Brandon Davenport: Weekly Hashgraph News

In this episode of the Hedera Corner, King Solomon interviews Brandon Davenport, Founder of Pixel Rug, and Doerksen & Davenport Inc. Brandon is a long time Hedera community member and was one of the early NFT creators to enter the ecosystem. Spearheading HIP 412 that set the Hedera NFT metadata standards back in early 2022, Brandon has been heavily involved in the entire ecosystem including running a weekly show called the Hedera Enthusiasts Twitter Spaces where he breaks down every weeks news and rumors happening around the Hedera network. In this conversation, Brandon is also joined by his business partner Joshua Doerksen and community members to dive deep into Hedera, Music NFTs, and much more.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
All right, I want to welcome up to the stage. And then I would have to say, if you guys are not familiar with Brandon, the hashgraph news and rumors aspects that he's been facilitating for literally, I mean, you're on like the 70-something podcast, you do them every Sunday. Certainly, one of the most hardworking people that I've ever met in the Hedera ecosystem. I want to also welcome up to the stage Fat Boy, you're up here as a speaker as well. But Brandon, yeah, I would like maybe just give a little bit of a breakdown about your history in crypto and kind of what brought you into the HBAR ecosystem as well. And thank you so much. Real quick to Adam, to all the speakers up here, feel free to hang out. I mean, Brandon has a ton of value with all these spaces. He's arguably probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the HBAR space just because he does these types of spaces every Sunday. So he's regurgitated it a million times in his head. Brandon, the floor is yours. Give us a little bit of an introduction on yourself.

‍Pixel Rug – Brandon Davenport - Founder
Yeah, this is awesome. I'm finally sitting up right now. I was laying on my floor in my office with my beanie as a pillow. I was listening to this. I love this conversation. A little about me. I mean, music is really one of the main things that I'm about, and it's really kind of who I am. But also, there's the technology side, and I mean, growing up, I was always into like computers and all those different types of things, and I started, you know, in my career basically at a high school which feels like forever ago now. But I had like a 13 editor technology publication. I had worked at a few different branding agencies and different things like that. Also, was in like, you know, touring rock and roll band, and so my life always had that back and forth between technology and art. But a lot of the times it felt like I was flipping between those two worlds. And it was, I think it was just the tail end of 2019. I Cameron probably heard about Swirlds first or Hedera, but I heard about Hedera, and I watched that old Harvard presentation that Leeman Baird gave. Leeman Baird is the inventor of the Hashgraph algorithm and a co-founder of Hedera. And I kind of was just, you know, I don't have to go over it, but I mean, it's like, I had the same reaction that a lot of people listening have had where it's like, "Oh, this seems really interesting and fantastic," and just kind of fell into the community. And this was before Hedera had NFTs and all these different types of things that I was just spending time with a lot of people that were excited about this technology, right? These Hashgraph enthusiasts. And a year later, I ended up starting a weekly show, the Hashgraph Enthusiast News and Rumors show that's still going. I actually started it on Clubhouse before Twitter Spaces existed, and then NFTs came to Hedera, and I started a project called Pixelrug that was 3D kind of metaverse collectibles and they were one of the first 3D NFTs on Hedera that were objects and weren't just images, and it was really exciting because it was before any of those initial NFT standards were around. It was very, very early, and that project is still going really well. I actually have a lot of exciting things planned for it that I can't quite talk about yet, but I am excited about it. And then basically, where I really have ended up is I have a company with my really good friend and business partner Joshua Doerksen, who's up on stage now, called Doerksen and Davenport Incorporated. And basically, we work with people in the ecosystem, helping various startups and projects do things like, you know, can you get a minimum viable product out the door? Can you get yourself in a little bit better of a position to try to get some funding or something? Or can you, after getting some funding, try to go to market with something? Or all these different things that you want, like if you have, if you think of like a zero to one startup, can you get to 0.1? Can you get a little bit of foundation? Can you get the plane in the air? And after that, it's just a matter of staying in the air until the bear market's over. But I've had the pleasure of working with so many different people in this ecosystem. Actually, one of the people I work with, one of our clients, is Mynt. And we've been working with those guys for a while. And just listening to them talking the spaces always reminds me of why we choose the people that we work with, is because they are coming at problems in a different way than other people might be coming at them from. And it really takes all sorts of different approaches to get everybody what they need in a space. Not every project going to be everything to everybody, but we do need that variety, and we need that collaboration. And I think that's why this conversation is so great. But yeah, that's basically kind of a quick little synopsis of my journey. I don't know if maybe I'll throw it over to Josh just for a quick second because I know he jumped up, but maybe he can speak a little bit about his path and us joining up in business and kind of taking on the Hedera ecosystem. It sounds like you're talking to us from a deep space station, but I love it.

