♪ You gotta find, but you're right ♪
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You gotta fight! You gotta fight your right!
I hope you don't run that care You're probably innocent, what's that noise? Oh, I'm not even chance to see the police, they're boys
You gotta fight! You gotta fight! You gotta fight! You gotta fight! You gotta fight!
I'm welcome everyone to Monkey Monday Spotlight the only doctor approved here to the Monday blues Hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. I know I did we got a nice little show nice little chill show that today we got Metaplex as well as the slonym slonym monkey business team up here for Gen 3
lot of news going on. We actually had Metaplex in our town hall this most recent Friday and I was thinking why not just bring them up on Monkey Monday give them the stage to take talk to the greater Salon a community. We also got Crypto ape and Undy up here. How you how was everyone feeling this morning? Feeling good GM GM everyone.
GMGembro, I am feeling good. Happy Monday, the weather is great outside and the market are pumping. It looks like it's a return of the bonk and you know what that means for the monkeys.
Intent the wing wink always excited to see the markets pump in I know I feel pretty good up based off I'm so great great Monday always a great favorite day of the week for me But I think we can hop right into it. I mean, I think everyone knows you know who and what Metaplex does but Mac I don't
all if you want to start up with maybe a monkey story how you got into monkey dot how your experience has been and then maybe a quick overview of Metaplex for anyone that still might be unfamiliar. Yeah, happy to do that. Thank you again for having me here today. So I'm Mack. I'm on the partnerships team here at Metaplex. My monkey journey, it began in
And I want to say it was April or May of last year. I was a little bit later to slun NFTs and some. I didn't really get into them until March of 2022. And very quickly it became clear to me that Monkey Dow was the home for builders. And so at the time I wasn't working in Web 3.
I was working in my old former life and finance, but I was looking to explore what three was, what do people do in it professionally, if you're interested in NFTs, what are some jobs that have to do with NFTs, all that kind of stuff. So I started going deeper and deeper down the salon at NFT route.
And kind of became obsessed. And so once I once I realized that monkey that was the home for builders, it became pretty clear that that's kind of what would have been a good community to join ability to meet people all across the ecosystem learn from some of the smartest people in the ecosystem on all the different things they're working on.
on and so it was kind of a natural fit and so my first monkey it was a cop monkey pretty clean it had the blue cop hat biker jacket no smoking or anything like that and so I got that guy back in and I want to say mayo last year
and really just kind of tried to learn as much about Monkey Dow as possible over the next few months. And so then I actually ended up joining MetaPlex in September of last year and about a week after actually taking a step back. The first crypto event I went to was actually consensus and awesome.
in June of last year. I wasn't working in crypto at the time and so I knew very few people, the people I met through Monkey Dow and Discord and whatnot. And it became clear to me from my very first crypto event that I went to that the value of having a monkey. So I was in Austin. I didn't
and I just joined a monkey down telegram chat and got connected with a bunch of wonderful people who were in Austin at the same time. I immediately had a group of, call it 15 friends to spend time with, which is a big jump from not knowing anyone there. And so I remember we went to
to like a beer hall kind of thing. The Warriors were playing. This was a playoff basketball. I'm a Warriors fan so so was very excited to watch that game with a bunch of other wonderful people and end up having a great time and it was really that experience that opened up my eyes to to what it meant
to be a monkey, to be part of this community, and really the quality of individuals we're with and monkeyed out. And so then fast forwarding to September of 2022, I joined a Metaplex and had a very similar experience again. I was about a week into the job at Metaplex. I went to the Vancouver Hacker House.
Similar kind of thing, there wasn't anyone from Metaplex there at the time, a couple people showed up later in the week, but I was the first one. Didn't know anyone there. And right off the bat, once again, like 20 monkeys were there, had a great group of people to spend time with, to get to know other people in the ecosystem with and monkey down.
met a handful of people who actually I see in the audience here today at that hacker house for the first time, including Simon who I see throwing some hearts up. And it was great. Honestly, like every single time I've gone to an event in the Salon Eco system, I'm always blown away. Like the difference
makes having a monkey. And so for me that was kind of the value proposition that I had internally. So myself on when I spent a few thousand dollars on a monkey and it absolutely has turned out to be true. And so ever since then monkey dad has kind of been my home always whether it's at break point or other events try and spend time with other
monkeys and I'm really grown to call kind of monkey down my favorite community in Salona. And so fast forwarding to kind of what we're working on these days, it's an absolute pleasure to be working on Gen 3 with the team. It's kind of, it's funny coming full circle from that first
a venture to that I went to where I met monkeys to where we are now. A lot has happened in that time frame, but it's really, I think, an honor for us here at Metaplex to be working with monkey down in the mint and supporting one of the most important communities on Salona. So once again, happy to be here with all of you today.
