$WHALE Town Hall || Q3 2021
Q3 Growth & Highlights, NFT Photography, Selling Vault NFTs, Infrastructure, Community, and Art Updates
Welcome to the Q3 2021 Town Hall Recap!
The recorded presentation is embedded below if you prefer to watch it in full.
You can jump ahead to any section using the table of contents below.
Table of Contents
- Town Hall Presentation Recording
- Project Overview
- Q3 Growth Review
- Q3 Highlights
- Infrastructure Update
- Community Update
- Art Update
- AMA
Town Hall Presentation Recording
Project Overview
Vision
Empowering anyone and everyone to become a Whale through $WHALE.
Mission
Creating the world’s leading NFT-focused DAO-enabled social token through Operational Transparency, Industry Leadership and Stable Growth.
Strategy
We have 5 strategic pillars that create value for $WHALE:
- ASSETS: The $WHALE Vault asset portfolio providing long-term and stable growth
2. COMMUNITY: that advocates for, participates in, and shares in success
3. ENGAGEMENT: Channels of engagement that attract, retain and drive community membership and participation
4. DISCIPLINE: Financial discipline in budgeting, expenditures, and leverage to ensure longevity
5. LEADERSHIP: Industry leadership through education, content, innovation, and knowledge sharing
Q3/Q4 Review
Our focuses for 2021 have continued to be:
- Refine content strategy: We have continued to produce regular cadenced community events and content. Executed plan to increase frequency and diversification in Q3, resulting in exponential community growth.
- Team maintenance: The HR structure that was developed in Q2 has been actively implemented and leveraged in Q3. Further refinement and staffing changes resulted in enhanced quality and throughput.
- Increase market liquidity: With $WHALE listed on two top 10 exchanges, Gate.io and Huobi, Leadership continued to negotiate with additional top exchanges for additional listings and optimized existing liquidity provisions
- Drive operational efficiencies: Implemented project management infrastructure, realigned staffing, pivoted from poor ROI events and reinvested where beneficial to streamline expenditure.
- Leveraging the vault/brand: Significant uptick in activity to leverage brand strength consumer awareness. $WHALE presence in premier physical auction houses, Media appearances, first time taking Vault assets to market and using proceeds to reacquire open market $WHALE for community distribution coffers.
Assets: Vault Growth
The $WHALE Vault continues to be one of, if not the absolute, strongest portfolio collections of NFTs in existence. Seeded with $535k in assets just 19 months ago — the $WHALE Vault achieved a new record high valuation of $126M for the month of November. (+23,451%) The unique portfolio potency and breadth puts the $WHALE Vault in position to continue this trajectory of exponential growth going forward.
“My personal opinion is that if we do not see a $200m Vault valuation by next year and a $500m valuation within the next 3–5 years, I would be extremely surprised” — WhaleShark, Founder of $WHALE
Community: Growth (Discord)
The $WHALE community membership has continued to grow in tandem with the $WHALE Vault, having increased on Discord (primary community vehicle) +44% since Q3 to over 23k members. Combined with international membership on alternative platforms, the $WHALE community has grown to over 30k members globally.
Budget: Monthly $WHALE Expenditure
Even with excellent asset and membership growth, $WHALE remains extremely fiscally responsible, having reduced operating costs and expenditure from an average of 35,000 $WHALE to 27,000 per month. This reduction was passed through the $WHALE DAO via a majority vote.
Additional streamlining initiatives and changes targetted for March are expected to further reduce to 20,000–25,000 monthly.
Price: Growth
The recent quarter saw $WHALE token pricing settling in the $20 range, though recent volatility in the macro Ethereum and Bitcoin markets have caused some pullback. With $WHALE hovering near $14 at the time of this presentation, the current pricing represents a near 300% increase versus the start of the year. We anticipate continued growth as the strong fundamentals of the project and unrivaled vault assets become reflected in market pricing.
The team and community will continue to steer decisions to help shepherd this growth via:
- Mindfully managing the amount of supply released into the market
- Continuing to provide value to the vault, enabling assets to continue to appreciate
- Exercising patience and allowing the market to reach a larger liquidity base
“You see a lot of record-breaking sales in the market today, but what is more important is the consistency and amount of liquidity that exists in that higher-end market. I believe we will see that influx into the market over the next 12 to 24 months.” — WhaleShark, Founder of $WHALE
Liquidity: Growth
Recent months saw milestone growth, with $WHALE’s liquidity breaching $10M for the first time. $WHALE remains one of the largest liquidity pools of all social tokens.
