This is an industry for the risk-takers, for the people who dared to do things that may never have been done before. David Wachsman saw the vision of the borderless future belonging to the fearless. He started his firm, Wachsman, off of this vision, supporting clients and companies who are building this future. In this episode, David joins us to share how he has grown Wachsmann into the world’s largest comms firm specializing in Web3, DeFi, Fintech, and more. He also shares his insights on where we are at in terms of the public’s perception of blockchain today as well as in the global macroeconomic system. Plus, David emphasizes the importance of community input, especially in the Web3 space. Bringing his expertise and experience, David gives us a great show full of information about the future of technology. Tune in to not miss out!
---
Listen to the podcast here
David Wachsman, CEO And Founder Of Wachsman, The World’s Largest Comms Firm Specializing In Web3, DeFi, Fintech And More…
This is David Wachsman, Founder and CEO of Wachsman, a strategy and communications firm advising the most advanced companies in tech and financial services. I'm here on the Edge of NFT, a show that keeps you on the edge of everything.
---
Stay tuned for this episode and learn why Web3 firm, Wachsman, believes the borderless future belongs to the fearless. Plus, how a simple napkin holder can hold a special place in someone's heart. Discover how Blur is turning the world of NFTs into a digital pawn shop with their lending platform Blend, all this and more in this episode.
Our awesome community gathering Outer Edge LA returned to Los Angeles in March of 2023. If you think you missed out, you can still catch up on all the interactive experiences, discussions, presentations and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and sign up with your email address to get a full recap of over 60 captivating conversations and performances. It is time to outer edge and chill.
---
This episode features David Wachsman, the CEO and Cofounder of Wachsman, the platform that can help companies in all stages and the world's largest communications firm, specializing in Web3, decentralized, finance, FinTech and emerging tech. As one of the earliest and highest-profile PR professionals in blockchain, David has helped to shape the way traditional media outlets view the industry.
He has advised dozens of companies that are pioneers in the blockchain sector, including Cardano, Ripple, Polkadot, Maker, Avalanche, Cosmos, Chainlink, Stellar, Filecoin, Decentraland, Hedera and Tezos. Wachsman is a leading global strategy, marketing and communications firm advising the next generation of companies in Web3, disruptive tech, finance, FinTech and venture capital. David, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. It is great to be here.
It is great to have you, David. I feel like I have run into you all over the country since Outer Edge LA. For our readers at home, for full disclosure, Wachsman has been an incredible ecosystem partner for Edge of Company over the last several years. We run into each other in Miami at the events there and in Austin. It is like having an old friend on the show.
In addition to meeting up here in the States, we have hung out all over the world together, going to premier events everywhere. It has been fun.
Shout-out to a dear friend of ours, Ron, for making the intro back in the day when we were on the precipice of planning our first big marquee event. I appreciate it, David, that when we share our vision, you are all in. Being early is part of the fun of the blockchain industry. Wachsman has been early to the party and helped many different companies establish and defend their industry position, take advantage of new opportunities and deal with challenges. There is no shortage of those in our space. It creates a more sustainable level of brand awareness. Let's jump into how you got started in this business. I have never asked you this question all the time that we have known each other and it is a fun one. What is the genesis of all this for you and the firm?
It is not dissimilar, Josh, from how you and I met in person for the first time. I was at a tech party in New York in early 2014. This was after the Mt. Gox disaster had taken down the reputation of the entire Bitcoin industry. I met the CEO of one of the first VC-backed Bitcoin exchanges. It is called Coinsetter or at least it was.
Jaron Lucas, the CEO, was this charming, engaging, brilliant young man. He had this Bitcoin exchange. They were one of the top ten largest Bitcoin exchanges in the United States. They had gotten some money from Barry Silver, who is legendary among others. They were looking to stand out in a market where they were selling the same product as every other Bitcoin exchange in the world. You could only buy and sell Bitcoin at the time. That is how these things worked.
The differences were based on trading volume, which is liquidity and the ability to buy and sell large orders quickly. Execution, whether the price was correct. Those were the business things that trigger why a customer would use an exchange but reputation and brand are something different. They hadn't established that.
I got to work with Jaron from that point forward in early 2014. We worked together for shaping the Coinsetter brand. They were one of my clients at an older PR agency. After about a year of working together, we cleaned the clocks of every other exchange worldwide. This was before even Gemini had come into the market but the competitors were like Coinbase, bit-stamped some of these early exchanges and we were doing better in terms of media coverage.
Jaron said, “David, what are you doing? You love this industry. You need to work in it full-time.” I went and brought a mining pool, a hardware wallet, a software wallet, a VC fund and an ATM network. I started Wachsman as the first truly professional communications firm in the space. There was an individual, Michael Turpin, who was doing it before me. He has become much more of an investor and is a dear friend, whereas Wachsman has become a professional services firm focusing on Bitcoin and later on the blockchain and Web3. It all started in a bar and asking a lot of questions.
We know Michael Turpin well. Who doesn't in the space? He is a staple in our industry. It may or may not have been a pushup contest on the roof of his penthouse in Puerto Rico. One said moment in the history of Edge of Company.
