Jeremiah Owyang on tokenized apps and the RLY Network

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have Jeremiah oh Yang the CMO of rally Network Jeremiah welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hey it's my pleasure to be here thanks for having me Ashton you're very welcome let's dive into what rally network has been working on I'm

0:21excited to hear more about you know the different projects that your team's working with especially in the gaming sector I feel like that's a huge spot for Community growth and just to focus on bringing value through tokens and I haven't really seen anything just like what Rally's working on so let's let's just break into it with an intro of what you and your team are have been building

0:44with rally networks so far and then we'll dive into all the details sounds good rally network is an ecosystem of consumer apps that have token economies uh in particular fungible tokens and they use our software middleware middleware software rally protocol where permissionless open source no feed multi-chain protocol that helps Games social networks create

1:11economy apps all launch their own branded tokens great and I feel like there's been a lot of experimenting over the last five years and a little bit longer on you know what makes a good token in a blockchain project and how do you set it up successfully to ensure that it's not too much focused on the token and you're focused on the actual application and

1:32the users and growing the community um and you know with this tokenized consumer application sort of running on the rally protocol I feel like this is something new that's hopefully sustainable and good for the communities um what what is the main value proposition behind the companies that are joining onto rally Network versus just trying to make a token on their own

1:55yeah great question so many of our partners they whether they're web 3 web 2 they really want to focus on the core thing that they do and you said it Community they focus on their game their Gaming Community or their creator economy Community or their social network community and adopting web 3 requires some knowledge resources that make it challenging so having a partner

2:19that can make it easy to launch a token economies key so here's some of the challenges that many projects have one is they have a small market cap and so they were not able to be listed on a decentralized or centralized exchange so there's no liquidity and they just don't know how to do pricing as well secondly they need to have the a way to kick start a market whether that's if

2:41they can't be listed on a decentralized exchange then they need another way whether in our particular cases we offer token bonding curves which work for small communities up to very large ones and if you're not familiar with the token bonding curve it's a form of a market maker where there's we have four different curves and they're basically quadratic formulas

3:03that say if the quantity is this it's tokens then the price is automatically this and then they're bonded to our own token the rally token which is erc20 uh so they have instant pricing and liquidity so it's basically token economies in a box we also have some other ways to support these economies we offer grants and we also have a reward structure which we're changing at the

3:25moment to make it easier and so we have open source open source code and then online events and the developers learn from each other one of our partners is super layer Venture studio and they are working hand in hand with large uh projects and they have launched a number of apps using rally protocol and some of the been very successful and we can talk

3:48about those in a minute so to answer your question um communities and developers want to be in web 3 there's a number of barriers from liquidity pricing kick starting and just getting some revenues into the community and for themselves and we provide all those solutions to our B2B partners wow that's incredible um and you're completely right about you

4:10know the beginning setting up the the token part of it is it's like a whole other company you know it's like it's like trying to run a public company it's a cold start problem right yeah it's like trying to run the stock and trying to run the company and they're almost two separate things and you sort of need to have that expertise good to you know rely on somebody like rally to to

4:29provide that expertise and you know I hinted at the beginning that gaming communities are I feel like some of the strongest communities I think in blockchain that would benefit from this um are you seeing a a wide variety of different blockchain companies taking advantage of this or is there a common trend yes so we are absolutely seeing adoption of consumer and Casual games

4:54specifically in Asia that you use rally protocols so some of our partners in particular Joyride games has a game platform where developers other developers can load their own games onto their game meta or they also have produced their own games such as Solitaire Blitz another one is a pool a game called trick shot and they have a tennis game which uses fungible tokens

5:17and non-fungible tokens in combination in these economies and users or gamers are using this for play to earn but also redeeming tokens for you know upgrading and other things as well and those things are are just being um you know experimented with as well but when you look Ashton at you know most social networks they too act like games people are vying for followers and

5:40likes and a lot of those things can be tokenized too right one of the big challenges with web 2 is the web 2 platforms are exploiting the craters and so now we're seeing that social networks there's another one working with us called Taki also in Southeast Asia that rewards creators with tokens as well as those that are participating and they can even have their own branded tokens

6:02created coins using our software rally protocol and the users can earn and they also do peer-to-peer tipping and thanking each other with the talking coins powered by rally protocol so we want to enable that different level of of peer-to-peer and so those are some examples like games in gamification exists in all types of apps we've also seen some other projects too

6:27we have Gambit which has been focused on sports fantasy gaming we have other players coming in as well so lots of growth especially in the Asia area right now wow that's interesting to hear and we have spoken with tacky on the show before and I'm specifically interested in the social media Network aspect of you know web3 platforms because you know the web 2 social media networks

