Hello everyone, Sandow61.
We are 61 episodes into this grand experiment.
Today I have an interview with the whale council.
Whale.me whale members.
A lot of different words, a lot of different whale words.
We're going to go over that as part of one of our questions.
Today I have two people, Mongoose and Nightmare, and we will be learning about the whale members
and who they are and what they do.
Welcome Night, welcome Mongoose.
Hey, Lancer, thanks for having us.
Yeah, happy to be here.
So the scope of the talk today is a meet and greet and a learning opportunity.
Mongoose and Night have graciously given us their time to learn about them.
And the disclaimer is that none of us represent the sandbox game or the sandbox style foundation.
We're not your financial or legal advisors and nothing we say is to be taken as financial
or legal advice.
When we use the word SIP, we're talking about sandbox improvement proposal.
When we say the word DAO, we mean decentralized autonomous organization.
When we use the word SanFam, we're talking about the sandbox community, those who participate
in the people, product, and the purpose of the sandbox ecosystem.
That ecosystem looks a little bit like this.
We went over it in Sandow31.
The people sector have everything from the gamers to the sandbox team.
The product is everything from the game client to the DAO itself.
And the purpose is not only what was in the white paper from 2020, but also what was expanded
upon by the co-founders, Sebastian Bourget and Arthur Madrid.
All that together equals that round and round ecosystem that we use and we participate in
day to day.
And today's episode is squarely on a very prominent, I could use the word prominent,
but longstanding OG landowner within the sandbox ecosystem, the whale vault.
So you've likely seen the big giant whale all over the map.
This is the team behind that.
And today we're going to talk about exactly who they are and what they do.
I have Mongoose, head of partnerships and outreach, and Nightmare, co-founder and head
of culture.
Mongoose, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself before we hit Nightmare.
Sure.
Yeah.
I'm Mongoose or Ryan.
Either way is fine by me.
I'm the head of partnerships and outreach for whale.
I've been working with whale since about 2022, a member of the community since 2021, and
generally involved in crypto since 2017.
And I say all that knowing that some people in the space are having beef right now with
folks who identify their year associated with crypto.
So not trying to flex anything here, but just, yeah, yeah.
I just want to give it some context here.
But otherwise I come out of a classical music background mixed with some art presentation,
production, and also tech business.
So that's where I'm coming from.
I too have a classical music background.
I don't think we talk much about that.
I used to be a composer.
Oh, yeah.
When?
Same.
I consider myself a lapsed composer, lapsed trumpet player, but ultimately I've always
found myself supporting the arts and artists, creators essentially, right?
Anything that's made artisanal, I really get behind and I want to support those folks because
often they need extra help to do what they're doing and not focusing on some of the more
administrative operational aspects that some of us can cover a lot better.
Gotcha.
And I'm not surprised to find you associate with whale now that I understand the artisanal
background of it all.
What led you to the whale members?
I would say it was back in the day, it was Clubhouse, if you remember that time, right?
And it was just the beginning of the pandemic or maybe we're square into the pandemic by
that point.
But I found myself really needing to find a new artistic outlet.
And I might have a creative background and enjoy that aspect of the arts.
But again, I want to be there listening to other people talk about their art, their creative
process and be involved in that way.
So I actually heard Whale Shark and Nightmare talking on a Clubhouse talk.
And what they were saying really resonated with me in terms of access and what Web3 and
the blockchain really provided to artists, creators, collectors, anybody who was looking
for provenance, who was looking for equality, who was looking for democracy.
There's so many aspects here that really hooked me.
And I followed another person into the whale discord.
And from there, I immediately just resonated with it.
And I found myself wanting to listen to all the artists talks, all the artists interviews.
And then I found myself volunteering to take minutes for Whale Hour that happens once every
few weeks where all the leadership gets together and talk.
We're still doing that today.
And just kind of progress from there.
And I think that's kind of a typical thing for Web3 is you find yourself just kind of
constantly immersed to the point where you just naturally want to get involved, right?
And you lend your talents, your experience, your background to whatever is needed at that
point.
So I'm happy to still be along for the ride.
And 2025 is looking to be just an incredible year.
So it's great to be here.
Thank you.
Glad to have you here, Mongoose.
Night, how about yourself?
What a long journey it's been.
First of all, involved in cryptocurrency relatively early, at least in comparison to the NFT cycle
and how we find ourselves here on Web3.
So I have a couple of cycles under my belt.
I've always been rather tech forward, come from a background being a gamer, come from
a background being a musician.
I've released albums and performed broadly where I am and also published a lot.
And likewise, found myself just immersed in different projects through cryptocurrency.
I think that I lean pretty libertarian when it comes to fiscal things and autonomy and
rights and the ability to carry your personification online without social constructs and a lot
of the things that Web3 really helps enable.
And I do that while also moonlighting, I guess you could say, with a corporate gig.
I help manage business and operations for a $8 billion international brand.
So I carry some of that skill set with me to everything that I also do and have this
automation of things and interests and skills and found my way to whale when it was kind
of starting right there at the onset in summer 2020.
And Whaleshark was coalescing kind of community around tokenization and Web3.
That was the first community to really do that.
There was disparate pockets and it was the first thing that kind of broadly took it and
brought it all together.
And I was enamored with the possibilities of Web3 of having a home base to do a lot
of the things that I found fascinating and empowering about the space.
And much like Mongoose, found myself volunteering to do different things and your skill set
gets recognized and along the way empowered to do more and more.
And so I've been fortunate through the years to do a lot of really cool shit from interviewing
MC Hammer and hanging with Jake Paul and Paris Hilton and all of these people that were along
for the last cycle for the NFT bull run.
I'm taking calls with museums and just doing things I never would have dreamed were possible
otherwise.
And it's all because of this incredible stuff Web3 provides.
So I continue to build and we continue to do cool shit and we have a lot of stuff on
the slate as well for the future.
But it is an octopus.
There's so many different realms that we play in and different things.
And I just, I love it.
It's a passion for me.
It always has been and I'm just blessed to be in a position to be able to do something
about it.
That's awesome.
We're definitely getting into that.
So 2020.
All right, before we get into the backgrounds and everything else, terminology clarification,
please help me understand there are so many whale monikers in here.
How do I parse them out?
Well I'll preface this by saying whale was the name of the project, whale, period.
It's just whale, whale.
It was started by whale shark, his vision in early 2020 after he had been doing a lot
of collecting in 2019, I think 2018 as well.
And a project to really bring a lot of the different facets of Web3 that were emerging,
crypto art, community of creators, gamers, like the guy had 400,000 gods and chain card
or something crazy like that, right?
The metaverse.
And so I think the vision at the time was enabling people to harness the power of multiple
assets in Web3 and community in Web3 and allow them to become whales, whatever that manifestation
meant, whether that meant monetarily because they were speculators, whether that meant
because they had a lot of stuff, whether that meant they roamed in a pod of people with
like interests and really helped each other.
And so whale was the name of the project.
For a long time, there was a Twitter and some media presence.
We called it whale community to kind of represent that broader base and not just our founder,
because certainly he has very strong opinions and he did at the time relative to PFPs and
all this other stuff.
And as a community, we represent a lot more than that, right?
Sometimes we definitely butt heads and don't have the same vision.
And so the project is bigger than him.
It evolved and he literally handed it off to the community.
So he collected and had the vision and then donated all of these assets.
So our entire whale vault, which is, you know, vacillates in value, but right now I think
our latest valuation was $42 million.
At peak it was $150 million.
He donated that to the community and said, hey, this community that I've built, you guys
run this, this is yours.
And so the community is how we wanted to reflect a lot of what we do.
It's different than just whale shark.
So whale, you can imagine on socials, on whatever, a medium or Twitter, there's going to be a
million things just called whale.
So we needed to distinguish what we were and really call out what it is.
So it became whale community, whale members, whale.me.
I couldn't even tell you why they picked that domain.
Maybe that was hot at the time.
I don't know.
But, but whale is the name of the project.
Gotcha.
And then whale tails, was that like a newsletter?
Correct.
Uh, you know, depending on where you are throughout the history here of the past five years, there
was a time where we were banging out medium articles because that's really what our community
and with the macro entity community wants.
So whale tails was that component.
Um, you know, whale FM was a cycle of gosh mongos.
At one point we were hitting like 10, 10 different sessions a week where we would live stream
with artists, with games, with creators.
And we were just going ham on interviews and live streaming.
Right?
