Episode 6-The real-world value of NFT projects

Transcript

Find below the transcription of the video from Amit Vyas and Andrew Thomas.

Andrew

Hey Amit. 

Amit

Andrew?

Andrew

How are you? Are you okay? 

Amit

Yeah, good, good. 

Andrew

It's a friendly greeting “Hey, Amit.” I don't know why I lean into the “T”

Amit

It’s like telling me off. Like how my wife calls me, sometimes. 

Andrew

Oh really?

Amit

Yeah. 

Andrew

That’s super creepy, I’m not going to lie. Just stopping that now. It’s interesting because being called Andrew everyone kind of knows me here is Andrew but then strangely, you know, it's, I get called Andy as well. I know we tried toyed with Drew for a while but it didn't work out. 

Amit

So we had a bit of an experiment I mentioned earlier we were on holiday in Spain, so we had a bit of an experiment because what we figured out is my kids also shouted at a lot about my wife and we figured out that the reason they shouted at a lot is because of their names, because they're quite easy to say those names with anger.

Andrew

They are. 

Amit

Right?

Andrew

Yes. 

Amit

So we decided to change their names on holiday, which totally infuriated my wife, but basically gave them really kind of weird Indian names that are so difficult to say that you can't say because you can barely say them. But anyway,

Andrew

So what's your new name?

Amit

No, mine was okay. 

Andrew

Oh okay, you’re sticking with yours. 

Amit

I’m sticking with mine. I think it’s quite funny. 

Andrew

Fair enough. Good stuff. 

Amit

Anyway. 15 minutes, two minutes wasted.

Andrew

Two minutes wasted talking about changing names. Welcome to web digest guys! Not the web digest. The Web3 digest, apologies. So, welcome to the web3 digest. Today we are talking about a particular project. So we said in a previous episode, we were talking about Goblins. So these are projects that we've kind of jumped in on and we want to kind of share our experiences. Today we are talking about the Saudis.

Amit

Well actually, we're going to start with something else. 

Andrew

Are we?

Amit

Yeah. We’re talking about two projects. 

Andrew

Oh, I thought we were going to do one. 

Amit

So like last time when we thought we’d get we'd get three projects in the Goblins episode. We kind of didn't. 

Andrew

Yes. You want to talk about Pop.

Amit

Yeah. So much more, much more kind of discipline.

Andrew

Okay, Yeah. Pop. 

Amit

There is a project, and the reason I want to talk about that one first is because it’s

Andrew

You don't infuriate sales that you're talking about. 

Amit

But basically what you've got is so many different types of NFT Projects. We've spoken about this and you've got those really kind of speculative NFTs. You've got the profile NFTs and you’ve got art. 

Andrew

The main names. 

Amit

And the one I want to talk about is called POP like crypto packaged goods. But the reason why people have had vicinity is purely down to the community. And the funny thing with this is if I tell you the maybe the kind of economics behind it.

Andrew

Can you tell us first, for people to understand this is an NFT that was purchased and then by owning this NFT.. The only thing it gives you from day one and they tell you is a community of individuals. 

Amit

That's it. 

Andrew

Okay. Do you know who those individuals are when you buy day one?

Amit

No, no idea. You kind of hope that they are decent and I think we spoke in the previous episode about free mints basically attracting the wrong audience. 

Andrew

Yes, exactly. 

Amit

This was the polar opposite. So this went on the market at 3 or 4 Eth, right? 

Andrew

$5,000, something like that?

Amit

Mint price, yeah. And, oversubscribed.

Andrew

Right. 

Amit

The reason why they could justify that is if it's the second launch that they had. The first one was a one launch that went up to 30-35. 

Andrew

What was that called?

Amit

That was crypto packaged goods. This one is POP - they’re part of the same group. 

Andrew

Yeah. And basically what they did is again, they built a phenomenal kind of network community and to get into that community, you know, ultimately people were investing and still are investing upwards of 20-30 Eth to get in there. Right? The secondary -

Andrew

Basically $40,000.

