Developing a Long-Term NFT Vision

mm hmm. Welcome to the Crypto business podcast helping you navigate the frontier of crypto and now here is your host, Michael, still Zehner. Hello, Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Crypto business podcast brought to you by social media examiner. I'm your host, Michael steles owner and this is the podcast for innovative thinkers who want to know what works in the

World of Web 3.0 today I'm going to be joined by Roger Bryant and we're going to explore how to develop a long term vision for your N. F. T project. I think you're gonna find this absolutely fascinating. So be sure to buckle up and enjoy this week's episode and by the way, I'm

at Stella's owner

on instagram. And if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show. So you don't miss any of our future content. And now for this week's interview with Roger brian helping you to simplify your crypto journey. Here is this week's expert guide today, I'm very excited to be joined by Roger brian,

if you don't

know who Roger is, he's a Web three investor and founder of results dot IO an agency that specializes

In helping web three

companies launch successful projects. He's also

founder of

Block Capital, a Blockchain Fund and he's host of the weekly coffee with the nerd live show. Roger. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Michel. I appreciate

it. It was great to

meet with you in person at N. F. T. L. A. You're involved with a lot of fun projects and I'm super excited today to explore how to establish a long term vision with N. F. T. Projects. I think

that so many

people that launch N. F. T. S. Are not thinking long term and I can't wait to dig a little deeper with you today. But before we go there I would love to hear your story. How did you get into N. F. T. S and crypto start wherever you want to start. Yeah,

The Crypto side is always a fun story. I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013. I was at a mastermind in ST martin's with a couple of marketing buddies and we decided we were going to go out on a catamaran with a couple

of local friends turned

out to be an

anarchist. A few members of anonymous and

the anarchists wife.

I remember she was beautiful, she was an

attorney, but she didn't

like to wear clothes which

made my girlfriend

at the time a little uncomfortable And I handed him $80 in cash and got my first Bitcoin that day. I also proposed to my wife that day And didn't realize that it was April one. So there's a lot of memorable

events

To that day. You buy your first Bitcoin and proposed to your wife on April one

with an anarchist and a naked

woman running around. You tend

not to forget about

How you came into the industry. Did you save that coin or did you sell it because $80 for a Bitcoin while I'll have that one forever. That's like the

one that I pretend

doesn't even exist

is just memorable

at this point. I

then was like

many people that came

in relatively early. I

bought a bunch

In the $120

Range and then sold it all at 1500

and thought that I was a

Genius for 10 x. In my money. Little did

we know what would

happen fast forward In just a few years

later

I got really heavy back into the

Crypto space. In 2000

and 17 we launched

a project called totally crypto

In the digital currency index. We had one of the largest crypto communities in 2017 with 40

5000 people

in our facebook group. And we had about 1200

monthly subscribers

to our newsletter at the time. That led me

to becoming the head of

crypto at a

financial firm called Equity

Trust, which is a 27

billion dollar financial

services company. My

job was to train their

team and sales

reps on how to sell

Cryptocurrency as an investment. And

That was back in 2017,

And then N. F.

T. S. It's really interesting. One of my buddies is a pretty well known digital

artist and at the

Beginning of 2021 I tried working with him to get his collection online right after people sold his for what, $69 million. And if you've ever worked with

artists in

the business side of things, you'll you'll know that it's like

herding cats.

So that didn't necessarily work out.

But it brought me into the

market and I started buying

a few things here and

there and then went really heavy in august

and

started advising projects. I'm the largest holder of many popular projects. And since then it's grown into, I think what we're gonna talk about a lot today on this call,

well, and why don't you

go ahead and explain the project that connected us together as well? Just because you know, I ended up investing full disclosure, I ended up investing in,

I think it was called the whale

sharks. And I think it's changed a little bit, but why don't you just tell a little bit of that story as well? Yeah, awesome. So we decided at the end of last year, as I was working in a lot of different projects, we saw

a common

thread throughout all of the communities of a

need that individuals had

that wasn't being met.

A lot of groups call

it Alpha, I personally believe as an investor they're using the term incorrectly, but it was bringing together those that were looking to not just

trade N. F. T.

S. And make a quick buck because you can there's nothing wrong with that. And don't get me wrong we do that too, but how to create a long term wealth strategy in web three. So grabbing in the metaverse play to earn defi N F T s. So we brought together a couple of 100

individuals and we

launched a project called

the whale sharks. It's

the whale sharks dot

com and it's an end of tea collection that serves as a pass to our ecosystem

into the whale maker DAO, which has had an amazing run over the last 90 days for its investors and is designed to be more like an index fund of assets across the metaverse and web three. And we've got a great community of individuals with a shared vision and that vision is to build wealth over the long term and how to make strategic investments and how to pick the right projects to put our capital

into and what

are you focused on predominantly today? What? Like tell us a little bit about what results dot Io really does if you don't mind. So results dot Io was born out of my partnership with VC funds out of Taipei. I'm an

LP at a company

called I V C. Internet Ventures crypto, which is an offshoot of headline asia, which is a multi billion dollar fund.

