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Revealing Success With Digital Artists At KBW: Adidas, Serotonin, NFT-Now And Frank DeGods Share Their Secrets
The Edge of NFT team, just had an amazing opportunity to spend an incredible week at the Korea Blockchain Week where the arts in blockchain and Web3 scene had electrifying energy. On this episode, we connected with three pioneers to get their perspective on mass adoption, how they’re helping brands enter Asian markets like Korea, and how brands are utilizing Web3 technology here. Get the latest brilliant and borderline crazy ideas from Amanda Cassatt of Serotonin, Stacey King of Adidas, and the legendary Frank DeGods. Plus, get treated to a stunning display of what’s possible in digital art with Aaron Baker, an artist at The Gateway. Stay tuned for all these and more!
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Revealing Success With Digital Artists At KBW: Adidas, Serotonin, NFT-Now And Frank DeGods Share Their Secrets
The Edge of NFT team just had an amazing opportunity to spend an incredible week here in Korea, where the arts and blockchain Web3 scene had electrifying energy. In this episode, we connected with three pioneers. We get the perspective on mass adoption, how brands enter the market cycle like Korea, and how brands utilize the Web3 technology. Stay tuned for more.
We are in Seoul, Korea, during Korea Blockchain Week on the second day of Impact with an individual who’s been important to the Web3 industry for quite some time, Amanda Cassatt, who I got a chance to catch up with here in Korea as opposed to the United States. It’s great to see you.
Thanks so much for having me.
What brings you to Asia?
We’ve been seeing a lot of growth in APAC. It’s gone from maybe 2% of our business to almost 20% of our business almost overnight. We are going to be opening an APAC office in 2024. We’re working directly with the Korea Blockchain Week team. We’ve been helping market that event to reach more people in the West, and we think the meme of Korea, especially Web3 is growing and it always feels good to be part of something growing.
It always feels good to be part of something growing. Click To Tweet
For those of you who don’t know Amanda, she is the Web3 and marketing decentralized technology trail leader, AKA the CEO of Serotonin. This is an agency and product studio which enabled her cofounding Mojito, which was part of Outer Edge LA. It was great to have them involved. That’s a top NFT commerce suite embraced by industry leaders like Sotheby’s and CA, to name a few.
She authored Web3 Marketing, which is the world’s first book on decentralized tech marketing. She was the ConsenSys CMO from 2016 to 2019, instrumental in Ethereum’s growth. Before that, she cofounded Slant, which is another media startup following an apprenticeship with Ariana Huffington at the Huffington Post. I got to see her at VeeCon. She’s another amazing trailblazer.
Just a little bit more context, Serotonin is a professional services agency and product studio founded in 2020. The focus is on the Web3 landscape. Let’s get into it. Folks can do a little bit more research on Serotonin and check it out. To start off, you’ve worked with so many different brands and have an interesting experience crossing Web2 and Web3. What are some of the lessons learned and takeaways for you from the last few years?
We coined the term the Web 2.5, and that’s been the main lesson of the last few years. There are all kinds of companies that are somewhere between being centralized normal companies and fully decentralized projects that don’t have an entity or are governed by a DAO, etc.
Korea Blockchain Week: There are all kinds of companies that are somewhere in between being centralized, normal companies, and being fully decentralized.
More in the middle than on the sides.
We are meeting a lot of traditional companies where they are and helping them realize the benefits of wading out into the decentralized world. It’s like how a lot of companies first started exploring the public open internet. On the commerce side, we’re working with a lot of the leading Web3 native startups, ones whose goal is to be as decentralized as possible and we’re helping them pick up users.
That gives us a unique vantage point to help them partner with each other and create the relationships between the two. We can work with a traditional brand and help guide them into Web3 in a way that will be received positively and strengthen the overall space. We can also help forge narratives and partnerships connecting the Web3 world with the mainstream names that people know and love.
Experience helps. Erick Calderon said this in the show. Our box was completely an experiment. From his perspective, it still is. What are some specific takeaways from the experiments you’ve run over the last few years where you’re like, “I didn’t realize that would happen?”
