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Jaime Rogozinski (Wall Street Bets), Ayo & Teo, And Gutter Cat Gang Members Gutter Wang & Voxel Blaze (Blaze Games) @ dCentral Miami & Art Basel
Dive into another episode of exclusives from key NFT tech and culture leaders at DCentral Miami and Art Basel. In this episode, your hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger sit down to interview Wall Street Bets Founder Jaime Rogozinski, musical artists Ayo and Teo, and Gutter Wang and Voxel Blaze (Blaze Games and Sandbox) of the Gutter Cat Gang. They discuss exciting possibilities in the future of NFT, from finances, art, and music, to building a growing community within a decentralized platform. Continuous integration and mass adoption are bound to be inevitable. Don’t miss the chance to get ahead on what’s coming next in the space by tuning in!
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Listen to the podcast here
Jaime Rogozinski (Wall Street Bets), Ayo & Teo, And Gutter Cat Gang Members Gutter Wang & Voxel Blaze (Blaze Games) @ dCentral Miami & Art Basel
NFT curious readers, this episode is one of an incredible series we are sharing from our visit to DCentral Con Miami and Art Basel from November 30th through the first week of December 2021. Keep reading for exclusive access to conversations we had with key leaders in NFT, tech and culture. These sessions are cut right from one hot interview to the next without much chatter in between to give you the feeling of being there and reading on various key conversations. We will introduce our guests as they enter. Enjoy.
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Remember, NFT LA is coming up from March 28th to the 30th, 2022. It will be an unforgettable experience featuring the crème de la crème in the NFT space. Head on over to NFTLA.live to get your tickets as early as possible for the best pricing. If you are someone you know wants to partner with us to co-create a special unforgettable experience, there are still opportunities to get involved. They are also going fast. Please reach out at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com.
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Thanks, everybody, for joining. Jaime, it’s great to see you from Mexico City.
Thank you. My last name is Rogozinski.
The rise of retail investing, meme stocks, meme coins, DeFi, NFTs and all this stuff tie back in some way in its DNA to WallStreetBets. Let’s talk about the origin story. How did the ethos evolve?
The ethos of it mirrors that of the crypto world. It was born around the same time as Bitcoin was. It was a post-financial crisis. I created it out of frustration. I personally lost my job to the financial crisis. I was left unemployed for a while. Eventually, I got a job and decided it was a very well-paying job. I had a lot of extra disposable income. I could afford the risks because I was single. I didn’t have any kids at that time. I said, “I’m going to take the extra money and risk it. I hope to make enough money, so I don’t have to be in that situation again.”
That’s where the spirit of this thing came. At the same time, we have the crypto revolution starting with its own whole centralized system, banks, fiat currencies and government control. Let’s try and get away from that as well. Both of them started off in the same direction but on different paths to get there. I can see how now they are starting to merge.
**Tell me about the ethos, like the underlying support for the little guy and helping them to come up, rise up, take on these institutions and succeed. **
WallStreetBets starts off with this idea, “These big banks were gambling with the money that they are not supposed to gamble with.” The term casino has been used to describe Wall Street as far back as Google lets me search. I have been able to find instances in the early 1900s. They usually talk about that in a derogatory way, “These investment banks are being irresponsible at gambling.”
I decided to embrace that and say, “That’s right. Maybe they are gambling and setting up tents outside of Wall Street and occupying. It’s not going to do very much good. Perhaps if we are able to wear that on our sleeves and show that individuals, not just large institutions, are the ones that can also play with this thing sometimes irresponsibly or in an incredibly educated and intelligent manner, but also embracing a ton of risks that the people everywhere are able to participate to.”
Right around the same time, you start getting these discount brokers, eventually free like Robinhood. Now, they forced all the other brokers with no minimums and instant funding. These barriers to entry have been going down. Pretty much anyone is able to participate in the financial system and the stock market. This allows people to come together and say, “We are going to go ahead, take a risk and call Wall Street what it is, a casino, have some fun with it and hopefully make some money too.” Throughout the years, the community has figured out a lot of ways to outsmart, most notably GameStop in 2021. Prior to 2021, they had done a lot of high-profile things that were just as sophisticated.
