This episode recorded the team’s trip to dCentral Austin and Consensus, in June of 2022. Listen to Jeff and Josh talk with Bill Tai, Chairman, and Amanda Terry, COO of Metagood. They discuss the details of building a Web3 project that has an incredible impact. Hot topics bring us a chat about XPUNKS, bringing the crypto punk aesthetic to XRP NFTs. How can you go wrong with primates and punks? You can’t.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Bill Tai & Amanda Terry Of MetaGood, Catalyzing Positive Change For Collective Action, Plus XPUNKS, First & Only Punkmunity Of The XRP Community, And More…
This episode features Bill Tai, the Chairman, a monetary Cofounder, and COO of Metagood, the for-profit company that strives to build a better future for Web3 while doing good along the way. Bill has been funding startups as a venture capitalist since 1991 and has 23 of his startups become listed companies. Originally trained as a chip designer, he joined LSI Logic, a seminal Silicon Valley startup formed by the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor, after earning an Electrical Engineering degree with honors from the University of Illinois.
In addition to being a partner at Charles River Ventures, he cofounded the nonprofit MaiTai Global, a professional networking group that merges work, play and philanthropy. MaiTai also heads up the Extreme Tech Challenge, an international startup competition that culminates in a pitch presentation to Sir Richard Branson on Necker Island.
Amanda has over twenty years of digital media sales and business development experience from Twitter, NBC, Zagat, 5min, TARGUSinfo, and Acxiom, all of which were acquired at some point as well. She’s a frequent speaker at blockchain industry events, including NFT.NYC, Ethereal Summit, South by Southwest, VeeCon, and soon-to-be NFTLA.
She’s a Minneapolis native. Amanda received a BA from Princeton University and an MBA from Wharton. Metagood empowers communities to be catalysts for positive collective action. Through its first NFT project OnChainMonkey, Metagood has simultaneously created value for its community members and contributed to several important causes. Amanda and Bill, welcome to the show.
Thank you. We’re honored to be here.
It’s so great to have you both.
Thanks for having us.
You two have some relationships with some of the biggest projects in the space, investors, advisors and friends. What drew you to Metagood? Give us the origin story.
The origin story dates back to the funding of Dapper Labs. I did happen somehow to be into peer-to-peer computing in the ’90s. A friend of mine started Second Life. I became Alan Greenspan Gollum and helped create the concept around what became the Linden dollar around 2003 or 2004. When the Bitcoin white paper came out, it was an immediate draw. I ended up in that industry around 2010. I funded Bitfury, the silicon that became Bitfury mining. I and a couple of kiteboarders funded that silicon ASIC chip in 2011.
That eventually led to me passing on the formation of Ethereum, but then I realized that it was going to be important. That year, I decided I’m going to back a couple of projects in Ethereum. I funded Powerledger and Fluidity, which created the first DEX through AirSwap and Dapper Labs, which had created CryptoKitties. When CryptoKitties got up and running, it became obvious to me that there was a lot of economic power in communities that were interested in these digital assets. I wanted to capture some of that energy to do some other things that were good for this world.
Separately, I had helped start a nonprofit. The name has evolved to become ACTAI Global for Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators. We support both environmental conservation and economic empowerment through entrepreneurship. Along the environmental front, we were throwing an ocean gala with Sylvia Earle, one of the Time 100 people. She’s a famous woman in the ocean space. I wanted to do something interesting. I asked the team at Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties to create a special edition CryptoKittty, and they did. It was called HonuKitty. It is a CryptoKittty with a turtle shell. It’s very cute. You can find it on Giphy and look it up on through a bunch of search engines.
We managed to auction that off for tens of thousands of dollars. We gave the money to Captain Paul Watson who parked his ship to fund something called Operation Gyro at the turtle nesting area off the island of Antigua. He had people walk the beaches 24/7 to protect the turtles to make sure the babies got off into the water and that the bigger ones didn’t get eaten. That was an idea that happened around 2017 and 2018. It has been a good few years, but I always knew that the general idea could be made to be lower friction, replicable and scalable. That led to the formation of Metagood.
