Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to a very special interview episode of Waiting to Be Signed. We are here with Nat Emodi. founder and CEO of Highlight. Unfortunately, Trinity is not with us today. She's got a lot of real life stuff going on between work and baby, but you got me, Will, and Nat on the mic here. Hey Nat, how's it going?

Speaker B: Hey Will. Yeah, it's good.

Speaker A: Great to have you. Thanks for accommodating a somewhat early time on the West Coast for you here. I know you're just waking up, but we're super excited to have you on the show. You know, Highlight is kind of come onto the scene or onto our radar relatively recently as a platform that we've been surprisingly not critical of. You know, we usually look at these new platforms and kind of wonder like, what's going on with them? Like, what are they trying to do? And, you know, we became aware of you during this like on-chain summer thing that Coinbase was kind of sponsoring. So I think we're gonna get into all of that, but first and foremost, why don't you introduce yourself and tell everyone how you first got into crypto, NFTs, and generative art?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the show and I was especially astounded when we didn't take too much criticism on our recent launch. As builders on the team, myself as founder, all I see is the flaws and all the stuff that we still have to do. So appreciate the recent shout out on some of our projects. My background, I'm originally from Canada and I grew up really with the internet. as the internet was growing up. And my first job ever actually was making art for gaming. And I know, I know you have a gaming background. Trinity has a gaming background. Unfortunately, none of the games I made art for, I think, ever saw the light of day, but made a little bit of money doing that. So the idea of making art and just selling it on the internet has been ingrained in me since then. I've worked in tech for most of my career, so I live out in California now, and I really fell in love with building products and I think just finding a deeper purpose working in tech while working at Square in the early days. So I was lucky enough to be part of the team at Square almost 10 years ago. And I think what stood out to me then or what really got me inspired to this day and with Highlight just gets me super energized is this idea of economic empowerment, making tools that can help people make money in fundamentally better ways. It's crazy to think, but with Square, right, not even 10 years ago, it was really hard for a small business to accept credit card payments. And when I was there, we had mom-and-pop shops that were just signing up in droves. In a lot of cases, revenue for them would just shoot up 20 or 30% overnight because they got a little piece of hardware that they could plug into a smartphone and accept payments right away. I then spent a little bit of time at DoorDash and in the same sort of theme, was true there, which was the whole on-demand economy where I saw just so many folks with bicycles or borrowed cars and a smartphone that suddenly could make $15 or $20 an hour on their own terms. So pick up their kids from school, go learn English or study something else when they wanted to and have that flexibility. So those were some themes that were in my head when I was thinking about what to do next. I knew I wanted to start a startup for a long time, and I had spent most of my time on the business and product side of things. And while I was doing that, I was dabbling just in my spare time making art, learning about crypto. I could tell you a little bit about my journey there, and coding. So the story with Highlight is during COVID I was ready to start my first startup, and I was in my backyard, and my neighbor G-Monk, he was sitting in my backyard, and he had just sold some art on Nifty Gateway. He was the one who introduced me to NFTs, and this was in late 2020. And Gmunk, if you don't know, he's a well-known director and digital artist. Same crowd, same sort of upbringing as folks like Refik Anadol and Beeple and other folks like that who've done quite well with NFTs. And Gmunk left art school much younger with hopes of being an artist, and he wound up working in advertising. to make ends meet. And suddenly with NFTs, he had this ability to explore his art full-time again and sell his work and support his family. And he's done really well selling mostly one-of-ones on sites like SuperRare. And after that, it just sort of hit me. I started to go pretty deep on crypto from just an intellectual standpoint. I had owned crypto for a long time. Crypto was really strong just internally at Square. Going back to 2014, 2015, but just reading a lot about it, mostly through Vitalik's writing and going deeper on ideas like decentralization and trustlessness and this idea of building better systems for creative people than Web2 really has been able to do, just immediately appealed to me. So started Highlight officially in late 2021, and we raised some funding early last year.

Speaker A: So it's been around for a while, but it's only recently popped up on our radar. So is this something that a lot of people were using that we just never became aware of? Like, or was it kind of a slow journey to getting this adoption that we're seeing now?

Speaker B: We spent our first year or so exploring the market, and while we were doing that from a company lens, we were getting increasingly passionate about generative art. So we were creating it, different folks on the team are You know, artists themselves. We were collecting it, we were meeting artists. And for me, I think beyond that conversation with Gmunk, I was pretty early on the Art Blocks train. Some of the early Art Blocks drops I was really lucky to be a part of. At the same time, it wasn't clear exactly what we wanted to build for different reasons on the team. And so we had been building basic tools to help really anyone create NFTs, running some experiments and really studying the space.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it was about last summer, last fall that we stepped back and really thought from first principles if there needed to be another generative platform. And that's something we can get into. But we thought if we could build the tools and the platform that we heard artists talking about and something that would really motivate us, what would that look like? So it was about a year ago we started whiteboarding all that out, but we came up with 5 things almost immediately that we felt like we needed to build and Going down the list, we couldn't see any of them in the landscape for generative art platforms.

