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GRAILED CHAT
Recorded: July 10, 2025 Duration: 1:00:48Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent Grail Chat, the Token Gators team discussed the exciting developments in the crypto space, including Bitcoin's all-time high, the resurgence of interest from legacy media in blockchain, and the importance of community-driven narratives in shaping the future of digital assets.
Full Transcription
The End I'm sorry. Thank you. The The End I'm sorry. The The End Oh, my God. The Thank you. The End Thank you. The Thank you. The End The GMGM
GMGM
And welcome to Grail Chat.
My name is John Carl. It's amazing to see
so many communities in the audience. I see you all.
Special shout out to the Token Gators. What a reminder
of how strong our OG communities are. Year
after year, still here, showing up.
I look forward to this space because of all the PFPs I see out there hanging out and listening
in the audience.
Thank you for rolling up to listen, hanging out, and supporting Grail Chat.
Without you, these shows truly wouldn't be possible.
And if this is your first time joining us, welcome to the family. We appreciate you tuning in. This is not an alpha space, but instead
a community space. We hope Grail Chat will become a place where all communities can come
together, reflect on Web3, and learn a few things from time to time as well. So if this
is your first time joining us, welcome and buckle up.
Tonight is memorable for more than just the insane show we are about to have. But ladies
and gentlemen, I don't know if Grail Chat could have landed on a better day because
it's Bitcoin all time high day, settling over 113113,000 for one solitary Bitcoin.
What a time to be alive.
And how far we still have to go.
Because while Wall Street is finally waking up and settling into a crypto-friendly environment,
there are so many builders that remain head down and focused on the future of Web3
and prepare for the next wave of retail to enter a crypto-native digital world.
And this afternoon, Figgy and I have the pleasure of having one of those teams on with us today.
We're thrilled to have the Token Gators team on stage, led by Paper D, an artist and creative
director at DreamWork Animation. And even more importantly, a big-time Bored Ape Yacht Club community member.
Figgy, Figgy, Figgy.
First off, I know you're overseas tonight, and it's nearly midnight,
so thank you so much for still making time to be here with us.
But I want to go back, way back.
I learned about token gators in an almost cult-like fashion,
sporting a foam gator hat for my grail just to get on the mint list.
That was over two years ago, before the mint even happened.
And 10KTF rarely does mint lists.
So I knew this team was special from that day forward.
I'd love for you to take us back to those days in 2023
and let us know a little bit about the insight
of how you knew this team
was just so special and uh gm figgy gm gm what's up everybody yeah i'm over in europe um
out here until the middle of next week so doing a midnight show with you guys but uh
you know this is how the folks in europe experience Web3 anyway, so I'm just living it from every kind of time zone possible.
If I'm going to take back the story of, like,
how and why we, like, wanted to do something with Token Gators,
I'd have to start earlier in 2023.
Probably have to start 2021, maybe even 2020, probably 2021.
I mean, this crew is about as OG as it gets
when it comes to digital assets, digital ownership.
These guys are super creative.
I mean, super top secret.
Whether it's an event in Hong Kong or Paris or Singapore,
I'm always seeing this guy everywhere.
And KThings and Pay Per D,
they're always getting into a lot of trouble.
So I love just talking with those guys and seeing d they always getting into a lot of trouble so like
love just talking with those guys and seeing what they're up to um and yeah mad respect for paper d because he was like you know he's one of those guys that is just important in the space uh when
it comes to artistic contributions we've got guys like rita andremlin and Paper D. And I think folks that are able to do a little real-time call and response with their art.
And I'm talking about this is the days before AI prompting, right?
This is like something happens and then within a couple of hours or faster, you have an artistic response to that thing.
And so Paper D was always good at that.
And I think these folks also helped to do one of our very first raids,
or I guess the Grail Chat got raided by them
because Paper D was doing a bunch of other projects with the frogs.
Anyway, I've known these guys for a while,
and so when they started to talk about doing a project,
definitely wanted to see if we could help amplify that.
And just before I hand over the mic or before we move on,
I also want to give a shout out to Bad Teeth's new project.
We've got to make sure that you've got eyes on it if you haven't seen it yet. It's really cool. It's got
a lot of like telegram integration and I don't think we've seen this deep of an integration
before. I believe it's going on right now. So make sure you click on that profile and check out
what's going on there. Yeah, but look's bitcoin all-time high day and and it seems
like weirdly it doesn't seem like it's super frothy on the timeline or it's euphoric but um
you know i i am watching this pump phone ico and it's it's pretty interesting how far we've come
like it's very just clearly talked about now. I think maybe some people here remember
2017 ICOs and then ICO became a dirty word. Don't say that word. That word is a scammy word.
Now it literally says pump fund initial coin offering. It says it in bold text. I think that
just goes to show how far we've come in a regulatory environment, that people would want to be able to push literally that narrative.
