Solving Crypto’s Marketing and Branding Problem - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

gmgm uh the conversation I want to have today is uh ultimately about uh what I think is one of the most important problems uh in crypto that needs to be solved which ultimately the solution is about consumer crypto so we'll get into those slides in a sec about two and a half years ago we bought pudgy Penguins ultimately to create a brand that could resonate uh with people from all walks of life this idea that we weren't going to sell people on price going up or Price going down but that we were going to sell people on IP uh and digital ownership and being censorship resistant and being part of an amazing community over the last two and a half years I've subsequently seen a pretty big problem in the industry which is I think we have a really bad marketing and branding problem I think for the last 10 years we've been focusing on technology we've been focusing on innovating on the actual infrastructure in the tech stack uh but today I think if if you build actually on chain uh I think a lot of those woses have left us but unfortunately the stigma of the industry remains and a lot of people uh do not want to participate within the crypto industry uh because of what has transpired in the past and so we have a branding and we have a marketing problem and I think we're going to solve that via consumer crypto so before we get started I just want to give you guys a little bit of an introduction I'm uh the CEO of a company called igloo which holds uh pudgy Penguins uh and another company called abstract pudgy Penguins is uh the world's I think second biggest nft project and uh abstract is going to be the consumer layer on evm so to solve The Branding and the marketing problem I think it starts and stops with consumer crypto but consumer crypto is pretty vague and so it leads the question what is consumer crypto I think consumer crypto is blockchain powered apps that people use in their everyday use and I actually break this down in three phases I think the first phase around discre uh around consumer crypto will be predicated around discretionary spending I think the second phase will be around necessary spending and the third phase around essential spending to kind of break down what I think uh these is these different phases are exactly uh I think the first phase in this case would be discretionary spending these is the first 50 million users it's actually pretty interesting because I think right now A lot of people are trying to build in a general purpose approach and I think this approach is relatively fragmented and I think has created The Branding and the marketing problem because if you look under the hood of a lot of these crypto projects it's actually too confusing for the everyday person and so discretionary spending is this idea around fun or leisurely spending people where people or applications and products which people spend their free time basically consuming and if you actually kind of look under the hood uh of what I think has been viral and has gained a lot of momentum within uh for consumers within crypto I think has really been predicated around this phase and this phase specifically so give you guys a little bit of a breakdown as to what I think uh know discretionary spending looks like in consumer applications around this spending habit I think it's gaming I think it's social and Creator platforms I think it's trading I think it's Bing digital Collectibles and tokenized culture I think the reason for this is because one they're prone to virality and crypto needs more virality not around price going up or price going down but it needs virality around good products that people enjoy uh the second one is I think it's naturally easier to sell to Consumers if you kind of look at these categories these categories to me are fun uh and I think fun is an easy sell and fun is universal I think we always talk about web 2 and web 3 but fun is a universal emotion which uh whether you're in crypto or outside of crypto we all can resonate with and naturally I think it solves a lot of web to problems so if you guys are not familiar there's actually a slew of Pros around discretionary spending building and web 2 a slew of cons uh that building around discretionary and web 2 kind of presents so you know I made my career actually uh building consumer applications and consumer product Brands I've had some of uh the most successful uh consumer product brands of the last five years at least in uh in America and uh some of the some of the problems that I faced with was first the fees again if you're building with discretionary or around discretionary spending in web 2 you're getting charged a fee between 3 and 10% depending on high RI on on on the risk of the actual business that you're building fund tends to be higher risk and tends to charge a bigger fee Geo restrictions chargeback risk and then natural censorship uh if you've ever built Fund in web 2 uh I think uh you know you've had a a a hard time being censored whether it's through payment processors or uh different GE restrictions and things like that and so I think this is uh probably the most important Frontier that I think we're going to have to face uh one that I think we've currently seen success in over the last couple of years but it's a place that I really want uh Builders and community members uh to really double down in and try to push the barrier forward as I think this is the first step in terms of solving our branding and marketing problem the next one is necessary spending and so I kind of consider this the road to 250 million users and so I kind of look at it as a a pretty straightforward approach I think right now uh when you're kind of looking at the general purpose approach that we've embodied for a long time you can't really be good at one single thing and so if you focus on discretionary spending if you focus on consumer once you have a base of five 10 15 20 million users it's really easy to upsell them on what I call necessary spending and so this idea where uh give you guys an anecdotal example uh but pudgy Penguins for example has you know 500,000 people signed up to our pudgy wallet which people don't even know exist as that number grows to millions and they participate within our web three product and ecosystem once that base is big enough I can then upsell them on savings I can then upsell them on identity and payments uh and ultimately this is where I think necessary spending comes in and so uh this is a little bit of a breakdown and ultimately where I think that stuff can go and that can kind of include digital Commerce media payments you know dii software as a service and others this is kind of a breakdown of uh what I think the current model around blockchains today and I actually believe the The Branding and the marketing and the adoption problem I actually I I put that responsibility on on on the chains actually uh most people think chains are just payment rails but I actually think they're a little bit more than that uh I actually think they're the custodians of adoption throughout the crypto sphere and too many blockchains are building what I call a general purpose model which as you can see if any of you guys are entrepreneurs which I hope most of you are it's a pretty uh big uh big business to tackle and it's pretty hard to do one of those things well especially when you have so many different commitments and so I think the solution uh is ultimately going to be through a more uh calculated and uh and uh less segmented approach which ultimately I think will probably lead into my next topic or my next uh form of spending which I think is essential spending so once you break through through necessary this is obviously a world on chain you can then become general purpose once you do one thing really well you can upsell you know your audience on different verticals and then you can then build the next generation of Internet economies in which your entire life is powered by the user experience on chain and so that would probably be you know the conclusion to where I think uh the consumer adoption funnel is ultimately going to come from and then probably not and this is a a visualization of uh ultimately how I think that looks like as you can kind of see you tackle one thing first you expand you expand you expand rather than doing uh a really fragmented and segmented approach uh from the beginning and uh this is probably at least how we're looking at things internally so obviously everybody you know is probably familiar with what we do over at pudgy we actually just announced that uh we acquired a blockchain uh that blockchain was uh called frame we now rebranded it into abstract and we want abstract to be the evm uh for consumers and so our approach contrary to most uh general purposes or general purpose approach is we want to be the chain for fun we're going to build a hub of fun we're then going to build that Hub of fun to be what I call uh you know crypto's digital amusement park once I grow the user base and the retention on the platform I'm then going to expand the offerings uh to capture different parts of their lives and I think ultimately if more people start to build in this approach uh this is ultimately going to solve I think uh the confusion around blockchain and crypto today uh which I think is a a big handicap for why uh we're dealing with some of the problems that uh we're dealing with and this is probably my most important point I think consumer crypto is crypto's final and most important Frontier I think with the Breakthrough of the ETS we've broken through through institutions in a way that I think uh is super exciting but if I'm being frank I think uh the industry is at a really interesting inflection point if we don't break through to Consumer sooner rather than later I think our industry will be handicapped and probably today's Tam I think is somewhere between 10 and 15 or 20 trillion but if you're going to power the next generation of Internet economies I think the Tam there is upwards of a hundred trillion but you're only going to get there uh if you can break through to Consumer and I think to break through to Consumer you have to reposition the ethos in which you build for Consumer uh which right now is in the uh the custody uh of blockchain so I really encourage anybody who's building chains or building applications uh to build in a really consumer first approach one thing I like to tell Builders and I like to tell people that are building on chain is building for web 2 is also building for web 3 but building for web 3 is not building for web 2 so certain languages like connect wallet never made any sense to me it should be connect account or create account one speaks to both web 2 and web 3 users one only speaks to web 3 users and it's fundamentally broken in that approach and I think where're crypto is a day I think we're uh similar to the early 2000s I think in early 2000s we were building uh you know infrastructure new hot narratives were kind of things that took businesses and and rewarded them on the stock market I think today in crypto uh if you raise the right round and you tap into the right narrative you can see huge success but I think the market is maturing to a new approach uh I think uh where I think the space is going to go uh is going to more is going to Value consumer adoption more than it is narratives and uh that's my Spiel I'm a minute early but uh thank you guys