Devin Sawyer on DAOs, NFT rewards and building Legends of Cypher

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] welcome to web3 academy you're here on the weekly spotlight super excited to be here see everybody in discord see everybody on the podcast as always i'm jay hamilton and i'm here with my fellow host kyle read head today we've got an awesome guest that we're super excited to have on board with us uh devin sawyer devin is the ex-marketing executive uh from a traditional finance background

over two decades of experience in digital marketing and commerce expertise and then as many of us he made the move full-time web three uh founding some different projects building some communities i'll just give you a couple quick highlights before i pass it over you devin you can obviously do a much better job than i can uh but uh uh he's part of the defiant team uh one of the largest crypto newsletters over a hundred thousand subscribers across all their platforms uh there he built a referral and nft uh reward system so we'll dive into that today excited to hear more about that uh he also um cut his teeth in the dow world uh working uh at bankless dow so we'll chat a little bit about his

experience in daos and banquo's dao and then most recently uh he launched a new project a new nft project called legends of cipher uh and so we'll dive into that and i know i think you have a couple other projects on the go too devin uh you're a man of many many things so uh excited to hear about all these different things uh and uh and where you're going uh so welcome to the show devon great thanks rob you're welcome we're excited excited for you to be here glad to have you devon and glad to have another bankless dow member uh on the uh on the podcast today shout out to vancouver's dao you guys are late yeah

awesome so why don't you walk us through i mean jay just kind of gave a good a good intro i guess but if there's anything else you want to add just to add a little bit more uh meet to the story feel free to walk us through a bit of your background in your journey with web3 yeah for sure yeah i think um you know like like most of us went down the rabbit hole uh for me it was um right about the start of the pandemic you know started finding a little extra time working from home and uh spending it all in the crypto space was totally skeptical in the beginning um and then you know for me it was um raul paul um you know he wrote a piece about what he called the bitcoin being the life raft

um and so that intrigued me and i dug deep and was kind of like shocked and amazed to find out that an entirely new um that crypto wasn't so much just a currency that was operating on the internet that was really cool and smart is literally a new financial system being developed from the ground up that enabled self-sovereign ownership of your assets and that like blew my mind so you know i worked i had an amicable departure from the bank i was at um so i i left and moved on to spend my full time in in web 3.

yeah so that was kind of the story landed in the bankless dow first so i was uh subscribers in bankless um community that's where i was doing a lot of my research um and then when the dow opened i was attracted to him mainly because i was hearing about daos at the time and but most of what i was hearing about daz was really development based taos and this was one of the first media dials it may have actually been one of the first media dows certainly the first i had heard of did you get the air drop as a subscriber to bankless no you know what i missed it i had to i know yeah yeah i tried every which way from sunday to get a sneak in but like dude you're

just gonna have to buy bank so i bought my bank and uh locked in it was worth it yeah so for those for the listeners here that don't know bangla style so bankless is uh one of the clients that that we work with at our marketing agency and they had a big build up a big subscriber base and they they basically just airdropped all of their paid subscribers tokens and that token was the access into bankless dow um which ended up i think now it's like one of the biggest dows that there are there's thousands of people in it they've got a bunch of products that they're creating just trying to onboard people into crypto um really really cool what bank of style is doing so check them out but yeah walk us through walk us through your little journey there in in bank of style

yeah yeah it was um it was exciting it was complete chaos so it was bright you know i was in there the first couple weeks and um i know kyle you were kind of watching things since they went i remember i i jumped into the marketing gala being the marketing or the marketing guild um so it was pretty interesting because they organized around sort of traditional functions like marketing that are writer's guild education all these different guilds which kind of sounded like a corporate corporate structure but there was still no hierarchy so it was it was total chaos from the way everyone was trying to figure out how to work together and that what i found beneficial the value i could bring was just a little

bit of sense of what you know corporate structure could be but also you know not being a fan of the hierarchical side of the corporate structure so you know somewhere in between there is sort of where we landed where we had these functional guilds operating toward the same mission vision and goals that was where we started was really land the mission vision goals make sure everyone understood on the same page um but then it was really driving work out of the guild so i ended up kind of taking a leadership role for the marketing guild which was largely just creating space for people to figure out what we wanted to be as a marketing team posting weekly meetings hosting conversations taking notes putting a little bit of structure and guidance

around um what we could be doing um and while i was there you know we found some great people we launched a pretty well scaled uh social media program we got we all boarded a whole bunch of talent to start doing tweets we started a tick tock channel so it was you know it was exciting because what we did in three months was more than what most organizations could do in a year and all the guilds from what i could tell were kind of moving at the same pace all finding themselves growing at the same time but maintaining connectivity and collaboration across so as much as there was chaos it was you know that kind of chaos that sparking a

lot of really really cool creative work um and i think what god really interests my my favorite story was the use of coordinating so when you when you think of um you know the bonus structure where i came from it's all based on your level and your performance and your performance was decided based on the hierarchy who above you says how well you perform relative to whatever they saw and how what feedback they gathered we did uh we used we did a test on coordinate i don't know if they still use it i hope they do because i thought it was brilliant but what it allowed us to do was allow everyone in the in the discord um that was participating in the dow to