So we have a lot of different wings of how we delivered and interacted with the community,
but really based on the pulse of the community, were they looking for that at the time?
Were they coalescing elsewhere aggregating towards different things?
So you know, we've had a lot of different names and iterations for it, but the core
base of it period is whale.
Got it.
And as well, if, and when you interviewed MC Hammer and Paris Hilton.
Uh, yeah.
Well, FM was the broad umbrella of anything we took live at the time.
I think that actually predates Twitter spaces, right?
And then we carried it over to Twitter space.
But yeah, like during the, uh, the 2021, 2022 NFT cycle, I mean, you, the gamut came through
as far as celebrities and interesting people and, you know, celebrities, some of, some
of them were here for the grift and we tried to have, um, difficult conversations with
them about it.
We gave them some more introspective and, and really getting to the crux of why it was
empowering and trying to champion this to a broader audience.
If I have a thousand eyeballs because I was interviewing, interviewing cashmere at the
time, uh, and all those EDM folks were tuning in, then I was trying to, you know, make sure
that they understood and got some of the messaging on why web three was, was positive as well.
Right?
So yeah, we did a lot of cool stuff.
You know, museum founders, people that were important in the world of science and in politics,
a lot of very cool conversations and interactions.
And we continue to have some of those to this day.
Right on.
Well, and I'm, I'd also say too, you had, you had, uh, children, you had, you had, uh,
creators who were very young, very old from all walks of life, right?
Uh, developers, artists, musicians, you know, uh, nightmare started this, this blog, right?
Blockchain beats, uh, focus on music NFTs, which is something that, that, um, you know,
we hadn't seen much of, and I think still is kind of a dark horse in the web three space.
But you know, that's again, one of the things that really attracted me to whale to get more
and more involved was just, it was not just focused on ape JPEGs and there's maybe nothing
wrong with that at the end of the day, but so many web two communities, I feel like have
very singular myopic visions or they just have blinders on that are focused on just
going to the moon, whatever it might be.
And um, you know, you know, whale, whale has a very different scope, which is, which is
really refreshing.
Gotcha.
And that is not to say we're adverse to the other, like I believe speculators and people
that do want to go to the moon and all that aspect of culture, uh, it's here and it plays
a role in the macro, but I think having a more balanced take a more nuanced take of,
you know, how you approach it and community.
And even when there's divergent opinions, I think that's valuable and that's, that's
hard to find.
And we're blessed to have that in large part because of how we came to be like early, there
was no other communities.
And in our community, our discord, our media was the artists shoulder to shoulder with
the builders of the platform.
Sebastian was in there, right?
Ben from crypto voxels was in there.
We had a hack a towel, a lot of money, all these people in our discord, along with the
enthusiasts and people that were just, just checking out web three because they're in
a, in a third world country.
And they think it's something that could empower them.
It's, it was a beautiful, um, you know, combination of different motives and reasons for people
to be there.
And I think that that broad base and that rich tapestry that paints our history is part
of why we have a unique position, uh, in, in what we do in web three.
Gotcha.
So now we have a whale Dow that that's what, uh, and then we have a whale token.
So the whale token has been around for quite some time and, and that itself has remained
pretty strong, pretty unmoved.
So is there anything underpinning the token itself or is it just tokenomics as I've seen
on the discord?
Uh, so we have the vault, right?
The vault of assets and the assets are within the control of the community, but it's not
a, you know, it's not, we've never painted it as, um, fractionalization of the vault
itself.
Although essentially now that we've gone to, um, one whale equals one vote in effect, it's,
it's more closer to that than it has been in the past, but the token represented a social
currency, which at the time was relatively novel.
There had been a few before us, but we were one of the first to really take a basket of
assets and the power of a community and an influential founder and say, Hey, this token
represents everything we are doing.
That coincided with kind of everybody learning about NFTs.
And so the valuation is, has fluctuated significantly.
I think at launch it was pennies, right?
At peak, I think it was $50.
It's gone down.
It's come back up to 20, $30.
I think now it's back into the sense, given what has happened in the market over the past,
right?
Um, several months, but that being said, you know, if you extrapolate that token value
versus the circulation and then juxtapose it with the vault assets, you can see that
certainly there are levers there that will make sure that this continues to be, um, something
that we can use to reward the community, to entice the community, to participate.
Because at the end of the day, it's a social currency and that's what we value it for.
Rewarding people, uh, using it within our ecosystem and, uh, really helping empower
those different things that, that we find important for web three.
But, uh, that being said, you know, we understand the other aspects of the market and, and there
are mechanisms in place within what we do here at whale.
Like there's, uh, of those assets, you know, it's, it's long been recorded that, you know,
when we take them to market, um, part of the proceeds from that sale would go into buying
back the token.
So then we would have more supply that they can, again, reward the community and, you
know, the tokenomics will respond in kind, but that's not really our, our core focus
here, right?
That's not what we do.
We have a much broader vision, uh, and it's a long-term vision.
So you know, people that, that are, that are looking from a speculative perspective oftentimes
have to take a step back and understand what we do and what the mechanisms are to understand
what could trigger what and where we are.
But at the core of what we do, uh, it's not make number go up, although that is part of
the equation, certainly for us as a project.
Um, but it's much more important that we focus on from a culture perspective, what we want
to do with the art and be stewards of, of the history that really we helped paint here.
Gotcha.
That makes sense.
And so the current leadership, when I was looking up on the website, it looks like the
current leadership is whale shark, Zorro, decryptolorian, and then yourself.
That's correct.
Okay.
So just going back in time, just myself having watched some of the whale, um, the whale town
halls, that wasn't always the case.
Then it seems like it was whale shark for a while until he decentralized the leadership.
How does that work?
Yeah.
And uh, it really, so when we talk about this, we're talking about over a five year period,
right?
So this has gone through several iterations.
At first he was the founder and of course he had a team to support his project and what
he would, he would do.
And then, you know, help disseminate kind of his objectives and incorporate a lot of
the good ideas from the community into people he put into some, um, various leadership positions.
You know, we had kind of a very streamlined corporate structure at one point with silos.
At one point we were at 30 people on the team, right?
Because things were just moving so fast in the NFT space.
And then it continued to evolve.
I think one of the big transitions was to heads of respective departments.
So there was a person that was in charge of just operations and that was their focus,
a person in charge of art, a person in charge of community, et cetera.
And then through time and I think through kind of seeing, you know, people's colors
through, we went through a bear market, like a really rough bear market.
And I think participation in any project vacillating can go up and down, but we went through the
dead of the bear and the people that were still contributing because it was a passion
for them and what they believed in wanted to do.
They weren't dissuaded by the swing in a token or market, you know, uh, sentiment, uh, that
were still there.
He wanted to recognize and say, Hey, these people we want to empower as well.
Right.
And so, um, now we have kind of a more decentralized structure where he's not really calling the
shots.
He's just a person within our leadership group and the other leaders have respective things
that they focus on, but really, you know, if Zorro, if you're familiar, anyone on our
discord knows Zorro, he's like the AI wizard infrastructure master, he's got all kinds
of stuff going with, with, with regards to the discord with our socials or whatever.
He's not really the art.
He's not really the gaming guy, but if there's something that we really think is important,
we're all going to have a voice in that decision.
Right.
And so it's more of a decentralized leadership structure now.
Um, and some of the people that have been there since the very beginning, along with
whale shark and, and, uh, and, um, you know, shown what they could do have been empowered
in different ways.
You know, there's a number of us that have been made it co-founders almost similar to
like a being made partner, I guess, at a law firm or something.
Right.
You guys have been here since the beginning, your major contributors, your key linchpin
in this, we're going to formally recognize you.
There's people that have been empowered and become different roles.
Like a person went from a volunteer to a writer to, you know, a head of art, right.
And when we talk about Wes and what he's shown and what he's done and likewise with Mongoose,
he had a similar path.
So people have been empowered and put in position to take the reins on different initiatives
and really focus on their core competencies and their strengths.
But basically do what you enjoy and do dope shit.
And I think at the end of the day, it's going to manifest into what you see.
Right.
And when you see the interview that Mongoose does is super passionate, everyone, everyone
loves it.
And, uh, that's a testament to his passion that he's always brought, not just the recognition
that he has.
Yeah.
I remember back when I first, first started looking into, to whale and happened across
natively digital and Mongoose, I don't know if you remember you and Wes allowed me up
to the stage and I just happened to be talking about sandbox at the time.
And I didn't understand at the time that you all were like very, very focused on the art
version.
