There is no longer any question about how great the technology behind Web3 is, but that alone is not sufficient to break the threshold to mass adoption. People care more about the products and less about the underlying technology. Brands are waking up to this realization and starting to straddle the boundary between Web2 and Web3. We spoke to some during our stint at the Edge of Asia in Singapore. In this episode, we dive into how Mask Network is reshaping the Web2 experience and solving many problems in this groundbreaking decentralized social network. We then dive into learning from first mover brands in Web3 with leaders from DayAway, BBRC Studios, RiteStream, and Mighty Jaxx as we look back on valuable lessons decentralization has taught their teams working very closely with respected brands and sophisticated consumers. Tune in for more!
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Listen to the podcast here
Unleashing And Learning Web3 Wonders At The Edge Of Asia With Mask Network In All That Matters 2023!
We're landing back in Singapore, where we stopped by the DeSoc Unleashed x Web3 Social House, and all that matters to get you in on more Web3 content. Here's what is to come. First, we'll dive into how Mask Network is reshaping Web2 experiences and solving many problems in this groundbreaking decentralized social network. Then, dive into learnings from first mover brands in Web3, where we're on stage with leaders from DayAway, BBRC Studios, Ritestream, and Mighty Jaxx. As we look back on valuable lessons decentralization has taught, their team is working very closely with respected brands and sophisticated consumers. It was fantastic to get so much first-hand perspective from founders across the Web2-Web3 bridge as we wrap up our Edge of Asia series. Enjoy.
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This special Edge of NFT Asia Roadshow Tour Edition is sponsored by our friends at Casper Association. They oversee the evolution of the Casper Network. A blockchain supporting innovative tech giants, as well as decentralized applications of the platform featuring both upgradable smart contracts and predictable gas fees. They also have a great new show called Casper Blockchain Podcast. You can check out on Spotify or by visiting Casper.Network and click on News.
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I just got over here in Singapore from Seoul and I'm excited about this conversation. It was excellently curated as a curator myself of the show and Outer Edge. This is a special group of folks who have been doing things on the branding side for quite a long time and have a lot of experience. We're going to jump right into the conversation.
The question I have for all of you guys from looking at your websites and getting a sense of your brands is how you've approached how you're using Web3 and how front and center it is differently. I think that contrast is a healthy conversation to have. I'd love to start with this. What do you guys think is the right balance in terms of Web3 in terms of putting that out there to the world? How has your perspective on this particular decision shifted over the last six months? Who wants to start?
The experiences that we've had with the whole Web3 experience when we jumped into it, it was a lot about tokenization, crypto, etc. Where we have ended up is it's about building a real business. The fundamentals of business apply to Web3 as much as to Web2. I think the people that will be successful and the brands that'll lead the way will be the ones that hone down on, regardless of what the underlying technology is, there's got to be a product-market fit that has got to achieve the end goal for the people that are going to be using your product.
The fundamentals of business apply to Web3 just as much as to Web2. Click To Tweet
To what extent are you marketing that your entertainment platform is Web3?
We started off with a heavy focus on we are all about Web3. Now, it's about communicating to Web2 communities that this is something that they can leverage to succeed within the entertainment space and that we offer them that platform to do that. The end consumer, our customer does not even need to know that this is Web3 at the end of the day.
Nelson, what about you?
In the past six months or the past year, so much has changed in the NFT space or in the Web3 space. The positive thing is the space is maturing. We are, as mentioned, it's all about sustainability and it's about being able to monetize and create a business of it. The reason why I got into Web3 in the first place was I saw the potential and the possibilities. What I do in terms of art and culture, and combining them with tech, the possibilities and potential there is endless.
We're very early in the space building the foundations and we are moving in the right direction, going to the masses. Over the weekend, we had a toy convention that we showcased a bit like Pudgy Penguins. We showcase our IPs in a pop toy show. We got a great response from the Web2 audience. That's how we want to onboard the Web3 audience.
Lawrence, you're working on a big activation right now not too far from here. How have you approached the marketing side of the blockchain, Web3, and NFT components to what you all do?
There are a few things. Back in 2018, we have been producing figurines and we have been authenticating them on blockchain. We're working together with a team of Nelson Pudgy Penguins as well. Blockchain for us is a way to make sure that these products do not get counterfeited. That was a long while ago. We've done some NFT projects and not bad, but I'll leave it up to Nelson to do it better than us.