We just closed

our 1st $70 million web three round at the beginning of the year.

We've invested

In. I don't even know how many projects now we have our monthly meeting coming up on the 18th. It'll be good to get caught up because it's just been nonstop

picking up

allocations in some of the biggest projects

on market

and in that relationship would participate in the phone calls with the investors for pitches and also review and doing the quarterly review of the investments that we made. And I often ask questions like, have you thought about

doing this from a marketing

perspective, have you thought about doing this? Finally, the head of I V. C. Called me up music, where where are you coming up with all this? And I told him I built and sold to marketing agencies, one of the main inc magazine's fastest growing company. Three years in a row, I've built and sold the publishing company in an e commerce business. He's like, alright, we're starting a marketing company,

Here's your first set

of clients and here's the goal. I'm like, okay,

so that's really our results

That I owe came about. And as of 2018 I was semi retired and I would just sit around and read books and

coach

the few businesses that we

own

and I was living an amazing life now I actually have to work again, but it's so much fun

and you've met some of

the people who were working with these people are just amazing human beings. We get to work on a lot of mission driven projects and results dot Io has quickly become one of the top web three marketing agencies on the planet. Do you want to mention the one that

we experienced

just a few days ago? Oh yeah, so Michael had a chance to come and

meet the team from

meta crafters and proof of learn, which is founded by Sheila Marcello, who was the founder of care dot com, that she sold a couple of years ago for half a billion dollars. She's on a

mission

To onboard web to developers into the Web three

ecosystem. So

that's creating the Blockchain developers, the game developers for the metaverse. The metaverse developers,

she has a mission of

On boarding 10,000 new developers

In the next 12

months. And it's such an amazing project. It has all of the largest investors in the Web three market and in traditional markets.

She's built an

amazing team of some of the smartest people I've ever met.

And Michael, you'll have

To admit they threw one heck of a party in L. A.

Never been

to anything like that. Alright folks,

Well you've got a sense

of Roger's background now, I want to ask you Roger as a guy who has invested in a lot of

N. F. T. Projects

and you know, we're really zooming in

on N. F. T. S today

because I feel like that's

that's what my audience can

really wrap their head around as like small business creators,

entrepreneurs marketers, why do these projects fail? What do you, I feel like is lacking because it seems like an empty projects are propping up all the time and most of them are not successful. So what are some of the big mistakes that you see happening with these projects?

Yeah. And I'm gonna pull

a number from Gary V. He has publicly said

numerous times that

98

percent of

the N. F. T projects will

fail. I mean it's

absolutely correct. There's so many reasons that they fail. So let's

kind of like start at the top

and come down a little

bit and the very first one is really lack of vision or originality.

We see

these really successful projects

like the crypto punks

which there right

to fame is that they

were one of the first and then you see the board ape yacht club which is selling for $350,000 for one N. F. T. And you could have bought it for $180 almost exactly a year ago. And we think

that it's

Just a matter of putting a project out and that the world is going to embrace it and the next thing, you know you're gonna become a cultural phenomenon on the cover of rolling stone with $26 million dollar auctions at Sotheby's. Unfortunately that's not the

case. We look

at the

most successful and we try

to model them often not realizing that when they become a phenomenon, they sort of start

to break

the rules that the rest of us need to follow.

So

just like any product you really need to solve some type of problem.

You can

solve an emotional need problem by developing an amazing community,

you can solve a

nostalgic seeking individuals psychological need to re embrace it's

their youth

for example, we're working on the power rangers, N. Ft. Drop

a lot of the

anime series from the eighties and nineties are becoming really popular in the N. F. T. Space. But even with that it's still not enough to be successful. So solving a problem really means that you've got to get creative in the

market, you've

got to have a hook. And as marketers we understand that. But a lot of times as project creators

you get a bunch of guys

or gals sitting around, they come up with an idea, they quickly put something together, they put it out

and they want to

sell 10,000 N. F. T. S. And then they stall at 160

and they're like what

do we do wrong? We've got this amazing artwork,

we've got this

amazing vision of all these things that we're going to do. The reality is people, they want to see

stuff now. So

even if you do manage to create an original idea, what are you showing the world that you have

today? The

investors and the participants in this

ecosystem are much

smarter in 2022 than they were in 2000 and 17 during the I. C. O. Craze when you could basically sell anything. If you could write a good white paper

today,

the audience wants to see something tangible, something

realistic, something

that they can be

involved in. Michael, you saw all kinds of real world parties and FTl

a some of them were

absolutely amazing and it's delivering that in real life value to the holders of

a certain project. It's a great

start.