That's a fantastic story. I think I can speak for every monkey that the IRL events are one of the best parts of being part of monkey down and the telegram chats are definitely an essential move because obviously there's always the official events that monkey down host but being in that telegram chat where you know monkeys will just throw in there. Hey, does anyone want to get lunch or dinner? Yeah, you know, let's plan
something. There's always something going on, always someone doing something in there and being able to have that core group, like you said, you go somewhere, you don't know anyone, but as long as there's monkeys there, you got that. Yeah, exactly. And even so, I guess this would have been last month, but NFT and YC, similar thing, right? We always
went out to an amazing steak dinner. There were some monkey karaoke that happened after that. Obviously, the monkey plex event where we got to celebrate monkey dows independence. So many great things that happened during that week. A lot of feedback that I constantly heard from people personally was folks who maybe that was
the first monkey down event that they've been to, they all kind of came up to me and they were like, wow, like the vibes at the monkey plexigment were just different than any of the other events I went to. And I think people in the ecosystem really appreciate, kind of just, I think monkey does really well around it, right? There's just people who are doing all sorts of different things in this space.
I think it's a really important part of the community that the whole community has built.
real pleasure to be a part of that so far and looking forward to more awesome lucky events in the future. Yeah and I love your story because it sounds like you know you got into Salona and started looking at it and you got the itch. No everyone kind of gets that itch early on is that they they get obsessed like you said you know you want to get in every community
And I know you mentioned you're working your web to job and then when you went to the hacker house you were with MetaPlex for about a week. I'd love to hear kind of how you got involved with MetaPlex and maybe just a quick overview of for anyone that might be unsure about what MetaPlex is. Yeah, so it's kind of funny, but I
So I was at the time when I was getting interested in NFTs. I had moved from New York to Seattle. I had recently had my first child as well. So really wild time to get into NFTs. And I kept in touch with some people from kind of my former life in New York.
New York and one of them had joined Metaplex from an old investment firm that we worked at together. And I was at first like I just wouldn't have guessed that he was like a tech guy or an NFT guy. I was also trying to figure out what are NFTs. I keep seeing these things that people are trading around and making money on. And so I kind of
started going deeper and deeper down that route and one thing that just like immediately clicked for me was this idea of just like ownership of digital assets how there needed to be some sort of vehicle or medium for like owning assets on the internet and I truly do believe that we're continuing to
to have more and more digital things taking place in our lives. And so some sort of digital asset that's kind of like a universal standard just intuitively made a lot of sense to me. And so I was actually at the firm I was working at and Seattle at the time I was covering tech companies and I was like trying to figure out
what area of tech do I want to spend more time on and really if I'm going to be covering tech for the foreseeable future, what is a part of tech that I'm actually passionate about. And so I just kept learning more and more about what was going on and what three and how crypto, which originally when I bought my first crypto in 2017,
just like an asset that I held in a wallet, right? And I didn't really pay attention to the tech behind it. But it became really clear to me that a lot of the tech that was being built in Web 3 was really like at the cutting edge of this new industry that was just starting to take off. And so like I think similar to probably many people here in the audience, once you start going down that rabbit hole,
it's really hard to stop. And so I just kept going deeper and deeper. And I got to the point where I wanted to kind of do it full-time. I was really fortunate that my friend who had started working at Metaplex, he was like, "Hey, we're actually looking to hire someone with your background right now." And so the timing of it all just
kind of worked out. I also would say Kudos to my wonderful wife who was very supportive of me making the jump from what was a fairly stable industry to something that's maybe a little less stable amidst us at the time having a six-month-old daughter. So shout out to her as well for supporting me in that journey.
