Hello, hello. We're going to give it a couple minutes just to let this space populate, but thank you so much to everyone who's here early. Appreciate you.
All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. I am going to retweet this space and get it on out there for everyone.
Can I get a soundtrack from Token Tales?
All right. Cool. Just retweeted the space.
Glad to have you here. Where are you tuning in from or where are you speaking from this time?
This time from Lithuania.
Okay. So you're back home for now.
Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself to get us started actually?
Yeah, sure. So I'm a founder of token tales. I'm both leading technical team and the vision of token tales to save all the cats in the world.
All the cats in the world. It's no big deal.
Just a little, just a little thing.
Well, that's great. Well, I am Lindsay Poss.
I am a growth marketing manager at the Stellar Development Foundation.
So I get to spend a lot of my days working with ecosystem projects like Token Tales, which is really, really fun.
And today we're going to dive in a little bit into what Token Tales is, how it's saving cats, and how you can be involved if you'd like.
All right, so just to kick us off, can you first, I would love for you to say your name to everyone because I can't say it.
Yeah, so my full name is Gigumontas, but for simplicity, you can call me Gigis.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
And I am like actually truly beyond excited to talk about this project because I think that you guys are just doing really, really fun and really, really cool stuff in Defi and in blockchain in general.
So that's going to be so good.
So let's just kick it off with a quick little kind of overview of what token tales is, what the story is behind it, what led you to create it.
And yeah, what's going on with it.
So tell us about token tales.
Yeah, so I had one cat and I wanted to adopt another cat, second cat.
I checked a lot of shelters and I solved a huge problem that the conditions are really bad.
We failed to raise funds.
I eventually adopted a second cat called Feta, but basically it inspired me to start helping cats and they wanted to find a way and how to do so.
And I just couldn't adopt them all because first, like in the European Union alone, around 70 million street cats.
So I found a problem that why it happened and how it happened.
So population is growing.
And we have 120 million cat lovers.
And we have 70 million stray cats out of total, 130 million cats in the European Union.
So the idea behind that, that majority of cat lovers are affected by bystander effect.
It means that we understand the problem, we're going to help them.
We love cats, but we fail to connect with them.
And that's where we want to help them.
We want to create that connection with real cats in the shoulder that seeks help and
We saw that the cat market is really huge, but we don't have that much donations towards cats.
So engagement is a part where shelters are lacking.
Do you want to fill that hole, combine all the shelters, and let them into token tails?
Yeah, and tell me about building out that link because Token Tales is as of right now a telegram game and it's on a couple of different platforms as well. I know I'm saying Telegram because I played on Telegram.
But you're able to build a link kind of between gaming and GameFi and actually connecting with real world shelters.
So walk through how that works and how people can actually play games to help cats.
Yeah, so I'll start off from shelters perspective first.
So basically, we're right now onboarding one shelter per country and allowing them to tokenize the cats.
And basically, these cats can be adopted in our game across different platforms on both telegram, on browsing right now.
We are working also on a native app for Android and Apple devices.
So we have a shelter, distributed space, to actually get into, get from a little
few scats and help, and basically help them to be saved.
Yeah, and so that's from the shelter side.
And then tell me about from the player side.
Yeah, so like initially from the player side, we struggled with onboarding.
So we figured out on the way and how to make it as simple as possible by implementing as we call it feedwall.
So user needs to feed his cat because like if cat is hungry, cat won't respond to commands, right?
So we have created a button feed after cat is fed.
He can start playing, get into various kind of spaces in token tales, including virtual cat shelter.
And in virtual cat shelter, you can get into actual space of the shelter, what is a presentation, virtual representation of the shelter cats.
So you can feel the vibe of that shelter, including like scratch boxes, cats running around, various kinds of tokenized cats.
And if you own that NFD cat, you can actually play the widest kinds of games.
We have catbassers and poor quests right now, but we're working on more.
And basically, by owning an NFD cat,
the owner is eligible for e-drops, eligible to actually play these games and get elevated rewards ratio.
Gotcha. And can you walk me through the actual gameplay experience?
So all this stuff is connected and I get all of that. But like, I've played the actual game, but for people who haven't, what is the actual game like?
Yeah, yeah. So it's pretty simple. As we don't want it to create like a game experience, you want to have something quite simple.
but engaging and we have created catbusters.
So basically it's a simple game in which you need to collect coins.
