What’s next in the NFT space? How do we keep the community growing despite the pullback while we aim for mass adoption? Here to share his wisdom is renowned NFT cultural thought leader, educator, and community authority, Gmoney. Gmoney is the Founder of Admit One NFT, which provides holders access to the entire gmoney ecosystem, and 9dcc, the first ever crypto-native luxury, house, and lifestyle platform. He joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to share his philosophy and his vision for the future as he teases innovative ideas and potential collaborations. Keep an eye out for today’s Hot Topics, including G. Love Community Token with G. Love himself and Yuga Labs’ potential class action lawsuit over ApeCoin and NFT sales.
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Listen to the podcast here
GMoney – NFT Thought Leader, Influencer & Creator Of 9dcc And Admit One NFT, Plus: G. Love’s Community Token With YellowHeart, Yuga Labs Lawsuit Threats, And More…
This is Gmoney and I love building the Web3 community. I’m launching the first ever crypto-native luxury house and lifestyle platform, 9dcc. I’m here on the Edge of NFT and they are launching your brain into NFT space. Hold on tight, and stay tuned.
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NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out why keeping curiosity alive is so important in life and business and how it led to Gmoney’s latest drops.
Why Jay-Z’s quote, “My life is tailor-made for me.” Also, have so much meaning to the Gmoney roadmap.
Also, how G. Love is transforming the community and the music business with his latest drop, the G. Love Community Token, in partnership with YellowHeart. All this and more in this episode.
Don’t forget, we put a little soiree together called NFT LA, and it brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to 2023.NFTLA.live to get on the whitelist for tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better. Also, as intimate and impactful events are happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there.
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This episode features Gmoney, Founder of the Admit One NFT, which provides holders access to the entire Gmoney ecosystem and 9dcc, the first ever crypto-native luxury house and lifestyle platform. Gmoney is a renowned NFT cultural thought leader, educator, and community authority known for sporting his iconic orange beanie CryptoPunk.
He has deep investment experience and used his time during the pandemic as a catalyst to understand blockchain technologies, become a leader in the space, as well as to invest and advise over 80 blockchain projects, giving him unparalleled access to the best and most innovative technologies.
Gmoney is also one of the largest collectors of NFTs in the world and was listed in the inaugural list of Fortune’s NFTy 50 of the 50 most influential people in NFTs. He has advised major corporations, celebrities, entertainers, and athletes around the world on their NFT and metaverse strategies. He uses his platform to elevate minorities, women in crypto, and people of color in the space and is positioned as the authentic voice and trusted advocate for mainstream adoption.
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Welcome, Gmoney.
Thank you for having me. That was a mouthful. I appreciate it.
It’s your fault for being such a prolific leader in this space. It was great to connect with you IRL at NFT LA. You said something was coming but didn’t give us more than a sneak peeks, and it’s clear that you’ve done some epic stuff. We are excited to learn more about it now.
I’m excited to talk about it. It’s been a long and thoughtful journey, even though I was publicly coming out with it. It’s been something I have been working on. I’ve been thinking about it since I got into the crypto space, so it’s been a fun process.
For those that don’t know about your prolific background and support for everyone to understand, you’ve done a lot in finance, investing, and advising for a long time. You wrote a manifesto that goes into the genesis of the Admit One drop. For those that haven’t read the Manifesto yet, I’m sure they are going to be excited and want to dive in after the show. Give us the cliff notes and some of this origin story that led to what we are talking about now.
I put it out there in place over the roadmap because, to me, it’s as long as I have a set of guiding principles. I explained why I was launching the community now and my reasons for doing so, and also listing. I believe it was 30 or 31 different principles that I try to live by the most in my life and be like, “These are my guiding principles.” I’m working on some cool things. You don’t know what’s coming next. That’s how life is, but I think we are in an important part of the cycle. This is almost like the calm before the storm of real mainstream adoption.
That, to me, is what has been exciting. Even with this massive pullback in the space, you still have people getting up excited about the technology and community building, and that’s something that is the successful calm. You always hear every overnight success and years of hard work that goes into that. We are in years of hard work period that will lead to the “overnight successes” over the next 2 to 5 years.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Unpack that hard work part of your statement a little bit more for us, and let’s throw humility out the door for a moment. What are some of the nuts and bolts of what you’ve even built over the last few years that led to this moment?
When I first got into the space in August of 2020, I went down the NFT rabbit hole because I have been involved in crypto since 2017. When I started going down the NFT rabbit hole, it made sense to me very quickly because I started playing Fortnite at the beginning of quarantine. When I started playing Fortnite, I played with my friends and their nephews, and these kids were 10, 11, and 12. The first thing that they would ask me is, “What skins did you buy?” Skins don’t give me any special powers. Why would I spend $7 to $8 on something to change how I look? This game is free to play.
It took me a few weeks to realize that I was like, “I started spending a bunch of money on skins.” It was then that I was like, “We are going to have this massive supercycle where these kids are 12 years old, and in 10 years, they are going to be 22. They are going to have their own disposable income, and there’ll be totally okay with owning a purely digital asset. There’s going to be this massive supercycle. I don’t know how to harness it yet, but I know I need to pay attention to it.” Lo and behold, I found NFTs months later, and I was like, “This is it.” NFT is your profile picture and your skin on Twitter.
I started going down the rabbit hole. I remember when I first started, I would go in and find a project and be like, “I’m going to buy $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 worth of this project, and I wanted to do it across 10 to 20 different projects.” I remember I was a whale then, buying somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. I’d go in and sweep the floor or I buy a bunch at once. People were like, “Don’t spend all your money at once. Spread it out.” I’m like, “No. I have my plan.” I remember I had heard about CryptoPunks, but I was like, “I don’t want to buy CryptoPunks. I want to buy the next CryptoPunks.”
