New Wave of Blockchain Entertainment | KBW2023

[Music] all right uh thank you thank you everyone for coming um and thank you for tuning into um our session on the new way of blockchain entertainment um so before we begin I kind of wanted to make a note that entertainment company has been a very old Legacy industry throughout the time um and he was very Capital focused Market as well um and throughout the time I think there has been a lot of Innovations in this market especially um through Technologies like Ott platforms and so on um but as we're in a a career blockchain week we want to shed light on how crypto and blockchain infrastructure can help contributing to that disruption and Innovation um so we have uh very um strong experts in this market um and we will be shedding light on um sort of sharing our insight to our audience so can we begin with introducing ourselves start with uh starting with Dan hi there yeah um Dan Patterson General partner of saeron which is a multistrategy investment firm kind of focused on the web three uh consumer applications we started uh back Circa 2019 with a direct nft uh nft asset investment firm um focused on you know gaming assets art assets Collectibles the whole Gambit if you will um in late 2021 we launched our Venture fund um really focused on bringing broader adoption to the metaverse Via kind of these web three applications um which is what we're doing today hi everyone this is Joseph from mous I'm a co-founder of mod house mod house is a K-pop startup Who Wants To Be A Game Changer in this industry using blockchain technology and we are uh having decentralized K-pop Idol uh production so um fans can decide fans can participate in the uh Al album production process having nft and utility token that we provide them so uh let's have a a good discussion today hi my name is Amanda casset I started in the space as CMO of consensus where I helped bring ethereum to Market and built the first web 3 marketing team my company serotonin is the largest web 3 marketing firm we work with Korea blockchain week actually and a lot of leading startups in the web three space we also are a product Studio we invest in uh building and spinning out products that are of interest to our community the first one of those is mojito which is an nft e-commerce infrastructure platform used by a lot of the leading brands that are selling web 3 digital Goods all right thank you for the introduction I wanted to start with Dan um you know speria is very well known with investing into a lot of metaverse projects um nft based projects which is a very core function um of what we see in the future entertainment um and there are a lot of cultural um you know Trends being built on top of those um Technologies and and you know your portfolio companies so um in this regard like what's your take on um how content distribution will be shaped with this uh crypto technology as we go by yeah I think uh when we think about content distribution for kind of web 3 entertainment applications I kind of hearken back to a lot of the roots about why crypto uh is interesting in the first place right it happens to kind of disintermediate some of the kind of Legacy uh financial institutions payment providers what have you and I think in media entertainment we're going to see kind of the exact same thing where artists are able to directly interact with their fans create content that is is hyper-personalized and kind of avoids kind of the some of the Legacy distribution channels um so again if I'm creating digitally programmable art I can do that in a way that is custom to my collectors they can all share and participate in that process in a much more direct capacity and I'm not ryant on kind of you know Legacy galleries or brokerages um to really own that relationship for me so it's really just about having that hyper-personalized and direct kind of Fan Experience if you will I'm kind of intrigued about that hyper personal hyper personalization part Could you um elaborate more on that yeah totally I think that you know it's where we're seeing a lot of like the technology going especially with regards to you know more automation more utilization of certain AI tools Etc I think one one of the first ways we saw this was um through onchain generative art right where it's like you know I as a user come in and have a say in the metadata of the art that's being created right that was a totally new use case um in the world of digital art right so it's like me as a fan I mean Joseph's can speak about this much better as well right but their their fans are actually having a say in the content that's being produced right through the label and so I think that's just you know kind of one it's different for all genres right whether it's a game application whether it's an artist whether it's a K-Pop group but I think you know having that fan engagement piece is going to be super critical and that's a lot of what nfts are you know allow us to do right yeah um that's very interesting how um you know how crypto can actually shape um it actually opens up a room for a lot of different models that has not been you know possible with um traditional infrastructure so um just pinning toward that you know direct contact with fundom I kind of wanted to get to JSP on this question um you know mod house is using you said utilite you know utility tokens and nfts um that you're using so you know I mean Korea is famous for having a lot of entertainment companies um and you know from your experience like how what like to what extent can these technology um you know capture the monetization strategy further from traditional Industries um could you sort of explain on like from your own experience so for uh entertainment business Trad Al um album sales and the concert concert was the uh top Revenue sources for um entertainment companies but nft can be one of the additional uh Revenue source for all the entertainment companies but uh most of the