Wall Street Unplugged
Episode: 899May 26, 2022

Why demand for metaverse real estate is exploding

David Evans TCG World

We just announced a historic deal here at Curzio Research: We’re partnering with TCG World to purchase $5 million worth of land in its metaverse. In September, TCG will launch what I believe will become the best metaverse in existence.

Regular listeners have heard me talk about the enormous opportunity the metaverse offers early investors. 

But today, you get to hear it directly from David Evans, the CEO of TCG World. 

David shares what attracted him to the metaverse… how it differs from other virtual worlds… and how it will soon blend with real life. He also highlights his vision for TCG World and the metaverse over the next several years—including how it will give all users the ability to profit.

Inside this episode:
  • Our historic metaverse deal is official [0:30]
  • David’s vision for TCG World [6:10]
  • How the metaverse gives users a global opportunity for success [12:30]
  • Why metaverse real estate is seeing strong demand [23:50]
  • Why cryptos are the key to making money in the metaverse [28:33]
  • How accredited investors can get in on our land deal [42:50]
Transcript

Wall Street Unplugged | 899

Why demand for metaverse real estate is exploding

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street right to you on main street.

Frank Curzio: How’s it going out there? It’s Thursday, May 26th. I’m Frank Curzio, host of the Wall Street Unplugged podcast, where I break down the headlines and tell you what’s really moving these markets. Guys on Tuesday, Curzio Research announced a large land deal in metaverse history, where we’re paying $5 million for 19 commercial real estate properties inside the TCG World metaverse. That’s the largest open world 4K metaverse. This is a partnership where TCG owns equity in Curzio Research. Yesterday, I talked about why this deal was a game changer for our company, having real estate in a premier metaverse. We built our headquarters, first in our industry to do so, which is awesome. We had the opportunity to lease the rest of our commercial real estate to big retailers, other companies, as this metaverse grows and gets more popular. Also, it’s actually a partnership, so TCG is going to be an investor in our company. They want that, so we want that, right? Incentivize, introduce us to every company in their metaverse, which means we’re going to have access to literally tens of millions of names who become potential subscribers to our newsletters and services, Curzio Research.

Frank Curzio: I talked about yesterday that those are the benefits for us. I always like to hear from everybody, right? And I want to hear everyone’s opinion on this. And it’s going to be easier for you to form an opinion after today because I have a very special interview set up, and it’s with TCG. I want to get their perspective on the metaverse and why it’s different from anything out there. Asked David Evans, the CEO of TCG to come the podcast to explain this along with how much unique business model would incentivizes innovation for developers and users. Going to talk about the reason why he’s seeing some of the best developers, people work with Marvel and Game of Thrones, billionaire world right now.

Frank Curzio: It’s about creating educational courses, free educational courses in this world to educate average person just learning about the metaverse for the first time, which is probably in the billions, right? We hear the word, most people really don’t know what the metaverse is. We’re going to talk about where he sees TCG one year, three years and five years from now, basically highlighting his growth initiatives. And he’s also going to show everyone how to purchase land in his metaverse, which is selling for one 20th of what the smallest piece of land is selling an essential land in sandbox right now.

Frank Curzio: I’m pretty sure this is the first interview David has done. It’s not because he’s trying to stay behind the scenes or he is too good for it, he gets nervous when it comes to public speaking. And I said that needs to change because he’s getting bigger and bigger, and he’s start get a lot of big companies that… To stop purchasing that and purchasing land in this site, over 50% of land in his metaverse’s soul. It’s amazing because they’re going to launch September.

Frank Curzio: However, if go to TCG, you can see everything there. You go to YouTube it’s amazing, you see a lot of stuff they’re doing. He has other people doing these interviews, which you’ll see when they do on the YouTube channel and things like that. But I told him, “This is why people need to hear from you because you’re not a fluff guy or a promoter.”

Frank Curzio: He’s a guy that’s just going to explain the motivation behind his project, his vision, where he plans to take this in the future and as an investor, that’s what you really want to hear. And from someone that has done interviews for such a long time, I’ve interviewed a lot CEOs, I interview a lot of people and most CEOs are promoters. They like to promote their company. And they’re never going to tell you… I’ve never met a CEO and say, you know what? Don’t touch our stock right now. We’re shit, we’re going to be shit for the next couple quarters. It never ever happens ever, ever. But that was a big part of the reason that sold me on David, it’s just how genuine he was. How I felt like when I’ve seen people during my 30-year career build the greatest companies in the world, they didn’t do it for the money. They didn’t do it. “Wow, we can make a lot of money this is what we need to do.” It’s not like a mining company that switches from cobalt to lithium, to whatever’s hot, uranium right now, back to gold then to copper just to ride the flavor of what the year, whatever. Because every year, it’s something else that we need some and that everybody just switches because they want to bring their stock price up so they could sell the shares to a lot of the insiders.

