NFT DRAFT ft. pplpleasr, Matt Condon, Matthew Gould, Jimmy, and Diana

HOST:  Hey everybody and welcome back to the Unstoppable Podcast.  I'm your host, Diana Chen.  And I'm here for a very special episode today.  We are doing a Snake Draft which for a lot of you listening from the crypto community, you might not be familiar with what a draft is or how it works. 

If you’ve never done fantasy football or fantasy sports you might be confused about this.  Basically I’ve got a whole crew with me today.  And we will be giving our favorite NFT picks in four different categories.  And those categories are Most Valuable NFT Project, Best NFT Community, Best NFT Artwork, and Best Narrative/Story around the NFT Project. 

And I am joined today by an incredible crew.  I’ve got my cohost Matthew Gould who you’ve all met before.  CEO and cofounder at Unstoppable Domains. 

I’ve got Jimmy Chang who you’ve all met as well.  He runs Product Dev -- what is it?  Dev Tools.  He’s a product manager in dev tools.  Sorry.  I always mess that up.  At Unstoppable.  Mm-hmm.

I've got Pplpleasr who you all, I'm sure, already know.  Congrats by the way on your Forbes thing.  That’s like super, super incredible. 

And then last but not least I’ve got Matt Condon, 1 of the many Matts.  He is the guy that microchipped his own hand in the name of NFTs.  And one of the NFT OGs he helped write the NFT, err, the ERC 721 Standard.  So I'm sure he’s got some really good picks as well. 

I'm actually a little nervous.  I feel like these people are going to know way more projects than I do and have some better picks.  But I hope you enjoy this episode.  And after you watch this, I want you to go on our Twitter account at Unstoppable Web.  And there’s going to be a poll up there. 

And it’s your turn, now, to vote for who you think won the draft.  So after you watch this, listen to our picks, maybe go do some research on your own, if you’re curious, and then go on our Twitter and vote for who won this.  So let’s go ahead and get started.  All of you, thank you all for being here. 

Our first round is Most Valuable NFT Project.  And by the way, we randomly generated an order of the draft before this.  And the order is going to Jimmy, Pplpleasr, Matt Gould, me, and then Matt Condon.  And then it’ll snake every round so the next round it will be in reverse order and then we’ll reverse so people get a chance to go in different orders.  So let’s kick this off.  Round one: Most Valuable NFT Project.  We are starting off with Jimmy.

JIMMY CHANG:  Well so I get to go first which means if, for folks that are familiar with fantasy football, usually the number one pick is never that controversial.  So I get to pick the Crypto Punks, obviously.  It’s one of the earliest NFT projects.  It is pretty much the kind of representation of crypto right now in terms of its punk attitude in term of like the pixilation.  Obviously it has a lot of provenance. 

It has a lot of historical value in terms of what it means for the NFT and crypto community.  A lot of the OG crypto folks and now a lot of the huge thought leaders in crypto own Punks.  And so that’s why I'm picking it.  I think it’s just the most valuable project, I think, in 10, 20, 50 years, it’s still going to be the most valuable project.  So I'm not saying anything very controversial here.

HOST:  Well, cool.  Yeah, I think everybody’s familiar with Crypto Punks.  It doesn’t require too much of an explanation there.  Not surprised that that is the first pick that we came out with.  So second pick goes to Pplpleasr.  What do you think is the most valuable NFT project?

PPLPLEASR:  Well since I can’t pick Crypto Punks, honestly right now, probably Bored Ape Yacht Club.  Like I mean the floor is going to like 38 today.  So.  Feel like there’s not really a dispute there.  Huh.

HOST:  All right.  Yep.  Another pretty self-explanatory pick.  I think Matt Condon you’re going to be in trouble.  You’re the last one to go this round.  So.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Oh, yeah.

HOST:  I hope you’ve got some unique ones in mind that people aren’t going to pick.

MATTHEW CONDON:  I think I -- maybe.  Maybe.

HOST:  I believe in you.  Next up we’ve got Matthew Gould.  Matt, what is your pick for the most valuable NFT project?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Yeah, so I'm going to go with Gaming, right?  So that means I’ve got to go with Axie Infinity.  I think that gaming is just absolutely exploding right now.  I think people are sleeping on gaming.  I think we’re going to see lots more gaming things come out later this year.  Axie’s number one.  They’re the blue chip for gaming.  That’s where I think people are going to go if they want to get those collectors’ items long term.  So, yeah, Axie Infinity.  That’s my draft.

