Wizard Wednesday Transcription, 2021-07-21

Wizard Wednesday Episode 1

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Elf: [00:00:00] Yeah. Well, I just wanna start out with, uh, welcome to the First Wizards Wednesday. Uh, this is Elf and dotta channeling in from the Quantum Downs. We hope to be doing this once a week, every Wednesday, of course. And generally what we'll do is just update you on our progress for the project. Some weeks may not be very exciting and some weeks might blow your freaking heads off.

Uh, so yeah, the, the few items that we have on the docket for today are, um, are 3D artist is almost finished. In fact, he is finished with his 3D pieces. This fr this is from the the 5 5 55 contest. So I'm gonna help him mint these tonight, and then hopefully we will present them soon, maybe on Friday. Um, this is actually something that we want to do more often is we, we've got a lot of [00:01:00] artists making art about their wizards and we want to give them a chance to speak and present their art to as many people as possible.

So I think we're gonna start doing that regularly as well. Um, Uh, speaking of other artists, uh, working on wizard stuff, our Bard, Margaret, uh, she is our Wizard poet. Um, she has already made about, I don't know, like 30 poets for other wizards. Um, so we are working on a way. Uh, with her to sort of streamline that process, um, because thus far she has been writing the poem and then I've been formatting it and drawing a custom little wizard for the frame.

And unfortunately that is not within my bandwidth anymore to draw these little extra wizards, um, because I've got so many other things I'm working on for with the Wizard's cult. Uh, so we're gonna figure out a way with Margaret to streamline that, um, [00:02:00] and we'll keep you updated on that.

Dotta: Um, is El breaking up for you guys or is it just me?

I hear him pretty clearly. Okay. It's probably just me. All right. Sorry, go ahead. I am pretty clearly too.

Elf: Great. Okay, good. Um, yeah. Okay. And then, uh, on Friday we've got the Ethermore contest. Um, that is a little collaboration with the nice folks at Ethermore. If you enter this contest, then you will have a chance to win one of their character NFTs.

Um, if you would like to learn more about that project, uh, just go to our Discord and look in the announcements channel. Um, and then another thing that I personally am working on, which I can't wait to show you guys, is. I am working on, uh, turnarounds for every wizard. And so what that means is,

Dotta: I think, I think that's, we call that an airdrop.

I mean, it's not a new token, but I think it's, it qualifies. [00:03:00] Oh

Elf: yeah. It's gonna be an, it's gonna be an airdrop for sure. You guys are gonna love it. But, um, but what it is if, if you don't know what a turnaround is, okay, so like right now you've got your wizards and the angle that you see them at is more or less a three-quarter view.

I am going to draw every single angle, the side, the front, the back, and you'll be able to see your, your wizard in 360 degrees. It'll still be pixel style. It'll still look exactly like your character, but you'll see it from every angle. Now, why am I doing this other than just being a fun little airdrop?

These are, we're gonna take this artwork and, um, give it to a studio who is then going to take that and make your wizards walk. And why do we need your wizards to walk? Well, several reasons I think you can probably figure it out, but we'll leave more details on on that for a later discussion. But yeah, the first step is to turn these wi wizards around, and you guys will [00:04:00] receive an airdrop of that as soon as they're ready.

Um, and that's all I have on my uh, list. Doda, what about you?

Dotta: Yeah, I mean, I think that these Wizard Wednesdays can be part ama, uh, part discussion of the day. I don't necessarily have any new announcements. Um, I did a tweet storm today talking about, um, you know, some of the things that are on my mind. Uh, one was just hopefully giving some maybe advice to folks who are trying to do airdrops.

I could talk more about that if people want to hear about it. Um, I've also been getting questions from the dms about, Um, how to think about like, hype and pricing, and I've been thinking a lot about that. Uh, I think that'd be an interesting topic of discussion. Um, and then I think another one that's kind of just on our mind is around, um, oh gosh, stoner cats.

Uh, stoner cats at, which is like the bigger topic of like NFTs as Kickstarter. Um, so I think those are basically three [00:05:00] topics that, uh, you know, I don't necessarily need to have a soliloquy on. We've got a bunch of speakers up here. I'd kind of just, it'd be interested to hear about everyone else's thoughts, but maybe you could talk a little bit about like, pricing, for example.

Um, so one of the things that I've been, uh, there's a, there's a new project coming out and they were asking me and they were saying, uh, and they were saying like, Hey, We're trying to think about doing a silent launch. You know, we, we've been hearing that all these projects are having like gas wars and, uh, all these problems.

We were thinking about just doing like a pretty quiet launch, you know, telling our friends, what do you think about that? And I was like, you know, respectfully, I think that's like a terrible idea. Like, unless that's part of your, um, unless that's part of your plan, like part of your allure is that you just did this like quiet drop and then now of a sudden you've got, um, like.

A bunch of punks in your back pocket who are gonna tweet about your influencers. [00:06:00] Like a silent lunch is actually a terrible idea for a lot of reasons. And I think it's not obvious, I think it's not obvious. I, for for sure, it wasn't obvious to me when we were doing wizards from the fir, like our first time through.

Um, and here's some of the ideas that I've kind of been thinking through, like one is that I think that like selling out is kind of a sign of. Pent up demand. And like as much as, um, as much as we want everyone to just want the art for its own sake, right? Like we want everyone, like, we want everyone to like love me.

For me, probably, I don't know, 70% of the energy, of the liquidity that goes through a project and from people that are looking to like buy and then sell someone else at a higher price. And if you don't sell out, You're basically showing like there's no pent up demand. There's, it's almost like a bigger risk for your community, um, that when they buy it, there's like nobody else who wants it.