And it's the same thing that I've been talking about in previous weeks where we're seeing people move away from like,
hey, we're going to do a Cayman Foundation and it's going to have a BVI entity and then there's going to be this other Cayman's thing to hold the treasure.
It's just like, okay, or we could just do it and see what happens because
like that the actual doing of it is really hard you know um i've also been like in the last week
pretty interested in this kind of like pump fun let's bonk back and forth that's been happening
and i think i just like it a lot because it feels like Bonk is just a bunch of builders.
I'd love to have them on Grill Chat at some point,
but they're always just building a bunch of stuff from the old days of the Pooper Scooper,
which is basically like you have all these random coins in your Solana wallet,
but you don't want these random coins.
They have a product called Pooper Scooper that scoops up all the random coins
and just converts it all to Bonk.
And so it's been pretty amazing to see them overtake.
I don't know if you guys have been following that, but like PumpFun pretty much dominated the Launchpad game.
And then Let's Bonk or BonkFun, whatever, just kind of came out of nowhere and took over half of their lunch.
lunch and it's like right before this ICO so um you know it's it's been a pretty pretty hectic
And it's like right before this ICO.
backdrop before even today and then today of course we dropped the news about ApeFest um
I I'm really stoked about that because to me like getting to work with ComplexCon on ApeFest
and seeing how that folds into like the strategy, it's like it really is
all about collecting to me.
I think collecting is something that is the fundamental verb of everything that it is
we do, whether it's tokens or art or whatever it is, experiences.
I think collecting is key to that.
And there was so much of the space that got me excited tonally with Daniel Arsham and
all of the hype beast, ComplexCon associated brands.
And a lot of that has gone away for something else.
And I can't even really put a finger on it, but I'm glad to see that we're getting back
to it.
I'm super hyped that the team was able to figure out a way
that we can do this partnership with ComplexCon,
because I think that's really going to be important,
getting the heartbeat back to collecting.
So yeah, man, I know I'm probably pretty delirious
because it's late over here,
but that's the backdrop for PaperD, top secret and k things token gators crew
and just a couple things that have been on my mind this week i love that thanks figgy um you know
you you always do a great job of uh giving a broad overview and there's so much going on this week
and i mean it's been insane um one thing you didn't mention are all the treasury companies. On Wall Street, it just seems like it's just a battle for who can just recruit the most capital just to buy ETH and Solana and Bitcoin. I mean, those are the big three right now that I see constantly. Just so many of these treasury companies raising billions of dollars. And it just seems like it's just getting started.
There's so much going on.
One thing that I love that you brought up is that the nature of collecting
is going to become, I think, even more prevalent and more special
as AI continues to spread and just dominate different networks.
And I think one thing that comes to mind when thinking about AI
and thinking about collecting is how important a lot of these OG projects are.
I mean, Bored Ape, Yacht Club, and we're going to talk a lot about 10KTF
we're going to talk a lot about 10 KTF and token gators,
and Token Gators.
like a lot of these lore,
a lot of the backdrop behind IP started in 2021 before kind of this,
this big moment for AI where it just started taking over the last couple
of years.
And I think a lot of the lore that set forth was allowed people,
I think,
I mean the 2021 NFT boom forth was allowed people, I think, I mean, the 2021 NFT boom
really allowed for people to gather around like this creativity, this creative culture
on the blockchain.
And I love that Yuga kind of pegged that term.
They wanted to be culture on the blockchain because I think that's exactly it.
And I think that's what's missing.
And I think that's what we'll see moving forward in years to come a lot of the culture a lot of those apps those native apps that are um that people don't even realize they're uh using the
background of the blockchain but you're seeing it already another thing you didn't mention and i
don't know if you're aware of it was robin hood coming out uh last week and
just being like you know what we're building on ethereum i mean they're they're they're creating
uh they're tokenizing um they're tokenizing stocks on arbitrum and i mean that's massive
so all of these unlocks just tokenizing everything i mean you see see, especially with the regulatory regime that's around now,
it's just going to be a lot easier to innovate. And I'm so excited to see Wall Street innovating.
But I mean, I don't think, I think we just haven't seen that overlap quite yet when it comes to the
NFT market and the culture market, if you will, because a lot of the big
money flowing in isn't retail, in my opinion. Right now, a lot of the big money is Wall Street
money. So that takes me to token gators and 10KTF, because a lot of projects in 2021 were focused on
creating these PFPs, selling them out, then trying to figure out like, oh, what are we
going to do now? And Yuga very smartly was like, well, you know, like we're going to continue to
uplift our collectors and we want to create lore and build around the builders. And I think that's
why Ape Chain and Ape has been so successful. What I about 10 ktf and token gators though is that it
wasn't just what are we going to do like we just want to sell out we're going to make money but it
was like why why it makes sense um that you loved this project and we'll love the token gators in my
opinion too is that that it's all storyline based it's lore. It's creating like this narrative.
