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Prakash Somosundram Of Enjinstarter - Next Gen Blockchain Gaming Launchpad, Plus: Magic Eden Valuation $1.6B, NFTLA 2023, SoHo Technique, WeDream AR, And More…
In this new age of technology, the digital world has taken to more than just trading tokens. You can now buy land, virtual items, and even experience. And in this episode of the Edge of NFT Podcast, we are joined by the CEO and Co-founder of Enjinstarter, Prakash Somosundram, to talk more about the space and his journey to Web 3.0. Prakash has been active in blockchain and cryptocurrencies since 2016 and has led his team to raise $5.5 million in both private and public sales. He launched the business in early October 2021 and has since completed more than 45 IDO projects on their platform and counting. Tune in to this conversation and get insights on how you can raise capital through NFTs, the importance of community building, what are the new trends, and what’s coming up in the Web 3.0 space!
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Prakash Somosundram Of Enjinstarter – Next Gen Blockchain Gaming Launchpad, Plus: Magic Eden Valuation $1.6B, NFTLA 2023, SoHo Technique, WeDream AR, And More…
**This episode features Prakash Somosundram, the CEO and Cofounder of Enjinstarter. Prakash is a Singaporean serial entrepreneur. He has been active in blockchain and cryptocurrencies since 2016 and has been involved in various aspects, including project development, acceleration, and investment. Enjinstarter is a launchpad focused on blockchain, gaming, entertainment, and metaverses. **
**He led the team to raise $5.5 million in both private and public sales and launched the business in early October 2021, has since completed more than 45 IDO projects on their platform. Notable projects that Enjinstarter has invested and accelerated on their platform include Defina, The Killbox, and PathDAO. These projects have delivered between 24X and 53X return on investment from their public IDO launch price. **
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Prakash**, welcome to the show. **
It’s been crazy. This has been intense.
**Enjinstarter is a massive vision. Give the audience an idea of the origin of it and how you brought it all together. **
I was given an opportunity to invest in Enjin’s project called Efinity, which is a blockchain that a building on the Polkadot network. After I read the white paper and the pitch deck, I knew that this was going to be the future where they’re trying to build this interpretability between multiple chains and primarily focus on NFTs. They’re creating a new standard for NFTs. They call it the ParaToken. I saw that as the future. That’s where we pitched it to them.
They invested with us at a very early stage. They gave us the blessing to use their name, and we became their first launchpad for the ecosystem, but we’re not restricted to the ecosystem. We’ve done projects in 8 to 9 different chains. The whole idea is to offer our clients a multi-chain strategy. Eventually, when cross-chain compatibility comes in, we’ll build more stuff on Efinity. That’s what our vision and purpose are for existence.
**It’s worthwhile to rewind a little bit because you’ve been a guru in digital marketing for a long time. How did that experience lead you to this journey into Web 3.0? **
Back in my agency, these clients used to pay us to tell a narrative or a story. What we did with fundraising, every project that we mint is about helping them build a solid narrative. That’s the biggest challenge. We see a lot of creators with great talent, but they can’t tell a story and usually struggle to fundraise. We converted all the experience that we had in marketing and in narrative building and brought that into fundraising and investor relations. That’s the key value that we bring to the projects that we work with. We invest in them, help them build a narrative, connect them to investors, and help them communicate that message effectively to the community.
**As a platform, can you tell us about what are the nuts and bolts of Enjinstarter? **
In a single line, we are a YCombinator/Kickstarter. We provide acceleration services. There are a whole lot of things that happen backstage they don’t know about, like fixing the project’s tokenomics, figuring out which team members we should feature and which segments, and then helping them become investor-ready. That’s the key at this point in time in helping quality projects stand out in a very crowded and also slightly bearish market. That’s primarily what we do offline. Once they are ready for a fundraising exercise, we put them on our platform.
Our community needs to buy our tokens and hold our tokens. The longer they hold our token, the bigger allocations they get. We secure our public allocation from these projects, and a lot of our community wants access to that. The key is for us to get the man on the street to be in VC, participate like the VC with the same terms, and decide which of these projects are going to succeed. That’s what we offer as a platform.
