Bankless - Shibuya’s Rethinking Production Studios with pplpleasr, Maciej Kuciara & Jacky | Alpha Leak

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Shibuya is not your typical Hollywood production studio. The storytelling side of things is built entirely using web3. And the inspiring team behind it is none other than wildly successful NFT artist pplpleasr, renowned concept designer/artist Maciej Kuciara, and experienced developer Jacky Wang. Decentralized storytelling is a web3 creative model for crowdfunding production via NFTs/tokens. Choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, dynamic credits, character development all done using the power of web3. Hear more of Shibuya’s other grandiose ideas and so much more in the episode! ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask  💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:00 What is Shibuya 9:50 Shibuya’s Product Market Fit 15:05 Balancing Community Power Dynamics 18:02 Shibuya’s Experiments 25:15 Web3 Talent Coordination 28:30 Story Format 31:05 Community Decisions 33:05 Voting Fatigue & Power 36:02 Dev Challenges & Tokenomics 39:39 IP 43:41 Shibuya’s Spectrum of Engagement 46:48 Shibuya’s Grandiose Ideas 53:11 Key Ingredients to Success ------ Resources: Shibuya’s Website: https://www.shibuya.xyz/  Shibuya’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/shibuyaxyz  pplpleasr: https://twitter.com/pplpleasr1  Maciej Kuciara: https://www.instagram.com/maciejkuciara/  Jacky: https://www.instagram.com/jackywangadventures  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to this edition of Alpha Leak, formerly known as Meet the Nation, but we are now calling it Alpha Leak because it's just a hotter name. Today we are talking about Shumbuya. Shambuya is a brand new content platform out of the hands of people pleaser, the famous NFT artist behind the X times Y equals KNFT from Uniswap V3 and many, many, many more NFTs beyond that. We've also brought along two of her co-founders of Shambuya, Meshay and Jackie. and we tell, and I get them to tell the story of Shambuya itself. And Shambuya is a kind of a content production studio, but instead of a director, instead there's a DAO. And that is where this story gets really, really interesting.

Emily and her fellow co-founders are devs and artists, and they have been charged with the creation of the story, but who determines the outcome of the story or where this story goes is up to the discretion of the Dow members, of the token holders who stake and make a, make the producers actually have the, express the choices that the community wants. And so this is decentralized storytelling. This is storytelling by the community, and then the producers actually tell the story. And so if you want to check this out while we're going through the show, you can go to the

website. It's shibu-y-z. That's s-h-I-B-U-Y-A.X-Y-Z. You can go watch the first chapter of the story, and then you can stay tuned to watch the remaining chapters of the story after, token holders determine what the story actually is. This is like a kind of a choose your own adventure type story, but built for the Web 3 Metaverse world. And we've talked about this concept before on bankless, where previously you would have the artists on stage producing creativity, producing music, producing art, and then it being consumed by the community.

But with the power of tokens, tokens give the community voice and the ability to actually give back, reverberate their interests back to the artist and say, hey, we liked this, but less so of this. So you should go in that direction. And this back and forth content creation, this back and forth creativity between artists and community is, I think, going to be a very fundamental part of Web3, a fundamental part of the Metaverse, and it's platforms like Shibuya that are enabling this to come into the future. So we're going to go and talk to People Pleaser and Meshay and Jackie from Shibuja. but if you are interested, you can definitely go to that website.

Again, it's S-H-I-B-U-Y-A dot XYZ, and then the Twitter account is S-H-I-B-U-Y-A-X-Y-Z without the dot on Twitter. So you guys can go follow those directly there as well. There will be a link in the show notes, so you can just go click that if that makes things easier for you. So let's go ahead and get right into the conversation. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private. keys. And that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet. And brand

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a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy, you can bridge over your eth or other tokens, and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. Welcome Bankless Nation to this edition of AlphaLeak, where we are going to explore Shibuya. And so with us on today's episode, we have three of the co-founders, three of the five co-founders of Shibuya. You guys probably recognize People Pleaser. She's the person behind the X times Y equals K, NFT, that rocketed her into fame. And she also has brought along her two other co-founders. We have Meshay and Jackie from the Shibuya.

project guys welcome to alpha leak thanks for thanks for joining me i appreciate it thanks for having us thank you uh so people pleaser i think people recognize you the most i'm going to start with you can you just give us the high level pitch of what shibuya is what are we going to be talking about today sure and i think for the rest of the podcast we can just not even acknowledge the existence of our other two guests i'm just like um no i mean yeah like so we're building this new thing that we're calling Shibuya. It's named after Shibuya Crossing. And what it really is is sort of like a decentralized video platform.

