The NFT space is undeniably growing in many directions: from high-end digital art to virtual real estate to digital collectibles, and more. In this episode, Michael Bramlage explains the value of the latest innovations in blockchain and how they move collectibles from cardboard into code. Michael is the CEO of Quidd, the original digital collectibles marketplace. Their platform allows you to buy, sell, and trade digital collectibles and earn real money in the process. According to him, this trend that Quidd is riding is part of an inevitable future of digitization. Tune in on his conversation with hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, Josh Kriger to learn about this exciting new model and find out what’s hot in NFTs.
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Quidd CEO Michael Bramlage On Digital Collectibles: The New Trend In NFT, Plus: AC Milan NFT, CryptoPunk Flash Loan, Facebook Goes Meta, And More…
This episode features Michael Bramlage. He’s the Cofounder and CEO of Quidd, the Animoca Brands and Sequoia-backed marketplace for buying and selling rare digital collectibles with over $2.1 billion assets issued to date. Formerly VP of Topps Digital and Head of Product at Nokia, Michael brings a wealth of experience to his leadership of the Quidd team and the innovations he has brought and continues to bring to the Quidd marketplace. Michael, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
We said it before, this is a historic moment, this is the first time all three of us have ever been in the same room together, much less doing a show together in person from New York City.
I hope you can make it to the end of the show before killing each other.
Much less into the freaking week. We’ll see.
There may be a queen bed that we are all sitting on. For the record, we all have our own beds in New York City with two different conferences, all sorts of events. We were talking shop a little bit before. it sounds like we’ll probably be at a couple of parties together. It should be fun.
I’m excited. I’ll see you there.
We connected through our friends at Animoca Brands. It’s such a cool group of folks we had yet on the show. We had Robby on the show. I love everything that they’re about. I’m glad that we could connect with you. There’s so much to Quidd, the history and what you have going on. It predates the NFT boom by far. Can you tell us where did this all begin and more about the origin story?
We’re in a space where the origin story matters. We’re dealing with collectible products whether it’s high-end artwork, fine wine or low-end trading cards both physical and digital. It tends to get more valuable as time goes on. This is the weird quirk of a space where old stuff gets more valuable as it gets older. We spent a lot of time talking about our origin story because we do think it makes us a bit unique. That’s a type of uniqueness that is especially important in these collectibles in the NFT space.
Quidd has been around for several years. We were first to market with our marketplace in 2016. The idea for Quidd predated Quidd itself. I had worked previously at Topps Digital. Around 2012 was when I and a team that I work with at the time started experimenting with digital ownership. It’s this basic notion of, could you take a JPEG? Could you make it verifiably scarce? Could you get people to want to collect, own and pay real money to have it?
What was novel is these digital objects existed outside the context of a game. We’ve all played games. We’ve all spent money on a sword that has a functional value, that helps you level up or even decorative skins to help feel cool within a social context of the game. That was well established back then.
What we were doing was even more narrowly focused and it was devoid of any broader game context. It was, “You’re a fan of this thing. Maybe a way to express your fandom is to own a limited-edition JPEG that features the brand that you love.” There wasn’t much to do with it besides barter it with somebody else or simply hold it in your digital collection that was accessible from an app on your phone.
We were early on in this exploration of a format shift where collectors are going to shift from buying products made of cardboard to buying products made of code. We had a bit of success there from about 2012 through 2015 so much that it started creating tailwinds for the creation of Quidd. We said, “If this is working over here, maybe it’ll work over there. Maybe over there at Quidd, we can do it even bigger and better as a VC-backed startup.” In a lot of ways, we’ve been in this space for over a decade. With Quidd, specifically, that play has now been up for several years.
There’s so much experience thinking about the space. I’m sure that influenced your thinking in many different ways in how you can evolve over time. It’s an interesting origin story.
NFTs have been part of your line of sight for a long time. We talked about how early use of NFTs was the skins in the games. You’re part of that genesis era thinking about this even before CryptoKitties. How has that impacted your strategy? In particular, when things got hot with the market, how did that impact your roadmap and your vision of Quidd?
When we initially raised money way back when for Quidd, we used comparisons to the video game market as a way to explain to investors like, “Trust us or at least look at this data. Young people that are digitally savvy and digitally native spend billions of dollars on these new game assets, $25 billion, $50 billion.” We quoted some massive numbers and that certainly got people’s attention.
One of the outputs of having been in this space for so long is you do build an appreciation for the nuance and the layers that exist. What we probably have are three categories of digital objects that exist. One is you have the in-game items. Those are probably games that are in traditional video games or free-to-play experiences that aren’t on-chain. They’re not individually serialized and scarce. They’re rare. It’s things like legendary, mythic, uncommon, common. They all carry those rarity labels. Those rarity labels don’t map exactly to a quantified count of exactly what exists.
