Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast
Background
Mint Season 1 episode 1 features Allie Mcpherson and Mason Geysir – the duo behind $ALLIE coin. Allie Mcpherson is a popular gaming streamer making headwinds across YouTube and Twitch where she primarily streams card games like Hearthstone & MTGA. Mason Geysir is the backend behind $ALLIE coin – he helps manage the day-to-day or ALLIE’s brand and all that Allie coin entails. Together, they are a powerhouse.
The three of us discuss Allie and Mason’s upbringing, their motivation behind $ALLIE coin, the biggest challenges with starting their coin, how she’s created utility and value for token holders through gaming tournaments, and much more.
Thank you to Season 1’s NFT sponsors!
1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/
2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/
Interested in sponsoring future seasons? Get in touch here!
Adam Levy: Allie and Mason, welcome to the podcast. How you doing?
Allie Macpherson: We’re doing well. Thank you for having us.
Mason Geyser: Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Adam Levy: Yeah, of course. I’m very excited to have you on you’re actually the first streamer that I’m having on the show. So first of its kind, unique story. And let’s just jump into it. Okay. Both of you guys. What a pleasure to have each of you even though we’re talking about Allie, obviously, there’s a team behind Allie right, Mason from what I understood, you’re very hands on, you’re very in that process of building and managing, right. And now he’s very much on the front end. And in doing all the beautiful things that come in the front, right. That’s how I understood it based off what Allie was telling me, right? Is that the dynamic?
Mason Geyser: Yeah, it’s funny that you said front end because I always say like Allie’s, the front end, and on the back end. Yeah. I’m like, behind the scenes doing managerial stuff. And Allie is just like, the face of everything and has the personality.
Allie Macpherson: I [Inaudible] very into cryptocurrency, obviously. But Mason’s definitely more on the technical expertise. So the two of us together, we make a really good team. And that’s come about through Allie point.
Adam Levy: Give me a quick background both on yourselves right. So Allie for you. How did you get started becoming a twitch streamer, right, and just a streamer in general, and more of that gaming personality in the following that you’ve gotten? How did you kind of get started with that path?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s a good example of how ingrained you know Mason has been to every step of the process, because it was actually Mason and his friends that introduced me to this game called Hearthstone. So it’s a card game. It’s the card game version of World of Warcraft, if you’re familiar with Blizzard, and Wow, so I started playing Hearthstone, in 2014. And then Mason and his friend said, Hey, you, you should stream and I was like, Well, I don’t even know what streaming and Twitch is. So, you know, I always liked the idea of entertaining people and doing something a little unconventional. So I graduated college in December of 2015. And my first stream was February 1 2016. And then the rest is kind of history. After that I just kept on going. And now here we are five years later.
Mason Geyser: [Cross voice] off like in the in the first six months of her streaming, I think like she was like, I’m going to give it a go for six months and see where we’re at. She did it full time. And yeah, things just really took off.
Allie Macpherson: Yeah.
Adam Levy: What do you think attributed to that take off? Like, what do you think people resonated the most with?
Allie Macpherson: Honestly, I think it was a few different factors. One, I treated the streaming like a full time job. So I was lucky enough to kind of set aside six months without going to pursue a job to where I could stream nine to five, you know, 40 hours a week and basically just treat the stream as if that was the job that I had right out of college.
Adam Levy: That’s a lot of hours for a streamer in the beginning.
Allie Macpherson: Yeah.
Adam Levy: That’s a lot of hours in general, but okay yeah, continue.
Allie Macpherson: So I think it was just that, that schedule that, you know, there was just more opportunities for people to discover my stream because of that. And also, I think I’ve got a personality that resonates with people. And you know, I think I know, it’s kind of weird to talk about, but I think it, I just did a good enough job, I guess where people would be interested, I don’t know,
Mason Geyser: A big part of it’s your personality. I also like to say, you know, there’s opportunities when there’s something missing in the market. And in this case, there wasn’t a lot of females that are big on Twitch, that are also you know, high level competing at their game. And so Allie actually started to get really good at the game. And she started beating some of the best players in the world. And I think like, Blizzard wanted to promote her, because they were like, Hey, here’s a girl who’s actually doing really well at the game. And we’re we don’t have a lot of those. So like, let’s start putting her in events. And that was huge. Like they put her on the launcher for the game one day. And that made a big difference.
Allie Macpherson: Fortunate to have gotten the attention through social media, like the Social Media Manager found me tweeting about Hearthstone. And so that’s just the, you know, a piece of advice that, you know, content creators out there, you want to be on so many different platforms, because you never know who might discover you. And so yeah, I got the attention of Blizzard and they were kind enough to include me in different tournaments and events.
Adam Levy: That’s really where I feel like your background was super helpful. You studied.
Allie Macpherson: Advertising and public relations. So I basically just applied what I learned in college to a streaming internet career, I guess.
Mason Geyser: she advertised herself and I think that’s really why Blizzard discovered her in the first place, but she did a really good job like she was on aeroplane travelling and she pulled up Hearthstone on her phone and we got a really nice photo of her like travelling and playing Hearthstone. And I think that’s the post that the blizzard manager found?
Adam Levy: Well, what would you attribute a lot of the success to like which platform? Because you talked about like, it’s important to be on every platform. I think it’s a great rule of thumb for new creators and existing creators, which platform gave you like the biggest jumpstart, would you say?
Allie Macpherson: So Twitch is my biggest platform. And as Mason was saying, there was sort of a gap in the market for like, a woman in my particular game. And so twitch worked out really nicely for me. But I will say that one of the things that contributes to live streamers gaining more attention on Twitch is having a secondary YouTube channel as well, like that I think really catapulted my live stream is, you know, making content out of the live streams and putting them up on YouTube. And then being active on, you know, Twitter and Instagram and stuff like that. But it really just depends on the individual and what’s going to work for them. But for me, my biggest platform is Twitch.
Adam Levy: Got you and when did you guys get started in crypto? I know you brought that up in the beginning, because you’re one of the very few creators that I know there’s obviously a handful is a bunch of people dabbling in the space, but you’ve taken it upon yourselves to like, be like one to one with crypto right with the launch of Allie. So when did you like first discover crypto? Was it with Bitcoin? Like, what’s the story behind that?
Mason Geyser: But crypto is definitely my thing first. But my story, it was like I learned about it. In 2011. I was studying computer science. And one of my classmates was just like, have you heard about this thing, and he was freaking out about it. Like, we were actually learning about RSA encryption algorithm. And he was like, Oh, this uses encryption and does all this cool stuff. And I think I kind of just wrote it off in the beginning, like, I thought it was really cool, I was actually going to buy some on Mount Gox, like something, and I had to wire money overseas to buy it. And my bank was like, if we if we do that we can’t get the money back and kind of shied me off from it. So I decided not to and then in 2014, I thought I was a genius because of the mount Gox hack. And I was like, I was like, good thing. I avoided that scam. And then I think it was like 2016 I started learning that there were like 100 cryptocurrencies and they were doing all sorts of different things. And that just kind of piqued my interest a little bit more. And then after going through a wave of trying to learn about how all these things are going to be Bitcoin killers, it kind of brought me back to like, okay, maybe Bitcoin actually is kind of the best version of digital money. And I started to really love Bitcoin and learn more about it get deeper into it. And that’s when I really started to like it and 2017 probably started putting some money into it, I started doing some mining, I mined some weird stuff like burst coin using hard drive space, because I thought it was more energy efficient. And you know, and then actually, a funny story is that in 2017, I was so into this like social token idea that I launched Allie coin as an ERC-20 on ethereum main net. And obviously, nobody wanted to use it because nobody wanted to pay to send it to people. And there was no way to buy it. There was no liquidity, no order book or exchange. And so it kind of just fell by the wayside. I gave it to a few people and it just sits in their wallets to this day. But so that’s kind of my path. I learned about it. And then once I started doing the mining and stuff, I started telling Allie more about it. And then she started to share the passion for it and doing her own research.