But we hope to also expand to other media forms outside of video. And I think probably the easiest way to explain it is we have sort of like a first animated web series that we're launching on Shibuya. It's called White Rabbit. And it's kind of just taking the sort of. pick your own path, like style of storytelling and bringing it to Web 3. And so, for example, our first chapter that we're calling it, you see, you watch this little animation and then at the end of the chapter, our main character comes in front of two doors, and then behind each door is an alternate

ending to the chapter. And to watch each alternate ending, you have to mint what we're calling these ERC-1155 NFTs that we're calling producer passes. And so when you mint one, you can then use that producer pass to stake it in the, you know, the outcome that you want to see. So, you know, you pick a door and then you can watch the ending. And then, you know, then we give sort of like a grace period for everybody to kind of give everybody a chance to stake their producer passes. And then, you know, when that voting period ends, then whatever is the majority vote,

which already happened for our first chapter would be sort of dictate the plot going forward. And so in this way, everybody who has a producer pass and has also staked it feels like, you know, they have a part in sort of the development and the storytelling of this web series that's currently being built. And at the same time, they will also, you know, get to keep that NFT as like a paper trail of their, like, participation in the project. And also in return, our rewarded the valueless governance tokens that we're calling White Rabbit tokens. And currently, you know, they can be using these tokens to do things like vote on, you know, the main character's name in the show or also like we right now we have

a leaderboard as well and sort of what we're calling dynamic credits at the end. So, you know, when like the credits roll in, it's like artists, executive. producers, producers, and it's all based on people's token holdings, basically. And there's also a leaderboard on our site. So you can see who kind of like are our top producers and so forth. And so that's kind of like a very high level explanation. We're really, what we're trying to do here is just to sort of change the way that the stagnant state of the NFT market is sort of like like stuck at these PFP projects and we're just kind of coming in and already building something and we already have content to show and be like, this is what you're getting into and this is what

you're supporting instead of like doing a drop first and then promising some kind of like roadmaps later, you know, and also just to kind of change the way that people are thinking about how utility is actually used in NFTs beyond it just being a JPEG or some kind of membership or, you know, And also trying to decentralize and democratize the way that independent film projects could be funded. So I'm reminded of these Choose Your Own Adventure books back when I was a child where you would come to the end of a chapter and there were some choices and you could pick which page you would flip to based of what choices you wanted to go. And then the other thing that this reminded me of is Twitch plays Pokemon, where you have like so many people having inputs into the choices that the main character. makes. And so I think I'll throw it to Meshay. Why do you think that this is going to be exciting? Like, why do you think this is a product market fit? What do you think it's really going to get

the creative juices going on this project? It's, well, first of all, in terms of like a long-form filmmaking, this is something that rarely ever happens. Like usually when it comes to long-form filmmaking, there's a production that's set up. It takes quite a bit of time to find a team to get get things built. You have obviously passionate artists and directors who do short films all the time, but that's like very rare and just takes out your soul, basically. I can tell that from experience working on a couple of like my own short films where it's, it's really difficult to make them and combine that with your like life choices in general. Also, a lot of us are video game enthusiasts as well.

Like, you know, there's, the gaming industry is huge. It's actually bigger than the film industry that tells you that people like to play the characters or have their own choices and see where the stories or the gameplay will develop. So I think it was no-brainer. Like, as you mentioned, those old books where you choose your own path and you choose your own way of how you want to develop the story, that's been always exciting. And there maybe have been only a handful examples where that kind of type of content has been used in animation or film. So we felt like, you know, it would be very interesting to try this, but also just because the way Web3 works in general and the technology itself allows you to do so many different things and so many different levels, it almost became for us like,

like a playground where it's like how can we make an interesting storytelling an interesting story overall but get the community involved in how this story develops and where it goes and from that point you know we kind of started with choose your own path like you have two different doors each of them lead to a completely different storyline obviously the one that people choose is going to be the one that that's going to develop. So that gets community involved. But from there, it was just like, we sat down and started thinking like, what else can be done?

Okay, you can vote for the character name. And then just opens up, okay, when we have that utility, there is so much more that can be done that has never been done before. And I think that's the exciting part in this project specifically in White Rabbit, where it's like, yeah, we can kind of like do. whatever we want and get the whole community engaged without asking for some producers, studios, and, you know, high-level executives that are basically funding the project to see if our idea jives with where the studio wants to go. Instead, it's just like, it becomes like a

grassroots film project where it's just creatives in the community and we kind of decide what it's going to be. And I don't think that has ever been tried before. I might be mistaken, obviously there are so many projects out there. It's very difficult to track the whole internet, obviously. But I haven't seen anything on like a really high creative level with high-end animation where that kind of plays out. And that's probably the most exciting part about this project specifically,

but just also like the utility of itself. The leader board credits, you know, credits is something that is very easy to compile if you get people involved in the project. But this is like a dynamic credit too, which is also exciting because now that also gives us an ability to play with different things, play with like different ideas. Okay, depending on the level you are, whether you're like executive producer or a producer or associate producer. a fun fact actually last place is a production assistant just as a funny thing we found it can give you like a different experiences throughout as well

so there's just a lot of creative things not only just the level of tag but just a level of animation where we can kind of get to decide okay we can add like the extra interactive layer to a medium that normally isn't really interactive at all. So that's definitely like the biggest part of it. So with all things,

this sounds like the gist of this is like decentralized storytelling. You're allowing storytelling to kind of be pushed to the margins, allowing the users to have say and the outcomes. But also at the same time, sometimes decentralization can be bad. There are a lot of dows out there that are just like chickens running around with their heads cut off. And so they actually do kind of need that like centralized leadership.

