Crypto & NFT's 2022: With Ape n Bird Podcast, A Special on the Market's Highs, Lows, and Lessons

Greg, you had your 88th sale. I was swatting away 1200-1500 ETH offers on the Gold Ape at the time I converted it to Australian dollars the max was around 5 million at one stage. I don't know what I was thinking. I still love my Gold Ape and I'll be holding him now.

Welcome to a special edition of the Benneberg show and the Ape and bird show. 4 Very Good Radiohead looking people jumping on today for a special yearly wrap up of 2022 which has been an absolute disaster of. Yeah you could put it out there Greg, hand over to you to intro mate. Welcome Steve Bergs.

Yeah welcome everybody to what is a big collaboration today with the Ben and Berg show but I think we're. Steve last time I spoke to you was about five weeks ago and we, we trialed a beer for the first time in episode 26 and then my computer literally shut down never came back on and we just ended up publishing the episode and dubbed it the worst pod ever so I'm glad what a.

Way to go out.

I'm glad to be back. We've obviously got two training wheels on for for us today with Ben and Berg showing us the way for, for episode 27 but lovely to see you again. I thought we got cancelled.

If they saw our outtakes we would have been. But no we're still alive.

Is this your same episode number as us?

We're both at 27.

There you go.

You'll be overtaking us in a couple of weeks.

Maybe we're both gonna be done after this episode. Maybe we'll just hang up, hang up the microphone after this.

That's it. It'll be the new worst episode ever.

Off to a strong start.

So I guess what we're gonna try and do we're gonna attempt at this is a bit of a crypto wrap up slash NFT wrap up and obviously Steve and and Greg are definitely our in house NFT experts and Ben and Ben Burgs and I try and focus Ben and I try and focus on the, the the the crypto side of things. I wanted to take us back gents to this time last year sitting at the 20th of December and Bitcoin sitting at 50000 US dollars so sitting around.

What are we probably about 2 3x from here and we're sitting pretty fluffy. I mean there was calls at some point around this time last year that we're going to 100k. Where were you guys at late last year? We're heading into Christmas I'M ready to buy Bitcoin for the family. It's all we're talking about whether, you know, we're the most popular kids in town.

Then 22 hit.

What were you guys doing last year? You know, were you ready to retire? How are you guys sitting?

Do you want to start, Steve?

Sure. A lesson I've learned for the next top and when to sell is when you start looking at yachts and Ferraris, that, that is when you sell. It's a good signal, very good signal for next time, of course. So that was my December last year, of course I had just released my own NFT project, so I was busy doing that and the markets were just nuts. Of course, every relative at Christmas. So should I be buying? Should I be buying? What are we doing? It was crazy.

Did either of you recommend to buy to your family because you're going to see them again this Christmas and you're going to have to front up.

No, definitely, Definitely not on my end.

Yeah. No, I always say I have no idea, which is true.

True.

And make sure that they do their own research if they're going to buy.

Well, I literally have no idea. So that's why I stick around, stay away from it as well. But I think it was interesting, right? We talk about sort of November and December last year being the top in terms of bitcoin and probably Ethereum price action. But for the NFT heads like Steve and I, really the top for us, particularly if you're in certain projects and I know we're going to touch on that today, but you know the mania of April 2022 where we saw Moonbirds veefriend series two to a lesser degree and then obviously the other side drop with Yuga Labs and that massive gas war. I mean, if you were in some of those projects, the top for your NFT portfolio was definitely April rather than sort of November, December last year. So yeah, it would have been interesting in November, December last year I was just sort of still riding the wave. Wouldn't say euphoric, but sort of like, wow, what a, what a year it's been. In 2021 I just left my, my corporate job as well and I was like, oh, isn't this going to be the best thing ever in 2022? Get to work in web 3. How wrong I was.

That was the euphoria. We're all like, wag me. And that just kept going through. If you're with NFTs and yeah, things like Goblin Town where it's like, it makes no sense it shoots to 5 8th in like a couple of minutes.

It's.

It was ridiculous. Complete mania.

Yes, absolutely.

So Greg and Steve, I think let's start off with NFTs because I think early in the year it was all NFT craze, right. Like run us through. What were the big events in Q1 this year? I remember just, it was just bananas. I remember going to America, Greg, we were probably preparing to go to the States at this point and it was just insanity. What, what were sort of the key events earlier this year? Take us back.

Yes, I mean some of the events and Steve, feel free to chime in at any time but you know, sort of remember the AO Art Ball obviously with, with Ridley in, in January. I thought from a sporting perspective, both Steve and I are big sports nuts. We were actually at the tennis with NF team Steve's project back in January and really love that, that Art ball project, you know, just sort of, it was something different besides sort of the traditional top shot model with that. Sports had gone down that route previously. But I can go back to sort of February too. And I remember sort of trying to grind into the allow list for cyber brokers. So I was able to pick up five cyber brokers. That was a sort of a drop that not everyone knew about, but certainly, you know, did quite well, particularly if you sold probably in the first like month or two of it being out. But you know, other significant moments that come to mind in sort of that, that Q1 were, you know, Apecoin was in March, so a little bit back end of Q1, but ultimately like Grails as well. I'm in the Proof collective that I've got to say that was probably, I think that was in February. That was the funnest 90 minutes I've had on the Internet in a long, long time. I mean it was for those that don't know about it, particularly if you, if you listen to Ben and Bergs, you haven't heard about Grails. It was, it was 20 artists that, you know, Kevin Rose and the team had selected and only Kevin knew who the artists were. They put the art up on a website and they said, anyone that holds a proof collective nft, which there's a thousand in the world, you get to pick one, essentially you get to mint it for free. Or I think it was actually 0.5. It was like something, you know, very, very small couple hundred bucks like that. And ultimately they had some of the biggest artists, you know, Tyler Hobbs, Dimitri Cherniak. Ended up having Lava Labs so you had about two or three weeks to pick your selection and they drip fed through the website. There was a lot of banter, there was a lot of speculation. Tim Ferriss and Gary Vee were also artists as well. So you know there was, there's a lot of notable names and that reveal on a Sunday morning for us was so much fun. I mean it was obviously still in a, a bull run. Everything was still sort of up only to it to a degree. Ethereum price action had gone a little bit sideways but in terms of NFT action as I touched on before it was still very much in an up only phase. And I can remember feeling gutted because there was two left. I think they'd revealed 18 and I was thinking okay, mine still hasn't been revealed. I chose number 11 and Kevin said, you know, and number 19 artist is Tyler Hobbs. And I, I, my heart sank because I thought that number 11 was going to be Tyler Hobbs and I thought this will be worth a bit of It's Tyler Hobbs, right. You know the, the artist behind Fidenza's not to realize that about 60 seconds later Kevin was going to, he said, you know, we're saving the best for last. Number 11 is, you may have heard of a thing called autoglyphs. Well before the autoglyph was something that Lava Labs whipped up and they've dubbed it the proto glyph and they couldn't get this fully on chain because of the size of it. So essentially there was 77 proto glyphs minted and I minted one of those within 30 minutes of that reveal. One of those proto glyphs went for 88th when ETH was at about 4000 Australian. So it went for nearly a quarter million dollars. Now did I sell mine at the time? No, because I said oh surely it'll go higher than that. Couldn't be happy just with a little 88th Sal just straight off the bat on a Sunday morning. But yeah, look, I'm still pretty bullish on where the proto glyph will be long term because I know that a lot of autoglyph holders and there's only about 500 auto. Glyphs. So you know the, I believe in sort of the next decade of proto glyph is going to be pretty valuable. It's still probably holding about 25 8th floor right now. But that was a very, very fun experience the, the grails and look, I'm sort of raving on a little bit about it but it was a change from the PfP like we're so we had been so accustomed to, you know, flipping this picture or flipping that picture with an earring or a bandana or this code or that code or whatever. And to actually have something that was a little bit different from an engagement perspective like that grails drop was pretty cool.

Great.

