A movie no longer has to be just a two-hour, spectator experience at a theater anymore. With blockchain technology, you can now become a part of the magic of telling amazing stories—from inception to distribution. The new cinematic experience is made possible by trailblazing projects like Block of Horror. In this episode, Blockimus (Zach) and Quit join the show to share how they are disrupting the way that content creation works and re-envisioning film and storytelling from a decentralized, community-based perspective. After a rousing discussion about Block of Horror which includes a “killer” demo video, the crew talk about Strangeloop Studios and why it is one of the leading creative pioneers of the new digital media realm. Join this conversation and learn how you too can now be a part of creating within a whole new realm of storytelling and media production.
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Listen to the podcast here
Block Of Horror – Be A Part Of The Story Making Process, Feat. Blockimus (Zach) & Quit, Plus Strangeloop Studios, Global Titan NFT Sporting Events, And More…
Stay tuned for our episode and find out how Block of Horror is going to take to choose your own adventure idea to the next level.
Why Strangeloop Studios has become one of the leading creative pioneers of the new digital media realm.
Catch a shout out to one of our most beloved community members, all this and more on this episode. Enjoy.
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Our sponsored episode features Zach AKA Blockimus and Quit of Block of Horror. The platform that is disrupting how content creation works. Blockimus inspired the Block of Horror mission to re-envision film and storytelling from a decentralized community-based perspective. Blockimus got his start in Web3 in April 2021, where he went headfirst into the OpenSea of NFTs, learning the market and building a platform with Web3 ethos.
Through experiencing all of the NFT space and what it has to offer, Blockimus, a play on Gladiator’s Maximus, has become what he considers a Web3 lifer and hopes to be an ambassador of what this new technology can do to decentralize Web2s most gated opportunities. How about Quit? Quit has been a crypto degen since 2013.
He is a BAYC Owner and renowned educator in the NFT space, sharing deep insights, usually in the form of Twitter threads, to help protect the community from bad contracts, nefarious actors, and outright scams. He also heads up development at Block of Horror and including the upcoming mint and voting portal. He is an invaluable piece of their team and a trusted voice for the entire NFT community.
Block of Horror is the beginning, a launch point to build a decentralized platform that offers up the most access and best experiences for artists and fans. No longer just footing the bill for a ticket at a theater, members of Block of Horror can join the story-making process from inception through distribution, gaining access to come aboard as co-producers and collaborators who are always celebrated and revered. Their members are key parts of the magic it takes to tell amazing stories. They will always work with that as their guiding light. Guys, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us. I appreciate it.
This is Opera pro. You named the project Block of Horror. That’s how we all feel about this market. It is one giant Block of Horror. This would have been a great time to release the project. If you foreshadow this, I don’t know if that was part of the mix.
Honestly, we were geared towards a Friday, May 13th, 2022, mint date. It would have been timed brilliantly perfectly. I’m not sure that too many people would have been gung-ho to purchase at that time, considering everyone was like, “Sky is falling.” They are looking to protect their downside risk, unfortunately.
There’s an emotional element to this industry. It’s Quite possible that the name of it would be, “I have already lost 99% of my money on Luna. Why not throw the remaining 1% into this cool project?” You never know.
If you believe that, I trust your judgment. To our benefit, we pushed it to give us a little more time to button up everything. It could have been a good marketing position to be in.
Don’t take my advice. You guys clearly thought this through. What you are trying to do here is cool. You transform Hollywood content machines, and how they operate without sacrificing artistic integrity and coming up with high-quality experiences and stories, which is the heart of Web3, our society, and culture. It’s a massive vision. Can you tell us more about how this project came to be?
The best way to frame this is around where it all began. In April 2021, I wrote a treatment for a feature around NFTs in a horror context. It’s a horror slasher thriller. I wrote a ten-page treatment. It was going to get into production for a short of that feature. As we geared up to get into production, it hit me. I was like, “Do I even know enough about NFTs and about crypto at this point in time to tell an informed story that hits it on the head?” I pulled back off doing that piece of material and decided, “Instead of the production budget for that short, I’m going to funnel that money right into NFTs directly and learn by diving ahead first.”
From that point on, we came up with Block of Horror, which originally started as a PFP project because the market was up in arms about the next PFP thing. This was even before BAYC was on the map. As we were developing this PFP world around horror, monsters, and all kinds of cool things, I was like, “Is that what I’m here to do? Is that what Web3 is meant to be, a cool JPEG that we can rep on social media?” It is cool. I rep my mutant regularly but to me, NFTs spoke to the use case around what’s possible utilizing the smart contract in general. We pivoted off of this PFP strategy and started to ask ourselves the harder questions. “Why are we here? What do we want to accomplish?”
