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Navigating The Digital Evolution In Identity, Collections, Food & Fashion With Mocaverse, Pudgy Penguin, SARÀH, Gmoney, Vertu & Legitimate
We are seeing theexciting digital evolution happening everywhere, which just goes to show theincredible potential we have yet to see in the space. In today’s episode, we goon a global journey right in Asia to the outer edge of innovation along withamazing guests who help us navigate this digital evolution across identity,collections, food, fashion, and even phones! We sit down with Gojo Satoshi from Mocaverse to talk about how they plan to reinvent digital identity. LucaNetz of PudgyPenguins shares their incredibly successful toydrop. We hear from Yuya, who is building a viral blockchain-powered food ratingapp called SARÀH. Gmoney also shares his perspective on the state of fashion and Web3 inAsia and Lina from Vertu talks about their luxury Web3 phone brand. Plus, we go fullcircle and chat with the founder of Legitimate, Calvin Chan, on building digital and physical fashion. Get a front-rowseat in today’s digital evolution; tune in to this special edition of Edge ofNFT Asia!
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Navigating The DigitalEvolution In Identity, Collections, Food & Fashion With Mocaverse, PudgyPenguin, SARÀH, Gmoney, Vertu & Legitimate
Welcome to another special Edge of NFT Asia roadshow edition, where we take you on a global journey to the outer edge of innovation and digital identity, collections, food, fashion, and even phones. First, we catch up with our friends from Mocaverse and find out how they plan to reinvent digital identity while also creating a robust reward program on Web3 steroids. We traveled to Seoul and Singapore where we connected with some early and emerging Web3 pioneers shaping the future of food, fashion, and digital collectibles.
You will hear from Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, on their incredibly successful toy drop, as well as the founder of a viral blockchain-powered food-rating app. In addition, we catch up with gmoney and hear his perspective on the intersection of fashion and Web3. Sticking with this theme, you will then meet the team behind a luxury Web3 phone brand. Lastly, we go full circle and chat with the founder of a Web3 company that connects physical products to digital identities and has been used by Puma and Mocaverse to close out this special guest-packed episode. You don’t want to miss it.
Welcome back to our special new recurring segment, the MocaMoment. We’re catching up with the team at Mocaverse on a monthly basis given the breadth and depth of this special growing ecosystem. For those that don’t know, Mocaverse is the Animoca Brands membership NFT collection of 8,888 unique beings. They call them the Mocas. They are building the world’s largest Web3 identity pass in culture and entertainment, empowering personal growth, partner project growth, and the growth of adoption of Web3 in general. For full disclosure, our parent company, Edge of Company, lies within the Mocaverse ecosystem. This is a regular segment as part of our immediate partnership.
I’m excited that we have Gojo Satoshi who’s the Marketing Lead of Mocaverse and the Marketing Director of Animoca Brands. Gojo came from a creative advertising agency background with over ten years of marketing and branding consulting experience. He was the Head of Marketing of an NFT marketplace. Before that, he was Head of Brand of a crypto exchange.
Now, he is all about crafting the right story for Mocaverse and building the largest Web3 identity pass for culture and entertainment. He also knows how to throw a great party, which I got to experience in Singapore where I got this dope hat that I’m rocking as well. It has an RFID tag, and he’s rocking that as well. Gojo, it’s great to have you on the show. There’s a lot to cover.
Thanks for having me.
There’s so much to talk about here. We’ve got the $20 million investment round, the Moca ID, and other stuff to cover. First, how are you doing? It was great to see you in Singapore. Thanks for building the Moca community and having us over at that event. It sold out. There’s a lot of FOMO, but we had a great time.
Thanks, Josh. I’m glad you liked the party in Singapore. It was a hell of a party. Thanks for the kind words on the $20 million. It’s a strong vote of confidence from the investors on what we have been building and what we have been experimenting with in the past few months. To us, the vision has always been super clear. It’s the same for the team, which is to build the largest Web3 identity pass for the culture and entertainment segment.
With the new capital, we can even be bolder and more aggressive in growing the project on all fronts. That includes product development, the partnership side, marketing channels, community, and more. Our latest focus for those who haven’t been following us is the Moca ID. It’s our approach to build on-chain identities in the form of.MocaDID, which I’m sure we will talk a lot more about later. I’m super excited about being part of the project. I can’t wait to show the world what we’re building.
You have been busy but let’s start with something more simple. Tell us about this cool swag. I got this hat, and I’ve been playing around with it. You could tap on it with your phone. This was a collaboration with a cool company that I happened to interview in Seoul. I met with the founder, Calvin. They have done a huge collection with Puma. These guys are crushing it with some great technology. What does tapping on the hat do if you happen to be around someone who’s part of the Moca family?
It’s our first phygital merch collection that we rolled out at the Moca 2049 event. You should have kept the stickers, and that’s for the culture. This is where the NFT chip lies. You use your phone and tap it, and you can claim an NFT, which is this MoCap visual. It will be an NFT itself. Once you claim this NFT, we will provide a phygital experience for the MoCap holders. In the future, we will be dropping exclusive benefits or real-life perks for holders. For example, right after the Singapore 2049, we gave away one championship ticket to MoCap holders for free. Keep the MoCap NFTs and look out for more surprises.
It still works without the sticker. I didn’t completely miss that.
As long as you claim the cap before you throw away the stickers.
I think I’m good. We will figure it out. Let’s talk about the investment round. It was led by CMCC Global and a lot of other interesting folks. You talked about the big vision here. What I’ve come to understand from getting to know the team and having a chance to experience the ecosystem is a lot of that vision comes to us in terms of gaming and entertainment. Maybe you can elaborate on that aspect of Mocaverse.
We’re trying to build Mocaverse almost like the L1 empowerment layer across culture and entertainment. That’s what the Animoca Brands ecosystem has been focusing on. We’re building this loyalty points program where we integrate with different portfolio companies within the ecosystem. We have been doing it in season one already with the Mocana Odyssey campaign.
We have been doing it with GAMEE and a cool Mocaverse group game, and then we also did it with Biker and Dustland. That’s the approach that we’re trying to get at. When you think about it, gaming, culture, and entertainment are probably the most retail-facing pillars in Web3 and probably the easiest way to onboard the crypto-curious and Web2 crowd. This is where we’re focusing on and trying to target with Mocaverse.
It makes a lot of sense. In Outer Edge LA, we doubled down on this intersection of gaming, entertainment, and culture. That’s where we see the most traction as well. That’s where people are excited. It’s one thing to have these tools available for digital art and PFP projects and to have the infrastructure, but it’s a whole other thing to experience it from a consumer lens. At the end of the day, it’s part of being human. We like to consume things. Those tend to be things that we watch or listen to or games. That makes a lot of sense.
You have been quite clever about this. I’m trying to understand what’s going on here behind the scenes. I don’t get that much more than everyone else. Part of this mass adoption approach is this buzz around Moca IDs. I’ve claimed mine. I’ve shared some with some friends. We’re going to announce a pretty cool contest for our audience. What are some of the unique privileges that await Moca ID holders as they journey through the immersive realm of Mocaverse?
Moca ID is our approach to try to build and tackle that concept of on-chain or digital identity. Moca ID will become the on-chain identity for the participants within the Mocaverse ecosystem. There’s an analogy I love to use when I explain the Moca ID concept. Think of Moca ID as your passport plus your club membership card combined in one pass. Not only does it reflect your identity with that unique.MocaDID, which is your legal or passport name that people will recognize you with, but you can also earn loyalty points passively for even more benefits when you engage in different activities or engagement within the Mocaverse ecosystem. It’s exactly like a frequent-flyer program but for Web3 and not only limited to airline experiences.
It’s a good frequent-flyer program, not like Spirit Airlines. It’s a high-end frequent-flyer program.
It’s like a Oneworld premium frequent-flyer program. Imagine going to a restaurant for food or playing games and not just flying airlines or traveling to earn points. You can also redeem these points with a lot more different real-life benefits and utilities. That’s the beauty of it. By engaging within the ecosystem, you’re not only earning the points passively. Because we’re so early in Web3, you’re building reputation and influence along the way. The more you engage, the more you build your network. The more you earn, the stronger the network effect you will start building within the space.
Mocaverse has always been this ecosystem play. We’re trying to expand it bigger than ever with Moca ID as the first step. When you think about it, we launched the Mocaverse NFT in the beginning. It’s only 8,888 NFTs. We can only reach that many with that finite amount of NFTs. With Moca ID, we can reach a lot more users. That means a bigger network effect and a bigger net collective value that we’re all co-creating. That’s a win for everyone. It’s not dilutive, but when you think about it, it’s an ecosystem expansion play. That’s what we’re trying to achieve with Moca ID.
It’s like a Oneworld airline program unhinged with the types of benefits that these airlines would love to have. It’s complicated in a Web2 world to negotiate all these agreements and get all this input from all these different community members, whereas you have the flexibility to do whatever you want without the same bumpers. It could be hundreds of partners and all these things that people already want to do.
That’s what makes a good rewards program. You’re not incentivizing them to do something they didn’t want to do. You’re adding gas to wherever they want to go, “Get this extra benefit while you’re doing what you already love.” Those are the airline programs and plane programs that I enjoy. It sounds like you’re going in that direction, so it’s cool. On another note, you also announced a partnership with Phaver. I downloaded the app. I checked it out. I updated my profile to flex my Mocas. Honestly, I’m still jetlagged. I have a lot going on. I haven’t digested what Phaver is all about. Break it down for me and our audience.
Phaver is probably the biggest decentralized social app within the Lens ecosystem. They’re incentivizing you to create, interact, and socialize on the app. The foundation of this partnership is built on the mutual dedication to build Web3 social and on-chain identities with Phaver. Once you’re on the app, you can see the profiles. In nature, it’s either .Lens or .Phaver. They adopted .Cyber, which is CyberConnect. They’re big on digital identities and decentralized social interaction.
Our first step with them is onboarding the Mocaverse NFT collection to the app so that people can now connect their Moca NFTs and flex their muscles that, “I own a Mocaverse NFT.” There’s a limited-time offering for those who are connected to NFTs. They can earn Phaver credit and Phaver points at the multiplier within a limited time to amplify and grow the Web3 social pie together. A little bit of alpha here is the next step as you can tell because the Moca ID will be appearing in the form of .Moca. We hopefully will see .Moca be integrated into the Phaver app very soon.
I was going to ask. It seemed like that’s the direction you were heading there. Moca has a nice ring to it as an extension. We will leave it there. That’s not all the news. You are so busy building and I love it. You also announced a big collaboration with Rarible to create MocaMart. I’m curious about what inspired this program. How is this custom marketplace different from other marketplaces that are out there?
We launched MocaMart a few months back. What’s new is that reward program. I can touch on the incentives on MocaMart first because there are two main reasons why we needed to build our custom marketplace. It’s because of security reasons and also better integration into our ecosystem. In this space, we see a lot of scam collections, imposters, and shady OTC trades. We always put our community first when we think of different user experiences and products.
Building MocaMart with Rarible is to provide a safe haven for true fans or our community to interact and trade with peace of mind. Secondly, when you go to MocaMart, instead of trades and full prices, you can see the XP count. The beauty of MocaMart is it automatically reflects the Moca XP per Moca. You have way better visibility on what you’re purchasing. You can make a way more informed decision when you ape into a Moca. It’s not driven by only the floor price or the trades that you love.
Digital Evolution: Building MocaMart with Rarible provides a safe haven for true fans or our community to interact and trade with peace of mind.
I didn’t realize that MocaMart started a while back. It caught my attention with the new program. That’s the goal. It worked. You understand how we consumers are busy zombies. Eventually, we wake up and we’re like, “That’s exciting.” To your point, these are key parts of a marketplace now because we have seen the challenges with the generic one-size-fits-all marketplace from a creative royalties perspective to the overwhelming amount of stuff on there, and then not having the custom features for specific collections that are relevant. You mentioned some other perks. I’m excited to see that partnership evolve. I’m excited about everything you have going on. Before we close out, you’ve been working hard on an exciting event coming up in Hong Kong. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
We are going to announce and set the date and more details. What we’re doing is we’re co-hosting a side event in early November 2023. We will be hosting the side event around Hong Kong FinTech Week and also ApeFest. The whole objective of this side event is to onboard Web2 users onto Web3. It will be a big side event open to the public instead of just holders. Holders will have different unique privileges if they attend.
It will be a Web3 experience showcase where Web2 audiences and other Web3 communities can go to different booths and experience different projects. We booked a venue that’s big enough to host 4,000 people. We’re going big on different experiences for the audience. We will have, as usual, our party theme. We will hire 100 DJs to perform in our show and make sure Web3 or Web2 people or the retail crowd can enjoy themselves in our event. More details will be coming in the next couple of days.