But honestly, it's been the best decision that I've ever made. Certainly a roller coaster, lots of ups and downs, and it really does keep you on your toes. But I actually kind of like all of that. And so it's been a really good fit. And so frankly, I think it's been a really unique position.
to sit in and kind of be part of the ecosystem understand what people are working on with their pain points are and how I can personally be helpful and how MetaPlex can be helpful. And so maybe that's a good segue. I can give a little bit of a brief background on what MetaPlex is and kind of what I do here at MetaPlex. But MetaPlex is a platform
for creating digital assets on Solana. It's program library, consists of many of the most used programs on Solana. So if people here are probably familiar with Candy Machine, which is the most used Minting program on Solana, it's open source, and
And we actually, there's a handful of programs that have been formed around that as well, such as token metadata, which is the NFT standard on Solana and gives people the ability to attach metadata to those NFTs and has evolved over time to facilitate a lot of different and interesting applications such as the ability to enforce rules
with programal NFTs and all sorts of other things that have really grown from that. But it's kind of been at the heart of a lot of the growth you see on Solana to date, especially around NFTs. And so kind of up until this point, so Metaplex was founded in I think August 2021.
Since then, there's been over 38 million NFTs that have been minted using MetaPlex's tech. There's been about $4.8 billion of commerce that's transacted over the MetaPlex protocol. About 1.1 billion or so of that has been primary sales directly to creators.
creators selling the NFT and being paid directly, and then the rest of that would be secondary trading that's happening over various programs that MetApplex has built, such as token metadata and things like that. And all sorts of other tech, right? So like things like compression, right? So the ability to mint millions of
billions of NFTs for a fraction of what people are used to be paid. Metaplex has been fortunate enough to play a leading role in rolling that out. And so there's a handful of other things too that Metaplex has really spent a lot of time building on and working on. But I think the simplest way to think about it is really a lot of some of the most kind of
critical and widely used type that you see in Solana NFTs today. And I know I'm probably a bit biased, but I actually like to think it's also been kind of a differentiating force for Solana NFTs as a whole as well. If you look at kind of the amount of transaction volume, the amount of NFTs and really some of the features that are
NFTs have were right up there with Ethereum NFTs in many regards. And in some ways, from a tech perspective, continue to kind of be at the cutting edge of that. And so feel fortunate that here at MetaPlex, we've got to build a lot of tech that's continuing to innovate and push the ecosystem forward and really trying to do that.
collaboration with the community. And so even this week, we have, you'll see some announcements going out this week, but Creator Studio, which is a no-code tool that we've built for creating digital assets and managing those assets and really trying to abstract away
a lot of the complexities that came with having to set up your own candy machine. So in theory, right, with Creator Studio, you don't even need a developer to use it. It's a no code tool. You could set up a candy machine with all of the latest tech and features that you can use if you were to set it up. And, anyway, you can use many of those features, but in a no code basis,
you can do it all in about five minutes. So it's a really awesome tool that I think kind of honestly like takes away the need for gatekeepers if you don't want to go through gatekeepers. I think it's good for everyone. It will continue to push the ecosystem forward. It gives people an opportunity to continue to offer value-ad
If you do want more of that white glove experience, but you're no longer dependent on that. You don't have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to go higher in devs, but you can if you want to. You don't have to get the permission of a launch pad to get your NFTs out there, but obviously you can if you want to. And so it's just like another option for creators.
So we've been in closed alpha with that for maybe six or seven months at this point. And there's I want to say about 25,000 wallets that have been permissioned and used the tool today. But I'm excited to say that we'll be opening that up to the public this week. So you no longer will need metaplexes permission for your wallet to work. You can just
to the tool. And so you'll see some more announcements about that coming out this week, but we're really excited to finally roll that out to the public and make it so anyone can use it. And so a lot more news to come there. I'm not going to front run the rest of the team that's working on that, but that's a little bit alpha for you.
We always appreciate good alpha. I'm lucky money that was a fantastic overview. I was gonna say metaplex really is kind of a powerhouse in Salana that the jack of all trades they really are kind of helping everyone out and You know the creator studios just a great example of that of like you said lowering those barriers making it quicker you
easier and more quickly be able to make the collections and whatnot. I know we got a few people up on stage today. If anyone has any questions or concerns, feel free to hop right up. You can raise your hand, you can hop in. But Mac, you're going over what your main focus has been right now. You mentioned the creator
studio. Is there anything else that MetaPlex has been focused on in recent weeks? Yes, so there's been a variety of things. So me personally where I spend most of my time at MetaPlex is being out in the community talking to creators, understanding kind of what their pain points are, making sure that we're building tech
that kind of helps address those and understanding kind of the opportunities that exist and really where we should be spending our time and efforts. From a more macro perspective, obviously Metaplex was in the news a little bit last week and so happy to talk about that as well. But I think last week was
I had a couple of different takeaways. So for one, for folks who aren't aware, we released a plan to make token metadata immutable. We've been working with the Salona Foundation on this for months. And so we know that that has been a goal of all of ours for a long time. And certainly something
that I think can continue to help move the salana in a ecosystem forward and help it mature and reach its full potential. And so we're excited to roll that out. As part of that, what we had also announced was putting small gas like fees on certain activity that takes place on token metadata.
