Hello, and welcome to another episode of Coffey and Code. I am excited to have two awesome friends on the show with me today, Alex Wasner and Matt howatt. Alex Wasner is the CEO at TwoThirtySix Labs. And Matt Howitt is the CTO at TwoThirtySix Labs. I'm excited to have them on the show today to talk about all things and NFTs, DAOs, Web 3.0 and more. And I'd like to give a little backstory real quick before we dive in. Alex, Matt and I actually used to work at Apple way back when and we go way back. So I'm just really excited to have them on the show today to talk through these important things with you all. But without further ado, Matt and Alex, welcome to the show!
Thank you excited to be
Matt and Alex, would you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself aside from the little throwback introduction?
Yeah. So I, Matt and I have been kind of working together for quite a few years now, like I said, worked at Apple, and came down to Austin, Texas, I started working at a company down here doing a bunch of like client services. So working on companies like Slack comfort and autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Under Armour, kind of a, you know, a bunch of the big name companies.
But, you know, a fairly small company still. And so got a lot of exposure there, Matt ended up coming down a little bit later. And I can let you kind of go go from there with your,
you know, branch off from there. But I then went over and worked at a news organization and ended up starting my own company and having that job on full time. Yeah, I've been working with technology ever since I can remember honestly, just taking apart the phone taking apart the VCR as a kid playing with Legos, things like that. So just kind of made sense. You know, when I got older that I've worked in this space, got my started Apple slinging iPhones on the sales floor, working my way up to being a genius, eventually doing some web development for the iPhone eight launch, worked at that same company, as Alex had mentioned together, I ended up working at places like JB Hunt, working on their mobile app, and just a couple other places here around Austin. And then finally, quitting my job going full time, diving straight in in October of 2021. With 236, and it's been a ride, it's been fun.
I think Matt, Matt's elevator pitch about himself is way better than mine.
You know, I just like him, you know, I started working in technology ever since I was, you know, literally probably like, second third grade, taking apart things and putting it back together. And like had a secret lab, my backyard and we'd go on trash day, all day, all the neighbors and find vacuum cleaners and take them apart and all sorts of fun stuff like that. And then started doing web design, middle school, and kind of went heavy on the computer science stuff, got my first job doing web development, like full time at 16.
And, you know, then went to college, became a college dropout. And then pick up my story where I started. I love that I love that you two have really great backstories. And I think it's complimentary to this intersection of where you two are in this virtual digital space right now. But Alex, can you tell us a little bit about 236 labs, and I'd love to hear kind of the origin story behind the name. Yeah, so we are what I call an r&d firm, we kind of work with entrepreneurs that are wanting to kind of build up a product or an idea that maybe they don't have, you know, the biggest budget to kind of fund we also work with like larger clients that have a lot of money that they want to throw into like some random idea.
And kind of, you know, build out a prototype, and then eventually take that prototype all the way into kind of like a production scenario, whether that be a mobile app, or most recently, obviously all the NF T's and blockchain web three projects, kind of whatever like the the client has in mind, like we try and find a cool solution for. And so we work with all sorts of technology. From you know, we've had to figure out all sorts of weird command line tools and making videos from images without having to you know, to make them procedurally generated.
And so like,
I don't know if that explains like the research side of it, but doing random projects for clients was kind of our
forte. And as far as like the origin like I talked to briefly about it before the show, but
I was trying to come up with a name. And you know, I tried all sorts like research and development type names and couldn't come up with anything that the state of Texas would approve.
I, they kept denying it because it was too similar to another name, or there was a copyright or trademark on it. And so after being denied, like three or four times, I finally just was like, You know what, I'm just gonna look at the time and write that down. And so when I first got it, they gave me back to 236 is what I just put down. And they sent me a failure letter for that as well. Because there was some company in Dallas that was like 258 or something. And so I added the labs on the end because r&d lab
and so finally got a name that was not trademarked. And the Texas allowed me to keep that is this so awesome, actually,
I love a name that has a cool backstory behind it. And like what better way to come up with the the company name is the time? Yeah, and in computer science, they always say like, the hardest thing about computer science, or programming is naming things. And I think the same is true for naming products and naming. Even just like picking out a web domain is just like the worst thing ever.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I was very fortunate to be able to snag my my name domain,
thanks to Nick Brown, who notified me about it. But yeah, unless you don't have you know, that luxury, then you're gonna have to, you know, do a deep search of domains. But I think that's a really good segue into some really interesting topics that are floating around right now that are really catching fire, and is behind a lot of the work that you do. So it's around NF, T's, D, EO and web 3.0. So Matt, Alex, can you to give your best description for listeners who may not be familiar with these three things? Break it down for us? Yeah, I think I'll take the first part, and let Matt kind of talk more about Dallas, because that's kind of his, you know, recent hobby, if you will. But I think from like a high level, probably explained, like what web three is, would be a good place to start.