Enjinstarter: The key is interpretability. If you can be restricted to one particular metaverse, it’s going to fail. What we need is to have these brand experiences and content transcend different metaverses.
**In particular, this energy you’re building with folks around community building is so important for gaming because we’ve seen, over the evolution of gaming, how the community is everything. Some of the biggest games of the last few decades are all about community. I’d love to learn more about how you guys are deploying NFTs as a mechanism for raising capital in the gaming fair. **
What our platform offers are three different ways that project owners can raise capital. They can issue tokens, they can issue NFTs on our platform, or they can sell land on our platform. Each one of these things can be used as part of the community-building experience. In one of our early projects, what they did was they first issued a token and started issuing NFTs to raise additional capital but also to build a community. They also use that as a test bid to see what characters and gameplay were interesting to the community. They started scripting that back into the game.
That’s one way that NFTs could play a role in not just raising capital but also coming into the narrative and using that as part of the game design and gameplay. The other key thing we’ve always been looking at is Founder’s Token. Enjin is one of the early guys that came up with this concept. We want to support loyalty, not just to come in and participate in these events and then flip it once you get a good return, but will stay committed to these projects because they take a long time to develop and mature. We want people to stay on, and we’re trying to use NFTs to build loyalty. We’ll recognize this loyalty the longer they hold these tokens.
**There’s something powerful about this idea of land and being able to offer land. I joke with folks because there’s a lot of Josh’s on our team. I always run into Josh in the space, like Josh DAO. Now that I’m thinking about what I would do next with Josh DAO, we’d have to have Josh world and start selling. It works, but there’s something powerful about giving people the ability to use the land to support that crowdfunding mechanism. It’s different than what was available before. Do you think intrinsically you’ve seen that attraction occur for folks? **
It’s a whole new internet that’s being built, and this is our opportunity to own a piece of it. Some of us may have missed the opportunity of owning physical real estate, but now we’ve got an opportunity to buy these digital real estate curated in any manner and fashion we want. We can start hosting our friends. We can host events like this in a virtual space where we all don’t need to fly to one city, but we can connect from multiple cities. We’re quite excited about what we can offer, especially with a lot of these metaverses coming. The key is interpretability.
If you can be restricted to one particular metaverse, it’s going to fail. What we need is to have these brand experiences and content transcend different metaverses. What we are doing during this bear market is focusing on a lot of niche communities. This is where we work with a lot of our communities. We’re working with tattoo artists, who are all creators. They have their own audience. What we’re looking at doing with Web 3.0 is to offer them an additional revenue opportunity. It’s not going to replace anything existing, but it’s going to now create a whole new way that they can engage with their friends.
**Let’s talk about the process of participating in the incubator. What should a participant expect? How do they think about sustainable strategies and campaigns? How do you support that? **
What we did was we thought of all the pain that we had gone through in our startup lives. We found a way to reduce that friction. The pitch that we have is that we’ll hold your hands and guide you on a 150-day journey. It will be a lot less painful than how it went through for us. Writing an IDO is probably one of the most painful stuff that you can do out there. In our case, we got hacked one day before our IDO. We didn’t have a public website to even conduct an IDO. There are a whole lot of scams and spam texts that we had to deal with.
That’s one thing that we want to try to now reduce for the partners and portfolio companies that we’re working with. This 150-day journey gives us time not just to work with the team but also to build a community. The key at this point in time is the community. The community needs to understand what are the longer-term vision that these guys are working towards. There’s a big need for bigger loyalty in crypto, especially now, because people jump from project to project.
They get alpha on a project and leave once they get multiple returns. A lot of that needs to change if we need to build a sustainable ecosystem. They expect that we’re trying to introduce a level of impact in every project that we do. If there’s a social cause, a nonprofit, or a bigger picture we can with the community, especially using Web 3.0 as a canvas, we will achieve greater success for ourselves.
