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Hello, friends. Welcome to the University of Nicosia. Welcome to the Open Metaverse.

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I'm George Giaglis and it's a real honor and a pleasure to welcome you all here today.

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I'm really excited to see hundreds of people from all over the world joining us. This is

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a truly historic day as we all come together for the first live session of the world's

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first ever university level course that will take place entirely on-chain and in the metaverse.

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I couldn't be prouder to have with me as a co-instructor in the 12-week journey that we start

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today, Punk 6529, who is undoubtedly the world's leading authority and a visionary thinker in the

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field of NFTs, the Open Metaverse and the future of our decentralized world. I am so proud to count

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him among my mentors. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the more than 50 investors,

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artists, collectors, entrepreneurs and thinkers that have kindly agreed to share their unique

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insights into NFTs and the metaverse with us over the next weeks. I cannot honestly think of any

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university course ever that has had such an impressive lineup of invited speakers

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and I'm sure that I will be learning from them as much as everyone else here today.

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Special thanks also to my amazing team at UNIC who are constantly breaking new ground

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and always give their very best to support our students and the educational experience that

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we'll be having over the coming weeks. And last but not least, a big thanks to Ryan,

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Mungi and the whole team at Oncyber for making all this possible and for working around the clock

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with 6529 and the UNIC team to create an awesome metaverse experience for everyone.

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Right, so before we begin with session one, let me bring up our presentation to take you quickly

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through the logistics of the course. So, as you know, the course will be running for 12 weeks.

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Each week there will be a presentation like the one that you are looking at now. This will include

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further reading material for those of you interested in it. We will also have a live session

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like the one we're having today and we will have starting next week one or more additional

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guest lecturers or interviews or panels. All material, including this live session, will be recorded.

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Everything will be available to watch on demand for those of you that cannot attend live either

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for due to time zone constraints or some other reason. At the end of the course, there will be

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an assessment. The assessment will be different for those of you that are already students at the

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University of Nicosia and want to take academic credit from this course. You will have to do to

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take a qualitative assessment. Everybody else who simply wants to receive an NFT in the form of a

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professional certificate issued by the University of Nicosia will have to pass an online multiple

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choice test with a score of 60 % or more. As I've said, the course is being led by Punk 6529

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and I'm going to be helping him whenever I can, but obviously such an experimental new course

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couldn't have been possible without the help of many people from our team, both at the University

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of Nicosia and from the team of 6529. In this slide, you can see the members of the team

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that are the main contacts for this course. We have introduced them in the pre-course last week.

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You can find their Twitter handle and Discord username for all of them, so please refer to this

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slide and talk to them either in Discord or on Twitter for anything that you need relating to

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this course. All of them are with you today in the OM and are monitoring the chat, so they will

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be taking on questions that they can as we go along. Let me say a few words about the University

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of Nicosia because I'm sure judging from the multitude of countries where everybody's coming

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from, many of you might not know us. We are the largest English-speaking university in Southern

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Europe. We are a comprehensive university. We have more than 14,500 students across more than 100

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degree undergraduate and postgraduate programs. We are ranked top 3% globally and among the top

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200 to 250 universities in the European Union. We are one of only 50 universities in the world

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that have received five stars in the QS assessment about our online teaching. Our campus in Nicosia

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consists of more than 20 different buildings, among them probably the world's most beautiful

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and iconic student accommodations ever. But apart from the people that we have

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on site in the university, we are very active online and we are particularly active in the field

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of crypto. We have always been a global pioneer in this space. We were the first university in

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the world to accept Bitcoin for tuition payments. We were the first to launch a course in crypto,

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our free MOOC, the introduction to digital currencies taught by Andreas Antonopoulos,

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Antonis Polimitis and myself has been continuously running since 2013. It was the first course ever

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in the world and we are proud to have trained more than 80,000 students from more than 120

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countries until today. We were the first to offer a full academic degree in this area. Our master's

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in blockchain and digital currency started in 2014 and is still the world's largest program in

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crypto. We were the first university ever to issue our certificates as blockchain verifiable

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credentials. We started in 2015 with our MOOC alumni. Then in 2017 we moved to issue all the

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degrees that are awarded by the University of Nicosia. They are now awarded on the issued on

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the blockchain. Last year we started issuing certificates also in the form of NFTs on the

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Ethereum blockchain. We have the largest dedicated crypto team in academia globally, in our

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Institute for the Future. We do basic and applied research working with many crypto projects as

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well as institutional partners like the European Commission or the European Central Bank. We aspire

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to become the first university in the metaverse having launched this course today in partnership

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with Punk 6529 and hopefully we will be aiming a new full academic degree in metaverse systems

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next year. Now having said that trying to be first at something is always a challenging

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endeavor so this course and the whole learning experience is going to be a big bet for us and I

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think it's going to be a learning experience for everybody. We've frequently said that this is the

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first university course to be held on chain and in the metaverse. Let me take a second to explain

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what we mean. By on chain we mean that our internal bet is to try to do as much as possible in this

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course without touching upon any centralized information system of the university. That's why

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we did not ask you to register in a web page and give us your full name and contact details and email

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or whatever. We asked you to mint an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and this NFT will become

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your ticket to access the class. We aim to have all material available in the form of NFTs so

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everything will be air-dropped to your wallets so those of you that have minted the course access

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token I would encourage you to transfer that token to a separate wallet that you control

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because on that wallet will be air-dropping a number of things including this presentation,

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interviews, panels, discussions, everything that we're going to be doing in this course.

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By the end of this course you will have a full portfolio of material inside your Ethereum

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wallet. That's what on chain means and in the metaverse obviously means that we're going to be

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using the OM to do that. Today we are using the open space of OM. We are here in this beautiful park

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but starting in the coming weeks we will be gradually revealing parts of the metacampus

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that we are building in the OM. We're going to be holding future activities in auditoriums,

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in special learning facilities, we're going to have exhibition rooms, we're going to experiment

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with many modalities within the metaverse and we would like to have you with us in this journey.

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We expect to have some hiccups in the beginning of the course and probably even later as we're

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constantly breaking new ground. Please get back to us, tell us what you think, what works well

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for you, what doesn't work well for you. If you have any feedback or ideas or you would like to

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help us in making this experience better for everyone we are open to your suggestions on Discord,

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on Twitter and in the chat here. A quick technical tip for those of you that

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are connected through mobile you will make most of your experience if you connect through a desktop

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environment and if you connect through a laptop please make sure that you set it up so that your

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browser uses your dedicated graphics card if you have one to render the world that you are seeing

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in the OM. Many laptops would by default use their internal graphics card and you might have

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a lesser experience. Having said that because we have hundreds of people we have made the design

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choice today to create separate rooms. Each room consists of around 300 people so that we do not

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have hundreds and hundreds of people in the same space to avoid any performance issues.

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In the future as we become more comfortable with the performance of the world and the environment

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we will be bringing more and more people in the same instance as well. I'm saying that because

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as we go along and especially in the Q&A session some of you might hear either 6529 or me talking

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about a question in the chat that you might have not seen in the chat and will be wondering what's

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happened. The reason is that there are separate chats in each of the rooms so each group of 300

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people or less are looking at a different chat and we are combining everything together in our

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current. Another thing that I would like to stress is that everything that you see in this

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course coming from the University of Nicosia is released under a Creative Commons Attribution

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License which means that you are totally free to reuse the presentation materials and everything

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else that we produce in this course as long as you attribute back to the University of Nicosia.

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So you can take this slide use them as they are or modify them so long as you attribute that the

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source was the University of Nicosia in this course. Obviously this release has to do only with

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intellectual property that comes from UNIC and not intellectual property from other parties.

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All the presentations will be available on our Github and all the presentations will be minted

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as NFTs and air-dropped to your wallets. Obviously this is an educational course only.

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We will be discussing various projects, various people, various NFTs. None of this is investment

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advice. None of this is a recommendation to either buy or sell an NFT. I hope that this is

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clear to everyone but I had to set it. If you are new to crypto, note that we are at the frontier

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of investment classes here and any investments at all at Island should be made only after careful

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research and probably after consulting a professional advisor. As you have seen in the website,

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we have a 12-week schedule ahead of us. We are in the first week now so we're just going to be

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laying the ground, the background and making sure that everyone is on the same page about

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what is an NFT and why all these things are important. Each week we're going to be dealing

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with a specific subject either on NFTs until week seven or related to the metaverse from week eight

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onwards. That was it in terms of the logistics of the course and let's go to session one.

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Session one is a challenging session in the sense that we have a very diverse group of

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students obviously. There have been more than 20,000 people that have minted the course access NFT

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and we're super happy about that but obviously some of you are very new to this area and some

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others are at the other end of the spectrum. You might already be developing or collecting NFTs

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and hence you know much of the background information. The goal for today is just to create

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a common language about NFTs with everyone. Some of you will find today's presentation very

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straightforward or even simplistic. Others might find it very difficult. The presentation will

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consist of two parts. I will start with a brief technical overview to define NFTs and discuss

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some of the standards for NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and then I'm going to hand over

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to 6529 who will take us through the different types of NFTs, their use cases, examples of

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interesting collections and explore the market size and structure for NFTs. Let me start with

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a technical discussion. I'm going to try to keep it as simple as possible and not go through

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everything that you see in the slides. You can read them at your own time. First of all,

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I hope it's clear to everyone that NFTs live exist on blockchains. If you are not familiar

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with the concept of a blockchain, a distributed network of computers processing transactions

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in a peer-to-peer manner, grouping them into blocks and appending them into a chain, then I

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would suggest that you follow our introduction to digital currencies MOOC, the link to which

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you can find at the bottom of this slide. NFTs live on blockchains and so we could be

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spending time here discussing the different types of blockchains, but we decided to keep things

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simple to just base the discussion on one of them, the Ethereum blockchain. I'd like to start

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by discussing what Ethereum is. Ethereum is what we could call a second-generation blockchain that

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is capable of running applications. I'm using the term second-generation to differentiate it from

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Bitcoin, which everybody considers as the prime example of the first-generation blockchain. Bitcoin

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is an open public and permissionless network of computers. This means that anyone can join

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just by downloading some software and connecting to the network, but Bitcoin is single-use.

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The only thing that the Bitcoin blockchain is doing is effectively processing the Bitcoin token,

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so the blockchain and the token have the same name. Ethereum is a second-generation blockchain

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network that is similar and very different to Bitcoin at the same time. It's similar because

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it's also an open permissionless public blockchain and also has its own token. It's called Ether.

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Many people call the token Ethereum as well, but technically Ethereum is the blockchain and

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Ether is the token. However, unlike Bitcoin, this is a blockchain in which we can program and run

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applications. Very simplistically, you can think of Ethereum as the Internet of decentralized

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applications, a global network of computers that can run any application without needs for

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intermediaries. You can have the functionality of Facebook without having Facebook, the company

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mediating the transactions. You can have e-commerce without Amazon or some other provider,

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and this is what is most revolutionary about these types of blockchains. How is this possible?

