Henry, CEO of CyberKongz, explains how one of Web3's original degen communities survived five years of chaos, including a 27-month SEC investigation, the metaverse collapse, and the disappearance of 99% of 2021 NFT projects. From launching in March 2021 as a premier avatar collection to building Wall Street Kongs into crypto's most active alpha community, he's navigated partnerships with Adidas and Japanese toy manufacturer Nanoblocks while watching major Web2 brands like LaMelo Ball, Manchester United, and Mattel completely abandon their Web3 experiments.

This episode covers:

- Metaverse to ghost town: Investing heavily in Sandbox land, Arcade, and World Wide Web for interoperable avatars in 2021-2022, then watching the entire metaverse narrative evaporate by 2024 while projects pivoted to IP plays that also failed to move floor prices

- The 27-month SEC nightmare: Getting subpoenaed in January 2023 and operating with hands tied until March 2025, how it sucked all air out of the room during a critical bull market window, and why the rebrand after the investigation ended "didn't go so great."

- Why Web2 IP partnerships extract value: Watching Doodles announce McDonald's and Universal deals that tanked their floor price, attempting their own Adidas collab and Nanoblocks toy in Japan that sold out but "wasn't meaningful within the community," and realizing the IP play is "years and years off" for most projects

- Death threats and daily Discord: The biggest surprise about running a Web3 company is "how many death threats you get," but why 3,000+ community members showing up daily for almost five years in Wall Street Kongz Discord is the only reason CyberKongz still exists when contemporaries have rugged

- "Most Web3 games suck": Moving their Genkai collection and game to Ronin blockchain, watching Pixels' botted TGE kill momentum, and admitting you wouldn't play 99% of crypto games without financial incentive, whether the intersection of AI agents and gaming tokens on Virtuals/Base can save the category in 2026-2027

- Trench Bot and the community North Star: Building Discord tools to buy tokens across ETH, Solana, Base, BNB, and Ronin with one click because "that's what degens actually want," not corporate partnerships, and whether focusing on being the ultimate alpha group playground instead of chasing IP deals is the survival strategy other OG projects missed

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