A look at Web3’s art market

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Some of you are going to love what today’s company sells and others are going to not just hate it, but hate me for even talking about it.

John Crain is the founder of SuperRare, a marketplace to buy and sell NFTs from the world’s top artists.

And still, despite the fact that you could right-click and save the art to your computer, they’ve sold over a quarter billion dollars worth of digital art in their marketplace.

I wanted to understand how so I invited the founder here to talk about it.

John Crain

John Crain

SuperRare

John Crain is the founder of SuperRare, a marketplace to buy and sell NFTs from the world’s top artists.

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Full Interview Transcript

 

Andrew: Hey there, Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner and, uh, some of you are going to love what this company sells. The one that I’m gonna talk to you about and others are going to not just hate it, but hate. for quote unquote, buying into this madness. All right. What’s this about? John Crane is the co-founder of Super rare Labs.

Let me say it again. Super rare labs. They sell NFTs. Yep. The digital art that you can right click and save to your computer for free. what they sell. And still, despite the fact that yes, you could outsmart the whole system and right click and save to your computer. They sold over a quarter billion dollars worth of this type of digital art in their marketplace.

I wanted to understand how, and so I invited the founder here to talk about it. I also wanted to know why they were switching their business model to a Dow. Do you know what a DOW is? D ao. It stands for a decentralized, autonomous organization. That means they’re turning their company over to their community, giving Dow members not just voting power over decisions, but also all the revenue from the market.

I did this interview for Origami where I launched a podcast all about Dows because I’m excited about what a Dow can do. Origami, if you don’t know, and you should know by now, they help launch and grow dows. In fact, if you’re interested in how your community, or your company or your organization, how it could form into a Dow, just go over to join origami.com and tell ’em you heard about ’em from me, from Andrew.

All right, enough of my yapping. Let’s get into the interview.

 

Andrew: how would you describe Super rare?

John: is a great question. Super is, uh, art platform and marketplace that’s for digital art. I think it’s the infrastructure for the art market of the future. We have two trends converging. One is the digitization of the existing art market. If you look at markets like finance, we don’t have brokers that you call anymore.

We now use Robin Hood, and that trend hasn’t really hit the art world yet. One track and then the creation of art itself is digitizing. If you think about who the Picasso of today is, they’re probably experimenting with things like AR face filters and vr, and you know, really all the work they’re creating is in its, you know, Essence digital.

Do you have these two digitization trends colliding? Super is trying to be the platform to support those two.

Andrew: What are some of the most notable works of art that have been sold and for how much?

John: Probably the most famous piece of art sold on Super Air is the X copy. Uh, right click save as Guy

Andrew: for 1600 E, about $7 million to a Snoop Dog.

John: Yep, exactly. That one has the biggest reach X copy also recently added the Creative Commons license to his work. So there’s also been a lot of remixing of that one, which is super interesting and fascinating to.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

John: I’m trying to think about, Yeah. People for the non kind of crypto audience, Shepherd Fairy has dropped a piece on Super Air. I did that early summer last year. A whole lot of different artists from this new crypto art space.

Andrew: I think it was, uh, Destination Hexagon, 2 million US dollars. Right.

John: Yep. X copy I think has had the highest secondary sales of any of the artists in the space.

Andrew: What’s different about you from others is it’s curated. I can’t just go and take a picture and post it on Super air and start to sell it. Right?

John: Correct. It’s curated at the artist level. In the early days, uh, thinking about Super Air, you know, we were very excited about digital art, about the potential for a digital art market. But at the same time, you know, with NFTs, it’s very easy to just go take somebody else’s image, you know, create a token that uses it.

And you know, that’s not gonna be a very good art market if it’s full of. We made the decision early on if this was gonna work, people needed to have a place where they could kind of trust the authenticity of the works they saw. And so we decided to curate at the art artist level. So once somebody’s onboarded to Super Air, then it’s up to them.

You know, they could min, you know, 300 pieces of art a week or one a year. You know, that’s, you know, that’s really, um, up to them. But we felt it was important to. have a space that was curated and you know, like as this scales, we felt like it was gonna scale differently than YouTube. Like, I don’t think we end up with, uh, purely algorithmic curation, uh, which, you know, does work well for, uh, certain use cases.

Uh, I don’t think it works super well for fine art.

