The Evolution of CyberKongz | Overpriced JPEGs with Inverted, CMO

Transcript

[Music] welcome welcome gmgm hello everyone welcome to overpriced jpegs show about nfts and the metaverse i am carly riley and i am so excited to be kicking off 2022 here at overpriced jpegs i have to tell you i am so excited about what this year is gonna bring for this show i'm not gonna talk too much about this here i will talk about it on saturday's episode which is coming out in a couple of days i want to just dive right in to today's episode but lots of good stuff is coming down the pike today i am interviewing inverted who is on the council of kongs he really

runs marketing and growth for the cyber cons project and i have to say this conversation made me see cyber kongs so differently than i had thought of them previously i don't know if it's just me or people who have come to this space a little bit more recently than some of the true og's but i thought that cyber kongs was this like kind of mysterious too cool for school like super expensive elite project that was like inaccessible and like shrouded in like illuminati type and sorry there's cursing in this episode and honestly what i found was not that that

was an entirely inaccurate picture i think they are mysterious and inverted will talk about really their marketing strategy in this episode but they're also really open and kind and friendly and like not at all trying to be too cool for school which i guess is like secretly what makes them so cool anyhow if you uh like me really didn't have a sense of what this project is i think you're really going to enjoy this episode cyber kongs is really a behemoth in this space not just because of how much their genesis kongs are worth or their baby kongs or any of their kongs you know it's not just about the prices of their tokens it's about how much they were the first like that they were the

first to do a lot of things that are now very commonplace in this space so we talk about that we talk about some of what they did first we talk about where kongs might be in 10 years we actually recorded this back in december of 2021 so inverted gives us his 2022 market predictions and he actually compares cyber kongs to a bentley and that's part of this sort of discussion on on how cyber kongs approaches marketing so i don't think you'll be disappointed if you've been curious about kongs for a while i think this will help shed light on the project and i really hope you enjoy it before we get into it we have a word from our sponsors and then please enjoy this conversation with inverted from the cyber kongs project axiomfinity is a game universe filled with cute

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build on the polygon ecosystem go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation and if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on polygon hello inverted thank you so much for being here today very excited to have you i've wanted to talk to somebody from the kong's team for a while and i'm just glad we could make this happen i have to say i i feel like cyber cons is a little bit like the illuminati of the nft world i feel like that's the reputation y'all have like sort of mysterious like a lot of you still go by like you know pseudonyms or names

yeah anon names there we go that's the degen way of putting it so are you doxxed by the way or are you only ever inverted and and nobody knows who you are a little bit of both so a lot of my background is marketing and whatnot so i i have some presents from before but uh for the crypto world and nfts i pretty much keep it all all under inverted cool there's a couple select individuals out there that know though so we'll get a little bit into your background i think towards the end but i really wanted to kick it off with kongs and was hoping you could tell us like the origin story of cyber kongs because i think it's really interesting how this all happened it was sort of an accident to some extent that this project has become what it is hundred percent yeah

and thank you for your time by the way i know you're obviously busy and have plenty going on so thanks for having us but yeah origin story was uh you know it's it started off as a covid project by mayu myo back in march early march like the third or the fourth and it was uh literally just kind of a fun thing to do with him and a couple of his friends you know nfts were starting to pop off and everyone literally worldwide was pretty much on lockdown so they spent some time just kind of designing tinkering seeing what was there and randomly decided on that day to upload a thousand monkey pictures started off as just the the thousand genesis that were

all hand slash macro uploaded onto the open c storefront page uh took i think 16 to 20 hours or something like that to get them all on because of just the process of click here click there click that definitely an interesting time uh i remember coming back and and seeing how process was get the sales were going over the you know first couple days and you know back then there wasn't really a whole lot of volume pumping through anything uh you know you were kind of lucky if any project got up to like a point two point three point four ish uh f value wise and this one sold out in three days four days i think and in that time and we're talking about march of this year so march of 2021 correct march

2021 sorry sold out in three or four days uh and the floor price went up to somewhere between three and four f within the next 24 hours and then of course you know post mint price drop got down to i think like one or two and then hovered right around the two to three range for a while and then you know fluctuated between now and then but and mint price had been 0.01 sorry yes mint price was .01 back then and f was i think right around 1600 so it was uh we were paying 16 for minting the genesis kongs and then about 45 in gas so not eve i do call it f

do you know that that's non-traditional i do i found that out being out more in public you have since been made aware that that's that's so funny and is that is it like a potato potato thing or like and i'm the idiot or are you saying it wrong no i i i don't know uh i'm probably saying it wrong honestly but that's hilarious yeah this is this is why i think cyber kongs is like this i don't know that fits somehow in the cyber kongs world y'all are like your own special like illuminati ecosystem called and like no no no i think muslims power brokers yeah no i think most of them call it uh f no which one do you call it sorry i call it you call it e so i think that's because

