'Community and Solidarity in NFT: MintFund' - Carlos Gomes, Michail Stangl, Samantha Ayson, Sirsu

all right hope you all got a quick break um there's still a few hundred of you watching these summits and i really want to thank all of you for sticking with this for the last few hours there's a lot of activity happening i kind of spent the last few minutes catching up with what's happening on our discord the hackathon's officially begun a lot of people are thinking about ideas talking to each other talking about teams and uh two more talks to go for the summit and uh and then we're gonna spend the next 48 hours just looking at all the creative projects that come out of this so i'm super excited for this next talk um we've been talking for the last few uh talks and panels on what's happening from the artist side and the creative side where people who are uh known in this industry through other uh sort of uh means and have distribution have definitely are seeing the value of entities and benefiting it off of what's happening in their ecosystem but we definitely wanted to contrast that with what's happening at the grassroots of our ecosystem whether that's dallas how nft culture is changing how how should we think about ownership in this case and investing in this ecosystem all these ideas we haven't really touched too much on so the next panel is super interesting because we're going to talk about all these things and how we actually think about community in this space from a really fundamental level i'm super excited to welcome carlos samantha cersei and mikhail to uh to discuss community and solidarity and nfts and they're going to be talking about mid fund i'll ask all of them to turn on their cameras and we'll have mikael from zora moderate this discussion and uh let's get started started without any further ado so please welcome everybody here thank you so much cardik good evening everyone uh welcome to this very very exciting panel about the mint fund uh it's going to be funny because i'm as well as much as i'm hosting also part of mint fund so you not going to watch a traditional panel but rather a informed conversation and reflection between friends and colleagues who have been spending the last couple of months doing something very very exciting um first round of introductions maybe um i think i'm going to introduce myself probably afterwards so let's go around and maybe you know my steam colleagues tell us a little bit who you are what your connection was to nft and technology and art pre-nft and pre-mint fund and maybe what has happened for you let's say in the last six months that most certainly all felt like at least a decade um samantha since you sneezed yourself into the spotlight tell us a little bit about yourself it was a slight cough actually um yeah so i'm samantha i during the day i work for a foundation i'm the creative content lead there i work a lot with the artists that we onboard into the nft space before i found my way into crypto i was working for contemporary art museums in los angeles and so really come from like a space of um understanding artists and their practice and how i ended up in crypto i'd say over the past year i've really started to notice that a lot of artists not just from like the visual sense but musicians poets developers coders creatives of all kinds were really experimenting with nfts and yeah there's just so much happening in the space i would never imagine that i'd be working in crypto at some point in time and then your last question was something that's felt like it's happened for a long time but was it i was actually wondering but it doesn't matter i have so many more questions i'll find um okay because because actually because you are some also with me you have a background in let's say non-digital art or institution oh i got a really really you know like one of those words institutionalized art um so i would like to talk to you a little bit later about that in particular and all the similarities and differences but maybe let's um have carlos who is dialing in from shanghai and it's four in the morning so please all of you at home a warm applause for that much commitment to get up at four in the morning to face all of you carlos um thanks thanks michael uh yeah it's for him uh in in in beijing uh close to shanghai uh but yeah so my name is carlos um um i'm currently the founder of forefront which is a social token aggregator content targeted market uh as well as a contributor for uh city club and uh obviously uh mint fund uh but yeah i think i i really got interest i've been you know in the space for a while now but um really around social tokens uh but i got really into nfc and started to think about it um more deeply when i was uh on andrew stinwood uh you know podcast and we were talking about all this you know social tokens and stuff and then he asked me like which nfc do you own and i couldn't really come up with one because i didn't uh and from that moment i was you know i started to go down the rabbit hole and uh but yeah until uh today uh we are here right so uh like you said it's been a decade or two i don't know did you do before crypto um so i i did all my undergrads that is here in china and um 2015 uh was the year i started you know you know learning about crypto and 16 working for a crypto uh exchange um but before that it was just your normal uh you know job right like you know for a sas company and it's always been a software developer but yeah that's pretty much it okay interesting um amir now you are not only in technologies you're also a crypto artist but tell us a little bit about all of that sure um my name is amir cersue on twitter i'm very loud i'm kind of a creative anarchist two ways i think mainly because of the fact that i'm very gung-ho about inclusion and sustainability and making sure that everyone feels like they have a safe place and so i'm not afraid to call it the [ __ ] and i think that's part and parcel as to why i've flocked to this space and tried to embrace it holistically because of the