And when I brought in the sandbox thing, it was kind of a, uh, a divergence from your
normal agenda.
And I thought that was very gracious of you.
Once I realized, Oh, I just kind of, cause I'm super passionate about like DOWs.
Yeah.
Well, no, that's the, that's the thing is that, um, you know, we're, we're all multifaceted
people, right?
And we not only have our digital personas, the avatars, uh, the monikers, we go by what
we, uh, chooses our PFP or what we choose to even like show in our wallets on open sea,
right?
And so that's the divided aspect, um, there is some part of crypto Twitter that is just
a LARP, right?
At the end of the day, um, it is not even a full realization of who we are across social
media.
It just tends to be very tailored towards crypto.
So, um, yeah, I remember that episode very well.
And you had a great passion about DOWs, uh, both Wes and I, and I'm sure, I'm sure nightmare
two, you know, have been involved in numerous DOWs throughout our time in crypto.
And, um, you know, whale is just another one whale for me, a whale DOW specifically is
one that I really uphold as one that's been launched in a great way.
Um, it didn't just kind of spring out of, out of nothing.
There was great intent and purpose behind it and great structure and thought.
And you know, I think I've expressed this to you, Lancer, and in general, you know,
I'm not somebody who believes in just kind of spinning something up for the sake of it.
I really do think that there should be, um, you know, some, some intent and really understanding
of what you're doing, some strategy.
And that for me, decentralized autonomous organization is almost a little bit of a misnomer.
I think distribution is probably a better way to go about it and understanding how we
distribute that power and still make sure that things run properly and run as they should
and scale up.
Uh, so I think that conversation was great because we kind of talked about this, um,
general notion that sometimes DOWs just, um, they're, they're too autonomous from the beginning
and there's no real guidance to them.
And they very easily fall apart, you know, quite often there needs to be kind of a, a
structure that's kind of driving it.
In this case, you know, the whale leadership.
Um, I think it was very important for, for whale shark to, you know, from, from my perspective,
from when I very first started working at whale or even just showing up in the discord,
I did not see whale shark as the sole central figure.
He might've been kind of that impetus for me joining, listening to him in nightmare
talk on that clubhouse talk, but it was everybody else contributing to the conversation.
It was my ability to contribute to that conversation that got me to stick around and being more,
more involved.
Right.
So I do think that that's really important.
And um, you know, I would hope that every DOW can kind of go through that realization
that it, that it does need some kind of centralized structure for operation that enables the whole
larger organization to be able to talk and share their ideas and be involved.
Yeah.
I really enjoyed that conversation.
I have a, in addition to being a musician and a writer, I have a business background.
I've owned my own business for quite some time.
So as soon as Dallas came together and I see G in the chat, big shout out to G. He also
mentioned anyone who used the word tapestry allegorically gets a nod from him.
He's quite often in his spaces.
That's a Mocha verse hall on Mondays, by the way, later on tonight.
So check it out if you're free.
But anyways, yeah, when, when the DOW started happening last, last May, I was my first introduction
to a DOW and then it just all clicked into place for me.
All the whole decentralized, decentralized leadership and how we vote and just, I've
been looking for something like that for quite some time.
And then you all announced it's the DOW, the whale DOW back in September.
And then I think it was that same day that I pushed out a proposal because in my professional
life I, I, I negotiate contracts, I write proposals.
And so turning out, you know, a one page proposal was just right up my alley.
And my disclosure to the whole group is I was the author of wavy one proposal that passed.
So just let that set that out there for everybody.
And yeah, I've been very interested in trying to connect the whale community to the sandbox
community because there is clearly a connection.
But it was also obvious that once you spend some time with the whale community, that the
interests weren't the same, you know, the way the sandbox and what they're interested
in is, is different than what the whale communities spends most of their time in at the very least.
And so that's where I wanted to talk about next was back in September, well, Dow announced
a whale shark announced that the multi-sig had occurred.
The whale Dow would be stood up and then like that day or the next day I submitted the proposal.
Was that a, was that a tough thing, like a tough sell or was that just, you understood
that's the way it needed to go?
What two, two quick things, Lanser.
Number one, when you mentioned that you, you popped in and were like, Hey, natively digital,
this isn't the space for a, for a Dow discussion.
It's not, that's not the space.
In fact, that's the whole concept of natively digital is like anything going on at web three.
We want to talk about it, but from a cultural perspective, right?
There's a lot of spaces that are wag me numb, you know, we're going to make so much money
or this, and that's not what it is.
It's like all the cultural nuance and so oftentimes that's the crypto market in a macro.
It could be art specific.
It could be a PFP crazy thing going on, whatever.
So you are more than welcome.
We will continue to welcome.
It's just, you are, as you said, from your business background, you're like hyper focused
more so in the weeds than we probably, probably are, but we love that, that it really enriches
it.
That's the thing, like come to our community and bring that.
That's what we love is that breadth of different interests, right?
So love that you came in and love that you love that you did that.
So please don't ever feel like you can't do that.
The other thing I wanted to mention is I understand.
I understand.
I could be a little intense about it sometimes.
I just, I love it.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's so much fun.
Yeah, we can see, we could see you, right?
Believe me, I have things like geek on hard too as well.
And I get made fun of, made fun of it, made fun for it.
Plenty in the discord.
The other thing is I saw a reference to like the whale Dow standing up in September, 2024.
And I'm sure you, you know this too, but just to clarify for anyone that could be listening
in we've existed as a Dow for these five years.
It just wasn't in the current incarnation.
And initially it was primarily run manually through our discord.
We had a, a number of processes that people would use to propose votes and how it would
have to pass the house and then the Senate and people had different roles that they staked
in order to be able to be a vote, you know, to have their vote in the Senate, et cetera.
And yeah, and it was a V2 then it was, it was always said that when, when whale shark
initially set it up, there was a lot of questions like this isn't totally autonomous.
This is not automated.
And he said, by design, by design, right?
We have a $50 million basket of assets.
I want to be confident in the community that we're handing it to that it will be cared
for not only for monetarily purposes, but for legacy, for culture, for our mission.
Okay.
Number one, number two is the technology there to safeguard this without us having manual,
you know, inter intervention here at the time.
And I mean, look, look at what just happened, what just happened with a safe and genosis
and ledger and everything, right?
That just happened now rewind five years ago and imagine where we're at.
Right?
So there's concerns from, from that perspective.
And also I think that, you know, we, as a group, I can't speak for everyone, but I can
say at least personally have always been an advocate of almost a hybrid governance type
of structure where you have some leadership kind of, at least giving you some, you know,
a head start or some direction on, Hey, this is what we're trying to achieve.
These are the goals.
Let's try to stay in line because we've seen through our five years here, lots of dows
that have, you know, been strong-armed by people that came in, were able to take positions
and liquidate all the assets.
Governance attacks.
Yeah.
Right.
To the detriment, to people that would even, from a, you know, from a sentiment perspective,
come in and try to, try to, you know, really drive some different things.
So we just wanted to give this the care that we believed was necessary.
And I think that in September of 2024, through the evolution of the team and people really,
you know, proving kind of their metal as far as their loyalties and what they're about,
are they here to just cash out or would they try to snag assets or from between the team,
between the technology to be able to go to multi-sig and how we would leverage it.
And also to be frank, look at the macro sentiment from a regulatory perspective, right?
It's much different now than if you rewind five years ago.
So all of those things coincided with, hey, this is opportune for us to make this move
and do this and do what the promise was, which was slowly over time, hand more and more of
this over to the community with this long-term vision, right?
With this long-term vision, we weren't trying to be, let's build something for five years
from now.
Let's build something.
We want to be evergreen.
We want to be something that is still here representing some of these ideals and what
we want to carry forward for crypto art, for amazing people, like a lot of money who, you
know, today's the anniversary of his passing.
It was such a big part of our history.
All of these things are super important to us.
So we try to safeguard all of those carefully.
And that's part of why our governance structure was what it was and how it evolved to where
it is now.
Got it.
That makes sense.
And so your connection to Sandbox, you all have at last count 1,699 that just rounded
up to 1,700 lands, 39 estates, a big presence at 7 million voting power now, as far as voting
power calculations go.
How did that connection happen?
Nailshark was an enthusiast in 2018, 2019, 2020 and got involved very early with the
Sandbox, you know, pre-release, I believe, and said, this is something that I believe
in and it wasn't unique to Sandbox.
He also felt the same way about Cryptovoxels.