a lot of people say ethereum whereas i say ethereum so it's like the ae idea uh the kind of match together like aether that's where i pull my my saying from but yeah i'll allow it all along yeah thank you i appreciate it none of those guys okay so that's i mean it's just fascinating to even think that this project that is you know one of the the biggest projects by value it still took three or four days to to sell out which i know you're saying at the time was actually fast it sounds like is what i hear you saying right was that was pretty good for the project yeah there wasn't even a standard as far as like collection size or you know a lot of people were doing like

a hundred two hundred because to be honest it was a pain to upload onto uh open c and you know most people weren't writing their own contracts then and well even the fact that it was an open c contract initially is so interesting because now that's looked at sort of seen as low brow you know like so you know when did you guys migrate over to your own contract yeah so about a month later i think it was april 13th or 15th somewhere right around there uh we migrated all or not all of them but most of the 1000 genesis over to the new baby and banana contract and that was actually the birth of the banana token as well which we're going to talk a lot about i think that's sort of the core of something that fascinates

people about cyber cons of course but i want to talk about so you at that point where did you fit into the ecosystem in march as this project was launching so i was actually just a holder came in i was talking to mayu on twitter before there was even a discord uh i think i was like the 12th person in discord certainly you're talking about random monkey pictures and stuff so as far as like the we'll say leadership formation uh is of cyber kongs and kind of how that's evolved it started off as mayu as kind of a solo project with a couple just friends helping him out shortly after that my understanding is coco came in a cocoa bear if you're familiar with him in the space uh came in and basically said hey like this has legs like let's let's bring the community around and

keep this going uh so between my understanding is between owl lixie coco and mayu they came together and basically created and we'll say defined what cyber kongs is today and then from there we've kind of expanded out to what we call a council of kongs which is essentially an oligarchy of 10 people who rule the new and creation side of things for the brand whereas we then also have a dow for anything that changes inside the brand so you say these these folks came together and you were sort of a holder at that point and they defined what cyber kongs would be and were like okay we want to take this project seriously this thing that started off as really just a whim we're now going to fully

dedicate to it and make it something what is that definition of what a kong is like when they came together and said okay this is what kongs are it sounds sort of like a branding exercise like how would you articulate what cyber cons is yeah so i mean that's uh just like the space it's an ever-evolving process um we're definitely not trying to you know nail ourselves down i'll say to to a certain part but in general the the kong's system slash build eco is all about an inclusive community with exclusive owner benefits so we you know the discord we always call the jungle like doesn't matter who you are um you know where you're from what you hold you are allowed to uh you know come in hang out like we're all kongs rather

you you know whether you have one or not and you've also said uh you know i think the project talks about this regularly and its sort of materials is like kongs are 2d 3d social avatars and and you've sort of i think made yourselves distinct in that you haven't said we are a game you you haven't done a lot of what i think other projects have done in that front in terms of trying to really emphasize like our utility our end thing is a game our end thing is x y or z you've really said hey we're these 2d 3d social avatars why have you done that talk a little bit about that decision if it even is a decision or if it's just something that's evolved naturally yeah of course so uh mayu's took a lot of his inspiration from the the kind of build

out of what a crypto punk was you know the the whole pfp thing obviously started with them and you know part of the realization after getting into this is that it's there it's not possible to be just them um there's so many people out there who haven't even heard of the space who just like all of us are gonna want a profile picture you know like yeah we all love ourselves but at the same time it's more fun to be a monkey or a cat or you know something like that so focusing the brand on being the 2d 3d social avatar kind of allows us to focus on the brand itself and building the ecosystem for integration into other ecosystems so we build assets that can basically be used

elsewhere not just as a profile or an avatar you know our vx is a great example it's one of those where you can use it as a pfp on twitter discord or whatever no problem but you know one of the unrealized benefits thus far is that they'll be playable models avatars the 3d aspect and sandbox and other metaverses and to give folks a little context who maybe don't know there's the genesis kongs which is that original 1000 drop they're then these baby or like incubator kongs which you make by breeding the genesis kongs and then there's the vx kongs which are these 3d like voxel models that can be used in metaverses those are kind of the three the three categories do i have that right correct yeah we do have three

collections in the brand so what i just heard you say there was interesting because it it sounded like you were almost saying we're making a bet on the the pfp part of this expanding and i i think what you're saying is actually sort of much bigger than that but is that part of the bet you're making like you know more people are going to come into this space and the play we're making as a brand is to say hey we're going to be a a very cool strong brand that increasingly people are going to want to use as their pfps yeah i think that you know kongs as a whole kind of sets a tone with not only their demeanor uh you know big brightness uh you know we'll say ape mentality for going hard into projects

you know like being a kong says something just like with you know kind of anyone who reps any brand you know but with that we we do like to be front runners in the industry and and focus on that and the concept of being able to have that disassociation while you're online i think is is really important because it allows you to kind of almost reinvent yourself if you want you know whether it's that that kong or that cool cat or you know whatever so i said i think one of the ways you all distinguish yourselves is by having this emphasis on hey we're 2d 3d social avatars and not i don't know for lack of a better term being grandiose about all these other things even though you do have a lot of other things going on behind the scenes which we'll talk about

