Yo-yo, yo-yo, yo, what up, What up?
Good morning, Good morning GMG, Friday, Friday the February 9th,
2020. 4. Look at that.
Another beautiful day. What is on me?
Another beautiful day. To have a beautiful day.
Sorry we're late. Y'all, but we are here and that
is all that matters. I got my Co host Mando in the
house. Mando, the man of the hour.
Our superhero. Good morning.
How you doing today? Oh no, I can't hear you.
I can't hear you. You can't give us any shit now.
No way, bro. No way.
You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to.
I think. I think Sam's what Mando does.
Let's just bring Yat up. Let's talk with with Yat because
he's like that that Mister Metaverse is the busiest person
in all crypto. So we're going to bring him on
while we have him. Yat.
Good morning. GM, GM, Can you actually hear
me? Yes, yes, Like the voice of God
coming from the sky right now. We've been doing 15 minutes.
OK, great. Wonderful.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, good morning. Let me, let me hold on.
We usually start you know I chat with man and everything that's
not working we have you right now.
Does that one of the the only the only you know.
Plague. Plague.
Sorry. The only area moment in time
today that we could get you on. Let me get open.
Campus on on on. Here.
Let me, let me send him a code. Stand by and everything.
Mando. I still can't hear you.
So I guess you transferred your powers of being able to be heard
to Yatsu this morning. So we appreciate you for doing
so as we only had Yats for half an hour yet.
Wow. How's everything?
It it I saw you in Davos. Well, actually Mando as well he
was hey little cats here. It was really cool at the Casper
Labs house on the promenade on the main promenade.
How how you been since how's everything going on on you
guys's end at Adamoca? That's.
Great. I mean, you know, I think, I
think almost everyone in our industry would have been in a
much better mood as of the last two months, shall we just say.
And especially today, it's pretty, pretty amazing in terms
of to see where where Bitcoin is in the entire market overall.
And it's been driving a lot of activity in the area of gaming
in particular. One of our other projects have
been supporting called Pixels, just recently was had a
Launchpad launch pool announcement and finance for
instance. So you know lots of activity in
this space. Gaming is on fire generally in
the Web 3 space and just general adoption and conversation is
good. So I think 2024 is going to be
the year of adoption, right, in the sense that 23 might have
been the year of consolidation and cleanup.
I think 24 is the year of growth.
And by the way, Happy Chinese Year.
It's a year of the Wood Dragon. And the Wood dragon, everyone.
Right. And the Wood Dragon's symbolism
is prosperity, growth, audacity, and everything else that I think
we're hoping for in 2024. I I love that that's some that's
some really good stuff and and and and of course like happy
Chinese this is this is a big moment you know we talk about
the year the dragon a lot on the timeline that dragon by the way
well how do you say dragon in in in in in Mandarin is long right.
So you know does that does that mean something Maybe I am
actually yes. I did some research because I
was going to go tomorrow for breakfast in this local place in
Montreal in the Chinese Chinese quarter for for like the
traditional breakfast. And and I found out that I'm
actually born the year of the the wood dog.
And so as someone when you're the wood dog, I have to bow down
to the wood dragon and let him cook because if I don't I may
give all my money away and he's going to take it away from me.
So I need to let him cook in in in the web three terms that's
what I was that's the research I what I was told.
So yeah, look it's a pleasure to have you this morning.
It's so much fun you're here and and and I love that the the
update especially on the gaming side, we're super bullish on web
through gaming on this show. We've been talking about it for
a minute and I mean we cover it every other day, there's news
coming out so and so it's really cool and Gigi on the side of the
Crypt is just like added a lot. So it's really cool to see.
So the other thing though that's that you're bullish on Adamoca
which is something you came to talk about which again something
that we're commonly bullish on with you is education in Web 3.
So let's I kind of want to dive right into it and like ask you
straight up like you guys see Adamoca is is is wide, it's very
large company. You guys are invested across the
entire crypto space in multiple, you know, companies here, but
why is Animoca specifically so into web through education,
right, that we have the open Campus account on the stage as
we speak to? Yeah, well, I mean, first of
all, when you think about our space being gaming, actually
gaming and education kind of go hand in hand because actually
whatever you do, what I mean in terms of, you know, we learn
through play and these these days, you know, we learn mostly
through digital play. If you think about our kids
playing on Roblox or you know, playing Minecraft, you know, you
know, social interactions. And so to us it's a very natural
fit to basically include education in the whole area.
Also, I personally have been involved in education.
I helped visitors. I'm on the board of several
schools, helped sort of found some of the some some sort of
educational centers and schools in the region as well.
I always felt that education was really, really important for
society, broadly speaking. And also the other thing is, is
that education is something that we all do.
I mean, we might say, for instance, that, oh, YouTube is
entertainment, but actually YouTube is the largest education
platform in the world, for instance, where people go and
sort of go and, you know, to learn how to play the guitar,
Rhythm Facts, podcast or vlog, actually, those are all kind of
forms of education. So we're actually doing that
every, every single day. And you know, education, you
know, we talk about gaming being big.
It is big, of course, right? You know, it's like, you know,
over 3 billion gamers. It's the $200 billion industry
today and growing, especially when you add in the Web 3 mix.
But education, everyone does it and it's a $5 trillion base,
right. And and the other thing I would
also add is that, you know, we also looked at it from the lens
of how do we get mass adoption in terms of I guess, political
adoption as well. And here's the thing, You know,
gaming is great and financial sort of, you know, literacy and
sort of financial growth is all great.
But unfortunately, these aren't very popular political
narratives. But no, politicians don't get
elected because they provide better services for gamers, at
least not yet, maybe in a decade or so, right.
And also, yeah, when it comes to sort of the Wall Street effects
and that that crypto has enabled, web fear has enabled,
unfortunately that's not necessarily very popular amongst
a certain group of people. However, if we can make teachers
more money or actually if you think about it, some of the
largest, really probably the single largest creative group in
the world, then that becomes a powerful political bloc, a very
strong voice. And actually, you know, if you
can basically educate our teachers about Web 3, then guess
what they're going to educate next, the next generations and
the people thereafter. So as a centre, I think focusing
our attention on education, I think is I think really
important for broader Web 3 adoption.
