Theme: What we got wrong? Look back at predictions and the year in NFTs
How did our predictions pan out?
- Coinbase NFT
- Superbowl
- Games
- Music
- World cup
- NFT tracking tool value (NFTs as SAS)
- Don’t trust solana
- The MERGE will boost the market
- Project: Etch by Deca
- NFT News
Rough Transcript:
[00:00:00] today on all about affordable NFTs, what went wrong, celebrated our wins, right? What went wrong? What went so wrong? We're looking back at our predictions, uh, and, and the year in NFTs a little bit. . I think this is what I like about the episode we did a little while back that just reviewed every single project that we recommended and just held up the mirror, and this is kind of doing that, but with what we were speculating about around this time last year, December, January, periods of time, and seeing how it either held up or didn't.
[00:01:16] Uh, gosh. Anything new in your wallet? What's going on for, for you? Right.
[00:01:21] Uh, no, nothing too new in my wallet. Recently, I talked a bit about that edge project. Haven't done much, uh, much else since then. Um, You know, I guess, uh, you know, looking at, uh, looking at moving some of the, the, the mistakes that I've made, you know, those, uh, end of year, uh, tax harvest, tax loss harvesting, so working on that a bit, but that's, uh, you know, that's not that exciting to talk about the, the lose the losses, right?
[00:01:50] No, but I guess that's, that's true. I've also been doing a lot of, moving of, of pieces that I had. I, I think it's super important because, you know, I, I look back and there were moments where, Liquidating staked coins to buy NFTs. And like both went down, but at the moment of liquidation, those coins were actually worth quite a bit.
[00:02:08] So really spend some time doing that because frankly, it's locked on the blockchain and if you don't do it now, you're gonna kick yourself to earn tax time. So, you know, go back, uh, and, and really, uh, look through those, look through those losses. And also think about any moments, like, I'm, I'm thinking back to my Peg Axi stuff where I was like, you know, VIS was pumping that was like that, like fake coin.
[00:02:30] these like, uh, flying horses threw off and I couldn't believe how much money he was coming in. Sorry, which, which fake coin from which horses? Which fake coin? This is from Pey? Uh, not, uh, no, no. Not my, my very legitimate horse racing. Um, on Zed, which I love. But no, but like, here's the thing. Those coins were worth a lot.
[00:02:50] I was getting them, I was selling them, but then I was like half of those money I was using to buy more stupid flying horses. Um, and so the part I saved, I don't regret, but the part I spent technically, those were taxable events. I bought an asset then, then went down. So just play that out in your mind as you're like doing your your N F T harvest.
[00:03:09] Yeah, we talked about this a bit more on a recent episode, so if you didn't give that a listen, you know, because it said taxes in the, the title, um, might wanna go back and just give it a, a quick listen as you're, uh, getting towards the end of the year here. Yeah, yeah. I, that's true. All right. What have we got in the news?
[00:03:27] Oh, right. So, man, we talked about some of the. It's the big grifts that were happening in. Man, this looks a bit , a bit like some of the ones, some of the items that we talked about in that last episode. But there are, uh, people coming after Justin Bieber, Jimmy Fallon, uh, for their basey, the, their board ape endorsements.
[00:03:49] I'm not saying that those are related, but man, this does, uh, it doesn't look great and it, there were a lot of suspicions at the time of, you know, how much they were maybe getting paid. , you know, that wasn't on the chain. Uh, and that they were being, these were basically being purchased by Moon Pay on behalf of celebrities.
[00:04:06] So it's not entirely clear how much, uh, the celebrities were paid versus getting paid. And we may see, uh, some of that information come to light with these lawsuits. Yep, yep. There's a big difference, right? If you're getting paid to sponsor a thing, you're need to disclose. , if we were running ads, if we were like, we were also try to be clear on, you know, this podcast when we talk about, oh, like I, you know, I make my jokes about Polygon, but yes, I hold polygon.
[00:04:35] Like when we own a project, we, like I hold this project. You also have to say if that project was given to you or paid for by someone else, because there's an assumption from the market that you chose to freely of your own will go and, and buy a thing versus, no, no, I've been just paid. Paid to drink smart water.
