‘Are You Guys Tech Dorks?’: Inside the Opening Night of the NFT LA Conference

Harri Weber

Harri is dot.LA's senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to harrison@dot.la.

​A logo for the NFT LA conference at the Downtown L.A. convention center.
Photo by Harri Weber

On opening night of the inaugural NFT LA conference, a crowd of entrepreneurs, marketers, engineers, YouTubers, hucksters and NFT holders filed into the Los Angeles Convention Center to dish on the nascent technology that had brought them all there: non-fungible tokens.

The event was hosted by Magic Eden, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and NFT marketplace, and coupled a series of panel discussions with performances from rappers and DJs—including the headliner, Sir Mix-a-Lot of “Baby Got Back” fame. It had many of the trappings you’d expect from a tech or gaming conference, from a surplus of men and startup demo booths to the distinct yet fleeting vibe that we were all there for work. (Even Sir Mix-a-Lot has long been a fixture at tech events, from SXSW to regional conferences like Seattle Interactive.)


\u200bA t-shirt reading \u201c*This Is Not Financial Advice\u201d at the NFT LA conference.

A t-shirt reading “*This Is Not Financial Advice” at the NFT LA conference.

Photo by Harri Weber

“Are you guys tech dorks?,” the MC of the first session blared into a microphone. Then, a panel of crypto YouTubers dug into the opening topic: explaining NFTs to your “average Joe.” As the panelists explained their efforts to demystify crypto, attendees spoke to dot.LA about what, exactly, had brought them there in the first place. More often than not, they introduced themselves solely as the handles they go by online.

“Really we’re here to meet up with everybody we talk to online and never get to meet face-to-face,” said NFTraveler, who was standing with conference speaker BaronVonHustle.

VonHustle added: “We just got to see one of our friends [Spottie WiFi] perform on stage, and he grew that as a character from his Bored Ape and CryptoPunk—so it’s pretty cool to see our friend bringing it into reality.”

Another panel took the stage, featuring rapper Waka Flocka Flame and birdm0n, who created an NFT collection called Thugbirds that is pursuing a clothing line.

"Bro, I’m not religious but I love God and I feel like God told me this is the future,” said Flocka Flame, who praised Thugbirds and the Solana blockchain’s “low gas” (a.k.a. transactional) fees. “I love Thugbirds, y’all a bunch of gangster nerds, by the way,” he said.

Offstage, across the threshold to the VIP section, an NFT holder explained how he joined the scene.

“My name is Shoe, and the first NFT I ever bought was SOLgods, and the founder’s standing right next to me.” SOLgods’ art first caught his eye, but after joining the NFT project’s Discord community it “just grew into this group of people over six months that we almost feel like family,” Shoe said. “It’s the first time in my life that I just met random people from the internet, but it’s kind of amazing.” According to Shoe, the night’s vibe was “pretty standard for NFTs. Music that probably I’m too old for, but I can still bop my head to it. And there’s quite a lot of weed-smoking, and that’s pretty standard fare.”

Music plays from the stage at the NFT LA conference.Music plays from the stage at the NFT LA conference.Photo by Harri Weber

As a DJ set rattled the room, Mia—an NFT creator on the XRP Ledger—said she got her start in the scene by watching YouTubers, in particular CryptoWendyO. “I actually just saw her earlier and took a picture with her. She was a great inspiration, but there are very few women in the space still,” Mia said. “Our project is called xMochiDonuts and that’s why we’re here—we’re here to learn.”

The crowd concentrated by the main stage as Sir Mix-a-Lot closed out the night. The headliner cracked a joke about having lost money after buying 16 Etherum ($3,420 USD at press time). “I thought E was something I could smoke,” he declared to a placid audience.

Later, Sir Mix-a-Lot let out a big sigh and said, “I know what you all want.” As the crowd pulled out their phones, he added, “for the millionth time,” and the opening line of “Baby Got Back” rang out: “Oh my god, Becky. Look at her butt.”

Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.

Two LA Startups Participate in Techstars' 2023 Health Care Accelerator

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Two LA Startups Participate in Techstars' 2023 Health Care Accelerator
Courtesy of Techstars

Earlier this month, Techstars announced that their 2023 accelerator program will have two simultaneous cohorts–Techstars health care and L.A. As previously reported on dot.LA, Techstars has brought on board returning partners Cedars Sinai, United Healthcare, along with new partners that include UCI Health and Point32Health for its health care cohort.

“For our healthcare program, this is the first time we've had multiple partners as sponsors,” Managing Director Matt Kozlov said. “This allows us to support and mentor a wider diversity of companies than we've been able to help historically.”