fact we have a very unique opportunity to shape the ground that we're walking on um and intention and good action is important to that um and so for me this space was sort of always kind of like pitched as the the new frontier or the way in which we can uh you know build true equity and self-sovereignty and so i'm here to call that bluff to really see if it if it's about if it's really about that um i've been used to blockchain since like 2011. um i had i'm a part of the old stories of people who had some coins at one point and then lost it and can't recover it no big deal there um but i think after 2017 i've really got a chance to really think about what blockchain could do and how to build around it or how to build with it um i had done a lot of bounties through like bitcoin um i had done some stuff through consensus in 2019 um and then after kind of like uh being a part of that hackathon circuit i just kind of let it go um and then last year i was just for some reason dead set on owning a crypto kitty and didn't necessarily know why i wanted to do that um and it wasn't until my friend layton shout out to late effects on twitter uh told me that he was selling instagram filters on the blockchain that everything sort of clicked and after he showed me a wearable profile i really sort of understood that this this actually could this could work um and so ever since i've been kind of just like i was at first experimenting with my artistry and seeing what i could do in the space as an artist it was one of the only things that really got me thinking about pursuing art again um i'm by and large uh a designer and worked in corporate in and like startups forever but this was something i could really kind of like take hold and shape in the way that i wanted and then i realized that you know even though we have a decentralized environment and like we have the affordance to build these equitable and inclusive spaces it still requires human work and i realized that there wasn't a lot of that being done so i just was like okay well i want to still do art but i think this is also very important and so i want to like focus on kind of filling in these gaps and building infrastructure and so that's why i'm here and that's why we're out here from infund so um uh thank you and i wanna touch on kind of immediately on two of the words that you introduced because they really really relate to either community on maybe the opposite of that so maybe also a few words of introduction to me my name is mikhail i work at zora as the curator i and my background is actually in a lot of grassroots um culture i'm come from electronic music from underground electronic music where i've been working with a lot of small electronic music communities all over the world and the focus is in particular in community because um electronic music is in particular defined by communal structures which means structures that build mutual space um hold that space together support each other out of principle and not because there's some sort of financial gain out of it and it's it's it's incredibly powerful and i through of course covet that made electronic music completely impossible you know looking at new spaces nft of course became a very interesting alternative proposition and not for art but rather to renegotiate power relationships that are always present in art and and in the way artists um relate with the systems that enable them to do the art and that also informs the possibilities of artists to kind of build communities you know in an analog world this is a lot of manual labor you know you build out a space you maintain that space in the digital world this is a little bit different so i mean you said two things first of all you mentioned the word anarchism and you also mentioned the word sovereignty now a lot of people equate um in particular blockchain with a the idea of sovereignty you know where everybody can kind of build up their own island you know be their own island kind of define the rules of engagement with uh him or herself which seems to me a little bit opposing the idea of actually communal structures well sure you can build community but um my understanding of community is that with a community comes also a certain rule of conduct uh rules of conduct that are sometimes informed by principles in terms that you do things even if you kind of maybe not agree with them but you do them because they're part of that you know contract that you have within that community so because you're the longest uh within crypto art and blockchain in this group tell us a little bit you know your perception of how community has been built out in those largely digital spheres and what you felt lacking word yeah so i think the how community are sort of formed is you know it's always a commonality right that's found first people flock to a thing because they like a specific thing for a certain set of reasons and i think interestingly because we're dealing with art for instance artists like that it's it's very ubiquitous it's just one of those things that is art is culture and so much is you know culture is just like this intangible tangible thing that we all contribute to in some form um and so art is like the pinnacle of that in many ways and so when you have like work that's being created and and talked about those that are around when that moment is sort of happening become a part of that initial community whether they are diametrically opposed to the work that's being done or they completely agree with it or they fall somewhere in between um and so what ends up happening is that there's a there's a conversation um that's formed around the general consensus of how people think about that work um whether it like is like infused within them whether they deal with it in a daily basis or you know or again they don't like it um and so that's kind of like how you have like these these like communities that are sort of like forming and these are all fine because everybody can have their own particular pockets and kind of like speak to