Moonbirds and the Future of Utility NFTs | Kevin Rose

Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to another state of the nation. We've got a hot episode for you today with none other than Kevin Rose. Kevin just launched one of the biggest NFT launches ever. I think definitely the most successful launch of the year. It's called Moonbirds. We're gonna talk about how he did it, what made it so successful. David, some stats here, man, before we begin, okay? So the best NFT launch of the year, $280 million worth of primary and secondary trading in two days, okay? So this just did what uh more more than more than Bored Apes did in the last 30 days, and it did it in in a 24-hour period of time. Uh 59k per moon bird right now, it might be like 50 to 80k, leading the open sea charts, over 177 million dollars worth of trades. Um, Kevin's got his hands into a couple of NFT projects, right? The first was with Proof Collective, which we're going to talk about, and the second is this PFP um profile pick type of NFT experience uh called Moonbirds, and that's the one that that's mooning right now. But Proof is doing pretty well too. Anyway, so much to talk about. What are you most excited to uh to discuss with Kevin?

Well, I think this is going to be especially relevant for bankless listeners because if you are a content consumer, this is what Kevin is making an ecosystem around. He's making an NFT ecosystem with the Moonbirds, the profile picture, but also his scarce like 1000 unique uh membership NFTs. Uh, and he's just making a tokenized community around the the uh the content that he creates and overall just like a tokenized community. Uh and so this is very, very relevant for the world of web two or excuse me, web three content consumers, because these products are for you guys. Uh and so I'm gonna be just tapping into to Kevin and seeing the lessons that he is learning because Kevin is on the frontier of tokenized content and tokenized communities in web three. So we are bringing him on to hear about what he has learned on the frontier and taking it back so we all have something, a roadmap to go on as we go on the frontier.

Yeah, this is amazing. I think this this episode is gonna be full of alpha because it whether you're part of one of these communities, there's massive opportunities for you. Or if you're a creator, we're actually gonna ask him like uh an hour of free consulting with Kevin. Like, how do you do this? If if bankless wanted to launch an NFT for its community, right? How do we do that? I literally do those questions. Exactly. Like, I want to pick his brain because he's got a couple successful ones under his belt, and he's doing it with a uh a long-term vision here. So it's not sort of a you know quick um pump in, pump and dump sort of thing. Like he's got a lot of utility that he's injecting in these NFTs, and he's put together a fantastic community. So it's gonna be a great discussion. David got something else going on, and that is graph day, which is coming up. This is a conference by the graph protocol. Okay, it's happening June the second in San Francisco. It's a four day event, and I think this is like part conference and graph day and June the second, and then also part hackathon. What uh what else should we say about this conference?

The collection of people that are going there is fantastic. Kevin O'Walkie, we all love Kevin. He is going to be at this conference. We also have Sam Williams from R Weave, Michael Cena from Ceramic, Arjun Bhuptani from Connect, Cammy Russo as well, another DeFi content creator. And just the fact that the graph is throwing a hackathon, it's just it's great to see app layer stuff throwing hackathons because hackathons are just the great way to outsource development. Reese Vinmark is actually one of my personal heroes in this space. So he's going to be there. So if you are in San Francisco during June or you just want to be there, June 2nd is when it starts. It goes to a four day conference. Wave two tickets are out. So you've got to get your tickets. There is a link in the show notes. Also, bankless.cc slash capital G graph, capital D Day.

Graph Day, bankless.cc slash graph day, but with the capitals, uh, and we'll is where you can get your ticket.

Yeah, that link will save you fifty dollars on this ticket. So uh there you go, right out of the box. David, gotta ask you the question before we get in this conversation with Kevin. What is the state of the nation today, sir?

Oh, Ryan, the state of the nation is pioneering. Like I said, Kevin is on the frontier. He has discovered some cool new things, some cool new primitives for community engagement, community uh content uh creation, uh, and he is bringing this information.

