Authenticity and trust bind NFT artists and collectors together. It is what makes this whole ecosystem work in the first place. Having a Web3 allowlist makes it possible for artists to decide who joins their list and make sure it’s filled with real collectors, not bots. This is what PREMINT has been doing starting early on in the industry’s inception. PREMINT is trusted by over 4 million wallets, and is used by the world's top NFT artists, communities, brands, and even celebrities for their high-profile NFT projects. In this episode of Edge of NFT, CEO Brenden Mulligan takes us on a tour through PREMINT’s evolution and gives us a sneak peek of what’s to come. Plus, he talks about the most recent developments at his other project, Vulcan, the safe haven for token-gating your Discord community.
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Listen to the podcast here
Brenden Mulligan Of PREMINT — The Web3 Allowlist Platform
This is Brenden of PREMINT, Web3’s allowlist platform, and Vulcan, the best way to manage your Discord community. I'm here on the great show loved by so many smart people like you. Stay tuned.
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NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn how PREMINT empowers NFT artists to curate a list of real collectors, ensuring authenticity and trust, and how Vulcan, the ultimate safe haven for token-gating your Discord community is growing and changing to be so much more. Finally, learn how our guest’s patience stands up to minutes, hours, years, or even decades of abuse. All of this and more on this episode.
Before we go, don't forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. You can now catch up on all the discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and registering with just your email address. You'll have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge-watchers are welcome. See you inside.
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On this episode, we're happy to introduce our guest, Brenden Mulligan, the CEO of PREMINT, a platform dedicated to the Web3 community for all their NFT needs. It's a welcoming space for everyone, from blockchain beginners to crypto experts. To give you a bit of background, Brenden is the driving force behind not only the PREMINT platform trusted by over 4 million wallets but also Vulcan, the safe haven for token-gating your Discord community.
Prior to PREMINT, he led teams of talented product managers, designers, and engineers to create scalable consumer and enterprise products at startups and companies like Google. About PREMINT, it's not just us who love it. It's being used by the world's top NFT artists, communities, brands, and even celebrities for their high-profile NFT projects. PREMINT is all about creating a fair playground. You get to decide who joins your list, making sure it's filled with real collectors, not bots. It's this level of care and commitment that makes it a favorite. Brenden, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure.
It's an honor. Thanks for coming by. I’m glad that you can make the trip up North for that.
It was great. Thank you for having me there.
It's an honor. I've been following PREMINT and participated in the initial mint launch of PREMINT. I’m still a holder, for full disclosure for our audience, because I saw something special there that hadn't happened before. At that moment, our industry was pretty fragmented when it came to minting solutions. There were a lot of scams and challenges with the process. You made it easier for folks. I've seen this perpetual motion to make things easier for more people that you've embraced. Thank you for what you're doing for our industry. I would love to understand more of the story behind the inception. Give us a little bit of insight into what PREMINT is all about.
I've spent my career building tools for creators. I generally get interested in the community. I want to see the creators have more time to spend creating and less time managing a business. What I was starting to see pretty early on with NFTs was creators would launch their projects. For a while, no one cared about NFTs, but then as NFTs got hotter, when they launched the project, generally, it would get minted out incredibly quickly.
Collectors and real people who wanted to collect generally walked away from the process, having spent a ton of gas and not having gotten anything in return. On secondary, on OpenSea, immediately everything was on sale. You could see that the people who were being able to buy the NFTs were the bots, not the collectors.
I saw artists bothered by this and starting to build HomeGrown Solutions. They started creating Google Forms, and they would ask people to give them their wallet addresses ahead of time. They'd create type forms or whatever. They would try to say, “DM me your wallet address.” It was not user-friendly and overall bad.
One morning, I was working with a single artist named Pindar Van Arman, who is the godfather of bitGANs and incredible AI artists. I went to him and I said, “If I built you a page where someone could come on, connect a wallet, connect to Twitter and Discord, would you use it?” What he was doing was using Google Forms, where you entered your wallet address and then you typed in your Twitter or Discord name.