You’ve got one category in-game virtual assets but you don’t know how many of them exist and you don’t own them. Ultimately, you’re at the whim of the game developer to effectively lease them from them. You have this middle category, which we operate now, which we’re calling non-fungible digital collectibles. They are off-chain items that are individually serialized and have a fixed supply.
When we issue items off-chain on Quidd before they hit the blockchain, they’re all individually stamped and serialized. You know and can verify as a collector that only 2,000 or 5,000 of these exists. It’s different from the world of gaming and it has to be. In the world of gaming, they have to run their economies so that if the game explodes and all of a sudden, they go from 1 million users to 100 million users, they can print more items and have enough for them to buy. In our world, it’s truly fixed supply. If there’s 5,000, there’s only 5,000 that will exist.
To the right of us, you’ve got pure-play NFTs. One of you asked about what has the boom in the NFT market done for us? It’s validated the path that we started years ago but it took it to another level. I’ll give you an instance of this. For years, Quidd existed largely off-chain and largely selling collectibles to fans and collectors that sought out that JPEG because they love the brand, the character.
They wanted the item to complete a set of 8 or 18 items. It’s this notion of completing them all. They wanted to have prestige within the social context or app. They wanted these objects for years without any notion of economic utility. They didn’t buy them to then resell them. They didn’t buy them because they thought they could sell them for 10X in five years and help pay for rent or pay off their student loans.
What NFTs uniquely ushered in starting in 2017 and with the boom is a technology that can give the peace of mind of ownership that can then be valued at price points that are real, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. I don’t think you can achieve those price points or that you’ll cap out if you can’t offer to that collector, to that buyer what the blockchain offers.
It is a sense of permanence, a sense of, “I own this,” and access to various marketplaces where you could buy and sell for real money. In a lot of ways, what NFTs ultimately injected into the conversation is that economic utility and that ability to sell to somebody else in a currency that is meaningful to you and that can affect your everyday life.
Digital Collectibles: What NFT is uniquely usher in is an effective technology that can give the peace of mind of ownership that can then be valued at price points that are real hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.
What’s compelling about where we are, the state of play is we are at a point where if you like art, in my case, if you like sports trading cards, entertainment trading cards, you have a tough decision to make, “Do I buy cardboard or code?” Ultimately, the code format has caught up. You could put a list of all the things you can do with a physical trading card and put an NFT next to it and it’s pretty comparable. It checks all those boxes.
One could argue because it’s digital-only, it always starts on-chain. Technically, you can lose access to your wallet but you don’t lose the item itself. It’s interoperable and can go into various contexts. You can buy and sell on OpenSea. It’s 24/7. You can look at it and touch it without degrading the condition of it and then devaluing the object, which exists in the real world. I would argue that you put those two things side by side. We’re at a point where NFTs, as a format, win out.
Is that why you ended up doing this real-world pre-Mint market and aftermarket? Is that your bridge to the mainstream that you guys created?
A hundred percent. It’s a bit self-serving to say we had this vision years ago, that we’d had this hybrid solution. In a lot of ways, we built this thing over half a decade. We said, “This is a valuable asset.” We’ve got a community. We’ve got collectibles in circulation. We’ve got a whole lot of code to run this off-chain marketplace. We don’t want to jettison that. What we’ve been able to do is find a way to connect it to the blockchain in a way that’s complimentary and also authentic and organic to how trading cards work. You guys probably are young gentlemen, younger than I am.
Are we talking about the ’70 and ‘80s here?
Yes. I was collecting parchment paper with the Founding Fathers’ signatures on them. When I was collecting physical objects, not everything you own is super valuable and that’s okay. It’s fine to have a binder of trading cards where 90% of them are items that you’ve collected along the way to complete a set or they represent your favorite player but they’re not super valuable. There’s a portion of your collection that is the 5% or 1% that are valuable. What do you do with those?
That’s a great analogy. People talk about these NFTs that go down in value. When you buy trading cards, you expect that.
I have thousands of zero-value cards in my binders protected and sitting there.
Not all of those, in my opinion, wasn’t on-chain. This is where you enter the blockchain where our application of blockchain technology matches a usage cycle or a play pattern that you see with physical trading cards. For that 5% or that 1%, you’re going to treat them differently than you would treat random cards in a box or a binder.
In the parlance of sports trading cards, you’re going to authenticate and grade it. You’re going to send it off to another service like PSA to say, “This is indeed authentic and to give you a score out of 1 to 10. You’re going to protect it and ensure it. You’re going to put it in the slab and you’re going to get an insurance policy because it’s worth thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars. You’re probably going to vault it. You’re not going to want to have it under your bed or in your closet if it’s that valuable.”