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It's possible because Ethereum and other similar blockchains run what we call smart contracts,

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and smart contracts are computer programs that run on the blockchain and are immutable. Immutable

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means that they cannot change, and this is a very powerful characteristic. I cannot overstate the

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importance of this characteristic. We have programs that once we hit run and we deploy them on the

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Ethereum blockchain, they cannot be stopped or modified or nothing even by their owner. Technically,

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the owner can keep them in a state that is changeable, but I hope you will forgive the simplicity

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here. The promise of having such immutable code running on a blockchain is nothing

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short of revolutionary because now, for the first time in history, we have the ability to program

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any interaction between parties that is automatable, program it in a smart contract,

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and be trusted to run as programmed without intermediaries and without censorship,

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without anyone being able to stop it. This opens up the possibility to all sorts of applications.

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The other difference of Ethereum is that it is a multi-token network. As I've said,

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it has its own native currency, Ether, but on Ethereum, we can also create additional tokens.

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Some of these tokens are fungible and they follow a standard that we call ERC20,

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and others are non-fungible or NFTs, and they follow different standards like ERC721 or ERC1155.

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Fungibility is a property that has to do with whether different units of some asset are exchangeable

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or not. When we say that a token is fungible, we mean that any two units of that token have the

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same value. If you have one Ether and I have one Ether, this Ether, in theory, should have the same

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dollar value, but non-fungible tokens are unique. They are different from each other. If you have

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a CryptoPunk and I have a CryptoPunk, the value of our Punks is generally not the same because

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each token has its own properties, so some of them might be more valuable than others.

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As I've said, there are three major standards in Ethereum governing token creation.

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One of them is outside the scope of this course. ERC20 is the most popular

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standard and it deals with fungible tokens. The other two, ERC721 and ERC1155 were both

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released in 2018 and they both deal with NFTs. ERC721 is the most widely used standard for NFTs

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today. ERC1155 is a more complex version that allows us to create smart contracts that manage

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multiple token types at the same time. These tokens could be fungible, non-fungible or hybrid.

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ERC20 is, as I've said, outside the scope of this course, so tokens like Uniswap, Sushi,

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Tether, USDC, Manna, or Raptether that you see in this slide basically deal with various types

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of financial applications, so we're not going to be dealing with them. If you are interested

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in fungible tokens, then we've got you covered. We have another MOOC that I'm also teaching with a

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group of colleagues from the University of Nicosia on decentralized finance. You can access this

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at the link that you see at the bottom of this page and it's a totally free course.

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What we are going to be dealing with are the standards that are used to implement

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non-fungible tokens. The simplest of that is ERC721. It provides basic standard functionality

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that developers need in order to manage, track, and transfer NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.

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Technically, you would need to write computer codes in a smart contract programming language

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like Solidity to do that, but in practice, most creators today would use some third-party service

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that would allow them to create their collections without writing code or with very little programming

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involved. ERC1155 is Ethereum's multi-token standard. If you see the first three bullets in

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this slide, they provide the basic difference between the main standards. If I wanted to create

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an ERC20 token, a fungible token, I would create a different smart contract for each token.

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So, Tether has its own smart contract and Uniswap has a totally different smart contract for the

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Unit token. ERC721 allows me to have different tokens in a single contract. So, I have punk6529

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and punk6530, which are different tokens, but are managed within the same contract

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with different meta data, different attributes for each of the tokens. But all the attributes

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are defined at the smart contract level. So, whether my crypto punk is male or female or alien

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or an APE is defined in an attribute in the smart contract. And ERC1155 takes this idea of being

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able to create meta data and attributes for your tokens, not at the collection level, but at the

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level of the individual token, at the token ID. And this is something that is very important when

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you want to create more complex applications, for example, in gaming. We'll discuss gaming later

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in this course, so I'm not going to go into details. This is a table that summarizes the

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differences between the two main standards for NFTs on Ethereum. Now, and I will finish with this,

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if I wanted for you to take one thing away from today's lecture, the technical part of it at least,

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is this slide. Many people, even people that are quite knowledgeable in NFTs, have a very

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fuzzy idea or have never thought about how, where are their NFTs really stored. And what I would like

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to emphasize here is that in most cases, storing big data on the blockchain is very expensive.

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So, if I created a collection of 10,000 images that each of them, you know, is a few megabytes

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worth of information, it would be very, very expensive to store the images themselves and

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transact with the images on the blockchain. So, instead, the token that you own, when you own an

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NFT token, like the course access token that you minted here, effectively you own a pointer

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to a URI, a Uniform Resource Identifier, like a web page link, that points to where the actual image

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or the actual content of the NFT, because it might not be an image, it might not be a video,

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it might be this live session, is actually stored. And when dealing with storage, we have two options.

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We can either store our NFTs in a centralized server or we can store them in a decentralized way.

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And what usually happens is that in the NFT field, if we have to choose between centralized and

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decentralized types of storages, always decentralized is better. So, two examples of

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different philosophies that do the same thing, distributed storage of NFTs, is IPFS and ARWAVE.

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ARWAVE is the standard that we are using in this course, but IPFS is equally good and they both

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provide ways in which the actual image and its metadata for your NFTs are not stored in a single

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central location, but are shared by thousands of computers worldwide so that you have additional

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security that nobody can mess with your NFT unless the whole network goes down.

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Now, in some rare cases, we might even see NFTs that are stored natively on chain and this means

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that the actual image and its metadata are stored on the blockchain. This is obviously the best case

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scenario. It preserves all the first order features of the blockchain, so you have really

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immutable, decentralized NFTs with no single point of failure and all the other attributes that

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those of you familiar with blockchains will know about, but they tend to be very expensive,

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as I've said, so you would see them only when you can somehow compress the data. For example,

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in generative art, as we will be discussing in a couple of weeks from now, this is a decent

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choice to store your NFTs natively on chain. If you have one of one art or photography or

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videography or anything else that creates large files, this is probably not feasible.

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So what I want you to remember again is that when you own an NFT, effectively you own a token

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that is a pointer to some location in which the actual file is saved and whether this is on chain,

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off-chain decentralized or off-chain centralized matters a lot, this is going to be a big theme

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in this course. Okay, so this concludes the technical primer and I'm going to be

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handing over to the man that you've been waiting for. Punk 6529 is with us and I'm going to give

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the floor to him to discuss what our NFTs are. So 6529, if you can hear us.

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Okay, fantastic. Well, first of all, I want to do my own round of thank you's to

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everyone who has brought us to this point. First of all, George and his team, the team on oncyber,

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the team at 6529, the broader team at the University of Nicosia that has helped even

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folks who are not in the blockchain area have been helping. The audio visual team is helping us

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here today and of course all the incredible guests, lecturers, panelists that are going to be joining

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during these next 12 weeks. So thank you. This is a group effort. It's a team effort and the

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overall experience is going to be not just a group and team effort among the people who are working

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on this course but also with the students. One of the things we are trying to understand here,

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one of my deep interests in trying to understand, is in fact what we can do on chain and in the

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metaverse. My general perspective is that we have been a little bit intellectually lazy in the

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crypto world about how much we can actually use decentralized systems. The vast majority of people

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use cryptocurrency for realistically financial speculation and sometimes things like transactions.

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Part of what got me very excited about NFTs in addition to seeing great art and wonderful

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artists was that the NFT world in great contrast to the fungible token world was spending a lot

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of time on chain and was doing new functions on chain. Last week we were minting QQLs at

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6529. That was fun and it was an activity that I don't remember doing three or four years ago

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in cryptocurrency and I believe for cryptocurrency to make it, for decentralized walkchains to make

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it, we have to have real-life usage cases that are something more than we're going to hold on to

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these tokens and the number is going to go up. I've mentioned this before on Twitter, I learned

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by doing things and yes I'm going to be sharing some material and I think the students will learn

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some things from the material that I will share but I also hope to learn from this course and

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specifically what I want to learn is what does it mean to have a large group of people engage in

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you know broadly a course and do it without using a centralized database. What does it mean if we're

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doing a class in the metaverse but more importantly what does it mean if we're going to run a community

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focused on learning about NFTs or working in the NFT space or thinking of new ideas in the NFT space

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and what does that mean in a persistent three-dimensional environment.

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While I think today's experience is super interesting and I've been enjoying watching it and watching

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George and lurking in the background in one of the rooms I think the more interesting thing over

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the course of the next few months is what we are all as a group going to do outside the classroom.

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I think there will be an exercise an iterative exercise of seeing what people want to do,

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trying to build these spaces that enable them to do it. George mentioned the campus is being

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built and the OM teams doing a lot of support there and one of the reasons the campus is not ready

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is just because it's not ready but the other reason that it's not ready is we want to take a design

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iterative design approach there, and launch a certain set of spaces see how we use them see what other

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needs we have see what spaces are needed to support those needs and what would be a great success

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for me at the end of the year is not only that we've had some nice panels and lectures

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but there are groups of people who have met in this course have become a part of this community

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and are planning all types of interesting things to do together, that we can find people to

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also educate in parallel with this course. We stopped at 50-ish

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lectures because the logistics were starting to get out of hand but there's a lot more people who

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want to contribute and part of what we're trying to figure out once we get past these first couple

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of weeks is how to let them contribute in parallel with the course. I noticed this when I was working

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on my set of slides. These slides, if you're deep into the crypto space today's are the NFT space

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and you have a crypto background today's session is super easy but I was trying to think if we're

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trying to onboard someone new here someone who is excited about the NFT world or the metaverse world

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but does not have a deep understanding of crypto well we are trying to cover everything from bitcoin

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to ethereum to smart contracts to where do you store an NFT to what is the market cap of the

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space what are the subsections of space in a few slides, it's not possible and so what I'd like to

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get to is parallel tracks people doing not every single person has to come to every session but

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that over the next few weeks we have a campus an educational area, where people are learning all the

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time there's no bigger barrier to our development and education there's never a limit on how much

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we can learn I've been in the space for a very long time and I learn new things literally every day

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and there's people at different levels of development and they're going to learn things,

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every day as well and so we're trying to enable something like, a

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university of old right where you went there and you're learning you're living there and you are

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aiming to learn from your colleagues and those students and the faculty and the visitors but

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with the great benefit that we can do it globally for the whole world at the same time and so

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this is the spirit of this course, and this means that we're going to need your feedback for sure

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your help for sure and your initiatives for sure to figure out how to do all these things and figure

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out what are the things you want to do and so where you know reach out on twitter on discord

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feel free to organize things I think in two to three weeks once we have the basics working,

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we're going to be very open to people coming and saying hey I want to do a

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special lecture specifically on the details of how IPFS works, and we will say yes the answer is

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going to be yes the answer is let's do more let's find a way for everyone to be able to share the

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knowledge that they have and for people to learn that knowledge so this is my view of let's say the

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course philosophy now in this and the time that I have today I'd like to do one and a half things.

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What I really want to focus on is my big picture conceptual idea of what NFTs are

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conceptual the rest of my slides are things like well what are the sectors of the NFT space PFPs

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or generative art one of ones we're going to fly through this fly through those today, because for

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each of those areas we have a session later in the course, so I'm not going to spend almost

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any time on PFPs today because we have a whole session in two weeks on PFPs and we'll dig into

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the micro details there so I'm going to focus on the first set of my slides and see if we can get

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some big picture ideas communicated with that that's a great lead into this slide,

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in a way the way I see NFTs it is the most absurdly trivially simple idea,

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literally the only thing an NFT actually is, is a token with a number they are enumerated tokens,

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they are tokens where you can identify one token and it is different than another token,

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this sounds I mean if you think about it at this most basic level and if you,

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think about if this is important. It sounds very unimportant, I'm trying to imagine if this was

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several years ago and someone told me oh this is a really important idea you know what's the idea

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we're going to have tokens and we're going to put numbers on them. I'm pretty sure okay well

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that doesn't sound very important why is that important okay cool, I guess right what we're

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seeing here on the slide are the three-six-sequential tokens that on the crypto punks contract that

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includes 6529 so in my theorem wallet is punk 6528 crypto punk tokens 6529 and there's also 6528

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and there's a 6530. That's all NFTs are and it's weird because it's one of those that is deceptively

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simple because it actually enables a huge number of things, let's go to the next slide.

