The last year has been absolutely crazy. DeGods was a relatively like unheard of project a year ago. Fast forward to where we're at right now, it's one of the largest projects in the NFT space. It's also one of the most polarizing projects in the NFT space. What factors contributed to this massive success in such a short time? What’s on the outer edge for DeGods? Join in on this Fireside Conversation at the Outer Edge 2023 Stage as Frank DeGods bares it all with Marc Colcer. Frank and his team are really pushing the envelope of what’s possible in the space, and the exciting things they’re doing are clearly being rewarded by the community. Tune in and see what’s on store for this massively successful project that’s starting to change people’s lives!
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Listen to the podcast here
Frank DeGods & Marc Colcer Fireside Conversation | Outer Edge 2023 Stage
Fasten your seat belts for this fireside chat with Frank DeGods. He's going to be talking with Marc Colcer from The Marc Colcer Podcast. Thank you.
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How are we doing, Frank?
Excellent.
We had a wild night. The DeGods party was a great time per usual.
I don't know what you're talking about. I was grinding hard at work.
I want to give you an opportunity. The last year has been crazy. DeGods was a relatively unheard-of project a year ago. Fast forward to where we're at now. It's one of the largest projects in the NFT space. It's easily one of the most polarizing projects in the NFT space. I want to give you an opportunity to reflect on what last year has been like for you and the rest of the team. Even earlier, we were talking about somebody who announced that they had paid off all the costs of their entire wedding by selling a DeGod, which is a Bitcoin DeGod.
It was minted three days ago.
In two days, they paid off their entire wedding. Can you reflect on that? What has it been like for the last year for you and changing so many people's lives?
When we started DeGods, the idea was to be a builder project. We started making all these tools. Nobody remembers the first 4 or 5 months. We did these community bonding things like DeGods Week. We had these bounty challenges. We were doing that on the side. We're trying to build this blogging tool. We're trying to build this Reddit thing. We're doing this community stuff on the side. At some point at the end of 2021, I realized, "All this builder stuff is pointless because the community is nuts. We got to lock in on this."
What 2022 has taught me is the more that we go in and the more we focus on our holders and our community, the more we influence the rest of the space. Instead of trying to go mainstream and try to tackle millions of people, we try to make a dope experience for our 10,000 DeGods and 15,000 y00ts. That strategy has paid off in a big way. We're not changing that strategy at all. My thinking is if we make the life of a DeGod holder and a y00t holder dope, everyone is going to want to get a DeGod or a y00t. We're going to keep doing that on repeat. It's going to keep getting bigger.
There are a lot of trends in the NFT space. There are certain things that pop off for a second, and then they tend to fizzle out. You have always been thought leaders and pushing the envelope of what is possible, what people think is groundbreaking, and things like that in the space. When you are going through the thought process of "We're going to announce something. We're building something," especially at the beginning, there were things that you built that didn't have a great reaction to them. People didn't utilize them.
As time has gone on, and you have refined that whole creative process in coming out with things that people want in the space, how do you build things that people don't realize they want but by the time you announce them, they go crazy for them? We have seen the Bitcoin Ordinals, which we will get into in a second.
There's a lot of noise on Twitter where people want to get their own engagement. They want to feel good about themselves. What that leads to is a lot of dilution of basic fundamentals. For example, when I look at the Bitcoin NFTs, Bitcoin is the biggest cryptocurrency, and it's not even close. Now they have inscriptions, which are an incredible way to do NFTs on Bitcoin. It's not just some side thing. It's on the actual blockchain itself. When you see something that's a no-brainer like that, it's pretty exciting. It takes time for people to understand the impact of it until you prove it.
When we launch stuff now, we have such a high bar. If it's not going to get people to go nuts and if it doesn't get people excited, there's no point in doing it. You're competing with a Twitter feed where people have thousands of projects that are showing their shit nonstop. To stand out from the noise, you have to do something worthy of talking about. This is specific but when we're launching something, we ask ourselves, "Is every Twitter NFT influencer going to tweet about this because the headline is so obvious that they can't not make content about it?"
If you think about it like that, it changes your approach to how you choose what to work on. If you choose the right things to work on in this space, the space rewards you heavily. People are looking for exciting things in a space where there's so much capital. People have no idea where the direction of this thing is going. If you do things that get people excited, the outsized asymmetric returns on that are so nuts. It's the only thing that's worth spending time on at this point.
When you announce things from there, you know that some people are going to have a great reaction to it. Some people are going to FUD because FUD-ing can be fun sometimes on Twitter. How much do you worry about the negative comments? Do you think about those often? Do you look to see if there's merit to what they're saying? Is it something that if you have that conviction on what you are doing, what the team has done, and what the decision was made, you roll with it and not let the FUD bother you?
