From Gaming to Streaming: How Soulbound TV is Empowering Creators in the Web3 Era

In this episode, Casey Groom, co-founder of Soulbound TV, discusses the innovative intersection of live streaming, gaming, and the creator economy in the Web3 space. He shares insights on how interactive tools and decentralized prediction markets are transforming the streaming experience for creators and audiences alike

Please enjoy!

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Key Topics Covered:

• Web3 and Live Streaming Integration: The episode highlights how Soulbound TV is revolutionizing live streaming by incorporating interactive tools and decentralized prediction markets, enhancing the viewer experience and creator monetization.
• Challenges in Gamer Adoption: Casey discusses the hurdles faced in onboarding gamers to the Web3 narrative, emphasizing the need to bridge the gap between traditional gaming and the emerging crypto landscape. 
• Future of Interactive Content: The conversation explores the potential of decentralized prediction markets and interactive features to create deeper engagement between streamers and their audiences, paving the way for innovative content experiences in the gaming and entertainment sectors.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/

Episode Highlights:

• "There's a lot of different components that you can start to unlock with like web three live streaming. Uh, one being just the live streaming itself. Uh, that's now like a deep pin enabled solution." - Casey Groom (00:06:13)
• "I think people just want to be part of unique experiences that maybe are happening somewhere else besides where they are at the present moment, right?" - Josh Krieger (00:18:08)
• “This is huge for us. And this happened only one month after we launched our V1. It tells us exactly what we were hypothesizing this whole year on." - Casey Groom (00:21:16)

For the full transcript, see further below. 

People and Resources Mentioned: 

• Caesy Groom LinkedIn 
• Soulbound Website 
• Casey Grooms Of Soulbound On The Future of Gaming Article  
• Animoca Brands Website 
• Avalanche Website
• Magic Eden Website  
• Story Protocol Website
• Livepeer Website 

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About Our Guest:

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• Bio: Casey Groom is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Soulbound TV, a Web3 live streaming platform that integrates creator incentives and decentralized prediction markets. With a background in mobile advertising and user acquisition solutions, Casey has a wealth of experience in the tech and gaming industries. He began his career in ad tech around 2010, building a programmatic platform for buying and selling ad impressions in real-time, primarily for mobile games and apps.
• Website: Soulbound
• Twitter: @caseygrooms
• Instagram:@caseyegrooms
• LinkedIn: Caesy Groom 

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Full Episode Transcript:

Casey Groom: Hi, this is Casey Groom from Soulbound TV. We're transforming live streaming with interactive features, prediction markets, and tools that empower creators. You're tuned in to the Edge of NFT, the show that streams the best of Web3 innovation every week so you can predict where the industry is going next. Stay tuned.

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Josh Kriger: Hey, Web3 curious listeners, stay tuned for today's episode to learn how Soulbound TV is shaping the future of live streaming with interactive tools and decentralized prediction markets. Plus, the creative ways streamers and creators are monetizing in the Web3 space and how platforms like Soulbound are making it easier. Lastly, our guest today's perspective on the importance of truly going offline when you decide to not be online. All this and more at the edge of Soulbound TV. Cue the intro. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Edge of NFT, the podcast created by Jeff Kelly, Ethan Janney and me, Josh Krieger, featuring a variety of top notch guests and other hosts. It's another production of the Edge of Company, a quickly growing media ecosystem, powering the pioneers of Web3 tech and culture and response for other groundbreaking endeavors like the Outer Edge Innovation Festival in L.A. and Riyadh. And today's very special sponsored episode features Casey Grooms, who's a serial entrepreneur dedicated to transforming gaming and supporting the new creator economy. His journey spans founding innovative startups in mobile advertising, spearheading user acquisition solutions, and investing in emerging tech and gaming ventures. As the co-founder of Soulbound TV, Casey channels his expertise into building new tools and opportunities for gamers and creators to thrive in the Web3 era, And we'll talk a lot more about Soulbound TV, which is a web three live streaming platform that integrates creator incentives and prediction tools. It's backed by investors like Animoca Brands and it's redefining gaming and streaming for the next generation. Casey, it's great to have you on the show. How are you today?

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Casey Groom: Hey, pleasure to be here, Josh. I'm doing really, really well.

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Josh Kriger: I heard you decided spontaneously to take a 20 hour trip from Dubai to Miami for our Basil.

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Casey Groom: Yeah, in between I was back in Puerto Rico, so it wasn't too bad.