**You’ve got an ecosystem that you’re building. I’d love to know a little bit more about that and your vision for creating a community. How do you see that community building moving forward? **
As the community grew, the community had different objectives. In the early days, it was all about getting alpha and early into these projects. We’ve been shifting the focus, spending more time with micro tribes that exist within the community. Because it’s a bear market and people want the investments to recuperate, they are now sending us leads and ideas of what we could do. That’s where the beauty of community building comes in. It needs to be two-way. People need to have the ability to socialize and exchange ideas in a very free and unjudgmental way.
We find ways to incentivize them. We have tokens, which we give them, and we invite them to events if we feel that they’re contributing. That’s one way that we’re trying to build our community. Secondly, we’re also building a lot of these niche communities. We feel that niche communities have a very strong ability to do community acquisition. The last thing that we’re working with at this point in time with our focus on entertainment is working with IP owners. It could be a musician or creator who’s got access to friends. If we can onboard Web 2.0 consumers into the Web 3.0 space, that’s another level up for us from a community-building perspective.
**Speaking of building, now is a great time to build. I’m sure there are a lot of interesting projects that you’ve been incubating. What are some of the upcoming projects that you’re pumped about? **
One of the projects that we’ve been working on is a project called Warlocks. The people who are behind the project are property developers. They’re based in Singapore, and they’re also listed in Singapore. They engaged us to develop a metaverse strategy for them. We’ve built out an entire strategy, which is soft-launching here in NFT NYC.
It’s got a full experience of a metaverse, but they’ve connected it to the real world. They call it Phygital. These guys own buildings. They could be hotels or malls. Now they’re creating an entirely new experience that connects the metaverse to the real world. The first mall that they’re working on is an eSports mall. Whether it’s a whole range of eSports activities, they will be in one place. Anyone who comes in to participate in that will also have a presence in the metaverse.
**It’s almost like you plan that. SoHo Technique is one of the partners of this event, and SoHo Johnny has a lot of real estates. I know he’s thinking about some of these same opportunities, so I’m sure you guys can have an interesting conversation after this show. **
**Tell us a little bit about what’s next on the roadmap for Enjinstarter, like products, features, and partnerships. **
As Josh said, this period is for us to build. We are in a global expansion. We’re expanding into Dubai. We expanded into LA. Elizabeth is our market launcher. We are using this opportunity to now expand and have a physical presence, not in a very big way, but at least having a market launcher who pretty much does everything a team would do. It’s a single individual who goes in to connect with communities, understand the needs of each community, and then we develop a strategy based on each market we’re expanding.
This period is the best time for us to expand. We’re getting into a lot more quality conversations. There’s a lot less froth in the space. This allows us to spend a lot more time with the projects to ensure that the right strategies are in place to build this out. We are building a lot more features in the launchpad so the community can come in and use it as a dashboard to manage their entire portfolio. Once you start getting into the space, there are a whole lot of things that you need to balance. It’s a full-time role, so we’re trying to create some tools that can help you monitor your portfolio, and then you can decide what’s it going to be.
We are doing a lot more in the entertainment space. This is where we’re doing a lot more incubation and innovation consulting. What we’re seeing is that there are now a lot of Web 2.0 companies that are looking and coming into Web 3.0. They feel that this is the best time for them. These guys have existing communities. They may have a product already. What they’re looking for and doing is creating something in parallel in the Web 3.0 space. Some of them are creating a new business opportunity, like an entirely new business model. Some of them know that their existing business model is going to be disrupted, and now they are preparing for that by starting to build it for Web 3.0.
**It’s worth mentioning that we know each other, and you are one of our co-creators in NFTLA. As we’ve gotten to know each other, one of the interesting things I’ve learned about you and how you look at these startups is it’s never too early to have a conversation. It’s never too late to learn. It’s worth letting our audience understand how open you are to startups, wherever they are in their journey. **
We are always open to having conversations. We try to keep in touch on a regular basis and ensure that they are giving us updates. If projects give us updates proactively, it’s always a very good sign for us, and we try to spend more time with them. When they reach out to us, we will never leave that conversation without at least connecting them to a partner or an investor. Constantly, we’ve got to be keeping in touch with this.