Well, let me talk about my December to Q1 of 2022. So as we mentioned Christmas, we still had that. It was sort of airdrop season, if you remember sos we had that airdrop and that was pretty much Christmas. And then going into January we had looks rare so we had the looks airdrop. And then the next month you had x2, y2. So all these OpenSea competitors were coming out and doing their vampire attacks to try to get users over to their platforms. Greg, you had your 88th sale. I was swatting away 1200-1500 E offers on the Gold Ape at the time. Yeah, I think I converted it to Australian dollars. The max was around 5 million at one stage. I don't know what I was thinking. I still love my Gold Ape and I'll be holding him now. But I had Sotheby's in my DM saying oh, let's put it to an auction and everything. It was just such a crazy time. I really don't know. We see those sort of times again. And then to cap off that period where anything was minted out, you could put up a 10,000 collection of poos with eyes on it and that would have minted out. And I know, I know a lot of people were trying that exact one. But then I think we capped off Q1 with Pixelmon. If you remember Pixelmon, this was a 3 8th sale. And then of course the, I think the guy, pretty much rugged, showed some horrible pixel art. And then we got Kevin, which was amazing. If you've seen the Kevin NFT since then, it's actually been bought out by a big gaming company and we'll probably talk about that later. But of course we had the Ape the other deed launch and that was where I was ready to make my biggest play because I was thinking, all right NFTs, this is just. Everything had been going well. This was the thing. I was going to put everything into other deeds. Luckily I could only buy I think about 20 because you needed to be KYC. There was big uproar over that as well. So I minted my 20 and each transaction was 28 in gas alone. It, it was incredible. And then pretty much after that Q1 is when it all started going downhill.

So Steve Just to. Just to confirm you did 20 land sales to eat per transaction in gas.

That's just in gas.

Yeah, that. Then that Ethereum back in December Jan was sitting somewhere between.

Somewhere between let's just say US$3,000. So let's just do a quick math.

While you're doing that math.

I was also short on an account because I had only put about 1.8 ETH in each wallet to try to because I didn't think it would be 2 8th so I had to send 0.2 eth across to this wallet to be able to mint that cost me because of the how crazy the network was at the time. US$2,000 just to send the ETH across to then another 2 ETH. It was ridiculous.

So. So in the words of people of the reply guys on the board 8 bot, I would say to that free.

Let'S just say I'm happy I only bought 20 lots. That's. Oh sorry. And then later on I did end up buying more because this is later in the year Elon and I'm sure we're going to talk about Elon a lot today posted a picture of a lot of board apes saying these look pretty fungible if we remember that moment. Yeah, I was ready to buy a heap more other deeds as soon as that happened. I knew those other details were going to go nuts. Other deeds were about 3.4eth at the time so of course I went in big. Then within an hour Elon had tweeted again saying these don't look so fungible anymore. Just a classic Elon ship post and everything crashed and I've been holding ever since. So my biggest loss in 2022 at the moment would be on other deeds. Yeah.

And quickly Bergs before we go to you for Ben and bergs listeners that aren't into nft. So Steve, basically because he owned bunch of board apes, you know, was able to mint and and buy some of the land in their other deeds. Metaverse gas fees obviously we know what gas fees are. They were insane back then on Ethereum when the NFT craze was going wild. Yeah, it costs over 120 roughly US thousand dollars on gas fees. It's like giving 120k to MasterCard to do transactions.

Good luck on your tax.

Thanks Metallic Thanks Vitalik.

That was a great tax loss harvesting as well.

That is true.

Amazing.

There was a lot of great tax.

Lots harvesting and you mutated your ape as well. I was watching that live. That was really exciting.

Yeah. I think Greg, you were at Vcon at the time. Was that the episode I was with.

A little bit of a cough? Yep.

Yeah.

Now that was a great episode. I think we ended up having 10,000, 000 viewers on that live stream, Steve, when. When you mutated the ape and.

Ridiculous.

I was taking everyone on the floor and everything like that. At Vcon. It was. Yeah, it was good.

Yeah. That was our first and only live Twitter since we've been doing them over Riverside and then uploading them. We decided to see if we could just do it live. And it did quite well. I don't know why we moved back, but, yeah, the reason I had mutated was because this was the stage where your last chance to get apecoin and also to get other deed plots. So, yeah, that was really fun episode. Just getting to mutate those.

It was a great watch. And I remember your thought process because you're posting it on Twitter and you were holding off because it was an unmutated ape and you're like, oh, I don't want to do that. I don't know what's going to happen. Can it be worth more? And it's a gold ape, so it's like one of the rarest. It's worth tons. And then everyone's like, do it, lad, do it. And then you did it. And on the live stream, I'm like, man, there's no way he's going to do this. It's going to be a rough pool for sure. And then, like, you muck it around, you're hiding your screen, you're like, oh, I can't see these cars. I take it forever. I'm like, nah, he's not doing it.

He's just.

He's just yanking that chain. And then he did it. And it was epic. It was so good. It was so rewarding.

I actually don't think those mutants look good at all, but I think they do for a year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we, after the NFT craze, that was probably roughly near the top. I'm not sure where that. If we have a top of NFTs, Steven Gregg was somewhere in Q1, I.

Would say end of April. Was.

Yeah, I can definitely tell you first of May, 100%. Because if I. If I would have sold everything on the 1st of May, oh, I would have been a happy man.

And people paying like multiple eth for a Gazali every day. That's how you know that the top's there.

So I'll give you. I'll give you a story on was it April 30th or May 1st, whatever the Sunday was. Someone's got a calendar there, whatever Sunday was.

So the other side land drop happens, right? And I remember Steve and I were doing a preview show of that and it was meant to be at 2 o' clock in the morning. And then yoga come out and tweeted like we bitched and moaned about it on the pod and we said, ah, you know, another 2am mint and what are we going to stay up or get up early, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they put out a tweet and they said we'd change the time. So it was now going to be about 10 or 11am on Sunday morning. So we thought sort of beautiful. That that sounds good. And obviously the big gas war happened. I ended up similar to Steve. I picked up an additional two pieces of land on top of the free claim I had for my Bayc that I had. So I got three plots of land. I paid 2 8th as well for that transaction. Absolutely ridiculous. In hindsight, like, still doesn't feel real to say that out loud. And I remember I was out for dinner that night and I got a text from a buddy of mine in proof and said, hey man, Bayc pieces of land floors at about 35 48th. Now this is just for the one that I got the free claim on. And I'm like, another bottle of wine.

I'm like, this is just this April was the biggest ridiculous month of all time because I was in proof. So I got two free moonbirds, I got another moonbird, I got a bunch of Gary Vee series 2v friends. I got other side land. It was just ridiculous, right? Absolutely ridiculous. And I can tell you from that text of the Bayc land, because I went, oh, maybe I'll go home tonight and like sell it next morning. I think it had dropped to maybe 12, you know, from 35 to 40. And then it was just down only and it's been down only since this moment in time. So.

So I think current floors about 1.3.

Not for being maybe 3 or 4. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So speaking of down only the, the first I would say in the, in the line of dominoes that happened probably about a week after Greg that you had this Sunday event was. Was terra ust imploding. So yeah, I was in the states of the time. I. I remember, you know, I've come, we all got the stories right, you know, of the tour. I'm keen to hear yours, Greg, because I've heard this is a golden one. But starting around May 7, we started to see the sell off of the UST lunar peg and it started to basically spiral out of control. Now this was worth at one point close to 45, sorry, the market cap was somewhere around 40, 45 billion dollars. And that had been erased in like a week. Within a week UST was trading at less than 20 cents. This is the dollar, this is the, the dollar. Stable coin pegs is trading around 20 cents and Luna was effectively zero. Now this was the first of a lot of different things to fall out of this because this idea of like earning a 20% was a 20% yield. Goodness me, thinking back then, oh my God, like everyone was piling into this, you know, like everyone was just like this is great, we're all gonna make it like just stick, stick your savings in here, like wag me. And then it just plummeted. Now Greg, I've heard, I've heard it was panic station. Steve, have you got the story for us?

