How can artists collaborate through NFT? What can physical/traditional artists do to adapt as this new art modality is introduced to the world? An NFT Art Community might give you the answers and solutions to both. Miguel Vallejo is one of the great minds behind Art Community, a space where artists can work together and collaborate as they transition into the world of crypto and blockchain. He joins hosts Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley & Josh Kriger to discuss this new platform and how it can benefit artists, and how this extends to both digital art and physical art. They also talk about the latest news on NFT surrounding its integration on social media and many more relevant topics on the matter. Tune in to learn more about this new collaborative platform and stay in the know about what’s currently happening in the world of NFT.

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Miguel Vallejo On Building An Art Community Around NFTs Plus: Twitter And Insta May Integrate NFTs, Israeli President NFT, Wimbledon NFT, And More…

Our episode features guest, Miguel Vallejo. He is the Founder of Art Community, a community of creatives combining knowledge from different fields to provide a social impact model that bridges artists and their supporters. He started his career as a graphic designer at age fifteen and leveraged this to create a signage and marketing company called Pro Signs that still exists today. In 2017, Miguel co-founded JeTtrades, a crypto-forex education platform, and mid-pandemic, Miguel went on to co-found Fealty Investments Group along with two partners. Since 2020, this venture has expanded to include a marketplace for artists aforementioned called Art Community, which we will be talking about. Miguel, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me here.

It’s great to be here. We had one other in-person episode with another Art Community in Venice, California and I was representing for that one. It’s great to have Eathan here with you and with me. Jeff will join us on our next episode and we’ll have more adventures from Puerto Rico. You’re the first person we’re meeting with and it’s great to connect with you. You’re doing so many interesting things with the community. Maybe you can start by telling us what your origin story is for this project.

I started in 2021. We’ve been in Puerto Rico developing different strategies, forex investments, and crypto. With all this knowledge that we have acquired during the years that we’re driving inside the NFT world, it’s bringing so much value to everything that we can build, especially for artists. When we saw this, we started telling ourselves, “Puerto Rico is full of great artists.” On the island, there’s so much lack of information about the crypto world that while we started building this, what we’re always been doing is bringing to the local people this knowledge so they can understand what is the blockchain and everything it’s building for it.

As part of it, for local artists, we’ve been developing all this information so they can understand what the NFT world is and bringing a marketplace to them so they can bring all this art and future art to work as NFT products inside the marketplace. We have a vast array of great artists. We have a great team that we are building, a curator team that is professional artists in Puerto Rico. We’ve been developing all this marketplace. We’re bringing all the ideas and trying to bring new innovation inside the marketplace, merging physical art and the NFTs as well. Because Puerto Rico is so full of physical and artists that are doing street art, physical art, and all this, we’re trying to merge all these guys together so we can build a great marketplace for it.

You’re communicating with people that you’re connected with about NFTs, blockchain and crypto. What about you? When’s the first time you heard of NFTs for example?

In 2019, OpenSea started sending all this NFT. When OpenSea started the whole marketplace in the whole general area, I was amazed how about how this world and my world were merging. I’m a graphic designer, I love YouTube work, and I’ve been working in the film industry and animations. I started at fifteen years developing websites. I don’t know if you remember flash animations back in the days. Back at the time, I was so passionate about that. I started learning about animations, building websites with animations and all this stuff. Now with the NFT, when I saw them, I was like, “This is my world.” I can start with all the guys that I know from Puerto Rico, the local artists that we have. We can build a great marketplace for them.

There are 35 artists in the community and I got to assume that there are various degrees of receptiveness to doing this from guys and women that were like, “No, this is crazy. Why do you want me to do this?” To ones that are like, “Sure. I’ll come.” Can you talk about the adoption process and getting them on board?

I want to bring so much culture to the marketplace. NFT could bring much value to these old people that are in the art industry and they don’t know about NFT. One of the stories that I’m working on one-off is about a 74 years old lady. I’m trying to explain to her, “I want to produce all your physical art as NFT.”

How did that conversation go?

She’s like, “What is NFT? What do I have to do?” That is why part of the platform is working with an in-house marketing team so we can bring the value of, “This is your physical art and this is the version of your physical art as an NFT.”

