A $1M ApeCoin DAO proposal for a royalty-enforcing OpenSea alternative

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jay bird and I believe that nfts are going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. what's up what's up y'all welcome back to another episode today we are talking about nft royalties we're talking about apecoin dow we're talking about the future of digital communities and the future of digital businesses and how they're going to exist on chain and what tools they need in order to build sustainable businesses

to create the revenue that they need in order to exist long term it's a fascinating conversation we have Zach herwagon joining us Zach is the co-founder and CEO at snag Solutions where he works with some of the top collections to build a a white label Marketplace for them he's works with board API Club he's a goblin town he's worked with the undead work was super normal he's worked with so many of the top collections out there world of women and he comes from a web 2 background he worked at doordash previously and was an early member of their go to market team focused on their white label product so from that experience he saw what is it like to take an app which needs to go to

market across many different restaurant chains because that's what doordash did well we had a similar challenge with nfts where we have all of these projects these communities that need to go to market to get there get new people acquire new customers get new people into their ecosystem and how do you do that well Zach is focused on providing Solutions and tools for these leading nft projects many of whom he works with and many of whom he is building alongside now this conversation before we get into all of this stuff that Zach's doing in his day job at snag we

actually start this conversation around ape coin Dow because Zach is an active member and eight point out and currently his team has a proposal to a coin Dow for them to give snag Zach and his team a million dollars have asked eight point out for a million dollars in return for them to build a royalty enforcing Marketplace that would be a competitor to open C and blur so we talk about we start off this conversation talking just about eight coin down we haven't really on the Webster Academy podcast talked to ton we haven't talked much about apecoin now we've talked a little bit about them we talked Lots about Hugo we talked Lots about board APR Club but how does a coin

Dow fit into that what is their role compared to yuga's role why did is eight point downloads exist what is their mission who's involved in eight point out how many members are there all these questions we answer in today's show because it really sets up this amazing framing for what it is like to be part of a dial like apcoin dial right now there's a lot of questions around doody's work do they not work well this is a conversation where we talk deeply about one of the largest Dows and how it is working and also how it's not working it's not perfect there's certainly struggles there's issues you know Dows are a work in process so to speak as we learn and figure out how to use them better and then after the Bitcoin dial conversation we jump into more of this

larger conversation of do we need a royalty enforcing Marketplace how will that work and more specifically what do we need in order for royalty enforcing Marketplace to work and the key that Zach and his team believe is we need a source of Truth to show who has played royalties and who hasn't because the only way that we're actually going to to enforce royalties is at the level of the Creator enforcing it in terms of removing benefits from people who do not pay royalties on their collection very interesting the way they're approaching this and again Zach is approaching this from conversations with all the top projects so he's not doing this from his own views or opinions he's doing it from

the inside which really is what gives Zach this ability to speak on such a interesting and deep profound way that he understands what the project leaders of the top entity collections are thinking what they want and then he's building alongside them really allows this conversation to give you a holistic view on the current setup of these businesses and how we're building for the future so everybody get ready we're gonna take a minute but hear from our sponsor before we jump into hearing about Zach and apcoin DOW and snag modern newsletters are built on pair paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that

combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level where paragraph readers can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletter this opens new possibilities like creators sharing Revenue with fans I also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gpt4 natively in paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and

have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because it's profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early GM Zach great to have you back on the podcast how you doing man how you been gmj thrilled to be back here lots changed in in just a few months so excited to pick up the combo on royalties and and all things NFC marketplaces yes such an important convo and a conversation that if you have not been active in the web 3 space every

month something big changes big Marketplace changes we go zero we go four royalties we go zero royalties we're just swinging back and forth you and your team are building some really important products in the space working with some great Partners so excited to break that all down and talk about some exciting launches that you guys have coming up we'll get to that later in the show I want to start off with apcoin Dow we haven't talked a ton on web3 Academy about eight coin Dow but there's lots of conversation right now around Dows we wrote a piece last Friday about the noun style fork or the nouns doubt breakup with over 50 percent of the Dow leaving it's kind of led to this conversation of

like if Dows are working when are they working and so I think ape coined out being one of the larger dials in the space is really relevant and you're obviously an active member so let's start at the top can you just sort of give us an overview of what is apecoin Dao and maybe lead into how Yuga is involved or how they're not involved yeah so eight point Dow was created by Hugo labs as a community organization that was set up to be stewards for the eight point token as a uh ecosystem currency for the metaverse I I think it's actually supposed to be a arts and culture token

in the metaverse I could be saying that slightly wrong and the first thing to say is that is where yuga's involvement ends they set everything up through a Cayman foundation and and have you know done their best to make this truly a standalone operation that that can be run by the community with an eye towards legal compliance that's all on that one when you mention legal compliance maybe you can just give us a little bit more color there of what is the fear why can't Yuga be involved in the management of Bitcoin yeah so when we talk about the Howie

