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In this episode, Austin chats with Stephen Hess about the evolution of the Solana NFT ecosystem from the summer of 2021 to the present. Starting from the initial creation of the Solana NFT standard, Austin and Stephen reflect on recent technological advancements such as compressed NFTs, programmability, and the introduction of the "Core" standard. According to Stephen, the creation of "Core" represents a shift away from NFT standards toward more of a "digital asset protocol". The conversation also covers the Metaplex DAO's role in governance, controversies around features like programmable NFTs, the introduction of protocol fees, and more.DISCLAIMER The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives. All opinions expressed herein are the speakers' own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any entities.
幻冬舎の暗号資産（仮想通貨）/ブロックチェーンなどweb3領域の専門メディア「あたらしい経済 https://www.neweconomy.jp/ 」がおくる、Podcast番組です。 ーーーーー ・DEX「dYdX」がアップグレード後に約10時間停止、現在は解決 ・ソラナ（SOL）でネットワーク混雑による遅延が発生中、開発者が修正急ぐ ・中国資産運用会社の香港子会社が「ビットコイン現物ETF」申請 ・DEXアグリゲーター「1inch Network」が暗号資産デビットカード提供へ、Mastercardらと提携で ・ビットトレードが「積立暗号資産」に7銘柄追加、DOGEやSHIBなど ・バイナンスにSolana上のNFTマーケットプレイスの「Tensor（TNSR）」 上場 ・香港ハッシュキー、グローバル向け暗号資産取引所「HashKey Global」開設 ・東証スタンダード上場のメタプラネットがビットコイン購入へ、調達した約9億円で ・ブータン王国がビットコイン（BTC）のマイニング能力を6倍へ、半減期の影響に向け ・ピカソネットワーク、コスモスとイーサリアム間での資産移動を可能に ーーーーー 【関連リンク】 ニュースの詳細や、アーカイブやその他の記事はこちらから https://www.neweconomy.jp/
On today's episode, we cover the Tensor token airdrop targeting Solana NFT traders and holders. Additionally, we'll analyze the Ordinals Andrus weekend rally and the overnight surge in Bitcoin prices fueled by institutional interest in Bitcoin ETF S trading in Hong Kong. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM Eastern to 10:15 AM. Buy our NFT Join our Discord Check out our Twitter Check out our YouTube Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
On today's episode, we discuss the comeback of Ethereum NFTs, explore meme coins, and review Ethereum and Solana NFT collections. Plus, a special guest from Karate Combat previews their upcoming event. Stay tuned for insights into crypto and blockchain trends. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM Eastern to 10:15 AM. Buy our NFT Join our Discord Check out our Twitter Check out our YouTube Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
On today's episode, we analyze the Runestone airdrop and discuss if it's worth buying at current prices. We'll also review the launch of the ordinal Maxi Biz Orange I mint. Additionally, we'll examine the recent crypto dump and speculate on its future. Meanwhile, Solana has surged to $180, sparking interesting conversations. Lastly, we'll explore potential buying opportunities in the Solana NFT market. Stay tuned for all this and more on our crypto podcast. This episode is in partnership with Tensor. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM Eastern to 10:15 AM. Buy our NFT Join our Discord Check out our Twitter Check out our YouTube Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
Blue Alpine Cast - Kryptowährung, News und Analysen (Bitcoin, Ethereum und co)
On today's episode, we dissect ordinal meme coins, evaluate the considerations for Solana NFT investments, and analyze the recent bullish pullback in Bitcoin post its all-time high. Our conversation also includes insights into upcoming drops and the flow of liquidity in the crypto space. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM Eastern to 8:45 AM. Easy's YouTube Easy's Twitter Buy our NFT Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
Blast Network Launches, Dogwifhat Soars, & Wells Fargo Makes a Bitcoin ETF Move! Gear up for a whirlwind of crypto news on today's Rare Bits! We've got everything from Star Wars invading the metaverse to exclusive Bitcoin ETFs for the wealthy. Buckle up as we explore: May the Force be with your NFT: MixMob welcomes a new playable character - the iconic Stormtrooper! Wall Street Says "Yes" to Bitcoin: Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch join the party, offering Bitcoin ETFs to select clients. Blast Off with Blast: The Layer-2 network launches, unlocking over $2.3 billion in staked funds. Dogwifhat Takes Off: Searches surge for this mysterious token, leaving everyone scratching their heads. NFT Market Mellows: Both Ethereum and Solana NFT sales see a slight decline, but the space remains vibrant. CryptoPunk Fetches Fortune: A rare CryptoPunk NFT changes hands for a whopping $488,632.86! Join Rare Bits for your daily dose of crypto news, analysis, and insights. We'll keep you informed and entertained as we navigate the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency.
On today's episode, we're thrilled to announce a strategic partnership with Tensor, the leading Solana NFT marketplace, shaping the crypto landscape for the rest of 2024. Join us as we dissect recent surges in both L1 and L2 ecosystems, explore the continued vitality of a specific NFT, and spotlight two upcoming February mints. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM Eastern to 10:15 AM. Buy our NFT Join our Discord Check out our Twitter Check out our YouTube Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
On today's episode, we will delve into the dynamic world of decentralized finance with a comprehensive discussion on the imminent WEN airdrop and the highly anticipated JUPITER airdrop within the Solana NFT ecosystem. This episode is in partnership with @MyGeoTokens. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM Eastern to 8:45 AM. Easy's YouTube Easy's Twitter Buy our NFT Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In this episode, we dive into: Art Basel Recap Pudgy World Wilder World Game Debut Zynga's Sugartown Ledger Security Update Degen with Drew Oviators by Jack Butcher Airdrop Farming Futureverse: Reebok and $ROOT The First SOL NFT Hosts: Drew Austin: https://twitter.com/DrewAustin Alex Taub: https://twitter.com/AJT Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefewpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/few_podcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fewpodcast
Follow 1000x On Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sJOsIJ Follow 1000x On Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/47MEsxe Follow 1000x On YouTube: https://bit.ly/3DNc5C6 -- In today's episode of 1000x Jonah and Avi discuss the recent bullish price action in crypto markets. As Bitcoin broke out above $44,000, we dive into the best way to play the BTC/Alt rotation trade, crypto's cycle top & the most hated trade in crypto right now... Ethereum. To hear all this & more, you'll have to tune in! -- Follow Avi: https://twitter.com/AviFelman Follow Jonah: https://twitter.com/jvb_xyz Follow 1000x: https://twitter.com/1000xPod Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- Referenced In The Show: Solana's End Game with Anatoly Yakovenko: https://apple.co/3QuF7NZ -- Timestamps (0:00) Introduction (1:19) Allocating To Crypto (5:30) The BTC/Alt Rotation (11:19) Ethereum (15:10) Solana NFT's (19:01) Crypto's Cycle Top (27:46) Crypto's Biggest Mover's (31:17) Why Own Crypto? -- Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
ALL IN NFT - Der tägliche NFT, Metaverse, Web3, Krypto Podcast
Alle relevanten Links findest du bei Linktree Linktree: https://linktr.ee/mic_seb Kontakt: Sebastian@allinnft.de https://x.com/friendtech/status/1731065062130135533?s=20 https://collectibles.manutd.com/ https://x.com/TheTreeverse/status/1731735310050996553?s=20 https://cyberkongz.medium.com/cyberkongz-launch-ronin-network-validator-node-2167592ed58d https://x.com/soundxyz_/status/1730271352161235329?s=20 https://opensea.io/0xb9eB79E3E735Ee636255dD8D65872a1287744e33 https://x.com/blur_io/status/1731720806265180306?s=20 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1731706803153506338?s=20 https://x.com/wormholecrypto/status/1732037297963741429?s=20 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sebastian-michels7/message
Welcome to another episode of Daily Crypto News. Today, we bring you news about the Thodex CEO receiving an astonishing 11,000-year jail sentence over a $2 billion crypto exchange collapse. Discover how Shaq played an active role in a Solana NFT project before a sudden lawsuit emerged. Coinbase announces Phase II of its international expansion strategy, targeting 83% of major hubs. The FBI attributes a $41 million hack to North Korea's Lazarus Group, while China continues its crackdown on crypto influencer accounts. We also explore how blockchain education can make South Korea a crypto leader and Hana Bank's entry into the crypto custody business. Stay tuned for all this and more!#CryptoNews #CryptoExchange #NFT #InternationalExpansion #Hacking #BlockchainEducation #CryptoCustody #Regulation__________News Links
Our guest this week is Richard Wu, Co-Founder of Tensor, a Solana-based NFT marketplace tailored for professional traders. We explore the origins and journey of Tensor on Solana, and delve into the unique capabilities of their recently launched compressed NFT marketplace. Richard shares insights on the differences between traditional NFTs and Tensor's compressed NFTs, and discusses the innovative trading functionalities and community strategies in place at Tensor. We also touch on Tensor's rewards system, their upcoming NFT collection, and their strategic partnership with Metaplex. Show Notes:00:54 - Starting on Solana03:37 - From Solana to Tensor08:17 - Solana hackathons10:16 - Only possible on Solana 12:16 - Compressed NFTs and User Experience at Tensor15:06 - Insights on Compressed NFTs vs. NFTs17:08 - Tensor's trading functionalities20:47 - Tensor's strategy for the community 23:03 - NFT collection24:35 - The point system25:29 - The Solana ecosystem / Being a leader in the NFT marketplace27:13 - Partnership with Metaplex28:33 - A builder he admires in the Solana ecosystem? Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist. The show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Richard Wu, the co-founder of Tensor. Tensor is the premier NFT marketplace for pro traders on Solana. Richard, welcome to the show. Richard Wu (00:28):Thanks for having me on, Brian. Great to be here. Brian Friel (00:31):I'm super excited to chat with you today. We got a lot to go into. Obviously you guys are extremely popular recently on Solana, but I think you guys have a really interesting story to tell. Going back to some of your earliest days, you and your co-founder, I remember you guys multiple times either placing highly or winning some of the Solana hackathons. Can you take us back to those early days of how you guys both got started on Solana? Richard Wu (00:54):Yeah, of course. Just to give some backstory maybe on myself and on Ilja, so I think not a lot of people know this, but we were both essentially strangers right before we started Tensor. And so we basically met through this co-founding matching portal online, YC Startup School. And that was sort of our first connection. We hadn't worked together before. We basically had no interactions outside of that. So one of the first things we did initially was we basically got on a call, exchanged a bunch of notes on what ideas he wanted to work on, what interests us. And for Ilja specifically, he had been building on Solana for quite some time. I was actually not familiar at all with Solana nor like crypto development in general. And so he sort of red pilled me into giving it a shot. And so our first project that we actually worked together was a hackathon project. That was sort of our NFT pricing oracle that at the time made a lot of sense. (01:51):So essentially what an NFT pricing oracle does is it provides price information about NFT collections so that other NFT protocols can actually consume these prices in order to do certain functions. So you can imagine a lending protocol that follows a pool based model would need some price to perform liquidations or for people to... I guess mainly for liquidations. (02:13):And NFT Perps, for example, is another type of protocol that would require pricing information on chain. And so that was initially the project that we worked on together. We submitted that to the Solana Riptide hackathon I believe, which I don't know if it was the second or third ever Solana hackathon, but we were pretty early on in the hackathon cycle. We just submitted our project to that hackathon because one, we wanted to win a bit of money so that we can bootstrap ourselves further in the process. And two, we just thought it would be fun to submit something. We ended up placing third in the DeFi category, which was pretty cool and the rest is sort of history. Brian Friel (02:53):That's awesome. And so you're famous on Twitter I would say, for being this David versus Goliath set up because you guys have gone from these two devs who just code all day submitting the hackathons to today Tensor is always up there with Magic Eden in people's minds as leading marketplaces, not just in Solana but say in NFTs across crypto. And a lot of people don't know that most of that is really built off the backs of everything that you and your co-founder have built. And starting back to those early days where you guys were just in hackathons chewing glass, so to speak, walk us through that journey. How did you guys go from that initial Solana Riptide hackathon project idea to getting the idea for Tensor, deciding this is something you actually want to build and then sticking it out and then getting product market fit like this? Richard Wu (03:37):I would say for us, the biggest strengths that we had as a two person team for the longest time was that we could really spend a lot of our time as founders talking to customers and understanding what their pain points are when it comes to NFT trading. So the initial idea of building an NFT trading product or platform was because Ilja and I, when we were building the NFT oracle, we were both trading NFTs on the side just to understand the market a bit more, try to understand why people are trading NFTs to begin with. And we had sort of this aha moment where I think at the time Okay Bears was minting and it was one of the hottest, if not the hottest, mint of 2022 on Solana. And we went on Magic Eden and we went on Hyperspace and we went on a bunch of other sites and we tried to buy Okay Bears, or at least I tried to buy Okay Bears, right after the mint and it was basically impossible for me to get a transaction through. (04:32):And I think the biggest issue then was these marketplaces weren't showing listing data fast enough and that was a huge issue for a lot of these new mints that happened after Okay Bears. There was Tripin Apes, which is also a really hot one. There was a slew of other really hyped collections that sort of faded into existence now. But it was just really difficult for me as a human trader, like NFT trader, to actually put any trades through. And that was sort of the inkling that motivated us to build something better. When we thought about our experience using trading platforms like Binance, like Buy Bit, Coinbase, we were very familiar with the idea of real time data and that speed matters a lot if you're trading in and out really quickly. That was the motivation to bring sort of the Coinbase, the centralized exchange experience, at least the speed, of it to NFT trading. Brian Friel (05:25):Yeah. For sure. And I've heard this from you guys before, but some of your thesis around why traders would want that because at the time, going back to those days when there was the Okay Bears hot mint, you mentioned Magic Eden being basically the only game in town to go and see these. I'd say the paradigm around NFT trading was very much you go to a site and you see a picture you like and you click buy and the model that Tensor and you guys have introduced and others like Blur have helped pioneer as well is very much spinning that on its head and making it, I'd say, less about, or maybe potentially less about, the characteristic [inaudible 00:05:59] much more around this pro trading like style interface. What were some of the insights that led you guys to believe that that was something worth betting on? Because it was very much a contrarian take at the time. Richard Wu (06:09):Yep, absolutely. I think at the time when we were trying to fundraise, actually... This was actually during the whole FTX collapse and Solana going to 10 bucks, but a lot of the VCs that we talked to were questioning, "Why would you build a product that is already somewhat niche like NFTs and sort of the grand scheme of crypto for an even more niche group of users?" I think one thing that we saw and we knew just from our experience in sort of TradFi as well as trading fungible tokens was that we knew that with all things trading, it follows this sort of parallel dynamic where the top, let's say, 20% of traders account for 80% of volume for any given market. That's a rough approximation. So the 80/20 rule applies here where most traders are probably not trading in size, but the ones that do are few and far between, but they want something that's more advanced, that's more catered to their style of trading that many other traders might not care for. (07:11):We ourselves weren't exactly that for NFT trading, but we knew a lot of people in the ecosystem who did trade NFTs in the hundreds at a time. And the whole NFT sweeping thing is kind of obvious in hindsight now, but at the time there were very few marketplaces that actually had the sweep feature and we made that one of the first features to implement, was being able to bulk sweep, being able to bulk list, being able to bulk de-list. All of that obviously is table stakes now for any marketplace, but at the time we were the only aggregator/marketplace to do it. Brian Friel (07:44):So you mentioned the fundraising journey there a little bit. I want to hit on that just a little bit too because you guys recently announced that you closed your first round with placeholder leading as well as a large group of angels, many of which I would say are Solana power users and probably power users of Tensor as well. What was that whole process like for you guys? And going back to when we started this conversation about the hackathons, what helped prepare you for this fundraising journey and if you could depart any wisdom on folks who are now in upcoming Solana hackathons, what would you say to this next generation of builders who are going through that? Richard Wu (08:18):The thing that moved the needle for us was having a really good network of both personal connections in the space. We went through this accelerator called Alliance. I think they're called Alliance Dow. They might just go by Alliance now, but they're essentially a Dow that has almost like a YC accelerator for web 3.0 companies and they actually helped us one understand the fundraising ecosystem a bit more. They also provide a tremendous value when it comes to mentorship. But they helped us connect with a lot of investors. I think when it comes to raising in a bear market, even if you have a killer team and potentially a killer product, you can still be overlooked by a lot of VCs and at this point it's just a numbers game. Get in as many calls as you can, try to prioritize the VCs that are showing interest and the ones that actually care about the founding team versus just trying to make a quick buck by flipping your token. A lot of the investors that ultimately invested, including Placeholder, came through either personal connections like other builders in the space or through the Alliance network. Brian Friel (09:25):That's awesome. I know many folks who were part of that rounds. I know some Phantom team members were as well very excited to be supporting you guys through that. And at the time I'd say it still was a controversial take, even though I think Blur had, at that time, gotten a decent amount of traction on EVM. You guys I think had launched around the same time Blur launched, but it had taken a little while for that same model to permeate on Solana. I guess focusing on Solana, what made you guys specifically choose to double down on it? You mentioned that your co-founder, Ilja, red pilled you on Solana early on. I'm sure when you guys were talking to VCs, everyone has an opinion on where teams should be building, but you guys have really decided to stick it out, not only double down on Solana but continue to push new features like your compressed marketplace that are only possible on Solana. So can you talk a little bit about that decision? Richard Wu (10:17):I think you were spot on in that a lot of VCs, in fact 95% of VCs, basically told us on the first call or