I spent a few years in Los Angeles, working in Hollywood. My Cofounder, Mike, said the same thing. He’s an editor for AMC. My wife worked on Avatar 2 and 3 and Justice League. Seeing the issues that plague the centralized choke points within media and Hollywood, we started to formulate a plan around, “Let’s bring artists and fans to the creative table from inception through to distribution. Let’s have them be integral to the part they can play, and making a communal effort towards creating exceptional experiences, cinema, and everything that’s possible in the metaverse, especially from a technological perspective.”
You have VR. Augmented reality is going to be coming out. We wanted to position ourselves to build something that could sustain the long haul of what this technology is doing, which is transforming every industry in time that there is. We started with what we know, which is cinema, storytelling, and filmmaking. That’s where it all began. We have been building ever since to get to the launch point, which is coming here soon.
I want to pull out a theme in what you said. We had Eric called around before this show. He delayed Art Blocks for a few months because he was too busy playing around with NBA Top Shots. There’s something to be said for not forcing projects out the door too quickly and letting the creative juices marinate and mature. We delayed one of our drops for the same reason. A constant conversation we have internally with all the different opportunities in this space is to let things marinate and make sure of where you want to focus your energy. That makes a lot of sense to me.
To add to that, it’s why we found Quit. I had good synergies. He’s similar. To me, there are people in this space that have to take up this ambassador role, whether they like it or not. I never intended that to happen. With all the cash grabs, the outright scams, and people getting completely wrecked and screwed over by bad actors, I wasn’t about to participate in that narrative. I’m not saying anyone who launches quickly is doing that but we are building a company.
We are building something that, in a Web2 sense, if you raise money, that money goes to the community’s growth, inevitable rise, and brand. It doesn’t go to the founder’s wallet. We have been working to position ourselves to build properly, organically, and well. If we want to be here for 10, 20, or 50 years, that’s what you have to do. If we wanted to profit, check out, and potentially go to prison, maybe we would do something more nefarious, which we decided not to do so.
I want to talk a little bit about some of the concepts you came up with. You’ve got this genesis NFT, which has thirteen movie posters based on the original story concepts you designed. You are minting those potentially here in early July 2022. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and the utility involved? If a reader wants to participate, how might they keep their eyes on that?
We are aiming to mint in June 2022. The markets may dictate the date that we mint. You don’t want to mint into something that the market is completely on tilt and off-kilter. The plan is about mid-June but if we need to push to make sure the market dynamics are conducive to mentoring, then we will do so. The thirteen movie posters are original story concepts that we came up with. We built them into movie posters. For anyone that’s familiar, your movie poster historically is your first major piece of advertisement around, “Should I go see that thing? Should I go experience that Saw movie or this Halloween franchise?”
We built these original stories, some of which have been IP that we have been developing for years personally. I have a few that I have been working on that I donated to the thirteen original story concepts. Between me, my cofounders, our poster artist, and creative producer, we formulated these stories that when you get a chance to mint them, whether it’s in June or early July, you are going to get one of these stories or movie posters as a token. That’s your forever membership pass to the Block of Horror.
There’s a lot of additional utility outside of that but you are part of the club. You are part of the Block of Horror. You are going to have a say in which one of these thirteen stories are we going to make into our first future-length movie? From the start, you mint, you decide. Right from the start, we want to demonstrate that the community, the members, and you are collaborators. You are a part of the creative process.
We have different subgenres of content and stories, some of which are more geared toward the left-field, some towards the right field. It’s going to be open-ended like, “Whatever you all decide, that’s what we are going to make first.” The good thing is the other twelve pieces that are not selected as the feature-length film, we are going to structure into different separate projects that will be, let’s say, a screenplay or a TV pilot, geared towards a board game or different types of experiences in the metaverse. We are going to attack all 13 in season 1 of Block of Horror. We are going to tackle all of them throughout the season. There will be various use cases for each one and different types of content.
I love move movie posters as a method of all this. They fit perfectly into NFTs but there are these kernels of things that are nice and tight. I’ve learned another thing in the movie industry. In the logline, you tell this story in a sentence but that sentence tells you whether that might be a good story. It’s the Snowflake Method of writing a novel. You start with an outline, and then you flesh out a little bit more and a little bit more. It sounds like you’ve got a lot fleshed out potentially depending on the project as well, so you can hit the ground running when people vote for it.
That’s the beautiful part. It’s a prompt. It’s a concept. Though we have backstories and rich material behind it, we are not going to present all of that upfront because we want the imagination of the community, the fans, and the members to inform us, to tell us what they are inspired by, what they feel, and what resonates with them. We can find those synergies with the lead artists that we bring on for each project and work in tandem to create the best IP possible.
We have a demo that you guys put together to inform our readers more about that project. This might be a good time. We will take a look at that. Let that marinate in the reader’s mind. We will come back and talk about it once it’s over. Let’s get to that.
“Block of horror was started in April of 2021 with the mission to challenge what we call the Hollywood machine. Head-on, we are tackling the choke points of backdoor centralization, the hoarding of IP, inequitable distribution of profits, and dull, formulaic storytelling. Block of horror is founded on the principle of decentralized community-driven content and prioritizing artists and fan empowerment.
