📺 NFT Mania | Andy8052 & DeeZe (SotN 8/25)

hey guys welcome to another bankless episode we've got state of the nation here for you today david we are talking about nft mania today and what a perfect week to talk about it because it does feel like something's going on something big is going on with nfts i'm amazed at how fast nfts have taken off and to such heights so quickly pretty unbelievable what are we gonna be talking about today yeah we actually had to completely reorg the schedule for the show today we actually were going to have uh hayden

from uniswap but we actually kicked him out uh down the line for a future state of the nation because this week is all about nfts it is nft week it was nft week last week it was nft week the week before and just the momentum behind nfts has not stopped so we are bringing a previous guest of the show andyof who is the founder of the fractionalized platform which fractionalizes nfts and his uh community manager at fractional uh which is uh who's called

ades and these guys are they both have their bios as nft degens and so they were both d5 maximalist turned nft maximalists and so they have been paying attention to the nft markets which is what we need to figure out what the hell is going on in the world of nfts i i kind of feel like i need this episode david in my life because i feel like somewhat of an nft boomer do you know like i've known about nfts for a long time hugely bullish on the asset class but like

um haven't really dug deep down the rabbit hole still can't wrap your head around it well it's kind of hard right and you have to have a passion so like i'm looking at all of these markets on open sea i'm trying to figure out hey you know what's the next big project how do you even evaluate these projects what does it take so i'm hoping to ask andy and dees some of these questions uh just to get them out of the way you know what's super cool here david is like um with crypto there are so many cohorts that have done really well right so uh in the early stages you had to make

kind of bets on base monies like bitcoin and eth and do well that way then you had to be sort of a finance geek or maybe a developer and get in on sort of the d5 boom d5 frenzy and all those booms continue of course but now this thing requires a different set of skills uh it's a lot about you know art curation how do you predict what's going to be the next next big meme it's going to be the next successful art project like i haven't really worked out how to develop skills in that space i'm really excited to explore this uh before we get into the

episode we should talk about some announcements some things that are coming to the bankless nation the first is we've got a new show man and it's hot i just listened to yeah we do it's it's great and i you know i didn't do a pre-listen i listened to it at the same time everyone else in the bankless community did it because you've kind of taken this project and developed it on your own but guys this is called layer zero and this is a new bankless show talking about what we talk about so often which is the people layer the community layer

the culture layer of crypto that layer zero that's behind every single crypto network in existence and so you are doing like these uh targeted interviews with key people in the space not even key people you know just interesting people in the space and hearing their stories so it's a different format for bankless we had um like the original i guess the the founder of vitalik buterin which is dimitri buter and vitalik's dad on the episode uh and i listened to this all this morning david is absolutely fantastic well done on that uh what else

do you want to say about player zero in that episode yeah it it definitely follows a much more free-flowing format with every single bankless episode or podcast we have like a massive like agenda that we go through and this is the exact opposite there's no agenda we just have a conversation and because there's so many interesting people in crypto that a free-flowing conversation is like always almost always interesting right and so first episode like you said is it with dimitri budrin i have two more episodes that i've already recorded eric connor is coming out next week

followed by justin drake and each episode has gotten better and better already um i i particularly loved both of those conversations uh each person has their own kind of like perspective about the world and about crypto that they everyone has like ideas and thoughts that are unique to them but then when it comes to the world of crypto podcasts like we have to talk about like your project and we have to talk about fundamentals behind assets and we have to talk about you know technical details david stop making fun of our other podcasts

i don't want any of that on this show i want to to hear about like what people think about when they close their laptop lid and actually like turn off um uh yesterday i recorded with justin drake who actually uh there came this moment in this podcast where he uh was just thinking it's like well i don't really know when this podcast episode's going to come out so i don't know if i want to leak any alpha and i said well this doesn't come out for three more weeks justin so like go right ahead uh and what he said was absolutely fantastic it has to do with mev and ultrasound money so that's cool but then we also talked you know a fun

fact about justin drake is like he he's got a kid and like you can see a lot of like justin drake in the kit according to justin drake obviously but then you can also connect like that to the rebellious nature of justin drake to the rebellious nature of ethereum at large which is kind of the whole point of this show yeah i think it's cool it's not just the the free for forum conversation i think that's a huge part of it but it's also the different set of questions that are asked on the show it's like more about tell me about your story like how did you meet vitalik's mom was a question yes that's not a question we would ask

