The State Of Web3 & Emerging Tech Capital Markets At The CryptoMondaysLA

January 19, 2024

Web3 and emerging tech capital markets take center stage in this enlightening episode of Edge of NFT. Recorded live at CryptoMondaysLA, the panel features industry experts Elana Dickman from Red Beard Ventures, Adam Struck of Struck Crypto, and John Nance representing Sustany Capital. The discussion delves into the current landscape of the crypto space. Our panelists share their unique perspectives on the challenges and opportunities within the Web3 sector, touching on topics such as regulatory uncertainties, the impact of valuations, and the evolving intersection of AI and blockchain. This episode offers valuable insights into the dynamic world of Web3 and emerging technologies, exploring how capital markets are shaping the future of this rapidly evolving industry. Don't miss out on this engaging conversation with key players driving innovation in the crypto space!

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Listen to the podcast here

The State Of Web3 & Emerging Tech Capital Markets At The CryptoMondaysLA

This is Adam Struck of Struck Crypto.

This is Elena Dickman of Red Beard Ventures

This is John Nance of Sustany Capital. You’re tuned in to the Edge of NFT. Your choice for the best Web3 news content. Keep tuning in.

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This is Josh Kriger, co-host of Edge of NFT. We are live from Expert Dojo in Santa Monica. This is a special live audience event. Thanks to CryptoMondays and Startup Coil. I'll be moderating this exciting panel regarding the state of Web3 in emerging tech capital markets with an amazing lineup of top-notch investors in the space, including Adam Struck, Elana Dickman, and John Nance. We will get into it. First and foremost, a little background on our panelists. Adam is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and spearheaded Struck Crypto. He's been one of our featured guests on the show, which we enjoyed so we wanted to have him back again. Now we're going to go a little bit deeper. How are you doing, Adam?

I’m doing well. How are you?

I’m doing great. We have Elana who's another Forbes 30 under 30 recipient, two-on-one panel. Check that out. She's a partner at Red Beard Ventures. She leverages her financial acumen to host The Girls Table Podcast and made a mark as an Angel investor for various projects. She just got off a livestream with Lisa Carmen Wang promoting her new book Bad Bitch Bible. That's a rocking financial self-help category everywhere. We're glad to have you with us. Thanks for joining.

Thank you so much for having me.

Last but not least, we have John. He's the Chief Investment Officer and General Partner at Sustany Capital, a prominent investment firm with a keen focus on sustainable innovation technologies, leveraging the experience at White Lion Capital, Deal Box, and Sterling Global Strategies, among others to dive into sustainable investments in the innovation industry. How about that? Let's give it up for our great panel. I chose this topic because I thought this was a conversation that has everyone in a debate globally about what's going on in the Web3 space and the AI space. Is it the end of the world? Are NFTs dead or are we going through some evolution? I'd love each of you to start by sharing your perspective on the current state of Web3. Where are we today?

From our perspective, we have a pretty unique lens because we have a Web2 fund called Struck Capital, a crypto fund called Struck Crypto, and then we have a venture studio where we're building companies. When I look at the crypto space, we're cautiously optimistic. We're a registered investment advisor. We have to be very careful about how we buy and sell or invest in Web3 generally. The regulatory uncertainty and essentially the SEC going AWOL on the entire space is difficult.

When we look at 2024 and we look at the upcoming Bitcoin, the inevitable Bitcoin, ETF, and Ethereum continuing to move to proof of sake and shipping new upgrades, there are many reasons to be optimistic. What we don't want to do is to be pedal-to-the-metal investors and bull markets slam the brake and bear markets. We want to run our process with blinders on, do a bunch of diligence, and invest because we have dry powder and that's what we're doing. For us, it's cautiously optimistic and making sure if we're investing in a project, there's a sustainability aspect to it. There’s a sustainable unit economics, the tokens are there for a reason, and these founders want to build because they're passionate about the space versus getting rich quickly.

Right now, It's a builder's market. Back a few years ago, you would see the deal flow. You'd see a deal and you had 24 hours to decide if you wanted to invest in the deal. If you didn't invest, somebody else would put in the money and the round would close. A lot of people are building right now. We're seeing a lot more high-quality projects. People are here not just to go do a money grab but they're building something that has a lot of value. We also tend to focus on a lot of companies right now specifically in the Web3 space that's targeting more Web2 companies because first off, Web3 companies right now don't tend to have a lot of money to go ahead and pay for marketing and loyalty. If they're taking the Web3 technology and marketing towards Web2 companies, that's where we're seeing a ton of value.