Back to the to the center, back to the like. This is kind of how I think about these things is people go out on the frontier, they discover some gold, and then they come back to bankless and tell us about what they've discovered. Yeah. And so we are broadcasting the gold that's on the frontier. And so this is why you are definitely going to listen to this episode, because on this episode, we are pioneering into the frontier.

Yeah, super excited to pick his brain about all of these things. Guys, we will be back with Kevin Rose in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to coming back to the show again. Kevin Rose. He's an intranet entrepreneur, co-founder of Dig originally, but now he's a Web3 VC. He's been on Bankless before. He's the host of the Proof Podcast, mentor of NFTs in the proof collection, which we're going to talk about. And now today we're going to talk about Moonbirds, which is absolutely living up to its name, is absolutely mooning. In the last 24 hours, or like a few 24 hours ago, it actually did more volume than Bored Apes in the last 30 days. So absolutely phenomenon, uh phenomenal success. Kevin, it's great to have you on Bankless. We're excited to talk about this.

Yeah, glad to be back on. Thanks for having me, guys. Really appreciate it.

Hey, you having fun man? Is this fun?

It's it's the time of my life. Like for for me, this is like what I love to do. The the scariest part was the sale. What I love to do is build products. And that's what I the done my entire career. So going out and building products for this community is just gonna be a blast. It's it's my favorite thing on earth.

This is really cool because I feel like you are pioneering in a lot of ways the building product side on the NFT, like utility, bringing utility to NFTs through the community. Just a couple of stats to rattle off for people who haven't been following uh what Moonbirds has done. We're about to explain it, but $280 million worth of primary and secondary uh purchases in two days. Um a Moonbird is going for 60k right now. That's in ETH terms, uh, absolutely crushing it on OpenSea. So leading the charts. I think one of our big questions coming into this conversation, Kevin, because we want to like unpack the secrets of NFT here, right? Is uh how did you do it? Can you teach us? Can you show us your ways? Like, how did this actually come about about? What is the secret combination to success here?

It's a good question. Honestly, I didn't expect it. To be honest, we it was one of those things where we had started off with a community in building proof and the proof collective. And that was our first NFT drop, which was a thousand members. And we really got just this amazing community of hardcore NFT collectors that served as the backbone of this drop, like people that were really excited about the things we were building. And then I think that if you take a look around at who's building in this space, there's you know a lot of big promises from a bunch of different teams. And um people are looking for, I believe, uh people that have built um credible things in the past. You know, you want to pick a team that you know is going to deliver and live up to all the hype and expectations. And so I, you know, I think about Dom and all the great work that that um you know he's done. Uh you know, he created Loop, but he's done so many other fantastic products prior to that. And some of the other builders that you just look at and you're like, okay, I trust you because of what you've created, you know, over the last couple decades. And I feel very fortunate that people trust what we're about to embark upon and what we're going to build. And it was that that led to just so many people being oversubscribed, and we were going to do a Dutch auction initially, and then we realized it was just going to turn into a gas war, and then we had to flip it to a raffle. Um, and then once it went out, we had no clue what the secondary volume was going to be. If you would have asked me the day of, I probably would have said, well, we'll end up at around, you know, two ETH or so. And then it immediately shot up to five, and then 10, then 15, and then it just kept climbing. So it was it was shocking. But um, you know, I do realize it's not lost on me that um there is a lot of hype here. And so it's on us now to go build and really fulfill everything that we the roadmap that we've put out there.

