98% Of The World Haven't Heard About NFTs Yet

listen to me you were the furthest thing from late like 98 of the world doesn't even know what it is 99 of the world has not participated like this is just starting the garyvee audio experience vaynernation how are you if you've been paying attention to me in any shape or form over the last nine months you know how much i am deep into nft land one of the things that has really caught my attention over the last four to five weeks is the thought of wait a minute you know there's 50 to 100 to 200 of these great projects coming out a day now which is causing a supply and demand issue and one of my great fears is that people are day trading and really kind of using nfts as an investment tool which is great and i love that stuff and i'm a businessman but i do worry about oversupply versus demand even though i think demand is exploding by the day and people are getting in by their ethereum and other currencies to buy some of these nfts i am concerned by the sheer speed of

the amount of projects that are out there and so i've been doing a lot more archaeology work as my brother aj calls it i've been looking back to the olden days of nfts which takes me way way way back to the year 2017 and 2018 when some of these projects started hitting the scene um and one particular project really caught my attention and i started doing some real homework as i've gotten more and more into the nft land whether it was chubbies or fame lady squad i realized you know i need to know a little bit more homework about the human behind this project because sometimes the art is stolen sometimes people claim to be who they're not and you know unfortunately when you get a platform it's required a little bit more homework before you yap even though i make a hundred trillion videos on twitter and instagram and on this podcast saying please don't buy what i buy things

for different reasons i'm trying to learn i'm not you know i'm playing a different game plus i've spent years and i mean years on you know putting myself into a position to be able to afford to take risk uh and so even though i say all those things people kind of jump and so i start doing more homework than ever and during one of those i call them bingers because i get into something and i'm just in it and i discovered this incredible project crypto strikers um that i was really fascinated by uh an open c they're called rap strikers we'll go into that in a minute uh and and now i do the kind of homework where i reach out to the individuals behind it and that is how i met uh my guest on today's podcast and i asked gianni to get on the show mainly to talk about 2017-18 nft land because as you know if you're listening um i think history tells you the future and i think there's a lot to glean from

the people that launched projects in 2017 and 18 and so i thought this be a great opportunity for a lot of you to learn about that era even though it's five minutes ago it's a billion years ago i mean it's a world of women a project i'm very into today tweet that you know we launched our project a month ago we want to thank everybody i'm like jesus that felt like 600 years ago and so i'm really excited uh for this guest to be here and so my friend why don't you take the floor tell everybody who you are a little bit about yourself and how the project got kicked off yeah awesome um super happy to be here and kind of this is kind of caught us by surprise because as you said you know crypto striker is the 2018 project we uh my partner and i tell everybody who you are i apologize tell me your full name your background a little bit and then we'll get into ben and all that too sorry cool yeah no problem uh so i'm my name is johnny cetino uh born and raised in montreal studied computer science i was working at a fantasy sports company called draft that ended up getting acquired in like early 2017 and i basically at that point like took some of the money from the exit and just like i wanted to you know just do some research on crypto i put it into ethereum and ethereum just like skyrocketed from there and i was like all right you know now like a large chunk of my net worth is in this thing i gotta learn about it i actually gotta do some research and figure out what it is what's going on with this uh kind of this new world of smart contracts and and programmable money so i started doing a deep dive you know at the time the big rush with icos the trading icos uh back and forth but really what caught my eye was late 2017 was uh cryptokitties which was the first you know kind of mainstream nft project so it was the first one i ever you know i also bought eat a couple years earlier cryptokitties was the first thing that i'd ever heard of and i really wanna not over regret because i just don't have that gear in me but there was two or three times judy there where i was like oh i'm gonna sit down and really look at kitties uh today and i really believe had i