As I had mentioned before, that $4.8 billion number of transaction value that's gone through token metadata, we've never taken a penny of that. And so this was kind of an opportunity for us to actually try and operate it in a more sustainable way.
I think for folks who don't know, it's incredibly time-intensive and expensive to continue to build a lot of this open source tech and a lot of the things that people come to us looking for support on. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of bodies.
We spent probably four months building out program on FTs, which is something that was important to the ecosystem. And so a lot of time and effort that they could do it to other things, right, got spent on stuff like that. And so we're constantly working on things that they try and push
the ecosystem for, but it's also expensive to do that. And so, these small gas like these were intended to help fund a lot of that continued contribution as we marched towards making token debt metadata immutable, continuing to build up compression, which is right now very much
and kind of like an infant state, if you will, in finishing things like program line of teas, which to some people probably look like they're done from the outside, but there's a ton more work to do, for example, like royalty and forced additions. We don't have those yet, right? So finishing things like the print instruction, or
or continuing to make improvements around the compute sizes so the transactions aren't so large and so complex. All those things that are very technical and are happening behind the scenes, the average person in the ecosystem might not see those, but those are still happening and there are a lot of work. That was the thought process there.
I think there's certainly the way it was communicated wasn't good. I think we tried to, I'd say, take a different approach than what we did on program, and that kind of, let's be back when we did that. People didn't feel like everyone had kind of
an equal amount of say even though I think we tried to do it all in public for over a course of four months or so taking feedback. And so in this instance we said okay we'll come out with a Salona Foundation who's a neutral party and do this kind of hand in hand with them. People didn't like that approach either and so we spent really 48 hours just listening to feedback.
getting kind of a lot of like really critical, I'd say just feedback, they opened our eyes to certain kind of edge cases that maybe we hadn't considered like a use case here or there that hadn't really crossed our minds. And so kind of I think that education was really important and it's a critical part of building them public.
which is something that we always strive to do. It doesn't mean we always do it perfectly. There is room for improvement, but it is something that's important to us. After about 48 hours or so of listening to that feedback, I think we landed in a really good place. We put out an update at the end of the week. That update was very well received.
Most of the fees were dropped completely except on the great instruction which opened up a lot of use cases that people had kind of flagged for us. Frankly, it also lowers the integration work for developers drastically. And so all around, I think, a huge win. And I know, kind of,
Speaking to devs creators and collectors, all of them kind of felt like it was certainly a positive step in the right direction. And so it wasn't the smoothest path to get there, but I'm happy where we landed and I'm glad we were able to do that kind of in partnership with the community.
That's great to hear and I think it's great that you know even with everything MetaPlex has accomplished they're always
But I don't want to hog this stage poppy. I know you got a question. You're more than welcome to hop up if you'd like GMGM. Glad to see everybody up here. Mack, you just had a question. You know, you were talking about sort of like the dichotomy of the approach between the role effort P and FT's versus the changes to fees. And I'm curious like,
in hindsight between those two experiences, how Metaplex is sort of viewing community collaboration in future rollouts. If you think some sort of methodology in the middle of those two approaches is best or how you guys have sort of gone back to the drawing board as a result. Yeah, 100% honestly that's a fantastic question. So
So I think that the right answers probably somewhere in the middle of those two approaches, but I can just like looking back on the program and FT stuff. I can still see room for how maybe even though we tried to be very transparent and public, there would have been ways to disperse that information more clearly. So I'll give you some examples. I think if we look back at
We did a couple things. We did them consistently. So for one, we had a very large space that went on for like five hours where people just kept coming up and giving us feedback. And so that was kind of when we kicked off that whole process. And then after that, we put out a MIP or an AMI
which stands for a metaplex improvement proposal and that had all of the more technical details around what the solution would look like and it was up for months and people were encouraged to go on GitHub, give feedback and many people did. But I think one thing that was certainly lost there is if you're a dev, you know that
But the average person in the community who's maybe not as technical might not know that that's there or that they should be providing feedback there And so even though we would tweet about this very frequently like hey like this is up go check it out. I still think that information was not Spread as widely as we would have liked it to be
within the community. And so I think really what that's opened my eyes up to personally is there's another element to it, which is like I think it's more of like a kind of a ground game where like we should be like jumping in like discord AMAs with a bunch of communities right we should be doing spaces even more for
We should write tweet threads that even though we try and make them sound less technical and we try and simplify them, we should do those even more. And so it's one of those things where the subject matter that we cover here at Metaplex, it's really wide. Some of it is incredibly technical.
