Hey, banquet station. Welcome to another state of the nation. We've got a hot episode for you today with none other than Kevin Rose. Kevin just launched. One of the biggest nft launches ever. I think definitely the most successful launch of the year. It's called Moon, Birds. We're going to talk about how he did it. What made it so successful, David some stats here, man, before we begin. Okay, so the best nft launch of the Year, 280 million.
Ian dollars worth of primary and secondary trading in two days. Okay. So this just did what more than more than board Abe's did in the last 30 days and it did it in a 24-hour period of time, 59 k, / moonbird. Right now might be like 50 to 80 K leading the
Open Sea charts over a hundred and seventy seven million dollars worth of Trades.
Kevin's got his hands
into a couple of nft projects, right? The first was the proof
Collective, which we're going to talk about it.
Second is this pfp profile
pic type of nft experience called Moon birds. And that's the one that that's mooning right now. But proof is doing pretty well too. Anyway so much to talk about what do you most excited to discuss with Kevin? I think it's going to be especially relevant for for banquets listeners because if you are a Content consumer, this is what Kevin is making
an ecosystem around. He's making an NF T, ecosystem with the moon Birds, the a profile picture but also his scarce like
Thousand unique membership and FTS and he's just making a tokenize community around the content that he creates and overall just like a tokenize community. And so this is very, very relevant for the world of web to or Sidney Webb three content consumers, because these products are for you guys. And so I'm going to be just tapping into Kevin and seeing the lessons that he is learning because Kevin is on the frontier of tokenize content and tokenized communities in web 3, so we are bringing him on to hear about what
Learned on the frontier and taking it back. So we all have something of roadmap to go on as we go on the frontier. Yeah, this is amazing. I think this this episode is going to be full of alpha because whether you're part of one of these communities, there's massive opportunities for you, or if you're a Creator, we're actually going to ask him like an hour of free Consulting with Kevin. Like, how do you do this? If Bank Lis wanted to launch an entity for its Community, right? How do we do that? I literally wouldn't be doing this questions. Exactly. Like I want to pick his brain because he's got a
Apple successful ones under his belt. He's doing it with a long-term Vision here. So it's not sort of a, you know, quick pump and pump and dump sort of thing. Like he's got a lot of utility that he's injecting in these n ftes and he's put together a fantastic community. So it's going to be great discussion, David got something else going on and that is graph day, which is coming up. This is a conference by the graph protocol. Okay, it's happening. June, the 2nd in San Francisco. It's a four-day event. I think this
Like part conference graph day and doing the second. And then also part hackathon. What? What else should we say about this conference? The collection of people that are going, there is fantastic, Kevin. Iwaki. We all love Kevin. He is going to be at this conference. We also have Sam Williams from our. We've Michael Cena from ceramic Arjun, Bhutan E from connects Cami Russo as well, another defy content creator, and just the fact that the graph is throwing a hackathon. It's just, it's
Great to see a player stuff throwing hackathons because hackathons are just the great way to Outsource development recent. Mark is actually one of my personal heroes in this space. So it is he's going to be there. So if you are in San Francisco during June or you just want to be there, June 2nd is when it starts a good set of four day conference wave two tickets are out. So you've got to get your tickets. There is a link in the show notes. Also Bank list dot CC / capital G graph, capital D de Graaff de Bank.
Start CC / graph day, but with the capitals and we'll is where you can get your ticket. Yeah, that link will save you $50 on this ticket. So there you go. Right into the box. David got to ask you the question before we get in this conversation with Kevin. What is the state of the nation today? Sir? Orion the state of nation is pioneering. Like I said, Kevin is on the frontier. He has discovered some cool new things. Some cool New Primitives for Community engagement Community content creation, and he is bringing this information.
Back to the to the center back to like this is kind of how I think about these things is people go out on the frontier. They discover some gold and then they come back to Banquets and tell everyone that he discovered. Yeah. He's a we are broadcasting the gold that's on the frontier. And so this is why you are definitely going to listen to this episode because on this episode, we are pioneering into the frontier. Yeah, super excited to pick his brain about all of these things guys. We will be back with Kevin Rose in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The era of proof of stake.
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Now he's a web three VC's, but en banc less before, he's the host of the proof, podcast mentor of n FTS in the proof collection, which we're going to talk about. And now, today we're going to talk about Moon Birds, which is absolutely living up to. Its name is absolutely mooning in the last 24 hours or like a few 24 hours ago. It actually did more volume than board Apes in the last 30 days. So absolutely phenomenon. Phenomenal, success. Kevin. It's great to have you on Bank. Le sigh. We're excited to talk.
At this. Yeah, glad to be back on. Thanks for having me guys. Really appreciate it. Hey, you having fun, man? Is this fun? It's the time of my life. Like, for me. This is like what I love to do that. The scariest part was the sale. What I love to do is build products and that's what I done my entire career. So going out and building products for this community, is just going to be a blast. It's my favorite thing on Earth. This is really cool. Because I feel like you are pioneering. A lot of ways that the Building Product side on the nft, like, utility bringing utility to nft is
The community just a couple of stats to Rattle off. Your people who haven't been following. What moon Birds is done. We're about to explain it, but 280 million dollars worth of primary and secondary purchases in two days. A moon bird is going 460k right now. That's a nice terms. Absolutely crushing it on Open seeds. So leading the charts. I think one of our big questions coming into this conversation Kevin because we want to like unpack the secrets of NFC here.
Right is, how did you do it? Can you teach us? Can you show us your ways? Like how did this actually come a pal about? What is the secret combination success here. It's a good question. Honestly, I didn't expect it to be honest. We it was one of those things where we had started off with a community in building proof and the proof Collective and that was our first inductee drop, which was the Thousand members. And we really got just this amazing community of Hardcore and ft collectors with
Serves as the backbone of this drop, like people that were really excited about the things we were building. And then, I think that if you take a look around it, whose building in the space, there's, you know, a lot of big promises from a bunch of different teams and people are looking for, I believe people that have built credible things in the past, you know, you want to pick a team that, you know, is going to deliver and live up to all the hype and expectations. And so, you know, I think about Dom and all the great work that you know, he's done.
You know, he created Loop but he's done so many other fantastic products prior to that and some of the other builders that you just look at your like, okay. I trust you because of what you've created, you know over the last couple decades and I feel very fortunate that people trust what we're about to Embark upon and what we're going to build and it was that that led to just so many people being oversubscribed and we were going to do a Dutch auction initially and then we realized it was just going to turn into a gas war. And then we had to flip it to a raffle.
And then once it went out, we had no clue what the secondary volume is going to be. If you were to ask me the day of, I probably would have said, well, we'll end up at around, you know, to either so, and then it immediately Shop 25, and then 10, then 15, and then it just kept climbing. So it was, it was shocking. But, you know, I do realize it's not lost on me. That there is a lot of hype here and so it's on us now to go build and really fulfill everything that we the roadmap that we've put out there.
Evan will have already said this in the intro, but I kind of view you as a Pioneer who went out into the the margins the fringes of the web three universe and discover something cool. And now you're coming back here to tell us all about what you found, which is very appropriate for somebody who also like made dig that one of the first like bottom up style websites of the internet. And so following through on your brand, is somebody who's being on the frontier of the internet since since day one and there's so many different elements.
About what you've built. Right? There's the proof Community. There's the proof nft. Now. There's Moon birds and each one of these things represents what feels like a Lego that stacks on top of each other. And we're going to explore each of these things and kind of how they relate to each other, like how the Lego stacked upon each other and what really gets me excited about this story is as somebody who came into this industry in a non-technical fashion. Realizing I was never really going to be able to learn how to code because I just didn't have it in.
