Pushing the Boundaries of NFTs with Mitchell F Chan from Digital Zones

Diana Chen:  Hey everybody.  Welcome back to the Unstoppable Podcast.  I'm your host, Diana Chen, and I'm here today with our guest, Mitchell F. Chan.  He is the artist and creator behind a really cool NFT project that I have just been going down deep, deep rabbit holes on.  It's called the Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, also known as IKB if you've heard it referred to in another way.  So, I'm super excited to have Mitchell here to talk about this because it has—it took me so long to wrap my mind around what this project is, and it's one of the original NFT projects back from 2017 before NFTs were really even a thing.  And so, Mitchell, thank you so much for being here today.  I'm really excited to talk to you.

Mitchell Chan:  Thanks so much for having me.

Host:  So, now that I've, you know, teased the hell out of this project, I'm going to make people wait even more.  I want to know a little bit about your background.  Let's just go chronologically.  Take me back to, you know, who you were before you created Digital Zones.  Were you an artist in the past, or...?  What kind of background do you come from?

Mitchell Chan:  Sure.  So, before Digital Zones, I was, as I still am today, an artist.  And I had been an artist, I mean, I been working as a professional artist since probably 2006.  So, you know, very fortunate to have had that career.  And really my—the sort of thesis behind most of my work was that, you know, I'm interested in an artist—I'm interested in representing the invisible systems and structures in the world around us that have a big impact in our very visible and tangible world, right?  

And so, a lot of that is technology—technological systems.  The way that, you know, social media networks are set up is invisible, and intangible, and yet has an impact on how we deal with each other face-to-face in our real world, economic systems, social systems, right?  And so, if you were trying to paint a picture of the world today, and be truthful to reality, it makes sense those would be the subjects you that would try to paint in those pictures, right?  But the question is always how best to represent something that is invisible and intangible.  And where my career had been leading me was that, I said, well if you're trying to make a depiction—a representation, of these systems and structures, which are invisible, the best media to represent them would be media that are almost invisible, right?  You know, that are just on that threshold.  That's as truthful as you could get.  

So the last sculpture that I made before I made Digital Zones was a sculpture that consisted of two clouds of water vapor.  And water vapor, right—nd so, there were these two clouds that came out of walls in the gallery.  Every few seconds you'd hear a boom, and these two big clouds, they were each maybe 3 feet in diameter, they would move towards each other in the gallery, and then collide into nothingness.  And this was a way of representing systems of online discourse, right?  

These things are invisible or intangible, so I made it out of something that was almost intangible, these clouds.  So that was sort of how I worked, and then when you think about my career like that, it's sort of a natural progression that I would use cryptocurrency as a medium 'cause that's a system.  It's invisible.  It's intangible.  So, that was kind of how it all led there.

Host:  Yeah, got you.  So when you—when was it that you first learned about crypto?  Was it, you know, like, way back when the Bitcoin white paper came out, or was it later?  And then how did you, I guess, conceptualize—you essentially conceptualized NFTs in your head before NFTs were even a thing, right?  So…

Mitchell Chan:  [Laughs].  You know what, it was—okay, how did I come to crypto?  Of course, you know, I'd heard of Bitcoin prior to 2017, but I wasn't really in that ecosystem.  I really came to it—I really came to crypto looking for an art material.  It was right after—it was right after making that cloud sculpture, I was trying to figure out, well what will my next medium be?  What's even less tangible than clouds?  And I learned about Ethereum, right, programmable money.  And I said, oh well if this is money that's programmable that means it's money that you can digitally sculpt with, right?  It's an art material.  So that was how I entered it.  And in terms of conceptualizing NFT, you know, I must admit, it wasn't my initial aim to do that.  At first when I first started playing with it as an art material, you know, it's just like being in the artist studio with any other material.  I don't know what I'm going to make.  I'm writing code.  I'm learning solidity.  I'm configuring it like this.  I'm configuring it like that.  I'm wondering, oh is this going to be a trading bot?  Is this going to be, you know, am I going to make my own kind of branded alt coin or something like that?  And it was ending up making a non-fungible token representing art; it was just where the research led me.

Host:  Got you.  Okay.  So then take us through this journey of creating Digital Zones, and maybe start with the story behind the original story that inspired you to create this on-chain version.  So, tell us who is Yves Klein?  What did he do, and like, what inspired Digital Zones?