Speaker A: I mean, I think that's a great time to actually start having that conversation. So yeah, why another platform? What was missing in the space when it comes to art and generative art platforms? Because it seems like a lot of people identified that there was a need for this, or that there could be a need for this, right? We've seen so many platforms launching from 2022 into 2023, some of them taking a more curated path. more premium, higher price point, exclusive artists and stuff like that. Some doing this more open thing. What are some of those things that you all coalesced around that the market needed that you wanted to provide?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, so you're right. I think it's one of those things that other people spotted some opportunities, but I'll tell you how we think about it and I'll tell you what's fundamentally different, at least right now, about where we're at today. The first one is at the time there weren't any open access platforms for generative art on Ethereum. just platforms with curation committees. And we wanted anyone anywhere in the world to be able to permissionlessly create and deploy a project. That was number one. And of course, others have had that idea too. Second for us is it had to be on Ethereum, but it also had to support all of the compatible layer 2s. And we can talk more about that, but we are particularly inspired by Ethereum just because of the track record of decentralization, and open-source development. And really, for artists, we want to support artists with the highest amount of confidence that their artwork is going to be permanent as far into the future as we hope. And the last thing, of course, is just the size of the community. Ethereum has a pretty active community of artists and collectors and developers. Number 3 is we wanted a platform where artists would own their smart contracts. At this point, as A little bit nuanced, but it's fundamentally important to think about, we think, if you're an artist. So instead of having artists that are shackled to either a platform that could be risky, as we know, or a blockchain that could be risky, we've seen blockchains sort of become obsolete. We wanted to give artists full ownership over the contracts that produce their art. And what that means is we can't rug you. If you're an artist, you can upgrade, you can extend or modify your contract. directly on the blockchain as you see fit. And so that was really important for us as well. Number 4, artists should be able to use any code library, we think, and that's any type of files or any type of data inputs that they want to use really easily. We don't wanna put any rules in place around forcing you to use the transaction hash, for example, or a certain version of p5 or any of these other things that we understand and appreciate why others like those type of rules. It creates for a certain amount of consistency. But for us, what gets us fired up is helping artists push the boundaries of the medium creatively and expressively. And on our side, that just means giving options for artists to explore and figure out what's possible. And the last one is we decided we weren't going to charge artists anything. It would be completely free, and Highlight is completely free except for a small fee that we charge to collectors. For us, this really comes from a place of seeing digital art as something that's going to be a much bigger market in the future. And we think this is the best business model to support that, to support a more mainstream market than we have today. Either we're going to see generative art remain very high-end and niche and we'll fail, or it's going to become much bigger and we'll succeed. This business model is a bit of a bet on that.

Speaker A: Yeah, let's definitely put a pin in the future of gen art and some of the bets you're making with that model. I want to go back and investigate a couple of these points. So the idea of owning your own contract is something that we've heard come up with a couple other platforms too. And I don't know that people really, especially like the layperson, like me, a collector, really understands what this means fully, right? So when you deploy, say through Art Blocks, you're deploying on their contract.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And what's the distinctions that like, so if I wanted to later on change the royalties or something, I can't do that if I deploy on Art Blocks, but if I own my own contract, I'll be able to amend it? Or like, what are some examples of things that artists can do by owning it?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a few. And for a smart contract, if you just think about it as a vending machine, I think is still just like the most straightforward analogy. And if you create an art collection on other platforms, You're putting your art in someone else's vending machine. And so if they want to adjust the prices, if you want to adjust the code behind your project, if in the future you decide you want to add more, extend the collection, any number of scenarios that we think all should be within an artist's control and discretion, you need to go through the owner of the smart contract to ask them to do that. That to us is just a little bit at odds with where we're going, hopefully, with Web3 and with decentralization, which is putting ultimate power and ultimate control in the hands of artists and creatives and not creating another set of platforms where a large amount of the control is at their discretion.

Speaker A: I'm just trying to think of an example in my head here. I go to Highlight, I don't really know Solidity. But you, you all give me the tools to kind of Frankenstein together the type of contract that I want to release a piece of art or maybe a series of artworks.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: If I went and learned Solidity, would I then be able to make changes? Am I kind of like stuck with whatever tools you provide me? Because ultimately, like the feature set that Highlight gives, if I'm not someone who's a coder, I'm still kind of bound by what you allow me to do, right?

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. I mean, you would need to learn how to code to upgrade or modify your smart contract. But for us, you're able to do that. And so whether that's, you know, yourself or you had someone help you do that, if you're making generative art in the first place, we think in general, this is something that's relatively straightforward to do. Not everyone knows Solidity, of course, and we help a lot of artists sort of do custom things. A good example is if you were an artist who wanted to add different metadata, for example, to your contract, or if you wanted to put hidden messages in your contract, or if you wanted to back up some of the source material your project. So an example, we did a project recently with Melissa Wiederrecht, friend of the show, and we helped her put some of the prompts— she had done a project with us in August where she had used AI prompts to create part of her artwork. It was the Crypto Native project with Onchain Summer.

Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: And if she wanted to independently create a project on Highlight, she could use our tools to do that, and then she could take those prompts And write them directly to her smart contract on the blockchain without asking us. So that's, that's an example of something an artist may want to do and that they can do on a fully self-serve basis. With generative art, there's obviously an emphasis on permanence, right? And how much of a project is on-chain, which is a whole other discussion. But by giving artists access to the smart contract, they can decide how much of the project they want to make on-chain, Or not. That's kind of a key one.

Speaker A: For that piece, I imagine a good chunk of it is held in IPFS or some, somewhere else, right? Where the tokens themselves are pointing to that data or retrieving it from somewhere off-chain.

Speaker B: Yeah, we use Arweave, but that's, that's correct.