[00:04:53] Okay. That's. But you need to disclose that. And I think because of this like gray area of like, oh, it's an N F D, like it's, you know, totally on the blockchain, no one will tell like, if you're doing something wrong and you know it, like people are gonna find out , like, especially if you're a celebrity. Uh, I'm here, I'm here for those, uh, for those investigations.
[00:05:14] I'm here for that. Yeah, I'm, I'm very curious to see what happens with those. Some get some, uh, some juicy information on those deals. All right. We get the next one, man. Actually, you called this. You freaking called this without. I never even saw it in the news. You were always calling this though, so you're good to have a I told you so.
[00:05:32] Woo. Nice. . You get no money, no fanfare. Yeah. , I afraid. Oba. A whole bunch of smugness. You can be so smug. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. , smug mug. . Oh man. So we've got another old, you know, early internet era, nineties internet era, uh, company making it a comeback. I guess some of those. Os, uh, like Limewire and some of the others, but this one we've got Win amp coming back with a N F T with a music player that will support NFTs music.
[00:06:05] NFTs. I actually think this is kind of cool idea. I don't know how to play music NFTs other than going to a website, and I know that that's not very, it's just not a way that I'm gonna ever listen to a collection of any, or, uh, listen to my music. It's having to go to a website for. Specific song that I wanna listen to.
[00:06:24] So I haven't tried this out. I like the idea of actually being able to bring all of your collected music into one interface and play it all there. I can't, I, I was actually a little surprised to hear that Win Amp was, was around it all. Not clear to me if this is an original, you know, original, uh, company that's still working on this, or if it's been bought out.
[00:06:47] But, eh, I used this project for, for years, back in the day. , there's something romantic about this. I, I, I was so ready to hate this, and I have to take a step back and say, yeah, I'm from also like an era where I would play a record. I would play a cassette, I'd play a cd, but I could, you know, in those moments, you'd be showing to the audience or to whomever, like especially if you're playing a record, like I have that record.
[00:07:14] And for NFT music, a lot of it in your mind, you're like, oh, just play it on Spotify. You're like, that doesn't exist on Spotify. Yes, you could right click save, dump it into a file, push it onto a server, connect that server to your spot, like it gets a bit of headachy. But then there's also this like, oh, if you're playing it for friends or doing something like that, I could see it whole like device standalone to be like, in the same way that we're talking about digital picture frames, my mind immediately goes to, you know, it's an N F T player and it could have N FFC functionality so that if somebody else were.
[00:07:48] They could be like, Hey, here's my album that I have. Like Oh cool. Just makes it a touch. More romantic. An I R L sense. Yeah, it does. And I, you know, I think they, yeah. They're onto something here. You know, we've , I dunno, this next one actually is, is maybe somewhat related. Uh, the SOUND XYZ platform has seen some, some impressive usage recently.
[00:08:10] Uh, that's the, the title here is say that the NFT Minting goes Stratospheric on sound. . So this is, you know, I know what that, I'm not sure if I'd quite go that far, but, uh, you know, we do see. The, it's getting used. There are more people, uh, starting to get into, into music NFTs. Um, you know, it's something that actually I, well think, we'll maybe touch on this later, uh, that, you know, I had talked about early in the year, and for the most part I would say that we haven't seen music NFTs be a major, uh, Major impact on the N F T marketplace, um, overall this year.
[00:08:45] And there's a lot still happening. Uh, you see a lot of new marketplaces, a lot of new tools being introduced for, for music creators. And you know, like to see that, that there are mints, uh, happening, even if it's not maybe, uh, you know, the, on everyone's, you know, the, you know, it's not the front page of open sea or anything like that, but there's a lot happening here.
[00:09:06] But still alive. And they, uh, share some of their data. They've onboarded 240 artists, dropped 709 tracks, reached 6,200 unique collectors, minted 33,000 NFTs and paid 4 million directly to artists. I think that's, you know, pretty great. I think on the, the million, 4 million to artists, uh, that's something pretty impressive because, you know, it takes a whole lot on Spotify to like earn enough 0.0000.
[00:09:34] You know, units of money to actually get there. So, uh, I like that final stat. I'm less impressed actually by, uh, by the mint volume there, you know, in terms of 33,000, you know, like that's like, you know, a, a Tuesday on, um, Tuesday and Open Sea. Hey, I mean, Reddit's, uh, certainly putting up much bigger minting numbers than that, but yeah, 4 million directly to artists.