Andrew: Take me back to where this idea came from. I understand weed and drinks were involved,

John: Yes. Uh, as with all good. I started the company, there’s three co-founders and we had experimented, uh, with many different things. You were kind of like builders, my background’s in, you know, design and technology and have been working in kind of the crypto Ethereum space. And I was always super interested in the crossover of like consumer web and crypto.

You like. Um, I think still today, you know, it’s mostly finance, the, the use cases, which. you know, are interesting, but it’s not really like what I was passionate about. So I was

Andrew: Like what, what, what are some examples of what you were excited about

John: really it was like thinking about how do we build new business models for creatives. So if you think about platforms like Instagram or YouTube, uh, the business model is almost at odds with the peop the customers in that what YouTube wants is to sell as many ads as possible.

And if, if they can show less content and just show more ads, they will, uh, whereas. People want is to distribute more content to their fans and customer. Like, you know, they have their own fan base and the fan base is different from the shareholders. They’re almost at odds where it’s like, I just want my friends to see cool stuff.

Instagram wants you to go buy a new pair of pants or something. Um, and so I feel like this is really interesting, right? There is this kind of back and forth intention between the stakeholders, the company, and then all the stakeholders who are users. Uh, and so we were just thinking about like, what are these new business models?

And so, you know, we saw kinda like the early development around NFTs, um, you know, like rep Peppes, crypto punks, these early art experiments. And we just started to think about like, you know, well this is interesting. You have, you know, web three kind of starting to touch things. I. A greater audience will care about, you know, like art is really interesting.

Um, and if you think about a lot of the consumer web, you know, it’s, it’s like an image with a ID and a title, which is essentially what NFTs are. And so when I saw the standard being developed, got pretty excited and felt like, well, this could change. You know, this can be a new economic engine for, uh, creative content of all.

And then I was just personally most interested in, uh, digital art,

Andrew: you said that you were kicking around a few different ideas. What are some of the ideas that were either horribly bad in retrospect or kind of interesting and should have succeeded?

John: just thinking about what NFTs offer. Right. You know, we debated quite a lot. Like you now have this ownership field, uh, that you can apply to essentially any, you know, piece of digital content. And, you know, like we had many conversations early on where it. Well, you know, how much would you pay for if you, if everyone in the world could know that you, Andrew owned, you know, Jay-Z’s first tweet, like, how much is that worth?

Right? We saw that Ha Like that was, that auction happened with Jack Dorsey’s tweet, you know, last year and kind of the craze. Um, and I think that’s still valid, right? There’s this new, there’s like new internet real estate and I think we’re still at the very.

You know, early days of how that

Andrew: it around, what are some of the things that you were thinking of before? Art?

John: opens up new licensing models. You

Andrew: Uh, were you thinking about how do I allow people to own a piece of art and then license it out so that maybe Jay-Z doesn’t just sell an album, but sells the right to reproduce the song to somebody and then an NFT allows that?

John: Yeah, and more detailed licensing is still a very opaque process. It’s, you know, like there’s no, it’s, it’s a very strange asset class, right? If you think about like licensing, You know, if you wanted to like buy a bundle of licenses, you know, there’s a ton of paperwork and this is the type of thing that, you know, Ethereum and blockchains do very well.

You can have the know a public registry of all sorts of types of, you know, digital assets.

Um,

Andrew: didn’t you pursue that idea? I.

John: well part of it was just personal preference. It was more fun. I made a lot of, uh, digital art over the course of my lifetime. Lots of physical art as well. So partially it was.

And we felt like it was gonna be easy to understand, right?

Licensing is a little bit more esoteric and we felt like this was a very obvious use case. And I mean, we just launched as an experiment. You know, we had no idea if Super Air was going to act like if people would care about it. The first product, you know, looked horrible and, and, um, you know, it was. There were absolutely no network effects.

It was like every artist we knew personally, every collector we knew personally, we were like trying to help people. You know? We were like, Oh, this new piece of art came out, like you should go look at it. Um, so it was kind of personal preference and it, you know, it started to work. So I think, yeah, we kind of just got drawn in that

Andrew: How did you get your first buyers?

John: First collector. His name’s Jason Bailey. Our art Nu is kind of his like internet, uh, pseudonym. And we knew him through the New York digital art scene. So, uh, we were building early prototypes and actually just googled like New York digital art. We were like, I wonder if anyone else is thinking about this.

We can’t be the only people or you know, we hope we’re not the only people thinking about this, cuz then we might actually be crazy and. we weren’t. So there was a, you know, a small but vibrant digital art scene in New York and we met Jason there and, you know, showed we, we became friends, kind of started talking about what we were working on and he was like, Hey, well actually there is a piece of digital art I would like to buy.

