 All right, everybody. So welcome to the show. And I got to tell you today is one of those days where it makes me quite happy that we have been dollar-cost averaging and doing a lot of the hard work as everything happens in the background. And of course, what I'm talking about, if you have not checked your portfolio, which I highly doubt that you have not, quite a big green day today. And it looks like we've got, I think Bitcoin almost hit 32, Ethereum up above. And there's been some major, major moves. And some of the big ones, of course, being alts. We got Solana 26% for seven days, Tundcoin almost 12%. One of my favorites, Chainlink 37. Of course, there's a ton of different ones to go over. And that is just what is happening for the market itself. The question then has to be asked is, why is this all happening right now? So the good thing to do is take a look at, is this a fake pump? Is this just something that is a flash in the pan? So the first thing we want to do is just take a look at, well, some of the most interesting or easy stuff to take a look at, which would be volume. And we take a look at volume. We can see right here that today it is the 23rd. Let me blow this up real quick. And yesterday, let me see here, October 23rd, 47 billion, 147 million, 792,000. Not too bad. And we see that the volume itself is doing pretty good. So if we take a look at this, it's not just a little bit of people moving the markets, there is more out there. However, this pales a comparison. If we take a look back into March, when we had 85 billion, and then moving back, looking into July, 68, moving back into November, 7, 2021, those were good days, 92 billion. But all in all, the volume is not weak and it looks pretty good. So what does this mean for the bears? And unfortunately, for every winner, there is a loser. And we should not celebrate too hard. But yeah, unfortunately, the shorts in the last 24 hours have been liquidated to the tune of $132 million. So that is just one of those things that happens. That's the market itself. Again, the question would be why? And really, it comes down to a lot of things that are going on behind the scenes. One of those things being BlackRock buying Bitcoin. And of course, this spot ETF. Now, you all know my position on this. But things have been changing. So what I want to do is have you take a listen to this. This is of course, Tester Pierce, one of the commissioners at the SEC. I'm not going to play the full eight minutes because I linked that in the description. You can take a listen. But what she says here in the first 30 to 45 seconds is quite telling. And let me pull this up so you can actually hear the entire thing. Just take a listen to this. Commissioners, good morning to you. Love to get your sense of where you think the state of some of these regulations around crypto really stand right now. There's been so much speculation, even in the past several weeks about where a Bitcoin ETF might land. There was a moment, as you I'm sure recall, where a report came out erroneously, apparently, that one would be approved. That would be the BlackRock one. But a view that given some of the things that have happened in court recently with the SEC losing that maybe the SEC is now more open to approving one of these types of funds. Is it? Well, good morning, Andrew. And I can't I can't say whether or not the the commission is is ready to approve a Bitcoin exchange traded product. I've been thinking we should approve one for the last five years. That's it. That's all I'm going to play. Because if you listen to the entire interview, you will understand why Hester really hasn't got things moving because she doesn't really give too much away. So when she's talking about this information, I thought it was just most telling when she said that it was surprising that they haven't actually accepted a spot Bitcoin ETF for five years, which I have to say I have to agree with her. And the rest is up. It was interesting. But of course, you can watch the whole clip. It's about eight minutes links in the description. But I think that first part was the most telling. So from that piece, again, what's happening behind the scenes? Well, as of today, the SEC was ordered to review grayscale's Bitcoin ETF application. Now, this comes as no surprise, because the SEC did not appeal the decision for the court case, which would have allowed grayscale to turn over their their fund into an actual spot Bitcoin ETF. And it looks like the court is saying yes, the SEC has to review it, but not so fast. Here's what the court was saying. And according to the judgment of August 29, this constitutes the formal mandate of this court. We're the Court of Appeals, clerk Mark Wanger and a Monday filing. While the SEC still has the power to deny the application, it would need to find a new reason for doing so not related to its prior justification. So just because the SEC has to come in and say, OK, now we're going to actually take a look at it again, they can still knock it down. However, the chances of that are actually becoming less and less. This is an article on October 16, the Bitcoin ETF is in your certainty by January. And this is from Cryptoanalyst Gnomes at Bloomberg, given 90% odds that a product will debut by January 