Frank Curzio: This isn’t like that, you’re going to see that right now. And when someone’s interviewed a lot of CEOs, that’s really what sold me here is his vision, how clear it is, what he’s looking to build the true metaverse. And I think you get pretty excited. It’s a great interview that anyone who wants to learn more about this topic, which by the way, if you watch the CNBC, you saw Andreessen Horowitz just announced they raised $4.5 billion. Now in this market, 4.5 billion. By the way, you see metaverse investments in crypto at all-time highs raising billions. They raised $4.5 billion for what? Three investments, companies like these right in this market. They’re the largest venture capital firm I believe, in the world. One of the best in terms of performance, that’s all of Davos and stuff. It’s all over CNBC now.

Frank Curzio: But when you look the metaverse and people explain it, you’re going to hear from there right now how it’s much different. It’s not what Facebook Fortnite big tech is doing right now, that’s not the metaverse. You’re going to learn a lot more about the metaverse in this interview and why it’s potential is similar to internet; it’s limitless. And here’s that interview right now. David Evans, how’s it going?

David Evans: Good. How are you, Frank?

Frank Curzio: Good. Good. Thank you so much for joining us. We are doing a special deal right now, very excited about and people hear from me, my audience hears from me, and what they’re hearing from me is related from our conversations. And some of… You’re one of the smartest people when it comes to the metaverse, and just to see what you have accomplished… And for me, a research guy, comparing it to every other site, I was just blown away by your company, TCG World, which is why we partnered with you. We’re doing a big deal with you guys, but let’s start from the beginning. When did you see that metaverse as a big deal, and what made you get into this trend? What was the inspiration for you to be like, “Hey, you know what? I really need to build something because I’m seeing it as different from everything else that’s out there.”

David Evans: Yeah. We actually launched in May last year, so May 2021. And when we launched, there were no other metaverses. The metaverse wasn’t a trend. There was nothing else available on the market other than one other company that had a virtual world, we’ll call it. And what we set out to do was to create not just a metaverse, but a virtual world with a gamified experience. One of the biggest factors… I’ve been a gamer for 25, 30 years in a light fashion. But to me, in order to maintain people’s attention, you need something that is going to entertain them and draw them to be in the metaverse. Having a virtual world compared to a metaverse are two different things.

David Evans: A metaverse has to have a reason for people to be there. You have to have your entertainment, you have to have your gamification, you have to have your social aspects, your commerce, and people have to feel compelled to be there and have a reason whether that’s financial reward to be within the world. What we set out to do was to build a downloadable game, so similar to all the games that we’ve played over the last 20, 30 years. Zelda, GTA, Sims, all the different games that grab your attention, I want you to be there, but provide financial reward from doing that. We’ll compare it to Fortnite for now. Fortnite is on everyone’s mind. Everyone plays Fortnite, hundreds of millions of players. And when you buy items in Fortnite, they’re linked to your account. You get kids spending thousands of dollars a month on avatars, skins, weapons, all these different items within the game. But because that’s a game, that’s tied to their player account.

David Evans: Now with a metaverse, anything you buy within a metaverse is fully tradable so whether that’s still the skins, the avatars, the in-game items. Or now, you’re developing into the sort of Sim style, build a home, and then you can resell a home within the metaverse. Because everything’s on the Blockchain as an NFT with limited rarities, you can resell anything on your player account to somebody else through the marketplace. The idea was to provide a platform, a marketplace, and a game with all the different social aspects of a metaverse that allow for people to live, work, and educate within a single world.

Frank Curzio: With that said, and this is why I love it, because I know you don’t do interviews a lot, and you leave that to some of the media personalities, and I love that about you because even you were like, “Well, there’s one company out there.” And you’re not about one of the things that I got really attracted to in terms of your company is… It was you, and you’re not like this high flashy guys saying, “Hey, you got to buy this, this is the biggest thing ever.” And you never talk about the competition in a bad way, which I always think is very good. I hate talking to companies, especially for the first time with like, this sucks, this sucks, and this is why we’re going to beat them. It’s like a respect to the industry saying, “I know I could build something better.” When it comes to-

David Evans: Something different, not so much better. Look, there’s always going to be lots of different products, and lots of people will like those particular products. But to have a vision and have people that support that vision, which we have, and grow into that is more important than saying, it’s not better than anything, it’s different because we’ve gone with a different view and a different outlook to produce what we see as our vision. It’s not direct competition because its different products. Its different platforms, its different ways of integrating. And in our minds, having a hyper realistic virtual world with gamification provides some of the key elements that we see that people need. In order to entertain people, they need a reason to be in the world. Imagine ready, play one. That is the early version of the metaverse, which currently isn’t really achievable on today’s tech. But by taking a gamification along those lines where people can actually be entertained for hours on end, days on end, months on end, there’s a reason for them to be there.

