AMA with LOFI | Transcript

Q: You say that LOFI-DEFI is a cryptocurrency focused on supporting artists, musicians, and artisans of all stripes by creating an asset and platform. How do you plan to support creative people, how exactly your products are going to help them and why they should choose you beneath many other similar projects?

David: We’re approaching this from multiple perspectives: artist, musician, and investor. Since we’re in a decentralized space it’s important for us to be able to provide equal access for anyone with as little censorship as possible. Currently, we are doing as much as possible for creators to be able to mint their work and have a ready-to-go audience of token holders on the platform in their localized community. Investors can search for new creators with social metrics like followers, subscribers, total tipped, and total sales to support. They’ll be able to tip creators for input into their process or just recognition, subscribe for exclusive access to new work and special features or buy and sell NFTs on our marketplace with LOFI. These are just some of the features we’re looking to add.

Branden: There is a massive void in the Musical direction of online streaming and sales. Most of the catalysts that propel new artists forward on current and popular platforms are heavily vetted and controlled by a 3rd party agency or promotion company. Aside from the fee of listing their stream and paying dividends to the multi-layered system in place to hype them up. LoFi-DeFi aims to step in and help the SOURCE of the content. We plan to provide artists and creators with a decentralized platform to create, mint, distribute, market, promote, and sell all in one platform not to mention being able to fully interact with their own meta communities live. We’ll be featuring artists and having Live Events in different venues around the world. Our goal is to give all the revenue made by a piece of art go to the artists and the artists alone.

Q: Have you already managed to enlist the support of influencers/bloggers/famous artists or other people in this area and how do you plan to promote your product?”

Larienne: For this part, it is actually a very complex and difficult process as the artistic environment is very specific and getting meaningful people who can elevate the platform and add value takes time. Thankfully, I joined the NFT space in March, and I was able to establish connections with many artists. If you gain their trust and build a bond, you will be able to get their interest. Most of the emails with invitations to various platforms land in the trash bin — I know it based on my own experience — there are so many of them like you mentioned. Due to various connections, I have built myself as an artist, which will come in handy to invite people and curate them properly. Secondly, we also prepared an NFT collection called Lofi Kitties, which helps us make a stand in the NFT world. Purchasing a cat for a price of 0.045 ETH will give you exclusive benefits.

Branden: If I could chime in a little on that one too! From my work as a Talent scout and entertainment coordinator, I’ve been able to meet some absolutely incredible people. I’ve become close friends with a lot of different bands and artists from around the world that have massive followings and are constantly creating. Every single artist that I’ve approached about LoFi has been begging me to release a quick beta, so they can start using it. These early Brand Ambassadors will all have the same passion for this movement as we do, and we’re tightly vetting the first set of brand ambassadors to match that paradigm. Without doing any big namedrops to add hollow hype, I can tell you that the content that will be produced by the LoFi Artists will blow your mind.

Q: What about your platform? What features and purpose it going to have, and how do you plan to achieve something that you mentioned in your whitepaper “supporting artists, musicians, and artisans of all stripes by creating an asset and platform that invests in their future and help build their brand while providing investors with an investment vehicle that’s set up to deliver exponential returns for years to come?

Larienne: So for my part, I care for building meaningful community because with a platform you have to ask yourself who will come to buy stuff? Why? You want to make sure you bring quality first.

David: Oh, well enough said then! Let me just say that the NFT collection is such an important step to transition creators and investors from the ETH to BSC space. We really need to establish credibility first and with Larienne’s support, we’ll be able to achieve that.

Larienne: Exactly. The successful collection opens many doors on the ETH chain, brings credibility and respect.

David: For the platform, its main function will be an NFT marketplace where you can use LOFI to buy and sell NFT’s. What will separate us from all the other platforms out there is that our focus is on the artists behind the art and the end-users of the platform. Too often when I research other NFT marketplaces or social platforms, the entire focus is on the NFT’s and not enough on the artists producing them. We want to make a consolidated space where creators are minting and marketing to users that are already on the same platform looking for utility for their token. We think holders are much more likely to use their tokens to support people instead of buying mundane things. Nobody wants to use their crypto to buy a sandwich, that’s what cash is for. We think this is an easy use case to implement, artists and musicians are especially underserved as far as tools to brand and build community go. The places that allow them to effectively do that have no monetization tools for their creative works right now, it’s pretty much just ad revenue. With the help of these experienced and reputable professionals plus the input of token holders through voting and direct input, we’ll be able to bring together all perspectives to deliver a platform that should be something special.