And even with like the choose. your own adventure books. Like, you couldn't make the characters do anything. There were only certain predetermined outcomes on this. And so I'm wondering, like, what on the spectrum of just, like, complete community control versus some guided outcomes, how much is, like, what does the infrastructure actually look like? When you guys, like, start the story, did you guys start, like, the gist of the story and

then you want the community to finish it? Or, like, how are you guys giving power to the community? not too much power. How are you like navigating that balance? So I think the best way to kind of think about this is referencing if anybody has seen that one black mirror episode on Netflix. It's a one-off called Bandersnatch. And they adopted this sort of choose your own path kind of storytelling model where they pre-shot a bunch of different sequences and then split it up. So, you know, your character could be like having cereal. And then between choosing the two different types of cereal, which they're allowing the audience to do,

it leads down to a completely different storyline. And then down the path, it could, you know, sort of like loop back into the same storyline again, or it could just go down, you know, there's people who have, like, mapped out the entire thing. And so we've done something similar where, you know, obviously we have complete sort of like artistic direction that's already been, you know, dictated already.

So we show it to the people. And then, you know, it's kind of like based on their engagement and their interest levels. And, you know, obviously, if anybody has seen Meshay's artwork, it's incredibly, he's incredibly talented. And so, you know, most people respond extremely well to this kind of art style, right? And so, and, you know, the community doesn't want to actually do the artistic work. You know, they're not like sitting there like, oh, I want to animate either.

Like, they want to be fed content and entertainment. But so, you know, we have like sat down and kind of written out, you know, and we start our still doing this every day, actually, you know, writing out sort of like the general different possible plot lines. Like you can think of it as a node graph and all the different paths that it can take. And just so that we sort of like take the front seat and kind of driving the community down this, what we think would be, you know, good storytelling and things like that. But having the community, you know, be a part of, you know, sort of less detrimental decisions. Like so kind of like giving them an option or like a palate tasting, right?

and not having them create the meal from scratch is how you can think about it. I love that metaphor. It's like a tasting menu. And that also, it makes it so that you guys don't have to go do like five storylines of work just for the community to pick one of them. And then you just wasted four storylines of, you know, production value that you are not ever going to use. But is that the final form of what this kind of vision looks like? Like how, in what ways are you interested in like kind of opening it up even more?

So it's not always a binary choice, actually. Future chapters, there's going to be ones where it's not just binary choices. But on top of that, you know, because it is a native Web3 media that we're, you know, broadcasting this on, it's a web series, right? And so we are really trying to take advantage of the fact that it's Web Free Native. And so, you know, an example of this is we're like partnering with DGEN score and, you know, there the guys who are building technology related to scanning, you know, on-chain identity and wallet history. And so you can imagine like one of the chapters where, you know, somebody like

David, who's interacted, let's say, with Unisov a bunch of times, you know, based on your wallet history, you're seeing a different version of the episode than what I'm seeing. And so that's kind of like, you know, things that we're experimenting with and adding, you know, depths to how this kind of storytelling is possible and making it even more interactive beyond just it being sort of like a binary option and choice. Yeah, I could add maybe what you touched upon in terms of like how scalable that would be in terms of like the taste palette and like prescripted decision making. One of the one of the interesting things we already found out working on chapter two and chapter one is that we actually talk with community and ask, like, what?

what they feel the story is going to be, like where they think the direction is going and why they made one decision over other. And that kind of like informs us to look at the plot line we have and sort of like the story structure and be experimental in terms of, okay, maybe there's a specific visual cue that we're going to add that is a reaction to what community's expression

to what they saw already was. So in terms, yes, it's sort of like a curated experience because obviously when you're filmmaking, you kind of have to do that to make a cohesive story that holds together, glues together. The characters make sense. They talk and that makes sense, obviously. And the story concludes one way or another. But there's always like side elements or even just main plot elements that could be changed, whether it's visually or through the audio or through the music. or even through the dialogue, where the story still holds together, but it's a pure reaction to how people who engage the content

and wanted to participate on the level of voting and voting with tokens and whatnot to a point where those decisions can have like a domino effect on what's going to happen later. So as Emily mentioned, we pretty much every day, we're kind of sitting and writing, it's because, like, we do have the story. We do have a structure of what the scene is going to play out. But there's also, like, okay, how can we kind of spice it up based on what's happening? And that's the interesting part, too, because it's very challenging from a perspective of directing and editing.

