Unleashing Cryptoys - The Next-Gen Digital Collectibles Revolutionizing the Blockchain World: William Weinraub - OnChain Studios

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Will welcome to the show, dude. Awesome, man. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Well, I mean, well, I'm on the other side of the mic now. So it's it's a little fun. I mean, last time you and I connected podcast-wise, uh, it was on lessons via leaders, which I we were just talking before the interview was a a real big motivation after I saw your little podcast studio setup. Um like, I need to do that. And I went on to do that. So it's all your fault, Will.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Yeah, you can blame it all on me. Yeah. That was that was a great little studio there in Miami Shores. And uh, you know, lessons via leaders, we did that podcast for for a couple years, um, you know, before we started on-chain studios and cryptoys. Um, and shout out because actually we just relaunched it uh with Elizabeth Azari as the co-host. So oh nice! Check out uh Lessons via Leader season two, officially live as of last week.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

You know, I helped her in her early podcast days when she's like, I think I'm gonna start a podcast, and she did, and it was her the initial show on there, and then she went on to do just great things. Uh, I think she was she was doing interior design when I first met her. And she was in she was in transition uh trying to figure out what was next for her, and she sure as heck found out what was next. Absolutely, she's a great human being, so that's great news. Glad to uh glad to hear that. So you and I first connected at Waffle Wednesday. I think I showed up at your office in Wynwood, and I'm like, hey man, what's live ninja? And I know what Waffle Wednesday is, I think, but here's who I am, and I kind of just like cold introduced myself, and that's how we met. I just who let this guy in here? Um, and uh you had some great success uh with that and went on to do a couple other things after that. But then on-chain studios uh came on the scene uh a few years back, and that seems to to just have just a massive, I mean, based on my He-Man collection, um, just gained a lot of great trend and great great traction. So let's back up a little bit and talk about you know the initial inception of on-chain and how it all came about.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yeah, totally. So, you know, uh the way this whole thing came about was kind of by accident. Uh, this whole thing was really inspired by my 10-year-old daughter, Victoria. Uh, at the time she was six years old. Uh, and this was back in like 2018. Um, and uh we really after I sold my previous company, which was Live Ninja, you're referring to Awful Wednesday, which we had at our office. Um, you know, I was working, you know, for the company that bought us, uh, and was just kind of trying to figure out what I was gonna do next. Spending a lot more time at home, obviously, after you know, you sell your company and you're you're working nine to five. Um, so my daughter started to get obsessed. Again, she had just turned six. She was obsessed with these things called LOL surprise dolls. Um, and of the like, which is if folks that don't know what LOL surprise dolls are, they're basically these toys that you buy for like 20, 30, 40 bucks at Target or Walmart. You don't know what's inside. Kids take them home, they open them up. Inside is a random toy, and some are more rare than others. So you can kind of think of it like the plastic toy version of like a pack of basketball cards or a pack of baseball cards. Uh, so my daughter was obsessed with this stuff. I was spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on these toys. Because you're a good dad. Because yeah, I'm a good pops, and I wanted her to be happy. And what I realized quickly, if you were walking down the toy aisle at Target or Walmart, you would see that this entire industry has basically turned into this like blind bag phenomenon because it was selling so incredibly well. LOL Surprise was the best-selling toy in the world for like five years in a row, just printing, printing money. So every other toy company basically copied the blind bag model. So, you know, we started buying up all these different collections. My daughter was obsessed with it. At the same time, this is around 2018. Uh, Fred Wilson uh from Union Square Ventures, who's you know one of the most respected VCs in the industry. I follow his blog, AVC.com, and he writes a blog post about this new investment that he's making in this thing called CryptoKitties. Uh and for me, you know, and the whole blog post was like, hey, don't laugh. This is a digital cat on the blockchain, but NFTs and digital collectibles are going to be a big thing one day. And for me, I was just fascinated with the idea about a digital collectible. Uh, because again, I've been a collector all my life. I collected baseball cards, basketball cards, um, pogs back in the day for those that remember pogs and comic books, and for and then I turned into a gamer. So the idea of having digital collectibles with provable scarcity that was really exciting. So started dabbling into the world of NFTs in 2018, bought a few Crypto Kitties. Uh, and then, you know, one day I'm working from home around that time. My daughter screams from the playroom with excitement, and she's like, Dad, come quick, come quick. Oh my God, I got it. I got the ultra rare. This is the one I've been looking for. This is the ultra rare. And I go to see what she's doing, and she's holding up this gold, glittery plastic doll. She looks at it for about 10 seconds and then throws it in the bin in the corner of the room, uh, just to collect dust and like the mountain of plastic, uh, of all these unused toys. So that was like the big light bulb moment. I'm like, oh my goodness, here's this multi-billion dollar segment of the toy industry that's predicated on collectivity and scarcity. Here's this thing that Fred's talking about, this blockchain NFT thing. We can now combine the two and do digital toys uh for the first time ever. So that was the idea. And I went to my daughter, I said, sweetheart, what if I were to make you the digital version of these toys where you can collect them, chase after the rare ones? But then when you get them, you could actually do things with them, play games with them, interact with them in different ways. Would that be something you'd be interested in? And and she said, Oh my god, dad, that'd be amazing. I'd love that. So I thought to myself, I'm like, all right, you know, they got my nine to five, but nights and weekends, let me build a little passion project with my daughter. Uh, my old co-founders from Live Ninja wanted to do something as well, nights and weekends. So they they joined the the team, and you know, Emilio and Alfonso, and then Freddie, who Emilio knew from back in the day working at Disney together, he joined the team as a as a 3D artist, and we had this little