And we're introducing more and more things that creates a vibe in the game,
including spawning enemies, if you collect too many coins,
switching gravity so that if you play for too long,
the gravity will switch, making you to actually try harder.
And also we have created our second game, BurQuest, which is also in scope of Logan Tales, to dive into adventures to find a treasure.
So it's an automatically generated map, which is different every time you play, where a key will be hidden somewhere in the map.
You'll need to find it, going and facing all the enemies in the map.
And once you'll find the key, you also need to find a treasure. Open it and you'll get coins based on the duration you'll endure.
Yeah, I will say too, again, I'm someone who actually has played the game, and it's really fun.
And as one of my co-workers said, she said, I love eating that little cat around.
It's really fun and really silly.
And then I, I, like, truly have a good time playing it.
And I like getting all the little notifications in Telegram that remind me to play.
And I'm like, oh, I should take a break in my token tales.
Yeah, you want to also, like, personalize this...
As we are right now embedding AI aspect into token tails.
Right now we have implemented AI Fisher so that if you own an AI plugin for your cat,
it will appear under your comment section on Twitter and Rose, you'll forget to feed it.
But we also want to create more capabilities for these cats, so you'll be able to chat with them.
You'll be able to even mention them on Twitter and we'll respond to your comments, things like that.
As we want to gamify outside of the game itself, if you are like owner of an FDCAT.
Yeah, I remember you saying this because I had joked about turning.
I have a cat and a dog and my cat is very much, she's such a princess.
The dog is like the sweetest, she's the sweetest girl and the cat is just like an angry little princess.
But we had joked about that because I had said, I know my cat would roast the shit at me.
I turned it into an AI that was able to reply on Twitter.
Lady Tuna will one day be yelling at me in the comments, I'm sure.
But I want to dive in a little bit to kind of how you built out this game.
is specifically from the branding side. And we, you know that I'm a marketing person. And
one of my absolute favorite things about token tales and what genuinely excites me a lot about
it is just the look and feel of the game and the look and feel of everything that you're building.
So how were you, I mean, it's cats on the internet. So it seems like this would kind of be an
obvious way to build a brand. But how were you able to create such a fun and expressive brand in
what you do that's still kind of married to this idea of social impact?
Yeah, so we are actually doing a lot of surveys and checked out their audience and the amount of the nations from beach type of people are coming.
So we are focusing women mostly.
Yeah, as we saw that like majority of the nations are made, why women?
And these colors are adjusted also towards them more.
But on top of that, to create mass exposure,
we want to build our own network to reach people.
There's a lot of things going where you don't see.
We have working on dozens of cat profiles building them,
creating memes all around that, etc.
To create awareness about token deals around them.
It's a good way on how to connect with people because we want to see cool stuff, fun stuff,
because like cats are fun.
It's really like engaging to see that kind of game to be tied with memes and we also like to be like community driven.
For example, each shelter has from 400 to 6,000 community members, 2,000 on average.
and we want to onboard 2,000 shelters in the European Union alone.
It's just around like 2 million community members coming only from these shelters.
As besides this onboarding of ambassador shelters,
we will allow these ambassador shelters to onboard more shelters on their behalf.
as we have this kind of partnership,
as it will allow us to scale, to reach the high potential
and save a lot of cats in our long way.
Yeah, hopefully it will be able to hit like a thousand safe cats this year,
but let's see what future holds.
Well, I mean, yeah, lofty goals are always good.
And it's really smart that you did kind of a survey figured out who your main supporters
were and geared your brand towards that.
I think that that's part of definitely the step in product market fit.
Can you walk me through a little bit the sort of play-to-earn mechanism and how that does support the shelters?
I know you did that a little bit in the beginning, but I want to make sure for the people that I've jumped on a little later that we go through that again just to really drive home how playing this helps cats.
Yeah, so a start of how these cats are linked and how the like a blockchain part works.
So we are creating wallets for these shelters and after a purchase of an FTCAT funds go straight to these wallets of these shelters.
So we'll be able to min-draw and actually help these cats to be treated, cover medical costs, also buy toys, etc., things like that.
But on top of that, we are creating initiatives around token tails where people could earn by owning these NFD CATs.
As the actual aid drop amount will be based on the
Two factors, how much we have played, how much coins we earned in the game, how much cats we have actually owned right now,
and also how many cats we helped.
So it's based on these two factors.