10, not at the very last piece, because the last final deadline would be March 12, March 13, correct me the comment section. But the second to last would be around January. So hopefully by next year, we'll get one going. This was also registered as far as a ticker for iShares, the BlackRock ETF. It's going to be under the iShares Bitcoin TRSHA. Listen to the ticker IVTC. So they already got that going. And then the Coup de Gras, what everybody's been talking about today. BlackRock has formally announced that it plans to seed its spot Bitcoin ETF in October. So you have to remember that in a spot ETF, it's a lot different than a futures ETF. Futures ETF, you don't have to really buy anything. It's just paper, paper, Bitcoin, paper products, paper commodities. It's just a futures product. However, with a spot, you have to buy the underlying asset and hold that underlying asset. And that's why BlackRock has teamed up with Coinbase to hold the underlying asset, which would be coin, which of course, be Coinbase, but they have to actually buy it. And they've actually made this statement. So information was discovered by Scott Johnson, an investor at Von Braun Capital, who also know that BlackRock has obtained a CUSIP number for the ETF. A CUSIP number serves as a unique identifier for securities. Seeding an ETF happens when initial funding is provided typically by a bank or broker dealer. Use the purchase of a few creation units, that'll be Bitcoin, in exchange for ETF shares, which can be traded in an open market on day one. So it looks like BlackRock is feeling pretty confident this is going to happen so much so that they went ahead and bought Bitcoin. I think this is one of those reasons why the market is jumping. It is a green day. And I got to tell you, this is one of those days when I'm actually happy that I've been doing some dollar-cost averaging and going forward. Now, I need to remind everybody this is important. Just because today is a green day doesn't mean that green days last forever. Tomorrow could be World War Three. Or Bitcoin could become the world reserve currency. Who really knows? So just be careful what you do out there. Maybe if you're so inclined, take profits. It kind of lines up with what we're talking about as far as the rules. Never invest more. You can afford to lose. It's all gone. Everything's a scam until proven otherwise. Don't leave any on exchanges. Take it all off. Use a tangent wallet, cold storage device. Don't use leverage. Two to three X is not so bad. And take profits along the way. And that's all we have. So let me know what you think about that in the comments section. That will conclude the part for the news. Now, Bitcoin's great. Traditional crypto and gel assets are great. But what about things that are going on in Web three? And with Web three, it's a kind of a it's not a difficult com concept to understand. But it's important that we get people in here who understand it better than me. So to that end, I've had Yatsu, who is the founder of Anamoka Brands, and he laid down exactly what Web three actually is made it very simple. I link this video also in the description. You can check it out so you can understand a little bit better. So today, what I want to do is I wanted to bring on Robert Braggs. He's from Token Gamer and also Metamona from the Metamona show. And what I want to talk about a couple of things is why the metaverse is important. Web three and all that great stuff. And then also take a look at the other side from Ugo Labs. So without further ado, let me introduce you to two friends of mine. That would be Rob Braggs and Mona. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thanks for stopping by. Yes. Thank you guys. So guys, I'll be honest with you. By the way, Rob, sorry to say this, but Rob number one, Rob number two, before we get it mixed up, I just want to say Rob number two, did you hear? He just puts us in the same category as Yatsu. Thank you so much. That is very generous. Yes, I don't know if you guys have everything on your belt like Yatsu, but I know you guys are just as knowledgeable to bring us the great information about what's going on in metaverse and Web three. So I appreciate it because I find it very hard to keep up with all this stuff. So thank you for stopping by. So yes, yes, yes, yes. So the first question is, um, let's start with this, because let's start with with Rob number one and go from Rob to talk about Ugo Labs on the other side. And then Mona, I'd like to get to you to talk about actually, no, no, no, let me rephrase that. Let's do this first. Mona, I want to start with you first. Okay. Yeah, I want you to go first because it's important that you set up why the metaverse is important because when Facebook changed it to meta, I thought that was it. That's gonna be the greatest thing. And we saw the most ridiculous thing that meta ever put out for their for their metaverse. It looked ridiculous. However, just recently, he was on a podcast and it looked fantastic. So talk to us about why the metaverse is important and why it's going to dominate moving forward. You know, first, let me say this that as a journalist, when I came to the dark side, the side, I personally decided for myself after reading a lot of white paper papers that I