Hello, hi everyone, welcome to the Open Metaverse, and welcome to week four of the University of Nicosia's free MOOC on NFTs and the metaverse with Punk 6529 and me. The topic of today's NFT art is going to be presented as always by 6529, but before he takes the stage, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss a little bit about the course logistics. So, okay, here we are, just to make sure that everyone understands what type of material we produce from this course and where they can find this material. So, each week we will be producing two main pieces of material. The first one will be a PDF file that will contain the main presentation of the week. So, we have 12 weeks, there are going to be 12 PDFs in total by the end of this course. And second, one or more than one video for each of the live sessions. So, there will be at least one live session each week, like today, but especially going forward, there will also be more than one live sessions as 6529 and I'm going to start interviewing guests, hosting panels, etc. So, we will be producing one video for each of these sessions and these videos are going to be part of the course material. Now, where can you access this material? There are four different places. First of all, in the course website, you can find both the PDFs and videos there, our GitHub account. You can find both the PDF and the videos there. The videos will also be available on YouTube, some of you are watching the video on YouTube now on live streaming, but they are also available as recordings afterward. And finally, both the PDFs and the videos can also be seen as NFTs in your Ethereum wallet or in OpenSea or other NFT marketplaces. Now, for this last part, let me clarify that for the first week, the material has already been air-dropped to everyone's wallet. All of you who have who had minted the course access token should have received the week one material in your wallet already. We wanted to air-drop this material to everyone because we think this has a historic sentimental and maybe in the future who knows some provenance value because it's the first material of the first on-chain course ever. But from week two onward, you will have to proactively go and access the material. So we will not be air-dropping the material as NFTs to everyone's wallets. We will be announcing this on Twitter and on Discord every time something is ready for you. But we also expect you to go and visit the course website, go and visit our YouTube channel and see what news is available there. We are also working to develop a claim website where you will be able to go and claim all the NFTs you want from the course. All the PDFs, and all the videos will be minted as NFTs. You will be able to claim them for free. You just pay the gas fees. But it will be up to you because we don't want to be flooding your wallet with material that you may not be interested in. Finally, I wanted to let you know that we're working on the process of reducing the cycle the time it takes for us to produce all this material. But it's not always easy. So there are too many things happening in parallel. The transcription of the videos always takes a while. NFT minting is an experimental process for us. We are minting very large video files and we have had to test the limits of platforms like Arweave or OpenSea in the process of doing that. So thank you for your patience with that. So that's all regarding access to the course material. The second thing I'd like to say has to do with the weekly breakdown. As you know, the course is 12 weeks long. Each week we cover one main topic. So last week it was PFPs. This week is crypto art. But especially from now on, as more and more guests will be joining us, please note that the educational coverage of each week's material would not be necessarily confined to that week only. So for example, we may be covering art in today's live session. But some of the discussions and the interviews with guests related to NFT art will be recorded and broadcast or will be live-streamed in the coming weeks. We will be using Discord, Twitter, and the course website for all the relevant announcements. And in the website, in the end, you will be able to find all the material organized per week, regardless of when it was live streamed or recorded. Finally, the third thing that I'd like to inform you is that, as you know, we have been very busy building our Metacampus. So soon we will be hosting our first live session there instead of sector zero where you are today. As you are facing the main OM screen where you see me now, I invite you to hit jump to just hit space on the keyboard. And while you're up in the air, turn to your right. You will see there is a vast open space with one open amphitheater in the middle. This is where the Metacampus is currently being built. I cannot say much today, but stay tuned for announcements in the coming days. If you want, after the end of today's session, you can walk towards the portal to the Metacampus. This is the door that you see on the right of the park. You can hit E on your keyboard when you reach it and you will enter the space. There's not much to see there apart from the open amphitheater, but we're going to be releasing new buildings and new functionalities in that space in the coming weeks. But do that after live session, because for now, we want you to stay here because we have none other than Punk 6529 to walk us through the exciting space of NFT art. So, 6529, the floor is yours. Thank you, as always, George and great to be here as always. Let me get the presentation up. Okay, today's session is going to be a little bit different and a little bit shorter than some of the prior ones. And the reason is, crypto art and one-of-one art is a vast topic area. One-of-one art is really just another way of saying art that happens to be an NFT. And the art of any type. So, it's not an easy area to box in, get a hold of, put in a handful of bullet points. And partially because of that, we have a lot of guests coming for this topic area. And so, similarly to what happened last week with PFPs, but I think specifically for this week's session more so, probably the most of any of the week sessions we're going to have. I think this is, by far, the broadest, least-defined session. What I'd like to do today, which I think will be particularly useful for those who are less experienced in this space, it provide some basic background, some basic frameworks, some context terminology that will help you in the sessions that we have with the artists, the collectors, and some of the other curators in this space. And then, as we do these sessions, I want to see what we absorb from these sessions and work it back into the presentation. So, I want to say this for now. This specific PDF for this specific week is going to come out later. It's not going to come out in a couple of days. I'd like to do the sessions. And I'd like, I'd like to do the sessions because we have just incredible people coming for the sessions. On the 28th, we have people. People are arguably the most famous NFT artist in the world. I think I'm going to learn a lot from the session. I think there will be interesting conclusions from that session. And I want to take those conclusions and feed them back into the