Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome again everyone to a special bonus episode of Waiting to Be Signed. I'm here with co-host Trinity as always, and this week we have a special guest, Kaloh, from Twitter, from his newsletter, from Spain. I'm just going to kind of let you introduce yourself from here. I think you're a big character in the NFT space. Maybe you can let us know how you got involved, what brought you to NFTs, fx hash, Tezos, you know, all the above.

Speaker B: Well, thanks, thanks for the invite and doing this. I think it's Great podcast, and and yeah, I feel like we need more more of this kind of content. And yes, you said I am I'm known as Kalo, and and I've been writing a newsletter called Kalo's Newsletter for around eight months now. Yeah, how I I kind of you know I always wanted to to write in the past. I I've written blogs about baseball and stats. But they didn't, like, I didn't continue for as long as now. I guess my background is in technology. I'm a software developer and I work in tech for around 8 years doing, you know, software development, data science, and product management. And yeah, I always, you know, I'm very interested in new technologies and I guess that's how I got into the crypto world. And then later into NFTs. And I guess now I'm also a collector, right? And I also released some of my own NFTs. But yeah, I guess the main thing I'm doing now is the newsletter.

Speaker C: That's amazing. And obviously 8 months ago is way longer than FX Hash has been around. So when did you actually get into NFTs? Was it like an entry point of you saw the space, you loved it, you started your newsletter, or? What's your journey like been through the space?

Speaker B: I discovered, well, crypto a long time ago. I think it was in 2013, so 7 years ago. I wrote an article about that and how I was mining Bitcoins with some friends, some colleagues at the office. But somehow I stopped doing that and I didn't come back to crypto for like 5 years. And it was, I mean, last year, 2021, I started to read very early, like in January, About Ethereum and all these dApps and all the things you could actually build on top of this blockchain, and I really liked that. I think it was much more interesting than just Bitcoin, and I started to play around, build some things like in my free time. And I guess in March, right? That's when NFTs were in the headlines because of all the big sales. So I mean, it was very hard for me to. To understand what was going on and trying to find good sources explaining what was happening, both in, you know, in dApps in general, in the whole ecosystem, DeFi, but also how NFTs worked. And it took me a while, you know, to understand what— how the whole thing worked. And I wanted to do— I had some free time, I wanted to do something on my free time, and I said, okay, I can just start writing along the way. And I didn't know at the beginning what was it that I was going to write, right? But then I just said, well, when I discover something new, something cool, I will just write an article. I didn't even have a goal. I wanted to do it weekly or daily or monthly. I just went with the flow and it started to grow, right? Like, I guess, as I said, there wasn't that much content around. And yeah, it started to get some subscribers and discover Twitter. And I guess that's— I took it from there and just naturally wrote what I thought was interesting.

Speaker C: Has it always been market-focused? I know that's really been your focus, at least as it pertains to the work on Tezos. What was your early content about? Because like, I think that the market then was just crazy volatility. Nobody knows what's happening.

Speaker B: My first articles were more about artists, right? Like some artists that I like, and I wrote about their NFTs, explaining what I thought it was, like the art behind it. But then You know, I started to collect PFPs projects on Ethereum, and I wrote about my experience doing that. I collected the Pudgy Penguins, which were like from one week to another blew up like over one ETH each of them. So I kind of wrote a story, right? Like how everything since the moment I mint them until I sold some of those. And so I started to dig into the economics, right? Like the return of investment. And but I also wrote about the community aspect, meeting people online and what it means to be part of a community and all these projects that actually have a goal, right? Like an end goal is not just to make money. So that was like probably around the first 2 months, 3 months, I was still like writing about different things. But then fxhash, as you mentioned, when fxhash came around, that was November, around those months. So that The volume was very high. You know, very quickly it became like a very important marketplace on Tezos. And as I was collecting, I couldn't find like information. How are things going? Are they going up or down? If I buy this, what was the price last week? And after I bought it, like I wanted to understand, okay, am I like doing well or not? So I started to do it for myself. As I said, I was writing mostly about what I was doing, what I was learning. I started to Post these Twitter threads about the market analysis, just to inform what was going on with the market. Right? And then, as I got more confident, I started adding some insights. Right? Like what I thought could happen, what was driving the prices. I think people liked that because again it was needed. Right? There were not many resources doing that. Now FX hash has evolved, and they are adding more statistics and. You can see the leaderboards and you see some information, but still it's very hard to cover everything. And I think the best is that external sources also support, right, like what's happening. It cannot be only the platform doing it. It needs to be like external players doing these sort of things.

