Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, went from non-existent to taking over the world in record fashion. But what is their utility besides being collectibles? Brian Mosoff, chief executive officer at Ether Capital, talks about how something can "meme" its way into becoming valuable and why NFTs are gaining traction in an environment where everyone's searching for scarcity. Plus, he shares his views on how cryptocurrencies can play a part in a portfolio and how the space could be regulated.
Hello, and welcome to What Goes Up, a weekly markets podcast. My name is Mike Reagan. I'm a senior editor at Bloomberg Nambodna Hi across Acid reporter at Bloomberg. This week on the show, well as any listeners who stick around long enough for our craziest things in market segments. No, we're kind of fascinated with n f t s these days, you know, the non fungible tokens that are some of the hottest investments in the cryptocurrency markets these days. We're gonna take a deep dive into n f t s and all sorts of other hot topics on the blockchain this week with the CEO of a company that's involved in cryptocurrency investing. Now, you know, Vildana, I don't know if you've noticed, um that I'm not necessarily the youngest hippest guy in the world. Have you picked up on that? Yeah, I think everybody has. Okay, I'm sorry to break it to you. The cats out of the back. So one of the hazards of being not so young and not so hip is that you don't it's tend not to like new things. You know, You're like, what's wrong with these old things. I like the old things, and that was, do you still have an iPhone too? I actually have a twelve. I've upgraded to the twelve recently, but only because because my old iPhone one or whatever it was, that it was just stopped working. So I do. I am hip on the iPhones. But I'll tell you what, when you're not too young and not so hip, guy, you tend to have a lot of friends who are not so young and not so hip. And I've been fascinating any party I go to. Lately, the subject of n f T has come up, and people get, like I rationally angry at them, like why are these things worth anything? They're just j pegs, you know, And I find myself being the voice of reason that trying to explain, well, you know, look at a Babe Ruth baseball card. What's the intrinsic value of the cardboard that's printed on? You know, it's all the it's all the scarcity value, the originality value of the item. Anyway, That's that's my way of explaining it. But we do have a guest this week who I think we'll do a better job than me in explaining hopefully, hopefully, Yeah, you can only go up from here, right, Yeah, so I think he'll he'll give us sort of the bookcase at least on some segments of the n f T market. So we're happy to have him on the show for the first time. He is the CEO of Ether Capital Corps, let's say, publicly listed company on Toronto's Neo Exchange. His name is Brian Massov. Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, and hope to join in on correcting some of the way you look at the n f T s as an old person who gets angry. Sorry, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but hopefully you're not angry by n f T s And yeah, let's dive into why why they might be potentially very valuable. I have an old person who gets angry very easily. It's true. That's absolutely right. But I'm coming around to these new fangled investments. But before we delve into that, I'm I just want to sort of have you, uh introduced us to eat Capital. What the company is all about, how you got involved with it, um, what the sort of mission and revenue stream is of the company. You know, what's it all about? So either Capital was put together in early two thousand and eighteen, and everyone looked around and said that during the bull run of seen crypto assets were going crazy. Bitcoin's going from a few thousand dollars up to twenty dollars. The I C omnia is going on, and it was really hard to find an access point in the capital markets to invest in the asset class and follow a group of people around the table who really understood the space. And so Either Capital had a very focused thesis the group of people around Ethereum and what was going to happen that there would be this smart contract platform that would be a very important piece of the Internet. And so it was put together to be an access point in the capital markets to a group of investors who said, I don't quite understand the space, but there seems to be something happening there, and I want exposure to it. And it's funny because that's basically the same conversations. That's how being around n f T s now right, there's there's something happening there. There's a lot of hype, but it's hard to find where's the real meat on the bone? What is going to last two years, five years, ten years? That comes from all this mania. So either capital invests in ethereum focused protocols and tokens in infrastructure. We're a group of crypto natives and traditional finance and venture capitalists who make up management in the board, and we're passionate about the stuff. We're passionate about the space. We I mean, I I've been in crypto since kind of late. This is my life. I don't have normal friends anymore. I don't have regular conversations. It's it's crypt seven on Twitter, on Discord, various chat groups. So very excited to you know, come here and shed some of what I'm seeing with your listeners. It's funny to be at boil stay out. So there's certain class of investors who are like, yeah, yeah, crypto, it's exciting. Just tell me what I need a stock, Toby, I need a stock divide, and that that's kind of the niche fill with a with a company like this to some degree, I guess, I