How far off are we from Web3 mass adoption? We would all like to be optimistic about this, but there are issues to be resolved first. Web3 creator Nate Alex sees such an issue in the dichotomy between tech heavy projects that don't have an audience and marketing and popular projects that don't have tech. In this short conversation, he explains how resolving this is key to giving the spotlight to projects that truly deserve it. Speaking of Web3 projects that deserve attention, Rug Radio is getting bullish in giving life to the decentralized media space. Farokh gives us the scoop on what they’re currently working on and what we can expect from them in the nearest future. Tune in for all of these and more in another exciting episode of Edge of NFT!
---
Listen to the podcast here
OuterEdge At Veecon 2023: Nate Alex & Farokh Of Rug Radio
I’m with Nate Alex from Tennessee. It’s great to mix up with you and chat a little bit about what you're up to in the space. Why don't you kick it off by introducing yourself then we talk about chain phases and the secret project if folks don't know some of the backstories?
Thanks for having me on. I've been in the space pretty much since the beginning, trading NFTs when there was only $1,000 a week in volume and when people think it is dead. I was mostly a collector for a couple of years until I wanted to start making my own stuff. That started in early 2020. I made two projects that were popular with the small crowds that existed.
That was still a very early time. Things didn't pick up until late 2020.
Top Shot was the catalyst for bringing a lot of new people in. I launched another project in early 2022 called ChainFaces Arena, which is the most well-known project of the ones that I've made. The basic idea was your NFTs could die in this arena game. To make it a little juicy here, we put a few million dollars in the arena. The longer you survived in the arena, the more money you could pull out of the arena. Also, the longer you survived in there, your art piece would dynamically update with more scars because it earned him in the arena.
The inspiration for this, and besides being a cool idea, is that you're into a gladiator and have played video games. It makes sense to me. I played a little bit of NBA 2K. You're trying to dunk the ball. You've chosen these cards. You get more prizes, but you could also die. I was more likely to die because I wanted to earn more prizes. It gets to a real primitive instinct in people. Where did it come from?
I remember telling a couple of people the idea. They're like, “You can't do that. You can't just kill people's NFTs if they're going to buy it from you.” I was like, “I can.” I guess the idea was on the nose. It would be super relevant in a time like this of shit coining where a thing is very PVP. Some people are going to make a lot of money. Some people are going to lose money, get nothing, or going to make a little bit. The arena was a proportional payout.
It started with a few million dollars in the pot and 17,000 NFTs that entered. Some of them didn't enter because they didn't want to risk dying. Every day, random entities are dying. The amount of people left in the arena shrinks. Now, your proportional share of the pool is larger. You can leave at any time. You could take a small bounding now or wait for more people to die.
Can you come back in, or once you're out, you're out?
Once you leave, you're gone. You threw in the towel. We called you a coward and moved on. It lasted about one month. Every day people are pulling out money. The person who survived the longest, more than anybody, pulled out $180,000, $170,000, or something. The person forwarded that for $80,000.
Is it their money left?
No, it's all proportionally paid out over the course of a month. The people and early-day cowards were leaving with $30, $50, or whatever. The idea was like a microcosm of the degenerate crypto space of people making a lot of money, little money, losing money, and losing everything. That was the whole showcase of the design. It was supposed to be like an artistic commentary on all that.
It's fascinating to me. I'm sure the winner went on to sign the UFC contract and is doing their thing now. Fast forward to now, I noticed one of your Twitter posts talking about this dichotomy between tech-heavy projects that don't have an audience, marketing, and projects that don't have tech. This is not new. I've been in the space since 2017. It feels like a little bit of deja vu in that sense. We try to be trying to show the projects both. There are some of those two that are worth acknowledging. What is the story behind that? Is it the Wild West nature of the origins of the crypto industry or do you think this is a common trend in any emerging technology?
It is a common trend. When people like something, that makes more people like it, and it is just like a giant snowball. You can build the most deeply technical thing, the best thing to ever be built that nobody knows about. It doesn't matter. It's insignificant. It is hard to balance that you have two types of people that are great salesmen, technical engineers, and experts in that field. They rarely collide. For me, I'm decent at both. I'm not the best at either of them. The people I know who are the best technical experts got 100 followers on Twitter. The people who have 200,000 followers on Twitter don't know shit about reading Etherscan.
Twitter favors people who have a lot of attention or clout. If you have 200,000 followers now, when the space blows up again, you're going to grow disproportionately compared to somebody with 100 followers who is the greatest technical expert in the space. Some of it is just attention. People who are great marketers are great at growing their brands. If a lot of people know something, there's not enough supply. It creates this appearance of, “There's a supply-demand mismatch here. That's a great investment,” versus, “The greatest technical person has 100 followers. They build something super cool. I'm never going to make any money on this. I'm just supporting them. They're not going to sell out $10,000. They only got 100 followers.”
I feel like a lot of the dGen movement or side of crypto are smart people that see the world two different ways at the same time. One with hope and optimism and the second is with pragmatism and humor. I want to look into the future of the space from both perspectives and get your thoughts. A year from now, what is your hopeful and optimistic perspective and where will we be?
