Coin Artist - NFTs and Future of Crypto Art

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JP Berwick and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. [00:00:14] The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders in the space.

[00:00:21] JP Berwick is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon [00:00:33] foreign investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:47] Welcome to the Digital Gold Podcast. This is your host JP Berwick and today I’m with Marguerite aka Coin Artist who’s a technologist, game designer and blockchain enthusiast. Her background is an art where she has served as an art director at the Lions Head Art Gallery [00:00:59] in California. She then integrated her background into the blockchain space by becoming the director of the Dark Wallet Puzzle which involved creating a viral marketing campaign for cryptocurrency as an asset in educational puzzles and gameplay.

JohnPaul: [00:01:11] Currently she serves as the CEO of Blockade Games which specializes in integrating blockchains, puzzles and games to create experience that transcend the digital world. The most recent project has been creating Neon District, a cyberpunk role-playing adventure where players strategize and fight to progress through a sci-fi dystopia while collecting [00:01:26] characters and gear backed with blockchain technology. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today, Coin Artist?

CoinArtist: [00:01:31] Hey, thank you for having me. Of course. I want to jump in.

JohnPaul: [00:01:34] My first question is how did you come up with the name Coin Artist?

CoinArtist: [00:01:37] What’s the story behind that? Oh my gosh. I wish it was a really good story. I joined Crypto Twitter January 2014 and this was in the beginning of the first type cycle, [00:01:47] not the first actually. I guess there’s been technically like four, but one of the first and needed a name and I was an artist at the time. So Coin Artist, it was.

CoinArtist: [00:01:54] It could have been con artist, could have been something more clever, but no, just scoring. Well, then is that how you got the coin ticker name for your token? Can you touch a little bit more about what that is? [00:02:06] I think that’s a really interesting idea, something that I’ve been playing around my head about how do you tokenize influencer or your personal brand? Yes. So people called me as a nickname and discord and other chats coin for short coin artist.

CoinArtist: [00:02:18] And so coin is a social creator token that I use for inspiring my community. People that want to do a quick hackathon project, but they maybe need other developers with them. We can use coin to help get their project started. [00:02:29] So with my puzzle background that I’ve had since that time 2014, developing these crypto puzzles along the way, I’ve created a pretty healthy developer ecosystem in my community. So when I launched my company later on in the years, we launched it into a vibrant community that was already there because of the creative work we were doing in the technology space.

CoinArtist: [00:02:48] And the blockchain sector. So coin was the attempt to bridge the gap between having been that organic community builder and then turned official formal company. We missed the connection because blockade games in our products. [00:03:01] The majority of it is not open source. So because of that, we missed that connection we had with the community and coin actually works to bridge the gap. People can stake with it.

CoinArtist: [00:03:09] It’s actually shards of an NFT.

JohnPaul: [00:03:11] So can you explain real quick, what is the shard of an NFT?

CoinArtist: [00:03:14] Because I’ve heard that concept, but I don’t think the audience might. NFT is ERC 721 token, Ethereum. And when you shard it, what you do is currently right now, the people that are sharding it is Niftex exchange. [00:03:26] If you’re curious about that, they will shard us 721 for you. And then the shards of it become ERC 20 tokens, which represent fractional ownership of the originating NFT. So that NFT gets locked into a contract.

CoinArtist: [00:03:38] And then the ERC 20 shards are then distributed to all the holders in whatever mechanic for in my community, we did it through farming so people could farm for shards for other means. But with the actual coin allocation, we set up a Uniswap with the shards for people to buy [00:03:51] a coin. It’s been pretty cool. There’s some fun magic tricks about shards though. Once you own all the shards, you can unlock the NFT.

CoinArtist: [00:03:58] So people then compete to own the fractions on the marketplace that Niftex has. And they go into bidding wars. And then if somebody submit to bid and nobody outbends them, then in a two week window, the NFT will be rewarded to that winner. [00:04:11] And then everybody else has aetherium that they can take their shards and go claim. So we mentioned a lot of terms. I want to make sure that listeners know NFT stands for non-fungible token. And that’s on the ERC 721.

CoinArtist: [00:04:22] Is that correct? Yep. And that is a contract type on aetherium. And then you’re sharding it and you’re giving it to all of your fans or people that you [00:04:32] know you in the community that are familiar with your brand or even if they’re not, and they’re just new in the space, they want to kind of capture some of the potential upside to the coin artist brand. And you mentioned staking or sharding.

CoinArtist: [00:04:42] And so when these individuals are putting their tokens and they’re staking them, that’s the creation of new tokens correctly. So there’s new coins being created.

JohnPaul: [00:04:50] Can you explain that process?

CoinArtist: [00:04:51] We made an NFT farm so you can stake your coin tokens. Like most people don’t think of them as shards. We just call it coin. But when you stake coin at these NFT farms, you’re then farming shards of artworks that [00:05:03] we’ve collected. So there’s different NFT farm pools that you’d see on a webpage featuring the art and the artist. And you can see basically how much we were able to acquire on chain.

CoinArtist: [00:05:13] And it’s also linked to NFT decks directly there on the website. So anyways, people will then go and stake their coin allocation and over a period of time, they will be yielding the shards in proportion to their ownership of the coin they’re staking for the shards of the NFT artwork. [00:05:26] And that happens for about a week. And then we’ll roll over and we’ll have new artworks. And we were doing three art pieces at a time. But as you know, the aetherium gas prices have become astronomical.

CoinArtist: [00:05:36] So that whole farming ecosystem was successful. And we had people doing the fun bidding wars. But since, for example, my game is on a layer two of aetherium for purposes of cheap transactions, we need to do the same with all of the coin, DeFi, ecosystems and NFTs as well. [00:05:50] And we use polygon, which is formerly known as Matic, which is our layer two solution that we’ve been working with. So polygon, Matic, a lot of things to be named there guys. Definitely check them out.

CoinArtist: [00:05:59] And the coin artist is on coinartists.io if you want to see a little bit more about the coin in the main website. Is that correct? That’s correct. [00:06:07] Sweet. So if you guys are interested in checking out the token after you listen to this conversation, that’s would be the best place to really, in my opinion, get a piece of the personal brand or the ecosystem that you’re building.