[00:07:00] Everybody who has it, wants it, and then now you don't have any secondary. So now you can't actually, um, in reinvest beyond like the initial sale into like your creative work. And so I think that like, we think that like, We don't wanna hype too much and hype to people, but it's actually a bit of your responsibility as like the project creator that like the people who are investing in you, expect you to be the hype man because they expect you to like build into the project like future people who are gonna be interested in and like potentially if they ever wanna sell, those people can sell.

So I think that's basically the advice I gave this person. I'd be curious to hear what people here think. You know, one of the things that I thought early on, which is like, okay, we set a higher price, for example, right? Like we, our, our price I think was 0.07 E and we were talking about 0.0 8.09, like even 0.1 at one point when E is really low and you know, kind of the question that I had was like, well, Like, [00:08:00] why is it bad if we don't sell out?

Because we might get more money upfront. And it's like, well, it's bad because your community's unhappy if there's like nobody sort of after them.

I think. I think the stealth drop is like a very interesting idea. And I think it definitely, you kind of have to weigh two pretty strong cons in terms of like, if you don't do a stealth drop, then you're gonna have to deal with a big gas war. And then if you do do a stealth drop, then you're gonna deal with the loss of that, like 70% of people maybe even like just foing into the project.

Um, I'm kind of wondering if, is there, do you kind of see like a place for. A happy medium where maybe it's something like, Um, announced drops of releasing a certain amount at each time throughout the day. So maybe in a project of like 10,000, you see 2000 at, at block number, so and so. [00:09:00] Um, and then a few hours later you see another 2000 at block so and so and, and so and forth until you get to know 10,000.

Um, yeah. I like that

Elf: idea.

Dotta: Yeah. Yeah. Curious. See what you guys think about that though. Yeah, I think for like, um, are you guys familiar with Clam Island? Um, so DK Ninjas, like a friend of mine who's really sharp and um, one of the things they've done with Clam Island is like when they do their drops, they do like 50% at like a time that's, that would work for like Americans.

And then 50% they worked for people in like Australia essentially, because the timing is typically like really inconvenient for people globally. And I think that's like a really considerate, uh, way of doing things. Yeah. Cause I mean, I guess it, I mean, if there is truly that amount of demand, I guess it's possible that you could see, you know, a lesser, a lesser amount of demand at the first 2000 because people are under the impression that maybe they can hit the final [00:10:00] drop.

But then maybe that kind of brings up a problem where maybe there's a ton of hype for a project. But the first 2000 and the, and the second 2000 drops, Don't get a ton of hype, and then the last one gets really jumped on, and then at that point there's only 2000 left. It's so risky because as a project creator, your interests, like, there's just so many different parties, right?

Because as the creator, you for sure wanna sell out at the highest price possible. But then you also have to think long term that like you're not causing, you're not manufacturing. Fomo. Above what you're worth because what you for sure don't want is to like sell to 2000 people and then the, like the next day you crash your market and those 2000 people like actually hate you instead of love you.

And so, but on the other hand, what you don't wanna do is like half the drop and then the first half, like doesn't quite sell out or something. Like if you lose your momentum, you [00:11:00] want a little bit of FOMO because you want, well, you want to sell the whole thing. Um, because that gives you options in the future.

And, uh, yeah, so it's hard, like the, the idea of like cutting out whales for example, right? Like the people are like, oh, we don't want any big whales coming in here and like buying up the supply. But as a creator, actually, like being able to negotiate or even talk to like, like I know the top holder or wizards, who it is, and like he's in my chats and we talk and like, um, And that's like easier as a creator to kind of like manage one person and then you're happy because they might buy as many as like hundreds of other individuals would would buy.

Yeah. Who are maybe a lot less committed. But if you sold the whole collection to like 10 whales, now you have no community and you're for sure not going anywhere either. So it's, it's a hard problem. Yeah. So brings up, oh sorry. I don't, I don't also don't wanna like hug the stage, but I had another, another point.

No, please. Yeah, please. [00:12:00] Um, I guess that also kind of brings up the, the Vogue drama of yesterday, um, where, you know, there were, there's, I think by the end of the mid, there were 900 holders of an 8,000, of an 8,000 project. Um, and it's like people got, I'm really angry about them. There was a lot of, you know, discontent, you know, brewing, but like, Does that mean that we now reduce, does that mean now that an equitable project now reduces the mint cap to something like five or seven or something as opposed to like the 20 that they had?

And it's hard because people who are like big collectors, uh, like they write code to write scripts that like get around things and it's like, okay, let's say you can do. Five per wa, like five per min. And then like they just loop over it and they're like, okay, we're gonna do a cool down. Well then they just create other wallets.

It's like [00:13:00] the, at some point kind of limiting the big guy limits the small guy too. And so it's just like, what? Yeah. What does it mean to have a fair drop is so difficult. I think this drop was awesome. I wasn't one of the original, like people that received a wizard. I went to the secondary market. But like, even still, like I wouldn't have changed any way that this drop went about.

Thank you. I appreciate that though. I also wonder if, you know, we didn't have a lot of mechanics in place to, to, to, for example, avoid someone coming in and buying the whole collection. Like, you know, if someone had wanted to come in and just like buy a. Like a lot at a super fast gas and then try to flip it everyone else on secondary cuz they thought it was gonna be that desirable, that would've been possible with the way that I programmed the contracts.

And I was like worried about that happening. [00:14:00] Um, so I'm really thankful with how our drop went down. I think part of it was like we weren't, we had enough hype to like sell out, but it wasn't like what happened with Vogue by the way. I, I saw that they were having trouble, but to be honest, I don't actually know what like literal.