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Josh Kriger: Okay, not too bad. Just a hop, skip and a jump.

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Casey Groom: Yeah, yes. It was fun. I hung out at the Magic Edens Villa and a couple other, you know, gaming events and parties and, you know, was able to kind of catch up with some of our content creators that we work with. So that was fun.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, the creators like Art Basel. So that's great. We had one of our correspondents, January Jones there. And, you know, I decided to skip the trip for a little while. It's been a lot of travel this year. As you know, I keep finding you all over the world. And, you know, we've built a great partnership from getting to know each other globally. Love trotting together. And I can't wait to tell people about what you've been up to at Soulbound. But first, let's just dive into sort of a little bit more of your background and what inspired you to focus on this intersection of gaming, live streaming, and the creator economy.

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Casey Groom: Yeah, so I started my career in ad tech specifically, and specifically in mobile ad tech. Around 2010, me and a few friends ended up building a programmatic platform for buying and selling ad impressions in real time. mostly through mobile games, mobile apps, mobile websites. A lot of our customers at the time were Uber and large mobile game studios looking for user acquisition outlets and channels. And so they, you know, would buy a lot of media through us, connecting to other games and, you know, hoping to drive kind of traffic to their game and, you know, track like, you know, user engagement, kind of like funnel, track the whole down funnel metrics, right? Like, install, sign up, first purchase, get to the level one, get to level two, things like that. And so, as we kind of, you know, we're building a lot of these tools, and I ended up exiting that company around 2017, 2018. I started dabbling in the crypto space and specifically in the gaming space. Here we are today with Soulbound TV. It took a lot of those insights from before to manifest and evolve what we've been building here at Soulbound.

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Josh Kriger: Were you always a gamer? Did you go out playing games?

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Casey Groom: Yes, definitely heavy on Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, all the Game Boys, Game Gears, and so, I mean, this obviously dates me a little bit, but was pretty heavy on that, and Unreal Tournament was one of my favorite games to play, so that, kind of like the early stages of Unreal Engine, essentially, and Yeah, so I don't play too much games now, just timewise, but I'm definitely watching a lot of games and watching a lot of streams, and that kind of got me into rebuilding the next-gen Twitch.

Josh Kriger: I think I think that's part of the magic of this sort of game streaming industry is that you're not alone. A lot of people enjoy watching other really good players play games, right? It's sort of this industry that Twitch, you know, initiated, but now there's so much more potential there, especially when you get into the reward mechanisms of what three and how to integrate that with streaming. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. I guess, you know, live streaming as a whole, as I just mentioned, has really reshaped the entertainment industry over the last decade. When it comes to that intersection with Web3, how does that transformation sort of go to the next level? What's possible? What gets unlocked?

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Casey Groom: Totally. Um, so there's a lot of different components that you can start to unlock with like web three live streaming. Uh, one being just the live streaming itself. Uh, that's now like a deep pin enabled solution. So almost like a peer to peer video computation for live streaming.

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Josh Kriger: So yeah, just, just a quick pause for those at home. The deep end is the decentralized physical infrastructure. And really what that enables is everyone to operate a note from there, it could be from their computer or other devices. There's another one called Hive Mapper that you put a device on your car and it helps sort of map out the world. So all sorts of cool use cases for D-PEN. Just want to sort of clarify that for our audience. Go ahead and continue.

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Casey Groom: Yeah, so on the video infrastructure side, you can use various different third parties now. We're using Livepeer, for instance, for our broadcasting. So users can directly just broadcast on Soulbound through our infrastructure, play with them and partner with them. And other components that we started to build out as a next-gen live streaming initiative include all of our emotes and NFT, our NFT specifically. So any user can create an emote, emoji, and stickers that's usable within our real time chat. You can graffiti people's posts, things like that. We've been putting a lot of time and energy into building out tools for gamers, streamers, and content creators to help them get paid more easily, quickly, and better. What that means is just an immediate transaction. So once they stream a game, if there's a bounty on that game, they're paid immediately. So they submit the bounty. They claim it. We check it on our side. So did it meet the requirements that were embedded in that bounty, for instance, that kind of came from the game itself? Um, so we create these bounties with games. Avalanche is one of our customers. Once the user does complete the bounty, they are able to claim it, we check it. We have various other features that are creating more interactive elements with the platform. So there's a prediction market, a dare feature, things like that. So I think we can chat about more of those interactive elements later.

