The NFT Morning Show: Macro 101, Crypto vs NFTs and 2024 Predictions

27:28You know, I'm kind of gaming through this scenario. I love your sort of bullish end of your perspective because I think that that's, you know, kind of a well-reasoned argument. One thing that I've been considering, you know, you talked about where do NFTs fall in all of this and what's leading and what's lagging to sort of macro. At least my view here is like, so ETH feels like pretty obviously correlated to S &P. Like if we have a big, although S &P recovered a little bit more, like percentage-wise up from the bottom, it's kind of, you know, mixed, right? Like Like it's pretty correlated. It seems pretty obvious to me that if we have a rate pause and or a rate decrease, like we'll have ETH run, right?

28:07That's, I think, not a different. Now, my question is, and this is what I have a harder time thinking about, is what the impact on NFTs might be. Because historically, when we've seen significant ETH runs, we see NFTs sell off in ETH because everyone's like, oh, man, ETH is running. Got to go catch my ETH run. So sell my NFTs, right? Do you think like where do you think this like how do you think that NFTs you know is is a pause or decrease in interest rates like long run bullish for NFTs short run like how to think about that relationship. Yeah. So I think that assets tend to lag by 12 to 18 months in any economy, just because it's wealth effect that gets recycled.

28:48Right. So nobody's making any money yet. So what we've got is we are 15 months behind ETH making a low last year. so okay we're in the zone so you know you buying nfts right now is exactly in the right zone we can never time it perfectly and you know there's different assets it's very complicated with nfts but generally speaking have punks hit their low most likely was that was that the flush out and is that the benchmark is that like bitcoin or eth hitting its low probably so that's how i think about it they're lagged so then we need to go into the future 18 months and say okay the action's not really going to happen for a while so it should base come up a bit and we've seen that with punks and some of these they came up from the low they'll probably stabilize for a while if eth rips higher which i think there's a very high chance it does even into the year end um they won't participate obviously eth goes up so you participate anyway but you know the call option that NFTs have embedded in them.

29:55But the real action in NFTs is later in 2024. And 2025, particularly when everyone's made a bunch of money in their bags and Solana's gone up 20x and they're all feeling clever and they all want to buy Fidenzas. We've seen that was also the other interesting point is we saw the generative high-end art market bottom and actually go up and that's a signal as well so that was flight to quality so the flight to quality started to happen and we kind of rotate through the curve while kind of all of the less quality stuff has gone essentially to zero yeah well that's right yeah i love the insight and and pointing out that you know not that doesn't mean every nft is going to go up right you called out punks you called out the high-end generative art market those are sort of the proven areas of nfts if there are any i want to talk about real vision for a moment which is your content platform we've had uh one of our nft brothers uh i've seen make appearances there and do a great job sergio silva known as sergito in the nft space so he's made some great contributions there i also remember in 2020 you had a trader on real vision i don't remember the gentleman's name but he called the commodities pump like on lumber and stuff and i just remember being blown away by that i was like wow i would have never thought to you know turn to that market but what's going on with real vision right now and maybe give some context because I do think a lot of our audience would appreciate it as a platform.

31:21Thank you. Yeah, look, Real Vision is the place like everybody here has watched Real Vision. It's like it's a place where you come for high quality knowledge. You get to learn. And we interviewed, we started nine years ago after the global financial crisis and the European crisis with a whole banking system. I was living in Spain at the time. We almost lost the entire banking system. That's when I started getting into crypto as well, 2012, 2013. But the idea was people are now on their own. You can't trust the advisor. You can't trust the banks. Who do you trust? You have to learn it yourself.

31:57And so there's been a big movement from Occupy Wall Street onwards to take back control of your own finances because everybody realizes they've been kind of screwed in this whole process. So Real Vision was the answer to that. We just wanted to democratize all of the knowledge. So we started all this long form finance content didn't exist before Real Vision. And we just interviewed the most famous hedge fund managers, analysts, strategists, and gave it to people, you know, subscription based business. And it kind of changed a lot of people's lives. And then, you know, we were back in 2014, when we first launched, our first ever video was about crypto.

