The Emerging Social Economy: Digitizing Communities and Individuals - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

amazing how is everyone amazing good to hear quick survey I just want to understand raise your hand if you have a metamask wallet okay okay cool raise your hand if you uh participate in a dow okay good to see you raise your hand if you hold or uh a social token okay uh raise your hand if you guys hold a fan token okay raise your hand if you uh hold an nft okay cool uh well we're gonna answer a lot of questions today uh we have an amazing panel uh we're going to start with uh introductions here uh Irene you want to go first hello everyone this is Irene I'm the creator of Irene Dal and also the founder of Soco so at a Soco we are trying to build the next killer app in the web free social space so irindale with just our proof of concept circle is a platform where we are helping millions of web 2 creators to create their own versions of irental at the click of a button so our test night is actually gonna go into life in two weeks time hope everyone can join and test the platform Amazing Alex you want to go next well I'm going to try to have the same energy uh so I'm Alex I'm the CEO of Chile's chilies we are a European company that is tokenizing sports team uh we've been doing that for the last four years and a half and long story short we invented and created the concept of fun tokens um and we work with 150 teams in the world from 80 soccer slash football teams like Barcelona Arsenal Paris Saint-Germain Juventus and you name it we have like 85 like this we work with UFC Formula One teams here um NBA teams NFL teams even though we haven't launch it yet so our job is to try to engage and monetize the 99.9 of fans that are not in the stadium or not even in the city of the team they are supporting and we created that uh and now we have like 300 employees all over the world amazing hey Michael you want to go next day Mike um so the block is one of the leading media and info services companies focused on digital assets so generally excited to be here and talk about how we're monetizing creators and content a little bit better awesome John why don't you go next morning everyone I am John V the new CEO of Napster some of you may remember who has ever downloaded something on Napster uh-huh lots of criminals in the room um so the rebellious kitty is back again uh we just raised a new Round We announced it this week in Singapore uh We've announced the Napster Venture fund to invest in web3 music uh artist Development Fund for web3 artists so our general take is that webstery music has been underinvested vis-a-vis web3 gaming so we're looking to take an iconic brand and transition from our strong web 2 business into web3 amazing hey Michael um why don't you help us Define uh what a social token is or a fan token and the difference between that and nft and then everyone can kind of tell us about uh you know what what the future will look like in these categories yeah you're the expert fan token I think I mean they were you know it's interesting because when we started four and a half years ago there was not a nft hype whatsoever um and everybody was looking at us like what are you doing this never gonna work uh to the point that we always been asked for the last four years do we have any competitors and I'm sorry to say that four years ago nobody was stupid enough to do what we were doing luckily for us four years later we created this massive Network effect where fungible tokens not nft you know in in our case uh became a membership it became a a tool for token gated benefits and especially for us it's a it's a voice as a fun fact the original name of fan tokens were voice token because they were giving a voice to the fans all over the world um and that's how it started and they're very different and I and I hate to compare that with nfts because we are comparing apple and oranges um but yet the the market of fan tokens it's much easier to apprehend because you can just buy one token it's one dollar five dollars ten dollars and it gives you an immediate utility out of it yeah so I mean jumping in uh I used to work in a company called Roblox and I think the whole notion of uh you know nfts in terms of that first stage of Collectibles more Prospectors and investors at ROBLOX we had an ecosystem it wasn't on the blockchain but we had around music the area that I ran millions of people getting these small we call it virtual merchandise little items for a dollar two dollars five dollars and they were expressing again their fandom uh for the artists that they loved and this created tens of millions of dollars for the for the music industry and artists so I'm definitely a strong believer I think sports music anything that's personality driven um where you can love your favorite team love your favorite artist we think it's the is going to usher in this next phase uh Beyond nfts with the sort of investors moving to to fans so I think it's very very inciting transition time amazing um Irene do you want to tell us maybe about uh the future of the next five years with uh nfts and and fan tokens and what that could look like I think the difference between fan token and FTS is like nft are actually non-fungible and although like your fan token has more liquidity and it's like you can like name every like phantoken like according to celebrities but I think fan token don't really have the sentimental value to the fans because for example I've been a creator for the past six years I had like half a million followers across all different platforms and like the fan if I can turn my post if I can turn my music turn my video into nfts the fans can actually collect all of them as part of their memories for example like I got my first