All of those steps, authenticating, grading, ensuring and vaulting, they’re all value-added services that physical training card collectors apply to their valuable items to protect and preserve them permanently. Things like permanently and things like preservation are all things that blockchain technology was designed to do.
That’s where our adoption of blockchain technology comes in, not because it’s fashionable and we want to slap an NFT label on things. It’s because, in our off-chain marketplace, we have our collectors who are valuing off-chain collectibles at hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. They’re hitting price points and the sense of valuation off-chain where the owners of them are starting to wonder, “I want to give this to my kid or I want to protect this long-term.” That’s where you enter the blockchain in our minting technology to let the collector choose what from their collection should go on-chain, when it should go on-chain and to which chain it should go.
You’re probably hearing in my explanation a lot of comparisons to physical trading cards. That’s something that we won’t ever lose. It’s a unique perspective. We think of that metaphor of authenticating grading, ensuring and vaulting. It’s a good metaphor to explain why the blockchain when you’re talking to a noob, a no-coiner or somebody who maybe has heard of the label but doesn’t understand why the technology has to exist.
All of that wrapped up puts Quidd as an Animoca Brands company in a strong position to be that front door to the mainstream. You could imagine if I parsed this argument down to some marketing going to a car convention in New Jersey on a Saturday and talking about what we do would be understandable and appealing to someone who spent 30 years collecting cardboard.
I want to get a little bit into some of the metrics you got going on. We hear you’re generating a listing conversion rate of 48% over six transactions per second. Those sound like pretty good stats. I want to get a sense of how you all think about metrics. What metrics and stats you’re aiming for in the future?
We’re ending maybe one of the 1st or 2nd chapters of NFTs where attention-grabbing is the individual NFT selling for tens of millions of dollars. That’s great. The Beeple auction, all those things are proof points and bits of evidence that are necessary to send messages from the world of crypto into the mainstream to get their attention. They’re little marketing messages that go over the fence so to speak. Ultimately, does every new person that comes into NFT going to wind up with a $6 million to $9 million NFT? Probably not.
Those vanity metrics are usually all-around primary market drops. It’s usually around things like sales velocity and how quickly you sold out in five minutes. It’s usually around that aggregate revenue that’s generated from there. In the case of it focusing on the aftermarket, it’s usually one singular sale where you’re like, “Someone bought this from somebody else for millions of dollars.” You probably saw the sale for CryptoPunks.
Yes. It’s a hot topic.
It was a flash loan. The guy bought it for himself. Hopefully, that becomes a cautionary tale for the industry. As an industry, we shift to a different set of metrics. The individual one-off sale, people could start to see through that especially if you’ve had instances of it being gamed. That sexy, fast-selling sell-out, that’s also going to shift. Where we want to focus is on aftermarket liquidity for as many buyers and sellers as possible.
You talked about the listing-to-sale conversion rate. You talked about the transactions per second. What’s important for us is if a buyer wants to buy, he or she can find an owner and compel that owner to list something at a reasonable price to buy from them. If an owner wants to sell and liquidate, he or she can find a buyer and make that sale.
I would call it generalized liquidity that is equally distributed amongst your entire collector base of buyers and sellers not just five whales or not something that produces a single one-off aftermarket sale that generates millions of dollars. That can exist in isolation but not be scaled down to the rest of your buyer and seller user base. What matters to us is liquidity. We’re as concerned about liquidity for inventory that might cost $0.10, $0.50 or $1 as we are liquidity for the high-end items that are 1 of 1’s that should go for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A sustainable ecosystem.
Digital Collectibles: We have our collectors who are valuing off-chain collectibles at hundreds, if not thousands of dollars and they’re hitting price points and they’re hitting a sense of valuation.
Our approach is we’re going to go through different boom and bust cycles. This is the technology and also this is consumer behavior, which is important. It’s not just the technology but the consumer behavior that’s here to stay. We can all envision a world of getting together at these social events in person for NFT.NYC and pulling out your phone and showing off the cool thing you own. That’s already happening. That’s going to happen a ton. That’ll go mainstream over the coming years.
We’re not in a world where we’re not necessarily chasing the massive single transaction for millions of dollars. In a world where we have a long-time horizon, what we can focus on is making product investments so that liquidity can be distributed across the big guys but also the small guys as well. Part of that economic utility argument is it’s great if you got into one of these NFT projects early and there’s an ever-increasing floor price. The floor price isn’t value. The floor price is the coordination of sellers who are incentivized to drive up that price. That’s not actual liquidity. Liquidity is bid-ask spreads.
If somebody at either end of a transaction wants to do something, they can do it and get a good outcome instantly. That’s a problem solved at scale only if you invest in technology and only if you build a next-generation version of eBay that can deal with all this digital inventory. I’m stealing this from someone far smarter than me. What’s not cool is one NFT that sells for $1 million. What’s cool is a million NFTs selling for $1. In that latter case, you got a large audience and you’re getting liquidity for that large audience of buyers and sellers.
