Show Transcript
Ivan Kan: All right, I’ll kick it off again. Let me know if there’s anything you want me to remove. I can do so. All right. Welcome to the CrowdCreate podcast. I have Gianni with me, pretty exciting guest. He’s been in the space from the very beginning. He actually worked with Anthony and the and founding team. So I’m excited to hear some of the background story where he’s come from. You know what he’s seeing now, he’s really a blockchain and crypto marketing expert today. And so he’s been really involved right now with NFTs specifically, you know, we’ve been chatting earlier, but JPEG Morgan, there’s so many exciting things going on.
Gianni Dalerta: I don’t know about JPEG Morgan,
Ivan Kan: But let’s, let’s dive into things Gian. Tell, tell me a little bit about you for those listeners who haven’t met you yet.
Gianni Dalerta: Awesome. Yeah Ivan I’ve been marketing branding for 20 years. I actually went to school for graphic design and that was like the end of the nineties during the first.com. Boom. So I had AOL of all things and I started programming HTML Websites it’s on a wow.
Ivan Kan: That’s real OG right
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. And, and funny enough, I, you know, was so geeked out on it. I thought it was so cool that I, that my friend said, look, there’s an internet service provider. It’s a term that typically don’t doesn’t get used anymore, but you know yeah. That’s where you got your email and that’s what you have, you know, hosted a website and, and in the late late nineties and they’re like, oh, they need people to build websites. I’m like, oh, I can build a website. So I show up, they hire me. And it was quite interesting because the downstairs was a print shop, traditional media.
Ivan Kan: Oh, how ironic.
Gianni Dalerta: And the second floor was this, you know, you know, ISP that, you know, was using telecom graphic servers and like, you know, things that people have never heard of or don’t know even know about anymore. But they, I had to learn how to program a website and what a database and, and a variable was. I had no idea having been a graphic designer. I was like, what the hell? You know, what is that? But that kind of kicked off my fascination. And then I started getting into flash and I would design flash websites. And I would, I learned action script, which was like my gateway to programming of all things.
Ivan Kan: I know a lot about action script. Actually.
Gianni Dalerta: I mean
Ivan Kan: S WF files.
Gianni Dalerta: Yes. And, and then apple coming and screwing it up for all of us lovers of flash and, and cool interactive websites and movie websites and all this cool stuff that ended with, with apple saying it’s not secure. And that was it. Right? Yeah. But, but during that first.com boom, I actually got the.com boom came and went very quickly. So I got a job at Alienware. I was like the first 15 employees I designed the brand early on. It’s not the brand you see now, but you know, was still kind of bleeding edge. Right. It’s the second gaming PC company that had been in the gaming magazines. And like people were, were, you know, customizing their computers and, and all that. So that was really, really cool. And then I moved forward to like, you know, maybe 10 years later, I kind of lost romanticism of design because it’s hard it to make money as a graphic designer or as a web designer, you know, you’re always chasing the, the, the project. And so I kind of transitioned to marketing, but my entrance into crypto was technically from an alien work person who was working for a virtual desktop entity. And on the off time that the GPS weren’t running there’s things, they were, they were mining for Bitcoin. You know,
Ivan Kan: give me a year,
Gianni Dalerta: I would have to say, I got really deep into crypto in 2013. Wow. Obviously it’s not 2009. So probably around 2012, you know, around there somewhere, because I think Bitcoin was maybe like 30 bucks, you know? And you still could with GPUs, like there weren’t Asics or, or, or any, any of that technology,
Ivan Kan: You are constantly on the bleeding edge. That’s crazy.
Gianni Dalerta: I’m like geek, man. I just, you know, I go deep into things and then I, I don’t know how to figure it out. So then I like shelve it and that’s what happened. I shelve that idea. Like, I don’t know, understand this stuff. I’m a designer, I’m a graphic designer, web designer, creative guy, finance, and all that stuff was kind of like foreign to me. But then during the silk road fiasco, yeah. All the news that came out, because if you were in flash, you remember back in the day that when you wanted to get like wears and you wanted to get like crack keys for your games and that there was an underground web, there was like Atel Vista. And like all these search engines. And then those things disappeared and I hadn’t even thought about it. But then the silk growth thing is like, oh, there’s a deep in the dark web and this thing and that thing. And then there’s this Bitcoin thing that people were using. And the Bitcoin thing like, oh, that was what that guy was talking about. And my friend. And so I, like, I went into Bitcoin forums and I was just the borrowing information, the varying information, not knowing what to do with it, because I’m a designer.
Ivan Kan: You’re literally like the, the, the creation of that crypto community. Like that was the very early days.
