Koop started off as a result of my experiences working in NFT projects and communities. I felt like there was infrastructure missing. Not necessarily for DAOs, but for communities who were less than 40 individuals, smaller squads, teams, fandoms that were really missing ways to engage and also to connect with one each other, one another. And so Koop is hoping to build out that tooling in the crypto native way.
We think what's missing in crypto is fun. We want to have fun again and many times, for example, if you were hosting this Twitter Space inside of Koop, people would be able to see their membership passes inside of that community.They'd be able to level up. So you could actually set different permissions that a user would need to do inside of the chat. For example, "submit three questions to ask Natalia." Or "write a Twitter thread highlighting Caroline's last my BFF live spaces." Or, "invite five of your favorite Hispanic leaders to come listen to the chat."
And by engaging in all of those actions, which will be laid out inside of the chat within the hour of this experience of this Twitter Spaces, they would then get rewards that you, as an admin would be able to immediately distribute. So for us, we try to get rid of all of the admin tools, all of the reading, all the long form tags, and we try to get back to what does it look like for a user. I have these small actions to do, and then I get to listen to an awesome conversation with Caroline and Natalia and whoever else wants to ask a question. And so it almost feels like we're sitting at home talking to one another.
When I was going through the process of fundraising, the question comes with this connotation of you dropped out [of college] because you are so smart or you dropped out because you saw this opportunity in crypto. But I would say that 60% of the reason why I dropped out was because I couldn't afford to stay in college. It was way too expensive. It wasn't worth my time. It was $100,000 in loans that I would be taking out that I could not imagine paying off in 20 years. And so I think that it's those life experiences and those perspectives that lead you to solve different problems that lead you to look at things in a different way. And so with a lot of other Hispanic friends that I have in this space or other founders in crypto, I really encourage them not to follow along with the trending narrative. Think about what is a problem that they want to solve. Because when you focus on that, you'll realize how different you are and what had made you different. Your whole life is actually what makes you so special in a space that's so early like crypto today.
When I when I first came into crypto, I quickly realized that crypto's biggest use case from my perspective is community around cultural pieces. And those cultural pieces were NFT's, and three years before that they were tokens. And I think that there's more opportunity for culture to be created in crypto that extends beyond our niche space and the people who have historically created culture are diverse voices, people with stories, people with struggles and journeys, and those are the types of communities that have succeeded best using the coops platform tweaks NFT, which is the project that I mentioned earlier. It was actually started by two college students who had suffered from anxiety and depression, and they felt that they didn't have a space in the digital world to feel comfortable to feel at home.
And so they launched this NFT collection using the funds from that. And then they started hosting events in person. And so they used all that money for snacks, for beverages. It wasn't the biggest collection in the world, but it was from those spaces that they hosted together that they actually built out a Sandbox universe for other individuals.
It's going to be leaning on the individuals who have almost untraditional stories and giving them the space in the room and the tools to create culture. This is a subculture that previously did not exist before communities like BFF and those are the places I'm most interested in getting involved in, and I think people really resonate with that because they can they can very quickly read through the real and the fake when it comes to NFT communities and projects more generally.
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This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
