Interview With Famous Foxes Federation Co-founder Draxxts | Tokenminds Podcast Episode 28

Video Transcript:

Fritzy: Welcome to the Token Minds podcast I am your host Fritzy the senior content manager here at TokenMinds a creative engineering crypto and nft agency helping businesses us all over the world with our blockchain and nft development crypto and nft marketing and token sales strategy. In this podcast, we will dive into blockchain and talk about relevant topics for businesses and founders. Together with me today are Keith Tan and TokenMinds Chief Marketer Anchor Chan and today we have our special guest from the famous Foxes Federation, can introduce yourself to our audience?

Draxxts: Sure yeah names Draxxts one of the co-founders of the MS box Federation we are a Solana-based nft project of one of the most trusted brands of builders in the space and very much looking forward to kind of chatting with you at TokenMinds and kind of jumping into I guess a little bit of the mindset to a founder within the nft.

Fritzy: All right let’s start with kind of like a standard first question here in TokenMinds podcast can you can you please share with us your story on how you first got into nft and crypto in general?

Draxxts: Yeah certainly yeah I love kind of my background story because I think it’s the same for people just depends on like their time frame as to when so I actually came from the like stock investing world if you will and actually got more into the degenerate side of naked calls and puts back in 2016 did not do that great however was really fascinated by a news article that came out for somebody in like a perverse area where they were just had a news crew coming through and they were panning across people and someone had a cardboard sign up that had their Bitcoin address written on it and there was a you know a news follow-up to it that apparently that person had raised at the time this is back in 2016 times around like 50 Grand or so something to that nature and just off of them having a cardboard sign with their Bitcoin address written on it and a media camera just going right across them and I was amazed by that because even in today’s standards you know it would take very, very long to try to send fifty thousand dollars from one person to another different hoops to jump through all those kinds of craziness and so to me I was like this is amazing like this this is going to change you know the financial world and so it was really fascinated by it and at the time too I was part of a stock trading Discord and you know we had a little bit of a network in there IDMs the leader of it said hey you know I think Bitcoin blockchain stuff could be you know the next big thing and this is late 2016 and I never got a response back so I ended up buying my first Bitcoins January 12th of 2017. Bitcoin was around 860-ish, 850 ish, Ethereum was twelve dollars just so people have an idea of the time span there I, unfortunately, was not of the hold mindset so you know bought at 850 and sold at like 1200 because a 50 gain in a few months you know was just absolutely fantastic and so basically watched the rally like we were talking just before we started a podcast that rallied to almost twenty thousand dollars that year I think it was either early 2018 or late 2017 where you know it was just around 20K and I was blown away, I was like I was, I was ready for like I was in it like I just did not have that hold of my I didn’t hold a single thing I just like watched it go crazy and I was even bombed too because like some people were talking about you know Ethereum at 90 dollars. I’m like I could have bought it at 12. So anyway so long story short like that got me just hooked 2019, you know the market was really dropped down I switched my 47wQbNPTDJp9hMYdvogK2hAUiHsGeiybwaWe36bwtRQ3UTpYV7YuZ8FV5j9nauFCWwcjM6dTzpL5s2N79Rp5unwdMvc8ZKU cryptos I could and then you know the 2021 rally early in the year came on and it did quite well with within you know the the cryptocurrency area and at the time too had had started seeing things pop off primarily around crypto punks and so I’ve heard of crypto punks back in 2017 they were selling for fifty dollars and I thought people were crazy for spending fifty dollars on a picture but you know in in early 2021 I was very interested I’m like there’s more to this there’s some reason that people are paying you know 8ETH, 10ETH for these you know jpegs you know so I did a little bit more diving into it and at the time I that stock trading Discord had finally gotten a crypto Discord you know 2018 or 2019 something like that they had branched off to crypto and then I had made a smaller group of friends within there that kind of did a little bit more djend trading primarily in like Binaance, the Binance chain BSC coins and so I mean really that’s the long story but we just really there’s about 12 of us or so that were part of that group chatted every single day and had eventually identified that we had a very unique kind of skill set mix between you know a few of us that were very interested in possibly creating our own project we thought that you know based off of what everyone else was creating within the nft ecosystem that we could do better and we can create something that is meaningful in the space and that really was where foxes were born and so you know the idea of foxes which I know you might have some questions about that too we wanted to be different you know every project was coming out was a monkey based thing primarily because of board apes, everyone wanted to have their own kind of monkey project, we didn’t want that we wanted it to be something different and so that’s where we really landed on foxes and there’s just a lot of characteristics about foxes that really you know fit with us with the vibe of what we really wanted to create and so September-ish 21, you know we started marketing we were primarily actually we were focused on launching as a whole by like October we wanted to do Solana as our launch but at that point in time early September was actually quite difficult to get like a launch in on Solana it was just kind of more like a country club and people were still trying to figure things out and so like mints were very complicated so we started marketing towards eth but we had the goal of launching on Solana and so we once we got to like actually I think the second week of September he completely flipped it and we saw the opening we were ready to pivot we just switched everything over and then started marketing to Solana and had minted out I think October 2nd we kind of consider October 1st like our one year anniversary that just passed but yeah it’s kind of a little bit about I’ll say the backstory of me with crypto but also with nfts and foxes.