Speaker A: I mean, that's one of the reasons we want to have you on, right? Because in some way our show is trying to do that as well, not just through our discussions, market trends and what we're observing and the way people are kind of talking in Discord, but also, you know, looping in artists and just recapping the week because it's so hard to remember what happened 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago. It feels like such a long time ago. Before we can, you know, I think the focus of this episode, we definitely want it to be on the market. So one, we forgot to do the disclaimer, of course, that none of this will be financial advice. This is just us talking about FXHash, the platform we know and love. So please enjoy and don't trade on any of this or make any decisions because of what we say. But before we really go formally into the market discussion, which I'm super excited about, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about the project you released recently, which first of all, congrats, sold out really quickly and has had quite a bit of activity on the secondary. And I saw you were putting some curated pieces up on OBJKT as well. So was that your very, very first NFT creation or just your first generative piece?

Speaker B: Thank you for the shout out. I created some NFTs in the past. I actually some of my editions, like the newsletter editions, I created them as NFTs as well, sort of like you could mint my newsletter. But I don't know, I, I feel like the marketplaces are not really there yet for written content, so I, I kind of stopped after a while. And then I also work in a project called the UniBots, where I mostly did like the communications and the technology part, like the smart contract. And the art was done by 2 artists, one from Argentina called Multivac and Datcel from Mexico. So I work in the past year, I work on that project, which was more like a PFP community-driven project, right? And then I work on the Impossible Sneakers. Yeah, I released that a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, I was very, very excited. I mean, the whole thing was very interesting, like Putting myself in the shoes of the of the artist and coding it. I think I learned a lot from the whole whole experience. How to from an idea until the final creation, the final algorithm, and then seeing the the reception. I I was not expecting it. It was mint like in forty forty seconds. I I also made it sort of like a small collection. I didn't want it to be like five hundred one thousand pieces. It was seventy five. And I think it's complicated to create, you know, a generative collection. You have to take many things into account and you have to also do many, many tests and see many iterations to actually understand what's happening. And you cannot do it like one by one, which is something I learned. If you just test and see outputs one by one, you kind of lose the feeling of how the whole collection will look. At the end. So you need to see them as maybe 50 by 50 and trying different outputs. And also getting feedback from my readers, from Twitter was very interesting. I try to use the build in public. I don't know if it's a technique or how you can call it, but basically sharing your progress right over time and see what people say, if they like it, if they have some ideas. And that was very, very, very cool. And getting the feedback while I was coding it.

Speaker A: Yeah, super similar to what we've been doing with the podcast now, like once a month releasing an NFT on fx hash as a way to fundraise and so that the community can support the show if they enjoy it. And it was really rewarding actually today, Trinity, you were away while this happened, but someone in the gallery section of the Discord posted a picture of their gallery that had one of our fractal NFTs in it. And I was like, oh, thank you for supporting the podcast. And they're like, I don't even listen to the podcast. minted it because I thought it was cool, which was like, okay, 2 and a half months of learning p5 is starting to pay off maybe. So yeah, super cool that you're, you know, you went down that same kind of journey into creating that we have been. I assume you use p5, right?

Speaker B: Yes, just p5. And I don't know, I feel like you can use other libraries, right? But I wanted to use just p5 and I still want to kind of master p5. I think there are many, many more things to try and learn, and before adding something else, I would like to, you know, get, get better at p5.

Speaker C: I mean, I think that from what I've seen, p5 can just go so deep and goes forever. It's basically a question of how much math do you want to be able to apply to it. But I'm assuming that your programming background, that you've been— you're very familiar with JavaScript generally. And that p5 was more of just learning a new way to think about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I actually worked a lot with Java at the beginning, which is not, I mean, it's similar to JavaScript, but I didn't do much frontend-wise, right? I always worked like more in the backend roles and data science, right? So that's really like, you don't really need to, you don't pay too much attention into the frontend. It's mostly like, well, some charts, some, how to explain what sort of what you discover, like maybe do a presentation, but not so much like I never work in UI and UX. I did design some things, but more like, you know, mockups and like raw mockups, but not into the creative part. And that's, I think, something that I'm learning now and I'm really enjoying.

Speaker A: That's the— that'll be the p5 corner of the podcast. That's kind of the first time we've really talked openly about that on the show. But yeah, I think let's transition into FXHash markets and trends. It's been a really interesting time on the platform, I would say in February in particular, but starting with the new year, I think we've just kind of seen a relaxing of pace in the market. Every week seems to have brought less new generators, new drops from artists, artists taking longer time in between or maybe churning away from the platform. lower volume kind of across the boards, not just on fxhash, but it seems globally, right? There's just so much going on. So curious to know, like, what's your current take on the state of the market and what do you feel in NFTs in general or for fxhash where we might be going in the coming weeks or months?

