Rally Digest #44 (September 27, 2021)
Welcome to the Rally Digest, a weekly round-up of everything that’s happening around the Rally project.
New Creators:
Kayvon Thibodeaux / $JREAM
A college Student-athlete, fixed on being more than an athlete.
Andy Milonakis/ $DGEN
Professional weirdo, travel streamer, sometimes actor and have been diving deep into the crypto and NFT world.
Cole Seely/ $CS14
Former professional supercross and motocross racer turned freerider and content creator.
KLOUD/ $KLD
KLOUD is an electronic producer & artist that merges timeless electronic sounds with modern production elements; sonically inspired by darker techno/house, electro & analog synthesizers. By perception, KLOUD is an elusive fictional character that plays off the modern realities of data privacy, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Kyle McLagan/ $CLAGS
Kyle McLagan is a professional footballer (soccer) from Kansas City, Missouri; he currently plays in Reykjavik, Iceland. Kyle’s passions include football, fitness & nutrition, travel, and his pursuit to help aspiring athletes chase their dreams.
April Kae/ $APRIL
Musician and model by trade, and creative and activist by passion.
Sloppy/ $SLPY
Professional Gamer since 2016
Rawtek/ $RAW
DJ and music producer from Los Angeles
Notorious B.O.B/ $BOB
World Champion competitive eater and Buffet Buster. Widely recognized as the Buffet King of the World.
Tommy Winkler/ $CRNH
Tik Tok’s King of Crunch
Graysworld/ $GRAY
Gray is a social media content creator, specializing in dark humor and awkward comedy.
Project News:
Xoogler, a community of 10,000+ Ex-Google Employees and Investors, Mints First-Ever NFT
On Tuesday, Xoolgers, a global community that counts more than 10,000 ex-Google employees as members that work together to help each other in the startup ecosystem, announced the launch of its first collection of NFTs that will grant holders priority access to future Xoogler Demo Days, starting with Xoogler Demo Day Blockchain II on November 11, 2021. Xoogler Demo Days are a series of events where early stage startups led by ex-Google founders pitch their project to a group of more than 100 top investors. The first Xoogler Demo Day was organized at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in 2016.
NCAA Football Player Kayvon Thibodeaux and Supercross Star Cole Seely Make History
On Thursday, Oregon defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux and professional supercross racer Cole Seely made history as they launched their own cyptoruccrencues via Rally, Kayvon as the first first NCAA football player and Cole as a supercross rider.
Kayvon ($JREAM) will donate 100% of weekly activity rewards and 20% of the coin genesis mint to his Jream Foundation. Benefits at launch for coin holders will include access to a gated Discord and exclusive merch. Check out Kayvon’s announcement here.
Cole’s token ($CS14) will give fans access to a host of benefits, including exclusive content, Seely Speed Factory merch, and entry into exclusive contests surrounding Seely’s new toy drops at Target and Walmart. He will provide coin holders a look behind the scenes as he builds and tests bikes, rides in unconventional environments, and performs at events. Watch Cole’s announcement here.
Thought Leadership:
- Rally’s VP of Product Chris Fortier appeared on two panels at Mainnet 2021 discussing social tokens and NFTs. The first panel, “Tokening the Creator Class” featured Mason Nystrom (Messari) as moderator with Chris, Nicole d’Avis (Seed Club), and Alex Zhang (Friends with Benefits) as panelists. The second panel, “From Grammys to DeFi: Artists & Creators in a Web 3.0 World,” was moderated by Kevin Kelly (Delphi Ventures) with Chris, !llmind and Jeremiah Owyang as panelists.
Rally in the News:
- The launch of $JREAM was covered by ESPN, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Yahoo Sports, Bleacher Report, The Athletic, Coindesk, and a number of other publications.
- Xooglers’ NFT launch was the featured story in Tuesday’s crypto newsletter from The Information
- $CS14 launch was covered by RacerX
- VP of Product Chris Fortier was interviewed by DeCrypt at Mainnet 2021 re: Rally’s approach to NFTs and social tokens.
Industry News:
- Bitcoin tipping comes to Twitter. The social network — and key watering holes of the cryptorati — has added tipping with Bitcoin to its growing suite of creator-centric features. This creates the possibility of using Bitcoin as a major payments rail within a large social network for the first time…
- …But perhaps more interesting than payments is Twitter’s next crypto-creator related feature, which is authenticated NFT profile pics (or ‘PFP’ for the non-fungible among us). Twitter will let users connect crypto wallets to an account and display NFTs held by that wallet, with the addition of an authentication badge on the profile picture, The Verge reported. Collectors will then be able to show off their NFTs as profile pics without the suspicion that they don’t actually own them.
- Snapchat is reckoning with the unintended consequences of easy money: its $1 million daily giveaway to the most popular creators have filled its streams with a slew of copycat content, co-founder Evan Spiegel has said. It will soon give out a few million dollars a month to creators, The Information reported.
- Pioneering social token accelerator Seed Club announced its third cohort of projects, CoinDesk reported. Among the 15 teams selected for the six-week program, which will help them design and launch their tokens, were Russian art collective Pussy Riot, music analyst Cherie Hu, the music blog Tiny Mix Tapes and former Bloomberg reporter Matt Leising, who quit the news giant to start a DAO that makes TV shows and movies.
- The token-powered news and data site Forefront published the first network analysis of social tokens, revealing a taxonomy of the token landscape. A glance at the network graphs shows that tokens are used overwhelmingly in governance and curation, but little used for DeFi or payments. The analysis also shows that communities often produce media and events, but rarely get involved with fashion, payments or research.