um indicate through like everyone got 100 likes if you will and then you could assign so many likes so you know a guy like frog monkey i give 10 likes she's been great everyone gave these likes out and then the bonus pool of bank was distributed through the way the sort of the voting which was really powerful me being an executive because you know i was compensated for my so-called leadership of my team but i was evaluated on my leadership of my team not by my team whereas this entire coordinate process evaluated the leaders based on a flat hierarchy based on how people felt other people were helpful in the discord and that for me was like okay this is like

game changing eventually that is how corporations work there's no reason that if i'm a vp of 100 people in a unit that i shouldn't be that my bonus shouldn't be tied whether or not they think i added value to their lives in their work so for me that was a huge eye opener was the way we utilized coordinate for distributing a bonus pool i i remember seeing the coordinate as well and i thought it was an incredible way because then they they drew up i don't know if you saw the picture where they made like some like map where it had everyone's like like faces or whatever or pfp's and it was like showing who voted to who and how many how much went to these people it was really really cool and it's also cool as it's open and transparent so everyone

can see like who's getting what who did all the work and stuff so it's actually really interesting um can you just walk us through you said you're part of the marketing guild how big was that so how many people were in this guild and like yeah on the other guilds what are the the sizes like and then what other tools did you guys use to stay organized in in structure yeah um so when i was there there was probably i would see anywhere between eight to twelve people in the in the marketing guild weekly meeting and then so they were generally the same group active so yeah i'd say with average about 10 in the marketing guild design guild writer's guild um similar numbers um again i was i i finished up with them like it back in august so i'm sure

they've evolved and have many more people than that um i can talk to the tools so so we've gotten to the point where you know we were testing out compensation structures um we were tipping so you know tip bank um that was very powerful way to reward our colleagues instantly um you know we would offer a bounty like hey if somebody could write this piece here's um you know i'll tip you 500 bank that sort of thing um but then we then we got multi-sig wallet so what was really cool was every mark every guild um got a budget um and we all set up a multi-sig wallet and then we all got distributed back so

that we could remunerate our teams for the work they did in the guild um and that was just simply a distribution of the bank token to the multi-city wallet um but other than that um you know the notion was where we you know was our primary wiki for the day-to-day communications and then discourse we used for proposals so some of those standard things um and the team was like that the development discord i think they had like 35 people strong and they were actually all going through solid so they facilitated salinity training for everybody so they had 35 people going through solidity training so

pretty powerful they were building a lot of stuff like bots into the discord um the facilitated automated onboarding quite an exceptional like if if there isn't a case study written about it um already there should be because what they've done and tested and certainly in the three four months i was there was quite a bit i know they've evolved a lot since yeah it's incredible to see i mean i don't know how many people were in the dow when it first launched but it was in the thousands i think um and you're right it was absolutely mayhem in the beginning but like i feel like it pretty quickly started to get organized and structured and like i don't know now they've they've built a bunch of products and

they're they're developing apps i think like i don't know are you still involved like do you know where they're at now no i'm not turned out no i'm not involved to degree that i would know what they i know what they were building and they've likely launched so we were started redesigning the website i think that's launched we've uh we were building an onboarding program um oh yeah we launched the vet index we partnered with index co-op and launched bed which was uh bitcoin and d5 um index fund um that was pretty cool we um we launched that while it was there we partnered with the index co-op team and ran a campaign on that so yeah it was um

yeah that was about it a couple of uh of threads i just want to pull a little bit more on here that i think are really interesting um and so i'll present them both and then we can take them one at a time one that i think is really interesting is you said that you were amazed at how much got done in a short period of time and a lot of the dow members that we talk about talk about that it's not always the case right often right doubts are actually quite slow there's a lack of leadership a lack of of um a lack of uh you know decision making really when you have that right involved so i'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that speed that you mentioned and maybe

um uh maybe to pull a little bit more on that it's it sounds like it's uh this setup of like these guilds and i'm curious if you have this guild set up which obviously allows more productivity at a small team level how do you how did how did that also ensure that there was some sort of vision at like the higher level and that these guilds weren't just going in their own direction so that's one thread and let me just present the other one and then you can take one at a time the other one i think is really interesting is you're one of the few people that's left the dao uh that we've talked to most people we've talked to are either and most of our listeners i think are interested in joining a dao right or looking to join it out so i'd love to

hear a little bit about your story of why you decided to leave and what made you make that decision and that might be a nice transition into perfect what what happened next for you yeah um so i think structure did play a part it was it was interesting because when we jumped in um uh frog monkey i'm sure you guys kyle you might remember frog monkey um he was probably like i'd say then the key thing that in a doubt is probably like what is a frog monkey i know he's been a friend for so long it's like calls off the tongue like it's

like saying david like it's not is a pseudo-anonymous uh fellow um who you know is an anon like many of many others in crypto um he just emerged as a as a as a leader um you know just really taking accountability and ownership for the overall structure and organization he was really good at like for me exam for example you know he saw me chat around you know i was just trying to find my way and saying things and he just said hey you know we could really use your help getting aligned on the mission and vision um can you join a call so i joined a call with some folks we got really