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Because the other part of NFTs you will not find on a blockchain the other important part of NFTs

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is a social convention. People who don't understand NFTs well often make criticisms of

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the following genre but NFTs are just a receipt, they're just a pointer they're not the thing

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they're the thing that points to the thing. George earlier pointed out that most NFTs the

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actual image is not on the blockchain it's somewhere else it's on IPFS for example,

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and people say it as if this is some type of big gachu and that's because people haven't spent

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any time thinking how any advanced society works, and every single advanced society

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works primarily by manipulating pointers not underlying objects.

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I have a big tweet storm about real estate and people say oh you know real estate is a super

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tangible thing like when you very different than NFTs you own a house you own a piece of land you

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own an office building. but when you own a piece of land what does it actually mean what it actually

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means is that the land registry office for your jurisdiction there is a title deed and that title

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deed says, plot 123456 is owned by Mike Smith and if Mike Smith wants to sell it to George.

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They're going to go to the title office and maybe some other places and maybe their lawyers will

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put some documents together and they'll sign all these documents and the pointers will change hands,

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nothing is actually going to happen on the land itself right the land is just going to be sitting,

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there the land doesn't have the slightest idea the land's been there for billions of years right

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that's the slightest idea that there are some overgrown monkeys us who are trading pieces of paper

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or in modern times entries in a database and saying this land is my land this land, is your land

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we've now changed who's landed as the land's just there very much off-chain hanging out but Mike,

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Smith and George are trading a pointer to the land and when that pointer moves we all collectively

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pretend that George owns the land just like we all collectively pretended that previously that Mike

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owned the land, this is the part where someone says yeah but the reason that works is society is

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willing to enforce it like if George now owns the land and Mike won't get out George can call the

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police and yeah that's just because society, is respecting that social convention it's just a

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social convention. It didn't exist at some point at some point hundreds or thousands of years ago

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it's one of these stories that other if it's actually true, that people say about when the Europeans

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came to North American the Native Americans were there they didn't really have this concept of land

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ownership and they thought the Europeans were kind of nuts quite saying like, oh I owned this river

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and I owned this mountain, I don't know if it's actually true or if it's one of those things

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you learn in elementary school, but in any case that is in fact how it is it's just an imaginary

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social convention we have decided, that the way to organize land ownership, is by trading these

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pieces of paper well that is exactly what NFTs are. We have decided and today the people who care

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about the social convention are maybe a million people, or half a million people or two million

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people, but that number was going to grow every single year we have decided that a token and if

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that token is in your wallet, it is a pointer to something else and we're going to attribute

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ownership to something else to the person, who has that token. It is also why the right click

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save as argument is so very silly if you're deeply crypto native someone of course can go

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right click save hug 6529 right now. In fact when I first started tweeting a lot people would do it

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to me all the time they'd come and say, oh ha ha ha I've right click saved your punk and now I'm

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going to use it okay have fun I mean you can use it but the reality is we all know, that, the

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crypto punk token 6529 is in my wallet not in your wallet and if you want a market assessment of

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how strong the social convention is, the market assessment will pay exactly zero dollars for

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your downloaded jpeg, but would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the token that's the

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social convention at work, that's why if you go just stand on someone's land you don't become an odor

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of it you have to go buy the title deed right you have to go through the social convention.

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So what does how do I see this where does this fit in,

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to the history of crypto assets it is all exactly the same idea as when we started with

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bitcoin. Bitcoin is this concept for money currency you can argue which one of those two it is

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is some type of commodity one of those things and what we have said in the bitcoin world, is if you

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own these certain outputs in your wallet you can that means something and the amount of

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eye rolling that was happening a decade ago when bitcoin people would say that was gigantic

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there's no question this mean anything at all why does this matter right now. It has been established

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that it matters and this doesn't nothing changes of bitcoin's worth two thousand dollars twenty

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thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars the it's clearly worth something people have clearly

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subscribed value and monetary like value to bitcoin then the ERC20 tokens, that george mentioned

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earlier are more or less the same point but for financial instruments now you say well what do

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you mean are they financial instruments are they securities, are they not securities there's a lot

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of dancing around on this topic because of the us regulations, against secure against unregistered

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securities, so some ERC20 tokens look very much like financial instruments some go through

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0:48:41.440 --> 0:48:48.800
a variety of convoluted ideas to not look like financial instruments but basically, that's what

392
0:48:48.800 --> 0:48:54.080
they are right and some of them might be a security under the us definition some of them are not a

393
0:48:54.080 --> 0:49:00.560
security under the us definition, but what they are aiming to replicate is arbitrary financial

394
0:49:00.560 --> 0:49:07.440
instruments so if bitcoin or maybe ether but you know the popular perception of bitcoin is

395
0:49:08.480 --> 0:49:16.320
the underlying currency well, an ERC20 token is something like a stock, a bond, a derivative

396
0:49:16.320 --> 0:49:25.360
some weird new financial instruments that don't have great analogs in the fiat world, but things

397
0:49:25.360 --> 0:49:33.120
whose nature is primarily financial and they are fungible and that's how financial instruments

398
0:49:33.120 --> 0:49:40.400
work, right, that's how financial instruments work in the real world they are all fungible,

399
0:49:40.400 --> 0:49:46.880
and they're traded around primarily for financial reasons and if you see how ERC20 tokens

400
0:49:46.880 --> 0:49:58.000
work that's the context of their environment with this in mind we go to ERC-721 switches

401
0:49:58.000 --> 0:50:06.000
or 1155s in any case the nft protocols. This is the same concept for quite literally in my view

402
0:50:06.000 --> 0:50:12.240
everything else in the world and it's interesting because everything else in the world, is actually

403
0:50:12.240 --> 0:50:22.320
a lot of things in a very big number most things in the world, are non fungible there's a huge amount

404
0:50:22.320 --> 0:50:29.120
of value embedded in fungible instruments, in the world a huge and possibly well certainly hundreds

405
0:50:29.120 --> 0:50:34.080
of trillions of dollars, but there are even more hundreds of trillions of dollars, embedded in

406
0:50:34.080 --> 0:50:38.160
non fungible objects and with that let's go to the next slide.

407
0:50:42.560 --> 0:50:57.360
This is my highest level view of what NFTs are, what NFTs can be, and how NFTs can develop

408
0:50:57.360 --> 0:51:05.760
over the next decade, and the first thing to see here is that split on the top between

409
0:51:06.800 --> 0:51:14.640
natively digital intangible assets and physical, or tangible assets, where we're

410
0:51:14.640 --> 0:51:26.720
making an abstract pointer to them. NFTs will first develop in the intangible natively digital

411
0:51:26.720 --> 0:51:38.400
category the reason that is is because the blockchain world, the online world, the interoperable

412
0:51:38.400 --> 0:51:46.960
with blockchain world, does not need anything from the regulatory system from the government,

413
0:51:46.960 --> 0:51:54.800
from the enforcement mechanisms of the state, in order to make the first part work so, if

414
0:51:54.800 --> 0:52:12.560
like uh i do on occasion we mint a meme card and there's i don't know 420 tokens and we assert

415
0:52:12.560 --> 0:52:25.440
that that meme card each one of those tokens, represents an addition of one out of 420 of

416
0:52:25.440 --> 0:52:37.120
this piece of art and we the artists the issuer are going to treat them as such. Well that's it

417
0:52:37.120 --> 0:52:44.400
but i don't need any other i don't need any other assistance from the state to do that.

418
0:52:46.640 --> 0:52:51.520
I can see where those tokens are i can interact with those tokens

419
0:52:53.280 --> 0:53:00.560
permissionlessly i can say if you have one of these tokens, you can come into this token gated

420
0:53:00.560 --> 0:53:08.640
space in OM, if a person who does not currently have one of these tokens asks me, how can i buy one

421
0:53:08.640 --> 0:53:14.480
of the additions from this artist? in the meme cards i can just point him to the meme cards

422
0:53:14.480 --> 0:53:19.760
contract and say well buy one of these tokens and then they can buy it on a permissionless exchange

423
0:53:22.640 --> 0:53:27.520
i never need to call the courts i never need to call the police i never need to use the

424
0:53:27.520 --> 0:53:34.640
enforcement mechanism of the state that is required for physical goods. Because the wonderful thing with

425
0:53:35.360 --> 0:53:43.760
cryptocurrency it is much easier to play defense than it is in the real world. In the real world,

426
0:53:44.400 --> 0:53:52.160
if i was if there was no state and i had a piece of land and i'm just a normal type of guy

427
0:53:52.160 --> 0:54:01.440
maybe someone who has more muscles, or more guns, or more friends, says well i don't care about your

428
0:54:01.440 --> 0:54:10.880
silly little title, you have i'm moving in and you're moving out and in absence of a state

429
0:54:10.880 --> 0:54:16.240
mechanism it's actually quite hard to prevent them you know if you did this with a normal

430
0:54:16.240 --> 0:54:21.040
developed state, you're going to call the police and the courts and someone will help get you your

431
0:54:21.040 --> 0:54:28.960
property back but in absence, of that you'll probably lose it, with the encryption embedded in

432
0:54:28.960 --> 0:54:34.800
crypto assets with the model embedded in crypto assets, playing defense does not require any help,

433
0:54:35.440 --> 0:54:41.520
you can just have the token in your wallet, and nobody can take it to you by force at a first

434
0:54:41.520 --> 0:54:47.760
approximation and yeah there's hacking and things like that but at a first approximation nobody

435
0:54:47.760 --> 0:54:58.800
can take it by force, so what this means is anything that can be digitally, linked to an NFT

436
0:55:00.400 --> 0:55:07.040
can start developing now. The regulatory state the normal,

437
0:55:08.480 --> 0:55:14.640
Society is slow on innovation they'll eventually get there but it might take 5 to 10 years

438
0:55:14.640 --> 0:55:22.000
15 years, fortunately we don't need to wait for Washington or Brussels to make a decision in

439
0:55:22.000 --> 0:55:29.680
order to put an intangible asset like a piece of art on an NFT so in this bucket what do i say,

440
0:55:29.680 --> 0:55:38.880
well NFT started with what weren't something like collectibles or things that straddled the

441
0:55:38.880 --> 0:55:46.320
line between collectibles and art they have gone very strongly into the art space as well

442
0:55:46.960 --> 0:55:53.600
so collectibles and art are the majority of the market today. What most people expect is going

443
0:55:53.600 --> 0:56:02.320
to come in the next phase, as greater usage in gaming assets, in metaverse assets, buildings

444
0:56:02.320 --> 0:56:12.080
lands trees things of that nature. What will come after that is more real world intellectual property,