Well, well if, if you know, April was the most like greedy, just like what the hell is happening? You know, we, the, the NFT money printer is just going brrr. Like if, if, if April was that then May was the, the first month that I've been completely unhinged in crypto, right? I've, I have, I have not been in it as long as you guys. I don't know about you actually Bergs, but I, I've been in this thing for maybe two, two and a half years now. And you know, I sort of like had a pretty hectic first couple of months and April was just, I was just essentially doing nothing but my portfolio, right? And I was, I was like, I'm going over the US for six or seven weeks to VCon, bunch of these events. This is great. I gotta get my wallet, security all sorted, you know, just to make sure that I feel comfortable with that and sort of traveling, etc. And that's really my only priority. Well that's soon changed with the, the collapse of Luna because ultimately like I was way too, like I wasn't leveraged so that was a good thing. But I was so top heavy with just NFTs and sort of Ethereum and I just had very little stablecoin, sort of, I just didn't have a balanced portfolio. And you know, one thing I've learned this year is just how quickly things happen, right? And I remember just thinking, why is this happening right now? I'm on a plane like next week, I got no idea what to do, you know, like you Know, let me have this back, let me have this back. And then I'm thinking like all stablecoins are in trouble for some reason because I remember seeing USDC and Tether and a few others like starting to depeg while the lunar stuff was happening. So I went out for a walk. I think it was probably around that like May 7th, 8th time Ben. And I can remember sort of like I'm texting Steve and he's like, oh yeah, you know, looks it's a little unpegged here and like just very, very like very like calm in sort of the storm. And I am just this anxiety fueled like nut job that's like walking at a thousand miles an hour with his headphones in like refreshing coingecko 17,000 times a minute, just not knowing what to do. And you know, that, that was, that was really difficult. And it extended, to be honest, all the way through. You know, we saw obviously Celsius and three, et cetera, but my whole trip in the US and we obviously caught up over there too, Ben. Like it wasn't all about doom and gloom, but I didn't make the necessary adjustments before I left and I just thought, oh well, you know, everything's dropping by 10, 20, 30% in one day and it seems like it's happening every second day. But I was like, I just got to get over there, just got to get to June. I mean, had I pulled the pin when, you know, the ground started to shake a little bit, I would have had much better outcomes. But I sort of was a little bit of a deer in headlights, to be honest. And it wasn't until sort of mid June where I feel like, and I've told this to Steve on, on our show before is like, I sold my ape. And it was probably actually in today's prices, it's probably more than I would get today. But I felt like I got shook out a little bit and I sort of sold like had I sold at the, at Vcon, Ben, when you and I had sort of dinner, I probably would have made double the money because the floor was still holding okay. And ETH was still, you know, not, not at sort of the one, you know, 1200, I think us is when I sold my ape and I converted it all to usdc, but I just got shook out and it was very, very difficult in the US because I hadn't gone through a down cycle like that and the velocity that it happened. So I was seeing friends that I hadn't seen for five, six, seven years. And I'm staying on, you know, their couch or staying with friends or whatever's happening. And they'd be all excited and say, oh, we're going out for dinner and we do this and we're doing that. And all I wanted to do was sit with my laptop in a dark room and rock just for a coup or two couple of hours and just try to sort out what some like try to make some decisions, right? And I think, I think my indecisiveness caused me a lot of sort of extra burden and extra stress and anxiety with it. But it is interesting, you know, you fast forward six months and I know we haven't touched on FTX yet, but ultimately when the FTX stuff happened, I didn't feel like I did with the lunar stuff. Even though in the macro picture, right, like in terms of what FTX was versus Luna, much, much more significant. But my portfolio wasn't balanced well enough when Luna happened. So and, and I hadn't been through that, that sort of chaos before. So it was interesting six months later psychologically how much different I handled it versus in May.

There's a really good lesson in here as well. So this is my sixth year in crypto, so I've been through a few market cycles and always have a plan for what you want to do because when it comes to that crunch and everything's going down and you don't have a plan to get so emotional, you look back like, oh, I could have done this, I could have done that. And it honestly took me five years to start actually planning this, right? And the first time I had a plan was because the majority of my stuff are just long term holds and I'm fine with that. I can eat all the losses. They're paper losses. I know it's a long term hold and that's my strategy. There was the first time I had, it was with Moonbirds, right? So we get on this, I get everything set up, I'm on the allow list, applied for the allow list, got all my money over and I'm like, this is great, I'm going to buy it. It was roughly like 10 grand, something like that, to buy one. Like as soon as it hits 150, I'm selling, that's it, no worries. And I didn't get on the list and I was like. And Ben, who just like totals in at the last second, just gets on the list, right? And then Matt, our analyst who brought it to our attention, he missed out on the list, but then he somehow got in like a second way and managed to mint one. But that was the first time. And I legitimately, even though I was going through the roof and it went to like 200 grand or more, I would have sold at that point in time. And just having that plan made me feel so good. And all I need to do is just remove the emotion, look at the plan and just execute on it. And I know that in a few weeks I'll be fine because it did what I needed it to do.

Bergs, can I, can I add two things on that? So one is completely agree with you. And, and I've actually learned that from Steve really to be honest, like some of the podcasts we've had previously. Like he'll often give me a number on a show and he'll say like I'll buy this at 5 or I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna buy this if it's at 10 or you know, whatever. And he's, he's just sort of sticks to it, right? He doesn't get overly emotional about it. And I think that that is something I, to be honest, learned even recently like with Tim Ferriss's Punch Mint, right. I got on the allow list there and, and, and look, if I wasn't so busy with NFT Fest, I probably would have been able to get a few more spots, but I really just took the easiest path forward and that was when I got an email. I saw that I could get on the allow list that way. So I minted for 0.3 and I flipped within an hour or two for 1.6 and I haven't bought back in. I'd like to support the project, but it was much more of an unemotional decision to me. But the second thing I want to say about this, because you guys have been actually in crypto a lot longer, right? But for me, where I haven't done a lot of normal crypto investing, I mean I got a little bit of bitcoin that it's just sitting there and it's a long term hold and Ethereum. I started off by holding, but I've obviously spent a lot of my Ethereum on NFTs these days. But I do think there's a different psychology with NFTs than say your standard crypto and token just because of the divisibility of it. And you know, I think there's a different emotional connection where if bitcoin got to, you know, $60,000 again, I'd be like, oh, I might just sell half of my bitcoin and take a Bit off. Right.

But selling 20%, 50%, 80%, whatever is a lot different than saying selling my proof Collective pass which I feel like I get a lot of value outside of other than just what the floor price is. Having said that, what I am learning now, that is I have under indexed or underestimated the almost. I won't. Well, necessity is nearly the right world. The necessity to somewhat be an NFT trader rather than a holder. Because I would classify myself more of a holder and collector than a trader. But had I sold my ape and my proof collective pass at anywhere near the top, I could probably buy three to four of them right now as we sit here today, maybe more. And so that's a difficult pill to swallow to your point. Bergs around sort of like detaching from all time highs and you know, paper gains and things like that. But in that moment where I felt like I was a deer in the headlights, I was sort of subconsciously weighing up not just the price of them but. Well, I don't want to leave the proof collective like I want to be in this thing for the long term, if that makes sense. So there's a, there's a different psychology and dynamic.

You sound like a hex head.

So there is that similar vibe if you get into a community for a token as well. But NFTs do have that ownership, real ownership of the. The piece you do get attached as well. But I like to echo what Berg said and this cycle I've been in a few was the first time that I actually got a spreadsheet going, had points at all, right, if bitcoin hits this price, I've got to sell this many. And it was every 5k increment and luckily enough you get to that point. And I remember at the start of 2020 when it had gone down to 3K and then we started that rise, that's when I thought, all right, this cycle I'm gonna have a plan. I'm gonna make sure I take some off the table. And yeah, so I had started at sort of like 50000 Bitcoin. If it gets there, I'll take one off. Then 55, then 60, then 65. So I managed to get three lots before it all came crashing down. But even when I was there and it got to that 50000 I was like oh well if it is going to 100k should I? And it was very difficult to just pull that trigger because I don't think I've ever sold. I. Well that's a lie. The initial time I ever bought bitcoin, I sold straight away. But then since 2013, I just held. So it was really difficult to sell even one. But then once you make that first, you stick to the plan. It was much easier to do the next lot and the next slot as well. So I've still got that spreadsheet. I'm just waiting for it to go back up, maybe in a couple of years. But, yeah, it's key to have a plan. It's. It's the famous Mike Tyson saying, everyone's got a plan until they're punched in the face. And as long as you. Once you get punched in the face, and we've all been punched in the face this year, if you know you had that plan, you've got that backup, you're going to be fine. Like, it sucks, but you'll get through it. We've seen this happen time and time again and, yeah, you just need that plan.