NFT | Web3 Capital Market
Web3 Capital Market: It's definitely a builder's market now.

We call ourselves Sustany Capital because we invest in sustainable business models and technologies. From our perspective, we don't do any investing in tokens and we haven't owned a lot of crypto in quite some time now, but we work with entrepreneurs in the space and inside of our portfolio that are focused on building the digital infrastructures themselves. The way that we think about this is about forcing functions and not necessarily having to make an argument for why your product or service needs to generate some adoption or product market fit.

From that perspective, it’s taking a firm look at what we consider to be non-optional technology, the things that we feel should exist and are driving societal benefit or economic benefit at a fundamental level. From that perspective, a lot of things that do not fall into those categories are having a tough time with their burn rates, raising additional capital, and being able to prove the business model or the product and service that they've been launching.

We're very much in more of a wait-and-see pattern here, but we do a lot of this VR skunkworks programming division that we run out of the UCI research facility. We have two live apps on the DAP store right now that I'm happy to share with anybody if you want to talk about them afterward. Ultimately, it's a difficult environment out there and we think it's important to focus on things that have fundamental forcing functions and not something difficult to explain to a consumer.

I appreciate everyone's perspective. I got back from two weeks in Asia where there were a lot of different perspectives on what is going to carry us into the next bull market from an investment thesis perspective. Four themes kept coming up over and over again. I want to make this spicy and instead of being able to say, “Those are all interesting,” let's force rank them as a group. If there's some contrast, that's totally fine.

One of those themes was a decentralized social. We all know about the challenges with X. I have trouble even saying the word X. There are plenty of examples where the decentralization of social is interesting. Another topic is gaming. While some people would say we've been through the game DeFi heat, I can tell you from talking to all these big gaming companies that are still pivoting to Web3 for their fundamental thesis that there's a lot of game development happening, a lot of interesting AAA games, and all sorts of different games going on with blockchain components.

The third area that I hear a lot about is using loyalty and rewards to spearhead Web2 companies. We had Adidas on the show. That's a third major area. The last of course is DeFi. There are comments that DeFi is holding steady relative to the other markets. Let's play a game of force ranking these areas. If there's something I'm missing, let me know because maybe I'm interested in investing in that area too. Adam, you're used to being put on the spot. You've been on the show. How would you rank these four categories?

I'll start with last place first. We all remember the BitClout DeSo debacle. I'm going to go with distributed social.

You're not a fan of friend.tech.

I'm going to put that last. Loyalty and rewards are important components using crypto economics to incentivize behavior with microtransactions. That makes a lot of sense, but I don't see that as its own category. There are ways to do that in a Web2 space in a centralized manner as well. That should be an important feature. I'm going to put it a little lower because I don't think it's its own category. I'll go with DeFi as number two because I'm very biased towards gaming because we were the first investor in Mythical Games, which is one of the only companies in the Web3 space with their launch of NFL rivals that has bridged the gap of true Web3 NFT distributed sports gaming.

They've hit escape velocity. They're the number two app in the whole app store for sports. That's been pretty amazing to see all their users. I want to do gaming and DeFi as a tie. On the DeFi front, we're very interested in RWAs or Real World Assets. To incentivize a lot of bullish behaviors, people start putting actual assets on chain. There's a lot of plumbing and infrastructure that you need to figure out. One of the things we're flirting with at the studio level is essentially being almost like a verticalized oracle to be agnostic with various qualified custodians and put people in a position that when they're looking at a real-world asset that's tokenized on chain, they have verification in real-time. There's a tangible asset that's authenticated that's collateralizing in that token in real-time, so that on and off-chain issue. Those are my four.

You are to thank my girlfriend for my latest distraction, which is NFL rivals. Does anyone here a John Madden fan?

I’m a Madden fan.

NFL rivals kick Madden's butt. It's all in the blockchain and you don't know that you're playing a game with NFTs and a blockchain marketplace. You're just playing an awesome game. If you're looking for a new late-night addiction, I highly recommend NFL rivals and I can see where you're coming from there. Do we have any disagreement among our other illustrious panelists?