Q: Your app is going to be a wallet and a marketplace for creators, did I get this right? So is it going to be an NFT marketplace/content for subscription/platform for freelancers, or how exactly is it gonna work for creators? Are you going to choose who is going to be great on your platform, or anyone can become one?

David: Our app will be a basic version of our platform where users can browse different creators via social metrics in order to find new, undiscovered, or well-known talent in the space to be able to support them via patronage or NFT sales in LOFI. We want to make it as accessible as possible, we’re looking for ways to be able to spotlight creators randomly despite their social metrics so that anybody has a chance to get noticed, and we’ll provide tools to creators to be able to build their community and brand as well as push their work out to all the other various socials to make our platform as user-friendly as possible. We’re definitely going to bring some pretty big names onto our platform as far as artists and musicians, but anybody will be able to use the app and platform once the final version is released.

We’re not trying to just limit it to artists and musicians either, we’ll welcome any content creator! We definitely see an underserved market in artists and musicians though as we feel that the current solutions are incomplete and can be implemented better, fairer, or more efficiently.

Q: How critical do you consider the interoperability between the ecosystems to be to the future of blockchain tech, and How are you paving the way to that future?

Ryan: To that point, I believe it is insanely important for each network to be able to be cross-compatible, but as of right now this doesn’t exist in a way that is very feasible. There are, however, solutions that are being created by very reputable teams. In a perfect world, a contract would be able to interact with users on any network they so choose to use. Right now, that is not Lofi-Defi’s mission. And we are not creating any technology that would allow for cross-chain compatibility.

Larienne: There’s no technical way to be compatible, but with our token being on BSC and our collectibles on ETH we are able to reach out and mix communities for mutual benefit.

Bringing people from one side to another! Even now, here, I try to bring people who love tokens into the NFT adventure and tell them about the benefits that can come from that.

Q: In your roadmap, you plan to collaborate with top Influencers. How do you select which Influencer to collaborate with? What exactly do you look for in those Influencers, what virtues do you focus on? Have some of those Influencers been selected already?

Branden: An Influencer will be heavily focused on community engagement. That is ideal for LoFi-DeFi. They will need to have a passion for Digital Art and Music Production and have a following that mirrors that. There are so many influencers these days who are just paid inanimate totems that do nothing except copy and paste a random shill message for $100k. What a life! But with LoFi, we’re scouting the Artists that want to be part of the LoFi revolution with the number one goal in mind at all times: “LoFi is made BY artists FOR artists.” As far as Brand Ambassadors, that vetting process is a little different. I have a few lined up already but without getting into names at his stage I would like to go into what we look for. We need content that has been produced and well received, and a supportive fanbase that will follow the Artist to the platform. After all, this movement is also for investors to profit from, not solely the Artists. We will be implementing a variety of different functions that will allow investors and users to profit from the platform’s success, along with talented artists. Currently, again without dropping names, we are working with onboarding a band from Scotland that has a massive following, 3 Albums released with Sony, and are currently touring (that’s all you get for now).

Q: What types of users are there in the market that you are focusing on? What’s the competitive advantage of Lofi ‘s Product to its users?

David: It’s important to us to be able to provide creators all the tools they need to be able to have all the tools they need to sell their work and build their community, so it’s good that we have the input of people like Larienne and Branden to be able to know what pitfalls other platforms suffer from and be able to design it in a way that’s the most welcoming and easy to use for creators as possible. At the end of the day though, the vast majority of the users of the platform will be investors or people seeking entertainment. To that end, we want to provide as many tools as possible for people to be able to search through what we expect to be a vast array of creators and content to choose from. I know that’s one of the issues we suffer from right now is content overload, it’s tough to be able to know where to begin. I’m big on analytics, so I’m looking to introduce them in as many ways as possible so that we can all benefit from community input.

Currently, there’s a lot of focus on the art and not enough on the artist, that’s the gap we’re looking to fill.

Q: Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and maintain the project/company. What is the way to generate profit/revenue from a token? What is the income model? plan for the future?

Larienne: The plan contains a few aspects, one of which is collectibles! They are deployed on the ETH chain. This will give the company big stability. On top of that, we are preparing a play-to-earn game.

David: We actually have a few different revenue streams; the token, the NFT collection, and merchandising. The token has a 1% tax in the smart contract, so any time tokens are transferred 1% of that goes towards development, operations, and marketing which should fund us as we scale. The NFT collection will provide a separate source of revenue that doesn’t depend on token sales, and we’re developing a play-to-earn game that should help increase the demand for LOFI tokens. Merchandising is along the same line where it provides an extra source of revenue for development, operating, and marketing expenses outside the token.