Original On Spotify: NFT Catcher Podcast | Episode 43 | INTERVIEW: Carlini | NFT OG from 2017 | Purrnelope's Country Club
Transcript
This transcript is computer generated and has not been proofread. Only a few names and words are replaced in batch.
Speakers: Carlini8 (84%), Jennifer (11%), Michael (4%)
Nothing on the show is meant as financial advice and please do your own research.
Jennifer Sutto 0:41
What's up everyone and welcome back to another episode of The NFT catcher podcast with me Jenny from the blockchain and my co host Michael Keen. Michael. Happy Tuesday.
Michael Keen 0:54
Happy Tuesday afternoon. I'm good, how are you?
Jennifer Sutto 0:57
I'm doing great and especially since we have a very special guest with us today. Today we have an interview with Carlini from Purrnelope's Country Club, and Carlini has been in the NFT space since 2017. So we're really excited to talk to him about you know what this space was, like, years ago before it was even popular to be in NFTs and you know, just just excited to talk NFTs with Carlini, so Carlini welcome. Welcome to the show.
Carlini8 1:29
Hi, thanks a lot for having me on.
Jennifer Sutto 1:31
Yeah, of course. Thank you for coming on. Um, let's get started with your NFT journey. Um, can you kind of tell us about how you got into NFTS at first and like, you know, what got you into NFTs?
Carlini8 1:46
Oh, well, I'd already been in crypto for a while. And I was even back then a bit of an ETH Maxi. So I had I bought Bitcoin can't even read. I know, I bought some in 2015. But I can't remember if I mined it, before that I effectively got trolled out of mining Bitcoin. Because it wasn't profitable. When I was doing it or, or not much. And I wasn't doing it to any sort of degree, it was my gaming PC that I left on overnight, you know, and I excitedly wake up, go downstairs always made 15 P or something like that. And then I just got trolled by family like Bo you're gonna be a Bitcoin millionaire soon. And I was like, I made 15 P last day, which I may be only mind it for two weeks, maybe a month before I just gave up because it was a lot of effort. At the time, it wasn't as easy as not that it's easy now because, you know, mining on your PC doesn't really make sense. But it was just a lot of effort, pretty much no rewards, and I ended up losing that wallet. But I wouldn't, it wouldn't have been much, you know, even now, it wouldn't have been much. But I was I was into Ethereum. I just believed in effectively getting rid of the middleman. Like my journey in crypto is more about, I guess, practical uses that I I think personally work rather than taking on the system or taking power back to the people. That's almost like a nice, a nice side effect of crypto for me. Whereas I'm all about, I guess utility utility utility. And I'm sure people will argue that is utility but it's not utility that I care about yet. So as I was playing around and all these ICOs and things like that, I was buying lots of different tokens on ETH. And obviously, they've all gone to zero. But then one day I was we were my wife was pregnant with our first child. And we'd had some sort of complication or we're actually staying the night in the hospital. December 2017, and I was just I she was in the bed she she was asleep and I was in this sort of horrible hospital chair that couldn't sleeping. But I have my laptop and I was just browsing online, taking a look at ETH trade on Reddit, you know, things like that just general ETH crypto stuff. And then I came across crypto kitties. And it just NFT is clicked for me for it just straight away. You know, I used to play a lot of rune skate when I was a kid. And it just kind of went, Ah, it's kind of like that. Now it's on ETH. And all of the values that I have for the stuff on Ethereum makes sense in NFTs. Let's play around in this game. And at that time, it was very much huddle culture. Because of all these ICOs and it was far more huddle than now. I would say, you know, if you weren't holding your token, you were, you know, getting relentlessly trolled. So, people coming into crypto kitty He's buying their crypto Kitties and just holding it, despite the being a game. And I was just there, relentlessly breeding and selling my cats like, I had time as setup I had spreadsheets, it was I write this cat is going to breed this cat in three hours. That kid is then going to breed this cat from this other pair five hours after that, you know, these these sort of combinations. And it was, it was fun. But I guess in a different set, when you're hearing it now, you're not going to think, oh, that sounds like a great game, I want to play that. It was more been involved. It was a new, it wasn't solved, it was just an
Carlini8 5:42
element that we don't have now. Because right now, everyone knows what they're doing in the NFT space. If you're new, you know, within a month someone's caught you up, you know about all the rarities and how these sort of things work. But cryptokitties had a unique sort of breeding mechanic that needed to be solved. And no one knew how we were literally using, we were importing data from effectively the blockchain into Google Sheets and then staring at it was a crazy time. Something that just can't really be replicated again, I guess I imagine the bored apes puzzles that they do. But you don't have a team of puzzles coming in, who are doing all that kind of stuff. You're all just trying to figure out this code together in a way that no one had ever done before. And it was all very interesting. And I was just hooked from that point. I was, I was in I was an NFTer for you know, I, my sort of LARP quote is, I've now been in NFTs, six years, because if you count 2022 is three months as a year. And December 2017 is a year that's now six years.
Jennifer Sutto 7:01
Okay, okay. Nice. Nice little check there.
Carlini8 7:03
And I've just been hooked hooked the whole time. You know, my, my wallet proves that it just
Michael Keen 7:08
yeah, I'm actually looking through your wallet right now. Oh, yeah. I can't believe how many crypto kitties you have. I can't scroll past them. I'm like going down and down.
Carlini8 7:17
Well, what kind of happens is, you end up not being able to sell them, you know how they, they're a liquid JPEGs? Well, some of us know more than others. how messy is that's the truth?
Michael Keen 7:29
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Jennifer Sutto 7:31
And the seller point for crypto kitties was really just like, as far as like the game goes, it was like you were trying to breed and if you there was like a percent chance if you got the combinations, right that you would get like a special like rare kitty, basically, right?
Carlini8 7:46
At the start. We didn't even know that. Like, they, they were there. But people hadn't discovered them. We had to keep breeding until they happened. And they were fancy cats. I like the first ones were cropping up and people like, what is that? And I remember try it. There was one. That was I think it was called mistletoe. And I tried using that name. It was quite Christmasy. It was December. And I was trying to get these traits like emerald green, and a red into the same cat to see if that triggered an event because we were effectively just experimenting. Gas fees were very low. And I'm sure there's often it comes up, you know, crypto kitties broke a Ethereum in reality Ethereum went for like one gas to maybe 100 150. I've actually gone back and checked. But it was numbers that now a few months ago would seem low. And it got all of that negative headline back then. But really, it was the community. And that's all you know, community is always the meme. But just to kind of show how powerful that community actually was mainly because it was the pretty much the only community I know punks existed. But calling that a community is a bit of a stretch. And I sometimes I think of it in my head a bit like if you go back to our childhoods and new ask people about what games they played. Often, you'd have played similar games to people, because there was no choice. Like now if you want to play a good shooter game, you know, there's maybe 10 different ones that have loads and loads of people playing at the same time. But back in a day, you know, that'd be one that be one, Contra genre. Yeah, did you know people are just going for, they just go for what they can get to and there was no choice. And cryptokitties was effectively the only NFT community and just sort of to hammer that home a bit. The discord for crypto ditties in December 2017. It took the crypto punks, Dysport, Discord, two and a half years is to get to as many posts in their whole discord as crypto kitties in that 25 days. Wow, it was it was active.
Jennifer Sutto 10:10
So how many people do you think were because I know a lot of the, you know, og crypto kitty people like they went on to create their own thing and, and we'll talk about what you ended up creating in a second. But how many people do you think were like, actively involved in crypto kitties, like, you know, in the early days and like 2017?