I was going to say something similar but Adam said it a lot better than I ever could. Rewarding is more of a feature that I see. You won't know that it’s using blockchain-based technology. You're in the Starbucks app and you're getting your loyalty. You don't know that they're using the blockchain now. I was going to put them last and then decentralized social as second to last. I do believe that something is going to come in and disrupt X, I still call it Twitter, and some of the other applications that we use. I don't think friend.tech where you're going out trying to get people to buy your token is necessarily what's going to be the thing that's going to make an impact. I do believe that something is going to come in that we don't have yet where you could own your followers and people who are taking the time, and move it across different applications.

Something's going to come in and disrupt X. Click To Tweet

You could do that with a newsletter right now. You could go on Substack and then you could go on Beehiiv. You could take off your subscribers and put them back on. Why can't you do that on Twitter? Why can't you do it on Instagram? I do see one time where you're going to be able to decentralize social, own your followers, and own everything that you put your time in. In terms of DeFi and gaming, gaming is probably the first for me, especially with interoperability. I believe that when you play a game, you're spending all this time. There shouldn't be an abundant amount of the top limited-edition characters or limited-edition weapons. I believe that there should only be a few, and then if you have one, you should be able to own it and then resell it. Most games will have to use infrastructure that will enable interoperability between different gaming assets.

I agree with my fellow panelists. In adding to what they've already shared about some of these categories, as an anecdote, something interesting we've seen in the gaming space has been in relation to working with very high-quality media assets. Think about some of the brands that I won't name because I can't talk about the business, but they're all household names. You guys have seen these movies and watched these shows on television. They're designing a set of games around all of these. To Elana's point about interoperability, the cool part is if you're playing a specific character and you have a certain asset that you purchase in one of these properties, you can transfer that to any of their upcoming games coming out in the future. These things become assets, not expenses, as you're playing these games.

They can be resold but the thing that stood out to me is that you can transfer them across the games or the other properties. As you have an affinity for a franchise, let’s say you're a big Call Of Duty player or something like that, it would be interesting to be able to carry over those assets that you spend a lot of time earning or spending money for in those other environments. On the DeFi front, that's number one for us. We are some of the earliest investors in Figure Provenance. Provenance is the new blockchain that Figure has developed.

Figure is founded by Mike Cagney. You guys probably all know Mike Cagney especially because we're in LA. He's the founder of SoFi. This is his next version of what the future of lending looks like and unlocking the ability to purchase real estate and access home equity lines of credit. If you need a validating function for that, they issued $5 billion worth of HELOCs on the platform in 2022 alone. Those are the kinds of things where if you're talking to somebody who doesn't necessarily believe that these things are real, it's very real.

I appreciate the perspective of everyone on the panel. Something that's been on my mind a lot lately, if you pay attention to the news and also the energy going on in Asia relative to the US, is whether the US market is falling behind in terms of Web3 with other countries. I'm sure you all look at companies that are not just based in the US and companies that are not just marketing to the US. I'm curious from a regulatory landscape perspective, are we falling behind?

The answer is absolutely in our eyes. It’s not so much on the securities regulation framework, but we look at a lot of the blockchain industry as a major solution for identity management and general human rights around data privacy. If you follow things like GDPR versus the CCPA here in the States, the differences are very clear in how Europe thinks about these types of regulatory environments as opposed to the US. A lot of the time, what we'll look for is how we can take one of these technologies from a data privacy standpoint and help implement them in a place where their regulation is advanced from a point of privacy. We see that happening a lot in Europe and also in Sub-Saharan Africa of all places.

From a demographic standpoint, it's very interesting. We use this analogy internally where when the first telecommunications were installed in Africa, they didn't port a copper cable line to give you a dial-up phone in these locations. They gave you a smartphone. In today’s environment, I'm sure some of the audiences heard these analogies before, but these people are getting leapfrogging in terms of technology when they're getting exposed to what has happened already technologically in other “developed” countries. From that perspective, it creates a unique opportunity for some of these other environments and geographies to, in some ways, surpass where a lot of the developed nations are in terms of technology. A lot of that has to do with regulation.

