 Well folks it's been a long time coming but today we're digging into the mainstream trajectory of gaming NFTs How the battle lines are shaping up and a big challenge that traditionally closed loop gains will face as the future of ownership within game Worlds comes into focus and that's not even getting into the inflation aspect But before that introductions, I'm Adam B. Levine and this is speaking of Bitcoin for today's discussion We're joined by the other host of the show Stephanie Murphy. Hi Jonathan Mohan. Hey and Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello So on today's show, we've got a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short period of time I'm pretty much ready to call it though, although we haven't seen the first mainstream AAA game that uses NFTs in them roll out We have seen a flurry of announcements from the industry giants on whether they're on team token or prefer to maintain the status quo For those of you who understand the games industry the results are pretty much what you'd expect But it's worth talking about anyways on team NFT We've seen statements over the earnings season that started in mid-October from Ubisoft Activision electronic arts and epic games to name a few on team status quo We've got Microsoft's Xbox lead and valve operators of the steam gaming platform I think more surprising to me than the specific names are the simple scale of the players These are arguably the biggest companies in gaming both on the platform and e-commerce side with epic valve and Xbox Along with some of the biggest cross-platform game companies like Ubisoft Activision and electronic arts I'm pretty sure that I'm our resident gamer here to the extent that I have time to do that anymore Although Jonathan, I know that you dip into this a little bit too. I'm becoming a gamer now, too. Oh, are you Stephanie? Oh, yeah Thank you. I just got my PlayStation 5 a month ago. Oh I have been refusing to buy one because I can only find them from scalpers. It's ridiculous I feed the scalpers. I Admitted there's now a non negligible chance if you're playing online with a ps5 you might be playing with Andreas Antonopoulos Oh, my my PlayStation idea is a Antonop. So it's it's not gonna be Docs in himself everywhere it goes. Oh my god. Yeah, and by the way, I Will die so fast in multiplayer games. I am not I'm not up for shooter games I don't know. I prefer cooperative and world-building if you see a Antonop on ps5 Be sure to white knight him as hard as you can and carry him Okay, so I mean seriously though like the the kind of world of NFTs has obviously Exploded since I would say about this time last year in November of 2020 is when things really started to pick up steam and just the FOMO has been growing and growing and growing and growing so I guess in a lot of ways It was inevitable that we would hear from sort of the big players in the space simply because of the pressure that's being put on them And I think also like, you know little upstart game Axie infinity has done a really ridiculous amount of revenue right pulled in just a ridiculous amount of money Over just the last couple of months by really leaning into this whole play to earn powered by NFTs type of model So again as publicly traded companies, which pretty much everything we're talking about is valve is not valve is still privately held But I mean it just seems like this was inevitable So how much do we think that this is virtue signaling versus something that we're actually going to see start to get deployed in the kind of foreseeable future call it the next six months to nine months Is there a difference between the two because as far as I can see in our industry Every wave of real adoption is preceded by a wave of adoption for the sake of marketing and virtue signaling first Which then just turns into reality through sheer inertia and success So whether that's corporate treasuries or it's adopting Bitcoin as a national currency legal tender or various other moves we've seen with commercial and retail companies accepting it or PayPal Selling and buying it all of these started very much as virtue signaling and marketing campaigns Mostly and then gradually became a trench reality until until you could no longer get a marketing premium from them Can you really call it virtue signaling though if it's done ultimately to make the company's money? I thought virtue signaling was just to show how great you are. I Guess it's really just signaling. Sorry. I think I set us up there with the virtue part I think it's just signaling right and that's what we see kind of over and over again It's people kind of taking these moments, you know, and we talked about this before You know, like the the the amount of time that passed between the bees brothers in 2013 announcing that they were accepting Bitcoin for their, you know Family produced honey products to PayPal announcing that they were accepting Bitcoin was only like eight years, right? It was not a long period of time and with NFTs It just seems like that has gone even faster, right as a concept is something that's been around since 2014 in very very Basic terms, but they've only really been popular for a couple of years with kind of non hardcore crowds And really mainstream is something that was elusive until call it six months ago, right? So the pace here has been accelerating