 Hey folks, this is both our first and last episode on the NFT moment for the near future at least. This episode was the first one we recorded back on March 11th, just over a month ago, but man, a month feels like a year in 2021. Things are moving fast in all our worlds, and as of next week, we'll be returning to timely shows covering a variety of topics, so stay tuned for that. But for today, enjoy this host solely discussion at the dawn of the NFT moment. One of the amazing things that's happening with NFTs today is that it's bringing a lot of digital artists into the crypto space, and those digital artists are changing the way people perceive the crypto space, but they're also providing very, very valuable perspectives that we are lacking in our industry. As prices explode and mainstream attention, if not adoption, seems to be reaching a fever pitch, tokenized collectibles, commonly known as NFTs, are all the rage today. This morning, popular crypto artist Beeple's auction at the Venerable Christie's topped $69 million, making him the third most valuable artist alive today. I'm Adam B. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. Today as always, I'm joined by the other host of the show, Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello. Stephanie Murphy. Hi. And Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. So this episode on NFTs has been a long time coming, but frankly, I'm glad we waited, because today's auction really capped off an astonishing rise that we've seen so far this year. On today's show, we're going to discuss what NFTs are, what they can and can't do, and a bit more than that. So who wants to kick us off with a basic explanation of NFTs? I feel like I've been talking about them constantly, and I could do it, but let's have someone else jump in here. Well, Adam, that's because you have been talking about them constantly for like the last eight years, actually. Well, that's true, but that's not the point that I'm making here, although I do appreciate the accolades, Stephanie. Well, no, I think that's really important, because this is your thing. And then for those of you listeners who have been with us for a while, you've heard us talk about this concept a lot over the years, whether it was Adam's project with Tokenly or even before that with the idea of colored coins and other projects. So my understanding of an NFT is, first of all, NFT stands for non-fungible token, and fungible means one thing that's sort of exchangeable for another, like cash is fungible, Bitcoin is fungible. If you have one Bitcoin, it's not like that particular Bitcoin is the only one that can be used in a specific instance. While with non-fungible tokens, it is specific to the actual token that can fill whatever use case you're looking to use it for. So for example, this could have lots of implications. It could be like a key to a lock. It could be a unique piece of art like we were just talking about today. It could represent a physical piece of property in the real world that can be swapped to transfer ownership of the property, and there's only one of them. I like to call these NFTs. I say the acronym itself is a negative explanation, and it stands for naming failure total. And the reason it stands for naming failure total is because if I explain what an NFT is by unrolling the acronym, that's a negative explanation. What is a negative explanation? Well, you had one question, which is what is an NFT? I unroll the acronym. Now you have two questions. You still don't know what an NFT is, but now you also don't know what fungible means. So now I have to explain fungible before I explain non-fungible, and now I have to make two explanations to explain one thing. So that's a negative explanation. So you get minus one knowledge when I rolled it out. This is a fundamental problem that we see again and again and again in our industry, which is the engineering term doesn't make it through a marketing, branding, naming, product management towards user experience departments because we don't have those. It just goes from engineering to the public with no intermediation. And as a result, you get a name that actually doesn't tell you anything. I almost like that one company has tried to rename these into NIFTs, which while it's not a good explanation, it's at least not a negative explanation. So if you say, what's an NFT? Oh, it stands for NIFTY. Okay, what does it do? Well, lots of NIFTY things. NIFTY, that's the only appropriate reaction. I mean, at least I haven't had to add another explanation. I can just start talking about the NIFTY things it does without having to explain monetary economics. I think the needing to explain it is a part of the social dynamic. Every major concept in this space that became very popular was one that you spend like 10 minutes explaining. And I think that everyone wants to be Neil deGrasse Tyson for like five minutes. And I think like, because back when Charlie Shrem co-owned that bar in New York, and it was ever, but if you said ever, someone would just correct you and say, oh, it's called VR. And that type of culture of being able to clearly know someone didn't know how to say it, right? Because it's the letters, not the name. I think in Bitcoin, or