On our activation, we're working with a lot of IPs, one of them is Stranger Things. We brought an experience to Singapore, the encounter. Essentially, you buy an NFT ticket for the experience. Our vision is that working with all these IPs, we want to offer an experience that starts before, during, and after the event. One thing that Web3 has brought to the Web2 space is the need to offer more than just a ticket and offer more than just a one-time off. That's very valuable also for consumers who are outside of the Web3 space.
Martha, your focus is luxury membership. We'll get into that a little bit more, but from the perspective of the demographics that you're targeting, how has that shaped your approach to the Web3 membership experience? You can go to your website, which I encourage people to do. It's cool. It does say to connect, but otherwise, I wouldn't know that this is a Web3 membership club. It was that intentional. Was that always how it was done?
Yes. When we launched our platform, it was primarily almost 100% Web2 audience. We were in business for two years before we even started to explore integrating blockchain into our platform. I think what was important for us was to have the on-ramps compatible for both audiences. Our Web2 members can sign up using their credit card for a number of different tiers of membership. We then created this process for the Web3 community to have a seamless user experience as well, which is connecting their wallet and using this NFT to unlock all of these token-gated privileges. For us, what was interesting was the decision to even start integrating blockchain was very organic.
We went from being a public marketplace to a members-only model and we wanted to start building our loyalty program, something that every travel and hospitality membership in the world has. When we were thinking about our partners giving us these very exclusive privileges that were for a select number of people, their first question was, "How are you going to gate this? We can't give you a discount code, people will share it. We can't give private links. What is the solution here?" From my understanding of blockchain at the time, we can token-gate it. We could have this digital asset backing all of our memberships, sometimes without the members even realizing that would allow them to redeem all of these benefits with minimal friction. That's been the case for us.
I want to give you credit for your boldness because you had a traditional Web2 business and you took a risk there in terms of creating this token-gated experience where a lot of companies would be intimidated by the risk of, "What if this doesn't work?" I am curious how that onboarding process has been for Web2 versus Web3 clientele or potential clientele. Luxury doesn't have any borders. There are people in all geographies who enjoy luxury. What has the onboarding experience been? What has the recruiting experience been like? Is it more referral-based? Is it more people find you online? Are you doing some outbound marketing? How is that varied by those two audiences?
It's a mix of everything you described, which I think from any new startup in this environment trying to service this very digitally savvy consumer, you have to be willing to integrate new technologies that build a more sustainable platform. With the integration of blockchain, we're not claiming we're a Web3 company, but this was the best technology at our disposal to build the most user-friendly membership experience. Same thing with using AI to increase our product inventory. We can spin out hotel pages 500 at a time by typing in the list of hotels that we want to be on the platform and our backend will create a page for them. Again, keeping in mind servicing the end customer. If we wanted to appeal to both audiences, we had to create the user experience that they expected.
For your question about how has it been referral versus outbound marketing, are we specifically trying to engage with Web3? That all, for us, happened by accident. We were launching this membership either way. We were going to use blockchain to power it either way. When we started thinking about releasing the membership program, Web3 was very much in the background because we wanted to go to our existing database of 10,000 users who were all primarily Web2 and say, "It's going to be backed by this token and you won't have to keep track of discount codes or private links." That all sounded exciting, and then OpenSea got involved. They were excited about the real-world use case that DayAway could prove out, so that's when Hype came pitching to this Web3 audience and they got it right away.
There's a member of my team who helped build out the American Express Black Card program. He constantly says that Web3 addresses real gaps in the rewards gamification loyalty space that were not accessible beforehand. You can do a lot more. I appreciate your decision there. I think that's interesting for other Web2 companies that are trying to maximize engagement. Nelson, you're also intersecting with the luxury space. Have you had the same experience that luxury and Web3 go together well? Do you think that Web3 is appropriate for the broader market too? I'm curious why or why not.
I'll bring an example. Let's say some community like Pudgy Penguins, I would say considerably in the Web3 space or in the NFT space, at least their floor price is considered premium. What Luca is doing is they're building real-world products in Web2. They're going for mass adoption. I think that's the right channel. In terms of Web3, whether it's premium or accessible, it depends on what the brand is trying to achieve. When Web3 came, it attracted such a wide audience.