I'm chronically online. If you are tweeting some shit about this, I'll read it. I pretty much read everything on the internet that mentions about DeGods and y00ts. To me, that's customer research. What other industry in the world where many people have opinions about your early-stage startup? That's nuts. You've been there for some of the dark days, and they never go away. People can be upset but the skill is getting numb to it. For every ten negative comments, somebody might have some valid feedback. They might package it in a dickhead or douchebag way but if it's valid, it's valid.
It's important to read that stuff and learn from it. It's a benefit that everyone is talking about stuff that we're launching. I would much rather people say negative things and talk about us versus the reality that most projects face, which is nobody says anything about it. We have been in that spot. That's way worse to be in. It's important that there is commentary and things happening around the brand because it's like oxygen. With no attention, an NFT project dies. It's important to always be fostering attention.
When you first started seeing the Bitcoin Ordinals coming to be, what was your original thought on those? Did you think they were going to do well? Did you think this was something that was going to be a fad? We know you're a huge Bitcoin max. You love Bitcoin but with that, did you think this is an opportunity for us? We have all known in the community that the 535 burned DeGods that you decided to revive, and we know in the community that for the last years these were going to come back at some point. We just didn't know how exactly that was going to come to be. When exactly did you realize there's a huge opportunity with Bitcoin, and that we've got something that we can do with this, and it's truly going to be something super special?
Two weeks after Ordinals came out. In the first week, there were 20,000 early inscriptions. I was like, "It looks like dog shit." From 20,000 to 50,000 inscriptions, I was like, "This is on the Bitcoin blockchain. People are bidding on the block space. This is sick. How can we do this in a mind-blowing way?" When we talked to Luxor Mining, the mining team that we work with on this, we talked about the idea of doing it all in one block.
When he said it was possible but they would have to do something that has never been done in Bitcoin history before, which is design artistically and construct a block, I was like, "Sign me up." We negotiated. We got the price to two Bitcoins but he could have said any number, and I would have been like, "Let's go." We got a good deal on it but it was a no-brainer to me. Bitcoin is king. The only reason any of this shit even exists in this whole crypto space is because of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to keep getting bigger.
There's the idea that people are going to want or not want digital artifacts that are on the Bitcoin blockchain. It's ludicrous to me to think that people are not going to want Bitcoin artifacts. The way that the protocol of Ordinals has been done is so elegant. It's a no-brainer. The question then became, "How do we do this in the right way that's authentic?"
I'm happy because Bitcoin means a lot to me. It seems like even the Bitcoin community is hyped about the way that we did this. We paid the miners a lot. We had degens paying a lot in gas fees to get on that mint. It makes me happy that people are paying off their student loans, wedding bills, and all that stuff because that's what gets me going every morning. That's crazy. We could change some lives. That's what matters at the end of the day.
The mint day of Bitcoin Ordinals felt a lot like the original mint day for DeGods. It was funny watching how much money people put into gas in there. Somebody spent $3,000 on gas for mint.
It has to be a record in Bitcoin fees.
What was the mint day like for you? Were you nervous? This is something that had never been done. I don't think most people who even minted the Bitcoin DeGods that day knew what they were doing. It was a lot of people asking questions up until twenty minutes before the mint. What was the mint day like for you? Did you breathe a sigh of relief when everything went through, and you knew it was all 100% set, and it worked out perfectly?
It was lock-in. We had a skeleton team because most of the team is working on this migration to ETH, which is coming up soon. It was a skeleton team on the Bitcoin DeGod stuff. We were on Google Meet calls for 8 to 9 hours a day for the whole week leading up to it, putting out all the designs and making them on the fly. When it got to mint day, it was day five of a monster sprint. We were running on fumes but fully locked in. I had the monitor set up with a Mempool, a Discord chat, and support tickets.
We were in the control center. We didn't have a lot of time to think about any of the implications of it up until the mint happened. I was nervous, "Maybe it doesn't sell out. Maybe people aren't hyped about it," but I was confident in what we were offering and the product. I felt like, "This is so historic." I didn't think the mint would go so crazy when we break records and break the Bitcoin blockchain, which DeGods broke Bitcoin. You can't expect the upside of how crazy it gets but I was pretty confident that this is a fair deal for the market. The market usually responds well to fair deals.
I felt like even though people were complaining about the mint price, it was fair to me and a lot of people. It sold out three times over. We had to put out how to do a lot of refunds. I'm hyped to see them do well in secondary because that's what matters. I want people to make money on our shit. That's important to me. I care about that in the same way for a lot of things. That's dope.