And then kind of going more into the NFT side of things. So you can think about the web as web 1.0 Being a consumption mechanism. And you go, you know, earlier as the internet, you go on the internet and see content that companies or people provided, there wasn't a lot of like ability to search or find things. It was clunky, it was, you know, heavy, heavily relied on the the text, you know, interface, web 2.0 was a lot more interactive. So they brought in social, they brought in the ability to buy things and have, you know, customized solutions, and, you know, commerce a bunch of like the things that we know of the web as today. And web 3.0 is kind of the next evolution of that. And so they're, you know, if you ask a million different people, they'll give you a different million different answers for what web 3.0 is. In my mind, it's kind of like the there's two main aspects of it one, obviously, just AI and heavy amount of data. And so like, using AI to make the web a more personalized experience. And using all of the data on the web to kind of, you know, aggregate and create something that isn't. I don't know, it's kind of hard explained. The, the other aspect is decentralization. So, you know, right now on the internet is basically owned by Amazon, Google and Facebook. And they also own your data. And so like when a new platform comes up, you either have to export your data from them, or create a whole new account and do a lot of, you know, setup that you've already done. And so the decentralized web is basically removing that middleman, who houses all your data and spreading it out so that you can easily move from one platform to another, and kind of a decentralized fashion. And so that's that's kind of the the explanation I could think of as web three. Matt, do you have anything to add to that? For web three?
Yeah. Yeah, the best way to you know, I kind of imagine it as the umbrella for all the things that we're seeing now in the news like blockchain and FTD styles. It just kind of helps sums all that stuff up. But yeah, it's it's still early ages, we were referring to earlier as kind of like the dial up era, I would say, of some of this technology, still in its infancy, but we're starting to define a lot of the utility for it right now. And I think in the future, we're going to look at this stuff and be like, I can't imagine that we were you
using this for cat photos, and they were going for $10,000 apiece, and now, you know, my, my home mortgage is on this thing. And it's easily transferable because it's because of web 3.0. Yeah, I think that like, to the analogy of web 2.0, when you know, when that first came out,
there was a bunch of people, you know, trying different things, a lot of it failed, a lot of it turned into what we see today. So like Amazon was, you know, one of those first Big E commerce giants. But like, for the technology side, you have things like Adobe Flash, that was a great for, like, you know, having a beautiful interface and adding some, you know, interactions. But from the tech side, like, there was a bunch of flaws with it, especially when you come to like, screen readers, like, screen readers don't know how to interact with that. Yes. And so, you know, you see the evolution of web 2.0, to where it is today, where like, it's heavily focused on ensuring that every you know, device is going to be able to consume it correctly. And every type of reader or consumer is going to be able to, you know, use the technology. And so just like that, like Matt was saying that, you know, the dial up phase, web three is, is so far from where it's going to be in, you know, five years where everyone kind of can interact with it.
An NF T stands for non fungible token.
And the the best way of kind of analogy for that in the real world is a fungible token is something that is equivalent on both sides. So you can think of like $1. You know, $1 is always going to be equal to $1. Regardless of whether it's a coin, or, you know, fiscal dollar, they're equal regardless, a non fungible asset is something like a painting, you know, even a white canvas, if you put some, you know, a single mark of paint on it, it's going to be completely unique to any other painting out there. And so the token aspect of it is the representation of that on the blockchain. So, the blockchain is basically
Mat, do you have anything else you want to add to that?
