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Nick Rose Of Ethernity - NFTs Featuring Top IP And Brands, Plus Monai - Creating A Universe of AI Art, And More...
Big brand IPs never die. This is why Ethernity has decided to focus on acquiring rather than building. They are bringing you big-name brands and IPs in sports, content, collectibles, and technology to the blockchain. Join Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, & Josh Kriger as they talk to Ethernity founder and CEO, Nick Rose. Discover why building brands from scratch isn’t always the best way to start. Sometimes you could just focus on IP acquisitions, things that already have value in the real world but are untouched in the NFT space. Listen in and learn what Ethernity is doing differently. Find out how they plan to evolve in the future of the crypto scene.
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Nick Rose Of Ethernity – NFTs Featuring Top IP And Brands, Plus Monai – Creating A Universe of AI Art, And More…
This is Nick Rose of Ethernity, the platform you can find super-exclusive NFT stuff. I’m here on the show that brings you the most exclusive NFT content you can find. Keep reading. Cheers.
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Stay for this episode and find out how Ethernity went deep into the weeds of licensing before anyone else and captured some of the most hard-hitting brand IPs to share as NFTs.
Why does Nick Rose in TikTok go together like FOMO and gas?
Why up-and-coming projects like MONAI WORLD/Universe are a shining example of how creators can translate their imagination into the community? All of this and more on this episode. Enjoy. Remember, NFT LA is coming from March 28 to 31, 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 or someone you know wants to partner with us to co-create this special unforgettable experience, there are still opportunities to get involved but they are also going fast. Please reach out at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com.
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This episode features Nick Rose, CEO and Founder of the unicorn blockchain company, Ethernity.io, which specializes in producing super rare digital art and collectibles. He is also the Chief Brand Partnerships Officer for Rewild.org. That’s a foundation that protects and restores the diversity of life on Earth, with over 15,000 projects worldwide. Nick, this is cool stuff you’re up to. We’re excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you. I’m happy to be here. The Rewild and NFT stuff are cool. We can talk about whatever you want first.
We should give our readers a little more background on you. Tell us about your path to Ethernity and how you come up with the concept.
I’ve been in the blockchain for many years. I bought my first Bitcoin from Liberty back in 2011 a long time ago, out of complete lack, to be honest. Somebody told me about it. I was a 22-year-old great kid in Vegas for the first time. I was like, “I’ll take it out.” That was the first interaction I had with anything related that on the blockchain. I got into Bitcoin. I didn’t take it seriously close to 2013. By early 2014, I looked at my account and it had a pretty significant difference. I was like, “What is going on?”
I got curious about it and the technology. I got interested in it. I went all over the world to conferences, met multiple people, met Vitalik and Adrian, who’s our Vice President on Ethernity. I got very interested in blockchain applications. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. I’ve been investing in different projects, equity deals, talking deals, different DeFi applications obligations since 2017. NFT is the latest thing I got interested in and following the crypto banks launched back in 2017. I got very interested in NFTs and that’s how Ethernity came to be. The NFT technology has a lot of very fun applications. Art and collectibles are one of them.
That’s something that we all love about this. There’s a lot of fun too. There’s the technology and hard work but your hard work can pay off because you get to build cool stuff that people can utilize. It engages with all parts of culture, which we appreciate. I want to know about ANFTs. Tell me where that came about and bring us up to speed on this concept of ANFT.
As you can see in the market, a lot of these companies are focusing on brown buildings. A massive example is the Bored Ape Yacht Club. They are CryptoPunks people and companies are building brands from scratch. New brands of people are buying into and either collectibles or some of them have some financial utilities. We wanted to do that but we wanted to start differently. What nobody was doing back then was looking at IP acquisition. Everybody wanted to build their own thing.
Big Brand Ips: Back then nobody was looking at IP acquisition, everybody wanted to build their own thing. It’s better to acquire and license things that have value and transcend them into this digital environment.
In terms of strategy, instead of building our thing at the start, let’s go acquire and license things that already have value in the real world and transcend them into this digital environment. We went a year full long before we even launched on IP acquisition. When we do deals with Muhammad Ali’s estate, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe with ABG, they’re one of our very early investors. You know the Lionel Messi deal that licensed up with me on, the Shaquille O’Neal we did. We have over 300 licenses. Most of them are exclusive. Some others are not.