wanted to lean more into metaverse and gaming because I saw the space as a lower barrier to entry for the mainstream audience. I saw a lot of related ability for the mainstream audience and I thought the mainstream will have an easier time. It's more palatable for them to come from this direction to accept some of the features that web three offers. Now, having that said, you know, it's rough. It's been it's been very rough. This is all very correlated with crypto and the sentiment and where we are today. And we have to get rid of a lot of bad actors. And you know, you brought up meta big tech like meta. And this is again, my opinion, but I think big tech like meta gave metaverse a bad name. When it pushed its janky vision to the masses and said, This is something brand new. Well, this is not something brand new. I think Rob would agree with me that word of warcraft is a metaverse and is not new. Fortnite is a metaverse and is not new. And they're all evolving, right? Sure. Horizon World is suffering from no user base. I don't know what Horizon World is doing. But I can tell you that open online virtual worlds are evolving. Yes, the DA user are down. But devs are up. And that's our saying right now. And a lot is happening behind in the backgrounds and in the foregrounds. And I think, you know, and I say, I'm going to speak for Rob here as well, we are in the trenches, and we are seeing what projects are doing. Now, we're not saying that every project is going to make it. But what I can tell you is that the substantial projects are really thinking about creating these digital immersive worlds. And they're inevitable because this next iteration is being built for the generation that's coming behind us. And you go and they want to be in these environments. So metaverse is inevitable. I will say that. Yeah, and it's interesting because like, I got to tell you before I took a look at it was Lex Friedman. I always stumble on his name before I saw this interview with Lex and it's him and Mark Zuckerberg going back and forth. This is them in their metaverse. This is them, they have the goggles on, you can't really see it right here. But I was saying myself, I'm like, if this is how it looks now, and this is only like after what's 12 months, 14 months of work moving forward, what is it going to look like later on? And then of course, like you talked about Fortnite. So these types of like, I know people on my channel, we kind of think of ourselves like Web three and Fortnite that is making sense. Remember, Fortnite was the first free to play game to hit a billion dollars in under a year. So as we move forward and we have this other types of aspects of going from Web two to Web three, I think it could be a very big play. So well, I mean, and we have come a very, very long way from what is it torso down non existent avatars, right? And I think we really have. So we're gonna we have to give mark that credit. But I think Rob would agree with me to that now. And I think I read in the audience comments as well. It really at this point with gaming comes down to a compelling IP. If you don't have a compelling IP, the technology is not selling it. Right. So at the end of the day, you still have to have a compelling IP for people to be attracted to it and want to virally share it. And I know Rob is gonna have a lot to say on that. Well, that would be perfect. That would lead us to our next point. So Rob, Mr. Braggs, let's talk about this new piece that you we've got here. Well, first of all, you guys can you can find Robert Braggs and his YouTube, also Twitter and everything else links in the description. Mona show here and Twitter also in the description as well. But Robert, you got this website token gamer, which is pretty good if you can't watch everything. And you've been featuring this. This is from you go labs called the other side. This is another metaverse play, right? It is. It's so it's a metaverse project that was perhaps a little blurry in the early stages when they first announced it. I wasn't sure if it was just an extension of their success with board AP Yacht Club. And it didn't feel like it had much flesh on the bones. However, it has started to make real end roads with what they're doing. And the foundation of that is technology. They are investing heavily. Well, they're investing heavily in two areas are investing in hiring, which I think is fundamental. I mean, you can't build something that's going to change gaming forever, change the online experience forever, and not have a highly experienced team. The end of 2022, they hired Daniel Allegra, who is the ex president and COO of Activision Blizzard. He's now CEO at you go labs. They also announced a couple of years ago or last year, perhaps Mike Severs, who worked at Riot Games and Epic Games. He's now CTO. And they've, they've started investing in they invested in a few different tech companies. So one of the problems that I've seen with the metaverse, and I think we've all seen whether we realized it or not is you couldn't have enough concurrent players in the same digital online space to make it feel like a city to make it feel like a stadium to make it feel like anything meaningful. You can flesh it out with NFTs. Sorry, NPCs. But I mean, who cares? It's just