At Astar, we are deeply rooted in the Japanese market. Yet, it can be hard at times to gain insights into what’s happening in it from the outside. That’s why we decided to introduce you to some real people working in the space in Japan and what their experiences have been like.
If you joined our NFTs in Japan space, you might be familiar with the person whose story we’re sharing in this post. Wailoaloa, short Wai, whose real name is Jack, has been in and out of crypto for years.
Despite not getting their appeal initially, it was ultimately understanding NFTs and meeting the right people that got him involved full-time.
Getting into crypto
10 years ago, Wai was still working as a journalist with a deep interest in tech. It was only natural that he learned about Bitcoin early on and even started accumulating a good amount through mining. What attracted him most was that Bitcoin sat right at the intersection of Finance and Tech.
However, after a big argument with his brother, who thoroughly convinced him that Bitcoin was a bad idea and he should stop messing around with it, he deleted all his wallets and didn’t engage too closely anymore. Nevertheless, he always remained interested in digital money.
“If this argument had never happened, who knows, I might have been retired by now,” he adds jokingly.
The explosion of ICOs
Src: https://www.nfttech.com/newsroom/comparing-the-ico-boom-of-2017-18-and-the-nft-boom-of-2021
For a while, the most exciting things happening in crypto were forks (for example, during the Blocksize wars) of Bitcoin or iterations like Litecoin, which then would be forked to give birth to memes like Doge. This changed with the launch of Ethereum, which brought the ability to create smart contracts and compute them in a distributed manner. A major use case of it turned out to be so-called ICOs, initial coin offerings. During an ICO, investors would send Ether to a smart contract, which would then send them a different token back - the one they invested in.
It was during that time that Jack got together with his engineering friends to write research papers that would explain what all those projects were doing - an early introduction to concepts like multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs.
“With a bunch of friends, we were digging into projects, and they’d write very technical papers. I’d then take that and clarify it for anyone who wasn’t a blockchain engineer to send out as research papers and newsletters.”
By October 2018, over 800 teams had raised roughly $20 billion using this method, many of whom never delivered even their first product. Needless to say that the ICO bubble crashed, and many of these tokens trended toward zero.
“It was interesting to observe how we went from exchanges and projects spending lavishly on massive events to the next year only small crowds of real enthusiasts gathering. That was my first time on the rollercoaster, and I eventually fell off.”
NFTs evoking the spirit of the old internet
In 2021, NFTs started taking off. Even though Wai still considered himself a crypto finance guy, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick look at this technology. He joined the Friends with Benefits DAO his friend Devin (also a Galverse founder) had been raving about. It was in the middle of the pandemic, and he ended up spending hours in this community where there was just a great vibe and a lot of creative energy.
“It took me back to the roots of the internet. The times when I’d jump in on a chat room or forum after school. It really was a very social experience.”
He also highlights that the first community in NFTs/web3 you get into will often define your experience. For him, FWB was a great place to start as there were a lot of creatives where the talk wasn’t purely speculative, but the vibes were nerdy and funny.
Friends with Benefits is a crypto social club, a token-gated community dedicated to fostering creativity and culture using web3. It has been compared to a decentralized Soho House and includes renowned artists and musicians.
Spending a lot of time around these web3 creatives also changed his mind about NFTs. He started understanding that they can be seen as a “Gateway to the rest of web3” and an intersection of culture, tech, and finance.
While crypto so far had been dominated (still is) by men and fairly mono-cultural, NFTs brought in more creatives, and to Wai, it became clear that they could become a great driver of adoption through culture.
“While engineers are great at building things, they can end up building for themselves rather than for other real humans. Artists are naturally good at explaining the things they do and cater to others”
In a short amount of time, Wai became a full NFT Degen - minting a lot of NFTs that ended up going to zero, but considering it part of the experience.
Going full-time NFTs
While Wai was minting art and derivatives, Emi Kusano inadvertently kicked off a wave of NFTs in Japan. She had already experimented with blockchain before, putting one of her music videos on-chain.
However, it was her son who’d become the reason the Galverse team came together. Her son had seen the news about a kid in the UK making money by selling NFTs. So he decided it was something he could do as part of his school art project: Zombie Zoo was born.
The pixelated animals caught the eyes of some FWB members, and this is how Devin (Wai’s friend from earlier) learned about them. He reached out to Emi to discuss doing something more at the edge with them, such as composable NFTs. Emi’s son didn’t want anyone interfering with his art project, so composable zombies didn’t happen.
But, Emi and Devin were set on making a project. Emi’s friend Ayaka was a traditionally trained cel animator, and through the pandemic, they’d traded ideas of making their own anime after making a short music video together. It was an impossible dream in the regular anime industry - it’s expensive to make, and there are strict power structures and publishing routes which make it hard for a newcomer to create an IP.