So. So I love the Mike Tyson quote, but I didn't even have a plan. I just got straight punched in the face.

As you're falling, you made your plan.

I. I like that added complexity with fungibility, where if you're getting into an expensive project, it's unlikely you got in at the Mint and you weren't able to meet multiple of them where you could sell them or you could trade them. So it's a yes, no decision. Do I leave this group and all the benefits that flow from it? And if we look at that and we attach value to it and say, the value of this token for me is I can be in this group, I'm going to get future drops, I can talk to these people. It's a status symbol for me. But at some point, that value is going to translate to your life. And whether that's. I can pay my house off or my car, or I can go on that holiday I wanted, what is that worth to me? Is it worth selling that asset that I have? But once you're attached to a community and people, and the second you sell it, that door is closed, it is a very, very hard decision.

It really is.

I reiterate everything you've said. Oh, so I was the same Steve. I. My 2017 cycle didn't have a plan, just. Just nuked all the way down. But then in 2018, 2019, I got where I made the most of my money was early in the metaverse, before it was really called the metaverse. There's a few projects. I made some progress, really good gains there, and I had that spreadsheet laid out. And the thing that saved me was I had an accountability partner, but not that we really realized was accountability. He and I both set up the same plan in the same project, and we kept each other accountable by literally, like, stepping out of the office, going to the pub, looked at these charts and looked at, like, where the product was at, was gone. This is just ludicrous, basically. Like, what the hell is going on? Like, if you showed this to this bartender here and said, this is how much I've made, and look at the project, look, what's. What it's worth, he's gonna slap us in the face, you know, so having that, like, ability, I think, just to step out of it and have that, like, real thoughts, we can get caught up in a bubble, I think, in crypto a little bit. But to your point, Bergs, like, I was the same with Moonbirds. Like, yeah, I didn't have a plan. I only had one. And, man, when that was sitting at 48th, I was like, Wag me. This thing's going 100. Like, let's go.

Every day. Every day we're texting, it's like 10. It's 28, 30. Oh, my God. And I'm just getting more and more rage because I did, right? So not only do I have to swallow it, it's all of Ben's gains.

We had talked about it on our podcast and had come up with what we thought the price would be, like a minute after minting out. And we had said, what was it, like 6 8th? We were thinking.

I think we were thinking 6 or 7. Yeah, yeah.

And it went straight to 8, then 12, and then 15 in no time. And I had actually a friend who had whitelist, so he could have minted two. He was camping and he forgot to mint it. And, oh, he had no Internet connection or something like that. And I was just thinking, oh, my God. And this was a guy who hadn't really got lucky in NFTs up until that point. And I. I was saying, whatever you do, just mint it because it will go nuts. And, yeah, him missing out would have been very painful for him.

So I was down south at the time, and I had intermittent Internet on a farm. And I had to do all this setup. Like, I had to get money, do a loan document, loan it to my trust, and then put it in there for all this tax shit, did all that and then didn't even get on the list. I was just so, so filthy. Like, after all that effort, and then I have to Unpick the loan, send it back. It's like, oh my God. So that extra stab in the guts, here you go. Not only did you not get it, now you have to deal with this crap and explain it to your accountant.

It.

It was pretty crazy the night of them. So I tried to get some sleep. It was like at 1am was when the proof collective members could claim their two moonbirds for free. And then from 2am was the. The mint, the allow this mint. And I tried to get some sleep at about 10 o'. Clock. Didn't really happen. So sort of got up at about 10 to 1, you know, Sunday morning, got the bloody coffee out, the vcan if I needed it. The whole. I had like a war chest, right, like just sort of set up at the desk. So this is gonna get a free fridge.

Yeah, Y.

It was just, it was locked and loaded. But you know, I had a huge amount of fun on that night. But one of my friends from Proof, his name's Dan and he, I think he picked up about seven or eight moonbirds in addition to the ones that he minted that night. And he was sitting on NFT nerds. And he was, I think, the only person that picked up a moonbird. When it hit. There was one or two moonbirds that were listed for about 6.8 or 6.9 and they were gone within the matter of seconds. And it felt like in a blink of the eye it was back to like eight and a half. And I had about. What did I have? I think I had about 16, eighth spare. And I thought surely I'll get an extra two, right? Like I'll get minimum of two, maybe three here. And I ended up only picking up one and that's the one I use as my profile pic on Twitter now with the hoodie and the heart eyes. And yeah, I sort of made that decision at about 4:30 in the morning and I. That was the largest NFT purchase I ever made at 12.9. And then hoodie moonbirds, I think within, I don't know, three or four days. Definitely within the first week they were sitting at a 65E4 for Hoodie Moon birds when Eth was still at like 4 grand Aussie. So just absolute insanity, but just more, more, more salt to rub into my old, old time wounds in the wounds, yeah.

So in, in, in. In light that we're only not even halfway through the year, gents, we might, We've all, we're all, we all haven't made it. We're all lost money at this point we, we now, we now lead into around June, around late June and for. I'm not sure if this name was on your radar in the NFT community, Steve and Greg, but 3ac certainly like even for us in the crypto space like they were a big player. But until this really came to light about how big these guys were, I felt that was sort of in the, in the background a little bit. So three Arrows Capital was one of the most prominent crypto hedge funds been around for a long time. A couple of big founders, big followers on Twitter, sort of, you know, quote unquote thought leaders in the crypto space. I would have said filed for insolvency in late June and basically what had happened that they had invested a bucket load of money across a bunch of different areas but one of their biggest investments was in Terra USD. So they had had around. I'm not sure exactly how much was in the hundreds of millions was invested into TerraUSD. And then once 3ac went down it was like dominoes because they. It also took down its partners, basically throws capital, had a lot of crypto projects, money that they were investing on their behalf. So terror went down which then brought 3ac 3ac down and then it really started to fall. So one of the biggest lenders of 3ac was Voyager. They then filed for bankruptcy in late June. Then crypto prices really started to plummet from then we led into Celsius which filed for bankruptcy, which Then led into BlockFi, then into FTX. We'll come to that later. But it was just a shitstorm from about late May into July which I would have said probably caused the next like well the first real quote unquote crypto winter for NFTs bergs I remember in the group during this time. So for Ape and Bird listeners we run a, like a membership platform. We've got a bunch of investors and it was just like things were blowing up like literally portfolios, like exchanges, everything and you know, engagements on our platform skyrocketed. I remember I think we had our biggest you know, live, live call at some points during there. I don't quite remember, it was just a bit of a blur. That whole period of time I was in, I was in the middle, I was going through a breakup. I was in the States, I didn't know where I was. You know, it was just down only for me. Burke's. Where, where were we in the middle of the year?

Oh mate, it was, it was getting hectic I think like you know, people in the middle of the year. People kind of still had hope for NFTs, but then all of the crypto companies blew up. One good thing, gas fees got really cheap.

So he could actually trade. But it was, it was hectic and people were coming into the group and they wanted to hear about what was going on. These intermediaries blowing up and that affected the entire ecosystem. Like, everything just got ripped out. And over the coming months, every single discord started to go quiet. Floor prices just plummeted on NFT collections. I remember, like, just a few months earlier, the buzz was like, you'd wake up and even though you had your real job, you'd be on discord and you'd be like, what are we meeting today? What are the dumpster mints? What's happening? What time?

What?

And people had NFT calendars. It was absolutely crazy. Like, people would just getting amongst it. And to go from that in such a, you know, from, we're all going to make it to, like, none of us are going to make it, have to go back to our jobs. It just happens so quickly and especially in like the, the crypto space, you just don't want to see. We all thought, you know, yeah, the bitcoin price has gone down a little bit, but we were expecting institutions to come in, we're expecting big people to buy up. We thought this was like, there was a little bit of a lull. It was all going to be done by the end of the year. But it's like, no, this is the big event. And not only is this the big event, they're going to be further shockwaves and events from this.

And just for context, NFT volumes went from $17 billion a month in January to 1 billion in June. And 8th price went from, I think it was around, yeah, 2,700 at the start of May to it hit a low of around 900 bucks in June.