house like two years ago and probably this post has some special meanings to uh some of the fans because they feel like they get inspired or they feel like oh I really feel happy before I read that she can earn her first house and she can they can actually own that part of the social media post as an app piece for example I think enough he's had a lot of Potentials in the future and also nfts give back the ownership to the Creator themselves and also fans can invest in early by buying all these nfts because for example if you own Jeremy links in Ft like when he was not that famous imagine how much you're going to worse at the lean sanity period so these are all the potentials nfts can bring to the economy yeah got it interesting yeah I I'd say like for nfts um as for how people are capturing value right if there's a sports team that needs to capture some amount of value and enable better connection with say the end consumer like it's kind of difficult for there to be every single instance be kind of captured in an nft and like sold out to an audience and so there's certainly a trade-off between like what you're describing are some of the benefits of like an nft compared to more fungible tokens Associates for instance has done kind of like a great job of providing almost I I guess I would describe it as like a base later layer for all the various team tokens that exist on that platform and that allows fans to kind of like navigate an overall ecosystem rather than creating an ecosystem for every particular Creator uh in this case like an athlete or even particularly a sports team it's actually the the ecosystem and the network effect matters a lot in sports for example and I'm sure it would be the same for sure in music is fans are not fans of one team one sports today they are fun of multiple teams and multiple Sports the reason we invested a lot of money in resources to create that Network effect with more than 150 teams it's because if you create one token for one team on your own of course it's easy smart code smart contract uh three line of code almost and it works but this is the easy part the difficulty is not to create the token is to bring utility and to ensure that you can sustain that utility in the next five to ten years and that's why that's where we are investing a lot at the end all business at least in our case uh and I hate to say that publicly we are not to wait 3.0 company we all went 2.5 2.3 depends on the week uh but we we believe that we can use the technology to give this voice and this asset to the fans yet you do need uh companies like us to invest and build the ecosystem that's going to empower these assets and and that's where it's difficult actually and that's why we have to spend a lot of resources yeah now it's good I mean if you think also within a better music business for 25 years on and off and all the businesses and the music business were siled not for the reason that they were centered on the fan but they were centered around business structures so for example I went the other night to the see the script the Indoor Stadium great show seven thousand screaming Singaporean fans and me and uh it was amazing but everyone paid 150 250 for a ticket and then they left with nothing so I mean all these fan touch points the bar is I think relatively low to create these new membership models you know we're calling them fan tokens Etc it's really just fandom and and memberships and I think having creative ways to help people who maybe to your point don't know individually or there's not enough individually and having a sort of aggregate Force well the fans can come occur there they can shop across different memberships artists can then uh kind of find all their fans in one place it just it feels fairly logical that this is the the direction everything's going absolutely great Point yeah we're going to move on to mass adoption um so you know when do you guys think we're going to see tens of millions of users touching you know fan tokens nfts and how do we accelerate this how do we make this happen sooner uh for for us um we have already 1.

6 so million users so step by step but the thing is you can spend as much as I mean as much money as you want to start something it will not grow till there is enough legitimacy and you cannot buy legitimacy that's the only thing or two things time and legitimacy uh and and I think we just need time we need time to show that what we say is right and showing showcases deliver of value not Financial but value to the funds uh value to the teams we're already doing that last year we pay that's Financial but we paid more than 200 million to the sports industry but on the other end we we realized that we help these teams and I'm talking massive teams um FC Barcelona and and uh these kind of Brands to touch fans that they never managed to touch directly why because and that's how we pitch uh fan tokens is we believe that in the next five to ten years we're gonna go from a passive Fan industry to an active fun industry where I used to be just a spectator and now I'm going to be an actor of the brand that I like not the game of course but the brand and that transition that bridge is gonna come with different assets fan tokens are one of them um but these teams the biggest teams in the world they are very powerful brand very small organization and at the end the only thing that matters is delivering the spots um I mean winning games so they do need Partners like us and others to actually go in the space that we are today and it's difficult and it's every day we are we're not fighting talking to educate the funds we are fighting first to educate the teams we are working with and then eventually it's going to become more organic in the next three to five years yeah I think