document. So, it felt strange to me to write up all the document and finalize the document before we speak to some of the top people in the world on this exact topic. So, there will be a delay on this PDF. We'll do it after we've completed the sessions. And I think that's fine. So, what we're going to do today, a little bit of background, a little bit of background was coming. I think it's going to be one of our shorter sessions, which is okay. The last few sessions have run very low. And even though the quote unquote live session, the official session of the week is going to be short, the total number of sessions and the total hours for this topic is going to be very high. I think as we get into this week, next week, the week afterward, we also have a lot of guests for next week. We also have a lot of guests for the week afterwards. What I would like to suggest is the following. Of course, try and attend as many of the sessions as you can, both live or on-demand afterwards. But if you miss one, it's okay. There's going to be a lot of material. There are going to be a lot of sessions. You might not get the total number of hours of sessions of guest lectures. It's going to be significantly higher than a typical course. So, it's okay if you don't get told them. Of course, we'd love to have all of you see all of them. That's why we're doing them. But I think it's also okay if you don't see every single one. The other thing that's going to happen, and this is just a matter of logistics. Not all the sessions for week four, session four, will happen in the next five calendar days. That's simply because we have a lot of people in the next few weeks. So, we're going to stretch them out a bit over the course of the next few weeks, just so that the whole team can actually be there in time. And it's partially my availability, but also partially the availability of everyone that is helping with the course. So, we have a lot of things to cover. We're going to spread them out of it. I don't think it makes a big difference. We are talking about a maximum a couple of weeks up or down before we complete the sessions. And then we'll circle back. We'll circle back with the final presentation. That includes everything that we've learned and that I have also learned. So, as I said, a little bit different, but I think okay. Okay, this week, we said it's week four, it's art NFTs. We said we were going to discuss frameworks. So, we'll come back with the conclusions. This is the general disclaimer. These are the guests we have and I'll talk about the artists a little bit more at the end. But we have a great set of artists and also a great set of collectors who will discuss crypto art and NFT art both from the perspective of the artists and from the perspective of the folks who are collecting these artists. So, let's start with the general framework. And to me, this is a very useful slide. Again, for some of you, this is going to be a completely obvious slide. But for those who are newer to the space, I think this is a helpful way to think about NFTs that have an art association with them. And why do I say NFTs that have an art association with them? Metaverse land is also sometimes shown as a representative, represented as an NFT. Gaming objects are also sometimes represented as an NFT. Maybe someday our houses will also be represented as an NFT. But I think everyone agrees that none of these are art. So, the part of the NFT landscape that people look through the lens of art tends to be these three areas and let's go through them. The first is PFPs, which recovered last week and on the whole most people do not consider them art. But not 100%, right? So, like, you know, we discussed this when we were discussing the crypto punks last week. Are the crypto punks collectibles like baseball cards? Or are they a form of digital art? Are they both? Does it matter? I think most people consider the crypto punks to include both aspects. They are both, yes, a collectible, but they're also something like Andy Warhol's soup cans that they're a form of conceptual art. And, you know, the same questions existed back then about some of Andy Warhol's work. Do you really art? Or is it just some type of marketing thing? Well, what about the other PFP collections? Well, I think the reality is it depends. You know, the stereotypical case of someone went and found someone on Fiverr to make some cartoons and minted as a PFP collection. I think most people would think of that as collectible. But there are people who have made PFP collections and they are individually hand-drawn PFPs by an artist who drew them in their own style. Well, it's not obvious to me that those are not art. So I think where most people come out is that PFPs are primarily collectibles, sometimes art, and that might mean that some collections are 100% collectibles in some art, or it might mean that some collections have aspects of both. I think that's where we are with PFPs. Then next week, we'll discuss generative art, which is a form of digital art. It's a form of procedural art. But because it has been so successful in the NFT space, it is generally thought of separately as its own thing. And in particular, the type of generative art that is thought of as its own thing are long-form generative collections. And we'll talk about this more next week, what these are, but where they are one of ones of X. So there are a thousand Fidenzas. That's the X. But each Findenza is unique. That's the one of one. So this is viewed as a distinct category. The boundaries of this category of generative art are actually quite clear. Long form generative art in particular, is very clear if it's that and if it's not something else. So this tends to be thought of as its own category. And then people discuss the category of one of one art, which it's funny because it's not exactly a thing. It's not exactly one of one art is not a category. It's like a generic container. It's what in the non NFT world people would just call art. If you think about let's say the leading site for high end curated one of one art, which is super rare, I think today's fair to say that's still the case. Today in 2022, there's no obvious style that exists for this art. Some of it is glitchy animated dark art. Some of it is traditional oil like painting. Some of it is photography of various types. There's no specific definition. It's not a category of art. It's not like impressionism. It just means it's almost a way to think about it. It's not one of the other two categories. It's not a PFP collection. Those are obvious. You'll know a PFP of collection when you see it. It's not a long form generative art collection. That's also fairly obvious. You know them when you see them. It could include short form generative art, like people who have made a generative art piece they created procedurally and they published the individual piece. It could include photography. It could include animation. It could include video. It could include literally anything. It's just art. And even I think the one of one is a misnomer. You know the one of one in this context came in as a distinction between the PFPs because the PFPs are also a one of one of X type format. Your crypto punk is a one of one of 10,000. So what people meant casually here was that