[00:10:00] I think there is something there. You know, as you said, the, the, the royalty structure in streaming music is not very good at all for, for artists, and I think that there's a, a real, uh, potential to solve, uh, some, some problems there anyway. Oh man, what a reversal here. So Apple, we talked about Apple a couple weeks ago in that they were going to impose a 30% tax on all transfers, including going, uh, trying to get a cut of gas fees, Ethereum gas fees for, for any transfer if even a from of a, of an N F T from one wallet to another.
[00:10:38] Now, uh, seems like they, they maybe are, are listening to feed. Seems unlikely that Apple would do that. But, uh, I suppose if they actually do once in a while, listen to what people have to say and they have reversed that they're going to allow, uh, external, um, apps in that could bring in crypto and NFTs. I, I'm quite surprised by this, the idea that they will allow external with apps, This is, I mean, they've never allowed external apps at all.
[00:11:05] So I think there is some something here, like there probably, there seems to be a distinction of what they'll allow in the, in the app store. These are, if you, early on there, there are many features that were not available on on iPhones and there are a lot of, uh, and he would jailbreak them, definitely used to do that, to even able to get a lot of other features that, uh, from apps that weren't allowed.
[00:11:28] So I think it'll be somewhat like, That you'll be side loading these. Um, most Android phones also do this where you don't necessarily have to get an app through the official play, the Google Play Store, you can get them from unofficial, um, you can get an unofficial app. Uh, but it's sort of a use at your own risk, uh, mentality on those from, from Google, from Apple, I assume, with this one as well.
[00:11:54] So, uh, Hey, I think this is better. You know, I think they maybe realize that there's , you know, that's a potential huge loss of, of a cust of customers if there's really no option to, to interact with, with crypto outside of paying 30%, which is, you know, just completely unfeasible. So what I'm reading, and obviously the news is updating by the, by the day here is.
[00:12:18] They're preparing to open iOS competing app stores and that N F T component only for the European market, but not the American market. I missed that part. . Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but uh, as I go down that article, like, uh, oh yeah. Mark Irman writing for the Bloomberg says Apple is preparing to do this.
[00:12:42] So it wasn't clear to me if I, I see that they're doing it to comply with those, if I've read it as they were, that was sort of the impetus. But not that it would be different for the two stores, but that is possible that they would act. Yeah, that it could just be that they allow it where they have to and, uh, and not allow it in the us.
[00:13:05] Yeah, this isn't, I'm not dancing, I'm not dancing yet in terms of this being like, oh my God, everything's gonna change. I'm not heading back to Apple with my phone, but also choice anytime soon. . No, no, no. Uh, also though, like just as a reminder is technically impossible to charge a 30% fee of gas because that would change the transaction amount, which would change the gas, which would change the transaction.
[00:13:33] It is a recursive loop that doesn't end a snake eating itself if you try to take it in Ethereum. But if you just said you try to take it in the actual transaction to it, if we're going to just say, well that was $12 and 38 cents in gas, we're going to charge you 30% on your Fiat Apple Pay connected credit card or whatever.
[00:13:53] Um, , I'm sure they'd be happy to do that and, and send you the accounting for it too. Figured the way to do it, I guess. Yeah. , but absurd. Absurd.
[00:14:04] Okay. I think, I think you talk about the, the project Etched by Deca. I know you were excited about it on the last episode. I've actually minted one of these and I, I think it's like pretty cool. So here's my, like, layman's understanding of this. Like I connected my wallet, I. It looked through my NFTs and said, Hey, take one of these and then shove it through this algorithm that makes it into this cool etch, which is like, you know, uh, obviously a generative art piece, circular multiple colors.
[00:14:38] It looks like one of those, like, uh, Steno grafts. I'm pronouncing it wrong, but like, you know, where you have those like various designs where the pencil goes around in a circle? In a circle and, uh, it's a good looking thing. I guess I don't fully understand it. Maybe you can explain a bit more. Yeah. Uh, I could try to, I know that it's a, it's a experimental project from Deca, as we talked about.
[00:15:01] And, and Matt Cain. And Matt Cain is the, uh, he's a very, one of the earlies. OG crypto artist. He's been around the space for a long time. He's, uh, one of the early, uh, super rare artists, has a lot of pieces there, um, that, um, go for a, a very premium price. He's also the artist behind the Gazers Arc Blocks collection that, um, I think is now at something like a 35 eighth floor.