especially in Ethereum, it's the like, the idea that catches on most easily is the one that lets you act like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Or just like a giant hipster, like, oh, you probably don't know this band. So what you're saying is it has like enormous smug factor. Yes. And that is the reason why it medically gets adopted. Okay. Okay. I see that. That's also why people are confused about what this means. No, it is confusing. It's confusing, because, first of all, most of the explanations only cover a very, very small range of things that can be NFTs. So almost all of the explanations I've heard lately are digital art related. And that's great. That's the most prominent use case for NFTs today. But it's not the only one. The best explanation I've honestly heard, and the one that I used in mastering Ethereum when I described these three years ago, was the word deed. And if you look at the actual technical specification, they're called deeds. So what is the deed? Now, we already know what a deed is. I have a deed to my house. That's a deed. Okay. So a deed is a certificate of ownership. But it's a certificate of ownership of not some quantity of something. It's a certificate of ownership of something very specific, this house, or the title to your car that's a deed to your car. And you can understand how that works. If you have a mechanism by which the ownership can be ascertained through presentation of this deed, which has a lot of implications in this space, then you can transfer the deed and that effectively transfers ownership. Therefore, whoever controls the deed controls the asset that that deed refers to. If I transfer the deed to my house through a lawful process, somebody else now owns my house. If I sign over the title of my car, somebody else now owns the car. Now with Tangible, it's easy. When you add intangible, you can see that like I have a trademark. So what's my trademark registration? Well, it's my deed to my trademark. If I transferred that, I could transfer ownership of that trademark, even though you can't touch it. It's a thing, right? And you can make a copy of it. And this is where it gets interesting for digital art, which is you can take a screenshot of my trademark logo, but you don't actually own it. And I do have, in that case, an exclusionary interest that I can use, but also I can prove that I own it. And that's important. So anywhere where you can think of a deed being useful. And again, even that doesn't cover all of the different use cases. I think that the deed idea around NFTs is a really, really interesting one. The angle I want to point out here that you didn't really focus on, but which I think is probably the most interesting to me is that when you own the deed to something, that means that you own it and you have a lot of control over what you do with it, what other people can do with it, how they interact with it. It doesn't mean that you're making money off of it. You can use it in ways that make you money. It doesn't mean that you're enjoying it or getting any sort of benefit from it, right? If you own the deed to a house, but you never pay any attention to it, you don't live there, you don't rent it, you don't maintain it, you still own it, but it's not actually doing anything for you. And that, I think, is kind of a place where we are right now with a lot of these NFTs. Right now, we have the deed part. But what do you do with it part? The kind of, what's the advantage that it offers you? How can you make money with it? All of those things are things that people are still working on. And yet, we built the deed part first. So keep going, Andreas, but I just want to point that out. The deed, as a certificate of ownership, is only one part of what tokenizing control over a non-fungible thing can actually do. Because unlike a deed that is a non-programmable static claim of ownership, these things are programmable. And also, they're payment endpoints. And that opens a whole range of possibilities that you didn't have before. And here's a specific example. If I had a non-fungible token that represented ownership of my car, that could also be the very same non-fungible token, could be the access mechanism that allows me to start it and drive away. Meaning that the key to the car is the key to the NFT is the NFT. So when I transfer ownership, I'm not only transferring legal ownership or control, I'm also transferring the means by which someone can open the door and start the car. You can do the same thing with a house. You basically turn it into an access token, as well as an ownership token. The other thing you can do is use it as a payment endpoint, which means that if I have access to, let's say, I have an NFT that gives me partial ownership of an article that's on a social media or a sharing platform, let's say Hive, then I presumably could make that a payment endpoint so that I could essentially get a stream of dividends or royalty payments that are distributed to all of the holders of NFTs for that unique item as it generates royalties, payments, tips, donations, whatever that may be. For example, you can connect financial benefits to it. So then it's not just a token, it's also a share of a potential revenue stream, which makes