HODL Podcast Episode 4 was originally published on January 31, 2023.
Join Drew, Skyler, and Joel with special guest Keith Laska as they talk about Holder, crypto roaring, 2023 crypto predictions, BAYC's latest launch, Porsche's launch, and more. Keith has a deep history in startups and entrepreneurship, and teaches Bitcoin and law at Fordham University School of Law.
Episode Rundown:
In this episode, we'll dive into the Holder Messaging launch — a feature set in Holder that gives creators, community managers, and marketers the tooling necessary to message wallets in web3.
- Crypto prices roaring, and the latest inflation news.
- The recent bankruptcy filing by DCG/Genesis and the implications for the crypto community.
- 2023 predictions for crypto and Web3.
- BAYC trial of Jimmy the Monkey, the recent game launch of Doo Key Dash & Sewer Pass.
- Porsche's latest mint.
About Holder
Holder is a CRM and marketing automation platform for web3 brands and creators. They help businesses engage and communicate with their customers on the blockchain. With Holder, companies can manage customer data, track user engagement and automate marketing processes. For more information visit our website.
Podcast Transcript
Read the Full Podcast Transcript Below:
Welcome back, everybody to hold on for Dear Life, episode four. I'm Drew Beechler, and I'm the CEO at Holder and you are listening to the Holder podcast. Holder, if you aren't familiar, we are a web3 CRM and marketing automation platform for web3 brands. And today I am joined with our three regular contributors, myself, Skyler Braun.
And Joel Moser on the holder team. We are also joined by Keith Laska, who is a board member at Holder and a key advisor to us and a good friend. And so I am super excited to welcome Keith to the show. Keith is I'll maybe let him share a little bit about his background as well, but he's an operating partner at High Alpha, which is the metro studio that we launched Holder out of.
He also is a, blockchain law professor he is deepened the web3 ecosystem, has started a number of companies and founded and led a number of companies in a handful of different industries. And would you call yourself a poly Glock Keith?
I would, yeah I do speak a number of languages and thanks for that, that intro, drew.
That's awesome. Great to be with you guys. You got my swag on, got all my holder stuff on right now which is fitting for a podcast. But yeah, I'm super excited, excited to be with you guys. Do speak a couple languages when forced.
Yeah. Probably most people might not know.
Keith listened to this episode, but Keith started a number of companies and was involved in the Lang kind of translation and language services, and then started your career teaching English overseas. Right Keith? Yeah
So I Started working at a actually at a a school called Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
And then I moved into the language business. I was in the language business for about maybe a decade and a half. Seven years out of my time within the language industry was based in the UK, across Europe and Asia. So I got to experience multiple cultures and and come back hopefully a little bit wiser than when I left.
And then I got involved in the startup scene and started a number of companies have been CEO of a number of companies. And I'm super excited to be working with you guys. You got something huge going on here, which which I hope the world finds out about in due course. I love it.
Thank you. Yeah, that was just a little bit of the inside baseball there. I feel like it is also interesting from where your perspective comes as get into some of the stories and the headlines here too. I think, Keith, you bring a really strong and unique perspective around macroeconomic trends and why you are so bullish even on crypto and this new industry and economy and opportunity here.
But you did lead me into our first topic really well. Since this is the Holder podcast, we're gonna shill holder a little bit here. We have a very exciting announcement and launch for a brand new product line at Holder called Holder Messaging. That is gonna be live by the time this podcast goes live.
And so we have, when you think of your marketing journey one of the biggest challenges in web three today is I can't connect with my customers. And so that's a lot of the problem that we are hoping to solve with holders. How do I understand who my customers are, which is a lot of what we've been building today with our CRM and audience builder and holder forms, tools, and today, are launching our holder messaging products so you can now craft the customer journey and actually connect to your customers directly using holder messaging products.
Email and SMS are live today. Wallet messaging and other messaging formats are coming soon down the pipeline. But yeah, we are super excited to be launching that. I think it's gonna be a game changer for how web3 brands. Craft and launch these, curated customer journeys. But Skyler, anything else you would add or Joel as well around our holder messaging launch?
We're super excited about that being live in the product here as of actually as of Friday in production. But official launch coming soon. Yeah.
I would say one of the things that I'm most excited about with Holder messaging is the ability to have this kind of omnichannel focus in your communities and communicate in the ways that people want to be communicated with.
And I think that has been one of the ultimate struggles of web3 as a whole, is there's really limited ways right now where you can be communicated through. And the majority of that's happening through Discord, that's happening through Twitter, but the reality. There are many people who live by their email or live by their phone.
