Transcript of Burnt Banksy: How Burning $95K of Art Changed Crypto | Ep 264 with Burnt Banksy Founder of XION

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So I'm calling from New York. I've lived in New York for about 10, 11 years at this point. Went to New York University, and NYU gave me free electricity. Long story short, I found that you could mine Ethereum, and I got kicked out of the door and fell in love with crypto. We were looking at this market and we were like, Let's do something cool. I'm a broke college student. They end up making enough money off of game staff options. This is legitimately how I get this money. In order to go buy a $95,000 bank CRPs with the sole intention of setting it on fire, hence an invert bank fee. We did that. We bought it, we lit it on fire. We sold it as an NFT. We got Vice to perpetually photograph it. We sold it for about $400,000, which was really exciting. Boke a lot of records was anonymous for a little while because of all the hate I got, which was incredible. Realized that crypto was an unusable from the application layer and built Zion to make crypto usable.

Today, we're going to do something very different, and that's why I can't wait. Anthony, a. K. A. Bert Banksy, which By the way, I've never had a guest on that was not just their first name. I'm actually happy to... I'm going to call you Bert, Mr. Burnt. I'm excited to talk through stories. Sometimes we get serious. We just had a whole finance person on talking about the markets and such. I feel like I just want to storytell. That's why I think-We got stories. I got so many stories in Web3. You got so many stories. There's a lot of stories the last few years, but I want to start off with how your name even came about.

Yeah. I'll give you the name about and then how I got into crypto because they're similar. I'm calling from New York. I've lived in New York for about 10, 11 years at this point. Went to New York University. Consensus was just getting started when I was a freshman, and NYU gave me free electricity. Long story short, I found that you could mine Ethereum, and I got kicked out of the door. Technically, I wasn't kicked out. I was just I was not allowed back at the dorms. Huge difference. Felt in love with crypto. It was pretty much just mining for a while, working at a few projects on the side, but nothing really full-time. Was a pretty avid collector of like, I lost a couple of crypto punks in the Mount Gox hack and had some crypto kitties, but it was an interesting time and NFTs were definitely not what they were today. And so suffice to say that we were looking at this market and we were like, Let's see something cool, me and two friends. I'm a broke college student, and I I'm going to end up making enough money off of GameStop options.

It's legitimately how I get this money in order to go buy a $95,000 bank CR piece with the sole intention of setting it on fire, hence the name Burnt Banksy. We did that. We bought it, we lit it on fire. We sold it as an NFT. We got vice to professionally photograph it, and we sold it for about $400,000, which was really exciting. Boke a lot of records was anonymous for a little while because of all the hate I got, which was incredible. We can go into that. That's why we have two names. Then realized that crypto is an unusable from the application layer and built Zion to make crypto usable.

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Okay, so was the burning of Banksy, was that a media stunt or the ability to create some virality, or was it more to create the NFT? What was the purpose or idea originally of it? And did that change after you did it and the reaction that you got?

Yeah, we definitely didn't think we would make any money off of it. That was a pleasant surprise, to say the very least, I will say. A very pleasant surprise, to say the very least. I didn't think we'd make any money off of it. I think that most of it was probably the media virality factor. It's like, maybe we lose half of our money, maybe we get lucky and we break even. Doubt it. But let's do this because I don't know. I really wish I could tell you the reason. There's a lot of things that I do, and we'll probably get to it, which if you were to ask me why I did it, I don't know. I don't have an actual answer. It was because it seemed cool and I just wanted to do it.

It reminds me of the Purple Cow or There's people who do really interesting billboards and things to create attention because we already know nowadays attention is hard. It's so fast and everything is just moving. I mean, three, four years ago, it's different than it is now, which is insane. The industry moves quick, and if you're not grabbing attention, then you just disappear into space. But I remember the NFT days, by the way. We were really active on Clubhouse. You remember Clubhouse?

That's where everything happened was on Clubhouse. Of course.

It was insane. I remember when Bored Ape launched, and my friend at the time was like, It was $600, and he's like, You got to get in. He bought a couple at $600. I was like, No, it sounds… I don't even understand what it is. I don't even understand NFTs. But we had a pretty good community there. It was pretty large. People were launching NFTs on the platform that we created within Clubhouse, but I didn't really understand it. I missed the boat. Everything I bought was crap. I never bought a Banksy or anything of value. I didn't buy any of the Bored Apes, even though he kept telling me to do it. I bought all crap that never turned into anything. But isn't It was funny to think back to those days?