Afterward, he’d then go and double-check to make sure these people existed and the wallet had a real name. It was a ton of extra work. That's what PREMINT was at the beginning. It was a single page with three buttons. The only rule it had was you couldn't connect your Twitter account to more than one wallet. If you wanted to submit 100 wallets to an allowlist, you had to create 100 Twitter and Discord accounts. Nowadays, that's not that hard because there are farms and people know the process for this, but at the beginning, that was enough to dissuade most bots.
The other thing we did was we would privatize and hash an IP address, but we would track IP addresses. If the same computer signed up a bunch of times, the person or the creator could know that immediately and disqualify that person. It’s a pretty simple solution. It was a very Web2 solution, to be honest, for the problem. It did have a wallet connection, but the rest of it was off-chain.
It was enough to get the creator the tools they needed to be able to get a list of wallets that they could then add to an allowlist for their mint. That was inception. It was like being in a Discord channel with about fifteen artists. They were all telling me their problems, working with one of them to solve their problem, letting them use it, and telling me how it was working for them. That's how it started. That was last October 2021.
We started this show in March 2021. We were facing these challenges and talking about them on the show and then PREMIT came along. It is an interesting time. What I find interesting about you from my Twitter stocking is how intense you've been around an open customer discovery process since then. At that moment, it was like fifteen artists. Now you've got millions of users in all sorts of feedback coming in that you have to ingest and integrate, but yet you're still having an open dialogue with the community about that. I'm curious what that process has been and how you came up with this approach. I'm a lean startup guy back in the day. Is there some lean startup in your blood? Is that the genesis of all this?
I was interested in building for Web3 and building for creators. I built PREMINT in addition to 2 or 3 other things. I had a sales spot product for a while. I was building this member dashboard where you could see all of your holders when they bought what they own. This exists in a bunch of places now. The idea was it would be like a place where you would direct your holders to go to sign up. They'd provide additional information. They'd tell you who they were on Twitter. They'd fill out a profile and you can build a community there.
I was building a bunch of stuff at the same time. I didn't think any one of them was better than the other one. I thought they were all going to be useful and I set the community point me in the right direction of what to spend more time. When PREMINT was launched, it was one artist. For the most part, for the first 2 or 3 months, a dozen users. Users mean artists. Plenty of people were coming in and signing up, but there wasn't a huge awareness of it. Every user I got would say like, “It'd be cool.” This sounds dumb now because I feel like allowlist-based products are all very similar right now, but when we built PREMINT, there was no other one to look at.
Originally, it was, “Connect your Twitter,” and then, some artist was like, “It'd be cool if they could follow me.” I was like, “We could make it. Not only do they connect their Twitter, but they also would be following you.” Another one would be like, “I'd like them to join my Discord also.” “We'll make them join your Discord.” “It'd be cool if not only they were in the Discord, but they had a role.”
It wasn't like I came to the space and I was like, “I know the answers.” I put it out there. Artists would recommend what they wanted to make it more gated to them. When we did a partnership or a launch with Gary Vee, they have 300,000 people in their Discord. He was like, “It's important to me that when I launched this allowlist, people can't sign up and then get on the allowlist and sign up for my Discord. I want to reward my existing community.”
For that launch, we added a feature that you could set a date where when someone tried to register, they had to have been in Discord prior to a certain date. That was like working with one community on what a solution to their problem is going to be. PREMINT is the result of 100 conversations to build 100 little features to shape it into what we think is a pretty good solution right now. The only way to do that is to open yourself up to feedback and build in public.
We've had missteps where we've released stuff that people didn't think was useful or it was one artist that demanded or wanted it and we released it and realized they were unique that it made the product more confusing to a lot of other people. There's a balance there. They did the same thing with the other products I was working on and they got no feedback because they weren't very good. They were okay, but they didn't solve a big enough pain point where people were like, “Please add this.” They were like, “It's cool.” it made it easier.
It's almost easier when you have twelve users. As you said, once you get to that level of 100 or 1,000, you have all these feature requests and then you go down that rabbit hole of that one that didn't matter to anybody and waste all your time. It's nice to start small like that.