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Josh Kriger: Cool. Yeah, that's great. Basically, it's like live streaming on steroids. Once you have that sort of mechanism in place to sort of track what both the gamer and the audience is doing and how they're engaging, you can unlock all sorts of different potential. Of course, it's not easy, or everyone would be doing it, right? There'd be 100 soul bounds out there. What are some of the challenges, sort of, or gaps in terms of getting to this sort of nirvana state with using Web3 and live streaming that get you excited as an innovator and have been sort of tough to navigate along the way?

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Casey Groom: First being just the culture of Web3 and user adoption. Gamers specifically were not really always into the Web3 narrative. So they're like, why do games need crypto? Why do games need NFTs, tokens? That was always a big hurdle that we had to overcome. So we spent a year and a half as we're building this platform and iterating and evolving our first stage of the platform as a social gaming into a full on next gen live streaming, we kind of solved a lot of these hurdles and are still solving them. A lot of it being gamer, streamer onboarding. So we do spend a lot of time and energy onboarding streamers and curating that content creator and onboarding them to feel at home, be a part of our community and stream games with us and for a lot of the game developers that we work with. So we were at TwitchCon, both TwitchCons this year for instance, various other game developer conferences and have a booth to specifically onboard and outreach to not just game developers and the users themselves, but very specifically streamers and content creators, because that's right now our bread and butter to create activations and have more content just obviously like 24-7 across Soulbound TV.

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Josh Kriger: That makes a lot of sense. And I know the new sort of version of Soulbound TV was released with quite a lot of early positive signals from the community and a lot of engagement. And I think it'd be great for us to sort of get a quick demo of the product. And of course, for our listeners at home, Casey, who aren't sort of watching us on cable or on YouTube, please kind of narrate this demo for them. kick it off and let's see what you guys have been building.

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Casey Groom: So here we have Soulbound, Soulbound TV. We'll be rebranding actually the entire experience to soulbound.tv very soon. You can just kind of scroll through different live streams from gamers that are playing games. Right now we have a Shatterline bounty that's up. So we've been working hand in hand with Avalanche. Avalanche, Avalabs specifically, is one of our customers. They work with us to create bounties for games that they're supporting on Avalanche. This is a $10,000 bounty right now that's activated for about two weeks. Users must stream the bounty, complete, you know, stream for three hours, and have a minimum of five kills. They need to put Soulbound in the stream, drop our logo in there, things like that. Helps create, you know, some more branding engagement for us across Soulbound and Twitch specifically. But once they submit it, we check it and then we give them the payout. So all the streamers participate in the bounty payout. They also earn Points on our system points in Solomon TV will then turn into soul bucks At our airdrop amount at our airdrop date, but you can see here just streamers kind of like playing Raven quest a few other Games right now like shadow line obviously is very big so you can see we have can we zoom in on one of these games? Yeah, sure. So we have real-life chat where you have emotes in here. Um, and You can drop in any kind of emotes you want and just kind of have fun and start chatting with users. This user specifically has 21 viewers right now. And he's actively playing Shatterline. And this is kind of like one of his taglines here, Shatterline Soulbound. So he's participating in the bounty right now in real time to get the payouts. That's cool.

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Josh Kriger: He seems pretty good. He's moving around fast.

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Casey Groom: Yes, time will tell. But one thing is we also have a prediction market and decentralize the entire 

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Oracle system. So a user can become an Oracle in the platform and actually create a prediction on top of his stream. And we've just been fine tuning that process. We'll release a little bit more of a better flow this month over that. But as an example, in this scenario, you can actually predict like Is he going to win or lose this match. Is his team going to win? Is he going to get five headshots? But you actually, as an Oracle, actually need to sit here and watch and basically moderate that. And we've been building tools to help you in that moderation 

process.

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Josh Kriger: Can those sorts of stakes change during the game, like in real time? Like, you know, I've noticed that in UFC fights now where You might have one prediction at the beginning of the match, but then in the middle, it looks like maybe this other guy is going to come out on top.

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Casey Groom: Yeah, that's going to be something we're going to be polishing up next year, over time. That's a lot of work in terms of if we're going to be creating, let's say, odds on the streamer and the stream itself, and then these fluctuating real-time changing odds based on, okay, there's a minute left, he's gotten three headshots, can he get two more headshots in the next minute? Those odds are going to obviously increase very heavily of him not being able to do that. That's gonna be something that we're gonna have to fine tune really next year and it's a work in progress. So we're not at that stage yet. Right now we're at the V1 of Soulbound TV. We've built the foundation and we're just kind of setting the stage for 2025 and next year.