So being able to message somebody in this kind of omnichannel way, send them a text message, which is lightning fast imagine a DAO, right? With trying to get enough snapshot proposal votes. That's something that if you need the votes right away and you have someone's phone number, And you don't wanna bother them with an at and discord, or maybe that might not even be in your Discord anymore.
Or just imagine when they mute your discord. That's very hard. That's pretty much a churned customer, even if they are so part of your DAO. But having that means to communicate with them in the way that they wanna be communicated with that gives you the tools to immediately. Pump up the amount of proposal votes that you might need for your DAO governance.
Or maybe you're at NFT NYC and you've got some tickets for this low-key event and you gotta show up right now and you could use Holder to message someone. And what's cool is all of these tools do exist in some capacity, right? But they're fragmented. You have to use multiple different SaaS products, multiple different tools to do all of the same things that Holder can now do in one platform, plus the audience and insights.
That you can get out of holders. So being able to slice and dice your community in ways that make sense to you, whether that's the NFTs that they own, or the first party data that they've surrendered or given to you, I should say, because they want to be part of your community. I think the people that want to participate in your community are gonna have absolutely no problem giving up certain per first party information to you as a company or you as a brand because they want to participate.
And again, not everybody wants to do that in disc.
Completely agree. I think you hit the nail on the head with this is one tool set, web3 is one tool set in your omnichannel approach. And we're just trying to connect a lot of these channels together. And I think when you start thinking of email, sms, and other marketing channels, these are really all owned marketing channels.
And I think today, For most through brands, they've been relying on rented real estate with Twitter and Discord. And so we're really just trying to help these brands build out their own owned audience, and I think that goes really far. Yeah, the only thing I think I would add is that SMS feels more personal.
It's a little bit more of a direct line of communication to, people that care about your brand and the people that care about your project. Yeah that's what kind of speaks to me the most is that you get it. It's a, I don't know, some might think that it's a little bit like too close that see people like having an arms length reach or, and like arms length distance between them.
And and that's where like Discord and Twitter kind of come in cuz you can kinda come and go as you please. But the SMS is a little bit more personal which I think makes it simultaneously more engaging and. Maybe less, I can't think of the right word, but yeah I just think it makes it a lot more engaging for the people who really care and they, and they get a little bit more direct communication with you, even if it's not a back and forth response reply.
Just not having to check Discord every couple of hours to see if there's a new announcement. Even if you have notifications turned on I missed those. Half the time still.
It's gonna be game changing. The first topic on external news is that as we sit here today, Wednesday, January 25th, crypto prices are roaring.
A lot of it against the backdrop of inflation news, which the CPI. Announcement came out January 12th for last month, which was really encouraging. And since then we've seen, ETH soar to over 1600 and Bitcoin soar back over 20k. For the first time in four months or something like that.
And Keith, we are gonna rely a lot on you with your brain power around economic trends. And I thought this was a particular great topic and why we wanted to have you join this episode with us today, but just what are we seeing in the markets? Why is this happening? What does, c p I even have to do with crypto prices?
And where do we see the next few months or even year potentially? I will also caveat all of this, this is not financial advice and do your own research. And yeah, it's there. It's been said. That's awesome.
Thanks. Yeah, like I'm not a diplomat economist. It's just my opinion. And on the spectrum of kind of bitcoins to Bitcoin, I'm much more of a Bitcoin maximalist as I think you guys know.
So that's where I derive most of my knowledge and education from the study of Bitcoin. Look the reality is on inflation, the FED is doing their job. They've brought inflation from 10% back down to 5%. The challenge is that was 10% of the work. Ultimately, 90% of the work is bringing inflation, core inflation from 5% down to their stated goal of 2%.
So I think there's going to be a bumpy ride ahead for the markets for some period of time as we get clarity. But I do think there, there has been a rally, and I think the rally's been fueled by a number of factors. The first and possibly one of the most important is that liquidity. Drives everything in our 110 trillion global equity market, right?
So for the most part, everybody was short in Q4 expecting an, a huge economic crash. Expecting the fed tightening that they were doing right removing liquidity from the system to soak up all of that liquidity. And then we see a huge crash. What they found out was that actually wasn't entirely the case.
The debt ceiling debate, which we all know about, means that Congress can't spend any more money right now,
And the treasury can't get funded, this is what happens when you have debt, ceiling issues with a split Congress. We really don't see that alleviating itself. Anytime soon. And so the treasury has a job to do, and in order to do that job, they've got about 470 billion from its saving account, sitting in their spending account, and they need to spend it.
So ultimately that kind of acts like an artificial quantitative easing. In other words, the treasury is putting half a trillion dollars back into the market because they have to spend what's on their balance sheet. And that could go straight through to the summer.
So I think people have sniffed that out.