Crowdfunding through NFTs was a new way to approach the industry, though. Ayaka started working on the art. Emi kicked off the creative and business side. Devin took the lead on tech and design. And when it came to building a community and marketing it, Devin reached out to Wai.
Devin, Ayaka, Emi and Wai/Jack - the Galverse team
Seeing the designs, Wai was immediately on-board. A huge anime lover himself, the art evoked a nostalgic feel. He literally told them during one of their first calls that:
“I won’t have to work very hard because the art is so amazing; it’ll sell itself.”
Indeed, the art wasn’t just amazing, but it also contained well over 2,000 traits pushing the system they used to the limits and also making it challenging to algorithmically generate traits. Wai and his team spent countless hours manually fixing gals.
In April of the next year, Galverse launched and became a success trending at #1 on the OpenSea page for a few days after launch. It’s still one of the most successful projects to come out of Japan and gather international attention.
Some of Galverse’s Tokyo community
On building community
One area that Wai oversees is the community. As a previous degen, he had seen many hyped projects with a short shelf life. Hype eventually died down, and people lost interest. However, with the Galverse team the NFTs were just the start of a bigger vision, so building a supportive community was key.
“We were very intentional about building community. We didn’t spend money on ads or influencers. Ultimately, it’s the members who make the culture, but we set standards early on. For example, we had a bot to send new members reminders that we were not a ‘Waifu’ project focused on objectifying our characters if they started leaning that way. And for those who wanted to talk about floor price, we sent them to the broom-closet”
Broom Closet = separate channel in the Galverse server to talk market dynamics. 🧹
The team took a lot of inspiration from happier places in NFTs, such as the Crypto Coven and the Friends with Benefits Discords, who all had managed to establish communities that weren’t there only for the money, but friendly places that became a place to set up your home base in web3.
Behind-the-scenes anime art - the goddess ‘Mother’ of Galverse in draft cel form
Making an anime
One of the most exciting parts of Galverse is that they are making an anime. Wai is a key part of the process and has met a lot of legendary anime studios and producers. In a sense, many of these legends were visionaries pushing boundaries in their own right.
When they met the producer of Cowboy Bebop, he told them that when initially pitching their concept, they were laughed out of the room because Cowboys, in space, and Jazz?! No one would want to watch that!
“These iconic anime make a lot of sense in hindsight - I grew up with them, and loved them from the moment I watched them, so I’d never really thought about the challenge of getting that kind of concept made in the production committee system you find in the Japanese anime industry.”
After an exhaustive search to find animators that understood the Galverse vision - and could fit their schedule - they finally struck a deal with a studio to make their own anime. For Wai, NFTs make a lot of sense in the context of Anime, an industry dominated by a few huge publishers, where studios are often booked for years. He sees it as a “Kickstarter for creative projects that otherwise would never be created.”
“I don’t think there’d be any other way to make something like Galverse. Just like Cowboys - Jazz - Space, Ayaka and Emi’s trope-smashing dream of badass Gals - sci-fi - action - fashion would probably never make it through a production committee’s process.”
Tips and recommendations
We finished our chat with a few tips and recommendations for those looking to explore NFTs.
- Artists: The best way for artists to see if NFTs make sense for them is to mess around with the tech. Set a certain budget for gas, mint an NFT, and send it to a friend or to another wallet of yours and back. “The first time I really understood the power of the blockchain was when I could observe a transaction go through without any intermediary party," Wai explained. Another part of experimenting can be purchasing an NFT from another artist. This will make it easier to understand that feeling of attachment you develop, as well as the value ascribed to some of these works.
- Collectors: Buy art that you like. Don’t necessarily expect it to make you money. There are some communities that are friendlier for newbies than others. If you have a specific interest in things like Anime, Galverse is a great place to go, as they provide insights into the process of making an anime. Similarly, other NFT communities enable you to be part of co-creation, such as StoryCo.
- Any project: “Don’t overcomplicate things. It’s better to have a very clear message. It also facilitates onboarding.” If people can immediately understand the value they gain from purchasing the NFT, that drastically reduces hurdles and makes it a lot easier to market.
While Wai started as an NFT degen, nowadays, he is very occupied with project managing the Galverse anime, sitting through very long meetings in Japanese, keeping the Galverse community thriving, and working on VTuber upgrades for gals that he doesn’t find as much time to degen. Nevertheless, he closely follows what’s happening in space and is very excited about developments such as ERC-6551, a token standard that essentially allows NFTs to become wallets.
He believes that the current market will shake out a lot of projects, but the ones who are just heads down building will remain, and we’ll see a lot of interesting creative works over the next few months.
“I’ve been up and down on the rollercoaster before. Web3 and NFTs will come back in some form, pushed by some new social or technological drive. It’ll look different, but it’ll always be interesting.”
You can see more of what Wai is up to on his Twitter feed.
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This post is part of a series looking at NFTs through a human lens: by introducing the stories and experiences of real people involved in them. There is no financial advice to be found here. You can find part one of Ramz sharing his journey here.