Gianni Dalerta: Right. I threw up a JPEG, I’m a designer. And I thought to myself, all these people are like making a crap ton of money with Bitcoin. Maybe they’re gonna buy some things for their family. Let’s give ’em some, some wrapping paper. I know I was ridiculous in my brain. So I did like this repeating pattern with like Bitcoin and snowflakes. And, and I just did a post. I put it up there and I put my, my Bitcoin address, cuz I’m thinking can’t buy it among Gox. That was a pain. Don’t know where to get it. So maybe I can earn it. And so I put that there and, and lo and behold, I forgot about it. And three or four days later, somebody had comments said, eh, it’s 50, 50 bucks. Thank you. Incredible. And I look at my wall and I’m like, there’s 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin here.
It was like that smooth. And so that was like the antithesis. And so new years of that year, I launched a website called 51 attack.com where I started doing these grunge t-shirts of Bitcoin do coin this like crypto minor shirt, like all these cool things. And I used this coin payments thing to accept 47 different cryptocurrencies auto trade them auto traded to Bitcoin on cripsy, which was like the other exchange that was around at the time. Yeah. And found the guy in California who would print my shirts, fulfill the shirts. And I would take the Bitcoin and buy gift cards on Vinny Lyman’s gift app. Cause he would on Vinny’s 10% more because that’s how he would get his Bitcoin. He would give you a premium of 10% more on your gift card so he can get your Bitcoin because you can easily get it.
How smart is that? But it was an experiment to show people that you can do a closed loop. Cryptocurrency equal system was never going to Fiat. And that’s how, that’s how the Ethereum story starts kind of, because that year was a north American Bitcoin conference here in Miami. And it was the night before Ethereum was announced. And I found myself with some guys from the Bitcoin center from New York saying, Hey, we’re here with Ethereum guys. They need some t-shirts you think you can help them? And this was like a Friday and the event was Saturday. And I’m like, I don’t know if I can help ’em but I’m not gonna say no, I’m gonna show up. So, so I showed up and I’m in there in this house in, in Miami shores. And I knew that I was watching history unfold. I actually took a picture, put it on my Instagram and it’s dated and everything. And it says, I am witnessing history because I had already been reading Bitcoin magazine. I’d already read what vital had been writing. And there, when I walk in vitals there, Charles Hoskinson Joe, Luin incredible. All those people were there. I even remember, like in the patio talking about how they’re gonna launch it, how they, you know, just ramifications of the things they’re doing. And I’m like, like a fly on the wall, kind of like can’t am I listening to this? Like I knew what I was witnessing.
Ivan Kan: How was it like being just like amongst, you know, the visionaries and like what, what was it being part of that?
Gianni Dalerta: I mean, I, you don’t think anything. There’s just like, Ivan, maybe you’re a visionary we met and I think you are right. You know, you guys have a great company and doing great things. It’s the same thing. You’re human beings, you know, you, you get to meet them and, and, and, and, and become friendly. This in real life thing is very, very important. But Anthony, I kind of clicked more. He’s my kind of closer to my age, similar things, we building websites and stuff early on. And so we connected and then out of the blue, he calls me and he says, Jenny, we’re doing the, the, you know, aside from the, the launch of Ethereum and seeing metallic do his presentation and seeing people like ransack him after the presentation, like, it looked like a mob of people trying to like take pictures and, and all that stuff. You know, I, I, he calls me and we were chatting either through Skype. I think that’s what we were using at the time
Ivan Kan: When Skype was, was heavy back
Gianni Dalerta: Then, that was heavy man. And he is like, you know, I’m, I’m hosting the first Bitcoin conference of Bitcoin expo, Canada, Toronto. I like to, to invite you. He paid for my flight. He paid for my, my, my, my hotel gave me a booth. I had all my t-shirts there and, and I was there. And, and then he had a gala and the guy that presenting at the gala, the keynote speaker on Andrea SOOP, you know, oh my God, how cool is that? You know, so cool. And people that you listen to, like the Bitcoin talk guys, you know, like, like Adam D. Levine, you know, and, you know, and then at the gala, I’m sitting with Elizabeth poche, who is like the letter of Bitcoin magazine and Vitalic, and is the a at the same gala, you know, like super cool.
Ivan Kan: You literally saw like the, the events where it all kind of hit.