CoinArtist: [00:06:17] Is that correct? Is there any other benefits they get? I know some of these recent NFTs or some of the recent artists coming into space are offering, let’s say time with the creator. [00:06:25] Like I saw a post Malone’s doing like a beer pong game. What? Post Malone’s doing a beer pong game? Yeah, NFT beer pong.

CoinArtist: [00:06:31] There’s so much happening in this case. I cannot. Discord. It’s a token controlled access to lock channels within our neon district discord. [00:06:39] And we have in there what’s called coins Eden. So coins Eden is a syndicate within the neon district universe. Think of it like your underground mafia crew. So you’ll be with all the most hardcore players, the biggest advocates of my project for multiple

CoinArtist: [00:06:52] years in there. And basically there is where we scheme and make plans and I take the community very seriously about their feedback because these are my committed folks. So there’s different tiers that you get assigned according to the amount of coin you own. [00:07:04] And then eventually as we play more with token controlled access, we can even defund things within the game universe itself about having access to content in game you wouldn’t have otherwise or being able to acquire or get dropped certain gear that maybe is exclusive for coin holders.

CoinArtist: [00:07:18] In addition to that, I’m rolling out a cyberpunk fashion line. So for context, there’s neon district is a cyberpunk RPG. That’s our big game title. So coin is going to be creating what’s called mirror where mirror where is where you have [00:07:29] physical assets that are basically tagged with an NFT through a cold storage wallet device embedded into the clothing and it has Bluetooth. So you also have capabilities of geo caching and using augmented reality filters for your gear.

CoinArtist: [00:07:44] What’s neat about this is that this NFT is also represented in the game universe. And with mirror where you can do things like you could play almost Pokemon go style experience where you’re traversing the real world and things that happen to you in real life or in the digital world, your stats can have an impact over like let’s say you go to a location [00:08:04] that you’re supposed to for game purposes, you’re interacting with it through your AR camera, your AR clothes can also reflect back what’s happened to you. Let’s say you’re damaged. And then also when you play on the actual game in the game itself, your jacket can look

CoinArtist: [00:08:17] differently as well. It’s almost like next level ready player one because even a ready player one, it wasn’t this bridge between virtual and physical. And for those people who don’t know, we’re ready player one is a book about this guy [00:08:29] who’s in this virtual world and everyone basically lives and spends them almost their day in the virtual world. And they’re looking for the creators treasure chest and actually read something about that. Some people think bitcoins or Satoshi Nakamoto’s, I guess treasure chest of bitcoins could

CoinArtist: [00:08:41] actually be a puzzle like that, which is interesting comparison there. But talking about neon district and these NFTs or these clothing items that you guys are launching. So you’re going to get a physical piece of clothing correct with an NFT. [00:08:54] And obviously when you sell that NFT, you’re not going to be necessarily selling the clothes. So it’s only the first issuers that are get the both items together. Is that correct or do the items move together? That’s correct.

CoinArtist: [00:09:04] So when we have the store set up, we’re using Metafactory, I think it’s Metafactory.io and we’re working with them. It rolled out the clothing line. So everything’s custom crafted. [00:09:11] They’re going to be pretty sweet pieces. Like I’m really excited about having a cyberpunk lighting and cool edges custom crafted. I’m not sure if you’re not familiar with the on district, the art is just out of this world.

CoinArtist: [00:09:23] I’m so proud of our team. So yeah, basically getting to use them as clothing designers is going to be next level. So definitely check out neon district guys. And then how will you be dropping this? [00:09:32] Will it be the discord or Twitter when you open the store for the clothing? Will you guys be dropping like one item a day or just a bunch of items a month? How is that going to work? Have you thought about that?

CoinArtist: [00:09:42] Yeah, we’re starting within the next month, rolling out the first piece. It’ll probably be an auction format for buying it. And they’ll be limited editions basically. But we’ll do to support some auctions within coin that are specific to just the coin brand [00:09:53] and then also cred when you liquidity mine with coin. So that’s when you go to Uniswap and you provide Ethereum liquidity and coin, you get an LP token. And when you stake the LP token, you start yielding coin rewards and it comes with a

CoinArtist: [00:10:07] secret token called a cred, which is street cred. And it’s the only way to get that token. And we use that token for very special auctions and opportunities. And also it gives people the chance to anything we have something in a store that’s for sale. [00:10:20] If someone just makes a bid using cred, I generally just accept it. It’s kind of like the cool kids token of our game universe. And so when you’re selling all this cool stuff, NFTs, clothing with these tokens, cred and coin, do you take Ethereum and other currencies as well?

CoinArtist: [00:10:36] Or is it only cred and coin to buy the products? Yeah, we will be accepting Ethereum. But there will be items that are designated specifically also for coin and cred. So there will be a broader more general one to allow people to get in, but it will [00:10:48] have an exclusivity to coin holders as well. One question going with the coin and the cred. People are earning these tokens through different mechanisms. And when they pay for these items, you guys take those coins, then do you end up liquidating

CoinArtist: [00:11:00] on the market to obviously pay for the raw goods? Do you hold it something in your wallet?

JohnPaul: [00:11:03] How does that work after the NFT is bought for digital artists a little bit easier?

CoinArtist: [00:11:08] I guess the credit has to be paid to ever made it. But then for physical stuff, there are some raw costs there.

JohnPaul: [00:11:12] Can you talk a little bit more about what happens after people buy the NFTs from you?

CoinArtist: [00:11:15] So currently with the clothing sales, I don’t think that’s actually been designed yet with how we’re going to handle the coin we receive. I would imagine we would roll it back into things like staking rewards and back into the economy. [00:11:26] There’s a pretty large allocation there of coin that’s reserved for liquidity mining and staking purposes for the community. But then also with the game company. So we accept coin for blocking games for a neon district.

CoinArtist: [00:11:37] And actually we have quite a few developers that work for coin. So people submit monthly for hours they’ve done for us and we pay them in coin. So I could imagine those funds we receive basically through neon district. We haven’t sold any yet. [00:11:50] We’ve just been holding it. And same with the credit we’ve been receiving. I imagine we’ll be putting those funds back into our development pool. Now there’s only going to be 3.4 million coins created.