test it's about ongoing value accruing to asset holders that is driven by a individual or a small group of individuals and so when board apes and mutin apes were dropped apecoin during this initial airdrop event that could be perceived as this small group of individuals Yuga providing value to those holders the board ape mutinate asset as an unregistered security and so to strengthen the defense of this as a decentralized asset and something that is not subjects just

to the the contributions of Yuga they've set up the foundation and the currency to be managed entirely by this community organization so there's kind of a a separation of administration from the token launch and when you say the foundation is that the same thing as the dial or is that another entity so that's we could say it's the same thing as the Dao I would maybe bifurcate a little bit and say the foundation is the legal entity and the Dao is the collective of individuals and there's been a lot of good discourse on this recently where the board members of the eight coin Dow who really represented and interface

with the the foundation and the legal entity they're asking the community to ignore the legal entity right like their request to the community is put in the request that you want to be true of the doubt you want the Dow to invest in uh Venture deals put a proposal together and we'll solve for the legal component or tell you that we can't solve for the legal component but they're really trying to push for bifurcation in the community voicing the ideal path for the dial versus then the foundation being there as that that execution arm for these initiatives and the reason that there's this legal concern is that the the SEC is going after a lot of

different projects they investigating Yuga eight coins you know do you have any any idea about what's going on there no answer on the latest but apecoin was initially named in the sec's investigation into Yuga as a bet and so this is maybe like six months dated at this point that this was named in in that initial claim from the SEC but that there's two different points at which the organization needs to have plausible decentralization one is it's clearly separate from Yuka Yuga has not done anything to touch or impact the organization since launch and that

extends to like the founders won't comment on anything in the forums right they really hold things at arms length um and then the second layer of plausible decentralization is the community being that organization that drives all decision making for the doubt and so this wouldn't impact Yuga they just need to prove they're separate but if you know the SEC were to find that the foundation was really making all the decisions and driving operations without sufficient input from the community as this decentralized you know board of directors almost that could cause a separate set of right issues right so they need

the Dow to be active basically and prove that it is capable of operating and making decisions and executing and pushing forward because then it's clear that it is a decentralized entity and it needs to prove that it's done this by its members and by its current setup okay what's your role in it going down thank you for giving the the space for disclaimer that this is all my opinion as a active and engaged Community member yeah but I have no formal affiliation with the Dao I'm unapproved author through our our initial eight point proposal but just plugged in and listening to all the spaces really

right okay and how did you initially get involved in the Dao how did you join give us your background your story getting into the dough yeah so I I bought a board ape in maybe September October 2021 back when you know we were right in the the peak of the nft bull market and all apes and mutants were airdropped apcoin um I I think it's worth noting that directionally fifteen thousand unique members were air dropped apecoin and so that's how the founding members of the apecoin community were seated with their allocation but today this isn't exact

but it's it's over 70 000 apecoin holders today and holding any amount of Bitcoin 0.11 100 provides access to the Dow and so I don't think it's a stretch to say that ape coin Dao is the largest community of web 3 you know community members enthusiasts et cetera and that that's a critical play space that they take in this emerging ecosystem yeah no no pressure too that's you guys that's for sure okay so you bought an ape you joined in there's about 70 000 people in how does voting rights work yeah and

Dow voting is super hotly debated both specific to ape coin Dao and across other Dows um today it's all proposed proportional based on amount of paper owned and as a result the the vote is not entirely controlled but mostly controlled by a set of 10-ish whale voters or delegates there's some of these Community orgs like the French apiat Club where the UK Yacht Club that are just an amalgamation of delegates but there's really these 10 wallets that control the majority of the boat ranging from a couple hundred thousand eight

points through to a couple million eight points that's a little bit scary it feels centralized then as opposed to decentralized to have so so few people control so much of the voting power don't know that we want to go down the path of a better voting mechanism right now if you want to feel free to add in but we didn't talk about talking about that on today's show so I'm gonna let that one rest for now let's go to it's one more sort of general question and then I want to talk more specifics can you give us an idea of the size of a point out Beyond its members any metrics you can give us in terms of to just so we can paint a picture of the scale and size of it yeah

so for all of these Dao and token market caps there's concept of fully diluted versus current assets in Market I think the fully diluted valuation for apecoin is just over a billion dollars still maybe like one to one two with maybe a little bit more of that Supply already distributed maybe moving towards 40 50 percent of Supply already distributed roughly the other half of assets remaining locked in the the Dow Treasury and available both to stakers as token rewards but also to authors of aips and proposals who want to build infrastructure to support the Dow

okay okay awesome let's take a step back now tell us a little bit about your experience what's it been like to be part of the Dao you've been active now for I guess two years a lot of people I talk to they're not in Dallas they're working in centralized organizations uh or they're in Dows but they have not a lot of people have great Dao stories to be honest I almost don't want to say that because I really like Dallas I think it's an amazing concept I think it can work but that's the general opinion what's your experience been like yeah so just sell the story first and then I'll make some some points on it we started by drafting a proposal to build

