Around the Block With Jefferson Nunn – Interview With Nicole Grinstead at Lunar Digital Assets

Jefferson Nunn  0:13 

Live from Crypto.news Global Headquarters. This is “Around the Block with Jefferson.” And I’m here today with very special guest. Nicole Grinstead with Lunar Digital Asset. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

Nicole Grinstead  0:27 

Hey, Jefferson, thanks for having me. Great. Just getting started for the day.

Jefferson Nunn  0:32 

Awesome! Awesome! And what an exciting day and week? Well, here, it’s been right. So, tell me just a little bit more about Lunar the Digital Assets and what’s going on there?

Nicole Grinstead  0:45 

Yeah, so Lunar Digital Assets are a full stack marketing and incubation firm. We represent a variety of projects across the crypto space, I believe that you were contacted specifically about my involvement, our involvement with Quickswap.

Jefferson Nunn  1:02 

Cool, cool. So, tell me more about Quickswap. How does that work?

Nicole Grinstead  1:07 

Yeah, so Quickswap is a fork of Uniswap version 2 on polygon. So, it is in an automated market maker decks on the polygon network. And then it’s the largest decks on the polygon network.

Jefferson Nunn  1:23 

Wow. And I know polygon has been making a lot of amazing moves this year. They seem to be the number one network. But for those of us that are still getting used to how all of this works, what is polygon? And how does it relate to Ethereum? And all of that?

Nicole Grinstead  1:43 

Sure, yeah, polygon is a layer two scaling solution for Ethereum. So, polygon, where a lot of like side chains were invented and marketed as Ethereum killers, Polygon was created, actually with the intent of helping Ethereum. So, it’s an EVM chain, which means that it EVM means Ethereum Virtual Machine. And it means that the block times are considerably faster. It’s an entirely proof of stake network. So, we’re able to do transactions much faster on Polygon, and for much, much, much lower gas fees.

Jefferson Nunn  2:24 

Well, which would be a big sigh of relief for a lot of folks that I know were trying to do anything with Ethereum a while back and even now. So.

Nicole Grinstead  2:34 

Yean, probably God has had like, so much growth in you knows, in 2021 2020 21. And, and then also now in 2022, with like, major platforms coming over and launching on polygon. So, it’s been really, really exciting time to work for LDA to work with polygon projects.

Nicole Grinstead  3:05 

Yeah, it’s a Dex. So, it’s a decentralized exchange. It’s on chain. So yeah, so it just the exchanges happen directly between people without anyone giving up keys to their assets.

Jefferson Nunn  3:19 

Very cool. And so, with that, they’re pretty much like uni swab, but for polygon then.

Nicole Grinstead  3:26 

Yeah. So, we like to say that Uniswap is our mother. So quick swaps. mascot is a dragon. And, you know, they’re quick. And I mean, people love dragons. We all love dragons, like Quickswap, of course. And we, you know, we frequently say like, you know, dragons love unicorns, our mother is a unicorn, because Quickswap is a fork of Uniswap v2 code. And we had, you know, permission from Uniswap. To fork their code, we gave quite a bit back to Uniswap and Uniswap liquidity providers via quick swap liquidity mining rewards.

Jefferson Nunn  4:01 

Cool. So, I’m curious to Uniswap is up to version three. How did that affect you guys?

Nicole Grinstead  4:08 

Well, so it didn’t. So Uniswap launched v3, and they still have v2 and v3 on Ethereum. And then Uniswap, v3 also launched on Polygon.

Nicole Grinstead  8:17 

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the in-person trade show. And conferences are like really important for the projects, because that’s where people meet each other. Like, I mean, they’re very, very important networking events. And then there’s a lot of people who are newer to this space, and who want to meet people who represent various projects in person so that they can get an in person read on them. So, I don’t think that those in person, you know, trade shows and conferences are going to go anywhere are gonna stop anytime soon. However, they are expensive to attend, not only do you have to like fly team members from various parts of the world all around and put them up in hotels and everything. But you know, they’re just extremely expensive in various ways.

So, I think that one thing that we learned from all of the lock downs in, you know, in 2020, and 2021, is that some of the conferencing that we do can now be done virtually. So, without the need for incurring a lot of expenses. And that doesn’t mean like I said, I don’t think that the in-person trade shows are going away anytime soon. Because they are really, really important, really value additive. But I think it’s great for smaller projects with smaller budgets to have the option to get to talk to people and meet people without having to incur those massive financial expenses. overhead expenses.

