Impact Investing in Web3 — Transcript of R Planet Townhall (Nov 2022)
Below is an abbreviated transcript of the recent townhall that was held by the R Planet team, you can listen to the full recording here. Please note that the text below is a combined voice of two team members — Ashley Vickers and Chelsea Maclin — that were leading the session.
We have been collecting feedback, notes and questions over the last couple of weeks and are hoping to address many of those. Team will also be available to address things after the Townhall if there are remaining questions.
When you’re building a brand and community in emerging tech, there’s fear and uncertainty — a lack of trust — and we need to overcome that by building trust in the team, the community, the platform, our purpose and value creation. We’re trying to build things intentionally and are learning along the way. We also want to stay on top of regulatory concerns and how businesses are evolving.
We’re here because we believe in creating a more sustainable and just world for all, and we know that the most powerful tool to implement change is to align purpose and profit. That shifts capital flows. The reason we chose to build in web3 is that web3 allows us to merge a purpose-based ecosystem — entertainment, commerce, investment, impact — and to actually evolve that with our community.
Our genesis question was ‘what if our tokens can do more?’ — what if your token could give you an exclusive branded jacket, make you money and fund a clean water initiative? I’m so proud that this team has already started that and I’m sure that everyone saw our iconic partnership with two global brands (UNICEF and Judith Leiber) to create something very unique and special, but ultimately we as a community brought clean water to over 1,500 children and their families in 10 villages. This is life-changing and we’ve just begun.
We’ve had hundreds of our community members that have attended our wellness and meditation sessions over the past weeks; we just finished a week of learning sessions with exclusive access to experts and thought-leaders and had almost 1,000 attendees across those seven sessions, which is juts an example of some of the exclusive content and education we are excited to provide. Part of the reason we sent out the survey yesterday is to better understand and curate our education programmes, our exclusive partnerships etc. to this group — so please do go and fill out that survey.
What does this all mean from a big, hairy audacious goal perspective? Our goal is to put an impact token in every single pocket. Aligning consumers, aligning our brands, corporates, commerce and investment with real world impact — climate action, sustainability, mental health, diversity/inclusion and more.
What does that mean in the near term and for you as a Genesis holder? We’ve created this Genesis collection to be the OG group. This is the group that shares our values, that believe we can do better, we can do more and pair profit and purpose together. That metamorphosis is possible. This group not only has values aligned with what we are building, but is also helping us drive forward with your ideas, your input and feedback, there have already been some great creative executions and ideas — we want to see those keep coming. This will allow us collectively to reach and build IP that builds value.
The Genesis group will get first access to everything that we’re building. You’ll be rewarded over and over again just for being early adopters and holders. You will be co-owners of future initiatives that we build together. We’ve said this in our Wiki — please do give that a read — and our Genesis holders will be gifted in everything that we do. That means first rights to all off-chain and on-chain activities; that means your ability to earn loyalty rewards through $pecie; and exclusive access to both digital and physical experiences, such as those we previewed last week.
$pecie is the R Planet rewards system that we put in place to reward loyalty, longevity, being a member here and valuing this community that feels time-based versus in-and-out. We wanted some kind of reward mechanism that can put you in the right spaces to be able to claim different things that we are trying to bring to this community. Each pfp will earn $pecie for every day that you hold this pfp — this is our absolute baseline. Every R Planet Genesis holder will get $pecie, irrespective of traits, class, types and others.
A lot of people have asked whether the quantity of $pecie will be based on traits and what happens if people own more than one? Huge shoutout to those who are true collectors in this community. The answer is that we will never change the baseline earnings that will always accrue, you can count on that, but we are deeply appreciative of the loyalty and our brand is all about metamorphosis, evolution and changing — so additional $pecie and $pecie multipliers will tie to different traits, lore and storytelling behind R Planet and initiatives that we are running. That will evolve over time as our story and our lore evolves.
Holders will be able to use that $pecie for a range of curated physical and digital items; in real-life experiences; some digital that we can do as we are all in global settings; upgrades to your pfp; limited edition merch and swag; airdrops and limited edition giveaways; allowlists and things for future collections; and other collaborations that we have planned.
It’s really down to those basics and I know there have been a lot of questions as to what else can this mean — all I can tell you is that the baseline will never change, every member of this community if you are a holder will be accruing from day one. The evolution of the multipliers and additional bonuses will evolve as our story evolves.
Timing? We will have all of this ready in the next couple of weeks. We have a dev team currently working on the rewards system and token checker page, that we will have available this Winter — before year end. We are aiming in the next couple of weeks for all of this to be available with some clarity on the first wave of earnings and what this is working towards.
When we first introduced $pecie there has been some amazing thought-partnership from this community on ideas and ways that we can do this — whether it is soft-staking, different multipliers and things that can be attributed. We love those, please tag us and DM as you are having some of these thoughts. We are refining this now with Jira Money Minds and the ideas that we have going forward, and want to evolve this with the ideas that you have. We may also hold a small focus group to preview what we are doing and get some feedback, building with you in mind and the best way to utilise this.
The reward system mechanism is one piece of the R Planet puzzle, which is much grander and bigger than this, but it is an exciting development that we want to bring to you.
R Planet and this community stands for more. We care about impact, we care about delivering it, but we are not a non-profit — we believe that purpose and profit together drive change and that web3, especially through the ability to tokenise, fractionalise and distribute cause-based assets to everybody versus just a few which is at its nascency from a technological perspective. Our parent R Labs closed $5mil in pre-seed funding to build this, based on our team and track record and thesis. We had lots of interest from an investment perspective and continue to have interest.
R Labs is working on sustainability projects, affordable housing, impact initiatives that enable us to mobilise capital for purpose and profit. We’ve been working on this in the background for a long time, putting money to work to build the team that can navigate this very rapidly changing regulatory marketplace and environment. The team has sourced the initial pilot assets and those will drive the initial partnerships and value creation efforts going into 2023. With these initiatives and assets, we will have the ability to tokenise, fractionalise and distribute off-chain impacts on-chain.
R Planet, the first consumer facing community and brand, will have proprietary and exclusive access to anything that comes out of R Labs that we create and gives us the ability to connect those same off-chain initiatives and enable you to share in the lasting, measurable impact that these initiatives will have. We can’t wait to share more on what is already happening on the impact side.
There is a level of team that is at the R Labs parent company level that are not the forward-facing people, that are investment experts and people that helped build UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole, and we’ve also worked in regulatory industries for decades. A lot of these sound like fancy brand names, but what this truly means is that we are impact investors and do this professionally on the backend. We have been working tirelessly on building an impact portfolio, which is what we know how to do, in areas of sustainability, women and BIPOC platforms, areas that we see can make an improvement in the real world. Our goal as R Labs and thesis that closed the VC funding, is that web3 is going to be the primary access point for this entire next generation and it has the technology for the first time that can enable the level of fractionalisation, tokenisation and distribution to people that have not regularly or prior had access to this in historical and tradfi systems.
R Labs has grand visions of tokenising these impact assets and owning the impact digital asset class of web3. That is what it is looking to build and the benefit to R Planet is that everything we are building needs to go through the R Planet community first. How is the VC funding being used? It is on that grander vision and the level of team to execute on that vision.
How is R Planet going to be able to benefit when you have these additional tokens, products and services made? There is a filtration that we want to implement, that as we do anything with brand and corporate sponsors, corporate partnerships and players, it has to go through R Planet first. That is the entry point and gating system to everything that we want to build on web3. This will drive steady-state demand and growth for this project. This is beyond a single pfp project, this is just the beginning to pushing the limits to what tokens can be used for.
We can’t release everything at any given time, but these assets do exist; they have been underwritten; they have been developed by our team. I’m not going to front-run a couple of these, but they already exist — we are not out there seeking them. They have been underwritten and due-diligenced. We are excited to be able to connect R Planet to them very soon.
What have we learned in terms of what it takes to build a successful business? Most critical to us is building an extraordinary community. That is based on the team and the first core adopters that drive engagement and drive the community forward in growth. You’ve seen us welcome some new names and faces in the last week or so — but instead of us being a team of five people, we’ve become a team of 5,000 and we want to operate that way with you all. This drives our collective activity and our collective success globally. So part of our strategy is to engage our core community through R Labs and R Planet.
