Background
Mint Season 6 episode 9 welcomes Natalia Murillo aka Nati, who’s the founder of Koop, a new home for communities to become more personal and collaborative. In this episode, we discuss Koop’s product vision, Nati’s plan for turning consumers into contributors, on-chain data, her vision for a new social media, the evolution of creator governance, and so much more.
Time Stamps
- 00:10 – Intro
- 07:22 – Getting Started in Web3
- 10:18 – Lessons Learned for New Creators Joining Web3
- 12:11 – What is Koop?
- 20:25 – How Scalable is Centering Access Around Money?
- 27:10 – Why are NFTs The Perfect Medium For Membership-Based Communities?
- 30:06 – How Have You Seen Creator Governance Evolve?
- 33:30 – What Does It Take for More Web2 Creators to Enter Web3?
- 36:00 – The Current State of the Web3 Creator Economy
- 39:56 – What Will Social Media Look Like in Web3?
- 42:04 – Where Community Governance and Social Overlap
- 48:58 – Outro
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Natty Welcome to mint. Thank you for being on a part of season six. So, what’s going on? How are you feeling?
Natalia Murillo: Yes, I’m good. Thank you for having me on. Excited to chat a little more today.
Intro
I’m excited to have you on, you’re doing really cool stuff at Koop. You’ve been working on great projects with like a lot of mainstream creators that we’ll get into soon. But I think a good place to start is, who are you? Natty? What does the world need to know about you? But more specifically, how did you get your start into crypto?
Natalia Murillo: Yes, definitely. So, I got started in crypto about three, four years ago now, I was a student at USC, I actually met you were in the first people who was rubbing crypto at USC and got introduced to a class, I had a professor who is taught me about zero knowledge proof. So, one of my math professor’s kind of kept sparking that curiosity inside me. And then when COVID hit, I went full time in crypto, I started investing in NFTs, contributing to communities. And that really led me to where I am today with Koop, which is a company I started about a year ago.
So, can you talk more about the crypto scene on campus? I talk a lot about it. But I feel like I’m a little bit bias. What would you say, crypto scene at USC was like?
Natalia Murillo: Definitely, I think it’s unique to every person. So maybe we had different experiences. But I would say it was pretty desolate, being a 2018. So, when I came to campus, around that time, you were one of the few people talking about it. There were a couple of people investing in it. But in terms of building core infrastructure, there weren’t a lot of builders around campus. I was at a lava Lab, which is a student kind of startup organization and very web two products being built. But yeah, I would say pretty, pretty empty. Not a lot of conversation compared to today where I think there’s a ton of USC.
A ton of activity. Yeah, yeah. Shout out to the students that are actually doing it much better than I did and then we did. It’s really cool because back in like when I was doing it, I did the club on campus. And it was like 2017, 2018, 2019, like I transferred in as a junior. And there wasn’t a policy like there wasn’t really going on. I felt like I was trying to make some type of policy on campus, even though it was like struggling, but there were people we were doing like white paper roundtables. There was something but today, I see online like just following blockchain at USC, that they’re killing it, like much better than anyone at the time was sort of doing so props to them. What’s cool about your story, though, Natty is that you also dropped out from what I remember, right?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah.
Can you talk more about that?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. To be very honest, I didn’t always love USC. I didn’t love college. I don’t think that it was a result of the university, I think I would have felt there in a lot of places. But I’m curious. I’m really curious person. So even when I’m not in classes, I would be online trying to study topics, trying to find out new things and kind of going down the rabbit hole as they say. And I felt like the traditional structure of school kind of slowed down that process. It’s very structured. It’s week by week, month by month, you take the test, and then you never apply the topic or dive deep into it again. And so, I never really felt fully like I fit in inside of school. And then once I found crypto and could make money to support myself on my own, it was pretty clear that I was going to take a hiatus and thankfully, I have parents who push back at first but came around to it.
Can you talk more about your parents backlash of you leaving, I feel like college is a very big thing in people’s families. And I know if I dropped out, my dad would have hung me. And I’m curious what sort of experience you went through.
Natalia Murillo: Definitely. So, my mom is from Argentina. My dad is from Colombia, and neither of them had the opportunity to go to college. They couldn’t afford it at the time. And so, me being the first in my family to go to college was a really, really, really big deal. And so I think it’s really just that, not even traditional values that many individuals in my family had gone to college before but the idea behind education really acting as a level of prestige, a level of acceptance. I think for immigrant families, it represents all of those things and I think I have the opportunity now building a company to bring that same type of sense of pride and belonging that many look for an education through making an impact by building something that people need.
Okay, but when you left USC, when we were talking behind the scenes, you actually joined a cool initiative. Right? Which is interesting because if you look today, you’re very like crypto native, but the initiative that you joined, they weren’t really doing like crypto native things right? You were telling me you join the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Right? And you got involved in the crypto scene over there. Walk me more through that. First of all, I’m sure like you dropping out and then going into the initiative was maybe like a better point for your parent’s sort of like seeing what you’re transitioning to, right? Talk to me more about that. And also, what you got involved with over there?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, no, that is an awesome question. I actually forgot, I almost forgot about CCI.
