Online Optimism
Thanks for joining us. Ooh, let me start that over. I’ll just start over. All right. Thanks for joining us, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Long
I’m doing great, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be on this program and because I looked at your website and I see what you all are doing, it’s very exciting to me and I like the whole aspect of what you’re doing, the positivity, optimism, it’s great, it’s really awesome.

Online Optimism
Well, speaking of optimism, I have to confess, I am an NFT pessimist. This is probably the only space where I don’t feel optimistic. But reading your bio, I was very intrigued and perplexed by what is an NFT archeologist?

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, well, an NFT archaeologist is a someone and it’s a very small group of us right now, probably less than 50 in the whole world that swear by it. But we are a small group of researchers that look through the blockchain, cataloging the history of what has already happened from around 2011 to currently, which is the era of NFTs as we currently know it. And also learning as many lessons as we can about what happened in the blockchain

projects that were rugs, all the things that were people were worried about. We know about those things and we talk about it. And then all the things that need to be highlighted and were amazing projects that maybe didn’t get the attention they originally deserved, such as some of the most legendary ones like crypto punks. We want to make sure people understand why those projects are historic and possibly even, you know, valuable in an intrinsic way, because people love the art or they love the story and they love the team behind it and just making sure that people have a

clear vision of what that blockchain history is. And so that’s what we all work together in a very loose consortium to put together these timelines and understanding that history of the blockchain.

Online Optimism
Interesting. So do you have, like, do you study all the minutiae? Are you looking for more significant events?

Jeremiah Long
Okay, so I may be different than some of the other archaeologists, but I love the minutiae. I like to sit on Etherscan late, late at night, digging through contracts, trying to see what were people thinking during different times? What was this era of NFTs like? Because during certain eras, like the early 2018 era, everyone was really excited about this one concept called a hot potato where the price automatically increased. And then in our modern era, we don’t really like that trend. So we don’t use that anymore.

So looking back to those contracts, I find a lot of, I wouldn’t call them dead ends, but contracts that we don’t really find as important today as was thought of at that time. So yeah, sometimes it’s about finding things that are interesting, and sometimes it’s just cataloging what happened.

Online Optimism
Do you do any trend forecasting based on your observations as an archaeologist?

Jeremiah Long
I actually do. And the reason that I put together what I feel like are benchmarks across the, what I think of as four different waves of NFTs is because those NFTs had different capabilities. And early on, NFTs were basically just a digital asset that you could possess and you could transfer it to a different person. And then, you know, we got closer into the modern NFTs where they are ownables, you could sell them. Those types of capabilities weren’t really there early on.

and the things to do with art, where we’ve attached a piece of content to the NFT, because an NFT is really just a certificate of authenticity. It’s not actually the content itself. So I’m always looking and evaluating that. So some of my benchmarks are, does it meet the criteria just to be an NFT at all? And then did it do something innovative and was it one of the earliest examples of innovation?

because we’re in 2021 when everything was kind of blowing up in the NFT space, everyone was like, oh, I’m innovating and doing this. Oh, well, my trend is, you know, I’m gonna have a Dow token or I’m gonna fractionalize or I’m gonna share the IP rights. And all those things are very interesting and especially very trendy at the moment with the larger NFT community, larger, it’s still very small. But if you’re an NFT archeologist, you might look back and go, hey, in 2018, someone made a very similar project.

that had all of those hallmarks you’re looking for in your new projects, and they did it better in a way. And just because you don’t know about that project doesn’t mean that because of the blockchain, it’s still just sitting there and it still exists and all of the properties on the blockchain are still the same. So it’s very important to understand what those trends used to be, how we may have forgotten about them, and how when they come back, you’re gonna be like, hey, this is already on the shelf and it’s really amazing, it’s worth looking at.

Online Optimism
Yeah, all right. Definitely and I think that’s really interesting because I think there’s so much that people don’t know about it. And so I’m curious, how do you define an NFT and how does the NFT work with the blockchain?