And I know, you know, with Token Gators,
it's set in a magical swamp
where gators like reclaim their dominion.
It comes, I mean, that's like straight from a movie script.
So I'd love to start,
I'm going to throw it over to you, Paper D.
I'd love to hear a little bit more
about the Token Gator development
because it was a long time between like that, the event and
grail chat, and then the actual mint. But I imagine the there was an important aspect of the
development and around the IP around the lore. And so I'd love for you to go into like just just the the meticulousness that you guys took before launching and um
and kind of the the progression because it wasn't just like an overnight thing like it was in 2021
where it was just like let's get a pfp together as quick as possible you could tell that this was
much more thought out so i want to hand the mic over to you to talk a little bit about your project
So I want to hand the mic over to you to talk a little bit about your project.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Great.
Yeah, I've always been a big fan of alligators as animals and as characters,
and I feel like they're underutilized. my uh solid my college um uh animation thesis with a alligator character back in like 2001
and so it's it's been a big thing so like i spent a lot of time back then like
just drawing alligators and like figuring them out and uh so later on when it came to
like i was talking to you know supertop and k things about
like you know we should really do something and we were thinking like you know what what is this
space really missing and kind of going into we were all like really into the board ape lore at
that point and there on the old website there was like this little section of it uh that shows like the one of the doggos and
the a gator kind of interacting and you know i think like back then we were like oh you know
what like after the dogs we like before we knew about mutants we were like oh they're going to do
gators next that's you know obviously what's going to happen but that never happened and you know we kind of felt like it was a a thing that should happen and so we were like all right
if no one's going to do it then we're going to do it and we'll we'll make it you know great and
um so then it was really into like kind of figuring out like what we wanted to do for it and
how we were going to build a new type
of project. And like, I really enjoy coming up with like new ways to do things. And so going into
this, I knew we were going to need like a way to kind of generate these images that would allow us
to do like very specific things. So we worked with a dev ravenous who did a great
job in building us like this custom generator that we kind of spent a really long time kind
of getting right and uh making it so we could really um kind of curate the collection and
design it and see how things are coming together as we were doing it. But I'll have Supertop and Kthings joining because I'll tend to ramble on my own.
So they can come in.
GMGM, Supertop and Kthings, how are you guys doing?
Yeah, sorry.
My dad just sent me a picture of In-N-Out.
That's an easy distraction.
You got to get the animal style, baby.
I'm on an internet call.
I can't pick it up.
Can you bring it?
But my door's locked, so it's going to end up...
Let me talk to...
Okay, thanks for a second while I get this hamburger.
So where were we?
Right back.
Yeah.
So Paper D likes to draw.
He very much likes it to be perfect.
We happen to also be fairly strong sticklers for perfection ourselves so uh it probably was
going to be a long project no matter what but we we really went the extra mile here and and uh
spent as much time as anyone probably should on a nft collection but i i think it was all well worth it. I'm surprised that we did it for as long as we did
and we were still kind of able to launch
as kind of the gator project on the blockchain.
I mean, obviously there's other ones,
but as far as sort of this Yuga ecosystem,
we almost kind of came out of the box a little hot
trying to plant our flag that we were going almost uh kind of came out of the box a little hot trying to plant our flag uh
that we were going to make gators just in case um yuga still had plans to make gators they would
uh they would hopefully tell us that we are we are spinning our wheels on something that's already
happening so uh we made an announcement that that this was coming um like spring the year before it came out bring a 23
it was february 23 we were saying it's coming in a month or two um so uh but thankfully uh we ended
up having plenty of time to to make it right i think if we had launched then it would have been
would have been pretty tragic so uh the
the generator was was a godsend and a curse at the same time because it gave us an enormous amount
of control for layering and interacting with different traits and that just kind of let us
run wild and extend things over and over so we ended up with things like unique frogs for different hat traits
and different interactions so um it was all it was all definitely uh good in the end but uh
i think we clocked it in about two and a half years
but that's amazing i mean you guys that says something about that your team and uh really
in it for the r i mean i've looked uh uh mean, it seems like every Gator has such different traits.
Seems like there's a lot of storyline behind a lot of the traits too.
What inspired some of your guys' favorite traits?
I see a lot of like Bored Ape Yacht Club homages in the traits.
Yeah, we actually, we started with probably a lot more of them um we i don't know if
everybody has a count but it's a couple hundred traits that we drew to some extent maybe a sketch
maybe you know took two months drawing it and then threw it away but i know we got rid of 230 traits
so yeah uh so yeah we threw away a lot uh what What was left was all the best traits that maybe lived in the Bored Ape world.
But we were kind of looking at all of, you know, given that this kind of went on for as long as it did,
it sort of gave us more time to reflect on, you know, what is it that we're really creating here?
Is this the gator that's sitting on the dock in Bored Ape land?
