Welcome back fellow degens, I've gathered you all here to share my thoughts on an interesting juncture we’ve reached and how, after processing an incredible amount of opinions/feedback, I'd like to navigate through it.
Before I jump in, I’d like to quickly discuss something I've had to learn about leadership that has affected my stance on this topic. Good leadership isn’t just about making decisions — anyone can tell a group of people to do something, then sit back and watch as everything catches fire. Good leadership is about ego management. It’s about putting your emotions aside and really trying to understand if the decision you want to make/have made is serving your group’s intended goal OR if it’s just feeding your ego.
When you’re making decisions on behalf of a group, obviously the best outcome is the one that benefits as many in said group as possible, and as stated above, is working toward a goal. Well, the current juncture I refer to in the opening lines very much entails the future of this goal. However, I see this as an opportunity.
For those of you who have been active in the community in recent history you may have noticed mixed feedback over art reveals for the eggs. Usually I wouldn’t share art before being able to show it in its entirety. Without seeing the bigger picture, it’s difficult to know what to make of it. Although, in this case I'm actually very glad we did. Not for the specific comments about facial features, but for the bigger picture concerns that are important to us all.
Our mission has and always will be to give as much value to our holders as possible, but value that aligns with our long term goals. The eggs are a way of delivering said value, firstly to the ‘twins’ and secondly to the community at large. We recognized the twins was an error on our side and before submitting a more permanent fix, we’d make good by generating value for/from them. It is not until recently however that I have had to concede that the initial vision for what would come of the eggs was no longer true to the vision of what we aim to build with the Degeniverse. The bigger picture.
Our long term vision is to become an entertainment company. Our IP generation and growth has and will start in crypto but this is not the end goal. If we are to onboard more people to web3 we have to expand out of it, to cast a wider net. Our NFTs/characters will always be the posterchildren of the brand. Whatever we develop, they will all be front and center. They are an advertisement for everything we build in the future (Games, television, movies, apps etc). When you start to think about them in this light, the stakes become far greater.
The most important bit of feedback that I read regarding DAK addressed the issue of ‘expansion’. This is key. Every time a character is introduced into a ‘universe’ of characters they should offer something new. It’s an opportunity to expand the lore in a far more interesting and meaningful way but for us it’s also an opportunity to expand the community in a meaningful way too. Regardless of whether you like the jr. apes art or not, they fall short of this goal. They were created for a community that already loves Degenerate Apes. They are praised internally because of nostalgia. But with the goal of further IP expansion, introducing a character that shares its essence with something that has already been created is/was short sighted. Unfortunately it took me creating the entire fucking collection to realize this but I can simply chalk that up to past tunnel vision. Over the months we have matured in our focus and we are now far more set in the direction we’d like to take this company and this brand. Simply, I see this as an opportunity. It’s a meaningful pivot toward a future I can see being far more beneficial for us all. The unfortunate downside I wish we could avoid is further waiting. This sort of art takes time (you are all way too familiar with this by now) but trust me when I say I'm only doing this because I truly believe it will positively affect the value of what you hold and the value of our brand at large. You may think I’m mad scrapping months/hundreds of hours of work, I had a single minute where I thought I was too, then promptly moved past it knowing that in retrospect it will be the right thing to do for us all.
Yes I have started on the art already. When the realization hit me that we needed to pivot, one single tear rolled down my cheek then I jumped straight back into art land. A stronger concept was formed and a new character rose from the 3D ashes over the course of a week. One that we think will meaningfully complement the world we are building in its own unique way. One that we think will attract new community members. One that we think is worthy of the grailed “egg”.
We have set a new target deadline internally for the creation of the rest of the collection and will aim to keep you updated as we move closer to it. In the meantime, please know that myself and the team will continue to have long term success as our goal. Each of these decisions are incredibly hard to make but they are made with our future vision in mind. One that we hope will start to become a whole lot more apparent in good time. In hindsight, it’ll still be obvious.
Bonus alpha: In the last article I wrote the potential way we would upgrade ape traits and how that would work functionally. Since then I have been working with the one and only Scum behind the scenes to establish ideas for a ‘cleaner’ collection from an art stand point. The cogs are now turning on this too.
Much love.