Never get into a pushup contest with Michael Turpin on a rooftop in Puerto Rico. That is all I have to say. It is a fascinating story and an organic start to it. A lot of things are that way in this space. This organic start is where things coalesce and come together. There is a lot of ambition and hard work but this organic growth of things feels natural and the momentum in the industry bears witness to that.
You founded things with this specific vision here to support entrepreneurs, founders and risk-takers. As we can see and as you get into these new markets, it is a bit risky but those types of folks that risk big can win big because they are doing some monumental things laying the foundation for the future. Tell us a little bit more about the vision as you formed the company in the Web3 blockchain space and where you saw things going from where you started with what you laid the groundwork for.
When I started the company back in 2015, it was the tail end of a two-year bear market. After Gox’s things slid for two years, the Bitcoin price went down. There was no Ether trading. The top ten coins were different than they are in 2023. There were a lot of people claiming that Bitcoin was dead. I remember going to a conference in San Diego and it's called Inside Bitcoin San Diego at the end of December 2015. It was in December. It was in this cavernous space and a gigantic venue. There were all of these white round tables like you might have at a picnic but they were inside an area that looked like an aircraft hangar. There were only four booths at the entire conference.
There was a good speaker lineup relatively in an adjoining room with a stage but not that many attendees, maybe a couple of hundred but I feel privileged to be there. They are listening to people like Patrick Byrne talk about the futures of securities trading from Overstock.com. Some of the people building some of the first wallets, like Paul Puey from Airbitz, now called Edge Wallet. Some of these are dear friends within the industry but the boots were sad.
If I were a mainstream reporter at the time, I would have said, “Bitcoin is dead.” I would show a photo of that huge room with four booths and all those empty tables. I would say, “This is the proof.” Bitcoin wasn't dead because, in 2016, crypto tripled. In 2017, crypto 30X and we were off to the races. The vision has always been to help the founders, entrepreneurs and investors who are building out a brand-new industry.
Back in 2018 and 2019, a colleague of mine, Danny Fan and I came up with the tagline for Wachsing, which is, “The future belongs to the fearless.” We think that our clients, the companies who are building this future, our staff and the 175 people all around the world who wear this logo, are people who we consider fearless because they are doing something that no one has done before. They are doing it bravely and proudly. They are conscience to make the right decisions in a time and place where the rules aren't fully yet defined. The vision is to go and help them with things that maybe have never been done before.
I have a follow-up question, which is a little bit intriguing and may not have an answer here but I'm curious about your perspective. You see these things emerge in the technology space throughout history, where it is almost inevitable. There is an organic growth that is happening. I'm looking at this series. It is called The Men Who Made America, going through Andrew Carnegie, Vanderbilt, railroads and steel systems. That stuff was going to happen anyways but the right people had to come in and make it happen.
How do you balance the concept that there is some organic growth that is happening? There were 30X and 10X of these different things that were happening. How much of it do you see as organic and natural? How much is this spreading the word in an intentional way that you do a necessary part of the growth? It is a little bit of a chicken in the egg story. How do you see that being involved in the spreading of the word around new technology?
Tolstoy’s greatest and most famous War and Peace is all about how Russian hold cadre of them were responding to the Napoleonic invasion of Europe and eventually into Russia itself. The moral of the story, if there is one in a 1,000-page book, is that fate is much bigger than any one man, even someone as big as Napoleon. I don't think individual people necessarily are driving the overall trend. Napoleon was the first one to do many of the things that he did and so too did Patrick Byrne, Brock Pierce, Charlie Schrem and many of the forerunners within this industry. The Winklevoss twins were doing things that no one had ever done before. As it turns out, they were part of a bigger trend but we didn't know it at the time.
The reality is we couldn't have said and predicted necessarily that blockchain was going to take off the way it was because the death nail had been stated so many times. If you had read newspapers over the course of many years, you would have been convinced this was all a scam. Bitcoin is got to be a scam. After all, there is nothing physical except the minors, people, Asics and everything else that goes into it but they like to talk about the intangibility.
What I'm trying to say is this. I feel like it has been our opportunity and privilege to work with some of the great founders in the space. I can tell you from being there at the beginning, “When the sausage is made, it is not quite as clean and easy to digest as it is when the eventual product is fished.” We have spent many hours dealing with everything from the world's most irritating crises in every conceivable sub-sector of the industry but also product launches that were hard to define.
For example, Decentraland. We have been spending the years in my old company, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, talking about these fungible tokens, what they represent, what they do and what the teams behind them are trying to research. All of a sudden, here comes this ERC-721 standard. There is this thing called NFTs that had to be defined for the first time. We are going to do this in a virtual world that people like to call the metaverse. It is going to be done by selling virtual real estate in a land that doesn't even exist yet and that, eventually, we will say, “People will spend their time in.”