Carlini8 10:29
Um, well, the the issue is always, you know, you can have multiple wallets, and the UI wasn't great at the time. So using multiple wallets actually helped to organize your crypto kitties. Like if you wanted to try and breed something. Exactly. You would move those traits that would make that to a new wallet and breed from there. So it's not bang on. It was crypto kitties was the first project to hit 100,000 unique wallets. And that was in 2017. I think. I mean this the stats are on the blockchain. So I'm just pulling it off the top of my head. It was maybe 50,000 Different wallets in 2017, which was then never seen. Again, I guess the real importance of crypto kitties wasn't you know, it wasn't dapper. It wasn't. I guess it was axiom Zen back then. It wasn't what they built or the NFTs they've left behind it was that community and what it sparked because open sea met in crypto kitties, you know, those guys, they were in crypto kitties. And they saw this, this gap in what was obviously going to be to people who've been playing obviously, a huge market for NFTs and they jumped at that x infinity came out to crypto kitties, because they were like, right, we got this crypto kitties. We want to battle them, or we want to fix we want a game. And there was a game in production, which was called kitty battler or kitty battles or something along those lines. And at the time, axioms M were always pushing for the community to build stuff like they weren't building it themselves. And this is kind of where my cynical side comes out. And I never really believe that. You can just leave it to the community. Like the needs to be a figurehead. spearing it building that main game and the community can build around it. But you can't rely on them just because I saw potentially the greatest ever community never build anything. Well try to build something in it not take a take on I guess
Michael Keen 12:44
what was what community was that?
Carlini8 12:46
The Crypto kitties.
Michael Keen 12:47
Oh, Gao. Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
Carlini8 12:49
So like they built because my theory is almost always if you have that ability, why do you make it for the game and not your own game where you can sell the NFTs which is exactly what xe did. Why would you make a marketplace for just crypto kitties when you could make it for everyone, which is what OpenSea did? So they the relevant the the important part there really is they brought so many people into the space who then went on to do great things and also cryptokitties funded for things fully flow development and onto Topshot.
Jennifer Sutto 13:26
That's cool hearing the history of like, oh, like OpenSea, you know, the founders like they started in crypto kitties. And, you know, that's how they met and formed. And everything in xe infinity too, that's really cool. And I was curious, like, okay, so then what did you decide to do? Because you're like, everyone kind of, you know, all these different things started popping up. And people kind of decided to, oh, what problems do they want to solve? And, you know, start their own projects and stuff. What did you decide to do? Out of crypto kitties.
Carlini8 13:59
I was a degen is what I decided to do. 2018 ponzis hit hard. You know, like, now we've got lots of them. But then you'd get maybe one a week, because it was much harder to copy paste projects. And you kind of had to come up with something new every time or it wouldn't be bought, because there wasn't the money sloshing around that it was now. So I was back at the time I was a professional gambler. And I was I was doing pretty well for myself. I had all this money to degen around in, in crypto basically. So I didn't feel like building was for me because I was already running this other business. And it wasn't it wasn't actually degen gambling in any way. It was very calculated. And I thought the world you know, ups and downs because that's just variants, but I knew what I was getting into and I knew how much I should be making and how much I actually was making. And that was a full business 24/7 in itself. So the building bug hadn't hit me at that point. But the the degen plays were just fun, like, kind of fun, I guess, though, there was no open sea. And you could only sell an NFT project if they built their own marketplace, and most couldn't. Not many had their own marketplace. So the way of the way you'd sell your NFTs, early 2018 is from ethical dividends. It was basically a FOMO ramp where I would buy an NFT and the price would go up a little bit. And that little bit that the price has gone up would go to me. So if someone bought after me, I would get that little that little dividend in the uptick of the price. So people would just buy and then she'll show like crazy. Because if people bought if loads of people bought enough to you, eventually your breakeven and then you're free rolling. But back in the day, we weren't smart enough to be on Twitter. Crypto, we're on Twitter, but everyone else was in discord. And, you know, just thinking back, that was pretty dumb, because you can't you can only reach people who have already come into NFTs that way. Like, you know, a Discord is gated, you have to press join. Whereas on Twitter, you kind of just shout into the void. And it all comes out. So there were there were lots of things like death threats. Back in the day, there was a project called crypto celebrities, where you'd buy, you know, Elon Musk Satoshi. And they would just automatically relist on the website, a percentage higher and you would get that percentage would effectively be your profits, you buy it for 10 It relisted 15 It's probably more like 13, and then someone had to buy it for you to then get your ETH back and a little bit of profit. Um, that went a bit crazy for a while, like the floor pumped everyone was it was the ultimate floor watching projects. And then all liquidity just died. And one of my friends bought Elon Musk for 100 Ethereum, which, that was crazy at the time, but probably only 40k. Just to just to put it into context at the time. So like I said, the money was not sloshing around like it is now. And nothing happened after that. It was just dead. And people just started not not my friend. He didn't care. But people started just for in deference, this dev team. I do sometimes wonder if there's old projects that were put out, are they still around? Have the founders come back in JPEG madness?
Jennifer Sutto 17:54
How did you just how did you see it? Because you said oh, you can only sell an NFT if that project had built out their own marketplace? Because there wasn't an open sea where you can just display and see all your entities. How were you able to see what NFTs you had? Like? I don't know if that's a dumb question. But
Carlini8 18:11
on their site, generally etherscan was not what it is now. So he did have some functionality, but it wasn't as easy to use as it is now. So most people couldn't use it in any way. You could use my eth wallet to some degree. But generally, it will be on their website. So I still own it's a nice fun fact is it's quite a famous building in the US of A that I own is called the White House because I bought it on the blockchain. And obviously that was that's there forever. I bought it for I think it was seven Ethereum. And I have no idea how to ever see it again. All I know is they own it.
Michael Keen 18:54
Maybe you should take claim because we haven't had the best of luck recent inhabitants there.
Carlini8 19:00
I'll see what I can do. It was it was on a site I think it was you collect or why gov. There were a couple of around the same time. So my memory is a bit hazy. Yeah, three or four projects where you effectively bought the world and stuff world and things like that.
Michael Keen 19:20
Yeah, there's still even some of them going now. Like some of the you know, there's a few different ones like that. That's, that's really cool. hearing your story and all that history and stuff like so when you're going through all this. Did you kind of know like, eventually this is really going to catch on? Or was it just kind of for fun? I mean, I guess you're trying to make money, right? But you're having a good time. Like what did you What did you really think? And then I guess like at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021 Was that like, really gratifying to see? Like, oh, this really is common.
Carlini8 19:54
We did feel like crazy people. because, when when you go like 18 and 19 was not really about money because there wasn't really much there, like your, your average sort of, say 12 months ago from now. So 2021 March, if you brought in a degen friend, and you're like, look at this discord, you know, this discord claims to be an alpha group. Look at that for two weeks, that person in two weeks would have made more than most people did in 2018 and 2019. Combined. Especially yours for sure. Yeah. So it wasn't like I was making, you know, a lot of normal person money in gambling. So it wasn't really too much about the money. It was just those what's what's the quote along the lines of life is just a game and money is how we score it or something like that. So you weren't really making money then for you or for profit or for you know, it wasn't for Lambo money or anything like that. It was just to be I don't know, better than your friends, like, they've made five ETH, if you've made six, you'd have better winner, you know, that sort of thing. We were sure, like a group that we're going to discord of maybe 15 of us talk daily, always you know, about our lives as well. But NFT is always the main topic. And we're like, come definitely, this is definitely NFT is going to be everything. We're certain that just it all clicks for us. Why isn't it clicking for everyone else? And then, you know, you get to the end of 2019. And the sort of NFT bear market was horrific, you know, everyone's down bad. We're like, are we just crazy? Is it us? It's not everyone else who's the problem? Maybe it's us. That's the problem. And then when, you know, it was probably mid 2020. Roughly, I'm not sure exactly when things were ticking up a bit. And we were like, Okay, maybe we're not the crazy ones. Maybe this is actually something. And by January 2021, we were on, we were euphoric on that. You know, the Wall Street's bets market guide, we'd already we were like, how can this keep going? And obviously, it did for I mean, it kind of still is. So yeah, it was very, very, you know, just we're not crazy. Thank you.
