Melissa Burr & AlfaFrens

We'll explore the challenges and opportunities of revenue sharing in decentralized platforms, the parallels between rising token prices, and the innovative changes in AlfaFrens V2. Melissa shares her unique journey from professional poker to becoming a keystone in the web3 and NFT communities, highlighting her insights on content creation, community building, and social media dynamics. We'll also discuss the latest in the crypto ecosystem, focusing on project scalability, discoverability issues, and the pivotal role of effective communication in driving success.
Join us as we unpack how Melissa's poker experience informs her crypto strategies, the transition from fan tokens to Sparks, and the ongoing evolution of the AlfaFrens platform. Plus, we’ll hear about the latest token transition to AF, and how it’s set to revolutionize engagement and participation in their community. So, grab your headphones and tune in for an episode packed with valuable insights and forward-thinking ideas!

00:00 Unraveling Web3 stories with top tier innovators.

06:14 Why is an NFT necessary for this?

11:36 Art evolves; communities shape technology advancements.

16:54 Focus on long-term goals over short-term rewards.

25:58 Hired by Alpha Friends due to passion.

31:17 Affordable group chat access for mental health discussions.

34:53 Effective communication and support are critical for success.

41:59 Communicating enjoyment within Alpha Friends without strain.

45:15 Exploring Superfluid: Streamable, programmable money introduction.

49:04 Superfluid teases new token mechanism amidst challenges.

58:21 Price increases; new changes offer more scalability.

01:00:03 Discoverability issues and customization options in tools.

Music & Sounds By: Lakey Inspired
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CastOff/Episode Discussion, here.

