The Exchanges

Q My question to you is like, when was that inflation point? What was the tipping point where it was like, boom, this is really taking off in a way we did not expect. Was there a moment or a period where it really became clear?

A Maybe two, like to August of last year, like, you know, we started having more competitors and like people started paying a little more attention to the NFT space. And, you know, it was kind of clear and, you know, volume started kind of going generally upwards. So it was clear there was momentum building and about a year ago, and that's when we sort of started like, okay, we started saying, okay, we need to kind of hire and be more ready for this. Cause it's starting to happen. Our more art projects were online, more artists were doing things, more people were paying attention. And then the other big inflection point was, so I think in January, we did about eight million dollars of transaction volume. In February, we did ninety five million in transaction volume. And then in March, it was like one hundred and sixty million. So that course of three months was like a big step function. There was sort of this pent up excitement around NFTs that hadn't really gone viral into the crypto community. And that sort of started to happen in those months, right? Where like you had these projects that launched that That really got people excited and then people would buy and sell them on secondary marketplaces. And then similarly, there's a similar inflection point from like July to August of this year, where we went from about three hundred fifty million to 3.4 billion dollars of transact…

AI assessment note: “In February, we did ninety five million in transaction volume. And then in March”

Q little bit about kind of the gaming elements within NFTs, and, you know, we've seen multiple of Kind of adjacencies away from collectibles, you know, more and more we see elements like utility and the experience layer of NFTs. You know, we mentioned before, you know, Axie, there's SoRare, there's many others. How do you think about interacting with these communities that are maybe external to a centralized NFT marketplace?

A Yeah, well, I mean, for, it depends on the project, right? So, for a lot of games, we're the main place where people will buy and sell the items. So, good examples, like CryptoVoxels, or Zed Run, or Where they don't have their own secondary marketplace and, you know, they rely on OpenSea. And one of the exciting things about OpenSea is that when someone transacts on OpenSea, the project can actually take a percentage of the sale. And so there's this nice symbiotic relationship where the project earns when a sale occurs, which is really important. Other times, you know, there is like sort of an internal in-game marketplace, like in the case of Axie, which has its own chain. And so it's sort of like a separate ecosystem and the interaction there is a little bit less. And then sort of somewhere in the middle where like they have their own marketplace, but like the items are viewable on OpenSea. There were sort of like this, you know, visualizer explorer for all the content and sort of a proof of authenticity for, for the NFT. So there's a variety of ways we can interact with games. The one that we really try to strive towards is providing a really good marketplace for games so they don't have to build it themselves, but they can still monetize.

AI assessment note: “There's a variety of ways we can interact with games.”

Q Okay, so that's what they are, and this was a power challenge. He goes, ask him, why are they so fucking interesting and exciting, then?

A Well, I think they're really interesting because, you know, it's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet, right? And there's all of these sort of interesting implications to that. If you look at kind of what are the emergent properties that NFTs have, one is they're like immutable. And depending on the NFT, you can sort of be guaranteed that they're going to be around for a long period of time, and they're not going to necessarily just change all of a sudden. Two is liquidity, right? You can Trade them, or you can buy and sell them openly on marketplaces. Three is like global transferability, right? So you can transfer them anywhere around the world freely, regardless of like where you live. So there's a host of other like sort of special properties that emerge, but all of these things are just like really interesting building blocks. If you're thinking about a new application to build that couldn't exist without sort of these digital objects with those sorts of rights

AI assessment note: “it's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet”

Q little bit about kind of the gaming elements within NFTs, and, you know, we've seen multiple of Kind of adjacencies away from collectibles, you know, more and more we see elements like utility and the experience layer of NFTs. You know, we mentioned before, you know, Axie, there's SoRare, there's many others. How do you think about interacting with these communities that are maybe external to a centralized NFT marketplace?