Speaker B: It's very hard to say, right? Because it's in terms of what can happen, because it's still a very new space, right? And it's a completely greenfield. So we will have to, I think the best way to try to predict or understand what could happen is to look at Ethereum, right? That has been around for a little bit longer. And what I've seen there, it's that there are trends and there are ups and downs and cycles, right? So the NFT space, it doesn't matter what kind of art or what kind of platform you're using, it's a lot driven by hype. And news, and there are some triggers that cause more traffic to come to X or Y platform, right? So we saw that, I think fx hash started out impressive way, right? Like it was less than a month that the platform was around and we had many artists, many collectors already in there. And basically, I don't know, like 60, 70% of the projects were minting out. I think that the Since it started like so fast and the growth was so so quick at the beginning, it's hard to maintain that rhythm, right? It's not sustainable that those things continue, those numbers continue to to show to happen every every day. And I think we are more in a stable zone right now, and we need to look the volume, but we also need to look at the numbers in in terms of users, right? Like how many users, how many new artists, and how many collectors or unique wallets are in the platform. And that's growing constantly. Like every time I do my analysis, we're up on a weekly basis, probably like from 5 to 15% monthly. And that's, that's our great numbers. If we keep that rate for a year or two, we'll be in a great spot in terms of users. It's true that the volume, it's, it's a little bit down compared to the peaks, but still, if we do like average take into account the average, it's still going up. As I said, I still see it growing and maybe not sure if— I mean, a good comparison or something to take into account is when we compare Ethereum to Tezos. I was running some numbers the other day in terms of volume and Tezos is still in volume 1% of what Ethereum is right now. Of course, there are some very high collections on Ethereum driving that volume, right? Because we have the Apes and we have all these over 10 ETH collections. But that's— imagine like if Tezos just grows and becomes 5% of Ethereum or 10% of Ethereum, we'll see what, like x10, x20 of what we have at the moment. And fx hash, of course, being the only generative art platform and having this solid community of artists, collectors, it will get noticed even faster, right? The volume will grow from one month to another much faster, right? So yes, something to think about. I like to compare things, right, to keep track of more on a monthly basis and try to compare those key stats, right? Number of users and number of artists. I think that's the most important.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I was really into the number of wallets or number of users metric, and now I'm starting to feel like Paradoxically, right, the number of users goes up but our volume is going down. And I just wish there was some way or some site that was keeping track of on-chain that measured the frequency with which— or only counting wallets that interacted on a daily basis or every other day, right? Because it's really hard to know what number of those wallets have been inactive for 2, 3, 4, 6 weeks, but they're still counted, right? So it shows us growth. I think there's this well-known whale from back in December named Darold who just hasn't been around, right? And everyone's like, where's Darryl? But he's counted. He's in there.

Speaker C: He actually counted twice.

Speaker A: He's also other Darryl. He's got other Darryls. Yeah, it's one of those tricky things where I agree, I feel like the platform is in general growing, and, but we lack a super meaty metric to really get our hands around what's going on. Yeah, it's a hard question. Sorry, I threw you like a what's going to happen in the future question, which is a big no-no in crypto.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think also 2 months ago when fx hash was getting all this attention, people that were collecting there, many people were coming from Ethereum, and they were thinking that fx hash will get to the same level, like the floors and the volume that Art Blocks had at their peak last year. And but that's, that's very hard, right? Like Art Blocks volume was crazy high. It's very hard to replicate those numbers. So then when they saw that that was not going to happen in the short term, they kind of left. That's something that I've been thinking, right? Like they were expecting, okay, from one month to another, we see these, the same floors, we see like maybe a new Fidenza on Tezos and everybody wants to collect that one. Don't miss out. But I think that, yeah, it will take, it will take more time for that to happen.

Speaker C: But again, it's kind of when you are expecting these giant floors and then you leave, you're kind of preventing that floor rising from happening. You know, I think that, you know, a lot of the floors have been at their highest when we have the most active and the most ardent collectors. And so obviously you don't want to be the person who's single-handedly pulling the floor up with you as you buy higher and higher, but it is an interesting market action to kind of, to look at from a long-term perspective. It would make sense to understand that what it means to be early Might be different on FXHash than what it meant for Art Blocks way back when NFTs were at the tippiest top of their height. Buying an Art Brad, for example, for 8 tez and just kind of holding it long-term, it seems like a no-brainer. So the fact that they would like just leave the platform altogether and not even try to purchase things on the primary or, you know, when things are getting flipped really low on the secondary, I don't know. It's an interesting chain of events. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's also because some, for example, I collect mostly because I like the art, right? So I feel like I collect things because there is a chance these NFTs go high in value at some point. Maybe I sell them. That's great. But also I will say big part of my portfolio, I have it because I like them, but that's not the general case. Most people on NFTs are here to make money, right? And to flip NFTs and maybe buy and get 100% gains. So those will probably find some opportunities somewhere else, right? Maybe on other chains or other hot platforms. So the hype of the month. So they will— they probably are just jumping around doing these sort of investments. But the people that stay and the ones that are joining now are the ones that are here because either they like the art or they like to create art. And those, If we think about the long term, are the ones that FXHash wants to have around because they will be around. It doesn't matter what the floor is. It doesn't matter if the volume is high or low. They want, they like to actually create or collect on the platform. And I think that's the key at this moment. Of course, it's good to have whales and have these big investors, right? That's important. But more importantly is to have these true fans, especially now that it's not even like 6 months old. Those are the, the ones that will be around from 5, 10 years from now and will tell the story, right? And but it doesn't mean, right, like those that came during those months will not come back. They are probably, as I said, maybe investing somewhere else, but they will for sure have it in their radar once volume goes back to higher numbers.

