My wife and I just announced our 2nd drop with Average Sunday, the creative project we started in the summer to bring our web3-native decentralized brand to life. We’ve partnered with Vancouver’s O5 Tea, a rare tea bar that micro-milled a limited edition matcha for this collab. If you like excellent matcha, you can buy the O5 Tea x Average Sunday: Sunday Matcha here.

For an update on how I view web3, opportunities for existing companies/brands looking to experiment in this nascent industry and a download on some of the reasons why I’m still highly engaged in this space, read on.

TL,DR 

• While the market is quite volatile right now, my conviction in (strong) web3 brands and startups continues to grow

• The Azuki brand in particular, the brand that developed the artwork we use for Average Sunday, has delivered some very impressive products, partnerships and lore over the past 2 quarters

• New use cases and technological advancements are proliferating at a good pace and I’m amazed at the difference I’ve witnessed in just 12 months of part-time immersion in this space

The long version:

Why am I talking about web3? Why do people spend so much money on pictures of monkeys? Didn’t that FTX guy just defraud the entire crypto market and why on earth would you want to be associated with all those scams?

These are some of the recurring questions I get from friends and family and I believe there are a lot of legitimate and not so legitimate concerns surrounding web3, so thought I would start by stating my bull case for web3. In short, this is a new form of ownership in the digital economy and I’m sure many of you reading this would agree that the rate of change in the past decade or two regarding our use of and reliance on technology continues to accelerate. In high school and university I had a flip phone that my carrier charged $0.10/SMS message; facebook was only available to students at select universities when I joined and required that you have a digital camera to manually upload files to it, and ecommerce didn’t really take off in a major way until the last decade. Now, everything is online, I work from a home office and commute via high-definition webcam and wireless internet and can spin up new businesses on Shopify or Etsy in under an hour. But, to this day, we don’t really own anything digitally. We don’t own our email addresses, we don’t own our social media profiles, we don’t own the content we produce and put out there that drives the FAANG economy. Even after building lucrative businesses on these platforms, try moving your followers to another platform (from youtube to instagram or twitch for example) or better yet, what happens if the content moderation team at twitter shadow bans your account? 

Looking at this from a completely different perspective, the blockchain provides the ability to establish ownership, provenance and changes of ownership for things not easily tracked outside of a central database - like a deed of a house, medical records, memberships, etc. Coming from years of inventory management experience, this digital ownership advancement is one of the concepts that most drew me into web3. The ability to create “smart contracts” makes it easy to transfer ownership from one person/entity to another in a trustless way without the need of the legacy paperwork and bureaucracy that governs most of the transactions we enter into.

While there was a strong bull run in the crypto markets both from a currency/token perspective (think bitcoin, ether, solana, etc.) and in NFTs (digital collectible/fundraising mechanism) over the past 2 years, the broader economic downturn has certainly dampened these volatile markets and a lot of participants on the fringes have exited. That said, this is my second crypto cycle watching the run up and crash of bitcoin in 2017/18 and things are considerably different. The number of participants, institutions, VCs and projects that raised significant funding during the bull run and are building organizations of note would probably surprise a lot of people. The thing that keeps me most engaged and interested in this space if I’m being honest are the communities that have popped up surrounding this technology and the projects and brands growing around it - it’s hard not to feel optimistic about this technology becoming omnipresent in our daily lives when I see the passion, dedication and sheer brainpower bringing it to life. When the rush of chasing life-changing money becomes more of a pipe-dream, the ones who are left are the ones who push the space forward and I’ve learned way more than I thought I would being an active participant in web3 this past year.

What is Azuki? Why do you have anime characters all over your website?