Top-down organizations limit creativity. Click To Tweet
We don’t talk enough about Second Life in this space. It doesn’t come up often. I appreciate you raising that. Amanda, how about you? What was your story? What was your journey to Metagood?
I’ve known Bill since 2013 through ACTAI Global. I helped to run that community for the last couple of years. We wanted to do an NFT to raise some funds for ACTAI Global. We did it but ran into a lot of issues along the way. I was thinking, “There has to be a way to harness the power of NFTs in those communities to connect them with causes.” That was the root idea in my head.
Bill was kind enough to connect me with our Cofounder and CEO, Danny Yang. Danny has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. He is the Founder of Maicoin, which is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Taiwan. He found a company called BlockSeer, which he sold in 2018 and billed it back to his previous company.
Danny and I got together. We were kicking around a lot of different ideas in everything from a marketplace to other ideas. We’re working on an art collection that involved bears. Danny, being the technical genius that he is, decided on the side to work on a little project. He’s like, “I wonder if I could do a 10,000 profile pic collection all on-chain in a single Ethereum transaction.”
He was working on this thing on the side. On September 11th, Bill and I get a WhatsApp message from Danny, “I did something pretty cool. You might want to check it out.” That was the launch of our Genesis collection. Within four hours, they were all minted out. Roham from Dapper Labs retweeted it. They were gone like hotcakes. That was the launch of OnChainMonkey.
A little fun aside is that our Head of Events, Zach Sekar, planned a little happy hour at a popular bar in Venice for Dapper after CryptoKitties launched. Jeff was there too. We met Mack and heard the old story. He was on the phone a lot because things were still breaking. They pretty much broke the chain. That was our first exposure to NFTs, which got us excited about the industry.
It’s the Genesis block of this industry.
There has been a lot of building. There’s also a lot of ideating on what problems can we solve in Web3. I was in Davos. There are exciting conversations there. Making projects like what you all are doing is so relevant and important in the space as we get past this PFP phase. I would love to dig into what are the big problems that you all think we can solve that inspired Metagood?
Going back to Second Life again because people don’t talk about it enough, Second Life was built at a time when things were hard to build with the technology that existed at the time. Computers were not that fast. The broadband was spotty. Not everybody had internet. The clients had to be massive and software downloads. It was not that user-friendly, but the company accomplished a lot with real-world physics or physics implemented behind the UI of the assets. It was a real live economy.
They had a giant concert for Mariah Carey or someone.
U2 came in. IBM used to have a booth there to display products and things. There was a lot of experimentation with things that would become more commonplace now, whether it’s livestreaming through Twitch or metaverse-related things. All of that was already pioneered in high friction in Second Life. As we move forward in the world, some of the elements that were born in that era are coming to life both inside the metaverse and are being abstracted outside to touch real-world people and assets in a connected way.
What are the problems to solve? There are still a bunch of problems to be solved in the web infrastructure layer to try to make things cheap enough to run economically. You see it in the friction around the viewers with the headsets. Those work well but they’re expensive. At some point, the rendering capability has gotten a lot more economical than ten years ago, but it’s going to go a lot further because of the clout.
Metagood: When CryptoKitties got up and running, it became obvious that there was a lot of power, a lot of economic power, in communities that were interested in these digital assets.
Moving forward, we solve these problems. On a social impact scale, what do you think is possible using Web3 that maybe wasn’t as easy to accomplish otherwise?
The communities are a lot larger now because of the breadth of use of the blockchain as a standard methodology to have a trusted distributed database where things act as real currency. Second Life is a SQL server with almost loyalty points programs. They were convertible into fiat currency but through weird little exchanges like IGE that Brock Pierce ran in 2005 and 2006.
A lot of those things are already embedded in what you can do with a digital asset, whether it’s an NFT or a cryptocurrency. The communities are big and broad. The communications channels exist across everything from the existing social media things to newer things like Discord. You can spin up communities and spread messages fast. You can resolve questions at scale quickly in ways that you couldn’t before. You can get communities of interest built by discussing things and making decisions at a speed that was unfathomable many years ago.