pointless. It doesn't add anything. So what they've done is they've invested in a company called Hadion, who is working on that exact problem, a scaling issue. And they did, as you can see right there on the screen right now, second trip, which was a technical test. And they had 7,200 concurrent players in the same space, which if you're not a gamer, that perhaps isn't that impressive. If you are a gamer, you'll know that is absurd. Like doesn't happen, particularly in the 3D world. So these sort of moves, I think a lot of what people imagine the metaverse to be, or what it can be, is gated by technology. And why I would put some of my eggs in the other side basket is because they are investing in exactly the technological limitations that we need to overcome. Excellent. You know what, this is Go ahead, Mona. Sorry, I just wanted to write on what Rob said. Rob, they also bought Roar Studios, correct. And I think with that collaboration, they are hiring a ton of AI engineering positions. Do you know what, where they're incorporating AI? I was looking into that, reading into that. I don't not off the top of my head, no, but I mean, every good company at the moment has to try and find a way of integrating AI into their workflow. And yeah, it doesn't surprise me, but I don't know exactly what areas of AI they're implementing. Yeah, so yeah, I think everything has to, I mean, we saw a couple of games that were coming out that were using AI and they were really just plowing, plowing forward. I think it's going to be one of those things that you have to actually do. But Robert, just to get to your point about the 7200 NPCs or 7200 players that are out there. I remember there was a study that was done. I want to say it was the sandbox, one of the early metaverse plays, and they found out that out of all the players, all the people that on the hype that was there, it was under like 100 different people at any one particular time. So for you to say that there's 7200, I think that was the central land. This, that's what it was, the central one. Pretty awful. So when I swear it's something like that, I'm like, this is, this might not be so great. So now we're talking about 7200 and moving forward. It sounds pretty good. How about this? Because a lot of people are asking there, I see some things in the chat. So like, okay, metaverse is great. And that's fantastic. So what is the play here? What is the play here? Is it for, is it for the immersive experience? Is it for to move things forward? Is it to invest? Or is it all the above? Or what do you guys see it as? I mean, I'll take on that. I, I'm, you know, I'm a journalist. So I'm not a gamer. And I'm, I'm not here for gaming. But metaverse does start in gaming, right? And the future is moving toward digital experiences in immersive worlds, right? But there's this misperception that metaverse is going to replace our interactions. That's never been the case. No project, no founder is preaching that the metaverse. And I think, you know, Robin, I were talking about this earlier, we need to change our terminology. People don't like the word metaverse. They don't like NFTs. They don't like crypto. So from this moment forward, I'm going to refer to the metaverse as a digital environment. Okay, the digital environment is going to be the is not going to replace your experiences is not going to replace your world is going to be an extension or enhancement to your experiences, right? Digital environments are going to add, look at it as another layer on top of reality and not the reality itself, right? And the and at the core of this digital environment, they will be culture and experiences, right? There are so many opportunities for immersive world that are not gaming. I can name one fashion. Let's talk like just for a second fashion. There's in world shopping, you're already doing it with Amazon, right? There's smart wearables that we could have a whole session on smart wearables, there's portable experiences, brand activations, then we have events, we have concerts, fashion shows, then we have sports, then we have education, then we have training. And yes, there are problems. We have technological problems that I think Rob focuses sometimes on those topics and Rob, feel free to interrupt me with what are some of the problems right now. I know we have VR limitations, we have scaling that Rob was mentioning, we have interoperability, which by the way, in the past two years, I've seen significant interoperability advancements. We still have digital identity risk management that needs to be mitigated. But the solutions are on the way, right? We're seeing pushing these technological boundaries. We're seeing creator elements being added. So they're bringing Snoop Dogg and Tony Hawks and Paris Hilton and different artists to create these experiences. And we're seeing major IP brand partnership. We're seeing Marvel, Disney, Nike, Adidas, McDonald's, they're all coming in and they're getting their feet wet. So that's how I look at it, Rob. I mean, I obviously I agree with almost all of that. And I would say I want to take one step back. So a lot of people want to know why why there should be any interest in the metaverse. But I think that the metaverse coming to fruition is just a natural logical flow