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Polka City: A Groundbreaking, Immersive NFT Virtual City Experience With Carmelo Milian Plus Perfume and Pringle NFTs, Vee Friends Launch Delay, Cheugy Discussion, And More
One of the beauties of NFTs is its amazing ability to connect people from all over the world with similar preferences. Carmelo Milian wants to bring that up a notch by creating a virtual city and providing a truly immersive experience. Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley, and Josh Kriger sit down with the developer of Polka City, a fully autonomous contract-based NFT platform that will allow users to invest, trade, and sell assets. Carmelo showcases the game’s demo, discussing how to navigate and make the most out of its features. He even talks about the current status of their development, citing its many ups and downs. The four also dive into today’s hot topics, from the still-delayed Vee Friends by Gary Vee to the most outlandish NFT items available right now, including a twig and recorded farts.
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Polka City: A Groundbreaking, Immersive NFT Virtual City Experience With Carmelo Milian
We aim to bring you not only the top 1% of what’s going on with NFTs but also what will stand the test of time. We explore the nuts and bolts in the business side and also the human element of how NFTs are changing the way we interact with the things we love. This show is for the futurist and dreamers, disruptors and creators, fans and connectors, and the makers and doers that are pumped about this ecosystem and driving where it goes next.
This episode features guest Carmelo Milian. He’s the developer of Polka City, a new fully autonomous contract-based NFT platform that allows you to invest in virtual assets in the form of a virtual city. Carmelo has extensive technical management experience, including over a decade with Microsoft as a Senior IT Operations Consultant and as President and Founder of OneCloud, which enables companies to optimize Cloud management. Carmelo, welcome.
Thanks for having me.
It’s great to have you on the show. There’s so much fun stuff happening in the world of blockchain. Virtual cities are one of those topics that we can’t get enough of. A funny story is I learned about what you’re up to when I was looking for different virtual cities to participate in because I’m a fan of the concept. It smacked me over the head that you were doing something different. When I saw these virtual assets that you can buy in your city and then accrue revenue around, it was like, “Whoa.” A lot of these cities people don’t know what’s going to happen and how they’re going to make money or even if they will make money. For you, it’s right there, a clear value proposition. Was that intentional?
It was intentional. We wanted to build a virtual economy. We thought about all these companies like Roblox taking all my kid’s money and not giving them back. All these games sell you a lot of stuff and you’re spending but you don’t get a return or the return is something that you cannot sell, you cannot make money off. We decided, “How about we have something like an economy, a mix of Roblox and Grand Theft Auto without the violence, something where people can feel that the money that they put in, they’re going to get it back eventually?” That’s what we did.
I’m excited to own a barbershop. I’ve always wanted to own a barbershop. I remember the first barbershop that I went to. You can’t beat that neck hot towel shave. I’m going to offer some special services in our barbershop. I hope that’s okay with you.
Definitely. We are going to get creative. One of the NFT assets, for example, the hot dog stands. You’re not going to be able to sell hotdogs because you’re to going to spend your good earned POLC on a virtual hot dog. For example, the hot dogs, they’re going to be ticket scalpers where you can go to a hotdog stand and see what events are happening in Polka City and buy your tickets there. The owner of that hot dog stand will get a little cut of the action.
**How does this all get conceived? Is this all in your imagination? Is there a team? How many people? **
It’s right here and the entire community. One of the greatest things is that we have a community that, from the beginning, has been on board with the idea. You have no idea of the number of good ideas and strategies that I get. This is becoming a monster and it’s going to be successful because of the ideas of the community.
Can you talk about building a community from nothing into where it is now? What was the process of that? How did you make that happen? Have you done that before?
Building a community is easy. Building a good community is hard. If you want 10,000 or 20,000 people in your community, you can do airdrop or give away something for free. People will come over for bounties and all this and then they go for nothing. Ninety percent of everyone in our community is people who have invested, people who have bought NFTs and they want to see success. That’s how it is. Building it up, I’m not going to take that credit. That credit goes to Noah and the community and Fatih. They are in the industry and they’ve been doing cryptocurrency marketing for a long time. They did Polka City.