Everyone knows and we agree that floor price is super important, but we also have to understand that the environmental conditions at this moment in time also have to be taken into account. We can’t live in a vacuum, but our tech and purpose, our impact initiatives haven’t changed. We are seeing uptake in partners that want to partner with us — but in order to partner with us you must be a Genesis holder. That goes for our partners as well, which allows us to create real demand — not artificial demand — that we can repeat from an always-on strategy perspective. This will allow us to take care of the floor in a meaningful and sustainable way. This isn’t just a project, this is a business. We are creating for profit in the real world and those are long-term challenges. We are excited to address those together.
The second thing we have learned is that we need to constantly strengthen and grow this IP. We are the first brand and interactive ecosystem where our tokens matter for more — and we are expanding this in our lore, our storytelling and character development which you will see unveil over the coming weeks. We were really intentional about partnering with Nessi and creating really rich anime, pop-fantasy art… may or may not have been inspired by Captain Planet and Marvel, we’re big fans over here. That rich detail allows us to story-tell and that ties to impact, which gives us an opening to brand partners to enter our eco-system and drive value to the extraordinary community. That appeal will drive and strengthen our IP via corporates, via brands, and brand value and loyalty are arguably the most important thing that we can develop and grow as a community. If you have a group of holders and they care about the planet and the people who live here, what do we think that brands are attracted to? That high level of engagement and incredible value to the partners is something that we can offer that will collectively impact both for price and our community.
We also wanted to make sure that you know where our Mindmap is. The value is measured, yes, in your NFT but also in what you get gifted and the ownership and impact this NFT creates around the world.
More will be released, we know people want an abundance of clarity and some kind of roadmap. This is a mindmap and we have a lot of ideas on how we can have a differentiated approach and also about shorter snapshots of time because the world is a volatile, interesting place and we need to evolve with the community. Yes, we do have a series of partners that we are currently negotiating with now that are very interested in our proposition — which is because of this community right here and what we stand for. That is what moves the needle for them. We would rather under-promise and over-deliver on what is coming in shorter snapshots, but for now we wanted to start to roll-out and restate what it is we are trying to build as far as our mission and vision and make sure we are all aligned in what it’s going to take to get there.
The value that you feel you are getting from this, the utility you feel you are getting from this, is important — we are just branching out what that can mean. Utility is going to mean different things, both monetary and other. This is the group that is the OG and gets access to everything, we will reward you as we go through $pecie as a starting point. You will have access to everything that R Labs is building, which is inherently connections to off-chain assets which are good for the environment and good for the people that live here. As those get tokenised and brought on-chain, those will have different forms but we will do our best to ensure that R Planet has an ability to contribute to those. As those become different styles of instruments, we are at least filtering value through the R Planet community who want to have access. So even if you are not an end-holder of everything that gets developed, you will benefit by being an OG.
We want to make sure this is clear to you all and the roadmap we will be delivering in short snippets. Be here for the journey, because it’s going to look a bit different each go around.
Please do continue to send through your questions, as we will continue to answer those either via townhalls or announcements. We also want to start holding focus groups around specific items, whether it is $pecie development or other feedback. We are excited to get to know you better and please do fill out the community survey — we want to understand you and make sure that we are serving this global community to the best of our ability. Let’s do this together.
To reiterate again on the FTX-fallout side, we are protected and moved very quickly post-mint into USDC. We were not every here to be speculative investors with treasury and business funds for this project, so were protected ahead of the ETH downturn. We do not do business interactions with FTX and other exchanges. We have multi-sig cold storage wallets that we ensure are protected and removed from any members of the community, team and project team. VC funds are being used to develop our investment portfolio and the tech to tokenise and fractionalise to get that out to a broader audience. This will come to life more in 2023 but has already existed and the assets are created on the backend.
We are sharing more hints across social and twitter about our upcoming activation, which has started to activate today. This will lead to a fairly major brand partnership, coupled with our first purpose initiative. Starting with some lore and storytelling, more will be dropped over time leading to our next big initiative.
We look to benefit all 8,888 holders — every being is important to R Planet and you can’t underestimate what one of these pfps will do in the future, which holds for the accrual of $pecie as well. We want to ensure we are applying value to everybody, not just raffle style based on traits. But we also want to keep you guessing! This next initiative is one to benefit all holders and we are quite excited with this one. Timing is everything on some of these announcements, and it would have been irresponsible to come out with any exuberant messaging these past weeks — but the time is now right and we are ready to announce this next activation.
Thank you and we are excited to answer any additional questions you might have. We are excited to continue to both collaborate with and for you all.