Whether you're in for collecting art or you're your trader. I think Web3 offers a wide audience, but it's very important to be able to communicate the vision of what you are trying to do and attract the right audience into your community so that you don't get distracted by people who are opinionated or people who are motivated by different things. As founders, that's what we need to communicate constantly and be very consistent with that message.
If you go to the Pudgy Penguins website, which I encourage everyone to do, you don't see the word "Web3" or "blockchain" anywhere. Every word is precisely around this brand that they've created. The Instagram page is also very funny. There was recently a comic about someone who took a power nap, woke up, and realized it was 2:00 AM. I was like, "That's me." They're definitely trying to relate to the broad market.
Speaking of that type of entertainment content, you're building something fascinating in the entertainment space. I think that's a space that has evolved and become more global. I was in Seoul as I mentioned. We all know about Parasite and how that impacted the global entertainment market. Netflix has given me a lot of choices of foreign content now that were not there a few years ago. How has the globalization of entertainment impacted the potential of using Web3 within the entertainment realm?
Globalization of entertainment, I have a couple of businesses in Web2 as well. What we have seen is now Korean content travels worldwide. Very soon language will not be a barrier because, with AI technology, dubbing, subtitling, and all of that is going to become a breeze. I think the content will travel even more than ever before and the monetization opportunities increase exponentially. What we are doing in Web3 is building a platform that empowers creators because the industry has been controlled by a handful of people for generations. Creativity cannot be truly unleashed. It's only a chosen few that get that opportunity to bring the ideas to life.
The opportunity that Web3 offers is literally the ability for anyone to say, "I've got this amazing concept and I can bring this to life through the community and give ownership to that community as well." So that everybody participates in the success of a film or TV project and say the next Star Wars that's conceptualized-created belongs to the people.
Let's dig a little deeper there. What are some of the mechanisms that can be used without triggering the regulatory flags and whatnot that you're able to do with Web3?
There are definitely regulatory challenges. What is a security or what is not? There are different mechanisms by which we can reward people for ownership through staking, for example. The way we envisage it is that by NFTs you'd have ownership of a particular piece of IP and that would give you staking rewards which are indirectly connected to the benefits from the success of that film or TV show. Plus also, access as well. Behind the scenes, access, meet and greets, and all other rewards that you wouldn't get otherwise. The concept is to create this powerful ecosystem whereby the creators and the community participate equally and the success of creative projects. We decentralize that whole process, which is so heavily in the hands of five studios today.
I would draw some attention from the audience too. Fox's new project, Krapopolis, the writer Dan Harmon, is launching in September. If you own the chicken, you get special access to content, but your chicken also can lay eggs and those eggs can be used to buy redeemable merchandise. You have a major studio based in Hollywood that's using blockchain in a revolutionary way that sounds like you're empowering others to do as well.
We'll talk a little bit more about that, but let's also hit on the merchandising side. Since we've covered collectibles, ticketing, and luxury membership, I think merchandising is something that's inherently part of the conversation with all IPs. Lawrence, you're doing that in some creative ways. You showed me one particular activation on how you're doing that. I'd love to understand what Web3 brings to the table in terms of activations and collectibles, and to what degree it's attracting Web3 folks or Web2, and how you look at that moving forward.
For us, it's not so much even about Web3 or Web2, to be fair. Our event is clearly targeted on major audience. Our collectibles are targeted towards the collectors. Those collectors might not always be interested in the Web3 space. Merchandising, that's the core of what we do. For us, to offer that experience that goes beyond that one purchase moment and go to that event being able to offer additional merchandise.
As you mentioned, additional experiences behind the scenes and things that we're considering as well. We have a lengthy process before one of our items comes to life. There are a lot of people involved within Mighty Jaxx with the artists themselves. To get the people involved with that process is something we're looking into as well. Definitely, Web3 can give you that early access and can give you that extra look into it.
This is a broader question for all of you. I'm curious, what have you learned what your audiences like and dislike? How has that approach to engagement been adjusted over time? Let's get into some nitty-gritty of lessons learned here because these broader conversations are fun, but some things don't work. They don't stick. What hasn't stuck and what have you done differently?