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Transcript

0:00

It's a tough balance, but you just have to believe in yourself and not let emotions just dictate these decisions over and over again. You have to kind of harden yourself to that. So I think. Yeah. And there's a reason you see so many poker players in crypto, right? Because they've trained themselves over time to just keep making the right decision over and over again and not get the best of them. But they also implode themselves with leverage too. So there's a double edged sword because they gamble like their life depends on. Yo. Welcome back to another episode of behind the Screen with G, the podcast where we unravel the stories, insights and secrets of top tier artists, avid collectors, innovative builders shaping the digital frontier better known as Web3. I'm your host, Ramaha, an avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the space since 2012, joined the NFT space in 2021. And yeah, let's talk about this week's episode. So this week's episode is with Melissa Burr and Also Alpha Friends v2. For those unfamiliar with Alpha Friends. Alpha Friends is kind of like a platform where you can really talk about anything. It's kind of like a paid community chat with supporters. They're doing a relaunch to V2. They initially got started with V1 back in April of 2024. So this is kind of a revamp to talk about V2. What are the changes, what's coming? And also a little bit about Melissa, who has a crazy story from being in crypto since also 2013, 2012 for a while as well. Professional poker player. And you know, how she got involved with Web3 or how she kind of contributes in Web3 right now. Yeah. So just a heads up, we did lose or get rugged a little bit with the audio. So we got MIG rugged. I think we lost about 20 minutes. I'll summarize that towards the end. Just kind of with my own notes of what happened. Yeah. So sorry about that, guys. Let's dive in. Thanks again for doing this. I wanted to kind of jump into who you are first just because I know you have a very interesting story regarding really like the poker part, how you got started with Farcaster as a whole is pretty interesting to me as well. And then we can then switch kind of into how you found Alpha Friends and how you leveraged Alpha Friends yourself. I know to build a community like that. Specifically that. So yeah. Who is. Do you. Are you fully doxed or you are. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've always used my full actually on all of Social media. The idea of not being docs never occurred to me because I joined Twitter in 2011 and I joined it basically. Matt Glantz, another famous poker player. Another. Not just he, he's actually much more famous than me, but he was like, you have to get on Twitter. Everybody's on Twitter. And I was like, I really don't even like Facebook, but okay. So I signed up for this Twitter account. I didn't even know I wanted to make my screen name. And I just, I have an affinity for Burberry merchandise. And I was like, all right, I'll just throw in a bunch of Rs and make that my account screen name. So, fun fact, if you look up the history of like this whole money printer and the money printer go, brrr. My Twitter screen name predates the money printer. So people always make this joke like, I'm the OG money printer. I actually. So I joined in 2011. And, you know, it's pretty well known in my history that, you know, I was just this kind of like mixed game, high stakes, mixed game poker player. But everyone does know that poker overlapped crypto probably back in 2013. 2012, 2013. Probably around that time, we were playing on, probably no, 2013, a site called Seals with Clubs. And it used bitcoin to process all the transactions. And during that time we were playing. It's one of the things I constantly reach back for. We were playing one bitcoin, two bitcoin, Omaha, eight or better. Those were the blinds. And what that means in poker terms is that the limits are 1 bitcoin, 2 bitcoin. So pre flop and on the flop, the bet increment size has to be one bitcoin. And on the turn in the river, it's two bitcoin. So, like, if you think now that the bitcoin price is over 100k, I actually wasn't playing these stakes at the time. Bitcoin was, I think, $400 at the time. So I was actually playing like 400, 800. But now that I think of how I was sitting there playing 1, 100,000, 200,000. That's crazy. I have never played that high stakes. But that was my first exposure to bitcoin. And I, you know, obviously along with everybody else, I didn't hold it then. But I did revisit it again back in 2015 or. Yeah, 2015. So that's how long I exposed the actual, actual crypto through poker. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it is interesting, like how bitcoin got people, you Know, like with poker and online poker, the moving of money or funds with US dollar is such a difficult thing. And then bitcoin just naturally fits into that digital realm so easily. And it's funny that just that is what got Bitcoin for the Silk Road or for really anything early on, that was product market fit. Essentially, if you look at the whole of cryptocurrency in itself, the best products solve a problem. Right. When I. Whenever anyone comes to me with a. With an idea or like, hey, I think this would make a good coin, or I think this is a good idea of a project, a lot of people approached me to launch, like, an NFT project back in 2021. They were like, hey, let's. Let's start this poker project. And I'm like, well, why. Why do you need an NFT for this? It was like the most common question I always ask people, and they couldn't really come up with a reason. I'm like, well, you have a Web2 company. I don't know why you need a Web3 company. And fundamentally, if you look at Bitcoin, it solved a problem. It solved a fundamental issue that society needed to move money in a. In a fast, you know, decentralized type of way. And if you go, if you look at the major coins that we have in cryptocurrency, Ethereum, even if you reach back to something like Monero, which was totally private coin, the best ones had the most functionality. If you feel, even if you look at today's coins, the meme coins, or the ones that we like the best, we cope with this idea of, oh, well, this coin does this, and so that's why I buy it. And inherently, all humans are motivated by this kind of idea that we need a reason for why we buy something. But at its core, Bitcoin, we all bought into the idea of cryptocurrency because it solved this enormous problem that society faced. And so if anyone is listening to this podcast, I would encourage you to always keep that idea in the forefront of your mind. Like, why do I need to make this coin? Or why do I need to make this idea? Because if you can fundamentally solve one of our biggest problems, then you'll have a successful idea to come to fruition. Yeah, I had no idea that you actually were. Makes sense, though, that you were involved with crypto that far back. Yeah. So same as well for me. I've been around since 2013 as well, like, heavily. I don't think it's a surprise then. We're talking on a podcast in 2024. Because, yeah, it's. It makes. And it's not surprising that J.C. made this connection because it turns out J.C. and I have a ton of different friends that overlap in this community, but we just connected through Farcaster and Alpha friends. Right. But it took something like a smaller environment for us to overlap and connect. And that's kind of why, like, this whole entire ecosystem, much better. Because here, for years now, we've been swimming in the same sea. But it wasn't until this smaller environment that we were able to connect with each other finally. Yeah, because, like, on Twitter, same with, like, same with you. Like, I joined Twitter, like, in like, 2010, and a lot of my Twitter for a long time was like, I used. I used my full name as well, like you. And this is my last name, in case anybody is curious. But the. You know, it's like, it's all your. For me, it was like, all the things that I like. So I liked, you know, Arsenal Football club, politics. Okay. Bitcoin, like, just everything, you know, high fashion, fashion and, you know, like, it's really. Twitter struggles with, like, forming those communities, like you finding those people within those communities. It's good for, like, finding, you know, like, the journalists. Yeah. Like larger ideas or whatever. Yeah. And reading them and getting it, like, more real time. But, like, actually forming communities is like a little. I mean, I think they're trying to do that now, but, like, for a while that's not what they were doing and that wasn't their goal. But yeah, like you said, going to a