That is a hell of a lot to say to somebody who has no appreciation of the metaverse, who is never bought an NFT, heard of an NFT or can even conceive of what fungibility is because back then, fungibility was something that monetary theorists talked about and that was about it. Being able to tell that story in 2017 was difficult. Telling that to reporters who had put it down in a newspaper that would be read by many people and interpreted by many people is a challenging thing to do. I don't think any of us realized at the time quite how big that industry would become. It was a fascinating thing to do at the time. It wasn't us that invented the technology. We did help tell the story but we are one of many that have turned this into a gigantic industry.
The journey continues. You could take what you shared about the early days of your firm and parallel it with where we are, where there is an exposition of what we see on the inside in terms of the robust amount of building, innovation and progress that is being made in the industry versus the public perception of our industry led by a number of mainstream media outlets as well as challenges that have come through scams that any industry would bear the brunt of and would be impacted if you dissect the fundamentals of FTX, what it was and what it wasn't. I love to have a broader conversation with you about where we are in terms of public perception of blockchain, Web3 and NFTs. Where do you think we are relative to the history here?
We are at a relatively low point. There are a lot more believers. Millions of people have downloaded software wallets and interacted with a digital asset of some sort, whether it is an NFT, digital collectible or someone who maybe bought Bitcoin, Ethereum or another Altcoin. Millions of people around the world have done that.
The perception of the reputation of this industry is down a lot. It is for a good reason. Some of the most famous individuals of the last few years turned out to be the biggest crooks. You can't blame reporters who are covering the space. You almost can't even blame the politicians who are talking about this and trying to go and win elections for talking about this industry and giving it a bad name.
You and I, Josh, know well how much progress has been made in this space and the amount of technology innovation here. The reason why I devoted all of my time to this space wasn't that I was excited about Bitcoin. I kept seeing IQ points flood the market that has not gone away. We have billions of venture capital dollars that have been spent building out zero-knowledge proofs, optimistic rollups, scaling solutions and ways for us to go and build a decentralized internet with infrastructure including storage, compute, GPU and bandwidth, all powered by blockchain-based technology.
When it comes to public perception, it is much easier to go and talk about the mistakes of this industry than it is to talk about all the progress we have made, necessary important progress that I legitimately think is going to improve society but we have to go and get past this somehow. We need to see some real wins, major improvements and things that regular people can do with blockchain technology they couldn't do before blockchain. Once they had a chance to spend some time enjoying life with blockchain-powered X, we could go and tell the story, “Without blockchain, this wouldn't exist.” We are not there yet.
Eathan and I talk about this a lot. We as a company talk about this a lot. We are constantly trying to showcase and highlight projects in the space with real utility pushing the edge of technology. Before we have that broader conversation, I wanted to get your thoughts on one trend of the day, which is meme coins. We got Pepe out there doing this thing. We got Turbo.
I was at a fascinating IRL Alpha conversation. I encourage anyone that lives in LA to visit on Thursdays at Budman Studio. Budman hosted our first live episode. It is a special place for us. They have this live conversation around trends and meme coins come up. There are two sides to it. Some people in the audience were like, “It is all good. More power to it for speculative trading on Blur and meme coins.” It is all part of the fun and nascent nature of our industry, which is meant for cowboys and whoever wants to be part of it.
On the other side, there is a perspective like, “This is not good. We don't need meme coins now. We don't need leverage NFT trading on Blur. That is not going tona get us any further when we are trying to have this broader narrative around maturing as an industry and NFTs not being speculative assets to digital collectibles.” Are we going to continue to see this trend toward hybrid economies of tokens and NFTs? Is all of this going to continue to be splintered with more fast-moving projects that don't necessarily have a long roadmap but are a lot of fun?
We need to separate the two things, serious projects and meme coins, in our heads. We need to do a better job of talking about this wide separation and tall wall in between as much as we can to everyone we possibly can because meme coin has been around for a long time. Anybody who has been in crypto since 2014 or 2015 saw a million Litecoin forks that turned out to be nothing other than either fun on one side or scams. We have seen Dogecoin, which has turned into a top-ten coin over time. We have seen all sorts of different projects. During the ICO era, we saw an enormous amount of scams.
Doge is ahead of Solana in terms of market cap.
Without naming names, I went to an event at Consensus in Austin. I saw a meme coin that is trying to create its version of a metaverse. I couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that we are seeing meme coins being taken seriously by the people who buy them and make an attempt to make use of them. Some people are building real things.
For example, remittance tools are far cheaper and faster than classical FinTech or financial services. We need to be talking about things like that to the extent we can and not talking about Pepe coins because meme coin is fun as they are. Those of us who are within the industry already know about this separation. It is clear to us but to someone off the street, a regulator or a banker, these things blur together far too much and it is causing bad effects.
The fact that we are seeing in the United States, many companies lose their bank accounts because they are somehow associated with this industry. It is sad. These are bank accounts for companies that are trying to pay employees, pay their taxes and do everything properly but because they are next or adjacent to an industry that has meme coins, we see all sorts of negative effects. That is why it is important that people out there who maybe did buy some of these coins and made a lot of money that is great. Make sure you are not talking about it in a way that is going to cause further damage to an industry that is already beleaguered.