The technical thing actually was, does anybody know? No. Yeah. I mean, also, can you guys hear me right now? It's very windy where I'm at. I can do the wind, but it's okay. I'd love, I want your thoughts. Yeah, the, the bogus, it was like, they, they, they honestly, I think they announced the project in like early July and they just built this crazy community, um, over like the course of the month.

And then by minting day I just, you know, people, their, their project was showing up everywhere and I think their discord gained around like two to 3000. People in like the few hours before minting, then minting came around. You had eight, you had 8,000 people in the Discord all trying to get in. [00:15:00] Um, and then like there was some deal with like the wallet connecting the, the wallets that were connecting.

There were so many wallets connecting that meta masked that they were getting DDOSed and so, They shut down their server and basically were like, Hey, we can't do this cuz we're getting like DDoS right now. Um, and it was just like a shit. And then they like, you know, pushed into the next day and then like pushing into the next day they got another 2000 people on board trying to get like one of the vocals, which is like pretty crazy and ironic.

Um, but also to your point earlier about the. Level of hype that you guys had, like I think for better or for worse, like it really felt like you guys kind of hit the sweet spot in terms of like hype. Cuz it wasn't like the, the kind of project like the Vogues where there were 9,000 people in the Discord all trying to get their hands on one.

It was like, You know, however many it was. You know, I think it, I don't know, one to one to 2000 [00:16:00] people. Like in the discourse? Yeah. Like very actively trying to get it. And so it was enough for it to be like a sup. I mean, obviously sold down 30 minutes, like it was an incredible drop, but it was also not too much to the point where it was like people solely treating it as like a financial exploit.

And just people dropping 2000 gas on it, trying to, trying to get into it because like, I mean for the Vogues, like I dropped like 300 cuz I thought that that was gonna be high. And then I saw the queue and it was like fucking 1200, 1100, a thousand. And so I canceled it and I was like, this is bullshit.

Like I can't do this. Yeah, yeah. Right. We sold out in 30 minutes, not like five minutes, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Didn't they also have a problem with their contract where they sold more than the 77. 77 and they had to do some refunds. Yeah. Because that was the other technical glitch that happened

Elf: and, uh, they sold more than cap.

Yeah.

Dotta: [00:17:00] Somehow they must have not set it up. Right. And they went over, they maxed supply that they stated, I, I don't know if I, I didn't, I don't know if technical details behind it, but they had to add, you know, essentially refund some people that bought in after the max supply. Wow.

Doda. Um, I really appreciate the thread you, you posted today about, um, With the info about releasing a drop and I remember when, when Forgotten Ruins was the Day of the Mint, I was just refreshing that block counter, that block countdown. I wish a lot of projects use that method. So just wanted to mention that.

Cool, thanks. Yeah, and like, you know, I hope that thread is useful to people. I think that like, You know it, and I feel a little sheepish about doing a victory lap about our men. Like I'm proud of what we did, but I also, you know, you hear about Vogue, like there weren't 10,000 people in our Discord, right?

We had 2000. So it is a little bit of a different game. [00:18:00] I really wanna understand if they are, um, technically accurate about saying that meta mask said they DDOSed them. That is very interesting. Like, you wouldn't think that. That doesn't make any sense to me at all that like I'm happy to be corrected. A hundred percent happy to be corrected, but that sounds like a load because there's like a lot more than 10,000 people using Ethereum and meta mask every day, every moment, and so like that, that is surprising to me that that would be true.

Yeah, I could be, I'm with you on that. I could be wrong, but No, I heard that too though. I heard, I heard them say that. You what? You Yeah, what you're saying. So I, sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say what, what I read, cuz I'm also not by any means a fucking expert on, uh, meta mask or any of that type of stuff, but like, I think one of the functions that they had on the website was the Connect Wallet button.

Ah. And I ended up personally hitting that Connect Wallet button [00:19:00] like 10 times cuz nothing would happen. And so I think that with the eight, 10,000 people hitting that Connect Wallet button, each of them hitting it five to 10 times, like Got it. Meta Mouse might have received like, you know, 75,000 to a hundred thousand like wallet requests in the span of like two minutes.

Yeah. One thing I would've changed on our drop is, The, the crow didn't come in and let you connect your meta mask until the timer was down on the day of. I was like, oh, that was dumb. You should have been able to, like I told people to load up early. You should have been able to connect your meta mask early and then it, cuz it was just stayed connected.

There was no reason you couldn't have connected early. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a good idea. I was actually talking about that with, um, remixer, who is also Yeah, that was a, that was an idea I threw out last night. Cause, um, we're, we're trying to find

Elf: solutions to that issue too. Well, my

Dotta: question is, after knowing all this stuff about this latest drop, it seems like we're gonna have a bottleneck around the burning.

I mean, [00:20:00] 10,000 wizards and only a thousand are me allowed to be burned. That's gonna be like a pretty high bottleneck. Um, do you guys have any plans for that? Yeah. Don't commit me to this, but one of our ideas was like, um, different rooms at different block numbers would be, uh, uh, like allowed to burn. I don't know that that's the fairest way to do it, but it's something we've talked about.

And of course, if there's no room, that of course has a slot of its own. Um, but yeah, this is a thing. I don't know why everyone's so eager to burn their wizards. It's not necessarily an upgrade. Yeah.

Elf: You guys just, I'm not burning mine. Just so

Dotta: you guys know. Dude, I, I, I thought about it, but, ah, you go attach to these guys. Should have never brought it up, man. Now we all want to burn wizards. Wait, while we're on the subject, Doda, do you, do you, would you, uh, be willing to share how many unique visitors you [00:21:00] guys had on the Dave Mint?

