'The Value of NFTs' - Dylan Field & Twobadour

i want to move on to our next talk i think i was thinking about how do i think about doing really good segways and transitions into how we change themes or topics but it turns out that everybody's just automatically making it easy for me by already setting up uh what the neckties should be about so um here just talked about what this actually means in a social context and how do we actually get people to care at scale and uh this kind of brings up for for our next talk so i want to really i'm super excited to welcome dylan field from figma and tubador from metapurse to really kind of share their opinions on some of the recent events that have happened in this space um we're going to be talking about at a high level what the value of nfts are um or is and uh and there's a lot of things going on here so we'll see whatever we can fit into this ecosystem and in the next 30 minutes and uh without further ado let's kick off this incredible talk so we have dylan and tubador thank you so much for uh for joining us um not only is it amazing to have you from both of your respective communities but it's also an honor to uh do our uh summit with this anonymous person um this is kind of the world that we uh are jumping into and that kind of excites me a lot more because it's just new to a bunch of us and just uh just great so welcome and what i want to do is i want to just ask each of you uh to introduce yourself and just going to give us some context into how you got into crypto and entities and i'll start maybe with dylan yeah well card take first of all thanks for having me and uh i'm really excited for this this conversation um i've gone to crypto uh i had been really interested in cryptography uh in middle school and high school um and i've done some like lectures online about uh hash functions and people have been reaching out to me like in the very early days of bitcoin about about crypto unfortunately i didn't i thought they were insane and so ignore their messages uh and then i joined the teal followership community and as a tl fellow people were really excited about crypto as well i also thought they were insane and so it took me a few revs to get to the point where you know i started to get very interested and very involved in the crypto community um and that's i think why i flipped all the harder when i finally did uh in my my day job i uh at my night job to be fair i'm ceo of co-founder of figma and uh i really care about uh how to make it so that everyone is able to be creative and how to make it so that more people are able to participate in the digital economy uh and i think that crypto and nfts and figma to me kind of all go under the same umbrella in terms of like how do you enable creativity and how do you enable sovereignty and abundance and um and so yeah i'm i'm very excited to discuss today thank you i was with dylan on a clubhouse chat the good time show with rt and sriram i should have learned my lesson then this guy is a tough fact to follow uh in under any circumstance so i should have gone first and uh can't think i'm not a pseudonym it's just that i look exactly like my avatar it's totally fair what you see is what you get yeah uh i mean uh i love telling the story of how i got into this space and uh only recently because it it says very different things to different people right if you're a left-brained person my story feels like a series of lost opportunities and finally finding your goal but for the right brain person he thinks oh wow okay i can skip the first three years of this guy's crypto life and jump straight into the nfd space because that's what it allows that that's practically my story i uh i was introduced to crypto by mr cohen who was uh an app developer and a serial entrepreneur already and uh so the first conversation we had he spoke about bitcoin he used a lot of words i understood all of those words individually i had no idea what he was talking about and we didn't speak for the next three years and that might have been on purpose in some sense but uh a few years later some somewhere in uh 2016 he had a couple of enterprises under his belt he'd uh you know done escrow services he uh he'd installed like 100 bitcoin atms all over the world and then he came back and said let's do android and so i jumped on that ship so i did d5 for a few years with uh vignesh but then during the pandemic it sort of pushed all of us inward into the metaverse and that's when i truly discovered i mean like gary we put it right sometimes nfts when you interact with them they feel like okay you found your life's purpose in some sense and that's that's not because of any um how to say it is actually quite profound it's because nfds are experienced at the end of it and you start to feel them and they're so vivid and they're so real and me i'm a wordsmith for a living i write for elena i communicate finally i was able to sort of start talking in color start communicating in color and that really blew my mind i was able to connect with people and this pseudonym that you see in front of you it's sort of uh dropped into that space without any baggage with just uh a whole bunch of uh metaphors to explore and that's that's when the metaphors journey also started so long story short for left-brained people uh a bunch of lost opportunities and finally finding you who right brain people take note if you want to jump into crypto start with the nfts skip the rest know