Did you guys get into the gas conversation? I was like, “How’s that going to work?”

NFT Art Community: We’ve been bringing all these ideas and trying to bring a new innovation inside the marketplace by merging physical arts and NFTs.

No. That is not a topic for that. I feel like the artists already know about this and that’s part of why we’re building a blockchain for our own is so we can start bringing new ideas and almost have all this energy resolve, intellectual property, and all this managing for NFT. This is part of what we’re building with the team inside the marketplace.

What about the street artists? What do they think about this?

They’re excited about the NFT. We have a lot of street artists around the world doing many things and they’re part of the platform. We are in the midst of making an agenda for the drops. We’re going to begin probably in August or September 2021 to start the agenda for the drops for every artist. They’re excited, especially one of the artists that I’m excited about is my favorite street artist. I was excited that he is going to be part of the platform. We’re cool with that.

When you’re talking about working with this woman who has more age, it reminds me of Quincy Jones. He’s getting in the NFT space and he’s right on top of it. He’s been on top of everything.

We’re interviewing the CEO of his platform, OneOf.

This generation is the why generation. The easy part is to say to them, “You don’t have to do anything. Just give us your art.”

“You’re going to get some magic money that will be in your wallet in a digital format that you don’t know what to do with but it’ll be cool.”

“Your physical art is going to have a value. It’s going to be great, so don’t worry.”

What are your thoughts on how this can impact the economic potential of local artists? How’s the economy here post-COVID and overall? What do you think this can do for the community?

It’s going to bring a lot of value, especially to local artists that don’t understand how much value an NFT can go through the space. We want to bring importance to physical art because physical art has some value itself and this artist has built their career with their craft and their passion and all the art they’re producing from their mind. They already have a value, so putting the value of the physical asset inside the marketplace as a value, as exact value is going to bring both of the economies, decentralized economy and a traditional economy, to merge together. They can have both of the best worlds inside of the economy.

NFT is great for artists now that it can be part of the second market and bring in these sales inside the intellectual property of them, inside the world and the smart contracts. It’s a beautiful thing for artists, especially for me to see and do a part for them. It is a great thing, especially in Puerto Rico because I know that Puerto Rico is a small island. People are scared about crypto. It’s a thing but at the same time, Puerto Rico is in the spot. All the crypto guys are right here. Us being a US territory, we have a lot of advantages on that. Mixing both of this world inside this little island for artists is going to be great.

That was a question that we want to ask you. Josh and I see what it’s like from the contiguous United States. We have friends and we see people moving to Puerto Rico. People call it Crypto Rico. We’re curious about what do you see as a perspective of other residents around you, an influx of people coming here, the focus on that, and how there’s an integration or lack thereof?

Putting the value of the physical asset inside the marketplace as a digital value merges the decentralized and traditional economy together. Click To Tweet

It’s a sweet and sour situation but, at the same time, it depends on the person because I have met a lot of people with great mentalities and a great vision of how to bring more value to the island. The most important thing about moving to a place is how you adapt yourself to the culture because you’re bringing your culture to an island that’s different. We are a warm island and different in a way because we have our vibe.

I’m going to recommend every store in the country throughout the US that has a DJ in the men’s section that launches a siren as you’re trying to decide, “Do I want this or do I want that?” That’s the future.

Walmart here is the hang-out. I don’t know if you have heard the term of window shopping. They go to Walmart to window shop and they have DJ, music and everything.

Do you look down on people that don’t try mofongo? That was the first thing that Eathan did when he got here, so I consider that cultural immersion.

I ate a huge plate of mofongo. It was delicious.

Seriously, what are the challenges? Let’s talk about the sour part.

The sour part is when you come here, don’t feel colonized. If you’re coming to a place, you see necessities. If you have a lot to apport, it’s a good part. The government is giving you so much. In return, you can come to the island to apport at the same time. It brings a model for social impacts. There are so many communities that need help here. After Maria, we still have few other places without water and energy. There are many things to do here on the island that we can be productive on. We can deliver a lot of things being small. We can bring more opportunities for the people of Puerto Rico to bring to the table and bring independence.