445
0:56:12.640 --> 0:56:20.080
right well intellectual property that might not be directly linked to a visual on an NFT,

446
0:56:20.080 --> 0:56:29.200
brand's cultural society all of this type of intangible assets and can come on board now there's

447
0:56:29.200 --> 0:56:36.800
no technical challenge stopping it there's no regulatory framework. That is needed all you need

448
0:56:36.800 --> 0:56:43.680
is education onboarding and you might say well okay i mean that stuff sounds small it is not

449
0:56:43.680 --> 0:56:53.440
small at all intangible assets there is a very large report and in fact George we should add it

450
0:56:53.440 --> 0:57:02.320
to the reading and maybe next week, that every year counts the amount of intangible assets on

451
0:57:02.320 --> 0:57:10.640
corporate balance sheets and it's over 75 trillion dollars and that doesn't even capture intangible,

452
0:57:10.640 --> 0:57:18.880
assets that are not on balance sheet you know the american flag, the statue of liberty, the land of

453
0:57:18.880 --> 0:57:24.000
the free, and the home of the brain that's an intangible asset but you're not going to find it

454
0:57:24.800 --> 0:57:28.960
written down on a financial statement somewhere but it certainly makes the United States more

455
0:57:28.960 --> 0:57:36.160
valuable than if it didn't have this type of branding so we are looking already at a

456
0:57:38.000 --> 0:57:44.320
existing stock of intangibles that's larger than the money supply and there's no obvious

457
0:57:44.320 --> 0:57:52.160
barrier to me for some of that migrating on chain this is kind of bucket one bucket two which is my

458
0:57:54.000 --> 0:57:58.640
mission for being at 6529's mission for being we'll cover this in later

459
0:57:58.640 --> 0:58:05.520
sessions in more detail. I believe NFTs can be the underlying database for an open metaverse

460
0:58:05.520 --> 0:58:09.520
but i don't want to get into that today. That's a longer story we'll pick that up towards the

461
0:58:09.520 --> 0:58:18.880
end of the course then at some point we will start migrating non-fungible physical world assets,

462
0:58:19.440 --> 0:58:24.640
and services to NFTs, and these are all the examples that people talk about now but nobody

463
0:58:24.640 --> 0:58:32.880
does, because it's going to take time oh i can buy a house by buying an NFT, i can rent a holiday villa

464
0:58:32.880 --> 0:58:39.920
by buying an NFT, for these certain dates i can rent a digital billboard, in Times Square for these

465
0:58:39.920 --> 0:58:48.800
hours, by buying an NFT and what it means once this happens you can move all of these interactions

466
0:58:48.800 --> 0:58:53.200
out of a bunch of fragmented proprietary databases which is where they are now.

467
0:58:53.200 --> 0:58:59.920
If you want to book a night at the midtown Hilton, on six avenue you have to call Hilton

468
0:58:59.920 --> 0:59:05.920
which nights are available in the Hilton database and these things are going to end up

469
0:59:05.920 --> 0:59:11.680
a decade from now in the OpenSea of that which might be open here might be someone else, so

470
0:59:11.680 --> 0:59:19.120
i want to go to the Hilton let me see what the floor is for Hilton upper room prices on these

471
0:59:19.120 --> 0:59:29.680
days on sixth avenue. For these things to happen you'll need some more let's call it enforcement

472
0:59:29.680 --> 0:59:37.760
counterparty regulatory certainty, now you have the token you show up and say hey this house is mine

473
0:59:38.400 --> 0:59:46.080
someone says no it's not. Well we're back to the physical world issues the mechanism by

474
0:59:46.080 --> 0:59:50.640
which you bought the house has to be recognized by the state so you can say look, Mike you've

475
0:59:50.640 --> 0:59:55.680
got to leave the house i have the token i can prove to a court that i have the token and

476
0:59:55.680 --> 1:00:02.560
you're going to get evicted so i see these coming closer to the end of the decade.

477
1:00:04.800 --> 1:00:10.320
Both will happen and when both happen you're discussing an addressable market of several

478
1:00:10.320 --> 1:00:19.360
hundred trillion dollars but the natively visual ones will happen first. Let's go to the next slide.

479
1:00:19.360 --> 1:00:28.720
I think this one straightforward i put it here in case anyone,

480
1:00:30.400 --> 1:00:35.520
you know, if it was helpful after the prior slides but this is in fact the kind of two

481
1:00:35.520 --> 1:00:43.520
by two matrix that fits here there are things that are tangible and intangible right so commodities

482
1:00:43.520 --> 1:00:51.760
oil, wheat, etc is tangible and fungible a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat at a first approximation

483
1:00:52.880 --> 1:01:00.800
there are things that are tangible and non fungible my house is different than your house my

484
1:01:04.080 --> 1:01:08.160
painting on my wall is different than your painting on your wall there might be things,

485
1:01:08.160 --> 1:01:15.760
that are semi fungible, right? My Nike sneakers are different than a lot of Nike sneakers but

486
1:01:15.760 --> 1:01:23.680
similar to some Nike sneakers and well, it's a joke but, it's not a joke i mean us right all of us

487
1:01:23.680 --> 1:01:31.200
are tangible non fungible objects towards, is different than me and we're very much tangible

488
1:01:31.200 --> 1:01:39.120
and then on the intangible side the intangible fungibles are the ones who said before money

489
1:01:39.120 --> 1:01:47.040
and financial instruments. These are these are where we see the l1 the the tokens of the major

490
1:01:47.040 --> 1:01:53.680
blockchains and the ERC20 tokens or their equivalent that right above them, and then

491
1:01:53.680 --> 1:02:01.760
tangibles and non fungible intangible non fungibles are culture society, a lot of services are

492
1:02:01.760 --> 1:02:06.240
intangible digital goods, obviously like the ones we've been describing a lot of intellectual

493
1:02:06.240 --> 1:02:12.560
property and so, fungible tokens will work on the first row, here non fungible tokens will work on.

494
1:02:12.560 --> 1:02:24.400
The second row short of public blockchains, public cryptocurrencies getting banned by the regulators

495
1:02:24.400 --> 1:02:28.960
which spending a lot of time and effort, to make sure that does not happen all of this is going

496
1:02:28.960 --> 1:02:33.680
to happen over the course of decade and all, of it is going to be actively good for society

497
1:02:34.880 --> 1:02:40.640
there's no reason they'll be actively good for society, in the same way that the internet was

498
1:02:40.640 --> 1:02:45.520
better than filing cabinets, or a bunch of independent content management systems were

499
1:02:46.240 --> 1:02:52.480
the internet gave you a unified platform, a single standards-based interoperable way to

500
1:02:52.480 --> 1:03:01.200
transmit information. Crypto assets give us a uniform interoperable public commons

501
1:03:02.000 --> 1:03:10.080
to trade things of value, whether they're fungible or non fungible. So let me see which is the next

502
1:03:10.080 --> 1:03:20.720
slide is. One more high-level model and people who follow me on twitter hear me talking all the time

503
1:03:20.720 --> 1:03:29.360
about memes and how we need to seize the memes or how the memes are the most important thing in the

504
1:03:29.360 --> 1:03:34.320
world and i think, some people think i'm joking but i'm actually not joking at all

505
1:03:34.320 --> 1:03:48.160
there's a great book called Sapiens by Yuval Harari which talks about myth how society works with

506
1:03:48.160 --> 1:03:54.880
myths or stories if you prefer or if you prefer, if you're a sociologist inter subjective

507
1:03:55.600 --> 1:04:01.760
realities and objective things are things like the computer i'm speaking to and the microphone,

508
1:04:01.760 --> 1:04:09.040
i'm speaking to objectively they're here subjective things, are kind of non-tangible

509
1:04:09.040 --> 1:04:14.400
things that i feel, right, i feel happy right now, i'm telling you that i feel happy but, i, you know

510
1:04:14.400 --> 1:04:20.880
there's really no way for you to see it or feel it inter subjective things are imaginary things.

511
1:04:20.880 --> 1:04:34.560
We believe together so imaginary things, we believe together, are that the Nike is a good brand

512
1:04:35.920 --> 1:04:42.240
but just do it makes us feel happy but just do it makes you want to buy a pair of shoes for more

513
1:04:42.240 --> 1:04:48.560
money than you would have otherwise, but wearing shoes with a swoosh on them, might make you more

514
1:04:48.560 --> 1:04:56.400
likely to jump higher or further or faster, so these inter subjective myths,

515
1:04:58.880 --> 1:05:07.600
are basically not different from the memes. They're basically not and you can say okay well

516
1:05:07.600 --> 1:05:15.440
that's fine but that's not the important stuff the important stuff is trucks and guns and oil and,

517
1:05:15.440 --> 1:05:24.960
and physical resources and cash flows and investment bankers and i disagree.

518
1:05:26.960 --> 1:05:34.560
All of those things are downstream from memes and myths.

519
1:05:36.240 --> 1:05:42.560
Nike has a lot of revenue and a lot of factories and a lot of distribution

520
1:05:42.560 --> 1:05:48.160
but the reason it has all these things is because people believe in the solution just do it and the

521
1:05:48.160 --> 1:05:55.600
general brand that has been built, and if that brand didn't exist, those would be less important and

522
1:05:55.600 --> 1:06:04.160
less successful. It's easy to see at a national level people are willing to

523
1:06:04.800 --> 1:06:11.520
unfortunately die, for national memes and myths and that might be good it might be bad it might be

524
1:06:11.520 --> 1:06:16.080
bad it might be noble it might not be but it's clearly the case that people are going to know.

525
1:06:17.600 --> 1:06:26.560
If you're very good medically if you're Obama and you say yes we can and you repeat it thousands of

526
1:06:26.560 --> 1:06:33.600
times, or if you're Donald Trump and you say make America great again and you repeat it thousands

527
1:06:33.600 --> 1:06:43.680
of times, and your meme your myth, that yes we can all do it together with solidarity or

528
1:06:44.560 --> 1:06:50.640
that America's on the decline but if we change how we operate it will be ascendant again. These

529
1:06:50.640 --> 1:06:58.080
are intersubjective myths their memes right that red hat make America red hats a meme.

530
1:06:58.080 --> 1:07:07.360
If you're very good at memes the population of the united states will reward you by making

531
1:07:07.360 --> 1:07:14.160
you the most powerful person in the world who can direct trillions of dollars of economic resources,

532
1:07:15.760 --> 1:07:19.920
and give you the power to end human life on earth.

533
1:07:19.920 --> 1:07:31.680
Armies are an important tangible thing they're not a meme, but who gives instructions

534
1:07:31.680 --> 1:07:40.080
to the army is the person who's good at memes, that's how you get elected and i think in the last

535
1:07:42.240 --> 1:07:48.720
16 years of politics if anyone previously had delusions that the reason you get elected is

536
1:07:48.720 --> 1:07:53.360
because you write very good policy papers, that should be over now right though

537
1:07:54.720 --> 1:08:02.160
well you get elected is by getting people to feel a certain way to organize a certain way to believe

538
1:08:02.160 --> 1:08:09.760
in a common reality a common intersubjective reality a myth a meme, and then human behavior

539
1:08:09.760 --> 1:08:21.680
organizes downstream from that. Long-winded way of saying nfts can be very important socially as well,

540
1:08:22.320 --> 1:08:29.440
because they give us direct access, to the underlying meme

541
1:08:31.840 --> 1:08:35.040
i don't think this has even played out one percent what am i about to say.