Oh. I'm 100% willing, but I also forgot to install the Google Analytics key, so I like literally don't know. I could tell you like how many Alchemy requests we had or something, and I, I could look it up, but I, I actually don't know the answer. Yeah, I'm just, I'm curious. I will, I'm also one of those people who, who bought on the secondary because I wasn't able to, I didn't quite catch the initial mint because I was using mobile meta mask and the gas, you know, the gas issues on there.

It's hard to do advanced fast enough. Right. Yeah. Someone convinced me not to adjust gas prices and I got Oh shit, outta luck. Yeah. And there were other problems with our drop too, like that, uh, I cringe about, like, for example, the video that there's only one video kind of, of the, of the drop and, um, that's been going around.

Someone recorded and, um, It shows one of the bugs that I was like, ah, I'll just [00:22:00] leave it in. Nobody will know. And then of course, that's the one video that gets shared all over Twitter, which is if you resize the page when you loaded it. The wolf and the cat like floated off screen. So if you find that tweet or whatever the crow, yeah.

If you find that tweet and you actually like zoom into the video, which like, you don't need to, like, I know you have a life, but I noticed, um, in that video he must have like resized as the page was loading. Uh, and that, that's forever will irk me that that's, that's still the air, but whatever. Are there any, uh, Easter eggs on the website that nobody has found?

Or like any Easter eggs you threw in? Cause I, I look at it and I'm, I'm always like I go back to that minting page cause it's still one of the best I've seen. You could, who, who's that old guy like that keeps bothering me.

Elf: The first rule about Easter eggs is you don't tell where the No,

Dotta: no, no specifics.

Just wondering

Elf: if, if they exist.[00:23:00]

Well, I am just gonna say, well, and, and then sigh.

Um, let, let me put it this way. The, the, whether they do or they don't exist, the website is a work in progress, so it'll, it'll constantly be changing.

Um, You know, not to change the subject, but uh, were any of you guys at the last AMA where I accidentally left it on public and then we got some fantastic random guests, uh, that joined us?

Dotta: No, I wasn't able to catch the last one. Was that on Discord or on Twitter? It was on

Elf: Discord. This is why

Dotta: we need these recorded.

Elf: Yeah. Yeah. So if I know, I know a lot of you there, like I see Dr. Brock and, and [00:24:00] Magus. Um, but yeah, uh, just to briefly recap, it was brick and hilarious. Um, we had one. Person come in and I, I think it was a, I think it was a girl. She, um, she said, she just straight up was like, uh, what is this? And I said, well, this is a Wizard's cult.

And then she was like, are you guys American? Cause I guess she was like British. Um, and then she's, she's like, I don't get it. And I said, well, do you know what an NFT is? And she said, no. And I was like, oh boy. I was like, do you know what cryptocurrency is? And she said, no. And so like, you know, I didn't really know how to respond to that.

Yeah. I have a hard time

Dotta: telling my girlfriend I'm part of a wizard called and explaining all this shit in myself, so I totally,

Elf: exactly. Well, and, and then to that, then we had like, like another guy who came in who must have [00:25:00] thought it was like a legit. A cult type of wizard's, cult, and he was like asking questions about crystals and rituals and, you know, he may have been a troll, but like, I wanted to feed the, I wanted to feed the troll.

That's

Dotta: awesome. Duh. Okay. So I think another thing that's on my mind is around, um, I, I wanna put together a tweet storm with this. Maybe we can talk about it as a group, which is, uh, it's almost like the N F T hierarchy of needs. And, um, part of the narrative that you kind of see with stoner cats is look at this new funding model for Hollywood.

NFTs provide like Hollywood this way to, uh, to kickstart their projects, you know? And uh, [00:26:00] and when I see that narrative, it drives me nuts because to me it feels like a very, sort of like, to think of kind of NFTs as a fundraising mechanism feels so much like not, like not seeing the whole picture. I think that like the next layer that we sort of see above, like fundraising is around, um, uh, let's say like, uh, economic or like, uh, like, uh, maybe something around, let's call it IP rights.

Um, so. You know, without making any specific promises around wizards, because I'm always like concerned about being misinterpreted as a financial product. Let me talk about this in the abstract, which is NFTs in the vision of fundraising, they also provide the opportunity for like ownership of, let's call it ip, which is to say, if you had a character, right?

If you imagine if you owned Pikachu and then every time Pikachu appeared in a game, a [00:27:00] show card game, like in all these different sort of like, uh, um, Instances, and then you were entitled to some sort of like royalty to the Pikachu character, right? You're not just owning the image there, but you actually own that character.

I think that's a whole other layer that you're not seeing, um, in stoner cats as far as I know. But then I think even from there, the, the third layer, um, which is maybe the peak and certainly something that we're going to, is this idea of like, um, The N F T is being as like self-identity, that it's like you're not only, you're not only like own that character, but like you are that character that you adopt that character or you adopt that persona for a, a as your identity.

Like not only on like, Like, I mean primarily on like Twitter and social, but like within games. And so like when you see sort of your wizard on a show, it's, it's not even seeing your wizard on a [00:28:00] show. You're seeing like yourself, like you are there in that show. And so I, I think, I dunno, these are just some ideas that are not really well formed, but, um, just, I'd be curious to see if, if anyone has any responses to that.

Like how NFTs are so much more than fundraising, but they're like, also like economic and also this sense of identity. Does that resonate with anyone? I've been fine. I've been kind of following the, uh, decentralized, uh, sovereign IDs they're coming out with on blockchain and they're minting them as like an N F T.

So it's kind of co tangent with all these avatars that are coming out with, you know, like almost the same kind of, I don't wanna say value, cuz you can't really put value on a human, but like really, you know, It's almost code tangent in a way. If we're all gonna be like minted as NFTs on the blockchain in the future, I think that the.