6:51are the largest companies in the world and I feel like no one has really gotten it right with these web3 social media platforms which when one does uh it's going to break out into potentially billions of users and probably be the onboarder of everyone into web3 and from what I've seen you know way back to 2016 Steam and some of the other social networks the token economy and sort of

7:17managing that you know and with creators as you mentioned they're sort of being taken advantage of finding a way to flip that script so that creators are earning tokens but fairly in a manner that they can't exploit the network and exploit the token I feel like that's a huge problem right now I'm interested to hear you know how rally network will help

7:39with that and you know if there it seems that there's no one perfect solution right now yeah there's no one perfect solution and we're also I mean that brings up a great point you know uh we also work in the Creator economy where we have like individual creators that have their own communities that function like social networks they often rely on Discord or

7:58telegram or Twitter so they're using the existing web 2 and they each have their own token and economies like so each individual app has their own way that they're doing to open economy so there's no there's no Silver Bullet no single path that that companies are taking this forward with but I generally see Ashton that there's like four things that four

8:18models that need to happen in a token economy so you can achieve achieve Network effects and I wanted to share those with you and an amazing uh audience here so the first thing to do and this is usually the foundation of my speeches at conferences is you need to get that token into circulation so you need to have a business plan a marketing plan and there's three subsets under

8:38that is you either air drop it or the the community earns it or they swap or buy it bringing in uh crypto or USD Fiat the second strategy is providing perks for those token holders and this is critical we saw a popular game that was played earn when the market collapsed in Spring they had massive liquidation and cell pressure because they did not have

9:00enough those perks provided so what can you get by holding the tokens whether it's fungible or nft it doesn't matter right so and there has to be a roadmap a promise for that to happen uh and and the third one is redemption utility so you can turn in those tokens the fungible tokens to receive Goods services or experiences and then the fourth level and this one is the network

9:24effects it's a peer-to-peer ecosystem the most successful token economies and we have not seen many examples of this I'd say the closest that we've seen to date is probably the eight coin from board Apes uh where it's being used by animoka Gamers so it's being used by sandbox there's swap mechanisms in other exchanges and so that's the the highest order when the community is actually

9:47choosing how they will use it peer-to-peer and the originator the creator of that token may not be even involved in those decisions so getting your coin into circulation perks Redemption and then Network effects through peer-to-peer those are the four levels that every single token economy strategy must have all great points Jeremiah and you're completely right about you know the

10:09utility and it's a great example with board Apes where when you have a product in a community that is well established you can sort of hand over that that governance to the community and again trust that that they will use the token and the community as best fit for the community um that's right you know with talking about utility of the token and like

10:33having rally Network help with that it sort of gives me a thought about uh the um like incubators and and helpers of projects grow you know and I find that there's a balance for these projects where obviously you have to focus on the token to help grow the community but some projects Focus too much on the token and not actually you know like a product Market fit especially if it's a

10:57industry use case that's not really in in web3 or not technically Savvy they're so focused on the token what about the product itself really needs to be up to par otherwise you're just going to have a token that's circulating in web 3 and not really like a useful product agreed and if you don't have those the focus on the community and enabling people to be loyal to each other whether

11:19relationships matter and even physical world meetups like that is something that a token doesn't actually those are on chain and off chain benefits you have to apply for both of those I totally agree and if you don't have those asked in your right you'll have incredible pressure uh risks when the market starts to dip down so agree agreed with that and with the companies that come into

11:43the rally Network and you're helping them with the tokenized consumer applications and and and the tokens is there any requirements for them to ensure that you know they are a company that has that product Market fit or you know they've got the other boxes checked that your team isn't helping with sure so a bit about rally Network Association that's the official uh name

12:07of our group we're based in Switzerland we're a non-profit um our investors are just giving this background so you you know it'll make sense on who who we're working with um we are backed by Andreessen Horowitz and also coinbase Ventures and other fine investors the founding team comes from the gaming space the um the founders of Kabam or the original

12:27team as well as we're associated with the prior team of forte different organizations of course and we are a a permissionless protocol so that means any developer can grab the code on getbook and they can Implement so we found that developers that are already working in web 3 can spin up a branded token within 30 minutes to 60 minutes there's one a web 2 developer it took

12:50him two hours he works on Microsoft Azure products two hours to split up a token so that gives you the range of how quickly that can be done there's no approval process there's no registration required you can grab the code um and then we also do provide grants and we are looking for apps that will have growth opportunities and we are providing those

