00:00I'm just curious about the OpenSea's business right now.
00:03Given the decline of NFTs and the interest around NFTs, what would you consider OpenSea's core business?
00:09Yeah, so I think, you know, we really see it as this broad trend of the tokenization of everything.
00:14And if you look at kind of the tip of that iceberg, you're seeing a ton of talk.
00:18And I know you guys have covered in the show previously about financialization, stable coins, all of the sort of finance side of crypto.
00:24What we're really excited about is building a platform where people can trade everything that represents the broader landscape of crypto goods, which includes NFTs, but it also includes tokens, right?
00:36And so OpenSea's really focused on this idea of let's bring crypto to a broader consumer base and let's really bring a platform to those people that allows them to trade anything super seamlessly.
00:48So that's what we consider our core business now.
00:50But NFTs are still a part of your business, right?
00:53They haven't gone away.
00:53Yes.
00:54So having said that, why is it that NFTs have not recovered in the same way that, say, Bitcoin has, right?
01:00After 2022, we've seen Bitcoin recover tremendously.
01:03I mean, it's been very volatile, but it's gone up and to the right.
01:07NFTs haven't done that.
01:08Why haven't they been rising with this?
01:11Yeah.
01:11I'm going to give a rising boat lives all tides kind of analogy.
01:14Sure, aquatic.
01:16Exactly.
01:16So I think if you zoom out, right, NFTs are the non-fungible component of the crypto asset class.
01:25But it's really about this broad trend of just tokenization, right?
01:29And some of those things are going to look non-fungible.
01:31Some of them are going to look fungible.
01:32But there's all sorts of use cases that people are exploring.
01:37And I think the sort of speculative fungible side of things has been, you know, taken by some of the more the currencies that allow people to trade in that manner.
01:47Right.
01:47And so we see it less like let's subdivide into NFTs versus other assets.
01:51We just see all of the innovation that's happening under the surface.
01:54And then we want to provide the best place to trade all of that.
01:56So Vlad Tenev of Robinhood has spoken a lot to us about and a lot to everybody about tokenization.
02:00This has like been the horse that he has been on for quite a while right now.
02:03Would you say that your idea is to compete with a company like Robinhood when it is, when you are able and when one is able to trade tokenized stuff online?
02:14Not directly competitive in the sense that I think Robinhood, Coinbase, these are companies that are building financial platforms and sort of banks for crypto.
02:23OpenSea really was the first company to bring crypto to a broader consumer audience.
02:28Right.
02:28In 2021, we had musicians, we had gamers, we had artists, we had collectors come to our platform and often use blockchain or crypto without knowing that there was Bitcoin or Ethereum involved.
02:41So that's really our vision is we want to bring this not just to people who want sort of a new bank, but to people who want to experience all of what crypto has to offer.
02:50And we're just at the beginning of that.
02:53We think that there's so much to build and so much room to grow.
02:57I'm curious to get your take on the wobbliness that we're seeing in crypto assets overall.
03:02You know, we've had Bitcoin lose its gain for the year.
03:06It's, you know, stabilizing right around 90,000 right now.
03:09But what does this mean for the guys who are building the architecture, the infrastructure for crypto versus those who perhaps just got into crypto maybe in the past year?
03:20Yeah, so I think for the people who are on the ground floor building in crypto, you know, they're more used to the ups and downs of the industry.
03:28And for us as a company, for example, we really look at the long term arc of the technology and the systems that are underlying all of this.
03:36So there's been a ton of innovation in L2s, in stable coins, in on-chain payment rails, in self-custody solutions that really, you know, if you look at that arc, it's a gradual increase in the capability of the technology.
03:51And then for the mainstream, you know, what they see is the ups and downs, right?
03:55But for us, we see the we see the long term arc.
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