Explore the evolving landscape of NFTs with AdLunam Co-Founder Nadja Bester. She is joined by Sam Simmons, CEO of MintPass; Bogdan Dmitriyev, Co-Founder of NFA.space; and Caitlin Burns, Senior Director of Story at Candy Digital. Together, they delve into how NFTs are reshaping digital ownership, offering new monetization avenues for creators, and transforming the cultural significance of digital collectibles.

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Digital Collectibles: NFTs Redefining Ownership in the Digital World

SPEAKERS

Nadja Bester, AdLunam Inc Co-Founder

Sam Simmons, Co-founder & CEO at MintPass

Bogdan Dmitriyev, Co-Founder of NFA.space

Caitlin Burns, Senior Director of Story of Candy Digital

All right, guys, I see we have all three speakers in the house, although Bogdan, you're not a speaker yet on my end, but let's get started in the meantime. So, 3,2,1 hey web3 world, this is Nadja Bester, and you are listening to the future of NFTs, where we talk about everything under the sun to do with web3 and emerging technologies and what the future might hold for them. But of course, tonight we are talking specifically about NFTs, really going back to the roots of the show when it was still all about NFTs. And I think, as we will be discussing tonight, we've come quite a long way in these last past years. And I'm excited to go into this and a whole lot more in terms of what the future holds for NFT utility with my amazing guest tonight. So we have in the house Sam Simmons, the co-founder and CEO at Mintpass, Bogdan Dmitriev, co-founder of NFA space and Caitlin Burns, senior director of story of Candy Digital. Future of NFTs is brought to you by AdLunam, the web3 investment, first and only, socialfi web3 investment platform that leverages engagement in order to provide IDO allocation. All right, so I see Bogdan, you are speaking are fantastic. So let's get into it, guys, I typically don't ask this question, but I think because of the nature of today's topic, really demonstrating how far the NFT space has come, going to also go back to the roots of the show, we used to start with this top with this question quite often, what is it that got you into the NFT world? So Sam, let's start with you. We have a very varied panel here tonight in terms of travel, in terms of art, and then in terms of fan community and engagement. So starting with travel, specifically tell about your experience and your journey that led you to start.

awesome. Thanks, Sam. Thank you so much for that. I think, like you know, reflecting on your journey of coming from the DJ and entry point through the casino space and then the whole PFP movement that I mean in itself was crazy, and then experiencing NFTs, perhaps you're in the more mainstream manifestation that it had, but then also being able to recognize that there's a universal sort of aspect to it and that, I mean, the way that mint pass is doing it through travel, travel is also a universal experience. So definitely looking forward to unpacking, you know this idea of what is universal that transcends technology, but that technology is able to leverage in order to, well, get to that adoption point that we all want so much. Yeah, awesome. Great to have you here, and great to speak to you again. Bogdan, so Bogdan Dmitriyev, the co-founder of NFA space. Bogdan, you are in the art aspect of NFTs, which, I mean, of course, we have heard so many times, because that is the predominant definition that most people in the world have for NFTs, is that NFTs are art. So many people constantly say, okay, NFTs are dead. The NFT market is dead, so we'd love to have your journey. You know, sort of, how did you get into the NFT space? And then as for where we are today, kind of, what? What do you see in terms of your own experience? How has that evolved in your involve through your involvement with NFTs?

Yeah, awesome.

Bogdan, thank you so much. I think you know you really touched on something that I am very excited to explore with all of you tonight, this idea that, of course, we know how any hyped trend goes, especially in the web3 space where hype is pretty much everything. But we know that, you know the definition of what NFTs are, PFPs and digital art. I mean, it's really limited. I think the possibilities of what this technology can do. And so I think all of us on this call today are very aware of it, but I think all of you are building something that very tangibly says, yes, there is a future for NFTs Beyond PFPs and beyond just digital art. So thank you. Very excited to dig more into this. Caitlin, welcome. Very happy to have you here. I would love to know your journey. Of course, just to add a little bit more context about candy, digital, where Caitlin is Senior Director of story, some of their partners include DC Warner Brothers, discovery, Major League Baseball, Netflix. There's an incredible list of partnerships. So we can clearly see this cross pollination between a web3 technology and big traditional brands. So we'd love to hear your journey in this space and kind of how you came to be where you are today. Sure.