the transition for us in music you've got fans going to like members and then the nice thing in music going to participants so we think that the whole notion of creating for uh there's companies like splice and Company investing called make it so and then the whole user generated participant opportunity with the music industry where you're not you are first of all it's like you're in the audience they're on stage then you have like a closer interaction with them you're like hanging backstage of meet and greets but then maybe you're like recording you're offering your Beats you're offering your lyrics you know with them uh together and then fans connecting with other fans so I think that that whole transition of these industries becoming really communities where for the last number of years I worked on Napster 20 years ago and gave them 50 million dollars we nearly got it legitimate then this is a 20 year old t-shirt um it's clean um and I think now this note but that was a community it was people chatting with the Napster and people like we're meeting people they were sharing music it really felt like a movement and I think what happened everyone got a little lazy in streaming where streaming has been more just a commodity so you have we have 100 million tracks great you can listen to it but there's no community so we think injecting Community back where the fans are connecting with each other they're connecting with the sports teams they love the music teams um Etc just again has been locked in a little bottle so I think once it's Unleashed there's no doesn't need to be on organic cap or a force cap to 10.99 a month or 9.99 a month the fans if they're engaged they've shown that through physical merch in the past and then we've shown it again through virtual merch and gaming so we think the the fans once they're connected will tip and support their artists and um teams any way they can and hopefully then also participate to be parts of the community themselves and contribute yeah uh one thing that um Alex said that was really interesting it's like you're able to really build up this ecosystem over time and over that period of time do you build like a clearer and clear value prop to the incremental user so what is that utility that a user actually needs to believe in to say make the jump over naturally there are frictions transitioning over to web through world and we should all be really really eyes open to it but how do we ask like uh you know movement of sorts really make it clear through sports or individual nfts or digital media companies or uh musicians out there that there is enough to kind of like make that initial hop right and so I think once you get to that kind of like critical mass point where you can support you know your favorite athlete your favorite organization and it's really seamless uh that's kind of when we reach that Breakneck speed uh so for us what that has taken like form into it uh we actually recently announced the integration of access protocol into theblock.com which is kind of like our free new site and our switching out our consumer subscription paywall for a web 3 oriented paywall so it's kind of like token gated if you're staking and the experiment uh is one that I'm obviously really excited for of course but just seeing how you can convince uh the user that might be driving by to take an action because they want the utility behind a paywall right uh and so if you're seeing millions of people touch that paywall per month or per year um how many actually convert right and like how do you actually take that one individual event and then create more utility for that user once they're in the overall ecosystem yeah and I think another friction point in terms of getting more velocity is having trusted Brands so it sounds like you'll you're the trusted brand in sports I think Within the Music Space there've been a lot of from an investor perspective again 330 Million last year four billion in gaming right so they've been five billion dollar bets seven million dollar bets but not any big bets so we think a brand coming into the space that everyone can trust that will be around for a while so hopefully in apps that we can fill that role then everyone kind of jumps on and then you have a network effect of all the people with Talent you know then talking to their user bases like the music they have I have 10 000 followers I have 100 000 million followers and I think once they trust a place then that will create the network effect to kind of start to scale so give us 18 months and we'll get to 10 10 minutes okay yeah and also we are trying to improve the sustability and you after investigate the mass adoption so at so-called we are working with a lot of big web 2 companies to help integrate their product integrate nft into their existing product and the services for example we are working with nothing a very super slick phone brand they are like giving airdrops and ft's to their communities who are the pre-investors of the company who of all those who pre-order the phones so the nfts comes with a lot of utilities for example through some burning mechanism they can redeem nfts with a lot of physical gadgets and also what we are working with the world's best chefs in the like in LA so they are coming up with different nfts like abdicated uh private dining experience So when you buy the nfts you can actually enjoy a very curated product experience by these world-renowned chefs so these are the use case we are exploring with different categories different sectors in the world and we are trying to bring Mass adoptions to uh like a mess optional left key to the web 2 world amazing yeah so it seems like this there's this transition where you know you start with a fan where you don't really get too much