I resonated with the comments you made about the influx of IQ points. That is one thing that is hard to deny when you are at the Outer Edge and talking to folks who are astronauts or someone like Stephen Wolfram. That is a name that I remember back in my high school days. One of my fellow student’s dad was a mathematician at the University of Chicago. He was using mathematics to solve his algebra homework. I watched Stephen Wolfram from Bill's Mathematica from afar over.
This guy is a legendary Renaissance man. This guy is legitimately one of the smartest people in the world and there he is.
He created an NFT collection and talked about blockchain. Vitalik, in and of himself, is such an incredibly intelligent individual. It is hard to deny but at the same time, you might also see people that don't have as many IQ points. I don't know how to say it in the terminology that we are saying. What the benefit has been of the “fun side” of it is bringing attention. It is good attention or bad attention. As we are having this conversation about the legitimacy of things, we also notice it can be a bit boring. There is this interesting juxtaposition of making something very interesting about something relatively boring.
It is a lot more exciting and fun to some of these meme coins and our NFT projects that are not in any way meme coins. They are fun. We saw art takeoff and decentralized music, which is powered by NFTs. These types of things and projects are very exciting. They are fun and consumable but at the same time, they are not altogether scams that a few people got rich on at the expense of someone else who has lost money. That is what I'm trying to say.
Sound.xyz, if you buy an NFT, you get a piece of music and you own that music. That is amazing. The artist gets direct benefits from that in a way that was never possible before. It is that type of stuff that gets me excited. I ask the question anticipating your response but it is challenging when meme coins are doing this and they are creating NFTs out of that. 1 out of 10,000 of these turns into a legitimate project, builds a real community and does cool things but the impact of the 99,999 that don't do that is profound.
Back to the IQ points, Eathan, because you brought up something interesting. In 2016, I met a guy named Charles Hoskinson, who was one of the Cofounders of Ethereum. He was the first CEO. He later on founded this thing called Cardano. I met him after he had founded it but before we had launched it to the world in 2017. This is 2016. I could not believe how smart this guy was.
I have had a chance to meet or know Charles for many years and he might be the smartest person on the planet. It is incredibly impressive to hear him talk about almost anything, the depth of knowledge he has, the capacity to go and put 2 in 2 and 2 times to the exponent of 50,000 together and connect the dots. It is extraordinary.
That is why people like that are some of the real pioneers of this industry. They are the ones who are creating the platform’s technology that leads people to have fun. That mix of things is the whole point of the crypto ecosystem. That is what has been built. It is a full-on ecosystem. Everything from many layers of infrastructure and competing visions of what the future could look like at the infrastructure layer to things that any consumer can touch, feel and have fun with.
Gaming is important because people spend a lot more money on video games than they do movies by orders of magnitude. At the same time, movies can't exist without photographs, video cameras and film. It is the same thing that holds true with Web3 gaming, which is going to take off. It can't work without scalable Layer 1s or Layer 2s on top that works well and seamlessly. It doesn't work without interoperability and all sorts of types of things, even payments which are difficult to do between multiple different rails and maybe multiple different countries. You can't have a great Web3 game without all those things built.
I love that movie analogy because the top 25 or top 100 movies are a mix of comedies, dramas, documentaries and all different genres. You do have the Jackass trilogy out there. A lot of people love that movie. It has come back several times around and you got Top Gun. That is a nice analogy. For a more volatile, pioneering industry like ours, it is the Jackass trilogy of the world that everyone wants to talk about and not the beautiful documentaries.
They also still watch Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan. There are authors out there that consumers like as well. The same holds true in the blockchain space, where we are seeing people who are creating extraordinary things, real magnificent artists, musicians, filmmakers and creatives. These are the types of people who show up at your conference, Josh. These people are building great things on rails made by other brilliant people who built that infrastructure and upgrading infrastructure too.
It is not my conference. It is the community's conference and a large team behind the scenes that make that happen. I'm one of many folks who put that bad boy together.
It would be interesting if you were open to talking about the wider global economic and political situation that is going on. I already had gotten into the Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. It is fascinating to see where we are at. If you listen to what he is talking about, it is a very dire perspective on America and maybe the political situation. From your perspective as someone who is engaged in these different places in different ways and studied a little bit of history, where are we at here within the context of the global macroeconomic system?
It is important to note for everyone in the audience that in this industry, blockchain and Web3 are as borderless as they come. We are seeing innovation happen everywhere. Everyone is competing at the same time in every single country. It has enormous implications for the conversation we are about to have here.
Ray Dalio, worth noting, is talking about the decline of America and many people have been talking about this since the end of World War II. He was one of the earliest investors in Mainland China. He had an extraordinary rise. We have seen their GDP grow many times over since the ‘90s. It is interesting to hear a person with a vested interest in a competitor of the United States talks about the decline of the US. Everyone should understand that the crash of the crypto markets in 2022, starting with the Terra Luna crash, happened at around the same time as we saw the overall economy slow down and cool. We have seen interest rates rise precipitously. With that, we have seen a lot less overall investment in alternative assets.