Gianni Dalerta: And I got to see Anthony’s, you know, decentral house that he had in a Spadina, which was like the first crypto hack house, you know, because that’s where he would do his events and where they had the, the hackathons and, and all those things were happening there. And, and, and I had, I felt like I needed to give back or PR provide somehow to the theor ecosystem because of his generosity to me. And so I ended up, you know, participating in the forums, there was like a, was a logo contest because the core Ethereum team said, you know, we came up with this logo, but we didn’t get the community to get involved. So they did like this logo contests, and a lot of people started submitting things. I submitted like three logos, but in my last logo, I basically said, you should not pick any of these logos, not even the ones that I’m submitting because in a branding sense, the Ethereum logo ago had already been so branded that it would be a shame to try to re rethink it
Ivan Kan: Oh, I mean the original diamond,
Gianni Dalerta: Not me, somebody else did.
Ivan Kan: Oh, but you, you say don’t change it.
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. Don’t change it. I did stuff like derivatives of the diamonds and gave it some, some purpose and meeting by the end of the day, I won with somebody else $500 worth of, of Bitcoin at the time. So sometimes people see that and they think that I was the, the guy, but there’s this other guy texture. And so there’s a couple characters in that story, but that was interesting as well.
Ivan Kan: That is so cool.
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty crazy. I mean, and then, you know, just participating in the forums and, and being, you know, I don’t know exactly how many were like part of the early team. And I was a very small component. I was actually,
Ivan Kan: You are the key part of this community. And like, from everything you’re telling me, it’s so fascinating because yeah. You know, community voting on logo designs, you know, having hackathons, if you look at what’s happening today, it’s, it’s really just a, like a light evolution from what was the creation of Ethereum. Like these communities were not that much different. Right. They’re, they’re, they’re powering it. That’s fascinating. And to hear from you, I know, I believe we were actually on the same Jack’s launch yacht yacht event, and that was, I think it was adjacent to consensus 2018, but we might have crossed paths literally. That’s great.
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. Well, well, you know, unbe now, to me, I didn’t think I thought Etherium was gonna be cheap always. Right. I always thought it was gonna be very fluid. It was gonna be sense to like use it because it needed to be the fuel. And you don’t think that the fuel was gonna be two or $300. It was always being sense. Right? Yeah. And so I had liquidated a lot early, which was mistake. I participated in the Dow. Wow. You know, I should have not tried to clear out the Dow tokens that I had and waited for the fork and I would’ve been saved, but regardless 27, 20 17 rolls around I with my boy Scouts, I were like on top of mountain and I see my portfolio going, you know, astronomical. And when I got bought off the mountain, I told, I called Anthony.
I go look, I’m, I think now’s the time to go full, full bore blockchain. And so I started working with him at decentral jacks, July of 2017. Wow. And I worked remotely through a robot with Anthony. I was the only American employee or contractor. His CEO was Charlie Shrem and for a little bit. And then, and then we, you know, we did it for a year and that was, you know, Jack’s Liberty. I got to meet a lot of great people that worked with him, Addison, his, his, his, his attorney, and then later president such a fantastic person,
Ivan Kan: Johnny. I know, I know I met the team at Jackson. Like everybody, like we’ve met Maggie, we’ve met Anthony. Everybody is, you know, such a strong, you know, believer in the, in the, you know, in the whole mission. But, you know, that’s, that’s incredible, you know, listening to those communities being built back then. And I would actually like to transition this to like, what are we seeing now? So yeah. There’s a lot of parallels. Yes. There’s, there’s a lot of similar type of, you know, reward mechanisms and community building, but it’s also different, right. So if you can kind of shed light on, because you see these all the time and you’re, you’re literally, you know, part of one, like how do people build NFT and crypto communities today?
Gianni Dalerta: So it’s, that’s a loaded question, right. Because right now, you know, on the NFT front, for example, crypto Kittys launch what I was working at jacks. Right. Like I, I knew it. I even saw the E I P before they, they launched crypto kits without even being ratified as the ERC, like agreed on standard. Right? Like they just said, screw it. We like this idea as a proposal, we’re just gonna drop it. We think it’s good. And bam. And I started tabulating all the projects and, and all the different things that were happening, but, you know, fast forward and thinking back and reflecting on it. I think that the real great projects in web three in general, be an NFTs or crypto are the ones where people see a bigger vision. They see like an epic, you know, on this epic, meaning this, this calling, this, this thing that’s above them.