Whatever the world’s problems are, whether it’s poverty, cleaning the oceans, conflict resolution, or even getting the constitution amended, you can do these things with more ease through that community-centric gathering and the multiplier effect.
The soil is right for that. You can plant seeds in a desert. Nothing will happen. We’re at a point where there’s a generational change occurring. Pretty much anybody that’s 25 and younger or maybe even 45 and younger cares because they see what’s happening to both the destruction of our environment and the rising temperatures. There are arguments about, “Is it cyclical? Is it climate change?” People know that it’s affecting them and they want to do something about it.
Let’s talk about OnChainMonkey, what it is, and how it incorporates some of this DNA we’re talking about. Why is it so special?
We’re a collection of firsts. We were launched on September 11th, 2021. It’s a free mint. We were the first profile pic collection all on-chain in a single transaction. All of the metadata and images are on SVG. It’s very energy efficient to launch that way. We were one of the first NFT collections to my knowledge that has ever projected NFTs on landmarks in San Francisco and LA.
Instead of a bat signal, it was shining a monkey signal to raise awareness of OnChainMonkey and be like, “We need to do something differently.” Weeks later, we projected NFTs on the side of the Armadillo Building in Glasgow, Scotland during COP26 while world leaders were meeting to inspire a billion people to think about the climate change crisis. We have done things differently.
We did OCM Earth, which was a mosaic of 25,000 of our monkeys that we shaped in the picture of the Earth with a heart over Ukraine. We sold those for 0.1 ETH. We did say, “There’s no utility. This is donating.” We raised $185,000 in two weeks. Instead of our team deciding where it should go, we consulted with one of our investors, Holly Branson of Virgin Unite and said, “We want this to go to a good humanitarian cause.” She gave us three options. That was our first DAO Snapshot vote, “Which charity should it go to?” It went to Save The Children to fund humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
Starting in a DAO is also on the edge. I’m curious. Why start a DAO? How does it apply to your vision?
A DAO is a natural fit for communities. If you think about trying to drive collective action across a group of people that share a common interest in both an asset category as well as a cause, it’s a perfect way to map those two. The way our company functions is it is a for-profit company because we need to make enough to keep going and funding causes. As the digital assets that we create trade on exchanges, a certain part of that is commission.
That commission comes into a bucket and splits into two pieces. One is a foundation entity that is the pool of capital that the DAO gets to vote on. The other fund is for the operations of the company. As this capital pool builds up separately, the members of the community that are monkey holders or NFT holders can suggest projects of any kind. It’s very democratic and open. They can be Web3 technology projects, charitable projects, and open-source projects. The group then can nominate. There are discussions. Things resolve to whether or not the group wants to apply capital.
We were doing a social DAO panel over at Decentral talking to some of the folks over there. ATX DAO was part of that. It was interesting that they’re reaching out globally to other DAOs and trying to find these synergies between them and utility across DAO is everywhere. It sounds a lot like society in general when some of the complex interactions that happen across governments. We’re at the very beginning, but it’s cool to see these things start to evolve.
Also, what’s getting interesting is because we have created such an authentic and passionate community of NFT holders, we have been getting reached out to by very large brands who want to understand, “How can we leverage and move into the Web3 space? How do we offer NFTs to our customers and our shareholders to engage and incentivize them either with fungible or non-fungible tokens?” To all of those large brands, we said, “You should buy some monkeys, get into our community, and join our DAO.”
Consulting knowledge is valuable. Let’s do a little bit of a Web3 exchange here.
We’ve got Bill Tai, a legendary Silicon Valley investor. We’ve got Danny Yang, the consummate tech builder and incredible technical genius. I’m on the business side. I said, “Come in, buy some monkeys, and participate in our DAO. There are projects we can do with you that can get funding from the DAO. Also, you have a built-in base of customers who are already going to be consumers for your projects because they are OnChainMonkey holders.”
Are there any non-anonymous brands that we can talk about that are now monkey holders?