We own about 200 parcels of land in Cryptovoxels.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Cryptovoxels, but another metaverse that at the time was
really the home of crypto artists really trying to really hone their craft and be able to
put their artworks on the metaverse.
And it was a belief in the future of a lot of these things, not unique to just the metaverse.
But at the time, you know, we are heavy in NBA Top Shot.
We have probably the number one collection in NBA Top Shot.
So sports collectibles made sense to this guy, right?
Crypto art made sense to this guy, specific kinds of art, but crypto art, right?
The metaverse just made sense from a gamification standpoint, made sense.
Web3 gaming made sense.
And so we took positions in these projects that we believed were the future and were
important and not just because we thought they had runway to grow and appreciate in
value, which was certainly part of the decision.
I mean, Wailshark is an incredible businessman.
He started and sold off all kinds of companies and put himself in position where he could
give away $150 million in assets and it doesn't, it's not his anymore, right?
That's just a passion project for him.
But it was also because of our belief and conviction that the metaverse in Web3 and
tokenization is so important for creatives, for decentralization, for enabling people
to circumvent global gatekeeping for different things, to empower people to have a presence
where they may not otherwise.
All these things were important beyond just the financial opportunity.
So took a big position in it and held, and held.
We got disgusting offers for our estates through the bull market, like blow your mind offers.
And at the time we said, look, we're not in a position where we need liquidity.
And if we're going to do something with this, it's to be meaningful.
We're going to set a record or we're going to be taking that and doing something important
with it.
So we'll pass.
Right?
Like I don't even want to say the number because I don't want anyone to bug out.
But believe me, we've been here with conviction and diamond handed for a long time because
what's important to us is beyond just the monetary aspect.
Yeah, I would say there's this shared, a shared future, you know, in the metaverse that I
think aligns largely with what Whale is trying to achieve, probably what Sandbox is trying
to achieve as well.
I think that, you know, we see these as interactive community driven assets.
It's not just virtual real estate.
You know, I think one of the things that always attracted me to Whale's holdings of it and
its offerings of it was this ability to also, you know, talk to creators, artists, who,
you know, builders who are interested in these kind of virtual architecture build outs and,
you know, what can be done to lend those parcels out to enable these creators to have that
opportunity that maybe they didn't already have.
Maybe they couldn't afford it.
Maybe they just didn't have access to it.
But now Whale is in a position to offer it.
And you know, I think that, you know, this is user generated.
This is a blockchain powered thing.
It's something that can drive engagement through immersive experiences.
You know, again, this community model is really central to Whale.
And with my experience with Sandbox, at least, that's also what I take away from it.
You know, I've been involved in numerous Sandbox experiences, whether it's through Whale or
through Dizzy Dragons, through Paris Hilton, McDonald's, you know, Snoop Dogg, you know,
there's so many interesting things happening with Sandbox.
And I think it's really about that community driving it and that overlap with Whale.
You know, it's just, to me, it seems like a very strong synergy.
And you know, going back to you, Lancer, I thought that was where your initial proposal
just really kind of resonated so strongly with so many of us.
It looked at what Whale presented as an organization and also what we had in our assets.
And I feel like you put together something very meaningful.
Can I?
Go ahead.
Go right ahead, Knight.
I just wanted to color that one with one more thing that I think that was pretty interesting
when it comes to the origins of Whale.
We had all of these land assets early.
So the Sandbox, the Cryptovoxel, we were looking on how we could leverage this to empower our
community.
And so one of the things we did is said, hey, if you are a member here of Whale, you just
ask for it and you can have a plot of land and Cryptovoxels in Origin City.
And I think we were trying to do it with Sandbox as well, but it just didn't have the mechanism
at the time.
Whereas in Cryptovoxels, you can assign someone as a collaborator and it didn't work the same
in Sandbox.
But nonetheless, we did that.
And we had a specific initiative where Whale Shark basically went to the artist community
and said, hey, I want anyone that wants us to take a plot of land and I want you to build
whatever you would like on it.
And I remember the conversation happening in the Discord like, hey, what if we wanted
to sell these assets or whatever?
And he said, look, we have more than enough that if we ever wanted to go to market, we'd
be fine.
But the beautification and the using and the understanding of that, the value proposition
of the metaverse, making that a beautiful, vibrant place is more important than the monetization
because that will uplift the metaverse as a whole.
It shows people why it's powerful, why it's empowering.
And I think it benefits the projects as well as what we're holding.
So I thought that was awesome when I had seen that back in the day.
And there are some incredible, incredible historic monuments, you could say, in CryptoVoxels
of these artists in 2020.
People that are legendary, XCOPY, Coldy, Hackitao, a lot of money that built super dope things.
Even Rando's that are well-known artists just experimenting and what they left in their
plot.
It's like walking through a time machine at that moment in history.
But the rationale that, hey, we need to use these and let people do it because the future
of the metaverse and what this represents is so important.
I thought that was a beautiful thing.
And I think that it talks to why the metaverse is important to us as a project.
Yeah.
And I appreciate your kind words, Mongoose.
That to me was like a see a need, feel a need.
And earlier when you all talked about your, the great care you all took toward your assets
and wanting to maintain provenance, which I had no idea what that word even meant until
I interviewed another SIP author, Arthmoret, who is a curator in France.
And he's the first one that told me the word provenance.
And I think I linked it in my response back to you, Mongoose, where I'm like, provenance.
And I had him explain to me on stream what that was.
And just, and so to me, it was a clear thing of I really, really wanted, if you all were
okay with it, to get you involved in the voting and the participation of it.
And it just seemed like a see a need, feel a need of people who are very, you all take
great care when it comes to like, who was it?
You just interviewed him the other day, Gladfly, right?
Sir Gladfly of the Hoodlums collection for Ordinals.
Like I didn't even know what an ordinal really was until I listened to you and him and Mongoose,
you all discuss the particulars of that.
It's just, it's a great learning experience and a community full of people who are there
to help each other, to appreciate art together.
And I wasn't much of an art enthusiast before, let's just call it that.
I'm not a huge art enthusiast, but it's grown on me a little bit.
The more I learn about all these particulars that I didn't know about before.
And a lot of it's through the stuff that you all go over week to week.
Yeah.
A lot of people found their way into Web3 for various reasons and they start exploring
and next thing you know, they're in a lot of segments.
I'll say our gaming wing on whale is probably the busiest right now, right?
A lot of people playing a lot of cool Web3 games.
And I know that's near and dear to your heart as well, Lancer.
So like, we touch a lot of things, but the crossover is definitely there and it's part
of what makes this space super dope and very cool.
I will say relative to participation in the sandbox, that's always been something that
as soon as the DAO, the sandbox DAO was widely announced, we talked about internally immediately.
We need to participate in it and we want to, A, because we represent such a huge voting
block and B, because stewardship of the metaverse is important to us.
It always has been part of our ethos as a project.
So we intended always to do it.
Initially though, as it was set up, there was challenges for us, right?
Especially as good of characters that we all have been judged, Whale Shark wasn't about
to say, Hey, yeah, here's the seed phrase to the whale vault.
Go take it for a spin and cast some votes.
It wasn't going to happen.
And we wanted to do our due diligence on how to be the most secure and how we participate
in all of these things.
So being able to move things to the multi-sig and have a more secure process and how we
would go about voting and how that would not put the assets at risk was serendipitous timing
so that we could get involved relatively quickly after the sandbox had gone live.
Although I do believe initially, because I was poking around on the discord and reading
a lot of things as landowners, our voting power was not really to the breadth that it
is now initially, right?
I think initially it was more of the token staking and other things, but now we're in
a good position to be able to do so.
Yeah.
And let's roll right into the current whale dowel and its current format.
As you pointed out, it's at least version two, if not version three or four by now,
but it's current iteration, the white paper that I read back in October, how the whale
members is an omniversal private members club that unites, excites and engages its members.
This is a full on white paper.
Was this developed?
Was this always in existence or did this come together recently?
There's been multiple iterations of the white paper over the years.
This is the latest incarnation.
My bad.
Four and five.
Excuse me.
Yeah.
Who?
Go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
I was, the first thing I wanted to figure out was now that you all are with Wavy One,
it is, it requests whale members participation in each sandbox proposal.
And with that comes, we've seen you vote twice now.
One on my proposal and the one after that.
And I think the biggest question right now is to start off, what is important to the
whale fam, whale fam community as it pertains to voting?
I'll let you hop in Mongoose.
I think what you've seen already, Lancer and anybody who joins in the discord grabs a role
because it is a role based discord, right?