It's also important for the narrative, and I see it very
similarly to how, you know, when we looked at gaming, most people
forget that we got into sort of evangelizing and Web 3 gaming in
late 20/17/2018. It was a long time ago and
similarly back then a lot of people didn't see it.
And of course, today everyone's talking about it.
And we kind of think education is the same because in some ways
it's everywhere, but nowhere, right?
It's kind of like, you know, because we do it every day.
We somehow forget that actually, you know, just ask your parents
how much they spend on education on you, right.
And if you don't have children yet, you might not actually
fully appreciate just how much you spend on that.
So it's a generational thing. And eventually everyone here in
crypto land is going to go maybe have their first kid and then
they, oh, you know, I want to send to a school and hire a
tutor and oh damn, how much money did you spend?
Give me. Exactly.
Starting to get stressed out
about that? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And and The thing is, I think
the other thing is, and this is what's so great about Wave 3, is
you want to actually reward the very people who are giving the
most direct value to whoever it is.
And so in the same way that we can give artists direct value,
we can now give teachers direct value for the services they
create for our students, as an example.
And then today, again, facing the same problems in the Web 2
platforms, they're being disintermediated.
Teachers are, you know, like in the US, Frances are amongst one
of the lowest paid sort of people, given the fact that the
role that they're doing is perhaps one of the most
important. I mean, they probably spend many
of our kids spend more time with teachers in school in a week
than probably even with their families, right.
If you think about sort of working families and all that
kind of stuff. And yet we pay them way, way
less. So there's something wrong with
this system and I think Web Three can solve that.
And so that's one of the reasons we're so focused on on education
with open campus and with tiny Tab.
So I love what you're saying here because it it's.
I love that because I've been saying like when we founded Rock
Radio originally was always on the premise of like education
and entertainment, of course. So it's a mix of both, like you
get on this show for example. And I always said that like
creators are kind of the educators of our industry right
now. Like they're in charge of like
either entertain you or some of them will educate you.
Or like for example Mando and Ovido in the morning with the
market reports and stuff like that and different topics that
we try to cover. Those are people that let pay
the least. Like just recently in Quebec
where I'm from. Yeah, there was a huge strike
and the schools were closed because teachers, we're
rightfully demanding some help, right.
And and it's always, it's feels like it's always less people
that we think about in society. Yet you know they're the people
thinking of our kids. I mean Mando just had a child
year and something go OV you know he's about about about to
happen in 2024. You know wife is pregnant.
OK, baby. Full market baby that he's going
to Yo, your baby's going to be born the Year of the Dragon.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. Cool.
You're you know but but yeah I want to, I want to kick it back
to you now it's like So what where does blockchain technology
fit here? Like you said you have tiny tap
you have open campus. I'm very familiar with both
brands and companies and it's really some very it's some great
companies you guys have, have, have have funded here but like
what? What does where does blockchain
technology come into play here? How does it help?
So, yeah, exactly. So let me just give you one
example. There's multiple, but let me
give you one example that I think is easiest to illustrate.
You know, one of the powerful things about Web Three is the
fact that we have property rights as in this case digital
property rights, which means that we can now allow for
capital and value formation. So normally when you have an
intellectual property that could be created by anyone including a
teacher, it needs a certain kind of value before you can actually
turn it into a sort of a product that you can then basically
license and sell out. Because you know if it only
makes $100 a year or something. That's not worth sort of having
a legal construct and all the settings around that to
basically sort of sell it on for some kind of capital value
because the cost of the lawyer and the legal construct and and
and the systems around it are just too expensive.
But when you encapsulate that into an NFT, you're actually
able to have the legal provenance, the intellectual
property rights, where the money goes in a single transaction
that costs less than a dollar. Which means that we can now
allow capital formation to be created on intellectual property
assets that could make as little as just a few dollars a year
even if that's what we wanted. So imagine the scenario for
instance, teachers in Venezuela make between 10 to $15.00 a
month, which is not a lot. And if they make content on tiny
tap, which then becomes content in which they could earn a
royalty on because of the fact that people are subscribing to
it. That's what Tiny Tap does.
The tiny tap is kind of like a Netflix for educational content,
which by the way serves about 200,000 teachers today and
roughly 8 to 9,000,008 to 9 million families.
And So what happens here is, is that when a teacher makes
content on tiny tap on the creator tool, they then
basically make revenue because a parent or another teacher uses
it and pays a small subscription for it, right, Kind of Netflix
style. Which means that the content
then becomes basically a layer which basically makes money by
buying the NFT from any third party.
The royalty 80% of that up to 80% can now go to the new buyer
and which means basically that the teachers just created his
own intellectual property stream kind of like, you know, you're a
musician and you're basically now able to sort of you know,
sell your royalty zone to someone else as a single
product. So that means capital formation
is possible. So if I if this all content
makes $100 a year, he might sell it for 500 or $1000, which means
that whoever's buying it might make, you know, somewhere
between 10 or 20% yield, which is not bad.
The teacher makes more money and reinvests it into more content.
The owner can actually market the product and actually make
more revenue because now he has, he or she has this product that
maybe they could sort of even promote further.
So for instance, we had a Japanese entrepreneur who
bought, you know, in some of the early auctions, bought a lot of
this educational content earlier on and, you know, pay 10s of
thousands of dollars of it for it, and then basically started
selling this education content to Japan, helping localize it
and basically created a bigger market.
And so something that was making maybe 10 or $20,000 a year now
makes double or triple that because she ended up doing some
entrepreneurial activities with it, which then also showed us
something else. Teachers can make great content,
but it's not paired with people who know how to do business.