CoinArtist: [00:11:59] And you guys have around a million coins in the circulating supply. And so for people who aren’t familiar with this whole concept, you basically have your community, which you were interacting with them previously in US dollars or in Bitcoin. And then you decided that it would be better to transact in your own cryptocurrency.

JohnPaul: [00:12:15] Can you explain where that shift came from and maybe any obstacles you came across when

CoinArtist: [00:12:19] you were making that decision and making that move to your own currency for your fans almost or your community? We’re actually just getting the tip bot set up in our Discord. And I come from the space where I don’t know if you remember pink coin or when we used [00:12:33] to have tip bots on Twitter. I really love that gifting culture and the tipping culture. And I love being able to support creatives and developers and that I’m not necessarily have to work for free.

CoinArtist: [00:12:44] I think people should be allowed to be rewarded in a tipping culture style, especially when they’re contributing to the health of the community. When I did an interview with CoinDesk about the launch, I did try to clearly communicate that it’s play money. [00:12:57] Think of it like play money because we’re doing such highly experimental things with it. That if you’re not there to experiment and have fun and be a part of this really creative ecosystem, it’s probably not the place for you. I could see that people could look at it and be like, this is an NFT ecosystem.

CoinArtist: [00:13:11] I definitely want to invest in coin. But that’s not really the purpose of it. It is there to cultivate that ecosystem and by a secondary nature, it could be successful financially for its own reason. [00:13:22] But as a community, when we talk about it, we don’t have people coming into our Discord because this is not a community that was formed out of a launch. And I would agree with you on that. I think about how I view social money or these coins and currencies that you’re referring

CoinArtist: [00:13:35] to that help communities transact. It really just reduces the friction by giving everyone their own currency that they can be a part of something bigger now. And they see, I guess, the members of the community and yourself see different types [00:13:48] of returns and financial mechanisms that you wouldn’t see if you just used Bitcoin or if you just used US dollars because it is more niche. But you’re right. People shouldn’t view it as an investment and think about, oh, when’s Moon and when are

CoinArtist: [00:13:59] we going to hit the dollar per toge coin type of conversation? But more of like, how do I use this to increase the experience or even reduce friction with the experience of participating in the ecosystem and in the games that you guys have developed? We have developers that are just there already that have an idea and they want other developers [00:14:16] that are also in the community to experiment with them. When I see that kind of positive behavior happening, I will usually, if they need a help to bridge the gap of something they’re trying to launch. We had somebody working on interactive NFTs, basically just started up their own project

CoinArtist: [00:14:30] and I’m now trying to get them to go out and set up their formal business and fundraise, open their pre-seed because they’re there. And this all came from just encouragement from all around and within the community. And also when they needed a little bit of coin to build out, they did, but they didn’t [00:14:46] really need that much even. That kind of culture is really healthy. And you see it a lot in the Ethereum space, the developer ecosystem kind of like, you see it with Bitcoin and developers just helping other developers out.

CoinArtist: [00:14:57] It’ll be interesting to see that that culture gets repeated on any other network. It hasn’t yet, but Cosmos just launched today or not Cosmos. What was it? IBC? [00:15:05] Yeah, the IBC with Cosmos with IBM launching their own token. That’s going to be huge. It’s supposed to be the Internet of blockchains. But apparently today I can go spin up my own blockchain and claim a name, like blockchain name.

CoinArtist: [00:15:16] I’m not sure exactly the depth of this. I need to go check it out. And so for people who are wondering, that’s cosmos.network. Feel free to check that out and they just seem to be launched with IBM. [00:15:24] But that would be super cool if you’re just saying anyone can spin up a coin or reduce the friction. How hard was it for you to start a coin and cred? It wasn’t difficult at all.

CoinArtist: [00:15:33] I worked with NFTEX too with my original NFT. I wrote a story about my brand capturing the years of work I done and my community and how they contributed. Just really tried to tell that story with the NFT and then we sharded it. [00:15:47] And then I actually had NFT sales where each NFT gave access to a crypto puzzle. So you had to be an NFT holder to be able to call basically the prize at the end. And it was a pretty significant prize. It was 1% of the coin supply.

CoinArtist: [00:16:02] With that money though from those sales NFT sales, that’s how I seeded the Uniswap pool. Then I made a pair of the ETH and the coin. How does seeding a Uniswap pool? Oh, what does that look like? [00:16:11] Because I’ve never done that myself. Is that like you have to put up so much capital and then to get on Uniswap? Honestly, but just put up as much as you want. But it does set the price for your token.

CoinArtist: [00:16:19] So the first time I did it just messing around, it wasn’t paying attention. I just wanted to try something. And it ended up setting the price really high for just a totally random token we had made up before. [00:16:28] We tried to set a price at me since when we did that. That’s the only thing you really have to think about. It’s pretty straightforward. I don’t know if you saw that the Uniswap just made an announcement.

CoinArtist: [00:16:36] They did something like a what is it? A billion. Uniswap is growing insanely fast and there’s so much volume there. Feel free to check out Uniswap. [00:16:44] Feel free to check out the Cosmos network with IBM guys. One thing I wanted to mention, which you briefly touched on was the crypto puzzle.

JohnPaul: [00:16:51] So how did you first get started creating crypto puzzles and hiding these in your artwork?

CoinArtist: [00:16:55] And what is the feedback then from the community in these different pieces? The art community or the crypto community at large? So I just wanted to clarify real quick. Are you sure about IBM? [00:17:04] Yeah, you’re right. It’s not IBM. That’s a great, codifying thing. I might.

CoinArtist: [00:17:08] I’m much too lucky to see it properly read it like that. We’re not involved IBM. So you’re exactly right there.

JohnPaul: [00:17:13] Thanks for clarifying.

CoinArtist: [00:17:14] And also, the number that Uniswap did was 100 billion in volume as a decentralized exchange on the 15th. And that cumulative volume. Yep, that’s great. [00:17:25] So pretty awesome. Anyway, so how did I get into puzzles? I read Ready Player One. I read a book called Damon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez.