There's also a second view that the Fed has been very aggressive and certainly they've raised rates. Disproportionately high compared to previous height rate hike cycles, I should say. And they probably were a bit late to raise and now they've aggressively raised.
And whether that's baked in or not, we don't know. The next, CPI report and fed meeting. We'll see whether they raised by 25 basis points or freeze, in which case the markets, I think, continue to rally or whether they go 50% because they're, they wanna be, continue to be aggressive, and I think we're gonna see a huge correction in that case.
And then I also think the third factor is that people, although they're, they seem nervous and they say they're nervous, they're not pulling their money outta the markets just yet. And I think funds are seeing that across the board from what I hear. People say they're nervous about the economy, they say it's gonna crash, but they're still in the market.
So all these factors lead to what feels like a short to medium term rally. and just to get your opinion on this specifically around your third point, I feel like you still hear that airports are completely packed with people flying all over the place. And I know some of that is from Covid, right?
People had this real severe itch to start traveling again, but I feel like I still see and hear that spending is still going on from the consumer level. Of course. And I think that's fascinating to your, third point there that people are still willing to pay the hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket and whatever the hotel costs to their destination.
And all of the restaurants that they're going to eat at. It's interesting. I feel like we've heard for the past year that we're gonna be, the re recession's coming and you better be ready for it. And I think we as a business are doing our best for that.
And we definitely feel some of those impacts, especially with rising inflation and interest rates. But people are still spending right now. And I wonder when that will stop. If it will stop at.
Such a good question. It's like when you wanna know what's happening with the economy, just feel the pulse.
Go back into your store and see if eggs still costs the same amount of money. Forget about the basket, the CPI basket, that's all complete, bs, right? We know that stated inflation is, X but in, in reality, we're paying 30, 40, 50% more for our milk every day.
I do think if you take a look back, To a couple of years ago we printed an inordinate amount of money as a global society. Really took the briet out and started printing like crazy. That money's flowing through the system. And maybe it hasn't completely exited the system quite yet.
But I can tell you it will eventually in my opinion, exit the system and we're due to for one of two potential outcomes. And it might be more, but from my perspective, the first is that, that the Fed kind of pauses. Or limits their rate hikes and or cuts. And at that point in time might say a sharp recession, right?
Because that's typically when recessions occur, when the fed pauses or stops raising rates that's the indication that they've done their job and quote unquote, hurt the economy enough. Or the fed kind of smooths things over for a period of time. The soft landing. In that particular situation, we could potentially see stagflation.
So it's a period of sustained high inflation of the type we're seeing now for years. Maybe 24 to 36 months. There's no easy way out of this. And that's the interest and the irony in academic macroeconomics. It's all mathematically based. Where do you see that money going?
You said exiting exit where?
Take a look at treasury yields right now, short term treasury yields, like we're sitting somewhere over four points, right? At some point in time there's what's called the the rate of risk, right? With returns and you can take a certain amount of risk, but if treasury yields are kicking off four to four point a half to 5%, a lot of people are gonna say, look I know I'm getting hit by inflation, but I'm guaranteed.
Four to 5% from quite possibly the most credit worthy government and central bank authority in the world. That's probably a safe place to put my money. And, if you multiply the amount of cash that's sitting there in bank accounts that are sitting there you just pull out one to 2% of that back into savings accounts.
That could be problematic for the equity market. Short term or maybe medium term we should say. What's also interesting getting back to crypto is that Bitcoin has finally in, in its early days, it's it's finally deep pegged from the S and P. So if you take a look at the S and P and you take a look at Bitcoin's price, it's pretty much followed its movement for the past year and a bit and more recently than not in the past couple of weeks, you started to see this decoupling.
And although I'm not an advisor in these matters, I do know that from history when Bitcoin and related crypto. Decouples from equities markets, you start to see some really interesting alpha plays starting to occur. One thing I'll add to that too, and I haven't checked this recently.
I think it was like a month ago that I saw this Bitcoin's price. Now it costs more money to mine it with the electricity cost than the cost of Bitcoin in producing and mining that Bitcoin itself. And again, to your point, and no advisory role historically, every time that's happened and every time it's recrossed that threshold where it is again profitable to mind Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has exploded in price, and I wonder if these are early kind of intense signals. 2024, I believe is the year that the having is coming up for Bitcoin. And again, that's been a traditional signal for Bitcoin to go up in price. So I think, I wonder what we'll see in the coming year.
And I think part of what we wanted to talk about were our 2023 predictions going forward for crypto and web three and for Bitcoin. I feel like we're talking about that a little bit. Does anyone else have any kind of predictions for what's gonna happen going into the next year with the, having coming up for Bitcoin and what's gonna happen with Ethereum or R to see, the next Solana or the next avalanche?