Amit

Right now, yeah. So, actually when this was launched, um Eth was still priced at about $2.5-3,000. So you're talking about potentially a $12,000 investment to get into this community. Um that’s about three or four months ago. 

Andrew

Where does this community live?

Amit

Globally. Actually, surprisingly, they're, I mean they're literally all over the world. So the people that I've been engaging with are - there’s some in the States, a lot of them in Europe, some in the Middle East. Again, we've just got 

Andrew

A real mix. 

Amit

So mint price was say $10,000 today, the price to get in is about $1,500. Okay. Um so on paper, what this is, is potential terrible investment. Actually, we didn't pay for $10,000 because we didn't get whitelisted. Thank God, but  basically bought the deer. But, I would say even for those people and there's a lot of them still there who paid full price.

Andrew

Still there?

Amit

Still there today and I would say all of them would categorically say that the best value investment that they have made in the NFT space has been this. And it sounds crazy if you know potentially talking about 8-$9,000 loss but actually the value of the community and what our community is unlocked has been absolutely mind blowing. So from different opportunities to getting involved in different projects to um to new investment opportunities. Goblins, for example, was one that was first on there, one of the one of the main guys was like keep an eye on his project guys this looks really interesting and at that point you're talking about something again that was maybe $30 that within a week went up to $17,500. So, people have got some enormous sort of value out of it. 

Andrew

And other connections and they're happy as we've spoken about before to share this knowledge. 

Amit

It's unreal. Just for collaboration, for communication, there's a whole lot of people who don't really know what they're doing but they've heard it's a good community and the community is there to learn, learn and teach. So you've got that, so I think I think it's definitely a project to kind of keep a lookout and I think especially at that kind of price.

Andrew

How does this just work, like I mean for people to understand you know okay like you bought the NFT. Then what? Do you jump on Discord? Is it Twitter? Is it Telegram? What does it work from? 

Amit

Yeah, the only weird thing with this is I've been so used to being on Discord in most of the U.S. communities. This one was Telegram only.

Andrew

Right, okay. 

Amit

Telegram has been one of those apps that sat on my phone for the last two or three years and I've never really used it. And then when I started to use this I really started to understand why Telegram was really good. I guess the best way of saying it is that it's like WhatsApp on steroids.  So if you want to run polls if you want to kind of have all kinds of different interactivity, all of that kind of stuff 

Andrew

And you connected, similar to Discord the wallet, so they verify it. 

Amit

Yeah, exactly. So you can have private channels outside of Telegram that are fully verified so you've got to have access to it. It's really smart. But yeah and then you start then just engaging with the community but there's no - there's no one sitting there waiting to pounce on the newbies right. There's no one sitting there wanting to laugh at you because you don't know what you're doing. It's all very much a case of - look, we see people saying “hey, this is like the first NFT I’ve bought, I don't know what I'm doing here and everyone's like “hey, this is what you do, this is how you connect, this is how you start to engage.” You know and that happens five or six times a day. Right? And it just happens. It's yeah, it's really smart, 

Andrew

Nice. So we've got about, I think six minutes here. Okay. So I think it might be worth talking about Saudis now. Because anyone thought that Andrew and Amit are going to talk about the Saudis, so we'd better leave and the people that were listening in talking about Saudis. So it's not actually Saudis as in the place, the country, it's a project called The Saudis that kind of popped up. I'd be interested to know, actually, first off, where you heard about it because you, you actually raised it with us. You were like “hey, listen, check this out. There's a whitelist. We all tried to whitelist, none of us got it. But tell us, tell us that first.

Amit

Yea, that was a really interesting one. Again, it came from POP, right? So basically somebody, somebody said: Oh there's a collection called The Saudis that's going to be launching in the next week or so. It looks quite interesting.” And then you kind of look at it and you go on and then the link to the Discord and you start to see the communication and it was crazy actually - I think we've both been on Discord channels where you know, it’s basically an  infinite scroll. It's just impossible. It's like twitter in the old days.

