Just give a few minutes for folks to trickle in and then we will get rolling.
Alright, well we'll kick it off. I'll give a little bit of an intro to get us started. Kazumo, welcome to Operator. This is the show where we dive deep into some of the biggest investment projects across Solana.
So, very happy to have you here. I'm Mark, also known as Mark, head of ecosystem here at Dialect, and we're very excited to have Skeleton Crew on the show today. Skeleton Crew are purveyors of fine NFTs, fine art, and fine open source
tools and we're thrilled to be working with them. Two power notifications for Skalana Fest, which hopefully a lot of you guys have already seen flying across your timelines, which is a month-long celebration of artists on Salana. They're doing a lot of great stuff there. We'll have Kazumo really give us the downed duty on everything that's going on there. For those
Not familiar with dialect. We're building open source developer tooling that powers web 3 messaging and notifications for over 40 projects in the ecosystem. We're also upcoming launching the dialect app, which is a telegram style web 3 messaging app. That's coming very, very
soon. So keep your eyes peeled for that. It's been really fun to see notifications coming where the team is already is already using the product. It's been fun to see notifications coming from the Skollana Fest into the dial up getting those what to push notifications straight to my phone. So that's been pretty cool.
So the motivation behind this Twitter is that at Dialect, because we work with so many projects across so many different verticals, we get to see the best and brightest across the ecosystem operate up close and we want to share that experience with all of you. So we're hosting
some of our partners every couple of weeks to give an insider peek into what it's like to operate some of these projects. And today we get to learn about what it's like to operate. Skeleton crew are doing a ton of different things. We'll let Cosimo tell us more about that, but across
building up source tooling, having a pretty exciting PFP project, and then everything that they're doing for the one-of-one art community. So they really run the gamut. It's sort of a Renaissance project in the Slanted ecosystem. So Kazemou, welcome to this space. We'd love to start out by just having you
introduce yourself and tell us a little about the skeleton crew. Awesome. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks Mark for having me. I'm Cosmo. I'm one of the co-founders and the tech lead at Skeleton Crew. We kicked our project off last year. Just about a year ago, October 1st, 2021 was our mint.
And yeah, we, you know, we probably prepared for that for about six to eight weeks before the mint, a lot of, you know, sort of building up the infrastructure for us to be able to create our project and, you know, then, you know, marketing and making as many connections as we could with the sort of
early players in this Hologram Space. And so yeah, pleased to be here. Happy to dive into everything Skeleton Crew and some of the tools and events like Skull Anifest that we're operating. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I remember. So Skeleton Crew for me personally was one of my first percent of
I remember even scooping up some additional skulls on the secondary on Solsea, way back in the day, and it was early days of rarity and all this kind of stuff. But what I would love to just hear a little bit about what inspired you to start this project, to have a skeleton
And then also just like what was it like a year ago to start an NFT project like what tools were available to you and what is how is the landscape changed? When you're later and obviously you guys have played a play to role in helping to helping to advance the tooling that artists have at their method disposal to start starting projects now.
Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the inspiration, I think, you know, I think like a lot of other folks we saw what was kicking off with Web 3. And, you know, I had been around watching, you know, punks and cryptokitties and I think what really hooked me in finally was actually have some
people prints that have been hanging in the hallway at my home for a while. Cool. Before he even got into NFTs and saw him make that transition as well and started seeing a lot of other artists that I was following, you know, start to dip their toes in. And really, you know, just was super excited about the possibilities for them.
And at the same time, I had been following, you know, just like really hobby light trading in a group with Joe McCann, who's, you know, one of the, you know, investors and early supporters of a lot of Solana projects. And so, you know, he was selling everyone that Solana is going to be the next big thing.
these are going to happen there. I was watching it unfold, fast forward a little bit, and a lot of monkey business, and a couple other projects. First one I minted I think was probably the DGN AP Academy. I wanted to focus, wanted to focus, ended up with an exiled ape.
which at the time felt like man didn't work out for me but what actually happened was I got pulled into that community and saw it form in real time. So just folks who are figuring out how to build an NFT community off of what essentially was like a misprint in the process there but it was super
exciting, like to see this thing form, you know, to try to build a dour around it, try to figure out like how this community could exist on its own. And so at a certain point I decided, you know, this is something that I wanted to do as well and try to build something that was like really purposed around art and enabling artists.