it very interesting when it's attached to a singular item. And it goes on and on like that. You can turn it into a ticket that gives you access to a concert, for example. So someone who has an unfungible token that's connected to an artist or something like that or a piece of work, they could use that as a ticket to access a concert or live performance. So you can do all of these interesting things that you can't do with deeds. I wrote an article back in 2016 called Tokens in the Family Car that got into exactly that type of topic around this idea of taking physical, real world keys. And early on, I don't know if you guys remember, but the Dow actually emerged out of this company called Slocket, I believe. And their use case was, again, creating door locks way back at the beginning of Ethereum's history, that you would then use a token as the key and then you would wirelessly connect and sign a message or something like that, prove that you own the token, and then be able to gain access. So these ideas have been around for a really long time. As I said in the intro, the thing that's really different now is the popularity around it. And that popularity certainly has come from the art use case. One of the areas that there's been a lot of excitement about, and which I've heard a lot of excitement about from the kind of non-crypto space from the traditional art world has been the idea of smart contract royalties built into these collectibles. So the idea here is that when you're an artist in real life, you sell a painting. Well, you've now sold that painting. So hopefully you made a lot of money from it because you will not get any money typically from any further resales of it into the market. And so what can happen for popular artists who are in the space for a long time is that they wind up competing later in life against their earlier more desirable works. And so it's created a problem in the art world, honestly, where there's lots and lots of money being made, but very little of it actually goes to the artists. And few artists are able to actually live on the income that comes in from that in the manner that you would expect relative to how much their art actually trades for in the open market. So there's been this big push in the kind of smart contract NFT art world, which really has been a thing for maybe six months, it seems like, to create a way for the person who creates a given NFT to then get money to come back to them. They set a percentage, 10%, 20%, something like that. And then when that piece is sold on the secondary market, then they are supposed to get some of that. I really love this idea. I think it's a really cool thing to do, but I feel like the way it's been talked about and the way it's been presented to many in the art world is not entirely feasible, right? Well, I'm curious what you mean by that, Adam. Why do you think it's not feasible? Is it because the technology isn't there yet? Well, so it's because when we're talking about smart contracts, right, backing up for a second, most of the big sales that are happening right now and most of the places where these things are being offered are on well-funded marketplaces specifically around these types of NFT collectible tokens. So, Rarible is one that comes to mind. Another big one is Foundation. And there are probably a half-dozen to a dozen more of these platforms that are out there that are doing something like this. And basically, as far as I can tell, the problem here is that when you transfer an NFT, well, if you are making a purchase and a sale on the blockchain, then you can see that I sent something to you and you sent money back to me, right? And we used a smart contract to make this trade. But a lot of times, people will go outside of these marketplaces, contact the artist directly or contact an owner directly and purchase it from them out of band, right? Or maybe you want to get paid in dollars or something like that for your NFT. Well, none of that inherently travels through the blockchain. And so that means that there's this kind of weakness with these systems, where in order for the artist to get that percentage, the sale has to happen through a channel where that percentage is being collected, right? Which means it has to be a public sale. And it also kind of means you can't transfer these things too, right? Because if you can transfer them and you don't need to give some nominal dollar amount to the artist, well, then what's to stop someone who owns one of these things from saying, well, I didn't sell it to anyone. I just transferred it to them. I gave it to this guy over here or I just changed the address that I was holding it in versus actually paying that extra 15% or whatever the artist has defined. So that's the problem is that there's definitely a code is law element to this and there could be, but there are a bunch of kind of implementation problems that make it so that because it's possible for someone to avoid paying the fee, well, if you don't avoid paying the fee, you're kind of leaving money on the table. Well, yes, but at the same time, it's already possible to avoid paying the fee. So even if you only had marginal compliance to this scheme, which you could do through some kind of licensing