‍Joshua Doerksen – Doerksen & Davenport Inc
Okay, great. I am actually, it's a deep metaverse station. Anytime there is a cross-platform music industry disruptive NFT space, the lights go on for me, and I get really, really excited. And it's glad to be able to jump in here today. Normally, this isn't a great time, so I'm really happy I could be here. Just to echo some of the things that have been sort of said that I caught and what Brandon has said, lifelong music producer and a classical composer, working for many marketing agencies over the years at the corporate level, and then also working in artist development for about a decade with a lot of different artists. And so naturally landing is in the kind of crypto music and in the NFT space, I was immediately really intrigued as to what types of platforms were kind of coming to fruition and what different ecosystems were doing. I have collaborated with Brandon for a long time now, probably 12 years now, professionally and creatively. I helped produce his band's first EP back in the day and just did a lot of touring actually as well within my own bands. And it's just so exciting for me to finally see Hedera at a place where the music ecosystem is starting to grow and the seeds that were planted when larger marketplaces like Zoo started to take but. We've seen now the maturity in a lot of ways, a lot of generative projects in the space, and now I feel like we're on the beginning of the turn to seeing music and the teams take off in the space in the same way that we've seen happening on heat. I've got a lot of musician friends who are web 3 musicians from other chains who I talked to who are doing all sorts of really fascinating and unique things. And one of the things I think Solomon said was, once you know, a lot of those musicians are experiencing a lot of frustration and are looking for solutions to the problems. Obviously, gas being a number one issue, but there's a lot of other struggles that they're having. And anytime I end up talking about Hedera, the sort of eyes wide and they're like, what do you mean you don't need smart contracts? What do you mean creative royalties or Kingdom? What do you mean? It's like they had no idea that all these other things are possible on a network like this. And I think, you know, I've identified that while that's really great, there's still the struggle of the liquidity and the fact that for a lot of these musicians that have established and built communities on other chains, they're still struggling with making the leap over to Hedera because of the fact that there's a lot of investors and buyers and collectors still well established in those communities. So when we talk about building up the music ecosystem on Hedera, we're not just talking about bringing artists over here or doing cross-collaborations so that platforms can offer artists more things. We also need to bring listeners and lovers and collectors and investors who are interested specifically in being early adopters of music NFTs over to the space as well because I'm finding that there's a much larger market of buyers on other chains than Hedera has. And as we know, Hedera is a pretty small community relative to the rest of just some other chains and cryptos, and it's challenging because not everybody in our community is necessarily interested specifically in music or music NFTs. And so we have to broaden our reach, and part of that is reaching out to the music industry and getting them interested in what DLT specifically, Hashgraph, can do. But it's also, you know, looking to other chains and saying, hey, buyers, you know, we've got some amazing artists over here and here's some incredible stuff. And as well going off with our platforms, and so I'm really excited also to kind of see that aspect of this conversation. For sure.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
It was going well with the sound. I know it sounds a little bit like a wind tunnel, a little bit, and no, 100, Joshua It really comes down to the ability for us to expand out the utility and the efficiency of this network into multiple different networks. And sorry to mute everybody, it was really loud for a second there. I apologized. But your sentiment's a million percent Joshua, are super valid. Maybe Brandon can expand a little bit about what Joshua was talking about. That'd be great. If the mic was just really hot for a second there and I wanted that was such great audio too, like I wish Valor's probably in the background like this is really great, but I don't know if we can use any of this audio. Brandon, go ahead. Brandon, go ahead though real quick, and Josh would know 100 like super valid points dude. It really is about expanding out into these other ecosystems. And like, look, I think we touched on this earlier a little bit too with like the Ethereum platforms that exist. Yeah, the money's there, the liquidity's there, but it's still that boom and bust, you know, mindset of just these platforms launching that are unsustainable. They're doing X, Y, and Z, and how are you really helping to bootstrap out real creators and real community, whether it be music or whatever else you're trying to actually build? Because a lot of people that launch in the bigger ecosystems, unless you know somebody, and it's like the old boys club almost was Ethereum sometimes, unless you know somebody, I mean, good luck because you're gonna be potentially get lost in the shuffle of how large these ecosystems are. Brandon, real quick, and then maybe Seiki as well.