Or is this, you know, its own sort of magical world? And so there's, there's, you know,
call outs to, you know, crypto punks and Azuki's and, you know,
a whole bunch of, you know,
hidden little Easter eggs of CCO properties out there that we kind of wanted
it to make it feel sort of more encompassing than, you know, a Yuga, um, you know,
derivative and more of sort of a everything to everybody kind of NFT
project. So, um, you'll see,
you'll see quite a bit from, from other collections. And then also,
you know, from an inspiration standpoint, pop culture, uh, I'm,
I'm about as much of a pop culture nut as you will find so when they said
you know let's let's pull something else out from the movies or from your favorite game or your
favorite tv shows and and so um there's a ton of references in there we kind of played uh kind of
played with that with some of our memes early on um i still don't know if anyone noticed but
uh there there is there are many references and i'm, I'm pretty sure we haven't,
we haven't really scratched the surface on a lot of them yet.
So get in there, dig around.
Yeah. There's something for everyone.
One thing that I love, uh,
grown to love is the foam hats because from the, you know,
it was years of just foam hats. It was just, we,
everyone was got their gator hats on.
But one thing that it felt like even before the mint is that,
and you just spoke to it a little bit about with the traits,
it was like an invite for everyone.
Regardless of what PFP, you had some traits of different popular collections
in your guys' traits.
But it was just like an invite to hop in and enjoy the community.
I just have to stop for a second because i just keep getting notifications i just saw that uh bitcoin hit 115 000 so we're gonna have to have
grail chat with the token gators figgy because uh apparently it's just been pumping ever since we
started the show um but uh one one thing i wanted to ask you guys, how important... I'm high too. 2,900.
Jesus. I mean, it's a great day to be in crypto.
I want to talk about that Gator foam hat, though.
Yeah, we're doing Bitcoin hats today.
You're doing Bitcoin? Yes. We need the Bitcoin Gator hats.
Special for this show. I expect that on the timeline after.
How important was the Gator foam hat uh and and like the conception
of that because it was just uh i mean it was perfect marketing and it also spoke to like it
didn't matter what pfp you had it was like you can still be having fun with the gators
yeah i mean the the foam hat kind of comes out of the lore which we're slowly starting to like reveal and um it but it's basically from uh our
amusement park that uh we'll we'll have more things to talk about that at some point uh but
yeah that was like the souvenir of that and that's kind of where that came out of and then
it felt like a really good way to kind of
be able to play with styles and put it on different things and kind of be able to show
uh support for like more than one project at once was was kind of one of the real
main things that came out of it yeah and we're living in a world of ai now so it might not
Yeah, and we're living in a world of AI now, so it might not seem obvious at the time,
but looking back on it, Paper D drew every single one of those hats by hand.
There was no computer assisting.
So when you see a random style of an NFT project that has a perfectly matched hat,
project that has a perfectly matched hat that looks like their artist drew it this is one of
it looks like their artist drew it.
paper d's uh superpowers is you can basically match any style there is so uh we were we realized
that pretty early on um just seeing him playing around with you know board ape memes early on
um and so as we got further down we had this hat this hat and wanting to engage the community. We were all Bored Apes ourselves and had Bored Ape PFPs.
We knew how sticky that was and how much support we had from the Bored Ape community.
It wasn't realistic to expect everyone to change their PFPs.
So putting a foam hat on them was something we were already doing,
just playing around with adding things to apes.
And, you know, from there, it just, you know, it was very easy to kind of invite any community that wanted to.
And, you know, I think Paper D probably regrets some of the nights that we just kind of opened it up and got, you know, 50 requests.
And he felt he felt like we did do them all.
And, you know, sure enough.
So, yeah, no AI, no ai on any of those hats no ai on any of the any of the traits nothing like we literally wouldn't
update photoshop for two years because we didn't want any ai imprints or anything on the on the
actual files themselves so uh all natural maybe maybe maybe the last NFT project to ever be done before with no AI
assistance.
I wouldn't be surprised.
One of the things I love though, let's, let's cut straight to it.
Like go to token gators.com. Just go to that damn website.
It is,
it is very similar to a lot of the stuff that vibes with me,
where you go to that site and there's not a lot of explanation.
It's just like an adventure.
If you haven't checked it out, you should really go to tokengators.com
and just see it there.
Because actually, there's a bunch of things.
Can you walk us through some of...
It feels like this is built up over time,
and anybody who knows 10KTF knows, like, that's the style, too, where it's like, okay, it's kind of like an old LucasArts, you know, LucasArts video games where there's, like, a piece of art and you click on different parts of it to find out what's going on.
we have a website
We have a website.
so yeah
I mean the website is like a point and click
adventure you know because
it's fun and it's interactive and it's like
you're in this office
who am I you get to interact
with the things in the office
and there's like little easter eggs click on that
and it might have like an animation that happens
it just sort of like
we wanted this aesthetic.
And I thought that web page was very important for someone who's like getting to know the project to to see that we're building a world, something that can like, you know, draw you in.