behind vision mission and then we sort of spent some time promoting just vision and mission for like two three weeks just to make sure that that was stated clear it was built into the onboarding so that people coming in knew what where why and how um to a degree um so you know moving from frog monkey to others you know it was it was really individual leadership you know some people that left the dow i heard would would say you know it's kind of felt centralized this smaller group of people but yeah i don't i don't know that that's centralization i think that that's just leadership you can be in a decentralized organization and have people emerge

you know be called to the task of doing the hard work like leadership is freaking hard and so you know it's it's an unforgiving task at times and just we were lucky that we had a number of them like every guild had a really strong leader in a lot of cases a backup leader so you know for me uh there was a guy who was extremely helpful with me when i was leading the marketing guild and then when i left there was no one felt we missed the beat because chorus was his name just kept uh sorry grendel was his name kept kept the ship running right um so it was really i'd say it was the leadership that emerged in the dow first and then the structure second so i'd say yeah you need good leaders

people willing to step up do the hard work put the time in to make sure that other people are taken care of and know what to do and how to operate in the dow and then yeah good a good functional structure i think is really important because you get a lot of scale teams focus on certain matter areas of subject matter expertise and then you know guy like frog monkey not you know he didn't lead one specific guilt but he sort of played a role in connective tissue across the guilds he was a guy that was worrying about how people collaborate across guilds and making sure that we don't become our own silos which you know could easily happen too so yeah i'd say leadership first structure second and then cross

structure collaboration and so and so was there a uh was there a team or a i mean it wouldn't be a guild but like was there anybody you know you mentioned frog monkey kind of was across all like is there was there a a higher level leadership meeting happening yeah eventually yeah eventually we evolved and um it basically became like the treasury group so the overall treasury group became kind of that leadership guild that saw across they were accountable for distributing funds to the guilds they were accountable for approving proposals at the highest level that the guilds would all need to support and they would distribute funding to the guilds in

addition to their guild funding they get additional funding as required to support the main projects that were approved by this treasury group so i mean it starts to look and smell like a hierarchy but the compensation structure is not based on a traditional organization that's what i really like about it similar to coordinate where people recognize leaders none of these individuals could have got to that position if they weren't like good functional members of the dow to begin with they had to emerge as leaders in order to be seen as viable candidates for that because basically it was a consensus mechanism that everyone agreed that these individuals would be the right

ones to fit so you know i think they had like 20 30 people put their hand up to try and be as part of this higher order treasury management team but the community voted for the ones that we wanted so you know i guess it's a democracy that you know is really what was happening it was a democratic hierarchical process what's interesting though is it doesn't it's not like they voted in now they're that for like the next four years or something like a presidential election right it's like they can get voted out anytime um so it's like it is sort of hierarchy but it's also like it's kind of a combination of a lot of things and it can all happen in real time which i think makes it just makes it better right yeah

yeah 100 yeah it is it's very organic that way right right and i think what's also cool is like you said it wasn't like it this all started with just an airdrop of tokens to thousands of people that just had the same um same interests right they were just subscribed to a newsletter so they all were interested in bank lists or in crypto but most people didn't know each other it just all of a sudden we all just joined in and it was like okay let's start seeing who's doing stuff and then let's get them in and then if they fall off let's vote someone else in so it's very fluid i think which is yeah to me i think that's the best thing just to give people some context this launched in i think it was may of 2021 bankless dow it is a valueless token so it was

worth nothing and then um today it's worth a market cap of eight million dollars uh the dow if when we were in like the bull market back in i think like november um it went up to 40 or 45 million dollar market cap yeah um in like what is that eight months or seven months or something like that not even that's just incredible to me yeah so when did you when did you begin to exit out of bank of state yeah it was um in the summer so i think august by september i was fully fully exited it was partly because i was also hanging out in the defiant discord um and i got to know cami and i really got to appreciate the work she was doing

and i was a big fan of her book and um so i was sort of helping out there and then she had a role open up for um growth so she was gonna hire a head of growth and i i applied but didn't apply i sent basically a message saying hey i'd love to help you out with both i'm not looking to take a full-time gig um so she asked if i would just join the team and help um so became a kind of a paid consultation sort of gig um and i just didn't feel i could do both really well um and i had a great time and bank was down i knew for sure that you know they were a great hand so yeah i took the opportunity to go over the defiant and

yeah i've been been working there for cami um on a part-time basis ever since that's awesome so can you walk us through um first i guess maybe just to explain to some people what defiant is for those who don't know and then uh and then maybe just give us a rundown of what you've been working on with them cool yeah so defiant to similar to bank listera they're they started out as a newsletter so tammy started a newsletter on crypto she was a bloomberg analyst um was covering crypto at blueberg um kind of part-time and i think she actually approached them and asked if uh and suggested that they have a desk for it and they weren't at the time ready to dedicate anyone to crypto yet they have

now but at the time they weren't she was well ahead of the game so um so yeah she she started off on this journey with a pretty basic newsletter i'm gonna grew it from there you know to some multimedia news journalistic you know journalistic integrity for sure that's their number one ethos is they really you know want to maintain that they're really unbiased you know cami will say you know unbiased about crypto but biased for crypto so you know believes decentralized finance is the way of the future um but it's not biased to anyone protocol project platform blockchain

