Tuom Holmberg - Collector Crypt

(upbeat music) - Hello everyone, welcome to Billions, the show where we interview the best consumer founders on Solana. I'm extremely excited to have Twom from Collector Crypt to Solana Native collecting platform. How you doing today, Twom? - Doing really well, thank you. I'm loving the day already. - That's awesome. You got your coffee, you got your phantom, and shirt on. Let's jump into it. I'm extremely curious from a collecting motivation standpoint. What is your motivating for collecting in your life? Let's start there. - I mean, life's short, right? And there's things you gotta enjoy in life, and things you gotta not enjoy, and everybody has their own thing that they like to do. But for me, particularly, I got into magic gathering in the early '90s, so I started opening up packs of Managing, actually, in 1993. So really, the first year that the game was out, it started playing it, and as a nerd, in kind of, I think I was in middle school at the time, maybe seventh or eighth grade, as a nerd, it was really a nice thing to be able to do, because it was almost, you can't go and play Dungeons and Dragons. It's a good school, right? I'm gonna go and play a quick game of Managing over lunch with your friends, or that kind of stuff. And so I think it enabled you to do something really cool instead of sitting at a lunch table with your other nerd friends, and be bored, I don't know. But yeah, so I loved it. I started collecting, I started trading, winning tournaments, getting into it, and the whole kind of culture evolved, and it became a really big part of my life, and the '90s, and then of course, you grow up a little bit, and you mature, and when I went to college, right before I'm like, "Well, are these prices real? "Is this gonna last?" And all this kind of stuff. So I wound up selling a large part of my collection when I went to school, and I actually paid for a lot of my school by selling my collection. So I thought that was a good idea. But then after school, I'm like, maybe I should go and find a local game store. I wonder what's going on with the product. I wonder what's going on in an tournament scene, and what's happening. So I slowly started getting back into playing the game, and then all the people that I was hanging out with, they were like, "Oh my gosh, you have a black lotus. "You have mocks, your decks were $10,000." And I'm like, "Wow, that's kind of nuts." And so it was really fun to get that status, get that appreciation for a decade of my life that I spent collecting, and it was part of my social kind of like ethos at that time. That's why I got into collecting. I really loved, and when I say status, I'm not saying, "Hey, I want everybody "to put me on the pedestal." But when I say status, I mean, you get respect from people that are like-minded to you, people that are probably a little bit earlier on their journey than you, or a little bit later on their journey. And it's not necessarily like the financial status, right? It's like, I appreciate your taste. I appreciate the way you handle yourself and the way you play your games, and all this kind of stuff, that kind of status. It's really intangible. But I think as I'm getting older, I have a lot of gray hair. As I'm getting older, I realize there's people that have a lot of money, right? And they have no friends. And they have status because of their money, but they have status from other people that have money that also have no friends. And it's like, that's not really a good feeling, right? I would much rather have status from something that is important to me, and be able to have that human kind of relationship and that emotional attachment with something than just status because people look at my fancy Porsche when I drive down the street. So the older I get, and of course, you might say, well, that's just rich guy talking. I'm struggling here. I'm trying to eat money and I need to pay rent and this kind of stuff, and I get that. But what I'm saying is that money for status is not equivalent to me anymore. I think I really enjoy collecting, and I want to show off my cards, and I want people to show me their cards and show me what they're interested in. It's interesting. You talk a lot about the social aspect and the status. A core memory for me is growing up in Brazil and São Paulo, and you would drive-- you would stop your car on the traffic lights. You'd have hagglers trying to sell you Panini cards. And that was a massive, massive social scene, because they actually knew that everyone and their mother was trying to complete the Panini, the World Cup books, the local lead books. And it's almost foundational to pre-existing communities, whether it be school, work, or new communities. It is a connector to be like, I would like to trade your Panini packs with each other and whatnot, especially in today's day and age, when there's a lot of financial nihilism out there, as we could talk about AI. I think these humanistic things definitely bring people together. And it's fascinating to see from a crypto perspective, and I would love your opinion, being in the industry on chain on sluana, in the sense that I think there are two specific verticals that are very resilient right now in terms of spend one as prediction markets, which we can lead aside. But the other is collecting. People are collecting from a behavioral standpoint at an all-time high. Myself, I have a lot of yoss, Pokemon cards, and whatnot. So I am curious about that transition for you from an obsessiveness standpoint, from enjoyment standpoint of collecting. When did I click for you to say, I'm going to build a business around this? I'm going to actually enable people to collect in a safe way. Great, great, great, Lita. So I got into-- I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So I love finding a problem. I love kind of feeling important, even though I know there's 1,000 other people that have the same idea. I love feeling important. That says, wow, I'm the only one probably within a 1 kilometer radius here that's actually thinking about this problem. Even though there's 1,000 other people out there doing it, I sometimes sound arrogant and have hubris. And I probably do. But I try to also temper it a little bit. But I just love trying to solve unique problems. And so I got into Bitcoin in 2013. I started mining Bitcoin. I kind of felt special doing that. I got into Ethereum in 2016, mining Ethereum, losing money in the Dow hack, getting money back in the Dow hack after E4 and all that kind of stuff. And just kind of like living in a slightly different experience than most of the people around me. And that's always been interesting to me. And then in 2017, I think it was crypto kitties. Or maybe that was late 2016 crypto kitties, like, took down ETH. And I'm like, well, what's all this NFT stuff? People trading stupid things and having them have sex on chain and creating babies and all this kind of weird stuff. And how is it breaking this