[00:15:26] Um, and it's a very interesting collection. He's a. Big time in the big time coder in the way he goes about his art. Um, those pieces, the, the Gazers collection changes over time in response to the moon phase. Um, and this project is definitely experimenting with his, with his coding and bringing in, uh, bringing in.
[00:15:45] The, your own bringing in collections or pieces from your own N F T collection and then combining it with, um, with these works as just like, as George was saying, I think it's a stenograph maybe, is that ? I dunno the exact word wrong. I love somewhere someone was like, they don't know the answer. It's stenograph.
[00:16:04] So then, yeah, then you've got the idea here is that you can etch these words onto the blockchain. You know, he's saying that we don't actually get words typically etched on the blockchain. So you, when you, you have to add text into this, um, in order to sort of commemorate, them to, to remember these words on, on the blockchain.
[00:16:23] I don't know where this project. obviously in the future. I think, you know, there's a lot of potential for, you know, maybe using these to combined in, in further ways or even, you know, to string different words together. Um, you know, I have no idea what may play out here. I would just, I'd be surprised if this were the end of it.
[00:16:43] Um, other projects that they, I mean, their DECA project is an ongoing, um, Just an ongoing creative project where you, they keep adding new levels that you can get to with points. Um, I think they, well, they've done, they've done a piece with, uh, with X copy in the past, um, that has given a holders access to, or given them, I, I think, I mean access, but has given raffle, um, Raffle entry, uh, two.
[00:17:13] And I, you know, there, I just think that there's a, a good chance that they will, they will end up doing more with this. So probably worth minting, uh, one at least. And, you know, maybe a couple if you want to experiment with, uh, you know, putting maybe a phrase together. Yeah. I put my, one of my favorite, my noun, uh, my noun 83 in there, and I minted that out.
[00:17:34] I think it's worth it for mint price, uh, and has upside to get to play with some tech. Um, yeah, I like this project. Uh, so it's deca.art. Yeah. Show us, show us your, your, your cool ideas in the, the discord. You know, show us the words that you came up with and, you know, just, just don't say anything too bad about us in, in, in the description.
[00:17:52] Hello. That's right cuz whatever you put in the description is actually minted there. Worst idea ever. Terrible. It's actually kind of interesting. Um, Alrighty. So the theme, what we get wrong, so we're looking at back, you know, we scanned through our, what we were excited about, kind of podcasts and what was top of mind.
[00:18:13] So last year around this time, we were very excited about. Coinbase, n f t. It was like when, when we actually have an episode when Coinbase, n f t as though it were like some magical event that would automatically turn all of the users of Coinbase into fervent rabid N F T monsters. Uh, how did that play out, Andrew?
[00:18:38] Ah, I mean, Coinbase NFT is out , um, it's. Uh, maybe it's maybe not as big of an impact as we thought. Is that, does anybody understating it? ? I'd put it at the top because I think it's the number one thing we got wrong. I learned a lot actually. Whenever my expectation versus reality is like that high a delta, it really helps me like look back and be like, like, what don't I understand?
[00:19:06] And I. From that point, I, I think was too much in the world of like how excited I just was about the ownership of NFTs. And I thought when other people got this opportunity, my assumption was that it was a barrier to entry. Like it was some sort of like, oh, too hard to cross into this ability to purchase things and Coinbase will make it easy.
[00:19:28] And it's, it's not about ease of purchase necessarily, uh, or at least the way they. . Um, it's really about the different ways that functionality has to be built into things. So, you know, I, uh, I had this assumed thing that would be automatically adopted by everyone has of the market, and instead it was like a dead feature out of the door.
[00:19:48] Yeah, I think there was maybe more self selection than we realized in the people who were interested in NFTs. They had largely already found their way to. To self custody to to use meta mask. Yeah, largely meta mask. , maybe some other , some other, you know, extensions, you know, and at the end of the day, you know, we're we're saying it was a huge hurdle and there's a lot of people, if you've really wanted to get into it, it's not as, as, you know, people listening to this, you know, you know that you can get into NFTs and, um, it's not the most technically challenging thing if you, if you really want to do it.