HOST:  Nice.  Nice.  I like the change of direction there.  I am next to go and so my pick is going to be GHXST.  They’re spelled G-H-X-S-T.  And they have really risen to the top recently.  They’re still going up.  Up only hopefully.  But they’re not -- I mean I don’t really care, I don’t have a GHXST, but I think they're really cool.  The project is cool because each piece is like hand drawn. 

It’s not generative art like you see most of these like NFT avatar projects where you just like have a base thing like whether it’s a penguin or a cat or whatever and then you have all of these traits and then an algorithm automatically generates all of these unique NFTs. 

With GHXST they’re all individually drawn by the artist.  And they’re released one by one instead of like in a batch at first.  And I think because of that they have a really engaged community as well.  And people really pay attention to what’s happening in the community and pay attention 'cause they want to know when the next drop is.  So I think the art is pretty cool.  I think the concept behind it is really cool.  Price is really high right now as well so that’s going to be my pick is for the GHXSTs. 

And then lastly, Matt Condon.  What is your pick?

MATTHEW CONDON:  Feeling good that nobody took this but I also am saddened to use it for this round and not best narrative.  I think the most valuable digitally -- like the most valuable digital thing that one can own is a Digital Zone from 2017.  It is the most NFT of any NFT that ever NFT’d.  It is steeped in art history.  It is steeped in crypto memetic narrative.  It came out before everything that matters except for Punks.  It is -- the idea is that it’s a record to an invisible concept.  Like NFTs. 

And you can buy them and they were issued and it’s steeped in this Eth -- zone art history thing.  I'm not going to do it justice here.  And there’s 100 of them.  The floor is now 120-something Eth.  I think 1,000 is a reasonable minimum.  This is the best narrative that I’ve ever heard and I really, really dig narrative as the driving price or driving narrative in driving meaningfulness for an object.  And so I'm sad to use it for Most Valuable and not the Best Narrative Story.  But I do think that those are just perfectly correlated.

HOST:  I totally knew you were going to --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] It’s all --

HOST:  -- pick that.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.  [Laughing].

HOST:  I totally knew when you were like, oh, I don’t think anyone’s going to take this.  I was like I know exactly what you’re going to pick. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  You were a merciful god for not saying it.  [Laughing].

HOST:  Okay.  So the good news is you can’t repeat a pick in the same round but you can repeat a pick --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Ah.

HOST:  -- in a future round.  So --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Yeah.

HOST:  -- you can’t repeat your own pick in a future round.  So like --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Oh.

HOST:  -- you cannot pick Digital Zone in multiple rounds.  But somebody else --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Yeah, that’s fair.

HOST:  -- can pick Digital Zones for a different round. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yep, yep, that’s fair.

HOST:  Very cool.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Okay.  So I’ve got some other thoughts in mind for the Best Narrative.  But.

HOST:  Okay.  Can’t wait to hear.  Cool.  All right.  So that concludes Round One.  We have Crypto Punks by Jimmy.  We’ve got Bored Ape Yacht Club from Pplpleasr.  Matt G. picked Axie.  I picked GHXST.  And then finally Digital Zones.  That is a solid round.  Cool --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] I'm actually surprised that we don’t have Autoglyphs in there. 

HOST:  Yeah, or Art Blocks is something that I was maybe expecting here --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Or any Art Blocks.

HOST:  -- as well.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah, I was --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] That’s true if you think of Art Blocks as a collaborative or like a group. 

HOST:  Mm-hmm. 

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah.  Oh, trust me.  Autoglyphs will come back.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.  Autoglyphs --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] That’s in our back pocket.

MATTHEW CONDON:  -- 100%, yeah.

HOST:  Or Matt, you’re in a gaming parallel was probably a close second in your book, right of somebody who picked Axie --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Yeah. 

MATTHEW GOULD:  Yeah, so that’s actually a very strong contender.  So but you guys already picked out Crypto Punks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.  So I didn’t think that both of those would go in the first two so I had to go with what came to mind and that was Axie.

HOST:  For sure.  All right.  Awesome.  So let’s go ahead and get Round Two started.  Round Two is the Best NFT Community on Discord/Twitter.  So as we all know, you know a lot of people are like why the hell are people paying millions of dollars for a JPEG.  And a lot of what surrounds NFTs is this like social element of it.  It’s like this aspect of community and so that’s something really important that we wanted to touch upon.  So this round we’re picking the best, the strongest NFT community.  And Matt Condon, you get to start.  Start us off this round.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Very good.  These days I'm less involved in the gigantic communities that are a firehose of activity.  And so to that point I think my favorite right now is the DEAFBEEF Discord.  Just because -- and for those who may or may not know, DEAFBEEF is a really cool generative artist.  Really pushed the boundary of the whole NFT medium, time and time again.  Really good stuff.  And their Discord is just filled with pretty cool conversation on generative art and NFTs and all that stuff.  So definitely not the incredible deluge of community and outpouring of joy that you see in a lot of other Discords but very, very fun to be around.