Which I feel like it’s such a big part of your career.
Natalia Murillo: I scraped my whole LinkedIn, like, in my LinkedIn, I like to forget that I had a professional. But, you know, I worked at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, about two to three years after the fund was started to get rolling. So, they’re only about 7 to 10 individuals full time on the team, and I was their first intern, and then kind of worked in an analyst role there. And I got exposure to crypto through CCI as well. The biggest reasons why I wanted to work at CCI is because I think capital is one of the biggest ways to make an impact and actually see change, and CCI, many people claim to represent that value or instill that value. But CCI backs it through their money, where the Zuckerberg foundation takes an incredible amount of funds, millions each year and puts it behind, not only companies and venture funds, but also building out their incubating and building out their own products as well. So, it was through them. I actually was on the crypto initiative there. And so that was how I learned about crypto VCs and investing in tokens. And that kind of led me even deeper into exploring crypto.
So, what was the crypto pulse at CCI at the time? And what year was this?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, this was 2019. And very early, they were just exploring the topic. I think that they were of the belief there’s no doubt that crypto plays a role in the future. And a lot of my role for that period of time was determining to what extent it plays a future and in what areas, but I learned a ton. I learned a ton from everybody on that team.
Getting Started in Web3
Okay, so dropped out of USC went to CCI, okay, did crypto research. And then you left CCI and joined web three more full time or what’s the transitional story into web three?
Natalia Murillo: Yes. So, I, right after I stopped CCI, I said to my parents, I need to take one year and learn everything possible about crypto from infrastructure to consumer, every single opportunity. I know that this is the future. And if I figure something out, how to support myself over that year, I’ll go back, I’ll still continue. If not, I’ll go back to school. So, I moved back home. I was in my parent’s basement. I know it’s like a meme on crypto Twitter living in your mom’s basement. But that was literally me. And I just spent every day reading white papers on CT and in discord. And I made an Al Anon. And I was just getting inside of communities, hey, how can I help out? What can I build? What are we doing? And I just tried to work my way up, I saw this huge opportunity to almost become this like protocol politician. And that was my goal for three months is how can I become core to these teams? How can I influence, how can I learn? And I did that for about three months. So maybe spent 16 hours a day online.
Wow.
Natalia Murillo: Which is scary.
That’s crazy. Which I feel like is for a lot of us too like we live online. And I think what’s cool about your story is like your share willingness to just understand things and just go into it like knees deep, not knowing what you’re getting yourself to and just trying to find your place in the noise. What were some of the like, more contributor-based hats that you wore, while you were infiltrating these communities?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So, one of the first ones that I hopped into actually docs was juice box. So, Django is actually one of the first people I DM didn’t crypto, he’s the one of the founders that did juice box. And we were just going back and forth. I was trying to learn about how the protocol worked. And as time went on inside of the community, I would help manage their community calls. I would write articles, I would share ideas around how to manage the treasury, I would have the biggest role that I played inside of, one there is no set roll. It’s like whatever. It’s like a startup whatever’s on the floor you try to pick up but one of the most interesting things that I learned from Juicebox is how big narratives play into crypto. I think Juicebox is an incredible, maybe even groundbreaking experimentation and protocols and governance. And I would get on calls and I DM community, saying you need to launch a token through juice box, and they wouldn’t get it. But then the second that constitution now happened, juice box absolutely blew up and so, I think a lot of web three teams tend to over index on building and less so on distribution. And I think we’ve learned that through web two products, you know, a lot of product lead companies forget their go to market. And I think it’s equally as important for protocols to consider those things as well.
Lessons Learned for New Creators Joining Web3
So, what are some like the biggest insights or learning lessons you sort of took away, kind of like bumping around these communities, whether it be through Juicebox, other organizations that you sort of got involved with? And the reason that I asked, by the way, is because you are the one who possesses the mentality of like, I want to, I see this excitement, I want to try to find a way to get involved. A lot of people coming to the space, I feel like want to do something similar, but don’t know how to get started. And what you just prove to us that there’s no real way to get started, you just gotta get started. Like, you just got to dive in. Right? And by doing so, I feel like you’ve picked up so many things along the way. I’m curious, like, what were those lessons that you’ve learned?