A Yeah, well, I mean, for, it depends on the project, right? So, for a lot of games, we're the main place where people will buy and sell the items. So, good examples, like CryptoVoxels, or Zed Run, or Where they don't have their own secondary marketplace and, you know, they rely on OpenSea. And one of the exciting things about OpenSea is that when someone transacts on OpenSea, the project can actually take a percentage of the sale. And so there's this nice symbiotic relationship where the project earns when a sale occurs, which is really important. Other times, you know, there is like sort of an internal in-game marketplace, like in the case of Axie, which has its own chain. And so it's sort of like a separate ecosystem and the interaction there is a little bit less. And then sort of somewhere in the middle where like they have their own marketplace, but like the items are viewable on OpenSea. There were sort of like this, you know, visualizer explorer for all the content and sort of a proof of authenticity for, for the NFT. So there's a variety of ways we can interact with games. The one that we really try to strive towards is providing a really good marketplace for games so they don't have to build it themselves, but they can still monetize.

AI assessment note: “So there's a variety of ways we can interact with games.”

Q Not at all. I've wanted to do this one actually for, for a while now, so I want to start with some context here. We see OpenSea today, this incredible company with incredible trajectory. What was the founding moment for you, and how did it all start, Devon? Sure.

A Yeah. I mean, it really started with just an interest in crypto more generally. So back in 2017, I'd followed, you know, crypto peripherally, but I'd never really like sunk my teeth into it and gotten my hands dirty with playing around with smart contracts, seeing what was available and reading the white papers. Going to meetups actually at the time was a really great way to kind of get deeper into all the things that were happening in crypto at the time. But yeah, I got very academically interested in crypto with my co-founder and started thinking of different Crypto ideas. A lot of the trend at the time was sort of like, think about a marketplace and build it in a decentralized way. So the first idea that we had was building this decentralized marketplace for sharing internet bandwidth. And that was the idea that we got into Y Combinator with, but we ended up sort of being more interested in this early sort of more mainstream use case for crypto, which was really pioneered by CryptoKitties, which was one of the first NFTs. In the first blockchain game and just thought that was really cool. Like I hadn't been super deep in like gaming. So I realized like how much fun it was to like build in the gaming ecosystem and sort of started thinking about ideas related to crypto kitties and this idea of sort of a more generic marketplace for digital stuff, which, you know, the idea was …

AI assessment note: “we decided to go and build it and kind of pivoted from our original idea”

Q Well, today we've seen the majority in collectibles as a format. Like, how do you see the most popular use cases of NFTs, and how do you expect this to change over time?

A Yeah, so certainly around collectibles, I think game items is, is another emerging category that, that has taken off to some extent with games like Axie Infinity or Decentraland or Sandbox. I think gaming is this really interesting natural fit for NFTs because people have been buying digital items online For quite some time now and spent, for example, billions of dollars buying virtual clothing and some, a game like Fortnite. And so gamers are already used to digital things having value. They've just sort of been confined to these like closed worlds, right? You know, it's hard for you to go and like take something inside of Fortnite and bring it into some other game and some other developer. I think that concept of like, you know, open worlds, open economic systems inside of games is one that's very early. And it's going to be really exciting.

AI assessment note: “I think game items is, is another emerging category that, that has taken off”

Q My question to you is like, when was that inflation point? What was the tipping point where it was like, boom, this is really taking off in a way we did not expect. Was there a moment or a period where it really became clear?

A Maybe two, like to August of last year, like, you know, we started having more competitors and like people started paying a little more attention to the NFT space. And, you know, it was kind of clear and, you know, volume started kind of going generally upwards. So it was clear there was momentum building and about a year ago, and that's when we sort of started like, okay, we started saying, okay, we need to kind of hire and be more ready for this. Cause it's starting to happen. Our more art projects were online, more artists were doing things, more people were paying attention. And then the other big inflection point was, so I think in January, we did about eight million dollars of transaction volume. In February, we did ninety five million in transaction volume. And then in March, it was like one hundred and sixty million. So that course of three months was like a big step function. There was sort of this pent up excitement around NFTs that hadn't really gone viral into the crypto community. And that sort of started to happen in those months, right? Where like you had these projects that launched that That really got people excited and then people would buy and sell them on secondary marketplaces. And then similarly, there's a similar inflection point from like July to August of this year, where we went from about three hundred fifty million to 3.4 billion dollars of transact…

AI assessment note: “In January, we did about eight million... In February, we did ninety five million”

Q Not at all. I've wanted to do this one actually for, for a while now, so I want to start with some context here. We see OpenSea today, this incredible company with incredible trajectory. What was the founding moment for you, and how did it all start, Devon? Sure.