Yeah, that, that, that's what I was going to say with E. That was when I had to get real with myself and talk about, like, why do I want to take some NFTs off the table? It was for, it was for Fiat, really. Right. Or at least a stable coin and food. Yeah.

I remember listening to a bankless podcast. Like, it's like an emergency episode and they're all talking about like, oh, he's probably going to go to like 400, 500. I'm like, that's it. I'm selling.

And then I feel like I, I think I sold some stuff and converted at USD when ETH was at maybe.

US or 1100. But yeah, I definitely remember when it touched, when it touched 900, that, that was very much in, in June. That was sort of when the, the Fed was starting to jack up interest rates as well. So it just felt like our, our whole bubble was, was really starting to burst.

Yeah, the, everything bubble popped and then the cost of capital is getting more expensive as well, so people can't deploy it.

Yeah, yeah.

So this was also fueled amongst a macro.

Disaster as well, I guess you'd call it, you know, impending recession. So as crypto winter continue to worsen, we then had Russia entering the war with Ukraine. The Fed decided, stuff this, we're just going to continue in, you know, raking interest rates because inflation was getting out of control. And then we had the layoffs. So Coinbase were probably the biggest, I remember to, to tee off laying off 1100 employees. NFT, the spacer OpenSea laid off 20%, Blockchain.com laid off 25%, Crypto.com laid off a bunch of people. And it just went on and on and on and on. And this was at the point, gents, when it was like, right, you know, welcome. The winter rolled in, we got our coats out.

The fun is over, and we all decided, why don't we sell? We all thought to ourselves, that's it.

You've got time to actually look back because the price action is just not there. And then all those nice memories that are carved in stone, all your failures just come to the surface. When you're trying to sleep at night, you're like, why am I like this?

Year after year, how many times I mentioned to my wife, if I had only sold at this point, we could have been here now, not even worried about any of this. But yeah, there was also, if you look now, even that NFT volume has just kept going lower and lower. Sure, there's a lot of fake trades on Blur at the moment that lifts that up. But even at that time, and to really put a point in it, we had what everyone thought was going to be the next big leg up in NFTs with Coinbase NFT platform. So I think that came out near the middle of the year or something like that. And I remember every project was trying to get on their, like, partnership platform to be the first on there. I even had cores probably, I think three or four separate calls with different people at Coinbase trying to get NFTs on there. It launches, you can make your profile. Crickets.

It was the biggest joke.

Those tumbleweeds down the Content down the feed.

That's a, that's a bit unfair, guys. Like I remember seeing at one point, I think after a month they'd done at least three and a half. Eighth volume.

Analyst told us about it and he just kind of had one sentence. I'm like, I gotta check this out. So do the setup log in. And I'm just first of all like, what the is this? This is Coinbase. And it's like some high school kid launched it and then you got comments. Ridiculous.

You know how much they paid the main creator of that platform. It was in Cointok and other tokens, but it worked out to be about $600 million to build that platform.

No, mate. Yeah, I, I'm not even a dev and I could have built that in a weekend. It was so, so bad. It was like generic tools, the UI was ridiculous and people using it day one. Yeah. And look at the comments. It's like f your board 8 or like I saw you down the pipe. It's just ridiculous. It was so, so lame. From a company that has done crypto quite well. It was just so unexpected.

And now we've seen since their peak. When did they ipo? At the start of the year, I think. And it was near US$400 for their actual stock. I think it's just hit its all time low.

Did it really get to 400? Yeah, I think it's only at 40 right now.

Yep.

Yeah.

IPO near 400.

It's down over 90%. And this is the thing like people see and this is so just for the listeners, this is how all the investors exit. So they invest in a private company, this is rich people and they're expecting a certain price to list at and then essentially all it's a liquidity event. So all the public people will go on and buy it and they'll have a, like a five to a thousand x multiple on their money when people are buying it because it's the first kind of legitimate crypto exchange has been offered that is not the time to buy. And if you just look at that graph, because there's peak excitement people are getting in, there's a lot of volume and there's no credence given to market cycles or where they're at financially or whether it's a good company or not, they roadmap their strategy. Oh my God, these people are just hurting. They are down 90%. They would have been better buying literally anything else that in the crypto space. Any other crypto asset apart from NFTs so.

And FTT.

Too soon. We'll get to that.

Let's go through the list.

We'll get to FDX in a second. But we did have one successful launch gents, in around September, which was the Ethereum merge. It was the. Probably the only thing that sort of stood out in, you know, Q3, Q4, before that's been anything worth mentioning. I think we were holding our breath a little bit to one, to see if it'd actually work and two, if we'd maybe get a bit of a price rally afterward. We didn't really get a price rally but it did go off without a hitch. So Ethereum moved from proof of work to proof of stake. Something had been in the, in the pipeworks for a number of years and now I think Ethereum's now turned deflationary. We have 99% more energy efficient and you know, I think in terms of the fees on the network, where fingers crossed the next NFT bull market, we might be a little bit, you know, Steve might save some money next time.

Well, yeah, I don't think this actual. The merge changes anything with gas fees, but we've got. What, what have we got to come? The purge, the surge.

We've got a few.

I don't know what else is there but this one, it was a. And it seems everything in the crypto market is a sell the news type event. So I remember it was about 1600 US at the time of the merge and it had pumped up from about 1200, 1300. And then as soon as that merge happened, and of course other things were happening as well, it just started its decline. And where are we now? 1100, 1200.

So the big thing that happened around that, I was just like, look, it's a technical thing, it's going to be boring. But then all these bitcoiners came out and they were like, what's the issuance? What's going to happen here? I'm out of ETH and I'm all bitcoin. Even Checkmate came on and he had everyone shook with his questions. Everyone's like, oh my God, I got to get out of eth. And in the end it went off without a hitch. Hats off to the devs there. Just amazing, amazing work. The blockchain's working fine and it was just really good to see a success story with eth and yeah, yeah, none of those events really, you know, eventuated and I was just so pleased to see that and the path that they're on.

Yeah, well, Greg, Greg and I have talked, Sorry, Greg, about how in the NFT space, the biggest concern of brands and everything has been that ECG component. So, Greg, you've talked about this heaps.

Yeah.

Do you want to talk?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that obviously competitor blockchains have long held sort of, you know, put their hat in the arena and sort of said like, well, we're ESG friendly, we're the greenest blockchain, we're this, we're that. And ultimately, like a lot of board presentation rooms, like boardrooms that I've given presentations in in the last sort of 6 to 12 months of corporates that are interested in dipping their toe in the water with brands around NFTs has been a real hesitation when Ethereum was still at proof of work. Right. Because of ESG concerns with those, with those businesses. So I think September's the merge was very, very significant for the network effects of Ethereum and what the future is going to hold with Ethereum in my mind, And I think not only that, and I know I keep jumping the gun here, Ben, with sort of the more recent events of ftx, et cetera, but, you know, having even seen an article the other day about Coachella's NFTs that were launched on Solana and they were done through the FTX marketplace, I believe, from what I read, and it's sort of like at the moment they're just locked up, right. So not only have we had Ethereum move from, you know, from proof of work to proof of stake, which now throws out the argument from corporates to say, well, there's ESG concerns, we're now, we're now seeing for the first time, or for the people that have only been around for a year or two, like myself, we're actually seeing how decentralization and how security of a blockchain matters too. Right. So I think that it's been actually, in my mind, a very big win this year for Ethereum as a, as a chain, because they've addressed a lot of problems and, you know, as other layer ones have fallen by the wayside, you know, I fear, I think despite the price of Ethereum right now sort of going sideways or slowly moving down, still I think it's been a big year for the Ethereum ecosystem. That's a huge point.

That's a huge point as well, where even moon birds, they allocated a portion of the Mint to offset how much they ruin the environment with a carbon offset. That was a genuine market need. And the other big thing About ETH was censorship, resistance. So tornado cash happened around that time before the merge and people's addresses were getting banned. And if we move from a proof of work mechanism that's relatively decentralized to a proof of stake where you have stakers and validators, are those people who you can potentially identify going to obey the laws of the countries that they're in and potentially ban addresses with blockchains? That was a huge, huge thing that was happening and it was unknown. It hasn't happened yet. Everything seems to be going smoothly but again that remains to be seen. If people are acting that way and you're a proof of stake blockchain.