whatever um so you know i really appreciated that and she had some really strong vision about where she wanted to take the organization so i jumped in she needed help growth she wanted to launch a referral campaign um you know traditional web 2 email referral campaign for the newsletter but she also had ideas for an nft reward system so we actually partnered with viral loops which would be your web 2.0 email um email referral provider and we partnered with galaxy which was an nft provider and meta factory because we wanted to have the nfts have utilities so you

could redeem them for physical merchandise so my job was to lead a project to build this as a capability working across these four partners if you will defiant galaxy viral loops um and meta factory and so yeah we basically you know use the the infrastructure or the out of the box solution for fiber loops so that's how we got you know people um our existing subscribers to get their own unique referral code refer other people and then every time you got a referral um we were counting that in the back end when you got five referrals that got you the friend of the defined nft and if you got 10 referrals

um you got the ambassador there was three levels of master keys um like um throw to the j key i forget now but ready player one with the kind of pro tube um and then yeah so and each level had different you know for the for the first one you could redeem at better factory for a defiant mug hat hoodie all the way up to really dope bomber jacket actually um so it was um and the cool thing about it was it was a it's an immutable reward system so you know as i reach each level you know our future plans were not only to allow you to redeem for cool defiant merchandise

but it could be more utility so you know if you were you know you reached 100 referrals and you were a defined one we would have different rewards or different access you know you might get your paid subscription for free so it was something that we built so that it could scale and to be a web 3 reward system because of the nft infrastructure behind it not without its challenges for sure you know trying to make a web i called it like a web 2.5 bridge um that always felt like it had a crack in it somewhere um but it worked um the team's still managing it running it today it's really still running as a beta like we launched it as a beta

really to beg for forgiveness from from our customers because you know we didn't know how well this would work we knew we'd have problems um so it still runs today uh as a beta in fact but um you know that once they build kind of you know better pipes between the three partners um i think it's something that can really scale a referral to nft reward system so is it not fully uh because you could say automated or integrated right now like did you have to do some manual stuff to allow this to work yeah there's a lot of manual back end activity required to yeah because you've got to use the viral loop system the power of them is they've got a great fraud detection system that allows you to get clean

referrals but that's a manual effort to manage that then you've got to approve the good referrals versus the bad ones then that goes to one system and then galaxy team will read that file and say okay these are white listed then then the user can go claim the nft then once you claim the nft you get a unique code that you can go redeem the meta factory and you take the nft there so yeah hence beta you know we had yeah right you know we had some loops we had like uh it was like a five-page user guide um to get through the process but um you know the community loved it you know when they were gonna ask that's what i was yeah they loved it yeah did they get feedback and stuff

like what did they say what did they say they liked about it other than it's probably complicated yeah it was yeah it was yeah complicated doesn't always work sometimes i'm slow to get my approval you know i know i got because you know viral loops would tell me i got my five referrals yet i go to the galaxy site and i can't claim it yet and that was simply time lapse between somebody giving the approval and the individual reaching five referrals so you know typical um kind of time delay sort of complaints um and then some people just you know get caught up in the fraud system because if you're a web 3 person maybe a coder and developer you've got all kinds of things going on in your machine and then you know the viral loop system gets a little worried and might flag you as

fraud when you're not right so you know some of those kind of challenges um but the learnings were were significant um so i know the team's going to take those and i know matter factory uh viral loops and galaxy i'll continue to talk so i'm sure they're building apis or connectors to to automate this for the future so it was exciting that's super cool was there anything that stood out on the positive side like we talked about what didn't work anything that that you're saying did work or was it just people liked it because it was new and it was like it was an nft so it's kind of cool but was there anything yeah well i think that i think the the instant reward of the nft um was powerful as much as we had that time

delay um you know if it was synced up well it was pretty pretty neat that you know as soon as you hit the fifth referral you're claiming and minting your own nft for it and then that that nft knowing that that being in a beautiful artifact on your wallet you can instantly redeem it at meta factory for merch and then our just just as an organization knowing trusting the way that the non-fungible token all tokens work just knowing that once the cust the client had that was that we could add rewards to that future could build on that so it was really exciting from that perspective and the nfts looked really cool like we had really nice really neat designs um and everyone was excited about that so

was the um nft made in a way like a poe app where it wasn't you're not able to like send it or sell it or is it one that like could actually accrue some sort of value yeah you could sell yeah interesting see that's one of the that's one of the cool features of it all right it's like yes you can claim it for i don't know a mug or maybe you don't want the mug but someone else does so you can also just like sell it right that's what web 2 doesn't offer so i love that exactly yeah and and what about the results on uh any any boost that you saw to subscribers to the defiant was it an effective program in that way yeah i mean it was tough to measure um because there was so much fraud to to to wade through and understand but overall

yeah we were putting on a pretty pretty good push there you know i think we went from uh 40 to 55 like i think we added 15 000 subs i mean with our normal organic growth rate it's hard to separate that from from the from the from the total yeah but yeah we saw we saw definitely definitely some girls interesting and any i don't know if you guys like if the team talked at all but just curious like where do you go with that next or where might they go with that next did any ideas come up just if listeners are thinking about doing this i just wondering like where where can you go and continue to build value back to the to the community yeah yeah we wanted to um we wanted to