But if a business person comes in and says, wait, I can take
this content, I can make it even more famous or I can make more
revenue from it, then we both basically can, can benefit from
this. So in a way it's also tied in
the people who know about money and entrepreneurial and sort of
enterprises with the content creators, in this case teachers
who don't know much about it at all, which is something that's
never happened before, right? Teachers were always isolated
doing that particular task. They don't necessarily know how
to run a business because they never had a product that was
worthwhile selling. And basically NFTS can help
solve that. And so that's kind of how we
think of this as kind of revolutionizing publishing.
And so we call these the Publisher NFTS, which is
basically a kind of sort of innovation around the NFT space
that allows teachers and creators to basically have
intellectual property rights and revenue streams that come from,
you know, ownership of these NFTS.
Wow, this is sick. Like, you know, the meme, like
blockchain fixes this. It's like this is happening.
Like it's not a meme. It's like it's actually fixing.
Like there's an opportunity for it to fix the educational
system. Mando, I saw you on mute here.
Did you did you have something or you wanted me to?
No, I I see how this ties in. There's a lot of headlines even
a couple of days ago, right, which was a quote which you were
saying, which is like NFTS are the building blocks of
capitalism or digital capitalism and that kind of did the round.
I think every major news outlook picked up on it.
I can kind of see exactly how this fits in to to that.
It's definitely not a realm which I think a lot of people
have looked at from like a capitalism standpoint.
But then again, teachers aren't making that much money.
So maybe this is an important way to to go down there.
Is there anything else like when you take a step back, you're
like, wow, this could also be revolutionized with this, with
this sort of concept? Well, I mean everything.
If he's taken away from the concept of teachers, what NFTS
allow you to do is they encapsulate your intellectual
property rights and that means basically everything essentially
can have the benefit of this capital formation.
Which is why we think NFTS are pillars of digital capitalism in
this case, right? Because property rights are the
basis of a capitalist system today.
The fact I can own my house or own my car is the reason why I
can have value formation. It's the reason why we can have
assets and which is the reason why, frankly economies flow,
right. If you don't have property
rights we can't have capitalism. And in the digital space, pre
Web three, we actually didn't have any property rights because
everything was owned by a platform where basically we're
just rent tears. We don't have the right to
actually do anything with this stuff because it's not really
ours. I mean even if we have a million
followers on Instagram, they don't really belong to us.
We can't take them away to where we want to because they don't
belong to us. And so this is basically what
we're through really fixes. And of course the other thing
that happens is that when you have capital information, you're
actually creating significant value.
That was kind of already there, but now it's something that's
distributed amongst the sort of the the general population,
which is again something that we've seen in history right when
we moved from feudalism to basically democratic capitalist
societies. Actually what happened was it
wasn't that it was taking money away from essentially you know,
the kings of of their time. It actually created more wealth
overall and more activity because people were able to
build new network effects on top of it.
So we see this kind of in the NFT space as well.
You know, if you want to board a someone else can make a game on
it, someone else can target you because you own that ape.
Someone creates sort of new skins and costumes and they can
even have the right to basically do a burger joint or you know,
sell alcohol or create water. They can basically build all
these businesses because they own the rights around that
particular ape as an example. That's actually what property
rights enable you to do. And when you forecast a little
bit into the future, it used to be that we used to think that,
you know, sort of our property was a form of our labour, you
know, in the classic Lockhean sense.
But today, our labor is no longer that physical.
I mean, some people do physical labor, but frankly, you know,
when you look at the future, machines and robots will do all
that kind of work. So what is the labor that is
valuable to us as humans? It's what's in our head, It's in
our mind. It's in our creativity.
And so teachers are creating creative content to educate our
kids every day. Artists are doing this every
day. Game developers are going to do
this every day. The future of work is going to
be very much the work of the mind.
And so we need to find a way in which we can own that.
And this is basically why we need a digital context for it,
because it's not scalable for us to sign legal contracts for
every time we think of an idea. But NFTS can do this at scale
immediately. It's true that it's.
Going to be the work of the mind as a banger.
Go on, Mando. Sorry.
Yeah, I agree with that. Sense of that I do think for a
while people have said you know it's it's the building blocks of
of ownership. You kind of need for it to be
fully the building blocks of like ownership.
You do like courts and you need everything to kind of catch up
with it like how how do you see that happening?
Like I I haven't looked. I know tiny cap is based in
Israel, right. So like how how do you look at
stuff like courts in the different jurisdictions in
Syrian How do you, how do you think about stuff like that?
Yeah. I mean, we we always have to
obviously collaborate and work with governments because at the
end of the day, we still live in a physical context.
You know, as much as we like to be virtual, at the end of the
day we still have to eat and sleep and pay taxes somewhere.
But the the base idea still is, you know, you first need to
prove ownership before you can even talk about it.
And so this is the point about web two is let's say I use AI,
don't know a platform like YouTube, and I make content.
If YouTube deletes it, how do I prove that I actually owned it?
The only company that can tell me whether I really owned it was
YouTube. And if they feel like saying I'm
not sure where that is anymore, which has happened many times,
then your content is lost and you know you don't have any way
of proving anything because actually a third party has
become the arbiter of your so-called property.
But then in terms of not services, you don't have that
property anyway. In blockchain you actually have
the ability to prove that, you know, the moment it was minted
and created. And so this is another thing
because it's immutable on the blockchain and that basically
becomes the almost the governmental Ledger as you are,
right? It's it's a, it's a record
keeping to prove it, which is the net first step that you need
in order to then say, OK, I own this Providence now I can
actually go to court if I have to defend and protect it, which
is basically, for instance, if someone steals your Bitcoin, you
know, 5-6 years ago people were like, what's this?
But now you can go to the police and you can file a claim and say
my Bitcoin was stolen because they, they've accepted that
there's a way to actually really prove that that was your
Bitcoin. And therefore we can basically
put a claim and we can do all that kind of stuff that's
necessary to protect our rights around that.
So I think all of that was sort of very naturally flow in.
So what blockchain solves is essentially the provenance
first, the authentic, authentic ownership or for which when we
can basically build legal structures on top.