And other elements of it aren't as technical and so it's it's not the easiest thing to find the balance to just kind of disperse all of that information in a way That can be easily understood, but I think we continue to recognize how important that is and so if we had to do the the fee thing all over again. I think it probably would have
looked closer to what the program will NFT roll out look like, but maybe with some more, I think, just like ground game going on. So like I'm saying, like more community like AMAs and spaces and things where people feel like they have a chance to weigh in and they're not surprised by it.
And so yeah, like I could think you're completely right that the right answer is somewhere between what we do with program on a piece and what we did more recently and clearly in retrospect what we did more recently at least the first attempt was not the right way to go about it. And so it certainly been a little
learning lesson for us. And I think one thing I'd just like to say is like just thank you and express my gratitude to people here and others who did give feedback that was incredibly valuable. I know many monkeys reached out and shared things that like we weren't aware of, like a particular use case.
I know I gave this example in the town hall, but static dev informed me in one of our devs on a gaming use case he had that was like just he was going about it in a way that we didn't realize people would be going about gaming use cases like that and it was certainly eye-opening and so there's countless other examples that were really helpful.
And so I think we certainly are grateful for the patients that people had with us last week and frankly promised to do better. Well, we're always happy to have you in Town Hall or host you on Monkey Monday. Crypto 8, the stage is yours.
Yo yo yo yo what's up what's up guys super super excited to you know beyond the spaces over here at MetMac over at a few monkey dive events in person super nice guy and you know get to be speaking to you again I want to I want to ask you a question like on the on the on the Metapoints
updates you guys did. It was a pretty quick turnaround and I think the community really appreciated how quickly you guys went about all the changes and whatnot. But yeah, I wanted to hear like what was it like behind the scenes because I know you're in that strategy role and
I've been in similar situations in the web too in the past, but with such a quick turnaround, what was the experience like with the executives and the team and can you walk us through some of that experience of that process? Yeah, certainly. So it was definitely intense.
My background is like I mentioned before, it's in finance and I used to do it in New York at a fairly intense level. And so those types of intense situations where they're long, they're exhausting, you don't sleep very much, you're emotionally
very much kind of like all in. Those things aren't new to me. It doesn't mean it's not tiring, but it's not new to me. And so there was probably maybe ten of us between kind of like the executive team and many of our most senior devs who basically were
like all in trying to like understand all of the information that was coming at us and it was like drinking from a fire hose. And so look, we're really fortunate in that we have a lot of partners in the ecosystem that we built trust with for years now, right? Who we can go to, we can ask questions, they'll give us
and a very constructive way. I think those relationships really were helpful because we were able to ask questions, get clarification on certain things, even if someone maybe wasn't comfortable talking on Twitter about it to us, maybe they'd send us a DM or something and share something that was really helpful to us.
the process. And so it's a lot of information to get through and I can tell you that we certainly kind of were all hands on deck. But I think kind of a lot of us do come from backgrounds where we're used to working jobs where you really do have to be all in to be successful at them. And so I think
kind of the strength of our team and the diversity and backgrounds of our team too. Certainly kind of came into play and helped us kind of turn that around pretty quickly and what I think was a fairly thoughtful way.
No, that makes sense. That makes sense. I know exactly which means being in management consulting in tech, I've been through some crazy situations when acquisitions were happening. Curve both left and right. I was really impressed with how quickly you guys
possible and not let the fun and that animosity brew up even more and even if it's not the absolute perfect solution just getting that communication out really quickly is paramount. Yeah, certainly. I appreciate
the understanding there. It's one of those things where you're trying to balance being quick but also being thoughtful and making sure that you don't rush something out that hasn't been thought through well enough. And so hopefully I think we were able to strike that balance.