Frank Curzio: When I look at the graphics on your site it’s night and day, compared to a lot of the competitors out there, where there’s essential end sandbox, where you can’t even use a lot of the stuff. You could drive cars, you could drive boats, the experience is much better, it is beautiful, and entertainment factor is huge. Because the more entertainment you have, the more fun people have in this world, the more you’re going to want to stay in it. I want… Because that leads to developers and without developers you really have nothing. You guys have great developers but talk about the system within developers because that’s why I see a significant difference with yours and what Facebook is doing. Facebook, of course, has the people, have tons of people and I get it. But if I’m a developer and I decide to build something on Facebook, they’re going to take 47%. And to me, that’s ironic that they were bitching so much and complaining about Apple and how much they take for their app and stuff like that. But when I do that with you and I’m a developer, I come to your site and develop something, talk about the economics behind that and why that incentivizes for more developers that come to your site compared to everybody else.

David Evans: Okay. I’ll rewind a little bit. What we want to do is encourage creativity. We don’t want to be the company making everything and taking the money for everything. What we want is everybody around the world to have equal opportunity to be able to be creative, create content, whether that’s buildings, whether that’s in world attractions, entertainment. As long as it fits within the specifications to be imported, tested, and work within the world, anybody can create within TCG work. You’re going to have… I’ll use Brazil and Asia as examples because… And Philippines because we’ve got a huge Philippines community, we’ve got a huge Brazilian community, and I’m regularly on Twitch with those communities, where they may get paid a few dollars to make an amazing creation. Now you take that amazing creation, put it on a global marketplace where they’re not selling to their local communities, they’re selling to anyone around the world for a fair market price. It opens opportunity for everybody around the world to get paid fair value on what they create. Which in this industry is probably one of the only industries where we can make that happen. Because of NFTs, because of Blockchain and crypto, we can give people a marketplace where they get paid based on what somebody’s prepared to pay rather than what somebody is going to pay them to create it.

Frank Curzio: Talk about the NFT market because I think people… You and I, especially you, this is your field, and I’ve been learning about as much as I can to the point where we’re putting a big deal together. But for the people out there who are looking at NFT’s and they see these board apes or a lot of craziness, and that’s actually one of the better ones, but its digital art and what it was for selling for was crazy at the top of the crypto market. When people look at NFTs, I think that’s the definition of NFTs, like they’re looking at saying, okay, this is a market and it looks like a fad and it kind of blew up and now a lot of these things, you change your freckle on a face or something and you want to charge the same price or a little bit less. And…” Talk about the NFT market, and for me, it’s revolutionary, but I feel like sometimes I have difficulty explaining it, especially when you see what it’s being used for now compared to what it’s going to be used for in the future.

David Evans: Yeah. NFTs really exploded in 2021. They were around for many years before but it was only really the mainstream that started in 2021. I remember Board Ape Yacht Club for example, is only just a year old, and the things they’ve done are absolutely amazing within the industry. They’ve built up a really strong community, a really strong brand behind what they’ve done and a few others of that have as well. But everybody needs to understand that for an NFT, now you need utility. If you are launching an NFT project you want your community to feel welcome that whatever they invest in is going to benefit them long term. We launched a range of dragons on Open City, and the first week, we limited everybody to two downloads or two mints per wallet, and we minted 6,000 in a week.

David Evans: Then the second week, we opened it for another three per wallet, and we minted 4,000 in two hours because everybody that is in our community knows that within TCG world, those dragons are going to have a utility, they’re going to get future benefits, they’re going to become in game items that they’re usable. All of a sudden, your NFT that you mint for 20 to $50 has now an in game experience that you can experience. And a lot of people have traded those dragons for in excess of 1,000, $2,000 but a lot of people are collecting them so that they can use them within the world. Something that was free that we gave to everybody, and they just paid the minting fee is now trading over $1,000.

Frank Curzio: Explain to people out there what the world’s going to look like, because I think sometimes, people think this is just going to be a game, where you it’s going to be a lot about a game, but for me, what it’s… You could make it a game, you could go see race cars, you could just explore the beautiful… You’re making this incredible, which you guys could see at TCG world. You can go online and check it out yourself. Or you can go into a certain concert you could see. For me, it’s just thinking about the companies who have invested in your platform already who have land. And then you have investment companies that are coming in, where you have special classes or things, but it just seems like it there’s something for everybody where it really is a world, it’s not just a game, it’s… I’m going to be entertained so many different ways.

Frank Curzio: How are companies viewing this from your point of view? Because what I’m seeing right now is, your site is scheduled to officially launch September, I’ve been saying September, October. I always give people a little bit extra because how crazy it is, but you guys have been updating every single month and providing amazing updates and videos you can watch on YouTube. When that opens up, what could people expect? And are you seeing a lot of demand come in now to the point where… Because it’s now, you’re seeing it develop, now people can go there and see what’s going on and you see the quadrants and everything. Explain what’s going on right now compared to what you were seeing maybe six months ago.