scheme, even if you only had marginal compliance, that's still better than what we have today. So I don't think you just throw the baby out with a bathwater just because there are some weaknesses in the first implementation of this and the incentives over time may very well change. You could also get a lot more compliance because art is a very prestige perception driven field. And so the original artist could basically have a taint that they could apply to the token where they have like a secondary NFT or token that they could attach to it, such that if there's a transaction that they believe occurred, and they have a good faith belief that they didn't get a cut of it, they could just color the NFT as one that didn't abide by the social agreement of giving the artist a cut of the transfer. Yeah, let me give you a specific example of that. There's a game and I can't remember what the game is called, where there is a piracy detection mechanism inside this game. It's a PC game. I wish I could remember its name, but it's really funny. So if you have a pirated copy, your in game character wears an eye patch with a skull and crossbones. That's it. Throughout the entire game, you get to watch your character wearing that eye patch. And it doesn't do anything. It doesn't change the gameplay or your capabilities or your enjoyment to the game. But it just tells you, listen, we know, we know that you took our work and didn't pay for it. And if that's okay with you, well, go ahead, you're going to play it. And if you make screenshots or videos or try to share your play with others, which of course now is a very big thing in the game industry, then everyone will know. Yeah, it's like a really cute way of holding up a mirror. And I bet that works. And it does work, exactly. So I think there are all of these social mechanisms that have nothing to do with the code is law implementation. Because at the end of the day, the vast majority of human behavior and moral behavior is not enforced by law enforcement. It's enforced by social convention and peer pressure and expectations. And you can do a lot of that outside of the blockchain. And the other thing about art, of course, is that some of the benefits that accrue to the people who buy art are precisely this prestige, not of being the owner, but of being a patron of the arts. It is almost like a civilizational badge that you get to carry. The Medici family pay a sculptor to make a beautiful sculpture in Venice. They don't make it so they can put it in the living room. They make it so that it goes in the piazza where everyone can see it and go, that's a really beautiful sculpture. Yeah, I know this was a Medici patronage, right? So that's the prestige that then transfers essentially rubs off from the artist to the patron of the arts and vice versa. So I think that's an effect that you can get with NFTs. And it's the same as having a Patreon, right? Which has been a very successful way of solving the starving artist's problem except for the fiat. You know, one of the things that strikes me is that you could also do this from the positive way as well, right? You guys have been talking about kind of the ways to discourage people or to use social conventions and norms to discourage people from avoiding this, but we could look at this from the other way too. You could have a token that's like Patreon coin or something like that, right? That gets awarded to people as they, based on the amount that they actually wind up paying in these splits to artists. It doesn't even have to do anything, right? It doesn't have to be worth anything, but it probably would be worth something if it really did represent sort of prestige or something like that. And then again, one could see almost like a simple leaderboard play, right? Where the whole point of this, since it's all just like mostly social signaling anyways, just like you want to have as many Patreon coins as possible because you want to be the top patron. And in the type of use case we're talking about, these are people who are already trading money for, you know, patronage and prestige on that side. So I think maybe you're right. Maybe it's not about the technology at all. Maybe it's just about putting the right social systems in place to kind of reinforce the behavior that you want in this type of system and discourage what you don't. And this is exactly why it is very important to have a diverse community with multiple different disciplines and crafts and have artists as part of your community. So having artists in the NFT space is making the NFT space better because precisely because it's not about the technology precisely because engineers who make NFTs do not necessarily have insight into the user experience of an art buyer. And so one of the amazing things that's happening with NFTs today is that it's bringing a lot of digital artists into the crypto space and those digital artists are changing the way people perceive the crypto space, but they're also providing very, very valuable perspectives that we are lacking in our industry. And the same thing applies with musicians and many of the other creative arts, which we're sorely lacking. This is one of the reasons why I keep harping on the idea that this is not just about