542
1:08:35.040 --> 1:08:40.560
If you are Nike and you are now the holder of a powerful myth

543
1:08:42.080 --> 1:08:50.880
you have to go through an extremely complicated set of activities designing shoes hiring athletes

544
1:08:50.880 --> 1:08:57.280
who are putting them on tv, running factories in Vietnam, shipping shoes across the ocean,

545
1:08:57.280 --> 1:09:02.880
shipping shoes across the country, having retail employees sell them to you accountants lawyers

546
1:09:02.880 --> 1:09:09.200
taxes money and bank accounts financial statements shareholder resolutions and you pay a dividend

547
1:09:09.200 --> 1:09:15.440
at the end you monetize that with a vastly complicated set of activities you take the

548
1:09:15.440 --> 1:09:20.320
meme that is intangible you make it tangible through a huge amount of human effort and billions of

549
1:09:20.320 --> 1:09:31.120
dollars of dividends got there. Here we can short circuit here we can hold the intellectual property

550
1:09:31.120 --> 1:09:35.120
directly the meme directly i say well why does it matter what can you do with it i think we're

551
1:09:35.120 --> 1:09:40.640
figuring that out i don't think it's actually this is not something where i can say on the next

552
1:09:40.640 --> 1:09:45.200
five slides i'm going to tell you what you can do when you see the meme no we're figuring that part

553
1:09:45.200 --> 1:09:54.480
out along the way. I believe this gives us the opportunity to change society for the better

554
1:09:55.520 --> 1:10:00.400
that when people say well i'm not happy with this societal system or i'm not happy with that

555
1:10:00.400 --> 1:10:05.920
societal system well societies are just made out of people right voters are just the people,

556
1:10:06.880 --> 1:10:14.560
you go to work with or go for drinks with, or hang out with, or i don't know go to sports games with

557
1:10:15.200 --> 1:10:21.040
those are those are the fellow voters everyone believes in memes, everyone believes in myths

558
1:10:21.760 --> 1:10:27.760
and when you change a medium you know the medium is the message every time there's a shift in medium,

559
1:10:27.760 --> 1:10:34.560
there's an opportunity for new messages to emerge and perhaps we have an opportunity for

560
1:10:34.560 --> 1:10:43.120
more pro-social messages to emerge for messages, that are more decentralized in nature that a society

561
1:10:43.120 --> 1:10:53.680
that gives more trust to people and spreads power more diffuser. I think there is that level

562
1:10:53.680 --> 1:11:02.880
of opportunity it's not easy the opposite could also happen right NFTs are politically neutral.

563
1:11:02.880 --> 1:11:11.040
Someone could use them to very effectively promote memes that are against perhaps the values

564
1:11:11.040 --> 1:11:15.520
the crypto community believes in so they're politically neutral like every other technology

565
1:11:15.520 --> 1:11:26.160
but, i think we will see a different way of organizing human activity just like tv organized

566
1:11:26.160 --> 1:11:32.640
human activity in a different way right tv was, a centralized force in American culture all of a

567
1:11:32.640 --> 1:11:40.080
sudden once broad network tv crossed across the country at the same time at the same hour across

568
1:11:40.080 --> 1:11:46.320
the gigantic country all people could watch the same show or listen to the same news anchor and

569
1:11:46.320 --> 1:11:54.640
that formed a form of certain social construction. Now we have the ability to form social construction

570
1:11:54.640 --> 1:12:00.640
in the natively digital environment that we live in and without the centralization that

571
1:12:00.640 --> 1:12:06.320
has happened with social media companies but it's not a sure thing this part's not a sure thing

572
1:12:06.320 --> 1:12:12.080
this part we have to work for. This part we have to figure out how to do it but i have a

573
1:12:12.080 --> 1:12:22.320
very very gut sense that it is possible, i think this is it on my high concept slides and

574
1:12:22.320 --> 1:12:26.400
hopefully this was comprehensible. Can we see the next slide please.

575
1:12:30.160 --> 1:12:34.160
I'm going to run through the rest of these slides quickly because i think for some of you

576
1:12:34.160 --> 1:12:38.400
these are over basic and in any case we're going to cover this in much more detail in future sessions

577
1:12:39.840 --> 1:12:44.960
early nft collections did have a collectible slash gaming flavor and you know now there's a big

578
1:12:44.960 --> 1:12:49.680
debate you know our punk's art or the collectibles or Pepe's art and the collectibles they certainly

579
1:12:49.680 --> 1:12:53.680
have some collectible type characteristics right even if they're art they certainly have

580
1:12:53.680 --> 1:12:58.720
collectible type characteristics and this is where the space started. Next slide please.

581
1:12:58.720 --> 1:13:06.960
PFPs are by far the largest market category today we'll talk about that in a couple weeks. Next slide.

582
1:13:09.200 --> 1:13:15.760
Of the more art oriented nfts generative art has found its natural medium on chain

583
1:13:16.400 --> 1:13:21.040
we'll have a whole session on generative art it's probably my favorite area of

584
1:13:21.920 --> 1:13:26.480
NFTs and i'm very much looking forward to that we have some of the greatest

585
1:13:26.480 --> 1:13:32.960
generative artists in the world joining us, to talk about generative art. Next slide.

586
1:13:35.360 --> 1:13:40.480
One-of-one art is really interesting it's such a token-based term right it's because,

587
1:13:41.600 --> 1:13:47.840
a lot of other tokens are not one-of-one but one-of-one art in the world at large, is just called

588
1:13:47.840 --> 1:13:56.560
art by a painting, not, an addition but one-of-one art is not one type of thing. It's many types of

589
1:13:56.560 --> 1:14:01.360
things again we have some great artists joining there. We'll talk about that in five weeks i think.

590
1:14:02.560 --> 1:14:08.800
Next slide. Gaming NFTs, metaverse oriented NFTs,

591
1:14:08.800 --> 1:14:19.360
this is not to say that we don't have these now we do but these are areas where people believe

592
1:14:20.000 --> 1:14:26.800
that, there's going to be tremendous growth and there's going to be tremendous growth in

593
1:14:28.160 --> 1:14:32.880
the coming years if you notice venture capital firms like entrees and Horowitz are funding

594
1:14:32.880 --> 1:14:40.400
an endless number of gaming studios to build blockchain centric gaming companies. So i suspect

595
1:14:40.400 --> 1:14:44.960
we'll see a lot of development over the next few years here and learn a lot more than we know today.

596
1:14:44.960 --> 1:14:55.200
Next slide. Utility-based NFTs are also an area that has not just a ton of potential but

597
1:14:55.200 --> 1:15:02.960
almost completely unexplored the most famous one is BNS, the ethereum name service where

598
1:15:03.920 --> 1:15:10.080
it is in some ways one of the most successful NFTs collections the domains are NFTs

599
1:15:13.760 --> 1:15:21.520
and it is a blockchain based domain service where the domain itself is an nft it's fabulously

600
1:15:21.520 --> 1:15:27.120
smart it's super successful. But you know the mint pass that you will use to attend this course

601
1:15:27.120 --> 1:15:32.560
that's also utility-based nft there's a nice piece of art associated with it but the primary use of

602
1:15:32.560 --> 1:15:37.280
it is to be able to enter the core spaces to be able to mint your certificate, at the end,

603
1:15:38.560 --> 1:15:45.280
there's a lot of potential utility-based nfts that we mostly have not yet fully explored. Next.

604
1:15:45.280 --> 1:15:58.400
This is the back end of my prior chart when we start representing real world objects on chain,

605
1:15:59.360 --> 1:16:08.000
as i said for big important objects like real estate, we need, regulatory bridges or some type

606
1:16:08.000 --> 1:16:11.600
of enforcement bridges for people to feel comfortable what you're saying now is super

607
1:16:11.600 --> 1:16:18.160
interesting experimentation this is a project by G-money where you mint an NFT, that NFT represents

608
1:16:19.360 --> 1:16:24.160
apparently an extremely fancy t-shirt i understand you can actually take possession of your

609
1:16:24.160 --> 1:16:29.040
t-shirt or they can store it for you i don't i haven't dug into it in detail but we're at the

610
1:16:29.040 --> 1:16:37.280
beginning of representation of visual objects as NFTs and it's logically going to start with

611
1:16:37.280 --> 1:16:43.520
less expensive items like 300 dollar t-shirts or expensive t-shirts but they are not actually

612
1:16:43.520 --> 1:16:49.760
highly expensive items in the house and as we learn more we'll move up the value chain into

613
1:16:49.760 --> 1:16:54.400
more and more expensive objects. But this area has been truly almost completely unexplored

614
1:16:54.400 --> 1:17:00.400
it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. Next slide. All of those are

615
1:17:00.400 --> 1:17:06.000
topics we are going to cover in the coming weeks. I want to talk just for a couple of minutes on

616
1:17:06.000 --> 1:17:14.320
market structure, to give a sense of where we are in overall size area of development what have you.

617
1:17:15.440 --> 1:17:22.880
The point that out this is in no way a comprehensive list of exchanges, there are many more exchanges,

618
1:17:22.880 --> 1:17:26.160
but to me the most interesting thing about exchanges,

619
1:17:26.160 --> 1:17:38.240
is in the NFT space, is that almost all of them operate on chain,

620
1:17:39.920 --> 1:17:44.480
which means you have data that you just didn't have

621
1:17:48.160 --> 1:17:49.840
with traditional centralized exchanges

622
1:17:49.840 --> 1:17:56.080
and traditional centralized exchanges report some data they might have an API they might

623
1:17:57.040 --> 1:18:05.360
they might share some stats and figures but they're not showing you every trade.

624
1:18:06.400 --> 1:18:13.280
That's in their own matching engine or whether it's open seer super rare looks rare,

625
1:18:13.280 --> 1:18:20.640
you can just go on the theorem blockchain and see every trade. It's a level of transparency

626
1:18:20.640 --> 1:18:26.720
that i don't think we've ever seen in markets and so this allows for a lot of data collection

627
1:18:26.720 --> 1:18:32.080
to minimum but it also allows i think for a more interesting and competitive environment

628
1:18:32.800 --> 1:18:39.440
looks rare, when it launched in a form of what is known as a vampire attack on open sea it basically

629
1:18:39.440 --> 1:18:45.920
dropped tokens on the large customers of open sea in the hope that this would

630
1:18:47.040 --> 1:18:49.280
incent them to move their business looks rare.

631
1:18:51.360 --> 1:18:53.840
Well you can't actually do that in the centralized one right like.

632
1:18:56.080 --> 1:19:03.600
Binance can't call up Coinbase and say hey brian i'd really appreciate it if you'd send me your

633
1:19:03.600 --> 1:19:10.080
customer list and in fact not just your customer list and their contact information but their bank

634
1:19:10.080 --> 1:19:18.080
accounts and also if you could be so kind as to rank all your customers in order profitability,

635
1:19:18.080 --> 1:19:21.520
because i really want to go after your profitable customers and take them from you.