First off, it's going to be like the same people who are here now are going to be us until there becomes the snowball effect, media push, and Bitcoin goes into $50,000 and things that attract outside money into the space.
Is that a year from now with the halving coming up?
I hate to make hard predictions, but it's been a very consistent cycle. It's always been the smoking gun at the start of the race. Everybody goes time to bag hold and play this game of hot potato again. It doesn't happen immediately. The halving happens, and it's not like the price goes 10X. People start to go, “We're about to start this again.” As a whole, they generally are more holding than buying and selling. That creates the right market dynamics to talk about the price going in the right direction and start getting the media talking about it.
We're still in the hopeful, optimistic perspective. We'll get to this other side. There's been a lot of technology built over the last cycle to support mass adoption. It's not like you can't buy things with a credit card. Now, you can. It's not like you can onboard with an email link, you can. PREMINT, which was on our show and had all sorts of cool ways that you can authenticate without connecting your wallet. That's going to reduce hacks. Does that give you additional optimism in terms of how easy it will be to onboard toward the next bull market? Are we going to face some more challenges and confusion for the masses?
It's a little bit of both. Confusion won't just go away. The UX is still terrible. People will dive in, dig in, and figure it out if they think they're going to get rich. If people hear about their one friend who dabbled and turned their $1,000 portfolio into $10,000, they become like a multilevel marketing thing.
Where do the purity of art and the type of art that you've created fit into it?
It naturally becomes a thing. Let's say Punks. People talked about utility, what the founders are going to do, what companies you're going to build, and all this bullshit. I look at Punks. I look at Larva Labs' founders. They never promised anything. Nobody who buys Punks is like, “Where's the utility? Nobody buys auto glyphs.” There's a piece of art history. There is a historical art narrative that's underlying here that some projects that get that, cater to that, and build the right stories will be something in 50 years from now. It's one of the things like ChainFaces, not that it necessarily will be one. One of the designs is that everything is 100% on a theory. There's no server or IPFS, nothing.
It is like what people refer to as immutability with ordinals.
For me, it was interesting to think about what ChainFaces will be when I'm dead if Ethereum is still here for 1,000 years. When you're trying to build something sustainable, you don't want it to be, “If this company goes under, they're going to quit paying their servers. The artists are gone.” To me, it's not art, but it's a long process. It didn't happen overnight. There are a lot of brands that legitimately think. I made Angry Aardvarks. They pumped to ETH. That's cool, and it's not cool, and nobody's going to give a shit in two years, but it takes time for you to learn and figure that out.
I know that because I've been around since the beginning. I've seen the projects that caught the attention when mania and the media were talking about them. It is a depression cycle, a few projects that are cool mania cycles, a few projects blow up, a lot of projects that don't deserve to blow up, and then back to the depression cycle, and a few stragglers stick along. Over time, the trend is more people are going to participate in this economy, more cool art projects will be made, and more cool use cases will be made.
As a creator who has had some success in space and been around and who is critical of projects that are more empty, do you feel more pressure as you're thinking about what you want to do next to do things that truly are at the edge in both utility and artistic value?
It's been pretty challenging for me to release something new. I built a project in the fall of 2022. I hired six artists. I spend about $200,000 in getting all the pieces going. I wrote a lot of smart contract code and then it didn't get to the level that I felt like this was ready for my audience. I had to take it on the chin and scrap it. I built another project in 2023. It didn't cost me a lot of money but time went into it and scrapped it as well. I still am looking to make something that I think can be impactful, interesting, and cool, and hopefully show people it's not just a picture on a token.
It's not just a hot potato game. It's a big element. A lot of money is made in that. It's fun, cool, and whatever. That's such a small piece of what this is going to be and I want to be part of what is going to be but early before most people get it and understand it. Even as an NFT investor, I've been known for buying NFTs in a six-figure range that have not done well for me, getting caught up in the hype, and losing a lot of money. I make fun of myself on Twitter. I realize the insanity of all of this, but I do know that this will continue. I do know that some things will not be the Mona Lisa but the same digital equivalent of that stuff. That stuff will happen within this space.
It makes me enthusiastically curious about what's next for you. We're at the VeeCon. Arianna Huffington talks about her recipe for a happy life, which includes managing stress. We're in an industry where there's no shortage of ups and downs and stress. You've been through it. What's been your stress-coping approach and how has that evolved over time? Any insights there that you could share with folks that are like, “This industry is heavy?”
It is deeply heavy. In 2022, I had a major drawdown, like millions of dollars. I had a lot of self-reflection of this and thinking, “I'm going to keep making more and more money. I'm set for life,” kind of thing and then being like, “It's fleeting,” more than people realize. You can lose that stuff. The stress was super high for me. Coping is one thing that you get drawn into the day-to-day of crypto like, “I need to be on Twitter every day. I need to keep up with every single thing that's happening every day, or I'm going to miss that opportunity to invest in Pepe and make a million dollars with $30.” That's not true.