A Yeah. I mean, it really started with just an interest in crypto more generally. So back in 2017, I'd followed, you know, crypto peripherally, but I'd never really like sunk my teeth into it and gotten my hands dirty with playing around with smart contracts, seeing what was available and reading the white papers. Going to meetups actually at the time was a really great way to kind of get deeper into all the things that were happening in crypto at the time. But yeah, I got very academically interested in crypto with my co-founder and started thinking of different Crypto ideas. A lot of the trend at the time was sort of like, think about a marketplace and build it in a decentralized way. So the first idea that we had was building this decentralized marketplace for sharing internet bandwidth. And that was the idea that we got into Y Combinator with, but we ended up sort of being more interested in this early sort of more mainstream use case for crypto, which was really pioneered by CryptoKitties, which was one of the first NFTs. In the first blockchain game and just thought that was really cool. Like I hadn't been super deep in like gaming. So I realized like how much fun it was to like build in the gaming ecosystem and sort of started thinking about ideas related to crypto kitties and this idea of sort of a more generic marketplace for digital stuff, which, you know, the idea was …

AI assessment note: “pivoted from our original idea into that”

Q How do you think about NFTs as status symbols now and the social capital associated to it? As you mentioned there, it is this incredible symbol of pride for someone that they put it on all their socials. How do you think about NFT as status?

A Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of like the first, it seems to be the first kind of killer use case, right, is just purchasing this to symbolize that you're part of Some exclusive club, right? And now there's, especially as things are starting to open up, I think there's like an, even an in-person element to where people are talking about kind of like what things they bought. And, you know, there's now these crypto folks who are willing, who are looking to kind of spend on something in the same way that, you know, someone who on wall street might like spend money on, you know, a nice watch or something like that. It's now the equivalent of that in the digital world. So I think it's a lot of the same patterns that humans are Have adopted in physical society applied to the digital world. And I think that's one element of the NFT space, but I think it goes much more broad than that. And, you know, it's not necessarily just about status. It's about being a part of a community, you know, building interesting things that you can do with NFTs, right? If you look at the loot project, building like brand new experiences and building better experiences than you could without that sort of like Coordination layer that NFTs provide, where you can have this item that can kind of live across multiple different applications. So I think the data stuff is interesting, but I think it's just sor…

AI assessment note: “purchasing this to symbolize that you're part of Some exclusive club”

Q Now, I apologize for the base question here, but we have a general audience, and I want to make sure that everyone kind of follows the conversation with us. So first, starting with the core, what is an NFT?

A Yeah, totally. So an NFT stands for non-fungible token, but you can kind of think of it as like a digital thing on the internet that you own in kind of a similar way that you might own a physical item. You know, when you own a physical thing, like a chair or something like that, you can kind of like do whatever you want with that thing. You can like Throw it away. You can give it to a friend. You can go and like put it for sale on eBay. Whereas with digital stuff, you know, you own digital stuff in a variety of contexts. Like maybe you own an item inside of a video game, or like you own your Twitter handle to some extent, or like domain names. A lot of people own domain names, but you don't necessarily have like the same property rights that over those items that you have in the physical world. For example, an item inside of a video game, maybe you can kind of like move it around in the video game, but you You can't necessarily go and, like, sell it on some other marketplace or, like, freely gift it. So, NFTs are these digital items that have those property rights kind of baked into them. Again, in the same way that, like, something like Bitcoin or Ethereum is a currency, and there have been many different digital currencies, but they sort of have those, like, you know, property rights associated with them that make them really exciting.

AI assessment note: “NFTs are these digital items that have those property rights kind of baked into them”

Q Okay, so that's what they are, and this was a power challenge. He goes, ask him, why are they so fucking interesting and exciting, then?