asked us, "Why are you still on Solana? What are your plans for moving cross chain? Why haven't you moved off of Solana yet?" And I think for us, we're pretty good at thinking for ourselves and thinking from first principles, but even then this was post FTX and we had doubts ourselves whether or not it was a good move for us to stay on Solana and not build on Ethereum or Polygon. Ordinos wasn't a thing at the time, but the next hot chain. (10:51):When it comes to staying on Solana today, I think we have almost like a very strong fundamental belief that there are things that you can do on Solana that you can't do elsewhere that have been untapped when it comes to NFTs. So you mentioned compressed NFTs. I think that is a huge potential for Solana to become the number one digital asset/NFT chain in all of crypto. Just the value prop of being able to mint a million NFTs for less than a hundred dollars and being able to airdrop that for essentially free, it's just like a hundred bucks. Most companies or startups probably spend that on some random AWS service. Being able to do that basically for free is something that is very difficult to find on any other chain and we think that has a potential to onboard the next million users to Solana and even to onboard companies that are a bit hesitant about paying for gas fees on Ethereum L1 or a bit hesitant about spending a lot of money creating NFTs on any given blockchain. I think this is the way to onboard all of those skeptics and all of those people who are hesitant. Brian Friel (11:57):Yeah, let's dig into that more. At the time we're recording this, it's June 6th, I think you guys just last week had announced the launch of your compressed NFT marketplace. It's the first one on Solana. How has that launch gone? Who are you guys working with? Where are these compressed NFTs coming from and if I'm a user showing up to Tensor, what is that whole experience? What can I expect? Richard Wu (12:17):So we're currently working with a number of key partners. The very first partner that we worked with was Dialect. For those who are not familiar, Dialect is this web 3.0 messaging app. They're primarily on mobile. They essentially integrate... I think of Telegram integrated with a wallet. And so they let you, for example, send solds to your contacts directly in the chat app. They also let you collect these stickers which are minted as compressed NFTs. And the interesting thing here that Dialect did with these stickers was that they essentially gave them out for free and to anyone including those who have nothing in their wallet. The great thing about compressed NFTs is they're so cheap that you can just airdrop them in mass to a ton of users and not have to think about the cost and the users themselves don't have to pay any gas to receive them. (13:04):Obviously you need to pay a bit of gas if you want to interact with... Let's say you want to send it to someone else or if you want to list it on the Tensor marketplace or if you want to do peer-to-peer sticker trading. But the big unlock here for Dialect was they were able to essentially give these out for free to all of their mobile app users and they can now trade them on Tensor and perhaps sell it for a bit of Soul and use that Soul to do other things. (13:27):Another partner we work with is Drip and they're doing something somewhat similar in that instead of stickers, they're actually doing art drops and they're working with a number of creators like Xeno, maybe not Xeno, but another artist called DJ Poet who creates these art pieces, essentially distributes them through Drip and anyone can come by and claim these art pieces for next to nothing. They just pay for transaction fees. And based on these two use cases, we think that these airdrops, these new ways of distributing essentially digital assets to users for essentially free will become more and more popular. And we may even see non NFT projects like platforms such as Dialect. Drip is technically a platform. Their specialty isn't in compressed NFTs, but that's a huge part of it. They'll start using compressed NFTs as a distribution mechanism and we want to essentially build the trading infrastructure around it and also any infrastructure required to make them successful. Brian Friel (14:26):Yeah. The point you hit there about it's almost like a user acquisition cost, but it just turns it on its head and it's so cheap and it's like if you think about subsidizing that to get a user's attention, I think it is something that is a unique unlock that right now it is only possible in Solana, I think is largely overlooked in the rest of the crypto community right now. It's really cool to see. Since this has gone live, how have you guys seen users interacting with this platform? I mean is it pretty much similar behavior to trading and sweeping regular NFTs? I think we're entering into the chewing glass territory of Solana where you guys are building new functionality that's kind of pushing the limits of this. But what are some of the insights you guys have seen from the early launch? Richard Wu (15:06):Yeah, it completely blew our expectations. I don't think we one, expected the sheer number of unique wallets or I guess in this case it's a proxy for users, the sheer number of users that actually want to trade these things. So I guess I'll give you some absolute numbers. So in the first four or five days, I think it's been four days since we launched officially, we saw over a hundred thousand sales that occurred within three, four collections. These are literally collections that launched not too long ago, so they're not like the D gods who already have a lot of hype and a massive user base. These are relatively new and upcoming projects that are experimenting with CNFTs such as Dialect, such as Drip. They're going to be massive in the future obviously, but they launched these CNFTs and we saw over a hundred thousand sales actually occur with over 7,000 unique wallets and I think we just crossed a thousand Solana volume. (16:04):Obviously there's a long way to go, but just based on these three or four collections that just started trading and how little time that has actually passed since we launched this blew our expectations. Brian Friel (16:15):Yeah. And the thousand Soul marker too is pretty wild when you consider that most of these were probably given out for free originally or very much close to free. Like Drip, you can just drop your wallet address, get these for free. Dialect, you said people are getting these stickers even on empty wallets, just being a very early user of the app. It's pretty wild that you guys are basically creating something from nothing here and I think the sheer volume of that probably speaks for itself. (16:42):Outside of compressed NFTs, let's talk a little bit more about some of Tenor's unique offerings. You guys cater to this pro style trader. You mentioned the 80/20 rule before that 80% of users might be more casual NFT buyers, but the 20% that are really dedicated are bringing the vast majority of volume to Solana. What are some of those advanced trading functionalities that you guys are proud of that you guys offer at Tensor? Richard Wu (17:08):A lot of people know us for our trading view chart if you're in pro mode and you can sort of see the live feed on the side and also an order book view, which is one of few platforms in Solana that offers all three of those. But I think that stuff is kind of table stakes for us now. I think what we're especially proud of and digging more into is sort of more features to enable someone to quickly, let's say, manage their NFTs and be able to list it instantly on Tensor and be able to de-list it instantly and essentially be able to do whatever you can think of as imaginable with their NFTs on Tensor without leaving the platform. To give you a concrete example, right now you can send 200 or 300 NFTs at once to another wallet through Tensor. So this bulk sending feature I don't think too many other marketplaces have yet, but we've essentially implemented that since I think day two or day three. (18:03):Obviously as you mentioned, bulk sweeping, bulk listing, bulk de-listing, those are all table stakes. I mean there's not really one specific feature that we have that no one else has besides maybe compressed NFTs, but I think we're just very focused on providing the best possible user experience and that comes with attention to detail. So it's making sure everything runs as fast as possible. There's next to no lag. Everything updates like responsively on the front end. So after you perform a listing or any transaction, the NFT instantly updates with the correct information. And that's hard to get right. It took us a lot of glass chewing to actually perfect. Every time you list a NFT, it shows up almost instantly with a new price on your front end. Brian Friel (18:48):Yeah, I see the tweets from you guys, all the data pipelines that you guys are building. So I know that's a lot of glass chewing, a lot of work to be done. And on that note of focusing on UX, making things easy to manage these NFTs, it's probably a good time to announce if we haven't already by the time this is live, that we'll be introducing a new feature called Instant Sell directly from Phantom and you'll be able to click on NFT and be able to instantly sell this NFT and Tensor will be one of the marketplaces that we'll be sourcing liquidity from. And in addition to that, we'll also be introducing list on Tensor directly from FAM as well. Super excited about those integrations to be working with you guys as well as supporting your guys' compressed NFT marketplace as well. Richard Wu (19:29):Yeah, I mean we're very excited for that feature because we know that a lot of our users are Phantom Wallet users and they've been asking us like, "Oh, when Tensor listing from Phantom?" And I think having both Instant Sell and Listing from directly and embedded into Phantom would be such a killer feature for all of our users. Brian Friel (19:49):Yeah, it's the next win. Ledger Mobile finally shifts so the community needs a new win to yell on Twitter but I'm excited to get this out. I think by the time this episode is live, all the listeners should be able to try it out. If you have Phantom on mobile, you can go directly in there, make your first listing, make your first instant sell all thanks to Tensor's AMMs. (20:07):I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your guys' focus on community. So we might have hit on this early on in the conversation, during your fundraising process you had a huge interest from angels, many of which were power users of you guys. I'd say that you guys have a really strong unique community that's native to Solana that you guys are building for this 20% power user. Talk a little bit about some of the features that you guys have on the community side. I see a lot about rewards. I see a lot about boxes. Yeah, you guys build a lot of really awesome tech, but you guys are also doing a lot to reward your users directly. What's your guys' strategy there? Richard Wu (20:47):I think for us taking a step back. We sort of understand that our users are what makes us. While sure we can build a really cool product with a bunch of reliable data pipelines and we can build a really fast trading platform, without users we're nothing. And I think a lot of startups realize this sort of later on, and we understood this from day one, that users and distribution is what matters and we want to do right by our users at every given possible opportunity. I think for us, we're obviously making fees from our marketplace and we want to give that back in some ways to our users. So I'll give you a very concrete example of what we did recently. Mad Lads, obviously one of the biggest NFT mints of this year across all of crypto, they basically blew a lot of the Ethereum 24 hour volume and seven day volume charts out the window. (21:43):We actually did this massive giveaway/raffle where we essentially promised and committed to taking all of the marketplace fees that we took from any trading that happened on the Mad Lads collection for the next three months and basically gave it away back to the users in terms of buying back Mad Lads off the market and doing a raffle for anyone who trades Mad Lads on Tensor. And that's just one way that we want to show that we actually do care about the community and you guys are what makes Tensor great and the best way to do that is to essentially give back our fees in terms of these NFTs and these buybacks. I think going forward we want the users to be as much as a part of Tensor's journey as we are a part of Tenor's journey. Obviously that will take some time. Currently, we have the rewards and point system and that's a proxy for us to actually attribute who is the most loyal Tensor fan, who is the most loyal Tensor user. We can give you guys loop boxes, which converts into our NFT collection and other rewards in the future. Brian Friel (22:49):Talk a little bit more about that NFT collection. I've seen some rumors about it. The boxes are very cryptic. When I log in I see these mystery boxes, not much I can do yet with them, but there's talks of an upcoming NFT collection. What can you say about that? Richard Wu (23:03):So one of the best pixel artists I would say on Solana, Xeno... I think he goes by Xeno sometimes. We reached out to him pretty early on and we basically said, "Hey, you want to do a really cool pixel art PFP collection?" And we want to make that essentially the image of Tensor users. We call Tensor users Tensorians. I think what's unique about this NFT collection is that yes, it can be PFP-able. You can put it on your Twitter profile and it'll look nice because obviously Xeno is a great artist. He knows what he's doing. But two, I think we want to make the NFT collection a first class feature of Tensor. So much like how real time data, these bulk sweeping features are first class features of Tensor, we want to make the NFT collection a first class part of Tensor. So what that means is you may get benefits in the future for having a Tensorian NFT. We're still thinking of the right mechanics to introduce, but one of the things that we're committing to is making this NFT collection actually meaningful to Tensor users. Brian Friel (24:10):That's awesome. Well, I'd say you guys have done a really awesome job with the whole point system today. It's just even really fun, I'd say, to make trades and look in and see all the points updated in real time and leaderboards and everything. So I'm excited to see how the NFT collection ties into all that. I have a feeling it's all tied in together and there is a great plan at the works here. Do you guys have a high level ETA on when users might be able to expect more from that? Richard Wu (24:35):The biggest technical blocker for us for the next phase to happen was actually the compressed NFT marketplace. So that might give you a bit of a hint on what we're planning on doing. It may involve a couple of compressed NFTs. It may have something to do with these boxes. There's a lot planned for this NFT drop. It's not going to be a typical NFT drop. Brian Friel (24:54):Nice. Richard Wu (24:55):You don't just show up to Tenor and mint you an NFT. There's going to be a couple of new mechanics that we're going to be trying for the first time. Brian Friel (25:02):Exciting. A little bit of alpha drop there on the podcast. I love it. (25:06):So from where you guys sit today, just to kind of put everything in perspective, I mentioned this David versus Goliath story where it's two developers, hackathon projects, and you guys end up building the marketplace that caters to these pro users and takes over Solana by volume. How do you guys view your current position in the Solana ecosystem and what does it mean for you to be a leader in the NFT marketplace? Richard Wu (25:30):To be completely frank, I don't think we've necessarily won anything, won the market or become the number one marketplace definitively. We think that Magic Eden is... They're a great team. They've done a lot for the space. And I think ultimately we want to grow the entire Solana NFT space together. We don't want to essentially be the ones who takes all the pie and leaves nothing for anyone else. We want Magic Eden to succeed so that all of Solana can succeed. (26:02):So I think for us, while having the majority market share at any given point is nice, I think what we want to do is basically close a gap between Solana and all the other blockchains when it comes to NFT market share, which is sort of a loose term. I think compressed NFTs is one of the big bets that we're making, that this will be the reason why Solana NFTs are seen by others as competitive with Ethereum NFTs, even competitive with Ordinos because obviously Ordinos has attracted a lot of attention when it comes to NFTs. So we're going to keep innovating, build an ecosystem around CNFTs so that it's dead simple for a creator or project or platform to come in and create a bunch of CNFTs and actually get value out of it whether it's user acquisition, whether it's a new gaming mechanic that they want to experiment with, we want to make Solana and Solana CNFTs the destination for them to do that. Brian Friel (27:00):I love it. It's a great position to be in as a leader. I have to ask as well, I noticed you guys just today announced a new partnership with Metaplex, specifically around launchpads. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that helps grow Solana as well? Richard Wu (27:13):So I think the Metaplex partnership made a lot of sense for us because as we've seen with previous experiments, working on a launchpad is difficult and trying to own that all to ourselves is a monumental task, just beyond the technical parameters of building a launchpad and making sure everything runs smoothly, which we can eventually figure out. I think the Metaplex team, one thing that they have that very few teams have is that they're very great liaison between creators and sort of the rest of the ecosystem. They've essentially done quite a lot for the ecosystem, including building the NFT standard, building all the tooling around it, building Candy Machine that enabled this whole explosion of Solana NFTs to begin with. And they've done a lot when it comes to onboarding creators outside of the ecosystem. And we just felt that both of our teams had a lot of alignment here, that we both want to grow the pie together, and so it made sense to partner with them for their launchpad, for their primaries, and we can focus on the secondaries. Brian Friel (28:14):I love it. That's great. Well, we're excited to support both you guys. Big fans of Metaplex. Really excited for everything that's in store for you guys in the future, compressed NFTs as well. (28:23):Richard, this has been an awesome conversation and one closing question that we ask all our guests, and I'd love to get your take on this as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Richard Wu (28:34):The obvious answer is my co-founder. He taught me a ton. He basically fed me everything I needed to know about Solana. But outside of that, we really respect the guys at Helius a lot because when we were going through the CNFT glass eating, they were the first ones to respond to all of our dumb questions about how do CNFTs work? Why is this breaking? Why is this returning an error? They were one of the first ones to respond and they've been relentless at trying to build out essentially the infrastructure, like the RPC infrastructure for CNFTs. So they have a lot of our respect and we work closely with them. So yeah, they're one of the best builders. Yep. Yeah, he's been fighting for Solana to the ends on crypto Twitter, so a lot of respect for that. Brian Friel (29:20):Yeah, murder's a legend, and if you're on crypto Twitter, it's hard to miss him. We're lucky to have him not only as a staunch defender of Solana, but also as the guy who will answer your telegrams frantically at two in the morning when you're trying to eat glass and ship new features. Yeah, great answer. Well, Richard, this has been an awesome conversation. Where can folks go to learn more about Tensor? Richard Wu (29:41):The very first place would be our platform Tensor.Trade. That's where you can find the fastest NFT marketplace on Solana. If you want to check out some of our other stuff, we tend to do a couple of tweets every day, and big announcements happen on our Twitter. So that's twitter.com/tensor_hq. Brian Friel (30:00):Awesome. Well, Tensorians, you know where to go. Richard, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's Richard Wu, the co-founder of Tensor. Richard Wu (30:08):Appreciate the time.
