 That's all I needed to know. I gotta look into it. Our name is in it. Non-fungible. Name's in it. Ha ha! Been waiting to drop that one. Crypto. Everybody's talked about it in the past year. Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency. What is the strategy as far as the crypto space? The market shot up and people were happy. Then it pulled back. Now people are worried. Bitcoin dropping more than 3% today. I'm looking at the significant fall in the cryptocurrency. Elon Musk tweeting earlier this hour, but you cannot buy Tesla with Bitcoin anymore. So what can we learn from sitting down with one of the low-key cryptocurrency insiders in America? Is he a billionaire? Can he help make me a millionaire? Why is everything in crypto inspired by Japanese culture? Eric is the young CEO of Injective Protocol, who's token as a market cap of over $400 million. We'll talk to him and some big EDM DJs that are using NFTs for their business. By the way, this is not financial advice. What's going on, guys? Welcome to Upside Mindset. This is our very first episode. I feel very cool today because we are here with Eric. Hey, guys. How's it going? I'm going to go ahead, Eric, and say you're like 10 out of 10. You're one of the biggest crypto insiders in the continental United States. I mean, I don't want to say biggest, but definitely work on my own projects. Definitely been in space for a very long time. Hi, I'm Eric. We are Injective Protocol, the best and most secure experience for decentralized exchange. So Injective Protocol is the first fully decentralized exchange protocol that lets anyone to share liquidity and fully prevents from running from occurring. You're not just like having been just commentating on the space. You are in this space. You are a NBA player and have been an NBA coach versus just a NBA fan. Tens of thousands of people are heading to Miami this weekend for what's being called the largest cryptocurrency conference in history. I mean, is this proof of how much Bitcoin has taken off in the last year or what? Organizers say they've sold out of tickets. How does somebody go from 0 out of 10 to 10 out of 10? So first of all, you know, I study like finance, CS, school, and then a lot of background knowledge. It's a very interesting overlap for crypto. In 2017 or 2018, I basically started like going through a lot of research and back then, you know, a professor in my school also was doing a lot of contribution to a lot of, you know, like the back end, more higher profile projects out there. Later on, worked in a few funds, you know, specific like fondant trading and stuff like that because there was just so much opportunity there. And yeah, like that's what, you know, slowly over time, over the course of one to two years, you just get more familiarized with crypto space. So you got into crypto space early? Yeah, relatively speaking. Right. It's almost like, just for people on our channel to understand, it's almost like you were working at Supreme with James Jettia like before Supreme turned into this huge hype thing. This was at a time when crypto was already booming but more for people who knew about it. Now it's like mainstream. So this is not the first time that crypto has kind of like gone up and down, correct? Yeah. I remember 2017 was like still like a very, very small space but 2018 definitely like it just exploded exponentially. What convinced you through the boom and the bust and now we're in a boom again to diamond hands your belief in it and all the work you had put in because I'm imagining some of your co-workers are like, I'm out. Once you've realized that you have a certain level of understanding that's top 10% or top 5% within the space then you realize that this is probably the space where you get technical people who are kind of like very, very hard to find and those who get married, finance and especially software engineering background is even harder to find. Your company Injective Protocol sounds really cool just by name but can you explain what it is? Yeah, so Injective Protocol is a fully decentralized, derivative exchange protocol that allows anyone to create futures markets and preventive soft markets and create this entire exchange ecosystem where people can trade and interact with each other. Okay, okay. Is there another way we can word it for people who have no idea what you're talking about? Yeah, so basically people can create futures contracts like trading futures of stocks, futures of employing, futures of commodities just by a click of a button within five minutes and then they can create that market for everyone to trade on. Now that we've established, Eric, what you guys do Injective Protocol is a very successful company it's got predictions to become even more successful as this space grows what has just been happening in the last few months with crypto? It feels not like 2018 but like almost some shade to that again, to a layman. So I think generally there's a lot of institutional demand starting from the end of 2020 and all the way leading up to this entire 2020. You talking about for Bitcoin or for crypto? Just the entire crypto. And by institutions you're talking about banks, these big traditional institutions, right? So you know, like their side, you know, legitimacy around it you know, Morgan Stanley started applying to positions, you know MicroStrategy was kind of one of the first few public companies to do it and you know, it really started piquing