One of the things too that come to mind for me is as we think of the evolution of NFTs, we talk a lot about going from pure collectibles with no utility to these utility-backed projects and then something else beyond that. I don’t think we’ve even come close to tapping into the value that exists in the core collectibles market. Collectibles are built around nostalgia and passion for things that are meaningful to people. A lot of folks talk about like we moved on from that or something. That’s the beginning and we barely scratched the surface.
It’s freaking early in this space. There’s no week that goes by where I’m like, “I didn’t realize it.” This is the 2nd or 3rd order of consequences for the implication of what NFTs have ushered in. There are multiple parts of the collectibles value chain that are massively disrupted and do business differently as a result of NFTs.
One thing with NFTs that everyone talks about is, in its application to the collectibles market, it solves a problem that’s been plaguing licensors and licensees for the longest time, which is their lack of participation in the aftermarket. Take traditional baseball cards, Major League Baseball and Topps never participated in a big aftermarket sale on eBay.
What did they do in response to a hot product on eBay? They made new content and sold that new content to try to capitalize. What does that do? That floods the market with more supply. What does that do? That sends asset prices in a depreciating fashion. With the introduction of NFTs and the ability to do this on code, you’ve got a situation where licensors and licensees expect to participate in aftermarket sales.
No one’s wondering, “Did I get my cut?”
It’s all programmatic and automated. We’re doing deals where it’s like, “What’s your wallet address? We’re going to send money into perpetuity. Make sure someone watches it. In 5 or 7 years, there could be a huge transfer in there.” I thought, “That’s cool. It’s an additional revenue stream.” It changes how you even approach supply in general. If I’m a licensor like a large media company, a sports league or a player’s association, I’m less optimizing for retail sales of my NFTs. I’m more optimizing for the preservation and steady growth of my NFT assets. That’s a different concept.
It’s not about, how many cards can I sell this season? It’s, what’s the overall asset price of my branded NFTs over the long term? Their role is less of a decision-maker on how widgets get shipped. Their role is more of an investment manager who’s deciding what portfolio of supply should exist and how those should appreciate over 5 or 10 years? Not to get too theoretical with you but we’re early that there isn’t a week where I don’t hit some traditional way of doing business and collectibles and say, “That’s now entirely upended because of this technical innovation.”
One of the things that we’ve seen across the board is that community, collaboration and partnerships are central to the most successful projects in the space. We wanted to know, how important are partnerships to Quidd in what you’re doing?
It’s important. In the early days, we are also around partnerships. Let’s zoom way out. We specialize in officially licensed content. Anything that has been issued and is in circulation on Quidd is officially licensed. That was born out of a legal agreement that we had with these media companies where we’ve earned the trust to work with their most valuable asset, which is their IP and their brands. Everything we’ve done has been historically 100% officially licensed.
Why do we do that? One path to the mainstream is working with intellectual property people love. There are other paths. Look at Punks or Bored Apes, those are crypto brands that are originated from crypto. That’s crypto’s Mickey Mouse is what I would argue. Apes has become the Disney portfolio of characters for the crypto world.
In this space, the use of well-known popular IP has always been a ticket to the mainstream because using those characters of those brands is an emotional hijack of the senses for that prospective buyer. It instantly infuses that JPEG or that PNG with a built-in audience and has some built-in demand. That’s one partnership.
Are we going to get a taste of what’s happening there? We love to get some secrets on the show. Anything that you can talk about on that roadmap?
No.
We’re going to continue this show after a shot of tequila and then we’ll press play again.
It was a significant pause.
I hate to be coying and give you little tea leaves for your readers to attempt to dissect and figure out what’s next. We’ve dropped clues elsewhere when we’ve done AMAs.
They’re working on something with Lipton.
There’s certainly a lot happening in the works there. One of the interesting perspectives that we have is we’ve been talking to media companies and sports leagues about digital collectibles for over half a decade. We were the only ones talking about it years ago. Now, it’s a crowded space and everybody wants to want to get in. It’s wonderful to see a lot of these companies that formerly weren’t receptive to it now receptive to it. With each week that goes by, they’re getting less shaky and more confident in it.
It’s not easy. An NFT deal implies perpetual ownership of the media, the metadata and the underlying token, which itself is an ownership record. It is difficult for these companies whose brands are their most important asset to all of us. I said, “We’re going to create something that can live into perpetuity.” We’re really getting there. It’s been wonderful to see the rapid evolution and adoption of this new technology.