mean, I think it's great if you look at kind of where we're at in terms of exposure points in the capital markets, there's a number of different ways that now you can get proxies to crypto, whether it's through mining companies or e t f s or closed funds that are listed in the US. There's avenues for people to get exposure who aren't yet comfortable going and buying the asset direct and either custodying it themselves or holding it on a platform that's not registered as kind of the traditional securities dealer. So you know, the space is improving. There's more access points now than ever, and you know that that's that's great for everyone. That's great for the space. It's great for that new set of investors who weren't comfortable from two thousand and nine up until kind of twenty who might have said, I want exposure to this space, I just don't know how to do it um and so they sat on the sidelines because they had no other choice. So I think that it's all it's all good for the space. But now we have this new part of the space, the n f T S, the n f T part, as you're saying, and people are wondering, well, how do I invest in that? Do I even want to invest in that? So so right I'm hoping we get to n f T s in a little bit. But I know that you had sent us a list of some of them most frequently asked questions you get from people, especially retail investors, and one of them was what are the real world problems crypto is trying to solve? And I feel like maybe that's something you guys were also thinking about before you started the firm. So what what sort of answer do you give them when when people ask you that? It's kind of a two pronged question, because I think most people are looking for an everyday use case that they can latch onto and say, ah, now I understand what this thing is going to be. And it's kind of hard to look at that right now because it's still very much in this experimental phase. So we know that one thing that crypto assets do is they create an investment opportunity or a network that is uncorrelated to traditional assets or over time hopefully becomes uncorrelated to traditional assets. It's outside of the monetary policy of any political agenda, a specific jurisdiction. When I look at what bitcoin did, Justin Drake, who's an ethereum researcher, describes um what bitcoin did is it came along and said, gold has this really interesting monetary policy. It has a very few unique attributes to it. There's a fixed amount it has to be extracted from the Earth's crust. It gets mined and extracted at a very specific rate um. But the problem with gold, of course, is that it's physical and it's not digital, so it can only go so far. And in the world of digital assets and digital transforming of or or or sharing information, gold doesn't really work in that world. So Bitcoin comes along and says, can you replicate that same kind of monetary policy but in a digital environment? But Bitcoin kind of stops there, and that's kind of what bitcoin does. You can you can send it, you can receive it, but it can't do much more than that. Ethereum comes along and says, well, what if you kind of create this clearing house for the world. The first thing that Ethereum really does is say, what if the world has a clearinghouse that no one company, no one party controls, and anyone can record their activity, their information, their token, tokenize their dollar, whatever activity they want to perform can be recorded into this global ledger, this global settlement layer and just pay a little transaction fee. So, even though that's still kind of abstract, right, people are wondering, well, what do I do with that? Who cares? So what? I think? We're still scratching the surface of how people are going to use this, and we're starting to see use cases emerge. You're starting to see decentralized finance come around. You're starting to see n f t S digital art right that exists on a blockchain. That's becoming a recent trend. Um Visa about six months ago said that they're going to test token izing U S dollars and moving them across the Ethereum network for settlement between their their data centers. So there's all sorts of of use cases that may seem legit, like what Visa does that has a kind of nexus to the real world, but then there's this digitally native set of uses that we are not used to in our brand new And the second prong to this, which is much short, I promise I would say, is that it's kind of like looking at the Internet in the mid nineties and saying, well, okay, fine, I can only send an email if all my friends have an email account. How how valuable is this thing going to be? The things that really became valuable. We're not just taking what existed in the physical world and saying, now I can replicate this in this digital environment. It was all these use cases that no one imagined yet. So the early Internet, you know, had people taking their newspapers, their magazines and just copying and pasting the content. And what really was valuable about the Internet was saying, well, if something is digitally native, and it's built from the ground up, respecting kind of the protocol design and the flexibility that this new architecture allows, well, then all of a sudden, it's not just about putting your newspaper up on some web page. It can become interactive in a way that the world had never seen before. Right social media, Instagram, broadcasting, Twitter. These were things that didn't have an uh an existing structure prior to the Internet. And so I think people who are looking for the how do I copy and paste an old model just into this environment. There will be some of that that goes on, and there's probably some you