It was funny. I remember after the Banksy auction, my whole thing was like, I've seen a lot of drifters in the space, and especially at the time. I think one of the things that I wanted to drive home is because I was this brand new identity on mine that popped up a week ago. I didn't want people to know who I was. I had worked beforehand, but I didn't really want to show that. A, I got a pretty profound idea of what it was to be a builder in the space or an anonymous builder in the space. Actually, I do miss being an anonymous builder because it's all about action and there's no aspect of trust me available, which personally I enjoy. I remember one of my big fears was like, Oh, my God, people are going to think that I'm here. It's just one and done. But afterwards, whether it was the Alex Monopoly auction or the Pussy Riot auction or a Naked Philanthropus, I ended up doing about 40 Clubhouse NFC launches just based off of that and trying to give back in the way that people help me. A lot of the only force founder came out of the whole burnt bank seat thing.

I remember he told me that he was a gym... I actually had Now we don't want to talk to him. Sorry.

How does one even buy a bank seat? I always wanted to know that. This is a great story. Even it's real.

This is a great story because I must have been 21 at the time, maybe 22, and I've never, obviously, bought an art. This has just never been a thing for me. But we go to... I'm in New York, and they have the exact piece that we wanted, which was morons. We walk in. We just walk into this gallery. It's me and two friends who are dressed in almost equivalent of pajamas. It's like New York wintertime. And so a D to sweat pants, an overcoat, doesn't match at all. No one who in the right mind is trying to buy art. It looks like we're loitering. We walk in, we're like, We don't know what we're doing. So we're like, One, please. One Banksy, please. We originally were like, You guys, I imagine you don't take crypto, and they're like, No, we don't take crypto. I'm like, Okay, how do we do this? Like, Cash? It In my mind, I'm imagining a briefcase that's handcuffed to me with $95,000 in cash. They're like, Yeah, that works. You could also just wire us the money. We're like, Oh, okay, yeah, let's do that. It was just this series of stupid events.

We kept the Banksy and my friend's maybe 400 square foot apartment for four months as we planned everything. It was an absolute nightmare, but it was so much fun.

How did you then figure out, okay, you buy it, which I would have no idea how to get one either. You know what? It really is comfortable wearing pajamas. It is. People don't understand how you can get judged. But when you're in New York or LA, you want to dress down, right? You want to dress down. You buy this art now, you're planning it out. How do you start to get the attention before the launch?

We created the profile picture or used the profile on Twitter, I would say maybe two weeks before. We got it circulating within the crypto community, I would say first, just because we knew the crypto community after years of already working in crypto space. That was the snowball trip. We had a bunch of friends who, friends at OpenSea, which at the time, they were the only one.

Opensea was crazy, crazy back in the day. It was like they had all you need from zero to a trillion. I know.

Then right alongside Clubhouse. Then you had Foundation, too, if you remember that But OpenSea was the one that survived, obviously. We started there. The way that we did it was we had a photographer from Vice could professionally photograph it. We had a one-off PR team just for this one thing, and they were really, really helpful in getting the initial circulation. I think the first one was Forbes, was the first real article that we got. The way that When we did it was we burned the Banksy in my friend's backyard in Long Island because we didn't have a lot of places to lay anything on fire. Friends' backyard in Long Island. We took an Uber there, and there's this great photo of my friend holding the painting, getting into this Toyota Camry, and then breaking down on the side of the Van Wick Expressway in New York. When you're standing there where the Banksy in the hand. Oh, that's great. Then we let it on fire, and immediately the press starts rolling out, which is super lucky. Could not have been more lucky with that. The press starts rolling out, and one thing leads to another.

We got a week of really hard press. I'm on interviews pretty much 24/7. Bbc asked for a comment, and then 30 minutes later, they posted a slam piece about us, which was awesome. Walk around with the New Yorker. It was everything in the world that you could have dreamed it to be and more, and was doing those interviews, and then came time to sell it. When it did sell and it sold for $400,000, even more blew up. The piece was called Morons, which I loved. Everyone kept calling us moron on Twitter, which was perfect. It's more on sell for $400,000. It was incredible.

Man, see, that was the good part that I enjoyed about the space because there was a lot of this fun. People didn't want to take everything so serious, which I think I enjoy that, and the fact that you can do that as well. You go from anonymous, nobody really knows who you are, to now being famous, getting a lot of notoriety. Now everyone knows who you are. I think you mentioned earlier that you got some hate. How did you deal with that?