What does that mean? Venture capitalists get their money from LPs, Limited Partners. Those limited partners are either institutions or wealthy people. They might be syndicates who take some of their money and give it to VCs. They invest it for the next several years at a rate environment like we had before, where the interest rates were unbelievably low. It is near zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve and other central banks all over the world. The best way to go and make money wasn't to go and park your money in a bank account, a savings account or a mutual fund. It was to go out and buy alternative assets.
Public equity stocks weren't performing the way private equity was performing. Private equity has been doing well for quite a long time and not anywhere near as well as some of these frontier either digital assets or other types of alternative assets. We saw collectibles take off during COVID, where Rolex was worth many times what they were when they were sold in the first place because there were few of them and there was high demand there.
That is because you were seeing returns on investment profiles that were high and your risk-adjusted yields were high. A lot has changed as interest rates have arisen from the banks. If I can go and get 4.15% by taking my money and parking it into an FDIC-insured Apple account, Goldman Sachs, I'm going to do that rather than risking something to try and make 6% somewhere else. That is not worth it when you have risk-free 4.15% or 4.6% CDs. You are seeing it in lots of banks across the US. As a result, you see less money being imported to alternative assets, including ventures.
Those venture capitalists don't have quite as much fresh money to invest in things that they think are going to give them outsized returns. VCs are invested in necessarily risky things. That is why they are called venture capitalists. They might be losing on 4 out of every 5 deals or even more often than that. They might lose everything they put in. They have to make enormous returns on that last remaining amount. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to invest again.
We are seeing this whole cascade of events that resulted in less economic investment into the blockchain and digital asset space but more broadly into all venture capital over the last few years. This is interesting. It means that we are not going to be able to see people with DeFi protocols that are risky takeoff because people are going to say, “It is not worth it in this environment.”
We might see smart DeFi takeoff. That is what I think is going to happen. You might make only a few extra points more than you are going to go and get for free from Apple and Goldman Sachs or Chase Bank. The risk is going to be far lower because the smart contracts will have been audited better. We are going to have a lot more confidence in the way the technology works.
We are going to start seeing more money pour into the space from LPs to VCs directly into these projects and eventually from consumers investing in the space. That is how I see the macroeconomic picture. It is related to the overall reputation of the industry but it is not one-to-one. The reason why we are not seeking a massive investment in crypto isn't because of the reputation. It is more because of interest rates.
Why do you think that you can have Bitcoin and Ethereum, having doubled in value since the beginning of 2023 and it feels like a bear market? Is that going hand in hand with this interest rate thing?
People like to say that is true. I don't think it is. I simply think we saw too much of a crash toward $15,000 in Bitcoin and suba-thousand dollars in Ethereum. I'm going to call it an artificial price floor that was too low. We saw too much demand to sell during panic times, especially post-FTX. People were panicking. They didn't know where the bottom was. It was an artificial bottom that set in.
In 2023, we are seeing closer to the natural floor. If not the floor, then the relative floor for this market. That is to say, “It is a much bigger market now than it was a few years ago.” Many more people know about this. I'm saying that even without a plethora of new VC money coming into the space, we are still seeing nearly $2,000 Ether and nearly $30,000 Bitcoin.
That portends well for the overall industry's health. Even in this “bear market,” we are still seeing thousands of people show up for the best conferences in the industry, an enormous amount of discussion online and tons of column inches of newspapers, magazines and online talking about blockchain. It is healthy, as much as you possibly can be when your reputation's on the toilet.
I appreciate your candor, David. It brings me to wanting to think about the broader trends in technology as a whole. I have also met plenty of VCs in the software as a service space that has said, “I made one investment and I returned my fee to my investors because there is not a lot going on there.” There is this interesting creative convergence going on. We have the writer’s strike. There is a lot of creativity happening at the grassroots level using technology like AI and blending that with blockchain technology and other types of nascent technology all at the same time.
You also have this other trend that you didn't mention but I'm curious about your thoughts on startups buying other startups in this micro M&A trend going on. We take that trend and combine that with this real technology revolution that is happening on the ground. I'm curious how you think that impacts the broader macroeconomy in the future of blockchain.
Valuations during the bull market got silly. As an Angel investor, I was seeing precedes with $60 million to $80 million valuations. These people hadn't the closest thing to a product. It was a “white paper or a shell of a blueprint.” They were commanding these enormous valuations and getting big VCs to contribute, let alone angels.
We have seen compression evaluations ever since. That has been good for M&A. We have seen a lot more consolidation in the space. It is probably a good thing in part because some of the trash is being taken out but also because sometimes, 1 plus 1 equals 2. We have seen this before too. That trend is going to continue all over the place, whether it is the bankrupted lenders in the space being bought by traditional financial services companies or others in the space.
We are going to see NFT projects merging. We have seen a lot more of that because what is going to happen is the cream will rise to the top and capital markets will simply do their thing where they are. That is an interesting trend, Josh. We should be paying close attention to it because some of the winners are going to be the ones who are picking up good companies on the sheet.
Tell us more about the day-to-day work you are doing for clients that are getting you excited. What is going on?