CoinArtist: [00:17:34] I read Snow Crash. And this was all in 2013 around the same time as I was. We just started mining Bitcoin actually with our gaming GPUs. I clicked immediately that Bitcoin would be like an internet money. [00:17:47] Like how you could use it and interact with it in the same way like you do with games. So basically turning the internet into a game like playground, which we’re just now starting to see with NFTs for I think they’re really bringing that to life. But anyways, I wanted to play immediately with Bitcoin as a creative tool. So it hit me when I was doing a portrait for an article on the creators of Dark Wallet with Cody Wilson and Amir Takai.

CoinArtist: [00:18:10] They were the developers for that token. So I was doing portraits for them. And as I was creating it, I realized I needed to hide something in the art piece. And I thought it should be something that leads to a private key. [00:18:20] So because a private key can be represented visually, I had been reading about Stegenography. And actually, Cicada 3301, which is a very famous alternate reality game style cryptographic treasure hunt was out. If you don’t know about it, you should definitely check it out. I just kind of like blurred all those different inspirations together and launched it on Bitcoin Talk and when the painting was complete.

CoinArtist: [00:18:40] And it became the most popular thread on Bitcoin Talk at the time. And this is a social forum. So if you can imagine, I did not expect that to happen. Being an artist, you’re always competing to galleries or show off your work, make sales, seeing that kind of reception. [00:18:56] It made me realize that I just did something. And what did I do? And I kept wanting to iterate on it, eventually started doing works, basically being contracted by different projects. Because what happened was it was such a positive experience and great community building tool that people, when they embark basically on these digital

CoinArtist: [00:19:13] quests across the internet and whatever mediums you roll out, which can be pretty much anything in it, can transcend to physical experiences as well. But there’s a bond that’s created that is so tight knit that a lot of times people don’t leave. Now you’re basically invested emotionally in this project. And you’ve also along the way, if we did our puzzle trail right, you’re learning about the technology. [00:19:33] So at the time when we did it for that first Bitcoin one, a lot of people were just getting familiar with Bitcoin, but forcing them through the puzzle and the mystery, they started trying to look at all kinds of information and learning all about just the code was I referencing different Bitcoin commits to the GitHub, like just people are just diving into everything. And so this happened again, over any project or for any Bitcoin or blockchain company that we did these treasure hunts for, you had then all of a sudden a very intelligent community, a lot of times people with skills because they needed skills in order to decipher the puzzle. And it’s actually how I found my CTO of blockade games.

CoinArtist: [00:20:10] I worked with Charlie Lee and a very famous cipherpunk to do a light coin puzzle. And it looked like the light coin brand, but as a design, it had little nodes all strung together. And you had to understand said what to unriddle it. And I watched my CTO solve it in the different public chats. [00:20:27] And from there, like, I just basically snatched them up and wanted to go. And that’s basically what happens with a lot of my puzzle designers or developers is I’ll recognize that talent. And then instead of having them put their time into these puzzles, which obviously they have passionate time, they’re willing to contribute to something, give them a different kind of puzzle. Let’s go build this really hard engineering challenge.

CoinArtist: [00:20:47] And they’re great. So I’m really proud of my team and my CTO. So for these puzzles, are you the one getting into the SegWit logic and piecing that out? How’d you start with going from here’s the code or here’s the private key, which, you know, I believe that’s what you’re saying, you’re encrypting or hiding in there. [00:21:04] And that for people who don’t know is a string of numbers and digits or numbers and letters, usually. How do you go about hiding that and kind of figuring that whole puzzle section out for then someone to come and solve? Because it’s not like you can just put in a software and it, you know, gives you a bunch of different little pieces of paper. You go hide somewhere, like digital pieces of paper.

CoinArtist: [00:21:21] Actually, we have done so many different variations of hiding information. If you’re curious about some of these tactics, like at DEF CON, there are different challenges they put out online. But like with SegWit, for example, we start with Charlie Lee saying, I want it to be the Litecoin logo. He wants to educate people about SegWit. [00:21:37] And the result is going to be this private key. So with enough information there, then we start thinking about the user experience. And where’s the easiest place that you think you would be starting? So people, even if you don’t say it in words, you have to, as a puzzle designer, walk through the logical solving process of how you would receive enough information.

CoinArtist: [00:21:55] But it can’t be too easy because then you’re going to have someone just rip apart all this work you’ve done. A lot of times it takes about a month, a matter of hours, which has happened to us before. Even if you think you have all the checks in place and you think that it is difficult enough, but not too difficult, because if it’s too difficult, it’ll not have the intention you want, which is to be a fun community building experience. Instead, you’ll have a room full of very angry people that are mad at the pacing of like making certain solves along the way. [00:22:22] And that little solve leads to the next solve, which leads to the next one. And you shouldn’t be able to skip ahead to like step four without completing the first three. So there is an art to it. And then also putting includes to let people know that they’re on the right track, because you could think you’re on step four just because like coincidences lined up to certain information and you think that’s right.

CoinArtist: [00:22:41] So we try to put little checks in place along the way so that you can almost be solving hand and paper from a visual puzzle. But if you have the right information, basically what I’m saying is there’s little code in little tips that you’re on track. It’s complicated. Well, what’s neat about the puzzles was they take about a month to develop and then usually about three months total at most to solve. [00:23:02] If we did it really right, there are certain times like my hand painted torch tarts painting, which is the most famous probably of my puzzles. It took three years for people to solve. And they were so close for a couple years, but people just kept talking themselves out of it at the end. No way could I be right until the last of both cycle, a couple of engineers, they solved it in about three months once they caught up with Bitcoin.

CoinArtist: [00:23:23] Talk. What was the guess the reward for solving that puzzle?

JohnPaul: [00:23:26] And then can you talk through that final leap to get?

CoinArtist: [00:23:28] Why did people think they weren’t able to solve it? Or what was that kind of that last puzzle? Because I really find interesting. You mentioned adding breadcrumbs to make sure people get that first early win, but you don’t want to give them too much information. [00:23:38] So that first puzzle was five Bitcoin and the peak of it was a hundred thousand dollars. And when it was actually solved, they were able to claim 50,000. And I don’t know if he sold it or not. That’s no small prize.

CoinArtist: [00:23:50] Seriously, there’s a lot to be said about you putting even your coins in there. And that’s a huge thing.

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CoinArtist: [00:24:02] By combining over seven years of mining experience, 24 seven management and directly aligned incentives, Orm’s managed mining program is the simplest way to enter the digital currency mining market. To learn more, please visit OrmCapitalCentures.com. I think it was about $300 per Bitcoin when I loaded that wallet in 2014. This group of engineers waited to solve that for three months.

