Top Podcasts
Alexandra Hooven Of Rally, Where Creators Build Their Own Cryptocurrency, Plus 7.9B NFTs, PplPleasr’s Longform NFT, CryptoPunk Ukraine Donation, And More...
Some creators really want to give NFTs a chance but are hindered by their lack of technical knowledge. Alexandra Hooven shares how their company Rally addresses this problem by building a community of creators who can showcase their passions through NFT. Joining Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger, Rally’s Director of Strategic Partnerships explains how they help independent artists launch their own token economy strategies. Alexandra discusses how this out-of-the-box setup allows these individuals to highlight their talents further. For today’s hot topics, the group discussion centers on an experimental project creating NFTs for the entire mankind, PplPleasr’s Longform NFT, and a donation to Ukraine in the form of CryptoPunk.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Alexandra Hooven Of Rally, Where Creators Build Their Own Cryptocurrency, Plus 7.9B NFTs, PplPleasr’s Longform NFT, CryptoPunk Ukraine Donation, And More…
Our guest is Alex Hooven, a seasoned entertainment executive, Web3 innovator, and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Rally, a platform for creators and their communities to build their own independent digital economies. She works closely with creators, artists, athletes and their management teams to design, launch and implement token economy strategies powered by social tokens and NFTs.
**Alex served as Head of Content and Creator Partnerships at United Talent Agency for more than five years, where she built a team to lead all client work related to the original content and creator-driven partnerships. She was a founding member of the Digital Assets Practice, where she advised clients on their NFT and larger blockchain strategy. In her spare time, Alex is active in several crypto projects, including Friends With Benefits, where she serves as a Governance and Operations Lead for LA. She is based in Los Angeles. Alex, welcome to the show. **
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to chat with you guys.
**It is great having you, Alex. I heard she is a huge Lakers fan. We chatted about it before the episode started. Nonetheless, we are not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about Rally, Alex, and everything that’s happening in your world. Let’s start with the story of how you and Rally came together. What was that journey like? How did it come to be? **
Prior to Rally, I cut my teeth at United Talent Agency, which is where I spent the majority of my twenties for about six-plus years, working in our Corporate Consulting division, where I was advising our brand and corporate clients on their overall entertainment strategy. At the Talent Agency, we had a unique purview into the entertainment and media landscape, by nature of where we sit. The access to information and relationships is pretty unparalleled. It can be quite advantageous to a brand that is looking to leverage talent or properties as a platform to amplify its larger marketing strategies.
To be honest, this is a safe space on the record, but I never cared all that much about brand marketing strategies. I was always a little bit grossed out, seeing all these major brands exploiting talents to sell a product. With that aside, I have always been a big consumer of the arts ever since I can remember. Films, music, fine arts were always a passion of mine growing up. It gave me that energy and inspiration every day.
From an ethos perspective, being able to find alternative revenue streams through these big corporations, whether it be Google, Lyft, L’Oreal or whatever, I could justify that feeling of uncomfortability with my brand clients. I knew that the money that I was able to deliver to them was hugely beneficial to these artists in terms of affording them the potential to go out and maybe do a project that they were not able to do otherwise.
Eventually, I got a little bit burnt out by constantly having to deliver on brand guidelines, metrics and KPIs that, from my perspective with this kind of work, was completely distracting from the art itself, which is the end goal. That is why we are all here, why you are hiring us, and why you are hiring this talent. What clicked for me was the recognition that crypto was going to change the game for artists. They will no longer need to rely on these middlemen corporations anymore for that paycheck. That was super attractive to me.
I quite found my way to Rally through our CEO, Bremner Morris. He was formally the Head of Go-To Market Strategy at Patreon, which was a client of mine at UTA a few years back. We were helping them with positioning themselves in front of the talent. His original team dispersed and went their own separate ways, but he came back while I was still at UTA.