done that all this insanity that is taking over my life right now would have started back then i do believe i'm a man of timing you know i think my greatest strength is understanding when millions are going to do it not hundreds of thousands yeah i think that i always think my best skill set in business is when tens of millions are going to do it versus tens of thousands i probably would have figured out in 17 my intuition i could be wrong about this that it wasn't prime time yet but [ __ ] i think i would have ended up with strikers and punks and kitties and some eve and who knows what the winds would have done i'm clearly glad i'm at where i'm at but man i wish those three different times in 17 i feel or 18 where i was like let me dig into it this weekend or this holiday or tonight and i never got around to it so to back up your point and i think for a lot of people are listening here cryptokitties was probably the thing they heard yeah and that was you know only a couple thousand people using it but it was like the first kind of mainstream success and like i think it would have been really tough to extrapolate seeing nfts then to where they are now because that project had like a little you know one month peak a couple thousand people using it but it never fully crossed and captured the public's imagination like nft projects did today so you know punks they were giving them out for free like you never would have known that punks before would be uh whatever the floor is today it's like some crazy stuff so i'm kicking myself too i was i saw the crypto punks website when they were just free and you can claim your punk and you know now it's like that was a pretty expensive mistake looking back um but yeah now that was you know so i saw cryptokitties and i figured like all right i i'm an engineer i kind of want to build something i come from a sports background played sports my whole life uh the logical kind of step also given that it was a world cup year that year was making sports cards in the blockchain so like the panini sticker equivalent to you know having her panini book and collecting stickers it's like all right how do we use this kind of new nft concept um and you know have these cards on the blockchain where you can buy packs trade them with people sell them on a marketplace and that was kind of the impetus for crypto strikers

one um what happened like tell me like you know obviously you're into it you're digging deeper into you see kitties you're like let me go even deeper and get myself involved in it which is a very mean move that's what literally you did what i did with b friends i'm like the only the way i learn is by doing what um have it been come have your partner come along did you guys know each other and i don't want to glance over the logical thing understand you're into sports world cup but i want to go a little bit more into the details of like what was different then johnny versus what's going on now like did you know how did you get your designers how did you think about it obviously the rc standards were different like go a little nerdy for five minutes with me on this yes i can start with how i met ben i we have a mutual friend uh jeremy levine who's like really big in the sports card world in the fantasy sports world and i was bouncing ideas off him and he you know during one of our brainstorm sessions he's like sports cards on the blockchain like it makes so much sense this is like one of those crossover things that could bring mass adoption to uh to nfts and tokens and he's like i know a friend of mine this guy ben he's looking to work on a project like you guys should totally sync up and then and just get the ball rolling you know just [ __ ] do it and that was kind of how we met and then we started brainstorming we're like look these things have to look awesome like people are not gonna buy them if they don't look good so we started searching for designers we found two different uh designers one in montreal one in the i believe in the philippines who made the two different editions of the cards and we started brainstorming these concepts uh all right like how is the pack sale gonna look like what's you know what's the trading marketplace and then basically like at one point was a hundred days to the world cup or like all right are we doing this or not like we gotta if we wanna do it like there's a lot of engineering work a lot of like pr work to do so we just went heads down for three months and basically on an early version of the erc 721 standard which is you know if we get to the rap strikers later i had to build a wrapper this year to make them compatible with open c and other sites because it's such an older format we just went heads down for basically 100 days straight and like launched on day one of the world cup

did you literally make it for day one yeah i think like i mean i didn't sleep for the last week of it and like we were testing stuff out like the nerdy thing you know if you want to get into the technicals of smart contracts like once you ship them you can't actually change the code they're on the blockchain forever right it's not like for everybody who gets like i'm not a developer but i've worked with them since 1996 closely i understand what johnny just said like we used to launch things like push out things for winelibrary. com and it didn't work and eric castner or john casamatus would go back into the code fix something and push it and then i'd look at it it'd be live for two hours we used to this was like old school 96 when we didn't have

