Lab3’s Post

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to episode 17 of the on Chain Pick of the Week with higher chain represented by Handsome Jack and Lab 3 represented by Handsome Ben and Patrick. How are you doing? Sorry. I'll talk to you. Very good. Thank you. Very good. I know this week, Jack, you wanted to take the floor with a little bit of a Dgen pick. Yeah, I've forgotten to put my media light on, but I'm not gonna turn it on now. It means I cannot be blinded while I'm talking to you. It's just delightful. So I'm having a bit of a having a bit of a clear out at home and discovered an old collection of Pok��mon cards from when I was did you my much younger, but I'm not even slightly ashamed of it because I still absolutely love them and they're very nostalgic for me to look at I so I it reminded me of this crypto project that I have used and fan of but yeah, so anyway, I'm going to show you what it is so. If anyone out there is interested in collectibles, you'll know that there are various grading agencies for collectibles. So the same if you've got like a classic watch or something, right? There are experts that can say what condition this is in, whether it's real, etcetera. When it comes to collectible cards like Pok��mon cards and sports cards, and there are various different grading agencies you can send your card off to and they will tell you you know how much it's worth, what condition it's in. Generally they give a rating from, I'm assuming it goes one to 10, but most of the ones I've seen like 78910, I guess you don't get them graded if they're poor quality. So this is a product called Courtyard. And with Courtyard in Dartmouth, there is a light mode as well, but obviously I straight to dark mode. I've sorted high to low, which is just purely for like, you know, dramatic effect. I've no idea what this card is worth. And obviously, you know, I think anyone can just list any card at any price and you can look at recently sold for example. But how it works is you send your cards that you've had graded by one of the agencies they approve. So PSA is the one I know offer. I think there's six or seven on here. And you get them graded. Then you send the official cards to one of their vaults. They use a company called Brinks, I believe, to vault the cards. So what happens then is there is an associated NFT with the card. So now they know that this card is graded at this level is in a vault somewhere, and they can sell the NFT. So there is a transferable digital representation of that card. And whoever owns the card can apply to redeem it. So they can say, I want my shiny Charizard that I just bought in this market. Please send me the real one. Or they can, they can hold it on this platform and they can sell it. They can sell the rights to that card to someone else in the future, right? So I think it's pretty interesting because first of all, your dusty collection in your attic, you have no idea how much it's worth. Also, it's kind of difficult to sell them like individually and figure out how much each card is worth, get it graded, et cetera. If I could click my fingers and turn all of my old collection into cards that were the vaulted with this company. Then I would know, you know, I'd have offers on them. I could list them for certain prices pretty pretty quickly. The offers come from a variety of real users, but also bots. You know, people that they know they can sell this card on another marketplace for $25 and so they're happy to always pay $10.00 for example. So there's always some kind of liquidity there. But I also think there's quite a lot of opportunity for a, a platform like this. For example, you could build like a Chrome extension to compare the price of. Pok��mon cards with prices in non crypto markets and automatically buy stuff if it's listed below the like 40% below the market price or something. So yeah, I think it's pretty cool. I think it's pretty interesting and they also have this vending machine thing here where they. Yes, it does passionate to me a bit when I was looking at this vending machine concept. Yeah. So I think basically just gambling, which I'm totally up for. And there are an array of cards in this vending machine and you can buy a pack much like you used to go and buy packs of, you know, Pok��mon cards or football cards or whatever. You can buy a pack and then you are gambling, you know, with your $25.00 fee, which cards are going to be in that pack. And you could get a very rare one or not. They're offering a 90% buyback at the moment on the site, which looks quite interesting. So you're actually not risking $25. 