it's not that. It's not part of a broader collection. It's an individual piece. Now it doesn't mean necessarily that the addition size needs to be one. You could have a photograph and instead of minting it as a literal one of one, you could mint it as a addition of 10. And I still think it falls into this category what people call one or one art even though it's actually an addition. I wouldn't break out additions as their own category. So and then I think an area that people get somehow confused or mixed thing about is what people call crypto art. Crypto art is not a horizontal definition like one of one art. It's a vertical definition. It is a definition of something like an art movement. It's a definition of a distinctive style. It overlaps with the early days of one of one art. In the early days of NFT based one of one art, most of that was crypto art. Today, that's not the case. Today, you can find art of different types that is linked to those are one of one NFT. And so I think the right way to think about it is crypto art tends to be one of one art, but not all one of one art is by definition crypto art. We'll talk a little bit more about this in the next section. But you can play around the margins of these four circles, but I think they're broadly helpful. They're broadly correct. It's broadly a useful way to think about art oriented NFTs. And again, I separate those from gaming oriented, metaverse oriented, utility oriented NFTs. Those are different things. So in these three buckets or four buckets, it's a useful framework for thinking about NFTs. It's interesting. I'm going to bring a topical point into this discussion. It's not in the slides, but I was treating about it this morning. A lot of people are saying that it's very good what happened with Reddit recently. Reddit, or the Reddit community historically was I think quite anti NFT. And then Reddit launched polygon based NFTs. But labeled them digital collectibles. They actually are NFTs. But they didn't use the term NFT. They use something friendlier. And it's been a success. And so it's very interesting to me to think about what that might mean. Because again, you have a similar overlap, you have overlapping circles, not every digital collectibles in NFT. Not every NFT is a digital collectible. Nobody is going to think that a refric and a doll will look at one of it as a digital collectible. It's a possible work. Not everyone is going to think that a unique access token is digital collectible. It's a utility NFT token. And so I have mixed feelings, not exactly my word, interesting feelings about this. I'm glad that now millions of people on Reddit are now using NFTs. And if what needed to be done is to call them digital collectibles. That's fine. It's a form of consumerization. But I also would say that it is everything about the token ultimately being hidden in the marketing and branding may or may not be right. Because a digital collectible could also be stored in database. It's fine. It doesn't require being on a blockchain. And I think we're not going to end up with one non NFT definition of NFTs. Because it's very common, this idea, we'll just call them digital collectibles. Well, sure, some NFTs are digital collectibles. Mostly a subset of one of these circles. But a lot of NFTs are not digital collectibles and they would, you know, certainly a lot of the artists in the second two buckets, I think would be quite unhappy or insulted if you said, oh, oh, look at this digital collectible you've made, right? But it has been helpful in these last few weeks of Reddit of getting an option. So we'll see how it plays out. So these definitions matter and don't matter. They're helpful. They're not complete. I think they help, but they're never perfect. And yet they are used and there's a bit of social construction happening on what they mean and where you use them. Now, most one of what PFTs didn't come from, you know, didn't come from the heavens brand new. There's a tradition of, there is an art tradition that from which they spray, that's the joy. Most one of one NFTs are not, in fact, they have a physical sculpture carved in marble visible in your courtyard. That's not likely to be a good one of one NFT, right? I mean, you can't represent it natively. It doesn't really have anything to do with a blockchain doesn't have any use computers. A useful way to think about, you know, where they came from in the history of art is the joy. We have had digital art before. We had cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. In fact, we have had digital art even before we had widespread use of personal computing. And Warhol famously made some digital art in the early 1980s when most people did not have a PC. And like with other categories, there is a fuzzy and emergent and evolving definition of digital art is. If you see what computer is going to say, that it says something like the first bullet point, but it incorporates digital technology in the creative process or in the presentation. Okay. I think in 1960, that would be a pretty hard boundary. And it would be useful for defining the piece of art because digital tools were not very widespread. And so you could say, again, if it involved digital art, a digital tool of some type, that's digital art. Well, today, there's digital tools everywhere. And even works of art that I don't think you would think of as digital art might have passed through digital tool. This is an example that I mentioned here. You could take a photograph, take it on film, because you want that certain grain or aesthetic or what have you, you could scan it, make some changes in photoshopping, print a piece of paper or piece of aluminum, what have you, you have a physical installation, here's the photo. It would not be obviously the case that someone say, Oh, this is digital art, but it did involve a digital tool along the way. It's hard to get away from digital tools in 2022, right? Like where we spend a lot of time using computers. And so the more advanced thinking, advanced, in quotes, more contemporary thinking, let's say on what digital art is that the digital art, the piece of art interrogates the digital medium in some way, right? There's some real meaningful interaction with the medium, not just somewhere you use the digital tool in the creation. But like everything else, everything else of this type, it's a fuzzy boundary. I think you cannot definitively classify every piece of art in the world into digital art and not digital art. Also, another thing to think about is this comes up a lot in one of these. Digital art, pre the internet, pre widespread PC usage, usually came with a physical installation, right? Because how do you actually, how do you actually display it? And so yes, there was the part that was digital that might be a piece of computer code or graphics. But then there would be a machine or a broader installation that embedded it. And of course, that still happens today. There are all types of interesting digital art installations that have a physical representation. And that's normal. And some of those will end up on NFT as we'll talk about one in the next slide. But where NFTs have found a very strong fit with digital art is an art that's 100% digital. That is not a digital, some digital code, plus a