like a dev server so we'd be like developing live on the internet because there wasn't anybody really paying attention anyway um to your point this one this happened with me with v friends there was you know we did a great job because we were going hard but um we even had one slight error even though we looked at the data seven trillion times you know uh with the anchovy and money in my set was there any errors actually when you pushed it no we actually did a bug bounty program opened it up to the public said hey if you want to look at our code and find it by we'll give you money someone found a small bug i think we gave them like you know one or two eve at the time which was you know a thousand dollars or something but like it saved us probably you know a large loss had that gone live but yeah i mean the contract ran perfectly fine never any hacks or anything so that was like a big success but it was definitely stressful how big you know how do you compare this era of nft craze to that 18 when things were starting to pop off that first wave well i can give you like the numbers we did in our you know our total sale of cards i think was like 50 over the course of a month and now projects basically hire like a designer of fiverr and they sell out like you know two million dollars worth of tokens and we're like one of the bigger projects like cryptokitties and then us in terms of volume like the early open sea days and we had done like 50 of sales basically so it's like microscopic compared to what you're seeing today and were you like pumped like wow we

really nailed it yeah we were super excited because people loved it we had like a really um committed and like involved community people like we're in the discord every day chatting trading so like on that note it was about success john i'm sorry to interrupt you like tell everybody about the discord culture back then versus today same thing like it was the main place where people communicated i think crypto projects had started using discord like the first time i used zoom and discord was like in that era like in the early 2018 when you know i'm syncing up with designers for these projects like other crypto guys picking their brain but yeah it was the place it was either telegram groups or discord and discord is kind of better for like managing you know channels and stuff so we set up a discord and like during the games during the world cup people would come in and like live chat during the game so it was definitely um the discord is like one of our highlights of the community but that was the place where early crypto projects kind of had their uh people kind of gather and chat why did the nft thing not gradually grow why did it kind of die off and then resurrect like what did what's your observation of 2019 or 2020 or did they not die off and they did graduate like what's your perception on that it i mean it's fully died off like we so we tried to raise money off the back of crypto strikers like look we had this thing we ran it had a bit of success and like investors just didn't really care and like you know open c was around superheroes around and like i really respect those guys because they just grinded it out for two years in a full-blown bear market where like no one cared about nfps um but i don't know like honestly the ux is really bad back then it's still kind of bad for the average person to come in and like i thought the kind of the uh you know what would trigger mass adoption of nfts would be like the ux gets 10x better and it hasn't so i don't know what's changed why nfts like resonate more today than they did two years ago i don't know if it's a pandemic people stuck at home people looking for kind of ways to speculate on things um but for some reason people just you know love the nfts today like they didn't love them two years ago but it's hard for me to put a finger on what changed do you think investors struggled because you didn't have the rights you know as this project is resurrected i've been obviously very involved in discord and i'm a major collector of your project do you think you know a lot of times people bring up to me other serious collectors like hey gary you know so rare i like so rare better because they have the rights you know like some of the footballers are doing their own direct products i didn't take a look yet under the hood but messi did his own thing recently here was was that an issue did that lead to you to selling it because i know you in bed

sold the company like what was the whole you know there's i have a baseball card set that i'm in love with from 1951 52 called burke ross that this entrepreneur just made baseball cards and put them into his cookies and didn't talk to anybody about it just did it um i think that was a little more ridiculous because cards had been around for 70 years and there was a call it a acceptable protocol and a way to do things i think what you and ben did it was such early frontier that you know i don't i don't see them the same you know i think he would that entrepreneur in the 50s was a little bit more aggressive i think there you know even talking think about what you just said we had one of the most successful projects that we did 50 eats when eat was 500 right so i'm just curious from that perspective do you feel that was the interpretation and what has been the history of the fact that you know you didn't do this trophy for the players yeah i mean the goal was always to kind of validate the concept and then you know raise some money do either partner with an existing uh yeah card maker like we had very high level talks with panini um back in the day we had you know we could talk some other companies that were rights holders and that was the path we were going to pursue but the i mean the thing with you know the leagues and the you know we had to talk to the association stuff they have really high like minimum guarantees and there's like there was no way in 2018 2019 when no one's buying nfts to like make turn a profit like people just didn't care so it's like we can guaran you know sign a contract pay them a million dollars a year in mgs and like what are we gonna do we're gonna sell 25k worth of nfts yeah so that's that kind of you know that's why i respect like the so rares of the world they just kind of tucked it out grinded grinded and now they're in a really really good place i know you're an investor and so rare and like they're an awesome company we love them but they were early crypto strikers users too it's like they kind of yeah you know yeah but um