smaller pool, like Forecaster has been an unlock. Because at least from the crypto side of things for me, like, I've been able to meet just a ton of people instead of forcing this massive monolith thing that is Twitter, into forcing it into crypto only it's like now you're just on Forecaster, which is crypto native to begin with. And. Yeah. All right, so I did have a question regarding kind of. So you were doing poker, bitcoin online. I know the prices. I know it's bad to look at those prices nowadays and think about what you used to do with that. So when did you get, like, into the east space? The East? Yeah. Like Ethereum and like. Okay, well, let's see. So. Because it sounded like you like some. You were around in 2021. No, no. So I really was in. In 2016. I was here for all the ICOs, Denticoin, the Rise and Fall of XRP. Back then when it hit $3 but, you know, every. I've been here for like every huge cycle that has hit crypto Twitter, you know, everyone went crazy for ICOs and all the tokens back then. And it really. It's when you look, zoom out and you look at it, it's not that none of it's all that different, right? They're like, oh, we need a coin for everything. We have Filacoin, dentacoin, all this other crazy shit. And it's like, oh, you can pay your dentist in this coin. And we're like, okay, we'll buy that. And it was just, yeah, you know, looking back, and then they slapped an NFT on it and it was like, okay, well, now you have an NFT for this to get you into this. And everyone bought that. Now we have all these meme coins with the idea of utility behind that. It's just like we have a different shiny object that is the main character, the forefront of every cycle. And it's like from that, though, always has a class that will graduate to the next cycle if they're. If there keeps repeating a cycle. And it's like you try to pick the winners that will graduate and stay from that and the teams that will stay. Because even if you look back at, you know, back at. To. If you look back to reach back to NFTs, you still have communities that are thriving, teams that are still put together and intact. And I'm not talking about the big ones like pudgy Penguins, but if you look at, you know, let's just say another community that's just as large, but would be the MFers. And probably a large amount of that could be attributed to the fact they were cco. And there wasn't a huge team behind that. It was just let the art be its art and let the community do what they want with it. But there's other smaller communities that could come through to the other side that you would still see in, say, 2030. And then if you reach even further back to 2017, some of those coins also still exist today. AAVE still a lending protocol, just things will carry. But everyone keeps predicting what will be the next big thing. This hype cycle, this could have been probably predicted if you look, if you were to look back to NFTs and the way everyone embraced kind of these cartoon pictures, you're like, oh, man, things are going to get even stupider, like in the next cycle. And how could I even imagine just the state of things today with meme coins? But I will say that with every cycle Comes a component of technology and advancement. And now you have this other layer of AI. And now the distinction comes. How much can people push the boundaries of AI and how fine of a line can they walk between grifting and scamming people? That's always the topic, too, with every cycle. It's like, it's just crazy. It's actually really fascinating because my favorite part of every single cycle is observing human behavior. And it's kind of the why. The why I joined Warpcast and Farcaster. Bitfloor Ghost just tried to bring me over kicking and screaming. But I, you know, much like everyone else who had a huge following on Twitter or even a medium sized, like, oh, my God, I worked that since 2011. I now have 15,000 followers on Twitter. Do I really want to just abandon that? But I did want to abandon that because when they released the monetization policy, it was like, generate 5, 5 million impressions in the last three months. And I was like, all right, I'm going to go hard in the paint for this and see if I can actually just hit this. And I came in at like 4.5 million. I was like, I put maybe like half effort into it. And I was like, I don't think I want to do this for like $116. I'm like, this is kind of like. But this is kind of nonsense because my Twitter account did really well. Like, for someone who is just posting nonsense and reply guy ing, I thought it did really well for 15,000 followers. So when Bitflur was like, hey, come over to Warpcast, like, you're going to crush it, I was like, all right, fuck it. What do I have to lose? Like, I'm not getting paid anything on Twitter. Like, I'm just wasting my time. I'm sitting here scrolling endlessly, not getting paid. And then I found like, this kind of community where I was like, wow, I can help a lot of people, but I also get to observe human behavior. Kind of like the forefront of the technology that I'm interested in. And I felt like I would have a unique view into the next bull market during election season, which would have been crazy. So, like, taking a step back from, like, when I actually joined, which was February, I think, 2023, I doubled down on the idea of social finance back in. Back then, I committed basically all of my time building this Warp Cast Persona, introduced myself to the community. Like, just got ingrained in everything that I could and spent now all my time on Warpath. I don't even really look at Twitter anymore. But so far, it's turned out to be a really good bet because obviously we're seeing, you know, the activity with base, and I think a lot of things are getting just built over there. And also I just enjoy talking to the people more. They're just. They're just more fun. I think there's a lot of innovation happening over there, for sure. That's what I enjoy about it. Yeah, it's interesting to hear. Kind of like, at 15,000, it still didn't even feel worth it for you on Twitter. It's kind of nice to hear because my following is definitely a lot smaller than that on Twitter. And I was like, oh, I wonder how that payout is. And it's so funny to hear that because I know someone, I think they have, like, 30,000 followers and their payouts about, like, 500amonth, which I'm like, oh, that's pretty good. You know, like, I could. Five hundred to a thousand. You know, it depends on, like, how, you know, crazy of a month or quarter it is. But then, like, I look at, like, djin tips or, like, some of the activity that's happening for me over here in Workhouse, and I have, like, one tenth of their size on Warpcast, and I'm making, like, the same amount. I'm like, okay. I don't know. I was like, I couldn't even participate in Twitter. Yeah. And probably with less effort, like, less shilling. Like, I definitely don't. I would say I'm not even the best replyer, to be quite honest. Like, it's something. I try to get better at it now. Now that I know that, like, it helps. But yeah, I'm like, it's insane, like, just naturally being you. Like, I've changed almost nothing about myself, like, my Twitter behavior and just moved it over to Farcaster, and even that will give me. Even if it was a hundred bucks, I'd be like, that's better than nothing. Like, exactly. And it's not. For. Even if you were just to assess it on the surface, you're getting, you know, X amount of money this month, but you're also reinvesting into what you believe in. If you believe in social finance, if you believe that this is the future, this is the way things are going to be done, then you believe your open rank score or your Namor score is going to follow you around. And. And you can already see it with, like, if you just look at Moxie, if you were around for Moxie, the people with the highest open ranks got distributed the biggest Amount of pie. I don't believe that's going to be the last protocol that comes through here. And it just makes the most sense. If you're going to come through, advertise on Warpcast, drop a big product or collaborate with any of the big builders, you're going to want the biggest accounts, you know, talking about it and you're going to give them the biggest slice of the pie. So it's like even if you're only making whatever $50 a month in degen tips, you're also in tandem, in stride, working on your open rank score to secure your bigger piece of the social pie that is warpcast. And I feel like some people get lost in this kind of like short sighted thinking. I always see it in poker. They always want, like they want this reward right now, but they don't see the larger goal of what they're working towards. But if you believe in, if you believe in something, you're always working towards it. And you can forego these short term rewards that maybe don't work in your favor right now, but will work in your favor in the future. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's hard to like separate that, but yeah, I think, yeah. Like I see Proxy even like he tells people like, hey, how do I get my score up? And he's like, literally just be you, like just join. But like don't worry about the score. Like it will naturally come and then you'll be able to launch tokens. Like the more you focus on it, like trying to be behave in a certain way, like the less it's going to work for you essentially, you know, or it might work, but like you said in the short term, but in the long term you won't form connections, relationships. And that's really like what social media is about, you know, in my opinion. Like it's like making friends, meeting connections, meeting other like amended people and all that. There's a reason that farmers always move on from an ecosystem because one of two things has happened. Either the rewards have dried up or they have, the protocol has figured out how to box out farmers. But if you're just a natural, this is why I go constantly go back to just using a protocol in its natural environment, not trying to exploit it to the max. You will never get boxed out of using it. Right? If you just constantly naturally use it and then you constantly just reap the rewards and you move up the social ladder, you never have to worry about stuff like that and then everything for you just naturally gets better. But farmers Always move on. Why? Because they're boxed out. They're rowing against the tide and they're not utilizing anything to the max. They just move on to the next protocol. It's a leech kind of behavior. But if you're a good user, you'll just constantly be given opportunity, especially in an environment like Warpath. Yeah, agreed. Yeah. I wanted to ask you something kind of random. Maybe not random, but like, similar to do you think, like, you being a professional poker player has helped you with, like the cycles or. Oh, just being better at kind of spotting, like trading. Yeah. Human behaviors, I guess. Yeah. You can kind of see exactly where you kind of predict what people are going to do. And warpcast is really just kind of one of these places because it's such a small place. You can see, you can kind of see the sentiment just shift on the timeline. You can start to see certain people hold certain opinions and then just everyone else kind of just fall in line and dogpile on that one belief or opinion. And being a poker player kind of hardens you to a lot of different things. And the one thing is, the one thing about trading is you have to fight, like every instinct that you want to execute at that time. So, like, when everything is just going down, people want to panic, sell. You have to be the one that's like, nah, I believed in something at the time and we're just going to hold for here. And I'm not talking about dumb meme coins or a clanker coin that just dropped. I'm talking about when you're holding in a position in something that you bought, you did research in. You like this idea. You farmed it for a while and now everyone's panic selling when everything is telling you that you should be also selling too. You have to resist that urge. And then also, if you're really good and you can find that conviction again, here's where you can buy the bottom and bring down your average cost. And being a poker player, it's like you have to do things that are constantly the right decision for your roi. And not everyone can do that because there's a lot of emotions that come with poker. But I think I've played to date probably over 11 million hands of poker now between online and live. And it's like, does it get easier every time to make a decision that you feel like might be wrong in this moment, but you know, long term will always net you money? It doesn't get, I wouldn't say it gets massively easier, but you just get hard into kind of those emotions. And it just, it takes a certain kind of special person to lose a lot of money and be okay and then move on to the next trade. And sometimes I worry about people in the space in terms of accepting responsibility because that's another piece of poker. There is a layer of accountability that in order to be a good poker player, you have to accept about yourself. Otherwise you're just going to think you're the unluckiest person in the world. Right. Because there's a component of luck where the river, the turn comes or the river comes where you can't control that card, but you control every decision that leads up to that, hoping that when the river card comes that one time you did make all the right decisions and the money's getting pushed to you. So it's a tough balance. But you just have to believe in yourself and not let emotions just dictate these decisions over and over again. You have to kind of harden yourself to that. So I think. Yeah. And there's a reason you see so many poker players in crypto, right. Because they've trained themselves over time to just keep making the right decision over and over again and not get the best of them. But they also employed themselves with leverage too. So there's a double edged sword because they gamble like their life depends on it. Yeah, it's, it's funny. Yeah, I, I wanted to ask that because I do have a friend who, who does. He's not a professional like you. I think he does like amateur and he's won a couple amateur things in his area. So he's like, you know, he's decent, I guess. But it's funny like he, he, he listens to a lot of interviews and like podcasts and like just people that are actually professional players. And so I think he's like really plugged into their community, into like the poker community as a whole. Yeah. And it's funny to see how I'm retired. I only play a couple tournaments every year. Yeah, I took a step back from it. It's just after you do it for a really long time, you kind of, it's not even about like, it's not a money thing, it's like a, it's just an exotic, emotionally exhausting type thing. And the people just like, after a certain amount of time you want to, you just want to move on to something else. I don't think anybody could. People who play poker for a living for more than a decade, I don't, they really love it. And I think that deep down in my. In my heart, I really loved being playing pool, which was what I didn't do. I played poker instead. But I really didn't, like, love poker to the extent where I was like, I have to play this for the rest of my life. Professionally. It's just. I think it's too taxing on the body and the soul. That's all I'll say about that. Well, now you have meme coins to do that. Yeah. To mess with your emotions. Awesome. Okay, let's start talking about Alpha friends, because I know that's kind of what we're here for. It's a good transition because I did leave poker so I could work in web 3. In 2021, when the pandemic hit, I already had, like, one foot out the door. And then the pandemic hit, and they were like, closed the door. They were like, no more casinos pandemics here. You can't come to the casino. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm not playing poker anymore. And actually, before my foray into, like, working in web 3, I ate 65 nuggets on YouTube for a prop bet because they canceled sports and we had nothing to gamble on. So I was like, eh, okay. It, like, started out as an innocent joke, and then everyone was like, well, you. It started out like, you can't eat 60 nuggets in one hour. And I was like, I think I can. So it just become this massive prop bet. You. We were all so bored. I ate 65. It's on YouTube. It's like 300 people tuned in, and I won this bet. And, you know, we just had nothing to do during the pandemic. NFTs hit. And, you know, I didn't have. I have this blank resume of just being a professional poker player for a decade. And then I just. I started buying NFTs again. I'm this type of person, just an overly active community member. And then before I know it, I'm talking to the project founders and I'm telling them what they should be doing. I'm like, you're doing this wrong. You're doing this wrong. You're doing this wrong. And they're like, can't we just pay you to do this? And I'm like, well, you're gonna have to pay a lot of money. And as it turns out, in 2021, I asked for some ridiculous amount of money, and they were like, here. That's how good NFTs were. They just hired an ex professional poker player with no experience. I do have a degree, but they were like, here you go, you're an operations person now. And then, since then, I've been