Pixel Rug – Brandon Davenport - Founder
Yeah, I think that when we talk about some things that need to be done to accelerate the kind of community growth on Hedera, is of course, there's the fan-consumer side, there's the artist's side. And I think that as well, there's another element to this that I don't think is talked about often enough, and it's something that's being worked on currently that I'm really excited about. So to give a great example, last year there was a new hip brought to the network that was called HIP 412. And a HIP is a Hedera Improvement Proposal, and it's the way that any old Joe like myself can contribute to the network. So I was a co-author of HIP 412 that was the NFT standards that you know people will refer to. That's like multi-file and having multiple files and NFTs and stuff. Having those standards gives creators and projects the confidence to create more complex products that give those experiences and have the assurance that they're going to work properly on marketplaces and wallets and stuff like that because the DNA of your NFT is metadata, right? And theoretically you can put whatever metadata you want in your NFT to do whatever you want it to do, but the problem is that if you're not speaking the same language and using the same standards as marketplaces and wallets there's no incentive for them to support your different features. So before those initial NFT standards, all of these different projects were doing these kind of really strange and wonderful things with their NFTs. But the problem was, is that they were all reinventing the wheel in their own way, often in their own corner. And we ended up with some of these products that don't really work in these platforms. These platforms can't take on that tech debt to support everything under the sun. So when we brought NFT standards to the network, it created this almost like Cambrian explosion of the confidence for creators to say, "If I want to make something more complicated and more in-depth than just a PFP, I can do that because I know it will be supported." So that was incredible. But we're at the same place right now with NFTs where music NFTs, in particular, are really interesting because you could have a single, or you could have an album with all sorts of different songs, and each of those songs might have different creators or potentially different royalties. And there's all of these different complexities with music. There may also be tie-ins with existing royalty management entities in various countries or all these different things. So there's all of these... It's a whole can of worms that has to be opened, and you have to start with the basics and get the basics right. For example, there are certain features like the length of a song, the key of a song, the BPM of a song, the artist who played what, and those have to be put in the metadata. But it's not going to work until we have standards so that all of the different wallets and marketplaces and apps, like Siki and Mynt and Tune FM, can kind of support all these different things and have that interoperability between different platforms. And just to wrap up my point on this is there is currently an ongoing working group for NFT metadata music standards that meets bi-weekly, and we're making great progress. And we're actually putting out very soon kind of a proposed starting point for these standards, and another member of the ecosystem, Patches from Turtle Moon Command Center, he's going to be putting out a single rather soon to demonstrate kind of that the stripped-back standards and kind of what they could possibly be, and we're going to continue working on those. And I hope that alongside this NFT ecosystem kind of growing and that fan demand growing, these standards will come into place to give creators and projects the confidence to bring more full experiences to people with the assurance that wallets, marketplaces, and other platforms are going to be able to support that. So I think that's a really low-hanging fruit area to look at as a community. So when all these people arrive live, they've got the foundation to thrive.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think we have Siki up here as well, Brandon. We're going to end up having to do another interview too because we're just talking about music for the past half-hour. But I wanted to bring up... I mean, you bring up a really good point, and I know what a lot of people that come into the space, you know, that are here, you know, I'm participating in Ethereum and multiple aspects, and it's like Ethereum is, you know, there's a lot of great points that were brought up here. It does have the majority of the liquidity as far as DeFi and Metaverse and gamification and all this different stuff, but it's almost a shotgun approach as well. Where you know, when you deal with smart contracts on Ethereum, you're pretty much, it's touring complete, which means that if I want to make a transaction on Ethereum, right, let me, I'll try to provide an example. If I want to go down to the gas station and buy a candy bar, right, Ethereum isn't just going to take that candy bar into account. It's going to take into account me walking down to my car, me putting my car in the ignition, me driving down to the gas station. I'm losing gas during that time, I'm walking into the gas station, I'm buying the candy bar, I'm walking back into my car, I'm walking, I'm driving back to my house, and then I'm unwrapping the candy bar and eating the candy bar. And it's like, it's just a huge shotgun approach that. This is why whenever you're in some of these projects that have to reissue, reissue a token, a V2 or reissue an NFT, a V2 of an NFT, why do you think that, like with artifacts and the Adidas stuff, every time they try to pivot in their ecosystem, you burn your NFT and you get reissued a new one? Um, there's not a whole lot of programmability, um, within that ecosystem, and it really doesn't allow for people to or projects to just build out in a way that made sense to them at the onset. Where maybe you don't need smart contracts, maybe you just need this baked in a royalty baked in, maybe you just want to use consensus service, or maybe you want to use the token service, um, in a way that you can adapt over time. So, I mean, yeah, and I think that there's a long way to go within all these regards. I did want to introduce Siki up to the stage as well. I know Siki is, if you guys aren't aware, crypto social and gamified NFTs, including music streaming, I believe you guys have had some live, live concert aspects as well. I know Elizabeth from Hello Future has mentioned you guys multiple times and, uh, excited for you guys to, uh, maybe give us a little bit of an overview. And Brandon, like I said, dude, we've got guests up here at this point now, and I feel really bad, I dude, because I wanted to try and get some numbers in the space. Like, we've got to do another freaking interview at some point, dude. You, you have my word, we will do a justifiable and finite interview with Brandon in the future. I just, I, there's a couple of other spaces going on right now, and I wanted to make sure we pulled some numbers.