David Evans: Yeah. The initial roadmap was a low poly open world experience, where when we first started, we were using low poly assets to test and push the boundaries of what we could do. And now 12 months later, we’ve got a hyper realistic world with four different regions, we’ve got Northeast Asia and foreign… Each of those regions has its own city. And the idea is, you’ve got 25,000 residents around each city, each city has its own epicenter where you have your businesses, where you have your events, so people can go and explore the cities. And you may have different types of commerce within each city, you may have them in each city. But the idea is that you go to the city for your city living. Then, when you want to relax and go out and build your own home, socialize with friends and family, you go back to your own property within the metaverse.

David Evans: But what we want to do is create a Disney-like experience around everything we do. Whether you want to come in and tour the properties for sale, we have virtual real estate agents, most of which are real estate agents in real life that have now transferred over to the metaverse, and we want them to provide an experience so you’re not just walking into a metaverse and trying to find a property in this huge open world. You’ve actually got a tour guide that will take you around, and you may want to live on a beach, you may want to live in the mountains. You may have a dream of what your property will look like. And if somebody’s already built it, the real estate agents will have the knowledge to take you around to properties, showcase the properties, and work with you in an experience in-world that you would expect in real life.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, that’s incredible just picturing everything coming together. When did you really feel like you were onto something big? Because when I compare you… And I’m going to say it, I know you wouldn’t say this, but when I go to the Decentraland, I was there for about 20 minutes, definitely less than a half an hour, and the experience wasn’t good. It was… I was like, “Oh wow.” It’s easy to do, I want everybody here to do that, go to the Decentraland, go to Sandbox and then go to TCG world and just look at the videos. But once you guys launch, it’s…

Frank Curzio: The graphics are different. You could use different things, like the cars you could drive, you can get every place whenever you use planes. But when did you realize that you guys hit that part where you’re like, “Wow, this is really, really big. And this is I feel like we are really making progress here. We’re better than everybody else,” but in just a metaverse in general? Because for me in this type of market where everything’s really coming down, the amount of money still pouring into this thing and how fast this is happening, really, I was surprised. Usually, I’m into trends very, very early and that’s one of my mistakes, I just get excited. I’m like, “Wow, this is great.” And takes a little while to develop, even though our security token took a while to get going. And I would love to feature them, of the capital markets. But when did you start realizing like, “Holy shit, this is really coming right now, and we are like in great position.”?

David Evans: It was probably around September, October, when Facebook announced their change to Meta, then all of a sudden everybody started to realize that Facebook was building a metaverse or going to build a metaverse, it was three to five years away. Other companies started to develop metaverses, but we were already six months into development and we’d already gone through all the testing, all the improvements and we’d realized what works, what doesn’t work so now we know what we can produce and we are hopefully six months ahead of anybody else. And we are not building to rush the product and get the product out as quickly as possible. We are building to hit what we see as the vision for the metaverse. And there’s so many different aspects to the metaverse. We’ve touched on a few but a few other key ones, other than entertainment and revenue for people playing, is education.

David Evans: We’ve partnered with several different education providers. One of which is Blockchain Collective and Cheese Blockchain Savvy, based out of Australia. And they provide free and paid education courses all the way through to diplomas on Blockchain education. What we want to ensure is that anybody from a gaming background or a regular background or an investment background that comes into crypto and the metaverse actually understands what they’re doing. Having investment from non-crypto enthusiasts is great but they need to understand what they’re doing within the metaverse, how to protect their funds and having that education factor is key. But then we stepped it up so then we partnered with fintech, Dow, and now we’re offering a full education course for an artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship within the metaverse, digital fashion. Now we’re going to have university professors from around the world hosting education, not just to people within their industries, but to anybody around the world.

David Evans: We’ve set up charity portions of that so that charities can come to us and say, “We want lessons in artificial intelligence.” And we can give free education on top of the paid education to people around the world that wouldn’t have access to say, for example, an MIT professor. They can be hosting a lecture within the metaverse, but everybody around the globe can access it. Then, we got into charity work. We partnered with Project Nightfall. They have 15 million followers on Facebook, and we partnered with them late last year, just before the Philippines had the tragic weather issues. And we actually work with them to raise $40,000 in a few days to send aid and assistance to the Philippines. The difference between the ability to provide assistance quickly through Blockchain, and we’ve seen that with the war in Ukraine, where they use Blockchain to access funds, but we were doing that previously to help emergency situations in the Philippines.

Frank Curzio: That’s awesome stuff and to me, when I spoke with you, this isn’t something where I felt like Decentraland, which we recommend our portfolio and is a good company, but I just felt like it was kind of rushed a little bit, being first to the party is great and they’ve done amazing. But when I look at that experience and even the land values, and that’s what I want to talk to you about, what do you see in terms of land values? When I look at yours, I feel like people still don’t know about your site, right? And once it launches, that’s going to change, you’re going to see it. But you are… Now, you’re seeing the sales pickup, I believe… I believe you said it was more than 50% of it sold-

David Evans: No, we were up 600% from our projections every month since October. To give you an example, last week the market had a bit of a crash with terror and UST, so we did a promotion and we had over 4,500 laments in four days.