side project from 2018 to 2020. Uh, nobody cared about it whatsoever. Uh, we look completely insane because you know, you know, I'd go to lunch with like folks that knew me from the Miami tech scene, and they'd be like, Hey, Will, you just sold Live Ninja. What's like the big next move? What are you gonna do next? And I'm like, Well, I'm still figuring that out, but let me show you this digital panda that I'm working on. Uh and they were like, uh-huh. And then I'm like, it lives on the blockchain. And they're like, uh-huh, sure it does, bro. Sure it does. Uh, it was kind of like those moments like these digital pandas, are they in the room with us now? Sure, kind of thing. And uh again, we just were having fun with it. So we persisted for a couple of years just doing it for our kids, and then obviously the market turned in a big way, and things like NBA Topshot came to light, and and the world started taking NFTs and digital collectibles seriously. And because we had made progress for the past two years, we had a prototype and and a website and some interest, and we were able to raise some funding to take it from a passion project to a fully fledged company, and that's when we founded On-Chain Studios in 2021, which was like, okay, here's this passion project called Cryptoys. Now we need a real company uh behind it. So on-chain studios was incorporated. We brought on JT uh as co-founding COO, and the five of us just started there off into the races we went, building a digital toy company.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Love it. Well, I mean, you came out swinging too. I I I found out about the Mattel deal, and I I mean I grew up with, you know, if you were anywhere, you know, remotely close to a television in the 80s, you you knew who He-Man was. So that immediately just put me right back. Um, you know, and the the nostalgia of it all. But then I got in there and started to expare, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was just I'm like, well, and that that whole idea of like the rarity and like the all of that, which I don't still don't thoroughly understand, but when you get something rare and it's like one of, you know, you know, you've got something on there. So I think I probably have 15 of them now. Um and I thanks for the support, man. Of course, dude. Of course. I mean, that's just that that that that's that's the uh you know the direct product of of our relationship, of Waffle Wednesday, if you will. And I just even if I wasn't, it's it's not one of those, hey, listen, I want to support Will. It's like I believe in what you're building because I've seen you build stuff and sell stuff and move on to what what's next on there. And as an innovator and a creator and just a brilliant mind on you know where we're at with technology, um I'm like, this is the kind of circle that I want to at least try and figure out uh is is about, which is web three, which is what's next there. And that's really the closest as the NFT world has kind of faded a little bit as it starts to correct itself right now. It's not gone. If you're listening, NFTs are not gone, uh, they're just getting started. Um but uh something I could really sink my teeth into. And I was talking with Stephanie on your team, and I'm like, so what do I do with these things now? She's like, Well, have you unwrapped any of them? And I'm like, I think I've unwrapped them. Like I did the whole unveiling, but I don't know if I took them out of the box physically. So what let's talk about that specifically, actually. So when when someone buys a cryptoy, like for example, I bought a bunch of the He-Man Masters of the Universe um toys on there, and I did the whole unveiling, which is phenomenal by the way. Phenomenal. But in fact, I just sent the Star Wars one to my buddy who's a diehard Star Wars fan and said, Hey, I know you're not too hip on the Web3 world, but this is badass, and you'll want to open these with your daughter because the unveiling is fantastic. But once the unveiling happens, I don't know if that's the right word or not, what what happens next? You you take them out of the virtual box, and then you can kind of play around and interact with them. Are they utilized for games or how's that all work?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Yeah, and and and thank you for sharing that with your friend. Uh, the Star Wars unboxing experience is a whole other level. Like this is like we put our heart and souls into that one. Yeah, every time we try to one up and outdo ourselves on on the next one. So we're really excited to share the the Star Wars unboxing with with the community. I can't wait. Um, so so the way that if we want to be the digital toy company, um, you know, you have to think about the ways different consumers collect toys uh and interact with toys. So there's a type of collector and toy consumer that likes to buy toys and keep them in the blister packs. So, like here you can see on my desk, I have a boba fett here, I have a Spider-Man here. These are in the blister pack, these are in quote unquote min condition. Because as a collector, you know, you want to keep them in the blister pack because you think it preserves value, it's a certain condition, you want to hang them and display them. Then there's the other type of toy consumer that takes them out of the packaging. So here's my Donatello, right, from Ninja Turtles. Let's go. So this one I can articulate. I can move the head, I can move the arms, the legs, etc. So I have different kinds of consumer patterns here. This is more on the collecting side, more on the play side, right? So we want to give both modalities. Yeah, that's a Gary. So we want to give both modalities, right? We want people to be able to be passive consumers if they just want to collect, or people to actually play. So that's the idea is you get both. So you you get a cryptoy cube, you unbox it, then you know what you got. It comes in a blister pack. It's up to you if you want to keep it in the blister pack, and there's benefits to keeping it in the blister pack. There'll be things like airdrops and things like that. But then if you want to play with the toy, click on it again, the whole packaging will burn off, and your cryptoy will come to life through an animation, and all of a sudden you have a playable game character that you can do different things with. The first thing you could do is take it for a walk on what we call the block, and that's your test drive area. Uh, so your crypto is taking a walk on the block, it's the first experience we we provided, but then soon you'll be able to have AR experiences with your crypto. We have another mini-game that's about to come out. Um, so yeah, gaming is a big piece of what we're doing. The best way to think about crypto is as I like to describe it, is you take a toy company like Mattel and a gaming company like Nintendo. Yeah, if those two companies had a baby and it was born on the blockchain, it would be cryptoids, and that's kind of what we're building.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

