Cooper Kunz on Calaxy’s social platform for creators

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have cooper kunz the cto of galaxy cooper welcome to the show and thanks so much for taking the time to come on yeah thanks for having me uh super excited to chat with you and and you know share more about what we're building

0:20yeah it's uh crazy times in the blockchain industry and in the world right now especially on social media there's a lot of things going on on social media and i know galaxy is looking at some innovative solutions to uh aid in the next version of social media and for creators and i would love for you to kick it off for us with just a high level overview of foxy and what

0:43the team's been working on yeah absolutely so galaxy really likes to think of ourselves as an open social marketplace uh and what we mean by that is that we provide the ability to content creators professional athletes celebrities of kind of all kinds uh to offer more direct and intimate experiences with their fans uh you know through a variety of tools

1:09and different types of services that they can offer on our platform but that's kind of the marketplace side of it and then you know when you're dealing with big celebrities and influencers and content creators in general it's really really easy and nice for them to be able to directly engage with their communities and to try to actually have a singular shop or stop uh for all of

1:32their fans or other community to be able to engage with them with so you can see this manifest through you know familiar social experiences like post feeds and stories uh but you can also offer you know direct video calls or video messages uh on galaxy as well to your fans um so that's just a little bit about it but obviously i'm excited to be here and

1:54chat with you uh share more definitely cooper and yeah um the ability for these platforms to directly engage where you know you want to talk to your favorite athlete or some superstar and like it's becoming more and more accessible and also to you know buy their merchandise directly to support them for them to interact with you and i think social media has all

2:18these barriers uh right now in the traditional medias and there are a lot of other social platforms that are and they see this problem it's like a huge problem everyone in the world on social media needs a new solution why do you think galaxy's solution and the way that your team is approaching having creators connect directly is going to be the one that will succeed

2:40for years to come yeah absolutely so galaxy takes an innovative approach kind of sitting between what we like to think of as web 2 and web 3. so web 2 is you know your traditional social media experiences like twitter or instagram and within web 2 you also have you know your traditional kind of monetization tools if you're a big celebrity you can go on cameo you could go on you know

3:04patreon and people could pay you for your services um but there really isn't a cohesive application within webq that makes it really easy for you to actually monetize from your fans and you see this with instagram trying to roll out different types of advertisement capabilities uh twitter actually are beta testing you know a super subscriber type feature

3:24where you could you know pay for for content on twitter but there isn't yet a web2 platform that makes it seamless and cohesive to not only you know talk to your fans but also earn money from them so galaxy is providing a really nice and easy to use experience that feels kind of like web 2. it feels like twitter or instagram but we're using different kind of web3

3:48or crypto like tools to help engage and provide more intimate experiences uh so specifically galaxy is a platform for social tokens uh which are you know fungible cryptocurrencies that you can buy that are branded for different celebrities so for example you know spencer dinwiddie who's on the washington wizards is actually our co-founder and ceo so if you wanted to buy a video call

4:11with spencer you would have to buy spencer's token and then you know spend spencer's token on parts of his time for different types of engagements with him so this is just one unique tool that galaxy offers and it does provide a fundamentally new paradigm for ways that you can quantify your fans and community engagement you you do have a cryptocurrency-like

4:35balance sitting on a public blockchain that tells you who your biggest supporters are and there's kind of no denying that you know you can actually go out and verify it which is kind of cool um in addition to the social tokens that people and celebrities can issue and use to respond to requests for their time we also enable non-punchable tokens or nfts

4:56so different types of celebrities and you know professional athletes can offer uh digital nfts or you know hopefully eventually uh nfts that could be redeemed for physical merchandise uh we actually just did a cool kind of beta test or pilot with a partner of ours called suku where you could buy one of spencer's nfts and if you want to you can redeem it for a pair of shoes that

5:18he actually wore an an nba basketball game um and so those are just kind of the tools that we're giving people to empower you know their actual monetization ability we also have various different kind of web three uh social media features uh so specifically we're working on interoperability protocols for decentralized social media so ways that different interfaces can

5:44kind of plug and play the same social feed and you know for whatever reason if someone in the future builds a better version of what galaxy's doing they should be able to kind of just plug into the posts and the feeds and the followers that are already there so hopefully removing the huge huge amount of vendor lock-in that's traditionally experienced in web 2.