so let's talk about the resurrection so you're living life you did this once i'm sure you know back in the day you leave the space i assume because there wasn't anything going on and that's at least what i can assume from what i've seen from afar all of a sudden this you know nba top shot hits in the fall of 2020 punks starts having things happen in march of 2020 then june of 2020 then the fall of 2020 and then [ __ ] gets completely batshit crazy in early 2021 you got characters like me and cuban on cnbc you got people selling for 69 million topshop punks go to this and now we're in full pledge hysteria nine months in when did it register for you that oh [ __ ] this thing that i was so prominently involved in is coming back pretty early so i mean i left the space in the sense that like that my day project what i work on for my day job is not crypto related but i'm still like super close and following the space a lot of my friends still work in crypto so i was like well aware of what was happening in nfts i was one of the early probably first 100 users in top shot i was in their beta so seeing all this you know and then you know january february 2021 you see nft is going crazy you're like man i had an nft project three years ago how do we start bringing this back like how do i not miss this wave so i was uh on vacation with my girlfriend i wrote the rapper contract just to get the cards working with the new exchanges and it was just like explain explain so everybody when you look for this you've got to go to open scene go to wrapped strikers not crypto strikers when you search it explain what rapping means i know it's a little nerdy but in its most simplest form for everybody who's listening yeah so rapping is when you uh basically take an asset and you lock it up in a smart contract and the smart contract gives you a new asset that is compatible with a new protocol a new website so basically it's just like a one-to-one trade where you're trading in the old thing you're getting a new thing that works everywhere so i think crypto punks you know similar both they're not on erc721 so they you can wrap your pumps and have wrapped plunks um there's a bunch of other projects that have done that mostly old projects just to make them compatible you're swapping in the old nfk for a new nft that works everywhere now johnny a lot of people ask me this if

ethereum isn't destined to be the platform will it be rapping or something similar that makes people take nfts that worked on ethereum and make them work on a future blockchain that may be the winner of 2030. yeah i think that'd be more like bridging is what people call that where you're bridging assets from one blockchain to another and like people talk about this multi-blockchain world where you know you have ethereum coexisting with solana coexisting with uh like polka dot exactly and you'd be able to port your assets from one to the other um i think ethereum has a really big head start i don't want to pick any winners just yet but yeah if ever some other blockchain became dominant it would involve bridging your assets from ethereum over to that blockchain do you consider ethereum in a place i

mean this is one man's opinion none of us know i've talked to everybody about this you can imagine for me i'm in a spot where befriends was so successful that i'm there i have a lot of beef and i have to be very thoughtful about diversification things that nature um you know in your own mind do you ever think about ethereum kind of similar to yahoo where it's like okay yahoo i mean obviously it's different things but we're talking from a brand standpoint yahoo kind of emerged as the winning search engine from those early days and then it did take something that was so much stronger at it than yahoo aka google you know five six seven years later to kind of take market share do you think something has to cut given how far ahead ethereum is uh and ethan's uh do you think it's going to take something really special to kind of move that pendulum yeah i mean it might be like a second mouse gets the cheese type situation where someone just comes and does it better but like as a developer and knowing a lot of people who are developers in the crypto space like everyone's building you know not everyone but a good 90 of the people are building on ethereum so you have this like network effects of the developers so it would have to be like a 10x experience not for just the users but also for the developers to switch over because like end of the day the people building products on top of the platform or like if that's what's going to determine the winner it's like you can have the best blockchain in the world if there's no experiences no yeah and what about for web 2 like websites i remember wine library was originally on asp then it was php then it was ruby on rails python like do you see similar like there it seemed that the language of preference for developers tended to evolve it might the same thing might happen here like the language for ethereum is actually not amazing it's this thing called solidity it's like a theorem specific thing you know maybe one day a blockchain comes or you can just write javascript which is what most people know and you can build amazing apps on top of it i haven't seen that yet um but yeah all i know is that today most of the developer activity is on ethereum whether that something much better comes along and that changes i think it's going to take a couple years but for now ethereum to me is it clear the clear front runner what um what resurrected so going back