What's up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 22. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in on the fun. This has turned into one of my favorite parts of the week and I can't wait to dive into what's been going on in Solana. I'm testing out a new way of doin this where I go live on Twitter for a space. My team decided that I needed to create a Twitter profile (@solanaweeklypod) for the pod to separate from my terrible twitter posts. (There is no team.) I figured it would be a good time to test out how this amazing technology works and nobody follows that account yet so I'm hoping no one joins and messes up the flow. If they do, we adapt, overcome, improvise, and download the audio and release as normal. (Update: my Airpods spazzed out so I'm not releasing space.) But we have another great show for you guys, we've got the mint of the year coming up today with the Mad Lads, prices remain up, memecoin season came and might be ending, SMB IP is getting transferred and we go over how I fumbled the bag by trying out a raffle. * Solana Price Update: A review of the current price of Solana and its performance over the past week. Sitting at $23.37, down a total of 1.39% after breaking out of it's range last week it just couldn't get out of the resistance right below 26. I thought it was going to send, but the selling pressure has been to high around that level. I've also been reading that Wintermute has been absolutely dumping the hell out of Solana. They had something like a million Solana and have been offloading to recoup. Not ideal, how long will they continue this? We'll see. Narrative is there, we will overcome. We saw a massive dip last night, hope it stops. * Solana vs. Ethereum: Down to .01178 with a 4.5% decrease on the week. This was looking really good, but Sol took a dive against the market. * Solana vs. Bitcoin: Sitting at .0007997 which is an decrease of 1.6%. I'm still super bullish on this chart. The White Wolf shared this chart on Twitter saying it's the generational bottom. It's not happening now, but this is a chart I'm keeping my eye on. * NFT Happenings: On to what the fun chain does best. Biggest news is Mad Lad's is dropping today for whitelist and tomorrow for public. It's going to be huge. Everyone in NFT's, not just Solana NFT's is pumped. It's the best advertisement for the Backpack wallet I could imagine, a hyped mint. We'll see how it goes, but I'm minting two and freaking pumped. I think this is going to be a pivotal moment for Solana NFT's with the release of xNFT's to everyone. Executable NFT's directly in the wallet. These are basically dApps that you can buy and trade and execute in a secure environment. So I'm pumped and I'm excited to see the expansion of NFT's into more than just pfp's. * An example of XNFT's and the amazing utility of quacking is in the newly released xnft of Crypto Duck Punkz. If you download their xnft you can view all your ducks in it and make them quek! It's hilarious, but I think it's also a good demo of the product. Ducks are still doing great, meme's are hopping, giveaways in discord, useless staking also.* SMB IP is in route to Monke DAO, not exactly sure when the release will be, but the deal has been done and I'm waiting on a Nom post to send my SMB to the moon. This is huge, I can't imagine a better ending to this story and I'm very pleased that the owner is a top notch DAO rather than a borderline scammer. * The Heist minted yesterday and it was a banger, I skipped it, but the game is live as of today and it looks like people are having a blast playing it. * The Chads are minting tomorrow as well, I don't know too much, they are funny on Twitter, I'm minting. * I also decided to test out a Famous Fox Raffle and dove right in. I wanted to sell a TFF and a Degen Ape above floor, I watched a bunch of other raffles on Famous Foxes go above floor so I said f it and went for it. TLDR, it didn't go well. Both went just under floor and I would consider it a massive failure. I assumed there was risk ahead of time and figured that the move was +ev overall, but I felt like an idiot for bit. * Solana Phone purchases are live and I got one baby! Ship out on 4/20 and I'm pumped about it. They are doing a whole slough of rewards and bonuses. They sent out cards to everyone and if it made a good poker hand you got a discount, I got four of a kind and they took $50 off. We are also getting some $ on Magic Eden, and a free mint for a new collection of Claynosaurs. I think I'm going to come out ahead on this one, but I'm also just so pumped with the possibilities here. * Helium merge to Solana is also live as of today. Helium is running on Solana and I get one free month of service from Helium with my phone. So I have no idea how to use it, but I'm going to figure it out. But I'm bullish on other protocols doing their own research and finding what they need in Solana. * Bonk is performing super strong and I think it's going to outperform Solana in the near future because of the organic ownership and fun it creates. We're seeing Dogecoin pump again, and I can't even get myself to buy any, there isn't anything that it is better at than Bonk other than it has Elon's heart and soul behind it. * Regulation news: we saw a hearing yesterday with Gary Gensler on the stand and legislators had time to question him. He sounded like an absolute idiot, dodging yes and no questions and did not really have anything of substance to say other than crypto is non compliant with the laws and banks failed because of it. He was chair when FTX went down and is using his press releases as a form of regulation. No clarity and the companies that are trying to be in compliance get no direction. What we did see is the Republican's come together and rally against him. Legislation was introduced to remove him because of his incompetence and his pushing out of innovation out of the US. Again we see the right is rallying behind crypto and I'm having a hard time not seeing this trend continue. Bullish on the new Trump collection selling out another 45k pieces. * Closing Thoughts: I think we are in a pivotal moment in Solana history this week. We are getting the first crypto native phone that you can run on a crypto native 5g network, and we are seeing novel use cases for cryptocurrency based on the unique properties of Solana. I couldn't be more bullish on the Solana narrative as I am right now and I hope that this energy continues. We are also seeing the crypto narratives in general being proved out in congress as we speak. We are seeing a shift in the right direction, or at the very least getting started. Let's have a great rest of the week and thank you for joining in on the fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thomasbahamas.substack.com
Welcome back to NFT Alpha! Your #1 source for NFT news. In this video, Taco looks at a HUGE Solana drop coming soon and how some projects may be manipulating the NFT ecosystem. ➡️ NFT Alpha Discord (join now!) https://discord.gg/jCatrUuWdg
SectorH is taking down the serial ruggers called the Hooligan Gang. They've pulled over $200K from the Solana NFT ecosystem, and SectorH is tracking it all. Check out the evidence: https://sectorh.gitbook.io/sectorh/adversary-collective/the-hooligan-gang Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SectorHSecurity Report rugs in the Discord: https://discord.gg/Th89cA5Ar7 Tune in next time on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NFTORIGINSTORY
I tried to record last week but I was at the beach and it sounded terrible. So we're bringing an episode with two weeks of alpha shrunk into one. Solana Price - Ranging, we are at $23.50, hit as high as $26, and dipped down to just under $20. SolEth - Sitting at .014, not bad. Toly on Bankless, gets a fair shake.SMB bought out by HGE and given to HadesDAO, in spite of MonkeDAO negotiations. Gotta dive into that. Overall it's good for holders, unbelievable opportunity for Hadeswap, kind of shitty for all the contributors to MD. Gambling! We talk Rollbit, SolCasino, and how this is hitting product market fit on Solana. I don't think it's going away. Altcoins: RLB, Bonk seeing some rise, Hades seeing a dip. Wallet Security - up it, Kevin Rose hacked for 2 mill +, we got tons of great solutions. NFT's on Bitcoin? That's right. Tooling on Solana - ZachXBT bashes it, hopefully Mert from Helius saves us. DeGod's Female Deriv - the Solana NFT lifecycle in a week. Pump, rug, de rug, pump. amazing. Regulation - Binance US and struggle with USD deposits, Kraken lawsuit for 30 mill in regards to staking. Decentralized staking becoming vastly more important/ appealing. Have to talk Lido protocol and how important they are. Balaji new podcast - legend, and his importance on the last cycle was massive. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thomasbahamas.substack.com
The Mint Condition: NFT and Digital Collectibles Entertainment
TMC has added 2 shows a week via Twitter Spaces. Every Monday and Friday at 4:00PM ET, hop on Twitter and join the guys in a live "social audio" chat. You can request to come up and particioate in the discussion. On today's show, the gang discusses the Christmas news that DeGods will be switching to Ethereum and y00ts will be migrating to Polygon. Both PFPs help build the Solana NFT community. Powered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Follow us on Twitter:dGEN Network: https://twitter.com/dGenNetworkTMC Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheMintCondFollow dGEN on all of our Social Media:Discord: https://discord.gg/8vbVZ8vDhrTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dgennetwork?_....FB: https://www.facebook.com/DecentralizedGenerationNetwork/Support the show
Gm, Gm all! It's a bear market, fud is all around us, crypto market is down, Solana is down, NFT's are mostly sideways, but still tons to go over. I've been debating the idea of how we move the space forward and have actually come around to the Web 3 narrative and think we should all get behind it. Why? It rebrands crypto, gives a much more positive connotation and also puts together all these different factions of crypto communities giving us one big central idea to push. All the different communities and coins and protocols are too much and the infighting does nothing. I normally cover what's the biggest fud, and it's the internal fighting. It's Eth vs BTC, it's Eth vs Sol, it's Solana NFT projects bickering about royalties. It's actually the biggest users and biggest bulls that aren't doing themselves any favors. I think a lot of these discussions aren't meant for the public and are boring af. A lot of this is arguing about the wires that power the internet, not the beautiful applications of the innovation that we can cheer on. I don't know how we go about changing this, but we gotta start with ourselves and choosing positivity over fud. Solana is a positive add to the web 3 space, and we need to be promoting digital assets that are fun and can be wholly owned and secured. * Solana Price - We're sitting at $12.19, we had a high of $14.70 and dumped to $11.70. The crazy part about this is that I can't even tell you why. It got scary on the lows, we recovered, but you know everyone is out there calling for sub $10. * Sol/Eth - nothing burger - sitting at .0100, still down bad.* NFT News - Mara's minted out yesterday, strong community and dope art from Near, Knittables are minting today and it looks like they are having some issues with the mint page being down. I gotta bring up the Trump drop. He dropped his trading cards and it was a smash. On Polygon. 45,000 individual pieces and they 10x'd before dropping. How do you bring about mass adoption? Bring in the niche communities and show them they can make money. Maga hit a 10x. They are a powerful community with 45 million votes for Trump as president. A former president (whether you like him and his politics aside) launched an NFT project and you're not bullish on the space? Come on! The way it was done was smart, it was a digital trading collectible. Easy to digest, pay $99, use a credit card if you want, and you get a digital card. Whether they will be able to actually find their wallet is yet to be determined. This proves that the more that we can simplify the wording, narrative, process, the better off we are. Growth is growth. * Defi news - Drift Protocol version 2 is live to everyone. I tested it out and it's clean AF. I think we need more of these and hope to see them succeed. I also got red pilled on Lifinity and their Flare NFT project as well as their defi protocol. I love everything about this, lock up your NFT for 6 months, earn yourself some tokens, lock those tokens, earn more. Also while you do that you are earning some of the revenue of the defi protocol. So it's not actually a ponzi, it's distributing profits. The team seems solid, community has been super welcoming. I also have to bring up some conversations that Toly has been having. He's been advocating for building out a CEX on Solana. I don't really know how this would work, but the idea would be something like a centralized organization having all reserves and addresses on chain so that you never have another FTX. I could see this being huge because the centralized experience is generally so much better. I watch Toly's Twitter debates like an avid sports fan that doesn't fully understand the sport, like it's rugby or something but it's my college so I'm rooting regardless. One of the main guys at Orca actually chimed in saying this is something they will do. Bullish. I tried pinging him in MonkeDao's Defi channel in Discord but haven't heard anything back. They also discussed this on the Unchained Podcast in the Episode with Cobie and Chris Burniske. * The quicky of the current thing - Trump, Polygon, multichain, L1's even profitable, NFT smart contracts being open sourced or siloed to Magic Eden, bear market, Bitcoin development, boredom, DCA. * Best FUD - I think that everyone's fudding, but everyone is just downbad. I think the biggest fud is people leaving the space because it's just not as fun. We're going to be down for a while, find some areas you can contribute to and add something positive. Or just DCA and work. Another thing I've been thinking about is how I'm going to actually use the Solana Phone. They start shipping Q1 and I'm an iPhone guy. I'm ready to upgrade my phone and debating getting a new iPhone or just going 100% Solana. I'll probably keep the iPhone because I don't want to have those green messages in the group chat and ruin it for everyone when someone likes a post. But we'll see. Anyways, this is Thomas Bahamas bringing you an okay recap of the week in Solana. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thomasbahamas.substack.com
On this episode, we're talking about Ethereum Layer-2 scaling platform Polygon ($MATIC). Since the FTX collapse, Solana NFT marketplace and Phantom wallet have added integration for Polygon. Is Polygon stealing Solana's entire onboarding ecosystem? Meanwhile, developers on Polygon continue to grow. Later this year neo-banks like r=Robinhood and Lemon Cash will release simple to use DeFi wallets for millions of new users, potentially creating a new massive catalyst for DeFi opportunities.Guest: Hamzah Khan, Head of DeFi PolygonPolygon Twitter ➜ https://twitter.com/0xPolygon~This episode is sponsored by Trezor~Trezor website ➜ https://trezor.io/
Magic Eden is already the leading marketplace for Solana NFTs and also supports Ethereum NFTs. Today, Magic Eden announced that it will add support for NFT assets minted on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain scaling network. Polygon enables significantly faster and cheaper transactions than Ethereum's own mainnet, making it an ideal option for projects that require large amounts of digital assets. With Solana developers potentially running for the hills is Polygon getting ready to dominate the NFT space? Meanwhile, in traditional web2 gaming land... Grand Theft Auto has followed Minecraft in banning NFTs.~this episode if sponsored by GALA Games~Gala Games website ➜ https://links.gala.com/PBNGalaGamesGala Music website ➜ https://links.gala.com/PBNGalaMusicGala Film website ➜ https://links.gala.com/PBNGalaFilm
On this episode, we're diving into Solana Breakpoint 2022 Event which highlights everything happening with Solana's ecosystem. We're focusing on NFT & blockchain gaming updates announced this weekend.
The most valuable crypto stories for Tuesday, Oct. 04, 2022.“The Hash” hosts discuss Tesla CEO Elon Musk moving forward with his on-again/off-again purchase agreement for Twitter at $54.20 per share, according to Bloomberg. Plus, new data from DappRadar sheds light on the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace amid crypto winter.-ZenGo crypto wallet is an on-chain crypto wallet with no private key vulnerability, leveraging advanced cryptography called MPC. Get started at ZenGo.com/HASH and use code HASH to get $20 back on your first purchase of $200 or more. Terms and conditions apply. See site for details.I.D.E.A.S. 2022 by CoinDesk facilitates capital flow and market growth by connecting the digital economy with traditional finance through the presenter's mainstage, capital allocation meeting rooms and sponsor expo floor. Use code HASH20 for 20% off the General Pass. Register now: coindesk.com/ideas-This episode has been edited by Nia Freeman. Our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
On tonight's @dGenNightShift:- #Renga Rules the Weekend, next stop: Blue Chip?- Jenkins - Azurbala art drop fumble- #NFT Weekend Recap- Moongirls - Kitaro - Poobs - Linagee and more!- #Solana NFT updates - That's BoldVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNsj_FlzHQUPowered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Follow us on Twitter:dGEN Network: https://twitter.com/dGenNetworkNight Shift Twitter: https://twitter.com/dGenNightShiftThe Crew:JpCaz: https://twitter.com/jp_cazPh0nics: https://twitter.com/Ph0nicsMizzle: https://twitter.com/ITzMiZzleTj: https://twitter.com/nft33jShane: https://twitter.com/ValentinesDipSupport the show
Degenerate Ape Academy made history as the first major project to kickoff the Solana NFT phenomenon. Co-founder and head of product, CrassKitty joins Brian Friel to talk eggs, The Hatchening, and what to expect next in The Degeniverse. Show Notes:01:01 - Origin Story 04:45 - Why she changed her mind of crypto06:27 - What is special about DAA? 08:12 - The early days at DAA 10:51 - Future of NFTs 11:52 - Projects DAA been working on 15:31 - Bridging the digital and physical world19:53 - Advice to new projects / Challenges in the space21:52 - The vision for the future of DAA 22:46 - A builder that she admires 24:09 - Info / Contact Full Transcript: Brian: (00:05)Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer of relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest today, Crass Kitty. Crass Kitty is the co-founder and head of product at Degenerate Ape Academy, one of the earliest and most well-known NFT collections on Solana. Crass Kitty, welcome to the show.Crass Kitty: (00:28)Hello, Brian. Nice to see you again. I hope you're doing well.Brian: (00:32)Likewise. Great to see you too. For those who don't know, Crass Kitty graced us with her presence at our Solana Summer Camp Hackathon in San Francisco. We'll be posting some of the workshops that she did to YouTube, but it's great to see you again. I'm really excited about this episode. For those of you who were around Solana last year in August 2021, Degen Ape Academy I think really kicked off the whole Solana NFT boom that we all know and love today. You guys have a ton of interesting projects in the works today as well, but before we dive into all that, it would be really great to learn a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you get started with Degenerate Ape Academy?Crass Kitty: (01:07)Man, who am I? I'm a product nerd who loves the color pink. You guys can't see me, but Brian can, and my office is mostly pink, including my headphones. Other than that, I jived a little bit into product after that with a company called Bebo, which was later acquired by Twitch to become Twitch rivals, using their machine learning to detect if you make kills on-screen. And from there, I worked at FetLife and later at NEAR Protocol, which is where I got my first venture into crypto.Crass Kitty: (01:35)I actually thought crypto was totally a scam. When I first was joining NEAR, I was like, "This is a scam. There's no way. This has to be a scam." And I was one of the first 10 team members at NEAR and towards two weeks into my contract, there was this pivotal moment and I realized that like, "Oh, shit. It's not a scam." Sorry. Am I allowed to curse on this podcast?Brian: (01:55)You are. Don't hold back. You're good.Crass Kitty: (01:57)Okay, cool. Good. Thank goodness. I am Crass Kitty after all. For those that don't know, crass means inappropriate, uncouth, likely to curse. Anyways, yeah. I worked at NEAR, launched an NFT marketplace called Pluminite, which was the first open-source NFT marketplace on NEAR. And when I left NEAR, I took a little hiatus, then started looking for my next role. And I knew I wanted to be in crypto. I had found a really deep passion here for product work in crypto and so I reached out to Solana. Got an interview with Stephen Hess who was head of product at Solana at the time and things were going great. Great interviews. And then I took a vacation and he took a vacation and three months rolled by and I was like, "All right. This has been a while."Crass Kitty: (02:43)So, I hit him up and I was like, "Yo, Stephen, what's up here?" And he was like, "We're taking a while because it looks like I'm going to be starting this thing called Metaplex." And I was like, "Oh, cool. Sick." And he's like, "Yeah, but there's these guys who need you." And I was like, "Oh." And he's like, "Yeah, they're called Degenerate Ape Academy." And I was like, "All right. Sounds fun. Can you tell me more? Is there a salary? Is there insurance?" He's like, "Nah, there's none of that." And I'm like, "Risky. I'm into it. Let's go." And so I get on a call with Monoliff. Monoliff and I have one call before I joined as a co-founder and a team member and head of product.Crass Kitty: (03:13)On this call, he's talking to me about all this. And I'm just like, "This sounds like the riskiest thing I've ever heard of." He's like, "Yeah, we basically just minted out on our second mint because we messed up our first mint" and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, that's scary." And then he's like, "And I promised him this 3D academy" and I'm like, "That sounds cool." And he is like, "But also we made duplicates in the NFT collection." I'm like, "That does not sound as cool." And he's like, "So, we have to create lore and tell them that they get to earn extra perks for having these duplicates." And I'm like, "Okay, I like the story spinning." Anyways, this call is very enlightening for me.Crass Kitty: (03:45)I think a more sane person probably would've walked away at that point but, like I said, I'm not risk-averse and maybe a little bit less sane than other people. And I was like, "Yeah, sure. This sounds fun. Why not?" And so I joined and I don't think fun is the right word to describe my job. I think it is organized chaos in the best possible way and as somebody who has always described themselves as somebody who sits in the eye of a hurricane and coordinates it, it works really well for me. Product managers typically herd cats. I herd apes. It goes well-ish or as well as I can expect. So, that is me. That's how I got here, and yeah. That's my story.Brian: (04:20)I love that line, herding apes instead of cats. There's a lot of really cool stuff we can dive into with DAA but maybe before we get into all that, you have a really interesting journey. You hit on starting as a Twitch partner, getting into everything at Twitch and the gaming side of things, and then being really early to building NFT marketplaces, but you did mention at one point you thought crypto was a scam. What changed your mind on all that? And it seems like you pretty early gravitated to NFTs, maybe before a lot of the mainstream did. Was that related to you