In Web 3.0, trends change very quickly. It’s difficult for us to see that this is the only thing that we’re going to be doing. Take, for example, this entire move-to-earn. It trended like crazy. We completely missed it. We said no to one of the top ones that went up to 36,000%. These trends work because things move quickly now.
Enjinstarter: The community needs to understand the longer-term vision that we are working towards. There’s a big need for bigger loyalty in crypto, especially now, because people jump from project to project.
More so, because we’re coming out of these two years of lockdown, pandemic, and travel restrictions, a lot of things are now happening at a quick pace. If you have the right place with the right tech, this is where things start to fly quickly. This is where we constantly need to be attending events and meeting with startup founders. We connect with traditional accelerators. We attend as many talks as we can so that we’re always connected or very close to the ecosystem.
**We’ve had a great chat here talking through all this stuff. We’re excited to move on to our quick-hitter soon. Here’s the last question of this conversation. We’re all amazed and fascinated with all the inspiration that’s going on now. Personally, I’ve said it over and over again, it’s especially inspiring when the market is doing whatever it does, but there are those folks that have that intrinsic energy around this stuff. They’re passionate about what they’re building, and they’re moving forward. That leads me to our last question. What inspires you that’s out there? In general, what inspires you to do all the wonderful things that you’ve achieved? **
I’ve always enjoyed working with creative people. That’s how I built a career in digital advertising. The work that we do is primarily we’ll create this right. The beauty is when we wake up, we could be working with a rep from Singapore or it could be working with an artist from New York. Every day is a new day. What’s exciting is creators are starting to understand that Web 3.0 is primarily for them. This is the best opportunity of removing the middleman, building a direct relationship with the community, and, more importantly, co-creating with your community and telling beautiful stories.
As long as creators have stories to tell, they will succeed. That’s what Web 3.0 is. Despite spending so much time in crypto, we know that we are very early in Web 3.0 because a lot of the infrastructure required to get the mass market into the space is still not there. That’s the beauty for us. It’s to be able to identify some of these builders building the infrastructure, support them, and also bring them into our ecosystem.
**Thanks so much for sharing that. **
**Our relationship with you has been a reflection of what you described, very open, transparent, helping, and always adding value. We appreciate you joining us and sharing. **
It’s a pleasure.
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Sweets at GSO.
**You’re an early import-export king. **
Donation tickets when I was a scout.
What did you get her?
It’s called Crypto Goddess.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
I sold shares in my company.
My proudest possession would be my family.
A Bored Ape.
Positivity.
Hanging on to things that you shouldn’t be.
Wherever the next party is.
**Should we move on to the next hot topic? **
**Let’s do it. **
As long as creators have stories to tell, they will succeed. That’s what Web 3.0 is. Click To Tweet
**It’s March 20th through the 23rd of 2023. **
You can look at Enjinstarter. We are present in most social networks. We are very active on Facebook, Telegram, and Twitter. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, folks. Have a great time.
** Important Links**
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
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Facebook – Enjinstarter
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Telegram – Enjinstarter
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Twitter – Enjinstarter
About Prakash Somosundram
Prakash is a Singaporean Serial Entrepreneur.
He has been active in Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies since 2016 has been involved in various aspects including project development, acceleration and investment.
Prakash is currently the CEO & Cofounder of Enjinstarter, a launchpad focused on Blockchain Gaming and Metaverses. He led the team to raise USD$5.5M in both Private and Public sales and launched the business in early October 2021 and have since completed more than 30 IDO projects on their platform. Notable projects that Enjinstarter have invested and accelerated on their platform include Defina, The Killbox and PathDAO. These projects have delivered between 24X to 53X return on investments from their public IDO launch price.
Prakash has also been actively involved in Start-up Ecosystem development in Singapore for more than a decade including his role as Vice Chairman of Action Community of Entrepreneurship from 2014 to 2017. He has also assisted various external government agencies in the set up of their market entry strategies into the Singapore and ASEAN ecosystem. This includes the Australian, Austrian and Dutch government agencies involved in start-up promotion.
In 2021, Prakash was awarded the Public Service Medal, Pingkat Bakti Masyarakat (PBM) for his voluntary contributions to the Singapore government