chain? This is nonsense. That shouldn't happen. So I started researching it. And then 2017 crypto punks came out. And by the time crypto punks were out, everybody was talking about using NFTs to represent legal contracts. And I'm like, what's the-- OK, you're taking this really cool technology. And you're saying we're going to replace paper with digital code for legal contracts. It doesn't move the needle for me. Then you say, OK, we're going to use NFTs to represent real estate. So you can have a digital ownership of your home on blockchain. And that gets rid of all of the friction related to title related to transaction fees and all this kind of stuff. And then, of course, you could fractionalize. And I'm like, well, real estate is probably the largest, most heavily regulated industry in the whole world. And you're going to have a 22-year-old kid go and tell a bunch of billionaires that they should go and take all of this regulatory baggage and put it on to blockchain. And you think you're going to solve it. And yeah, a lot of kids raised hundreds of millions of dollars and they weren't able to move a single pebble in terms of tokenizing real estate. And that seemed to be pretty obvious to me back in 2017. What I wanted to do was I said-- because at that time, I skipped a whole decade. So between 2003 and 2017, I started getting into trading. I was trading a lot on eBay. I was understanding some of the friction in the collectible space. And so my whole. thought was, well, you know, if you have a hard time trading real estate because of regulatory, what is another thing that has a lot of friction? And trading cards have a lot of friction because of the fraud, because of high transaction fees, because of authentication. And what if we were to try to solve this pretty hard problem in a very simple way? What if we were to tokenize these cards on chain and authenticate them up front? And now you have the trust of what it is, you can trade it very easily, you know, and all the things that people say about crypto, like open permissionless, you know, global trade, all this kind of stuff, it's all lumped in and improves it, right? And so I had the idea back in 2017 to start collector crypt. And then as I started to dig into it, it's like, well, you know, people don't want to buy stuff with East, right? Like, you're not going to go to a card show and say, hey, I want to buy your black Lotus with, you know, for two East, right? That's not going to work. They'll laugh at you. And so, you know, we need to stable points. And then you say, well, how do you trade these things? Like, so at that time, crypto punks had their own website. And you have to trade crypto punks on the website. So you have to build kind of your own marketplace. There weren't these like open sea or magic eat in kind of marketplaces that existed. They were kind of getting, you know, open sea was getting started at that time to kind of solve this. You know, like, it seemed like a very big problem. It seemed like there was a lot of infrastructure that needed to be built in 2017. And so I kind of took the whole idea and put it on the side. And I did a, I was a biotech entrepreneur. So I did another biotech company at that time. And then in 2021, you know, with DeFi summer, when all the stablecoin kind of stuff started happening, then you have the NFT boom in 2021. So I guess 2020 was DeFi summer, 21, all the NFT started happening at the same time, all the collectible started happening. And I kind of said, well, if there's a point that is the right time to start this, it is now. Right. So I remember probably early 21 sitting there, like, you know, seeing, you know, listening to all these podcasts from like, Laura Shin and some other really, you know, some of the greats out there in in crypto education. You know, just just hearing how they were thinking about the future and how things were evolving. And I knew that was the right time to start this piece of I didn't start it then. I'd be looking back and saying, I regret starting it then, right? And it was the perfect time to start it. It had a lot of like components of starting up a disruptive business. Like one, you talk to a VC, nobody understands the problem. Two, VCs didn't think your solution made any sense, right? So it was very difficult to raise capital because it's not like most, most VCs, they want to invest in copycats or they want to invest in like, hey, who else is in the round, right? Like if there's somebody out there and it was very difficult at that point to get people interested in this intersection of crypto, you know, trading cards and collectibles, right? Munchen that all together. People just couldn't understand it. And so, you know, but that meant it was the perfect time to start because we were able to kind of like grow and build and build product market fit in essentially a vacuum, right? There was nobody else doing it. And so we got the opportunity to kind of create what this whole thing would look like down the road. It's interesting. I remember one of our early conversations in 2022 and one of the frustrations you expressed to me was well, crypto native VCs have no idea what I'm doing. Traditional VCs have no idea what I'm doing because it's crypto and you're kind of stuck in the middle almost. And you at that time, I think you knew that this was industry defining, right? In terms of this intersection of those three categories that you mentioned, that must have been a scary place or a very uncertain place, right? What was the conviction? Where did that conviction come from? Because it's the classic, those VC threads of, well, if no one's doing it, that must mean something's wrong. That's a great question. And maybe it's just my mental defect or something like. I knew for a fact that bringing this on chain and trading cards on chain is a better way to do it than eBay and some of these other things. Because you saw the trajectory that eBay was in, right? You saw the amount of fraud that's happening on eBay and you go through in a very kind of finite way and you say, "Here are the major pain points on eBay." And you say, "Does kind of the business model ever think it about solve this pain point?" And when you go through a list of like 20 of those things and you get a positive check mark to like 19 of them, like how do you, like, how could I live with myself if I gave up on the idea because some VC who gives me 10 minutes of time, you know, doesn't think about it for five years the way that I did, right? You know, I was, I am so confident that crypto is going to, and blockchain are going to rebuild the way we view collecting and the way that we, you know, interact with kind of like nostalgia and things that are close to the home because like, you know, you saw it happen like in 20, 21 with all the NFTs that came out. You saw that kind of passion that people had for these things. Yeah, there was a lot of hyper-financialization around it and we're seeing that with, you know, trading cards