Pixel Rug – Brandon Davenport - Founder
Well, just, just real quick, I mean, King Solomon's coming off like I'm some bigwig. I mean, I just started a new show, and King Solomon, like, has been such a huge reason why my show has grown, and so many other people's efforts have found success in the Hedera ecosystem. I mean, your cross-chain you're many different communities. You do so much for people. So, I'm just happy to be here. If you need me to show up again, just let me know and I'm happy to show up. This is such a great space. So happy to chime in when needed.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
So, I want to get this nailed down in audio because, and then see, certainly, I know you came up, so you'll have the mic in a second here. But I did not have a good opportunity and then today. You are one of, like, the workhorses in the Hedera community. If you could touch base a little bit about your experience. You've been doing your Sunday spaces for well over a year now. What are some of the biggest lessons learned that you've had? You know, just what's your experience been like just doing it consistently with that continuity that it really takes to grow organically? Because, like I said, dude, I mean, you're one of the hardest workers that I've seen in this space. Can only probably put four people in that, especially within the HBAR ecosystem, into that grouping which is probably what's good. And it's great to have Fatboy up here as well. Fatboy and hot dog are starting to do, like, really consistent spaces, but you've been here for a while. Elizabeth has been here for so much time down there as hello future. Brandon, Hbar bull we've tried helping and I've tried helping where I can, but what's been your experience really doing it from a continuity standpoint?

Pixel Rug – Brandon Davenport - Founder
That's what it is, it's continuity, it's consistency just to bring it to the music analogy, anybody who's familiar with music and um, I've actually experienced these moments, you know, with Joshua as well, like being in bands together and stuff like that, is you play your first shows and you know, maybe nobody shows up, maybe if five people show up. I mean, for the first, you know, probably 10, maybe 20 episodes of the Hashgraph enthusiast news and rumors show, it's like, I didn't have many people listening at all. Um, it's about building trust and it's about showing up and it's about creating that routine and ritual for people, because that's kind of stuff is really lacking in the space, and there's always that little part in someone's brain that see something cool and they kind of go like, can I trust this to happen again? Can I commit to this, you know what I mean? And you just have to keep showing up so you're, you know, so you can turn from the guy that does like a new show to the guy that does a new show every week for sure. You know that I'm gonna do one next week because I have a track record and that's really all it's about. So, that's really the key, and if and if you find that it's not working, make an adjustment or try something new, but don't stop. Always keep showing up because eventually things will end up working out. And the other thing that I say it's important is try to solve a problem It's even better if it's a problem for yourself. The new show for me was trying to solve a problem for myself. I found it hard to keep up with all of the news for this investment that I had, HBAR. So, I was like, if I force myself to do a show every week, I'm going to be held accountable to continue learning about these things. Otherwise, I just might not do it, and that was a problem I had to solve for myself. And through that, you realize other people might have that problem too, and they show up every week with me, and we kind of stay up to date on everything. So, if you can solve a problem and you can do it consistently for people, then, you know, you can get a ball rolling and see where you can go from there.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think a lot of it was the fact that getting out of your own comfort zone, and like you said, you had a problem that you needed to solve with how much was actually occurring within the ecosystem. So, you just said, 'screw it.' You know, I might not be comfortable hosting these spaces. Maybe nobody shows up, and I'm sure 76 or 75 episodes ago, you probably didn't have a lot of people showing up. But you've done it consistently for 75, 76, whatever it is, weeks now. And what I think a lot of people don't realize in the space is you don't have to just start. I mean, and nothing again, you release a coin or an NFT or a token, you know, good on you. I mean, that's amazing. But there are so many other opportunities in this space that just come from networking and the continuous aspects of, like, hosting a space or, you know, making connections and trying to break some barriers down between projects. And I mean, that's what I tell even, we had a couple of people from Genfinity. Like, I know Carola is getting into our spaces on Wednesdays now, and she was really nervous. And it's like, just do one. Just come up and talk for one. You might not be comfortable, but most of the speakers on these panels are going to speak anyways. Just ask them about themselves, ask them about what they're building, and then after that, it's like, after you get outside of that initial fear aspect, you're just like, 'Yeah, I can do this 100%.' And you start growing within that. So, I wanted to allow Siki to come up real quick. I know you guys are speakers up here, and I also believe that you guys had, I think it was a live concert going on, if I'm not mistaken. I think Elizabeth from Hello Future told me about that a couple of weeks ago. If you maybe touch base about what Siki is facilitating, that'd be fantastic.

