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      If we build it, will they come?

      Theme: If we build it, will they come? 

      • Top collections surge, while most collections move sideways/down
      • Active NFT wallets have fallen, despite new platforms, tools, apps
      • Long-awaited Coinbase NFT Marketplace has not brought new users
      • Building and investment continues in NFT platforms, tools, etc

       

       

      Transcript

      [00:00:00] The day on all about affordable NFTs. If we build it, they will come question mark. And I think you kind of know when you're asking, unless it is a field of dreams that is dropping an NFT in your wallet with ghosts baseball players, you might have to work a little harder to avoid that, that, that dreaded sideways motion of your NFT not taking off, but that's our theme.

      [00:00:23] What's the news.

      [00:00:24] Oh, great. Yeah. Talk NFTs again, George. Good to talk here. I am pulling up my notes. As you made able to tell the, where did I see of tabs? I got them here.

      [00:00:40] I have open C acquires gem to invest in pro experience. So.

      [00:00:46] Yeah, I thought that this was a good move by open C Jim dot X, Y, Z. We've talked about this one a little bit. It's similar to genie. You can buy multiple NFTs at once. And we'll also accurate from multiple sources. Although I think it's primarily just taking everything from. Right now, maybe some looks where it may also not be taking any from other platforms soon, but I think this is good to a good feature, to be able to.

      [00:01:14] Offer offer people looking for a bigger traders that aren't less looking to just buy maybe one or two pieces at a time. They're really trying to move significant amount of money around and want to maybe buy 30 of you know, 30 of a collection at one time or more. So I think it's E it gives them it gives them a lot more tools here.

      [00:01:36] I think the other nice thing for them is sort of stops this aggregator from. Potentially becoming a competitor at some point. We've seen how aggravators can grow quite large and open. See, just just acquire one of the, the biggest one right now. Although we'll see how the market reacts. Genie, as we've got here is going to be releasing a token of their own.

      [00:02:00] They vowed to stay independent. He has said that he, the founder said that. Ben a pre was approached by open sea as well, and refuted their offer so wants to stay independent and actually be able to work with multiple marketplaces. So we'll see. If that, you know, which model work, it turns out to be more successful here.

      [00:02:20] I think it's a good move by open. See, I am a little surprised that Jim had decided to sell there. I think it is, it's good that we've got one that will stay independent and be able to actually work as a real accurate.

      [00:02:32] Yeah, this pro experience and certainly for Wales looking to like, look at a market and buy up like a certain type of rarity of a project and be able to do multiple things. It makes a lot of sense, but I gotta be honest in, in the future where NFTs are lift listed on separate platforms. Be it, you know, referable looks rare, coin Bates, NFT.

      [00:02:56] Like you're going to need to see a holistic view and bid across platforms to find where the opportunities are. So I, you know, I get it as a, as a feature, but the real feature is being able to look across platforms. And if you're not allowing that, then I'm kind of confused.

      [00:03:09] Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that the cross-platform functionality will do big benefit to Jeannie in the long run on here. And actually. You mentioned Coinbase marketplace that has opened to the public has not seen a lot of action quite yet. I got the email that it is open. It was I dunno, I guess I was kind of expecting a little bit more of an event with that, or a little bit more of an announcement, something going on.

      [00:03:35] It not surprisingly has not seen a lot of a lot of transactions because there wasn't, I don't know. There wasn't much to get people there.

      [00:03:43] The headline here is on its first day. The market floor has opened up and saw less than 150. I'm not missing a thousand. I'm not listening a million. No, no, no. A hundred and one five, zero, no other.

      [00:03:57] million people on their list.

      [00:03:59] 150 new users sign up for its platform. According to analytics.

      [00:04:05] You know, I've been, I've been unimpressed with some of the, the usage of the looks rare platform. It, because it's so incentivized. And that it's mostly washed rating. However, They've at least tried to incentivize people to get there. I'm not sure what, what the impetus is for anybody to go use the claim basin Ft marketplaces right now, besides it being on Coinbase.

      [00:04:30] I dunno. It's not proven. It's not great. I thought this was actually going to be in beta for a lot longer. Was surprised to see that they announced it that quickly. And without any apparent fair, fair fanfare.