Speaker A: Similar to IPFS, right?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So those are some really good examples, right? I love the idea of being able to update metadata, looking at projects on other platforms where maybe artists like didn't think about that. And maybe there's some features that you could surface that would be really cool to have, or, you know, obviously future-proofing a piece, updating the codebase, making sure that it continues to work with browsers or whatever the intention is. All of those sound like very good examples. Are there any potential risks or bad things that can happen? Like, can artists brick their contract if they don't know what they're doing? Or are there any like malicious things that we are potentially introducing here if someone decides to, you know, be a bad actor?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think on the balance, those scenarios are are certainly possible, but when we thought about it, we said, on one hand, you have really artists getting rugged in some way by platforms. It's pretty easy just to look at the history of NFTs and crypto. There's a lot of fantastic early art that is really hard to find and reproduce because it existed on platforms that no longer exist anymore. You know, that's like losing the keys to the vending machine. You can't get in there, you can't do anything to try to preserve it or salvage the artwork easily. And the sort of history with platforms is, is a long one that you know pretty well, but having some amount of control given to platforms from the beginning usually ends up over time not to work in the favor of artists and creators. And so there's that risk on one hand, which does felt very real, and there's a bunch of really tangible examples of that just recently. On the other hand, there's the risk, of course, that If you give this control, all of the control over to an artist, then they can decide in the future they wanted to do something with the project that collectors may not be happy with.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's that tension there. And I guess in a sense, it's like shifting, right? With fx hash, with Art Blocks, with platforms that run their own contracts that artists release through, when something goes wrong, it's on those platforms to take responsibility, provide remedy if there is a case for it, pivot, make changes, be responsive. If something goes wrong with an artist and you've got no way to get to them, or they're just unwilling to like try to resolve it, then you're kind of like, that's it, that's where it ends, right? They only have their personal reputation. They don't have like a platform-wide reputation or business model that they have to manage. I mean, I, and again, this is like not a artists are gonna do this. I'm just trying to understand.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: What are the potential downsides, right? Because I think right now a lot of artists are very focused on just making art and not really focused on 5, 10 years from now. what it might mean to kind of maintain these things.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. In all those cases, and we've had cases like that come up for sure, as a team, we work with artists to help fix whatever they're trying to do. If it's already written to the blockchain, right, if they've already deployed the project, if tokens have already been minted and things like that, then it's out of our control, it's in their control. But as a team, we're super hands-on and we'll work with artists to help figure out what they're trying to do.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Let's talk a little bit about the business model, which is to me like kind of the freshest, most different thing about Highlight. And honestly, I wasn't aware of the way that you all function until we had like our little intro call a couple weeks ago. And you explained to me that the fee when you go to mint is not gas or anything, or maybe that that's partially contemplated in that fee, but that's really it. That's where Highlight is making their cut.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Maybe this is a good opportunity for you to talk a little bit about like one, a little more of the philosophy of like making it free. to artists and to like kind of the implied faith in scalability of what's going to happen here, right? Because if you're just taking a flat fee per mint, it doesn't matter if someone's selling it for $1 or $1,000, you're getting the same cut, right? So I'm just going to kind of tee that up and I'd love to kind of hear you expound on like how you kind of imagine the space growing and how Highlight is going to scale with it.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think it starts with just the open access idea. It's very simple. We think that's the most exciting approach to take. to what's happening with generative art and digital art. And the concept of openness is not just in the sense of being able to publish your stuff without a curation board, but just to be free to do whatever you want that you find interesting without any kind of rules or limitation. And so with Highlight, if you can program it, you can do it on the platform. There's no rules, which is really empowering. The philosophy behind it, I don't know, are you familiar, Will, with the The Cathedral and the Bazaar?

Speaker A: I might be if you start explaining it, but from those 2 words, I'm not.

Speaker B: So it's an essay. It's about open source software. This guy, Eric Raymond, published it in the '90s. Yeah, you hear about it a lot if you talk to developers about things like Linux and the Apache web server are good examples of one of the models, which is the Bazaar model. And the Bazaar model is just an open and decentralized approach to software development. But it could apply to any type of creative endeavor. This is where source code is typically open and accessible, and it allows contributions really from anybody, anywhere in the world. And so that as a starting point is for us, I think what gets us most motivated and where we see digital art going broadly. The contrast to the bazaar, which is the open bottoms-up approach, is the cathedral. And the cathedral has a lot of advantages for it, for sure, but that's the more top-down and closed and structured approach. You could say that's maybe like the curation board approach. And what excites us the most is for anyone in the world to be able to pick up a tool that we created and use it to make art. We love collaborating with artists, especially on our work that we think is really exploring the medium and expanding the medium, but the open model is necessary for artists to come along and sort of show us what's possible, surprise all of us with what's possible. If you think back 20 years ago, everyone thought that the internet would just take old models and replicate them, right? So NBC, CBS were going to destroy YouTube, I think was probably on the front page of a lot of newspapers 20 years ago. And what we saw was the opposite. We saw the creator bazaar really take hold. And this type of DIY model, in that case around video content, is really what ultimately was most successful by far. None of the stars of YouTube today, people with billions and billions of views, would be possible without an open model. But if you look at the art world, it largely remains very closed. I don't know if you would disagree with that, but there's a set number of established institutions. Collecting art is not something that most people in society actively engage in.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And we think that an open model has the best chance at creating a much more vibrant, much more active and new generation of artists and collectors that can bypass those old models. That for us is the starting point. And then I can explain more about how the business model plays into that.

Speaker A: I mean, I think that's a really nice vision. I think that's one that a lot of people share too, when it comes to Web3 and giving people like this level of ownership and autonomy. Through this increasingly connected world that we live in. But at the same time, I mean, I think only knowing what we've seen so far, the last kind of 2, 2 and a half years of this kind of generative art, on-chain art renaissance, that it feels like we had that influx of people who came in, were interested in creating, some of which had been around for a long time, some of which you got inspired by seeing that explosion of art through Art Blocks and fxhash and some other platforms. This year, it just hasn't felt like there's a lot of new names. And just like at the end of the day, there's only so many people who want to collect art, it feels like there might be only so many people who want to or are capable of making art. You know, I don't want to say that not everyone can be an artist, but as a collector, right, how you've observed this last year or so of just kind of seeing the same names everywhere.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think if you want to stick on business model, none of the math makes sense in the current market. Right. It's a brutal market out there. So I definitely agree with you, but I think all of the math makes sense in a bigger market. And so to step back and just explain a little bit, we only charge a small fee to collectors along with gas when you purchase. So artists keep 100% of primary sale proceeds. And if you want to put secondary market royalties on your project as well, And you have to keep 100% of that too. And so it's a different model from a percentage-based model, but we think the math works, assuming the market grows in the way that we expect it will down the road, notwithstanding the doldrums that we're in now. You know, I think to you and others, this model is initially surprising, especially if you're most versed in a percentage-based model. But I'm curious if you've thought about the math on the percentage-based side. Just in the current market as well?

Speaker A: I'm sure a lot of platforms are struggling. You know, maybe Art Blocks is doing okay, because they play at just higher price points. But obviously, on ETH, there's the issues of like royalties and kind of this like long tail of income that's clearly not happening anymore. If it's not being traded on the Art Blocks platform, they're probably not capturing their piece, the artists aren't capturing their piece. So I mean, I kind of get that the flat fee upfront right there, kind of insulating yourself against the shifts and things you can't control outside of your corner. But yeah, I imagine, like, to your point, that probably no one is really happy with the revenues they're making right now.

Speaker B: It's a tough market for sure, I think, especially on the royalty side. But for us, we think there's just great potential for many more people, millions more people to be excited about collecting digital art. And in that world, We think the model of a collector's fee does scale really well. And again, back on the theme, as we're talking about smart contracts, we're talking about how we're open access, creating a model where artists get to keep 100% of their sales to us just felt really important.