A Well, I think they're really interesting because, you know, it's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet, right? And there's all of these sort of interesting implications to that. If you look at kind of what are the emergent properties that NFTs have, one is they're like immutable. And depending on the NFT, you can sort of be guaranteed that they're going to be around for a long period of time, and they're not going to necessarily just change all of a sudden. Two is liquidity, right? You can Trade them, or you can buy and sell them openly on marketplaces. Three is like global transferability, right? So you can transfer them anywhere around the world freely, regardless of like where you live. So there's a host of other like sort of special properties that emerge, but all of these things are just like really interesting building blocks. If you're thinking about a new application to build that couldn't exist without sort of these digital objects with those sorts of rights

AI assessment note: “it's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet”

Q hyper growth, but I do want to start with a sense of chronology because, you know, it's been an incredible last 18 months or so. But as I said, I spoke to Alexis Ohanian before the show, and he suggested that I ask a question around YC Demo Day. He said it was in the middle of crypto winter. How was that experience for you, and how did that go?

A Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of fun. Like, I think YC Demo Day, there were only a couple of crypto companies, maybe like five or six crypto companies. You know, at that time, we had, like, sort of built the product Launched it and kind of gotten early traction, but it was very early. And, you know, I would say like, you know, we got positive reception from some VCs and like others were rightly like more skeptical or just not interested. And certainly like there continues to be a whole section of tech that just thinks crypto is, is not sort of an interesting phenomenon, but yeah, you know, like after demo day, we raised from sort of a mix of both like traditional investors and Crypto investors who were more kind of sold on the vision of NFTs. It wasn't as crazy of a funding environment back then as it is today, where it's just like so easy to go and raise a giant seed round and an insane valuation. It was a lot more conservative, but you know, there were still a lot of people that got excited by the idea of OpenSea.

AI assessment note: “after demo day, we raised from sort of a mix of both”

Q Three billion plus in GMV, and scaling that fast, I mean, it's just, it's almost unprecedented. My question, actually, I can't take it, it's Avichael's question, but he's at the, you know, scaling so fast, what are the biggest challenges, and what breaks first?

A A couple things, like customer support becomes a really big challenge, right, because there's just more people, and you know, you hadn't really built out that org or function, so that is one of the main things, and especially with a product that is still very early adopter, Phase, right? Where, like, there's so much new stuff. There's wallets. There's all these things. So that's been an org that we're, like, continuing to scale and build out. Obviously, like, platform, right? So, you know, dealing with more web traffic and more site usage and more, like, you know, deploys become riskier, right? Because they impact more people. So that's another one. And then, of course, like, as an extremely young company, like, and this probably isn't the case for every company, because I think some tend to develop this more Earlier, but like just operations of the company, so like basic HR, basic finance, basic legal, like all of those things, you know, you sort of have to really quickly kind of ensure that you're equipped there. I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust and safety, so ensuring that people aren't selling fraudulent items, and then core platform.

AI assessment note: “I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust”

Q Can I ask, when you put on the contemplative hat and you look back at the last year and the growth of NFTs, what surprised you most?

A Yeah, I think the thing that surprised me was just like that the cultural movement around crypto was what drove the NFT movement to be big, right? So like, you know, you look at these sort of profile picture projects, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but basically it's like, you know, people collecting digital art and then setting them as their Twitter profile, right? So people will collect a CryptoPunk, which is this sort of antique NFT, and set it as their profile picture. And that Whole phenomenon, which is really, like, this growing community of people with all of these interesting, like, cultural norms associated with them, and, like, ways of interacting online, really rallying around this idea of, like, a collectible that you can own and just have people admire. That phenomenon, I didn't think was sort of what would drive a wave of excitement around NFTs. You know, I sort of had more of a thesis around, like, Games or things that are useful or like inherently useful NFTs versus these like more collectible use cases.

AI assessment note: “the thing that surprised me was just like that the cultural movement around crypto”

Q before that you said about the transaction volumes, and you know, I see so many founders chasing GMB today, and Bill Gurley from Benchmark said on the show, you know, not all GMB is equal. How do you think about the North Star metric for you, which determines success with OpenSea? Is it purely GMB chase? How do you think about that, and bluntly, the other elements to focus on?

