Rick Latona - WOW!? Validator Nodes & Token Ecosystem - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

who we are as a company. We are in the AI agent business. We sell AI agents to web two people. Uh we and me as a person, I've been in the domain name business for 33 years. I have an M&A company.

We broker online companies like you know SAS businesses, e-commerce businesses and all those sorts of things. So buying digital assets and buying uh website properties is kind of my core expertise. At the core of what we're trying to do as a company, we are not trying to onboard a billion people to web 3. I think the whole idea is ludicrous. Only about 5% of crypto owners even have ever downloaded MetaMask or Phantoms.

I don't think we should increase the size of the people in this room. What we want to do is onboard a billion people's money into web 3. And we do that by selling web two products, SAS products and regular businesses uh to regular businesses and then selling it on chain and running it through validator nodes. You know we build we have a lot of different products. I plan to come here and talk mostly about our automated social media managers and crypto you would call them automated automated KS.

These are agents that will post on behalf of you, reply on behalf of you. Um, we think ours are quite advanced in the sense that we use agent swarms. So there's actually like 600 different agents that worked at any one time. One will be uh, you know, researching what's trending on the internet. Another one will like if it's replying, it'll read everything in the thread.

It'll read everything about the person it's replying to. It'll read everything about the person that started the thread, you know, and it and you know, it's designed to where it when it does reply, it'll get engagement and it's contextual and relevant. Who here remembers the instant messaging app ICQ? Anybody from the 90s? It was the biggest instant messaging app in the world.

It had 100 million uh users back when the internet had 300 million people on it. The from 1996 till 1999 it was run by these two Israeli guys. They ended up selling it for $158 million to AOL. Um, years later, AOL sold it to a Russian company called VK. The you might know them as Mail.

rru. Uh, we just wanted a contract to buy them. Uh, we we are now going to be the owners of ICQ.com. The ICQ.

com has 450 million back links. HTML didn't I don't know how many of you know about SEO, but HTML didn't even have the no follow attribute until 2005. So that means that vast majority of those 450 million back links are do follow back links. So it will not be difficult to get icq.com ranked again very high for pretty much whatever we want.

It also already has still hundreds of thousands of visitors a month even though the site's not working. Mail.rruu had shut it down in October of last year. You know, it also comes with all global trademarks. And I can tell you as somebody with 33 years of domain experience, all global trademarks are impossible to get.

The only way you could get it is if you had AOL's lawyers and AOL's money because, you know, if when a startup comes out, they and they start to do well, somebody in Greece, somebody in Pakistan, somebody in this country, and that country, they're all going to like start filing trademarks and, you know, basically blackmailing you. So, so to acquire a domain name as famous as this one with the history it has the original OG Instant Messenger um with all these backlinks, all the existing traffic that it already has, all the trademarks that already has. And what are we going to do with it? We're going to put it on our node network. Um we are we are going to launch a truly secure and decentralized instant messaging app.

And we are going to compete head-on direct with Telegram and Signal and WhatsApp. All of web 3 is run on nodes. There's nothing that's not run on nodes. At least everything that is decentralized runs on nodes. So a Bitcoin miner is a node.

An Ethereum validator is a node. When you connect your web 3 wallet, you're connecting to an RPC node that connects to a blockchain. Chain link uses nodes to get real world data on chain. Blockchain is nodes and node operators get paid for moving all these ones and zeros around. So we are launching our own node network.

There will be a maximum of 50,000 nodes. Uh of those 50,000 5,000 will be kept by our company locked. Uh another 5,000 will are set aside for strategic deal making. These are for people who own trade shows or major media companies uh for centralized exchanges. We're trading for uh listings fees.

We've already cut a deal with three. Our goal is when we launch the WOW token to have 15 exchanges with an average of 4 million customers each. So 60 million people are getting emails and trading contests. We uh let's see, we also have uh 5,000 nodes that we are pre-selling currently at $500 each. And then after after those, then we start retailing them at $1,000 each.

And every 100 nodes will go up by $10 until we've sold the 50,000th node for $3,990. First, let me tell you about the token allocation. So, the nodes are going to receive 50% of all the WOW tokens. So out of a billion tokens and those will receive 500 million tokens over a 25-year period, 10% for my company which will be locked, 20% for liquidity on centralized and decentralized exchanges and 20% for the community fund. And we have a very sexy solution for that community fund.

So 20% of the wild tokens are going to be at a vault. By the way, do we do have manage node services for people that don't want to run their own servers or even open an account at AWS, but these are lightweight nodes. You don't need Nvidia chips. Um, and they're going to, like I said, these nodes will be receiving revenue from ICQ, from the every time we sell an agent to a doctor or lawyer or a dentist, a portion of that revenue is going to flow to the nodes of their monthly billing on their usage, that kind of stuff. So, the first 5,000 nodes that we're selling in pre-sale, we're adding to the money that we already have in the bank from the fundraising round we did last year.

But then after that, there'll be 35,000 nodes that are retailed. Half of that money is going to go directly to support the liquidity of the token. So, however many nodes we sell between now and mid June when we have our token generation event, 50% of that will go directly into the liquidity pool. how big that liquidity pool will be, how what our starting market starting market cap is well is directly related to how many nodes we sell. And after that, what do we do?

How do you how do you add and deepen liquidity to a token that's already live? I tell you what we're not going to do. We're not going to do a mantra da and buy our own token off the market. It's unsustainable. You know, you're just giving other people exit liquidity and eventually it's going to come crashing down on you.

So, we thought to ourselves, well, how do we deepen liquidity for a token that's already live? Well, we do that through uh an EIP 4626 token vault. So, this technology allows us to uh make tokens redeemable for other assets that are in that vault. So, after the TGE, 50% of all those sales will go into that uh token vault. So, imagine this.

