Ep 129: K-pop, Fandom & Blockchain voting with GD Kim

[00:01] Welcome to Boys Club Interviews. This is a show where we bring on people much smarter than us to talk about the new internet. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No. No. Just Boys Club. [00:19] Hey Natasha, so a question we get asked a lot is, what do you look for in a crypto platform? So let's talk about it. Well, Dina, I look for a secure, no fuss platform that I can dive into right away. That's why I love today's sponsor, Kraken. If you're waiting for the right time to get into crypto, Kraken makes it super easy and intuitive to get started. Plus, if you get stuck, they have an award-winning client support team that's available 24-7, along with a bunch of educational guides, articles, and videos to help you along the way. If you're ready to check out the simple, secure way to trade crypto, [00:49] Hi. [01:11] Hey. [01:12] We're in Seoul. [01:14] We're in Seoul talking about K-pop. [01:16] talking about k-pop some really fun stuff we have here today we are in seoul for biddle asia and eath seoul we are doing an event with near tonight we're doing some karaoke and korean barbecue so we're gonna be k-pop stars ourselves tonight what's gonna be your karaoke sandina i like to do a thousand miles by vanessa carlton

[01:42] nice but i don't know if they're gonna have a year i've heard that the selection is a little bit more limited [01:48] I know that you do a Santa baby. I do a sensual Santa baby. It's a season agnostic Santa baby. But I also do love a... [02:01] Shallow [02:03] But you need a partner. Big song. Big notes in that song. Big voice. It's a great opportunity to go flat publicly. Nice. And so it gets the crowd going, though. And so we'll see. We'll see where I end up tonight. I've made many mistakes before. I've put people in compromising positions in karaoke many times where I have told them definitely, definitely do that Pussycat Dolls song. Definitely do it. And then they get up there and they start and. [02:32] singing and realizing that 75% of it is a monologue and it's so bad I have done this to my sister absolutely destroyed her accidentally one time at karaoke and she was at all we were on a cruise we were on a cruise and I was like that's a great song and she went up there and half of it's talking like half of it is like that's tough to deliver unless you know it right right right and you're like missing the words yeah I'm not gonna take your advice but I um I saw a take on Twitter once that was like karaoke songs should be [03:01] 90 seconds long. [03:03] which I totally agree with. I couldn't agree more. I also think songs should just be 90 seconds. My TikTok addled brain doesn't need the three to five minute song anymore. Give me 90 seconds. I'm good to go. Okay. Back to our interview here. We had on GD Kim. So GD works for what's essentially

[03:27] like a venture studio or and they he calls it an incubation [03:31] program but it's essentially a venture studio that is out of hashed which is the biggest venture firm in korea from what i understand and um [03:43] His company is called Unopened and they do venture stuff, venture studio stuff, and with a focus on entertainment, with a focus on consumer and within that a focus on the entertainment industry. So they do a lot of gaming stuff and they do a lot of K-pop stuff as well. So we are focusing on the K-pop conversation today. And we met GD by happenstance, happened to be sitting across from him while we were eating some blue crab in Seoul. [04:13] he started talking about what he was working on and [04:16] It's crazy. It's it's crazy. It's web three meets kpop fandom and feels like a honestly [04:25] a perfect expression of the technology and what it's capable of. And, [04:30] And with... [04:32] existing consumer tapping into existing consumer behaviors. [04:36] that exist in Korea around how they engage with, [04:40] their K-pop idols. And so GD will get into it, but it was really fascinating to hear. I don't know that it [04:49] translates to Western artists, but it certainly is fascinating for here. Totally. I just want to give some stats. One of the K-pop bands that they are doing this type of on-chain fandom voting with is a...

[05:04] group called triple s they have a song that went viral and that ended up in our discord a few months ago called girl capitalism which i can get behind their project where essentially fans can they're purchasing erc 720 and they don't know it and they have over a hundred thousand holders those holders have engaged many times and there's over 1.5 million votes that have happened by these [05:34] not talking about an insignificant number we're not talking about insignificant engagement with these fans it's pretty interesting it's crazy they're also just like so cute and just exactly [05:47] adorable and so fun and there is total minted triple s cards or uh engagement is almost six million so we're talking about significant numbers here and there's a thing that's happening in korea that we should all look at and understand and as gd was talking one of the things that came up for me was that packing mccormick quote that we used it brand new like we should be building web3 products that [06:13] help people do what they already love to do better. And this is such a perfect example of that. So give it a listen. I hope you like it. [06:22] And you'll be hearing us back stateside next week. [06:26] It's time for a more open, inclusive, and transparent financial system. A system that serves nearly everyone, everywhere, all the time. That's why we love today's sponsor, Kraken. Kraken is a crypto platform that provides a super simple on-ramp to the world of crypto with a 24-7 support team. Crypto transcends physical and imaginary borders. No matter where you are, you can send funds easily and quickly to almost any part of the world. Plus, forget about waiting times and waiting lines. You can send, receive, and trade crypto anywhere near instantly.