The mint that you were talking about earlier was Collector Pass Mint. PREMINT evolved as a creator tool. You collected names. They were in your dashboard. You exported the CSV of the names you gave, put them in Manifold, or wherever you're going to mint. That was your allowlist. As a collector, you came to a page. You clicked a button and you were told you were registered. For 6 or 8 months, there was no next button.
There was no, “Check out the other list to join. See all your registrations.” There's zero experience for the end user. Probably that's what YouTube was like for the first X amount of months or years. You just went to the video page, watched a video, and closed the window, then they were like, “We should probably get people to keep watching videos, create their own account, or be able to see what they've watched before.”
Even that entire side of the market, if you look at it in a marketplace, we weren't even serving the collector for the first eight months until the collectors all started saying, “It'd be nice to be able to see what I've registered for. I forget. I don't remember what I registered for. I'm registering for premiums all the time.” I’m thinking like, “We should probably tell people that. It'd be nice to get an email notification that the Mint is that I won the spot on. It'd be nice to be able to browse all the projects looking at categories.” It’s all that stuff. I was listening to that. That was when we had hundreds of thousands of users, but hearing the volume of requests is what led us to build the collector side of things and launch the Collector Pass.
We got to dive into not only the foundation of the idea but the details of how the artists can exclusively identify the people they want to be on their lists. Are there any details about that that we missed or we covered the main idea around how the artist can decide on those types of things?
At the time of this interview, we're in a fairly deep bear market. As the market changes, the utility or why you're using PREMINT changes. In the beginning, it was all about filtering. It was like you could release anything and everyone wanted to buy it. PREMINT was more about, “I have 100,000 people who want to buy my NFT. I'm only releasing 10,000.” How do you get from 100,000 to 10,000? In order to be on the list, you have to do X, Y, and Z. You have to follow me on Twitter,” or whatever the artist and the creator wanted to do. They could design it however they want.
How am I going to get from a smaller subset? Maybe I want to do partnerships with communities. I want people who have a Moonbird, a CryptoPunk, or a Doodle to be able to get to buy this. I want to set aside 300 spots for those people. That whole concept of collabs and doing joint partnerships with different communities came out of the list being harder diminished. We built a whole part of the product that was all around and set aside spots for these different communities.
You can have one PREMINT list without your sublists for different communities. It was like, “How do we give the artist tools to be able to do the filtering however they want to filter?” When you flip to the time when not as many people are interested in buying NFTs or gas is high, it's harder to get someone to buy an NFT. If it's a bear market and the liquidity's gone, a lot of artists are using it to, “How do I get eyeballs on my project?”
Before, it was like, “How do I get people away? How do I limit the amount of people who can buy?” Now it's like, “How do I raise awareness? How do I do my marketing?” The same set of tools used differently is useful for that. If you're launching a new thing, it's like, “I need Twitter followers. Maybe I'll do a PREMINT, but in order to get the PREMINT, you have to follow me on Twitter. I want to get other communities involved maybe by giving them some spots, that'll make them more willing to share my project with their community.” People are using the same tools totally differently.
You have this unique vantage point on what's happening in the industry behind the scenes. There are only X many active wallets in the space or X many collectors. There's probably no one in the space that know the real truth here more than you. I got to ask you, where are we now in terms of the level of activity in the NFT space?
I’m a better data scientist. I can probably look at our data and give nice projections and estimates on numbers. All I can tell you is that it is significantly quieter than it was before. It's obvious and most people have a lot of liquidity and volume has moved over to airdrop farming on Blur and meme coins. There is not a lot of people out there. You see this in like the numbers of the volume on Blur and OpenSea and everything.
How does that translate into the PREMINT world? If there are less people out there willing to buy secondary, there are probably less people interested in buying primary because there's a large group of people who were buying NFTs, not for the art or the community. They were buying it to flip and trade. Our industry always had these collectors and they hated flippers, but we needed the flippers to get the volume, and it was a weird relationship.