I’ll mention two. These are not signed yet, so I have to give that caveat. We are going to be doing something with Hut 8 who are going to be buying some OnChainMonkeys. We’re hoping to do a PO app with them for an upcoming event where there will be some very high-profile people. It’s a great way for them to get their brand out like a digital swag in terms of a badge that you were there, which is a big flex in anyone’s wallet if you come to this event. At our gathering, we have been chatting with the New York Stock Exchange about doing something as well, which can be big scale.
There are so many cool things coming up. One I want to talk about in particular is Karma. It’s right here very soon around the corner. Tell us a little bit about this drop. It’s your second drop.
Our first drop was that Genesis collection of 10,000 monkeys. We did a Snapshot and dropped 10,000 Desserts. We had 55% Ice Pops, 45% Divine Donuts, and 15% Celestial Cakes, which we have been selling for 65 ETH to 80 ETH. This will be our third collection, which has been designed by a Hollywood animation team. The coolest story is it was one of our community members who created a monkey derivative of his OnChainMonkey and posted it on Twitter. People in our community loved it so much.
We reached out to him and said, “Do you want to come work with us on our next collection?” We hired him, his boss, and two other colleagues. They’re the team behind Rio, Ice Age, and Ferdinand. They have been working on this collection since October 2021. That’s what’s coming. You have a Genesis monkey. It can eat D1 or D2 or both Desserts. It will get a Karma monkey with the traits of the Genesis monkey. That’s for existing holders. You can come in and buy a Genesis now or wait until the public mint and get your Karma monkey. Buying now is good because there are better rarity chances of knowing what you’re going to get than waiting for the public mint.
We were on a panel together in 110-degree weather. I still heard this correctly. You let them go in terms of the creation process, which is so cool. You all have a lot of experience, expertise, and strategic guidance that you could provide to the different dimensions of OnChainMonkey and Metagood to the extent that you can. You’re letting people roll with it and see what happens organically. That’s the power of the Simon Sinek role. You define this meta-purpose and see what happens. That’s pretty awesome.
Thank you. That’s the way the world should work. I’ve always struggled when I’ve been in top-down organizations. Those limit creativity. In our community, there are such interesting people. The people that ended up driving the art for the Genesis collection were original holders that happened to be artists that worked on Academy Award-nominated films.
Web3 is that too. It just happens.
Metagood: Now we’re at a point where there’s a generational change occurring. People care because they see what’s happening—the destruction of our environment and the rising temperatures. People know it’s affecting them and want to do something about it.
Without suspending the creative and innovative spirit, what are the types of projects you would like to see encompass the Metagood community in the future?
First of all, in the spirit of not being top-down, we would love to see that come from the community. I mentioned broadly three buckets of things where there are going to be incredible things happening. One is the for-profit company space. There’s a lot of stuff that still has to be invented and deployed in Web3 to make the industry reach its potential. That’s not going to come from us necessarily.
We might do little pieces of it, but the spider web effect of all the thousands of people in our community that see things, that are able to nominate things, that can then put them in front of thousands of others, that can then spread the word and provide funding, we’re an amplifier for that kind of thing. Key new technologies, movements and products in Web3 can get their sea legs in our community.
There are going to be some things that are not so much companies but open source projects. I funded a lot of different open source projects over the years mostly in bits and bytes and things like that. There are some things that lend themselves better to that business model than for-profit companies. This is a perfect vehicle for something like that as well.
There are so many things to be done in the domain of charitable giving to support causes that will never make money by themselves, whether it’s things around ocean conservation, preventing climate change, the plastics issue that we have in this world, and projects like that. There may be some for-profit things that come out of there but maybe not. We can do these spot things as well like the Afghan girl getting lifted out of the arms of the Taliban. That changed lives, her and her whole family. There are lots of things ahead.
That’s some good fodder for current community members and potential community members.
Let’s piggyback off of that and talk specifically about the Metagood and OnChainMonkey roadmaps. What are those specific things that you have on your roadmap for the next couple of quarters?