the things that they like or that they don't like the the problems that end up happening though is when you introduce commerce and to these types of communities right and certain communities get more of the commerce um and what we end up happening what ends up happening and a lot of chains or a lot of spaces that create these this um this commercial layer is that we tend to see mono cultural consumption right where you know a certain set of parameters are floating up at the top of these sort of communities and largely ignoring other ones and so if these communities don't have the right type of components and sometimes it's rooted in a lot of different tangible intangibles like race for example it's a quasi-tangible thing because we can see physical differences within each other but honestly it's a social construct that means no [ __ ] thing at all like it just it shouldn't even exist but it does um and so because we have a social construct like that that could be a modifier in which commerce then says does it fit this criteria if not we're not really going to pay that that much attention until it becomes so much of a thing that now we have to buy into it um and so and so that's the thing that i noticed is that there's a uh uh there's monoculture when it comes to what's being purchased and what be what's being consumed more often what's being talked about um and then what's being highlighted and when you have that kind of uh division from a monetary perspective then that's when we have a lot of issues again if you're a community it's fine if every community doesn't necessarily like mesh or talk to each other that's okay everybody has their own pockets um but money becomes a signifier of value for many people and it's a very binary thing for them um and so when you start assigning monetary value to one particular groups of communities versus another then we start to see a structure of power imbalance um when we start to see um you know the imbalance of you know what gets propped up and what gets talked about we have these we have this concept of what happens first within crypto and a lot of people are chasing that next first and there are a lot of communities that have done these things prior to but because they don't have the the the the resources uh which could be monetary because people aren't putting value in their work or in their community that's largely ignored and then other people are first which is in many ways cultural erasure um and so that's the stuff that i noticed um is that uh the way in which value is derived within communities from a monetary perspective is creating a large imbalance on on how these communities can operate but i mean ultimately what you're also saying is that even though blockchain very often promises to renegotiate a lot of those power imbalances that are quite often structurally ingrained into the way the way society operates just because you know we're claiming to build new contracts that a lot of that is basically being carried over one by one in terms of um even like all the way to the biases because what you say you know when you talk about the monoculture that means that the attention of a largely space populated by white patrons of the art white uh artists benefits also exactly that socio-demographic markup whereas that's exactly the issue that when one had promised to overcome you know like the traditional art world that does not let in marginalized communities but nonetheless that is being at large reproduced that ultimately the lay of the land at the moment and to that point too like i think in terms of the culture that's being built right now the opportunity that we have at the mint fund to really be conscious of this is something that we're all really thinking about as we build up the mint fund and for people that are tuning in and maybe don't have like the background on how that started i think that'd be like really great for amir and carlos to tell how that happened else do you want to go yeah go ahead go for it carlos yeah i think i think amir you know really goes really deep into this stuff and he's really you know involved in so many ways which is amazing to see him on his mission and it was really the way everything started for mint fund was just um you know i i forgot his i think was lex i'm not sure um an artist on twitter you know like these days everything started on twitter and he was like can someone you know send me you know each ten dollars and then um for me to meant a piece on zora um and if i make sale you know everybody gets a piece of it right so the moment i saw it i was like yeah why not like right so i sort of like reached out to amir we had we previously had talked before uh and we sort of put the money together and he ended up selling selling it so fast and then out of nowhere amir is like carlos like you know where do you want me to send you you the you know your piece right so i was like what do you mean he was like yeah so the the money we sent right so it sort of started that way and it was like what if we can put that amount you know to help other artists or the creators that want that want to mint and you know what we just give them zora invite as well right and from that point it's sort of spin out with you know jacob also helping there and we're like you know we're turning this into a dow and you know let's you know make sure that we get you know as much um people you know to get started with minting and all of that right and this has been like a month or so uh but the journey you know it it it's so crazy how it started and the way we are implementing everything now and you know we're making sure that um not only we help artists mean their first piece but we're also providing them like a mentorship and sort of like really like the the whole process right so like you know how how can we make because like just the process i really feel like some sort of fulfillment when someone from midfield meant a piece it's just such such an empowering um uh you know step forward for the new internet right uh and and