Andrew

Yeah, yeah

Amit

Like you just can't keep up and I was blown away. I've never seen anything at that pace, so I thought okay, there's something going on here, but obviously it seems to be a community trying to get the free mint and get on the whitelist and get an eye on it. And I think it's a really interesting project because what they, ultimately what it is is they've turned the Crypto Punks artwork into different designs and all that kind of stuff

Andrew

Pixelated style. 

Amit

Looks pretty cool. But what you've got behind there is some really smart people and I think that became obvious on Mint Day. So somebody did say “Oh if you use this, you can mint for free.” And I was just like, I'm just not sure if I trust it, so I didn't and I'm glad because basically. I think on day one there was an issue with a contract and somebody had gone in there and found a little loophole and started to, you know, mint hundreds of these things and the speed at which they responded, but also kept the whole community in the loop as to what was going on was just magical. It was so - it was very, very slick. And so you start to think some serious people behind it, who, by the way, nobody knows who yet. So some serious people behind it and then what they've been doing every, I'm not sure about this, but I think we did with Goblins, where you’ve got to keep these communities engaged. 

Andrew

You got to do something more. You can't just sit back on your arse. 

Amit

You've got to have, you know, you've got to have maybe at least 5 or 10 steps kind of planned out. And what these guys have done is within about a week of mint, they said “Oh by the way guys, we're going to send whoever's got whoever's got Saudi NFT,  we're going to send you an oil rig.” And you're like, okay, and you've got no idea what's going on, right. But the next day you check your wallet and we've now got an oil rig in there. And then they’re like” Right, hope everyone's got oil rigs because now we're going to use your oil rigs to find oil.”

Amit

And then basically a few days later, I click on this link and just connect your wallet and it will tell you how many barrels of oil that you’ve managed to churn. And it works, they've given 1 barrel per hour per NFT, which is essentially - So I think yesterday we logged in and we're sitting a few 100 barrels of oil, which by the way, we have no idea what it's made of. 

Andrew

Don’t know if it's valuable, don’t know if it's a joke. Next, next thing they've said is “Hey, we've got, apparently there's a millionaire merchant who wants to come in and buy oil and it's going to be selecting a few wallets to basically buy oil from. Now if you've got 200 barrels sitting in your wallet, and they've got live oil prices, ultimately you've got 200x maybe $102 a barrel. 

Andrew

Right, right. 

Amit

I mean, this could just be, this could just be a nice kind of hate is a few $1,000 gifts, right?

Andrew

It’s smart. 

Amit

But again, what this is doing is getting people to keep the community engaged, building up demand because 

Andrew

And ultimately increasing the floor price, right? Because people are talking about it and understanding it and they're jumping in on it. 

Amit

And again, just, just a really good example of how you keep the community engaged. The community is super engaged. One of the strongest communities I think I've seen on there,

Andrew

Is it time zone wise, is it US again?

Amit

Again, a lot of action. For example, there were tweets going out last night saying one of one of the Saudi sheiks has just gone to L.A. To meet some prominent people, but it was 3 AM, I think, so there's I think potentially it might even be a whole US team. But either way, they're very much and they're keeping in the tradition 

Andrew

And some of the language is Middle Eastern. Excellent. 

Amit

Yeah, it is very much Middle East, whatever it has done has been done properly. 

Andrew

Good stuff. Excellent. Like it, guys, we want to kind of keep this pinch to 15 minutes or thereabouts, so hopefully you've kind of gained a bit more knowledge today. And not just the fact that these couple of guys here at the moment are having way too much fun around this at the moment, but it keeps us young, although we don't get any sleep, so it's fine. Anyway,thank you everyone for listening, watching the Web3 digest.  Amit, see you next time.

Amit

See you Andrew, take care.