know, nine to ten improvements in there, but it's the zero to ones. It's those brand new use cases that you know, Peter tele talks about that that's what's really exciting here. I want to rewind a little bit. I'm glad you brought up that notion of crypto being an uncorrelated asset. This is kind of a perennial debate here in crypto markets um, because at least looking at the big ones, if you look at ethereum and Bitcoin, there are sort of long stretches of time where they do appear to be uncorrelated, to say that the SMP five. But then you have a week like this where the get kind of a macro shock with the China ever Grand or ever grand a situation. I don't think anyone knows which one is right, but you get this shock at this sort of risk off move in markets, and crypto does seem to sort of tighten up that correlation with everything else um. And I imagine, you know, as more companies like yours come onto the public markets, as more companies like micro Strategy and Testlina hold more crypto on on their balance sheets, that there's the risk of that those correlations tightening tightening up. Even more so, is that sort of promise of crypto being uncorrelated uh dying a slow death? Or am I looking at it wrong? You know what? How do you look at that that concept? I think that these assets over time will become more and more uncorrelated. Certainly. I think one of the things that you've seen in the last year or year and a half, you know, since COVID is we've realized the world is more interconnected and all these markets are more interconnected than everyone even imagined. And it didn't matter if it was the OPEC crisis, it didn't matter if it was what just happened in the last week. People are looking for safe havens in these extreme moments of volatility, and the question is where the safe haven is going to be? What? What is the safe haven these days? Is that the US dollar? Is it? Crypto is it? You know what? Where is that money gonna go? And markets don't like uncertainty. I think that we've seen that, you know before crypto. In crypto, people don't like uncertainty. So this notion that crypto is this uncorrelated asset, I think is something that will be more and more true as time goes on, as it continues to prove itself to be robust uh in in volatile times. I think it was very important that in the March of market crash, bit quin ether and you know, all the crypto markets, despite them having this drop and basically a twenty four period, which is extreme. By the way, everything you know I got, I got a lot of text. It was not a happy day, certainly from my phone blowing up and with my friends. But you know what you did get to see is that the space didn't die. The asset class did not go to zero, and in fact, not only did it not go to zero, it woke up this new group of investors who had written off this idea of bitcoin or ethereum or cryptoassets and said, there's this pending inflation that everyone's concerned about. What are the alternatives? I mean, so there's gold, fine, but maybe some of that spills off into bitcoin. And so you have these new investors who before did not want to participate in this environment and say, maybe crypto is a place that has a partner portfolio, doesn't matter if it's big or small. But maybe this is going to become a legit asset class. So I think that it's still going to be volatile for the foreseeable future. It's still going to be correlated in times like this, and over time that volatility will drop and people will be less scared, uh and the swings will be less wild. So it's it's there. It's going to take time. Though, when we talked about a week ago, I was I was impressed with sort of your bowl case for f and crypto punks or as I call them, cyberpunks as I incorrectly call him the cyberpunks, but crypto punks. I was suppressed with sort of your your rationale for why we should take these seriously? Um, so you know, give me some more ammunition at my cocktail parties with the angry old men that I associate with when they say, it's just a JPEG, it's not worth anything. What's what's your book case here for? For this whole asset class? So I think it's helpful for listeners to understand the mechanics behind the specific project as we dive in and then discuss how they're going to be used in these new systems, because then there's just more context there. So in two thousand and seventeen, Larva Labs basically publishes ten thousand unique characters that have various combinations of attributes as JPEG's. Actually I think that they're technically either SVG files or PNG s. I'm not sure, but someone's super techy out there is gonna jump on me if I call it a jpeg. But they publish it, and whether it's it's a male cryptopun courts female, or it has wild white hair or three D glasses or maybe a handlebar mustache, there's all these different attributes and different combinations of these attributes, and they put it up on this website and they're completely free. All you have to do is pay the four dollar gas fee and you could claim one to your address. You would claim the ownership over that picture. And most people wrote this off and said, well that that's kind of an interesting idea, but yeah, I'm not interested in paying the four dollars for this jpeg. Forget it. And what ends up happening is there's enough people go this is kind of an interesting idea. How would you um create a token that represents a specific thing versus something that's fungible. So for anyone who's not familiar, right, fungibility would just be I give you the five dollar bill. You don't care which five dollar bill I pull out of my pocket. You're happy that I give you a five dollar bill. In a non fungible token