hired by Alpha Friends, will be the fourth project that I consult with. But my background and my degree is in operations management and business development, but I just wasn't working in the field. But so then I worked for two different NFT projects. I still volunteer pro bono for the one, and now I work for Alpha Friends. And I've gotten to this point where I only want to work for projects that I want to work for, and so I haven't worked in a while. Alpha Friends is the first project I've worked for in probably two years. And I just, I have to believe in the product. So it's no surprise that I've been using Alpha Friends for, you know, the last six, seven months. And I've had various calls with Franz as an active community member and said, you have to fix this, you have to fix this. And then probably about six weeks ago, Fran said, can we just pay you to do this? And I was like, well, it's going to depend. And that's how I got hired with Alpha Friends. But I just had a lot of different ideas and I think Fran liked them. And here we are. We're going to roll out V2 in about seven days. This is prerecorded, but I think that the team that I've assembled with J.C. and Erin, I think we're going to be pretty successful. Yeah, that's exciting. And you use the product and that's cool. Like you said, like, you, you believe in it and you were sort of naturally doing it. That's always the best too, you know, it's like you're. You're already naturally giving feedback and everything and, and you have solutions and ideas and it's like, might as well get paid for it instead of doing it for free, you know. So, I mean, credit goes to Fran, really. I mean, too many. I mean, you see a lot of founders that take community feedback and they're like, you're wrong. This is not. We're going to do it our way. And not only did Fran hire me, I had said, like, I need to be supported in these two different areas because I'm not great with visuals and Photoshop and I need a second person to support me. And with no hesitation, on the first phone call that I had that I was hired, he let me bring on JC and a third person, Erin. So, like, not only did he hire a community member, he hired three community members that all used A platform who were all users that understood how the product works to roll out the next version. And I actually just don't think there was a better, more effective way to spread a message of what the product's actually going to do in the second version than to hire three people who are using the first one the most effectively. It's actually a huge hat nod to Fran. No, seriously, I agree. Yeah, it's hard to know sometimes what feedback to take serious and implement and other feedback that's just people complaining because they complain for whatever reason. And like you said, not just like one, but like three of you and all community members and all that. So I think for anyone that is listening to this and isn't familiar with Alpha Friends. So just as a quick recap, it launched back in the spring of 2024. It seems long ago at this stage. Um, and that was V1 and it was through Degen. And for, for me, it was actually my first time ever being exposed to the Super Fluid protocol. I don't know if that's like, if this was like their first tournament that was using it or maybe there was other. But to me it was like the most consumer facing, like streaming, like the whole concept, like once I became aware of it, it was like mine was absolutely blown. I was like, this thing needs to be everywhere. And for you, did you join like right away back then? So for those. Yeah. So for those who aren't familiar, I'll just give you like a 5 second elevator pitch for what Alpha Friends actually is. Alpha Friends is a social platform that utilizes Super Fluid technology, which is a live streaming payment. And basically each channel has a creator and has a subscription price. And if that subscription price, like currently my channel is 500degen. With super fluid streaming technology, you don't pay 500degen upfront. You pay for the exact amount of time that you consume the content for. And why that makes that unique is because it's capitally efficient in the most possible way. If you don't like the person's channel, you can just simply unsubscribe. There's no bonding curve. And if you think about it, this is how we should operate in pretty much every way we stream services. If we think about all the ways, all the times we've opened up like Showtime plus to watch one movie, they've made us pay for the entire month and then we didn't find another movie we want to watch, that could never happen with a Super Fluid product. With Alpha Friends, you could subscribe to 10 channels and pay for one hour and read all of those channels and decide, okay, five of those channels are not for me. And you can unsubscribe from five of them. So Alpha friends, as a channel creator, you can create a channel. It is a one way chat. It's not a group chat and that's a feature, not a bug. The reason for that is you get to curate the conversation that flows through your channel. So if you have 200 subscribers, if you think about it, you wouldn't want a group chat because then of those 200 subscribers, probably 10 of them are going to try to be shilling their channel in yours. So the one way group chat functions as a curated conversation for yourself and your subscribers. Ideally, in a world where there's conversation, you are able to quote the reply that comes back to you and have this kind of like conversation that goes on the. I think that's my elevator pitch. The reason why I like it is I have treated it like an intimate look behind the curtain of all the things that I build on Warpcast. I talk about various topics with mental health, but basically there's no other access point to me in all of my social media outside of this channel that is unique to this. And it's a super low, it's going to stay a super low price because I just feel like people always ask me, they're like, why do you do this? You know, your time's worth much more than 500 DJ a month. And I said that's true, but my time is not worth more than a thousand people paying 500 degen a month. And the fact that it's a consolidated effort to just talk to one group chat and just type the thoughts that I want to made it feel like, okay, well even if it's one person subscribed to my channel or a thousand, the bandwidth that I spend doesn't really change that much. So that's why I kind of stuck it through and I just saw a huge opportunity in the, you know, social finance sphere to kind of capitalize on something like that. Especially with the technology they provide. Provided. Yeah, with the one way channel conversation I, I agree with you that it's nice from a curation perspective. A question that I had for you kind of is, I know JC mentioned that she met you through her, through your channel on there and you've met a couple people. How does that work? Like how do you form, you know, friends, I guess and the Alpha friends. How do you form friends with that type of communication? You know, so with the way that Version one rolled out. All of our channels were tied to our warpcast names. So you knew who. You knew who your subscriber was, and you knew who you could go back to. It's kind of proof of workcast. Go back to warpcast and find who they are. But JC and I connected. We were. She subscribed to my Alpha Friends channel. Then we kind of just spoke on warpcast, and I just realized she was a person that I wanted to stay friendly with. You know, she just had this. She exuded kind of this positive vibe. She's always happy. We were always tipping each other, just like, always just got a good feeling from this person. But within the channel, it kind of offers just this, like, intimate conversation. And in my channel, I talk about all the ways that I struggle, right? I am like a perpetual mess. I just couldn't figure out how to even get into this podcast to begin with. But I talk about mental health. I talk. I make myself extremely human, right? Because we're all human. And I feel like some. She told me, actually that she was extremely intimidated by my channel before. And I, like, I don't even know how that happened because I'm in there and I'm just like, I'm a mess today. I up this space. I didn't do this right. Bar Friends is a mess. Like, I'm so honest in my channel, it hurts sometimes because I read it back and I'm like, what was I thinking? You know? But, you know, I think that, like, just within that channel, I just really wanted to talk to her. And then also, I'm just like an open book, and I want to help a lot of people. So within my channel, people ask questions, how do I raise my open rank? How do I get a power badge? And all