[06:56] So on today's podcast, we have GD Kim, who is currently the COO of Unopened. [07:26] builder of Hashed. Unopened supports Web3, K-pop, and gaming projects as well. [07:33] Gigi, welcome to Boys Club. Thank you. Thank you for having me today. And looking forward to have fun with you, with amazing ladies. [07:42] We're super excited to talk with you. We had dinner last night and we talked about a lot of the things we're going to talk about here today. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation. [07:50] So I think a great place to start would be, could you just tell us a little bit about your work at Unopened, what you guys are working on, what you're prioritizing? [07:57] Yeah, so as introduced, we are a company builder of Hashed. Hashed is one of the most renowned cryptocurrencies in Asia and definitely a dominant player in the Korean crypto scene. In 2021, [08:11] During the last cycle, the founders of Hash, they came up with an idea of this company builder, which is now unopened. It's mainly our retail side projects. [08:21] You mean retail, you mean like consumer facing projects? Yes, correct. Especially the content and the entertainment side.

[08:27] Great. I'm excited to dig into K-pop. I must admit, I'm not like a mega fan. I dabble in the way that I'm probably [08:36] many Americans do, which is the occasional, you know, Blackpink. I don't know, Natasha, what your K-pop experience is. It's light. It's light. I know that K-pop is huge. I know that when you're looking at the music industry and who has the largest export of global music, it's like the US and South Korea. And it's crazy how much this industry is growing year over year [09:06] I had read somewhere. [09:08] For people who have no context for K-pop, it would be great if you could kind of give us the [09:12] one-on-one sort of your context in what it is, how much of a phenomenon it is here, just to get some setting and grounding for folks. [09:23] - [09:24] Yeah, K-pop has been phenomenal in the music industry for the recent several years, especially starting from BTS. [09:31] and then we now have Blackpink as well. So kind of like a synergy in terms of the Korean culture. [09:37] And K-pop is beloved by especially in the teenager. It's mainly because of a abundant content that comes from the music. [09:47] So the success of BTS, of course, [09:50] All of them are handsome, and all of them sing and perform really amazingly. But when you go to the YouTube channel of BTS, you will be able to see a huge amount of additional content that fans can actually enjoy.

[10:05] besides music. That's how BTS has been interacting with their fandom, which is called ARMY. A lot of people in the music industry is pointing out the importance [10:17] of fan engagement. [10:19] and then fandom management. And K-pop was ahead on that. And definitely that this is also connected to Mod House, the K-pop project that we've been incubating as well. [10:29] So can you tell us a little bit about Mod House and the work that you're doing to bring [10:35] fandom and K-pop into [10:37] the world of Web3? Yeah, so Mothouse was founded about two years ago now. The current CEO, Jaden Jung. [10:44] one of the legendary producers in K-pop. [10:47] And he had an idea of this fan participatory system. He thought that K-pop fandom should be more engaging into an artist creation or artist operation side. And then we had similar thoughts on that. [11:00] So we wanted to use blockchain for transparent voting system. [11:04] So that's how we founded the company. And Triple S, that's the first idol group that we have. And now Triple S has 24 members. [11:13] [redacted address] it operates, it's a subunit system. [11:19] So the subunit system is that there will be four to six members designated to specific subunits. And each subunit has different concepts, different styles, different songs. And users will be deciding which members will be assigned to which subunit through voting.

[11:39] And a subunit is just like a subgroup? A little mini band? Correct. Yeah, correct. So already like acid angeliformacea, crystallized, lowvolution, evolution, these are the names of the subgroups. [11:50] I want to set some context for folks. Triple S is not some small thing. There have, I think I saw 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube, a couple viral hits, girl capitalism. [12:02] was circulated in the Boys Club Discord at one point. They have reach, for sure. You guys have kickstarted this thing, and it's been successful on many fronts. And... [12:13] A big part of that has been [12:15] the web three or the blockchain element which like you says bring brings this transparency to voting in our conversation last night you were talking about how that crypto part of it the web three part of it is abstracted away [12:26] and that a majority of the fans of Triple S don't know that they're [12:31] interacting with the ERC721 token, but that's kind of the engine behind it. Can you speak a little bit more around like [12:36] Sure. What that [12:38] is sort of tactically and also some of the decision making around why you wanted to abstract it and how you did abstract it. That'd be great. We definitely thought that any blockchain component, technical blockchain components shouldn't be exposed and all of them should be abstracted. [12:51] And it shouldn't be a hurdle for user experience. That's not just for the mod house, but also for the entire unopened incubated project. Fans don't have to care about anything about the wall itself. And voting, it's a very familiar event for K-pop fans. They've been participating in different types of voting auditions and so on. So it's pretty much straightforward. You have one token and it's a one voting. But we don't just tell them it's a token.