significantly Well, I would also say that it's the corporate equivalent of what we as individuals did many years ago I would say that 99% of every individual I've ever known to I'll buy an alpaca sock was a bit coiner Yes 2015 I can't remember a single person giving a shit about alpaca socks until they had to prove that they've at least spent Bitcoin once as a Transaction So I mean this is just the corporate equivalent of that and as Andreas was saying it is it is a healthy step forward I also think that when you're as big as a company like Ubisoft or valve You kind of need to do a blockchain and name only play first to get the signaling out there to see if there's any regulatory Hammer that drops so that you can fall back on what we were only signaling We actually didn't do quite yet just to sort of see How liberal you can be with actually executing and so there's just there these like step functions towards actually doing that You have to get through when you're you're risk managing a company as large as they are That's a fascinating perspective Jonathan. I'm glad you brought that up hadn't thought of that, but You know if you if you think about it As you rightly point out the regulatory implications are pretty huge We've seen in the past that games have been used extensively for various nefarious purposes covert communication channels in game chat Various types of money laundering Through even closed in game currencies and so it wouldn't be surprising, you know early adopter criminals will also use these kinds of things as money because they are money and that means that effectively gaming companies are becoming banks if they enter into this space not just but banks central banks and And And that has some various serious implications and it also would likely make regulators rightly anxious because it opens a huge hole in their regulated industries all of these are Almost completely international markets without borders and much much more popular than weird and strange crypto currency Well, you know, they say that the the I think it's the 18 to 35 or even 25 demographic is is the most valuable from advertising perspective Because once you've established brand loyalty After 30 you very rarely spend any time changing your brand loyalty And so it would be amazing if you know go after the children, right? Once video game companies become central banks kids are gonna just already have their established brand loyalty to the central bank They prefer and then you know, they may stick with Blizzard over the New York Fed. I Think that there's a really interesting conversation to be had there But just to kind of back up for a second It's worth noting that steam is one of the companies that has taken a somewhat hard-line approach against NFTs and games that include blockchain in general and this is again I think that there's two sides to to that position that sort of make it make sense on the one side steam is very much an Incumbent right steam has the dominant distribution platform when it comes to you know when it comes to PC games So they have kind of not a lot to gain from this type of move And then on the other side of things steam as a company is kind of an odd company, right? It's not publicly traded It's privately held and I was just about to bring this up next. Okay. Go ahead Yeah, yeah, and well, and it's got this flat structure, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's it's famous for being like a collective or something or It's it's not like a co-op. It's like they don't have bosses non hierarchical That means that on the one side They have been very kind of driven to do lots and lots of really weird things and they've actually gotten in trouble for some Stuff before that is very like tokens, but which is not actually using tokens And it I mean in some ways you can make arguments the tokens would have made their prior problems better But just a recap for people who have not been paying attention to that saga So counterparty very very very popular game produced by steam and released primarily through the steam platform One of the later versions of the game introduced the ability to have skins for your weapons and characters and stuff like that I think it was actually just weapons and basically what would happen is that people would Buy these skins in game and then they would go out to a secondary site where they would then gamble with skins And it was a way that people who were not old enough to gamble could then participate in gambling The reason they got in trouble was while a third party was actually having the gambling marketplace The assets were custodied on valve and they were expressing the balance changes through using the valves API, right? Yeah, and so valve valve is a digital bank, right? And so when people are like valve should use crypto It's sort of like going to a bank and they go well, this is why you should use Bitcoin It's non custodial and a bank goes. That's literally the opposite exactly word bank means And so when people say well, I can't wait till we have NFTs on valve They're missing the point that valves entire existence is on the basis of unilaterally custodializing your digital goods So they would have to break up the it's it's the entire antithesis to what they do but more specifically with the That that that legal case they got in trouble because