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Evan Luza Of Cool Cats — The Platform Where You Can Experience The World Of Cooltopia, Plus: MINtangible

Evan Luza Of Cool Cats — The Platform Where You Can Experience The World Of Cooltopia, Plus: MINtangible

NFT Evan Luza | Cooltopia

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There are so many exciting things happening in the NFT space. But so often, it is those that draw a community that make their marks. In this episode, we dive deep into the world of Cooltopia with the Co-founder of Cool Cats and the mind behind Ghost Boy and Alpha Labs, Evan Luza. Evan takes us back to his origin story and how a fear of death led him to create one of the most successful NFT launches since. He talks about the phenomenon of Cool Cats, from how it continues to draw a passionate global community to how it has evolved into a digital powerhouse. They are even expected to be in the 2023 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade! Evan also shares his wisdom on navigating through the noise and the need for responding versus reacting. Plus, get to know MINtangible and what they are offering to creators and owners on NFT IP rights and more!

Listen to the podcast here

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Evan Luza Of Cool Cats — The Platform Where You Can Experience The World Of Cooltopia, Plus: MINtangible

This is Evan Luza from Cool Cats, the leading player in Web3 storytelling.

Stay tuned for this episode to learn how fear of death helped lead to one of the most successful NFT launches in the bleakest of markets.

If you’re getting lost in all the noise, wherein lies all noise and responding verse reacting will lead to harmony in life and business.

Learn how MINTangible has made an easy button for creators and owners to craft and understand NFT IP rights. All this and more on this episode, enjoy.

This episode features Evan Luza, the ingenious Cofounder of Cool Cats in the creative mind behind Ghost Boy and Alpha Labs, hailing from Austin, Texas. Evan has made a significant impact in the world of Web3 and NFTs. With his deep expertise and insights as a seasoned creative and entrepreneur, he’s left his mark on major brands like Bitcoin.com, Microsoft, Adult Swim, and Valves. He’s channeling his talents into his latest venture, Alpha Labs, where projects like Blockalizer are taking shape and the development of the captivating Ghost Boy NFT Collection.

In this episode, we’ll delve into the phenomenon of Cool Cats, a renowned blue chip NFT brand with a passionate global community born from the imaginative comic character Blue Cat. This brand has evolved into a digital powerhouse, boasting an impressive array of collectibles, animated content, comics, games, and merchandise. As a trailblazer in Web3, Cool Cats is dedicated to igniting innovation and crafting immersive experiences that draw the community into the captivating realm of Cooltopia to the Adventures of Blue Cat and his friends. Here’s our new friend, Evan Luza. Welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

It’s great to have. I think we covered it all in the intro. That’s it. We’re probably good. I appreciate you joining us. Cool Cats is a massive community, engaged community, and passionate community. It’s a brand that does embrace the cool name.

The clue’s in the name.

Also, innovation. At the forward edge of innovation. That’s the stuff we like to talk about. Let’s start at the beginning. Share with us how it all came together.

I told Clon this too, so I have permission to say this, but I’d like to think of myself as Morpheus and Clon’s Neo. We went to school together. We went to Georgia State from Atlanta. He’s from Atlanta and we’re both in school together. I was always significantly more of nerdy crypto tech-centric dude. He wasn’t familiar with blockchain or anything like that.

After I graduated, I ended up at Valve and Microsoft. At Microsoft, my buddy put me on crypto for the first time and it was like the ChainLink ICO. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the ICO days back in the day, but that’s what got my bug going in crypto land. That was like 2017. I worked at Bitcoin.com for a little bit after that.

Long story short, I was contextually the technical background to understand at least the crypto space to some degree. I saw the Apes mint. It was like 2021. It feels like many years ago, but it’s also like yesterday. They minted and someone who’s from raised off Pokémon and Game Boy and Yu-Gi-Oh cards who loved and cherished that back of recess trading peer-to-peer stuff, I was like, “There’s something here. There’s some collectible component.” It’s on the blockchain. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what I was looking at.

I had the idea. I was like, “If these Apes are selling, if other stuff is selling, I think there’s a market opportunity here.” I had the idea to do a project called Sushi Pets, which was these anthropomorphized little pieces of sushi. I worked with a pixel artist and the plan was to launch the collection. I hit up Clon and he was doing motion graphics at the time. “Look, this is NFTs. Everyone on the internet’s going crazy about collecting these Apes and it’s all unfolding right in front of us. There’s no rule book here. Anything goes. It’s all the Wild West. It’s all very exciting.”