Jennifer Sutto 22:35
I was just gonna say so then when did you see you're the co founder of NFT boxes as well? Which Pranksy is also He's like one of the co founders right it was you and Pranksy that started that. And then you ended up leaving it. But can you tell us a little bit about NFT boxes?
Carlini8 22:53
Yeah, sure. So in 2017, I got Pranksy into crypto kitties. Say I knew him before NFTs. And he's in this discord. He went through, you know, pretty much everything I just said. We it's sometimes just going through an event together. You're just like, you know, it strengthens friendships, you've all you're all like, wow. What have we just done and going through the bear market, crypto bear market and the NFT bear market at the same time while just playing around in effectively Ponzi NFTs and Ponzi ICOs we we'd sort of, you know, it strengthen the original friendship because it was almost like Stockholm syndrome, where we're like, wow, look at look at what has happened out there. And only you guys and a handful of others really understand what we've been through.
Carlini8 24:01
And there are maybe that sounds, you know, in the context of the Ukraine or Russia war going on. Now, that just sounds over the top to say out loud, but in terms of 2018 and 19, effectively just bleeding money away that you're hoping because this all started in crypto kitties in 2017 as ETH was running to 1000 500 and then suddenly we're buying it 80 while playing in NFTs. So it does affect you quite mentally and to be affected in the same way as a group. sort of you know, forges forges those friendships and at the end of 2020 I think it was December I just said look, shall we? This this sort of idea of a box that a subscription box we get different NFTs from had been thrown around in our Discord quite a lot for maybe a year maybe six months. And I just sent a message like, look, shall we actually do this? Because I knew I could set it up. I knew I could make it work. And I knew Pranksy could contact the artists and I knew Pranksy could sell it. So we kind of complemented each other in that sense. And he said, Yes, just started, you know, got to work working maybe 18 12 hour days, you know, just crazy just working constantly on it. Because at this point, it's hard, hard not to love an NFTs, you know, you've been through so much with NFTs, you're sure they're the future. And suddenly, there's a bit of an uptick. And you're working in, you know, your hobby, your hobby becomes your full time job. And you're just so so motivated to work on it. Pranksy got together the artists and effectively used his Twitter account to market it. And we sold out in that January. And that was just great. We're building this amazing community, which quite a lot of come over from Topshot because we were quite well known in that community. I think almost half of our early buyers, maybe maybe 40%. It was their first NFT. Their first a Ethereum NFT. And it's great to think just looking back that if they kept going, they've done very well. You know, we brought them to Ethereum. Maybe they were you know, interested, interested already, but they came over from Topshot, tried to Ethreum. And if they just kept playing around, there's almost no way they're down right at this point. So it's just just a good feeling and nurturing that community was my job. So I was I was talking to them daily. I'm using their you know, I was just talking in the discord everyday or getting to know these people, or it's splinter groups coming off just because of like how much certain people were talking to each other. There were, there are a couple of groups that cut off and made their own discord from NFT boxes after I'd left, because I wanted to focus on the community because you know, that's what I was doing day in, day out. But Pranksy he was talking to the artists day in day out. And that's where Pranksy he wanted to focus. And we both owned 50% of a company a legally sort of, you know, formed company in the UK. And we were kind of blocking each other because he wanted to take it one way, I wanted to take it another way. And we couldn't get around that because no one no one was 51% we're both like, Well, we were both co founders, I really don't think just focusing on the art will be good for NFTs because, you know, it's, it's not what people want. It's, it's you, you want to build up the community more within NFT by NFT boxes can become this brands that people come around and artists want to do. Whereas Pranksy he wants to celebrate the artists, which he knows that a different noble cause. So it's, it's kind of hard to say you're wrong, because you know, supporting artists is good. And it's kind of hard to say you're wrong. Because if you're supporting the community is good. And I think some point towards the end of March I said look, you wanna buy my half because I can't sell NFT boxes without you. But you can get someone in to do my job was sort of my thinking at that point. And then we had sort of a legal process that took a few months. And then eventually it was sort of I don't know if it was the first ever NFT project to be sold on chain. But it was it was fully done in USDT USDC, which was pretty cool. And I from there, I just caught the bug and I had to keep going. I couldn't, I couldn't stop. I just love talking to everyone in discord and taking on their ideas and trying to implement them. And I had two people that I'd wanted to hire for NFT boxes that I just kind of promised the job to one of them had left their job of nine years and six months, it was half a year away from the 10 year mark had quit to help us on NFT boxes. But then there was no because we will go in different ways. There was no role to be filled. And I was like, I've made you to quit your jobs. So what should we do? And that's kind of where Purrnelope was born from. Although it was actually originally the cool cats Country Club. And we were going to implement cool cats from Top Shot and maybe give them some kind of AirDrop. I was in talks with Luke are Dumbo about that. Because I knew him from he was in the same slack that myself and Pranksy are in, before crypto kitties. And then obviously, cool cats came out. And we're like, well, they're doing well. We can't, we can't use that name, funnily enough around the same time was, what was it called the K9 Country Club, something like that. So we're worried that both parts were going to be completely gone. And they did not quite do a do a cool cat so we could keep the country.
Jennifer Sutto 30:27
Nice. Yeah, I remember when Purrnelope's Country Club came out. And the whole team at first was completely anonymous. And then it came out that and then it was like, a couple of weeks like the minting was open, and like they were just kind of slowly minting and then once you guys like revealed, like, who is behind the project, and it was like, oh, shoot Carlini behind this. And then it just like sold out like almost instantly after that. After you guys like revealed like who was who was the team behind the project. I have three myself and I still have the one that I minted as well. And then I made my sister Steph mint some. She's like, What Why? Why do we need to meet these? I'll just do it. Trust me. And she's like, she's like, Okay, this better workout? And obviously it did because you know, now she's she's up and she's happy. And she's holding on strong to her Purrnelope's.
Michael Keen 31:20
Yeah, it's doing well. Yeah.
Carlini8 31:23
That's the fate the sale kind of hurts us because I didn't feel it was right to be like the plan was never to be anonymous. Like I've been, I've been Carlini8 for, you know, since 2017. It's all on chain, have many 1000s of transactions I've done over the years. And it's always been me and no one's ever accused me of scamming. So you know, I've built up that web 3 reputation through transactions effectively. And I've done some, you know, ridiculously large trust transactions that would probably not go through nowadays. But I didn't feel it was right to use my name for Purrnelope's, while people still thought I was working on NFT boxes because the sale hadn't gone through. So we had people, it annoys me when a founder says you know, they're fully dedicated to a job. And then they go and do something else as well. Because I know how demanding it is. And if you're, it doesn't matter if like you're saying it's about messaging, I guess if, if that's what you do, if if that's the type of DEV you are, and everyone knows, going into it when you release this project, you know, the beanie meme, the Blue Gold, I would dedicate my life in crypto to this. If that's the message you're giving off, and then suddenly you're doing something else that would annoy me personally, and I don't want to do something that would annoy me personally, because I imagine that would annoy other people. I I'd said to prank look, I'm going to I'm doing this project. So I'm going to be anonymous until the sales gone through because I don't want to harm NFT boxes, because it will look bad that I'm sort of abandoning it before the news comes out. And then literally the day, the day the sale was finalized, is when I added on to and I was just, hey, this is me. I was wanting to tell you guys, now I can I'm going to do you know, this is what I'm working on. Now. It didn't didn't work there for whatever reason. But you know, I still talk to him. Most days, you know, we're on good terms. It's not like bad blood or anything like that. It just, it just didn't work for NFT boxes. And I learned from that and now have pretty much final say on Purrnelope's.