how would you describe kong's in relation to other projects or or where do you think kong's is distinct and distinguishes itself yeah it's a great question so there's actually a recent twitter post that was shared by one of our council members metal kind of summarized uh we'll say a list of ways that kongs has front run the industry a couple of them are just like the idea that there wasn't uh legendary nfts before you had like crypto kitties with their like holiday ones or uh i forget what they call them unfortunately but like they're they're special ones that were you know bread that weren't just cats they were like cats and costumes and stuff but you know we what mayu originated the idea of having

you know 10 out of the collection that were legendary and now that's kind of a norm even just the term genesis collection is something that in you know i could be incorrect on this but it wasn't as widespread or even really used and then of course you know the idea of like a utility token uh yielding from the nfts themselves even the term vx is something that you see all over now that started with cybercons vx the reason i know that is because it was supposed to be a placeholder for us for voxel and you know push came to shove and it was like all right cybercogsvx is good and then now we're here so yeah i mean there's there's lots of like random inspirations throughout kind of

you know we'll say even current nft history you know even i remember even looking in there and uh seeing like the original shill from uh board api club in our in our shill zone from gargamel you know saying hey this is getting ready to launch in a couple days and you know this is after our baby and our breeding banana contract had already started even so it's it's amazing just to see kind of the the influence uh you know a lot of stuff that i hadn't even necessarily realized because you know being frank we're just busy building but definitely lots of impact all over you mentioned even when we spoke a couple days ago like the non-profit alignment that's happened a lot of projects saying hey we're going to give to charity you know mayu initially gave a lot of the initial earnings from cyber kongs to charity is

that right yeah so the original sellout uh was i think for 10f or eth sorry no no of course you can say no no no i know i'm just giving you a heart attack um you know he the the original sellout for .01 for a thousand of them was uh you know 10 aetherium and uh it was one of those where you know he came a discord you know after it sold out within a couple days and he's like guys like this is this is too much like you know this is it's been days literally like what what's going on here like i can't accept all this like i'm gonna go and i think he donated 60 of it uh to i want to say it was the red apes a monkey-based organization i know that

i mean frankly it blew the community away like there was no road map there was no there was a stealth drop like no one knew who mayu was there there was no name to kongs or cyber kongs or uh to be frank even really any kind of monkey based nft other than like you know the the punk apes and so why did it take off is it really just the right timing and people like animals like is it is it just sort of the combustion of of all those factors coming together because i think about all the people now who are desperate to try and sell out a collection who are grinding and regrinding and can't get folks to buy it

yeah i mean it it was definitely kind of a perfect storm you know timing as they say with is everything right a month earlier i wouldn't have been on i know there's plenty of people that wouldn't been on i mean last i knew we're still only at like a quarter million wallets on openc so it's it's still early you know there's still so much time so i think it's one of those where yeah it was it was a perfect time of or perfect timing perfect storm and to be frank probably the perfect people uh you know coco doesn't buy everything but he was one of the first purchasers i would say like number six or seven of kong's and again when there was you know no promises no road map not even a discord there wasn't even a twitter so and then i think people just realized

kind of what was going on in the community that accidentally got created as we all kind of conjoined in discord and twitter and realized we're not just here for the hype like we're builders and we're branders and we're marketers and we're artists and you know i think it's one of those unfortunate things where nowadays a lot of people have been attracted by the flip and that's why it's so much harder to hold attention in a new community because every time a new nft springs up uh you know they're basically trying to form an entirely new community you know i've been part of kong since march and to be frank i i mean i spend some time in other discords but i've never once felt anywhere close to his welcome and you know when something new is coming up

like a new project it's one of those where you have people who are asking about floor price you know all the time or when this when that and it's rather than worrying about building and you know what's there they're worried about what else is coming uh it's one of my favorite questions when people pop into cyberkung's discord is you know when's more utility and i'm you know like obviously i always kill people with kindness like that's my thing is you know be nice and just answer questions and uh but it's one of those where it's like you know no offense but like we everything has utility like we're still building you know like what it's it's interesting people's expectations when uh as the markets evolved and changed and most people don't even know that you know the their

nft that generates a token is based off of kong's history is a funny thing as as fast as everything goes well i was going to say it's so funny it is important i think to learn the history of this space but it's also hilarious that history means eight seven months ago yeah eight months it's been 84 years ago yeah and it's like a lifetime in this space i wonder if you're comfortable and if you're not we'll cut this out but you made a comparison to me you said like sort of chevy projects and and i'm blanking on the or the you know bentley yeah and you don't have to name any projects specifically but do can you speak to what that comparison means in the context of cyber cons and where you see all sort of living of course yeah uh so

when it comes to uh people talk about marketing and you know how to market an nft project and how to shill when to show where to show i always like to explain kong's as kind of a bentley marketing strategy compared to a chevy marketing strategy chevy marketing is they're out there everywhere they're loud they're proud they produce a good product right nothing wrong with that there's a huge market room for everyone but at the same time they're they pay for ads they you know pay for celebrity voice overs and in their commercials and it's not it's not very genuine i guess is maybe the way to put it it's it's showcasing a lifestyle right kongs and or bentley uh you don't you don't see