So, Michael, I mean, I've got like a bullet point list. Do you want me to just jump into some of the other macro reasons projects fail? Okay, so let's put our market our hat on and we're gonna wear three different hats for this

conversation.

As a marketer, we understand that in order to have a successful product, we must market it. Often projects fail to market. They failed to build their communities.

Those communities

in this space are

typically undisc

ord telegram and twitter. If you don't reach critical mass in those elements, it's not likely that you'll have a successful project. For example,

we had an N.

F. T. Project pitch us maybe three weeks ago and they have 10,000 N. F. T. S that they want to sell its amazing artwork. They've got an awesome vision for what they want to do.

They've got like six

1000 people in their community and when you do the math,

there's

no way to create demand after the drop because everybody could

probably meant to.

But then there's no one left that knows about the project that will then want to be involved in

it. So the

marketing aspect is about building your community and getting it over. Subscribed to whatever it is that you want to do. So if you're gonna have 10,000 and FTS drop, you want 50,000 people in your community that are actively

engaged in some

way or another. That is not an easy task. You've got to be a good marketer, you've got to be a good networker, You've got to go out, you've got to build the relationships and do what we call a Emma's or ask me anythings with other communities. So one of the other reasons that projects fail is

if they don't have a vision and they don't

have a product, they tend to fail

if they

don't have good marketing, they tend to fail. After marketing. It really comes down to who are you initially engaging with? And this kind of is the collector investor. Hat.

When

I sit down at a dinner with some of the larger players in the and of T.

Space.

Most of them are part of a syndicate. So they're part of a group of individuals that once one of them buys in everybody buys in real quick on the syndicate thing, is

this a formal word

in the N. F. T. Collector space? Or is this just a word you mean? Like they're in a small group of buddies who share

whitelist projects

with each other. Do you understand what I'm asking? No, It is, it is a formal word. So they're called three different things. They're called alpha groups.

They're called syndicates.

And some of

them even call themselves

mafias. I was trying to avoid that word because it makes it sound a little dirty. There are projects that we have worked with that have been anti whales, whales are the larger players

in the crypto

or N. F. T. Space. So they designed their projects to not work well with these syndicates or these whales and that rarely works to their advantage

because they don't

Have the people that come in and buy 10-20% of the supply

and then share

with their friends that they're involved in the project. And we're seeing this more and more.

I think we're going to talk

a little bit about what makes

them work. And right now

we're talking about what doesn't work. But there's a project that I'm very heavily invested in that seemed to embrace this strategy. But then quickly became publicly anti whale anti syndicate and they've struggled

because of that.

There is a community that you need to

embrace. And if you don't, your project will struggle. And very few creators realize that

because they're not taking the time to do their marketing, do their networking, do their research and to look at who the biggest holders are in similar projects

and approaching them

about becoming involved in there? Most of them want to. And it's all on the Blockchain, it's not hard to figure out who these people are, but no one spends their time

doing it. I have a

question obviously right now, there's I think I read there's only about 16 million people that invest on open C 16 million, which isn't a huge number. Right? But do you feel like with the onboarding of N. F. T buyers And as the masses over the next 12 months start coming that these syndicates are going to be less important? Do you understand where I'm going with this? Because as

people who

have large communities outside of the N.

F. T. World,

on the socials, for example, as they begin embracing N. F. T. S, for example, imagine Mr Beast, right. One of the largest Youtubers in the world,

he could

bring literally millions of people into this space if he wanted to.

Do you feel like

that right now, it's syndicates and

Alpha groups and

that eventually that's going to be less important? Or

do you feel like these people

are still going to be important because they're the ones that can move the needle on the floor price of a

lot of these projects? Yeah,

I think they're always going to be important. I mean, you can go into the

professional sphere

of public equities and they're called market makers. They're systematized machines for producing a specific outcome or result to a listing, whether that be a publicly traded company. Um The introduction of a new Cryptocurrency, the N. F. T. Drop, they are a vital part of the ecosystem. And when you talk about someone like MR Beast, you start

to do that

Equation again. Where if you want to sell 10,000 you need 50,000 active

members. If you've

got a million active

members in your community

And you want to sell 10

1000 you're probably gonna be a huge success out of the gate. So that's initially but

then you get

into the longer term

reasons that projects fail

and that is typically around the team not

understanding what

team members they need in order to be

successful because

you can take an artist, a developer and marketer put them

together, bring a

product to market, sell it out. But then they're all looking

at each other. Okay the artist is done with his art.