Siki
Yeah, um, I definitely want to say too, like, you know, obviously hearing from Brandon and Joshua and all them, like, I love everything that they're working on too. You know, I'm trying to be more myself active within the communities of the crypto stuff. You know, we're multi-chain. I try to jump on as many Twitter spaces as I can, to kind of understand more about the things that are going on, um, and I know one of the things that we're looking to do is, you know, I know Elizabeth is working on, you know, Hedericon. No, it's Hello Future Live. So we're gonna do that. We've also been doing, because essentially, we're a DSP plus a live streaming service. Um, so we host, like, basically like what this is right now, right? You have like 35 people in the room. People can also be live on video. They can share screen. You could tip people in different types of crypto. Currently, it's Polygon, Hedera, and Siki. Um, you know you can have multiple videos going on. You could like gift an NFT if you choose to. So the past two Sundays, you know, one, the first one, we brought in like Scott Page from Pink Floyd and a couple of other producers that are really big. This past week, we brought in an individual who, he's gonna basically be syncing music from our platform to television, a lot like SoundCloud. The funny thing is this guy by himself is actually, you know, he could do more than SoundCloud could do. He's a very interesting individual. So, you know, we've been looking at, like, let's take some of our resources. You know, we've been in music for a long time. Let's bring some things in. Let's test the waters with how people react to different kinds of NFTs. You know, we did the Bankroll Hayden Kid Leroy song that was probably, especially at the time, the largest NFT that was dropped. You know, we didn't pay for a crazy amount of promotion, but, you know, I have over 250 million streams on Spotify, which I think the other one, I think it was like a Snoop Dogg song, only had like three million. So, like, you know, it was really big. Didn't fully catch on, which started to show me more and more, is this like, you know, obviously a pay-to-play kind of game of like, it's all like conceptual. You know, we bring in Alan Watts, like, who I think is just, you know, he's changed my life three times over, but just his speeches and everything, being able to have that licensing also for other artists to use, you know, seeing how that tests the waters. And then, you know, we dropped probably the first docu-series, you know, television sync theme song for Love and Hip Hop last week. And, you know, with what we're building, it's really the goal is to figure out how do I bring in a community. So, like, for instance, if this was one, it would be a studio that's NFT on Hedera, Polygon, whatever you end up cheated on, and then people building that community there to kind of engage more specifically with these different things, being able to show video to a concert, whatever it is. Um, and it's been, it's just been kind of interesting to see, like, what kind of, I guess, kind of shifts the traffic like in the mainstream audience. It seems a little bit simpler than if I'm thinking how do I bring in people specifically that are looking to purchase NFTs, and that might be due to the timeframe that we're currently In with the markets, I know everything's kind of coming back a bit, but, you know, that's kind of why more and more I'm kind of seeing, you know, with Hedera that Community Polygon's communities interesting within itself. We're also talking a lot with Algorand right now and NEAR, and we're seeing which one of those we're going to kind of go next with.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
But one of the things that I'd be really interested in from Siki's standpoint as well as Mint, as well as anybody that's dealing in music, like from the Genfinity purview, later this year, and this is definitely going to be later this year, really trying to put together some sort of a large, uh, cross-chain, almost conference. It'd be really, like, digital, breakdown silos, create networking events. Um, so we definitely want to put people up on the same panel, allow them to talk about what they're facilitating from the music industry aspects, and then also, it's going to be really cool to, like, just allow each project that is dealing in music to be like, who do you like, who would you like to showcase within your ecosystem, your project, and then, like, kind of have that aspect, like, being streamed live as well, like, here's an amazing artist that is, you know, working with Siki, or here's an amazing artist working with Mynt or any of these other platforms, and just really trying to, like, break down some of the barriers between these ecosystems, because I mean, that's Brandon, taught about this last night. There was a really great blog post about kind of these ecosystem and Community bubbles that exist right now and how we can break them down, and I think it's pretty clear-cut and dry how we break them down. We just put work in and we break them down. It's not talking about doing it, it's just doing it, creating large mass-scale events, whether it be music or a culmination of multiple things, and just doing the work and breaking them down. I would love for you guys to participate in something like that, all you guys. ‍

