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Edge Of Austin 2022, DCentral & Consensus: Tatiana DeMaria (Nacci), Plus Jonathan DeLucia, Benjamin Schmidt & Daniel Moncada (Meme NFT)
Join Edge of NFT as we continue to scour the planet for the best of Web3. This episode is one that comes to you from our time in Austin, TX in early June 2022. Listen in as we get the latest intel and insights and bring them straight back to you. Today’s episode features some builders at MemeNFT, the special NFT marketplace built for traders and by traders. Jonathan DeLucia, Benjamin Schmidt & Daniel Moncada chime in to share their philosophy and why they’re amped about MemeNFT. After that, catch a chat with Tatiana DeMaria. She is an accomplished British/Lebanese songwriter, artist, musician, and producer. She is also the head of web3 at Nacci. Nacci harnesses the power of data storytelling, responsible capital, and unbridled innovation in the service of a radically different future.
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Edge Of Austin 2022, DCentral & Consensus: Tatiana DeMaria (Nacci), Plus Jonathan DeLucia, Benjamin Schmidt & Daniel Moncada (Meme NFT)
I’m a fanboy for a moment. Get to see Daniel again. Epic to be here with you and see you twice in one year. This is pretty amazing. Learn about what you have been up to and reveal a little bit of alpha for those reading at home about an exciting project. I have Daniel, Benjamin, and Jonathan here with me. Let’s start with you, Daniel. You have been a Web3 evangelist. You have been there. Talk to us a little bit about what was that a-ha moment where you got pumped about Web3 blockchain. How did you get into the space?
I like money and have a goal that I want to retire my mom ASAP. I’m with the MemeNFT. I’m the Chief Branding Officer. You asked me how did I get into MemeNFT and why.
Before MemeNFT, which we are going to go into depth about, I’m sure everyone wants to know more about it. What got you pumped about the space? What was that moment where you were like, “NFT, this is interesting?”
It’s new. I looked at it when NFT first came in 2017. When they started emerging, they came back from death. I looked at it almost like when Bitcoin first came out. There are many opportunities to be able to make some money and, hopefully, have some financial freedom. My two buddies, Ben and Jonathan, are all guiding to NFTs and always trying to help each other out. When there’s a call, we try to call each other, “What do you think about this?” We start doing the research. It’s how I got in.
Were you thinking about it from an entertainment industry perspective and some of the challenges with the old guard, if you will?
I think a little bit of both.
You got into it, met these guys, and now you are the Chief Branding Officer of MemeNFT. What got you excited to join this crew? We will learn more about it from Jonathan.
The main reason I love MemeNFT is that they are different. We call it the people’s marketplace because we are open to always taking whatever the community wants to put into the marketplace. The reason why I ended up getting here is that I used to promote projects here and there. I would do my research, read the white paper, go to their Twitter, go to their Discord if it was an NFT project, and try to do my due diligence with the developers, what projects they have been in, and all that good stuff. Still, with all that research that I used to promote, I was never in the rooms with them to see what they were talking about behind the scenes and besides what they were telling the public.
I was not baking. In MemeNFT, I am one of the executives. I see everything that’s happening. I know what’s happening. For example, with the marketplace, we need the alpha. I knew that was going to happen. It’s the most beautiful process that we had to go through. It was a long process but the fact that I was able to oversee everything is more valuable to me than getting paid by promoting.
It’s the knowledge and feeling part of something. It’s knowing what’s under the hood.
Before, I didn’t have a say, so in another project. It was like, “You are going to promote. You are going to do this.”
MemeNFT: MemeNFT takes in the entire community’s input on what they want on this platform. MemeNFT makes sure that they’re adding things of value that traders actually want in a marketplace.
That’s hard as a creator and actor. I’m sure when you have been doing shows and everything, you got to provide input. Those brothers didn’t come about on paper from the writers. What were some of the character development you did? Was there a certain scene or part of the show that you had some meaningful input into?
The one that came out right out of the top of my head was an explosion, Breaking Bad episode 301, No Más. That was my second day on set. We had to do the explosion with the truck. My brother and I were known out there in the world that we had been around the block. We were in prison. We changed our lives and everything. Before that, we were young, dumb, and we made mistakes.
We went to prison, came out, and started changing. My brother started channel getting my head about the scene because Bryan Cranston came, and he gave us the description of what he wanted for us to do in the scene, “It was one explosion, one truck. Please, can you guys not flinch if you can.” Some people flinch. Everybody flinches.
My brother wasn’t along to death and everything but he was not super nice about it. He was like, “Motherfucker.” He started barking at me. He’s trying to get me in the zone. He started telling me, “We do shit every day like walking in the fucking park.” I’m not going to lie. I was a little bothered. He was trying to do that out of love. It was my brother, tough love.
He started drilling and telling me, “Remember the one time that happened when we got attacked. We got hit with machetes and all that. Remember getting the zone. We do this all the time.” When the explosion went off, we kept going. I took the drug out of that cigarette as if I was walking in the park, and there was shit flying all over the place. It was boots on fire, flying like a tire. The thing is, we didn’t know that it was going to happen. We thought that it was going to be an explosion.
We started seeing shit flying. I remember before the scene, my brother told me, “Anything, do not turn around. Something hits you or you catch fire, keep going.” If you are in danger, the fire officers and paramedics are going to come and put the fire out, and maybe you will start rolling on the ground if that happens.
I know you guys got a military background on your team. We have a cofounder that went to West Point. There are a lot of metaphors in what you shared in terms of Web3. The durability takes to build in this space and endurance. These things don’t just happen. I would love to learn a little bit more about the genesis of MemeNFt. Jonathan, which Daniels joined the team. What is this all about? Why do we need another NFT marketplace? There’s got to be a reason. Once you are in with all these marketplaces, you decide to do this. I want to understand what’s behind MemeNFT.
That’s the question that started this whole thing. Why another marketplace? We dubbed ourselves, as Daniel said, “The people’s marketplace by traders for traders.” What that means is we take in the entire community and input on what we are doing on this platform. We make sure that we are adding things of value that people as traders want in a marketplace, whether it be analytics or building a trading platform where you can trade an NFT with somebody else on the platforms. You don’t have to rely on the trust that they are going to send it after you send it. That are a couple of examples.
How’s that different than MemeNFT? I can buy someone’s NFT. What’s the mechanic?
This is like, me and you want to trade an NFT with each other. OpenSea doesn’t do that. This is peer-to-peer trading.
At the same time, it’s like, “I like your Ape, and you like my Ape, done.”
This is where people get rugged all the time. We are developing a portion of our platform where you can put one person who puts up their NFT. One person puts it together. It goes intermediary wallet, double checks, and sends them out to the person. That’s one innovation that we are working on but we are mainly focused on the community.
When I go to these events, we typically don’t have booths. We have a booth at this event but typically, I don’t believe in doing the booth. I would rather walk around with a backpack, a microphone, and a speaker, talk to people and say, “What marketplace do you use now?” Almost 9 times out of 10, I hear the words BrokenSea or they are getting into looks rare or something like that. They are talking about OpenSea in a negative aspect.
With how close and intimate we are in this space and how love you Web3 is, how are we settling for anything less? Why aren’t we using a platform that we want to use? That’s where MemeNFT comes into play. We’ve got plans for gamification, talking about account levels, badges on your account, and a 3D box with clothes you will be able to add to it. We are doing a lot of things at MemeNFT.
The first thing that we are doing is we are proving ourselves to the community. I am personally in Twitter space for ten hours a day talking about MemeNFT and getting other projects to onboard with our platform because I believe in that grassroots marketing that, “I’m the CEO, let me show you what we are about.” I lead them to it, and they can make their own determination.
Customer discovery, listening to your customer, and evolving. Those are important in any business, especially Web3. Do you have a formal process for customer input or is it more informal now? Is there going to be a governance structure around different decisions with the platform?
Now it’s pretty informal but we are building a ticketing system or whatnot for bringing in feedback and onboarding. We mainly use Telegram because our token on our platform is Binance Smart Chain. We are seven chains.
I noticed that. That’s a lot of chains. Let’s go through them.
Ethan, Polygon, Fantom, KuCoin.
KuCoin has its own chain.
It’s always very well but we have it. We are going to be adding Pulse as soon as it comes out.
MemeNFT: The problem with OpenSea is that they’re making so much money and they’re doing nothing with it. They’re not improving on their platform which is a disservice to the people using it.
We have the CEO of Fantom on the show, Michael Kong.
Fantom is one of our launched platforms there.
That’s an emerging technology right there.
It’s a 2% fee across everything. We wanted to save our investors money because I feel one of the misses with OpeSea was they were making so much money and doing nothing to their platform, which is a disservice to the people using it. At least, if you are going to make billions of dollars, we are only now seeing them put money into their platform.
It should have been happening from the beginning. We built a custom-wide protocol contract. Everything was built from scratch, 721 a minting contract. If you are a new artist coming up, you are going to get that gassy fishing contract, loading your collection on our platform. We are the first ones to integrate it into a marketplace.
We also have Benjamin here. How would you describe yourself in relation to MemeNFT? What drew you to the project?
I have been in crypto for several years. During the pandemic, I saw NFTs as something that you could trade and flip like cryptos but there’s the blockchain technology that proof of ownership is huge. I wanted to find a utility within the NFT that was like crypto that I could make money that felt secure.
It had more of a trading experience.
I was like, “Let me find a marketplace that’s coming up that I can input, give information, build with and grow a community. We can make this huge. The people’s marketplace comes along, and it’s a token with scalability because, in OpenSea, if they wanted to upgrade their contract, they got to de-list everything, which is going to cost so much gas. In MemeNFT, they built it on the proxy so they can build and scale it up as they are going. As more blockchains are coming, we can add them on, and no problem. It’s OpenSea on steroids to me.
To be an early investor with a token on it and able to have a say, “This is what traders want.” Can we do this? Can we make it happen and be able to see these guys, their faces, their docs. I’m not dealing with avatars. I’m dealing with real people, real companies, LLC, international, and here in America. They are doing it the right way. They are taking their time to make sure everything is secure like everything in the military needs to be secure, and so does crypto and DeFi. It was a no-brainer for me to ape in.
I know you guys have a lot going on, and you got to get back on stage soon. I would love to know a little bit about what’s coming up on the roadmap? How can folks get involved? How can they participate in the community? What opportunities are there and available for folks that want to collaborate with you guys?
A lot of the stuff I was saying is in our V2 version of the platform, so V1 launched now, and that’s basic like OpenSea via sell and trade. A lot of the features we talk about in the V2 are part of the roadmap.
When’s that coming?
That’s looking like the next several months in 2022 for the V2 portion. There’s still a lot of development that needs to be done on that side.
It takes time to make the sausage.
I didn’t realize it before I came in here. OpenSea took four years to build that platform. That’s a long time. We’ve grown a lot since that platform was created. A lot of the stuff that we are doing is newer in the space, and we can only get better.
What collaborations do you have coming up, and how can folks get involved if they want to collaborate?
We have a launchpad service. We can, from A to Z, launch your project for you. I talked about this on a panel but if you do a launchpad service with us, we require a minimum six months promotional period. If you launch with us, you have to promote your project for at least six months or there could be legal consequences because we are not trying to promote rug pulls. An awesome celebrity partnership we have coming out in 2022. It is a collection from Jamie Kennedy, who is a star of Malibu’s Most Wanted. He was in Scream. We got him locked in under contract. We have our artists doing his artwork and everything. That’s going to be fun.
I’m sure Daniel, with all the folks that you know, you are working on some fun stuff.
I was trying to bridge the gap, try to bring them into the space, and be able to help them. I educate them. I teach them the ways like the way I learned. I learned the hard way. I got rug so many times.
MemeNFT: MemeNFT is giving what traders want because they’re not dealing with avatars. They’re dealing with real people and real companies. They’re doing it the right way securely.
I was admitted on stage. I got rugged. I lost a clone act.
If you haven’t got rugged, you are not even for the crypto. We don’t want the new people to come in and get a bad taste in their mouth and be discouraged like, “It’s freaking crypto and NFT suck. I got rugged. I lost all my money. I would rather leave it in the bank and collect $0.70 per year or something.” We are going to try to help people when they come onboard to educate and teach them the ways that it’s not about cash, money, praise, and grabbing each goal. We got to have six months and be able to put in the work that they need to, not just collect and bounce.
I always tell people it is important. I’m saying this, “I’m a huge advocate for training people the proper way, at least the basic fundamentals when you bring them in.” How many people do you know? They bring a friend in, and that friend relies on them. They don’t even know when to sell. They don’t know what they should be buying. They are not paying attention. They’re relying on you. We got to get away from that. If you bring someone in, it’s like, “You are in this. I’m going to teach you. This is a wallet. This is what you look for. Don’t connect it to random sites.” You have an obligation to that individual to teach them the basics, to prevent them from fraud, and you let them fly on their own.
The hat says it all MemeNFT.com. What’s the Twitter handle?
Is it the same Telegram?
Telegram is the same.
It’s such a pleasure. Congrats on getting this far. It’s a journey. Good luck with everything. Thanks for joining us for a little while.
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I’m excited to be here on day one in Austin, 105 degrees, with Tatiana DeMaria, who got off stage and is hanging out with us for a little while. She’s coming to LA. We will get to hang out some more. I’m super excited to delve into all the cool stuff you have been doing in Web3, music, what you are up to now, and your new role. We could start with a little introduction of yourself and how you got into this war world of Web3. It’s a pretty big deal because you were an early pioneer and have also been in the music space since you were eighteen.
I was fifteen.
Talk to us about your journey.
I started writing music young. I wrote my first album when I was about 15 or 16. I got lucky with that. In England, I was independent but we had a couple of charting singles. For me, it was my passion for writing music and touring it. It’s something I’ve always felt compelled to do. I love music. I have synesthesia, and a few forms, which I figured out later in life was why I was always pulled back to it.
With that said, I’m a touring musician. That has been my main career my whole life. I have been lucky to be able to own my music, own my masters, and build independent businesses. I was lucky to be approached by some labels at different points in my career. I found that what was right for me has been my path so far. Over the years, I’ve built some businesses around music.
That’s a big deal owning your masters at such a young age and realizing that is the path that gives you the greatest empowerment. Talk to us a little bit more about how that came to be because that is unusual.
When I was a kid, my mom was afraid of driving on the motorways. Getting to a band rehearsal was hard. I remember feeling I was dependent on other people to make music. I had to go to rehearsals with my bass player, and drummer or we couldn’t be a band. I decided to write music and was like, “As long as I’m writing the songs, I can be free to do what I want.” I’m writing all the music. I own all the songwriting and the publishing.
I got lucky that I got picked up. I had a wonderful manager, and people liked the songs. I started doing production, and very young, I signed a publishing deal. I found that there was so much red tape. If I wanted to, there were people coming to me with opportunities. I was excited about it but the publishers were like, “No.” There was a lot of freedom taken away. With that said, I fell into it. I managed to get out of that publishing deal because I wasn’t happy.
I owned all my stuff and thought, “I don’t want to go back to that dynamic where people are stopping me from putting my music out there.” In addition, I was lucky. I had a manager very young, and he retired from management for personal reasons, and all is good now, touch wood. I took on management when I was about 17 or 18. I accidentally was running all the business and everything we were doing. It was a tremendous amount of work but at the same time, I valued the freedom so much.
This isn’t before NFTs lit up.
That’s when we started our show in March 2021.
Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure.
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Important Links
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Michael Kong – Past episode
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@MemeNFTOfficial – Twitter
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Telegram – MemeNFT
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@TDMCrypto – TikTok
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@TatianaDeMaria – Instagram
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Twitter – Tatiana DeMaria
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Spotify – Tatiana DeMaria
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iTunes – Edge of NFT