The private sale sold in five minutes and the presale sold in 30 seconds. The presale was a crazy thing. We launched the contract and everything is right. Zero time comes in, we’re open. I’m a little bit nervous because I want to make sure that nothing’s going wrong with the contract. We were live the first time and I opened it. I clicked and everything is pending. I said, “What’s going on?” The next thing is Noah pops a message, “We’re sold out.” Everything was pending because we were sold out in 30 seconds. I never saw one transaction. Everything was way down the blockchain. It was crazy. In 30 seconds, that’s when we knew we’re going to make this thing happen. Once you get that backing, there’s no reason why not to make this happen.
What was it about the launch, the story, the community you’re building do you think that caused that to happen? It’s such a rapid sale and such passion for the project.
Those are Noah’s and Fatih’s secrets. They already had the channels and they already knew the investors. They were warming up the presale for weeks before it happened. When this thing opened, everybody knew about the NFT virtual economy. They knew already that the NFTs we’re going to be giving are high APY. That’s one of our other things. Our max cap is 250 million and that’s going to be our total supply. Out of that, 225 million is all for the people who invest. We made that pool that will last up to three years for all these people buying NFTs to get their returns immediately so that they feel comfortable in the platform knowing that it’s for a specific period of time. When that is gone, it’s okay because by then, we should be already in the game with the actual economy.
I’ve noticed this interesting style you’ve had with communicating updates to the community where you don’t make promises you can’t keep but you give them enough of the vision that they’re excited. It seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into the communication side. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
I worked for Microsoft for a while. If you went to a customer and you tell them something, it needed to happen. I’ll tell you a quick story. I had an account manager who went to a known bank. Back then it was SMS. He said, “I need SMS to do this and that.” Things that could not be done that the pro didn’t deliver. The company went there and said, “We can do it.” It was my customer and it’s my responsibility to make it happen. I know the pain of having to deliver something that cannot be done. Therefore, I don’t want to put myself in that situation.
**That experience is invaluable. Don’t have that history when they’re building projects. **
We have a lot of things going on that we don’t announce because there’s a 20% or 50% probability. We might start talking about it if we are in the ‘80s getting ready for it to happen. The same thing with due dates, we don’t give due dates. We say soon or in this month or this quarter. Even if we have something ready for tomorrow, we’re going to tell you that we’re going to deliver it next week because you never know if something’s going to happen. We rather overachieve a little bit by delivering earlier, a couple of days or something, than to be late. If we are late, it’s because the situation was hard but it gets done.
Never promise something that you can’t deliver. It’s ridiculous when people come to our platform and they see an NFT with an APY of 300% a year and they go, “How can that be done?” I said, “It can be done but only for X amount of time.” They go, “That’s not sustainable.” “You’re right, it’s not sustainable. It’s going to be happening for X amount.” We have a counter on our homepage that tells people the actual weeks of the current spend rate that will last them. If you buy an NFT, you look at the account and you go, “I can make my money back.” “It’s too risky. It’s not worth it to do it right now.”
I’ve noticed some interesting dynamics in terms of what people have been purchasing and what they haven’t. For example, the art gallery brings great possibilities and higher unknowns. So far, you’ve sold one art gallery. Congratulations on that. People have invested in hotels. Someone bought a stadium. It looks like a lot of people are buying billboards and yachts. What surprised you about what people have purchased in abundance and maybe what people have been more hesitant to invest in so far?
People are investing in the NFT thinking short-term. Most of them are not thinking long-term. The art gallery is one of my favorites. It’s not because it was my idea. We’re offering all these holders a piece of the business.
A meaningful piece, 50% of the business. If they own one art gallery, they get 1/20 of 50%. That’s equity in your company, in a sense, with immediate profit sharing.
If only five galleries fail, that’s a bigger piece of the chunk because the 50% is going to those holders. It’s not that they’re going to get 1/20. That 50% is going to be distributed among those holders.
To focus on the art gallery, the big question there is there’s a lot of NFT marketplaces. We have them on our show. New ones are popping up every day. Why are people going to shop in your art gallery and how will that art gallery interact with OpenSea and other art galleries that are on web 3.0? What’s going to make your art gallery work?
Any of these in total. The art gallery is one category. We have the 2Ds and 3Ds and we’re going to have the art, which is paints and drawings. We’re already assigning one artist. She’s amazing. She painted The Pope and Beyoncé and a couple of people. She painted the Pope and she gave the paint and she delivered the paint. She’s awesome. She’s from Brazil. We’re going to talk more about her soon when we launch it. The idea is all these art gallery holders are going to have to consider all the art sales. The art sales can get crazy. It can be expensive, especially when this is real art where the artist is going to paint. After the artist sells it, the artist is going to stream the destruction of that paint. It’s going to be 1 of 1 painter of those paints. That’s going to be big in those terms.
