Anna (00:00:05):
Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

Anna (00:00:27):
This week Tarun and I chat with Andy Chorlian. We talk about his journey starting as a MakerDAO dev all the way to NBA Top Shot star and how this has influenced his new project Fractional and how it connects to the PleasrDAO, a DAO that has recently outbid the competition and bought the Edward Snowden NFT. This episode really explores the connection between NFTs, DAOs and DeFi and how these overlaps could enable some truly futuristic ways to allocate value and create value. Now, before we start in, I want to remind you to check out the ZK Jobs board that I mentioned last week. I update this every month to coincide with the ZK Jobs Fair. I also recommend you sign up for the Zero Knowledge announcement newsletter to stay up to date about all the activity over here in the zero knowledge community, and it's hard to keep track. Do join our telegram group to join the conversation. And I've also added the links to both the ZK Jobs board and the Zero Knowledge announcement newsletter in the show notes.

Anna (00:01:25):
I now want to take a moment to thank this week sponsor and a zk-focused project that I'm proud to be advising on - Mina. Mina is the world's lightest blockchain powered by participants. It is a layer one protocol creating a private gateway between the real world and crypto. The entire chain is about 22 kilobytes, thanks to zk-SNARKs. The layer one protocol replaces the traditional blockchain with the zero knowledge proof, ensuring a super light and constant-size chain. This allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network. The entire chain is and will always be around 22 kilobytes, even as it scales, and SNARK-powerd dApps, called Snapps, allow access to verified real-world data from any website for on-chain use. The ecosystem is growing fast and Mina's mainnet has just gone live, which offers users a platform to build a private gateway between the real-world and crypto. To find out more, visit Minaprotocol.com. I've added the link in the show notes. So thank you again, Mina. Now here is the conversation between Andy, Tarun and myself.

Anna (00:02:34):
Today Tarun and I chat with Andy Chorlian from the Fractional project, and he's also part of something called PleasrDAO. So welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy (00:02:42):
Hey, thanks for having me, excited to be here.

Anna (00:02:44):
So maybe just start off, tell us a little bit about what Fractional is and also what PleasrDAO is.

Andy (00:02:50):
Yeah, for sure. So Fractional is a new project that I started working on a few months ago and it's focused around fractionalization of NFTs, obviously NFTs have captured a lot of the crypto, Twitter sphere and general, like mind share, over the last couple of months. And I got pretty interested in them over the last half of a year or so, or now even a little longer than that. And so Fractional, as a protocol, is going to allow you to take an NFT or a basket of NFTs and lock them up into what we're calling "a vault" and then create a fractional ownership tokens of that NFT, that are just normal ERC-20 tokens. So that's Fractional. And then PleasrDAO is kind of this new, strange DAO that popped up back when Pplpleasr released her "x*y=k" NFT on Foundation. And I was actually part of the initial little group chat to form PleasrDAO. One of my friends, James, messaged myself and a couple of the people and said, "Hey, this thing is really cool. Do you want to try to buy this?" And we were like, "Yeah, sure. Let's do it". And we didn't really know it was going to turn into what it has turned into. There were a lot more people who were interested than we expected, and now it's kind of formed into a bit of a bigger collective of generally DeFi people who are interested in art and NFTs and DeFi stuff.

Anna (00:04:23):
And Tarun, are you part of this too?

Tarun (00:04:25):
I am. I was also in this "genesis" group of people, but I regret not, as they say, a thing anymore.

Andy (00:04:33):
Me too.

Anna (00:04:35):
I want to go back to this later on in the episode. Right now I want to hear a little bit about your background. Let's go back pre-crypto, where were you at? And what led you to here?

Andy (00:04:47):
Yeah, sure. So I went to school for computer engineering and I didn't really know it — so, at the time I thought I was interested in hardware, I wasn't interested in hardware. I learned that.

Anna (00:05:03):
That's good.

Andy (00:05:03):
Yeah, that's good. And so then I found myself at a pretty generic software company, it was owned by Fidelity, called eMoney, doing general back end work, working in C#. I was there for around a year and this was from 2016 to like 2017 summer. And in the early spring that year, I had started to get interested in crypto and this all stemmed from wanting to gamble on an offshore sports gambling website and not wanting to give them my credit card. And so I downloaded Coinbase and started, it was like, "Oh, what are these things that I'm buying?" And I just got totally captivated by it, I just realized that this was something that I was extremely interested in and I thought it was just so, so cool. And so then I was lucky enough in August of 2017 to get a job at a fintech startup in New York, that was tangentially interested in crypto. And then I was interested in crypto. And so I kind of fell into a position where I got to learn Solidity on the job and we made an ERC-20 token and did all that fun stuff. And so I worked there for about a year. For a while I was the only crypto person on the team. And then we eventually brought on Noah Zinsmeister from Uniswap, prior to him being at Uniswap. And I worked with him for a bit. And then around the same time, this was towards the end of 2018, I had left to go to Maker and I spent two years-ish at Maker on the smart contracts team, doing a little bit of everything that we needed to do for the smart contracts team. And so for a while, that was prepping for MCD's release and a lot of the formal verification and testing around that. When I joined a lot of the code was already completed. And then a lot of the stuff that came after that with Black Thursday and working on the new Liquidation Systems, which actually I think just released today for LINK, which is exciting.

Anna (00:06:59):
Wait, what's Black Thursday?

Andy (00:07:01):
So... Oh, man.

Tarun (00:07:03):
This is like the biggest day in DeFi, it's like the big crash. We've talked about it on the show before. Or maybe not.

Anna (00:07:16):
Really?

Tarun (00:07:16):
Yes.

Anna (00:07:19):
Damn it!

Tarun (00:07:19):
It's March 12th, 2020.

Andy (00:07:21):
Yeah. So this was right as COVID was kind of really coming into its own, which is a weird thing to say about it.

Anna (00:07:29):
Was it just the day that everything crashed?

Andy (00:07:31):
Yeah.

Anna (00:07:31):
Oh, wait, is this the day that everything crashed and Maker's, what do they call it, CDPs all got called?