Michael Keen 33:52
Were you with Pranksy when he minted the the 1000 Apes or whatever it was 1100 Apes.
Carlini8 33:58
I was told over and over again mint these mint these mint these told by Pranksy told by Jimmy because I think they were maybe one in two holders or one or two minters. And they were like, because originally he minted a few 100, and he was like, Guys, I've just minted at a few 100 of these. You should mint too. And I was like I my wallets, you know, PCs upstairs, can't be bothered what's sell it to me what's special about it? And he was like, there's no FOMO ramp. And I was like, that's not a selling point. Just because HashMask did it. It's a selling point Why sell it to me and he was like, I don't care mint the more down. I was like and then you know, when he when he went really gung ho and effectively finished it off because he minted so many that it sort of hit people's targets because at that point it was you know if 70% of minted It's 100% Gonna mint out because you've hit a point of no return. Right? He got it to over that level and other people did it by the time I was that awake, you know it was done and I was like, I'll be fine. I won't regret this for the rest of my life that we find.
Michael Keen 35:13
Oh my Yeah. Did you ever buy one or you don't even have you don't even have one?
Carlini8 35:19
I publicly. I publicly had one. Okay, for a bit, but for quite a while now I've had most of my NFT holdings. I can't do this for the ones that I've already bought with my main wallet. But if I'm buying something else, I say I I basically have a new fresh wallet. Okay, no one knows me just for I guess.
Jennifer Sutto 35:49
So you probably ask them Jack you're probably dealing I am not. Can you confirm or deny?
Carlini8 35:55
I would never wrote myself. I I spent 20 Ethereums washing Purrnelope's on looksrare so the community could have the looksrare bonus. And then a few weeks later, every project got it and I DMed I was like You've rugged me. You say oh, sorry. And I was like, Don't worry. I rugged you on the low prom packs. I sold you in Topshot.
Jennifer Sutto 36:24
Oh, yeah, I remember when you're selling unopened packs, actually. And you would like oh, yeah, pay me and I'll open it for you and send you the moments. I remember my friends at Boston from you.
Carlini8 36:35
It was fun. It was a lot of work. But it was most people ended up from that because I I kind of worked out the Eevee and then underpriced it just because I got the money. And then people were happy as well. Generally, you know, I did. A couple of people had rough rough pools, but you know, 90% were happy. And it was it was because I got the pack opening experience. And then I hear their reactions as well. It's quite fun.
Michael Keen 37:04
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So go back to Purrnelope's for us. And what's kind of the ethos of the project where you I saw that there was the roadmap 2.0 And I was reading over that but kind of in your words like where do you want to take it? What do you what do you see happening with it like,
Carlini8 37:21
so my, my main thesis is be able to pivot. And NFT is going everywhere, just everything online that you could own will be an NFT. When it's feasible. We're not there yet. NfTs are not yet better. But all of us degenerates mostly know they're going to be better. So there's this. There's this Bill Gates YouTube video about the internet in 1995.
Michael Keen 37:53
Yeah, he was on like, it was on like Letterman. Yeah, exactly. That's hilarious.
Carlini8 37:57
Well, he's he's all excited because you can listen to our fingers a baseball game on the internet. And Letterman just says, Have you not heard of the radio was better. But if you could see where it was going, you could see that the internet was going to be better. And I think that's where we are. I mean, it's not I think it's where we are now it is where we are with NFTs. It is harder, you know, a big, a big Defi account, five years in the space got hacked this morning and lost NFTs. It's not easy for a normal person to come into this space. You have to be careful you have it's not convenient, the world is going more and more convenient. Everywhere else. An NFT is just not yet convenient and safe. Yeah, but we are going to NFTs will be better than the current alternatives and everything will be an NFT and that doesn't mean that everything will be expensive. Most NFTs this isn't a 99% are going to zero claim it's a 99% will start at zero, like that. They're created to have no value but they're useful. And you won't even know their NFTs you know this is 10 years in the future. And Purrnelope's is is built firstly with that core ethos of my community days in NFT boxes I genuinely enjoyed making the discord happy and sort of taking on their ideas and building on it and sort of theorizing where NFT boxes could go. And I took that with Purrnelope's and you know, step one was create something that me and my friends could work on. Step two, hire more people in to make this thing for the community. So now we've got nine full time people working on Purrnelope's is and we've done some some pretty great things. Well, you know, community is a meme. You know, everyone has to say that community is great but We have on-chain info that you can look at that shows that we took in 800 Ethereums from our mint, and we put so much of that back in all on chain all visible, we put, we we bought a collective vault of NFTs that's called the kitty vault, which is currently worth about 1000 Ethereums. And that is that is CO owned by our whole community. And I see that almost as a gold standard, like back in the day, gold back to the dollar. And if you wanted to, you could take your dollar and say, Can I have my gold please? You know, no one did that because that was stupid, but you knew it was there. And it's almost a bit like that, you know, the NFTs are there. So you know, your NFT has an underlying sort of protection from any kind of just complete rug I guess, because for your NFL Penelope to be worth zero. You know, all NFTs have to be worth zero, kind of all that we have. And we you know, we've got we got punks, we got apes, we got mutants, we got a dog. We've just claimed our ape and we voted, the community voted to sell it to buy new projects. And I imagine we'll probably buy a doodle with that we've got cyber kongs, you know, we've got some heavy hitters in there that add up to 1000 Ethereums of value, we are going down the brand route. So something I think there will be huge that hasn't really taken off yet, is ens sub domains. So my username on Twitter is Carlini8. So my brand dot PCC, the community that I like the most dot ETH the chain I liked the most. And we have 200 Other dot PCC dot ethers on Twitter. And we have closing in on 500 ENS subdomains registered and they work you know, just as well as ens subdomains in general, while turning your username into a profile picture at the same time, because I can't search for everyone on Twitter with a Purrnelope's profile picture. But I can search .pcc.eth click on people and follow everyone that's in my community effectively.
Carlini8 42:25
And it also is kind of a proof of verification because they are attached to the cat. So you can only have a .pcc.eth, if you have one of our cats. And if you sell that cat, it follows. So our community manager Peter Papa, he got a lot of questions about staking and NFT, the NFTX vault released single sided staking where you could just stake effectively your PURR which is just a tokenized, Purrnelope. And he was like, Okay, I'll get so many questions, I'm going to try this out. And he staked his cat without knowing that he'd actually sold it. And someone else bought it and had his ENS name until he'd managed to work out a deal to get it back. So having that ens name is proof that you are actually a holder, which, when Twitter have the hexagon for ENS names, I'm sure it'll then be a hexagon, you know, how did they decide to show this ens name is true, you won't have the verified board apes that are 12 professional gamers, and auto bought like all of your posts. You know, they can't, they can't farm Twitter to effectively just sell a Twitter account with more followers. Because it's it's verified via that ENS. And so the click there is you just ask the question, if board Oops, did it how many people would do even 24 hours? Probably 1000s. Yep.