      [00:04:42] I my heart hurts so much because I like, I mean, you've heard us talk about this. I have looked forward to this kind of like moment where a bunch of people will be like onboarded and brought on. And it's just such a reminder that like, you just can't bet on the. bet on the roadmap. You can't bet on this like high expectation of a thing, but this is gotta be below all manner of expectation.

      [00:05:03] You know, I've, you know, I've had blog posts do better in a single day than this. This is not a, this is not an acceptable thing. You know, and obviously this stock took a massive tumble as a result of, of, you know, I guess a number of things, the general market, but also on this, and it's down like 30% over the past month.

      [00:05:22] But coming back to what I think they could have, I thought was going to happen here is that you already had users using the app and they were clicking in a single experience. They've just created a new destination or you have to go through and upload had they tied it into. The actual app and that experience and bringing those things together, like, oh, there you go.

      [00:05:41] But instead they, you know, similar to like Facebook trying to compete with, you know, Instagram, they, you know, didn't end up being able to achieve that. And then he just bought it. They bought the whole software and brought those users in there. But if you're trying to create a whole new marketplace from scratch, simply because you have a branded name, like it's going to take more to your point than that. So Ouch in

      [00:06:06] So I don't think there's going to be the catalyst that brings the next wave in which maybe we'll have to discuss a little bit more here.

      [00:06:13] I think, I think we have spilled enough ink and words over the expectation associated with the Coinbase entity marketplace. And just going back to the episode, we just had valuing the product versus the promise. And I think we overvalued the promise a little bit, just a little.

      [00:06:30] yeah, yeah. All right next. We've got that. Let's see. Another marketplace raised 50 million in seed funding. I think this just kind of goes along with what we keep saying. There's going to be more marketplaces. They keep raising more money. It's not necessarily a single marketplace world. So there's that one this next bit is a bit of a self promotion.

      [00:06:52] There's, there's a dune or a, I'm sorry, a, a, an article in business insider, et cetera. Dot com on dune analytics wizards. I was included in that, that article. So I've included that link. I think you should definitely go read it or at least you know, try to, if you weren't a wold from it, but there's a lot,

      [00:07:12] quote. What did you, what did you quote in here?

      [00:07:14] Yeah. Oh, it is paywall bone. Sorry. I thought there was a way to, to preview it initially anyway. Yeah. What. So, yeah, they, they were asking me about about how I got into blockchain analytics. What were, you know, what is could be discovered there, you know, and that, you know, I'd let them know a little bit how I got into it initially, which was prime will actually do looking into social tokens initially.

      [00:07:36] Was doing some, some dashboards for some bounty work and then got really into dune and let them know, you know, how I how much I like looking into it, because it tells you so much more than what you see on these surface level numbers. You know, we know that there is a lot of there are a lot of numbers that aren't quite what they seem in in NFTs.

      [00:07:54] So I, I, I really like looking into the. Trying to look at who the wallets are and look at the, the, where those, where funds are moving around a bit, trying to looking at those things, but also look at look at where big collectors are, are maybe moving into next, see what's going on there. So A lot of different ways you can use this stuff, but it's I was, I was happy part of that.

      [00:08:19] And I am bullies looking more into those, those blockchain analytics. So fun to be part of that.

      [00:08:27] Yeah. it's pretty cool. To be in a, an article in business insider with the title of meet the read the wizards of of dune and certainly your work there, it's like, you just constantly hear it. Like, Hey. The dashboard for this. And it's, you know, part of that, that open stuff. And we'll have the link in the show notes.

      [00:08:45] And of course your NFT marketplace, data links super helpful for understanding what's going on. Cool. Very cool. I'd be a little worried though, every now and then someone wants to talk to me about like the NFTs and my wallet. I'm like, ah, did you docs yourself in that?

      [00:08:59] Yeah.

      [00:09:01] Oh, he's out there.

      [00:09:03] Yup. Yup, yup. Yeah. Yeah. There's, you know, it's out there. If you look hard, you know, and I'd say even this this, I, you can put it all together. Right?

      [00:09:12] Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Congrats. Super cool. Well, maybe I'll have to get some new kicks, some new Medicare.

      [00:09:23] Oh, God. Nice segue into the Nike NFT crypto kits. Yeah, for, for A mere $130,000. You too can have digital sneakers.

      [00:09:35] A wait that's, that's the premium stuff, you know, but the floor, I think, is down much lower than that, but they, they do look cool. So they, there is a, these came out of the artifact company. This has been part of, let's see, it was part of the artifact. I can't remember the name of the original NMT, but then they had Sorry.