But it's also, like, super exciting because you get to, like, almost crowdsource the outcome with the community. which is great. I feel like projects, artistic projects that combine community input and really like cater to the community itself as almost like a love letter of like, hey,

here's a piece of entertainment, but you're also part of it, are probably the most interesting projects, in my opinion, rather than just like, hey, here's the content, watch it,

like it or leave it. That works too, but it's very rare you find real gems when that happens. And so. Yeah, I feel like, you know, sort of so many, like, Hollywood productions or things like that are in such, like, closed doors. Like, you know, they're always, like, boxed into some studio and people, like, don't see what's going on. But everybody is curious, right?

And so this is sort of, like, a more transparent way for us to be like, this is how we're making it. And, you know, everybody who's in on this early, like, clearly because it's just started production, right? You guys are all part of, like, the storytelling aspect of it. Yeah, I just want to add that. our Discord community has been pretty amazing like people are crazy about potential plots, different scenarios

have all these different theories of what the story actually means to see that organically grow and people participating and be able to be really invested into the show it's pretty amazing

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and helping to design the Fair Fair launch of Across. If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.com to bridge your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. Yeah, I remember during the, when Game of Thrones was in its peak, the Game of Thrones subreddit was like one of the most lively spots on the internet. And there was just so much ideating on theory and, you know, conspiracy. theories and like, you know, what's going to happen to the future. And just, and then also just kind of its own culture and its own vibes as well. And what I'm getting out of this is very much aligned with

the whole Web3 narrative where, you know, previously in the Trad web 2 world, you have exactly what People Pleaser was just saying. You're kind of just like spoon-fed content. Like, here's the story. Like, I hope you like it. And you either like it or you don't. But in the Web 3 world, the possibility that tokens have to return voice, to echo back towards the leadership saying, oh, hey, we like that versus, oh, hey, we don't like that. Or actually just giving them, like, user autonomy to actually be a part of the creative process.

I think it's actually a really big challenge because in the Web 2 Tradify world, you had the benefits of just, like, centralized talent, just producing it, and it just worked. And in the Web 3 world, we see this potential where we have, you know, the talent, which is you guys, the co-founders, but also trying to figure out how to also empower the community,

which might be people that are explicitly not talented people. And so I think the challenge that you guys have is, well, how do you guys as artists, how do you enable the good expression to come out of your community? Have you guys thought about this angle and how you guys plan on doing that? I think we're pretty pleasantly surprised, actually. I think I sort of started and, well, first we have these like token-gated Discord channels where we think of it like more of like a writer's room or a producer's

roommate. And I sort of really encourage people in there to start, you know, talking about their theories and, you know, their analyizations of the plot and things going forward and Easter eggs and such. And yeah, it was honestly a pleasant surprise of how sort of much attention to detail that people actually are. And they're surprisingly really good writers too. So maybe we've been really lucky in that regard that we haven't received. sort of any super terrible ideas. On top of that, there's always sort of like a comedic element to it. So anything that's like really terrible has always been sarcastic and intended to be a joke,

like, oh, we should name the main character Kevin, you know, like things like that. But nobody's actually, you know, giving out really, really bad ideas. And in fact, we really encourage that too. And obviously we have some kind of like filtration system too where if somebody's like, we want to, you know, make a, you know, not PG-13 film. or something, then obviously we can, you know, sort of veto that, of course. I think the other dynamic here is where a lot of like defy Web3 protocols, they need governance for a means to an end, as in they need governance to like produce the outcome.

But I think with this, like the product itself is the governance. As in like this is a governance platform, what are we governing over the story? But it's about the governance. The governance is the product. And the value of the governance is a function of like how. interesting and valuable this story is. I want to put listeners into the shoes of what they would actually expect if they were participating here. What is it actually, like, if they want to go and consume this story, what's the format? We're talking about like, you know, five-minute short-form

videos. What should listeners expect if they wanted to actually go watch the story? And then maybe we can actually start talking about the website. So our users would go on Shibuya.xyz. The first chapter that we made, I would say is, you know, probably around like just a little over a minute long. And it's probably a little bit shorter because it's sort of the initial proof of concept that we are releasing to the world, right? And also keep in mind, we did this with zero funding. It was completely grassroots. Like our first round of sort of, you know, any kind of support that came in came in from

us, you know, selling producer passes. But before that, everything, we just sat here and sort of like built it and made the animation without. It was literally just Meshay and I. And so what you can expect is you go on the website and you see this super beautiful animation in the style of Mishay's artwork. And then, yeah, and then I would say each sort of like alternate ending has there are a little bit different in length too. But yeah, roughly just a little over one minute. and we're obviously already working on the second chapter that is expected to be around just over two minutes long

and maybe more yeah maybe more because it's constantly evolving and changing and basically literally every day we're like adding or subtracting things into the plot and things like that but yeah we're hoping you know if anybody has seen love death and robots those are really really high quality animated shorts and each of them are between, let's say, like, six to 15 minutes long, and we are hoping for a white rabbit at the end of every chapter stitched together

to be probably an over 15-minute high-quality short film animation. So with that first episode, that was just you guys setting the scene, setting the stage, not too much governance in that first episode, more governance into the second episode. And then how many, like, how many governance decisions do you think is going to be? be happening per episode? Like how, how many decisions does the community need to make? Or is it just the ending? Well, starting from Chabber 2 already, we have the voting of the name of the main character. And I would expect that we have a lot more coming in, you know, some of them that were sort of still working on right now. And maybe sometimes like meant to be a surprise as well.