Frank Curzio: So you still see-

David Evans: Which is insane.

Frank Curzio: It’s amazing how even in markets like this, when you see good projects, demand’s going to come, good deals. Talk about the land prices, the difference between your land prices and Decentraland. Decentraland developed more, and you have more companies going to that. I just feel like, “Hey, that’s a choice right now.” But the land valuations between yours and what I’m seeing out there, it’s just incredible like the differential compared to what’s coming with you guys. Talk about that because that’s what really has people excited, I think, where I think people could grasp causes of metaverse going, “Okay, I could own a piece of land.” And that’s what we’re seeing with Decentraland. A lot of people I think, went in their own land and they’re like, “Wow, this appreciate some value and I could whatever sell it or do whatever you want with it.” But when you bought… When you’re looking at another metaverse that you feel it is much, much better and the price of that is, I would say at least one 10th of it, then that’s got me a little bit excited, don’t you? I could see demand really taking off from here.

David Evans: Yeah. And what I wanted to do and what we decided very early is to make it affordable for the early investors. Everybody that gets on board early gets the land as cost effective as we can, to make sure that they are getting value in coming in early. As we haven’t launched yet and they can’t come in and play, giving them that value is key to growing and success. To give you an example, so when we came up with the initial idea last year, we were selling our diamond plot to land at one B and B, which is currently under $300. As we’ve progressed, we’ve then consistently been selling them for 20 B and B from the ones that were remaining after the presale, and people still buying them every day. Those that invested in day one, 20X on their land. Then we went on to platinum, they were one B and B, they’re now selling for 12 B and B.

David Evans: Then we went on to gold. They were one B and B. Now, selling for seven B and B. The silvers are one B and B, and then now once they sell out, they’ll sell from us for four B and B. We’ve tried to make it so that there’s a financial gain for everybody for what we will sell the remaining 10% of plots for once we hit the 90% of sales, but the open market means people can sell for whatever they want. Whatever people perceive the value of their plot and their location, what they’ve built on it is what they can advertise it for sale. And you imagine now, we’ve got 8,000 landowners out of a 100,000 plots of land. Once you hit 20,000 landowners, 50,000 landowners or 80,000 landowners plus one million players that are all looking for land, that’s when the real value of the land is determined.

Frank Curzio: What is the next steps in terms of growth for you? And also you could explain the economic model to people out there because you did a great job saying if someone purchased something for $100 or $1,000 and how 20% goes to different levels and stuff. I was wondering if you could explain that again and what is the growth, what are the next steps to you see in this growth? And for us, we’re making a big purchase of commercial real estate, and what are you seeing in terms of demand for that? I’m just curious to see what’s the next step and where do you see yourself in a year from now and three years from now? Because I know everything’s going so fast right now. It’s… You want to keep that in mind and keep those projections and make sure that you’re able to keep those timelines.

David Evans: Yeah. In terms of the world, although we’re launching Q3 Q4 this year, that is the initial launch. That is when everybody can access the world, start building, start exploring, start capturing creatures, start earning from the world. But to me, that’s just day one. That’s when we start the next phase of development. The next one, three, five, and 10 years are going to be full on development, improvement, adding new regions, adding new features because it’s built as a downloadable game, we can keep evolving this world forever.

David Evans: Currently, the map is 800 kilometers squared or 800 square kilometers as you say in the US. If you compare that to GTA five, it’s 20 times larger than GTA five, so you can imagine the scale of the world. In order to make the world successful as an economic point, we don’t look at the market cap of the coin, we don’t look at the coin price, we look at the revenue generated from the world so that’s in game purchases, that’s people buying, upgrading, trading. We’ll have a percentage of 5% of royalties for every transaction for property selling to other people, so that builds up a fund for the economy, so we funded the first four years of the economy. We’ve got one million TCG, two per month allocated for rewards. But in order to give out free money you have to generate revenue to provide liquidity.

David Evans: We split it into five, 20% goes into auto sell from for liquidity, 20% goes into staffing costs, 20% goes into development, 20% goes back into the free to play ecosystem, and then 20% goes into the company for future acquisitions, marketing, and profit. Long-term, we want to establish a stable economy, but in order to get to that, we need to test, we need to make sure that the number of players coming in are generating enough revenue to give out the number of coins. It may be in the early days, we give out half a million TCG two per month. But as we grow, you could be given out 10 million a month. And as the coin price rises, the potential for earnings within the world are unlimited as long as the players are coming in, buying the items, trading the items. If we hit the market cap of some of the competitors that can be 30, $50 million a month we’re giving out to people to earn within the world.