NFT Evan Luza | Cooltopia

Cooltopia: Everyone on the internet’s going crazy about collecting these Apes, and it’s all unfolding right in front of us. There’s no rule book here. Anything goes.

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I slowly contextualized him to the market opportunity and red-pilled him. That’s why I said the Morpheus to Neo thing because I red-pilled him contextually on what the opportunity was. Long story short, we ended up getting Sushi Pets about ready to launch. At this point in time too, solidity developers and smart contract deployment, it was very rare. You couldn’t go to Fiverr or open up Twitter and be like, “Who can fork this contractor? Who knows a Solidity dev?”

This was the cusp of when NFTs were rolling out. It was hard to find someone who even knew how to tie a front end to a smart contract. We had Sushi Pets basically 90% done ready to rock. The dev we had, he didn’t rug us, but he was like, “I’m going to do something else. I’m not into it.” Me and Clon were depressed for like 2 or 3 weeks as we had put a month’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears into this project we wanted to bring to the market. We felt defeated. Long story short, we’re on the hunt for a new Solidity dev and we’re starting from ground zero. We’re scrolling through the Twitter feed and I think it was Clon. He found Faticorns.

Faticorns was the project that Link and Tom, who were the other two cofounders of Cool Cats, had been working on. That was Pixelated Fat Unicorns. We joined their Discord. There are probably ten people in there. It’s mostly me, Tom, Link, and Clon. We contextualize them. We’re like, “We’re not idiots. We understand the market opportunity. Here’s Sushi Pets, what we were working on. Do you guys have any interest in helping us launch this thing?”

The Faticorn website looked good. It looked like if you’ve ever got like Animal Crossing game or anything that Nintendo makes, there’s a website tied to it. It was crisply done and the smart contract worked, which was what we were looking for. We tell Tom and Link, “We got Sushi Pets essentially at the finish line. We’d love to work with you guys to help bring this thing to life.”

They flipped it back on us and said, “We’re interested in working with you guys, but how about something we could have equal involvement in? What could we do from scratch together?” That was then a challenge to ourselves like, “Let’s put Sushi Pets on ice.” We now have a Solidity dev and a front-end guy that was Link at the time who’s doing the front-end stuff. The task at hand is like, “What are we going to bring to the market now?” He went by the moniker, The Catoonist, which is like a play on the cartoonist, but The Catoonist. He had a whole catalog of Blue Cat as comics and a bunch of different poses, bits, strips, and all that stuff.

He had a poster on his wall that was Blue Cat and this was before, simultaneously during the advent of the whole PFP craze. It was serendipitous. It was looking right at him. He had a poster on his wall that he made years ago, but it’s Blue Cat dressed up as a ninja, as a dog, as a turtle, and as all these things. He’s sitting on this couch, he’s like, “Why don’t we bring Blue Cat to the blockchain?’ It was looking at us the whole time.

Long story short, that’s what we got in alignment on. We didn’t know what to call. We didn’t know if it was going to be like the Cool Cat’s Casino or the Cool Cat’s café. It was this whole getting the brand right, getting how he would be perceived, but it ended up manifesting as Cool Cats and it’s all these different variations of Blue Cat in different outfits.

That’s the TLDR story. We had no idea the magnitude of success we would have. We thought it through and we’re thinking this super weekend project of the boys coming together, making sure the assets look right, the website, the story, the narrative, putting Twitter in the right position. We opened up Discord. We had some sales. We didn’t sell out instantly, but we hit the market in the right way and authentically.

A few hours later, we ended up selling out, and then next thing you know, there are celebrities buying Cats and we’re watching this thing explode in real-time and people are like, “What’s next?” We’re like, “We don’t even know how we got here.” It’s been this surreal road trip of assembling the plane while it’s simultaneously taking off. That’s the high-level Cool Cats story.

It’s a moment when preparation meets opportunity. That’s the whole thing.

That’s true. To that point too, it takes ten years to be an overnight success. Not to knock other collections or artists, people work at different speeds and different cadences. Clon had been working on Blue Cat for 7 to 10 years. That’s a character that he had. He had put his heart and soul into it. It wasn’t like, “How do we slap this on the blockchain and tell people, ‘That looks cool?’” He has real pain and struggle. If you go and look back at some of his comic strips of Blue Cat, you can follow Catoonist on Instagram still. You can go through the archive or even in the Cool Cats Discord.

I forget what it’s called. It might be called Originals or something like that origin story or something. There are many different instances where Blue Cat’s struggling with writer’s block and depression, like human things. It’s basically Clon who was channeling himself in this character that he’s a Blue Cat. That’s what lent itself to the stickiness of the Blue Cat, Cool Cat story is how authentic he was at channeling himself into this character. It’s not as simple as, “Cats are cute. I’m in.” On the surface, it might feel that way to some people, but there’s a story underneath it all.

There are probably two types of folks reading this story that you’ve encountered over the time of success for launch. One that’s like, “I tried to do that too, but mine didn’t go that way,” or, “I wish I did that. I missed it.” There’s so much nuance to it and the nuance is where the magic happens. I had another question, but I am curious, is that what led to the accelerated momentum during the sellout? Do you think it was the narrative, a story that you guys shared? Did you make a couple of the right calls to people you knew in this space?

No, it was totally organic, and even to this day, we’ve never paid for the endorsement. We’ve never paid for any manipulative floor what have you. Historically and retrospectively, if you go back to the crypto and ICOs, the whole subculture of crypto land, there’s nothing cute and inviting about it. There’s degenerately baked into internet crypto degens even.

Nothing but respect for Yuga and other folks of their caliber and the same thing. It’s the art and the aesthetic is, “I’m on a yacht. I’m smoking a cigarette.” It’s a different audience that I think Cool Cats, I believe, was the first to market to come with this. I wouldn’t say it’s child or kid-friendly, but it was open to all. It’s the same feeling that you get when you look at Pikachu or Hello Kitty.

There are grandparents that love it and are into it. There are kids that love it and are into it. With Cool Cats, we presented this character that was like a breath of fresh air. We also set the standard for what was the foundational pillar which influenced and informed a lot of other people after us as well. I think we’ve validated the cute and cool model. It’s not too cute, but it is also cool. There are no cigarettes. There’s no cussing. There’s no degenerate stuff like that. It’s very palpable and relatable to the masses at large.

You guys made history again when you touched down during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, a classic institute in our society. I’m curious about what led to that.

We’re the real Blue Cat float that is going to be in the parade in November 2023. Macy’s announced that they were going to open up a contest that I don’t know if they handpicked or I don’t remember how it went, but we were up against the lights of GMoney, Gary Vee with the VeeFriends, Cool Cats, and maybe 1 or 2 others. The TLDR is that the winner of a fan favorite community-voted collection would then get a balloon in the actual Macy’s Day Parade.

Super shoutout to the community. It was a neck-and-neck thing. GMoney was up there for a minute. VeeFriends was up there for a minute. No one had it in the bag, but in the last week or few days, our community banded together and made it their undying effort. We’re going to see Blue Cat in this freaking parade in real life. Everyone’s going home. The community rallied and we ended up securing that. That’s the big brand moment that we’ve been trying to funnel in as much preemptive thinking throughout the year.

When we have that moment in November when Blue Cat is being broadcasted to tens of millions of people around the world for the first time and they’re like, “What is this cat floating around?” We’re going to make sure we coalesce that into a properly thought-through activation moment from digital to physical. Shout out to our community for helping us make that a reality.

Over 69,000 votes. Pretty awesome. Congrats.

Thanks. That was a blur.

I don’t know why they’re not putting the heads on the Edge of NFT cohosts inflated in the Macy’s parade, either. I’m a little bit bitter about that.

That wouldn’t be a sight to see at all.

I’ve heard a little bit of buzz generally about the Amazon NFT marketplace and various people in projects getting involved. You can confirm, deny or neither confirm nor deny your potential involvement in the Amazon NFT marketplace. Do you see anything going on there? Is there anything you can share?

Confirm or deny? No comment. I will say it’s tough because obviously, every coin has two sides to it. Amazon’s clearly like a centralized entity and they’re very consumer-driven. You could argue that they’re the other side juxtaposed to what decentralization is all standing for.

I could argue with Amazon, but then I wouldn’t get my packages delivered to my doorstep. Be careful what I say.

It’s going to be players, Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and these other gargantuan that are going to be these gatekeepers that usher in the NFT space and expand the NFT audiences and reach as we know it. We’ve seen so many Web2 and Web2.5 brands attempt to break into the Metaverse or Web3, but there’s a fine line between authenticity and money grabbing and defining the why.

So many Web2 and Web2.5 brands attempt to break into the Metaverse or Web3, but there’s a fine line between authenticity and money grabbing and defining the why. Click To Tweet

There are also a lot of wrong ways to do it and there are a few right ways to do it. That being said, I know Amazon is probably the most well-funded company in history. Don’t quote me on that number, but they have a few acorns that they know how to spend in a way that’ll probably perpetuate their success to some degree.

All that suffice to say, I am eager to see how they end up scaling out their NFT marketplace and rolling out their NFT platform in general. It has the potential to be a big deal. When Coinbase was talking about their NFT platform, everyone was like, “Game changer. They got 1 zillion wallets. This is it. This is the moment. Lock in.” It’s just, “I guess we’re all still going to use OpenSea at the end of the day.” We’ve talked to them a little bit. I’ve talked to them a little bit. They’ve understood the implications and the lay of the land to authentically try to come to the market in some way that’ll onboard as many people as possible while simultaneously upsetting as few people as possible.

We’ll see. Until the curtain is open on that one, it’s going to be speculative who knows sandwich. I’m personally more optimistic and eager. This is a step in the right direction because I think more and more NFT collections rolling out on an increasing basis and I don’t think we have the infrastructure as a global society that there’s not one consumer touchpoint that’s been Web2.5 into Web3 that can potentially integrate us in the way that Amazon potentially could.

Speaking of businesses expanding beyond their initial mission or vision, you’ve also launched Alpha Labs. Can you tell us a little bit about the story there and what your vision is for this aspect of your business?

Basically, stepping into an advisor role with Cool Cats as opposed to being involved in the day-to-day gave me the freedom to pursue my own thing. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I need to make stuff. I need to touch things. That also put me in the position to do my own collection, Ghost Boy. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

Alpha Labs is a Web3-centric product studio that’s also NFT-centric, where myself and my cofounder Uneeb who used to work at Coinbase. The intention is to rapidly iteratively bring experimental, disruptive, and innovative products to the market. Blockalizer was the first collection and experimental tool we came out with. Long story short, I won’t get too into it, but basically, there’s a lot of non-sexy data as far as what’s inside of a transaction.

If you send someone $5, there’s nothing to look at. It’s the ETH moved here, and USDC moved here. I said, “What if there’s a way to connect to a platform where you could select a transaction address that you’ve had before TX 1, 2, 3, 4, and you could convert it into a digital collectible through P5 libraries and using generative art? It could turn something that doesn’t have visuals into a digital collectible.

That’s what I mean when I say experimental tech. Generative art within itself is not for everybody. Some people are like, “What am I looking at?” Other people who are into technology and who are tech purists are like, “This is impressive. This is cool. This is technically sound. I’m impressed by this.” If it doesn’t have a cute face on it, some people are like, “I don’t care at all.”

That was our first stab at launching something with Alpha Labs. The intention is to do twelve geneses to one a set of 1,000 every month. We’ve done two so far. We want to do twelve, but we skipped a month because we had East Denver and other stuff going on. The intention is to have another 1,000 every month.

With Alpha Labs, the intention is to focus on all these different market opportunities within space. Peer-to-peer trading, NFT trading, and fractionalization haven’t been solved. A lot of people are trying to solve wallets. MetaMask is best suited, but the user experience across the board of the Web3 land as we know it, it’s so difficult. Nothing is easy. Everything is very difficult. With Alpha Labs, our intention is to find market opportunities where we can bring innovative, easy, pain-alleviating solutions to the marketplace.

If you look at Revoke.cash, for instance, they’re a prime example of the formula that we’re trying to apply to ourselves as well. Before them, someone would click a wrong link, they’d get phished and then their art block or something is gone, their Ape, or whatever. There’s this scramble that went crazy on Twitter. People are like, “How do I revoke all my stuff?” They saw a market opportunity Revoke.cash and there you go.

For a Ghost Boy, you mean?

Yeah.

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Tell me the secret. What is it?

What’s immortal can never die. There you go.

It gives me a hug and it scares me even more.

I think so.

Ever? Before NFTs?

I bought another deed.

Infinite money.

That’s better than zero.

It’s incredibly hot in Texas.

Shall we get onto the Hot Topics?

That’s a great idea.

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That sounds like a job for your new laboratory.

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