How do we do this? We envision a world where avid fans have a say in the direction of creative content and where they can benefit from the success of the final product. By way of our very own unique voting portal, we are bringing members to the decision-making table. This type of platform prioritizes the independent artist and avid fans’ desires first by giving them direct access to the creative and producing process in our dedicated community channels.
The team at Block of Horror has written thirteen original story concepts that have been designed into professional and spiring movie posters to represent our genesis NFT collection. Immediately after mint, token holders control which story will go into production first as a feature-length movie via our voting portal. As we get into development and pre-production for the feature film, community members will participate in helping decide the character’s fates who lives, who dies, how, and when led by professional artists, filmmakers, and industry professionals, the community will become integral to the experience that inevitably ends up on the screen.
Block Of Horror: The reason why we wanted to do this, too, is we want everyone to gravitate toward the stories that they like the most.
The remaining twelve-story posters will not be forgotten, as they will each have dedicated focuses and resources for various forms of horror, themed experiences, and content. Some media candidates include metaverse experiences, TV series pitch packages, 360 and VR experiences, graphic novels, and even board games. We see this as a continual collaboration, not a producer-consumer gatekeeping wall.
Every voice should be respected and heard. In our Discord, we will have dedicated channels for each piece of IP so that token holders of those stories can be a part of that story’s inception, development, and lore. That’s just the start. We have a metaverse theater already live in VR chat where you can watch Block of Horror, original and curated content with friends.
We also hold metaverse real estate across all of the premier Metaverses with preparations to build unique experiences on all of them. Utilizing Web3 to its fullest, Block of Horror is about trailblazing, pushing boundaries, and building towards a more advantageous and rich experience for members moving them away from being just a ticket holder to an integral part of our collective creativity and development production and ultimate communal success. Welcome to the Block of Horror.”
Thanks a lot for sharing this with us. To give you a little bit more of the visuals, there is some cool cinematography, graphics, or whatever. It’s almost like scenes from movies, or particular scenarios, an Ouija board. I remember I caught some smoke moving by, some creepy movie theater themed stuff like a movie theater with a popcorn maker that’s in the shadows. I might not want to eat that popcorn or the popcorn might turn me into a vampire or something. There is a lot of VR and AR themes going on in there. It’s cool stuff. I encourage the readers to go check that out. What did you guys think, Josh and Jeff?
It’s amazing stuff. It’s clear you guys have that experience in the industry that you come from. It comes through there. It’s also the amazing summary of everything that is Block of Horror and what it can be, the entire concept of choosing your own adventure and all that means. There’s some nostalgia there. There’s also this entire new platform that has never existed in human history before.
The entire Web3 platform and what that can mean is built on the foundation of NFTs, which is what we are here, always talking about every single day. This is where it’s at. Seeing the actual implementation of this stuff come to life is amazing. It’s one of the best use cases for NFTs and for what’s happening in Web3. The video’s a great demonstration of that.
Going back to the Block of Horrors, it would take the crumbs of my Luna and put it in this opportunity and then probably double or triple down on it, depending on where those crumbs are, given where Luna is going. It’s all in my mind. Tell us more about how you intend to work with the community to build the first season of Block of Horror. You mentioned the movie posters to start with. What happens after that? If I’m in your community, what can I expect?
We will have different Discord channels for each piece of IP. If you are a token holder of, let’s say, the zombie concept, you are going to be able to hop in that Discord channel with the other 500, let’s say, participants or token holders of that poster and work with our lead artists, as we bring them in to go, “What do we want to make here? We are going to do, let’s say, a TV show around this.” We are not going to do Walking Dead but that was the place we wanted to go. We could all work together, pitch ideas, share information and work towards creating a piece of content that we all want to create.
We would build it outside of that but it’s thirteen separate opportunities. The reason why we wanted to do this too is we want everyone to gravitate toward the stories that they like the most. When you mint, you are not going to know what you get. It will be revealed after the first vote of the feature film happens. From there, you trade out to something you want, being a part of all of them, if you buy all the thirteen separate movie poster tokens. We want people to gravitate towards the stories that they want to be essentially a part of.
Quit, how do you pull something like this off? Are you duct taping together a bunch of Web3 technology? Is this something you had to build from scratch? Is Discord ready for this and already has everything you need? What happened when you are like, “This is what I want to do. How do I achieve this vision?”
Discord is mostly ready for what we intend to use it for. In terms of the NFT itself, it will mostly be standard 721. We do have some plans for the voting portal that will be custom-built. We are excited for that process.
That’s cool. That’s great for our audience to know because this sounds like a daunting task. The power of Web3 is that the tools are there for you. The creativity is around the product itself. Don’t be too intimidated by taking on a big adventure with your community.
We want to dive into the IP going on here. We touch upon this every once in a while in the show. It’s a fascinating domain. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve come across here as it relates to taking the IP that’s being built here and integrating it and the intricacies that you have seen in dealing with IP in this crazy new Web3 space?