this official Yuga asset Marketplace that was powered by eight point and associated with a coin as a community run Marketplace and getting through the process I have nothing but good things to say it was easy enough as an author to understand how the community was thinking about proposals sneak peek they don't like to spend a lot of money on proposals it's a very very Roi based organization in the way that community members think about what's in it for the Dow itself what's in it for me as a community member and so as part of that process we ended up stripping all of the cost out of our proposal so that we were

able to you know focus on on all the the benefits to the Dow and really use the Dao somewhat as a marketing platform to help share what we could do with the broader nft ecosystem where I see things starting to break down a little bit today is I kind of mentally said I wouldn't do this but to talk about the current proposal that the Talk of the Town we have aip304 I think that is Machi Big Brothers proposal nothing negative to say on Matia as an author or as a community participant but the the whale in the room is that he is the whale in the room he has three million ape coin right now and for most

of these proposals I think we see maybe 10-ish 10 to 12-ish million in internal ape coin voted and so there's a strong ability for him in particular right now but absent of him mocha versus normally the big delegate at maybe a million and a half to swing these votes and I I don't even want to get into problematic it's the Dow operating the way it's supposed to operate but what could be challenging is in in the most recent set of proposals there is a documentary that was pacing at like 85 to 90 percent Community vote Machi came in last minute and voted no for it and luckily in that case the documentary crew was able to kind of rally the

community to get a million votes in in the the 11th hour and get that one over the line but it kind of shows the the inherent whale bias of the Dow the way that it's set up today and and we'll stay clear how we improve upon that it's just yeah rude Christensen and and uh Baker now he's probably the all-time great example on the other end where he has I think truly over 50 of the token so you know Machi is not the king of the whale again does it as it relates to doubt politics it's just a good example okay let's you mentioned your proposal I just want to go back to that can you give us a a bit of a breakdown what was the first proposal that you made I think

you said you said we made it so it wasn't just you who was involved in that teen and sort of tell us a little bit about what you guys did what you built and what the results were because that leads into uh the next thing we want to talk about in today's episode yeah and I don't know if I properly introde myself so starting there uh my day job is to lead snag Solutions and we started snag to build easy to use white label tooling to let nft creators or Brands Ecom Services building on nfts as a tech primitive to launch high quality sales channels starting with like marketplaces and white label loyalty

Solutions so that's the problem space I wake up thinking about most days and we took our first proposal through the Dow really as a proof of concept to the White Label Marketplace solution we were already building versus the current proposal we we have is a bigger swing on a currently it's a million dollar request to fund the development of a Marketplace that supports all creators as an open C competitor that enforces royalties and creates a source of Truth for royalty payments in a way that lets creators provide value to payers or withhold

value from non-payers so really trying to request that the Dow fund infrastructure development that lets us help swing things back towards royalty payments which we view as a critical piece of nfts being a robust technology platform that folks want to use anything anything okay great I love that you brought that up just want to quickly summarize your story so our listeners are up to speed so you and your partners made a proposal to bitcoin Dow about a year ago I think it was November 2022 am I correct in that yeah okay so you made this proposal initially you asked for funding you strip that out because you

realized that was maybe would lead to not getting this proposal to pass the proposal did pass correct correct okay and as a result of that you built a Huga Marketplace for all their nfts yes yes and you combine that at apecoinmarketplace.com today okay awesome we'll link to that in the show notes so you built this Marketplace at the same time you're also starting your own business called snag Solutions where you're building marketplaces for other Collections and now what you've done to finish the story is you've made another proposal to a coin Dao asking for a million dollars in funding to build a

Marketplace tool that would be a competitor to actually I guess to build a Marketplace it would be a competitor to openc and to blur but it would be royalty enforced correct I get that okay nailed it awesome let's jump into this royalty enforced question we talk a lot about the need for royalties I still think there's sufficient debate as to why we need royalties and maybe not necessarily why we need royalties maybe more so the debate becomes around who deserves royalties and when it works versus when it doesn't let's start with sort of your view you obviously wrote this proposal Frederick Pozo it's very well written

you know these things are long documents a lot of thought a lot of work goes into them give us sort of the high level of if you're trying to convince somebody in apcoin Dao or somebody to support you in this proposal why do we need a royalty enforcing Marketplace yeah so the thing I start with is everyone and they've coined out mostly own some nfts and generally speaking they own more nfts in value than they own eight point and so the first thing I'm trying to appeal to is the fact that when we all entered the space mostly in 2021-ish we thought that royalties weren't were