changing your mind on why crypto's a scam?Crass Kitty: (04:51)I've talked about this in other interviews. So, before I was a Twitch partner, I was actually a stripper and a cam girl. This is full disclosure here. And one of the biggest struggles that I've seen in that industry is that Visa and MasterCard limit who can get paid. They just say, "You can't get paid if you're a sex worker." Basically, if you get paid in PayPal and somebody charges back and says it was for camgirling, PayPal will freeze all your accounts and freeze your whole assets. So, I know that's 18-plus, but my moment for knowing it wasn't a scam was when I was talking to engineers at NEAR about what censorship-resistant payments meant and realizing that it meant that creators like adult content creators but also Twitch partners, anybody who is a creator in the creator ecosystem, would be able to get paid safely, ethically, and also without limitation.Crass Kitty: (05:37)And that blew my mind. It was just like, "Wait a minute. There's a solution to this problem that I've known about for literally a decade? What?" And so, that was really phenomenal to me. That's like ... I don't know, very near and dear to my heart. It's like the reason I joined crypto. It also feels like it ties the beginning of my origin story to the end or to the point where I'm reaching the hero arc, and that feels cool.Brian: (05:58)That's awesome. Yeah. That's a really unique perspective on the space. Diving now into NFTs, you started your own marketplace, I presume on NEAR. Then, you get involved with DAA at a time when they're trying to carve their own path. They're one of the first major NFT collections on Solana. Everyone's figuring this out. I think at this time Metaplex maybe was just getting started.Crass Kitty: (06:19)Oh yeah, barely.Brian: (06:20)You mentioned Steven Hess who's now the CEO of Metaplex, but at the time he was at Solana. So, in your own words, what is Degenerate Ape Academy? What makes you guys unique in the NFT space?Crass Kitty: (06:33)If you go to our website, it says our mission is simple and that is to fuck shit up. Put 10,000 degenerates on this planet and let them fuck shit up. And I wish I could say as a product nerd, that was not the case internally as well, but it's totally the case internally. Constantly as a product nerd, as a product person, it's my job to organize all the chaos. Probably some of the hardest organizational work I've ever worked on in terms of making sure that we've literally scoped out, probably, I don't know, eight different theories since we released the eggs in January of what we were going to do next. And we'll be in the middle of building it or in the middle of scoping it, and then a wrecking ball comes through that is in the form of a team member, and it'll be like, "Okay, this is cool. But what if we did like this?"Crass Kitty: (07:17)So, lots of fucking shit up basically. Degenerate apes though, as a culture, as a brand, as a project, as a company, I think ultimately, we're a place for those that maybe have always been a little bit on the edge of life. Maybe you are a cool person who gets along with everybody but have a more degenerate side. I think we're a home for everybody who identifies with that. And I think that's something that is a testament to our success is the fact that we not only are a home to that, but we lean into it.Crass Kitty: (07:45)I worked at FetLife. For those that know what that is, you don't have to dox yourself, but it's kinky Facebook basically. It's BDSM Facebook. I am a degenerate at heart and being able to work on a project that leans into, owns, and accepts their own degeneracies has just been an absolute delight.Brian: (08:00)So, what was it like in those early days when you guys were just getting started? There was basically no tools out there for NFT creators like yourselves. Like I said earlier, you guys were pioneers in this space. For those who weren't there in August 2021, walk us through those early days, what you guys had to get through.Crass Kitty: (08:18)So, we had just minted our second mint successfully-ish, but the first mint was kind of a mess up. Some apes snuck through, as we say, and those became the exiled apes. So, we basically in those early days were trying to figure it out internally while also trying to make sure externally that a story was always told. So, Monoliff was really good at spinning lore and spinning our mistakes into lore. So, in those early days, I would say our work from the product perspective was very reactive. So, it was like, "Okay, we have exiles. Now we have to create a dow so that they can vote on what to do with these exiles. Do we let them in the collection? Do we not? Let's put that into a decentralized autonomous organization organization." Which is the DAOO if you don't know. Organization organization twice is a personal enjoyment of mine that we wrote in a product requirement document.Crass Kitty: (09:04)Anyways, that was a thing. And then figuring out what to do with twins, because we had duplicated some of these apes in this 10002nd collection. And so how do we make those twins more valuable while also making sure that people don't feel like they got gypped because they got the same ape as somebody else? We pulled that off, but like I said, a lot of it was very reactionary work. I would say, as a company, as a product team, we are now very proactive, which has been an interesting shift.Crass Kitty: (09:31)If you've ever worked at a startup and gone from being reactionary to proactive, there's usually a rough patch there where you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I not react to and what do I be proactive for?" We did have that rough patch. It's like we're in a horse race and the horse that was in the middle front was slowing down a little bit and then found a new burst of energy and rushed to the front. That's literally where I feel like right now as a product cycle. We're at this point where we're literally shipping things every couple of days right now internally for testing, things are coming along really quickly.Crass Kitty: (10:01)We've figured out our marketing strategy. There's something called love bombing that I don't even know if I'm supposed to talk about, but we're doing this where we give these teasers, give these moments, give these loving attention moments to our community, and then leave them with a little bit of chaos and wondering, "Why don't they love me now?" And so, we've identified this as our strategy and that's working for us. Moving forward with this proactive approach, it means that as we build products, I now actually get to share screenshots or progress pieces, and instead of delivering this perfect thing as a reaction to something that we fucked up before. Does that make sense?Brian: (10:35)Yeah. No. I'd love to dive into a lot of that now, too. I think we covered the early days, the wild west of the NFT space, but let's bring it forward to today. How do you see the current state of NFTs broadly? What's in the future for NFTs? And then, what are you excited about both maybe across the ecosystem and specifically with DAA and some of these upcoming product releases that you guys are working on?Crass Kitty: (10:57)Well, we are in a bear market. I think we can all acknowledge we're in probably one of the worst bear markets to be in because previous bear markets have existed, but there weren't a ton of builders at that time and so there weren't a ton of consumers of products that were being built. So, the disappointment for a bear market before, while big, was also not I think as widely spread on Twitter and social media and people you talk to in real life if you're lucky enough to know people in real life who know about crypto. So, now I think the reason I say it's one of the worst bear markets is not just the financial implication, but also the social implication.Crass Kitty: (11:29)We're in this really interesting period where people are aware of what's going on and they're aware of crypto and they're aware of NFTs and there's so many builders in the space and a lot of people are feeling scared and worried about the state of the world and also the state of the crypto market. And I think that's fair. Yeah. I think that's the current state of the market.Brian: (11:49)And then, I guess diving a little bit into DAA and some of the guys you were building throughout this bear, can you shed a little bit of light on some of those projects, what you guys have been up to?Crass Kitty: (11:58)Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, because it is a bear, pay attention to the builders in this space, pay attention to the people who are still here in five months, six months, a year. Those are the people who are building sustainable products and that's what we've really focused on. I think previously our methodology for income was based on royalties and secondary sales. That is not a sustainable method of income for a business at any point, including a bear market, and so we've recently done these crate auctions, which had been really fun to work on. Full disclosure, I think we had three, maybe two and a half weeks lead-up to the first auction on product and development life cycle including design. That was fun. But we pulled it off and we actually pulled it off with no bugs so I'm pretty stoked about that. Go Veritas and Dev Lock. My developer is really proud of them there.Crass Kitty: (12:43)But that being said, we've done these crate auctions, which are these one-of-one auctions for these crates that hold our eggs. And I mentioned the eggs previously as these things that the twins got to get when they bred in the bathroom. Long story. Anyways, eggs have been a thing that people have been waiting for us to hatch so we're releasing these eggs inside of crates that are more elite eggs is the way I would describe them. They're even better eggs than the other eggs, and the other eggs have tiers anyways. There's regular eggs and inbred eggs, which inbred eggs are for twins if you didn't catch that. But anyways, my point being, all of this is leading up, these auctions, these eggs, these crates. By the time this podcast is released, we'll be really close to the Hatchening, which is very exciting. It's so exciting. I'm so excited.Crass Kitty: (13:30)I mean, we've basically just been building, finding other revenue streams, and also working really hard on, like I said, being proactive in the bear versus reactive to the state of the market or our own mistakes in the past.Brian: (13:41)That's really cool. I love the creativity there of trying to spin things and keep users engaged. For an end user who maybe owns a Degen Ape, maybe they were lucky or unlucky enough to get one of these duplicates, maybe they have an egg, what can they expect from this? Will they be having to interact with these kind of things? How should they be thinking about some of these hints that you're dropping so far?Crass Kitty: (14:03)So, twins have a higher floor price than our non-twins, which is kind of wild. Because like I said, they're duplicate NFTs, which is really funny from a product perspective, but I own a twin and I bred my twin and I got an inbred egg from that twin. And so twins got free eggs. They didn't have to pay anything to get an egg and they got a guaranteed egg. If you entered your twin into the bathroom stall, you got an egg. Congratulations. And you got a guaranteed inbred egg, which inbred eggs I believe ... I need to double check the price, but I believe inbred eggs are actually much higher than regular eggs. I want to say the floor for them is around 200 SOL and a regular egg is like 69 last I checked. Going to double-check that in my numbers really fast.Crass Kitty: (14:42)So, these eggs are going to hatch and on the Hatchening, as I said, which is a much more dark and sinister way of saying what's happening. Basically, inbred eggs have 175 floor and regular eggs have a 66 floor, but inbred eggs are going to have very different attributes than regular eggs when they hatch. Also, this is still in discussion, but I'm hoping it's going to lean towards what I say. We are actively discussing and I'm currently pushing for the idea that you can choose if you hatch your egg or not. So, it doesn't mean it's mandatory. I'm working towards this. No promises. If this gets uploaded and I'm wrong later on, don't quote me on it. You never heard this.Brian: (15:22)Love that. And so, are all of these experiences going to be things that live within the Degen Ape website? I see you guys have also been doing a lot of I guess in-real-life marketing pushes as well. How do you see blending maybe the physical world with what's digital so far? Where have you guys been focusing your efforts there?Crass Kitty: (15:40)Yeah. So, we have something coming out called homeroom and it'll be coming out a couple of days after this podcast does if everything goes according to plan. Nothing ever goes according to plan, so again, don't quote me on that, but homeroom is going to be your hub or your central place for your degenerate NFTs. That includes the eggs, what they hatch into, the apes, and the trash pandas. So, you'll be able to go into this homeroom experience and you're going to be able to do a lot of things that are coming soon. Namely, gold stars are going to be our new economy. They're not related to any real-life value. There's no US dollar that is equated to them. They're an inflationary asset. We don't believe in tying them to US dollars at all. But these gold stars are basically these really cool things that we're going to use to gamify our universe.Crass Kitty: (16:27)They're SFTS. They stack in your wallet. You get them in three different ways basically. Number one is roll call, which is where we check if your NFTs are listed. If they're not listed at random points in the year, we don't give you any warning, we don't tell you it's coming, it's just like, "Boom. We did a snapshot." If you're not listed at that point, randomly, we will award you gold stars that you can claim. If you don't want to claim them and you sell your NFT later, they go with the NFT as you sell them. Think Ape coin or Trash panda's rain token. It's kind of like that.Crass Kitty: (16:59)The second way you can earn gold stars is through homework. Homework is the idea of you pay attention and you get to earn things. So, if you see our Twitter and we maybe hinted the fact that homework is active somewhere in one of our comic book strips on our website that are coming and we tweet out the pizza emoji and a comic book gif, you may go look for a piece of pizza in the comic book on our website, click that pizza and then magically there's gold stars that are awarded to you for you finding that Easter egg.Crass Kitty: (17:30)These are active Easter egg hunts that we're putting all over our site and we're tweeting out, discording, and sharing information about stealthily. These are for people who pay attention and do their homework. And the last one answers your question of how we see physical and digital world interacting. It won't be coming for a while until after homeroom launches, but it will be hinted at in homeroom. Field trips. What's a field trip? I just saw your face light up there.Brian: (17:52)Yeah. I love the leaning into the mic for the name drops there.Crass Kitty: (17:55)Yeah. So, field trips are, if you've heard of Cupcake Protocol, it is the idea of NFTs being attached to NFC technology, which means you can tap your phone to it. Not scanning it with your camera, but literally tap the physical phone to a sticker or a card, and you can claim gold stars by tapping your phone to these digital scavenger hunts. Think Pokemon Go mixed with geocaching.Brian: (18:19)Yeah.Crass Kitty: (18:20)But for the Degenaverse.Brian: (18:21)That's super cool. I've always wondered who's going to make the first Pokemon Go experience in NFT Land. That totally took over San Francisco where I am for a couple of weeks. Super, super fun experience, so I'm really glad that you guys are thinking along those lines.Crass Kitty: (18:34)The really cool part about field trips is, if you have a friend who doesn't have a Degenaverse NFT, but you want to take them on a field trip, they are also able to claim gold stars. So, you do not have to have one of our NFTs to claim them on these field trip encounters. I'm really excited to be working on this and building this and able to show this to you guys soon. It's going to be probably a little bit after homeroom releases. I want to say between two to three months after the initial rollout of homeroom, we'll have field trips ready. This is the biggest alpha that I think I've released ever, and a preliminary call or anything, so I think I might get killed over this, so don't quote me on anything that changes.Brian: (19:09)I love it. The alpha here on the Zeitgeist Podcast.Crass Kitty: (19:12)It's like alpha of alpha, because a lot of it hasn't been fully finished if you know what I mean or committed to. So, like I said, if things change in the meantime, know that the vision is leading towards these things, but the implementation may be different.Brian: (19:24)Totally. Yeah. Now you covered a lot there. I think it's really cool that you guys are thinking about bridging those two worlds, the physical and the digital. You guys have been around the Solana space now for over a year or about a year now. I'd say there's a lot of NFT projects that are maybe just starting up. They're trying to build a community, emulating something like you guys have. Sitting in your position now where you have this large community, you've been through the ups and downs, now you're thinking about all these really cool projects, what would you say to maybe newer projects that are trying to find their feet in the ecosystem and what are some of the unique challenges that you guys face as a more established project in the space?Crass Kitty: (20:01)If you're new to the space, find yourself a damn good tax accountant because it's hard. It's a nightmare doing taxes in an NFT project and incorporate or form an LLC as soon as you can. We did not immediately do that and we did our taxes as a joint partnership. You don't want to do your taxes as a joint partnership if you're an NFT project. Just pro tip there. So, I know that's kind of a boring answer, but logistics matter, and I think we're so caught up in crypto sometimes that we feel like, "Oh, it's all decentralized. It's all cutting-edge tech. It's all gray areas. We can avoid being logistical."Crass Kitty: (20:38)Don't avoid being logistical. Set your early foundations to be structurally sound so that you can grow in a structurally sound way. It's like if you're building a house or any product, even digital, but you have a minimum viable product, which is the bare bones of what you're going to build on top of. If you look at your company that you're forming in crypto or the NFT space at this point, think about what your bones look like as a company. So, imagine your company is a product or is a house or is whatever it is that you're used to building, and if you're an engineer, maybe that's the structure of the code and your libraries and how you're setting them up.Crass Kitty: (21:12)You got to look at your company the same way, and I think this is where I see the most projects make the mistake is that they don't look at it like a company. They look at it like a project and they don't realize that they're going to get taxed like it's a company, they're going to get affected like it's a company, and they're going to get legal implication like it's a company. So, give yourself that foundation. And that's really important. I can't stress how important that is. I know it's a boring answer, but it's the realest answer I can give.Brian: (21:36)Yeah. No. I mean, that's sage advice having been through it. From where you guys sit today, we touched on it a little bit with your guys' plans for all these great projects, but how do you envision maybe years from now? What is the essence of DAA? Is multi-chain something in your future? Do you guys envision continuing to cross the physical and the digital worlds? Basically, what is your grand vision for Degenerate Ape Academy?Crass Kitty: (22:02)We're going to keep fucking shit up. And that can be a good thing and a bad thing. Fucking shit up could also mean fucking up the status quo or fucking up the way that things are traditionally done, and I think that's exactly what we're aiming to do. We're trying to be on the cutting edge, to change things as they're changing, and to push the boundaries of what's possible.Crass Kitty: (22:17)That being said, years from now, it's impossible for me to predict what we're going to be building because the market and the conditions and the state of the ecosystem changes so rapidly. Six months ago, I would not have told you that we were doing something like field trips because Cupcake didn't exist. So, as new technology comes out, we will adapt, we will build, we will innovate on top of it, and we will always aim to be one of the first builders that you're going to see in that space doing those things.Brian: (22:41)That's super cool. I got to say that Solana space is really appreciative of you guys being trailblazers here. I know there's a lot of NFT builders who look up to you guys. Maybe from where you sit, we ask this question to all of our guests, but who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Crass Kitty: (22:56)So, I mentioned him earlier in this interview. I interviewed with him. Now we're really good friends. I've invited him to my wedding. Stephen Hess, CEO of Metaplex, is one of my favorite builders in this space. Having a conversation with Stephen when there's a mutual NDA in place and we can both be very transparent is incredibly invigorating. It's just talking to a fellow product nerd and being able to talk to somebody who thinks so expansively about what we're building, what we're all building, and someone who believes in open source technology the way that he does and providing solutions to builders the way that he does.Crass Kitty: (23:30)Every conversation I have with Stephen has me walking away with a giant smile on my face and an energy that usually keeps me up until about 4:00 AM writing product documents. So, if you ever get a chance to talk to Stephen at an event or anything, he's a very friendly dude. He's like seven feet tall or something. He's a giant. Looks scarier than he is in the sense that he's very tall. If you're short, it's kind of intimidating, but he is the gentle most wonderful, also very intelligent person I've ever encountered in this space, and just a delight.Brian: (23:58)That's really cool to hear. That's Stephen Hess, former head of product at Solana Labs, now CEO of Metaplex, which is basically the metadata company for all tokens on Solana. Crass kitty, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time sharing with us your vision, where things are going for DAA. Where can people go to learn more about all these crazy projects that you guys are up to?Crass Kitty: (24:19)Yeah. You can go to DegenApe.academy is our website. That's where homeroom will be deploying. You can go to our Twitter, which is twitter.com/i think it's Degen Ape Academy as well. Or discord, you can join that from our website. I mean, not to plug, but you can totally follow Crass Kitty on Twitter, Crass Kitty everywhere really. I've claimed stake to that name. My DMs are always open for a reason, and that is that if anybody ever has any questions about anything that I'm building or things that they're building and need help, if I have time, if I have bandwidth, I will absolutely give it, and if you just want to be onboarded in any general sense of the word to anything Solana or crypto, I do that passionately and also, as often as I can.Brian: (24:57)I love to hear it. Yeah. That's definitely been the spirit that I've seen from everyone thus far on Solana. Really appreciate you continuing to carry the torch there. Well, Crass Kitty, this has been really great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have to have you back out in San Francisco again for another branding workshop soon.Crass Kitty: (25:12)Looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for this.Brian: (25:14)Take care.