Let’s fast forward then to the present day. We’ve got WallStreetBets DApp. Tell me about what that is, what the offering is, and where things are going.
For a little bit of context, I do a lot of speaking. Half the speaking that I do is to these investment groups. I was in Vegas at Money20/20 and Stansberry Research. I spoke at London Stock Exchange. I speak at a lot of DeFi, crypto and NFT-type conferences. When I go to these investor forums and talk about crypto, I get this response of, “Crypto, do you think Bitcoin is going to go up or down?” That’s the extent of crypto. I get frustrated like, “I made that mistake too. Crypto is not just Bitcoin, I promise. God help me if I bring up NFTs.”
When I come to this type of event and say, “I like stocks,” people look at me and say, “What is a stock? Where does it get its value from? Why would anybody pay money for one?” I get the exact same face like, “There’s no reason why stocks should exist when you have crypto.” It’s an interesting dichotomy that exists. These two worlds are incredibly powerful and big. There’s a lot of money and influence on both. WallStreetBets DApp is an effort to try and merge these two worlds together.
It’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. The power of crypto is unfathomable, more specifically, DeFi. They have created sophisticated, intelligent, smart, contract-based and trustworthy systems that can do things that normal Wall Street cannot do. It’s anything from the automated market makers to the way that have these intelligent ETFs that have variable leverage components and real sophisticated stuff. They trade 24 hours a day, which is one of the most basic things that a healthy market needs.
There are also a lot of great things in the stock market, so does crypto. The stock market is still a way for companies to grow, raise money and reinvest jobs, goods and services. It’s putting these two things together. What we are doing with the WSB DApp is we are doing several things. It’s a DAO, so people can buy the token. They become part of the governance. They can vote on making these decisions. We are tokenizing stocks. You take the stock and put it on the blockchain. We pass on the voting rights and dividends. You are participating in the stock market.
We are creating these intelligent ETFs. We are calling them ETPs. You can have these mixes. You can buy an ETP that has a little bit of Tesla and GameStop but also has a little bit of Ethereum, Solana and whatever else you want to put in there. NFTs should be on the table as well. That’s the crux of it. We are trying to stay ahead of merging these two worlds together.
You are bringing people in originally through WallStreetBets. You are bringing people in now on the blockchain and doing the same thing but at a whole other level. It seems game-changing for sure. Let’s think about the future then of DeFi and traditional finance. Where does it go from here? How do you see the next several months or years evolving?
DCentral Miami 3: These barriers to entry have been going down and down, and pretty much anyone is able to participate in the financial system and the stock market.
I don’t pretend to be smart enough of what is going to happen in a few years. This thing moves so quickly. At the time that I came here, I didn’t know how much I had already missed out by not checking Twitter. It’s clear that these two worlds are going to merge. It’s inevitable. The last speaker said, “It’s a train that’s on its way and you can’t do anything to stop it.” Both worlds are going to learn the best of practices. There are still a lot of great things on Wall Street and crypto.
I can see them starting to merge to the point where you don’t have to make that distinction of, “Do you like stocks or crypto?” If you are using stocks and/or crypto for investing purposes, YOLO or whatever, they are part of the same thing. It’s like, “I own a little bit of Bitcoin, Microsoft and whatever other types of asset that you want NFTs.” In the last panel, they took physical things and put them on the blockchain. All that stuff is fair game. I can see those two things no longer being different.
It’s the merging of traditional with DeFi and NFTs in place. There are many cool things happening. It’s amazing the influence you have had on the space so far. I’m excited for you to be here sitting next to me and talking about this with the crowd. I’m sure a lot of people may have questions for you about your history and what you are working on. We wanted to open the floor in our limited time here to some questions on the floor. We will take it from here.