Jennifer Sutto 44:01
It's like when everyone all the bored apes put like the banana, like in their profile or whatever. And it was like, Oh, if you had the banana, like you had a bored ape, but that's really cool. I didn't know you can just so is it kind of like just to kind of compare and make more sense of it. If you were to sell your Purrnelope that you have your ens name attached to is that kind of like if you were to sell your space doodle and then it like sells your doodle.
Carlini8 44:33
Oh, pretty much yeah. So you know how when you buy an ens a ENS domain, you get that NFT this in your wallet imagine you just smash that inside your Purrnelope it's just in there so yeah, if you sell it is gone, and it can't be separated. So yeah, it's a bit like selling your your space doodle under the floor which to be honest, I'm sorry. only to people that that, you know, a lot of other people who don't read and just act first think later in this space.
Jennifer Sutto 45:10
Right. Yeah, act first think later. Not the best technique. But
Carlini8 45:16
I've got a lot of bags that show that I've been doing that for a long time.
Jennifer Sutto 45:21
Yeah, yeah, lobbying? Yeah, it takes sometimes you have to think fast, but it's like, at the same time, you know, you have to try to be super cautious as well, especially if you're, you know, for you give the example of Oh, somebody, you know, lost $5 million worth of bad or a million dollars worth, they had been in the space for five years. And it was like, you know, they were using a hot wallet. And they just, I don't know, I think they had clicked on some PDF thing. Like I was trying to look into it.
Carlini8 45:50
It was a, it was a PDF that they'd Oh, is a Google doc sheet, I think that they've made to look like it was been sent from someone within their company. And they were just, oh, was this person sending it for click? And then at least two wallets compromised?
Jennifer Sutto 46:12
Geez. What advice would you give to maybe new people or even people that have been in this space for a while, but maybe they don't know too much about, you know, securing their assets? Like, you know, what type of advice would you give to, to people on how to make sure that you don't get scammed out of your NFTs.
Carlini8 46:36
That's, that's such a hard one. It's a big switch, it should be easy, it feels like you're going back in time, really. People have got used to now that if it's actually worth something, if you you know, if you get if you get stolen money stolen at your bank, you know, generally you get it back, if someone steals your card and spend on it, generally you get it back. And that's what people are used to. And then you got to say, hey, come to this space. And suddenly the level of protection you actually have to follow to be definitely secure. is kind of insane. Like I put up a poster a few months ago, just based on the sort of scams at the time, that I thought more people were getting scammed because of hardware wallets, than like if hardware wallets didn't exist, I think less people will be scammed. Because hardware wallets protect against the kind of thing that happened this morning. So his computer was compromised. And that's what a hardware wallet protects against. But that isn't the common scam. That's much harder than the scams that just to to do. It's always social engineering. Yeah. Which I guess even you know, even the one today was kind of a social engineer, but it's, Hey, let's do this trade. And then the trade is fake, and they're still signing it over, regardless of the hardware wallets, or, Hey, let's let me animate your NFT for you, let's send it over which is effectively just the rune escape trimming armor scam from, you know, 2002 maybe, you know, all the way back then. But if you It depends how, you know, there are the absolutely high level, insane versions where you get yourself a dedicated machine with its own mobile internet set with its you have a dedicated phone for 2FA that no one else knows exists. Maybe you even have that you just have that as a pay as you go. And you use a hardware wallet. And the key always, always is to understand the hardware wallet protects your seed phrase and it protects you typing it up. Its whole purpose is that you never type your seed phrase. And that your Metamask or rainbow wallet can't be compromised. While you know from someone getting into your machine. That's his purpose. Some people think he just stops all scams, you know, because hey, I don't want to get scammed. What do I do? Top 10 replies get a hardware wallet. Quite often from people who don't fully understand what a hardware wallet does. So hardware wallet is very good. But it often adds a level of complacency because people don't fully understand why they should have it. And when I'm saying all these things like get a dedicated machine and a Dedicated into the line and its own phone and then a hardware wallet. The grids grid plus is pretty cool. Because it's, it gets all of that information into a readable sort of, you know what you're signing more with the grid plus over a ledger which kind of helps towards those social engineering scams. But at the end of the day, it's it's 90% Intuition. Like, should I be doing this? This this Discord is doing a stealth Mint for no reason. They've not said a mint is coming. And they're spamming everyone a hell of a lot. Let's mint you know, you should you shouldn't be minting there. It's, it's avoiding the situations, avoiding situations where your FOMOing for speed will stop you getting scammed much more than a setup. Because your your personal security is a scale of what you're comfortable with all the way like, there is just no way to be foolproof in this space. Because right now, because you have to put your seed phrase somewhere. And even Vitalik has spoken about how when he dumped Shiba, he had to call all these different people, because he's got a multi SIG, and he's split up his seed into each one has a different seed for the wild sick or something like that. He opt for obvious reason to fully go go deep into it, because you know, then people can sort of reverse engineer it. But you could work out if you put enough effort in, anyone can get those seed phrases and access a multisig. You know, and that's, that's the absolute insane level of security that you can be you can have dedicated machine internet hardware wallet, 2FA which would just be free strangers, I lied, you can't 2FA say Metamask or the blockchain or anything like that. And then you could have a multi sig split up between five different people and you have to call them even that there is a possible attack vector, and there is no one that can save you if that is attacked. So it is incredibly unlikely though, you know, we were talking about we cross the road every day, because there is a risk there when you cross the road. But there's a you accept that as you cross the road, and you kind of have to decide where your level of risk insecurity is, and what you think is likely. But those those insane sort of the recent to the two individuals who have found from the was it bitmex Heck. And all I really remember is the girl had the wrapping. Like they have the seed phrase on the cloud, which is a high level of risk. But even you know, when you look at the tweets afterwards, like oh my god, they kept that they kept their seed phrase on the cloud, that's stupid, like blah, of course, it's stupid. But even that is a low level of risk. Because you have to know to attack this person and know that their seed is stored there, like unlikely, maybe, you know, they were absolutely insane and had a Dropbox and the file just said, bitcoins seed phrase or something like that. But still, you have to go and find it if you get it. It's all very unlikely, but it does, it can happen. Yeah. And I'm not big brained enough to even know how, how this is solved. Because the future of everyone having a ledger just isn't it? Like that's, that's not sound money. That's
Jennifer Sutto 54:15
right. Yeah, cuz Yeah, cuz it's a, it's kind of crazy to think that it's like, you know, a lot of people are connecting the same wallet that they have all of their money or like most of their, you know, digital assets and to the sites where it's like, you know, you don't know what's gonna happen. And obviously, you know, you want to be educated and you're able to read, you know, what transactions you're signing, but it's it's definitely very risky. And like you had said, you don't think it's at the level of it being something that everybody and normal people can comfortably do. So I'm curious, I know you said you don't know like how to solve this problem, but what do you kind of See the future of NFTs being like how do you see things kind of working into more mainstream adoption to where everybody has a wallet? Or I guess everybody owns things digitally on the blockchain? How do you see that playing out in the future
Carlini8 55:19
I can see wallets been automatically built into a browser and automatically coming with your phone. Like, right now you have to add Metamask or add rainbow, you know, you have to go out of your way to get it onto your even brave, you know, which is, you know, it's a crypto browser effectively. But you still have to go and add your wallet. I think that will be built in. And the, I guess the issue is there's there's always that battle between the people who were originally in Bitcoin, you know, they had different motivations. And where the world end up where the world ends up with crypto. And NFTs is not going to be a word they're happy with, they're going to look at it and say, This is not what Bitcoin is for. Like, yeah, maybe your browser a bit like how, if you're on your iPhone, and you've got a Mac as well, you can copy on your iPhone and paste on your Mac, I can see that sort of thing happening with your browser, and your mobile. Which implies to me, there's some sort of cloud service going on, which you know, big no, no. But I think that's just where it's gonna go. The world always pushes towards easy, and we're not at easy. And for, for my vision of everything online being an NFT, there are there are lots of hurdles, you know, fees need to be zero, basically. And I can see things like immutable X pushing us their security needs to be solved. And I don't know fully how and it needs to be easy. It you need to right now, I don't even use my card, because in the UK, I just I just tapped my phone Apple Pay. Away we go it is so bit annoying. So use my curve card, which is then attached to my crypto.com card, because I can't add that to Apple Pay. So I am kind of paying with crypto. But until we're at that level, we're not going to see every every ticket you get is going to be an NFT every every you know piece of music you you'd listen to or be an NFT or the art you buy will just be an NFT I mean, physic physical art, you know it will remain being a digital art will be an NFT It's just when there's no reason for anything on your computer or phone to not be an NFT. Then everything just will be and I think we'll also very branded away from NFT at that point. I think too many people hate NFTs at the moment. And you know, just with everything being an NFT, they'll just be a lot happier with some new buzzwords. And I always just think of Parks and Recreation where Leslie Knope who's accountant, a city councilor, if anyone hasn't watched it, she's trying to put fluoride in their water. And no one wants it. No one wants it at all. And then they put on some presentation where they call it H to flow. And just, you know, some jersey, you know, lights and a dance and everyone, and they get it. It's just a rebranding effort to get everyone on board.