Kevin will have already said this in the intro, but I kind of view you as a pioneer who went out into the margins, the fringes of the Web3 universe and discovered something cool. And now you're coming back here to tell us all about what you found, which is very appropriate for somebody who also like made Dig, the one of the first bottom-up style websites of the internet. And so following through on your brand as somebody who's been on the frontier of the internet since since day one. And there's so many different uh elements about what you've built, right? There's the proof community, there's the proof NFT, now there's Moonbirds. Uh, and each one of these things represents what feels like a Lego that stacks on top of each other. And we're going to explore each of these things and kind of how they relate to each other, like how the Legos stack upon each other. And um, what really gets me excited about this story is as somebody who came into this industry in a non-technical fashion, uh, realizing I was never really going to be able to learn how to code because I just didn't have it in me, it was always gonna be content consume or content production that was going to be interesting for me. And there was always on the horizon something about content production and tokenization somewhere, as soon as we figure out what that thing is. And it seems to be that you figured out what that is. Uh, and so that's gonna be, I think, the theme for the episode. But before we go into the details, can you just give us the uh overarching scope of proof, the whole thing? Like what are all the pieces, what are all the components? Because we're going to dig into each one of these things. So when you view the sit the system, what is the system? What is proof?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's a great place to start. So Proof started off as just a podcast covering all things NFTs. And it was d driven from my personal passion to interview artists and creators and have them on the show to talk about their journey and their passion for creating whatever it might be. So I was very fortunate that, you know, over a year ago to have, you know, the founders of ArtBlocks on and the founders of Quantum and just uh Flamingo Dow and a lot of the really early kind of pioneers and builders in this space. And, you know, it was actually the CryptoPunks episode was really fun too when I had those founders on as well. So it started off there, and then I quickly realized that we were just building a pretty massive audience. I mean, we kind of hit the market at the right time and that you know, NFTs were starting to pop. And when they did, then you know, that went from 25,000 viewers to 50,000 to 100,000, and it kept growing. And I realized that these are all people that are interested in collecting uh NFTs, and some of them are really passionate and really hardcore. And there's a bunch of different groups out there, different Discords out there that are focused on information around the collection or collecting of NFTs. But the problem that I saw is that there is just so many new projects that are dropping every single day and every, you know, every single week. Anyone armed with Photoshop these days can create an NFT, right? And the the majority of the groups that you find out there are focused on quote unquote alpha groups, right? And those groups are about trading. They're about trading. Um, oftentimes they can talk about flipping, they can, you know, it is about how do you get into a project, score that three to five X, potentially get out, and and oftentimes move move on to the next thing. And so for me, that's not really that interesting to me. That's not what I want to focus on. Like what I want a proof to be about is really about that artist's story and about the long-term collectibility and why you should care about a particular artist. And so I wanted to get into their backgrounds and go deep on that. And so when I wanted to create a private Discord, which became the proof collective, it was like, let's not create an alpha group, because I just that's not my DNA. Like I'm I'm a believer in NFTs for the next, you know, holding for the next few decades and beyond. So let's create something that is about like-minded collectors that want to talk about, you know, curation with a kind of a point of view. So, like just really about going deep and finding those projects when you buy an X copy, which one should you consider that you're gonna hold for the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years? Um, that type of conversation, and that's what launched the proof collective. And so that launched in December of last year. It was 1,000 NFTs, they look like little membership cards. And if you held one, you had access to this private Discord. And so that is what kicked off this entire thing. After the podcast had already been out for like, you know, almost a year at that point, and I did Dutch auction. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna sell these proof collective passes. It'll be, you know, five ETH, and ETH was less expensive back then, working its way down to eventually 0.1 ETH is where it would have bottomed out. And they sold out at uh one ETH is where it ended up. And so we got to work and we said, okay, let's let's start building. And so with that, we launched the private discord. Later, we launched several different collaborations that were unique to proof collective holders, one exclusively with HeartU, which is a great artist. Um we did one with Hackatao, um, and probably another three or four others that we that we launched over the last few months. And granted, we're in April now, so we're only we're only really four months into this. We launched the actual membership uh kicked in January 1st. And then the idea was how can we take this capital and not put it in our pockets, but every single dollar that was raised actually went right back into the company. And so the cut and so what does the company do? The the company does a handful of things. We go off and we obviously we've talked about the private discord, but we also are gonna hold an annual NFT conference in LA called Proof of Conference. That's gonna be crazy. It'll be free for proof collective holders. We're hiring full-time analysts. So we're about to close three full-time analysts that we we've narrowed it down from 20 applicants down to three. They were gonna be responsible for doing what we call proof deep dives, which are these really deep full analysis. It's almost what you all do at Bankless on the DeFi side, where you go really deep and give people the understanding and the analysis. But rather than we don't want to, we're not DeFi experts, we're NFT, we're on the NFT side. So we're gonna go deep on the NFT side and tell you who is Xcopy, what are their Genesis pieces, like, and then really work with these upcoming utility uh drops and these other PFP drops and help you sort through all of the garbage that can happen out there and really elevate the best ones and give you these really deep, concise, like TLDR briefs on why you should be collecting and holding these particular NFTs. It's almost like a forester research back in the stock days, but for NFTs. Um and then, you know, early access to our podcast, and then we do exclusive projects like Grails was the first project that we launched, which was really cool, um, where you didn't know who the artist was until you actually minted the piece and you had to have a proof pass to be able to mend it. Then we launched moonbirds, and so every proof collective member got two free moon birds with their pass. Uh, we have a future metaverse that we're building, uh the code name right now for it, is called High Rise. And so the proof collective is kind of that thousand person like backbone to all the things that we do, if that makes sense.