Andy (00:07:39):
Yeah. So I was at the time... My girlfriend Allie was working and living in London, and so I was visiting her in London. And so the crash happened pretty early in the morning, US time. And so I was sitting at a coffee shop, eating some lunch and just on my laptop. And all of a sudden I see all these messages come in, like, "Are you guys seeing what's happening? What's going on?" And I was like, "Oh crap!", then I grabbed all my stuff and left the coffee shop and went back to her apartment. And essentially what happened was crypto and kind of everything flash crashed. And what we learned was the Maker Liquidation Systems were not totally prepared for a massive flash crash, but also there was a lot of other stuff going on. There was difficulty getting transactions through to Maker. And I mean, some people even still think there could have been some type of minor manipulation there. I didn't spend enough time to really have strong feelings about that, but essentially what ended up happening is when CDPs are liquidated, they basically go up for auction and someone was putting up bids that were extremely low, 1 Gwei bids, and the bid length was only 10 minutes. And so after 10 minutes, if no one had outbid you, you would win. And people just weren't prepared for this and were having trouble getting transactions through. And so the gas fees were insanely high. And so for example, the Maker's Keeper network code had a hard cap on gas fees, like 400 Gwei. And I think it was more on like 500 range. So none of the bots would work and they couldn't get transactions through. And so a lot of CDPs were liquidated for basically nothing. And so that was Black Thursday.

Anna (00:09:13):
And you were at Maker at that time?

Andy (00:09:15):
Yeah, the rest of my time in London I basically spent working.

Tarun (00:09:20):
Wait, can we get a little color on what it's like being a developer in the war room on Black Thursday? Cause like that's probably one of the... Since 2017, certainly the craziest day. Of course, prior to 2017, there was Candy [?] stopped trading and things like that. But that was the craziest day, you're working at the developer that made the thing that was losing the most money and have the most at stake. What was it like just stress-wise and... That's different than being on call at a tech company. This is potentially hundreds of millions of dollars are about to be liquidated.

Andy (00:09:58):
Well, yeah, so it was really stressful. I think one of the hardest parts too was, because it's all smart contracts and kind of code is law, we felt a little bit helpless in a lot of things. And so part of it was, once we realized what was happening, Oracles would update every hour. And so every hour you would have a wave of liquidations. And so most of those liquidations happened over a period of a couple of hours. And so then it was trying to figure out... The first couple of waves, we just didn't really have time to appropriately respond or figure anything out. And then relatively quickly after that, some people spun up just some internal code so that we, as employees, could bid on these things. Or anyone who had money and wanted to try to bid on these CDPs that were being liquidated, could try to come in and just help. I was literally on Ether scan trying to put through bids on different CDPs that were being liquidated. And that was hard. You couldn't just push a code through because Maker governance has a whole governance process and all this, it was hard. There was a lot of internal discussion about calling emergency shutdown and what that would do. I think that was really where the stress came in. There was a group of people who felt that we should call and shut down the system, and a group of people who were like, "No, that's not the right way to handle this situation". And I think, in the end, the right decision was made not to shut everything down, but it was very stressful. And then a lot of what came after that, after the first couple of hours, was just an insane amount of calls trying to figure out what do we do, how how do we rectify this, how do we calculate what the damage done actually was? And what is our process to move forward from this?

Anna (00:11:37):
Wow. But wait, they could have stopped it? When you say "shut it down", that's surprising to me that that was even an option.

Andy (00:11:44):
Well, so MakerDAO, the protocol has an emergency shutdown, where if you burn 50,000 MKR, it basically just kind of seizes the protocol, and there's a whole unwinding that comes along with that and stuff. But so basically the conversation was: "Is the fallout that's going to come from calling emergency shutdown and you'd basically have to re-bootstrap DAI. You'd have to start over again. Versus the fallout of people losing money from CDPs, getting liquidated for next to nothing". Kind of weighing those pros and cons and figuring that out.

Tarun (00:12:20):
And for the record, that is probably one of the most extreme engineering situations, I think, anyone has lived in crypto that day, not just for Maker, but like BitMEX went down. I mean, that led to BitMEX's collapse in a lot of ways, was how much money people lost that day due to system failing. So the craziest stress test, as all of the engineering in this industry, took place on one day, during this crazy crash. And it's important not to understate that, because most networks, especially new networks, have never even come close to dealing with 50% of their network getting liquidated all at once.

Anna (00:13:02):
In like 12 hours or something.

Tarun (00:13:04):
One hour for BitMEX. BitMEX was a crazy, thing when that happened.

Andy (00:13:10):
Yeah. That is crazy to think about. In my mind, I have a hard time imagining what could possibly happen, that could be a more catastrophic market event, then that, for a system like Maker, at least. And if they were able to withstand that and continue to go through, it would have to be a bug in the code that actually broke the system at this point for it to collapse.

Tarun (00:13:33):
After the most calamitous collapse in this industry, then we have this crazy insane bull market. And part of the bull market was really driven by yield farming and these protocols giving out tokens to users directly, which is a very different model than proof of stake networks, where you sell the tokens or distribute tokens upfront, instead of distributing them to users per se, it's a different go-to-market model. And in the process you got involved at Yearn, pretty heavily. So I think maybe walk us through how your degen habits somehow made it on chain.

Andy (00:14:13):
Yeah. So I was actually, all things considered, I would say I was a tiny bit late to DeFi summer for a bit. So when YFI came out and there was that one week of farming, I was on vacation with my girlfriend's family and I missed all of that farming. So that was a bummer. But what I found really, really interesting about a lot of DeFi summer and all of that was a lot of the strategies and figuring out how to more efficiently farm and do all that stuff. And so back in like September, October, I started to get pretty active in Yearn and the strategist group, as that was starting to be built out a little bit more. And so what I was primarily focused on at that point was SushiSwap farming. So they were pretty generic strategies, which were: you were depositing liquidity positions into Yearn vault and farming Sushi tokens. And then part of the interesting evolution of these strategies was Yearn's change in relationship with Sushi. And it created some interesting problems, where originally we were farming and dumping Sushi tokens, and then Yearn creates a pretty strong working relationship with Sushi. And so at that point we changed the strategy from farming and dumping Sushi to farming Sushi and staking it in xSushi and earning more xSushi. So that was kind of a fun part of the DeFi summer for me who was trying to figure out more programmatic ways to be involved and also help other people do the ridiculous things that I was doing. Cause there was a period of time in like September, where I was just not really sleeping and just aping money into every single Asian food name protocol.

Anna (00:15:59):
Did you still have a job at Maker at this time?

Andy (00:16:02):
I was still working at Maker.

Tarun (00:16:03):
But I'm sure everyone at Maker was doing this because...

Andy (00:16:06):
We were all in a group chat together all the time.

Tarun (00:16:08):
It's like you're already in the weeds.