world, uh, the token represents a specific thing, so it's not just that you bought a house on this street. You care which house specifically you purchased. And so in the context of the crypto punks, you don't care that you have a claim on a crypto punk. You want to know that no, no no, no, I the specific crypto punk with the handlebar mustache and the three D glasses. And it spawns a bunch of research and a new token standard on ethereum. So it's it's a different tech standard basically, and that's called the e r c SE. It goes away, and it possibly just goes away because we're in this bear market, right this is kind of mid two thousand and seventeen, two eighteen, the price of crypto crashes, and so most people are kind of shying away from the space. Maybe some developers leave. The community shrinks a little bit, but n f t s are certainly not what they are today. And in the I would say mides um and people are waking up to this idea of of digitally native art, you know, that lives on a blockchain, and how could it be sold for this much? And around this point in time, everyone turns in the community back towards the crypto punks and says well, this is the first. Right, this is the first time anyone ever tried this experiment on ethereum. Its spawned the e r C seven twenty one token standard. There's only ten thousand. There can't ever be more of them. People turn around and say, well, crypto punks are the first, and in a in an environment where everyone is looking for scarcity, right as the US dollar is is hitting this, you know, pending inflation, people looking at gold. A lot of the criticisms that people have towards n f T s in a way you can catch them and say, how is that any different than your arguments towards bitcoin, And then they go no, no no, no, but bitcoin is different. You go why, and you start hearing them say well, there's a fixed amount of them. You go yeah, but you could create other bitcoins, right, you could create light coin, you could create dose coin, you could have feather coin. There's something sticky about being the first and representing a specific point in time culturally that a community rallies around in terms of consensus that they say this is this is the one. And so I also like to point out to people say that there's no intrinsic value, or there's you know, how are they how are they valued? Look at something like Twitter. Twitter is not valuable because of the number of servers that they're running in the number of data centers that they have in the backups. No, it's valuable because you can't just replicate that same number of servers and data centers somewhere. It's valuable because there's social consensus and a network effect that has taken place around that set of standards that people go, we're all going to rally around this thing, and we think that that's the place to have our you know, three sentence communication, and that's where the value comes. It's the network effect, and that applies to bitcoin, and that also applies to crypto punks. So the crypto punks start getting bought up kind of in that latter half of twenty nine, sorry, and then have this huge explosion basically you know, throughout this year. And the reason that they're valuable is they're the first they the very first n f T project that exists in ethereum. They're kind of, in a way, the birth of this entire movement. So the people who criticize and say all of n f T s are are a bubble and they're not worth anything. I will agree that most n f T s probably won't be around in five years or hold any value five years from now, but crypto punk specifically, those are the opportunities to buy these works of art that some people would argue it as an art, but it's the opportunity to to buy into these very early historical pieces that have not only cultural significance, but they also represent um I think, a transition in the art world towards more utility, uh to what these pieces of art can do. So I was thinking of this column that Matt Levina Bloomberg Opinion wrote a couple of days ago, where he quoted somebody who said, you know, this f T that this person had bought brought this person joy. And so it got me thinking about, like, what are some of the reasons somebody might want to own an n f T besides just the collectibles aspect of it. And you know, it's not like if you buy a share of Ford, for instance, that sort of brings you join or joy or makes you happy, But like, what are some of the other reasons that somebody might be into n f T s besides just the collectible aspect. So I think that most of the purchasing of n f t s right now is on speculation. People are trying to catch the next pudgy penguin or board apiacht club that will have this huge explosion and in price and value. And there's something fun about it. It doesn't take itself too seriously. In fact, kind of the weirder and the more fun these n f t s can be by design, the more people seem to be interested in playing with them. But there's something else happening under the surface, which is that utility. And I think that's where I sit in my interest in what n f t s are going to be. And there's two things here. The first is I think what you're seeing in the world also right now. Is that the controversial statement, but I'll just say it is. Money is just a meme, right, All money, in a way is just a meme. I call money memes, right the U. S. Dollar. What is the meme of the U. S. Dollar. Well, it's most powerful nation in the world, most successful economy, in the world's biggest army, most stability. You know, it represents certain things. And so if you think about this as an equation, I was saying this to a friend the other day that if you think that this is an