VenturePunk CEO Jordan Lyall discusses the motivation behind Santa.fm, the project’s NFT gift exchange project this Christmas. Get involved!
Can you tell me briefly about yourself, VenturePunk and Santa.fm?
VenturePunk is a Web3 product studio focused on innovation and rapid experimentation in decentralized finance and digital culture. I, Jordan Lyall, created the company as a product-focused builder with a long history in the crypto and non-fungible token (NFT) space.
As a veteran builder in Web2 and Web3, I have previously served as CPO and co-founder of Nifty’s Inc, an NFT platform for community engagement.
Widely considered a pioneer at the intersection of media and technology, I founded the MEME Project, an early experimental NFT protocol in 2020, and product teams for the DeFi division at ConsenSys and served as the CPO at Totle, a crypto liquidity network. In addition, I have also co-founded Make Believe Labs, a mobile app startup which JibJab acquired in 2014.
Although my first exposure to NFTs was through CryptoKitties in 2017, I have been collecting top-tier NFTs and analyzing such markets since 2020.
Most recently, to celebrate festive cheer, Santa.fm is a decentralized NFT gift exchange game I have helped create with the rest of the VenturePunk team. To get the most from it, users must deposit an NFT into the pool before coming back on Christmas morning to open a new random NFT. It runs on the Santa Protocol, a decentralized peer-to-pool protocol for randomly distributed NFT gift exchanges, and uses Chainlink’s VRF system to facilitate randomness in the NFT distribution.
Related Content: How to Gift an NFT
Please explain what makes your VenturePunk special – pitch your project in five sentences:
- VenturePunk’s focus is rapid innovation and experimentation in decentralized finance, digital culture, and the metaverse.
- We’re passionate about NFT communities, collector tools, Web3 games, DeFi, decentralized social media, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), creator monetization, regenerative finance, CC0, among other areas.
- As a studio, we use the same internal team and resources to experiment as efficiently as possible using proven processes to ideate, validate, get traction, and then scale new projects.​
- Our first public initiative is Skylab, a thriving curated community that includes some of Web3’s most ambitious and accomplished builders and enthusiasts.
- In the coming months, we will announce our next product release, an interactive on-chain art platform.
How did the Santa.fm project come about?
We at VenturePunk created Santa.fm, a Web3 product studio. We’re a small team of builders experimenting with DeFi, NFTs, and digital culture.
Our roadmap for the next few months is stacked! We’re launching several new innovative products and communities starting in January. But several weeks ago, we realized we’d wrap up 2022 without shipping a product. So we started brainstorming end-of-year ideas for a fun side-project that we could launch mid-December.
We pitched each other dozens of ideas, but the one that ultimately stuck was a simple NFT gift exchange. It was the perfect combination of fun, simplicity, and memes. That intersection is our sweet spot.
Can you give us an idea about the rewards in the pool?
At the moment there are 2,200 NFTs in the gift pool. We estimate over 13 ETH in total NFT value with several in the .3 ETH range.
Since it’s all decentralized, anyone can view the gift pool on OpenSea.
Tell me the reasons for creating this project to celebrate Christmas:
We really wanted to do something fun for the NFT community, show off our skills as a studio, and get our name out there. And, what better time to achieve such goals than Christmas?
What does Christmas mean to you?
For me, Christmas is a time of reflection, gratitude, and celebration of love, friendship, and the values that bring people together.
I’ve actually launched a holiday venture previously (HelloSanta). So it was fun getting back into the business of Christmas, at least for a little while.
How will you be spending your Christmas day?
I will be spending Christmas day with my wife and two kids at home… with one eye on my laptop making sure the NFT gift claiming goes smoothly, of course. 😉
What do you think we will see in the world of NFTs in the new year?
The world of NFTs will continue to grow and evolve in the coming year as curators develop new and innovative uses and more people and organizations become involved in the market.
We will likely see continued growth and adoption of NFTs by both individuals and institutions. In addition, more people and organizations may use NFTs to represent and trade digital assets, such as art, music, and other forms of media.
We may see the emergence of new types of NFTs that curators are specifically designing for different use cases, such as NFTs that represent physical assets or NFTs for voting or governance purposes.
We love what you are doing! How can we stay in the loop with your project?
Grab yourself some free rewards this Christmas – check out Santa.fm’s website and Twitter.
If interested in VenturePunk, check out our website, Substack and Twitter.
If wanting more first-hand information from myself, feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn!
Happy Christmas, everyone!
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