Do you think that's the most money ever transacted via a spreadsheet we have ever seen?
It's a $2.5 million trading volume over a spreadsheet. It is nuts. It's this idea of keeping it simple. It's what's magical about Bitcoin. The friction is what makes it cool. You have guys that are clowning on people for bidding 0.91 Bitcoin on it. They're getting clown emojis if they try to bid underneath the floor so it's funny. I'm not surprised at this point. The DeGods community is different. I tweet about it. It's beyond me at this point. You can't stop it. It's pretty crazy to see them do it like this on Bitcoin.
Do you think there are going to be any future DeLab projects on Bitcoin? Is this the end of Bitcoin? Do you think at some point, maybe we have some y00ts on Bitcoin or another project on Bitcoin? Is there anything like that?
Let's get y00ts on Dogecoin. I don't know yet. We're focused on migration. Let's crush ETH. Let's take shit over there and then go to Polygon and make that a strong ecosystem. That's where my head is at right now. We're locked in on that. That's mission one.
Let's talk about migration. I believe it was on Christmas. You announced that the DeGods were going to be bridging over to Ethereum and that y00ts were going to be bridging over to Polygon. Can you talk about what went into that decision, why that decision was made, and why you feel like that's the best course of action for the projects?
I've been saying that 2023 is the year of FAFO or Fuck Around, Find Out. For us, it's very controversial and speculative but I do think that we capped out a little bit on SOL. When you looked at the DeGods market cap, it was bigger than the next ten projects combined on Solana. I felt like there was a little bit of a challenge there. Even now, Bitcoin DeGods with 535 supplies, the market cap would be the number three biggest Solana project. I do think that there's a liquidity crunch happening on Solana. There are a lot of incredible projects there. It seemed like a no-brainer to take DeGods to ETH.
When we thought about y00ts to Polygon, we saw that there was so much opportunity with all these massive brands building on Polygon. They had no avenue, no place to take them, and no NFT projects to anchor. It's a risky bet. Polygon is early as fuck. There's not a lot of trading volume on there. You have the Trump NFTs and Reddit but that excites me a lot because it's a fun challenge. Hopefully, the Bitcoin DeGods thing shows that we're not just trying to launch shit and throw it out there. We care way more about how the thing does after the launch. We want to build a strong ecosystem on Polygon. The upside of doing that is untapped and massive. That's the goal with y00ts.
Can you talk about the timeline of this decision? A lot of people saw the FTX crash and how that affected Solana. They thought that decision was made at that point in time. Can you give the timeline of when the bridge idea came to be and when you started putting in work to make that happen?
I'm not going to lie. FTX sucked. That was a bad day but we have been talking about moving multi-chain and doing stuff like this for a long time. When we first started selling kmoney when we started doing Duppies around that time, that was when we felt growing pains on Solana, especially at y00tlist when DeGods for the first time became a top-five project on any blockchain. We did feel a little bit of that, "Are we being capped being on this chain in terms of liquidity, market cap, volume, TVL, and all this stuff?"
FTX accelerated the decision for sure because for context on Dust Labs, on the other side, we had a lot of potential customers. We had contract signs and all this stuff for future mints. There was a lot of expected revenue there. All of them canceled after FTX. The hidden pain for a lot of projects post-FTX is not talked about enough on Twitter but a lot of people closed shop. A lot of businesses went under. You're seeing more things closed down now.
We were quick to move on it for sure but that's our MO. We're quick to move on Ordinals. We're quick to make a move because the opposite of that is going slow. Going slow in this industry equals death. You're seeing a lot of projects that thought they should take it safe during the bear market and that they should play it slow. You're seeing them get wrecked. I don't want that to happen to DeGods, y00ts, and our holders. We're in heavy aggression mode in 2023.
Social relevancy is a big thing with that. You announced the move or the bridge-over. That was in December 2022. We're in March 2023. When exactly is that bridge occurring? Is it well planned out that you announce something like that, and it becomes this hotbed subject for the next few months, keeping DeGods and y00ts socially relevant? Everybody has got a comment. They're all going to make those comments during that time.
Do you make that announcement, knowing it's going to give people something to talk about, which once again is something that you said is important like having people discussing the projects and things like that? Is that why the decision is made to give people something to talk about, which keeps once again the project relevant?