It does.

It really seems like um you you said you're trying to just not not uh get into the whole like all right, you get in at this price if we buy this NFT and then you get out at this price. It seems to be a lot like more um

like paid research, right? Like some people pay like a lot of money to have journals uh you know send them the best research that an industry has. And it seems to be the web three version of that. And and Kevin, I I'm wondering if you uh how much um

How prepared or how like like scared perhaps you were of turning this into a token, right? All of a sudden there's a token or NFTs that trade on the secondary markets, where you previously you were a content producer with a with a community around that, but now you're a content producer with a community around that with an NFT badge uh for membership and also the moonbirds. Did that decision to go into on chain tokens that trade on secondary markets? Like, talk about that the weight of that decision.

Yeah, I mean what think when you when you launch something like this, you never know what the adoption is going to be. And all I know is that the nice thing about what we do as product builders and what we've built over the years in terms of the products that we've you know created that have touched literally tens of millions of people's lives. Um we know that we can deliver on that piece. And if we hold true to that promise, then the price will take care of itself. So I I don't follow the token, the NFT price is like the of the proof pass. Of course, I'm looking at Moonbirds right now because it's just insanity. And like I'm of course I'm gonna check that out. But it it's it's I don't check it every single day. And it's because I have to I have work to do. Like we have it's it's time to let's go, let's get to work. And and at the end of the day, you know, we is we've laid out what we're gonna create, and then we have to go and execute. And I and I think the the price just will fall where it falls. Like that it's I I hate to see like there's this.

There's this danger, I think, if you're a creator of one of these projects, where if you're chasing this token price, like it must hit this, or you know, I have to get this much value extracted out. We actually would rather take in less revenue and have a more stable community than the roller coaster. So

What I'm really proud of, one of the terms that I'm proud of or of figures I'm proud of right now is if I go to, I'm clicking on it right now, the proof collective on OpenSea, we have 933 unique holders out of 1,000. That's a 93.3% unique holder rate of our proof collective token. That is awesome. And you can compare that against any other big PFP project, and it's always much lower. Moonbirds is obviously much lower right now. We're going to get that up. And the reason I love that is it's less churn. Yes, that means that it was less revenue because obviously we don't get those royalties. But we're starting to get to know each other as a community. And we're we're the the goal is to create these like lifelong bonds and relationships and share information and intelligence. We believe that people coming together can create a collective intelligence that is better and stronger than any one individual. And that's held true so far. And that's that's what we're going to continue to build.