It's not just these gators.
It's not just these gators.
It's everything else around it, too.
And so the allow list also, if you wanted to, like, you know, check your if you were on the allow list, we had this sort of like game text based game where you had to figure out how to get to that.
And then it would say, you know, success.
You have the allow list and you could share that.
And so every aspect of this is a bit of a nostalgic journey through gaming on the computer.
And then we have the memes readily available on one of the screens.
And we also have the Explorer where you could check out all the gators and all the traits and all the themes and all the stuff that we sort of put in the collection that you may have not noticed.
and all the themes and all the stuff that we sort of put in the collection that you may have not
noticed. Yeah. And the site also has evolved and like stays evolved. So it doesn't like
backtrack in the story. Like if you were there on day one, when we launched it, like if you clicked
on the frog, the dart would go into the frog and it would be animated to go in there. And, you know,
all the monitors were different at that time. And, the darts have already been thrown, so that stays.
And we've added some pictures to the bulletin board.
And as things kind of change and new features come out,
the monitors change.
Different things change within the site itself
to kind of keep it alive and keep the story going.
See, I love that kind of stuff i think it's
like it's tricky though right because it adds it adds like narrative texture onto everything like
oh i can keep coming back to it every couple of weeks or every week and there's more and more and
more but like it also raises a barrier to entry for like newcomers like they have to figure out
how to catch up yep you know it's the same thing that we ran into on the tank atf stuff and honestly like it's a lot with you run
into it with mmos too like if you look at the history of world warcraft like every every three
years three four years they need a hit or reset because without that reset you know it's it's
almost like too much baggage from the last thing for newcomers.
They just get turned off.
And I don't think you're at that point right now at all.
I just think that work is what wins over hearts and minds over time.
But it also builds a wall for new people to come in.
And you need to figure
out like reset points for projects i think this idea of like okay cool like let's start a project
today and it's gonna go for 10 years is like that that feels like it can only become more insular
right i'd be curious what your thoughts on that are fig Figgy, because you're, I mean, 10KTF has been kind of addressing that. Like, what are you, like, thinking about IP development, especially?
it's one of the really big criticisms of the people who are trying to get people on board.
It's like, oh my God, I need a way to be able to onboard people.
And there's all this stuff that I love, but I have to talk to them.
It's like coming into season five of The West Wing and you've missed 60 episodes.
It's like, okay, I got to catch you up, right?
And I think the really great television that I like
with the wire for instance the wire is 60 episodes it's five seasons but every season is almost
self-contained like they it was kind of like game of thrones in a way where like they'll just
introduce like 50 new characters to you and it's like shut the fuck up and keep up like if you can't
keep up we don't care and so it's like it's it treats you like you're characters to you and it's like shut the fuck up and keep up like if you can't keep up
we don't care and so it's like it's it treats you like you're intelligent treats you like you're
smart um and then like you know within the wire there's still like a multi-season through line
that happens but uh you almost need to put like bookends on this type of narrative storytelling
i'm thinking about a lot on the other side too because it's very similar.
In fact, whenever you roll out that type of high effort linear storytelling
that you could accidentally create narrative walls
that hamper user acquisition, right?
So yeah, I guess I just...
I like token...
If you go to the tokengators.com website and you look at it and you hear what these guys are saying, it's like, OK, it started off.
There were darts and then the darts are there now.
This other thing is happening.
It's like it's very similar to like, OK, so this old Japanese man and like he's I guess he lets you use like your IP.
If you show up with your tokens, he's got you like your ape and he can make your
shoe for you um and then the kusa were there but then the yakuza like they left a note because he
gave us our materials and like we have those materials now and part of those materials we can
get tools and put the materials together with tools you like you sound like a crazy person
you know like but you sound like passionate person too so That's what was going on? Yeah, I think all of those bits and pieces,
it needs to do an arc, and then you need to reset
and then do another arc and reset, do another arc.
So I'm always curious with these projects.
There has to be a point where I love it in its current state,
tokigators.com, and you can see all of the kind, features that you've put in there that really speak to the project.
Like, one of them is there's just this gator that's walking.
But when you click on it, it takes you to the bridge that you guys built,
which I feel like in 2021, that'd be a really big deal, right?
Like, you have a bridge that can go from ETH mainnet to ApeChain.
And I did it the other day.
Like, I max-minted Totengator when it came out,
and I was like, oh, man, I gotta get these on ApeChain.
And I did it the other day, and it cost me, like, I don't know,
a penny, maybe a fraction of a penny to do it.
And the whole time that you guys presented it,
like, I would encourage you to actually, like, try,
anybody in the audience,
pick up a token gator on ETH mainnet
and try that experience.
It was so not just technically easy,
but you guys did a really creative wrapper around it.
There's animation.
There's a story around it.
I think all of that stuff is important
to bring the fun back to all of this stuff.