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, so an NFT, I define two different ways depending on if it’s a person I’m just introducing to an NFT or it’s someone who works in the NFT world or is familiar with NFTs. For the person who wants to understand what is an NFT on the most basic level, I do still describe it as a certificate of authenticity. That certificate can be attached to art or music, video, audio, a computer program, any other emerging data types that

aren’t even fully explored yet. But by definition, differently than that, an NFT is a non-fungible asset or non-fungible token, meaning that there’s only one single one of it and it can’t be exchanged with a different object in parallel, similar to if I had a dollar bill and you had a dollar bill and we traded dollar bills, we’d still just both have one dollar bill. But if I have a Picasso and you have a Monet, they are different objects that cannot be one for one exchanged because they’re

They’re different. So that’s like the basic definition I would tell you if you were just getting into this space. If you’re in the space, a non-fungible token really gets fun and it gets more interesting, especially if you love technology. Because strictly, an NFT needs to have a few properties. It needs to be unique. It needs to be transferable digitally from one digital house or one box or one wallet to another.

it needs to be ownable. I need to be able to understand, own the blockchain, that this particular wallet or this particular entity has possession of the asset. And then, of course, when I say non-fungible, we always, like I said, we meant a unique object, but in our world, there are certain objects that are considered fungible, like an item that has multiple editions, a single piece of art with 25 editions. That is also considered an NFT, even though in the strictest sense, it is a fungible token.

So in that sense, we get into the most technical part of the weeds where you have, for example, an ERC721, and that word means the standard that defines a modern NFT, ERC721. And that is what we commonly call an NFT, is one that adheres to that standard that was established by the Ethereum Consortium, you know, the Ethereum Foundation. Now, when I met the non-fungible NFTs, or the fungible NFTs, excuse me,

Jeremiah Long
there’s a standard called ERC 1155 that is another set of rules and regulations essentially that say if your token adheres to these standards, the 1155 standard, then we consider that also an NFT. So those are the most technical versions and then the most basic versions of what an NFT is.

Online Optimism
Yeah, I’m definitely on the more basic side, but just to follow up on that. So you can have one NFT that’s non-fungible with multiple additions to it.

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, and so we still call that an NFT because it’s a colloquial version of just like, we call these things NFTs. But the 1155 standard does allow you to have one picture of your art and 25 editions. And so if you and Sam and me, all three had one of each of the editions, that edition is still transferable. It’s still ownable. I own one copy and you own one copy. And I could sell.

one of my copies to you and you would end up with two copies, right? But when it comes to the digital way of accounting for where it exists at, you have one piece of art that has 25 copies. So it’s very similar to the way that in traditional art, you’d have a numbered print. And so a numbered print is the same piece of art on your wall and at the bottom of the corner, it says one of 25, two of 25. That is the exact digital asset parallel to what we’re talking about.

Online Optimism
Okay.

So I know that a lot of NFTs, like it is an actual JPEG, like that’s what the thing that you’re having the certificate for is that like I have not even the rights because you can’t make media off of it, you can’t put it on a shirt and sell it. You’re saying that I own this, what is the value to that when someone can, as people like to joke, right click and save?

Jeremiah Long
So yeah, that’s a really interesting place that we’re at that I think when we talk about NFTs and we talk about web three, it’s important to also talk about traditional art and the web two era of art, which I think really centers around a platforms like Etsy, for example, and think about artists, digital artists that are very strong in that world of making their own digital prints on Etsy or selling a digital print on Etsy. I like Etsy as a great platform because just Etsy by itself.

captures so much of the web to digital artist world and it really catches a lot of them. You know, there’s other platforms, but that one I love because they really cater to those artists. So here’s what that real difference is. The JPEG that you purchased in the case you’re referring to that did not grant you any sort of rights to the art, the reason that you are purchasing it is because that artist is amazing. You think you love their story, you saw them come up through the era.

You love their style of art. The reason that you are exchanging your hard earned fiat or crypto, you can do it in many ways. As long as you’re exchanging value for that piece of art is because you wanna see their career grow and you wanna see them be exceptional and get the recognition they deserve. That is the absolute end of the story in my case. I will hold onto that art for years to come, tell people about it, show people it. A lot of times they will give you the permission to make a print, to put on your wall, a physical print.

And in that case, that’s really where the story ends because you wanna see that artist do well. I don’t do the secondary market of art collection in the traditional world is usually on a 50 to 100 year kind of cycle. So these are not short term movements. And that is where that really is at. Now there is a different class of NFTs and this is what makes the technology interesting because the underlying smart contract.