The developer is done with the

Blockchain side. Okay market

or go go make this work. And the market

are sitting there looking at

well what do I sell next? What are we doing

next? Are we doing events?

Are we gonna do

staking, are we gonna do a

game like what do you want me to do? And everybody

looks at each other and like,

well we don't really have a leader

here. Who is the person that understands

business? Who

is the person that understands

finance and many many teams like that

and many

people that get involved

in these N. F. T.

Projects fail to look for that before they get

involved.

They don't go into

the discord, they don't see

what team members are available and look at what their experience

might be after the sale. And that's a real problem

that that shiny

object, that short term thinking that seeking Alpha today in the N. F.

T. Space

based on Hearing about people that minted something for .08 ethereum. So what, $250 and then they turn around and sell it instantly for 380,000

dollars. And it

happens. It does. But that's the

0.0

001

of the

participants in the community.

So for the rest of

us that aren't hitting those huge home runs out of the gate, we continue to seek them. We hope

we wait.

But if you're gonna be looking at the project long term, you gotta ask yourself who is the

leader and what is their

experience in this type of sphere

that leads you to

believe that this project can be

successful

post mint. And then the last one with that on the long term vision is money management. So many of these projects pulling massive amounts of money, A big trend that I saw at N. F. T. L. A. I was meeting a lot of project creators that have millions of dollars sitting in a dow for their project to use and they have no idea

what to do with any of the money.

They're like we can throw

parties, we

Can build this, we can build that and you look at it and you're like hey you've got $2 million dollars

that's like you raised a series

a without having to give any equity away in your business. Like you need to think about how you're going to deploy that as a run rate and how it's going to continue to build community and community value

in order to

make the project successful over the long term. You know, the other thing that I think that a lot of projects don't do well is communication because the truth of the matter is that unless you're actually active and discord or you have notifications on on twitter,

it's almost impossible

to keep up with what's happening in a lot of these

projects. And if you are

invested in multiple projects, I would imagine this is part of where projects fall apart as people get excited during the minting process and then they forget about the project because there's no easy way to communicate. Don't you agree? That's a big part of the problem as well. Oh

I I agree. 100%.

We have a full time

employee whose only

job is to manage my N. F. T. Collection so that I can stay up to date on

things now. Not everybody

can do that. My recommendation to people that are new in the N. F. T. Space or are looking long term if you're not

a professional investor

and this isn't part of your overall portfolio. Don't

get involved in more than

five projects. You'll never

be able to keep up.

And it's often the things that you miss which are the

1/2 that could have made

you money, whether it's a secondary drop, it's a partnership, it is a token launch. It is a staking mechanism. The earlier that you adopt the things that your projects are doing, the more profitable they are and if you start missing them then you really are limiting your value inside of those collections.

Okay, so let's

talk about what successful long term projects are doing. We've talked about kind of you can flip some of the stuff we talked about on its head but let's talk about like taos and token issue and stuff like that because that's stuff that I think a lot of people maybe haven't considered. Yeah. And this is I'm going to talk about it from my perspective as an investor working for a fund managing a fund and then I'm going to apply that to the general public because it's no different that you

have the same available data

and can ask the same questions. Our first question is always who are your

backers?

So typically like it results dot Io we do not have a single client on our roster of 22 clients right now. That is

not VC back.

And the reason for that isn't just the credibility that comes with it, but

it's letting us know

that the project has been through due diligence, someone's

looked at their legal

documents. The team is doc's meaning that everyone knows who they actually are in real life now, hold on a second

on this point. So

many of these big projects

like lazy

lions, for example, and

board apes and even

a sneaky, you

know, they haven't

docked their founders yet. They've been

successful. So

there's a lot of people that think I can get away with working with the pseudonym, but are you saying that this is important

now? Like people

want to know who the heck the founders are and that's, that doesn't

really work anymore. Yeah.

And the board apes founders are now docks, they didn't choose to do it. Somebody docks them or at least that's the way that appears to the market. But with them doing the ape token drop and working with Horizon labs on that

and the K Y C

that needed to be done in order to get those allocations. I don't think it was an accident that they were docks When you look back to 2021, it was cool To not be doxed when you look at 2022 and you look at long-term investors, the players that really are looking to build wealth in the space. They're, they're not gonna go for that anymore, that doesn't mean that you're not going to see the 1% of projects that still managed to pull it off.