Talk about that. Walk us through what is the social impact model of your platform to the Art Community that you’re building. Who gets what?

For the social impact model, we’re bringing value to all the technology that we have. We have automated systems that we are bringing to for the artists so we can raise funds for independent artists, especially the hiding artists that haven’t been seen. They have good talent and they are good at their craft. We’re selecting these types of artists to raise some funds for them. With our automated system, we can bring more value so we can budget them. We can bring independence to their life in a way so they can be free of building all the art for commercial pressure. We’re bringing all these technologies to them so we can impact their lives, they can change their life and be part of a good system.

We talked about NFTs going beyond the hype cycle at this point but, fundamentally, there’s a lot of marketing in blockchain and crypto. What are you going to do for the older artists that may be aren’t as social media savvy where you’re going to give them a platform and audience? How much is it going to be dependent on them to embrace this technology and to build a social media platform for themselves?

That’s a part of what we’re building because we are building a team so we can collaborate with these artists. It has it in the name. We are a community of artists. Part of the community is that they help each other. That’s what I bring to the table. I’m bringing down the egos, the artist’s egos, so they can start collaborating themselves. It’s funny because bringing all these great artists together to a platform has come together to slow down the egos and be more collaborative in a way. There are talented people and they make a great path through the international way. Bringing all these mentors to the platform and bringing the old traditions to the new traditions and merging this whole community and helping each other is going to explode in different ways. That’s why we’re building a specific team of curators so we can bring value to all generations in traditional ways and bring into the massive marketplace of NFTs and produce all this art with the team.

You’re like The Tom Brady of the Art Community. Every community has a lot of different superpowers to get that championship and that’s what you’re trying to do here.

NFT Art Community: Putting the value of physical art inside the marketplace as a digital value is going to bring both economies together so artists can have the best of both worlds.

That’s what we build in our protocol inside the blockchain of converting the physical art to the NFT. We call it UDI System, Unique Dynamic Image. We extend the rights in that in our blockchain so we can have our governance. It’s all between what we’re doing with the contract with the artists. We have an in-house marketing team of collaborators building all this NFT for people that don’t have the information on how to build this. We have the systems so we can integrate the physical art with the system as NFT with a great collaborator of people and great teams of talented people inside the market.

Every time that Josh mentions Tom Brady, I believe that’s an outreach to try to get him on to the show.

It’s going to happen.

We’re talking a little bit about how things are going and a little bit about how artists can manage the value streams coming in here. Do you have a long-term vision for the company?

We have our technology at the table. With the marketplace, we have a chip that we’re integrating inside the physical canvas. That’s where we can track the physical art. The original track is the problem that we have in the art industry. The original artists are not selling the original art. They’re only selling the duplicates and selling them at the same price. Bringing this technology into the blockchain, we can track all the original paints with that. It’s a solution in the art industry in the global aspect because by tracking the lifecycle, the original paints inside the blockchain, we can store data and temperature for the artists. You see the location of the physical artwork or where it is.

It’s another tool that we’re bringing for artists so they can track their intellectual property as a physical asset inside the world. Seeing the global aspect of this technology is a great technology for galleries and museums to bring to the table. Our community around the world can join forces around all the original physical art. If we can track it in the whole world, it can be one of the biggest storage of physical artwork around the world. Having this on the table, we can have all this great physical artwork converted to NFTs inside our marketplace.

It sounds like you’re open to all types of NFT experiences for consumers where they’re made by the physical art or they’re made by digi-physical where they get both and they all have different rarities. How crazy are we getting get? Are you going to have exploding NFTs like Burning Man-style where they burn after a certain amount of time? Are they going to evolve and change over time? We talked to one guy, Max Song, and they’re doing World Wildlife NFTs where the climate changes in the art piece as the weather changes outside.

I heard about that and I see the main is dynamic NFTs. We love bringing that value to the NFT that the art can change during the time. It’s something that we’re talking in the table because we’re seeing all these dynamic things happening. As the time runs, we want to budget different types of events that we’re going to produce as a physical aspect to budget. It’s difficult for artists to build different murals or whatever they can build. We can have different types of NFT built around the world.