What it does in that first case where we’re talking about, it just does the basics of an NFT. It transfers a copy of the art to you, and you are able to transfer it to someone else. You could sell it, and it’s very similar to just having a physical print that if you wouldn’t had a yard sale and you sold it at your yard sale, that’s very similar to what would happen with that particular NFT. Now, other NFTs have formed using their smart contracts and sometimes just using creative language inside, without…

Jeremiah Long
There’s not really Web3 technology attached to that language. It’s just a contract, essentially a regular contract, where when you are the owner of that NFT, and if, let’s say it’s a unique one, like a PFP project, right? I, in my case, I own two Cool Cats. So one of my Cool Cats, they have granted me, in this particular case, and this is different from other projects, a non-exclusive commercial right to my piece of art. So in that particular case, I do have the right to put it on a T-shirt,

to license it to be in a movie, to create an entire empire like Disney behind my particular piece of art. Now in Cool Cat’s particular case, this is why it’s cool but it’s complicated at times, they also, they granted me a non-exclusive right. So they also have a parallel right to develop that intellectual property on their own because the artist is the one who drew the picture, the company is the one who is promoting it. So in parallel, we both possess those rights. Other…

NFT collections grant you the absolute right to your IP. They actually give it away from themselves. The company says, I created this, we created this art, but if you are the owner of the NFT, you are now the rights holder and we are not. We can’t tell you what to do. We don’t even have the rights. We’ve granted them to you exclusively. And that is what gets complicated is that’s only one project. Over here, Cool Cats is one project.

And then you have the greater sphere of NFTs that’s literally, because we’re kind of in the wild west of how this all works, that are all across the board. You’ve got ones from the one side of the range, and I now possess NFTs in all of these classes. On the one range that really fits what you’re talking about, and photography’s a great example usually. I get no rights whatsoever to the art itself. What I own is the NFT, and what I’ve really done is I’ve supported the artist. That’s the heart of that.

all the way through that middle ground that I just talked about Cool Cat Source or a lot of other projects that grant you some form of rights using the smart contract. And then you would move those rights from yourself over to another person if you transferred or sold it. And then you’ve got this class all the way on the other side and this is the class that can get, it can get, I won’t say dangerous, it can get tricky. Where we have what we call CCO, where they are copyright free art.

Jeremiah Long
So that art on this side, no one owns the rights to, not the person who made it, not you that owns the NFT, no one on the planet. I can literally right click and save that art all day. No one has the right to tell me I can’t, include that’s specifically what they want. And what’s really happening over there is different than these other two worlds. This world over here, that’s where you get all of the stock day traders that come into the space looking for upside value. Those people,

do not actually look at the artwork when they’re trying to decide whether to buy or sell that NFT. They’re looking at market conditions that have to do with buy pressure and sell pressure. They’re trying to buy an NFT that has a very large hype cycle and a very large marketing budget at a very low price, and they’re trying to let that value accrue very high, and then they’re gonna sell it for a lot of upside. Now, they’re doing things even more complicated because they’re day traders.

So as a day trader, they’re making micro movements all through the day to try to obtain small amounts of value that eventually amount to the total floor value of the collection going up very high. And that’s something that we saw across a few collections such as the Board Ape Yacht Club. I was there during that entire cycle. And believe me, nobody cared about the Board Ape Yacht Club for the first three months. You could have bought one at 0.15 all day long and it minted at 0.08. So that’s not that much, that’s less than double.

It set there for three months. It took them nine days to mint out that collection. So if you look at it from the perspective we think of today, they’re like, why would somebody pay 90,000 for that? And then I was just having a conversation earlier and I was trying to remind people, over 70% of people paid 80 or $100 for their board date and have just held it this entire time. So it’s not, people aren’t actually paying 90,000. Very rarely does anybody pay 90,000, maybe once to seven times per week.

but not like it was when it was worth 0.15 Ethereum and there were thousands of trades happening every day. So it’s interesting to look, you know, with hindsight was another reason I love being an NFT archeologist and really digging out the differences in those three main things. I’m just supporting an artist. I’m part of a community that grants me some sort of rights and there’s the day trader value seeking side of it. And that’s

Jeremiah Long
It’s a part we’re not going to be able to dislodge. It’s a part of what we do. It’s a part of our community. So, but it’s good to understand that they are different.

Online Optimism
Interesting. Jeremiah, can you give me one second? I was going to ask, can you hear Sam’s dog in the background? We are a dog-friendly office, and so Sam likes to bring his little dog, Tom, and I think he got out of… We’re in New Orleans. Yeah, yeah.