[13:18] But everything is happening on blockchain. Can you talk a little bit about the ways in which voting is already part of the K-pop engagement? I think there's a lot of people in [13:30] the West who [13:31] have thought about fandom and fan engagement and doing all these sorts of new ways to, for artists and musicians to have a deeper relationship with their fans. [13:40] But it's a new behavior. And so adding crypto on top of a new behavior of fan engagement, I've seen it be really hard for American Western companies to try to pull off. But you guys have had a ton of success. There's I think you showed us last night. How many wallets currently hold tokens? We saw the Dune dashboard. So it's it's real. We'll link in show notes. [14:10] participate and to be able to vote and so that behavior is already very common. Could you talk a little bit about how prior even to what you guys are doing how K-pop stars have had relationships with their fans and what that engagement has looked like previously? So most of those western audition programs are the results are actually decided by the producers correct but here in [14:40] - Yes. [14:41] text message and then online. And there was an incident. [14:45] There was a program called- And when they vote, they have to pay to vote. [14:48] Yes, it's a paid vote. Like there's a monetary component. Okay. Correct, correct. It's a paid vote. And there was an incident at that show called Produce 101. And the producer of the show actually manipulated the vote result. And he went to jail. I think it was like three, around three years ago. People take it really seriously. This is not a joke.

[15:06] It was huge because it's not a free vote. I mean, they've been paying. It was a pay service, right? Do you know what they were voting on? On their artists. So on the artists they support. [15:15] Who would win the show? Yes, correct. Okay, and so he was tipping the scales in one way or another, and whatever the result was wasn't a reflection of what the paid votes were. [15:25] Yes, correct. So he was bribed, and then he kind of changed the result. He wanted a specific member to be the winner. [15:33] So it was a long story, but it was quite huge in Korea. So people started to raise issues on this type of voting. [15:43] additional programs and [15:45] That's when Mothouse came up with this idea. [15:48] of transparent blockchain voting system. Blockchain fixes that. [15:52] And so you guys have two groups right now, Triple S, [15:57] And then what's your other group? [15:59] Artemis. Is that a girl group as well? It's a girl group. It's formed with the former member of Luna. Okay, cool. That's awesome. What you showed us last night was so interesting. Essentially, fans can buy these face cards that are almost like digital baseball cards of the different K-pop stars. Crypto is totally abstracted away, but then they get an ERC 720 in exchange for that face card and then [16:22] Essentially what happens is that allows them to vote on different topics. The main one being what are the subgroups of the 24 [16:30] different K-pop stars, what are the new subgroups, what are their songs, like how is it going to manifest itself in these different groups?

[16:36] And that voting is all happening on chain. [16:40] And I am curious, what are some of the most surprising and like emergent behaviors that you've seen from this sort of new world? [16:49] it's not new for you guys, but for us, it's a new way of seeing that level of engagement with fandom and also the way that K-pop [16:57] shows up in the world from what I've seen is that it's much more, there's like a science to it. And there's very much like a way to produce these types of [17:06] stars and that's very culturally relevant here and that's a lot of what you guys are doing. So I'm curious as you guys have been doing this work and working and seeing fans engage in this way, has there been surprising things that you've seen? What are things that are maybe different from how the West shows up in pop stars? What has that looked like for you all? So many cases that really surprised me. When you compare to a Western cases, I would say how people are immersed with these artists. [17:32] So they say they breathe [17:34] together with their artists. They are living in the same life, like same time, and they feel that they are growing together with their artists, which means they spend their money, they vote for their artists, and they pick the best songs they think for the artists. [17:51] and one of the voting was about the debut timing. So usually there are two subunits come together for the voting part. And then among those voting events, one was deciding the timing. So which subunit [18:06] should go

[18:07] to the stage first. [18:09] And there was kind of like a two-month gap between two. And we actually didn't think seriously about that. [18:17] But the discussion that actually went through on the fan committee was that should we put [18:24] this artist first or later. [18:28] It's mainly because one of the members was on the stage, was on live right before the previous subunit. So she didn't have enough time to take a rest. So that's why the fandoms decided to put one group, putting behind in terms of the schedule. [18:45] They were caring for her. [18:47] Yes, it's a real-time social game, I would say. [18:51] Yeah. With the real human. [18:52] And then they're putting their emotions, they're putting all efforts, they're putting their money. [18:59] Okay, so let me fit you on an idea that I have. [19:01] hearing you talk about all this. So the sort of world that you've constructed with Triple S and with Artemis is this basically people are [19:10] buying in and receiving a token and that token unlocks one vote. [19:15] to sort of control the destiny of these groups in various forms. [19:18] whether it's the subgroups or [19:20] stage time or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. [19:22] Um... [19:24] I think that [19:26] first of all is [19:27] so exciting to see and so [19:29] honestly surprising for us because we in the West like we it's like Natasha saying it's a new behavior, but it's actually it's an existing behavior for you guys and to see it being augmented by the technology.