First of all, I love Erick, and I have a squiggle on the front cover of my book that I licensed to be able to use that way. We love the Art Blocks community and everything that they’ve done in partnership with us for the book.
It was an honor to have him as one of our keynotes at Outer Edge.
In terms of lessons learned, the thing I always say about marketing is there’s no way around it. You can’t suddenly hack your way to being a big, well-known global brand, but you have to do all the things. All of the projects that fake their user numbers or buy a bunch of followers, those followers aren’t engaged and no one’s convinced and no one cares at the end of the day. The market falls away and it’s gone.
What’s important is building something from fundamentals that people have a need for that makes sense, that has some audience, or that’s able to probe and find early market fit. It is growing a community the organic way, starting in concentric circles with the people closest to it who care about it the most, but then evangelizing it to the next concentric circle. You’re not going to wake up and be an overnight smash hit. You’re going to move outward in these rings doing it the authentic way.
That’s what we work on with all of our projects, figuring out how to get users, grow, and build communities that care about the project. We often compare a community in Web3 to a spaceship. You are a space alien and you land and you put down your ladder. Some humans, wherever you land, walk onto your spaceship.
You fly away. You populate your planet and live with those humans forever. You’ve got to be selective about who those people are. If your first community members are what we call moon boys, where people saying one moon and one token that doesn’t care about your project, that’s going to put off the users later that you want. There’s no way to hack around building something people want and building an authentic community.
Have there been any specific nuggets where some things have worked better than you expected or things didn’t land how you had hoped without getting to specific campaigns, but generally a-ha moments that you’ve had along this journey and Web3? When you’re dealing with aliens meeting other aliens and going on new planets, they don’t always understand each other in the way you might’ve expected, even if you do your very best to distill the message.
I can give you an example. One of our partners is this great company called Galxe, which is one of our first partners that’s local in Asia. They run these cool Quest-style campaigns.
They’ve been on the show, and we’ve done some Galxe campaigns. It’s incredible what they’re doing.
What they’re doing accelerates project user growth fast. They’ve brought millions of users to projects, things that are also clients and partners of ours like Polygon, and things like Optimism authentically. Those are actual Web3 users who care about the project and have done projects or quests that prove that. They get rewards and then they get to join the community.
It’s not like you can’t use any extrinsic form of rewards or incentives. You need to make sure that you’re using investments, not bribes. Without naming any names of any particular projects, if everybody that’s building with your technology is being paid to do that, the question is what are they going to do when the money dries up? Do they stay or do they go? If they stay, then it’s an investment. If they go, then it was a bribe.
That’s a good rule of thumb, and there are some L-1s I’ve talked to where they’re taking a hard line that they’re not doing bounties or their chain. It’s if they want to win on the technology and the value prop to the developers and the builders to use their chain. I appreciate that because there’s been a lot of bounties in our space over the last few years.
People shouldn’t shy away from using paid growth tactics. We have an amazing paid growth team at Serotonin. We’re basically reinventing what paid growth and all of the analytics and tracking around that means in a Web 2.5 context.
Korea Blockchain Week: People shouldn’t shy away from using paid growth tactics.
Just being thoughtful about it and not throwing these marketing dollars around.
Making sure it’s investments that stick.
What do you think some of the sub-sectors of Web3 are that are most promising? Folks talk about gaming a lot and big brands, but are there any niches that you’re excited about besides those macro trends?
I’ll talk your ear off about them. There are memberships, rewards, and loyalty. We’re super excited about that. The blockchain is the best CRM known to humankind. You get direct buying behavior. You don’t have to store anyone’s private data. You can retarget people on the same platform. We have lots of big companies that are about to be launching that. It’s on-chain summer and people have been talking about L-2s and L-3s, but also, it’s been stablecoin summer.
The blockchain is the best CRM known to human kind. Click To Tweet
We’ve worked closely with PayPal. They launched their stablecoin, PYUSD. The killer use case of Ethereum so far is stablecoins. The fact that you can send money to anybody in the world, that’s an ERC 20 token that lives on a blockchain that’s unprecedented. The future of payments and stablecoins is at stake. That’s incredible and we’re going to see that use piece pop up.