And I think the other thing is that, you know, even if the
content is only generating 100 or $1000 a year, when you can
prove that there's another element of enforcement which is
social enforcement, right. So when you think back in the
days when we were hunter gatherers, how do, how were we
able to, you know, there was no government, how were we able to
enforce essentially sort of our rights?
It's because everyone else knew that was your cow, right?
So because we're just a hundred 150 people, So even if I ended
up taking for ox cow, then basically Mando and OSAF are
like, well, hold on a second, that's for ox cow.
We say it's his cow and therefore you must return it
because within our social circle we had consensus.
The problem is that when we became hundreds of thousands of
people, consensus was no longer possible because we really were
transacting with strangers that we didn't know each other.
So we needed government to come in and basically say okay, This
is how it's organized. This is how I knew what was
doing is what blockchain solves this because this entire sort of
provenance is now on chain. Meaning that, you know, if it's
for ox digital cow, then you know, everyone knows this is
COW. And if I happen to take that
cow, then you know, everyone else around the ecosystem will
know that I took the cow. So it's a social enforcement
that comes, which we see today when there's a hack we create,
you know, before the police is even involved.
Actually, there's a social mechanism around blockchain that
creates already an hour of defense and analysis and all
that kind of stuff because everyone can see it.
So I so I think you know that will sort of create more of a
sort of the social, the social enforcement layer that wasn't
possible in digital until today. So by the way, that was that was
so good. Thank you Amanda for asking,
'cause I think there's a lot of lot of lot of gems in here and
for people to really understand like different use cases of the
blockchain, why the blockchain in general?
So definitely we need to elevate all this.
But you came here today to speak also not only about tiny tab,
but open campus, right? Like they're on stage with us
right now on the on the Twitter spaces.
So say if you're on here we're both on video and audio deal
with Yatsu founder of Anamoka you've all heard of ya before is
legend Mr. Metaverse and and he he accepted to to come on video
with us and the open open campus stuff is where it gets really
interesting right. Like I saw it's it's it's
actually it's a really big deal. So do you want to talk to us
about, you know, what Open Campus is like, what's what's
the low down on on that? Well, I mean I think you'll hear
a lot more about Open Campus. But the way that you can think
of Open Campus is that we're basically building it as a kind
of educational layer for schools, institutions and
teachers and creators in that field to basically use that as a
way to on board into web into Web 3:00 and basically build it
as the educational platform that really doesn't exist in Web 3
today. And in some ways it's kind of
wild to think that you know there is nobody, really, nobody
else really doing education at scale in web three when it is in
fact one of the most important pillars of any society.
And you've probably heard me speak this before which is that
I think of blockchains, layer one layer twos and metaverses
kind of as as national economies, right.
And the the way to basically you know one of the key pillars of
any kind of economy is the state of education that you have in
the space and it's a protocol basically you think of it as
that sort of enables and empowers you know educators in
the space and you know it's powered by the Edu token.
So it's a it's a token infrastructure.
We have a creator fund which is $10 million to basically help
basically people who are interested you know in sort of
furthering web through education.
They can go for grants. It's a Dow.
So that means that you can put in your proposals and you can
vote on on things around sort of which proposals should be funded
that basically sort of use sort of, you know it could be, you
know I think we have like web through literacy programs, we
have to educational K12 programs and all that kind of stuff to
basically help advance that. And there's a there's a there
there is the thing about this is it there's an actual very
practical sort of, you know sort of a financial incentive here
because when you create content, you can sell that content and
the content has educational value attached to it because a
qualified teacher is doing it. And the buyer of that content
doesn't necessarily have to be a Web Three person.
It can be someone else who's like oh, I want this English
content. They don't necessarily even have
to know that Web Three is powering the back end and they
would basically be just be using it on you know participating
platforms like Tiny Tap, pay a fee and then basically that fee
gets paid to the owner of the NFT which they can basically buy
through open campus. And we've got financial
institutions like Gems, we've got schools, we've got you know
and most recently we sort of announced A partnership with
Forbes with the OC 100 which is basically sort of trying to
honor essentially you know the movers and shakers of Web Three
particularly that are sort of pushing it forward in education
and and and so forth. So, so this you know it's, it's
a, it is still an early initiative relatively speaking
you know, but it has you know significant financial power
behind it and that's again something that you can really
only do in Web 3. Wow this is sick like you guys
are. This is really, really good.
Like, I, I I love what's being built here and it's super
interesting. So it's.
I think a lot of people should look into that.
So what are what are some what's the big wins right that you guys
you know that the the project nailed so far like what are some
really. Yeah.
So, yeah, so maybe maybe one other thing that before I go
into the big wins, maybe I I just wanted to highlight as well
is you know when we think about sort of let's call it impact
investing or for purpose investing, there aren't a lot of
projects out there where you can say that if I own this token or
if I own this NFT, I'm not just potentially sort of you know,
having personal gain out of you know whatever effort if I could
I could make out of this. But also I'm helping a broader
cost. And by the way we do this for
instance today when we choose to sort of you know, buy green or
we choose to sort of you know, be sort of you know, energy
friendly or we basically look at sort of you know, sustainable
environmental products as an example.
And there hasn't really been a mechanism to do this for
education. When you think about it, even
though we all can agree that education is very important,
that teachers need to be paid more, that value should be
shared across educated educators more broadly.
And so really think about it for the first time.
If you actually get involved in the project, you're actually
helping a broader cause, in this case, make teachers more money,
which then basically creates a positive flywheel, right.
So, and I actually think that's one of the other sort of hidden
powers of Web 3 which we can do with NFTS or other kind of
projects. It's not just about sort of you
know, it's something that is sort of artistic or beautiful or
pure utility. There's also the whole element
around actually doing something that has really positive impact
which which by the way I think will be a trend in the future as
well. Meaning it's not just going to
be an education, it's going to be also for like animal welfare.
It's going to be for all sorts of other areas.
You know, like other good causes were you know, through a
tokenized infrastructure, you can basically sort of help
create sort of positive causes that are also not going to be
charity but actually can be profitable.