money. And if you think it's just about money, you're missing such a big part of the picture. And the other thing that it does that's really weird is it creates a structure of incentive for the artist to want to incentivize the velocity of their art. So art is a highly illiquid industry and there just isn't an incentive to increase the velocity of art. So the velocity of money is how often money changes hands. And so it'll be very weird from an economic standpoint and then also from a business process standpoint to look at what that would mean and how artists could go about incentivizing the increase in the velocity of their paintings if they start making a cut every time there's a transfer. Did you guys see that Taco Bell released a set of five designs that I actually thought some of them were kind of cool. They had like this, what are the steel balls, you know, where one taps against the other and it's just kind of like a metronomic effect? What's that called? Newton's Cradle. Newton's Cradle, yeah. So one of the Taco Bell NFTs was that but with tacos. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but they're pretty amusing. I'll link to over the show notes. Taco Bell is kind of at the forefront of like very strange ways to advertise Taco Bell. I think like a year or two ago there's a movie that came out called Ideal Home where Paul Rudd is in a long term gay relationship and 20 minutes of the 90 minute runtime is them taking their child to Taco Bell. Okay. So it's like systemically important to that movie. Yeah. Listen, NFTs, very weird ways to advertise Taco Bell. They're at the forefront of maximizing the impression in the marketplace. So there are a lot of people who are quite bothered by NFTs. And I'd like to address that or maybe look at some of the criticism that is arising in this place. I find the critiques to be very, very similar to the critiques of ICOs. And in fact, there are many very strong parallels in the emergence of the ICO market in 2017 at the height of the bubble and the emergence of the NFT market and the enthusiasm behind the NFT market and the vast numbers we're seeing in NFT money that is happening this time round. And I kind of feel the same way about both of those, a bit more so the ICOs than NFTs, which is that in order to truly appreciate what's happening in the space, you have to be able to hold two ideas simultaneously in your head. And the ideas being for ICOs, for example, that we're looking at a truly innovative revolutionary mechanism for funding early stage startups and making investments available to everyone in the globe without borders, the future of finance, finance, 2.0, woohoo, plus the worst scam pit of shit you've ever seen flooded with absolute garbage, opportunists and sharks that are defrauding rubes. And if you can hold both of those ideas simultaneously, then you can really appreciate what happens with ICOs, right? It was both of those things simultaneously. And you have to look at it that way, in my opinion. Otherwise, you're missing at least half the picture. Same thing to a lesser extent with NFTs, meaning that on the one hand, this is a whole other level of what tokens can do, which is much more interesting than the early stage startup funding idea is tied to creative pursuits like the arts. It can truly revolutionize how the arts are funded, how artists are funded, how artists connect to their audience, how the audience connects to the artist, how the secondary markets work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is just art. Forget all of the other applications of NFTs we talked about. And the degree of ridiculous FOMO that is happening in this space and the oversupply of low-cost money that is sloshing around trying to find yield in the most ridiculous places is also pouring into this market and creating some evaluations that, quite honestly, I don't see any rational way you could justify or even any artistic subjective way you could justify either. And so if you can hold both of those ideas, you can see this as something truly innovative and world-changing and a most ridiculous overexuberance at the same time. I think in both of those cases, we're going to see some amazing innovation emerge from this. And a lot of people are going to be left very salty and very burned. And a lot of the criticisms mirror that. They come from a very kind of sound, money-hard monetary principles crowd who do not see the point of doing anything other than digital gold store value 2.0. It kind of feels like with the NFTs, you're playing the Wheel of Fortune, except your options are like the million-dollar sliver is the one called innovation. And then there are three other boxes called It's the Next Beanie Babies. The other one is called It's the Next Bit Connect. And the other one is called, No, it makes sense because it's all just a front for money laundering. And people don't know when they spin that wheel if they're going to get that little sliver of innovation or if they're really just buying a Beanie Baby or if it's the next Bit Connect or, hey, something sold for $70 million because it's just a way to wash money. But they're all on the same wheel. And you can't pretend that the wheel doesn't also have the innovation. I mean, you