um but yeah that's really that's how it started and i america go really deep into that because he definitely was involved into helping so many other artists getting started but uh but yeah that's pretty much how he went and now we have you know you can see how the community is evolving how everybody's helping each other uh yeah happy to touch on on commute a little bit but i mean it would be great to just you know type in a little bit there and and yeah yeah now you you basically did it yeah um shout out to my friend leighton again latefx on twitter uh yeah he was like i wanna ment a song on zora and you know like what carla said put up some bread and so we did i ended up getting like 600 bucks and i'm just like i dm carlos with the quick fix like bro like you just got a hundred dollars he's like are you kidding me i'm like yeah man um and yeah i mean again like i i what's interesting and what's not what's not lost on me is uh how twitter has sort of become like this uh this tool to galvanize community around in around crypto um culture and the fact that we were able to get such an expedient and like big response from a tweet that was very kind of just like we wanted to just pay it forward and we didn't necessarily really anticipate the fact that it would become an actual like entity that can be responsible for starting up many artists careers um but in many ways i kind of just feel like there were a lot of other working pieces that we all were part of that that kind of culminated in this right like for me as i got more into the space i was hosting clubhouse rooms becoming a crypto creator in like since last december where i was doing like a whole week long thing of just taking people all the way through the entire process from knowing about cryptocurrency getting a digital wallet buying eth for the first time all the way to the mint process knowing all the different marketplaces that you could mint on and then how to manage money and everything like that like i was trying to field lawyers cpas to talk about money management because i think there's a lot of other stuff too in this space that a lot of people don't really harp or talk about they'll say oh it's you know we want to like make sure all artists are earning but then what do you do with the money that you earn from sales right like you could just reinvest that back into yourself you could reinvest that back into artists but if you're not careful especially because we're dealing with uh very regulated uh or not very but like somewhat regulated space within the united states if you are not careful you will be screwed um and so it's very important too to also have um when we're talking about sort of creative freedom and self-sovereignty there also harping on the financial freedom and financial sovereignty being able to really truly understand how to manage the the funds that you have because this is not like a bank that is doing it for you you are responsible for for a lot of the stuff so it's a huge mental shift um and that we're that we're doing here and i think because we've all arrived at this point in time to where we've had that mental shift about how we operate in this space it kind of works it speaks well to kind of like the chemistry that we have at mid front and like what we're trying to do even though it's like kind of a snowball that's chasing us at this point or at least that's how i feel like we were rolling it and then now it became too big and then i'm i'm ahead of it like oh [ __ ] like this thing is gonna take me that's how it goes with you know the best things when they grow faster then you can chase them because that informs also that makes you proactive you know but also a lot of that was also kind of you know i remember i mean you and me had a conversation months ago uh also about this idea of digital communities of care you know where we were discussing that and this is also one of the things that i was observing that a lot of young artists were finally you know getting to a point where they could make money with art that they thought would be a hobby probably always maybe if they're lucky enough they might you know get a commission from a brand but they never thought that they would be able to to to make a living with it and then i saw a lot of big artists who obviously already had a platform you know now just were able to to make an even better living you know and that started the thought process also where if we are really claiming to build out a new artistic community what are then the support structures that will foster an understanding of solidarity and understanding of meaning and that also holds people accountable for contributing out of principle and not just because you know nepotism and when you look at you know krypton especially about communities that are very much twitter based quite often support means retweeting but that's not really support that is the lowest you know this is the technological function that if you if it wouldn't be built into the interface that you use you probably would not do it because it's very convenient and whereas you know in in in real life when and then samantha you probably will be able to confirm that that if you're part of an artist who's part of a group you know part of a collective part of an atelier community means access to infrastructure access to support emotional support even not just support in terms of help you get something going but it's like here's a shoulder to cry on and resources right that is i mean that is the beauty of of having having that and how do we build that out in a digital sphere yeah and and to like go off of that i think that's not to pat ourselves on the back but i i really do see that as what's happening at the mint fund right now in terms of like the the additional layers of support that we're giving to artists um carlos organized a workshop with osinatchi where they were able to give advice to artists about what goes into minting a work we had cooper turley who is just another very vocal voice in the space um lead an