to your point, right? Like there's pressure to react quickly. You try and kind of take the emotion out of it, but that can be challenging when people are yelling at you on Twitter. And so it is, I think, an exercise in just kind of like professionalism and a lot of others that
that go into it. But like I said, we're super grateful for this community. I think if you taking a step back in some ways, it actually makes me like even more bullish on this community because of the fact that like we're down a lot, right? People's bags are not doing great, but they're still really
passionate users here. And so whatever kind of the situation that is that comes up, people have a lot of energy and a lot of passion when they respond to things. And I think it goes to show like if this is how people feel right now and they care this deeply, even
When things haven't gone great for Solana and TZ over the last year or so, it makes me that much more excited for the future. When things do start to bounce back as we continue to innovate and frankly what I'm in my opinion build some of the best NFT technology that exists
this across crypto. And so as we kind of look towards the end of this bear whenever that may happen, it just gives me that much more confidence that it's going to be that much more glorious on the other side when we do make it through. And it's just a matter of survival. But I really do, I
think have a lot of admiration for this community and its users and how much people really care about these things because they do matter. And it's very clear that the people who are still here today, they also care deeply. And it's a good kind of group of people to be going through this adventure with.
I love that perspective. I mean, even if the response isn't great off the first tweet, it just shows how much people care, even in the bear market, like you said. And something you said about the turnaround, I mean, it was a very quick turnaround, but you wanted it to be quick, but also thoughtful, which I think is really important. And one of the reasons that, you know,
good segue here is that the Gen 3 and Metaplex are working together for the minting of Gen 3 coming up. If anyone has any questions for Metaplex or for the Gen 3 team, feel free to request and come up. But I thought we could go over just kind of what the partnership entails and how it's been. I can say
confidently from the Gen 3 side. It's been a great experience working alongside Metaplex so far. We really appreciate that. Look, this is like I mentioned before in our minds one of the most exciting things we could possibly be working on and so we're incredibly excited to be doing it. Excuse me.
with with monkey down really kind of the pre-eminent down community on Salona. And so just kind of for the groups background here, this is something we've been talking to the the Gen 3 team about now for oh guys I guess really kind of shortly before
the NFT and YC event, so maybe a month and a half at this point or so, maybe close your two months. But for folks who don't know, the Gen 3 team had this really awesome vision of how they wanted to create a mint experience that I think stood out and was different from other men's that have taken place on Solana.
And I mean it makes sense right this is this is one of if if any community is going to have an awesome mint experience it should be the monkey doubt community right and so there's a handful of different phases to it. There'll be a phase that is exclusively for Gen 2 holders and so if you do own a
team on is basically a building on a system that allows you to claim a mint token for your respective Gen 2 SMB. All of it will be recorded on chain. There will be a way to check whether the monkey you have is eligible to mint another one or whether you
you're looking at buying a monkey that's trading on a marketplace, but you don't know if it still has its mint token or not, you'll be able to check that as well. And so it's all built in a way that that's on chain. And then ultimately when you do go to redeem that mint token, you'll
burn it and you'll get your gen 3 monkey on the other side. So you'll be able to pick which gen 2, you're sorry, you'll be able to pick which mid token you want to burn and vice versa right when you are kind of minting the mid token with your gen 2 you'll be able to pick maybe this gen 2 I want to do
it, but this other one I want to hold out because maybe I'm going to trade it and I want it to trade with the mint token attached. You'll be able to select all those things. Holders in the monkey doubt community will have full control over their experience there. On top of those 5,000 mint tokens,
that will be assigned to each of the Gen 2s. There will be a pre-sale component, which the Gen 3 team is going to be running that, but there will be a thousand mint tokens that are set aside for that. And then there is going to be a raffle portion. So there will be 4,000 mint tokens that are raffled off in like a
public raffle style. And so really excited for that as well. I know that's a mint experience that a lot of people really enjoyed lately. And so we're excited to be building that out with the Gen 3 team. So all in all, like a handful of different phases and components that are going to be associated with this mint.
And then ultimately after that, like I have mentioned, there will be the redemption process that will take place after people have their mint tokens so they can redeem the mint token for the Gen 3 monkey. And then there's even an auction component that we'll be going on later on, which I'll let the Gen 3 team talk about a little bit.
more about, but it's really I think going to be a very just like awesome and different mint experience that feels different and it feels special and feels worthy of the monkey doubt community. And so we're really excited to be a part of that and to help be facilitating that at a technical level in the gender
team has been awesome to work with. I think their vision for how they came up with the different components was really well thought out. This is, I know I've been having a lot of conversations with the team. We even have standing weekly calls with them to kind of go over progress, share demos, things like that. And it's really clear that like the vision behind
this meant is a number of things. One of it is to grow the community in a way that feels sustainable and organic and isn't just a massive pump and dump but something that can be longer lasting which I know has always been an important part of the community and it's something where I think obviously when you introduce
more members to a community. It can certainly have an impact, but I can tell you personally just from my experience working with the Gen 3 team that they take this really seriously and that they are incredibly focused on making sure that this isn't disruptive to the community and it does feel organic. And I just know many of the other
right is that we've been batting around like the vision here by the Gen 3 team I would say is big and frankly not even all of it is on Twitter yet right like it's big and I think people in the community especially current monkey downholders are really going to appreciate the thoughtfulness that's gone into this.