Natalia Murillo: Yes, one, that was incredible advice, like you said it, just get started. And for me, whenever you’re getting started, like what makes you laugh? Like, I would hop in these calls, and I would be dying, laughing and sometimes I’d get on the voice. And this is when I was eating on. And they would hear my voice as a girl, they would be like, are you using a voice changing app? Who is this person? Like no, there are girls who exist. But so that’s one. But second biggest learning is that people participate inside of these digital worlds with more passion and fever ins than their local democracies. And even before crypto, I was a subscriber of the NELC boys of impulsive, and all that I can do is subscribe. It almost feels like paying taxes, I’m paying a tax and all that I get for that tax is commenting and buying a piece of merch. And so, I felt like there was a ton of improvement. And even you may even call it innovation to be made in terms of our role inside of these communities, and also how we participate in them because they’re literally our states, our unions, our networks.
What is Koop?
So, by you saying that it makes me think like, how did the internet get so boring? Like the way you just sort of put it like we are paying taxes when we subscribe to these Patron pages. Okay, there’s a level of excitement to it. But what’s missing? And I guess like web three is the missing puzzle piece. But from your point of view, and I guess it’s a great transition into Koop too, right? You’re sort of on a mission to kind of like, make the future of communities more personal and collaborative, right. Like, that’s what I understand from Koop, right. And you’ve worked with a variety of projects, either intimately or independently that sort of embody those principles now. You’re talking about paying a tax, right? But web three is now this new primitive of being able to build communities that are more incentive aligned. Is Koop trying to go after that market, like what is Koop doing in the grand scheme of things and how does it prevent like that tax paying experience?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. I think less so I think there isn’t much changes to be made in terms of that initial entry into a community. It will always be, you need buy in, right? On Instagram. That means a follow-on YouTube. It means subscribe and crypto today, it means buying, minting midseason to pass, right? So, I don’t think that’s where we see change. I think we see change in terms of participatory mechanisms, which today are one to many, right? Even inside of Twitch, I’ll even go as far as to call it spam, there are spam across the Internet today. If I’m a Twitch streamer, how can I engage in a high touch way? I can implement TTS, which means that anybody in my can chat can donate. And then a robot says out loud what that person is saying. And then you have a human who’s collecting donations and ignoring that thousands of messages and spam. And so, our step one or our first goal is creating new mechanisms for participation inside of communities.
Wow. So that was actually a really good visual description of what happens if you look at a lot of the live streamers or the Twitch streamers. They have massive discord servers where and they like mirror the chat on their screen as they’re like doing these conversations. And it’s like it’s fast, like they’re going, they’re standing, they’re typing, but also there’s a level of excitement to that. And from what I understand Koop is trying to do the exact opposite. Like you guys are focusing on a more niche type of audience a non-fungible sort of membership NFT that gets you into a community that doesn’t have that level of scale. Am I getting it right?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So, discord, right? Twitch, Instagram today, they have fungible membership. So, there is no sense of self inside of the community, because you exist in the perspective of the creator. So, you are one of thousands, if you looked at Mr. Beast most recent video, it was kind of funny. It’s actually funny. I actually love Mr. Beast, not hating on him, but I am a little bit here. Everyone’s got a shirt. Everyone got a shirt, and, on the third’s, the goal was to win an island, right? If you participated in these three games, the winner at the end won this island. And everyone was wearing a red shirt with the number of subscribers that they were. So, you had 250 subscriber all the way to 96.4 million subscribers. And one of the competitions was his earliest subscriber could kick out 10 people out of the 20 in round three, and they were booted off the island. But that’s the only metric of support or loyalty that a creator has today. And if you look at like innovations and social the only example is tick tock and what has tick tock done? it shifted that perspective. But it’s still one to many, except that one is you, were it’s you in the centerfold, and you have a feed and now the feed is based on your interests, not on the thousands of creators that that you followed. But as you were hinting at, what do we believe the future is? it looks like non fungible membership, where you can actually create an identity and a space and that identity is portable, across social networks. So, I know that was a lot.
But let’s break it down. No, I think that’s a good start. Yeah, so a couple of things. So, I like the gamification example that you gave, because it actually gives a good sort of visualization of what an NFT can be used for, as a way to sort of kind of like earmark your participation early on in a creator’s journey, right? So instead of using the subscriber count, as a way to sort of measure certain access and rights to sort of maybe kick someone off an island, the NFT could kind of represent that. And it can be used in an interoperable way. So, you can create those experiences not just across YouTube, but across other platforms, as well across Twitch, across web three, Twitch web three Twitter, whatever the web three platforms and becoming that I get that right, that’s number one, right?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely.
Okay, so number two is sort of thinking about, but wait a minute, these systems actually work, why do we need to change them? They work but they don’t work, I guess in the grand scheme of things, but they still work. Like when we talk about the problem space of seeing all the chats flicker on the screen. When we talk about Mr. Beast just using the subscriber count of his early subscribers as a metric is sort of gamify and experience, these things still work in the grand scheme of things, right, like creators are still using these to cultivate experiences. Why are you betting on the fact that there actually needs to be a non-fungible version of that, where we need to create smaller, tighter knit communities?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, I think that one thing that never changes is the competition for engagement. So, the web two today, every platform, whether it’s a new platform, why they able to grow so quickly, so early. Let’s say mint creates a new social network, it’s because their distribution channels aren’t flooded yet. So early individuals, online forecaster, forecaster, just by us being early there, we have the ability to grow probably to millions of followers that we could never do on Twitter today, solely for being early. In web three, that engagement metric becomes a liquidity metric. And so, every single token, whether it’s an NFT collection, or an ERC 20 is competing for liquidity. So, you’re no longer competing for engagement that is determined by outside players, you’re competing for liquidity and an open market. And so, in order to access that liquidity, I believe that you need strong backers, you need strong LPs, you need strong participants in that network. And to do so you can no longer play the game of let’s scale to one to 10 million, and Instagram will do that for you, you need to play the game of how can you scale from one to a thousand. And those one thousand will back you and grow your cultural relevance, as well as the stability of your treasury.
Interesting. So, it still feels like the creator still needs to take the initiative to create the initial group, right?
Natalia Murillo: Yes.
What about examples where fans make groups on behalf of creators, and like, for example, more like visual example is if you go on Facebook, and you look up Lady Gaga, I use this example on the podcast, you’ll see a bunch of Lady Gaga fan pages where the fans created these communities on behalf of Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga is not in there creating communities and managing these communities, right? So, I’m trying to think, where does that come into play in the web three cents, maybe with the rarity traits, right? Maybe Or where else could it come into play?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, I think today that actually looks like a collector Dao. And today it’s hard to fork those collector Daos, right? Like I think what will be super powerful is that core collector Dao can act as a central source of liquidity. And then there can be spin off sub-Dao which actually represent the niche interests. So you can almost think of them like Reddit threads, where the core Reddit thread is Bitcoin but then you have Bitcoin maximalism, people fighting about the merch, shitting on Ethereum and then you have other people trying to turn BTC into the next app chain, and so I think that that’s the way that I think about collector Daos today, since we’re so early is, these are the early curators, they’re willing to back their money in time and to shifting and investing in culture. And soon it’ll be segmented and fragmented once we see enough volume and interest where my collector Dao will actually be the next Taylor Swift fan base.
How Scalable is Centering Access Around Money?
Interesting. How scalable is that? The concept of using money as a way for access, like it works today, without using money like all these communities, they live and exist without the incentives, the financial incentives. And I think it’s a question that doesn’t have an answer just yet. But I’m wondering like, what your take is on that?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah. So, I think that people like people are scarred from Defi. And also, human incentives and human nature rarely changes across history, when it comes to how we handle and interact with finances. But I would make the argument that people tend to over index on how financialized these NFT communities are. I’m a part of a ton of NFT projects that I expect zero rewards and profit from because when I buy it, it’s point one Eth or point 05 Eth. And I think a lot of these communities come together, and the way that I see it is I just bought equity in a company. I’m a seed stage investor, and I bought equity. And maybe I get exposure down the line. But because it’s my money, and I don’t have the dependencies of LPs, I see it Gary Vee has this really famous line where he actually found Logan Paul on Vine. And he said, I brought Logan Paul in, and I invested in one of his projects, not because I thought that one was going to blow up because you always bet on the jockey. And I want to form this closer relationship with the jockey. And I feel the same exact way about every brand. every community, every creator that I invest in, I’m not expecting upside, I’m expecting a closer relationship, as well as an opportunity. Literally a professional one to expand my opportunity set, whether that be in crypto, the music, space, etc.
I think that’s actually a fantastic way to answer that question. Because I take my collection like thesis, I don’t if you don’t want to call it a thesis. When I collect something, I usually bet on the person, right? I usually, I collect because I love what they stand for. I love how many times they like how consistently they show up in the space. And I know at some point, they’re going to just figure it out, right? And I want to be along that journey. So, but I also think that’s like an early adopter’s mindset. I don’t think everybody thinks like that. Because also in the grand scheme of things. And maybe like a counterpoint to this is like web three is only meant for a certain subset of people. But in the grand scheme of things, majority of people live like paycheck to paycheck, like they don’t have the additional expenditure to collect things the way we do, maybe we have the privilege to, so maybe web three is like a subsection for the creator economy or for fandom that allows us to get even closer with fans like they could still listen to music, right? But then there’s like an even subset of listeners that want to be even closer to the creator. They want to be engaging in these like non fungible communities. You think I’m on the right path over here? Do you feel something similar?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, no, I do. I think long term just as an example, marketplace fees, any protocol fees trend towards zero. I think very similarly, around this concept of token gating, right or locked access. There is no freemium model for NFTs outside of CCO myths that we’ve seen today. And the long tail of even something like Koop looks like you can hop on a Twitch stream, right? A creator can still be making content, that’s their first form of interaction with the entire internet. And then through the chat, you can be collecting and earning some part of that creator share or just relevance, very similar to streaming mechanisms today. And then that initial exposure interests will then convert you into a sale or convert you into purchasing a closer experience. And I think, rather than the lens of financialization, it’s more so increasing the quality and bar of participants throughout the levels of a creator’s life, a creator’s community, etc.
So, you’re talking like a freemium to premium model, that’s what you’re referencing?
Natalia Murillo: Exactly.
I think that’s a fantastic example because my bet also is that a lot of creators are going to trend towards the free NFT strategy and they’re going to build like, they’re going to cast a wide net of collectors and then find a way to funnel them in based off different experiences, traits, etc. And we’re actually already seeing that happen in real time. I wrote an article and mirror basically talking about like the free NFT model where it references this artist, her name is Queen George, okay. And she was preparing for a sound drop that she had, she wanted to sell out 25 editions. I think it was like point 01 or point 08, something like that. But what she did, she basically contacted on Twitter like a lot of the top music NFT collectors, DM them about her new song that she’s releasing, and said, hey, join my telegram group chat. And once you do, I’ll give you a free enough to pull up, essentially for coming in, right? And then she amassed like 50 collectors in that group. And she was kind of teasing them with like new music that was coming out, preparing for the drop. And then when the drop happened, she had 25 editions to sell out. And she sold out, right? And it worked. And she was able to use like the top funnel free model to then filter them down until like converting collectors to actually join her community. That’s one example. Are you seeing other examples in practice?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, I think the clearest one is board ape PR club. I have an ape, OG ape, I even called OG because they think they’ll launch a ton of stuff in the future. And they’re continuously thinking about how to increase supply. They’ve increased supply, and we haven’t seen the delusionary effects of it. But I am invested today, because I want to be an owner. And I think that let’s say the floor price is at 30 today, it shouldn’t drop down less than 30 over the next few years. But I don’t think that it has the same, it’s the same type of investment as punks, where that’s going to 10x over the next 200 years. I look at it as they are a team that’s looking to create a game and a Metaverse and they want to increase access and distribution. So, they created a board ape kennel club, they created MAYC they created other side Meta, ape coin, I promise you that the next launch that they do, there’ll be three of them. There’ll be even larger supplies. And the more the supply, the more that the separate collections are diluted individually. And so, I think that that’ll open them up to in the context of that musician, right? For her or him, it was minting out that initial collection. And their goal was to raise money. But with board ape yacht club, their goal is to increase the distribution. And that means like the same concept around this pull up, it means not expecting financial upside at the beginning.
Why are NFTs The Perfect Medium For Membership-Based Communities?
Interesting. That’s actually a really good example, a completely different model. I like that. Okay, let’s transition into talking more about membership NFTs. Okay, because that’s a big component of Koop. And I think when designing Koop, you’ve taken upon yourself like specific decisions to sort of made Koop what it is today from a product point of view. And membership NFT has come into the picture because you’re sort of betting on the non-fungibleness of a community. But in the beginning of I guess, I don’t want to say like the Dao era, but let’s call it the Dao. The token base community era, a lot of communities were creating communities based off ERC 20s, fungible tokens, right. And now we’re seeing a shift from fungible tokens to non-fungible tokens on a larger scale. Why do you think we’re seeing that shift? And why do non fungible tokens play a better type of model for creating a membership-based community?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, I think it’s very simple, content and currency are converging. And so, you slap a picture on top of a token, which both represent the same type of models, and you take a currency, and that’s all of a sudden that currency becomes content, and content and currency are converging, I’m going to bring another one, for example. Same with ape coin being able to be purchased at Gucci. So, I think even the biggest, when we think about the biggest challenges for communities or brands, or even when thinking about the US dollar, previously, they had to ask the question, you know, how do we stay stable enough? How can the US dollar be sound enough? How can we create enough trust around it? But I think long tail with crypto adoption, it won’t just be how stable is this currency? But how relevant is it? And how interesting is it? And in order for it to also be interesting, there needs to be a cultural element. And art is the first step in that direction, which is why from the beginning, everything in Koop is centered around the concept of a membership NFT.
Got it. I also remember, there was a certain point in time where, as more Dao sort of evolved, they also sort of transitioned to the NFT model, the best examples using like developer Daos, that’s like one of the more mainstream Daos that came out and issued NFTs as a form of access to the community versus an ERC 20 like we saw with FWB or forefront, etc. So, I also think for me from like, a consumer’s point of view, okay, it’s like, it makes more sense for me to collect a ticket to enter something versus like buy stock, even though it does have the sort of financial like both tokens have open markets, right? But I It feels more native to me to just purchase one thing and to get access, or just versus purchase like 75 things and get access, you know what I mean? Do you think about it the same way?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, no, I think it’s honestly a very simple answer. I think people overcomplicate it. But I completely agree with everything that you’re saying.
How Have You Seen Creator Governance Evolve?
Alright, let’s talk about governance right now too. Okay, so a big portion of Koop obviously is focusing on the Creator economy. I’m curious how have you seen creator governance evolve over the year, two years, etc?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So today, governance is really boring. Very, very frankly, it’s hosted on discourse or snapshot. And that means that it’s static long form text. I think the long tail version of governance looks like Kickstarter videos, Tik Tok videos, live streaming everything around proposals is storytelling, especially in NFT communities, especially around creators and artists. So, everything that we do at Koop on governance is how do we make this more fun and engaging?
So, can you give me an example of someone that’s doing it right, would like a storytelling approach?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So, one example is 99 original styles. So, Logan Paul has this NFT collection, 99 Polaroids, he auctions them off every day. Very similar, if not exactly the same as Nouns Dao model, he manages the treasury outside of Koop, and individuals inside of the community are rewarded for voting on what to do with the treasury and for supporting his content. So, he posts the storytelling videos on Tik Tok would create this incredible story around every Polaroid or round every community proposal. And then the community is then incentivized to distribute and grow the relevance of his content, or of the content that one day they’ll create around the story as well.
So, Logan Paul uses Koop is that what you’re saying?
Natalia Murillo: Yes.
How did that come about? That’s pretty big. How did that come about?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. Some of our investors, our investors in, not in investors in him but have collected some of his passes. I own one of the 99 originals and I thought it was a really cool project. So, once I was in the token holders chat in the discord, I started talking about Koop and got enough buy in from him and the community to get people behind it.
So casual, all right. What’s the next question? That’s like, that’s like the biggest creator in the world. Not like the OG creators and just like, oh, yeah, I just use the skills that I have masked, entering web three, joining all these communities and infiltrating my way through and just found one of the biggest creators to build on Koop like, alright, no big deal. Next question.
Natalia Murillo: I actually, yeah, that’s very funny my response, but it is. I’m not gonna overplay it. I’m not gonna say I did something today. But, but yeah, I actually think Logan is incredible. As a side comment. I think we’re both like very into creators and what he’s managed to do, from Pokémon to WWE to NFTs. I know, he gets a lot of shit in the NFT community for some of his past projects. But I think that more generally, when you’re a large creator, there’s a lot of attention on you. And it’s easy for us to experiment without a lot of eyes and dependencies. And really excited for 99 originals. I think it’s one of the most underrated projects in crypto right now.
What Does It Take for More Web2 Creators to Enter Web3?
I agree. I’m a fan of the project. And also, it continuously goes viral on Tik Tok and his web two fans, they love it. They love it without even knowing what a Dao is. They absolutely obsess over it. And they starting to comment like wow, Logan Paul’s actually artistic like I’m actually really enjoying this side of Logan, like I didn’t know he had this in him, and how he’s using NFTs and like Dao formats to sort of formulate that entire concept, using content kind of normalizes this entire space. And it kind of abstracts all the bullshit of all these keywords and these primitives and just lets you focus on the art, right, which I think I think is super cool and very unique to his project. And we haven’t really seen a mainstream creator like himself from web two coming into web three, do it accordingly. My next question to you, Natty is, what does it take for more web two creators to enter web three? What are we missing?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. I think that it’s not through going after the top creators. Logan was more of an accident. He was looking for a tool, we had a tool. I think that historically, products or platforms that go after kind of like what is the traditional meta, tend to fail. And so internally, we’re looking for ways to create more bottoms up experimentation, where as an example on track is an artist that works with us and when he started his first Koop, he was thinking about using it for his entire persona. This would be how tracks Dao represent every piece of future current and past art and music, and then we decided as a team with him involved as well, you should just launch this with your first DP, or for the hound pack, which is his discord community of individuals, we kind of shows them how to produce and they learn and grow together. And so I think the more that we can take away the pressure, and even less so the financialization, but more so the responsibility that comes along with raising a large amount of money or putting a large roadmap ahead, and the more that we’ll be able to set adoption, I think a lot of people run away when they hear Dao, because they’re like, now I have to run a discord and a thousand other tools. And at Koop our goal is, if you want to just try a new experiment with voting, or you want to try a new mechanism for streaming, let’s just do it once. It’s no pressure, no stakes, and we’re going to try to make it as fun as possible. And I think that’s actually how you get more web two creators, is just creating a medium for experimentation.
The Current State of the Web3 Creator Economy
What do you think the current state of the creator economy in web three looks like today? With that sort of your mental model of getting more people in.
Natalia Murillo: The current? Could you repeat that question?
Yeah, the current state of like, what the creator economy in web three looks and feels like today?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, today, I think that we still haven’t solved the distribution problem. So, until we.
The virality component?
Natalia Murillo: Exactly. And I think to give one quick example, Mr. Beast, I think it was on, let’s just say it was on Joe Rogan. Mr. Beast was on Joe Rogan. And Joe asked him, why have you not created your own white labeled version of YouTube, and he said, I think YouTube will grow 10x faster than I’ll ever be able to grow outside of YouTube. So, he’s taking a bet that their network effects are greater than his. And a goal of anyone building in the creator economy should be to solve the distribution problem for creators. And I think that it’s around the corner. It’s not that we’re missing any infrastructure, it’s just we’re missing a new model to do so. So as an example, right? Andrew Tate, he did this spectacularly. He said, anyone can buy a subscription into my Discord community. Your one role in this discord community is I’m going to come on your podcast, I’m going to come on your YouTube videos, you’re going to clip that content, I’m going to teach you how to clip it. And then we’re going to grow together, we’re gonna beat the algorithm, we’re gonna push and move forward. And then everything after that initial bootstrapping of an audience was outside of his community, just the fact that Andrew Tate is saying really crazy things online that invokes an audience. But I think that the creator economy today in terms of what can crypto offer, that’s not offering in web to is that initial buy in to then grow that network without having to hack a, literally hack a distribution channel through YouTube as Andrew Tate did or as Mr. Beast is doing as well.
I feel like Andrew Tate is like the epitome of CC0. It’s like anybody can sort of use his content, like his community is literally replicating on his behalf. And they’re using him as like their memefying him, essentially. Now that he got banned across Tik Tok, YouTube, like all the main social platforms, he’s still on my feet, like I still see. Right? Because like, I don’t know, I feel like there’s like some sort of saying that sort of, like, sprouting from this case study. It’s like, many is greater than one, right? And that can be applied in many different ways. But also, from an audience point of view. Like you haven’t really seen people do that. Like maybe you see, like JRE shorts, like Joe Rogan shorts and like the community sort of like replicates that through like financialization, Instagram or whatever. But you’ve never really seen the content proliferate on that level with any other creator. Yeah, I think it’s an interesting example. Yeah, you want to you want to add something?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, I think that will be productize. Like a creator will not have to do all of that work. And like I said, game the system, I think there will be a product that enables that type of magic, where you’ll be able to connect with those thousands of individuals with similar interests, similar goals, you’ll be able to set a clear mission, right? These are the roles and responsibilities in the case of entertain, it was hosting the podcast, clip it, post it and then from there, you’ll be able to see these like new niches implode across the internet that we would have never unsurfaced or uncovered before because of the way our algorithms are structured today and that is what’s going to make the internet more fun in my opinion. I think you’re muted.
Can you hear me now?
Natalia Murillo: Yes.
What Will Social Media Look Like in Web3?
All right, hold on. Let me write that. Okay, let me let me start over. Now that we’ve sort of talked about governance, we’ve talked about, we’re like skimming the surface on social. I want to transition talking about web three social. And I’m curious to get your point of view of what like, what does the new social media look like and where does crypto come into place?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. I have quite few opinions here. I think that the new social looks like high touch experiences. It means no diversions of chat, it means no concepts of long form discord posts, and it means rich experiences. So today, that means streaming tomorrow, that means ARVR. And I don’t know what that looks like 100 years from now, but that’s my bet is that social does not look like Twitter. The second bet around social is kind of the idea of controlling your own algorithm and curating your niche personal spaces. And that was one of the initial reasons why I got into crypto anyway, was discord kind of did that for me in a scrappy way. I was going through all of these different communities, with all these different sentiments and portals. And today, a lot of backlashes on Twitter, and other socials comes from the idea that you have to disagree or agree with opinions. It’s very combative. And in the future, I think that you’ll be in environments with people who actually highly agree with you around certain opinions. And some may argue that that’s bad. I actually think that it can be productive as long as you have exposure and discoverability and to other types of discourse. But Twitter is already trending to that today, if you’re a Republican, rarely do you see content around Democrats. I almost think Ethereum and Solana and almost make the analogy. It’s like Democrats and Republicans fighting on Twitter. Because very different beliefs around guess the spectrum of centralization and can invoke a reaction around its audience.
Where Community Governance and Social Overlap
Where do you think community governance and social overlap? We talked about content as a way to proliferate. But where do you think it goes even beyond content?
Natalia Murillo: Community governance is the new social, I bet everything on that, I think the ability to vote right? Today voting is very, it’s very boring. As I said, you see a long form text and you vote yes, or no. Instagram pose is the next meta of that, you can long form and I can share a little message and then we get live polling at the end, I think the future of voting looks like a video stream, where you can actually be engaged throughout using some type of form of token curated registries or new mechanisms that somebody creates, but live voting, the ability to have a say whether that be today through a numeric system, or tomorrow through voice or another type of digital interaction is, in my eyes, what’s unique about crypto and what will actually be a new type of participatory mechanism to drive forward social interactions more generally?
So, with that same train of thought, where do you think data comes in like on chain data?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So, one, I would love to hear your thoughts about this afterwards. So, I’ll say my opinion, but I also want to hear yours because I think you’re have been speaking to a ton of people about this, you’re also building in this similar idea of realm. But today in web two social the only idea that you have the concepts of follow, which is support, you have the concepts of liking, which is determining preferences. On crypto today, you don’t necessarily have this idea around preferences. And that is going to be a new zero to one in my eyes. The only concept of preferences is voting and governance. And at Koop, we connect that to your NFT and our contingency thinking of different ways to create a unique identity algorithm around an individual rather than around a network.
So, I think that’s great. I think there’s also layers to it, too, just to build on what you’re saying. I think governance and voting is like, the bottom of the triangle, like the more funnelized, triangle, right? But I think just being able to sort of collect something just indicates what your preference is, right? And being able to buy something or being able to just, whether it’s a free collect, or a paid collect. I think that indicates sort of like, what you like on chain, from the communities that you are part of, to the events that you attend to all these sorts of things that we do on chain kind of build up our persona, right? I use data, on chain data, and I think in a very unique way, I haven’t seen other creators sort of use it. I’m hoping more creators do, which is like a lot of the reason why I wanted to do season six, is to teach creators that the reason why we’re here, there’s many reasons why we’re here, we’re here to make money, we’re here to be free, we’re here to be independent, but part of doing that is like owning our audience, right? Owning the little like, pieces that make an audience and with that is the data that comprises our audience. And in web two, as a creator, I don’t really get to see like, who my audience is, right, I don’t really get to know them, right? And the perfect example is like, if you have millions of listeners on Spotify, you don’t really know who these millions of listeners are, you don’t. When you sell tickets to a concert, you don’t really know much about who’s attending, right? But if you kind of like bring all that on chain, and you start issuing tickets, as NFTs, you’re able to sort of build like a minimum viable community, through your music by people who collect your wav files, you’re able to sort of build this audience persona profile, who are the people that love and adore you, who are actually spending dollars to come and see you and to support you. That’s how I think about it. There’s a lot of like, every single wallet possesses a bunch of things, right? And you can access that information and get to know more about those wallets in a non-intrusive way, without knowing their first name, without knowing their last name, without knowing their address, in a way that’s sort of like much better compared to how web two datacenters are sort of like doing it. Right. So, I use on chain data as a way to formulate my content strategy, I use on chain data to understand what my listeners like. And based off that I bring in the right guests to kind of like formulate the right conversations that tailors to what they’re collecting, right? I bring in sponsors based off their crypto nativeness. Right. So, I tried to use that as a way to become a smarter creator and a better creator. And I think you’re on the money though. Like I think it’s all about building like an interoperable community. And it’s a community that lives freely like the community is the social platform like we are, it’s no longer creator against platform, it’s like platforms now need us more than we need platforms kind of thing, because we have all these tools to sort of build our own platform, right? To build our own audience. So that’s a little bit of my hot take, what do you think based off of that?
Natalia Murillo: No, I’m in line with everything you said, I think the biggest kind of nugget that you said is that it’s non-intrusive, I can get all of this information without actually knowing who you are, where you live, what you do, the non, I guess, necessary pieces of information around a user or community member. So absolutely agree with everything you said. And hopefully we’re able to build out aspects or segments of that future together.
Yeah, I really hope so. And I think whoever ends up building it, it’s very net positive, because at the end of the day, like the reason why the podcast exists is to create more, I guess, like transparency around a lot of these primitives that many creators might not know of like, there’s more to being in web three than just minting a wav file and selling music NFTs, there’s more to web three than just sort of like having somebody vote yes or no on something or, like, there’s layers to and I think we don’t even know what that really means. In the grand scheme of things. We’re seeing it sort of develop in real time.
Outro
alright, let’s bring it back now. Okay. I know we only have a few more minutes. So, what can we expect from Koop in the future? And from there, I also want you to let us know like, where can we find you? Where can we keep in touch? And we’ll wrap this thing up?
Natalia Murillo: Yeah, definitely. So, kind of summarizing all this points about creators, communities. Today, Koop is a place where you can bring yourself, your community, you can build a treasury, which we see as an ecosystem and network and you can use those, that treasury to back anything from content to software and proliferate not only your cultural resonance, but also the strength and ties through a bunch of the different tools we have, which are some of which we discussed today, from governance to NFT memberships, to some of the things that we’re building in the future. We’re launching a twitch product similar to some of the concepts that we see today, creators using to engage in a live forum setting like I said, how do we make it fun? If you’re interested in creating a fun experience with free community, you could check out Koop on Twitter, @Koop XYZ and then my personal Twitter Na0XM. But thank you so much, Adam, for having me on today and really excited about the future of the mint pod and the mint ecosystem.
I’m excited too, I’m excited for you. I’m a fan of what you guys are doing at Koop, so we’ll have to do this again soon. Natty, thank you so much for being a part of the season, for making the time and yeah, we’ll talk soon.
Natalia Murillo: Thank you.