Thank you, Caitlin, that was just absolutely brilliant example. I mean, I think there's probably no one listening to this who's not at some point, imagined what it would feel like to be a character in Gotham City. So awesome to have such a concrete example of what's possible about the with regards to the tech that we're talking about. So I want to kind of segue from a point that I've heard across multiple answers. You know, this idea that we are using these technologies to make experiences or feelings or just ways of being in the world come alive for people come alive for the audiences that we are engaging with. So I want to touch on that a little we are living in. I think every generation probably says this. You know, this is the strangest time we've ever lived in. But I feel like we can justifiably say that we check enough boxes that that is perhaps very true. So we live in strange times. We see that there's so many things up ahead for technology. We've seen Facebook make the pivot into the metaverse, even renaming and rebranding the company. So clearly we can see that there's a bet on what this digital future is going to be like. Now, on the other hand, we have so many people saying that, and of course, we experience this ourselves. The digital is just taking us further and further away from ourselves, from each other, from nature. So there's a very broad spectrum of you know, kind of where this future is leading. I'm curious, how can NFTs contribute to a positive let's say quadrant of the spectrum. Sam, let's start with you.

This one's a fun one, but a tricky one, because, again, there's so many angles to it, and I don't exactly know quite where to start, but I'll start off with, I guess, where this all came from. Me back to the whole aspect of fandom, and how NFTs can drive that. I mean, it’s maybe an oversimplification of an answer, but I think what, what I love about NFTs is, again, the ability to bring people together digitally over what they're passionate about. But I think what we what we typically lose sight of, is how, how that exists physically. And one of the example that I share is, you know, walking, for those that are sports fans among us, when you're walking down the street and you're wearing a jersey of maybe your favorite team, and perhaps in an out of place setting, you see someone else walking across the street wearing that same team's Jersey, and immediately you build a sense of connection with that person, despite not knowing who they are, because of a shared interest in something, being a team, and a shared fandom towards that team, and that exists in many examples across sports, I think, like streetwear could come into play. So if you, if you see someone wearing similar sneakers as you, it says something about each other that builds affinity towards one another. And that's, it's just, it's just, it's kind of like a given, like, okay, that that exists in the physical world, but there really has been no means to create that kind of connection in physics or digital realms, I should say. And so that's where I think NFTs are really cool, in in signals and identifiers of one's interest areas, one's passions, one's fandom, to create this holistic pain. Sure of who one is, and bring people together over that. So, yes, there is inherent disconnect in the world, both in a in a literal sense in it, but also a metaphysical sense. But I think NFTs are a way to bridge a lot of that and bring people together digitally over those interest areas.

Yeah, lovely. This reminds me of the conversation that you and I had actually back in the day, when we were discussing men pass and I remember saying to you that, you know, travel is part of my identity, but I'm not necessarily someone who hangs out on Instagram, and so where do I kind of, where do I have this shared space where I'm able to share this aspect of my identity with strangers. And so I think that's just a great example of what you are talking about, this idea that, yes, I'm able to go out into the street and I'm able to see, okay, cool, that person is wearing, I don't know, a Pink Floyd T-shirt. And you know, we both like Pink Floyd so let's make eye contact. I can't do that digitally, unless I specifically go to, let's say, a Pink Floyd group on Facebook or, you know, wherever, subreddit, but with NFTs, it then ties into the idea of digital identity, whereas I'm able to have, you know, a representation of myself online. And as part of that, I'm also able to share these different aspects of what I care about, what I'm interested in, what I'm involved with, brilliant Sam, thanks for that answer. Caitlin, would love to have your thoughts on this as well, maybe building on what Sam says, or completely new perspective.