sublawn chain and it was a key part of the narrative that led to nfts having such explosive growth and such strong product Market fit in that that cycle and you know could talk separately about why I am so bullish on the next 12 to 18 months for the crypto category at large we were talking about Progressive web apps social sign on L2 block space before we hopped on here right like the the court infrastructure problems that that were problematic in the last we'll run our largely solved today but the new infrastructure problem specific to nfts is are royalty is a thing right separate from like I I don't think we're going to move back towards 100 enforcement ever I

don't think that's possible but can we get back to a space where the top brands artists creators that are actually providing ongoing value to their woulders okay can they provide enough value where it makes sense to the holder to pay the royalty right if they're not receiving enough value utility Etc even if that's just you know good standing in an artist Community it doesn't make sense and it will always be an option to not pay royalty so we need to make it make sense to the end user yeah that's always been my feeling is that it'll never be possible to fully

enforce royalties even if we did figure out a way it would be like this endless back and forth right like devs on one end would figure out how to enforce it devs on the other end come back months later and they'd have another tool to not enforce it so it would just be endless which is why I think openc has made the decisions that they made I mean we could talk maybe a little bit about our views there I think that openc really fumbled the ball on this one because they had a position as the creators marketplace where all the creators really respected them and felt like they could be a leader for this new Revolution but then they decided to basically try to follow blur because

blurt called it trading volume and quite frankly they're not blur and we don't need another blur serves its purpose don't get me wrong like I think blur works for the Traders for the people that are maximizing profit and look paying zero royalties is going to maximize your profit great and also blur is going to get you maybe an airdrop Farm okay great you're a profit driven that makes sense for you I can't argue against that but I do think openc fumbled this so feel free if you want to jump in with your opinion there you can what I want to sort of go to next is like okay so we do need a royalty and forced Marketplace the only way that really works is if there's extra if there's a reason to pay a royalty it

doesn't work when it's like oh great I made this pfp collection once or I made something once I'm giving you no extra value I'm just going to sit here and collect a fee right that's not when royalties work when it works is when the creator has a business to run and by collecting royalties they can continue to build that business which supports the community like then it makes sense how do we achieve this like can we just go build what does your proposal look like I guess can you just go build a royalty and forced Marketplace and be done with it or is there other underlying Tech and underlying tools that we need in order to make this possible there's a lot there I'm going to start with a couple examples and then we'll get to the the two Core Concepts we have a few partners

that have already enforced royalties through our our marketplaces today I'll chat about two in particular for now the plague which is a pretty meaningful project and Truth Labs which includes Goblin Town and Illuminati and a few others both of them a couple months ago now migrated to a new contract and airdropped new nfts from their core collections to their community and that's gone pretty well for the most part the plague's floor price I think is actually up since they made that move they've been doing a lot of cool stuff on their new project but you know kind of validating the concept that you can

enforce royalties and you can be successful in this market uh but neither of them are you when Yuga tried to block Blur by supporting the operator filter for their new other side collection blur when and leveraged C port to look around that system and I I think it actually roughly I suspect breaks out into top five-ish creators and not popped by this creators in terms of I'm just calling it blur for today but it could be anyone it could end up being open see for all we know there's going to be some rational actor out there I'm not even going to call them a bad actor who's going to find a workaround to these enforcement Solutions and the simplest way to think

about that is actually blur wrapping crypto punks that are not normally tradable in NF marketplaces they just wrap them into a 721 wrapper and and they make those tradable and that same approach will always apply even if we go to a different chain you can Bridge them back onto ethereum and trade the muffler or blur can just stand up their contract on the new trade it it's really not ever a system that can be completely functional on its own uh and so that's why we think that the creation of a data source that is a real source of Truth on royalty payment data that creators can use to decide whether to provide benefits Discord access in

the case of eight coin or not eight coins all right in the case of Yuga or azuki 8 fast Suzuki party access right these bigger communities have real value and utility that they're providing to their members and so we want to through the creation of this system create that kind of canonical source of Truth for payments that let them determine how to reward their users okay so walk us through give us the like Layman's explanation of how that would might actually work so you have this source of Truth that shows whether or not a royalty was paid or not and then it impacts the basically the token the nft as to

whether you can claim certain Rewards or certain benefits is that the idea that's the concept and I'll also mention that in the create the in the conversations we're having with top five to ten creators this is exactly how they are thinking about solving the problem hey I'm seeing a lot less energy around let's just go block everyone else and a lot more energy around how do we bring this front and center within our community and uh and I think that's less scary as well right like that that they don't have to Silo themselves from a blur and opens yet at this point instead they can create the right set of incentives for

collectors before I keep going here there's an interesting rough data point that pre-plur roughly 50 of nft volume was collecting volume versus trade or volume and that was defined by amount of time held between what right was it in the wallet several weeks or less than several weeks and during this Market cycle that's shifted towards 80 20ish I think or maybe even a little bit more severe than that trading versus collecting volume and I think this core concept of how do we actually reward The Collector if the collector is not receiving value you know whether that's event access Discord