too. But you know, that doesn't come out of a vacuum. That, you know, it's not like you have a bunch, you know, 20 traders coming to a room. Well, maybe you do like, you know, the mean coin, prompt fund stuff is kind of like that. But, you know, with like the original NFT boom, you know, you had a core group of people who really believe in this digital collecting and this digital future. And then yeah, you have a lot of speculators and traders coming on top of that to help kind of like increase liquidity and financialization and make it fun and exciting. But, you know, the whole soul and passion of it is there, right? You can kind of like understand the landscape of what you're getting into. And because I had at that point over two decades of experience trading cards and collecting and interacting with collectors and traders, I knew without a doubt that this was eventually going to work, you know, given enough time and enough money and enough like external catalysts, you know, we would be able to educate people on the benefits of doing this in this way. Can we talk about the, you mentioned hyper financialization traders, the speculators. I really wanted to talk about this during this podcast because I would love to know if you think that the speculators are a feature or not a bug of your platform, right? Like how do you segment, do you segment, you know, speculators and traders who maybe have the math laid out of like these gadget machines versus the collectors, right? Like the OG collectors. You mentioned passion, you mentioned nostalgia. How do, how is that relationship with these themes with the speculators and the traders? Yeah, I think if you get into the core and the heart of collector crypt, you know, we obviously kept really close tabs on courtyard. We kind of both started our companies at the same time. A lot of respect for the courtyard team. They, you know, they innovated kind of this vending machine product and, you know, my initial reaction to the vending machine was, you know, like, and the physical repacks side, physical repacks have been around for decades, right? You could go to any Comic Con or any kind of like, you know, card show and there's vendors that are selling physical repacks. And those are tend to be highly, highly extracted. They're like negative 40% EV and some of them are just outright frauds, right? There's no regulation. There's no promise that, hey, this $10,000 card is actually in one of these packs. Like, have you? And so like, one courtyard came out with it initially. I was like, oh man, they're really going into the gutter there. But, you know, we started thinking about it very carefully to say, well, you know, let's not throw out the intelligence in what courtyard did, right? Just because it's similar to something that's highly extractive in the real world. And so what we started thinking about was, well, how can we use this mechanism? Because people love ripping packs, right? People also think about like, what is my value? Like how much money am I throwing away by ripping these packs? And with a typical Pokemon pack, you're typically, you're thrown away like 70% of the seal value by opening a pack, right? On some of the modern release stuff. Like, I mean, sure, some sets are better. Vintage cards tend to be done with expected value kind of in mind. But, you know, for new release stuff, you're losing 70% opening up a pack. But people still. do it. Right? And so you kind of question like how do we how do we going to take this mechanism that people obviously love, which is ripping packs and combine it with something that is, you know, fair transparent, that is also, you know, built for collecting. Right? So, you know, you kind of want to go and define the the the the the the the the spear that you're looking at and you say, well, is this a gambling product? Is this a collecting product? You know, what are the different dimensions of that? And how do we how do we take something that people really enjoy doing, which is without a doubt ripping packs and turn it into a product that collectors can use? And so that's that's kind of how we we thought about building our business model for our gotcha machine and how we came up with, you know, the idea of positive expected value of, you know, being super transparent about the odds about making sure that the pricing is accurate and fair and transparent, making sure everybody can see like what are the last like right now we have a public API and you can go and see the last three million packs that have been pulled off the platform and you could run it through your chi squared kind of like, you know, goodness the big model the show, well, hey, you know, they're actually being honest about it. You could take any transaction and throw it through a BRF and say, well, hey, is this, you know, verifiably random? These are all things you can do and we want to try to make it as easy as possible for people to have the transparency that, hey, this this pack actually does have a 10% positive expected value, right? And so then we think about like the psychology of that, like, okay, maybe somebody has a million dollars and they want to buy a million dollars worth of cards that come to us and they're like, okay, we want to buy, we want to give you a million and we want to get $1.1 million worth of cards. They could do that, right? Until the machine runs out, obviously, that's the caveat and that would probably be okay for us because we are buying these cards to our network of buyers because we have experienced doing that at like a 10 to 15% discount value. So yeah, it's not what we want to have happen but that does happen. We have large collectors that actually own stores internationally that will just go and straight up but, you know, half a million dollars on our platform and ship, you know, $550,000 worth of cards out. What tends to happen though is that people get that idea in their mind and say, well, I don't want to buy back the cards because obviously for us you're buying them back at a discount and that's where we make our margin but because we have a lot of these common cards, it's very difficult for somebody to sell thousands of cards worth between 30 and $50, right? You can't really sell those at market price. Right? If you want to move a thousand cards, you're going to be selling them at a discount probably to people like us. So the concept to go and buy a whole stack of these cards, even though that card is worth something, you have to take into consideration the liquidity of those cards and what discount you're going to sell them for to be able to move that and all the hassle. So we really, really finally tuned our business model to make it not really attractive to go and collect $1,000, $50 lives but make it attractive to sell those back and go after the higher tier slabs. So, you know, and the way that our machine works out, if you buy back all of the common slabs, you're actually buying the uncommon slabs, the rarest labs and the epic slabs at