Burnt Banksy: How Burning $95K of Art Changed Crypto | Ep 264 with Burnt Banksy Founder of XION

0:00Today's episode is sponsored by PipeDrive, the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses. I'm excited to share more about them later in the episode. Anthony, aka Burt Banksy, how your name even came about. So I'm coming from New York. I've lived in New York for about 10, 11 years at this point. Went to New York University and NYU gave me free electricity. Long story short, I found out you can mine Ethereum and I got kicked out of the door and fell in love with crypto. We were looking at this market and we're like, let's do something cool. I am a broke college student. They end up making enough money off of GameStop options is legitimately how I get this money in order to go buy a$95 ,000 Banksy RPS with the sole intention of setting it on fire.

0:50That's an inverted Banksy. And so we did that. We bought it. We lit it on fire. We sold it as an NFT. We got advice to perpetually photograph it. And we sold it for about$400 ,000, which was really, really exciting. Broke a lot of records, was anonymous for a little while because of all the hate I got, which was incredible. Realized that crypto is an unusable from the application layer and built Zion to make crypto usable.

1:21Today we're going to do something very different. And that's why I can't wait. anthony aka burt banksy which by the way i've never had a guest on that was not they're just their first name bro i'm actually happy to i'm gonna call you burt mr burt and i'm excited to talk through stories it you know sometimes we get serious we just had a whole finance person on talking about the markets and such and i feel like i just want to storytell and that's why stories i got so many stories at web3 you got so many stories there's a lot of stories the last few years but i want to start off with how your name even came about yeah yeah i'll give you i'll give you the name about and then how i got into crypto because they're kind of similar so i'm coming from new york i've lived in new york for about 10 11 years at this point uh went to new york university um consensus was kind of just getting started when i was a freshman and NYU gave me free electricity.

2:24Long story short, I found out you can mine Ethereum and I got kicked out of the dorms. Technically, I wasn't kicked out. I was just not allowed back at the dorms. Huge, huge difference. And fell in love with crypto. It was pretty much just mining for a while, working at a few projects on the side, but nothing like really, really full time. And, you know, was a pretty avid collector of like, you know, I lost a couple of CryptoPunks in the Mt. Gox hack and had some crypto kitties, but it was an interesting time and NFTs were definitely not what they were today. And so suffice to say that we were looking at this market and we're like, let's do something cool.

3:08Me and two friends. And I am a broke college student and I end up making enough money off of GameStop options is legitimately how I get this money. In order to go buy a$95 ,000 Banksy piece with the sole intention of setting it on fire, hence the name burnt Banksy. And so we did that. We bought it. We lit it on fire. We sold it as an NFT. We got Vice to perpetually photograph it. And we sold it for about$400 ,000, which was really, really exciting. And broke a lot of Records was anonymous for a little while because of all the hate I got, which was incredible. And we can go into that. That's why we have two names.

3:55And then realized that crypto isn't unusable from the application layer and built Zion to make crypto usable. I've spoken to hundreds of entrepreneurs and one of the biggest pain points they share is generating consistent quality leads. Most founders spend hours chasing down prospects, juggling outreach, and still end up with missed opportunities. That's why I recommend today's sponsor, PipeDrive, the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses. Top sales teams are using PipeDrive to close an average of three times more leads per month. My favorite part, PipeDrive takes messy sales process, turns it into a visual pipeline so you can see exactly where every deal stands and what you need to do next.

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5:19And you can be up and running in minutes. Okay, so was the burning of Banksy, was that like a media stunt or the ability to create some sort of virality or was it more to create the NFT? What was the purpose or idea originally of it? And did that change after you did it and the reaction that you got. Yeah, we definitely didn't think we would make any money off of it. And so that was a pleasant surprise to say the very least, I will say. A very pleasant surprise to say the very least. I didn't think we'd make any money off of it. So I think that most of it was probably like the media virality factor.