NFT in my head is a picture of people with straight faces, but as the NFT goes up in value, they start smiling more and more.

Maybe a portrait of a person that is young and then it goes older at the end of the year. It’s the type of thing that we’re talking about.

If Tom Brady wins the Super Bowl again, everyone’s partying in the picture.

Tom Brady, we’re calling you to come to the show.

Art Community is going to bring a lot of value for local artists who don’t understand how much value NFT can go through the digital space. Click To Tweet

As we’ve seen on the show, as we talked to different artists and ask people who are in the know in the industry, the different platforms that represent different niches like SuperRare or SuperWorld or any one of these other platforms attract a certain type. What would you say the type of niche is that’s part of what you’re building? If you had to build an avatar description of the type of artists that you’re working with, how would you describe that?

It’s not only one niche of artists. We’re going to have a lot of artists inside. We’re going to have the whole generation inside of the marketplace. We have young people and middle-aged people. It’s a whole aspect. We’re wrestling the whole area of art.

All are originating from Puerto Rico.

We have international artists, too. The majority of artists are going to be from Puerto Rico. The one we’re starting, we have a few other international. We have one of the famous top piano players that we’re going to produce from Russia. He’s not from Puerto Rico. We have a great NFT that we’re going to build for him. It’s a performance that he wants to do. He’s one of the top piano players around the world.

Eathan has a team of piano tuners that can come out and help tune the piano before his next performance.

What we’re building is creating the content that we’re going to drop inside the marketplace and that’s why we’re a community. That’s why we’re merging all the artists and the well-known artists that we have around here so we can all work together to produce this NFT for artists, pianists, or whatever person has a great talent. We are going to choose them to make the NFT and make it happen to the marketplaces.

There’s a new NFT project that comes to life every minute. There’s a mix of thoughts on where this is all going. If you could wave a magic wand and paint a picture of the future, what do you see happening here?

NFT is the biggest thing that’s going to happen around the crypto world. NFT is going to emerge in everything, not only in art and real estate. NFT is everything. I know it’s going to involve a different marketplace. We have so many artists around the world. At the same time, bringing a unique style inside the marketplace is the one that is going to represent what the marketplace and the NFT world are going to make in the world of technology that we have.

Some folks see a strong push towards eCommerce and bigger brands. Have you explored the world of partnerships, brands and larger companies in Puerto Rico in mashups? Maybe there’s a good rum company here and you collaborate with them and your artists and do some NFTs for the rum for each month or each quarter or something like that. You could steal that idea if that wasn’t on your mind already.

What a great idea you gave me. We are in the development stage. We have a guy, Luis Sotelo. He’s a great guy and a part of the team. He’s part of the social innovation process that we have in the platform. Because we are the first Puerto Rican marketplace, we’re in talks with the government. A typical La Cultura de Puerto Rico because we want to bring out the local cultural barrier of what we have. We are merging with the culture in the first and all these types of people that represent luxury brands that are in the physical world. It’s part of the things but I love the idea. I’m going to steal it from you.

We’re going to be talking with LUKSO and they did a collab with Chanel, if I’m not mistaken. This is happening. There’s a tremendous opportunity to integrate what you’re doing with brands locally and internationally that want to support art. Is there a broader social impact mission here in terms of other nonprofits that will get involved that either the different artists want to support or that’s important to the Art Community? What’s going on in Puerto Rico around the nonprofit world?

There is not much about nonprofits is happening. There are little projects. We have an afro project in Luisa. These guys are doing galleries for minority people. How our community started is that here in Puerto Rico, the government started closing schools around the island. Part of the project that we want to start in the nonprofit for our communities is rising all schools that are abandoned. We want to rebuild it as an art school for the communities to work around and part of the process of our community is building those schools for Puerto Rico.

NFT Art Community: The most important thing about moving to a place is how you adapt yourself to the culture.

One last quick question is, what is the next big milestone on your roadmap?

Launching the project. We’re going to launch dApp, a decentralized application, so the marketplace is going to be an app for the NFT. It’s going to be there. Building those and launching the coin, we’re going to have our coin for the marketplace. That’s the next thing that we have for our community.