Allie Macpherson: I just want to bring up something interesting because yeah, Mount Gox. And I just want to say that there’s actually a decent amount of crossover between gamers and crypto enthusiasts and it just Mount Gox Magic the Gathering online exchange, okay, like Mason has been playing magic since he was 10. I started playing magic too. It’s just like, I know, that wasn’t necessarily like magic didn’t have like the game didn’t have too much to do with it. It’s just an interesting history that you know, it was initially a game platform. And obviously, we know about the mount Gox…
Mason Geyser: You are card game player and I’m very into crypto these days. And so the fact that there is that history of card games and crypto being merged together going back as far as like 2014 that’s pretty awesome.
Adam Levy: It’s a very common theme you do see a lot of gamers be those first adopters into crypto and I think it’s because like, just to relate to you guys for a minute. I used to play a lot of games when I was younger, I slowly phased out of it for whatever reason, but the first game that I really fell in love with I think a lot of people can resonate with is ruins escape, okay, ruins escape was that first game where I got hacked a bunch of times you know, like I went through like ups and downs like they had the leader board and ximo was always like the top one you know, like how do you get 99 everything you know, and there was like there was like in game currency and that was the closest thing that there was to cryptocurrency right? And I think you’re also seeing this right with fortnight and all these platforms have their in game currencies that you swap for USD for the native token that you can then interact and the entire centralised ecosystem.
Mason Geyser: [Inaudible] everything’s Diablo three, I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. But they had this endgame auction house with items and you could buy and sell the items for real money. The gold was actually translatable to real money they had a way you can sell like packs of a million gold for whatever the going market rate was. That to me was like the first version of a cryptocurrency that had a real economy tied to it like it was functional items, you could actually go farm with them, and then go make additional money if you had better farming gear. So I that’s definitely a concept that crosses over a lot.
Adam Levy: Definitely. And the more I kind of go across Twitter, the more people I see with like the Twitter banner, like rune scape, like old snapshots, you know, or like, this guy’s like an O g. You know, so like the fact that crypto is very integrated in gaming is a very, I think first step right. We also saw that with crypto kitties in the launch of NF T’s you know, and people breeding kitties. And you’re seeing that with now I guess born apes, right? More common of people basically minting these functional, but these like images of really cool apes, and they get rewarded with dogs, you know, and you start building an ecosystem. And now they start developing utility. So the gaming the graphic side was definitely obviously the first intro, but you’re very unique with your story. Because you started obviously you got your head start with streaming, whether it be on YouTube on Twitch built a really nice sizable platform across social media, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But a lot of I guess, a lot of what crypto minded individuals argue when they’re pushing this narrative of web three. Okay, and I want to get your point of view on this is that the next wave of the internet must stray away from like those big corporations that lead the large hands of the people that have the power over the platforms in the users, right? And that power needs to be redistributed back to the people who create the content that consume the content interact on the platforms, through ownership and better data privacy. Right. Do you resonate with that?
Allie Macpherson: 100%.
Mason Geyser: But I also think there’s varying degrees of it. So it kind of exists on a spectrum. And I think a lot of people get caught up in it’s either decentralised or centralised. And I think that for especially things like creator coins, we kind of want to exist somewhere in between those two, because at the end of the day, it is kind of centralised, it’s all based around one creator. And that’s centralization to some degree. But even the platform, we experienced some of those issues of platforms being egregious with their monetization and take power away from the creators, we really feel like rally is embodied the ethos of giving the power back to the creator in a way that most of those tech companies don’t. But then there’s still that degree of centralization and control that they have. And their goal is like a roadmap to decentralisation and giving even more power back to the creators and making it so it’s like truly a community run by the community and not by the rally company that they kind of had to form to get things like money transmitter licences and other legal frameworks to allow the things on the platform like credit card purchasing.
Adam Levy: Yeah, I think like an argument that people have because I actually didn’t know that you went through the route of launching your own traditional ERC 20 token before migrating onto more of these centralised platforms. And when creators kind of go down this social token path of Okay, these platforms that a great job in building my audience, but they’ve, they’ve literally like screwed me over and trying to monetize them to an extent, right. And they now they’re like, now I think people are kind of shifting more towards digital currencies, right? And personal coins, social tokens, crater coins, whatever you want to call them. And with where we are right now in the space Mason, because you did take it upon yourself to do the ERC 20. Right. Would you like re-evaluate your thought process in the strategy of launching traditional token because Allie went live on rally in December 2020, right from what I saw from the chart,
Mason Geyser: A little earlier than that the chart goes all the way back to the beginning.
Adam Levy: Okay, but what would you I guess, like how would you advise creators whether to launch their own 720 or go to a platform like roll, rally, coin vies, or all these like middlemen platforms that make minting and distribution easier?
Mason Geyser: I have to say that it’s far better, in my opinion, to join another platform. You just have to look out for what the platform is trying to accomplish and the ways that the platform monetizes you because at the end of the day, I think the platforms are trying to make money or trying to add value to their core token. I rally like what rally is built specifically out of all of them. And I think we kind of lucked out that we ended up on rally because I don’t think we did our full market research before launching it. But I now that I’ve, you know, we’ve gotten very deep in this industry, and we’ve looked at all the competitors and we’re actually really happy with rally but it’s such a different The world having a platform do it for you, because the piping that they create for your token, and this third party developer community that’s being built around rally now, where they want to give us all these tools, we didn’t have any of that when we launched our own token. So the buying and selling thing is huge on low market cap tokens, when somebody wants to sell a token, if you only have like 100 or 200 people in your community, they’re probably going to have an order sitting on the book for like a week before it finally gets filled. And it’s not going to get filled at the real price that they wanted at a lot of the time, they have to move it around. And, and then it’s also rallies built on a side chain, which now it’s very centralised in comparison to a lot of stuff in crypto. But what that allows is very cheap transactions. So people get the experience of like an old web to site where they get to log in, it’s a hot wallet, it’s much easier for a person. And this was a big thing for Allie coming from a creator space that people didn’t want to adopt crypto and learn about metamask and transaction hashes and how to do all this web three stuff. They just wanted to be able to support Allie a new way. And so this is kind of like an interim step that I see a lot of people go through in the community where they’re willing to try it out. Because it’s really easy. You can connect your twitch to make an account and you can buy with a credit card that’s very familiar for them. And then eventually, as they learn a little bit more about what’s happening behind the scenes, they finally start to branch out into getting a Meta mask and bridging some of the tokens off of the sidechain. And onto the main net, and actually using all this crypto stuff that they shied away from because they had a familiar like gateway into the introduction of crypto.
Adam Levy: Yeah. How do you kind of feel about that? Like, obviously, you’re very much on the front end. Mason has a lot of the foundation between the for the crypto right and all the infrastructure in the pipeline’s like when you’re talking to your audience, and you’re preaching this stuff, and you’re trying to hype them up and get them on board to be alongside your journey in a more intimate way financially and personally, right. Because now they have like a stake in you. Right?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, yeah.
Adam Levy: How has that process been? Like when you’re trying to communicate that to them?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, I mean, I will say, you know, I’m so passionate about teaching people not teaching but getting people into cryptocurrency, because I genuinely think it’s this amazing thing for the world, right? And over the course of the year since 2017, that I started talking about it, you know, I’ve had to deal with people being like, crypto lol, you know, like, through the crash and everything and, you know, it’s at sometimes when you’re like this public person, it’s kind of hard to keep the enthusiasm up, you know, when it’s $3300 Bitcoin, right? So, you know, with Allie coin and rally, it’s been this really nice introduction for people to get into crypto, and not that, like an aggressive of a way to be like buy bitcoin, you know, it’s like, this is a way to support me. And it’s a way to like, for people to dip their toes getting into crypto into the crypto space. And so it’s been, it’s been really, really nice. And I’m just really looking forward to the future of social tokens and creator economies, I really believe that this is going to be the next evolution in sort of the influencer space because, you know, in the world of, you know, content creators and the internet, like more and more people are making this a job, right, whether you’re a podcaster, or a YouTuber, you know, I think that eventually, a lot of jobs are going to get automated, and then humans are sort of going to be creative. Right? And so take this creative roles and jobs, then, you know, attaching cryptocurrency to it and sort of building an economy around yourself. I really think is the future. So yeah, I’ve been absolutely loving it. I think it’s great.