That's a great question. Would you I really realized in that moment, it was more the people who didn't understand. I was very public on Clubhouse. I pretty much lived on Clubhouse, and I very much welcomed all criticism because it was, How can you burn a banksy? How can you do this to art? I'm like, Well, we're not destroying it. The idea is we're transferring it, you can still buy it. Pre-equisite with this is an experiment. We're just trying something new, and we want to see if it works. That's it. I think that I would say that maybe half of the people that I spoke to were just like, Okay, I see this is an actual experiment. There has been other examples of destroying other art to change the medium of it, which I am blaming on the names right now, but something that I commonly said it back in the day. But I think that if you understood what we were doing, it was it's one of these moments that this is either the stupidest thing in the world or the most genius thing in the world, then we didn't even know, which is how you doing something.

I feel like a lot of things in history were like, either this is going to be amazing and we're genius, it's brilliant, or it's the worst thing ever and it's stupid and you think you're idiots. I want to say probably the greatest moments in most throughout history. The things that we consider great were probably in that moment. If you go 8: 50, it could go left or right, good or bad or whatever you want to say. And this one went good. You got some hate, and then you moved on. Obviously, NFT fizzled as a whole. But then here we are. I think cryptos, it's been obviously just exploding the last few years. It's just the amount of people that I know that are in crypto that five years ago, even probably four years ago, would be like, I would never touch that. All these institutions and all these people. At the same time, I have maybe two accounts throughout my time in crypto since about 2017 that I lost the phrases. I don't know what happened to those accounts, and hopefully, there's nothing left in them, so I don't have to get sad about it.

But what was the problem that you were solving with crypto? Because I think it's related.

Yeah, it was impossible. It was impossible for people to use. I think that the idea that you needed a MetaMath, the idea that you need to bridge over learn what an Ethereum wants and learn what gas fees are and learn all this stuff and save the phrases. Crypto is unusable. It really is. Even to this day, it's pretty unusable. There's no real products for it outside of pure speculation. What we're trying to do is make it a real industry. I feel like I've been in this industry for way too long and have not seen enough progress that I want to see. That pisses me off. I want to change up.

What was the best coin that you ever bought at the best price? Did you buy Bitcoin at a dollar? Did you buy Ethereum at 25 cents? Is there anything that you could... You don't have to say the amount, but is there- No, yeah. I got it.

I would say my mining days. The issue is, it was funny, my My parents told me to sell immediately every time I mined it, I listened. We made some good money. But it wasn't until the last bull market that I did the math on it and realized that their advice lost me. I think it was $78 million something like that. I realized to stop listening. Kids at home, don't listen to your parents. But that was probably it. But obviously, I sold. I think there was a funny one where I built on Solana really early, and I built on Solana when it was a dollar. It was funny because you needed Solana to deploy Solana contracts. I remember after all of a sudden done, I checked a couple of years later and it was maybe a couple of hundred thousand that went right to... It was company money, not Not mine. But it was a couple of hundred thousand which was like, Oh, okay. Well, that worked out well.

There's so many moments of that. I mean, the fact that you... I mean, you know what, though? But what's $78 million? Would you be happier today if you had $78 million?

I wouldn't be here. That's what I tell everyone, the whole, I lost this in a hack or this. Instead, it's like, would you have sold? Would you have really It's held on to this day. I remember freaking out when Ethereum cost $50 and being like, Oh, my God, this is it. It almost hit $5,000 the other day. I don't think that through the cycles like this, I would have been able to. I will say that I did ride, and I still do ride, Ethereum. I think my average entry is $700, which is good. It's obviously $4,000, but I'm very happy about it. But it's not like I'm ever going to sell that either. That's on a ledger.

Well, that's the thing, right? Yeah. If I bought Bitcoin at $2, I probably would not still have had it today. At some point, I would have exited out, or maybe it was during a div or whatever it was. It's Only the people that are already wealthy where they didn't need to touch it. I feel like the ones that have kept it because they said, need to touch it.

Exactly. It would be like, Hey, let's use all the money we have to buy this token that we know is going to go up. It's just like, Well, that's all the money that we have now. When is that right time? It's annoying because it's a perpetuating thing. Now, Ethereum is at 4,000. It's like, Well, I'm not going to sell until it gets to 10,000. You know what's going to happen at 10,000? Same thing. But it's funny. I just had an interesting thought, which was I saw something on Instagram the other day that embarrassment is a underexplored emotion. I believe that to the point of the Wild Wild West in crypto, I think that the anonymity really helped spur innovation because people were not afraid to try and be embarrassed and fail. You could fail very easily being an anonymous account or being an anonymous user. I think that there's actually something quite beautiful to that because there's two sides to that. Either you embrace your real name of Anthony Anzalan and you say, I can be embarrassed, and that's okay, or you can say, I'm Berne Banksy, and this can fail, but that's okay as well.