Yeah, that whole
bridge experience i think is it speaks exactly to your um you know make making it too fun and and
maybe not obvious enough for for folks because uh initially when we when we finally uh the mint
completed and we ended up uh surprising everyone with everyone with, uh, a second gator, uh, that we
had already bridged onto ape chain and airdropped in everyone's ape chain wallet. We did it in,
you know, our normal fashion of, you know, cryptic fun animation tweets that don't really
tell you much, but you know, if you're paying attention, maybe you noticed that that's what
we were leading up to. Um, I highly encourage if you can scroll that far back
in twitter uh to find that chain of events um you know we we were we were kind of alluding to the
fact that we had all these extra gators because we were physically moving them on the blockchain so
people maybe were snooping and noticing doesn't seem like they were uh and so a lot of people
even after we airdropped everyone a free gator you know months later we'd run into holders and they would have no idea that they had another
another gator in their ape chain wallet people still might not know yeah probably not wallets
uh but you know it's it's uh it's nice having the bridge there now because you've got a very
you know uh visual aid to show you that uh there's. Cause you've got a very, you know, uh, visual aid to,
to show you that,
there's something there to click on.
And then once you do it,
like you said,
hopefully it's a pretty smooth,
experience.
And,
if you already have a Gator on Apechain,
you can also bridge back to Ethereum and then back to Apechain.
So if you really want the experience,
you could just bridge back and forth.
so that,
that,
that's been available
pretty much from the beginning.
Yeah, there's like no fee on it.
It's just whatever gas is
and it's usually really well.
It's pretty cheap,
except maybe right now.
I wouldn't do it maybe right now.
As a big coin just hit 116,000.
So, I mean,
it's just like a rocket right now.
The market was kind of ripping
when we did the bridging ourselves,
and I think it cost us a pretty penny to bridge all of that
because we caught, like, the one hot day of the month.
Yeah, we spent $15 million bridging them.
Are we allowed to play that?
Are we allowed to play that?
I mean, well worth it, right?
One thing that I love about 10KTF and you guys, I love teams that are in the trenches in legacy creative arts. I don't think DGENs appreciate how much of the lore and the creative design that goes into the background like it's like why we just want like floor price to go up or we want you to airdrop
us something like that's like the 2021 mindset i feel like you know the 2030 mindset is going to be
much more in like ip development one thing that i'm curious both from you figgy and paper d because
you between possible and dreamworks like we're finally entering an era that is more crypto friend, like more much crypto friendly.
The blockchain seems to like be finally dawning on companies again.
That's like, holy shit, like this may be innovative.
Like we need to look back into this.
I'm curious what you guys are seeing in the back end.
Are these bigger legacy media companies and bigger clients like starting to wake up again to blockchain
and wanting to explore.
I'd be really curious to hear both your insights on that.
Figi, you want to go first?
Yeah, I can chime in.
Yeah, well, there were a lot of people
that were very interested in 2021, right?
Like, and my litmus test for trying to do business development in 21 was like,
if I have to explain, if I have to like persuade you to be a part of this,
then like this isn't going to work, right?
Because there's so many companies that were just curious
and they would, you know, set up a 30-minute meeting with you,
try to figure out like if you would basically consult for them,
but they weren't sold on Web3.
And I think that is maybe 100 times harder to do
than a company that's ready to work,
ready to explore and do business with you.
Even if they're 100% down
and they have a native Web3 team on their side,
it's still going to be an uphill battle because they're not a native Web3 company. It's an
external brand that is co-signing this new experimental thing that could turn into an
FTX situation. That's literally what they think from their point of view.
And so what I've been seeing is there's actually a lot of people
who really believe in it from the 21 era,
and their own careers have been evolving.
They've been climbing within their own organizations,
and they've been evangelizing from the inside.
And it's when those opportunities come around, we're like, damn, like couldn't really make it work in 21 because like organizational friction was too high.
But in 2025, you know, it's the same thing as like when you first heard about Bitcoin and then you're like, no, I'm going to fade that.
And then it comes back four years later and I was like, oh, shit, maybe I shouldn't have faded that.
And then you fade it again four years later.
You're like, OK, I got to do it this time.
And I think it's going to be the same for companies, right?
Like you're going to have a lot of the same operators that were trying to do Web3 things from before, except they're now in like higher up different positions of the company.
They're able to socialize things better. And they have a track record of other things so they can
be practical on their company sides to be able to do it. I still think that there is a stigma,
unfortunately, because of how many scams were rampant in 21, that companies are definitely going to be a lot more careful.
Because yeah, when you think about what 2021 was like, I'm talking about pre-FTX, pre-LUNA,
Terra, pre-Celsius, pre-3AC, pre-like literally every pillar of the last cycle just kind of like didn't, wasn't a thing, you know?
And so if you have to look at it not with rose tinted glasses, but with like, okay, now that we know all of that can happen.
It's something that you brought up early on, John Carl, and top of this is just all these Bitcoin treasury companies.