Michael Keen 59:09
Yeah, you know, I actually see, like I envision and I'm not saying this is a good thing, but like, I bet like a lot of people that want to be super safe are going to have their wallets through like Chase Bank, or Bank of America or things like that. And those companies will actually have wild like wallets for people holding their stuff where it will be, you know, insured to a degree like your Chase credit card, or your bank of america credit card. You thought about that at all. Do you think those companies will provide that there's probably a lot of people like that's not the route I would go. But I think that that's something that's going to come I think all those businesses are going to want to do things like that.
Carlini8 59:52
Every Bitcoin Maxy have just loved there
Michael Keen 59:54
and now I know.
Carlini8 59:57
But yeah, I mean, maybe we'll just we'll Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's nothing we can do about it. And in a way, it almost reminds me of DC investor. I don't know if you've seen sort of, you know, with, with Yuga Labs buying Larva Labs' IP for, for points and me bits. You know, he's kind of changed his views a bit around NFTs. And what what he's done there is, something has happened very there has been variable change. It's a bit like the Monty Hall problem where there are free doors, the game show House asks you to pick one, you pick it, he opens a different one. And says shows the prizes in there and says do you want to swap? And the answer is yes. Because originally you had a one in three chance. And now you have a one in two chance. There are stipulations that are important. You know, he knows where it is. And that's actually important in the logic of this. But what's happened with Yuga and Larva Labs is this investor has learned something new, he has now learned not that behind this door is a goat, he has learnt that your IP can be sold. And he has reacted accordingly based on his own views. So if you don't, so I guess the point of getting it, if you yourself, don't want this wallet with Chase Bank, you won't have it. But people who don't care about crypto, and there will be lots of people, even people born today who will never care about crypto, because there are just people like that there are people now that don't care about the internet, which, you know, seems insane to me, but it is the case. And there will be obviously the older generations that will just never, there'll be people within the older generations that will never come around, I have seen there's a 99 year old or 100 year old, generative artist who's kind of connecting with art blocks at the moment. So you know, there will be older people who care, I'm not saying you know, all of them won't. They just will be older generations, when we get fully mainstream, that won't care at all. And they'll be like, Okay, if I have to have one of these to order a ticket to the theater, then I'm just going to go with Chase because that's who's got my money, they haven't stolen for me 80 years of my life, I'll get the chase wallet. And in in a way, you could argue that is centralization, because people can then pick a decentralized option if they want, but they've chosen Chase like they have, it's more about options, right and where your values are, you can go to where your values are. So I I will always want noncustodial ownership of I will back myself of my of my money of my NFTs and maybe I do get hacked, but that's the risk I've taken. Maybe other people will want Chase because maybe they offer some sort of insurance that there have been quite a lot of quite a lot of chatter the last few weeks about some kind of crypto insurance slash NFT insurance so that would be interesting to watch how that grows over the years and how people can protect you.
Michael Keen 1:03:38
Interesting. Very cool. I'm glad to hear your perspective and I appreciate it
Jennifer Sutto 1:03:42
Yeah, I'm also I just I just wanted to tell us to kind of mention because you're talking about noncustodial wallets and I'm curious your thoughts on on flow because you also didn't mentioned flow and you're like oh I can see blockchains with no gas fees like immutable becoming more popular I'm bringing this back to TopShot because as I can see here on evaluate market you are ranked number 86 Absolute scam you're like a huge collector right like to be on top you shall the number will be your number 86 according to I say yeah, so I'm just curious I know they just introduced they just think aloud noncustodial wallets for life like basically sites that are compatible with flow so obviously it's like open sea you can't you know, you can't like move your your and your your cosmic moment to be displayed on open sea. But you can do it on things like block toe and some other ones that that are like that allow flow. Um, and I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on flow like are you bullish on flow at all? You do have a Big Top Shot collection And yeah, and I'm curious, your thoughts on that?
Carlini8 1:05:03
Well, I do own flow. I had a lot of dapper credits back in the day when, you know, early 2021 When stuff was taking off, and that was effectively put into flow, you know, it's like, okay, this is it is a blockchain built for NFTs because like I said earlier, dapper. Were pretty much the NFT community for so much of their life. They brought so many people in and they saw the issues with Ethereum. And instead of going right, we can't, we can't do what we want on a Ethereum. Let's try and fix Ethereum and say, Polygon Intermatic doing their thing. meter collapse doing their thing. They went Okay, let's try and make a chain that is focused on NFTs, I guess. So they have dt, the guy who faithfully invented the ERC 721 inventing the flow standard, NFT over there. And I guess I just want to crowbar in how I see some terrible influencer takes just on Earth teas in general. Like I often see the take that top shot on NFTs because they're not in a noncustodial wallet. Which is a terrible take. Because at no point in the word NFT does it say non custodial or you have to have it in your wallet or you know, anything like that it just isn't NFT that can eventually be moved to a noncustodial wallet they've always said it's coming. And they have just just now let you say so. I well, I don't know if I've Twitter's been going off that you know Disney is buying Dapper. I my views may change if that happens. Because what what the Disney know about the blockchain. But I do think we're going to be in a world of lots of different chains. I am, I guess I'm not an ETH Maxi. But, you know, my time is spent on a Ethereum, I didn't even I, I invested in flow in the original sale. I told all my friends. I told everyone I know, these guys, who I you know, I learned NFTs from I think they'll do well, by in this round. And it was you could buy 10,000 flow for not for 10 cents or flow. And I told everyone I knew to do it just because I was sure you know, they'd get it right. And you could definitely argue that they have I know it's not flow is not what everyone wants it to be. It's it does have you know, dapper runs it. And no one runs ETH you could, you could argue the Ethereum Foundation have had big sways like no one's going to go up against them. But it's not quite anywhere near the level of dapper controls over flow, but it is still a blockchain. And they do deliver eventually what they said they're going to do. So I do still hold flow. Obviously, I still hold my Top Shot moments. But my problem my problem there is I don't like basketball. It's I don't like I don't like any American sports. Basketball is probably the probably your best one because you don't you don't do five seconds of sport and then have a 15 minute break. Or I guess you you guys love I'm saying you you know I mean, America.