The main thing that we have been heads down on is this public event on June 29th, 2022. That goes super well because a certain percentage of the revenues will go into our DAO treasury. When we hit 10,000 ETH, we decided to give 50% to the company of all revenues and 50% into the treasury DAO, which is a very high percentage compared to most DAOs on mints and go-forward trading revenues. That has been our main focus. It’s getting that up and running because we have started it.
It’s a lot of work to run a DAO effectively. It’s everything from getting all the proposals, giving them good feedback, and educating the community on why we’re doing it, what type of things they should vote for, and what’s appropriate in terms of funding. Investors are always like, “Do they need that much? Can we do it for less?” It’s thinking about all that and the DAO.
What we’re excited about that we haven’t announced yet is this idea of missions. You can send your OnChainMonkey on a mission. The first one is going to be based on the concept of nesting. You hold your NFT for 45 days, and then you will be dropped some type of fungible or non-fungible token. I’m not going to give all the details yet on that. That’s just one thing.
What’s so cool is we have created these incentive systems to change how people behave both online and in the real world. That’s our first experiment. You can imagine that we have already integrated with Twitter and Discord. If you tweet with OnChainMonkey and your wallet is connected to the OnChainMonkey website, you can earn a digital banana. In our Discord, people every eight hours can earn a banana and give a banana.
People give bananas when people are doing good things. Those bananas have value. It’s a social value within our community. You can all also use those for real-world things like buying merch, hats, and allowlist spots. This concept of missions is going to be critical for us. The nesting thing is one little beginning step in what we think is how you incentivize people to create value within a community but then work together for a greater good.
I want that banana to come with some peanut butter. You can’t do one without the other. That’s amazing. It’s a contrast to other communities. We get different concepts shared with us every day. There’s another community where if you sell below the floor, you get a 30% penalty. There are positive versus negative incentives. It’s a big ground for experimentation and inspiration. Before we get to our next segment, I am curious. What other projects in this space inspire both of you?
There are several. Amanda and I both like the World of Women thing. I do like the Unicorn DAO project because I’m friends with Rebecca and Nadya. It’s very timely because it’s addressing such a crazy problem in this world that you wouldn’t think could exist now. That one has been amazing. The power of the people that are in the World of Women is fantastic. Randi is one of our big supporters as well.
You were asking before we got started, “What was the first thing you bought?” I was thinking through NFTs. One of our investors is Roham from Dapper Labs. I’ve been impressed with Dapper Labs, not just CryptoKitties. My first NFT was an NBA Top Shot. I’m not even a huge basketball fan but it was a gamified approach to getting me to buy it. I could do it with my credit card. It was super easy. I love how they’re innovating. The whole flow ecosystem is awesome.
It’s such a good job at such an early stage of this segment of the evolution of NFTs.
It’s another inspiration for this show. There was someone here that got a rare LeBron. It was not me.
Randi Zuckerberg is one of our investors. She founded TheHug.xyz, which is an accelerator helping people. That’s another important thing. If we talk about the roadmap, we haven’t figured out quite yet what we want to do, but it’s helping onboard new people into crypto and educating them on security. We have a partnership with Ledger. We were the first NFT collection to create a custom OnChainMonkey Ledger.
Stuff like that is important and to continue doing education. How do you keep your NFT secure? How do you make sure you don’t click on the wrong link in Discord? While a lot of our NFT community is quite savvy, we want to make this accessible for more people. To do that, we have to help educate them. We like TheHug.xyz. She founded cofounded Meta Angels. I’ll be speaking on a panel with them at NFT.NYC. I’ve been getting to know their project a little bit in preparation for that. It’s a cool project.
I’ll mention a couple of other ones. One is a real project that exists. The other one is maybe coming. The OneOf.com project is very cool because it’s opening that space that empowers artists. They started with musical artists that had sold their music rights to other labels and things. A lot of the artists were issuing digital picture-type assets.
It allows creators to touch their fans in a different way. That company has made a lot of progress. If people follow that company, they would have seen that eBay, the world’s largest physical collectibles marketplace, chose OneOf to have them migrate to digital assets. They did a Wayne Gretzky collection as a test. There’s a significant change that can happen there.
