News Update; Crypto Down, NFT’s Up? – Crypto Business Show Episode 4
Video Transcript:
Rob: Crypto business podcast brought to you by TokenMinds. I’m your host Rob Eijgenraam, director of TokenMinds, a blockchain agency that combines all crypto disciplines from marketing to development in one in this podcast we’re discussing any blockchain topic that is relevant to businesses and entrepreneurs today we’re gonna go over the relevant news of last week I have in a podcast with me today Dev and Reinhart. Dev is a business development manager working in the blockchain field for several years now, and Reinhart is a data analyst working full-time on gathering and analyzing data in the crypto industry let’s first start with our main article of today which is from forbes.com and it describes the recent market crash of crypto and the fact that it hasn’t affected the nft market at all so there is also another interesting article published about that on fx3.com which actually is saying that because of the success of nft salespeople are liquidating their Ethereum so they see some statistics opensea that people are sending their key crypto exchanges collected from the sales of nfts, and collectors from the royalties over the last weeks which is pressuring the Ethereum price down, so quite interesting developments. We also can see that for example in our nft sales infographics which TokenMinds is sharing with the public where we have some interesting data about that as well so we already discussed last week the different trends of the last couple of months covered in that report including nft popularity in different regions of the world and the amount of benefit fails but now it has a new page on the report added which is the bitcoin crypto price and popularity versus nft, so there we can see some interesting data that the nft sale actually went up since the last couple of months. So we are not at the all-time high but definitely higher than December-November although the amount of sales is also actually higher than November-December and was potentially lower than last year and that means that the price prices the floor prices went up a lot also interesting to know that Ethereum definitely has by far the most volume still and yeah as mentioned the crypto price is quite under pressure but nfts seem to do fine and you can always you can almost think that it’s beneficial for nfts because gas fees might be lower, Ethereum prices might be lower a lot of the nfts are sold in Ethereum obviously and then lastly we have quite interesting statistic here about the google trend so it’s kind of the search for you for different topics where we compare not only nfts and bitcoin and crypto but we also have a couple of other trending topics like A. I and IOT for example and we can see actually that there’s only growth for nfts every month to month even last month whereas crypto yeah you can see there’s some pressure and overall compared to like VR metaverse nft is really doing a great job is definitely on top of the worldwide search volume so yeah I think this is quite interesting what do you guys think about this Dev and Reinhart?
Dev: Yeah right so you know it brings my thoughts to the sentiment of the people sentiment right now so obviously we know that the cryptocurrency market is not very strong it’s been crashing for a few weeks now with bitcoin being at its lowest price so what does that reflect of people that you know invest in cryptocurrencies and as to why so it was always considered an instrument of significant appreciation right so they would not invest in traditional assets but instead would invest in cryptocurrencies but with the crash in cryptocurrencies and simultaneous ownership of nft so maybe they’re thinking that okay they should you know to receive the profits and benefits of selling some of the nfts at their peak value rather than taking the chance of deferring for a later time at least that way they can compensate for the loss of the crypto market losses that they may be experiencing so those are my initial thoughts what are your thoughts, Reinhart?
Reinhart: Well yeah back to the news that Rob just said the Ethereum crashed right and some of them like have a theory that they are liquefying the Ethereum and like it’s exchanging indefinitely right and I guess that makes things really connected I guess because yeah as we can see from the data before the total volume and total transaction of nft is quite rising right so perhaps the absorption of liquifying some crypto to nft is quite it makes sense actually and also not only that like in Indonesia as well like nft trend is going very, very yeah it’s been rising everywhere you hear every time you go out and yeah you kind of hear nft everywhere in here in Indonesia because I think it’s something some issue about goose alley as well yeah, and I guess I’ll agree with the nft trends like if it is rising recently because here in Indonesia that’s the case.
Rob: Yeah I actually, to be honest, totally agree I hear the same thing around me that people talk about nfts because it’s adopted by so many influencers including for example I’m in Taiwan at the moment there is a big time, and celebrity that just sold some nft so people know about it but at the same time I think that it’s not a household name I talk also to a lot of people that are completely outside of crypto and I mention and nfts about to them and they have no clue whatsoever so they know bitcoin and they’re interested in bitcoin especially now the price is low but nfts they never heard of so I think there’s a long way up from here still so yeah let’s go to the articles that you found for this week Dev.
Dev: Yeah so you know just how you were able to share with us a theme around some of the news to this week i’ve i have been able to get some articles as well again with this overarching theme of big tech giants entering the space of blockchain web 3.0 as we now know them so we’ve got google and youtube coming out publicly in a way to announcing about their involvement or at least creative growth and development and engagement with these technologies so we had you know google’s leadership talk about how you know they are beginning to see benefits of blockchain and how they might leverage blockchain to store their existing data better and you know it’s kind of interesting to see that because the last time they made such public announcements of tech development whether that was their google glasses or their involvement in social media it kind of fell flat on their face right so here again they’re obviously it can be interpreted as a signal of good confidence in the use of blockchain technology for long-term projects right yes so you know we arrive at this point this week where we learned about big tech giants entering the space of blockchain, and web 3.0 and the use of or development of projects that could see light of day in the long term so in the recent past we know Google made announcements of their involvement in tech development whether it was hardware in terms of google glasses or software in terms of their you know building of social networks which were not so successful so they were always apprehensive of that and for them to come out now and announce publicly that they would be leveraging or at least working in their labs on blockchain solutions as a means to store data better it should give a big boost to people in this space to you know continue to build the apps and other such products right another search article that really you know was interesting to me was YouTube’s again albeit part of Alphabet/Google but youtube’s announcement of encouraging and the use or tokenizing content on their platform right so they want to be able to encourage their content creators and in a way to prove authentic content for them to you know generate better revenues for themselves and remain profitable and continue to drive that originality of their content on youtube’s platform and this comes fresh off the back of their youtube’s announcement of shutting down their own division of content so they no longer want to do their own content production but instead will continue to benefit from and encourage this you know individual user space where people like us you know distribute content on youtube’s platform so together both google and youtube now coming forward and announcing that they want to create an ambience and atmosphere which is conducive to using these technologies both from the creative side of things as well as from a data management side of things. Yeah, that’s it for me.