add like make bring more bring more utility to it from the perspective of because not everybody you know had could get 15 referrals or 20 or let alone 50 referrals so our idea was what we wanted to do was build a sort of participation mechanism so you know run a run of run a run a discord analysis on people that were active in various uh in the discord and maybe give them a friend of the defined nft right here's five equal equal to five referrals go ahead and mint thank you for all of your conversation and contribution and providing subject matter expertise in the discord

um or using pull apps so we would give pull apps out if you join jam sessions community calls the next plan was allow for if you collected five you know maybe every every participation co-op was equal to a referral so you you know we would work with galaxy and then five collapse could could be converted to um a referral nft so yeah we had a vision of that the nft would be a reward system for all the behaviors that we wanted to see from our community not just referrals for growth yeah you can imagine it being useful for uh surveying or customer feedback as well if you wanted to you

know that's something that everybody's always looking for uh yeah and they're tough tough to reward people for that right other than the classic like you could win a 50 amazon gift card is i feel like the web 2 way of doing that yeah yeah yeah yeah the examples like that are exactly the types of things we do interesting so uh now you're working on your own nft project or maybe it's even more than one um why don't you unless you have anything else you want to add about about what you did uh with defiant i would love to hear kind of where you're at now and what you're building yeah yes uh we'll finish off so to find right now i do sponsorship and partnerships so folks want to

um pay for sponsoring the defined i manage that program uh and then i support partnerships so you know when people want to come and um you know a lot of conferences want to just cross promote you know we do some of that um anytime there's strategic ideas that you know there might be a win-win situation with another web 3 organization i'll negotiate and work through those opportunities um and then yeah so yeah i've also so the legends of cypher is an nft project um that i've been in i actually met the folks that i work with in the backless dow who's actually a writer in the project was

kind of writing some narrative about this idea he had for a story that would be really a futuristic scientific story about a fellow named hash who invents this technology called cipher um which said in the future was sort of like today's cryptocurrency um and so you know we were kind of trying to think well you know i don't know how well this resonate with you know marketing context you know we were talking about it in the marketing guild um it wasn't just something that was landing well um as a as a campaign or anything to do to promote bankless and so a few of us said well that's fine but

the story is really cool let's talk about offline so we just you know hopped on created another server and started talking about this this universe in the future um that we created where basically what we did was we imagined if sort of central bank central government the webtoon that sort of paradigm that we have today largely in north america and other parts of the world imagining we extrapolated that abstracted that into 10 000 years in the future if that sort of model prevailed what would it look like and so we invented this um uh future where um all the all the planets corporations came together and formed something

called the centopoly which is a large corporatocracy that basically manages the known universe through a central organized structure and everyone aligns to one simple metric so similar to social scoring in china um or your you know financial scoring your credit score imagine all that was combined but it was all aligned to one seemingly human mission right to propagate and progress humankind that everyone would gravitate say yeah i'll buy into the metric because the metric rewards you with how better technology better money better money better better better um so we invented this metric a rep that runs the entire old universe through

this entity called the centopoly which is basically an empire and so that's sort of the way we see central banks central governments today then there's hash and sipherians and hash has invented this technology called cipher which raises the level of people's consciousness to a degree that allows them to understand that they're hooked on the metric and that there might be other alternatives for the metric and then the cipher is also technology a new financial system and a new a new transportation system that can operate outside of the centople control so it's this big massive universe we spent eight months kind of laying the infrastructure about it how it works how

it functions um you know what the metrics is there's you know we've written an entire report about how it works and how it functions and how it's designed um and how cipher technology works and and we've just been building kind of inspired by some of the storytelling um ventures out there so we're gonna our remain through line will be a set of comics so you know addition one to chapter one two three and so on um so we launched the universe just a bit of the test market just launched a website that was just disposing some of the philosophies between synthopoly and um sipherians through our lead characters malaria and hash you can see those now i guess uh jay were

talking that's what you have seen on that um and so this thursday we're launching the first nft which is is a thursday you'll be able to go to legends of cypher.io read the book for free um on a digital reader or you can buy the nft and then redeem that nft for a physical book and then you can sell it on the secondary market of course and then we'll have different windows so that in every window if you've sold your book you've already got the physical book and you sell it again on the secondary market that second individual can still go ahead and redeem the physical book so we'll be using windows to allow for

multiple redemptions after um the sellout the secondary market so the book is basically like it's this this turning point in the universe where mankind has first left earth you know probably i think it's six seven thousand years into the future and we've settled the cosmos um but we've become overly dependent on ai and there's a civil war between um a part of humanity that wants to have less control from ai and then those who want the comfort and control of a the comfort of ai and then the battle ensues and basically humanity destroys the ai control um and then so we go into sort of a dark

freedom period and that gives way to the rise of satophy because those who are left without the comforts and convenience of ai control re-establish this entirety is kind of the human mechanism that manages the ais but what is really true is that centavo is just facilitating the metric for the ai so just gone right back to this moment of time so we thought we you know before we started the through line we wanted to start with this with this this epic story that kind of introduces how humanity um got to this point in time where we freed ourselves from ai but then you know created another opportunity for an empire to emerge and then the