Adam Levy: So that was the intention of launching Allie. Because I was like my next question. Obviously, we talked about it, we were talking about why social tokens. But the intention of Allie was to put it from a point of view where you’re really starting your own creative economy and trying to close those barriers internally, right, and funnel users from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and do it in a way where you can better monetize them. Is that why you created it?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, I initially, we had worked with the rally developers on previous projects. So they had made different kinds of things for streamers. Okay, like different applications. And so when they approached us, you know, they were like, here’s cryptocurrency and your forte of content creation and, you know, there’s a mix between the two of them. So for us, it just made perfect sense to try this new thing out. You know, I’ll be honest, I was a little bit apprehensive in the beginning because, you know, it’s kind of nerve wracking a little bit making myself a cryptocurrency, right? And also the notion of, you know what if your coin goes up in value, it’s attached to you. And for whatever reasons out of your control, people lose interest or whatever. And, you know, then people are really mad at you, and they hold you responsible for losing the money. So there’s definitely been like some things that have been on my mind. But I think the point of creator economies is not necessarily just to, oh, I think Allie’s going to grow, I’m going to invest in Allie. It’s not just about that concept of a monetary gain. It’s about participating in an economy that I’m creating, right. So I’m going to offer different services or products or experiences that are built around me. And if you want to participate and be, like, more closely a part of my community, then this is an excellent way to be involved.
Adam Levy: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s beautifully put, I think. I think that’s a lot of the reason why people approach this stuff is for that reason, specifically. So let’s talk about what can you do with Allie right now? Like, what’s the utility, the value beyond just the price itself?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah. So one of the most successful things so far with Allie coin. What is my Allie coin tournaments? So you know, again, I am a Hearthstone streamer. And my community had been asking me to run Hearthstone tournaments for like years at this point, and I just never really knew how to run a tournament that well. And then Mason was like, Okay, well, this is the perfect opportunity to get them into the concept of Allie coin by taking something familiar, like, which is the game and participating in tournaments. And having Allie coin roped into that. So basically, what we did is we set a threshold like if you’re an Allie, coin holder, you’re basically guaranteed to participate in this 16 player 32 player event. And then we had the prize pay-out and Allie coin as well. I was very, you know, I said all the time, like, Hey, you can hold on to your Allie coin for future use cases, or you can sell it for cash if you want, you know, I was always like very transparent about that. So people, you know, might not be too nervous to get into it. So we held eight qualifier term tournaments, and then how to Grand Finals. And that was an excellent way for natural interest from my community to happen with Allie coin, because, you know, over the course, or four months, Allie coin tournaments, quote unquote, you know, would come up and different viewers would be like, oh, what’s Allie coin? So it was that was probably one of the most successful things to get people into it. And then recently actually made some you want to talk about the merge, because you came up with the whole system of how we were going to release a merchandise.
Adam Levy: yeah, but before we even get to that, because I want to hear about the merge how many people that were holding Allie coin actually participated in the tournament.
Allie Macpherson: So we did not bar people off like people could play if they can hold Allie, because we didn’t, you know, we want people to be involved and not say, Oh, you absolutely have to be an altcoin hold. So I would say, less than 50%. In the beginning.
Mason Geyser: I think it was around 50%. So the way we did it was in other 16 slots for the tournament, we give a certain number of slots to coin holders and a certain number of slots to a raffle. So more people would want to play in the tournament, then we could fit in. And so we would prioritise the coin holders, and then we would give it to the rest of the people so but in general, it ended up being around 50%. Some tournaments were like 70% coin holders, and then other ones were maybe like 40%. But always a good chunk of coin holders for sure.
Allie Macpherson: What wound up happening though, is that as the tournaments went on, more and more people became coin holders, because believed in the system, so maybe it was less than 50% in the first two, but by tournament eight, I would say that over 70%.
Mason Geyser: there were people who like tried to get into a tournament two or three times and didn’t get in and then they went and they bought a coin because they were like I’m playing in the next one. And that was kind of fun to see that people could see the value of holding one of these coins outside of just monetary value. And that’s a big thing. I think for creator coins is non-monetary value. If you’re not giving people an experience or actual physical item or something else. I think there’s only so much of up on the roller coaster that you can have before eventually you come down and if it’s all about speculating on the value of the coin, when it comes down, it’s going to crash really hard and it’s probably not going to come back.
Adam Levy: So out of like the rewards that you guys distributed how many of them actually held Allie versus sold?
Mason Geyser: It’s that’s a tough one. We’d have to probably dig through some analytics to find out but I’d say I see most of the smaller winners held on because actually hashing out, it’s not the easiest thing, you have to bridge the token out, which is an ethereum transaction. And then you have to swap rally for ethereum on uniswap was, I mean, it was $40 at least for a while there. I don’t know what it is now. But so if somebody want $50 in the tournament, they’re paying $8 to bridge it out and then $40 to swap it, they don’t have any money left at that point. But the people who want like 500 bucks or more, or they want 115, it turned into 1000 because the coin actually did really well. Some of those people did cash out, we have one person cash out for like 10 grand, and they got laser eye surgery and a new gaming chair, etc. Like, and they were just like, so happy about Allie coin.
Allie Macpherson: I just want to speak on that really quickly, just from the creator perspective, you know, over the course of five and a half years, you know, in my career has been sustained by the support of my community right so whether it’s people subscribing to my twitch channel, or donate just donating to me because they appreciate my content. And now Allie coin has been a way to give back you know, it’s more of a two way relationship where I can give back to the people that have supported me for so long. So as Mason said, Yeah, someone got LASIK eye surgery with the money that they made off with Allie, yeah like computer you know create crazy stuff and add just pro [cross voice] was quite fulfilled.
Adam Levy: I was looking through the discord cuz you have you have the Allie coin channel, you have the crypto channel and I was scrolling up to the top to see like what kind of conversations people are having. And someone literally wrote I bought a computer. I bought this. And then I think Mason you responded like nice, like Goodwin.
Mason Geyser: I love that channel that we have a got with Allie channel in Discord. And it’s just for people to post what they bought with Allie if people wanted to talk about it. So we wanted a place for people to discuss.
Allie Macpherson: One thing that I do say though, is just, you know, these creator coins are not necessarily supposed to just be this like speculative thing, right? You shouldn’t really just be buying Allie because you think Allie going to go up in value. It’s just kind of a nice thing that if you buy Allie to participate in my economy, there’s a chance it can go up in value in which it did for a lot of people and then they were able to, you know, get some monetary benefit.
Adam Levy: Yeah. And what about the merge, you started telling me about this merge developing.
Mason Geyser: Just before the merge for sec, because this leads into the merge, I want to talk about rally does this really cool thing called the rally rewards program. So it works a lot like a defy project that will give you tokens for you know, adding liquidity, the creators that are adding value to the platform, which they mainly measure by if your coin is growing or not over the last four weeks, they give you a dividend in the form of new rally tokens. And so most of these creators, like that’s a great way to monetize without having to sell your coin and kind of like rug pull your audience a bit is to get these rally rewards as a dividend and then use them for something. And so our idea was okay, well, let’s take that dividend. Let’s sell it for some cash. And let’s go do some fun things for the community that’s non-monetary value. And so the first thing we wanted to do is Allie was making this new merge with a new merge company, we thought it was really cool, we wanted to get it in the hands of as many people as possible. So we came up with a programme to take those rewards pre purchase, like a wholesale amount of shirts and hoodies, and just give people 100% off discount codes if they held on to some Allie coin. So we came up with a tiered system, like the guys who held 100 Allie coin would get a lot of items. And then people who held one Allie coin, I get a 10 Allie coin, you got one item, one Allie coin, you got a $5 item. So you could you could buy that with Allie coin, and the shirts are $30 to $50. So it was a heavy discount. And we sold, or we gave away a bunch of shirts that way, and people were just so thrilled. They’re like, not only is my altcoin gone up in value, and I’m getting some dividends, but now I’m getting free merch on top of that, which is merch I really like because I like Allie as a creator. And no matter what people tell them in real life, like your coin is going to crash or you’re going to lose all that money you put in, at least they can say I got an experience I played in a tournament and I got this awesome shirt. And I think that leaving them with that, regardless of what happens with the token price is something awesome that we can do for the community.