Or maybe they'll continue on? I don't think that's happened traditionally where these alt coins or shit coins as we'll call them, pump and then pump again and in another cycle. So what's everybody kind of thinking is gonna happen?
I think on chain and NFTs are gonna take off, but that's also because that would be be good for my portfolio.
On chain as in like IPFs data is stored on the blockchain and not on piñata.
No, just not IPF FS. IPF FS it IPFS is really just the protocol. Piñata just deploys their own like IPF FS nodes to store stuff on. No, directly storing like base 64 encoded or SVG encoded directly on in, like in the memory bank of the blockchain.
And it costs more to deploy NFTs of that kind, but it is. But they are, they will exist as long as Ethereum does. Whereas if that IPFS node goes down, or the person who is serving the data on that IPF FS node goes down, you just get a broken. Until they put it back up or they change the metadata url and if they've revoked their, like ownership rights to the contract, then they maybe can't even do that.
So now they have to redeploy that and make sure they have the exact same image URLs published. Otherwise, it, you will literally just have an NFT that represents a broken link..
You're just buying a jpeg. It's yeah, in that case you are, because if that goes away, like you are buying like a representation of it on the blockchain and that is immutable, but the like image of it itself is different. So like the, that kind of begs the question existentially of if the image of a bored ape itself goes away, is it still a bored ape.
Technically the contract says it is, but like the image is gone. The image is now a completely broken image link. So that's just a whole thing. But I think yours is about, is actually under a lawsuit right now. I think his name's Ryder Rips. And Jeremy Kohe. And essentially their argument was they created a spinoff NFT, which used the exact same IPFS images for the AYC, except the NFT itself is completely different because as we know with an NFT, it's non fungible token.
There's digital providence of an NFT and they are unique. No, NFT can be the same as the other. So their argument with creating the secondary collection was exactly your point was an NFT. There's nothing to copy right here. We're simply pointing our NFT the image metadata to the Bored APE Yacht Club image.
But our NFT itself is not a Bored Yacht Club. Yep. And I think that's an interesting argument. .
Whereas if that is a basically foreign coded image or some o, some other way of being of storing it, it directly raw and bits on the blockchain, you can't do that. You could copy the exact same thing, but it would actually be a separate representation.
It would not just be a pointer to the data, it would be an actual separate representation because it is a, and like in memory on the Ethereum blockchain, on the actual nodes that are storing all of that memory, it would actually be a separate memory address, like on the hard disk. Yeah, and I don't wanna make a price prediction, but I'll bank off yours a little bit and maybe make it more of a call to action.
I think in 2023, what we need to see from crypto, and I'm gonna talk specifically about Ethereum. Is we need to see some of the things that when we talk to our grandparents or we talk to our friends about what Web three is and why NFTs are powerful and we give them all of these amazing reasons of, just imagine the possibilities with taking a digital token and being able to itemize anything, physical or digital in these Providence tokens.
That's like a super powerful function. But the reality is over the past couple of years as NFTs have exploded in growth, all we've really seen are JPEGs and profile pictures. And we've seen, music NFTs and we've seen gaming NFTs, and I don't think any of them have particularly taken off. Maybe they will, but I'm hopeful, and this is a call to action, the community as a whole.
I think we need to start building more of the things that Starbucks is building with their NFT loyalty program, where they are taking this new and unique and frankly, innovative approach to one of the most successful loyalty programs in the world, and now putting it on the blockchain where you can now take these NFTs and use 'em on the open marketplace.
We talked enough about this in our previous podcast, so I won't go too deep here, but I think in 2023, going into 2024, we need to see more of that. And whether that's Web Two brands taking the lead, or Web three brands like Zuki and Yuga Labs who have, really quite frankly made it. I think we need to see more utility based NFTs.
Gets us on to an interesting topic around like, how do you explain crypto and web3? I might be jumping a little bit here, drew, but it leads on to that, right? How do you explain web3 and crypto to generations that normally wouldn't get it?
And I saw this. This video recently where I think it was Sailor was saying, look, in the late eighties, early nineties, you had the internet but it was at a protocol level. So you could use the internet, in 1990 1991 but then somebody came along, you know who and slapped a web browser on top of it and all of a sudden everybody's oh, I get it now.
Access to information. Albeit kind of basic information. And I think right now what's happening, and this is why I love bear markets, like companies are building real value. There's, marketing has been stripped out of this. And companies are building real value. And I think there will be an inflection point where the the protocol level and the infrastructure level is all but complete, it's solidified.