Andy (00:16:14):
Well, and that's where having people who you know and trusted in the space was insanely valuable. Cause we had a Signal chat with like 10 people in it and it was a lot of smart contract developers and one person would find a new farm and they posted in the Signal chat and we would all pull it up on our code diffs and stuff, and we'd look through it and go, "Yep, looks good to me". And then we'd all just dive in right at the start, we'd have timers and keep each other all ready and stuff. It was a really weird time.

Anna (00:16:41):
Very bonding though. It sounds like a fun game with some friends.

Tarun (00:16:45):
Like summer camp, COVID edition.

Anna (00:16:49):
Interesting.

Tarun (00:16:51):
So after you learned a lot about DeFi summer, you decided, "Hey, I'm going to go from Maker", which was an organization, I suppose at this point it was more like in maintenance mode than in adding new products mode, a high velocity because it has a ton of value in it. So it can't move quickly, as quickly as someone smaller. So maybe you want to walk us through that and then how that led to you becoming the face of NBA Top Shots in the Wall Street Journal?

Andy (00:17:22):
Yeah, sure. What you said is exactly right. So DeFi summer kind of reignited in me remembering just how cool Ethereum is. There was a period of time while Maker was in maintenance and stuff. It was really easy to just be tangentially involved on Twitter and tweet about stuff once in a while, and then do my 9 to 5 Solidity work and call it a day. And DeFi summer was just so insane. I was like, "Oh, this is really fun. This is what's really, really cool". And so after that definitely found myself in a place where I wanted to get back to more rapidly iterating and building and having fun with all that kind of stuff. And so that was what I found myself at Yearn. And then at that point I was pretty set that I was going to move on from Maker, just when the opportunity arose and figure out what I was going to do next. And I had a good friend reach out and say, "Hey, I know these guys who are starting a new project, would you want to read what their docs are looking like and their idea?" Because he knew that I was relatively knowledgeable about on-chain strategies and farming and stuff like that. And so that was Element Finance. And so I ended up, after talking with Will and Johnny, the co-founders, I decided to join that team and help them out as someone who knew a lot about Yearn and knew a lot about strategies. And so the idea of Element is basically to take deposited positions into yield bearing protocols and cut up that position into two separate tokens: one, which is your principal and one, which is your interest. And those are based over a deposit that's tranched or time-locked. And so I was helping a lot there with writing the code to integrate with Yearn and ideating on what the value proposition of this stuff would be and why it's valuable to be able to separate your principal and interest tokens. And that was a really, really fun project to be a part of. And so I was there for about five months, and I think they're going to launch relatively soon and I'm really excited to be able to take part in that launch and see what happens there. But at the same time, I was also starting to dabble in NFTs and I found NBA Top Shot. I'm a huge basketball fan. And so I previously, before COVID and everything, I was playing pretty intense NBA daily fantasy and had my own models for scoring and stuff. I watched a lot of basketball. And so for me, it just totally clicked in my head. And I was like, "That's awesome! NFT of basketball players, so let's go". And I aped in a little bit harder than I probably should have. I mean, it worked out, but in retrospect it's like, "Oh yeah, I put a lot of money into this thing", but it was one of those things where I just really loved what I was doing and so I wasn't even really consciously doing it.

Anna (00:20:14):
I mean, this is what we're going to be talking about for the rest of the episode, the NFTs and how you're involved in that space. But a few months ago we interviewed Andre and Trevor, we did this episode about NFTs music and media. And after that I wrote a piece where it's was like, "I can't imagine myself buying one of these things", but part of the reasons, this is what the conclusion I came to is like, "The reason is, is the content, the underlying content, isn't something that I'm in love with yet". But there are things I am in love with, types of media I really love. Now if you combine that with NFTs and that's where sort of mind experiment goes where it's like, "If you combine something you love with an NFT, would you then ape into it?" And it sounds like they did the combination that you wanted right after that.

Andy (00:21:05):
Yeah, exactly. And that's where it clicked with me. So I had previously been following along with CryptoPunks and I had considered buying a couple back in the summer and when they were less than 1 ETH per... And I didn't. Cause I was like, "Why would I do that when I could yield farm with it, with that same Ethereum?" And obviously hindsight, is 20/20 there, I wish I had a couple more CryptoPunks than I do right now. But yeah, so Top Shot, for me, it, like you were saying, unlocked me, like, "Okay, now I get this", because previously it was like, "Why would I care about CryptoKitties or CryptoPunks, and all these different things?" Sure, they have an interesting story, but they're not really a narrative that fits what I'm interested in. And Top Shot was the first thing that really did that. And so I spent a lot of my free time, between September and November, December even, either browsing the Top Shot marketplace, working on off-market deals or all these crazy things. I had written a bunch of Google Sheets that was doing analytics on all the moments and stuff got way too into the weeds, but it was just fun for me. It didn't feel like I was making some super sharp investment that was going to do well financially. And at that point, at the same time, it made it really clear to me the value proposition of all NFTs. And at this point, now I do own CryptoPunks and I've bought more, because I get it and they have a cool story.

Anna (00:22:20):
Let's hear what happened to you with the NBA Top Shot. So you said you went into hard, maybe.

Andy (00:22:26):
Yeah. Well, so I had a couple of good connections with a couple of the larger NFT collectors and more like market maker-style NFT people. And so they weren't really interested in basketball and I was, and so I felt that I had a bit of an edge where I could be like, "Hey, I want to buy a bunch of this player from you that you don't really know that much about or don't really care about". And so I was generally offering them an off-ramp from Top Shot, because at that point, it was very, very hard to withdraw. It still is now, but it's not as bad as it used to be. And so I would buy stuff at a discount to offer them an off-ramp into Ethereum. And then, back in January, a daily fantasy guy, now writer, doing a lot of cool stuff, named Jonathan Bales, put out a piece about how him and some of his friends bought a Ja Morant moment for $35,000. And that kicked off like a tidal wave. And so there was a couple websites that would show you your account balance or your general idea of how much your account was worth. And over the course of three weeks, my account went from being worth like $200,000, which was a little more than the amount I put in, but not very much, to, I think at its peak, it was almost at $16 million. It jumped down significantly from then.

Anna (00:23:48):
There's an article that came out about your experience with Top Shot that Tarun actually shared with me. That was one of the things that I read about you before I met you. So you were kind of the poster child in a way, you were the example of: if you're lucky, girls and boys, here's what you can do.