6:00It's like, you know, maybe we lose half of our money. Maybe we get lucky and we break even. Doubt it. but let's do this because I don't know like I really wish I could tell you the reason there's a lot of things that I do and we'll probably get to it which you know if you were to ask me why I did it I don't know I don't have an actual answer because it seemed cool and I just kind of wanted to do it reminds me of you know the the purple cow or you know there's people who who do it really interesting billboards and things to create attention because we already know nowadays attention is hard and yes it's so fast and everything is just moving i mean three four years ago it's different than it is now which is kind of insane right you know the industry moves quick and if you're not grabbing attention then you just disappear into space but i remember the nft days by the way so we were really active on clubhouse you remember that's where everything that's where everything happened was on clubhouse of course it was insane so i remember when board ape launched and my friend at the time's like it was six hundred dollars and he's like you got to get in he bought a couple at six hundred dollars and i was like no that sounds i don't know what i don't even understand what it is i don't even understand nfts but we did it we had a pretty good community there it's pretty large so people were launching nfts like on the platform that we that we created within clubhouse but i didn't really understand it and i missed the boat everything i bought was crap so i never bought a bank see or anything of value i didn't buy any the board apes even though he kept telling me to do it i bought all crap that never turned into anything but isn't it funny to think back to those days it was you know it's funny like i remember after the bank see auction um my whole thing was like you know i've seen a lot of grifters in the space and especially at the time and i i think like one of the things that i really wanted to drive home is because i was this brand new identity online that kind of popped up a week ago and i didn't want people to know who i was like i had worked beforehand but i didn't really want to show that you know you i a i got like a pretty profound idea of what it was like to be a builder in the space or like an anonymous builder in the space and i actually i do miss being an anonymous builder because it's all about action and there's no aspect of trust me available which personally I enjoy.

8:26And I remember, you know, I was one of my big fears was like, oh, my God, people are going to think that I'm here just just like one one and done. But afterwards, I, you know, whether it was the Alec Monopoly auction or the Pussy Riot auction or Naked Philanthropist, you know, I ended up doing about 40 Clubhouse NFT launches just based off of that. And, you know, and trying to like give back in the way that people helped me. And, you know, a lot of the like the oni force founder came out of the the whole burnt banksy thing i remember he uh he told me that he was a gym he was a he was a i actually i probably don't want to talk some sorry so how does one even buy a bank seat i always wanted to know this is a great story even if it's real this is a great story because i'm i must have been 21 at the time maybe 22 and I've never obviously bought an art this has just never been a thing for me um but we go to you know I'm in New York and they have the exact piece that we wanted which was morons um and we we walk in we just walk into this gallery it's me and two friends who are dressed in almost equivalent of pajamas it's like New York winter time and so like a deed of sweatpants like an overcoat doesn't match at all no one who in the right mind is trying to buy art like it looks like we're loitering um and we walk in we're like we don't know what we're doing so we're like uh you know uh one one please like one one banksy please and we we originally were like you guys i imagine you don't take crypto and they're like no we don't take crypto i'm like okay like how do we do this like cash like in my mind i'm imagining like a briefcase that's like handcuffed to me with a with 95 000 in cash and they're like yeah that works um you could also just wire us the money we're like oh okay yeah let's do that and it's just like this series of stupid events we kept the banksy and my friends maybe 400 square foot apartment for like four months as We planned everything.

