What's up, guys? We are Meta Money. And today we are sitting down with the one and only Ben Armstrong. And today we're talking about Shiba Inu
entering the metaverse. So, with that being said, Justin,
why don't you ask the first question? Absolutely. Alright. So this is all over the news. SHIB, they're launching their metaverse. Wooo! 100k land plots. But you can only buy them with ETH. I'd like to get to that in just a second here. But, first, alright, so SHIB's coming out
with their metaverse what are your thoughts on this? Is this a money grab? Is it a money grab? It's hard for me to really talk about Shiba
in any serious capacity.
Because it's a memecoin? Not because it's a memecoin. Because the whole thing is a joke. Like, we seem to associate memecoins with "jokes", but, like, Dogecoin isn't really a joke, right? If you go back to the earlier days, it's actually a pretty consistent performing altcoin since the very beginning. It's not like, all of a sudden, it came out of nowhere.Shiba wanted to hop on the trend that Dogecoin had kind of set,
but they learned from Dogecoin that if you limit yourselves and just say, "Well, we're just a currency. We're just a memecoin," that you're going to hit limits
of where you can go. And so Shiba, the people behind Shiba are constantly coming up with ideas to try to carry it into the next iteration of what it's going to be. But nobody wants to take Shiba seriously. So, the question is, what do I think about it? I just think the entire thing is a joke. You know? Like,
the Shiba people don't want to hear that. The Shiba people want to be like, "No, no, this is what is going to set us up for success." No one is going to seriously use a Shiba metaverse.And like I said, I-- just wait till we get to talk about the ETH. - That's ridiculous.
- Yeah.And so when you say, like, no one's going to use the SHIB metaverse,like, I totally understand that and I agree with it.I mean, eventually, the goal and if, like, you know,
if you followed the movie Ready Player One,you know, everything was connected into one.And, to me, in my opinion, that's when we have a true metaverse. I have-- I don't see any way that there becomes any interoperability between some of these metaverses that we're seeing nowthat, you know, you have Sandbox, Decentraland,
that have like a pretty decent working product or closer to it than most and then a company like or a platform like SHIB.Yeah. I mean, I think a much more interesting conversation istalking about the Bored Ape metaverse,- the Yuga Labs metaverse,- Yeah. that's coming because that has already got like a big community of people that are kind of in that worldwhere the Shiba investor is just someone who heard there's a cheap coin.
- "I should buy it."- Right. And they went and they bought it. And, you know, people were quick to point out the massive returns for Shiba. It's the No. 1 returning coin of 2021 in terms of return on investment.You know, like 75,000%, or whatever it is.
Well, only the people at the very beginning that were behind the project realized those kinds of gains.- No one will-- that'll never happen again.- Yeah. But I think the difference is, like, Shiba has a community. Right? - The same as the ApeCoin.- Yeah.But it's the partnerships. And it's who they're-- like, what does SHIB really have? Do they even have the team that's able to make this successful? And I don't believe so. But, I mean, could they, with enough money, raise? Possibly. But I think the big difference is you have to have community,
but you also have to have the team and the partnerships to be able to pull off a successful metaverse. What do you-- now, when you talk about the community, what do you think about, you know, kind of the demographic of these communities? Because, like, you know, Ben said, you know, the SHIB community, that's going to be a lot of younger people who really don't have a ton of money, who, on a pipe dream around a hope and a wish, bought a bunch of SHIB, thinking like, "Oh, I'm going to get rich with this $100," whereas the ApeCoin community,
I mean, you got a lot of these people that are Bored Ape holders that are-- it's a $300,000 NFT.You know, they've got a lot more money to prop up that project than a collective--I don't want to say poor people, but a collective bunch of people who aren't financially secure yet. Maybe.Well, they're at least poor in decision making. - Some of them made a lot of mone though.- Because--Now, I want to be clear about that. That's 100% accurate. And we would never, you know, demean anyone that made a lot of money on Shiba because congratulations if you did. That's a big win.- Learn from it and get out.