[00:20:25] So, you know, the idea that maybe that was the biggest hindrance, um, to holding. You know, to holding people back, you know, that were, were into crypto, but didn't want to, to get into, or that, that wanted to get into NFTs and just didn't have access to it. Yeah, I think we made a big mistake there and it's definitely something I've tried to keep in mind.
[00:20:45] you know, as, as new projects have come out, new products are released, . Okay. Another one, sort of a prediction thing we were looking forward to was the Super Bowl. We thought that NFTs would be featured prominently and crypto would be featured prominently. Following onto adoption, what we didn't realize is that one of the biggest advertisers for crypto in the Super Bowl was actually one of the largest, uh, perpetrated Ponzi schemes in recorded history.
[00:21:12] Ftx being the leader out there paying for a lot of place. . And so it actually had the complete inverse effect. Yeah, there was, I mean, we did see a few ads, huh. Um, from some big companies, but yeah, it definitely did not bring people in, in the, yeah. In the end we saw a lot of celebrities pumping N F T or probably crypto, that's not looking so good anymore.
[00:21:36] It definitely, again, you know, I think we're, it was the idea that, you know, More exposure, just gonna bring people in. And you know, we had already, we had seen that wave. I think that wasn't what was going to do it, man. That's, uh, that was a big miss. I think it's surprising that, uh, we're still seeing some companies talk about trying to do a another, uh, or to.
[00:21:59] Invest in a Super Bowl ad, um, after we saw a pretty considerable amount spent last year and ooh, I can't imagine that the R ROI has been good on any of the, that money . Yeah. I feel that people are still feeling the rug burn, but we'll see. Uh, okay. Another one, games. We were incredibly bullish. I was leading the charge on this, I'll say like every game.
[00:22:21] I was like, someone's gonna figure this out. Someone's going to. , you know, the next big thing out there. And what happened was there would be hype cycles, and they were far shorter than I realized. Uh, you know, I started this episode talking about like some of the things I'm, I'm selling from Pegasi, which completely imploded, but you know, I, you know, you can look at all pretty much games.
[00:22:45] Even Red Village. We were really excited about it. Just, uh, it wasn't there in terms of being able. Figure out an economic model that sustains right play to earn or play and earn. We were kind of always like, oh, which will, you know, be the thing that the truth is, it doesn't work yet. You know, if the game doesn't start off as fundamentally fun, addicting, something I wanna be a part of.
[00:23:09] uh, you, you, you really have a hard time, I think starting with an N F T first mindset versus a game first. Um, and we haven't seen it in the market. We haven't seen, uh, even the largest ones like Atlas, um, you know, come to fruition in any meaningful way. Yeah. I don't know. What do you see on this? Yeah, I mean, I think there was, I know there's been a ton of investment in different gaming projects and we have not seen the.
[00:23:38] Uh, the adoption that you'd expect at this point? You know, I thought, and I know that there, there, it can take some time. I am hoping that, you know, we still see something. However, I think we've talked about this before. I think that there's a strong, a stronger chance that we get a simple mobile app type of game that's.
[00:23:57] You know, maybe not all that impressive. And it is just what, you know, it gets a lot of users and, and you slowly, or people don't even realize that it's happening. Um, and maybe isn't this, this nf this huge invested, uh, investment, um, N F T project that everybody's paying attention to. You know, I think maybe that's too obvious and.
[00:24:19] Trying to go about it a little, uh, too head on. Um, you know, I could be wrong, but it feels like there's gonna be a different, a different tactic that ends up working here that, that maybe, uh, makes better use of the blockchain or integrates with a blockchain in ways that we beyond just owning an asset in a game.
[00:24:39] Yeah, I mean, for all that said, you know, AXI Infinity for the past seven days has done 364 Eth Ethan. , like that's real, right? 37,000 sales, like people are still playing as Yeah. There's still interest. There's still, I mean, I think that's the thing, you know, you're seeing that there's still interest, there's still people there and you, maybe we are out of some of the hype cycles.
[00:25:00] You know, the, the prices have certainly come down, but that's true everywhere. And uh, uh, there was a ton of investment. As I said. I think that probably, uh, Increase the, the value of some of these with the, the expectations that there was going to be things come, you know, releases coming right away and, and more investment and, and more, uh, more public players coming into the space.