Speaker A: Yeah, I remember in December when we started not even December, in January, and we started noticing the slowdown, then one of the narratives in the Discord from some of the bigger users who also played a lot on ETH were like, everyone's just paying attention to ETH PFP projects right now and that's where all the money is to be made. And they were thinking about it from a purely ROI standpoint. It was like, you know, let us go make our money on ETH and then we're going to come back and invest with passion on FXHash. Because if you're a large enough wallet, whether or not you mint a project or buy one on the secondary, even if it's like 2 or 3 or 5x over mint by the time you buy it, it probably doesn't matter that much to you on a cost basis level because we're still talking about Tezos here versus ETH, right? So I definitely think there's something to that. But I know you started talking about your approach to collecting, and I'm curious to know from looking at your newsletter and looking at the data you put out every week, I actually don't really know what you like to collect that much.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I'd be curious to know like what type of art you like to collect and Do you do any flipping at all? You know, that's something that we talk about on the show is that we do kind of flip to sustain our wallets when we have to. And like, what's your approach to that?

Speaker B: Let me start from what I collect. I think I don't have like anything specifically that I collect. Over the past 2, 3 months, I've been collecting mostly generative art on FXHash, but I do collect from time to time You know, in on other Tezos platforms, and I'm also active on Ethereum. I do flip, but I don't I'm not doing that like on a daily basis. As you said, like I I'm probably selling on Tezos. I'm not really selling much, to be honest. I think I have sold like five to six things that since I joined from when you think about big NFTs like over a hundred Tezos. I see more Ethereum as the place where I flip. But again, it takes a lot of time to do it short term. I don't know. I did it when I when I joined like the first three four months when I joined the NFT space. I was paying attention to like what to buy today, what to flip, checking all the floors. But I didn't I didn't enjoy that, right? So you could make money doing that, but it was not very rewarding. Let's say so. I kind of changed that for a more sustainable strategy. So I'm thinking more long term. So basically, I'm collecting. What I like in terms of art, but I pay a lot of attention to the, to the artist, their background, their history, how they manage their portfolio, their style, their socials. For me, very important. I'm trying to invest in artists that will be doing this over the next 5, 10 years, that they are not just here for the hype, but they are actually going to be here around for 5, 10 years, as I said. So those are the ones that I'm collecting, but I also pay a lot of attention to How was it created? Is it something very unique that I haven't seen around? I see a lot of abstract creations. So I see recently a lot of, probably you have seen all these, how do you call them? Views, right? Like mountains and yeah, a lot of mountains.

Speaker C: Seascapes, trees.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning it was unique, right? And when Zancan created his Zancan piece, which still is very, very unique, the monoliths, the garden monoliths, that was amazing. But now I'm not, you know, I'm trying to find unique things and I'm also looking into how they create the code. I'm not reading the code, but I'm trying to get a feeling of how complex it is to create that piece in particular. But I'm collecting mostly for the long term. So I probably sold 2 or 3 on fx hash at one point. I just listed them, but it takes a lot of time, you know, to be listing and to be checking the floors. And many people do it, and it's something that anybody can do, and you probably can earn some income doing that. But I say it's not really rewarding for me, so I'm trying to collect things for the long term that maybe I flip at some point, and things that I just will never flip, right? I just want to hold them. I like the art. Probably 15% of my collection I will never sell. And then the rest, if the price is right, maybe I will, but I don't think it is at this moment, right? I expect it to keep growing. I really enjoy what I'm doing and what all the artists are doing. And I truly believe that if fxhash is around 5, 10 years from now and keeps growing at this pace, especially the collections from the first 5, 6 months will be very valuable.

Speaker C: I think that's something that we're all looking forward to. It's just hard to kind of have that long-term view when we're still so young and so, so new to it. When it comes to like the stable or like the down market that we've been experiencing over the last month or so, has that impacted the way or the volume with which you collect?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say a little bit, but also because I'm not flipping, right? So if I'm not flipping, it's hard to just continue to buy art. If I had more time to maybe flip some things and kind of clean my portfolio and get more income. That way I could sustain collecting more. But at the same time, I prefer to use that time writing or, you know, reading what's going on. Yeah, I will say it's part of because of the volume, because the volume went down, so I haven't flipped some things that otherwise maybe I will. And yeah, but I still Like daily I check the drops, right? I try to mint things that come pop up. It's very hard to mint, as you know. So it's sometimes if I miss the mint, I'll jump in later, maybe a few days after. But yeah, I was collecting a lot in December. I think it was December. And also because I kind of sold the way I look at it. I sold some things on Ethereum and move part of that portion to Tezos, which is something that I wanted to do. For a while, when you think about it, you can easily flip things on Ethereum for 1 ETH and up. And when you move that to Tezos, that's a lot. Like, you can buy plenty of things. So once that move that I did kind of ran out, I now have like a more selective strategy, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think both Trinity and I have— we were there during the honeymoon phase in December when it just seemed like you literally could not miss on a mint and everything you minted was immediately worth 10x what you minted it for and just That was really the heyday.