bentley commercials you don't see bentley merchandise but i'm pretty sure if you ask everybody if they want to bentley their answer is going to be yes so it's one of those where you know we we always go with the organic approach we've been reached out to by so many influencers so many organizations companies from all over the world about hey you know give us money and we'll get you in contact with these guys and they'll hold your product no offense but unless they're interested and want to spend their money we're not interested you know we're not trying to to fill our our discord and our our project and collection and brand with false endorsements i'll say right anyone who's here is here's because they want to be when you see you know becker blondish

people like that who are still holding for months ago talking about it still and using it in their you know content that's that's because they want to you know i remember blonder specifically she came in i am not in the the dj market or you know i wasn't familiar with who she was but has a huge following um and you know she was asking about stuff and had tons of questions i was helping her and you know we got through and she's like you know you don't you don't really know who i am do you and i was like no i'm gonna be honest i have no clue like until she sent me her link and it was you know so many thousands of followers and stuff like that i'm like no that's awesome you know she's like i was waiting for you to like shield me and like try and get me

in and uh you know she's like i just love how genuine you guys are you know we vibe really hard and she uh played at one of our holder parties in new york for nft nyc so yeah it's definitely more of a more organic approach we're we'll never pay for a celebrity endorsement we won't pay for advertisements we will do strategic placements for things like decentral you know when we were there with advertising there things of that nature but even as we get bigger and bigger we have more and more people reach out who again want us to pay them to do anything and our response is hey you know i obviously appreciate your hustle maybe look into kongs yourself and maybe there's something of value for you know you there to share on your own if so

share it you know maybe you'll get some attention due to the brand that we have and as a community and things like that that would be a value to you and for learning about the project income comparison to us just putting some dollars in your pocket interesting i did hear the the kong's party at nfp nyc was amazing i've heard from from several people they they thought very highly of it so well done on that and it sounds like what's so interesting is y'all are are i think very well branded and yet it feels like they're there haven't there aren't like meetings about like how are we branded it's it comes from sort of an authentic place of one decision after another that we all make when they arise is that is that true is that sort of what you're

describing in terms of how the brand has gotten to where it is 100 it's you know as as we talked about earlier it's been a completely fully evolving process um from 0.01 all the way up to our top price of 200 you know so it's it's been i mean community basis is a lot of it too right i mean we we have our brand but it's also kind of a part i mean we have our ideals on you know how we want the brand but at the same time it's it's kind of our uptick or up to our community to kind of hold to that we're not a bunch of hype beasts you know you go into our discord and you know wall street kongs is talking about anything from the

latest coin to the latest nft drop to what dropped six months ago uh and you know people kind of having their own mini archaeology days and oh my gosh when's this from and you know all the way up to in genesis or og hall where it's you know a little bit more slower pace just uh everything from big brain conversations about what's next for web 3 to what do you have for dinner last night where'd you go on vacation a little bit more of a slower pace in there for sure okay i want to get to utility tokens and i want to start by saying when i was first becoming familiar with kongs and the space in general and banana tokens it felt like this you know arguably unsustainable

cyclical thing where banana tokens at one point i think banana tokens would earn you like two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year if you if you were if you were a genesis calling holder you get ten banana tokens a day and at their peak they were like whatever a hundred and twenty dollars or something like that and you know i remember seeing that stat that it's like you know you would earn 240 000 a year just by holding a genesis kong and thereby accruing banana tokens but it felt like banana tokens have value because they can be used to breed baby kongs that go for 5e plus or whatever and but then baby kongs have value because

you know genesis constant value like it sort of was just like the cyclical thing that was doomed to implode and i think there are people who sort of have that impression what do you say to that and how do you explain banana tokens of course yeah so one banana is always one banana uh the team doesn't necessarily even track or really care about the price of banana it's it's our core token to utilize inside the system uh obviously you know we're only eight months old but also eight months old long and short in regards to you know crypto time versus real time and although baby is the baby name change as well as bio are all three uh things that can be used for banana so although the the baby finished

for a couple days a week ago at most uh banana con or baby contract so all four thousand of those are bred now um you know they gain their utility and value from their access and channel and other uh aspects so as far as like uh you know you mentioned an imploding system all the bananas that were used to breed the babies for example uh were burned so those are no longer in the system and then at the same time like as sandbox and other metaverses come out those tokens will then be used inside those systems to purchase things like cosmetic items wearables you know just like with ethereum bitcoin like it it has to exist in order for a system to

run otherwise there's nothing to run the system on you know you can build a car but if you don't have gas then it can't go anywhere and so what was the original inspiration for this utility token and when mayu was deciding he was going to dedicate fully to this project my sense is you were sort of more fully on board as like a team member then what was the impetus for saying hey we want this banana token and this is what you're going to be able to do with it yeah so i mean the main goal has always been to be a utility token you know the idea that we want to set up and are setting up an entire ecosystem that grows and evolves as web 3 does you know being a social avatar brand you know it's not something that you can

