Prez Thomas on Dank Bank's meme NFT marketplace

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have prez thomas the chief meme officer from dankbank prez welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you for having me you're very welcome let's dive into the world of memes in cryptocurrency and dankbank as a

0:24platform as well i'd love to just kick off the conversation just by starting to hear a little bit about you know what your team has built at dankbank and what are some solutions and how you're bringing memes into blockchain and into the world really and then we'll dive into the details yeah so bank bank is a fractionalized meme exchange you know

0:47we are in the business of finding people who have created or have been the subject of viral legendary internet memes acquiring those names minting them as entities fractionalizing them and then those fractions can be traded on the site we've seen over the course of the last two years that means in their one-on-one forum have always sold for

1:15premium you know collectors recognize them as being very culturally the culturally significant and inherently valuable assets that they are and so we see memes like harambe and coffin dance selling for millions and other very prolific memes like bad luck brian success kid david after dentists you know selling for small fortunes so the ambition with bank

1:40bank is to allow anyone to get exposure to this like fairly highly sought after class of classes so we make sure that we get nothing but the purest most grass-fed authentic real deal nfts we facilitate some kind of some kind of contract with the creator where they're retaining a sizable portion of the flow so they're getting that financial

2:05kickback for this asset that has become exceedingly recognizable in many cases they've never gotten financial recognition for them so it's a winning proposition for collectors it's a winning proposition for creators and it's also very stupid and very fun which is which in my opinion is what crypto is all about so yeah no it's super interesting how it

2:29came to be and some of these memes that have been become some of the most popular in the world you know the people who were the face of the meme they didn't mean to be a meme at all you know like the successor satoshi nakamoto you know old japanese man who knows and now they're famous and that wasn't the intention but if you know if you're

2:50becoming famous through a meme you might as well capitalize on that and actually have the ownership rights to the memes and the photos that you're in so thank god that there's a platform that can do that with dankbank and you know you mentioned there at the end about how it's stupid and fun and you know that makes me think about elon musk and

3:10how he was saying that you know he hopes that dogecoin becomes the future currency of the world just because he sees that the most ridiculous funny answer to what would be the world currency should be the truth it's it's interesting yeah you know how he points that out and now i just want to like talk about like memes in cryptocurrency overall you know

3:35it's great to be able to monetize them but i feel like they've actually had a significant impact in growing you know the validity of cryptocurrency as well you know in dogecoin you know it started out as a meme but then they funded the jamaican bobsled team and they're on nascar and then made it all over the richest man in the world promoting it on saturday night live

3:57and i feel like a lot of positive things have come from that you know how do you see meme culture in cryptocurrency and how that blends into crypto culture i mean memes at this point you know the digital age are really how we communicate it's a lot easier to convey a lot of ideas through a meme than it is to do so in words and so it is means often make us pretty to

4:25radical concepts it was definitely the absurdity of doge that compelled a man like elon musk to put it on a pedestal in the way that it is i think like in the long term it's kind of the absurdity of cryptocurrency generally i mean bitcoin for a lot of its life was at least two traditional investors kind of a meme a joke and it was only once it had

4:49it was only once that meme reached critical mass and we saw that major adoption in 2018 that people realize you know oh wow this is this is a billion dollar asset now this is not a joke this is something that can be taken seriously that makes people like changing money and then the other thing is you know a lot of people who are in right they're young people they were kind of

5:10incubated in the internet and so memes are an important thing to them personally they tend to be very nostalgic i mean i think lots of for a lot of people in crypto for a lot of young collectors and maybe for like the entire living population period you know something like pepe the frog is a lot more recognizable than a rembrandt or a vermeer so people put them on that

5:34same pedestal it's like this is the art that is going to define our generation i would like to be the person who owns it so that as we get older and as we get wealthier and as the significance of this meme becomes greater and it stands the test of time i am i'm exposed to a tough setting yeah it's so crazy to think about the meme economy you know when

5:59when memes first came out and people saw funny pictures who would have thought that the person who actually could take ownership of that picture could be set for life right yeah i just think it's a joke and i feel like the meme economy continues to grow now and i'm not sure you know how to quantify the market capitalization of the meme economy but maybe dankbank's