And these are kind of people on one side gamers who likes to play a lot and on our side.
people of these shelters, community members of shelters,
we just want to donate and vibe with a cat,
So from these two things come the rewards
for the players and community members of Tolkien Tales.
Yeah, we should talk through actually a bit of the tokenomics behind this and what you have going on with the token.
So walk me through where you're at in development of your tokenomics and of launch and all of that.
I know we may have some big things coming.
We did like a huge analysis over tokenomics.
And what we wanted to do with our token is to basically let the token to represent the health
and the value of token deals.
We don't want it to start like as over-related asset as many projects do.
And it results in huge selling pressure, which we cannot hold because we started like insane volations.
And it just doesn't work with this type of community-driven projects.
They are trying to do so. But the majority of firms are failing because they are trying to like raise too much, started high valuation.
distribute too much tokens and we can control the token after that so what we are doing instead
we're starting with flow fdv and the flow market cap and we're going to distribute a portion of our
revenue straight into token buyback so token will gain value towards the volume it will generate
so it will be directly tied with if a project value that it generates and on top of that like
like various kind of initiatives will be hosted around tokens so that users will be able to stick their
own cats that they own in the game and craft tokens by using them so like and this elevated
token rewards actually is going to impact on how much this nfti cat is going to yield so it will be
based on two factors the price of nfti and the
multiplier which CAD has.
So yeah, you have a lot of different mechanisms built into there, which is great.
And I like that you're thinking about long term and not just kind of quick schemes, which I want to use to kind of jump into our next topic here, our next point of conversation, which is,
There's obviously been a huge narrative around meme coins, alt coins, and these kinds of projects lately.
And it can be really difficult, I think, to continue having faith in the space in general in doing things for good and in building for the future, especially as, I mean, there's just news story after news story after news story.
You have taken a different approach, and I love this because it matches so well with kind of the ideals of the stellar network in general, just that, you know, this isn't simply a mean coin or simply a game.
It actually has a real world impact tied to it.
So what do you think about kind of the current narrative that we have in crypto around meme coins and how do we change that?
Yeah, so instead of outcoin season, we had memecoin season.
I believe that we're going to have out-coin season still in the runway.
But the thing is that mean coins are not going to last.
I mean, majority of them are failing.
like behind that is we have no value as beyond the hype for sure but it's really important
in this climate to build actually what users want what we love but we would like to use on
daily basis or if it's something related to defy in that case it must create and have huge
potential otherwise it will flop so
The most important factor right now to be seen, to be known, and to build something that creates a real world value.
Because we have too many projects right now, we're trying to compete with each other in same categories.
And we end up spending too much in marketing and failing, dropping in terms of value, both token and well project value if it's incorporated.
But even like right now, majority of these mean points are not incorporated and not disclosing their identities.
So like people must be really be aware of if you want to like do anything with them or not.
And it have taken like a completely different approach.
We got like bootstrapped till now and like including like a seller community fund helped us a lot with that.
Fun that gave us an award which we appreciate a lot.
and it allowed us to be bootstrapped to build what we have built right now,
to build what makes real world impact.
Yeah, which is really great. And we can dive a little bit more to your process of the Stellar Community Fund because I was going to ask you anyway about some of the bigger partnerships you've had, whether it's been Microsoft or Startups or Scale Network and of course SCF. But these collaborations, how have you used them to continue to build token tails? And what has a successful collaboration looked like for you with these major partners?
Yeah, so every partner that we had did we part to Tolkien Tales to make it better.
For example, we just finished a game tech accelerator, which was funded by European Union Fund.
And we were coached by such mentors from like a vault of tanks, like club penguins, if you know that game.
Basically, it gave us a lot of good tips on how to build a better game.
And we also participated in various kind of accelerators which helped us in terms of business
We have also received like infrastructure, full coverage in terms of services, in terms of
all the hosting services that we had.
So our all infrastructure is running for free right now, basically.
completely by Microsoft for startups, MongoDB for startups and open AI for startups.
And on top of that, a lot of like other chains as scale also helped us in some cases.
For example, we covered fully gas fees for us.
So we have been able to track the activity that is happening in conchain.
So that was really beneficial.