[00:25:23] And, uh, you know, gets, gets back to what we've said. You know, it's, this is a. We haven't seen a sudden surge. This is more of a slow growth, uh, type of, uh, at least right now, that's where we are in, in, in the crypto space in general. I mean, we are not at the stage of seeing, uh, you know, just a, a surge of people come in and.
[00:25:43] I think that's gonna be true with the games too. We're gonna have things that are crypto native, that, that maybe get some, get some, get some buzz in the crypto area first and then hopefully can, you know, lead to things that, that get more mass adoption. I don't know if those are actually the same type of game though.
[00:25:58] Yeah, yeah. It's a good question. Uh, another one we were, I think you, so you, you were a bit more excited about this than I music, you know, looking at the opportunity for music, NFTs, I mean, on the heels of hearing sound, X, y, z calling, calling their numbers stratospheric, which, you know, I, I don't know, 30, 33,000, I dunno that I would say stratospheric, but hey, but you know, we got win amp.
[00:26:24] Um, you know, that's what's, you know, no, I'm not gonna take this as a win. But, you know, I, I do think there's still something more coming here. There is a lot of investment as said, there are. There is real usage. It's relatively small, and the fact that there is a problem with, with how music is distributed and, and paid for in the, like the digital distribution of, of music is, is broken.
[00:26:49] I think there is, you know, potential here because of that more so than than industries where you see it working pretty well. Um, you know, there's a bigger opportunity. . Yeah. I think it's got a more near term success probability because you're talking about artists with true fans, and those are two critical ingredients, I think, to generating that type of value, um, and utility.
[00:27:14] It can also, you could imagine, blend, uh, blend into IRL events pretty elegantly. Um, I think there's tremendous opportunity there. I think it's just, uh, Got a bit more road, thank goodness, get to that market that Taylor Swift did not get involved with ftx. There, there there's a story that they had tried to sign here to a hundred million deal, but if they had actually done, I don't know, maybe it would've turns out that would've saved them or something.
[00:27:41] You know, they, they would've handled the ticket thing and just pocketed all that money. , yes. Yeah. The joke that I was like, Aaron is just like, I mean, It's, uh, I'm very impressed. I, I keep waiting to hear any sort of statement from, uh, Taylor Swift's team, but like what, um, what remarkable presence of awareness to be like, why, eh, I don't like it.
[00:28:04] Something smelled like, cuz a hundred million dollars is, yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, for anyone, a lot of money. I don't care who you. . And so something must have thrown off an alarm bell. But the joke of the matter is that Sam made a calculation, right? Like this is a smart human, that he would've just taken all of the fans money, who would've obviously wanted to buy NFTs on their platform and paid her with it, and then kept everything left over, right?
[00:28:31] Like, can you make more money? Right? Like that's essentially what you're doing. You're buying someone's celebrity, monetizing. taking the people's money who think that they're saving money and putting money into an investment account or savings account or stablecoin on your platform, buying an n f e on your platform, uh, and you're just taking and paying that person and you can just keep repeating that again and again, which is very interesting.
[00:28:53] Um, and it's destructive force in it. So that did make me think the other part of this, you know, we're talking about the music distribution and how digital music is played, and we also know. The ticketing industry is very broken, and that's where I think you could see some of these come together. And I know that there's a problem with, with the access to venues, and a lot of the artists that we're talking about on, on these, you know, that are producing on sound at X z I don't think are, are at the level of, of needing to worry about that, you know, the, the larger venues at this point, you know, maybe this does need to start from a, you know, a, a more grounds up kind of, of, of manner.
[00:29:30] And there's something to, to, to combining those, giving access to your biggest fans, giving them the option to buy tickets ahead of others, and you really understand who the fans are. Not giving access because they're a, you know, a Capital One Gold, whatever member, you know, that doesn't show that you're a, a fan, you know, if you, if you have a, yeah, you can have that n ft.
[00:29:49] You, I mean, yeah, maybe you bought the N F T, but you've at least had to do something to. To, to show you're a fan and if you're, you know, if you've been along for a long time, you've got that NFT cheap, you know, at when before they were, before they were anything. And it, it's almost like, yeah, I, I knew the band before they were played, you know, before they made it to the top 40, whatever, you know, that kind of the idea before they blew up and, and you can prove it.