but if

98% of projects

are failing,

then you have to understand that like that 1% is super rare, and it's typically because they partnered with the syndicate with a group of guilds or a market maker to make them a success out of the gate and then that they hit the nail on the head with all of the other things. Amazing art,

having an

avatar that people can relate to,

meaning that

like monkey

pictures

are fine. They're funny, I

invested heavily in a

vampire project. It never really caught on, even though it's got an amazing team. And we started to ask ourselves like, what did we do wrong on this project? They hit the nail on the head with so many of the elements we look for,

and it's just

that the artwork might not resonate, and they've got one of the artists that did that project is actually the same artist that did the board upshot club. So you'd think that that

correlation would lead to

more success, but it didn't. So that art avatar element is an important consideration as well, so that you can hit people emotionally and psychologically that they want to represent, or flex, they're N. F. T. S as their profile pictures on social media in order to create expansion, but when we go back to the dark side, artists can get away with it. But I mean, these projects are raising $5 million, $10 million, $20 million. I would want to know that someone raising that

type of money what

their background is because if they have never run a

business, they've never really

even been part of a successful

business. There's a

high probability that that money is not going to go towards growing the project and that they have no idea what to do with the money and that usually leads to problems. Cool, what else are important? Long term things. I also want to see a public deck even with N. F. T. Projects. Art is really cool utility, meaning that like I can get access to an alpha group, I can get access to in real life events, I can get merch drops

or even

token drops. Excuse me, That's cool. But I want to see a deck. I want to see a traditional format

deck. In fact,

this hat that I'm wearing, This is not one of our clients. I do own an N. F. T. In it called Unchained Monkey.

What I loved

about this is one of the founders, they threw a big party in L. A. They had a gallery display. It was amazing. They really spoiled everybody there. But

then later in the Hotel

the next day I'm wearing the hat

and she comes up to me,

she's like you got five minutes she opens up her laptop and she starts going through the deck of everything that they've got coming all of partnerships, all of the people that are owners. And

to me, I was like

holy s if every project was doing this, they would be so much more successful than the ones that just think that they're going to sell a bunch of artwork.

Let me back up for a second.

Let's talk about douse and let's talk about issuance of tokens because not everybody understands this and it does add complexity to the project, right? If you're going to have a

dow and

you're going to issue tokens somehow, Can you explain why these things are good for the long term for projects and maybe what we need to know about them? Yeah, we've done right. They can be the primary value prop of a project. And I emphasize when done right because they're typically done wrong. A dow stands for a decentralized autonomous organization

without

getting too in the weeds. From a

security perspective,

it is an instrument that currently lives outside of regulatory bodies for raising money that can then be invested into other activities. And when I say that it lives outside the decentralized aspect of it is that people that own the tokens inside of this

tao

votes on everything that the dow does with that money.

So it lacks

central management, which is a key part of what's called the Howey

test

for distinguishing what's the security and what's not. That's a very complicated explanation. Let's well, and

that's exactly why

board apes issued a dow for the rape token. Right? So they didn't have to have it be

a security, right?

Yeah. And they hired the best, the team at horizon labs, which is part of the digital

currency group,

are some of the best in the legal and technical side of this. There the company that people go to when they're trying to do things at scale. I am not an investor in that company, although if I ever got the opportunity to, I would be note, I'll send them this video so they can see me promoting them to hopefully get in on whenever they raise. But yeah, doing that decentralized aspect allows you to live outside.

I always want to be careful how I

word this. It is outside of the current regulatory landscape. Often, especially in the US, which nobody wants to be based in the US because of a lot of this.

The federal government

Tends to try to interpret laws that were written in 1930 for and apply them to the things that we're doing today. That's both an advantage and a disadvantage in this case. Someone in 2018 figured out. Hey, technically if we're

all voting on what we do

with the money, it's not a security. We're gonna do this at scale. And then it became the dow, we have a dow, I invest in a lot of douse it gives us more flexibility

in the things that

we're going to do without having to fill out a bunch of paperwork and worrying about

regulatory

filings and things like that. That just slow down bootstrapping projects.

If somebody

who has an FT project adds a dowel

to

it and we've we've interviewed people and talked about douse on this show before.

Generally speaking,

is it based on the number of N. F. T. S that you

hold that will

allow you to have votes. Is that generally how it works? Typically in order to be done correctly, There has to be a token allocation. So let's say that there's 10,000 NFT And then every NFT gets air dropped one

100 tokens. And then if you owned 10 of them, you would now have 1000 tokens. So you would have a larger vote in

the dow's

say of what's going to be done with the

money that was put in there.

When you think about a community driven tao that is voted upon with N F T. S.

Typically you walk a fine line there because often, and I see this happening right now, projects will take part of the money that they earn from their drop or the royalties, they'll put it into a doll and they call it the community

doubt and then

people will vote based on an F. T. Ownerships.