just put your stick in the mud and say this is what we are you want to remain relevant like the only way to do that is remaining social so you've been talking about utility we've been talking about utility throughout this conversation it is a little bit of a buzzword now people coming into your discord being like when is there going to be more utility etc etc you had said to me at one point you know there are other projects that need to build a game for themselves or some version of that in order to create utility because otherwise they're just art whereas kongs sort of has this innate utility which i'm assuming has to do with their usability in the metaverse etc but you can correct me if you think there's something else there and that other projects you feel like

not to name any names or dis anybody in the space right but that other projects are more focused on how to let people know that they have utility instead of just doing the work of building and having utility did i summarize a set of your views properly on that is there anything you want to say on that yeah so uh outside of just being you know a social avatar and what we'll call it art like you mentioned you know the the genesis kongs act as our node in the system in the entire ecosystem for eternity 10 years whatever same thing as eternity and crypto babies are essentially the what i like to call the keys to our future so very early on in one of our medium drops or medium articles it mentions that babies are

the primary receivers of air drops in our system so the idea of vx every single baby got a free uh vx role but genesis kongs did not so genesis got a matching one of one so similar but different so in order to complete the 2d 3d social avatar basically genesis kongs are the only ones that will actually have matching across all avenues so you can have your 2d kong genesis as a 3d avatar because a matching one of one was made the babies all got a random role so they had a chance at like the legendaries the different traits and all of that claim was essentially a free airdrop for every

new baby that was made so as we're talking about utility and cyber kong's place in the metaverse i want to make sure we highlight the banana shop in the sandbox and and you all have a big partnership with the sandbox can you tell us a little bit about that and what's happening there yeah that's uh that's a lot of land that's all i got to say we have uh we have a 3x3 a 12 by 12 and a 24 by 24. does that make it in a state isn't that or yeah yeah so i think anything uh anything over a one by one they're calling or maybe a three by three burgers in the state i'm actually not sure as far as their definitions there but yeah so uh we we are heavily vested in the sandbox uh we've had a partnership with them

since uh before august even uh you know when our vx launched and minted out so it's it's one of those where the banana shop is our uh future integration and wearables usables equippables type uh place so the idea that you know in kong's island neocon city our different lands you know you'll be able to run around quests do different activities you know part of that is everything from your standard air and running to slaying monsters stuff like that uh you know and all of that is you know the sandbox grows and allows us of course but so the the banana shop will be the only way to get those wearables you know

just like with any minting process people love their packs and you know how to have a chance at rares and things like that so it'll be a situation where you know you can um don't quote me as far as packaging per se but uh you know you'll be able to buy uh something out of a banana shop and have a chance to get a legendary sword and you know in sandbox my understanding is that you know different items can have different stats uh different effects different abilities uh you know so we'll be we'll be going uh full tilt with that and making sure to utilize all that as well so sandbox is definitely a place that we're very vested in very excited for you know they just got done with alpha as far as i know our vx were the first

fully rigged 3d models to kind of be ready for that yeah i think i saw somebody like moving through the cyber kongs some cyber cons land it looked really cool i have to say like in the sandbox yeah that was for sandstorm they have uh we have a partnership with them and they have a little cyberkong's area on top of their hq in their their motor verse uh we haven't actually leaked any information or uh screenshots of what our areas look like yet okay got it so i didn't actually see something that was cybercons what i saw was cyberkong's branding and the cyberkung's area on top of a different a different plot of land great well that looked great um are you guys making a bet on sandbox more than other metaverses not to put you in the

position to to compare there but i i would say that yes um that is mostly where we're focusing uh as far as our time and energy uh you know we're always gonna make sure that we have the files available as they're accepted in different metaverses and that we have integration with them you know we have a partnership with untamed isles and guppy gang to for that game that's coming out which is a totally different metaverse more centralized compared to like sandbox's concept uh but still another metaverse you know so we're definitely uh always going to be looking to further integrate with them but we are definitely i will say hedging our bats a little bit on the

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have already trusted nearly 50 million dollars to the mvi index and if you buy 500 of mvi on the dharma app you can receive fifty dollars worth of eth on the polygon network there's a link in the show notes for you to click so you can get started on your journey into the metaverse unstoppable domains is the number one provider of nft domains with domains ending in crypto.x or nft unstoppable domains lets you replace your long complex wallet address with a human readable address using unstoppable you can verify the ownership over your nfts log into web3 apps and join tens of thousands of people using them as their twitter usernames with unstoppable domains you can have all of your crypto addresses registered to one single domain so it doesn't matter where crypto

payments are coming from or where they're going by registering all of your crypto addresses to your unstoppable domain all of that is taken care of in the back end better yet with unsolvable domains you don't have to worry about gas costs or renewal fees because you own it buy your domain and you can show it off as your new twitter username so you can get your name for as low as five dollars at unstoppabledomains.com well and part of the utility my understanding is and even part of the banana strategy is to start plugging kongs and bananas into existing ecosystems which i think you mentioned earlier correct yeah i know one one strategy y'all have for that is your kong's tank can you speak a little bit about what what kong's tank is of course