636
1:19:21.520 --> 1:19:27.360
it'd be very much appreciated just just email it over me to hear CZ at binance.com right

637
1:19:27.360 --> 1:19:34.880
that's how it works this is like the most closely guarded data at one of these companies and in the

638
1:19:34.880 --> 1:19:39.840
NFT world it's all out there in the open not only it's not closely guarded it is literally not

639
1:19:39.840 --> 1:19:47.840
guarded at all it's on a public blockchain and once you've seen this, it actually feels strange to

640
1:19:47.840 --> 1:19:57.120
go back and if you're truly a believer in free markets, if our regulatory system could get past,

641
1:19:57.120 --> 1:20:05.600
its one-sided view of crypto we'll talk about that later, and think about what this can mean for

642
1:20:05.600 --> 1:20:14.480
capitalism for consumer surplus for, actual free markets, it's very good for consumers there's a

643
1:20:14.480 --> 1:20:20.000
reason that transaction fees are low and dropping in these marketplaces they'll continue to drop,

644
1:20:20.000 --> 1:20:27.760
because you can compete and you can compete in a way that you know nobody can compete with the Apple

645
1:20:27.760 --> 1:20:35.200
app store for apple devices so i think it's interesting that we'll have a pretty open and

646
1:20:35.200 --> 1:20:52.560
transparent view of the trading in this space. Let's go to the next chart. So this is a chart that

647
1:20:52.560 --> 1:21:02.720
comes from a team at the University of Nicosia called nftvaluations.com i'm an advisor to the

648
1:21:02.720 --> 1:21:08.400
team a bunch of other six-five to nine people advise the team they're trying to build up market

649
1:21:08.400 --> 1:21:20.320
caps of various collections token by token and the market cap in a fungible collection is easier

650
1:21:20.320 --> 1:21:23.840
right you just take the number of bitcoins you take the last trades you multiply those two

651
1:21:23.840 --> 1:21:28.800
together as you know that the market cap of bitcoin is 385 billion dollars, or whatever it is

652
1:21:28.800 --> 1:21:36.000
the market cap of the crypto punks is hard because sometimes some are alien, some are zombies, some

653
1:21:36.000 --> 1:21:44.160
are humans, some have hoodies, some have mohawks, some have the dreaded spotty face, i mean what you need

654
1:21:44.160 --> 1:21:49.360
to do is calculate the value of each one and then add it up and it's hard and on any given

655
1:21:49.360 --> 1:21:56.720
and on any given token you might be wrong, but i've seen the data that underlies this,

656
1:21:56.720 --> 1:22:01.520
it's certainly more than good enough for the purposes of this chart right any particular token

657
1:22:01.520 --> 1:22:08.400
might be wrong but in aggregate i think the mistakes cancel out, and what it says that for

658
1:22:08.400 --> 1:22:16.080
pfps and generative art and this data does not include one-of-one art yet, it does not include

659
1:22:16.080 --> 1:22:23.600
metaverse land, except, i think the other side land is in there um it does not include utility

660
1:22:23.600 --> 1:22:32.400
based which mostly don't exist except for ens and it does not include gaming, but it does have

661
1:22:32.400 --> 1:22:38.960
most of the major PFP and generative art collections the overall market cap is around 10 billion

662
1:22:38.960 --> 1:22:47.840
dollars today at peak happiness in the crypto markets, it was around 30 billion dollars.

663
1:22:47.840 --> 1:22:59.520
This matches my sense and so it's 10 billion, maybe with the other sectors in it's 15 billion

664
1:22:59.520 --> 1:23:09.280
something like that. What is my takeaway from this the space is still absolutely tiny, tiny,

665
1:23:10.240 --> 1:23:15.760
fungible tokens are we're flirting with a trillion dollars recently, in the peak they went almost

666
1:23:15.760 --> 1:23:22.880
at 3 trillion, i say this all the time to everyone i can find the only thing i'm a hundred

667
1:23:22.880 --> 1:23:30.480
percent sure, of is the current ratio of fungible token market cap and non fungible token market

668
1:23:30.480 --> 1:23:38.960
cap, which is today about about a hundred to one that ratio is wrong i think that ratio is going

669
1:23:38.960 --> 1:23:44.160
to get closer every year i think one year they eventually they're going to be more or less the

670
1:23:44.160 --> 1:23:50.640
same. That might take a decade but they're going to be more or less the same and they're probably

671
1:23:50.640 --> 1:23:54.240
going to be more or less the same at a higher number than we are today. Now.

672
1:23:57.600 --> 1:24:07.520
I got pretty active in the bitcoin world in summer 2013 and in those days the market cap of bitcoin

673
1:24:07.520 --> 1:24:16.160
would you know go to 5 billion dollars and maybe all of the other altcoins, maybe you'd get to 10

674
1:24:16.160 --> 1:24:22.800
billion i don't remember the details but it's in that range and this is what it actually feels to

675
1:24:22.800 --> 1:24:29.360
me this is what the maturity of the space feels to me like, it feels like 2013 era bitcoin it's

676
1:24:29.360 --> 1:24:37.280
about that size it's still a fairly close community, i tell people sometimes enjoy this is the time

677
1:24:37.280 --> 1:24:41.840
where if you're really active in the space you can sort of kind of feel like you know everyone

678
1:24:41.840 --> 1:24:48.640
you might not know them individually, but you know of them that's going to change, it's going to change

679
1:24:48.640 --> 1:24:52.400
fairly soon and it's going to change, because the space is going to get bigger and it's a good thing

680
1:24:53.280 --> 1:25:00.400
the space will get bigger it's a healthy thing but fairly soon you there'll be hundreds of things

681
1:25:00.400 --> 1:25:05.520
going on all over the world in all types of sectors and sub sectors of NFTs and you'll have no idea

682
1:25:05.520 --> 1:25:10.640
about them because you'll be focused on, you know generative art in south America or something

683
1:25:12.160 --> 1:25:19.840
but so i think the important takeaway it's still very early it means the space is also going to

684
1:25:19.840 --> 1:25:27.680
be hugely volatile, all crypto assets are volatile bitcoins the least volatile theorems a little bit

685
1:25:27.680 --> 1:25:32.800
more volatile the altcoins are more volatile than a theorem. NFTs are more volatile than all of them

686
1:25:32.800 --> 1:25:38.640
and that has to do with their level of maturity which is not very mature and by the way i just

687
1:25:38.640 --> 1:25:44.880
want to be clear and i reiterate George's not financial advice from the beginning.

688
1:25:46.800 --> 1:25:52.880
Just because the NFT space today is 10 billion dollars and i think one day it's going to be

689
1:25:52.880 --> 1:25:57.600
100 billion or a trillion it does not mean your NFTs are going to go up 10x or 100x.

690
1:25:57.600 --> 1:26:03.360
Your specific NFT might go to zero and that market cap could be in a new NFT collection

691
1:26:04.080 --> 1:26:10.960
NFTs do not have the same network effects that bitcoins right with bitcoin most of the value of

692
1:26:10.960 --> 1:26:18.320
the money currency commodity store value usage case, coalesced in one token that's definitely

693
1:26:18.320 --> 1:26:24.160
not going to happen in the NFTs space. NFTs represent a wide range of things we've been

694
1:26:24.160 --> 1:26:30.160
discussing so there's going to be a broad set of NFT tokens and collections that are carrying this

695
1:26:30.160 --> 1:26:37.680
market cap. The vast majority of them not yet invented so certain of course NFTs will do well

696
1:26:37.680 --> 1:26:43.520
over time, but, my perspective is not that the average NFT will do well over time economically

697
1:26:43.520 --> 1:26:47.120
in fact my perspective is actually close to the opposite the average NFT will not do well over

698
1:26:47.120 --> 1:26:53.520
time some of them will but most of them won't but what is absolutely the case is that NFTs

699
1:26:53.520 --> 1:26:59.840
as a category will do better and better and better every year, you know subject to the normal

700
1:26:59.840 --> 1:27:05.040
macroeconomic and crypto market cycles. Let's go to the next page.

701
1:27:12.240 --> 1:27:19.920
So these are the two different ways, that they calculate market cap anyway there for these

702
1:27:19.920 --> 1:27:25.840
purposes the same the interest is the thing, i would point out is among the two categories

703
1:27:25.840 --> 1:27:33.360
PFPs and generative art most of the market caps and PFPs and it'll be very interesting.

704
1:27:35.280 --> 1:27:38.880
if anyone can come up with a reasonable estimate for the value of one of one art,

705
1:27:38.880 --> 1:27:43.840
that's a very difficult problem because it basically never trades so we'll see what that looks like,

706
1:27:43.840 --> 1:27:49.120
but i'll be surprised if it's more than generative art right now i guess it's in the same range so

707
1:27:49.120 --> 1:27:53.760
it does mean that even though a lot of people say like oh i don't know about PFPs maybe they're not

708
1:27:53.760 --> 1:27:59.120
great, most of the market cap the market in aggregate values PFPs more than anything else.

709
1:27:59.120 --> 1:28:05.120
That might be wrong we'll see but it's what the case is today an interesting sub point a lot of

710
1:28:05.120 --> 1:28:13.840
that market cap is in the Yuga collections or Dapes, Apes, punks we have one of the co-founders

711
1:28:13.840 --> 1:28:18.320
of Yuga coming in a couple weeks we're going to discuss that and if that's healthy not healthy

712
1:28:18.320 --> 1:28:25.120
what it means how that space evolves but today the things you should take away is the space is

713
1:28:25.120 --> 1:28:30.960
10 15 billion dollars most of it pfps and as we'll see when we do the more detailed PFPs

714
1:28:30.960 --> 1:28:37.520
most of it in fact Yuga Labs manage PFPs so let's go to the next bench.

715
1:28:43.360 --> 1:28:44.320
Let's go to conclusions.

716
1:28:44.320 --> 1:28:54.560
Okay. Very, very high level uh summary and i think we cover this in more detail but

717
1:28:55.520 --> 1:29:02.320
NFTs are unique, enumerated contracts that can live on smart contract blockchains

718
1:29:04.400 --> 1:29:09.760
they will certainly there's already, certainly representing a lot of intangible objects and

719
1:29:09.760 --> 1:29:15.840
represent a lot more intangible objects and in time tangible objects the potential addressable

720
1:29:15.840 --> 1:29:29.280
market is gigantic but the current NFT market is tiny, so many exciting things have happened but it

721
1:29:29.280 --> 1:29:36.480
is still super immature super experimental many things are going to fail there are many new things,

722
1:29:36.480 --> 1:29:41.920
that we're going to invent along the way that have not been invented and so we're at the beginning,

723
1:29:41.920 --> 1:29:48.240
of the beginning, we'll have several cycles of up down and new inventions along the way over the

724
1:29:48.240 --> 1:29:53.600
next, you know, over the next decade. Let's see the next slide.