Shall we jump on over to edge quick hitters?

Let’s do it. Edge quick hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little bit better. There are ten questions and we’re looking for a short single or a few-word response but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready?

Yeah.

What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

I was remembering the story when I first bought my first Micro Machines. Do you remember the Micro Machines cars?

Yeah. You had the guy that talked fast in the commercials.

That was my first $10 spent on Micro Machines cars.

Those are awesome. I don’t know if they’re Micro Machines. I have a son, too and I know there are some little cars. There’s something great about a little thing that is fully functional.

I remember the little lights. In front of the Micro Machines, they have lights and everything. It’s like a little car.

Add too many and triple the price. What is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

NFT is the biggest thing that’s going to happen around the crypto world. Click To Tweet

That’s the whole story. I first bought that because it was innovative. Inside the school with my friends, I started selling them for $0.50 for each car. Every friend of mine wanted a Micro Machines. It was new, so I started selling them.

Did you get into different rarity levels? Did you increase the price as the scarcity went up?

Yeah. My father started looking for rare Micro Machines and I bring them to the school and I’m like, “$1 for this one. This is a rare one.”

For some people like yourself, digital collectibles are in your DNA.

I’m sure the kids went home and they told their parents they were hungry and they said, “What happened to your lunch money?” “Miguel didn’t steal it, per se. He offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse.” The next question up is, what is the most recent thing that you ever purchased?

A hamburger. I became a vegan, so I’m adjusting to my diet.

This was a vegan burger. Impossible burger?

Yeah.

Jeff likes those.

It’s healthy.

Following up on that one, what is the most recent thing that you’ve sold?

I sold a guitar. That was the last item that I sold. It was my acoustic guitar. It was a painful thing that I sold. I mentioned the guitar because it was heavy to sell but I sold it. I was like, “I don’t want to know more about music.” I was like, “Let’s merge about companies and business.” Now I repent myself for selling that guitar. It was a lovely guitar that I had. A friend of mine has the same one. It’s some Taylor Martin acoustic guitar.

NFT Art Community: We’re bringing mentors to the platform and merging this whole community with old and new traditions to help each other.

In a way, it was bittersweet. You’re trying to let go of that so you can move on to the next thing. I have an interesting story. I don’t know if you’re familiar with an instrument called the microKORG. It’s a cool little keyboard.

I remember that. I’m a piano player.

I went in and I was a music major in undergrad, then I went on. I went in to get into neuroscience and I was doing business stuff. I had this closet with all my old keyboards in it. I wasn’t using them. I was like, “I’m not going to keep traveling around these things.” Instead of trying to sell it, I gave my microKORG to my friend, Eric, who is getting into making digital music. It was the best decision I ever made because every time I visit him now, he’s making cool new music on that keyboard. He’s expanded his whole set of keyboards. He’s got moods and he’s doing all these digital patches and stuff. Sometimes it’s great to let go of things.

It happened the same to me. I was moving from apartment to apartment. It was heavy to have all of them. I have a friend that’s always like, “If you’re going to get rid of that guitar, call me.”

Even if you sold a Memecoin, that’s still a better story. What is your most prized possession?

My children. I have three kids. They’re my treasure.

That’s quite a spread, too. They are keeping you busy.

If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or experiences currently for sale, what would it be?

I’m passionate about nature. Land is the thing that I want to acquire for myself in this next stage of my life. I want to build things inside and grow things. It’s part of my next passion project I’m building off.

I want to go to a retreat on your land with all these cool artists.

We had a guest also say they wanted to purchase some land as a nature reserve. It’s a great idea. The next question is, if you could pass on one personality trait of yours to the next generation, what would it be?

I’m a happy person, so it’s happiness. The way to overcome the situations is I find solutions for everything. There’s a solution for everything. I have that mindset and that’s the mindset that I would love to pass over my generation to be overcomers and not to lack of, “I have this and I cannot do anything.” It’s part of the things that I’m proving to my generation and to my kids, to be overcomers in every way.

Be overcomers in every way. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Click To Tweet

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” On the other side of that, if you could eliminate a personality trait of yours in the next generation, what would it be?