Their relevance is the bare minimum. Without relevance, it's hard to grow and make big moves. Relevance is the bare minimum. I look at it pretty intensely, "Is this going to get more people to want to buy and hold a DeGod or a y00t?" You have to get creative to do that but we're strict on the things that we launched. It shouldn't be like, "We are doing this cool collaboration, and now everyone is going to all of a sudden want a DeGod." That's not what moves the needle. It's providing value, creating incredible experiences, and connecting the holders so they get tight together. These are real needle-movers to me.
The relevance part is the bare minimum. You have to hit that point but after that, what is going to make a DeGod or a y00t something that people want to have and make the desire of that go up? The only way to do that I've found is to make the experience of the holders so good that they talk about it. They're telling their friends, "This is dope. You got to get in." That's where most people buy expensive NFTs at this point. It's almost always from a friend, a trusted influencer, or these trusted resources. You can't fake that. At the end of the day, you have to make a great experience. That's what moves the needle.
With the bridge, can you talk about some of the challenges you have had to overcome? Doing something like this is not easy. There's usually a lot of friction with something like that. Can you talk about the challenges that you have had to overcome? Frank, we need the alpha. When is that bridge happening?
In terms of the challenges, the biggest one is you want to make sure that people that are buying the DeGod on ETH and buying the y00t on Polygon feel like they are buying an ETH-native asset and a Polygon-native asset. To do that, you have to do something like a burn-and-mint. You have to burn it on Solana and mint it on ETH. That way, you don't have this question of provenance going between chains. To do that, have it verified, and rebuild all of the staking and contracts that we built on SOL, it starts feeling simple. You scope it out to make sure you have all the edge cases solved. It's a process.
In terms of when the bridge is happening, I'm pretty confident we're hitting this Q1 deadline. You can do the math on that. My whole philosophy with marketing and crypto Twitter is, "Give people a maximum of 48 hours." If I say, "It's happening next week," people forget about it. Some other shit happens. Some major bank collapses. You've lost the excitement. Forty-eight hours is enough for most people to figure it out. It creates that FOMO and excitement around it. That's the alpha I can tell you. Whenever the bridge is going to happen, I'm going to give you a 48-hour warning, and then it's going to go.
Can you talk about what can we expect with that whole experience? Is there any alpha you can give us? When that 48-hour announcement comes, what should we expect with how that's all going to work and how it's all going to look?
My whole strut is, "Lower your expectations. It's going to be horrible. There's nothing cool planned for it." Have the lowest bar so then everyone is mind-blown because the Bitcoin mint set the bar too high. It's like, "This thing is going 5X in a day." Relax a little bit. Let's see what happens and nail the technicals of this. We have some cool stuff planned but lower your expectations.
When you are making big announcements, in the past it has been something where you have given specific dates. On that, we are well known for the delay. Is that something where now you have decided, "Let's go with the 48-hour announcement. That way, we know it's done. It's ready to go. We can push it live," and not something where you set a date a few weeks ahead of time, and now if that date gets delayed for a matter of reasons, you've got people who are angry on the timeline all because a specific date was given?
The delayed thing is the time from the community. They take us up and then make it into a joke. Thank you. Here's a shout-out to the holders that do that but it's not good. We're trying to fix it. Most of the time, when we do delay, it's for the community, and it's for a good reason. For all the things I've talked about throughout this talk, it matters to me that people feel, "When DeGods does some shit or when y00ts does some shit, I have to pay attention."
If you do too many mid-launches, you dilute that effect. We have been through that. We have had a series. We have done a lot of mid stuff. It's no fun. It's not exciting. That matters a lot. We're trying a new strategy here. By the time we announce the 48 hours, we already have the site live. We have tested it. It is ready to go. Forty-eight hours is so people lose their minds. That's how I'm thinking about it.
You announced that DeLabs is going to be hiring for some pretty big positions. Can you talk about what those positions are going to enable DeGods and y00ts to be able to do moving forward that you haven't been able to do currently?
There are two core things. One, the team is four people now. It's a skeleton crew that has put together a lot of stuff with DeLabs, especially DeGods and y00ts. We have been working out of our apartment and now house for the past year and a half. The point is the brand has gotten so big at this point. It's irresponsible to keep operating it like this, to be real. What happens is we're working on the stuff to day-to-day maintain the project and do the new shit that's going to blow people's minds at the same time.
The new stuff always ends up getting delayed because we have so many things we're back backlogged on. We got to fulfill all these promises and all this stuff. The team is going to allow us to grow, push, and be aggressive on the day-to-day while I and Johnny start focusing more on season three, y00t season two, the airdrops that we're planning to do, and the next shit that's going to blow people's minds. I do feel always that those things never get enough time and focus.