You guys have a new accelerator that Red Beard is suing. I'm sure you gave some consideration to this in terms of the criteria for choosing companies and where they're focused. What's your perspective on this?

We started an accelerator called Denarii Labs. It's a tokenomics-based accelerator. We're dealing with tokens. We're trying to help them find utility for their tokens. It's an interesting question. The US is going to fall behind if they don't get their regulations for crypto-based currency, for being able to invest in tokens, and especially for companies who are dropping tokens and the utility behind them. We are focused just on the companies because I believe regulation is going to come into the space. It's a matter of not if but when. Especially in the accelerator, we are still focused more on finding companies that have a token that has utility as opposed to just focusing on location sites that they're building in.

NFT | Web3 Capital Market
Web3 Capital Market: The US is going to fall behind if they don't get their regulations for crypto-based currency.

Are some of those companies based in the US and they have a token, but it's a utility token in your mind?

It's like Truth Labs if people know that NFT project. Goblintown is working on creating characters and using their IP. That's one for instance that's based in Delawares and it’s an LLC. That's one that's based here.

Adam, anything to add?

Regulatory uncertainty hinders our technology innovation. I do think though, on the flip side, there was a lot of crazy stuff that happened. A lot of crazy shit that happened over the last few years. I think we need some regulation to fix a lot of that. At the end of the day, I agree with the rest of the panelists here. There will come a time when there is more regulatory certainty. Up until that point, if other jurisdictions surpassed the US in providing that certainty, it's going to hinder progress locally.

Regulatory uncertainty definitely hinders core technology innovation. Click To Tweet

For us as a fund, we're structured with essentially offshore entities because we want to minimize all contexts with the United States. What I think has also happened, and that one of you touched on this a little bit is there are now strong builders in Web3 building in LA or Silicon Valley. They're petrified of launching a token, even though in theory, that token could have some utility for what they're trying to do and then they're trying to play the regular bottoms-up or top-down enterprise SaaS game.

The problem is all the buyer personas in Web3 have no willingness to pay. We're sitting there and we're saying, “Gosh, you converted Yuga Labs and it's $4,000 ACV.” I'm like, “Your unit economics are upside down, this makes absolutely no sense.” It's difficult right now for builders in the US and there's no question about it. There will be long-term effects unless we can get some regulatory certainty sooner rather than later.

As an investor with a long-term thesis, how do you navigate these challenges short term?

We keep investing. Even though the market is a bear market, we're still looking at companies. We're actively investing. You can't just hold off investing because it's a bear market. That's the best time to invest and to look at companies and projects. We're keeping busy. We're honing in on our thesis and continuing to look into diligence companies to keep busy.

Going down that path, valuations are way down for everything from small emerging projects to big players like Yuga, even Mutants and Bored Apes. How does that affect your perspective on the impact of ROI for these companies? Would you say that valuations and value are synonymous or different?

Do you think Yuga Labs should have had a $4 billion valuation?

Maybe not.

I think valuations are way higher than they ever should have been. If you look at some of the projects that we're raising versus their revenue projections where they were headed, a lot of it is going to go down the road of NFT specific. It was one-time revenue. They had no way to get ARR and additional revenue. They were basing a lot of their valuations on this one-time drop that they had with no actual utility behind it.

With those one-time revenue bursts came years of liabilities.

You're seeing a lot of projects merge and a lot of acquisitions in that space because people are trying to get out of it because they do not have much value for their investors or their holders.

That’s right. Adam alluded to it as well. It has flipped the business models on their heads. When the unit economics starts to look like what he described, it's very difficult to justify a valuation like that. The other interesting thing is when you have more of a free-floating valuation because of the liquidity of some of these types of assets, it's difficult. You're getting intense swings in these valuations or perceived valuations because you're dealing with a more liquid market. When you bring that liquidity to something that early stage, it's difficult to figure out whether or not it's sustainable long-term.

There are a ton of founders that I know that were able to get protocols off the ground and they're on Binance. They have a lot of liquidity for their token. They don't care about revenue at all. They care about supply-demand mechanics associated with their token, which is a weird concept to understand. It's very plausible that true enterprise value can decouple from the valuation you're getting, especially in a liquid market. That can be dangerous. We're also investing in Web2 SaaS companies through Struck Capital. I'm still amazed at the frothiness from a valuation perspective in Web3 right now.