I appreciate that overview. That was a fantastic overview of the mint process overall. I appreciate the kind words. It is something we have been thinking about for a really long time. There are a lot of moving pieces and factors to consider. One of the things you did mention was growing the community, making sure some
to pump it up, making sure that we can actually bring in these community members and we're not overwhelming our gen 2 holders, but still being able to grow the community and grow our influence. And that was a big motivation between auctioning off the 5K monkeys over 12 to 18 months.
is that we do kind of get this immediate addition to our community, but we get to continue growing it afterwards as well. And it's been great working with MetaPlex because, like you said, it is kind of a unique, minting process, but you guys have been so responsive with all of the little nitpicky things that we've suggested.
We know one of the things was being able to check any SMB Gen 2 to see if the mint token is available. That was one of our immediate concerns with if people are buying a Gen 2 and they want to claim their Gen 3, they got to know if it's available. Yeah, absolutely.
like what I really appreciate is when you guys came up with this just meant to sign, you did try and think of all these little kind of edge case scenarios or different things that would make or would improve the experience for the collectors. And certainly as
as a holder myself, I really appreciate that. But two, I think is we've gone into kind of building the tech that supports that. It's something that we can really respect it. Because you guys have put a lot of thought in. It's not always the case when you work with creators. Sometimes there are
And kind of needs or desires can change over time and that's totally fine. But what I will say is you guys have been amazing to work with and we really do appreciate how much thought you put into it just up front. It certainly is apparent on our side and it's been a real pleasure working with you guys on this.
Yeah, it's been something that we've always tried to work with our community as well. You know, this entire process, this minting process was something that we had immediately put up for vote and make sure that the community was happy with it and was satisfied and going along with that.
is how the mint funds were going to be used, which is to buy out the IP from Hades now. I know we got a few execs up here. I don't know if they want a comment on it at all. But yeah, that was kind of like a lot of the big motivation behind the process that we're going out.
I know we got a few people up on sage if anyone has any questions for for Metaplex for the gen 3 team. You know, we just got the generator out This most recent Friday in town hall. I don't know if we want to post up or pin that that tweet But I've been having a ton of fun. I think we broke 30
might leak a little bit of alpha here. I think Metaplex might have an honorary coming up here in the future. I don't want to say too much there, but I am looking forward to it. I think it looks fantastic. And we got a bunch of other honorary's coming up this week as well. I see more recent audience and I know he's on that list as well.
Yeah, I feel really fortunate that I get to see some peaks here there of various things the team is working on. And I've been blown away every single time. I think I probably speak, or I imagine a lot of the community shares the sentiment in that I think the art has continued to improve along the way.
I'm personally really happy with where it's landed at now. The fact that we've only seen 20% of the traits are so far to me is incredibly impressive because I feel like the generator and all the different combinations that people have been seen on the timeline has been a huge hit. And so I'm excited to see more of those. But yeah, I think that the team is
a great job in certainly looking forward to that metaplex on our area. Yeah, and just kind of touching on the art updates as well, you know, how, where we were when we first kind of released the teasers for Gen 3 and the art style that we were going for is very far from where we're at now. And, you know, I know metaplex can relate on this
is that we definitely got a little bit of fun when we first released it, but we didn't take it personally, right? We took a step back and we said, "All right, where is this coming from? Where can we improve?" And I think that we've done a great job of taking in community responses and then constantly updating and iterating the art.
And massive shout out to TWX. I mean the guy is an absolute animal, a workhorse. He's been updating the entire color palette. I believe in the last few weeks. We got Xeno as an art advisor as well. And he's been a massive help for just kind of the, you know, this small things, the small aspects of NFT collection that'll
a lot of people don't really think about. And so having a lot of different eyes on it is massive. I want to see if crypto ape or poppy if you guys have any questions or comments that you want to add, I think we are kind of coming to close here on the show. Yeah, no, for sure. I'm very
I've seen the art generator for all the SMB gen 2's and super impressed. I like that aspect. It's pretty much organic marketing at this point. I've been seeing a lot more tweets and posts from Monkey Dow and some initiatives.