In that membership club that you mentioned.
We don't require much for membership.
You can be a visitor to the discord.
You can hold one whale.
You can grab a member role just with one whale token in your possession.
And it unlocks an incredible opportunity.
For the sandbox DAO participation, we want to be able to see what the SIP is that's being
discussed.
We have someone, in this case, you Lancer is kind of holding a role that kind of helps
us interpret what that's about, what the context is for the DAO.
And then we want to be able to discuss it.
And we've got numerous channels to discuss this in.
And I would say the aggregation of that discussion is then what goes before the whale council.
And we do have a council of eight people right now.
Right Nymer?
Correct.
Yeah, eight people that could possibly expand in the future.
But these are folks who have been with whale for a very long time, do have a very clear
understanding of the mission, the vision, the ethos behind it, and can represent the
community.
We do have also an ability for the community to weigh in through an emoji system to be
able to kind of read that SIP, understand it, and voice their opinion.
But a lot of people discuss these things and never bother to click on the emoji.
It's a discord, right?
People can click on emojis all the time.
So we do want to make sure that we have that discussion around it that then helps inform
the council.
Because the council also are folks who may not be present for that discussion.
We need to be able to have something that can help inform.
There's these checks and balances, I think, right?
We have these different bodies that exist within the DAO.
And I think that helps avoid centralized governance.
It helps distribute that power in many ways.
It also gives plenty of opportunity for the community to be able to voice their opinions.
And likewise, for the council to be able to function within the sandbox DAO and still
be able to vote and represent it.
And I think it kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, too, the idea of provenance.
The blockchain, I've always thought, is a beautiful system because it's an immutable
ledger.
My initial experience with it was just looking at it from a financial point of view, right?
To be able to understand that when something goes somewhere, it gets there accurately.
And you know who sent it, who received it, right?
But when we look at the provenance, whether you're talking about that transaction or a
token of art, token of anything, or in this case, a decision made on behalf of a DAO,
for a DAO, you know, that decision, and this is something we talk about on Natively Digital
all the time, right?
Every week, I think it probably comes up.
Your choices that you make on the blockchain with your wallets, those are what are becoming
the foundation of your true digital identity.
And this is a kind of a first point in human history where our digital identity is starting
to be crafted in this way that, you know, it's there.
What you're doing with your wallet, the choices that you make, for better or worse, are going
to follow you around, but also represents you, right?
Your choices now do actually start to form that identity and color who you are or what
organization you are, what your values are, et cetera.
So it's not a process that is taken lightly.
You see this is version five of the of the white paper.
I imagine there's going to be another version or more.
And likewise, I do expect the whale DAO to continue to evolve with the space.
The technology is going to continue to evolve.
The matters that are important to us all are going to continue to evolve.
And that flexibility, I think, also is a testament to what Neimer alluded to, right?
Whale sharks lack the desire just to create something that just, you know, hit the ground
running and never changed.
I think there has to be an understanding of easing into it and understanding what's there.
Yeah.
I'll just put it in here.
I would love to help contribute to that in any way I can in the future if there is a
version six.
We certainly know that you are extremely talented and would be a great resource there.
Just a dovetail on what Mongoose had said, you know, from a, I think part of your question
was what's important to us as the whale community with regards to voting in the sandbox.
And I think that some of those core principles that we've touched on, which is responsible
stewardship of the metaverse of history, of crypto art legacy, of our holdings, right?
For our community and for our token holders.
But more so being responsible level headed good citizens of this space.
I think that from a cultural perspective, we put that above all else and we're blessed
to be in a position to do that, right?
Like we don't need to drive a monetary return on the sandbox to exist as an organization.
We don't need to drive, you know, make number go up to try to bring it to market.
We don't need to do anything like that.
So really it's being, it's taking the governance responsibility that we have seriously.
And I will tell you that there were some votes where there were internal discussions and
basically, you know, this would be better for our interest, but this is what the responsible
governance and being representation, you know, and the representative of our project, what
that means is.
And we made that decision because I think that, you know, trust in us as an organization
and, you know, our breadth, we touch a lot more than just the sandbox, right?
And so being good actors in this space and being a responsible participant and also,
you know, seeing the long-term vision.
I mean, these are all things that are core and important to us.
And I will caveat that and say that prior to the proposal that came through that requested
us to participate in every vote, I was more of the thought process at the time when we
were coming together that, Hey, if things are pertinent to us and important to us, and
we have an opinion that would be of value here, then we should participate.
And maybe if it's something we feel meaningful to move forward and we just help make core
and we participate, but we should not, I was not of the thought process that we should participate
in every vote because what if it doesn't pertain to us?
There's instances where it doesn't really pertain to us.
I don't think we feel strongly one way or the other.
And if we vote, we make quorum happen.
And then that vote is going to go through on whether that's a contentious vote with
the community or not and whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm not sure, but I thought that that puts a different lever that we're triggering there.
We're making things go to a decision either way.
That sometimes we didn't necessarily advocate for that.
We don't feel strongly that it should or shouldn't, but if we vote abstain, then it's going to
pass to should or should not.
We don't want to be the responsible vote to do that, but the vote passed.
So now we are in that position to have to do that.
And I will tell you that I have long been in the Discord, which is a lot of different
conversation than the forums on the sandbox.
But I am in the weeds there as well.
I'm creeping on everybody.
I'm checking the conversations.
I'm getting the email updates, which helps me.
Thank you.
But I'm also in there checking and checking profiles and who's commenting on what and
really trying to understand the pulse of the community because that to me as the culture
guy here at Whale is very important.
If the community within the sandbox feels like, Hey, we really, we really believe that
this funding should be more focused on core gameplay and user acquisition and all of these
things instead of other things.
I'm going to take that into consideration and how I relate and how I position myself
in these internal conversations we have within the council.
I pride myself on being in the weeds.
So I don't want anybody to think, Hey, there's some organization over there.
They don't know what's going on here.
They're not.
They don't have the pulse of things.
I randomly play experiences all the time just to know what's going on.
If I can share a frustration and what's happening, if, you know, I tool around a magic of voxel,
like I do a lot, like I touch a lot and I just don't want people to think this is some
ivory tower out of touch with what's going on down here at the ground level because I'm
in the ground level.
I'm just in the bushes watching that.
I got to throw in there real quick.
I don't know if you knew, but, but a nightmare and I used to cohost with the voxel architect,
a very dear friend of the whale community, noisy.
We used to host a wearable Wednesday's segment for a long time where we did live crafting
of a metaverse wearables.
Yes.
And now that, now that noisy is back from his hiatus, maybe we can convince him to do
a another event.
So we used to always have these thematic builds for whatever was happening.
Like we had one where we sacrifice for the summer solstice.
You could sacrifice NFTs and there was gamification of finding stuff.
So hopefully we get a new event going and we'll pull you into another metaverse to check
it out and get some perspective there.
Lancer.
I would love that.
I would absolutely love that.
Yeah.
I think, I think that was what the perspective was.
And for me, they all just put it out there.
So everyone knows.
I thought that when I first heard that how much land you all had, and then when I got
into the discord, I'm like, where are my sandbox people at?
And it was like crickets.
It was crickets.
And maybe I didn't delve deep enough to, because I didn't, it wasn't obvious to me that you
all were in the weeds.
And it wasn't until you responded back to my sip back in January when I asked, when
I, when I expressed my reaction to the vote and then you gave me that almost a mini dissertation
of like an academic paper of how you reached to the decision that you reached.
And once I read that, I'm like, okay, all right, this, this good faith, this is good
faith there.
They really did do their homework.
I didn't agree with the, I was upset and I didn't agree with the way you all voted.
However, I can argue that you all put thought behind it and you, and it was clear that you
cared and it's the same thing you did with sip 19 with the user generated proposal.
The UGC proposal, the, how you explained how the cost differential, the scope, clarity,
the sentiment, the future flexibility.
You had bullet points of here's the factors we considered and here's how we reached the
decision.
And I'm like, all right, all right, you, you are clearly paying attention, not from just
some ivory tower.
And that, that was very much appreciated.
I did.
Thank you again.
Thank you for, for taking the time to, to learn and participate.
Like you said, as, as a, as a good actor, as a responsible citizen, that means a lot
to me.
Thank you for recognizing that.
And there's, there's nothing personal, like even with the, with the latest sip that we
voted on and, and, and where that landed, you know, someone made the, made the point
because I, I try to be thorough and everything, right?