Yeah, so, so what we've seen as well is that the tech side just keeps working, keeps being built out and everything. It's the human greed side that has been the story here for 2022. So as you said, there was also the tornado cash stuff and I know Brian Armstrong from Coinbase came out and said look, if we're asked to censor certain addresses and everything, we're not going to do it. I believe there's still like 70 I have of blocks are censored so they're not allowing certain transactions but over time that'll get figured out as well. Just going back to mid year we had and now we've had three ac, we've had ftx, we've had all these blow ups but until last week we didn't have a sort of charge or arrest of any of these people. But halfway through the year we did have an OpenSea employee. So I think his name was Nate Chasten. Yes, he made about 8 eth profit by front running what was going to be up on the OpenSea homepage. He got arrested, he's been charged with insider trading and I'm not sure of the result or whatever better but out of everything that's happened in this space this year, for that to be the one that the authorities have gone, oh yeah, we're going after this guy is just ridiculous.

This is the thing, this echoes the gfc. The rich people don't go to jail. It's like someone though, they need a patsy. It's old mate that made 8 ETH and we'll send him to jail for 10 years.

Exactly.

So, so Nate, Nate was actually, I mean what he did was, was, was wrong. But for those that don't know Nate that Steve's talking about, I remember when I was first getting into NFTs and sort of, you know, starting to slowly but surely follow a lot of people on crypto Twitter. Nate was one of the first people I followed because he was an OpenSea employee and he was a hustler. And when I say hustler, like he was the really the public face. He was in the weeds of Twitter. So if someone had a problem with something or if someone wanted to vent or you know, give praise or whatever, Nate was essentially the one that was always replying off his own Twitter. And to be honest Steve, he sort of felt like one of the community, didn't he Nate? Like he was really, he was really in it and it was, it was such a shame to sort of hear what, what happened with, with him. But yeah, echo your, your statements around that, that it seems pretty ridiculous given the gravity of what he did versus some of the other stuff we've seen from, from some crypto characters issue.

And that sort of leads into what we all have been through in the last few weeks. And I want to reiterate that I think as we mentioned, all the problems that have occurred this year has been centralization problems have been human problems, right? Nothing has changed for the technology, nothing has changed for Ethereum, nothing's changed for Bitcoin, nothing's changed for NFTs. These are all been human problems. And FTX was the biggest by far. And for those people that have been living under a rock or unconscious for the last month, basically the founder, Sam Bankman Fried.

Basically committing fraud and, and using alleged customer.

Don't don't sue either of the podcasts we need to Stay Alive allegedly committing fraud, basically using customer funds to bail out his hedge fund which was closely tied to ftx. And then his analysts are sort of digging deeper so sort of digging through the mess. The incoming CEO after FTX filed for bankruptcy, John Ray iii, which also, who also oversaw the Enron liquidation which was one of the biggest fraud cases in the last, you know, 10, 20 years, said in a court filing that in 40 years he's never seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of, of trustworthy financial information. So it's, it's been massive. You know, we've seen the likes of, you know, Tom Brady, Steph Curry, I mean they had FTX stadium in Miami that I'd been to and that has now completely blown up. And we've got the likes of Blockfly also coming off the back of it as another domino effects that file for bankruptcy. And yeah, we're probably still seeing the contagion fall out, but this is by far the biggest story, you know, since.

Blanking on the name Steve exchange back in the day. Matt Gox, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks, Greg. So, yeah, massive news.

Let's put this all in perspective. They use QuickBooks and Microsoft Teams. Just knowing those two pieces of information, you know that something's going on behind the curtain.

Never ever trust anyone that uses Microsoft Teams.

Correct, correct.

I use QuickBooks but not Teams.

Oh, see you later.

Let's boot him.

But yeah, it really is true. Look, this market exploded. There are a lot of, look, looking back, incompetent people that were figureheads in the space and when you, when things are just going, you just don't care about stuff. So he probably was just like, well, all this money's coming in. Well, we'll use QuickBooks. What are we doing? We're getting millions of new customers. We've got to scale, we've got to do this. We can't hire quick enough and it just ends in this. So a massive fraud, allegedly, but also incompetence and just being way out of your league. And as we said, it's gonna. There's gonna be more contagion that we don't know going forward. I think it's Barry Silbert's the next one DCG Group or whatever it is. But look, I got lucky myself. I wasn't in Luna. I was researching Luna at the time because Milk Road, a really good newsletter. They had put in a lot of money into Lunar and were talking about it. I missed that. But I did have money in blockfi, another sub stack I'm subscribed to. I think Bow tied something they had said if you have any money in any of these, just get them out. Don't even bother. After Luna, I did move a lot of my bitcoin out of blockfi. So very lucky that Sam and FTX sort of saved them at the time because they would have gone down at that time. Then I was inundated with emails from BlockFi. We're fine, come back, here's your extra interest, we'll give you 18% APR. Luckily I just left it and then of course with seen what comes next. So yeah. Anyone still in any sort of. I doubt there is, but anyone still generating yield from anything? Yeah, be very careful.

I think that's probably all the major events. Unless I missed any Stephen Green. I'm not sure if there's any NFT stuff you want to touch on before we do a wraparound.

I. I was going to say Ben 2:2. What a fitting way really to. To end 2022 with two recent mints. I've touc earlier today but Tim Ferriss's punch. So you know, Steve and I are big, big Tim Ferriss fans, fanboys. But you know, ultimately this is, this is an experiment for Tim. He's been pretty on the record to say, you know, it was a 0.3 mint and he said don't expect this to moon. Don't expect a lot out of this. Don't expect anything. Yeah, don't expect anything essentially. And you know, I think he sort of set the bar reasonably low. He set extension expectations. But what a funny name. If you listen to him on the Bankless podcast, he sort of talks about it obviously being a play on words. He talked about, I think a recent breakup and you know, just a lot of times in Covid over the last couple of years and he said it just feels like I've been, you know, punched in the over and over again. And he said, but he also, he's also doing a play on words around cocktail fighting, you know, roosters as well. But I think that that was interesting just seeing sort of, well, what would you call it, Steve? Sort of the pump of the there. I would say a couple of days after. A couple of days after Mint there so ran up sort of 1.5, 1.6, 1.7. So very, very funny.

I saw that as well because I saw the mint and I'm a Tim Ferriss fan. I was going to get in but I read what it was about and he was saying he's basically, if he gets bored, he's not putting any effort, don't expect anything. And I'm like, no, this is not the one for me. And then he released a few podcasts which sound amazing to do with this fiction and it's absolutely incredible. And look, Greg, I think I know the next one that you're going to talk about and I can't wait for you to get there. You might want to do a trigger warning, mate, because it might trigger some people.

Yeah, yeah. Well, for those that don't know, you know, the T in NFT actually stands for Trump.

There it is, there it is.

So yes, if you're, if you, if you don't, if you're not aware there was over the last couple of days there was some Donald Trump trading cards. What are they called? The Trump digital trading cards that, that minted, I think for, for 99 u. S. They're on Polygon. They have been essentially the highest volume NFT over the last couple of days. Over the weekend on Opensea, the floo sitting at 0.24 right now yesterday I think they were, or maybe even on Saturday they ran up as high as something like 0.7 or 0.8. So you could have, you could have got a 10x flip on the Trump trading cards. But not only did they have such high volume and sort of the floor, like I said, sort of 0.7, 0.8. It touched on. There's 45,000 of them. So it's a very, very large quantity. Right. Like I can only remember like, like obviously other side we talked about was a hundred thousand parcels of land. Gary V's V Friend Series 2 was 555,000. Well, no, sorry, it was 55, 555 and then Trump at 45,000. But you know, there's a few tweets that I've seen out there that are saying that, yeah, he's just licensed his image, etc, it's not even him or his team that's necessarily behind it. But what a pretty funny way to end 2022. You know, this is, this was not being brought up to get political whatsoever, but we even saw actually this, the spin up of some Biden trading cards which were just some type of, some.

Type of awesome Obama as well.

Yeah, yeah. So this was just, just the stupidity of the space sometimes that, that they come into it. But yeah, so, so two mints there in, in December, Ben, that I think you. So you could have made a, a momentary pumpkin on.