on a typical podcast or like uh do you fear for vitalik safety a pretty crazy question but like i'm intensely curious about that or how often dimitri peter and do you check the price of eth so anyway this is all really interesting content new ground uh exciting show it comes out every tuesday morning we're gonna have this i think every tuesday morning hopefully as long as david has it in him uh to do this and it'll come out on the podcast and also youtube so make sure you are subscribing to both of those channels to check that

out the other thing we should mention before we get into the show is our friends at tracer dao they're doing two cool things that are about to be absolutely huge one is d5 perpetuals which haven't yet taken off in the space yet but are about to think perpetuals are huge everywhere else they're about to be big in d5 they're building a perpetuals product for this allow you to go short and long on assets like ether defy tokens really easily super cool and they are launching a dow and they have a dow so they are inviting members of the

bankless community listeners to the podcast to get involved in their dao as a contributor as a governor you guys you can do that by joining their discord discord is kind of like the the office for dows right like that's how you go into the office and you know put up your hand and say here i am i'm a worker i can do things so go check that out um there will be a link in discord for that all right those are announcements david i gotta ask you the question we start every episode of save the nation with which is this what is the state of the

nation today sir the state of the nation is manic we are a little bit manic right now like we said asset nft asset prices are all up and to the right almost every single one of them that like has the the any decent amount of attention most art block projects most like profile picture nfts like all of these things have like insane charts with like whatever few available charts that there are to actually chart these things um people are buying into these things regardless

of like whether they're what they were previously interested in it seems to be like the entire attention of the crypto industry has focused on nfts right now and people are kind of like fervorous right now so there's a little bit we're all a little bit manic the thing is like you can be a little bit manic but we can all get a lot more manic and so that's kind of what we're talking about on the show today is like how much juice does this thing have and can we actually turn this like you know crypto industry into or this like crypto native phenomenon into a global phenomenon uh maybe that's

what's coming and that's kind of the conversation i want to have today these are very much my questions as well and and also the effect of nfts on the broader crypto landscape so um you know we've talked so much about eth being money and uh dc investor and others have have uh said hey eth is now culture money essentially that's what you're buying when you're buying nfts you're buying a piece of internet culture a piece of crypto culture and it's all denominated in each so what other effects does the the mania of

nfts have on crypto markets that remains to be seen as well hopefully we'll explore those topics today guys stick with us we will be back with andy and deez in just a minute but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets which makes proper private key management a breeze but the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet

ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app and if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite d apps all in one place ledger is where you want to be not only does ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like paraswap which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control defy never stops growing and the ledger live app grows alongside with it so click the link in the show notes to see all the defy apps that ledger live has and stay

tuned as more and more apps come online and if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet what are you even waiting for go to ledger.com grab your ledger download ledger live and get all of your d apps all in one place bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human

counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uniswop ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uniswap dao apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost 3 billion

dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dao no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless hey guys we are back full swing this is nft mania jpeg mania we've got two

really great guests for you to talk all about nfts make sense of the markets what's going on hopefully explore some project and see what's good out there in the space the first is andy 805.2 he's a d5 d-gen turned into an nft maximalist and not lately he's been an nft maximalist for quite some time he's known as the guy with the crypto punk with the beanie and he's also the founder of fractionalize that's a platform for fractionalizing nfts into erc20 tokens so you can gain liquidity on them we've had andy on

before congrats on the late the raise by the way the paradigm rate is 8 million i think or so uh andy it's great to have you back on bank list thank you sir yeah thanks for having me i feel like so much has happened in so little time since i was on last right it's been crazy yeah we gotta we gotta get caught up on what is happening in nfc's we also have uh deez or deezy he's a degenerate [ __ ] [ __ ] coin gambler who got into nfts again coming from the d5 space getting into nfts he got into them in september 2020 then he went all in in january 2021

sounds like my story with bitcoin and eth but he's got one for uh d5 and nfts and then he's currently the community manager at fractional and he's the host of many twitter space uh spaces on nfts you may have heard he does like four to six hours like eight hours a day on twitter spaces just talking about nfds i need to catch one of these deez it's great to have you as well oh thanks for having me i'm excited to be here oh man well everyone's excited about nfts these days and uh i think when

david and i started the summer with bank list we thought we were going to get some kind of a layer two summer like a d5 summer round two but instead we got jpeg summer that's what's happening and maybe that rolls into a an nft mania a jpeg mania into the fall i don't know this doesn't show any signs of stopping or slowing down at least right now i want to start with the the big picture question how did this happen how did we get to this point andy what's your take i mean like a lot of it is really