32:31So it's been part of this thesis, all of these worlds combined. And then as it's grown, we realized that what we've also built was a community because people who like Real Vision content, like you guys, tend to be like-minded, curious, open-minded, interested in how the world works and trying to figure it all out. So we found we built a larger and larger community. And then we've been leaning into that at a time. So now we're just building an entirely new platform, which is everything from pricing and charting and that stuff. But we've also got AI that helps people explain so you guys aren't finance naturals but you'll be able to just find out what does reverse repo mean highlight it the AI will explain it to you if you just want a content summary it'll do that we've got that we've also created this incredible network map of all Real Vision members around the world so you can connect with anybody in this cool visual not like a discord which goes like this but you can go and find where everybody is so let's say you're on a trip to Paris you're like well who's in the Real Vision community in Paris are can have a drink with and you can kind of see them and then chat to them and stuff like that and around all of that you know i've had this core thesis that web3 is the future of a lot of this so we've had nft communities for a while so we had the um genesis nft that was a was free with the pro crypto subscriptions and that's had held good value over time because it's really that our genesis and they've had a lot of perks for doing that then we thought i've been you know if you look at my twitter pfp it's a mashup between my board ape and my ex my ex copy and my damien hurst uh no just with the ex copy on that one and because i wanted to show after crypto where it's so tribal, Web3 is less tribal.

34:26The NFT world is less tribal. It's a kind of nicer, better spirited place. I want to show that all these communities are together because we're doing something bigger here. This movement to Web3 is something bigger. And we lent into that with an NFT project called the Real Vision Collective, where we bought all art from different projects, even got rights from Damien Hirst to use his, to mash these things together, make unique art, to say, listen, here's a place where anybody in the Web3 community, whatever projects they're involved in, whatever they like, can come together, learn together, exchange ideas, and get a bunch of perks.

35:02So it's like a membership NFT with cool art and a whole bunch of perks. Season one came with Real Vision subscriptions for five years and all sorts of stuff. Because again, we want to educate, help, and bring people together. So our view at Real Vision is knowledge times tools times network is your best chance of success. Well, it is success. So we leverage into that. And we're just actually right now, finishes today, we're just minting season two. But you'll like this because season two, again, is another mashup. It's a cool mashup. I mean, who have we got in this one? We've got crypto dick butts, obviously, and a whole bunch of CCO stuff.

35:39But the magic of this one is not only joining the community and the discords and soon as we launch our new platform be token gated content and token gated areas and stuff is I want to have a bit of a joke because everybody knows that I bought ETH call options at the peak in 2021 and that bet went wrong and I spent 5 % of my bag on ETH call options and they went to zero. And I always say that NFTs are also a call option on ETH. You know, if you get punks right now and they triple and ETH triples, you've made a ridiculous leverage about money. So we thought, well, why don't we lean into this? So 5 % of all of the proceeds of the NFT buys ETH 3 ,000 calls for year-end.

36:27Wow. And then it gets given away in some sort of grand prize. So there'll be somebody who gets like 50 % of it. now, if we sold all 9 ,000 NFTs, that thing could be, if ETH's at 4 ,000 by year end, which is possible, that thing's worth over a million bucks. And so that becomes just a fun game that everybody plays is, what's the price of ETH? And am I going to get selected in the prize giveaway? And it's also just to educate people about how these things work. So yeah, there it is. and what we're going to do is I think we're going to stop at 5 ,000 and then burn the rest to maintain the value. So there's not that many coming and that finishes today.

37:16But it's fun and it's an amazing community and then you get part of the whole Real Vision engine of stuff that goes along with it. Real cool to see that. So realvision.com forward slash collective for anybody who's interested. Realvision.com slash collective, ladies and gentlemen. And yeah, it's interesting to integrate Web3 with the subscription-based content service. A lot of people have kind of talked about doing it, but we haven't really seen that many examples of it. So it's cool to see. I'm assuming it's gone well. Yeah, it's gone great. Everyone's still trying to figure out the business model of a lot of this stuff.

37:47Yeah. Because, yeah, it's complicated with subscriptions versus one-off payments. But we've also got a lot of other experiments to come, what we can do, how we can integrate digital ID, how we can do all sorts of things. So we've got a kind of ambitious roadmap to how we can integrate Web3 and not make it that it's all about Web3. What we've got to, as crypto natives, if we want adoption, we need to abstract this stuff away. You know, you can't use a MetaMask wallet and get some person who's been in macro for 20 years or traditional markets and expect them to go through that pain and then screw it up and lose everything.