Fritzy: Can you tell us more about the journey that you had with the famous foxes federation?

Draxxts: Yeah sure, yeah so as far as the journey goes you know we started off as three co-founders, myself, foxy Dev and then our artist, and we had around I’d say like eight or so like part-time people that were helping us out with partnerships or collaborations and monitoring Discord and all that kind of fun stuff so you know we did different levels of marketing some of which you know would work today some of which probably wouldn’t work that well today but primarily you know the main goal is to try to get attention for people that exist in the space that you think you can provide value to I think is probably the most critical thing and show them what that value is you know you might not have the full picture to paint everyone which you know I still think some people kind of miss you know our picture at a whole you know that what we’ve been creating but the most important thing is to get eyes on the project and so you know however you can go about doing it highly recommend doing it and so you know once you kind of start fostering that community you know you’re going to have people that come in and go out and like there’s just going to be an ebb and a flow to it you know for us it’s always about as long as you can kind of bring more attention in get more eyes on your project create more fun things give benefits but bigger benefits than what others can’t really provide in the space it’s just going to keep people you know in your community and so that’s what we’ve been doing I think we do it quite well I think there’s a fine balance too for a lot of projects when it comes down to like Twitter and marketing for being too much hype and not enough like actual stuff and then other projects that have a lot of stuff but maybe they’re not like the best with marketing so like there’s just different ways that you kind of at least for foxes have grown organically by what we offer versus just trying to be super hypey and trying to catch attention for people or anything along those lines so that’s kind of what I would say at least a little bit about like our journey for like getting started as far as Fox is at a whole what do we offer we offer a ton so we have four different collections we have our Genesis famous fox Federation collection which was the very first one that we had minted 7,777 pieces they are in a line art style we then have 7,777 pixelated foxes which we call our trans-dimensional foxes we have 3,000 what are called dens which is really an nft gallery but it’s also been kind of gamified into our ecosystem and then we have I’m not sure the total amount right now it’s somewhere around 50 as a whole famous Fox Federation friends and foes which are collaborations between other artists in the space for creating these like one-off pieces that are of their own specific collection but that are also gamified into what we do and the only way to get those with the exception of one is to a bid on them via an auction style about every two weeks we’ve done them every week we’ve done them like once a month we it just depends on how many artists we are connected with at the time for how many we can kind of push out and it’s to the highest bidder so so that’s how that collection is really created we had we were the first to have on-chain staking on Solana we offered foxy token so the Genesis collection earns 100 foxy per day for our staking 1.0 and our pixelated foxes earn 25 foxy per day, the first utilities that we had foxy swap which is a peer-to-peer swapping platform which has kind of been I mean recently it hasn’t been too hot with all the commotion that has really been going on in the ecosystem primarily because a lot of marketplaces had switched over to an optional or zero royalties market stance, we have on-chain messaging for ding for you to be able to send an nft message to someone else in the form of like a text almost like an on-chain text message if you will, we have a minting tool, we have a raffle tool, we have a white list and SPL token marketplace there are just so many so many different utilities we have a sweep an aggregate sweeper tool a bulk nft sending feature for you to be able to send a bunch of nfts from one wall to another which is actually kind of fun because for those of you that were kind of in the space there was a slope exploit that had happened a couple of months back slope is a wallet for Solana and there was an exploit in the code where people could actually get access to that specific wallet via like basically have full control over that wallet and they were getting drained that were I don’t even know how many wallets thousands if not tens of thousands of wallets got drained at that incident we actually were able to not only make Foxy send free where you could send nfts from one wall to another free because we do charge micro transactions for people that aren’t holders we actually built in a contract for that specific period of time where you didn’t even have to have SOL in your wallet to send nfts so the way it normally works you have to have that base currency as gas in order to do a transaction we had made the contract so you could use gas from a different wallet and we asked for donations we ourselves donated funds to it and so people that were exploited via this you know at this incident were able to safely get their nfts off those wallets to other wallets which I thought was pretty awesome I think that not specific data was over 75,000 nfts that were sent in a 24-hour period but yeah on top of all of that I mean those are kind of like the big tools for us we do have kind of a gamified way of doing staking so I mentioned our staking 1.0 we have kind of a gamified staking 2.0 which you send foxes out on six day missions and so they come back with what we call Fame which is experience so your foxes kind of gain levels and they’ll also come back if it’s not a Fame only mission they’ll come back with chests and then within those chests we have different prizes anything from our native token foxy to den interior rooms to Solana to nfts to merch to other other product projects that have like giveaway type items that they create and then a couple of other fun items too that we kind of throw in there so that that’s like the biggest way that people in our ecosystem end up kind of getting back is by doing these missions and getting chests and you know possibly getting sold from, we actually had during our VCS or voice chats we do them every week on Sunday midday Sunday we pick three random people you know to get a chest to unlock for free the first person won five SOLl just for being there and the odds of getting five SOL are 0.04 percent, and I’m the one that opened them up for them so it was just like stupid lucky he was like a you know a one in 20 chance of getting picked and then you know one in 250 chance of getting five SOL so it was just crazy odds but super fun and and yes I mean that’s like most of what we kind of have going on I know there’s a lot that I’m still missing there we do have a foxy mint feature so you’re able to mint an nft right from our tools with a lot of different options in there which is pretty awesome we’ve partnered with another project which is called Boombox, we have basically a music nft marketplace, and recently too we’ve opened up a commission marketplace for like one of one artists or people that just have like an artistic skill that want to offer commissions where people can come in find the artist offer them however much USDC for whatever work they’re looking to get done and then it’s all transact on that platform so some people offer you know real life paintings or some kind of digital remake on something other people offer like art for a full collection and things like that so it’s quite amazing I mean just the variety of things you can really create in the space as long as you have the skill set for it and you know there’s just there’s like the opportunities are endless it really just comes down to like the skill set that you have to be able to execute on it and the ability for you to kind of reach an audience of which we have an absolutely amazing community behind us which is pretty awesome

Keith: Sorry but that’s quite a story you have right there and it seems like over time you really develop expertise on the craft you’ve built your own identity in the market though you also made mention about community so how do you guys maintain engagement to your community do you use some sort of like do some other fun stuff that’s different than the other companies or how do you guys do it?