If you think about the eBay model where there’s a physical asset and I sell it to you, and then I’ve got to ship it, you can’t sell it until you get it. It moves again. They have now set up a vault. There will be a digital certificate so I could sell it to you, you can sell it to her, and she could sell it to you all on the same day. The volume is going to go like that.
They have the OnePass. We interviewed them the day they announced the partnership with the Grammys at the NFT New York. We have been following those guys. Our friend Erik Mendelson is on that team. I’m a big fan of all the things that they’re doing in the space too.
Here’s the one that I’m hoping launches that hasn’t yet. We have been helping the team at a Burning Man camp called Robot Heart. That’s one of the pioneering music camps on the playa. They did a little foundation dinner. At that dinner were folks like Diplo and Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil who’s now a DJ. They have been busy taking the iconic Robot Heart logo and turning it into variants that address certain things. At some point, they’re going to issue them. I hope they issue them but they’re working on it.
There are a lot of alphas on this show.
Metagood: There has to be a way to use and harness the power of NFTs and those communities to connect them with causes.
Bill and Amanda, thank you so much for giving us all the details on Metagood, OnChainMonkey, and everything to come. We want to shift gears and go into segment two, which is called Edge Quick Hitters. It’s a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. We’re looking for short, single-word or few-word answers, but we will dive in a little deeper here and there. We will do the first five with Amanda answering first and switch up. Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It may have been an entrance to a roller rink when I was a kid.
You always remember your big purchases. The first big purchase I made was a BMW in 1987 that I still drive. People that know me well know that I don’t ever sell anything. I tend to buy and then I hope. I still drive that car.
Amanda, question two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Could you come back to me on that one?
We will come back. What do you have, Bill?
I agonized over it because I don’t sell very much. I was Zoom’s first backer. My holding was pretty big. I had some tax people telling me that I needed to gift a bunch of it. It’s not a sale. That was the first thing. Usually, I hang on to everything. That was a good call because Zoom was low and then high. Now it’s in-between.
This is probably later but I do remember the first big sale that I celebrated and was excited about was my first job out of college, which was here in Austin, Texas at Trilogy Software. I sold a software deal. For me, that was a huge thing. It was an eight-month sales process. I remember being super stoked. I’m sure that was something small but there’s smaller stuff along the way. That was probably the thing I was most proud of.
That counts. Question number three, Amanda, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
It’s probably clothes for my daughter. I do like to also get stuff at used stores because she’s growing so fast. From a sustainability standpoint, it doesn’t feel right to keep buying new stuff but sometimes there will be something very cute that I see like a sundress that she needs. That’s the first thing.
You found swag around here for her as well. Bill, how about you?
Mine was a Garmin 86csi, which is a location device that floats if you’re in trouble in the ocean somewhere. It won’t sink. I’m on the water a lot, kiteboarding. I’m going to be on the ocean a bunch this summer. I figured I needed a tracking device that would float if I got into trouble.
That’s super smart. Question number four, Amanda, what is the most recent thing you sold?
This is along the lines of what Bill said. The most recent thing I sold was I had some kiteboards from 2015. I decided with my daughter. I was like, “I’m going to wait and get new kites when I start kiting again.” That was the last big thing I sold.
Bill, what about you?
I can’t think of anything.
I’ll tell a story about your computer. Bill was the first investor in Zoom. When we started Metagood, we said, “There’s COVID. Bill, you need to have Zoom backgrounds. You need to make sure your computer can have these Zoom backgrounds.” He had a laptop from 2011 that could not do Zoom backgrounds. A group of us banded together. We were like, “We are going to buy Bill a new laptop. When he’s on calls on Zoom, which he backed, he will have the ability to do Zoom backgrounds.” This is true that he is not a transactional person in any way.
Question number five, Amanda, what is your most prized possession?
It is my time. It’s not a possession but it’s the most valuable thing that we all have.
That works. Bill, how about you?
I don’t prize possessions. It’s this whole necklace thing that was not purchased. It was made by some friends. It’s a symbol that represents the nonprofit that we drive. The symbol is a cross between the DaVinci man and the Freemasons’ logo.