Sure, I worked on dozens of different new technology platforms and plenty of more traditional ones as well. And I've been through a lot of these waves of new technology excitement and new technologies are amazing, but in many ways, their success point is where we stop talking about them like a trend, and start simply using those as natural parts of our existence across all of the dozens of platforms I've worked on, the one thing that's really in common is the human audience. And yeah, I think there's probably a timeline where we're going to get to, where robots are selling to robots, and that's a totally different system. And I intend to be here. I intend for humans to be here. So I'm going to keep making stuff for human audiences. People are always looking for ways to connect communities, even if they don't know that's what they they're missing or what they're looking for. They're seeking. They want to find ideas, contexts, shared experiences that they can engage with together. It's part of what makes us essentially, essentially a culture together. I feel like what we're seeing with NFTs resembles a lot of other fandoms I've seen in that creating communities around these shared experience, whether they're technological or speculative or narrative, which is one of the ones that I find to be the most powerful. It builds incredible connections between people and helps empower people to pursue their dreams. The stories that I hear from fans when we do outreach, people have pursued crafts that they've never felt empowered to take on before. People have started businesses and found networks of collaborators who they want to do those businesses with by working as part of our current communities with Batman fandoms and Harlequin. But this is something that is common to communities, and if we can make things that are useful, that help bring things together that help create shared moments, human systems emerge that are really powerful. And I think what we've seen is a first flourishing of communities that have an incredible amount of human and social power, being able to take what you view learned from being active in an experience, from being active in a new technology type. Well, this is the real work, and that's where we have the these moments where it feels like everything is slow or everything is chaotic, and we have to become more active. We need to figure out, what is it that we want to build with these people and these skills and these tools we've created and keep going with it. A lot of the time, people will take those skills and transfer them back into traditional formats or traditional technologies. But that doesn't mean there aren't new lessons and new opportunities that emerge in the process. So you know, I think there's a tremendous. Amount of power when we build communities, and figuring out how you can continue to fuel them, inspire people, and allow for people to grow often beyond the community where they've begun is really key.

Caitlin, thank you. I love what you said about human systems having innate human and social power, because I think we very often discard that. And you know, the term community is used so often and thrown around so often as I mean, like anything, it becomes a hype word. If the term community is not in there, that means you're dead. And if you use the term and you know, you have the flashy, the flashy like acronyms, then that means it's community. So thank you for reminding us that there's actually an actual power in it beyond just what the marketing team says.

Well what I'll say my final point on this is, you know, a lot of these NFT programs have been very active. You know, we can talk about wearing shirts and things like that, and that is an incredibly powerful quality of culture that can connect people, but ultimately it's a little bit passive. What we've seen with a lot of NFT communities is a greater desire for participation, a greater desire for community engagement, and those are lessons that are really going to help catalyze the next wave of whatever this turns into. You have power in these communities. You have the ability to engage, build and take things further. You don't have to just sit back. That's totally valid, but it's not the only way you can engage. And the more we're active, the more the world we want to build can come to life.

yeah, perfect. I love what you said about you know, these communities were born during the hype phase of the market, but some of them have sustained and I think that's really when we look at, you know, successful NFT use cases. Perhaps the benchmark shouldn't be as much, you know, how much an NFT was sold for, how much is currently trading for, but really how these communities have been able to sustain themselves, because ultimately, that is what it comes down to. And I think the point you raised about, about the meme Queen market, is also really interesting, because, I mean, that's exactly what is driving that space, is community, although, of course, it looks very different, at least at present, than the NFT community space does. But going from community, which, of course, is a very strong focus and really the foundation. I want to pivot a little and talk about, you know, the specific use cases that NFTs offer now. I mean, we can talk about any number of things. There's so many things that are relevant just between the few people, the few speakers in this room. But specifically, if we talk about, for example, art Bogdan, there's a number of specific use cases in art that is very strong, similarly, in the entertainment space and in the in the fandom space, Caitlin and then Sam, of course, specifically what you are doing at ,Mintpass with travel. So I want to talk a little bit about what these specific use cases are, and why NFTs are the better, or, you know, perhaps the superior choice, as opposed to what is currently available on the market. So Sam, let's start with you in terms of Mintpass. So you have partnered with Expedia, you've partnered with Skyscanner, you're partnered with Coinbase. So you have a foot in both worlds. You have a foot in the web three world, and you have a foot in this very web two travel space. So we'd love to hear from you what is what is it about NFTs That makes it a superior choice. Why have you decided to go with NFTs to provide an experience, and why is it important to have this experience as opposed to the experiences that we are used to?