725
1:29:57.200 --> 1:30:04.960
We have put a little bit of extra greeting for those a little bit more technical you know

726
1:30:04.960 --> 1:30:12.160
or you can go see some of these standards of, how an NFT token is designed what are the design

727
1:30:12.160 --> 1:30:18.480
standards if you're not technical i think you're going to find the first four licks borderline

728
1:30:18.480 --> 1:30:24.960
incomprehensible and i wouldn't worry about it you know if you're more technical and you'll want

729
1:30:24.960 --> 1:30:32.320
to see the protocols it could be interesting. A lot of these big picture ideas i tweet a lot

730
1:30:32.320 --> 1:30:39.760
and tweet storms and that's the link to all the tweet storms but we're working on trying to get

731
1:30:39.760 --> 1:30:44.240
them in a format that people can read easier, so at some point during the course we'll have

732
1:30:44.240 --> 1:30:50.960
that and i'll share it and some of these topics you know real estate and memes and what have you

733
1:30:50.960 --> 1:30:57.840
are covered well in the tweet storms and so, we'll make that available and then the data we just saw

734
1:30:57.840 --> 1:31:05.040
on market cap came out of a report that the NFT valuations teams does have recorder,

735
1:31:05.920 --> 1:31:11.200
it's online, there's a link there they they have not learned to make it an NFT yet we should harass

736
1:31:11.200 --> 1:31:18.400
them to make it an NFT, but right now it looks like it's just a pdf on their server but there

737
1:31:18.400 --> 1:31:24.640
are some interesting facts and figures there to look at. Okay. I think these are our official

738
1:31:24.640 --> 1:31:33.360
slides i think incredibly George is going to come back here and what we're going to do is

739
1:31:34.160 --> 1:31:40.800
answer some questions and hopefully, the because, hopefully the team has been pulling together

740
1:31:41.840 --> 1:31:50.400
questions while we chat and maybe we can spend George, on 15 20 minutes answering questions

741
1:31:50.400 --> 1:31:57.360
something with them I think first of all thank you very much for this this was as always hugely

742
1:31:57.360 --> 1:32:03.760
enlightening. We are at the beginning of the beginning this is this is what what what I've kept

743
1:32:03.760 --> 1:32:10.480
and I think we're gonna be coming back to this thing later on. So first of all the team has been

744
1:32:10.480 --> 1:32:15.200
active in in the chat and they have been responding to people's questions

745
1:32:15.200 --> 1:32:24.720
and covered many of them uh there are a couple of questions i can i could relate them to you.

746
1:32:24.720 --> 1:32:30.720
One is - What are your thoughts about Manifold launching a gallery-themed marketplace yesterday?

747
1:32:32.400 --> 1:32:40.560
Well first of all I would say, I think Manifold is great I think they have done,

748
1:32:40.560 --> 1:32:51.840
the best work of anyone in terms of helping the community realize, it is doable manageable and

749
1:32:51.840 --> 1:33:03.920
with the help of their tools easy enough, to get to launch on your own contract. I've used

750
1:33:03.920 --> 1:33:10.560
manifold contracts for several things I found their tools helpful so I think Manifold's great

751
1:33:10.560 --> 1:33:14.160
i saw their announcement that they're going to make a marketplace.

752
1:33:16.480 --> 1:33:20.320
I think it's a logical move for them i think it is also,

753
1:33:23.760 --> 1:33:29.360
always a challenging business model. Marketplaces are very successful when they're successful

754
1:33:29.360 --> 1:33:39.040
and tough to break into when you're new. Right? So right now right now most

755
1:33:39.760 --> 1:33:47.360
over the volume by far is on Opensea and that makes open sea an extraordinarily valuable

756
1:33:47.360 --> 1:33:58.320
marketplace and there are endless teams, coming from different angles, to try and take some of

757
1:33:58.320 --> 1:34:05.520
that market share and some of them have taken some market share. But the competitive dynamics of

758
1:34:05.520 --> 1:34:12.720
who gets to be which win which part of the marketplace market share is probably the

759
1:34:12.720 --> 1:34:17.120
single most competitive thing in NFTs right because it's the single most valuable prize.

760
1:34:17.120 --> 1:34:22.800
If you can win it so i understand why they're doing it and i wish them luck because i think

761
1:34:22.800 --> 1:34:28.560
they're you know they're very good operators in the space they're promoting the right values but

762
1:34:28.560 --> 1:34:33.920
it's also not a sure thing because breaking the liquidity of another marketplace is hard.

763
1:34:37.600 --> 1:34:43.200
Okay thank you. There's another question that i think i can take it's uh it's technical about

764
1:34:43.200 --> 1:34:48.880
the course. When will the airdrop occur? I guess the question is about the airdrop of the material

765
1:34:48.880 --> 1:34:57.840
for week one the answer is that we have already started airdropping course material the first

766
1:34:57.840 --> 1:35:04.480
400 of you have already gotten the material this presentation in their wallets. The reason

767
1:35:04.480 --> 1:35:12.640
for the delay has been that we basically broke the limit anything about the 19 000 airdrops

768
1:35:13.280 --> 1:35:18.160
needed a special handling from us so we're doing it in batches so those of you that

769
1:35:18.160 --> 1:35:25.760
have minted the course NFT you should expect this presentation dropping to your wallet in the next

770
1:35:25.760 --> 1:35:33.600
couple of hours and then we're gonna be having multiple airdrops for the videos and everything

771
1:35:33.600 --> 1:35:41.760
else in the course please monitor our discord and twitter you see both in the slide here because

772
1:35:41.760 --> 1:35:49.120
we're gonna be announcing every time we're doing a an airdrop next question is actually very

773
1:35:49.120 --> 1:35:59.040
interesting. Is there a pull-up proof of attendance protocol to admit. 

774
1:36:01.440 --> 1:36:09.760
I mean i think the answer is no right now right but it's a very good idea but it's a good idea

775
1:36:09.760 --> 1:36:16.400
it's a very good idea and so, um and so, the

776
1:36:19.040 --> 1:36:25.440
we should do it for some event yeah yeah let's make a note let's make a note for that and

777
1:36:26.400 --> 1:36:30.240
get back to it it's a very good idea i think and some of the things that we are doing

778
1:36:31.200 --> 1:36:38.160
especially with our guests might, it might be a good thing for people to to have a proof

779
1:36:38.160 --> 1:36:44.480
of attendance on these events and i think as we roll out the campus over the next few weeks,

780
1:36:45.600 --> 1:36:54.080
this is going to become more more pertinent. I can actually see the question chance myself so

781
1:36:54.640 --> 1:37:04.080
oh nice. The Amazon web service is responsible for storing all of our NFTs well i

782
1:37:04.080 --> 1:37:08.080
don't know who our NFTs are but certainly not the ones for this course right the ones for these

783
1:37:08.080 --> 1:37:17.200
course are on Arwave i believe correct so no no we are we're all about decentralization

784
1:37:17.200 --> 1:37:21.760
and setting best practices so we will not be putting your NFTs on Amazon web services.

785
1:37:22.720 --> 1:37:28.800
Another similar technical question people asked. Why did we make the mint passes?

786
1:37:28.800 --> 1:37:36.800
As ERC 720 ones not 1155s and the answer is so we can track individuals right like so people can

787
1:37:36.800 --> 1:37:47.360
say this is the one that i got here and i did this over time when an 1155 doesn't 1155, is

788
1:37:47.360 --> 1:37:54.000
non fungible within is fungible within the context of a specific token right so if we want to say

789
1:37:54.000 --> 1:38:00.880
a student 1234, did these 18 things over the course of the semester

790
1:38:02.080 --> 1:38:10.160
we need a ERC 721 to do that george is that correct sir accurate yes yes i think it's a it's an accurate

791
1:38:10.160 --> 1:38:17.040
description. There's a similar question that says: If i transfer my course NFT to another

792
1:38:17.040 --> 1:38:24.480
wallet where the airdrops come to the new wallet? The answer is they should we as i've said in the

793
1:38:24.480 --> 1:38:31.680
beginning we are we're experimenting there we've done our tests at limited scale today if i'm not

794
1:38:31.680 --> 1:38:40.720
mistaken we have had up to 3000 people joining us live we have more than 20000 wallets connected

795
1:38:40.720 --> 1:38:47.920
and minting the course access token so what we're doing is we are we're querying the

796
1:38:47.920 --> 1:38:57.840
contract and we're looking at transfers, so we should be able to airdrop the, the, nfts to the

797
1:38:58.480 --> 1:39:06.400
current holder of the token this means that if you have minted your course access nft and then

798
1:39:06.400 --> 1:39:14.160
you transferred it to another wallet, all future airdrops will happen to the new wallet however,

799
1:39:14.160 --> 1:39:18.960
if there have been airdrops to the previous one obviously these are not going to be automatically

800
1:39:18.960 --> 1:39:24.400
transferred you would have to either leave them in the old wallet or manually transfer them there.

801
1:39:26.400 --> 1:39:31.440
I don't see why the team couldn't snapshot the new wallets for airdrops allow lists things like

802
1:39:31.440 --> 1:39:39.920
that so i think we'll be okay. 

803
1:39:44.240 --> 1:39:49.360
Oh here's a very good question: Are you going to issue soulbound NFTs for students who have

804
1:39:49.360 --> 1:39:56.240
completed the course? Very good it's a very good question. We have our initial view but we're going

805
1:39:56.240 --> 1:40:01.360
to think about it over the course of the semester and give a final answer at the end of the semester

806
1:40:01.360 --> 1:40:10.240
but my general view, is no we will not make them soulbound. Because my general view is let's say

807
1:40:10.240 --> 1:40:20.640
you want to hold this uh certificate for the next 40 years of your life there's zero chance you will

808
1:40:20.640 --> 1:40:26.880
not change wallets during that period in fact you will probably change wallets many many many

809
1:40:26.880 --> 1:40:32.640
times during that period and if you want so either that means you're going to be stuck

810
1:40:33.200 --> 1:40:40.320
maintaining an old wallet for the rest of your life just to hold a course nft or the University

811
1:40:40.320 --> 1:40:47.520
of Nicosia is going to have to provide customer support for the rest of your life, where they'll

812
1:40:47.520 --> 1:40:53.680
have to verify that you are now that new person in another wallet to transfer which seems quite

813
1:40:53.680 --> 1:41:02.480
difficult. So we um we think they will not be soulbound but probably once we get to the last

814
1:41:02.480 --> 1:41:08.000
few weeks of the course we'll come out with our logic on that and how specifically we think about

815
1:41:08.000 --> 1:41:18.400
doing that. Fair George yeah i think it's fair i as you said i too haven't made up my mind 100%

816
1:41:18.400 --> 1:41:25.040
about the applicability of soulbound tokens for for university degrees and

817
1:41:25.040 --> 1:41:32.400
certificates but given that long term there's as you said zero chance that people will not be

818
1:41:32.400 --> 1:41:39.360
migrating to new wallets and so on and so forth i think the default option should be that these

819
1:41:39.360 --> 1:41:47.440
things should be transferable. Now we need to figure out how we can make them transferable but

820
1:41:47.440 --> 1:41:53.840
not sellable because obviously we don't want people to go in a marketplace and sell

821
1:41:53.840 --> 1:42:00.000
their their degree to others uh that's that's that's totally an open question, we have some

822
1:42:00.000 --> 1:42:08.480
thoughts on that too but i think we should start with with a non soulbound token and you

823
1:42:08.480 --> 1:42:19.520
know be convinced otherwise. Next question. Are you scared of big brand style of centralization

824
1:42:20.240 --> 1:42:26.080
or should we embrace because there's truly room for both? So the answer that question is yes and yes

825
1:42:27.760 --> 1:42:37.200
i had many arguments discussions healthy debate vigorous debate on Twitter about this topic when

826
1:42:37.200 --> 1:42:43.120
big brands issued NFTs right and a lot of people said well we don't like it that Adidas did an

827
1:42:43.120 --> 1:42:51.760
nft draw we want to be here for the independent artists right and i'll answer the second question

828
1:42:52.320 --> 1:42:56.800
first first of all it's a permissionless network anyone just like an independent artist can

829
1:42:56.800 --> 1:43:01.920
issue an NFT Adidas can issue an NFT and they don't have to ask our permission to do so right

830
1:43:01.920 --> 1:43:07.360
and if a lot of people went and spend a lot of money on the Adidas NFT and it suggests that people

831
1:43:07.360 --> 1:43:13.040
want the Adidas NFT right if everyone really didn't want the Adidas NFT it wouldn't have been to them.