Yeah, but so taking away, taking away Trump here, it shows that NFT in a community, it can still go nuts. If you've got that community and Trump does, you're going to be able to sell and bring new people in and then let the degens take over on the trading side and pump it up even crazier. But what I wanted to end with NFTs is. And you mentioned Polygon. We've seen a lot of big brands near the end of this year start using Polygon and coming out with their projects. So of course we've got Starbucks that came out with their loyalty cards and there's been Nike buying Clone X and being on ETH and releasing all these shoes. And it's just Meta has now added integration. Of course we have Twitter integrating. So in the space things are happening. It's just like anything in crypto. Everyone expects things to happen straight away, but it's over very long time frames that these things really pan out and then you get the value at the end.

It takes a really long time to build stuff and that's what you're waiting for. And even with nft, you've been doing that for a minute now and you got grand plans for that and you're still building in the background every day.

Exactly. Look, 2022 has been the toughest year of my life. I went from 2021, I've been pretty much semi retired, doing a bit of investing and so on, a bit of sports betting. Then of course got hooked on NFTs and then decided to bring everything together that I knew. So sports bet in sports, crypto, NFT and so on, and created nft.

Look, I'm proud of where we are at the moment. We're probably one of the few projects that are still above mint. We've got a community, our discord. You can go in there. There's at least a couple of hundred chats a day still. So I. I'm very proud of what we've been able to do over the past year. But yeah, I've been building, been pretty much 18 hours, hours a day for the last 12 months. And yeah, in 2023 I get to actually show off what we've been working on for the past year. So who knows? I still think next year is going to be a down year for NFTs and crypto, so it's going to be very tough. But I will have a 10k drop, maybe 5k drop, who knows with the market of these players coming out and building out the whole NF Teams platform. But yeah, if I can do a second 10k drop and sell out, I think we're well on our way to build in the next big sporty metaverse.

That's amazing. So will that be a drop or a paid mint?

Sorry. So, yeah, that will be a paid mint. We're dropping jerseys for current users and that's free, but that will be a paid mint, but nothing like the sort of mints you see now. It'll be very close to the original 0.08 E that we've got used to early on but have moved. I think the last three mints I've paid for are all 0.3 or 0.25 and above. And you now that I've had to work on a project with a very limited budget for the past year, I understand why they try to raise so much, but I'm trying to keep it small and affordable for everybody. So expect that maybe March, April of 2023.

There you go, a little bit of alpha for your listeners.

That's our best job, I think, at a timeline of events in 2022. Hopefully that was helpful. Now what I want to do gents is do a wraparound and I want to get one key lesson or learning from 2022 plus one prediction or hot take for 2023.

Now Bergs, you look like you've got one so I want to go to you first.

All right?

So my lesson learned was.

In my life to choose.

Uncertainty over unhappiness. That is the big thing for me and this relates to joining collective shift. So not only am I a crypto investor have been for years. I've actually joined a crypto company and I was held back for a while because I was in a corporate job. It was very secure, the money was great but I was unhappy in that role and it's very uncertain going to a startup, let alone a crypto company. But it has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. Like I get to work in an area I like every day with awesome people. I'm a lot happier, a lot healthier too. So that is probably my big learning for the year. Choosing uncertainty over unhappiness. Try to do that a lot more in my life. And a hot take for 2023.

I don't even know if it's a hot take but I think it's just going to be the everything bubble. Things are going to get more challenging across every single sector. Equities, crypto NFTs. It's just going to be more challenging and I think we're going to see more of the same where we've seen a lot of contagion, a lot of crypto companies closing, they don't have the working capital. I think we'll have a huge flush out and the ones that survive and have the skill and the capital to do so will be some of the biggest companies in 5 or 10 years time.

Awesome. All right, I can go. My hot take of 2023 is actually the major crypto coins. So bitcoin eth will be up from where they are now. Even though very likely there'll be a recession. I think near the end of next year we will see crypto prices higher than they are now. I also think AI is going to be the story of next year. I'm sure we've all been using chat, gbt, stable diffusion, all these just incredible pieces of tech and they're still so early but so incredibly powerful. I, I haven't used a piece of tech before or in a very long time in decades that you're just like wow and just out of the box first iteration, just incredible. So there are going to be so many one or two people companies using these AIs and linking into APIs from everywhere, creating amazing companies. And we've seen all these big companies sacking workers. So you've got hundreds of thousands of IT guys without a job. They're going to be tinkering for a couple of months and finding these great uses. Probably my biggest lesson of 2022 is know when to sell and sell but also to continue doing what I do best, which is absolutely nothing, just holding, just sit there so good, do nothing at all and know that there's always a next cycle that's going to come. My, my thoughts on crypto haven't changed. My thoughts on people in the space haven't changed. There's always going to be greed. There's always going to be people working behind the scenes as hard as they can to build great products. So you just got to wait it out and eventually it will come back around and there'll be another bubble, bubbles after bubbles and yeah, we'll get there definitely.

I've.

So I do have a hot take and I'm going to jump on Steve's one. Next year will be the year of the solopreneur. So this is not just content creators but people that have amazing APIs, especially around AI that can create products. And we've seen that with Danny Postma and with Levels IO within a week you can spin up a product and get customers and I think more and more people are going to start doing that, just building stuff on the Internet. It doesn't have to be massive scale or to just cover the job or a bit more that you had and you get a lot more free time and you can live anywhere in the world. I think we're going to see that a lot more.

Yeah. Finally, Tim Ferriss's four hour work week is a reality.

I think my lesson is what we touched on earlier. I mean 2022 has been the wildest year of. I'm going to call it my working life. Like I'm not going to call it of my life but you know, working life, career, whatever you want to call it. Similar to you Berg's first 12 months sort of out of a corporate job. I didn't dislike my corporate job. I've worked in sport most of my life. But you know, this is a massive, you know, if you've seen that meme where it's sort of like, you know, it's a, it's a sign, right. And you, you know, you're going this way or you can just veer off the road and you're going that way. Like I've veered off the road and I'm going this other direction in this weird and wacky world. But I think a lot of this stuff happened to me by accident. It was through a, you know, curiosity and I sort of got my hands dirty with some NFTs. And then all of a sudden, you know, I'm in a position that I never thought I'd be in ever in terms of sort of the financial gains and a lot of those evaporated and everything happened so quickly and like we didn't touch on before but obviously, you know, there was a lot of tweets going around saying that people that got into NFTs were much better at self custody of their asset than people that have been in traditional crypto because they would just look at FTX as essentially as a bank. Right? You're so used to just, you know, putting your, putting your money or in crypto's terms putting your coins on an exchange and leaving them there. So I was figuring out things like hardware, wallets and you know, seed. Like all of this stuff was self taught, right. And I just felt like I never got to a moment where I could take stock and go where am I? Right? And then it just got like I said before in April, it was euphoric and then it was sort of down only and it was very hard psychologically to deal with that. You know the encourage everyone to look at that punk6529 thread on sort of detaching from all time highs. But I think for me it's the great lesson is, is try to, try to allocate time to actually plan like you guys have all talked about on, on the pod. So I think that's a big, big takeaway for, for me or a big lesson learned in terms of 2023 hot take. I mean I'm not really a macro guy, although I feel like I've learned a hell of a lot this year. I tend to share the sentiment and that's look, that's not based off anything other than just listening to intelligent voices like you guys. And, and I listen to the all in podcast and it seems like the Overall sentiment is 2023 will still be relatively rough. My hot take is Diamonds in the Rough. Be aware of Diamonds in the rough in 2023. And what I mean by that is we often say, well overall as an industry we think we're going to be down. But.

Even Having the bandwidth after NFT Fest to just jump back into a few discords and see a few experiments like what we've seen at Midnight with Giancarlo or even what I'm seeing sort of with a few artists that have got some things coming out in 2023, some experimentations, and obviously not all of them are going to hit, but I think within that sort of rocky road, or maybe moving sideways and slightly down in 2023, we're still going to see some things that, that have some upside and, and that's what I'm excited to be honest, to, to sort of unearth potentially.

I like that a lot because this is the period where if you're in crypto, you really believe in crypto and really like crypto. If you're building in this market where everyone's basically pivoted to AI, you're gonna, you got a high chance of if you're gonna launch. You know, it needs to be awesome to just attract attention and for it to be successful.