Me, it was always going to be content consumed or content production that was going to be interesting for me. And there was always on the horizon, something about content, production and tokenization somewhere. As soon as we figure out what that thing is and it seems to be that you figured out what that is. And so that's going to be, I think the theme for the episode. But before we go into the details, can you just give us the overarching scope of proof the whole thing? Like, what are all the pieces? What are all the components? Because we're going to dig into each one of
These things. So when you view this, it the system. What is the system? What is proof? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's a great place to start. So proof started off as just a podcast covering all things in have teased and it was driven from my personal passion to interview, artists and creators and have them on the show, to talk about their journey and their passion, for creating whatever it might be. So I was very fortunate that, you know, over a year ago to have, you know, the founders of art blocks on and the founders of quantum and just Flamingo down.
A lot of the really early kind of pioneers and builders in this space. And, you know, it was actually the crypto Punk's episode was really fun too. And I had those Founders on as well. So it started off there. And then I quickly realized that we were just building a pretty massive audience. I mean, we kind of Hit the market at the right time and that, you know, entities were starting to pop and when they did, then, you know, that went from 25,000 viewers to 50,000 100,000 and it kept growing and I realized that these are all people that are interested in collecting.
Being in of teas and some of them are really passionate and really hardcore and there's a bunch of different groups out there, different discords out there that are focused on information around the collection, or collecting event of T's. But the problem that I saw is that there is just so many new projects that are dropping every single day. And every, you know, every single week anyone armed with Photoshop, these days it can create an entity, right? And the majority of the group's you find out there.
Are focused on quote unquote, Alpha groups, right? And those groups are about trading their about trading, oftentimes. They can talk about flipping they can you know, it is about how do you get into a project score that 325 x potentially get out and and oftentimes move on to the next thing and so for me, that's not really that interesting to me. That's not what I want to focus on. Like what I want to prove to be about is really about that artist story and about the
Long-term collectability and why you should care about a particular artist. And so I wanted to get into their backgrounds go deep on that. And so when I wanted to create a private Discord which became the proof Collective, it was like let's not create an alpha group because I just that's not my DNA. Like I'm a Believer in in FTS for the next, you know, holding for the next few decades and Beyond. So let's create something that is about like-minded collectors that wanted to talk about, you know, curation with a kind of a point of view. So that
I just really about going deep and finding those projects when you buy an x copy, which one should you consider that? You're going to hold for the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years that type of conversation and that's what launched the proof Collective. And so that launched in December of last year. It was 1,000 in FTS. They look like little membership cards. And if you held one you had access to this private Discord. And so that is what kicked off is this entire thing. After the podcast has already been out for like, you know, almost a year at that point.
Em, I did Dutch auction. And so I said, okay, I'm going to sell these proof Collective passes. It'll be, you know, five eith in eith was less expensive back. Then working with its way, down to eventually, .1 eith is where it would have bought them doubt and they sold out at one. Eith, is where it ended up. And so we got to work. We said, okay, let's let's start building. And so with that, we launched the private Discord later. We launched several different collaborations that were unique to prove Collective holders, one exclusively with heart, you will
Which is a great artist. We did one with Hackett a bow and probably another three or four others that we that we launched over the last few months and granted were in April now, so we're only really four months into this. We launched the actual membership kicked in January first and then the idea was how can we take this capital and not put it in our pockets, but every single dollar that was raised actually went right back into the company and so the cut it. And so was the company. Do the company does a handful of
Thanks, we go off and we obviously we've talked about the private Discord, but we also are going to hold an annual and ft conference in l.a. Called proof of conference. That's going to be crazy and I'll be free for proof Collective holders. We're hiring full-time analyst. So we're about to close three full-time analysts that we narrowed it down from 20 applicants down to three. They were going to be responsible for doing what we call proof. Deep Dives, which are these really deep analysis is almost what you all do. It Bank lists on the defy side where you go, really deep and give people that the understanding and the knowledge.
Jesus but rather than we don't want it. We're not defy experts. We're in of tear on the empty side. So we're going to go deep on the nft side and tell you who is xcopy. What are their Genesis piece? Like and then really work with these upcoming utility drops in these other pfp drops and help you sort through all the garbage that can happen out there and really Elevate the best ones and give you these really deep concise like tldr briefs on on, why you should be collecting and holding these
Clarion of T's. It's almost like a Forrester research back in the stock days, but for in FTS and then, you know, early access to our podcast and then we do exclusive projects. Like Grails was the first project that we launched, which was really cool where you didn't know who the artist was. Until you actually meant that the piece and you had to have a proof pass to build a meant it, then we launched Moon birds. And so, every proof Collective member got to free Moon, birds with their pass. We have a future metaverse that we're building the code name right now for is called high-rise. And so, the proof Collective is kind of
That thousand person like backbone to all the things that we do, if that makes sense. It. Does. It really seems like you said, you're trying to just not not get into the whole like alright. You get in at this price. You Free by this nft and you get out of this price. It seems to be a lot like more like paid research, right, like some people pay like a lot of money to have journals, you know, send them the best research that an industry has. And it seems to be the web 3 version of that. And and Kevin, I'm wondering if you
How much how prepared or how like, like scared, perhaps you were of turning this into a token, right? All of a sudden, there's a token or n ftes that trade on the secondary markets where previously you were content a producer with a with a community around that but now you're a Content producer with the community around that with an NF T, badge for membership. And also the moon Birds did that decision to go into on chain tokens that trade on secondary markets like talked about that that the weight of that decision. Yeah. I mean, I think would you
When you launch something like this, you never know what the adoption is going to be. And all I know is that the nice thing about what we do as product Builders and what we've built over the years, in terms of the products that we've, you know, created that have touched literally tens of millions people's lives. We know that we can deliver on that piece and if we hold true to that promise, then the price will take care of itself. So I don't follow the token. The nft price is like the of the proof Paths, of course. I'm looking at moonbird.
Now because it's just insanity and like I'm of course I'm going to check that out, but it's I don't check it every single day and it's because I have work to do like we it's time to let's go let's get to work and and at the end of the day, you know, we is we've laid out what we're going to create and then we have to go and execute and I think that the price just will fall where it falls like that. It's I hate to see like there's this, there's this Danger.
I think if you're a creator of one of these projects where if you're chasing this token price like a must hit this or you know, I have to get this much value extracted out. We actually would rather take in less revenue and have a more stable community than the roller coaster. So what I'm really proud of one of the terms that I'm proud of our figures, I'm proud of right now is if I go to click on that right now, the proof Collective on open.
We have 933 unique holders out of 1,000. That's a 93.3% unique, holder rate of our proof Collective token. That is awesome. And you can compare that against any other big pfp project and it's always, much lower. Moon. Birds is obviously much lower right now. We're going to get that up. And the reason I love that is. It's less gern. Yes, that means it is less Revenue because obviously, we don't get those royalties, but we're starting to get to know each other as a community.
And we're the goal is to create these like lifelong bonds and relationships, and share information and intelligence. We believe that people coming together can create a collective intelligence. That is better and stronger than any one individual and and that's held true so far. And that's what we're going to continue to build. That's super cool. Kevin and I think we have so many questions. This is just on the proof side of things. We're also going to talk about Moon Birds, but I want people listen to the podcast. There's probably, you know, two camps of people.
One is there's a lot of creators out there with communities involved, the communities and and they're scratching their heads and they're looking at what you've done with proof and what you've done with with your community and you know, NFD is and they're trying to think about. Okay, how can I launch something like this for my community? What what does that look like? Putting themselves in the mold of a Creator? There's also another group who's like, okay. I'm part of a really interesting community and I want to participate more. How can I gain?