Yeah, I think I like to the best thing about NF T's is how unique they are. And the cool thing that's coming out of them right now is to Alex's point, utility behind it. Something that makes an NF T successful would be its utility. So people would look at things like board apes or punks and things like that. And they might just see, you know, a PNG on a web server that's getting traded for hundreds of 1000s of dollars, but there if you dig into it a little bit more
More, the teams behind those started to create special utility behind it. One really cool example is this golf course that recently got acquired by a group of people and they sold fractions of memberships of the golf course to the people holding the NF T's. So there's a physical piece of land that has an actual golf course on it. You go on the blockchain, you buy this NF T and all sudden you you're a country club member, what is really cool, which actually leads into Tao is what we were talking about earlier. Were people that own this NF T are able to vote on bringing in new members, naming the golf course, you know, even like hiring outside people to run it. Who cuts the lawn? You know, what's the the logo even? So? That's another cool little utility behind it.
Yeah, I think one of the thing that excites me the most about web three and about NF T's in general, is obviously not the images like images are great. But you know, you see people on Twitter, like, oh, I took a screenshot of your NF. T. It is the utility, it's also from like a company standpoint, like there's some really cool stuff you can do. Like, right, right now, if a small little startup wants to, you know, let's just say you're a company and you want to compete against Coca Cola. Well, right now, like, you're a small little, you can't, you know, a smaller company, you can't go and compete with the big guys. You can even you know, try on Shark Tank and get the funding there, but they're gonna laugh you out of the room. And, you know, I've seen that happen on Shark Tank, actually. And the cool thing that you can do with NF T's in that space is you can actually see all of the people who are colas, biggest buyers, is the all the people who are your your competition's biggest fans, and you can directly target those people and give them in FTEs to try and get you get them over to your platform. Or to buy your product or to you know, do whatever. So one example of that recently is there's a NFT platform called open sea. And it's kind of the, the golden ticket for the NFT space, everyone wants to be the next version of that. And so a small little scrappy startup called Lux rare came along, and they were like, you know, what, we're gonna give you a cheaper rate. And for all the transactions you've done on open sea, we're going to give you a token that's associated with that. And so they air dropped tokens that are associated with a, you know, utility on their platform, to all of the best and highest spenders on open see. So did this kind of like guerilla marketing, where they went in there and targeted the exact people that they wanted on their platform. Yeah, it's, it's super, super cool to you know, that's one one example of it. But like, you can imagine where that can be in five years with even larger companies competing with each other, like the access to all of that data is something that only comes with web three and decentralization.
It's all visible on the blockchain, which is the greatest thing about it. And the worst thing about it, there's, you know, everybody was talking about where blockchain was coming along about money laundering and stuff like that. And everything's visible. So like any purchase that I make now is going to be forever tied to me in the future. Like I said, Yeah, it's a great thing, and could be a bad thing. Not that anyways, doing anything illegal, but it's just a forever record.
Yeah, that so I don't mean to like, take the entire I'm on you to ask them questions, but wanted to put one little comment on that. But with the guy who one of the top people at open sea, he was actually doing some quote unquote, insider training. So what he was doing was buying up a lot of NF T's of one that he knew was, you know, we're gonna land up on the homepage, or, you know, have a big spike or something. And so you'd buy up a bunch of them and sell them as soon as they started showing up on the homepage. And the only reason he got caught is because of the public ledger. And so people were able to go in and see all of his wallet transactions, and he was doing stuff to try and like mascot. But eventually everything kind of was traced back with, you know, a bunch of people with, you know, posters on the wall with red red string to try and figure out the web of wallets. But it could be traced back in two, you know, to his original wallet.
Isn't that amazing? It's,
it's amazing. And it's also, you know, I guess it goes back to the idea of web 2.0. So, you know, I said some stuff in my Zynga and my MySpace pages that I would not want to be found today. And I'm sure that same thing is going to be true in a few years whenever people are looking back at their NFT purchases, and they're, you know, stuff that maybe is no longer legal According to law, but because it's on a public blockchain, it's, you know, immutable.
Yeah, I guarantee there's gonna be some kind of legislation that comes out of this that says, Alright, past this certain day, anything that you did on the blockchain bought or sold on Silk Road and whatnot, like you can't necessarily be held, held accountable for that, at least I hope that's what happens. Because, you know, IRS, they're cracking down on a lot of these things, too. And, you know, if you miss paying taxes on something, well, eventually, if they don't have the technology, now, the technology is going to catch up. But the, the, the record is always going to be there. So they'll always be able to go back and see if you did in fact, pay those taxes or not.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that also extends to other tools as well, like AI and hiring and whatnot. But I want to hear more as a startup firm that's based and focused on NF T's and web 3.0 projects. What are you currently working on that you can talk about?