to how life has has been evolving. We've used to send a letter, now you send an email. You used to buy your newspaper, now you read a website. Like, we now do a lot of meetings through video calls. I'm streaming this right now rather than being on stage. Every part of our life is now influenced by digital because it's easier. And we're moving more and more to that. And I think one of the most important points Mona made there was when it comes to replacing the physical activity, the metaverse won't necessarily replace anything. It can augment our life as it happens right now. And when you look at sports, one of the most exciting things that's happening that would be parenthetically linked to the metaverse, it could be a key part of the metaverse is digital events. We've seen Fortnite putting on like concerts. We're seeing technology at the moment where you can be in a sports stadium watching a live game, but in VR as if you're sitting in that stadium. And I told this to a friend, I said, how amazing would this be if you could watch whatever game you wanted, as if you're really there, you're sitting in the stadium and watching the game. And he said, why would I want to do that instead of going to the game? I said, well, that completely misses the point. If you could go to the game, you go to the game. But for example, Tottenham Hotspur played tonight, that's my football team, soccer team. They played tonight. They have 10 plus million fans globally, maybe far more than that. I don't know. The stadium only holds 60,000 people. So think how many people globally cannot get to that game, even if they could get to the game, they probably can't get a ticket. This allows for people to watch that thing. And that's just one element. I mean, fashion shopping, we're seeing all these different elements. Just more of modern life is becoming digital. It's enabling us to do more, see more, be in more places. And for me, it's just a logical extension of how the digital world has been evolving. Yeah, I went to, I have to, Rob, I have to tell you guys this for the first time ever. And I cannot believe I'm saying this, because I feel like a 12 year old when I say this, I went to a digital night club last week in the central land, and I took salsa lessons with, and I had to buy a wearable, because I felt like I was underdressed. I mean, and I had so much fun. You know, they gave me the coordinates. They're like meet us at negative 100, negative 100. I show up. I'm like, wow, there are hundreds of people here. It's a night club. There's a real DJ. He's playing salsa and they're doing salsa lessons. And I'm looking around and I'm like, wow, I am so underdressed. These people are, they're taking digital wearables so seriously. And I had so much fun. I don't I don't know how to explain it to you guys, but it's just it's something different. It's something different that we're slowly getting used to. Maybe it's maybe it's yet so much fun because like when you go to like a lesson of anything or you're in a public environment, you always have that feeling of like, you know, people are watching me and I'm here, especially people like social anxiety. I think some of those people would want to do that. But they can't do that. And they miss out on different experiences. So maybe that would be like one of those things to get around it. For me, when I take a look at the metaverse, like the stuff that we said, like, that sounds good. I'd rather go to a live game. But if I can't, well, I'd, you know, do that other option. But the other thing that I think is pretty great about it is like, just like we take a look here, like I would really like to, you know, hang out with my grandson a lot more. And I can't do that as I travel and I move around. So if I have something like this when they're actually here, imagine the people that you could put back into your life. And I think that's one of those things that when you're there and like you're you're seeing them, it's a lot different than talking on the phone or texting. That's for sure. I think the connections are one of those things. So that could be one of those one of those ideas to you. There's there's an interesting point there. So during COVID, where the UK was locked down and I was living on my own at that point. And so I didn't see anyone for like three months. So my lifeblood was Zoom meetings and calls with family and friends and colleagues and so on. But I couldn't quite shake the feeling that it wasn't it just wasn't scratching the itch quite as much as I wanted it to. And some people did quite a few different universities did research into this. And they found that Zoom meetings, because there's an almost imperceptible delay in saying something and the person reacting and responding and their micro expressions changing, right, you weren't getting the human connection that you usually get in person. And I think that it's probably a multifaceted problem. It's probably not just the delay. There's probably many factors and moving. I mean, the next and Mark interview, that does feel like one step closer to a more fulfilling social interaction online. I think at the moment, we're kind of primitive in the way that our digital interactions happen. And so I do think that will be a very interesting part.