physical installation. But things that are 100% digital, where they can move around the internet at internet speed, without not at UPS or DHL or FedEx speed. And the NFT solves the problem of ownership and provenance and duplication. And that has been a very powerful combination, right? Because when you had a 100% digital pre NFT piece of art, it's very hard to handle provenance and ownership and deduplication. If there's a physical installation, you can, right? If someone says, I've made them digital art. And now this art plays on this specific screen and this specific sculpture. And now you have the sculpture in your house. It's very clear that the sculpture is in your house. It's not in someone else's house. It can't just be copied. But if you were making as X copy was interesting illustrations on Tumblr, and they're 100% digital, well, there's no particularly obvious way to protect them. There's not particularly an obvious way to say these belong to 6529 or these belong to George. And so NFTs by solving this issue for digital art, 100% digital art, are going to, are going to, I think, be extremely supportive of digital art. I think they're going to lead to an explosion of digital art. And this, to me, is super interesting, right? I think this is what's happening anyway. And I just don't see how that stops because it allows all the benefits of being digitally native without the pre NFT downsides of it. Now, having said that, and for everything I just said, there's always a counter example slightly to show it. This is a piece of art by Raffa Ganadol, who's an incredible artist. We bought this in one of the NFT 6529 funds. And this is a very complex hybrid piece. And I'm going to describe this not because it's a wonderful piece, it is a wonderful piece. But I'm describing it in order to think about the types of things that can be done. So this is the Gaudy House. Raffa made an incredible light show on the Gaudy House, where the light show itself holds information from environmental sensors in the Gaudy House in Barcelona to UNESCO site. And then in a physical installation, that's a Rockefeller Center, or as the screen and that screen shows what is happening from the environmental sensors and the light show. And further, the code and the models are linked to an NFT and this was all sold as an NFT. And so this is hybrid, this is obviously digital art, but in its digital art that was minted and collected as an NFT, but with a huge amount of hybridization and touchpoints to the digital world. As we get further into the evolution of NFTs, we'll see more of this. I still think most NFTs will be 100% digital for the reasons that you're older, but I think you will also see innovators like Raffic do innovative things like this piece. And I can't tell you what it's going to be. That's why we need people like Raffic now. I would have never thought of this before I saw it once I saw it as it was incredible. And so even when we're in the NFT world in the area of one of one art, you still might have a hybrid aspect, both in the creation here, in the creation of the environmental sensors are hybrid. And in the presentation where it can be presented, yes 100% digitally, but also into the physical world. Again, this is for background knowledge, most of you know this. Unlike PFPs, and most generative art collections that tend to primarily be bought and sold on generalized platforms, like open-sear literature, one of one art has historically invented and collected on specialized platforms for one of one art at the very high end super rare is the most famous today. But the auction houses, the traditional auction houses are making their own platforms. Foundation is quite popular, the one in the right. And there's been a variety of them, but there is a somehow specialized ecosystem that supports this. So this was used, I think hopefully useful, background for this. Let's talk a little bit about crypto art, which is that is a subset of one of one art. And here I am going to absolutely liberally borrow from Artnome, who I think has been the best writer on this topic. And later in the semester, even though Artnome is not an official guest of week four, I think is week six, perhaps officially, we're going to talk to Artnom and really dig into this topic because Artnome has just been early and excellent to this topic. And his view is that the first crypto art started with the Rare Pepes. Like the punks, the Rare Pepes probably sit on a bridge between collectibles and art. But I like the crypto punks that was a unified project. The rare peppers were more like a platform. So there were many, many artists who made Rare Pepes and all in different styles, but with the Pepe being the unifying team. And I think he says, he says, but he thinks it's the beginning of crypto art. We'll discuss this with him. And is it okay with crypto art? What's some type of framework to think about? This is Artnom's definition. I think we're going to hear other definitions as well. But I think it's a good starting point. And he has eight parameters. I think some of them are definitely true. I think some of them are a little bit aspirational. But let's go through them. So these first five, I would say, are more about the medium itself, but it's digitally native. It is a geographic agnostic that is democratic and permissionless. And I think this is quite a big difference from the traditional fine art scene. The traditional fine art scene is highly permissioned. You do have to pass through, for better or for worse, quite strict tradition. And I think the people who are the creators as in all pre-internet businesses think they're playing a very important role in curation, it's how they preserve quality, supply, and things like that. But the NFTs aren't like that, right? Anyone can mint. And then some combination of the audience, the market, the artist will retrospectively decide if they value it or not. Decentralization, we've discussed this at length. I do think blockchains are a more decentralized way to create transport art in the off-chain system. And anonymity, pseudo-nimity, which of course has existed in the traditional art world as well. Nobody really knows who Banksy is to take a recent example, but it is more common in this space as we discussed. And so these are, let's say, platform-y type concepts. And then when we get into the substance of the world, the substance of the world, it does tend to be highly memetic. And I think this comes from its roots on the internet. And it's funny, it's like evolution. It's not exactly that you have to make memetic work to make a crypto art. It's that if something is memetic, it spreads more, it becomes more well-known, it gains more attention, it gains more social construction and say, oh, this is crypto art. And there is, it's like evolution. It's not like the way evolution works isn't that animals and plants wake up one day and say, oh, I need to evolve into a better version of myself. The way evolution works is that there's a variety of different things being tested in the environment. And some evolutionary changes are more fit for the environment and they spread further. I think this is what happens with the memetic nature of crypto art, because it is internet native. And one way to, probably the main way to get