up all its interest. It kind of like said it as an example that you know, the silver jade industry it's safe enough to invest and for people to come in and I think that's really what contributed to this whole excitement around crypto and you know, like everything that's going down to it. Right, because the institutional adoption leads to mainstream media adoption mainstream media adoption leads to mainstream retail investor adoption. So it's this whole domino effect, right? And that's what just pumped an incredible amount of money into the space, right? Yeah. So basically the reason why your mom and dad are texting you about crypto right now is because the institution's got it. Real quick, just to answer this question, should people be scared right now? Obviously Bitcoin hit a high 65, now it's in the 40s right now low 40s as of right now. Is it at support? Is it at whatever? Real quick, do you have an opinion on that? Any quick comment? So I would say like generally you know, it depends on you know for all the broader user, like what your time horizon is. If your time horizon is 10 years, like you know, 20 years or you're saving for retirement, I think the greater crypto space you should look at it from you know, from 10 years ago for example. So really do you really care about you know, all the movements within the next two months or three months? Or should you care about you know, where's it going to be like five years or 10 years from now? So you're saying no, don't be really scared if you can just hold on to it. Yeah, because you know like there's always going to be speculators in the space and we've seen you know, inequity market and traditional market that's always going to be the case. It's just about the mobilization of these retail base. So at the end of the day it's all about you know like these are one of those things where you know, you can't be always right but you know, once you're right you're yourself. Switching gears a little bit to something that is more our space, the culture space. Why does it seem like a lot of things in crypto have like some sort of Japanese theme to it? Like crypto really started with a lot of connection to you know, Japan in general. Like the first ever Bitcoin exchange was Monkots which is based in Japan. Most of the exchange today, their matching engine and their central server is still based in Tokyo. And just in general, there's a lot of you know, Japanese native cryptocurrency communities. For example, NEM is a very very popular cryptocurrency that really sets its ground within the Japanese community. Japan is very much of a modern urban like almost like cyber-conquest country. And I think that's kind of like where crypto really looks more to being, right? Digitized value, digitized art, digitized identity. Everything is you know, peer-to-peer, transparent and not controlled by you know, central. I know that everybody's into crypto across the world. I know especially in Europe and stuff. But does it seem like there's a lot of Asian people in the crypto? Yeah, definitely. I think crypto is one of the, I would say, few industries that's very very much global. So you know, it doesn't really have like a locus that's you know, singled around, you know, a few nations. For average people out there, and I think we've went pretty deep cut already, what should they be doing? What would you want them to understand about the space? Yeah, what would you want them to understand because most people are probably like, dude, I bought ETH at 3700, it's at 3400, I'm down dude. I am sure based off the title of this video, they are looking to you to tell them what to buy. You know, beyond just buying coins, you know, like holding them, I think just in general, like there's a lot more opportunities, especially with the advance of DeFi to really treat it as something that's stable, as something that's safe as an investment. For example, you know, you can earn 10% on your USDC or USDT, which is basically dollar backed on you know, compound or AVE. And these are, you know, like lending protocols that you know, will never, never like dump on you. At the base level, if you want to be safe, you can kind of like, instead of buying what people used to do is like buy American bonds, right? For safety, they can buy into the USDC coins. Can you explain real quick how a token pumps? It depends on, you know, how much it's being float in the market. So first of all, you know, there could be tokens that pumps, you know, 100% or 200%, but you know, you have to start, you have to look at, you know, what's the starting market cap or like, basically more importantly, what's the starting float? How many coins there are? Yeah, how many coins there are. Just like in a stock, how many potential shares there are, right? That will determine the market cap. Yup. If someone really wants to buy a coin and they kind of just buy it indiscriminately, they will push your price way up because you would, you know, as a market maker or, you know, as, you know, a trader, you wouldn't be selling all of your coin out of one price point. You would be like spreading it out. So that's how kind of like, a lot of coins with global liquidity kind of goes up so quickly and then, you know, goes all the way back down because, you know, like, people might just want it all sudden and then, you know, people saw the price action and they, you know, they want it like they're in their position and so that's why, you know, during