I love that. So, is there gonna be a way? Like, are these are these considered an investment because they can be utilized in other gaming facilities, like like people are utilizing your character in a game, or like how does that or is it just for sole collecting purposes?

SPEAKER_00 12:30

As as somebody that's creating IP and and building something from scratch from the ground up, I don't like to perceive what we're building as investments. I like to to to build something with fun and fandom at the forefront and enjoyment and entertainment. And we know a big part of like the web three crowd is interested in investing and accruing value and all that stuff. Our whole thesis is you gotta focus on fun and fandom and entertainment first. And if you do that right, the byproduct of that becomes secondary value on the investment front. But the problem with the web three space right now, and the reason it turns a lot of people off, it's all about money, money, money, money, money, money. And it reads off as a scam to a lot of people, it reads off as a cash grab to a lot of people. And for us, we want to start with fun, fandom, enjoyment. Um, and and then look, if we do those things well, then they they should be worth something one day. Just like you know, the Pokemon company, right? When they created the first, you know, Pokemon sets of cards in 1999, they didn't think that a Charizard was going to be worth a million dollars one day from that base set. They just created a game, a trading card game that you could play, and that was a powerful card. But then fandom took hold. They got enough fans and enough people that enjoyed that IP so much and that rave about it that the byproduct of it became rarity and scarcity and and desire. But you have to start with that at the foundational level um to really achieve that. Like the the first the first comic or the issue of Superman, right, that was ever created. You know, DC Comics didn't think that that one day was gonna sell for as much as it does, they just wanted to create tell a great story about Clark Kent and Superman. Yeah, and and fandom does what fandom does, and then eventually, in a healthy way, you're able to create these communities that value these things over time. So we want to take the same approach. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