And so, you know, the example here would be the publisher NFT
sales that we did, you know, we had a an initial, the last sale
that we did had over $1.3 million of demand, which for
educators is, is a lot. And you know, some of the
teachers ended up making, you know, literally half a year to a
year worth of their salaries from the sale of these NFTS.
And you know, this is actually, again, something really quite
fascinating because you know, when when someone like a
teacher, a creator, makes more money, the natural thing they do
is, you know, they might spend a little bit on themselves, but
then they hire their friends and they build more educational
content, right. You know, and and this is the
thing, right? If if the person involved on the
other side that's making money is mostly there for financial
gain, which we have a lot of people in the initial Web 3
space as well, they tend to buy other things that aren't
necessarily going back into the ecosystem.
But you know, and by the way, we've seen this with NFT
artists, right? If NFT artists make money, sure,
they, they, they might buy some nice things for themselves, but
they also buy more NFT art to get involved in ecosystem and
they reinvest in them because they're builders, right.
So, you know, giving builders more capital actually makes the
building environment bigger and better, broadly speaking.
So again, we've seen, we've seen that effect.
You know, we have several, I think like 7 cohorts in the
accelerator. We have an Open Campus
accelerator. We want to bring up to 100
educational companies into the ecosystem by the end of the
year, which I think would be quite impactful.
We also launched our Open Campus ID, which is basically sort of a
way in which we can sort of start tracking your educational
identity and your data around that.
Just think about sort of you know, some of the possibilities
that that could come from that, you know, how do you do
provenance, you know, on chain in terms of you know, your, your
degree or your background. I mean just think about today
when you're actually trying to sort of verify someone's
background, what you have to do, well, you have to call the
college, right. You have to get their
permission. You have to figure all that out
or could you just do it on chain with permission from the end
user in the zero knowledge proof way?
He doesn't have to reveal everything, he just reveal the
things that he needs to reveal. And so I know that OK, he went
there and OK, he did this degree and everything else doesn't
really matter. Because really, why?
You know, when you send your sort of sort of ACV to to you
know, to to work or wherever it is that you do, do they need to
do everything on your background, right.
They really only need to know the pertinent things that you
give them permission to. And that's again something that
blockchain can solve. But you know some of the other
things that are going to be I think pretty pivotal.
And again, we're not doing them yet.
But think about the space that education covers, right?
It's not just learning and education, it's things like
student loans, financial services.
I mean these are massive, massive industries that are
basically controlled by people who are really abusing
essentially their monopoly positioning.
And we know what Web three and and blockchain can do.
Now imagine what happened in the world where you can actually
take this type of power that Web three can already enabled, which
by the way is a 1.71 point, $8 trillion space today, right,
underpinned by Bitcoin. And you can actually provide
some of that, let's say value down to the student level in the
form of potentially loans or something like that.
How could that change the world, for instance?
And how could that actually create more opportunity in a
manner that is more sort of sort of Fair and equitable?
So, you know, there's I think the possibilities are endless.
I think if once you start going to the education rabbit hole,
you start to understand. That's why it's a $5 trillion
space and Web Three is, I think, ideally suited to help change
and alter and disrupt it for the better.
I could listen. Yes, you speak for hours, man.
But you guys, I mean, OV Mando. The future of education is
bright, huh? You guys have young.
You know, you OV's got one on the way.
Mando's got one that's a year old already.
Ed I I'm bullish on my future kids when I hear stuff like
that. This is this is cool.
Honestly. Like it's.
I think it's a it's a space that needs to be revolution.
I mean there's been some companies that have been that
have been very, very popular. I think if you can, if you can
form degrees or qualifications which people can start to be
internationally recognised that that would be the real end goal
or something like this, because then then it can have incredible
power I think, or maybe on board some of the already
internationally recognized qualifications.
But yeah, it does feel like a space where the incentives are
often misaligned. It's very, very difficult for
people to track quality. Like the only only time you can
really track quality of kids education is like parents
teacher meetings right. Or and this is a much better way
of potentially seeing seeing the value in in different courses.
So like courses are so big in post education work so like you
know people have been selling courses for a long long long
time so so it does feel like that's the space that could that
could move in here relatively relatively quickly.
So yeah, I think it's a it's a very smart industry.
I didn't realize it was, it was that big in terms of I guess, I
guess obviously spending too but.
Just just just think about how much your parents and how many
for those who may have that have taken student loans, just add up
that amount of money before you know until university.
Let's just just work back and just start calculating what that
sum is and then suddenly you're going to go, wait a second,
actually maybe that's not even that much relative to the scale
or size that we invest in, right?
Have you spoken so? Institutions, those institutions
that you might spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars
on, like already the big universities interested in this
sort of platform. Have you seen those university
endowments? I mean, these are Fortune 500
companies, which is like what? I mean, you know, like the idea
originally when I first grew up, you know, I was thinking
educational companies, It ought to be sort of a little bit more
sort of on the sort of social enterprise style.
And then like, wait a second, these are money making machines,
right? They're not for profits, man.
They're not for profits. You should.
You should know how they run, yes.
Exactly, exactly. Yes.
Oh my, I love that. So yeah, look, I know, I know we
we had to start late because of all the bug, the the issues we
have. But I do have a couple more
questions for you And then you know we're going to free you so
you can go enjoy your hopefully the celebration's coming up but
what are what's the what's the game plan right 2024 you know
it's it's going to be it's a great year for crypto thus far.
It's looks like it's going to be a great year.
You know we're going to get to the market report for everybody
listening after we're done here but it's still guys going to be
a good one all around. So what's what's the game plan
for for Open Campus and Amoka And then you know of course like
what are the exciting stuffs you got you guys got on the on the
horizon. Well, I mean there's a, there's
a whole bunch, but let me first start with Open Campus.
I I sort of teased a little bit earlier you know Open Campus ID
obviously the design is to have that be a core primitive
basically in the entire Open Campus ecosystem.
You know for the learner profiles we just talked about
you know the acceleration program as well.
