Fungible Strategy | Wider NFTs initiative for Data Marketplaces | Round 20

OceanDAO Round 20
#1

Project Name

Fungible Strategy

Project Category

Outreach

Proposal Earmark

New Outreach

Proposal Description

With the emergence of the data NFT innovation on Ocean Protocol, many vendors started selling and trading data.

However, this new process is still quite hazardous without an organization to facilitate the process for the vendors. This means that many projects will use the resources made available by Ocean to launch their own Data Market.

Fungible Strategy would like to use this opportunity to implement its service on Ocean Protocol to help data providers focus their business on real needs and create a sustainable business model around this new opportunity.

It is characterized by assistance in market analysis and deployment of a core strategy to structure a data marketplace.

We are ready to accompany projects to develop the data of tomorrow, sold and managed as NFTs.

Since this is our implementation on Ocean Protocol, we are ready to offer our services for free for one month to interested projects.

Thus, the 3k requested grant will be used to pay the salary of the Project Manager (PM) deployed full time for 1 month to assist projects building their Data Marketplace on Ocean.

This is to create credibility that we can capitalize on in the future and get paid for it. The aim is to create a sustainable activity that would finance the PM’s remuneration by itself by helping as many projects as possible.

Grant Deliverables

  • The first deliverable would be to help our first project(s) on Ocean during the free month. We have the capacity to assist up to 3 projects. For this, we will be posting about the free service on Ocean’s social networks (discord, Twitter, etc.) to attract prospects. We have also seen projects submitting proposals to integrate this new Data NFT feature, so we’ll get in touch with them. This will happen directly after receiving the grant.

  • The second deliverable would be the collection and analysis of the good and bad practices done during this first month to then establish advice to provide to our next customers. This will occur the first week of the following month or earlier if possible.

Please note that if the amount received is less than $3000, we will be able to help proportionally fewer projects during our free month.

Project Description

Take a look at our Pitch Deck HERE

Problem & Mission:

Fungible Strategy (FS) is a blockchain consulting agency specialized in assisting the launch of NFT projects.

Fungible Strategy aims to break down the barriers that separate NFT communities from one blockchain to another. There is currently an uneven distribution of NFT users on the different blockchains. This can of course be explained by the age of the ecosystems, the first mover positions or the funds deployed by the ecosystems to promote faster growth.

Nevertheless, the observation is that a positioning strategy targeting multi-blockchain communities could help NFT projects to launch more successfully and Ocean’s user base to grow faster.

FS therefore wishes to provide a strategic support service for Ocean’s NFT projects.

Services:

The services provided consist of two things:

1) A market analysis and strategy development service

This service consists of consulting missions for specific questions and of short duration (1-7 days) or by a much more integrated work within the project until its launch/delivery.

The latter aims at providing in-depth work on marketing strategy, project management and all the issues that projects with little blockchain experience may encounter. We also provide assistance in negotiating partnerships with previously assisted projects and influencers we have worked with and/or established long term relationships, usually characterized by specific offers negotiated for our clients.

2) A fundraising assistance service

This service aims to help our clients raise funds to facilitate and accelerate the development of their project.

For the moment, we have helped projects to get in touch with blockchain foundations like the Near Foundation and the Aurora Foundation which offers grants to promising projects. Thus, we help the projects to build their applications and refine their business model and other important aspects to ensure their survival regardless of the market conditions. If possible, we would like to develop our relationship with the people in charge of grant allocation at Ocean to allow similar assistance for Ocean NFT projects.

Secondly, we are currently developing our network of VCs for projects seeking funds in exchange for equity in their company. This network is currently composed of VCs from the French VC environment and contact points given by the Near Foundation. The VC contact is not the favored solution but it is still in our will to develop it in order to minimize the dependence of our clients on foundations.

Finally, we are in touch with two project incubators: Station F and ESSEC Ventures which incubate promising projects and allow them to meet individuals looking for potential investments. It’s a network of incubators that we are trying to grow to allow project owners to incubate their project no matter where they are in the world.

Note that Fungible Strategy is about to finalize its incubation with ESSEC Ventures.

Achievements:

So far, Fungible Strategy has achieved impressive results. The project has received a grant from the Near Foundation and has successfully leveraged it to help over 30 projects working with the Tenk DAO incubator which is one of our preferential partners on Near protocol.

These 30 projects have managed to raise over $2.11M in Primary sales and generate over $2.54M in Secondary sales volume.

Please note that Fungible Strategy is the spin out of Tenk DAO’s marketing business, with the two businesses separated since June 2022.

Thus, the kpi’s to be used to observe the growth of Fungible Strategy (number of followers on Twitter and member on Discord) are to be put in relation with those of Tenk DAO. Therefore both social media accounts will be linked below.