On tonight's @dGenNightShift:-Top 3 NFT's to make money on today!-y00ts & Solana NFT updates-Lots of new Mints!-Prep for the ETH Merge Powered by @dGenNetworkSponsored by @DraftKingsVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkJ_cqqqI_MdGenNetwork Podcast Lineup: https://dgen.network/podcasts/Follow us on Twitter:dGen Network: https://twitter.com/dGenNetworkNight Shift: https://twitter.com/dGenNightShiftThe Crew:JpCaz: https://twitter.com/jp_cazPh0nics: https://twitter.com/Ph0nicsMizzle: https://twitter.com/ITzMiZzleTj: https://twitter.com/nft33jShane: https://twitter.com/ValentinesDipSupport the show
The y00ts have arrived to the Solana NFT market! In this video Dan and JWeb recap some of the highlights and lowlights of a very successful drop of the y00ts NFT. They dive into the numbers as well as discuss the funding raised by the team behind DeGods and y00ts, Dust Labs. Subscribe to Web3 and Me, a podcast featuring Daniel and JWeb where they talk about everything NFT. New episodes every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Web3 and Me is a production of FLOLiO, an NFT portfolio management platform revolutionizing the way people conduct NFT market research. #NFTGuide #NFTStrategy #NFTTips #y00ts #DeGods #Solana #DustLabs #solananft —————————————————————— FLOLiO: https://flolio.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/FLOLiO_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flolio__ Discord: https://discord.gg/AkuFEvkmPx JWeb: https://twitter.com/JWeb777 Daniel: https://twitter.com/DanLaaq —————————————————————— DISCLAIMER: This is NOT financial or legal advice. We are just offering our opinions. We are not responsible for any investment or legal decisions that you choose to make.
No card talk today, this episode is all about what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite hobbies, the Solana NFT-based basketball sim, the Virtual Basketball Association (VBA). Continuing from Episode 3 way back in May, I break down the different player archetypes, community resources and my own approach to setting my main team lineup. Thanks so much for listening! I hope you enjoy it! (1:00) - Intro to VBA (9:00) - Player Archetypes Comparison and Stats (40:00) - Community Resources (46:00) - My Setup and Approach
On tonight's @dGenNighShift powered by @dGenNetwork:- y00ts Mint, Degods, Tj makes the y00tlist!- Renga Reveal and stuff we're watching- Sol #NFTs: Cets on Creck, Schremps, Primates- Draftkings and other #DFS & Fantasy Games- Special Guest Mentions:Sponsored by @DraftKings@frankdegods@y00tsNFT@yOOtlist@DeGodsNFT@RENGA_inc@CetsOnCreck@shrempin@PrimatesnftPrevious Show Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1955224Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_skg8ZKfq5g Follow us on Twitter:dGen Network: https://twitter.com/dGenNetworkNight Shift: https://twitter.com/dGenNightShiftThe Crew:JpCaz: https://twitter.com/jp_cazPh0nics: https://twitter.com/Ph0nicsMizzle: https://twitter.com/ITzMiZzleTj: https://twitter.com/nft33jShane: https://twitter.com/ValentinesDipSupport the show
On tonight's @dGenNightShift:- y00ts, DeGods and $DUST- DigiDaigaku Raises $200M - #BAYC at the VMA's- Solana #NFT's on the move?- Renga, Commoners, Simeji, Potatoz & MorePowered by @dGenNetworkSponsored by @DraftKingsMentions:@y00tsNFT@DeGodsNFT@moonbirds@DigiDaigaku@commoners_nft@RENGA_incPrevious Show Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1955224https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unr5qTnKjNUFollow us on Twitter:dGen Network: https://twitter.com/dGenNetworkNight Shift: https://twitter.com/dGenNightShiftThe Crew:JpCaz: https://twitter.com/jp_cazPh0nics: https://twitter.com/Ph0nicsMizzle: https://twitter.com/ITzMiZzleTj: https://twitter.com/nft33jShane: https://twitter.com/ValentinesDipSupport the show
Von is joined by the host of The Unruggable Pod, Moishe Kaufman to have a web3 podcaster-to-podcaster conversation about the ever-evolving NFT space. In addition to the discussion with Moishe, Von was joined by one of the founders of Kreechures. The first NFT project on Solana besides 1/1 art collectibles. They took a deep dive into what founders should be aware of and Von got a history lesson about the evolution of Solana marketplaces.
Kreechures was launched on March 26th, 2021 on the Solana blockchain and became the first to do so. Although this just over 18 months ago, Daniel and Kreechures have experienced many similarities to what some of early NFT Relic pioneers faced years ago. Without any infrastructure to build on Daniel had to be creative to ensure his P2E game Kreechures would have a healthy lifespan. |Kreechures|• Twitter → https://twitter.com/kreechures• Website → https://linktr.ee/kreechures|CONNECT WITH JAKE|• Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/jakegallen/• Twitter → https://twitter.com/jakegallen_• Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/JakeNGallen• Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-gall...|FOLLOW AND SUBSCRIBE THE PODCAST|• Website → https://www.jakegallen.com/• Youtube → Subscribe to this page• Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...• Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/7hQdRAz...• Google Podcasts → https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR...• RSS Feed → https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1005154.rss• Website → https://solo.to/theguestlistpod• Media Host → https://theguestlistpod.buzzsprout.com/
In today's episode, we covered OpenSea's launchpad with their first Solana NFT mint, Zoonies. There was talk about the Degentown mint and how it is looking rather bleak. A team member was let go from the project, there's a lot of drama on who's actually back in the project and who's doxxed. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In today's episode, we dive into the gambling meta on the Solana blockchain. In Solana NFTs, we focused heavily on Degen coin flip and the Degen Fat Cats, as well as the current height behind SOL crash. We also talk about what we're looking at in the Solana NFT space with some logic and how some upcoming Solana liquidity catalysts will affect the trading market. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In this show, we dove into the recent Magic Eden launchpad mint, Liberty Square, highlighting what they did well to sell out in this downtrend and why we felt that there was a variety of factors that played into their mint, including their project founder frequenting spaces, the right mint cost, and having the right individuals on their team to help drive that interest. In addition to this, we dove into Oak Paradise and the fact that they deleted their discord and Twitter prior to mint. Then we concluded with what we're looking at in the Solana NFT market and how we feel about certain projects like Tayo Robotics, and Magic Eden's support for Ethereum NFTs. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
We highlighted lots of Solana projects throughout today's episode. There is conversation on Okay Bears and what's in store for them. We also cover Degentown, what have they delivered as it has lost its sparkle? Has it lost its lore? what's going on post-burn? We then took a dive into what we were looking at in the market, circled back on things like Shrouded Playground and the lack of quality in their art, and then finalize the conversation on upcoming value in the Solana NFT market. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In this episode, we dive into Magic Eden heavily marketing for their own NFT mints and Degentown finding success without promising anything on their roadmap. In addition to this, a conversation sparks about Solana NFT projects removing their discords to focus more on the marketing efforts of social media and Twitter. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In this episode, the big topic of discussion is the role of an advisor on a Solana NFT project. What's the difference between an advisor or consultant and a promoter? We also talk about the hot projects on Solana, who's trading, and the state of the market. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
Sidney Zhang (Magic Eden CTO) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss his personal story to crypto and how Magic Eden scaled their way into becoming the top Solana NFT marketplace.Show Notes00:42 - Intro / Background08:46 - What prompted creating Magic Eden on Solana11:53 - Picking up rust and working in solana13:57 - Magic Eden: From underdog to behemoth16:52 - Building at Magic Eden20:35 - Engineering challenges that were faced23:01 - What they look for in engineers27:35 - Evolution of NFTs29:19 - Builders he admires in the spaceTranscriptBrian (00:05):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce Sidney Zang. Syd is the co-founder in CTO of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Syd, how's it going?Syd (00:29):Yeah, very good. Thank you for having us.Brian (00:31):Thanks so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you today about what you guys have built with Magic Eden. I'd love to start though if you could give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you were up to before you got started in this space.Syd (00:43):Yeah. My name's Sidney. I'm the CEO of Magic Eden. I'll go from the beginning. Actually, when I first graduated from college, I actually started my first crypto company right after college in 2013. At that time, I was the co-organizer of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group.Syd (01:01):And so generally, I was really, really into crypto culture, especially crypto developer culture. I was also contributor to some of the crypto libraries that were used at the time. Funnily enough, my collaborator on the library is JP, the founder of Exodus Wallet, which is a very large wallet.Brian (01:20):Oh no way!Syd (01:20):Yeah. And JP actually slept in my living room when he was in SF, but shout-out to JP. So at that time, I was really also into crypto consumer products. And at that time, smart contract was just a concept that was coming up. But obviously, there was nothing. The Bitcoin scripting language obviously was not Turing complete, so you couldn't really do much. And so we created a lot of consumer apps that we thought was interesting at the time. We created a second Bitcoin tipper bot where the first tipper bot was on Reddit.Syd (01:59):The second tipper bot was on Twitter, and that was the one that we made. Our users started spamming celebrities with Bitcoin tips to create awareness for Bitcoin. That was kind of fun, but ultimately, there wasn't much traction. Another thing that I did was the first big crypto browser wallet, Chrome extension wallet, we built the very first one.Brian (02:20):Oh, wow.Syd (02:22):No one had started at that point. It was kind of magical. It was really nice, the experience. But eventually, we shut it down because we thought no one would ever be able to make money from a crypto browser wallet like that. Just how can a crypto browser wallet ever be a business, right? It's not possible. So we gave up on that, even though it was really, really cool.Brian (02:42):How far we've come on that.Syd (02:43):How far we've come, right, since then. And then also back then, I really started thinking about NFT at the time. It wasn't called NFT at the time. It was basically like Bitcoin had this bite code called OP_RETURN that allows you to put 80 bytes of data in there.Syd (03:02):It's going to be copyright, so let's hash the image and put the bites into those 80 bites. Obviously, nobody used it, but I thought it was cool to put image on the chain. We created this thing called LoveBlock. And the slogan was like, "Roses are red. Violets are purple. Diamonds are bullshit, but the blockchain is forever."Syd (03:27):And so people put love letters in there because the blockchain is forever, so your love would be forever. That obviously also didn't get traction. It was big for a day on Valentine's Day, and then it died the next day.Brian (03:37):Big on Valentine's day. Yeah.Syd (03:39):So we built a lot of things-Brian (03:40):Oh, that's amazing.Syd (03:41):... that... That got a lot of attention on Hacker News. That was big for a day, and then it will just inevitably die a few days later. Yeah. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, it's really hard to do consumer on crypto unless you run an exchange.Syd (03:58):So I was like, "You know what? I am going to build a developer API because there are so many developers and they will come up with a consumer product." And because I was a co-organizer of the Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group, it was really natural for me to do that.Syd (04:12):So I did that, raised a little bit of money, obviously spent all the money. And as it turns out, the fact that I wasn't able to build a consumer product, nobody else could either. So we ended with all this developer using our API that also couldn't make money and couldn't pay us.Syd (04:31):So eventually, the Bitcoin developer API also was not successful. I ran out of money. I had to borrow money from my girlfriend, who is my wife now. So luckily, that worked out.Brian (04:43):Nice.Syd (04:43):I actually never pay her back because we forgot. Brian (04:52):Your gift is probably on the blockchain for her though to still see.Syd (04:52):And I ended up living on a boat for a little bit because I was so poor. It's funny, the owner of the boat, Nate, actually works at Magic Eden now.Brian (05:02):Wow.Syd (05:03):Anyway, it's a long, long place-Brian (05:05):What a story.Syd (05:05):Yeah. So I was on the boat for a bit in the Alameda Marina. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, man." I was just bitter about crypto. I was like, "Fuck, crypto sucks."Syd (05:16):I was like, "I need a break from crypto," and it was like during the deep bear market at that time.Brian (05:20):What year was this?Syd (05:21):I think by the time, I think it was 2015 that I left crypto. I joined Uber.Brian (05:27):It's one of the earlier bear markets before.Syd (05:28):Yeah, that's right.Brian (05:28):Yeah. Everyone knows the 2015 one.Syd (05:31):Yeah, yeah. I started in 2013. No, I actually started in 2012. Because buying marijuana in Australia where I'm from, I'm from Australia, buying marijuana in Australia was very illegal. And so the best way to buy marijuana as a college student was using Bitcoin.Syd (05:46):And so that's how I go into the space. But at the same time, I was very... I had a lot of libertarian kind of leaning. And so the idea of a non-inflationary currency really appealed to me. Anyway, so then 2015, I joined Uber Eats as one of the first engineers there before Uber Eats was a thing. We built Uber Eats.Brian (06:10):Yeah.Syd (06:10):Uber Eats obviously grew from nothing to like $50 billion GMV or something ridiculous. Right?Brian (06:18):I heard you were in the room at the time when it was just a Figma file essentially.Syd (06:22):Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was. I don't know if it was Figma actually. I think at that time, people didn't use Figma. I think it was-Syd (06:27):Yeah. I think they probably used something else, and I can't remember what it was, so yeah. So I would stay with Uber Eats for a few years. I learned a lot there. I was primarily working on all the machine learning initiatives.Brian (06:39):Okay.Syd (06:40):Ranking, recommendation, search, discovery, little bit pricing, all those things. And then after that, I transitioned. I transferred to ATG, which stands for Advanced Technologies Group, was like the self-driving research lab in... The lab was based out of Toronto.Syd (06:59):And so there, I was a research manager. I focused on computer vision. I focused on prediction towards them with a little bit simulation as well. Then after that, I went to Facebook. I was at Facebook AI. And at that time... The whole time, I was just watching crypto, buying tokens, trying to make sense of the madness, but also really exciting at the time.Syd (07:21):And then when NFT... But I always really wanted to do something in crypto consumer because that was like what really appealed to me. And I was like, "Hey, I'm not going to go back into crypto until there's a consumer opportunity." And that was something that I really care about.Syd (07:36):And then NFT started to take off. And I remember when NFT took off, it was almost like... At one time, I was like, "Fuck, I like all these things." I thought about this in 2013. And then at the same time, how it's happening is nothing like what I thought would happen in 2013.Brian (07:56):Right.Syd (07:56):I thought about crypto gaming in 2013, but I would never have thought like Game Fire, Symphony. All these things are never... just out of this world. And I was like, "This is just fascinating." And at that point, I was just really sold.Syd (08:10):Even though I was at Facebook, honestly, I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." I was just obsessed over it. And then soon afterwards, I left Facebook and then we started Magic Eden and the rest is history.Brian (08:21):The rest is history.Syd (08:21):Yeah.Brian (08:22):That's great. So somewhere along that journey from the 2015 bear market, you being an early Uber Eats employee and then joined the Facebook, you leveled up, you got out of the houseboat in Alameda, I assume.Syd (08:33):Not a houseboat. It was a 24-foot sailing boat that was really small.Brian (08:39):Yeah. Amazing. And so at this time, after the 2018 bear market, obviously, there was a lot of activity on Ethereum. What made you pull the trigger to actually start Magic Eden? And why did you pick Solana of all blockchains at the time?Syd (08:55):You know, first of all, I think there are a few things, like the stars need to align for you to start a company. And my co-founder, the CEO, Jack, was working at FTX at the time. He was at Google before. Joshen was a product manager at Coinbase. He was employee number two at dYdX.Syd (09:11):And then Rex, I've known Rex for very, very long time, always a big crypto degen since I met him at Uber. And so the four of us... And Jack and I, we've known each other since high school. We actually met each other in math tutoring.Brian (09:26):Oh, no way.Syd (09:26):Which is a very Asian way to meet someone.Brian (09:29):Well, you guys are both from Australia. Is that correct too?Syd (09:31):From Australia. That's right. Yeah. We're both from Melbourne, went to the same math tutor, Dr. Heath, math coaching.Brian (09:36):Wow.Syd (09:37):So we've just been talking about crypto for years. We're like, "We want to start something." Right? And so I feel like it's just like we've been paying attention for a long time. That's why the first thing, which is that opportunities come every once in a blue moon.Syd (09:56):But the people who are ready to go at that moment are the people that capture the opportunity. And we've just been looking at it for a very long time. We keep following it. So that's probably the first thing. And then there's a question on Solana.Syd (10:06):I think our thesis was very much that NFT is what's going to take crypto to mainstream even though, I think, crypto in general is now breaking the same barrier, right? What Coinbase is doing, which is amazing what Crypto.com's doing, what Binance is doing and, to some extent to... and what FTX is doing, crypto is breaking the sound barrier.Syd (10:31):But I think ultimately, NFT is going to be that thing that's going to take crypto to the mainstream.Brian (10:36):Yeah.Syd (10:37):That's when it's going to be like Phantom's going to have... Phantom Wallet's going to have a hundred million users, you know? And then I think a lot of them would be using it because of NFT. Right?Brian (10:46):Right.Syd (10:48):And I think that for a consumer experience to make sense, I think that the speed of the chain, the chain being designed not to be cheesy web scale, is really, really important. And I think that's what attracted us to Solana.Syd (11:06):Even though the ecosystem, the