You know the the the funding that we set aside for basically
people creating content around that area, bringing in many more
sort of educational companies that are not in web three.
You know stay tuned for some sort of pretty big protocol
based views around that area. And initiatives like OC 100 and
Open Campus University that basically really aim to
spotlight creators and sort of spotlight sort of you know what
education in web three is all about.
And again, you know, I gave the examples earlier.
We just have to scale that out. In some ways.
The good news is that because it's such a sort of nascent Web
3 space, it can really only go up in terms of growth, right?
It's a little bit like, as I said, it's like gaming in in in
2018-2019, right? It's like it, it seems like a
really small space, but actually when you think about it
naturally it can only really grow and expand and and we're
obviously hoping that there'll be a lot more participation.
But then of course the other thing that Animalca is also
quite focused on for this year is, is the Mocha verse, which is
another basically concept for us that basically helps tie in
essentially the Animalca ecosystem of a 450 plus
portfolio companies and our various subsidiaries into
essentially 1 ecosystem. You know, not just in governance
but also in terms of basically using that for for basically
sort of you know like a decentralized steam, you know
like examples for instance. Like we've invested in over 150
games and the expectation for us is obviously that you know why,
Why would you have to basically launch like your KYC, every
wallet every, every single time when you basically you can just
simply do that by by by having a single ID for instance, you know
and being able to share those network effects basically across
your entire network is is what we're hoping that more of us can
do. And it's been quite a successful
sort of community build up, you know, and it's kind of cool
because it was built over a bear market, right.
I mean it's we started in in 23, which is really, if you think
about it, arguably a bad time to do stuff.
But that's actually the best time to do stuff because it
brings in a core group of people who are really here for the long
term because if you were thinking about sort of you know
a quick flip you probably would have left by early 23 and would
have been a little bit shy of the space so.
So I think we've we've had the good fortune of building a
really strong community and as you know it was effectively
almost a $0.00 mint and and right now I think it's maybe
around I think it's like 4-5 E whatever the price is you know
in in terms of the floor price. But you know I think the whole
point on this one is it's actually helped put together a
really strong community and and we'll we'll grow it from there
with you know among sort of the mocha versus ID which I think is
slowly approaching half a million active users at this
point. So.
So again these are the things that we sort of are going to be
focusing on you know outside of games and investments you know
we've been very active investors in 2023 many of the games
actually that are about to launch are now launching this
year. It does take two to three years
to make good games, as you know. So these the cycle of game
launches between now and the next 12 to 18 months will be
very sort of accelerated. And so as a result, I think
again, we should be expecting to see more broader Web 3 adoption
from Web two people who might not even necessarily know that
they're playing Web three-game, but they're basically basically,
you know, getting on boarded into this whole sort of sort of
Web 3 ecosystem. Wow, that's exciting.
Yeah, it looks like you have a busy year ahead.
Looks like you have a a busy year ahead.
What is it? I'm going to, I'm going to
bother you for one more question.
What are what are a couple of predictions you got for 20/20?
What are you? Some like give me like 2-3
predictions for the year of the dragon.
OK. But well if I'm going to, if I'm
going to be bold about this, I think that this 12 to next 18
months we should be hitting our first sort of 100 million users
I think in terms of the native Web 3 space.
So I don't mean people owning crypto in an exchange.
I actually mean people sort of interacting basically with like
you know wallets and then games and that kind of stuff.
I think I think you know gaming and hopefully education will
help drive that and sort of grow that space.
That's that, that's one I guess sort of hope that we have the
second one. I think gaming will drive a big
part of that narrative, particularly in the first part
of the year just because of the fact that I think, you know, the
games are launching and and you'll see a lot of, I guess
success in the space as well. Just because we see this, for
instance, what's happening with pixels and what's happening
with, you know, the revival of AXI Infinity and Ronan as, I
mean the network effects that are sort of bouncing back from
each other, right? I mean people don't generally
talk about it, you know how AXI is doing really well because
it's you know the media doesn't want to talk about that.
But actually AXI is doing incredibly well for instance,
right. And and as as an example and and
the space is broadly recovering in in in in really good way.
The other area I would say is I think this is the year of Asia
in the sense that you know, Asia has been at the forefront on the
regulatory side of things and has basically been pushing
forward, particularly when it comes to Web three culture, so
gaming, NFTS and so on. The biggest game companies in
the region in Asia are actually adopting Web Three.
You know, you know, Korean, Japanese game companies, they're
all doing web three related projects, one form or the other
in stark contrast to the US for instance, where they're still
shying away from it. And I think again it has a lot
to do with the context of how to view you know capitalism and the
fact that their user bases, you know not as friendly towards it
for the time being. But we've seen the same thing
with sort of free to play in the in the freemium business models
in the early days. So I think we will see more
natural growth coming from Asia than than the West.
However, don't count out the the West I mean and but I think the
broad market I think will be good.
It's an election year. So generally speaking, we should
expect this to have actually an A positive impact just because
people don't want to create too much instability for all sorts
of reasons. I don't see, knock on wood any
kind of major black Swans. I think last year the settlement
with Finance was probably the biggest single issue that our
industry had to fear and I think we are sort of clear from that,
which is great. And it also told me something
else. It told me that contrary to what
some naysayers would say, the US isn't out to kill crypto because
if the US is in fact out to kill crypto, they could have done
far, far worse than put an expensive penalty that finance
can actually afford, right? It told me that the the US
agrees that maybe Crypto and Web Three is systemic or it's
important, or it's reached a scale that essentially has a
point of no return in the sense that we have to sort of figure
it out. And you know, maybe the SEC and
some people there don't agree, but the rest of the American
government is not on the same page, which again is one of the
beautiful things about the American democratic system,
right. It's it's not talking about that
way. So I feel, I feel quite positive
about this and I think that it was the market clarity we saw
the rest of the world is going to be adopting Bitcoin spot ETFs
because after all the US doesn't need to have, shouldn't have all
the fun. Hong Kong has already received a
number of applications, and I think it's quite possible that
the theorems about ETFs might actually come sooner in other
markets. Obi loves to hear that.