yeah kong sync is uh our initiative to help newer projects uh succeed and kind of burst into the market so you know i mentioned earlier kongs are kind of known for our aping and our community and just kind of the you know individualism that also goes along with you know staying true inside all that and part of that is is we want to make sure that uh you know not only are we you know happy with our success and trying to continue to build but also bringing up others with us and part of that is kong's tank and the idea that people could submit their proposals uh that included vx and or banana as part of their system and their uh eco and just community in general

in some regard that you know added a utility for banana or vx in general and then we would give them a budget of ethereum as well as uh council assistance for advising and just kind of be there along the path for hiccups issues you know we have some of the top contract devs on our team so there's questions about how to make you know some efficiencies that's that's what we were there for so council of kongs is something that came up you just mentioned even in the in the case of kong's tank the council provides advice and you know sort of advisory services across the project explain what council of kong's is and how did it evolve over the course of the project

yeah so uh the council of kongs is a group of 10 of us uh considers basically an oligarchy that runs the cyber congress brand which you mentioned i suppose actually yeah yeah we're all specialized kind of in our own niche everything from we'll say the traditional roles of you know any business like a ceo is as coco who's you know always kind of task mastering everybody and making sure that uh everything's aligned and getting stuff done mayu with you know like uh source content generation in regards to like the genesis kongs the babies the vx uh all of our merch literally all of that is still done by the original artist he refuses to let anyone else touch it um you know owl on contracts myself on

marketing so it's uh one of those things where we're all volunteered you know we've we've been volunteers since i want to say middle of june or july is when it officially formed it's kind of been a community ran project up until that point with you know mayu and koko and and them uh obviously you know making final decisions and stuff but they would kind of lean on the community as far as thoughts and feedback and you know what to do and i think that's kind of why the the council was officially formed is because as things grew there was you know more to do and more specialization needed but uh it's been a fun time getting you know kind of all the different roles together to see how they all coalesce into what kongs is today

and how do you balance that sort of slightly more centralized oligarch structure within the dow component to you all have to have the more decentralized piece of this yeah so i think the the best way to probably put that is anything that is new in the ecosystem is coming from and through us we're a build now hype later type brand so it's one of those where we want to make sure that we're delivering the best and the brightest that we can and in order to do that you know to be to be frank you can't tell everyone what you're doing a lot of the times too many cooks in the kitchen things like that so i think overall the community has a pretty solid belief in the council

and you know what's being created and the the fact that we focus on the initial source anything new coming in the eco and then if there's something changing like we reduced cost of name change things like that we'll put that through the dow so rather than you know just kind of telling people what's happening there in regards to what's already been done in our you know previous promises whatever you know if we see something that we think needs changed or someone else sees something you know there's a whole channel for verified holders to make proposals and then those can go to the dow type thing so yeah it's all uh it's all about making sure that kind of all the areas are covered but you know still making sure that we're able to do what we need to do to get stuff done okay let's look

ahead two years five years ten years from now when i think that the banana contract has issued all of its banana if i'm not mistaken that's a ten year process what does kong's look like what if you guys succeed to your wildest dreams where is the kong's brand oh that's a big question paint me the picture inverted i'll paint you the picture okay it's going to start upside down but no um [Laughter] for anybody who's not on youtube and doesn't know inverted he's got an upside down kong sort of avatar i can't even attempt to guess simply because of how i mean i i really don't

like the term more early but with only you know 25 or 250 000 while it's on openc like you know grandma and uncle are still asking about crypto and i mean even friends are still asking about it without a clue like it's one of those right i think anyone who tells you that they have an idea of where their brand is going to be or even the system then is completely full of it let me let me ask it this way i think there are some projects where it's clear to me or i've even talked to them and they say yeah my end goal is this character is on streetwear brand that people are wearing all around the world and we have this game that's come out and a tv show has launched with our characters and we're in talks for a

movie deal with sony or whatever right and that's the dream is that kong's dream uh i would say in some aspects yes in most no i mean we're all about building the ip but it's more based on kind of what the community wants more than what we want just like the the origin of cogs you know it's it's been an organic growth factor shill free so it's i think as the the space evolves you know uh like i mentioned before it's about staying flexible and almost not too much on your own goals but the goals of your community um and as long as you're we'll say hurting the flock the right way like you're you're gonna have the right minds in there to have the

right ideas to get you to the right place to help you stay relevant you know and to be frank that's kind of one of the biggest challenges in not only crypto but just any market is staying relevant and i think in order to do that almost not defining and not over exaggerating or promising or stating who or what we are as far as outside a 2d 3d social avatar brand uh kind of gives us that flexibility to continue to grow and be open to more people so i mean are we against you know like uh doing movies or comics and you know blowing out the ip no but only when it's naturally uh occurring rather than and what would naturally occurring look like what would