And then the application layer comes on and makes the innovation easy for people to use. Now I would also say the asymmetrical risk and reward exists today. Which is why there's such a craze around crypto, right? Why things are going 10 x 50 x a hundred x some cases a thousand x because there are these interesting projects and there's this moth to a light syndrome going on, and people are trying to find the next Amazon or Google or whatever happens to be, and they will, some will find that, and they'll have these great success stories down the road.
I think that's one way. That patience to get the application layer out. Just, not again, not inside baseball, not a plug, but if you've ever queried, ethers, scan. You really need like a lot of help to understand what the hell is going on. But if you're using Holder, it makes that process of interpreting that really complex data easy.
And there are other applications out there that are doing this as well, but I think we need a lot more of that innovation in the market. And things will slowly become more clear to people. But the question is, will there be a Netscape that comes along and purely dominates? Yeah. And I think too, thinking even back to Web 1.0 if, I guess Netscape is probably in the web 1.0 era, there's a lot more failures there too.
Like it is harder to build at the infrastructure stage and be durable, there's a lot of kind of like spits and kind of flame outs even back then. And the same is probably true today to be quite. As compared to building at the application layer it's much easier to build a SaaS cloud-based company today than in 2002 even, because you're more at the infrastructure layer.
And I don't know, maybe, yeah, that's my prediction too, for 2023 of, I think we will see more. Building at the application layer, I think we will see a lot of consolidation. Just in the last like week, I feel like I've already started to see that just in like our mar little market even too of like companies being acquired or going outta business.
I think we'll see a lot of consolidation. I think we will see big stall warp brands start to be built of the people that can endure and persevere through the next, call it 18 months. On the NFT side, maybe one prediction of mine, I would say I think we are seeing close to the death of the 10 KPFP and it's super exciting to see things like the VV checks and, Some of those kinds of projects take off and the friendship bracelets and just a little more on the artistic side.
I think seeing a lot of open additions and kind of artists play in that space. Des Cruse launched one last week or so that was super successful so far as well. Bummed that I did not min one. Back to the, I just need a text message when, a favorite artist of mine is launching a new project because I'm not in their discord all the time.
But yes, you should come use Holder ps But yeah I'm super bullish on all of those aspects and I think there is a lot of value still there that like we're just scratching the surface with what the creative outlet that web3 and blockchain and NFTs can uncover. Moving to our next story on January 19th Genesis's Crypto Lending Business filed for bankruptcy protection.
This is Genesis Global, HoldCo, IC, and I'm just quoting straight from CoinDesk here. But them and their subsidiaries, Genesis. Genesis Asia-Pacific, PTLD and Genesis Global Capital, filed a trio of voluntary petitions with the United States US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
All three fall under the DCG Digital Currency Group umbrella, which actually also owns CoinDesk and also owns gray Scale and a handful of other organizations and companies. And it's Biling, Genesis global Capital. Estimated more than a hundred thousand creditors between one and 10 billion in liabilities as well as assets.
The two other entities estimated their assets and liabilities in the a hundred to 500 million range. Genesis owes over 3.5 billion to its top 50 creditors among which is the crypto exchange Gemini. And we have been seeing Cameron Winklevoss in a Twitter war recently as well with Genesis. And so it's just all of this unfolding over the last couple of weeks.
So maybe Keith I'll hand it off to you first, but what are your thoughts on implications around Genesis? This seems to not be fallout from fdx, but even back farther to three Arrows, capital and still some of the challenges we had in liquidity in the space. Even back to Terra Luna still falling out, but what are some of the implications, in your mind around this bankruptcy filing and where we see.
A lot of these products in the future, and the impact even on consumer trust, I think is maybe my own personal challenge with it. Yeah. If I were a libertarian, cipher punk, I'd be pretty frustrated with this process. Native cryptos will not be happy with this because Genesis was the lender of last resort in our markets, right?
They could have held everything up. And they were as close as we'll probably get for a couple of years time to what we call a prime broker. And it's just a quick sound bite on Prime Brokers. The FX markets are eerily similar to the crypto markets. If you go back and talk to any. Stodgy FX trader back in the day.
They will say and then lined up what's happening in crypto. They'd be like, oh my God, this looks just like fx. And until foreign exchange trading found a prime broker, which was basically a large, usually bank that says, I am willing to be a clearing house. I'm willing to clear the trades overnight that happened during the day with this huge stash of X that I have.
Then you don't really have a lot of legitimacy and that. Leads to a lot of other questions like why the SEC hasn't approved a spot be Bitcoin ETTF. Which goes back to GBTC. So I think like not having this lender of last resort, not having our prime brokers troublesome, I was waiting for another ball to drop.
I think this does have repercussions not just for DCG and Genesis and Gemini, but I think for arc for coin MicroStrategy, like anybody that's touching crypto is gonna be. Affected here. But I would say where there, there's red meat and blood, there are wolves. And I know the Vic Vi are having an, a public spat right now.