that's an amazing intro and uh it may be so i had a bunch of questions prepared but i feel like i'm going to just throw a bunch of that out of the window because there's just going to be a lot more just things that will come from your answer so we'll just dig in and then go into it directly so what i'll do is i want to start off with actually uh with youtube adore so metacoven yourself made a bit of news um a couple weeks ago by uh buying and winning the people's 5000 days uh for the first 5000 days artwork and purchasing it for a little over 69 million dollars um i actually want one and one um the audience watching to you a little bit gonna hear about how you actually made that decision to sort of get into this you've talked about being a fan of people for uh not just from a few weeks ago but from lane west um just walk us through what made you interested in his work um how you decided to think about owning that as our piece and how that historic moment all together just came to be from from your side wow okay yeah i mean uh i guess i did see a few tweets on my timeline about that so a bit of views um you know uh uh medical in an iv uh metaphors was like a uh it's sort of a coalescence of both of our thesis about the nfd space that fellow uh has been collecting nfd's culturally and uh culturally significant nfts since uh early 2017. he started with decentraland uh he's now the largest estate owner single estate owner in central land he has a delta time triple one he has the first supper on async art which is the first work of programmable art he has an urban galaxy and and so on and so forth right he's been collecting for a while but then somewhere down the line uh around march april may when i started to sort of uh interact with the creators and the artists in the space our thesis about nft is being this this catalyst this touchstone for everything crypto started to converge and that's how metaverse was uh born so after a while we when we started to uh think about this thesis how do we power this uh you know this engine that we have of uh you know nfts how do we take it to the next level uh out of the blue and this is where serendipity works in uh in crypto right people reached out to medico and he said uh hey man i'm i'm doing this uh are you interested and the weirdest part is that people reached out because uh meadow coven was a losing bidder in his first nifty gateway auction he didn't get the piece that one went for i think sixty thousand dollars or something and uh mental government lost that bit and he just reached out as a whole and then it clicked so the shift here was two things one uh the thesis that uh the future of the nft space depends on creating experiences around these nfds the cambrian explosion that we're seeing right now is only the acquisition phase right people are uh gobbling up nfts trying to acquire them but the real explosion will occur when these nfts finally start to be experienced in a manner that they were meant to be and that's where we wanted to go with this so uh we decided to buy all 20 of people's single edition pieces uh that that's that's a whole other story but but we did that and then we created these massive monuments across the metaverse in decentralized crypto voxels we called it the b20 project it's it's still there so we bundled all of these 20 pieces we bundled these monuments we bundled an original soundscape by blau and we fractionalized the ownership into the b20 tokens so white people is an easier question to answer because we believe he's the artist of our generation we believe that he represents the only thing that is unhackable in this digital world and that is time and that's what this people 5000 represents right think about it every day 5000 plus days he sat down and done this one thing it just blows your mind and that sort of consistency almost spiritual level of consistency and creating for the sake of creating is plus the beauty of it is if you started uh the 5000 piece at the top left the first picture is absolute crap uh i mean people level absolute crap and then you graduate all the way you see the journey of an artist how he's grown as an artist and how he was able to do these things at the most crucial times in his life right i remember a story where he he did one in 15 minutes because his wife was in labor he didn't miss even that day so this this uh this collage or this con this thing represents a person's life 13 years of commitment to this one thing and that's why we believe he's the artist of the generation and that's why we also believe uh in retrospect that we got it for this deal that is an absolutely wonderful perspective on how you're thinking about this and and i absolutely agree this is a snapshot of uh the 13 years of the progress of who people is now and i'm sure you'll be extremely happy to hear that and and uh and i feel like now dylan is the fact that you're the act that demands to follow so um it wasn't just uh mata kovan and yourself that made some news uh dylan you also made a little bit with the the recent cell of cryptopunk 7804 um i want to actually have you just talk about what crypto punks are um just talk about some of the trade scarcity and describe 7804 yeah um so cryptopunks were the first ethereum crypto art project and they were created in 2017 as well uh which is around the same time probably that medicoven uh tuvador were we're checking out central land because i remember checking it out at the same time that's