I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface on the types of partnerships. Working upstream and working with licensors to create an officially licensed product, that’s compelling. No one’s talking about downstream and building a distribution network of NFTs or building a network of interoperable apps So that from day one of the issuances of an NFT, you already know the list of compatible apps, games and metaverses where you can bring that. We operate in a space where a lot of NFTs are dropped for a game that’s yet to be built. What if via partnerships, you can effectively build a real metaverse that, from day one, had these NFTs interoperable between and amongst them?
Digital Collectibles: We want to focus on aftermarket liquidity for as many buyers and sellers as possible.
I have nothing to announce but we’ve been hugely fortunate to be part of the Animoca Brands family because there are other subsidiaries within Animoca Brands that have wonderful not just projects but businesses, products and communities. One would be The Sandbox, for instance. It’s not too far of a leap to make to imagine us selling and issuing digital collectibles on Quidd that can be minted, fully interoperable and used in The Sandbox once it’s on-chain.
It’s those downstream distribution networks cobbling together a day one roster of interoperable apps, games and metaverses that is super compelling. That boosts the utility of the NFT immensely. The cool part is we are in a unique position with Animoca Brands to not just promise that but to deliver against that before anybody else.
I see everything they’re doing. There are many great companies under that umbrella and partnerships. It makes our minds explode how many opportunities there are. It’s cool.
Even if it takes Facebook making a big announcement for people to get excited about Metaverses, it’s all good in my mind. All I know is the announcement drops in every Metaverse token jumps up in value 50% to 100%. I’ve been telling folks that 2022 is the year of the Metaverse where all this stuff that’s been the conversation. What is the Metaverse? How do these work? We’re all going to find that out in 2022.
I had to watch Ready Player One because we’ve been talking about it about every other episode. Michael, have you seen the movie?
I have. I don’t know if that will necessarily happen in 2022. That’s always going to be that aspirational Metaverse concept that’s out there. What I’m finding interesting is the notion of a Metaverse that maybe lives in your head more than it lives in a virtual Roblox-style environment. It’s easy to do Ready Player One conceived strapping on a VR headset and all of a sudden, you’re in that virtual world. It’s easy to extrapolate and having a rare pair of sneakers in that world would be pretty cool and replicate how cool it is to have a pair of rare Nikes and walk through the hall of your middle school.
It’s easy to see that but what is interesting is taking the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Some might argue that’s a community. It’s a Metaverse but the metaverse plays out in someone’s head as well as places like Discord or, more broadly, on the internet. I don’t know that Metaverse is a place. A Metaverse may be more a state of mind as cheesy as that sounds. I agree that we’ll see it play out and huge advances in 2022. Aspirationally, it’s probably a decade until we get to Ready Player One.
I’ll make one more comment there. There’s a whole separate Bored Ape Yacht Club track for the week of NFT events in New York. I got to imagine once these guys hang out in real life, there’s going to be more activity in the Metaverse. That intersection and rotation of IRL and Metaverse over and over again are going to create some interesting perspectives on what is the Metaverse to your point. It may be that another person at Starbucks that you realize is also a member of Bored Ape Yacht Club and you cheer to each other across the cafe.
It’s a country club without a physical location. They can live anywhere and be fully decentralized.
It’s also the intersection of the real world, the virtual world and the augmented world. I don’t think it’s fully defined yet. We’ve been going deep. We could talk all day about everything that Quidd is about and everything that it can be. We even talked before the show about circling back and talking more with a completely separate episode on the sports world and everything that’s happening there with trading cards and the evolution.
I wanted to take a step back and ask your perspective on some other questions to get your personal view on some things. It’s a section that we call Edge Quick Hitters. It’s a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. There are ten questions and we look for single-word or few-word responses but we always like to give you the bandwidth to expand if you get the urge. Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It’s probably a terrible late ‘80s, early ‘90s cassette tape, a Vanilla Ice.
I have Martika’s Toy Soldiers. I’m sorry. I’m going to admit it.
I had MC Hammer and Paula Abdul.
I had both of those.
Somehow, I got a hold of a Kenny G tape too.
I had Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em.
Was Kenny G considered jazz or not?
I don’t know what that is.
I had a Biz Markie cassette tape too.
I ruined your show.
We’re going to do a whole show on this particular subject. Question two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
A Whitey Ford baseball card that I bought at a card convention in the Midwest for $7 and I sold it for $50. I became hooked on the small little business of running a card collection.
Question three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
Probably a Bob’s Burgers digital collectible on Quidd.
Question number four, what is the most recent thing you sold?
Also a Bob’s Burgers digital collectible. I know these are meant to be fast answers. For your audience that doesn’t know, Bob’s Burgers is a strange animated program that used to be on Fox. It’s now on Hulu. It’s someone in Brooklyn who did the Simpsons in 2016. It’s fascinating. We have been fortunate to work with them over the years and produced a lot of irreverent, silly digital collectibles that have the word fart in them and they’re hilarious. I’m sure they conquer that market on Quidd.