I also think that on the Stoner Cats thing like that felt very like that that fundraiser [00:29:00] and what the funders got in exchange for the fundraiser felt very like antithetical to web three and decentralization in my mind cuz it's like, yeah, they definitely, they had like a perfect opportunity to like offer the people who bought these NFTs, like fractional IP ownership as you said, like, In some sort of, you know, basically give these investors some sort of, um, you know, piece of the show, whether it's like, you know, 0.1% of any sort of revenue.

Just something like, you know, fractionalizing a really small part of royalties or something like that. But instead they just like, You know, just charged a stupid amount of money for these NFTs. I'm like, I'm a little biased cuz like, I didn't, I didn't like personally love the project. Um, but I think that, I mean, they caught, they caught the wave of the profile picture, you know, n f t boom.

And they had a great idea in turning it into a fundraising thing, but I think that they kind of missed the bigger picture. Like long [00:30:00] run, how these fundraisers can have the opportunity to work. Because I mean, like there's a lot of fundraisers that like recently have been coming out where they're like held like, um, there was one for this like music, N F T service, um, called Electra, where you pretty much would contribute capital and then you would get back just.

Essentially like direct, kind of like interest in what they were creating as opposed to just like a token of gratitude, essentially what it is, or like an art piece. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, yeah, I, I think that they could've, I think that they could've gone more down that route, and I definitely would've respected it a lot more if they did.

I don't know. I'd like to retouch on like this, like token or whatever I was talking about, the NFTs. Um, I don't know if you guys follow, uh, Fabian Vogue seller, but he's like the one that came out with, uh, the code for the e RRC 27, 21 and all that. And really this stuff we're in the beginning of the first steps of fusing, uh, [00:31:00] physical and digital items.

Like the N F T is the first thing that they're calling the digital assets. So, I don't know. I really see a bridge like coming, you know, in the near future with a wave of all this shit. I'd like to see some of you guys' thoughts on that?

Elf: Did you say Fidgital?

Dotta: Uh, yeah. Fu of fusion of physical and digital.

They coined the term already Fidgital, right? Yeah.

Elf: Okay, so it's like a port manto of, of physical and digital. I, I have not heard that yet. Interesting.

Dotta: Yeah. Really interesting stuff.

Elf: Hmm.

Dotta: I was, I was wondering if I could just backtrack because I wanted to just hit on, uh,

Elf: uh, uh, what is it, um, representing

Dotta: self on the, on the, uh, NFT

Elf: front.

Dotta: Um, and then the, sorry, I, I just didn't want it to get crossed over or glossed over, but I, I was just gonna say that Wizards is the first one that spoke to me

Elf: because I played [00:32:00] like Final Fantasy

Dotta: and Dragon Warrior and I played those and, you know, you get certain characters that are in the game and you, you

Elf: get 'em in your party.

And you never really like

Dotta: own those characters? Well, like the Wizards as NFTs satisfies that 110%. And that's why I've just like gone ecstatic with this project because it, it fulfills that for me. Like I get to own these crazy little wizards that, that you had in these games. You know what I mean? Like you've never had that, you know, cause you know, like, You know, a million other people own that wizard or that warrior that you're using in the game, whereas now your character only, you own it and it just like fulfills this really, really special, special thing

Elf: or you know, so anyway,

Dotta: that's it.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally

Elf: agree. Totally agree. Yeah. And Final Fantasy was a big inspiration behind this project. Um, and yeah, I mean, as, as far as games go, we, we definitely [00:33:00] are exploring, um, all possible avenues to, to make that happen so that you will be able to use the wizard you own and in some sort of RPG game, like setting.

Um,

Dotta: and hopefully a lot, a lot of settings, right? Like, I think part of it is we are working on first party games that, you know, trying to make them happen with a studio that's bigger. If those things fall through, you know, we have other options, like we've built games together before. Um, but I think even short of that, you know, everyone is looking towards the metaverse and, um, in the same way that sort of the stories of our characters.

Will appear in different bits of lore. Um, kind of the manifestation of our characters will exist in a lot of uni metaverses, right? We're talking about this airdrop that we're doing, um, that's like 2D pixelated. And in the first, in the, the first version, it's just gonna be like four sides, right? It's not even [00:34:00] actually a walk cycle.

And then from there we'll do a walk cycle. Um, we're talking this week about, um, 3d, like we're doing 3D model contests now, like. Those aren't part of a bigger collection necessarily, but like it's a pretty easy leap to imagine, uh, how you might have, um, not only like voxel versions, but even potentially 3D versions at some point in the future.

Um, that's not on our roadmap, but it's easy to imagine, um, when you see these characters in comic books and shows and movies like the, these are all different kind of. Um, manifestations in a way that you can kind of see your character, which you own

Elf: play out. Yeah. J just to pick up on what Dota just said, um, I, I said this in the last ama in our discord, but for the new people here.

Yeah. What's really fascinating about this space is we are being approached and DMed by other people who are making other metaverses that you could call [00:35:00] games, um, and they want to put wizards in those metaverses. And it's just like, like, you could call it a crossover, but, but I feel like the whole nature of like decentralized IP and decentralized content building, it, it, it, it just works.

Like IP has never, I. Really done crossovers to this extent before, like when, when, when Family Guy and The Simpsons, they do their crossover. It's like, it's like a huge one of a kind event. And I don't know, it turns out weird, but like in the N F T space, it, it just feels so natural and, and it feel, and it feels just like that's the way it's supposed to be.

Dotta: I feel, and I feel like the culture kinda have been pushing in this direction though, because like we look at record Ralph and movies like that where they already have Disney characters and all that under one umbrella. Um, Not only that, but they came out with video games where you can just keep pushing [00:36:00] the ends of the map, you know, like Minecraft and No Man Sky.