I was going around to these different projects. I ended up minting a bunch of Chromie Squiggles one day because I wanted to own 500 in total. I ended up only minting a little under 300. I remember when I went into Chromie Squiggles, I was trying to figure out how to do a mass mint or a batch mint function, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t find the Discord, so I sat in front of my computer, minting for an hour straight. Once I was done, I went to go check my Discord and somebody recognized my wallet from other projects that I had swept. They were like, “They posted the link to the Art Blocks Discord.”
I started minting around the 1,700s. I didn’t know if people wanted to own a historic year for a Squiggle or the year their dad or kid was born. I’m like, “I’m going to mint for the next 300 to 400 years and see what I get.” I did that, and I saw people were going nuts, like running home from dinner to mint stuff while I was minting and all this stuff.
Snowfro, the Founder of Art Blocks, was like, “What are you doing? Stop wasting your money. If you are going to be spending this much money on NFTs, you need to buy a CryptoPunk.” Him and a couple of other OGs spent the next 2 or 3 days red-pilling me on CryptoPunks, and I was like, “I get it now. This makes so much sense.” I bought a zombie a few days later. I was looking for a CryptoPunk ape, which I bought about a month later. When I bought the ape, I wrote my thread on Twitter which went viral on crypto Twitter. That was the beginning of Gmoney and the CryptoPunk ape. I realized at that time that I saw space very differently than most. If I were going to go around red-pilling people one dinner conversation at a time, nobody would ever understand what NFTs are.
I was like, “I needed the power of social media to get my message and put my point of view out there. Hopefully, people would agree with it, follow it, and understand it.” I remember when I started that thread, I had around 50 followers or something. I was like, “If I get to 10,000 by the end of the year, I will consider this a massive success.” I got to 10,000 within 1 or 2 months, and the rest has been history ever since.
Gmoney: Even with this massive pullback in the space, you still have people getting excited about the technology and the community building.
I’m reflecting on our combo with Erick Snowfro and about how Chromie Squiggles started. It’s a fun story if you have a moment to check out that show. I’m sure you personally know Erick’s story too. He delayed his launch for a couple of months because he was dGening on NBA Top Shots. That delay is what gave momentum a chance and serendipity to work. You realize a lot of this is happenstance, and people are looking for that magic bullet, but we are still learning together.
You took all that experience, core beliefs, feelings, and DNA that went into that Manifesto. You created Admit One. It was a free mint also, which is atypical for this space but packed with utility. Tell our readers a little bit about that. What are the benefits of holding one of the thousand Admit Ones?
Myself and the team spent a lot of time thinking about 1) The distribution and then 2) The pricing or the mechanism. We were going back and forth up until two weeks before the actual launch. It’s like, “Do we do free mint or an option? Do we do an allow list?” I want to solve mainly two things. 1) I wanted to make it as inclusive as possible and I didn’t want any gas wars with that, and then 2) I wanted to have a wide distribution of holders.
There are 1,000 NFTs out there and 890 unique wallets. You basically have 89% of it across different wallets. Those were the things that I wanted because I wanted to build a strong community. I didn’t necessarily want 300 people hoarding NFTs. If you want to go out there and you are a believer in it, you’d have to pay up. I have tons of friends that are whales that would love to own 5% or 10%. I’m like, “I want you to. You can, but you have to go out and buy it on the open market. I’m not going to give it to you free.”
That’s done with a lot of cool and interesting things with regards to the community building, and how to incentivize and how happy people to be part of it. I knew right out of the gate I had my vision for what I wanted to do with it. I did a collaboration with Adidas into the metaverse NFT drop back in December 2021. I’m having conversations with a lot of other brands that are going to be very interesting. Nothing that I can talk about yet, but the conversations are ongoing. Like anything in business, especially the new frontier, things take time and they usually take longer than you might want them to.
I also knew that I wanted to launch my interpretation of what a luxury fashion brand will be on Web3. As a consumer, there are these things that I didn’t see that I wanted to see. One of them is certifiable scarcity. Another is how can you use this for community building? A lot of these things are a no-brainer as a consumer that I would love to see that I haven’t seen. I’m like, “The technology exists. It’s out there. Nobody’s harnessing it yet, and I see it.”
This reminds me very much of when I bought my CryptoPunk. A lot more people understand NFTs and the utility value behind them now, but people aren’t necessarily pushing the space forward the way they should. There are a bunch of projects that are, but what the brands from Web2 the legacy world need to see is success on some level from the crypto-natives.
If we wait for the legacy brands to do it, it will probably never happen because they are not incentivized to disrupt themselves or their way of doing business, but it will happen from the crypto-native. That was the genesis behind deciding to launch 9dcc. Admit One is your ticket to all things 9dcc along with all the other cool things I’m working on, but 9dcc is my main focus.
One of the interesting things I wasn’t expecting with the launch of Admit One was how energized the community was around it and how the community has helped build around it. There were a bunch of community members early on that were like, “Let’s utilize this community and get an allow list. Let’s utilize the Admit One community.” Because it’s a smaller community, it makes it easier for a higher percentage of community members to get granted access to other communities.
We had around 5 or 6 people that were running around getting onto a bunch of different allow lists. Internally, we are like, “We don’t have the time to do this. This wasn’t necessarily part of the plan, but people are energized around it. Let’s give them the resources they need to go around and get the community onto allow lists as people see and choose to do.” We formed The Watchers, which is part of Admit One, which is going out there and getting onto different allow lists. They have their criteria for projects to get on and stuff like that.