People don't always like Web3. Our collectors don't always like Web3. Sometimes we think that, but by doing it in our case, we are narrowing down the audience even to a smaller amount. For us, it doesn't become commercially viable again, so we have to bring it a bit more to the background.
Our holders like high floor prices. That's a reality.
I don't think there's anyone that doesn't like the high floor price in blockchain.
Seriously, because we've been in this space for two years, the holders that are still with us now, we definitely know what they are in for. When we started, my background was in fashion retail. I've been doing it for 18 years. When we got into the space, we thought of what value we can bring into Web3 which is leaning into our strengths in fashion, brick-and-mortar, and distribution channels in the form of apparel. When we launched our first NFTs, it all came with physical jackets. Our goal is to be able to create avatars.
When I came into the space, I didn't think of doing avatars or making them interoperable. I wanted it to be able to create garments that you can relate to. A lot of NFTs were like animals or things, but there wasn't a relatable connection that you could personalize. I think for us, it is focusing on that. After a year, people who are still around want it. They are asking, "What are we releasing next? What's the next collection are you releasing?" Our brand promise at the very start is keeping it true to that. That's something our holders beyond the speculation, beyond the floor price and trading, whoever is still left, focus on that. That's our original mission.
I spoke with Frank DeGods. He said he learned that longer timelines that are more ambitious and may slip don't work as well for his audience as shorter smaller bites of the apple. Do you feel the same way in terms of how you're communicating expectations to your audience?
Yes. Typically, what we find is that the Web3 community wants things like that. They're often less worried about what's happening with the business. They're focused more on the token price and other elements. I think what we have had to learn is to say, "Let's not worry about all of those things. We're going to build a real product and we'll communicate the real product to our community," which is what we have been doing. Doing it in shorter gaps is very important because you can't be silent with these guys. They expect movement all the time.
I could add on something from our experience. For us, the hype was a challenge. Like I mentioned earlier, we had thought to launch our first NFT with our initial Web2 community, not needing them to know how much how it worked, but just how this would improve their user experience. When the hype came in and we attracted some attention from the broader Web3 community, we learned as well that long-term play was not a priority for them. When we launched our token, we did something that we thought was quite interesting is we offered a 90-day money-back guarantee.
What was important to us to protect the integrity of our partners was that we didn't have people buying this as a speculative asset. We didn't want people that were looking to flip in a day. Before the mint was live, we must have said it a million times on Twitter spaces, this is all about the utility. If the long-term roadmap is not attractive to you and what we're building, you're going to be disappointed the next day after you buy this NFT.
We did do that and we've been encouraged to see that our community of holders that are a mix of this crypto-native audience and Web2 community that have never purchased an NFT before and don't know how it works. We hold it for them in a custodial wallet and link it to their account, but they still have their NFTs. They're using it and they're booking flights with it. They're booking hotel rooms, and that's why they'll keep it. The fair price will stay high.
Have you considered adding perks the longer you hold your membership?
We did. For anyone who had held their token for 90 days, there were a number of new privileges that were released. To reward them, we had them in our back pocket the whole time but we wanted to give them that "thank you" for believing in the project. The whole idea is over time, as DayAway grows into more markets, more partners, and more privileges, they will benefit from all of that because their token represents a lifetime membership to our platform. The hope is on the backend that the value of that membership will rise over time. Like a country club membership, instead of selling it back to the club, you can sell it on these open marketplaces.
It's this mix of surprise and delight with predictability. You can't just do one or the other. You need to do both but essentially, you need that predictability to some extent, but you also want that intrigue, so it makes sense. Web3 offers a lot of co-creation capabilities. We talk about it all the time on the show from creating scripts together to designing collectibles together, to creating perks in the membership. All of it is possible, but some people want to enjoy the benefits and other people want to co-create. Maybe they want to co-create, but they don't want to get into the nitty-gritty. How have you all leveraged the power of co-creation without getting your audience to say, "No more co-creation. Please let me just enjoy the perks."
Knowing what brings value to the community and the holders is very important. What matters to them? Co-creation together with not the community, but also with partners like Mighty Jaxx. We co-created the physical vinyl and we shared a community. We exposed each other's community with Mandela as well. Huge support from their event space and their membership.