Peak stablecoins aren’t always the sexiest thing, but I was talking to someone about this. They’re critical infrastructure and there’s quite a lot of technical sophistication and complexity behind the scenes there.
More trends. ZK is interesting. We’ve had a lot of businesses hesitate to get into crypto because they don’t want to put all of their business logic on the public blockchain. There’s all kinds of business logic about my business that I don’t want to put on the public blockchain, but being able to do ZK and there’s some L-2s integrating it. There are also ZK L-1s like Aleo that are interesting. That’s super cool.
I’m interested in the app chain thesis, this idea that there’s going to be value accruing at the application level, not just at the protocol level. We’re seeing the interchain ecosystem that originally evolved around Cosmos and now has so much different stuff in it. That’s going to grow and that concept is going to grow as applications get more users. There’s real world assets on chain, which is going to be a great non-correlated part of this asset class.
What are some of the real-world asset use cases that you’re most excited about? Do you think real estate has a chance here? Titles, luxury items? What are your thoughts?
In terms of physical goods, the base case is that NFTs replace receipts and even maybe starting with luxury because receipts or certificates of authenticity already matter. We’re going to be able to trace all of our buying behavior and track all of our receipts and all of our objects on chain with things like NFTs. Things like real estate. Being able to sell a house on the blockchain, like what Roofstock already did. We’re going to see that use case emerge as people figure out the UX.
Big fan of what they’ve done and how they’ve led the way there. People had talking about doing what they did for like 5 or 10 years. I remember in 2017, people were talking about that, but no one got it done. They got it done. Kudos to them.
People have been talking about social tokens for years. People have been talking about Web3 social. In this next cycle, we’re going to finally see it materialize. I don’t think the thing that’s going to end up sticking is going to be the bit clouds or the friends tech, but there’s something there and someone’s going to crack that and figure it out. Lens from Ave has a fighting chance because they’re building at the protocol level without a thesis on what the actual social app looks like. We’ll see what people build on top of that.
Are there any hot takes you have on ways to succeed with Web3 that are not commonly held or discussed beliefs? There are a lot of panels on community and conversations about the importance of community, but do you have any opinions on the industry that are a little bit more against the grain? I interviewed Frank DeGods and he certainly has a lot of those, but I’m curious where you disagree with industry thought leadership principles and you’re like, “I see it a little differently.”
There’s a lot of pressure in the industry to juice up your user numbers whether that’s Twitter or Discord server. The fact that we don’t do fake tactics and we’ll drop a client if they’re doing fake tactics puts us in conflict with a lot of the secret pressures that exist. We come out and say there’s a lot of that in this space and that we’re against it. That’s notable.
The other thing that’s unique about Sero is we’re not guns for hire. We only work on projects that we care about, which is unique in the industry and unique for a services company. In terms of mainstream wisdom, here’s something a little controversial. I’m not a maxi. I sometimes get called an ETH Maxi because of my role on Ethereum, but I’m not. We work with other L-1s that are great.
You’re not anti and all that?
We work with other L-1s that are differentiated in niche. I’m a big Bitcoin fan. A lot of the Ethereum came out of Bitcoin. A lot of Ethereum people love Bitcoin.
I’m like you. I’ve always been a moderate.
Sometimes in the space, there’s this attitude like, “Don’t be so tribal and don’t say something negative about an L-1,” because you have to say positive things about everybody, but it matters which L-1 people choose because root ownership of assets is part of the core value proposition of Web3. If users don’t have root ownership of their supposedly blockchain-based assets, then it’s not a real Web3 wallet or a real Web3 onboarding.
There are voices on Twitter that say, “Don’t point out the negatives or the drawbacks of any of these L-1 platforms.” It’s important that people point out logically and calmly what’s going on with all these different platforms. Whether they go on and off, whether people own their assets, whether they can transfer those assets, whether they might lose those assets because that blockchain goes away, that conversation is important. I don’t think there’s a need for all the emotion and tribalism that goes into it, but the converse of being discriminating in a good way is also important. Discernment.
There’s not enough civil authentic comparing and contrasting of L-1s and L-2s and the pros and cons of them in marketplaces. Everyone comes in strong and hot and people want to have the ability to make these analytical decisions with the pros and cons and there’s no place to go to find that information. It requires a lot of research. That can be overwhelming to enterprises that want to get involved in this space. They bring in these big teams, they hire a bunch of consultants, and it takes a long time. If we were a little bit more forthcoming with the pros and cons of these different tools, people could make better decisions.
The other thing is it’s important to point out the elements of the stack and Web3 that are centralized. There are a lot of centralized elements of the Web3 stack in general and projects are trying to decentralize. There are these centralized points of failure that are common to a lot of these DeFi projects. One thing I’m excited about in this space is for there to be decentralized or more decentralized competitors to some of the more centralized elements in the stack like an AWS or an edge network or for those projects to be able to get assurances that they’re not going to be a centralized point of failure that shuts them down.
I thought it was interesting. I was at Berkeley for an AI blockchain decentralization conversation or symposium and Google was there talking about all the things they’re doing with their cloud to ensure user privacy and everything. They’re also part of the conversation.
They’re right. Those big players, there’s market pressure from this part of the market to be more private, to provide more trustworthy assurances about not shutting something down. That pressure is a positive on the big players.
Let’s pivot for a moment before we wrap up and talk about AI. I mentioned to you before, we have a new show, Edge of AI. It sounds like you’re going down that rabbit hole a little bit or maybe a lot. What’s your perspective on this intersection of AI and blockchain? How are you encouraging your clients to think about AI?
This is so freaking cool. Another place where I disagree with a lot of people is people have gotten obsessed with AI, but it’s not an either/or AI or crypto and blockchain. They go well together. In the future, what payments and transactions are going to look like is on-chain transactions undertaken mostly by AIs on behalf of people.
Korea Blockchain Week: It’s not an either-or. AI and crypto/blockchain actually go really well together.
The actual UX of the blockchain is a fine UX for an AI, even if it’s a tricky UX expert person. And AIs are the ultimate digital natives. They’re going to use digital native currencies to transact and then to be able to show humans their work and wrap up what they did in a nice little UX bow for the human to look at. That’s one use case. Another is we’re going to change our mentality about content where a piece of content unless someone’s verified that they’re saying it’s true. We’re going to assume it’s not theirs. It didn’t come from them or that it’s been fabricated by AI.
Right now, we assume when we see something that it’s real until proven guilty. That’s going to flip and it’s going to be on chain verification by people or by a creator or by a publication that this piece of content is authentic according to them and that it came from them. We’re going to see that. These proof of humanity projects are interesting. We’re going to get so overwhelmed with content on the internet that we’re going to need to flag somehow that we’re human.
What I’m not so sure about is the UBI use case. I’m still waiting to fully understand that. I’m waiting to fully understand how distributing additional currency to people doesn’t raise the price of the goods they’re trying to buy, such that their purchasing power would end up the same as it would’ve been otherwise. I’m still trying to learn about what the economics of that would be. I’m hopeful that AIs are going to help bring down the price of goods in a way that converges with changes in human ability to create economic value. I have an eye on that. I’m curious about it, but I’m hopeful about it.
I appreciate the hot takes on that topic. I will say we’ve had a couple of shows already on deep fakes and there are so many nuances to it that need to get broken down. Audio deepfakes are totally different than video deepfakes and photography deepfakes. All of these things are different and they’re complicated and we’re still figuring it out. I appreciate your perspective on that.
Everyone can join?
Thanks for having me.
Do you want a freestyle on it?
Why not? I appreciate it. Let’s do it.
There’s no wrong way.
This is dope. Thanks again. This is awesome.
Thank you.
Frank DeGods. Frank, how are you doing?
We need to make no-brainer NFTs. Click To Tweet
Skittles from the gas station.
A sick house.
Where?
LA.
Thanks for having me.
You connect those two together.
It is.
I’m down.
Do you know tricks?
No. Terrible. I’m bad. That’s why I sold it.
You need three assistants.
I’m always hungry.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Important Links
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Galxe – Past Episode
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@Amanda.eth – Twitter
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@AltsByAdidas – Twitter
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Discord – Discord
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iTunes – Edge of NFT