It's just an interesting anecdote that I just thought about right now. I think why we don't see in the same way that my PR team doesn't want me to be anonymous anymore, I think that's also why we're losing the spur and the innovation in the space is because there's so much criticism and there's so much almost hate, but that itch, you really shouldn't explore embarrassment more, I guess.

Well, you bring up a good point. I think the original idea is doxing or unmasking, whatever. It creates trust because you know or see the person. However, the person is now under a lot of pressure, that may be unneeded pressure because if something goes wrong, their name and everything gets dragged on. But we know business is risky in the sense. Look at so many companies companies that have tried. Look at WeWork or whatever company. It could go amazing, and then all of a sudden it can go south. Sometimes it's because the founder, and sometimes it's out of their control. It's like all these investors. You put your money in 10 and you hope one hits. You know nine are going to... 90% failure rate plus. That is a fast... I really like that point, though, around anonymity can spark creation. I guess we even think prior to social media. Prior to social media, pretty much everyone was anonymous, and they were doing a lot of things. How do you feel about social media? I'm really torn about social media in general. I obviously have benefited I know people have benefited financially and it's created great things.

But the same token, I'm also just scared around people in your age bracket and others and how social media is going to impact the world.

You know, It's, again, a great question. But I think it's, again, so much, first of all. I think that social media is one of the most addictive things in the world. I think on a pure time basis, a dopamine basis, it's probably one of the most addictive things. One of the highest causes of anxiety, one of the highest causes of mental strain. I fully subscribe to it. There's a book by Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism, that I come back to every few months, and it's just about pretty much just unplugging. I find myself in these habits of consistently checking Instagram or Twitter. I think there's an obfuscation with some of it that's personal versus work, where my Twitter is my work. But I also... I'm lucky enough and I'm fortunate enough to love what I do, and so it doesn't really feel like work. There's a bad omen there in a way where I'm excusing myself because it's work. But there's a lot of negatives. There's a lot of negatives, but then there's also a lot of positives. I think to your point, this is now an attention economy. That is what this is. There's a lot of times where I'll look at a pitch for something, and it doesn't need to make revenue.

It really doesn't need to make revenue, but show me the attention that it can capture, and sometimes that's better than revenue. I think that that's going to be the case for a lot of things. You get messages that can be spread quicker, but they also dissipate quicker. So you got to choose your poison. I think we're way too far gone to be able to go back.

That's deep, man. I want to read that book, Digital Minimalism. I'm going to get that book up. How do you feel about AI? When it relates to how it's going to impact currency, how it's going to impact jobs, the world, Are we going into Star Trek or do we go into Terminator or is it none of the above? I was just reading something around. It was like all jobs, 99% of jobs will basically disappear by AI. You don't want to know my side of this because everyone hates on me for my personal opinion because they think it's negative, but I actually have a very positive opinion. I don't want to work 40 hours a week. I want to work 2 hours a week. I would rather do this. I want to go hang out with Bernt Banksy and just chill. I don't want it to have to work. I don't even want to have a job. But how do you see the thing on technology?

I think that the way that I look at AI It's very similar to a calculator. We're not going to stop doing math now that we have this computer doing math for us. We're going to do more complicated things. I think complexity is going to rise and the menial things are going to ideally dissipate. There's Rick Rubin said this, and I really resonate with what he said, where he compared it to the punk rock music, where before you needed to go to a conservatory, really learn the instrument, really learn the sound, find your own sound, learn all the music theory, et cetera, instead of years to be a musician. But then when punk came on the scene, all you needed was three chords, and you really could just get started. If you wanted to be and you had something to say, you got started immediately. I think the way that he looks at AI is the way that I'm starting to look at AI, which is if you have something to say, it gets easier to have something to say. You don't need to be technically complicated or you don't need to do that menial work and the menial labor to actually say something, where I think that...

