Crypto Marketing: Are We Early?

Recorded at Solana Crossroads, Istanbul.

Hodl Up: Today Dren and I have a very special guest. As you may know by now, we're covering Solana Crossroads, and today we have Quicks with us.

Quicks: Thank you guys for having me. From Solflare. I appreciate you guys.

Hodl Up: Quicks from the Solflare marketing team. Perfect.

Quicks: I do a little bit of everything.

Hodl Up: You're quick, and you've got to do everything in crypto. That's the whole industry, right?

Quicks: Exactly.

Hodl Up: Why don't you start by introducing yourself: your background before crypto, how you joined the industry, and whether it was easy or hard. Everything, the challenges, the good side of crypto. The origin story, man.

Quicks: It's not as cool as any of the Marvel ones you'll see, but I've been early to Solana for about four years now. We keep saying we're early. Before all this, I grew up in New York in the United States. After school I went to Florida and lived there for 13 years, and now I live in Thailand. I've only had three jobs in my life. I worked in retail, I worked for a moving company, and then I worked for Red Bull, which is what actually got me into crypto, because they had a partnership between Tezos and their F1 team. I ended up swapping Tezos for SHIB, thinking, I'm going to quit this job and be a millionaire. Eventually I got rugged on Ethereum and found my way to Solana like everyone else, and I've been here ever since. I've been working for Solflare for coming up on a year now. It's an incredible project, and we'll talk about it in a bit. Before Solflare, I was hosting Spaces, being active in the ecosystem and doing AMAs. This was during 2022 and 2023, when it wasn't fun to be on Solana, but I was still out there telling everyone about it and interviewing projects that are now building and launching games, and it's incredible to see. So I like to think I've been part of the Solana ecosystem, and we keep growing together.

Hodl Up: One of the guys challenged me to ask a two-word question. You mentioned the transition from Ethereum to Solana, so: why Solana?

Quicks: I thought you were going to say "wen moon." That's the most common two-word question we get. Why Solana? It's an interesting question. We get asked a lot why we're not a multi-chain wallet, why we don't offer Bitcoin and Ethereum support. It's because we believe so firmly in what's being built on Solana: the infrastructure, the technology, but also all the teams and projects building here. It's undeniable. The tech is there, the teams, the projects, the developers. We're at events like Crossroads, we have Breakpoint later this year, and next month we'll be at Accelerate. Solflare is sponsoring everything. We're really trying to be part of the Solana ecosystem, and we don't see a need to go cross-chain at this point. We like to stick to the Bruce Lee model: practice the same kick 10,000 times. True mastery.

Hodl Up: I think that's one of the best approaches in crypto, because the space is getting very fragmented, especially after the bear market we just came through. New projects try to build new things and go multi-chain immediately, but I think you have to build the foundation first, especially as a wallet, with all the security implications. And Solflare is big now. What I wanted to ask is how you held up during the 2022-2023 chaos on Solana. I remember Solana dropped like crazy and FUD was everywhere. Everyone feared something even worse, like Solana dropping to cents. I liked Solana, but I thought, okay, FTX fell, Solana's going down with it, and it's going to take these giants out of the market because of one mistake. So how did you survive that?

Quicks: I think the most important thing we did was keep our conviction. We held strong. We knew what the outcome would be. We knew that whatever the price, the teams and what was being built were undeniable. At the very least, there were going to be a few scrappy teams that wouldn't give up and would make it happen, and we believed we were one of them. So we kept shipping and developing our wallet, and our most recent updates are a culmination of all of that. It's also our new foundation for everything that will be built on top. It was obviously hard during those times. We weren't generating enough revenue; we were kind of breaking even at one point. It was difficult, but we made it through. We have an amazing community and an amazing team, and we kept our heads down and kept building, and held strong on that conviction. It's kind of like you guys, huddling up.