We did a deal with Copa América. I don’t know if you know Soccer Fund, probably some of the readers. We’re trying to do something with the World Cup. We are not sure if it’s going to happen yet. Our mission was always to go get bronze in individuals that have actual brand value and transcend them into the blockchain.
We had a fashion company and always saw this digital twin for these interchangeable patches that we did on a company called Canopy. I went to the Licensing Expo. I met with ABG and NFLPA. These were not top-of-mind ideas years ago. Once the bell went off, everyone was intrigued but also very cautious. How did you convince these big brands with prestigious IP to go with you?
Hours of hours. I ended up having a record at some point saying the same thing to every single person. I had to record my voice and play it to them. In the earlier days, even the boom, it was a nightmare to explain all this. We spoke to everyone. You can name any company we have spoken to. We grinded so hard in the first year. The hardest part was to convince them that this is real. Our built structure was very weird. It was like, “We want to try it. We will throw numbers out.” They’ll say, “How can you guys sell that? Who will buy this as a digital limiter?”
We ended up saying, “Don’t worry. They will buy it.” All of our licensing deals in this time of the earlier days looked like that. If we do that and we hit that certain amount, it renews up to three years. We’re in a very advantageous position because the market exploded. Our hard work in bed paid off because we have all this IP that we can monetize for the next couple of years. That’s nothing because these opened the doors. Companies are coming to us.
We get emails daily, “You worked with Lionel Messi, who was the biggest soccer player in the world. We want you to work with this other guy who was equally good or up and coming.” It’s easier. We still have a full-on department that does IP acquisition but we’re more focused on technology and finance sales. I love DeFi, Decentralized Finance. I’ve been working very hard on integrating DeFi into NFTs. That’s my mission. Gaming and DeFi are what I’m working towards. That’s what I spend the most time on because the IP acquisition is flowing pretty well.
You say it with ease but I have been in those conversations with these brands and it’s not easy what you’re able to do there. I could see how you manage your team. Let’s talk about the Utility Token and how it provides value to holders. You’ve been around this space for a long time. You look at this as a web three convergence, where these are all tools in the toolkit. How do you see utility fitting in with your project?
We wanted to have control of our ecosystem so we created that token that we gave to our community and that gives access to specific verticals through our ecosystem. They can get access to things you couldn’t get if you wanted to pay with your credit card. People feel that they belong to a community when they’re all incentivized to own something. We have about 40,000 different wallets that own this token. That’s only on decentralized exchanges. I don’t know about centralized exchanges. It might be way more. It gamifies the experience. If you go on our website and you create an account, you’ll see the number one most popular product. It’s Stone Farming.
What Stone Farming is, the community can get our token and they interact with a smart contract and farm stones. We named them stones because we were huge Marvel fans, all the infinity stones. When you earn those magic stones by staking our utility token, you get to redeem them within our marketplace and that’s means merits. You can buy physical merits of the merits I’m wearing from hats to T-shirts to Ethernity sweaters and all that stuff to actual NFTs.
The hardest part of any deal is to convince them that what you have is real. Click To Tweet
We have members who have been farming stones for a month and they were able to redeem the stones for actual NFTs and sell them for Eve or Erin. This is a full-on DeFi application. That’s the first phase of integrating DeFi with NFTs. You have somebody who can stake stones where they’re worth nothing because you can’t trade them peer-to-peer but it is only used to redeem them on the marketplace. The way our licensing works, let’s say we launch an NFT with a money-bucky-out rate, we’ll sell 3 or 4 NFTs on the marketplace. We’ll have one specifically for the stone holders.
This can only be accessed by the stone holders that have to stake and do this whole process. We haven’t priced this NFT. They can price it themselves. There’s a great example with the money bucky out. If somebody bought one super rare one and sold it for 7 ETH. Out of the stake on our utility token and he got to make $7 to $31 for doing completely this DeFi application within our website. That’s number one. We’re building NFT staking, renting and lending. We’ll see about the lending. I’m going to put an asterisk there because of the regulators. I don’t know what’s going to happen with all that stuff but if eventually we’re able to figure it out legal center, NFT lending is on the way.