Mitchell Chan:  Sure.  Yeah.  I love telling this story.  So, I'm in the crypto world now and it's completely new, and whenever we come across something new it's very helpful to look back to the past to see if there are any precedent ways for understanding this, and then you can see how they're similar and you can see how they're different.  And so, I spent a long time trying to figure out does art—does the history of art have anything to say about these cryptocurrency things? [Laughs] and after a lot of research, you know, I ended up at Yves Klein.  And so, here's what Yves Klein did that I felt was a perfect analogy to what would happen if art started to be traded on blockchain.  

Yves Klein created this project in 1958.  It was called Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.  Now what we should know about Yves Klein before we get into this project is that Yves Klein was by that point already a very famous artist, I mean, he was a prodigy.  This project was released in 1958 on his 30th birthday, and he was at that point very famous, mostly for these stunning blue monochrome paintings.  These were paintings and they were just blue, and they weren't just any blue, these were the most incredible, flat, hypnotic shade of blue that you can imagine.  It's a blue that he actually patented.  He patented his own process for making this specific blue, right.  

So that was his whole career, but his whole career he had a very spiritual view of art, right.  He wanted his work to be not just a painting that represented something, he wanted it to be a feeling that was conferred to the viewer and in a lot of ways, the painting, the object that was mediating this feeling between the artist and the collector—was an impediment to him, and he always wondered, can I just directly transfer this feeling that is in my soul to a collector?  All this sounds very sort of cheesy, very Kumbaya, but he was this kind of guy, right?  And so, the apotheosis of his career, I believe, happens with the Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.  

It goes like this; people line up to see this exhibition in a gallery, all right.  It's happening in Paris.  They approach the gallery.  There's a blue curtain over the window, so you can't see what's in there, all right.  You enter, and the room was completely empty.  These artworks, these zones, they were empty space.  They were completely invisible, and Klein claims that they are—that the room is full of the sensibility of the color blue that he's imbued.  

And this seems like a very sort of low-effort art school thing to do, but, you know, you look at his whole career and you could believe in this, right?  But he's also very interested in—beyond just the sort of spiritual nature of art, he's also very realistic about the relationship that an art's experience has to its transaction.  And he understands that buying a piece of art and owning a piece of art is apart of its experience.  And he doesn't do this thing that we see in the art world a lot, right?  

We see in the art world a lot people say, oh well, it's vulgar to talk about prices.  Oh, it's vulgar to talk about the market.  We must only talk about the higher sensibility of the art.  He's beyond that, you know, that's a very disingenuous argument.  He acknowledges that these things bleed into each other.  The commodity form of the artwork and the experienced form of the artwork—they bleed into each other.  So, these things are for sale, and he's thoughtful about how they're going to be sold.  

This is the most immaterial artwork that's ever been made, and so to juxtapose against that, he will sell them only for the most material of currencies.  He will sell them only for pure gold, okay?  And this is a nice counterpoint to what he's trying to do in the art.  People did buy them for pure gold.  This actually happened.  They would give him 20 grams of gold and they would get in return this paper receipt.  It told them which specific zone they had, how much they'd paid for it, all right?  So, this was a token.  It was a non-fungible token that pointed to ownership of an immaterial artwork, okay?  And I've just now described every NFT that we've seen over the past four years.  That's what it was.

Host:  And this was in the 1950s?  That's insane.

Mitchell Chan:  It was in 1958.  Right.  So, I'm looking at this and I'm saying, holy smokes, like, because I'm thinking, all right, how could blockchain transact art?  How do we trade block—or art on the blockchain?  Well, the blockchain is very limited in terms of what we can put on-chain.  We can't really put all different types of art on-chain.  We can only create receipts that point to other artworks, right?  And that would be a separation of the commodity form.  The commodity form now goes on blockchain, so the expressive form is free to be whatever we want, anything and even nothing, all right?  And that's what would happen if ever tokenized artworks existed, right?  This is what I'm seeing. 

So, it's not that I conceived of non-fungible tokens as a way of transacting artwork, it's that I saw in art history that—oh my goodness—this is the example that points to how all future, like, artworks on blockchain will be transacted, right?  So that was—that was really it.  There were a bunch of other neat features about Klein's artwork that I translated into Solidity.  For instance, like the issuance.  They were released in series, or tranches, and those series were releases on a bonding curve, where the price doubled every 10 tokens, so mine did as well.  

There was a unique feature about burning the piece that I think we'll talk about later.  And so, all of these I translated into Solidity, and it was just a way of understanding for myself, and hopefully for others, like, what tokenized artwork would mean in the future if it ever were to become a thing, which at the time I wasn't sure it would.  