Every time I would coach a project on a launch, I'd be like, “Here's how we DeBot. Here's how we make sure the only people who are going to buy are the collectors.” There was always this, “We need some secondary volume because if there's no secondary volume, people will think that the project isn't desirable.” It's this weird balance. Now that that whole flip side is gone, it's harder to launch a new project. The best use case for PREMINT was I'm launching a new collection of thousands of NFTs. Without that, we see a lot less people doing allowlist in general for brand-new projects. It's an obvious answer, but volumes are down.
What's great for me is scams are way down. Our life was hell for a few months because all we did was try to prevent abuse in general in Web3, but on the platform also. How do you stop someone from pretending they're going to launch a project, collecting names, getting someone to go to a website, and then draining their wallet when we're not the minting platform? We can't tell you if that contract is going to be a wallet trainer or not.
We spent a lot of time building anti-scam and anti-fraud bot technology. We don't need that right now because the financial incentive to bot and scam is gone down. Those people are moved on to do something else. That's one of the things for us that's great. We see a lower amount of volume, but the projects that we do see are like artists that are excited to launch their collections. It's meaningful work for them. Collectors generally are excited to collect.
We've seen that, in general, in all our activities in space. Slower times are when dedicated builders come to the forefront. In some sense to the outer public, it looks like nothing's going on when it's almost like that's when everything of legitimacy. That's worth paying attention to.
You can't tell the future and know what's going to happen in 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. Will there be another boom? What will it look like? I don't even try to pretend like I know. I do know that in every boom, everyone looks back at the bear and says, “I wish I would've bought a Fidenza when they came out, a Squiggle, or a CryptoPunk when it was $300. When things are amazing, you always regret not paying attention at this exact time.
When things are amazing, you always regret not paying attention at this exact time. Click To Tweet
When it's most bloody and hard to make the effort, you get the biggest reward.
A lot of the people got the biggest reward. When the bull market comes in and everything's crazy expensive, they like to talk like they're geniuses, but in reality, most of them didn't buy five Fidenzas because they're like, “This is going to be worth 100 ETH one day.” They bought them maybe because they liked them or maybe they were like, “I'll buy five. What is this thing? It's only 1 ETH. It is cheap. ETH is $100.” It's not even like the geniuses are doing it. Typically, people who are active end up being rewarded later, assuming there is another time when everything comes back.
It'd be great to shift over and talk about Vulcan and PREMINT, how that collaboration came together, and why. Can you tell us about how that all came together?
We've been able to usher people into Web3 who aren't necessarily native to it. PREMINT is a product that looks like a Web2 product. It's easy to use. It doesn't require you to mint anything. You don't have to load it with ETH. You do have to have a wallet, but you can download MetaMask and immediately have a wallet. We care a little bit more about helping make sure it's a secure space. We did this with PREMINT in general and making sure that all around, PREMINT was more secure. We've done all kinds of crazy cool security stuff on PREMINT to make it easier and more secure.
When we did this analysis of, “Where are the scams?” every scam ended up with the same exact moment which is someone connects their wallet where they shouldn't. Back then, I was like, “There are too many people asking you to connect a wallet right now. It's unclear as to what's going to happen.” Even though it's decentralized and all that, I went with a Web2 approach where it's like, “Let's limit the amount of times you need to connect a wallet or new sites you need to connect a wallet.”
This is a primitive belief. On PREMINT, you connect your wallet the first time because we have to verify who you are, but after that, you can sign on to Twitter. You don't have to connect your wallet ever again once you've done it once. We try to help people not have to do wallet connection at every turn. Discord was a huge place where all the Web3 people were going and then there was a bot that was sending them to some site to connect a wallet.
The norm for an industry is to go to Discord and then click a link to leave Discord to go to a site that you might have never heard of and connect a wallet. It feels like we're training people to be abused because there are 1 million ways of phishing scams and stuff. If the behavior is to go to Discord, leave Discord, and connect your wallet and that's what we're all doing all day every day, I feel like it's probably not going to be a good outcome. There's going to be no way to protect. We started looking at what we could do with PREMINT to help with that.