Who has got questions?
Considering that a lot of the younger generation was involved in that experience, what are some things you think that potentially the project you are working on can do to educate the youth a little more on investments, including cryptocurrency and stocks? Considering that, there’s a large youth influence that’s growing on your platform essentially.
I’m not so convinced necessarily that the youth has to learn a lot because the youth is defining. If you look around what is happening in this convention center, you can see that there is a change in the air and things are different. I’m talking with a group of older individuals who are lifetime auctioneers. These guys said, “I have auctioned a total of a billion dollars worth of stuff in my entire life. I don’t understand what this NFT is, but it’s clear that I need to do something with them. Help me merge these two ideas together.”
The symbolic point of that is here you have the older, wiser and experienced people saying, “Dear young person, teach me how this works.” To some extent, it’s not as relevant as passing the knowledge of the previous guard. Stocks used to be transported on horseback across Manhattan. It will take two days and somebody has to reconcile the things. That’s why we have two-day settlements, which ended up causing the Robinhood debacle. There’s no reason to teach that to someone when crypto does instant settlement. These things are archaic and gone.
To some extent, this is here to stay. It’s a lot of power and it’s going to change. The young people have to educate the older people on the bigger brands that want to come in. On the other hand, something fundamental is going to transcend these two generations, which is, “How can I be wise about my money? That doesn’t change. How can I store the value that I do stuff to generate money, wealth or value? I want to store some of that so that I can buy bigger stuff, pay for my kids’ education or whatever it is that you want to do. I want to have these assets work for me.”
That fundamental concept is not going away. Making things easy to understand is fundamentally important. These mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations are multisyllabic complicated words that don’t mean very much or they do, but you can describe them with a meme. You take your CFA test. It’s jargon. You know these concepts already. You know them with Pepe, GIFs or whatever animated JPEGs are. That’s not difficult. You take that sophistication. When you make it fun, you can embrace the risk and whatever it might be, allow people to take control and realize, “This is not that complicated.”
I know that for most of this industry, everything is relatively new. When it comes to learning in your personal experience, what has been the best way that you have been able to grasp true and accurate information rather than false information that could be around on the internet?
There are two things that you said. Maybe you can clarify. One thing you said is learning and the other one you said is acquiring information. Which of those two things or both?
I feel like it’s both because you are learning from certain information when you are learning. Whether you are learning from accurate or false information, that appears a lot.
What I meant by information is like, “Which stock is going to go up type information? Where do you learn? What is the best way to do it?” There are some truths out there that are objective, but it’s not so clear-cut. When something is going to go up in value, you can say it’s supply and demand. Once you get done with that one explanation, if you say, “Why did the stocks or crypto go up? Why did they go back down,” it’s not going to be whatever news article you found that day. Rarely, that’s the case. More often than not, there are one million factors that are affecting whatever is happening. You can find a lot of competing truths around it.
DCentral Miami 3: It brings freedom to everybody.
What I recommend for people who want to learn whatever type of system is to find something that is a simple explanation with which you can relate to. One of those explanations will be true. It can be true at the same time as something else is true. As long as you continue down that path, you can keep digging and understand it more. Let me give you one example of what I mean by that because I realized that was abstract. When I started trading, I was like, “How do I make money? Somebody teach me. Experts, please tell me when it’s going to go up or down and how short or long.”
I had in a chat room three professional traders that were all wealthy and successful. One guy that was a technical trader drew astrology charts and said, “This thing is going to go up because it’s head and shoulders.” The other guy was a news trader. This was back in the day. He paid $20,000 a month and he had this vibrating bracelet. He would get the news wire twenty seconds before the actual news people would get it. He would run to his computer and make a trade. The third one, who was an algorithmic trader, used statistics and quantitative analysis.