We are working with companies all over the world. We got 3 offices in the United States, 3 in Europe and 1 in Asia. We have seen an enormous rise in interest in Asia in part because Hong Kong reopened its doors to crypto, blockchain and NFTs. That has been exciting. We have seen a lot of interest there. We have seen interest in Dubai, where we have seen a friendly government setup. In Europe, this is a new thing ever since MiCA was more or less passed. It is going to take a little while for everything to set in.
We have seen a lot of companies say, “We want to build in Europe. We are convinced that there is going to be some certainty here. We can sleep at night knowing that what we are doing is within the confines of a rule set. We can make the requisite changes if necessary. We see an enormous amount of interest there from everything from Layer 1s to DeFi and a lot of overall infrastructure companies that think they can set up there and comply with the rules clearly defined.”
I know firsthand from being in the trenches with you that you have expanded your offering from traditional PR into some other cool areas like policy, marketing and advertising and brought on some other heavy hitters to your team. Why did you go in that direction? How does this influence your roadmap and the roadmap for the industry moving forward?
I made some huge mistakes and the audience should know. In 2018, we started a separate company for legal reasons but an investment bank at Wachsman. We got some registered broker-dealers. We thought that there was going to be a huge trend toward M&A and capital formation advisory at the time. It was too early. By that time, everyone had their licenses and everything was set up properly. The crypto winter had set in. We are talking about a different crypto winter, not like Ether at $1,000 crypto winter. I'm talking $80 Ether in December of 2018. It was brutal.
Although that fell apart, I still think there is a need for great investment bankers in the space. We stayed away from that. We have decided to go in a different direction. We expanded in policy, building out our office in DC and hiring veterans from some of the best public affairs firms in the United States. We are doing a lot of that work also in Europe, where people who have worked in Brussels of the European Union and Singapore, people who have worked all across APAC dealing with policy. We have seen those types of advisory offerings being popular.
Beyond that, in marketing, we were lucky enough to hire the CEO of Cointelegraph, Jay Cassano, to come to join us at Wachsman. We are lucky enough to have a couple of other people from the CT team join Wachsman in a marketing and strategy capacity. We are building out and offering community management and social media advisory. We think that is also important because why get a placement in a major publication if you can't shout about it on the internet?
It always confused me how a lot of PR companies take a traditional approach to Web3, which is anything but traditional. It is community-centric. You have an opportunity there to amplify the traditional messages through grassroots community building, which is how you build an audience and modernization strategies with those in the trenches community members that they care about a lot, not just the media.
They are the ultimate evangelists, the people who care about what you as a company or you as a team are building. One major difference, you both know this well, is that if you have to go and describe a single characteristic to everyone in Web3, nevertheless, whatever their backgrounds are, it is that they hate inauthentic people. If you see any traces of inauthenticity or dishonesty, it is incredible how fast the internet turns on you.
When we have seen traditional marketers or communications professionals come into the space and try their hand at this, they are corporate-y and are not experts and it shows. As soon as they come up with some message that simply doesn't make any sense to this audience, we see a revolt. Some major brands have had some failed projects within the space because they took the wrong approach. They didn't get community input. They didn't in any way interact with the people whom they needed to have as their core audience. These evangelists are going to keep working for them like surrogates in a political campaign. They never got their input and they paid the price.
It is like jumping from all the traditional marketing things that are going on YouTube, Facebook and Google Ads and jumping into this domain. It is a different world. Different things work and different things don't. Before we get to our Quick Hitters, which is going to be fun, are there any other projects out there in the Web3 space that you are not working with or internal to what is going on there that you are like, “That is amazing?” Especially some of the obscure things that our readers might not know about.
Maybe not so obscure but I'm a big fan of what people are doing when it comes to doing X and earning. This is an important concept. One of our dear friends in the industry is the team behind Sweatcoin. I was an investor full disclosure in the company but I love the concept of working out and getting paid something for it.
Here is the important point. I think and maybe I'm wrong, that it doesn't matter if you get paid 1/10th of a penny or less. It is better to get that and get some reward that you can measure and feel than get paid nothing at all. At Wachsman, we helped launch this thing called Steemit back in 2016, which is probably the first serious decentralized social network. It was purpose-built. The blockchain was created specifically where new tokens and an inflation tax method are going to pay out posters on the internet and to Steemit.com based on their contributions to the overall protocol. It was an interesting system.
Over time, those rewards on a US dollar basis got less and people complained like crazy. I don't blame them for complaining like crazy and you can say the Tokenomics was off or whatever other complaints you might want to have but I still think it is better to get paid a little bit of something than get paid nothing at all. There are going to be a lot of inventive other types of ways of do X and earn that are going to come out probably for things that we have never even thought you could make money or even a little bit of it and get recognized for it before.
On that point, we all have credit cards that give us points back. Whether it is 1%, 2% or 5%, we don't complain, “It should be 20%.” We know that's not a viable thing for a sustainable economy for the credit card companies and for us to make a difference but we want to bend at the edges and not break those programs. The right rewards loyalty systems will be set up for the right rewards at the right time and not over-incentivize early and crash the economy.
These are things that we have learned and were a major topic of conversation in Outer Edge. We had the head of Tokenomics globally, Mohamed Ezeldin, for Animoca Brands. We have a lot of lessons learned from the last few years for the future of awards and loyalty. This is an area we are also helping clients and are excited about. I couldn't agree with you more.