But, I gave my 2023 predictions, it's pinned to my Twitter handle at Keith Laska. And I believe that some huge crypto player is gonna be acquired this year. I said it's probably Coinbase with a depressed. Price, but they have a lot of cash in the bank and they can survive for some period of time.
Maybe it's, maybe it's DCG, Genesis and GBTC. Now, if I were like super excited about something, it would be a crypto friendly big company like Fidelity, for example, coming along and buying up the assets. And then putting their position forward as the prime broker. Now you imagine a GBTC has what, five, 600,000 Bitcoin.
Is it, give or take micro strategy's got a hundred, 3,000,50,000. They start mopping up the market, in, in the depth of a low cycle for price. They then have, a million Bitcoin. They can be the prime broker. So I think there's opportunity in all of this as well, and it's. , in the deepest, darkest points where the hero comes along and tries to save the day.
And maybe that's gonna be a big company like Fidelity. Yeah. Approximately 633,000 Bitcoin in GPTC. Yeah, I would agree, Keith. I think that is like maybe silver lining or kind of future looking prediction as well, but I think it could bring potential. I do think that's probably a very likely outcome as an acquisition here, and I think it could bring a lot of more legitimacy and some of the bigger players into the space, the traditional.
Players, the trai players into the space, and I think could be really unique and big for the ecosystem. Do you think that will a alienate any like current players in the ecosystem having, a tra fi come in and be the dominant leader? It. I think for a Bitcoin and subsequently crypto to grow, you need three things.
And these three things are in progress, right? First, you need institutional adoption for Bitcoin to be cl declared a proper asset you can invest in. And I think Fidelity has a hell of a lot more of a chance to convince the SEC on the spot Bitcoin ETF DCG
But that cooperation is coming with SC, FTC, FDIC.
I think the second thing you need is technology utility, right? You need simplification of technology. We talked about this on the pod. And then the third thing you need is macroeconomic.
10 tailwinds. And that's not a problem because our politicians keep printing money. So those three things together will probably create, the perfect storm and what we call that supercycle that everybody's talking about.
And I think to DCG and Genesis even were traditional enough, honestly, that it's not like Unis swapped, it's not a complete decentralized, so I think that from that perspective, like they're already seen to the hardcore folks in this space probably as not, decentralized enough anyway.
So I don't think that there's, they don't see the people that it matters the most to, probably don't see too much of a difference even potentially. That's a fair point. Onto our next headline. Over the last couple of weeks, Yuga Labs has announced their latest big drop in the Yugo e Yuga ecosystem, which is the new update on their Jimmy trial of Jimmy the Monkey.
They launched this sewer pass game called Dookie Dash, which is endless runner's tile of game. And in order to play Dookie Dash, you have to claim a sewer pass. That was a free. I believe depending on which assets you held within their ecosystem, you got a different tier of a sewer pass. It is not yet revealed really what these tiers do.
And so the game started on January 18th and it closes on February 8th and the sewer passes have sword even on secondary volume to up to three east floor. I think I just think this is really unique from a. We have three perspective around like this concept of the skill-based mint. The higher you score in the game when this game ends, the high score is gonna have some kind of better opportunity to get this special key that's part of this Jimmy the Monkey trial.
And so I think this is really unique, the like skill-based mint, the higher you score, the better your reveal chances. We're also seeing one of the first times that they are using their native coin for real transactions. So you can buy powerups using their APE coin as well, which I think is starting to highlight just some of the intentionality and kind of interest interesting things that they can use this 20 token for.
So maybe open it up to the floor here. Why? Why is this so interesting? Why is this important or what is interesting about this launch and kind of move for Yuga for any of you that have thoughts on it.
I like this because this was more than just your typical airdrop where it's, another NFT that you're gonna sell on the open marketplace for a cheaper entry into an already enormous ecosystem.
And they've done that a couple times now, and for the most part, all their assets are very valuable from a US dollar perspective, but from a utility perspective. And from a gaming perspective, I personally love it. I don't love the naming. I think, I get it's part of the whole brand and part of the whole storyline, and it's funny to be totally honest.
But I think the game aspect itself, competition is an incredible driver. And to drop something like this, in order to play the game, you have to own one of these passes. And now, while they're particularly expensive, and I don't personally have a lot of bullishness in very expensive blockchain games to.
I think the way that they rolled this out has been, seemed pretty flawless to play this game. You can now try and like the skill-based aspect of this. I guess what I'm really trying to get at is it's no longer a, I have the most money, so I'm gonna make more money than you. It's now down to people who are gaming and if you are really good at gaming, you can play this game.