Draxxts: No a great question you know there’s a variety of things so I would say the one thing that’s the most engaging for us right now is honestly our missions the way that we’ve done a gamified six day contract for people going out and having to do a thing every week people look forward to getting their foxes back on a Saturday afternoon you know opening up chests sometimes they’ll do they’ll do group parties where they’ll just open a bunch of chests to see if they get lucky that week and then they get kind of prepped up for what’s going to happen you know the missions that are coming out mid-Sunday and we have raids too that go out I forgot to mention raids you get better chests that just have better rewards to them and they’re more limited so we had a raid this week where it filled up in two minutes and that was for a hundred foxes that had to go into it so it’s just like that level of attention that we just have in our community we have different like kind of sub-daos that people kind of really vibe with some of which are just based off of attributes for our collections we’ve got like What’s called the coke dao so there’s just a cope hoodie and a cope hat that’s based off of a token that we really pre-mint had kind of like onboarded some people from that ecosystem into foxes that people vibe with there is a K-pop Alpha group which is quite funny but it’s what keeps people together it’s just, it’s very fun to see just the different interests that exist in people and like how much they really just want to spend time here, people just are very comfortable they just enjoy you know the space they enjoy what we kind of have to offer from a community side we do we do two updates every week we send out one there’s like a heads up of like here’s what’s coming for missions and oh by the way these are the items that we’ve updated and then we’ll do one as well on Sunday to kind of let people know about it we’ve implemented recently with a platform called questive where we do like like Twitter quests so people we basically say hey you guys are getting chests on Saturday tweet out about it and everyone that tweaked out about it will give you guys an extra thousand Fame token for you to you know add more experience to your foxes so that certainly helps like keep people engaged but also drive you know new people in when someone wins you know a famous Fox and tweets it out or 10 SOL and tweets it out like people are going to see oh this guy just won 10 SOL like how do you do that and then it just brings people in, so that we have our commission marketplace where we we’re tweeting out the artists and the work that’s being done that gets tweeted out as well if they’re interested in it so that’s going to drive more engagement into us our token Market I mean we have just shy of 600,000 SOL worth of volume on our token market which should be launched like early February so that alone just brings every project effect into our website just because they either have an SPL token or they did a whitelist mint or there’s another one that’s coming up that’s either has you know whitelist token to it or another SPL token that exists for someone with staking and our platform you know we can verify things quickly we’re amazing with customer service and you know we really care about the ecosystem I think a lot of people understand that based off like the fees and such that we charge it’s not like crazy but it does add up I mean once you have ten thousand, twenty thousand you know transactions and things happening I mean you know a little bit goes a long way so there’s just a lot of different ways that we really engage with our community and even communities outside of us which has kind of just been organic over the year, almost 13 months now of us existing.

Anchor: So by the way you know as the chief marketer writes into commands I’m also curious about you know how actually you were working on this marketing right so very impressed with all those kinds of things like your defi solution like staking and also your future like marketplace plan but I know that you know in this market nft market is very a lot of competition here so it’s a lot of so many other threats as well that’s but actually you are now also one of the big best ones in the market, so I’m just the one to also get more information like were there any difficulties along the way and how did they overcome them especially you know also including like post minting right it’s also very important to keep also the hype and the vibe rights and also all the plans right how to deal with this kind of difficulties?