10:41It was an absolute nightmare, but it was so much fun. How did you then figure out, okay, so you buy it, which I would have no idea how to get one either. And you know what? It really is comfortable wearing pajamas. So people don't understand how you can get judged. But, you know, when you're in New York or L.A., you want to dress down, right? You want to dress down. So you buy this art now. you're planning it out and how do you start to get the attention before the launch so we we created the profile picture or use the profile on twitter i would say maybe like two weeks before um and we got it circulating within the crypto community i would say first just because we knew the crypto community after years of already working in crypto space and so that was kind of like the snowball tour you know we had a bunch of friends who you know friends at open sea which at the time they were like the only one um you know and open sea was crazy crazy back in the day it was like they had all you from zero to a trillion and like i know and then uh right alongside clubhouse and then um you know you had like foundation too if you remember that one but OpenSea was the one that survived obviously and you know so we started there we the way that we did it was we we had a photographer from Vice could freshly photograph it uh we had a like a PR like a one-off PR team just for this one thing um and they were really really helpful in getting the initial circulation I think the first one was Forbes um was the first real article that we got um and the way that we did it was we bought we burned the banksy in my friend's backyard in long island because we didn't have a lot of places to let anything on fire um french backyard in long island we took an uber we took an uber there and there's this great photo of my friend holding the the painting getting into this toyota camry and then breaking down on the side of the van wick expressway in new york and we're just standing there with a banksy in the hand oh that's great um but so then we we then we let it on fire and immediately the press starts rolling out which is super lucky like could not have been more lucky with that um the press starts rolling out and one thing leads to another we've got a week of like really hard press i'm on interviews pretty much 24 7 uh you know bbcs or a comment uh and then 30 minutes later they post a slam piece about us which was awesome um walk around with the new yorker it was really like it was everything in the world that you could have dreamed it to be and more um and was doing those interviews and then came time to sell it once when it did sell and it sold for four hundred thousand dollars even more blew up and the piece was called morons which i loved and so everyone kept calling us morons which was perfect so it's like morons sell for four hundred thousand dollars it was incredible man that see that that was the good part that i enjoyed about the space because there was a lot of this fun like people didn't want to take everything so serious which i think i i enjoy that right uh and the fact that you that you can do that as well so you go from anonymous nobody really knows who you are to now being you know quote unquote famous getting a lot of notoriety now everyone knows who you are and i think you mentioned earlier that you got some hate how did you deal with that um it was you know that's a great question you don't what you really kind of realize in that moment it's like it was more the people who didn't understand and i was very public on clubhouse i pretty much lived on clubhouse and i very much welcomed all criticism because it was how can you burn a Banksy?

14:43How can you do this to art? And I'm like, well, we're not destroying it. The idea is we're transferring it. You can still buy it. You know, and prerequisite with this is an experiment. Like we're just trying something new and we want to see if it works. That's it. And, you know, I think that like I would say that like maybe maybe half of the people that I spoke to were just like, OK, like I see this is like an actual experiment. Like there has been other examples of destroying other art to change the medium of it, which I am blanking on the names right now, but something that I commonly cited back in the day.

15:20You know, but I think that like if you understood what we were doing, it was, you know, it's one of these moments that this is either the stupidest thing in the world or the most genius thing in the world. And we didn't even know, which is how you know you're doing something. I feel like a lot of things in history were like, either this is going to be amazing and we're genius. It's brilliant. Or it's the worst thing ever. And it's stupid. You think we're idiots. I wouldn't say probably the greatest moments in most, most throughout history, the things that we consider great. We're probably in that moment.

15:50If you go, it's 50, 50, it could go, you know, left or right, you know, good, good or bad or whatever you want to say. And, and this one went good. You've got some hate. And then you moved on. Obviously, NFT kind of like, you know, kind of fizzled as a whole. But then here we are. I think cryptos, I mean, it's been like, obviously, just exploding the last few years. It's just the amount of people that I know that are in crypto that, you know, five years ago, even probably four years ago, would be like, I would never touch that. Right. Yeah. All these institutions and all these people. So at the same time, like I have maybe two accounts throughout my time in crypto since about 2017 that I lost the phrases.

16:37And I don't know what happened to those accounts. And hopefully there's nothing left in them so I don't have to get sad about it. But what was the problem that you were solving with crypto? Because I think it's sort of related. Yeah, it was impossible. Like it was impossible for people to use. And I think that the idea that you need to metamask, the idea that you need to bridge over and learn what an Ethereum wants and learn what gas fees are and learn all this stuff and save the phrases. I mean, crypto is unusable. It really is. Even to this day, it's pretty unusable. And there's no real products for it outside of pure speculation.