That sounds exciting. I’m looking forward to hearing how that goes and hopefully, even coming out there myself. I have such a crazy travel schedule but I already have the FOMO. We will see. You never know. Maybe I’ll hop on another plane after going to Dubai. You have so much going on. I appreciate your time and spending some time with our audience and letting people know all this cool stuff cooking.
Thanks for your generosity. Thanks to the whole team. I’m excited to announce that our audiences are going to get 50 Moca IDs hot off the press. It pays to be early. We know that in Web3. We’re going to announce all sorts of fun ways that you will have a chance to earn these Moca IDs and share them with our audience. If you don’t know and you just tuned in, Moca IDs will provide unique privileges and bonuses to holders using Mocaverse’s reward system. Think of it as an airline reward program on Web3 steroids. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
I want to quickly add that with the 50 Moca IDs, we wanted to design the Moca ID program to be as inclusive as possible but we’re starting it exclusively. Those 50 Moca IDs will be distributed in the form of invite codes. Before the actual mint date, we’re only giving out the invite codes to Moca holders and close partners such as Edge in this case. You have to have the invite codes to be eligible to reserve a Moca ID spot where you can have priority access to calling dibs on your favorite Moca ID name, so Gojo.Moca or GojoSatoshi.Moca won’t be taken by someone else.
That’s the exclusiveness. The invite codes will evolve into something more referral model-like. After the mint, we can still use the invite codes as a referral code. If you refer someone using the invite code, you get part of the attribution from that person. In other words, the more active your referee is, you as a referrer will earn more points from him or her. We have been advising our community to be wise when they give out these invite codes. Edge has been a great partner of Mocaverse. That’s why we think these invite codes are in good hands with Edge.
You heard it, people. If you want to have a chance to get one of these invite codes, make sure you’re going to do something with it. Participate with the community. Don’t just put this on the shelf and let it get dusty. Let’s do this opportunity justice if you decide to apply. I appreciate all that cool context. Gojo, it’s great to hang out with you and learn more about what’s happening in the world of Mocana. I’m sure we will have lots of fun things to talk about in another month.
Thanks for having me.
As we wrap up this edition of MocaMoment, be sure to mark your calendars for the Future Blockchain Summit at Dubai Harbour, where you can explore the future of Web3 technology, blockchain, and gaming firsthand from October 15th to the 18th, 2023. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Gojo, will I see you or the Mocaverse team there?
Hong Kong is our top priority. I will FOMO in Hong Kong.
Fair enough. I’ll make sure you hear about it. If you’re a Mocaverse holder or an Edge of NFT fan, come say hi. I’ll be there from October 10th through the 20th. I hope to see some of you. I’m excited to hang out with 1inch, Binance, Circle, and Sui. A bunch of folks will be in Dubai. There’s a lot going on internationally, and we try to cover it all. I also look forward to your event in Hong Kong. Thanks again for hanging out.
Thanks, Josh.
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I’m Josh Kriger, co-host of Edge of NFT. I’m at TOKEN2049 with none other than Luca Netz. It’s great to have you on the show finally.
I’m happy to be here.
You have done so much for the industry in terms of Pudgy Penguins. For those who don’t know at home, Luca leads the NFT collection of 8,888 adorable penguins. He took over in April 2022 and revived the project from a pretty rocky past. That’s the nature of Web3 and emerging technology, expanding into the physical world with Pudgy Toys, amassing over $500,000 in sales within two days on Amazon. That’s not too shabby. You’re the visionary leader of a transcending brand.
Here’s a shout-out to Peter.
What’s next?
Thank you.
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It’s nice to meet you. Thank you.
It took off.
Thank you.
Yeah.
My Twitter handle is @SKYuya03.
Thank you.
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What’s up? How are you?
How has that impacted your roadmap with 9dcc?
I’m not that involved in it.
Thanks.
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How are you doing?
It’s purely an AI. It’s based on ChatGPT.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. Take care.
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It’s great to meet you.
I remember AirSwap.
Walk us through the use case there.
Thanks for hanging out.
It’s a pleasure.
Important Links
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Instagram - Pudgy Penguins
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@LucaNetz - Twitter
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@PudgyPenguins - Twitter
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TikTok - Pudgy Penguins
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@SKYuya03 - Twitter
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Snowfro - Twitter
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Twitter - gmoney
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@LegitimateTech - Twitter