Andy (00:24:07):
Yeah. That is definitely the weirdest part of this simulation that we live in, for sure, but really, I think honestly what that actually comes down to and what I've been incredibly thankful for is the dumb luck of Top Shot going crazy and me being one of the largest collectors. It has opened up a ton of doors for me, just of new friends and people that I've met, who have been just so kind and really great to get to know and great to work with, people that I feel like I've made lifelong friendships because of this. And one of those guys who bought the Ja Morant for $35,000, Peter Jennings, so he is also a big daily fantasy guy, really successful. And he reached out to myself and MBL267, who was the other guy in the article, about his friend who worked for the Wall Street Journal, who was looking to do a Top Shot article. And so we had a couple of calls with him and then I had a really weird hour-long photo shoot with someone from the Wall Street Journal.

Anna (00:25:06):
Yeah, how do you take a picture of a Top Shot star?

Andy (00:25:09):
Well, so she brought a basketball. I don't own a basketball. And so we walked around Brooklyn for a while and took some pictures. And then it's funny, that picture we ended up using is in my second bedroom of my apartment, which is a home office for myself and my girlfriend. And I didn't know we were going to take pictures inside and I was like, "Oh, should I clean up the office?" And she was like, "No, it's fine. We probably won't use one of these". And then she did, there's just crap on my desk, clothes on the floor, but it's fine.

Anna (00:25:37):
So what does it mean, when you make this change over, you've gone from farming, I guess, to now you're on Top Shot, but is this your job? Is now this your job? Do you spend every day looking at these NFTs and trading them? Or was it more like this was a side thing that blew up?

Andy (00:25:59):
I would say more so that. There was a period of time where I was spending a lot of time per day on it. And I think crypto has taught this lesson many, many times, especially in the crypto space. If you feel like there's an asymmetric risk/reward ratio, the best thing you can do is just dive in head first and see what happens and figure everything else out later. And I was lucky as well to have a couple of guys who were also pretty confident in the platform, who I considered smart and would talk to you. And we would talk about strategy, what we're going to buy and sell together, I think we all were able to help convince each other, that this was a really good product. We all came from extremely different backgrounds. I was the only really crypto-native one. One of them runs an education start-up. The other one was a Wall Street guy. And neither of those guys are really crypto-savvy. One of them doesn't even really own crypto. And so that to me made me feel more confident in it, because I was talking with the guys who were all interested in buying these things, one because he thought it would go up in price. But also because they were really excited about the platform and wanted to be a part of it and really enjoyed what they were doing. And so it made me just really, really confident. And so for a period of time, I was probably spending like a full-time job amount of hours, just thinking about it and doing things. But then, at a certain point, I got to the point where I was like, "Okay, I've put enough money into this. I don't need to put any more money into this thing. If it goes well, I'm going to have money. If it doesn't, I'm going to lose this money. And I'm at a point where I feel good about the risk/reward ratio."

Anna (00:27:28):
Fair enough. By the way, I just realized, I keep asking you, was this your job? And I'm sorry about that. It's such a dumb question to ask in this space. I mean, if somebody asks me that it's like, "Ah, they're all my jobs, all the things are my jobs at some point and it's also my life, I don't know." It's like, there's a combination happening. And a lot of it's just interest, you're following something that you're into.

Andy (00:27:50):
Yeah, definitely. I think, it makes sense. That's another weird thing in crypto, I feel like. People do have jobs where they're paid hourly, but at the same time, it's a constantly moving thing that is just always changing and always evolving. And so there's a lot of things you can do that can take up a lot of your time, that aren't your job, and you can still find it extremely interesting or worth it.

Anna (00:28:13):
Yeah. It sounds like you're somewhat at peace with whatever happens in the Top Shot world. You've kind of explored it to the point where your interest has been fulfilled. You're just going to leave it there. But at the same time, the NFT market, you must know quite well how that's doing. What is happening in the NFT market right now? What are your thoughts on that?

Andy (00:28:39):
That's one of the other funny things that have come out of Top Shot. I now do a weekly livestream with some other Top Shot guys called "Club Top Shot". It's a very, very casual YouTube stream. We had on Ja Rule a few weeks ago. And it was so fun. Ja Rule got high with us on a livestream...

Tarun (00:28:57):
Did you ask him about Fyre Festival?

Andy (00:28:59):
So he made one backhanded comment. Ja Rule is an insanely large collector. He had some crazy stuff in his apartment or his house, not an apartment he's too rich to have an apartment. But he had one card that he was showing us and he said that it was Fyre, but it felt like he knew what he was saying. And then he actually did talk a bit, he sold a Fyre Fest NFT, and he talked about it for a second. It sold for like six figures. But he was saying, I think, it was like closing a chapter in his life in a way. But I was shocked. He came off, I expected nothing from him, and he came off as the nicest dude who was extremely thoughtful about collecting. I was really, really taken aback. But he was like a really, really good hang. It was funny. But sorry, to go back to your original question. So yeah, I definitely at this point, with Top Shot specifically, I'm not really putting more money into it, that would be extremely irresponsible, I think, just based on my general situation in life, but I do still keep up with it pretty well. And I still use this, they have challenges, I'll go in and complete them sometimes, if I think it's a good risk/reward. But I definitely am keeping up with NFTs pretty consistently. And at this point, I don't only own Top Shots. I've CryptoPunks and I used to have some Hashmasks. I think I sold all of them.

Anna (00:30:23):
But do you believe that at this moment in the NFT lifecycle, that it was over-hyped and that it's on the way down? Or do you feel like... I'm really curious what your thoughts are, maybe of this moment? It's obviously in the future, we don't know, but...

Andy (00:30:41):
I think so. Well, so I think, I've actually been thinking about this a bit, especially because of the NFT very, very quick rise and fall that happened. Although, I mean, the CryptoPunks are still doing pretty good. They just rise and rise. But everything else has had a bit of a rise and fall. I think that we're going to continue to see bubbles of these things rise and pop faster and faster, because of the internet. I think they're not just going to keep accelerating these things, because the time it takes to disseminate the information of what is this and why is it cool has gone from years to hours. And so I definitely think that it was over-hyped, but "over-hyped" is a hard word. I think the NFTs are amazing and game-changers for a lot of different things. So maybe "over-hyped" isn't the right word, but maybe just overbought for the amount of participants in the market.

Anna (00:31:32):
For the use case almost.

Andy (00:31:33):
Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of, thinking about either like the dot-com bubble or stuff built on Ethereum in 2017, where there's going to be some really cool stuff that stands the test of time and it going up and down a couple of 100% in the spring of 2021, it's going to be irrelevant. But there's gonna be a lot of stuff that no one cares about.

Anna (00:31:55):
After a few years, probably.

Andy (00:31:57):
Yesh, probably.