attention in an audience is this, which is somehow different than the main way to get attention. So the audience is, I don't know, the Gaussian picture, a great artist, and holds a cocktail party. And then through a variety of steps, someday you're in a museum and the art history books. And that's, of course, another way. And there's nothing wrong with that way. But it's not an internet native approach. So I think that does tend to be a memetic aspect, please. Self-referential, here he means within the crypto industry, which makes sense. I mean, these are the early works of a community that lives on blockchains, that thinks blockchains are important, that things, crypto assets are important. So it's logical that a lot of the early works touch upon that and don't touch upon, I don't know, the episode in reinforced. I say that for a reason, I'll come back to it. It's often collected by the crypto patrons, which again, makes sense to people who are most likely in the beginning to buy a token to find an NFT potentially valuable or people who previously found a Bitcoin or Ether valuable. Prioritist is more a general platform point that the intermediaries do tend to take lower take rates than in traditional art, for better or for worse. And then dankness, which is a hard concept. I'll go with Artnome's definition as a potency of expression and creativity is a good way to say it. I was thinking when I was looking at the slide, if I could think of a better way to say it, then I don't think I can't think of a better way to say it. So is this a reasonable starting point? I think Art Nome wrote this in 2018, so we're going to come back and speak to him in 2022. And a lot of these things have now changed in the broader one-to-one space. The Solgado, a fantastic photographer, minted a collection of several thousand photographs of the Amazon rainforest. That has nothing to do with this. It's not self-referential to crypto, it's not particularly pneumatic, but it's an amazing collection of work. And it's now an NFT, so that's a one-of-one with not crypto art. And it will be interesting to me to see how much crypto art can continue to hold coherency as a lot of digital art rolls in to NFTs. Because I'm of two minds of this, right? Like one version just might be as individual artists and all different artistic genres, minted NFTs. The initial approach of crypto art will get better. I mean, it's not a matter of certain to happen in any case. But the alternative point of view is that there will remain a tradition of crypto art within the broader context of one-of-one art. And we will continue to see it and it will speak to a community of collectors who are more crypto-native, which might be different than a community of collectors who are just not necessarily, their values don't necessarily align with crypto assets and that principles per se. But they do see a nice piece of digital art and they'd like to buy and it happens to be an NFT. And that's fine, but it's almost parenthetical to the underlying piece of art. So we just have to see how this evolves and we'll have to see how art did feels about this in 2022, because things have definitely changed since 2018. Yeah, so these are examples, right? Like everyone would definitely say that X-copy is crypto art oriented and Matt Caine will talk about this. We'll talk about X-copy in a bit. Hold the iPhone so too. For most, this is an amazing artist. It makes amazing NFTs about more their personal emotional journey. And are they incredible and important one-of-ones in the NFT space? Yes. Are they particularly obviously crypto art that they have to do with self-referential mimetics to crypto assets? Not really, right? So it's going to be a fuzzy border, I think in many ways. I want to take a moment to mention the Last Robbies. It's an interesting piece of NFT lore. And for those, I was very confused about these at first, when I first claimed this place. And so I'm going to use this to share some insider knowledge for people who weren't that deep in that space. And Robbie Barrat was asked, I think I have a type of there, it's an H, was asked in 2018 to, he had made a portrait that had AI generated, in part 7, it was divided into 300 frames. And it was at a Christie's summit and the participants thought like a scratch card, but if they scratched the card, they'd get the key that would allow you to claim the artwork. And the reason these became incredibly famous is most people threw them away. Most people came to this art plus tech conference, it's 2018, and NFTs hadn't done very much by that point, they're okay, I can't be bothered. They throw them through them away, that's why they're the lost Robies. And initially, 12 were claimed, I think now we're close to 40, we're in the mid-30s, and it's believed there might be another five or 10 floating out there where the participants still, know where they are, they might have not scratched them and claimed them yet they have them. But most of them are lost. And it's a story that has taken on symbolic meaning, symbolic meaning from the perspective that the traditional artwork didn't initially recognize NFTs, recognize this type of work, and literally threw them away. And the funny part is these now trade for 1 to 200, 250 ETH, so anyone who did throw them away is probably kicking themselves because it's 200,000, 300,000, 200,000, 250,000, they trade for these types of prices. Now of course if everyone had claimed all 300, well the supply would be much larger plus the story wouldn't have this type of resonance, and so they wouldn't be worth that amount of money, so it's one of those. The ideal scenario is as a participant of the conference and everyone else throws their ways, and you keep yours. And I note this because this is an interesting and seminal event in the lore of NFTs, of one of one NFTs in particular. Now Robie actually stopped minting NFT shortly afterwards for a variety of reasons, but the story has taken on a power of its own, let's say. People, now most people who don't know much about NFTs have still heard of people, and I'm very excited and honored that people will join the course later in the week. People very famously has had the largest NFT sale by a wide margin, and it's interesting because it was that NFT sale was largely because there became a competition in that option between two very rich crypto folks, which drove the price up to $69 million, but also it's important to know that like that work called Every Days was that one piece of art people every day has been making a new piece of art since 2007, which is rather incredible accomplishment. A lot of people say, oh, I don't like his art or I do like his art regardless, I use some glittery colors you like over that level of commitment every single day to come up with a new piece. And I would say these pieces do have some level of, you know, for sure they have social commentary, some of the later ones do have crypto commentary, and they obviously started before Bitcoin existed, so they're not all crypto commentary. And they were all brought together into one piece called Every Days, which is 5,000 pieces of art. So, yes, 69 million a lot of money, and it is the highest NFT sale by a wide margin. I actually think the second highest is also people's as in the 20-something