who the hell knows um but i i think i think a part of it that has become like more clear to me is uh you know there there's so much culture in community like especially on ethereum that's where almost all the nft trading happens and there's such like a valuable community of people on ethereum who are doing things and interacting and like it makes sense that they would have their own natural ways to collect things together or signal their success or

their status and like that would start to leak out into the rest of the world as ethereum starts to leak out into the rest of the world and so that's kind of how i've been like how i've been thinking about more of the origin of why now why is this happening is i feel like personally over the last year and a half as i've been working on ethereum things have kind of taken a jump as far as defy and just kind of the global status of crypto and so it makes sense that the collecting side of things would also grow and when those types of things grow they grow really fast

what's your take on why this is happening you think it was inevitable all along like we were going to get an nft mania season and this is just inevitable or is there some specific reason for the the the timing of this and uh the magnitude of it yeah so i didn't expect any of this to to happen the way it did right like when i was buying punks and our blocks and pegs and having an investment thesis like my best case scenario was that like the prices they're at right now was going to take like a year or two to get

to so the fact that it happened so quickly has even you know blown my own expectations i think it's a variety of things number one like nfts are just fun plain and simple and it is a very low entry playground for people to come in and get involved you can with very little money mental project and potentially change your entire life off of one rare mint and you can't do that with a [ __ ] coin like you can't 100x a [ __ ] coin in a week like there's no way you're gonna get dumped on by whales there's no chance

but you're seeing a lot of people come in with a small stack who just to ape stuff and i think there was a lull um if you look at like the ethereum and bitcoin charts pull it up here but like in june and july um ethereum you know it was kind of pretty like from may actually um into june we had the soft abuse auction which gave a lot of credibility to these nfts ethereum wasn't doing much of anything defined [ __ ] coins were kind of just slowly ranging and people are bored and

they want to do something so like i i know a lot of my d5 friends didn't get into nfts until like june and july because they were bored and it was enough for them to just say hey let's you know look at these punks and art blocks and i think it's almost reflexive where like people make money they come in and they don't take the money out they just invested into the next project and we're seeing this you know massive reflexivity where nfts are just taking off and like you said we are in this manic phase like is this this could even be euphoria like we might look back in two months and be like what were we

thinking fidenzas are selling for i'm thinking that now right so i i'm always like you know telling myself right now like do i have enough ethereum that i'm happy like i'm selling nfts every day just to make sure i have enough ethereum that i'm happy where if this is like the euphoric top then i'm good but i'm still you know overly optimistic and i still think people coming in are like early in a way and this might be just like the beginning of the end i mean sorry the end of the beginning how much ethereum do you need to be

happy because i'm still um i think that's a tough question i mean it's relative to your net worth and your goals for me i need uh enough aetherium to like i need like 30 to 50 percent of my portfolio and ethereum to be happy we'll just say that you saw it there right now there's never enough ether that's that's for sure um these you said that like uh people were perhaps minting these things because in in contrast to buying a [ __ ] coin that like can't pump

a thousand x because you'll get dumped on and in contrast you can just mint a token which has by definition no previous sellers no like privileged you know early mentors no there's no you know nft pre-mine and that kind of is reminiscent of some of the defy summer activities which kicked off that whole defy mania because of the whole fair launch phenomenon like the whole like food coin forks those are all like very much fair launch phenomenons do you think that that is a common denominator between what we saw uh with d5 summer in 2020

and what we're seeing in jpeg summary right now yeah i think you're pretty spot on there it's having fair distribution and a low barrier of entry um even then like if you were a well you could get a lot of the liquidity from liquidity mining where right now if you're a whale trying to mint a bunch of these projects like you're going to get them but you're going to pay a ton in gas and i think it's harder to like really dilute the uh like you you could really dilute

a liquidity pole right if you have 100 million dollars and there's 25 million in the poll and you dump the 100 million in like you just diluted the crap out of everyone who's in there whereas like with something where there's only 888 mints or 10 000 mints you can't really dilute it to that level so it's even more like upside than d5 summer what would you guys say that andy go ahead if you want to say something i know i would agree i think that it's like it's kind of all the best parts of defy summer and so much as like there's really high upside and there's a lot of

value in like just scrolling twitter and discord and telegram and finding the next thing to to buy but then you just have like these added benefits that aren't really possible in a defy token where like one you can be emotionally attached to your nfts like i i love d5 and that whole space at the end of the day like if i have to sell my maker for ave or by comp for eth like okay you know it's whatever but like i love my crypto punk and i don't want to

