We had the pleasure of sitting down with Emmanuel Aremu, Growth Marketing Manager at Optimism for the third episode of ORBIT: Creator Editions.
In his characteristic rapid fire manner of storytelling, he brings us through his first experiences with web3, how he supports creators with Optimism, the collaboration with Crowdmuse on the exclusive Stay Optimistic drop for Onchain Summit at Devconnect in Istanbul, and more.
In this interview we explore:
🟥The past year's growth in collaboration among Web3 artists and collectors.
🟥Emmanuel's journey into Web3, sparked by curiosity and a desire to address gaps in UX and messaging within the space.
🟥Scaling Ethereum and broadening onchain creativity at OP by supporting a diverse range of contributors in the ecosystem.
🟥The concept of RetroPGF as a reward mechanism for positive contributions to the Optimism ecosystem, especially for projects that are impactful.
🟥The collaboration with Crowdmuse for the Onchain Summit, highlighting the smooth creative process and the success of the OP custom merch drop.
🟥"We ❤️ the Art" contest, an initiative to support emerging artists and musicians with significant rewards and to showcase diverse onchain creativity.
🟥The future of the onchain ecosystem as a phase of onboarding and education, focusing on creating quality experiences to attract a wide range of participants.
🟥The importance of fostering a diverse, creative, and collaboratively growing blockchain ecosystem.
A few of the top highlights from this conversation include Emmanuel’s vision on supporting artists to bring more meaningful onchain activity…
“We wanted to do something that brings a lot of creators to the forefront, especially a lot of emerging creative talent, and the best way to kind of stir that up was to do We Love the Art.
The idea of it came around like, okay, how can we support new upcoming emerging artists? How can we focus a really cool incentive mechanism to allow that to flourish. It's mostly different people working with creators through different avenues, deployments on OP mainnet, Base, Zora, and ultimately, to bring that creativity to the contest itself. You need stuff happening on chain to help attract developers to build more stuff within the particular ecosystem, and that helps bring more people on chain and increases that flywheel.
One of the coolest things is people who've never interacted with sound before ever said, Hey, I didn't know sound was so easy to use and so cheap.
These tools are out there and just like bringing it together, put it in front of creators and let's see what they create.
And the way we look at the contest is like, this is the first version of it, there's gonna be some iterations for the next one, and how can we continue the momentum, help onboard more people into this space and help bring onchain creativity with different partners that we're working with as well. So that's definitely how we want to approach it going forward with We Love the Art.”
…his down-to-earth review on working with Crowdmuse:
“Working with the Crowdmuse team was such a massive stress reliever. From start to finish the co-collaboration was really awesome. it's quite a seamless end-user journey, so even though you never minted an NFT before, the experience is not too dissimilar for when you experience something from an e-commerce perspective, but then also more importantly, just to think about the entire end process of it, logistics and how did they get this to the right people, that just takes a lot of mental energy which is instead of it being focused on more the logistic side it's focused more on the creative side. It’s gonna move very quickly in terms of here's the first couple of iterations we're working with, what the sweatshirt would look like. The team were really really helpful in terms of not just hand holding but obviously going on this crazy journey together.
We did a really cool awesome drop I have to say for Onchain Summit. Yeah, I swear about that sweatshirt, the quality is amazing, it definitely embodies the sustainability ethos that Crowdmuse does as well. It ticks all the boxes in terms of like you know the values that we have hold as well we trying to build for sustainability, Retro PGF and a contest I’m gonna to talk about in a minute but I also like you know we do things in a way that's unique and stands out there as well so it was just a perfect match.”
…and his views on what is really needed to bring web3 to the masses:
“I definitely think for the next couple of years we are in the onboarding and educational phase. It's a case of having quality experiences and products that give people the reason to be onboarded into space.
If we start to marry a lot of the technology with a lot of native things that people are accustomed to, that's ultimately going to help onboard a massive ton of people. There's a lot of ground to be covered, a lot of infrastructure things that need to be covered and I think that's an area which I definitely think the space will possibly fall into. On the creative side we’re having to think of who is curious about the space that is open to collaborate.
I think if we start to collaborate with people who are curious but also want things done in a way that resonates with their brand and their community. I think those are sort of people’s leverage for different partnerships and the educational aspects are like I mentioned like you know okay, what the heck is an NFT? What the heck is a wallet? Those sort of educational pieces.
If you collaborate with people who are in a web 2.5 kind of like curious about the web3 experience, I think that's ultimately to help with the educational aspects of it all. By tackling those two pieces you're going to have an explosion of far more amazing experiences, far amazing apps coming online, and then you can layer on the piece, okay how do you bring the governance angle through something like Retro PGF into the real world. That's that's the next big hairy thing that's down the road. Onchain creativity is definitely here to stay. It's just a case of how many people want to play in that particular sandbox as well.”
Join us on our journey as we unlock more insights from creators.