Hodl Up: Personally, I've been a huge proponent of Solana since 2020-2021. Back when Solana was $8, I was telling people to buy. Not financial advice, by the way. I'm still a huge supporter. Everyone was saying, "Oh, but there are so many network outages," but it's one of the few chains that appeals both to institutions and to normies and new traders, because the UX is much better and gas fees are low. Now, on Solflare: there's competition in everything you do. How do you stand out and show people why Solflare is better than the rest of the market?

Quicks: 100%. That's a great question, because we're kind of punching above our weight class. The number one wallet right now has way more revenue, way more money and a lot more reach. But we're so strong in our conviction, and our grassroots marketing has been really impactful over the past three months. We've gained over 100,000 real followers on X, and we've onboarded nearly half a million users into Solflare. Everything we're doing right now is working. We're partnering with all the big projects on Solana, hosting a weekly Space on Twitter and sponsoring all the events: APEX, Crossroads, and we'll be headlining Breakpoint. We're positioning ourselves not only to be the number one wallet on Solana, but to be true contributors to the Solana ecosystem. We can't do it all. We can't be the meme token and the trading platform and everything else. But we want to be your touchpoint to Solana. Like you just said, the UI/UX makes Solana so easy and seamless, but to use Solana you need a self-custody wallet, and we want to be that Solana wallet for you.

Hodl Up: To tie into what you just said: what products have you launched in the past few months, or are launching, that make you stand out? I saw something at the main event, and I'd like you to go into it a bit and tell everyone, and us, why it's a really good product.

Quicks: This is actually a really exciting interview, because you're the first outlet we're sitting down with after the announcement we just made. So make sure you're following the Hodl Up pod and tell all your friends about it, the same friends you told to buy Solana who I'm sure didn't, and now they're hitting you up. We've done so much recently, but what I'd like to focus on first is Solflare Guard, which is extremely important. It's our security layer. It'll show you in your wallet when a token is unverified, and if you're trying to connect to a site, it'll warn you if the site is malicious. It's all geared toward protecting our users. Next is the big update that came with our rebrand, with a lot of features and enhancements to the app. It's now 13 times faster than it was last year. If you're a regular Solana user who used the old Solflare, you'll see the difference with the new one when you swap or just navigate the app. It's snappier and faster. Not as fast as me, but we're working on it.

And the most exciting news we'd like to talk about: we just announced that we're launching the Solflare Card. You'll be able to load your card, connected to a wallet of your choice, with stablecoins that earn yield, and then tap to pay at over 100 million merchants worldwide. We plan to launch a physical card later as well, but you'll get the digital Apple Pay version immediately, and you can sign up for the waitlist right now. It launches in the summer, first in Europe, and then we'll expand to the rest of the markets throughout the year. We're really excited. It's something the space needs, and a lot of our competitors and other projects are looking at it. Some cards have come out, but none of them have done it right, and we want to be the ones who do. We have our self-custody wallet to back it up. We don't need a janky TradFi-style app that doesn't really work as it's supposed to, with its own wallet and security issues. We stand on our product, Solflare, and the card felt like the natural next step. It surprised a lot of people, because there are a lot of features in our app that users have been requesting. And they are coming, just so you know: you'll get all the browser features you've wanted, the quick links, the featured pages. But for now, the most important thing was to focus on growth and our community. Our Guardians community is growing exponentially. We'll be powering the Seed Vault for the new Solana Seeker phone that drops this summer, so our team has been working extremely hard to hit those deadlines and make sure everything is perfect. We've also had a lot of campaigns going on, and we've been preparing for Crossroads. We've been spread pretty thin, but we have a really strong team that works together and communicates at all hours of the day, all across the world. We're really excited about the next one, two and five years of Solflare and what we're going to build and accomplish, and it starts with the cards. Users have been asking for this for a while. Off-ramping has been a huge issue in the space, and we're aiming to solve it. We're really proud of what we've built, and I hope you guys are too. If you use the wallet, or even if you're just a Solana user, I urge you to try it out. Import a burner wallet or something with a little in it, do the things you normally would, and see the difference. I truly believe that if you're a Solana OG, you'll enjoy the Solflare experience more.