Frank Curzio: How come that model makes so much sense to scale, yet you’re not really seeing that among everybody else is because maybe, hey, I understand Facebook, you’re a publicly traded company, you need to make more money for yourself. Having open platform decentralized doesn’t make sense for them because they have less control. They want more control so they can make more money. But to me having a model like this, what I saw it’s promoting the developers, it’s promoting more people to come online. It’s like everybody participates. It’s good for everybody. How come we’re not seeing that model across others is just like a grief factor, or is this is what a metaverse should be?

David Evans: It’s a different model. A virtual world is kind of a one way ecosystem where the company is taking the money. People are making money on the secondary trades, but there’s no in game economy behind that. Some may have gambling or smaller events, but they haven’t sat down and looked at what is going to benefit people. We are creating jobs. Our idea is obviously education generates jobs and revenue, but also opportunity. The real estate agents is one example, they generate revenue from their work and their sales. But then you add in the 3D modelers that want to create content and sell it. Then you add in the tour guides or the tourist attraction. Somebody wants to build a fair ground, they charge an entry fee so they’re generating their own revenue within the world. If you open up opportunities to people to come into the world and build and create their own business, they’re going to do that because they’ve got the freedom then to make their own revenue. Whether that’s integrating your web2 website into the web3 virtual world. So say, for example, somebody wants to order food, so you’ve got a food ordering site where you can come into the metaverse, explore and pop up my peers after six hours saying, have you eaten? Here’s our menu, you click, you order your dinner, it arrives at your door, but you’ve paid for it in your cryptocurrency.

David Evans: We’ve also met with travel companies. You can hopefully long-term, you can go, you can earn some money through the farming or the free to play aspects then you go to the travel agency. You say, “Right, I’ve got $2,000 budget. What holidays are available within my crypto budget? Where can I go?” And you can book your vacation in real life through the metaverse. By creating multiple opportunities for people to create businesses within the world, that then creates the economy rather than the company or the gain, taking all the income and relying on the secondary market. We’re relying on the people creating the businesses to then generate their own income and create essentially a GDP.

Frank Curzio: That’s fascinating, man. Seriously. I know you don’t like doing interviews, but you need to do more interviews because that is fascinating.

David Evans: Thank you.

Frank Curzio: No, but people can tell it’s not… I want to say it’s a bad way when people say, “Well, it’s not about the money.” But you, it’s about the big idea, and every time I’ve seen big trends, like even with Zuckerberg, I don’t care if you like him or not. He wasn’t like, “Wow, I’m going to be a billionaire doing this.” That wasn’t his idea behind Facebook. He was like, “We need connection, people need to connect, we need…” You’re networking, and it was a much bigger thing than that. And to see this level of how you’re thinking about it longer term was saying, “Oh, we can make this much money in the first six months.” And it’s more about, “Here’s what we want to be and to get there this is what has to happen.” And that’s what attracted me to it. As someone who looks at business models for 30 years, I’m fascinated by this, but obviously doing this deal with you could see I’m fascinated by it. But if someone wants to learn more about TCG, and again, these are people from my list where we’re from Wall Street but they know the metaverse. They may know about purchasing land, but not too much about NFTs and actually going into this world, where could they learn about this? And you talked about educational courses, when will those be available?

David Evans: They’ve been running for months. We’ve had that up and running within our communities that I’m active 15, 16 hours a day in telegram, but we’ve got… What we did, so just rewinding again. Rather than building up and hyping the product without the team, without anything else and just become a crypto pump and dump, we funded everything to start with, oh, I funded it. And then, we started generating some revenue from the community for land sales. We’ve never had to reach out to VCs, we’ve never had to have investment in the company, we’ve managed to maintain control of everything. What we did is, we put together a very strong team of investors that pretty much work a lot, 10 hours a day as moderators, as trainers within the community. We’ve got really strong teams on telegram, discord, Facebook, Twitter, where anybody that wants advice, anybody that wants help can come there and speak to one of the team.

David Evans: And if anybody wants to jump on telegram, I get probably four, 500 DMs a day, and I reply to everybody. If anybody-

Frank Curzio: For now.

David Evans: Come and chat to me, no, it will always be open. I love to be involved with the community, helping the community. I get so many proposals every day of what people want to build within the world. And we have to respect the timelines of when that’s going to be possible, but I like to help everybody out and make them feel welcome within the project. And I have a great team assisting me. The team will always be there in the chats to help everybody. Just watch out for scammers because crypto is rife with scammers, and we’re no different to every other project. Always ignore anyone that DMs you without your permission.