introductory workshop about the lay of the land and i think that artists that are coming into the crypto space there is like such a steep learning curve for them that by having this community available to artists that are just learning about minting is so crucial right now like from my own experience to see the artists really getting to know each other and wanting to collaborate with each other and help each other out i think that's invaluable and even after they meant something with us for the first time to see like those relationships really cement in the space is what i'm looking forward to seeing how we continue this i mean one of the things that's also incredibly important and pretty much everyone who's watching maybe you know when they try to understand nfts as well there's very little canonical language there's a lot of of half knowledge and i felt when i was looking into i mean now there's like a little bit more socio-political discourse around it on quality discourse but until very recently half of the things you would read online felt either as a pitch or an investment scam or you know some some half truth and to also to be able to build a community where artists who are not plugged in or maybe not quite tech savvy will have a community that already verifies the knowledge you know that gives them also the support because ultimately one thing that we also see is that there's also very critical conversations around nfts because there's a lot of misunderstandings about what it is what it stands for and most people what they see is just a bunch of crypto rich white people prepping up rich white artists you know and in combination then with some questions about ecological footprint and support and so on a lot of artists who venture into that face conversations that might be not prepared for and that might sometimes be unfair for them to have individually so building also an information databases educational database that equips them with the right understanding and language is also one of um of the one of the jobs not only of mint fund actually of anyone who's out there doing this but we decided to make that our folk our main focus absolutely now knowledge is key um and the best people who have the best knowledge are those who are always seeking and always asking questions and always figuring out how to distill what they're picking up what they're learning what they're able to synthesize from others into a way in which they can give to someone else um and that takes a lot of intentional thought work too to to trough through all the noise to really kind of look and and find what's out there that really actually is helpful um you know when it comes to a lot of the discussions about saying oh nfts are like you know money grabs or you know it's a ponzi scheme or uh you know it's contributing so much to the environment and it's like well let's take a look and and break down sort of like what the what these actually mean what these what what claims you're talking about and then you know sometimes too even have the experiment and saying okay if we even consider these that are not true to be true for example what else is mirroring in the real world these types of examples that you might already be actively participating in that you may or may not know of right and i think what ends up happening is because stuff is new and this is no different right anytime technology is new there's going to be a lot of resistance against it right because we all go through the cycle of something is new it starts to catch on a lot of people are catching on to it all the way down to those who are late and then by the time those folks who were deniers or didn't agree with what was new become late adopters a new thing's already happening so they're always in like this ketchup mode of trying to figure out where they're going to fit because they're no they don't want to accept the fact that they can find footing in a new thing and this is not just about technology this is about culture too culture moves the exact same way there's going to be a bunch of people art moves the exact same way we think about our history over the past like especially in the 20th century it was almost every decade somebody was saying oh that's data art [ __ ] that like we're going to do something else oh that's that's expressionism we don't care about that this is impressionism now so there's always this um this like this new wave of of of folks kind of shouldering and moving on um and so we have to i think for us it's uh it's very important that we take heed with what's happening and make sure that we are a a space that we can distill the best and um information as possible um and also still be kind of like that shield and say hey like you know what i noticed on twitter all last like uh a lot of this month um was especially related to the ecological um conversation was that there were a lot of people who weren't aware of what's actually happening in the space that is uh uh citing old research um from a a group that didn't actually have the most accurate and information at the time to then attack artists right and then after that point was after that was happening when we were when they were talking about the financial issue situation they were also still attacking these artists and so what what ended up becoming a place where you know we're talking about open and active participation became a a toxic environment for a lot of people and that that leads to real physical harm mental harm emotional harm that a lot of people aren't really taking into account in that when you are a part of something new it requires you to be very strong because you have to have the mental fortitude to take on what's like to take on what's happening um to to to say that you're going to be a part of this experiment to see if something is possible for us in this future and what does that look like and being an active builder in that future requires that we got to take a little bit of dings but hopefully you know what we're building at mit fund is a safe space