they custody their own Digital assets and had they not if they weren't the framework that people were calling the out, you know balance transfers from They would have been fine because it wouldn't have had anything to do with them But that's core to their business model The reality for valve as you were kind of laying out there is that they have very little to gain from this type of move And they have a lot of risk that could potentially come with it So they're just not the kind of player who is really well positioned to want to take that risk now You look at their kind of I would say primary competitor in the space Which is epic games right now epic games operates the epic game store And of course they made a whole bunch of money off of fortnight among other prior successful titles before that But fortnight has really been their cash cow. They've since been pouring a lot of that profit Into their game platform and for a long time. We're literally giving away, you know free games every week Just to people who would use their platform. They do it every Thursday today is Thursday before you mentioned them I literally have them open. I'm downloading never alone right now. It's there you go There you go, I mean like I so then they've been doing that for like what 18 months at least like I haven't picked up A game for them recently, but like that's Thursday. Yeah, so I mean like that's not cheap They're doing it because they're trying to get market share and so again as the kind of well-funded contender They're very well incentivized to take whatever the opposite position of the incumbent is so long as that position can be kind of viewed As empowering the users right it makes it easier for them to make an argument Against the incumbent platform even though they have less network effect overall It's also worth noting of course that Epic Games although they're not banning this stuff in the way that steam has basically indicated that they are They're also not really kind of embracing it either They're just being open to it and again that's something that as a kind of up-and-comer contender You can do in a much more easily in a much in a much more comfortable way than if you are the incumbent Who has to defend sort of that against both the regulators on one side and the users on the other side We've talked about this in the context of how second-tier banks Can use cryptocurrency to compete much more Effectively against first-tier banks where first-tier banks will try to insulate themselves from Innovation and second-tier banks can use it as a competitive differentiator as a weapon as an asymmetric Weapon that the first-tier banks they know cannot use to fight back same thing happened with telecommunication companies in the ISP game the second-tier and smaller companies were able to more aggressively adopt internet technologies and use them as a competitive advantage against first-tier Telecommunication companies that were late to the game and cable companies did the same to Beating the telcos at their own game So it wouldn't be surprising to see second-tier game companies Using these things knowing that they're going to get less of a backlash from regulators They're going to be able to move faster and they're going to be able to deploy this as a differentiator that the first-tier game companies cannot just as easily do I was going to say when you guys are talking about Valve trying to avoid having anything to do with looking like a bank. I don't know how they can really avoid it though because if they're going to have games in their platform and they're going to compete with competitors There's they can't really control like the content of the games That creates items of value that are going to have a secondary market And so they're going to end up being involved in it somehow. I think Well, the question here really is what is the defining characteristic of a bank because I think the argument that valve can Rightly make is that a bank is something that you keep stuff in that you can then take out of right? Well, you can remove your stuff from the bank and as far as valve is concerned and frankly as far as any of these legacy platforms are concerned That's not the deal right when you buy a game with valve You don't own the game everywhere you own the game with valve, right? And so if you can't withdraw like that's how that's why they got in trouble was because when they allowed these asset transfers to Happen then somebody else could take and build a system that used that to do something that was against the rules potentially And then they get they're on the hook for it, right? Because they're actually enabling these transfers of value which has all kinds of implications around it So it's a reasonable position to have but again like in this new world. We're talking about where NFTs are pervasive I agree with you the difference between you know a game company that's storing your game assets and a bank is much more kind of Like hand wavy than it is in this era where you know you have your music on Apple music, right? Like as soon as you can take your music out of Apple music and exercise it anywhere and sell it and whatever Then is Apple a bank because they're holding your music collection I think the argument can be made that they they potentially are yeah What about PayPal when they're selling crypto on