And that ethos of, of giving that ethos of, of the altruistic aspect of why you’re participating in this thing, I believe is why certain projects fail or, or succeed. If you don’t have that component, they never come off the ground. Some things can, you know, especially at NFTs artwork alone, we’ve noticed and seen can be the thing that propels it because people are just loving it. You know, if I love Disney characters, the Disney characters propelled Disney yeah. With everything they’ve done, right. The artwork alone and the storytelling alone was what came, came to, came to fruition. But I like to say that in web three, if you participate in web three, you win. That’s like a slogan that I kind of like have repeated and, and reinforced. And it’s so simple, but I participate in Ethereum and I won. I won financially and I won with relationships. And I one with opportunities when NBA top shots came out, I wanted to experience the technology. I could care less really, to be honest with you, the collectible aspect. So I bought a couple packs. I won, I got to experience something early. It became very valuable. Now I dropped and it’s not as valuable as it was before, but those experience to lead to other experiences. Right. And so,
Ivan Kan: But those experiences are also, I, I would actually add in here it’s, it’s because you got in early and you were able to achieve or receive those experiences. And so it kind of pays to be ahead of the game, you know, watching these trends. And I know specifically, because of what you’re working on, you let me know how much you can share about like, you know, Miami NFT week or some of the projects, but essentially those are communities that either grant access, you know, to those early experiences are when, so that you can have that. Right.
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. I mean, NFPS has become that, I think, but at the end of the day, I feel that there’s the people behind it, right. If they can, they can show that they’re building value for the community. It could be an artist that’s just pumping on amazing artwork and it’s just prolific. And there’s some special something that they’re breaking the norm. You know, like when the board apes came out, the fact that the board apes came out was cool and they were just fantastic artwork. But I would say that the fact that you can go into this, this image and there’s a bathroom and you can click on the thing. And only if you have the NFT, you can go into the group feed with pixels. That was enough of a touch to show innovation and utility and, and experience. And this gating idea of what an entity could be, that kind of like move that the imagination of people plus the community itself.
People contributing, people, deriving other things from it. I think that’s the part that, that continues to grow. I like to actually, and the reason I think I’m early on many things is that I like to follow the people that are building cool things, right? Like if you find them, like, you know, at a time I would be on GitHub. If you put Ethereum or you put whatever, any cool project that’s start starting to get built is gonna be in GitHub and some repo in there. And there’s some description in there and there’s some like demo of something. And if it’s cool, follow it, who’s the guy behind it, the gal behind it, you know, connect with him on Twitter, send them a message, say, Hey, that’s a cool project. Tell me about it. Like, you know, can I contribute? There was an early project that somebody was doing self phones as server gateways for wallets. So that people that didn’t have internet access could access it with text, text messaging, right. So you can generate a wallet and you can send crypto, but there was a gateway phone that was like the main one. And so he was translating it and into different languages. And I, I, I could speak Spanish, but I wasn’t great. So I went on to Google translate and I just spent the time and, and I freaking did the, you know, the little script file to help ’em out.
Ivan Kan: You put the time in, like, you took your time out to help a project. And that’s again like, oh man, that’s, that’s like 1 0 1 community building contributing, right? Yes. Community members contributing for, for maybe nothing in return.
Gianni Dalerta: Yeah. It’s, it’s that mentality of you give, and you don’t know if you’re gonna receive, but you will receive, it may be, may not be financial right away, but it could be a relationship. And the fact that I worked with Anthony and the fact that you connected with Anthony and Maggie and all that, there’s already a credibility that I was part of that community. Part of that group, part of those friendships that are initially will, will propel me and our relationship. And we can get rid of all the stuff where we don’t know each other. And you know, does Johnny know what he’s signing about? Does I know we don’t even need to deal with that anymore. We already know, like you, the fact that you mentioned that you played with flash and we’re doing cool things with flash that already sets me off in a different, in a different trajectory with your experiences, you know, like that’s true. That commonality
Ivan Kan: Very true. And I, I, I think cuz like, let me bring up like Miami NFT week, that’s almost like a meeting of the minds where the people you meet there kind of in a way how like meet those qualifications because they put out the time and the money to go to this event. That’s truly about NFT. So yeah. Tell us about a little bit about Miami NFT week. Are we allowed to talk about JPEG Morgan? You let me know.
Gianni Dalerta: So yeah. Well I’ll talk about JPEG Morgan. I mean, it’s not a result of that. That’s, that’s kind of a fluke of things, but it’s still in the same ethos of the, of community, right? Yeah. But Miami week is a culmination of many years of like, you know, I would, I was here during Bitcoin 2014 north American Bitcoin conference and we would do the Bitcoin meetups and go to Latin house, grill a restaurant and be able to pay with Bitcoin to buy beer and food. You know, if you look up guy, Fier, diner, drivers, and dives, and you look up LA house grill and you see the chef, he’s got a Bitcoin thing embroidered on his shirt. What, and, and I don’t think he kept any of the Bitcoin from that time. But, but those things culminated to people knowing that I was passionate about it and getting, I was, I got pushed back even from the Bitcoin community for having been involved with Ethereum, they taught me that I was a scam.