We know you want to increase liquidity but you don’t have to do all the buying and selling yourself.
Digital Collectibles: With the introduction of NFTs, you’ve now got a situation where licensers and licensees expect to participate in aftermarket sale.
Number five, what is your most prized possession?
This is lame, my kids. I don’t possess them.
How many have you got?
Two.
Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be? What do you get your eye on?
It’s probably something old. I like vintage things. I’m a closet Antiques Roadshow fan. In a lot of ways, this has influenced our approach to Quidd. We love these oxymoron vintage digital collectibles. I can’t name it specifically but something 50 to 100 years old. I love old stuff.
I went to an estate sale for the first time in a while. I remember how fun estate sales are. You can find old stuff at those things.
Each one of those old things has a weird story to it and you wonder, “Why did this person buy it? What do they do with it?” A lot of what makes NFT special as well is the ability to attract growth in us and bake culture into that object itself. Old antiques also have that attribute.
Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?
The word is resilience but it’s the ability to not die. I don’t mean in the sense of mortal life. I mean in the sense of being able to take a bunch of licks and keep getting up. Resilience is key.
Question number eight, if you can eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
A lack of discipline. I can be someone unstructured at times. That’s only increasing with all the different stimuli we have throughout the day. I have a weakness in that I chase bright shiny objects too often. I would eliminate that and give them the gift of focus.
Seems like you got a pretty solid long-term methodical plan here but you could always be a little bit more analytical and methodical about things. You got a pretty good balance.
Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I unpacked groceries. I can only tell you the truth.
He bought a Bob’s Burger NFT.
With the word fart in there.
Did you get anything from the grocery store that you’re looking forward to? Was it just the staples, eggs and stuff?
I was remarking to myself that the bags looked as if it was packed by a prop handler. It was a French baguette and celery stock shooting out. It was like every bag of groceries you see in a movie. It’s not real.
Question ten, what are you going to do next after the show?
Attend the event at NFT.NYC. I hope to see you guys there.
Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. That is Edge Quick Hitters.
Next up on the agenda here are hot topics. Let’s hit that hard. AC Milan will be the first club to launch NFTs with Chiliz rewarding ACM holders. On their website, they’ve announced that Rossoneri will be the first football club to launch an NFT campaign on the fan engagement and rewards app, Socios.com, partner of the Rossoneri since January 2021. The launch will take place on Sunday, 31st of October 2021, when 100 limited edition NFTs will be emitted to commemorate the biggest AC Milan moment from their game with AS Roma. The NFTs will be subsequently dropped to ACM fan token holders. Cool stuff, getting in there with sports.
One of the cool things I saw about this thing is that you have to have a certain number of tokens in your wallet to be eligible for the NFT. Also, you have to make a prediction about the outcome of the game and only then are you eligible. There’s this gaming aspect of this going in. There’s something cool, DraftKings-esque, going on here with this thing. I like this use case. It’s fun. Fun is important to the space. We got to keep things fun and interesting. This is one of those where I’m kicking down the door or the intersection of fantasy and NFTs and all this fun stuff we’re doing with gaming.
Entirely new verticals of products will be created that is very much of interest for the DFS players whether it’s FanDuel or DraftKings or even the traditional sports betting players like Penn or MGM. They’ve all seen what Dapper has done with Top Shot. It presents not only a new model but an entirely new vertical.
In this space, you’re not necessarily having to play the role of a GM and feel the lineup and do a draft and populate various positions to then earn points and rank and win money. When it’s an NFT and it has an asset-like ability to it and when it’s determined or connected to the sports performance on the pitch or the field, there will be the invention of a new vertical that isn’t quite DFS but isn’t quite NFTs. It marries the best of both worlds into one experience. That’s cool to hear that Socios is doing that. Without sharing too much, you’re going to see a lot of innovation in that space.
Digital Collectibles: It’s not about how many cards can you sell this season, it’s about the overall asset price of your branded NFTs over the long-term.
Something with tea as well. You said it several times but we haven’t heard that particular phrase before. It’s relevant, the cardboard or code. One interesting thing that is obvious but it’s not is the code. The code, there’s so much you can do in engagement levels. We haven’t even scratched the surface into what programmatic things you could do. You can’t own a cardboard trading card and that gets you special access to something and it’s automated.
The list is endless. Let me give you one without may be sharing too much proprietary secret information. There are limitations on the type of physical inventory that can transact on eBay. If the item is less than $50 in value, you’re not going to go through the pain of listing it. Think about it, picking, packing, shipping, receiving, confirming receipt, all those things are a headache. It functions as a tax on a transaction that effectively limits what inventory can be transacted. You have these physical markets around pieces of cardboard that exist simply because of the physical nature of the widget in the middle.