Jennifer Sutto 1:09:06
Yeah, I don't even watch. So I love talking about
Carlini8 1:09:08
but over here, you know, that's just adults Rounders for me. I'm afraid. We serve just you know, go to the park and play around us just for fun. So I, I can't get into collecting these players. So for me, I was actually invited to the alpha. And I declined because I said look, I don't know anything about basketball. I only know about Steph Curry because he was going to be a crypto kitty at one point. Until they found out they weren't dealing with him. They were dealing with his media company. And they actually got rid of them. But that's how I learned who Steph was. I knew MJ I knew Kobe because obviously you just shout Kobe whenever you throw anything. And Shaq literally the 3 the 3 basketball players I knew
Jennifer Sutto 1:09:58
you're gonna make so many top shot collectors mad because you have a huge Top Shot bag and you don't know basketball, I got a lot of shit for that as well.
Carlini8 1:10:07
Hey Topshot People, I declined. I said, I don't know, basketball, it's not for me. And then they came back and said, just just look at it from an NFT perspective for us, give us give us takes. And I do like to think I gave a lot of feedback. And, you know, sometimes it got pretty heated. So I, I do think I helped. Obviously, I didn't in any way, build anything or contribute loads. But you know, I just I just helped as a voice, push it to where it is. And I do think topshots gets a lot of unfortunate sort of claims about it because NFTs themselves have just run so much. And if you're thinking, if you're if you're investing, now you're doing it wrong. Like if you are buying Topshot moments to invest, you are there for the wrong reason. Because people were not buying Pokemon cards 26 years ago to invest that the handful that did were keeping sealed boxes in a garage, and they waited 26 years, and it was actually about 24 years until Pokemon cards popped off. So if you're buying to invest, and you're happy to wait 20 plus years, sure, go ahead. But if you're angry, because in three months, the price is lower, then you should you shouldn't be buying it in my opinion. Dapper. Sorry, go ahead.
Michael Keen 1:11:44
No, I was gonna say you're actually you make a great point. And you're exactly right. Jennifer, Jennifer and I touched on this in the last episode that there are some NFTs sure that you that you know, people are into make money and you're gonna make money. And that's what the kind of the, the, what they're almost what they're there for. But there's a lot of NFTs that are literally products just like other products in the world. And it's not going to be worth more than what you pay for it right away. Maybe you'll get lucky. And over the decades. It will you know, I agree with that. And another point, you brought up a point how you guys weren't into basketball. I'm a huge basketball fan. And sometime in late 2020, I saw an advertisement for it. And I remember seeing like, why would I want to buy a digital moment. I was like, why would I want that? So that's a shame.
Carlini8 1:12:32
Somewhere, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have a post on. So my instagram at the time, I was trying to it was for Pokemon. So I was following all of these Pokemon card accounts on a sort of burner Instagram account. And then when I was invited to Topshots, I started following all these basketball card accounts. And I have posts that I've kept we we turn that account into the Purrnelope's Instagram account. So we've hidden them. But it's like, it's maybe June 2020. Schilling Top Shot like, Look, I can't actually get you into this yet, because it's beater. And I'm not actually allowed to invite you know, it was alpha sorry at that point. But when it's when I'm allowed, I will send all my followers a link to what I think will be huge. And that's just it, it will be huge. But people are comparing it to NFTs that are making money. And that's almost the problem with utility. As soon as you add utility to something. It's always priced on the utility. Whereas if you have no utility, it's always priced on potential mystical future utility. This NFT could solve the world. But this NFT that has a an exact utility is worth much less because it does its job. And it's it's just tricky, right because dapper have forum for basically saying, we want our product to be accessible. Does December 2017 there will be news articles somewhere online, where they call they caused a huge ruckus in discord by saying we want there to be crypto kitties, the cost $2. And people like what the hell, the floors, the floors, no point one for any crypto kitty, which at the time was over $100 Because we were in that run up. You want You want us to oversupply this so much that this $100 goes down 50x. Now they were effectively Yes, their mission is bringing a billion people to the blockchain and they're trying to build a product. So while while there are, you know, lots of issues, for instance, I still can't sell those patents, which I was told and you know, coming up to two years ago that I would be able to eventually
Jennifer Sutto 1:14:57
apparently the end of this year Although I feel you because I've been hearing about it since I joined Topshot, too.
Carlini8 1:15:04
But it's always the end of some point in time. Yeah. Yeah. So when it when it comes, but great, but that's just an example of, you know, there are legitimate issues. But I know they're printing loads of moments. But that's because people keep buying them. If people stop buying them, there'll be less moments. And people are buying them because quite a lot of trying to invest or make money, which just wasn't the case for comparable products, magic Pokemon, you know, just just cards that are worth money now or collectibles that worth money now, and never flipped right away. The right, it needs to take time and time is what makes it valuable. And people get locked out of their Top Shot accounts because they forget how to log in and things like that. Yep, that's, that's what I make these valuable. Because people are comparing them to NFTs like bored apes and doodles and things like that. And they're just completely different vehicles. So not to not to sound like a dapper Maxi or anything like that. It's just at no point was it ever. It's it's hard to say, as someone who did on chain, you can visibly see that I profited on top shot. So you know, it's hard to then come in and tell everyone. The whole point of this isn't to make money. Because I do think the whole point wasn't to make money, but I did. So it's hard for me to say that. So I need someone who's down to come and say that.
Jennifer Sutto 1:16:38
And say, I have one last question for you. Um, Michael, if you have a last question after this, let me know. Otherwise, we're coming to a close here. But I'm curious, you know, you've been in NFT. Since 2017. It's been, what, five years or something. And you've seen you've been here through the cycles, you've been here through the 2018 2019 NFT. bear market? You know, as you said, you know, we're still in that like euphoria phase right now. What do you what do you think the in the next maybe year, like, you know, kind of immediate future of NFTs? What do you think about the market right now? And what do you think the market is gonna look like? Maybe in like, a year from now,
Carlini8 1:17:30
I will start this by saying, I am a terrible trader, I can. If I can, play NFTs I can, I can do NFTs most of the time pretty well. But when it comes to trying to figure out what to do with ETH, I'm just always wrong. You know, I know everyone says, Oh, if I sell, you know, ETH will go up, you're welcome. But it just, it does happen. If I'm even it gets to the times where I'm like, right, I would normally sell now I have the feeling that I would sell. I know I'm a terrible trader. So I'm going to hold and what to do, it goes down more, even though I've tried to counter trade myself, it still goes down. So I just can't get it. Right. But what I will say is, I don't think we have had an NFT bear market. I'm sure there is some people who say there are certain fundamentals that point towards, you know, whatever. But in my experience of NFT bear markets, and it is hard to say because obviously the the market is wildly different now. There is so many more people in to the point where the percentage gains since the actual bear market is levels that I think differ hugely to say, a crypto Twitter cycle or crypto cycle in general, that the people on crypto Twitter have seen and been through my that that change in the amount of people that are in NFTs in 2018 and 19 to the amount of people in NFTs now will be such a bigger percentage jump than any crypto cycle at peaks and bottoms, that I'm not sure my NFT bear market experience is in any way relevant. So I guess I don't think we will see what I would consider an NFT bear market. I'm sure we'll see. An NFT bear market will ever people will lose a bit of interest because some people I mean, I don't mean some people but most people are here you know, for profit. Some people come for the profit, fall in love with NFTs and will stay in a downturn. But when it is really you know, pure Max Payne 90% down, people will leave just because of how is not easy anymore, and I feel like levels of engagement. went on Twitter is still pretty high. I'd like to think we'll be okay. I've Yeah, I think we'll be okay. It would. I think it'll take Ethereum breaking under $700 If Ethereum breaks under $700
Michael Keen 1:20:20
No, don't talk about that. Oh.