then you become a member or you have this you know private utility and access and then potentially becoming an owner and having a voice in um you know different teams and Brands I'm curious do you guys think um you know we need uh sort of a new chain as well uh to achieve uh Mass adoption do you think this can happen on like an ethereum L1 how do you guys think about ltus and sort of the the social economy or other chains completely uh yeah that's actually a great question because it draws me back to a point that I I didn't make before but ultimately if we're really successful here uh the idea of a particular change should be totally abstracted away from the user right like that shouldn't really be a consideration for someone that's entering the ecosystem uh and so what do we need to do as kind of like Builders uh to really achieve that right how do you make what is a checkout process uh instead of it being 20 clicks across three or four different domains you know four click same domain super easy a very familiar experience to what they're working with today um yeah yeah so um for us four years ago we made a choice to actually create our own chain uh the cheese chain uh which we are launching a new version by the end of the year but the the going back to what our fan tokens and it will explain why we use blockchain uh the reason we use blockchain is because fans want to have a voice and we decide to to have a voice we needed two things one doing onshen voting so it means that when you vote the funds vote when the fund votes to decide that what's going to be the design of the Jersey next season the music in the stadium or anything that is fun related and that the club or the team are asking their fans this on social centuries it's on chain so there is full transparency and integrity of the of the vote and I'm saying that because at least in Europe I don't know how it is in U.S but in Europe we all like and for sure here in Asia I've seen it you know your Saturday night on TV you have this X Factor or whatever TV show where you have to send an SMS to choose uh who's gonna be the number one number two number three um there is no way you can believe that the guys that have voted have actually chose that uh you know it's rigged like you do it but you know it's rigged so at least on on blockchain for the funds we decided to say okay if we're gonna give you for the first time ever a voice an access a recognition we're gonna use a blockchain and on top of the voting there is a bit the concept of social status what is the most important for a fun most likely from any brand but especially in sports fan it's to be recognized as a fan till now when I'm a fan I just follow you on Twitter that's a one-way relationship and also I'm an anonymous but I'm an anonymous account so we have a fan token nft any any asset that makes sense suddenly there is this link and on top of that you have a vested interest I love the English expression that says that you put your money where your math is it's like sports and fandom is exactly that I'm putting ten dollars hundred dollars on something that I believe in so by definition if I put money to own a token whatever it is about a brand I'm gonna have more vested interest into it and therefore I'm going to be more committed to that brand and that's how we try to scale and educate our product on the blockchain yeah so interesting I used to be a TV producer so they're not always rigged like the voting but I think I did a lot of interactive television and talk about those fan experiences when we had a show so we produced live interactive Talk Show game shows and the fans after the show so you could win prizes you'd text in uh and we had a whole group of people who had like a chat room and they were giving us production notes on the show and there was one host we had from the UK Jerry and uh this one guy in the chat room like loved Jerry and loved it when she did her dance so imagine you're watching television for other people it's that connection it feels very distant right it's just a screen and so I got we talked to Jerry in her ear and said can you do your special dance for Jerry 55 she has uh okay okay so then she goes right Jerry 55 this is for you and like the Champions Go Bananas right because it's this connection again to a point once you break that wall and it's like oh my team is actually speaking back my artists are talking about the TV shows talking back and that link once you've experienced that kind of connection and interactivity we used to call it participatory media I think this is all these are all the threads that I've seen in television and advertising you know in gaming like once you create that link these fans are fans for life um they're going to your question in terms of the chains I think the more we can all strip away jargon um the better and it shouldn't matter I mean the early days of the web in music there was talk about codex and this and that doesn't matter it was the experience so you know we're on our ground our ground's a big investor of ours I think that seemed like a smart choice is carbon carbon negative and the music industry is very you know concerned about that not a transaction per second but I think as we scale I don't think we would be limited necessarily by if you like our back end we want to make sure the experience is great um you know for the fans and the artists in the community amazing uh yeah one of the uh let's talk about uh monetization so one of the big dilemmas of web 2 social is a lot of create a lot of creators teams organizations you know it's kind of hard to monetize from the beginning right right uh right when you start uh when we think about web three social economies what responsibility do we have to um you know help help folks monetize and