entertainment companies in Korea they sell another digital merchandise of uh nfts so um there limitation on the number of nfts they're meting and they're selling at extremely high price so that fans cannot uh purchase more nfts than compared to other like investors so that was the problem in uh this industry but we um we had different approach uh compared to other nft project we have uh Unlimited Supply on nft and selling it uh fixed price so that um fans can get more nfts and they can participate more and then the album that is produced as a result of uh that nft sales or uh that uh voting events can be higher with with the mass adoption so what we focused mainly was a mass adoption of nft for Kpop fans I see um and I was also wondering though um like you know we had an little interesting conversation before we enter to a stage where um you know are lots of Korean Enterprise um and entertainment companies actually opting into web through Technologies as well um but what so you know given that there are a lot of l1's and L2 players coming to the KBW as well um what was your criteria in choosing um you know which blockchain you want to build your you know application on like what was your rational and um y um you can Pro provide transparency in the process by uh having onchain data so that uh fans can trust and believe all the uh process that is uh forming Idol groups or uh choosing title songs but uh for us if there is a um problem on the process of uh voting events I think it will be a um CS for uh entertainment companies so what we focused on choosing um layer one or two was liability and speed and the gas fee because we focused on the mass suboption all the gasp is paid by modhouse and all the uh like minting process is done by uh operated by model so the speed was one of the um criteria that we were focused on and all the also the gas fee and liability it can it can be like uh having all the uh like there will be all the lot a lot of components to have liability but uh if if it failed to have it on chain that would be a um big problem for customers so that was our criteria for choosing those uh ler one as a polygon for us right so um Su it was like transaction fee um and speed of the transaction and um sort of reliability of um the infr chain itself imagine like chain stops when fans were trying to vote um and all these young teenage um boys and girls trying to vote and they couldn't make it and then you know the wrong if the wrong result comes out there's going to be a lot of you know CS work for you guys um do you have any experience on having those kind of problems so far every time we have um votes for children choosing uh songs choosing units there is there was a problem but uh it has been solved uh very quickly right okay all right great um and yeah I also wanted to ask Amanda on um you know you have experience um in consensus and all that um and now you're running you know a marketing company that really pins towards web three companies and in that regard like um could you also share more of an interesting um insights and stories about your you know your client like who you've been working with um who has been delving into like fan engagement um and any like interesting cool take from them yeah absolutely so we're seeing a ton in the membership rewards and loyalty space uh we work with one of the largest hotel Brands that's going to launch something around that using nfts we're speaking right now with one of the largest festivals actually in Asia that's uh considering an entire web 3 enabled experience and just imagine they're thinking about the blockchain as a CRM and it's the best CRM ever if we think about platforms like the various meta business Suites what they're doing is trying to gather personal information to extrapolate buying behavior from it but on chain you just get the buying behavior and you don't have to worry about personal data and storing all of that and so you can retarget your audience on the same platform where they made a purchase without having to store anything that could get hacked that could have a problem and so at the very minimum we're seeing this um onchain membership rewards loyalty concept also building Community um from small Brands to large Brands usually your customers never meet each other but on chain if everyone downloaded the same or claim the same nft or has the same token to join a community they get to actually meet each other and that's a way more powerful form of Engagement so even clients as big as PayPal who we recently helped launch their stable coin um and are doing ongoing work with even they're thinking about how do we build web 3 onchain community at that scale so this is everything from some of the smallest artists and creators that are using it to build their first communities of 10 people 20 people but it's also some of the largest companies in the world thinking how do we remake make our experience and our relationship with our customer base and turn them into a community instead of customers yeah that's a really interesting take um so we talk about relationship between a supplier and a consumer right um you know that's what so fandom is definitely something we can call it as a community because they're sharing the same interest um and they're sharing the same value um but the way crypto shaped um you know different engagement um what other case do you think there would be um in this field you know apart from just uh being in the same Community like you know you know not being confined to like a Discord server or telegram chat like you know um do you have any um you know have you seen any case or do you think is there any like ideal case um that you can mention I think the other cool thing is the relationship between the physical and the digital so we've had this for a long time with poops proof of physical attendance um which is it's been around for a while but now lots of Brands and companies are thinking about this for their events