A Great NFT Project
If we’ve talked in the past few months, you’re probably aware that I’m a huge fan of StonerCats. They sold NFTs of stoned cats netting them 10s of millions of dollars, which they’re using to fund the production of an animated series about said stoned cats.
Similar to Dapper Labs, there is something much deeper happening beyond the money and flashy headlines. Also like Dapper Labs, it starts with cats. And ALSO like Dapper Labs, the creative guru behind the scenes is a guy named Mack Flavelle.
I love this project because it solves an urgent need, gives fans new ways to engage, and pioneers a new decentralized community model that never existed before.
Urgent need
Show creators need funding for their projects. This typically comes from production studios. The problem is that only handful of studios make most of the significant decisions about content production. According to Mila Kunis, none of the studios would greenlight her stonercats animated series because it’s too risky for them to create a show about a controversial topic like weed. This highlights the broader issue that a handful of risk-averse companies control the content that we all see. To get around this, Mila needs an alternative funding model.
Stonercats is the first Hollywood show to use this new model. Instead of relying on those incumbent studios, they went straight to their fans to raise money from NFT proceeds to fund the show. Now, the show will exist when it otherwise wouldn’t have.
New type of fan engagement
As of this week there are 4.6 thousand owners of stonercats NFTs. The cheapest price to buy one currently is 0.36 ETH which is ~$1200. Why would someone pay their hard earned money here?
Firstly, the NFTs serve as access tokens to enable you to watch the show. You log onto the website, connect your wallet, and the show becomes viewable. That’s cool!
The NFTs also allow you access to token-gated Discord channels. This is the crazy, weird part of why I love this NFT space. In these channels, you can interact with the show creators, community managers, and other stonercat owners. The conversations are fun and weird and often with the leading innovators in the space like Mack himself. They’ve also hosted events with the production team on how to pitch a show and their world-class animators on how they do animation.
Lastly, the project has promised token holders early access to future NFT drops for their other projects. With this piece alone, token holders could more than earn back their initial investments.
A new model for community
Everything mentioned so far could be done in some form without NFTs. The thing that is really pioneering here is the aspect of community governance happening behind the scenes.
That guy Mack I mentioned is up to something big. He is creating a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). DAOs are something that could not exist before and have the power to alter the nature of organizations.
What it boils down to is a community-governed organization. The community is empowered to make decisions about the project they are a part of. They can make proposals, vote for changes, or decided to sell their tokens and leave the community while others can freely buy-in to join. So far, the community has voted on small things like the name of a vacuum in the show which is now named “Shroomba” (lol).
That Discord channel I mentioned where all the stonercats holders participate is actually a part of the Big Head Club umbrella channel which is Mack’s company. Stonercats is the first project of many that he plans to help launch. They’ve already started work on their next project called Oni Ronin. Stonercat holders have early access to buy Oni Ronins before they’re available publicly. Currently, there are 22,021 members in the discord who will be following the decisions of the DAO governance.
I mean, come on. This is epic.
Some more info and links:
Stonercats on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/stoner-cats-official
Podcast with Mila and Ashton: https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher
Podcast with Mack and the business team: https://www.nfx.com/post/stoner-cats/
Have a good weekend!
Brian