00. But the, but I didn't quite understand was where they were sourcing them from is the. Idea that Courtyard must have bought a massive collection of these over time and they're now flogging them on it. Feels like it. Well, partnerships I suppose. Yeah, I'm not sure where they're coming from. I mean, it would be quite easy to find out because you could RIP one of the packs, look at the cards and then see the origins, right. See, did, did it exist on the platform and have they bought these, you know, to to add them to the pile or have they, you know, have they got them off outside of the platform in like some bulk by maybe they've got someone that sits on eBay all day buying cards, I don't know. Yeah, talk, Talk me through. Talk me through the NFT component here, because you're obviously sending in a physical card. It's in a vault that's obviously registered as your card is the NFT. Just to show if it changes multiple hands, basically it can sort of be exchanged while never leaving the vault. That's essentially the the the main use for the NFT, correct? Yeah. So the NFT is a representation of ownership. So if I send the NFT to you without you buying it, the only person that can go through the redeem workflow on their website to get it back is the person with the NFT and their work. If I sent it to you or deleted elsewhere by accident, then I can't get it back right because I don't know the NFT anymore. Though they've transferred representation to someone else. So yeah, that's exactly what it is. I think there's also something where the person that vaults the card originally gets a like 1% of every sale or something. So I'm assuming, and I haven't looked into this, but I'm assuming Courtyard make a fee. Let's just guess that it's like 3%. So they're giving 1/3 of that say to to the person that originally supplied the card until someone obviously redeems it and then the person could. You know, revolt it themselves if they want it to be the the kind of origin of that card. Yeah. So I think there's like there's incentives to be involved in this, essentially to put your cards on the marketplace. I also think that the nature of people that are into crypto and obviously they want this to appeal to the masses, but the nature of people that are into crypto at the moment tend to be people that are into speculating. Yeah. And also there's lots of people that came by money, you know, through various ways in crypto. So they don't mind perhaps slightly overpaying. For, you know, stuff that they they could go and buy, you know on eBay and spend ages or they could just buy the NFT and if they spend the extra $5 a lot of them probably don't care no, I think this is really clever, but I think there's a few elements to this that works really well I mean one of the things I would say is you could insert collectible here right the mechanism and actually Jack you inspire there is a project we hope to release at some point next year that you know about which is effectively a similar model to this based on what storage and collection and being able to trade then the. The assets of this, but the idea that it's insured, safe, being kept properly, you know, it's quite interesting. We started this by you saying are you found the dusty collection in the atom and that's the classic things to happen that happens to these sorts of cards otherwise, right? They're now being immortalized, protected, looked after and the ease of transaction. I just had a look. It's a 6% fee on sale and you're right, you then get 1% for every transaction paid out monthly minutes. It's a very clever mechanism. I did a little bit of sleuthing when you mentioned this company. I was kind of interested that one of the cofounders. Nicholas seems to be the partnerships manager at YouTube before he founded. This was a bit of a pivot for me. So I'm guessing this is born out of a hobby or passion. But what I think is really nice about this is the model. So I don't get particularly excited about the cards because you have to have the interest, but I think the business model is really clever and you could actually apply this to loads of stuff. The only thing I couldn't see was, and I maybe you will know this or not, but it doesn't look like you can fractionalize. Right. But that is some of the things that is something that we're doing generally in the industry, right, fractionalized in real world assets And curious on your take on that part of it. Yeah, I don't think they do that. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people will look at this and think that's like a fun gimmick. But people underestimate how big the collectible cards marketplace is. Like it's the the markets absolutely gigantic. You know, if you were to go and buy say you went to like a, you know, we call them car boot sales in the UK. But for people the rest of the world, like you go to some sort of like garage sale or something like that. Exactly yard sale. If you were to find a first edition Charizard, that's worth about 1/4 of $1,000,000, yeah, You know, if it's in good condition, and that's not like you having to hang around to sell it, someone will buy it from you for that amount of money, you know, So it's an absolutely huge market. There are trade fairs that go on all over the world probably every day. People spend hundreds of thousands on these things to have, you know, the best, most rare, most pristine condition collection. The Pok��mon cards that are really the only ones I know about just because I was. You know, into Wheeling dealing with these things when I was a kid, but if you had the unopened packs of those cards now in particular if you had a box of unopened packs, they sell for an ungodly amount of money, like half a house amount of money, you know, so I've seen YouTube videos where they they do an unpacking of cards. I don't have any particular interest in this, but the videos of them unpacking the cards and seeing what cards they get on the Pok��mon side is pretty compelling viewing. It's weirdly addictive. I know yeah, he's just and you can't watch