Siki
We do have some pretty massive things coming. Like, I am working with the president of Atlantic Records, which, you know, goes through everything. We do have like MGK. We just partner with a 30,000 person Stadium over, I can't actually say specifically where it is right now, but, so we're going to be doing a festival next year. Like, we have massive things. Our biggest thing is kind of figuring out where's the right place to place these things, because most of these opportunities, they don't care which blockchain they're on specifically. They're like, "I understand it's there. Let's see how it goes." But they're already operating in a normal capacity. But that's kind of why I was thinking, like, you know, you have something like this even right here. You know, you have 35 people in the room. Every time you play a song on our platform during a live stream, this is the only place in the world this happens. It actually pays a royalty. So you play one song for three minutes, it counts as 35 streams and 35 payments. So what actually happens is you now are, like, you know, kind of breaking songs in a sense because, you know, 80% of users on Spotify don't even get 50, so you play the song twice, they're doing better than Spotify, so it's like sort of this way of like how do I build so the communities can build right for their own purposes and then I could use my benefits of like, you know, syncing the TV, signing the labels, like we have a bunch of big festivals in place that we can do between Vegas and overseas and in California and, you know, work with all these different things. I know NEAR, like I said, some of these other chains, they're all really excited, but I'm still trying to learn, I guess, the landscape of each sort of blockchain, figure out like, you know, who's the best people, how do we kind of work this all together to make the most sense.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think even when we do these kind of, you know, this is a great space right now because we have real Community Builders in here, and 35 people that are listening to real Community Builders is much more valuable than 3,500 Bots that are in some of these spaces. But whenever we do these kind of larger cross-chain aspects, like I think two weeks ago, we did, you know, you have like Enterprise and real Executives from like these different layer ones across chains, and then almost taking like a pivot and a break like every 25, 30 minutes and just playing a song that gives everybody a little bit of a chance to breathe, but you have 4,000 people in the space. Everybody's streaming, everybody's doing X, Y, and Z. It's these are the kind of ideas that I think really open up a lot of opportunities, not only for platforms that are facilitating royalties and streaming for artists in Web3, but for people that are trying to do media as well where they're not, you know, not taking money from an individual project and tokens or X, Y, and Z, but just making media relationships and partnerships that make sense because let's make no mistake about it, for those of you guys, I'm sure Siki knows this, to put one article in Coin Telegraph, it's about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, and how many people are actually reading that article? How many people are like, what value does that represent within the actual Web3 platform that you're building out? It's acidine. There's all sorts of ways to do this in the right way, and for me personally, I always get ideas every time I have people up here, which is, which is almost like honestly a blessing because I get to talk to you guys that are all way smarter than me and then just try to figure out some ideas around it. So, Mynt, Josh, you guys go ahead.

‍ItsMynt – Adam - Founder
Hey, yeah, this will probably be less thought, just speaking to what you just said a moment ago about cross-chain and collaboration. We couldn't agree more. I think that we need to start thinking like it's not, it's not Mint against Bandcamp, and it's not Siki against Spotify, etc. It's a fairer economy and a new economy against the existing beasts you know they are huge, okay, and we need to like, kind of bend together to really show fans and artists what this is about and how it adds value to what they do. And why it's a better situation for them instead of kind of having just our own angle on it, you know. And so, I couldn't agree more about that, and we'd always be able to do anything on that front.

‍Joshua Doerksen – Doerksen & Davenport Inc
When we talk about creating these sort of big multi-chain conferences or events that include artists actually performing, what immediately comes to mind is, yes, of course, it's really important to have project creators and build networking relationships and strategic partners and make things cross-chain. But the big question mark for me is always what about the fans and the onboarding of the fans either from other chains to Hedera or from the music industry themselves and getting them educated enough to be able to support in this new vertical. It's so challenging to have a conference that is built on pitching to big labels, say in big artists, saying, "Hey, this is great new technology. It's going to disrupt things. It's going to be an amazing new revenue stream for you," etc., etc. But there's no buyers, you know. The fans have to migrate because fans are the ones who build artists; they're the backbone of artists' careers, whether it's indie artists or it's major artists. And so, I always have that big question mark of when we're talking about creating events that bring people together and creating communities, especially in terms of disrupting the music industry, it's how do we get the average person to participate. And that's always the big question mark for me. And I'm just genuinely casting everyone in the room.

‍Juliana Mihai
Well, let me tell you something. I mean, we are in the web tree; we are in a blockchain. We are already in here, creating connections with producers, with fans, and everything. Now, we already have the bread in the hands, let's say like this. For those other people, like huge names around the music, and I'm talking about someone like, I don't know, Beyonce or Swedish House Mafia or something like this. Right now, when these kinds of people come in here and let people know that fans are in the NFT in the blockchains with the pool of people that they have already as followers and everything, do you think it will be a problem to bring them in? Amnesty for these kinds of huge monsters of music. It's very easy to get in; they will be following everywhere because that's what it is. The monster of music brings with them new people, and those will be the people who are also following and curious to see what's happening with other music in NFT because let's be honest, we are the new pioneer of the music. Right? I did a new music before to come in NFT. No way. I was all my life a fashion designer before, a model working for Dior, for Chanel for whatever, that doesn't matter. Because of my having my own brand and then getting in here, starting with one-on-one art and avatars and all this, when people were looking at me like I'm an alien, what I'm doing here, and then I started to create my music. There you go, I have sales. And I'm just, you know, I'm not a professor. I didn't study a conservator. But I can tell you 100%, I was feeling my music since day one in my vein. My blood was running over there, so it will not be difficult for those people, for those monsters, to bring people in here. Actually, it will be a plus for even us, for people who make music in NFT because some of the people just come in NFT because it was like a replacement for the coffee time. That was the huge explosion of the NFT, so I will not be worried about that. Josh.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think one of the biggest issues that we see in these spaces and in web 3 and crypto, in general, is that, like I said earlier, I think it's like the old boys' club, especially when you deal with Ethereum. Yeah, all the liquidity is there, and there's a lot of money there, but how are you really cultivating and caring about people that are trying to innovate? Because a lot of people are nervous to even try to step foot into crypto and into this space, and it doesn't matter if you're a musician or a builder or an innovator or whatever you may be. And a lot of people don't even know that they are a boater or an innovator or anything in this space until, you know, they get into a space where they feel like they can gain that confidence to at least take that first leap. I think what you've said, 100%, Julia, is a thousand percent correct. You never know what you're going to do or be in this space until you take that leap forward. And there's got to be platforms or ecosystems or people that are trying to break these silos down to make people feel confident enough to do their own thing. Because I really do, I personally, truly believe this. If you don't have some sort of a digital presence or a side aspect of what you're doing in your personal career in five to seven years, it's going to be really hard to even survive because everything is shifting towards digital. I mean, everything. And this space is going to take over society as a whole. And by the time that the masses are marked, like the powers that be are marketing it to us like it's the best thing since sliced bread, it's a little bit too late for the mass populace out there.