We saw an innovative solution in Vulcan, which was similar to PREMINT. It was built by a single founder and rapid iteration. His first server that ever had Vulcan was XCOPY. We are working with real artists to make sure that they're solving real problems. It was nice. All they did was something slightly different, which was instead of connecting your wallet to Vulcan, they asked you to go update your OpenSea bio.
The assumption is everyone's logging into OpenSea. OpenSea is a safe site. In Vulcan, they would say, “Go to OpenSea and type in this set of characters into your bio. When you do that, come back and hit a button and we'll verify.” The only person who could've done that was someone with a connection to the wallet. That's their way of verifying that you own the wallet.
I thought it was awesome and it was like starting to be very popular with the most highly packable and high-asset servers. You saw, at the time, the PROOF Collective token was 100 ETH. You saw all these servers that were like the assets were valuable moving to Vulcan from other solutions. The founder had written me months prior. I hadn't even gotten the message. He was like, “Vulcan's going well. I'm not necessarily someone who knows how to start a business around this, but I know that I'm solving a real problem. Would you be interested in working together?” When I reached out to him, he was like, “I already emailed you.” There was this immediate chemistry between the two of us.
We dug into it. PREMINT acquired Vulcan. Adam, the Founder, is on the team and still running Vulcan. He's also one of the best NFT collectors in the space, in my opinion, but he's also still one of the main XCOPY mods. Talk about user feedback. He's modding one of the high-profile servers out there while we're building all these tools.
With Vulcan and PREMINT, we thought, “How can we take Vulcan and make it even better? What can we do?” Since, at the time, 1 million Discord accounts had signed into PREMINT and connected a wallet, we were like, “We can make this pretty amazing.” You can go into the XCOPY server. You can hit verify. In the pre-PREMINT days, it would say, “Go to OpenSea.” We can send the Discord ID to PREMINT and see if we know what the wallet is and figure out the wallet that Discord ID is connected to and then look at the walls to see if the XCOPY stuff is in there and then assign roles.
If you've ever been in a Vulcan server, once we put this in place, it was good that we had to slow the process down artificially so you knew what was happening because it happens quickly. Since people trust PREMINT and have signed PREMINT, we can make it possible for you to verify your holdings without even leaving Discord without clicking a link, connecting a wallet, or anything because we already have the data.
It was cliché but it was like a 1 plus 1 equals 3 type of scenario where we were like, “On the day that we announced this acquisition, we can make the entire Web3 community safer.” The servers don't even need to do anything. It'll be how it works now. No matter if we never add another feature to this, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be much better. It was already miles better than what else was out there and it'll be miles better than that. That's where we started.
Are there any other features of Vulcan that you wanted to call out briefly?
We let that improvement for the rest of the year. Starting at the beginning of this year, the entire PREMINT engineering team and all of my time spent with Adam on rebuilding Vulcan to be way more scalable. When I built PREMINT, it scaled way beyond what I thought it was going to be. I hired someone to come in, help me and make it able to handle the immense load and traffic and user base and everything that we had. We do the same thing to Vulcan. We rebuilt Vulcan from the ground up and we built a framework that we can build a lot on top of.
The next step in making Web3 safer outside of verification is all these Web3 servers install a bunch of bots. The more bots you have, the more attack vectors you have on your server. If you're installing a bot to check floor prices, do tweets, support tickets, and do verification, right there, there are four bots that could all be hacked. Once someone gets in, then they can do whatever they want to your server.
We said, “How can we keep Web3 safe? We can provide more services for everyone, some of the basic stuff that people need.” We've rolled out an art bot that's modeled after the XCOPY art bot that lets you define collections to your community using slash commands and can randomly post art into the community to keep the conversation going. The community can check the floor prices for certain collections in your servers by using a floor bot that we were introduced to.
We introduced PREMINT bots. If you're in a Vulcan server that allows slash commands, you can do slash PREMINT and it'll pull in your PREMINT account information and show you what you've registered for and what your upcoming mints are. All that stuff you used to have to go to PREMINT to read about, you can do right in Discord now.