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Josh Kriger: Fair enough. I mean, it's really cool what you've built so far, and definitely appreciate the demo to give us a real sense of what this experience looks like for those that are sort of participating in the gaming experience. Check out Snowbound TV for yourself, and you don't have to just see the demo. You can actually try it out. So Casey, it's really cool to see that demo and get a sense of what you guys are up to. Would like to get a little meta with you. I'm really curious. What makes interactivity so crucial to the modern content experience in your opinion?

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Casey Groom: it's just the the connection between the streamer and the fan themselves and Having that interaction where they're either playing with each other they're engaging with each other and there's some kind of element of maybe not just risk involved, because prediction market is, you know, just one of those interactive features that we're building out. But it's kind of more about just having that connection between the user and the streamer and their fans. Right now across Twitch, a lot of it is really just chatting to them. And we are trying to level up that next game of, well, what's after chat? And, you know, can they participate in um, creation of emotes together or, you know, with the whole NFT communities and the world centered around, you know, especially web three, um, tokenization of things and there's incentives and rewards. Where can we insert, you know, engaging elements there, um, and interactive elements there. So that's something that we were fine tuning right now and kind of just experimenting with as we kind of built the foundation.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I was a reality TV fan. I still am guilty. You know, it's true. Everyone on my team knows it and my friends. And I think it's just this idea of being part of an experience that someone else is going through. And, you know, now with reality TV, there's the post show and there's sort of A lot of interaction with folks online, of course, with all the American Idol stuff, there's this voting component. I think people just want to be part of unique experiences that maybe are happening somewhere else besides where they are at the present moment, right? I think that's what it comes down to. And it's just going to continue. That trend is definitely unstoppable. Another part of this which you guys are doing and you talked about is this decentralized prediction market. concept. I'm curious, like, how important that is in your mind to real-time engagement and how tools like this could impact other industries, like sports, for example. How are you thinking about prediction markets overall?

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Casey Groom: We're thinking about it in more of a fun way. So we want this to be a fun experience and not a gambling experience. There may be gambling components involved where there's actually like winning and losing of the SPX token or different tokens that you are betting on. But this is not the end all be all of the platform. We don't see ourselves as a gambling platform. We see ourselves, you know, an entertainment and live streaming platform. And then there's various features underneath that to kind of make that up. So with the prediction market, right now, it's just a fun feature to create, you know, this entertainment value amongst the users. The streamer themselves actually don't even need to be part of that uh experience per se because it is a permissionless system so I can create a prediction or contest on your stream whether you are whether you know about it or not and that's kind of like one of the interesting aspects of the community themselves can rally to create something and bet on something if they just want to do that on that stream. So it could take esports to a whole new level. And esport is one of our target markets going into 2025 that we want to start expanding on and building upon, because it kind of naturally fits with, obviously, live streaming and the gaming market and, of course, predictions. But we, you know, our market on that side is micro betting. And we also Our bets are happening like hundreds to thousands of bets at any given time across the stream. So it's not like Polly Market, for instance, where it's one large hundred million dollar bet on who's going to be the next president. And it takes several months to complete the bet, complete that contest. So we're doing this like the long tail of the prediction market.

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Josh Kriger: So yeah, that totally makes sense for me. And clearly this type of engagement is something people want. You guys recently, I believe the stat is made up over 20% of Godzilla's off the grid streams globally. So that's a significant amount of folks that sort of want this deeper level of engagement. Congrats on that achievement. What does this milestone tell you about the changing dynamics in terms of gaming and live streaming?

Casey Groom: I mean, this is huge for us. And this happened only one month after we launched our V1. It tells us exactly what we were hypothesizing this whole year on. As we're talking to streamers and content creators throughout the year at TwitchCon and various other events, There's a big disconnect between when you're streaming on Twitch, for instance, or other platforms, how many followers you have and how many viewers you have at any given time per stream. Right now, it's like 1 in 10, 1 in 20, 1 in 100, depending on who you are as a streamer. So you can have 100,000 followers on Twitch and end up with 10 viewers watching your stream. And that's not going to pay the bills for you as a streamer who might be streaming, you know, three, five, eight hours a day or 10 hours a day.