We have a great legal team that has a strong understanding of IP commercialization, what CCO entails, and all of these possible IP licensing options. What we want to do, and why we decided to break the content into thirteen pieces is we want to structure our ability to attack all of these IP choke points individually as necessary. A great word that has been thrown around by our legal team is this progressive decentralization.
The ultimate goal is, “We make the next Soul franchise.” We would love for that at some point to be relinquished to the community, to commercialize with us without us, to have a say on the Star Wars Saga, and own a piece of Star Wars. Let’s be honest. Who owns Star Wars? We know Disney does. We know George Lucas did but it’s the fans’ IP at this point. We all know it. Without them, it would be nothing.
The ultimate goal is to position and push toward these IP Web2 choke points to see how far we can pragmatically and realistically open Pandora’s gate of what’s possible. To start, we will have two options right out the gate. The feature film will be non-commercial licensable. That’s so we can make sure to position to have partnerships and distribution, we can get our feature film picked up by Netflix or HBO, The other piece of content that we’ll lead out with will be open-ended. If you own a token of that concept, you will be able to commercially license with us, whatever you want.
If you want to do a short based on the material that we are building with you, you can do that. If that becomes a successful piece of IP, let’s say, a movie of some sort, you can go make a spinoff and we are not going to stop you. You are going to be a part of that piece of IP to be able to commercialize it however you would like. With all 13, we got 1 foot in front of the other mantra.
We are going to strategize to make sure that the community has opportunities to engage around IP commercialization of various story concepts. We will be working with them on those. Some of them may have to be tighter and closed off to start so we can make sure to find those partnerships to scale the brand and make sure we are in a position to benefit the community ultimately.
When I was doing my PhD in studying Animal Behavior, it was interesting to look at the different ways that various communities of organisms work together. It’s fascinating how ants are able to communicate and work together in this hive. Everybody has their roles but nobody is taking the lead. In this Web3 space, with people being able to jump forward and take their role and play their part in making and contributing to the larger whole, there’s a fascinating analog into that type of biological system. That means you need to make a movie where there’s some hoard of ants taking over the hive. That’s all.
To give you to give you guys real life context of where this worked and worked brilliantly is back in around 2005. When X-Men III came out before the next set of X-Mens, there was a viral video, before things went viral to the degree they are doing now, that was a parody of an X-Men Animated Series. One of the lines that was repeated as a joke in the parody, the filmmakers took that line and put it in the feature film and no one even asked.
They did that because it was so popular, viral, and engaging. When you went opening night, which I did at that time when I was in high school, when X-Men III came out, this huge $100 million blockbuster, halfway through the film, everyone is waiting if this character that pops up is going to say the thing that was in that parody video and he did. The whole audience loved it. It’s probably still the best part of the film, no offense.
Even on that small granular level, the community, and the fans put that line in the film. If you weren’t a real fan like an avid fan, you wouldn’t know that that was for you. It worked within the context of the story. For someone who didn’t know any better, it was another line. For the fans on opening night, they were heard. They were respected. Their input was then even put in this huge worldwide film. That’s an example of what’s possible and pragmatically so.
We were talking about the IP stuff. There are some complex concepts to navigate here. These are a lot of the front-end ones we are talking about. There’s also stuff on the back end. A lot of your relationship and collaboration with Quit falls into this world, smart contracts, what has to be written there, and how precisely this has to be done to make sure that everything flows properly. The way that you guys are approaching transparency are complicated subjects to deploy in an effective way. We would love to know more about that. How did this relationship come about? Tell us a little bit about those elements.
Quit can speak to the security aspects. That’s why we reached out to him. The beautiful thing about social media is that people are open books a lot of the time if you can navigate who’s a good actor or not. I spotted Quit online via his posts about when they do coin drops. You get it in your wallet and you are like, “Is this safe? Can I claim this? Is the contract okay?” Reading his threads, I was like, “This guy gets it.” He understands the ethos of not only Web3 but about what I talked about at the top of being an ambassador. We are not getting paid to give free information about how to be secure but we do it because we need this space to be secure, to be more advantageous for people to come in and not get screwed.
When I was here for the first month, I got rug pulled by OpenSea and lost 60% of my bankroll. It was devastating. I left for a month and a half and missed Bored Ape Yacht Club because of it. It’s because no one’s teaching anything in a sense that from a scale perspective, it’s not readily available. Seeing Quit be this ambassador, informed security around smart contracts, I reached out to him on Twitter and said, “This is what we are doing. I would love to see if we could find some partnership to bridge you into this.” To our benefit, he was like, “That sounds awesome.” That’s where we are. I will let Quit speak to the security aspects.