JohnPaul: [00:24:26] And can you talk about how that last puzzle might took so long?

CoinArtist: [00:24:30] Was that the hardest puzzle you guys have done in your opinion or is there other ones that are even harder? I don’t know. It just depends because the challenges are just different. So skill sets range because sometimes we embed things into audio files and using different techniques, doing something by hand like that is always more challenging for people because it brings in a layer of the abstract where I didn’t render the image with a computer. [00:24:52] I took a photograph of a physical painting. And so that leaves out people like the idea that the stegenography is in the file. And if you can’t use computer software, it is harder for people. And so I’ve done a couple like that and I should make more.

CoinArtist: [00:25:06] It’s just the fact that doing them by hand actually is very time consuming. And anyways, with that puzzle actually was all self contained and there was no actual clue along the way. It really was just like us. The only clue was that the painting was inspired by Shakespeare poem and there was a line in that poem that once you figured out the private key, which was embedded into the flings on the outer border of the painting, it had that line. [00:25:29] In the beginning of the string. So you knew that you were right. So you made a mistake somewhere. You’re trying to decode it.

CoinArtist: [00:25:35] You’d be able to run different checks. Well, that sounds like an adventure, especially one that lasted for three years and that you’ve been doing continuing to do it. And obviously people trust you that the bitcoins are there and not only that they trust you, but they can be verified by the blockchain and you’re seeing in that wall. And then everyone know which I think is super cool. [00:25:51] And we’re going to see when these puzzles are found. So how big is this puzzle hunting community? I guess gotten or the coin community grown over the past couple of years since you’ve been doing this. It’s called alternate reality games and it’s a org.net.

CoinArtist: [00:26:03] And there’s other communities like Reddit has different puzzle hunting communities. I think they were bigger back in the early 2000s. Maybe when video game companies were spending a lot of money on these hidden Easter eggs. And I’m curious because I’m kind of removed from that culture at the moment. [00:26:18] I wonder what that’s like. But this puzzle community has grown. I’m sure that I feel like everybody must have stumbled upon something crypto puzzle related at some point at least now. And so it’s cool to see that.

CoinArtist: [00:26:30] It’s cool to know that I inspired a trend of a way to interact and play with crypto that people didn’t initially think of. But other people I think came even without my inspiration. I think that there have been people that also just kind of stumbled on putting two and two together in the same way. Yeah, it is this, I guess movement, as you can say, and the playing with blockchains, which I think was [00:26:51] really popular back when not the bear markets, when people are looking for things to do with these coins and the price action isn’t everything. Then people overspending time, I would say jumping into some of this, the smaller bits or the more minutiae details and niche details in the blockchain world. So I know we talked a lot about coin and credit and all of that. Is there anything else you want to touch on in that NFT space with coin and credit before we jump to more like talking about your GPU mining rig and stuff about how you got into Bitcoin around that conversation?

CoinArtist: [00:27:19] Well, just actually on the puzzle front. We used to hide stuff in the Bitcoin blockchain. And if you’re a puzzle hunter of any sort, there’s a lot of images and ASCII art and notes and things stored in the blockchain. We had a lot of fun making fake addresses, hiding things, playing with transactions, weaving, basically puzzle steps through the Bitcoin blockchain, which is so cool. [00:27:38] We could not afford to do that today. There’s some really neat pieces and there’s different sites. If you look up secrets or pictures on the blockchain, fun lore there to go catch up on. But anyways, within NFTs, I’m really excited about non-fudgeable tokens in the way that it’s leashing just a creative storm in our space.

CoinArtist: [00:27:57] And it’s a little unsettling in the way that I don’t know if we were totally ready for it yet. There’s questions we get a lot of times. I’m an artist. I want to make it NFT. [00:28:06] Where do I go? What’s the platform? There’s a lot of artists that just want to participate and get in on it because it’s a way since it’s less saturated than traditional art space. It’s a way maybe to get your brand stronger or to create a following and maybe have your first really big art sales.

CoinArtist: [00:28:23] But it’s also a little alarming because artists aren’t very completely up to speed on the technology or what they’re doing or the why. Like usually when artists choose a medium, canvas or paper, they’re making that choice because it supports their art in a way that like the entire artistic experience and what they’re trying to communicate with their artwork. And I am more excited about artists using tokens or smart contracts or what’s possible with composability and essentially that magic trick feature that we have with smart contracts and tokens as a part as an integral part of the NFT and the token in the art itself. We’re seeing generative artists using this function, having real time code, render NFTs, interactive NFTs. [00:29:04] And there’s quite a few different projects working on that, like, each block art, art blocks beyond NFT, async art. These are all projects that you should watch. The idea that you can have an NFT broken up into multiple layers and interact that a user can actually interact with an NFT and it could be a game. Do you have a list of where, you know, a lot of these websites you’re making, like a list of all of them?

CoinArtist: [00:29:27] I know that’s a hard ask, but I’m just thinking like there’s so the NFT space, as you mentioned, is so hard to keep up with because there’s so many people doing so many cool things. And it’s just like, wow, like I just looked up beyond NFT because I was the first one I could remember. And that’s a whole nother level of fractionalized NFTs. Or really, like you mentioned, being able to work with an NFT and generate them in programmatically. [00:29:48] So do you have any like, where’s your best resources? That’s the problem right there is that as a user walks in and then they’re just hit with a million different avenues of different types of platforms, different types of NFTs and what’s the right fit for you? OpenSea has a NFT Bible. It’s called the NFT Bible.

CoinArtist: [00:30:06] And if you just Google that and openSea, you’ll get it. It is a good primer, but OpenSea is just one of many platforms. And really, it’s just whatever the artist is going to be most comfortable with. OpenSea does have the ability for artists to basically mint these assets for free. [00:30:19] They’re not like actually minted on the chain yet, but it’s designed in a way where it’s bound by the blockchain. And it’s when the consumer buys it that the gas fee is made or the transaction happens and they take on the gas fee. So the artist is not taking that burden. So that means that there’s more content basically to shop through.