centopoly so it's the first book we're selling um the story and then after that we'll start selling the um the the comics that tell the story of the through line for how hash and cypherians try to save humanity from being hooked on the metric some uh sounds like some black mirror stuff you ever seen black mirror that's exactly what i thought yeah totally yeah totally influenced by some black mirrors yeah yeah this is a really cool story and so i'm intrigued here and i'm trying to figure out you guys are basically like creating a i don't even know what you call it but let's call it like a disney but you're creating it like through nfts slash i guess a book as well

um you're basically creating a story from scratch and like eventually this could go into a movie or into a uh i don't know some sort of tv series or something what is what is the like i guess right now you're launching nfts are they of the characters the nft will just be the book okay uh yeah it's actually unrearable right now uh one of the team just minted it on wearable so there's 536 editions available to buy a wearable yeah so yeah it's basically like we call ourselves a multimedia uh venture so you know digital digital digital books physical books um the through line of the story will be

told through nfts which would be your digital comics um so you'll be able to buy that by the nft download the pdf similar to the punk's comics and then redeem that for a physical version of the comic as well um and like our we have a short film launching which introduces the universe which is kind of like a moving comic parallax type thing so really experimenting and using different digital mediums to tell the story but yeah you're bang on it's kind of like you know we would be a marvel universe for the avengers universe um the the star wars universe acceptance instead of starting with a

film you started with the the infrastructure of the narrative and then we're building the narrative from there and our real hopes is that we build community around it so as people come come to enjoy the story that we're creating you know we have plans to engage them um in our discord in our community um through a process we're inventing called story mining which will have different factions sort of participating in universe and competing for the opportunity to tell the story and the different factions will have different philosophies different ways they would approach um the battle against centopoly so we see some real cool opportunities

to you know allow the community to shape the where the story goes that's the problem he's going to help the community is going to help sort of build the the story as it goes kind of thing yeah very very interesting that's the that's a long-term plan i think probably for the next you know for the first three books i'd say we're probably going to be very centralized sure we'll run events we have uh um we're on events so what would the way we'll test community engagement is through like backstory telling like we might say hey you know this leader of this faction he's really cool we're telling the through line his involvement in the story but hey open to anyone to invent his backstory

here's some parameters go tell the backstory write it and then what we would do is the winning idea you know if somebody's submitting a short story with some pictures maybe they collaborate with some teams the community votes up the winning backstory and then we would use our production capabilities that we built to launch the comics and the short films etc to launch what we call a legend version of it so then we would take that individual's idea you know share the revenue with them from the sale of the nft of that backstory but produce it in our style in our format so it has that high production quality that that will be known for

but the story would be created by a community member and they'd be remunerated for their efforts as the winner of the legend so it's like a it's like an open sourced story which i think is kind of mind-blowing to me this is super cool i want to get into the business models of this of like what else you're going to sell other than books but first this is all web 3 based there is no revenues or sales or things happening from the web 2 world is there yeah wow yeah our our team is we would be you know if you think of centralized decentralization as a scale we're we're for more decentralization we're deaf we're for web three yeah like you know we're minting on ethereum being

that you know we talked we considered polygon for a minute but now we're pretty pretty grounded in uh you know we want the most secure platform for for the product and you know our eyes are on decentralization in the long run but um not kidding ourselves that you know for the near term we'll be driving much of the storytelling to make sure that people really understand the universe and then gradually bring the community along the journey until such a time i feel hey this story could be better told by community i always make a joke to the team that will be the first i'd like us to be the first um entity accepting an academy award for best film

but it's a doubt amazing that would be amazing this so i always think about intellectual property in nfts and how companies like disney or whatever or marvel like you said how they're going to use their characters uh and put them on the blockchain kind of thing will you is i don't really understand what the model is for this i'm hoping you can kind of give me a framework but like do you create ip out of all the characters you're gonna create through the story and like there's one nft for those or there's a collection of nfts for each character like how are you guys thinking through that yeah it's interesting um yeah we everything we invent is the net new um we spend a lot of time doing it like

we've been for example malaria who's the the lead character for the centopoly uh or representing the centauri we've been spending the last six months design like we've we've thrown out three designs of her just because we're not satisfied with the way she's coming out um we've got a good voice actresses bird that does the voice on the website currently um so yeah we put a lot of effort so vip is really important um so eventually as the characters get designed you know we would do one-on-ones with them but we wouldn't sell them because we we'd want to retain the ownership within the legends of cypher universe for those main characters so the ip for us um is ours to hold and the stories that we tell you

know we'll be we'll be selling them um but the the characters and storyline we maintain the intellectual property for but then when selling um the nfts to the community obviously they'll be allowed to use their own um they'll be able to do with with what they choose with that uh with that with that product um we do plan to have a pfp it's much later in the roadmap sort of waiting for the technology to evolve because we want to we want our pfps to be more um what's right like more like when you build a character in a game so as you engage in our universe you're you know if you've got um a character from the techno mages which