And, you know, there's sort of other things like in the first, chapter already and we're probably going to do this for many, many chapters. We have these what we're calling Japanese good luck bags, which was actually a wallet that we seeded with some NFTs. So in the first one there was a one-on-one people pleaser, a one-of-one meshay NFT, a cryptoed and a crypto-dick butt. And we, so after seating that wallet, actually, you know, so this was all already very early on, you know, we've planned this from the beginning. And then so we generated the seed phrase for that wallet. And there actually, each word in the seed phrase was hidden in a very specific, in various

different parts across chapter one. And then we actually, you know, upon release, we just tweeted, we didn't even say that there was a seed phrase. We just tweeted the NFTs that are in the goodie bag. And then we said, somewhere in this episode, you know, lies some goodies to be found, finders keepers. And then to our surprise, actually within two. hours, somebody had figured it out and transferred out the NFTs, which is really crazy.

And so we are also thinking that in the future, maybe the governance will also include people voting on what goes in the goodie bags for future chapters, for example. How do you make sure, I know we, I mentioned how like governance is the product, so people should be expecting to go in and make a lot of decisions. But also, how do you, you guys thought about like things like voter fatigue or just like, oh, I only really care about these things. I don't really care about the other things. How are you guys managing that?

I think voter fatigue will always exist. And maybe for sort of like DFI protocols, they're a little bit more sort of, how do you say this, like hindering towards furthering governance. But actually I feel like for what we're doing on White Rabbit or just Shibuya in general, it might not be a bad thing because then it will really show you kind of who is truly engaged in the,

content that's being made, right? We don't want people who don't care. And so the people who really care and are really sort of like devoted, you can think of them as super fans of just like you said, you know, not everybody's going to go on those Game of Thrones subreddits and go to comment, you know, their thoughts about everything.

But the people that are doing that are people who care a lot. And this is obviously the kind of community that we are trying to give our content towards. You know, the content is actually essentially going to be free for anybody to watch, even if we don't have, you know, met with Asqu wallet and stuff. It will always be free to watch up into the point where there's a vote happening. But the kind of people that we want to be, you know, minting the producer passes, staking

it and getting the governance tokens are the kind of super fans who really like it because they, you know, really love the content and not just because they're a passive viewer. So one of my favorite stories from the internet is the story of when I can't remember who did it, but they let the internet decide who was going to name this one boat. I can't remember where this was, but the internet decided that the name of the boat was going to be Booty McBoatface, just because that's what happens when you let some internet DGens, internet trolls, like name your stuff. Are you guys worried that like somebody, like the people are just going to come in and start naming things or just basically breaking things with governance? Or is that actually a feature?

Because, you know, they're unable to do that. I think we're almost a, it's part of the charm of White Rabbit and this whole project. is that we're not taking ourselves too seriously. You know, we have some silly Easter eggs in there. Like it starts with in the year 2069. And, you know, kind of the gist of it or, you know, sort of playing on this whole culture of Web 3 in general is just, you know, this kind of mindset of it looks good or it's super high quality,

but at the same time we're not taking ourselves so seriously, like everything in Hollywood, actually. And so I think we're just going to have fun with it. Obviously, we're not going to, you know, we're going to prevent things like naming our character Hitler or something like that. But otherwise, I don't see it as much of a minus, but rather like an interesting experiment that we're conducting right now. Jackie, I want to get into some of the dev technical questions of this,

which is hard for me because I'm not a developer. So sometimes I don't know what questions I need to ask. But I think the first question is like in your experience as a dev, how has this particular project been like unique or changed? challenging to you. Like what are the unique aspects about this project that really stand out from my developer's perspective? Yeah, so this is actually my first Web 3 project. So it's really fun to kind of learn, you know, smart contracts and all these different things. And I think the part that actually felt the most was the tokenomics. So like, you know, you can easily write a smart

contract, you know, to generate PFPs and a lot of these things that people have done already. But to design a system with tokenomics to kind of dictate the behavior of your users, It was very interesting. So, like, for example, when people vote, we have a mechanism where if you vote on the winning side, you actually get a 10% bonus of tokens. So these different designs where we can kind of leverage to incentivize different behavior is very fun. And we thought, like, what if people just wait until the end and not vote and then see, you know, which side is the winning vote and then just all vote on that side. So then we also implemented an early-saking bonus where the earlier you vote, you know, the more tokens you get.