Jeremiah Long
I may have heard one, just one little thing, but not for the most part.

Jeremiah Long
Yeah! Where are y’all based out of?

Oh, awesome. Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a New Orleans. I act and I’ve been getting a bunch of auditions down there, but I haven’t quite booked yet.

Online Optimism
Oh my God, yeah, so much is, well, they shut down NCIS down here, so that was a lot of the work. But there’s still a lot of projects. I went to film school, so I like, was here for a reason. Yeah, but then I ended up being like, mmm, I don’t want to work on movie sets, I don’t want to work on any sets. I want committed, long-term work that I’m not begging people to find me another job. So I went into marketing.

Jeremiah Long
Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah Long
Oh wow, yeah. There’s a lot of commercial work for sure.

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a lot of my friends are in the, I mean, I come from being a television producer, but a lot of my friends still work in the union side of the production here in, I’m in Atlanta, you know. So yeah, but they also all want out. Yeah, they all want out immediately.

Online Optimism
Yeah, huge. I’m sorry about that, Jeremiah. Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, welcome back, Sam. Okay, I was so interested, but also my dog was freaking out and I’m very sorry about that. But that was a great explanation of the… Let’s just hop back in. I have a question. Yeah, let’s just hop back in. Sorry. Yeah, so you said for a lot of people, the value is just in supporting and…

artists that you appreciate, which I understand that. I can get behind that. But then, so how do you feel about when the NBA was like, own this photo of this shot, like, Nate Budweiser put out NFTs. Kind of, you’re not helping anybody, you’re not helping a little guy, it’s just a corporation trying to take over another sphere. How do you feel about that?

Jeremiah Long
I will tell you from my personal experience in both of those particular communities, I don’t necessarily like, you know, when you’re supporting an artist, there is an altruism, there’s the story, there’s so many reasons that I think years from now that might be, you know, intrinsically valuable, at least to me, or it’s just, you know, just an interesting or historic thing, right? Whereas…

where the NBA is coming from is you have a lot of specifically players in the NBA that are technologically very advanced or very interested in technology. So from the behind the scenes area, and this is because they’re working with the flow blockchain, and the flow blockchain is very much a centralized blockchain, it’s very much about big box clients, and the reason they’re doing that is because they wanna keep everything very tight and very safe, as they say, and very secure.

So all of these NBA players kept coming to their teams and to the overall NBA saying, hey, we’ve got to get into this Web3 world. We’ve got to do this. And this is back in 2019 into 2020. And so they started experimenting. So I would say the heart of what NBA Top Shot and everything came out of was just a desire to explore Web3 technology. I’d say in the execution of which they figured out, hey, this is an in for digital sports trading cards.

So whatever that vertical of industry is, I think that they’re really just trying to put that lightning into a bottle. So, you know, it’s interesting if you’re a big fan of sports, like capturing moments from games, especially that you’ve been to is, you know, intrinsically something that’ll have your heart. You’re like, I was there, I was in the stands. I saw that dunk, I saw this thing. And if you’re really deep in sports, you know, that might be your biggest passion. So I do understand where they come from. Their execution with the public,

has also been kind of helpful for mass adoption. And the reason I say that is because one of the biggest issues we have as artists getting into the space is how to convince people that don’t understand the space to make that leap into Web3. And what Top Shot has done with Dapper Labs is they allowed early on for what are called fiat on-ramps. They allowed for you to pay with cash or pay with a debit card instead of using cryptocurrency. So…

Jeremiah Long
I could tell you across the board, so many amazing legendary artists that entered the Web3 space because they collected a few top shots. And they’re like, oh, okay, so there’s a thing here. So that was their onboarding into Web3. So while they are a huge corporate entity and they’re just gonna continue to grow, they don’t necessarily care about small artists. There is some heart inside of the company. I definitely know that from having personal conversations with people in the tech side with Dapper Labs.

But yeah, I definitely get what you’re saying. That corporatization of it is, it’s not exactly the web ethos we’re looking for in web three. But again, that part of it was important. And can you ask me the second part of your question?

Online Optimism
Just my other example was like Budweiser. I know, I went to a conference, they were there and they were talking about it and everyone’s like, ah, if you’re in marketing, you gotta be at the forefront of NFTs and I was like, well that’s, it feels kinda scummy that these like, in a space that was meant for creatives to grow, now it’s just a marketing scheme.