That’s been cool. That’s something I didn’t expect. If we were sitting here months ago and I was telling you my vision for Admit One, that wasn’t something that crossed my mind. It’s like, “Let’s empower the community.” I think that’s something that’s powerful. As much as I have my vision of what I want to do, you also have to listen to the community and give them some of what they want. It’s very much like the give and take. I have my vision, and I know I’m going to execute that the way I want to execute it, but also create that room for the community to be part of that journey with me.
It’s fascinating the excitement and community spirit that seems to have emerged here. It must’ve been fun to be a part of that. The ITERATION-01 is the first 9dcc product launch. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What’s the scoop with it?
The only thing that I can say now is that it will be a t-shirt. It’s going to be my interpretation of the perfect tee. It’s something that I find. It’s super comfortable. I have been wearing a sample of it for the last months. It’s been something that I feel comfortable putting my name on. It’s something I’m building and making for myself that I’m hoping other people will like as well. That’s all I can say right now, but a lot of extras that will be going into it, along with the community building and all the cool stuff with that.
More broadly speaking, as far as the ITERATION-01 is concerned. Is that something exclusively accessible by your community, or is there broader access to it? Could you share a little bit broad-level on that?
The only way you’ll be able to access it is by owning an Admit One token. I purposely designed it that way. The interesting thing is no matter what I would have done, there would have been a demand for it. How do you solve getting broad distribution without creating gas wars? That was the genesis for distributing Admit One so that now I have this token-gated access where I don’t need to worry about getting bodied every drop because that’s the headache and nerve-wracking. No business wants to go through that in any way, shape, or form, at any level, let alone once a month or once every week.
New frontier things take time and usually take longer than you might want them to. Click To Tweet
Even what we have seen with PREMINT in spite of their best efforts, there are challenges with the tools and technology out there to support that queuing process, and no one has quite figured it out. Having that established community that you work with makes it easier. It’s a meaningful number, but it’s not so overwhelming that you can’t engage with that community on an in-depth basis.
I don’t have too much time to listen to podcasts. I happened to turn on the one with you and proof and got a little bit of a sense of how you are looking at the community and how you’ve been impressed with the amount of engagement in the community. It would be great to check in with you now a little bit further on how the community is developing so far, what you are learning about the community, and where you hope to go from here from a community perspective.
The reason why I went with 1,000 was because I knew that I could provide value for 1,000 people. If it is a 5,000-member community or a 10,000, eventually, I will get there. There’s no need to rush it because I want to perfect it. That was the advice that Kevin told me early on, back in January 2022. It was at most a month after the PROOF launched. I was toying with the idea somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000, and he was like, “Do 1,000 and make sure you understand it.” It’s big enough to your point and has enough scale, but it’s not so big that it’s overwhelming and you are going to be filling out customer support tickets every day for twenty hours a day.
It’s been an interesting learning process. Again, when I think about brands and building stuff, you only need 1,000 true fans. I forgot who wrote it, but everybody is generally familiar with it. People have been talking about this for years. Web3 is putting that to the test and we are seeing it play out pretty successfully where a lot of the biggest NFT projects in the space have 3,000 or 4,000 unique wallets. That’s minuscule.
You are talking about these brands and projects commanding multiple millions of dollars. In some cases, billions of dollars worth of market value from such a small community already. That shows you the value of the community and being able to interact with the community. There will be a lot of cool points of interaction, where there’ll be opportunities for community feedback. By creating and having that intimate community from the start, you are going to be able to do cool things down the road.
That was our thinking behind the size of the first NFT LA, and the amount of VIP passes that we had. There’s way more demand, but we wanted to do something that was meaningful for the people involved and create a level of intimacy. That’s an energy that you can’t change out for anything. It’s so valuable to have that intimacy. We are thinking about building out the next NFT LA, and we have the same thought process. How do we make it bigger, bolder, better, and scalable but also still intimate? That’s a good framework for everyone to think about the projects that they created in the space.
You’ve done that and I’m excited to see where things go next. One of those pieces which you’ve talked about a lot in terms of the evolution of the project so far is partnerships and collaborations. When we think of these next steps beyond ITERATION-01, do you have any partnerships or collaborations that are cooking that you could share with us? If you can’t share the deets with us, maybe talk more broadly about how you think about collabs and partnerships.
I don’t have anything that I can share at the moment, but when I think about collabs and partnerships, it’s things that I want to see. I have used this quote a bunch where Jay-Z had an amazing quote on a podcast that he was on years ago where he said, “My life is tailor-made for me.” He does things that he likes that he wants. If people like it, great. If they don’t like it, that’s great too because he’s living his best life and it is his interpretation of it. I have that same philosophy where I have been approached with tons of collab opportunities that would have been very lucrative but they weren’t on brand for me.
Somebody coming to me with a brand that’s like, “Let’s do something with this.” I’m like, “I would never wear that brand.” That’s inauthentic to who I am as a person. If these brands want to come to me, I’m gladly talking to them about those things. It’s just that. Going to that ethos of, if it’s something that I get excited about, I want to work on because people understand authenticity no matter what it is. You could love Adidas and I could love Nike or vice versa, but if you are passionate about that brand or the project that they are working on, it comes through in your voice. You can tell that it’s not a paid shill or whatever it is. You can tell that person is excited to be part of that.
That’s my philosophy on all things. With Adidas, I have been thrilled. 2022 is my one-year anniversary when I first went to Adidas HQ and met Ben White for the first time. When I walked out of there, I had to pinch myself because I was like, “I knew that moment would come. I didn’t think it would happen.” At that moment, I thought it was 3 to 5 years away, and it was 3 months away.