million range, which was an individual piece, not like Every Days was. But it is also 5,000 individual pieces of work. So, I'm going to plot my pocket calculator here. If you divide 69 million by 5,000, you get to 13,800, which is arguably not an unreasonable amount for a successful artist to have one of their pieces so far. It's just that people turned out to be a very successful artist and really worked very hard over a long period of time to create this. So, we've talked to people about this and many other things in the coming days. This caused a lot of consternation in the non-crypto world that both, oh, is this really art? Is the art good? Is this money laundering? Is this, wow, did anyone do this? But I don't know. Someone works for a decade, create over a decade, creates 5,000 pieces of art and just happens to solve them all at once. It's not quite as wild as people might think. Now, ex-copy, I think most people would agree, ex-copy is a crypto art artist. I would think, I think this is probably fair, most people, if they wanted to give you a definition, an easy definition of a crypto art, artists would point to ex-copy. It's uncontroversial that his work is in the crypto art genre. It tends to be very, it tends to be a little bit dark animated glitchy and often refers to themes that have to do with crypto art, crypto assets and so on. So on the bottom left is right click save as guy, which is a piece of art that reflects the common criticism of these that you can write click save. And so this, there's a lot of people who are not exactly sure if they're crypto art artists. Xcopy, I am pretty sure, is. And it's just amazing to see the evolution, right, like he, he worked on Tumblr is at some point he discovered cryptocurrency and NFTs and his early work would sell for $100, something like that. And recently this year, he made an open edition or anyone could mint as many as they wanted and it minted out at 23 million in 10 minutes for an open edition and his largest pieces have, or his most expensive pieces have sold in the one to eight million range. But this is also, I think, a reflection of how early we are in this movement as well, right? Like, I mean, Xcopy, who I think most people would say is a prototypical crypto art artist. A few years ago, four years ago, not 10 years ago, was an artist whose piece has sold for $100. And this has been, you know, we're in the period where this genre has taken form and taken shape and has grown from being something that a very tiny handful of people paid any attention to, too. A slightly less tiny handful of people, right? We're still, I think, in a world where if you surveyed 10,000 people in the world at large, without any particular orientation to them being crypto people, I don't know how many would know of ex-copy, but it won't be that many. And so we will see, you know, how this evolves, if it becomes, if it becomes a broader movement, and if it becomes a broader movement with the folks who were there in the early days. And so these are all things that we're going to learn along the way. This is just some data to give some context of volume of, yeah, this is volume on the major one-of-one oriented marketplaces. And so as you can see before, say, March of 2021, volume was, hey, it looks like there's nothing on the chart, but there are data points on the chart, they're just invisible. It was effectively no volume before March of 2021. It's when the first pickup happened with the first very large sales of alien crypto punks. There was a lot of activity last summer when crypto at large was very gloomy. And it's been much quieter recently. And as you're trying, I'm trying to look at super air through that data. We're kind of back, and this is how everything is in the NFT space at large, we're kind of back to the first half of 2021 for kind of super air, maybe a little bit foundation, say the first quarter of 2021, maybe a little bit higher for super air. And, you know, this is, again, it's going to be one of those very interesting topics, because people outside the space, like all you see, NFTs are just a bubble. NFTs are over. And while not making any forward-looking projections, I have no idea exactly what's going to happen. This has been the history of cryptocurrency, right? It spikes, it booms, it collapses. And when it collapses, it tends to collapse in price and volume at the same time, where people lose interest. But then it tends to come back in waves. And so this is, this is going to be more of a builder type period, where there's not automatic free money floating around. And we'll see which artists, which other application builders stick around and do interesting things in the space. Yeah, so this is interesting. If you look on the left-hand side, there has been more of a change in secondary volume, collector to collector, than there has been in primary volume. Of course, primary volume is down quite a bit, the primary volume artist to collector has not fallen to the same amount. And the number of active collectors have not fallen to the same amount. What has happened is a drop in prices. And a drop in price is both because the price of ETH has fallen, and also because the price of a lot of this artwork in ETH has also fallen. So the interesting, the underlying usage data on the right has less of a drop than the US dollar data. But anyway, you look at it, these are very small absolute numbers. These are tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of collectors. And this can mean one of many things. It could mean A, maybe this doesn't happen. I doubt that's the case, but it could mean O, or quote-unquote early, and this will pick up in a different cycle. But that might not mean that super rare or a certain notice pick up in a different cycle, maybe in a different cycle, something new picks up. And so maybe the thing that gets mass adoption hasn't been invented yet. We just don't know yet. So it's interesting to see, and I think it's interesting to see this in the context of, in some ways, I think NFTs have taken on a much bigger mind share and reaction in the world at large than their actual mathematical point. I've said this before, I said this was almost all my presentations. NFTs are about 1% of the crypto market space in terms of market capital. They certainly get more than 1% of the attention. And I suspect one of the reasons they get that type of attention is unit bias. So when Ethereum trades from 800 to 5000 or Solana from three to 100, these all sound like small numbers, and you don't think about what Dogecoin trades underneath a dollar. And so they're like, okay, well, plus the dollar, I mean, maybe that's sensible, or it's 50 bucks, maybe that's sensible. That sounds like the price of a stock. And people don't think that the market cap for those in the tens of billions of dollars through most of, through most of 2021, Doge had a larger market captain, the whole NFT space. But because NFTs have attention getting sales, this one NFT sold for 8 million, 69 million, 1 million, half a million. It catches people's attention for good and for bad, that's why I'd like to learn more of this, or it catches people attention and say, oh, well, this must be fake. It must be a scam. It must not be real. How can someone pay that amount of money? But