Carlini8 1:20:21
I think I think that like, pain that you guys will experience my pain, you will? Because I mean, that's what have we went from 1500 ETH. So we had days where, you know, make a few ETH on cryptokitties 1500 ETH lovely, what a day. And this was in a time where it was not easy to make money. I mean, it kind of was, but the levels of money we're making was, was very tiny compared to now. And then we literally, we literally the some, some big person in Top Shot, there is a meme in our group, or I'm gonna say who it is. But they sold ETH at $80. And, Dan, yeah, they were they were a bit of a meme. You will know them?
Jennifer Sutto 1:21:23
Well, I know that. Yeah.
Carlini8 1:21:24
But they're not in that, like, they're not in my group. So I'm not gonna
Jennifer Sutto 1:21:28
you tell me after we record?
Carlini8 1:21:32
I say publicly. So it was you know, it was so down beds. ETH is what halved. And it's it's even, it's up from half now, because we never hit, we never hit 6k. So we're at three now, to me that isn't paid. Like it's, it's a lot more money that you're losing. But percentage wise, it's not paid. So I don't know. Because you see these Twitter accounts that, you know, they've been here for years and years, and they're talking about Super cycles, and they just saw helping us they they tried to make us exit liquidity, or do they truly believe it? I've, I think it'll be good. I think big things are happening. And I genuinely think that NFTs held crypto up. I think it was almost the other way around. I think crypto would have dumped harder without our insane bull run last year. So I think a real use case has helped because people are seeing, you know, crypto in general has all these sort of niche uses, and some of them are incredibly powerful. But how do you know that uniswap is great unless you're in crypto, like you can't. But when you just come and have fun in NFTs, it sucks is sucking people in. And top shot was a huge sort of multiplayer of that because so many people came into Topshot because it was so easy. It was sign up on a sign up to a site which people are used to deposit with a card which probably used to buy stuff online, which we're pleased to. And then we saw the migration from Top Shot of people, like all Metamask in store, try and send some ETH to it. And they're learning because of that easier onramp and I just think we've captured too many people. So I'm from those people where they encounter you know, we've got nike, I say we've got nike, you know, they bought artifacts, we sit nike in bored apes are now owned by Well, you know, they're not they're invested in by lots of different companies open sea has got lots of big players invested in them. nameless, lots of big players invested in them. I think too much money has come in for us to experience a normal sort of bear I think where it's it's the sort of big waves getting smaller and smaller as we get more mainstream. So I think in a year, I get a call. And Sam domineer 8000 ETH.
Jennifer Sutto 1:24:22
Ah 8,000 ETH, we're gonna bring you back on the show and Carlini about that 8000 ETH
Carlini8 1:24:29
10 projects over 100 ETH
Jennifer Sutto 1:24:32
Oh she'll bold predictions.
Carlini8 1:24:36
They have at least 1000 in the collection because you know, I could just make what a tentative tease single that listen for 111 and I fit let me let me have a look at the top. So when this bull market started, what I looked at was which project has done the most volume ever And that was crypto kitties, maybe at the time xe infinity. But it was tricky because not everyone was looking at the right chains and combining them. So all the charts had crypto kitties at the top. And I think it was $26 million all time traded on crypto kitties, which was way, way ahead of anyone else. Except, you know, I said maybe axie because of the multiplier. And now, now when I try and find them, crypto kitties of around 47 point 8 million, so almost doubled since the start of 20. The start of 2021. They've almost doubled their volume, and they're in 96. It's kind of insane crypto bats by Ozzy Osborne, that's a recent thing that's come out. So 51 million is head of crypto kitties, which was literally the top selling projects in 2017 2018 2019. And going into 2020 of all time, it always been top basically. And now it's 96. So the top right now is axie of 4 billion. I think any year later I go. What do I go a max project? 25 billion for the context bored apes is currently at 1.5 billion. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So it's a big jump.
Jennifer Sutto 1:26:28
Dang bold predictions at the end here.
Jennifer Sutto 1:26:42
Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay, well, hey, some hopium towards the end, you know, so some optimism to end the show here. For all of our listeners. That's great. I hope that does happen. That would be amazing.
Carlini8 1:26:56
Do not buy a Ethereum because I say it will be 8000 I have told you.
Jennifer Sutto 1:27:03
Yes. Yes. We have a disclaimer at the beginning. Don't worry. Michael, you have any? You have a last minute thing?
Michael Keen 1:27:13
Yeah, only Yeah, the only other thing I usually ask everybody is and we can do it real quick. But do you have any other favorite projects, favorite builders in the space? You know, things that you think you're gonna do really well, long term?
Carlini8 1:27:28
I have to, I do have to say I was I was blown away by bored apes execution of the airdrop just a way they had every exchange, you know, all the top exchanges coordinators to tweeting at the same time. It was just, it was just a level of execution that we haven't seen in this space. And to add to that would be doodles at SXSW. There in in real life events, the execution there was incredibly high as well. I do like the friends because I just think it shows we're seeing you know, Floyd Mayweather has now announced he's coming in. And what we're seeing is Gary is showing how celebrities should come into the space. I guess he wouldn't call himself a celebrity. He called himself a builder and others would call him an influencer, which he will take. He'll take that and be like, No, but I built and he's showing us
Michael Keen 1:28:33
You said Floyd Mayweather now he's coming into the NFT. Space.
Carlini8 1:28:37
Again. Yes. Yeah.
Michael Keen 1:28:38
I was gonna say cuz he had that other project. That was he did something with Yeah, but he had his own Floyd's world. And it was like, it was a disgrace.
Carlini8 1:28:49
Oh, he's coming back. After going. I'm pretty sure he got sued for what he did in 2017. He's normally okay. The cases.
Michael Keen 1:28:59
Okay. Okay. That's right. Right. Yeah.
Carlini8 1:29:03
And I guess I'd back word of women as well just. They've got guy represents them. And he, in my opinion, I you know, I don't know behind the scenes, so it's just, I guess, a hot take from looking on the outside. I think he took bored ape to the next level. I think he's the one who's made them what they are. Obviously, the founders worked very hard. And I don't want to take away from them. That That guy's level of execution and ability is so high with her working with word of women. We can see them going places.
Michael Keen 1:29:37
Yeah, guy. Oh, Siri, you're talking about? Yes. Yeah, yep. Yep. Yep.
Carlini8 1:29:41
And I guess the other one I'd say is cyber kongs because they have introduced, but I think is the next step for NFTs which is the token yield. And I think they've done that. And I think they've done that well. And that's kind of inspired me. Yep. Nice. that'll be my pics. Cool. Thank you.
Jennifer Sutto 1:30:05
Well, thank you so much Carlini for coming on the show. Seriously, this was awesome and we should title this like, NFT history lessons with Carlini. I don't know my
Carlini8 1:30:15
place. I'm gonna teach anyone. Just you did you do Oh. rambles?
Jennifer Sutto 1:30:26
No, this has been, yeah, this has been great. And actually there's been some of our listeners have requested for us to talk about, oh, he talks about historical projects or things in the past and so like this, it would be a nice interview for them for those people who have not to listen to it as well. Since you talked a lot about you know, other projects and whatnot. But yeah, thank you so much, Carlini. coming on the show. And thank you to everybody listening to this. We'll catch you in the next episode. Peace,
Carlini8 1:30:55
everyone. Hello.