about 1% discount to market price. Right? So in a sense, it's a filtering mechanism to allow the person who's playing the machine to go through and find the cards that they want so they're not only getting the dopamine to open the packs, they're also getting to have this filtering to find something that says, "I need that card." And then they take that and they're not overcharged for it. Right? And that's kind of like the whole pole balancing mechanism and why our platform and some others are copying us. I'm not going to say we're the only one, but why our platform has been able to do so well in the last few years is because we've really designed it to appeal to collectors, people that actually want to take curbs off. It's interesting because I am of the demographic probably that does not care about expected value, right? I go and collect a crypt and I probably have a specific card in mind, or, "Hey, I really want to see your soccer offerings," or play the Pokemon Gacha, but the math and the fairness gives legitimacy, obviously, to me going to your platform, right? Even though I don't care about the expected value and it could even be negative and I don't care if I lose money, there's like an nostalgia premium or unquantifiable nostalgia premium, which I feel as if for collectors, that's probably true. But I'm curious because there is a lot of math, there's a lot of quantitative research and you are seeing a lot of pieces research articles as collectibles as an asset. Right? Where do you think the future of this goes? Because obviously from the Solana network perspective, you are seeing this movement of every asset, every market on Solana, from stocks, bonds to cultural assets. And I would definitely say crypto is unique in the sense that being able to value cultural assets and develop robust markets for those, which I know we've had a lot of conversations about is a unique value problem of Solana. But where do you see the future in five to 10 years? Is there going to be a Pokemon ETF? And if so, is that good for collecting? Well, it's good for collectors who have a lot of cards in their collections, but it's obviously the price is going to go up if that happens. I think people don't want to go in and collect stocks. And it's not like you say you have up on your wall, your portfolio, and you're like, oh man, I really love owning these shares of Apple or something that really made some people do. That's probably not the same kind of nostalgia as Pokemon. I think what we're going to see is an exploration of some of these concepts to have kind of proxies for these card indices, because there's a lot of people out there who take a look at Pokemon in particular and they see while this has grown at like a 20 to 25% average compound rate return over the last 30 years. That's pretty impressive, right? You compare that to any major equities index and it blows them out of the water. And you probably compare it over long term to crypto and it's kind of at the same level of crypto returns if you were to look at crypto 15 years from now. And so I think it's definitely going to be something that's explored. I do think that it's probably going to turn off some collectors because they kind of want to be able to get their cards and enjoy looking at it and this kind of stuff. And now we've seen, and this is something we should talk about over the last two weeks. We've just seen an explosion in the value of vintage Japanese Pokemon cards. It should like cards that we're trading last week for $10,000 are selling this week for $60,000. It's absolutely crazy. And you can kind of give you that mean point kind of like fear that you know, "are this the top? Is this the top?" But anyway, I think there's a lot of people out there who don't really understand trading cards. They don't understand Pokemon, but they do understand what that kind of compound annualized rate of return means. And they do want to get exposure to that asset class because they are familiar with investing in other things which are kind of similar like, you know, gold. Right? Most of the gold, you know, is gold price is not propped up by the usage of gold in electronics or the usage of gold for thin phones or whatever in the semiconductor space. Right? The usage of gold is propped up because people feel it's a store of value and it's a limited resource. Right? So, you know, gold is very similar. I know we're talking gold Bitcoin is gold digital gold, but, you know, trading cards also have some of those very same features. And I think that, you know, it's a diversified asset class. So to the extent that Pokemon is making 20 to 25% returns per year on the trading cards, if somebody could take, you know, 5% of that and put in their portfolio and it's diversified from everything else in their portfolio, that's going to improve the risk adjusted returns of what they have. And it's going to give them a more stable kind of asset outlook. So, anybody who's an asset allocator is really right now looking at trading cards and collectibles in a way to diversify and to improve their risk adjusted returns and the way that they traditionally have done that. There's been a few private equity funds that have started up. Like there's one, you know, that we keep hearing whispers about that's in Newport Beach, you know, Martin Screlie posted something about it a few months ago about this $200 million collection. I know a little bit about it, I can't talk about it, but, you know, there's private equity funds out there that do that. And as you know with private equity kind of like you know this is my they say, "Okay, we're gonna take 20%, 30% of carried interest. We're gonna charge 2% management fees per year." And it extracts a lot of the value from it. So we could take Pokemon cards and collectibles more broadly and stick it into a liquid kind of ETF or a key standpoint type of thing. And you eliminate the carried interest, you drop management fees to half a percent. That could be something that's extremely interesting to a lot of people out there, even if they have no interest in trading cards at all. So, why don't you do that? You have the inventory, you have the pricing data, you have an existing consumer platform, right? It's almost like a basket in a way. Yeah, yeah. You've heard of the cards token, right? Yeah, yeah, which is why, which tell me about that, right? What's the relationship there? Is that the basket? That's the plan. I mean, so, card token right now, essentially all of the inventory on our platform, which right now the platform owns around $10 million worth of inventory, that is all owned by the card token, right? So, like, the growth of that value is all attributed to the card token. This was kind of in our Genesis post around our token utility back in the day. And I'm speaking, you know, kind of in riddles because I want to make sure we don't have to violate anything and the fed's going to come up the street or something. But, you know, we believe that our card token could