The server can post PREMINT registrations into the server that no one has to leave Discord to register for. You see like, “Here's the project.” There's a register button. Hit register. It does all the stuff that it needs to do and tells you if you're registered or not. We've added all that functionality. That's one side of the replace bots.
The other big tentpole goal that we had, especially now in a time in a bear market is, “How do we help community managers manage their communities better?”
All they know is people got a role. We're rolling out a dashboard that will show you everyone in your Discord and why they're there. Meaning like, “Brenden's there because he owned Guzzler. That's why he has this role.” It'll allow the community managers, and someone's being disruptive, they can be like, “Who is this person? When did they join?” This is all stuff that they never got to see before.
It’s starting to open up like, “This person came in. They connected their wallet. They got this role. Here's who they're and why they're there.” On top of that, we added a whole support ticket tool so people can come in and ask questions and it's all embedded in Discord. It creates sub-threads in each channel. People can ask questions. You can prompt the person.
You can say like, “What do you want to ask a question about? Do you want to ask a question about the upcoming mint?” You can reply back with like, “Here's all the information on the upcoming Mint.” “What's your question in regards to my wallet isn't connecting?” It's like Zendesk, but it's inside Discord. It's geared towards Web3. It's all about like, “How do we help people keep their communities closer and safer in this time and keep their Discord safer?” All of that is because we've totally rebuilt Vulcan to be able to add all of this stuff on top,
It's cool that you can integrate so much and add so much utility from what you've started with. A couple of questions before we hit go over to Quick Hitters. It is going to be pretty fun with you. What about the roadmap going forward? You mentioned a few things you're rolling out. Is there anything cool with AI? No pressure.
AI is great. I'm excited to dig into it. There's still work to be done on some of the basics before we get into AI. There's some AI stuff being built right now that's awesome. There's stuff that's flashy but not super useful. We still have some basics to build. It's like we're going to tell you why people are on your server. I do think there's some interesting AI stuff around, “Here's a problem that I would love to solve. It's very complicated. It probably will be a while. The way that the Discord data works is hard.”
I don't know if you've seen this in Web3. You've got this community of people who like holders that are super supportive of the project. They love the project. They've been there for a while. It's like a good group. You're part of it. You love this group. The price goes up. Someone who buys at a higher price comes in. They're excited about the project, but for whatever reason, the market goes down, bad news, fraud, and whatever. The price starts going down.
The original people are still way above water and they're still happy. You have a couple of people who are upset. Those people sit in Discord like spoiled eggs or rotten apple that ruins the whole bunch. They make it a miserable place to be. You've got these OG people who are there, positive, and excited, being like, “I don't like sitting in this channel anymore because this new person won't stop bitching. They hold the NFTs. It's not fair to boot them.” I've seen this in many services. The OG people start dropping out and then new people come in. What they're exposed to when they get in there is the negativity and then they leave right away. You watch this erosion of something that was great because of a couple of people.
The other thing you see is like people who used to be supportive start getting sour and generally, the community managers don't see this until it's too late. I do think there's a place for AI around sentiment analysis that I think we could do something that would be cool. I'm saying it's going to come in a long time because it's like you're having to read every message and there's a lot of stuff about that I don't feel comfortable with and I don't know how we do it.
It would be nice to say like, “Not only are your biggest or longest-term holders here but here are your biggest fans,” then even more important to be, “One of your biggest fans is unhappy right now.” It would be a pretty amazing thing if we could start helping communities however they would want to solve them but give them tools to be able to see some of the stuff.
It comes down to sort of making it easier to know your own community better and to respond more proactively to incremental adjustments and the climate in that Discord. Talking about Discord and where it's going, that's like a whole other conversation we could have with all the quasi-Discord killers trying to come to life. It's a fascinating dynamic, but you get a chance to see a lot of projects come into the space. It would beget me not to ask of anything going on that inspires you in Web3 that you've seen that is not directly related to PREMINT that you want to mention.