But

often the project holders will decide whether or not to implement that or whether or not it's realistic,

there's a

balancing act, there there's no correlation of value between the dow and the end user

and then the

vote is not necessarily

decentralized

so that the project gets to make the ultimate decision. And I don't, there should be a different name for those because they're not a decentralized autonomous organization and you can do that. But if it's driven by tokens relation between the assets in the dow

and

the actual tokens, there cannot be a centralized controlling organization that decides whether or not something is legitimate enough to do. Let's talk about tokenization a little bit because obviously N. F. T. Has the word token in it. And when we think of token in this particular case and tell me if I've got this right, I hold an N. F. T. I might be earning tokens over time, depending on how long I hold the N.

F. T. Or

depending on if I stake the N. F. T. Like explain how that works because a lot of my audience doesn't necessarily understand that. Yeah. And there's a lot of different go to market strategies here.

So I don't think when the board, a

yacht club launched that they had envisioned, how big they would become, what their market cap would be or how much revenue would be generated from that, enough revenue that they can go out and buy the intellectual property rights to crypto punks and then just give them to all of the owners who didn't have them, then they see all this money and they want to put it in

play so they

air dropped or allowed the owners to claim tokens that had financial value and it was a windfall. So many N.

F. T. Holders that had an

N. F. T. Worth a quarter million

Dollars were given 100

And $70,000 in Tekens. That probably

was a once in a lifetime

type thing. And

those tokens are now

a central part of their economy. They will be used to buy land in their metaverse.

They'll be

used as part of their game.

They're used

for buying merchandise. They've got a billion dollar plus market cap now. Well, I'm not going to look it up, but I hate quoting numbers if I'm not exactly sure what their market cap is big and then you go into smaller projects and a lot of times they issue what's called a utility token. So projects will issue this

token and then you can use

it inside of their ecosystem. Some popular projects do it so that if you want to get Alpha, meaning that they've partnered with a project for whitelist or allow list, you can buy

those access

rights for their token, you can

use them to buy tickets to in

real life events. Remember these tokens are all free, they're just given to you whether they're going to be created for financial value

and go through that regulatory realm of K.

Y. C. Or they're gonna be

giving with giving them to you as a

promise of utility.

There is some inherent consideration

of the

individual that those tokens will be worth something

later, which is

why they go through

the process

of earning them

or claiming

them. So even

in the project that we're

involved in together the whale sharks, you can stake your whale shark into

what's called an alpha

node and it will pay you tokens every month. Those tokens

represents the assets

in our now. So although those tokens sold at .008 cents, They're now worth about 4.5 cents.

So if you bought

them, you've already seen

A five or 6

X return on your

investment. And if you're

staking them, you're building

long term

wealth based on the allocation that we've put into our staking mechanism. A question that I often ask founders when they mentioned a

token in their project

is I asked them who is it responsible for your monetary policy? And it's almost always

a deer in the

headlights response because when you

issue a token,

you do become responsible

for

that token success the

same way a government

is responsible

for the

currency of their

country, their

economy. The definition of monetary policy

exemplifies the need to be able to expand

and contract based

on market conditions

and no one in this space understands that.

Let me take that back. I

Don't want to say No one. There have been a few projects

that I've asked that question

and the answer that

they've given me has just

blown my mind and that's how I

know they've got a good project. They've got a good team. They understand monetary policy, they have vision, they have money, they're VC back

like

this is probably going to be a home run. This is a unicorn and they're out there. If you're talking to enough projects, if you date enough of the wrong people, you tend to find the right one. If you sit at home and date no one you end up lonely.

So many of my

listeners are obviously new to N. F. T. S in general, Right? And we're talking pretty advanced here. Let's say that they have hired facility of developers in the the designers and they've maybe got their own financial backing more than enough. So they don't need to go out to a venture capitalist firm.

But they don't

understand the token side of things. The issuance of tokens. Are

there entities that

specialize in helping them? Are their

agencies

are there yet service providers that do the toca gnomic side of it because that's obviously complex, more complex than the actual N. F. T. Launch. It is and it's not inexpensive to do that side correctly.

Like if you want to go to the

Horizon labs route, you're probably going to be paying seven figures. You can go with like Republic

who's very well

known for a fraction

of that price.

And again, these numbers aren't exact, their just deals that I've known that we've participated in and they each take their payment in different ways. Someone an

allocation, someone

to just get paid up front. But there are professional firms that have been around for quite a long time. Republic's been around probably 2017 18 if not longer and they can help you figure all that out. There's probably a million companies with the name. Republic. Is there more to the name than actually Republic for people who want to do a little research. I think it might be, let's just pull it up real quick. Yeah, that would be really helpful because you know, as you're pulling it

up, I'm an

investor in a number of projects and some of them do have tokens and I just don't even understand it because it's not

clear to me.