Azuki is the brainchild of the team at Chiru Labs in LA and arguably the most successful NFT project that minted in 2022 by sales volume and unique pfps represented on twitter (the social media platform of choice by most of web3). Self-described as “The Skaters of the Internet” and relating to early skate culture - a counter-cultural movement with values of creativity, individuality and style - this web3-native brand is creating the digital anime universe and a high-end streetwear brand along with it. The artwork we used on our first drop with Harken Coffee is from their 2nd collection of Beanz (He’s a quirky animated coffee bean) and on our second drop with O5 Tea we introduced Amani, our character from the genesis Azuki collection. The artwork itself was created as generative artwork, which means hundreds of different character traits were illustrated and made to act certain ways in combination with different trait layers (e.g., a hairstyle looks different on its own vs. underneath a hat) and was drawn by Arnold Tsang (aka. Steamboy) the former Senior Character Art Director for the massively successful Overwatch video game (over 50M downloads).

Given the treasury the team has maintained, they’ve been able to put on a number of impressive experiential events around the world and establish partnerships with some big name brands. This past quarter they held an auction for 8 gold skateboards over a 24-hour period while displaying one of them at the K11 art museum/mall in Hong Kong and sold these for between $200k-$300k each, making them individually the most expensive skateboards ever sold. They had one of their characters (like ours) show up on the Red Bull Racing formula 1 team cars in the Dubai circuit - the team that won the grand prix - and through the race weekend had “Lei the Lightning” profiled as one of the team drivers on their socials. The team also partnered with Japanese streetwear brand Ambush, owned by Yoon and Verbal (of Teriyaki Boys fame - if you’ve seen my favourite of the Fast & Furious movie franchise - Tokyo Drift - you’ve heard their music) for a limited edition product drop of hoodies featuring an open-sourced technology they developed called PBT - the Physical Backed Token. PBT allows for the digital ownership of a physical item through an NFT-chip embedded with cryptographic keys. Creating a digital version of a physical item allows brands to create a digital experience along with the unboxing (hello virality) and better yet, allows for the tracking of lineage of an item from one owner to another - this is particularly valuable in the recommerce or luxury goods market segments and a strong deterrent to counterfeiting. 

The other part of Azuki’s innovation in web3 that I find captivating, is their concept of becoming the largest decentralized brand in the metaverse. That word can be triggering and you might be thinking of a virtual world in which people interact like in a video game, and yes that might be something that happens at some point, but really I just think of the metaverse as a place where we interact digitally - like through this LinkedIn post, slack or video calls. The decentralized part of the equation is what really excites me - it’s what has people like me and my wife creating projects around our intellectual property (the art) and finding a built-in fan-base, organic engagement on our social posts and some recognized branding even without a big brand name. Without spending a dime to extend our reach on instagram or twitter, we’ve received thousands of views on our content due to the broader Azuki community championing and supporting the work that people are doing to help the brand reach more people.

I’m excited to see where they take things next.

What is Average Sunday? What is this project about?

We named our project Average Sunday because we love Sundays at our house and the slower pace it usually brings with space to create, reflect and enjoy good food and drinks. As we both have day jobs and parenting duties, we wanted to build something that would really let us flex the creative muscles that we might not otherwise do - no limits on creativity and keeping things fun, with a focus on building community and highlighting people and brands that inspire us. For me it was an opportunity to experiment with this concept of a decentralized brand and the development of intellectual property. Storytelling is something I’ve done in my spare time since I was young, but never as part of a business venture and we’ve tried to weave in the stories of our characters - Hiro-San the coffee bean, and Amani, its best friend - into our content and product drops. 

I’m thrilled to be collaborating with O5 for our second drop and seeing our artwork on their product. We have quite an ambitious project underway for 2023 that I can’t wait to share more about - you’ll have to live in suspense a little while longer. In the meantime though, I would highly recommend a listen to one of our seasonal and lofi playlists - this is the sound of Average Sunday and just one way we’re developing our story. Listen here.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading - I would be happy to chat about web3, NFTs, Average Sunday or anything else that might have stirred up some questions - shoot me a message and we can go from there.

Please give our socials a follow:

And check out our collaboration with O5 Tea here.

With gratitude,

dantheman