In the first panels, NFT LA is DeFi gaming is changing the world as we know it. We have folks that we’re friends with, like the guys at decentral games where you can play poker for a living or loan out your NFT and let someone else play poker it. It sounds like you’re all in.
Unless it’s built already. The difference with us is we’ll announce the fundraiser with disclosed. I won’t say the names and who was behind it but that’s brig VCs but we have to do things by the book. I could easily go myself and launch a decentralized website where you can go and give loans to people but we don’t want to do that. We have to do everything by the book. We have legit investors and partners like ABG and others. We were even where to launch this lending protocol. It has to be fully registered and approved.
One of the coolest things to a large degree, the foundation of everything is getting those licensing deals, bringing in these amazing brands and personalities. You have tons of them that you’ve done from Dallas Cowboys to James Dean and other nostalgic figures like Bruce Lee. It’s all very exciting. Tell us more about that relationship between the IP owners and yourself. How do you collaborate? How do you bring that to life in a way that’s exciting for everyone?
I’ll be super honest with you. In the start, I was fully involved in the whole process like the step to step then it’s automated. Our team is about 100 people. We’re a pretty big team. How the whole thing works, let’s say, we’ll do a new deal with a license. They always ask us for an artistic brief, what do we want to do with them? How do we imagine that? We’ve worked in the past with some of some very notable artists from Rutgers University, who are from LA. He’s a great guy. You know Boss Logic. We did a massive thing with him. We’ve done a lot of things with him.
We’ve been working with a lot of notable artists. What do we do is we have our director who identifies what would match with his license. He’ll pick an artist. We’ll speak to the artists and see if they would like to get involved with that. At the same time, we’ll have our in-house artists who are building full-on wearables and metaphors items like the Dak Prescott jersey that you can. We launched the big pharmacy with Sandbox but now you’re going to go on Sandbox and whoever owns this jersey, you can claim the Voxer latest version and put it on your Sandbox. You can wear the Dak Prescott thing around and hang out. Within a drop, it’s not only artistic staff. There are wearables as well, which is we’re very interested in the wearable side of things.
We present them in what we want to do. They either say, “We like it,” or they don’t. If they don’t, we go with something else. If they approve the creative, we go with it. We strategize in-house and internally on what do we think is going to sell and what will have value in the long-term. That’s very important for us. Our stakeholders are not great. They are okay with 1,200 ETH rate sales, an open sea in about 2,000 ETH on our website because of everything that’s trending in the app. It’s like Bored Ape Yacht Club. Everything is new brands and BFP projects.
They don’t like when I say that but I can’t help it. Most of those products will go to zero and not Bored Ape. I own lots of them. I love the Yuga Labs. You see new brands being created every day, daily, hundreds of them. That reminds me of the ICO of 2017 easily. It’s not going to end up well for the community.
Big Brand Ips: A macro trend right now regarding NFTs is that cooler and more unique products will pop up. There are a lot of smart and creative people out there that haven’t even gotten involved in the industry yet.
We’re going to do our own thing. We’re going to keep focusing on IP acquisition. Those digital collectibles we’re selling are backed by the actual brand. Either the person is still alive or not. Bruce Lee will always be a legend. The collectibles will be sold out in minutes like his first-ever licensed authenticated collectibles on the blockchain. In my opinion, years from now, you’re looking at something valuable. That’s my opinion. No financial advice. I have to see that all the time. Boss Logic did a triple partnership with Anthony Francisco and other Marvel artists. They looked amazing. I didn’t even have time to buy all of them. I bought 1 of the 3.
We didn’t highlight this. We were talking about it a little bit before acquiring that IP. We have some folks are doing that kind of stuff lately, including Jeff and Josh, who have done it. It’s not as simple. It’s asking for it and negotiating the financial rights. It’s like people have a brand they have to protect and they need to know who they’re giving it to.
A lot of them have acquired a pretty hefty payment up front. Let’s not forget that. We took the risk to put those payments upfront. Go do a deal with Lionel Messi. He’ll tell you, “I want $2 million upfront, whereas I’m not even speaking to you.” You got to be able to do those things and we were able to do it. A lot of these investments were personal. It’s my investment without raising any money.