HOST:  Nice.  Very nice.  Solid pick.  All right.  I am next to go.  My pick is going to be, and Jimmy is going to kill me for this, my pick is Cool Cats.  I think the Cool Cats community just has been everywhere.  Like if you’re on Twitter at all there’s no way that you don’t see at least 50 Cool Cats tweets per day. 

The community is everywhere.  They do so many community calls all the time.  There’s people with Cool Cats shirts, like merch, all this stuff.  Yeah, Jimmy’s like glaring at me right now or it looks like it.  And he can probably explain the community a lot better than I can but I just think this is a solid pick.  So I think the Cool Cats community is what has boosted it to the price that it’s at today.  It’s like largely, largely dependent on how strong their community is. 

JIMMY CHANG:  That wasn't my pick so you’re good.

HOST:  What?  Whoa, okay.  Whoa.

JIMMY CHANG:  [Laughing].

HOST:  All right.  Well now I can’t wait to hear your pick but --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] Or maybe I'm just doing PSYOPS.

HOST:  -- next… oh… well next up is Matt Gould.  What is your pick?

JIMMY CHANG:  So I just want to preface this by saying I don’t like this question, right?  [Laughing].  Because I’ve actually learned something different in every single one of these communities that I’ve been in.  I am going to have to give credit to the Pudgy Penguins though because I think that they actually got me excited about NFTs.  And I’ve been on the sideline for a while watching a lot of these art projects and they just brought in thousands of new people to this, to the NFT scene, just through everyone changing their profile picture to a penguin and creating the memes and everything like that.  And I like that. 

I like the lighter side of crypto.  So that made me very happy to see that.  And some of the tweets are pretty funny.  Vitalik’s tweet like he’s worried about the concentration of penguins in the Antarctica, things like this.  I just thought it was fun to kind of see the community get engaged.  So I’ve got to give it to the Pudgy Penguins.  And I wish I could shout out like ten other communities that I’ve learned so much from.  So but this one is recent and I think it’s on people’s minds so I'm going to go with the Penguins.

HOST:  Nice, nice.  Got a few Pengus here.  So definitely support that community, repping the community a little bit.  All right.  Next up is Pplpleasr. 

PPLPLEASR:  Well I was going to pick Pengus, but… oh.  I guess let me do a real quick brain scan of -- I mean honestly Crypto Punks, like they also have a - - community, like even -- I don’t even have one but I like browser Discord sometimes 'cause it’s just like there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there.  So.  

HOST:  Good pick, good pick.  Okay.  And then last but not least Jimmy. 

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah, I'm going to reuse one, too.  I still think there’s a ton of unused answers that we could have given in the last -- in this round.  But I'm actually going to say GHXST.  So the GHXST community is well documented in terms of just how avid they are.  I think GxngYxng has done an insanely amazing job of like the gamification of his collection. 

So it’s like you combine a Zodiac with an Immortal and you get something else.  And he’s also really good about gamifying drops.  And so he’ll just do flash drops.  He’ll just go @everyone, like here’s the link for my new release.  Everyone bid like .0024 eth.  Right?  And so it’s like you can’t really buy it.  And people just go crazy, right? 

People stay up all night for like these flash drops.  GxngYxng is like a meme.  It’s well documented.  GxngYxng has made pieces that are literally just like these like rudimentary drawings of people with push notifications on their iPhones saying one flash drop or something.  So the community is just avid.  Their memes are hilarious.  I think they’re a pretty, pretty strong voice in the community. 

HOST:  Yeah, for sure.  That, I think you can use GHXST for pretty much all of these categories.  I definitely was -- community was the next category, I was going to use it for if I couldn't use it for the first one.  So solid, solid pick there.  All right.  So that wraps up Round Two.  Just to recap Round Two.  Best NFT Community.  We have Matta Condon with DEAFBEEF.  Me with Cool Cats.  Matt G with Pudgy Penguins.  Pplpleasr with Crypto Punks.  And Jimmy with GHXSTs.  All right. 

So let’s go ahead and dive into Round Three.  Round Three is Best NFT Artwork.  I feel like we’ve got an artist amongst us and so Pplpleasr is probably going to have the best pick in this round.  She’s probably going to be like none of you know what you're talking about.  I am the first to admit I don’t know art. 

I don’t know how to value art.  I -- yeah.  I'm just going to go off of what I’ve heard other experts call high art and that’s going to be my pick But I can’t wait to hear Pplpleasr’s pick in this round.  But we are starting off with Jimmy since you ended the last round.  Jimmy, what is your pick for Best NFT Artwork?