Frank Curzio: No, that makes a lot of sense, it makes a lot of sense. And even the emails and stuff like that, for me, I’m always like, “Email me.” And then as you get bigger and bigger and more and more come in, it’s like, “I’m trying to answer as many emails as I can to be there for you.” But it’s cool that to see how hands on you are and understanding that concept where that’s one of the things I realize at crypto and trying to merge crypto on Wall Street and be in the middle of this, which is very difficult, which we found, into the security token is when people are coming from crypto they don’t do a good job explaining things. It’s very technical and things that I have to read four or five times that even when I’m feel familiar with what they’re doing, being like, “Okay, what the value of this token? What’s going…” Just understanding that concept in order to get people in, you have to educate them. That’s a big deal of getting more people to your site, which is really, really exciting.

David Evans: Well, education is the number one priority. We don’t want people to come in and invest or buy without understanding their investment and understanding how they’re going to long-term sell their investment, how they’re going to protect their investment along the way. crypto is at different markets to WallStreetBets, but also it has a lot of similarities. And a lot of the followers for Wall Street are now coming into crypto as well and merging between the two. And I think long term, we are going to see that migration where crypto potentially may migrate into some the apps with the option to purchase stocks from crypto. But for now, it is starting to merge, and we see that. We’ve already partnered with several Wall Street groups that are coming into crypto.

Frank Curzio: No, that’s great to know. And last question here, in terms of commercial real estate, that’s something you can’t go on your site and actually you’ll see a price for, how are you seeing in terms of demand? For us that was a big deal being like, “Hey, we want to be landowners.” That gives us options. It gives us options to build our headquarters, it gives us options to lease it, to sell it when we want to, to build on it, just so many different options. What do you seeing in terms of demand for that? Because again, that’s not on your site, but yet you see, and I don’t know how much you could say about that and if you can’t I understand. But that’s why I think would be a question for people where, “Okay, what’s the deal with the commercial real estate. I love to buy it, but I’ve not seeing a lot of sanctions. We probably have to talk to you first, but what kind of demand are you seeing for that?

David Evans: Tons. We’ve been very selective with the commercial. To me, the commercial real estate is the epicenter of each region. That has to be the go to that the city where everybody’s going to go and want to visit retailers, visit commerce, have events and things like that. We have been picky, we’ve turned some down, and we have a lot in progress but we are getting recognition from a lot of big brands. We’re meeting with a lot of big brands, and we’re working with third parties to build out for big brands. The announcements will come as and when we’re allowed, but the cities are going to be very special.

Frank Curzio: And it’s nice to see because when I said, “Hey, I want to do an interview. I’d like to do this for our investors who want to learn a little bit more from the actual person, not just me, who’s building this thing.” But you’re like, “Well maybe I should wait till I get back, and this way you could see…” You always see the nice bookcase with the whatever it is, right? All the books they read. And I said, “Right now, you’re in a hotel room, you’re traveling, you’re working, you’re grinding.” I said, “That’s what I want to see as someone that’s investing in this, where anybody have a nice background.” And say, “I don’t want to see that, I want to see where are you all? What are you doing?”

Frank Curzio: And, and for me, I really appreciate doing this interview because I know you’re traveling a lot, you’re answering a lot of calls. This helps our investors too because for me it’s all about transparency. I need just like you said, you’re turning away brands. For me, I’ve turned away people where I think this isn’t the right situation because it is aggressive. It’s a new industry, and I want to make sure, “Hey, this is my vision of what I see it, and this is where I want to go with it and it’s got to be something that you believe in over the long-term, not short-term.” And the last thing here, I said that before, last thing, but tell me why you’ve turned down those businesses because for me, I remember somebody asking you, “Hey, I could put a strip place up here and stuff.” And this was a very big deal to me with your response to that. And could you answer that question?

David Evans: Yeah, no. We’ve been asked to build all types of businesses, and to me, I’ve got four kids, so four young children. To me, family values, ethics come before anything else, so somebody could offer me $1 billion to build a strip club, it wouldn’t happen. This is not a three-year, five-year, or 10-year project, this is a lifetime project. But long-term, my kids are going to come into, their kids are going to come into, their families. My wife’s going to be exploring, my parents are obsessed with the project. My parents have become stalkers of TCG World because they absolutely love everything we’re doing, and they couldn’t be prouder. But literally, all I get from my mom is, “When can we come in?” You don’t even play games, but they want to come in and explore the world. Yeah, to me, ethics and family values and having that vision, where whatever we do is going to be for the benefit of not just the investors, but the whole community, everybody coming into the world, and not just a money grab to say, “Right, yeah, you can build that and we’re not going to mind.” Because you’re going to notice in some of the news articles, you see people having issues as females being abused within, not just virtual worlds, but everything.

Frank Curzio: Yeah.

David Evans: My wife’s father was a policeman, very high up in the police force in the UK, so pedophilia and everything is something that’s very strong in our views that we want to protect against. But also, we don’t want kids coming in and being able to spend money that they don’t have, on parents credit cards and things like that. Everything we do is about security, about safety, about family values, and about the community. Some people may not like that, but to me, that’s more important than any money.