can. And lots of people are pretending. One of the criticisms I've heard to get a bit more specific, which I think is worthy of an answer is, why do you need a blockchain for this? Why do you need an uncensurable blockchain for this use case? And that is a very fair question. And my answer is because if you understand NFTs as deeds, whether it's for intangible or tangible property, you cannot secure property rights with a centralized intermediary without having enormous counterparty and regulatory risk. And so for the very same reason that I want to be able to transact my money without interference, without censorship, without freezing, seizing, and censorship and all of those things, I want to also be able to do that with my digital art or with the token that represents some other property. Now, that connection is far less tenable if we're talking about a tangible item that is pointed to by reference by the NFT because then you don't have any way of enforcing that. So if I'm talking about a deed to a house, you can say, well, you don't really need an uncensurable blockchain to do that because the actual possession of the house is censorable by that jurisdiction. And that's very true. So for the time being, that doesn't really answer the question in the case of a tangible object that isn't on the blockchain, but it still does answer the question in the case of intangible property for which I can get recognition of ownership through the blockchain. Okay, so I want to take us in one other direction as far as the critiques are concerned. These critiques come to us from Xan, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right, it's xanofblackgirlscode.com. They present two different arguments that I don't believe we've discussed yet, but which I think warrant a little bit of it. And I just searched on Twitter for NFT climate change because I have heard this a lot. And it's been kind of interesting because some of the people on the kind of more woke side of things have really, really started getting aggressive with artists who have started dipping their toes into NFTs specifically because of concerns around the environmental energy consumption. Now, we've heard stories like this before, since basically the beginning, right? The energy concerns around blockchain specifically that use proof of work, you can agree with them, you can disagree with them, whatever. It is the same argument that is being made here, for anyone who's lost on how does NFT contribute to climate change, then they show a video of the computational power needed to solve a block from a blockchain. Then they show like one of those shipping containers that's been put on a site in like a energy generating location, and then it's full of Bitcoin miners or whatever it is that they're mining there. These server farms use cheap and dirty energy sources, coal and natural gas and burn it at a huge rate to get the electricity needed. It's wasteful to the nth degree and becomes even worse as more and more folks adopted as a service or type of payment or trade. Banking energy averages based on 2018 kilowatt hours from ING quote used by 7.6 billion people on the planet as of July 2018 results in 8.4 kilowatt hours. I'll skip the math, but it comes to basically 64 terawatt hours. The current annual energy consumption of Bitcoin was 71 terawatt hours, so more than the banking system used in its entirety, and of course, then they're citing many fewer people. Let's stop there, take a step back and talk quickly about the energy thing. Well, just do it on Ethereum with proof of stake. There you go. Now I really off the Bitcoin maximum because I just gave you a reason why you can't do it on colored coins. But it's not a good answer, but it is as flippant as the question itself, which is there are so many misconceptions, red flags, extrapolations, and non sequiturs in these types of arguments that they simply do not have any weight of evidence behind them. Okay, first of all, ING counting the total banking sector. Do you include the seventh fleet being parked in the Straits of Hormuz in that? No? Really? Because I think that's what the proof of work of the US dollar is. And that's not a what about. That's an actual relationship between how the US dollar is backed. So you can't just pretend that there is no equivalent pollution or energy use. All money is energy. The only question is, the route from energy to money in the minting process, how direct or indirect is it, and what carbon footprint does it have? And then there we can have a real conversation about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin versus the carbon footprint of other things versus the carbon footprint of the US dollar, the euro, etc. Otherwise, we're really not having an honest conversation about this. And the argument that the more people that use it, the more energy it uses is simply not true. I would also say that a lot of artists aren't familiar with dealing with negative externalities because in order to create negative externalities, you have to make money first. Ouch. There's a very simple solution to dealing with the internality or the externality of creating CO2 because you're using Ethereum by internalizing that cost. And that's think about how much of the