JIMMY CHANG:  What a great introduction.  I get to be the one before Pplpleasr.  And I also want to disclaim that --

[Crosstalk]

HOST:  [Interposing] Yeah, don’t ask to come out --.

JIMMY CHANG:  -- I have no idea… [Laughing].  I also want to give a disclaimer that I have no idea how to value art so this is purely subjective kind of opinion on what I think is really beautiful.  I'm going to say the Art Blocks curates at Fidenzas.  They’re just amazing.  Hard to articulate why I find them so beautiful but they're just captivating like the curves and like the delineation of the different noodles.  They’re probably not called noodles.  That’s what I call them.  I love them a lot.  I personally don’t have one.  But, yeah, I love Fidenzas a lot.  Maybe I'll get one, one day. 

HOST:  Darn you.  That was going to be my pick.  I just listened to somebody on a podcast earlier today talk about how Fidenza is high art and I was like, okay, I'll go with it.  Don’t know why but I'll go with it.  All right.  I'm going to be doing some really fast Googling now as Pplpleasr gives her favorite pick for Best NFT Artwork.

PPLPLEASR:  Well I mean art is subjective at the end of the day.  And you know obviously my bias is just like my personal taste.  I am by no means an art expert.  But -- and this, I feel like this project is maybe more like up and coming so not that many people know about it yet. 

It’s called Omnimorphs.  And it’s done by this really, really amazing artist, like Daniel Taylor, who is like -- I think he has like a lot of followers on Instagram or something which is no surprise because his art is amazing.  And you know I think it’s a per picture project but the art itself actually reflects his style which is very much like Mobius influence.  He’s like a 2D illustrator but it’s like a very Sci-Fi futuristic but at the same time like retro style which is really cool.  So that’s my pick.

HOST:  Nice.  Solid pick.  I'm not familiar with that one so I will definitely have to go check it out.  And then I'm going to go and tell everyone that Omnimorphs is the best art piece out there.  [Laughing].  All right.  Next up in this round we’ve got Matt Gould.  What’s your pick for Best NFT Artwork?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Sorry guys.  I'm absolutely blanking on this one right now.  I am not a modern artist.  This is a very -- like I'm not an art person.  This is a very tough call for me.  So I'm just going to have to dig into my personal collection here and see what I’ve got, right, based on my own opinions.  And I think -- I think I'm going to -- well maybe we’ll see if this is correct in the future but I'm going to go with Punks Comics.  I think that I really like the comic book like kind of art form.  And I'm excited about what they’re going to be putting out over the next couple of years.  And so we’ll see.  I guess that’s maybe a bet a little bit on the future but that’s what I'm going to go with.

HOST:  All right.  I was expecting you -- I was half expecting you to say Pudgy Penguins but… Punks Comics, I'll have to check that one out.  Okay.  And then next up is me.  So since Jimmy stole my pick, I am going to go with another Art Blocks project.  This is Rinascita by a guy called Stefano.  And this is a very -- it’s like a more abstract I would say sort of rendering of… well you know what? 

Let me just read his description.  Rinascita is the legacy of Ascenza, Rebirth through Epiphany.  A celebration of gratitude, joy, and family and a sudden awareness of the raw greatness of life.  So, yeah, that’s how it makes me feel, too, when I look at it, I think.  And I just think it looks really nice.  Definitely go Google it Art Blocks Rinascita if you haven’t seen it.  I like the wispy lines on it and how it looks like kind of abstract and open to interpretation.

And lastly we’ve got Matt Condon.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Catch me aping the Rinascitas after this.  This is really, really hard because I think that’s one of the coolest things that’s happened over the last three years is that all of this art that otherwise didn’t have a home, right, all this like NFT medium gave it a place to live.  And in that way like so many cool things have been done and not just visually or audio-ly but also art in the conceptual sense and art in the performative sense. 

There’s just so much good stuff.  One of the things that I think a lot about when I think about digital art is where it lives in my life.  And in that way obviously Twitter - - Pictures are one way that art can live in your life. 

But the other that I found that I quite like is screensavers.  And Harm van den Dorpel is a really iconic name in this space.  Back in, goodness, I think it’s 2013, made a Bitcoin based screensaver, what is today, a semi-fungible token and sold it to a museum.  And that screensaver I think is one of the coolest pieces of art because it lives in my life unlike anything else.  It’s called Event Listeners.

HOST:  Event Listeners. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah --

HOST:  [Interposing] Very cool.

MATTHEW CONDON:  -- I highly recommend that you check it out.  It’s the first NFT or crypto art.  I'm not sure what the label is for it but it’s the first one sold to a museum which is really need.