Anna (00:31:57):
Speaking of things that will hopefully last the test of time, let's talk about your project. You have a project called Fractional. I'm curious about the origin story of this. How old is it? And let's talk about what it is.

Andy (00:32:12):
Yeah. So naturally a lot of my initial thoughts about it came because of Top Shot, which I think just makes sense because of my introduction into really taking NFTs very seriously. But a lot of my conversations with a few of the other larger collectors was: "I want to buy this moment for $25,000. I think it's worth a million dollars. Is anyone actually going to spend a million dollars on it? What's the addressable market of people who have seven figures they want to spend on a basketball GIF?" Which it seems like there's just no one. And so then it's just obviously reevaluate what that means to larger numbers. And so that got me, and a lot of people at the time were fractionally going in on Top Shop moments, but just not trustlessly. That was just a group of friends who were either agreeing to, or giving one of their friends cash and then they were buying it and just custodying it on one of the accounts, which works at a small scale, but realistically you have to have better solutions than that in the long-term. And so at the time, this was, I guess, like early February, I basically just spent a weekend coding up what it would look like to have a fractional vault of an NFT, that would give out shares and then you would have a reserve price. And if someone were to meet that reserve price with Ethereum, you could buy out the shares. And so I coded this up over a weekend, just no front-end or anything, just some smart contract code. And I actually reached out to Tarun, because I knew that he had, or the Robot, I should say, had some involvement with NFTX. And so I just wanted to get his opinion. I didn't know Tarun crazy all of the time, but we exchanged some DMs and Twitter. And so...

Anna (00:33:58):
It's funny cause you guys actually live in the same city, but you just never crossed paths. I mean, it is a big city, but...

Andy (00:34:09):
Now we have, but hopefully many more times. But yeah, so I just reached out to him and I was like, "Hey, I have this idea what I've been working on and just spend the time doing this, I'm curious what your thoughts are". And just pretty quickly, I'd been wanting to do my own thing. And I had thought about that before doing Element even, and I just felt like it was as good a time as ever to do that.

Anna (00:34:29):
Yeah. And it's like a thing you have experienced maybe even more than most. You've gone through this cycle fully.

Andy (00:34:39):
Yeah, totally. And I do think that fractionalization does bring some interesting DeFi-style stuff to NFTs. And so I feel very fortunate that I think that I found myself in a nice position, where I have experience in both of theset hings to a level that not a ton of other people do, just based on my circumstances. So really the focus of what we're trying to build, at a super basic level, is how can we make something that's really easy for someone to lazily buy some percentage of a CryptoPunk or LeBron James moment or all these different things. I think there's going to be a ton of different, really awesome and really complex DAOs and things like PleasrDAO, which has spun up to where it's not explicit fractionalization of an NFT and sharing the pieces, but you're going to have these DAO groups that are coming in and buying stuff. This is more focused on just the really basic lazy version of that. What does it mean to lock up an NFT and people can buy a bit of it and then maybe someone will buy out the entire thing. And so that's actually been the focus,

Anna (00:35:44):
Is that how it works? So the fractionalization, I think, makes a lot of sense. I think anyone can understand that. You take some fixed thing and then you break it up into lots of mini parts and each part represents a minor ownership in that, like a stake almost, but is the idea here that it would go across all the platforms? That it would work on the NBA Top Shot and on some of the Ethereum-based NFTs? Or is this more like... I'm just trying to picture, you've already coded it in Solidity, so I'm guessing it lives more in the Ethereum world. Is it meant to be kind of a concept that's then expanded out to other ecosystems?

Andy (00:36:23):
Yeah. So in the short term, obviously I'm insanely bullish on Ethereum, I spend a lot of my time over the last four years building on Ethereum. And so to me that was just like the natural place to start building this thing. I think in the long term, it will be really, really interesting to see how the multi chain NFT world plays out. Because I do think that there's going to be a much larger retail and casual focus, than DeFi or a lot of the financial stuff. I've been trying to convince my friends for years to get into crypto. It took me five minutes to get them to buy a Top Shot moment. So that kind of stuff, to me, I think, it lends itself to a less sophisticated, not in a bad way, but just a group who doesn't care as much about a lot of different things. So I don't want to totally count out something like a Flow blockchain or some of these other chins that are coming up, that are more NFT-specific. But to me, I naturally just first going to place my bets on Ethereum and build on Ethereum. But I do think the idea of being in a cross-chain world with NFTs in different places is definitely possible. At least right now it's happening. Whether or not that plays out long-term, I don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked to see Fractional living on multiple chains at some point in the future.

Anna (00:37:36):
It's not a protocol though, is it? Is it a product? I'm curious. And what stage is it at, too? Throwing a few questions your way.

Andy (00:37:46):
I think the protocol versus product question is really interesting. I would argue that we are trying to make something that could be considered a protocol. I guess the question is, what do you consider a protocol? I don't really know. I don't know. I'm not sure I have a final answer to what is a protocol versus a product. But I want to make something and we are actively working to make something that doesn't have to live on our website, that anyone can come in and fractionalize anything and build on top of us and create products on top of the Fractional smart contracts. So in that sense, I do think of it as a protocol for fractionalization, as far as the smart contracts go, but at the same time, we're pretty interested in building a really nice front end and UI that is a great product for people who want to come in and buy a fraction of a CryptoPunk or something along those lines. So it's kind of hard to say. And as far as how far along we are, we just finished up an audit, end of last week or middle of last week or so, and everything went pretty good. So we're hoping that very soon, maybe by the time people are listening to this, people can test out our product on Goerli testnet and get an idea of what that's going to look like. It's just all a fake CryptoPunks smart contract, and you can mint yourself a Punk and fractionalize it. And then go to SushiSwap and sell the fractional shares or provide liquidity. And so hopefully if that goes well, it won't be too long until we're able to have people fractionalizing on mainnet. We don't have a specific launch date keyed in right now, but we're definitely hoping that it's sooner rather than later.

Anna (00:39:23):
Cool. Is this using one of the ERC? I know that there was ERC-721 and then there's these extensions. And I can't remember the number of the one that allows the NFT to have hats and accessories, like the game example where you have the one NFT that is standalone, and then you can actually use another standard to connect other objects to it. Is it using that? Or is it completely separate from that?

Andy (00:39:50):
So I'm not sure exactly which one you're talking about. I know there's ERC-1155, which was, I think, made by Enjin, and that's what Rarible uses for their NFTs. And so that one allows for you to have NFTs with additions of more than one. So out of the gate, we are not going to be supporting that, we'll just be ERC-721s. But we're very much extensible to be able to support that in the future, should we need to.