And so that's where I started talking to AO who's my partner on the creative side about, you know, what it would take to do this. And do we think we can, you know, be one of the early players here too? Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, Joe, Joe McCann, who is one of the early investors in dialect.
and hugely influential. He's what got me onto Skeleton Crew. So he was the one who brought me to you guys in the first place. So yeah, I would, how did you, so how did your team come together? Is there somebody that you knew previously? Do you have a background background in art? How did the team form?
to bring this thing to life. I'm always curious about those kinds of origin stories. Yeah, sure. I was working in Big Tech and AO is someone who I've worked with personally, really respected as a creative, someone who can really execute. We talked
about this for a while. We were doing sort of like dabbling in this space already and she mentioned that she was down for it and I thought it was towards the end of the summer 2021. I had some free time. We thought we could pull this off and at the time didn't know that we were going to be pulled into a long
term project, but you know, once things got going, it was hard to pull back and hard to go back to pre-web three life. I think once you have a taste of it, it's really, you know, you're in and it's hard to get back out. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's addictive, just the pace of everything.
how creative everybody is and how creative you have to be to stay one step ahead because the meta changes literally every day in the space around everything that's going on. That's great and what and so you talked a little bit about when you
You started the project, was the idea to support artists generally, was that always a part of it? I mean, there were like the 30 days of 31 days of era drops that happened almost immediately. So was that part of the genesis when you were minting and everything? Yeah, we were trying to figure out how
We had to, you know, one how we're going to differentiate ourselves like why would people be interested in the skeleton crew. We did, you know, as we were preparing for them in, we started building out a tool to do the artwork generatively. So there was like really nothing great out there at the time. And, you know, we figured long term we're not going to be the only ones that
need this tool. So, you know, if we can put something together for ourselves, this might be useful to other folks that ended up becoming a tree toolbox. And so, yeah, we basically, as we were building this, we were starting to see and talk to a lot of the other artists around the space to kind of get a sense of what other tools they might
need and what sort of holding them back from really taking advantage of all the opportunities that are available to them in Web 3 and some of them had played around in Ethereum and were now experimenting with Solana. This was sort of their first base that they were in, but we just recognize that it was going to be
a long period of maturing of tools and making this accessible to more folks. And we were watching folks who would work with the developer and the developer would walk away with all the funds and they would just be completely ripped off or teams who are going to Fiverr and completely outsourcing the artwork.
the artist is not getting a piece of the success that comes from the project when it finally takes off. So we wanted to change that if we could and we figured we could approach it from one sort of the tools angle, but also then like working directly with artists to give them access to those tools and walk them through it.
and someone that a lot of folks know now Xeno was one of the first people that signed up to do that. He was kind of an early member of our community and amazing sort of pixel art artists and meticulous and sort of the detail and attention that he gives to all of his pieces and you know we decided to kind of work
with him to get the first-hand experience of what another artist is trying to go through this process would be like and whether our tools could help. That's amazing. Zeno is incredible. I'm a huge fan and I'm lucky to be a collector of some of his things, including getting the original
air drop from you all back in the day. And he's such a such a positive force in the community, just like very low low low hype, but just and just promotes promotes others. And it was so positive. So he's a fantastic person. And it's such a such an amazing thing that you all will help helped like help his
Genesis in this whole space. Yeah, 100%. I think every artist we've worked with says, and says, benefited in some way from Zeno, like whether they go to him for advice of their own or just like getting a bit of feedback from them as we're working on sort of other collections with other artists or yeah,
is just very generous with this time and his expertise and definitely a gem for Solana. And so talk a little bit about like so, had the men tattoo the air drops and like what is what is what is the life day in the life week in the life months in the life
for you all in the years since then. So you built treat toolbox. What's like sort of the steady state of running the project been like since then? Yeah, so we sort of hit artists from three different angles. So there's treat toolbox, which is sort of the, you know, self-
Basically, self-service tool that you can use to create generative projects. Then we started doing the white glove experience that we did with Xeno. Every six to eight weeks, we'd work with a new artist and help them put out a collection so we did that for cursed mics and long harbor. That was all from Alejandro Mirabal.
then we did, I said work with Mars Dorian and so now the most recent one that we're working with is Ike, aka and he's dropping as part of the colonifest so we're really excited about that one. I saw DGEM poet this morning looking interested so I've
I'm really, really cool if that comes to life. Totally. I love this stuff and it would be a perfect fit for kind of a gender collection. But yeah, so that was sort of like the first piece and then the white glove was the second piece. Beyond that, we've also been doing some things called the Skawana Academy, which is
I guess you could think of as like scolana fest light. It's bringing artists who are trying to get more exposure or trying to figure out how to do this stuff on Solana. They work with us, they create some pieces, and then we drop those to folks in our community. And so our community is essentially made up of a ton of art collectors.