For your information, Tenk DAO is the first incubator of generative NFT projects on Near Protocol. Tenk DAO created the standards and the open source code on which all Near Protocol incubators are based.

How will this impact Ocean:

It is on this experience obtained on Near Protocol that Fungible Strategy wishes to capture to launch similar services on Ocean and thus assist as many projects as possible.

This would increase the number of projects building in the ecosystem, the NFT sales volume and bring back new users thanks to the cross-blockchain promotion strategy.

It is important to specify that although our focus is on NFTs due to our past experiences, we seek to develop our activity with DeFi and DAOs projects. This gives us a better agility to deal with the vagaries of markets and end-users’ preferences.

Legal context:

After working several months without a legal entity, the company Fungible Strategy was officially created on July 12, 2022 and is domiciled in France.

Examples of previously assisted projects:

Here are examples of projects we have previously assisted on Near:

Thank you!

Do not hesitate to ask your questions, we will answer with pleasure!

Final Product

The end product would be to have assisted our first project(s) on Ocean Protocol in order to build a credibility on which to capitalize to assist other projects in the ecosystem.

Then our website will be updated to offer launch assistance on Ocean Protocol as we advertise now for Near Protocol and Aurora. We would have a full time Project manager dedicated to help Ocean Protocol projects.

Value Add Criteria

This proposal could benefit the Ocean ecosystem by helping projects better leverage their data and data marketplaces. This would be characterized by an increase in the visibility of this new innovative technology within the blockchain industry.


From a KPI's point of view, this would increase the number of projects building in the ecosystem, the NFT sales volume and bring back new users thanks to the cross-blockchain promotion strategy (mainly from Near and Aurora), coming for this exclusive technology. Highlighting this innovation would greatly contribute to drive the use of Ocean.


Until now, Fungible Strategy has a successful track record on other blockchains. Indeed, we have helped more than 30 NFT projects that have managed to raise over $2.11M in Primary sales and generate over $2.54M in Secondary sales volume. This just goes to show that if the opportunity arises, we do our best to turn it into a success for us and our clients!


For now, our team has been mainly observing the evolution of the Ocean NFT ecosystem from the outside. Nevertheless, although new, we couldn't resist the urge to contribute to the ecosystem when we saw the arrival of NFT data.


So far, we feel that our values of collaboration, inclusion & diversity and freedom resonate well with the community. So, I don't think we'll have much trouble bringing our expertise and network of former customers to the ecosystem who will surely be interested in this new feature for NFTs.

Core Team

Enzo Soyer is Co-Founder of Fungible Strategy. He has a bachelor degree from ESSEC Business School, one of the best business schools in Europe. He has studied in several places in the world, in Denmark, Singapore and France.

From a professional point of view, he is also acting COO and shareholder of Tenk DAO, the first incubator of generative NFT projects on Near Protocol. Tenk created the standards and the open source code on which all Near Protocol incubators are based. He also has experience at Brave Software, the Navigator/search engine and Thales Alenia Space, one of the largest satellite manufacturers in the world.

These experiences have allowed Enzo to create a professional network of potential partners who prove to be very useful for the assisted projects, allowing in passing to affirm the credibility of Fungible Strategy.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-soyer/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dgetsylver

Tenk DAO council (Dgetsylver.near): https://app.astrodao.com/dao/tenk.sputnik-dao.near

Henri-druv Xanthopoulos is Co-Founder of Fungible Strategy. He also has a bachelor degree from ESSEC Business School where he had the opportunity to study in Canada and France.

His professional experience is mainly inherited from web 2 as Financial Controller at Tereos, one of the largest sugar cooperative in the world. He has also worked at Walt Disney World, LVMH and L’Oréal.

These last experiences are a real asset for the artistic advice of our clients who wish to give a prestigious touch to their projects.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henridruvxanthopoulos/

Advisors

Not applicable in our case, we are not working with advisors. However, we are open for it.

Funding Requested
3000

Minimum Funding Requested
1

Wallet Address
0xD0192F9D034EbAE5AfA35c91d19d4AE9eb2F3e16

1 Like
#2

Hi Enzo, given that you have applied for Outreach, can you please explain how you have engaged with the Ocean Community previously?

It is the community that votes and pays for the grants.

Has your only interaction been to create a proposal to ask for funding, or have you had any meaningful interactions with the Ocean community prior to this?

Please clarify and provide evidence of community participation within the Ocean Ecosystem?

1 Like
#3

Hey @zippy1979

Thank you very much for your question.

To be completely transparent with you, we have never had an interaction that could be described as “meaningful” as you suggest.