It was horrible, you know, all those things. But I knew the, what the vision was that, that, you know, this, this programming on a blockchain is phenomenal. You know, people like if you look back like people like Manuel rose who had come up with the proof of existence, right. That is to me provenance, like the beginning of Providence, you uploaded a file and it would hash it and put it on the blockchain. And you can reclaim that, that, you know, that crowd create logo was me, you know, or your designer who did it at the time and can prove it on a blockchain, you know, like that’s like mind blowing. And so, you know, obviously NFTs came out, I’m a marketing guy. So I bought a bunch of domains, Miami NFT week, NFT, Miami, like all those things, nft.miami. And so I had built a relationship with a city.
I had, you know, the mayor’s one of the mayor’s venture Miami team members, this gentleman named SISU fantastic person, a giver giver giver. He’s like, look, we need some help to vet some of these projects and things that are coming through the pipeline. And so I, I, I helped in different things. I did the first work NT workshop with the mayor at a gallery to educate people how do NFTs? We did a digital key to the city as a proof of concept using polygon where the mayor could like literally dedicated, you know, Ivan, thank you for your podcast, sign it and send it to you. And there’ll be like a, you know, the key would be floating, you know, but just to showcase, like there’s a lot more that can be done with this technology. And then fast forward, I, I, you know, I talked to the city and I met some partners that would be able to help me people that are local because I, what I really lies during the Bitcoin 2021 event is that they didn’t let you talk about, they didn’t let you talk about Ethereum or any other project for that matter.
And so I thought we need to do something so that entities could be talked about. Ethereum could be talked about and other types of blockchain technologies can be talked about because while I I’m biased to Ethereum, I’m non I’m, I’m agnostic to any blockchain that’s coming out because I think it’s the future. And we need all these different types of functions and different ideas to propel us to the future. And so that’s the, the birth of Miami NT week. And our hope is that it’s not just a conference. You know, this is the first year that we’re doing it. We hope for it to every year. It’s three days before Bitcoin Bitcoin, 2022 is the sixth. Ours is April 1st of the third, it L and we basically, the mayor has built such a phenomenal thing with people moving to Miami and startups and, and people, you know, Coinbase just is, you know, has a headquarters now in Miami, 200 people that are, you know, going, it’s incredible.
Yeah. All this thing is happening. So why not for us to own it? Why not for us to have this experience and make sure that those in real life experiences that I experience can happen again, because you can meet people and connect with them and do zoom and do discord and do telegram and all that. But when you meet someone in person and go have a drink with them and have a conversation with them and they can see your expression and, and your body language, it changes everything. You know, you know, if you like them or you don’t like them, you know, if you want to continue being their friend or their project is scammy, you know, you can, you can pick it up. You can pick up those, you can up. Yeah, exactly. So, so that’s kind of also how J pick Morgan started.
We’ll go into that like very briefly, but it was basically a WhatsApp group called NFT chat. It was four guys talking about NFTs, educating ourselves, sharing some stuff said, Hey, you wanna invite this other guy? You wanna invite this other girl, you wanna invite this other person? And so we started inviting people that we thought were like would contribute. And because many of us had already a strong network of people, the types of people that were coming in were just phenomenal. And that just started like increasing further. And so now we have about 200 members. We don’t charge anybody, but it’s very curated. Like, you know, it’s not like you have to pay to get in. And, and then we did some swag and the swag has become, you know, they think that the swag is not the reason why we have it. It just is. It’s fun it and cool. And a parody to things that are out there, you know, we’re
Ivan Kan: Not so Good
Gianni Dalerta: You know so
Ivan Kan: I’m, I was actually a graphic designer in the very beginning of my career. So nice. I appreciate it when there’s a well made logo and, and kind of like the story that wraps around it, it, like, I saw that JPEG Morgan and I was, it just clicked. And like, now it’s so funny cuz it comes around a full circle, right? Like that was your background. And I can see, I can see the intention behind it because it wasn’t just, you know, something slapped together. It was well thought out. So kudos to you on that.
