Is the competitive dynamics between OpenSea and other NFT marketplaces similar to that of Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini in the crypto exchange space?

Absolutely. I think that OpenSea did a really fantastic job of helping us show our collections to the best of their ability without reinventing their entire product for us, but actually doing a significant amount of surgery on their product to make it accommodate us. As you see other marketplaces come out that are literally created to cater to generative art as a medium, I can see that taking some market share away from OpenSea because I don't know that OpenSea can react or be as flexible or pivot as quickly because they are onboarding a bunch of engineers too. Psychologically, there's a pre-August 2021 era, and there's a post-August 2021 era where people just assume that because you're selling a lot of stuff, you have a hundred new engineers just show up in your office, and they all know how to work together, and they're all happy with their job, and they don't have any questions about benefits and how to start a job. And that doesn't actually happen.

I feel like Coinbase has had many, many years to build up, and they still have outages. OpenSea has had many years to build up. They have outages. Art Block has had a year to build up, and we have outages. This is all still very much the wild west, in my opinion. No matter where the volume or liquidity is in the space, because I can't control that, I will always be infinitely grateful for OpenSea adopting what we're doing early, way before we were generating a bunch of income for them, and taking us under their wing to make sure that our stuff was represented in the best possible way.

What's really going to reflect moving forward is how the new marketplaces embrace Art Blocks. So we are weird. We have a weird way of doing stuff, not as weird as it was last year. Now there's other competitors to Art Blocks that operate in a similar way, but we have a classification of projects that creates cyber storefronts, and then we have features within each project that is what the whole industry nerds out over. And it'll be interesting to see how some of these massive, new entrants into the NFT world will handle Art Blocks and whether they will give Art Blocks the love that OpenSea gave us early on when there was no money to be made by creating adequate sortable storefronts that let you sort by project and by artists, or if they may not get to that right when they launch because everybody's just scrambling to launch, which is totally understandable too.

We'll see. I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation as you see these marketplaces evolve. I see a lot of competition in the NFT space in general between different platforms. Guess what, competition comes around, it's new, it's fresh, it's grassroots, it stumbles. Everybody is going to thrive in this space. There's room for everybody. But guess what? Time goes into building these things, and reliability is hard in this space, and it's really hard to go out the gate and get it right the first time, no matter how much time you put into it. I think people are going to have a little bit more grace towards OpenSea when they see that we're all human and all of the new marketplaces are also human and are going to have their own set of struggles. I think as long as everybody works together to work through them, I think everything will be okay.