That’s from this artist Robbie Barrett, you know, is the, is the product ready? Like I wanna buy it on. and I was like, Give one second. Like, Hey guys, like do we think we could go live on Monday? And it was like, well, if we stay up for the next 48 hours, probably. Uh, so that’s what we

Andrew: The question I’m wondering is in web two, you’re supposed to go and talk to your customer and understand why they want to buy, what their motivation is. When you asked him why did he say that he wanted to buy it, what was he thinking of?

John: in art provenance is very tricky. So there’s actually a ton of fraud in the traditional art. And it’s like estimated that like 15% of paintings in museums, like national institutions are fraud, like fake because they don’t really know. There’s no actual way to be sure that you have a Picasso, you talk to the Picasso estate or you know the BAS gala state or whoever it is, and they tell you, yeah, you have a real one and do you hope they’re correct.

Um, and so Jason was actually super interested. You know, kind of feel like the data around art and provenance. And so he, what he really wanted was, you know, truly secure, like a provenance record as being the, kinda like the owner and collector of this piece of art.

Andrew: To go any deeper. Like did you wanna understand whether he’s trying to display it and, and kind of boast? Did he believe that it was going to sell for more money? Did he just wanna move this idea of digital art forward

John: I did not explicitly ask him what his motivation was, but we’d had many conversations at this point and we were aligned philosophically around this idea that, you know, we both loved digital art, you know, just like, uh, as a passion. Like as a passion and felt like one of the things that was holding back this from being a more kinda like mainstream.

thing to do was this kind of ambiguity around provenance and ownership. And so if you could solve, like, if you can solve kind of like the provenance and ownership of the art, it adds this layer of scarcity that’s important. Um, but I think one thing that’s interesting to think about, you know, like a lot of the early, like a lot of the VCs who turned me down, like people immediately want to rationalize what’s happen.

Um, but the act of collecting itself is very irrational, right? You’re adding stuff to your life. It serves, no, it doesn’t have a u utility value, right? You have these, I have this, these pepe socks behind me that I want at an auction. And there’s, you know, there like, if you wanna quantify the utility, it’s completely different than like, Oh, I have a more efficient widget.

You need widgets. These widgets are, you know, 50% cheap. So you’ll buy the widgets, right? Like art collecting. Collecting in general is completely irrational. It’s this very interesting phenomenon of the ability to do it just digitally right now. Before you weren’t able to show off your collection in the same way you show off your, I dunno if you have collect guitars or I collect skateboards, right?

So if people come over and you’re like, Oh, did you see the, you know, the new neck face skate skateboard came out and I bought it. There’s no way to do that digitally. So it was kind of, An existing human phenomenon that’s now that is sort of

enabled through

Andrew: is for him it was more about the collection. Um, the reason that I ask is, I know you also used to go to bitcoin meetups and you clearly were in the whole crypto space. You were working at Consensus, which is this investment firm that has helped fund many projects. And so I, I wanted to know, was it.

We need to find a way to move the, uh, web three forward, and I’m going to support my friend John in doing that. Or was it about collecting

art and for the collection it was. Okay. And so you had that, and then how did you expand beyond him?

John: mostly through artists, right? Like two sided marketplaces. You’re always thinking about which side, You know, chicken and egg problem. You gotta grow one side first. There was certainly more interest on the artist’s. And so through the same network of, you know, digital art enthusiasts, uh, just reached out to anyone who would respond to my emails saying, Hey, you know, here’s this thing we made.

If you wanna try it, like respond, I’ll send you a login. And like, you know, if you wanna get on a call, like, I’ll do that. So I think probably the first 200 artists or so, you know, we had video calls with like, we were. Talk about, be like, talk about digital art. Why were they interested? You know, what do they do?

Um, and yeah. So it was a very manual process.

Andrew: It was you making calls, Don personally, explaining it. Showing it. Were they counting on you to bring in collectors?

John: not necessarily. I think part of it was just that it was. something new. Like they were already interested in the space and it was kind of like, Oh, here this is,

you know, here’s this new idea. Like, I’m excited about it. Do you want to try it? And then, I mean, we were, you know, like also talking to all my friends, anyone else, like, Hey, will you try this thing out?

So, you know, a lot of early collect. Were were other artists, so they were like, and also kind of like an early, you know, like they were artists were collecting from each other. And then just, you know, people we knew in the space who were excited about NFTs and digital art.

