How To Think About Investing In Long Term NFTs

Today, we're going to talk about how to invest in long-term NFTs. So my name is Eric Siu and I have a portfolio of different businesses, mostly marketing businesses, and I'm here to help level up the world. So let's get into it. So NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and people might be saying these are not investments, these are illiquid, these are stupid. I can just take your picture. I can right-click and save it. So you have a lot of naysayers, right? And I'm not really going to get into that. I'm thinking about it from a business perspective and an investing perspective. Look, it's a very exciting time right now. The advent of Web3, we're talking about this decentralized web. There's a lot that's going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years or so. And this is really just the beginning. So I think being able to invest in stuff that you think has long-term value is exciting, right? So I'm going to pull up my screen over here. So let's come over here to my NFT collection over here. And if you just go to lazy.com/ericosu, you can see what I got here. So I'll On the right side, I have an ape, and I'll explain what that is in a second. And then in the middle, I have these drawings. These are known as VeeFriends from Gary Vaynerchuk. And I have this CryptoPunk over here. And if I come down here, you can see other stuff. These are known as the 7s. And then this one, I have no idea what this is. I think someone just dropped it into my profile. And I have this kind of wander over here, and I bought it because it has a bobo on the left because I'm Asian, right? I have also these Mooncats as well. as well. And these are kind of, um, you know, earlier NFTs. And so I'm going to talk about why I invested in kind of what I think the marquee projects are in terms of my little collection over here. Before I continue on, this is not investment advice. So let's start with the BYAC6287. So this is known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And I have this ape over here because I believe that the community is very strong. So Bored Ape Yacht Club, I believe they're the very first NFT project to have a super strong community that just stands out. And so when you look at BoredApeYachtClub.com, you can see they have 10,000 different tokens. So there's scarcity, they have different specs and they have special access, right? So this is bathroom, the bathroom, members-only graffiti board. And then there's different roadmap activations and all that, right? So what does that mean exactly? So let's start over here with roadmap activations. So what this means is, you know, after they sold about, you know, 10% or so of apes, you know, they'll pay back their moms and then 20%, they're going to release, you know, new apes. And then 40%, they start their YouTube channel. And then up to 100%, they release a new type of ape, right? Which is like a mutant ape. So that's cool. At least you have some type of roadmap. It shows, it tells people that you're serious about continuing to develop your NFTs. And you're not just, you know, creating a bunch of pictures and then just trying to, you know, go for a cash grab. Right. And you can see over here, their, their team, they've been there, done that. Right. And kind of the, you know, these people are— come from a gaming background as well. And NFTs to me are kind of the intersection between gaming and business, right? And, you know, we can see the world's kind of converging right now. You can see a lot of people that are entrepreneurs that are actually aping or getting into this space. The verb aping actually came from— I believe it came from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. It means jumping into NFT projects early. This is kind of stupid of me to not jump in on it early. I had an opportunity to, but I didn't jump in until way later. So Now you might be saying, okay, Eric, you're showing me all this stuff, like this has nothing to do with community though. So let me show you why it has to do with community. If we look at my, my screen over here, um, we can see that this is a Twitter chat room. Okay, so this is Miami-based, uh, Bored Ape Yacht Clubs. Okay, and so you can see people in here, they're actively supporting each other. What's gonna happen in the next couple days or 2 weeks or so, we're all gonna get together for dinner. And you have people in the group, some are— might be artists or creators, some might be investors, some might be entrepreneurs, and we're just going to get together and we're going to be able to break bread. And the other thing I've heard about the Bored Ape Yacht Club is that there's actually people right now, they are creating kind of these underground clubs where you need to actually have access to one of these and you can prove that you have one and get together. Right. So there's this element that's true element of community because you can all hang out with each other and there's only 10,000 of these. And reality is only a couple thousand people are holding these these Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs because some people own multiple ones. So these are not exactly the cheapest NFTs right now. They're fairly expensive. I believe the floor is about $100,000 or so. And you can look at it in ETH. But I mean, let's just go take a look at it right now. The floor right now is 39 ETH. Okay. So I believe Ethereum right now is maybe $3,000 or so. That's $117,000. And you have 5,500 owners. These are the ones that are that you might be able to buy if you hit the buy now button. And so the reason I decided to buy this one is 'cause I believe it's the very first NFT to have a super strong community and they've kind of set examples there. And I believe access to the community is gonna be worth than what was paid for it, okay? There's a lot of memberships around the world that you pay for like members-only clubs, things like that. And this is just a cool way of doing so. And I believe this is really just scratching the surface in terms of what NFTs can do. So that's number one, that's the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Now, number 2, let's move over to VeeFriends. So Gary Vaynerchuk, He is an investor, entrepreneur, founder, whatever you want to call him, creator, New York Jets fan. And I love what he's doing because you might be saying, oh, well, these drawings are so half-assed, they're ugly, whatever. I think they're great because they're hand-drawn. Gary drew all of these, and I believe it took him 4 or 5 months from drawing all the characters to launch. I picked the characters that I think that will continue to resonate. So there's a strategic element in terms of what I