it's not really the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is on a total market perspective. And the right way to look at it is how much intangible cultural value are we representing with NFTs in general, with one of ones in general, and this is a large number or a small number. And then it absolutely turns, it's so very small number. And so what that means is that we're arranged to be seen, but it's clearly a small number and total absolute value. Yeah, this is also interesting, right? Again, for an, this goes nicely with my PowerPoint, per all of the, oh my gosh, NFTs are very, very expensive in popular press type logic. The average NFT sold on super, super air being the quote unquote elite site behind what's highly curated, the most expensive artist looks to have spent most of the last year and a half below 5 ETH. And at some point 5 ETH might have been $15,000. Today 5 ETH is, you know, six or seven thousand dollars. Okay, I mean, these are not unusual numbers for work coming from, you know, serious artists. If you go and say, oh, I bought a piece of art from a serious artist and I paid $6,000 for it, when people are obviously going to be shocked with us, but because you do have these power law outlier sales, I think they do create perhaps a misunderstanding of how the space in general is structured. Now, as I've been done in a body mirror, which I am, I'm going to go very quickly, just to give you a little bit of background on the guests coming in this week. People, I did not repeat in the slides. Oh, as I do have a slide here, but we discussed, we don't need to discuss again. Claire Silver is an amazing artist who focuses on AI art. So in addition to all the general one-on-one art things we already discussed, we'll also discuss the AI controversy, you know, of the general type is AI art art. As we said, it happens with every single new movement so it will happen with this one. Sam Spratt is a classic one-of-one artist, makes these very tight, very evocative series. We'll talk about him. He's a pre-NFT artist as well, so I think we can talk about that and transition pre-post NFTs. Sasha does some very interesting things with poetry. I love this quote on the left, I'm going to just read it out loud. Oral language and written text were invented as time machines, data storage systems. Poetry is the original blockchain, a way to save ideas using devices, meter, rhyme, accidents, et cetera, that make them easier to remember and almost impossible to forget. I think it was my favorite quote in this whole presentation, but that was amazing. I believe that the whole is an incredible photographer. It does, you know, his most iconic work, I think, in the NFT space are the Aeroglyphs, where he has drones create light art over national landscapes, but he's done amazing things he did the National Geographic cover recently for Stonehenge. We can talk with him about NFT photography. Isaac Wright Drift has another incredible story. Drift has climbed a lot of very high buildings and taken incredible photographs of those buildings and was put in jail for this and then was released. And so I think it was going to be a lot of things to discuss, not just about NFTs itself, but about non-conventionality and society, and we'll see how those things all come together. Blessing, that was very interesting. And so it's a different constraint. Constraint to a phone for the photography and then it's also been today's NFTs. Priyanka is going to tell us about the borough. The borough is a Southeast Asian collective who are in the NFT space. And so, I think it's a really interesting topic, both with Blessing and with Priyanka. What do NFTs mean for internationalization, right? I mean, would the artists, let's say, in the borough or in South Asia? Would they have had access to a collector like me? I don't live in India, travel to India, but I don't live in India. If they were in a gallery in India, I'd almost certainly not know about them. But online in the NFT space, I've collected from some members of the borough and this global environment and seeing people from around the world, different cultures, different approaches. I think it's one of my favorite things about the NFT space and just I also feel very new. I think at the very, very, very elite level of collectors and artists, the people who can hop on a plane and go to a show in Hong Kong and Singapore and New Delhi and New York and the artists who have enough of a following that people will get them into those shows. Yeah, sure, you could collect internationally before, but that's a very elite environment, a more normal environment. For even people who, you know, take this type of stuff seriously, it's much more plausible to collect from around the world, to see different perspectives from around the world in the NFT space than it is in the traditional art system. And Ena, you know, we're going to talk about a couple of things. Yes, her art has some really interesting ideas on how NFT art and one-on-one art can also be used for social change and so we'll see how those things play out. So, I mean, it's going to be an incredible set of folks. We also have Art None, who I think is very relevant to the topic. So, hopefully, what we managed to accomplish today is you and me will go into these other interviews or panels or see how it serves them with a common initial framework. And then, hopefully, through the course of the next two or three, because we will enhance our framework. We will learn some things. We'll come back and see how we can enrich it. And then kind of pull this together. So, I think, yeah, that's it for me in this session. I guess I could take some questions. I have a little bit of time. I can take some questions. Let me just check if the team wants to feed me any questions that have come up. Give me one second. Some questions. If there are, we'll go for there. Okay, I'm seeing a few questions. One question was, to get my view on digital collectibles versus NFTs as a term, I ended up discussing that. Anyway, same thing, Reddit, and why they feared the word NFT. Oh, they feared the word NFT because NFTs got a lot of very aggressive, bad publicity in the mainstream press. To me, shockingly so. The general approach was end-to-end negative on every dimension. And for no particularly obvious reason. It's just the type of reason that people don't like new things. They were possibly some legitimate questions about environmentalism, which again, I don't want to get into this. It's a complicated topic. I'm not convinced the proof of work isn't that is positive also. But in any case, you had non proof of work, blockchain is the whole time. And either on an absolutely well-communicated pathway to proof of stake. So anyone who was saying, oh, well, NFTs are going to destroy the environment at best not well-educated in the topic, and at worst, you know, misleading. Now that either is proof of stake, if it was on a proof of stake system, obviously traditional art is worse from the environment than NFTs by a gigantic marsh. Making something physically, taking it to an art convention, flying people there to see it, running a gigantic concrete building, a museum with HVAC and security and people in order to see it, flying to New York to go to the moment. All of these