developer ecosystem was raw at the time, it's just a... I would say it's an ecosystem, was just full of energy and the foundation had been very, very warm to us and help us and so on. And I think all these have been very important reasons for why we chose Solana over any other chains.Brian (11:26):Yeah. I think that resonates very well with our founding story as well here at Phantom and why we chose a similar path as you guys for similar reasons. You touched on a little bit about how at the start, the developer ecosystem was very raw. And Solana is and still... or was and still is very different than EBM or what you were doing in the earlier days with Bitcoin.Brian (11:49):Can you talk a little bit about how that learning process was for you? Obviously, you had a ton of experience from way back in the day. But coming from a Web2 environment, Facebook, Uber, how was picking up ROSS and trying to build your first program on Solana? What did you use to get started?Syd (12:06):Oh, Rust isn't hard. Rust is an amazing language. It's probably like Solana smart contract self. They're just nuances. We used Anchor since the beginning, shout to Amani. Amazing. Amazing.Brian (12:18):Yeah, putting the industry on his back.Syd (12:19):Yeah, and just carrying the industry on his back. I think that when you run into issues, the error message didn't make sense.Brian (12:30):Yeah.Syd (12:32):Like, "Oh. Well, something broke, 0X75." You're like, "What?" And we just ran into stuff like that. But I think that's the power of open source, right? We just stuck into the core. And if you dig enough, you'll find what's going on.Syd (12:44):We're very lucky to have just great people with us along the way, like shout to Andrew from Zeta Market where he really help us a lot from the beginning. Without Andrew, I think there would be no Magic Eden.Syd (12:56):And yeah, we crunch really hard at the beginning and we shipped the first product after coding for 10 days.Brian (13:02):And when was this? Was this around the end of the summer in 2021?Syd (13:05):Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we just crunched really hard for 10 days, and then we shipped. And that was how we got started.Brian (13:15):Wow.Syd (13:15):At that time, there was already very entrenched competition where Solana, DigitalEyes, they were doing... Collectively, they were doing over like a hundred-something million dollars a month-Brian (13:26):Yeah. I remember those days.Syd (13:28):... in GMV at that time. So they were really, really big. The network effects were very, very strong. Yeah. And it was in that environment that we started. Yeah.Brian (13:37):Yeah. I remember those days. You only had one or two mints a day, if that too. So the NFT space was very small. You felt like you could keep track of every project and who was what, and there was just a few…Syd (13:50):Not anymore.Brian (13:50):Yeah, not anymore. And there was just a few projects or a few marketplaces. But as you said, Solana and a few others just were dominant in market share. How do you guys think that you guys rose to where you are now? You guys basically were an underdog to start. You're an absolute behemoth today. What would you attribute to that success?Syd (14:16):I think just to show our company a little bit and talk about culture values, we have four culture values. And the first culture value that we have is customer obsession. The second culture value we have is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0. And what does that mean? Right?Syd (14:29):That means that from the very beginning, we knew that it's very important to be in touch with Google culture. And of course, each chain is a little bit different but Solana is definitely like a deep, deep crypto culture, has a deep crypto culture.Syd (14:45):I think in crypto community, it's extremely important. Being customer-obsessed, being community-obsessed was that thing that... And I think it sounds cheesy in hindsight. It's like, "Duh." Right.Brian (14:59):Mm-hmm.Syd (15:00):But actually, when you focus on that, it propagates what you do every single day, you know?Brian (15:06):Right.Syd (15:06):What we do when the times are good, what we do when we fuck up, when we mess up, we certainly had a fair share of disasters, being honest, being transparent, being obsessed over the customer, their experience, embracing communities. Right?Syd (15:22):A lot of the marketplaces at the time were very like... They were like a boys club almost, right?Brian (15:30):Mm-hmm.Syd (15:31):They were only... The marketplace will only work with you unless you give them a bunch of money or they need to suck up to you before they work with you. There were a lot of that at the time, and we came in and we just went to community first. And all these things, I think, just sound really cheesy now, but it's definitely very true at the time.Syd (15:53):And the other thing that I would say that's really cheesy is it really is the little things that matter. It's the things that we did every single day that then gradually build up our reputation and our trust with the users. To the program's point, I read this article that he wrote a long time ago. It's like, "Do the things that don't scale."Syd (16:15):And we really focused on doing things that don't scale at the beginning. And the interesting thing is that if you focus on doing things that don't scale and you do it enough, and if you're smart, you'll find a way to make them scale too.Brian (16:27):Yeah. Right.Syd (16:29):But anyway, I think very cheesy, but also very true. And I think all these truism, cheesy truisms, they become cheesy because it's so true.Brian (16:38):Right.Syd (16:39):So if... Yeah.Brian (16:41):And that's Paul Graham of Y Combinator who coined that phrase and obviously, he's seen probably more startups do that than anybody alive today.Syd (16:49):For sure.Brian (16:50):That's amazing. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about how you guys build products at Magic Eden. Obviously, you're the CTO. What is the engineering culture like? How do you guys decide what to build, who builds it? There's a ton going on. You guys have a lot of products. Can you shed a little light on what that process is like for you guys?Syd (17:08):Yeah. I think I would probably talk about a few things. One is how do we drive prioritization? The second is how do we organize our team? And then the third thing that I'll probably emphasize on is how do we... Autonomy. What does autonomy mean to me? Right?Syd (17:28):And I'm hinting because our teams are generally very autonomous. They get a lot of power over what they do. One is like prioritization. Generally, prioritization is driven in the way that's ideas are generally very bottom-up and prioritization will drive very hard top down.Syd (17:44):I think all the founders, we generally have a very opinionated division for how we want to take this. And we use metrics as a prioritization framework, and we drive towards that. And that's how we then make decisions on a resourcing standpoint like what to work on, what not to work on.Syd (18:01):But more importantly, I would say generally, startups are all about execution. You can do the same thing, but someone else will do better than you. Right? And marketplaces certainly are not really about who has the most longest checklist of features, right?Syd (18:20):Generally, every marketplace quickly are feature parity with each other. But how you do it, how you execute really matters. And in this case, we do have product managers in the company. But I would say that a senior engineer and a senior designer at Magic Eden, they're in parallel, a junior product manager too.Syd (18:39):We really make sure that our engineers and designers, they own the user journey and they care about the user journey. And it's up to them to produce a really good user journey. We make our product managers back off from the details and let the engineers and designer drive the details.Syd (18:56):And we formed this thing called squads or pods where the squad is a self-contained organization that is led autonomously by a lead. And within a squad, it's very full stack. For example, in a squad, building a feature, marketing person will be in there.Syd (19:13):If there's any partnership that we're doing, a partnership person will be in there, for example. And as such, each squad operates like a startup within Magic Eden, and just their goal is a sub-goal of Magic Eden's overall goals. Right? And so that actually allows us to ship really fast, operate really quickly.Brian (19:33):Yep.Syd (19:33):And I think the last thing that I would probably mention is the word autonomy. I think people love the word autonomy, and that's how companies use that word to hire people. But autonomy to me is not really about autonomy at all.Syd (19:51):To me, autonomy is about what to do when things go wrong and being okay with that. We really do give trust to our engineers and our designers to make decisions to ship. And then if things go wrong, fix it. And the only thing that... I joke about it, but the only thing I ask our team is like, "Hey, we trust you to make judgment calls. That's why we hire you because we trust your judgment calls. Brian (20:18):Yeah. Right.Syd (20:18):We just want you to be correct? 70% of the time. Brian (20:21):Yeah.Syd (20:23):"So also, don't make this... Don't be the decision maker and be wrong 80% of the time too. Right?" But-Brian (20:29):Right.Syd (20:29):But those are some of the, I would say, important points in how we run the eng team.Brian (20:34):Yeah. Prioritizing shipping over asking for permission.Brian (20:37):How has that worked for you guys as you guys have scaled? What are some of the biggest engineering challenges that you have come up against? Do you think it'll persist throughout the lifetime of Magic Eden, or do you see a need for this to change? How has scale brought this to the front for you guys?Syd (20:55):Companies like TikTok still operates like this today. And TikTok have thousands of engineers, right? They still operate this way today. And I will say that Facebook... We know a lot of early Facebookers. Facebook operated this way for a very, very long time as well.Syd (21:13):And I think the squad model does scale. At least it will scale to the point... to the range of having hundreds of engineers and still have this kind of squad model. The first time I heard this squad model is from Ryan Sokol. Ryan Sokol is a mentor and investor of mine. He runs engineering at DoorDash, used to run engineering for Uber Eats.Brian (21:32):Okay.Syd (21:32):The engineering team, I think it's about 2,000 engineers or something like that.Brian (21:36):Wow.Syd (21:37):And even them, they still run a squad model till today. Not to the extent we do it, because our squads are even looser than them. Each month, we form new squads. Their squads are more stable, but they still do this till today, to some extent, not as deep as we are, but I think this will scale.Syd (21:56):In terms of engineering challenges, I would say that people that follow Magic Eden know that in January, we had a string of outages. We really got that under control now, and thank you to the community for sticking with us. And then now, Solana, TPS, you guys, you guys must feel it too. Right?Syd (22:21):I think along the way, we do have periods of challenges like that. But I see that using the word challenge is almost the wrong word. It's really privileges. We're lucky to be in this position.Brian (22:33):Yeah. I like that.Syd (22:35):And it's all thanks to our community.Brian (22:37):Yeah. No, I think that comes back to what you said earlier too about how it takes so much work, doing the little things every day to earn that trust. And you can lose that trust of the community very quick. But I agree. I think both our companies are in a position now.Brian (22:50):Solana, as it's hitting the mainstream, there's a lot we can do to really lead the way and help-Syd (22:55):Yeah.Brian (22:56):... best practices, help this thing scale and communicate that well and be good stewards of the community here.Syd (23:02):Yeah.Brian (23:05):You mentioned a little bit. Your team's growing, you have these pods, you rotate a lot. What do you look for as you guys are growing? What do you look for in an engineer who decides, "I want to work in Magic Eden"? I imagine you took on... You mentioned being a self-starter and having that autonomy. Is that one of the main things you guys look for?Syd (23:26):Yeah. I think one of the... I told you two out of four cultural values. The fourth cultural value that we have is a champion's mindset. And what does that mean? Right? I think that running a marketplace is really hard, for real, like-Brian (23:47):Yeah.Syd (23:48):You know? You might not realize just how hard it is to run a marketplace. It's really, really hard. And what's harder than running a secondary marketplace is running a primary marketplace when we have a Launchpad product. That's even harder.Brian (24:02):And running both together at the same time.Syd (24:04):Yeah. They're really, really, really difficult. On Solana, there're like 10, 15 Launchpad copycats that saw our success in Launchpad and they try to copy us. Many of them are shutting down. Many of them are not doing as well as they might hope or like... And the reason is actually, this is very, very difficult.Syd (24:26):It's much harder than it looks on the outside. All this stuff is very simple. But simplicity is actually like... There's enormous amount of work to hide the complexity, to be simple on the front end.Brian (24:38):Yes.Syd (24:39):And I think that when we hire engineers, we look for... I say this other times like first and foremost, I look for heart over experience. I look for talent over experience. And what I mean by that is that high is this willingness to win. You know?Brian (24:58):Yeah.Syd (24:58):And the willingness to really... Understanding what the user wants is a very tedious thing to do. You got to put a lot of work to figure that out, and you need to be willing to put in the work. You need to be willing to move quickly because crypto moves really quickly.Syd (25:15):You need to be willing to get out your comfort zone and move around, do new things all the time. And then at the same time, we also really look for people with raw talents. They're engineers in the company, they're very young, but they're just extraordinarily talented.Syd (25:30):And you can tell that they're the people that given the opportunity, they'll be better than someone with 10 years of experience. And we really look for those people too. And lastly, we do have... We don't have a conveyor belt. We think about team composition.Syd (25:46):And I think in many ways, Google, Facebook, Uber, worked in all these companies, they have a very com conveyor belt process for hiring. It's just like they hire the same people overall. Again, they don't care about what each person's good at or like, or whatever. They just chuck them on a team and just soldiers. Right?Brian (26:04):Mm-hmm.Syd (26:05):We really think about team composition. You know, we have engineers here that are very degen. We also hire a lot of people from Google. I'm going to say hi to the Google Ads team. Thank you for giving us so many people. We have a lot of people from Facebook. So we have a very diverse range of people that come from very diverse backgrounds.Syd (26:25):And that diversity is what allows us to compose the team. And some people are a lot more product-conscious. Some people might not care that much about product, but they're just very good at dealing with scale. And we have all of those people too, so yeah.Brian (26:39):That's great. You mentioned accountability, you mentioned customer obsession, you mentioned mindset of a champion. Is there a fourth that I didn't get hint to that?Syd (26:48):Oh, no. So it is customer obsession. It is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0, really embrace Web3.0.Brian (26:54):Web 3.0 over Web 2.0.Syd (26:54):It is champion's mindset and it is unity and ownership.Brian (26:58):Okay.Syd (27:00):And this, I'm going to give credit to Jack. Jack, before Google, he was at BCG, Boston Consulting Group Brian (27:07):This is the CEO of Magic Eden.Syd (27:08):Yeah. Yeah. That's a management consulting firm. And at Google, he was in strategy and then in product. And he was self-confessed as a reorg specialist. And he's done probably 20 reorgs more and he realized just as a company scales, people can start competing with each other within the company instead of uniting as a team to compete with your competitors.Syd (27:33):Instead of trying to deliver the best experience for your user and focus on your own community, people can start thinking about how do you create, then grab, carve out your own thing. Right? And so we very intentionally make that as part of culture value. And there's a lot that we do to make sure that we unite as a team to deliver an experience for our user and be better than our competitors so that we earn our users' trust. Right? Yeah.Brian (28:01):That's great. So looking ahead here for a little bit, how do you see the NFT space evolving? What are you most excited about ?Syd (28:12):I think that the most important use case today in NFT is obviously community and PFP, and then that, then [inaudible] utility, right? That, to me, I'm extremely bullish on. I think that that's obviously something that's like this need for community and being a part of a community and then having an ownership as an entry to the community, but also being able to transfer that to someone else is extremely valuable.Syd (28:44):I think that what's coming is going to be... in terms of next big caliber is going to be gaming.Brian (28:49):Gaming. Yeah.Syd (28:50):And you can see that we have Eden Games, which is a completely gaming-focused NFT experience. Soon, we'll release a market report like a Q1 lookback, and we're going to talk a lot about gaming. So guys, look out for our Q1 report.Brian (29:05):Nice.Syd (29:05):And we're going to talk a lot about gaming. We work with many, many game studios yet to launch. And if you know you're a game studio, that you're looking on any chain, that you're thinking about this, come say hi. Reach out to us anytime. And I think there's just so much exciting stuff that's coming that you will see in the next two, three months. Yeah.Brian (29:26):I couldn't agree more. We're super excited for gaming and so much else that this space has in store for us., Syd (29:34):Out of all the gaming marketplaces, we probably have the largest gaming focus. And certainly in Solana, vast majority of gaming NFT happens on Magic Eden, and we want to continue that way, and yeah.Brian (29:55):That's great. Super exciting stuff. Well, Syd, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Just before we go, I'd love to ask you this question. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem. Syd (30:14):I think we have to start with Anatoly and Raj for creating the Solana ecosystem. I think that there are a lot of decisions, small decisions, technical decisions that they make that were just like, "That's right." That makes Solana scale and also just made it... I would say very easy to work with if you want to operate a scale. And I think that's really important.Syd (30:31):I really also very admire the Phantom team. Seriously. Obviously, we've been in the trenches since the beginning. We've known each other for a long time. But just seeing how the Phantom team operates, how the Phantom team executes is quite inspirational. And it's lucky to be able to call myself a compatriot, that we really grew together since the beginning. Yeah?Brian (30:55):Yeah. Oh, yeah.Syd (30:56):It's really crazy. And then thank you so much for having me on this podcast. Awesome.Brian (31:02):Likewise. Well, the feelings mutual. We really admire you guys. Thank you for what you do, driving this industry forward, and thanks for being the first guest here on the pod.Syd (31:11):Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye.