access metaverse and and experience access airdrop access Etc there's no reason to pay the royalty and the space is going to slide towards Traders or away from the product Market fit so what we're talking about is the operating system through which projects can reward holders to me and I know I'm I'm going a little long on this one but coming back to the core kind of tech we want to build here our infrastructure partner Reservoir they do amazing work we work closely with them they already have a source of Truth on royalty payments that we utilize today that is maybe 98 to 99 accurate okay on was the royalty paid

but you go I I'm just using Hugo repeatedly in this conversation by the way right azuki proof Etc that same applies but if if they were to just come out and say hey folks who have not paid royalty no longer have Discord access no longer have a plus types access Etc that would be a major Black Ops like you wouldn't do it no if we were to give them an interface through our new self-serve tool that let them come in and say after X date start tracking unpaid royalties and withholding access along with what it means to make that royalty whole right like maybe right it's uh fixed to eat fee or what whatever it is for their product right

yes so because yeah just to be clear there there's the possibility that somebody would buy a nft Community pass a membership not know that they didn't pay royalties and then not get the benefits but they were like well what the heck I didn't do this on purpose yeah that's what your choice fought on and we're looking from feed for feedback from those top five creators on on how do they want the system built right this proposal that we came out with it was to start the conversation on the need for this source of troop and the need for this infrastructure and we really need those top creators as much as we need the community to Define what they want

the solution to look like we need the creators to be informing that solution as well so those are a lot of the compost we're having behind closed doors very interesting okay so two pieces of tech that you're building here as part of this proposal one is the source of Truth or maybe you're using Reservoir source of Truth so maybe how are they different how do they work together the other is the marketplace we would be building the front end for people to interface with that source of Truth both the Creator to tell us you know how to track royalties specific to their collection so that they can put their own inputs into this as well as potentially the tool through which a user who had not paid a royalty would go fix that royalty and put in the Tokyo ID

and send the royalty to the correct address to to bring that token into which I'll be honest is not a wildly popular concept of the nft community without sufficient explanation of you know this being based on some date that the Creator decides there's a lot of complexity there so it's been a challenging conversation about so can you speak to the conversations that you're having with these it sounds like you're tapped into I don't know which of the top 5 10 nft projects you're tapped into but I'm guessing you guys wanted them but it sounds like you're tapped into a bunch of these you're talking to the leaders of these companies they're trying to you know notice I call them

companies not nft projects everyone's trying to move away from we're an nft project to building a sustainable business in order to build a sustainable business you need sustainable revenue streams we've seen lots of nft Pro watch these companies build other sources of revenue because they recognize that royalties you know we've had zenica on the podcast many times and he always talked from the beginning a year ago about how their focus was let's build other revenue streams for Zen Academy because if we rely on royalties it will be screwed long term and he saw that coming I think a lot saw that coming so how do how are they thinking about it then are they thinking the thing that I

think I've always struggled with and maybe you can is if the objective is that I am joining a community then I shouldn't be selling my nft right and if I'm not selling my nft then there's no Revenue coming back to the business or the creators right there's no royalty to be had but then I expect you know eight Fest to happen every year and to get access to that well so how do they think about it how do you think about it yes I said this already but the core thing that seems to be a shared perspective across the this top business cohort is one

whether or not they need royalties to stay in business near term most of these folks have real funding and don't they view it as a critical piece to make their P L's work midterm yuga's royalty Revenue was run rate hundreds of millions of dollars even before layering in primary back when they were raising at a several billion dollar valuation and so to grow into and grow past that valuation it'll just be really challenging without royalties there's obviously a path there with the other side and game-based revenue and kind of rebuilding World of Warcraft that could get them there but it'll be a whole lot

harder without this as a revenue stream the thing that we have really not been able to get good feedback on yet is and we haven't really talked about this yet but the other half of our proposal is use ERC 721c as a default for this Marketplace okay so let me derail on that and I'll come back to the question in a second yeah so erc721c it sounds like 721 for a reason it's compatible bowl with many marketplaces that already support 720 ones today including our own and the key difference is unlike the operator filter that previously restricted access from certain

Marketplace contracts so to be an operator culture I could say do not let blur trade do not let open see trade this is really the inverse of that where it's an allow list that says only let this Marketplace or these set of approved marketplaces that enforce royalties list and trade my assets and it does that without restricting basic transfers I could still send you my asset you could send it back to me but we wouldn't be able to do an atomic trustless action which is where I put it in a you know smart contract call function that is gated on some future input from you as as the buyer and so that's kind of the

base of the system it's worth noting this was developed by limit break who does Digi digoku I can never pronounce that uh but the important thing is these are it's a big brand that has rational incentive to solve the problem and has put millions of dollars into the solution on behalf of the broader community so we think that's a great starting point and what we're suggesting is build a basic Marketplace built on that new standard and do that in a way that supports the this source of Truth on on royalty payment data so that creators when in inevitably folks work around the system so that