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Josh Kriger: And you have to make sure that's not going to cover Taco Bell.

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Casey Groom: No, not at all. In order to keep your partner status or your affiliate status on Twitch and other platforms, you need to make a certain number of streams per day, per hour, and keep a certain number of viewers on your stream on average. And so it's kind of like a grind for them. And we want to change the game where At least for now, we're coveting towards more of the micro streamer niche. So not anyone in the, you know, the, I would say, quote unquote, tier one streamers that have, you know, 1000 plus viewers per stream. Below that, we're kind of like targeting them to work with us. We're paying them immediately, so there's immediate payouts. You stream the game, you get paid. We're developing a lot more solutions to funnel traffic and viewers to you as a content creator, so you can build your reputation as a new streamer or a streamer themselves, have more viewers and more engagement, things like that. So there's a lot that we're doing to level up the playing field for these micro streamers community right now.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's great. And, you know, I think as we progress with the demand for gaming in the esports industry, micro streaming is just going to get bigger. Right. We know that, you know, teens today spend a lot more time, you know, on their phones and, you know, playing games than ever before. And there's no stopping this trend. So it's going to be important to sort of figure out how to make a micro economy around this. It's just a reality. So I guess to that point, you know, your product is available globally. What's been the sort of geographic landscape of your users at this point, and how do you look at different markets and the impact this can make, for example, in the Philippines or Vietnam versus, you know, some country in Europe where gamers are? How do you look at those dynamics?

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Casey Groom: Right now, yeah, our market The target, well, are a lot of our streamer base and viewer base. So we have multiple different types of users in our platform that we consider at different roles. There's a streamer, there's a viewer and user of the platform, and then there's like a game developer or a game themselves. On the streamer side, we have a little less than 500 to date streamers who actively stream on Soulbound and create content and take up these bounties. Those are kind of like a solid mix between the US, Europe, LATAM, and Southeast Asia. We have a large community of viewers from Southeast Asia, Philippines specifically, and there's a few coming up on the India side, Indonesia, and we've been really growing our LATAM community over Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia over the last few months. So our streamers are kind of like all over the place right now, which is great because we have a lot of different content and we can service different streamers from different communities and regions. We have a few different KOLs that we work with in Turkey. So we've been onboarding a lot of streamers from the Turkey region right now as well, who make up a massive game content creator base, especially for kick. So we've been kind of like taking a chunk of that and activating them recently. But for on the streaming side, we started to build out tools specifically for streaming with your phone on the mobile, because a lot of the these new streamers that are so we're starting to spawn gamers who have wanted to dabble in streaming but didn't know how to get activated and it was kind of a daunting process to become a streamer on twitch or kick and start to you know have fun with it create a user base you know you need to stream so many hours and it was kind of like a job on those platforms and we're trying to make it more fun and easygoing and that's something that we've been just working on in terms of just Just making it simple to stream on Soulbound immediately, as well as from your phone itself, you know, you'll be able to stream from Soulbound TV from your phone and stream mobile games as well because a lot of the users that we have coming from, you know, Southeast Asia, they actually don't have a computer or they don't have, let's say, PS5 so they can actually run some of the games that we are streaming for like off the grid you need it's a pretty heavy-duty game and you need a pretty expensive rig to actually stream that and so it actually took a while to find a lot of these streamers to get them activated and be able to capable with enough computer to stream certain certain games that are pretty pretty heavy

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, that makes sense and impressive what you guys have built. Let's turn our attention for a second to Telegram because that's been sort of the rising star in this overall engagement era of Web3. We were both at the Tan ecosystem event in Dubai not that long ago, maybe about a month back. What are your thoughts on why Telegram has been so effective recently in terms of community building? And how are you thinking about Telegram and how it relates to your core product?