global liquidity events and we kind of saw that from GME as well, you know, you just see the price going up and down, up and down at 30% every other second. It's just, you know, like the phenomenon of like global liquidity. You are sort of explaining why in crypto sometimes, cryptos go up 50% and then they go down 50% and everybody just, it's normal. Yeah. But obviously this is like, we're like immature coins. That's what people usually hear about. It's like, hey, my coin went up, you know, 10X, my coin went up 100X. But, you know, generally, you would see that most of these, you know, like more mainstream, you know, like more, I would say, widely heard of like accepted coins. Generally, you know, they're not as volatile compared to, you know, like one overnight 10X coins. Is anything like Doge pumping a pointless coin? Can that ruin the crypto space? I think some people were like, ah, Doge is making the crypto space look bad. It's looking legitimate. It's giving crypto a bad name. Generally, it's like good to see like so many people are equalized. For a lot of people, it's the first time they're learning about crypto. Right. It might not be the best, but generally, I would say, you know, like the more people learning about crypto, the more people learning about blockchain. So it's good because it ultimately got people into the space and got people thinking about crypto. Yeah. And the more people think about crypto, maybe the more people will trust it. Is Elon Musk good or bad for crypto? He's kind of like that catalyst in space where it could go both ways. He introduces both of these. At the end of the day, if it wasn't Elon Musk, it would have been Kanye. Yeah. It could have been Biden, Trump, whoever. Yeah. So now that we got the audience kind of caught up, we asked all the normal questions. Tell us about this NFT stuff. Is it just buying LeBron gifts? What is it? It's a new craze breaking out in the crypto world and it's all about crypto collectibles, non-fungible tokens, or NFT. In February alone, NFT sales hitting $340 million over the last few weeks. You may have heard people talking about NFTs, which I found out too late does not stand for the nudist fishing trip. NFT, you can, like, understand as more liquid, more easily tradable, collectible. And you can understand as, like, a baseball card that's always going to be mid-conditioned. You don't have to worry about, like, getting trash, you don't have to, like, work out sort of costs and stuff like that. How is it different than a crypto token? Because probably that is immediately kind of confusing, right? Because it built off the blockchain, but it's not a coin. Generally, for coins, it's, like, highly fun to do. Like, you can go down, say, 0-1, 0-1, 0-1. Like, 18 decibels. But for NFT, like, you can make it, like, 1-1, or you can make it, you know, just non-fungible at all. Like, basically, you know, there's only five ever existing. You can't really break it apart. Because I'm constantly behind this, like, this is what I'm watching. Like, you can't have half of the NFT. I either have the whole thing or I don't have it at all. Exactly. Who is buying these NFTs? You know, because, like, I hear a lot of these, like, people saying NFTs in the future, but then the same people who say NFTs are the future are the same people who say, I think, 90% of NFTs in five years will be worth this. Does the same case for, like, any collectible? Let's say you can collect some kind of vintage. You know, if you're trying to sell it, you might not, you know, find it a buyer or any type soon. Like, maybe, like, you put it on a market for three years and it'll take three years to find a buyer, right? Because this is, at the end of the day, it's up, right? You don't need 1,000, you know, 1,000 or 1,000,000 pairs when you want to collect. And I heard a lot of NFTs, it's not just for collectibles. It's also being used for, like, restaurants and it's going to have all these other uses. Can you shed some light on those? NFTSL is basically a term where, you know, the token is non-fungible, right? So, it has very, very broad applications, right? Like, you know, restaurants can give you, like, a token or, I don't know, like, tables and stuff like that. These are, you know, like, more, like, applications of NFTs rather than, you know, like, what we, being the understand NFTS. You're saying people shouldn't consider them as serious investments, right? Generally, these digital collectibles? I would not, you know, consider them as NFTs. What about, like, wills? You know how, like, families are always fighting over, like, the wills of, like, a wealthy grandfather. Could he NFTize his assets? And the second he dies, it just, boop, but then everybody just gets their fair share. That is certainly one of the use cases, once, you know, like, there's enough infrastructure around it to fill, like, you know, people linking NFTs to physical goods, you know, people, a lot of people are, like, trying to sell, uh, banksies, a lot with an NFT to, like, prove this authenticity, right? Like, generally, one still set the charges when you go out, like, you know, there could be this entire small contract, like, sell some of the system where, you know, you don't even need lawyers to be involved. How can smart contracts help the world, like, let's say, New York City, like, solve some of New York City's problems? The only thing I'm familiar with is smart contracts. It's Cardano in Africa, where, like, maybe