So in a way where voting early and getting it wrong is actually more profitable than voting late and getting it right. So I think other than a technical smart contracts, the website, the tokenomics part really stood out to me as very fun and interesting to design. So there's two tokens in this ecosystem, I believe. There's the producer passes, which is the NFT 1155, I think is the right EIP.

And then there's also the white rabbit token, the ERC 20 token. How many producer passes are there? And that producer passes basically like the funding for the project, right? That's like how you guys are paying for development. Is that right? Yeah. So there's 5,000 producer passes for the first chapter.

Okay. And we actually have a bonding curve implemented for their entire show. So like the next chapter, we might have more producer passes for people to admit. So in a way, the ERC20, the White Rabbit token, is a fixed supply. $69,000, $420, $4.20. Nice. But for every chapter, people get the same amount of tokens. So when just more producer passes, actually, you can, you get the most tokens from minting early.

So we also want to beware people who support the show from the beginning. And then the white rabbit tokens. Talk about the value of the white rabbit and rabbit tokens. Why would people want those? So they're basically valueless. They're governance tokens. So having those tokens allow you to, you know, participate. participate in devoting all the stuff we talked about, be on the leaderboard, and, you know, be in the gated Discord, then get a telegram, and talk to us, give us your input, your theories about the show.

Yeah, so basically a value of this governance token. I see on the website that once the film is completed, it will be turned into a fractionalized NFT. Maybe you guys are using fractional for that or something. Maybe not. Yeah. But then we're using fractional without art for this. Yeah. So actually, in the beginning, we create this vault.

that minted this fixed amount supply of tokens. And we seated it with two NFTs to create this basket that can hold multiple NFTs. So what we will do is in the end of the show, when all the chapters are completed and connected together, we will then transfer the NFT into that fractional vault. So essentially the ERC20 is a fractional ownership of the NFT. The NFT of the full-length movie, of the full-length show. Do the token owners also own the IP to that show? Does the IP, is the IP irrelevant a variable here?

It's a good, it's a good question. Right now, we're, we're basically looking at all the possibilities, really. There's also like just general implications in terms of like what decisions you make in terms of IP rights. As anyone who lives in US, you probably understand how complex IP rights, copyrights and trademarks are. and so we're very closely looking at what that is and if that's going to be part of the project or not. We usually the way we look at the project in general, just Shibuya in general and White Rabbit specifically as well, is we like to not promise things that we're not sure we can deliver and instead focus on the things that we know we can deliver and promise those in. instead. And then everything that comes after would be an extra bonus, literally kind of like

that kind of approach. And that stems from the fact that if you follow any of the Web 2 projects, like specifically Kickstarter, there's just so many stories of Kickstarter, promising amazing ideas and never delivering. And there's obviously examples where they deliver and it's an amazing product, but for every example of something that worked out and it's amazing, there's 100 examples of something that didn't work out and turn into a shit show, let's say. And by virtue of creating this thing, we completely want to avoid that. We don't want to promise things that we don't believe in. We don't want to build stuff we don't believe in.

We don't want to be on the hook of like, hey, give us A. we will potentially maybe sometime in the future give you a B. It's just not the way we like to operate. We just want to build this platform and the film to be an interactive experience, something new that is just not, haven't existed before, and take everyone on the right, everyone who's interested and wants to participate and wants to become part of not only just community, but like, as you said, the governance of it all

where it's like you're not just participating and consuming content, you're actually actively, you know, participating in making the content better than it would have been if it was like spoon fed to you. I would just say instead of looking at the tokens as, you know, IP, I would more look at it as like a Dow. So like every potential future shows we have on, on the platform could be at its own Dow where the community can make decisions together,

push the film forward, and all have skin in the game. And I think, you know, obviously this is an original IP by, you know, myself and Shea in terms of like fully creatively. You know, we've created this from scratch, right? And so, but, you know, we're thinking of this differently from, let's say a PFP project where people might be thinking, oh, if I buy this PFP, can I, you know, put it on a tote bag and start, like, selling those tote bags. And this is kind of the usual discussions around IP and things like that.

but our native media is just different, right? It's a film and it's meant to be consumed and the main purpose of it is entertainment. And so we're kind of trying to bring it back to the whole concept of people going to a movie theater and they're not thinking, oh my gosh, how am I going to profit all this is this movie? Like, they're buying a movie ticket because I want to exchange my time and, you know, however much this ticket costs for some two hours of entertainment, things like that. And so this is really what we're trying to bring it back to. So let's take the perspective of a wide variety of potential users slash consumers of Shambuya.