Yeah, so I'm going to try to be as simplistic as possible with the answer, although there's a lot of angles to take here, that the operative phrase that I was go back to in talking about this industry, but certainly our place in that industry is that of incentive align, incentive alignment. And I think that is really the North Star for me, of where this all works and why it works better than anything else. And for us in travel the to consolidate the problem statement, if you will, to a singular data point, it's that 84% of travelers made their last destination decision based upon a word of mouth recommendation. And what that means is that we just value word of mouth Rex from friends, and we've probably all been in that spot when taking a trip somewhere, of hitting up our friends to see what you should do on an upcoming trip, and think about how much value is generated by the recommendation shared with others, and yet those who shared those recommendations get none of that value in return. And so basically what we're doing is creating this cool social graph around one's travel experiences to power this word of mouth recommendation network, where, basically, you collect NFT identifiers of one's travel experiences to build this larger persona of what one's done around the world, both where they've gone and what they did while there. And then, as they make recommendations from those experiences, there's the opportunity to earn on chain rewards from doing so, basically, when, when, whenever, your friend's book based upon your Rex, you earn rewards from it. And it's, again, this really cool thing of just rewarding behaviors that we seek to encourage, which in this case is just A, traveling and B, sharing recommendations from your travels C, knowing how valuable that information is to others travel planning purposes. So yeah, I think it's, it's funny too, because we, as you mentioned, work a lot with these web2 companies and a lot with web2 personalities as well. We're working a lot with, like travel creators on a lot of this stuff. And what I what, how I describe it, as I did just now on this space is going to be very different, as you would expect from how I describe it in a non web3 setting, where, if you just put the focus on value profits, a place to document and share your travels and earn rewards by sharing your recommendations. It's like that that to a non-crypto person sounds compelling, and I don't need to use the technology to explain that value. So that's. Where our head goes, and I think that's where we need to keep focus on, of not over convoluting the value prop with the jargon. The Jargon is okay in the right setting, but let's focus on where the value lives, and that's where web3 wins.

Yeah, wonderful. Sam, couldn't agree more. And I think Caitlin, you are the perfect person then to take the baton from here, because we love jargon in web3. I mean, it's, I think it's in every industry, like every industry I've ever been in, if you speak to people outside of it, they look at you like, you know, as if you're speaking Greek, and you don't realize it, because, of course, you feel great using all these acronyms. And so in web3, it's exactly the same. We love our acronyms, but whenever we speak to someone who's not in web3, we face the problem that they have absolutely no idea what we are talking about. So we'd love to hear from you. How have you gone about I mean, you've worked with some incredible IP maybe I can just name some of them. So the audience is also where you've worked with Pirates of the Caribbean, Tron Legacy James Cameron's Avatar Halo for Microsoft, happiness factory for Coca Cola, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Nickelodeon. The list literally goes on Dexter for Showtime. So you've worked with these really traditional IP and now we are in a space where, I mean, the IP you are working with is still the traditional IP, but the technology is crazy, and suddenly you have to onboard people that don't know anything about this. So why choose these technologies? I mean, of course, they offer so many benefits when it's so difficult to explain to people, or is there a way to not have to explain it? We'd love to hear your strategy on this?

Sure. I think for me, being in a space that is new is fairly familiar, because every time I've worked on one of those large projects, we've been in the middle of a technological revolution where there are these, all these new tools, and audiences want different things, and we can do different things with them. So even if you go back as far as like Pirates of the Caribbean, that was when people were honestly still learning how to use the web to connect to movies. It sounds insane now, but we were dealing with jargon problems because people didn't understand what the power of websites could be move through social media eras, streaming video. All of these things are constantly changing, and the problem of jargon is not new. Every round of jargon is different, but at the end of the day, you're people talking to people, humans talking to humans, and finding the things at the core that are shared, and trying to be open to figuring out what you don't know and what the people you're trying to work with don't know is really key. There are a few things that will always be good center points, what is useful about this, what is desirable, what is possible. And humans are incredibly good at telling each other stories to help them understand a bigger idea. For me, I've worked in both nonfiction and fiction, and I've worked with a lot of different types of companies, in addition to the laundry list of IP so when I'm thinking about it, I'm really trying to break it down to those core points first. And I'll be perfectly honest, I developed the habit of being the person in the room that might over explain an acronym or be the first to ask the question and look stupid. I don't know what that meant. Can you explain it? And the more you introduce those open opportunities, the easier it is to navigate different professional languages, different expertise. I think, at the core of everything we're talking about, we're trying to find the things that are most exciting and valuable at this point in the technology cycle of NFTs. And some types of value are self evident. I can financially benefit from this. I can have a clearer sense of contractual ownership or royalties. I can participate in something in a different way. And all of those are real advantages beyond that. You know, the immediate flash of excitement around the new technologies wears off very fast every time and figuring out how you can use these tools in a better way or in a more exciting way to provide something that's useful, exciting, desirable is really key. And I think for us, we focused on fan experience, but we also look at a lot of archival work. This time last year, we launched an amazing collection exclusively from Getty Images. Called Ghost in the Machine, which was looking at exclusive photographs that aren't available digitally anywhere else that were in the Getty archive. I think, you know, we can always ask ourselves, are people going to buy more or fewer digital collectibles in the future? And those may be tokenized and they may not be, but figuring out how to work with institutions, how to work with one another, to create clear, equitable advantages in the way that we're creating products like digital images or building larger experiences, like the sort of connected world we've done with DC and the DC archival comics, DC collectible comics, that we put out is a really good challenge to me. How can we make these items accessible? How can we unlock this treasure trove of historical comics or imagery, and how do we make sure that that is feeding back appropriately to the artists who make it? You know, it's really an important question to ask as we go into an environment where a lot of technologies that are coming up seem extremely high control, and like the users or the participants in them, may have less authority over their own identity, their own products and their own work.