their platform, but you can't take it out Are they a bank but PayPal really is a bank though as far because they do before but with respect to the crypto They're kind of not because you can't take it out, right? Right and and it's interesting because in the long run that strategy ends up getting you Many many of the regulatory disadvantages of the bank without any of the advantages of actually being able to trade on these assets so So how long does that strategy work? It only works for a short period of time because the regulators are not going to go Softly because you've decided to try to hide behind your thumb and pretend not to be a bank, right? If others can use you to evade or avoid various regulations in their jurisdiction and Therefore use you to do the bad things that you can do in a bank the regulators are gonna want a piece of you So you're gonna end up suffering all of the regulations of a bank without getting any of the benefits And so for the game companies that are trying not desperately not to be a bank You know, this is only a short-term strategy eventually The ones who bite the bullet and end up doing the whole thing it can get some of the Benefits of that move and not just the disadvantages So I want to move on to the next topic that we're going to discuss But there is one other element here that I think is quite interesting which we don't have an answer to Which I think will be actually somewhat important as we move forward So as we mentioned, you know Ubisoft, you know electronic arts And Activision have all basically announced that they're in as far as these NFTs are concerned the thing I don't believe we've seen from any of them though is what blockchain They're going to use because again one of the big challenges in doing stuff on kind of the traditional most popular blockchain You know Ethereum when it comes to all of this type of thing That's not something that's going to scale to even a single game from even one of these companies It would absolutely crush it in its current state I've been saying for some time that most people don't realize that Virtually no one in the Ethereum community cares about the Ethereum execution environment They care about the EVM and so like in the past couple of years You've seen all of these you know EVM forks that offer superior execution environment. What is the EVM? Sorry, Jonathan. The the Ethereum virtual machine Oh, yeah, is the is the like domain specific language environment that Ethereum smart contracts get executed within and then the Ethereum protocol is One instantiation of a framework that can execute EVM scripts But so is Binance and you know Solana and Cardano and a whole bunch of these other Systems that are trying to do more or less the same thing in more or less compatible ways When we talk about money, we're talking about trustlessness But when you talk about video games and you talk about monopolistic services, which no slight against You know World of Warcraft, but like it's not money It's not you know saving the world It is a unilateral service provided by a single party that you have full faith in because it's their unilateral product And so the trust environment is so fundamentally different that you may not need a Nakamoto consensus Execution framework for the virtual machine that you're using to begin with and so I would be shocked if any Major video game company uses what we would consider a traditional public blockchain in order to achieve what they do with smart contracts They may very well just run their own copy Because it's it's so much easier to just fork and run a private island that runs Ethereum That's completely separate from everything else. So they just launched on network Well, I mean, yeah, that's literally called a video game server, right? I mean, that's how video games are detected Right, so they're not going to run it on a public blockchain They're going to run it on the EA gains blockchain the Activision Blockchain the Ubisoft blockchain all of which are most likely going to be Code forks of Ethereum, right? And then and then maybe the process by which you net out of the video game is via a bank back onto a primary Protocol right via something like a Twitter or a Coinbase or a PayPal I guess the point that I'm making with this is that However, that winds up working out again like to the extent that you have one of these triple A games that have You know hundreds of thousands tens of millions of players depending on really what you're talking about That's larger than most blockchains that are out there as far as their actual network user base is concerned And certainly they're active network user base So if this is something that really is built in at like a architecture level to these new game worlds Then you're going I just think that it's an incredibly powerful Thing that will come to anything and I think again like if I was in the business right now of running one of these You know Ethereum killers, you know That's already on proof of stake and that already has the ability to do the scaling and already has hundreds of millions of Dollars in a lot of circumstances I would be banging down the doors of all these game companies trying to convince them that they don't need to build Their own thing they just need to do theirs on mine And I think that there's going to be an enormous amount of business