sell it and it doesn't really matter what the price is and that's just like not a thing that really exists with with d5 stuff i i definitely resonate with that because there was there was a time i bought my uh my penguin avatar at like roughly 0.4 eth and now the floor is at point 2 heath you know good trade good appreciation but like because it's unique and because i've put it as my profile picture and also to some degree because i'm a little bit of a public figure like i would feel bad about like letting my penguin go like i would let the community down my i don't know who

would buy my penguin i want my penguin and so it does kind of feel like there's a one-way flow of like capital into these nfts and then like the emotional attachment like sucks you in and captures you and it's like now it's stuck there and then that actually kind of sets like a floor for some of these things yeah definitely i almost feel like a lot of these nfts are like almost deflationary in a way because you have people who are just totally not price sensitive those this guy vincent van doe who's a really big collector and he tweeted out something the other day that that was

really good where he said you know this isn't like a quick flip this is a land grab and like to him he doesn't care what the price is he doesn't care what the price is now like he's buying stuff because he thinks it's going to matter in 10 years and so like when you have a bunch of people who are doing that all of a sudden there just isn't quite enough to go around sometimes what would you guys say is the like starting pistol for this whole thing because like we we talked about uh previously the nft bear market but like in in retro in retrospect turns out like that is exactly what you said andy it was

actually an nft land grab do you think that there was like a like a moment where this like thing actually started was there like a starting pistol to anything so i think that like the start start of all of it was actually uh two things that are now like not doing it i haven't gone nearly as parabolic as everything else which is nba top shot at nifty gateway and kind of like and maybe i'm wrong and you could really dig into the data and this is incorrect but based on my naive thesis you had a

bunch of people who were not into crypto but who got into nfts in a very easily accessible way and this was you know back in the fall of last year so almost a year ago at this point and they were paying with credit cards they weren't really having to learn too much but once you do it and you're actually like experiencing an online all the time liquid marketplace and all this fun stuff you kind of want to learn more i think a lot of people did i made a lot of friends through topshop especially who did want to learn more and i was teaching them how to install metamask and what crypto punks were and why they

would want to buy one and all this stuff and then a lot of those people came and they set up meta masks and all that and then they minted board apes and then board apes went crazy and like i've seen a long a strong correlation on my timeline at least of people who used to be nba top shot fanatics who have board apes as their profile pictures now and all of a sudden this was like a massive wealth generation event for an entirely new group of nft collectors who are generally coming from a less crypto native background so would you say ryan and i we often

critique flow in top shots as kind of being like fraudulent nfts because they're done on a centralized blockchain so are they really nfts and that's a conversation for a different day but uh would you agree with the statement that like these uh non-ethereum based nft platforms that perhaps more uh centralized were actually like training wheels for people to come into the world of nfts and then perhaps graduate to like the real uh the real nfc market which is ethereum i i definitely have seen that i'd be curious to hear jesus perspective

because he was on top shot as well pretty early on but i've noticed that with a lot of people who i've interacted with i i would agree with everything you just said um for me i feel like the starting you know the gunshot was um in mid-january when john bales sent out that article that said i just spent thirty five thousand dollars on a jpeg or a and whatever it was just some of the drama ramp moment he bought and like a week later an alien crypto punk sold to flamingoed out um

and that was when i was like oh holy [ __ ] here they come because i was involved with the daily fantasy scene a little bit i was a low stakes player who like could grind and make a little bit of money but i wasn't great and seeing guys like john bales and peter jennings and all these other daily fantasy personalities come in like i knew that was a really bullish sign because these are people like amy said we didn't see them on ethereum we didn't see them using any of our tools until after they got that like first i i probably use the wrong terminology

but i call like an nft flip it's almost like a hit of crack like if you buy a top shot and it goes up 10x in a week you're thinking to yourself like holy [ __ ] like i need more of this so then when top shot kind of died like andy said they're like oh we gotta find this next hit like it's not top shot like this is not like not dying but this is going down and people aren't excited about it like what else is out there people came into punks who could afford it we saw a nice little run up we see the christie's auction come out kind of lends legitimacy to punks when you have an auction house that's like hey

we're displaying this with a basketball and all these other famous artists and this is a crypto punk um and then we have the sophomores set of like art blogs and the covid alien punk and like 20 other nfts and i think that just kind of put a stamp on the whole nft marketplace like this is legit this is here to stay and slowly but surely we started to see like traditional art collectors come into the space after those auctions so like from june up until now you know people buying these art blocks