I’m curious, what’s going to be different about your NFT gallery versus other sites? You’re going to have a marketplace soon. I imagine there’s some integration with OpenSea or some other platforms. I was curious about that.
Our art or our NFTs, you can sell them in OpenSea or any market. It doesn’t matter. However, their art, you’re not going to be able to put it in our marketplace yet. Our marketplace is for our NFTs. The reason why is because we’re going to be launching now the Bridge where you’re going to be able to claim your rewards either in POLC for Binance or POLC Ethereum. All the NFTs, you’re going to be able to purchase either with POLC Binance or POLC Ethereum. You’re going to have that flexibility to choose where you want to be. Also, we’re going to have a Bridge separate where you just move your POLC or your NFTs from one chain to the other. If you want to be in an NFT in Binance and then you realize, “I could be making Ethereum POLC. I could be making more money or the other way around.” You’re going to be able to move.
You’re talking about long-term thinking. I’m a person that wants to do well in Polka City and be a part of the community but also sees a return on my investment of time, effort, and resources. What else comes to mind when you think these are the plays that people should be thinking about but they’re not looking at?
We have some NFTs that are more suitable for people with a certain skillset or that aren’t part of the business or entertainment business for example like the stadiums. The stadiums are there to stream live sporting events. One of our co-managers is thinking about making a partnership with another project that does sports streaming to see if they can partner with us and purchase that. They don’t even have to pay it upfront. They can start paying a little by little with the profits or whatever so that they can stream those live events over there. That’s the live events.
Building communities is pretty easy, but building a good community is hard. Click To Tweet
The other one is the disco. You’re going to be able to stream events also but these are more live concerts and entertainment and that kind of stuff. We have one of the owners who is big in the Austin, Texas bar scene. She’s going to be streaming live entertainment from those bars into that place. That’s going to be fun and probably charge you one POLC to get in to do that. When you’re doing those events and then if you own a disco, that’s your business. You’re going to be streaming and making money with that. You should do your marketing, too. That’s something you need to think about.
We’ve got a big business deal cooking up. You’re saying that we can take our Polka Yacht out to the sea and invite our potential business partners onto the yacht and get some business done on the yacht and streaming some music and all that type of stuff. What’s possible in Polka City in the future in your mind?
The purpose of owning a job is you can make money moving people from the island to the mainland. We’re going to do events and treasure hunts and stuff on the island. There’s going to be a whole dynamic in that part on its own. That’s what we’re thinking about the yachts. The yachts are spacious. You can fit up to ten people and they can be there. We don’t have anything like that planned for entertainment and all that but those are the things and ideas that keep coming. In a future update, it could be done. Right now, it’s a transportation thing. You’re going to see people there and you can chat. You’re going to be on the water and you can talk because the whole thing is social. Wherever you are, if you have somebody in close proximity, you can talk. You can text to talk to the person that you want in a private chat, too. That’s the thing.
You can pick up some crypto trading tips from your neighbor.
You can strategize. Let’s go to this treasure hunt. You look on this side and you look on this one and we share everything.
I want to ask how long this has been in the works. To answer the same question, what background are you bringing to this where this surfaced itself as the idea you needed to pursue?
We’ve been talking about doing this since the beginning of 2021. We launched at the end of February.
**You’re saying that you pulled this together in a month or something. **
Yes.
This is incredible. I thought you were going to say, “Two years ago we had this idea.”
No. The first release is at the end of the year. It took us a while. That’s going to take longer. That’s the first release. You’re going to be able to have the art galleries and the discos are going to be making money. We’re going to start doing other releases and monetize all the other assets and including them in the game.
**To get some background on this, we looked you up a little bit. It’s not easy to find a lot of information about you specifically out there already. We’re going to have the scoop on some things about how this all came to being. Why do you feel like you were equipped to do that quickly? Is it the connections that you have? Is it some experience you had at Microsoft with their previous project? You’ve been in crypto for a long time. What’s the background? **
I’m not equipped to do this. I know the people who are equipped to do it, the right marketing guys, the right developers. It’s about building the right team and making things happen. I understand code. I can read code but I’m not the greatest coder in the world. I’m more of a process person. I like to see things organized and make things happen. My expertise is to make this happen. Things are going to happen when they’re realistic and we can accomplish them.