In the digital world, that doesn’t have to exist. There’s zero shipping. It’s instant. There’s an ability to trade these things and buy and sell them 24/7. There are innovative sales formats that haven’t even existed. There’s fractional ownership. I’m sure there’s going to be a suite of financial products that are offered up to NFT holders to sell off a portion of the item and get some liquidity. There are many things that are yet to be invented that simply cannot work on top of the cardboard. We’re very close to a situation where it’s clear that dealing with code is 10X or 100X cooler, more fun, more efficient, faster, than a static piece of cardboard.
Don’t get me wrong, I love cardboard. I’ve got a baseball card collection that I love and still check in on and still trade every once in a while. It’s inevitable. There’s this unstoppable trend towards digitizing major parts of our lives that it’s unthinkable that this collectibles category inclusive of low-end trading cards or high-end art isn’t also going to go in that same direction. I look at it, not as the Liberal Arts guy but more of the structured thinker.
Somebody is going to build a product or experience that is much cooler that has not just the digital natives that prefer things that way but gets those inbetweeners somebody who’s invested time and energy into, in this case, their cassette tape collection and someone comes along with a CD and they have to upgrade format, it’s so much better. We’re on the eve of all that happening.
What else we got going on in, Eathan?
Facebook is rebranding to Meta. That is a story that’s been in the news. I forgot the exact scenario. There’s some release video around this, Mark Zuckerberg doing an explanation. I have no idea what it is.
He did a post on it.
My wife was like, “Did you hear about that?” I was like, “I heard about it.” This video came up on my feed when I searched for it and said, “Let’s watch the video.” She’s like, “Let’s not. I already saw it. I don’t want to see it.” I don’t have any idea what’s going on.
I haven’t used Facebook for several years. Any of my connections to the broader Facebook universe is a necessity for running elements of our business. I do use WhatsApp but it’s far more as a productivity tool than it is where I hang out and deal with people. My reaction to it was a strange one, which is I still don’t care because I haven’t largely viewed them at least irrelevant in my life. I don’t know if I’m part of the leading trend of people that have deleted their Facebook account or walked away from them.
Is this a desperate pivot? Is this a long-term vision that’s been in the making?
It’s probably both. I don’t think it’s a desperate pivot. It’s part of the rebrand because things couldn’t get worse from a PR standpoint. It’s also ruthlessly commercial in the sense that they see where the world is going and they need to start putting the building blocks in place to dominate that future world.
Jeff, I can feel you have something to say here. Part of the messaging from them has been this is going to be more open and it’s going to be more about collaboration with other people being able to build on top of what they’re doing which is not.
Unless they came out and said, “We’re going to change your business model,” this would be a bright, shinier 3D VR way to experience the same Facebook ecosystem and economy. I’m a believer that everything goes down to the business model. Even with these disruptive technology changes, they’re largely business model changes that render some incumbent. All of a sudden, they’re making money the wrong way. The new entrant comes in and makes money the right way.
Facebook as a whole, takes in your data and the content you contribute. They use that to make you the product and sell you to advertisers. If everyone in one day stopped using Instagram or Facebook, they do not have a business. There’s a whole ton of asymmetries there where it’s the community that does the work but the community gets a very little benefit. If you believe everything about these reports from Instagram, they give the negative benefit or a cost, which they feel bad about themselves.
There’ll be no change if Meta is a new application layer on top of the existing business model. What matters instead is this whole concept of Web 3.0, which is quickly becoming a reality. The community owns the thing. We finally get right the reciprocity of the value in coming back and value out for the community.
Look at Friends With Benefits, you’ve talked about Bored Ape. In effect, owning the NFT or owning the token makes you a member of the community. That relationship is one of a co-owner of many co-owners as opposed to a relationship that’s like, “I’m here to give content and view ads.” I’m a little skeptical about it as you might learn in my analysis because what matters is probably the business model more than some new application layer on top of the old business model.
Time will tell.
What’s interesting about the Facebook and Google model over the past many years that they’ve been around is people have this value locked inside of what they do that they don’t always realize is valuable. Some company comes in and says, “We realize there’s value. Give it to us for free. Sign the terms of service. We’ll generate value around it.” In essence, that’s okay if they know how to generate value out of it and the users don’t. There’s that other aspect of it, which you alluded to, which is they’re generating value by hijacking people’s dopamine system and making them feel bad about themselves at the same time.
Let’s fast forward ten years from now. There’s going to be a generation that thinks it was crazy to post interesting, creative content to benefit some other platform in their advertisers. That idea that we did that for a decade or more is going to feel obscene.
It’s a paradigm shift to use an overly clichéd term but you’ll see the same thing with video games. This is happening sooner than we think where people will say, “I can’t believe I played video games and didn’t make money.” Full stop. I’m a huge believer as does Animoca in the play-to-earn movement. We are at the late stages of free-to-play. Free-to-play as an economic system is awful for players. It uses 2%. It takes its addictive mechanics to prey upon the 2% and subsidizes the other 98%.
