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August 5, 2022

GMoney - NFT Thought Leader, Influencer & Creator Of 9dcc And Admit One NFT, Plus: G. Love’s Community Token With YellowHeart, Yuga Labs Lawsuit Threats, And More…

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What’s next in the NFT space? How do we keep the community growing despite the pullback while we aim for mass adoption? Here to share his wisdom is renowned NFT cultural thought leader, educator, and community authority, Gmoney. Gmoney is the Founder of Admit One NFT, which provides holders access to the entire gmoney ecosystem, and 9dcc, the first ever crypto-native luxury, house, and lifestyle platform. He joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to share his philosophy and his vision for the future as he teases innovative ideas and potential collaborations. Keep an eye out for today’s Hot Topics, including G. Love Community Token with G. Love himself and Yuga Labs’ potential class action lawsuit over ApeCoin and NFT sales.

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Listen to the podcast here

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GMoney – NFT Thought Leader, Influencer & Creator Of 9dcc And Admit One NFT, Plus: G. Love’s Community Token With YellowHeart, Yuga Labs Lawsuit Threats, And More…

This is Gmoney and I love building the Web3 community. I’m launching the first ever crypto-native luxury house and lifestyle platform, 9dcc. I’m here on the Edge of NFT and they are launching your brain into NFT space. Hold on tight, and stay tuned.

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NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out why keeping curiosity alive is so important in life and business and how it led to Gmoney’s latest drops.

Why Jay-Z’s quote, “My life is tailor-made for me.” Also, have so much meaning to the Gmoney roadmap.

**Also, how G. Love is transforming the community and the music business with his latest drop, the G. Love Community Token, in partnership with YellowHeart. All this and more in this episode. **

**Don’t forget, we put a little soiree together called NFT LA, and it brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to 2023.NFTLA.live to get on the whitelist for tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better. Also, as intimate and impactful events are happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there. **

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This episode features Gmoney, Founder of the Admit One NFT, which provides holders access to the entire Gmoney ecosystem and 9dcc, the first ever crypto-native luxury house and lifestyle platform. Gmoney is a renowned NFT cultural thought leader, educator, and community authority known for sporting his iconic orange beanie CryptoPunk.

**He has deep investment experience and used his time during the pandemic as a catalyst to understand blockchain technologies, become a leader in the space, as well as to invest and advise over 80 blockchain projects, giving him unparalleled access to the best and most innovative technologies. **

**Gmoney is also one of the largest collectors of NFTs in the world and was listed in the inaugural list of Fortune’s NFTy 50 of the 50 most influential people in NFTs. He has advised major corporations, celebrities, entertainers, and athletes around the world on their NFT and metaverse strategies. He uses his platform to elevate minorities, women in crypto, and people of color in the space and is positioned as the authentic voice and trusted advocate for mainstream adoption. **

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**Welcome, Gmoney. **

Thank you for having me. That was a mouthful. I appreciate it.

**It’s your fault for being such a prolific leader in this space. It was great to connect with you IRL at NFT LA. You said something was coming but didn’t give us more than a sneak peeks, and it’s clear that you’ve done some epic stuff. We are excited to learn more about it now. **

I’m excited to talk about it. It’s been a long and thoughtful journey, even though I was publicly coming out with it. It’s been something I have been working on. I’ve been thinking about it since I got into the crypto space, so it’s been a fun process.

**For those that don’t know about your prolific background and support for everyone to understand, you’ve done a lot in finance, investing, and advising for a long time. You wrote a manifesto that goes into the genesis of the Admit One drop. For those that haven’t read the Manifesto yet, I’m sure they are going to be excited and want to dive in after the show. Give us the cliff notes and some of this origin story that led to what we are talking about now. **

I put it out there in place over the roadmap because, to me, it’s as long as I have a set of guiding principles. I explained why I was launching the community now and my reasons for doing so, and also listing. I believe it was 30 or 31 different principles that I try to live by the most in my life and be like, “These are my guiding principles.” I’m working on some cool things. You don’t know what’s coming next. That’s how life is, but I think we are in an important part of the cycle. This is almost like the calm before the storm of real mainstream adoption.

That, to me, is what has been exciting. Even with this massive pullback in the space, you still have people getting up excited about the technology and community building, and that’s something that is the successful calm. You always hear every overnight success and years of hard work that goes into that. We are in years of hard work period that will lead to the “overnight successes” over the next 2 to 5 years.

**I couldn’t agree with you more. Unpack that hard work part of your statement a little bit more for us, and let’s throw humility out the door for a moment. What are some of the nuts and bolts of what you’ve even built over the last few years that led to this moment? **

When I first got into the space in August of 2020, I went down the NFT rabbit hole because I have been involved in crypto since 2017. When I started going down the NFT rabbit hole, it made sense to me very quickly because I started playing Fortnite at the beginning of quarantine. When I started playing Fortnite, I played with my friends and their nephews, and these kids were 10, 11, and 12. The first thing that they would ask me is, “What skins did you buy?” Skins don’t give me any special powers. Why would I spend $7 to $8 on something to change how I look? This game is free to play.

It took me a few weeks to realize that I was like, “I started spending a bunch of money on skins.” It was then that I was like, “We are going to have this massive supercycle where these kids are 12 years old, and in 10 years, they are going to be 22. They are going to have their own disposable income, and there’ll be totally okay with owning a purely digital asset. There’s going to be this massive supercycle. I don’t know how to harness it yet, but I know I need to pay attention to it.” Lo and behold, I found NFTs months later, and I was like, “This is it.” NFT is your profile picture and your skin on Twitter.

I started going down the rabbit hole. I remember when I first started, I would go in and find a project and be like, “I’m going to buy $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 worth of this project, and I wanted to do it across 10 to 20 different projects.” I remember I was a whale then, buying somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. I’d go in and sweep the floor or I buy a bunch at once. People were like, “Don’t spend all your money at once. Spread it out.” I’m like, “No. I have my plan.” I remember I had heard about CryptoPunks, but I was like, “I don’t want to buy CryptoPunks. I want to buy the next CryptoPunks.”

I was going around to these different projects. I ended up minting a bunch of Chromie Squiggles one day because I wanted to own 500 in total. I ended up only minting a little under 300. I remember when I went into Chromie Squiggles, I was trying to figure out how to do a mass mint or a batch mint function, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t find the Discord, so I sat in front of my computer, minting for an hour straight. Once I was done, I went to go check my Discord and somebody recognized my wallet from other projects that I had swept. They were like, “They posted the link to the Art Blocks Discord.”

I started minting around the 1,700s. I didn’t know if people wanted to own a historic year for a Squiggle or the year their dad or kid was born. I’m like, “I’m going to mint for the next 300 to 400 years and see what I get.” I did that, and I saw people were going nuts, like running home from dinner to mint stuff while I was minting and all this stuff.

Snowfro, the Founder of Art Blocks, was like, “What are you doing? Stop wasting your money. If you are going to be spending this much money on NFTs, you need to buy a CryptoPunk.” Him and a couple of other OGs spent the next 2 or 3 days red-pilling me on CryptoPunks, and I was like, “I get it now. This makes so much sense.” I bought a zombie a few days later. I was looking for a CryptoPunk ape, which I bought about a month later. When I bought the ape, I wrote my thread on Twitter which went viral on crypto Twitter. That was the beginning of Gmoney and the CryptoPunk ape. I realized at that time that I saw space very differently than most. If I were going to go around red-pilling people one dinner conversation at a time, nobody would ever understand what NFTs are.

I was like, “I needed the power of social media to get my message and put my point of view out there. Hopefully, people would agree with it, follow it, and understand it.” I remember when I started that thread, I had around 50 followers or something. I was like, “If I get to 10,000 by the end of the year, I will consider this a massive success.” I got to 10,000 within 1 or 2 months, and the rest has been history ever since.

NFT gmoney | gmoney

Gmoney: Even with this massive pullback in the space, you still have people getting excited about the technology and the community building.

**I’m reflecting on our combo with Erick Snowfro and about how Chromie Squiggles started. It’s a fun story if you have a moment to check out that show. I’m sure you personally know Erick’s story too. He delayed his launch for a couple of months because he was dGening on NBA Top Shots. That delay is what gave momentum a chance and serendipity to work. You realize a lot of this is happenstance, and people are looking for that magic bullet, but we are still learning together. **

**You took all that experience, core beliefs, feelings, and DNA that went into that Manifesto. You created Admit One. It was a free mint also, which is atypical for this space but packed with utility. Tell our readers a little bit about that. What are the benefits of holding one of the thousand Admit Ones? **

Myself and the team spent a lot of time thinking about 1) The distribution and then 2) The pricing or the mechanism. We were going back and forth up until two weeks before the actual launch. It’s like, “Do we do free mint or an option? Do we do an allow list?” I want to solve mainly two things. 1) I wanted to make it as inclusive as possible and I didn’t want any gas wars with that, and then 2) I wanted to have a wide distribution of holders.

There are 1,000 NFTs out there and 890 unique wallets. You basically have 89% of it across different wallets. Those were the things that I wanted because I wanted to build a strong community. I didn’t necessarily want 300 people hoarding NFTs. If you want to go out there and you are a believer in it, you’d have to pay up. I have tons of friends that are whales that would love to own 5% or 10%. I’m like, “I want you to. You can, but you have to go out and buy it on the open market. I’m not going to give it to you free.”

That’s done with a lot of cool and interesting things with regards to the community building, and how to incentivize and how happy people to be part of it. I knew right out of the gate I had my vision for what I wanted to do with it. I did a collaboration with Adidas into the metaverse NFT drop back in December 2021. I’m having conversations with a lot of other brands that are going to be very interesting. Nothing that I can talk about yet, but the conversations are ongoing. Like anything in business, especially the new frontier, things take time and they usually take longer than you might want them to.

I also knew that I wanted to launch my interpretation of what a luxury fashion brand will be on Web3. As a consumer, there are these things that I didn’t see that I wanted to see. One of them is certifiable scarcity. Another is how can you use this for community building? A lot of these things are a no-brainer as a consumer that I would love to see that I haven’t seen. I’m like, “The technology exists. It’s out there. Nobody’s harnessing it yet, and I see it.”

This reminds me very much of when I bought my CryptoPunk. A lot more people understand NFTs and the utility value behind them now, but people aren’t necessarily pushing the space forward the way they should. There are a bunch of projects that are, but what the brands from Web2 the legacy world need to see is success on some level from the crypto-natives.

If we wait for the legacy brands to do it, it will probably never happen because they are not incentivized to disrupt themselves or their way of doing business, but it will happen from the crypto-native. That was the genesis behind deciding to launch 9dcc. Admit One is your ticket to all things 9dcc along with all the other cool things I’m working on, but 9dcc is my main focus.

One of the interesting things I wasn’t expecting with the launch of Admit One was how energized the community was around it and how the community has helped build around it. There were a bunch of community members early on that were like, “Let’s utilize this community and get an allow list. Let’s utilize the Admit One community.” Because it’s a smaller community, it makes it easier for a higher percentage of community members to get granted access to other communities.

We had around 5 or 6 people that were running around getting onto a bunch of different allow lists. Internally, we are like, “We don’t have the time to do this. This wasn’t necessarily part of the plan, but people are energized around it. Let’s give them the resources they need to go around and get the community onto allow lists as people see and choose to do.” We formed The Watchers, which is part of Admit One, which is going out there and getting onto different allow lists. They have their criteria for projects to get on and stuff like that.

That’s been cool. That’s something I didn’t expect. If we were sitting here months ago and I was telling you my vision for Admit One, that wasn’t something that crossed my mind. It’s like, “Let’s empower the community.” I think that’s something that’s powerful. As much as I have my vision of what I want to do, you also have to listen to the community and give them some of what they want. It’s very much like the give and take. I have my vision, and I know I’m going to execute that the way I want to execute it, but also create that room for the community to be part of that journey with me.

**It’s fascinating the excitement and community spirit that seems to have emerged here. It must’ve been fun to be a part of that. The ITERATION-01 is the first 9dcc product launch. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What’s the scoop with it? **

The only thing that I can say now is that it will be a t-shirt. It’s going to be my interpretation of the perfect tee. It’s something that I find. It’s super comfortable. I have been wearing a sample of it for the last months. It’s been something that I feel comfortable putting my name on. It’s something I’m building and making for myself that I’m hoping other people will like as well. That’s all I can say right now, but a lot of extras that will be going into it, along with the community building and all the cool stuff with that.

**More broadly speaking, as far as the ITERATION-01 is concerned. Is that something exclusively accessible by your community, or is there broader access to it? Could you share a little bit broad-level on that? **

The only way you’ll be able to access it is by owning an Admit One token. I purposely designed it that way. The interesting thing is no matter what I would have done, there would have been a demand for it. How do you solve getting broad distribution without creating gas wars? That was the genesis for distributing Admit One so that now I have this token-gated access where I don’t need to worry about getting bodied every drop because that’s the headache and nerve-wracking. No business wants to go through that in any way, shape, or form, at any level, let alone once a month or once every week.

New frontier things take time and usually take longer than you might want them to. Click To Tweet

Even what we have seen with PREMINT in spite of their best efforts, there are challenges with the tools and technology out there to support that queuing process, and no one has quite figured it out. Having that established community that you work with makes it easier. It’s a meaningful number, but it’s not so overwhelming that you can’t engage with that community on an in-depth basis.

**I don’t have too much time to listen to podcasts. I happened to turn on the one with you and proof and got a little bit of a sense of how you are looking at the community and how you’ve been impressed with the amount of engagement in the community. It would be great to check in with you now a little bit further on how the community is developing so far, what you are learning about the community, and where you hope to go from here from a community perspective. **

The reason why I went with 1,000 was because I knew that I could provide value for 1,000 people. If it is a 5,000-member community or a 10,000, eventually, I will get there. There’s no need to rush it because I want to perfect it. That was the advice that Kevin told me early on, back in January 2022. It was at most a month after the PROOF launched. I was toying with the idea somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000, and he was like, “Do 1,000 and make sure you understand it.” It’s big enough to your point and has enough scale, but it’s not so big that it’s overwhelming and you are going to be filling out customer support tickets every day for twenty hours a day.

It’s been an interesting learning process. Again, when I think about brands and building stuff, you only need 1,000 true fans. I forgot who wrote it, but everybody is generally familiar with it. People have been talking about this for years. Web3 is putting that to the test and we are seeing it play out pretty successfully where a lot of the biggest NFT projects in the space have 3,000 or 4,000 unique wallets. That’s minuscule.

You are talking about these brands and projects commanding multiple millions of dollars. In some cases, billions of dollars worth of market value from such a small community already. That shows you the value of the community and being able to interact with the community. There will be a lot of cool points of interaction, where there’ll be opportunities for community feedback. By creating and having that intimate community from the start, you are going to be able to do cool things down the road.

**That was our thinking behind the size of the first NFT LA, and the amount of VIP passes that we had. There’s way more demand, but we wanted to do something that was meaningful for the people involved and create a level of intimacy. That’s an energy that you can’t change out for anything. It’s so valuable to have that intimacy. We are thinking about building out the next NFT LA, and we have the same thought process. How do we make it bigger, bolder, better, and scalable but also still intimate? That’s a good framework for everyone to think about the projects that they created in the space. **

You’ve done that and I’m excited to see where things go next. One of those pieces which you’ve talked about a lot in terms of the evolution of the project so far is partnerships and collaborations. When we think of these next steps beyond ITERATION-01, do you have any partnerships or collaborations that are cooking that you could share with us? If you can’t share the deets with us, maybe talk more broadly about how you think about collabs and partnerships.

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