Adam Levy: You know, it’s interesting because I talk to a lot of creators, a lot of people that have taken themselves public quote, unquote, right, as people like to say and think about and rally’s tokenomics the way they design the system is really remarkable. It’s very interesting how they did it. And they’ve seen growth because they’ve earned that right like they’ve really introduced something novel to the world. One thing that I hear from creators is a concern that they get is because rally is somewhat centralised, okay, and a lot of your token success depends on the performance of rally that because they’re already tinkering in a world of crypto that’s already risky, and then tagging that along into a platform where your success as a creator and the value of your currency depends on proportionately to a different currency, the underlies that value. They get, they get not fearful, but it’s a barrier to entry. Right. In addition to ERC 20 tokens are already hard to launch and provide liquidity to right enrol, like, is somewhat also centralised, with the smart contracts and their minting contracts and whatnot. Was that was that a fear of? Did you guys have that concern at all? Or was it like, they just they started talking to me, I trusted them and their team and their vision, and we just went for like, what Where’s your head at during that process?
Mason Geyser: Well, I can answer that in a few ways. Actually, it could be a lengthy answer, but I’ll try and keep it short. We did have a good relationship with the team, like we said, so we did trust them to that degree. But like, I also, like we said, we tried doing this on our own, and it just, it didn’t work for us. And maybe it works for somebody who’s a really large creator, or they have a team of developers make some of those tools for them. But they’re not having liquidity is just a huge issue. And also having it on a theory on Main net, like maybe if we could launch it on Matic now it would be different, because it would be so cheap for people to use it. But I mean, it just it was a huge pain on ethereum. We don’t mind tying it to a platform that we like what they’re providing to us, right? Like, you could make a website and upload photos. But it’s not like you have an Instagram at that point, I think at some point, you have to make the leap and say, Instagram is providing me a platform, it’s worth giving them some of my monetization to have that be the place where all of my fans go to look at my photos. And for us, we need a place that all of our fans go to buy the cryptocurrency and use the cryptocurrency, because that place is more functional than it is by itself, like on its own website. But then also, with tying it to the platform, you know, that was an interesting change that they actually made in the beginning, it was going to be USDC that backed all the coins, from my understanding, and that’s how it started. And then they change the bonding curve to be with the rally token, which at first I was a little sceptical about because I was like, Oh, no, we’re tied to the success of the platform now. But as we work with the team more, and we trust them, and we learn to believe in what they’re creating, and all of the developer community as well, which is outside of them. And their ethos really is to make this a decentralised project one day where there is no internal Rally Team. And it’s really just managed by the community and through voting. But it’s a transition to get there, it might take for eight years. Who knows? And then the other thing I wanted to say is, with the coin value, there’s it does move on its own curve. So we’ve seen a lot of Allie growth against the rally token, or even as the rally tokens been coming down in this market crash Allie tokens been growing against rally, which has helped kind of level out the price a lot. It could have fallen, you know, from $60 to maybe $15. But instead it only came down to about like 27. And that’s because it’s been growing on its own against the system. And I think that’s really cool. But then the other thing that they’re working on is allowing us to bridge the token off of the platform. And at that point, it would no longer be fully tied to rally. Like if rally completely fails. Maybe people still want to buy the altcoin outside of the rally, right? Not using the rally bonding curve anymore. But in a different marketplace. Maybe we launch it on like each swap on polygon or something.
Adam Levy: Yeah. No, very, very solid points. And I think it’s a common thing in crypto with new projects that are coming out. They have their foundations, they’re non-profits that a certain portion of tokens is allocated to that foundation to hire employees, marketing, engineers, operations, whatever. And then once they feel more established, and they have a good system and a good control of what’s happening, they slowly start releasing the keys to the community. And the best example of that is maker Dow. Right? That’s very much a defy platform, not so much social tokens. But I think there’s overlap but referencing them because they started off, not centralised, they started as fully decentralised, or protocol, at least. But they had the foundation, piggybacking in driving a lot of its success by having contributors, developers, marketing people, Ops, people that manage the day to day in the in the, the I guess the image and the look and feel of maker, right. So 100% a strategy, especially when you’re entering such a weird space that’s very grey and very experimental. There needs to be some familiarity, for sure, right with how things are done, how things are structured. So I hear you, I want to kind of pivot more into the streaming side of things because there’s this cool function, obviously on Twitch and a lot of people know about bits, right, and people kind of rewarding people in bits and cheering them on. And in many ways, it’s very relatable to a social token, because I’ve seen creators leverage their own currency to receive tips as well. Right? How do you kind of differentiate like receiving tips in Allie versus receiving tips and bits? Like is that even a thing that you’re thinking about? What’s your thought process there?
Allie Macpherson: Honestly, I haven’t really thought too much about kind of comparing the two for my audience, like, I understand that there is still a lot of apprehension to crypto from a lot of people. So, you know, I’ve, I accept the twitch system of bits, you know, and I tried to talk about Allie coin naturally as much as possible just for the sake of teaching people about what I offer with Allie coin and stuff like that. But right now, they’re two very separate forms of support, you know, and I and I, I never say, oh, like, you just gave some bits you could give me Allie instead, you know, like, I don’t really do that. You know, um, and yeah, so maybe in the future, when creator economies and creator coins are more commonplace, you know, people will opt for, you know, that form of support. But right now, as it currently stands, bits, like twitches just made it so easy to support creators through their bit system. And so, you know, you know, people used to actually just send individual donations through PayPal and stuff like, it’s bits have been introduced on Twitch like, I hardly get, like, external donations, because most people just use the bit system. I forget how much of a cut.
Mason Geyser: It’s 40 to 24%. I believe, with 24% being if you buy the largest bulk pack of bits.
Adam Levy: Wow. Crazy.
Mason Geyser: Yeah. Which is, which is really high, by the way, like, PayPal was when we were doing it through stream labs of Pay Pal I think was like 3%. And with Allie coin, it’s, I guess it depends on how you look at it, but it’s basically fee free. There’s no real fee to do it. Now, of course, when you do that you’re buying rally token first to place it behind in the pool for the bonding curve with the Allie coin. So there’s maybe like a small hidden tax there in the terms of like, rallies getting a cut somehow in the tokenomics. There, but it’s still I feel like it’s more direct. Do you feel that way too?
Allie Macpherson: Oh, yeah, absolutely. YouTube takes a pretty decent chunk in their donation system as well. So yeah, I think maybe in time, when this becomes more popular, people will opt for this form of support, because it’s not just, you know, as I said earlier, it’s not just donating to the Creator, the donator gets something or should be getting something out of the experience as well. So it’s more, it’s beneficial for all parties. I love it when you buy it, because it makes my coin go up in value, but you should like it more to because you’re not just donating and then never seeing that money ever again. Maybe you get to get a free shirt out of it or participate in something that I put on or, you know, etc.
Adam Levy: Yeah, yeah, I think the more equivalent thing, so if twitch takes anywhere between 25 to 40%, right, there more equivalent thing is now wanting to swap Ollie for rally and then rally for eath, and then eath, or rally for usdc. And then putting that usdc in Coin base, withdrawing from Coin base to your bank account, and going through all those layers and everyone taking a cut from the network to the platforms and etc. So she gets messy right now.
Mason Geyser: I will say that’s another awesome thing about rally is they’re thinking about that. And they want to actually become like a PayPal or a coin base and allow people to connect the bank account to their rally account and withdraw directly from there. And then a lot of those fees will go away.
Adam Levy: Yeah, makes sense. Can you tell me a little bit more about your community? Like who are your fans? What’s that general audience? Are they mainly male, female? Are they more crypto native or non-crypto? Tell me a little bit more about them.
Allie Macpherson: Sure. So I play a card games. And I would say that card games generally have a little bit older of an audience as opposed to a game like fortnight for example. Right? So my main demographics are is male 24 to 35 that’s the majority of my community. And you know, I definitely have some women here in there. But in general, there are definitely more males in the gaming space. And that’s changing with time. And it also I think, it depends on what game is it I find that more males are into card games as opposed to something like I don’t know, valour and are among us and that kind of stuff. So But yeah, I would say that because I’ve got a little bit of an older audience, you know, introducing Allie coin and cryptocurrency has is really nice, because you know, if you if I was a fortnight streamer, you know, and a lot of my audience was, you know, 15 year old boys, you know, getting them into cryptocurrency, you might feel a little bit harder. So it’s all just really worked out in that, you know, Mason’s initial passion for block chain and crypto introducing it to me teaching me about it and then having the landscape to be able to introduce it to my community. It’s really, you know, I think you’re just meant to be honestly.