and so they're excited that they get exposed to these people early and for the artists, you know, they're sort of like this predefined collector base that they can sort of tap into and, you know, get some early exposure. - That's great, and they can work out the kinks and figure out how all this stuff works.
on their way to hopefully a launching point. Yeah, so when did you when did the planning start for Skolanifest to like pull together all the artists and everything and talk talk a little about what's what's happening right now and then and then I want to use that as jumping up to
point to talk about ballistic, which is the newest release from you all. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I think we always imagined that, you know, the one year anniversary, there was going to be some expectation that, you know, this 30 days of air drops is going to be brought back. That, you know, it's sort of, we call it spooky season at the time. And we'll, you know,
We're skeletons and it's spooky season again like what's coming so we knew there was gonna be some anticipation for some sort of an event but we didn't want to do the exact same thing we did the year before the air drops one were pretty expensive and also pretty tedious to kind of do you know a thousand drops a day for 30 days something like that
Yeah, so yeah, as well. I just remember I remember being in the background and getting them and being like I cannot imagine how much work it takes to actually make this possible every single every single day. Yeah, and there were and you know this was when there were no tools for it too. So we actually built an air dropping command line tool that we also open source a
alongside the the effort to kind of get those out. But I remember day one, it was like by hand, I'm trying to write the tool, but it's not ready in time. So I'm like dropping things out of my phantom wallet one by one. Oh my God. Just to make good on our promise that, you know, it'd be 30 days. And so, uh,
So yeah, so that was really rough, but you know this year we figured we could do something a little bit more sophisticated with the tools that are out there now. And we also had these ambitions to build essentially, you know, more tools for artists around dropping collections. So treat toolbox is kind of the art generation side, but there was not
You had a tool for folks to take the generated art and actually put it on a minceye. That's where we were doing the hand holding was Zeno and others. And we always had the same vision to build something like ballistic where you could take your art or you can create through a web UI a minceye or you can put up your own art for sale.
And so that's what ballistic is. And you know, we're still working with all the artists to kind of do that piece of it as it's in beta, but the ultimate goal is to kind of open that up to be again, a self-service tool that anyone can go in and use to do something like what we're doing now for each of these individual artists. And yet, the last one.
last count it was like 57 artists that were signed on to the full roster, but we also had a few. In fact, we used dialect for this. We did a secret drop. So anyone who had signed up for notifications who were notified that hey, we're dropping this thing that's unannounced and it was a really
amazing piece and folks were able to jump in and that completely minted out in probably 10 minutes or so thanks to the notifications. Yeah, it was almost instant and that was pretty thrilling, especially I may feel like bringing these notifications to life.
and like having notifications are most useful when there's some urgency around them like you need to take an action right away. And so like when we were first getting started at dialect it was like the canonical example that people talked about was like a liquidation alert where it's like you're about to be liquidated go take this action. But it feels like it feels like with the
this like scalana fest. This was one of my favorite examples. Like I'm not deep into a lot of the the the DeFi stuff where I'm in a position where I might get liquidated. So this I'm more of like the I'm more of an NFT DGEN than a then a DFI DGEN. And so this was like one of my first notifications. I was like, Oh my God, drop everything. What do I have#
So it was really fun to see that. Yeah, talk, if you don't mind, can you talk just a little bit about integrating dialect into ballistic? I think you set maybe like a speed record for fast disintegration, which was amazing. It feels like you had the, we like talked about integrating it and then in a couple days, it was like up and running.
which was amazing to see. Yeah definitely. Yeah so I'd say like between defile liquidations and NFT drops they both have this pretty strong sense of urgency depending on which camp you're in but definitely a positive story when you when you can walk away with some art versus the potential of losing all of your fun. I know.