Did that create some sleepless nights for you, in all honesty?
In my first year, I haven’t slept and then I’ve made it like a ritual to take Sundays off but that’s it. The rest of the days are the same but Sundays are off. Sometimes other days are half. In the start, it was stressful but I used to be a poker player as well. That’s how I got into Bitcoin. I heard it from another poker player. Sometimes taking risks pay based off. I don’t take risks anymore. I take calculated risks and I fully understand the technology. I understand this potential and blockchain’s potential. I’m more than happy to go. Something that looks like a great risk for somebody else might doesn’t look like a great risk to me. Being able to sign Lionel Messi and be the company that’s going to take his collectibles out there, we made our money back in the first hour.
Risk is dependent on the person who’s taking it, what skills and resources they have. For the readers, your computer screen has got Bored Apes all over it. We’re talking about the trends and things that you’ve been in this space for a while. It’s pretty clear. From your perspective, what do you say are the macro trends going on in the NFT industry since before this boom up until what’s going to happen next? I’m sure you know exactly what’s going to happen next.
What is going to happen is we’ll have a little bit of more brand building, more Bored Apes will pop up, more good brands will pop up because there are a lot of smart people and creative people out there that haven’t even gotten involved yet. Buzzer then will pop up. In my opinion, we’ll have massive grass. Everything that didn’t do well will die. All these, not well-funded companies will die. We’ve seen it in crypto happen. We’ve seen it happen before. We’ve seen it on the internet back in the day as well. The good company survived and thrived but the companies that this hype goes away.
The same thing will happen with the NFTs. I’m always telling my friends and family, “Don’t be too heavy on owning too many NFTs, stay liquid and look for opportunities.” Look at the Bored Ape. I’m looking for opportunities with 114 ETH. During Christmas, it was 50. The ETH price was a little bit different as well but still, it needs, I don’t think in dollars anymore. I don’t care. I want to have as much. In crypto, if I have more ETH, I’m winning. I don’t care what the ETH price is. In the long-term, in my opinion, ETH will outperform any S&P and any of all that traditional investing people do. I completely stop investing in any of our other stuff.
We talked about the macro trends overall. What are your thoughts on sort of the EVM compatible chains, Phantom cart, even the non-EVM compatible chains? Let’s talk about Phantom, Cardano, Solana and Avalanche. What are you feeling?
I wish I could be fully honest. I can’t because I represent Ethernity and we have a bunch of deals in a table with a lot of them but I wish I could speak as Nick on the technologies of each one like I can break down every single one.
Have you had heard of Solano? We could talk about Polygon?
We can talk about Polygon. I love Polygon. It’s one of my investors as well. We’re using and will keep using Polygon. It’s user-friendly, fun, great guys. The whole team is great. They backed us on our equity round as well. I liked Solano as well. We might do something there as well. We’re going cross-chain. That’s a fact for Ethernal Labs. Our company that veteran company is called Ethernal Labs. We are going cross-chain, no matter what. For full disclosure, I’m an investor on Palm. They launched the Damien Hirst NFT.
Matt** is coming to NFT LA. We had them on the show.**
I’m an investor there and we’re launching another marketplace that’s called Eye Candy. It’s going to be fully art, with no licensed staff. It’s going to be a fully creative decentralized platform where any artists can go and create their art. It’s not an open seed. It’s going to be fully curated. There’s going to be an invite-only. We are launching that and it’s full-on with Palm. We use Palm as well too.
How long have you been doing that?
Since I moved here.
I sold the Navy yesterday and I bought a new one.
I’m not part of that.
I’m ready for that if that happens.
I was looking at the Apes.
What are you going to do next after the show?
Ethernity.io is our website, @EthernityChain on Twitter and @Ethernity on Instagram. We’re trying to get rid of the chain on Twitter soon. That’s where you can find all information on the company. Stay put. We have some stuff coming up. You can find me on Twitter for opinions and on Instagram for jumping mountains and stuff like that. That’s all about it.
Important Links:
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Matt Masont – Past Episode
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Fancy Bears Metaverse – Past Episode
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Twitter – Nick Rose
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Instagram – Nick Rose
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast