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Building Web3 Communities: An Insightful Conversation With James Of Just Ape
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Building Web3 Communities: An Insightful Conversation With James Of Just Ape

NFT 298 | Just Ape

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In this episode of Edge of NFT, James of Just Ape emphasizes the core principles of building Web3 communities by discussing their journey and initiatives. The conversation underscores the importance of transitioning from Web2 to Web3, with a focus on creating tangible value and combating biases against NFTs. The launch of Apes Across Worlds exemplifies their commitment to fostering interconnected and decentralized communities, emphasizing digital ownership and open-source governance. The discussion revolves around building bridges between diverse Web3 ecosystems, learning from successful projects like Nouns DAO and Proof Collective, and addressing the challenge of community engagement. Plus, on our Hot Topics segment, Matt Mason discusses Broadside’s new partnership with Book.io, which involves a collector’s edition of Broadside books where the community members who contributed content are rewarded with 30% of the royalties. Tune in for more!

Listen to the podcast here

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Building Web3 Communities: An Insightful Conversation With James Of Just Ape

This is James with Just Ape, a community about getting back to the basics of bridging Web2 to Web3. I’m on the Edge of NFT getting back to the basics of why Web3 matters. Enjoy.

NFT-curious audiences, stay tuned for this episode to learn how Apes Across Worlds are building bridges to true open-source community governance for an exciting new L1, how a total stranger turned into a total lifesaver for one of our guests, and finally, how one of the most active communities in the metaverse has broken new ground once again in the realm of digital books.

It’s official. You can dive into the captivating world of artificial intelligence with the Edge of AI Podcast, our newest addition to the family. Join us as we explore the frontiers of AI and its impact on our lives. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on Twitter @Edgeof_AI and LinkedIn for exciting updates and insights. You can also visit our new website at EdgeOfAI.xyz.

This episode features James AKA Groovy, the visionary founder of Just Ape Studios, Just Ape, and Apes Across Worlds. An ardent believer in the transformative power of blockchain and decentralized technologies, James’ journey in the Web3 space is a testament to his commitment to driving innovation. Leading the charge at Just Ape Studios, they crafted a unique space for digital arts and fashion enthusiasts, connecting creators and connoisseurs in an unprecedented manner.

With Just Ape Studios, James steered the integration of cutting-edge blockchain solutions into multimedia and fashion, solidifying their position as a pioneer in the field. With a technical background deeply rooted in software engineering, James couples their extensive knowledge with an intuitive understanding of market trends, setting new standards for blockchain-based projects. James, how are you doing?

I’m doing amazing. How about you?

I’m doing incredible. I’m glad to have you here. It’s good to connect and keep talking about all the amazing things you’re doing. It’s rare that you get to meet people in person in your hometown. We got to meet over some coffee at Radio City and had an awesome conversation. I was like, “We have to find a way to get you on the show.” This is that day. It’s awesome.

It has been a long time coming. I’m excited to get things rolling.

It’s the time to build. I’m here in Dubai, and they’re also excited about building. A lot of folks have moved their companies here to do a lot of building. I love that you come from that builder background and mentality. There’s a lot more infrastructure here that the industry needs. I appreciate all that. It’s fascinating how Just Ape is a movement about getting back to the basics. I’m curious. What made you choose that type of messaging? How did the community respond?

We launched on Solana following the whole hype era of Okay Bears. During that time, we saw a lot of holes within the communities that we wanted to fill. That’s what we prioritized with Just Ape when we launched. We wanted to give back and approach it from this no-nonsense perspective. When it comes to NFTs, there’s always this bias against NFTs and how they are scams. We want to put utility and substance behind that. When we launched, we knew we wanted to give back and create these tangible goods that represented the brand and the company that would allow our holders to receive something tangible from participating within our community.

We launched our rewards program that was very similar to a Web2 loyalty program or something like airline miles. That was the first big product that we undertook when we launched. That receptiveness within the community was something that was well-received. Everyone was happy with the NFT assets that represented their part or stake in this loyalty program. When we launched, it was very well received. After our first season, we had a lot of community members who were happy with how things played out and being able to stake their assets. They didn’t have to worry about any excess tokens or any issues with regulatory uncertainty.

It did well when it launched. Through season one, we were able to showcase a lot of the tangible products that we were creating in brick-and-mortar stores in both New York City as well as Miami. Overall, it was a good onboarding mechanism, not only for people who were already in Web3 but the people who were going into these stores on the Web2 side of things were able to see these tangible products that stood behind the NFTs and understood what the actual mechanism of our project was. That did well.

I remember when Solana was coming out with their brick-and-mortar stories, and I was like, “I wonder what stuff they’re going to put in there.” You’re telling me, “Our product was there.” That is awesome. The use case was trying to see utilities and even talking about the rewards program and how loyal your community is at Ape. It’s awesome even to see the activity that’s still happening on Twitter and other places. You continue to push the envelope. You’re continuing to do cool things, and the latest happens to be Apes Across Worlds, which exemplifies your vision for a decentralized interconnected universe where community engagement and digital ownership are paramount. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this project came into being? What was the journey to get there?

You brought up some good points with the whole physical brick-and-mortar stores. They were great while they were around for these onboard mechanisms to bring more people into the community. One of the big things that we have focused on ever since we launched is how can we grow and scale. That thesis for us is we’re always going to have to look outside of the ecosystem to onboard more people to the space. That was my thesis on how would continue to grow. If we were always aiming for this recycled liquidity, it would never work out.

NFT 298 | Just Ape

Just Ape: We’re always going to have to look outside of the ecosystem to onboard more people to the space.

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It was great while Solana Spaces was around. We were able to onboard a lot of new people to the project and the community and introduced a lot of people to what we were working on. Unfortunately, Solana Spaces shut down. We were aware that it was going in that direction. They weren’t getting funding from too many participants, other projects, and businesses within the ecosystem.

Once that happened for us, that killed off that vertical at least in terms of fashion. We had to go back to the drawing board and pivot in terms of how we can focus on more contributions that are going to help Web3 as a whole. For us, what that meant was focusing more on Web3 infrastructure and building out products that are going to help us grow within Web3 as opposed to mostly focusing on onboarding.

With that in mind, we started looking at a lot of other ecosystems and places where we could again continue to grow, scale, and build infrastructure that was going to help the ecosystem grow. For us, that meant looking at open-source contributions. We ultimately landed on Aleph Zero. We spoke to a lot of other networks at the time. We spoke to Polygon, Sui, Aptos, NEAR, and a few other ones as well. Ultimately, Aleph Zero is where we landed.

We want to take it back to how can we help this ecosystem grow and thrive. For us, that meant focusing on open-source contributions. With the governance platform, we idealized that was more or less meant to be the standard for NFT ecosystems or the NFT ecosystem itself. How can we create a platform that’s going to allow projects to keep their community in line with what they’re working on, foster transparency of what they’re working on, as well as allow their community to have that input to say, “This is where you should build.”

For us, Apes Across Worlds, which is the product on top of the governance platform that we’re building, will only be around 220 assets. The idea is to bring a bunch of builders, visionaries, and contributors from all across Web3 to this ecosystem where they can actively contribute to helping expand that ecosystem. With the governance platform itself, that’s our first deliverable. We’re also implementing the NFT standard on Aleph Zero, which will be open source as a means to allow the ecosystem to use it as well. The second thing we want to build is an NFT lending protocol. That’s what we’re focusing on or the next chunk of work that we want to move on after we finish the governance platform.

You covered a lot. Let’s break it down a little bit. First, for those who don’t know what Aleph Zero is all about, maybe you can explain that to our audiences to start.

Aleph Zero is another L1 chain. It has high throughput. It’s very scalable. It has a privacy layer to allow transactions to be privately made as well. At its core, it’s highly scalable and privacy-compliant as well. It was found by a great team out in Poland. That’s the basis of what it is. It’s highly scalable and very fast. To my knowledge, it’s one of the fastest blockchains that has pretty much near-instant finality, which means transactions are pretty much near-instant finalized. That’s the basis of what Aleph Zero is.

That makes sense. Those are some cool tools that you’re building. How are those tools going to catalyze growth and innovation for that L1? Break it down a little bit more in layman’s terms in terms of how these projects all tie together.

Here’s the whole core thesis of expanding Web3 at least when it comes to NFT ecosystems. When we were at the drawing board, we were looking at a lot of big ecosystems now like Ethereum and Solana, and looking at which products catalyzed their NFT ecosystems and which projects helped those grow. On Ethereum, one of the big projects that we saw that was a smaller concentrated community was Nouns DAO. What they have achieved in such a short time is they have proliferated Nouns DAO across all of Web3. They were a project that helped the ecosystem grow.

We took a lot of lessons from that. We looked at other small communities like PROOF Collective, which were also instrumental in getting that NFT ecosystem expanding and growing as well. We modeled a lot of the governance platform after what we could do in terms of creating tools that were going to help communities contribute. That’s what we saw in terms of friction when it came to these smaller concentrated communities that wanted to grow and expand. A lot of the communities wanted to contribute but they didn’t have the tools to do so.

That’s the first problem that we aim to solve. We wanted to create something that was very frictionless, something that incentivized community contribution, and something that allowed the community to actively see what the project was going toward or what vision they were building toward. We also looked at Solana, some of the smaller communities on Solana, and things that were prevalent in the early days prior to Solana experiencing its explosive growth.

That was also a big toolset that we saw missing from these smaller communities. It was the tooling that would allow the community to say, “This is what you should do. This is why you should do it.” Everyone else backs this idea. Our thesis for the catalyst is to create tooling that will allow us to actively contribute and say on a very frictionless approach. They want to check in every day and say, “This is what you should build,” or vote on a proposal that they think is going to bring value to the wider ecosystem or even Apes Across Worlds itself. That was our thesis for how it will contribute to that scaling factor.

That’s an L1 I wasn’t familiar, with and I’m sure other folks weren’t as well. Part of the reason these L1s do grants is to bring the right advocates and communities into their broader ecosystem. I’m going to check them out and see what they’re all about.

Congrats on the EFP grant. Getting those is always their set of challenges but you’re using that to go and create a lot of cool things from the tooling and also looking at how you build in those communities. Having gone through what you did with Just Ape, you know how to talk to different communities, collectors, artists, and newcomers, and you’re trying to wrap that into why they would now want to be a part of AAW. Can you describe how you’re leveraging digital collectible ownership, community governments, and the other ways you’re using blockchain infrastructure? You talked about a couple of those different points, and you probably have some things in that roadmap that people can be excited about.

Taking it back to season one for Just Ape on Solana, we created this whole loyalty program. All holders had to do was stake their assets. They get distributions of tokens over the sense of the whole season, which allows them to burn these tokens for tangible items. There were other things. There were raffles. We gave away a $10,000 Triumph bike, which is pretty awesome.

We had this amazing season one. One of the biggest lessons we learned after season one was everyone likes all this free stuff from this rewards program, and it’s great but they want something a little bit more. They want to be engaged, and they want that sense of ownership. Moving forward, that was also tied into this next platform that we’re building. How can we keep people engaged on a daily basis? How can we keep them coming back? How can we make them feel like their voice matters?

How can we keep people engaged on a daily basis? How can we keep them coming back? How can we make them feel like their voice matters? Click To Tweet

That came into full circle with the governance platform. Every holder of every single Ape has one vote. The more Apes you hold, the more votes you have. That allows you to leverage your voice in a way and say, “This is what we should do.” When you’re putting proposals forward, you can go ahead. Our method of taking apart these proposals is you need to have everything down from teams to finances to everything that’s fully fleshed out. We’re taking the Nouns model and putting it on overdrive because we also want to tie in a lot of social dynamics.

It goes without saying that Web3 also lives on crypto Twitter, and if you don’t have that presence, you’re not making noise about what you’re building. No one is going to care. I ultimately say it came into looking at how can we tie in social dynamics to this and how can we also incentivize these participants to actively contribute. We also wrapped an achievement system into our governance platform that allows holders to look at certain metrics of things. They have fixed metrics that they have hit within the community itself and things like signing in every day, making a certain amount of proposals, and making a certain amount of votes. We tied in some of our physical products as well into these achievements.

With everything that we have created in the Web2 space and all these tangible goods, we didn’t want to completely leave that behind. We wanted to look at how we can incentivize people to actively contribute every day. That’s a sense of ownership and achievement within the governance platform itself. We want to wrap everything together, and that’s something we nailed with the governance platform when it comes to ownership participation and actively engaging on Twitter.

This is not the first L1 that needed this type of government structure and reward mechanism. There are other systems out there. I’m curious. To what extent you were inspired by what others have done relative to starting from a place of curiosity and discovery as a longtime product dev? I’m sure this is a common tension in that world because there are tracks that have been laid that are not bad but if you go down those tracks, you are missing out on something fun that’s down a different path. How do you balance all that?

You bring on some very good points in terms of tracks that have been laid. The whole idea of Web3 is to iterate. Keep building. Keep iterating on the product until you build something better. You can go down a track for as long as you want but it isn’t until you start veering off that you create something very unique. Luckily, Web3 has been around, and it hasn’t been around for too long but on the other side, we have seen so many tracks laid on Ethereum, which is one of the biggest NFT ecosystems in the space. Through that, we have been able to see what works and what doesn’t.

The biggest thing for us was looking at ways to tie incentives into everything that we were doing. It goes to say especially within the bear market that people need to be incentivized for some greater reason to actively fill that need and contribute. It has been a balance of taking those tracks that we have seen bigger projects like Proof and Nouns laid down, looking at things from a top-level view, and being like, “How can we improve on this model and make people want to participate in this over the long term?”

Some of the shortcomings we have seen with other products and projects are people get bored. People get bored all the time. They move on to the next thing. They want to be a part of the new hotness. It has been that fine and delicate balance, “How can we make it interesting enough that people don’t want to move on? They want to stay. They want to contribute. They feel rewarded and incentivized enough to keep building with us.”

We launched Just Ape. We have been able to hone into the diehard community that has been with us since the beginning. On the other side, we have talked to other networks. We have been able to cultivate this community from all ecosystems, whether it be Ethereum or Polygon. What we’re bringing out with Aleph Zero is a nice mix of everything.

We’re seeing people who ultimately don’t care about one particular ecosystem. No one is the maxi. The only maxis that we have are Web3 maxis. That’s the important pivotal part for us moving forward. We wanted to bring people together from all ecosystems. There has been no better time to do it than in the bear because, at this point, everyone who’s still around cares about Web3 as a whole. It’s not like they’re a maxi for one particular ecosystem. They want to make sure that Web3 works so that all of us don’t have to go back to Web2.

NFT 298 | Just Ape

Just Ape: At this point, everyone who’s still around cares about Web3 as a whole. It’s not like they’re a maxi for one particular ecosystem. They want to make sure that Web3 works so that all of us don’t have to go back to Web2.

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There’s more of that message that needs to continue to spread. There’s room for a lot of cool projects that can exist and keep furthering this community. We’re still unfortunately in a world where a lot of islands are being built with not enough bridges but it sounds like you’re on the side of building these bridges to keep bringing all these amazing communities together. This is a cool way of going at that. On your end, you still have some things coming out with Apes Across Worlds, and there are probably some things that are coming out either toward the end of 2023 or coming up early in 2024 that you might be able to tell us about. Can you tease a little bit of that for us?

It’s good to see you. Thanks for having me back.

I did my research.

I’ve forgotten about that.

That’s a fun fact for sure.

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What guidelines? That’s the problem.

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Thanks for having me. Cheers, guys.

What are you going to do next after the show?

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