An opportunity entering that community. So I think we want to address both of those, but there's more to the story to so like with proof itself. Were you how did you get the curation? Right? So you said 933 members, but like you've kind of built this thing in concentric circles, right? Where it's like it starts with a nucleus. It's you maybe a few others on your team at proof and then it expands to like 1,000 core proof members and now you've got 10,000 pfp. So it's you're sort of building.
From this concentric circle of you fans. If you will, you know, that the hundred true fans than 1,000 true fans that would like that. How is that important? What's your secret to good Community curation? Because I think a lot of people, if they launch a token or and ft, they will get those your Telegram and ft, pump-and-dump groups that aren't necessarily incented for the long term. They have a really hard time, creating a nucleus for their Community. Can you talk about that?
That now it's a great point and I think that, you know, you and I you over Banquets are in a similar position where you have people that listen to what you say because you have a proven track record for talking about high quality projects, and you buy the nature of you just not talking about the pump and dump type stuff. You don't attract that crowd. So when I was doing the podcast around proof in the early days, there's never been a single episode about flipping about how to make money, you know, with there's never been a single episode about how to
Extra gas to get into something really fast. Like we just never did that. And so it was always about the artist story and that attracted a lot of these long-term holders, like, the people that are were really into that style of collecting because Diamond handers that. Yeah, the diamond handers, the ones that that see, this is the first inning of a great story that's going to play out over many decades. And so when you have that as your core, then you can introduce them to this product and you don't on purpose give allow.
Alice spots to Alpha groups and to flip or groups and all this stuff like that was by Design. Like a lot of collections will go out there and engage with these these flipping communities to try and give them access and spots and that's great for your initial sale. If your only goal is just just grab some money and run, but if you want a real durable community that, that that's, that's not the way to do it, but you all have kind of done that with Banquets and what you've done. I mean you're on the token side, right? But with your Dow and like,
You have that trust? You can easily do this and to your point earlier about other communities that could do this as well. And people that are looking to do this. I think this is its early days and that it's tough because I was talking to Tim Ferriss about this actually because he's got a massive podcast and I don't know what percentage of Tim's base would be in 2nf, TS, but I know there'll be a thousand people for sure. That would be hardcore, the probably 10,000 or more. So this is just a new way to think about monetizing and
a way to get off of that a drip. And the reason why I have had such a hard time with advertising in general, is it forces you to make bad product decisions that are more about retaining your eyeballs and selling your customers, that it is about really building things that are really going to be beneficial to them. And so, you know, when I had dig I launched dig in 2004 it became the first social news site before Reddit, you know, we grew that 238 million people a month and we still weren't profitable.
With 38 million people, we only had 50 employees and if I'm 50 may sound like a lot, but not for someone that servicing 38 million people, right? And so and it was because, you know, we were living in this ad world and there was just no way to monetize what we were doing and we were slow to monetizing it. And yes, we could have gotten to scale and eventually gotten there, but we made bad product decisions because of that. And so that this is a beautiful new world where we don't have to sell out our users any longer and we can, you know, look to that kind of recurring
Revenue that comes with the royalties. So this is so cool and I think a lot of creators are hearing this and they're just getting really, really excited about the potential for their communities. But let's talk about the the revenue model if you will here because this is a switch, you called it. The, the a drip, and that's how a lot of Creator communities are, you know, funded, right? For example, Bank lists thankless has ads, other podcasts have ads. That's one way to fund a community. The other way to fund a community is sort of, through a
Description service, you might have a sub stack. You might have certain community members paying for premium benefits. I pay for your newsletter. I read it all the time. But there you go. It's like Sam Harris as well. Like he's got a very successful podcast and his thing is like, hey, I'll give you a taste of the podcast. But if you want the full podcast, you become a, you know, a premium membered my community and these models have been successful. So you got the kind of the, you know, Revenue model, one of ads Revenue model to of Premium subscribers, through traditional payment.
Entrails. What is this new third Revenue model that you're opening up. So take us through proof as an example. So, you did that original nft sale, you received some amount of E from that. See, from that sale as revenues kind of like I guess seed revenue and then is there a royalty attached to prove? How does that work? And then, what does the the community received? Because now the floor prices, like, 84 for Ed, for E, for a proof membership, so I imagine the community received.
Jordy of that of that upside. How did the puts and takes of the of the revenue model, work for a Creator. When you're doing something like a proof of membership? Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, essentially, the good news is, when the price of the actual membership goes up when they do turn, and it's slower because they're not made as many are selling. So, you know, I would say out of the Thousand, maybe I had to go. Look at the numbers I do. I could even tell you haven't been, I've been swamped in Moon Birds land, but it's maybe it's let's call it three.
Four passes move per week. Then you get a percent of that and you can Define that anyway, you want. And so we set that on the higher side at 7.5%, and we receive that back into the company as Revenue. So we have to recognize it as revenue and then, that is what we use for everything. So, there's like, no odds ads on the podcast. Even for the people that aren't members. There's no ads on the podcast and we use that to fund all of our future initiatives with our be the conference and, and all the things that we're going to go off and build, right? So,
Is kind of how that gets funded. And then in terms of the users that are collecting these, you know, they receive a whole slew of different things over time. So with Grails, for example, we launched something called Grails, where there were 20 different artists and as it proved Collective holder, you got to pick one to meant. We didn't tell you who the artists were the secret is that four out of the 20 or top 5. Grossing artists of all time on the Nifty world. And so we had a very
Very early prototype of The larva Labs, the creators of crypto Punk's, their Auto glyph. It was called the Proto glyph. And so one of them and it didn't look anything like the because there's a higher Fidelity, but it was one, they couldn't put on the blockchain back then because it was too high resolution. And so we have their early prototype as one of them. And so the people that minted, that those are going for over 100,000 on the secondary. And so they received that in there while they were some hit.
I was when we first went out, which is crazy. So they receive that in their wallet and that was part of the upside that they received as a holder of the proof Collective past. So the products that we turn into n FTS whether it be grills or our future metaverse or Moon Birds, which they each got two of which, you know, are now valued at twenty or Thirty Grand whatever, they are USD per moonbird, the go back to the proof Collective holders. So they receive that informs of in a form of just value, that comes back to them as holders. In addition to all the
in value that comes out of the membership in the meetups and the group we've had 20, International meetups now with proof people getting together, which is just crazy. It's we're actually hiring ahead of head of like meetups and we have to have a whole Services team. Now around these different meetups and functions that we're going to be doing a have you ever done like a back-of-the-envelope calculation and how much value you've driven to should have not even just it to be like just 100x? At least it's more than the one you
They paid for the if they bought him back then,
but you're saying for creators who are like a little worried about getting off the a drip model. Like this is enough Revenue to accomplish for you as a Creator to accomplish the goals, you set out and to like, pay a team and to staff somebody for meetups and to staff some analysts. It's just working out for my Revenue side to be able to fund this operation as well.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the proof in general his if I had to guess and I'd have to go talk to our accounting folks. I would say that.
The collective pass is probably brought in around seven or eight million dollars in Revenue since January. Wow, which is this year of this year? Yeah, which is great. And so that, you know, but you'll see, I should probably do like a public, like show people what we spend our money on because we're going to do we're going to throw one of the best and if he Converses in the absolute World kind those are expensive conferences. Those are very expensive. So Ryan Carson, who is our CEO. Oh, he used to throw a future web apps conferences back.