because i sidetracked you but i like bouncing around so now you're like oh [ __ ] this is all happening i have this project that i is my baby of course like any project i'm gonna write a rapper for it so that the people that are sitting with it can show up on that open c so i assume that's where you were going earlier that's what you did tell me what happened from there well i mean from there it kind of just had sat pretty quiet until you found it to be honest it's i was sitting in the discord one day and people like yo who's this is that right is there is that right there was no other like blip one small spike i think the thursday before you found it um it kind of like we did 16th in volume that day and then it came back down had a little bit you know people were rediscovering these old projects we had a little spike but then i think the ether rocks came out and like everyone rushed into the rocks um but then you started buying up and i guess you did on your public wallet people noticed and then that just snowballed into madness but uh it was basically you to be honest and tell me the story what was happening for you on your end you're like sitting there and i saw messages in the discord like uh someone was like yo who's buying up all these cards so i hop into the open sea activity and i'm looking at the history i'm like man this guy is like buying you know one eighth here two weeks and like loading up and then someone's like oh you don't know who that is that's garyvee by the way so i started doing some digging started piecing together the mystery um and then i saw i believe the same day logan paul was buying i'm like all right something's up something's got to give and then you know obviously you and i you reached out to me we started talking but that was kind of like you know someone noticed it in discord i did some digging and i was like all right like what's going on here

and so now what's been happening the last two weeks i mean we just had these crazy days like i think we were the number like we were top 10 nft projects for a couple days i think now we're like top 15. uh you know we did more volume than like zed run top shot so rare for a couple of those days you had you know uh the draftkings guy matt met khalid yes you had you had logan paul you had steve aoki like seeing all these blue checks buying cards it's been like really crazy um i think it's slowed down a bit from that peak but i think people have kind of it's been interesting to watch the ebbs and flows like it's funny like going through patterns now it's there's so many projects it's like moments and then like one thing happens and everyone gets you know crazy again it's been interesting what's been fun for me is seeing a lot of old accounts wrapping in yeah we've been tracking that number the wrapped percentage basically so i mean just more context for people who are not familiar with crypto strikers there was 10 261 cards total that we minted in 2018. so we sold them for a month those cars you know what i forgot that are you

10-2-6-1 yeah because i know that the original right yeah that was deep fried is 10 255 which is wild because that's just very unusual numbers by today's world for us to be that close within each other i like that keep going well the crazy thing is like all these projects today they do 10 000 on purpose they like all right like we're creating the supply of ten thousand we just like sold all the cards we could once the world cup ended we just stopped selling cards and it just landed at that number which is like kind of the standard nft number today is ten thousand we just got there by some weird accident and i guess you guys probably got there by accident too but yeah i know i was very affected by punks that was the thing i most taped into in january and so i was aiming towards that number but i was

but i did characters with you know 20 then eight and five and just kind of the math worked out that way and i was like fine i'm also like not that anal i'm like who cares like they ran a little over it is what it is um so what's the state of the union right now like what are you what are you thinking about because you sold the company right we sold parts of it we sold some of the assets so it was actually a company that had raised money to go do licensed nfts uh and then the bear market hit and we just we kind of pivoted to other stuff and mostly in the sports gaming sports betting world um but they own certain assets stayed behind in the llc so i mean ben and i are talking because obviously now we got all these eyeballs in the project like what do we do with it do we you know what are the options we haven't figured it out we both have day jobs it's kind of tough to manage this project which we thought was in the past and what we're currently working on but we're evaluating a few options we definitely want to like be supportive and be helpful where we can for