That's uh super cool, Kevin. And I I think uh we have we have so many questions. This is just on the proof side of things. We're also gonna talk about moon birds, but I want people listening to the podcast. There's there's probably you know two camps of people. One is there's a lot of uh creators out there with communities and involved in communities, and and they're scratching their heads and they're looking at what you've done with proof and what you've done with with your community and uh you know NFTs, and they're trying trying to think about okay, how can I launch something like this for my community? What does that look like? Putting themselves in the in the mold of a creator. There's also another group who's like, okay, I'm part of a really interesting community and I want to participate more. How can I uh gain opportunity uh entering that community? So I think we want to address both of those. But there's more to this story too. So um, like with proof itself, um, were you how did you get the curation right? So you said 933 members, but like you you've kind of built this thing in concentric circles, right? Where it's like it starts with a nucleus. It's you, maybe a few others on your team at proof, and then it expands to like a thousand core proof members. And now you've got 10,000 PFPs. So it's you're sort of building from this concentric circle of fans, if you will, you know, the the 100 true fans, the 1,000 true fans outward like that. How is that important? What's your secret to good community curation? Because I think a lot of people, if they launch a token or an NFT, they will get those Telegram, NFT, pump and dump groups that aren't necessarily incented for the long term. They have a really hard time creating a nucleus for their community. Can you talk about that?

No, it's a it's a great point. And I think that you know you and I, you you over at Banklets are in a similar position where you have people that listen to what you say because you have a proven track record for talking about high quality projects. And you by the nature of you just not talking about the pump and dump type stuff, you don't attract that crowd. So when I was doing the podcast around proof in the early days, there's never been a single episode about flipping, about how to make money, you know, with uh there's never been a single episode about how to pay extra gas to get into something really fast. Like we just never did that. And so it was always about the artist's story, and and that attracted a lot of these long term holders, like the the people that were really into that style of collecting. Because

Diamond handers

That yeah, the diamond handers, the ones that that see this as the first inning of of a great story that's gonna play out over many decades. And so when you have that as your core, then you can introduce them to this product and you don't on purpose give allowless spots to alpha groups and to flipper groups and all this stuff. Like that was by design. Like a lot of collections will go out there and engage with these these flipping communities to try and give them access and spots. And that's great for your initial sale if you if your only goal is to just grab some money and run. But if if you want a real durable community, um that that that's that's not the way to do it. But uh you all have kind of done that with bankless and what you've done. I mean, you're on the token side, right? But with your DAO and like you you have that trust that you could easily do this. And and to your point earlier about other communities that could do this as well and people that are looking to do this, I think this is.

It it's it's early days and that it's tough because I was talking to Tim Ferris about this actually, because he's got a massive podcast. And I don't know what percentage of Tim's base would be into NFTs, but I know there'd be a thousand people for sure. That would be hardcore, probably 10,000 or more. Um so this is just a new way to think about monetizing and a way to get off of that ad drip. And the reason why I have had such a hard time with advertising uh in general is it forces you to make bad product decisions that are more about retaining your eyeballs and selling your customers than it is about really building things that are really going to be beneficial to them. And so, you know, when I had Dig, I launched Dig in 2004, it became the first social news site before Reddit. You know, we grew that to 38 million people a month, and we still weren't profitable with 38 million people. We only had 50 employees. And if 50 may sound like a lot, but not for someone that's servicing 38 million people, right? And so, and it was because, you know, we were living in this ad world and there was just no way to monetize what we were doing. And we were slow to monetizing it. And yes, we could have gotten to scale and eventually gotten there, but it we made bad product decisions because of that. And so that this is a beautiful new world where we don't have to sell out our users any longer and we can, you know, look to that kind of recurring revenue that comes with the royalties.