I'm very curious to see how it works out.
It actually, I cannot find
a single problem wrong with it. Like it actually makes a lot of sense. We say this as Bitcoin hits
all time high, like everybody just shoving their chips on the table. Like it is an up, it is up
only technology, right? Like it's, it's incredible that like micro strategy has done what it's done.
We're going to like rinse and repeat and do it on other things. And like, I think it's going to work. I don't think there's a problem today with it, but
I do think that with this much upside, there's a lot of bad actors that can show up and act on greed.
And it just takes a couple of those to really mess it up. I know a lot of people that were
deploying capital into companies like that, like companies that were trying to launch Bitcoin treasuries.
And, you know, in fact, I talked to somebody two weeks ago who was like all about it.
And the person said that they've stopped deploying capital into it because like it's actually getting kind of hazy to see like what is going on. It sounds really good, but if everybody is saying that thing and there isn't
really a difference in the proposition that's being brought to the table, then it's kind of
scary to throw money at that. So yeah, I guess to boil it all down, it's like, I think there's a lot of skepticism towards our space.
I think that if we are able to show people how unscary it can be and how there's built-in systems to protect people when it matters,
then I think we're going to reduce the friction.
I think the brands that work— I shouldn't even say the brands.
It's really the people that were working at the brands, right?
The believers that were around from the last round
that are now in different positions,
I think they're going to be able to make moves.
So that's the kind of thing that I've been seeing.
And another thing is like, look, you know,
look at Snoop Dogg is back
and just sold $12 million worth of stickers on Telegram.
You can still make moves in NFTs.
And I think that when that much money is moving around, people will pay attention.
And a really important thing this time around is I really think we've got to figure out how to nail creator royalties.
Because I think once that got circumvented, the wheels kind of fell off a lot of things in the last cycle.
And that's one of the great things about putting stuff out on Ape Chain natively.
It's all ERC-721C.
So you are going to be protected on ApeChain.
But I think that there's even more room for putting controls like that in how assets are traded in a way that accrues value to a creator
so that they can keep creating.
Very well said.
PaperD, do you have anything to add on or insights on your end?
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that, with the creator royalties thing.
It's like, you know, right now we're working on like building up the IP like as much as we can and trying to get attention.
And we're doing it through like making all these videos.
And basically, basically the royalties
come towards the
credits for AI because as much as we were
against doing AI in the actual
collection, we're all about it now.
It's become
the most amazing
tool and it's
really made it
a level playing field with any
large corporation out there that does
content it's like you can you can basically create anything like things that would have taken me
you know like six months at least to do some sort of like elaborate cg animation like by myself
are now you know days it's it's, it's just crazy.
It's like certain shots and it just like the quality now is just so good.
And, you know, the amount of things that you can do to kind of level up the IP and, uh,
you know, respond to things and do it in like a quick manner.
And it's so important for like web three.
It's like, you know, if you don't post something for a
week you're gone you know so it's like we're we're trying to make a ton of content and you know make
sure people know we're around and we're building and doing all this stuff and you know like right
now we're trying to do um basically expansion of the world and kind of expansion of like how you see
gators. It's really, we want people to like,
anytime they see a gator at all, they,
we want them to think about token gators.
So we're really not really focusing on like the style of one particular gator.
We're just trying to like really blow that out and make it so like anytime
there's a gator, like no matter what style you
think of token gators um and that's that's kind of our our goal at the moment i mean it really
does feel like in 20 if if ai was around in 2021 there would have been a thousand more projects
probably um but in but at the same at the same point like in, it's going to be a lot of these amazing Web3 minds, a lot of creative direction, and then these communities that have formed.
And, you know, in 2021, I still believe, and I talked about this back when I had a show back then all the time, about how the thing that was missing on the blockchain and in crypto was like the sense of culture, sense of community. And it became such a buzzword back then. But in reality, for like fast forward
four years to where we're at now, like there's actually history and context really matters
in this space. And now you have a lot of this like culture and communities and the storyline and people that are really connected to IP.
So it feels like just very, it feels like the next phase is very much so where,
especially with AI, that communities can come together and rally around IPs
and help build them out along with the builders that are kind of at the forefront
and helping develop
and I think that's a really special time I feel like I don't know I mean Figgy that's got to be
so exciting especially as other side kind of ramps up with like user generated content is
going to be so so important in the next cycle of like IP and web3 native culture brands.
Yeah, UGC is a huge component of it,
and I think that's why we've set up this barbell
of you need tools that hardcore devs can use
to be able to build things and make it a platform
that can host really complicated experiences.
But you also need to be able to have non-technical UGC.
You need different levels of it.
And part of that to bridge the gap is really AI, right?
Pulling up the technical stuff, abstracting with the code
and pulling up the technical stuff.
And so you can just focus on the artistic experience.
I think it's going to be really critical in our space
and, frankly, in every space going forward to be able to incorporate that.