development going on behind the scenes That is trying to accomplish exactly that goal And I think that when we see it We will know who kind of invested the time or had the connections in order to get in there And I think that again like this is going to be an incredibly powerful trend probably not this certainly not this year And maybe even not next year, but at whatever point these worlds start to come out I think that it will be very significant as far as the trajectory of non primary blockchains becoming Closer to primary real players Yeah, but beware what you wish for because all we're doing now is replaying the same kind of History that we've seen before so back when Ethereum fans started talking about flippening bitcoin My warning was you're going to start looking over your shoulder, buddy Because if you think you could do that to bitcoin, there's at least 10 other people who think they can do that to ethereum And of course then they appeared But they don't actually have As easy a time doing that either because you still run into the same basic scaling network effect development innovation trade-offs That all of the primary blockchains have already run into and you end up trying to reinvent the wheel and solve these problems The difference, of course, is that you don't have any of the goodwill any of the existing investment and any of the developer affinity that these primary chains already have Ultimately, I think the build a blockchain for each game company strategy fails And it fails for exactly the same reason that private blockchains have failed in the past that it fails for exactly the same reason The closed innovation ecosystems fail However, that failure may come 10 or 15 years down the road and in the meantime It can be a very lucrative vehicle for those riding it There's this idea that ethereum killers or bitcoin killers or any of these sort of incumbent killers Can be better because they are better right can actually beat the incumbent because they have some type of technological advantage What we have found at least so far in the history of cryptocurrencies that is actually not true What winds up happening is you get this sort of here's the incumbent and it's not perfect But it has network effect and by nature of it having network effect when people come into the space and they look Around for where do I want to you know, what do I want to use where do I want to put my money? They have basically two options One option is they go with the incumbent and the other option is to go with one of the killer options The problem with the killer options is that there are so many of them because the incumbent Became the incumbent because it was the first one to do it right and build the network effect based around that Well, you know 50 percent of them might go to the incumbent and 50 percent of them might get split up between 25 different platforms that are all trying to be better It's very hard to stand out from that pack Grand Theft Auto, you know six comes out and they're like, hey, we're doing everything on Solana or we're doing everything I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Grand Theft Auto 6 is never coming out. Just let let it go. Let it go. It's never it's been 13 years It's it's not happening. It's just Grand Theft horsey to three Okay If if the if the next dlc for Grand Theft Auto 5 came out I will continue you get my point here Which is that we're talking about enormously important cultural kind of artifacts that if they pick a side in that That's going to be different than anything that we've ever seen before when it comes to a challenger trying to overtake One of these sort of built-in network effect incumbents And I actually I don't know if if the incumbents could actually survive that or if this is really just a way to Create new incumbents without displacing the existing ones This might be a big enough market That you could actually survive as an incumbent challenger by sheer number of users But the opposite of network effect is fragmentation effect. And in this industry, there is no defrag This is the fundamental problem Which is all of these Attempts to unseat the incumbents feed the fragmentation that in itself Ends up feeding the incumbent I mean if you look at just the the game store effect, right Where steam came out and then a couple other came out and then every major studio came out with their own Darn installer It's gotten less bad than it was a couple years ago But there are some games Where you install it and you have to install the dumb ubi soft thing just to play a game, right? Or you have to install the dumb ea thing on top of the steam thing in order to play a game And I cannot imagine A good five to ten year period where they're not doing the exact same thing with their own evm and you know protocols Okay, so let's turn the conversation and talk briefly about this thing that happened with amazon's new world product As I understand it amazon new world is a cursed mmo that breaks your laptop. Is that Yeah, that's that's basically the gist. Okay, so I'm taking this from an article that andreas found from ars technica So amazon has shut down wealth transfers in new world for the second time in a month Hobbling the in-game economy in an attempt to limit the damage from yet another item duplication bug in the popular mmo Apparently this is