With Pudgy Penguins, for example, we are two different IPs. They are penguins. We're adult correctors. There's a lot of space for collaborations because our community wants that. They want the same things. Being very aware of what they want is very important. There are a lot of distractions. As entrepreneurs, we always see opportunities and sometimes those are distractions. It's the same as a business. Know what the customer wants.
Any other thoughts?
Co-creation is at the very heart of what we do. Essentially, we are empowering anyone to become a producer to take part and create projects that they would never be able to do through traditional Web2 mechanisms. I think this is incredibly empowering for Web3 audiences, but also Web2 audiences that ultimately, if we make it a seamless process, everybody can be part of that creative process.
I would argue you're also enabling creators to increase their tentacles in terms of what they can do as possible. We live in a world where, at least in the US, writers are quite concerned about their livelihood. However, with platforms like this, a writer could be more than just a writer.
A hundred percent. Now, the writer can dictate, "This is how much I'm going to get." They're not having to fight for it every single day. They can set the terms. This is great for them, great for the actress, great for the community, and great for the whole ecosystem. I think this is where Web3 is going to transform the industry and we're at the very early onset of that.
Before we close out, I'd love to go through a round-robin with each of you in terms of one more quick piece of advice summed up in a sentence or less that our audience can take away from them. Lawrence?
For us, in our case, don't focus too much on Web3 alone, focus on the products. That's what I've been doing for all of the years that I've been working is focusing on products. If it's Web2 or Web3, to me it doesn't matter too much. It's about your audience. Know your audience, know what they want, and then create an awesome product.
It's a long road ahead. As we saw with the internet, it took quite a while for the real businesses to emerge and for it to become what it is now. I believe Web3 will do that and much more, but people need to be patient with it.
Nelson.
Something that's very important but very hard to do is to gut your piece because this space can be very brutal. Ultimately, it's a great space to learn, grow, and be open for collaborations and explore all possibilities.
Martha.
My advice to other startups out there is to start thinking about how you can use this technology to solve real operational friction in your business. Provide real utility to your core community and don't let hype distract you.
Where can folks go to learn more about you and what you're doing?
For us, you can go to MyDayAway.com.
Follow us on Twitter, @BBRCOfficial, or myself, @MrGentleApe.
Check out RightStream.io
For us, it's MightyJaxx.com. To plug a bit more, 1st of October, we're stopping with the Stranger Things event, so go to Bugis, 30% discount. Please go by. Thanks.
For me, you guys can go to EdgeOf.xyz. EdgeOfNFT.com is our podcast. I encourage you all to subscribe on Spotify or iTunes. In addition to that, we have an event called OuterEdge.Live in LA which is the intersection of culture entertainment and Web3. We also have a new show that started, Edge Of AI which you can also find on all those different platforms. It expands the conversation around this convergence of technology. Everyone, thank you so much for your time. This has been incredible. I learned a lot. Thank you all for showing up for the first session of the day.
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Hi everyone, Josh here live in Singapore. It's day one of our Action Pack, two weeks in Asia over in Singapore. We got off a late flight in Seoul and we're back at it again caffeinated thanks to Suji and the event that he's hosting here. Suji is the CEO and Founder of Mask Network. They're all about decentralized social. We're going to hear a little bit more about what they're up to. First, why don't we kick it over to you to give some background on yourself and Mask Network for those who don't know what you guys are all about?
Mask Network is one of the first leading decentralized social network. We found the company in 2017. Personally, I always love the new frontier. I drop off from college. That's my senior year to found Mask. That's also the time when people are debating about the ownership economy and about the problem over centralization for social networks, data leakage, and etc. That leads me to, "We're going to get into the social network to create the next generation."
We have a recency syndrome where we think this debate just happened this year because it's hot again.
It's been over almost ten years now.
It's ten years of realizing, "Something's broken, we need to fix it." You guys have been doing that. Talk a little bit about the history of the growth of the network and where you're at at this point.
We found a project in 2017, which that year, also in the ICO, is a crazy year. We didn't choose to launch Token to take the quick money. We started to build on top of every existing Web2 social network including Twitter and Facebook. Our idea is there are so many users stuck in the existing ones simply by providing a new one doesn't solve the problem. You need to create a bridge to help them to get out the existing ones to extract their data into a new cyberspace.