CoinArtist: [00:30:35] This should be that all NFTs were minted at the expense of the content creator. There’s some pros and cons to that, but we’re going to have an abundance of NFTs flying around, which is fine. It’s just a matter of that means that now we need more people doing curation. And that question opens up, do we want high-end fine art curators to be telling us what is good NFT art or do we want to centralize dows and communities or some sort of voting mechanism for us to have like a popularity contest? [00:31:02] Talking about curating and who is going to be picking these NFTs. Have you heard of their community? Whale, the whale.me guy.

JohnPaul: [00:31:08] Can you talk a little bit more about what that is and then what they’re doing?

CoinArtist: [00:31:12] And if you see that fitting into that curation conversation that you mentioned? Yeah, they have a vault and they collect artwork. I know the whale shark community and I interact with them, but I haven’t participated directly in the community. So I can’t speak as an authority on that, but I do know they have a vault. [00:31:27] They accumulate high-end art pieces. And I know that their community makes quite a bit of money participating in whale shark does have their own token. I found this actually this happened to me. I needed to buy some assets for crypto voxels, some wireables.

CoinArtist: [00:31:41] And when I went to go shopping on OpenSea for them, everything was listed in whale shark or the whale token. And I didn’t own any. So I was kind of like, damn it, I’m gonna have to go buy whale to get these cool assets. So it works. [00:31:54] They do buy good art and I was definitely finding myself wanting to go pick up some whale for that purpose. That money goes back into them accumulating more artwork, but he has one of the founders, if not the only founder. He is also launching like an esports fashion line. Yeah, so I don’t know if there’s two worlds will collide.

CoinArtist: [00:32:10] I imagine they will. I bet he’s thinking like I am with mirror where I’m thinking that sort of mentality and mirror with mentality that he is probably in the same mindset. And the whole whale community or whale platform is like you said, they’re locking these NFTs in a vault. And then are they just holding that and waiting for those enough to sell them? [00:32:29] Because that’s one of the things I’ve had concerns about are just really confusion. It’s like, OK, as NFT start going up crazy and value, is it going to become so oversaturated when it’s just there’s not really any. I guess there is a physical aspect of the NFTs and it does create take time to make them. But at the same time, it’s very low cost to distribute and keep on creating new NFTs.

CoinArtist: [00:32:48] And we see massive pack drops.

JohnPaul: [00:32:50] So can you talk a little bit more about where you would see the price and kind of this overall space of NFTs going in the next couple of years?

CoinArtist: [00:32:57] Obviously no one has a silver ball, but I’m happy. We’d love to hear your thoughts on that. We’re going to see there’s going to be more demand for utility game assets as we scale on layer two networks assets that actually exist in other universes and or interoperable across a couple of different universes. NFTs are really, I would think of them as toys for the internet, essentially. [00:33:18] And the more that they’re going to be able to play with the toys, the more valuable they’re going to be. There is going to be this argument that what about artwork, for example, hadn’t it can be displayed in your multiverse apartment, right? Sure, that’s probably going to happen too. But I think something that has, for example, stat something that can be upgraded or improved or where you can basically drive additional value to it.

CoinArtist: [00:33:40] So let’s say you buy something and that’s a dud value wise. You can’t sell it for the life of you on a marketplace. You don’t really care if you have it anymore. A user that has the ability to invest in the actual NFT themselves and create additional value around it, that NFT is going to be more interesting, I think, to people. [00:33:58] There’s going to be a lot of people I think that collect duds in this market thinking that they’re going to be valuable at some point. And that’s just look at counterparty, the layer that was on Bitcoin. I have a ton of counterparty assets that are absolutely worthless. I don’t know about rare pipes today or any other of those types of NFTs that were on counterparty, but it’s not something that people are thinking about right now.

CoinArtist: [00:34:17] They’re thinking about this trend, but really what we should be thinking about. What is it that we can do with the technology? Think of the energy as a technology. As a technology, and I really like looking at it in that view because I agree with you being in the altcoin space and being in the rise of 2013, 2017, we saw massive projects where those coins. [00:34:33] Now, if you look back, of course, they haven’t died because they’re blockchains, but they’ve been delisted. No one’s really supporting them. The value of those coins were dumped on by founders. And so sometimes some of those coins don’t really have staying power unlike NFTs.

CoinArtist: [00:34:46] Those are those were fungible tokens on like NFTs that are non fungible, which means they’re all unique. But you mentioned adding assets to an NFT.

JohnPaul: [00:34:53] Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CoinArtist: [00:34:54] Because I have been really interested in a project called charge.5, which is about charging an asset or kind of like you’re having your sword and you can start staking ERC 20 tokens on that sword to give it some more power. But what do you what did you mean by that? And can you touch a little bit more on that? Yeah, I’ve been following that project too and that’s neat. [00:35:10] But I was talking more about. So, for example, neon district, the way it works is you have different assets that you compose together to create your characters and then your characters you have for that create your party. Everything you’re issued at the beginning is basically level zero and it’s only through your gameplay and development and your leveling and you are selecting in a very specific way how you want to level every time level has a option to pick new attributes to the assets and everything combined and how it plays together is a formula for that player and this team will play better in certain situations than a different team that they have assembled.

CoinArtist: [00:35:48] And as you level, you are manicuring that experience of how they’re going to play. And so it’s very strategy heavy. It’s like a RPG Final Fantasy classic with a backbone, like magic, the gathering as far as how wide the game design is. And that’s important for the blockchain asset because it doesn’t matter how powerful, let’s say, something is necessarily as much as it matters how skilled the player is knowing when to play the right or make the right move or execute the right character at specific times, knowing your deck really, really well. [00:36:17] When I talk about that leveling or bringing new value, it’s the opportunity for the player to use skill and develop an asset, which mirrors their skill and then I’m also executing with skill with this skilled asset.

JohnPaul: [00:36:29] That part of neon district, can you explain real quick, high level, what the gameplay looks like?

CoinArtist: [00:36:33] So you mentioned swapping is like a card game. We were playing cards down or is it like a 3D world? Yeah, and district is 2D. It’s very painterly. And the way it’s designed is that a character, when you level, you see a display of cards that you’re picking. [00:36:47] You have three and you pick one. And when you’re playing the actual game and the turn based gameplay, and when it’s every character’s turn, there’s a deck that’s assigned to that character. And you get a random draw from a 3 cards for that character’s turn. And you’ll be playing with those 3 cards for anyone that’s played Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone might be familiar with some of that mechanic.