and so they're using this to learn who actually showed up at something in person and then there's this relationship with the digital and so I think we're going to see a lot of the incentives that are web three based incentives on and off the chain and those things merging really seamlessly with each other through incentives um you said like uh you also Master like who showed up to the event um to what extent um like how how much do you would you wait um in that because I think that's also a t so here's how we think about marketing and perhaps this is useful to people but if you can convince your mother and your father and your dog to use your product that's the first group that's concentric circles and those people will show up for you and those people will be your super fans then you talk to your uncle and aunt and your cousins that's your next Circle and so you want to really engage the people closest to you that are your super fans because then they evangelize and they spread the word and the people people that show up in person are your super fans and your evangelists and they aren't people to be ignored they're the people to really invest in so like for example if Jay-Z shows up in our that one of those physical events people just go dive into the community and try to get into Community I mean even more simply than that not necessarily some big celebrity showing up somewhere I mean the everyday people that are early fans of a project yeah that's very interesting yeah uh thank you for your take the next question would be pinning surprise to um every one of you here um you know when when we talk about crypto we we talk about transparency we talk about like data Integrity um but when it comes to like you know applying that concept to um you know entertainment industry it can sound a little bit too abstract to a lot of people um so you know um what do you think you know these entertainment companies um should and like you know what what which actions they should take when it comes to like you know content licensing you know content distributions you know like um just to um compare it with the current industry like you know is there any like solid problems there are in the market and how that can be changed with crypto you want to take this yeah there is uh uh some manipulation on um like fan participation program there are a lot of fan participant program that uses voting for having uh fans opinion but there was uh vote manipulation and also for like movie uh there are a lot of uh customers or viewers uh having their comments but there is fake uh viewers and they're manipulating all the result of the um uh like having uh Mo Movies um score yeah but for uh K-pop scene there is uh the main producer of the uh biggest K-pop audition program has been sentenced to three years in jail because of the manipulation Scandal and we wanted to put uh transparency using uh onchain data uh all the voting result can be uh recorded on chain so that fans can more trust more on the resert and the process of building Idol um IP yeah I I think that transparency is you know largely applicable in a lot of different ways just outside of just fan voting but again like crypto in general has been cited as kind of like a Panacea for voting systems more broadly and it's really fun to see that actually being applied in Joseph's case in a way where you know we're not ready to vote for president using blockchain necessarily but but like let's try it with voting for what should the title track of the album be and again you're seeing kind of fans go around and actually create like understand what polygon scan is so that they can actually audit the outcomes of these vote Tellies right so I think that's a really cool kind of first use case you can also think about it for like fantasy sports and wagering platforms um and just really anything else where people have like a monetary incentive or even just a fan incentive to understand what's being done right you think about kind of the offshore gambling market and why of kind of they've adopted crypto in general right it's like there is a you know peer-to-peer relationship that you're able to have with extremely low fees that people can trust right without having to trust their counterparty so I think whether it's voting whether it's payments or whether it's actually the digital media that's being delivered to the actual fan I think you have that auditability and transparency that what's happening is kind of above board again because we're all very bullish and kind of blockchain and Technology being adopted more broadly yeah it's uh it's kind of interesting though um because I think transparency is really important to like users and and funds whereas like companies probably would not want too much of the transparency because they have the room to leverage that right um and you know what's your what's your take on that like do you think given that like you know this blockchain technology can guarantee that transparency to the people who's interested in this market um would a lot of companies actually adopt uh this technology for for the sake of that um it might they they're certainly going to be reticent right which is kind of why we had this whole like you know uh blockchain not Bitcoin kind of like Enterprise blockchain you know theme especially circle like the 2015 16 bare Market where you had a lot of like the large Banks and whatever building kind of their own Enterprise blockchain uh applications but I think recently with this huge Drive kind of towards uh ugc content creation you know you look at like epic and Roblox and all these guys you look at guys like what uh mod house is doing I think the trend is definitely there for more kind of fan created content that is then used as their avanger to kind of go out and find that next um you know fand leverage so I think this they're going to be kind of directionally pushed in that venue anyway Asing they're kind of becoming more of