Q3 Highlights
Significant milestones achieved in recent months:
- Token listing on Gate.io and Huobi Global: Listed on two top 10 exchanges and ongoing discussion with additional top 10 exchanges for listings
- Sotheby’s Natively Digital 1.2: First time $WHALE Vault NFTs were ever brought to market — selling 1 Pak ($1.1m), 1 Hackatao ($504k), and 1 Brendan Dawes ($37.8k)
- Binance NFT Ode to the Crypto Whale auction: Initiated relationship and partnership with Binance, helping to curate and execute a premier artist auction
- Poly Auction Exhibition: Successful Poly Auction Exhibition in China
- Art Basel Exhibition: coordinated unique $WHALE presence and exhibition at Art Basel Miami that was well received
Infrastructure Update
👨👩👧👦 Human Resources
Team structure optimization is ongoing. Below is a summary of the activity over the past few months.
- 5 departures (October - December 2020)
- 8 additions (October - December 2020)
- HR process formalization and EOY reviews
- Team restructuring
Updated Organization Structure:
⚙ Improved Workflow — Jira
With growth continuing to drive expansive scope and staffing, $WHALE fully implemented project management suite Jira in October to streamline workflows, optimize resource allocation and ensure accountability. All leadership and moderators have been onboarded and are using JIRA with mandatory task and time tracking.
Recent Stats:
- 1,491 hours logged in October
- 1,241 hours logged in November
🐳 $WHALE DAO
Q3 and Q4 $WHALE DAO highlights:
- 16 Proposals underwent voting (July to November)
- 1st proposal to acquire assets — Damien Hirst
- 1st (3) proposals to auction assets — Sotheby’s + Poly Auction + *Discretionary
- 1st proposal to spend assets — Token 2049 Asia 2021
*The discretionary auction slot was allotted to WhaleShark allowing him to sell 1 NFT per month from the Vault when/where opportunistic.
🔁 Automation Improvements
Further improvements to workflows via automation:
- Jira automation for over 100 templated tasks
- Implementation of stream-text lock/unlock bot
- Automatic creation and setup of VIP event channels
- [In progress] Restream bot
- [Coming soon] Vault-keeper bot re-launch
- [Coming later] DAO voting tools upgrade
Community Update
🐋 Brand Refresh
Our video and design teams have been hard at work updating all of the $WHALE branding and visuals across our channels.
- New social key visuals: Upgraded key visuals across social platforms
- New stream bumpers and overlays: Upgraded visuals for live content
- New WHALE introduction videos: Content series explaining the nuances of $WHALE in layman's terms and helping bridge people to social tokens
- Enhanced social engagement voice and reach: Enhanced focus in our social media approach, as well as within our managed communities
- [Coming Soon] New website with web3 integration: A new $WHALE website is launching soon that will include web3 integration with token gated content and unique interactive elements accessible for $WHALE holders
🆕 New Content
During the recent quarter, the team has been ramping up the quantity and focus of value-added content production. With a widening scope and breadth, the content aims to enhance the experience for the $WHALE community as well as provide macro market appeal with external content and draw people to the project.
These efforts have resulted in significantly expanding reach and readership, whereas previous content delivery was primarily an internal audience.
💹 #Market-Strategy Content
The $WHALE Market Strategy Team has been analyzing the market closely since August to find and deliver keen insights and alpha to the community:
- Developed NFT Fear & Greed Index (NFGI): Proprietary methodology to gauge NFT market sentiment, the first and only fear and greed index for NFTs
- In-Depth Weekly Highlights: State of the market, recent events, NFGI updates, and upcoming drops to be aware of
- [Role Holder Exclusive] Market Strategy Channel — Direct Access: Opportunity to discuss directly with the $WHALE Market Strategy team
- [Role Holder Exclusive] Monthly Macro Report: In-depth look at what has happened the previous month, what it means for trends going forward, and what the projections are
- [Role Holder Exclusive] Project Scorecards: Individual project analysis scorecards on upcoming / current projects of interest
🏈 Expanded Sports Collectible Community
The Top Shot Lounge has been rebranded to Sports NFTs to reflect the growing sports collectibles NFT market and expand its reach beyond just NBA Top Shot — Including:
- Soccer (football) Integration
- Inclusive NFL Gamification
“One of the more exciting things that evolved from this for me personally is this was the first iteration of a $WHALE Community sub-committee, where I was able to sub out the task of putting together this gamification to a unique group that had volunteered. We worked out what the parameters would be, and they’ve done a tremendous job.” — Nytmare, Head of Community Marketing
📷Community Expansion
Established $WHALE Photography Community
$WHALE has leaned in and embraced NFT Photography in a big way, starting with the addition of many photography pieces to the $WHALE Vault — and continuing with the establishment of community resources and infrastructure to continue providing support and amplification of this important market segment.