Host:  This is why this is, like, my favorite project right now that I'm super obsessed with because I, like, what you just described is NFTs were conceptualized in 1958.

Mitchell Chan:  Absolutely.

Host:  They're not even—they're not, like people talk about, oh the were conceptualized in, you know, 2017 with CryptoPunks or whatever, you know, I think it's up for debate what the first NFT project was, but it sounds like the first NFT project was in 1958.  We just didn’t have the technology to be able to, you know, put it on the blockchain, or do things like that, but that's essentially—that's exactly what it was.

Mitchell Chan:  That's what I believe as well, and so again it's just about making—it's about making that connection, right?  Because I think that a lot of—most of the innovative things that we see in the world, they're not just sort of created, you know, out of the blue—out of the ether to use two, you know, very convenient turns of phrase, right?  There are very few innovations in the world that true, like, let there be light in the darkness moments.  It is about finding the right historical analogue to apply to the right current technological conditions and then saying, Eureka.

Host:  Yeah.  Yeah, exactly.  And so, okay, let's go back to Yves Klein's story because we haven't even gotten to the most exciting part yet, which is the burning ritual.  Okay.  So, Yves Klein back to 1958.  Basically, you go to this art gallery.  They set you up with a bunch of blue things—blue curtains, blue windows, blue everything to sort of, like, you know, get this feeling of blue, or this idea of blue, or just get it in your mind that you're going to, like, walk into this empty room and feel this feeling of blue, whatever that means, and you go in.  You buy, you know, a zone.  You get a receipt and then what?  Okay.  And so, this is the most exciting part.  So tell us, then what?

Mitchell Chan:  So, here's the thing, this whole project is about the difference between, like, legal ownership and true ownership of an artwork.  And Klein says that just because you own this token, I mean really what you own—it means that you own a receipt, but this project is about a sensibility, and like, to have a true sort of spiritual sensibility, like, it means a relinquishing of legal ownership.  So, he says you can perform this ritual.  

You meet me at the river's end, and you burn this paper token, all right, and this paper token is the only thing that you've got in exchange for you twenty grams of gold, well at least the only visible tangible thing that you've got, right?  And it's a thing if you'd have held onto it, you know, right now it'd be in a museum and it'd be worth a lot of money.  But you could burn this token and Klein would throw half of his gold into the river and in doing this, this ritual was the true transfer of the sensibility of the piece, right?  And I think this is really beautiful, and there are three documented instances of people doing this.  

People met Yves Klein at the river, and they burned their paper token, and Klein threw his gold into the river's end, and that immaterial sensibility was conferred.  

Host:  See, this is the wildest thing to me because I think this is where, like, a lot of people listening maybe are just, like, they cannot wrap their minds around this, or they're pained to even hear it because in this day and age it's like, everyone has to capture every moment.  You know, you've got to, like, take pics of every moment.  Put it on Instagram.  You have a record of it.  And to just completely destroy any evidence of this transaction—of this history, and all that remains is in your mind, or in your heart, or in your soul, or, you know, however you want to convey that, I think that is—I mean that's something that is, you know, really hard to get a grasp on.

Mitchell Chan:  Yeah.  And there's something—it's really strange.  Very few people have done that with my token—with my NFT.  In fact, it's only been done once, and it was done the day after the project went on sale.  And as, you know, things have progressed and the project has become more widely known, and also, more valuable pricewise, I think that that idea has become even more special to me?  It's become even more meaningful.  

I mean, obviously burning one of these tokens now, you know, would be a much bigger financial loss for whomever did it as weird as that is to think right now.  But it's also, like, you know, in this real—this market is more supercharged and frenetic then I ever would have imagined.  And therefore, the contrast to just letting go of all that, and just having this sort of, like, peace and calm and serenity that comes with that relinquishing is, I think, even more meaningful right now, and I hope that I get the chance to do that with some collectors in the very near future.

Host:  Yeah.  So, okay.  Explain that parallel a little more in detail about how it works with your digital zones now.  So, say somebody purchases a Digital Zone NFT, which also by the way there are only 100 I think, or is that 101 of these NFTs?

Mitchell Chan:  There were 101 that were ever available, and then one has been burned, so we're down to 100.  And hopefully some more will be burned and we'll be further deflationary.