Draxxts: No I think it’s a fantastic question I think the one thing to point out there that’s going to be different for us compared to a lot of projects is the hype side I we’ve kind of recognized from early on that with hype comes disappointment over time you know unless a team is legitimately able to deliver on that we’ve seen it happen time and time again and so for us you know we did have a couple of like hype moments primarily around having you know big volume come in or post mint you know just the general excitement that comes with it however to your point competition is rampant, tons of projects you know in in our minting days even for us it took us about 48 hours or so I think it was 36 hours total for us to mint out and that was at a time when some projects were minting out in minutes you know so it definitely did create you know a little bit of fun around us but you know we kind of stuck it out and just kind of kept trudging through it you know just kind of letting people know what we’re up to what we’re planning on doing like you know we talked a little bit about earlier from like before we started recording but like a road map side of having a decent like Vision to it and kind of built building along what you’re building but then we just kind of kept stacking on we kept saying hey we can do this thing so we’re gonna we’re just gonna do it you know and some people even had told us you know that that we’re bred differently from a marketing side because we don’t build up hype and then do a thing we do a thing and then say oh by the way we just launched this and some people who just get like so confused by us doing that but it really kind of goes back to like the value that we can provide or we have provided really to the ecosystem is that we’re not dependent on hype we’re as real as it comes from an nft project side the one thing I forgot to mention too with foxy swap so that that was our first tool that we had launched we also included a Twitter bot for it so every foxy swap that goes through it gets tweeted out and so that way if you know it’s almost recently become a thing where people not really that recently but people try to say like who got the better deal you know in the swap because in a swap up you can do up to six nfts in a transaction so you can trade like one for five, three for three, two for four, one for three, however you want to do it but you can also include SOL or a few different SPL tokens in that trade so you can do like a dgen8 and you know like a hundred SOL for one of their eggs or something like that and so it’s just been really fun to see a lot of people engage with that organically because it exists that might not even be boxes but just because they know the tool exists and you know sometimes those trades seem ridiculous and we’ve even had people mean them which has been absolutely hysterical as well so you know there’s just I don’t know it’s tough to say you know from like from our side what’s been like the most successful you know there have been a lot of ways to be pivoted but for the most part we try to always have like our tweets be like consistent about what we’re doing what we’ve done kind of the value behind it and it’s never really in a hypey fashion of like oh this thing’s coming in you know three months six months a year you know we’ve raised all this crazy capital or anything along those lines we’re all we’re all about the building ethos and about providing value to the ecosystem as a whole and so it does kind of you know ultimately does trickle back into our holders at the same time it might not be these 100x games and stuff that people imagine you know happen in the space but it’s certainly you know sets us up for a long-term amount of success within the nft ecosystem especially on Solano.

Fritzy: So Draxxts you have really shared with us the foundation that you have with the famous foxes federation the whole project then I would like to know moving forward what are your plans for famous foxes.