But now that I'm hearing this, did you find the name by the way? Yeah, it's Republic dot com. Oh really? It's literally that simple. Okay, cool. Republic dot com And they specialize in token issuance basically with NFC

communities.

Communities. Yeah, they will consult with you under token ah, mix and they may connect

you with different

marketplaces for, um, your listing or your fundraising depending on the scale of your project. You can also go to someone like Start

Engine, which

is owned by Prime Trust, which is one of the biggest backers financially of the fundraising side in this ecosystem. Start engine. I've worked with them on numerous projects. They're a great team and they've really come to scale in the last few years.

So you can

technically issue tokens without an N. F. T. Right? I mean like these companies I would imagine would allow you to issue your very own token, you know, and it makes me think because

you've got these social

token concepts which, you know, you've got rally and roll, Which kind of act as middlemen. I would imagine if you have the funds, you could go direct and start your own tokens with some of these entities, is that correct? Well, to be honest, you could go and mint your own tokens for like $250. You could have a billion tokens for $250 and have them in your wallet and can send them to anyone that you want. It's not, in

fact you can just

google how to do it. I'm not gonna give websites

because many of them

are shady and I don't want to be

responsible if you

google how to launch a token on ethereum or how to launch a token on polygon. They're literally

websites where you connect

your wallet, give it a token names, tell how many you want click a button and it mince them and put them in your wallet. So creating them is not the hard part

driving

value or creating value around them is much more complicated. What's

your sense of N.

F. T. Airdrops

as

part of a long term strategy? Because for

example, I bought

some of the Walking Dead and they're part of their plan is they're going to do five different airdrops over the period of

a year and you

know that Walking Dead obviously did airdrops.

So is

this an important part of a long term strategy for an empty project as well?

It definitely helps.

The bigger the project is, the bigger the brand that it has, the larger the community, the more demand there is for, let's call it the genesis asset, which is typically the first

issue they called

It Gen one or a genesis and then whether it's air drops or claims that's something that

keeps the community engaged,

it rewards them technically from a tax perspective it's a dividend and that you have to pay your taxes on them when you get them that they create a longer term relationship, a lot of the better projects that we work with are going to continue doing that and a lot of them do to expand their ecosystems. So gen one could be male gentoo could be female, they could drop companions, psychedelics, anonymous has done a great job of dropping what are called

components so

that you start to build out your avatar and its ecosystem.

Some of them

have dropped clothing so you can dress your N. F. T. It's all correlated to the lore or the vision of the project, how these additional assets come into play and how you can benefit from them. Either from

a utility perspective

or financial

perspective, you mentioned

that an airdrop is like a dividend.

But isn't

it true that if you don't actually, I mean I get stuff air dropped into my wallet all the time and sometimes I don't even know who it's from. I would imagine it's only a dividend the moment you sell it. Isn't that correct? Oh that's a complicated area because if you think about like from a security perspective,

if you receive a

dividend on security it's taxable.

So technically

a dividend on an N. F. T. Would be taxable at some market rate. Even if you don't sell it now, this is a gray area. I don't know anyone that's actually paying their taxes on an air dropped N. F. T. Until they sell them. But technically eventually it's gonna come back in

places like open sea and

stuff may end up having to issue S. W. Nines

or

1099's whichever it's going to be and that air drops could do that. One thing I would recommend from a security perspective, if you have been air dropped an N. F. T. Into your wallet and you don't know what it is, you never want to interact with it on chain, you can get hacked through those air dropped N. F. T. S. Most of us have in our hidden wallet on open C. We just move

them into the hidden wallet

and we pretend like they don't exist. Because if you go to connect to say a website that says that you can sell

it next thing, you know your entire

wallet strained

but receiving

an air dropped N. F. T. That is legitimately spam and it is unhinged hiding it is not an action that's going to be hurt us, right? Because I've gotten a bunch of air drops that were spam and I just hid them. You know what I mean? That's not going to hurt me

at all if I do that right?

No that's not gonna hurt you at

all. It would be interacting with an on chain that creates

the risk potential.

So you're really kind of stuck with them and no one's really

found a solution to

that yet. So you just put them in that hidden folder, I've probably got hundreds of them in my primary wallet

at this point. And every time I log in there's a

couple more you think about

it from a marketing

perspective, it's a

reasonably intelligent go to market strategy.

If you want to target a specific market, you can drop an N. F. T. With a marketing

message and I'm not

recommending this, it's actually frowned upon. But you can drop a marketing message on there and say hey you own this, you should own this and it gets people's attention. Unfortunately it's negative attention at this point. When you said interact

on chain. I think

you really mean going to the

website and connecting your

wallet to the issuing

thing. Is that what you meant by that

or did you mean something different? Yeah a lot of times you'll click on them and it will say in the description that like hey you can take it over here and stake it or trade it

or sell it and

people get excited. They're like hey I got this free N. F. T. And here's a link. I

can go sell it now for three

100 bucks. They're like

oh I want to go do that and the second they do that they're compromised and everything is gone. Roger.