Host:  Right, right.  Okay.  So, there's 100 of these NFTs right now.  When somebody purchases one of these, it just goes through as a normal transaction, right?  They have to take the extra step of saying that they want to burn it, and they want half of the purchased price to be burnt as well.  Like, both parties have to take this extra step in order for that to happen, otherwise it just goes through as a normal NFT transaction, right?

Mitchell Chan:  Yeah.  Once you own it, you can at any point perform the ritual to burn it, and actually, I don't need to be involved with that.  Anybody can call that function on the smart contract and it will automatically throw half of my Ether into approvable irretrievable contract.  That'll be gone forever, and that collector's Digital Zone token will also be gone forever.  I've put it out there and asked collectors and said, if you do this, it'd be really nice to do it together because, you know, anybody who does do it, I'd, you know, I'd like to chat with them so we can truly like, confer some kind of non-tangible, like, experience together, but, yeah, it can happen really anytime,

Host:  Got it.  So, it's up to the buyer to decide if they want to burn the NFT, and then if they do decide that then half of the seller's Eth that they received for the transaction will automatically be burned.

Mitchell Chan:  No, half of my Eth is burned.  The seller just loses —

Host:  Oh, half —

Mitchell Chan:  — losses —

Host:  — of yours.

Mitchell Chan:  Yeah.  Yeah, exactly, right?  Because that is the goal gold that I received for this zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility and so I would be throwing half of my gold into the river.  And the collector would just be burning their token.

Host:  Okay.  Okay.  Got you.  And you said only one person has done this so far.  Did you know who it is?  Did they hit you or —

Mitchell Chan:  — I don't.  It was done completely anonymously.

Host:  Wow.  Wow.  Okay.  All right.  Okay.  Going back to when you first created this.  What did you think was going to happen with this project?  So you created it in 2017.  It was largely pretty silent until recently when it exploded again, right?  So, like, what was your expectation of what was going to happen when you created this?

Mitchell Chan:  I didn't have a lot of expectations.  I released it into the art world.  It was unveiled and the first token minted at InterAccess Media Art Center here in Toronto; which is a gallery and art center with a long 35-year history presenting innovative new media projects.  And then I presented it again at Ken State University a few months afterwards, and really nothing happen.  I mean, it was just something—I think that the art world maybe just wasn't ready to hear about Crypto.  At lease not the art world—at least not the part of it that I was, you know, in.  

There were other parts of the art world that were thinking about this and, but they were half a world away.  And we really didn't connect, and so, it was just quite.  I made some predictions in the essay that accompanied the piece, right?  This token—-this marked contract I released was accompanied by 33-page essay that put all these ideas and these stories down in writing.  And so, it did make some predictions and like, make no mistakes.  Some of them were a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I truly never expected to take off to the extent that it has now, but you know, I said okay, in the future—I did say that, you know, digital art works might be listed on exchanges, that there might be like centralize marketplaces for transacting them.  

I did say that it's possible that even though these tokens are indivisible.  That somebody could put it into a contract to fractionalize them, right?  And so, but all those predictions, I wouldn't say they were things I was expecting.  They were things that I was almost tongue-in-cheek, like, suggesting could happen.  And now all of them have happen.

Host:  Yeah.  Wow.  That's super impressive that you're able to predict all of that.  And so, I guess like, now when you look at like the eco system and how much it's exploded.  What are something that you attribute to that?  Like, why is it—-in your opinion, why is it that digital zone are mostly silent for four years and then all of a sudden have exploded in the last month or so?

Mitchell Chan:  Because Crypto is a very passionate community, right?  And one of the things that has fueled the NFT boom entirely is that communities need culture to survive, right?  You need a culture to rally around.  You need a culture and that's what I think NFT represented.  Like, on one hand—just from a market perspective.  They were a major liquidity unlocking event for a lot of Crypto collectors that gave Crypto accounts another place to invest in, but it was about seeing some of these digital artists and seeing, okay, this is a way in investing in an ecstatic, in a culture.  

And I think that digital zones have really, really boomed, because they're not just an artwork that that is native to Crypto.  They are an artwork that is about Crypto, and they are an artwork that presents Crypto as a natural extension to a century long story of conceptual art and I think that's meaningful for people.  I think it's meaningful whenever they see an artwork that acknowledges—really this is—this continues to story that had been that started a long time ago.  