Jeff, you’ve got a real estate background. Is Carmelo saying that he’s like the head builder? What’s the title that you would give that from a Polka City perspective?
It’s the real estate developer. You have the fund and you have this massive team of people that come together to make something happen. It’s that real estate developer background. In your case, all the technical know-how. You know what you don’t know, which is an important thing.
I know a lot of things to get in trouble and I get the right people so that I don’t.
**In terms of NFTs, what are you interested in outside of Polka City? Have you been keeping your eye on anything? Have you been buying them up? Are you mostly facilitating? What are you involved with? **
I’ve done everything else involving NFT and about Polka City. When I snoop around, it’s to learn and to see how they do things like OpenSea. How are they doing all this beating and taking everybody’s money and then releasing it? Those mechanics that they’re doing to consider them for our business, I don’t like it but I learned it and I try to figure it out when we want to do something. How are these people doing it? How are they doing it? One of the things that I do is that I always need to be learning something. If I’m not reading, taking an online class, or learning something, I feel like I’m wasting oxygen. I always need to learn something. In terms of NFTs, I’m not investing in any other NFT or not like that but I study them to learn how they’re doing things.
It’s interesting to have your outside Microsoft industry perspective combined with this new playground. I get the sense that you’re trying to figure out how to make things better on a rapid scale. What’s the gameplay experience going to be like in the future? You talked a little bit about discos and art galleries. Is this a desktop experience? Is this a mobile experience? What can people expect in the first iteration? You might show us a demo at some point later but give our readers a feel for what their experience will be like initially and then down the road.
In terms of the game, it’s going to be a desktop game for PC, Mac, and Linux. The reason for this is because all these NFTs and all these 3D graphics are high quality. I want this to look good. If we do browser enable, it’s not going to have the performance we need and we’re not ready to do mobile either because of that reason. In the future, when our game is final and we start thinking about a second version, the second version can take longer and go mobile, too. Initially, it will take us too long to also do mobile and go that way. It’s going to be a desktop.
What will they be able to do in the disco and the art galleries? What’s the user experience going to look like?
The disco is going to be a place where you can go in and network with other people. You’re going to have different levels. If 10,000 people come into the gallery, you can’t have 10,000 people in one room because it’s not going to work. What we’re going to do is we’re going to have a limit of people per room. When the room is full, we’re going to do another and another. The disco is going to have the same experience with the same streaming, same entertainment, same music but different groups. In the disco, you’re going to be able to enjoy whatever they’re streaming. Also, you’re going to be able to network and talk to other people.
Do you have any questions about this?
How many kids do you have?
I have four. That’s why I’m working a lot.
Except Polka City.
Let’s do it.
Pack of M&Ms with my mom’s money.
I sold a car for $600.
That’s the same price I sold my first car for.
It cost me $900.
Guitar strings.
Musician. We should be requesting a serenade.
I’m going to be paying people to watch me.
What’s the most recent thing you sold?
If I can buy anything, I’ll buy that.
We got you on this show.
Too trusting.
That’s some street smarts there.
It’s nice here.
That’s done. Next on the agenda is hot topics.
Let’s do it. You’ve got a few extra, Carmelo?
Sure. Go on. Bring it.
What the hell is that?
Do it.
What is it?
I’ll get to a few more after that.
I’d go for the Pringles NFT.
At least it’s affiliated with a major brand.
We got to have a golden Lambo.
Maybe family members and the community buy it.
The family pet rock.
The best place is to go to PolkaCity.io and look at the bottom right of the page. We have all the social networks there and you can reach us on Telegram, Reddit, and Discord on every page right there. The best way to find me is in Telegram or if you have something more important, reach me via LinkedIn. Search for my name. There’s not too many Carmelo Milian and you’ll find me there, too.
Thanks for joining us, Carmelo.
Thank you for having me. This was fun.
Important Links:
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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Telegram – Polka City
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Reddit – Polka City
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Discord – Polka City
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Carmelo Milian – LinkedIn
About Carmelo Milian
Carmelo has extensive technical management experience, including over a decade with Microsoft as a Senior IT Operations Consultant and as President and Founder of OneCloud, which enables companies to optimize cloud management.