uh what are your guys's ideas on web3 monetization for social economies I think the only the doctor can go first yeah sure yeah I have a lot of opinions here um but I think in general it's like time and time again we're seeing that ultimately like consumers don't necessarily want to pay uh directly for whatever utility that they're getting and so we were talking about it backstage a little bit but you know why my nfts might not work for say digital media company specifically right it's because it's fairly technologically difficult for me to say mint and nft for every single article and and sell them directly to individuals that are interested in that particular article um and at the same time like it's unclear how nfcs at this point enable kind of like recurring fees which is incredibly incredibly important to any Creator out there right being able to build uh fees that you can count on uh for your livelihood and everything else so what are the solutions there that kind of check both boxes of um one creating those recurring fee streams on the Creator side but then also deprecating some of like the value extract of nature uh of what is today's consumer Creator relationship um so that's what we're doing with access protocol integration into the block site one thing that you actually touched on which I'd love to chat more about is kind of like the social impact of you know making uh the connection between the Creator and the consumer like multivariate right in say Twitter for instance your only real action to demonstrate support uh I guess they've recently added the Tipping function so maybe this is a little bit dated is typically to follow someone right but if you had say like Irene 500 000 followers or so and each of these people can kind of demonstrate the degree to which they support by quantifying it right by owning some kind of fan token or taking some action that enables like d the content creator to identify that person and be like these are actually the top hundred fans of mine that I want to connect with I want to create unique experiences for them in some way right and what that could look like uh you know for digital media companies maybe is like oh you get to talk to this particular journalist that you've been supporting for five years or were an initial Staker at this person's pool those types of relationships are really interesting so we're pretty excited at the design space that very simply creating a multi-dimensional relationship between the Creator and the consumer hasn't sort so yeah I think in the going back to again business structures uh previously like locking you know Industries into ways that have been done for long periods of time that maybe don't necessarily make sense as fans have evolved and artists have evolved or creators so I think you know putting the putting the fan in the answers at the center of the experience is key um so from an absolute perspective we're already having discussions with a lot of top level artists and Independent Artists like you know how are you acting now um and reaching your fans in general and I think one of the key trends you know we work with 21 Pilots uh before not as an app so when I was at ROBLOX and I think it was very clear working with the guys that these are not people who just want to put out a three minute amazing three-minute song they are artists and they're three-dimensional artists so the the show that we did on on Roblox was more like a HBO you know scripted series like their brains are just full of this they're visual storytellers they're like you know they're interacting and they're and they're funny and they're these characters and there's there's folklore with the Bishops and it's this crazy Mad World Behind what people listen to in a three or four minute song so I think being able to work with the artist to help again them represent themselves in a whole different way where they want to do maybe a meet and greet they want to have a different character of themselves like an alter ego and they can have this and they're going to have different sort of art that they're connecting with and unreleased songs and a Beat and then when we want to put a bunch of their you know um samples out to the community to for them to remix so I think any different ways that they want to interact is the responsibility of a company like ours and the ecosystem is to fuel that and to make sure it's managed um and again I think everyone's heard the economics of traditional streaming not so good um you know for the artists because again it got stuck into a specific ecosystem and you've got the larger public companies who are now forced to deliver shareholder value on a quarterly basis so they're going off away from music into audio and becoming sort of audio Services doing audio books and podcasts and the musicians are going hey what about us you know we're the music people that got you going so so yeah so we want to re-center everything back around the fan and the artist and kind of serve them and help them monetize in all the creative ways that they'll dream up I mean yeah I know a lot of creators who has millions of followers on Instagram on Tech talk and also me I have half a million followers on Instagram if I post a very sexy hot photos and get 10 000 followers within a day but the thing is what can I do with all these followers I cannot really monetize on them directly so what I need to do is I need to do a lot of sponsorship I need to do a lot about test months and because most of my fans are males so actually I'm posting very like cute photos with like water purifier with like gaming chairs with male shampoos so all these kind of like a very funny content start to appear on my feet so I've been talking to a lot of female creators and they're asking me like I have