      [00:09:55] They had a box that came out of the monolith box that was given to the holders. So then the monolith box was opened and it had these, these crypto kicks along with a vial, the vial, axes, and skin for the for the sneakers. So there's different rarities of those vials to, you know, different look they've hinted that there'll be able to change.

      [00:10:15] There'll be more changes to these with, with, with what's coming in the future, on the roadmap, you know but you'll be able to actually make these sort of one-on-one sneakers and be able to print these artifact has done something like that in the past. They did that for punk holders. About a year ago, gave them an option to do a, the one-on-one speaker.

      [00:10:34] Each one was actually unique to the punk itself. So I think that's probably where this is going in at some stage in the future. I think there's going to be potential for merging different ones for trying different ways to customize and make it unique. Artifact has definitely one of the leading companies here and I think it's cool to see them actually put that Nike the Nike logo and see that in the in the digital version here.

      [00:11:01] Yeah, and it looks like there's like 10,000 items, but they said there's 20,000 total and the floor price is hovering around 1.5 as of right now. So kind of cooling off

      [00:11:13] a vial. Of course. So,

      [00:11:15] oh yeah. Okay.

      [00:11:16] you gotta get a vile to have any, you know, to make them look like anything. So yeah, they have cooled down a bit, but Nike. There are certainly a lot of Nike collectors out there. So we'll see if maybe some of those sneaker heads move over into NFTs. I've know that plenty of them have already.

      [00:11:32] I'm not,

      [00:11:33] Yeah, it takes up less closet space. So, yes.

      [00:11:35] That's right. You can have a

      [00:11:37] I dunno. Might be one to watch. Like if, if, if it gets quiet, like I think there's something to be said for the. The first Nike shoe drop and the sneaker head and memorabilia. I, I wouldn't go, I wouldn't attack it at this price.

      [00:11:49] No, not in this environment at that price either, but I think there is maybe an entry point that that makes sense there. Because I think artifact is a, is going to be pretty, I don't know, a big company. Fashion NFT space and fashion being that the way that Nike is fashion. And so I think, you know, being able to add Nike's anymore, just that swoosh is a huge, a huge benefit, but also the, the the collector base that comes along with Nike.

      [00:12:17] I think that that could be very beneficial over time.

      [00:12:20] I just put it on my watch list. So if it gets, gets us somewhere interesting, better believable, bring it to the project. All right. If we build it, they will come top collections, surging, but let's just be honest. Most collections. When you say most like 99% of projects, sideways or down.

      [00:12:38] Yeah. And I, I said sideways, you know, it's tough to say, you know, day to day exactly what it is, but you know, if they're not moving up anyway and they're, they're, they're, they're moving not much. And that's what we're seeing. I think in, you know, more recently we've seen some downward price movement and maybe that's even across the board for the law for a long time, we saw that the games were primarily in those board apes mute Napes You know, I'd say in a Zuki, we've seen him run in the doodles recently, but really everything else needs sort of mid-market the affordable NFTs or even not so affordable NFTs those next year.

      [00:13:18] If it had, there's not a lot, not a lot happening there. And, you know, despite this sort of these record volume days, it's not spilling over to, to lower volume projects or lower priced projects.

      [00:13:31] I feel that's because some of these large mega drops launch projects of moon birds, and the other side, you go lab stuff and they just sucking all the oxygen out. Like, look, there's a handful of users, right. We pegged it at there's like under a million there's 350,000 active wallets, depending on what you're looking.

      [00:13:52] It's only so much, frankly, ease that people have running around with. And if you're dropping it all into these projects.

      [00:14:00] and sucking it out, is it like at a certain point you've milked the cow too much, like what's going on.

      [00:14:05] I think it's some of that. I think it's also that you see some of these, that the best projects, the best collections launching. More collections, printing more, you know, making more NFTs available. And while they, while they initially released with a, you know, a 10 K hard cap or, or maybe even smaller, you know, they've realized that, well, we could just make a second collection and that second collection may have twice as many.

      [00:14:32] And we're seeing that oftentimes that second collection has a lot more a lot more pieces. So it's getting a lot more people and ability to get in at a lower price that becomes. You know, an alternative to maybe the, instead of getting the second or third or fifth best project of, of that category.