From my side of it, I was excited when Zach reached out because I have been in the space a long time. What appealed to me about crypto, in general, is that it’s a disruptor. It set forth to disrupt the financial industry. Since then, ETH and NFTs have taken a new turn. Zach’s setting out to disrupt Hollywood and that appealed to what I’m all about. I was excited to jump onboard, join that team, and push that forward.
Security in smart contracts is a different world. The 721s, a lot of these minting contracts are similar but there are a lot of gotchas in there. The nice thing about them is that they are all publicly available. Before you interact with anything, you have the option to read it over and make sure it’s all good. From the creator side of things, you have your one shot. Once you launch it, you are launched. You can’t go back and edit that code. If you make a mistake, if you have missed something in testing, then you are in a lot of trouble.
A lot of my time this past couple of years has been reviewing code either before it’s launched or afterward. It is an exciting time. Mistakes are higher than ever. That’s what appeals to me, and it makes it exciting. We’re excited to put something together that’s rock-solid, push that out to the public and hopefully, make a difference long-term in the NFT space. We do have some ideas for some upgrades, for some things that haven’t been put into projects at the base layer yet. If we can make that the norm, then the space will be better for it.
Block Of Horror: The ultimate goal is to position and push toward these IP Web 2.0 choke points to see how far we can pragmatically and realistically open the Pandora gate of what’s possible.
It’s so important, especially in the crazy times we have had and the highs and lows we have seen with both NFT projects, DeFi projects, and top 25 projects that have had major security flaws to the tune of $200 million being locked in a wallet. Nobody can get it. It’s crazy stuff. To dive a little bit deeper here on how you tackle this rather anxiety-provoking topic for many people in this space, what are your go forward plans around security? how do you communicate about it with the community, recognizing the evolutionary and dynamic nature of innovation?
The key to that is that you do have test networks available. What you need to do is run through not just your best-case scenarios for minting but worst-case scenarios. You talked about that $200 million being locked in a contract, which it’s probably not 200 million anymore with how the price has been going. It was a lot of money. It was one error and it can’t be recovered. That money is locked in that contract forever. The project can still get royalties and raise money that way but that’s a huge blow from the beginning. That hurts creators.
When you are getting ready to launch a project, you need to go through all of the scenarios and say, “This is a happy path. These are all the things that we think are going to happen. We’ve got all of our bases covered there but then this is the sad path. This is what happens if somebody wants to exploit us. This is what happens if this goes wrong here.” You need to test for those two, account for as many different variables as possible, and hit those in testing. You can’t take a day or two and test your contracts out. It needs to be a prolonged process with as many eyes on it as possible because you don’t get a second shot once you launch.
To add to that, one of the partners will be bringing on Halborn Security, assuming everything is still kosher. They audited A coin and they work with plenty of crypto. They are one of the top premiere security firms. What we are talking about is when a project got locked $32 million in a smart contract, and from what I read, they didn’t have their contract audited.
To what Quit said about, they didn’t have that professional third party overview of, “Would their contract function as intended?” We’ve worked to prioritize to make sure that forevermore, anything that we meant, we are going to do everything within our capability to make sure that those contracts are as optimized as possible, and that they are being reviewed by professional security services.
We don’t talk about it enough in this industry. It’s important to understand that not all audits are created equal like there are a lot of lawyers in this world. You can get a whole spectrum of legal advice. A security audit is not black and white. There’s a misunderstanding in this industry when a contract has been “audited” and it’s not as high of a quality security firm or that it does have that stamp that everything is going to be perfect. It’s not the case.
They don’t audit it at all.
They stick a random logo up there.
Bringing good business practices from any business is a tricky thing. If you are an architect, you are going to have a third party review your designs before you hand them off to the contractor. It’s how you do good business. There are a lot of spots where folks are missing that experience on their team or their knowhow. It’s important as a community to elevate that awareness and share where you have that background and knowhow with other people to elevate the space. We all lose when things like that happen.
It also boils down to the complexity of the contracts. Even the best auditors like Peck Shield will miss things sometimes. In the big DeFi groups of contracts like Popsicle Finance in August 2021 and they were audited. There are lots of moving parts, interacting pieces, and money on the line. When there are a billion locked or hundreds of millions of dollars are locked, you are going to have attackers and they are going to be constantly testing things.
Somebody will find something if you have left a weakness anywhere. Luckily, for us, NFT contracts are generally a lot simpler than DeFi contracts. If you do get it audited by somebody reputable, then you should be okay. As long as you are not doing something wild, you should be okay. What happened with that $32 million should have been caught in testing and auditing. It’s about that.
I’m glad this came up. We have talked about security on various episodes here but it’s been a while since we dove in deep. We get to talk a little bit about horror and also avoiding the horror as well. Let’s segue here before we wrap up this main interview and go to go to our quick hitters. What’s on your roadmap? Can you share a little bit quickly, Zach, what people might find exciting?
For us, we look at this season one Genesis token launch as similar to, I hail from the theater originally, when you go to a Shakespeare theater, they have a season. They have their year essentially of content. Some are various plays. Some are various new projects. From this perspective, this is season one. We are already telling you what we are doing. We have thirteen projects. All of them are going to get off the ground in various ways with the community. From there, the sky’s the limit.