I said to the three, “All of you guys are always competing with each other. Tell me whether the stock is going to go up or down. Let’s have the competition to see who is right.” One day, we decided on a Wednesday at 2:00, which is one of the Federal Reserve. On certain Wednesdays, they announce news about the interest rate that usually causes things to happen with the stocks. I said, “At 2:00, this thing is going to go on.”
The three of them, ahead of time, said, “This thing is going to go up to this value and then it’s going to drop here. I’m going to short it.” The other guy said, “You are crazy. I’m going to wait until my thing vibrates. If the interest is higher, then I’m going to buy-in. If it’s whatever, then I’m going to sell.” The third guy said, “You guys are both dumb because if you look at the volatility component of this, as far as what we are expecting in the average volume, we are going to stay within this range. I’m going to short or long it into the mean.”
Sure enough, 2:00 came across and all three of them had different trades. One of them was shorting. One of them was longing. I don’t know what the third guy was doing. All three of them made a ton of money in front of me. I was like, “I give up. I could have shorted or longed it. I don’t know what the hell is going on.” That’s when I realized you could have multiple ways or approaches, but their conviction was so real for each of them. They have learned this. They had trust in themselves and the system that they were able to do it. My recommendation for people who want to learn is to find something they are comfortable with.
We are going to do one more question.
Can you tell us anything about the metaverse that you are building? Is it going to be like what you are talking about now? Is it easier to understand the finances behind how you make money in this world?
The metaverse is still being defined. I can explain metaverse the way most of you guys will probably understand it. In this metaverse, most of the ones that I have seen are digital representations with some caveats or differences from the real world. That’s how this interpretation is taking place. It’s so early on that it’s not fair to say, “Now, you are going to have a shopping mall in the metaverse.”
You probably will because that’s the first thing that comes to our minds. There are going to be smart people who are in high school or middle school that are going to come up with something that’s well outside of this whole, “I can understand a shopping mall and video games. I can understand those two things together.” Somebody is going to come up with something crazy. I don’t know what that is and what that will turn into.
The shopping mall works. What is a metaverse? You have a place where people congregate for X number of reasons. They can interact meaningfully and you can have full-blown economies there. If you were to have a property in a metaverse with a lot of foot traffic, it’s easy to see how selling an ad on a wall where a lot of people walking by would make a lot of sense because that’s what the model can allow us to do.
If you want to build a digital store, you can order your pizzas and get them physically at your house or buy your merchandise online. I can see how people could make a living in a separate space. It’s a separate office. It’s a different location. I can understand how that’s going to be the first iteration, but I do not think that’s going to be what we are going to end up with. We are going to end up with something much more efficient, sophisticated and fun.
DCentral Miami 3: This whole NFT profile picture and Web 3 social club craze or whatever you want to call it has a way to connect people from all different types of backgrounds and all over the globe and unite them under a common banner.
I love that answer, “We don’t know what we don’t know. Don’t limit ourselves by what we do know.” You guys give it up for WallStreetBets and Edge of NFT.
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I’m doing a short interview with Ayo & Teo here in beautiful Miami. These are great guys I met at a nice yacht party. They are excited about the space like us. I wanted to get some thoughts from them. Let’s start with who you are and what got you excited about the space that got you into it.
This is Ayo & Teo. We are multi-platinum artists. We are super-viral dancers and originators on the web and beyond. We have billions of streams of music and users dancing. I’m going to keep it at that. You can look us up on all platforms. We are excited about the NFT space. I’m not going to say fully involved, but we have been watching from a distance and close at the same time. A lot of the things we have been doing are already NFTs. It’s time to capitalize on the NFT art.
You guys have been ahead of the curve in gaming too.
Thanks, guys.
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Gutter Wang, any thoughts on AR?
Thanks for having us.
Important Links:
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Gutter Wang – Twitter
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Voxel Blaze – Twitter
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Blaze Games – Twitter
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@GutterCatGang– Twitter
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Discord – Gutter Cat Gang
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iTunes – Edge of NFT