this just happens within the channel. And then other people are able to read these conversations, ask more questions. And JC Is the kind of person who is extremely brave to ask any kind of question. And I just got this very honest vibe from her. And I've connected with so many other people via Alpha Friends that I don't know what it is about that channel. But I feel like if someone is willing to pay for access to you, like, they deserve your time and a response to every single comment they make. And then after that, you just kind of. You naturally become friends and you want to speak to that person when you have a question about what their specialty is like. Lee Knowlton is another one who. I would say his name on warpcast now is Zini Eth. He built moxie Scout. And a large part of that build took place in his channel. But prior to that, he spent a large amount of time in my channel talking about social media and how he can best communicate what he's building outward onto social media. And I think that if you were to ask him, he would say, you know, a lot of that was successful because of what he learned on how to best communicate, how to do that. I think where a lot of people fall short is ability to communicate what they're doing. And this is where I think you said you fell off kind of like back in November. It's like Alpha Friends with. The biggest piece of feedback I gave to Fran was like, you started this amazing idea and you gave people all these channels. But the one thing that it lacked was the support for the creators. Nobody knew how to actually do a channel. Like, when I created a channel, even I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna post every day. But I kind of. I took it very seriously. Like, oh, my gosh, all these people are paying for access to me. I need to get a plan together. But not everyone is, brrr. They were just like, okay, I have a channel. And then just like, I'll say hi today. But half of you know, everyone that has a channel, they don't even. They haven't even unlocked what they have to offer because people have this misconception that I have to offer art. I have to talk about crypto. That's not the case. I'm going to help someone who is one of the best farmers that I know. And I feel like in this day and age when everyone's, like, just struggling with inflation, tons of people are growing their own food. I feel like if she were to lay out a content strategy for, like, week to week, this is. We're going to talk about soil this week. We're going to talk about weed infestation. But she wouldn't think to bring that to Alpha Friends. So that's where another area of support where jc, myself and Erin come in. We all have pretty good channels. I'll say. We found some success with the site. Now our energy can be produced outward to support the creators who kind of got lost in the shuffle. Well, here's a plan that we did that worked for us and we're conducting more spaces. Just I feel like all around, the education around how to create a good channel will be better supported in version 2, in addition, with just kind of the excitement to get more subscribers. So, I mean, that was my plan of attck from Day one, when Fran had approached me about this, just generate hype and provide more support. Yeah, you actually ended up answering one of the questions I had, which was kind of like some of the issues that you see has transpired since, like, launch. And yeah, I would agree with you. I ended up creating it. I mean, for me, it's funny, like, the way I approach things in crypto and have for a long time is like, for me, I'm like, I love the tech. That's what always got me into crypto was like the tech and decentralization aspect of it from early on. And so for better or worse, I love Monero. Super high tech, high devs. And it's private. This is a classic example. I know what you're going to say. So I love the Monero team. And even though the price is doing whatever it's doing out there, and I'm like, dude, they have cracked devs over in the Monero side. They do. But you know what they don't have? They don't have a crack PR team. I know they don't have a crack communications team. That's why I liked wow. Narrow for a bit too, because they got the meaves. But it's like, it was like a. Fork of an arrow. But anyways. So when I initially created Alpha Friends for me at the beginning, it was like, what got me was super fluid. Like, I was like, okay, this is dope. Like, I need to check this out. I need to experience it. And yeah, I think that's what got me. And then initially, like, I then got a subscriber, but I didn't. It's exactly what you said. I got a subscriber, someone subbed to me and I had no idea what the hell to say. I was like, what do I say? I was like, now I have a person that's paying. And I was just like, say hello. And. And it's funny because I actually do like, like, you know, like, I do this podcast, I do a weekly newsletter, I do meetups and stuff like that. So, like, I have stuff that I could like, definitely talk about. I. I actually have like a whole side of me. Like you, like you said, like, where I work in the legal field. So my brain is always like, legal in tech. Yeah. Like in Risk and all that. And. And it's funny, like, so there's like, other parts of me that I'm like, I could be sharing about that. And it never crossed my mind. I was always like, yeah, behind the scenes, crypto. Yeah. I literally, the first thing I gravitated towards was like, you know, behind the scenes stuff for, for like what I'm doing with like my content on like on chain or whatever, which is like, okay, you know, like, but it's also like you have to be interested in my content. Like it's a very small, narrow, you know, like you have to be interested in my content or you have to be interested in like content creators on chain and like behind the scenes stuff of like that. But like, as opposed to like, you know, what you said you were saying like you were sharing personal stuff about yourself or gardening. Like, you know, that's a very wide net of things. Sure. But I mean my channel is a hodgepodge, right. I'm sure that there are tons of people on my channel that don't give a fuck about poker. Sometimes I post poker stuff. I'm sure they don't care about the poker club if they don't play poker, but they are interested in how I'm building it, how I'm building a community, how I'm securing sponsors, what I'm doing for marketing, you know, so there's a ton of different ways to engage your audience with different types of things that you're doing behind the curtain. But you know, understand that just because you're talking about content creation this week doesn't mean you can't talk about legal stuff next week. The thing about marketing is that it relies on effective communication and if you're clear about what you're communicating that day, then it can be ever changing in that channel. The worst thing you can do is pigeonhole yourself and say, my channel is about how to make hats. And the only thing we're going to talk about is how to make hats. And that's just not the case. But I feel like this is a common, just a common pitfall all of these protocols fall into. It's like when Moxie was releasing these fan tokens, it was kind of a similar thing. Everyone's going to have a fan token, but no one knows what to do with a fan token. And then instead of supporting people on how to create a great fan token, they were just like, eh, don't worry about it. You can just set your Creator earnings to 90%. So it's like, that's not a solution, that's a bandaid covering your existing problems of people not knowing how to create a fan token. So like, it's a plea to the space. If you're going to drop a huge protocol on the base, provide some support on how to be successful at it or how to support your users on how to use it effectively. Otherwise you're leaving that on the burden of the community to figure it out. Which, fine, sure, you can break out the spreadsheets and try to exploit it in a farmer's way, or if you want them to use the product in its natural environment, you're going to have to kind of show them a pathway to success because there's not always going to be a community that will rally around to try to figure it out. And that's like with version two, you know, Erin is just working on so many visual guides. I remember being so lost with version one. Like, I didn't know optimal staking. Like, you're talking about these spreadsheets. I'm like, I don't want to do that and I'm not going to do that. So it's like, how do we effectively communicate all the different ways that you can have fun within the Alpha Friends ecosystem where it doesn't feel like work and how we can show you that the bandwidth is just not that, not