Yeah, right. But yeah, no, so you guys, you know, we're, you know, we're really appreciative you guys reached out. Try to get involved with sponsoring the colonifest and figuring out how dialect could work into the event in some way. And at first, you know, we had a ton on our plate and we're thinking, maybe this is going to be kind of tough to fit
in, maybe we can get something going week two or week three. But I figured I'd take a quick look at the docs and see what we were getting into in terms of scope. This was actually going to look like. And before I knew it, same day, I had a proof of concept built up. And really all that was left
do is kind of go and see that to fit the site. So then we said, you know, let's just go for it. We can get this done. And I think, yeah, it all told it was inside of 24 hours, you know, just putting the pieces together on ballistic. You know, we were able to use all the dialect SDKs. And, you know,
were able to send people notifications not just through web3 but SMS and email which I think you know it's really beneficial to be able to see it everyone in whatever way possible to just make sure that they see the notifications that are going out. Yeah amazing yeah well I'm optimistic that it's
a tribute to our documentation for how fast how fast you're really integrate but I assume there's a lot a lot of that has to do with you being a very talented developer so we're really grateful to be a part of this and that you were able to turn it around so fast. I also want to hear just a little bit about like your vision for where ballistic
could go because I'm pretty excited and bullish on just like these self-service tools for creators, especially in like the one-of-one space, because as creators build up their own audience and following and want to have
their own bespoke, you know, to have their own identity and their own websites and can start to integrate these tools to really bring their art to their audience on their own terms. I'm curious, like how you view that and where you, like in your dream of dreams, like where would Bulldozer
it go over the next several months. Yeah, I think if you look at the space right now, artists have some options, right? So you can go to form function or to exchange and set up an auction or set up some one-of-one addition drops. But I think when it gets really exciting and what a lot of these artists are looking for,
is tools that let them tell a little bit more of a story or get a little bit more creative. You know, they're all these, you know, very creatively minded people who are looking to create an experience that's really exciting around these pieces. And so, you know, ultimately first we just have to lay the foundation, but I think
you know, when it comes to a lot of the more advanced things that have built up around the ecosystem, like, you know, setting up allow lists and, you know, figuring out how to engage with a discord to let certain people have access or to do things like we did and, you know, have a secret drop and what it takes to pull those things off. Often it's only
accessible to developers today. And then, you know, after the drop, what happens, right? Is like, you need to know who your holders are. You want to be able to give different incentives to them. And I think, you know, it's sort of, there's a long road map of possibilities in terms of, you know, what we can offer to these folks so that they can play with
in this space too. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, I am excited to see where you take it. What else is going on in Skeleton Crewland? And so it's taking ballistic forward, it's taking troop toolbox forward.
Is there anything else exciting that we haven't touched on yet? I think one thing I'm excited about is the merch around Skolanifest. It's actually coming out sort of not as complex as some of the other initiatives, but we had some artists who just made amazing pieces for Skolanifest that we couldn't
get the idea of merch out of our heads after we saw them. Oh, cool. Yeah, playing around with that, we've been talking to Embroidery Boy who's someone that a lot of people recognize in the space for really high quality stuff. That's one thing I think that we're excited about for the short term was going
fest, but I think also figuring out how we can highlight artists in different ways like that, where maybe they don't have necessarily the scale each individually, but sort of by bringing them all together into one group, maybe we can offer things to multiple artists and figure out ways to give them opportunities to engage with that stuff.
Incredible, incredible. We will be watching out for, I personally will be watching out for the merch. I'm a big fan of embroidery boy and can only imagine. I think I saw one teaser for one, I think it was the tornado edition that is going to be on one
of the shirts. So I'm excited for that. And we really appreciate everything you're doing for the broader ecosystem of artists. We're big fans at dialect of both NFT projects, but also, but like the PFP projects, but also all the one-on-one artists out there and have some exciting stuff
on our roadmap as well working with some of these folks. So we were thrilled to be involved with the with Skull NFS and to support support that community. And Kazuma, thank you for thank you for making some time to to walk us through all this stuff. I continue to be a huge fan of the skeleton crew and of all this stuff you guys
bring to the space. It's such a blessing to have folks like you and projects like you that are so positive. Appreciate it. Yeah, and thanks so much for your support. It's Galonifest and even just hearing a little bit about what's next for Dialect has me super excited for the possibilities with
that web through messaging too. Definitely something that we want to continue forward as we build out ballistic, but also with all of our tools figuring out how we can take advantage of that too. >> Amazing. Yeah, I have a lot of ideas, crazy ideas about smart messages and ballistic. So I will be excited to talk to you about those.
And then we need to get you get you get you beta access to the to the dialect app as well. Because if nothing else, I really want you want your feedback on the experience. So I will look forward to getting that. Are you coming to to Lisbon for breakpoint? I'm still considering it. Not sure if I'm going to pull it off.
it. Okay, I'm a definite maybe. Okay, definite maybe. I will, I will definitely maybe see you there then. Sounds good. All right, thanks so much. All right, thank you very much. We will, we have got a stacked crew for our space on Friday. So for folks who are
interested Jordan Sticks, Jordan Sexton and Stephen Lusher from Salana are joining us on Friday. So be sure to tune into that one. And Kazemou, thank you so much. We will be seeing you for all the art drops this month. Thanks again.