Speaking from someone who has a child, we are an organism that can be motivated by stars on a piece of paper.
We want to get onto Edge Quick Hitters here and get to know you even better. Let's dive in. These are fun and quick ways to get to know you better. Here are ten quick questions. We are looking for a short single or few-word response. You can expand if you get the urge. First question, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It is got to be a Twix bar. I always love those things.
Second question, what is the first thing you remember selling in your life?
When I was in fourth grade, I created my first company, where we sold rocks. They weren't pet rocks. They were everything from gemstones to certain types of mineral formations that looked interesting enough and that was my first ever business. It was successful at the school fair.
I was on a little road trip. I'm in the Chicago area. I went to South Haven, Michigan, to the little beach town there. They had a store that advertised that it had fossils and shells. They have never been in a cooler store with that stuff. They had a giant crystal thing that you could walk into for $10,000. On that note, rocks can b interesting.
I had a meeting up in Pasadena. I tried to convince my girlfriend to go with me. She was like, “There is a rock show at the Convention Center in Pasadena.” I dropped her off at the rock show. This is April 1st, 2023. She gets out of it. She is not a spender. I was like, “Did you get anything cool?”
When you said a rock show, did you think it was a music concert?
No, I knew it was a crystal rock show. She gets out to the rock show and I see a big bag of stuff. I'm like, “What did you buy?” She was like, “I might have bought a rare rock from another planet.” I was like, “That sounds cool.” She convinced me that she spent over six figures on a rock but it was an April Fools show. She could have been a client or a co-contributor to your scheme. She loves rocks and crystals. David, what is the most recent thing you have purchased?
A case of Fiji Water. I can't have enough bottled water to hydrate. It is good for you.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
Hopefully some services to a new business prospect. We shall see.
Question number five, what is your most prized possession?
It is a napkin holder that I have in my living room that my mom got I don't even know where from when I was a little kid but it's the one thing that reminds me of my child at home and I take it everywhere I go. The rest of my stuff could get nuked but that napkin holder means the world to me.
Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or experience that is for sale, what would it be?
I would love to be one of the people to early on get to go to outer space. There is going to be a huge market for it. I'm not the only one but I love to be a space horse.
One of the more popular responses, unlike the napkin holder, which has never been a response we have had before.
How soon do you think it is going to be before we have an amusement park on the moon? It sounds like, “Let's go to moon land.” Isn't that going to be a thing?
That is going to be so much fun. Many people will die before that thing is constructed and fully built but it will be well worth it.
If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Unjealousy. I was going to say curiosity but good quality is truly enjoying when other people are successful and derive some happiness or joy from it. I love watching people succeed in whatever it is they love.
If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
Impatience.
You are patient with the sound check before the show. You are well on your way.
You got a relatively Zen quality for someone who could characterize themselves as a bit impatient. You are doing good. Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I did a few phone calls with my team members. Nothing all that exciting but over the weekend here in Miami, my hometown, there was an F1 race. There was a Heat and Knicks game that was worth watching. That was my weekend there.
It could be the Celtics and the Heat in the next round. It is not as exciting a game that I watched between them, where we missed by 2/10th of a second, winning that game. That was painful.
You also have to make sure and track our Web3 basketball team that we own, which we are starting to segment on the show from Swoops. We do have a digital basketball team that you can keep track of. As of this episode, we are number 96 in the rankings, which is higher than last time.
Who are the stars on your team?
We have named one of them. We are working on the name of the next one but we do have Tron Stockton. He is our star player. He is a five-star rated player in the game and he's doing quite well for us. We do have to shore up the weak spots for the rest of our team. Question number ten, what are you doing after the show?
No idea. It is Miami. The world is my oyster.
That was Quick Hitters. Lots of fun. Thanks a lot for playing along. The next segment is Hot Topics. As someone who is very acquainted with the news and what goes on there, let's visit a few headlines of the day. The first one is the NFT marketplace Blur has made headlines and it has launched Blend, a peer-to-peer NFT lending platform that allows traders to lease out their NFTs to collectors looking to buy blue chip NFTs on a smaller upfront payment.
Holders hoping to earn extra money can put up their NFT, receive loan offers and transfer their token via escrow smart contract to the renter for a specified period similar to a digital pawn shop. We have been talking about this. There have been various platforms that are trying to do it out. It is a nice cohesion of an NFT platform to make lending available.
It is a little bit different than what else is happening outside the industry. It is a little bit more extreme for one of the top marketplaces to do it right. If you are on the recipient side of that, you could partially buy a Punk or APE that you couldn't otherwise afford but you don't own it and you don't get the airdrops from it. You are taken out a high-interest loan to partially buy it. They could collapse. You could end up paying 5 or 10 times the value of that APE or punk depending on what happens in the market.
It is a high-risk form of gambling on an asset class. Folks like Richerd from Manifold and others in the space and like Tom Bilyeu are turning more mainstream. Everyone can afford this type of product like Sound.xyz, like we were talking about earlier with music. I'm going to vote that it is not a good idea for our industry and not the right time and place to do something like this.