Speaker C: It was so much fun.

Speaker A: It was a lot of fun. It was stressful because you'd want to be up and you wouldn't want to miss anything, but it was quite a ride and got us pretty addicted enough to make this show. But you, you know, you were saying now that it can be hard to compete for mints. I don't disagree, and I think a lot of that is driven by obviously people who are really logged on and want to be flipping, you know, humans who are behaving within their normal restrictions, but then also people who are running bots. bots or multiple wallets and scripting. I'm sure you're aware of that. Do you have any kind of view on what that's doing to the platform? Is that a long-term problem? I mean, I'm sure it exists on ETH, but I've, I've not really traded enough on ETH to know how much of an impact that has on the economies there.

Speaker B: In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with flipping, right? I think it actually brings some advantages, right? It brings exposure to artists, it brings liquidity, and It pays more royalties to the FX hash, to the platforms, and to artists. I have nothing against flippers, but I am think bots are not positive. So for me, flippers are positive. It keeps kind of the flow, the liquidity, the volume. But bots are not because they used you know it's kind of they can control create kind of a monopoly right of things, and it's very hard to track. I'm sure I think the FX hash team. They mentioned that they are analyzing these things, checking the blockchain, and they have probably already like a big list of wallets that are using bots. There should be a way to, you know, block bots. They are working already on the whitelist. Also, it hurts artists because their pieces are distributed among people that not necessarily collect them because they like, right? They are just collecting for financial gains. And they can drive the price up and down. Yeah, that can affect them if they have multiple collections being collected by bots. They can play with the floors and that's not positive for their long-term, what do you say, image as an artist, right? Flippers, on the other hand, it's kind of okay because also they bring like this hype to some artists. And it's like when there is a concert in real life, right? There comes a big band comes to town. If the tickets sell out quickly, that's because the band is really demanded. So that's, as long as the ways to acquire the tickets are fine, that's okay. It brings hype and it brings some sort of attention to the artist. But I think this will be solved. The bot situation will be solved with whitelists. So then artists can create their own, you know, restrictions on who mints, work in their communities and be more restrictive and maybe at least have like 60, 50% of the pieces going to whitelist and the rest going in a public sale, which is what the happens on Ethereum. Now whitelists also bring all sorts of problems, and it could be very, very boring, and spending a lot of time to be on a whitelist is also— I don't think it's the solution. But for that to happen, there needs to be just huge amounts of demand. So I think the early days of whitelists are fine. The problem is so many people want to get into the whitelist that it becomes a problem. So as a short-term solution, I think it's it's going to work. But again, I'm not against flippers. I think they bring some good things also.

Speaker A: I mean, we flip, so we're not— we flip ethically and we're not against it either. Yeah, it's just such a strange thing with the bots because a lot of what artists have done now with the tools they have, their primary tool for combating it has been price and trying to price their work at that level that the flippers might be flipping it at. So if they were going to put it at 10, maybe they put it at 25 or 30. And we've seen such mixed results from that where sometimes you get these really nice slow mints where only collectors really get them and they happen over the course of hours instead of the course of minutes. And then we just have this nice sustained floor at that level that goes up or stays level, right? But then sometimes you have an artist who comes in and tries that and then they don't get minted at all after they've had 2 or 3 or 4 drops just completely botted and flipped on them. And it just creates this really schizophrenic—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: ecosystem for artists to operate in where all they want is to get paid what they think the art is worth and get it into the hands of collectors. And it seems sometimes like all of these factors are working against them just doing that when, when we're trying to— we're trying to have this thing called the blockchain that's supposed to facilitate it and make it go super easily, right? It's supposed to be super frictionless and just all these other market-based conflicts arise that are super challenging to resolve.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. But also there is a thing about the How often should an artist release collections? And I don't think it's sustainable for artists to release collections every 2, 3 days, work maybe on longer, long-term projects and maybe release every month, every 2 months. In that way, you always have this sort of expectation people are going to be looking for your mint. But I mean, it's an open platform and you can do different things, right? You can have different strategies. You maybe are just experimenting. This is maybe a hobby. And maybe you now have the time to create, and maybe not in the future. I feel like big artists will always mint out, right? If you are able to create this good sort of image, and many use FXHash, for example, M Soria, you know, M Soria for Contrapuntos, Entretiempos. He built this huge hype on FXHash, and he moved on to Art Blocks now with his curated series. Even though he was very hyped, He only released 2 collections on fxhash. And I think that, that work, it probably would have been very different if he released 10 or 15 collections during that time on fxhash. So it's also about how the artists manage their drops and how they build expectation for their collections.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's just an interesting thing to think about because I think that we have seen a lot of artists, as you said, drop every few days. Sometimes people drop multiple times in the same day. And it's definitely like not sustainable from that perspective. But I think that it's really hard to always be trying to work in like the rule set of how the market is operating because the rules are constantly changing. It's definitely evolving at like a much faster rate than you can possibly respond to or think through. Every single week is different. Every single day is different. Sometimes it's even thinking about what time zones are like active right now. It's a huge amount of work.