CoinArtist: [00:37:08] That was a lot on entities. And I want to make sure we get the chance to real quick talk about this, the mining aspect of this, of the Ethereum network. You mentioned you had a GPU mining rig.

JohnPaul: [00:37:18] Can you talk a little more about maybe when you set that up and what got you into deciding to mine crypto currencies? You can try.

CoinArtist: [00:37:25] I mean, script coins had just taken off. And we were just on the edge of being able to mine Bitcoin. It was basically right when a six were coming out. So I also had taken some of those early mining rewards and funnel them into if you’re familiar with butterfly labs. [00:37:40] I am. I actually bought a jalapeno miner back in the day. I think we were both in that conversation with script mining of Litecoin and all that. So it’s crazy story. We had bought these more expensive GPUs one for gaming because we had multiple monitors.

CoinArtist: [00:37:53] We were running with our graphics cards, but also because we would want to mine Bitcoin too. But then as those became outdated, this was a really natural progression. If you think about it, the fact that then asics came and then everybody had these GPUs and what are we going to do with them? Well, of course, we should do some script coin mining. [00:38:09] So that was really neat. And at that first, I don’t know if you remember, cryptocurrency, but everybody mining their different script coins. And then that you have people like crypto, Cobain, who’s still around today. And he tweeted at you last week, I believe.

CoinArtist: [00:38:21] We know each other. I don’t want to say friends about that. We know each other just from these different this long timeline, right? But these big influencers on Twitter, even back in 2014, making like basically token calls and people that have been mining that token, it was time to go and sell it on the marketplace. [00:38:36] And so actually, I’d say my last mining adventure, though, was the Zcash launch. So I actually invested in an entire mining setup at a facility in Washington and was ready for that launch. And that was an interesting launch. Did you participate in that one?

CoinArtist: [00:38:52] I did not. So when you’re mining, getting on the network launches, you want to get on the network as fast as possible. And the launch was a little difficult that first day, but made up for it in other ways, I suppose. But these are things I cannot disclose. [00:39:05] Mining of the cryptocurrency, especially what was that one mean coin, not mean coin that came out that was supposed to be a handshake algorithm. I don’t forget the name of it, but there’s all these coins when they’re launching. It’s everyone tries to jump in. I actually remember when we were mining Ethereum, they just launched the Ethereum network.

CoinArtist: [00:39:19] I started mining Ethereum at like $3 a piece and we had 300 graphics cards. At that point, we’re mining 500 Ethereum a day, but it’s crazy to see how much the mining space has changed from at home users, butterfly labs, two weeks shipping to now the real industry we have today and how much it’s progressed. Are you still actively mining any with those GPUs? No, I would say the last time I was mining at home was when I was mining Decred and Ethereum doing dual mining. [00:39:44] That was pretty cool, but that was about it, I think. I was actually as you were talking, I was like, I wonder if there’s anything in the mine right now. I haven’t been really paying attention to mining, but is that it still going? Is that a culture? Yeah, this definitely a lot of mining happening.

CoinArtist: [00:39:59] The mining space has matured a lot in the Bitcoin side when it comes to the other cryptocurrencies. I mean, not slowing down, but it’s definitely you can’t get your hands on any new graphics cards. There’s a lot of new software coming out. So that space is still growing. [00:40:13] I wouldn’t say as rapidly as the NFT space because it is hardware and it takes a little bit longer, but it is growing massively. That’s exciting. So puzzles that use, for example, mining are so interesting. I always wanted to do a puzzle that required people to roll back the blockchain, throw some mining power and reverse the 51% attack.

CoinArtist: [00:40:32] But also, when you open up a block, you can unlock information there that you didn’t know was there before. But you can only do it when you reach the block. Yeah, there’s some really cool tricks that would be neat if someone were to do. But the whole idea there was even though if you created the challenge, would people do it? [00:40:48] Exactly. And I think the mining, it does take a lot of niche knowledge. And then also you have to have the hard work to actually to do that when you’re talking about turning back a chain. Yeah, that’s a whole nother conversation when it comes to mining.

CoinArtist: [00:41:01] So you’re not doing any more mining, but you got into it back in the day and you’ve had this experience. When you’re working with NFTs, I noticed there’s the community, as you mentioned, there’s so many things to check out. Did you see the Logan Paul NFT packs that he launched? And do you have any thoughts on those? [00:41:16] This one’s really familiar. I think it might have seen this pop over my feed, but I didn’t. Yeah, so Logan Paul launched some NFTs with a company called Bondly and they are basically almost like Pokemon packs with his name on it. And he was selling them for close to $5,000, $10,000 a piece, I believe, starting off the bids.

CoinArtist: [00:41:34] So he didn’t sell all of them off. I think he set his price way too high and went to the route of the camel and do a limited 5,000 of them or a thousand of them at a higher price instead of a million tokens at a dollar. That’s basically all I know about the project. Do you have any preference or would you go back and do anything differently when creating coin? [00:41:50] As you mentioned, Ethereum fees are pretty expensive. So would you change anything going forward and how you would price your tokens there? No, actually, in regards to pricing to a coin, it’s been awesome. Like we started, I think, at 10 cents a coin and the community just picked it up and people hold it.

CoinArtist: [00:42:06] It’s funny because it moves up with Ethereum because everyone who hasn’t basically holds it. So I’ve never seen a token move in conjunction when the tokens are moving together. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? [00:42:17] Do you know how many people dump their altcoins? I actually just bought some coin and about 500 of it.

JohnPaul: [00:42:21] So I’m excited to be a holder now while we’re on the podcast.

CoinArtist: [00:42:24] I’m like, I need to buy some. I don’t let you down. Yeah, I think last I looked, it was like $1.30. But it was so hilarious because crypto covane, when he did that tweet with me, [00:42:34] my girlfriend, we were in Miami. We were just bantering for fun on Twitter and just trolling. And I looked at coin and it’s $2. It had gone from $0.80 to $2.