So we're definitely moving in that direction, you know? Um, just glad to see you guys being one of the first people to capitalize on it, if that's

Elf: the trajectory. Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting.

Dotta: So, Hey, James. Hey. How's it going? So, um, um, I, I think that it's useful to see, uh, NFTs as, um, more as just property, like drop the intellectual part.

Um, because intellectual property is, is, um, is when you think about an abstract.

Sorry, I don't know what just happened there. Maybe James, do you wanna try to unmute and try that again? Oh yeah. Hey, sorry about that. Um, yeah, I, I was just saying that, um, I think it's useful to, to see NFTs as, as just property instead of intellectual property. Um, because, um, [00:37:00] intellectual property is sort of this abstract thing that's.

That's, um, recognized by social coordination, sy social coordination systems, whereas NFTs are more of like an implementation of that, and especially as we see these metaverses, um, becoming more prevalent. Um, it, it's really just, it's really ultimately just property and the relationship between the owner and holder.

I think that's like the second layer of kind of the, the, the Maslow's Hierarchy of NFTs. If I was gonna map it on like yeah, property is a part of it, but I don't think it's the peak

Elf: that, that is a very interesting take though. Um, cuz yeah, it's, it's like what [00:38:00] exactly does intellectual property mean? It's.

You know, you compare it to other forms of property that are purely physical, like land and gold and goods, and intellectual property as it at its core is something that really just exists in the mind. And really the only reason we can define it as property is because you can actually back it up by the law, by like, Laws that we have put in place.

So that's how you claim that property, and then you can just, you know, leverage it for money or whatever. But that, but that's what makes it, it's property, I guess is the law itself. Um, but to like distinguish it as property and not just intellectual property. Uh, yeah, I mean that's, that's a really interesting take.

I mean, maybe that sort of bleeds into the, um, the, the fidgital, I think that was the word that one of you guys used. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, [00:39:00] yeah, that's what's cool about this whole space is it's really just like blurring the lines and tearing down all these preconceived notions about what intellectual property and property is.

Dotta: Right. And I think that can also encapsulate what, what Dota was saying about how it can also be like a form of identity. I, I think that, I mean, Things that we own are ultimately part of us. I mean, in some sense. Um, so that, I mean, that's just, that's just one way to think about it, especially as a, as these, as NFTs become more ha have more utility like in, um, you know, video games and media.

Elf: Yeah. Super interesting. I don't,

Dotta: I don't, I don't think this was your main point, but I don't think property is defined by the law.

Elf: How would you define it? No, we're getting into

Dotta: politics. No, like I think that you're right to your property is like, um, and more inherent [00:40:00] to that, but yeah, whatever. That's not the point of this conversation.

We got a couple of new speakers up here. We got s and B. We got Bear Snake. Hello. How you doing? We've also got, uh, Mr. Cluster. Hello? Hello? Hello? Um, I think I'm, I think I'm gonna head out, but thank you guys so much for doing this and I'll be here again next week. Oh, of course. Yeah. See you. See you guys. See you.

I just, I'm really interested, frankly, in terms of this concept of this ego extension of the avatar sort of being, in one sense, sort of you a person belonging to a certain community, and then the monetary value placed on the avatar sort of being somehow indicative of the community's status or value, which I think is really unusual.

So I don't know what other parallels exist in, you know, the world, but that to me is really interesting where I've been seeing people change their avatars based on the market [00:41:00] value of the project in real time as sort of a status concept. And uh, it's really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of almost like country club ownership, you know, of I belong to this community.

Yeah. Belonging. Oh, I love that. Hey, I. I almost see the value of each wizard changing over time. Say we start taking on quests and something like that, and there's someone that just, this quest really appeals to them and they wanna take over the narrative for that. Therefore, the value of that wizard changes accordingly.

And then should the quest be completed, depending on the outcome, it could change the narrative of the wizard, thus the value. So I wouldn't be tethered too much to like a stable value of the Wizard.

Elf: Oh yeah, totally agree with what you're saying. Um, you know, my dream is that like, once we start implementing tools like the Book of Lore and once we get games and Metaverses going and, and other, all these other expressions, I.[00:42:00]

Like what I want to see is like certain wizards rise up to literal, legendary status because of the things they've done. Like if they do some heroic quest in a game or if they write some sort of awesome backstory or, or poem, or. You know, it's, it what's, what, just what's so cool about our, our, our project, I feel like is, is you're in control of your wizard.

You're in control of your token. You can build it up as much as you want or, or as little as you want. Um, but like, there's gonna be certain standouts in our community that build their wizards to like legendary status. And that's gonna lift the entire community as well. I feel like, um, like this is the power of the Wizard Cult.

Like we have empowered a bunch of individual creators to. Just expand the potential of their wizard as, as, as far and wide as they can. And as they're doing that, it's bringing up [00:43:00] the whole rest of the cult. And that's, that's the power of community, that's the power of decentralization. And it's only achievable by this new technology called blockchain.

Dotta: I don't know if you guys played Ro scape, but it sounds like, um, ZEMA, if you're familiar, like the.

Elf: I have actually, sorry about that. Well,

Dotta: I'm not familiar. I'd like to hear more. Okay. You're familiar with RO scape? Yes. Essentially, essentially Zemo was, Roone scape had a leader boards for people who had, um, they had leaderboards for, for skill levels and overall level. And you would. L it was an R ppg, it was an mmo R ppg.

It's still around, people are still really active in the community, but Zemo was basically this person who was at the top of every single leaderboard and he was always setting the record for, for the highest levels [00:44:00] and all skills. And it was insane cuz it, he must have been playing 24 hours a day to get his levels that high because he was.