this platform model versus kind of this onetoone I create the content you um you ingest it right but at the same time we're also seeing Technology Solutions to this in ZK things like Alo things like other ZK projects that are saying there's some business logic that people aren't going to want transparency around that the market isn't going to demand transparency around that you can put on chain so you can verify things without actually seeing all the steps I think that's going to really happen in the entertainment world and then like what Joseph was saying I think root ownership is a lot of the value proposition and making sure that people are clear that they actually own the things that are in their wallet yeah it's um like just looking at like Joseph's case I think um you know if you go in like Dune or polygon scan you can actually see how many people voted um and like how many like you know what which accounts would hold like how many nfts like some guys would hold like 800 nfts I swear so they would spend like loads of money uh for for these nfts um so given that like you know comparing it to um other entertainment company do you think um mod house actually disrupted like to a certain level um to the TR current industry um you know in in Korea cuz the competition of these entertainment like uh companies in Korea is very high it's like it's almost like a red ocean there are so many Idols that people don't really aware um and you know a lot a lot of like teenagers actually dream to become like Idols um and in this market um you know I think mod house you know an ENT Entertainment Company came out like fairly recently has positioned really well um and like you know I was I was kind of wondering if you um have any evalu ation on um your own company um to what extent you have disrupted um you know within this pool of um you know entertainment companies as user mentioned uh entertainment business uh this industry is uh highly competitive and there are a lot of Idols like more than hundreds of Idols coming out for uh having um fans attraction but uh I think Modas can uh attract a lot of fans within a very short time period it's been one year and 8 months after we founded this company but we released Four album with Trip s and now we have uh 1.7 million subscribers in our YouTube channel so uh it it can be a differentiation point for uh other entertainment companies point of view to have uh voting system uh subunit system fans can decide fans can participate in album production so I think it was a good start for us but uh what we ultimately want to do is to be a LinkedIn or Kickstarter of K-pop so we can uh have more uh to more gos to go but uh I was it was a good start for us yeah that's amazing um and I thought you know um I think I wanted to ask Amanda on this um you know since you've been helping out with a lot of brands in web 3 um what was your um you know take in you know just looking at like including web to like fans and um you know creators have been engaging differently throughout the time um so could you also share that um you know how that has been being evolved and uh what you would expect um that will be um you know changed when this web3 infrastructure come come into place sure so I think that creators are engaging with communities and artists are continuing to talk to their buyers rather than putting something out into the world and having it be gone I think that's the core the core difference right um so given that um you know the consumption can also be affected right um it's not just Korea but also in the states um lot of people would actually consume goods and products um and how do you think they will be shaped within this digital digital era yeah I think what's really exciting if you already have a big brand and a lot of followers it's a non- cannibalistic new product line and it's a new way to monetize your audience if you don't have a lot of fans and followers it's a way to bootstrap having an audience almost from zero and for big brands that are coming into the space and entering it's a way to have a closer more personal engaged loyal relationship with your potential customer and also gain customers that are younger more technologically savvy uh and that are going to be vocal on social media platforms about you and how do you evaluate that's happening like right now a lot of infrastructure still has a lot of hurdles for um these funds cuz uh now we're talking about like people who are familiar with web 3 but you know when we're talking about fans um they don't really have much experience in even like downloading metamask um so how do you think um you know how would you evaluate um you know that in the current you know circumstances sure so take one example which is our partner SES which we help bring into the web three space founded in 1741 and most of their book of buyers are older people their art buyers they don't have metamask and so when we started working with them through mojito our spin out which is the platform that all of their sales are run on uh when we started working with them we thought how are we going to convert all your existing book of users to care about nfts and it turned out that for the existing uh Community it was about the artist and the art itself and if the artists and the art and the actual use case is compelling enough people are going to jump over the hurdles with a bit of handholding the other thing we found was instead of just converting the existing SES customers to doing something new and buying digital art which happened a bit what happened was lots of new customers came to sou bees that had never bought something before from SES so suddenly crypto people which was you know a huge percent of people that have purchased in their various sales suddenly crypto people are buying digital art from them but also buying physical art and and coming across and becoming customers of of their other Core Business right so it's it's interesting take um so