be a really good proxy for the value of, you know, initially the Pokemon index, but then it broadly, you know, the trading card index and then more broadly, the collectibles side as we continue to expand our product offerings. You know, and I think being able to trade the card's token is very interesting because you could trade it on on radio, you know, through whatever actuator as well like Jupiter. And you're able to trade it with 0.3 percent transaction fees. And you essentially with that, you're picking up this token that, you know, we are going to continue building our platform towards this idea of a proxy for this broader universe of collectibles. And so, you know, I'm sure people who are hearing this are reading between the lines of the steps that we need to take to get there. You know, one of the things that we've said a lot, we haven't done it yet because we are in, we're truly in hyper growth mode right now. A lot of our profits and things that we're generating from our gotcha machine. And we've done around 13 million to 15 million of net operating profit in the last 12 months. Probably going to double that this year. You know, all that money is going into kind of like hyper growth in this kind of vertical. And some of that pretty soon is going to go towards start going towards token buybacks. So the whole plan is, you know, get capital in, buy a lot of trading cards. You know, open up our balting facility, which are, you know, this is the first time I've said it publicly, our balting facility is open and operating in Montana. Our guys in our discord, you know, they know it because we're shipping cards out of there already, right? But we have a, we have a 6,000 square foot facility that we bought up there and put together. You know, so these kind of big ticket items are kind of getting knocked off one at a time. And once we're at a point where we're like, okay, here we've built this foundation. Then we're going to go in and say something like, and this is also the first time I'm saying this. We're going to say something like, okay, every pack that is sold on our platform or through our partners platforms, you know, whether our partner is magicated or slap cash over on base. Or some of, you know, anybody who's using our API, a small percentage of each pack sale is going to directly go to to buyback the token. And this is kind of how we're going to continue to grow. But at the same time, we're going to start to fill in some of that value to the token because, you know, right now, for example, if you look at the market cap of our token circulating market cap, it's around, you know, $10, $12, $13 million or something. If we have $10 million worth of trading cards that are owned by the token, your enterprise value is, you know, very, very small for the amount of revenue and profit that we're generating per year. And this is not financial advice. This is just kind of like comparing, you know, what we're doing to others. But like, I think I think once we start implementing some of these like hooks to tie in buybacks and to tie in some things that we're doing, it'll be very, it'll be a very interesting thing. Time for it for the token. So, so tell me about the. So, you know, that's interesting in terms of the basket question and, you know, people can make assumptions there. And I'm sure you guys will have some cool announcements in the future. But tell me about the platform or all because there's a lot of moving pieces, right? There's obviously the, the first party platform collector group includes the Gacha, Gacha machine. You guys now have a vault that you own in Montana. And then also you talked about partners, right? And I know, I know you guys have some cool, you know, APIs and tooling that that partners can use. But for folks who want to build in the collectible space, tell us about that, right? Like, are you guys an developer? Are you guys going to become like a developer platform? Yeah, I mean, we, I think that's the goal is to become kind of like a, you know, creator of infrastructure and creator of ecosystem. And, and, you know, where we are right now as a platform, you know, we're, we can afford now to think about what this space is going to look like five years from now. Right. And as I mentioned before, our stated goal is to reimagine how collectibles are traded. And I'm not saying that, hey, we want to crush eBay. You know, that's not the goal. eBay brought a lot of innovation to the space. And I'm hoping that eBay can kind of see what we're doing and say, hey, your idea is really good. Let's work together. Right. I mean, I think that would be like an ideal outcome there. But, you know, one of the things that we really need to figure out how to do this, there's still a lot of fraud. There's still a lot of, you know, financial grifting happening in the outside of the crypto space with collectibles. Right. I'm talking about every single trading card show, you know, tons of fraud happening on peer to peer kind of like stuff. Facebook marketplace as a ton of fraud. And lots of high fees throughout the whole thing, right. And, you know, what we want to do is really figure out how to bring collector crypt to the user. Right. We want to figure out how to bring this technology innovation and this technology revolution to, you know, Joe and Bob over at the local game store, who are complaining every day that they still haven't like, you know, gotten payments for whatever. And that's going to need, that's going to need a lot of work and a lot of effort. And the thing is that, you know, if you think about Joe and Bob, you know, what is their experience going to be like if we go and say, okay, you know, Salona is amazing. Right. There's 10 platforms on Salona that are all, you know, doing this trading cart thing, you should go try it out. And so, so Bob's going to go and download Phantom Wallet or he's going to go and, you know, open up privy on one of these sites. He'll say, okay, what are some sites I should try out? You should try out collector crypt. You should try out a fidget. We'll try out all these guys. And then you have a list of 10, 10 platforms. And then, and then you go in and sign in with a privy wallet over on collector crypt. And you see, okay, I'm going to play the gosh, but she, okay, that was fun. I got a few cards there. Now I'm going to go try out a fidget. I have to reget a new login. I have to sign in there. Okay, now I have 10 cards. Well, wait, why can't I see the collector crypt cards over here or vice versa? Like, why do I have to do this on the marketplace here when I ship it? Why is it all coming from the same place? You know, this kind of creates confusion for the web to user because now all of a sudden they have, you know, 15 years of crypto knowledge that they have to absorb in a really short period of time when they're just like, bro, I just want to trade my cards. Why do I need to learn about private keys? Why do I need to like export my private key here and download a phantom wallet