so many fans so what can I do it's all expense and therefore we are creating a platform where we allow the creators to launch their investigated communities so where that's where they can identify who are the super fans who are willing to pay money to buy nfts to have more interactions with me and also we know like only fans Patron data law lists are like very exclusive content but the thing is most of the creators they don't want to associate themselves with all these like only fans platforms and therefore we need to really create a platform where they can monetize their content but they're not necessarily dilute their brand or harm their brand uh image uh yeah so next we're going to talk about Dallas uh so Dows are you know very crypto native application of Social and fan tokens and now nfts um how do you guys see Dao's playing out in uh in Social economies and maybe explain what a Dao is uh for those that aren't aware yet stands for like decentralized autonomous organization so to me I think Dao is like a great way to um group all your offense I mean I'm a Creator myself so to me that is like really a great way to group all your fans together and nothing that will really revolutionize how creators and fans can work with one another because like imagine if you're a fan you can simply your favorite creator for the longest time you watch the Youtube million times but you can't get anything from just by watching the content itself but imagine if you're a down member now we have the own Trend Governors we have the own Trend treasury you can vote you can come up with a lot of proposal nowadays like the fans they come up with a way to support their favorite creators and creators can come to the dial sometimes and say oh so this is the proposal I want this is like uh like uh something I want to achieve and now the fans can work together collaboratively collaboratively to achieve something more productive and more efficient because right now like to celebrate your favorite celebrity celebrities birthday they spend millions of dollars to put a really big board on like a bus stop on like a New York Times Square but the thing is like creator doesn't really want it for example I wouldn't want my face to appear at the bus stop but I would prefer the fans to group together and they like raise money and then we donate this money to some web to organizations to help the women and the children and this is exactly what we do at irindale so we actually donated 100K to like a child's organization in a web 2 space so this is what we can do and how we can utilize Dao to achieve a more productive goal me I'm gonna be the old uh guy here I think Dao is a bit of an Utopia in the actually no I think it works for individuals and crypto native Brands uh it will work for example for projects like board apes and stuff like this where there is no Legacy there is no history so you start from scratch with something that is build to give power back to the fans for more established brand which is what we do we work with 100 years old brand uh already and we we are doing this kind of governance token uh I like to call phantoken sometimes instead of a share of a company you have a share of influence and and it's exactly that you are sharing with other fans power an influence to design something but in reality today and in the next five years it's going to be mainly about uh individual and purely native brands that comes out of nowhere and therefore can use that tool rather than say hey let's buy you a football club because I've seen that a hundred times uh let's buy a football club and we're gonna do a Dao out of it it brings so many legal issue because then there is a Securities issue about ownership and control of the business it brings I mean there is only problems and the reality is there is also a question should fans decide business decision first the answer is no yeah I think you know when you get into the rights Industries which I think is a distinction between new brands who are unfettered unlike existing brands in the media space that have rights associated associated with them which are complicated uh I think they're you know like for example if you're picking if you're a tour operator like in the music space and you want to decide you know which bands you should book for your Venue that could be an interesting structure and there's some things in the music space where people are thinking about a dow structure to help people you know with booking and and that whole industry so I think there are certain aspects where maybe it's interesting and the fans could participate but generally I would agree that a membership mobile model with social tokens is you participate as much as the organizers want you to participate but there are some things that are kind of still behind the curtain due to like more complex rights and relationships we look at that actually um just before kovid that we were going to sign a deal with a top tier artist and uh your funds would have been able to buy the token of that artist I mean musical artist that will allude a lot of fun to choose what is the museum what's going to be the first song that's going to be played during the concert or that kind of stuff but if you ask fans um or yeah fans which artists should we book for the tour or in football for example or in soccer which player should we buy the problem at least in our eyes is that because there is an economical interest for a tour or an artist to actually be booked or there is an economical interest for the player to be signed there will always be a rigged mechanism where someone who has money the agent is gonna try to push that artist or that player and it's gonna screw the whole mechanism so sometimes I know I'm naive in that way but democracy doesn't work for