creators can continue to provide value that makes it worth collectors participating in isn't it that kind of gets into my next question is so can you just touch right why would somebody use a royalty enforcing Marketplace when there is a zero royalty Marketplace as well yeah so so again short-term creators adopt 721c all shout out my new friend Aaron Loop he's a Creator he has several successful projects he's done in the past and he's going to be working with us on launching our first 721c enabled Marketplace in the next week or two for his new collection so as that launches

there will be no other option right before blur or whoever else work around the system that'll be the only place collectors can collect Traders can trade and everyone will be on a Level Playing Field with royalties enforced so that's without that um kind of kick start it's hard for me to imagine incentives on their own sampling the problem it's a combination of the two but sorry fast forwarding you know inevitably blur creates an alternative to that right um then it has to be the Creator providing value to royalty Bears right and with the board ape community community is everything I bought my apop 100 for access to that Discord and you

know the value of the community personally yeah and they prefer to remove me from the Discord for not paying royalty that'd be a really quick and not you know let me go to the upcoming ape Fest Etc I haven't made my royalty pretty quickly if I hadn't already thank you right so when you are making this proposal since this proposal is to this is where this separation between apecoin Dao and you guys so clear you're not making this proposal to Yuga so Yuga is not saying that yes we will use this Marketplace and yes we believe this is the solution you're making a proposal to apcoin Dao to basically be the funders of this

Marketplace and in turn do you give them a percentage of equity or like what does that look like yeah we've suggested they get 50 of Revenue back to the legal structure thing they can't actually take equity in anything of course 15 of Revenue in perpetuity uh yeah and and really you know a layer up from that we're asking that the Dow fund the development of this new infrastructure in a way that will benefit the entire space including the collections they participate in already does the Dow own nfts and have vested interest but Treasury the Dao as a set of individuals and talking about where are those whale

votes coming from those whale boats are coming from the biggest four day holders who had the most eight point allocated to them initially and so if you appeal to rational interest in the value of the assets they own I think in this case it's almost as strong of a value of make a coin value go up because it's appealing to the right individuals right right very interesting where's the proposal at in the process what's the timeline yeah so we're both trying to get better feedback from some of these top creators I'm going to leave someone out invariably here but we think there's

this top cohort of brands that are graduating to full-fledged businesses that includes Yuga azuki proof artifact pudgy penguins and D Gods youths I know I missed someone there but those six would be good eggs Doodles maybe that Doodles maybe right like there's a lot that you can kind of layer into like uh yeah uh Doodles is probably a pretty good yeah yeah it doesn't matter don't worry nobody's offended if you are it's okay but uh you know the the takeaway being that we're trying to get enough feedback from conversations with those folks as we draft this proposal right yo

that it's going to get reasonable Creator adoption that makes the whole thing work and absent of that I wouldn't feel good about requesting a million dollars from the doubt right I think there's a another version of this proposal we could move forward with that's maybe a hundred to two hundred thousand dollars that just funds development of this as a white label product within our existing self-serve solution that lets any Creator get access to this infrastructure and Technology but it's the bigger bet on build and open C competitor that without strong enough Creator and Community alignment is just not great at work and

so trying to get confidence in in that as a likely outcome right now and I feel like you you need both if we take the web 2 example there is the Shopify that provides the e-commerce platform the white label for any online store and then there's the Amazon and many other marketplaces that provide the One-Stop shop to buy anything and in the same way digital assets will be very similar there will be the specific store especially if I think if that digital asset is connected to a

game right there will need to be the white label marketplace where you buy the assets you need where you can offer the UI that relates to that game you know you can show the full pack that you need in order to reach the next level and you can show what you're missing and it'll be easier just makes it an easier interaction versus going to an Open Marketplace and just buying anything but then there will also be marketplaces so if we're going to have this royalty enforcement we need both basically is what you recognize is that correct a hundred percent yeah right okay and so let's talk a little bit about the self-serve products because you mentioned that a few times you guys have just recently at snag you've launched

your self-serve tool Seltzer products you tell us a little more about that yeah and am I allowed to present for a sec wow you can definitely present yeah yeah okay we do not have many people present on the podcast you might be the first ever to be honest because mostly people are listening to this so for those listening we'll make sure we explain to you what Zach is presenting here okay and I'll pretend as though I'm not sharing as I voice over this but what we have here this is rugradio's admin interface we use them for our launch announcement but really this this is a hub for them to control their own Marketplace and their own micro social network that's gated to community

members so you see here the ability to add a social feed that's gated to Holders layer in peer-to-peer trading with no fees for holders and restricted only to approved Collections and then of course the ability to enforce royalties via the front end so creators can easily toggle this off and let lower listings into their Marketplace to maximize is the number of listings and and selection available or they can toggle on royalties and remove those zero royalty listings from the platform by layering royalties on top for the buyer and and we have some other great stuff in here stuff like the ability to add banners directly to the marketplace so you see