It's more of a theme. During the bear market, people are sticking around building the great stuff. You're saying, “What are the new projects?” It's one thing to be a new project coming into the bear market building because you don't have the context of how it used to be. It's a whole different thing to watch the people that have been building continue to build. What Manifold is still doing and the stuff that they're releasing right now is awesome.
They're enabling creators to look at releasing projects or NFT in a different way. You can see they had a feature and then you see this little meme. This happened where it was like, there are open editions with burns. We all saw like 1 million artists do that. It gets a little saturated right away, but it's cool that they release a new feature and suddenly, we see tons of artists sort of fall try it out. What Manifold and Art Blocks are doing right now is great. They're open sourcing stuff. They're trying to give the community more tools. It is hard.
I'll even say OpenSea gets a lot of crap, but I think that they are pushing. They're continuing to innovate and are shipping a lot of stuff. It's got to be rough to be OpenSea, being the king and the market disappears. SuperRare is still pushing out in trying to do one-of-one auctions and show off great art. I'm inspired by the people who were made kings and now we've all been made peasants again. There are no kings.
I love that. Erick Calderon and Richerd were both feature speakers at Outer Edge. I run into Richerd a lot. He came to our hackathon and coached some of the builders. It was a fan moment for many of them. He is a true deep believer in space and also someone I respect a lot. We could keep going here, but last, because you have to get back to building, we have to move on to our Quick Hitters segment, which is a lot of fun as well.
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Quick Hitters, this is a fun quick way to get to know you a little bit better. Ten quick questions. We're looking for a short single or few-word response, but you can feel free to expand if you get the urge. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure.
That's a good one. We know some of the original voices behind that show.
Second question, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Baseball cards at a flea market.
Very fun things.
Also, indicators of where your life took you. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
I got groceries. Is this an NFT or a general question?
Whatever you like. If there's something interesting, the grocery list or NFT list, that's fine.
I bought netting to get rabbits out of our garden off of Amazon. My daughter turned two and we had a donut party for her. We bought her sprinkled donut pants. Those are three.
Many vegan, gluten-free donut options in my neck of the woods. If they haven't crept down to your neck of the woods yet, they will. What is the most recent thing you sold?
I sold a set of plastic shelving on Craigslist.
That's a little bit of spring cleaning there.
Why did you sell on Craigslist? Do you need the money or do you hate seeing things go to waste?
To be accurate, it was Facebook Marketplace, not Craigslist, but I hate throwing stuff away. We didn't need it anymore. If it's not being sold on Craigslist, it's being given away next door before it's getting thrown away.
Question number five, what is your most prized possession?
I don't think I have an answer to that question. I'm not like a car guy. I like collecting stuff, but as prize to me is a different level. I'm not trying to have an opinion on anyone else, but I would say there's not a lot of that. I'm like, “If this disappeared, I would be upset.” I'm very thankful for the time and flexibility.
Also, the air that you're breathing.
Certainly, not missing those plastic shelves. Next question, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is for sale, what would it be?
One of the biggest pain points in my life is we live far away from family. I wish it was easier to get back and forth to see them. If there was a way for that to be easier, there are probably several different ways, but with a two-year-old, it's not super easy or pleasant to jump on a plane for 4 or 5 hours. If there is anything I could do to make that easier thing, that could translate into buying a house next to our house for the family to live in.
Teleporter.
That seems like it's cheating because that doesn't exist, but yes, if we're coming up with new stuff.
You got to hire a company to create an underground tunnel that rapid transit to your destination.
If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
The personality trait that has served me the most across everything has been patience. If my two-year-old daughter can grow up to be patient, I would be very happy with that.
I thought you were going to say curiosity, but patience almost perceives curiosity. You have to be patient to be curious.
If you're patient, it gives more room for kindness, creativity, and curiosity. If you get impatient, it blocks you from everything else.
If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
I do get impatient at times. You don't have a good answer for that.
You could always say what your wife or your business partner would say.