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, there's, you know, a lot that we probably can't talk about. A lot of the cool things that we're doing are kind of in the E commerce space, doing a lot with like Shopify, and integrating the, you know, interplay between NF T's and being able to, you know, buy physical products or digital products on Shopify, we're doing, we just did one with Deepak Chopra. He's got a company that's doing NF T's for good. And so basically, the idea is using NF T's as a means to raise funds for charities and the like. So I think it's kind of cool that, you know, you hear a lot of like negativity about the blockchain and about the energy it uses and how it's, you know, just a bunch of people on the internet, you know, wasting money and, you know, not adding any value to the world where, you know, I think it's cool to work on projects that do add a little bit of value back to the world. And back to the original kind of idea that I'd said earlier about the royalties and the painter, you get that same thing with this. So like, all of the NF T's that are sold as part of this auction, any trading of that, in perpetuity, is going to add royalties back to these various charities. So it's a kind of a way for you to feel good about selling an NFT. Even if you know, outside of just the monetary gain you make you're actually by selling it, you're giving back to a charity as well. Nice. That's kind of cool. We've also been doing a lot of stuff with like other profile picture type projects. We did a big one with superplastic and Gucci. Just earlier this week. That's so cool. called Super Gucci. Nice that that was actually kind of cool. And profile.
profile, you might want to explain what profile picture tees are.
Yeah, so PFP or profile, and you describe it if you'd like.
Yeah, profile picture and FTEs it's kind of what you see, most popular right now where it's like, monkey with sunglasses and monkey holding a banana with sunglasses. There's usually like 10,000 of them. A lot of people use them as their profile picture like Alex has one I have one. In a lot of people's personas are kind of like imprinted onto those as well. Cyber crypto punks. That's a big one, you'll see a lot of those little digitized punks as people's Twitter profile picture. So the community, which is really fun about like, the web, three communities, like we all have our inside lingo. So like PFP, you know, you might have heard Hodel and stuff like that. So it's all these little, like, little nods to the community that you'll see. So profile picture, or PFP that's where that
Yeah, and if you've ever spent any time on NFT Twitter, it is a weird place. There's like when I first got on there, I was like, What does wa GM? I mean? It's, we're all gonna make it are we all gonna make it? And so there's all sorts of weird lingo. I think that the one of the things that you may see is on Twitter, a lot of the big names in the NFT space have a kind of a hexagon, or maybe it's a pentagon around their profile picture. And that's because those people are using Twitter blue, which is I guess, their new, you know, pro level Twitter.
Oh, yeah, I subscribe to that. It's like 299 a month and you get like,
yeah, exactly. And I think as part of that, in their Beta program, they have the way a way to verify ownership of NF T's. And so people that have little, you know, hexagon around them, and a picture of, you know, some sort of NFT have verified that they actually own that real image. Whereas, you know, you may see other people that are like I took a screenshot and put it as my profile picture. Well, this is a way of verifying on the blockchain that that person actually does own it. So Twitter's kind of buying into that.
That's so cool. Yeah, it's
it's a it's a real world we live in.
Great to see big companies like Twitter and like Visa, like anytime, Visa or something like that announces that they're, you know, starting to hire blockchain developers like the the whole ecosystem kind of spikes. So just seeing everybody moving towards that is really reassuring. Yeah,
I mean, yesterday, I have a friend who's a consultant at Deloitte, he sent me a press release that they're starting to offer, like a new service to like their clientele around the metaverse including, like web 3.0 and NF T's. And I was like, Whoa, this is like, this is validating that to the enterprise that this is here to stay. This is not a fad.
Yeah, and don't get me wrong, there's definitely some some fads in there that I think are not going to stick around. The volume of profile pictures I don't think are going to be, you know, most of the profile picture projects are going to go down to, you know, completely worthless, outside of just showing your kind of excitement about an artist. But there are going to be a lot that add value in that, you know, create these communities that are, you know, like Amazon and Facebook today, it's gonna, you know, evolve from the early days of web 3.0. And kind of, you know, become these behemoths.