more about what's the marketing going to look like, the marketing campaign going into Mint, definitely curious on that. I mean, you guys have already got everyone's attention and interest. Probably the biggest mint that everyone's expecting in the next little bit. So, yeah, I wanted to
questions on that. Yeah, and we've undue up here, which I know she's been handling a lot of the marketing for Gen 3 and then also Maurice and the audience who I know handles it for for Monkey Dow. I can say from from my side of things that you know we've we've revealed a good amount of traits a lot of great looking traits but we
want to keep some of the best, you know, close, close to our chest, right? I think while it's important for people to get a good idea of the amazing traits that are going to be in the collection and we have a lot more that we're going to tease and reveal before mint and a lot of honoraries or, you know, influencer trait reveals are going to be coming up as well. There's going to be a lot that
that we're just not gonna reveal that are gonna be absolutely insane. Blow your mind as soon as you mint it. You're gonna see some of these first styles, some of these different clothes options. And I think be overall just really impressed with the style of art. I know we got more ease and undue up here now. So I don't know if you guys wanna kind of comment on the marketing as well.
Twitter's completely rugging me.
Well, have you been a bad talking daddy Elon recently because he may be cutting you off?
Yeah, I can only hear Benny every third word and then I saw Poppy on mute and I don't know what he said but I'm sure it was witty and phenomenal.
Love it. Well, we do actually have a very exciting space is tomorrow. I know that there's an event in the Monkey Dow discord that Simon created says redacted. I don't think I'm allowed to say who it's with quite yet. We might have a trade reveal today that that's going to hit towards it a little bit.
I'm going to leave too much and assignment will get pretty angry with me. So definitely keep an eye out. Ricky's been doing a fantastic job if anyone hasn't checked it out. We recently did a podcast with Mark Cooler. Fantastic guy Ricky went up there. I mean, that was the third time that they actually did it because we just felt like the first one was actually before
the buyout and then once the IP we achieved of getting the IP we kind of realized there are a lot of the questions, mother, comments and answers didn't didn't apply and so they ran it back a second time didn't feel great about it ran it back a third time and that's the one that we ended up posting but you know kind of going along with the marketing
is we're going to continue hopping on spaces. We'll be sending Ricky out. We got a big space tomorrow and continuing to spread the word not only in the Salonac community. You know, we know that we're popular in a Salonac community. We know people are looking forward to the mint, but we want to be open to other chains as well and really be onboarding everyone onto what Salonac is capable of.
in the awesome community that we have going on here. Just one more quick thing. Just wanted to say Mac appreciate you jumping on the spaces. I know a lot of people I would say who are sort of just casually involved in the ecosystem are not nearly as plugged into the happenings of like metaplex or phantom or some of these like large
legacy institutions on the chain. And so, you know, being able to have people jump into these spaces and get a voice to the organization is, I think, hugely important. So just glad that you're here and hope to see around more often. Yeah, look, I really do appreciate that. And I think you kind of nailed it there at the end, which is
is we should be doing that more often. I think sometimes we forget that not everyone knows who the people are behind the Avatar as you see on Twitter or who's behind the Metaplex logo on Twitter. And so I know personally it's a goal of mine this year to get more
out there to be more public. And I know other people at organization feel the same way. I think you can probably expect to see Stephen or co-founder out in public more often as well. And so hopefully we can continue to give more of that personal feel to Metaplex and it's certainly a priority for us as well.
I think we're going to be closing out to spaces here. I want to thank Mac and MetaPlex for hopping up here and sharing their insights and their thoughts and kind of everything that they've been going through over the last week. I know you guys joined Town Hall and it was awesome having you up there and it's great that you guys were able to kind of share your insights not only with the monkey community in Town Hall but
with the general slomic community here as well. I want to thank everyone that hopped up on stage with me. Crypto 8, Poppy, Marie, Andy, Super Simon. We got Simon behind the Monkey Dow account. None of this would have been possible without him. But with that being said, I think we're going to pump it up. Maybe Monkey Play listed up and definitely throw
follow towards the monkey music Twitter account might be having some some exciting leaks coming from there in the in the coming weeks. We didn't hear Simon speak once though and I got to tell you I'm not sure I love that so Simon if you have some like really profound closing words I think everyone here would appreciate that.
Reject humanity returned to monkey.
♪ 'Cause I know I see the last one, yeah ♪ ♪ And inside of the choice ♪ ♪ Yeah, I want to be there ♪ ♪ Those four ways days of life ♪