Anna (00:40:19):
So, yeah, it was ERC-998, but I think it's since been replaced by this maybe ERC-1155. I don't have that handy, but I guess anyone can correct us if we got that wrong.

Andy (00:40:33):
Sadly, I haven't been able to memorize every single ERC, I'm not quite there.

Anna (00:40:38):
Fair enough.

Tarun (00:40:39):
Actually, I think something that might be super useful is to maybe go through the mechanics of like, "Hey, I own an NFT . And how I fractionalize it, how things work?". Because I think actually for an audience that includes audit developers, it may be good to walk through the mechanics of how these things are made, what they look like. And I would say, at least from my purview, it's definitely a protocol. There are smart contracts that are options and there's tokens involved that are made. And so I think maybe if we walk through the mechanics, it will be a little bit clearer, if that makes sense,

Andy (00:41:18):
Sure. I'll go through the life cycle of an NFT and what that would look like in the Fractional protocol and what it does to the NFT. So, say I came with a CryptoPunk and I wanted to fractionalize it. Well, 1) you'd have to have a wrapped CryptoPunk, because we accept the ERC-721 tokens, not CryptoPunk tokens, but then at that point you would create what we're calling a "vault". And that vault cares about a couple of unique things. And there are a couple of things it has you put in, but it's not very opinionated on them. So you're going to be creating an ERC-20 token, which represents the ownership of the NFT. And so that ERC-20 token needs to have a total supply and a number of decimals, which actually force you to have 18 decimals for the sake of everyone's well-being. And then a name and a symbol. And so the protocol's not opinionated on those things, you can name it whatever you want. But then alongside that, some of the more important stuff is 1) a reserve price, which is going to be the initial price in Ethereum to buy out that vault. And I'll get into how a buy out works in a little bit. And then alongside that, we also need an auction length, which again, with the buy out is going to be a part of that system. And then lastly, we have what we call a "curator fee". And this is a fee that the NFT originator is able to set, which allows them to essentially take almost like an asset under managemen-style fee from the vault that they create. And this can be set in a range. And the way that that fee is paid out is in the form of total supply inflation. So, let's say you create a vault and it has a hundred ownership shares. Then you set your fee to 5% annually. And then over the course of a year, the vault would eventually accrue up to 105 ownership shares, and those would be sent to the NFT originator. And so what that allows for, initially, is in a market where maybe it's not very desirable to fractionalize an NFT, because NFTs are going parabolic, you are able to basically turn your NFT into something that is providing you some interest essentially, and you can take some profit of the NFT and still earn some shares. But in the long-term, what I think is really interesting there, is it allows for artists that fractionalize things to create a new revenue stream that isn't secondary market sales. It encourages diamond hands as opposed to weak hands with their collectors. It's like, for example, if an artist has a bunch of collectors who really like the artwork and don't want to sell it, they're never going to have secondary sale profits. Whereas in this, if you have a bunch of collectors who really like 25% of the fractional shares of your piece, even if they never sell it, you're still going to be seeing revenue from that, which I think is really cool.

Anna (00:44:07):
Interesting. Yeah, that's one of the problems with NFTs being sold to an owner who really loves it. They may just emotionally love it so much that they never resell it and the artist doesn't get that secondary market resale benefit.

Andy (00:44:20):
Yeah. And so I think that's a really interesting dynamic that'll play out. I'm very curious to see what kind of curator fees are set and what the market determines as a fair curator fee. But I think we'll just need time to see what that looks like.

Anna (00:44:36):
For this are you thinking primarily like the Top Shot model, where it's art that you're fractionalizing? Or is the vision a lot broader than that?

Andy (00:44:43):
Well... So I think in the short term, kind of the low-hanging fruit of Top Shot and CryptoPunks and all that, is definitely the current addressable market of fractionalization. But I do think that it's a lot wider-reaching than that, as we see real world assets come onto Ethereum, you saw that with Maker just recently, they started onboarding their first real world asset. I think that what is able to be fractionalized is going to continue to expand beyond just artwork. In general, my feelings on NFTs is that we're in a really interesting kind of proving grounds right now, where people are going to be building out a lot of cool primitives and applications that can use NFTs. And the artwork and everything that people are trading right now is just like the testing tokens for all of the actual insanely valuable stuff that, in my mind, should be an NFT or could be an NFT, like buildings and Esports teams and all these crazy things. There's been a couple of different models around fractionalization, some have been more heavily DAO-focused, and stuff like PleasrDAO is moving in that direction. And then other ones that are not quite as much. And so it's going to be really interesting to see, as this all plays out, what do these fractional tokens look like. Are they something that trades above what people consider the fair market value of the asset that's locked up and all these different things? It's going to be very interesting to see that all play out.

Anna (00:46:10):
Are there previous DeFi models that influenced your thinking around this? Or do you already see some strategies that could be influenced by some of that, let's use the term Degen activity, that you engaged in earlier this summer? At some point last year?

Andy (00:46:28):
Well, so I think one of the cool things that could really pop up from this would be an interesting way to do lending and borrowing protocols with NFTs. There's currently a project called NFTfi, which is basically like a peer-to-peer NFT lending marketplace. But I think turning an NFT into ERC-20 tokens allows for more like Compound or Aave-style markets around them and stuff, which I think would be really interesting. And that would create the ability for you to make more educated bets on NFTs, whether that's trying to go long on an NFT or short on it, which I think is really interesting and not quite as easy to do in something like NFTfi, I think. Or at least it's a little bit more of a manual process, because it's peer-to-peer, where you have to have someone agree to your terms and lock into a more structured loan.

Tarun (00:47:23):
Yeah. And for some historical context. So Aave, before they became Aave, was ETHLend, which was peer-to-peer and very similar to Nftfy. And it just could not get traction because it was impossible for people to figure out a price, what the interest rate was. And I think once they moved to the pool model, of course, they were able to grow much more quickly. And I think that's in general, probably the same thing for NFTs. Although of course the notion of price discovery for NFTs is difficult, but I think it's improved a lot when fractionalized. I guess, one thing that maybe is interesting to think about those, like, let's say I own an NFT and I go and fractionalize it. If I sell more than 50% of the shares, then I basically have conceded control of the reserve price. So I lose the ability to have a right of first refusal. So how do you foresee the dynamics changing there, when people fractionalize NFTs, but they keep a right of first refusal versus those that don't, cause I imagine that's something that happened in Top Shot and that's something I haven't seen... In DeFi there's no right of first refusal.