People pleasing. Part of my personality is that because I’m an overcomer and I’m always looking for a solution, it’s difficult for me to say no. I’m always a yes-person. It’s good to balance that in a way to say no in a time when you cannot. People-pleasing is part of things in my personality that I’m balancing in every aspect.

What did you do before joining us on this episode?

I was trying to fix my phone. The screen on my phone broke, so I was fixing my phone for that.

What are you going to do next after the show?

Maybe hang out with you guys. It’s nice. Is this your first time in Puerto Rico?

Second time.

Let’s hang out. Let’s have fun after this.

We’re done. There’s a big UFC fight. There’s a bar in San Juan.

We should go and walk to La Perla so you can see a little bit of Old San Juan if you’ve never been there and hang out a little bit.

That sounds great. We like to talk about whatever’s going on in the news, hot topics. Eathan, what’s cooking in that world?

I’ll serve up the first headline here. Twitter, Instagram may be integrating NFT auctions into their platforms, “Both Instagram and Twitter have been working on new features that would allow creators to monetize their posts too, so it’s possible that NFTs are a part of those services.” That would be huge.

NFT Art Community: Social media is the biggest influence to impact people, to connect with people, and to show the world the information we’re delivering.

Disintegrating Shopify into social media but now with NFT, that would be awesome.

The question for me is that are they perceived as the Starbucks of the community where everyone wants to get the local roast, the local platform that you’re building versus something that’s sponsored by the Zuckerberg empire? What do you think?

It’s true but right now, social media is the biggest influence for all to impact people, connect with people, and show the world the information that we’re delivering. Instagram and Facebook are part of it. This is a big deal.

By the way, the article didn’t say that anything had been announced publicly but these things are in talks. The next headline, NFT fever hit all-time highs with sales of $ 2.5 billion so far in 2021. “NFT sales soared more than 18,000% in the first half of 2021 and in June alone, NFTs generated $150 million, eleven times more than in the first six months of 2020.” That’s interesting because I feel like we’re in a well here when it comes to Bitcoin and the general swell of people’s enthusiasm around cryptocurrencies. I feel like I’ve also heard people saying, “The peak of NFT is over. It’s all downhill from here.”

In the crypto world, we are in a retest in the market. If you go back a few years from now, you can see the tendency of the market is the same. At the start of the year, the cryptos go up, and then in the middle of the year, it goes down. It’s like a retest market and now, it’s going to grab value again at the end of 2021.

It’s interesting. The value of some of the top NFT has gone down quite a bit but sales are not going down. I don’t think there’s enough attention on the influx of money and investment that’s been raised in the industry that has not yet been deployed. Tom Brady has not deployed his platform autograph fully. Our friends, Kurt and Jeremy, raised about $5 million from Mark Cuban and they’re still deploying that capital. Animoca has a lot of things cooking. They’ll be on our show. It’s hard for me to understand. When you look at the amount of building happening and how we could be in a meaningful decline, I think it is a retest in the NFT world, just like crypto and Bitcoin as a whole.

NFT is going to stay. We’re building it for it. That’s why we’re bringing to build a value to all the NFT too that we’re bringing to the table so people can understand the value of what they’re buying and how it’s integrating every artist’s potential to bring new things around the NFT world. It’s a new thing.

Let’s hit the next headline. This is an interesting one. Israeli president given NFT of father’s oath of office. “The Knesset presented Isaac Herzog with the NFT ahead of his inauguration as Israel’s 11th president on Wednesday.” I read over this and I may be missing something but I didn’t notice a price on this.

He got it for free. It was a digital copy of his dad signed oath of office from 38 years ago. It’s an interesting use case for providing people gifts from the past from their ancestors and the archives of history.

This reminds me of a bonus episode that we had from a DeFi Summit interview we did. We had a few people talking about art. We had this scholar, Frances Liddell, and she was working with museums and trying to do NFT related projects with them. They created a project where they had people come in and find an object in the museum that was meaningful to them and then help them mint an NFT around it. There was no thought of, “They’re going to sell it later and it’s going to go up in value.” They could sell it if they wanted to but what was interesting that she was highlighting about it was that the NFT is more of a symbol of a connection, an emotional connection, a community, and things like that. I don’t know that’s exactly the theme of this particular one but it’s interesting. This has meaning to it and it’s not necessarily all around financial value.