38:26It's just like, no, we've got to abstract away. So I'm really thinking about that. How can we lead the way here and show different ways of doing it? I think Reddit have done about the best job of anybody, which never gets talked about in NFT community. They've launched not only a token, which nobody's managed to do that hasn't gone to zero because all the money leaves the ecosystem. And they've managed to launch a massive scale of NFTs without making it all about the price. Yeah. I mean, well, you just said it right there. I was just going to say, and I know I want to throw it to Nick. I think Signal might have a question too.

39:00But the reason I agree with you about everything that you said about Reddit, and it doesn't get attention in the NFT space, like you said, because there isn't this humongous price attached. Like basically, if you want to know what's getting the most attention in the NFT space, just look at the highest price items. That's, you know, whatever has the most liquidity, whatever has the highest price. That's what gets talked about, no matter what the circumstance. Nick, you were going to ask Raul something? no i was just going to comment on the thing that he was saying with reddit that we use uh that as inspiration we have our own nft platform which is free there's no you don't even need a wallet to connect actually which is how reddit uh initially you can move things into your wallet uh in our system the majority of them are not but it is all it's essentially custodial nfts so you can go claim them for free um there's no trading of it right now Inevitably, some of that will eventually show up, but we have in-house artists that end up making the art, and we have almost a million NFTs collected in the past few months on the platform.

39:58And I think, A, no one pays attention to it, but that's all good because we have a bunch of people who interact on the platform. But the future of all this, you know, I look at something like D gods and some of the things that are going on right now in the space. And it's just like the future of this is not about$50 ,000 priced assets, although that does exist. But like before the, the COVID after the trough and then the boom followed, basically none of us were talking about, like I wasn't collecting art. Like that just wasn't like, that wasn't part of my life. Like that wasn't even like a thing yet.

40:43Now suddenly everyone's just like renowned art collectors all of a sudden. But like in general, that's not like a conversation of the masses that people are talking about what antique item you just purchased or something. And so that's like a very limited subset of society, which is even focused about on that. Yet the conversation spread into the masses, which is awesome. And I think that's just because of the digital overlap that exists there where you have mobile app adoption or mobile adoption and accessibility of these things. And you can interact with it. Whereas with like, I can't interact with, you know, my rich uncle's painting.

41:28Like that's just not something that I'm engaged with. So cool. That part's awesome. But we haven't seen, I think Top Shot was really the only like. I think Topshop and the one that nobody knows about is Ticketmaster. They've issued more NFTs than anybody in the world. Ticketmaster has issued more. Yeah. Okay. Last time I checked, it was 14 million NFTs. Wow. Okay. And what they've done is basically you go to a sporting event, you go to an Elton John concert or whatever, their wallet where you – because all of Ticketmaster's stuff now is all – you have a Ticketmaster wallet. Without telling you, it's a Web3 wallet.

42:06So what they do is they drop into your wallet a memento of the Elton John concert or the Dallas Cowboys game you went to. Without the expectation of people trading them, some will, they'll get scarcity and stuff once people figure this out. But they've been doing this at scale for a while. I think it's really interesting, which is kind of like Top Shops, but a different way. Top Shops was like, you buy your moment. This is, you went to an event and here's a memento. And I think of it that way because I'm a massive music fan and I'm old enough to have gone to Live Aid back in 1985. And I've still got my program and it's framed on my wall because it's an I was there, right?

42:48It was like a humanity scale, one point in time. And so I kept it. NFTs are going to be involved in so many things that people don't understand yet because we're all focused on, oh, you know, what's the next Fidenza or what's the next Ape or what's the next whatever. that's mainly a distraction to really the nft technology it's just the fun we're having as we're trying to figure this stuff out where do you get the stats on how many nfts are issued by ticketmaster spoke to them oh okay there you go right from the horse's mouth a signal looked like you had a question for ralph yeah ralph i was gonna say i really wish real vision existed when I was at university or just out because it would have saved me from reading Hulls, Options, Futures and Derivatives over and over again.

43:37And I could have just asked the community. I know, it's so much easier. Yeah, it's so much easier. I was going to ask, earlier on, you mentioned that liquidity indicators are potentially a signal of what can happen in the future. There's been so much attention on BTC ETFs, ETH ETFs coming from institutions like BlackRock. We've seen obviously that investment banks over the last five to eight years have stepped into crypto, stepped out of crypto. How much of a catalyst event do you think these BTC ETFs really are? So the biggest catalyst event of all is just price rising. You know, everybody's FOMO, right?