I'm curious, let's talk a little bit about Dows. And the prospect of converting existing businesses into a Dao. I know, that's a pretty meaty topic. But Matt, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, I've been doing a lot of research about this lately. Like I said, earlier, we've had a few people approach us like, their own multiple businesses. And they're like, we're not 100% Sure, like what we want to do or what this is, but we want to be the first at it, which is the mentality of a lot of companies. But I doubt take the corporate pyramid and smash it pretty much as how I imagined it. They try to, it aims to democratize the entire, I guess, corporate experience. And by doing that, on the blockchain, everything is completely visible. And transparent. voting happens on the blockchain. Kind of what what happens here is smart contracts.
So let's, let's define what a smart contract is also. So a smart contract is basically like a block of code that is executed on the blockchain. And that code can be NF T's. That can be a cool way of interacting with NF T's or selling things or acquiring, you know, tokens, acquiring assets, you can do all sorts of things with a smart contract. And so one of those things that you can do is create logic around how a business or organization is governed and run. And so I think an example that Matt had, and I had talked about earlier was, there's one called the Constitution now. And it was a bunch of people they got together, and they're like, we're gonna buy the Constitution. Wow. And so they, they started selling these NF T's. And they tried to, like, you know, get enough money, I think there was like six copies of the Constitution, one of them was going up for sale or something. And they ended up not being able to raise enough money to do it. And the problem was, then they then had a bunch of tokens that they couldn't, they couldn't buy the Constitution with. But also they couldn't liquidate, because pulling it out was worth more than the actual NFT itself. So there's a bunch of people with these constitution, Dao tokens that are effectively worthless. But that's one example of like, how a Dao could be used and governed by the blockchain. There was, you know, rules in place that once it hits a certain threshold, it goes out executes, you know, transactor,
you're asking about converting existing company into Adele. And that doesn't exactly know to dowser like, just like no two companies are like, but not every business model necessarily, can be converted into a down. I was mentioning a while ago that a company like Apple where there's a visionary at the top, you know, Steve Jobs had the the master vision for the entire company. You couldn't exactly take him out of that spot and allow everybody to have a vote because that's that's pretty much what it aims to do is everybody gets a vote on the blockchain. So I think one of the best examples of this that I've seen is a VC or a venture capital fund, where projects Come in, VCs get to vote on how much funding and where that funding goes to who works on this project. And then it's all governed, Like Alex said on the blockchain, there's guardrails put in place in a smart contract that are immutable. That carry out the will of the Dow. So kind of a little bit more of a scaled down version. I was trying to think the other day, I'm like, Well, what would be another example that would not be good for a Dow, and for some reason, in my head, a barbershop popped up. And I was like, well, actually, a barber shop would be a really cool Dow, because if you, if you think about, you've got one building, you've got all these people that have chairs or little stalls at the barbershop. And what you could do is you could issue everybody tokens, and that gives them voting rights in the barber shop Dow, if you will, so things that could come up and be like, we would like to put funding towards replacing the sign outside, or we'd like to change the name of the barber shop, or we no longer want Frank as a member of the barber shop, because he, you know, next to many people's heads whenever he cuts people's hair, or things like that. So um, you know, that was kind of a fun example that I could think of that where you could turn an existing company into a Dow something with physical products, we've had a couple people that have companies with physical products that have approaches trying to figure out how to kind of smash that into a Dow. And one issue that we've run into so far is legal status. So companies, oh, yeah, companies trying to be legally recognized as Dows. It's really difficult because of legislation and stuff like that. So there's a I think Wyoming is currently the only state that legally recognizes Dows as a organization. So you'll actually see a lot of Dallas based out of that. There's a Dow currently, that's buying up land in Wyoming just so that they can issue like, the Dow token holders, pieces of land. Yeah, I think I think that's coming along a lot quicker than, you know, people recognize it's going to be a bigger thing. In the future, for sure, hopefully. But again, not everything should be a Dow that's for sure. Like, if you need somebody to actually run the business and make hard decisions, and be the visionary of the company, then a Dow is probably not your thing.
Yeah, one additional kind of thought on that is, I'm a part of a Dow called ens. There, it's the Aetherium naming service. I think it's what it stands for, I think, because I don't remember. But basically, the idea is you can go on just like you can with the regular domain name service, you can go in and reserve your name. So I own Wasner dot eath. eth, and I can assign that address to multiple things that can be tied to an Aetherium address, I can tie it to other, you know, a secondary address that can tie it to a Litecoin or bitcoin address. And so everyone has like a record of what that address is. And so you can see, you know, a company maybe has, you know, Capital One dot eath, where you know that it's a verified transaction, because it came from Capital One dot eath. I feel like I've been saying that
lately in some, like, email domains.