Gianni Dalerta: T-shirts man, t-shirts win
Ivan Kan: T-shirts, But I used to, I used to screen print when I used to design. I don’t know if you had the squeegee
Gianni Dalerta: I never got to do it, you know, but, but I, but that’s why I got into graphic design because I love the print process. I love the print shop, you know, being there in the presses and all that. I mean, I still like it, to be honest with you,
Ivan Kan: We gotta, we gotta chat more about that later, but I do wanna, so another question that a lot of our communi has been asking is, you know, we kind of talked about how to build those communities, but how to, how do you build it into a way where it’s, it’s a longer lasting connection? It’s not just because this is a problem with lot of projects where they have a big, significant event, it could be a drop, it could be a mint, it could be whatnot, but how do you make it so that the community lives through the downturn? You know, the good times, the bad times love to hear from you, especially you, you you’ve seen all these rise and fall projects too.
Gianni Dalerta: I mean, I think now it’s even more challenging because before the supply of these projects was smaller, so you could dedicate your time to one or two projects. Now there’s too many projects, you know, and, and you really have to focus down onto to a couple that you, you think that you can contribute time and effort as a contribu, you know, and contributing doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a programmer contributing means that you’re part of the community, you’re hosting events, you’re doing your own meetups. You’re doing in real life things. You have a, you have a talent like graphic design, do a, t-shirt do a graphic, provide that and, and give it and not worry about if you’re gonna get paid or whatnot, because at the end of the day, what you want is to bolster the community. Right. And I think, you know, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know if it’s the founders per se. I think it has a lot to do with the founding team. Like, you know, like a company, for example, that company culture, right. It always starts from the, from the top management.
Ivan Kan: Can you share some of your favorite ones that you’ve kind of been following?
Gianni Dalerta: I like, I, I still, you know, I have an ape, I, I like the ape community, but I I’ve like the, a community more so on the local level.
Ivan Kan: Oh,
Gianni Dalerta: Combining like we now in Miami, it’s formed the magic city apes, like now there’s a name to it, you know, they’re forming a do. There’s been events. You know, we hung out just recently at a Miami heat game, you know, and, and there’s always smiles and it’s always like a hug and it’s always like, and these are people that you probably wouldn’t have met in your, your normal day, day in, day, day in life and career. Because either you got in early, you got an ape or you’re crazy DJ, and you bought it at the top. But in that group, there’s people that are flipping NFTs. There’s people that there’s a guy, that’s a pool guy. There’s a guy that’s like, you know, an investor. There’s a, that that’s an artist. You know, what other thing can you be? Part of that combines all those things.
And it just happens to be that there’s this piece of art or this piece of technology that’s binding everybody together. Right? And, and, and there’s something special. There’s a cultural shift that happened with FTS. And I personally believe back in the day with crypto, that the way that it would become popular would be when a Jay-Z or some celebrity would say, if you wanna come to my event, you have to buy my crypto. You have to buy myFT to get in. And then the masses would do it, right? NBA, top shots. That’s what happened. It made it easy for them to participate in something that there’s com and they may or may not care that it’s an Ft we care, but, you know, but with the aspect of the community, I think the founders need to dedicate time. They need to communicate. They need to be authentic.
If they make a mistake, they gotta claim that they made a mistake act on it very quickly. Apologize. You know, those are the things that I think that make any community, any company, any club, any person, any human being, someone you want to hang around with and continue hanging around with, because if you you’re with a friend or a group and they said something and then did something else, you’re probably not gonna continue hanging out with them anymore. Right. So I think that’s, that’s, you know, I think, I think values still matter. And I think there may maybe be even more valuable if you, if you, you know, if you, if you, if you implement those things, you know, generosity and caring and, and, and compassion and all those things are very, very important.
Ivan Kan: It’s so, it’s so interesting. I mean, for, for me, like I’ve been falling on a lot of projects and a lot of the good ones is like the, the founders, they will admit faults and they would, you know, they, they they’d come out front to center. Hey, we made a mistake and they they’ll, they’ll try to rectify it, but it’s interesting to see even communities kind of turn things around. So, I mean, one that I’ve been following it’s like me averse, you know, they had a lot of, a lot of things going on and, and when they did the drop, but you look at the community now and people are 3d printing their own Mecca verses like people are making artworks, like it’s, it’s Amazing to see.
Gianni Dalerta: And if you’re a graphic designer, you know that when you probably work building a brand or a logo or the, if the name is good, if the idea and the story is good, like everything comes from that. And just the ideas keep flowing and flowing and flowing. And you can’t turn off the faucet. I mean, yeah.
Ivan Kan: You know, what’s another, what’s a few projects that you’d highlight and kind of hit those same points.
Gianni Dalerta: Not so much on the community side, but on the technology side, there’s one, one that I’ve been following called critters that I just find it. So freaking fascinating. Are you familiar with this one critters?
Ivan Kan: I’m not. I feel like there’s a lot of critter type names going on right now.