Speaker A: I mean, I love artists getting more money and participating in a bigger way. So what is the path, right? I mean, I think this is a good segue into Base Chain and the On-Chain Summer and the kind of collaboration If it is a collaboration, I'm actually not sure like what the relationship between Coinbase and Highlight. Someone there must have organized this and included Highlight in some way. But do you have a sense, first of all, of like, is that push out to the broader Coinbase community who might not be collecting NFTs? Do you feel like they're getting any crossover, like anecdotally that you can tell? And if not, or if it's not to the extent that you thought, how are we going to push and grow? Right? I think everyone has this question right now. If we 10x the users, and then 10x them again, it's going to look brilliant. We're all going to look like geniuses, right? So like, what's it take to get there?

Speaker B: Yeah, so on the Base side, we knew the team working on it and we had been in touch with them for a few months. We knew we were going to be one of their launch partners when the Base mainnet went live. So just pausing for a second on L2s, we support all the major L2s for Ethereum. L2s are still extremely early and we love We like to provide options to artists. Base is one of them, and then we also support Arbitrum and Optimism and Sora and Polygon, which is more of a sidechain, less of an L2. But our belief really with L2s is related to your question because Ethereum mainnet, if you've collected there at all over the last couple of years, you know how painful the experience could be when gas fees could be in the hundreds of dollars or more. Yeah. When the speed of a transaction can be extremely slow or can fail for different reasons, sometimes gas related. And so we think L2s are really the future and are leading to a much more approachable and inclusive experience that we just haven't seen yet broadly. I think there's other chains out there, Tezos and Solana, that have done great work in bringing costs way down and speed up and just making a more mainstream user experience. But for Ethereum, where most of the energy and the excitement around NFTs in general, that hasn't been true until recently. The technology behind a lot of our L2s has only been perfected in the last year or 2, which is why you're seeing things like Base or Zora, which launched their own network, just come out earlier this year. So I think that's number one. Cost just has to come down dramatically, like by a factor of 100 on the gas side. And with that, I think we're going to see many more people just not feel that friction of having to pay a hefty tax on what is already a new idea, which is collecting something digital, let alone art, which for a lot of people is something that's never been within reach. And then I think just in general on the user experience, I know on our platform on Highlight, we're still focused on users who know what a wallet is and can connect their wallet and already have crypto. But the direction we're heading and what's really important to us is to make that initial sign-on experience and purchase experience a lot more straightforward and familiar to people who may be outside of crypto. So being able to sign in with an email address, being able to pay with a credit card, Those are things that either we've recently released or we're going to release a little bit later this year. And I think the final thing is generative art is just a huge passion of ours, and we think it's tremendously exciting and has really broad appeal with the right user experience. It's dynamic, it's co-created, you're actually working with an artist in a way to produce the art. It's really a reflection of just the modern world and it's quite different from the traditional art world. And so we think with the right product experience, there's going to be a lot more people who catch the bug and get really excited in the way that we are because just the experience is so fun. Showing up on drop day is so fun. Being able to dig deep into a project and understand the breadth of it and collect the pieces that really speak to you. is incredibly fun. And it doesn't have to be with really high gas and with a lot of technical hoops you have to jump through, or ultimately, I think, high price points for collections, which at least on Ethereum mainnet has typically been the case, especially for generative art. But we believe that generative art is a medium that can scale almost infinitely to millions or billions of people. And so we're really intrigued by projects that could come in at lower price points and could be much larger than some of the typical generative art projects we've seen so far.

Speaker A: That's one of the beauties of generative art is the scalability of it. And when you give the artist the tools and like you said, like a network that has lower fees, it becomes more feasible to like do a low price point and do potentially thousands of editions or do like a soft open edition, like a timed open edition, like Melissa and Leander and the other folks who participated In the Onchain Summer thing that they did on Highlight, right? Or like we saw with this Hearts and Crafts thing on Prohibition that Snowfro collaborated with, right? Where it's just 0.01 ETH, go nuts, mint as many as you want for as long as you want. Only really works on an L2. The scalability on the art side is there fundamentally from the nature of it being code-based. It's the scalability on that user experience side that is the problem. There's only so many people who are going to learn all this stuff. And, you know, doing credit cards is great. Email login is great. This highlights plan to custody this stuff. Like, how do you actually onboard people from an email and a credit card into like installing MetaMask and getting all the different networks put in there? Like, you need Zora for this one, you need Base for that one. Oh, that one you just minted is actually on Polygon. Where do you square that Web3 ethos with the scalability problem? Which I think, by the way, no one has actually squared that yet, but I'm curious what your opinion on it is.

Speaker B: I think it's really painful to the average person to experience L2s today. So the average person who may not even have MetaMask installed and they have to try that and then get crypto into it and then bridge it over to an L2 and all these different hoops are really painful. But I think where we're going is a world that's a lot more cohesive. And I don't think this is going to happen overnight, but I think there's many, many people who are working to solve these problems. And so I think what we'll ultimately see is a user experience that feels much more seamless, right? Where you can interact with NFTs on Base or on Sora or Polygon or on Ethereum mainnet and maybe have some of that context within it, you know, icons or other markers that specify what part of the broader network the transaction has settled on or the NFT exists on. But that can just be a detail that doesn't have to be so front and center as it is today. I think in general, that's where we're going. We like the idea of a superchain, right? Which is just this concept of Ethereum mainnet being one major fundamental circuit and then other different circuits, which are these L2s that can connect within it, all being one big, ultimately unified network. And most of the teams, if you talk to the people, and I think it'd be an interesting conversation to chat maybe with some of the folks.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: building L2s, the types of concerns that you're raising, like these are front and center, and this is what they're working on now. And we'll start to see improvements to some of these experiences come out, and in some cases the next months, but, but definitely over the next couple years.

Speaker A: Years feels like a long time. You know, we could be through the next bull run and back into another bear by the time some of that stuff sorts itself out. It just feels so curious to me, right? Because we have other chains like Tezos, And, you know, like Solana, as much as like maybe I don't collect on Solana or care about it, where they've solved a lot of these problems. Like you said, you don't have to manage 8 different tabs in your MetaMask and figure out bridging back and forth between these different networks to collect. You can just transact in Tezos. It's extremely cheap. And as far as I can tell, it's not significantly less secure than ETH. So I guess the question is like, why should we wait months or years to get all these different L2s to a level of usability that we already have on things like Tez and Solana. Other than the fact that there's money in ETH and there's just like the biggest pool of money there, is there something fundamental about ETH from a technological standpoint or security standpoint that makes you personally a believer that it's like worth going through all the hoops of all these L2s and all this horrible UI and user experience versus just using something that is already simple and essentially free.