is one of our factions because that's your favorite faction so you went and bought uh a pfp of a of a techno mage but you build that techno page by engaging with us so you know you might uh participate in a community call five times that gets you a new modification for your techno page it could be added so we want a sort of fungible non-fungible kind of um pfd so that our our community can create a character that they can grow and evolve with sort of like when you're gaining xp with a game character so sort of watching the market and how the technology is evolving there we don't want to build it from scratch we want to see what gets built in the

market there's some interesting interesting progress there so is the future of this going to be a game will you like is that is that or something to do with the metaverse or no it's funny everyone yeah that's what everyone says it's like so you're you're gonna be a game no we might we haven't thought that far um we've really only thought as far as every you know every community member being able to create their own character and evolve it but yeah it could very well become some sort of game um we do have this idea of just the fact the different factions so there's four different factions in the universe that kind of take up arms if you will against the centoply that follow and support hash and

sipherians to free humankind from the clutches of the centropolis metric and we want we want our communities to collaborate in these factions um to to um to help tell the story because if you're kind of aligned to the techno mage faction you'll sort of have an idea of philosophy and ethos that will guide how you think we should win against the uh the centoply versus the signs of ogo which are more military um based sort of organization that might want to use might so we're sort of playing with this idea of different teams forming together not so much the individual but the

gaming aspect uh sort of something we're aware of but we haven't given much thought to so hopefully the community since they all seem to want it will come and like inspire a gamification of it i was just going to say it's kind of going to be up to the community isn't it right like those that are joining they're going to sort of lead the direction of it this is fascinating this is this is really cool um i just want to be clear three years ago you were working at a bank right yeah okay just just checking there oh yeah some people think i went nuts [Laughter] yeah i can see that's so funny you went

down the rabbit hole for sure no but this is incredible and i'm excited this is i mean gary vaynerchuk talks a lot about this and he launched v friends which is the same thing not the same thing but similar where he's trying to create characters of a story and become sort of like a disney um and i'm i'm really interested to see how web3 do this because it just it creates the ability to have this ip and to have it community led and sort of open um i think this is going to be huge and i feel like everything's going to lead to games but that's uh that's yeah yeah totally agree totally agree we're all gamers i'm good i've got to ask devin because i think you know something that you clearly have an incredible ability of uh is

the ability to make community in web 3 the ability to find projects to work on i mean it's it's amazing um the number of things you've been involved with in such a short period of time and i think that's one thing that a lot of our listeners and community are they're you know we're trying to onboard so many people the web three and they're sitting there thinking you know how do i get involved in a project how do i get involved in the community so we'd love to hear sort of from you what would be your advice to our listeners who are looking for something and thinking yeah yeah i mean uh do some do some research i think there's there's the good news is there's a lot of you know there's a lot of research and write-ups out there now that kind of give you overviews of the

different dials available what they do so that's really exciting but the best way is you just got to get in there and find your way you know a good dowels like bankless was great for this they had people that were just really good at onboarding people like you know if you're if you're in a jump in and down that sound do a little bit of research in the dow you know go through their startup page make sure it's it's a mission vision you're interested in um you know validate for yourself that looks like a community could get involved with and you know just do that by just listing watching but then like put yourself out there try to be discovered because good dows have good leaders that will be watching for

people who are trying to contribute and if you're doing if you're struggling to contribute good dows will have leaders that will help you through that and guide you into a productive engagement so i think it's really finding one that you think you'll like and then putting yourself on the line a little bit you got to prove yours that's what i love about the space you know you're trading up applying for a job and going through the process of being evaluated based on a couple of interactions to well you put yourself out there and you either show up and make it or you don't right so it's a it's a it's a different model for me it's a it's a worthwhile trade-off when you're kind of you're you're all your own agent and it's really up to you and your capabilities

this is in discord you're talking about right yeah right so this is what's this is what's so interesting is if you look at like the real world right i mean pre-internet we used to have to go to store to store or business to business and hand in a resume right internet allowed us to like go to website to website an email on a resume and now it's like you just go into discord instead of like emailing or contacting a store you just literally go into the business and you see what's going on what they're building and you just start contributing and you can just do this with a million businesses all at once in discord this is why discord is so amazing in my opinion yeah and you just start contributing and eventually you find your place or your role in one of these things that you're contributing

and if you stand out if you provide enough of enough skill um well it's incredible actually yeah it is yeah yeah i really like your example of the the the difference between the typical interviewing process and yeah the the way to get involved now devon that's yeah that's great and i i also think it's one thing that i think and and maybe you can speak to this is i do find though that a lot of people maybe aren't um as comfortable in discord right you know they maybe don't have that so what would be your advice to somebody who's sort of maybe more comfortable on the sidelines they don't want to be uh they don't have that um that

confidence to just like get out there and put out their opinion yeah how would you tell somebody like that to get involved yeah find somebody find a leader that you think you could talk to and dm i had i definitely had a couple of folks that um dm me when i was um when i was leading the marketing guild in in the bankless dow just as just for advice hey how can i get involved so you know if you're not comfortable talking in a big group um or you're not getting or maybe you are talking in a big group but you're not really getting attention look for somebody you respect you think um could help you just put yourself out there that way just reach out