as long as people want that product they would get over the Huddle like whatsoever and it can go both ways it can be converting your existing users across and it can also be gaining new users that are native I see I yeah I I think there's another interesting element to that as well because again just with regards to entertainment gaming whatever it's like there there are a lot of folks where that's certainly true where the experience is that great where they're going to be willing to onboard or understand some new technology but I think for a lot of more fickle users right where they're you know may not they have so many options right it's like you you know what's the new free-to-play mobile game that I'm going to play you know next week with my friends or whatever what's the casual RPG it's just abstracting away as much of that complexity as you possibly can yeah and so it's like you know we speak with a lot of gaming companies today where it's like you know the first thing they come and say to us is you know users don't even know this is a web 3 enabled game right we're creating custodial Wallets on the back of it and for our Pro users who really want to monetize or take economics out of the system then we'll allow them to put it on chain or you know give them their Assets in a way that's truly kind of um you know to towards the web three ethos but I think so much of it it's just like let's give them an experience where the friction is as low as possible they're not paying gas fees like Joseph is talking about and just you know we can layer them into this as they kind of G familiar familiarity yeah the two factors are how much motivation they have and how much friction there is and those are the two dials to play with right yeah um I think we're running out of time so uh I'll go with our last question to uh ask all of you um when it comes to sort of integrating web3 Technologies to um and um for these entertainment companies what would be dos and you know don't um for these companies to get involved I can I can just grab that first but for us and we work with a lot of companies coming into the space and they're interested in working with serotonin or launching web 3 digital Goods on mojito because we work with a lot of the Native companies and so we know how to to help bring them in in a way that's going to be accepted so we the North Star is is this strengthening to the overall Community around web 3 is this augmentative to it or is it diverting resources into some other direction is it giving people actual root ownership of their assets and actual web 3 onboarding is it partnering with and helping grow various kinds of web 3 native Brands and communities and those kinds of questions are our Northstar I think you have to have a a clear definition of the target audience Target customers that you're uh targeting and also you have to know about their Persona and uh trying to meet their needs trying to uh analyze their needs to uh form the service uh it can be a it can be a a web web two service or web 2.5 uh service but if there needs is uh like for our for example uh we are targeting cap fans who doesn't know anything about uh web3 terms or web3 uh Technologies so we just focused it on the having um them to use web to service and uh that was I think biggest the uh key success factor for us yeah I think it obviously depends on the type of customer you're speaking about for like large consumer good brands like a Coca-Cola or a Nike you know the strategy is going to look one way for like luxury fion for a Tiffany or someone it's going to look a little bit different for a game application it's going to look a little bit different as well um I think you know kind of to what Amanda was alluding at doing it with intentionality into what Joseph saying understanding who your customer base is and what their kind of traditional Behavior set is and then leveraging that to do something new unique fun um again these are programmable assets at the end of the day so it's really you know the the World Des are always stir a little bit for kind of the right way what if like sort of confining to like fundom like what would be um what would they have to be careful when using like nfts I've seen like a lot of companies just selling nfts and just neglect it um and a lot of communities are just left you know they just left obsolete um not being able to do anything like they'll be keep asking like what's what's going to happen to the price of these nfts um you know it's you know I think a lot of companies um you know they try not to be speculative when they're providing these nfts but it's inevitable like when the price is tagged on those nfts and um as long as there's a secondary Market you want someone to take care of your nfts yeah I think a lot of the times these Brands don't have a true appreciation for they're literally launching like a capital value Asset right this will be a publicly traded like people are going to care as much as they do about like the price of their stock right there's going to be an equivalent um appreciation there for the value of these assets so I think I mean one of the things we say just coming out of the gate um for any brand is like just be very very aware of the price that people are paying for these assets out of the gate and to be appreciative that there's going to be a secondary market so you know your first buyer may make money that doesn't mean the second buyer who then holds it and buys it at 2 to 3x that price is necessarily going to have the same feeling that your original buyer did um and so again it really is just that like making sure there's that constant communication feedback road map planning all the rest of it so that people can't come in and be like hey you haven't properly communicated to me what the value utility of this asset is all right uh so that ends up uh our session thank you for tuning in and thank you for your valuable insights guys thank you very much [Music]