That's really cool. And you've talked a lot about kind of being an entrepreneur and building your own company and doing this on your own channels. But what do you, what has been the thing that's kind of kept you going throughout all of this? I know you mentioned obviously being highly motivated by the cat that you adopted and obviously being mission aligned with your project is huge. And also, you know, you're...
done clearly a very good job of finding incredible opportunities that allow you to keep building,
even when it's kind of been maybe a little tough or, you know, getting the right things covered is
important. But what has been your main motivation as a founder to keep going?
Basically, the main motivation is that I see Straycasts daily. So until I won't see them,
You really are so aligned with the cats.
I want to ask you just some final questions about kind of longer-term goals for the project.
And I know you've mentioned, you've mentioned, obviously, your longest-term goal is no stray cats, which is great.
What do you see for kind of, and you've mentioned, you know, some of the gameplay features that you're, you're implementing and all of that.
What are your goals in terms of like you've mentioned maybe a mobile app or some other other developments that are going to take token tails a little further?
But walk me through kind of your planned roadmap for the next couple years.
Yeah, for the next couple of years, from a cat saving perspective, once we'll scale across Europe, we'll scale worldwide.
But first, we want to educate some countries in Europe, for example, Turkey, Cyprus, because the thing is that we normalize three cats, and that's a bad thing, because we have like parasites, we have infections.
They're dying out of diseases and that's a bad thing because some people like normalized that and it's a critical stage right now.
and we want to scale worldwide, as I mentioned.
And in terms of gaming perspective,
we want to have not just like a mobile app,
we want to have like released on Xbox,
we want to release on Steam at the Game Store,
and to create and release 3D game.
As we already worked on how to transition from 2D to 3D,
and we have found like AI driven way on how to do so,
And we have a lot of game design documents, which we won't disclose yet about what are the following stages in terms of game development that we're going to follow.
Because to create a better connection with a cat, 3D might help a lot.
But before that, we want to create MMO experience because by the mentor of Pudgee Puget
it was said that it's a must.
If you want to create a connection, you must have like the solutionization perspective of your game.
For example, you own an NFT cat, right?
I own an NFT cat and we'll be able to go to some place and wipe together in our token tails virtual world.
So that's a cool thing to do and we're going to do so.
That's great. You are so mission aligned. For other people who are building out there with social
impact at the heart of what they do, what advice do you have for them? Especially, this is kind of
honestly a selfish question because the vibes have been bad lately in crypto. And this is a project
where vibes are very much not bad. And so I'm just wondering, you know, kind of what advice you have
for people who are trying to build and really think about how to help.
causes that they love and keep their head up above water as we deal with the markets.
Yeah. Actually, we collapsed with two projects who does social good as well. One of them is Carbify.
We are basically half NFTs and if you buy them, we plant a tree.
So that's a cool thing to do.
And we collapsed for another project as well,
which is actually saving dogs.
So it's a lines for omission.
So you might be able to get into a better relationship with them
and create something together in the future.
Oh, that's really wonderful.
So find the good people is your advice.
Yeah, we have some good people actually in Vapri narrative.
Yeah, but like you must be aware and do the diligence if you want to do something with a project which is saying that they are doing so.
But sometimes actually you check it out, you check all the details and we are not.
So it's certainly important to go through everything, do investigation and do actions only after that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Where can people find you, follow you, play token tales?
I need you to plug everything.
Yeah, so actually you can just DM to our Twitter account.
You can go on our Discord, Telegram.
You can actually connect with me directly on Twitter or LinkedIn.
So feel free to reach me out.
We are open for co-marketing.
We're open with all the ideas.
We're going to create a board for our community members.
We'll be able to come off with ideas on their own.
And we're going to work on the most voted ones.
Stay tuned and check token tales news as we're going to announce it and you'll be able to be part of token deals.
And I actually really do highly recommend checking out the project.
Not only is the gameplay fun, but like I said, the branding is super on point.
And it, it like actually will be a thing that makes you happy in your day.
When I was preparing for this space yesterday, I had sent the website to a colleague.
And she immediately was like, oh my gosh, this is so cute and fun.
So it really is something that.
you can use to kind of cheer yourself up.
So thank you so much for sharing that and sharing your story.
And you've been super active on Twitter lately too,
talking about what you have going on,
which has been fun to see.
Yeah, we'll be going to see more and more things coming soon.
Yeah, yeah, you have a lot in the roadmap and a lot going on.
So I'm excited to see it all.
Thank you so, so much for joining me today.
And we will catch you soon, hopefully.