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Casey Groom: Telegram makes it super simple to get activated as a user in whatever app you're playing around with. So if you're in Mina, for instance, you know, everyone, you know, there's a billion users on Telegram right now. And it's just, you know, the onboarding experience is super simple, you know, activate the bot, you jump into the game, whether that's a tap and earn game, it could be more of a fully flushed out experience across, you know, for whatever, you know, app is building on Telegram, it's just an easy way to really get activated. And be an engaged participant on that app specifically for whatever you're looking to do, whether it's like some kind of DeFi product or, you know, kind of like a simplified, you know, hamster game, right? It just makes it super simple. And the way that we look at that is we're building out our Telegram app right now. It's a completely integrated experience with Soulbound, and we're able to feature any live stream that we want to push towards our Telegram users in the user base. And for us, the way we see Telegram, it's our viral coefficient to get viewers up for our streamers. So when we're onboarding streamers, you know, one of our pitch to them is we're going to be able to start once we release this, we're going to be able to send you, you know, tens of thousands of viewers on your stream at any given time, because we're activating all these Telegram users. And so these Telegram app users are going to experience us in a more of a watch and earn mechanism, plus the prediction market and betting mechanism. So bet on your stream, create and chat in your stream, create engagement on your stream. And they're all going to be doing it from various countries around the world just through their Telegram app experience on their mobile phone. And the streamer can just be creating content all day long, kind of just like creating that engagement and earning from their predictions, anyone betting on them. And obviously, they get to tap into a new community of users.

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Josh Kriger: That's amazing. It makes perfect sense. I had a sense you're probably going down that path. I mean, it's the obvious next step with engagement is to sort of meet folks where they are. And Telegram has definitely been proven to be a go-to spot, thanks to Hamster Combat and all the buzz that's created since then. On that point, we talked a little bit about the demographics of your users. I was just curious about games. Are there certain styles of games that are more popular for streaming that you noticed or any kind of up and coming styles of games that you see sort of trending? Yeah.

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Casey Groom: Always, and still is the case today, multiplayer games are our bread and butter that we've been working with. Those are also just so happen to be the games that are paying us money to promote on Soulbound TV. So that makes it a little bit easier because it's multiplayer. Generally, first-person shooters, third-person shooters have been big with us. And a lot of these like new, pixelated style side scroller games, for instance, Raven Quest has been very big. So you go now to the platform and you'll see half the streamers streaming Raven Quest. And so that's actually been an interesting and fun game to watch people play. And Shatterline is, as I mentioned, one of the games that we're running campaigns with currently. Over the weekend, we just hit 60, 60 to 70% of all streams for Shadowline were actually soulbound streamers and content creators. So, you know, multiplayer third person, first person shooters are still kind of like the, the, the big audience for, for that. But I think over time you'll see, you know, various other games come up, come across our desk to, you know, start activations with.

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Josh Kriger: Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. I figured those are the bread and butter, of course, but there are some other sorts of games that are picking up more popularity as well. So cool to get a sense of that. You've covered a lot of your strategy for building out Soulbound and wondering if there's any other upcoming features that you haven't mentioned yet that you're excited about. And then just more broadly, what's sort of exciting to you about the future of live streaming?

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Casey Groom: So yeah, I mean, this is a great question. Live Streaming is where we're kicking things off with, and we see ourselves becoming more like a decentralized broadcasting network. And that's something that we're going to be building more into by the end of 2025 and 2026, as you would build this network television station. What does that compose of? have exclusive rights for syndicated content and maybe launch different movies and series on there as, you know, maybe people like short dramas is becoming like a bigger thing in the world. And that's now a billion dollar market. Well, you know, if we have, you know, millions and millions of users watching content on Soulbound TV, this is now the perfect engine for any new content creator who has maybe like a short film or a new drama that they want to test out or tap into different markets, they can now potentially just launch it straight on Soulbound and maybe do giveaways or rewards or incentivize engagement or their viewers across Soulbound to participate in whatever they're building AI created shows could be the next kind of interesting thing. Just to kind of tap on onto that, we started working with a company called Core Protocol. You might know them. If not, I can introduce you. It's a fellow named Inder. He's in Dubai, and they're creating a programmable IP chain. And so we are starting to build out some interactive features for the music space specifically right now. And we'll do marketing events next year with Imogen Heap as an example. She will live stream on Soulbound TV, remixing a song live, and then we're gonna be activating the tools for viewers to vote on which beat that they want to have in this new remix, for example. Once that remix is complete, if you participated in that remix creation, then your information and everything gets sent over automatically to Core Protocol. And then you essentially, as a user, get written into that contract as being a participant in the creation of that remix. So when there's royalty distributions, things like that, you get to participate in this. And whatever Core Protocol or Story Protocol, a very similar company, is going to do on that front, we're going to be building tools to support a lot of this and center ourselves in the We're the point of interaction where a programmable IP chain, they need kind of like distribution point. And so we want to be like that next distribution point for the next gen of the world.