OSF loves to hear that. Yeah, absolutely.
Yes. But it's great, It's great.
Look, I I mean I'm I'm as I said year of the Dragon 24, very
bullish on where it's going to go.
I mean we're generally very optimistic people.
But as a, you know the last two months, if if the last two
months has been any indication, then I think 24 should should be
really good here. In fact, if I had to put down a
worry, I would say overheating too soon.
Yeah, it said, look, we don't want to overheat too soon,
that's for sure. But Bitcoin is looking great
this morning yet hitting, you know the best monthly or weekly
candle we've printed in four months.
I just saw that. So we'll we'll take that I.
Mean I yeah, I mean I think the one thing that you know people
and I think one of the other hopes that we have oversee, I
don't think this will happen in 24.
But long term is that when we get people into Web 3 and you
know they would they become basically more financial
literate just because I have to understand Web 3 because
everything is kind of in the lens of financial value and
services. And I think, you know, hopefully
that also means, and this is to me, I think the bigger picture
that we can basically teach people more about why capitalism
is important. Because I think we've reached a
point in time right now which I think is quite dangerous where
people, you know, it's become fashionable to start talking
about Marx again and talk about sort of, you know, socialism in
in this manner. And again, I grew up in Austria
in a Social Democratic country, so I'm not anti socialist per
SE. But the point is, is that, you
know, capitalism is the engine of growth.
It gives us entrepreneurial spirit.
It's the incentives that we have that we can have this
disruption. And all the people who are
basically sort of criticizing crypto are actually also
critical to capitalism because they fear it.
And one of the things that I say to people is that actually
capitalism is a proxy for change, right?
We live on disruption and change.
Innovation doesn't happen because it's harmonious.
It happens because we create basically disruptive, crazy new
ideas that can change the world. If there wasn't capitalism, we
wouldn't have Tesla, we wouldn't have green energy, we wouldn't
have, you know, all the things that we enjoy today if it wasn't
for that incentive. I agree that the distribution of
capitalism has been, has gotten messy.
But I would also add, that's because in the web two world,
we're not living in a capitalist environment.
Because think about this, Facebook, Amazon, Google, they
control the market. It's not a free market.
If you buy advertising on Facebook, who decides actually
what the algorithm, who owns the algorithm that decides what you
should get? Why is it OK that when you spend
advertising, you have a one to two or three percent sort of
success rate? What kind of success rate is
that? If you run a restaurant that has
a 1 to 3% success rate, you're out of business, right?
So the point is that actually the web two companies have taken
away capitalism from us. They've created their own
essentially means of ownership of these productions and have
sold it to us basically in this sort of colonial manner.
And web three basically actually will save us I think by
reintroducing capitalism and hopefully educating people about
the benefits of this because essentially it's anti
monopolistic in nature and actually you know, think about
sort of you know how the markets evolve.
I actually think that I think Web Three will basically sort of
hopefully bring capitalism and the spirit of capitalism and the
hope of capitalism back to everyone.
Wow. Well, those are some great last
words. Yat.
So thank you so much for for coming this morning.
Always always happy to to to give you guys a platform with
this you're building you know I think Open Campus and Tiny tap
and what Animoca's funding in terms of education is very
important and honestly it was great just selfishly to hear it
hear and and be able to understand more about it.
So thank you so much for coming this morning, Yat and glad we
made it happen despite the troubles again.
Hope you have a wonderful new year.
You too. Happy New Year, and thank you
for having me. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Yat.
See ya. All right.
Well, that that was a different start for the show this week,
but it was a great one and it was a it was a great
conversation. I mean, OV Mando.
That was a lot of fun and and and lot of.
Fun that one. Yeah, love having, love having
yet on OV. I'm glad to see that you moved
apartments and it's seemingly your Wi-Fi still hasn't gotten
better. But how?
How is it? Is it still?
Lagging for you right now?
No, I'm just playing with you. It's working fine.
Why don't we, why don't we do
this? So I know we started late.
Why don't we go maybe a little quick little market report?
Because it does look like we're getting Shabbat candles.
And you know, I like my Shabbat candles.
You know, I like my Shabbat candles.
Are they back? It looks like they may be back.
So I'm going to kick it to one of Y'all in a second for market
report, then click through NFTS and then look.
We have $1000 to give to someone in the audience.
All you have to do is retweet the Twitter spaces.
It's pinned at the top. It's also at the bottom right
purple box, drop AGM, follow a robot, follow FOMO hour and
retweet the space and you may win 1000.
But also the two loot box guys from from Tuesday.
I hope y'all are here because I fixed the loot boxes.
I've been maintaining them. Now there is now a 99.95% chance
of winning an NFT. So I fixed that and we're going
to get you guys on again, but quickly, quickly, quickly.
Why don't we talk markets ahead of this weekend.
Coming up, man, though what? What came in?
TLDR man, I would you know, listen, you even saw me.
I did the ghost of capo after going through OV somehow like
tickled me inside, tried to sway me that we were going to go
towards the 30 KS. It looks like bears once again
in shambles obliterated crying back in the mother's basements.
What's happening in the market? Looks like we're pumping, baby.
Yeah. We're pumping and.
Oh, we can't. Shit.
Bitcoin again? You hear him?
I can hear him, but he's out of sync.
Like, big time and far, dude. Today is like the the day of the
nothing working. This is the day we hear you, but
you're out of sync and you're low shit.
Well, Ovi, Yeah, Just break the market down for me.
Yeah, I mean look if things are fucking off to the races right
now the S&P 500 is above 5000 for the first time ever we're at
once again new all time highs. NASDAQ is is quickly approaching
18K interest rates have been stable it's it's pretty you know
we're we're obviously seeing a large crypto rally today with
Bitcoin hitting north of 47 K and and Neath hitting
momentarily hitting 2500. But just want to say like the
under performance of crypto versus stocks in the last 18
months is still incredible. We are at new all time highs in
stocks and we keep hitting new all time highs every single day
and Crane crypto was still 50 to 60% off all time highs.