Mason Geyser: And then there’s a second community like a sub-community sort of point where like, the more that Allie coin gets brought up, and there’s naturally always somebody who hasn’t heard about it so they ask questions and then like, the sub community pops out and they all jump in to answer all these questions and introduce it and you know, they link to discord and then people join the discord and they start talking right there. Now we have a community of like 570 people or something like that just keeps growing. I can’t keep track.
Allie Macpherson: I looked at the number like right before okay.
Mason Geyser: It’s awesome that it just it just keeps growing. And so now we have this subset of people that are really into cryptocurrency and they have all these questions about crypto and it’s awesome to like, see, people go through that progression of just learning about crypto and now they’re learning about it through social tokens first, and then they go in and they’re like, okay, but why would I want to decentralised money and then it gets them thinking in a new way that you know, there’s always going to be people who naturally gravitate toward crypto the second they hear about it, but there’s also a larger portion of people I think, that are kind of resistant to the concept and finding that that in with them to show them hey, here’s something fun you can do with crypto that’s actually relevant to your life. It gets them hooked and then I love helping them go further down the path they’re like, Can you recommend a good YouTuber? I’m trying to learn about liquidity pools can you help me with that? And that’s like, I love that because yeah, we it’s all about everything in crypto not just having decentralised money but decentralised finance and decentralised creator economies and all that stuff.
Adam Levy: So you know what that reminds me of really quick is when Elon Musk, I remember when there was a period where there was a bottleneck with pushing out cars and on boarding new customers, so the cars already received and reach the retail location. But there are so many demands, like so many orders and demand and so many people need to get their cars that he tweeted to his community, to the Tesla community, if anybody wants to come down and help like, basically on board, other Tesla buyers and fans, meet us at this time at this place, and work with the employees who are getting paid and come volunteer with them to on board people. And the only reason I bring that up is, you know, a lot of creators tend to think like, man, how am I going to educate my audience? How am I going to tell them about metamask, Bitcoin, all this all these like different layers and loopholes? And when you think about it, when you build such like a cult following to an extent or such a strong fan base, the community starts educating one another. Right? And that and that, that power starts to kind of uplift off of your shoulders, and into the people who’ve really seen the success and the value that you’re creating for them. Right. And they kind of take it upon themselves what it sounds like, like, wow, I got to show that welcome. Let me show you the power behind this. Right.
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, absolutely. Like, one of my favourite things now is, you know, when I’m streaming and I’m playing my game, like I’m pretty distracted, right? Like I there, I’m doing all these different things multitasking and, you know, someone Allie coin will come up and someone will ask what Allie coin is? You know, it’s kind of hard to give the full spiel while also trying to win a strategy game. Right. So I’ve built enough of the community now that, you know, people are sort of excited to answer the question for me, you know, direct them to the discord, which is really nice. And I just wanted to touch on something that you know, the discord Mason is always in there, like, answering people’s questions like taking the time to private, like if someone needs a personal problem solved, like he’s, you know, taking it upon himself to help them in a private message and do that kind of stuff. But, you know, we’ve just arrived surprised at how much you know, Allie coin has become sort of a new subset of my content creation, like, you know, gaming streaming, that was my thing. And now a decent amount of time, is become Allie coin. And, you know, I don’t can’t remember what prompted it. But another thing that we were doing is like, on Wednesdays, we do our own. We call it a podcast. It’s not really a podcast, it’s a live stream, where we talk about crypto. And so it’s a time for the Allie coin community to ask us questions, just like on what we think. And some of the questions that are asked during that live stream are like very, very basic crypto questions. And so that just gives you an indication of like, this really is a lot of people’s first time, inquiring and trying to learn more.
Mason Geyser: I was surprised, though, on some of those live streams that people would ask, like, really good questions. And I was like, I was like, that’s actually really insightful and, you know, there might just be somebody who’s more experience in the general crowd, but I still try to answer it because like, anyone can take away something from it. And we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from even people who we hadn’t seen in the stream a lot for a while, they would pop back up in the live stream, and they would say, hey, thanks so much for doing that. Like I’ve been meaning to learn more about cryptocurrency and the fact that it was you and we’re familiar with you, and especially Allie, you know, you asked like, what makes her popular, it’s her ability to play the game and explain it well at the same time. And she’s good at educating people. So when there’s this topic that’s a little intimidating for them, which you know, used to be Hearthstone, but now might be cryptocurrency, they naturally gravitate to Allie to learn from her.
Allie Macpherson: Amazing to hear. I mean, like, that’s the, it’s really been this amazing thing that we can do together where, you know, Mason’s got the so much expertise on, like, knowing the technical and stuff like that. And so the two of us just sort of being this, I don’t know, duo and helping people learn more about it and, and create these different things for the altcoin community. It’s been, it’s been really amazing.
Adam Levy: So it sounds like the community is strong, they’re loving Allie coin. They’re encouraging others and on boarding others to use it. And from a point of view with what’s kind of trending in the creator economy in the crypto world as it pertains to creators, whatever, okay, there’s this concept of DAOs being rolled out that’s very popular amongst traditional defy and crypto projects that now there’s narratives of now creators are going to have their own DAOs from what it sounds like your audience is at a point where you can start forming those DAOs. And I don’t know if you guys already have that in place where and let me start with this. Are you guys familiar with DAOs, the decentralised autonomous organisations, basically, what it means is, your token holders are now like members of the community to the extent where they can now vote on proposals and govern the Allie community beyond Allie beyond Mason, right. So now when they hold a token, they have a share of a voice in how the platform how the brand kind of proceeds forward with its growth, right.
Mason Geyser: That’s definitely the long term vision, some of that functionality just hasn’t been built yet. So we haven’t been able to implement as much of it as we’d like. But when we talk to other creators, that’s always something I’m pitching, I’m like, give your community some voice for holding this coin. And if I talk to someone who’s you know, like an artist, that they’re a singer, I’m like, if whatever you’re comfortable giving up, you know, maybe it’s like the topic of your next song. Or maybe it’s the key that you sing it in, you know, give some power back to your community. So they can have input on what they would like from you. And you might even like that input, and it can help you as an artist. And so for us, we’re always trying to think of things that we can allow the community to vote on, in order to feel like they’re participating more in this economy that they’re now you know, like you said, kind of shareholders.
Allie Macpherson: It’s got to be a good balance, though, you know, where you’re allowing the community to vote on certain things, but you still are, you know, making decisions for something that you want for your economy, like, I think there’s probably got to be a good balance.
Adam Levy: So for example, right, the first thing that comes to mind, excuse me, is, you already have these tournaments, right, that you’re doing, you could put proposals in place and how that tournament gets executed and organised, right? It’s less about like, what Allie going to eat for breakfast today, you know? Like, she’s either going to do whole milk or almond milk, you know, guys vote like, that’s not where my head’s I’m saying, like having the community partake in activities and having like proposals put in place that they can vote and execute in even, like, take it upon themselves to build, right, because if they have a certain amount of Allie, and you and you tell me is this even a vision that you wouldn’t, you would see a reality for communities, there will be a time where the rally or the Allie community gets bigger and bigger, you have certain amount of individuals that hold a lot more Allie than others. Right? And they believe in you so much. They love everything that you’re doing. They can even start working for you to an extent, right and live off. Okay, so tell me about that. What does that look like now?
Mason Geyser: Yeah, so I mean, there’s a few different working relationships we have. And like you said, when someone gets a lot of the coin, they kind of want to do stuff for free, just because they’re like, hey, if I can increase the value of the coin, and that means my holdings are going to go up. And so we have one mod that he did a bunch of work for us on a tournament, and I gave him like, 100 bucks to the coin. And he’s like, you know, you don’t have to pay me right. And I was like, I mean, I want to pay you because you’re doing work to help the whole ecosystem, but he wanted to do it anyway, because he just wanted the ecosystem to do better. And then there’s another guy we brought in specifically just to kind of spruce up the discord and since I’ve gotten busy working on a bunch of things, I wanted somebody in there always answering questions, because I don’t want people feeling Like they’re lost at all in this community. So he’s been amazing, we pay him monthly. But he also has just taken it upon himself to do all this extra stuff. Like he came up with this concept of a text based video game that you could play in the discord typing to a discord bot. And you know, like those really old school text based RPGs. And if you get to the end of the game, then you win some Allie coin. So it’s like a great way to create engagement with the fan base. And it’s an idea that he came up with on his own, and now he’s doing all the legwork to like develop the text base prompts.