That's why we started Mask. We built it for many years. In 2021, we finally launched Token. We also started to help the other ecosystem projects. We also started to invest and to grant to do non-profit. I believe social network is huge and probably not only one project. It's probably dozens of projects. That's why we think we should work with each other. We provide financial funding and engineering effort to anything we think is meaningful. That's been six years but still, I think it just started.
It's awesome, the timing that you got into it. The first ICO opening, so you saw the first peak, then you saw the Valley of 18 to 28 and you saw the next peak. Now, we're back into this time of growth time in the field. You're doing a lot of grants right now. You're doing a lot of things to provide tools for people who are trying to be in this environment. What do you think learning from 17 to that full run back to where we are now, what were those core lessons that helped to elevate masking can help your ecosystem survive this moment?
We have to remember, in 2017, people are criticized about Facebook data leakage and Twitter censorship. They've been around for ten years. You won't destroy or replace something being there for ten years simply so it's decentralized. It's not going to work. You have to prove that the decentralization is robust enough. You have to prove through many efforts of events and through many coincidences, you have to prove, "This is going to work and there's a benefit for the creators." Every piece of it needs some luck. Every piece of it needs some patience. Even now, we've been doing this thing for six years. I think it's still very early, but I'm quite long-term. If you work hard enough and are patient enough, you're going to see the solution to the puzzles. We can put them together.
I think when we started this thing, there was only mass-down as a decentralized alternative. There's no blue sky. Blue Sky was initiated in late 2019. The face will never mention decentralized social back in the day. Now, there's mass-down as well. There is another 5 or 3 decentralized social on the blockchain. There's Blue Sky. Even Facebook came in and said, "We want to do this thread." I should have forecast the mass-down protocol. Most of them are going to fade. For example, what a Facebook user does is decline significantly. They probably say, "As a big company, we are going to kill the project."
They're not long-term enough. No one's going to wait. No big company is going to wait five years to solve the problem. As a small team, we have a strong commission. We understand the technology parts. We understand the financial parts. We need to put everything together. When we see a big barrier, we break it down and say, "Maybe we need five other teams to work together." They might need funding, then we start a venture to provide funding. We then encounter some problems in the academic field. Maybe this is a new algorithm no one has figured out. Even in academics, no one has done it. We then started to do non-profit. We start to donate to the college directly and donate to the engineer's individual developers. They start to solve problems.
It's more like an ecosystem. One example I always use is Tencent, which is a Web2 giant, but they're decentralized. Their way of working is very interesting. Half of the revenues from the investment. It's from the ecosystem. The meaningful way of creating a decentralized social network where it's not we build everything ourselves. It's by reaching out to everyone. It provides whatever is needed for everyone and puts all together, including Web2 or Twitter, and including the most advanced decentralized technology. Put them together. That's going to be a word.
What are some of the pioneering uses of Mask Network that you've seen so far that you're particularly excited about? Maybe there was a moment when someone used your technology in a cool way and it gave you that fire back to the beginning of when you started Mask Network and you saw it out there and you're like, "Yes."
We started the thing in 2017. In 2018, we started to have the first open-source idea. In 2019, we open-source pretty much everything. I remember then, many OGs from the ACM committee, they approach including Vitalik, the founder of the ACM protocol. In 2020, that's the Lunar New Year. In 2020 February, that's a bad time for every tech company. No matter the stock of crypto, everything's dipping for the COVID and everyone's freaking out. That's also the time for the COVID and also for the Lunar New Year. It's a big time.
I was quite surprised that we have a small campaign. We say, "Maybe we can do the red pocket, do the cool lucky job, some money lucky job on Twitter." One day, I wake up and saw Vitalik sending money on top of Twitter using Mask. You can even prove that with his wallet and his address. Not like some sketchy link.
Meanwhile, everyone else is trying to send Vitalik their project. Put it in his wallet and beg him to do something with it, but he's proactively reaching out to you.
If the project is decentralized, it has to open value and it's cool. Cool people are going to try it themselves. At that time, people think crypto is dying because 2020 March is crazy. Even the serums only $80. I think that's a good time to build, like right now. That's a moment when people like it. I know Twitter and other big companies weren't able to do it for many years. How can they integrate a decentralized wallet? They're able to let you send money to random people you don't know. They weren't able to do it. That's a unique edge. Since then, we kept developing amazing things.