Speaker B: I think in general for us, it's the track record towards decentralization that's most important with Ethereum, which dates back to its founding and which we're getting close to the 10-year anniversary of. The commitment behind that gives us the highest confidence that the idea of a blockchain, something that's permanent and immutable and has all these other properties, that, that could be true in the future for decades or centuries to come. I don't doubt that there will be other blockchains, you know, that will do that too, and that will exist for a long time to come. But I think for us, just focusing our energy on the chain where we can see that that seems to be the truest, just based on the track record. Related to that, the history of Ethereum hasn't been easy, hasn't been quiet. There's been huge things like the merge, which happened about a year ago. Almost exactly a year ago, right, where shifted from proof of work to proof of stake. It's an incredibly complex technical project where a huge number of people, all distributed around the world with different points of view and different interests and different incentives at play, were all kind of brought together to do this really massive technical upgrade. And so to us, that's just strong proof that if we believe in this concept of NFTs and we believe in these concepts of digital ownership, then the underlying foundation that we want to build on has to be one that we think gives us the most confidence that it's going to exist in the future. Not in any way to doubt Tezos, which is an absolutely incredible community and, you know, has figured many of these things out, but just to share a little bit of why we like Ethereum.

Speaker A: I guess I'd argue that Tezos also has a 6+ year history of upgrades and self-amendment and governance and stuff too. I don't know that much about the decentralization portion of it because I'm not that savvy to go look at all this stuff. But I had this vague understanding that like the decentralization aspect of ETH was a little bit not as straightforward because of people like using these like pooling things. But let's not, let's not get into that because I think that kind of gets us way off topic. And I'm not trying to debate Tezos versus ETH. I was really just more trying to understand like, the user experience stuff, which is such a key part of scaling this technology. And it seems like some of these other chains like Tezos have so much of that potential, but because they don't have the economic activity, people just kind of ignore them because it's like, as we've seen, even with like really good art, someone can have a super successful Art Blocks curated release and it doesn't really move the needle on their Tezos collections that people have been enjoying for a long time. It's very difficult to cross people over. So I totally understand that When you have like 90+% of the users and the money in one place, it doesn't necessarily make sense to try something on a different chain, or at least prioritize it, right?

Speaker B: I think that's one part of it. And I think the thing that you'll hear if you chat, I'm sure you've had a bunch of these conversations, but just to make maybe some of my points clearer about why, you know, why does the Ethereum Foundation's track record kind of like play into our thinking? It's because when you talk about the economic activity, And as an artist, say you're thinking about where to release a project, you want to go to the place where there's going to be the most number of buyers in general. And that's not always the case. There's different communities that are sprouting up. And so it's interesting to kind of reach different audiences, but economic activity is important. And then if you ask, why is that? Like, why are most of the people buying generative art NFTs? Why are they focused on Ethereum? The answers that I hear a lot are related to these underlying points about the longevity of the track record and the highest level of confidence for the investment you're making in art to want to exist in the future, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, the highest level of confidence being an NFT that's created on Ethereum. So not to say that makes sense for everyone, that that's the primary concern of everyone. And I think, you know, at different price points, you have different types of collectors for sure, which is the future that, that we see. But I think you see that center of gravity on Ethereum largely because collectors on Ethereum feel like this is a good place to build a collection. It has the least chance of being rugged. No blockchain has zero chance of being rugged, but they just feel like it has the most case of keeping their investment safe far into the future.

Speaker A: I've heard that, of course, as a reason for ETH. I don't know how much Personally, to attribute that to just like bag protecting and holding. And it's a nice narrative versus true pure belief in the technology because so few people can really actually explain it. And so when they say like, I only collect on ETH because I only believe in this, like, do you? Or is it just because like you've made some money here and you know that there's a lot of money? But again, not to litigate that. I'm just like, it's just a thing that I am always skeptical of. Because usually the people who are saying it are the ones who got into crypto very early and are very personally wealthy because of it. So it's a lot easier just to say that once you've already made your bag than if you're someone who's like trying to get into it now. Let's talk more about Highlight. We've talked about the economic model. We've talked about some of this L2 stuff, providing tools to artists. On the philosophy, again, of like Highlight and its function, you guys do promote some stuff on the front page. Mostly it's like a hands-off thing, right? The idea is for artists to make their contracts. They can deploy widgets to their own pages and kind of just disseminate this stuff wherever they want. So what role do you kind of view Highlight as a platform and promoter of art? Like, how does someone get their piece into that premium placement on Highlight? And what is your personal view on like the role that you should play?

Speaker B: So we chat with artists all the time. We think about it probably through a couple lenses. I mean, we do think about it through— it's really like 3 lenses. I think first I would say Where we think digital art and generative art is going is evolving. And it's evolving because we think the blockchain is this new medium. And most of the artists that we're talking to see it as something fundamentally different, just the way you can work with it as artistic material, as an artistic medium, is different. And so for us, that means data is this interesting new material that artists are increasingly excited to think about and to use to explore different artistic concepts or expressive concepts. Dynamism, so the way that art can actually evolve or change depending on the circumstances, the time, the size of the browser window, the device you're on, all those different things. Co-creation, which we think is the most exciting thing probably about generative art where something from the collector, which is typically the transaction hash, but it could really be any type of data, could be the wallet address or time of day or number of NFTs the collector's minting. All these things can play a really big role in how the art is produced and what the final output is. So I would just say in general, works that check a bunch of those boxes and seem to push boundaries of the medium just get us really excited. So if you're, if you're an artist listening and any of those ideas speak to a project that you're thinking about or that you're working on, please reach out. But then beyond that, we think about sort of 3 lenses. One is art, which is subjective and really just what is aesthetically compelling or beautiful. And there I would say we're really just going for what we like. There's nothing more to it than that. The second one on story is we're inspired by artists who are obsessed with different concepts and trying to express their point of view or their experience or their ideas around a concept or a set of concepts through their art. We think sometimes in digital art, there can be almost no point of view underpinning a work. It just like, it just looks nice, which is great too, but you feel it a little bit less in those cases. Where there isn't this kind of story underlying it. And then the last piece is technology. So this relates to just the blockchain as a medium, as something that gets us excited, but we love to curate projects and really feature projects where there are interesting technical aspects. And so it doesn't have to be solely about using data necessarily, or creating dynamic evolving works necessarily. Anything, you know, that leverages new technology, new libraries, new types of shaders, things like that. We love all of that. So yeah, projects that check any of those boxes and I think are just in the spirit of artists expressing what they want with this amazing new medium are the ones that we like to spend a lot of time on. And when we do that, we, you know, we help write custom smart contracts, we do a lot of marketing, increasingly more marketing. There's a lot more we can do there and we will be doing coming up.