- Yeah.
Because what SHIB--their marketing practice from the very beginning has been "Latch on something bigger and more successful, and let's ride that." They did it with Dogecoin. They did it with Vitalik Buterin by sending him a bunch of free coins. They've done it consistently. That's been their strategy. But what did they really put out that's been successful other than the price rising? And when you look at that track record, at some point, that formula is going to run out of gas. And I think it probably already has. That's not to say Shiba can't hit a new all-time high because it certainly can if the entire market moves in that direction. But we're never going to see the kind of parabolic gains for it that we saw before. So, if you were someone who came into crypto and you just decide, like,
"This is the coin I want to get," because people were making videos about it, and you made money, that's good. I'm happy for you. That's really good. You've got to learn from that and move on and mature and move to projects that are going to be around for a long time. Because the big narrative for Shiba over the fall last year was, "The Renaissance is coming because Shiba swapper, ShibaSwap." How is that doing?
- I've never used it. - Have you-- - Have you ever seen it? - No.No, no. The only people who, you know, know about it - are the people that were sold the dream - Yeah. from the people who have already made the money - that want to make more money.- Yeah.No one is going to use ShibaSwap as a major exchange. That's not a real thing. It's never going to happen.
Just like people are not going to use the Shiba metaverse. The only people that will be using it will once again be the people that already made the money that are trying to trick more people into coming in to give them liquidity to sell. Absolutely. Alright. So a second ago, you said marketing. And I think that brings us to our next point. Kind of the main point that we want to talk about is, okay, the founders came out and said,"Alright. We're going to do this big land sale."I think of the 100k plots, like, only 62,000 are available for purchase.
They're keeping the rest for, you know, in-house development, whatever. But with that being said, you know,they are going to only accept ETH for the purchase of their land.They don't want to use SHIB because they know that they'll dump the price to provide liquidity for the project. Does that even make sense? They understand Shiba is worthless. That's the entire proposition here. Because, you know, when I started BitBoy Crypto, like, many years ago, one of the things that I found to be so interesting about a potential career in this kind of, you know, in blockchain is the opportunity to have certain times where you will be able to receive payment to make money in crypto.
So you would be earning crypto, not necessarily investing in crypto. You want to invest. It's good.But if you can earn, that supercharges everything. Why? Because you understand crypto is going to be worth more down the road than it is now. And so when we would talk to different projects in-- you know, back when we did sponsored content, they would come to me and they would say,
"Yeah, well, we would like to pay you in ETH, or we'd like to pay you in USDT because we don't want to pay you in our coin because we think our coin is going to be worth much more down the road," just like I believe crypto would be worth much more down the road.What the Shiba people are telling you is, "We believe Ethereum is going to be worth much more money in terms of return on investment than our own coin is." Or else it makes no sense for them to do that. Because the exact scenario I laid out a second ago where you earn in crypto,how advantageous that is, because you understand the long term. They're saying,
"No, no, no. We actually don't think Shiba is going to be worth more than ETH on the return on investment from us receiving this payment in this coin." And that, to me, is the most condemning thing of this entire debacle because the liquidity argument makes no sense because you would be receiving the coins back. - You're not selling them. - Right. - So the liquidity argument doesn't make any sense. - No. So anyone who believes that and takes that at face value,
I mean, you know, you've just got to start making better decisions in crypto. That's really interesting. They'll be able to dump all the money that they earn. Like, even if they wanted to sell the ETH instantly, they could. And then they're not technically dumping the price of their coin. But then the community is probably-- I would be mad! I would be so mad because, like, why would you not want the price to pump by everyone having to buy SHIB in order to buy the land? Like, if you are in the SHIB community, and they're saying
"Oh, we're not going to use the coin," I would be pissed because that's like your chance for another pump or to help the community. - So it just seems kind of crazy, man. - Well, imagine. Imagine this. Imagine if they were to take in the payment in SHIB, and then instead of just taking all that money, they burned all those coins that came in. Burn it or lock it up or something. That's the only way Shiba ever gets to be worth any respectful amount per coin.- Not that that's important. - Yeah. Like, it will never reach a penny.