network you're utilizing. And you know what? In the same way, you want people to live by their values so that you get a cut when they trade it. Why don't you take 10 or 20% of the money you make creating an NFT and buy carbon offsets? Like every other rich person who has a jumbo jet but says they care about the climate. And just to clarify, carbon offsets, that's a fungible token. Okay, so there's one other complaint here or concern that I also think is worth addressing. And this one, I don't think it has as easy an answer. So again, quoting from blackgirlscode.com or Twitter thread by the creator of it. Also, for anyone saying they don't care or find this new crypto uses less energy or is wasteful, I present an argument against NFTs from an art perspective. If you have $1,000 to drop on crypto, consider instead buying a personalized commission directly with $1,000. If the point of the NFT is owning special and personal art, you can just pay an artist to make that for you directly without the non-sense of transactions or computers and servers. Quote, but it's not encrypted and could be stolen. And quote, but I have news for you about art theft. So I think that's a kind of more reasonable point. The question is, what is the argument in favor of buying something or patronizing artists using this type of technology versus just patronizing artists generally? Well, it's not a one or the other thing. Like you could still do both. You can always buy custom art. And I think a lot of people who might be interested in NFTs do do that, but now they have another option to buy an NFT too. And also NFTs can do certain things, like we discussed on the show, that physical art cannot just from a local artist. Ding, ding, ding. That's the best part of the response, I think, and Stephanie got it 100% right. It's as someone who actually creates stuff, my stuff is stupid videos about what Bitcoin is and why it matters. But nevertheless, it's creative work and I have an audience. Well, right now my connection to my audience is always tenuous. It's tenuous because at all times I'm mediated by a platform. And that platform takes away my ability to connect directly with my audience. And one of the reasons I like using Patreon is because it helps me reestablish that connection. It's not about the money. It's not about the transaction. It's about the connection to the audience. So if you understand that, then the difference between paying someone $1,000 for a commission piece of art and buying that as an NFT with a $1,000 transaction is because at the end of the first transaction, the connection is severed. You pay for the art, you get the commission, you walk away, that's it. There's no more connection between the artist and the audience. When you use an NFT, that connection remains. You have a thread that either the artist or the audience can tug on, can reconnect with. And you can use that to do additional things. You can use it to distribute additional royalties to the artist. So it's not a single transaction and bye-bye. And you can also use it to give additional perks to the people who are buying the NFTs by using it as an access token. So the NFT then becomes essentially a network connection. And you can build a social network between artists and their audiences. And that's the real thing. It's not about, well, how can we take transactional art and make it more complicated. It's about how can we take the use of art and turn it from something that is transactional to something that is interactive and long-term. So I guess the only other thing that is worth saying is that there have been, and I think that we may see this trend grow again with these big prices that we've seen come in for these things, we've seen an increasing number of people who are going on to Instagram and finding really nice looking art by just traditional artists and then claiming to be those traditional artists and tokenizing the thing and trying to sell it before anybody figures it out. So definitely, again, like if you are someone who's interested in this marketplace, just be careful as far as the provenance around a lot of these things goes. And again, like that is something that it feels like we will have to come up with or the space will have to come up with a better way to deal with, because right now it is causing a bit of a problem, I think, for sort of perceptions around the industry within a lot of the art world that isn't already on board. Still, as kind of a first step and as like kind of mass market validation, like we didn't even talk about what's going on with NBA Top Shot and just kind of like the craziness around some of the projects that are out there, but it's exciting because again, you know, like for better or worse, this is the closest that we've got in a lot of these ways to these mainstream or early majority type of audiences. So personally, I know we're all pretty excited about this whole NFT thing and it's a topic we'll be revisiting. Thank you very much to the other hosts of the show, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan, and Andreas M. Antonopoulos for sitting in on today's session. This episode was edited by Jonas and featured music by Jared Rubens. Stay tuned for our next episode. We'll see you soon.