It’s season one for a reason. It’s like a TV show. You write season one. You know what season two is but let’s make sure we hit it out of the park with season one. We put ourselves in position to then say, “Everybody, what does season two look like? Can we push these boundaries even further? Can we do innovative content in the metaverse with real life crossover and do the next Halloween horror nights? Who knows?” The main idea is to make sure that we are positioning ourselves to hit it out of the park with this season one so that we are in position to build into a season two and bring the community into that process.
Security in smart contracts is a different world. Click To Tweet
We probably didn’t share enough of the behind-the-scenes behind planning NFTLA. Our fans and the people who attended would have flipped their lids. They saw all of the bustle going on behind the scenes. We wrapped up a second of, “What are we doing?” It’s full-day postmortems. We are planning an FTLA. It’s several months from now, season two, as it were. We get that. It’s an exciting thing to do.
Before we head over to Edge Quick Hitters, I have one last question for you. Where are you guys drawing inspiration from? There are lots happening in the world of NFT and Web3. What’s got you jazzed?
Honestly, for me is why I got here in 2021, which is the use case. It is the real opportunity to transform how business functions and bring more equitability throughout a platform’s ecosystem to empower and inspire people that normally would be left footing the bill. That is a staple of who I am. That’s why I say I’m a Web3 lifer because I’m not going back to Web2. I may utilize Web2. I may have to use it to pay rent but this has already proven its use for the future of creating a more equitable situation. It drives me every day. I’m not going anywhere, so let’s keep grinding.
Quit, how about you?
That’s a tough thing. There’s a lot. This is the most exciting space that I have ever seen. It moves incredibly quickly. There are many things to learn. We are at the forefront of something enormous, so I want to be a part of it.
There’s blood in the streets, a reminder or a public service announcement. The folks that are thinking about bailing from the space maybe are focused more on the investment side of it or whatever but don’t do it. It’s here to stay. This is the foundation of the entire future and it’s happening now. Don’t let a down market or a blip in the market in the grand scheme of things dissuade you from continuing to grind, build, and change the world. That’s what’s happening. I couldn’t be more certain of that.
It’s the future and it’s happening. Don’t let this stop you. In any case, we got some other stuff to get into. We appreciate all the background on Block of Horror. It’s so cool and interesting. Everybody will go check it out for sure. We want to get your personal perspective on some questions. It’s a section we call Edge Quick Hitters. It’s a fun and quick way to get to know you a little bit better. It’s ten set questions looking for short, single word, or few word responses, but we may dive in a little bit deeper here or there. Are you guys ready to jump in on these bad boys?
Let’s do it.
Question number one is what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life? Zach, we will start with you.
It would have to be candy. I imagine it’s the first thing.
Do you have a go-to?
It’s anything chocolate. I’m a sucker for dark chocolate.
Quit, how about you?
It was a magazine. I don’t remember what the magazine was but it had Power Rangers on the cover.
Block Of Horror: You can get a whole spectrum of legal advice. A security audit is not black and white.
Question number two, Zach, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
This probably is going to come full circle. It is sports trading cards.
Quit, how about you?
A ticket to a football game is the first thing I remember selling.
Do you remember where you sold it?
It was Stubhub or eBay at the time.
Question number three, Zach, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
It’s probably an NFT. It’s probably Kiwami for anybody that’s interested.
Quit, how about you?
Maybe it’s an NFT. I’m trying to remember if I have purchased any in the past but I bought a house. It might be that.
Question number five, Zach, what is your most prized possession?
Not to get too personal but it would have to be my daughter, even though she’s not a possession. She’s the light of our lives. If it was physical, it would have to be my laptop because it’s where I do everything.
Quit, how about you?
I don’t want to say my daughter also. I could jump on that train but I will go with something physical. It’s probably my speaker set up from a big audio file. I love listening to music.
It's important to understand that not all audits are created equal. Click To Tweet
Is that pertained to your car as well or just up in your house?
My car has some pretty crappy speakers. It’s just my house.
It looks like I skipped question four. We got to circle back on that one. We will start with Zach on that. What is the most recent thing you sold?
ETH.
Quit, how about you?
It’s not ETH. I got to buy some more. I did sell some A coin.
It looks like you guys are providing liquidity in the ETH market by trading it amongst each other.
We are hedging each other’s bets. One of us will make it.
We did an OTC deal. I grab this straight from him.
We will flip the order here. Quit, number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, and experience that’s currently for sale, what would it be? What do you got your eye on?
Honestly, I could use a good steak now. I would say a meal, steak with whiskey.
Zach, how about you?
Besides a Koda, I would buy a nice house, a real estate.
Question number seven, Quit, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Block Of Horror: We’re at the forefront of something enormous, so I want to be a part of it.
Curiosity.