another topic i'm very curious talked with metaverse later if we had the time but the um uh they're created by these two artists matt hall and john watkinson and there are only ten thousand crypto pumps and they were actually available for anyone to claim at the start and unfortunately i did not claim the men but uh uh yeah and playing them for free in the early days which i thought was a really cool and pure way to distribute them to the community and then from there market formed and um different people were training them based on rarity uh of the ten thousand encrypted punks there were only 88 zombie punks there were 24 apes and there were nine aliens and there was exactly one alien uh punk that was smoking a pipe and its name is 7804 and i found 7804 just be completely magnetic and uh i was obsessed with it honestly and i over the holidays um of 2017 2018 um i i started to think seriously i was on a trip with my then girlfriend now wife elena who's also amazing and uh earlier than ft space and now working privacy in the crypto space and um uh and we started talking about it and i said i think i'm gonna this might be the craziest thing i've ever done but i'm gonna put down fifteen thousand dollars as a bid for 7804 so i think this could be the digital mona lisa and sorry this is 2018 correct yeah this is january early january of 2018 now and um and i bought a few already but this is the one that i coveted and care about the most and had most of a relationship with and just i thought a very iconic image and um and so the big guy accepted uh and yeah i i i told some people when i first came back uh from this trip and their reaction was that i was crazy uh you know i think that you know it's amazing how in three years how much much has changed about the way that we interpret understand the internet and digital ownership and art um but uh at that time you know people just totally didn't get it and so i was a little quiet for a few years um so i was like oh maybe i you know this is not the right time i'll talk to us another time and then um over the last six months i started getting more loud i put it as my avatar i started to really talk about it more with people and um i i over the entire period of time when oath was kind of a secret identity as well as when it was a public identity i really felt a relationship with the art piece in a way that was um i i never expected and i think going through the process of selling it which i i am i was very mixed about but i thought ultimately that if this is going to be the digital mona lisa it has to change hands it has to actually be recognized with value by somebody else um and uh of course i was conflicted because i loved it so much but i am i think through the process of selling it i've actually believe even more that all the conversations and questions about like are in ft's art uh can you have a relationship with digital objects those are just now so clear to me because i think the answers are sounding yes like not all nfts are art but art can be nfts and you can have a relationship with that art when it's digital and that makes me so bullish on the future of the nft industry because i think that there's it's not only art but i also think that when you start thinking about what does it mean to have a relationship with digital space and items there's just so much that that could unfold there uh and as we think about the metaverse whether it's centrelind whether it's gather town centralized decentralized um or a medium between the two worlds i think that there's going to be um relationships that form there's going to be objects that are created uh we're going to go from sort of this this if you look at the way the economy develops from currency to goods to services we're going to see the exact same thing happen in the metaverse and that's fasting to me and the crypto implications for that are so vast and just so wild that i'm really excited to see you the next ten year springs no it's absolutely amazing i think uh um you said this uh i believe in a tweet or another uh was it the clubhouse where uh you said owning seven or four was a curse as as well and it's it's just the exact same thing you talked about there's an emotional relationship that uh that you have with this uh this piece and you've had it for a few years that's part of your identity and for it to be successful and really propagate the message if this actually is a new way to think about art um you have to part ways and uh right i think and you'll have always part ways with the mona lisa uh that'll be part of my identity as well now but i'm i've signed up for that and that's okay with me because i i uh it's not the money that motivates me you know money is nice and don't get me wrong but um it's a very privileged thing to say that but uh by the same time i i care so much more about can we make this a movement and can we make this i mean where creators uh i i see nfts as a way for creators to have room to explore their art uh you know going back to what tubador said you know time is the only thing that's unhackable i think it's a beautiful statement uh and mata corbin said that i i thought it's a beautiful beautiful statement and i think that uh you know time is also so scarce and you know money can equal time um if you have income that will give you time to work on whatever you care about most and to the degree that nfts can create that space for people create that abundance for people i think the world can