and death beeps and punks like they're not as many crypto native people as you think i i think there's a lot of people who are just coming in now who didn't even touch d5 summer last year didn't get involved with ethereum until seeing these nft auctions and are now buying it up because to them it's like a couple hundred grand on a piece of arts a deal they look at things with 10 plus time horizons like andy said about the land grab it's just like what's the total supply of these like if you met picasso when he was 30 and you knew that he was only gonna ever make 10 000 pieces and

they were already made and you could grab a slice right now like you might think differently than if they're constantly supplying more and more and i think all of that is just like driving the prices up basically these you're you're touching on the subject i want to turn to next and so i kind of want you to expand on that but when when ryan and i were in the intro and at the very beginning we were talking about like hey we're kind of like just confused like people are spending money on all these jpegs like we've never spent money on jpegs before like what's going on and so like we're coming from the defy world right where

like we have these capital assets with you know cash flows total value locked there are things that we can measure that make us feel more secure about when we allocate capital to exposure to some sort of defy token uh and so like to some degree nfcs don't have any fundamentals right because they're just pictures is that really true or are the fundamentals just something else that we haven't really learned yet so when you guys are looking at nft projects like are there any fundamentals to talk about

but regardless of like what kind of the project is like what are the common like things that are always like fundamentally like bullish or bearish about like an nft project that you guys pay attention to this is gonna sound like super not quantitative but like it's mostly vibes like i go into the discord i talk to the team i'm a big fan of trying to get the team on a twitter space and just like pick their brain and ask about all their plans and you know where have they come from and where they think they're going

i think right now we see a lot of success with like punks and our blocks because similar to what you said there's a bunch of comparables there if you go to the punks page you look at ten thousand punks you look at all the recent sales you look at trait breakdowns you look at all these different comparables and you feel somewhat safe throwing 250 to a million dollars into a pump because you're like oh well these two just sold and they looked just like it and they sold for that amount so they must be worth this amount uh and similar with art blocks like you have the different comparables like you're looking at a set of ringers or a set of

fidenzas and you're like okay well other collectors are valuing with this amount like clearly there's something here and i think we haven't seen that spill over to the 101 aren't yet so like if you look at like x copy hackathon coldy some of these og super rare artists their prices haven't moved nearly as much as like art blocks like artbox might be up a thousand x and like you know x copy might be up 5x um so it's a big gap and i think that's because the people coming in like you said they just don't know what they're evaluating so they feel more comfortable buying something with comparables

yeah definitely i've noticed that as well and i think it's just like scary like someone i don't really have a ton of one-on-one art i have a little bit just because purely i like it and i have absolutely no intention of selling it if it goes up a ton awesome um but like i don't feel super qualified to decide what art is good and what art isn't good it's never really been something that i've thought about in my life previously and so looking at different projects that are more community driven or like these are saying have tons of

comparables in our collection it just feels a lot easier it's kind of like training wheels in a way of of how to collect art um and so yeah i think that that like is currently driving a lot of how people are making their purchasing decisions but then as far as fundamentals outside of that i i think a lot of it as it's as silly as fives is like it's kind of just all memes and it's all just you know the value is in the cultural relevance of the things that you are buying and

if you think that those things will be more relevant in the future than they are now then they'll probably be worth more money than they are now uh and it's hard to quantify that but are you guys worried that like the structure of this market is like almost super duper conducive to creating a mania because deez was saying like well if like my punk looks like this and their punk looks like that well i can probably get this from that meanwhile there's probably someone else who's doing the same thing it's like well their punk is like this and my punk's like this so i could probably get this for that and all of a sudden like kind

of like we were talking about the the inherent like kind of one-way flow of capital it feels like people are just going to stair step their way into insane evaluations and almost by definition that has to just be a bubble right like if it's only one if it's only up only then at some point like something's gonna pop right are you do you guys kind of think that this is just a little bit too conducive to be becoming like a massive bubble yeah well so i think yes but also kind of no uh which is a weird answer but so i think

in general yes nfts are in a bubble right now like obviously when whether how far up in the bubble we are i'm not really qualified to say but i think that everyone would agree they are in a bubble but really the question is the really high end of nfts like the extremely desirable stuff we don't know what percentage of people who are buying those are buying them purely for speculation or are buying them because they're saying i don't want to have there be a world where i don't own the punk or i don't own a vodenza and those people probably don't care