832
1:43:13.840 --> 1:43:19.920
Right? It can't be like it's very very bad a lot of people bought it if a lot of people bought it

833
1:43:19.920 --> 1:43:25.520
a lot of people wanted but to me and my things that i care about which is ensuring that our

834
1:43:25.520 --> 1:43:34.080
digital world in the future, the metaverse is decentralized well if Adidas doesn't issue an NFT

835
1:43:35.360 --> 1:43:41.120
it's not like the alternative is Adidas will not participate in the digital economy Adidas

836
1:43:41.120 --> 1:43:46.000
will participate in the digital economy anyway and they will issue some type of digital collectible

837
1:43:46.000 --> 1:43:52.160
on Facebook and the same people who like Adidas and buy Adidas shoes will buy the digital collectible

838
1:43:52.160 --> 1:44:00.240
on Facebook and Adidas will earn the same amount of money from doing this and promote centralization.

839
1:44:00.880 --> 1:44:09.600
Whereas if Adidas issues on an nft instead Adidas and its market power is promoting decentralization

840
1:44:09.600 --> 1:44:15.840
so between the two there's no actual option to say Adidas should stop earning revenue and people

841
1:44:15.840 --> 1:44:20.320
should stop spending money on adidas right they will this is going to happen and so if that's

842
1:44:20.320 --> 1:44:26.080
the case do we want them on our decentralized quote unquote rails or do we want them on someone

843
1:44:26.080 --> 1:44:35.200
else's centralized rails i prefer that they come with us. Now does this create a risk that people might

844
1:44:36.640 --> 1:44:45.040
or big brands might successfully centralize the space? Yes, for sure the big brands are excellent

845
1:44:45.040 --> 1:44:50.960
meme makers they're excellent myth makers they have millions of customers they have years of

846
1:44:50.960 --> 1:45:00.400
marketing people like them and so there is a window now, where new crypto native communities brands

847
1:45:00.400 --> 1:45:05.440
ideas can emerge but that window won't be open forever right eventually the big brands are going

848
1:45:05.440 --> 1:45:11.520
to come and they are going to be successful and we have to in the meantime stand up some of our own

849
1:45:11.520 --> 1:45:19.280
brands some of our own communities some of our own ethos, to be able to hold their own with them

850
1:45:20.000 --> 1:45:28.800
it's also why i sometimes laugh when you know people think that certain artists and

851
1:45:31.360 --> 1:45:38.400
certain artists, are minting too much or becoming too big. None of this is true.

852
1:45:38.400 --> 1:45:45.600
Everything in the NFT space all together is still a rounding error versus the big brands big

853
1:45:45.600 --> 1:45:55.520
society centralized society and so forth, this if we want to be successful in the world of large

854
1:45:55.520 --> 1:46:02.640
we have to get bigger all of the big nft native brands need to get bigger so that when we're 15

855
1:46:02.640 --> 1:46:08.400
years talking about Disney and Nike and Adidas and apple we're also talking about 10 other

856
1:46:09.360 --> 1:46:15.120
brands that got built in this era and that have decentralization as their underlying ethos

857
1:46:15.120 --> 1:46:21.120
otherwise all that's going to happen is only the big brands will go away there's no version

858
1:46:21.120 --> 1:46:34.160
where we can only stay small i don't i don't think that actually happens

859
1:46:36.800 --> 1:46:42.320
Okay. I think there's a related question regarding to regarding big brands, whether

860
1:46:42.320 --> 1:46:48.000
they will be in the path of decentralization the future so for example if you see Facebook

861
1:46:48.000 --> 1:46:52.400
or twitter become decentralized in a few years from now, what are your thoughts on this.

862
1:46:53.280 --> 1:47:01.200
Well is that the question about tech companies being decentralized or is it about brands being

863
1:47:01.200 --> 1:47:05.760
decentralized so i think well the first part of the question is about brands and then the example

864
1:47:05.760 --> 1:47:11.120
that the student offers is about Facebook and Twitter but i think we can take both.

865
1:47:11.120 --> 1:47:23.600
Okay one second. So let's take brands first because this is

866
1:47:26.640 --> 1:47:36.640
a very interesting topic the i think of something like Nouns right. Nouns is trying to build

867
1:47:36.640 --> 1:47:44.960
a very decentralized brand right they are they have their Nouns glasses and they're of course token

868
1:47:44.960 --> 1:47:58.880
based and the actual imagery is CC0 public domain imagery and so anyone can use their brand

869
1:47:58.880 --> 1:48:04.640
imagery and punk 4156 who's one of the founders there is going to come on the course later in

870
1:48:04.640 --> 1:48:12.160
the semester to talk about this and i think his view is that network brands that take advantage

871
1:48:12.160 --> 1:48:19.200
of tokens and social media and public domain IP will actually emerge and be able to compete with

872
1:48:19.200 --> 1:48:24.880
big brands, because they'll use the power of networks it's a very interesting question it's a very

873
1:48:24.880 --> 1:48:32.160
interesting experiment nobody has nobody knows how it's going to play out, but i very much look forward

874
1:48:32.160 --> 1:48:37.040
to seeing it now to another question you know will we have decentralized social media in effect.

875
1:48:39.760 --> 1:48:48.880
I think the answer is yes. I've also thought that for many years and i think it's less likely that

876
1:48:48.880 --> 1:48:55.520
it's because Twitter will become decentralized on the blockchain or have you in fact Elon Musk

877
1:48:55.520 --> 1:49:01.920
yesterday said specifically that he does not want to do that he does not think the scalability is

878
1:49:01.920 --> 1:49:07.360
there, to run a Twitter like service on blockchain whether he's right or wrong that's what he believes

879
1:49:07.360 --> 1:49:17.840
sounds to me that Elon wants to build the western We-chat uh but i do think some version will emerge

880
1:49:17.840 --> 1:49:24.000
but it's like the it's like the marketplace question. Twitter has gigantic network effects.

881
1:49:24.000 --> 1:49:29.920
Facebook has gigantic network effects what is the thing that is interesting enough

882
1:49:29.920 --> 1:49:36.000
to pull people away and my guess is with always these things it's not going to be Twitter 2.0

883
1:49:36.640 --> 1:49:40.800
and there's a lot of people trying to make Twitter 2.0 trying to make twitter but decentralized

884
1:49:40.800 --> 1:49:48.880
and i wish them the best and i hope it works but my gut sense is people get disrupted not by just

885
1:49:48.880 --> 1:49:53.680
the exact same version of what they are but decentralized they get disrupted by something

886
1:49:53.680 --> 1:49:58.560
that they don't think is a competitor at first they look at something say okay this is not a

887
1:49:58.560 --> 1:50:02.800
competitor i think the thing that will disrupt Twitter is something that when twitter sees it

888
1:50:02.800 --> 1:50:07.120
on day one and year one i was saying this is not a competitor to me at all i don't have to worry about

889
1:50:08.080 --> 1:50:12.320
and it's going to come from a completely different angle that architecture will be decentralized

890
1:50:12.880 --> 1:50:18.320
and then one day it will be taking market share from Twitter in the same way that Twitter today

891
1:50:18.320 --> 1:50:23.520
takes market share from the new york times and at some point you know 15 years ago if you told the

892
1:50:23.520 --> 1:50:30.720
new york times you are going to lose market share and brand share and setting the agenda for the

893
1:50:30.720 --> 1:50:38.640
world share to Twitter it would be a laughable proposition and yet it happened and so i think

894
1:50:38.640 --> 1:50:45.040
it won't happen but probably not in a direct clone but i wish the direct clones luck and maybe

895
1:50:45.040 --> 1:50:49.680
hopefully some of them will work i've supported some of them a direct clone would also be helpful

896
1:50:49.680 --> 1:50:54.480
and but i think it's going to look a little different.

897
1:50:58.400 --> 1:51:05.280
Okay. We are we're closing to two hours i know we've said that its live session would be one hour

898
1:51:05.280 --> 1:51:12.320
long but I guess this one was would have to be longer anyway because we needed to cover the

899
1:51:12.320 --> 1:51:18.960
course logistics as well. I think we've covered most of the questions that were related to this

900
1:51:18.960 --> 1:51:26.800
week's material i see a number of questions in the chat but they are related to stuff that we will

901
1:51:26.800 --> 1:51:36.640
cover in the future we have another 11 weeks ahead of us so let's not cover everything today.

902
1:51:38.240 --> 1:51:45.520
I guess we could wrap it up at this point 6529 any final parting thoughts

903
1:51:45.520 --> 1:51:53.200
because before i give people a few practical pointers to the future. No, i think it's great

904
1:51:53.200 --> 1:51:58.320
look we have i don't know 30 40 50 sessions in bound so we'll have plenty of time to cover a lot

905
1:51:58.320 --> 1:52:05.760
of topics if you are not following the UNIC metaverse Twitter account and discord please do.

906
1:52:05.760 --> 1:52:10.640
For now this is probably the only centralized part in the infrastructure and we're trying to think

907
1:52:10.640 --> 1:52:15.600
about how to eliminate that as well but for the next few weeks i think that is real it's a real

908
1:52:15.600 --> 1:52:24.000
thing and so do follow it and there are going to be ongoing developments every few days so keep an eye

909
1:52:24.640 --> 1:52:31.040
there so you you know you know what's going to happen. Absolutely we're going to be using both

910
1:52:31.040 --> 1:52:37.040
twitter and discord to announce things almost on a daily basis because we're we're building

911
1:52:37.040 --> 1:52:43.280
around the clock so as 6529 said please follow us on twitter and make sure that you

912
1:52:44.080 --> 1:52:49.600
keep an eye on discord especially in the announcements uh discord is our primary

913
1:52:50.240 --> 1:52:57.360
course support channel as well uh you can email us at metaverse@unic.ac.cy

914
1:52:58.320 --> 1:53:05.120
although I would uh say that discord will probably result in a faster resolution

915
1:53:05.120 --> 1:53:11.920
of whatever issue you have. I would like to remind everyone that the next live session for week

916
1:53:11.920 --> 1:53:17.520
two which uh is going to be about copyright and provenance will take place on Wednesday

917
1:53:17.520 --> 1:53:26.240
so that's October the 12th same time 5pm eastern European standard time Cyprus time so

918
1:53:26.240 --> 1:53:34.000
looking forward to seeing everyone then uh in the meantime uh have fun and uh keep an eye on your

919
1:53:34.000 --> 1:53:39.440
wallets because we're going to be air dropping uh lots of things uh to your wallets in the coming

920
1:53:39.440 --> 1:53:57.280
days bye bye everyone bye bye bye