equation where you have money on one side, an equal sign and then a meme word on the other side, what we're starting to see is that the equation goes into directions and that memes can also become money. And that's something that I don't think people had considered before, is that something can meme its way into being money. And you watch that kind of starting to happen with dog coin. Dos coin came out in I think late two thousand and thirteen. The last week or two the code gets published. Um, people get really excited by it. It's fun, it's not taking itself too seriously. And then it kind of goes away. And now there's this renewed interest in where people are going. Maybe this is going to be a transactional currency. I don't know why not. There's so there's so much of it. People seem to love it. It doesn't have the political agenda of any specific nation or group of people. It's kind of like the People's money, right, It's just it's just fun. Now. It doesn't mean that it will be money today, but it wouldn't surprise me. If toascoin became the way people paid to go see a movie or or I don't know, paid to buy their groceries with it. And so I think the idea that that money has kind of turned into a meme and memes can now turn into money unlocks this really interesting potential for n f t s. It Michael, when I was speaking to you, I think a week ago, when I was telling you about all this utility that n f t s can potentially have. One of the reasons people might be buying n f t s because they're starting to understand the potential actual utility of some of these assets. So crypto punks in particular, you know, if there's enough price discovery on these assets and there's high enough velocity and it has you know, the Lenda effects around long enough, potentially what happens is some new utility gets unlocked. And so we have to go beyond just looking at them as forms of art and say, well, what is the ven diagram then of this going to be, And that is that it unlocks things that don't really exist in the art world. So complete global access in liquidity is a new part of this equation, right, someone who lives in Asia. Someone who lives in South America can now participate in the financial aspect, or you could sell it to someone who lives in that part of the world. There's also cryptoeconomics that enters into the equation. Um there's also the programmability and the decentralized finance aspect of these um of these assets. And so there's all these kind of really interesting ways that n f T s I think are going to be used in the future that go beyond just you bought a picture. But Brian, but before we get to the crazy things, I do wanna touch on that idea you're talking about a defy and how n f T s kinda can get some added utility to them. You know, there's some project, was an eight or guerrilla that that spits off a banana every day that's as a separate n f T That's that's, you know, I think of as like a dividend. But my point is that it's actually a project. Did I miss this one? And it is. I'll send you a link to it. Yeah, I forgot the name of people wanted bananas and then people buy the bananas. But I whatever, you know, because the rest I bringing up is every day we wake up to some new headline, news headline about regulators finally catching up with this whole industry, and you know, incorrect, There is no catching up. It moves way too fast. But sorry, sorry, that's keep going. No, that's that's a fair point. That's a fair point, and I agree, I totally with you. But I had always kind of thought of n f t s as vaguely regulator proof because I don't see an argument about how an n f T could be a security unless you start using it in yield farming and that sort of thing. And then and then maybe that crosses the line. But for the broad picture, you know, how are you thinking about the regulatory risks in the entire space, you know, and sort of how do you determine who the who the winners and losers are going to be as the regulation and scrutiny gets a little bit greater, and you know, and if if n f T s fit into your thinking of that at all, then then soap. But I'm just curious, you know, when you wake up and see a new headline about this regulator, that regulator, you know, issuing a subpoena or sending a wells notice or whatever it is. Um, how do you decide where who's gonna win and lose in an environment where the scrutiny is getting ratcheted up. I don't think it matters that much what regulators do. I ink what it does do is it will change how people interact with these assets and how they interact from specific jurisdictions. But I don't think the assets themselves are going to just disappear overnight. You can't regulate at the protocol level, meaning you can't change the code of bitcoin. You can't force I P addresses into transactions. Now you can do other things to try and extract IP addresses from transactions to look for nefarious activity. You saw this happen with you know, the Silk Road case in twenty fourteen, I think is when that was really going on. But what's going to get regulated here are the access points and the marketplaces, and that's fine and it'll play out. However, I'm not I'm not against those being regulated. I think you're right in that n f T s are probably fairly regulator proof, but it depends on the distribution mechanism of the n f T. As you're saying, kind of depends how the n f T gets used. So maybe the crypto punk specifically itself is not a security, but if you try and fractionalize it, you know, maybe then you've created a derivative. And maybe derivatives get caught up because it's held in a specific way and it gets trapped by securities law or the marketplace that's trading those