certain places have a hard time verifying, um, like, college degrees. So now, like, Cardano's helping them say, like, you know, he really, this guy personally legitimately has a college degree from this place. The most basic and most understandable use case would be, like, digital identification or digital certificate. You know, that could be a sentence everywhere, you know, like, a college degree or, you know, a certificate of authenticity or something like that. Something money globally is actually very, very, very expensive and difficult and, you know, error-prone process. Crypto kind of, like, makes it so much easier to, like, transfer value across a, well, with smart contract, you can actually ascribe and, you know, program these values to be enforceable and executable without the presence of a lawyer or the protection of law. So very bullish on NFTs. Yeah. Okay. Well, shoot. That's what I'm, that's all I need to show. I gotta look into it. Our name is in it. Non-fungible. Name's in it. Ha-ha! The way to drop that one. All right. That was an amazing talk with Eric and I think we got to dive really, really deep but we have so much more to talk about and we have a special guest we're gonna be introducing. He's actually anonymous and he's actually known for burning the one-of-one banks and turning it into an NFT. So, on to the next part. All right. On our way to our second spot, we're actually gonna stop by TestLife, which is a Japanese store and we're gonna go pick out some snacks. But we want to introduce your friend here, Burn Banksy. What's going on, guys? You have someone of a self-explanatory name. Hey, I burned Banksy. We burned Banksy, actually. Banksy, a Banksy artist, one-of-one. Why did you do that? Yeah, so essentially, you know, a lot of the black that I was getting from a lot of the people who weren't in the NFT space in the crypto space was along the lines of, well, it's not my living room and I can't touch it and I can't show people it. But where's the value in that? So I said, fine, let me take something and I told it to some of these options. It was from a famous artist and has value because it was on a wall. I photographed it, digitalized it, turned it into an NFT and then burned the original. So only the NFT is left in existence forever. A group of crypto enthusiasts recently purchased a piece of artwork by the Mysterious Street artist Banksy and then they burned it. The blockchain company called Injective Protocol bought the screen print morons for nearly $100,000 from a New York art gallery. You were trying to make a point about NFTs. Exactly. Did you resell the piece? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we ended up selling the piece for $100,000 and then we resold it for what was $400,000 at the time. Wow. Okay, okay. All right, you guys, we had to continue our cyberpunk food crawl. You know, obviously we came from the Isekaya. We also have Japanese crepes in front of us, one savory, one sweet, a collection of Japanese snacks, we'll burn Banksy, of course, Air Chen. Could you give me a couple different pieces of, maybe not advice, but where to look at if I want to get into crypto at different levels? Because I think certain people are watching this, they're at level one at a zoo. They just want to know, hey, I still use Coinbase, you know, or how do I make an NFT to, you know, where they should be looking if they want to get into, like, stuff like what you guys are doing. I think like the person that I got to say is like, don't do anything just for the primary reason to get rich off of it, right? Like, dude, because you enjoy it, you get something wrong that you can pick. Otherwise, I promise you, you're not going to go far with that. A really good place to start, I got to give you a pretty good recommendation. Something called OpenSea, that's something called the OpenSea Bible, and it really is an NFT Bible. And I couldn't recommend it more for a good, informative read. Everything from, you know, buying, to selling, to minting, to the back end, very knowledgeable OpenSea Bible. For example, like the most basic case is like, getting some stable coins or getting Ethereum. I think that's, you know, how you interact with the greater and such as finance space. And then from that point on, you know, interacting with some of the basic, very, very low risk lending protocols. And obviously, you know, there's still a lot of security risk to us, so definitely don't, you know, put your, put all of your savings into it. And, you know, like start lending out your money. Like, you'll start, you know, seeing some of the APYs. You'll start, you know, seeing that it's really beating out a lot of, you know, the main street investment portfolios. From that point on, you know, like experiment with different, you know, new DeFi locales. There's so many interesting strategies that you can employ. For example, you know, like providing liquidity on Uniswap. Do you recommend people getting into it in the way that they, that they understand? Let's say, for example, they're a huge NBA fan. They're getting into NBA hot shots. You know what I mean? They're into this side. They're getting into that side. Maybe I'm in the street wear, street wear art. I'm moving on. I'm being seen, caused. I mean, I think start off where you're interested, right? Like you're interested in art, you know, probably not really knowledge, you know, maybe you don't want to trade derivatives on, you know, Ethereum