After 2021, we are more financially sustainable. We are lucky. We have a lot of treasury. We have a lot of friends welding to help us. We then started to make the donation to the grant. Every year, we provide around $1 million to $2 million worth of grant in different forms. It's not a big amount of money, but again, any big social network company, even a middle-size one, if you ask them, "Can you guys do a few million-dollar grants per year?" If you don't ask them about ROI, they're not going to do it. It's like, "How can I tell my board member? It's how it works." We had advantage again because we truly believe that it's a community of work. It's another moment that I think it's going to work.
Kudos to you all for putting in the work. You pray for something like that to happen. Someone as big as a guitar comes from music without you trying happens because it's authentic and works, it's centralized. From there, you keep building your community, you're doing your grants, and now you're able to do things like this at Token2049 putting on events and seeing your community come together and talk about things. What about this event and being here in this moment? What do you feel is different this year compared to the past? How do you feel about the current environment where things are headed?
This year is significantly bigger come. Singapore, Hong Kong is always like New York City. It's always the have of financial transactions. This year obviously, because of many reasons, people are still in the market, but more builders come like, "We don't mind the market. We want to build innovative stuff."
I was here last year and I didn't see this much building going on. It was a lot of FinTech folks and exchanges institutional folks. There are builders all over this event. To kick off the week, why Asia in particular? Why is Asia important to your ecosystem?
There are two perspectives. From the crypto or free-market perspective, everyone is important. Everyone as long as you have the capability to connect to internet and do transaction, that's important. That's part of the big global free-market. When we see the geo pod is getting more complex, the traditional free-market is dying. The non-crypto free market is actually dying. It is pretty much dead already. That's why it's important. Everyone can join and can participate.
From the social and determined perspective, some quick numbers like 30%-plus of the Twitter users from Japan alone, if you put Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and Chinese mainland users even banned by firewall. If you put the real user want to use something like Twitter together without any geopolitics, without any barrier, it's more than half. It's a very easy mess. Eventually, the population density of Asian countries can say, "This is a huge hotspot. There's no reason we're going to miss it." That's a reason from the social and team perspective why we have a lot of effort in Asia as well.
You've talked about the importance of Asia. What's going on with your development in North America? In particular, what are some examples of applications being built in that region?
Right now, in the bear market, a lot of good teams are asking for an exit. They're asking for a way to still contribute their ideas but also land safely. We made a lot of amazing teams. As we all know, the decentralized social network is pretty small, but we love to see how we can integrate them together and how we can help them together. We started to do more M&A, Mergers and Acquisition, especially with a very amazing European-American founders. This year, we did three acquisitions. One is in the US, RARA, they're doing the social NFT curation protocol. Another two in Japan. There are several ongoing ones. I believe there's a huge chance to do cross-border acquisition as well.
Tell us a little bit more about RARA.
Basically, how Foursquare and Pinterest are working like, "I want to come in my best restaurant. That's a five-star restaurant, but that's not a good one." You probably want to comment on the NFT later on in five years. Maybe your kids are going to say, "This is my best NFT," but that's an ugly one. They're going to interact. They're going to have their own social graph. They have their own unique social capital. That's underestimated in the past. Eventually, people are going to treat the curation of those cyber items and digital items as important as the physical ones. That's the reason we think it's interesting to acquire them. There are many other opportunities we haven't even discovered. There are going to be more funders joining, so happy to help them from any perspective.
We'll check out RARA. I learned a lot and have a lot of respect for what you're doing in this decentralized social space. I think it's a very important topic right now with what's going on with Meta, Twitter, and all the new platforms. Where can folks go to learn more about Mask and get involved in your ecosystem?
If they're interested in the project, if they can search Mask.io and there's a GitHub link everywhere. Our tokens launch pretty much exchange Coinbase finance. If you're interested in that, not financial advice, but there's a lot of articles out there. Generally, decentralized social network is underestimated. If you look at the current Web2 or internet joins, half of them are related with social network, like Instagram and Facebook, even Twitter. Half of them are more financial transactions and more data searching.
Right now, if you look into the crypto or the decentralized area, almost 80% are financial use case. There are some gamification use case where there's almost no social use case. I think that's pretty much underestimated. If you're a founder, my suggestion is to jump in this area. If you're an investor, that's also a quite big opportunity here.
Thank you so much for hosting this event and thanks for your time. I appreciate it.
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