Yeah, I'm so excited for the future with the other side
being closer and closer to being able to be kind of a persistent state
and being able to see kind of a persistent state and being
able to see kind of the next phase, especially with the assistance of AI, how much faster
teams can move and helping generate that kind of stuff and making it easier for the community
to become more involved, more engaged on top of the storyline and stuff that you guys are
working to build.
It just seems like this this perfect
trifecta like tech is really coming to a phase where it feels so much more ready this time around
like it feels like the thing the the things that were needed in 2021 that we were so we were wanting
to see are finally getting closer to being ready uh for the next mass of retail. And going to what you said, Figgy,
when it comes to the treasury companies,
I've been really diving hard deep into all these different companies
that are being formed.
And like you said, at the end of the day,
it really matters.
The execution of it matters very much.
What teams are going to be able to raise capital
the fastest, the most efficiently,
while prices still aren't at all-time highs, are going to have a strategic advantage.
Someone like Joseph Lubin, who co-founded Ethereum, co-founded ConsenSys, has all of the
developers that ConsenSys has helped, is going to have a much bigger advantage to someone else that's just
trying to come in and say, oh, I want to raise money to buy ETH. He's going to have a better
idea of where to stake and where to be able to put that capital efficiently. I think the same
thing is true when it comes to Web3 brands and NFT brands. The people that have been around that
have the connections, that can create this lore, that have the network are going to be the teams that you want to bet on. And I
think the storyline is the same. In 2021, like we all were saying, 95% of like NFT companies will
probably go to zero, but those 5% will go parabolic. The same thing is true with treasury
companies or any phase or cycle. The
same is true with the meme coin super cycle. There will be a few that stay around, but 95%
will go to zero. All of these things are true because there's certain teams and certain elements
of the people running things that make a huge difference. And I think that's going to be true in any cycle of crypto,
whether it's now or in five years when the next big development happens.
So I'm just really excited.
I love these conversations because it's nice to hear what other people are thinking.
It's nice to have all of the people in the crowd also be able to just kind of sit back and listen
and think about these things because Web3 is evolving.
And it's been amazing kind of being around, having these conversations when things were dead.
But I feel like in the next year, the next year and a half, as things continue to kind of grind up, like people are going to be talking about it.
We're going to be able to have these conversations in real time and see those developments happening.
And so I'm really excited for that.
Before we close out, is there any
big things that
the Token Gator team want to
close out on or
chat about things that are coming up?
One thing that I didn't touch
on that maybe you want to talk about is
ApeChain and the IP and
the other side. Is there anything to look forward to
there?
Super top secret yeah what's up um hey i'm just saying it's super top secret oh yeah oh yeah
k things doesn't like us talking about anything like yeah we'll keep well you know it's even
better when it's just right i tried to get figgy to talk about uh the grailed in other side and he
didn't want to talk about that last week either so i get it it's a lot better when i's just ready. I tried to get Figgy to talk about the Grailed in Other Side and he didn't want to talk about that last week
either so I get it. It's a lot better
when it... Go ahead.
Curtis had a
foam gator hat
during the world record.
You can just kind of
speculate from there I guess.
But we're in close contact
with Figgy and
he seems to be a fan of ours.
So hopefully we can keep working together.
I love that.
Figgy, anything you want to close out on with this team or in general with the market?
Yeah, I'd say with this team, I mean, you know,
I just thought it was really important to shine a light on, like, all the developments.
Because, again, like, unless I bridged Token Gators, which I just did,
I wouldn't have seen all the progress incrementally.
It's crazy to see it all at once, and I think it's worth checking out.
I think for the week, it's a pretty amazing week.
It's a pretty amazing week.
Everything seems to be going up.
Everything seems to be going up.
If you're in heavy, consider taking some money off the table at some point.
It doesn't have to be this week, but the feeling of round-tripping is the life I live.
So I just try to advise other people to not live that life.
I appreciate that. I need to hear that.
We don't want to round- that life. I appreciate that. I need to hear that. We don't want a round trip.
But yeah, Wall Street seems to be excited about crypto.
And Wall Street has a lot of money.
Pay attention to things happening,
not only in our corner,
but also the big moves that big corporations
like Robinhood are making.
It's exciting, exciting times
to believe in the blockchain.
And thank you to all of you for believing in the blockchain
and being here tonight.
We're coming to an end of our conversation tonight,
but man, what a great one it was.
As we wrap up, I just want to thank everyone
that took time out of their night to join us
for another episode of Grail Chat.
Special thanks to my co-host Figgy
and the legends of the Token Gator team,
Paper D, Kthings, and Super Top Secret.
It's always amazing to connect and join community
to have these conversations.
And I don't know about you,
but I love learning about all these amazing builders in the space.
So thank you.
And we look forward to seeing you in
a couple weeks and hopefully the chart is still printing green. We'll see you in
a couple weeks everyone have a good one. Thank you.