It is a fantastic idea for NFTs that are not speculative, of which there will be many. Maybe NFTs are representative of the rights to something. Assuming loans are being taken out for USD as opposed to denominated an ETH, for example, or Solana. That is a good opportunity. If you happen to have something that is consistently valuable, you should be able, provided that the tech and regulations are there, to go and get something for it. To your point, Josh, it doesn't work if the collateral collapse is in value overnight.
Consistently valuable is the key. I don't know if we are there. We have seen even the price dynamics of the most sought-after digital collectibles fluctuate dramatically day to day, week to week and month to month. Layering this level of risk on top of that relatively volatile economy feels ill-timed.
You might be right. I don't think it is a good business proposition to take your watch, bring it to a pawn shop and take out cash. They are called pawn shops for a reason. There is also a reason why they got bad reputations. It is not good investment advice to recommend that someone do that and use that money to do X, Y and Z. Odds are they are going to lose and it is why pawn shops make their money.
Powertools, from the buyer's perspective, I have always seen some interesting deals there but I have never snatched one up. Maybe estate sales are a better option for things like this. The Sui NFT scene already has early buzz. Will it last? The Sui blockchains may not launch on Wednesday of the article. Active NFT community is taking a route. The marketplace is dropping projects that have sold out and collectively yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of trades, albeit some early hitches. The Mysten Labs that developed Layer 1 blockchain has built Solana Killer by some but Solana boasts one of the liveliest NFT markets around. It is second only to Ethereum. I have heard a little bit about this. David, are you following the Sui at all?
Yes, for a long time. I had a chance to meet the founding team a couple of years ago. It is a great technology. They have done a great launch so far. I got to applaud them for it. People are working hard to build out a brand-new ecosystem. It is tough to do when you have so many extraordinary competitors on the market.
There are a lot of great Layer 1s out there that have enormous ecosystems and invested millions of dollars in building out developer toolkits and experiences for people all over the world to make use of their tech. As far as the NFT scene goes, it s brand new. This is one of the many things that can be built on top of this ecosystem. Interested to know though, what news source are you reading this from to go and say something like Solana Killer?
If you look at the coin market cap, you will see it took a massive dive after launching. I’m not sure what Tokenomics and trends are behind that. This is one of many examples in the space where the adage too early to tell applies. We have seen a lot of early-stage technology projects since Dave has been in the industry. We joined the industry a few years thereafter. They had all the promise and potential of the world not to make it and other ones came out of nowhere and quickly escalated to the top of the food chain.
I would be remiss to make a prediction at this early stage. The idea is that this Solana Killer is clickbait to some extent, given where we are at in the market in the cycle. It does seem like they are doing some promising building on the ground. We would like to have them on the show soon and later. They are one of the projects to follow in the space but not with conviction viscerally unless you are on the founding team. It is responsible for taking a healthy perspective on these new early-stage companies and overall what they are doing, not financial advice.
I appreciate the Not Financial Advice Twitter show. I can't leave his name. I'm bad with names or I'm delayed on names. Moving on to our next segment. David, our next segment is the shout-out. We always like to give our guests a chance to shout-out some interesting projects, collaborators or a person or group that is close to your heart or worth mentioning. Does anybody come to mind?
I love to give a shout-out to the Blockchain Association and the Chamber of Digital Commerce. We have some people fighting the good fight who are trying to go and take it to Capitol Hill, talk to policymakers and educate them on what is going on in our industry. As we talked about at the beginning of this segment, our industry has a bad name and reputation that has been caused by a few bad actors who were mega-famous and is having all sorts of effects on us.
We do have people in our industry who are well-educated on the issues, understood the process well and worked hard on behalf of everyone with a vested interest in this space. We should go and give those people credit. This is advice. Please donate to those organizations. They can use the support that will give them more ammunition to go and spread the gospel.
They don't get a lot of exposure here. I don't think we mentioned them ever before on the show. That is always great. This segment is always a great resource for things below the radar that shouldn't be. Before we go, where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you are working on? We got to leave them on a great note and send them off to something new and interesting.
Please go to www.Wachsman.com or check us out on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you are interested in working in Web3, hit us up. We do help clients find great talent. It is one of the things that we do at Wachsman. We are always hiring too. Check us out.
I appreciate you being here. We have reached the outer limit. Thanks for exploring with us, everyone. We got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. 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.
Thanks, Eathan and Josh.
Important Links
- Wachsman
- Blur
- Watch.OuterEdge.live
- Edge of Company
- Overstock.com
- War and Peace
- IRL Alpha
- Sound.xyz
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order
- Cointelegraph
- Sweatcoin
- Steemit
- Animoca Brands
- Swoops
- Sui
- Decrypt
- Not Financial Advice - Twitter
- Blockchain Association
- Chamber of Digital Commerce
- Twitter - Walchsman
- LinkedIn - Walchsman
- Spotify – Edge Of NFT
- iTunes – Edge Of NFT
- EdgeOfNFT - Twitter
.png)
.png)
.png)
.svg)