17:12So what we're trying to do is make it a real industry. You know, I feel like I've been in this industry for way too long and have not seen enough progress that I want to see. And that pisses me off. And so I want to change up. what was the best coin that you ever bought at the best price like did you buy bitcoin at a dollar did you buy ethereum at 25 cents is there anything that you could you don't have to say the amount but is it oh yeah i got it i um i would say my mining days i mean the issue is is it was funny my parents told me to sell immediately uh every time i minded i listened like and we made some good money but it was um it wasn't until the last bull market that i did the math on it and realized that their advice lost me i think it was like 78 million dollars or something like that uh and so i realized to stop listening your kids at home don't listen to your parents um but that was that was probably it but obviously i sold i think there was a funny one where i built on solana really really early and i built that solana when it was a dollar uh and it was funny because you needed solana to deploy solana contracts and i remember after all was said and done i checked a couple years later and it was like i was maybe a couple hundred thousand uh that went right to like him it was it was company money not really you know not mine but it was a couple hundred thousand which was like oh okay well that's that worked out well you know i there's so many moments of that i mean the fact that you i mean you know what though but what's 78 million dollars you know i mean like would you be happier today if he had i wouldn't be here that's what i tell everyone like the whole like oh you know i lost this in the hack or this and so it's like you wouldn't would you have sold like would you have really held on to this day i remember freaking out when ethereum cost 50 and being like oh my god this is it it only you know it almost hit 5 000 the other day i was like i don't think that through the cycles like this i would have been able to i will say that like i did ride and i still do ride like ethereum i think my average entry is like 700 which is good like it's obviously 4 000 but you know i'm very happy about it um but it's not like i'm ever going to sell that either right and that's these on a ledger well that's that's the thing right yeah if i bought bitcoin at two dollars i probably would not still have had it today at some point i would have exited out or maybe it was during a dip or whatever it was it's only the people that are like already wealthy where they didn't need to touch it i feel like yeah ones that have kept it because they said we need to touch it exactly it's like it would be like hey let's use all the money we have to buy this token that we know it's going to go up and it's just like well that's all the money that we have now like when is that right time and And it's annoying because it's a perpetuating thing, right?

20:07Like now Ethereum's at$4 ,000. It's like, well, I'm not going to sell it until it gets to$10 ,000. And you know what's going to happen at$10 ,000. Same thing. But it's funny. Like, I want to, you know, I just had an interesting kind of thought, which was like, you know, I saw something on Instagram the other day that embarrassment is an underexplored emotion. And I believe that, you know, to the point of the wild, wild west in crypto, I think that the anonymity really helped spur innovation because people were not afraid to try and be embarrassed and fail. You could fail very easily being an anonymous account or being an anonymous user.

20:46And I think that there's actually something quite beautiful to that because, you know, and there's two sides to that. Either you embrace your real name of Anthony Anzalone and you say, I can be embarrassed and that's OK. Or you can say, I burned Banksy and this can fail, but that's okay as well. So it's just an interesting anecdote that I just kind of thought about right now. And I think why we don't see, you know, in the same way that my PR team doesn't want me to be anonymous anymore, I think that's also why we're losing the spur and the innovation in this space is because there's so much criticism and there's so much almost hate.

21:21But that itch, you really should explore embarrassment more, I guess. Well, you bring up a good point, right? I think the original idea is doxing or unmasking, whatever. It creates trust because you know or see the person. However, the person is now under a lot of pressure that may be unneeded pressure because if something goes wrong, their name and everything gets dragged on. But we know business is risky in the sense. Look at so many companies that have tried, look at WeWork or whatever company, right? It could go amazing and then all of a sudden it can go south. Sometimes it's because of the founder and sometimes it's out of their control.