Here we are now, one year after that meeting, and some of the conversations and the people that I have met and the experiences that I have had over the past years, you could have told me exactly one year ago now, and I’d be like, “You are crazy. There’s no way that happens.” Maybe a couple of years from now, but not within the next twelve months. It’s been a whirlwind experience. I am fortunate enough that I can pick and choose the brands and the people I want to work with and make sure I’m doing things I believe in that are cool. If people like Gmoney, they are probably going to like the things that I like.
That’s a perfect philosophy. It’s something that I resonate with and especially when it comes to people whom you could potentially have some influence. It’s always nice to meet and talk to them. Do I like this person? Sometimes you meet someone on a bad day. It’s good to think about it. Are we vibing? If you are not vibing, you don’t pressure stuff like that. The next question, do you have any roadmap things you want to discuss? I know there are some things that are in process and things that you don’t necessarily need to share. That’s totally fine. What are you thinking about if it’s not specifics as you look into the next several years?
I have the internal roadmap that I won’t share with the public. When you talk about roadmaps, I used to trade publicly traded equities before I went full-time into NFTs. One of those things is when you make an announcement of what you plan on doing, your investors hear it for sure, and so does your competition. You lose some of that element of surprise of what you are working on. Companies will give broad strokes every few years, but they won’t sit there and tell you every earnings conference call like, “We are going to release these five pairs of Yeezys this quarter. These are the dates we are going to release them on,” because life gets in the way.
There are supply chain constraints, legal holdups, contract negotiates, or whatever it is that happens, but you have to trust in the team. That’s why management makes a huge difference. There are people that are proven executors, and they will execute. You can trust that, and there’s a premium that’s given to that. As much as I enjoy the things that I’m working on and am excited to talk about, I don’t want to be beholden to a roadmap.
It’s like new things come up. I meet new people and am introduced to new people all the time who are like, “We want to implement this type of solution.” I’m like, “Let’s get that. How do we do that as soon as possible?” I’m going to use two examples. One was when I did the Bitcoin Miami Scavenger Hunt, which was a three-day POAP event. I decided this three days before I was going to Miami. I met Patricio from POAP, so he could give me the QR codes because, at that time, the only way was you had to make individual QR codes that you would then hand out. I hired 2 or 3 different models across 3 different days to stand at 3 different locations.
Gmoney: A lot more people understand NFTs and the utility value behind them now, but people aren’t necessarily pushing the space forward the way they should.
Let’s say the first day was Friday. I had that one location for two hours. I tweeted it out, and then people went out of their way, maybe half a block or a block from the convention, to go get these POAPs. Over the course of three days, a total of somewhere between 60 and 90 people collected them. 11 people collected all 3 across all 3 days. The feedback I got on that was like, “This was one of the best things I did this week because it was fun and playful. It wasn’t much of a lift.” Two is what I knew when I was doing it is if a celebrity or brand were to come into the space and do that, if they only gave out five POAPs, they would consider that a massive failure.
If they gave out 1,000, they might consider that a massive failure. I was like, “I’m going to experiment. Maybe there’s something from here that works or does not.” At the very least, we are not going to find out until 5,000 or 10,000 followers at a time. I have the opportunity to fail. I can sit there and learn from my experiences and make it better next time.
It went off great. POAP then did an NFT NYC Scavenger Hunt a few months later. They have been playing around with that idea and those things with POAPs. It started helping POAP. It was already used at a ton of crypto conferences, but it started making it well-known in the NFT space. By doing cool things like that, I’m like, “I haven’t seen this. I’d like to see it. Let’s implement it.” By not having a roadmap gives me the opportunity to do cool things where I’m like, “That’s cool. That’s new. This is what I want to do with it. How fast can we do it?” The larger a corporation is, the longer it’s going to take them to do something, where they are like, “We are moving at the speed of light.” That’s eighteen months for a multi-billion-dollar corporation, whereas we can do it in one week in crypto.
I love that lesson too of how a small success can be a big success. It goes back to what you were talking about deciding to do a mint of 1,000. One of the great advantages of having only six people who were able to gather those three totals is you can treat them extra special without having to bend over backwards if there were 1,000 people that collected all three and you want to do something special. Recognize or celebrate that would be a totally different ballgame.
To that point, the 11 people that collected all 3 of those POAPs were the only people that were airdropped Admit One, not having to do anything in the order that they finished the collection. Whoever collected all 3 first got the first NFT all the way up to number 11.
We have got a little scavenger hunt idea cooking as well. I’m excited about the possibilities of making it more fun to be a member of the community both virtually and in real life. All the rewards, joy, and value can be delivered with NFT culture. That’s not as easy without NFTs in the mix. It’s pretty awesome how you pioneered that area. There are some other giants in the space that you respect and have looked to for inspiration. I would love to hear some of the highlights in terms of projects in the space that you admire people and what types of projects you think are doing pioneering things.
I’m a huge fan of everything that Snowfro and Art Blocks were doing. I would say he’s my wiser brother. He’s my North Star in the space. I love jamming stuff with him every few weeks. I’m a huge fan of Chromie Squiggles and everything that Art Blocks does. The way they think about community is unparalleled. What Justin Aversano is doing over at Quantum Space is amazing as well. Kevin Rose is doing an amazing job with Moonbirds.
What we are starting to see now is the branch away from art. Where does utility come in or something other than just, “Here’s a pretty picture to look at.” That’s nice and fine if that’s what you want to do, but also realize that everything in the real world is an NFT. As the world becomes more digitized in the future, and more of those assets come on chain, they will come on chain as NFTs. At some point in the future, I don’t know when. We are not going to be calling these things NFTs anymore. They are going to be things. It’s going to be like digital hat or it might just be hat.