You don’t own the thing nor can you make money from it. Free-to-play is ending in the gaming industry. What you’ll find is more things like Axie Infinity where people will say, “I got good at this game that I can make money from it in a much more direct way within the game itself.” That’s probably the one that’s sooner in where people will say, “I can’t believe ten years ago, people spent all their time playing these video games and didn’t make any money from it.”
I’m a little more optimistic that Facebook can see the light and use its power, money and capability to do some good.
Got some Facebook stock?
Digital Collectibles: It’s inevitable and there’s this sort of unstoppable trend towards digitizing major parts of our lives that it’s unthinkable that these collectibles category inclusive of low end trading cards or high end art isn’t also going to go in that same direction.
I’m not going to disclose any information. If anybody does have the power to make it happen, they do. Will they? I don’t know but I’ll be optimistic about it. It’s been an amazing convo. Michael, we’ll have to have you back. We can go down many different rabbit holes together and it’d be a blast. We’ll save that for another time. Please let our readers know what’s the best place to follow you and all the projects that you got going on.
The best place is Twitter. Go find us, @Quidd, on Twitter. We didn’t talk about it but there’s also an associated token that we’re working on. Find it on the internet if you could. If you want to get a sense of what Quidd is like to be a collector and to buy and sell these digital collectibles, you can easily find us in the App Store or Google Play. You can see a sliver of what we do if you go to Market.OnQuidd.com.
As a last little plug, now is a good time to get in early on Quidd. We haven’t marketed in two years. We’ve been heads-down building. It’s a good time to get into Quidd because there are a lot of what I would call hidden gems that you can buy on a relatively low-cost basis off-chain. In the near future, you’ll be able to take certain items off-chain, mint them as NFTs to your chain of choice and sell them on OpenSea.
We represent an undiscovered estate sale maybe that’s full of these vintage digital collectibles that if you follow the arc of history and the trends will only appreciate in value. No one has a time machine and it’s impossible to make a digital collectible from 2016 or 2017. You can’t do that now. By the nature of us that we’ve been doing it, we sit on this inventory that is inimitable and represents the Honus Wagner’s of the digital collectibles and NFTs.
You learned it here, CryptoPunks.
This is not financial advice but a whole lot of fun.
Punks have been dormant for three years and were rediscovered.
I’m skipping the party. I’m going heads down into Quidd. Another cool thing is we have a cool giveaway for our readers as well. Michael has got 40 number one digital collectibles on Quidd. We’re saying that one lucky winner that submits their Quidd username can choose one number one item from his collection and he’ll gift it to them and tell them to get started. He does love his collection.
I retain the right to veto your first choice. Someone’s going to swoop in and go for the one I bought for a couple of thousands of dollars and they’re going to look at that and snatch it from me. I retain the right to veto that 1st choice but I will not veto the 2nd choice. As you can imagine in the world of collecting, that individual serial number, that stamp is important to its value. The number one items that we have on Quidd are rare, precious and sought after. I sit on 40 of them. One of those will go to a lucky reader. Yes, I do retain veto power because I love my collection and it’s going to break my heart to give one of these items to one of your readers.
It’s a thoughtful gesture. Hopefully, we’ll find someone that appreciates what a generous offer that you’re giving us. Thanks so much.
Keep an eye out on our socials and you’ll get all the details of that giveaway. We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. Go to iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.
Remember, we always invite you to co-create and build with us at Edge of NFT. We are unlocking a whole new way to connect and collaborate with us through our own NFT drop, Living Tree NFTs. Through this project, we’ll be planting tens of thousands of real trees. This collection is not only beautiful generative art but will also be the foundation of everything we do with Edge of NFT in our community for years to come.
On top of that, Living Tree holders like you will co-create and participate in our show and access exclusive events and killer contests. It’ll be the front line for other NFT drops as well as a long, bright future of branching opportunities to come. Get on the whitelist by dropping us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet at us, @EdgeOfNFT and we’ll share with you the steps required to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks for sharing this time with us.
Important Links:
- Quidd
- Animoca Brands
- Sequoia
- Robby Yung – Past episode
- CryptoKitties
- OpenSea
- CryptoPunks
- NFT.NYC
- Bored Apes
- The Sandbox
- AC Milan will be the first club to launch NFTs with Chiliz rewarding ACM holders – AC Milan article
- Socios.com
- Friends With Benefits
- Axie Infinity
- @Quidd – Twitter
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
- EdgeOfNFT.com
- Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com
- @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
- App Store – Quidd: Digital Collectible
- Google Play – Quidd: Digital Collectible
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