It's funny, you could tie this into crypto as well, but it's like there's not a lot of real people saying real things. There's a lot of technically knowledgeable people doing technically complicated things, but not really saying anything with it. I think that AI is going to be a step up in civilization. Do I think it immediately gets us to Star Trek? No. I think it's another tool. I think it's another tool that can help us. I think it can ideally mitigate menial stuff. But machine learning has been going on for a while. Chatbots have been on for a while. I think with every new technology narrative, similar to what crypto was in 2017, how everyone's like, It's going to change the world. It's like, Oh, are we already... Are we destroying the banks yet? It's like, No, it's going to take time. It is an amplifier. It is not a replacement is how I view AI.

Well, I'm excited about robotics and humanoid. I feel Yeah, me too.

If I had a wrong, me too.

I was just arguing with someone. I'm like, Dude, there will not be a plumber. My robot can learn from YouTube and do my plumbing or my mechanics, whatever. I'm excited about that. But if I could have any job right now, I would want to be a DJ. If money was- It's not your truth, dude.

Live your truth.

I'm thinking about getting the DJ set, but if you could have any job or do anything, and it had nothing to do with money, what would it be?

What I'm doing now, I'll be honest with you, I feel like if I was doing this for money, I would have stopped a while ago. I really love what I do. I believe in what I'm doing. It's fucking exciting. There's going to be more burnt banksy stuff. I think that that is… Doing more of that is going to be exciting. But for the past four years, I had to build the platform to be able to do that so that people could use it. Now that people can actually use the platform and I can build what I want to do… I'm excited to… Are you familiar with the company Mischief, M-A-C-H-F? Yeah. That's my dream. I think that that's where we're going to as a company. Which is extremely exciting. Because it's guerrilla marketing. It's product launching in an attention economy.

When we interviewed Gary Vee, he said the same thing you said. I asked him the same question. He said, I would be doing what I'm doing right now. Are you going to I mean, this is like the event season. Every year, I always go to token 2049 in Singapore. Great event. Love the side events. Marquis is going to be an epic event this year. Korea Blockchain Week. I need to go because I'll be... I was I'm not going to be... I know I'm actually in Southeast Asia leaving in a few days, but are you going to be heading out to any of these events, any conferences? Can people find you out there? Can they meet you?

We're going to be doing KBW really, really hard. We're not going to do token 2049 this year, but we're doing Korea Blockchain Week really, really hard. And so we're excited for that one the most, I will say.

Man, well, I have a lot of friends in Korea. I'll connect you.

Please, yeah. Let's reach out after. Let's do it.

Yeah, no, I'm excited. Asia really excites me. Number one, we have a nonprofit around AI, and we provide education around the world. We have a lot of chapters in Asia. But at the same time, we also, three years ago, started a crypto-type event in Southeast Asia. I got to tell you, as the excitement of NFTs and stuff was dying in the US, that excitement was really building up in Southeast and Eastern Asia, surprisingly. Going into Korea. I know Korea Blockchain Week is huge. I think it's great and exciting when you can go all around the world and you can see different communities and different people and just the excitement. How people will benefit from something. It used to be like it would only be in your country, your town, your city, your home. But now you can do something like what you're doing, which can impact people all around the world. It's an amazing feeling. But if people want to get in touch with you, Burnt Banksi, if they want to meet you at Korea Blockchain Week and be a part of the events, how can they do so?

Yeah, I mean, follow me on Twitter, Burnt Banksi. Discord, Burnt Zion, Twitter, Burnt Zion, but Burnt Banksi is on Twitter for me. Yeah, I should post a lot, so heads up.

I like that, Burnt Banksi. Well, thank you. Mr. Burnt.

Mr. Burnt. Mr. Please, that was my father.

This is Dr. Burnt. Now, Mr. Burt. No, Mr. Burt. I appreciate your time, though. I like the name. Man, you got me thinking about what other type of attention creations can happen in this world. There was an author. What is his name? Ryan? He does the books about... Oh, my gosh. He used to write books about marketing, digital marketing. Now, he writes books about stoicism. I'm blanking on his Marcus Aurelium?

Just kidding.

Yeah, right. Maybe. His first book was all about doing wilds. It came out a long time ago. All about doing wild stunts and getting it-Oh, send it to me. Oh, yes. It's maybe 15 years old. It's really, really good book. Now, he just writes about stoicism, but it really opened my eyes maybe 10, 12 years ago, and he did some very interesting things. But, man, this has been great. I wish I could see you in Korea, but hopefully, I'll see you in New York since we go there frequently as well. Oh, please do, definitely. Amazing. Zion, Burnt Banksi. Thanks for joining us on Founder Story.

Thank you. Thanks for having.