I try to use deductive reasoning and contingency plan and understand what the steps ahead are.
And I'm like, look, understand that there is going to be, there is optics here that,
Hey, someone within our Dow put a proposal and we voted against it.
Or someone came to our community had been there a long time ago and then just said,
Hey, I just rejoined and got a membership or whatever.
And then we're like, yeah, sorry, we already voted.
It was no, like there's, you know, there's optics there, but I think the, the bigger
picture should be, look, we are acting in good faith into what is in the best interest
of the project and of whale and, and, and we put, you know, the greater, the greater
mission above self and, and above all else.
And it's really not personal at all.
But just know we're trying, we are making informed decisions with perspective.
Clearly, you know, we, we, we have vested interests, not only in the assets, but in
the culture, right.
In the culture itself.
Yeah.
And then this one, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the show.
So while so persistent about it was because I wanted people and myself to see that it's
not just an ivory tower taking place here, that there are real people behind it.
They're, they're thoughtful, good citizens.
And yeah, I was wavy one proposal.
It passed for the whale Dow.
And then my proposal went up right after that.
That wasn't planned at all.
It took me like eight months to get my proposal passed and to vote.
It just so happened to coincide at the same time you all announced the Dow.
So and then, and then well, Dell well, council chose to vote.
No, gave me their thoughtful reason behind it.
And it hurt my feelings, but we're still here.
And clearly with us being here in the interview together, they're watering the bridge.
It did not, I didn't take it personally after I saw that there was thought taking place.
And it was level headed.
It was reasonable.
And that's when I'm like, all right, good, bad, ugly, whether I agreed or not, I understand
the position you're in is difficult.
And you have to view not just a someone who is part of your, your Dow as asking for your
yes vote, but also the good of the industry, the good of the community sandbox yourself.
And yeah, so that's me saying no hard feelings, I guess.
We have none on our side as well.
And I was, I was really glad to see like some cool ideas and that new proposal that came
about because of it afterwards.
So kind of that, right.
That collective to try to entice and reward creators.
So you know, that's, that's part of what, you know, this Dow process enables, right?
You go through different iterations and you'll get there.
And I'm glad we're having this conversation as well.
And I'm glad anyone tuning in that thought we were ivory tower.
I'm watching you guys.
All right.
I'm on there.
I'm seeing all these snarky comments.
So, you know, look out, someone, someone asked me once actually, why, you know, why are
you less participatory and more watching?
And I think that for me, at least leveraging 7 million votes, I don't want to go in there
and have, you know, I make a comment and people, you know, try to change their perspective
or the way that they interact on the post seems a little different.
Certainly if I had a question or something I wanted to, to, to tweak or get adjusted
for something to pass, then maybe I would participate that way.
But just for, you know, like showing my presence and then having that have a material effect
on the conversation, I think it's more valuable for me as the person that's probably most
entrenched in the conversations and what's going on over there to really have a, you
know, an unbiased view without influence on what's happening there.
Hey, this is what they're talking about without knowing we're in the room.
This is what, what's actually important to them.
And so, you know, I appreciate having that perspective, but I'm not opposed.
I'm sure there will be a scenario where I say, Hey, can you do this or that?
Or why do you have whatever and, you know, things may adjust accordingly.
Yeah.
And so it's the eight person well counseled.
They have the deciding vote for the whale vault.
That's correct.
So again, it's a hybrid structure.
Of course, the community sentiment is, and wishes is very important to us and taken into
consideration.
I will say that we've had multiple iterations of the Dow where there was robust conversation
in 50 people voting between the Senate and whatnot.
And you know, we're still working on this whole process of, for the sandbox, like something
was published and someone like the emoji thing that was contentious here on our discord.
I don't even, I didn't even understand the process that I'm on the team, right?
Like this was still something in flux, but I will say that there was, there was a point
made that, Hey, there were more positive emojis than negative emoji.
We're talking a handful of emojis here, like three, four or five.
That's not indicative of our 4,000 members.
That's apathy, right?
That's people not really participating at that point.
I won't argue on that one.
Right.
And that could be a lot of things, right?
We see as the bull cycles come and go, as different things happen, people's interests
waxes and wanes.
There's a point where we have hundreds of creatives at our discord only building and
looking for tools or hundreds of speculators or gamers.
It changes.
So right now people were like, yeah, whatever.
The general sentiment from our community, from our feedback, from our different wings
of conversation is, Hey, we want stewardship and participation in the sandbox.
We want you guys to lead it with what you think is in the best interest of the project
and the sandbox as a whole.
And so of course we take the community's sentiment into consideration.
Of course.
I would not say that for this particular, we're talking a tiny issue in the weeds relative
to the bigger scope of the Dow, not to minimize your experience here, Lanser, but the emoji
thing where we're talking about, it was five emojis versus three emojis or whatever.
Clearly that's different than the Dow represented as a whole.
So I think it's just, we needed clarification on process, which I don't know that I'm still
clear.
I think I need to go back and rehash exactly where that is at.
But at the end of the day, the community sentiment is under advisement with the council and the
council, you know, with their various perspectives and what they interact with in this ecosystem
and in greater web three, have to make the call on what they think is in the best interest.
Yeah.
I was surprised as well, because even the wavy one proposal went through multiple iterations
where we, at first I was going to take the BOTB route, bulls on the block route, where
it was just a snapshot duplicate.
Same thing with Seb Dow when Seb wants to use his coin and his, I think he's got about
300,000 VP himself.
He uses a snapshot copy proposal process.
And then, you know, I got some feedback and wavy one throughout the process from your
mongoose, Zorro and others.
And then we landed on the emoji slash community discussion.
And so when I first posted in all three channels, you know, the whale, the water, deeper water,
and then the general, I largely got crickets and I was surprised.
I didn't know what to do with that.
So the only thing I had left was the emoji.
That was my one thing to hold on to that as part of the process we had determined.
So now as far as I understand, it's just the discussion and then somewhat like emoji is
kind of like an ancillary to that.
And so that's where we are right now from what I can understand.
And I'm sure it will go through more iterative improvements as we think up more ways to involve
the community more.
Whereas right now, I was having a tough time getting people to discuss it rather than say,
yeah, okay, whatever you think.
And I'm like, that's not that's not that's not what I was going for.
Yeah, I mean, this is a this is an issue with Web3 community governance in general, I feel
like a lot of people are there to lurk and just be participants.
And I don't think that means they don't care.
They may not feel like they can contribute their opinion for one way or another.
But I think this is important to where it just comes down to the documentation of what
we put forth out there in the charter, the white paper, these papers that exist that
are constantly being iterated on, and then the various channels for discussion.
Some are tailored to specific role holders, like you mentioned our whale role holders,
which is kind of the top tier of the hold to play roles within the discord.
The deep water channel is generally for the dolphin role holders.
That's a big bulk of it.
And then we have the metaverse channel as well.
And I believe that's a channel that that again, if you just hold one whale, you can participate
in that.
But you know, to be able to document across all these channels, all these different papers,
whatnot, exactly what the process is, what the discussion is, and then ultimately snapshot
voting, you know, then we at least have something to go by for the future.
And this constant iteration isn't just completely baseless, which I think is important.
I think I've said this already, there's differing opinions within our leadership group and with
our team with regards to governments.
But I'm always a proponent of a more hybrid model, because I think that full automation,
we've seen what's happened there from a negative perspective in a lot of ways.
So I'm always concerned about something like that.
Hey, someone sneaks in when didn't that actually happen recently?
Mungus, we were talking about that there was a Dow that their attention was elsewhere and
someone snuck in a proposal that passed and liquidated and they had to come in over the
top and be like, yeah, this is because people weren't paying attention.
And so, you know, there's a lot of people that were in whale for a lot of reasons.
And there's there's sandbox holders as well that and people that just play sandbox too.
But it's a different space than it was five years ago.
People have a ton of communities that they touch base with.
People get their information a lot of different ways and they come when they want to and check
in with home base and do different things.
But they're not probably, you know, actively all the time there to be able to participate
in that way.
So even when we had our different governance structure where it was like, hey, people put
a formal proposal and as discussed in this room and these guys are voters and you have
to vote or you lose your stake, all this stuff, we had to encourage people like, look, governance
is hard.
Like, Wes talks about he's in a what is it like a community farm or his rooftop or something?
He's like, I can't get people to I can't get people to respond to stuff because it's not
the particular thing they care about.
So like, you have to go pull the responses out of people.
He's like, I got to go pull someone aside.
Like, hey, what did you think of this?