so that you know we can we can dismantle a lot of those fears we can talk about the stuff that's happening in the space in a real honest way and say look like we don't know all the answers but that's why we're building a brain trust of a community so that we can all arrive at a point together um that solves a lot of these issues we we we have the mental space that we're saying we're gonna fight um to build uh you know an equitable environment for all artists to participate in um and so once we have that mental framing then the rest of it kind of like fills in itself because everyone's gonna say that's a mission that we can get behind because we truly believe that this space can can give us that affordance um and so it's just doing the everyday work um and i i love the fact that we're you know we wake up and we uh we do something about it and it's [ __ ] awesome i mean that also two very important points that you all um brought up one is dismantling you know and that means that dismantling means to dismantle structures within society that are also mirrored in the technological and artistic space that we move in and those structures are often rooted in white supremacy sexism um ableism um racism but also eurocentrism and also a and an extension of eurocentrism also you know focus on north america and when we speak about you know building equity we cannot have that position rooted in these immediate realities which very often are very privileged realities because a lot of people and this is like what upsets me when i look at you know crypto conversations and people come along with the statements like oh this is you know this is this is universally accessible there are no entry boundaries but they are there there are so many structures on systemic boundaries until somebody can even enter this and those need to be also addressed if you take the word equity into your mouth then you need to go all the way and maintain an equitable proposition for everyone and understand where are the boundaries and how can you overcome that and that is also one of the reasons why we actually not just have inspirational conversations but actually taking money into our hands to at least compensate for some of that because for many people you i don't know the demographic layout of the people watching but many artists that we engage with a hundred dollars gas fee or 150 gas is a month's salary and you cannot say yo for this incredibly exciting thing that potentially might work out for you but there are some caveats it's an experiment that we're all into but invest that much money that is technically an immoral proposition to make um and you do have as a community especially a community that's well-off to make sure that you extend support that is more than words but also money which is why mint fund actually also has a wallet with eve that we use to support artists and why we also knowingly chose to focus outside of north america and europe even though we're open to everyone but they're also priorities where yeah i mean you you said it right there right like like people think um equal and equity are two different things and i think people say oh i want things to be equal but equality we kind of technically already have right like there's for the most part especially if you're in your opinion in america almost a near equal access to stuff but equity means that there are certain communities that need a little bit more pyt right or like or tlc rather like tender loving care rather right that's the right word not the other one thinking of two different michael jack jackson songs anyway um you know but with that right that that says well okay they might need a different allocation of resources that everyone can sort of get an equal opportunity to get um and when we're practicing real equity then that says it's almost like the um there was a a a graphic that was released a while ago and it had like equity of saying uh you know there's a a gate and then there's like uh uh certain people with different heights and then they put them with different crates and they were like oh that's like equality and it's like great but like equity is removing the [ __ ] gate in the first place like why is that even there you know and so we we're we need to be in the business of saying if we're talking about equity we're saying like we're removing every potential barrier that we could that we that we can be ever present of um the most immediate is obviously funding um and then secondarily on top of that is then knowledge right um and then after that then everything else kind of like falls into play where it's like once we imbue you with the way in which you can kind of engage in the space we give you knowledge to know how to engage in this space in a meaningful way now it's about okay how can we help accentuate your what it is that you're trying to do as a creative you know what your story is what your what your what your mantras are what you stand for what you're about um and so that you can present yourself in the best way possible when you're not operating in this space because ultimately we could do a lot of the stuff that we're doing in mint fund to help people mint but i feel like my goal is um is that people who go through med fund i want to get their work sold yeah that's that's the one right there yeah and it's like real equity i found the edited version that is also about ableism just really quickly yeah yeah so it's like it's weird it's like yeah build a ramp and it's like that's great but why do you need a gate there in the first place um yeah so but yeah i mean i i think uh we're equity is hard to do um and and i i always say that there's like human work and like we need to like but it's like it's hard to do but i think the more you do it every day it's like a muscle right like practicing like anti-racism like to be anti-racist for example to be anti-sexist right all these types of things uh it's real active work and you have to practice it right exactly because we're we're all trained we've picked up certain things