Frank Curzio: Well said, well said. And I guess we’ll leave it there because that was so well said, we’re going to leave it there. But David, thanks so much for this interview. I know you’re traveling. This is going to help our investors to add questions. And I said, “You know what, let me do an interview with David, and this way, he can answer a lot of those.” And I’ll ask you personally, and they get a good feeling of you because I know you don’t do really a lot of interviews, so I really appreciate doing this, buddy.

David Evans: We’ve got a great team of streamers that love their interviews, Alex and Jace, and they just smash it, so they’re much more lively than me.

Frank Curzio: You did great. You were very lively, which nowadays, everybody loves, so I’ll talk to you soon, buddy. And I look forward to being partner with you for very long time, thanks man.

David Evans: Thank you, Frank, and look forward to meeting everybody. Thank you.

Frank Curzio: Take care.

David Evans: Bye-bye.

Frank Curzio: As you can see guys, David is not a promoter. He also doesn’t take shots of competition saying, “We’re the best, nobody knows what they’re doing.” He just has… We’re different. Works countless hours, I know because he’s on a different… He’s in… Think they’re going to Bahamas for a better tax structure because I think in New Zealand that they’re killing him in a tax structure, so that’s why they’re probably going to set their headquarters up. But just a time difference in us going back and forth, he’s working countless hours. But yet, he finds time to spend with his family all the time. He’s like, “I pick out my kids from school, and then I going to come back and I can talk to someone to what I do.” And we have a lot in common when it comes to that, where it’s family and work and building something that we really are going to be proud of, that we want to pass on to our kids.

Frank Curzio: And not just that, really good ideas we believe. I believe in David’s vision, I think TCG will be one of the premiere, if not the premiere, metaverse that major companies flock to build and grow their brands. I think we’re going to benefit through that. We’re in the middle of raising money to a private placement Curzio Research to fund some of this deal where investors will get equities stake in our company, be able to purchase our token Curzio Research, that symbol CURZ trades on the tZERO platform where anyone could purchase it if they want, on tZERO, but they’re going to be able to get a 30% discounts to where it closed yesterday. Very, very little dilution. These tokens we locked up for a year. The same deal TCG came in on. The same deal I’m coming in on, purchasing additional 200,000 worth of tokens.

Frank Curzio: $200,000 worth of tokens despite already being the large shareholder of the company. Tells you how I feel about this deal. And it’s the same deal all new investors are going to come in at so same deal across the board. You have to be at credit it’s $25,000 minimum, but we’ll open it up to all Curzio Research followers now. We opened it up, I want to see what the demand was. Demand was very, very strong and that’s why we launched it, but still some spots left today, if anyone was interested.

Frank Curzio: If you’re interested in learning more, go to curzioequityowners.com. It’s www.curzioequityowners.com. It’s where you find all the details, subscription agreement, be able to watch our video pitch deck. I think we’re one of the only people I’ll do a video pitch deck. Because I needed… For me, it was easy for you to see what was going on. It’s easy for me to explain, highlight it, show my screen. And it was really, really cool. I think a lot of people got a better perspective. And if you’re interested, even after reading all that stuff, which you can do again, www.curzioequityowners.com. If you have any other questions, I’ve talked to a lot of shareholders, I say more than half of them already, that had questions and I talked to them and some of them, I didn’t think the deal was great for them because they’re like, “Well, if I need this money in a year and a half and stuff like that.” I’m like, “Then this deal really isn’t for you.” This is something that it’s aggressive. We’re still considered an early stage company. I like the direction of our company, management team. I love this deal, but this is something that you truly need to believe in and let develop over time.

Frank Curzio: And that’s why I’m not just going to say, “Hey, you know what? Whoever’s coming in and…” You’re not going to hear me sell you on it. I’m just going to answer your questions. If you want, I’ll speak to you personally. If you’re really considering coming in again, I’ll set up a call with you. You can email me, frank@curzioresearch.com. But again, all that information can find at curzioequityowners.com. Okay. You have to be a credit $25,000 minimum. Guys that’s it for me. Hope you enjoyed that interview. Have a great, great weekend. I’ll see you next week. Take care.

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decision solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility.

Frank Curzio
Frank Curzio, founder and CEO of Curzio Research, is one of America’s most respected stock experts. His research is regularly featured on media outlets like CNBC’s Kudlow Report, The Call, CNN Radio, ABC News, and Fox Business News. His Wall Street Unplugged podcast—ranked the No. 1 “most listened-to” financial podcast on iTunes—has been downloaded over 12 million times.

Editor’s note:

The price of land in the Decentraland metaverse has gone up a minimum of 75,000% since it launched.

The price of land in the Sandbox metaverse is up 34,400%. 

That’s the kind of opportunity we have with TCG World. This metaverse is launching in a few months…

If you’re an accredited investor, here’s how to profit alongside us.

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