Day, I mean, Zuckerberg spoke of them have Williams, like all the greats. Have spoken of his conferences and they were fantastic in. The first thing. He said to me, when he joined, you knew he was gonna throw a conference. He goes, as long as we don't have to make money doing this conference amazing. He's like, cuz they barely broke even and they would have to charge like, you know, thousands of dollars to ten but they would have to spend so much money on staff and venue and all the logistics and operations of, you know, record all the video production and streaming and all the stuff that goes into a massive conference. And so, yeah, we're
excited it. So this isn't just money. It's important to note that even though we make this money. It doesn't come back to us as individuals. I mean, we get a salary and I'll be transparent. I pay myself fifty thousand dollars a year from from, from proof. That's my salary. And in the the purpose though is like, we want to go build something massive here. So we want to reinvest those fonts. It's about going bigger and broader and doing this better than anyone else. And that's the kind of goal here
in a part of the
Value, you've been able to drive to your community coming, like with those the, the mint's the auto equipment. And what was the name of that project again? Where the mint Trails Grails? Yeah, I would. Imagine that the reason why you were able to attract that opportunity for your community is because of the nature of the community that you have collected around proof. Again the right now. They're not the flippers. They're not the nft flippers. So the people that are saying hey, we have some NF, t's for your community, have some assurance.
Senses that your communities are not going to flip these things because you've been typically curated a community of very strong nft experts that are very qualified consumers of these n FTS that these nft projects would be very, very interested in having this particular community be a holder of. So what you've really done is you really curated the best consumer possible of the NF tease and saying, hey, if you are a long-term Focus, Diamond hander, you are
Probably part of the proof proof Collective and that is particularly attractive to people that are minting new nft projects. And so it's really playing that long game and the optimizations for Quality that has allowed so much value to be discovered in the proof Collective.
Yeah, that that's exactly right. I mean it's for us it is about how can we play this for the next this longing for the next decade. Like I built a handful of businesses and I know that for me I'm not aiming to do another like little single or double like we're really swinging for the fences here. We want to be a top five pfp project with moon birds. And so yeah, we're going for it. This is this is not about a little short term exit or rug and run. Like this is the something much
bigger.
So you have the membership nfte 2000 membership and ftes. Now, you have the moon birds for the profile pictures because you know, you gotta you gotta look good in the metaverse, but I'm cognizant that you are missing. And the RC 20 token. Is there any RC 20 token on
the menu?
Oh, man, I didn't know you were going to ask me this question. You know, I think that well I can I can tell you what we won't do and and let's start with those talking about what what we're seeing out there in the market if that's okay with you all. So, you know, when, when you think about these coin, kind of air drops that are happening, I think a lot of it is is broken in that.
There's two problems. One. There's why would you need to use that new token versus say just using eith like like take ape for example, like they're going to build that into their metaverse. But why do I need to have that forces? Ey. The code not just pay with ether, or with die or use DC, or whatever. It may be. That is one. I have yet to kind of, I'm still kind of grappling with and trying to wrap my head around. The other is, what is the value?
You of that token pegged to and this I don't think is solved by any one. It's just like saying it's an inventing, a token. Say hey, we have our token, hooray and like I'm just launching it, but there's nothing. There's no backbone. Other than a story of where there may be value. Like, I do appreciate what dye has done and that they have baskets of underlying other assets, that kind of back them up. And I think that something could be done here on the nft side as well.
Well, so I'll hint hint at that. You know, I like to think about what an underlying basket of in FTS, could do to power some type of new token. And then the other thing in the real thing that I think is tragic is the reward structure is completely broken. And so one of the reasons why we have nesting with moon Birds nesting is a non-custodial way of locking up. It's like staking your moonbird, but we don't actually take it out of your wallet and you actually get these little upgraded nests, you start with straw and then eventually becomes a bronze nest and silver has two upgrades over time.
But what that means is you're saying I have conviction in this project. I'm not going to flip this. Now again, we could make more money if people are flipping them, but that's not the point. We want loyalty, we want community. And so if people are locking in their birds and saying I'm willing to lock up my moonbird, then they should receive the outsize rewards if there ever is a future token in the in that comes out. So it was so odd to me that ape token launches, and I could have bought an ape
Token, the or a board up the day before. And received the exact same amount of tokens is someone that had held since day one. And I think that that's the wrong reward structure. It should be based on your commitment to a project and so we're changed in that and I will say this all with one caveat. Nothing bored Apes have innovated in so many different ways. It's mind-blowing nothing, but respect for that Community. I'm just thinking about in the token sense. We're just going to
It is slightly different take than then if we go there. When we do, it will be a different take than what has already been done out there, building in copying some other project. You know, I think at a minimum, like a pfp is kind of table Stakes for anyone that is in this world, but we wanted to make sure with the nest a mechanic and some of these other things that we added that were built into the smart contract. It wasn't just a me to project. And that we are thinking about this with a set of fresh eyes and going back to First principles versus just doing another clone. Because clones are a dime, a dozen and
The borders were not clones. They did marry the quite a few different Innovations with their sermons and a bunch of the way so that they looked at how to do derivative type projects on top of their existing user base, which I think we're brilliant and spot-on. Especially at the time. No one was doing that. But you know ours. Is it just a different take on this when we eventually get around to that that world. I love
that these nft projects are kind of leveling each other up because like, you know, one project we'll just take the best ideas from another and then,
Like iterate on the making improvements in various ways and then we get to kind of the next level. We unlock it. We see
what. So, I love it and I don't consider this. I think this is a fantastic thing for the industry. So I'll give you an example. This just happened. Today. This is fresh news Quantum art. Just nervous on. Oh fantastic. Best known. One of the best-known in photography and of T creators that's out. Their souls artwork at Christie's all the stuff. They created Quantum, which was initially just for photography based in ftes.
They announced this morning. They have their Quantum key, which is like their version of kind of Grails are not necessary, not girls, but the version of what we develop roof Collective and they announced this morning that they're going to do a Grails type launch. We don't know who the artists are and they'll do the reveal after, but they're putting the emphasis back on the art, getting people to consider and look at each piece of decide. Which then, when they want to collect and then doing the storytelling around the artist, this is the entire thing that we built for Grails that we launched, you know, a few months ago. I love that. They, they are now using this as
Part of their mechanic. It's like, if we find useful pieces to your, to your all's entire thesis around Lego blocks. Let's reuse them. Take the best ones, modify them make them better and take them forward. And that's that's how we all win. And I so I like to see more of that.
That's super cool. Alright. Well, let's let's back up and just complete the story around moonbird. So we talked about this Foundation, which is the proof Collective. And now can you tell us a bit more about this Moon? Birds launch, so it sounds like if you had a
If you reproof holder, then you got some Moon Birds minted to you. You got to
just claim to. That's right.
Good claim to you. Okay, so, tell us about like the moon Birds concept. How is it distributed? You know, where is it now? I think we can look on like open. See stats. As we said, in the intro is absolutely crushing it. Volume of 36,000 eith
over the last seven days. 76,000
do is. Excuse me. 76,000 who's counting though? Yeah, exactly. What's a few?
Hundred, you know doesn't eat anyway, thousand eat anyways, so tell us about the launch of this thing. The attributes, the the features you sort of explain the concept of nesting. I wonder if you could tell us about that. Again, just give us the lowdown on what moon birds are.
Yeah, absolutely. So in classic tip of the hat to crypto Punk's, there are 10,000 addition pfp, and essentially what they are.