Andy (00:48:34):
Yeah. I don't really know what's going to happen there. I've talked to a couple people who have been interested in fractionalizing stuff and have said, " I want to keep more than 50% to make sure that I still have some say in whether or not this thing would sell". But I don't know. I think, probably a part of it depends on what's being fractionalized and why it's being fractionalized. I think that maybe for some people fractionalizing an NFT is just a different way to find exit liquidity from that NFT. And in that case, maybe they don't care. And so they'll sell 90% of it, cause they just don't want to own this NFT anymore. And it was easier to do a Dutch auction for the fractional tokens, than it was to list it on OpenSea and wait for someone to buy it. But I definitely think that for people who are trying to build more unique and wider reaching projects on top of a fractionalized NFT or fractionalized basket of NFTs, I do think that that's going to be a point of contention for a while. Say, I have these grandiose ideas for I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to fractionalize it. And then people who own fractional tokens will be able to do X, Y, and Z, because they own part of the ERC-20 tokens. And so it sucks if you build this whole thing out and have this whole grand idea and then you sell 60% of it, and then a buy out triggers a week later and all of a sudden all your plans have now been ruined. So that'll be a very interesting dynamic.

Tarun (00:49:58):
Yeah. Because things like OpenSea and Rarible, the people can make bids continuously and people do just make a lot of annoying bids all the time. There's this weird UX thing that happens. So it's curious how you foresee that impacting... This idea that there's an auction triggered is kind of funny compared to DeFi. So DeFi in auction does a bad thing. It's like, there's a liquidation, like the loan is going under. But here the auction is a good thing, in the sense that it's supposed to be like, we could have the event, where we are cashing out. And so somehow merging those two mental states, I think, is the key to these products that people haven't really figured out. But factionalization certainly seems like one of the necessary pieces.

Andy (00:50:46):
Yeah, for sure. And it also comes with some serious risks, where if there is an auction where the buy out ends up going for significantly less than what the token was trading at, then everyone who was trading the token takes a haircut. And so there have to be token holders who are making sure they're keeping track of the reserve price, or really in any fractional thing, I don't think token holders want to see the NFT sold for less than they bought the fractional shares for. But that's also just a part of markets. That's the rough part of that.

Anna (00:51:20):
I want to talk about PleasrDAO and how this relates to all of this. So it's a different project, right? It's not closely related to Fractional and yet is there a connection point? Is there something of commonality between these two projects?

Tarun (00:51:38):
Maybe we should give the history of PleasrDAO.

Anna (00:51:42):
Please, do.

Tarun (00:51:43):
So basically Pplplsr, who is a good friend of ours in various regards, actually in summer, she did this amazing set of illustrations for SushiSwap's launch and Aave's launch. And Matteo at Uniswap messaged me and was like, "Hey, can I get an introduction to Pplplsr?" So I introduced him sometime in the summer and then I just didn't hear anything about it for a while, so I was like, "Maybe it didn't work out". But then in April, sometime, maybe March, late March, Uniswap V3 has this launch announcement. And as a teaser, they put out this video that she made.

Anna (00:52:26):
And she's an artist? I guess she's a animator, visual artist or...?

Tarun (00:52:31):
Yeah, she used to work on designing games. Then she's been a freelance DeFi graphic designer. She's done every DeFi protocol, done some piece for literally every protocol. Probably the most in demand DeFi artist that exists. Every project should have been trying to commission the pieces, and she's one person. So obviously it's hard to do. And so this piece was pretty epic, because it marks this big change for Uniswap. And then, I think around that time, there is a lot of violence towards Asian Americans. And so she decided to sell an NFT as a piece, with all the proceeds donated to Asian American violence non-profits. Well, anti-violence, sorry, I guess that sounded like... But you got one. And so then basically, I think it was an auction and the price started going up. And I think Andy and I both have different stories of how we got involved in this, but I was at a restaurant, a little bit inebriated, and I just got this message of like, "Send 10 ETH here before this amount of time". And I was like, "Well, who knows what this is, but sure. Let's roll the dice!"

Anna (00:53:49):
From anyone. Was it from an anonymous account on Telegram?

Tarun (00:53:52):
No, from someone who I won't Dox.

Anna (00:53:52):
From someone you knew and trusted, I guess.

Tarun (00:53:53):
Yes. From someone I knew. And they were like, "Yeah, we want to buy the piece. We're going to pull together some funds". And I was like, "Sure". This is basically the problem that Andy is talking about, pulling together money to buy one piece. This is kind of that. And get at this in telegram group and all of a sudden it's like, "Hey, we won this $500,000 piece", which was, I think, Foundation's biggest sale at that time for them.

Anna (00:54:23):
So wait, were you pulling together to buy the Pplplsr?

Tarun (00:54:26):
Yes.

Anna (00:54:26):
Like image NFT?

Tarun (00:54:30):
Yes. The Uniswap NFT.

Anna (00:54:34):
That she was selling to raise money. Okay. So there's basically a collection of people who got together in order to buy this.

Tarun (00:54:39):
Yes.

Anna (00:54:39):
Okay.

Tarun (00:54:41):
And then the group and then Pplplsr... I think, the group gave her some fraction of the token. So they tokenized basically a token for voting on what pieces to buy. Mariano from Maker was kindly our governance czar and set everything up. And then I think there was this crazy excitement and tons of people who were like, "I want to join, I want to join, I'll add money, whatever". And so we were like, "Ah, well, the goal of this thing was to have sort of a social mission and to buy paintings that have a social component and also represent the values that Pplplsr's art does". I think of these things as a community and art museums. You're never going to own a share of the Met, but at least here you can kind of own a share of these things.

Anna (00:55:31):
And the way you're doing this is through DAO. So you're basically just using a DAO infrastructure. Which one is it?

Tarun (00:55:39):
We're using Compound/Uniswap governance contracts. Pretty simple.

Anna (00:55:43):
Okay. So you have this DAO and you're pulling money in order to buy NFTs and in a way you're fractionalizing the NFTs?

Tarun (00:55:50):
Yes. And then somehow there's this decision on the Snowden piece, that the Snowden piece was the thing we had to buy and we had to raise money for that. And so somehow we added new members. That part, I won't really get into details on, but new members are added, capital came in and we had this crazy bidding war with this anonymous person. And then the piece ended up going to PleasrDAO for $5.5 million.

Anna (00:56:16):
Wow. And now you own it, but are you waiting to eventually sell it?

Tarun (00:56:21):
So Andy can now tell you where the true long-term goals go.