6:23helping with that maybe you can talk about the meme economy and if there is any way to quantify how it's growing yeah i think the meme economy is really interesting because it i think it's a lot older than the thing i would say the before i mean i guess the oldest example we have is there's the subreddit r slash medium economy right which is really just a birthplace for the spread

6:46of memes but people discuss memes on our slash stream economy which has around 2 million users subscribers in the same way they communicate about stocks when people see a meme template that starts to go viral they talk about being bullish on it so there's always been this idea of kind of treating the virality of memes and kind of the same way we treat during the volatility of

7:08stock but then you have like gme and blackberry and the 2020 like mean stock bubble where we see for the first time that retail traders can influence prices in the way that like big market makers only been able to do before and the natural by product was that people started pumping money into funny stocks right because it's easy to rally behind

7:31that so i think for the over the last several years we've seen money being spent in a memetic way in addition to that we also have meme coins right like shiva doge and will smith enu and like slap coin garlic coin like things that actually aren't even really backed by a real meme but their value is derived from their being funny so there's this without question multi-billion there are

7:58many billions of dollars that are sitting in funny assets so what we want to do is give people an actual ownership of an actual thing it's not just you getting doge though just funny you're in a community that has it now it's you're getting doge your own you're in a community that is funny but you also own a portion of the actual dough generation it has that provenance

8:22you know it's something that you can show to a collector and that has that really inherent value that i think is lacking in a lot of current medium coins so we're just trying to bring the meme economy to the next level by providing the real means the real deal now that we actually have the technology to do that yeah i guess it was really thanks to

8:46you know nfts that were able to capitalize on ownership of these kind of assets you know before with dogecoin and bitcoin you could own you could own the coin but you couldn't really own an individual meme or item and yeah nfts is really the technology that's accelerated that to create the meme economy yeah no it's exciting it's definitely i

9:12think the desire to invest in memes is older than the technology that has enabled us to do it so the demand is there the interest is there the assets are already valuable that's the fun thing right as cool as as cool as a fedenza or an autoglyph or a ward 8 is what's fun about memes is that we're we're bringing something that people already know and love to the table

9:37you know it's it's far less speculative i think than than a lot of what we spend money on in a tea market currently definitely and i'm curious on your take on you know twitter implementing nfts into their profile pictures and now instagram is going to be implementing it in and probably all social medias and you know all profile pictures and all pictures

10:03become nfts do you think that's going to help accelerate the meme part of this as well definitely i you know right now dank bank only deals in legendary memes every name that's on the site and everything will be on the site in the near future you know it you love it they're very famous but the goal is to allow anyone to meant any meme to the site and

10:26to really be able to invest in virality as it's happening not just buying things that have already become famous i think instagram and twitter and major social media outlets making people acquainted with nfts is going to help us get to that point where so much content starts its life on chain that you can in real time invest in the next meme as it's going viral

10:54so yeah i think that's a huge step you know if we get to a point where content creators realize that they can make extra money by minting their their original content not just putting it out there and trying to monetize it with ads that's really the where the paradigm shift is going to occur i think and you mentioned at the beginning about how some of these memes

11:16are worth millions of dollars which is crazy to think but and i saw on dankbank that you can do fractionalization of the nfts which i feel is super important you know not just for small people to who don't have a million dollars to spend on one meme to be able to own a part of it but also for people who do have you know they're the creator

11:42or they're a part of the meme and the to bring liquidity to that to have you know the democratized access so that a million people can own one dollar of that name rather than one person owning a million dollar meme trying to find somebody else who will sell who will buy it for a million dollars you know so are you seeing that on dankbank that

12:06this fractionalization of nfts is super important for the growth of the platform and for memes in general yeah absolutely i mean i think it's really twofold one is values do go up when many people can get exposure instead of finding one collector who has a million dollars that they're willing to spend you can find 10 000 people who are only willing to put in who only are

12:29interested in or can put in a few hundred but at the end of the day you come away with a larger market cap asset but it's also great because when these memes sell as one-of-ones a lot of times what happens is people will buy it for what seems like a really great price and then it goes up in value and the person who makes the most money is the collector