things are like orders of magnitude, more carbon intensive than NFTs. And so people who, in theory, a month ago, were super, super upset about the environmental impact of NFTs. If they really, really, that was the real issue, one would assume today they'd be promoting all artists to use NFTs and be trying to shut down or limit physical art. I haven't seen a single person say this. And so it makes me wonder if the real reason was environmentalism in this case, or something else. You know, the rest of the rest of the criticism was, I don't know, just wild. Mostly it was over the bucket of, oh, I don't know, there's a, there's the normal crypto bucket. It must be money laundering. I mean, this, it's the answer to everything planned. People don't know why something's happening. And in other words, effectively it's, they're too expensive. But if they're too expensive, it just means collectors are overpaying artists. But it struck me as a very strange thing for the mainstream press and the art press to be really upset that artists are now getting paid more money. I mean, it was not obviously the case to me two or three years ago that the world of large was concerned that artists were making too much money and we had to cut down on their money. The world of large has always been concerned that art and culture tends to be underfunded and artists tend to be underfunded. And suddenly there's a mechanism where they're being very well funded. And somehow this is also a problem. Even though, unlike traditional art, right, the, the funding is creating at a minimum, a visual public good, you can see the art everywhere. And in the case of CC zero, an actual public good. And so this, this, I think is the general question of coping mechanism when something new happens and you don't understand it, you'll complain that you're, I think all the things is like, I don't like this. I'm starting there emotionally. I don't like this. And now I'm going to think about the reasons that I don't like it. The one that I should probably find this article before it vanishes, right around the people's sale, there was a newspaper article being New York Times art editor, which went on and on and on of like crypto art isn't any good and maybe it's not real art. It's like you've kind of been kidding me. How come when you're having this discussion in 2021? The whole art movement you're going to decide is not actually art because, I don't know, it's too key. It's too man of the people. It's something, something like that was the argument, which is obviously absurd, right? Sothe net effect of all this was that for a lot of civilians and if he's got a bad name? And the reason I got a bad name, I think is not hugely necessarily something that if T space the wrong thing, there are people who did wrong things in the space, but the press on NFTs was unrelentingly bad, a relentless leader. And so I didn't understand it. I didn't. I couldn't imagine someone feeling this way about Bitcoin, where the, because Bitcoin had a bunch of assumptions that you should have a deflationary currency or a fixed currency or a gold standard based currency. And I can imagine someone in from a traditional macroeconomic perspective saying, no, this will be very bad for society, because we need to be able to use national sovereign currencies to manage the business cycle and we could for employment have the very sophisticated counterargument that most people don't make, but at least some sophisticated people made it. Why there was a very negative reaction to a bunch of people want to give a bunch of artists a lot of ether. This seems like an unambiguous societal good, and it should have been celebrate. But this is where we are. I think we're going to go through a phase where a lot of companies want to say it's digital collectibles, it's digital assets, it's all of these things. I think it's fine. I think it's natural. It's how they get their feet wet. I'll make a prediction. I'll make your prediction in front of hundreds of thousands of people. In the end, we will use the term NFTs. I remember this phase with cryptocurrencies at large when was out of 2014 to 2018 where everyone said, okay, well, we like this idea. It's good. But we need to talk about blockchains, not crypto assets. Crypto assets are scary. I talk about blockchains. Blockchains are not scary. And if it's an enterprise blockchain from IBM, even better, that sounds very not scary at all. And this happened in the 1990s when there was the internet, and it was uncontrolled and uncontrollable and scary. Was it okay? We like these ideas about the internet. We like them. They're nice. But we're going to make us the big telcos, the information superhighway, which will be this controlled network, and that's going to be better. And this can go on for several years, and I think it will go for several years, where people will want to use more comforting terms, less perceived scary terms, so that people can feel more comfortable with them. I think in the end, none of the terms that I have seen actually accurately describe NFTs. What they describe is a specific application of NFTs that could also be implemented in many cases, not as an NFT. And so it's fine. I don't mind people using them. I think it might be a necessary phase in the development and adoption cycle. But I don't think that's where we end up in the long run, because every one of them is incorrect. And the correct term for the technology, that is a non-fungible token traded on a decentralized blockchain, is NFT. It's not digital collectibles, it's not digital assets. It's not digital art, it's not any of these things. It's NFT. So we'll see. I mean, I don't mind either way, however, it ends up in the long run, is okay. But it's my prediction. But this prediction will be true in, I don't know, three to five years, not in three to five months. We're going to go through a long phase for a bunch of big companies and governments are going to want to take some of the ideas and theories about NFTs, sometimes implement them in something with not an NFT at all, sometimes actually do an NFT, but hide the NFT part, because they're going to feel it's less scary. And that's fine. But I do think it then will end up with NFTs. It is certainly the case that I'm going to keep talking about NFTs. You will not see me switch to digital collectibles. I don't think it's scary. I think people are grown adults. I think people can learn new things. And I do think the press does have kind of a reflexive negative reaction to technology. And they tend to delay a little bit the developer to go into this way, but eventually inevitable things are inevitable. So I think that's what's going to happen here as well. Okay, I need to wrap up here. I think we got to the questions. Thank you everyone again for joining. Keep an eye on the UNIC metaverse Twitter account for when the new sessions are when they're able to release course materials. And they are working on ultimately a website where all this stuff will be found in one place. And so hopefully two or three weeks from now, this is going to get even easier. And you can just go to a web page and see all these things. But for the time being, I think Twitter and Discord are the places to go. So as always, thank you and I'll see you back in the metaverse.