Gianni Dalerta: And then allows you to, to then play in the map because it knows that you have the NFT, but here’s a really cool thing. You can stake your character and it creates its own in-game currency. Right. And, and that in-game currency, you can use to buy, plots a lens. But here’s a really interesting thing. If I play the game proof of playing or proof of whatever, it knows that I’m in the game, or even just over time, it creates this currency, but I can sell you my staked character. Because when I stake my character, it gives me a character in return with an S in front of it, like, like a, like an LP token. Right? And you get that and you can play on the map and you generate two thirds of the revenue. And I generate one third and you’re playing on my behalf and I can buy a plot of land and I can stick the plot of land and rent that plot of land out. Now, the crazy mechanism,
Ivan Kan: I’m not. I feel like there’s a lot of critter type names going on right now.
Gianni Dalerta: And then allows you to, to then play in the map because it knows that you have the NFT, but here’s a really cool thing. You can stake your character and it creates its own in-game currency. Right. And, and that in-game currency, you can use to buy, plots a lens. But here’s a really interesting thing. If I play the game proof of playing or proof of whatever, it knows that I’m in the game, or even just over time, it creates this currency, but I can sell you my staked character. Because when I stake my character, it gives me a character in return with an S in front of it, like, like a, like an LP token. Right? And you get that and you can play on the map and you generate two thirds of the revenue. And I generate one third and you’re playing on my behalf and I can buy a plot of land and I can stick the plot of land and rent that plot of land out. Now, the crazy mechanism,
Ivan Kan: All inside of Minecraft,
Gianni Dalerta: All side of Minecraft and the crazy thing about this is that what primitives can be derived from this. So if I stake my character, I stake it for seven days. I can’t remove it, whatever. So you can play with it. If you don’t play with it, you’re not generating money for me or income for yourself or for myself, I can revoke because I can untake myself. And when I instate myself, it revokes your state’s NFT and gives me back my, it, it removes your LP token and gives me back mine.
Ivan Kan: So
You, so they’re incentivized to, to actually do it. Yeah. Cuz you can revoke them.
Gianni Dalerta: Correct. But what perimeters, can you come up with rental, you know, leasing and like providing, you know, temporary access to something, you know, you could not really, there’s no NFD that you can revoke technically right. To remove access from somebody that you’ve given an access to this gate, this gated content. If they bought the NFT, you can’t get, take it away from them. But what if they’re a bad actor and you need to get, take them away because you don’t want it to be part of your community anymore. This is a cool kind of mechanism. So those are the things that like really like blow my mind when they start. That’s really what drive me to find those cool uses of NFT technology. Because I, I do believe that every digital asset in the future be it images, docs, document files, 3d files, audio files, every single digital asset that we have will be wrapped in NFT in one shape form or another. And it’ll be pervasive. You’ll take out your phone and take a picture and it’ll be an NFT. You, you have a open document, be go, Google doc, it’s gonna be word doc. It’s gonna be an NFT. You know?
Ivan Kan: I see the VI, the visionary behind the what you’re saying, it’s, it’s kind like what you’re said earlier. It’s like, if, if you truly believe that it’s gonna to be something bigger than you like something, you know, way outside the realm of, Hey, this is the now, but this is like, and that’s kind of why these communities are, yeah. These communities are latching on where I know you mentioned, oh, go ahead.
Gianni Dalerta: Correct. No, I was saying they keep going because that, that epic meaning that, that hero, that, that, that, that vision, they have said it. And sometimes the vision of the project is not enough, but the underlying technology, like I would support, let’s say the critters thing, not so much because I wanna play the game. But because the technology they’re building so important and so interesting that it’ll continue getting people to, to get excited and build, derive things from that. Like people have built sta page just to see how many, how many hours people have been working. So you can check them out before you actually like, and that’s like within a week or two, somebody started building this infrastructure, like that’s mind blowing.
Ivan Kan: That’s so cool. And yeah, I can just see this. This is like kind of the beauty behind all of these crypto communities that are being built. They’re also transparent. So you, you can see, you can see things going on where as opposed to, you know, before, like let’s say a brand, you don’t really, you don’t really know where this community building is. You kind of see it on their Instagram, but not so much, but now in, you know, everything is living in these communities and that kind of transitions to our last point is like, you know, a lot of on our side is like, we focus on marketing and I know know you’re, you’re no stranger to marketing, but NFTs are kind of unique in where they market to, like these channels are a little different discord, Twitter spaces, and you’ve seen ’em all, you know, come and go. So like, what are your favorite marketing channels right now? You know, for companies, you know, starting out or even trying to grow, where is those best channels to go into?
