'It's going to be a giant boom': Gannon Breslin on the NFT Marketplace in 2022
Gannon Breslin, The Drop NFT Founder, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the NFT market and what he expects in 2022.
Video transcript
ADAM SHAPIRO: So with good reason, NFTs have become quite a phenomenon this year with a lot of people trying to make some money on that. Let's bring in somebody who knows how to make money and avoid some of the pitfalls. Gannon Breslin is the founder of the Drop NFT. If you go to Twitter, you can follow him there. I just want to ask you real quick, because some of us were slower than others to accept the validity of NFTs. But it's here to stay. It's an asset class that lots of people want to take part in. So will next year-- do you think be-- a boom or a bust?
GANNON BRESLIN: Well, I definitely think it's going to be a giant boom. We're seeing so many companies on huge scales get into the NFT space. Coca-Cola, for example, they had their drop recently. Adidas partnering with some of the biggest NFT projects in the space. And then Nike, as we saw as well, getting into the space.
- Again, what's up? It's Brian. I wanted to ask you just about the NFTs that people often most associate with the space. Because everyone on Twitter sees either-- it's either a Bored Ape Yacht Club, or it's a CryptoPunk, right?
GANNON BRESLIN: Right.
- Do you see any sort of overlap between people that are invested in both of them? Or are people shelling out so much money they can only be in one and not the other? Is there like a weird asset allocation between different types of NFTs?
GANNON BRESLIN: Definitely, I think, there's a crossover. Obviously, CryptoPunks were the biggest project and one of the earliest projects. So the big boom in the NFT market and space kind of occurred right when Bored Ape Yacht Club came to prominence. So if you're already into CryptoPunks, you're likely already on the Bored Ape Yacht Club train, if that makes sense?
- Yeah. But I guess as a follow up, though, a lot of people are looking at OpenSea, which is where you can transact these types of NFTs. And it's not just the two of them anymore. But I think maybe the early adopters in the NFT space are saying, OK, well those are at least the most prominent versions of it, if you will. So will they continue to be the dominant name? Or will some of these drops, like we were talking about earlier with Dan Roberts over at Decrypt-- because OpenSea is now having anyone who's got a wallet getting these new tokens and what they call SOS. I mean, I don't to get too lost in the jargon here. But there's a lot of other types of assets in this space is there not?
GANNON BRESLIN: Oh, for sure. There's new things every single day. On Christmas, basically, anyone who is involved in the NFT space, even on a small scale, got a Christmas gift. They got an SOS token, which they could transfer into Ethereum. No one saw this coming. What it really was was a project called OpenDAO, not affiliated with OpenSea. They came out with a token that if you did any transactions on OpenSea, you could claim a certain number of SOS tokens. So people just got paid, essentially, free money.
And this is not the first time this has happened. ENS domain, they had a token drop as well. This was a couple of weeks ago. And people were psyched about this. And many people are seeing this as the fuel to the fire that has brought the bull market back on.
ADAM SHAPIRO: But help me, as a middle-aged to almost old curmudgeon, understand the difference between a token and a non-fungible token. Because I get the token. That's a currency. The non-fungible token, though, if I don't have licensing rights to the image, all I've got is the rights to a code of ones and zeros that I own it. But what am I going to do with it? I can do something with the token. What do I do with an NFT other than sell it?
GANNON BRESLIN: Yeah. There's a lot of things you can do with a NFT. But it largely relies on the project to make sure that it has utility. So there are some NFTs that are just simply the art, the image. You have to also make sure that it is on chain. If you're not on chain, it's not really embedded into the Ethereum network blockchain.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Let me interrupt real quick, though. But when it's the art, the image, you don't own the licensing to the image. You own the code assigned to the image. So a million other people can print the image and put it up behind them on the wall. You get to own the series of ones and zeros and, hopefully, there'll be someone who will buy that series of ones and zeros. As for the rest of us, we get the pretty picture for free.
GANNON BRESLIN: I think it's a highly debated topic for sure. But big projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club have made it extremely clear to their community that if you own a Bored Ape Yacht Club, it is your image. It is your IP. If, let's say, a big brand wants to use your ape in a commercial, it's all on you. It depends. It's a project to project basis I would say. That's my answer on that.
- Yeah. And to be fair, I mean, just the amount of money that's been flowing in all of this space certainly validates that. At least some people find value in it, despite the fact that people who are outside might just say, well, it's just a photo. You could screengrab on the site.
But a final question here, again. And when we talk about the NFT space, it's not just going to be these images. I think that was the point you were trying to get at earlier. How significant is it going to be for music or for movies that are trying to turn ownership into some sort of digital ledger-based technology? Because it seems like that could be somewhere that not only is significant that can get value itself but actually might even take some steam out of people who might be invested in Bored Apes or who want to liquidate their CryptoPunks to get in, right?
GANNON BRESLIN: Well, there's this new frontier that's always occurring. Many, in my opinion, will be in the music industry, cutting out the middleman. There's a lot of artists that are already thinking about basically starting their own NFT project centered around their music. So they don't-- they can raise money much quickly much more quickly. They can have their community incentivized to share their music. Imagine if your favorite artist-- you had a piece of his or her work. And then you would want to share that music. There's that angle.
There's also hotels that might be getting involved. Resorts, if you own this NFT, it's basically your pass where you could get rewards or exclusive benefits. There's a lot of things that you can do with this. It's just the beginning. You know, it's going to be very, very interesting in 2022.
ADAM SHAPIRO: And it's why I'm going to ask the team to invite you back. Because what you're hitting upon is the assigning value for a licensing agreement or a bit of something tangible to the non-fungible token. And the growth there, as you just said-- huge. We appreciate your insight and all the best to you. Just want to remind everybody that you can go to the Twitter page and see Gannon Breslin's The Drop NFT. And we're going to get you back in the first quarter of next year, because we've got to follow up on--