Andrew: And then the industry rose. You rose with it and you always wanted to be cur.

John: When we thought of the brand, super rare, we were like, kind of the initial idea for the brand was like, okay, what if you. something kind of like a museum and then you smash it together with like crazy internet gifts, like, what are you gonna get? Um, and we felt like if it was too open then you, there wouldn’t be like enough context around, you know, if it’s like, if you have digital art and people, you know, trying to sell rare wine bottles, you know, it’s like, it’s hard to tell the story about what the product.

And again, I think you just, like personally, I was more passionate about art and the space. Like I think, you know,

trying to build new economic models for artists was like something we were excited about. You know, we, we launched with 10% artist royalties on day one. Um, you know, there was no secondary market at the time, but, We hope there will be at some point, and we think this is important, right?

Like we have this new tool, we have, you know, Ethereum and smart contracts, and you could now program in things like royalties for artists in a way that’s, you know, much easier than it was before. So why don’t we go ahead and try that.

Andrew: Meaning. If a collector buys a work of art and then sells it in the physical world, the original artist gets none of the upside from the next sale. You said We want to have an upside for the original artist from each sale. That’s what you’re talking about.

John: Yeah, exactly. This has been something that’s been discussed for, you know, the past, you know, 50 years at least in the, kinda like the physical, traditional art. And it’s something that’s incredibly hard to enforce and also just logistically challenging.

Andrew: Let me use this as a jumping off point for the Dow.

The fact that you curated everything makes the Dow more interesting to me. How does the Dow work?

John: The Dow is a couple things, but the first point of the, you know, so we started Super and we were. Curating all the artists on the platform and building an internet platform, right? Like part of the advantage of software is that you can scale it, you know, rapidly. But at the same time, we felt like the human touch of curation was still important.

So this was going to scale by adding curators to the platform. And at the same time with crypto and web three, we. These, you know, new things, tokens, right? Like as somebody just like curious and interested. I was excited to experiment with this new technology

and so we launched the Dow, which is essentially like handing control of.

The platform and the marketplace over to the users of the platform in the marketplace. And so if you think about that example I gave earlier with Instagram, you have shareholders on one hand and then uses the platform and they have opposing interest. And so in this case where the users of the platform also have, you know, kind of control of the platform itself, you have the ability to align.

I. Through these, uh, crypto economic tools and that’s what the DOW is. The first thing the DOW does though, is add curators to this expanding ecosystem. We essentially allow the community to elect, uh, and vet new curators.

Uh, through the super air space

race.

Andrew: The way I understand it was like this, you

gave collectors who purchased art before tokens. I think you also gave tokens to the artists, right, who are on the platform.

John: Yep.

Andrew: Were there anyone else who had these tokens?

John: We did an airdrop to everybody who would use the platform, equal number to artists, equal number to collectors. So if you had minted anything, even if you never. Uh, you got some tokens and if you had placed a bid, even if you actually never succeeded in buying anything, you also got some tokens.

Andrew: then did you keep any for Super Air, the company?

John: So yeah, we kept some for Super Air. So Super Labs were a big stakeholder in the Dow. A very active participant. And then also a bunch went to the Dow itself, into the community treasury. And so the idea there being that this is the beginning of the journey, not the end. And so there’s additional tokens in this community to reward, uh, other.

other people who kind of help build the ecosystem. So a great example there is we just built a new tool to run the space race. So the original tool was Sunset by another star. It was a product

that,

Andrew: Wait, before we get into the space race, I should explain that too. So now you’ve given out tokens and you’ve saved some for yourselves, and the tokens represent voting. And so you have what you call a space race, and the space meaning like an art gallery, a space to show art, where someone can say, I would like to manage an art gallery on your website. And others say the same thing. The community of token holders votes. One person who stood up and said they wanna run a space gets voted in, and then they get to curate the art and they get a percentage of the sales that come through, and that’s. ,it gives them money, but also enriches the treasury of the Dow.

So the Dow keeps building up its value. And so the space race, the first version has been up. It’s active. I’ve seen the online spaces. And you’re saying somebody in the community decided to change it.

John: Uh, yeah, so well, what happened was the tool we were using got sunset by the product team that was building it. So, We had this tool we were using to run the space race that got sunset. And so it was sort of on pause for a couple months and a community member stepped up and said, Hey, we need this to exist.