Jeremiah Long
Oh, yes.

Jeremiah Long
Yeah.

Yeah, and so this is a huge lesson I personally learned from the Budweiser NFT drop, is that it doesn’t matter how big a corporation is, they can still very easily put out a low effort project. And they can charge astronomical amounts for the mint price. The mint price was $399. That is not nothing. I mean, if you love Budweiser, you probably should have just bought 10 cases of beer instead.

Online Optimism
Yeah.

Jeremiah Long
But what I did is I received a, what I think of as a low effort generative project. No one knows who the artist is, so there was no story behind that may give it intrinsic value in the long term. It was probably just some, you know, someone in their marketing department who figured out how to run a Python script. And then once they launched, the first utility of that project was supposed to be that you would receive a physical pair of nouns, glasses, as a utility for having the NFT.

Well, they did such a bad job of communicating how to obtain that utility that over 80% in my estimation, this is not a hard number, over 80% of people who should have gotten the glasses never filled out the little form within the time window they allowed because you had to go into the Discord, you had to find this one specific announcement that was not clear, you had to click on this one Google Form link, and you had to do that within seven days of the time they launched that. And guess what?

most people missed it. And so their response, even through email, was, oh, sorry, we’ve already got into the manufacturing process, you just missed the window. We promise, in the future, there’ll be other utilities that will be exciting. So from a marketing perspective, and you know that they did go into this purely as a marketing effort, they, in my opinion, deeply failed their community because now it went from people being excited for the potential benefits of going to in real life

Events that are sponsored by Budweiser and receiving a benefit because I’m an NFT holder to being pissed off that I paid $400 and didn’t get a pair of 10 cent glasses That’s all like that’s all anyone cares about in that discord now is how you paid 400 bucks and you didn’t get your dollar glasses and like they want those dollar glasses before they’re even want To talk to you about staying in this community And so those that’s a classic example of how you can say I have a roadmap and this is what I intend to do

And then I don’t want to say miserably fail, but just not be in sync with your community in a, in the ways that web three demands. And, you know, they did the Budweiser specific one, two weeks later, they did a private party in St. Louis and anyone could go that’s an NFT holder. Well, I mean, anyone can go is all over the world. So only like maybe 20 people could make it to St. Louis for this private party. And so thank you, but.

Online Optimism
Right.

Jeremiah Long
that’s not really gonna cut it. I would rather have had the dollar glasses than fly to St. Louis to drink some free beer. So in the end, that’s a really classic example of large corporations coming into the space. Adidas is another one that absolutely came in with a monetary gain mindset. And they come into the community, they just try to pull a bunch of value out of us and they’re like, all right, we did that, see ya. And that is something that I am

very, very cautious about and something that as, you know, in my organization, NFTATL and in my newer organization, it’s a 501C3, it’s called Wedge. We are, we are very aware that corporate interests don’t really understand the Web3 ethos and that we have to be cautious anytime they enter the space as to what are their true motives.

Online Optimism
And I would argue that that’s true with any art. Any art, music, anything that creative people put out there has a chance to be co-opted by big corporations and corporations that don’t even pay attention to the communities that they’re extracting from. So it’s definitely interesting, but it has a history there as well. I’m having a brain blast right now. I don’t know if I said that in a mic, but I’m having a brain blast.

And so like my part of my like NFT pessimism is I have been a lifelong environmentalist. I know that there’s a strong environmental impact of the blockchain running every time there’s a transaction, all of that. Because I don’t know if you know why the environmental impact happens, but basically it’s all running on a million computers basically and the amount of power to power all those computers takes a lot.

Just for anyone listening. But so I went to this conference and it was a lot of it was about, supposed to be about social media, but a lot of it was about Web 3 and NFTs. And I came out of it being like, as marketers, I feel like we have an obligation to say like, no, this thing is bad for the environment. Like we don’t have to do it. But now my brain blast is also that we as marketers have to say, no, this is significant to a community and we shouldn’t invade it.

it. Right. Absolutely.