Speaker A: But, and some of the stuff that you guys have done, I mean, Even though maybe some of what I was saying with the ETH stuff sounded adversarial, that wasn't the intention. We, we are fans of Highlight. Like, we're loving what you guys are doing in general. So the stuff you did with like Agoston's piece, right, where sequentially minting more and more in a batch creates more complex pieces, the similar function with Melissa's where if you minted a certain quantity at once, you'd get like every kind of variety of text possible. Like, there's really cool things that you all are collaborating with artists on these contracts to do and to enable. And I personally love it. Like, I think it's super cool to see those little hooks and those like little new things that you've never seen before in a piece.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: I guess artists reach out, right? If you have a cool idea and you don't know how to do it on Art Blocks or fx hash or somewhere else, maybe Highlight is the place to try.

Speaker B: We hope so. We talk to a lot of artists and that's usually in the first couple sentences of what they share is I wanted to do this project on another platform and they won't let me, which we love to hear.

Speaker A: Yeah. One other question I had here, which I guess kind of relates to ETH again, in particular, not necessarily to go into a critique or anything, but just to get your view of it. What is your kind of personal take on what's going on with royalties there? It's not a problem that other blockchains are necessarily insulated from. It just hasn't— the contagion hasn't spread to Tezos yet, but anyone could probably build a Blur on Tez and provide a royalty-free experience over there if they wanted to. But on ETH, obviously, it's become a problem. I think a good number of artists probably who weren't super savvy or well-versed in technology, like, never anticipated this. And the idea of like releasing a collection at a low cost to then get paid in the long term off royalties if the value of the collection appreciates, that's kind of just gone more or less. When you're looking at that ecosystem, Are you trying to kind of solve that a little bit by just like giving the artist complete control? It's free. You guys just collect your fee off that first primary minting experience. You're giving as much of that primary over to artists as possible. Do you see it as a challenge? What is your kind of take on this whole situation over there?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I mean, first, I would say that royalties are one of the most exciting things about the potential of NFTs. Definitely one of the main things that got me super excited when I first got into the space. And I felt just deep crushing disappointment over the course of this year, if I'm being honest, with how things have trended. Just watching an entire generation of incredible artists get rugged around something that was promised to them in a bunch of different ways, either implicitly or explicitly, about the potential for royalties. That's just on a personal level. In general, I also just feel pragmatism in everything we're building. And some of the things you touched on about like giving artists control is really designed to protect against situations like this in some way. And rules need laws, right? I think we'd all agree on that. And in crypto and in technology, code is typically law. If something's enforced by code in a strong way, then you can have faith that the system will continue to operate that way in the future. And unfortunately, royalties were not protected in code. So I think on the bright side of things, we are seeing parts of the market trending in a more creator-friendly direction again. There's a lot of builders, there's a lot of collectors who want to either enshrine royalties in code or work to respect them as a more explicit social contract or norm. One of the things we're working on now is marketplace support for Highlight. So you'll be able to buy NFTs from projects that we have helped release on a secondary market that will exist on Highlight, and royalties won't be optional for listings that you create or fulfill. So it's one of the ways that we can do our small part to support it. There's a bigger discussion maybe to be had about business models and economic incentives because To the point you were making about the level of economic activity on Ethereum, I think there's, you know, when there's that much money flowing through the system, there's different actors. Not saying there are bad actors necessarily, but there's different actors with just very different sets of incentives or motivations kind of jump in to make a living. So I see how things have trended, but I also think like the solutions hopefully are going to come about with just more rules that are enforced at the code level instead of just sort of spoken by platforms and spoken by, you know, other actors in the space as, no, this is, you know, this is how it works when really it's not the case.

Speaker A: So is this another thing where owning the contract, is this something that's in the toolset now? If I was to go to Highlight, how do I protect my royalty by owning my contract?

Speaker B: Yeah, so unfortunately you can't, you can set it at the contract level, whether or not it's respected with listings, how NFTs get bought or sold on different marketplaces, can't be enforced. But there's new standards that are coming out where, you know, we might see sort of an ecosystem shift. We're hoping over the next couple years where there are standards in place where you can't really move the NFT unless things like royalties are enforced.

Speaker A: Could there be a way that you could upgrade your contract in the future if something changed? Is that kind of like the ability to adapt with it? Or is it kind of like people who are creating now are still kind of stuck under the current paradigm? Or is there going to be a way to like evolve that contract and enforce the royalty in the future? Hopefully.

Speaker B: Potentially. There's a lot of details here that would need to line up for all that to be true. But that's exactly the type of thing that is— it's hard to predict how it's going to play out in the future. But if the starting point is giving artists control over the contract to begin with, then it creates a lot of options for them down the road. So you can imagine a world where you had to burn the collection that was based on 721, but airdrop the exact same deterministic NFT based on a better contract standard with full respect for royalties baked into it at some point in the future.

Speaker A: Gotcha. So there'd be some kind of intermediary step there. If and when that happens, that'll be a very interesting moment that I'm sure will come with its— a whole new set of scams where people say like, click here to burn your token and get your ringer, right? All of a sudden, you've just transferred your ringer to someone else's wallet. So, but you know, that's a problem for the next bull run, I imagine.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: I feel like we kind of covered everything. We usually end with rapid-fire stuff here. I know you've listened to the show. So you know, this is coming. Let's start with this one, Nat, which is, what do you like to collect? This is your chance, as diplomatically as possible, to shout out some artists that you are a fan of. This is not you pumping your bags. This is not, you know, you promoting artists that have only released on Highlight. This is just like, who does Nat like to collect?