And they, you know, spent, you know, long nights and weekends and, uh, built a new version specifically tailored to the super community. So not only do we have a way to run the space race, It’s now actually even better cuz it’s more tailored to, uh, our community specifically. And so those are the types of things that like, you know, the rare in the community, treasury is reserved to like, encourage people to help.

Filled, uh, this ecosystem out

Andrew: How does it work in your doubt? Does that person say, We need a new tool. I’m putting forward a proposal. If you give me some tokens, I will build and then describes what they’re gonna build and then they get to work and they get.

John: the way it worked, we. So in this case, we said the community was like, Hey, we need a new space race tool. Let’s set aside tokens to, you know, for like a person, a team, multiple teams, whoever to go and build this. And then, yeah. Um, you know, and we’re kind of turning that into a more like formalized grants program. But, uh, yeah. And one way to think about it, this is something I’m curious, you know, like what Dows are, there’s like a lot there to unpack. Like there’s a lot of little pieces. Um, but I think it’s interesting to think about the platform itself is like being this regenerative economy as sales happen through spaces. Fees go to the space operators to compensate them, but then also some go back into the platform for people to vote on the next tooling or the next thing that we need to build,

Andrew: Hmm.

John: to improve it.

Andrew: Yeah. From everything that I understand about Dows, that’s the way they should work. There should be. Funds that go back into the treasury, and that allows a treasury to function. Otherwise, it just becomes a group of people with good ideas and maybe they hope that people will volunteer to take action, but that’s no way to really grow.

So I get that. And then what percentage did, um, super rare labs get to keep of the tokens?

John: So Super Labs, uh, and the investors kept 40%.

Andrew: What share of overall sales are now coming from spaces versus Super Air itself?

John: Yeah. So super spaces are contributing about like 20% of sales to the total, to total volume. And yeah, I think it’s important that now. Network fees. So even on main Super, any fees there. Also go into the Community Treasury,

Andrew: Wait, so if a sale comes through not from one of these spaces, all of the revenue goes to the Dow.

John: correct?

Andrew: Oh. So are you now fully transitioning to becoming a Dow instead of a traditional company?

John: Yep. Yeah, exactly. So Super Labs now actually gets paid. We’re essentially like a software or services provider to the Dow and um, We passed a proposal, I guess about a month ago. Um, and so we’re, we’re invoicing the treasury we’re getting paid by the Dow. Um, and yeah, so we’re, we’re, we’ve gone full Fold out.

Andrew: all in.

John: Correct. Why?

Andrew: Yeah.

John: I think it’s, Well, you know, it’s certainly harder, but I think it’s a better way to build. Right? There’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of people who talk about these concepts and I think for.

I think super air will end up being kinda like the infrastructure for this new art economy. So like the infrastructure for the digital art economy.

I don’t think that we should be the only people making decisions about how that gets built. And so like, you know, we bootstrapped in the beginning, right? We didn’t, we didn’t raise any money, We just built the product. And, you know, scaled from $0 in transactions to today. I think, uh, marketplace revenues are roughly like 270 million or something.

We wanted product market fit, but after four and a half years we really felt like we had achieved that and that. If we were gonna build something to be long lasting, it made more sense to go the Dow model than to, you know, stay kinda like, uh, the sole owner

Andrew: why if it was working, what did you think the Dow would get you that you weren’t able to do once you’d gotten funding and product market fit and collectors and a

reputation?

John: What’s interesting with NFTs and these open assets is you, if you think about like a platform like YouTube, There’s network effects in the content that’s created, but also your content only lives on YouTube. It doesn’t simultaneously get published to Vimeo and Rumble and who, whatever,

any video platform that gets created with NFTs, you publish an NFT in one

place

and it’s immediately on any platform that want and you chooses to index it.

And so I think. ,

the network effects and the way you scale these platforms has to be different because there is no, you know, like there’s this massive data lock in in Instagram. Like Instagram would never let you post your reel to TikTok. They would be like, Absolutely. Like that was like, would not happen.

And that’s just like the physics are different in web. Your content is everywhere.

Andrew: So you’re saying, look, if the content is everywhere and people are gonna have power over where it goes, and they could just decide that they’re gonna leave us, then maybe we give them full power and they’ll find a way to stay with us and to do this together.

John: Right. Yes. I, I think the network effects are different and like part of that is like creating the dow to align incentives, right? So it’s a less, you know, kind of like extractive model where we’re trying to extract, as, you know, like as much value as possible into like a, Look, we’re building this together.