He was advising the Rally project. He was like, “Alex, I’m working on this project at the intersection of the creator economy and crypto. We would love to work with UTA again in a similar capacity to what we did at Patreon.” I was loosely familiar with social tokens because of the work I was doing in our defacto Digital Assets division at UTA. That is now led by Lesley Silverman, who’s a total boss. You guys should get her on a future episode, but also because of my involvement with Friends with Benefits, which was a token community formed by a guy named Trevor McFedries back in September 2020 in Discord. That was my first foray into social tokens.
It was also generally a pleasure to work with Bremner. He is an amazing guy. It was an obvious, “Yes, let’s work together on this.” Two to three months after working with them on the UTA side of the hat, I realized I was spending all my time consuming more information about the digital asset landscape. I found myself on a day-to-day basis only interested in working with Rally and wanting to neglect my other clients. One day, I called up Bremner and said, “What would it look like if I joined you full time?” Here we are. I started full-time on the Rally side in the first week of July 2021, after six years at UTA.
There is so much I can relate to. I was deep in the world of management consulting for about a decade. Jeff was poking at me, “Check out this entrepreneurial wild side over there. You can be more creative and make a bigger impact.” Finally, he had lured me and the rest is history.
Bremner is such a pleasure to work with. He’s a great leader and steerer of the ship. It was a no-brainer. In terms of what Rally had built, plus a great team and leadership, it was like, “Let’s go.”
**That echoes quite a few stories we have heard in the crypto and NFT space. People get sucked into it in a good way because it is engaging. It appeals to what feels natural and where they are their best self. It’s great to hear that again. We have been talking about Rally for months. We were going to have you on the show months ago. It is like bringing everything together. How does Rally allow you guys to build a branded cryptocurrency for independent artists without any technical knowledge? How does that work? How does that come together? **
This is something that I heard from our Founder, Kevin Chou, while I was at UTA. He was on a call with me. To quote him very succinctly, he said, “Rally allows you to create an out-of-the-box economy through the primitives that we have set up and designed.” The creator onboarding process is very similar to creating a social profile like you would on Twitter, Instagram or wherever. In terms of the tech lift needed, there is not much there.
It’s as simple as going to Rally.io and submitting an application. If you are approved, you create an account, fill in those details of who you are, what the mission is, what the goals or ethos are for using the new token economy, and passing a KYC check. You are then off to the races in terms of fundamentally getting it set up. With that said, there is a lot of work to make a token economy a huge success. It is not as easy as clicking a button and letting everybody come through.
There needs to be a solid strategy in place. That is what myself and my team work on. We’re making sure all these creators are set up in terms of the tooling and different things and resources that Rally can come to the table. We are making sure you are set up for success. From a literal perspective, it is so easy to get started on Rally.
Community Of Creators: Rally allows you to create an out-of-the-box economy through the primitives they’ve set up and designed. It’s similar to creating a social profile.
Most of the work that was previously required and what you would probably see on Ethereum mainnet social token platforms like Coinbase or Roll, you are designing typically the tokenomics, or you are building your own liquidity, which is very challenging to minting the tokens. All of that work is already handled by Rally. You need to be the one that has the community of people, bring it to the platform, and offer token holder benefits that your community is going to want to see from you. It is as easy as that.
I remember when you guys were at the beginning of your public launch with CoinList checking out. It was like, “This is a no-brainer. This is a major step in the direction that this industry needs for mainstream adoption.” On that note, let’s go a little bit deeper in terms of what distinguishes you from other platforms. Some folks might be familiar with Bitcloud and some of the other ones out there. Let’s also dive deeper into the NFT side of the house.
There are a lot of things that distinguish Rally from other platforms. One being that we are on a side chain. That has afforded us the ability to build in all the frictionless primitives that make it easy for not an average person that does not necessarily have a crypto native audience along with them into their first experience into crypto.