First off, you're not going to hit that lottery. Realistically, most of that insider is a lot of other shit going on. Also, when you need a break or when you are overwhelmed, you don't need to spend 24/7 in this space. For me, most of the biggest, most impactful things happen in burst and then nothing happens most of the time. You have to try to find that balance. You got to not get completely lost in this whole crazy digital Casino.
What do you do to chill out when you feel like gentlemen are pumping a little too high from the industry? Any recommendations that we can share with our readers?
I like sports. I like pickleball and tennis.
I'm in tennis. Anytime, let's do it. Pickleball is big over. Anything on your roadmap that you wanted to point folks towards?
I don't have anything particularly hard set in stone that will necessarily like come out. I've got a number of things that are close that maybe with three designs, read, tweaks, or revisiting them and thinking through them again. I want to make and push something out that I think is cool. I hate to say that the vast majority of space thinks that everything is all wrong. When ChainFaces Arena launched, there were people who went, “I didn't even know you could do that with an NFT.” Not that the impact was long-lasting. There were a few clones who wanted to be like revamps, but nothing was as big. Since the question, I don't have anything coming in the short-term, but I intend on making something cool then publicly sharing it and hoping that it can get us on a different trajectory in the nearest future.
Thanks for spending a little time with us. Check out on Twitter at @NateAlexNFT. Keep up with your ventures and commentary. I appreciate you hanging out.
---
I’m with the one and only, Farokh. How are you doing?
How are you doing?
I see you everywhere but nowhere at the same time.
We're feeling great, VeeCon 2023.
It's fun. It's a chance to chill and catch up with old friends and make new friends. I love it here. Let's talk about Rug Radio. I appreciate what you do in the space. We're all looking at media differently. The writing is on the wall. There are bankruptcies in traditional media. What compelled you to get Rug Radio going and where are you now?
It's a place where we can empower creators and people to educate and entertain themselves around what crypto and NFTs are, but at the same time, give the narrative back to the people that deserve it. Those are the creators and network participants. It's people like you people and me who create content, but people like you all over there that consumer on the other side of it.
What propelled and inspired me to start Rug Radio is that everyone's talking about decentralization, crypto, blockchain, and the beautiful things about this technology. I was like, “I come from a media background. I've already been doing this for many years. How do we apply this to that?” and then came Rug Radio. We're trying to build a true decentralized Web3 media ecosystem that is tokenized and governed by DAO. Here we are, many months after launch, 70 plus creators on the network, 40 plus shows, and a 17-person team. We released our creator portal. I have a whole tech stack coming out. We're both a tech company and a media platform at the same time. It's cool to be able to do that.
I know you have that many creators at this point and a lot of good content coming out there. Have you seen the show diversity taking place? You get more and more shows tacked on. There's probably more nuance to the type of content being created. What trends and content have you seen on Rug Radio?
Honestly, it's much different stuff. For example, China's killing it. Rug Radio China is fully Mandarin. Its 30,000 members and 10,000 live streamers show on Binance Live. It is killing it. Rug Radio Friends are so much smaller crowd, but in turn, but very big in terms of the depth of the people that we're working with there. You have what might type of content, the daily topical news show.
The beautiful thing when you build decentralized media and brands in Web3 is that when you empower individuals within the network to build on top of something, which is Rug Radio on its network, there are no limits to how much it can grow. I was talking to two Rug Radio creators out there. Another guy, “I have a show on your network.” I'm like, “You are our network. You have my team that's going around.” It gets big at some point and you can't stop it. That's what we like about it.
It's bigger than any one individual.
It's bigger than I can ever be. This is why I started it.
From a thematic perspective where people get into random stuff like sports culture, fashion, and AI, what are some of the interesting shows that popped up?
We are doing sports now with Buster. Our partners are so rare, which is super cool. We have this sports focus show. We have more coming up very soon. We're going to go gaming. I'm excited about that. We're going to do a lot more gaming content and focus because that's a huge use case for Web3 and the next wave. I know we're going to fashion. I like to build on different verticals that way, and then also different regions and countries. That's why I'm super bullish on it. At some point, Rug Radio’s content stems out of Web3 crypto blockchain culture, but it doesn't have to be about that. For what it's worth, you could have a cooking show one day on YouTube, but it's powered by Rug Radio. That's what I'm trying to get to.
Is anything coming up on the roadmap that you can talk about?
We released the tech roadmap. We launched a creator portal. That was a promise we said for Q3. We launched a little before that. We have the marketplace coming with our rewards store and program on there. It is super cool and proprietary. By the end of 2023, we're launching the core content app, which is an aggregator of all content within Web3 in one spot because that's the need. People ask me all the time, “Where do I learn more about Web3 and crypto? I have to send people to twenty different things, even if I say listen to Rug Radio, but which one?” What if it's all in one spot? That's what's coming next.
I'm excited. It’s good to hang with you. We'll see you around.
Thank you for everything. Thanks for the support.
It's always great to support other content creators. With all of us doing what we're doing in this space, media is going to evolve. It has to.
We pull there up and down. Media is media.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.svg)