some pure economical stuff and and that's where thou has a certain limit and that's why in our case we always present fund tokens and again it's a very specific case but that has nothing to do with both business and sports because that's not the job of fans to decide that and also you cannot give a public you cannot make a public poll or questions uh say hey do we want to buy Ronaldo because if you want to buy Ronaldo then the whole press knows that you want to buy Ronaldo so it's not a secret anymore so therefore there is every single teams in the world that's going to try to overbear video in order to acquire him so everything that has an outcome that has an economical impact in a traditional business it's very difficult to give the voice to the Token holders yeah I think I would just say I think it's still a little Nuance between sports and music I think it fans it doesn't have to be you pick the exact answers but here are the answers that we like the whole point of people going to the show is meant to be fans so I think different to who's buying Ronaldo and I think watch the space someone like Ryan Reynolds with his UK football club right there he owns I imagine that would be a fun thing for him to try and do to do as a TV you know spectacle going hey it's a doubt like what do you want to do we're all going to do it as a game and we'll run the club together but I think it's fascinating like in terms of again behind closed doors this is the people that used to do things and this is how we do it so I think there can be some loosening of the reins uh to let again the people who go and watch the games or the people who go and watch the shows to participate I think it's gonna be interesting experimentations yeah I think Dows definitely have like a large opportunity in the space I I almost think they should be like more ambitious than just buying like a particular club or like a particular Golf Course uh I think where they get really really interesting is like how do you uh incentivize coordination across parties that otherwise wouldn't necessarily be uh colleagued in a way maybe they're instead like competitors right and how do all of these otherwise competitors in a web 2 world kind of rally around a single variable in which say onboarding more fans into the overall space uh something like that could be you know to everyone's benefit rather than just say like a particular agent's benefit right so yeah and there could be Dows as well like for industry standards like in terms of groups I think they're different uses for them that makes sense awesome yeah I want to ask a more general question just drilling down into sort of Rights and IP uh we've seen you know I think most popularly a lot of pfp projects just give uh you know creative rights the holders of nfts what do you guys think writes and uh IP will fall in in web3 do you think these sorts of things should be given away at scale or uh do you think those should be retained by the team and the company team at the end it's all about the IP uh you know we are working the we are working with brands that are 100 years old FC Barcelona is 120 years old PSG is 52 years old etc etc so um it will be difficult to tell to the CEO and actually the owner of a billion dollar business that hey you're IP I'm gonna tokenize your IP and whoever ever owns that token can do whatever he wants with the brand uh that's a tough selling and um and that's where it's easier to use native or crypto native Brands like border apes and other where you you start from scratch so there is no Legacy so I'm actually a strong believer in sometimes I'm even more strong believer in crypto native nft pfp project than a legacy brand going into that space and yet it's our business because there is so much education and so much trouble what does happen when the contract that you have with the company expire uh if there is a bridge one way or another who owns the right um and this hasn't been really I mean it hasn't happened because this industry is more or less four years old in a NFD or IP tokenized asset um but but it will happen in the next two to three years there will be some clashes and that will be interesting yeah so so I think in the music so I think Sports is a little a little bit more restrictive because you've got players that kind of employees of companies you know the clubs I think in the music space a lot of the answers we work with um so Grimes for example of of Elon connection super forward looking and and if she had her way and you've seen a lot of the projects she's been doing so far she would love to give everything away and like allow the community to create with her and because you know Fame there was a recent study by midia um you know Fame is almost the last thing ironically uh of artists that they think is important for their careers so they want to connect with their Community they want to express their art so I think you're going to see in the music space a lot of very interesting uses of Ip whether the owners if you like the old labels once artists can break free there's going to be a lot more experimental models where here's all my music Here's all my art you guys create and let's do something together and obviously you know a lot of the money is then made for live anyway so sometimes already that's how people are seeing streaming is you let streaming go and then you make your money from merchandise and um and tours so now as all of that goes virtual into the metaverse and into into the web 3 areas I think you're going to see a lot more loose uses of Ip um and that again goes from fan to member to participant um and that's a super exciting thing when you can participate with your fans is nothing more exciting there was a I think an analysis we work with um Zara Larsen from from