Speaker A: I'm curious to know, and I was kind of trying to get you to give some names before when I was asking who you collect, but who do you think is doing it right and is a good example? Like, I have a few names that I can think of and throw out, but I'm cur— you know, it's your interview, so I'm curious to know what you think, Kaloh. Like, who's high on your list of they're kind of just hitting every mark in terms of they're communicating in social media, they're dropping quality work, the right frequency, their pricing, everything. Like, who are some of your tops on FX Hash?

Speaker B: If you think about the success rate, I think Mark Knoll on FX hash. He I mean he has done many things right and it's working out very well. He has a solid community now. He has kind of a brand in small schools, and he has released many collections, right? It's not that he just made two three drops. He has probably over ten drops, and he has also experimented with different things. So I would say Mark Knoll is definitely. Doing something right. I don't know exactly how to explain what it is. I guess just people like his style, and he was early on the platform as well, and he has been on Tezos for a while before FXHash too. So that's something to take into account. I also think, you know, G. Wenlin is doing also great work. His collections are— he's also released a lot— well, not a lot, but probably over 10 collections, around 10 collections, and I think he's doing very well. It's high-quality collections. And then from there, I'm looking at my list because, you know, many— it's hard to say because many of— if you look at the over 25 Tezos collections, they are all doing great, right? These are collections that are worth— if you look at the market cap, some of them are worth over 10,000 Tezos. So many are doing well in terms of the most successful ones. So yeah, Yee Wen Ling is a good example and Mark Knol, but it's hard to explain what it is that they are doing Right. I'm also curious what— who are in your list, like, of the ones doing it well, doing it right?

Speaker A: I'll say that vibes is probably the word you're looking for. That's what we say in the US, that they've got good vibes. Like, I don't know why we like them.

Speaker C: Jazzy.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's something jazzy about them. One I would throw out would be Rudxane, I think is doing something right there, not only with the frequency. Now he's on a pace of about once a month. There's a lot of work and intention going into the releases. And now that he's done the Dutch auction and he's moved away from just these low-price drops, like, I think he's really established himself here and the diversity of the work. And he's also just such a cornerstone of the community in the Discord. So he's one I would nominate.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And you see the progress on his work, right? He has kind of evolved from 3, 4 months from now. You see his collections changing and I really like that.

Speaker C: I think from my end, one of the artists that has just been doing so well despite not really releasing a lot has been Erik Swahn. With Disegnatori, Farbteiler, and then Retrogrades. Just 3 projects, which is really quite slow. No new projects this year at all, but they all seem to be maintaining healthy floors. Like Disegnatori went and had like a really big sweeping from earlier this week. The floor doubled just through the efforts of one person. But I think that's one that it's really being held by collectors more than anything.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree. I wonder if he will release something soon.

Speaker C: Fingers crossed. Eric, if you're out there, let us know.

Speaker A: Well, I was curious, you know, we've talked a little bit about the allow listing coming future post-beta. Have you kind of caught up on some of the new dynamics with the DAO system and the fx hash token?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was actually thinking about that today. I'm looking forward for the curated spaces. I think that's going to be amazing. It will actually drive traffic to certain collections that are really good, but are forgotten, or maybe they didn't get the right attention when they were dropped. So that's something that I'm looking forward. I wish there could be a way to connect it to my newsletter, for example, and maybe in the future, right? So that you can actually build these sort of curated spaces outside of fxhash to drive traffic into fxhash. I think that would be a great tool to attract newer users that have never been there. But the token and the DAO, I think those are very important. For the community, right, to keep the community strong. And also when you think about investors, it's another way to invest, not necessarily on the art, supporting the artist, right, directly. But if you are an investor that you are not necessarily into generative art, you can just invest by buying a bunch of tokens, right? So it's a more straightforward way of investing in the platform, and I think that will be attractive for many people. But yeah, I think that's a great move. I was hearing Cypher on a Twitter Space. I mean, it's amazing that they are releasing all these things. I hope they can stick to their timeline. I think it's very optimistic, but they have been delivering, right? Time after time. So I'm sure they have the right people to do it. They have been very accurate so far. I hope they can stick to the timeline. So in a couple of months, we should have all these things. makes it like a very solid platform all around. When you compare it to other chains as well, it's like top 5 platform in the whole NFT ecosystem for sure.