The in-person program is taking place in Los Angeles and two out of the twelve companies accepted into the health care program are based in Southern California.

Read moreShow less

Why Pierced Media Is Betting on Creators To Be The Next Generation of Podcast Stars

Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a freelance reporter with dot.LA. They previously worked at Protocol writing the Source Code newsletter and at the L.A. Business Journal covering tech and aerospace. They can be reached at nat@dot.la.
Why Pierced Media Is Betting on Creators To Be The Next Generation of Podcast Stars
Evan Xie

It’s no secret that men dominate the podcasting industry. Even as women continue to grow their foothold, men still make up many of the highest-earning podcasts, raking in massive paychecks from ad revenue and striking deals with streaming platforms worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a new demographic is changing that narrative: Gen-Z female influencers and content creators.

Read moreShow less
nat@dot.la

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System
Evan Xie

NASA’s footprint in California is growing as the agency prepares for Congress to approve its proposed 2024 budget.

The overall NASA budget swelled 6% from the prior year, JPL deputy director Larry James told dot.LA. He added he sees that as a continuation of the last two presidential administrations’ focus on modernizing and bolstering the nation’s space program.

The money goes largely to existing NASA centers in California, including the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory run with Caltech, Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

California remains a hotspot for NASA space activity and investment. In 2021, the agency estimated its economic output impact on the region to be around $15.2 billion. That was far more than its closest competing states, including Texas ($9.3 billion) and Maryland (roughly $8 billion). That same year, NASA reported it employed over 66,000 people in California.

“In general, Congress has been very supportive” of the JPL and NASA’s missions, James said. “It’s generally bipartisan [and] supported by both sides of the aisle. In the last few years in general NASA has been able to have increased budgets.”

There are 41 current missions run by JPL and CalTech, and another 16 scheduled for the future. James added the new budget is “an incredible support for all the missions we want to do.”

The public-private partnership between NASA and local space companies continues to evolve, and the increased budget could be a boon for LA-based developers. Numerous contractors for NASA (including CalTech, which runs the JPL), Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman all stand to gain new contracts once the budget is finalized, partly because NASA simply needs the private industry’s help to achieve all its goals.

James said that there was only one JPL mission that wasn’t funded – a mission to send an orbital satellite to survey the surface and interior of Venus, called VERITAS.

NASA Employment and Output ImpactEvan Xie

The Moon and Mars

Much of the money earmarked in the proposed 2024 budget is for crewed missions. Overall, NASA’s asking for $8 billion from Congress to fund lunar exploration missions. As part of this, the majority is earmarked for the upcoming Artemis mission, which aims to land a woman and person of color on the Moon’s south pole.

While there’s a number of high-profile missions the JPL is working on that are focused on Mars, including Mars Sample Return project (which received $949 million in this proposed budget) and Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover, JPL also received significant funding to study the Earth’s climate and behavior.

JPL also got funding for several projects to map our universe. One is the SphereX Near Earth Objects surveyor mission, the goal of which is to use telescopes to “map the entire universe,” James said, adding that the mission was fully funded.

International Space Station

NASA’s also asking for more money to maintain the International Space Station (ISS), which houses a number of projects dedicated to better understanding the Earth’s climate and behavior.

The agency requested roughly $1.3 billion to maintain the ISS. It also is increasing its investment in space flight support, in-space transportation and commercial development of low-earth orbit (LEO). “The ISS is an incredible platform for us,” James said.

James added there are multiple missions outside or on board the ISS now taking data, including EMIT, which launched in July 2022. The EMIT mission studies arid dust sources on the planet using spectroscopy. It uses that data to remodel how mineral dust movement in North and South America might affect the Earth’s temperature changes.

Another ISS mission JPL launched is called ECOSTRESS. The mission sent a thermal radiometer onto the space station in June 2018 to monitor how plants lose water through their leaves, with the goal of figuring out how the terrestrial biosphere reacts to changes in water availability. James said the plan is to “tell you the kind of foliage health around the globe” from space.

One other ISS project is called Cold Atom Lab. It is “an incredible fundamental physics machine,” James said, that’s run by “three Nobel Prize winners as principal investigators on the Space Station.” Cold Atom Lab is a physics experiment geared toward figuring out how quantum phenomena behave in space by cooling atoms with lasers to just below absolute zero degrees.

In the long term, James was optimistic NASA’s imaging projects could lead to more dramatic discoveries. Surveying the makeup of planets’ atmospheres is a project “in the astrophysics domain we’re very excited about,” James said. He added that this imaging could lead to information about life on other planets, or, at the very least, an understanding of why they’re no longer habitable.

https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
RELATEDEDITOR'S PICKS
LA TECH JOBS
interchangeLA
Trending