Imagine there was 10 WOW tokens on $1 in the vault. A Wow token would be redeemable for 10 cents. If there were $10 in that vault, a WOW token would be be redeemable for a dollar. And that vault can also go out and seek yield on a and stuff like that on the other assets in that vault. So whether somebody buys a node with wrap Bitcoin, Salana, Ethereum, USDT or C, it's going to go in the vault with those WOW tokens.

And the way that deepens liquidity is that the more money that that's in that vault with those community tokens, um, you know, the the token should never theoretically never trade for less than it could be redeemed for in that vault. Otherwise, our bots would just pick them up and and get the redemption and that vault will continue also to receive money from services performed for for years to come. Most of the time when somebody launches a node network, I mean the missions are always highest in the first year. It makes sense because you want people to get in early and get an off and be rewarded for being early. Um, but most of the time there's there's a straight linear decay all the way down.

We decided to change the decay after year five so we'd have a long tale of tokens continuing to come. So what that looks like is in year one 19.05% 05% of the tokens will go to the nodes that are online in year 1 and that's 19.05% of half the tokens that so 500 million tokens. So on day one the a node will receive 1365th of 19.

05% of 500 million divided by the number of nodes that are online. Not really complicated math. And then but you'll notice also that in from years 6 to 19 it doesn't drop that much. It goes from 3.17% to 1.

47%. So there's a steady stream of tokens. But the idea what makes the node business so great whether you like my business or not. Just something to teach you guys if you don't know much about the node business. It's great for both parties.

I'm selling a software license and then paying for people for services performed. So, I'll let you ask your own lawyers what that means, but it means I could sell the software licenses to anybody and I can pay him whatever I want. And the the buyer of a node, you know, if they get in early and they get it off and they get they get high emissions of our native token that they can sell and lower the risk every single day. And if they're betting on a good CEO and a good business model, the hope is that these nodes will generate more and more cash flow because they get paid in stable coins also. And that at some point they are worth a multiple of revenue.

But it's better than investing in equity because you don't have to wait. You can you can sell you can sell them. I all the nodes are going to be locked for one year because I don't want to compete um with the node buyers until we've sold the 50,000th node. But after that uh it it sells on the open market just for whatever you can get for it. So usually people have a dual mandate when they're buying nodes.

You know token emissions and betting on something that could is going to go up in value also at the node level. Yeah. So this was supposed to talk a lot about ICQ but it doesn't. Um but yeah basically look it's in my interest to for those nodes to make as much as possible. Like I said our company has 5,000 of them.

So just some of the revenue models that ICQ will have uh uh we we will obviously be selling premium handles. We will have business accounts. We will have lots of premium services. Uh Jay over there came up with a really good idea for um sponsor messages. So, if you're an important person, you're a K or you're some kind of superstar, whoever you are, you'll be able to set the price of what you'll accept in order to receive a message.

So, if I don't know, pick a famous person has, you know, says I want $30 for a message, and you really want them to see their message, you can pay the $30. 10% goes to the nodes, 90% goes to the account owner, and we'll use AI to make sure they actually read the message to make sure, you know, that you got your $30 worth. Uh, so that's a pretty cool thing that we're going to be doing. There's a lot of agentic features that we're going to be having on this node network to run uh the new ICQ. uh you know smart routing and and a lot of security related things will be handled by the AIS.

So the the money that you know we're we're using for the nodes uh sales like I said it's to more devs more marketing to launch with deep liquidity and to deepen and harden the liquidity post TGE we're partner with everybody. This is this is where saying we have these we have these 5,000 nodes set aside for strategic partnerships. These are not for Koss. Not unless not unless you are very big, very respected and is very clear to everybody what it's for. This is for CoinDesk and Cointelegraph for centralized exchanges for people who run uh trade shows.

These nodes will be spent wisely. As far as I'm concerned, 5,000 nodes worth $1,000 each is a $5 million marketing budget. And I'm not going to just waste it on a bunch of unknown undocs uh people. So this is a QR code. If you're interested in Node, you can also just come talk to me.

My email address is rickwow.ai. My name is Rickona. I'm Rick Lona on all platforms. And you know, we are we are in the note selling business right now.

So there's probably no better time to get a deal if you're interested than to talk to me. Yeah. I guess let me just just touch real quick on the what I had originally come here to talk about. We are launching a launchpad. We are going to compete with virtuals and the other AI launch places, but we are very open and also partnering with them at the same time.

Our launchpad is going to be a little different. You're going to be able to imagine WordPress meets Shopify meets virtuals. So, you'll be able to register a domain name, Wizzywig, design a website, upload a set of images and a bunch of text um or documents to train the AI on its personality, what's supposed to or how it's supposed to answer people and and then also launch a token and you can choose which network you want to launch the token on. You can choose what method you want to launch the token whether it's a bonding curve or some other method. Um so that that is that is coming soon.

We are about to also roll out a a web two agent builder where you know we could take you know out of a thousand specialized um agents you'll be able to drag and drop them and build a captain agent that can do a pretty complex task. Again that that is more of a web two product but that revenue will also flow through the nodes. So I guess I'll end with the tokconomics part that I didn't cover. Virtual did something really really right. I don't know how many of you follow them.

Their current market cap is like one and a half billion because when you launch on virtuals, you have to launch through their decks with the virtuals token, which is brilliant. They literally create buying pressure for everybody that launches because it costs about $80,000 worth of virtuals to to escape the bonding curves and then they burn the LP tokens which which takes the tokens off the market. So, every time a token launches, they get buy pressure and tokens off the market at the same exact time. It's brilliant. We're going to copy it.

Um, and of course, we'll also have burns and and everything else. So, even though you can't see it visually, it's just a reminder. We just bought ICQ. Thank you.