Right.
And so doing that in a digital community and really advocating and pushing for the conversation
is a tough thing to balance.
Some people think I just throw it out there.
Some people don't want to look like spam.
So there's some challenges in that with regards to governance in general, not just Web3.
But I think that having that hybrid structure is a feature, not a bug.
But that's my personal opinion.
And I think that there's a sliding scale of how much every person would like that to be.
Some people want it all the way automated.
Here's the contract.
These many, there's five emojis versus four.
The contract activates.
That's what I was going for.
Yeah.
I could not sleep at night knowing that's the case, right?
Because some super smart person, Lancer, is going to come in.
No, I'm just kidding.
But someone that's going to understand how to leverage that system in a way that would
just benefit them when other people may be asleep at the wheel would do so.
And some people would say that that's great.
Our ethos and our mission and what we're here to do does not align with that.
So maybe we are.
I didn't realize that when I first proposed it.
Yeah.
Maybe we're 80-20.
Maybe we're 75-20, whatever that is.
But it's not 100% the contract goes.
Yeah.
And I would say too, this is for me coming out of my personal experience in the physical
world too, whether it's working with corporations, large corporations, nonprofits, or even just
artist collectives where it's very nebulous as to who's coming from where and what the
responsibilities are.
But at the end of the day, you do need some sort of structure in place.
And I think without a doubt, there needs to be some sort of central entity.
And I don't want to say centralized entity, but there needs to be someone or some body
that's ultimately making the final call and not letting it just be whoever shows up, whoever
just happens to participate in that particular conversation.
Because I've personally seen it in so many different applications that you just can't
rely upon that complete decentralized collective mentality.
There needs to be a little bit more.
Yeah.
That's the way when I developed Wavy One is I wanted a system that if I had walked away
from it, it would still work.
It would still function.
And nowhere did that become more apparent when I think it was not this sip, but the
prior sip.
I was late to telling you all that it happened, and then you only had like a week to vote.
And then suddenly I felt like a jerk because I missed it.
And like, well, man, that's the downside of not having an automated system.
I'm heavy process oriented.
I love automation and processes and that sort of stuff.
But yeah, I think we'll work on it over time.
It'll get better.
And we'll take this first iteration and then see what we can do to improve upon it.
So I'm not too worried about it now that I understand the environment a little bit more.
What are some criteria that you all used to vote on sips?
And the ones that stand out to me with the past two that you've commented on night in
discord is cost scope, sentiment, long term vision.
Are there any others that jump out at you?
Would you amend that list?
I think sentiment is is probably one of the most important for me, but I'm the culture
guy, right?
So I suppose that makes sense.
It's in my wheelhouse, but I don't want to make a decision on, for example, the last
sip and clearly one party was embedded with the community a lot more than the other, right?
And so that plays a role in our decision making process.
And it's weighted heavily on cost relative to the budget, I suppose.
And just recently, I've kind of come to the revelation that there's planned partitions
for the budget where they wanted at least initially.
Initially, they said, hey, this is how much we should spend on this and outreach and marketing
and user acquisition and had those silos that wasn't as clear to me initially.
But even so, setting precedent, I think is important.
That's something that we talk about.
The macro sentiment of the community is probably the most important.
What are the player bases?
What are the builders?
What are the other holders that are a long standing embedded entrenched in this ecosystem
saying what's important to them?
And then what do we think is the carry over effect of it?
Is it a net positive for the initiative and the sandbox?
And way down the list would be what it means relative to our holdings.
Because of course, that's important.
But I think progressive growth and success and health of the sandbox and its player based
and community, that comes back to us in kind in our assets.
So sentiment is probably the most important thing and really having a good pulse on what
that conversation is.
And it's not always 100%.
It's not always clear.
And that's where some of these other things become weighted and become part of it.
I come from a business background as well, like yourself.
And I think that something where I see open ended or lack of transparency and someone
answering something or if I see something that might become a liability instead of the
objective initially, it's beyond the scope of what it is.
These are things that we take into consideration, but I will tell you, if you think I left the
dissertation for what you saw, you should see the internal conversations, which clearly
I can't show you, but there was robust conversation and it's contentious even between us sometimes.
We have different views and we share them and we try to come to a conclusion together
on what we think is the pathway forward.
Yeah.
I say dissertation.
It really was just like some multiple paragraphs and it was bulleted.
Now I say that dissertation would be like multiple pages worth.
I get you.
I tried to be thorough and poignant.
I tried to be poignant.
I gave you my business shorthand there.
It was good.
That was very meaningful to me.
All right.
Next one was, how does the Will community organize and communicate?
We've got Discord.
We have XBases.
Yeah.
The Discord is the main hub.
This is where the community was formed back in 2020, May of 2020.
That's how I got into it.
The Clubhouse talk that I experienced, that was just an extension.
I think we have all these other extensions, right?
The YouTube channel, Twitch channel, the X account.
We are also increasingly involved in decentralized social media.
We recognize the importance of that.
The one that I think we participated the most in, and you can agree or disagree, Nightmare,
I think is Diso, or the current incarnation of that is Focus, previously Diamond or Bit
Cloud.
I think that Whale has had a presence on that probably since the beginning.
Was that 2020, maybe even 2021?
But yeah, I think there's all that in addition to in real life or physical events.
I think that's something that we're always looking to expand.
We've been at various conferences like Token 2049 in Singapore, NFT LA, or sorry, at that
point it was called Outer Edge LA.
We did a panel there talking about multi-chain NFTs.
We had artists involved in that.
And most recently, there's announcements now about our co-sponsoring of the NFC Summit
in Lisbon coming up in June.
Nice.
Congratulations.
That's going to be a really big one too.
Yeah, no, it's going to be great.
As much as we are this omniversal membership club for the natively digital, that omniverse
does include the physical world, right?
And that's how a lot of us make deeper connections, network.
And I think it just builds that better foundation of our relationships that do exist in the
digital world.
And to join Whale community, do you need one Whale, the Ethereum token, or I guess, and
Polygon token, right?
It's Ethereum and Polygon.
Anyone can hop in our Discord, can check in on our media like Mangu said, depending on
where we are in the cycle and what's going on.
I think on Twitter and YouTube and Twitch, we live streamed 11 events over the past 30
days.
A couple of artists interviews, a couple of platform explorations for creators.
Of course, we have our spaces talk where we do natively digital, where we touch on a whole
bunch of things along with Wes, who's our head of art and Emmy award winning host, by
the way, and three time Jeopardy champion, four time Jeopardy.
I don't know which one it is, but either way.
Yeah, Wes is literally as an Emmys, literally as Emmys.
But nonetheless, nonetheless, like we have all this media that we put out.
We'll put out more medium when we feel the time is appropriate.
We'll do Twitter threads.
So follow us on Twitter.
You'll see what we got going on.
You could check out the different interviews and things we do live.
There's a lot of things that are great discussions or we're showing you cool stuff.
You learn with ordinals, but most of all really home base for us is the Discord because there
we can use the social token, which is just an intrinsic part of us, right there.
We can literally use whale the token in a social environment.
We can't do that on Twitter.
We can't do that on spaces so much.
So we love Discord.
It's always been home for us.
There's a lot of different rooms.
If you pop in, you do not need whale to hop on the discord.
I think you could talk in general and see several channels and talk in a bunch of channels
without any whale.
But if you do want to grab one whale, which is whatever, 30 cents or something, and probably
there's other ways that you could get it just by participating.
People hang out in our live events and we airdrop whale.
We tip it out.
So you get one whale, then you can post in different channels where we're doing stuff
and participate in different ways and get different.
We do games for the Super Bowl, for sports.
I'm doing stuff with NBA Top Shot, all that kind of stuff.
And the goal really is not that people buy whale because if it was, why would we have
it at one whale?
It's to really make you part of this social currency network and understanding how you
use that and how tokenization is important and what we're doing here on Web3.
It's not just observing from afar.
Hop in, get your feet wet, have one token.
If you need one, I'm sure there's ways to get it.
Maybe I'll give you a token, who knows?
But hop in, participate, and really be part of what we do.
We'd love to have all walks of Web3.
Whether you're a creator, just enthusiasts, or you're on here, what the hell is this about,
guys?
Which we get plenty.
We get plenty.
And either spend some time and explore or you don't.
But I do think we're a very cool home base for people because we touch on so many different
things.
And you get a lot of exposure to a lot of cool stuff.
Some of my most amazing opportunities, things I've done, acquired wins, or just amazing
experiences I've had in this space was just by being there when something was happening
in Whale.