that would that mean that somebody come through the kong's tank and says hey the proposal i have is to write this comic or how would that naturally occur that's a great question because we have had that already happen in regards to uh you know people reaching out in regard uh about creating content about kongs and like i know there's one gentleman who's in the process of starting the documentary um i know that there's been a couple that have reached out about like trying to do comics or other things i think a lot of it has to do with what's important to the industry and what's not just a hype thing uh sorry important to the

community and not just a height mechanic so the idea of like if we went out and blew our community wallet to force a movie to be made it's not really in my opinion valuable to anyone even if we're getting out there more and people are seeing us and you can go watch us in the box office it kind of adds a level of disingenuousness in the event that you know uh somebody reaches out to us and says hey you know this is a major motion picture that we you know like to talk about that has more natural genuine vibe to it i guess is is kind of what i'm getting at it feels to me and tell me if this feels right it feels to me like the kong's brand is about almost a certain quiet cachet and

i think that gets into the bentley comparison you're not out there advertising everywhere but you have this tremendous cachet in the ecosystem because you were an early project because the community that flocked you early was impressive and talented and formed this wonderful dialogue in the discord for example and so the way it feels like y'all are thinking about it is that in and of itself becomes a way to be differentiated in the space by not being as loud and so you're really looking to collaborate and get kong's places specifically in the metaverse more so than i think in sort of the analog world or the irl or these traditional you know i don't know web 2 movie studio world things if that's a fair way to put it and

it's let's partner with people in the metaverse get kong's places where they're being shown off as these kind of 2d 3d avatars and that will build that will continue to build on this the cachet and the mystery of the brand because we're not out there just pushing it everywhere and and you just want that kind of image and that vibe to continue to build over the next 10 years so that you are still sort of a i keep using this word but a project with cachet in 10 years and you've expanded your reach even further but in this very sort of as people have come to you as people have built out with it we have a cool community way is that fair did i miss something in that yeah i mean it's not that we uh try and be mysterious or anything on purpose

i think yeah and this is just my personal opinion i think we may confuse some people because we're that way because we don't chill because we're not loud we're not going at other throats of other collections you know part of the early success of cyber kongs was the fact that punk's axi everyone came in it wasn't just like a a new flock of people that then spurred everything up it was a lot of ogs in the industry who decided to to come here and and actually make a community where people want to stay and chat you know we talked about banana earlier and things like that and it and it's one of those where you know as the babies have bred out you can kind of watch the floor price on gen kongs and see what's happened

there's a slight dip you know but the floor is very thin i think there's like maybe 18 or 15 something like that before we're all the way back to like 1 10 120 something around there um so it's one of those where ideally we draw in the type of people who know that one banana is one banana and it's a utility token and they're not here for that aspect of it but more here for the the greater community that exists you know i know there's been jokes on twitter and places like that about gen hall and their 150x alpha discussion and you know we're talking about christmas plans and like actually having real conversations and relationships and uh you know we've had two irl three irl events so far la new

york and miami and i think every single one of them that was there will tell you that that bond and that you know the community that exists there is maybe not worth more than the nft itself but you know just the concept that especially in you know this kind of universe you know crypto nfts with as much they hate to put it this way but there's so many scams and just ill-willed people not on the greater amount thankfully but you know it's there's a lot of money being moved around and there's always people who want to take advantage of that so it's it's always nice to find a home where you can you know have real conversations and have real input from like-minded individuals i'll wrap us up here soon

but i'm curious sort of partly your your lane in the kong's world you said is around marketing what does marketing mean and what do you spend your day thinking about when you're a marketer for a project that doesn't show that isn't trying to go out there and be loud and chase the glory what does that mean for your job yeah you know i will say that that in and of itself is probably a daily mental conversation [Laughter] you know a lot of it comes down to so essentially i'm the the cmo for cyber cons i do most of the like macro level marketing whatever but like you said what does that mean for a company that

doesn't show and is going organic growth and it really means more that i'm a like focused on building the relationships inside the jungle and making sure that those are continuing to grow rather than marketing people want to feel welcome right so it's it's one of those where like i'll try and pop in you know monkey business which is like our general hall and you know make sure that the like a vibe check you know basically that things are going well like but as far as the marketing aspect it's it's more about uh my background is experiential marketing so experiences in the real world and getting brands to connect with their consumers uh talking all corporate right there for a minute

you know and a lot of that to be frank kind of transfers over right like how do you get people to connect with the nft and want to use it as a pfp and all of that and that's that's a an ever developing question i will say i don't know that there is an answer for that but i definitely think that you know our take on focusing on the relationships and the community and uh making sure that you know everyone feels welcome is definitely part of it and it ties to that i heard wonderful things about your in-person nft nyc event can you tell us what you did there why was it awesome just good vibes what was that what made it special so i'm always uh i'm kind of sappy in that i'm always

going to say it's the people right it was a bar it was a rooftop bar it was a very nice place it was done up you know kong style awesome colors good food drinks like you know but really it comes down to the people wanting to be there and wanting to vibe you know there's a difference of going to a party to flex because you know that's kind of what you want to go there to do with your group of friends to see who else is there and going to a party to go actually meet people you know we we don't have ragers not that you know there aren't kongs who like to rage out but the parties that we have had uh we're more focused on allowing the community to to talk right and you can't do that with raging music and