them because then the. Rhythm just feeds you nothing but that. But before you know it, you getting excited about baseball cards when you don't know anything about baseball. But yeah, so it's it's a massive, massive market. People are doing it. There's another company and we could talk about another time doing it with watches where again, you know, they get graded, certified, vaulted and then people are people are selling them. Patrick, I think you you knew about another company doing that maybe with watches. Yeah, You know, fictionalizing these things as well so that you can own 10% of a. Particular rare watch or even like 1% to speculate its value overtime first heard of this it was with the car collection and a guy was fractionalized car collection cause it's been such a good asset class right And it's it's interesting because it's a really good example of blockchain unlocking these asset classes and making them much more liquid more interesting and even you've just alluded to it you can use them for arbitrage and all sorts that you really it levels the playing field which is great about whole transparency on chain is so powerful you can start to mark. Easter market really quickly, really easy because actually I would have thought one of the biggest challenges with let's stick with poker cards for now. You find those words in the attic, it's probably quite hard for you to really know what you could sell it for. You know, there's not quite that you wouldn't definitely. Maybe poker cards is a bad example because maybe there's enough examples, but there's lots of collectible things. I get a reasonable similar issue example when we were moving house a little while ago, mum found she bought me first edition Harry Potter books and I was like, well, what are these? Worth it. It's a lot. Not this sort of money, but it wasn't a lot, but but you still don't really know. You know, that's what we think it might be worth here. You're seeing what people are paying daily on chain. It's quite a nice way of sort of establishing the market. So it's really clever. It's also from a design perspective, super easy to use and navigate this think it's quite elegant site. Is good my only complaint with the whole this whole product is the funding mechanism. So they've they've got it really good where you can have fun stuff with like with your card you can buy stuff with your card and they will do that for you. If you are a bit more crypto native and you wanna fun stuff with your wallet at the moment it's done so you can connect an external wallet, which I don't think you could do when I first set this up so I hadn't done that. So I've got a wallet that they are you know that they kind of hold my assets for me if you like it's on the Polygon. Network and. You know, nothing against Polygon network, but when you go to look at your wallet and see what USC you've got in there, I think I've got three different versions, you know, so it's like, and on the Courtyard website, they want USDC. So I had to go through and look in my Courtyard wallet on chain, look at the contract address of the USCIS held, then check I was sending the right USC in just to make sure I wasn't gonna lose any funds. Or maybe they would have just swapped it for me. I don't know. They might have that covered, but I found that quite complicated and that's pretty in. Yeah, I found that complicated then it was hell. Well, it wasn't, you know, but that again is just because of me being unfamiliar with the different types of USC on Polygon. Do we think that resolved by the OR rather does it need to be solved by them or do we think, you know, we've spoken previous episodes about multi chain wallets and things. Do you think that might get sold by things like coin bases wallet for you rather than these guys? I mean kind of I, I think it's probably something to do with me using their like signing up before they made the wallet UX better maybe. You know, they use a company called Privy, which are an awesome company to help with authentication. You know, that they have extracted all of the complexity. I signed in with Google. You know, I don't have to remember any like private keys or anything like that. So, you know, I think right now if you were to sign up, the experience would probably be better than it was for me. And in particular, if you just wanted to sign up and then pay with your credit card, for example, I'd be interested to know if then they covered like gas fees for transactions because if you just funded it with dollars. You're not gonna have any Pol. The token is now used dramatic. You're not gonna have any of that token to cover the the swap fees, right? So yeah, anyway, I think it's good. I think it's interesting. I have a bit of a. Like fascination, the nostalgia, isn't it? So are your Pok��mon cards going on here? I don't know. You know, I feel like just kind of keeping them forever, really. This is the problem. Collectables, you just like on here, can't you? Yeah, I know. But I just like to have the like to keep them with me so that every now and then when I move house every decade, I can look at them. Yeah, I don't know, maybe I do have some good ones. So you know. Alright guys. Well, thank you very much for that and we will look forward to seeing you again next week for another episode of On Chain Pick of the Week. Alright, yeah.