At its core, what is interesting about Rally is that it is a social token platform plus NFTs. There are the nonfungible assets like the digital goods and services that you are going to be providing to your fans, plus the actual fungible currency that they can purchase those assets with. We believe that those two paired together is what makes a successful token economy. That is what we are focused on.
The most committed and vibrant NFT-based communities will seek additional structures that cannot solely operate on a barter system alone. They are looking for fungibility and liquidity. Fans can enter a token-based community without having to purchase expensive NFTs but rather earn their way in through participation.
Community leaders want to be able to reward their community members for the support that they are doing. Whether that is taking action like something as simple as retweeting a tweet, going to Spotify and pre-save this single. You can earn tokens through that. It is not necessarily about finding purchase and transaction mechanisms, but a way to reward the fans for the work that they have been doing in terms of their support of you along the way. What is exciting about social tokens is that it gives your fans the ability to capture the value of the support that they are giving you. That is the amazing thing.
Fans can participate in the upside of their token base communities by holding an asset that has shared value across the entire community, rather than a singular asset that has a nonfungible value. That is why communities are going to migrate and assemble around tokens that are native to the community, rather than relying on a ubiquitous token like Ethereum, Solana, MATIC or Polygon as the medium of exchange.
Because Rally is on a side chain, we do not have any gas fees. It is eco-friendly. Every transaction that is happening on the side chain is probably the same amount of energy consumption as clicking send on a tweet. We are not minting or transacting on the Ethereum mainnet, which allows us to do that. That is because we follow a different protocol called proof of authority, which is slightly different from proof of work or proof of stake.
It is a protocol that in some sense may relinquish a little bit of that true decentralization. We are open to doing that so that we can create this insular environment for people, especially creators that do have a reputation on the line and are not necessarily hesitant to bring fans into the crypto landscape, which is often known as polarizing. It can be quite volatile.
They know that they can do it safely because they are not going to encounter gas fees every time they try to make a transaction. There is a fiat on-ramp in terms of being able to use your credit card to purchase the crypto, not having to move money around from crypto wallets to Coinbase and whatever. That is important to a lot of these bigger artists. They have a reputation on the line. They want to make sure their fans feel safe and are excited about it. Building on the side chain is what allowed us to create that.
That is the key difference between venting a social token on Ethereum, Polygon or Solana. We have designed this out of the box economy that allows you to coordinate your fans around a digital asset. We have them capture the value of the support and work that they are putting into it without having them go through hoops and come up against roadblocks that we, as people that are probably a little bit more web free native, are used to experiencing.
I appreciate the elegance of interweaving the token side and the NFT side the way you have because they both have their pros and cons and different uses within the Web3 environment. You guys have thought about all those different dimensions and explorations.
**You are creating an easy button for creators to connect with their fans and followers in a direct way and create value in both directions. It’s so hard to accomplish that. Many companies struggle with that. It is amazing what you guys are doing there. You are putting it into practice. There are creators out there launching these tokens and doing this. They are doing it now. There are a few that I had noted here, Duncan Robinson, Roberto Carlos, Brandon Powell. Could you tell us a little bit about these launches and anything that stands out to you about each of them? **
It has been a big month for athletes on Rally. We have launched many and we have many more coming down the pike. I’m most excited about Duncan Robinson. He is such an awesome guy. He has thought about what his community means to him in a thoughtful way. He is known for being a point guard on the Miami Heat. He is awesome and fun to watch.
He also has a podcast called The Long Shot, which has a robust community and listenership. He wanted to use the token to hone in on that community and be able to give value back to the fans that have been supporting him in that endeavor. He launched the token which, in the short-term, has unlocked a private Discord channel and then access to merchandise. He will also be dropping bonus episodes that are just for the token holders and access to NFT drops, which will serve as tickets to live events and podcast episodes.