Adam Levy: That’s so cool. You know, that reminds me of like, if you compare it to what’s happening in the less sexier defy crypto world, you know, all these big projects that are decentralised, they have a certain amount of tokens allocated towards a grant that goes to fund projects, software solutions, tools that get built to help push the community and prove the community.
Mason Geyser: It sounds very lucky, when we launched, we were one of the first 10 creators on the platform. And they decided to give us or to buy a bunch of our coin and give it to us as a treasury. Yeah. And in the beginning, we were doing it out really slowly, we actually gave some coins out for free just to people who would sign a Google document and like almost nobody signed it. But those people, I think that’s like worth four grand now or something. So we give them for free. And just if you would just sign the Google signup form, that people wish they could go back and do it.
Allie Macpherson: I don’t know that they have it to like, yeah, there’s a few names in my holders, where it’s the exact amount that we gave out in the beginning, I’m like, got $4,000 worth [Allie].
Mason Geyser: But with how successful the coins been, it’s like the US dollar value of the Treasury has just been continuing to grow. And no matter how much we spend from it, like for these tournaments, or for hiring people to help out, it’s growing faster than we are actually using it. So at this point, we think it could last us years, which is really awesome. Because it gives us just a tonne of room to hire people and develop the ideas that we want. And that’s something that no other platform is really given to us. Right when that platform is like so successful. They’re not like, oh, let’s our early creators give them a bunch of shares in the company that they can sell and use to fund their own growth. But that’s something we get with rally because we are tied to the platform, and the coin grows along with the platform. And that’s the positive side of being tied to it is that like the rising tide floats all boats, and the creators that got in early have done really well on the platform, just from the fact that the platform’s grown.
Allie Macpherson: But, you know, I kind of want to say, though, that we even though we were one of the first 10 people on the platform, you know, it’s still really really early, you know, what I mean? Like the notion of creator economies and creator coins, like I believe, will kind of have their boom at some point here, someone huge, like a big name, Kim Kardashian, or whoever, you know, is probably going to, at some point, I think launch their own creator coin, and that will set off this sort of ripple effect to really shed light on the space. So I still think it’s really early for creators, businesses, whomever to create their own tokens.
Adam Levy: Yeah, I agree with you the other day. Kim Kardashian that just because we’re bringing her up started shilling ethereum max like a fork of ethereum that Yeah, just like a shit coin. Right? Just like another shit coin when I’m thinking like, why not? Why not just create your own currency and just do Kim or booty or whatever, like your brand is right? You know, like, whatever, whatever you want your brand is whatever your audience associated with, like, why she’ll and I don’t think she’s even educated to that extent. It’s and it’s not her fault, right? She’s not aware of how deep this is. She’s focused on her beauty brand, whatever, but 100%. And I think the creators who get early into the social token economy, will start seeing growth and rewards that are going to outpace traditional influencers and creators. And the best example that we have from that is Tik Tok and all the Instagram influencers that struck rich and big and have their hundreds of millions of followers to hundreds of thousands of followers, and now kind of getting outdated because attention is now on tik tok. And you have all these Gen Z, Millennials even like boomers, gaining a lot of like a huge following, when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to on Instagram. So attention, shift in energy shift in power, being an early adopter. That’s the takeaway here, right being an early adopter.
Allie Macpherson: I’m optimistic. You know, hopefully it goes well.
Adam Levy: Okay. I got another question. Okay. So in terms of your discord now, because people use discord as a very like centralised hub to funnel in people from all these different platforms to create a central line of communication for their audiences. Right now we have the ability to create these tools. Gated features where if you have a certain amount of altcoins, you get access to certain perks and features. And my whole thought process is one, what is your funnel for getting more people into discord? Because on one hand, it’s such a valuable tool and you want as much of your community in there. So what’s your funnel with getting people in there? And once they’re in there, too, how do you convert them into Allie holders so that they can partake more into the whole entire experience of Allie?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, that’s a good question. Again, my biggest platform is my live stream. So every time that I bring up the altcoin discord on my stream, like I try not to overdo it, right? You know, I want it to be natural, but we can see a significant amount or an increase in people come in after I mentioned it, particularly after our crypto chats as well, because obviously, there’s more crossover there. But, you know, occasionally I’ll tweet about it and stuff like that. But I would say the biggest funnel is me just using my biggest platform and saying, hey, you know, Allie coin is this. And if you want to know more like the nitty gritty, more details, then please, you know, join the discord. And then that’s where you can find more and interact with people ask questions, and that kind of thing.
Mason Geyser: That’s a great funnel is the tournament circuit. So part of the prerequisite to sign up for the circuit is to be a member of the discord and to put your discord name in. And that’s how we grab members in. And we run the tournament’s mainly through Discord. Besides the like, the bracketing system, which is on a separate site, everything else the communication, the getting people into the tournament, and choosing the participants and communicating with them. It’s all done through the discord. So that’s a great funnel to get them in there, get them to be an active member, and to get them to attach their rally account to the discord, which is another big step that people make. Yeah, once they’ve done that, I tend to see the people who have done that they stick around, and they become long term members of the community because now they see the value like in you can send coins to another person just through a discord bot command, which is off, so you don’t have to log into the website and use that. So people are starting to like really form a community in there of coin holders. And you’ll see things like someone wants more Allie coin, and another person wants Hearthstone packs. So they’ll buy them packs, and they’ll send them altcoin and return. And so it’s its own, like e commerce thing that’s going on between the members of the community. And that’s all enabled by the discord. So that’s really how we get it get people to stick around as they see that activity. And they’re like, Oh, I can be a part of this now and participate in the tournaments and the different stuff I can do with the coin and it’s all run through the discord.
Allie Macpherson: discord is just so instrumental in building a tight knit community, like, you know, I we often get the question asked, you know, like, my amount of supporters in terms of like, total holders is actually less than some other people, but the price of my coin is higher. And I really feel like the reason for that is that, you know, I’ve just got a pretty tight knit, loyal community, and a lot of that has come about by, you know, individual interaction and engagement that comes about from a platform like Discord. So, you know, I would definitely recommend, you know, any creators, that kind of thing, build an external community to your main platform, and, and definitely utilise it a lot.
Mason Geyser: You also asked earlier about what like the typical audience member of ALLIE is. And one thing I also want to say about these people besides their age and demographic is that because they play a mobile game, they’re very used to dropping a lot of money on it, like Hearthstone is an expensive game to play. So a lot of these people will spend 400 to $1,000 a year on Hearthstone Pax, which is a lot of mobile games will milk that kind of money out of you because they find little microtransactions to get you to pay more. And so I think they’re already comfortable spending money on digital products, especially as it relates to Hearthstone like the tournament circuit. So when they learned about Allie coin, and they put a little bit of money in, and then they see it go up in value, or they see that they’re getting use out of it, or they get a free shirt. They’re like, okay, maybe this is something I want to put more money into. And they’re kind of comfortable doing that, because they already do it on all these other mobile games. So I think that’s been a big benefit to the coin value.
Adam Levy: That’s its powerful. And then another metric I want to bring up is so right now you have 538 member’s 34 members in the discord 71 of which actually hold the token in discord yet on rally you have over 700 contributors holding Allie.
Mason Geyser: Rally number just to clarify is people who have bought it, but if they’ve sold it, they still get countered in that number. Whereas on this board, it would tick down when somebody sells the coin.
Adam Levy: Got you, so I guess like in the future Right when you have more people holding, assuming, two, three years from now, at least one of the top social communities out there for your niche of streaming gaming, maybe even bridges on beyond that. And people become more native to social tokens. Because they realize that the financial upside of trading people, that’s obviously a thing that’s coming from here in communities, which is very scary to think about, but it’s the reality of it. How do you, I guess, have you guys started thinking about? Or how would you kind of approach? There’s a lot of people holding and investing but not engaging and participating? Right? So how do you kind of how do you kind of clear the fog from the investors and funnel them in more to become participants, rather than just relying on the financial upside or downside of buying and selling your token?