Host:  Yeah.  So when you look at the space now, what are some other projects that you think really deserve some praise and some mention of being really awesome.  Because there's so many projects and I think people are—-I think everybody has sort of different views about this NFT space.  Some people see like the cool cats and the puggy penguins and all these cute little animals and don't really see the art value in it.  And then other projects are using cool tech, like, art block with the generative art.  I think that's really cool and the other projects actually have like high effort art, like, very much in contrasts to all the low effort art that we're seeing out there.  So, when you look at the space, what are some of the projects that you think are most worthy of mention right now?

Mitchell Chan:  Sure.  So there's I think are two different categories of works that are really blowing up right now.  One is work that is trying to test the boundaries of what can be done on block chain.  So we see anything like with the word on-chain, is really exploding right now.  On-chain generative, you know, whatever, whatever—and so, people want to invest in those innovations and be a part of them.  Feel a since of ownership over them.  

And in person I think that for artists there's this mad scramble to claim land, okay?  I'm going to be the first person to use blockchain like this.  I'm going to be the first person to create a smart contract that does exactly this.  All of those innovations and all those and all that experimentation is valuable because all those artists are creating tools for the rest of us to come in and use later, so it's extremely valuable.  But I think time will only tell by their—-the actual artistic expression, like the actual sentiment and idea and concepts behind that innovation will stand the test of time because it just a mad dash to be the first person to do this or that or to use the data field of an NFT transaction in such and such a way.  

The other explosion that we're seeing right now is that we're seeing a lot of NFT archaeologists find other projects, sort of, like, Digital Zones that were both innovated in their application of smart contracts and connecting to a history.  So, we're seeing like a lot of artist who four years ago were really just publishing their papers and ideas on further field, are now—-like now collector are discovering them.  The market is discovering them.  So you're seeing—-so we're seeing artist like Rita Myers and projects that were like facilitated by really big people in the space like Sam Hart and TerraZero, right?  Their projects are being discovered and they were similarly innovating technologically and connecting to history.  There's innovation and there was thought behind it.  

So those are—that's the category that I'm sort of most excited to see and also because those people are great, and recognition has been a long time coming.

Host:  Yeah.  For sure, those—I love those projects that you called out and I have recently been doing some NFT archology too.  And just going back and understanding why—-like, which are the projects that are still around after all these years and why they have been able to stand the test of time.  And that's how I dug up Digital Zones and some of the other projects that you mention as well.  So when you look into the future, what do you see as—I guess, like, some of the things that are missing in the NFT space or some of—-maybe ways that we've gone wrong or things that need to be fixed in the NFT space in order for us to progress forward be able to achieve what ever it is in your mind that you think, like, is the goal to achieve with NFTs.

Mitchell Chan:  Sure.  So right now we're moving really fast, right?  Like I said, artist are moving like very quickly as individuals all trying to plant a flag in this technological innovation or that technological innovation, right?  Collectors are moving really fast.  They're unearthing these projects, finding value.  The great land grab, all right, is here.  But there's a saying that if you want to move quickly, you go alone and if you want to go far, you go together.  

And so, I think that the next thig we're going to see is the building of more infrastructures that will support artists, collectors and most significantly culture workers long term.  What I mean by that is, the market has decided to elevate certain projects very, very quickly, very, very, far and markets can do that, right?  Markets can very quick, very agile.  And things can go up as quickly and they can go down as quickly as they can go up, but culture value is accrued slowly over time, right?  Ultimately, something like a Picasso has culture value because there's been decades of people writing about it.  

Studying about it, exhibiting it and using that artwork to tell stories that are meaningful to them.  

And the people who have build that culture value are not the artist themselves, right?  So right now our space doesn't really have a way to reward those people or compensate those people.  So what I hoping will happen next in the space, now that there's been this explosion of interest which is fantastic and I'm so grateful and so appreciative of.  And then hopefully we'll have a moment to slow down.  We'll be able to build something that looks a little bit like the galleries and artists collectives that we had before, but better, right?  

We'll be able to skip a lot of the stuff that didn't work about that and just focus on the things that did work.  And what did work are communities that are like invested in.  Building stories, doing curation, writing essays, put on exhibits and they're going to build cultural value that make sure this type of art is here to stay.

Host:  Yeah.  Yeah, for sure.  When I look at the space, I, sort of, see it like maybe going one or two different ways because we've reached a spot where prices are sky-high.  Like it just seems like we're a peak of NFTs that we never been at before and it seems like now people are taking like two different approaches to it.  Some people are trading NFTs almost the same way as they're trading Bitcoin or Ether or Litecoin as just like trading currency.  Like trading stocks and investment and going out and minting all these new NFT projects and then making a quick flip. They've, like, got strategy down.  There are people like that.  