picked. So does he say hustle a lot? He definitely says hustle a lot. So I picked up this hustling hamster over here. This respectful raccoon. He doesn't say respectful that much, but I think it's a cute character, and I'll come back to that in a second. But you want to be thinking about what does Gary say on his YouTube videos a lot? He's got a big YouTube channel, right? He says empathy a lot, right? He says patience a lot. So if I had Patient Panda, those are probably gonna be worth a lot long-term because he's gonna keep talking about them and he's gonna character develop these. This could be his version of Marvel. It's gonna be his version of Disney. It's gonna be his life's work. He's kind of said it himself. I'm gonna hold on to these. And I'm not just betting on the long-term character development here. I'm also betting on Gary Vee in general. Is Gary Vee going to continue to get better and better? It's going to continue to get bigger and bigger. Absolutely. The other thing is each of these tokens gives me access to his conference for the next 3 years. So that's special. So for example, if I click on this Hustling Hamster over here, I can see on, on OpenSea, you can see, okay, right here, this token is verifiable for admission to VeeCon 2022, 2023, 2024. And VCon is happening in the Minnesota Vikings Stadium. So that's exciting. And you can't go into that conference unless you have a VeeFriend. And so I wonder how many people actually own VeeFriends. Let's look at this. There's actually only 5,000 people that own VeeFriends, right? So you're not going to have 10,000 people showing up. And you look at this right here, the floor price, I believe it's underpriced right now. I mean, let's just look at the floor price right now. You can see my little calculator over here. Um, so it's about $50,000. You can see, um, at this floor price over here at 26,000 traded, um, that's how much has been traded so far. You can say, oh, You know, these don't look good. I mean, I mean, Gary's not— Gary's not an artist, right? But what's gonna happen is if Gary gets stronger and stronger and his brand grows, he's gonna character develop these and he's gonna hire artists and there's gonna be people that are drawing for him as well. His job is just to develop the storyline behind these and he can sell merch. Not only is there access, there's gonna be merch long-term and the roadmap's very exciting and the community is very strong too. And so that's my reason for getting into VeeFriends. That's why I have— that's why I have some VeeFriends. By the way, my NFTs that will be coming out at some point, I'm not going to talk about what it is just yet. VeeFriends kind of paved the way and we're going to have a lot of inspiration that's drawn from VeeFriends. And so this will be centered around Leveling Up, which is the book. If I go over to CryptoPunks, so these are the very first NFTs ever and there's only 10,000 of them. A couple of years ago, you could have claimed these for free. But, you know, now the floor price for these, which is the cheapest price, would be $294,000. US dollars, right? Or US token, whatever you want to call it. At the high point, I mean, you know, there's aliens that are selling for like $7.5 million. The alien is just a trait, right? You might have like a green one. There's only like, I think, 7 of them or so. It's just the rarity, the scarcity, right? And again, benefit with NFT, you have provenance, you have digital scarcity, right? You can prove provenance or look at provenance, right? My bet here with CryptoPunks is that if it's the very first NFT ever, it's— and NFTs are going to be a thing, these are going to be worth at least $1 million, I believe, In the future, if not more. You know, the way I'm looking at it right now is some people have sold their Punks for a nice profit. Yes, I sold one of my Punks and I kind of rolled it into another VeeFriend and another Ape, right? So I did pay like a good chunk of change for these over here. You know, that's trading. That's what it looks like, right? So it's— there's a lot of fun stuff that's going on right now. I mean, these, I believe these 4 up here are kind of— they're going to be long-term projects. These other ones over here, I was just, you know, I enjoyed watching anime growing up. I just thought this was cool because it had a little boba in it. These, I mean, these ENSs over here, I believe it's going to be great long term for me to hold on to these. And these cats, I'll hold on to them. We'll see what happens. But they're kind of early day NFTs. We'll see if they hold value or not. Right. But I'm just going to hold on to them. My take on all this stuff is that I'm only going to buy things that I believe have long term value for the most part. I might speculate or buy other stuff that I think is cool. I mean, that's art. It's subjective. Buy whatever you think is cool. Just buy it with whatever money that you're okay with losing. And again, this is This is me speaking to myself, not financial advice. And it'll be okay. It'll be all fun here. That's what it is. I think what I'm seeing right now in the market, the NFT market right now, is that too many people are trying to use it to make short-term money. And that never really works out. You try to make short-term money and you have a short-term mindset, you're going to go through long-term pain. But if you look at things from a long-term lens, what ends up happening is it's okay. Like if it goes down, whatever, you're, you're, This is where diamond hands come from. You believe in the project. That's OK. And if it goes to zero, it goes to zero. I remember when I held a good chunk of Ethereum and it dropped all the way down from— I think this is years and years ago. It dropped down from like $1,300 to like $100 or something like that. Like, I'm just like, I'm just going to hold it. There's no reason for me to do anything else. Like, my entire thesis with Ethereum is that it's going to be the very beginning of kind of having a programmable blockchain. Right. Or building apps on top of it, like the utility behind it. And who knows what's going to end up being the big one long term? Is it going to be Solana? Is it going to be Cardano? Who knows, right? That's how you got to look at things. Like I look at Ethereum with the long-term lens, Bitcoin with a long-term lens. And if one of these things works like Solana, Cardano, whatever, you know, look at it with a long-term lens. I look at my NFT projects with a long-term lens as well. And so it is what it is. And so if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button if you want to get more stuff like this. And don't forget to check out one of these other videos over here and we'll catch you in the next one.