Are there these cute if you can't see the video, there's cute little characters that look like, you know, Al's they are owls and they have different attributes in terms of Rarity around the different things that they hold. So that one that you're looking out, there has a little crown on top of its head. The one next to it has a baseball cap. Those have different Rarities associated with them and then their eyes are different and their tones of their different Furs different. There's one with some some fire hair that you just had up there and when we set up to create this project,
Wait, there was a couple things we want to do, we'll get into nesting in a minute. But let's just talk about the design, just the Mozelle, who's my co-founder, had a design, created them all. Except for the one with a little grumpy Gremlin Toad on the head when the great artists go Gremlin designed a little toad, which is a smoking Elon Musk on top of the head of birds, but one of the things that we want to do is we want to make sure that it wasn't lost on us that as just in myself, the one kind of putting together, the designs for this project that we were two white guys.
Doing it. So if you pause there and look at that one there, that one has like a little Tupac kind of bandana tied up and a gold chain around its neck. And so what we want to do is go out and get a diverse group of people that were our advisory panel on the attribute side. So we included a bunch of women and a bunch of people of color to make sure that they were being represented in the things that they would like to see on these different birds. So, you know, we have some eyes there that you're looking at right there that are the
Embo eyes, you know, depends on how you look at a rainbow, but oftentimes it can be associated with gay pride as well, which we thought was great. It was recommended by one of our members. We have a little do-rag attribute. That is amazing by was built. We literally did a design session with John Gray. Who you got to watch? John Gray's? Ted Talk is actually wearing a do rag in his Ted Talk. He's amazing. Really helped us walk through all of the stitching nuance and like what color it should be and all of this different stuff. And so it was it was our goal to
Set up and create different attributes, that would speak to different people and then some of these attributes would have further kind of utility over time many. We can do fun things with them. So, for example, once you Nest your moonbird and you lock it up at the 3-month Mark, we're going to drop you. Like the most insane hoodie for all the hoodie, Moon birds. Like, and like these, it's really thick. High-quality 200 dollar hoodies that are just done by this really great brand that we haven't announced yet, but they'll be coming, drop ship to you.
As for free as a moon, Birds holder and we have ones that have chromium squiggles on their head, which is a very famous art block project. So you can imagine, what will eventually be coming to those moonbird holders. I have an x copy that's going to be, are dropped to one lucky winner of our glitch after Buttes. There's only five glitch attributes. You can pull under. If you go to body type there on the left and choose glitch at the very bottom. You'll see if you scroll down that Center section there. Yeah, just hit glitch there. There's a sorry, there's six of them. So if you have the
the one of the glitch there, you'll be eligible for that particular airdrop. So we want to have fun both in terms of blanket benefits that will come to every moonbird holder. So it won't just be about the ultra rare ones. Like if you Nest your moonbird, you will get things. Like, I'll tell one awesome. When we're going to do is we should mention this as well as when you hold a Nona moonbird, you own the IP, for 100% of the IP for that, that image.
So you can do anything you want with it. You can you can build a company around it. You can sell merge with it on it. Like we're not holding this like the board board ape slice, absolutely was a fantastic Innovation by board Apes to do this. It was it was brilliant. And so what we're doing at the 3-month nest the nesting Mark, we're actually going to send you 250 stickers of just your specific moonbird with your number at the bottom of it that are these super high quality process that
Are having done on these stickers. That's just one example of like, a fun way to show off who your moonbird is and kind of distribute those around a friend's or wherever you want to put them. Of course, only legal places. But while, but we'll have like a moon Birds siding channel, on our Discord as well. Just does a moonbird holder, get any
of the same benefits that a proof Collective holder. Would
they get access to a private Discord? So there's a private Moon, Birds only Discord. They're going to get a front row seat to our metaverse. They will have
They won't probably get as much land as the proof Collective members, but they will have access to land in that metal versus well, there'll be other projects that are dropped on top of this. It's just going to be a whole like internal roadmap that we have of things that will come to these holders. So absolutely there's going to be a lot of there will be overlap there. They won't get, it's not really Moon, birds are more for the community and fun and IRL and the meetups and the culture side, and then the collective.
More of the hardcore collect in Ft collectors. So the collective receives the research reports, things like that. So that's that doesn't extend to. This is
crazy because I really see the network effect. What you're building essentially Kevin is like, if you are a hardcore nft collector like you want to be part of the proof Network, right? Because that's where everyone is essentially. So you're almost making it such that. It's just so attractive to opt into the proof network. If you're an NF T collector and it and what strikes me that the community almost self.
It's for you. Once you've established that. Hey, this is our stake in the ground. This is the type of community. We're going to become. Then they just they just come to the community as a result of that which is, which is fascinating. David. I think you wanted to say something. Yeah, the it seems to be what you're doing with the perks. Like the hood, the hoodie Birds, the pretty mood boards. Get an actual hoodie, and Ice quality hoodie and your everyone gets a sticker of the of their of their moonbird. And it's just makes as a moonbird holder. I would feel very just like warm.
Appreciate it and fuzzy and thankful that, like the, The Operators of this project are allowing me to have all these perks related, to, to the Moon bird, but it's also just a great marketing tool for Moon Birds itself, right? You're giving marketing assets to the individual holders, right? You're allowing the moonbird holders to express the moonbird brand to the best of their ability because they have the hoodies, or the stickers or like whatever merge comes with their particular moonbird. So like, you're making sure that the
The community feels answered and appreciated by but also equipping them with like, marketing ammo to promote the moon Birds brand. So I think the end of verse are we borrowing a little bit from like, the Gary Vee model? Because very Gary, Vee has like, redeemable. Nft s, right? But like, it wasn't about the art and this is much more about the art. And so, it's really doing the whole, like you actually get perks with this nft. But it's also nice to see in your Open Sea as well.
Yeah. I mean, that's Gary. Vee was a big inspiration. Gary's been a buddy of mine for over a decade.
Right now, and when he first announced that he was doing the friends and he told me how he's tying utility to these entities that were very much tied to Gary. If you look at the first, you know, drops like you get to go to a basketball game with Gary and I love that. I was like, whoa, okay at that was a big. Aha moment for me and connecting like real world. Life type functionality to nft sand. And so let me get you really excited. This is where we're going. So what hasn't been built? And this is very early.
Early days is the rails to talk to real-world locations. So there's no way right now that you can walk in to any location any restaurant, any any place and say I hold this in of t, let me prove it to you. You can open your men in masks on your phone, which is dangerous if it's a hot wallet or whatever, right? There's there's there's ways to like, show people screenshot of something that you say you own, but there's no way to really prove it. So, how can we build a product in this is where?
This is what we're thinking about that allows you to verify that you hold in a t on your phone. Without it being at risk for being stolen from you. If someone holds you up at gunpoint, right? And what's open. Now? What is that? Unlock? So that unlocks very basic stuff. Like you can go to an event and someone could scan your little thing or tap your phone and let you in and say, okay. Oh you are moonbird holder. Come on in, right? But it'll locks even crazier things when you start talking about the rails that talk to the point of sale connectivity. So if there's square or their Shopify, I'm actually
Talking to the Shopify CEO. And a few days about this, we want to be able to say okay Moma who use the Shopify to power, all the entry interests and I'm just making this up, but I got enough Mama used to it. But like let's say it's a Museum of Modern Art. We're going to do proof moonbird, stay where it's free and open to all Moon Birds holder to walk into the MoMA and go walk around and we can then power and Tel and send Moma the money to comp and benefit them to be able to go in and have that experience. And we
That at bars. We can do that at meet up so we can do that anywhere. So we can power all of these this, this connectivity to physical businesses to unlock experiences. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah, it's super powerful.