Rob: Yeah they’re quite credited so I think when I hear that about youtube I kind of have to think about them trying to just get a little bit of the pie because I have seen a lot of influences on youtube you know that have basically the largest amount of views they are monetizing through merchandise sale and I don’t think it’s easy for them to really get some piece of that and they probably figure hey they’re probably going to sell a lot of nfts so let’s just set up a department so we can monetize a little bit of that for example if someone’s trying to you know to sell an nft then they’re getting a small percentage of that for example.
Dev: Yeah I could not agree more right so you got to think about what Google and YouTube’s revenue generators are it’s ads 86 percent of the revenue still comes from ads so if people are watching original content through individuals like us rather than youtube’s own original content like tv shows then that’s where it makes sense for them to shift their resources towards and by allowing us to create those nfts on our content then they can you know definitely take a bigger chunk of that pie by allowing, for now, ads on those nfts or on those contents as well so maybe that’s the way they’ll structure that but that’s something that we’ll have to see how they proceed and move forward with.
Rob: Quite interesting what do you think Reinhart?
Reinhart: I agree with you like they are trying to make some yeah trying to have a pie of themselves right like selling the merchandise up there and I heard that I think the head gaming of the YouTubers resigned because he sees that the nft world and crypto and the blockchain world has a very promising
Rob: And he’s moving holy to Polygon right? I guess?
Reinhart: Right exactly.
Rob: I think there’s a lot to that step because I think a lot more is coming from polygon not only because if it’s a layer two on Ethereum, but also because polygon has a very interesting strategy around their scalability as a layer 2. So for example for gaming specifically what they’re aiming at is not yet live but hopefully coming soon maybe with this new hire that will help is that they will enable companies and applications and devs to have their own blockchain as on polygon. So polygon is that’s why it’s a poly right, it’s like a collection of a lot of blockchains that use the security of Ethereum but then solve this kind of scalability, and gas price issue I think their whole system correct me if I’m wrong but it can do like ten thousand per second whereas Ethereum can only do 10 per second or something like that so I think it’s a very interesting project so I’m pretty sure we’re gonna see a lot more news coming from them.
Reinhart: Yeah, I agree. Okay so from my side, I’m going to tell you about the news we see already in the Southeast Asia region so yeah last week we heard about Singapore’s negative sentiment right so yeah here comes again the native sentiments from Myanmar. So here in Myanmar the military government purposes to jail digital currency and VPN users okay so here we can see that Myanmar military real government is proposing to either close there or yeah they’re going to jail the VPN users and crypto digital currency users. Like they’re going to make some strict rule here like yes i know that some country or certain regions are not that open to the world into the technologies right so here according to a report so yeah individuals code using vpn will face a possible jail sentence between one and two years in addition the offenders may also be asked for a fine about two thousand eight hundred dollars or about five million Myanmar kyat and that’s huge besides that targeting digital currency and vpn users yeah the military government proposed regulations so perhaps this is kind of negative sentiments here in Southeast Asia regions and I don’t know about their regulations on the technology side but the director of netblocks it is an uk, uk director monitoring company so he said that this is actually not okay like the action of this are going to make the public sentiment further away against the military rule so yeah I agree on that side but yeah on the other side each region has their own regulations right so what do you guys think about this like what should act about this like for these Myanmar or Southeast Asia region because or we already saw that there are some sentiments bad sentiments around Southeast Asia region and yeah i think i want to ask about that how we should act about this what do you guys think?
Rob: Dev, what do you think?
Dev: Yeah you know what for someone who loves using a VPN I’ll be the first person to go behind bars but I think this is obviously a clampdown it could very well be a connection with you know with what’s happening in China with regards to their proposals over their approach towards this use but I wonder why I’m not sure why they’re concerned maybe it’s a terrorism-related thing maybe they just want to clamp down on crypto for use as a means to fund different nefarious activities I think it needs further investigation for sure, but regard when you speak about economics and Myanmar’s contribution to Southeast Asian economy let alone a global economy it’s not that significant right so I would have thought that the use of crypto would have assisted them in their growth economically in this region but that’s not the case they’re not pro that approach so It’s to be seen how this evolves in the next few weeks or over summer.
Rob: Yeah let’s see how that’s gonna develop you know I’m not so surprised because you can see the same thing on the internet when it first came up that a lot of counties especially more like military kind of regulated counties or you know out of credit counties they will try to regulate the internet usually they feel because people use VPNs or use other solutions but of course, there is always people that are countries or people in power that are trying that so yeah thank you so much, guys. Thank you Dev, and thank you Reinhart for your contribution. This week we will do another one next week to talk about whatever happened in the seven days before that we are going to have another podcast on Tuesday which is going to be around the technical development of smart contracts specifically nft so erc721 smart contracts I’m gonna have Josh in here who’s a development manager for blockchain. But for now thanks everybody for watching and listening, and see you next time.
Reinhart: Thank you.
Dev: Thanks for having us Rob. Appreciate that, thank you, Reinhart.