[00:30:12] Yeah. And, and those artists, those artists are there now. So maybe we do an episode where we look at Sound X, y, Z and be like, are there. Are there upsides there? Can we play in that? Um, or is, oh boy, that's a tough one. No one of many, right? It's really hard. I'm like, I like listening to music, but I'm sure someone can do it.
[00:30:30] Pacemaker or someone. Yes, someone can do it. Uh, all right, I like that music tee. Uh, I can go quickly through this one. World Cup. , I thought, uh, the number one attentive sporting event in the world combined with NFTs and soccer would do something. It didn't. Um, new coins were sort of created fan coins. Uh, there's definitely people making money, but the people that are making money are the ones that are launching projects, not holding onto projects and flipping.
[00:30:56] I've seen, yeah, I think they're running some those riff play. See last episode. What do you need? A major event with attention. Uh, yeah. So not, not much there. If you were gonna make money, you would've done stupid soccer balls based on the country and seen how many, like, go and do some incentive there, like it, um, a nothing burger.
[00:31:20] And so a thing that I'm gonna realize similar to Coinbase and Super Bowl. is that future event is already priced into whatever asset you're looking at, um, in many ways, uh, because the new attention is not bringing new customers at a level that's gonna move the price in any substantive way. And that's what I'm seeing.
[00:31:42] All right. Uh, another one. We were very bullish on N F T tracking tools, um, and NFTs and sas, and we're like, oh, despite our own reservations, The SaaS. Yeah, no, we pointed out the problem and then we still, I mean, you know, I still like my wagni, uh, wagni tool, but like, I didn't need it, use it enough that it's been worth it, but it's not the value of, of the, the NFT itself is certainly not worth it.
[00:32:08] Yeah, no. Um, and so NFTs is SaaS, um, don't really work. And when we say that, we just mean when you buy this subscription access to some software. that requires ongoing maintenance, but you just have a one-time fee forever, like very clearly, like doesn't necessarily work. Um, anyway, we didn't see the value there.
[00:32:28] Um, how about this one? We had a general, uh, shade against Solana and like not trusting Solana NFTs and things on there. Uh, we did, Hey, we had an open mind. We had an op. I like that about us. We had an open mind. We did dabble on there. We did play on there. Um, but how, how do you feel like this turned. In terms of our prediction, oh man, pat and I, pat and ourselves on the back here.
[00:32:52] Right. We have stayed away from that. Yeah. It's a bit of a, um, you know, I think it is one that was easy to get caught up in. And look, it's not that like everything else has been perfect, but that has had risk from the start. You know, when you don't have access, some of the time it's as good as like, , I mean essentially never.
[00:33:12] Um, so I, that always scared me, the downtime over there and, whew, I'm glad to, to not be involved in that ecosystem. My fear was also around the percent that investors held and would be dumping on the market. Mm-hmm. . And again, if you are paying a price for a thing in that currency, and then, I don't know, let's say a bunch of investors are looking to dump their bags on you as quickly as.
[00:33:38] Possible gonna do it. Uh, that's gonna have a very, very negative impact on, um, on the price. Um, you know, and then like the SPF debacle dropped that price from 30 from, it was dancing in the thirties for a while down to less than half. So it was dancing in like $12 range. But, uh, a year ago, do you wanna play the game, Andrew?
[00:33:59] Guess that price? What was Solana at? Well, a year ago it was Solana at. . Yeah. A year ago, if we were like, buy some one OFTs, that's the place to be. One 30. You plan at home. Gotta get a higher number. A little higher than one 30. Keep going. One 60, keep going. Uhoh. Two 30, . There we go. It got up to 1 97 so like, oh boy, just take a pause.
[00:34:26] Right? Like this time last year we were throwing shade and so on it cuz we were saying, I don't know if I trust the underlying asset. Now, yes, you can throw eggs at Ethereum all you want, but it sure as shit didn't do this type of drop where it goes from 1 97 down to a. $14. What happens to that N F T? You bought a 200, remember that episode?
[00:34:46] You did. What is, you know, when a a hundred percent gain is in a gain? This is exactly what we were talking about. Yeah. Oh, my N F T went up three x in value. I'm sorry, the coin you were on went down 99% in value. What does that look like? Well dig aloe. Look at Solana. Well, that's what that looks like.