So this is so cool. And I think a lot of uh creators are hearing this and they're just getting really, really excited about the potential for their communities. But um let's talk about the the the revenue model, if you will, here, because this is a switch. You you called it the uh the ad drip, and that's how a lot of creator communities are you know funded, right? For example, Bankless, bankless has ads, other podcasts have ads. That's one way to fund a community. The other way to fund a community is sort of through a uh a subscription service. You might have a Substack, you might have certain community members paying for premium benefits.

Oh, I pay for your newsletter. I read it all the time.

Well, there you go. It's like like Sam Harris as well. Like he's got a very successful podcast. And his thing is like, hey, I'll give you a taste of the podcast, but if you want the full podcast, you become a you know a premium member of my community. And these models have been successful. So you got the kind of the you know, revenue model one of ads, the revenue model two of uh premium subscribers through through traditional payment rails.

What is this new third revenue model that you're opening up? So with to take us through proof as an example. So you did that original NFT sale. You received some amount of ETH from that C from that sale as revenue, as kind of like, I guess, seed revenue. And then is there a royalty attached to proof? How does that work? And then what does the the community receive? Because now the floor price is like 84 for for uh 84 ETH for a proof membership. So I imagine the community received the majority of that of that upside. How do the the puts and takes of the of the revenue model work for a creator when you're doing something like a proof membership?

Yeah, it it's a great question. I mean essentially um the good news is when the the price of the actual membership goes up when they do churn and it's slower because there are not many as many are selling so you know uh I would say out of the thousand maybe um I have to go look at the numbers. I don't I couldn't even tell you I haven't been I've been swamped in Moonbird's land, but it's it's maybe let's call it three or four passes move per week, then you get a percent of that. And you can define that any way you want. And so we set that on the higher side at 7.5%, and we receive that back into the company as revenue. So we have to recognize it as revenue, and then that is what we use for everything. So there's like no odds ads on the podcast, even for the people that aren't members, there's no ads on the podcast, and we we use that to fund all of our future initiatives, whether it be the conference and and all the things that we're gonna go off and build, right? So that is kind of how that gets funded. And then in terms of the users that are collecting these, um, you know, they receive a whole slew of different things over time. So with Grails, for example, we launched something called Grails where there were 20 different artists, and as a proof collective holder, you got to pick one to mint. We didn't tell you who the artists were. The secret is that four out of the 20 were top uh five grossing artists of all time on the NFT world. And so we had a very early prototype of the Larva Labs, the creators of CryptoPunks, their um autoglyph, and it was called the protoglyph. And so one of them, and it didn't look anything like the because it was a higher fidelity, but it was the one they couldn't put on the blockchain back then because it was too high resolution. And so we had their early prototype as one of them. And so the people that minted that, um, those are going for over $100,000 on the secondary. And so they received that in their wallet. They were they some hit $200,000 when they first went out, which is crazy. And so they received that in their wallet, and that was part of the upside that that they received as a holder of the proof collective past. So the products that we turn into NFTs, whether it be Grails or our future metaverse or Moonbirds, which they each got two of, which you know are now valued at 20 or 30 grand, whatever they are, USD per Moonbird, that go back to the proof collective holders. So they they receive that in forms of in a form of um just value that comes back to them as holders, in addition to all the information value that comes out of the membership and the meetups and the group. We've had 20 international meetups now with proof people getting together, which is just crazy. It's it's uh we're actually hiring a a head of uh a head of like meetups, and uh, we have to have a a whole services team now around these different meetups and functions that we're gonna be doing.

Have you ever done like a back of the envelope calculation on how much uh value you've driven to to to a proof?

Have not.

To be like just hundred X at least.

It's more than the one ETH they paid for the initial pass if if they bought in back then.

But you're saying for for creators who are like a little worried about getting off the ad drip model, like this is enough revenue to accomplish for you as a creator to accomplish the goals you set out and to like pay a team and to staff somebody for meetups and to staff some analysts. It's it's just working out from a revenue side to be able to fund this operation as well.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think the proof in general has if I had to guess, uh and I'd have to go talk to our accounting folks, I would say that the collective pass has probably brought in around seven or eight million dollars in revenue since January. Wow. Which is w

of this year.