Thank you, Caitlin, I think you know one thing that stood out for me was this idea that we are building things that are relevant for people now, perhaps the building part and the relevancy, there's a few years lag between them. But I mean, when we are building, we are building for the society that is here right now, and so that is always constantly shifting and changing. I mean, what you said about when Pirates of the Caribbean came out, people still learning to come online. It's really true. It feels like a millennia ago, and yet it was just, you know, I mean, when I got started in my career, people were not using websites, and social media was not a thing. So it really is, you know, you feel like it's moving so slowly because you're in it, but if you take a step out, I mean, things are moving so quickly, because people are always changing, and people are moving and evolving.

We have something that's called Audience time, and then there's institutional time. Audience time is instantaneous. You will never be able to make people entirely happy with the speed of communication that people could communicate with one another. But when I was getting started, you know, the groups that were inside really big projects had incredible expertise in storytelling or filmmaking, but because they had spent all of that time specializing, didn't know anything about the new technologies, and that is maybe less common now, but I don't think so. If you're spending all of your time working on really big works, you need people who can come in and be sane and sensible and open and low pressure when they're communicating to you. Here's this new way people are doing it. You haven't had time to spend days of your life on forums, on Discord. Here's a summary. And when we're talking about film or game projects, you're making big decisions every two to five years about the content you're going to make in new media, digital media, you can go faster, but it's never as fast as the audience wants.

Perfect. Thank you. Caitlin. Bogdan, Caitlin mentioned two things that, of course, NFT art addresses directly, the ability to monetize your work, and then the ability to have ownership offset work, whether that's the creator or the buyer. So I would love to know in your conversations with artists, NFTs have been around now for a couple of years, if you're in the art space, more likely than not that you at least would have heard about it probably checked it out at least a little bit. How has those conversations shifted from maybe a couple of years ago? You needed to explain to someone what an NFT is, and you had to, I don't know, start from what Bitcoin is. How have, how have those conversations shifted? Do you feel like more artists nowadays understand this technology, or is it still quite difficult to onboard new artists?

Yeah, absolutely love that. And I mean, it's just very heartening to hear that. I mean, especially if you if you talk about the specific age group people 50 and above, I mean, they generally are not as open to trying new technologies. I mean, the younger you are, the more you're willing to sit there and figure it out. And, you know, suffer through it because you don't experience it as suffering because it's new and fresh. And then, of course, the older you get, the more difficult it becomes because you're set in your way. So I think it is certainly a very big win to have collectors that are coming into the space, obviously not buying into the culture, but buying into the actual benefits of what the technology offers. So that's really fantastic.

So what's been interesting with Bogdan is, I have a question in terms of the kind of art that you are seeing on the platform, you say that you don't focus on digital art, and of course, we've seen in the NFT space that you know now, especially with AI. I mean, I don't even know what the what the situation is nowadays in terms of seeing NFTs on platforms, on NFT marketplaces, because pretty much all the art you see nowadays on the internet seems to be AI generated. So what are the type of art that that typically these collectors are interested in, and why do they feel that NFTs provide the perfect vehicle to provide this digital certificate for this physical object.