At least 50% of projects are still coming to us with what they believe the pre-money or post-money valuation should be, whereas on Web2, that's not how it works. You go to market and get term sheets. That's your valuation. I still think it's necessary to have a bit of a mental shift because some people still haven't come down from the irrational exuberance that was 2021. Hopefully, we'll get there slowly but surely.

Speaking of exuberance, there's a lot of conversation and interest in the AI space. That's why we started a new show, Edge Of AI. It's been a fun conversation to get to know different folks. AI has been around for a while. There are a lot of different use cases and a lot of different categories of AI tech. I'm curious about what you all find the most interesting from an investment perspective. Given the rate of innovation, what is a defensible moat that's even achievable for an emerging company in the space when so much of the technology is easy to replicate now and scale but much faster than it was even a couple of years ago?

We're trying to still develop a thesis in terms of AI and blockchain and what we're interested in. The concept of an immutable ledger solving the black box problem for AI makes a lot of sense. We still haven't seen a company come to us that is putting that into a model that makes sense that we can invest in. On the Web2 side, non-crypto related, we look at the totality of the stack foundation model LLM at the bottom, middleware, and then the application layer, and then the ground zero would be the actual hardware or the GPUs themselves. We're not touching anything on the hardware side and we're not touching the foundation models. We're going to leave that to the multibillion-dollar companies because you could be in a situation where you put something out, and then your competitor puts out a new version and everything you spent time on is commoditized.

It's happening week by week.

We're a lot more interested in middleware or what we would call LLM enablers. For example, if you're an enterprise like Goldman Sachs and you have a lot of proprietary information, you realize that you could use a foundation model to create various synergies and efficiencies in your business. How are you going to get comfortable at the enterprise level and allow an LLM to potentially interact with your proprietary data? How are you going to essentially allow your employees on which way they are sharing data? What's permission and what's not? Companies that are enabling the enterprise to access the benefits of an LLM is a middleware solution that we'd be very interested in. The application layers are interesting but you have to be careful that it's not just an LLM wrapper. If you slap some fancy UI/UX on top of ChatGPT, it may look cool but that's commoditized. There's no sustainable business model.

John, do you have something to add?

I like the middleware piece, but to what I was talking about with respect to forcing functions, we look at it from an investment standpoint as an amazing opportunity to invest in a more secure infrastructure itself. We take a look at various data centers that are doing things completely off-grid, have advanced cooling solutions, and data privacy management things that can enable the environment that these types of models want to host their VPSs on and do all of their bandwidth compute through. From our perspective, it's more of an infrastructure exposure for us than it is the actual software.

Another regular debate on this topic is around open source versus closed platforms around AI and the idea being that we need open source for transparency for the future of humanity. It's also a powerful platform for building on. Are you guys more inclined towards open-source types of middleware projects or are you agnostic to that consideration?

From my perspective, when you think about Skynet and what AI could be, Sam Altman was quoted saying, “AI can harvest the infinite power of the universe,” or something to that extent. When you hear stuff like that, it's a little scary. You want it to be open source. You want there not to be a black box problem. We get very concerned about a lack of objectivity or bias inherent in the vector databases that are training foundation models. That's a scary thing. There could be bias that you're not even aware of and it could get to a point where it influences how everybody thinks. In that sense, I'm a fan of open source but I'm also a capitalist. I understand that there is a race to secure various proprietary data sets and use that to train the models that you outperform. It’s probably going to be a mix of both. We also need some regulatory clarity there.

Elena, how are you all looking at AI?

We recently made an investment called Brightvine. It's helping with mortgage-backed securities. It's helping with the reconciliation. It's choosing AI to look through the data, what a human would usually do, and then it's using blockchain-based technology to encrypt that data. From our perspective, we're looking at things that are a feature, but I wouldn't necessarily think that we're looking at AI as a whole and as one of our investment thesis. We have a syndicate end of fund. The fund is specific to Web3, crypto, pre-seed seed, and the syndicate could do any stage and any sector. We're still looking at a lot of AI companies right now, but I think there has to be another business model and touch point apart from building on top of ChatGPT and things like that.