A We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMB, right? We look at Number of transactions, right? So number of sales as a more healthy metric, because that's an indicator of, are people able to sell the stuff that they want to sell in the marketplace? And then also, is the NFT space sort of providing value to users in an interesting way, right? So a game economy, for example, can have items that sell for like, 50 cents each, all the way up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, and each one of those transactions could be really valuable to a user. So we don't just look at GMB as such a skewed metric, because if Things are selling for really high prices and yeah, you can have really huge GMV growth, but we tend to sort of be more grounded in like number of transactions, which again is also going to be influenced by the growth of the market. And then also just how many people are coming to the website with a wallet connected.

AI assessment note: “We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMB, right? We look at Number of transactions”

Q horribly macro question, but I am just intrigued. And I got asked it the other day and it's how do you respond to the statement? That NFTs do more harm than help income inequality. When you look at a lot of the people that made money in the early days, it's been quite centralized, tax centric, mostly male. How do you think there's more to harm than hurt income inequality?

A Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's definitely like a huge concern. You have to kind of look at things from like the short-term lens and the long-term lens, right? So the short-term lens, I'm not sure the breakdown, but a lot of the people who have made the most money from NFTs are probably the people who are already made a lot of money from crypto, for example, right? Long-term, like, if you think about the potential of NFTs, really what we're talking about is a way for, or one segment of this market is really a way for artists and creators to directly monetize their work and directly tap into their fan bases and have those people support them, right? So on the contrary side, we also know people who have, you know, paid off student loans by selling digital art as NFTs, right? Or creators or musicians who Maybe we're making a very small amount using Spotify and like sort of the pay to stream model, but now we're able to actually really effectively monetize as a creator or musician using NFT. So it opens up a brand new business model for these types of folks. On the flip side, there's a lot of success stories of people who didn't come from as wealthy financial backgrounds who have been able to reach people who want to support them more effectively. And same story with charities and all these things. And I'm not saying that that equation like nets out to something that, you know, is, …

AI assessment note: “long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone”

Q Now, I apologize for the base question here, but we have a general audience, and I want to make sure that everyone kind of follows the conversation with us. So first, starting with the core, what is an NFT?

A Yeah, totally. So an NFT stands for non-fungible token, but you can kind of think of it as like a digital thing on the internet that you own in kind of a similar way that you might own a physical item. You know, when you own a physical thing, like a chair or something like that, you can kind of like do whatever you want with that thing. You can like Throw it away. You can give it to a friend. You can go and like put it for sale on eBay. Whereas with digital stuff, you know, you own digital stuff in a variety of contexts. Like maybe you own an item inside of a video game, or like you own your Twitter handle to some extent, or like domain names. A lot of people own domain names, but you don't necessarily have like the same property rights that over those items that you have in the physical world. For example, an item inside of a video game, maybe you can kind of like move it around in the video game, but you You can't necessarily go and, like, sell it on some other marketplace or, like, freely gift it. So, NFTs are these digital items that have those property rights kind of baked into them. Again, in the same way that, like, something like Bitcoin or Ethereum is a currency, and there have been many different digital currencies, but they sort of have those, like, you know, property rights associated with them that make them really exciting.

AI assessment note: “an NFT stands for non-fungible token, but you can kind of think of it as”

Q The question was whether that's sort of one of the, how key is interoperability to the rise and their importance moving forward?

A Well, I mean, I think it's one of the really interesting things about it, but you know, interestingly enough, You know, the NFT space has grown significantly without that being a use case yet, right? It's like sort of still in people's imagination. Most of your point, most of the NFT sort of market has been around just like really simple collectible stuff, right? But there are sort of early experiments like loot, for example, where, you know, you could have these items that kind of exist independently from any individual experience around them. And I think that's a really compelling idea. Of course, like The game developers are rightly skeptical of this. I think existing games don't necessarily have a incentive to, like, open up their economies and allow this sort of interoperability, and you kind of have to think about what are the reasons that a game developer would want to do that. But I think new games and new developers who are more experimental and kind of want to figure out what's the business model incentive structure that works, they will eventually crack this and eventually build Sort of these open worlds that I think could be really interesting.

AI assessment note: “the NFT space has grown significantly without that being a use case yet”

Q hyper growth, but I do want to start with a sense of chronology because, you know, it's been an incredible last 18 months or so. But as I said, I spoke to Alexis Ohanian before the show, and he suggested that I ask a question around YC Demo Day. He said it was in the middle of crypto winter. How was that experience for you, and how did that go?

A Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of fun. Like, I think YC Demo Day, there were only a couple of crypto companies, maybe like five or six crypto companies. You know, at that time, we had, like, sort of built the product Launched it and kind of gotten early traction, but it was very early. And, you know, I would say like, you know, we got positive reception from some VCs and like others were rightly like more skeptical or just not interested. And certainly like there continues to be a whole section of tech that just thinks crypto is, is not sort of an interesting phenomenon, but yeah, you know, like after demo day, we raised from sort of a mix of both like traditional investors and Crypto investors who were more kind of sold on the vision of NFTs. It wasn't as crazy of a funding environment back then as it is today, where it's just like so easy to go and raise a giant seed round and an insane valuation. It was a lot more conservative, but you know, there were still a lot of people that got excited by the idea of OpenSea.

AI assessment note: “it was a lot of fun. Like, I think YC Demo Day, there were only a couple”

Q before that you said about the transaction volumes, and you know, I see so many founders chasing GMB today, and Bill Gurley from Benchmark said on the show, you know, not all GMB is equal. How do you think about the North Star metric for you, which determines success with OpenSea? Is it purely GMB chase? How do you think about that, and bluntly, the other elements to focus on?

A We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMB, right? We look at Number of transactions, right? So number of sales as a more healthy metric, because that's an indicator of, are people able to sell the stuff that they want to sell in the marketplace? And then also, is the NFT space sort of providing value to users in an interesting way, right? So a game economy, for example, can have items that sell for like, 50 cents each, all the way up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, and each one of those transactions could be really valuable to a user. So we don't just look at GMB as such a skewed metric, because if Things are selling for really high prices and yeah, you can have really huge GMV growth, but we tend to sort of be more grounded in like number of transactions, which again is also going to be influenced by the growth of the market. And then also just how many people are coming to the website with a wallet connected.

AI assessment note: “We definitely, you know, don't look just at GMB, right? We look at Number of transactions”

Q Three billion plus in GMV, and scaling that fast, I mean, it's just, it's almost unprecedented. My question, actually, I can't take it, it's Avichael's question, but he's at the, you know, scaling so fast, what are the biggest challenges, and what breaks first?

A A couple things, like customer support becomes a really big challenge, right, because there's just more people, and you know, you hadn't really built out that org or function, so that is one of the main things, and especially with a product that is still very early adopter, Phase, right? Where, like, there's so much new stuff. There's wallets. There's all these things. So that's been an org that we're, like, continuing to scale and build out. Obviously, like, platform, right? So, you know, dealing with more web traffic and more site usage and more, like, you know, deploys become riskier, right? Because they impact more people. So that's another one. And then, of course, like, as an extremely young company, like, and this probably isn't the case for every company, because I think some tend to develop this more Earlier, but like just operations of the company, so like basic HR, basic finance, basic legal, like all of those things, you know, you sort of have to really quickly kind of ensure that you're equipped there. I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust and safety, so ensuring that people aren't selling fraudulent items, and then core platform.

AI assessment note: “A couple things, like customer support becomes a really big challenge”

Q Can I ask, when you put on the contemplative hat and you look back at the last year and the growth of NFTs, what surprised you most?

A Yeah, I think the thing that surprised me was just like that the cultural movement around crypto was what drove the NFT movement to be big, right? So like, you know, you look at these sort of profile picture projects, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but basically it's like, you know, people collecting digital art and then setting them as their Twitter profile, right? So people will collect a CryptoPunk, which is this sort of antique NFT, and set it as their profile picture. And that Whole phenomenon, which is really, like, this growing community of people with all of these interesting, like, cultural norms associated with them, and, like, ways of interacting online, really rallying around this idea of, like, a collectible that you can own and just have people admire. That phenomenon, I didn't think was sort of what would drive a wave of excitement around NFTs. You know, I sort of had more of a thesis around, like, Games or things that are useful or like inherently useful NFTs versus these like more collectible use cases.

AI assessment note: “the thing that surprised me was just like that the cultural movement around crypto”

Q horribly macro question, but I am just intrigued. And I got asked it the other day and it's how do you respond to the statement? That NFTs do more harm than help income inequality. When you look at a lot of the people that made money in the early days, it's been quite centralized, tax centric, mostly male. How do you think there's more to harm than hurt income inequality?

A Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's definitely like a huge concern. You have to kind of look at things from like the short-term lens and the long-term lens, right? So the short-term lens, I'm not sure the breakdown, but a lot of the people who have made the most money from NFTs are probably the people who are already made a lot of money from crypto, for example, right? Long-term, like, if you think about the potential of NFTs, really what we're talking about is a way for, or one segment of this market is really a way for artists and creators to directly monetize their work and directly tap into their fan bases and have those people support them, right? So on the contrary side, we also know people who have, you know, paid off student loans by selling digital art as NFTs, right? Or creators or musicians who Maybe we're making a very small amount using Spotify and like sort of the pay to stream model, but now we're able to actually really effectively monetize as a creator or musician using NFT. So it opens up a brand new business model for these types of folks. On the flip side, there's a lot of success stories of people who didn't come from as wealthy financial backgrounds who have been able to reach people who want to support them more effectively. And same story with charities and all these things. And I'm not saying that that equation like nets out to something that, you know, is, …

AI assessment note: “You have to kind of look at things from like the short-term lens and the long-term lens”

Q I mean, speaking of one person who got excited, one was Avichel, and he asked, you know, what gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was telling you Otherwise, the crypto winter was real, and you could have shut down. What gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was bluntly shitting on you?

A I guess it was just sort of treating it more as a project than as, like, a company that needed to achieve, like, extremely high growth in a short period of time, right? Because on one hand, you know, we weren't really growing that fast. We were kind of, like, linearly growing. Sometimes we had, like, a negative month or whatnot, but we still did have, like, Some transaction volume on the marketplace. So it wasn't like no one was using the product. You know, there were people who thought OpenSea was cool. And like, there were a lot of kind of early users who were like, this is a really nice service that you guys are providing. And you know, you see like users complain and like care about what you're doing and that, you know, keeps you going for sure. And then I would say the bigger factor was just seeing the momentum in the developer community. Right. And so you saw all these people who are excited about Building NFT projects. It just takes time, right? It just takes time for those projects to actually come to fruition. So I think there are actually a lot of really positive signals, despite it being a bear market and, you know, it's a very different climate right now. So a lot of this advice doesn't apply, but in a scenario where we do see another bear market, I think the key is really just do something that you're excited about and that, you know, you'll keep on working on rega…

AI assessment note: “the bigger factor was just seeing the momentum in the developer community”

Q How do you think about NFTs as status symbols now and the social capital associated to it? As you mentioned there, it is this incredible symbol of pride for someone that they put it on all their socials. How do you think about NFT as status?

A Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of like the first, it seems to be the first kind of killer use case, right, is just purchasing this to symbolize that you're part of Some exclusive club, right? And now there's, especially as things are starting to open up, I think there's like an, even an in-person element to where people are talking about kind of like what things they bought. And, you know, there's now these crypto folks who are willing, who are looking to kind of spend on something in the same way that, you know, someone who on wall street might like spend money on, you know, a nice watch or something like that. It's now the equivalent of that in the digital world. So I think it's a lot of the same patterns that humans are Have adopted in physical society applied to the digital world. And I think that's one element of the NFT space, but I think it goes much more broad than that. And, you know, it's not necessarily just about status. It's about being a part of a community, you know, building interesting things that you can do with NFTs, right? If you look at the loot project, building like brand new experiences and building better experiences than you could without that sort of like Coordination layer that NFTs provide, where you can have this item that can kind of live across multiple different applications. So I think the data stuff is interesting, but I think it's just sor…

AI assessment note: “purchasing this to symbolize that you're part of Some exclusive club”

Q Well, today we've seen the majority in collectibles as a format. Like, how do you see the most popular use cases of NFTs, and how do you expect this to change over time?

A Yeah, so certainly around collectibles, I think game items is, is another emerging category that, that has taken off to some extent with games like Axie Infinity or Decentraland or Sandbox. I think gaming is this really interesting natural fit for NFTs because people have been buying digital items online For quite some time now and spent, for example, billions of dollars buying virtual clothing and some, a game like Fortnite. And so gamers are already used to digital things having value. They've just sort of been confined to these like closed worlds, right? You know, it's hard for you to go and like take something inside of Fortnite and bring it into some other game and some other developer. I think that concept of like, you know, open worlds, open economic systems inside of games is one that's very early. And it's going to be really exciting.