The market cap would have had to be eight times bigger than the price of Bitcoin - to even just make-- exactly. - For it to have respect in general. So, you know, because of all that and the crappy way they built these
tokenomics, each coin is basically worthless. And they're showing you that even they believe that. There were talks a while back about them burning a gigantic amount.We know Vitalik basically burned a gigantic amount. Like, they burn huge amounts all the time because it's completely worthless and they know that it's not going to be worth a massive amount over time. That's why they continue to try to cash out.
It's almost similar to, you know, people that are trying to money launder crypto that they've stolen from exchanges. Hackers, right? It's really hard for them to do that to get enough liquidity and to be able to move the money around enough to be able to pull all their money out. Same thing here. Like, people in the beginning of SHIB made so much money, billions and billions and billions of dollars. - They can't just pull that. - Right. They've got to keep coming up with a new ploy, a new ploy, a new ploy. And, like, I'm not saying it's a scam per se
because the word scam, you know, seems to indicate that, you know, you have no chance to make a return.You do have a chance to make a return on SHIB.Right.
But when the team is telling you that they believe other coins are better than their own coin,that shows you what they think about their own coin. Absolutely. And we didn't want to use the word scam either because I don't think it's a scam. And that's why we chose to use the word money grab because that makes the most sense here. It's like,
"Okay. How can we find a way to make a ton of ETH?" "Well, here we go. Let's only accept that for the land." I think the key takeaway from this is sell the news. Like, the metaverse is coming. This is your chance if you want. You know, but I don't know. But, also, we are Meta Money,
and we talk about everything metaverse on our channel. So if you get a chance, go ahead and check that out. Head over and subscribe to our page. We'll really appreciate that. Also, though, the metaverse is a huge buzzword. And that's kind of why we're a part of it as well. But are people putting it in their names? Are they starting their own metaverses just for money grabs? Like, how many projects-- how do you find a good project that has a metaverse, like, community? Like, how do we find that? Well, of course, it's a money grab. - You know? Like, - Yeah.
basically, you know, so many crypto projects out there, you know, back when DeFi was big in 2020 over the summer, all of a sudden, everything turned into a finance coin. - You know?- Yeah. - Everything turned into-- - DeFi summer, man. DeFi summer. You had projects that completely pivoted what they were doing. IOST was one that I supported heavily in the beginning because I really liked the CEO, and I really liked the guy that was in chargemof their marketing at the time. I bought all into it. And I still run a node on the IOST network, - but-- - You were like in the leaderboard, weren't you? - Yeah.
Yeah, we were like one of the top, I think, 15 nodes there at some point. But what happened is, is that the CEO basically disappeared. And I don't know if he's on vacation still, you know, years and years later, but then a lot of people I knew there, they started leaving, and also the project started losing its way and it no longer had that direction, and so what happens in 2020? "Guys, we're pivoting to DeFi!" Like, "Just whatever the latest trend is, that's what we're going to do. We're going to move there."
And that's such a common story in crypto.So you're going to see a lot of projects pivoting over to metaverse and kind of trying to sell you on this idea that,"Well, this is where we're going the whole time.