We’re in the heart in one right now. I got to feel like there’s some amazing history archived here beyond your community of artists that you’ve cultivated that could be NFT. Have you talked to the politicians, the government, or the museums at all about what to do with all the cool stuff going on here?

That’s one of the meetings that we have with the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. They are the guys who handle all the things around the archives that we have here. We already have ideas for all the old photos that we have building NFT for history in the making here in Puerto Rico. We are one of the oldest cities in the US so we have a lot to apport to the archive, story, culture, history about what we can produce as NFT in Puerto Rico.

The difficult part of talking about the government of all this is about how the crypto economy can merge around with them. At the same time, bringing all these technology and innovations, they are all like, “This can’t be built yet.” It is part of the things that we want to strategically build around here in this city because we can build the physical NFT gallery with all these archives and with the story that we can tell around the NFT. We are in the midst of all that.

The next headline here is, How a clip of Andy Murray’s historic Wimbledon win sold for over a crore via NFTs. Do you know what a crore is?

It’s a website. These are building a bull story of Wimbledon and they’re selling the archives of the full game of the game itself. I love tennis. Pete Sampras is going to be there. A lot of the great players in the story are going to be there. It’s a great NFT project that we’re building right there.

I’ll highlight the word in the title crore. We have a research assistant that finds some of these headlines. She’s Indian. Crore is an Indian term for 10 million rupees. It’s interesting that you don’t know these terms, speaking of currencies in general and how we speak about them. That’s $177,777. Reuters reported that an NFT enthusiast known as Pranksy claimed to be the buyer. Have you heard of Pranksy? It sounds familiar but I don’t know much about that. They will not own the copyright of the video clip they bought. “The buyer will receive as bonuses a small digital screen to play the video, two tickets to center court for the 2022 men’s Wimbledon finals, and a chance to play tennis with Murray and signed souvenirs.” It sounds to me like you would go for that if you could afford it.

I love how they added that experience into it because what makes these things special is real utility. We got to look at the utility side of all this digital art to make it stand out in the future and create experiences. There should be an opportunity with your platform for certain people to get a trip here to Puerto Rico and hang out.

Should we wrap it up there?

This is a great first show on our adventures in Puerto Rico.

Be careful if you’re hanging out with Josh, though. Your phone might break and the taxi might be late.

You’re likely to eat a lot of plantains.

Before we start wrapping up here, I want to get from you, Miguel, where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you’re working on?

We are ArtCommunity.io. We have an Instagram page and a Facebook page. You can check it out over there. We’re launching Art Community 2.0. We’re rebranding and restructuring everything in the way because we’re looking for future better and simpler ways. The marketplace, we’re attaching to integrate it and launch it as how the NFT marketplace around the world is launching, so it’s going to be great. We are going to have an event in December 2021 that is going to be part of the Art Community project, crypto-forex for Puerto Rico. We’re handling all that and you can handle it in ArtCommunity.io.

They can sign up. They can learn more, stay in touch with you, and all that good stuff.

That means we’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. To the reader, thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship. Make sure to invite your friends and recruit some cool new strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to iTunes, rate us, and say something nice, then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.

Important Links:

• Art Community
• JeTtrades
• Fealty Investments Group
• Max Song – Previous episode
• SuperRare
• SuperWorld
• microKORG
• Twitter, Instagram may be integrating NFT auctions into their platforms
• NFT fever hit all-time highs with sales of $ 2.5 billion so far in 2021
• Animoca
• Israeli president given NFT of father’s oath of office
• Episode – Live From DeFi Summit: NFTs In The Cultural and Creative Sectors With NFT Art Pioneers pplpleasr, Matty Mo & Frances Liddell on Apple Podcasts
• Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
• How a clip of Andy Murray’s historic Wimbledon win sold for over a crore via NFTs
• Reuters – NFT enthusiasts hold firm despite crypto price plunge
• ArtCommunity.io
• Instagram – ArtCommunity.io
• iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast