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Why Web3 Creator Tools & Platforms Must Build Towards Decentralization

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Mint Season 1 episode 3 features Jenil Thakker, CEO and Founder of Coinvise, who focuses on helping creators launch personal or community-owned social tokens on Ethereum. Coinvise is also Season 1’s sponsor and is helping make this podcast a reality. 

On this episode, Jenil and I discuss how to improve the UX/UI around minting, his mission for Coinvise on it becoming a decentralized Reddit for communities and creators, how to get started in web3 as a creator, how do you keep people in your community contributing long term, utility and value frameworks, why creator platforms must stay decentralized, 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: So let’s just get right into it. Give me a quick brief about yourself, your upbringing, how you got into crypto and kind of what you’re building right now.

Jenil Thakker: Sure. So I’m based out of India. I started like after I finished high school I moved, and I [Inaudible] And during that time, I really wanted to pursue a PhD in crypto economics. And so in my sophomore year, I applied for a research assistantship, but almost every professor in the CS department, and one of the professor’s got back to me, and we started working on ethereum. And that’s sort of how I got like accustomed to the space and got to learn more about it. So I started doing research. And we’ve worked on something called token reward protocol, which was later adopted by a company called zero chain, and we presented it at icnc 2019 at CES, and we worked on a few other protocols and mining pool security. Then, as we progress further, I really wanted to work on consensus protocol. So we messed around with dad for a little bit and sort of for fun just created our own. And as we move forward, after I graduated, I work again for zero chain. I was one of the early hires and they were sort of building a decentralised AWS, I worked briefly with them and a company called Luxo, which is working on digital fashion and tokenizing them. And they had a really interesting concept called the reversible Ico. And at the time, Icos were like no one as much as a scam, and I really wanted to work on making them better. So I got to work with Fabiana augustiner and got to learn about like, how he created the ERC 20 token standard, and what they were trying to build for consumer and social. That’s sort of where I got the inspiration for working in this space. And I think at the time, Roland rowdy were two platforms that were really deep involved in social tokens. But my idea was that if I want to build crypto and scale it to the next billion people I want to build for both a social network. And the main reason for that is like even after the quarantine, if you see the barrier to entry to create on the internet is starting to get lower or every year. And I think we’re only getting more lazier and just trying to be more on the internet, then do more conventional jobs. So keeping that in mind, I think it’s important that we migrate those people and give them an avenue for at least creators on the internet. I think the definition gets looser and looser, but just building a platform for them and see like how crypto can be beneficial for them. And that sort of the grain of time, we started building climbers, but in about November 2020. We started out as more like we’re all hackers and developers. So we were about four people. And we shipped out an initial version where anybody could create a token, it was all for free. Even today, it’s for free. And you could airdrop it to anyone on social media on just any platform really at the time. The idea was that we want to make interactions so simple that even grandma in Iowa can do it for you simply create a token. So that was fun. In about two weeks, we shipped it out. Today, the idea is that we’re trying to look more like a decentralised Reddit for communities and creators. And the train of thought is the same that we want to build these communities but aligned incentives and tokens are a great way to start that. And I think tokens and even NF T’s are some concepts that are easily digestible when you’re working with social networks. So that’s how we’re starting out. And eventually we’ll branch into 1000 critter dolls, which we can talk about later. But that’s sort of coin wise today and Rob running today on ethereum and polygon.

Adam Levy: Yeah, and so like you said the barrier to entry to become a creator is very low. People on tik tok are becoming influencers and gaining on hundreds of 1000s to millions of followers really, really quick. Right? All the attention is slowly shifting over there for millennials and Gen Z. But what is it about? Creators that like prompted you to go into this because it’s a very unique problem to get into, right? There’s defy, there’s daos there’s all these different moving parts within crypto. Why creators?

Jenil Thakker: Right? So I think creators are probably one of the more people that have like adopted technology as a form of work. And the whole idea there was like, when you date back to Instagram or YouTube, like having those microtransactions when you’re doing a live stream or something. The idea there was that How about we merge work and social together? Right. And the idea that fascinated me was like our definition of what a creator is, is maybe limited to like someone doing streams on YouTube or being an influencer on one of these, like, Instagram or Tiktok platforms. But it’s much more than that. If you have a bit of community if you have like a set of people that share the same idea as you and if you’re continuously creating value for them. I think that’s when you could also be like, labelled as a creator. And I think at some point, everybody’s going to be a creator. We just don’t see that as it yet but I think those are the people that are much more willing to adopt crypto and trying to navigate base to like monetizing, and finding new ways to like, level up every single time. So I think that was like the community that I really wanted to work with.

Adam Levy: yeah, a lot of people that get into crypto early on, you’re referencing how you kind of got started in college, working all these different projects, trying to get involved. I too, also started in school, and I think it’s a lot of people shit on going to school, but I think it’s a lot of work. Early ideas get spread, and experimentation gets done on a very intimate level with other students. And I think you guys come at a unique time where we are seeing these new social platforms come in and about, and people are, like I said, becoming influencers left and right, building their own communities. But they primarily live on these web 2.5 platforms, right. A lot of influencers. They’re building their audience across Instagram, tik tok, Snapchat all these platforms, but how do you monetize them? Right? And I guess that’s where kind of like coin bias comes into the picture creating in tokenizing. Community. So tell me more about coin vies? The vision behind that, how did that idea kind of come about? And where are you seeing the market that prompted that type of birth?

Jenil Thakker: I know. Sure. So I’ll probably give an example. Like my mobile personal example that I got really fascinated by was like, I’ll take back to college, when I used to, like, believe it or not, I used to pay my bills, like rent and food to get coin and get really, for I enjoyed gitcoin, because you could just write code, solve issues, or do any kind of work there that like fits your skill set, you can just browse through like an infinite scroll of like, all these issues, or, you know, things that fit your palette, and then you work on them. On GitHub, you put your code, someone verifies that, and you get paid directly in your Meta mask. And I survived to college to that. So I think that was like, What idea Dan was like, What if we could bring that experience to like, creators, and we could create like a social platform where monetization could look like that where funds are instantly no metamask. So the idea there was that we don’t want to just feel tools, but we want to create an experience around that where we can make those interactions simple. And monetizing shouldn’t be as difficult and really like when you look at that two platforms to take huge cuts, like how do we eliminate, eliminate that and keep it like a transparent process between them and their community? So I think that was something exciting. But even more so than monetizing, like how do you keep these followers or like your community long term and align them long term? How do you keep them consistently contributing value long term? So I think those are problems that were very interesting for me to solve. And I think Bitcoin was one of the earliest examples that did add that value to me. So coin wise, I mean, the idea there was that we want to make those interactions once a token is minted, let’s say, Adam, you have an idea and you create a Dao and you create a token around it. How do you interact around those tokens? How do you create, let’s say, a reward where your community can earn by contributing some value, and you can in turn, get some more coordination and engagement for your own like and grow it over time. So I think those interactions are really like something that I love.

Adam Levy: So let’s talk more about these interactions. Because when people are talking about utility, it’s really based off those level of interactions, right, from what I’m understanding. So when you’re talking about creating value, starting a Dao decentralised, autonomous organisation, for a problem that someone’s trying to solve a community, whatever it may be, how do you guys empower creators with utility with developing at least more utility?

Jenil Thakker: Right? So there’s two aspects of it, I think, more short term that if you look at it, there’s this sort of loyalty points approach where a lot of these utility are earning and spending, right. And we’ve seen like plenty of use cases there, and plenty of platforms building great products around that sort of use case. And the second approach is sort of ownership. And the whole idea of crypto like in my head, when I started out, or my professor always used to tell me that a crypto isn’t about money. It’s about decentralising power. How do you how do you decentralise power from one entity to like many people, and I think tokens is a form of ownership and seeing more examples, there is much more of a novel idea and useful idea long term. So and I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re part of, you know, like a music group, and a music creator creates an album and they do an NFT drum. If you have some form of ownership in a fraction of that NFT and you get royalties in perpetuity when that energy gets, you know successful, then you’re sort of sort of aligned that that success because you’ve invested in that. So I think those kinds of ownership mechanisms are very interesting to explore more into, but more short term, we’re going to see more like VR and fun use cases where you’ll see Okay, do this to earn x do that to earn x or spend it to like get an early access to this or tokenized access. I think those are some use cases. After dinner, I’d say more primitive and early.

Adam Levy: Yeah, you know, one example that comes to mind just because you’re referencing music is, you know, there’s all these like Sound Cloud artists that just throw shit online. And they hope to get some streams and listens and build an audience. And what if there was a way to kind of prove your early contribution as an as a fan, by getting some form of participation and ft for saying I was one I was within the first 1000 listeners of this album? So imagine you could do that with any mainstream artists that’s big today, when they’re just getting started and play that ego card. So is that is that kind of like the utility that you’re talking about, like creating proof of, of not necessarily ownership behind that, but proof of participation, proof of engagement? Is that what you’re referring to?

Jenil Thakker: Right, so I think, every single interaction that, you know, you can map up on the internet, it has a value to it. And when you when you bring in tokens, and you you’re essentially giving that sort of value, and giving it more sort of significance and making it more profound. So in this specific example, let’s say a music artist does an album and as an NFT and gives like fractional shares to people, early adopters of that NFT or like early adopters of LIKE, SHARE owners or whoever contributed early on, they could split the revenue long term, and everybody gets like a transparent equal proportion of that NFT or like, make that situation reverse where people pull in some kind of, you know, eat as a collateral and do it on a bonding curve, where long term as in when it gets more successful, the price of it increases and ultimately benefits the community as a whole. Which again, falls under the umbrella of like how to build positive sum game mechanisms. So I think those kinds of use cases we’ll see propagate like long term.

Adam Levy: so a lot of the main use cases that I see at the moment from social token communities is these discord channels, and using tools like collab land, and now you guys have something that you pushed out through coin buys, right, that competes with collab land to an extent that allows for communities to create essentially tokenized communities and kind of like, stake your time, your financial assets, beyond likes, clicks, subscribes and shares to be more ingrained in, in a more intimate setting. But those are like the main use cases I see right now. Like you can’t really reward people and automate the process for necessarily, let’s say, listening to this podcast episode, right? Like, like let’s pay, get contributed for listening or get contribute contributed for liking and proving that someone like, where does that kind of come into play? And you guys trying to tackle those problems too?

Jenil Thakker: Right. So I think, well, first of all, like, I think club Lang, like build a great product. And the whole point of like, just different products in the space is like more towards eliminating competition than bringing competition. So I think that a lot of these tools, like more long term are going to be ended up working together in some way, shape, or form than competing against. But I think, let’s say if we’re doing like something like a podcast or a stream, and how do you like sort of put value towards it, like more broadly speaking, and I think tokenized podcasts or tokenized, audio rooms, or any form of like, interaction that we have is doable, like entities are pretty restricted at this point to artwork and digital collectibles. But really, what NFC stands for is uniquely verifiable information. And I emphasise on the verifiability part, because let’s if we’re doing this podcast, and this is a form of content that you meant it, or it’s happening on chain, and there’s a copy of it, that other people can verify that at this given time, this NFT or this podcast to cuase. You could have you could pre programme it like programmatically distribute shares or programmatically distribute ownership of this entity to people. And then as in when you make revenue on this specific, assuming in this particular case, you’re making revenue in crypto. So since a lot of this is programmatic, as in when you make that revenue in crypto, it’s automatically distributed to the people who initially contributed. And again, this is verifiable. So anybody can see an on chain that okay, this podcast is full of content was minted as an NFT. So I think the whole point is like, in about two spaces, you cannot really verify that you cannot really put in value to that. But with crypto you can there’s a source of truth that you can point to Okay, this happened.

Adam Levy: Yeah. So from more of these like web 2.0 2.5 platforms, do you see them integrating social tokens and NF T’s somehow into the infrastructure? And because they already built mass audiences and mass adoption, like Instagram first comes to mind like, right or Tik Tok? Do you imagine these platforms integrating these web 3.0 tools to empower the creators?

Jenil Thakker: I don’t think so. I think it’s going to start off like much more in the sense that either they peg it to their own currency, or maybe start with eat, or something more mainstream that can cater to a larger audience. But I think that structure we’re already seeing through microtransactions on every single platform, even I think they’re all doing the theatrical right now. But it’s only a matter of times, they’re going to pop it as crypto gets more mainstream, and everybody starts to use it. So I think that’s, that’s going to happen, but it’s just going to take, I can’t put a timeline to it, but it’s just going to take a while to get there. I think more short term, what I see is that web two and red three platforms are going to have to work together, then separately.

Adam Levy: Yeah, it’s funny, because now I read a rumour that Instagram is working on launching their own NFT platform to some extent, or integrating it somehow, I don’t know the full details. But that comes shortly after a bunch of these new NFT platforms saying they’re the Instagram killer, quote, unquote, you know, yeah. So once social tokens see more mass adoption and validation, I’m sure those conversations are probably going to take place if they’re not already happening right now. But if a creator that’s listening right now, okay, whether they be a tik tok creator, YouTube creator, whatever they may be on any platform, how do they actually get started? Like, where? Where do they start looking for if they want to take their communities, quote, unquote, public or build tokens around them, and create better incentivization structures? To keep their audiences engaged? How do you get started?

Jenil Thakker: Sure. So I think the easiest step to do is you can create like, either a discord or telegram server, I think a lot of these communities start there, you can create an you can just sign into coin lives by just connecting your wallet and you can create a token pretty easily, you can create it on a bonding curve, or you can create it on a fixed supply. MDF instructions on what that looks like by creating a token is really simple to find wise. And if you want to build incentives around those tokens, like creating rewards bounties, or doing tokenized, access, or even do NFT as ownership, I think those kinds of tools are comes integrated with that. And I think on top of that, if they want to extend that sort of community, they could even create a Dao and create a treasury by like getting started with the little wallet that they can share with their core team. And I think dollhouse doll house is also a great place to create a Dao if you’re looking to create a Dao and sort of extended more onto battery. There’s a service called snapshot where you can do governance and do proposals, which is quite interesting. So you can slowly start to migrate all of these activities. But I think the first step could be really simple. Create a discord create an idea have some people join in. And once you do have people join in, you can just go to coin wise and quickly create a token, and start messing around with incentives like you know, Senator reward, like, hey, join my Discord server for 50 tokens, or like, hey, join this event, and aren’t 25 tokens sort of scale, like coordination, collaboration between these people. And once that’s fun, you can sort of extend it to ownership, which is, which is also amazing.

Adam Levy: So let’s break this down. So come up with an idea, find a group of people, or at least more than one person, or at least two people that are excited about it, put them in a discord, go to coin buys, launch a token, create some form of formal documentation, like a one sheet or have a white paper explaining the problem you’re trying to solve. And then essentially, mint tokens, create a snapshot. So you can write proposals and vote on those proposals on the direction of the goal of the group. And then slowly get more people to join. That’s what I’m kind of hearing from you.

Jenil Thakker: Yeah, slowly get more people to join. I think one of the things that I tell everybody is like have a clear use case of what your community looks like, and how you plan on like, leveraging these tools to grow your community rather than reverse engineering it, like doing a token first and then reverse engineering, engineering somehow to like, make it work. I think the right way to do it is first figure out the use case, see how that token can leverage you can leverage that token to like scale collaboration, because that’s what it does. It skills engagement. Because when you have incentives for people to join, or people to do anything for a community, and you have incentive to do that for them, I think that’s like a mutually beneficial game, but like, decide what that incentives and that could be as simple as, join our discord to like earn 50 tokens, or a contribution on our GitHub on the source code. And if you do it correctly, earn 100 tokens. I think those kinds of use cases, define it could be really helpful and then see, like, how that could help and then have like proposals, and see how as a community, you can make decisions on snapshot. And once that’s done, then you can slowly transition into it. Now,

Adam Levy: What are the more unique use cases you’ve seen kind of executed with social tokens? Daos. And all the buzzwords we kind of mentioned, but mainly for like social tokens. What are the more unique use cases you’ve seen being implemented?

Jenil Thakker: Sure. So as of today, we’ve seen obviously at wb where initially they started pulling sort of these tokens that created a community where they could get access to a lot of these premium subscriptions. I think that was a pretty unique use case. One of the other use cases that forefront up unfortunately, here, there’s sort of an even global coin research, whether they’re sort of trying to crowdsource content and like, promote this idea of data mining, or decentralised journalism, where if you’re good at writing, if you do good research and analysis in the space, you can write an article for them, and you can earn X amount of FF or GCR tokens. I think that was also a really interesting use case. Because after that, we saw a lot of people sort of started writing on that platform, and they started making more and more content. So it’s not just one creator creating content, its multiple creators at that point. And as a collective, they’re creating content instead of just one person. So that was a really novel use case using those tokens. Then there were events. A lot of people were doing token gated events, but I’m actually more interested in not limiting access, but increasing access, right? How do you have more people attend these events and collaborate so you can earn tokens by attending those events? So I think those are some use cases that we see primitively, but I’m more interested to see like how we could use NF T’s as fractional ownership, or tokens as a means of ownership. You could not I mean, at some point, you could even give salaries or stipends to your people and just have all of these activities on chain.

Adam Levy: So just jumping back into global coin research and forefront. Okay, so global coin research is one that your name dropped when we were having private conversations on how they’re kind of using social tokens but more in the form of a security. If I’m understanding correctly to redistribute profits back to its contributors, is that what you were you were referencing?

Jenil Thakker: So it was it wasn’t way too well, they weren’t doing an intro to security, I think they were doing it in phases, where the initial phase was that if you write on their platform, you can earn X amount of these tokens, then they pull liquidity, so the token is worth something. Again, the token doesn’t have to be worth something, it could be purely utility, as long as it does hold some value in it. But in that, in that particular case, they did pull liquidity and the token at some value. So whoever the contributor was, can instantly swap it against swap if they wanted to. So I think that was their phase one. I think the phase two is more like community on where ownership of GCR is getting more and more decentralised.

Adam Levy: Think about it for many users are becoming so powerful, you know, if there’s all these communities, incentivizing users attention in collaboration, the user can start getting greedy with who they give their attention and collaborations to an extent, like every community is paying them with tokens, rewarding them, that they could easily cash out or swap or depending on whatever that contracts aren’t, right. But if users keep getting paid and incentivized and rewarded for participating in the communities that they love, do you think that these users like now I’m like really thinking right, because obviously, this is not happening right now, it’s the other way around, where platforms are using users, users are going to be using platforms, I feel like it’s like an entire shift that’s happening, you think it’s getting, we’re going to get to a point where users are going to get super stingy with their time and their resources on, on who they contribute to and in, and so on, and so forth. You know what I mean?

Jenil Thakker: Right, and again, we’re going back to this idea of like, bringing social with work together, right, and you’re doing sort of this gig economy where you’re just tipped in these tokens, and you have like an entire portfolio of these either like valuable coins or invaluable coins that may or may not be worth something. So you’re going to start to see like, Okay, how do I segregate my time and use my skillset wisely to optimise for, you know, just like doing the most amount of participation for the things that I value the most. And I think that that’s the distinction between a like web two, or like the attention economy, and three, which is sort of the ownership economy. And wildlife, these sort of gig economy are like, getting paid in crypto, a lot of these tokens are like primitive use cases, I think more long term approach is going to be like something like what good coin did when I was a good coin user, and you could go claim on their website, if you were a user for a good point for a while. And you could use that sort of ownership, more so than participating on what the direction of that community is going to be. And based on your stake, that sort of, you know, direction matters. And you can sort of have that sort of say in where this project goes. So I think that’s going to be much more fun long term. So if you’re doing a lot of like attention to like, maybe communities that don’t matter to you. I think that wouldn’t be as valuable but we’re going to start to see more time management there.

Adam Levy: Yeah. Every day I hear more and more and more people betting on this greater vision, where the greater economy coincides with web 3.0. How does that kind of look like at Coin base? How are you guys thinking about this? I know you guys are building tools and resources to empower these creators, but like, what, what’s the vision beyond that?

Jenil Thakker: So we want to space where we can sort of also give the sort of idea of this discoverability. So one of the things that Instagram or just about two partners weren’t able to give is that if I’m not Adam Levy fan, I’m not interacting. But you know, other fans that are out there, I’m not interacting with other like, let’s say creators that are out there, like there’s no communication between an Adam Levy fan and let’s say, a Ted Cruz fan. What we’re sort of also providing is that we’re building a social experience where you just browse through a lot of these doubts, or create our communities and see what they’re up to and see, you know, if you can join them, and by joining those styles, or community if you can add value to them. And ultimately, what we want to see is like, let’s say I, as a user, I have some form of ownership and multiple doubts, and doubts really act as communities or like start-ups. So having that sort of ownership and just scrolling through coin licensee, let me see, like what f wb is up to let me see what GCR is up to and just scroll to like, what they’re putting out as, let’s say rewards or incentives. It’s great to explore those. So that’s worked for me. And it’s a social experience, because I get to be a part of these communities intimately and have ownership in that. So it’s starting out with social tokens, NF T’s. But my, the one thing that I say to everyone is going to look like a social network for daps, where people don’t know it yet. But when you do a token, and when you do an NF T and when you move slowly to unchained activities, you’re really acting as a doll. So ultimately, as a community as a whole, we want to get to a place where we can get out of other smaller dolls. So that’s the grand vision of coin wise, where we can build like a social experience where you can explore all of these styles and be a part of them. If you if you have an idea yourself quickly create a token someone tell have some interactions and incentives built around it, manager Treasury, and sort of building experience where, you know, we march this idea of social network?

Adam Levy: Yeah. And what when I hear people talking about web 3.0, and it’s merged with the creator economy, a lot of people tend to have conversations around the creators themselves, they don’t really talk about the platforms and their users per se, to, to an extent. I mean, there’s, there’s talks about that, but I’m kind of coming to you from the point of view right now that users are building such data rich profiles of themselves on the block chain, by participating in all these different vows in these communities. And these organisations, that companies like Facebook, I imagine, might even be incentivizing users to use that data by paying them with their own native token to an extent, you know what I’m saying here, like I’m participating in this music Dao, but I’m also participating in this food Dao. I’m also participating in these organisations, these communities. And based off what the tokens that I hold, based off the interactions that I’ve had these you’re essentially able to build, even though it’s anonymous, you’re able to build a profile of what this quote unquote, individual looks like that then platforms and companies can leverage for their own, I guess, benefit, right? And at the same time, use that data and incentivize users to allow them to use that data, like are these conversations you’re seeing people have right now? Or is that just too far too far advanced and thinking?

Jenil Thakker: Yeah, I think in terms of like privacy, and having that sort of user data, a lot of the whole idea of like, sort of pseudo anonymity is that I don’t know Adam Levine, all I know is Adam, eat online. And whatever you portray your identity on, let’s say, a social network that runs on web three to coin wise, Showtime or any other social network, I see that persona of you. Now that may or may not represent what’s what the real view is, in the real world, I don’t even know what Adam really looks like, I don’t even know what that person is. And even if that data is, you know, sort of an accurate representation of what you are as a person, or how you work, what your persona or your digital identity that you’ve created, where the only thing I know, is ethereum address, and we sort of understand bytes and bits of these people. I think that’s much more interesting to me. And I think that’s the purest form of like, you know, privacy where you just disclose information that is required, enough to like communicate with other people, but not enough for someone to manipulate you.

Adam Levy: You know, I’m thinking about this more from the perspective now. I’m a musician myself, I have been playing the drums for however long I can remember. And before I got into crypto, all I’ve been doing was music. And now that I’m seeing more of these artists get into the picture. That’s what really excites me and joining more DAOs that surround around that surround the musicians, the artists that I love most like I can’t wait till I don’t know Tame Impala releases a Dao and I could participate and contribute somehow and earn Paula tokens, you know, and but even from that point of view, if and I don’t know why I chose Tame Impala, right, but let’s say Tame Impala has a Dao, there’s a bunch of uses in that Dao, assuming those users also participate in other DAOs. And other organisations to Impala could start leveraging that data to create more intimate experiences and cross collaborate with other dals. To create one big hole, juicy community kind of thing. Overlaps with a bunch of different interests. It’s so interesting how this will kind of play out. So let me let me ask you this, why, why is tokenizing more of like an emerging critical element for these individuals and communities? Like I’m hearing more and more people talk about we got to tokenize the world and every single element of the world needs to be tokenized. Why is that such like a prevailing factor, I guess, from a macro perspective of what’s happening in the world.

Jenil Thakker: Again, I mean, we attribute a lot of value to money, I think. And tokens are a way of representing value. So let’s say you’re forming and to have someone that takes attendance in [Inaudible], and they reach out to you and that you guys want to gel together and create a token. I think the token somehow represents a value. And I think that’s what we’ve been attributed to, like, if you date back to history, we started out with shells, there was barter system, and money sort of evolved into what we have today. But that’s sort of how we sort of structure. Even people socially, like even in the social hierarchy, we, we sort of see people inferior or superior. And that’s how we associate power to, I think tokenizing, what really done that three is a decentralised is power in the sense that you sort of have control over your own economic structure instead of US dollar, where, let’s say 25% of the total supply was minted in the last six months, you have no control over that you have no control over how those markets are regulated. Whereas if you do a token, you can sort of have access or have control over how you’re regulated create that economic structure that fits best on what your community’s future lies instead of like treating the entire world as one just community or having these like smaller silos that can have like a token that serves that specific purpose. And then they could use claret something like coin buys, where a lot of these vowels can have inner communication and overlap where people can discover and that sort of communication layer is built on top of it. But that’s just how I see why tokenization has been an emerging trend, apart from just like, gimmicky use cases that we’ve seen, for sure.

Adam Levy: So I know you guys are working on a doubt project right now a DAOs product through Coinbase. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jenil Thakker: Right, so it’s less of a product or more the idea that we want point mice to act like a doll. And we want to build an ecosystem where a lot of these dials are just a social network for 1000 Simply put, on like a decentralised Reddit where we’re not really a centralised team building this, we want an entire community that we’ve built to have access over and have a lot of these dials have some form of stake in what we’re building. And vice versa. We want to work with a lot of these dads that are created on coin wise, and sort of continue to add value to them. So I think long term, what we’re trying to see is coin by starting to turn as a DAOs, which is what a lot of these companies that were forming today in crypto are going to act as launch our own token, and leverage that token to incentivize more collaboration, but a lot of the sales. So that’s the idea of Bitcoin lies and like I said, ultimately, NF T’s and social tokens have too much attention. I think they do hold like value. And they’re sort of heart of what a Dao is. But ultimately, you want to be at a place where you make that interaction so seamless, that you can create a summon, a Dao, create a token and have these interactions done seamlessly. So the learning curve on getting into battery is really short.

Adam Levy: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I’m thinking this more from the perspective of Okay, so let’s say in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know, let’s say we have, give me an example of a top crater that like you guys want to work with or that you’re working with right now.

Jenil Thakker: I’ll give you an example of someone right now. So forefront is one of our really like favourite dials that just sort of built out and is one of our successful interactions or more in terms of NFT. We’ve worked with a comedian called Mark Normand, who did their nit, but I think forefront is one of the DAOs that are doing curation. So the first step was again tools. Then the second step was like web three networks. The third step was probably dals. But there’s another layer where there’s a lot Seems like Yep, or forefront that are doing curation and talking about a lot of this next layer or next generation of like tokenization, or read through protocols. And I think that’s one of our favourite creators because we try to invest in creators that are upcoming, then someone who’s already established. People are concentrating, and sort of have potential in future and forefront is one of them that we truly see and, you know, work with is Does that answer your question?

Adam Levy: So yeah, so if Justin Bieber came to you right now and said, I want to start a doubt for his for his him and his audience. So that would be a less attractive type of individual to work with, you guys want to work with more of these premature type of creators and build and grow with them.

Jenil Thakker: I mean, it’s not the Justin Bieber wouldn’t be the ideal user, what we’re trying to do is, the whole point of like, leveraging crypto is to uplift and open access to Brian Weiss did not have access to. It’s like, we’d love to have Justin Bieber. But how do we create value for Justin Bieber, like Justin Bieber himself is, has quite a strong community. And I think that would translate very well on chain. But I think it’s much more fun to work with creators that are up and coming and sort of uplift them and see how crypto can get them from zero to one really quickly, rather than like, getting taken down by Instagram, taking huge cuts defeated by the algorithm, none of that.

Adam Levy: So let’s play on this a little bit more, because I think there’s a distinction between a premature creator and an already established creator. And I think a misconception is that to have a successful social token Tao, you have to have some type of following. I don’t think that’s necessarily true right? Now, but these creators that are established that have millions of followers, they’re also to some extent a prime opportunity, because they’re more web 2.0 2.5, native rather than 3.0. Native, right. And it’s more of empowering when these tools like it, could you see that as a value is it within itself rather than looking? You know, because like, a lot of people are talking about mass adoption, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All these buzzwords that, and energy that a lot of is just conversations, but there’s a lack of education, a lack of tools and resources to make it easier to onboard a non-crypto user and make them more crypto native. And I think I think that’s a lot more of the opportunity is to like the network effect that can come with that with adopting a new platform, and educating an existing fan base of millions, right on how to become more crypto. I think there’s a lot of value in that you don’t think so?

Jenil Thakker: Yeah, 100%. And I think from that perspective, just looking at it, I think that’s also like a really interesting way of looking at it in the sense that if let’s say you have a pre-established creator, I think that would create much more network effects. And we’ve been sort of pushing in both of those directions. I think it’s been fun working with someone who’s either a celebrity and has a huge audience, or someone who’s up and coming and then seeing them flourish and be successful. I think it’s it. I mean, we do put a lot of emphasis on followers. But I think what’s more important is how you engage with them, and how you build a community around. And if you do have that, I think then you can create a lot of more network effects than you would otherwise if it’s just like a following where it’s just one direction of value, like it should really be bi directional. And crypto enables that. So how do we solve a problem for Justin Bieber in this community? Right? And we’re all friends, when you see these craters on stage, they say that I am who I am, because of my fans, yeah, and, and deep down, they also know that without those fans, they’d be nothing. So 100%, I do think that this could be really useful like in just like specific terms of claim lies, it could be useful to this established creators, but also like, from a just grand scheme of things. Looking at it from a higher level, I think it’s, we’ll see a lot more like I think UFC did a token recently on socios. And we’ve already seen, like, a lot of these bigger companies, or individuals or celebrities do their own token, and launch them and have successful interactions around them. I think that’s going to create a lot of, you know, early days of YouTube back in 2008 2008 2009. It was like that, like, there were a few people creating and then that caused those network effects tend to everybody to be a YouTuber.

Adam Levy: But now everybody wants to be a YouTuber, and YouTube is screwing their creators and freaking taken away majority of their, of their payments in their, in whatever that comes with that. But yeah, crazy. And I think that’s like, that’s the problem that social tokens are trying to solve to an extent is creating better monetization schemes for these creators that are getting basically fucked by these platforms while they’re building an amazing audience. And those platforms have provided them with tools to gain those followers and those fans, they do a shitty job with helping them monetize them. And I think that’s, that’s the beauty behind what we’re about to experience. But let me I brought this up earlier. The misconceptions Behind social tokens, because all this stuff is super fresh and quite frankly, very overwhelming to someone who may not be as crypto native, what have you seen some of the misconceptions being around social tokens? And I guess people like wanting to get started, like, what are some that you’ve seen?

Jenil Thakker: You know, a speculation, making it all about prices. I think when you see it, you see things like tokens, when the core aspect of it is either, you know, to scale collaboration and coordination and sort of represent ownership, and you sort of sort of map that to financial value and try to speculate on it. I think that’s something that, you know, gets skewed down the line. And not, I mean, not to mention, a lot of these communities down the line aren’t going to be their own sort of cities or silos, or even billion dollar like dolls. And that’s awesome. But I just think that just looking at it from like this monitor mess lens of just price and discovery. I think that’s something that is a misconception, I think it’s much more than we’ve seen a lot of good implementation of vows, that don’t actually have a value at all, like they don’t have a US dollar value, or they’re not sort of created a pair with ease, they’re just different token and the value is that it creates scarcity or some kind of thing that you know, it filters out. So that’s a huge misconception that I’d like to solve. And the second is that mean coins and check coins, I think that’s been sort of the narrative in the past few months. And yes, we’re going to see a lot of those should coins and mean coins being made. But I think that’s not the whole picture, though. Like people, whenever you talk about social tokens, people generally attribute it to meme coins or ship coins. But as we see more like successful dolls, or tokens being created and interactions around them, that narrative is going to change. But I think the biggest misconception is it maps to this. And that’s not the whole picture. So I probably say those are the two things that focus too much.

Adam Levy: Let’s dive deeper into the first one really quick, because I think that’s what attracts users in the beginning, because they see a number on the screen that fluctuates, that’s tied to their brand, and their community. But how does a tokens value get, I guess, issued in place that launch? Like why did why do some tokens trade at 20 cents or two cents a token rather, our others trade at like $1 to $2 $3? At the Genesis like we’re where does that come from? How do people determine that? Because I’m sure that’s a lot of like, one of the major questions these people are like thinking about like, are you just creating value out of thin air?

Jenil Thakker: Right. So typically, what, what happens is when you do create a token, to give it some kind of value, you can go to something like uniswap, or kurtzweil, if you’re on a different chain, or banker or balancer or any sort of automated market maker where you can see it, but some capital. And that sort of capital determines the value of a token, if it’s mentioned on a bonding curve, we can start bonding curve itself acts as its own automated market maker. So if you pull some liquidity, and create a pair of with each, or put it as collateral that creates some seed value of that token itself. And then going forward from that, how uniswap prices, its tokens, based on like the supply and demand of that token itself, how its traded long term, the value of it gets determined, and that sort of makes the difference of it being at $1, or $10. And it’s not necessarily that the token creator has to list the token on one of these exchanges and start trading it. Anybody can do it for that matter. And they can list a token and seed it, but some capital, and that capital also like you decide if you want to, you know, put 0.1 eat for 110 eat or whatever, that’s capitalism create a pair. But generally, if you want to seed it, but some value, you can do it on uniswap, which is probably one of the most use platforms today. Where you can put some kind of eat and create a pair of it’s a particular ERC 20 token or a social token. And that means something called liquidity tokens. And again, going back to investing, you can also have a piece and LPs get point 3% of every transaction if they’re, they’ve like invested in the liquidity pool initially. So there’s some incentive there. But that’s sort of automated market makers work. That’s what gives value.

Adam Levy: Got you. So when people are creating or when creators are initially building and strategizing the launch of their token, what kind of factors do you guys use to guide these individuals who, let’s say are brand new to the space to determine their launch based off a bonding curve, or more of a traditional linear curve.

Jenil Thakker: So there’s so on coin rise, there’s typically two options. Like starting from the beginning, you when you create a token, you could either created as a scarce asset on a fixed supply, which is 10 million tokens, which is, which is pretty conventional. And then on a bonding curve, which is something that we were trying to recommend and more than universal. When you’re sort of trying to act up the Dow in perpetuity, you don’t want to really cap those. We add more liquidity and bins at the time. And then even when you do have that bonding curve done, you can like change the slope and adjusted over time, which is really cool. If you think about it. So that’s, that’s an idea that we just introduced very recently. But to answer your question,

Adam Levy: can you repeat that last part, it cut out for a minute, you said, so when you’re when you’re let’s say, You’re minting a 10 million tokens you were talking about.

Jenil Thakker: So either you can do it on a fixed supply, which Okay, are or something that we recommend highly to most people that we work with, which we recently introduced was a bonding curve, where you can sort of adjust. So the way when it comes to like put simply work is that as the distribution grows, or as the token is distributed more the price of it increases over time. And you define the function in that. So you can sort of define the function in a way where it goes linearly or in a sigmoid function or logarithmic mickley. So I think that’s going to be much more interesting, because then you can create the token that fits much more like your use case than just having one size fits all. Like so far, we’ve seen only like fixed supply use cases where just as 10 million tokens, I think it’s going to be really interesting when people start minting tokens on a bonding curve. And the way it works is that when you do have a bonding curve, you can select how much capital you want to seed it with. So let’s say you can do 0.18, and then you can mint those tokens, and that’s going to seed it with some value, which sort of acts as its own automated market maker. And then going forward, you can adjust it. So now it’s not growing linearly, you can do it in a sigmoid function, which is really cool, because that really fits with like specific use cases.

Adam Levy: Yeah, there’s so many. And this is why I feel like it’s such a great opportunity for creators and for individuals, communities to jump on board and to tokenize their communities. But while the tools in the process, you guys make it super easy, you just go on coin vines, you can mint tokens instantly. Right? It’s still a lot of process and thinking and strategizing on how to utilise that token. What the dynamic and I guess the economics behind that token should be and yeah, it’s interesting to see how this will kind of play out down the line.

Jenil Thakker: Yeah, I think I mean, one of the things that it does is like its lower lowers the barrier of entry. And like one of the things that as a team and coin wise, we’re trying to do is like, create more discovery for a lot of the successful creators that created their tokens. So if you’re someone who is maybe clueless about how you want to do this process, or it seems intimidating at first, you can just explore a lot of these people that created their own token and see how they’re using it and how they’re utilizing it. You can just its pretty transparent, you can just scroll through a list of rewards or explore to people that created their own token and just explore for like, really fun beer or useful use cases. And I think the second thing was that how do you get that initial like, so some of the normal ideas that were either setting up rewards or bounties, but the second was, again, ownership. And to get to a point where you can do all of that I think crowdfunding or investment in public goods was something that we’re trying to push for. And I think that’s something that we’re trying to bring to coin buys in the next few weeks, is that we want to be able to have these communities crowdfund easily from their community, either for straight staking or NFT, fractionalization. And I think that’s a really novel concept that plays into this idea of you can either invest into the community that you find it successful, and going forward, you can get paid either in royalties in perpetuity, or you can earn like, or you can like, essentially own a percentage of it. So I think I think crowdfunding is going to help a lot of these creators get started, and get those funds to, you know, Kickstarter, career bears, and that too, that’s something that’s very difficult to do, like, how do you get funded? How do you raise funds from institutional VCs?

Adam Levy: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I’m excited to see how this kind of plays out and the level of experimentation between bonding curves and token supplies and I’d be curious to see like, how are these how more of these mainstream creators individuals communities, however, however, we want to call that effect, there are so many terms, utilize this to empower their fans and power their audience, and do so in a way where on one end of the spectrum, because there are two users to this, right, there are the investors who are going to be speculating on the token price and trading these creator communities, right. And then there are the fans who are actually going to be buying into this stuff and leveraging its utility for what it has to offer, right? And while a lot of creators are treating this from the membership loyalty rewards point of view of access, right? On the other side, you have the people who are going to be basically trading these people like, like a human stock market, a community stock market to an extent, right. I’m like thinking Black Mirror right now. Okay. Is it ethical? Is it ethical? Like you can’t ditch that point of view of experimenting with social tokens and all that stuff, right? Do you think that’s ethical? How do you think people will kind of respond to that [Inaudible]?

Jenil Thakker: So just coming to the point in terms of investing, it’s either you can you can bet on institutions, or you can bet on bet on individuals. And I’d rather bet on someone like, let’s say, let’s say Elon Musk, right? For an example, just out of the blue, I’m just picking one name. And what if I could just bet on like, whatever this guy does, and I think a great example of that, is Alex master page. When he did his token, people were just betting on his career and his success going forward. And they get they got, like, basically a say, and what he’s going to do next. And that was like a really fun experiment, which was like more like a human Ico. And I think that taught like, it seems dystopian, but it’s not really as dystopian because we’ve seen a lot of people do it. And like I said, in the beginning, a lot of these days are individuals act like companies, where they have people helping them, they have like, they’re creating some value on the internet. And what they’re really are, is they’re acting like start-ups or companies that in their very early stages, and it’s completely okay to have their own token and sort of, you know, regulated as long as it’s done properly, as long as it’s done in a way where you can create positive some games, like one of the misconceptions that have been trying to solve is that it’s one of the use cases or utility that I’ve seen that shouldn’t be promoted as much as gated access. Like it’s, it’s not really about getting access, it’s about opening access, like it should be the reverse where you didn’t pay to attend an event as I can already do that for Fiat. But with crypto, I should get paid to attend an event. And there’s, there’s a great service called kickback that already does that. And if you don’t attend one, it sort of splits the revenue by all the people who attended actually, which is really cool. So I think a lot of those kinds of like use cases or utility that we’re going to see unclaimed lies are going to be really interesting to see going forward. But I don’t think that’s where dystopian that individuals are going to act like companies or start-ups, or even Daos.

Adam Levy: So you think that all these token-based discord channels, they’re actually doing it wrong? To an extent depending on the use case, depending on the use case, obviously, fragile benefits a unique community. But like, if musicians actors?

Jenil Thakker: go ahead and been doing it wrong, but it’s not really like, like, you could do the same thing with Fiat or like, like, how are you using crypto to create like a positive-sum game are mutually beneficial a game? Right? Like the core idea of Rick remember how to both parties win? Like how does everyone sort of getting transparent, truthfully, like equal access and freedom, right? And if you’re sort of getting access, you can already do that, by the way, with only fans and like other like similar platforms where it’s not really hard to do, like we’ve seen subscription models, like, what they really are is just filter mechanisms, and that what gated access is, so it’s not really a wrong approach. It’s just not a unique approach that are like you’re not just using crypto to leverage something even more powerful. So I think using crypto to increase access, or increased collaboration is what I’m interested in. And while we still provide that sort of feature, but I think I’m more interested in seeing that over getting access.

Adam Levy: Interesting. Yeah, that’s a good perspective to have. Because a lot of these communities that I’ve seen come into play, they have their discord channels, and I keep referencing discord because it’s the more plausible use case that I’ve kind of seen come to life. And they limit interaction and create exclusivity and FOMO by creating these token gated experiences, and I think if you’re trying to create a new type of fan base, and target your more hard-core fans, where you can provide them a financial stake in what you’re doing, I think both can exist. And in a creator’s community, I think there can be the token gated experience, and I think there could be the very open and loose and flexible type of Thank you for coming here as an airdrop type of experience.

Jenil Thakker: Yeah, it’s, it’s like what you’re looking for. Are you looking? Let’s say I have to give like a specific example. I look into your community, like how are you incentivizing collaboration, right? Like how are you like making that engagement goes from, like, 100 people doing something for you and you’re doing something for them to 1000 people working together. Do gaining access to the best way to get to 1000 people now are using is the best way to get 1000 people. And let’s look be specifically Adam has a really novel idea that helps a lot of people, how does he get to 1000 people faster getting access or increasing. So I think we’re going to see a lot of that in one click coexist. And we’re going to like really successful interactions like f wb. And it’s always nice to see those. But I think like six months from now, we’re going to see like, a lot more like, investment in public goods, kind of like novel ideas, bear sort of opens up access, and everything is transparent, no, FOMO get in right away, and, you know, come join us.

Adam Levy: But then if it’s easy to join, and it’s there is no FOMO, then will people want it? Because if everyone can get it, and there’s no exclusivity to it, there’s no quote unquote, scarcity. Will it make it appealing for people? And now we’re just talking general sense, right? We’re talking strategy. You know what I mean?

Jenil Thakker: Right? So I think, so we can talk about FOMO, FOMO can be like, you can still do far more and keep it relatively open. So let’s say I join a community, and it was like fairly easy to join, like, there was no barrier to access, right? Like, there was no like, you need to have X amount of tokens in your wallet to join this committee. Like none of that I joined it pretty easily. I think there could be FOMO on interaction, like, and I keep going back to good coin is because Good point, the way it works is that like, like, let’s say I could do a volunteer or reward for doing kind of some work, I can apply for it. And then multiple people can apply for it. And only one of them gets selected. Whoever is the best skilled at Sure. So you could still have FOMO but FOMO on interaction FOMO not unlike access.

Adam Levy: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Okay, final question. Okay. So, I want to talk to you about the stages of the internet’s development. Okay. So we had web 1.0, which was very read only type of experience that transition and gotten eaten alive by web 2.0. And now we got really beautiful interfaces, we were able to create online communities social interactions, we had these web 2.5 platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc., etc. And now we’re transitioning into web 3.0. Okay, because it’s building on top of the primitives of web 2.5. What do you think is going to one, eat web 3.0 alive, just like web 2.0, 1.0. Right. And then what might be its downfall, if any?

Jenil Thakker: I think so just taking a more philosophical approach or the IQ to destroy the board decreases by a point every year. And what retreat does is democratises access, but it also democratises disruption. So when everybody has equal power, or somewhat of a power or stake, it makes it easy to destroy it. So I think it’s sort of like a double edged sword when something is so powerful, and I think when you when you democrat democratising this, I think disruption is also like one thing that and we’ve already seen it, like if you’ve seen a lot of these exploits, where a lot of these protocols are been exploited programmatically by a lot of these hackers, that have figured out some more vulnerability where they either like, you know, sort of explored a protocol or even have more centralised access to it in the sense that they somehow find a way to get more stake into the game or more skin in the game, and make it more like a centralised game and sort of a decentralised game. I think those are some pitfalls that were taken down. But ultimately, I’m optimistic that, you know, the space or like that three years overall is going to survive, because just going back to like the genesis of crypto by some time fault tolerance, where you assume that a set of people are going to act irrationally. And, but there’s going to be more people and based on the mechanisms that we build, if we can incentivize good behaviour or bad behaviour. And what my professor likes to always say is you want to create a mechanism there. Make it more profitable to be a good actor than a bad actor. So I think overall, like long term, I’m more optimistic, but as soon as we design like the right incentives, like Adam is more incentivized to perform like a good actor, because that’s more profitable, then become a bad actor, because then you gain nothing from that. I think that’s like good design. And if as long as we design those kinds of protocols, really secure, I think we have a great future.

Adam Levy: It’s a good way to end off Jenil you’re the man, thank you for being on. You’re so sharp and so insightful. I really hope to have you on again, Thanks for being here.

Jenil Thakker: Really appreciate it, brother.

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Podcast Transcript

Using Social Tokens To Unlock Creator Merch, Music & More with JVCKJ of $PSTL

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast

Background

Mint Season 1 episode 2 features Jack Johnson, whose artist name is JVCKJ. He’s widely known as one-half of the multi-platinum pop duo Jack & Jack. He’s a creative force who earned a billion-plus streams, achieved multi-platinum records, and countless sold-out tours. He’s also the founder of PSTL aka Pastel coin – a gateway to building his vision for his creator economy. 

In this episode, we talk about his journey as an early internet personality on the once-popular social media platform Vine, his new single Money Memories, his vision for his personal token, why he’s so big on crypto, how $PSTL coin is empowering his fans, and towards the end, we start having a live brainstorming session on how we can create further utility behind $PSTL token.


Adam Levy: Jack, welcome man. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being on.

JVCKJ: That’s good Adam. Thanks for having me brother. Really appreciate it.

Adam Levy: Of course, man. How you feeling?

JVCKJ: Feeling good, man. It’s a beautiful day all right now top of the week, you know ready to get the week going? Got a lot of stuff in the works. So you know it’s summer’s here. It feels fantastic.

Adam Levy: Dude, we got a lot to cover. I know you got a lot of things coming up. You have a fire new single out called money memories. You have a new clothing line that’s about to come out called pstl. And even more so which is kind of like why you’re here you launched your own social token on cryptocurrency with the abbreviation of pstl tickers, PSTL. And, like, you’re very, I guess earlier, this space, one of many, I guess one of a few creators, at least that have kind of experimenting with this new space, that has really been a lot more for like, defy like decentralised finance, more traditional investment. And now you’re one of the few people who’s actually taking it and making it more creative and building communities around it. And I’m excited to have you on. So let’s just dive into Okay, I want to start with the basics. Tell me a little bit how you kind of got your start as a popular personality online. And then how that kind of transitioned into the music scene.

JVCKJ: Yeah, so me and my buddy Jacqueline ski, I think it was probably around junior year, summer, going into senior year, the app mine was a massive, you know, sensation at the time, eve3ryone and their mom was on there, you know, just consuming these six and a half second looping clips. And me and G were just very consistent. We made a lot of, you know, comedic sketches, a lot of, you know, music covers, and really, every single day would be uploading in some sort of facet. And it was crazy, you know, it just sort of exploded over the course of the next couple years. And we’re still in Omaha, Nebraska, actually, at this time. And we linked up with some local producers who saw some of our covers on there, they really wanted to get us in the studio making actual tracks. And so we ended up making our first four or five records we released just out there to our fans, you know, fully independently with our buddies, Travis and Turner Eakins, there were also two local kids who just reached out to us and it was great, we got a great response, it allowed us to, you know, come out to LA and link with bigger producers and just start to really kind of get our toes in the water in any way possible. And so, you know, we noticed once we got out here, the quality of the music is kept increasing. And now it’s at a point where we feel like the music is really is really caught up if not exceeded, you know, our following, which was, you know, it was a little difficult at first to be taken seriously with the stigma around us being like all these fine kids, you know, these social media kids, but at the end of the day, any artists you see coming into the forefront of the limelight these days, I think, has some sort of stake in social media and a lot of their a lot of their growth, especially now more than ever is due to social media due to eclipse going on due to something happening that, you know, put them into the ether space and just everybody can do their shit. That’s what’s so amazing about social media. And so I think over time, you know, with enough big records with enough like, you know, late night performances of worship performances, I think we really started breaking that stigma and showing people we were real artists. And so, yeah, now we’re sort of detaching from the hip, just trying to be a little less co-dependent on one another because you know, there’s so there’s certain things jeez into that I’m not into certain things I’m into that he’s not into. And musically, we thought it would be a good opportunity for us to really showcase what we can do as individuals as opposed to having to compromise in a sense on every record, you know, between his singing my rapping or whatever it may be. It’s been a very exciting The first single of my, my project, my jack j projects came out about I think, September last year, and so it’s been almost a year, probably eight to nine months, since we’ve kind of been on these independent journeys. But it’s been awesome man, you know, it’s been quite a journey. And it’s really, I think everything I’m a big believer in the butterfly effect. Everything that’s happened is has led me to this point, you know, sitting here talking to you. So it’s been a wild journey. It’s been very exciting.

Adam Levy: I love it, man. I’m curious though, cuz you have a very unique creative process. I remember I was on Vine just like everyone else. I remember seeing you and jack and jack. And alongside like the Nash Greer’s of the world that Cameron Dallas’s that whole, that whole crew that original like high pass you guys like we’re the oh geez. Right? Dude, high key that shoots high key, but I’m curious more about your creative process, because I know you’re not very big on genres. Right? So how do you how do you approach and decide, I guess what you’re going to spend your creative energy on?

JVCKJ: Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, I like to thank my favourite artists personally, are the artists who kind of, I think time and time again showcase their versatility don’t get stuck on the same sound in terms of music for sure. Don’t get stuck on the same sound and can kind of get outside of the box of what people want to put them in, you know, and can always change that box can always expand the edges in a sense. And so to me, like every record, I think the consistency between them when I put out music is, is my tone is like, you know, the way I sound, but I like I like having some slower record some more A B record some records where I’m purely singing some records where I’m purely rapping. To me, it’s about showcasing what you can do. Across the spectrum, you know, because then there’s going to be a record that could potentially hook in anybody from any, from any genre. It’s like, let’s say somebody loves r&b music, you know, I have some slower, you know, just guitar centric, like, records that. So the whole, the whole goal for me is sort of to cover the soundscape with my music, while still being consistent in terms of my tone in terms of my vocal delivery. Um, and yeah, I think I think I just want to be ever changing, ever evolving. I think that’s what any artist should aspire to be. Because, you know, the times of music are always changing, you know, people’s tastes are changing month by month, you know, it’s a quick, it’s a quick change, you know, out of nowhere, this punk rock kind of vibe came out, right? UK is in the youngbloods. And so it’s interesting, I’m just watching the landscape change in attempting to change with it, and also, more importantly, attempting to be on the forefront of the change, and be the one who spurs the change, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what I would say, my, my process is like, it can, it can start off with any given thing, it can be a beat, it can be a lyric, just like a creative bar that I have in my head that I want to base an entire song around. But um, in terms of the actual music, I always, the key thing for me is to showcase my versatility from record to record for sure.

Adam Levy: Yeah. And I like I scoped out your Insta page. And I think I was even a follower of yours, I might have been doing vine, or however the way their algorithm worked. But I remember also the creative process and kind of creating these videos and his content. And tying it to the music is also unique within itself. And that also, I feel like ties into your inspiration for launching your token, right? So how does that kind of like, kind of like melt together, like for the process of creating these really dope, unique videos that really play on comedy, right? You’re trying to create good energy, make people happy? And then also tag along this really sick music? And now you’re doing this token? Like, how does that kind of all synergize together?

JVCKJ: Yeah, it’s really kind of cool how it came about. So um, we ended up we had a conversation with the guys over at yellowheart, which they, they kind of onboard of the Creator coins, the creator coin, I guess, establishment on the rally network, which is really cool. What there’s about 130 creaters on there right now, I think I was probably one of the first like 60 or 70, I got in there pretty early. And essentially what we wanted to do was create this ecosystem within my PSTL World Within the jack j world where the people who really like our true supporters of me can get early access to things and can be incentivized to be coin holders in the past Dell coin. And so essentially, what’s what we’ve done with it is anytime we release a new single a new video, or we just want to do something exclusive for the fans, I know you mentioned we have the streetwear line coming out soon. So I’ll get to that in a second. But what we’d like to do is have some early access for anybody who’s a coin holder or PSTL coin holder. And so one of our biggest utilities is we have a subsection of my PSTL discord, where its coin hold its coin holder exclusive. And so if you are a coin holder, you get verified within that subsection of the discord. The night let’s say before I release a song all go on there with a group of people depending on how many are in there, I think it’s limited to like 25 people per subsection chat room in terms of the video calls. And so some nights if there’s 100 coin holders you want to be in there, I’ll do four separate rooms back to back to back and back. And all essentially preview them the song, let them cut their cameras on, get their first takes on it. It’s just a way for us to be more intimate with the people who really support us as creators. And, and it’s awesome because I think it a helps the coin in general you know, incentivizes people to buy the coin and, and to hold on to the coin More importantly, because we’re in this day and age where people are just looking for the quick flip. So you know, they’re, they’re doing all these mean coins and shit coins that just like, you know, they’re looking just a fucking excuse my language just to catch that I can just you know, cash out and it’s, it’s kind of a, it’s kind of like the anti-approach we’re trying to take, you know, we want this coin to be something that’s has longevity and it’s been great, you know, outside of like the actual increase that the coins value has had since release, I think the utility just becomes more and more fruitful with each release. And with each thing we’re doing and so over the streetwear line, we’re going to have an exclusivity period. Um, whether it’s a weekend or a full week, we haven’t quite gotten to the to the details of it, but we want to make sure your coin holders have first access to buy stuff before it sells out before um, before the general public has access to. If you’re a coin holder, we’re going to have a way to verify you through our Shopify website and make it so if you purchase you, you a have a chance to get more PSTL one. And you know, if you’re one of the early purchasers who has passed Oakland already you have a chance to get more PSTL Quinn and on top of that nobody can buy it when you buy it so you have everything and so whether it’s music, music videos streetwear any way that we can incentivize people to hold on to the coin and be a coin holder on the better and so yeah, it’s been great the growth in the community has been absolutely stunning. I’m starting to see people who like may not even know who I am just like you know putting money into the coin because they’ve seen its growth and seen the hype around it and it’s been awesome. You know, it’s been Very cool way to kind of create our own economy and his world right? And also utilise this this new this newfound cutting edge crypto space that you know not many people have tapped into yet so.

Adam Levy: Yeah, no, there’s so much to unpack there because you just talked about the utility behind the token, your inspiration behind you again, now, you’re actually building a community around and you’re able to basically centralise your more hard-core fans in a way and incentivize them and create more unique and intimate experiences for them. And also rewarding them along the way for the contribution and it’s a lot of what I kind of want to kind of dive deeper into, but how long have you been in crypto for? Like, what what’s the story behind that? How did you like, how’d you get into it? Because everyone has like, their unique story behind getting into the space?

JVCKJ: Of course, I was like, a very menial coin holder. And, you know, I had I had a little theory, I’m a little Bitcoin like, for, you know, the past couple years, I’m never really paid it, like too much mine, I was like, okay, like, I have friends who are telling me to go all in on this shit. And then I also have friends, like, my traditional Portfolio Manager, who’s back in Omaha, Nebraska, where I’m from, he’s always been, like, the biggest like naysayer against like, you know, like, he doesn’t trust crypto, because he works in a more traditional sense. And so it was kind of like, in my mind, I’m like, okay, I don’t know, if I’m fully sold on it yet. Um, and then I think really, within the last year, after seeing just the way that crypto has been moving in the belief of the people really just rising day by day, in the fact that I really think this could be the new currency, you know, across the world, whatever it may be, I think, whether every country has their own crypto, whether every, there’s something very interesting there because A is decentralised, which is very cool. You know, it doesn’t fluctuate based off of, you know, the price of the dollar or anything, it’s based, what I noticed is a lot of it is based off of the belief of the people, which I think is kind of the case with a lot of more traditional stocks in that sense. But yeah, the more the more hype, you can generate around something, which, what I’ve noticed is like, something I’m good at is generating hype, whether it be around a record, or around a video or a piece of content. Um, that’s sort of like how I started my career, you know, is just creating these viral moments and creating these, uh, these impactful clips in whatever medium they may, you know, come from, right. So with crypto, it felt like it was at this point where we see all these new coins coming out week by week, and it’s hard to know which ones to trust. So creating my own coin with an actual utility behind, it seemed like something really interesting. And that’s something that could really, just keep my fan base locked in and make them and make them double down on my coin, which, you know, I already believe in as you know, creator, but when you’re getting early access to stuff, and you’re and so I guess back to your question, How did my crypto journey start, um, honestly, through a lot of just like, a friends kind of like putting me on the game and, you know, learning me the process. And yeah, I feel like I didn’t really have too much of a grasp of it up until I made my Creator coin and realise, you know, how it was minted and, and started actually, you know, converting actual coins to one another through, you know, whether it be uniswap or metamask. And like, actually, like, creating my own profiles, and all these things, and learning the ins and outs, you know, I had to sit down for a few hours to figure out how to even do my first like, you know, metamask transference. So, it definitely was a process, but I think it was something that I had to be forced to learn to do via my own creator coin. And now I feel like I have a much better grasp on the space like definitely nowhere near an expert, you know, like, I, I’m probably like, you know, in the kindergarten phase in terms of crypto, whereas most people I think, are probably in you know, nursery school. So at least I have a little a little edge up on some people, but it’s been really exciting, man. And I think, you know, I’m looking to get way more into it. And then upcoming years, it’s just like a future for sure.

Adam Levy: No, you’re like, for sure the future, right, the fact that you’re already messing with uniswap you’re opening a metamask you’re transferring token from one point to another point. I guess my next question is why end up going with rally versus creating like your own, I guess eath based token and what do I mean by that right? Rally has a really easy way to onboard creators, mint tokens, like you said, but then you also experienced yourself like the other half of messing with uniswap opening up a Meta mask. Like why go through the rally route versus I guess the more traditional ERC-20 token or the traditional eath token you know.

JVCKJ: That’s a good question because you know, in order to like transfer any of these creator coins from rally you have to have like some grasp of, you know, how to go from, it was definitely a process because rally actually does this thing called the rewards programme where it incentivizes people who hold coins. And every week based on how, how many people are buying the coin, how much money is going into the coin, if you’re a coin holder based on whatever percentage of the entire pot that you own, you will get incentivized with more rally coins right? Every single week that you can a put back into the creator coin to keep supporting them more so or you know, you can cash them out. And so in order if you if you do want to cash out the rally coins, you have to I noticed you have to create a few other profiles on using these different applications. And so um, I think Rarely, I really liked the, just the look of the website, it was very clean. Um, and they, they seemed like they were the most interested in what I had to offer, you know, they really, they really took time to like, Listen to my vision, and everybody on the team like really, really thought that what I had to offer was something very interesting and something that we could incentivize. And so, um, yeah, it felt like science. Yeah, a partner who actually had more of a grasp and like me just trying to create my own ERC 20 token, you know, shot in the dark type shit. It seemed like they had a great platform and a great team that already could, you know, help me fill in the missing pieces that I didn’t quite understand yet at the time.

Adam Levy: Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. Obviously, these platforms that make it very easy for people to kind of get on boarded. And on the other end, they provide cool tools for their audiences to kind of create accounts and to use this tokens and whatnot. So when you were kind of pitching them your vision, what was that? Exactly? What were your goals behind doing something like this?

JVCKJ: Yeah, so um, to give you a little backstory on PSTL, in general, the whole brand is based off just, you know, I want to push the people who support me and people who may not even know me, and who just like happen to cross the brand in the internet space, wherever they may see it. Um, it’s an acronym, actually, it stands for progression always starts through experiencing life. And so to me, like the PSTL colours, like this, for example, like this PSTL pink, there’s sort of like the intermediary colour, the progressive state of any given colour, you know, let’s say like, just pure white is like 0% saturation. And then a full vivid like, thick, you know, pink, like a hot pink, is 100% saturation. This is sort of like in that 30 to 75th percentile in terms of saturation. So I like to view it as the progressive state of any given colours. So the colour waves, the branding, behind everything, the logo, it’s all in PSTL tones, which to me represent growth they represent, you know, you’re trying to push yourself every day, it’s our goal as humans to try and saturate our, our palette of life day by day, and try to get it as vivid as possible. But at the end of the day, there’s always room for improvement. So we are all PSTLs, we’re all ongoing works. And that’s sort of the whole mantra, and just theme behind PSTL. Um, and so I think that really caught their attention, because it seems like a seems like something that youth really need right now to you know, I mean, I think anybody needs it in general, but obviously, like, you know, with my fan base, and the people that I’m targeting more, so I’m in the mediums that I’m on, I’m definitely targeting the youth in my generation and generation beneath me, I think we live in this world where it’s so easy to fall into this funk of this, you know, I’m being a slave to technology, and just, and just like, you know, letting, letting your priorities and your goals go to the wayside, because there’s all this content, you can just consume. And I’ve even been in periods of my life where, like, you know, I, I feel like, I’m just wasting time and just like scrolling through content on my phone, and I’m like, What did I just do? You know, and so, the goal is, and of course, like, this is where, you know, I made my money and, you know, made my name was through this content. So like, I’m not knocking, content consumption and content creating, it’s just about finding a healthy balance and making sure you’re prioritising your goals over anything else, you know, especially in this day and age where it’s super easy to let yourself get side-tracked with all this stuff to consume all these video games, all these all these, all these content platforms. And yeah, the whole the whole theme behind that. And the whole pitch I had in talking to yellowheart. And rally was sort of just along those lines and just giving you my vision, and I think they were really interested in they, they helped to kind of find ways and give us some initial ideas on how we could utilise the coin and make it more incentive based for the for the real supporters in the real fans. But yeah, that’s like that’s the whole message behind the brand. And it’s something I’m really, really passionate about. And, you know, I have I have a grand goal for it, you know, PSTL records, I want to have, you know, the PSTL, I want to have my PSTL studios where each room in the studio is a different PSTL colour theme based on whatever mood you’re in that day. And it’s this is just the infancy of the vision, you know, the first half year nine months of division, and so I’m really excited to see what’s to come. But yeah, I think rally was really receptive to what I was what I was kind of putting out there. I think

Adam Levy: I think the beauty behind like using these platforms, now you have tik tok, and you get consumed by this, like limitless feed. And it’s one thing to create this content, but it’s also another thing to kind of create content with a unique message that aligns a group of people under a mission under values under morals, right, and then funnelling them into a more, I guess, widely accepted community where they can meet other like-minded people with that, and I think that’s what these social tokens do, right? They allow people to, to kind of one collect something that many other people who are like minded get to collect as well and to put them in an environment where they get interact and hang out in exchange messages, laughter whatever it is that they want to exchange with each other because now they have a financial stake in the brand right now they have a financial stake in what they’re doing. And it’s interesting to see how that’s kind of played out. What have you seen be the reactions from your from your community? Are they loving it? Were they sceptical? Well, tell me about that?

JVCKJ: Sure. Sure. I mean, a lot of my fans, you know, I’m around my age or younger, you know, a few older not too many, you know, but uh, at the end of the day, I think a lot of them kind of came in a little weary when I when I was when I announced the coin Especially with all these coins being promoted, which this is like, I feel like the polar opposite of all these. You see people putting up stories like in like all these influencers putting up stories and get this coin and it’s really only beneficial to them because, you know, they’re getting paid out in that coin and then they’re probably cashing out and you know, like, just pretty much cashing out on their fans, which is, I don’t know, it’s very sneaky to me. And so do it really quick.

Adam Levy: That’s what Kim Kardashian is literally doing, she posted something on her story with this like shit coin, and she’s like, they just burned half of their supply, you should go buy into it kind of thing.

JVCKJ:  Yeah. And then she like once it once it rises, you know, she’s probably just cashing out selling. And it’s interesting to me, because I have a few buddies who like I really trust in the crypto space. And I did one coin promotion. Um, and, you know, I really felt like I can trust them. And like, this coin was like, something that’s really going to come to fruition it had, it had a good, um, I think it had like a pretty good like, philanthropic, like utility behind it, I forget exactly what it was. But they’re like, trust me, man, trust me, like, I promise you and all your fans can make a lot of money off this. And, and so I promoted it. And it the coin was like, essentially non-existent within a few days, like it got rug pulled or whatever happened. And I just, I felt like an asshole. You know, I was like, if any of my fans did buy this, you know, hopefully didn’t put too much money into it. But like, that’s when I realised, you know, like, and then I start seeing all these stories from all my influencer friends. And I’m just sitting here like, Oh my god, you guys are just like playing, playing your fans for fools. And so even now I get, like, at least five or six messages every week, from friends of mine, like, do you want to promote this in exchange for some coin, or you want to promote this? And I’m just like, I just, I started, I got my own coin. Why would I especially that I’m like, you’re going to have my own coin to promote, and, you know, try to cultivate this kind of culture around? Why would I? Why would I be putting my time and energy into these coins that, you know, time and time again, have shown that they just don’t hold up? And they really have no merit.  And, and so, Wait, what was your original question that we did get a little side-tracked on.

Adam Levy: No, it’s just like, I guess, the community’s feedback behind doing something like this and you sharing that? Initially, you were kind of dabbling into crypto testing out the waters, you know, but now it’s different, because now you have something that unites people internally within your community. Right? Totally. And like in like, I guess, because of those rock pools, right, because of those weird experiences that people have a lot of my assumptions when now creators launch their own tokens is like, Oh, here we go. Another one, right. And even more, so now. They’re attaching their name to it. Right, like, so I but I guess you’re telling me that your audience actually really, they f**ks with it. Like, they liked it. They enjoyed it.

JVCKJ: Yeah, I think once they did their research, and the great thing about rally is they have you know, an FAQ section where like, if you don’t know what’s going on, in terms of like, you know, the creator coin space. Um, it’s a super simple like, two, three page read through that just answers all of your questions. And like, I think once I let my fans to that, that FAQ section on the website, and they actually did some research for themselves, because I would never tell anyone to invest without actually doing research yourself. You know, I can tell you, from my personal perspective, I believe in myself, so I believe in the coin, and I believe, you know, it’s going to stay on the rise for years to come. And there’s really no, no, no ceiling to it in my mind. Um, but of course, I want everyone to do their own research. And, you know, always tread lightly, and make sure make sure you trust what you’re doing. Right? Well, I think once fans actually like, got a grasp of what was going on. And, um, it’s interesting because like, I’m not like, the, the whole point of this is like not to, like, make people a tonne of money, which could be you know, a side thing, you know, that you can make money off of this, the coin has already risen, like, you know, 1000s of percentiles, which is like, besides the fact but I think once they saw my coin was actually rising in value. And on top of that, they were getting early access to everything, everything just kind of, I’m hitting from all angles. I think the fans really started to believe and, you know, the actual broader crypto network started to believe in PSTL coin, I saw people just like, just putting on unreal amounts of money into it. And I’m like, I don’t there’s no way I know this person who just put 10 grand into my coin. I don’t that’s one of my fans, you know what I’m saying? So, I don’t know, it’s interesting to see how like the broader crypto community has taken a liking to it. And on top of that, how my fans have really just, you know, gotten a lot of value out of it. I think.

Adam Levy: Yeah. Did you have any concerns or like questions? Or were you scared about anything prior to launching pstl, the token?

JVCKJ:  it’s a good question. I was pretty, I was pretty confident in what we were doing just because we had had many like, you know, previous conversations with everybody on the team and everybody who was behind it. Um, and, yeah, no, I feel like I was I was prepared, and I was ready, and I had to grasp what was going on. You know, I think if you would have asked me like, two months before I launch the coin, and like, it was just laid out to me, I probably would have been like, I don’t know if this is a good idea. I am, like literally, like, you know, two months prior, I really had such minimal crypto knowledge and so, um, yeah, I think I think all the conversations leading up and really kind of, you know, suppressed any fears I may have had, and I felt like I was very confident especially seeing the other people on their network, you know, big Twitch streamers Big Band, like, I think their first person was Portugal, the man the band Portugal demand and their coins at like 45 bucks right now like, type shit. It’s crazy. Yeah. And I was seeing all these creators on their growing their coins growing their kind of crypto expertise and their, I guess legitimacy in that in that sense. And it was very interesting to me because, you know, I’m, I’m all about what’s next. And this seemed like, the creator coin seems like what’s next? And since I’ve been on there, you know, they’ve doubled the amount of creators in the last like four or five months. And that’s only going to, you know, triple quadruple, you know, exponentially. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think I think all my fears were definitely, you know, kind of off to the wayside by the time we were ready for launch.

Adam Levy: Yeah, I think the most interesting part about this is, especially from your stories that you have such a grand following, you have such a unique audience, a lot of projects that launch in the crypto space, they typically start with nothing and build their way up to follow it right, you kind of take it from the other way around, you have your millions of followers, you have your passionate members in your in your community in your audience. And now you’re giving them a new means to kind of interact and engage with you on a more intimate level. And I think like, like you said, like the on boarding process is kind of difficult, but it sounds like the way you approached it referencing documentation. Were you were you doing any like guides or yourself or like Instagram lives or like, any form of content creation on your own and to kind of educate people. 

JVCKJ:  In terms of release?

Adam Levy:  Yeah.

JVCKJ: So essentially, the day we released it, I made like a minute long, kind of paraphrased version of like, where you can get the coin what it’s going to be used for, um, and we actually gave away a lot of free coins the first day, anybody who signed up, I think we had up to 200 people, and I think we filled out 200 slots within the hour. But, um, we said upon my announcement video, I’m like, Alright, first 100 people to sign up, we’re giving you 10 free PSTL coins. And this is when the coin was still at, like 40 cents. Like, you know, like, right when I hit the market and, and, you know, to those people, like even some of my friends, it’s funny, because like, I would tell them, I’m like, make a rally account, and I will send you some coin. And, you know, this is when the coin was at 40 cents. And like, when I started hitting like, eight bucks, they start hitting me back up, like I was like, I was like, Okay, now you just didn’t trust me. Hmm. But like, regardless, none of it’s about like the actual, you know, price point of the coin. To me, it’s about the utility of it at the end of the day. Yeah, so we did do like sort of like an onboarding video and told people how to get the coin, how to get free coin that first day if they wanted it. And it was good. I think it kind of eased some people’s nerves because like, if I just tweeted out a link, like, Yo go to my Creator coin, or like, you know, when people were all doing that BitClout thing, whatever that well, I don’t know. Like, what even was that? Was that like a?

Adam Levy: That was a really, really good social experiment. That was that got a lot of criticism for its execution because the criticism came in because people were allowed to send in their Bitcoin and swap it for bit cloud. Yeah. But they weren’t able to take out their Bitcoin, right? I don’t know where it’s at today. I haven’t used it since I remember when it came out that that weekend, there was a lot of talk about it. I was like, what do you mean Coin base ventures is behind it. The Winklevoss twins are behind it. A lot of these big known VCs that only back like unicorns and like top projects are back in the social experiment. All it is Dude, it’s just like a human stock market. Right? And your price is heavily fluctuated based off a very strict bonding curve, which basically means the more people that buy into it, the higher the price goes I like the larger the network effect the higher the price but it’s like steep right like that’s why you have Elon musk trading at like $80,000 or at least that’s what it was when I remember it. And all they did they just took like the top I guess top influencers on Twitter and tokenize them on their behalf and there’s a lot of like ethical ship behind it whatever but what it did do it allowed people to think about the space more critically and open conversations that otherwise weren’t happening right so I’ll give him that it showed people the potential that wait a minute like I can I can take my brand in my influence and attach a value number to it and wait a minute now I can also empower my fans with that like shit like there’s something here.

JVCKJ: They had like a feed almost like a Twitter like feed going to where the social media in a sense to you know.

Adam Levy: Yeah, it was like a decentralised Twitter that’s what it was.

JVCKJ: Honestly, I think I think if they made that interface like not look like it was made in like, you know, Microsoft Word just like normal asphalt, like it just looked like I think that’s what threw a lot of people off was just like how I guess not clean it really looked kind of looked like it was typed out in a note or something. But regardless Yeah, it was interesting because I noticed like a lot of these creators were on there but like they weren’t on there but their names were on there. So I was like, everyone’s like claim your profile claim your profile your coins already at this much or something. And then all my friends who haven’t claimed my profile I tweeted out tweeted out, I think so they could, you know, get the returns on, you know, the initial spike. But it was very interesting. Yeah. So but I guess outside of that, I was like, you know, all these people trying to get me to post these, these meme coins and, you know, these BitClouts, and I would just rather focus on something that I know as utility within my world. And I know I have a team of, you know, around that I can actually talk to this hands on that can answer any questions that I may have, you know, especially with me being in my infancy of my mike, a crypto mine, you know.

Adam Levy: No, it’s cool because like, now you have jack, you have all these people hitting you up to do all these promos and shit, right? And like, obviously, they get people’s stuff out to your audience. It has an effect. But I think about this space and correct me if I’m wrong, because you have a lot more experience in the influencer marketing side that, like, if someone wants to promote something with you right now, what didn’t you basically tell them, You want me to push your skincare product, you want me to push XYZ, buy 100,000 tokens and hold on to them. Be a core contributor, be a core member of my community, you believe in me, my audience you want to sell to them? If I can buy 100k worth of tokens, you know.

JVCKJ:  Really interesting. Bring that up, dude. Wow.

Adam Levy:  Right, so like, now you’re like reimagining what social influencer, marketing can be right? And now you’re creating…

JVCKJ:  In cash or like, or wiring me. You know, like, how many grand for a story post, say, Okay, I want you to put that how many grand directly into PSTL. Right? And now you do a brand deal. Entire community?

Adam Levy:  Yes.

JVCKJ:  And show me that you actually believe me as a person as opposed you just want my following. You know, that’s interesting. I think I need to start coming to some of these brands.

Adam Levy:  I’m telling you doing what you could do. Now, imagine, imagine you approach it from this point of view, you buy 100k tokens, because now you’re basically telling them like, okay, and I’m thinking out loud here, like we’re getting like creative session here. Alright. You get you get to the point of view, like they have a skincare product, whatever, let’s just use skincare for whatever reason, okay? jack, I want you to promote this product, you Tom by $50,000 with the tokens, and you do the post, you do the Instagram story, whatever you do the discord post, and then they’re like, now I can sell it now I can dump. So what you got to do, you got to be like, No, I’m locking you into a contract, you can only sell once you buy in every so often. But if you hold we can do more collabs together, right? We can do more engagements together. And now you’re building my community with me?

JVCKJ:  No, totally. Because that is the one kind of like fear that comes into my head. I’m like, you know, if these companies because right when they buy 50,000, the price rally fluctuates almost immediately. Like, if you refer if you like is all I’ll get weekly rewards. And I’ll put them back into PSTL the majority of every single time, it’s actually interesting, I want to talk to you about, we’re doing this really cool thing with the music where I’ll put about like 50 to 70% of my weekly rewards. So for anybody who doesn’t know what weekly rewards are, in terms of the rally network, they um, based on how active your coin is, that week, they will pump rally back into the community. So I think our biggest week, it was about I think like $35,000 with a rally that was pumped back into community. So based on how much of a percentage of the entire coin pot that you hold on you get it you get that back into your profile in terms of rally, so let’s say you own 1% of that 35,000 you know, you get 350 rally back into your back into your account that week, which is you know, depending what the price of rally is, can be 300 bucks can be you know, 450 bucks, right and I tell all my friends who get their weekly rewards that I’ve given coins to them, I just put it straight back into PSTL so we can keep this community growing and that’s what I try to tell my family to do. Um, so it incentivizes you as a coin holder but what’s really cool is we actually have set aside like a certain chunk of these rally rewards and with me being an independent artist um you know, we have expenses we got to pay for the street wear line up front for music videos, it’s all coming out of my pocket, you know, in some videos can that we’ve done a cab been upwards of like, you know, 10 to 12 grand and so what’s great about this is me being a majority coin holder Um, I’ll get a decent chunk of these rewards every week and we’ve been using that sort of as like our label budget in a sense so we’ve almost turned PSTL coin into like the label budget for the content that the fans who own PSTL coin get early access to its this kind of like this this awesome cycle that is allowing us to make the best content possible and incentivizing the fans to see that content early if they are coin holders themselves and you know, get exclusive access and whatever facet and so it’s this really interesting I don’t know if he’s even doing this.

Adam Levy:  Dude, you’re literally like you’re defining what it is to be a creator economy. Like it’s a buzzword that people like to plug and play and frickin talk about but that’s legit like a crater economy. That’s a lot of what kind of social tokens aim to do the fact that like, you can launch a token right? You can freak in go public quote, unquote, what’s the value? How are you creating circulation? Right? How are you incentivizing people to buy and spend right and create a flow of money? It’s, it’s great, I think and that’s why like, the whole impetus of this show is like to kind of cover these stories and to kind of share these unique ways that people are making businesses of themselves and their brands that extend beyond web to primitive Right, I think you’re on the cusp, you’re literally doing it.

JVCKJ:  Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s exciting, you know, it’s I feel like it’s, we’re on the forefront of something that a lot of creators could be using to their advantage very soon musicians, artists, really anybody in any sort of medium across the creative space. It’s Yeah, I want to kind of like, you know, almost be the guinea pig, the blueprint, and just like we’re trying this thing out, and it’s seeming to go really well. And it’s seeming to be the self-sustaining economy that we’re making. And it’s cool, you know, hopefully, we can eliminate the need for all these major labels to be swindling artists and you know, just taking kind of just taking control of their careers and absolutely, making a mockery of them in time. And not actually, you know, they’re, they’re in debt to them, as opposed to being in debt to them. Why not, you know, self-sustain your own economy, if you ask, you have a network of people who believe in you like this is this could be a way in the future to do it.

Adam Levy: I love it. Dude, I love it. Let me let me ask you, your community. How did you even know they wanted something like this?

JVCKJ: I don’t think I don’t think they knew they wanted something like this until it…

Adam Levy: Oh, so you’re just like, fuck it. Let’s just experiment here. Let’s just try something new.

JVCKJ: Yeah, I will say though I did always want to, like I was utilising my Twitch, which is cool. We actually have PSTL coin integrated into my twitch profile and your cool tip in PSTL coin, you can send it other people have via Twitch, it was kind of really, really cool integration. But I was getting fans early access to stuff on my streams. Um, and to me, I was like, what’s a better way to do this, instead of just giving everybody just like free open access, like, what’s a way to, like, you know, make it a little more exclusive. Instead of, you can just tune into my twitch for free, obviously, and just and watch this shit early. Um, it kind of eliminated like the appeal of like, Oh, I feel like I’m getting this and no one else is, you know. Um, and so as opposed to doing that, this coin seemed like the perfect way to do it, this this kind of marketplace and networks, you make the perfect place to do it. Because it really provided exclusivity to the people who wanted to take the time and learn about my coin and actually get my coin purchase my coin. And so that’s how I know people are actually, um, you know, somebody who’s really supportive of me if they’re, if they’re actually, you know, going out of their way to learn something that might be very foreign to them at first, you know? And so, yeah, that’s sort of how that all came about. Um, but yeah, I really didn’t know how they’re going to react. I just knew I wanted a better way to give fans exclusive content and, you know, just a way a way to get stuff early. And, yeah, we’re still we’re still trying to think of other ways that we can utilise the coin to you know, I feel like we’re just skimming the surface at this point with early access. Because early access, like that’s very easy, like it’s kind of the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about how to utilise creator coin. Yeah, but we’re trying to think more so about how we can get the fans involved. You know, we want to do something where we have our coin holders vote on let’s say, we have two music video treatments for the same song. And we only give access to the coin holders to view these two PDF treatments of the two documents and they vote on which music video we’re making, you know, or like stuff that makes them more invested in in the whole PSTL world and everything that we’re creating, you know.

Adam Levy: Golden dude, I think that’s like that’s the key right there. Like how do you create I guess more of this like Dao model right? Like where this this buzzword for those who don’t know, it’s like a term that’s roaming crypto Twitter, a lot of new projects are experimenting it basically decentralising ownership decentralising governance, putting the power into the hands of the people are making should happen, right. And giving them one a financial incentive. And I guess also, like, a creative incentive and like a non-equity own, like, stake kind of thing, right. And I think that’s, that’s, that’s definitely where it’s kind of, like, push it towards.

JVCKJ:  like, allow them to make decisions without like, necessarily, like owning any part of like, you know, me, but like, they still have, like, I guess, creative equity in a way where, like, they can help curate and make these decisions and help you know, like, whatever the vision is that the fans and like the real diehards, want to see is the one that we create based off of, you know, whichever way they vote on, let’s say, these two things. And yeah, there’s a million other things you’ve been talking about. Um, but yeah, we’re trying to figure out in the, in the upcoming months, how to really just find more utility for the coin and integrate it more and more so every, every single month and [Inaudible]

Adam Levy:  No, dude, its super exciting, because right now, okay, and I don’t I don’t want to show price. But I think its important factor of the PSTL community, and just kind of like talking about what that price means to you. Okay, so, right now, PSTL is currently trading at what, four $4.32 when I was drafting these questions, I that’s what the prices could have changed as around 303 supporters. What does that dollar number mean to you? Because when you started, I think I saw like back February 17. Like that’s when the token launched, I went all the way back to the history. And it’s done really, like relatively well. And if you were an old early holder, you’d have reaped a lot of those benefits of growing with the PSTL community. But what is that? What is that value mean to you as an individual as a creator, because I only bring this up and think about it because you’re tying a financial value to your name, right. So what does that mean to you?

JVCKJ:  Well, to me, the value is More, I guess symbolic than it is just like directly monetary, you know, like me being the majority coin holder of the coin, you know, I would never no matter what price PSTL gets to, I’m never going to sell my PSTL, because that’s just that takes the PSTL price. It’s just, that’s something I would never do. And so, um, to me like, it’s nothing I’m looking to make money off of, um, it’s more so it’s more so a symbolic value of like, how there are these people that are that are believing in me and like I think if they see the price go up, um, it’s sort of motivates them as a fan of mine. They’re like, okay, there’s something happening here. You know, what he’s doing with this, is on the increase, and it’s pretty crazy man like, yeah, I think we were at like, eight $8 something before like the big different crypto in general. Because I know, I know, if I’m not mistaken, rally is backed by the Ethereum network, and there’s a certain amount of rally embedded into each creator coin. Um, and so when you’re actually minted, like on the blog, they’re all like actual minted crypto’s they’re not like these, these weird third party, you know, like, really legitimate cryptos. So I think I think what the price really symbolises to me is just the growth of PSTL on the belief in PSTL and, and I think when other people see that price go up, you know, I think they, they’re more motivated to go harder for me as a fan to you know, as a supporter.

Adam Levy: Yeah, well, what happens jack, when the price goes down? How does your audience kind of reply to that and react? Do they react? Or is it more of like, you’re just in it, you’re part of the ride? Like, when you’re a part of a community, there’s always ups and downs, you know?

JVCKJ:  Yeah. And I’ve prefaced that to them a million times, like God wants you to buy this coin in hopes of, you know, just making a tonne of money, which, if they did cash out at this point, in, they got an early they have made a tonne of money, but like, that’s, like, I want you guys to hold on your coins, when you get your weekly rewards, put it back into PSTL, or you can use that as, like, let’s say, someone literally put in $10 in the infancy when was that 40 cents. Now it’s at $4. You know, they’re $10 is now $100. And then every week, they’re probably getting, you know, 20 or 30 bucks in rally. So like they’ve, they’ve already made their money back essentially, like rally incentives. But outside of that, it’s, I always preach to them, you know, we’re in this for the long run, we’re in this the whole this isn’t for any of us to make money. It’s for all of us to you know, grow, grow something special and curate a culture around this coin, you know, more so than just like, oh, quick money, grab quick money grab, like, Okay, I’m going to cash out this week, like, yeah, yeah, it’s easy. And it fluctuates. It can fluctuate very rapidly to you know, it’s the crypto, it can be half tomorrow, it could be quadruple tomorrow. It’s like, there’s really no talent.

Adam Levy: I think you’re, I think you’re on the dollar. And I think you’ll have both sides where, and we’ll get into this a little bit later. But you’ll have both sides where you have your fans love you. Everything that you do the content, you produce the music that you make, they love that about you. And then you’re also going to have the side of this speculators and traders who they see your social clout, right. And they want to trade that they see the PR, the good and bad PR that comes out on you. And you’re going to try to make trading decisions based off that. So I think, with this market, you’ll have both of those parties. But we’ll get into that later. Okay, I want to, I want to talk more about the value, okay? Because, again, anybody can create a coin, but the value comes from the utility that attaches to that token, the community that rides that’s a ride and die community around that token, right? How do you how do you approach the creative value and the utility behind your token? Like, is there some type of framework that you use, you kind of just look at what other people have? Or what you have coming up in the pipeline and ask, okay, how can I create unique experiences for my token holders, before more of these passive fans kind of get active to access to it, like how do you how do you approach that?

JVCKJ: Yeah, so I think the first step is we sort of scope out what’s on the near horizon, um, in terms of like releases in terms of projects coming out in whatever facet and then and then we sit down me my manager and the people I rally and we and we haven’t even added the craziest things we haven’t even added there’s like a utility like page on each crater coins like page and we haven’t actually added any specific like, things on there yet. Because usually, like, it’s something that I’ll announce on my ancillary social medias, I’m leading up to a release, like okay, coin holders Be ready, like we’re going to, we’re going to be doing something special for you. Um, but yeah, so basically, it all starts with us kind of scoping out what’s on the near horizon. And then let’s say we got a signal coming out in two weeks. Okay, how are we going to utilise the coin for that and we have a video coming out two weeks after that, how we can use the coin for that whether that’s them getting a say as like, oh, what little Easter egg Do you want to put in this video, you know, coin holders vote or, or you just being able to see the video before anybody else wants to see the video live on YouTube. Um, we sort of dissect it on a project a project basis, and we only use it for about, I think four or five things thus far. A couple songs, couple videos. Um, but yeah, it’s definitely a stretch, but that’s just kind of, you know, thinking about how we get creative and how, and that’s why I really want to start stepping out of just the Early Access kind of wave that we’re in.

Adam Levy: like one thing that I see that’s perfect for you just again, thinking out loud and brainstorming like a meet and greet, right, like an in person meet and greet that solely Dedicated to if you have 100 jack tokens, you know, and or if I’m doing a show in a concert 1000 like, if you’re holding 1000 tokens, I have reserved five spots for people for people to come backstage, right and raffle those like, even though it’s access, right, but it’s also like, extends beyond the digital world, the real world.

JVCKJ: Yeah. And we were even thinking with some shows potentially on the horizon some deals possibly on the table for some live shows, which is just so exciting now that, you know, this pandemic seems to be just on the taper, which is just amazing. I’ve been itching so badly to get back out there. But something where, you know, if you’re a coin holder, you can scan something at the at the merch shop, or the, I guess you could call the merch shop at the show, and you get a nice little fat discount of your coin holder, you know, or what, whatever we can do that can actually take away from just the digital early access component and, and you can actually get stuff in real life, we actually had this idea to this one, this one is really cool, which I think we’re going to do, we’re thinking of 3d printing, actual physical PSTL coins, um, and then shipping them to like a diehard fan and each of the major markets around the world. And then we have them hide it somewhere. And we haven’t had it somewhere, take a photo, and then like, send us the photo. And then we do this, essentially a scavenger hunt this PSTL scavenger hunt campaign around the major markets all across the world. Um, you know, we’re thinking maybe we do like just the 10, the 10 biggest markets in the world, and we hide the coin. And then we do this Twitter campaign where we send the photo out where like, the coin is in it, but like, you don’t know where it is, but it’s somewhere within the realm of that photo in that city. And so then, like, we have these people scrambling from city to city trying to find the coin, and if they find the coin, they get like, let’s say 500 PSTL coins, like just on the house, you know what I’m saying? Like just for my sheer I just send them to you. Fucking powerful. Just stuff that can make people who like aren’t even a fan of me or even know my stuff, I think could see this on Twitter, because Twitter is just such a like, you know, things can just blow up massively. And if we do it the right way people can see this on Twitter. And you know, check the price point of the coin. Oh, it’s at $5 Oh, 500. That’s 2500 bucks. If I go get that right now, you know, and the one thing we have to figure out is how do we make it so like, whoever finds it doesn’t just sell it? That’s why you know, we do want to keep it like kind of, I would I would appreciate like a die hard finding it and I think in the most cases they would you know, somebody who really is a fan of me would probably end up being the one who finds it. Um, but yeah, the one the one kind of like hygiene, there’s like avoiding the person who just finds it and instantly cashes out the PSTL off the price. A little bit. Um, but yeah, there’s we want to do more interesting, like you said, real life integrations that expand outside of the digital world because I mean, man, it’s, there’s a million ways to promote this that aren’t via the Internet.

Adam Levy: Check this out. Now that like concerts are coming back to life, you being a dope ass performer, though best musician, probably going to be doing more music festivals and shit LED screens everywhere your fans are in the crowd, you can put up QR codes and reward them for coming and checking out your set. And you airdrop them and you reward them tokens, right? For being there physically for spending money on a ticket and coming to watch you taking the time out of the day. Thank you. Here’s 100 tokens.

JVCKJ:  That’s actually a genius idea, man. Think about that.

Adam Levy: That’s powerful.

JVCKJ: Hey, Jonathan, I know you’re watching this make sure.

Adam Levy: Yeah, dude, this is this is like, you know, a lot of people, so much fun. A lot of people get lost in the token price. But there’s so many cool things that you can do in in communities and incentives and rewards you can build around this stuff that it just takes, you just got to know your community, got to know what they want, what they love doing what they love about you. And now reward them for participating, rewarding them for streaming, reward them for tweeting, reward them for doing all this shit for being active members of community. And I guess that kind of comes into play where, you know, you’re trying to bridge out of the access, there’s a whole another category of rewards, right, just for participating. And you’re seeing a lot of people do the gated discords. Right. But now you’re starting to see that shift more is like, okay, like, I don’t want people just to feel like they’re spending and they’re spending, they’re spending and they’re spending like, how can I give? Yeah, let me get back. And I think that’s totally like, like, I could see that come to light 100% I’m like thinking out loud here. But I could come to life.

JVCKJ: You have a lot of great ideas on this stuff, like stuff that I really have not even thought about until you brought it up. But it’s exciting because yeah, it’s I’d never want people to feel like you know, they have to spend money to support me. So I want them to always be away if you don’t have money on hand. You know, if you’re dead broke, and you’re just like a struggling college student, but you like who I am in the message I bring and just everything around my brand. I want there to be a way that you can still, you know, gain for me not just through my content, but you know, like a way that I can possibly put some money in your pocket. Who knows, you know, if you it can be something as simple as you know, I’ll pick three random winners who tweet out the hashtag in my new music video to win you know, 50 PSTL coins and then like, any way that I can, you know, find a way to give back to the people who have been supporting me and actually put me in this position. Undeniably, the better.

Adam Levy: Here’s another idea now that you’re bringing that up like a lot of projects in crypto, a lot of projects in crypto that have billions of dollars under management. They’ve now started these Dao grants, basically, token holders get to vote on where the money that’s in the Treasury that’s actually dedicated to funding community initiatives, how that’s spent in empowering the community. Imagine there was a jack Treasury, right? Where you had you had some type of forum where your fans can fill out and they basically say, like, why am a jack fan how long I’ve been a fan for, I don’t necessarily have the financial means to get access into this network, maybe there’s a grant that you that you have going that you can actually airdrop people just to get into that initial barrier of the discord channel, at least, you know, you know, and like, like doing it a very charitable way that shows that dude, I’m so for this community, if you don’t have the money, just share with me why you love being a part of it, I’ll fucking I’ll make you a part of it,

JVCKJ:  We’ll get you in there. I’ll expedite this lunch. Yeah, totally. And that’s really like, where we want to go with it, though. Like the whole Treasury thing. We’re like, there’s this pot of, it could even be like with the rally rewards that that I have, personally, like, we can make that like an open pot. And the fans can decide what we do with that. Because at the end of the day, that’s just like, essentially, our labour budget, and we want to make the content that the fans want to see, you know, we want to make stuff the fans want to see we don’t want to just in sometimes, you know, I want to make executive decisions. I’m like, I think this needs something in the people might not even know they want it yet. But like, once they see it come to life, you know, based off like what I see in my head, I know they’re going to be appreciative of it. But there can definitely be something where we’re like, we set a good chunk of all this aside, and this is the money for the fans to literally get together and decide what they want to do with it. We could even have moderators within you know, the discord. That’s, that’s a talking about what to do with this Treasury pot, the people with access, and they can create votes, they can create, um, you know, essentially, they come up, I don’t even have to be in there, you know, they can. And then they’re like, Alright, we got something for you. We designated $5,000 of this to creating, um, you know, we want sweat shorts for your next…

Adam Levy: Whatever may be like anything that they’re excited about, just empower them and create a community for them to share and get excited about it with others.

JVCKJ: Totally, man. It’s awesome. Because like, it’s, we’ve only been doing this for, I think about four months since our coin came on the market came on the rally network and, and so it’s crazy how like, it’s just it still feels like we’ve been doing it for so long. Just because like there’s something going on with it every day. I feel like whether it’s just like, you know, us having a call with the people there or what’s next and how we can use the coin next. It feels like it’s been we’ve been doing this forever, even though it’s really in reality only been like four months since PSTL coin has been on the rally network. And so yeah, man, there’s just so much so much potential for it to grow and so much, so many just cool things we can do with it. And it’s it really excites me even just thinking about it right now.

Adam Levy: Yeah, no, I hear you, man, I hear you so much shit going on. All right, I only got a few more questions for you. I want to be respectful of your time. All right. So I guess, look, you’re obviously categorised as like an early pioneer in social tokens. You’re an early adopter, your fans are early adopters. Okay, you obviously that you understand the vision behind where this could be? What do you imagine the future of social tokens kind of looking like and evolving over the next five to 10 years?

JVCKJ: That’s a great question. That’s a really good question. I see, I see the majority of creators having some sort of whether they call it a token, wherever they end up calling it something that like, lives in this space, that that, like, I see everybody having their own economy, in some sense, within the crypto world, you know what I’m saying? And, and I think people are going to realise if you aren’t doing that, like in five years from now, it’s almost going to be like shooting yourself in the foot. You know, it’s hard to tell just because, like, the way the landscape is ever changing, just like so, so rapidly, but based off what I’m doing, you know, I think, I think it’s like, if you have a tattoo and fan base, and you’re not utilising something in the space, um, it seems kind of like, you know, almost idiotic to me. And I don’t want to like, you know, people obviously, there’s still very few in the world and we’re not quite there yet. But, um, even being one of the early adopters of the critical ones in the rally network, it’s like I based off what I’ve seen in the benefit I’ve gotten from it my fans have gotten from it, it seems like a no brainer to me, I think the majority of creators will and should have some sort of coin some sort of currency that keeps their fans culturally locked in together and, you know, gives them like a space to help them out, you know, and receive back and give back and it’s, it’s sort of like an I scratch your back, you scratch mine community, which is what I think a lot of these artists are missing. You know, they’re, they’re kind of separated behind this barrier of like, you know, a lot of people aren’t even into social media and don’t even interact with their fans too much. And people still love their art. But this is a way that I feel like people can feel like they’re, they’re on board with you without necessarily having the get a like on your, like, you know, have to have to get a response from the commenter there was still a way that like, they feel like they can be fully involved in your process. Without um, you know, if you’re not a social media person, and that gives you anxiety and you don’t want to be responding to messages all day. You know, I love it. Responding to my fans, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people just aren’t that into that. And I totally get it. It’s not for everybody. Um, but this is a way that I feel like they can still feel fully involved in your creative process and what you’re doing, and feel like they’re actually making decisions alongside with you, as opposed just waiting, as opposed to just waiting for your decisions to be made, and then see what happens, you know, so yeah, 10 years, we’re going to see a lot more, I think majority of artists will have some sort of currency within their world and the brands are trying to create, you know.

Adam Levy: Yeah, I love that. All right, final question. So, are you familiar with black mirror?

JVCKJ: Very familiar, Yeah.

Adam Levy:  Okay. So, you know, like, it’s coming to a point where, and I asked everybody this question, I always end up with this question, okay. It gets to a point where you’re, you’re approaching a world that everybody’s going to have, or at least a lot of these influencers, creators, musicians are going to have $1 tag associated with their price with their personality with their character, right. And right now, a lot of people in society, we I think we can both agree, kind of argue your value, argue your sense of worth, based off how many followers you have, right, your influence, essentially, do you think we’re going to end up shifting to a world where you’ll still have your follower account, but what people put a preface more on is what you’re trading at, for example, jack is trading at $30. But Justin Bieber’s trading at $100, you know, more jack is trading at $100 in JB was trading at $25. Is jack more valuable than Justin Bieber?

JVCKJ:  That’s super interesting. It kind of reminds me of that, that specific episode where everyone has like their star ranking. And like, you know, you remember that episode where like, you have like your societal star ranking, and like, you don’t have access to certain things in society. Like you can’t even go to the grocery store. If your star ranking is like a three, much more much darker. You know, this is a more like, I guess, like a beneficial flip on it. But I think that it really is crazy. Like right now in this day and age, people are so caught up in their followers, it’s rare to find somebody who doesn’t even have social media A and then B, I feel like kids will literally be ostracised because they just don’t have enough followers, like in school and shit. And it’s very sad, it’s like, people put a lot of value on what you’re doing in front of the scenes and not behind the scenes. And I think I think that’s got to change eventually, you know, people are going to realise some of the most successful people, like, have no followers and are just sitting here behind the scenes and the utility, like their token or their value, like you’re saying, $25, $30, whatever it may be, can be high based on what they do behind the scenes. And I think that’s what’s great about these coins is, is my buddy Joey, he actually, he works with this company called give power and they’re coming, they’re coming out this coin called thirst coin, or the thirst, the thirst token. And it’s like 20% of all proceeds are going to be going to donating clean water and getting clean water to people in Africa and, and setting up systems and, and so I think the people who are doing more like philanthropic stuff, and not just generating following a buzz on the internet, um, I think should have a chance and should have the ability even if they don’t have a following to have their value be just the same as a beaver is you know, and so, hopefully, hopefully we don’t live in this follower driven world where I’ve been, you know, trying to not even focus on like, growing like, of course I want to grow followers and like it’s great because that’s like how I started and that’s like, you know, where my fans come from, but like I’m just I’m just trying to get a lot more hands on with my actual business behind the scenes and set myself up for you know, behind the scenes success as opposed to just on screen success because I love I love being hands on with all my phone calls. I’m I told my manager Jonathan I’m like, I want to be on every phone call. I don’t want you know, just to have stuff be done for me without me knowing what’s going on. And I think the people who are who are proactive in that sense and not just in terms of growing followers and making content a lot of the people with the most followers make Loki the worst content in my personal opinion, like literally regurgitated bullshit that just like anybody can make and they’re just catering to like this kind of Brittany’s audience and I don’t think those people’s value should be as high as the ones who you know work in the shadows and might have like, you know, let’s say 100,000 followers but like every one of those people really appreciate their artistic merit and appreciates what they bring to the table as opposed to just you know, making the most umbrella general content that the relatable stuff Yeah, so I think I think hopefully we get to a world where I’m where and Bieber is not even one of them because he makes great content and he has a great following right well those are no I only I only bring him up obviously because you definitely bring him up in that sense yeah, I think I think the people who are just as important society behind the scenes on should you know have a similar price point in terms of this this hypothetical price on people’s [Inaudible].

Adam Levy: like cuz like this shits like creating a public like, in a sense from how people understand markets, like a human stock market to an extent right a brand, a creator, a community stock market, essentially, and to see, like, just like you open your Robin Hood app and you see Apple, Microsoft, Tesla etc. Now you’re going to be seeing jack, you’re going to be seeing this person, this brand, this community.

JVCKJ: Headed man, for sure. And I think like, of course, if you have a following, there’ll be it’ll be much easier to utilise that. But I think what people fail to realise is, there’s so much more to having influence than just followers, you know, you can, you can literally not even be on social media and be one of the most influential people in the world. And I think that’s, you know, they think the only way for me to have you know, stronghold over an audience is to have a mass following. And that’s just, I don’t think that’s the case, you know, people are going to realise that real life matters just as much, I think we’re kind of going to have this correct this correcting and deciding, we’re like, followers have become the pinnacle, and the most important thing, all the brands are reaching out to the people with the biggest followers, and, you know, trying to get them on board, because that’s literally what runs the social space right now. And really, like the real world space right now, you just saw Logan, Paul box, Floyd Mayweather, because of how much he brings to the table in terms of his following, but I think we’re going to get to a point where, like, the anti-almost plays in more so than the, oh, you need to have followers. And I think there’s going to be this whole movement of people who are like, okay, you can have influence without having followers. And this is how you do it and, you know, work hard behind the scenes. And you don’t have to have everything fully overexposed on social media. And yeah, I would like to see the world to get more of more in balance in that sense. And hopefully, like those two people’s price points, who have the same amount of influence, but a very different following. They should be the same, you know, when that day does come.

Adam Levy: Its funny bring up first of all, I think that’s a great point of view. And I think I think you’re right, there’s a lot of people behind the scenes that don’t even have social followings that have done very, very, very well for themselves, and people have no idea who they are. And that also plays on the fact that like, people tend to be very anonymous online, especially on Twitter. Yeah, you have all these anonymous characters, etc. But the fact that you brought up Logan, Paul Mayweather right now just to entertain this thought, like I was at the fight, I was in Miami for the fight. Really, really? Yeah, really fun fight. It was the same week as a Bitcoin conference. So we said whatever we’ll go. But imagine if Logan Paul and Floyd Mayweather had their own tokens, right. And they like if they’re playing on the sports betting game like they are, they’re already trickling in that territory. You have barstool sports and all these other prediction markets kind of making bets on who will win. Will he walk out with Jake Paul, what song well, he played, imagine you can start making these bets in their native tokens. Because right now, all these bets, Logan, Paul and Floyd Mayweather, they don’t see any of that, right. But if they’re if they’re making bets in their native tokens, and they’re staking their tokens, or making bets accordingly, making decisions and assumption assumptions based on what’s going to happen using their native token using their social currency, you’ve introduced a whole new game.

JVCKJ:  That’s crazy, because then essentially, you could like, I mean, let’s say all let’s say Logan won that fight. Yeah, he has a token, all his fans bet his token. However much if they when they get double, let’s say, or whatever the line was, let’s say.

Adam Levy: You know, he tells him this. He’s like, if I win, I’m throwing a party that only token holders can get into.

JVCKJ:  Wow, that’s crazy.

Adam Levy: And now there’s a huge purchase that demands the price goes up like crazy, right? And now he’s doing a priority with all of his, like stakeholders, and they’re celebrating popping champagne doing their thing. And they’re all equally invested equally, quote unquote, right, but they’re all invested.

JVCKJ:  It wasn’t as low as when it was there win.

Adam Levy: Exactly, that’s crazy.

JVCKJ:  Yeah, cuz I wonder like, you can’t, like, I have like about 130,000 coin volume, like on my on my, like, that’s my cap. Yeah, that can be that can fluctuate based off, you know, people are putting money into everyone, right? Like, if there if there becomes a system where you can bet your own, or you can bet crypto, you can bet your own creator token. I wonder will there be a way like that? Will that market cap instantly double like or let’s say, you know, I have like 40,000 of my tokens, like and I bet 40,000 of my tokens like does that introduce a new 40,000 on the market that are in my pocket and like anybody else who bet two doubles their shit two or like I wonder how that would work because that would make the caps go…

Adam Levy: So think about it like this. Look, I don’t know I don’t know how rallies like tokenomic works. But a lot of these other ERC 20 tokens I get launched and published on aetherium main net or on layer twos like Matic whatever they structure there tokenomics from all the ones that I’ve seen, that don’t rely on role or rally these centralised platforms with a limited supply 10 million tokens. Yeah, never going to be more okay. And based off of that, you can make your speculations you can fractionalize one token into a half a token etc. You can make your beds based off that right so the supply cap would be hit the top right and people would just kind of like the more demand pressure there is the higher the price kind of goes right. The bigger the network effect, the higher the price swings. And if they’re if you’re like trying to play more on the Logan, Paul Mayweather thing, and he basically launches his token. He says that if I when I knock him out whenever there’s a party for all my token holders, there is a cap of 10,000 people you need. To have at least 10 tokens, so he makes a supply very low, but for a high volume of people, right, or I don’t know, maybe I’m not even thinking about this, right, this should so early, like,

JVCKJ:  That’s what I’m saying. It’s interesting. There’s definitely going to be a way though, where you can, like, you know, I think you’ll be able to start legitimately betting your cryptos I’m sure there already is a way we you can bet your cryptos on sports betting and shit. But I’m really interested to see how it plays out, especially when all these creators have their own, have their own tokens, they’re not promoting some other persons who are going to have their own tokens, you know, it’s crazy, there’s a million there’s a million opportunities to grow and just, you know, change the space and, you know, based off all the events that are occurring, there’s really no telling where it’s going to go but I’m excited for the future man. And it’s cool to kind of be in on this this creator this creator token vibe, in its infancy, you know, while still growing and it’s Yeah, I think we’re going to see a lot more people hop on board very, very soon.

Adam Levy: So I love it, man, more power to you. Good shit. Thank you so much for being on. I hope to have you on again soon. Once it’s more developed, you have more people and more and more and more.

JVCKJ:  Kind of implement some of these things for sure.

Adam Levy: Let’s do it. 

JVCKJ:  It’s definitely the longest like, you know, crypto conversation I’ve had and I feel like you know, you brought a lot of great ideas to the table that Jonathan, I hope you’re writing those down.

Adam Levy:  Take it man do your thing. Do your thing.

JVCKJ: I’m always and I hope to be in touch soon, brother.

Adam Levy: You got it, man.

JVCKJ: All right, Adam.

Categories
Podcast Transcript

How We Onboarded Our Audience Into Crypto with Allie Mcpherson and Mason Geysir

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.