In today's show, a lot of the discussion is on utility versus art and which is more important in the Solana NFT ecosystem. There's also some discussion on different blockchain models like walk-to-earn such as StepN, and who believes in it. Tune in live every weekday Monday through Thursday from 5:00 PM Eastern to 6:15 PM Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
Brett Harrison is the President of FTX US, a US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange. Prior to joining FTX US, Brett was Head of Semi-Systematic Technology at Citadel Securities, where he managed technology for the firm's Options, ETF, OTC, and ADR trading globally. He began and spent the majority of his career at Jane Street, where he led the firm's algorithmic trading system development. 00:34 - The role of FTX.US' president01:24 - About FTX02:55 - Nontraditional brand marketing08:05 - Educating people about Crypto10:46 - Being at the forefront of regulation14:52 - Collaborating with other players in crypto19:03 - FTX's policy in exchange and crypto23:19 - FTX and NFTs26:44 - CeFi / DeFi exchange and Cross-chains31:36 - Building interconnectivity between centralized crypto exchanges34:59 - Market hours in crypto?36:33 - Process of evaluating a token38:44 - Things he is hopeful for DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Austin (00:10):I'm Austin Federa. Welcome to the Solana podcast. Today, we have Brett Harrison joining us, who's the president of FTX.US. We got a bunch to talk about today, including the role of FTX in the markets, his sort of path there, and a bunch of what's been going on recently in crypto. So, Brett, thanks for joining us.Brett (00:27):Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Austin.Austin (00:29):I wanted to kick it off. What does the president of FTX.US actually do on a daily basis?Brett (00:34):Yeah, for sure. A good question. So yeah, I joined FTX.US exactly one year ago. Little bit of background first. So FTX is obviously the global cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. It's the second or third largest in the world. Around a year and a half ago, FTX.US, a separate company affiliated with FTX, was started for the purpose of creating a US regulated set of businesses to be able to do things like offer a spot cryptocurrency in the US, but also to satisfy some of our broader ambitions to enable other kinds of investment products for US customers such as US crypto derivatives, stocks, and things like that. My role is to sort of help run the ship over here, hire the team, and put people in the right offices, but also like do everything from think about regulatory strategy and policy to some actual software development in architecture and on some of our products. So it's sort of a little bit of everything.Austin (01:25):Yeah. It's kind of an interesting role. How big is the FTX.US operations at this point?Brett (01:30):We're around 80 people right now.Austin (01:33):That's pretty sizable for one year.Brett (01:35):Yeah, for us at least.Austin (01:36):Yes.Brett (01:37):For sure.Austin (01:38):You're at the top of a pretty interesting organization nowadays. When you joined, the pace of excitement and interest in crypto from a mainstream audience was far lower. The presence of FTX was far lower than it is now. There's many people who are familiar with crypto, who have been for both FTX for a very long time, as both the FTX international and FTX.US as two different entities that play an important role in pushing the concept of a centralized exchange further. Before you guys came on the scene, the role of a centralized exchange was maybe not quite as professionalized as it is now. There's sort of more of a lot of respect in the market for the speed that FTX is able to execute on and both sort of the pace of innovation that's come out of that.Austin (02:23):But at the same time, in the United States specifically, which is where we're talking about today, you guys have done a huge amount of what I would call very traditional marketing usually reserved for banks, and telecommunication companies, and these sort of like old Titans of industry in the United States. But this is a very new operation. Walk me through a little bit about that process of saying not only do we see a target opportunity here, but we're not going to take the path of most other companies, and run a ton of digital ads, and put up select billboards. But we're going to put our name on AAA, IP, and media.Brett (02:55):It's incredible to see where we are now compared to a year ago, two years ago, and FTX.US were fairly obscure in the United States. Not so much overseas where FTX had already really gained a name for itself as this leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. And it was really competing with the other top exchanges around the world that have been trading these derivatives products traditionally. But in the US, we had just started. We're up against 10 year incumbents in the space and very few people ever heard of FTX. And now we're on Super Bowl commercials. We are the subject of congressional hearings. It's like quite amazing to sort of see the way that we've sort of infiltrated the crypto ecosystem in the United States, in a way that's really established our presence as a brand that people trust, as one that feels innovative and fast moving.Brett (03:47):So I think just taking it back a bit. So we wanted to be able to get into the US market, and the US has one of the largest retail user bases in the world, maybe the largest retail user base in the world. So the number of people who are traditionally using their phone to trade stocks, for example, for themselves, is just much higher percentage in the United States than almost anywhere else. And so you have this broad class of people now getting interested in crypto, who want to be able to have access to that as a means of investment. But if you think about where crypto has been for the last decade, there's been a lot of ups and downs and noise. You have exchanges that lose customer funds, or they go down, or they get hacked, or they like suddenly become slow.Brett (04:31):And if people are going to invest in this still fairly risky, volatile, asset class, where there's a lot to learn for people, it's a very high learning curve. They're going to want some brand that they feel they're comfortable taking that leap, and putting their money in, and investing with. And so in the beginning, it was very difficult to acquire customers for us. And then Sam had this idea of, what's the largest thing that we could do, as fast as possible, and reach tens of millions of people. And it's not go out and buy Facebook ads. And the conventional wisdom here for us was, "Okay, when's the last time you saw an ad on Facebook for like Citibank or JP Morgan, and you are like a Bank of America customer? And then you said, you know what, I love this Facebook ad. It's time to move all my money from my checking account to this other one." I think it doesn't usually happen. I think it's a pretty high activation cost for doing something like that. It's not like giving some new website a try.Brett (05:28):Just plain and simply this is like a serious investment decision. And so we really needed to build that trust for people, and do it quickly, and in a way that really established ourselves as a unique player. And so the biggest thing someone could think of was, well, what if we put our name on a stadium. And it seemed crazy at the time, but then we did it and we put our name on the Miami Heat stadium, the FTX Arena. It was an amazing deal, the right place at the right time, because we got to also work with Miami Dade County on many of their anti-gun violence initiatives. So it was a really good fit. And short time after that, we did two other big deals. One was with Tom Brady and the other one was with the Major League Baseball.Brett (06:04):And for those, first of all, Tom Brady being this universally loved and respected individual for just his incredible talent and drive. And then for Major League Baseball for being this time modern institution. I think it, the signal to people was imagine what it took, what kind of due diligence was required for an institution like Major League Baseball to come trust FTX, crypto exchange no one's ever heard of. And let alone do anything in crypto. That's how I think we were able to sort of catapult ourselves into the US market very quickly was through this somewhat non-traditional way of doing this brand marketing. And since then, it's been amazing. I mean, we went from 10,000 customers at the beginning of 2021 to like 1.2 million customers at the end of 2021. So a huge growth in a very short period of time, on the eve of some of our new product offerings that we're launching. So pretty excited about the growth so far.Austin (06:56):What's very interesting for me on this, apart from just the growth of FTX.US in general, is this is against the grain for, I would say, the last 20 years of marketing. Which is that you really want to focus on identifying your core demographic, activating that core demographic, using them as voices and ambassadors. And this is the way that most crypto exchanges, and honestly, most cryptocurrencies have gone about growth as well. They've said let's put a bunch of resources into the very narrow domain things that are working, and then it will be an organic growth kind of coming out of that.Austin (07:32):And you normally see something like branding rights for an arena or a major partnership with MLB or some, or any sports team, something along those lines as being something that a company that isn't trying to educate customers, but is just looking for general awareness, goes through. Right? Staples Center, UBS, all the big banks have their names on these places. Not because they're trying to differentiate Bank of America's products versus Chase's products, but because they want general awareness. What was that process like to say, "Okay, we've got a stadium, but no one knows what crypto is still." What's that part two of that strategy?Brett (08:09):Yeah. I think we had to rewrite the playbook there. Because we don't yet know what the right demographic is for crypto, but also we don't want to pre-select a demographic. I mean, the whole spirit of crypto is to enable people to have access to investment opportunities, wealth creation, control over your personal finances in ways that have typically been difficult for many parts of the country. And if we just sort of start by saying, okay, well, who is the most obvious demographic to target for this? And let's just run Facebook ads that target them. I think it sort of misses the point. We're here to educate people, as you said, about not just the investment class, but also the promises of the technology itself. The fact that this will represent a new way of building internet based applications, in ways that allow people to share in the upside of those applications. It's going to enable for greater robustness and stability by using decentralized technology.Brett (09:11):I think these are all things that it's going to be difficult to teach people over time, but we have to start somewhere. And that starts with a general awareness. And it starts with trust, right? People have to understand that we are a very legitimate company. We are highly regulated, contrary to popular belief. We have, between FTX and FTX.US, we have something like a hundred different regulators. We have 50 different licenses. We need to be able to break through the noise and convey that to people. And that's why we started more on this general awareness. And now we're doing some of the other stuff. Like we're starting now to run some Google ads. We're starting to go for iOS App Store placements and traditional SEO. And we're doing that now that we have the product that we like and we're happy with where it is, although we're always trying to improve it. And we've built that general awareness and trust.Austin (09:58):Yeah. So, so you mentioned that you are both in a highly regulated industry and yourselves, highly regulated, by various regulators who look at the industry. FTX has, over the last year, put itself at the forefront of regulation in crypto in the US. You and Chainalysis are right up there together, testifying in front of Congress, and also putting out this FTX policy proposal that came out, was that six months ago or so, as well. What was the decision making process like internally to say, this is something that not only do we want to engage with, but to actually make a decision to be a face of. There are many exchanges that operate in the US. None of them have necessarily taken that as the mantle, as proactively, we are going to put ourself in this position. I'm sure that was both risky, and you saw a lot of opportunity in that process.Brett (10:50):Yeah, absolutely. So there's the part that's specific to FTX and the part that's general. Starting with the part that's specific, we would like to be able to offer an array of different products and services in the US. Some of those has to do with spot cryptocurrencies. Regulation in the US for spot cryptocurrencies are not well defined. And that is because of the two market regulators that exist in the US, and the US is one of the few countries in the world that actually has two separate market regulators not one, the SEC and the CFTC, the lines of jurisdiction over digital spot assets are not very well drawn. That's not true for traditional securities like Apple and Tesla and US government bonds, which is regulated by the SEC. And it's not true for the CFTC, which regulates commodity futures, and other sort of broad based index futures, and sometimes security futures as well in conjunction with the SEC. But for actual things like Bitcoin to USD spot markets, it's not clear.Brett (11:47):And what we want to do is help shape that regulation, such that we can safely innovate and offer products that also protect consumers. And in terms of how we influence regulation, do so in a way that doesn't push all of the intellectual property and all that innovation overseas. I mean, you guys know this too, that so much of the intellectual property, the founders, the CEOs, the developers come from the United States. And then ultimately move themselves to somewhere outside the United States because they don't feel like they have a safe place to be able to build their business and to be an entrepreneur. We really want to help that. So I think that kind of actually combines both sort of specific and general of what I wanted to say.Brett (12:26):Which is that on the specific front, we want to be able to offer all the spot tokens that we think are appropriate. We want to be able to list CFTC regulated margin derivative products in the US for US customers. We want to maybe eventually do more innovative, ambitious things like create tokenized stocks or tokenized treasuries. But then, at the same time, we want to make sure the playing field is great for all crypto participants in the US. And they really want to stay here and work here and build here, because we just think that's going to be good for the country. Now what's been interesting for us in this journey of being this sort of public face of regulation and policy, is that what we found is the most effective thing that we can do as a company is just showing up in person. You'd be surprised how many companies, and this is not just crypto, send these large teams of lobbyists and lawyers to Washington hoping to sort of engage in policy discussions.Brett (13:17):And I'm not in the room for those, but I imagine some of those come off as disingenuous. Or there are cases where you can't really get in the weeds of a conversation because the right stakeholders aren't in the room. The fact that Sam and Zach and Ryan and Mark and I just sort of like go to Washington, and email the Fed or the Treasury or members of the House or the Senate or the executive branch, and just show up and talk to them. And say like, "We don't have an agenda. We're just here to answer questions. We know we're in the education phase." Same thing with regulators. We talk with the CFTC, SEC, FINRA. It is just great to show up in person and show that we are open honest people who really want to engage in dialogue. It's been so useful for everyone involved. And I think that's really helped shift the narrative of crypto being like anti-regulatory or anti-government in some way. And that's been really helpful.Austin (14:09):Do you see this as something that you're primarily, obviously there's a lot of upside for FTX in getting greater clarity around regulations and having a legal framework that it can operate in with more definition around it. At the same time you look across at other industries, the credit card industry, the banking industry, agriculture, et cetera. They have very well defined and powerful industry groups at this point. And you often see like a lot of the big banks in the US moving in lockstep with one another. How closely does FTX work with other large exchanges in the United States or other people in the crypto space? And if that's not really as mature as it is in other industries, why do you think that is right now?Brett (14:54):Yeah. Great question. We do to some extent. We do more now than we did before. It's almost certainly not enough. And partly it's because this industry is very new, and it's not super well defined exactly what we need, and there's differing opinions of how we get there. I also think that crypto has done itself a bit of a disservice in the past by being somewhat hostile to regulatory involvement. And you see this a lot on Twitter. And I think it's not super productive. We want to be able to create a market environment that allows for all participants to participate in a way that it safeguards them. And to just completely throw away a hundred years of regulatory development to think that we can just sort of do the whole thing better from scratch, with no protections, is almost certainly not right.Brett (15:44):At the same time, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that you could, through the act of regulatory requirements, end up excluding individuals for not good reasons. For example, there's a lot of people who criticize KYC by saying there might be disenfranchised people who don't have good drivers licenses. And so therefore they can't KYC with an exchange. And so you're actually excluding a certain segment of the population by doing so. And I think we are receptive to those arguments. And so we would like to be able to push the envelope forward with crypto and allow the greatest number of people to participate without prejudice. But we have to engage collaboratively and cooperatively with regulators to do so.Brett (16:27):And so we are now starting to talk a lot more with the other competitors in the space about what are our shared goals for regulation? What do we think about who should be regulating us? What do we think policies would look like in the areas of spot tokens, of stable coins, of listing procedures, of licensing for exchanges. And I think that we're making progress there. Because the thing we've heard all the time in Washington is, okay this proposal of yours sounds great, but it can't be just the FTX proposal. Washington's not in the business of picking winners and losers in industry. We want to see you guys come together as an industry. And so that's, it's going to be critical for us going forward. And it's not just the exchanges. I mean, it's the protocol tokens, it's the stable coin providers, the infrastructure providers, miners. Sort of all across the board, I think we just need to come together more as an industry.Austin (17:19):Yeah. It's one of those things where you look at the Web 2.0 industry, and I think it's probably pretty obvious that they say at this point that their unwillingness to come together around issues of establishing common frameworks for content moderation, common frameworks for when a user should be banned from a platform, those sorts of things have really opened them up to a lot of attacks from Washington about... You see these hearings in the Senate all the time when they're talking one company, why your policy different from another company? And then there's a void there, where the regulators and Congress aren't really sure how to write a law, but they have a lot of ideas about what could be changed. Given the decentralized nature of crypto, there's one level where it's like, there are these centralized companies like FTX, like Coinbase, like Kraken, like Chainalysis that are on one side of things.Austin (18:10):But then there's organizations like Solana Labs or the Solana Foundation, which have a very different role and place in the market. And don't always necessarily have the same incentive alignment in those sort of areas. One of the beautiful things about FTX is, or any exchange, is that it's a entity which makes money on the aggregate state of cryptocurrency. And so the specific whims of one network is not necessarily of huge concern to it. For example, the shutting out of a certain type of user, based on a KYC requirement, is much less of a burden in the United States or for something like an exchange, then it might be for... Like if you have to KYC every user, that's not a problem. If Audius has to KYC every user, that actually puts them at a significant disadvantage compared to a competitor like a Spotify. How do you think about both the role of the policy work FTX does within the exchange industry and the wider crypto industry in general?Brett (19:07):It's interesting to think about where we need to head as an industry together. I think a lot about the role of CeFi and DeFi and how they interplay. I think there's a lot of people online who sort of draw this very bright line between them. And it's like, if you're on the left side, you're a centralized player and you are completely antithetical to the whole point of crypto. And if you're on the right side, you're part of the golden club and true decentralization means there can never be anyone who touches anything involving like regulation or identification or safeguards and things like this. And I think, again, these are the kinds of counterproductive discussions I was talking about earlier. I think that we need each other to grow.Brett (19:47):The more DeFi grows, the more equitable access to financial markets will continue to grow around the world. And the more the need for centralized regulated players, like FTX, who kind of bridge the gap between the traditional financial system and DeFi, will play that role as well. As far as regulation goes, you're right. It's not clear where you go with a project like Audius. And you like it to be such that it's the same as Spotify, but then you get into these tricky issues of like, well, what is the Audius token? And how does that interplay with who can actually buy and sell that token and interact with the system in some way? You have more ambitious projects, on the topic of music, like can we create tokens for songs where people can receive token distributions for the number of plays that occur? And does that make it sort of like a dividend and a securities offering? Well, I don't know. And this sort of is very difficult to understand.Brett (20:39):But there are two strategies when it comes to regulation for a company like Audius. And so one strategy is to sort of move as fast as possible and try to always stay like a step ahead of regulation. And eventually, maybe the feeling and the ecosystem around DeFi regulation catches up to an Audius and everything is okay. It allows us to do what it does, and it was worth the risk because they got to innovate very quickly and become a profitable business. But that comes with its risks, that maybe regulation catches up to it in a bad way, and says, "You shouldn't have been doing this all along. And please give me all your profits back from the last couple years."Brett (21:16):There's another way, which is sort to walk in the front door, and be sort of transparent and obvious about what you're trying to do, and to try to operate within the regulatory envelope of some jurisdiction, and try to get this properly vetted and allowed to occur. And that has the benefit of sort of establishing clear rules and allowing for other companies to tread similar paths. On the other hand that could slow you down. And if you have one of these competitors, that's going to run as fast as possible, you might lose to them, even though you're doing the right thing.Brett (21:46):So there's not really a right answer here. And this is sort of a tricky space for DeFi. I will say in either case, I do think it's worth it for these DeFi projects for Solana Labs, for the founders and companies involved, and this kind of entrepreneurship, people in the United States should really start going to Washington more and just explaining what this stuff is. I mean, people kind of get what Bitcoin is, but people do not understand what Solana is and why it's different. And that should change. People should understand what Solana is, what all these other layer 1s are, these layer 2s are. What these different token projects are. Why they're interesting. Why they're useful. Why they represent a departure from Web 2.0. Why that's important. Why that needs to be fostered and why that needs to be grown. I think that would be something that we could continue to work together on, as industry participants, is the education piece.Austin (22:33):So changing topics a little, we've seen FTX.US try and enter a few different, I