NFT Photography Highlights:
- Vault Additions: added 30+ NFT Photography pieces to the Vault
- Community Outreach / Dialogue: Ignited and continuing the NFT Photography conversation on Twitter, Spaces, and Discord
- Dedicated Community Channel: Launched #nft-photography channel in the $WHALE discord — open to everyone to allow cross pollination and info sharing with the macro NFT community
- $WHALE FM Segment Launch: Camera Culture! A new streaming series dedicated to NFT Photography, showcasing established and emerging artists — check out the first episode featuring Albert Dros
- [Coming Soon] $WHALE Photography Gallery Launch: A metaverse gallery build showcasing all of the photography NFTs in the $WHALE Vault
- [Coming Soon] $WHALE Community Photography Gallery: A metaverse gallery build showcasing the works of our vibrant NFT Photography community
- [Coming Soon] Staffing Photographer JR MOD: Looking to bring on dedicated NFT photography Junior Moderators to be part of the $WHALE Team and have that expertise to help bridge people into the emerging photography space
💸 Refocused Rewards
Social Token leveraging has been refined, moving away from general open drops and focused on rewarding $WHALE role holders and community members for actual engagement.
Reward Highlights:
- More Alpha and Giveaways from guests
- Shifted TIP and AIRDROP usage to reward engagement
- Focused on rewarding members with ROLES
- Larger airdrops and frequency in ROLE rooms
- Reward TWITTER amplification
- Reward ACTIVE engagement during streams
- Reward direct calls to action
Art Update
🎨 Art x $WHALE Relaunch
In the past, Art x $WHALE collaborations resulted in an oversaturation of pieces, so the program has been revamped with the following changes:
- One Artist per month
- Focused Content — Interviews, writeups, Metaverse galleries, etc. focused on the artist
- Artist Choice — The artist can now choose whatever theme they like, it doesn’t have to relate to $WHALE
- NFT Scarcity — Instead of 5 editions, we’ve gone down to just 3 and only 1 will be for sale
- Only for $WHALE — The pieces can only be purchased with $WHALE
On that note, December’s artist is Reinhard Schmid!
🦢 $WHALE x BREEZY — Vault Spotlighting
$WHALE has partnered with professional curator Eleonora Brizi (BREEZY founder) to highlight the artists and beautiful pieces in the $WHALE Vault. One artist is featured each month, with a dedicated curated showing in the custom Arium gallery, as well as content and amplification across all of our channels.
“We’re trying to spotlight and bring culture to the metaverse… do things that the traditional art world would do, but metaverse style.” — Decryptolorian, Head of Art
The first featured artist was XCOPY in November, followed by Giant Swan in December.
📷 $WHALE x NFT Photography
Bringing $WHALE to NFT Photographers! This was touched on in the community section as well — expect a lot more photography content in 2022.
- New Photography Channel
- Cryptovoxel Gallery
- Focused Content
- Photography Interviews
🔑 $WHALE x METAKEY — Community Spotlighting
Community spotlighting is back and now with rewards and more focused resources!
$WHALE’s partnership with Metakey is focused on highlighting the talented creators within both of the project communities.
The first exhibit’s theme was “Unlocking the Metaverse” — you can still view all the valid submissions in the $WHALE Cryptovoxel Gallery.
The top 5 winners as voted on by the communities were recognized for their work as well as given prizes in Metakeys and $WHALE tokens.
The theme for January’s exhibit is coming soon! Keep your eyes on the #art-whale-x-metakey channel. ($WHALE H2P Roles Only)
🌐 Other Art Initiatives: Time $WHALE Spent.