44:20So my work, because I've got an asset management firm called Exponential Age Asset Management, we invest in crypto hedge funds, which is another way to fund a funds. So it's another way institutions can get in. So my speaking to institutions is like they've all done the work. I've known about BlackRock, Apollo, all of these guys for three years now. I mean, they've all been ready, but they've been waiting for this turn. So I think, let's say we might get the ARK one through today, or it might happen on Monday. There's a possibility that it goes through. Everyone's saying, no, it's not going to be the ARK one.

44:55We'll have to wait for the BlackRock one. But look, there's a possibility that happens today. We should take everybody by surprise. What does that enable? That enables, well, the kind of average millennial buyer of crypto is already a Coinbase user, stuff like that. So it's not going to bring them in. it's going to bring in the boomers and the RIAs who use boomer assets. So right now, crypto is up between 50 % and 80 % this year. So it's attractive. It's done better than every other asset. But really, if it triggers a price rise, it will trigger a stampede. And we've seen these points in time where it just sucks in a bunch of people.

45:37But the narrative has been pretty bad around it still. So if you think of the normie baby boomer whose RIA is advising him, he's still in the FTX is a scam, everything's terrible phase. So we've got to get through the other side of that. And I think it's price that does it. So I don't think it's the biggest price event yet, but it will definitely see capital flowing into the space over time. So it drives the next wave of adoption. Now, what's weird is we won't be able to use the number of active addresses for wallets because there's these massive aggregator wallets, which would be these ETFs. So it's going to get a little more complicated to understand the space.

46:14So I think that all of the investment banks are working on this. They want to offer it to the clients. The regulators have made it too complicated for them to do so, but they are ready. They're all working on blockchain technology to issue securities and do a whole bunch of stuff, derivatives, everything. We've got the asset management firms who've all done the work in it. Most of them did some VC investing in the space. And they've kind of got clarity to do this, but they're just waiting to not get fired. So they need the price to start going up. Then we've got the RIAs who've dabbled in the space, but now they'll have a vehicle because the grayscale trust really hurt a lot of investors for the RIAs.

46:57So we've kind of got all the component parts in place, plus the liquidity component, because people to invest need to have some bloody money and nobody's got any money still. Everybody's kind of liquidity up to here, because if you were a VC-style longer-time horizon investor, your money's tied up, you haven't got any capital gains, you've had no exits from anything, and the average investor and the average fund manager hasn't participated in this massive NASDAQ rally. So they're all watching it. Nobody's made money yet. So that cycle is yet to come. So that's why back end of the year, I'm pretty interested, which is why I like this 3 ,000 strike ETH call option, because I think there's a probability it gets there.

47:38But, you know, it's all to play for for 2024. Play for 2024 when a velocity of crypto turnover is going to be the metric that you're looking at, okay? Nick, stop shilling your metrics on Raul. I love that sweepstakes model, Raul, because I feel like it's something that our, it seems like you understand the space because that is something that people in the space, I'd imagine would really appreciate. Also love what you mentioned about VCs. VCs deployed all their capital in late 2021, it seems. People told us that we had a bad deck and we still raised seven figures at that time. And I just think about right now, I'm like, we couldn't do that right now with a deck that everyone said was universally not that great.

48:17One thing, and I know we're limited on time. You have to - Well, speak for yourself, Pia. I'm still closing the deal, all right? Nick is the fundraiser extraordinaire. Anyway, I know you have to jump in a moment. Just one thing I want to cover is you talked about the comparison between Ethereum and NFTs versus stocks and real estate. And I think real estate is a subject a lot of consumers are interested in, a lot of our audience is interested in. Everyone says the real estate market's going to crash. It's going to crash. It's certainly slowed. But what are you seeing with real estate? Where do you think it goes and how closely are you paying attention to it?

48:50So we think that year-on-year rate of change of real estate kind of bottomed. Prices, at the beginning of this, we thought prices will ease off somewhat, but they won't go down a lot. So our guess was 10 % from peak to trough. And it's looking like it's going to be somewhere like this, because I don't think this is a catastrophic recession. It's more like the recession that none of you guys will remember, which was 1990, which was like, it was just a recession. Prices went down, things sucked. No houses traded for a while, which is what's happening now, right? Just house prices aren't trading because nobody can take out a mortgage with interest rates this high, you know, all of that stuff.