HOST:  Very cool.  Very cool.  Solid.  Okay.  So that concludes Round Three for Best NFT Artwork.  We have Jimmy with Art Blocks Fidenza.  Pplpleasr with Omnimorphs.  Matt G. with Punks Comics.  Me with Art Blocks Rinascita.  And Matt Condon with Event Listeners.  Solid round.

And now onto our fourth and final round.  This round is all about the best narrative or story around the NFT project.  And since we ended the last round with Matt Condon, we’ll be kicking this round off with Matt.  Go for it.

MATTHEW CONDON:  All right.  Wow, such power to pick the first one.  It’s really tough to call this.  I already mentioned the Digital Zones.  So I think I will introduce the one we talked about previously which is Autoglyphs because Autoglyphs were the first piece of fully on-chain art.  It’s a zero dependency piece of art.  It is, again, steeped in art history, Sol LeWitt and the sort of whole background of instructional art and the idea that the physical medium of a piece is not the art, it is more broadly the narrative and the people who think about the art and what they think about it that is that centralizing force. 

And so in the Sol LeWitt case, the actual like painting on the wall is not the art.  The instructions for the painting are the art.  And in the same way in Autoglyphs is those instructions encoded into a smart contract.  And so in that way it is really, really cool and it’s just that first -- it’s that first like poke that shows you the wide future ahead.  It’s just so -- it’s going to be so iconic for how people -- it’s just digital art is kind of -- and especially generative art starts there.

HOST:  Love it, love it.  Awesome.  I am next I believe.  Yep.  And I'm going to recycle an old pick.  I'm going with Digital Zones for this one.  And for anybody listening and trying to Google this, the full name is Digital Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.  Also known as IKB, yep, very confusing things.  So those are your Google search terms. 

I picked this one for Best Narrative or Story because this was one of the very first NFT projects ever that started back in 2017 actually on August 30th of 2017.  I believe this podcast is going live on August 30th, so the day that you hear this is going to be the 4-year anniversary of Digital Zones which is pretty exciting. 

So Digital Zones was created by this guy called Mitchell F. Chan.  And he basically created this as like an experiment.  I mean Matt covered some of it earlier but I think a cool thing about this is he created this as an experiment I think to like in an oversimplified way basically to show whether NFTs have value if the price is not sky high.  So with every NFT that you buy, half of that Eth gets burned as part of this experiment.  I think there’s also a really long paper on this, I want to say isn’t it like 20 or 30 pages, Matt, do you know?

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.  It’s like a 30-page PDF that he released and then like one person read it.  And then the project sat there in obscurity until recently.

HOST:  Yeah.  So you can find it on Open Sea.  There are only 55 on Open Sea I believe. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.

HOST:  Yeah, there’s only 55 items on Open Sea but there are actually 100.  There were 101 that were created initially --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Oh, right.

HOST:  -- one of them was burned so now there’s 100-

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] And that’s part of the art, too --

HOST:  -- total.  That is part…

MATTHEW CONDON:  -- that one that was burned.  Yeah.

HOST:  Yeah.  Yeah, exactly.  And then the 55 that you see on Open Sea are the ones that have been wrapped which is why you can see them on Open Sea.  And then another cool thing about this project is that Mitchell basically identified a new shade of blue, like named it something, I forget what, and made that the property of the NFT that makes it so valuable.  So the idea that you can sort of just like say like, oh, this is like a shade of blue and I'm going to make that viable is like a property that’s going to set the floor price, what is the floor on Open Sea right now is 140 Eth. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Oh, we’re up to 140, wow, that was different an hour ago --

HOST:  [Interposing] 140.

MATTHEW CONDON:  -- [Laughing].

HOST:  -- right, yeah, I'm sure by the time this goes live it will be even higher --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Wow.

HOST:  -- than that.  But at the time of recording it’s 140 Eth floor on Open Sea.  So anyway.  Digital Zones, that’s my pick for Best Narrative or Story. 

     And then up next we have Matt Gould.  What is your pick?

MATTHEW GOULD:  Yeah, so I'm going to go for a historic project as well.  I think the older projects in this space actually have the history already baked in and I think they’re really attractive.  I actually have a personal connection to this project.  And it is Lunar Plots.  And this was launched back in October 20th, 2017.  This was also before the ERC-721 standard was well known.  But it was actually based on a part of the ERC-721 standard. 

And I actually bought a Moon Plot on October 21st, 2017 'cause I like to play around with all the new things in the NFT space.  And this project just recently got resurrected in the past month.  A lot of these, there’s a whole group of NFT archeologists who are going back in time.  There’s some really great posts on this.  We’ll make sure to include the notes that you guys can go read about the history of NFTs and how they’ve evolved over time. 