and i guarantee you if it's somebody you're watching the discord and you think that is something i'd like to help me chances are they're gonna respond um to your d to your dm so yeah man don't be afraid to reach out get just see if somebody will help you out i mean i i loved it when people would reach out and ask for some personal assistance because you know it's easier to guide somebody in a one-on-one conversation than it is when they just joined the marketing guild meeting for a week and didn't say anything just i i don't know don't know how to get them engaged but you know dialogue for me is always a big one just find somebody to talk to find your find your frog monkey so as we wrap up here jay i know you

want to do so a speed round of questions but real quick in the chat here in discord i just want to read out what um there's a jeremy here wrote my wife loves fiction books but she doesn't get nfts this is the first project i've seen that i think would get her excited to check out the space and be involved in a community so it's really cool to see you know other things other than defy or you know bitcoin to onboard people into the space and it can just be a story right which is really really cool um but i think jay you want to run some uh some rapid fire questions uh so devon if you're if you're ready for that we're going to fire away how does that sound sounds good i need that okay quick uh

so yeah everything that we launched we're gonna allow to be read so she'll be able to read the rue 36 story that's our first book um on a digital reader go through the website engage in the discord if desired but yeah the book and the contents for free the nft is for people like us that kind of know what ownership means right and this sauce not just thursday right thursday yeah okay everyone we'll have it in the show notes uh whether you're watching on youtube or spotify or whatever they'll be in the description and you can check out the website there sweet okay let's get into the speed round uh let's start with this uh best thing you've purchased recently for

under 100 uh under 100 nft wise anything oh um but i like that your mind obviously stuck to web3 yeah i'll say uh i'll say i bought an eververse hoverboard oh sweet nice yeah yeah i bought that um bought that a few months back and i've been getting some offers so and if they're pretty sweet and pretty sweet yeah they have reverse hoverboard okay i think you got to change that question to uh we don't denominate in dollars anymore we denominate in eth all right so you're gonna have to ask that in under like point zero under your one zero zero one eight

uh so wait for the for listeners out there who don't know what that is tell tell tell them what that is eververse is uh every first state launch so eververse is basically um a metaverse um platform that uh and they've launched all these hoverboards that's all i know i just kind of read about it and they're like that sounds cool the hoverboards looked awesome i was in the mood for buying nfts so i picked up a few okay cool um favorite web 3 protocol i mean besides ethereum yeah um you know i have to say get

because my next venture you know guys don't get protocol no uh i've heard of it but i don't know i'm not familiar yeah it's a web 3 web 3 ticketing platform so they're basically building ticketing on the blockchain but um not just on the blockchain so it's you know it's what i call a web 2.5 provider um so there you you can basically if you're in the ticketing business which we're getting uh partnermind and getting into um you can launch soup the nuts an entire ticketing platform um and they're moving to decentralization and you can venture your tickets on the blockchain um so yeah get protocols my favorite right now

sweet cool uh weirdest or strangest dow that you've heard mr strangest doubt oh my gosh i'm pulling up my discord right now have a look it's a good way to do it i like that uh you know women and weapons there's one called women and weapons i um i can't say weird or strange but different right like they're they you know like they got they popped 246 notifications so there's been a lot of activity since i've been there but um yeah for me that was fun because you know um the god is a woman um nft

community became very popular and then i found it interesting that these ladies from portugal launched this cool idea of women with weapons um as a way to kind of yeah tell a different sort of story about women but uh yeah that was weird as trained i haven't quite figured what they're all about yet so i could call them weird and strange for now but i do cool cool okay any any final thoughts to share before we wrap up um yeah no i mean yeah i'd say like for me that web 3's become kind of a philosophy like uh it's become a bit of a life purpose you know and for people that want to get into it

you know there's there's lots of people that are just trying to make money in the space watch out for them you don't have to spend a lot of time here to figure out the difference between the people that are here to make money and the people that are here like you guys they're here to make a community um you know this for me if i think of the future of business it's community um and this is such a great supportive community right so yeah i think you embrace the community side of web 3 more than anything as much as it's a far superior internet than the one that is currently holding monopoly over so many people like far superior on so many levels what's actually really great about it is

the fact that it's a community of people that have similar similar values and operate on similar principles so yeah embrace that awesome awesome and for for those listeners out there that want to hear more about your your philosophies and your projects where can they find you online uh can they find me yeah did mostly in discord devon underscore ass [Music] my twitter handle is that devin sawyer um so you can follow me i don't tweet much but um yeah i had a couple websites that was i was sort of trying to promote my own sort of advising consulting practice but i just got too busy with projects that

you know i all my all my web properties are my project so yeah go to legends of cipher dot io buy the meru 36 nft that's where you'll find me there you love it devon thanks so much for uh for joining us this is great it's uh it's it's really interesting to hear someone who just has so quickly gotten as deep as you can get basically down there uh and has just transitioned so quickly too which i think is what a lot of people are trying to do so it's great to hear your story and how you're doing that and just seeing that it's working so i appreciate you coming on and sharing that appreciate you guys having me and uh we'll stay in touch that was great thanks devin cheers thanks guys bye

thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you

should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one