6:05and so i think between kind of the combination of all these things we're building an exciting and kind of uh wholly encompassing web 3 platform definitely sounds great cooper and with the creator tokens i think that's going to be the key uh to having that direct experience to creating monetization and revenue strategies for creators for athletes i'm curious more about the creator

6:29tokens in the platform can anybody who creates content create a token is there any limit to that and then do those tokens have a marketplace of their own or do they have a fluctuating value and how does that work yeah these are great questions um i'm excited to share that we actually just released the initial version of the galaxy ink white paper as well as a white paper uh that's uh

6:54from the foundation the creator's galaxy foundation which kind of outlines how all these eco the whole ecosystem works um currently uh the stable the creator tokens are actually one-to-one backed with stable coins uh so that's an example of something that we do to make it really really easy for fans right like if you just want to buy a video call with spencer or buy some

7:18merchandise from someone uh you shouldn't have to worry about the standard price fluctuation that you may or may not see in other networks or other types of social tokens in the future it's quite possible that the community decides that they want dynamically priced tokens and those could be things that we explore in the future but for now we just want to make it as

7:38simple as possible so we're working with a number of stable coin issuers and would support you know any popular stable coins that are available out there um and so they're actually collateralized on chain on the hedera hashgraph network which is uh you know the blockchain alternative that we use um beyond that the uh stable you know stable coins can be deposited and the

8:02crater tokens will be minted or burned on demand uh so if at any point you would like to kind of convert or unwrap your tokens back to the stable coins you're able to do so so you know fans and users are never at risk of being stuck in a celebrity's token who's no longer offering services or actually responding to requests um so again you know just something that

8:25we're trying to do to kind of bridge these worlds between web 2 and web 3 and kind of educate fans as as we grow through this experience ourselves um and we think that it's a nice model we think a lot of people will be looking at different types of branded or wrapped stable coins in the future um but that that's kind of the overview of how they work

8:46um the dynamics for getting a creator token or a um i guess getting verified within the galaxy application uh gives you the ability to meet your own social token uh but the nice thing is that it is actually a kind of permissionless ecosystem that we are building so if anyone would like to create a creator token uh but galaxy hasn't verified you yet you actually can do so on uh the

9:14hedera network directly or you know eventually through another interface um and it could be compatible within galaxy or within kind of the rest of the ecosystem that supports these social tokens um so it's pretty interesting very interesting and i like that it's simple backed by the stable coins i've seen platforms where it was very convoluted and it was hard for the creators or the

9:37fans to have an off-ramp or to actually get value out of something that you know was wasn't locked into the platform for for years to come so that that's great to hear that you're streamlining the process and making it easy to convert in and out for that value and and you mentioned there cooper about hedera hashgraph and i'm interested to know you know it's not a blockchain that

10:01i hear as often but i know that it has a lot of underlying value and i'm curious on maybe you can touch on why hedera is the best technology for this kind of platform absolutely so i think that there's a number of things that make hedera unique in the blockchain industry um kind of the first of which or the top level item is governance i think we were really

10:23attractive to hedera's enterprise-led governance model so hedera is actually owned and operated by some of the largest companies in the world including like google deutsche telekom ibm all actively contribute and support their network infrastructure so that was something that attracted us in general knowing that those large enterprises are investing their own

10:44resources in the ecosystem it's very validating for the you know the resources that we invest as well uh but just beyond uh the governance and you know the other people that are involved uh hedera is fundamentally very fast so we're able to do tens of thousands of transactions per second and when you're dealing with celebrities and people with you know millions of

11:05followers uh those performance speeds are really really important i mean also really important when you want to build familiar web 2 like user experiences beyond the high throughput and transactions per second hedera really nicely stabilizes their fees to us dollars so every nft that is made on galaxy actually only costs a dollar um compared to the ethereum network which you know