That’s where I first go to. It's like, “What would she say?” I don't know what she would say.
The next question is a simple one. What did you do before joining us on the show?
Adam and I were on Zoom or Google Meet talking about the stuff we're building on Vulcan, some things to fix in Vulcan, and how things should work. It was a product meeting.
Following up on that, and the last normal question, I've got a bonus here, but what are you going to do next after the show?
I'm going to have an engineering meeting about how we can make Vulcan more efficient.
We got that on our minds.
He's taking the whole time to build things seriously.
Here's my bonus question. Given that patience is one of your proudest traits, what's something that has tested your patience the most?
I've been in NFTs for the past years, but in crypto, for the past decades. I feel like it's hard to be patient during market fluctuations. When I talk about patience, I think of more like a personality trait of patience and being able to be cool, calm, and collected during times when other people might be impatient, but I'm generally good there. I'm not very good when it comes to, “I need to wait this out.” That's a different form of patience. It's been very hard in crypto where you have a thesis and you say, “Here's what I believe, and here's how I'm in the past investing. I'm going to invest.”
When things are bad, sticking to those beliefs and not being patient. I am historically the worst spy things and sell things at the worst possible time ever. I'm a way better builder than I'm an investor. When it comes to investing, I get freaked out. I sell stuff right at a time when you're supposed to be freaked out. When everyone's selling, which is why the price is low, the smart people are buying. That is probably the biggest thing.
When everyone's selling, the smart people are buying. Click To Tweet
You're human. I consider myself relatively patient as well, but it's those things that you have to be patient over the course of 5 or 10 years.
I'm happy with my long-term patience. I'm particularly good at it.
That concludes Quick Hitters. Thank you so much for participating.
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Before we start to wrap up, we always love to do a little bit of a shout-out. Are any projects or people that you might like to give a little shout-out to?
A huge shout out to Adam who built Vulcan. He's an understated person. I've been building for many years. I've had a lot of experience. This is his first real project. He built this thing, but no one knows him. They know Vulcan, but they don’t know him. They're getting people to get to know him more, but he's one of the most authentic people in NFTs right now. When you sell your company and someone else takes some control over it and makes decisions around it, a lot of founders are like, “I'm out. Cool. I sold this and you can have it,” but he's excited to keep building this out. He's excited about the space. It's been a great experience to be working with him.
In the space in general, one of the projects that I'm seeing that I'm excited about is Memeland. Memeland has been doing a great job. If you ever want to look at how a community has built a community, incentivized a community, and had a nice balance in NFTs, you have to have the balance of hype versus theoretical utility plus mystery plus delivery. They're doing a good job in delivering enough to keep people interested, keeping as much under the wraps as they can to keep people also interested, but like not delaying things long enough where people get bored.
They've done such a good job. In this market, they're fun to watch because most other projects are doing amazing work. The floor prices are dropping. The community's negative. Memeland is killing it right now. It's a great project to watch. For full transparency, I've known the founder for many years. Because of that, I've had some Memeland assets. I'm not saying this because of that. I just think what they're doing is awesome.
We appreciate that. It's always fun to learn about folks that you're connected with and the things that are exciting to you. We can wrap up here. We start to slowly wind down. The next question is an obvious one. Where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you're working on?
Twitter is the easiest place, assuming that Elon doesn't do something where my account shut down for some random reason. I'm @Mulligan on Twitter. We're @Premint and @VulcanAuth. That's the best place. We also have some BlueSky accounts. It was going to be relevant, but I haven't heard people talk about BlueSky. I don't know what's happening there. Twitter is the place.
Thank you so much. We've reached the outer limit of the show. Thanks for everyone exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes. Rate us and say something awesome, then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing @EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great Web3 content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- PREMINT
- Vulcan
- Watch.OuterEdge.live
- Collector Pass Mint
- Erick Calderon – Past Episode
- Manifold
- @Mulligan – Twitter
- @Premint – Twitter
- @VulcanAuth – Twitter
- Spotify – Edge Of NFT
- iTunes – Edge Of NFT
- @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
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