So this one, I had a personal connection to.  What’s even cooler is the dev came back, the developer for this project is actually coming back to work on this project again.  I reached out to him.  I actually chatted with him online in the last 24 hours.  And he’s a big Pplpleasr fan.  So he’s happy that we’re on here today with her.  But, yeah, I think it’s great.  So let me -- I want to take one little clip here from -- this is from a medium post from 2017 and this is why I really like this project.  And this is why I was excited about it four years ago. 

But this is the planned improvement section, right?  Everyone had a white paper and a roadmap back in 2017.  And he’s like I'm adding metadata to these contracts so that you can add a custom description to each plot.  And I actually went back and looked at mine and I named mine Moon Base, of course.  And then he also allowed for subdivisions.  Now you have to remember these Lunar Plots are before Decentraland, right, so this is -- I think there was one or two other projects that had land in them, maybe three or four around this time. 

It’s one of the very first land projects.  And I thought that was really cool.  He already thought about subdividing those properties.  Governance: he actually mentions this, right?  And he doesn’t use the word DAO, I actually don’t know when -- I guess he could have done this but he wanted to develop a democratic governance system for the Lunar Plots.  And then transfer ownership of the contract to the community.  Right? 

And so this is exactly a DAO and this is four years ago.  And we’re still working on these now.  And then the other thing that he did which was really innovative at the time was make a 3D image of the NFT that you’re buying.  So I don’t know if this is the first 3D image NFT, right, and the way that he did it originally, the NFT was the entire moon and then you could scroll around to find your specific plot, right, 'cause they didn't have Open Sea and the pretty images yet. 

But this was -- so, yeah, and then today they’ve redone it where you can wrap it and put it on Open Sea and you can see it.  But he used NASA footage, right, from 1994 so that you actually get a surface area like picture of the moon.  And then of course going to the moon is big in crypto.  It was really big back in the 2017 ICO days. 

And so this is my -- this is my contender for the project with a story and actually I think this story is just getting rekindled now.  And maybe in a couple of weeks we'll see even more things happening with Lunar Token from October 2017. 

HOST:  Very cool.  It’s sort of like the OG virtual lands like before Decentraland and Crypto Voxels which are what everybody knows today.  Right?  Yeah.  Cool, cool.  All right.  Next up we have Pplpleasr for your favorite narrative or story around a NFT project.

PPLPLEASR:  I like Proof of Beauty.  I don’t know if you guys know… like I -- I sort of heard about this project maybe like a few months ago.  But I mean I'm surprised it hasn’t picked up more because I think it’s really cool basically for people who don’t know what it is, is like you can take a TX, like transaction, from like anywhere basically and then I think then they generate like an art piece based on the TX that you feed. 

And so you can -- they see like document, like historical moments in, like, on the blockchain and then have it be presented in like an art way.  I remember somebody like tagged me in the one where I think the TX of Pleaser.dao, like winning the X-times cycles KPs.  But like that already belongs to someone else but I was like, oh, that would have -- and the one that it generated, like they’re all like really cool looking, you know? 

It’s like it’s not like, you know, like it’s like it actually looks like an art piece, like I can imagine it in my like living room in my home or something and I’d be like how cool would it be.  I mean obviously I don’t own this piece because somebody else owns it but like how could would it be if like in the future my house, like somebody comes -- and they like see this massive piece on my wall and they’re like what is this and I'm like, well, back in my day, like, you know, the story behind this art would be so cool.  So yeah, I really like what they’re doing.  And I hope maybe in my life there will be more iconic moments so I can be the first to snag the Proof of Beauty of how I [Laughing]….

HOST:  I love it.  I love Proof of Beauty.  It’s such a cool project.  Also I love the back in my day, I feel like in 10 years what you’re doing is still going to be cutting edge and [Laughing] there's not going to be any need for like back in my day, remember when this like Proof of Beauty hash thing was a thing and somebody minted the transaction of my big NFT sale or whatever. 

Cool, yeah, I really like that one.  We had David Sun from Proof of Beauty on the podcast to like talk all about the projects.  So if you guys want to learn more about that go check out Episode 32 with David Sun from Proof of Beauty.  Cool, all right.

And then lastly we have Jimmy with your favorite narrative or story around an NFT project.

JIMMY CHANG:  All right.  So I'm going to give kind of like a… like an atypical answer.  I'm actually going to say Cool Cats.  And so if you go into the Cool Cats Discord there’s a channel called Origins.  And it was basically all the content on this channel was curated by the artist.  His name is Clon, before the project was even live. 