that showing up here so that Oakes merchandise The Experience directly but we really feel back to your Shopify comp that we've built the first good web 3 business in a box tool here there's several other comps out there like a wearable but they're white lackluster on on both user experience to stand up and ability to customize things to really match your brand your Project's Aesthetics so we're thrilled about the step forward there and I'm excited to build more features and customizations into the front end like I just shared these additional features are very interesting because it shows that this

extends Beyond this isn't just a Marketplace for a new buyer to enter your community or enter your ecosystem it is a place where you can peer-to-peer trade for zero fees which we've seen a few part projects do that I think pudgy did that recently if I'm not mistaken and I love that idea that makes a ton of sense so you've got a pudgy but you don't necessarily feel you know that pudgy connects with you or you've got an ape or you've got a moon bird and you don't have that connection well you can trade with somebody else is that a no money trade is that how those typically work yeah you can add currency on either side so if I have a rare trade and I want to trade it for no more mole pudgy and unether or something like that

that's doable as well right right but the concept is basically that you could do yeah peer-to-peer and not have to pay a fee right hold on yep I just want to jump in on something you said around a new user onboarding one interesting thing and when I was leading white label at doordash we saw this aim at doordash most consumers who had never ordered delivery before during coved when everyone was trying to find their delivery Source it was Applebee's and chilis.com and some of the these known brands that saw the most dramatic bump in usage of it and very similarly uh a kid called BEAST's Marketplace is a really good example

here where we're doing pretty decent volume via their Marketplace but I think we're doing 10 000-ish dollars a week in credit card volume alone letting new users buy their first a kid called Beast nft so it's a big Channel on new user acquisition as well right it opens up a whole other conversation about basically customer acquisition and it's interesting because you you grow up to God's being a top collection and I agree with that despite the challenges that they've faced I mean who hasn't faced challenges in the space and one of the reasons is Frank talks a lot about this of the importance of you need a customer acquisition strategy

that brings new use users into your ecosystem and really the best way to do that you're not going to do that by sending somebody to a marketplace right like that doesn't tell them anything about your product right that doesn't give them a landing page which sells them on your product it doesn't tell them what the benefits are necessarily like we all know you go to openc or blur and you're trying to figure out if if what do you get for this mainly it's just you're just buying a pfp or a piece of art or a collectible you are not also able to see any of the extra stuff so that also kind of comes in here and then this social feed I'm curious more about this social feed factor is that connecting members like Twitter and bringing their Twitter activity into a

social feed or is it on chain activity I'm so excited to cut up what you just said and send that over to Frank when we're off so so we can pick up the combo on uh news user onboarding for devouts and Utes but on the social side it's a token gated social directory for holders at its core and so I as a user I can add my Twitter I can add my Discord we're layering in Instagram now I can add some basic profile information where I live some bio information and then that's all discoverable only to other in this case D gods are you it's asset holders

and then that same profile gives you the ability to post in the community social feed and that can be to augment your own Twitter content it could be to say I have a you know nft I want to trade and folks can create on-chain trade requests via your social post or you know shell anything else that that matters to you and upcoming event Etc and so we're we're still in the early ending there but excited to really build micro social networks for these yeah these that act as uh content delivery mechanisms for the creators as well because all the content is token gated and therefore you know an opportunity to provide Alpha

Insight Etc fascinating yeah fascinating because the concept of micro communities I think one of the key things of key elements of web 3 is that we were never able to you could have a micro Community but you could never have a currency towards it you could never have voting in it you could never have any sort of ownership in a trustless way it's sort of like you're giving a little bit of like uh fuel to the fire of these incredibly strong communities that are currently kind of separated right you know they're on Twitter they're on Discord I guess Discord is the one central place but they don't have that social feed I mean

I feel like most just have a channel and Discord that like you know has a bunch of bots that pull everything in so if you can enable these communities to you had to connect better to have more of a social experience then they'll build stronger communities they'll build stronger relationships and we can list off 10 different uh outcomes that would result from that that would be positive for everybody and what that as we talk about the progressive web app and and social sign on Tech stack as a tech stack that has strong fit in the space that's something Brands can adopt and start to help a small set of brand Advocates community

members Etc a crew value that's different from their broader web 2 audience so I think that's a core use case we're excited to build against for sure okay before we wrap here I only have one question and then I want to jump into a little bit of a speed round but you talked about your speaking to so many of these big projects these tier one or projects that are graduating to that business level I agree with that sort of categorization can you talk about how they think about the strategy of of building community of using these necessary tools to build their Community can you give us any insight of the