Of this year, yeah, which is great. Um and so that, you know, but y you'll see I yeah, I should probably do like a public like show people what we spend our money on. Because we're we're gonna do we're gonna throw one of the best NFT conferences in the absolute world coming up. And those are expensive

Conferences.

Those are very expensive. So, Ryan Carson, who is our COO, he used to throw uh future web apps conferences back in the day. I mean, Zuckerberg spoke with them, Ev Williams, like all the greats have spoken at his conferences, and they were fantastic. And the first thing he said to me when he joined, and he knew he was going to throw a conference, he goes, as long as we don't have to make money during this conference, it would be amazing. He's like, because they barely broke even and they would have to charge like you know thousands of dollars to attend, but they would have to spend so much money on staff and venue and all the logistics and operations of you know, record all the video production and streaming and all the stuff that goes into a massive conference. And so, yeah, we're we're excited. So this isn't just money. It's important to note that even though we make this money, it doesn't come back to us as individuals. I mean, we get a salary, and I'll be transparent. I pay myself $50,000 a year from from from proof. That's that's my salary. Um and and the the the purpose though is like we want to go build something massive here. So we want to reinvest those funds. It's about going bigger and broader and and doing this better than anyone else. And that that's the kind of goal here.

And part of the value you've been able to drive to your community coming like with uh those uh the the mints, the autoglyph mint, and what was the name of that project again where the the mint score grails? Yeah. Uh I I would imagine that the reason why you were able to uh attract that opportunity for your community is because of the nature of the community that you have collected around proof. Again, they're not they're not the flippers, they're not the NFT flippers. So the people that are saying, hey, we have some NFTs for your community, have some assurances that your communities are not going to flip these things. Uh, because you've specifically curated a community of very strong NFT experts that are very qualified uh consumers of these NFTs, that these NFT projects would be very, very interested in having this particular community be a holder of. Uh, so what you've really done is you've really curated the best consumer possible of the NFTs and saying, hey, if you are a long-term focused diamond hander, you are probably part of the proof uh proof collective. And that is particularly attractive to people that are minting uh new NFT projects. Uh and so it's really playing that long game and the optimizations for quality that has allowed so much value to be discovered in the proof collective.

Yeah, that that's exactly right. I mean, it's for us, it it is about how can we play this for the next this long game for the next decade. Like um I I built a handful of businesses and I I know that for me, I'm not aiming to do another like little single or double, like we're really swinging for the fences here. We want to be a top five PFP project with Moonbirds. And so um, yeah, we're we're we're going for it. This is this is not about a little short term exit or rug and run. Like this is this is something much bigger.

So you have the membership NFT, the thousand membership NFTs. Now you have the moon birds for the profile pictures, because you know you gotta you gotta look good in the metaverse. Uh but I'm cognizant that you are missing an ERC20 token. Is there an ERC20 token on the menu?

Oh man, I didn't know you were gonna ask me this question. Um

You know, I I think that

well, I can I can tell you what we we won't do and and

let's start with talking about what what we're seeing out there in the in the market, if that's okay with y'all. So, you know, when

when you think about these coin kind of airdrops that are happening, I think a lot of it is is broken. Um in that

There's two problems. One, there's why would you need to use that new token versus say just using ETH? Like like take Ape for example. Like they're gonna build that into their metaverse.