AI assessment note: “game items is, is another emerging category that, that has taken off”

Q I mean, speaking of one person who got excited, one was Avichel, and he asked, you know, what gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was telling you Otherwise, the crypto winter was real, and you could have shut down. What gave you the conviction to keep going when the market was bluntly shitting on you?

A I guess it was just sort of treating it more as a project than as, like, a company that needed to achieve, like, extremely high growth in a short period of time, right? Because on one hand, you know, we weren't really growing that fast. We were kind of, like, linearly growing. Sometimes we had, like, a negative month or whatnot, but we still did have, like, Some transaction volume on the marketplace. So it wasn't like no one was using the product. You know, there were people who thought OpenSea was cool. And like, there were a lot of kind of early users who were like, this is a really nice service that you guys are providing. And you know, you see like users complain and like care about what you're doing and that, you know, keeps you going for sure. And then I would say the bigger factor was just seeing the momentum in the developer community. Right. And so you saw all these people who are excited about Building NFT projects. It just takes time, right? It just takes time for those projects to actually come to fruition. So I think there are actually a lot of really positive signals, despite it being a bear market and, you know, it's a very different climate right now. So a lot of this advice doesn't apply, but in a scenario where we do see another bear market, I think the key is really just do something that you're excited about and that, you know, you'll keep on working on rega…

AI assessment note: “the bigger factor was just seeing the momentum in the developer community.”

Q Okay. So help me out. Like as a new, what would you advise a new beta buy?

A Yeah. So, well, I guess first, Wallet and getting accustomed to how it works by getting cryptocurrency, because you're going to need that. A good starting place might be, like, participating in some of the games that are out there. So, for example, I think Cryptovoxels is a cool starting place where you can go in and, like, build a, it's sort of like Minecraft, where if you own some land, you can, like, build stuff on top of it. You can have an avatar, and those avatars can have, like, wearable hats and things like that. So, no, the wearables are pretty cheap. So that might be, like, I think that's a cool way to kind of get a little more depth Versus just buying, like, a pure collectible, but of course you can also just buy a pure collectible.

AI assessment note: “Cryptovoxels is a cool starting place where you can go in”

Q Okay. So help me out. Like as a new, what would you advise a new beta buy?

A Yeah. So, well, I guess first, Wallet and getting accustomed to how it works by getting cryptocurrency, because you're going to need that. A good starting place might be, like, participating in some of the games that are out there. So, for example, I think Cryptovoxels is a cool starting place where you can go in and, like, build a, it's sort of like Minecraft, where if you own some land, you can, like, build stuff on top of it. You can have an avatar, and those avatars can have, like, wearable hats and things like that. So, no, the wearables are pretty cheap. So that might be, like, I think that's a cool way to kind of get a little more depth Versus just buying, like, a pure collectible, but of course you can also just buy a pure collectible.

AI assessment note: “Cryptovoxels is a cool starting place where you can go in and, like, build”

Q The question was whether that's sort of one of the, how key is interoperability to the rise and their importance moving forward?

A Well, I mean, I think it's one of the really interesting things about it, but you know, interestingly enough, You know, the NFT space has grown significantly without that being a use case yet, right? It's like sort of still in people's imagination. Most of your point, most of the NFT sort of market has been around just like really simple collectible stuff, right? But there are sort of early experiments like loot, for example, where, you know, you could have these items that kind of exist independently from any individual experience around them. And I think that's a really compelling idea. Of course, like The game developers are rightly skeptical of this. I think existing games don't necessarily have a incentive to, like, open up their economies and allow this sort of interoperability, and you kind of have to think about what are the reasons that a game developer would want to do that. But I think new games and new developers who are more experimental and kind of want to figure out what's the business model incentive structure that works, they will eventually crack this and eventually build Sort of these open worlds that I think could be really interesting.

AI assessment note: “the NFT space has grown significantly without that being a use case yet”