really change as a result absolutely agree and i guess you already brought that up and i was going to ask youtube adore um what's going to dig a bit into how you think about a metaperson just at the metaverse overall could you give us an overview of what metapurse is what led to its creation as as an entity or i would say as an org and and also you kind of just talked about the the b20 project but i would love to kind of have our audience know a bit more detail about what that was how it was set up and uh and now what were uh what you expected for people to kind of do and interact with yeah beautiful um v20 project was uh um you know it was done at a massive scale and uh one of the reasons we did it was because it was like trying to put together the first computer or the first car right you don't know how all the parts fit so it necessarily has to be big to see if that thesis worked so which is why we needed something as spectacular as the 2020 uh one of ones of people in massive massive uh estates in decentralized crypto voxels some new space and so on and we had what was called the metapalooza which turned out to be the largest ever virtual event in the crypto space uh i mean the thing is beyond a certain point uh metaphors can't take credit for any of it because i mean if i say uh 500 600 people turn up fine i'll take some credit uh you know nifty turn of phrase great design and all of that stuff when hundred to three thousand people turn up for an event he said okay somebody else took charge of this nobody told me uh about it so that that's that's kind of what happened it means that people were ready for uh a certain uh shift in the way they looked at art and engaged with it and that was at the heart of the b20 uh movement in a sense and andrew steinwald described it best for us it was the first public art project uh uh in a sense it was like the virtual moma with the only difference that you can now own a piece of the museum as well so when you walk into the museum of modern art and you have this visceral connection with one of those art pieces all we did was to tokenize that connection say i i own the entire experience right from the step that i walk into to this space to the sound that i hear to the experience that i have in the art and that's that's simply what the b20 token represents right it's very simple it's not a utility token it's not a social token there's no protocol behind it there's no roadmap it just means that it gives you a piece of the ownership of that and whether or not you have b20s you can walk into those museums today and experience those works a lot the paradigm we wanted to shift like i was uh talking about was the way the world engages with art is is very unimaginative you either buy it and flip it for a higher price or you buy it and lock it away somewhere which is what happens to conventional pieces the third part is is what we tried with v20 which is to open up access to the entire world that used to be how art worked in ancient temples in india or egypt or in rome ancient civilizations that's how art was experienced but then a layer of finance sort of settled on it it stopped being sustainable and b20 changed that it's now sustainable and sort of profitable for all of the stakeholders as well and the moment we realized that was when we worked with 30 people right uh to build b20 we worked with the whale street the team at wayne state but did the uh you know the underlying tech work they did the bundling and the fractionalizing now credit to uh nftx and niftex we have been doing it for quite a while now uh this is not an original idea this is not a new idea we just did it at a different scale that's all uh wayne state did that we have metacast which is a team of uh excellent communicators like andrew steinwald matthew from scent brook and so on uh we had grow your base which helped us with the tokenomics of the whole thing so about 30 people in all right and all of them chose to take b-20s instead of usdc or eth that's when we realized oh okay this they actually believe in this idea it's not just us and so uh it was very heartening to see also a community sort of form uh quite naturally and spontaneously around b2b uh that there is no official discord for metapurse we never created a b20 discord but now three discords exist there's one uh very graciously created by the whale community there's one um you know by by fans elsewhere and there's one as part of wales street so all of this is the uh b20 story and and this sort of uh confidence that this this uh this enabled in us is what you know spurred us towards bringing home the people 5000 as well if anybody ought to have that these it should be someone from the crypto space preferably not justin smith one of the things i've been reflecting on a lot recently is how the question of what is art has always propelled art forward and obviously that's getting pulled into question even more with nfts and and uh when people see whether it's people seeing people and going okay that's not what i traditionally think of his art or is people saying is the format and that's changed um i i also think that there's inherent link in crypto and i think you you highlighted it beautifully of art as community and that being a part of the artwork and uh i think you're it was fascinating just to hear you say about how this parallels ancient civilizations as well where art was also community and uh and part of the community in a different way and so i think