There's the 9 to 5 worker who wants to just come back and relax and see what Shambuya is up to. Or there's the internet, NFT, DGN who's in their basement playing with NFTs all the time and they want actually to have deep involvement. Just what are all the ways that people can enjoy this platform, either with just consuming it or actually participating? Let's go through just a full spectrum of how one would engage with Shambuja. Yeah. So if you're, you know, trad-fi Bob and nothing wrong with that, but you just like work a nine to five and you're super tired, right? You don't have time to be on the internet all day and you come home and want to just consume content. I do this too. Then you would just go on to Shibuya right now, which only has White Rabbit as the main IP, but we are onboarding more very quickly actually. And so you would just log on to it. You don't even need to connect your wallet or anything. You can just hit the play button. And it will just play up until the point where there is governance happening. So, for example, if we're on chapter five already, you can watch the first five chapters and be

entertained that way. If you are, you know, internet, Chad and you want to be super duper-dover involved since the very beginning, then you would obviously, you know, hopefully we already have, you know, found out about this super early and then participated since chapter one, but, you know, even on chapter two, then you would go on. And whenever there's a governance, you know, and the plot happening, the website will actually just tell you, you know, whether you're connected to MetaMask or not, if you click on something where there's, you know,

sort of a plot or a governance phone happening, then there will be a dialogue box that will pop up and be like, connect your wallet and then say, do you want to mint a producer pass if you don't have any? And if you already have producer passes, then be like, do you want to stake it in, you know, whichever option that you decide? And then after you stake it, There will be some confetti that's thrown in the air.

And they'll be like, here, you just earned X amount of white rabbit token. And yeah, and then, you know, after that, their involvement will look something like, you know, going to the discourse to participate in token data channels or just, yeah, it's kind of like a Dow where people are just really passionate about discussing the plot of this going forward and, you know, what their theories are and what things that they want to see being voted on and, you know, what they want the governance tokens to be used for. And so I would say, you know, those are sort of like the two extreme levels of involvement. There's also the people who are just minting producer passes and who don't stake it.

I don't know why you would do that because you should just get some government's tokens anyway. But that's totally fine too. Some people are just like, oh, I think these producer passes look cool. And it's kind of like collecting, you know, because because we will have a new one for each chapter. So, you know, and we do actually have something very special plan for people who collect. all the producer passes from each chapter. So it's just kind of like a stamp book, right? You're like, oh, I've collected them all.

And so those are the sort of different levels of engagement and involvement that we are seeing. Are there any, like, really grandiose ideas that you guys have when you, like, daydream about the future of this model? As in, like, I don't know, maybe some short story, short form movie, maybe not so short, is become so popular that it starts to air in movie theaters.

And the token holds. have some sort of like participation in the creation of that value that is now eking out of the Web 3 world and back into the traditional world. I don't know. That's just an idea that I had. Like what's some grandiose ideas if this, this platform is like maximally successful in like three, five, ten years? Do you guys like ideated around this? I think actually maybe one of the really big dreams for us and it seems like, you know, it is quite possible is, for example, when the whole thing is finished, we can have like a premier event or maybe multiple in different cities.

And so there's like kind of like premier screenings. And also we're thinking, you know, sort of like different ways to do this, but either people who have collect the full set or certain amount of a round token can exchange a premier ticket that you can attend and things like this. And so, you know, basically just thinking of anything in the traditional sense that what are sort of like the highlights

of the evolution of making a film, right? Usually it's like the premiere and, you know, just like the premiere is essentially a celebration of the completion of a film. I always like to think of movies as like they're essentially pop-up companies if you think about it. It's incredible that, you know, when movies get made, all these people assemble to sort of like work towards the same goal, you know, and then at the end of it, it gets disassembled. But before that, they all have sort of a really happy premiere event.

And it is a very grandiose celebration. And so I think that's one of the things that we're really excited about. And, you know, people who are producers or anything are obviously all welcome to attend. I would just add on the level of credits, you know, I mean, me, both myself and Emily, we work in Hollywood and on films and video games. And usually what happens when you watch credits, like the first, like the director, producers, writers, actors, actors. that's kind of given and then whoever drove them to the set and then whoever catered the food whoever like delivered the mail and and the list goes on and on and on and at the very end is like actually people who made it like artists and designers and animators and all those other like

workers and there's hundreds of them usually and it's just like you watch that and it's like it's obviously an amazing experience especially if you worked on the movie to sit in the theater and like actually experience it and see yourself in the credits. So like that's what we're kind of expecting to have the community. Like if we if in our dreams, let's say we have a premiere of White Rabbit, in Chinese theater, for instance, in L.A. or in some like really nice place where people can go and participate. Like imagine being a person who voted for the name of the character

and made multiple votes that actually shaped the story and you watch it with friends. And so like, yeah, I voted for that. that's why and this this this went that direction and at the end it's like look that's my name in the credits I'm the executive producer it's just like it creates a it's create creates a memory that just sticks around forever it's like you're a part of some of a project that that is just fun and you know obviously we cannot predict the outcome of where the right rabbit's going to go how successful is going to be but that's not not the point for making it. And for someone who worked in the movies for past 10 years,

you usually learn that you work on the project and you don't really know if the movie is going to be really successful or not. I'll tell you that from my personal experience, the films that I was expecting, oh my God, this is going to be a hit, flopped. And then the films that was working, I was like, ah, it's just another film just blew up to a point that was like, I don't even want to post work because I'm getting mobbed.

for doing, like, mobbed in the positive way for doing that, right? So it's definitely like experience building and we have like really grand ideas and daydreaming, obviously. It's just, it's just very difficult to conceive like how to get there. So we're kind of taking it step by step. We're kind of have like the starting point. We know what we're building right now and what are the immediate steps to continue. number one priority right now is continuing the story, obviously, of the White Rabbit. And we want to make this as the most excellent experience and then just experiment with it.

