Our pipeline continues to strengthen as brands shift their focus toward using blockchain technology for memberships, subscriptions, rewards, and loyalty.NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik prepares to enter Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft for a fit check evaluation at the company's Houston Product Support Center in this undated image. What sentiment do you see among traditional brands? Are they still interested in getting into Web3 and NFTs, or did their interest decrease with the bear market? Personally, I wanted to shift from using the technology to shaping the future of the industry and ecosystem. For most of my career, I have utilized emerging technologies to advance brands. The switch was quite easy: I believe Web3 is the complete reinvention of the internet, whether through blockchain technologies, GPT, and AR/VR/metaversal experiences-all combined, all complementing one another. Why did you decide to leave the media industry to lead an enterprise division for a crypto infrastructure company? Over the coming months and years, I think art and collectibles will exist, but the bigger opportunity for the technology is with memberships, subscriptions, loyalty and rewards for consumers and as a validator and efficiency play for businesses as it removes inefficiencies and ensures immutable truth. Ones that are literally only built on the intent to trade and try and profit. The communities most exposed in these types of environments are “greed-based” communities. More important, regardless of trading volume on OpenSea, we continued to see engagement in the community increase. We always stressed that we were a values-based community and that values create value over time. TIMEPieces was not built around prices or trading, and we said that from the very beginning. So where do you think this industry is headed? The trading volume of OpenSea dropped 99%. NFT trading and prices have dropped a lot. The notion of “warm crypto”-using the technology for good-is really important, in my opinion. Within 48 hours we raised nearly $400K, which went to humanitarian aid in Ukraine. So we approached 61 TIMEPieces artists on a Friday evening and by Sunday got 1:1 pieces from each of them to launch an initiative titled Artists for Peace. Given that TIMEPieces was a values-based community, we believed we should do something, too. Then you saw RELI8F raise a million dollars in 30 seconds. You saw it with UkraineDAO where she secured close to $10 million to support people in need. Of course! I have tremendous admiration for Nadya from Pussy Riot and think she is the best example of someone who uses the technology for good. That is the equivalent of a digital subscription! For the Web3 community, the subscription was secondary to the access and exclusivity of being part of the community. Over 15,000 wallets hold over 30,000 TIMEPieces, and nearly 10,000 of those wallets connected to to remove its paywall. You have to remember: Time reaches 100 million consumers a month, and we have millions of subscribers. This was more of a validator of the space than anything else. How many of your subscribers pay for the subscription in crypto? Ironically, I did not have to seek any approval for funding because we had done so much business on SuperRare that when they converted to a DAO, we converted our $RARE to $ETH and that ultimately funded the launch of TIMEPieces. They showed me the power of blockchain technology. This is how TIMEPieces came about: from conversations with people like ThankYouX, Dave Krugman, and JN Silva. I spent the following months in Clubhouse just listening and learning. Within a month, we’d accepted 34 different cryptocurrencies for digital subscriptions of Time. It was me, our legal team, and our creative director, and we had a lot of success with that. How did TIMEPieces get started? Did you make the decision to take Time into NFTs? Did you have to get approval from the board of directors? As somebody who loves art, I do collect a lot, especially photography NFTs. Therefore this was a perfect space for me. Do you like collecting traditional art as well? In September 2021, we launched TIMEPieces. In March 2021, we brought Time into Web3 with 1:1 collectibles. Thus, when I came across NFT technologies, it made sense that if my two identities were equal, if I wanted to own things in the physical world, I might also want to own things in the digital world. I was alone, isolated, and realized for the first time that my digital identity was just as valuable as my physical identity. However, it was not until 2020 that I came across NFT technologies. This has been a space I have been familiar with for years and that I personally enjoy. My career started at Wired, which covered technology and specifically the emergence of cryptocurrencies.
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