And then there are other people who actually see the value of artwork and have the mentality more in the direction of Digital Zone which is like—-the price doesn't matter maybe as much as some people might like to think or the market is expressing at this moment, but it's really like the feeling you get from the artwork or like the connection you feel to the artwork.  That is really valuable.  And so, I'm curious to see in the future which direction this goes, or I guess which element of the NFT ecosystem we carry on into the future.  I think you mention, like, the culture aspect, I think, is really strong and we can't really survive without.  

And then there's the community aspect which I think has really—has really surfaced with the NFT boom and I think that's probably a really good thing for us to carry on into the future as well, but I am definitely interested to see which direction we go because it does in a sense feel like we're at a fork in the road and we could go one or two ways.

Mitchell Chan:  Yeah.  I agree with that.  And really—I'm not a market speculator.  I don't have a ton of insight on that but really, I mean, it would go both ways, right?  Where some ultimately like some of the projects that are just traded they'll go away and projects and artist who invest in cultural labor and stuff, those will continue to have value, culture value and financial value.  Because what people will realize is that, yeah, you can build long term value for these artworks for these NFT in a ways—like, you can't necessarily build long term value for your alt coin, right?  And you build it by just supporting the other culture laborers who are telling the story around the word.  

Host:  Yeah.  And finally, Mitchell, last question for you.  Since you're able to predict so many things correctly in your 2017 blue paper about what this space would look like today.  If you had to write a blue paper today about what that empty space is going to look like in lets say 10 years down the road.  What would be somethings that you would write in that paper?

Mitchell Chan:  What I would predict is that tokenization would become adopted for physical artworks and that would be used by institutions to separate custody over the experienced form of the artwork.  From ownership over the financial aspect of the artwork and I would predict that would have a wild, wild affect on the global art market.  

Host:  Okay.  So basically,—

Mitchell Chan:  [Laughing].

Host:  — Okay.  Okay.  I feel like you need to elaborate on that point a little bit.  Cause I don't know if people understand what you just said.  You're basically separating ownership with custody and so how would that play out?

Mitchell Chan:  Well, think about this, right?  I said that—I said that and NFT is a way of separating the commodity form of an artwork from its experience form, right?  And when you do that and you let the commodity form be a token on Blockchain that's extremely liquid, all right, very, very easy to transfer to buy, sale and trade and then you also allow the art form to be anything because before, all right, an artwork had to have both of those aspects in and of itself.  You had to make a painting and the painting was the object that you sold, and the painting was also the object that you looked at and that's a limitation, that's a restriction.  

When you separate that, the thing that you sale is a token.  Your artwork can be anything, right?  So there you go.  So that's to me—so to me that's the promise of NFTs, is that I believe it can liberate artist to be more conceptual with their work.  You don't have to make a painting that matches someone couch.  All right.  You don't have to make a sculpture that can be like shipped and sold and fit on someone's end table, right?  But I think that that separation between commodity form and expressive form could happen for existing works.  

So it's possible if you have a piece on the wall behind you, there's no reason why you couldn't write a smart contract that says, okay, this piece belongs on the wall of - -, like, it's contracted to be here for the next 199 years, but it's ownership and therefore, its financial value can be transactive even while the physical thing itself stays on a wall forever.  

Host:  Got you, got you.  Very interesting.  Yeah, I can definitely—I can definitely see that happening in the future and we'll have to revisit this in 10 years and see if your prediction was right, I'm sure.  Maybe we'll hit it before the 10 years is what I'm thinking, but awesome.  Well, thank you so much, Mitchell for taking the time to come on the podcast today.  Before you go just tell people where they can find you and then also if you're working on any cool projects that you want to plug or let people know they can check out Digital Zone as well, because I know—I think on OpenSea it's something else.  And then, is there like a website that people can go to.  It's a little obscure and allusive to find.

Mitchell Chan:  Yes.  It's very allusive and mysterious, but the best way to learn everything there is to know about Digital Zones and my other work and my whole career is at the website chen.gallery.  And chen.gallery has links to my Twitter, Instagram, Discord and it has links to the blue paper which explain the Digital Zone back in 2017 and updates about where it's been since.

Host:  Awesome, awesome.  Well thanks again so much, Mitchell.  Thank you everybody for tuning in and we'll be back again soon with another episode with the Unstoppable Podcast.