So.

I agree. I reckon there'll be some awesome stuff coming out next year.

Yeah, I, I think the other thing that we really need next year is like crypto's mobile moment making it so easy. Greg was saying how we have to learn all this stuff with metamask and wallets, just making it so simple for a normal person to have a crypto wallet on their phone and to use crypto without thinking about seed phrases or self custody and all this sort of stuff.

Do you reckon 2023 will be the year where we see native wallets on phones.

Like where they just come bundle?

Yeah, Samsung has been trying a lot of stuff, but I don't know, it does rely on Apple and they don't seem all crypto friendly at the moment. So probably not. Probably 2024, which will hopefully coincide with the next bitcoin halving and the next run, hopefully.

Great, great, great thoughts, boys. My biggest lesson, I think from this year is to have more conviction in investments when you know you've got something good.

You know, and I'm not talking about anything fancy there. Like for me, bear markets can get boring from an investment perspective. So we tend not to put more feed into those assets that we think are going to perform because this is going down and you know, it's just, it's just sad to invest. But I really learned from previous bulls bear markets to know that this is the time to make money, right? This is when you plant those seeds, you build the stacks, you build your portfolio ready for those Bull markets. So I'm really as much as I can in the bitcoin and ETH right now. So that's one lesson. And the other hot take for me is that I am not a fan of CBDCs but I've heard along the grapevine that they, the Australian dollar CBDC will be here next year and I'm concerned about a cashless society with a central bank, digital currency and the lack of understanding of the mass consumer thinking. It's, it's a crypto. It's, you know, it's amazing and I get that it has benefits, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. But I don't like the look of a world when your currency is monitored and controlled and you have no privacy of your money with a central ownership or, you know, central government having the full control on that. So my hot take is that that will be out next year and us as educators, the four of us and people with, you know, us in the space really have a job of, of making sure people know what actually this is and what it isn't. So that's my whole take for next year.

Yeah, that's a really good one that it's going to be very interesting to see which country cracks on. And we, we saw it with Canada when they had their trucking thing and everything there and then closing accounts down. And we know China has been doing this, this for a couple of years already. But yeah, once say the Australian government says we're limiting the amount that you can spend and again we've seen them try to do this with like the centerlink cards in certain areas of Australia.

Yep.

It's just going to make life so much easier for them to implement this across all of our currency. So it is scary. Hopefully we do see proper legislation and rules around all of this, this. But you're right, it's going to be a big topic next year.

I'm actually going to take the contrarian view, not to say I don't know a lot about CBDCs other than like just, you know, in principle what it is. But I actually am more optimistic in terms of, I know that the world has been through chaos the last couple of years with COVID and we've seen more unbelievable life events like even here in Melbourne. I remember, I think it was last year we saw just unbelievable scenes of like, you know, the tradies that were, you know, causing a stir in the city with the COVID protests. And then we saw like, you know, bloody earthquake here. We just, it felt like we had lived so many years in a short period of time. But I'm optimistic that most of the countries that we're, you know, especially here in Australia, that we'll, we'll get these things right and it won't be necessarily a dystopian future. I think that, you know, the world will figure itself out. I just think that we, we are in a way sort of tending to lean towards dystopian thoughts because of the last couple of years. So I'm optimistic.

It's good to have hope.

Maybe I've just been kicked too many times.

Greg, you've been cock punched.

Brilliant. Gents. Let's, let's, let's wrap it up there. Just as a final thoughts. Maybe Stephen Greek give, give the Benneburgs listeners bit of a take on what the hell you guys talk about. I know you've had a bit of a break and what you're going to be focusing on next year on the pod and just wrap up anywhere you can follow you guys.

Greg, you're a much better talker than me, so take it away.

Well, we will be back next year for sure. I think we need to experiment maybe a few more times, Steve, with our formats. We talked off air about, you know, the, the episode that we did live from VCon when you know, I was over there and you mutated your gold ape tape with, with an M1 and M2 serum. So I think we, we toy with a few formats next year. We have had a number of guests, sort of like Zeneca that have and Harry and Aaron that are the, the devs at Proof and Moonbird. So they're all lined up to be guests. We just have to find time, Steve, to get them on the show. So you know what, the Ape and Bird show will be back in 2023, sometime in January. We'll probably have maybe even a wrap up. Steve, from, from the NF teams event and we should actually plug that actually, because I, I personally love that event.

So if you're, there's no point plugging it. It's already reached. It's.

Oh, has it? Okay, well there you go.

No one can come anymore.

Bad luck. You're not going to make it after all.

But.

We just got rugged.

We are having another meetup and the funny thing is this what January 16th of this year is when I first met Greg in person and we had an amazing chat about all things NFTs and that's why we ended up becoming friends and starting the podcast and everything. But yeah, we had a max at the pub of 50 people in at the tennis and we've already got that now. So even in these NFT winters there's still the community and we saw it at the NFT Fest event. We had the Aussie takeover of NFT Twitter a couple of months back. So even though NFTs seem dead and crypto markets seem dead, there's still some life there.

Aussies are the biggest degenerates. That's all we took away from that.

Look, we're the biggest gamblers in the world and crypto markets at the moment is just another gambling product.

And Greg, where can we follow you guys? Where can the listeners? You guys are on all the podcasts platforms.

Yeah. So Twitter handle is at Ape Bird NFT show. We our YouTube version is on NF Teams YouTube channel. So you'll find past episodes there and find us on the podcast version as well. So looking forward to a big 2023.

Awesome. And for Ape and Bird listeners that might want a little bit more cryptos. Oh man. You guys talk crypto but we're probably go a little bit more into the tokenized world of crypto. We don't talk too much NFTs. We're all about crypto, business and personal growth. So Bergs and I are personal growth junkies also sort of walk you through the ups and downs of trying to grow a business. So Bergs and I work together at Collective Shift. We haven't been at the podcast game for as long as you guys, I don't think. We've only just sort of started from the last six months or so. So we're still trying to figure it out.

But the same number of episodes, mate, that consistency. Gotta hit that growth, mate.

Yeah. So you can, you can search in Bennett Berg's most places on podcasts and YouTube and I'm @BenSimpson. Are you on Twitter? And at Babyberg baby.

And you go to bedenbergs.com and you'll find us there.

Guys, it's been awesome.

Yeah. Really fun to chat.

Absolutely. Have a great Christmas and New Year's everybody. And all of our listeners, all of our combined listeners, I want to say three of yous.

Merry Christmas.

It's just us listening.

One more thing I do want to add is actually like it's pretty incredible. We didn't touch on NFT Fest much and obviously it was sort of nearly a month ago now and Ben and Collective Shift were a sponsor of it and we thank Ben for that. But you know, it was an unbelievable event. But, but just even sort of Getting to people that 12, 18 months ago, like the people that are in my emails and DMs now, it's pretty incredible. Like in the NFT world that I operate in, like I was looking up to these people, like, how will I ever get to them 12 or 18 months ago and now with less noise?

It's pretty nuts. Like, I know. Ben, you met Crypto J on Twitter for the first time at NFT Fest. And like, like there's just a. It's so easy to. You're only one person away from getting to nearly anyone on Crypto Twitter these days. So like, I would encourage anyone, listeners from both of our shows to like, now is the time to like actually forge really good relationships because there's just not that much noise. And you honestly can get to anybody right now.

Yeah, agree. Because no one has anything better to do themselves.

Well, Greg, you've ticked off Kevin Rose. When Tim Ferriss.

When Tim. Tim.

Yeah, when Donald Trump. Great. When Donald Trump.

The, the, the. Can you imagine what Donald. I mean this is probably not a good, this is probably not a good way to end the show, but that's.

How we always end show.

I mean, clearly a Trump fan over here.

No, no, no, But I mean you can just imagine at the, the first, first press conference back. No one does NFTs better than me. I've been told I've got the most successful NFT collection of all time. They tell me it's the best. They tell me it's me. They tell me it's me and Crypto Punks as the two greatest projects of all time. You know, it's coming.

Awesome, guys. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks very much. Steve and Greg Berg's been awesome. We should do it again next year.

Thanks everyone and thanks, listeners.

Appreciate it.