Jefferson Nunn  9:39 

Yeah, that is a very interesting take. Because, I mean, I remember going to CES for at least a decade. Just in that was good. I’ve been going there and meeting people finding new products, you know, being able to touch them feel to new products, but now there’s decentraland there’s a lot of uses VR world, there’s VR headsets, you know, the next generation headsets from Apple, promise to be very lightweight and fully immersive. So, do you think VR tradeshows are going to be next?

Nicole Grinstead  10:16 

Yeah, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be you know, with people buying like upland and virtual worlds, I can’t see how trade shows aren’t part of that future.

Jefferson Nunn  10:27 

So how would somebody put on an event in a virtual world?

Jefferson Nunn  10:46 

Okay, sorry about that.

Nicole Grinstead  10:48 

No worries.

Nicole Grinstead  11:00 

How did you find out about Bitcoin? Okay, so a Bitcoin I guess is most people’s entry point into cryptocurrency, it wasn’t for me, my entry point was actually Ethereum. So, I got into cryptocurrency in 2016, my boyfriend at the time was completely obsessed with what he had started being obsessed with Bitcoin and really graduated to being obsessed with Ethereum. So, he was talking about it all the time, I ended up learning about it a little bit on my own, just so that I could have some, you know, questions to ask or something interesting to add to the conversation. Um, and then the Dow hack happened. So, um, you know, the price of Ethereum went from, like, what was at the time an all-time high of around $18 to, like, $6, I mean, virtually overnight. Um, and when he was, like, you know, trying to, he was like, trying to quit his job, so that he could remove his 401k at that point to get the Ethereum and but those like, you know, bargain basement prices, and that made me realize that something bigger than just money was going on, because there was this like, real element of belief in, in, in the crypto space and, and I had previously been a part of a PhD program in religious studies.

I had dropped out of my program several years earlier, because I just didn’t want to the field work and everything was far too much. And then I had a child and all of that I wanted to have like, more normal life. But, um, but when I found cryptocurrency, I realized that there was this like, major anthropological study of, you know, people who have these belief systems that are really around economic systems, and that no one at that time was studying it in the way that I would want to. So, I like went back to my old university and talk to my advisor, and was like, hey, I’m not interested in doing this formally or re enrolling in the program. But I would like some help like outlining a study so that I can do this just individually because I find it incredibly interesting. So, he helped me like, you know, create some parameters for an experiment and that’s really that’s where I got started with cryptocurrency.

Jefferson Nunn  13:22 

Wow, that is an incredible journey. And that’s one thing I find is that more and more, there’s this people from all walks of life for joining this, you know, revolution, so to speak, right?

Jefferson Nunn  14:23 

Yeah, that’s actually an interesting thing that we’re seeing with NFTs. I was just speaking with another gentleman saying that NFTs are really going to revolutionize our world and we just don’t know it yet. Where it was almost like the Ready Player One moment where you would have a collection of entities that almost defines who you are.

Nicole Grinstead  14:46 

Yeah, well, and it definitely defines your financial situation. Right?

Jefferson Nunn  14:51 

Right. Yeah. These days. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen an NFT recently. Go for Like $50-60,000, just for a basic hit of tea, and it’s just very surprising.

Nicole Grinstead  15:06 

Well, you know, and what’s interesting is like, I mean, I think NFTs are cool. And they give artists you know, all like the era of the idiom of this, the dying artists or the starving artists maybe dying, right? Because like NFTs have provided an avenue for people to generate wealth perpetually, so that it’s not just the collector who profits off of the increase in value of the asset being sold, the creator always gets a portion of the resale. So, I think that that’s great. And if these are also being used for, you know, for money laundering, of course.

Jefferson Nunn  15:41 

Well, that’s the thing. Banks. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the PR industry tends to really push hard on all the things that they do they do great ad, it’s kind of ironic, yes, it adhesions, even steam, you know, the Counter strike skins, there’s a lot of things that can be used for money laundering.

Nicole Grinstead  16:07 

Yeah.

Jefferson Nunn  16:09 

But the one thing I find most interesting about the, you know, community is that they can, they can make changes, to try to do better. For example, there was one project that came across, they’re implementing a carbon credit system, and they actually have utilization already. They started with utilization, but it’s a carbon credit system, all built within the blockchain or decentralized, which is great for improving our environment, right. So, what do you think would be some of the next great projects that would be coming out of his face?

Jefferson Nunn  17:37 

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of amazing stuff being built for sure.

All right. Well, Nicole, it’s great to have you. And do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share? Oh, and one more thing. If they want to talk with you and Lunar Digital Assets, how can they get in touch with you?