Speaker C: Wow. Those are, that's high praise. And I don't have as much experience with the other NFT platforms, but I can feel from everything that I've experienced on fx hash or on Tezos that it is de facto the best one in my opinion, just from usability, community, and just the way that it's It's really structured. I think it's really well suited for, you know, as you said, it's about the excitement, the hype, and also just kind of enabling people to continue to drive the market. I think with that said though, a lot of this FXHash token and the DAO where they're really coming in our full launch period, which is allegedly next month or maybe more in the next month or so, people have been saying a lot around the slowness of the market right now could be partially due to waiting for beta to end. What do you think will start happening as we transition out of beta and into like the full release platform?

Speaker B: I think that the key thing there is that all tokens, so all collections, will remain on the old contract, right? So there will be a difference between new collections and the beta collections. To be honest, I don't know if I particularly don't have any sort of strategy or just holding for the full launch to collect. I'm not waiting for that. What I think could happen in the future is that these tokens that were minted during the beta period could have a special value. Those could have additional value just because they were minted during the beta period, and that can never happen again. That's the only thing that I could see happening in the future, but I don't know, maybe, maybe people are actually waiting to collect after the full release or after this new contract is launched. But yeah, I haven't thought much about that.

Speaker A: I think it's more the artists who are waiting to release because they are worried about once we switch over to the new contract, the old contract will be deactivated. So if they have an unminted project, it's going to essentially be burned by moving over. Or if they have interrelated projects like a multiple-part series, they don't want to have some of them existing on the old contract and separated from the new contract. So, so that's kind of one thing we've seen is artists popping in and saying like, hey, don't worry, I'm going to release soon, but I'm just waiting for the new contract, which is supposed to come mid-March, right? So that would maybe be a week or two after this episode releases.

Speaker B: But one question, you will still be able to trade the old tokens, right? The thing is, probably from a view perspective, they will be separated maybe, or there will be like an icon showing if they are beta. From that period, from the old contract.

Speaker C: I don't know why it needs to be that way. Perhaps it's just a way of providing like a status that, hey, this is an OG project. I think that more of the concern is around the fact that you wouldn't be able to mint any of the beta projects. And so essentially, if it's not minted out, that's it, the rest will be burned. And it's kind of like that entire set will remain as is. But if anything, that'll help, it'll drive the prices of the projects that haven't minted naturally, making them a smaller set.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Or they know that there's a lot of new features coming on the new contract, like the ability to have multiple artists listed in, or multiple wallets, right? So collaborative contracts or Dutch auctions that are actually built in so you don't have to sit there and manually manage them. So there could be a lot of like just quality of life concerns where I had this idea, I want to do a Dutch auction, but I don't want to babysit my drop for 2 hours and change the pricing around.

Speaker B: I think maybe as well we're getting close to that, right? It's what, 2-3 weeks away? So probably, let's say, if I'm having a new collection ready in one, in one or 2 weeks, I will probably wait for that, the launch of the new contract. But during February, if they had a collection ready, let's say last week, I think they will still release it, right? But, but I'm not sure. Maybe it's a good question for Artie. Right, and artists that are more active. And maybe I could do— we'll run a Twitter poll on that.

Speaker C: Well, technically you are an artist, right?

Speaker A: One, you are an artist, and your Twitter is way bigger than ours, so you should definitely run that Twitter poll and get some serious data. So I think it was interesting to hear that you do kind of buy into the narrative that the beta projects, which are going to be labeled as like genesis tokens, could have a higher value. And I know right now a lot of the collector community is kind of focused on like first 20 projects on the platform. Obviously you have like the logos, RGBs, Weave, all the way up until like number 20 is Chromatic Dazzle by W. Blythe. Do you think it's kind of further back we go in history, we're just going to kind of see this more asymmetry, right? There's going to be projects that are sufficiently early to be grail or collectible. There's going to be projects from the beta that are just grails on status and quality, like Zancan or Waiting in Afton or, you know, Loom, things like that. And then what kind of happens to the rest? Does it have some kind of collectible value or do we stay with this very polarized outcome where a lot of it's just going to become, hey, it's cool that it's a beta piece. That's like a nice piece of history. But, you know, we're really only talking about 10 or 20 projects here that matter.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's a tough question, but I think it was Gary Vee, you know, the influencer. He's very vocal about NFTs, and he said that probably 5% of NFTs will have value in the future. But only like 1% will be like really valuable. So 5% will probably retain some value. 1% will be, you know, like the top and will be worth a lot. He also says that that's probably very optimistic. I think that applies, you know, to FXHash and to all NFTs, some number, some percentage around those two. So, well, what, what do we have? We have 20,000 or 40,000 collections, 50,000 collections, something like that. I think it's impossible for over 50% to retain value in the, in the future. It's very hard because there is just too much supply and it's very hard. So I would say maybe 0.5% of FXHash will have value in the future.

Speaker A: We just crossed the 10K, we just crossed the 10,000 project mark last week. So 0.5 to 1% would be 50 to 100 projects, right? So not, not too far off that 10 to 20 mark. It's within an order of magnitude of that.

Speaker C: And again, I don't know if you're following FX Tender at all as a form of curation.