Yeah, if you see it on, you'll see it all over Twitter. People have it. I think Paris Hilton says Paris Hilton. He Oh, wow. And so yeah, people are buying their names, they're buying their companies. And the big difference between buying a domain name and buying it, you know, ens through the US naming service is the ens has a Dow associated with it now at least. And so what they did is they looked at all the people who have purchased domain names, myself and all the other people included, and they airdrops tokens. And those tokens are governance tokens. And they allow you to, like Matt said place votes on things. And so the first thing they had you place votes on they made you select, you know, kind of five questions as you were onboarding. And then one of those was placed your one token, or you know, all of your tokens or you can split them up or whatever, place all your tokens on someone who you want to be your delegate who you want to represent you in this new version of the domain name service. And the cool thing about that is people applied for it just like they would you know, running for government office or something. Where they're like I work at Mozilla. I really you know, passionate about the future of the web and I want to be part of this. I work at discord I work at you No, I'm a small, you know, farmer that is big into crypto or whatever. And you can vote on those people to represent you on the blockchain. And the cool thing about that is that if you compare that to the domain name service, I don't have a say in any of that. It's all, you know, a bunch of, you know, yes, there are people that are voting, but it's all people at companies like Google and, you know, Mozilla, and people that I don't have access to. And so I don't really have a say, if they're gonna, you know, change the rules of the domain name service. Whereas I do have a slight at least a slight kind of say, in how the Ens is, is governed. So that's just kind of one cool thing you can do with a governance token in the Dow.
That is absolutely fascinating. Wow. Great overview, by the way. Thank you.
We try. Yeah, we try to explain it as if you're talking to like your mom or something like, how would you explain this to your mom?
No, no, it's perfect. I mean, I think Apple that's good at helping us you know, be able to explain technical details in like a basic language term. So it comes in handy in all aspects of life. Hey. But this is a good segue into my next question. What are your thoughts on the future of NF T's and the metaverse?
I'll take them I guess. So we can go off each other's. So I the first time I was in a meeting where they use the term Metaverse, I literally said I hate that term. And I do, but it you know it I think the metaverse quote unquote, is here to stay and whether it's whether it's a single Metaverse, or just the metaverse is I don't know what you know, back to my original thing is like, you could have a million people define what the metaverse is, and it's probably something different each company. So we've worked with a company that has their own Metaverse that they eventually were like, yeah, we'll just make it into the you know, merge it into the rest of the metaverse. It's I don't think people really know exactly what the metaverse means and his long term. I think that as far as like the future of NF T's, I think there's some really cool stuff that's in, in the works. I think it's a great concept from a utility perspective, great for adding value to creators. So like content creators, as well as artists and musicians. Well, you could think of it as a really cool example of that would be, say, I, you know, my friends band is out there, and I want to support them, but I don't really want to buy their $5 album, but I've got some crypto and so I want to give them you know, a little bit of crypto in exchange for an asset or the rights to the record. So, you know, they could create an NFT that's like 10 rights or 1010 licenses of our song or album or whatever. And you know, right now, it's not worth a lot. So I give them 100 bucks in crypto. Well, in 10 years, they're a famous musician that's touring. And Sony approaches me and says, Hey, I want to, you know, give you a million dollars for the rights of that song, or I don't know how much money people Sony pays for music, but let's just say it's $100,000 I paid $100 for it there give me 100,000 Well, not only do I benefit from that, but the musician does as well because he gets a royalty. So I think that's where like NF T's are going to last long term is the adding value and utility to creators as well as you know, interacting with the physical space. Another example of the physical space thing, they actually had a V board a yacht club had an actual yacht that they threw a party on that you could only get onto if you had access to a board ape. They may have done like one.
Wow.
Yeah, I, I kind of see the utility of this being a little bit more. A little bit different than Alex I guess. I think his his, his is correct. And I could totally see that too. But I look forward to the day where like my title and registration for my vehicle is on the blockchain. And you know, whenever I sell my car, it's just as easy as you know, scanning a QR code and then signing a blockchain transaction and I get to see you know, everybody that's on that vehicle, you know, the history of it, things like that. Whenever I go do like my emissions check and stuff like that, like I get a stamp from the emissions play saying that this has been, you know, checked out and then it's forever No more like losing papers and stuff like that in your glove box, or you know, selling your house kind of the same thing. Everything being in it Have tea in that regards more of a utility, utilitarian sort of point of view, I guess, instead of a artistic?
