Speaker 2
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Speaker 1
Yeah, totally. I mean, when it comes to digital art, it's a little bit different than physical art. Like there is only one Mona Lisa painting. There are plenty of copies of the Mona Lisa and an infinite number of digital images of the Mona Lisa that anyone could put on their flat screen TV and hang in their house. But there's only one original. Now, the difference between digital art and physical art is that, you know, the digital art displayed on one screen might look indistinguishable from what it is displayed on the other screen. Right. But the difference with the idea of using ownership is to basically create an original work that has a signature. thinking about like a single painting, think of a print, right? Like there's an original piece of art, and then they might do a limited print run of like 600 different copies. Or in the case of like, say a photograph, like a photograph, just like people sell photos for hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, if they're from a reputable artist. But if you get your hand on the negative, then you could just recreate it over and over again. So what makes the original valuable? Well, the original, the original is valuable it's the original, you know, signed by the artist. There's a proof that it's the first one ever. And that gives it scarcity. And the same is kind of true. I think what you're alluding to is the NFT space, which is basically, you know, these digital artworks or digital collectibles where, yeah, sure, you could just take a screen grab and post it on your website, but only one has the digital, has the signature. In the same way that only one has the signature of the artist in a painting, this one has a digital signature. So you can actually think of the NFT less as the actual image and more as the signature itself, right? Got it. That gives it scarcity and makes it unique. Now, that's not to say that I have a view on any of these projects as investments or something like I have no. Sure. But I do like the idea of being able to for creators to be able to prove that when they made something that it's the original, because that means that they might be able to monetize it, make more money from it. There's another dimension to NFTs, Chris, which is really important, which is that because it's just software, it can be programmed. And one of the things that it can be programmed to do is to pay royalties to the original artist in perpetuity. So basically, when you sell an NFT or any other blockchain-based asset token, you can program it so that it pays a royalty back to the original creator. So let's say I was a painter and I'm starving artist. I just graduated from design school and I sell my first painting for $500. And then I hit it big. And then in a year or two's time or 10 years, that same painting is selling for $100,000. Do I make any profit on the difference between $500,000 and $100,000? No, I've sold that art to the first person. The person who bought it is the one who will make all the money. What you can do with an NFT is you can program the NFT to that created payment automatically every time it's resold. So you don't have to rely on a gallery or some buyer to make sure that the original creator is paid. You can program the asset so it does that. So there's a couple of things that are worth talking about here. Number one, there are over 300 different NFT projects that have created at least $1 million of secondary royalty revenue for the creator. So not money from selling their work, but rather money that was earned from the resale. So someone bought it and then resold it. There's a profit there. And some of the money went to the original creator. This is important for a lot of reasons. One of them is because we're in this really, really perilous moment, in my opinion, for creators. And that's been largely driven by technology. Like technology for the longest time has been a tailwind for creators.