Gianni Dalerta: The interesting thing is that so many people will call people that are in crypto or NFT and say, how can I, you know, I, I want to join the bandwagon. I wanna make a lot of money. I, you know, they think that, you know, they build in and it’s gonna come. It, it doesn’t happen that way. And it takes a lot of effort and that community building is not something you could just buy. Yeah. You can sometimes cheat it, you know, and, and do things with bots. And, you know, I think people that are really authentic, we can see through all that because we’ll look at us, there’s no engagement with this. They have like, you know, a hundred thousand followers, but they post something. There’s like three people that like it, or there’s no comments on it. There’s something weird. And you immediately know, oh, they’re, they’re not, they’re not legitimate.
But I think that if they, I think that the most powerful thing that’s happened was during the pandemic that people were bored, they wanted to connect with people. And this, the, the, in the influence of what clubhouse did and allowing people to have these kind of conversations and just it’s as if you were sitting at a bar, but it’s not with one person it’s with 20 people and everybody in the room can kind over here and be kind of voyeuristic. And if they have the courage to go up there and express themselves, be it wrong or good because you know, wrong or right. Because I mean, a lot of clubhouse, there’s a lot of people that come out, they sound like really knowledgeable, but they’re really not saying the right things, but it’s still important because you join enough of those. This guy said this, and, but that makes more sense.
And you know, like when in history, have we been able to have these conversations and have immediate feedback from a crowd from people saying, I like it, whatever. And then obviously Twitter, you know, follow through with Twitter spaces. I think honestly, if you have the time and that’s the hard part, right, right now there’s no time for anything. Just our time is, is so short because there’s so many channels of things you can participate from discord to Twitter, to clubhouse, to like the nine chat, a chat apps that you have in your phone, for sure you have it. And every other person in crypto has, which ones do you, would you dedicate? I think the most important channel to build authenticity and build a strong community or having those Twitter spaces, having those one-on-one talks, having pod, doing podcasts and, and, and, and connecting with people and connecting with them as if you were going to a meet up or network, you can’t be the person that’s hanging out in the back.
You gotta be the person that goes and shakes the, the person’s hand and asks what they’re up to and what projects they’re interested in, what makes ’em tick, what are they gonna do on the weekend and build a relationship with them. And, and if you exude that you’re authentic. And I think brands that can find that. And I would say, like, for example, time, time magazine with their slices of time, you know, Keith was the president. He knows he is, got the heart. And his authenticity is coming through with that project, you know, from, from using like the photographer, Jane Silva to like curate important people within the NFT community, which, for example, for me, my passion project is Cuba. My parents are from Cuba. I have a project called NFT, Cuba, NFT, cuba.art. One of the first NFTs that I brought from someone in the island, this gentleman named Gabriel Bini because of the community and all the time he spent on Twitter spaces and clubhouse and building value and, and being genuine and being helpful and, and let him to be, to, to be featured as a drop on, on, on times thing, you know, on, on slices of time.
And that’s because this ethos of web three per is, is so apparent. And so, yeah.
Ivan Kan: Yeah. That’s, I, I even think you can take it further. It’s like, because of these like open spaces, like clubhouse and Twitter spaces is like human. Now have this ability to hang out where everything is transparent. It’s just almost like a stream. Like you’re just tapping into people’s thinking and streaming and, and there’s, there’s no judgment, but then at the same time, there’s judgment. And it’s like, you know, the, it, it kind of organically creates this community and like the authentic, the authentic ones sort of ones that stick and the crowd snips it out. And we’ve worked with so many projects where they use discord bots. And I’m always saying, someone’s gonna snip that out. A either you’re gonna get banned cuz you shouldn’t be spaming people or the community’s become, I think the community at large is just also becoming very intelligent now. Right. And so yeah, really good insights Gian. I really had a great time just chatting with that you.
Gianni Dalerta: Was a great conversation.
Ivan Kan: Yeah. What’s the best way for people to get ahold of you follow you, you know, on your handles. What are those, what are those places?
Gianni Dalerta: So my full name, which is Gianni Dalerta anywhere fully docked. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but when you’re docked, you gotta be authentic because it’s your name on the line. And so that’s how I I’ve always been that way. So.
Ivan Kan: Awesome. Well, Gianni, it’s so good to have you definitely bring you back for another time, but thank you so much for sharing your insight. So with our community,
Gianni Dalerta: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, having, it’s been great to, to, to, to share with you and, and looking forward to, to, to checking out your other interviews and, and all the other things that you guys are doing. Thank you so much for having me.