and open a phantom wallet? It says, if I don't remember this, I'm going to lose everything. And then it's just like, you know, this seems crazy. I don't want to do it. So we need to figure out how to as an ecosystem, how to make it as easy as possible for Bob and Joe with the local game store to go on to Solana and to go and try out these cool innovations. And one thing that we believe is that, you know, if you have all of these cards, these NFTs in the same collection, if you create kind of like this infrastructure to allow a lot of different players, each with their own idea. Like, you know, people, for example, like, individuals because individuals has a unique UX. It's different than our UX. They might like the community ecosystem better or worse. It doesn't like the whole point is like we're not trying to say we're better than everybody, right? You know, we are better in some ways and we're worse in other ways. And people should have an ability to choose where they go and what they want to do. But to the extent that we can make it super easy and super clean for them to get their cards off, for them to trade their cards to do all this kind of stuff. Make sense. And then of course, if you start thinking about, you know, what is the next step when you think about collateralized lending when you think about the digital gamification of these when you think about it. other platforms that are using these assets. So this is the open and composable part of blockchain. You know, if you have somebody building something, why should they have to go in and say, all right, I'm going to build this for five different collections. And these collections don't really top or play well together, but we're going to build all this software and all this code to enable collection aid and interaction collection be all this kind of stuff. That just gets to be a mess for development. So like if we can make it easy for developers to build, if we can make it easy for shipping logistics, if we can make it easy for Joe and Bob to go and interact, then that's going to, instead of like the whole ecosystem growing at 50 or 100% per year, we're going to be able to grow at 200 to 1000% per year. Right? And this is how we realize our five year kind of vision. Yeah, I know we you've been something to drum on standardization interoperability for a while. And hopefully we can more to come on that front, right? In terms of a coordination perspective. But I actually really wanted to double click on the fraud and safety because you know, I I previously a long time ago was at consensus on the Ethereum side and a partner use case that I really opened my eyes to the challenges that we face from a verification perspective is we had a partner that wanted to track fish, right? In terms of hey, this got caught at this date here is it's verified it's safe to eat. It was caught by this fisherman. We can do some we can do some rewards to like pay the individual person. But what happened was there was a web to blocker in the sense that fraud was happening where folks were inputting faulty data on chain. And that was the blocker. And when folks talk about blockchain as a as kind of like a silver bullet for fraud, I always think back to that problem as you know, blockchain is a great tool. But if the culture isn't there or if the the web to tooling around it isn't there, you're not going to solve the problem. So I am curious from that perspective, right? Because whenever there is kind of a crossover of like verification putting things on chain, I'm always very weary as a result of that example. So how do you tackle that from like a vaulting perspective? Yeah, I think that's a that's an incredibly astute kind of observation and question like, you know, we talk about solving fraud by putting it on on blockchain. And the fact that I I have a card and I meant an NFT doesn't make this card real. Right. Just because it's an NFT doesn't mean that there's anything legitimate or real authentic about it. And so and there's nothing I can do about that, right? Until, you know, until like the the manufacturers of these cards like add in some anti fraud measures like maybe there's a QR code in here and I go, Bob, right? But then of course I can spoof the scanner, right? So there's there's a ton of stuff that happens in terms of authentication. And, you know, and this is also why, you know, I think standards make a lot of sense in the space because like some of the original, you know, tokenized card projects back in like 2021, there was a bunch that kind of just started like at the same time. I think they must have heard about courtyard raising their Y combination around or something like that. A bunch of people started and you know, we didn't raise, we were working on it, but we didn't raise money for a few years after. But like, you know, I think people started and they're like just, they're minting cards on open seed. They meant to black lotus and they're trying to listed for sale. And and there was like no, there was no trust layer behind it. And I think where I'm getting to is that like at some point in that kind of ecosystem, you need to have a trusted entity or a trusted kind of like place where these cards are authenticated and where they're stored. Like you can't replace that that trust in that authentication with technology. You could probably go in and and use technology to monitor and to like say what the success rate is and that kind of stuff, but you're not going to be able to like use it to prove. You can't use technology to prove. You could use technology to verify. And so, you know, I think, you know, part of our mission as well by opening up our own vaulting facility. And in fact, our vault is open for B2B as well. Like we're already talking to a number of very well known digital repack companies and we're saying, hey, you use our vault. You know, here's the benefits of using our vault. And you know, we have some good relationships with some of them that will probably use our vaulting facility, which is really cool. And so like if we can kind of build it. So think about like the depository trust corporation, right? They're essentially custodying all of these stocks and bonds, right? And then you have also the vaults that are holding all the gold that, you know, the futures contracts and all these things are based on. So, you know, you have audits. You have all this kind of like accounting and this regulation that goes around them. I would imagine, you know, once we get to hundreds of millions of dollars in our vault and once we are, you know, making ETFs to do Pokemon cards and this kind of stuff, I would imagine that we are going to need to face that same level of auditing and scrutiny and have type of safeguards and controls. And I think it's really important now that we are building collector crypt and we're also advocating for the ecosystem to use that same level of diligence on what they're doing because and again, I'm not going to name platform names, but