conversations you're having I feel like I may be repeating myself but the most pervasive threat is the desire to reward contributions from community members you can think of this in in token gating I.E only give Discord access to the person who paid royalty but the more sophisticated version of this is I want to give 10 points a day to an asset holder who either minted or paid royalty right that they entered the project fairly and I also want to provide five points for a retweet and two points for a hashtag and one point for a Discord message and we're getting more sophisticated in the types of data we can take in and and

kind of calculate slash distribute rewards on based on Partner apis uh but we're really trying to build that into an operating system so that these top projects can track and reward and modify the things that that matter to them in their communities ongoing that's the thing that we're hearing most exciting exciting and engagement around is that alternating system itself and do you have any examples of that currently or is that more the concept of what you want to do so there's a couple coming out soon that I'm excited to talk about next time there's a couple live today world of

women bear um Art Fest promotion and the gamification around that for their last art best was built on our loyalty apis and for their upcoming patio build that's kind of their social network experience they'll also be integrating badges rewards Etc based on the system I'm describing so that's one good one with shout out shredding sassy as well they're a much smaller Community but why meta has been built during this bear market and managed to move their floor price up during it all in in spite of the noise and so they have that same loyalty product integrated directly into their

Marketplace as a smaller customer where users can see the points that they are that are crewing and start to spend those points within our Marketplace all as as a kind of unified solution so those are two earlier ones we have some bigger launches coming soon and then you'd ask me well when we were hopping on here one one other thing I would kind of mention from the peanut gallery before we move on is we have a top five partner launching soon on on Marketplace it's kind of one of those business partners we were talking about and the way they're going to be uh trying to differentiate that their experience is by pulling highly customized listing and purchase flows from this Marketplace into their in-game and metaverse

experiences so that users will be able to purchase in-game assets treats Etc within that in-game and kind of web to use their experience so that again we're abstracting crypto entirely liquidity from that experience back in the marketplace and kind of a more organic way to create usage for one of these customized experiences so on to mention that as well fascinating fascinating I don't think people realize what we are building right now is not just the future of crypto or the future of web3 it's the future of communities it's the future of

business because most business is online and it's the future of digital assets and it is really Paving the path so you know I think shout out to you and your team for the work that you're doing it is so necessary in the ecosystem right now we need people to think about this and think it through I don't know that I could be able to so eloquently discuss it the way you have today so I greatly appreciate it Zach thank you for your role in helping us tell the story not just snag but all the other builders try trying to innovate here in a way that is easily digestible for for the broader you know audience looking to learn about these topics appreciate it appreciate it okay I want to give you a chance we mentioned

a few links I think throughout the show we'll put those in the show notes but I just want to give you a chance to tell people where they can follow you where they can find out more about snag anything you want to go so snags Twitter is at snag underscore score Solutions we do most of our our stuff in Twitter as is customary in the space so please give us follow there PMS are always open and we can be reached you know if you need anything or want to chat about a upcoming Marketplace and then I would in particular highlight get dot snagsolutions dot IO which is our new self-serve portal and we couldn't be prouder of that or experience and how it stands out from other you know business facing Solutions available in in web3

today uh special shout out to my co-founder Jason who you know really solo Dev quite a bit of that and then pulled in team members to to get that into such a great spot for launch so thrilled to have you all check that out that's awesome yeah link will be in the show notes really excited to share that stuff okay a couple fun questions just to wrap up here give us one prediction for 2023 for the rest of the Year where are we in the air we have four months left that we have three months left there will be three Progressive web apps with social sign on launch between now and end of year that are maybe not quite friend tech level usage but clearly chart The Narrative that that is a tech stack that can scale

and attract web 2 users oh yeah I love it that gets me so fired up do you say that because you know of ones that are launching soon or is that just a a gut feeling we I don't know if any of ours on the launch by end of the year kind of depends on Partner timelines but that's the type of solution we're discussing with Major Brands so yeah cool have a good feeling about it very cool favorite person to follow on Twitter punk6529 always gets me fired up and reminds me why we're here it reminds me why I'm alive to be honest it's not just it's not just web3 it's like General philosophy of yeah your purpose in life which is we we all need

that refresher last question must read book or book you find yourself recommending so two that pawns who's the plague who leader recommended to me earlier this year are 1984 and Brave New World oh wow you went back yeah it's of the dystopian future that we're trying to create you know web 3 to avoid and those two 1984 was better than a Brave New World but both were ones I missed growing up in school maybe I was supposed to read them and didn't and was excited to Circle back this year great contact I like that I like that those are two

great recommendations yeah I think we all were meant to read them in school and probably even if we did we probably didn't pay any attention so I don't remember enjoying book reports now then as much as I would actually enjoy that now I still don't know how to do the report but yeah no no well I don't mind doing it I'm a content creator so now I I don't mind it but I'm not doing it for a teacher so I'm doing it for myself Zach my man so great to have you back on the show appreciate your time thanks for stopping by today thanks for having me today have a great day everybody thanks for listening in thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode

please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one