Sweden and I spent a lot of time with her and again anything that she could do to get closer to the fans and perform live and and have that uh relationship she didn't you know the business structure they're not necessarily business people they're artists and they want to create and connect yeah and I think from a Creator's perspective because recently some AI companies actually approached me he said I really I know you are busy you are influencer but I also you need to manage so-called so what if we can use air technology that you just need to record a video or just need to record a voice and then you give this IP to your fans or who holds your nfts and then nowadays nft holders can actually use the Air Technology to come up with a lot of different content for you so all these fans will group together and create different kinds of content for you and now you can reach a wide the audience to have a better and a bigger community so I think this way uh probably we can just like share of Ip with our like top fans to create something uh more attractive to to attract a wider audience yeah amazing um yeah I want to touch on uh Regulatory and compliance uh quickly um so we've all seen some unsavory if you're kind of an OG in in the space uh unsavory things happen in uh 2017 and 2018 we're starting to kind of see that again now how can we avoid um kind of bad behavior in uh in the social uh and Creator economy space uh through through good uh legal and compliant uh you know behavior in web3 that's a great question uh I don't know if there's like a great answer um I think again like looping back to what we're talking about earlier where it's like hey uh I think everyone on the stage like in order to kind of dissuade that kind of behavior there needs to be a higher level of accountability across like all creators because it does kind of create unnecessary duress in a way that could be unproductive to the industry long term um and so like what is that value prop that someone's actually providing when they are encouraging someone to say buy a fan token or buy a particular nft right like we can't afford as an industry for people to go out there do uh one-off token tail or nft sale just to bounce and disappear out of the ecosystem I think that's incredibly disruptive in terms of like how do we kind of like guide against that I I don't know if there would be any kind of like very good regulatory insertion that can be done and so like how do you kind of make it socially mandatory even working with so many anons on Twitter and everything else like it's it's a difficult problem I I think um what we're talking about earlier is we're moving in the trend from investor to fan I think that should generally be good from a regulatory perspective because the the notion of fans again inherently has utility and then I think that changes the whole discussion where it's not sort of prospecting an investor group these are these are genuine fans who have genuine utility and they connect things so it feels like it should smooth things over from a regulatory at least the discussions with our lovely lovely lawyers I think it's moving in the right direction with stuff you're doing and with music where services are not just um again nft up and up and down but they're actually long-term value propositions with large bodies of fans with respected Brands so I think then I think the the broader Market regulators and and consumers will go oh this is what it is this makes sense the jargon again slips away and people are then just able to participate and connect with creators they love and teams that they love and artists that they love and hopefully everything will will move nicely into the next phase that we've all been hoping it well Forest regulation is obviously a critical part of our business um because again I don't want to repeat but because we work with these big brands that are 50 100 years old and actually that have a business outside of what we do with them uh we cannot afford uh to taint them we cannot afford to damage the value of their brand and therefore uh we need to be regulated and are approved and or in a very safe environment in in the countries where we are operating operating as the product socials.

com Chinese Etc or where the token is issued for example I was Monday in Malaysia and actually just here there is a state next to Singapore called Johor and we uh we are launching the token of the biggest football team there and it took us six months to convince the Malaysian authorities to make sure that uh fan took ends are not Securities but this we have to do it in every single country that we are launching tokens in and I'm talking in dozens of countries so um and that's great except us where everything is complicated but in the rest of the world the the actually the framework is pretty clear but the difficulty when you create something that is a bit unique is we sit between nfts which actually are not really regulated nobody really knows what it is it's collectible Ah that's okay it's cool and cryptocurrencies because actually fungible tokens is designed or defined rather than design as a cryptocurrencies but we are not occurrences we're actually a crypto asset uh it's just that it's fungible and when to to get the benefits of what we are offering you just need to hold it you just need to own it like a membership program so in in a country for example in one of the European country we're gonna have to force users that before buying for even one dollar the the token of the team they want uh they're gonna have to be Cowboys it and that's a problem because for one dollar if you need to because that's not really scalable amazing all right guys uh that's our panel on the emerging social economy want to thank our panelists thank you so much guys