49:28So everything's gone illiquid. It's kind of like the NFT market. It's gone illiquid. Prices get marked down, not a lot going on. But we've still got this ongoing demand of anybody who's a millennial, who's getting, you know, because everybody's in there kind of hitting 35. They're at a point where they're settling down and thinking i need to buy a house so it's keeping a floor under house prices anywhere yeah some others well before like the kind of boomer houses that were out in the countryside were trading for nothing because nobody wanted them because everyone's working in a city that whole thing's changed now you know suddenly hudson river valley is like the place everybody wants to go and people are moving out to rural new jersey to buy five bedroom houses for the price of a shoebox in New York City.

50:15So the structure of the market's changing. So I'm not wildly negative. Commercial real estate is totally fucked. Yeah. I mean, on a different podcast that we have, we talked to someone about his, he called it a bubble. He said commercial real estate is basically a bubble at this point. And he was talking about all different factors and the issues that exist there. Spencer, did you have a question here? Oh, no, I just want to hop in on this that one thing that I thought was really interesting about commercial real estate. So I talked to a friend of mine who's a big real estate investor. And I was like, you know, it just, it strikes me that you could just flip it all to residential, right?

50:50Like, you know, and they're like, no, no, no. Like it's actually the cost to convert commercial real estate to residential is like 10X higher than you think it would be. And often is like cost prohibitive. And that's always been something that I guess I was wrong in making assumptions about was that the ease of flipping it. And so commercial real estate, I agree with you, has these giant headwinds. And that, so that, again, play it out in macro land. What we do in macro land is, what are the knock-on effects? So commercial real estate, bad. All of that's on the books of the regional banks. The regional banks are troublesome anyway with the yield curve and rates.

51:30So what does that lead to? More cowbell. All of those assets are going to have to end up on the central bank balance sheet. So there's no way around that except more cowbell. So again, that's how you think in Macri. Step, step, step. Never look at today. Love the quote. Nick? More cowbell being print more money. Indeed. Love it. Well, look, Raul, we really appreciate you joining us. What was the link for Real Vision and any closing thoughts on Real Vision or anything that you have going on that you'd like to let the audience know? Yeah, look, if you're curious in the space, a lot of people have come into Web3 and didn't know about finance, have had to learn the hard way that macro matters.

52:11Real Vision, we've actually currently got, just as we're rolling out the new platform, we're about to close the doors on new subscriptions for a while, while we just integrate the new platform. But if you go to, I think it's realvision.com forward slash last chance, we've got this crazy deal. It's like$20 for three months just to get in the door, get learning. It will help you as you've heard our conversations here these worlds are the same world we have to stop pretending that they're different worlds they're the same world um and then if you're interested in being part of the community the other way is realvision.com forward slash collective and get involved with the nfts and get involved in the game of the call option on eath because it's going to be a lot of fun if eath is like at 3 000 by like beginning of december it's it's game on right show it's just fun and it's a great community really is vibrant that's that i mean that's a juicy uh contest so ladies and gentlemen it was cheap as well it's only like 0.0698 so yeah nothing nft people aren't used to paying let's be real that's uh that's definitely right in the pocket there uh well look raul we really appreciate you having we really appreciate you coming on ladies and gentlemen uh raul paul of real vision this was not a sponsored spot this was just uh you know someone that we're really excited about bringing on the show as a as an honored guest, someone that had a big impact on my personal Bitcoin and crypto journey.

53:31So thanks so much for joining, Raoul. We really appreciate it. I love this. I think we should all do more of this is just merge all our communities, get everybody involved because together we're better. And that's what I love about Web3. We're not tribal. And so the more we do together, the better it is for everyone. 100%. Couldn't agree more. Check out the two links. I'm sure dot com slash last chance for the deal for the three months for twenty dollars then there's realvision.com slash collective for uh the mint that's closing today uh look ladies and gentlemen if it's your first time listening we do the show monday through friday 9 a.m eastern time you can find ral on several other much bigger podcasts but uh everybody knows this is the best one one more thank you to ral thanks so much for joining uh we're ready to wrap and ladies and gentlemen Check out the show on YouTube, Twitter Spaces, Audio Podcast on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

54:28We'll be back on Monday. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. And make sure you check out all things Real Vision if you're interested in really taking the market by the horns. We will catch you next time. Thanks for listening. What's up, revolutionaries? Thanks for tuning in. For more content like this, head over to realvision.com and get unfiltered access to the very best, brightest, and biggest names in finance.