Who is Wisdom Trust Forever

My name is Bulumko Napakade I’m a 24 year old independent artist hailing from Cape Town/Pretoria South Africa. Wisdom Trust Forever is my artist name that originates from my birth name directly translated from Xhosa into English, forming the initials WTF in the name of my independent label… WTF is Art 🥀.

Background

I’ve been making music from as early as 4th grade, in high school I began to really cultivate my love for music as a vocalist in the school band and really started taking music seriously towards the end of my time at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

At UCT I double majored in Economics & Finance and did my honours in Financial Analysis and Portfolio Management. My choice of study was motivated by a deep desire to become financially literate, with the aim of cultivating a comprehensive understanding of how investing works; which I aim to harness to create value for the web3 community.

After UCT I worked in the corporate sector as an investment professional, before subsequently leaving at the beginning of 2022 to focus on making music and building in web 3 full time.

Additional Skillsets

• Community Management: During college I gained experience managing communities as part of the executive counsel that ran South Africa’s largest student run society InvestSoc.
• Entrepreneurship & Marketing: I founded a company called Blx Grooming Essentials that provides black people in South Africa with basic grooming utensils that aren’t readily available. My team and I ran the business for four years growing sales by 4x in FY21 vs FY20.
• Investments (Buy side & Sell Side): After college I did a brief stint at one of South Africa’s largest asset managers Allan Gray before completing the Graduate Trainee program at Citi Group’s global markets division, where I worked on the South African Equity Sales & Trading desk focusing on research sales.

My Ikigai (Life’s Purpose)…

is to communicate beyond words, by distilling emotions through music. Reminding us that we all feel, hopefully reconnecting us all to our shared sense of humanity. For some people, the only time they can relate to a feeling is through experiencing it in a song… I see this as an opportunity to cultivate a deeper sense of empathy.

I believe feeling is an integral part of healing… as one of my favourite authors puts it “ Pain cannot be suppressed, but only transmitted from one person to another” - Brene Brown. I’m trying to show people your big emotions (especially as men) are valid and all part of our shared human experience.

Inspirations

My music is largely inspired by my own lived experiences of life, love and loss… music has served as my cathartic outlet… these songs are like therapy to me. Purely to manage expectations, I would categorise my sound as genre bend of Emo-rap production, Punk inspired vocals and back packer rap… I’m heavily inspired by Indie folk, punk rock, RnB/Soul and Hip Hop. I’m heavily influenced by the likes of Bon Iver, James Blake, Frank Ocean, Corbin, Juice World, Lil Peep and Real Friends. I’m inspired to rap when I have something important to say that I would like to articulate as consciously as possible… I look up to mostly South Africa’s great backpackers such as A-reece, Stogie T, Zulu Mecca, Shane Eagle and Proverb.

My Genesis project - Tumblr Boy 🥀: Heart Break in the Metaverse

A story about the alchemy of healing; transmuting pain and darkness into beauty and light.

The EP is set in the context of a relationship that  started, was nurtured and  ended... all in the Metaverse... an all too familiar phenomenon in our ever-digital age

Tumblr Boy an alter-ego  representing my Scorpio Moon energy goes through the 7 Stages of Grief

1. Shock
2. Denial
3. Anger
4. Bargaining
5. Depression
6. Reconstruction
7. Acceptance

Road Map

ESTABLISHING THE THIRD WORLD WEB COMMUNITY:

We are beginning the roll out by building community first! My single “Anxiety” is being airdropped to everyone who joins the Third World Web (3WW) community on Twitter by 12 April 2022 . The vision for 3WW is to create a powerful network that consists of Web 3 creatives and entrepreneurs, a network of investment professionals, and professionals in the entertainment industry… this melting pot is essentially the connective tissue that is necessary to take music NFTs forward. The mission is to break down barriers to entry into Web 3 for creatives in the third world, ensuring an inclusive and conducive environment for a healthy creator economy.

Dropping Tumblr Boy EP on Decent.xyz

We will be dropping the EP as a music NFT project hosted on the decent.xyz platform with a new track dropping in the first and last week of each month for 3 months… making me the first African artist to do so; as well as only the second artist to make use of the Crescendo pricing model.

What is Crescendo

Decent Crescendo’s dynamic pricing uses bonding curves to take the burden of pricing music NFTs off of artists and make collecting music NFTs less risky for collectors by introducing automatic liquidity. Crescendo enables both artists and fans to capture more value from the communities they jointly create.

How does a bonding curve work?

The core concept of bonding curves is quite simple: the price of a token is determined by its supply.  The more NFTs that have been distributed, the higher the price of the next NFT. This allows the pricing of the NFTs to be dynamic.

When an NFT is bought, price goes up. When one is sold, the price goes down.

For example, say the first NFT to be minted starts at 0.1 ETH. After the first NFT is purchased, the price of the next NFT will increase at a fixed interval - let’s say we are on a linear curve where each interval is 0.01 ETH.

• The next NFT sells for 0.11 ETH.
• The price increases again to 0.12 ETH for the third NFT (and again, and again).

What is really exciting is that NFT holders can also sell back their NFT whenever they want -- instant liquidity! This is because liquidity is guaranteed in the smart contract. For every NFT sold, the price that the next NFT can be bought or sold at will decrease in the same fixed intervals.

Why use Crescendo?

I believe in the Crescendo model because it lowers the cost barrier to entry for collectors, which i think is crucial for mass adoption of NFTs in emerging markets, where the exchange rate between Ethereum an the local currency is quite high.

The goal of the project evolves from “selling out” to:

1. Building a strong community over time, in turn making the community more valuable via NFT appreciation
2. The price of ownership is determined by my community.
3. NFTs have instant and guaranteed liquidity, making it less risky to collect the NFTs