So, you're manifesting the digital Community into into
reality and into the physical and creating like a bridge
there. We don't have to be there. We can say, hey this bar and random bar in Norway. We've seen that, there's 25 moonbird holders of their Friday nights a meet-up. And guess what? Here's a thousand-dollar bar tab to have fun and we just power it in.
Instantly and they can walk in and comp all of their drinks or food or whatever it may be. And so it's just figuring out creative ways to tie the online and offline worlds together, that is going to be a big piece of what we're focused on as well as awesome, Kevin. All right. Well, I think we want to get to the next
section where we start talking about. Like actually people, you creators communities thinking about launching an entity and your advice for them, but just to tie off that this first section and what you've accomplished with proof and moon Birds. What?
You
say the big lessons for you. Have been through this experience like the things you'd advise or pass on to a Creator, thinking about doing something like this, for their Community. Both in proof. And for Moon Birds. What were the takeaways? The key insights for you?
Yeah, I guess a couple things like. Well, there's a few 11 is always holds them back for your own like local always hold a few back. So when I first launched proof, I
I basically told all my friends that didn't that didn't get it. I'm like, oh, I held some back and I was like, hey, you just have them at whatever the floor was. I saw them off at 1/8 and then actually over-promised. So I had to go buy some off the secondary myself. So I was I actually had by a couple at to eat and I was like one day we're promised to many of these but I would say don't don't focus on the price up when you're going out to launch something like this. If it sells at a point one eith, that's fine because it's not about that initial sale. Yes, you'll get that nice little chunk of change to go out and build, but it
The it's going to be the word of mouth. The momentum of what you create to back up, what you've just done in launching that sale. That is going to drive more and more people to seek that out and want to purchase and hold that utility pfp. So are in f t. So that is, is kind of like it's on you as a Creator, then to go out and and deliver. So for us, it's never been about, okay. We just need to, you know, we saw how much, how oversubscribe we were in terms of the, the,
Sale, so we had 70 or sorry 8,000 available spots because 2000 went to proof Collective members of the Moon birds and we had about fifty five thousand applicants that applied to be in the drawing at 2.5 eith. And so we could have easily gone out and said, hey guess what? It's five youth now and we still wouldn't sold out but we didn't, we kept it 2.5 because we without was what we promised and so we sold out of that and that's okay because that was the right thing to do.
And you just have to always listen to the community and play back and do the right thing. Like I'll give you. Another example, we screwed up and there was a when we were doing the last tranche of the drop, so it was like unlocking, these different tear, these different people that could than meant. There was a 10, second delay between when the mint button went live and when the actual contract allowed, those people to Mint, and so we had 100 plus e that was lost in gas when that happened and it was difficult because
Cuz we know that there were a bunch of scripts that went in there and tried to jump the gun that didn't actually see them in button appear and they went in and rush in a bunch of gas really fast. And and so we had some valid people that actually click the button and we had a bunch of invalid people that didn't click the button use Bots and we said, you know what, this is the long game here. So we just went and refunded 380 thousand dollars worth of eat yesterday and but it's like that. That's the kind of stuff that yes, we could have gotten away with it and said ik we're not
Do this because you tried to do this or X, Y or Z or we don't believe it was, right? And it when men and mask was even throwing errors to people saying, don't Memphis even though they wouldn't clicked. Go ahead anyway, and so we just said, Hey, listen men in masks, are you in are but you click through it, but we know we've all been there. You get excited about a menu. Click any button that comes up, right? It's a lot of people actually get like they're in a tea stall and they're not paying attention to what they're clicking. So they're just clicking as fast as possible. And so, you know, it's like you just gotta go back to that. Who Am I, who am I building for?
And and what time Horizon is that going to be and for us, it's decades. And that means it's not worth the short term eith versus the long-term Vision. We're trying to build here. So it's, I guess it just comes back to always, delivering always always be shipping and and and, and don't set even though the the the excitement can be to go out and build 10 or 15 things. But really hone in on the two or three things that you can actually deliver versus trying to boil the ocean. I think that's another big mistake. A lot of entrepreneurs make in general not just people in web three,
this is
Belong, you know, just for recalling. The, the famous Duvall, quote of long-term games that the long-term people. And I think you really differentiate Yourself by playing the long term game for Community. Kevin and I met the alpha is just like be wholesome. This is like refunding. All of that gas. It's just like wow, that is the right thing to do and it's so wholesome in it. It's it's a shame that it's rare, but that that's that would that's what differentiates the community and is signals that you are playing a long-term game here, guys. We're going to talk more.
More about this with Kevin because I want to ask some more specific questions around launching an NF T like creators out there who are wondering is the time. Now for me to launch an NF T. Kevin were hoping you can get into the specifics of what that might look like. And then maybe if Bank list decided to launch an NF T. I actually look. What's Curious, you know? Yeah, just curious. Yes. As a model we want to talk about all of those things. But because we are not yet off the a drip.
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All right. So Kevin where we left things was you were giving us the story of all of the success. Proof is hat and moon birds have had for creators out there. Say they want to launch an NF T. Can you guide us through the prerequisite? So, I'm thinking things like, okay, what kind of a team do you need? At this point to pull this off? Maybe we'll start there. And then the walls of talk about Community. But let's start with Team. What kind of a team is required? To pull this
off? Yeah. It really depends on how technically you are. I would say that for me, I said,
Computer science in school but dropped out your to and so I can look at code in and read it more or less depending on the language, but I'm not I shouldn't be riding. That would just be bad. We'd all be hacked in that have no money. So so essentially what I did is there are I would say several really well-known smart contract developers in the space. If you're going to do a utility in Ft. I would say probably just don't go to one of the big Marketplace.
Has and mint on there like you want to have your own, you know your contract, you know your keys. If it's your keys, your crypto, it's your contract and your community. So definitely have your own contract built. The good news, is a lot of the the on chain Dutch on auction mechanics have been built before we use Divergence for all of our smart contracts. They're absolutely fantastic. The main protagonist there. Aaron is dual MD Ph.D., Ex-google 10-year, Google.
Like just is rock solid as they come Aaron and hairier. Fantastic. So I highly recommend them and we Outsource that entire thing to them. So they just wouldn't handle it all. So we didn't have to worry about that component. We could focus on what we're good at which is more Web building and and, you know, app building and community and all the things that we love to do. So smart contract Engineers are very hard to come by and oftentimes it's it's it's easier just to partner with someone for this initial launch.
I also like manifold. I think manifold does a great job on this part contract side. They're really, really well known for building great contracts for artists as well. So that would be two recommendations there and then you need a front-end engineer that's going to talk to the contracts. So who is that person? That's going to write that code that JavaScript? And you know work worth in fura or some of the other alchemy's that are bridging web to web 3 so that people can connect wallets. They can use wallet connect, the content on mobile and all of this.
Then of course, you know, all the hardware keys and everything. You need to keep your crypto safe. And then, you know, a proper Discord crew that knows how to set permissions and do moderation, do token gating, things of that nature, where it requires you to have the nft to get in. I would not recommend doing a public open Discord because there is just so much spam and and scammers that are out there. So I'm very much about the token gated communities. I think those that's the way to go. And yeah, that's kind of how you get Off to the Races. Then you work with an artist, you can find it.
Lance artist to kind of create your initial artwork. If it's just going to be some type of pass that you have access to, and that should be
it. How about other prerequisites in terms of community? Right? So, you know, it strikes me that proof very much had a community already that you'd see did through the proof podcast. Do you recommend people have a community before they do this? Because I think there's a lot of nft mints out there that think we can mint the nft and then build the community on the other side of that. What do you think? The order of operations?