Draxxts: It’s a great question so there have been quite a few different plans that were still like kind of building towards essentially because we’re looking at how is the market going to be in the next year you know year five years down the road like what does the space kind of look like, I think two of the bigger areas that are coming up are going to be kind of more metaverse specific especially in Solana around how people can interact with it what the experience is like how can you kind of elevate that to the next level and provide a platform where people can Thrive you know in a metaverse environment and the other one is gaming there’s going to be some kind of a breakthrough with the way games are developed that eventually will be fun more fun than they have been and it will kind of onboard you know more of a web2 presence in the gaming, so a couple of things you know that were were really like working on right now around like the metaverse side we have we have 3D Fox assets created we’re working on refining them so that they’re able to be used in metaverses, we have about five or so of those that we’ve we’ve kind of hand-picked that we’ll probably start with and then from there expand you know as kind of community is really interested in expanding, we have you know a platform already set up and portals for those of you that aren’t familiar with portals on Solana, and that’s where we’ve recently actually for the past maybe two months or so have done like our voice chats it’s just been a lot more fun to kind of be there physically versus just in a chat room where you’re kind of talking to yourself for an extended period of time. So I think that’s going to be a pretty big thing, especially from like the ownership side in nfts and being able to token gate you know using that avatar and such in these platforms it’s going to kind of take the pfp version of Twitter to the next level when now you have a different level of marketing and interest from people that will then hopefully want to use you know these characters within a metaverse versus the standard ones that are already created or eventually once more and more become popular but the tip that wants to kind of represent your brand so I think that’ll be pretty big in the gamified staking mechanism and leveling up of foxes we have also introduced what we refer to them as trait upgrades but really it’s just like different tiers of traits, so I don’t know the total number off the top of my head kind of escapes me I think it’s around 70 or so we’ve got about 70, let’s call it 90 I think it’s probably closer to 90. Unique traits between the heads and bodies that we’ve commissioned a Zeno for anyone that is again familiar with the artist’s space in Solana. Xeno is a very popular artist in the nft, sonic nft ecosystem but he’s created different tier upgrades, and different tier traits if you will for each individual piece. So every single headpiece and body piece have at least two different looks to them for the epic and rare they have a third one Associated to them so far we’ve only released the tier-one the artwork itself is finalized for the for all three tiers but there is like modifications that we have to do to make it so it looks clean when it’s when it’s created you know there’s no clipping or anything along those lines, we’re very strict with that but at the same time we have so much other things that we’re like maintaining at the same time so it can just take a little while actually earlier today I was going through like the full list of of pieces to identify what we have to create as like what’s called an accessory layer but anyway it’s kind of boring stuff but we’ve only released tier one so far tier-two and tier-three will be coming out in the not so distant future tier two especially will be coming out in the not so distant future so definitely looking forward to that and fox is kind of being able to obtain tier two and do different things with upgrades and just really trying to find ways in the current market that we can you know really bring more interest into our project. So like I mentioned we have our music nft marketplace, we’re still in a beta phase for that we’re working on a few upgrades for our music marketplace before we really kind of hit it harder so I think that that’s going to be pretty huge and I think the other one too that we’re definitely putting some decent effort in right now is our commission marketplace for artists that are interested in kind of getting involved with that so those are just some efforts that we’ve launched recently that we’re just making sure we kind of do spend time and improve on that platform and make sure that it’s a really good experience so that way at the end of the day it does kind of thrive in the current ecosystem that we have.