Bill, we’re going to toss it over to you for question six. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?
First of all, I don’t think I would ever buy it for myself. It would be something for kids. It would probably have something to do with an educational project like maybe a robot kit or something to build.
Amanda, how about you?
Metagood: You can get communities of interest built, discussing things and making decisions at a speed that was just unfathomable 20 years ago.
I haven’t looked into it yet. Probably someday I could do it. I am fascinated by seeing people go to space. It’s not on my immediate radar but at some point in my lifetime, that is something that I would like to experience.
It’s a common theme on this show for sure. It’s out there for people. Question number seven, Bill, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?
It’s good judgment. It’s not to say that I have good judgment but I’ve learned to not make bad judgments. When I fund companies and people, I’m not funding companies. I typically work at the stage when there are 1 to 2 people in a company trying to chase an idea. I’m generally looking for a good wave for someone to ride and somebody with a good judgment that will listen and take advice. A great judgment makes life happen.
Amanda, how about you?
It’s curiosity. Life is all about continually learning. I hope that throughout my life, I have the opportunities to keep learning. I hope that my children also have that curiosity and thirst to learn.
Curiosity and good judgment are hand in hand for sure. Question number eight, Bill, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
I would like to be able to get better sleep. It’s a double-edged sword because I’m a pretty high-energy person. My mind is racing all the time. I’ve had to force myself to learn ways to keep it quiet. I wouldn’t want to pass on that frenetic and explosive mind thing unless they had the ability to control it.
We can relate. Amanda, how about you?
I can be very analytical about things. I’m thinking about all the things that could happen or different options. That can make me a little slower in decision-making than I would like to be. I’m getting better at it but it’s moving forward with the flow, knowing it’s going to all work out, and not trying to analyze everything when it’s a big decision.
That’s a tough balance. Question number nine, Bill, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I ate a bag of trail mix.
Amanda, how about you?
Life is all about continually learning. Click To Tweet
I grabbed lunch with four of our OnChainMonkey holders. We were at the OneOf panel. We all went to a taco place. We were figuring out who to pick up the bill. I’m like, “You’re all holders. This is a mini-meeting of OnChainMonkey.” I grabbed a little lunch with four ladies.
We appreciate you fueling up before the show. That’s for sure. Here’s the last one. Question number ten, what are you doing next after the show?
I believe we have another podcast. We’re doing some investor meetings while we’re here as well.
We are hitting Meta Gala. It is the next big thing.
We also like to stack our show. Get them knocked out.
Before we let you go, where should folks go to learn more about Metagood, OnChainMonkeys, Karma, and everything you have going on?
At a high level, you can go to Metagood.com and also OnChainMonkey.com. If you want to get more details, everything is in the OnChainMonkey Discord and also Twitter @OnChainMonkey. That’s where we share all of our information.
Also, I have to mention we are going to do a little giveaway in collaboration with OnChainMonkey and Karma. We’re talking about doing some allowlist spots that are super highly sought for Karma. There are ten of them. Thank you so much. We’re very grateful for that. Please keep an eye on our socials for information about how to get ahold of those.
Let’s also thank ConsenSys for bringing us together. We’re live at ConsenSys in this cool booth that CoinDesk has graciously offered us. It’s awesome to be here in person with you and hear all the amazing things you’re up to.
We want to move over to segment three, Hot Topics. Our cohost Eathan Janney covers this section. He’s not here with us. Josh and I will do it. It’s all about XPUNKS. We are fortunate to have one of the founders, Kaj Leroy, to join us here at ConsenSys and talk all about XPUNKS. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
We got to start at the beginning. What is the origin story of XPUNKS?
Metagood: While a lot of our NFT community will say it is quite savvy, we want to make this accessible for more people. To do that, we have to help educate them.