And it’s basically a timeline of his whole relationship with the Blue Cat that’s now the logo for Cool Cats.  And so he actually created Cool Cats or the Blue Cat for Cool Cats in 2013.  So about 8 years ago.  And so this was something that he was sitting on for a while and it’s actually been through a ton of iterations.  And many of you may not know this but it’s actually been featured in a good amount of stuff.  It was actually in a mural featured in - - in 2015.  And so the Blue Cat has been with Clon for a significant portion of his life. 

And he’s been iterating on a design so you know the Blue Cat that you see in his sketchbook doodle in 2013 is obviously very different than the Cool Cat base that you see now.  But you can see the progression and through it he almost like painstakingly iterates on the perfect line weights of what the cat should be, the perfect ratio of the ears, the eyes. 

So it’s all very deliberate.  And he has a really strong emotional connection to the Blue Cat.  And it’s actually really cool because in the origins chat he talks about real world coming in and kind of like cutting off his time or his relationship to keep on developing Blue Cat.  So it kind of like fizzled out after a few years and he basically revisited it like earlier this year when he was thinking about doing NFTs. 

And now he has a tattoo, Blue Cat, because obviously Cool Cats contributes to a lot of really good news in his life.  And hearing Clon talk about it is like actually really emotional because it is really an extension of himself.  So I think the story behind it is something that I really resonate with just as a relationship of your visual representation to who you are as a person. 

HOST:  Nice.  I like it.  I did not know all of that about Cool Cats.  I think all -- Cool Cats is sort of just like -- they’re so much like outward hype about it that I feel like few people actually know the backstory because everybody just sees all these cats on Twitter and stuff but that is a very cool backstory. 

     So that wraps up Round Four.  We have Matt Condon with Autoglyphs.  Me with Digital Zone and Matt Gould with Lunar Plots.  Pplpleasr with Proof of Beauty and Jimmy with Cool Cats.

     Very good.  Everybody, thank you so much for joining me.  This was not bad.  We only had a few repeats.  I think we had Crypto Punks twice.  GHXSTs, Cool Cats, and Digital Zone.  I think that was -- those were the only repeats.  Everything else was unique and you got some pretty obscure ones out there.  Like the Event Listener that you called out Matt Condon, I’d never heard of that before.  Definitely need to go Google.  Oh, and then I guess we had a couple of art blocks as well if you’re going to count those as the same project.  Very cool.  Very cool. 

So I guess now we’ll just leave it up to the audience, the public, to vote on who they think had the best picks.  We’ll put together like a cool graphic, too, so it’s easier for you all to visualize who picked what.  I know it’s hard to keep track of on a podcast.  Also if you’re listening to the podcast version of this, go check out the video version on the Unstoppable Web YouTube Channel because we’ll be posting the actual NFT graphics on the screen. 

So if you don’t feel like going and Googling everything that we all said, just go watch the YouTube video and then you’ll get to have a little visual up there.  So, yeah, this was great.  Any final thoughts or any thoughts from you all about who had the best picks, who you think people are going to -- I mean -- okay, everyone’s going to vote for Pplpleasr, like I think we already know that. 

[Laughter]

HOST:  But [Laughing].

MATTHEW CONDON:  I'll vote for you, Matt.

JIMMY CHANG:  And there were so many good things that we couldn't… we didn't get around to talking about.  I mean five just isn’t long enough.

MATTHEW GOULD:  I think we should --

HOST:  [Interposing] I know.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- I think we should shout out some of these communities that we enjoy at the end here.  So I'm going to give a few just because I want to put them out there.  So --

HOST:  [Interposing] Yeah, yeah.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- I’d like to say the Waycards, Whycards, and ETHmap.  It’s another historical project.  I learned a ton from those guys by going in there and just kind of fishing around.  I actually want to also shout of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, there’s a lot of alpha from people who are in that tribe about NFTs in this space. 

I think they are kind of like the innovative ones inside the space and I feel like they have to be more innovative because you know the Punks were first.  And then I’d like all these communities that are doing more complex things with NFTs where they have like -- they’re trying to work on the -- you know they have a DAO for the NFTs and then maybe people are putting like a group of NFTs into a DAO and then those are being managed and there’s some sort of economic incentives around these.  So we’re just at the very beginning. 

There's a lot of projects that fit that.  And then I guess on the artwork I'm not the right person to shout that out.  I like Rocks.  [Laughing].  So like, oh, no, you know you’ve seen that spectrum, it’s like the developer, like where do you do your NFT investing and like I'm on the rock side of that spectrum.  And this modern art stuff, I have friends who collect it like the Fidenzas and all this stuff.  And they’re trying to explain it to me.  I'll get there eventually. 