Allie Macpherson: That’s a really good question. Honestly, I feel like…
Mason Geyser: You should take that up with Bitcoin.
Adam Levy: Right? Because Bitcoin, you have the traders, right? And then you also have the people, the core contributors who help push out updates, etc. But yeah,
Mason Geyser: You know, there’s always going to be speculators? I don’t think you can get rid of them entirely. But it’s still a good question. Do you want to try to answer that?
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, I’m not sure to be completely honest. Like, I think the best thing that I can do in that situation is just come up with things that people find valuable, you know, like, maybe some of the contributors, or the people that hold Allie, you know, don’t really care that much about the merge right now. Or maybe they don’t play Hearthstone. So they don’t have any reason to participate in the tournament, you know, but maybe at some point in time, I will come up with various use cases that will eventually get more and more people, you know, involved. And, you know, I would imagine that a lot of the holders are just, you know, people in the rally ecosystem, and they’re excited about the concept of creator coins. And so maybe they’re not jumping at every opportunity to engage super closely, but they’re just like, kind of a supporter of the system. And, you know, maybe they like what we’re doing, even though they’re not necessarily participating themselves. But yeah, like, I’m not sure exactly the best way to get more engagement going quite yes.
Mason Geyser: I think emerged thing was great, because it pulled some people out of the woodwork. Like, we’re like, Hey, we’re giving away a free shirt, all you have to do is connect your discord and then say what you want, because connecting the discord is the way that we can verify how many coins that own, and then we just say, claim your free merge. And if somebody’s not interested in free merge, then I mean, we’re not going to get them that way. But I think a lot of people, even if they’re just like speculator, they’re going to see these perks that we come up with, and they’re going to be like, well, I guess it’s worth my time to go connect my discord and get and claim that piece of free merchant, maybe we need to come up with more things that we can do to entice them to actually participate, rather than just hold the coin on rally and get the financial upside.
Allie Macpherson: And I just want to bring up another thing that that this concept of like, who’s really engaged versus just kind of, like a passive supporter is not something really specific to this, like, you know, I have usually 1000 people watching the stream, the amount of people that are typing in the twitch chat, and joining my personal Allie, strawser discord, or donating bits or following me on social media is probably pretty small, actually, to the, to the average passive viewer, you know, even like, a lot of those people don’t have twitches, they don’t follow her on Twitch, they just as an anonymous user, go to Hearthstone category, see that she’s online and click it and watch and they might be a regular viewer, but they still won’t even make a twitch. Like when you started watching Twitch, it took you a while to actually make an account. I didn’t make an account until you started streaming.
Mason Geyser: And I watch Twitch all the time, I just never wanted to make an account or like get that involved in a community.
Allie Macpherson: I will say that, you know, purchasing my Creator coin is definitely a more active though, than just like passively watching content, but still, you know, I can see why people might just believe in what I’m doing and want to support the system. And you know, maybe like, as I said, maybe they don’t play tournaments or really care that much about having allies trials emerge. But you know, but with more things that we create, you know, the merge was probably a wider or more broad benefit where like, if you’re competing in the Hearthstone tournament, you got to like actually be a Hearthstone player and, and have to have deck willing. So, you know, you said people came out of the woodwork for the merchandise well, that’s because there was more of a broader benefit. So what maybe with each thing that we introduce, you know, it’ll strike a chord with different people.
Adam Levy: Sure, sure. It’s so fascinating. You know, the more I learned about your community and the health of the token and the supporters, I’m starting to realise you guys have probably by far the most like the most healthy career economy that you’ve built from utility right to the price being driven up to are not price, like the growth and the performance at least. So the token to the number of discord members and holders that you guys have to now also developing a grants program, like an unofficial grants program where you’re paying people to create tools, discord tools, whatever tools to help kind of push and engage the community even forward even more so. Which is like the cherry on top is now hiring people in the community to help manage the community. And like all these all these points are critical to sustaining like, a very efficient crater economy. And I think you guys built yourself and maybe you don’t even realise how like, hard that is to do. You know, when you’re when you’re bringing people into crypto and you’re, you’re telling them internet funny money, you know, and numbers going up and down. And, and there’s this this shit coin from us from, from those from sheep, like all these like nobody, it’s so much fog, and there’s hard to build clarity. And you guys are building somewhat or in the in the genesis of building a self-sustaining ecosystem for yourself. Right. And obviously, you can attribute the growth of the token because from the time of this recording, I’d see it’s about $24, 63 cents. Okay. And when it got started, it was at 26 cents now not to shill token.
Mason Geyser: Lower than that.
Adam Levy: Lower than price. Okay, so I only see what rally provides.
Mason Geyser: They only go back in December.
Adam Levy: Yeah. So that growth for people who were part of the community believed in you engage in these tournaments engage in these activities. Were core contributors to helping build the brand saw the upside? I think that’s a lot of the ethos from what people are trying to kind of encapsulate here is there’s power behind being an early adopter. There’s power behind being a community supporter. There’s power behind crypto in decentralisation, essentially in the in the web three primitive, right? And what does that number kind of mean to you, when you see $24 on the screen? What does that mean to you guys?
Mason Geyser: Well, I see a big crash in the rally token price from $1.40 to like, it’s really hurt our coin. But that’s just crypto in general, it goes up and down. But to be more serious, that price means a lot, actually, we put a lot of work into growing it from 10 cents to where it’s at today. And whether it’s at 60 or 24. Like, we consider it very much a success. And the early adopters have had a lot of that and, and what I think more important than the price to me is really to see the adoption of creator coins in general and the people that I’ve introduced to the system that have stuck around, and also commingled with other creators, like that’s one of the other great things about rallies, it’s so easy to go from Allie coin to another creators coin. And with the rally dividends, a lot of people will take that and try out a new creator and get some of their benefits. So the, for me, that’s what’s more important is that all these people that have joined family stream, whereas in 2017, when we tried to get them to do that, it was like impossible as pulling teeth just to get somebody to like, make an ethereum wallet.
Allie Macpherson: Absolutely. And thank you for the kind words, by the way that was really nice of you to say. Yeah, I definitely think that there are a lot of great communities on the rally platform, and I’m sure there will be other, you know, creator economy platforms that do well, you know, as well. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of the price, like, I don’t know, it’s kind of crazy to wrap my head around just because it’s, it’s my name, you know, in it right, going to grow far beyond just about me. I mean, that’s our plan, right? You know, it’s, it’s, it’s an ecosystem and economy that we’re, you know, starting with me and Mason, and, you know, but I’m hoping that it gets to a point to where, you know, like you said, in terms of a doubt, you know, it becomes this thing that is so community based where even if it has the name Allie, you know, it goes far beyond just me Because honestly, that that concept kind of freaks me out a little bit. I’m being completely honest. It is kind of an issue with creator coins where, you know, like, creators want to retire at some point in their lives. Maybe that’s 2030 years from now, but a lot of the great crypto projects I think are going to exist beyond their founders.
Mason Geyser: And I wonder if that can be the same for some of these social tokens?
Adam Levy: Yeah, I think the perfect example of this to like look at more, I guess, modern day examples is you have Queen the band that had it’s called following right. And then Queen Freddie Mercury passed away. Maybe Queen has what’s that singer Adam from American Idol, right that like replaces him and does like tribute shows.
Allie Macpherson: Sure.
Adam Levy: And you have the occasional members but you have the Queen cult you know, that go they watch the movies, you know, they engage in the memorabilia, they still stream the music, and from those who stream on Spotify have more of the power engages right in the of the more active ones that dress up go to the tribute bands do all this really cool stuff and the brand of Queen has outlived, it’s like, it’s a legacy now. Right? And I think that’s the end goal for and correct me if I’m wrong like that was my next question to you. That’s like the end goal of Allie right? Right. Is that how you kind of see it?
Allie Macpherson: I love that you made the Queen analogy. We love queens. That’s really cool.
Mason Geyser: If we could have that kind of legacy, that would be amazing.