This last

question is is kind of a big question but I want to know where you think

everything is going. You

know like obviously you've been involved in this for a very very long time

specifically

when it comes to N. F. T. Projects.

Put your

Visionary hat on metaphorically and think into the future like 3-5 years from now, where do you

see this all heading?

That is a big question. So there are models that predict trends and Ray Dalio is very very good at this.

So in 2000

17 even in July I published an article that said that the I. C. O. And crypto craze that was going on at the time was unsustainable. And that we were going to have to lose 80-90% of our market value in order to

find a foundation to

stabilize and re grow from

Lo and Behold.

That happened in 2018 almost

to the

T. I. Was exactly

right

At the end of last year 2021 I saw it happening again. So

at thanksgiving weekend

I went mostly

cash

and sat for a while and watched as the N. F. T. Markets dropped. The crypto markets dropped and then I started buying back in. I want to do it from the

context of what I'm

buying so that it's less philosophical and more determined strategy.

So

when I look at like P. Diddy which is played to earn which means you own N. F. T. S. That can be played in a game where you can earn income I look at the long term vision of the game. So one that I will say there's a platform called gala games

and what they've done is they've built an ecosystem of

gains that you

can move in between and that it

has an economy that

shared amongst all of them and it all revolves

around the gala token. Now

you might have an in game token but it's

changeable directly

for gala and that you can participate in those economies, those ecosystems, the land, the rentals, the

business building.

So in 3 to 5 years in the p. two e. Space what we're going to see

is that the

games and the

projects that

win are the ones that are either

multidimensional ecosystems or are part of a multidimensional ecosystem

right

now the N. F. T. Market is completely oversaturated with land, there's more land plots than there are

people participating

in this space. So buying the wrong one could really go the wrong way. But if you buy

one that's part of an ecosystem

that has multiple games. So

Let's say there's 10 games

in that ecosystem one or two of them asked to survive for the whole project to survive and then you can add new ones if everything is siloed into a single

project. If

any part of that fails. If the game's not fun if the toca nomics aren't right if they don't market right if they don't manage their money right you as the investor or

the participant in that

project lose.

So I

want an expanded ecosystem that gives the project more leg to survive over time. And that's

the N. F. T.

Play to earn metaverse side of things. I could go into the douse the D. Five macro web three if you want me to. But on the N. F. T. Side that's really 3 to 5 years you're going to

see

less macro ecosystems And more cross chain cross function cross integrated ecosystems and those that adopt that now or have it as part of their roadmap will win those that don't 98% of them will fail. It feels

like even though

this whole world is about decentralization,

we're really going back to a centralized model where

there's going to be a couple of key

players and you're

going to have to work within.

Their metaverse is

right and their ecosystems

if you want to be successful is that kind of where you see it going? A big

part of it is there's

often

conversations about

whether or not that

is a fundamental

truth or if it's just because we're so

indoctrinated

into what success models look like

that. Maybe the vision

for success

that's different

than that. Look at the internet For 10 years, everybody was fighting

over scraps trying to

figure out what we're gonna do,

how we're gonna make money.

I sold my first website in 19

97 so I've been

there since the beginning of the economic models

of it. And then

we ended up with the big

players After the.com burst. The ones that survived became the amazons or the ones that were born later, the macro social media platforms were all kind of forced to play inside of their ecosystems now. Web three still offers an opportunity for a higher level of independence from those centralized organizations. So maybe sandbox becomes one of those, let's say that there's gonna be a big five and Web three, but I as an individual, can still own my land, monetize my land rent, my land, build a business on my

land

and then I can come in and out of that and I can

sell those assets

in an open market without any regulatory

limitations

by the marketplace

itself,

that would be slight Web

three, it'll

Be less centralization and more of what we Envision Web 3 to be. But I also think at a macro level,

someone

is going to come up with that fully decentralized concept that everyone's going to or the majority of people are going to embrace and they're going to find a way to not let the big players ruin it for everyone. Like often happens, I don't know what that's going to be yet roger this has been absolutely fascinating. If people want to discover more about you, where do you want to send him and if you have a favorite social channel, you want to send them to where you want to send them.

Yeah, if you go to

twitter, you can search for

Buchner dot f

e, th that's the best way to connect with me. Follow me participate

in coffee with the

nerd. If you are a project that is VC back, you can always go to results dot iO I would love to chat on a project level.

Honestly just hit

me up on twitter and we'll go from there, you can also join our discord server, message me on twitter and I'll give you the link

and just