there's a number of platforms out there that are literally shipping cards out of their bedroom closet. And that's cool. You know, I'm glad they're able to start pushing it forward. But a bedroom closet doesn't sound like a trusted, you know, verification and a trusted authentication that these assets are there. So, you know, like, you know, there's been a lot of people that have tried to solve this problem like there was this platform on ETH called material back in the day, 2020 or 2021 material was there. And, you know, they come up with these very, very complex ways to try to like abstract the way some of this, this like verification authentication. But at the end of the day, it comes down to trusted third party, comes down to appropriate insurance, it comes down to auditing diligence. And so that's all very expensive, right? And that's why, you know, we're also opening up our vault to others to use because let's say, let's say we are, you know, let's say we're 70% market share leader, you know, there's 30% out there that are doing some things and maybe there's 5% of that that is actually fraud, right? And if we bring people from Web 2 and they go and try these platforms, maybe they fall in love with that 5% fraud platform and then they get rubbed. Like all of a sudden, now you have an entity that's in Web 2 that literally got rubbed for the first time in their life, they lost $10,000, $20,000. They're going to all the local game shows, they're telling their friends, they're telling everybody, they're going on social media and they're saying, look, this crypto stuff is really bad. I lost $20,000 by doing this. And, you know, to the extent that that kind of like sour sphere of influence, like interferes with other people coming on and experiencing like what we have as a vision for less fraud, less extraction, all this kind of stuff, it poisons it, right? And so I think, you know, this is why we take some of this stuff so seriously. And I think, you know, people, I know some of you guys that's a lot of foundation and that kind of stuff are very, you know, want to make sure that users are protected and users are taken care of because that feeds into the long-term longevity and health of the ecosystem. And so we're kind of thinking about it the same way, but from the RWA collectible perspectives. Well, it's a cultural issue in my opinion, right? It's ironic that to your point, right? Like, we have the tech to do this, but it is extremely important from an association perspective, right, in terms of a network effect of narratives around crypto that we get this right and we showcase this. I am, you know, one of my last major questions here, I actually pulled back, I actually looked back on my calendar. We actually had a pretty, we actually had a pretty intense conversation, you and I in February in 2023 after FTX when you were raising, right, going back to like the VC conversation. Not only were you doing collectibles in crypto, so, you know, Web 2 and Web 3 VC's were like, what the heck? We're also building on Sv'ana after FTX. And the feedback that you were getting me, the contentious conversation was like, hey guys, what the heck, right? Like I'm getting a near-fall from this ecosystem, from this VC about Sv'ana, but not only did you say you obviously doubled out, right? And we talked about your conviction in this podcast, but given that this is a Sv'ana related podcast, I would love to understand and do a retro on that. decision, do some introspection from your perspective, you know, why you double down during such a chaotic time in addition to all of the external challenges you were facing. Yeah, that's a great question. So the initial choice to build on Salona was a really, really hard one, right? So, you know, at that time we were making the decision, I think, you know, courtyard had started on polygon, then courtyard probably got some advice from some people that said, "Well, there's no TBL on polygon. You really should be doing this on ease, right?" So courtyard moved everything onto ease. And then, and then of course, like, east gas fees kind of went through the roof and it was like, "I remember there was one point where gas was so high that to mint a single card courtyard was basically paying like $40 in gas to mint one card." And that's just mind blowing. You're like, "Wow, how are you going to even mint cards worth $100 when you're paying 40% in gas fees, right? So then we started talking to the polygon folks and polygon, they're BD guys didn't really understand it. It kind of seemed like, "Well, you know, are you going to build, you know, what are you building?" And it doesn't look like any of these five categories. And because these are the five categories that we could provide support for. And I'm like, "Well, you know, it kind of looks like this one, but not really, but maybe this one, but not really, and no, it doesn't really fit into any of those categories." Well, you know, then we're not interested. It's like, I think a lot of the chains out there at that time were trying to double down on narratives that worked, right? And I think some of the narratives that were working for Venture Fundraising and that kind of stuff were like, you know, blockchain-based gaming, you know, DeFi, like, you know, how many, you know, cross-chain bridges. These were all things that narratives were working. And BCs were throwing money at to teams that were like, let by people who were maybe first-time founders, not, you know, there's nothing wrong with first-time founders. But I think there's also a place for people that have kind of, like, grown up in the Venture Capital industry and seen, like, you know, this still happens. This is a huge problem in B.C. that there's this whole, like, me-to-concept and follower-concept. And I think, you know, really good VCs, and I'll hit up, you know, Simon over at Moot Rock. He was one of our early investors, like, really good VCs, you know, make their own independent narratives and their own choices. It's not a game of, like, me-to or following. So, Polygon had that huge vibe to me that they really wanted me to, and they wanted follow-ons, and they're like, well, how many users do already? So it's like, you know, they wanted to have the cake before, you know, somebody even bought the ingredients. And so, you know, we were getting a lot, we were having a lot of interesting conversations with folks over at Salona. This includes people over at Magic Eden, people building in the Salona ecosystem. And yeah, there was some of that too. I'm not saying Salona was just like Valhalla, you know, it was a lot of that too. But in between some of these cracks, you could see people, you know, like yourself Pedro, that, you know, we're giving it like the thinking and the kind of, like, intelligence that it deserves, right? And one of the early people, there was one of our project managers over at Magic Eden. You know, he was like, you know, I really believe in this concept, right? I really want to help