So actually, our collectors, they're just into physical art. They don't have any like specific choice or something like that. They love everything about art. It depends on the person and personal preferences for the NFT and benefits. First of all is smart contract technology for sure. The second one is transparency, because you can easily understand how much does it cost. You can easily use the secondary market to resell your NFT and the digital certificate gives you like proof of authenticity for the artwork. It's important for most of our collectors. And the interesting thing is that we sell digital artwork, but it plays a role some type of advertisement for us, because we sell cheap digital artwork, and then people come to us and say, like, I want to get this physical. We say, Yeah, easy. You can just need the NFT certificate, and it will send you the physical artwork. It will be delivered by NFA for free. So it works this way nowadays.

Fantastic. Yeah, very interesting. Very interesting to hear. Because I think you know this is really the key is for people who understand the limitations in certain industries, then to understand that these technologies are what, what brings the solutions. But then I see we almost run out of we almost running out of time. So I want to get in a final question about one thing that I've been hearing from all of you. Of course, it's easier to spot with art, because NFT art has been in the market for a couple of years. But this idea of ownership and the idea of owning things that we didn't necessarily always know that we could own, I think this is always a theme in web query when we're talking about these technologies, because it unlocks, in your mind, the possibility that, oh, wow, I could earn that. I could own this. And then it also unlocks the question, but wait, who owns it right now? So I think there's a lot of you know very, very important questions that are unlocked when, when people engage. With these technologies, but in terms of sort of the practical, let's say, onboarding of this kind of thinking. So Sam, if I use the example of Mintpass, I mean I travel, of course, I know that I own my experiences, but I've never been able to own my experiences in the way that mint pass offers. Of course, when I make recommendations, I make recommendations based off of my own experiences and all I've learned, you know, the wisdom that I've that I've gathered along the way, but then again, yes, I own those, but I don't own them in the in the sense that I'm able to monetize them. I write a review on Google, and that's how I've kind of shared my wisdom, my you know that I've gained so when we think about ownership and we think about a use case like Min pass, for example, what kind of future do you think needs to happen for people to be able to ask these questions about all sorts of things? I think Mintpass is a very good example, because everyone has this universal relatability to travel. And then I've never wondered about wanting to own my travel experiences or monetize my recommendations. But now that the options on the table, I'm like, well, great, I want to participate. So what do you think is it going to take for us to see more of these things happening in more spaces, considering that the technology, you know, is not always, doesn't always have the best press in the actual mainstream media.

Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I mean, to put to put it most simply to me, because I think digital ownership in its very definition is a very abstract concept, and I think people are used to understanding what they own by what they have in their home, or what they can hold in their hands, what they hold title to, as it relates to car, deed of a house, but when you translate that into this digital world where you've never truly owned anything, it's hard to make A equal, B when there's never been a reference for that math. Now I think where what digital ownership means in a lot of different instances, is an equation to value, where I can get value out of this thing that I possess digitally. And I use very vague terms for a very real reason, where value can mean a lot of things. And so yeah, in our in our example of the in travel, with your experiences being truly owned by you, we like to say, own your lists, where you have your recommendation list, as many often do in notes, apps and spreadsheets and the like, and tying ownership of that as a function of your logged experiences back to your digital persona, where the flow of value generated from that list returns back to its origination. So as your recommendations are disseminated across the network, the value that's generated from those recommendations, the form of bookings generated, goes back to you as the person who inspired the trip of someone else, and that's, that's a micro example, but I do agree with you. I think that the front end of that value flow is what needs to get better for this to really take hold. And what how this works is when, as I, as I'm about to say it, I'm like, wow, this is such a cliche. I'm not actually saying anything new, because everyone says this is like a meme at this point. But we need to be able to create these experiences where the technology is of no consequence, and we're able to own the things online that we create or that we possess, because it's the default and not the novelty, where that's just how you interface in these ecosystems as the new normal, and the value that gets returned because of that is the hook like I think that's once you see the benefits. That's when you see adoption, rather than trying to focus on the technology as the reason to adopt.