So it's a unique recipe with the people and the community that we have.
So welcome everybody to participate.
But for communication, keep your eye on the Twitter.
Anything we have going on anywhere else, you'll probably see outlined on Twitter.
And we'll let you know that as well.
Hey, natively digital on Tuesdays, Whale Hour, which is kind of like a town hall.
And just hearing from Whale Shark and the rest of the leadership, partnerships.
Yeah.
And I would say we're looking at August 2024 here.
It's a very different time already in the market.
And likewise, we've also expanded programming.
The Whale Hour is still something that's happening usually once a month at least.
And it's a great time to hear from Whale leadership, if not Whale Shark himself.
And we also have, like Nymer mentioned, various artist segments, project showcases that can
be broad, kind of hitting multiple things all at once or really deep dives into a specific
artist.
I started a show called Creator Toolbox that Nymer had alluded to where we are looking
specifically at platforms or people that have been building tools for creators.
And again, I'm trying to not even say artists because I do think that look at the sandbox,
for example, right?
You have a whole variety of creators who involved in one particular experience, right?
From a visual artist to maybe a lighting designer, maybe there's narrative lore type things behind
it.
It's so much more than just simply who's pushing the JPEGs and even that, the JPEGs.
There's a lot there.
So yeah, there's already a lot happening.
There's a lot more that I think is in the works.
And it's just an incredible opportunity to learn and experience stuff.
And like Nymer said too, by just being present, by being active, you're going to naturally
be picking up whale.
This is kind of the beauty of the social token is that we do ask for you to be holding that
one just to access even more channels than you can just for free.
But then by holding these roles, you get more.
That's the whole idea.
You get access to more and there's a monthly splash, a monthly whale splash of tokens that
goes out to role holders.
So there's just so much that I think that can appeal to anybody.
So I do recommend that anybody just jumps in the Discord.
Zorro has done an incredible job of laying out this Discord to where you have a lobby
that gives you basic information and then these very high level info channels with various
articles that we're constantly updating.
So we're also there too in the general channel.
If anybody has any questions, just ask.
There's other people asking the same questions.
I think that's a carryover from my gaming days, Lancer.
I live on Discord.
You'd be hard pressed to not catch me on Discord.
It's three in the morning.
It's eight in the morning.
You'll find me there.
We had a community question, which are, what are some keys to success for leading a community
like WhaleFam?
I think number one is, look, there's a lot of opportunities for people to participate
in Web3.
A lot of interest clearly in speculation and number go up.
And I think that having a, and we see it right now, especially in Web3 gaming, there's like
a plague of locusts that will descend upon a project and then leave at the next opportunity
to go to the next thing.
And I think that it's important to have something that is bigger than that objective and that
the people believe in, like a mission and a personality and an ethos of why you are
there.
So I think that conveying that and really championing that mission of what is bigger
than just the financial aspect and what is something that people believe in that resonates
with them is important.
And I think that secondly, empowering people within your community.
People want to participate in a meaningful way and be recognized or be able to just be
light and pop in and out.
Either way, provide opportunities for people to do either.
Don't make it so complex that people feel like if they're not contributing a ton that
they don't belong in the conversation and then don't make it so obtuse and so light
that people feel like it's not meaningful to be there.
So it's a balance to try to label things and try to apply that to how you manage your community.
But I think that we are blessed to be in a good position to do that, especially with
the legacy that we have of our participation and really the early days of Web3 and that
we're still here.
We're still here.
A sleeping giant, if you will.
We never stopped.
We've been churning out content and we've been here having these great conversations,
but we're about to head into what many would anticipate to be the upswing of the bull cycle
culminating maybe later this year.
Who knows?
And we didn't collect all of these assets for nothing, right?
Not to be meaningful and building something out on our estates, on doing something cool
with our 26 OG early X copies, with having these legendary pieces and artists and the
mythical cards and gods and change.
We're not just sitting on our hands to do nothing, right?
We definitely have plans.
So attention can vacillate, but your mission should be steady on what you believe in, what
your core ethos is.
And of course, talking out the other side of my mouth is being able to read the room
and adjust accordingly to suit the needs of what the macro community needs.
What does our head of partnerships and outreach say?
I mean, I got to echo a lot of that.
Whale is not the first community that I've been involved with and it's not the only one
I am involved with, right?
But I do think that being able to listen to the community or read what they're typing,
understanding the sentiment of what is there, but I think also understanding what's the
universal question that's being asked.
We're all coming to this from various walks of life, different life experiences, different
professional experiences, different creative experiences.
Some of us don't speak English.
It's not our native language and that tends to be what the conversation is in.
So being able to bring all that together and decipher it, process it, and be able to answer
people and I think help them along the journey, right?
I think this is something that I firmly believe in.
You do have the option to go at it alone and to be just this kind of digital nomad who
just wanders around by themselves and doesn't seek help from anybody.
You just teach yourself and you come to your own conclusions and you achieve your own route
of success purely through that.
But I think much with life, I would much rather have the experience of others to help myself
along and then I think also contribute that experience to others and help them along as
well.
So I think being able to listen and understand what these collective needs are and help communicate
to sometimes the needs of one aren't necessarily in line with the community's need to go forward
and how they're going to go forward.
And to keep that conversation alive too, right?
To not stamp it out or really just exert yourself and shut somebody out.
I think that is important and I think we can see that conversation in Wale quite often
where there are people who have one opinion, others disagree, there's good conversation
about it, and at the end of the day, I think there's generally alignment on things.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that you also have to accept anything either, right?
You can also dip in and dip out as you need.
But as leaders, I think us being constantly present, regardless of the market cycle, that's
a real fundamental, right?
And I think most great leaders that I've seen in the Web3 space, they are very cognizant
of the market, very aware of what's happening on a macro level as well as the micro level,
right?
But that's not necessarily what's driving their decisions.
It might color their decisions and might inform their decisions.
But understanding that North Star, that strategy that brought you here to begin with, that's
ultimately I think what you have to latch onto.
It can't be the market.
That thing that brought you here in the beginning.
Right on.
Thank you both, Night and Mongoose.
That was our community question.
And I always run through these at the very end, the sandbox spaces.
You'll see the very end one is a particular, I've been doing this for 61 episodes now.
So places where sandbox gathers is Discord, the hashtag DAO discussion.
Also the sandbox DAO forums.
On Twitter you have hashtag SamFam, hashtag the sandbox DAO, hashtag the sandbox game.
Shout out to the sandbox DAO handle, a rash selective and whale members Discord, excuse
me, X.
On YouTube we have the sandbox DAO, Lancer YT, which is the podcast you're listening
to right now, and SamFam Cafe.
Shout out to Pig Axe Master in the chat, who hosts that normally.
And then if you're into X spaces, today is Mochaverse Hall, so that's on Mondays, with
G as us.
Saturday is Bulls on the Block.
They're primarily Apecoin and Sandbox.
And then Coffee with Captains Monday through Friday.
And last but not least, on Tuesday we have Natively Digital with Whale Members.
So 61 episodes, I've been going over these by the way.
I thought that was kind of a neat thing.
So we're at the end.
Is there anything that you all would like to go over, any shoutouts you'd like to give
before we conclude?
Long Ghost Night.
I think we're good.
Yeah, I think we're good.
I think thank you for the opportunity to speak more directly with the SamFam.
Guys know that we are not an ivory tower.
We are not some scary entity looking to dump on the market either.
We're here to meaningfully participate with the best interest of the Sandbox and the Metaverse
and Web3 as a culture moving forward.
So all the decisions that we make are with that in mind.
Shout out to everybody from the Whale community.
Shout out to all of our friends and a special heartfelt shout out to the Legacy of A Lot
of Money who is the patron saint of crypto art who sadly passed on this date years ago.
Beloved, beloved artist within the crypto art community and more broadly.
And we are blessed to have had his art and his time with us and his friendship, quite
honestly.
So it's a somber day for a lot of people that are remembering our friend.
And we continue to do a lot of what we do because of his legacy and what he meant to
the space.
I think he embodied a lot of what was good about Web3.
You're here.
Mongoose, Nightmare, thank you both for your time.
I really appreciate getting to discuss with you and learn about the Whale community, learn
what's important to you all and just have a discussion.
Really appreciate the time and attention you give to the sandbox, especially to your voting
power and approaching that with a thoughtful place.
Thank you both and have a great day.
Peace.
Thanks, Lanzer.
Bye.