there's so much to explore there uh whether it's dows [Music] being able to mint things or vote on how art should change over time uh whether it's sort of communities coming together to experience art i mean there's so much there uh and i'm really eager to see how it evolves too yeah i was just saying that's right go ahead no no just uh emphatically agreeing with dylan that's um no it's actually very much true because what i was going to ask was like this definitely changes some definition of what art is because we've not to update the definition uh for the digital world i mean it's kind of stayed constant uh for for the last few decades ever since we've gone computers and internet to the uh to be widespread and mainstream but also until we kind of had a notion of scarcity whether that's verifiability or decentralization or anything else um we've never been able to actually get the digital version of the same art to explode or actually be equally valuable or considered valuable um so it's actually curious to hear both of your thoughts on um obviously nfts is not just art and it's a much bigger realm um you hint that about being doused and communities and having much more anywhere from tokenization or fractionalization of these things but how do you think about programmability a programmability in in the digital world like we have smart contracts that can create dynamic pieces we have a lot of ways to think about what creativity is what excites you in sort of that realm where you want to start no no i bet you okay um i think in the broader nft realm i again i think like this framework of thinking about the digital economy is moving from currency to goods to services is something i'm thinking about a lot right now and uh i i think that uh if you think about goods um having there's just so much that could be tokenized and uh and of course there's a question of like what is the advantage that being tokenized gives so the advantage that tokenizing a piece of art gives to the creator of the art is that they can monetize the art in a different way but they can also bring their community together and as if people have the financial incentives to grow the community the artists will then take off even more um i think that another thing that i get excited about is sort of how do you create productive assets as an fts so for example music rights would be an example there now i'm not saying a key comment legally or uh anything about like security not security but i think that that aside if you think about a music right being tokenized combined with fractionalization um you can start to get to actual dividend streams uh and i think that plus some of the things we're seeing with services like unit swap where um which might eventually come actually create dividends um crypto is then looking like not a speculative you know gambling house but rather it looks like an economy and i think like we are in that transition right now uh to that final state as it happens then i think that the boom and the bus cycles become a little bit less severe and crypto starts to grow in a more predictable way and it gets a lot more interesting very fast um and i think that the the bigger trend that the world is going through right now even outside of crypto is that we're going from a physical world to digital world and covet has accelerated this by like a decade uh and our entire economy is becoming digital and we're seeing this in figma all the time um because all of our customers are are these traditional shops that have gone from i create a physical product to like i have to actually figure out what that means in digital world and um i think as as we get more digital it makes sense to have currency and to have an economy that's also digital and nfts will be a critical part of that that was incredibly layered actually i saw like three very distinct layers all based on uh the the the aspect of programmability uh correct me if i'm wrong one layer that you described was the experience layer right so what the nft space lacks right now and what a lot of people are trying to build is this consumption stream how do i consume an nfd uh instead of just buying it and acquiring it so that's where the first layer of you know programmability comes in that's that's one of the things you solve by uh say creating immersive experiences for instance or 360 degree art or you know monuments like b20 which you go into the second part is to uh of programmability is to be able to transfer or share an experience without having to transfer ownership of an asset just a fancy way of saying uh i should be able to rent or lease my nfd in an effective manner without having to you know transfer ownership of it so that's that's sort of uh already uh many experiments around that and the obvious use case is land of course but uh there have been uh other uses too uh which brings us to the third layer of what you spoke about for these two things to happen you need interoperability across uh you know different uh um spheres of experience different metaverses and that's when the actual metaverse sort of happens so you create a consumption stream first and then you create this ownership layer without having to transfer ownership just the experience and then interoperability that connects all of these things together and then the metaverse is fully born i think what's even more interesting is uh um the way i kind of understood this is these are not explicit distinctions between one