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Josh Kriger: Wow. So, um, not an ambitious roadmap at all. No, just kidding. Very, very cool. And yeah, we know the core protocol guys. We're going to do some content with them and also, um, very familiar with what the story protocol team is doing. And it's very cool stuff. And I do think, uh, programmable IP is, is the trend, uh, to watch, um, in 2025 and beyond, not just from a web three perspective, just from a pure IP. creation perspective, I think there's a lot of value in terms of sort of, um, giving, uh, communities more opportunities to co-create IP with, with, uh, in a decentralized manner. So something to look out for and definitely some pioneering stuff you're doing, Casey, really enjoyed this chat and now want to get to know you a little bit better as well. It's time for our next segment, Edge Quick Hitters.

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Casey Groom: Super awesome. Thank you. I enjoyed it as well.

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Josh Kriger: All right, well, you forced streamers to be put on the spot, and everyone gets to watch their moves. So I think you can handle a little bit of edge quick hitters, which is a fun, quick way to get to know you a little better. There's going to be 10 questions. We're looking for just a short, single-word or few-word response. But feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready? I don't know. All right, that's an honest answer. We'll find out. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

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Casey Groom: I'm thinking it was these really cool pens. You go to the bookstore and you find these really nice pens in a Japanese bookstore.

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Josh Kriger: Nice. All right. Cool. Going back to the basics. What's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

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Casey Groom: Selling? Magic, the gathering cards.

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Josh Kriger: Nice. That's not the first time this has come up. What is the most recent thing you purchased? A little easier. The most? New AirPods. All right, cool. Just the Apple ones or some other brand?

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Casey Groom: Apple, yeah, the Apple 2, Apple 2 Pro. I lost my case on the flight over from Dubai here, so I can't charge my current ones.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah. It happened to me as well. Oh, I hope those work out for you. What is the most recent thing you sold?

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Casey Groom: What have I sold? I do sell some things on Greld. I'm kind of into fashion a little bit. And I know that I've been getting hit up to sell some of my items that I've not sold. But I can't remember the last thing I've sold. I don't know if I'm big.

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Josh Kriger: Some kicks or a shirt or jacket or something like that.

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Casey Groom: They're typically like a Rick Owen shirt or like Boris jeans. They're like very expensive jeans. I sold a couple of those bears recently.

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Josh Kriger: All right. I'll have to check those out. I don't know.

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Casey Groom: It's a little on the avant-garde side of fashion.

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Josh Kriger: All right, cool. Well, you're Italian, right? No. No? No.

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Casey Groom: What's your background? I mix my, I come from, I'm a little bit of a mutt, but Spanish, Asian, and white. Okay, I don't know why I thought you were Italian but um, no worry that some people might think I'm persian or I mean it's It's the yeah, it's an exotic Exotic look exotic look exotic fashion.

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Josh Kriger: Got it What is your most prized possession?

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Casey Groom: Uh, i'm gonna say my My It sounds stupid, but I mean, I can't live without my MacBook Air. So it goes everywhere with me. And I'd say that and my moka pot for coffee. That's what I bring with me everywhere. Nice. I'm a minimalist. So that's kind of the only thing I have.

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Josh Kriger: Casey's not kidding, though. Like, we were at the TUN conference and the MacBook Air was there with him the whole time. So I know you guys are BFFs. So Casey, next question. If you could change, I'm sorry, if you could buy anything in the world, digital physical service experience that's currently for sale, what would it be?

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Casey Groom: Mmm, that's crazy and unique or just what interests me as a Either whatever whatever comes to mind my friend Seaside Mediterranean Villa with a vineyard in the back and grow some, you know, have a natural wine farm

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Josh Kriger: There you go. Got to make some wine that doesn't provide a headache after, right? That's the key. Make it keto and I'll be one of your customers too. All right, so next question. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?

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Casey Groom: You know, I feel like there was a loss of you know, when we were growing up, we had internet, no internet to internet. And you kind of got the best of both worlds of life kind of growing up without being tied to your computer or phone or iPad. And so whatever personality trait that came from that, maybe kind of like being happy both with and without digital and you know, that experience. Yeah. That could be, that could be a nice one to have just maybe as not a personality trait, but an experience to have.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, like the lack of it's almost the lack of freaking out when you don't have Wi-Fi. Yeah.

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Casey Groom: Yeah. And it's actually kind of like a nice, beautiful thing. Beautiful experience when you don't have it.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah. There's going to be a word for that. If there isn't already, I think there should be a term for this. Yes. I like it. And if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?