[19:43] in such an elegant way is so thrilling, honestly, to see come to life, especially at the scale that you guys are doing at 100,000 Wallet. I saw the Dune dashboard. Like it's [19:52] legit, there's a lot of activity, people are buzzing. What if buying the face card [19:57] then got you into this DAO or whatever it is. This buys you into the community, token gates the community. [20:03] and then you're able to vote on [20:06] the destinies of these groups, but you're also the [20:09] do [20:10] the DAO owns the IP of the group as well. [20:13] I think you were kind of talking around that a little bit last night. Is that on the roadmap or is that just too radical for the K-pop industry to face? [20:21] So it's, I believe it's on one of the milestones in terms of in the longer term. But K-pop industry, it's one of a part of the traditional industry. I mean, traditional that... [20:33] that Web3 people define in the way of Web3 people define. But so it'll take some time, but the team is actually trying similar stuff, not for the SSS IP itself, but for the derivative content that fans actually create. Yeah, cool. Oh, cool. [20:52] Like fan fiction or fan... [20:54] Correct, correct, correct. Derived content is [20:57] - Correct. - Shared in ownership. - It just feels like there could be, I mean, [21:01] K-pop fandom is... [21:02] next level, but it feels like it could be even next level if there's like true skin in the game around people [21:09] like owning a piece of what they're speaking into with their vote.

[21:14] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. [21:15] And then you layer AI on it. We have AI idols. We're in the future here in Seoul. We're living in 2050. [21:25] Yeah. Okay. One other thing that I wanted to leave some space for that you had discussed last night was... [21:31] how much [21:33] How smart, Kapok. [21:34] K-pop fans are, [21:36] how engaged they are, [21:38] And you were sharing that many of them [21:40] actually are totally new to Web3. [21:44] but they have found their way to polyscan [21:49] and have found the blockchain transactions like [21:52] They're making sure that their votes are legitimate, that they are sort of rallying behind the decisions that they want to make and campaigning based on what they're seeing on these dashboards. [22:02] And... [22:02] That is so crazy. It's so amazing to see that type of behavior. And so I'd love for you to sort of just talk about what you've been seeing on that end, like the engagement level and sort of how smart and engaged these fans are to the work that you all are doing with these stars. [22:18] So, [22:20] As you could expect, at first we didn't want to expose the blockchain components directly. So we didn't tell them it's a blockchain related project, we just told them it's a transparent voting. [22:35] Among 100k photo card owners, we've done some survey and 95% of them first time purchasing FTs and then among them, 90% of them

[22:49] they don't even know they're purchasing NFTs. So that was the experience. That's like a persona of the community. But the thing is that [23:00] There are always some nerdy people. [23:02] So and when you go to kind of like a Korean version of reddit There's a guy or or a lady who wrote like a really really long long like a [23:14] I would say like 20... [23:16] page-long paper explaining about the entire structure of this triple s plus voting plus cosmo which is the our native app system and he explained about the contract address he explained about the polygon scan he explained about txid blah blah blah so f so [23:40] For the first of all, we did not actually recover the result on blockchain. [23:48] fans were able to track the voting status [23:52] in real time. [23:53] But because of that, there's no surprising part, right? [23:58] So we had to actually change the contract and then cover the voting and then let the... Oh, like conceal the vote. [24:05] Conceal the voting so that it doesn't release the results. [24:08] Got you. Yes. [24:09] So that's something that we have to go through. And then, and sometimes if the polygon, like the, we're using polygon at the moment, and if the medic price goes up, the company is actually paying all the gas fees at the moment. So if the price goes up, then the, and then the, the minting process, there might be some issue. There has been some issues in the back days. Now we have solved all the problem. But before, before the company explains what's happening, there's always a person that, oh, the NFT

[24:39] minting system or the photocard creating system is related to the price of MEDIC. It seems like if the price of MEDIC reaches up to a specific level, then the minting process procedure stops. That's my assumption, blah, blah, blah. So the MEDIC price is right now this much. So you will have to wait until MEDIC price goes down. [25:04] It's like, okay. [25:06] He was like 95% correct, even with the number of the range. So like, wow, these fans are really, really smart, and they know what they love. [25:18] And when they love, they really mean it. [25:21] Wow. [25:22] So interesting. Well, thank you so much. [25:25] um this has been so fun to talk about and so fun to learn about as we've been here in seoul and gd thank you so much for joining and for your time [25:33] Thank you so much for having me again. [25:36] Take care. [25:37] Take care. Bye.