11:31i've paid gas fees recently of like 130 bucks to mint an nft um and so doing it at scale just really isn't an option um and so you know the low predictable fees where we can kind of cost and predict our business out months or years in advance even is really nice definitely yeah those that is a major difference in price uh and i'm excited to take a look at the nft marketplace

11:53with these creators when that is all flushed out and when there's lots to choose from so i'm looking forward to that yeah yeah it should be it should be super cool um we actually do at the moment do gasless transactions so galaxy will counter sign your transactions and pay that dollar fee for you uh so technically you know it's free to mint uh nfts on galaxy

12:15amazing cooper even better i like it um and you know while we're on the topic of blockchain uh you also i was looking at the platform and in the white paper that you just released is the galaxy token integrated into the ecosystem as well which is different from a creator token can you talk about that token how does it integrate into the ecosystem uh what's the underlying

12:37value and does it create a sustainable ecosystem for the creators and for the fans yeah absolutely so galaxy token is a you know separate cryptocurrency from the actual creator social tokens or nfts um and it's not just a token that's relevant to you know galaxy inc or the application that we're building it is a broad protocol and ecosystem governance

13:00token that's kind of just used in galaxy's namesake as kind of an homage to them uh putting some of these in place uh but really any application can integrate those social tokens and nfts that we just discussed and anytime that they want to transfer or transact those tokens or buy an nft on a secondary marketplace for instance they have to attach gas or protocol fees

13:26in the native galaxy token so it very much powers the entire ecosystem and ensures that you know third-party applications are actually being used for pretty legitimate purposes kind of costing out the price of different types of attacks or spam that we might see in the ecosystem in addition it also provides formal on-chain governance so the fees and the

13:48specifications or the standards for example if we accept a new type of stable coins as collateral would have to be voted in by the community of galaxy token holders and so that they'll actually manage and determine how the ecosystem evolves over time uh they'll also determine things like which third-party applications can verify people um or you know just generally anything

14:12that you see with other protocol governance tokens kind of like uniswap and stuff like that definitely well thanks for that cooper and i know that your team's been working on this for quite a while but there's still more to come can you give us a snapshot of where you're at right now and what are the major milestones that the team's looking to achieve in the

14:31next few months yeah absolutely so you know over the past couple of months we've really built out our initial team so you know we have a solid engineering team internally i'm happy that i actually just hired an ex-colleague of mine paul madsen as our head of identity who's going to be working on a bunch of cool decentralized identity stuff for us um and we actually completed a seed

14:53round of fundraising and grants uh so we raised a little over seven and a half million dollars over the past couple of months and using that those funds to build out the rest of our team um over the past couple months we've also been live in a private beta so we're live with about 100 or so users on our application live testing it all those types of fun things as we're getting

15:13ready to roll it out so you know throughout the rest of the year you should see us actually go live with a public data we should be announcing some exciting partnership integrations that you might get a little tease of uh specifically in our white papers um and also doing some really cool exclusive nft drops and campaigns with uh you know not just the creators that

15:35you currently see on our website and in our white paper you know like dwight howard and aman shumpert uh and those types of people but also additional creators that we have not yet uh revealed to the world um so should be a lot of exciting things but i think the theme for the rest of the year is really validating our model and testing it and then hopefully we can make a lot of

15:57noise in the new year definitely and i'm looking forward to that cooper and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with those updates and get access to the beta and and use it what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved yeah um the shameless plug is you can follow me on twitter actually at cooper underscore coons i always post about

16:19galaxy stuff and um you know if there's anything that you should be aware of i'll probably share it there um but if you actually just go to galaxy app on twitter or galaxy.com uh you'd be able to find most of our recent news as well as download those white papers that we're talking about which uh were just released today so it's a very exciting news over here

16:41very exciting congratulations on that i will leave those links in the description box below as well for the twitter the website and your twitter as well cooper and all the best with galaxy moving forward and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you so much for having me i'm always happy to come on and share more about what we're doing uh maybe we can

17:00drag spencer or some of our celebrities into uh the next one when we are getting ready to launch more publicly sounds great thank you you