"Yeah. That's-- I mean, that's the--the biggest takeaway, I think, you know, about this whole thing is, you know, you always want to do your own research.And in that, you know, if you're looking at a metaverse project, look at their history. Look at their founders. Look what they
If they just rebranded a DeFi project to a metaverse project, - you know something's up-Yeah. Well, what's really funny is if you go pull up some of these projects and you start using the Wayback Machine and start looking and seeing their previous iterations of their websites, like, if you go back a year ago, you know, all of a sudden, they were talking about NFTs. You know, a year before, they were talking about DeFi. You go the year before, they were talking about, you know, maybe doing a decentralized exchange. They just keep changing and pivoting -
Just hopping-- - to get more and more money. And they hope that, at some point, they'll find something that will be able to push their project to the next level. And maybe that's what Shiba is looking for. I just don't think they're going to find it.You cannot keep pivoting over and over and over again because every time you pivot,
you lose a group of people that were excited about the vision you previously had. Right. And so, you know, I don't know how many people were excited about the vision of SHIB or something like that, but you are going to see this across the board. So many of these different projects, you know, moving into metaverse and figuring out-- now, it's okay to figure out how your project, you know, what it looks like in the metaverse. Of course. But you don't all have to have your own metaverse. There's not enough supply and demand. - Exactly.- Yeah. That's, I think, a huge point to bring across. You don't have to have your own metaverse. No one has to have their own. Let's build one.
And let's all, you know, make it interoperable so that we can all, you know. - Yeah.Well, I think, kind of like what we talked about last week a little bit with Everdome, like, I think you will have--you do need different ones because there's different styles of play that people like. You know, some people are going to like, you know, the Minecraft style. Some people are going to like
the hyper-realistic style. Some people are going to, you know, find one that kind of mimics what they do in real life. So maybe we'll have a furry metaverse out there.Or you just make the one, and you can just teleport to the land.Like, "Oh, let's teleport to the voxel land."
- "Let's teleport to the fuzzy land."- Yeah. Possibly. - Just make it all one with the silos built into it Yeah. versus having a bunch of, you know, exterior silos. We're just way far away from the capabilities to do that. - Five years? - Yeah. And then somewhat that would have to be like a big, like, decentralized or centralized platform. So having them--being able to, like, port to different ones is kind of where we're going to go, I think. But, alright. So, we have all this metaverse talk.We talked about kind of negatively about some of it.What is a metaverse project right now, let's each pick one, that we like,
that we think has a better chance than the rest to succeed?Oh, this is tough because-- I got mine.I would think we'd almost say the same thing.- I mean--- I think mine's different.Okay. Okay.Sandbox. Duh!There he goes! Okay. Sandbox is duh. Like
, Sandbox is the easy answer.Animoca Brands is behind it.We actually have a video coming out later today on the channel about Animoca Brands and everything they have worked out. It's going to be absolutely huge. The only question is how many people will like the voxel styleand that opens up an opportunity for other projects. But Sandbox is just so far ahead of everywhere else.Decentraland has a lot of money and backing,
but Sandbox has got the gameplay and the user base and the-- I think, the right demographic for what they're trying to do. So, you know, I love a lot of other projects. Bloktopia, Everdome-- there's a lot of metaverse I like. We're getting some land in Everdome. But it's just hard right now to be intellectually honest and say, "I think something has a better chance than Sandbox." Alright. - Okay. - I'm going to pick Victoria VR. - I like that one, too.
And only because it's one of those projects that I think has started out- with the metaverse in mind the whole time. -
Yeah.So it's not just like the money grab or changing their project over.So I think that-- and they have the team, too.I think they have like 200 or 300 people,which is like what a normal game development team has.Yeah.So that's one that I'm rooting for and hoping to see succeed.I like it.
I like both of your answers for the reasons that you gave.Mine is Everdome, though.I love the hyper-realistic nature of it.I think, for me, like, I'm not a video gamer.I don't like the voxel style that, you know.That's a "to each your own" kind of thing.So I love the style of Everdome.Are they doing everything, like, perfectly?Probably not.- But I'd like-- right.- We don't know yet.- We haven't seen it yet. - Yeah.But I like where they're going.And I like, you know, having these kind of conversations with you.I think the audience last week said, you know, this was a pretty cool format.
So, thanks for joining us again.I love you all.Yeah. We love you, BitSquad!Alright, guys. Leave a comment below with--- What's your favorite metaverse - Yeah. What's your favorite metaverse project?And we'll see you next time.
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