His skills were way higher. And this isn't a game that was like filled with hacking or anything like that. So people knew that he was genuinely putting in that work. But he would go around on, he would go into different servers and people there would, if you ever ran into Zema, it was like a myth, like, oh, like that's Zema.

And he would have 20 people following him because everybody just wanted a chance to, to like see him grind essentially.

Elf: Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. And so like, imagine if Zemo was that instead of using a character out of the box, he was using his own like character that he owned on the blockchain.

You know, a another example I like to talk about is, is, uh, Leroy Jenkins from World of Warcraft. You know, imagine if Leroy Jenkins was using a character that he actually owned, and like how much that character would be worth now. It's [00:45:00] le like, he's literally a legend. It is legendary. And so that's, that's what I wanna see with this project as, as time goes on.

Yeah, there's

Dotta: an NPC of LiRo Jenkins in World of Warcraft now. I think

Elf: that's so great.

Dotta: So if I understood you correctly, El, like you're, you're saying that the status to be tied more to an individual's accomplishment as opposed to sort of the ma monetary value of something like an avatar. Is that, did I get that right? Is that what your, your

Elf: hope is? Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, we're, we're not allowed to talk about value just because of the rules of the S e c, but

Dotta: I also just think it's not the most interesting part.

That's the floor, not at all. Exactly. Exactly. That's, I think that's the whole point, is that that bothers me most is like, why is this center stage in so many of the discussions is like the value of the dollar value of something that's innately supposed to be [00:46:00] cultural. Right. It's cultural at the end. I think it's, it's, it's just cause it's heavily coupled with NFTs, you know, it's, it's a buyer seller's market for most people.

Yeah.

Elf: Yeah. But I, but I mean, again, like, that is the point though, like of this project is we want to like, focus more on, on culture and like, like creativity and, and the, the intangibles, the things that you can't put on a spreadsheet, the things that are undefinable by something like rarity tools. That, you know, that's what what I think separates our project from a lot of others.

A lot of others. You can just easily gauge the ranking of your N F T on rarity tools by a simple number. And that's how you trade it. And we don't wanna be that simple. We don't wanna be that one-dimensional, we wanna be three-dimensional. Um, and so that's, that's kind of the point of this project. That's, uh, that's what

Dotta: I was gonna say too, is like, you can do things with wizards.

I just, I can't imagine doing it with any of the other projects. Like, I can't do anything with, with

Elf: other, uh, [00:47:00] avatars

Dotta: that I have. Like, and then, sorry, my, my kids with me. But you could take like the most like, Least quality wizard and make it the best in this project. Like I see it, it's like, it's like you have the soil in your hands, you have every, you know, you can create whatever you want with your wizard and that's what allures me.

It's like literally like the sky's the limit. You can do whatever you want with like the tiniest little wizard that has like nothing in his hands or you, I mean, it's

Elf: just like,

Dotta: it's just awesome. That's, and I see that potential and that's why I love this.

Elf: Yeah,

Dotta: the, I feel like this is the first project that I've ever really heard of that had the concept of a proof, proof of artwork. But my, I'm, I'm kind of hung up on that. I am an artist, so it appeals to me, but not everybody is a artist. So do you guys have any other ways to appeal to other people rather than just a proof of artwork concept?

For sure. Like, I mean, okay, so there's, we talk a lot [00:48:00] about the decentralized. Story building. We also, and, and, and you know, this idea we talk about like, uh, yeah, giving power back to other people to kind of create their character, to be able to allow the community to add to lore. And then even we talk, it's similar ideas like a pushing out around.

Um, saying, oh, we're gonna create avatars that exist in other people's metaverses that feels meals, feels like we're, we're like pushing out the opportunities away. I think what's important for us to, to communicate is also like our own personal like mission and sense of responsibility to provide, you know, what they call the through line.

Uh, like Elf is also writing out, um, lore. He's writing out the rules of magic in this world. He's writing out. The political systems and how some of the different factions that are involved in this world. Um, we're working with professional story writers, by which I mean people who write comic books and shows, [00:49:00] um, in addition to like day-to-day and poetry and these kinds of things to, and so while.

We recognize that not everyone can, um, like add their own artwork. We're supporting the artists within our community to do commissions for people who want them. And we're, uh, like organizing in that way. And we're also, um, running contests on like a near leaky ba basis to sort of give people who maybe aren't able to afford commission or just people can win to kind of get a free commission, which is funded by us.

So I think we're trying to make sure that we're being really inclusive, that it's not just like, I don't know, an art competition, but rather like a community coming together to tell these

Elf: stories. Yeah. And and, and like I was saying earlier, if if you wanna just sit back and, and just hold your wizard and not really do anything with it, that's totally fine.

Because hopefully if we've done our jobs right, we've empowered a thousand other creators who are doing that. And then the, the rising tide lifts all, all boats, so to speak. [00:50:00] So,

Dotta: I am, I imagine, uh, that opportunity falls into your lap. Like, how often does the hero just have something that he never asked for, just fall in his lap, you know, that completely changes the value of his life.

So I imagine that's, that's something that could happen with a wizard, you know, that, you know, just doesn't really have a story or,

Elf: yeah. Yep. Yeah. You know, and, and even if you're not an artist or a writer or a poet, You know, maybe in the game that we ha or any other metaverse we have coming, you'll have the, the, the chance to do some great deeds and become legendary in that way.

Dotta: So just again, I'm, I'm new to this. I just find this discussion fascinating. The idea of val adding value, the individual adding value. Um, so this proof of art concept that you mentioned, like, could you run me through like the basic, basic mechanics? If that's, if that's okay if I'm not taking up anybody's time here, I just No, we're happy to talk about it.