you build this, and I'm going to work to, you know, try to, you know, bring Magic Eden over the fence to come and work with you. And, you know, this, this, I'm speaking about Ash over there. And then, of course, there was, you know, a few other early, early guys at Magic Eden, who really pushed us. And, you know, just that opening of that door for a major ecosystem partner to kind of see value in what you were building, I think Salona, kind of the vibe that I got, was more open to thought. You know, it was more, you know, hey, let's think of the philosophy of what future blockchain is and what we're building. And then, of course, we had a lot of you know, it seemed like Salona was the home of a lot of the new kind of NFT myths that were happening. So you look at, you know, DGNA Academy, you look at Salona monkey business, I was, you know, I was originally in all of those kind of things, minting alongside them. And you kind of saw that, you know, East got very expensive and East got very hyperfinancialized. You know, you have, you know, board apes on the Super Bowl stage with Snoop Dogg, right? This kind of stuff, you're like, you know, that seems kind of top, you know, blow off top kind of stuff. But on Salona, you had much cheaper mints. You had real communities and real ecosystems forming. And everybody else was just trying to copycat, right? So I kind of felt that the heart and soul of blockchain moved from Ethereum over to Salona. And, and, and then, you know, we started building on Salona and that kind of feeling that we had was was validated by our interactions with the builders and the founders of some of these great ecosystems that we, you know, still love today, like, you know, backpack and our money, you know, talking about some of the guys over at SMD, you know, like, nom, these guys who are early foundational people in the culture and community of Salona are all beautiful human beings. And, and we wouldn't be here without them. Yeah. So it's a great answer. It, it, it almost leads to, you know, I like to, to end the podcast, uh, asking for advice from you for any early consumer founders out there. And I think to synthesize those broad guys, we talked a lot about, I'll, not only about being contrarian, but being independent thinker and I think contrarian independent thinker are different, right? And so, so I guess my question is a little more specific to, to recap this pod is, um, how do you cultivate that or how do you identify that? Uh, you are, uh, you are having a, a great idea in an independent way. It not just may be, maybe, maybe your analysis is right. So I'm curious if you have any advice for any, you know, young consumer founders out there. Yeah, I, I think wherever you are being a founder is, is a very difficult thing, right? I think you, you look at, you know, X and you look at podcasts and you look at, you know, Shark Tank and you look at all these iterations, and, and you, you kind of get a sense that, wow, you know, I should do that. I have a good idea. You know, this, this might make a lot of money or this, this is kind of what I want to do in my life and my career. Um, you know, the first thing you need to know is that it's, it's not easy. It's, it's one of the hardest things that you will ever do in your life and, um, it's not hard to fail. It's hard to succeed. And, and, and the, the, the thing is that, um, you know, I think a lot of founders kind of get stuck in, in their own kind of narrative and their own mental space that, you know, pay my, my idea is great and it's going to work no matter what because this other guy did it and they're working just fine. The truth is you don't hear about the, the 99% of founders that, that really, you know, try really hard and do a great job and, and push things forward and then it just doesn't work. So I, I think, um, you know, one, be, be ready to accept failure. I think is really important, um, to be willing to accept feedback and advice, but also realize that that feedback and advice is probably coming from VCs who spent 10 minutes thinking about it, um, but it doesn't mean that everything they say is wrong. Um, I think, you know, and then in terms of like how, so I, I just said, you know, here's what you need to always have in the back of your mind. And then when you go and start to say, well, how do, how do you be successful? I think the way you be successful is to one, you know, trust your instincts. Sometimes you get approached with a deal and sometimes you get approached with an opportunity that is, is too good to be true. I think a lot of people are out there trying to, extract, you know, for example, I can tell you how many times, you know, on a weekly basis, I get approached by people saying, hey, we're going to go crowdsource you more money or hey, we're going to increase your viewers by a thousandfold or hey, we're going to get you about 10,000 followers on Twitter. But by doing x, y and z, like most of those are scams. And I think, you know, we, we all recognize that. But what, what you need to do is you need to, you know, find before you do anything before you talk to VCs, you need to find a few really good advisors. And you need to go and, and get some feedback on your idea. You need to go and engage them. And you need to go and get their commitment to help you succeed. And, you know, I think one of the things that people don't really realize about, you know, the value of the NFT ecosystem is that, you know, the founders of these groups. And the people that are within them, the long-term holders, the people who are going to diamond hands their geckos until the day they die, who have put them on infinite journeys and that kind of stuff. You need to go, and it doesn't cost too much to buy these NFTs, you need to go to the events, you need to go and talk to people there, you need to go and get feedback on your idea, you need to go and find code developers, co-founders, other people that will help you grow that vision, you need to build that network. And that network is what's going to, when your idea is ready and when you are ready to move forwards, that network is going to help you make more introductions to very targeted people. It's going to make those introductions count. It's also going to make it much easier to raise money down the road. So like I think a lot of founders make a mistake of saying, okay, here I have 10 grand in my wallet, I'm going to go pay $3,000 to somebody to help me make a nice PowerPoint deck and then I'm going to shoot it off to a VC list over here and I'm going to spend $5,000 doing this over here and I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. And that just doesn't work. So take founding a company as serious as you would anything in your life because it's going to be one of the hardest things you do. But it could also be one of the most rewarding things you ever do in your life. So sorry, just a long mental diarrhea right there, but that's all I got. No, no, that's awesome. Tom, thank you so much.