would say different markets than are necessarily like the original core. So one of those was the NFT marketplace. I think there's been it probably mixed success in that. One of the things that I found fascinating is how different NFT culture is from crypto culture. Obviously it's a subset, but a lot of the applications and the platforms that have been very strong from a crypto trading perspective, in terms of fungible digital assets have not had much success in the non fungible space. And the non fungible marketplaces have either had no interest or no success in moving into the fungible asset space. Talk a little bit about some of the learnings that you guys had in that process and how that's informing the decisions of where FTX expands into in the future.Brett (23:25):Yeah, it's fascinating. So I personally worked on the NFT marketplace a lot for us. And when we entered this space, we thought there's not enough competition for Solana NFT marketplaces. There was really only one at the time. And we thought, this is definitely an area that's ripe for disruption. We were not wrong. But at the same time we did it, six other players did it. And they were able to move a lot faster for a number of reasons. First of all, they were able to really focus all of their energy on the user experience, which was super important. The second is that they were just sort of deeply in that culture and they were able to create, continue creating that NFT culture, in a way that like you have to spend 150% of your time on that to be able to actually really keep up with it and get what's going on.Brett (24:11):And the third was the decentralized nature of it. Whereas most of the trading in fungible assets is occurring on centralized exchanges in a custodial fashion. Just about all the NFTs are trading in a non-custodial fashion. Hook up MetaMask to OpenSea, you list your asset, you're done. And so I think we were disadvantaged by trying to, although I don't regret it at all, walk the sort of regulatory path of requiring people to custodian their NFTs with FTX in order to list them. And then we do proper KYC, and we make sure you're not like transferring an NFT from North Korea or something. So this is what we chose to do. And I think we ultimately lost out a little bit on that, but we're still very happy to have done it for a number of reasons.Brett (24:59):So first is that NFTs have been an important part of our various partnerships, like getting to do this really cool NFT drop with Coachella or for Formula 1. And having that as a platform has been very beneficial to us, even if we're not competing on Bored Ape Yacht Club. The second is that we have this longer term vision that majority of NFTs will not be in these like art or PFP collections. It will be in things like games. And to do that, you have to really build a platform and your average Tier One AAA game studio is not going to partner with a non-custodial solution. If they think it's going to hurt their regulatory standing at all. And so we're kind of building things out from the B2B platform side. With a hope that's actually going to be where this technology actually takes us. And so it's been definitely a learning experience for us and humbling in a lot of ways.Austin (25:53):So let's kind of talk about that a little bit. In a future where US regulations relax, and that there's a framework that allows for a little bit more flexibility and a little more certainty throughout it. We've seen over the last few months a rise in cross-chain DEX swaps. Whether that's enabled through something like Wormhole or whether it's these organizations that are sort of rolling a bit of their own solution. How do you see the competitive world, between what a centralized exchange offers and what a decentralized exchange, can offer evolving over time? I think in the early days of decentralized exchanges, a lot of people were like, oh, these are totally going to kill centralized exchanges. And we obviously have not seen that to be the case. But for a long time, the moat was described as being like, well, I can't swap my SOL into Eth on anything other than a centralized exchange, but we're seeing that change. So I'm sure this is a strategy that you've mapped out internally. What does that look like for you guys?Brett (26:50):I think you probably give us a little bit too much credit. I'm not sure we've like completely mapped out the strategy. I mean, between FTX, FTX.US, FTX Ventures, I think we have various either monetary or intellectual capital investments in a bunch of these spaces. Like FTX Ventures invests in a lot of DeFi and different bridging solutions. FTX itself is benefits and more people trading on our centralized exchange. And so we want to kind of to be able to benefit from the growth of both. I mean, again, we sort of see that, no matter what, FTX is going to be one of the major places to link up with traditional financial system. Like if you want to get Mexican Peso onto a blockchain, you're going to have to do this going through someone who can actually hook up to a Mexican bank.Brett (27:37):It's just going to be required.Austin (27:39):Yeah.Brett (27:39):But in terms of like you want to swap Eth for SOL then, yeah, I think there's going to be a couple different ways to do that. And I can sort of see the benefits and drawbacks of each one. One thing I think is sort of obvious, and I think people understand it but they don't talk about it enough, is the fact that DeFi still has a long way to go. Primarily because the entirety of the code is sort of laid bare for all to see at all times. Usually if you have a financial application and it has a bug, you're sort of protected by the network. And by network, I don't mean network of people who use it, I mean like the actual switches and routers that prevent certain kinds of traffic from getting in. And you have your moat around your application. And if there's a bug, you patch it and you're done.Brett (28:23):With DeFi, if there's the slightest bug, your whole smart contract gets exploited, and the funds are drained, and you're sort of back at square one. And again, I think that the discourse around Defi or CeFi as being kind of incompatible, has probably done DeFi a disservice in terms of its growth. Where probably some slight hybrid approach of building out smart contracts, iterating on them for like a long time, but doing so in a way that's sort of safe and secure, and doesn't mean that the first side of a bug means you are going to be drained, until it gets to the point where it's highly stable. And then you start to relax some of the centralized aspects. You follow the goal of making it completely decentralized, completely open, no intermediaries, and kind of get there over time. But I think the people who do that now would be criticized as being like too centralized. Everyone thinks everyone else is too centralized.Brett (29:17):So I think we have a lot that we can do together is what I'm trying to say. Whether it's us helping with KYC, or it's providing sort of the regulated entry points into DeFi. Whether it's helping create sort of these hybrid solutions between DeFi and CeFi, that will, I think, help DeFi grow over time. So we're trying to foster that innovation in a bunch of different ways.Austin (29:38):I would also say that if we are in a place where CeFi versus DeFi is a zero sum game, we've all astronomically succeeded as an industry.Brett (29:47):Right.Austin (29:48):That's still probably a five to 10 year away, before there are no new users left to onboard and instead a battle for who actually has those users' attention.Brett (29:57):Even CeFi versus CeFi is not a zero sum game.Austin (30:00):Yes.Brett (30:00):At all.Austin (30:01):That's true.Brett (30:02):There's a story that when ICE listed certain versions of energy contracts, that were being traded on the CME, the day they did that, CME volume went through the roof and the largest trading volume times per day were the times where the two overlapped with each other. And this is obviously because arbitrageurs came into the space and were interested and started trading the two off of each other. I think we cannot just have one centralized exchange. We need a bunch. And we will grow the pie together. And so, yeah, we're very, very far away from a zero sum nature of crypto, which is why I like crypto so much.Austin (30:39):So actually to that extent, I think there's a built in assumption there, which is that we need multiple centralized exchanges. And that is a, I think, a very valid assumption, but in some ways that comes from a world that predates computerized global interoperable connectivity. And that the idea that arbitrage opportunities should exist between comparable, centralized financial exchanges feels a little outdated, honestly. That the thesis of Solana as one global state machine to settle all of the world's trades and information, that's a very compelling, decentralized narrative story, but you can also see the exact same thing where you would have interoperable order books between something like FTX and Coinbase. Is that anything that, are there conversations anywhere about building some of those interconnectivities that you see in the traditional equities world still, within like centralized crypto exchanges? Because there is no NYSE for centralized crypto exchanges yet.Brett (31:42):I have actually the complete opposite take to what you're describing here, which is US equity markets have to abide by this rule called reg, or regulation, NMS, or National Market System, where you have to fill a customer quote at the best price seen on any exchange, any one of the lit exchanges, of which they're like 15 now. So that means like, let's say you want to go send an order to NASDAQ and NASDAQ thinks that they are one penny behind the price on BATS. Well then NYSE either has to reject your order or route your order to bats and get filled. There's a big problem with this. Actually, there are multiple big problems with this, in my opinion.Brett (32:24):One is that light is not infinitely fast. And so what is the kind of prevailing quote is going to depend on where you are. Because of those 15 exchanges, some of them are in Secaucus, New Jersey. Some of them are in Carteret, New Jersey. Some of them are in Mahwah, New Jersey. Some of them are in Chicago, Illinois. And so there's no one place where you can have the absolute truth of what the best quote is. And even above that, the second big problem here is you have to pay a lot of money just to get the market data required to make that determination. And then third, if you're going to do that, some HFT with slightly faster hardware and market data is going to detect that routing and probably beat you there. And they're going to profit off that opportunity.Brett (33:10):While I think that NMS was well intentioned at the time that it was created, which was somewhat before the real advent of electronic markets, now that we have electronic markets, I actually think that NMS has added a lot of complication, and fixed cost, and deadweight loss to the system of equities, and made things like very difficult to sort of spin up as a new exchange. Compared to, in crypto where there was never like an NMS routing between exchanges, but there doesn't really need to be because there's someone whose job it is to arbitrage between the exchanges and keep them in line. And they're paid naturally for the job of doing that. And so the market forces keep the exchanges in line and that works extremely well, and makes crypto very low cost and low barrier to entry for new participants.Brett (33:56):You don't have to hook up to every single exchange. You don't need to send your market data to some central thing, which has to display the quotes everywhere. And you can't accept orders, if it doesn't look like it's on the top of the book of that far away aggregator. It means that exchanges can exist sort of more globally instead of all being centralized mostly in New Jersey or something like that.Austin (34:14):Yeah.Brett (34:14):So there's been so many benefits to that. And then the other thing I want to say about this is, look, there's never going to be just one of anything. The only real way to kind of get rid of an arbitrage opportunity is to only have literally one order book. And even on Solana, you have different order books for SOL, USDC. And some of them might be kind of built off of similar primitives, but there's still going to end up being kind of arbitrage things between this swapping tool and this DEX order book and this centralized exchange, it's always going to exist.And so I think we should just thank the arbitrageurs for their service and just be happy with the fact that we can have multiple marketplaces. I think that's the ultimately right thing for competition.Austin (35:00):Do you think crypto needs market hours?Brett (35:02):No.Austin (35:03):We'll never get them, but I'm curious if you think it would help or hurt the industry?Brett (35:06):No, I don't. One thing I've kicked around in my head at some points is, something like whether one time per day, there should be an auction. Basically like a five second freeze or something, where people can submit bids and offers. And there's like a single kind of auction type clearing event that establishes an official mark for the day in that crypto. And there's a lot of different market structure theory between whether an auction type mechanism or a continuous trading mechanism is ultimately better and fair for our participants. And there's just lots of research in both directions. But that could be interesting to me to have some sort of discontinuous event, maybe once per day. It would help for things like ETFs that want to sort of mark their basket to sort of a day over day performance and they need sort of an official closing mark, and it would be nice to have sort of a single auction event for that. But I don't feel strongly about that at all. And in general, I think that 24/7 markets are the way that every other market has to go.Austin (36:05):Yeah. I agree with you on that. So I put out a call on Twitter that was like, oh, what are people most interested in learning about from FTX, apart from a rundown of all of your cats, which we don't have time for today. One of the ones is what is the process of evaluating the listing of a token looks like. Obviously replies are full of people shilling their specific coin. But there are also some real genuine questions in there about like, you see Coinbase having taken a very, very sharp turn in what the criteria they use for listing a token is over the course of the last 12 months. How do you and FTX.US think about that?Brett (36:40):So we have taken the position, as a company, that we would like to be very conservative on token listings in the US. And that is because a lot of the issues we talked about earlier in the podcast about the regulatory uncertainty around what US based crypto companies are allowed and not allowed to list. And I think there might become a point at which listing criteria becomes clearly well defined by regulators, at which point we will basically take as much risk as it allowed to us. But for now we think about what is our comparative advantage as a company? Is it to list the long tail of 500 tokens? Or is it some of these other things that we're doing that maybe some of our competitors are not going to be able to do in the short term? So the biggest one for us is listing Bitcoin and Ether futures for US customers.Brett (37:32):And we think that has such a greater potential to improve the health of the market. Give people opportunities for hedging risk, and being able to get capital efficient exposure, and to be able to trade the spot versus the future and capture the basis. This is much more important to us than listing that 200th asset on CoinMarketCap. And we're concerned that some of our actions in the latter might jeopardize our success in the former.Austin (38:00):Interesting.Brett (38:00):So we're just sort of, we have different risk profiles in the different aspects of what we want to do. And that's part of the decision there as well. We're also moving very much into some non crypto things. Like we're a student launching a stocks trading platform that's going to be vanilla US stocks through a broker dealer, all trading through like an exchange that's not ours. So we have just sort of different ways of thinking about diversifying our product set. And for now, I think as long as the regulatory environment remains this unclear, we're going to stay on the conservative side of that.Austin (38:33):One kind of last question before we wrap up here. With the amount of market volatility we have seen in the last few weeks here, the sort of precipitous drop in the first half of May, what are you excited for and hopeful for about the future of this industry in the United States?Brett (38:52):Yeah, it's natural for these times of great volatility and certain assets dropping a lot in value, for people to sort of turn inward and maybe lose sight of the broader mission. And we have to remember that we are building a generational opportunity for technology and for wealth creation. And many have already benefited from this, but we have much more to go on all the promises that we have. I mean, just think about how one of the main things people have talked about for crypto is creating this kind of global payments network for people to sort of cheaply or freely send money for remittances and things like this. I think we have yet to really fulfill that promise. So regardless of where asset prices go, we have to, as everyone says, keep building.Brett (39:39):And we're just excited for people to continue to push forward and continue to sort of responsibly innovate, and hopefully show people in the United States, especially policy makers, that even though assets can be volatile... I mean, equities have lost more money in value in the last month than crypto has, and people sort of forget that sometimes. But in spite of downward cycles in markets, there's a real intrinsic value to what we're all doing here. It's not just pure speculation. And we need to do everything we can to keep that going, and keep building, and keep investing.Austin (40:13):Well, Brett, thank you so much for joining us today on the Solana podcast.Brett (40:17):Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
In this episode, we kick off the 10 Solana NFT trading challenge, a head-to-head battle between Micah G and Easy Eats: who can trade 10 Sol to a bigger bag in 4-weeks? At this point, Easy has yet to make a trade, and Micah is up 0.5 Sol with a bunch of NFTs he could sell. Will Easy, the king of Solana, be able to make a comeback? Or is this the underdog story we all want to see? Buy our NFT Sign up for FTX Join our discord Check out our Twitter Give us your thoughts on the show by leaving a rating. -- DISCLAIMER: You should never treat any opinion expressed by the hosts of this content as a recommendation to make a particular investment, or to follow a particular strategy. The thoughts and commentary on this show are an expression of the hosts' opinions and are for entertainment and informational purposes only. This show is never financial advice.
In today's video, we will talk about DeGods, a Solana NFT project that is considered to be a blue chip within the Solana ecosystem. FOLLOW US // https://twitter.com/goatmetaverse https://twitter.com/yossihasson https://twitter.com/stanleymeytin https://instagram.com/stanleymeytin/ DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. We are not financial advisors. This channel is for entertainment and expressing our opinions. Our goal is to provide as much information as we can. Please don't forget to do your own research and make your own decisions.
How Low Can Crypto Go? Terra (LUNA) Classic Fork? |Solana NFT Summer? | Crypto Crash LIVE + How Low Can Crypto Go? Terra (LUNA) Classic Fork? | Solana NFT Summer? | Crypto Crash LIVE Analysis | Market Update. We compare 2014 vs 2022 and connect that to the USDT stress and Bitcoin. Global markets could crash. The only question is whether that is going to happen now or at the end of May. ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Token Metrics Apparel: https://shop.tokenmetrics.com Crypto Investing Guide Audiobook: http://tmt.link/audible Crypto Investing Guide on Amazon: http://tmt.link/amazon Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter at https://bit.ly/3B9OVDP ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Podcast: https://tokenmetrics.com/podcast Blog: https://blog.tokenmetrics.com/ Follow us: Telegram Alerts Channel: https://t.me/TokenMetrics Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/TokenMetricsDiscussion Twitter: https://twitter.com/tokenmetricsinc Instagram: https://instagram.com/tokenmetrics ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Token Metrics Media LLC does not provide individually tailored investment advice and does not take a subscriber's or anyone's personal circumstances into consideration when discussing investments; nor is Token Metrics Media LLC, registered as an investment adviser or broker-dealer in any jurisdiction. Information contained herein is not an offer or solicitation to buy, hold, or sell any security. The Token Metrics Media LLC team has advised and invested in many blockchain companies. A complete list of their advisory roles and current holdings can be viewed here: tokenmetrics.com/disclosures.
WGMI Studios: OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/wgmi-st... Twitter: https://twitter.com/WGMI_Studios Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wgmi_studio... TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdQVXnyS/ Welcome back to the WGMI Podcast with Kosher Plug, Bento Boi, and Andres Salinas! Todays video takes a look at the market, some big news and changes in the space. The Bored Ape Instagram was just hacked and the boys go over security in the world of web 3.0. While some feel like the market is slow right now, there seems to be some big things happening with Solana NFT's. Check out the podcast and be sure to drop a comment below! Follow Everyone's Socials! Andres Salinas: Twitter: https://twitter.com/_AndresSalinas_?s... Instagram: https://instagram.com/andressalinasnf... YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5hq... Kosher: Twitter: https://twitter.com/KosherPlug Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kosherplug/... YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KosherPlug Bento: Twitter: https://twitter.com/BentoBoiNFT Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bentoboinft... YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi9Y... 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram Hack/Security 6:10 - Otherside Land Sale/ApeCoin 10:15 - Solana Bull Run 12:30 - Imaginary Ones FUD 13:54 - What's going on with Squiggles NFT? Rug Pull Repercussions 14:45 - Thoughts on OpenSea delistings and the Platform's struggles 18:40 - Chargies NFT 21:20 - WGMI Shameless Plug 21:55 - Blvck Paris NFT opinion 23:45 - NFT Hiatus/Looking into Solana & Mentality Shift 28:35 - What are some long term plays in NFTs? What makes you bullish? 33:24 - Will we undervalued collections pump soon? Murakami Legacy 35:50 - Cool Cats potential, why is it the floor so low? 37:26 - Outro
Trinity of incomparable interviewers meet up with resplendent representatives, @bytheophana & @ChartFuMonkey from Solana NFT market juggernaut, @MagicEden, to deliberate topics such as assiduous perseverance, prospective renovation and portable network graphics.- NFADYORMFThread of The Week: https://bit.ly/37MRssMWeekly recap (00:56)Interview w/ @bytheophana & @ChartFuMonkey (6:20)Follow us at @DeGodCast
If Web2 is a freight train, Web3 is the hyperloop in terms of the pace and speed of development. Is this the future of work we should all be prepared for? As Sacca begins investing in Solana NFT's, we take you behind the scenes at Solana Labs with their Head of Design, Joshua Taylor. He describes what it's like to work on an L1 blockchain inside their Web3 incubation lab. *** This episode is brought to you by: Sendinblue: Visit https://www.sendinblue.com/rocketship/ and use promo code ROCKETSHIP for 50% off your first three months on a premium account Hawke Media: Get a free consultation on your business when you visit hawkemedia.com/podcast and use the promo code ROCKET. Vidyard: The Top Video Tool for SaaS Marketing and Sales http://vidyard.com/rocketship Canva: Go to canva.me/rocketship to get your free 45-day extended trial Carnegie Mellon MIIPS Program: Learn more about how your ideas could change the world at https://www.cmu.edu/iii/degrees/miips NetSuite: NetSuite by Oracle is a scalable solution to run all of your key back office operations. Go to netsuite.com/rocketship today. Issuu: Get 50% off a premium account at issuu.com/podcast with promo code ROCKETSHIP Justworks: Find out how Justworks can help your business by going to justworks.com Indeed: Indeed is the job site that makes hiring as easy as 1-2-3. Get started with a free $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/rocketship. BetterHelp: Unlimited Professional Counseling via Online Chat, Video or Phone Anytime, Anywhere. Get 10% off when you visit betterhelp.com/rocketship. Fundrise: Fundrise makes investing in private real estate as easy as investing in stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. Go to fundrise.com/rocketship today. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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