Adam Levy: I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay, a final question to you, because you already touched upon it. It’s something I asked everybody. Because the reality of social tokens is, well, you’re creating a human stock market, a community stock market, essentially, right? And it will come to a point where you where you’ll have the companies like Robin Hood that gamify stocks, options and trading. And you’ll have scenarios where creators, I imagine we’ll come to points where you’ll have the GameStop, short squeeze, you know, and the Doge Short squeeze? And how do you imagine that kind of one from a point of view of like taking effect, when you have millions of creators all publicly traded? Everybody’s speculating if you have more of the laggers adopting trading? How do you imagine this world kind of manifesting down the line? Because we’ve never had a scenario where we were able to invest directly in a creator person in the community, we’ve only been able to invest in stocks, right. And unless like, I’m talking from a public point of view, like if it was from a private investment, you could do it, right. From a public point of view, this is the first time that we’re actually able to do something like this. How do you guys see this manifesting down the line 510 years from now? And even more so right now we attribute influence to the number of followers you have right across YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, people are going to be launching themselves in the forms of tokens, will we start attributing influence based off what your tokens trading at? For example, Justin Bieber is trading at $100. Taylor Swift is trading at $30. Justin Bieber’s more influential than Taylor Swift and vice versa. So two very, very, like big questions, tackle them however you’d like.
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, wow. Um, that I do think that that probably is what is going to happen. And that this will be the next evolution of the influencer space. I will say that the concept of like investing in a person I, in theory, like, in theory, yes, I believe in that if you find someone when they’re small, or like their price of their Creator coin is low, and you’re like, wow, this person is a really good creator, I can totally see them getting big someday. I actually, like I loved my bands in high school. And I like found a lot of bands that wound up being way bigger than then when I found them. And I was like, Man, I wish I could have bought stock in this bands like I would have made bank. So there’s actually like, I had this concept as a teenager. And I do think that, you know, this is a cool thing. But the thing that I want to the concept that I want to drive home is that it’s, it should be first and foremost a way to participate in the economy that the Creator is making, you know, it goes beyond just, you know, investing and speculating, and if someone’s coin will go up and down. And it’s more about like, how can I use the coin that this creator has started? And I think that’s important, because I, you know, I don’t know how rational it is. But there’s a part of me that gets kind of scared of that landscape. It sort of seems like a black mirror episode, if I’m being completely honest. Like, you know, they had one about like followers and stuff like that. And, you know, you’re going about life in terms of like, how, what’s your score? What’s your rating, that kind of thing? And so having, like, $1 amount, just specifically attached to my name is kind of I’m kind of weird, but I feel like if as long as I can be providing services, products, and things that just go beyond me as a person, I think that’s the sweet spot. Mason, do you have any insight on that?
Mason Geyser: Yeah, just on the on the topic of like, does somebody coin price make them more influential? I think it’s going to be a factor. But I don’t think there’s ever one factor that makes somebody more influential than somebody else. There’s going to be all these like the connections that they have to other influential people. Like how the strength of their following but I do think, yeah, if you’ve got more money in your token, it’s not just that more people have thrown money at you, but it’s also that you have more money to play with. So you can go do more things than a smaller creator might but its all varying degrees, and it’s just one of many factors. And then in terms of like, what does the landscape look like in five to 10 years, I think it’s very much like what you’re saying where you’re going to slowly see a larger and larger percentage of creators having their own coin, to the point where it almost feels like almost every creator has their own coin. I think at some point it gets there, maybe that’s 10 years from now, maybe its two years from now, I don’t really know the speed of that adoption. But there’s going to be a lot of speculation. And they’re definitely going to come out with financial instruments to allow people to leverage their positions and short positions. And I think there’s going to be all sorts of liquidity pools and you’re going to be able to use your Creator coins as collateral at some point. It might depend on you know, the weaker coins, you probably can’t do that with because it’s too volatile. But with the stronger coins, people will probably lend against those. So yeah, over time, I think, like, just crypto in general, I think it’s going to be hundreds of coins and creator coins are going to be a piece of that whole pie. And it’s all going to be this interconnected web of financial activity. It’ll be its fun, like, it’s hard, it’s so hard to predict, because it’s going to just be like more economic activity than could even imagine right now.
Allie Macpherson: I like the idea of it being more fun than anything like I can see every, you know, creator having their own coin. But again, it’s a method of participation, you know, and support. You know, like, if you enjoy someone’s content, you throw them a tip, right, you know, you appreciate them and being a part of their community in this way, I think could be something that’s really special and one of the coolest forms, or one of the coolest ways to use cryptocurrency and block chain technology.
Mason Geyser: And nothing makes you root for a creator like owning some of their coin. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people will see a creator get really big, and they’re, you know, the, the jealousy comes out, and then they’re like, oh, that person doesn’t deserve it. But if you buy just like a couple other coins, you’re like, yeah, they deserve it, I love them go to making some more money. And, and I know that can be negative too. Like, if the coin goes down in price, you might hold that against the Creator. But I think, like I said, if you’re doing it with the mentality of I just want this to be a fun investment that I can make. And if it does, well, then great. And if it doesn’t, at least I know I supported this creator. Like that’s the perfect way to approach it. And I think if most of the people approach it that way, it’s going to be a really great time for almost everybody.
Allie Macpherson: Also, what people can do you know, when we launched Allie, we just put the name Allie like we call it Allie coin, but there are definitely a lot of creators who are not putting their name at you know, they’re a creator that creates. Give me an example.
Mason Geyser: Well, Jaws, for instance, actually, not only did he not use his stage name Jaws, but he used btx, which is his bite this label. So his coins, not even his stage name. It’s something else entirely. And that’s because he wants it to be like getting to own part of this new type of label that’s run by a cryptocurrency and the cryptocurrency holders can vote on which songs the label should add. And like that, to me is just an awesome social concept that I own some of that coin, because I think I really believe in what he’s creating there.
Allie Macpherson: Yeah, so it’s not just going to be Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber coin, it’s going to be creators, you know, starting their own businesses and attaching currencies to that.
Adam Levy: I think the perfect example of that is whale shark. Probably the most successful social token project to date. Have you guys heard of whale shark?
Allie Macpherson: I actually have not, no.
Adam Levy: So whale shark is part whale, part shark, okay, he’s anonymous. He’s anonymous character, personality online that he’s been in the space for years. But he really got his name to fame by his NFT portfolio and basically making big bets on NFT artists and buying large amounts of digital art okay and what he did, he then created the whale community. Okay, where it’s a volte of these tokenized assets, that’s pegged to his social token, indirectly pegged to social token, but there’s some value relationship between that. And people love whale like people love whale. And he took it to the extent where he now created a clothing brand called 1337, which is a social token within itself that targets the gaming community, okay, and creates metal ware that also translates into physical wear. So the whole bet that he’s making is people are going to be so heavily invested into the metaverse that they’re also going to want to represent what they were online in person. So you can purchase your clothing, right, through digital currencies through the currency 1337. And he also has his big cloud, right? So he has three different social tokens and the big cloud is the whale big cloud that’s also performing exceptionally well. So it’s three different social tokens, each doing and working their magic and like you said, probably these things, a lot of them will be tied to the creator’s name like Allie, but it should be getting to a point craters are thinking about building brands that extend beyond them. Where there’s a common like vision mission that community and a large amount of people, even a small amount of people, right depends how you want to build this network that align with and that grow that from there on that extend beyond you.
Allie Macpherson: An anonymous success in cryptocurrency is this satoshis…
Adam Levy: Is Bitcoin satoshis is a social token. Yeah.
Mason Geyser: That’s a joke in our friend group sometimes, like Cardano is just like a big social token for Charles hospital.
Adam Levy: I love that. I love it, guys.
Allie Macpherson: You know, when we started Allie coin, I was reading the Internet of money by Andreas Antonopoulos. And in that book, he just talked about how there were going to be creator coins, Bob coin and sueann coin or whatever. And he was talking about that in what 2014 or 2015 whenever he wrote that talk, and it was just crazy to me because I was reading that book and as we were starting Allie coin it was coming to fruition. I was like wow, this is crazy. So yeah, I just really think that creator economies creator coins, the next evolution of the influencer space honestly.
Adam Levy: I love it guys. That’s a perfect place to end off. Allie, Mason, more power to you. Thank you for being on and I hope to have you on again when your communities more developed, more success, more exposure. So cheers. Thanks for being on.
Mason Geyser: Thanks for having us.
Adam Levy: Of course.