‍Siki
I was just going to say, so like from what I've heard specifically because I've talked to him, obviously, like, you know, I'm like, 'You guys got Ed Sheeran, and you got Coldplay drop an NFT, and it will go crazy but some of the things that have happened obviously is like you have Chris Brown dropping an NFT, and it flops, and some of these other people are dropping NFTs, they're not doing well. They're really looking mostly at their image. Like even like you know, Alan Watts, to license some of his stuff, like Harry Styles just paid him like sixty thousand dollars to license something to be used, and it's like they don't want to lower the perceptional value. So they're all like, is this the right time? Like if I drop it here, is it going to do well? I do know the way that I can bring them on and get them to NFT, regardless, is because it's not because the top people. It's because labels sign artists on a regular basis that'll never continue on. Like there's like maybe like 30 or 40 duds in a year, which, God, I don't mean like that says they're bad or whatever, but they just don't make it all the way. They get around a hundred thousand streams, it is what it is. So by curating a community where it's like, 'Oh, they're in this community, they're actually doing well,' they'll bring everybody else in just like how, you know, TikTok and some of these other things, how newer projects grow. It's not because somebody big came in and made it big, it's because somebody's small is actually to make a big out of it. So that's just one of the things that I've seen with, as far as them kind of holding back on some of the big ones.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Well, especially with music, and especially with, you know, I mean, look, if you launch something at its inception and it's around revenue streams and driving revenue from a music standpoint, and that's all that it's about, it becomes very difficult to sell. If you create community and you encourage community, and you onboard community, and you really provide value within the community that you've created, then it becomes much easier for people to participate in the ecosystem that you've built in a way that makes sense. Because I forget who said it earlier, I think it was um, maybe it was Brandon, and it's not about like fake trust, it's about how much hard work it takes to actually really build trust through continuity, and then it becomes much easier to sell things, whether it be a piece of music or XYZ, in a way that has justified the community that you've already built, instead of just saying, 'Hey, we're going to drop a thousand, you know, 10,000 albums at some acid on and NFT price in the form of an album.' Like of course, it's gonna flop because you don't even have a community. In web three, it's like these people are going in Tropic Thunder, what Robert Downey Jr says, 'You never go full' and it's the r-word, but it's 100% what people have done in this space. They go full, you know, our word and yeah man, go ahead guys.

‍ItsMynt – Adam - Founder
And you kind of stole my thunder to be honest. I was gonna say yeah, does it add value? That needs to be the first question about onboarding people, you know, and creating products. Like, is this actually a valuable product? Is this something that people are going to want? Is it something that my fans will enjoy? And, you know, they want the one NFT we're excited to launch that's coming up. It's a guy who's been making music for, you know, 20 years, is like a real pioneer in the electronic music scene, and he's always hand-drawn all of his record covers. But I've been a fan of his for 15 years. I didn't know it was him that was drawing them. So we've had to shoot this whole kind of behind the scenes documentary about it, which is coming soon, and to really tell that story. And we're hoping that that kind of thing will appeal to an or to the fan, the whether can actually like engage and watch them think and find something new about an artist that they've loved for a while. And that that kind of thing might be the draw to really get them to kind of make this step. Because most people, people, let's be honest, are a bit scared of this new world, a bit scared of crypto and this and what it represents. And, you know, they only know what they've seen on the news and things like that. So, so it's got to be valuable. It's got to be something that fans are really going to enjoy. And when that, when that would kind of break through, that's when we'll really see the onboarding and the big numbers.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think. Brandon, real quick, and I know Julia has their hand up as well. We're probably going to end this shortly, but Brandon, just thinking about the pixel rugs and thinking about these kind of, you know, I'm thinking about Patches and Vasisi and the Liftoff and the live concerts and Seiki with the live concerts and Mint with the artists. From the pixel rug standpoint, I mean, I'm even going back to like the Rage Against the Machine, like in the room concerts that they had that were like just literally those guys in a room, like, you know, playing a small set or like Metallica playing a small set. And from like the pixel rug standpoint, how badass would it be if there were like competitions through Seiki or through Mint or through anybody else, um, any of these other platforms where like a one of one pixel rug for a live concert like in the metaverse and like that pixel rug is like super badass, like banned driven, with like the logo of the band and all this stuff like and you know it's about like I think just creating Synergy with these things. And I think that would be super freaking cool to see like a lot of like pixelated avatars like playing a real concert with like a pixel rug underneath them in the metaverse would be pretty badass.