I absolutely love that. And I haven't been much of a collector other than baseball cards when I was a kid. Yeah, uh, but speaking of Gary, he really kind of got me into it. I mean, he's been a diehard collector from the get, but um, when I started to see, I mean, it was really cryptoys and and and the the V-friends actually becoming physical products where I was like, wait a second. This is the next phase of like where we're at with Web3 and how you know and and collectibles aren't worth that. So it really started, and then I became a sneakerhead post-42, so that didn't help out at all. Um but I wear I collect them to rock them, not to like collect them and sell them to, you know what I mean? Um, but it is fun and it's something to, you know, it's it's it's it's a hobby, it's a great hobby. Um, but it'll it'll also can turn into something, I believe it can turn into something great one day because you were like, I remember when those guys started and I had no idea what Web3 really was or like digital toys, but I loved He-Man. So I was all in on that whole on that whole deal. Well, uh recent news just broke. You guys inked a deal with Disney and the Star Wars cryptoys are going to be launching uh in in about 10 days. So let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, I'm not surprised that this is the next natural next step for you guys on here, but uh let's chat a little bit about that because there's a couple Star Wars fans out there.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Oh, yeah, for sure. Just a couple for sure, right? Uh my God, what a dream to work on this IP. Um, the the Disney deal, we're just so fortunate to work with the folks at Disney. The the meetings that we have with the folks over there, they're such a blast, and it truly feels like an extension of the team. We have like a weekly meeting with them, and it's like you jump on, and it's just immediately like one big family working on cool products together. Um, and for me, Star Wars is my number one IP of all time, my number one franchise of all time. Like, I don't know if this is this a video podcast or just uh an audio? Yeah. So for the folks that are are watching the video version, right? Like I got stuff all over the place. You know, I got my you know, my boba fett here, I got boba fett toys, I got Millennium Falcons, I got Grogues, I got Star Wars everywhere. Um, and I just love this franchise so much, it represents so much to me um in my life, and now I'm getting able to do this stuff with my kid um and be able to share the lore of Star Wars and the fandom with him, and it's just such a blast and it's such a joy. And if you told me, like, okay, Will, at the start of this whole cryptoist thing, what is like the number one IP that you would want on the platform? I would have said instantly Star Wars. And I am just like having these pinch myself moments that this is even like I'm on Zoom calls with Disney, and I'm like, Am I is this real? Like, are we doing this right now? And it's just absolutely incredible. And one thing that I think yeah, and we hope at least that fans will understand when they see the product that we built, that this was built by fans for fans. This product that we created is a love letter from Star Wars fans to Star Wars fans. Like we put every ounce of our fandom into this product, and we hope it comes across the the screen and your devices when you uh when you check it out.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Yeah, I don't give a shit about Star Wars, but I'm excited about this launch. That's the whole just you see how you see you see how that have you just said if we create fandom and and and interest and community, anything's really possible from there. And now you're working with some of the biggest IPs on the planet. I mean legendary IPs, and I'd like to say it's almost out of the gates for cryptoys. You know what I mean? The passion project turned into a real project that it's actually a thing, is which is where we're headed. I think your timing could not have been more uh um impeccable with where we're at with Web3 and all this. So I'm stoked. I'm definitely gonna grab some uh some Star Wars toys. And I've if you're listening to this right now, you're like, I don't know what a crypto is. You can you can go to the cryptoys website and just experience it and get in there. You can actually buy a cryptoy with your debit card so you don't have to mess around with crypto and all that other stuff. You literally just buy it with your your debit card. That was one of the things I like best about it. Not that I couldn't buy something with crypto, but it was just a little bit easier to go in there and go and and buy them in the initial. And I got excited, like you buy the toy and like then like the unveiling is like this whole experience. And I'm I can't wait for the because if the He-Man one was like, what? I can only imagine what's to come with uh with Star Wars, you know?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, it's it's gonna be a feast for the census for sure.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Oh, I bet. I bet. Well, dude, I know you're short on time, man, you gotta run, but I I just love hanging out with you and and uh having conversations about what you're building, and we've been able to do this now. Gosh, it's it's it's probably been a decade uh that uh that that we've been connected. I had uh uh my buddy Jason who started the Groove Cruise. I don't know if you know Groove Cruise Jason or not on the show right before you, and I met him in Philly, another Miami guy 10 years ago. And I'm like, dude, can you believe it's been 10 years? But it's just uh the the power of podcasting, it's become my life's work, it's it's why I do what I do because it's just the power to really connect and reconnect with uh with with people uh that are in our lives. So man, I'm just so encouraged by what you've been able to create once again. Here he goes again. Uh and I'm not and I'm not shocked um by any stretch of the imagination. Uh well, well deserved. You're an absolutely brilliant mind. You understand community, you understand people, you literally legitimately give a shit about them. So it's it's no wonder that you uh had the success that you've had and continue to. So I just want to encourage you to keep rocking and rolling. I'm I'm a proud Cryptoys toy holder of many He-Men, and I'll have many uh uh upcoming projects, including Star Wars too. So thanks again for taking some time to uh to hang out with me and uh dude keep rocking and rolling.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Such a blast, brother. Thank you for having me on the show and look forward to doing this again soon. We'll we'll come back on with some some more exciting news and just continue rocking it together.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Absolutely. I look forward to getting in the fold with the cryptoys team as well, too. So stay tuned. We got some we got some things uh up our sleeve here in uh in the world of cryptoys and uh the podcast guy. Well keep keep rocking and rolling, man. Let's grab a beer when you're back in Miami. All right. Sounds a good plan, brother.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

You got it, man. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. I'll talk to you next time.