Beers, it's sort of community first, or do you think you can mint and then build the community on the back of
that? It's a, it's a great question. I think if you are an artist that you're looking to build something in the space, whether it be a pfp or put out your own art, then you just start without the community. Like you just get out there and but if you're on the Creator side that is looking to build something on the Utility side of an ftes, then you got, you have to have that Community First, right? You just won't sell out. Otherwise, no one would want to collect.
T' what you're creating, so, you know, if they if your podcast and you have to get your audience up to certain size, especially if they're non-technical. Because if they're non-technical, you can have a very low conversion of people that actually even care or figure. It can figure out how to collect these things. Gary Vee. If you look at how he did the V friends launch, he had a massive Community, but hardly anyone understood in at he's back in those days and probably, you know still don't and his community was largely people that weren't in the NFC space. And so he spent a lot of time and effort on the education side, you know, how to use
Met a mask how to, you know collect get purchase teeth for the first time and really walk people through that process, which I think most people wouldn't do.
Kevin. What do you think?
What's the role that utility? And if she is just have for creators, right? Let's what's the the opportunity for not just crypto creators. But, yeah, I mean, you talked about how like some many, many audience members for just the average content producer, probably not ready to get into crypto. But we all think here that cryptos coming to take over the world, right? So eventually everyone is going to be ready to be a crypto consumer, right? So for the creators out there, do you think that this is going to be a primitive that
Going to be true for all creators and and how do you know when it's you should start to look to crypto and look to utility and if T's to start to bolster your community and like you said, get off of that a drip. So who is you tenant? Who are utility? And if he's really for, and how should content creators identify themselves as this is good for me?
Yeah. It's a great question because it's not applicable to everyone, right? If you have a resource that you are producing that has
People consider it to have to give them some type of information advantage or some type of knowledge that is valuable to them. Or they want a more intimate connection with the creator of that content being able to ask questions or do things in a more tight Community versus a big Community. Then I think this makes a lot of sense for those types of creators to have utility based in FTS. I think if you're just trying to reach if you're a YouTuber, that just creates funny, you know, dancing videos. I can't imagine
This really applies to you at this point in time. It also works where there are businesses that have high demand, but not enough volume that they can produce. So I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of a winery called Harlan estate and very small producer of Napa Cabernet. And, you know, the discussions that are that are kind of being had at that level is you have a three-year wait list to get into.
To into a wine allocation, right? So you can imagine what was the traditional like sit on the email, wait list could be a more fluid membership that it in the form of an entity to actually gain access to something like that. But to take it one step further and this is just crazy. The 11 wine gets traded and I know this is completely different genre, but it just shows you how broadly applicable in ft's are to so many different Industries. When wind gets traded at the high end. It can be change. Hands like six, seven, eight.
Before it's actually the cork is popped and it's consumed. And so one of the issues is how was it stored was a stored at the right temperature to the actual wind, touch the cork. So didn't go dry. So it's not like a, you know, no air got in there as it becomes a corked bottle. Wine. There's all of these issues, right? So traditionally its that is men. Someone buys it, they take it, they sell it to. Another person says, it's another person that is being shipped all around, the country, all around the world, all over the place. You can imagine the issuance of an mft.
T to represent that physical bottle of wine and now you can hold on to it. Your green demon anytime. So is actually Burns The Entity and its it and sent you in the mail and then you consume it or you can trade it a decade later, you know, and it's guaranteed proven Providence in storage at the actual Winery, no, fraud because there's a lot of fraud that takes place in that industry as well. And every time it's resold, the original producer makes a cut of that royalty, as well. It's just like a
Beautiful new model for businesses that have a scarce resource. That is in high demand. As you can. Imagine this happening to tennis shoes. There's no reason why people need to be waiting around the block for Supreme shoes or Supreme gear, right? Like they could have an entity that represents that piece of gear that can be claimed at any point. In time, comes directly from The Proven manufacturer. In the manufacturer gets a cut of the royalties going forward. This could be. So broadly applicable to so many businesses out there
and the beautiful thing that I really love about that, is it just cuts down on so much waste? Like,
100% physically move. We don't need to burn gas to move these bottles of wine across the country. And so like it's just instead. We just move the token around in the metaverse and that is just an an ethereal transaction, which, you know, many people think Burns a lot of energy, but it actually doesn't and it actually will do a lot less in the future. Meanwhile, the wine bottles or just the product stays put and just lets the token float around in the
cloud. So get this, I you probably have heard this before but in the luxury world of goods, a lot.
Of what happens behind the scenes. And it's a horrible thing is, they overproduce, and when they over produce, they don't want their goods to go back on the secondary Market because the cheapens the brand they're sold it at wholesale or slash prices. So they actually physically destroy the clothes and bags and everything else. And it just gets put in a dumpster somewhere and out. You know, that's like basically the shredding documents in some sense. Now, imagine you have a world where you don't know the demand for the sneaker. You're about to create and you put it on.
It out there and you were thinking maybe a thousand and if you would have produced a thousand you maybe the was 1500, or if it because 2,000, then your 500 over other actual demand. And so, you lose money. Now, you know, it's 1527 and you can go and do just-in-time manufacturing and produce the exact amount without any of the waist. It's a beautiful thing. That's
interesting. That's actually a model that we have experimented with out of manufacturing and banquet style which that we take in the orders and then we get like 284 orders. So we
284 shirts.
Yes, but exactly yet, yet to
tokenize that. So maybe, maybe that's on the frontier. And again, speaking of the frontier utility and FTS. I think just offers like this Blank Slate of opportunity for creators. And we're, you've already Illustrated so many different ways that you can use and FTS. And you talked about how Gary Vee injected utility and that was an inspiration. And you also Illustrated just how we can decide from content and it actually works for stuff like Supply chains in a way. I had never never heard.
Described before just like for creators and for other companies out there. Just can you talk about just how there's just this empty space, that's yet to be filled in of opportunity for ways to do to use these utility and ftes. And I think this also goes back to your time at dig where did was really just put the power on to the individual, put the power on the margins of society. So like the average individual was allowed to have empowerment with dick, right? That was the utility website, but now we have utility and of tea.
And allows you the expression of the individual to come out. You have any thoughts about like what could be unlocked once. We allow individuals to really be able to express themselves with how they inject utility into their utility. And if
those it's so cool because in some sense, we're actually taking a very old model of kind of top-down media and and flipping it on its head, like, you know, the the Disney franchises that we all know and love. It's they're created by Disney. The characters are owned by Disney the
Royalties are owned by Disney the commercialization and rights of all toys and products and gear owned by Disney. And Disney is a very powerful company in this model with, with board Apes, offering the IP back to the users with moon, birds with the IP back to the users, you're saying, guess what the, the users can participate in the value, accrual, right. As something becomes more and more popular and you hold on to these you participate in that upside. So it's a bottoms-up and then now you actually own
Piece of the character set as well that you can go off and do very unique things with. So it's just a, it's a, it's there's so many different things that can be done in this new model. Like the next Disney will be built and owned by the people, not by a big Fortune 500 company, you know, so it that's that's very exciting to me.
That's cool. Right? Kevin.
So put these pieces together for us. Alright, so Banquets has a community right now. We do, we have a podcast. Many of the community are very crypto educated. What do you think we should do? Like, what would a bank lists? And if t look like, do you think? Like, because we were sort of in this hybrid of we're spreading crypto knowledge. We're building a crypto Community, but we're doing it. Mostly so far using web to tools, right? Like, you know,
Up stack podcast RSS feed, we do have the Banquets doubt piece of things and that's kind of building off in another Direction, but we've not unlocked. Like what crypto native membership features could be. So like what would your thoughts be for us? What would your advice be for us? If we were thinking about doing something like this?