CoinArtist: [00:42:43] And I felt like I got trolled. People are getting excited about the NFT space and also just us being OGs in this space. I’m not going anywhere. My token is not going anywhere. [00:42:51] And that’s pretty neat to see that response coming in with this new market. It’s interesting to stay relevant as a project. So it’s cool to still feel like people care, even though it’s not like newly launching. There was no big hype news.

CoinArtist: [00:43:04] We do consider you experimental things with it. It will be a fun coin. But yeah, so that’s me. That is huge news, especially with, as you mentioned, the media attention [00:43:13] that just that Twitter storm over the past few weeks, you’ve been able to experience. And do you see that it’s hard to get people we engaged in the community? Or do you think you guys are building enough utility? I bet that’s a question you get a lot of.

CoinArtist: [00:43:24] What is the utility with this coin other than the community? So you talk a little bit more on that and maybe ideas you have in the future of how to continue to reengage the coin community? Yeah. Well, I think because Neon District is an ongoing project itself [00:43:37] and you get a discount when you buy with coin. And then it’s going to have utility within that Neon District universe. And coins eat in itself has presence in the game. We have, I can’t talk about it yet, but there are some things planned

CoinArtist: [00:43:48] with partners in ways that they become immersed in the universe that coins, you know, and is also going to have the same sort of place. So like, it’s pretty neat to be able to flex all of the development power behind District and NFTs and utility there because that’s two and a half years [00:44:05] of incredible work we’ve done and content that’s lined up to roll out over this next year already done. So coin is basically that fringe experimental currency on the side that we all just use for interacting with each other

CoinArtist: [00:44:17] and building out experimental projects. And even if we do something we really like, for example, this fashion line idea, it can get adopted into the universe itself. I hope when other syndicates join the universe that they have their own token. [00:44:30] We have a community manager who’s just kicking butt basically on all the leaderboards and he has a following, like his own fan following because of the game now. And he’s also one of our best puzzle solvers. And so if he establishes a syndicate within the universe,

CoinArtist: [00:44:44] he gets to drive story and narrative and even help work with our designers and come up with his own assets and people that are part of his syndicate or opt into it, they get identified when you’re playing them. You’ll in different various ways, be it you can see underneath, [00:44:59] but also on things that their assets, their characters are wearing. And at different times we can come up with all kinds of syndicate wars in which different syndicates can have bonuses at different times for different challenges across the community.

CoinArtist: [00:45:10] And just like, Neon District is such a playground that when I think about the value of coin and what is the ecosystem, it’s going to be participating in. This is, yeah, it’s a long tail game. We’re talking, I don’t like, I don’t see this vision shaking off any time soon. [00:45:25] We were early with NFTs, we were early and ambitious with what we wanted to do. So Neon District is free to play, for example. There’s no gas fees for you as a user and you’re able to develop and play with NFTs for the first time anywhere on any web browser

CoinArtist: [00:45:38] and then convert that when if you want to, either into your first cryptocurrency or even be able to swap peer to peer with players, if you’re trying to design for a different style of team or you want a certain aesthetic. [00:45:49] So all those pieces together, it was really ambitious. And the fact that we are now public alpha, just it’s not even been a month yet, we’re just really getting going. I definitely agree with you on the fact that you guys have been putting a lot of time

CoinArtist: [00:46:01] into the community and building out the infrastructure, the game. It seems like something I need to get on and start playing around with more. So with these syndicates, are you saying this is basically a group of teams that are a group of people, like almost like a sports team [00:46:15] and then they’re fighting other syndicates in the Neon District? Yeah, so you can align with people and work against other parties that you think are getting too powerful. And that was designed so that that could happen and then it is happening.

CoinArtist: [00:46:27] It’s happening organically. And it’s just interesting how the personalities of the people with the different characters and then how people align and how it ends up being represented visually across the game. [00:46:36] And so right now Neon Pete says what’s live and it’s the free to play onboarding that has its passive gameplay, but the actual live real time gameplay is coming and the campaign play. So the content’s all there, but it’s actually just the rolling out of all of the pieces

CoinArtist: [00:46:52] and the UI and the UX all together at the same time and like easing everybody into this whole massive pipeline and updating as needed. So it’s just, it’s just a process now. And how many people are working on Neon District or the coin ecosystem? [00:47:06] Ooh, so Neon District and coin ecosystem, I would say about 15, probably dedicated just to and maybe even more than that actually because we have some really active community. But with just Neon District, we range to about 10,

CoinArtist: [00:47:20] but we’re actually hiring right now. We’re looking for engineers, operations and trying to scale out the company. And have you guys taken outside funding or has this mainly been funded by you and any of the other founders? [00:47:30] It’s funded by me, but also we have raised something like 2.2 million in total funding to date and we’re set right now with our traction and numbers to be opening another round here in the new future. Awesome. Well, that’s super exciting.

JohnPaul: [00:47:42] Thanks again for coming on CoinArtists.

CoinArtist: [00:47:44] Where’s the best place for people to connect with you online and what social media platform would you prefer? Yeah, I’m on Twitter, so coin underscore artist and then Neon District is Neon District RPG, District site, [00:47:54] is Neon District I0, and I’m happy. I get slammed with DMs and my telegram is basically rest in peace. If you want to talk to me the best chance of me finding you or seeing you is coming to our Discord and tagging me in our Discord on a general chat channel.

CoinArtist: [00:48:10] And if I don’t see it, it will be brought to my attention or moderator will be able to talk to you. So yeah, absolutely. Come check out our stuff, give us feedback, participate and come play. [00:48:19] And honestly, I feel like people that are going to find the value in this space and NFTs. The best way to learn is to play yourself, create yourself, participate and what’s interesting to you, you’ll be able to identify quicker,

CoinArtist: [00:48:32] what is probably going to be interesting to other people. And that is, in my opinion, the best way to find the next hot thing, if that’s of interest.

JohnPaul: [00:48:39] Thanks again for the time.

CoinArtist: [00:48:40] And if you guys are looking for the next hot thing in the NFT space, there you go. Look at CoinArtists on Twitter and Discord.

[00:48:47] I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Digital Gold. Be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops. Don’t forget to leave us a five-star review to support our journey

CoinArtist: [00:48:57] to become the number one crypto podcast. Thanks so much for listening.

[00:49:00] And until next time, mine on.