That’s the world we are headed to. The stuff that I’m super interested in in general is people that are pushing the boundaries and trying new use cases. I don’t necessarily have as much time as I’d like anymore to dig in the weeds into Discord and try to find new up-and-coming projects. When stuff comes across my desk that I find interesting, I try to look into it.
We had Mila Kunis’ business partners on and their new project which is film, metaverse, and gaming related. Is there any perspective that you want to share on the gaming side of NFTs and the music side because those are interesting areas?
Gaming is hard. You’ll have the big majors like Activision, EA, and Take-Two. They will spend millions of dollars and spend years of development on releasing something, and it will still flop. One of the scary things is it’s great. We are getting a ton of developers coming into this space that is building stuff on Web3, but I don’t necessarily have an edge in a lot of this stuff. I have invested in a few things. I’m an investor in Axie. I’m an investor in a bunch of other games as well, but for me, it’s not necessarily something that I have an edge in because I’m not a gamer.
If somebody were to come at me with pretty graphics, I’m like, “That looks great.” Graphics-wise, I’d play this game, but I don’t know gameplay-wise if I would play the gamer or if I’m even the target demo. There are certain founders that I backed that I like. One of the best founders that I have seen in the gaming space is Brooks Brown with NOR. I interviewed him on my show. His way of viewing the space in gaming, in general, is interesting. It was so contrarian to everything I had seen with regards to game development up until that point that I was like, “This guy is next level.”
I felt like I was sitting in on a Master’s level college course. It was informative. The hits will come, but I don’t know where it comes from and how it happens. It’s probably going to be something that people didn’t expect. Why did Facebook succeed when there were probably 4 or 5 iterations of social media networks before them that didn’t succeed? It’s probably the same thing. We are going to see the same process happen in Web3.
Lots of good stuff is happening, and so much of it is flowing through what you’ve built. We want to take a minute and switch gears a little bit and ask you some questions to get your personal perspective on things. It’s a segment we call Edge Quick Hitters. It’s ten set questions we ask every guest of our show. We are looking for short, single-word responses, but we might dive a little bit deeper here and there. Are you ready to jump in on these things?
Let’s do it.
Question number one. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
One of the first things I remember is I was 8 or 9 and it was summer camp. We went on a trip to a Mets game. That was the first time I went to a baseball game without my parents. It saved up $20 or $30 something from allowance and stuff, and I blew it all on souvenirs from the game. An important lesson is there was this one kid that was older that asked to borrow $10 or something, and he said he would pay me back the next day. I let him borrow it. Most of my stash went for this kid to buy his thing, and I never saw him again, like a hat or something like that. I remember my parents were not happy that I blew all of my allowances on souvenirs but also I subsidized this kid’s souvenir. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind, which is a good lesson.
That was a D-level loan you gave out there with a very high risk.
It’s better than $10,000 or $100,000 or more.
Was the lesson how to pick up an extra $10 as a kid?
That kid could have taught a master class on it.
Question two. What’s the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
The first thing that comes to mind is back when Napster was out, and it took one hour to download a 3-megabyte song. I downloaded a bunch of my favorite songs at that time, and I created a list of 30 to 40 songs that I started circulating around high school because I had a CD writer so I could make CDs. This is back when you had to go to Tower Records or Sam Goody and spend $15 to $20 to buy an album to get two songs that you wanted to listen to. What I did was I gave people that list and they would pick the first 60 or 70 minutes, whatever you fit in any order that they wanted for $15. That was my high school hustle. That’s around the time the Gmoney nickname started coming around.
That’s when you realize the whole episode was this thing operation.
Question three. What’s the most recent thing you purchased?
I got a pair of sneakers from Off-White.
Are you someone that racks your sneakers, or do you put them on the shelf? What’s your disposition there?
I rack most of my sneakers. I bought two pairs. It’s in my wallet. For those that want to go out and find it, but I haven’t tweeted about it yet. At some point, I will. I don’t think I will ever wear them although I love to, but I usually wear my sneakers.
I asked Gary Vee that same question when we were at VeeCon. He said he wanted to rack his gear.
Question number four. What’s the most recent thing you sold?
Gmoney: If we wait for the legacy brands to do it, it’ll probably never happen because they are not incentivized to disrupt themselves or disrupt their way of doing business, but it will happen from the crypto-native.
The last thing I sold was my GODA Mint Pass. I will probably live to regret that, but I did sell that probably in the depths of the bear market.
As we often do in the world of NFTs. We often regret those sales. Question five. What is your most prized possession?
It’s probably my CryptoPunk ape.
Question six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, and experience that’s for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?
Maybe go to space at some point.
Question seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I’m inquisitive. Part of the reason why I ended up getting into NFTs was because I’m always open to learning from anybody. That’s a trait that a lot of people have when they are young but as they get older. In crypto, in general, there are so many smart young kids that I could be their dad. I’m like, “You are a genius and so much smarter than I am. Teach me as much as I can from you.” That inquisitive is something that is one of my strong suits.
Keeping that element of curiosity is hard. For some reason, it gets beaten out of people somehow in life. It’s so important to elevate that sense of wonder, curiosity, and exploration. The world seemed sad for some reason. Question number eight, the flip side. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
I’m sloppy and disorganized. Probably that. If there was one thing that I wish I could do better, is be a much neater person.
Question nine is a little easier. What did you do before joining us on the show?
I went for a walk around Paris. I was at the Eiffel Tower right before coming here.
That’s got to be up there with the coolest responses to that one. Question number ten. What are you doing next after the show?
It’s up for debate. I might be going out for a few drinks with friends or going to bed. It’s midnight over here. It’s much later in the evening. I want to call it a night and catch up on some sleep or go out and rage.