Yeah. It's a great question. Well, how many people are in your doll right
now thousands? Yeah. I think there's probably like five thousand or so token holders in the
down and what are they?
Have to have to be a part of that dowel, how many of the token
they have to have 35,000 Bank tokens to be in the Discord. And
what does that come out to and USD right now? I don't even
35 times point zero three. So about a thousand dollars. Yeah, right. Little bit over a thousand dollars.
So I would allow every single one of those members to be a part of this community for free. So they get one of these and have teased you reward them for being your early supporters. Okay, and then I would figure out what your
Who's going to be your total like number of how many people you think you would like in this community? Whether it be a thousand? Well, you had, as you said, there's thousands of people in the, in the dash house. There's
thousands in the Dow, there's also on the bank list newsletter. There's like twenty two hundred thousand free subscribers. You just get this distributed to them. And then we have also premium members. So, we got like this, all of these different, I guess tiers of
membership. So you have to figure out how to gracefully roll them up, right? Because you want all of the come along, you roll them all up. Now. You have one in a
ft membership in a tea that represents everything that you do. And you have to have one of these have early access to the newsletter or the exit to the podcast weekly Q&A. As with all of you, like all the things that you would be providing to across all these different channels is now just done via this in Ft. Right? And I think that you have to put a hard cap on it. So it's not this ever expanding base where all of a sudden they people that hold. It had 5,000. They're like, okay, great. We're 105 thousand. And then like tomorrow, you're the one of those sounds like I just got half. Yes. Oh hey.
Yeah, you got to figure out what that number is for you all. But yeah, then I would I would roll it all up and then have this one utility and ft that people can point to rather than this being, this like floating token number. It's like I have my pass. This will get me in to see the guys when they throw an event or live podcast or a hold, a meet-up at this conference or whatever. It may be. This is my thing and I think that'll be your path forward. And do you get recurring revenue on all of that right off it as as new bank lists fans come in and join. Then, you know, you get
A piece of that which I think will help fund your business and you can decide whether, you know, I would definitely do add list versions of your podcast. For those users, you know, save them the time? Do you think this should be like,
like, do you like the 1000 superfans type model, orgy, think it should be. It should be larger. Right? So we kind of struggled with this a little bit where part of Bank Less is mission is to get out to everyone, right? Like onboard billions of people to in into Krypton you do
that with the podcast, right? Like see that. Yeah, so that's going to
Great, but the Deep dive information advantage that you all provide on defy. The reason I pay for your newsletter is because I'm always reading about stuff that I don't have time to go out and research on my own. And you give me that killer tldr that I know I can trust and it's not about somebody that's just like saying, hey, you invest in this and then the disappears the next day, like you do your due diligence and so you have that trust as a community and I would lean into that. And so those those are the hardcore people that say, I believe enough in this, to hold this in Ft, that gives
Me access to all of this additional resources, but still, you're still doing, you know, the good work and putting out the podcast the masses. So you're not cutting that off at at all. And you know, it's like maybe every fifth Deep dive article is completely free and you tell them, it can have all of them but they hold, you know, the nft. So it's a lot to think through,
do you think? So another part of this Kevin is that's been intimidating for David and I because like, you know, I do have one year computer side and then I then I switched by the way, in my undergrad. So neither David
Or our super technical is our questions is the tooling therefore for kind of craters. Like how difficult is this? I think when you were talking about it, look you need probably someone to develop the smart contracts. You need front-end engineer that sort of thing. How are the tools in this space coming along? Is it? I know it's not sub, stack level just like click a few buttons and auto mint, but is it. Is it easy enough? At this point are the tools in place to be able to deploy this fairly easily?
Yeah. It's a great question.
And it's early days. In a lot of people are creating the tooling around this. What we use right now is a site called nft portal dot x y, z and that will power all of your kind of dashboard for your users. So it collects their information. If you want to ship them things, you can token gate. All of you can took a gate articles there. You can talk and get a calendar. You can do a private podcast feed there, that gets released early. So it's a lot of a lot of what you're
Looking for can can be done with this tool. That's super cool. All right, Kevin man. This
is an awesome. We invited you on to talk about Moon Birds, but it was actually because we needed you to consult with us. Yeah, we just thank you for that. You consult a free consult the rug, pull their love it. Yeah, this is awesome. Really fun. So I guess like what's what's kind of next for the moon Birds community and like what's what are the immediate next steps for everyone in Moon? Burt. Are you guys like just catching your breath?
Right now and
we're running, you know, we've got five people right now. We just got together on Monday and we put together a list of our immediate hires. We have another 12 people that were looking to hire for. So that'll be posted up at the main boards website at the proof website. And, you know, it's all about consistent month-over-month delivering of the things that we promised on. So, we've got a new director of engineering that just started got a couple other engineering candidates that are starting
So, you know, it's falling all this back in and getting this to be a well-oiled machine and just ensuring that we can ship product which is my favorite part. Like, that's now that the sale is done. I can actually rest a little bit, not in terms of my workload, but just in terms of like, that was the scariest part. Like I know how to build products that we can build products in the problem, like, will deliver on everything we want to do. That's that, that I'm confident in. It was the initial sale on the smart contracts and all the risk around, you know, proceeds and all that. That
That was scary. But now we just go build build build. So can't wait how
much how much time out of the week. Are you focused on this on proof? Is this like a 40 plus hours a week thing or how do you do your time with it? Yeah.
Yeah, so I'm still a partner a true Ventures and you know, we take a lot of my deal flow and hand it off to other partners. We have a fantastic Network there and in truth is one of our investors is well improve which is great. And
So that's that's easy for me. They we have a 50 plus person company their true that that helps take in all the different deal flow and things like that. But yeah, my my focus right now is just really on this community.
Kevin. This has been awesome. Congrats to the proof team into the moon Birds community and the proof Collective community on the successful launch. You guys are absolutely crushing it. And really excited to hear your story here about this. This long-term multi-decade a game that you're playing.
In ftes, and we're excited to see what you guys do next.
Well, I'm excited for your June launched with the Bank closed in Ft
will launch at the same time, that you've merge happens. How about
that? So what two years? Yeah, something like that. They
could be one who delivers our meeting in Amsterdam as we speak right now. Are they right now? The devs are working. That's where I am right now.
Yeah, Wendy, like, give me. Give me. Give me the 5 second version. When is this launching? Yeah. Okay,
so I'm not gonna you gonna get us in trouble.
By saying a date. So we were joking about the same question. I was sitting with like Anthony Fasano and Justin Drake was with us and we are all we were all getting a beer and so we were joking about. All right, let's take all of our empty beers. Put them in front of Justin Drake, get him one more full beer, put it in his hand and we'll take a picture of him and be like Justin Drake says we're merging tomorrow. We did not do that. Yeah, if I had to guess, if I had to guess August to October.
August September 1st over
always four to six minutes out. Yeah,
always
push that little little bit
better happened this year. It's Gotta happen this year.
I think Ethan's gonna go nuts. It way. If this goes well, and the merge is like, it's nothing breaks, you know, like in a bad bad way. I think it's gonna really benefit from, from this being a success. I'm exactly.
Yeah.
I think we're all in alignment on that one. We're excited to timer nft for that date.
So let's say to you. Yeah, Kevin's this has been a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming. Thanks guys. Always great to be on. All right. Take care.
Thankless, guys, of course. None of this has been financial advisors and disclaimers. Of course, eat this. Risky entities are risky, all of crypto certainly as you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bank. This journey. Thanks a lot.