‍Pixel Rug – Brandon Davenport - Founder
Oh yeah, absolutely I was just going to search something up and pin it to the spaces, but that's exactly what it's about. And I mean, you can really get specific about this. Like, that already happens in the real world. You can go and get, like, a Bob Marley rug and stuff. And, like, the reason I started Pixel Rug is I, again, like walking around metaverse environments. And this was when NFTs were starting to take off in a big way. And I was looking around on the walls of all these metaverse environments, and I wanted to kind of find a space of my own. And there was no art for the floor, and it was kind of, most of these metaverse spaces kind of either had the default floor textures or something like that, but art was really kind of on the wall. And that's when I was kind of like, "Oh, I found a new, you know, kind of space for myself. Let me see if I can kind of get into it a little bit." And that's what a lot of people do with music, too. So, really, there's just a natural element about that. Like, if you talk about me doing Pixel Rugs or if you talk about a musician trying a tease for the first time, you're both just trying to do something new, something fresh. Um, either forming a whole new community like I did with Pixel Rug, or bringing something fresh to an existing community. And when you, as you're saying, bring those two energies together, those things are kind of already happening in the ecosystem. And I think we need to build those bridges within Hedera. And that's been happening, which is really great. I'll just share a quick little example on this: just pin at the top of the spaces, I do custom Pixel Rugs and other projects, and collectors or members of my community will come to me, "Hey, I want a custom Pixel Rug, one-of-one designs just for me, minted to the Hedera network." And that's fun and that's awesome, but when people get together in the Hedera ecosystem, that's great. And then, like we've been saying, the next level is across networks. And also, like Mint and everybody's saying, a lot of these artists are multimedia artists. It'll shock you, the amount of NFT artists in Hedera and other networks that are actually musicians as well. And it would also shock you how many musicians out there are also visual medium artists. And I think that these types of technologies can start to bring out all new sides of people that we already know.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
100. Julia, I'm gonna let you ask the last question because I totally forgot. Uh, Brandon H Bar Bull is hosting a space from Twigital. If you're not familiar with photogrammetry and what he's facilitating, we talk about digital items in crypto. It's a really, really interesting aspect of what he's actually building. I pinned it to the top in the Jumbotron. I would recommend anybody that hops out of this space to hop into that space because he's going to be talking about everything digital, digital items, and photogrammetry, and really 3D representations of real-world items that we can start implementing into this space. Julia, do you have a quick question?‍

Juliana Mihai
No, actually, I don't have a real quick question. Uh, what I was, uh, wanted to tell is Siki because, you know, being in the IRL and trying to be a musician for a lot of time, and so on, but being in crypto and being a musician, man, is totally freedom. So you can really try and retry, and you try a thousand times, and you get the right point in there, and finally, you find your way. So what I find in crypto, totally 100%, it's much way better. Actually, you are even protected because if you know how to type their a contract that eventually will protect you, and you have even your own royalty. Now, let's talk about that. And yes, thank you very much. I saw this place that you put inside in here. I will jump in after that because I'm curious about that. And absolutely, it was an amazing pleasure to meet you, Brandon, and Siki, and my main and Fat Boy. You know, I start to follow you guys, and with you also King Solomon. I know you for the XRP. You know, I was like, "I'm about to mentor a new album in XRP." You didn't know that, but stay tuned. I didn't know that. Yeah, I did not know that. You're not following me. You're following all these other people. I mean, God, I'll sit here. I'll, I'll, I'll just, you have, I'll just be here. I'll be here in the background. Okay, so let's see like that. Thank you very much for the mic, but guys, it's a pleasure with it.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Thank you, Julia. Thank you to Valor, uh, thanks for the whole Genfinity team, Brandon, Siki, Fatboy, Mint Adam, everybody up here today. I pinned up to the top Toy Little Spaces. I'm gonna hop in for 30 minutes before our team meeting. Um, I'm actually about a half hour late and doing that. I told Brandon I'd try to stop it, uh, by four, but, uh, great conversation. Um, yeah, and, looking forward to talking to you guys, uh, next week. So see you guys.