Anna (00:56:26):
Okay.

Andy (00:56:27):
Yeah. So I don't think we've had an official Snapshot vote or anything to ratify doing this, but generally the plan is to fractionalize the piece on Fractional. What exactly we're going to do from there also has not totally been decided. I would say it's a very free form group right now, we're still figuring a lot out. But that is the general plan. And I think the idea is that we could potentially then maintain ownership of the piece to some extent. And I think it's fitting for a Snowden piece or something to give it to the people. And then also hopefully raise some capital through that to be able to figure out what's next and go from there. But, again, if none of that happened, if we did something totally different with the fractional tokens, I wouldn't be shocked. But as of right now, that's the general idea.

Anna (00:57:23):
PleasrDAO sounds like it just was created by a community spontaneously, but is everyone cool with using it with Fractional or is it like..?

Tarun (00:57:33):
That's why there's governance votes. The NFT can only be moved by governance. The governance contract owns the NFT.

Anna (00:57:41):
This is an amazing experiment.

Tarun (00:57:41):
Yeah.

Andy (00:57:41):
It's a lot of fun. That's really cool.

Anna (00:57:45):
I know, it's like the launching of your project through this experiment sounds, given the story we've heard also of your background, this is so fitting and so awesome. It's like learning in the moment as this thing is moving a million miles an hour and all these people want to throw money in it.

Andy (00:58:04):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I have just pulled up my first Twitter DM from this, I won't say from who, it was just me and three other people, I'm just, "Yo, let's get this NFT. Someone suggested Kenny Beecham", and that was it. And then all of that turned into Telegram group and way more people.

Anna (00:58:20):
Amazing! Is Pplplsr involved in the DAO?

Tarun (00:58:25):
Yeah, she is now. After the piece was purchased, she is a partial owner. So...

Anna (00:58:32):
Amazing. So maybe to wrap up the interview, what are you seeing coming down the pipeline for NFTs? Obviously fractionalization is one of these things, but what else do you think you're looking forward to maybe in this space?

Andy (00:58:46):
Yeah, so I'm very curious to see what happens with the Christie's CryptoPunk auction, that should be happening pretty soon. I think that's going to be really interesting and there's a chance that it just totally re-rates CryptoPunks. And so I'm looking forward to that and seeing what happens there. I think there's also a good chance that that could be like the local top of CryptoPunks for a little bit, which wouldn't be shocking considering how the Pplplsr's stuff went and all that. But I think in the long-term, I'm really interested in fractionalization and all the different things that can come with NFTs and creating these really interesting, sometimes gamified sometimes just cool money Legos, just building out the ecosystem around them. Just buying and collecting is awesome and really cool, but there's just so much more that's capable of being done. And I think that these last couple of months have hopefully injected enough money and excitement into the space, that over the next year or so we're just going to see some really cool, crazy, interesting projects that are going to come out. And I think that as people continue to build, that's what I'm most excited for, is just other smart people who are building stuff and creating other interesting NFT Legos in the same way. You know, for a while DeFi was just a few interesting protocols that were doing stuff, and now we have this crazy ecosystem with so much going on. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that people haven't even considered with NFTs.

Tarun (01:00:13):
I would add, one of the things I find the most miraculous about: this story, plus in general the way that analogs to the last cycle, like 2017, that I would make for NFTs, is during the last cycle, there was obviously a lot of froth and fake stuff that doesn't work or make sense, like fractionalizing farms in India and selling them on the blockchain or something, I remember seeing things like that, but in every good lie there's a kernel of truth. And so I tend to think that in every good hype cycle, there's always a kernel of truth, infrastructure-wise. And last time it was DeFi stuff, the core tenets of DeFi, people were raising — Aave ICOed for ETHLend, Bancor ICOed. They may not all have been the main winners. I mean, in Aave's case, obviously they've made it into the successful ICO, wasn't a scam, really provided use value to users. And Bancor is maybe halfway there, I would say. But the idea is there's all this infrastructure that comes from the hype cycle and getting all these people into it, into these kind of last minute things and, I think, NFT, like infrastructure in general, to make it more useful and accessible and almost interoperable in a weird way, in the sense that like, "Somehow I want my Top Shot NFTs to interact with my CryptoPunks", but we don't know exactly how that's going to happen. I think that's going to be the coolest stuff to see. And I think fractionalization is one of those core primitives that has to exist first.

Andy (01:01:50):
Yeah, I totally agree. I feel a lot of similarities from 2017, like ETH ICOs and stuff to NFTs now, which has a lot of good and bad connotations to it, but I'm very, very excited about what the next couple of years are going to hold.

Tarun (01:02:06):
So I think DeFi and NFTs are going to intersect a lot more over the next couple of years kind of as we're talking about the future. Where do you see that going and what are the grape leaves, tea leaves, whatever, the leaves that are predictive.

Andy (01:02:22):
I do love stuffed grape leaves, but, I think, the thing that to me is just an obvious use case for fractionalization outside of the crypto collectibles and art world and into the DeFi world is the upcoming Uniswap V3 liquidity tokens, or LP tokens. So for those who aren't aware, in Uniswap V3, because they have "ranged liquidity", as opposed to just generic liquidity, they have to identify each user's LP position as an NFT, as opposed to an ERC-20 token. And so that's going to open up some really interesting things, but it's also going to break a lot of things. For example, Uniswap V2 liquidity pool positions are able to be used in MakerDAO as collateral to borrow against, V3 that won't really be possible. At least right now Maker doesn't support NFTs. So to me, fractionalizing those things immediately helps to solve that problem and address one of those pain points. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the long-term, as DeFI continues to evolve and explore NFTs more, and these worlds continue to merge, we're going to see more and more NFTs that represent positions in DeFi, or different things that we hold or do in DeFi. I mean, Uniswap has generally been a trendsetter for a long time and them doing this to me means probably other people will do it as well. And so I'm very interested and excited to see what that whole DeFi fractionalized LP positions and whatever else comes from that holds.

Anna (01:03:58):
Cool. So thank you so much, Andy, for coming on the show and sharing all of this with us. What an amazing journey and also very exciting stuff in the pipeline, it sounds like.

Andy (01:04:10):
Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun. It's always fun to talk about DeFi and crypto. I could do it all day.

Anna (01:04:17):
Of course, same here. Tarun, thanks again for joining as the co-host.

Tarun (01:04:20):
Thanks for having me.

Anna (01:04:21):
And I want to say a big thank you to Andrey, the podcast producer, Henrik, the podcast editor, and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
[inaudible].