derivatives, you know, would have to register as some type of marketplace. I don't know exactly how this is going to play out. I think overall it'll be good for the space and it will be great for investors long term because there'll be clarity around how to interact with these assets and these marketplaces. UM. I think this is a personal thesis, not a if cap anything. I think what you're gonna see as a bit of a bifurcation in this space where um, we're going to have these regulated versions of these assets that there's ky C and a m L applied to both sides of a transaction, or the wallets are fully ky seed, where you know, if you withdraw from coin base or any exchange, you know, they're going to have to know potentially, um, which who owns the wallet that the asset is withdrawn to UM, and that will only be able to interact with, you know, a certain other set of wallets potentially. But then I also see a whole other side of the world that is going to continue building UM these protocols in these assets in a way that may not be respectful of any specific jurisdictions mandates UM, and so there may be trading that takes place in very unregulated environments. Right you can look at something like unit swap or sushi swap UM. These are decentralized exchanges for anyone who who's not familiar where you don't k y C when you go there. You don't deposit your funds in any custodial wallet that's being housed by a corporation. And people who wrote off that idea that decentralization can get to scale or a meaningful amount of traction. One stat that I like to point out is that in early twenty nineteen, I think it was early twenty nineteen, whenever unit swap kind of began UM, there was maybe a million dollars a day slashing round on unit swaps, so not a meaningful amount of volume. But in the summer of last year there was about three billion dollars a day. I think that was traded on Uni swap, and that's not insignificant. And at the same day, whenever I don't know, looked at the stat or it made its way around Twitter, coin base also traded about three billion dollars on the retail exchange, and so I looked at that and thought that is fantastic and wild and crazy to imagine that this decentralized protocol that basically has zero employees, zero regulatory oversight, zero registrations, compliance jurisdictions, offices, overheads, bank accounts, corporate registrations, was able to do the same volume as a company that has, you know, hundreds or thousands of employees. You have to imagine that that is that trend is not going to stop and that these protocols will become more robust. So the question really will become long term, how how does the regular lated world interact with the decentralized world if everything gets tried to be completely ky seed and pushed back into boxes that regulators are comfortable with. My view is that we've just kind of recreated ce FI centralized finance with a little bit of optimization in there. The real interesting stuff is happening in that decentralized, chaotic world that yeah, there's gonna be a lot of scams, and there's gonna be a lot of things that go wrong, but I think that there's going to be a lot of really interesting things that come of it, um. And so it'll be interesting to see how this, how this plays out, UM, and how people who live in heavily regulated jurisdictions will continue to get access to projects and protocols and marketplaces that have liquidity, that have important or meaningful assets that are going to play a big part of this future economy. Stand clear. Of the craziest things we saw in markets this week, we donna k y C. You know what that means. That means no, your customer, And if I know the customers of this podcast, I think one thing I know is they're ready for some crazy things that we saw in markets this week. How's that for a segue? Not bad? Huh, that's what a transition? Thank you? Really, I get to say he emailed me ahead of time and said, just f y I this is gonna happen. So try and think of a crazy thing you saw on the market. And I thought, well, I have something that will top anything else you guys have seen. And I'm curious when I when I dropped my probably when I dropped mine. I'm curious. I'm curious if you say something someone a guest has ever topped this go I'll go last, though. Alright, well, Brian goes last. With that set up, you gotta go last. I'll go first. Widen's real simple. I'm taking us back to traditional trad five markets with the return to the office of all the Wall Street banks and the money center banks in London, all the trading desks returning. I believe it was City Group in London, vill Donna. They're offering therapy puppies upon arrival to work. You have a puppy to play with two um sort of ease the stress of coming back to the office, which I find kind of adorable and kind of bizarre. But I will say my dog does not relieve stress. My dog creates stress, especially during podcasts and radio interviews and TV. You never know when he's gonna start yapping. So I don't know. I think I heard him early, already heard him. Yeah, someone wants a cat question. What about the cat people of the world. I don't know. More stress. I don't know. I don't know if it will see We'll see how the therapy puppies work out. I don't know if therapy cats would be such a good idea with the clause and the allergies and I don't know. Maybe that could be thermal therapy n FT pudgy penguins or something like that. I don't know, not a bad idea. My cat is up for a therapy cat petting. She she she's really great. Um my craziest thing also is in traditional uh in the in the traditional finance world. I want to give a shout out to Katie gray Felt who actually flagged