Fritzy: And lastly, do you have anything you would like to share with your community or maybe individuals that also would want to start out their own nft?

Draxxts: That’s a tricky question I would say you know I would say I would say the one thing is to make sure that you’re genuinely passionate about what you want to do with an nft project the one thing I would kind of throw out there is that it is a lot of work I think a lot of people really don’t understand how much work is involved within an nft project we’re fortunate to have a good number of part-time staff that help us out we’re really only two people full time for our project right now we’ve got about a dozen or so that are part-time but then on top of that we have around a hundred like very active community members that that step up so you know huge shout out to really all of our fox all of our no lifer foxes all of our foxes that are there you know legitimately 90 of their day in Discord you know it’s absolutely amazing I love the community every everything that goes on in there is just it’s just so much fun you know it’s it only really even looked like a job you know for what we do it’s just being so engaging and so involved with people it’s just it’s just so much fun and it’s Innovative Tech you know it’s not going anywhere it’s going to really change a lot of things it’s just you know the whole macroeconomics eye you know isn’t that fruitful right now so obviously it’s showing people some you know normal colors that you might not see in a bull market but you’ll certainly see it in a bear market and I personally think that it’s for the best because at the end of this you know we’re gonna be positioned very well as a whole for our community of thriving you know in the next bull market I wish I kind of had this in all honesty in like the 2018-2019 time frame you know versus kind of me going into it myself so definitely looking forward to that as well and you know try it, try it out see what you like get involved in another project you know it to whatever capacity you can even if it’s on a volunteering standpoint be real with people you know I I get so many DMS from people that are like hey you know it could be a collab manager and then the next time an old message to be like, oh I’m a graphic artist too and then oh by the way I’m a UI designer like you don’t you don’t become these things every like week because you watch like a YouTube video it’s like if you want to be you know a community moderator that’s great you know we don’t need one right now I’m sure there’s another project that that’ll kind of take you under their wing so that’s all I would say. I would say be real and be transparent about like your objectives as a person that wants to work with a project and you know as long as they’re a legitimate project that is willing to kind of help you and anything along those lines like there’s definitely opportunities to get involved you don’t have to just create a project to create a project.

Fritzy: Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your story about the famous foxes and then about this essentially vibrant project that you have, Thank you also to my co-host Anchor and Keith and to our audiences be sure to check out our other episodes in TokenMinds podcast available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcast until the next one guys.