He is making sure he is using those channels in that community to weigh in on upcoming guests and having his community act as creative directors of his podcast. That has been cool. I have enjoyed working with his team on that. I love the way he is thinking about it as a community first and not this financial instrument that he is dropping into his fans. It is a social tool that he is using to connect with them and be able to give back to those fans that have been helping him make that podcast a success.
Roberto Carlos also launched. He is doing exclusive merch giveaways and NFT drops. It’s the same with Brandon. He will be releasing a lot of behind-the-scenes Super Bowl footage. He is planning to use the token as this gated ticketed access to football bootcamps that he is going to be putting on. There are lots of stuff that they are doing that is cool. It has been interesting to see all these athletes coming to the table in thoughtful ways. They are taking a smart approach in terms of thinking about how they can turn their fans into an actual community or tribe that represents something bigger. That has been cool to see that with these guys.
When we are trying to explain NFTs to folks that are not familiar with it, I always try to go to somebody’s passion. What is it that you are passionate about, who, the brand, the thing? Tell me about that first and let’s start there. If you start there, drawing the line between where they are now in real life or Web1 and Web2 world, and what Web3 offers is so much easier.
It is hard if I’m describing something I’m passionate about but they are not. If somebody is super into motorcycles or something, I can dial them in on what the value of having an NFT of this particular Harley Davidson motorcycle is, all the ins and outs, the upgrades on it, the access to the designer of it, and all these cool things. They are in love with it that they get it right away. If you are trying to describe it from a different perspective, it usually never sticks. I could see that for all these guys. There is a passionate following across all these figures.
The way I think about it is you can have millions of fans. That does not necessarily equate to a community that is driven by the same values. For a lot of these athletes, they are not expecting nor should they expect that they are going to get even 50% of that fan base to convert into this economy. That is okay because all you need is to be able to convert a small percentage of people that are like-minded, are going to show up, be a part of this community, and want to contribute in order to make it a success.
There has to be a unifying thing that everyone is there for. It is not necessarily for Duncan or the Miami Heat. It is because of this podcast that everybody feels super invested in and excited about. It’s that creative side of Duncan that this community is rallying around. That is what is interesting. You touched on that.
**We had Steve Aoki on. When it comes down to music or any art where there is a fan base, nothing matters without the community. They consume it, support it and be supported by it. I love the fact that these tokens and these communities, be it NFTs or social tokens, both allow a real framework around that and a real way to reward the key players in the system, which we have not had before. **
On that note, early on when we had the show and I would do research in NFTs, I kept coming across this band called Portugal. The Man. It was not a band that was on my radar for whatever reason. As I began to research them, it was incredible to see that they were appropriate for the social token. I would go to Rally.
**I do not know where they are at now, but they would be the top token. The story behind them is that they are not necessarily crypto or NFT-native as a band, but they had the fans that were and helped them on board. They brought them to the table. It all came together as a community effort. There is this free-safe campaign that involved Portugal. The Man. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on with them? **
That goes back to my point of using the social token as not just something for your fans to buy into, but a capture of value for the support that these fans are providing these musicians. Portugal. The Man was thoughtful about that and started their upcoming single. They wanted to reward fans that were taking this action to promote the single, be on standby, and have it pre-saved through their Spotify account. What happened is the pre-save was done through Warner. When fans authenticated their Spotify account, an email was triggered to that address that allowed those people to either create a Willy Wallet if they did not have it already or just click a link to claim tokens.
It is my Charizard Pokémon card to my neighbor.
This is like she is coming for the ride.
—
I wonder how do they get around that.
**Is that a wrap on Hot Topics? **
It is a good point to move on to fans shoutouts.
**What do you get over there? **
Important Links
-
Rally_io – Twitter
-
@RallyCreators – Instagram
-
Discord – Rally.io
-
@AEHooven – Twitter
-
Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
-
iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
-
Dutch artist creates an NFT for every person in the world as an experiment – article
-
CryptoPunk NFT is the latest donation of Ukraine’s $33 million campaign – article