Speaker B: There's so many, so I'm, I'm only going to feel guilty about this answer, but I would say Matt Delaurier is an artist who I've, I've just really collected and connected with personally, uh, whose, whose work I, I just find incredibly thoughtful. Matt also, just as a person, I would say if you could convince him to come on the show, is, um, a very deep thinker. About blockchain as a medium, decentralization, and a lot of the topics we got to cover here today. Emilie Xie is an amazing artist, one I've been lucky enough to know and is out there, I think, really uniquely weaving together just sort of personal history and personal narrative with the new medium. On the Tezos side, I think Marcelo, Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez, huge fan of. Nat Sarkissian, I'm a huge fan of. Leander Herzog, who we were lucky enough to support on a project. Melissa Wiederrecht. I, I could keep going, but those are some of my favorites.

Speaker A: I know it's always hard because you want to list like 50. I've been put in similar positions where I'm just like, oh, I left so many people out.

Speaker B: But Kim Asendorf, Jan Robert Leegte. Yeah, sorry, I'll stop there.

Speaker A: I don't know if you listen to Arbitrarily Deterministic, but Ken, the host of that show, had Matt on last season and they had a A really cool conversation about some of the stuff he does with like data collection and perhaps maybe some kind of hint as to some stuff he might be working on.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'll check that one out. I'm aware I've chatted with Matt about some of that stuff and it's, it's really, really cool.

Speaker A: The like measuring atmospheric electricity and stuff. Is that— yeah, that's wild.

Speaker B: The word is escaping me, but he goes completely off the grid as far away from any electrical interference as possible and picks up on really data from the Earth's energy field, magnetic field, and is using that, is recording that as sort of like this purely natural random data. And he's thinking about how to use that to seed an upcoming project.

Speaker A: I'm super excited for whatever that turns out to be. That's so cool. Related to this then, like, who would you like to hear us interview in the future?

Speaker B: I think some of the folks I mentioned. So I think Nat would be fantastic. Emily would be wonderful. I'm really interested just on some of the themes we talked about, just about, you know, how generative is expanding and the dynamic nature of it. Artists like Jan Robert Leegte and Kim Asendorf are really inspiring to me just for how deep they've gone into their practice to just sort of explore what is uniquely possible with computers and what is sort of intrinsic to creating art with computers. So yeah, those would be a few.

Speaker A: Kind of intimidating interviews. I always say this when people recommend to us, it's like, uh, I do want to talk to them, but I feel like I'd be well out of my depth talking to some of these people. Uh, all right. We usually also allow our guests to turn the tables and ask us a question, or in this case, just me. So anything that you want to ask?

Speaker B: Let's see. What are some of the trends that you're watching? I'm curious about You know, we are seeing some experimentation around things like open editions versus long-form generative versus more curated projects. Curious how you think about those distinctions and if you think there's any trend emerging or you have any sort of prediction for where those are going.

Speaker A: Prediction? I don't know, that'll be tough. The trend that we've been observing, I think we caught onto this probably middle of last year even. And I've been talking about since, which is the shift into physical components with digital work. And we've seen that like more formally now. Like first we kind of saw it with Verse, or we saw artists even before that who would release stuff and say like, email me and you can get a physical or like pay extra to get a physical. And then platforms like Verse and then now Tonic have come along where they're more formally like letting you get this stuff. And hand in hand with that has been, it's been interesting watching it in this bear market, in this down market. As we kind of seen this flight to— the term that they would use like in business, I guess, would be like the flight to quality. I don't think it's a fair term here, right? Because it's just like, it's art. And so any piece can be a quality piece in your eyes. But certainly from the market standpoint, there's a lot less appetite for taking a risk on a new artist, buying something, minting something that's only a few bucks outside of open editions, which I'll come around to. But yeah, it just seems like the The biggest trend right now is brand names with a physical component. It's great for social media, comes with a signature sometimes. So like it extends the connection to the stuff that we're collecting. It makes it feel more real. So I've been filling my office and some parts of my home with a lot of stuff. It's just been a really excellent way to like spread the vibes of being a collector in the space and find a way to talk about it that's not just like, hey, look at this computer screen. It's a cool trend to see physicals. I think the unfortunate side effect of that is that it seems to be becoming increasingly exclusive in terms of price point and in terms of which artists are doing that stuff. On the open edition thing, it's interesting. I personally don't know what to make of it. In my mind, they seem like great tools to get new users on board, but like we talked about, there's just so many hurdles into these things that I personally don't think we're getting a lot of new people in. It just seems like they have mostly been tools for new platforms to get wallets connected in the first place that are already existing. We talked about this on the show, but the Heart and Craft thing on Prohibition probably succeeded in getting several thousand new wallets connected to that website and getting a little bit of ETH bridged over to Arbitrum. But I don't think it got anyone who was sitting on the sidelines waiting to get into generative art or collecting to like go.

Speaker B: in.

Speaker A: I'm not really sure what, what the actual effect of open editions is. I understand the philosophy and the spirit of them, but I just don't think that they're maybe having that outcome. I don't know what you think.

Speaker B: A couple thoughts on it. I think it's the idea of a print, right? So Andy Warhol did an open edition. It was the Marilyn Monroe prints, which were— I think he made something like 19,000 of those, and I think the idea that you have a collector base that is limited to a small number of higher-priced artworks is something that artists increasingly want to try to move past. And I think this gets to, again, like this new thing that we're all together figuring out, which is what is this new medium? What does it mean to collect digital art? But for something that can scale infinitely or almost infinitely, you know, why limit the digital medium just to small collections? Yeah. Collections of 100 or 500 or 1,000. So I think there's a lot of that spirit to it. And that idea is, you're right, like maybe we're not right now reaching a ton of new collectors. I think we saw with the Coinbase project, there was a lot of support from the Base team. I should say Base instead of Coinbase rather, but to bring in customers on the Coinbase side of things. And we did see some of that happen. I don't know exactly how many, looking at the data, it's not perfectly clear, but I think a healthy number of folks that did collect, maybe 10% or so, seemed to be new wallets or people who paid with credit card or some combination. I think the other thing with open editions that's appealing to a lot of artists that we're chatting with, especially on an L2, is we worked with such incredible artists, and they're so technically talented that it's almost a feat of strength, right, to see how far you can push the edges of the algorithm and just like your technical ability. So artists like Melissa and James and Leander and Holger, who we worked with in August, I think they just saw it as this really hard and fun challenge. So I think there's like a different facet to it there where it's not purely about reaching more collectors with kind of Andy Warhol print example. It's also just a fun new thing to do that is possible with this medium and not possible really with any other medium.