      [00:14:50] You know, maybe if it's you know, some sort of a race car play to earn thing. I, you know, when you want, you can instead just look at the best one. I'm not a, it's not a real world example, but instead of looking at, you know, looking at the, you know, 17th best PFP project that is basically following the roadmap of.

      [00:15:08] Of, of merge of eventually we'll have a metaverse we'll do another PFP drop. They're just doing the same thing that the biggest ones are doing. I think you're going to see people just move. Try to move up a little bit by being in, by, by being in a related collection to the best projects. Instead of being with the competing project that probably isn't going to be able to overtake those leading collections.

      [00:15:33] So, And your active NFE wallets have fallen despite new platforms. And so

      [00:15:41] yeah, I shouldn't say as a new active wallets is more, I knew. Yeah. Not onboarding as the pace of onboarding has slowed.

      [00:15:51] Yeah. And we just talk about that with the long awaited Coinbase, NFT, we talked about it so many times there's 4 million people on a wait list. Like that had to mean something, but actually. Maybe you come back around and say like, let's just people clicking buttons on, you know, on the Coinbase app. And you're like, yeah, sure.

      [00:16:05] I'll join a wait list, click click, fine. But it's not really customer acquisition in the way that we thought it would be because those customers, if they want it NFS probably already want to gone and did it, but it wasn't the that smooth transition that, that we were hoping for. It just, Hey, you know, it just, it really took some wind out of the sales and this is going to be.

      [00:16:25] This is going to be a very careful time for ed say, throwing money around on an is like, continue to do it, but I'm being very, very judicious on it. There's no sort of like, there's no longer this, and then that's going to happen moment. I think this is just grind, slow and steady over time.

      [00:16:42] Yeah. And I think this is where we're actually going to see a lot of projects die. A lot of these, these projects are not going to make it. People are going to become less interested. Maybe it's part of that, that, you know, oh, the realization of, oh, this is actually what we're building and people realizing, well, you know, that's what it is.

      [00:17:01] I'm not, that's not what, I'm what I actually came for. You know, there's going to be some of that. That could be some of the sort of consolidation that we see here getting rid of a lot of the extra. And hopefully we will see some, some big winners that, that do come out. But yeah, I think you're right in being wary of of buying new NFTs right now.

      [00:17:20] Yeah, that's it. I'm I'm now I have a, an investment thesis that like kind of, you know, continue to evolve and share here, but there are still like, you know, opportunities. That then get presented under priced assets, especially when enough people get bearish and enough people are looking the wrong way, right When everyone's looking at the shiny object over here, that means there's a whole world over on the other side. And then you can evaluate the, you know, going back to our previous episode, the value of the actual product, as it sits as a piece of art or as a game token piece in a stable game, or however you look at that versus promises, cause like most of the promises dry up, you can then maybe assess that and say like, Hey, what will the next phase.

      [00:18:00] It's not going away. It's going to go through cycles. Those cycles are going to be faster. But the other issue I see is a little bit that I, you know, I used to play poker online and in the early days it was pretty easy to win money because the players weren't good when you're playing against uninformed markets and people you can do disproportionately well, But when you start to play against people that know their stuff, you, the edge gets taken away.

      [00:18:29] I'm feeling like maybe that might be happening in a, in a tighter market where you don't have that many new people coming in with new ease. Not that like we're competing against each other, but if you're playing the like value and slip game, like as the market gets tighter and smarter, like projects that are full of.

      [00:18:44] That, you know, if they build it, they assume they will come because there's just general users being ready to throw around things and not do due diligence and not care about the team and not sort of check what's going on. Like you just have to be more and more buttoned up. So if you build it, they won't come.

      [00:18:57] You're playing in a game with much more sophisticated players. As of right now.

      [00:19:02] there's not 4 million suddenly new wallets that came from Coinbase. So that means, you know you got to step up your game when you're playing with better.

      [00:19:09] Yeah. Yeah. I think the market has definitely changed. People are more knowledgeable, there's more tools available. And when the the rate of new people coming in slowly. It's a, it's a bigger problem.

      [00:19:23] Yeah. So if you build it, they will not come where we're here. So we're, we're trading around our. images with each other. I do think there's value. I am ever optimistic, but I'm just going to figure out what the, what the next play is. All right. Andrew. Thanks for bringing this to us.

      [00:19:37] All right.