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, I have to agree with you there. And I also, I’d love to piggyback on that with the environmental concerns, because that’s something that the builders in the NFT space, we are very, very cognizant of those concerns, because if we don’t fix those specific problems, then we end up with a much bigger problem down the line that we can’t solve. And…

I believe that the builders in the space are thinking about this. And there’s two parallels that I talk about with that, right? First parallel is that energy consumption. Currently, most blockchains are using a proof of work format, which means, like you were saying, million computers across the whole world are all trying to solve one single, very complex equation. And whoever solves it first wins, and they’re able to complete the transaction for whoever is that wants that transaction.

and they receive the mining benefits from making that transaction. Now, what we wanna do is move away from that world into what’s called a proof of stake world, which is, this is how I think of it, if proof of work is apples, then proof of stake is clothing. It’s just not the same thing. It’s like, it’s a totally different world, right?

In the proof of stake world, all those computers are trying to solve that computer program and you can solve that computer calculation at the same time. Whereas on the validator side, like when you have proof of stake, what you have are called validator nodes. And validator nodes are static, stationary examples of pieces of the blockchain. And what happens is when you wanna complete a transaction, you query that group of validators, you check.

across say seven computers, and this is all happening automatically for you, and they say, oh, well, y’all all seven have identical reference points to information ABC. If that’s all correct, then we validate it, and then we say, yes, you may write that to the blockchain. And that reduces that energy use by 98 or 99%, almost to 0% if you actually look at the way the statistics run. And so then we give it back into our Web2 world, and then I pose this question.

Jeremiah Long
because I was looking up the data, if we feel like, you know, there’s not that many NFTs being minted per day, just on scale, if you think about it. There’s a lot, but it doesn’t, but it’s not, it may be hundreds of thousands, it may be even be millions. But if you compare that to the amount of environmental waste we cause by posting IG stories, it’s absolutely minuscule. IG stories cost a lot more to the environment than NFTs.

And here’s the thought too, IG stories are ephemeral. So we’re using that energy and that electricity and then there’s no long-term benefits, it goes away. And so we use it once and then tomorrow we use it again and we use it over and over. And it’s just like flipping the light switch constantly. And I don’t know if y’all know, but there are billions of IG stories produced every day. And there are… Yeah.

Online Optimism
I think just from me, honestly. Yeah.

Jeremiah Long
And so those have to be stored somewhere, they have to be accounted for, and they’re a non-regulated blockchain of sorts, but there’s a lot more environmental toll based on the volume of IG stories than there is from any proof of work, the worst one, any proof of work NFTs being produced. So that being said, will eventually, in the Web3 world, try to fix that problem?

because what we in the Web3 world are working very hard to do is move over to this proof of stake system, which solves this echo-eco issue that we’re having. Now, something that’s very important is that there are a lot of blockchains that already use those systems. Optimism, all the what we refer to as L2s, so Polygon and MutableX, a lot of different blockchains are already technically using that system.

And then Ethereum itself, the big one, the big waster as we think of it besides Bitcoin, it’s moving away from proof of work into proof of stake, most likely by around August or September of this year. So before the end of the year, very likely, we will take and we will stop using 99% of that energy and we will only use less than, it’s really 99.9%. So we’ll use 0.01% of that energy once we get to that.

that area and I could go into the depths of what all that means on a technical level, but just to know the merge is coming.

Online Optimism
That’s very optimistic. I also know a lot of these companies, organizations, whatever you would call them, use carbon offsets to also try to compensate right now. So hopefully if they’re able to move to a 99% reduction in energy usage and use carbon offsets, then it basically goes completely neutral, which would be great. Like I said, I’m a pessimist, so I do try to stay aware of what they’re doing because I want it to be better.

But I think that’s a good place to kind of wrap up on a slightly positive note. Do you want to ask some more questions? I have one more question since I know that this is a lot of what you do with NFTATL. When people think of NFTs, they think of white millennial men with money to spare. Sorry. So how are you at NFTATL making the NFT space more inclusive?

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, and you know, shout out to everybody who got into space early, that had the ability, that knew about the space, that just happened, as you said, to be a lot of 25 to 35 year old, upwardly mobile white males. And you know, shout out to people. I’m a very individualist person, I don’t like to group people too big. So you know, everybody who’s coming to the space, shout out to you and shout out to the work that you’ve done if you’ve been trying to help with inclusion.

So for me, starting NFTATL had one specific idea in mind, diversity, equity, inclusion as an educational tool to help people enter the space. Specifically for me in Atlanta at first, but given the work that I’ve done and going to the various conferences around the country, VCon, Consensus, NFTATL or NFTNYC, a few others that I attended as a virtual participant.