Speaker B: I've seen it.

Speaker C: Yeah, those numbers roughly line up. I think there are about 150, maybe 200 projects that have actually been curated. And so obviously that's a little bit larger than that 1% number, but it's roughly in line with what will actually have value down the line.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then as there is more supply, there will be more collections that are valuable, right? It's just how things work, how it's very hard for more collections to retain values. We need more collectors for that and more, you know, more users. It's not bad. This is still a lot, like 1%, 5%. And it's like when you think about it as a collector, maybe your goal is to try to find those that will be in that 1%. And then do— when you look at the piece or at the collection ask yourself, is this going to be 10 years from now in the top 1% of fx hash?

Speaker A: Well, I wish I studied art in college so I could actually have any kind of basis to make that assessment. I think that's one of the challenges we often have on the show is like there's things that appeal to us and there's things that we know influencers say are good. And I think it's not just unique to us. I think a large portion of the community is really at a loss to appraise art in that sense, right? Because anything that's really valuable 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, it's going to probably also be driven by some kind of acceptance of larger art community and they're going to have their own standards that apply to these things, you know, unless, unless it just completely cleaves off and crypto becomes this outsider community that makes its own rules.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know it's interesting to think about it because obviously the artists are a huge amount, like a huge part of our community on FXHash. But outside of that group of artists who are actively artists or designated artists, how many of the people who are pure collectors have an art background outside of NFTs, I wonder? So it's just like being able to make that qualitative analysis. Is that something that we're actually getting without looking towards some of the more established members of the community who also carry that artist tag?

Speaker A: Sometimes the most established artists are the ones that create the most friction, right? I'm not going to name any names, but there are a few generative artists out there who have quite a lot of credentials whose work doesn't always get minted or trade at the level that we see like a Tree of the Week or a Mountain of the Week trade at. And it's like, These people have a lot of pedigree and it's kind of bizarre that the community just goes, you know, you didn't make me a mountain, I'm not going to collect you this week when they are far and away more likely to stand the test of time over 20 or 30 years.

Speaker B: And something you said about having an art degree to be able to kind of critique these sort of projects, I think that's interesting because generative art has been around for— since computers. Were created and you could actually code. But I feel like this is like a new start since they were combined with NFTs. Actually, we need— it's really needed, right, this sort of critics and art historians to actually write or create these storylines and try to explain what has value and what doesn't. But it's a— I think it's a new field. It's out there and we need this. I don't know if they will be collectors or even artists to actually explain and have a thought process on what's considered to be valuable. I'm trying to find, you know, good sources for this because I want to get also more educated in the— not only in the financial aspects, but more into the art topic. And it's interesting because it's not that easy to find these sort of resources. There are many good books out there, not to what's happening now with NFTs and blockchain and Art Blocks and fx hash. So it's a complete, I think, new field, and we need more people to actually think about this and create ways and critique and curate art. I think it's something that naturally will come, right? But I hope it happens fast.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, I know you're, uh, embarking on this adventure in March of writing about an artist a day. Maybe this will— I don't know if you're going to be reaching out to them for interviews or if it's just going to kind of be you sitting with their and writing about them, but maybe you can even start to form some of that opinion, right? And, or come up with a greater thesis around these 30-odd artists that you're going to be writing about. I don't know, I know you've listened to the show, so I do this thing called being the time cop where I'm like, it's getting a little long, we've gone for over an hour. So yeah, please, you know, if you want to talk a little bit about this upcoming project and where people can find you if they aren't already subscribed to your newsletter and stuff, I think this would be a great way for people to get acquainted with your writing.

Speaker B: Sure. Yes, I'm running this challenge. It's 30 NFT artists For 30 days. So I will be writing an article. It won't be very long. I want them to be, you know, short reads that you can, in your day, like in the morning, take a look for 5 minutes and discover new artists. That's a good point. I'm planning to ask them questions. There will be like a mix of interview and mix of me talking a little bit about their art. And I am actually going to be asking these questions, right? Like, what's considered— what do you consider to be good generative art and where could other artists and collectors look for these, right, like resources to get more educated or learn more about this new field. So yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to it and, well, trying to learn, right, trying to showcase some artists that are out there that maybe are not being noticed already and also learning, learning from them, learning from their process, and hopefully, you know, people will Enjoy it. It will be on my newsletter, as you said. So it's caloh.xyz.

Speaker A: And we'll link to that in the show notes along with your Twitter. Yeah, Caloh, thank you so much for coming on. I hope you enjoyed it.

Speaker C: I enjoyed it.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was very, very nice to talk, you know, like have video calls, talk FX hash. It's very podcast, very, very interesting. I'm mostly talking about it on Twitter or on the Discord, right? So it's a different thing and very enjoyable. Thank you for doing it.

Speaker A: Hey, it's just great to have you on, talk the market, something that we all love. Follow Kaloh, check the show notes, and that's it for this one. Thank you everyone, we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker C: All right, thanks, Will.