That’s Edge Quick Hitters. We appreciate it. Thanks for sharing with us. We want to head over to Hot Topics now. We can bring G. Love in the mix. Eathan, I will turn it over to you.
Let’s hear about it. The first topic here is all about the G. Love Community Token. We have got a couple of Gs here on the show incidentally now. The G. Love Community Token gave holders access to PREMINT the Philadelphia, Mississippi album NFT 24 hours before its public sale. YellowHeart launched his community to open in May 2022 and distributed about 5,000 tokens to his fans, giving fans early access to the album. It’s all happening right now. They are about to do more drops with G. Love.
People understand authenticity no matter what it is. Click To Tweet
The token also gives exclusive access to G. Love’s giveaways like concert tickets, art, and events. It was made available via YellowHeart, a global leader in entertainment NFTs including tickets, music, and collectibles. They have been on the show, and we are good friends. G. Love’s Community Token was YellowHeart’s most successful drop to date and G. Love’s album is number one on the blues charts for the first time in his career. G. Love, congratulations. That’s so exciting. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. This has been so informative to hear Gmoney speak on so much knowledge in the NFT space. It’s been a great ride jumping into this space. There’ve been a lot of challenges. My biggest thing right now is trying to get people, music fans in particular, and the community that we have built over the years doing live shows all around the world to get those people over into this space, which continues to be a difficult situation.
You pulled it off, in a sense, with success. It’s awesome to collaborate with YellowHeart and rocking the YellowHeart to show some support there. My girlfriend has been a huge fan of yours for many years and was super pumped to hear that you’d be on our show. We were at your concert in LA. What was the experience like to do this to your fans and see that compounding effect of the NFT supporting the physical sale of the album?
It was cool. This was the third drop that I have done. I did a PFP collection, 10,000 with Moonwalk, Dave Krugman’s Allships Co and Blockparty. We did the HenboHenning and G. Love first tour poster drop. We saw them with the YellowHeart thing was the third project I got to work on. It was so cool because we put out the community token. People minted a lot of them, and it was like, “This is happening.”
It was exciting. To be honest, the community token was free, and we tried to convert those into sales for the album. That’s been a little more challenging. This is a learning process, and maybe the first ending or the game is about to start with this whole community. I’m happy to be in it, putting into work right now, and getting it out there.
Keep grinding on that front. You are in this interesting position because not a lot of people bring such a distinctive community along with them, where on the one side is a big advantage because they follow you, they know you, there’s this passion there, this connection, and this relationship already. By the same token, like crypto-native, they don’t necessarily understand the space to your point. What steps are you taking to try to educate them and help them out, whether it’s getting a wallet or understanding the dynamic of NFTs and how it relates to your work? What are you guys doing on that front?
That was an interesting part of working with YellowHeart because their platform is pretty user-friendly for newbies because you can purchase it with a credit card. That in itself is a pretty big deal. If you think about when we were all first learning in the space, everybody had a guru or someone coaching them and teaching them how to get the wallet and move funds from here to here. Now you know how to do those steps, but if you could think back then, it was like your brain was frying. You’re trying to figure out all these steps.
It’s a challenge to get people to do simple things. You have to set up a wallet. You are going to have to go to Coinbase, put in money, connect your bank account, drop $500 in, buy Ethereum, and then move the Ethereum to MetaMask. This is a lot of steps for people that use the internet to look at Instagram. What are we doing? We’re trying to outreach with tutorials on how to get wallets. Like what Gmoney was saying, constant conversations and one-on-one with people you come in contact with trying to convert people over into the space.
Kudos to you for putting in the time. I know from experience. It’s not easy. Sometimes it can get frustrating too. The good thing is that it will get easier. If you thought of the internet several years ago, it wasn’t easy at all. Now to your point, you hit one button on Instagram, and you like. Several years from now, we are going to be in a very different world, and everybody here will be seen as one of the leaders of the movement, which is amazing.
To your point, I hope so. This is what we are seeing right now. As far as how NFTs and the blockchain are connecting with music, you are at the second great pantsing of the music industry. If we look back to 2001 with Napster, when that came out and the age of “digital piracy.” As you were saying earlier, these people are ripping music and stealing music. The Big Boys, Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music came in. They did every artist worse than any record company has ever done in the history of the music business.
If you look at a space right now where no one buys a record, artists don’t get paid anything from the streaming platforms unless you are like Taylor Swift or some major pop artist giving major streams. You are not making anything compared to the records you used to sell, even if you didn’t sell a lot of records. With NFT, like the deal that I have with YellowHeart, I retained 90% of sales. What business ever gave musicians 90% of anything? Never has happened.
This is a tremendous situation where this is pushing artists forward, creativity forward, a fan experience forward, and gives more power, money, control, and perpetuity back to the artists. Why do I call it the pantsing? Like in 2001, when the labels got caught with digital streaming and had no answer for it for 10 or 15 years, huge companies and music business leaders went under. Everybody lost their job and consolidated. This is the beginning of what could be the next thing like that.
It’s super disruptive stuff. As we look at the next steps for you, you got the album out there and the community building. What’s coming next? You had a couple of drops before this. You’ve got some more drops coming up. You got some more utility you are building for this community. What should we expect next from you?
We are trying to give the holders that minted the album. There already was a lot of utility because there’s the community token which was free, and they got the origin token which enabled streaming and downloading the full record. The next drop showed you what album you got, whether you got a black-colored vinyl, a limited gold vinyl, or 1 of 5 test pressings. There are experiential things like tickets, meet and greets, and a chance to win a free house concert show. We are doing fun things. I do some paintings and these hats. We are giving some giveaways like that. That’s what we are looking forward to with that project.