- $WHALE x Binance NFT: Significant work completed behind the scenes to manage technical aspects and porting of NFTs to Binance. NFTs could be ported back and forth between ETH and BSC
- Sotheby’s Auction: Sold first ever Vault NFTs
- Art Basel Vault Exposure: Team members Cartoon Advisory and Eleonora were on the ground at Art Basel managing a unique $WHALE AR experience
- Artist/Platform Connections: $WHALE continues to leverage it’s industry position and relationships within the movement to put artists together with platforms and find synergies
- Cryptovoxel Gallery Optimization Project: Gallery optimization will allow us to place the images ourselves through a third party platform
- $WHALE Representation at Community Events: $WHALE has increased their commitment to representation for community-driven events. If you are interested in having $WHALE represented at an event, we have the resources! Reach out to Decryptolorian (DC) in Discord
AMA
Disclaimer: The answers here are summarized versions from the presentation. If you want to hear WhaleShark, Nytmare, and DC’s full answers in context, then make sure you check out the AMA portion of the presentation.Q: Will there ever be a chance to let other role holders, other than WHALES, build in Cryptovoxels or other Metaverse parcels held by the vault, including WHALEKIDS?
A: Cryptovoxel parcels are in high demand; however, considering we have 1700 Sandbox parcels, once Sandbox starts allowing parcels to be rented out then it’s likely we can open up those to more roles… maybe not all Dolphins, but definitely Sharks.
Q : Update about the sales from vault? Its been a while after “Pak” sale, any auction ahead of us?
A: There is a lot of paperwork involved before receiving the funds from Sotheby’s, but WhaleShark has fronted a large portion of the sales in the meantime, so that we can go ahead with the token buyback…there is no public schedule for the buyback to avoid front running.
As for future auctions, it’s likely that our next one will be with Poly Auction into the China market. Other than that, it’s more of a question of when and why as we have close relationships with Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Poly Auction.
Q: Did that monthly budget include paying staff?
Yes it did.
Q: when is the Minnow role being launched?
A: The Minnow role has been pushed back, for one reason… we’re still discussing gated content.
Our experience working with the NFT Photography community over the last couple of weeks has really opened our eyes to whether educational content should ever be token gated.
We’re seeing so many people that want to learn but can’t afford even the very low limit of a minnow role, and we want to keep educational content as accessible as possible.
This will be discussed ongoing — the infrastructure for the Minnow role is all ready to go for when we figure out how best to implement it for the community.
Q: We know that after Hackatao movement so many members joined the club and role holders get the chance to have WL. Any projects ahead of us for role holders of Whale?
A: We won’t be doing a PFP project as it’s not in our DNA.
However, our new upcoming site will have token gated market analysis content specifically for role holders, including individual project analysis and the ability to pull NFT Fear and Greed Index on-demand. An abundance of alpha is coming soon.
Q: Can I join the DAO Senate?
A: DAO Season 3 structure has just been announced. Read up on that post for more details!
Q: The Poly Auction mentioned in the presentation, was it the Beijing Poly 2021 Autumn Auction? What was WhaleCommunity’s involvement in the Auction
A: There is an NDA in effect here, but what we can say is that we’re going to have a strategic formalized agreement and partnership with Poly Auction that focuses on mainland China.
We also helped them curate a portion of the gallery that was shown during the Beijing 2021 Autumn Auction.
Q: To what extent does the Whale Community make use of locked rewards to keep people invested in every sense even when the price is down? Can more be done on this front?
A: First, one of our safeguards is that accounts need to hold that liquidity in there for 30 days straight.
Secondly, the H2P role drops are random, so they don’t know what date or time the drop will happen and if they aren’t holding the role at that time, they won’t receive the reward.
Q: Do the end of year reviews include raises?
A: No they did not. WhaleShark is very proud of the team for the fact that the majority don’t place the ultimate value of their positions on the compensation.
Heads did all receive increases due to the amount of additional responsibility they undertook.
Mods, Junior Mods, and Heads can receive a maximum bonus of 100 $WHALE per month. Very few moderators have ever been rewarded over their baseline salary because it does have to be extremely geared towards overperformance when we do that. Only 2 out of 25 staff recieved a bonus in December.
Q: Has Whale ever done a random airdrop of edition NFTs to role holders, just to keep people holding and reward loyalty?
Yes, we have. It was fun, but with the transition from the way we’ve moved Art x $WHALE, the airdrop wasn’t as significant as it should be.
Q: What are the best ways new artists can get noticed by collectors? Shill thread seems suspect and I don’t feel right about DM spam.
A: The best way to get WhaleShark’s eye is through a shill thread. When he tweets out asking to show your work, he’ll go through every post —it’s essential you share your best work to ensure it is eye-catching.
About 50–60% of the NFT Photography work WhaleShark recently bought was via shill threads.
Q: As we are talking about listing as whale, why not to make an ad with a famous artist a collobaration?
A: Listing is a listing, we would love to do ads in the future once we make it to $500m. For the time being, the main reason we list is that it enters into a broader and deeper level of liquidity for the token.
