The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Devin Finzer: NFTs capture value for creators unlike rent-extracting Web2 social platforms
“I think long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone to like directly tap into a fan base or people who want to support them. So I think long-term you're talking about kind of brand new business models and the different model than …”
Devin Finzer: NFTs represent the first true property rights on the internet
“It's the first time that we have had property rights on the internet, right?”
Devin Finzer: Incumbent game developers lack economic incentives to enable NFT interoperability
“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 develop…”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea volume jumped from $350M to $3.4B in one month
“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 transaction volume.”
Devin Finzer: Experimental developers will crack the business model for open worlds
“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 rea…”
Devin Finzer: The 2022 seed fundraising environment is far crazier than 2018
“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.”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea tracks transaction count over GMV to evaluate marketplace health
“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…”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea volume grew from $8M to $160M in three months
“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.”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea expected gaming and utility NFTs to lead over collectibles
“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.”
Devin Finzer: Marketplaces must master core transactions before expanding peripheral features
“Because if you don't have that foundation of being a really good marketplace, You know, it's hard to kind of have things that are more peripheral.”
Devin Finzer: Short-term NFT profits mostly accrued to early crypto investors
“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?”
Devin Finzer: Traditional brands are building on Bored Ape Yacht Club IP
“Now what we're seeing with Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is another NFT project that's similar to CryptoPunks, and that there's only 10,000 of these kind of rare apes, right, is that traditional brands are starting to build interesting things on top of Bored Ape…”
Devin Finzer: Volatility across the Web3 tech stack hinders NFT application development
“I think there's a lot of, like, volatility up and down the technical stack, right? There's, like, underlying blockchains that are shifting around. There's, like, Wallet layers. There's just so many moving pieces that I could see, you know, some of those kind o…”
OpenSea originally pitched Y Combinator on a decentralized Wi-Fi sharing network
“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”
Devin Finzer: Billions spent on Fortnite virtual clothing proves gaming NFT potential
“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.”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea grew linearly and occasionally shrank during 2018 crypto winter
“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.”
Devin Finzer: OpenSea operated with only six to seven people during takeoff
“We had like six to seven people, right? When, even when things started taking off, we were really small.”
Devin Finzer: Customer support and platform reliability were OpenSea's main scaling bottlenecks
“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.”
Devin Finzer: Figma founder Dylan Field is a close mentor on OpenSea
“Founder of Figma is a really close mentor of mine. I mean, what's great about Dylan is he is able to do so many different things. He's running Figma, but he's also extremely deep in the NFT space, so he's just been, like, very helpful from, like, mentoring us …”