So the under, I know we're all excited about crypto this year
because we're finally seeing some price action and things are
moving and people are making some good money on altcoins and
stuff out there, but we're still, you know a big big
magnitude off where we would be have we been tracking stocks
since the, you know the the crash in in in 2022.
So I think that's it. That kind of explains partially
the reason for this big crypto move.
I think some of the ETF data has been pretty strong as well, but
it really is a risk on rally right now across global markets.
And I just think with the way things are going with stocks
right now and this is post the big macro risk factor which was
the FOMC. So we've kind of digested that
now and we do have inflation next week.
But you know we'll see what comes with that number.
It does feel like markets want to keep rallying here and I just
think crypto has to catch up. I think Bitcoin has to catch up,
ETH has to catch up and and alts will catch up too.
And yeah, it's tough. It's tough.
Yeah, I know I've been a bit more conservative recently, but
with those GBTC outflows now normalizing and with there being
a really strong macro rally as well coinciding with this, it's
really tough not to be. Once again, very bullish on
crypto here because everything else around you is is performing
very well. Yeah, love to see that.
You're right. I was just showing I mean look
I'm not a big you know macro guy like you guys but I I also keep
reading that the the the crypt that the the stocks keep just
keep ripping high and higher. We talked about meta last week.
Obviously you see a bunch of the different stocks like on the
tech side that are just flying. So it's it's the American
economy is rolling right now but at least the stock market is.
And glad to see crypto I guess somewhat pin catch up here over
you right 'cause you're right it was not you know, you know go
under the the same way for a minute.
Mando, are you back with us? Let's test one more time.
Yeah, it's OK now. Yeah, it's better just hear
you're from afar. But it's OK.
We'll do what we have. So, Tommy what?
My. Yeah, I know, I know.
It's OK. It's one of those days.
You know, it is what it is.
We still, we still delivered a fire interview with Yatsu.
So I'm not mad. And it's fried after all.
So it's chilling. Look, that's that on the market.
So you know what then unless there's like something crazy
that you really wanted to cover Mendo.
But I'm, I'm assuming you were probably going to go in and say
similar things. The only.
Thing happening right now is 4 O fours.
Yeah, people. Around.
With those and then and then it will like only said just like
everyone's getting really pulled up on these ETF inflows like
they are relentless as don't fade the ETF right like every
single day it's 100 million that that starts to really build up
so. You reckon, Do you reckon the
coin best coin desk, coin based desk or the Gemini desk just
there and they get this little like RFQS?
Thing of 100. K Bitcoin of 100K Bitcoin of
100K Bitcoin. Yeah, What we're referring to is
like when we're used to be traders, you used to get these
tickets just pop up on your screen when someone needs to buy
something and be like, oh, I want to buy this.
And with the ETS, it would be relentless.
It would just be like you couldn't even see other apps on
your screen because there'd be so many tickets coming in from
the ETFs. And I reckon that's what they're
they're facing right now. There'll be some ticketing
system where they're just getting pop up every two minutes
being like, yeah, I want to buy, I want to buy, I want to buy, I
want to buy. So I I don't know how you fade
Bitcoin like big Bitcoin right now there's big shorts at 50K
people are looking at. But then you know, you know,
maybe maybe this is the breakout you get there.
Maybe we hit 50K and we trace a little bit.
But those are just massive relentless inflows it feels
like. So I I just don't think you can
fade that people are getting very, very, very bulls.
Up also, I mean this is even better for ETH, right, because a
lot of people, you guys have been saying this on the show
too, like the if the ETFs get approved and if it's closer with
something, yeah, actually touched himself and I saw you
smirk there, you were listening for that part of that's for
sure. But that could be bullish for
that. But anyway, so it's very
exciting. We'll see what happens over the
weekend of course, and and and we'll get excited about that on
Monday. NFT wise some pullbacks across
the board when it comes to Bitcoin, the RCS went under .1,
they were to point 12/8. Yesterday went back to .0505 or
something .05 based on some comments like Casey made.
But you know that's that that seems to be a nothing burger.
Quantum Cats .26 that puppets even retraced a bit but seems
that everything's bouncing in this morning.
Love to see that ERC Four O 4 is of course getting all the
attention on the NFT front on ETH those collections are doing
really well and then Pandora is still pumping.
There's a lot of good stuff happening there of course some
good crypto punk sale. You absolutely love to see that
at all times. And then last but not least on
Solana. I mean Solana is a general has
seen has been like very very quiet on the meme coin and and
the and the NFT side since Jupiter but also you know a lot
of stuff happening on ETH right now with four O fours and
everything and Bitcoin like you know it's it's again like it's a
participants thing so people probably follow the money there
but Solana itself like the token is above one O 5 and seems to
have broken that that you know it was at one O21O3 mando that
it kept kind of being smashed back down at so I.
Think it's just Bitcoin, man? Like Bitcoin, dominance is
rising. Bitcoin is beating most altcoins
today, right? But that's.
Again, it's beating most all coins.
This reminds me of when Bitcoin went from let's.
Go. 26K to 35K all coins didn't move and a lot of people were
more annoying. If you bring up like Bitcoin
dominance, that's the real thing to look at here.
We went from about 50% to now breaking towards 54% I think
roughly. So yeah, that's the one and I
personally think that could be a a bit of a a move here like like
obviously you had that that dip a couple weeks ago, but now it
looks like we're breaking back towards the those highs and this
one feels strong, like this one feels very, very strong to me.
I think Bitcoin dominance, I would be unsurprised if that
heads heads towards 60% so and in that world.
You think? If you buy, a lot of people are
looking at some of the the Bitcoin alts again, which have
started to move. You started to see.
It's not that I don't think altcoins will move, but this
could be one of those periods where like everyone in altcoins
is sitting there going like. Fuck, I said.
Just. Bitcoin because it can be quite
painful.