I found out that space does need people and it needs advocates. So that’s what I do. I unspun my consulting firm that was Web2. I had spun up a Web3 consulting firm to help various NFT projects launch. I moved away from taking those clients so that I full time can work on education in the Web3 space. And what I have found are so many partners across the country that are working in the same world. Now,

When we talk about inclusion, I’m also talking about vulnerable populations, which doesn’t just mean by race or gender. BIPOC people and female identifying people are definitely top of mind for me, but also very important are young people and seniors because they fall into very vulnerable classes of people who aren’t getting into Web3 nearly as fast as the rest of us. And also very, very poor people. And me coming from…

from poverty myself and growing up in Section 8 housing, I can definitely tell you, there are some very, very sharp kids living in the hood that if you just showed them a little bit of how to get into creating art and how to get into the Web3 space, they are gonna run with it. They’re gonna become legendary in this entire community, but they need us to advocate for them. They need us to hand them the mic. They need us to create structures that will allow them to get on the stages.

Jeremiah Long
to pitch their projects. And so that’s where my entire focus is at. I created NFTATL, the conference in February of 22 to have a hundred percent, and we were able to achieve this, a hundred percent underrepresented speakers on stage. And that actually moved the needle for me in a very significant way locally, because it told me and it informed me, my community informed me, and I’m based on that feedback.

that I needed to do two things. First off, continue that work, because there are more people in that audience that need that opportunity. And then the second thing for me personally was to form Wedge, which is a 501c3, so that I can amplify people on an even higher level. Wedge’s entire, our entire ethos is creating educational programming within community-led organizations.

government backed and partnered organizations and private business, which includes small business, venture capital and private equity and getting a pipeline set up so people can walk in a door at a Friday night event in one case, learn enough to move into that next thing where we can get you into a class or get you some resources. And then by the end of it, we’d love to see you start your small business, which every NFT project is a small business. So we want to try to have that pipeline in place.

And I work with community partners all across the country that are working on parallels. And we’re always sharing resources because that’s the Web3 ethos is we’re all gonna make it wag me. So in that case, I truly believe away from all the day traders and the naysayers and the people that in our own community that are not inclusive, I don’t care about what they’re doing. I’m over here working hard on this, we are all gonna make it ethos. And I really feel like there are people across the country doing that same work.

But in the end, the biggest takeaway is anyone who has a microphone, anyone who has a platform, just giving that platform to underrepresented creatives whenever you can so that they have opportunities that they would not have had before. And that’s, that’s basically my 24 seven work.

Online Optimism
Awesome. Well, I love to hear it. It sounds like you’re doing really good stuff and really giving power to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it. So I appreciate that. Definitely. And I think this is a good place to wrap it up. And Jeremiah, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for speaking with us. You just mentioned a bunch of your organizations and the work that you do. Is there anything else that you…

Jeremiah Long
Absolutely.

Online Optimism
Want to mention or tell people where they can find you online?

Jeremiah Long
Yeah, I will give you all the links as well, but my LinkedIn is a great place to find me. My name is Jeremiah Long, L-O-N-G. I’m pretty easy to find. You’ll see I’m one of the only people in there that has NFT Archaeologist in their title on LinkedIn, so you’ll see me there. I really wanna highlight the fact that Atlanta really is doing a lot of incredible work, especially in that inclusion world, not only for underrepresented people, but for artists and creators and content creators in general. So, you know.

Huge shout out to the people in Atlanta working to make sure that we can hang with the LA’s, Austin’s, Miami’s, New York’s that are really doing a lot of big things in the Web3 world. We’re really coming together as a community to do that. So if you are in the Web3 world, we definitely in Atlanta would love to work with you to have you come down for conferences, to just find parallels and to just find that synergy and check out all the great work that we’re doing in Atlanta because it is significant and they’re.

a lot of great organizations doing incredible work like UmbaDyma, the Atlanta Blockchain Center, Babylon Web3 Academy. There are several organizations that are working very hard in Atlanta. So I just wanna shout out to Atlanta. And to, again, you can contact me on LinkedIn. It’s a great place to reach me.

Online Optimism
Absolutely. All right. Well, that wraps it up. Thanks so much for joining us, Jeremiah.