12:48the great thing about fractionalized means is that the owner retains a sizable portion of the mean so if it goes up in value they continue to see that kickback it's not just a one-time payment you're really you know making money and eventually making fees kind of in perpetuity it becomes a far more sustainable and favorable financial model especially when you consider i mean not

13:10many people a lot of people are interested in owning bad luck brian but not very many people want to wear a bad luck brian t-shirt there aren't that many elegant ways to monetize a meme so fractionalization is like a very intuitive and very efficient means a means of extracting getting getting fair value out of the assets that they've created definitely

13:34and what kind of investors are you seeing you know on dank bank or traders are if you have looked into it you know is it just people that are actually just trying to flip nfts for profit or is there you know genuinely people that just love memes and they're buying it to just own it forever i think i think people are able to rationalize the long-term value in

13:58mediums a lot more than they can like the long-term value in your typical coin so surprisingly we see a lot of small transactions people collecting small amounts of these memes and just holding them they find the memes that they already loved in real life and they just add that to their collection i think it's because with the meme like success kid bad luck

14:20brian harambe they've already they're already almost a decade old you know they've proven that they can stand the test of time so i think it's easier for people to buy it and hold it and also when you have that kind of emotional nostalgic connection to an asset you know i think people approach it a lot more like buying a piece of art that they would put up in their home because they

14:42like it they want to enjoy it and it is investment will appreciate they'll be able to sell it but i think people tend to come to the medium economy with less of a flipper mindset which is nice because i think that's really what distinguishes me from a lot of other assets in crypto is that it's it's unique in that it has that standing inherent value that cultural

15:05significance so yeah we see lots of small transactions just your typical collectors i mean of course there are the same whales who buy these mediums or mammoth amounts and then still hold them they're they're also interested but we were surprised to see how many folk came out of the woodwork and wanted to just get their hands on the memes that kind of defined their youth

15:34very you also see communities form around these memes which is really fun you know because you find people like two guys who already loved harambe they both find out that they own it and there's like an immediate what mutual interest that is really easy to kind of expand upon and build upon so that's very cool as well very cool and you mentioned that you

16:00know you can get the most legendary memes on dank bank right now in these fractionalized nfts but you're also working on you know building it out to have more up-and-coming memes and just more products and services in general can you talk about the future for you and your team at dank bank and what's the plan growing out the platform throughout 2022

16:24yeah i suppose i'm not a libertarian liberty to divorce a whole lot but the we have several very iconic names on the site we also have many many iconic memes that are not yet on the site and for the rest of the year not only are we looking into ways to reward

16:51users with these new memes but also just to simply expand economy and increase our offering not only are we going to bring more nft backed coins into the ecosystem but we're also looking to expanding to other memetic assets with the end goal being to turn bank bank into a place where you can go to invest in the medic assets of all variety be it

17:18backed nfts coins fractions of physical assets like you know beldelphine bathwater or e-girl farts in a jar so we definitely want to you know the meme economy is this very massive thing and what we have on site currently is just one element of it i think the newest and most exciting element of it but our goal is to consolidate the whole of what new economy is into one place so

17:44if you want to find out what the next great coin is if you want to know which memes are being auctioned off next bank bank is the place you're gonna go for that and then of course we wanna we wanna you know we're working on some pretty exciting incentive programs for tributes very cool and what's the best way for people to follow along with these updates as they

18:05roll out and make sure that they stay on top of the new releases for dank bank and just to go on the platform and trade and invest yeah you can check out the website at dankbank.co.co follow us on twitter at dankbankhq that's where we do most of our announcing that we are slightly more active and intimate in our discord which you can find in the bio or of our

18:33twitter sounds between those three things you should be you should be very pretty to all things awesome well i'm looking forward to seeing the next legendary memes on dankbank and all the best to you and your team with all the updates you're planning on rolling out i'm looking forward to hearing more about that i know you're pretty secretive on what's coming up

18:54next so i'll have to check out the platform on what's available i appreciate you taking the time i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers as well and all the best with dankbank and let's follow up in the near future thank you very much i appreciate you having me on