And what I have seen in some disc. And on Twitter, which I think is so awesome, is a lot of these asset owners who own a lot of bored apes have actually auctioned off the ability for other gamers who are good at gaming especially from big brands like Phase Klan and Hundred Thieves to play the game for them.
And they're giving them a cut for how well they do. And I.
I don't know how much it, it does good for, web three, mass adoption, when the, probably the best game in the ecosystem right now is revolving around going through a sewer sifting through poop for a key, but, yeah.
If it's a fun game, gotta start with something.
However, the fact that they are leveraging their ecosystem, creating loyalty from what we call the genesis holders, right? And or those that trade it in and creating utility value for the the coin.
That is, that's the real interesting point here, I think.
And I'm gonna assume other projects are gonna be following suit on this as well as we see the success of. Completely agree. I think, and even just throw out some numbers, there's 19,000 players that have already played the game and 3.7 million total dashes. So far, the high score is like something in the range of 640,000 points.
But I love that too. Skyler leave it to the degens to find some way to like even, and I'm hoping that it's somehow done through some kind of token that they've tokenized their winnings and we'll let hundred th players come in. That's awesome. I love that aspect of it, but I do think it also goes to show, I think what.
What they wanted to prove, even with the other side, like beta version, was just that we can build a game and kind of tease some of these out and that like we can build mass adoption products. And I think it is shifting yuga more into the into a product company, which I think is huge and I think really we need more of that.
Skyler and I have talked at ad nauseum a little bit. In the NFT space and sky. This is Skyler's point of view, not mine, but like oftentimes these brands are reliant on losing customers. Someone selling your NFT for them to make money through their royalty fee. And that just seems like not a sustainable business model.
And so I think it's encouraging at least to see though, I don't know how many brands can really. Execute at their level because they don't have the millions and millions in funding and revenue that Ecolabs does. But I think it's interesting to see here are some paths that some of these brands should take for how do we build a little bit lar larger and broader brand and business and sustainable business around this.
Speaking of other launches recently our team has also been talking quite a bit about the recent Porsche NFT launch, and this one kind of made it onto the docket here last minute, but as we were talking about this before the show started, so maybe I know we have lots of opinions in the room, but just to like level set with everyone, Porsche announced a really quite innovative NFT drop over the last couple of months that did it in conjunction with a P app at CES I believe.
Art Basel. Oh no. Is that Art Basel? That's where, and they had a very, actually now I remember they had a strip along like these booths where they, if you attended the booth, you grab the PO app. That was part of the allow list was if you had a PO app. So it was a very kind of integrated approach to how they wanted to launch this.
And then in the Twitter, crypto Twitter sphere over the last week, they announced the mint price of 0.911 ETH for 10. Units and crypto Twitter just went ri wild. And so they have really been dissing on Porsche ever since. And in somewhat of Neo in some ways somebody called this kind of a failed mint, but but they still had over 2000 NFTs minted and they closed the mint as of today I believe and now actually the floor price is almost double what the mint price was. And it seems like there's actually, there's like only 8% listed in nearly I think over 50% unique owners. And it's turning out to be really interesting project to, to watch, but maybe open it up to the floor just around overarching thoughts as we've seen this unfold.
I do have to give Porsche a lot of credit, I think still. Putting their best foot forward. And I think doing something pretty innovative in the space. Though maybe the target audience that they started with or they were trying to reach with this they might not have had the best targeted approach or communication strategy to that specific group.
But I think they're learning and we'll see where this goes over time.
I think everybody's gonna stub their toe coming into the space, and I think they did a little bit with the mint price, at least with the native community, I should say, from the 0.91 mint price. And at current prices, that's about 12, $1,300. So definitely not an inexpensive NFT to own and meant, I think the thing that the community was most frustrated.
Was the lack of a roadmap and lack of understanding of what this NFT's purpose was. And it felt a lot like a cash grab upfront until just today I think they actually dis announced what the utility around this NFT is gonna be. And I think we talked about it before the podcast. I think we're all pretty frankly excited for what they're gonna deliver on this.
Hopefully they do from a utility perspective. And I think. A way, especially for other automotive brands, even to take a look at how Porsche has done this and other big web two brands, how can we enter the web through space? And I'll talk about one point that I brought up again before the podcast, which is when you buy a Corvette, you're given an option to go to Las Vegas where they let you train on how to drive a Corvette.
And that is a super cool experience. And I don't know the way that they track. Whether that's just through receipts or not, but imagine you give an NFT and mint an NFT for the purchase of a Corvette to that person and then that NFT is redeemable right for you to go to that track. And if you want to go, great.
If you wanna give it to someone else and go that they have that NFT and burn that NFT or basically expend that NFT to go to that course, like that's a really cool and interesting and innovative. Thing to do for our, an automated company wanting to leverage a NFT. And it could even be like an image or of your exact car.