22:12It's like all these investors, you put your money in 10 and you hope one hits you know nine are gonna 90 failure rate plus so that is a fast i really like that point though around anonymity can spark creation what i guess we even think be prior to social media right like prior to social media pretty much everyone was anonymous and they were doing a lot of things how do you feel about social media i'm i'm really torn about social media in general like i obviously have benefited i know people have benefited financially and it's created great things but the same token i'm also just scared around people like in your age bracket and others and and how social media is going to impact the world you know it's a great it's again a great question but i think it's it's again so much first of all like i think that social media is one of the most addicting things in the world.

23:10I think on a pure time basis of dopamine basis, it's probably one of the most addictive things. You know, one of the highest causes of anxiety, one of the highest causes of mental strain, you know, and I fully subscribe to it. Like I really, there's a book by Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism, that I come back to every few months. And it's just about like, pretty much just unplugging. And, you know, I find myself in these habits of like consistently checking Instagram or Twitter. And, you know, I think there's an obfuscation with some of it. That's like, you know, personal versus work, right. Where like my Twitter is my work.

23:46Right. But I also I'm lucky enough and I'm fortunate enough to love what I do. And so it doesn't really feel like work. And there's a there's like a bad it's like a bad omen there in a way where I'm I'm excusing myself because it's work, you know, but there's a lot of negatives. There's a lot of negatives. But then, you know, there's also a lot of positives. Like, I think to your point, this is now an attention economy. Like, that is what this is. And there's a lot of times where I'll look at like a pitch for something and it doesn't need to make revenue. It really doesn't need to make revenue.

24:23But show me the attention that it can capture. And sometimes that's better than revenue. and I think that that's going to be the case for a lot of things and you get messages that can be spread quicker but they also dissipate quicker and so you got to choose your poison and I think we're way too far gone to be able to go back. That's deep man. I want to read that book Digital Minimalism. I'm going to get that book up. How do you feel about AI and when it relates to how it's going to impact currency how it's going to impact jobs the world like are we going into star trek or do we go into terminator or is it none of the above i was just reading something around it was like all jobs 99 % of jobs will basically disappear by ai i know i mean you don't want to know my side of this because everyone hates on me for my my personal opinion because they think it's negative but i actually have a very positive opinion like i don't want to work 40 hours a week i want to work two hours a week i would rather do this like i want to go hang out with burnt banksy and just chill and like i don't want to have to work so like liz like i hope i don't even want to have a job well how do you see the same technology i think that the way that I look at, like, the way that I look at AI is very similar to, like, a calculator, right?

25:47Like, we're not going to stop doing math now that we have this computer doing math for us. We're going to do more complicated things. And I think complexity is going to rise and the menial things are going to ideally dissipate. There's Rick Rubin said this, but I really resonate with what he said, where he compared it to, like, the punk rock music, where before you needed to, like, go to a conservatory, you know, really learn the instrument, really learn, you know, really learn the sound, find your own sound, learn all the music theory, et cetera, and study years to be a musician. But then when punk came on the scene, all you needed was like three chords and you really could just get started.

26:26And you really, if you wanted to be, and you had something to say, you got started immediately. And I think the way that he looks at AI is kind of the way that I'm starting to look at AI, which is if you have something to say, it gets easier to have something to say. And you don't need to be technically complicated or you don't need to do that menial work and the menial labor to actually say something. Where I think that, you know, it's funny, you could tie this into crypto as well, but it's like, there's not a lot of real people saying real things. There's a lot of technically, you know, knowledgeable people doing technically complicated things, but not really saying anything with it.