For my other project, the PFP for Juice Gang, I’d be interested to hear your guys’ thoughts on that. It was PFP. When we did it, I didn’t know too much about this space. It only minted 305 out of 10,000. We have a small community. We are talking about a bunch of the guys on Discord. The guys on Discord want to do a free mint. What are you guys’ thoughts about the free mint situation right now? It’s obviously had been a trend all spring and summer.
Gmoney: What we are starting to see now is the branch away from art. Where does utility come in?
Gmoney, what do you think?
One of the pioneers of the free mint situation, I’m all for it. I think it works, to be honest. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it worked. At some point down the road, you’ll end up making more on secondary royalties than you would if you minted them if you sold them on a primary. It also does a lot for the community and gets the community engaged because anybody w minted is in the money at any price. It does magical to the community, and it’s something to consider for sure.
How would you push the free mint out to get more eyes on it? What if you put a free mint, and it doesn’t even mint out?
That comes down to other community outreach of reaching out to communities that you vibe with, or maybe that members of the community already are a part of that. You go into their Discord. You do an AMA. I think it’s evolved how marketing and new project work now than it did even months ago. It’s fine to do a Twitter space, but you’ll probably get more conversion going into individual Discord doing AMAs, talking directly to the founders and working with them, getting allow list spots for each community, and making sure you have a diverse set in there. Those are the targets that you want.
I totally agree. I went to a private demo of a new project in LA with a small group of three people that got to see this project in action, and what they were going to do. These guys are doing this every day, these 5 or 6 demos, for the whole month. That takes a lot of work but think about the level of intimacy and connection you get with those people by doing the time and getting into that environment. This bear market is forcing people to be a little bit more oriented towards building true relationships and educating people about their projects. It inspired me. I’m going to mint. They probably have a pretty high hit rate from doing those one-on-ones.
It’s great feedback all around, for sure. G. Love, we appreciate you coming on and sharing with us all about your collaboration with YellowHeart, your history, and where you are going next. We got to give people a place to follow this project to make sure that they are staying up-to-date on everything you got pop in. Where should they go to follow the community token, yourself, and all these projects that you got going on?
You can find me on Twitter @Glove, on Instagram @PhillyGlove, G. Love & Special Sauce on Facebook, and our homepage is Philadelphonic.com. We are on tour. It’s the first big tour since the pandemic. We are stoked to be back out on the road. One more little thing I’m thinking about doing. Our next project is going to be a storage space full of all of our master Reels, like the Ampex 2-inch tapes from back in the day.
We are shooting all 50 of the Reels and going to do this master Reels NFT drop. Each NFT will be unique and they will each represent one Reel that has songs we recorded, like Blues Music and Baby’s Got Sauce. Some more obscure tunes and some of that one. That’s going to be the next thing going to happen. Other than that, keep plugging away. It’s informative to be here with you guys. Thank you.
It’s great having you. Word on the street is we got a little giveaway as well. It’s five of the new G. Love album NFTs. Keep an eye out on our socials for that. We’ll be giving you the deets on that giveaway, and it’s going to be super cool. Keep an eye out for that great album cover. Thanks again for joining us. We appreciate it. We can’t wait to see where you go next.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Gmoney. A pleasure to hear you.
—
We do have a couple of other interesting hot topics here if we have got a moment to cover these. If we’re good, I’m going into some Yuga Labs legal trouble potentially. Let’s jump in on this.
Yuga Labs May Face A Potential Class Action Lawsuit Over Apecoin And NFT Sales. According to the international law firm, Scott+Scott’s website, there’s a possibility that the non-fungible token company Yuga Labs may be threatened with a class action lawsuit for generally promoting the growth aspects and change for huge returns on investment to unsuspecting investors.
It’s a little bit close to home for a lot of people. I knew about ApeCoin because we are in NFT space. What I think is interesting about this is I met a woman at a little gift shop when I was visiting California for NFT LA, and she told me she had bought her first cryptocurrency. I thought it would be Ethereum of Bitcoin. I said, “What is it?” She said ApeCoin. I said, “That’s fascinating. I haven’t even got a chance to get some ApeCoin yet, and I know all about it. How did you hear about it?” She said, “I heard about it from Oprah.” If there’s something going on here, Oprah is in on it. She’s got her feet in hot water again.
Number one, any celebrity in the endorser, this is Branding 101. You are trying to elevate the value of your brand by collaborating with endorsers. The more you can find alignment with them and authentic supporters, the better it is. That pushes the value of your company. If it’s private, it increase sales of your product and the stock price, which is the value of public companies. That seems to have no merit to me.
The larger a corporation is, the longer it's going to take them to do something. Click To Tweet
Number two, to me, that says that Yuga Labs is that much more legit because once you start getting tort cases coming at you and these bogus lawsuits, you’ve landed. They landed a long time ago, anyway, but that is par for the course normal stuff. People threatened class action this and that. It’s an unfortunate reality of doing business and growing a business these days and achieving success. You got to have a big legal team to deal with these kinds of things, but that’s normal shit. This seems completely unfounded to me from what I’m reading here, but I don’t know.
Yuga Labs has a pretty big valuation of $4 billion. There’s a set of lawyers that pride themselves on finding big companies and trying to get a paycheck and get them to close shop on the case as quickly as possible here. They poked a big bear, and it’s going to be difficult for them to prove this case in the long run. I’m not hopeful about this lawsuit unless there are certain things I don’t know about how they used more explicit language than we normally do. We all want to create more value in the world. That’s part of being human. That’s being part of creating anything in the business, whether it’s a digital or physical collectible. Value is what makes the world go round. I’m very skeptical about this lawsuit.