that big of a commitment? Because that's the biggest. That's the biggest pushback I hear. And if we step back and look at what we have in terms of bandwidth and time, it's not unlimited. But if you're posting to warpcast and then you're also posting to your Alpha Friends channel, this is how I operate my channel. I usually have a clear idea that I'm talking about on Warpcast and they get a very brief look as to what I'm talking about. And then I take that idea and I break it down 10 different ways in my channel. If I'm talking about how to generate, how to have an effective bio created on Warpcast, I will break out three different bullet points and then on Alpha Friends, I will break out all the reasons why I have these bullet points. So it just becomes one step further than Warpcast. But the content creation was already there and it was already being put on a warpcast. So when you really think about it, it's just one level deeper, not a huge bandwidth commitment. Like I said, I broke even for the entirety of that Alpha Friends bear market. I just wanted to survive, to see to the other side. I didn't think I would be running it on the other side, but here I am. And it's like I see a world where if they were to escape velocity outside of the Warpcast ecosphere and onboard Twitter, there is such a huge opportunity, like we were talking about in the beginning, for people to connect with each other on Twitter, they're missing that link. And they tried to do it with friend tech, they've tried to do it with several different companies. But the problem is it's just such a big space and they need a way to connect people in a meaningful way through content. And I think Alpha Friends could do that. All right, my friends, this is usually where we take a quick break, but as mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this is also where we got Mick Rugged. Yeah. So before we dive into kind of like the v2 changes, I'll be summarizing this for anyone. I wanted to say thank you to my premium subscribers. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Usually we don't get rugged in the middle of it, but hey, that's life sometimes. So thanks to Seattle, Dog Mag, Vinyls, Johan, Nonlinear, Brennan, Peachy, Tree Girl, Embranson, Trevor Weekend, and Humpty. I appreciate you guys support and kind of what I'm doing here. Yeah. So let's recap. V2 changes. So the biggest change right now for V2 would be the transition from Degen to Sparks. Sparks is if you're familiar with satoshis and bitcoin, it's basically like a very small denomination of Ethereum. So it's just eth, but it's just like a fancy way of saying like a very small piece of eth. So Sparks, that's the big transition. Degen was kind of how I got started with Alpha Friends. You know, I had been familiar with Fronttech before and was in that ecosystem myself, but when I saw, you know, a base or a Degen equivalent, and really, to me, this was like my first entry point into Superfluid, the protocol itself. And that's really what actually got me to one, check out Alpha Friends, and two, like create an account and also put Degen into it. It was mostly just trying to test out this whole super fluid protocol. For those not familiar with Super Fluid, Super Fluid is basically this idea of streamable programmable money. So instead of like, you know, if. Instead of me sending like a hundred dollars and it's just one go to one person. So as soon as, you know, let's say they're going to do something for me for a month instead of me just hitting send and then they get 100, you know, at the beginning of the month, it's really like a consumption based model. It's kind of like if you think about it like with your. With your gas and electric bill, you get charged like for your actual usage and not just like a Flat rate fee. So it basically brings those, you know, that tech to, to crypto itself. So it's really interesting. And for me, Alpha Friends was the very first time I ever got to basically see this tech go live. So it was really cool for me and it was very novel. And ever since then it's been just in my brain like, how do we get more super fluid into more apps? And obviously they're doing a great job getting into more apps. But yeah, that was kind of like my first foray into Alpha friends back in April 2024. So they're basically switching from Degen, like stream degen to streamed eth or Sparks. And kind of the, when I spoke to Melissa about it, the big reason why is just like it's one extra or one less barrier to get people onboarded into Alpha Friends. So, you know, right before we got rugged, the conversation was talking about how do we get crypto Twitter onboarded into Alpha Friends. And you know, it's, it's a big leap to kind of go from like, hey, you need to download this app, Alpha Friends. But then on top of that, like, you need to get also onboarded into Degen, the Degen ecosystem versus like, hey, like if you have eth, this will work essentially. So I'll link the Twitter spaces that I listen to as well, where they go really into depth about like, how. Why they're doing this. But that kind of surmises their. Gives you a quick rundown of why. Yeah. All right, Next exchange is we ended up talking about Alpha. Alpha wasn't really a token. It was more like a point system. Basically sat like in a database, like in the private database of Alpha Friends itself, which actually kind of caught me by surprise, to be quite honest, because I, for some, for some reason I thought it was a token. I just thought like trading was locked, like we couldn't trade out of it. But regardless, yeah, it basically Alpha is now switching to AF token, so it will be a proper token. I know that right now that they're kind of locking down like being able to trade it and kind of like what you would expect from an actual token. One thing that I didn't notice from Superfluid as a whole, it's like they've been kind of teasing like a new mechanism of when it comes to like new tokens and when they drop again, same issue that we have, like really with a lot of tokens is that people will farm it or, you know, they get a certain allocation. Usually when they get the, when they get their allocation and it starts pumping even a little bit or immediately, like basically whoever gets the allocation first, whether they're awake or whatever, usually they sell it and then the price kind of just drops and then it tanks and then you essentially lost momentum and volume and liquidity and all that is all pretty critical. Like when it comes to a new token. Speaking from someone that launched their own community token as well. Go check out Aria. Yeah, so essentially, yeah, Alpha Friends, or Alpha is now switching to an actual token. It's going to be a one for one that will be an instantaneous swap or like conversion to it. So, you know, if you got a thousand alpha, it's going to become 1000 AF immediately and then your rewards going forward will be streamable. So similar to Degen, where like, you know, you'll do like a month of activity or whatever. And let's say they're doing like some kind of promotion where like they want to say, like, you know, you're going to get triple the amount of points. If you can sign up certain people, then those rewards themselves will be streamable. Super superfluid has been talking about that themselves is like, hey, like, what if we didn't mean tokens? Like, let's say I want to. Which I did do this. Like, let's say I wanted to give 10, 10, 15, 20 million area to every hypersub subscriber and basically send it and instantaneously everyone got it who was subscribed to me. But nothing was stopping any of my subscribers from essentially just selling that token immediately. What would have been nice and what I have seen before from Space, which is the nounspace team with their token, is you can actually create a stream where you could say like, hey, you're gonna get a million tokens of X or space or whatever it is that you want to talk about AF on this case, but it's gonna be streamed through you to you like throughout the next 60 days. So essentially every day that goes by or every second that goes by, a certain amount is being unlocked. So. So that kind of controls the faucet aspect of it. So super cool stuff. Nice to see that Alpha or AF now is actually going to become a token. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of speculation. For those that weren't in alpha friends in V1, there was people that had Alpha friend channels on how to farm and they created spreadsheets because it became like a math game essentially. And look, I have no issues with farmers. I know Farcaster as a whole, like farmers or people think of Farmers just like negatively for some reason, you know, Like, I think it is kind of bad, but at a certain stage, like, I don't blame people, you know, like, even for myself, like, I'm like a shithead farmer, which I kind of identify as. Like, you know, I'm not gonna really go 2021 levels of grinding on a discord to get a white list for a PFP project. Shout out to 2021 projects. I don't think I'll be doing that ever again. Just seems like too much work, to be quite honest. And my time's a little bit more valuable than that. But, you know, like, usually like naturally using an ecosystem and like all that. Like, hey, like, I'm all for that, you know, like, if you can create a on chain flywheel to get like the reaction that you need, like, you know, I'm. I'll do that essentially. So really cool stuff that Alpha Friends is switching, which for some reason, I don't know why I thought it was the token, but now it is going to be a token. So, yeah, definitely keep your eyes peeled on that. And yeah, again, I'll, I'll link all the documentation. They've done a really good job with kind of documenting the whole process and explaining it. I think having a token, I know people are like, not another token, like another this, you know, like Frontec did this and it might have hurt them a little bit. But yeah, I think like tokens really unlock a certain level of like engagement a lot of that cold start issue. Like, how do you get people to come participate in your ecosystem or your community? Like, I think tokens really help with that. So, you know, I'm not opposed to it. All right, next change. Another happened is so in the previous, like V1 of Alpha Friends, you essentially, like, you can stake in channels that you weren't subscribed to, which was a little weird. And I think that's what introduced a little bit of like the spreadsheet. Spreadsheet people. And I think these will probably be the people that will be the most angry to all these changes is that essentially like, if you're gonna farm or try and get as much Alpha or AF token as you can, you need to be subscribed to the person. So what ended up happening is you would have someone like Wake, for example. So wake. I was, I was pretty, I was subscribed pretty early to Wake's channel on Alpha Friends. Actually, I think it was like the first one I subscribed to. But essentially what ends up happening is I am Paying Wake a degen stream or in this case it would be sparks. You know, I get to check out his conversation. Looks really cool. I'm okay paying the monthly fee or whatever. And finally when I get some alpha or AF in this case, you know, I'm like, hey, I've been enjoying the conversation. I'm bullish on wake. So I stake my wake or my AF token on wake. And that lets me basically get some of the, some of the revenue or upside on his channel. His or her channel. I believe it's his. But so that was really cool. I think the issue that happened in B1 was that, you know, there was like, don't quote me on this and don't get mad wake, but let's just say there was 100 people just for simplicity's sake. And so there's a hundred of us actually subscribing and paying to wake. But then there was like, I don't Even know, like 500 people that were staking on to Wake. So they were kind of diluting the, the reward share because stakers were the ones like essentially you had to stake to like get some of the revenue. So they were diluting it for the rest of us, which felt really fucked up, to be quite honest. So I'm glad that this is kind of being addressed in B2. So like, if you want to stake in someone, you have to be subscribed to them. So I kind of think of it as like, I guess Melissa kind of describes this correctly, which is like the creator tax. Like, hey, you gotta pay a tax fee to basically to be able to partake. So. So I think Melissa did a great job of kind of describing it that way. And personally, I don't think many people will have any issue with this. I think the people that will, it's just not the behavior that the team wants to see anyway. So I'm sure they'll be loud and they'll get mad and whatever. But hey, it's a very sensible decision to me, so I have no issues with it. Next change? Yeah, some of the next changes are there was a question regarding kind of like the fee split. So I think Alpha Friends, the fee that they take from creators is pretty high. So I think it was like 70% or something. Pretty high, yeah. Is someone basically was asking like, will this change? I didn't get a chance to ask Melissa this. I think the explanation that I heard from from the team on the Twitter spaces was kind of like, because we're doing revenue sharing anyways, so it's not like they are taking 70% and they're keeping the full 70. It's more like of the 70 that's being taken, some is also going back to the. To the people that are staking. So the team basically wants to keep that. I also did have a chance to kind of ask a couple other questions. So, like, one of the issues regarding, like, you know, the transition to Degen to Sparks now was like, you know, the price of Degen really shot up. And I had a similar issue with Dracula themselves, where I was pretty early on the Dracula app, and I created a creator token. And essentially, because the price of Degen shot up, like, my token price was, like, really expensive. And as the price of Degen keeps going up, we're gonna have that same issue. So the issue that I kind of call out is, like, with Sparks, you know, like, right now, Sparks kind of works at, like, you know, five, seven dollars at the low end, but that's also with the price of ETH being 4,000. But if the price of ETH goes up to 10,000 now, it's like the lowest here you could charge is like, 15 bucks or whatever. I think the takeaway that I had from that was kind of like, you know, these V2 changes allow more customization and more. Yeah, essentially they can, like, they're more scalable, and they've been built with those ideas in mind. So, you know, I think everything will be okay if that's. If that's kind of what's being told. I do worry a little bit about the price, you know, of ETH just going up a lot, and then, you know, it changes all that. But I'm sure we'll, you know, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. The other thing that I kind of brought up was, like, discoverability. So. And the team's already kind of taking steps to address this. So I know Melissa and kind of the people in charge of the socials right now, which I believe is her, but essentially, you know, they're already doing a good job of highlighting channels that exist right now. So I know Alpha frontec started doing that as well, is like, hey, here's a community or channel that's, like, doing really well. Like, make sure to check it out. I think discoverability is just a really big issue overall with a lot of these tools. So, like, Barcaster has his issues like, how do we find people? How do we find communities that we want to join? I would say Alpha Friends. No different. So one of the questions I asked Melissa was kind of like, hey, do we have more avenues to customize our channels? So. So if you ever got to Alpha Friends, if not, definitely go check it out. Your choices for, like your channel specifically. You know, it's essentially like your profile picture, a short description, the price, and that's it. Like, there's not much, you know, so at least like with the channel on Parcaster, I can do a hyperlink or a longer text wall, or I could do a frame that I could pin that shows more information or I have a banner now. So, like, you know, like, you can really start making it, like, more customizable to you and like, entice people like what it is that you're going to talk about. So I know that that's something they're going to work on. Discoverability as a whole too, is like, hey, how do we bring more content creators or people just succumb to Alpha Friends? Yeah. So sorry, you know, a little bit weird ending to this episode, but I hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure to go check out Melissa, who's a really cool person. And thanks, JC for kind of hooking us up. Thanks to Melissa as well for jumping on and doing a chat on Alpha Friends, but also herself. Yeah. So this week's cast off question. Let's see. I'm gonna say, what do you think? Do you think I should build an Alpha Friends channel? I had 1 in V1. Does anyone see kind of any benefit to having a V2 version of this? You know, a lot of the stuff. That I'm doing right now is, like, on Telegram, like, writing my thoughts. I'm trying to be better about writing my thoughts, like publicly on chain, like via Forecaster or Twitter. But what do you think? Should I create a Alpha Friends channel or what kind of Alpha Friends channel would you like to see? Yeah. Thanks again. See you guys next episode. See ya.