27:04And so I think that AI is going to be, you know, a step up in civilization. Do I think it immediately gets us to Star Trek? No, I think it's another tool. I think it's another tool that can help us. I think it can, you know, ideally mitigate menial stuff. But machine learning has been going on for a while. Chatbots have been on for a while. Like, I think with every new technology narrative, similar to what crypto was in 2017, how everyone's like, it's going to change the world. it's like oh we are we already you know are we destroying the banks yet it's like no it's gonna take time it is a it is an amplifier it is not a replacement it's how i view ai well i'm excited about robotics and humanoidness i feel like yeah me too like if i get wrong like i was just arguing with someone i'm like dude there will not be a plumber my robot can learn from youtube and do my plumbing like or my mechanics like whatever i'm excited about that but if i could have any job right now i would want to be a dj like if money was not your truth dude live your truth i'm thinking about getting the dj set but if you could have any job or do anything and it had nothing to do with money what would it be what i'm doing now i'll be honest with you like uh you know there's a there's that uh i feel like if i was doing this for money i would have stopped a while ago um i i really love what i do i believe in what i'm doing and and it's fucking exciting like there's gonna be more burnt banksy stuff and i think that that is like doing more of that is going to be exciting but for the past four years i had to build the platform to be able to do that so that people could use it and now that people can actually use the platform and i can build what i want to do like um i'm excited to you are you familiar with the company mischief i'm a chf yep that's my dream like that and i think that that's where we're going to as a company which is extremely exciting because it's guerrilla marketing like it's product launching in an attention economy so when we interviewed gary v he said the same thing you said i asked him the same question he said i would be doing what i'm doing right now um are you going to i mean this is like the event season every year i always go to token 2049 in singapore great event love the side events marquee is it's gonna be an epic event this year uh korea blockchain week i need to go because i'll be i was supposed to i'm not gonna be as i know i'm actually in southeast asia leaving in a few days but um are you gonna be heading out to any of these events any conferences where can people find you out there can they meet you we're gonna be doing kbw really really hard um we're not doing 20 we're not gonna do totally 2049 this year but we're doing create blockchain week really really hard um and so we're excited for that one the most i will say man well i have a lot of friends in korea i'll connect you please yeah let's uh let's chat after that's there yeah no i'm excited so we the reason asia really excites me so number one we have a non-profit around ai and we provide education around the world we have a lot of chapters in in asia but at the same time we also three years ago started a uh a crypto type event in Southeast Asia.

30:18And I got to tell you, as the excitement of NFTs and stuff was dying in the US, that excitement was really building up in Southeast and Eastern Asia, surprisingly. And going into Korea. And I know Korea Blockchain Week is huge. So I think it's great and exciting when you can go all around the world and you can see different communities and different people and just the excitement. and like what you know how people will benefit from something it used to be like it would only be in you know your country your town your your city your home but now you can you know do something like what you're doing which can impact people all around the world um and it's amazing feeling but if people want to get in touch with you burnt banksy if they want to meet you at korea blockchain week and be a part of the events how can they do so yeah i mean uh follow me on twitter burnt banksy uh the um yeah discord burnt zion twitter burnt zion um but burnt banksy is in twitter for me um and yeah i should post a lot so that's up i like that burnt banksy well thank you mr burnt mr mr please that was my father miss dr burnt now mr burnt i appreciate your time though i like the name that so i really man you got me thinking about like how how you know what other type of of of attention creations can happen in this world there was a guy who there was an author what is his name ryan he does the books about uh oh my gosh he used to do write books about marketing digital marketing now he writes books about stoicism i'm blanking out his name uh marcus aurelion just kidding yeah right maybe that so his first book was all about doing wild it came out like a long time ago all about doing wild stunts and and getting it oh send it to me oh yes it's like maybe 15 years old it's really really good book now he just writes about stoicism but it really opened up my eyes maybe 10 12 years ago and he did some very interesting things but man this has been great i wish i could see you in Korea, but hopefully I'll see you in New York since we go there frequently as well.

32:34Oh, please do. Definitely. Amazing. Zion, Bernd Banksy, thanks for joining us on Founder's Story. Thank you. Thanks for having me.