Yeah, absolutely couldn't agree more. 100% agree with what you said. I'm going to keep it brief for the sake of time, because we are almost out of time. Caitlin, I think Sam mentioned now about the new more, the new normal, and it gave me a flashback to the pandemic. So I want to hear from you in terms of, you know, this openness to new experiences. We've been talking a lot about the unlocking of experiences that we can bring to audiences using this technology. How has this changed? You know, sort of during the pandemic and now after the pandemic in the entertainment space,

sure, I think I always get a little bit of a cringe when I hear someone, and this is not meant as a date, I hear someone say, there is no model for the sort of ownership or rights that we're talking about, because intellectual property rights have been really clearly defined and how. We talk about something that is essentially intangible in frameworks that allow us to participate, like there are existing, existing frameworks. The same is true for things like likeness rights. You know, the use of someone's likeness, especially if they're a public figure, are really key. And I think some of the biggest changes that I've seen in the past 5 to 10 years during and after the pandemic is people having very different senses of their digital identities, both in a sense of the importance of those and because a much wider swath of people are preoccupied with these things, a much higher sort of engagement with these questions, like, does an influencer own their own likeness? And you know, as we're all sort of navigating this world more digitally and seeing our own personalities content, you know, experiences and these things writ into the wider world. We're also coming up against a very dangerous period where platforms and technologies have the potential to decide entirely what the terms of our participation with them, our content, our likenesses and the use of our works look like. And I think that that gives me the most pause these days. You know, I tend to work with groups that are very, very aware of the legal parameters around the usage of their work, and largely their businesses are based on giving permission to other people to work in them, whether that's baseball and the likeness of players or that's a really big story world with all sorts of other amazing creators working on different projects in it, but I look at how people are presenting themselves online. I'm looking at how people are creating work increasingly online and on third party platforms. And I'm looking at how third party platforms are getting increasingly bad at curating things that people want to those people. And to me, the next phase of development, the next phase of sort of this, this technological culture that we live in, is going to require a lot more attention to curators. We trust programs. We trust names that we rely on as humans to find work that we know isn't garbage or is going to be reliably interesting or compelling. And I think that bar is incredibly low compared to what you know, the sort of high aspirations of art often are. But some of the things that are key on that that web three provides that other, more high control technologies don't, is personal authority over the things that you collect, the ability to do, smart enough contracts, to be granular with individuals. And I think that we'll see that these principles, these ideas, these tools that are individual and distributed, that we've built and worked with directly are going to be critical to developing businesses, stories, identities, projects in the future that allow humans to have that opportunity to control their own perspective, their own presentation and their own rights to their work, we spend a tremendous amount of time ensuring that we're able to meet the standards that have been established for pre existing content with their artists, authors and others in the work that we still do, and I think that if you're not paying attention to that, and you're not considering it, you're very likely to end up in situations where your likeness, your image, your work, is going to be used in ways that you don't anticipate. And that's going to be increasingly true for younger generations who've never grown up in a world where we had to determine those parameters. So the tools that we have in web three have the opportunity to make a really cool main space for all of us, whether we apply it as tokens or not. So I hope that everyone can take that into their hearts and think about it as you're going about the process of your work, are you ceding that control to others, and is it worth it in this situation, or is there a better method that gives you the opportunity to control your privacy presentation and opportunities in the future?

Well, thank you, Caitlin. I personally feel inspired and motivated by that. So I hope that that that everyone who's listening to this, whether live or after the fact, feels the same. I think that really encapsulates just everything that we all are working on and working towards. And, you know, I was just thinking, because I don't really focus the show specifically on any. NFTs anymore. We don't have an episode that regularly that focuses on NFTs, and it's almost like a pulse check every couple of months to see how far we've come. And it's just incredible after listening to all of you for an hour and just what is happening, not only, I think, in terms of how the space is evolving, but also how people are thinking about it. I think that's just a testament to how far we have come and just how much is happening right now to make things even better in future. So thank you so much. Sam Simmons, Co-founder and CEO at Mintpass. Bogdan dimitriev co-founder of NFA space and Caitlin Burns, senior director of story of Candy Digital. It's been fantastic sharing this space with you for the past hour. Definitely, if you've resonated with what our speakers have shared and what they are building, do follow them on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Go check out what they are doing. I think there's just so much value to unpack in what was shared here tonight. So thank you all so much. And if you have capacity for more, I will be speaking, let me just see. I will be speaking, I think, in about one or two hours at the gather verse virtual world Symposium on a round table panel entitled imagining the future of virtual existence. And with that, I will see you again next week for another episode of the future of NFTs brought to you by AdLunam. Cheers guys. Have a great week.

Thank you. Bye, bye.