and activities all the time or you know going here stand in a line do that you actually have to give them a place and a reason to mingle and you know kong's was that reason and of course nft nyc and everything else um yeah i think a lot of it is mostly just everyone wanting to be there and wanting to meet and see who they've been talking to for months and you know we also have a good time and do some special things as well but special illuminati no special things no sacrifices no sacrifices uh so for example in uh miami we had a like a jet holder boat party or a yacht party there was a gen holder who wanted to he had

been busy you know irl stuff and hadn't had a chance to make it out to la or miami um so he you know catered a yacht and went through and invited basically some of the genesis guys and you know said hey like let's just do a chill and grill kind of like let's meet each other network you know all the way down to ice sculptures at a house party we had in miami with coco's vx in there you know so no illuminati stuff not at all but last question just tell us a little bit about you how did you end up here i think when when we chatted a couple days ago it was like a year ago or two years ago would you have ever expected that this was your life and how did it happen ah yeah that's uh

i'll keep the long story short but yeah i mean my background is again you know exponential marketing working with brands and uh being at events whether that's state fairs handing out free t-shirts you know from geico to whoever's walking by all the way to designing developing implementing you know marketing activations and and how to get people to you know connect consulting brand so it's one of those where uh you know in crypto i kind of got in in 2017 when cryptokitties was the project that kind of hit the market and got in some news channels and i read an article so that was my first foray into nfts and not that i knew it was an nft then but uh nfts and crypto kind of

took a couple years off in between then and then in march i have been kind of randomly again just reading my you know news feed and saw an article about nfts and they mentioned cryptokitties and kind of made the relation of what's going on so i've always been big in a business and psychology and philosophy and the the human psyche and market conditions and like the psychology behind all that so coming in it was always fun to you know look at the activity page on openc about what was going on and when and where and who and what and that's actually what made me catch kongs i saw him minting mint mint mint mint mint for hours and i was like what is going on here like is this how it's done

you know like just trying to figure out the system and you know relearn everything so i was like okay you know grab a couple of these so i snagged uh 888 and 777 and those are my first two buys there came back the next day and realized that he had all of them uploaded and like another 100 to 200 had sold i was like okay you know some volume moving through here you know 16 bucks a pop that's a lot like let's uh let's grab a couple more you know so picked up a couple more and started talking to him on uh twitter and you know just kind of getting a feel for what was going on he was super friendly you know and uh come back the next day and you know discord's

up and there's like another couple hundred sold and you can tell that it's just basically going parabolic and getting ready to sell out because you know activity is one of those things where at the time there weren't icy tools or rarity tools or anything to tell you volume or you know what collections were hot what's not you watched openc activity page you know that's all there was so as people saw them selling more people you know fomo kicked in and then all of a sudden they were sold out it was crazy i think uh prices got up to like three or four that night and then you know as low as i think the lowest i've seen gen kong since then was point seven in the middle of julyish i think

yeah crazy crazy places to come from that was not that long ago i was in the nfc space at that point i could have thought that yeah yeah somebody uh somebody hit me with a number as far as growth that uh cyber kongs had outperformed btc at one point if you had bought it in 2013. wow yeah okay i said that was gonna be my last question but based on what you said i have to ask which is you said you like you you know we've talked you have a background in sort of philosophy and psychology and and it sounds like that translates into watching market conditions what is your prediction for the nft space in 2022 what do you think the market will do well uh that's a great question um definitely uh d-y-o-r nfa all the usual disclaimers

we literally know nothing none of us yeah we just pretend we know something no i think it's the microphone gives me a sense of power exactly yep uh the brand embodiment i love it i think it's one of those that i think personally i think january february will be good i think tax time will scare a lot of people that's a good point i think after taxes um are kind of done and over with that things will start to ramp back up as because a lot of like the brands like irl brands right now too are focused on their end-of-year stuff their traditional things so it's you know there was action a couple months ago from them dow's coming in or not dows but uh vc's coming in and

buying all sorts of stuff and making runs on that collection in this collection and you know that's slowed down quite a bit towards the end of the year and i think as we get past those you know i think q1 should do well but i think it'll probably be some bumps and i have zero clue about ethereum that's uh that's one of those that i personally i mean i you know got back into nfts and the i think 14 to 1800 range was maybe like about the lowest and highest that i saw when i first started so i don't even really try and pay attention to what it is you know it's uh it's one of those long-term things that i think everybody kind of has faith in regards to what's happening and where is it going

and i know we're all anxious for 2.0 to come though inverted thank you so much for being here for shedding some light into this project which i understand is not actually meant to be mysterious but that i think can come across a little mysterious in in all good ways i really appreciate you taking your time and and just chatting about this project that has had such an impact in the space as a whole of course yeah i appreciate your time uh i know there's always tons of questions and feel free to reach out anytime i definitely will i definitely will all right thank you yeah have a great day [Music] hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills

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