Speaker A: I think the balance to that is that, like you said, it's hard to do one that's really good if you want to support 10,000+ editions.

Speaker B: Super hard.

Speaker A: And have it be compelling. And maybe there will be an evolution in the idea, in the spirit of like what makes compelling generative art, but I feel like right now it's kind of this Trifecta or difecta of like, they all together in a set look like they come from the same family, but each individual output can offer me like an element of surprise or like, whoa, like I can't believe that it kind of expressed itself in that way. And that is very hard to do at even like 250 or 500. A lot of artists struggle with that.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Because maybe you could work on a project for like 10 years and get it to the point where it can do 1,000. Or you can express what you want to express and just do it in like 200 or 100. So I feel like maybe the open edition thing is better suited for that. We had that trend kind of at the end of last year of people doing like a 1 of X, and it was just open edition for 24 hours, and they were weaving in this like burn mechanics and all this other stuff too. It does seem better suited for someone who's just trying to do an addition to 1 of 1. Not to say there isn't a role for it, but I just don't know necessarily that an artist is gonna point to a long-form open edition that they did and say like, that was like definitely my best work. I don't know that they see it that way. I think, I think you're right. I think they see it as a challenge. I think they see it as interesting, but I don't know if they're going to go into this open edition thing saying like, yeah, like I'm an open edition artist now. Like I push— I don't know. I think they view it more as a marketing thing than they view it as like a truest expression of their work.

Speaker B: I think for us it's It's just a type of project that's interesting. And I think artists who have sort of like an established career, an established body of work, it's a compelling thing with the right idea and the right execution to take on. I think by no means should artists think about only doing open editions in their work. It's something that's just a piece of the puzzle that fits in where you can think about it as a new type of creative project.

Speaker A: They're definitely interesting and they definitely have interesting potential too. Like if you can charge 0.01 ETH, And get 25,000+ mints. I mean, that's Art Blocks curated money right there, you know, in terms of like revenue for the artists. I mean, I'd have to imagine like heart plus craft is like 99% of the volume on Prohibition if you looked at it so far. Whether or not you like the piece or think it's interesting, you can't deny the amount of pure ETH it sucked up. And I don't know, I haven't gone back to like do the math, but I'm sure for like Melissa Leander and And then it wasn't an insignificant amount of revenue to get like several thousand of these things at $8 a pull. Pretty good in this market right now, to be honest. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting aspects to it. We'll have to see where it goes. This stuff could really pop off in the bull market.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think to sort of round it out, like the more typical long-form generative projects, I think that's where you'll find really seasoned collectors like yourself and Trinity and others that just know that format and you can make an excellent long-form project, that's still the bread and butter of the ecosystem. And then I think, as you were saying, on the curated side, being able to do something that's really limited, 10 or 50, and really have all the outputs be curated instead of generated randomly is something we're seeing more artists want to do just as a sort of something special for existing collectors, for top collectors. Where there's strong interest in owning the really exclusive collection from an artist tends to be more on like the curated side.

Speaker A: Curation goes hand in hand with that kind of physical side too, where they tend to be artist curated and not just random outputs. And I feel like artists taking more control over their work and really saying like, no, like this 150 expresses the algorithm best and making that statement. Like that's kind of hand in hand with some of these trends, which at first, like I was kind of against. Or like not really necessarily against it, but I was like kind of like skeptical of it because coming from fx hash, it was just like long form first and always. But now I've kind of come around to embracing it more because I've seen how good some of these projects can be. And I've seen also like the challenges of trying to push random algorithms sometimes that has a lot of potential, but then you get some of these like duds in there and then you get floor pieces and you get all of this strange economics surrounding your release. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, we support curated. That was one of the features we heard the most about. From artists that they wanted. And I'm not sure who else sort of offers that natively, but as part of our tooling, you can just select which outputs you want to be available. And it's still a random mint, but it's random just from a pool of certain outputs. The other thing we hear from artists on this point is sometimes the algorithm really is really good and it could be a long form. They want more control. They want to pick out, you know, what the specific outputs are. To ensure that there's kind of like the range they're looking for and really just to like get the best of the best. On one hand, it's sort of like risk mitigation. On the other hand, maybe more positive side, it's, I want this collection to be small and for every piece to be just totally exceptional.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Last question, not even a question, it's a prompt. Anything that you want to plug? What's coming up on the roadmap for Highlight? What should we get excited about?

Speaker B: Coming up this year, definitely some big surprises that I can't share too much about, but I'd say on the product side, which is where most of our focus is, you know, we're a team of engineers and designers. There's the marketplace functionality that I mentioned that's coming up later this year. There's a lot of features around that for connecting with artists and staying on top of drops and things like that. There's a lot around building our community that we're excited about. We've been a little bit quieter. We have a kind of a secret artist Discord, but we're opening that up to collectors and making Highlight more of a multiplatform collecting experience. I think the last thing is, as an open platform, we're thinking a lot, a lot about discovery and how we can help artists that are just coming and using our tools independently to release work, how we can help get them surfaced.

Speaker A: All right, well, I guess the takeaway here is look forward to the Discord opening up, at least in the marketplace, right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: All right, well, right on, Nat. It was awesome to have you on to talk about Highlight. And get your perspective on the ecosystem, the market, Etherverse, Tez. We covered a lot of ground in this one, so I appreciate you giving us your time.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker A: That's it for this one, everyone. Hope you all enjoyed. That was Nat Emoti from Highlight.xyz. Go mint some stuff. There's a lot of cool work up there as part of the on-chain summer, and artists just releasing stuff like you know FX Hash favorite Agoston Nagy is up there right now. MCHX just Lots of artists that you probably know who are releasing on Highlight. Worth checking out. Thanks again to Nat. That's it for this one. We'll be back again soon with the next episode.

Speaker B: Bye. We're waiting, always listening. We're waiting to be signed.