And I appreciate everyone who’s dropping the knowledge on all these Discords and Twitter and everywhere else.  So and I think competing with these communities is hard to do.  They’re all really -- and I think that they’ve just -- it’s the most fun place to be in crypto.  A lot more fun than trading it. 

JIMMY CHANG:  Oh, certainly.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Lots of fire.

JIMMY CHANG:  I mean… [Laughing].  It’s a circle --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] We like the Ether Rocks.

JIMMY CHANG:  -- rocks and Fidenzas are the same thing.

[Laughter]

MATTHEW GOULD:  I like things that are very simple, you know that about me, Jimmy [Laughing].  So like these rocks are right at my speed.  And then I know -- but I also think another one we forgot to mention here that I wish to shout out for sure is BEEPLE.  And then the guys who are building these platforms or NFTs, like the Raribles, Open Seas, Nifty Gateways of the World.  They made it super easy for people to get in.  So, yeah, the whole space is exciting.  And I'm glad I got to draft with you guys because I learned about a couple of projects that I'm going to go look into so I appreciate it. 

HOST:  For sure, for sure.  Anyone else have any honorary mentions or any other projects you want to all out that just we didn’t get a chance to fit in to this draft?

MATTHEW CONDON:  I'm just going to plus one, the Ether Rocks.  I get it.  Like I saw it and I instantly got it --

HOST:  [Interposing] You know what it’s -- sorry.  Can you explain?  Because I have to say I don’t get it.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Sure --

MATTHEW GOULD:  [Interposing] It’s a rock. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.

[Laughter]

MATTHEW CONDON:  Do you want the -- do you want like why it’s so interesting or do you want the context behind the project?

HOST:  No, I think I have the context.  I just want to know why are you and a lot of other people really into the rocks.

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah, I’d like to know as well.  I don’t know either.  The rocks kind of happened without me --

MATTHEW GOULD:  [Interposing] It’s simple.

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah.  Is it a rock?

MATTHEW CONDON:  It’s exclusive.

JIMMY CHANG:  It’s a rock.

MATTHEW CONDON:  It’s scarce.

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah?  Cool, yeah.

MATTHEW CONDON:  It’s… it’s really simple.  Like there’s really no subjectivity behind it.  It’s like a rock.  And you know there’s no other way you can really slice it.  Like it is a rock.  Right?  And --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] Yeah, I mean rocks, you can’t really slice them that easily.

[Laughter]

MATTHEW GOULD:  And it’s simple to me the same way that Bitcoin is simple.  Right?  Like --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Sure.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- Bitcoin --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Yeah.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- Bitcoin, all it does is to store value and it’s not --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Right.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- supposed to do anything more than that --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Doesn’t do anything else.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- that’s just like -- that’s what it’s for --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] you can buy it and you can sell it.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- and then… right.  And the Eth --

PPLPLEASR:  [Interposing] And - - rocks.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- exactly.  Exactly.  And the Eth Rock is exactly like that and it’s got a meme because it was a Pet Rock.

MATTHEW CONDON:  Wow.

MATTHEW GOULD:  So, yeah.  I mean it goes -- like I got it immediately --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] I guess I'm buying a rock, all right.

[Laughter]

MATTHEW GOULD:  Yeah.  I don’t know.  You may have to sell a kidney to buy a rock.  That may not make it --

JIMMY CHANG:  [Interposing] Ooo.

MATTHEW GOULD:  -- that may not be enough.  [Laughing].

HOST:  Matt Condon just wrote in his journal, buy a rock --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] I did. 

[Laughter, crosstalk]

MATTHEW CONDON:  That’s actually true.  That’s true.  Word for word. 

HOST:  [Laughing].  Cool, any other --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] Buy rocks.

HOST:  -- projects that we want to shout out?

MATTHEW CONDON:  IT’s one of those situations where there are just so many.  Thinking of one --

HOST:  [Interposing] I know.

MATTHEW CONDON:  -- is hard.  It’s like, oh, you like music?  Name any song.

[Laughter]

JIMMY CHANG:  Yeah.

HOST:  Right, right.  We’ve got the NFT master here.  Just name one NFT, one project.

JIMMY CHANG:  Uh, uh, uh --

HOST:  [Interposing] Just one.

JIMMY CHANG:  -- uh, rocks.  [Laughing].

HOST:  Rocks.  [Laughing]. 

MATTHEW CONDON:  Yeah.

HOST:  All right, cool.  Well we can end on -- we can end on the rocks.  I think it’s too late for me to buy any rocks but --

MATTHEW CONDON:  [Interposing] [Laughing].