a game where you can kind of have these virtual cities But you're expected to pay taxes and people couldn't pay their taxes And wait, wait, wait, wait, wait amazon created a game where they have to pay taxes Taxes they don't pay taxes Okay, go on go on. Yeah. Well, you couldn't pay taxes because the entire economy of the game was shut down There were no transfers of wealth allowed amazon shut down wealth transfers on november 1st when the the bug was Discovered but then a couple days later. They also announced that they were banning People that they determined to be cheaters What amazon is saying is that the socially acceptable punishment for cheating on your taxes is to be executed? Is that the idea? Something like that and they are the judge jury and executioner Or just to have your ability to buy and sell completely taken away arbitrarily I guess everyone's ability is taken away when they say so This was like a big deal for this game because it's a virtual world and without an economy What are you supposed to do? Someone was quoted as saying Basically, the effect of this was to penalize the people who were kind of Following the rules and not taking advantage of the duplication exploit The reason I really love this article and wanted to bring it to everyone's attention is because the fundamental flaw in here was that supposedly unique In game items. Um, there's a word for that unique in game items. Oh, uh, non fungible tokens Were being duplicated And then spent twice now if only there was a technology that allowed you to control the double spend Uh fungible or non fungible tokens in a in an economy If only and and that's the irony right there. They're basically running into Even an essentialized system even without the trying to do this in a decentralized way They're running into the fundamental double spend problem. The solution is out there. It's just that that solution isn't as profitable as Whatever it is they're doing Turning off an economy is actually not a thing that is terribly unusual in games It does happen duplication bugs have been a thing for a long time. I think it's didn't the u.s. Government do that last year Yes, that's not a game. That's real life But if you can do it in real life, right, you can do it in the game So anyways the kind of the upside and the downside about this type of approach is that it has been done lots in the past Duplication bugs are not new things at all and they've messed up game economies in the past The thing that's different here is the real money aspect of it Typically or at least in the past typically when you created a game economy people had to exploit your system Basically and find ways to kind of ferry value into and out of your economy Because otherwise the way that you gained it was simply by playing the game, right? And if you play the game in the way that you know maximizes that Now, you know or or you hire people who live in lower standard of living countries To play the game and click farm type of environments or gold farming type of environments Then that's kind of the way that you monetize it So turning off the economy So to speak wasn't really a big deal because it really only impacted people who are already bridging between In the game and outside of the game against the rules of the game typically So the thing that's different here, of course, is that the economy is very much part of the game, right? Amazon creates this game and has created it in a way that gives people ways to put money into the economy That then become assets within that actual game that then actually have value that in a monetary sense, right? So that's kind of the thing I think that's really different about this and that's where kind of the Connection into these nft worlds and these other companies that we were talking about right that are now sort of getting into that It's going to be a question of how we see these games develop, right? Are these games being developed with this type of you know quasi uncontrollable economic circumstance in mind? Or are that we just really going to see these types of assets grafted on top of existing games with all the problems that that entails I think what we see here from the amazon story is that they just grafted it on top of kind of the old way of doing games And turns out that doesn't always work so well This is going to be so much worse in the metaverse. Well, let's wait to see what facebook does It's almost like this Glorious piece of performance art because they've created an open world that beautifully mimics the real world Now as someone who's grown up in greece the idea of an incompetent authority rife with corruption Messing up the in-game economy so much that they eventually they have to impose currency controls and then various forms of authoritarianism In order to shut things down Because they have enough power to do so and the captive audience really doesn't have any alternatives That's beautiful. They they've managed to recreate such a vibrant simulation of real world Environments in this in-game economy down to the corrupt authoritarianism. I don't know. Is this performance art? I don't know if most people get the irony The best forms of parody are the ones where you don't get it because you think it's just a comedy not parody And in this case I think that what we're going to see is this happening at a bigger