Um, we’re in it for the long haul and we we’re actively trying to align everyone’s incentives.

Andrew: do you have an example of something you expect to happen because now you have a Dow versus before? I mean something specific. What do you expect that they’re going to do? Come up with what?

John: I think it’s all about human coordination. Ultimately, what Dows are is their tools for human coordination, and I think in this model, Uh, it’s easier to coordinate with the community to like stay together. Like we’re trying to become community members in ways that you can’t as just, uh, a private corporation.

You could have a whole nother podcast probably on Dow philosophy. Um, but if you think about any kind of entity, whether it’s like a non-profit or company with shares like these entities were physically con. When you literally had to move around pieces of paper,

like you had physical stock certificates, you had physical membership in the co-op.

It was a piece of paper you had. You had like, there was actual pieces of paper?

involved and those physical constraints kind of like

dictated

the shape of the organization itself. And now, We can sort of have, you know, digital it cooked, truly native digital representation of membership in a community of some type.

So I think we’re kinda like reimagining how communities organize. And achieve goals together. And I think

Andrew: You know,

John: Yeah,

Andrew: John, I’m sorry to interrupt, but

I just happened to be talking to Lucas from Bankless Dow. Bankless started as a really successful content production company, right? Good blog, good podcast, et cetera, newsletter. And then when they created a Dow, it expanded way beyond what they could do themselves because suddenly they had more content being created than they could manage if they were doing themselves.

And they went beyond content to, for example, a consulting company that s sprouted out of this. And so by becoming a down. They are growing and reaching more areas, bringing in more revenue, also getting their mission, uh, accomplished by their their whole mission is to get more people on Web three. And it seemed to me like at some point the Dow was going to be bigger than the actual LLC that sits side by side with it.

And eventually the Dow might buy the llc, but only because, They could create more content for you. You’re not looking for more content. Do you think that the community will make more sales, that they’ll come up with more product lines? That they would do what? That you couldn’t come up with yourself?

John: Well, I think it’s like artistic experiences, right? Like in the case, uh, you know, it’s, there’s like the art piece is, you know, it. Where like Super Labs is focused and contracted on building the core marketplace. But you could think about, you know, there’s like a generative art product or like, there’s different kind of like additional products you could build on top.

And like with Bankless too, right? They could go do that themselves. Also, you could hire a team, try to like manage it internally, but if you let people be inspired.

and build with you, Like that’s a powerful concept and is I think much more challenging to do in like the web two context.

Andrew: So if I’m right, if you and I were to talk two years from now, the community will help you find more places to show your art that’s listed more ways to bring collectors on the platform, more artists that will come and, and show their work. And maybe they’ll have in-person events and things like that that they come up with.

John: That, and I mean, I think. Banding, like the rate of experimentation, like, you know, you’re talking about the Bankless example where there’s new ki types of content being created, right? There’s new auction models where if, you know, like smart contracts are open, anyone could go interact with the smart contracts.

You could have something recently that’s happened is people are, do like giving out, uh, what are called like bitter additions. So if you participate in an auction and you don’t win the auction, you might still get an addition just for participating.

Somebody can extend the super protocol to have that be a component and we don’t have to necessarily build it

into kinda like the core product itself.

Andrew: Now I’m starting to see the power of this. I know that we’re over time, Let me close it out with this. Everyone’s wondering, the state of the nft, marketplace size. Where is it? Where are you today? Can you release what your sales numbers were, say last month versus a year ago?

John: Sure. So yeah, it’s, it’s down. Significantly in dollar amounts. So yeah, I think last month we did roughly 7 million, and a year ago is probably closer to 15,

but

Andrew: million September, 2022 versus September, 2021,

John: yeah, when it’s probably closer to 15. Uh, but what’s interesting is the e volume itself actually isn’t that different. Um, so as far as like collector numbers and artist numbers go, Yeah, there’s a mat. You know, there was a huge hype cycle last year. It’s fallen a little bit, but we’ve still kind of steadily seen artists and collector numbers grow.

Um, And scales have stayed roughly the same, but just in e terms, not uh, dollar terms.

Andrew: So you’ve basically plateaued in East. It’s just that e is now worth a little bit less than it was before or significantly less. Got it.

Freaking. Hey John, I can’t believe this. I, I knew going into this was all like, all in on Dows, but to just hear you talk about it, um, it’s pretty exciting. I wanna see where this goes.

Thanks for being on here, man.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Andrew, thanks for having me. Let’s do it again.

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