So if you have, a yellow Porsche with black wheels, like how sick would that be to have a digital asset that represents it, that you can take anywhere with digital Providence on the day that it was pushed outta the factory and the guy who signed his name because he manually put it together and then, there's like a lot of sentimental value in that kind of thing.
And, but, being an NFT, there's an open marketplace, so there's inherent value that NFT has with utilities. So I think ultimately them coming into the space, I'm very excited to see what they do. And like you mentioned, I had the opportunity to min yesterday and now I'm mad that I didn't given the floor price and what they announced today.
Yeah, no, I'd just say that look the road to salvation is littered with landmines. This is all part of learning how NFTs work operate the clear value of describing utility upfront and the importance of getting a community on board with you through clear guidelines on what you're actually doing.
But look, you get you. You've gotta applaud Porsche for actually trying this out. They're certainly gonna learn I don't know that I wanna be in the board meeting where they discussed that they had to actually tell everybody about the utility of the NFT. But we need every major brand to be trying this out because once everybody gets used to NFTs as a part of loyalty and or some type of utility, it it, the clause of NFT strategies start to enter into corporate.
The corporate world and then you see more use cases for NFTs, which is, and we all know this, we all talk about it, we all read about this, but, a fractionalization of everything physical in this world is gonna happen through NFTs and it's a matter of when, not if. So we should be applauding every single brand that, that get, goes out there and tries this and hopefully, it becomes the norm as opposed to the exception that everybody's get involved in this.
Yeah, I don't think I have too much to data necessarily, like add, but it does seem that big brands are.
Yeah, I think you said it most accurately with stubbing their toe. They're, cause a lot of the times they're just approaching this from what they know and what has gotten to them to the level of success that they are not this new world that is like evolving from underneath everything.
So it's definitely harder to enter and not trip and stumble and, they'll probably, that, I think they will catch themselves. And I think the harder part especially with the roadmap, they're not having a roadmap was that they are too big of a company to not have one. It's one thing if you're just like a little some DJ project of free mint that's just like randomly airdrop or just not air dropping, but Stealth minting or something, or he is just doing it for a meme or something.
That's one thing to not have a roadmap, but to have a gigantic corporation that, they have a plan, but to not publish said plan is weird. And it definitely does color the feeling of what it was meant for. Yeah, I think the fact of the matter though, is that we're still sitting here talking about them today, and we're not talking about any other car manufacturers, other than Chevy Corvette's, but Yep. We're talking about Porsche and I think They're still getting a lot of that kind of the limelight and kind of the benefit from that perspective.
And like overall, this was still, it seemed like a flop, but I think it's still a very successful project. I think they put a lot of effort into, we did not talk about this, but they did put a lot of effort into the post mint experience. You're gonna actually be able to design your nine 11.
Everyone chose their specific license plate number that they wanted to mint with. And so I think they put a ton of time and effort into the technology around like how they want someone to build their kind of nine 11. And I think maybe not enough time and effort into yeah, what is the roadmap, what is this for?
And why does it command a price like this? And I think if you're Porsche too, like you're also a little bit. Stuck in terms of, between a rock and a hard place in terms of you are a luxury brand, and so how do you also balance there are no $10,000 Porsches, you can go buy off the lot.
So how do you balance our luxury brand was like what they're trying to do here and open it up into a broader community. And I think maybe that just didn't stick the landing initially, but. I applaud them and I think it'll be interesting to watch going forward and see how other brands learn from those missteps or take similar announcement strategies.
And the funny thing is too There are lots and lots of auto manufacturing brands that have launched NFT projects and you just would not know. And so we have this long list of every brand that's launched an n ft project, and there are lots and lots of auto manufacturers in that list that we were not talking about here today.
And their launches were Maybe not even nearly as good or not as well thought out and put together in a really cohesive plan. So it does feel like this is something that has it legs and they plan to make it a longer than just, an initial kind of mint campaign. And go beyond the mint, which I'm super excited to, to see where that lands.
And so with that, I am going to wrap us up for a fourth episode. I think this is probably our longest episode to date of the Hold on for Dear Life Podcast. Keith, thank you so much for joining us. It was incredible honor to get to have you as a guest. The fun thing about the style that we do with these headlines is that we might be able to have you back as a guest sometime soon.
So it's not like we just interview you and there's no more new stories to tell, but there's always, some new point or opinion or hot take that you can share on the news article. Hopefully we'll be seeing you back as a regular contributor to the Hold on for Dear Life Podcast in the future.
And for all of those at home you can learn more about Holder at Holder.xyz. And thanks so much for listening. Take care.
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