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Casey Groom: I'm actually very reserved, and I find that it's a fault for me. And so I would not bestow that upon anybody. So I think the crazier, the more free expression is better, because I lack that, I think. I like to see it. I like when I see it in people. And I'm actually envious when I come across someone who's so free in their emotions and personality.

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Josh Kriger: Well, I think you're moving in the right direction, my friend. You've made for a great guest on this show and lots of entertaining conversations. So I think you're already in the process of eliminating that trait.

Casey Groom: I'm going to just jump on TV and, you know, Start getting crazy.

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Josh Kriger: There you go. Well, first edge of NFT and then who knows what's next. What did you do just before joining us on the podcast?

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Casey Groom: I got some sun outside. Nice. Quick five minutes just to get some color.

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Josh Kriger: Better than no minutes. And what are you going to do next after the podcast?

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Casey Groom: Pilates in an hour.

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Josh Kriger: All right, so there is actually a Reformer Pilates class at my gym that they're offering me a free class. I have no excuse for not taking it other than I'm petrified.

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Casey Groom: Actually, I won a contest this weekend at the Magic Eden house where there's a new startup that built an aura ring, a competitive aura ring. They did a plank contest, so I was the last one standing at that plank. How many minutes was that? That ended up being four minutes, but I think I could have easily gone 20 minutes. So, but at four minutes, everyone else kind of passed out and I was like, Oh, okay. I guess I'll, I guess this is it. But, um, so yeah, Pilates is, you know, it actually paid off.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's for sure. Um, very cool. All right. So we like to, uh, end with a bonus question and usually one that sort of makes sense for our guests and what comes to mind here is what was the first game that got you hooked on playing and watching with your friends?

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Casey Groom: Two! There's two games, but Unreal Tournament is one, and Soulcalibur was the other one.

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Josh Kriger: Soulcalibur, what's that one all about?

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Casey Groom: It's like a 2D fighter, 2D, 2.5D fighter, back around 2001 or so. Think of it as like Street Fighter, but you know. different characters, different weapons, and religiously.

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Josh Kriger: Love those games. I was addicted to Mortal Kombat. In fact, I was at the Venice sort of holiday lighting festival this weekend, and they had a Mortal Kombat game. And I was playing, and then, you know, no one wanted to play against me anymore. I guess I was still pretty good. It came back to me. So I had, there was like, three or four people in line and then yeah, no one wanted to play. It kind of took the fun away.

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Casey Groom: So prediction, that's where the prediction mark comes in.

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Josh Kriger: It would not, no one would have predicted I would have been, that's for sure. So Yeah, we'll have to play some Mortal Kombat on Soulbound and see what happens. But this has been a lot of fun. We have one last segment before we wrap today, which is a shout out where we give you an opportunity to shout out someone in your orbit that's been a meaningful part of your journey in some way and maybe doesn't get as much spotlight attention.

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Casey Groom: Um, you know, a friend of mine, Manana, she's been instrumental in organizing and helping us, you know, complete our new round of fundraising. So shout out to Manana. She has a family office fund and Pasquale who kind of introduced us together and he's, you know, a hardworking individual. We met in Istanbul and became good friends. And so I want to shout out to him for kind of like the introduction for us.

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Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Pasquale for sure. Really cool guy building some really exciting stuff at the forefront of media tech and AI. Look for more information about what we're cooking up soon. And thanks for playing with us today. And I guess just to close things out, where can listeners go to learn more about you? Maybe follow you on Axe and dive down the rabbit hole of what Soulbound is all about.

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Casey Groom: Sure. So soulbound.gg is our website. Soulbound underscore GG is our Twitter. I go by Starfucker and there's, you know, various variations of that name you could find me under, but Starfucker and Telegram and Twitter. So, all right.

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Josh Kriger: Well, that's great. So we've reached the outer limit at the edge of NFT for today. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this Starship. So invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers. They'll make this journey all so much better. Hal, if you're among the hundreds of thousands of folks following us on Spotify or iTunes or iHeartRadio, or watching on Myco or YouTube, hit the subscribe button, rate us and say something awesome. Also, please pass this episode on to a friend or two that would get something out of it. And just a reminder to check out myco.io, that's M-Y-C-O.io, where you can watch and earn your time and attention. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great Web3 content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us today. 

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