It’s a crazy story. What happened was in October 2021, I was completely broke. I was always following up with XRPL, the community, and also with Ripple. Ripple announced their $250 million Creative Fund. That’s when I was like, “Maybe this is a moment that I can do something in this space.” NFT technology wasn’t there yet. We had to get creative. We were the first in the world to tokenize whitelisting. We issued 5,000 tokens on the XRPL. I borrowed €100 from my girlfriend to be able to do that. We issued 5,000 tokens, went live, and launched our Twitter. Within two hours or something, we had 3,000 followers. Within 24 hours, we had a $12 million market cap.
That’s amazing. It’s brave to take on a new protocol for such a name. There’s such a legacy to it. What was the experience of building on Ripple? What hurdles did you have to overcome along the way?
One of the biggest hurdles was getting trust from the community because issuing a token is easy. We didn’t have the art yet. The art wasn’t there because we couldn’t mint. We had to convince the community that we are a trustful entity. We do live up to our promises. One thing we focused on was transparency. We doxxed ourselves very fast. We brought a white paper as an NFT project, which is already quite special. Even in our white paper, we have all the separate wallets that are dedicated toward our budgeting with all the tokens in there. People can see when funds are moved out or not, and what the funds are used for. We’re transparent in everything we do.
Because it’s new, you had to mint the token before the NFT technology was even ready.
It was a crazy experience. After we launched, this whole community, we saw a lot of potential for themselves as well. There are about 400 to 500 projects building on the same infrastructure with these IOU digital voucher tokens.
I love when organizations like Ripple dedicate funds to projects like yours. Let’s talk a little bit about current functionality and utility. What’s next? What’s on the roadmap?
One of our utilities is also helping the community. We have, for example, incubator drops where a new project comes to us and says, “We need a small boost of exposure.” By doing so, they will airdrop part of their supply to our NFT holders. That’s one thing we do. We received the Creator Fund from Ripple to build a new project called Eden. It’s about the Eden doctrine. I can’t say much more, but it’s going to be a cool story. It’s a long project about ten months out.
With the XPUNKS, we created an entire ecosystem called onXRP.com. This is an NFT marketplace. We have a decentralized exchange and a gaming platform. We’re launching our game there as well. It’s not Eden. It’s something different. It’s a ten multiplayer battle royal obstacle run game where people can put up a stake upfront. The first person who reaches the end will win the pool. It’s play to win.
This is clearly not your average punks we’re talking about here. They’re doing some incredible stuff with utilities, taking NFT innovations to the next level, and trying to shine a light on all the cool possibilities with Ripple’s technology. It sounds great. It’s so cool to meet you in the Ripple House. If people want to get involved and plug into what you’re doing, where do they go? What do they do?
We have a website, XPUNKS.club. We’re going to be redefining it as soon as we mint. We have Twitter @XRPLPUNKS and also onXRP.com. We have Discord as well. We’re happy to help and answer any questions from the community members. We’re here.
Reach out. XPUNKS is happening. It’s here. There are so many fun things to come. Check it out.
There’s another surprise for our audience. We’re going to be doing XPUNKS giveaways as well. Stay tuned for information there.
Kaj, thank you so much.
Thank you for having us. It’s great to meet you.
We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for today. Thank you for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers to make this journey all so much better. How? Go to iTunes or Spotify, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Thank you again for exploring with us.
Important Links
- Metagood.com
- OnChainMonkey.com
- Dapper Labs
- Second Life
- Bitfury
- Powerledger
- Fluidity
- AirSwap
- CryptoKitties
- ACTAI Global
- Maicoin
- COP26
- OCM Earth
- Snapshot
- Decentral
- ATX DAO
- Hut 8
- New York Stock Exchange
- Karma
- Genesis
- Desserts
- World of Women
- NBA Top Shot
- TheHug.xyz
- Ledger
- Meta Angels
- OneOf.com
- Wayne Gretzky
- Robot Heart
- Meta Gala
- Discord – OnChainMonkey
- @OnChainMonkey – Twitter
- ConsenSys
- XPUNKS.club
- XRPL
- Ripple
- Eden
- onXRP.com
- @XRPLPUNKS – Twitter
- Discord – XPUNKS
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
- Spotify – Edge of NFT
.jpg)
.jpg)
.webp)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.svg)