[00:35:02] That's what that looks like. So, um, you know, you're, you're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller if you're trying to flip on a, on a platform that's got that much hype. Um, so the things we've got wrong, I will take it. But, um, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty bullish on that one. I think we, uh, hopefully guided somebody away.
[00:35:23] Decisions like that. All right. Uh, and we were, you know, related here. We nailed this. I love, we're laughing on this. We nailed it. did we, we really focused on, on the eth the Ethereum network. We did. Uh, so we have in here, the merge will boost the market. And this was sort of a broad sentiment that I think we had moving in the air.
[00:35:46] I can't wait for the merge. It was, it was gonna come out in June, then it was gonna come back, whatever. Uh, No, you don't think, has that not I haven't really looked at, no, no, you, no. I've been holding off and looking at the price cuz you know I'm gonna be untake and I didn't really wanna look at the price until I could Untake so.
[00:36:07] We're not, not doing so good. Not so hot . No, it's uh, it's not right. Like, so the merge, here's what I will say. I'm excited that the NFTs that I own on Ethereum are green by the sort of measurement of energy storage usage. Ah, not in the green. I like that. Uh, they're not in the green . They are green, but not the way I kind of wish they were.
[00:36:32] Right. So the market didn't respond. It didn't. , uh, the type of, um, I guess hype and adoption of the Ethereum network. You know, it's just people still building. So, uh, even when the event impacts the underlying technology of the thing, making it more stable and secure. Uh, and by the way, ultrasound money, because guess what Ethereum is doing, the operation of it, selling block space is technically reducing the overall supply.
[00:37:03] you know, month by month, uh, because of the new way that staking works, uh, which is pretty cool. Uh, but no one cares. Uh, no one cares about that. And we thought they would, they don't . Oh, that, yeah, it was, you know, glad that it was, uh, a relative non-event because if it had, it had a potential to, to really go bad if it didn't go smoothly.
[00:37:26] So I guess that's good, but it definitely was not a catalyst for, for, uh, the market in any way. ? Nope, Nope. Thought it would be. So I think here's a big takeaway. Like, um, the news is already priced in there. It is. Don't get excited about a thing in the future. The news is already priced in. Um, . I would, I would say playing in the right areas makes a lot of sense.
[00:37:54] So like, in a macro sense, uh, I still like the idea of playing in the, the domain of music. I, I am very wary about games. I have learned a lot about the game dynamics that don't work. I, I'm nervous about like, going all in on any other game. Um, so I'm probably not doing that anytime. We may have to get into another, maybe we'll have to get another predictions for what's coming, but I guess wanna go through predictions.
[00:38:19] I'm sorry. We'll do a prediction episode so we could be really wrong. Again, , I would definitely steer away from, from any of the ideas that any a signal event would be a, a big catalyst for either price or participation in, in NFTs. You know, that's, I, I've, everyone is not coming. That's the banner. Everyone is not coming.
[00:38:41] It's gonna be a trick. . Yeah. I mean hopefully incoming, you know, hopefully it's a , I think. I'm kidding. Not a slow trickle out . Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't say which way. Uh, alright, well there we have it. Um, I think maybe, we'll, we'll go for our predictions episodes. If, if we feel, uh, if we feel motivated, we'll come up with some stuff.
[00:39:05] Yeah. We're really, we're coming up to the end of the year again, man. It's, uh, yeah, definitely been a different year than, than what a, than what either of us thought it would be. And I think than, than what most people thought it would be. Man. Have you look at back at just the crypto has been dominated by, Uh, just scammer after scammer and grifter and, uh, all looking like it was the legit stuff.
[00:39:28] And man, I'm, I'm ready for, ready for something new. . Yeah, I, um, I, I think if you survive, like you weren't, you certainly weren't early when you were coming in to 2020 ones like hot market. But if you're coming in now and you've survived this, like you are officially. Yeah, you're official og. I think if you've survived this market and are still interested in doing this and, and experimenting hurting stripes, whether or not that's rewarded, who knows?
[00:39:55] Yeah. You have stripes. I'll mint them for you at the low, low price of how much you willing to pay. Yeah. . . Alrighty. Yeah. Uh, hey, if you haven't gotten us a gift already, leave us a review on whatever player. Are you happening listening. and uh, yeah, we'll probably have another episode, but in case we don't, uh, have a happy holidays.