Welcome to week 25 of Coffee with Captain. NFTs are back as a topic of discussion. Will the NFT market ever turn bullish again or be a constant slow bleed? If NFTs aren’t the answer, then maybe memecoins. We interviewed Adam from Arculus, a hardware wallet company. We also interviewed the 6079 team about AI. Michael Saylor continues to do Michael Saylor things with a massive Bitcoin buy. Let’s keep that Saylor conviction in what crypto can be in the future.
In case you missed any of the shows, below is a small recap of each day with links to the podcast on Apple and Spotify. Links to other streaming platforms can be found on our buzzsprout page. Check out the timestamp if you want to catch the specific interviews.
Monday
Drama in Crypto + Demanding Change in the ApeCoin DAO
The Pudgy Penguins brought us a feel good story to start of Monday. Someone repping Pudgy Penguin socials on TikTok found a former 15 year Disney employee who had fallen on hard times. Cbass (insert twitter) helped transform this account from 100 followers to over 120k followers. Read about it here.
The flip side of the current X timeline is a micro example of what the broader crypto Twitter culture has become. Drama is driving attention and people are starting to grow tired of it. It’s time for the leaders of the space to shift the narrative as the web3 space continues to grow. Right now, crypto X is not a place for normies. It’s a corner of the internet where new users can potentially be preyed upon with fake stories and blatant lies. The tech will continue to develop and news of products will continue to drop. However, there is a segmentation on X between entertainment culture and technology, which is easy to get confused if you’re new to the space.
In other news, Doodles are moving from Flow to Base. Big loss for a struggling Flow and a win for both Doodles and Base. Julian will join the show soon to speak more on the news. We also get a Banana Bill update from the weekend. Apechain has potential to shift the narrative around Yuga, but Cap hopes that ApeCoin DAO’s poor track record isn’t indicative of the future of Apechain. The show also gets a little spicy with talks of potential corporate plants for Mocaverse and Horizen. It’s worth checking out.
Check this episode out on Apple and Spotify.
Tuesday
The Bull and Bear Case for NFTs
Let’s be honest, the bear case for NFTs is pretty easy. There prices ran hard in 2021 on the back of stimulus money and has been propped up with unachievable promises. The introduction of Blur exposed some flaws in the NFT market. Now, with the current season coming to an end the NFT prices continue to be in decline. There’s also the NFT loan market playing a significant role in prices and it doesn’t look great.
The bull case is one of expectation, but not certainty. Those of us deep in the crypto and NFT world are fully expecting a bull market of some sort. There needs to be real crypto wealth created before NFTs can run again. It likely won’t ever look like 2021 again, but there will be new liquidity. Many old collections will stay dead and a lesser amount of new collections will run. When will that happen? Nobody can really be sure.
Check this episode out on Apple and Spotify.
Wednesday
Understanding Memecoin Strategy and Culture
We talk a little bit more about the NFT market on Wednesday’s show. What is the current state and what is the potential future? A Coffee Crew member brings up a question… Do you need NFT assets to get value out of communities? The question invoked Frank DeGods to come up on stage. He doesn’t think you need to own an NFT asset to be part of the community. At least not anymore. He says the struggle with NFTs is the higher in price they go, the fewer people that can buy.
This discussion morphed into a conversation about memecoins. The difference in memecoins is you can get in at a variety of price points and it’s significantly easier to get out of a position compared to NFTs. Memecoins are a gambler’s paradise and it’s all about finding +EV (expected value). We talk about how to manage your bankroll on memecoins and what is the long term value. It’s so easy to lose money in memecoins and a lot of times it’s just playing the probability on a token. As always, be careful if you choose to play in the memecoin streets.
Check this episode out on Apple and Spotify.
Thursday
$786M Bitcoin Buy + Arculus Hardware Wallet
Michael Saylor is at it again with a $786M Bitcoin buy through Microstrategy. Yet another conviction play by the Bitcoin megawhale. The loan Saylor took out had some terms attached to it, but he doesn’t show an ounce of worry from the outside looking in.
We take a little time to discuss the $DJT token and Martin Shkreli’s involvement. Steve talks about his criminal background from a previous venture. All signs point to Shkreli’s involvement likely sending him back to jail. The topic brings up a discussion about people’s criminal activity within crypto. The blockchain is immutable and forever so there will likely be repercussions down the line for people who think they’ve gotten away with crypto crimes.
Later the Coffee Crew is joined by Adam Lowe, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at Arculus, to talk about their hardware wallet. Arculus is a digital asset and digital identity company that’s built within CompoSecure. It’s a publicly traded company that makes payment cards and identity cards that people use in their everyday lives. They’ve progressed to making hardware wallets. They take a metal card and put a chip in it that’s the same type of chip as the US Passport. That chip generates, stores and manages all of your private keys. This is extremely important because “not your keys, not your crypto.” You have full self custody and full control over all your digital assets.
There’s an app to manage your keys and assets on the phone. The hardware wallet also has three independent factors of defense: the physical card, the pin and the biometrics. It was Adam’s mission to have both security and ease of use. They also wanted to make sure the box, message and look of the product all screamed a premium experience.
If you lose your card, then you still have your seed phrase and can just set up another card. The ecosystem is wallet connect friendly so it can connect via desktop as well. Arculus can also sign for the metamask ecosystem as well via a QR code.
Check this episode out on Apple and Spotify.
Friday
Tokenizing AI Intelligence
The collections market has millennials very interested according to an Altan Insights report. What does that mean for the future of physical and digital collectibles? This thesis is partially confirmed by The Colony’s $80k One Piece card sale. Digital collectibles on the blockchain give people an opportunity to buy with crypto. People see crypto differently than their discretionary income and consider it a great wealth option for the future.
Later the Coffee Crew is joined by the 6079 team to discuss AI intelligence and how to protect the future of it. For the best explanation of the protocol, it’s probably better to go back and listen to the interview of Jesse Bryan and Mikey Anderson. But here’s a short summary of my understanding of it.
The purpose is about owning our intelligence for the future. Proof of inference solves for double spending or double mining in AI. All of the major people trying to bring AI into web3 are running into a problem which is a major network launched and the opened up the ability for anyone to bring in GPUs. 6079 protocol is taking each GPU and verifying it’s humanness through gaming, such as CAPTCHA. Also, the 6079 Foundation is releasing $THINK to secure and power the 6079 protocol. More details on that will be released on the socials, discord and website.
Ultimately, there’s an arms race for the control of AI because of how powerful it can be. Meta (Facebook) has created an open source model because they don’t have control and don’t want any other person to have control. We’re going to be known as the generation that ushered AI into the future. Will we do this in a responsible way or create a big problem?
Check this episode out on Apple and Spotify.
Wrap Up
That’s all for week 25 of Coffee with Captain. We had a group of special guests that show us blockchain technology continues to advance. And whether it be NFTs or memecoins, it will be interesting to see a more bullish market, hopefully in the months to come. Thanks for spending another week with us. We’re always looking to add more people to the Coffee Crew. If you missed week 24, make sure to check it out here.
Be sure to check out:
- The Everything Token: A Book on Web3 and NFTs
- Making Coffee: Our Official Coffee Partner
- Pepecoin: The Original Pepe