you guys have been great custodians in this court if nothing else and to remind everybody who's listening just because the way it worked back then there is no royalties on this plus they sold it i don't know what but there was no royalty contract right johnny on this um we didn't turn those on open safe yeah johnny was that common in 17 and 18 the royalty component or now i found an old agreement between open c and us because we were one of the first projects in and then we had signed like a rev share where they got half the fees and they got it you know we split the fees half up but that was like for 2018. 55 back then yeah it lasted only that year that contract's done now there's no royalties only open c takes their card but like yeah the agreements are fully different back then did you did yeah did you look at it the other day and be like damn i wish that you could take a look and see if it's expired yeah i mean i don't mind honestly i just want people to have fun with it like we're not in it to make money we just always thought this was like a really cool thing that we were you know eventually if we had taken it full scale we wanted to make money on it but at the time just an experiment right so i wasn't waiting for him to learn yeah of course yeah what about for you as a collector today what projects are you into if any um i mean i'm kicking myself i saw the board ape contract when only 64 apes had been minted and i could have just gone and then minted a ton i sent it to some friends i'm like i don't think this is gonna sell out and next thing i know it's sold out i missed that on apes um i'm probably gonna buy a punk soon i think you everyone i think you have to own a punk that's probably the one that's going to hold the value of this yeah it's funny you say that every everybody i talk to right now who feels they're late and they're like man gary i shouldn't i can't buy a punk now it's 100 it's a lot of money first of all but the ones who can afford it i'm like listen to me you were the furthest thing from late like 98 of the world doesn't even know what it is 99 percent of the world has not participated like this is just starting and i agree with you on punks for that reason yeah i think that's the one you know it'd be really stupid for me to be in nfts to the extent that i am and not own a punk so i got to figure that out and buy one pretty soon before the floor yeah i think you should go up another 10 yeah i think exactly um but you are looking at projects constantly and things of that nature yeah i'm always like you know i've been kind of looking at that on1 project that came out the other day i try to get in on drops just because i can code so i try to write a bot get in on drop sometimes flip them keep some of the ones i like but uh but i think you know for long-term holds punk's apes those are the ones that are really gonna hold value any parting shots before we get out of here brother nah dude it's been awesome getting to know you it's been awesome you've been like really involved in our discord so people are always stoked when you drop in and say hi so don't be a stranger i'm happy that i won't

everybody who's here listen if you love proper football if you understand where soccer sits on the pedestal in society you know what's great about you know the blockchain is it's transparent uh it's been very important to me that i don't hide behind i'm not i don't own any wallets people don't know about i have the gennady one that sits with earphones which is my russian name and i have gary. befriends. ed and you know i uh i love that because i with sports cards you know i went in very heavy four years ago and just the amount of people that want to just start rumors of like gary's selling these behind the scenes of the pump and dump and i always like my reputations my is my life and i would get so frustrated to the point where like in a lot of ways it turned me off with sports cards it's like what do i can't enjoy it whereas with this i love it i can enjoy it right like if i want to buy sell it's all there like there's no you know like hidden agenda um and you know i uh i'm very fond of your project i mean thank you so much for introducing me to the artist who did the iconic work like i facetimed him the uh today actually was it today you know i'm just i'm trying to like help him and bring him do some work for with him like just love his art but he did a great job and like my ronaldo and messi like iconics like i'm completely obsessed with your project the way you structured it the moon boppies with the star i like and very honestly like maybe this is probably counterproductive but i love being honest with my um audience i'm loving this little lull i've noticed this being a pattern explosion a little low i've seen it with punks now for nine months i see it with beet friends right now i think the friends is like um an interesting lull opportunity right now but i'm enjoying the slow i'm hoping to see how long it could go because i'm surely not done adding to my striker's collection so i hope we cross paths a bunch of the future brother and i and congrats on putting together one of the projects that long after both of us are gone and people dig up the bones of this era this is gonna be one of the projects they point to for sure thanks gary this has been great take care youtube watcher what's up it's garyvee first of all thank you so much i hope you're doing super well during these times i also want to ask you please subscribe because my commitment and exploration of youtube is about to explode stories polls more content more engagement more surprise and delight this is the time to subscribe i hope you consider it and i hope i see you soon