Zach, how about you?
For better and worse, honesty.
Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be? Quit, you are up.
Stubbornness. I’m a stubborn person and sometimes to my benefit, sometimes it’s not.
Zach, how about you?
It’s partially honesty, too. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Sometimes when you prioritize being truthful, you tend to not take into other people’s position as honestly from where they are coming from. Not everyone is ready to hear the type of truth that you think you have. Being able to work on people’s level tends to be more beneficial to them and to the conversation than just announce, “This is what the truth is.”
There’s something to the kind candor concept that Gary Vee talks about in Twelve and a Half. There’s something to it that’s pretty cool. Question number nine, Quit, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was working on coding a bot that I toy around with for OpenSea listings.
Zach, how about you?
I probably was shit posting on Twitter between working on Block of Horror. That’s what I was doing.
Question ten, Quit, what are you going to do next after the show?
I would probably go spend some time with my daughter.
Zach, how about you?
Not everyone is ready to hear the type of truth that you think you have. Click To Tweet
I’m going to go eat, and get back to the work.
Thanks so much for participating. We do appreciate it. Word on the street is we’ve got some hot topics to hit. What do you say, Eath?
Let’s get into those hot topics. First of all, let’s talk a little bit about Strangeloop. This is a sponsor hot topic. Founded as an audio visual collective in LA, our sponsored hot topic partner, Strangeloop Studios has become one of the leading creative pioneers of the new digital media realm, providing design and content for live events and digital media, including producing music video, short films, and immersive experiences.
It has created original content for The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Nas X, Flying Lotus, Micah Nelson, SZA, Lizzo, Pharrell, G-Dragon, and Anderson. Paak, Earthgang, and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. In 2019, Strangeloop launched Spirit Bomb Records, the world’s first virtual artist record label receiving sizable investment from Warner Music Group, Chinatown Market, which has since changed its name to Market, Sony Music Entertainment Japan, and the Japanese label Avex Entertainment.
Spirit Bomb’s prominent product is music but in creating their own intellectual properties within the virtual reality and extended reality space. It more closely resembles a multimedia film studio of the future. Let’s chat about it a little bit before we add some more details. It’s a great hot topic for this episode, mixing and mingling all sorts of new approaches to media and making cool things. All of the players that they have brought on board are pretty impressive. Am I right?
It is, indeed. On this bad boy, we got to read soup to nuts on it, to the finish. It’s a regular read. We don’t have to do it at the moment, if we don’t want to. We can come back on this one and do an insert if that’s better.
The last thing I read was multimedia film studio of the future. I’ll pick it up there. Each of its artist’s characters represent multiple pieces of available content across any given medium, from music to movies, to video games. Since these are Spirit Bomb’s own creations, the company controls all aspects of their activities. Furthermore, for live artists who aren’t quite sure what to do with a recorded track, Spirit Bomb can provide a new creative outlet by developing a character closely aligned with their personality and musical traits.
In June 2022, Spirit Bomb will mint 4,444 NFTs of their most popular virtual being, LV4. To decentralize LV4 and reward an ever growing group of contributors, Spirit Bomb is building upon Web3 architecture and tools such as DAOs and smart contracts. Those that hold an LV4 NFT will have a say in the creative direction and stake in the future success of the artists.
They are great partners on their side, too. Talk about elevating awareness and bringing community together. From Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, there are millions and millions of people in the mix on that.
Should we hit the next hot topic?
Let’s jump in.
Global Titans have Introduced the First Sporting event with NFT enabled Livestream Access. “New company, Global Titans, are set to introduce NFT enabled access to live sports shows. Company will introduce premium boxing and MMA events at locations around the world with the debut event, featuring fighters such as Floyd Mayweather and Anderson Silva.” I’m thinking about the old days when you could steal cable from your neighbors or you can port in your buddy’s Netflix account. Quit, you are all about security and things like this, are NFTs the end of the end of stealing cable and stealing access to stuff like this? What do we think?
I don’t think so.
There’s always a way around the fence.
Block Of Horror: Sometimes, when you prioritize being truthful, you tend to not take into account other people’s positions as honestly from where they’re coming from.
Ticketing is interesting, even more broadly than the specific use case here. We were talking about a little bit earlier as NFT ticketing is related to NFTLA and some of the ways we integrated that to a small degree this go round. It’ll be a much bigger degree next go round. That is one of those game-changers, where there is a great use case for utilizing NFTs, and all the interesting things that come with it. I’m excited to see so many people getting after it. There is a lot of complexity.
We were talking a little bit before about IP complexity and thinking through that. The same is true when you are talking about events and what it means to be a ticketing company, all the different ins and outs of that, the policies, from privacy policy around user’s information to refund policies. How do you distribute the money? You are selling tickets to an event. You want that money to help fund it. The ticket issue has to think about refunds, chargebacks, and things like that.