just depending on where we are and how we've how we've lived and how we've grown up right and so to to dismantle means it's like an it's a it's an active engagement and active practice in removing you know like like systems and tools of harm and so some of the systems of harm are the the ways in which we see each other um and by actively removing those things and practicing better habits of of of love and understanding we get to a place to where we can we can we can create true equity because now we're impacting folks from sort of like the metaphysical space to not just what we're able to do with real tangible resources yeah i think one of the things that i've been really um because i'm from a small island with like with like 50 000 you know population you know my island specifically have like 3 000 people so for me access is one of the things that i look for the most so i'm really into this you know what happens when you you sort of like level up the playing field a little bit for everybody right so and one of the missions that you know it's you know now it's been fun but and the idea here is like when when we have conversations amir i always tell you like you know how can we multiply this effect right so we want to be able to mentor artists that are able to mentor their own you know create their own mint fund essentially right so that's the whole idea here right and once you have you give this these people that want to express that you know whatever they do uh into this new you know this new thing you know that is so exciting called nfts uh but then you know once they define their nation then they sort of you know you know sort of on board other artists or other you know people that want to express as well so you multiply that effect you give them the resources you give them the the financial you know incentive to do especially on ethereum now is expensive but the ideas here is like how can we get this information that like you said the knowledge out there and reach as much people that we want and the focus essentially is going to go to to you know minority groups and people are really like have never heard of crypto and how empowering this thing can be right so for me access that's the mission man i want to get like you know people from you know every every single corner in like you know in africa somewhere like some talented artists or some tell it you know you know writer some just you know apply for mint fund we're gonna give you everything that you need to you know to express yourself and and and then bring your your homies your your buddies and everybody else right uh but yeah that that's the idea when i think about it right instance we're coming to an end we have i think two minutes left there's one very important thing that i wanted to say because developers are watching us and what i find at the moment the most exciting thing about this is that we're as we're entering a completely new generation of the internet where the tools to build things are so much more democratically accessible you of all people who are coding who are designing the systems are the ones who can decide if you design the systems with ideas like solidarity not like not just wood laser thing to tick at the checkout box but as the rules of conduct codified put into code as the base function of what you are to design and that is the real power because when facebook instagram all the platforms were designed the only function the base function they had was the bottom line of whoever designed it in mind and this is what we've been basically fighting against or uh not being able to participate because those systems were predestined in their outcome to privilege a selected few and now we're the process we can actually make principled decisions about building out technological solutions that are principled that are solidaric that are intersectional and the biggest power in that have the people who understand how to write code and who write code um amir samantha what are your last words for the group uh i want to say that this was the first week that artists from the mint funds were able to mint their very first works um so yeah we're going to be building out a gallery on the mint fund website to share all their works once they're all ready but yeah everybody i guess follow us on twitter and keep up with us there because there's a lot more incredible work to come absolutely check us out at thementfund on twitter um yeah this was this was great um mikhail you said it you hit the nail on the head right um those with the ability to create um have a responsibility uh to think about how to create a more inclusive and equitable world um and if you don't really know what that looks like then you know get with folks who do um we're building an amazing community at mint fund and a lot of the very nice social economic kind of like ideologies about equity and inclusion can be found there uh so please check us out at mint dot af or the mint dot fund uh join our discord hit us up on twitter and of course you have me as a resource on twitter as well at cersuhabe um i'm talking about equity a lot uh it's literally what uh what uh but it's like wheaties um so we're about this life let's do it com join us and help us to really build a better world because we don't have that many chances left in our lifetime to do so and maybe we're going to be the ones who succeed um thank you for watching thank you carlos samantha amir uh thank you youth global for having us and being able you know to to have this conversation and good good hacking i would say what do you say at the hackathon like you guys participated in this you good hacking got speed code speed i don't know okay this is bad i'm sorry bail him out everyone samantha carlos thanks so much for for uh watching the conversation and telling us more about how you're changing this thing with uh mint fun and mikhail thank you for moderating it was an excellent conversation and we're super excited to see um how this develops and grows as a community thank you so much peace out and