13:11grants to different projects uh we are on Solana ethereum Matic and many of our partners are using flow as well so we count that we're looking at other chains as well we have a 15 billion dollar sorry 15 billion uh fixed and about 80 percent of those tokens are still on our treasury so we've been very careful on a slow release of the project so we would

13:33love to your question Ashton to work with consumer apps that are going to be launching millions of wallets and transactions especially if they're web 2 companies that really just want to stay focused on the to your point the community that they love and they want to Outsource the token economics platforms and middleware to us we'll make sure that they are on multiple

13:56chains and have um you know the liquidity and the pricing and also we have Financial grants wow yeah well that's a great background and and yeah I I'm glad that your team is working with multiple blockchains to sort of allow any application that's um wants to start testing it out in an hour or less uh to to work with that and and now I want to dive a little bit more

14:21into the rally token and sure the the other company's tokens that they're working with I'm seeing the rally token as like an added value um but do the companies have to are they relying on on the rally token Network like say they've they've grown up their ecosystem and and then they want to Branch off or are they tied to you know the rally Network because like that's

14:45how they've grown their communities yes good question so some of our projects are in a multi-token scenario and they could have one two three tokens at four it's fine uh so just first from the rally token that is our core token and then from there an application can launch their own coin just this for the for the concept of today let's just say the blockchain interviews token that

15:08could be one you could also have sub tokens for individual creators like there could be an Ashton coin that's a sub token of blockchain interviews token so that's just one um but we we also have other companies that are using other tokens and that's fine too um it's fine it's fine if some a developer wants to use our open source code such as the token bonding curves to

15:27apply to a different token that's fine too we've made that available to all so we certainly would like and encourage people to use the rally token and we have Financial incentives such as grants and rewards to encourage that behavior but we understand that at some point they may want to launch their own or just be using a native token like Solana or ethereum we totally understand

15:47understand that definitely good to know and as rally Network continues to grow obviously you're going to be adding more projects to to help them out but how is route nxa one year from now what else is Rally Network adding in to provide more value and grow their Network yeah got it um I can't spill the specifics but I will tell you one of the pain points that we've identified and

16:15we're building solutions for now uh one of the um well there's two aspects one of them is that we're seeing that web 2 developers are struggling to answer these questions do I have a custodial wallet or a user or own non-custodial wallet and and secondly the second part of that question is okay if it's a non-custodial self-managed wallet how do I get them to sign out sign up without

16:37suffering secure um security operations concerns when it comes to managing their their seed phrase and then doing an extension you know or do I need to have an in-app experience which might make it easier but then it's you know then I'm managing somebody else's assets so we know that as a challenge and we're working on some products that will be enhancing the

17:00existing protocol to help solve some of those onboarding issues some more news on that soon secondly one of our our key Partners is the rally Dao which is now called Summer Street they're going to be launching some unique perks that we talked about earlier for token holders and this team is web 3 native and they understand how to Foster community and so we'll have

17:21some announcements around how they are going to continue to expand so those are just two areas that we're continuing to grow in but I can also imagine that if you go to our website rly.network you'll see there's around a dozen logos of different web 2.5 slash web3 projects we would love to see a hundred logos in a year from now so we're just preparing the infrastructure during this

17:44time to build when the market is down and we're readying to onboard the web 2 games and web 2 communities and led to social networks as the market picks back up so we're in a good place and we're well funded in order to achieve that goal wow great to hear and with the wallets specifically obviously that's a huge uh barrier to entry for for example if

18:06there's a web 2 game that already has millions of players you know you have to get them a wallet if they're going to start getting into web 3 so to find a way to do that uh fast and secure more importantly exactly those are the two things great Jeremiah well all of this is super exciting I'm really looking forward to you know following along with rally

18:27Network and seeing how the project grows and I'm going to look into the Dow as well because I I know that that's becoming an Ever more important aspect of these networks um so with with that said if there are other projects that are just launching now or they already have adapt and they're interested in learning about these tokenized consumer apps and

18:48getting involved with rally Network what's the best way for them to reach out and to learn more yeah great um first of all go to rly.network that is our website and we actually have an upcoming event November 16th and if you go to the news section you'll see towards the bottom you can find we're going to have a virtual Summit and we will actually be having

19:09the entrepreneurs many who I just talked about will be presenting about their project and what have they done with their token economies and what are they thinking about in the future so that's a great way to learn it and don't worry if you can't attend that we'll be putting those videos on YouTube secondly at the top of the site there's a section called developer resources

19:27that's where you're going to find all that code there's three easy steps to get going and there's you know link to the application for the grant so we can't wait to work with everybody incredible thank you so much and I will leave those links in the description box below as well appreciate your time Jeremiah and your insights into this all the best with rally Network moving

19:45forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you Ashton and everyone