We have only recently become interested in the Ocean ecosystem. We were looking for new NFT technologies to offer to our existing customers. That’s when we came across Data NFTs and their potential applications for established web2 companies.

As this is an experimental technology, we wanted to apply to the funding program to finance a market analysis to establish the potential of these NFTs and thus help projects in the ecosystem using it.

This means that most of the interaction with established projects in the ecosystem will be done if we manage to get the grant and thus deploy resources for this mission.

Nevertheless, it is important to understand that this need for Data NFT seems to exist within some of our existing customers. So we would like to encourage them to develop on Ocean as well. This would create awareness around the Data NFTs technology on our two current working ecosystems: Near Protocol and Aurora.

Best

1 Like
#4

Thank you very much for replying and I respect you for your candour :handshake:

DAO Round 20 is the last round where projects will be allowed to propose deliverables in this manner, from R21 the DAO is moving to a retroactive funding model. Given that your proposal is to offer services for free, and then pay a project manager afterwards. I would be more inclined to vote for and support this proposal in R21 than now.

Especially as the proposal is mostly aimed at delivering social media consultancy. The team’s previous experience seems to be in the NFT PFP space. Data NFTs do not have much crossover with that kind of market, with Ocean’s core customers coming from the Data Science, Machine Learning and AI industries.

How does your experience in promoting PFPs translate to the Data NFT marketplace please?

Also I am still confused regarding the offer to provide a service for free, but also need $3000 for project management. Is there a standard fee schedule for your company? Could you share it with us in that case, so that we can understand better the discount being offered?

1 Like
#5

We do not reduce ourselves to social network consulting. It is only one of the areas in which we can provide assistance, as seen in the pitch deck shared above.

In reality, most of our work consists of global consulting to fine-tune their business model (think about the final utility of their NFT, the viability of this choice, etc.) and help them set up their deployment strategy (partnerships, use of social networks).

In a second step, we can help projects to raise funds but this is not what we want to focus on.

Our work can be done in the form of consulting (one-off meetings) or integrated into the project as project manager. The latter allows us to better understand the dynamics of the projects and to assist in the smooth running of the actions and advice we provide.

As far as our work with PFP projects is concerned, this is a very fair point. Most of the projects we have launched so far are PFPs and these are the ones I chose to highlight because their sales volume is often higher.

However, we have also been working with gaming blockchain projects that will start generating anonymized data about their users and could resell it. Moreover, in order to give more uses to their NFTs, some projects like Bullish Bulls have decided to create dapp aggregators, trading tools for their holders (https://neartracker.io/). These projects collect data that correspond to the profile of the Data NFTs. My greatest hope is for this project, https://blockversekit.io/, which is currently being funded by the Near Foundation and contracts us to quickly expand to other ecosystems.

That is not necessarily the AI, Machine learning or Data science industries you mentioned but why should Data NFTs be restrained to that. At the end of the day, all kind of statistical data coming from existing projects can be useful for building ones or even academical studies.

Finally, for the amount of $3000. This will fund a full time Project Manager to help projects for free during our first month of support on Ocean. It’s a bit like a free month of Amazon Prime. Projects that come to us can take advantage of it for free. Then, after this first month of activity, they will have to pay us if they want to employ us.

Normally, the prices are supposed to appear on our website but as it is offline for redesign, I attach a screen of the section in question. To put it simply, $3000 is the minimum price we charge a project for an integrated Project Manager mission. I think that in a month we can help up to 3 projects this way. So in essence, that’s 2 free assignments at our lowest possible rate.

Screenshot 2022-08-04 at 15.58.30
Screenshot 2022-08-04 at 15.58.301098Ă—622 114 KB

I hope that I have answered all of your doubts.

Best

1 Like
#6

Thank you Enzo for clarifying further :+1:

I wholeheartedly agree that the DataNFTs need not be confined to any set of industries and Ocean would certainly benefit from a broad scope of consumers for the marketplace :handshake:

The Blockversekit project does indeed look very interesting and is more in line with what Ocean Protocol enables.

We have a weekly Town Hall for OceanDAO on Wednesdays in the Ocean discord at 3pm UTC, and I encourage you and the team to join, engage and you would be warmly welcomed to present your ideas for the Ocean Marketplace at the DAO.

Feel free to reach out to me in the discord, my handle is the same, I am very active and I would be happy to help you get a slot to present at the next DAO meeting.

Good luck.

1 Like
#7

Hi Enzo, I know you did not get funded in R20, and I did not vote no to your proposal. I still think that R21 can be a good chance for a project like yours. In order to canvas for votes and better explain the value of your proposition to the Ocean Community, I strongly encourage you to attend and participate in the Ocean DAO town hall meetings. Come join the discord and engage with the community, I assure you that you will be welcomed.