or something like that. But given the NBA, I mean, I love NBA top shots because of how many people got into the industry for NBA. And there really is a big crossover between, you know, NBA players and people who enjoy crypto. Get into it on the level that you're, that you're into. You don't love it. Don't do it. Everybody knows that this space can be very also like, obviously not only game changing, but financially lucrative. Do you have any, like, larger goals that you, like, want to push? Yeah, I mean, like, obviously, I want to inject it to grow and reach its true vision. I think, you know, another really strong focus I want to work on is, you know, funding a lot of Asian initiatives, especially the entertainment space and just, you know, like how changing the perception of Asians within, you know, the North America. I think there's a current way of thinking that, you know, especially of trust coming from the top up. And, you know, I really think there should be more power to the people, the people who are working on this run. But, and I think I'd like, you know, more of a mental revolution, kind of when it comes to that and seeing a lot of people who, you know, are working for someone else to become rich and all be gone. All right. Big shout out to Eric and Burnt Banksy right here. Thank you for sticking with us and really trying to break down the game at different levels. What we're going to be doing now is we're actually going to be having a conversation with some of the top EDM DJs in the world, bass jackers, about their NFT project and what they're doing right now because, hey, everybody looks up to ADM DJs now. So if they're doing it, I don't know, might want to think about it. Yo, what's going on, Marlon? Yo, what's up, guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, good. Oh, good. For the people watching, could you quickly introduce yourself like where you guys are from, who you are? So I am Marlon. I am the DJ half of the DJ producer duo bass jackers. We are from the Netherlands. We were living in Amsterdam, but since January of this year, we're based in Taiwan. Tell me about what you guys are doing in the NFT space and like how you guys got started in that? I've kind of always been into crypto like at least for a few years now. I think about my first Bitcoin in 2016, you know, I went to the home market all the way up, all the way down and always kept my eye on my eye on the space. I never lost interest. And at some point I saw NFTs. Didn't really know what it was yet. I saw crypto punks, crypto kiddies. It was more a form of digital collectibles. And I thought it was cool, but I didn't really see anything. Like it didn't spark anything for me to get involved with it. Until I saw last year, November, DJ Blau dropping his NFT on Nifty Gateway. And that's when I suddenly like I saw like we have to do something with this because we can now like produce music combined with cool visuals and release it as an NFT and it's a cool way to like connect with your fans. I know some other, I've heard some other like DJs got into the space. It seems early like is there a sense that like EDM DJs like kind of got into either crypto or NFTs a little bit earlier than maybe certain other genres. First of all, you travel a lot. You meet a lot of different people, a lot of different cultures. I think that generally makes you more open-minded about stuff. Second, I mean, we are one of the biggest geeks that I know. Like, you know, like we produce music on a computer. We do everything on our computer. We're basically at least 12 hours a day behind our screens. That's just, you need to be a little bit of a computer geek to succeed in EDM. There's a lot of overlap between producing EDM, being generally interested in new technologies, gaming, all of that. I think that's just what it is. Combine that with a little bit open-mind for new stuff and that's how you roll into NFTs pretty fast. Word. All right. Last question, man. What were some of your favorite things that you've been eating out in Taiwan, Taiwan? People love the food. They love the night market food. They love the street food. They have good Japanese food out there. I really like din taifu and the xiaolong bao. I can't read any Chinese or anything, so I just point at something random and I get it and I just eat it. It's usually pretty good. All right. Cool. Marlon. Thanks, man. Good chatting and thanks for shedding some light on the NFT space and how a lot of the EDM DJs are using it and how it's just making its way into the music industry. So I appreciate that. Thanks for having us. All right. Go. Peace. To be transparent, we do have some crypto investments, so sitting here and talking to these guys really helped me understand the space better because like anyone, I want to make money. But I also know that if you actually understand and believe in blockchain technology, then you won't be as worried when it dips. So for now, it's still considered a speculative space and you can lose a lot of money. But that's why educating yourself on the topic is super, super important. Hopefully you found this video useful and let me know in the comments below what you think about cryptocurrencies. Maybe you hold some. Let us know. And also let me know if you like this style of video. We want to meet with more successful people in the finance and crypto space so that, you know, along with us, you can also learn something. So until next time, we out. Peace.