Gmoney, what are your thoughts?
I’m seeing this now, but from what it looks like from the explanation, they are trying to classify it as security, which would have bigger implications for the NFT sector in general. When a case like this, it probably comes down to certain legal leads talk and terms and conditions that I’m sure you Yuga Labs showed their lawyers and had their lawyers sign off on before having any official communications and stuff. It seems like they are trying to classify it as security, which is a bigger and more resounding issue. I don’t know if we necessarily get that answer from this lawsuit. I don’t know enough about the law, to be honest.
There is a lot of squirrely stuff that happens in that world. For example, in the OpenSea case where we had the CTO that was manipulating the system, picking up NFTs, and then highlighting them on OpenSea, the SEC got involved in that case, which was a clear move to classify NFTs as securities. That was the subtext of the article, but that was unquestionably a big part of the motivation. That’s an interesting angle on this. There could be a play there.
To be clear, if you read the article, it doesn’t look like they have filed any lawsuit yet. They are gauging interest from potential investors.
Once I hear class action, I hear money grab. That’s the thing. We see it so often and people make they’re living out of freaking class action lawsuits. It’s a bummer. Hopefully, that’s not the case. Yuga Labs is moving the needle in space and that would be a bummer somehow that it got forwarded.
More lawsuits. Pulp Fiction and NFT Lawsuit, Miramax versus Tarantino, et al. In the midst of the NFT craze and late 2021, Tarantino launched an NFT collection consisting of digital images of portions of the handwritten versions of a Pulp Fiction screenplay. NFTs were auctioned on the NFT exchange OpenSea. In response, Miramax sued Tarantino for breach of contract, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and unfair competition.
We got a chance to talk with someone from Secret Network who helped with this launch of Quentin’s. They couldn’t comment deeply about it themselves. One thing that was interesting that they noted was that according to the interview that I did, when Miramax was suing it, they were secret NFTs. They were like, “Here are some of my private notes of the script and stuff like this.” If you get it, it’s secret, and only you can see it unless you want to share it. Theoretically, Miramax was suing over the content. They didn’t know what it was, which is interesting if it’s true.
Gmoney, you are on the panel you mentioned with Quintin right before this lawsuit dropped. Did it catch you by surprise?
I don’t have a Hollywood background, so I don’t know the terms of these contracts. From the way Quentin was describing it on the panel was that it’d be pieces or notes, or it might’ve even been the original manuscript that he wrote. That was sitting in his basement anyway, so it was his property. It’s also bizarre, and this happens in showbiz a lot where you create something, and then you have no rights to it in the future, but it’s his creation. It’s his baby and his vision. It’s weird how that works. It goes back to why we are all here in the NFT space and how this empowers creators.
It’s taking out those middlemen that write everything in. I’m not sure if it was for this lawsuit or maybe another lawsuit where something as little as any digital iteration, like you owned the rights that anything in a digital format forever. Does that encompass NFTs or not? That probably does encompass NFTs if it’s written in that language. Maybe there was an exclusionary language that doesn’t. As a big Pulp Fiction fan and Quentin fan, this will be interesting to watch unfold and set a pretty decent precedent.
It’s a big precedent for sure. Gatekeepers are trying to hold onto power at the end of the day.
I did hear someone say they were fighting to get the rights to their life story back. You can accidentally sell away the rights to your own life story, but you can’t tell any stories at parties. I don’t know about that. It’s scary. A quick shout-out. We love to give appreciation to our friends and fam out there. We have a shout-out to Golly, which is @ForeignXchnge, and Allie, which is @NFTeeeze. These are producers and co-hosts of the On The BlocChain podcast, where hip hop beats Web3. We wanted to say hi, give a shout-out, and spread the love. They are always showing love on Edge of NFT and NFT LA Instagram and supporting the content we put out. We love having allies in the space, and so big shout-out to @ForeignXchnge and @NFTeeeze. That’s Golly and Allie of the On The BlocChain Podcast. We hope to meet up with you sometime soon.
Appreciate it. It has been an amazing show. Gmoney, thanks so much for joining us and spending this time with us here. We got to get folks all the deets on where to follow you and this amazing stuff that you got popping. Where should they go?
Twitter is probably the best. @GmoneyNFT, for myself. @Admit0001, for all things Admit One, and 9dcc.xyz for 9dcc. I’m working on some cool and exciting things. It’s going to be exciting and a whirlwind, so I’m excited to share everything I’m working on.
There it is. We appreciate it. To our readers, please follow Gmoney and all of his projects. There are so many cool things happening. There are lots of alignment between his belief and ours. We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for now, so thanks for exploring with us. We have got space for more adventures on this starship. Might your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better.
How? Go to Spotify or iTunes right now. Rate us and say something awesome. Then go to EdgeofNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing @EdgeofNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- YellowHeart
- CryptoPunks
- Chromie Squiggles
- Art Blocks – Discord
- Snowfro – Twitter
- NBA Top Shots
- PREMINT
- POAP
- Quantum Space
- Moonbirds
- NOR – Admit One with gmoney Past Episode
- Allships.co
- Blockparty
- HenboHenning
- @Glove – Twitter
- @PhillyGlove – Instagram
- Love & Special Sauce – Facebook
- Philadelphonic.com
- Yuga Labs
- Yuga Labs May Face A Potential Class Action Lawsuit Over Apecoin And NFT Sales
- Pulp Fiction and NFT Lawsuit, Miramax versus Tarantino, et al.
- @GmoneyNFT – Twitter
- @Admit0001 – Twitter
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- @EdgeofNFT – Twitter
- Edge of NFT – Instagram
- NFT LA – Instagram
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