Q: whaleshark.eth sold lots of gods and mork, you don’t like them?
A: I love gods and mork my friend, but given that, there are reasons I was selling Gods and $MORK.
For Gods, I have a lot. Whenever you are looking at a portfolio you have to do rebalancing and diversification… if you don’t, that is the way you get burned and that is capital and equity that is lost when it could be put towards the $WHALE project.
For $MORK, it was predominantly because I was helping them manage their liquidity curve. You saw it blast up to $14 and essentially people were using $MORK as a trading opportunity rather than what it was suppose to be, which was to allow people to enter the whitelist. When you look at the amount of $MORK I sold it was insignificant and it was only at high points where I thought traders were utilizing their buy-ins at $4 to trade off for $12–14, that was not the main purpose of the whitelisting. At the same time, I’ve held $MORK for 2 years now and was the very first person to help them establish their liquidity pool — I wanted to help them and make sure their liquidity, pricing, and everything was in range for them to succeed with their NFT drop that they are holding later today.” — WhaleShark, Founder of $WHALE
Q: How to apply for the NFT Photography position?
A: Send your resume and cover letter to join@whale.me
Q: I wanted to get your opinions/thoughts on NFT Photography being released under CC0 License..
A: WhaleShark doesn’t mind.
What is the difference between collecting an NFT and not having the commercial license anyway because the artist/creative has the commercial license versus owning the NFT and everyone has the commercial license?
For WhaleShark, there is no difference between the two because he never owned the creative license to begin with.
Q: Why vault liquidity removed and ETH and Gods sent to whaleshark.eth without telling the community?
A: We have an accounting system whenever anything is removed from the vault; this was shared with the mod group.
ETH was removed from $WHALE liquidity mining because we spent 75 ETH on NFT Photography.
Everything added or removed from the vault is logged on the blockchain and tracked by our backend accounting system.
Should we have to give a notification every time we remove liquidity from the vault? That’s a discussion that could be brought up through the $WHALE DAO.
Q: I’m with WHALE almost from the beginning and I’ve noticed recently a lot of moves in the team and some of our core mods are not with us anymore (at least they are not active recently). Can you comment on these constant changes in the team and are you not afraid of losing people who were the foundation of the project? I understand some people can leave the project from personal issues, but I’m sure not all of them.
A: There are several reasons why people have left:
- Left on good terms and just wanted to try something new
- Had to fire mods because of a sense of entitlement. Keep in mind our mods are very well compensated (~$3k/mo for a part-time job)… Some were working 20–30/hrs a month and wanting $60k/yr
- “Other mods have been let go because they were earning $4–5k/mo and spending less than 5 hrs/week on the project… I mean I’m angry, as a community, you guys should be angry as well. That budget for paying the moderators and junior moderators is coming out of the $WHALE distribution and a lot of those mods and junior mods that we fired were taking that money, liquidating it in uniswap and using it to invest in other projects…” — WhaleShark
Overall, we have added more talent this year than we have lost.
“There are values we hold in the $WHALE Community, which are to be honest, to be transparent, and to be accountable for your actions… and I promise to the entire community that I will push those same values until the team is top notch” — WhaleShark, Founder of $WHALE
“When we look at the immense amount of good things that have happened… Whale Vault is up from $500k to $125m, our membership count is up from 500 to 30k people, liquidity is increasing, within the next year we’ll have a $200m Vault, within the next five years we’ll have a $500m Vault… everything here is moving in the right direction and it’s mainly due to the people who have truly contributed and truly sacrificed for this project. I’m going to make sure that those people are very well rewarded, I’m going to make sure that they are being held accountable, and given that, I’m also going to make sure that any community members who do not share those same values and are using deceit and FUD are going to be banned from the community as well.
We created an oasis and there is no point in letting a tumor grow into a cancer.” — WhaleShark, Founder of $WHALE
“What we’re talking about is an organization with immense potential, with assets that are exponentially rising and will continue to do so, having immense fiscal responsibility and care to what their doing with their resources… and that’s what you want — so often you go into projects and think the inverse is happening.” — Nytmare, Head of Community Marketing
🐳 WHALE COMMUNITY RESOURCES
⚫ ️Website: https://whale.me/
⚫ ️Discord: https://discord.gg/whale
⚫️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/whale_community
⚫️ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/Channel
⚫️ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whale__community/
⚫️ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/whalecommunity
⚫️ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WHALE_Community
⚫️ Medium: https://medium.com/@whalecommunity
⚫️ Telegram: https://t.me/WHALE_Community