But why do I need to have that for CZ? Why the couldn't I just pay with ETH or with DAI or USDC or whatever it may be? Um That is one I have yet to kind of I'm I'm still kind of grappling with and trying to wrap my head around. Um the other is what is the value of that token peg to? And this I don't think is solved by anyone. It's just like saying it's an inventing a token, saying, hey, we have our token, hooray, and like and just launching it, but there's nothing, there's no backbone other than a story of where there may be value. Like I do appreciate what DAI has done and that they have baskets of underlying other assets that kind of back them up. And and I think that can be something can be done here on the NFT side as well. So I'll hint at I'll hint at that, you know, I like to think about what an underlying basket of NFTs could do to power some type of new token. And then the other thing, and the real thing that I I think is tragic is the reward structure is completely broken. And so one of the reasons why we have nesting with moonbirds, and nesting is a non-custodial way of locking up, it's like staking your moon bird, but we don't actually take it out of your wallet. And you actually get these little upgraded nests. You start with straw and then eventually becomes a bronze nest and a silver nest and upgrades over time. But what that means is you're saying, I have conviction in this project. I'm not gonna flip this. Now, again, we could make more money if people are flipping them, but that's not the point. We want loyalty, we want community. And so if people are locking in their birds and saying, I'm willing to lock up my moon bird, then they should receive the outsized rewards if there ever is a future token in the in it that comes out. So it was so odd to me that.

Ape token launches, and I could have bought an Ape token the or a board ape the day before and received the exact same amount of tokens as someone that had held since day one. And I think that that's the wrong reward structure. It should be based on your commitment to a project. And so we're we're we're changed in that. And and I will say this all with one caveat. Nothing the board apes have innovated in so many different ways. It's mind blowing. Nothing but respect for that community. Um, I'm just thinking about in the token sense, I we're just gonna do a slightly different take than than if if we go there. When we do, it'll be a different take than what has already been done out there. Building and copying some other project.

You know, I think a a at a minimum, like a PFP is kind of table stakes for anyone that is in this world, but we wanted to make sure with the nesting mechanic and some of these other things that we added that were built into the smart contract, it wasn't just a Me Too project and that we are thinking about this with a set of fresh eyes and going back to first principles versus just doing another clone because clones are a dime a dozen and the board apes were not clones. They did very quite a few different uh innovations with their CERMs and a bunch of the ways that they looked at how to do um derivative type projects on top of their existing user base, which I think were brilliant and spot on, um especially at the time. No one was doing that. Um but you know, ours is just a different take on this when we eventually get around to that that world.

I love that these NFT projects are kind of uh leveling each other up because like, you know, one one project will just take the best ideas uh from another and then like iterate on them, make improvements in in various ways, and then we get to kind of the next level, we unlock it and we see what's

I love it. And I don't consider this, I think this is a fantastic thing for the industry. So I'll give you an example. This just happened today. This is fresh news. Quantum art, uh Justin Arvasano, uh, fantastic uh best known one of the best known um photography NFT creators that's out there. Sold as artwork at Christie's, all this stuff. Um, they created quantum, which was uh initially just for um photography-based NFTs. They announced this morning they have their quantum key, which is like their version of kind of Grails, or necessarily not Grails, but their version of what we did on the Proof Collective. And they announced this morning that they're gonna do a Grails type launch where you don't know who the artists are, and then they'll do the reveal after. But they're putting the emphasis back on the art, getting people to consider and look at each piece and decide which they want one they want to collect, and then doing the storytelling around the artists. This is the entire thing that we built for Grails that we launched you know a few months ago. I love that they they are now using this as part of their mechanic. It's like if we find useful pieces to your to your all's entire thesis around Lego blocks, let's reuse them. Take the best ones, modify them, make them better, and take them forward. And that's that's how we all win. And I I so I I'd like to see more of that.

that's super cool. All right, well let's uh let let's back up and g just complete the story around moonbirds. So we we talked about this foundation, which is the the proof collective. And now can you tell us a bit more about this moon birds launch? So it sounds like if you had a uh if you're a proof holder, then you got some moonbirds minted to you. You got two.

Going claim two, that's right.

You could claim to. Okay, so so tell us about uh like the Moonbirds concept. How is it distributed? Um, you know, where is it now? I think we can look on like OpenSea stats as as we said in the intro, it's absolutely crushing it. Volume of uh 36,000 ETH over the last few days.