this one for me, and she had flagged in e t F filing earlier in the week from black Rock and black Rock filed for a China tech e t F, which with everything happening with China and the sell off there and the regulatory crackdown, the timing is so interesting to me. So to me, this was one of the weirdest things that I mean, obviously there was a lot of weird stuff, but it is an odd time. I'm speechless on the timing. That's all right, good one, good one, all right, Brian, you build it up for us. Here hit us with your craziest thing. So it's an n f T story since that's the topic of today's episode basically, and that is an n f T project that started out with a website called j PEG's Auto Mart, so j spelled j a y space Peg Automart. I mean, it's all, you know, pushed together for the for the u r L. But it basically looks like a late nineties website circa you know, or Allah Geo Cities and angel Fire if anyone remembers those days, with streamers and terrible colors and terrible fonts, which I actually think that the aesthetic is incredible. And they were selling n f T s of two thousand and seven Kia Sedonas. And this began because someone found out that this is apparently one of the rarest cars in the world. It was not very it was not manufactured in any kind of high numbers, and so you could go on this website and there was actually some very interesting kind of crypto economic distribution mechanisms that they used in this n f T drop. But everyone was very excited about getting a two thousand and seven Kia Sedona n f T and uh, I look at this stuff and just go, this is amazing. This is just so much fun. And uh, you know all my discord and chat groups, this is everyone talking about getting their minivans and have you have you made sure that you've got your keys yet and signed your least paperwork? So I encourage everyone to go to that website and kind of see what it was all about. I'm not sure that it will have staying power in the n f T world, but it definitely was the craziest and most fun thing I've seen, uh this week in in the crypto assets space. That is pretty awesome. Kia sedonas I can't even picture what it's a minivan. I guess you're right that they must be rare, because I don't think I've ever just written in one. And and I'll tell you an old guy like me, I've written a lot of minivans in my day, olda But here's a question. Was there really a difference between any minivan? I did the Dodge in the Chrysler. Did any of them really look any different? There? Like it didn't It didn't matter, It didn't matter. No one went over and said, oh, check out my Dodge. One it's like, no, it looks the same as all the other ones. Who cares You're in a minivan. Let's be real, you're in a mini vent. This is your life now. So but I think it ties back to your and I've written about this too, But that whole notion of the entertainment value of an ass that is something new and pretty fascinating. I think it's it's something new and and these things are very community driven. And this is a community made up by a bunch of programmers and researchers and tech misfits, and so the weirder and more funny something can be, those things become the flex. So in this world, you know, if you show up at let's say DevCon. DevCon is a conference that takes place every year minus the COVID year, the COVID years, whatever this is going to be um, a flex is not going to be showing up at DevCon in a Porsche or a Ferrari. You know that the to the Moon Lambeau meme had its place in time, but that's not really what this is about. Now. If someone were to show up at the next DevCon in a two thousand seven Kia Sedona, I'm telling you they will be. They will be the hero of that conference at DevCon. At DevCon in Japan, someone brought the shiba In Neu dog, the doge coin dog, and I think it was either the school dog that the picture and the meme was based on, or was the brother of the sister. I can't remember. Everyone lost their minds and had to walk out of the conference and get a picture with this dog. So there's something fun about the community and the culture that that intersects with these assets that I think is is really special to be a part of. Talk about a therapy puppy. There you go. Well, we'll have to check the prices of the actual real world Kia sedonas and see if they it'd be hilarious if they start going up in value as well, for for the same reason. Low two thousand's I've already I've already checked. I thought about trying to buy one, just just as a joke, but I didn't. That's hilarious. Well, listen, Brian, I could talk about this for hours, but I think we gotta leave it at that for this week. But hopefully we can get you back some day and uh and cover everything we've missed. Because there's as you said, there's so much going on in this space that it makes your head spin and trying to keep up with it. But Brian Massov, thank you so much for your time, thanks for having on the show, and hope to be back soon with more Kia Sedona like stories plus the legit stuff that's happening in the space What Goes Up. We'll be back next week and something. You can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal website and app or wherever you get your podcast. Would love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple podcast so more listeners can find us. And you can find us on Twitter, follow me at Reaganonymous. Bildonna Hirich is at Bildonna Hirich. You can also follow Bloomberg Podcasts at podcasts. I thank you to Charlie Pelletta, Bloomberg Radio and the voice of the New York City Subway System. What Goes Up is produced by Tofur Foreheads. The head of Bloomberg Podcasts is Francesco Leavy. Thanks for listening. See you next time.