Well, I'm curious, what kind of advice would the two of you have for those who are listening? who are looking to get into the NFT and web 3.0 space?
Probably the first thing is, this is not legal advice. Um, but yeah, my first advice is like, getting into the the crypto space, in an empty space can be expensive, and you can easily get scammed. So do your research, that's probably the first thing you can, you know, play around with NF T's in a less expensive way. Because like, using the main platforms like open C and Lux rare and some of these other like NFT platforms, if you're trying to get into NF Ts, you're going to be spending a ton of money just on doing the transaction to purchase it. So for example, if I were to go on and try and sell something, the price could fluctuate from $50, to a transaction to $350, just to trade it based on the you know, various Wow, volatility on the the network at that moment in time. And so like it can, you know, it's not an easy way to just like, jump into the space. But there are like, cheaper alternatives out there, there's side chains and block and you know, alternative blockchains polygon is one of them, that's a kind of a side chain to the main network where you're not paying those astronomical fees. There's also some more like, eco friendly solutions that are, you know, launching NF T's like tezos You know, more for the artists and kind of green conscious people are very heavily involved with tezos. And I think the, you know, the last thing is like, never, never put all your eggs in one basket, you know, like, if you're getting into the space solely to become like a multimillionaire. NFT. flipper, like, yeah, sure there are some of those people. But you know, get into it for the tech, get into it, and really dig into the teams behind these projects, make sure you're getting something that you really believe in the utility behind it and understand what you're getting. I think my last little bit of advice is, you get a seed phrase, which is basically like your golden ticket password to your, you know, your bank account, basically. And so never type that anywhere. That's probably the the biggest thing I've literally seen in work emails, people emailing their seed phrases. Oh, no. And that is a company that has a, you know, whole blockchain side of the organization. And even they made those mistakes. So yeah, that would probably, if there was a number one thing, don't email your feed phrase.
Yeah, with. With crypto, it's like you're taking the security in your own hands, unlike Chase, or something like that, where, you know, they've got all this infrastructure in place to make sure hackers stay out, and things are safe. But it's so easy to get duped into accidentally doing something. These days, especially if you don't know what you're doing. I can imagine all the people that, you know, when Dogecoin got popular, a lot of people were vaping in because, you know, they were seeing how much money people were making the price kept on going up and up and up. And then and then it just crashed pretty much. And a lot of people lost a lot of things.
Yeah, and there are like, you know, as far as taking security into your hands, there are like companies out there that are trying to solve that and give it a kind of, you know, pretty face for the consumer to take some of that security into the company's hands. Coinbase, for example, is one of those companies that is trying to do the NFT thing now, and also the buying and selling and trading of various crypto assets. But there is one kind of caveat with those, his you're giving them control they're in you know, they're in control of all your custodial, or they're in charge of a custodial wallet that is in charge of all your money. And so if that is compromised, unless they're insured, you're losing that money. So there was a famous example of that called Mount Gox. Where basically, it was a way that people were storing all their crypto assets on this platform and all of a sudden, I don't remember the exact scenario but like the thing went under, and so everyone is locked out of their millions and millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. And there's no way to like retrieve that back. So you can hand it over to an organization but there's also like, you want to make sure that you choose an organization that is at least ensuring that in some some way that if something were to be compromised that, you know, it doesn't, doesn't just disappear out of your your wallet.
That's a great, great overview. And thank you for sharing.
I feel like we could probably talk for hours and hours on these just topics alone because there's just so much to absorb. But I think you've, you've given a really good deep dive into the intricacies of everything. But I'd love to hear from you both kind of like, what do you think the future is going to look like? Where where are we going to be? What are we going to be seeing? What is like your version of what the future looks like in about 510 years? Yeah. So first AI for President, I'm excited for that.