There’s this whole dynamic there that is complicated. As great as a use case as tickets are, there’s a level of sophistication to deploy a project like that is super high. I’m curious to see who ends up being at the top of the heat here. There’s not going to be one winner. There will be a lot of people doing it. I’m on the sideline, watching and I’m excited for what’s next here.
There are certainly a ton of advantages here. Even in our bit of an experiment we did with Spirit Seed holders, we created the VIP vouchers for NFTLA. What I was fascinated with is there are tons of people trying to trade tickets that they bought on the off market which is its own thing. We left it up to people but it’s a headache to know whether you can trust the person on the other transaction.
It’s a whole another thing if you have an NFT collection where you can verify the contract address. You don’t even have to know who sold you that NFT. As long as you trust the person who’s hosting the contract and you can redeem that NFT ticket, you are set and it’s trustless. I love that part of these type of tickets. I don’t know if they are going to do that with this streaming access type of thing but it’s pretty awesome.
All these core elements are part of Block of Horror. Zach, there are a lot of considerations that cross over here.
As we get closer down the road of a distribution, that’s something we will be looking to integrate, build with, and find partnerships to do so. There’s a world where the content you make now, you can give direct peer-to-peer distribution to people in the metaverse, in the community. You may not have to rely upon getting distribution deals via Netflix or other types of companies that want to take a larger percent from the community. There’s a world where it all goes to the community. There are a lot of advantageous opportunities for the Web3 space.
There is exciting stuff in the world of in the world of NFT. Even with all the craziness happening in the market, there’s people out there building. They are chopping wood, and making it happen. Keep on doing it. We need it to get to the next level. That’s hot topics. We do have a little shout out we wanted to give to one of our amazing partners and collaborators.
Let’s hit it. We could both speak to a little bit of this. Zach and Quit, we love to recognize community members. A lot of these folks who come out of the woodwork, they’re people maybe we knew a little bit. All of a sudden, we are thick as thieves, doing all kinds of cool stuff together. One of those folks is our great friend, Lawrence Lanoff. He has been a man on the scene for almost everything that we are doing even though he’s a powerful creator in his own, having all of these amazing projects.
He has been in the cryptocurrency space since 2011 and participated in the guidance and building of various platforms. He also happens to be an award-winning filmmaker, professional Producer and Director, as well as the best-selling author. He has been a huge part of the Edge of family, an advisor, supporter, content creator, producer, and so much more. He’s going to head out to Davos with us, help record content, and make stuff happen there. What an awesome guy. I’m happy to give this shout out to Lawrence Lanoff.
Big ups to Lawrence. I love the guy, his candor, openness, and willingness to always help give a unique perspective on everything we are doing. It’s a big shout out to Lawrence, much love.
I have to say something on this because one of his email address is this Energy Master. That is the dude. He’s got that energy. He’s done some deep studies of yoga traditions and things like that but he permeates awesome energy.
There’s more to come from Lawrence here in the near future.
We are nearing the end here of the episode. We want to make sure that all of our readers know where to go to follow this rocket ship that is Block of Horror. Where should they go? Where should they follow you?
Block Of Horror: There’s a world where the content you make now, you can give direct peer-to-peer distribution to people in the metaverse, in the community.
BlockofHorror.com or our Twitter, @BlockOfHorror, is a great place to start. You can link into our Discord from there. We have a new website that will be launching here. Once the voting portal’s live, the mint’s live, there will be more information and ways to engage there as well. We hold some powwows in our VR chat metaverse theater until we have a chance to build some more experience-based opportunities and some of the other metaverses. Feel free to get involved. Hit us up. If you have any questions, you can hit me up on Twitter. I’m always happy to engage with people even candidly.
Word on the street. We also got a little giveaway we want to talk about. Zach, do you want to share a little bit about what we are going to do here?
As we give up for our mint, we want to give away, offer up some allow list spots, which we call our blood list. If you want guaranteed access to mint, one of these tokens, one of these movie posters, you can follow us, share this show, and we will enter you into to getting one of these allow list spots. If you are an avid fan, keep at us. I’m sure there’ll be a place for you at the table.
There’s lots of goodness there. Keep an eye on our socials. We will give you all the details on how to enter and participate. It’s very much appreciated. The generosity goes a long way. Folks, we have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFT. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify and iTunes. Rate us. Say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNft.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Block of Horror
- Strangeloop Studios
- OpenSea
- Discord – Block of Horror
- Bored Ape Yacht Club
- Halborn Security
- Peck Shield
- Popsicle Finance
- Stubhub
- eBay
- Kiwami
- Koda
- Twelve and a Half
- Spirit Bomb Records
- Strangeloop Studios – Interview: Strangeloop Studios Co-Founder Ian Simon Article
- Global Titans have Introduced the First Sporting event with NFT enabled Livestream Access – Article
- NFTLA
- Spirit Seed
- Lawrence Lanoff
- @BlockOfHorror – Twitter
- Twitter – Blockimus
- Spotify – Edge of NFT
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
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