NFT | Web3 Capital Market
Web3 Capital Market: There really has to be another business model and touchpoint apart from just building on top of ChatGPT.

We started a little late and we have another great talk coming up next, but I want to give the audience a chance to ask a question or two. If anyone has a burning question, feel free to raise your hand and then I'll repeat it back here. We had Lucas on the show. That episode was already released. Check it out. What do we think about Pudgy Penguins and what they're up to?

From my perspective, like with Mythical Games, it's a thesis that we believe could work in theory. The concept of bridging the gap between digital assets in the Metaverse and physical assets in real life, taking the utility that people experience in the real world, and bringing that to the virtual world makes a lot of sense. I know Mythical experimented a lot with Blanko space trading cards. You could collect the cards, then you could scan the NFT, and then play a cool Blanko’s end game. That then would be rare, and then in theory, supply-demand mechanics could make money on that by trading it.

I do think it makes a lot of sense. It's not necessarily a business we would invest in for a variety of reasons. I think the company that cracks bridging real-world tangible assets with assets on the Metaverse and explaining that things like digital scarcity are as important as real-world scarcity, there could be a lot of enterprise value there.

There's also a lot of entertainment value in their Instagram. They had a recent cartoon about someone who woke up from a power nap at 3:00 AM and thought wasn't sure what day it was. That was very relatable to me. They're doing a good job of consumerizing their brand at the very least. Your perspective on the popularity of the current fundraising environment and what's changed over the last few months there?

At least from a VC perspective, there's a little bit more pushback on the valuations that people throw out there. We still believe in blockchain as a whole and the actual technology. We're looking at Web3 companies that are targeting more Web2 companies. That's something that we're focusing on because we feel like a lot of people right now are struggling with their go-to-market strategy and how they're acquiring customers. They're using the technology of the blockchain, but not necessarily trying to get other Web3 projects on that we're seeing a ton more value.

Keith is asking, “Are royalties for creators coming back at some point?”

They might. That's why a lot of people were excited about NFTs in the first place. It depends on what it is. If it's a piece of art, obviously, you want it to go back to the artist. In the future, we're looking at a ticketing protocol. Let's say we're Taylor Swift and we drop the tickets. I don't think there they would take away royalties. At the end of the day, it's always going to be going back to Taylor Swift. Those types of marketplaces and ticketing protocols will require you to have whatever the royalty is involved. When we're talking about NFTs, they're trying to get more people to buy random Apes and other NFT projects. As a whole, when there's utility behind it, then people will be willing to pay the royalty and spend it.

When there's real utility behind an NFT, people will be willing to pay the royalty. Click To Tweet

There is a new platform launching. It’s our recent launch called Kreatorhood that came out on the show. They're building these features into their platform. Some of that is happening. On the flip side, it's challenging if you want to broaden your market and create interoperability, cross-chain, and cross-platform to uphold it. It’s virtually impossible with the complexity of that matter. This has been cool to get a fresh perspective on all these things that keep coming up in the news and diving deeper into it. Thank you all for your time. Where can folks go to learn more about you guys and your respective venture capital firms?

We're on Twitter at @StruckCrypto. You can go to our website as well. Our office is here in Santa Monica, right next to Lionsgate. We always want to jam with people, especially, those who are local. If you're trying to build, let us know.

I'm under @TradingFemale on Twitter. I'm also on LinkedIn under @ElanaDickman. RedBeard.ventures is our website. We also have AngelList syndicates. If you are looking at starting your startup journey in Angel investing, you could go on AngelList if you're an accredited investor and follow different syndicates and invest in different deal flows that you find interesting. Let me know.

LinkedIn is best for me. I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. My name is John Nance. You can look us up online at Sustany.vc. If anybody finds themselves in Orange County, I guess I'm the only non-LA panelist. Look me up if you're in Newport Beach.

Before we end this session, I'd like to thank our partners who made this episode for Edge of NFT possible. Shout out to CryptoMondasy, Startup Coil, LA Tech Happy Hour, and lastly, Expert Dojo. We've reached the outer limit of the Edge of NFT for today. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on the Starship, invite your friends. Recruit some cool strangers who will make this journey so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes. Rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNft.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms, @EdgeOfNft, and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for some more great Web3 content. Thank you.

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