or the other there all these three are also self-consistent with each of the other layers because you can have this programmability also apply on the sharing on the on the the collaboration of it to generate uh this piece and also on like what it means to make this productive so all these things are also intercompatible and and that's what's exciting because now the surface area was possible is is exponentially bigger um so that to me is i think that the most interesting piece because uh there's over 500 people working on cool things with nfcs and they're going to be looking at applying programming to to create art and uh and that excites me um so i also want to kind of just have um maybe we want to wrap this up i wish we could go longer because there's so many things that we can dig into and we'll maybe just this is an action item for us to do where we can have a much longer conversation uh in the future but um how do you kind of think about essentially what we need to do to make more artists and um creative folks developers get into this uh this ecosystem uh more any advice dylan you've obviously inspired a whole generation of designers uh and and with figma uh tubador and meadowcoven you've brought this on from the cryptofirst side and inspired that that created the whole um i would say the industry on how big uh this uh this sector can be how do you kind of think about getting more people in what should they be thinking about if they're looking to get into the space and overall like what can they do if they want to be more involved yeah uh i think there's a few different parts of that so first of all i think like there's an opportunity to create technology that is not as complex as crypto typically is uh there's no reason why it has to be as complex as it is today no reason why when you send a transaction it has to be so scary uh you know um i think that there's huge ux improvements we can make things this ecosystem that'll help bring people that are not as not as technical into the ecosystem uh i i also think that the the ultimate thing we can do to make it that more people can experience this is scalability uh when you have it costs fifty dollars to mint in nft or more uh you're gonna limit this to the people that can do that and so i'm excited to see the ethereum community invest so much in layer and an e2 as well as other layer twos and um yeah i'm really hopeful for for where we'll end up there nice um um i guess one of the powerful tools in trying to bring people inside and what dylan just described uh is uh more creating a welcome atmosphere once people sort of start looking this way whereas most of the attention we get right now is around the price tag of nfts that gets sold typically nothing wrong with that obviously 69 million is a big number it does attract eyeballs but the other thing we thought we could do is to try and tell effective stories right so one of the things we've done right after uh the christie's auction while we were trying to process all of it is to announce this grant of five hundred thousand dollars hundred thousand for uh one storyteller can be a writer a videographer a filmmaker whatever your medium is split over 12 months titans there are amazing stories in the metaverse like karthik just described 500 people working on uh incredibly diverse things to build in the metagross so those stories need to be told and i think those can be powerful magnets for uh you know technical people who will want to become part of those stories to build and also to uh right-brained idiots like me who who just look at right blinking colors and are attracted and come to this space and we need a bit of both right so i think telling these stories uh effectively and uh with a conscience uh will will make a lot of difference in trying to bring people as well that's uh that's well put i i think uh just for everybody listening on this and we'll actually uh we'll make sure we uh advertise this on on the event discord too but matter first dot fund um just announced uh the fellowship where they're going to be giving a hundred thousand dollars to five uh folks and uh and talk in demonstrating their stories and how they can actually make this space a lot bigger and more inspiring so um that's a really good i think that's a really good way to end this um what we'll do is uh i mean i the best thing about like we've been doing events for years that the best thing that kind of gets me excited every time is that i know who's participating but i don't know what's going to come out of it and i won't know until everybody else at that same time so 48 hours from now is when we see exactly what comes out and it's going to blow our minds three years ago when we started eighth global uh we saw the birth of cryptokitties and uh and if i kind of think about uh sort of summarizing what's happened in the past uh a developer hackathon from 2017 um and now we're doing an event entirely on an industry that came out of a project from that event is to me a really good way to talk about and think about what it means uh when new industries get popped up through the benefit of technology so um i am super excited to see what comes out of it we'll be sure to tell both of you what also came out of this event and uh hopefully we'll get you a lot more involved in the future events so with that dylan tubador thank you so much for giving us your time today and uh thank you carter thank you thanks can't wait to see this event amazing thanks