and bigger and bigger scale because ultimately all of these systems as they become Simulations of real economies that are bigger and bigger bigger scale They run into exactly the same kinds of problems that real economies run into But these problems just get magnified at bigger and bigger scale And so what I'm hoping for is the next chapter in this performance art story because Once you have the the dictator Acting in an authoritarian way to shut down the economy The next chapter is a peasant revolution by the gamers by the players to overthrow the dictator in their game I don't know how they do that. Do they take over the game servers? Do they raid the offices? I actually think Andreas we're we're we have an intermediate step in the parody of life there Which is something I don't think we've really dug into that deeply which is play to earn Based video games. I don't even necessarily think I have like a hard side on it It's just you know to the extent that people think child labor is a thing It's going to be fascinating to see how play to earn Plays out in this cross-section of metaverse currency and you know employee rights I I can't wait for the conversation about your 14 year old Being about whether or not he's owed employment benefits Or if what he's doing should be illegal to begin with when he plays his amazon based new world video game Mom they tried to classify me as a contractor. It's clear. I'm an employee under california labor law Yeah, every every 14 year old in the state of california is now an employee in the mfo god I've heard of some kids, you know, we're on that age making a lot of money on roblox No, it's an incredible time So we're we're just about out of time for this episode But I actually do want to take us in a slight diversion here, which is actually into the inflation area It's something that we've talked about a lot. We got there a little bit before it was cool It's not transitory And it's not just the us thing. We're now seeing especially in the european union. We're seeing Real headline inflation rising So even the things they do measure with the jury rig statistics are going up But also all of the hidden forms of inflation and things like real estate and rent and various other bubbles that are going up all across europe So inflation is really happening now. Let me tell you my experience of this When inflation strikes and it starts Hitting ridiculous levels what people do and I remember this in greece from when I was growing up Is they go out and they buy what they consider to be more durable assets than cash So they try to dump as much cash as possible And load up. Um, so they front run a lot of their Expenses that they might have They buy a new washing machine. They buy a new car. They buy even a second hand car second hand markets are exploding all over the place in automobiles, but also In boats and planes and anything else that you can use for transportation People are acquiring Durable assets and durable assets is a very vague term When cash is suffering from inflation almost everything is more durable than cash And so people go out and try to spend their way out of inflation Which brings an interesting point Are nft's durable assets in that environment? Well, they're unique. They're non-fungible and they're rapidly appreciating in value I'm not saying that's a good thing. I don't think it's necessarily a smart investment I'm simply observing the fact that this is already happening. What happens when you add inflation to that mix My prediction Things are about to get crazy Things are already crazy. It's worth noting that I mean just talking about kind of blue chip quote-unquote nfts I think we saw a post Malone and And jimmy fallon both by board apes for you know, again hundreds of thousands of dollars To add insults to injury in the more obscure side of things a rare pepe called rare pepenopoulos And uh sporting a receding hairline on a green frog Was auctioned at sullabies for three and a half million dollars two weeks ago No, how did I miss this? Oh my god, are you joking? And I didn't get a penny. I have no idea who this rare pepenopoulos is It's it's just bizarre a world. It is absolutely bizarre a world Can anyone get roger veer to tweet about this? Oh my god, see they are not joking. That's a bit of an inside joke jonathan But those who've been with us a while will get it What it's worth it does not have a receding hairline, but it does say great blockchain educator and it has a Let's see 100 hard and it has my stock portrait wearing a suit from the early days of doing bicoid education I mean, it was literally a copy of my stock Portrait 3.65 million dollars is indeed the uh the the thing that was sold that is that is well If if anyone Greek in an obscure industry like really if whoever bought that nft is listening and would like andreas to digitally sign Their digital piece of art. I am sure he would be open to offers to do that If a three and a half million dinner on a bubble bath, seriously Okay folks, that's all the time I have for this episode of speaking of bitcoin Thank you very much for listening today's episode featured andreas m antinopolis stephanie murphy and jonathan mohan And uh, it's also myself adam beloved with music by gertie beats Uh, you can send us an email at adam at speaking of bitcoin dot show until next time. Thanks for listening