Yeah. [00:51:00] Absolutely. So, okay, so we have folks in our community who have created fan art from like, nearly, maybe literally day one. Um, and so these would be everything from taking the, uh, pixel art that we've created to animated gifts to, um, mat Zuki who's here. He, his wife, uh, who goes by the handled bread.

She's been creating artwork that's like high fidelity. You know, as good as we might put in a comic book, uh, characters, uh, based on these, uh, this artwork. And so, um, th th these folks have kind of come around and created these like, beautiful piece of art at all levels. And, um, one of the things that we realized pretty quickly is there needs to be a way that we can, um, memorialize these on chain.

For one, attach them to particular wizards for two. And then have a sense of ordering of time and then a, a network of the wizards involved. [00:52:00] And so what we've basically created is this idea of the Book of Lore. And um, with the book of Lore, it's essentially a way. That you can, um, attach NFTs to wizards, um, you know, given with those other things that we talked about.

Yeah. In, in order, that kind of thing. Um, the, maybe like getting in the nitty gritty, the idea that we think about it is like an on chain piece of, uh, Let's say, so Margaret, for example, has been writing poems. She's done probably 30 poems at this point. Um, each, in each case we've minted those as NFTs. So there's, you know, the poem itself, which is like the text and sort of the meaning of those words, which, uh, elf has also wrapped up in a parchment and then minted on open sea as a, as a, as an nft.

So this poem, and it's like representation exists as an nft, um, just sort of standalone in the blockchain. What we've written, what I wrote, I think last week, is a contract that allows you to map that, [00:53:00] um, that poem, NFT to a wizard, NFT. And so if you maybe think of that, that, that poem as like an, the artifact, right?

It's that piece of parchment that you find in a cave. Um, the, the, the, the, the, the poem is the artifact and the lore is kind of like attaching this artifact to a wizard. And so we've got the contracts done. We don't have them deployed to Pride yet. We're still testing them, um, out, and then we're building out the ui.

Um, but the idea is that there will be a page on our website, um, where every wizard has a page or many pages. You can go and you can look and see which wizards have Laura written about them, um, and then like read that lore. And we hope to like show this in a lot of different ways as we grow. I mean, it'd be fun to do like volumes that are physical.

That you could actually like have in your house. Um, but then of course they'll exist not only on our website, but within Metaverses, I'm sure. Um, but we're trying to get, get that [00:54:00] organized like right away. Imagine, talk more about the details and that's the, the

Elf: overview. Yeah. My dream is that in, in a few years, we will have this gigantic digital tome that is just a recorded history of all these wizards, all of their deeds, all of their poems, all of the derivative artwork that's been made about them.

And every wizard owner will be a chance to like fill out the lore of their wizard. Whether it's through writing or drawing or poetry or whatever. Um, you know, and a lot of you may not consider yourself to be a writer or a poet, but I, I think you might surprise yourself about what you could do. I mean, you know, even if you do like a really amateur child's drawing, or you write a really just banal story about how your wizard went to the, the grocery store and bought a carrot, like, that's your wizard.

That's really charming. That's really funny. You know, it, it doesn't always have to have like a professional. Slick quality to it. The these wizards are, are varied, and so I, I hope the book of Laura reflects that.[00:55:00]

Dotta: I wanted to just say something real fast. Fast, if that's cool. Of course. Um, yep. I know all of us on here following you guys and, and what you guys are doing are just super excited. Obviously, just the fact that we're here says a lot. Um, but I know, I'm excited about all these different expressions that you guys keep talking about, but I'd love to, I'd love to know like what.

You know, out of all the things that are being discussed, like a show or animated shorts or a game or a comic book or merch or whatever, like t-shirts and stickers and stuff. Like what? Like what people are most excited about, because I know that for me, I. It's kind of a toss up. Obviously I want, I'd love to like be rocking a wizard shirt and, and, and a hat or something, but I think that's kind of low on the totem pole.

I'd love to see a game or a show and I know that it takes a long time to develop that stuff, but like, just [00:56:00] hearing from other people, like what they would be interested in, cuz I think, um, either one of those would be such like a, a crown jewel I think for, for cre like expanding the world of these wizards.

Elf: Yeah, good question. Yeah,

Dotta: we'll open the floor for other people to, to say if you want to be a speaker and come up, you can. Or if you're in Discord, that's fine too. I, I would say personally, um, the number one thing I wanna do is just be able to interact with other people as my wizard, um, or one of my wizards, whether it be like on a, some sort of metaverse game or vr.

Uh, that's what I'm most excited about personally. I really want to, uh, be able to dungeon PVP and like hang out at a meta universal tavern with the homies and, and say, we do pvp. I really want like real world financial like, like, you know, consequences.[00:57:00]

Elf: Yep. That sounds awesome.

Dotta: Okay. Thanks for, thanks for allowing me to ask some questions. I'm, I'm really interested in the project, obviously gonna follow, uh, I'm gonna step down and let other people, uh, hopefully get up. Thank you. It's great to meet you. Yeah, I'll probably do the same. Yep. I'm, I'm also gonna head out Dota and Elf.

You guys are invaluable community members and thank you so much. This was, this was amazing. So I'll be here next week.

Elf: Awesome. Thanks. All right. Absolutely. Yeah. It's,

Dotta: it's, it's five o'clock, so I think it's time for us to wrap up, Alf.

Elf: Yep. Yep. It's been an hour. Um, so yeah, thanks for coming to the first Wizard Wednesday.

Uh, you guys we're the firsts. Uh, we will do this next Wednesday, and until next time, this has been Dota and Alf channeling out from the Quantum downs. Goodbye.