And I think those experimentations will also carve different ways in terms of where Shibuya itself could go. I think for me, like a big idea is I love seeing platforms giving creators more options and make it easier for creators to actually put their content. out there and get seen. I think for now, it's, like, really hard for independent filmmakers to actually get funding, go through the whole process in Hollywood and get their film made and then premiered. So I hope, like, if Shibuah does grow further, further into a, you know, bigger platform, then it'll make it a lot easier for creators, filmmakers, to actually produce their shows.

Yeah, like, almost, we kind of also, I think we talked about it, like becoming almost on-ramp for really talented artists that maybe don't have funding to actually start developing anything and we can help them with that. So that's like the dream. It's like what artists who learned craft without going to art schools,

a lot of them teach after they achieved a certain level as a giveaway to community that helped them to become what they become. We're thinking the similar way, But again, it's so far from the peripheral view that is very difficult to conceive how to get there. But there's always a path. I think moving into the Metaverse, sci-fi web 3 future, using this as like a model,

we kind of see in the current way that Hollywood is structured is you just have these like very superstar director names, like M. Knight, Shaw Malon, or insert your favorite director here, Quinn Tarantino. I think maybe in the Metaverse, the new version of this, the Web 3 version of this, is instead guilds like the Shimbuya Guild, like the Shimbabuya director, except instead of one person, it's just this nebulous set of people that are contributors, and maybe they have such a strong track record of building really cool stories that they are renowned as a guild, as a Dow, as an org, for producing and directing really, really good shows. and I think that would make you guys something like the production company or, I don't know, like Warner Brothers, I think maybe is the right branding.

I don't know. But basically you have like, you're decentralizing the director, but keeping a relatively centralized production company, I think this is the right model. But the final question I think that I think is really important is what are the key things that you guys need to do as sort of like a leadership team of sorts to really make sure. sure that this project is successful. Like, how do you maximally enable your guys' community to make sure that the outcome of this is, you know, something that is actually the right time for this very ambitious project and not something that's like five or ten years too soon? What are the key things that you guys understand, the key obstacles that you guys need to

overcome in order to make this a success? I think the first one is probably distribution, but we are having sort of very interesting conversations with potential people that can collaborate with us on that field. And the second one, I think, and always the last line of it is the content needs to be really good. And so, you know, with White Rabbit, you know, we're hoping, obviously, to make an anime that's very interesting, but also right now we are working, you know, to onboard other sort of content that we find. At the end of the day, you know, when you think of all the really, really, really good, you know, TV shows out there and stuff. I think really what stands the test of time is

good content, right? Like Breaking Bad has like a cult following. Graham of Thrones has a cult following. These shows didn't develop a cult following just for no reason. It's because the content is good. Same with Squid Game. You know, who knew, like they were not, you know, they didn't have any sort of Hollywood connections or anything. They're, you know, a Korean drama that probably most Westerners, maybe before Squid Game had never even watched a Korean drama before. And then it became a worldwide sensation. Why? Because the content is good. And so, you know, that's something that we really truly firmly believe in as one of our core values and is what we're laying the foundation for right now. And that is our main priority is just to make the content really good. And hopefully, you know,

when people see that, they will naturally be sort of more interested to get engaged. And, you know, and then on top of that, we're making it, you know, a different type of model where it is free for people to watch. But, you know, if you want to decide what it goes on the screens, you have to pay. Same concept in Times Square or Shibuya Crossing. And so that's kind of, yeah, what we're gearing ourselves towards. So guys, I think people by now are definitely ready to finally go and experience this for themselves. So if they want to go watch the first episode, where should they go? They should head over to Shibuya.xyz. It's a pretty straightforward website. There's a play button. just hit play.

And, you know, obviously we'll be rolling out chapter tune fairly soon. Or fairly soon, I mean, you know, within the next month or two for sure. And yeah, so stay tuned. And we also have a Twitter that people can follow. And then there you'll find, you know, where you can find our Discord. And also just things that we're posting, like behind the scenes and, you know, just updates about the show in general. And for the podcast listeners out there,

that's S-H-I-B-U-Y-A-D-X-Y-Z, and then the Twitter account is S-H-I-B-U-A-X-Y-Z without the dot on Twitter. Guys, thank you so much for coming and demoing Shibuya. I think this is going to be a really interesting project, and I wish you guys the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Cheers.