And they won't have a Twitter account. That's perfectly fine. Yeah, kind of like what I alluded to earlier, like, I'm hoping that the technology gets used in a more like realistic way. It's not just these dumb profile picture images, 10,000 times that are getting
bought and sold over the internet for 1000s of dollars, it's got an actual, like, really good utility for provenance and buying and selling. And I don't think central banks are going anywhere necessarily. I think, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna be here for quite a while. But whenever Visa and MasterCard and all those people start to really pay attention to the blockchain, I think some of the transactions are going to take place on there. Just because of how quick the transactions happen. The I think, widespread adoption, kind of like LVR was where that came out. And a lot of people didn't know what to do with it at first. And I think we're still trying to figure out like the best utility for it. But at least with this, there's, in my opinion, a lot more real world sort of utility.
Yeah, I think that I agree with a lot of that, I think the biggest thing is going to be making it more consumer facing for the the average full. Like I had to help my sister set up her first Metamask wallet by her first NFT Metamask. It's just a, like a wallet that you can interact with the blockchain with. And she was just, it was just a lot of information to consume. And, you know, you you look at the early days of the internet, and just like the types of people that were on the internet, in early days, were the the nerds, the techie people, you know, sending things on message boards way back in the day. And you know, now everyone can consume it, and everyone can use, you know, say whatever they want on the internet, I think the same is going to be true for web three. And, you know, moving into more decentralized internet, is that it's going to take a little while to get there, there's gonna be some bumps along the way. There's going to be some, you know, North Korean hackers on the blockchain, doing money laundering, but there's also going to be a lot of innovation. And I think that some of the things that I look forward to the most is just the because everything is decentralized. You know, moving from one platform to another is just going to be seamless, because all of my data goes with me. So like to kind of go into that a little further is like, if I was on Facebook, and I wanted to move to a new website called Twitter, I could just, I don't know which one came first. But I could literally just log in with my wallet, and all of the information about everything that I've ever said, or everything that I've ever transacted with everything I've ever, you know, posted out there is available on this other platform. So I know that like when you move, you know, platform to platform you have always like update your profile picture and make sure that everything you know that represents you is on that new platform. Well, I think in the future, we're gonna see a lot more integration with these things that make that kind of transition to a new platform a lot easier. And, you know, social media is one of those examples. I think there's, you know, a million other examples, even things like signing up for a bank account like I can show you my you know, banking history, right on the blockchain, you don't have to go and you know, review all my, you know, years of, you know, two years of employment and all that stuff. You can just look at what I have an account and see all the transactions and give me approval or denial based off of that as opposed to like, you know, credit history or whatever.
Absolutely fascinating.
Absolutely crazy, but it's it's so cool to think about what's possible, but it's important to really, you know, ask the important questions and make sure that it is a safe and equitable space.
But I'm kind of curious if someone who's listening on the show today wanted to get in touch with you to get a project collab. How would they reach out to you?
So as
much as I talk about the NFT Twitter space, I'm not great at Twitter. I get on the morning just to see the new, you know, hype and talk of the day and the NFT space, but I rarely ever post anything unless I'm mad at American Airlines.
And but you can reach me out there, I'll reply to your DMS at Alex Wagner, Al e x, w a s ner.
You can also send me some eath at Wasner dot eath.
And you can hit us up on 230 six.com There's little contact us at the bottom of the page. And that's 236 spelt out.com.
Cool, cool. Well, Alex, Matt, before we wrap up, is there anything else that you'd like to share? What you got Matt?
You know, just don't be afraid to dive into some of these projects. You know, it's daunting, there's a lot of steps, but it's gonna get easier.
It's the people that make the future of this thing. So yeah, I, I think that if I had like one kind of, like, last little word of wisdom is just like, have fun with it. I think that a lot of people in the NFT space are very easygoing, and fun people. There's definitely some jerks out there. But a lot of people that they understand that their image they just bought about for a bunch of money is kind of a dumb idea in general. But that it's they're having fun with it. And that, you know, at the end of the day, if they sold, you know, picture for $10,000 They had a laugh, everyone else has a laugh at them, then it's it's still a good place.
So, you know, I think that, have fun with it. I couldn't agree more. And that's just a really good note to end on. Thank you both for coming on the show and just having this very enlightening conversation. I definitely have a lot of takeaways here and I'm sure the audience has definitely found something insightful and learn something new from you to today. So thank you so much. And for everyone listening, I will put a link to 236 labs in the show notes, so you can check out their website. And we'll also be connecting their socials if you'd like to connect with Matt or Alex on social media. But thank you for listening to coffee and code