That's the core high level of what these positions we're going to bring that’s going to enable it. It's going to be tough though, with growing pains. Going from a bunch of homies in an apartment and a dining table to a real company is going to be interesting to see. At this scale, we are getting some of the top talent in the world looking to work here. There's no way that they were a net negative. There are going to be massive increases in the output for the brand.
We haven't scaled that yet. I always feel like we're early days because I know the internals of the company and I know how duct-taped together so many of the things that we have done here are. It all comes from love. Now that we're going to bring on some heavy hitters, it's going to make a huge difference. People are not ready to see DeGods and y00ts output at this level.
Can you talk about the level of quality of applicants that have been applying? I saw something the other day. A crazy number of people applied for these jobs. A lot of times, when you think about people who are applying for jobs, you think of someone like me who's in the community who's like, “I might be able to do that." What level of talent is applying for these jobs?
They're A-players. I'm trying to think of what's a good analogy here. It has a very diverse background. When you're hiring for any other industry, you don't get as diverse of an applicant group of people with music, business, history, tech, startups, film, and all kinds of different backgrounds. It's super interesting. That's the best answer.
Another big thing with DeGods, y00ts, and everything is the IRL meetups. We had a big event in June 2022 in New York. We had another big event in Paris. We had another big event in LA. Can you talk about the importance of IRL events and also the content that comes with them? We have seen some interesting content that always comes from these parties. We have seen people doing the worm. We have seen a mosh pit in New York. Can you talk about the importance of IRL events and why they're so important for DeGods and y00ts?
I love this topic because, in the bull market, IRL became the worst buzzword of all time. I was anti-IRL stuff. We never did any of the IRL stuff early DeGods. What I realized was we have a holder in almost every single country and all these major cities around the world. If you buy a JPEG on the internet, and you can travel to any city in the world and have best friends in that city, that is nuts. That is something that has never been able to be done before. I've seen it happen over and over again with the DeGods and the y00ts communities.
When I think about scaling and how this community looks when we get bigger, it's a superpower to be able to go on your phone because of a JPEG that you buy, go to any city in the world, and get A VIP experience in that city. That at a high level is what is uniquely powerful about having an NFT community and what it means to have IRL events. The IRL events that you're talking about are fun to do. We booked three floors of the best hotel in New York, the PUBLIC Hotel, for DeNYC.
That's sick because everyone was going to get a hotel room anyway if they were going to NFT.NYC. They might as well stay with the gang and the DeGods. If you're going to get one, let's all stay together on the same floor. That should be fun. Some slumber parties and sleepovers should be cool. How do you make incredible experiences that people are never going to be able to forget? Content helps with that for sure but if we can deliver that, now you get into the priceless range.
If someone has an experience or meets a best friend, you can't price that shit. The impact of meeting somebody that you're going to talk to every day for the rest of your life, what is the dollar value of that? The impact of having a night that people are never going to forget. People are tweeting they're never going to forget the Bitcoin mint, and now they're also up 5X on their initial. These are moments that will create loyalty for life. The more things that we could do like that, nobody is fucking with that. Nobody is competing with that. That's what gets me excited. That's why we're laser-focused on that.
We only have time for one more question. This is my favorite thing. You tell us everything that's happening. You tell us the alpha. We need to know for holders and future holders. What should people be excited about in the future with DeGods, y00ts, Dust, and everything in between?
The momentum that I'm hearing about with DeGods is, "We have never experienced this." Every single thing we have done for DeGods has always felt like an uphill battle, climbing up a mountain, and trying to get people to give a shit about us. The amount of energy around DeGods right now is palpable. With y00ts, the way I look at it is DeGods is going to be a huge story. That means we're going to start focusing on y00ts. It's going to be y00ts season two. That's going to go crazy. That's how we operate.
When y00ts was coming out, nobody was talking about DeGods for a long time. Everyone was talking about y00ts, and then you saw the power of DeGods come back. People are sleeping on the way that rotates and our team's focus. Operationally, the way to look out for it is DeGods are going to go nuts. We're going to go focus on y00ts season two.
At that point, we will have hired a killer team that will allow us to operationalize and scale both of those projects simultaneously as opposed to choosing one to focus on and then going to the next one, which is what we're currently doing. When you look at it like that, it's pretty exciting for the next 2 to 3 months. I haven't felt anything like this DeGods energy. It's nuts. I can't describe it. I'm so grateful for it.
As a holder and as a friend, I appreciate everything that you and the team are doing. I'm super excited about the bridge coming up soon. We've got a lot of fun things. Thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. Thank you all for tuning in. Let's go, DeGods to the moon.
It's number one on Bitcoin. It’s dope.
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