Hodl Up: One thing's for sure: you've made life easier for people like us on cashless trips, and it's a lifesaver. We try to avoid banks, because we're all about decentralization. But besides being the guy who gets things done, you also mentioned that you're a fan of NFTs.

Quicks: I love them. I know it's a problem. Is this an intervention? Is my mom about to walk in and say, "How much money did you spend in 2021? How bad is it?"

Hodl Up: Listen, we're in the same boat. If anything, we're enablers. We're a bad influence on one another.

Quicks: Even now, on secondary, I still look at all these projects and think, "Oh man, look at this one at this price, I'm going to get it." Then I check back a week later and it's half the price I bought it for. I thought I was getting a deal, dude. But I just joined another community.

Hodl Up: You just became a member of another community.

Quicks: That's it, man. I'm a big community member in a lot of communities.

Hodl Up: That's a part-time thing, right?

Quicks: Right. Until you CTO it, then it's full-time.

Hodl Up: CTOs... Even founders who are scamming people make a backdoor wallet and then claim, "Hey, it's a CTO, we're completely different people," but they're the same people. I think in a lot of sectors of crypto they're bastardizing the potential, even with NFTs. When I think of NFTs, I think of the future of tokenizing everything, and it feels like they bastardized it with collections that didn't bring out the best in this community, because they were just cash grabs that died out pretty quickly. Personally, I really hope NFTs can make a comeback.

Quicks: Honestly, NFTs are undeniable. The technology is there, but they're not solving any real-world problems yet. When I think of NFTs, like you just said, I think of the title to your car. The picture is your car, like the monkey or lion you see as an NFT, and the metadata is the mileage, the accident report, the color, the engine, the transmission. All of that can be put on a marketplace and sold, and someone can buy the car for 10,000 USDC. Now that NFT is in my wallet, I'm the owner of the car, and it's shown on-chain, verifiable. That's always been the beauty of NFTs to me, and what I envision most, along with gaming. Same thing: a lot of on-chain attributes, with Metaplex working on it, so you can level up and increase defense, attack and everything. That's the beauty of NFTs, plus the whole idea of ownership. That's why we're doing decentralized. I don't want to own nothing and be happy. I want to stake Solana and go live my Foxy life. So I agree: NFT technology is early, and the problems and use cases aren't prevalent enough or being solved yet. People don't have problems joining communities; they have problems getting educated, learning and navigating the space. Some NFT projects are doing the right thing, but we still have a long way to go before the next NFT bull run.

Hodl Up: I wanted to tie into that, because I agree with my friend Dren here, but I agree with you too. We're still really early, especially with NFTs, because crypto as a whole is still experimental. That it will be a success, I don't doubt it 100%. But we're still experimenting with what works and what doesn't. And with NFTs, in this digital age where attention spans are so cooked, the best way to try a product is with shiny objects. You need these cool NFTs to test the tech, and the tech is working.

Quicks: I think a big reason NFTs were so popular in 2021-2022 was also that people had a lot more liquidity and money, and your NFT is a kind of digital identity. It's a flex, the same reason people pay a lot of money for Fortnite skins, or now the Counter-Strike skins selling for ridiculous amounts. That's why the JPEGs went for so much: it was like buying an expensive watch, except it depreciated, unlike a watch. But it created a brand for you, and in this space that's really important, because you can build an entire brand off an NFT, as opposed to a LinkedIn headshot. And you have to be careful which NFT you choose as your brand, because people are very visual, and when they see your NFT, they already associate it with your ideology and what you stand for. It's similar to how you dress: someone may prejudge you by your clothes. Never judge a book by its cover, but that's how a lot of people operate in this space. I chose a Famous Fox as my PFP and I've worn it for years. I'm actually rocking a DY Cat right now because of DePIN; they just got a huge partnership with AT&T, which is big for Solana, so I've got to show love to our DePIN projects. But it's modeled after my Fox, a direct replica, so it's still on brand. It was important to me to choose an OG Solana project known for builders, nothing nefarious, with cute art. It's a derivative of Cool Cats, so if any Famous Foxes are watching: we're Cool Cats derivatives, but we're on the right chain, facing the right way. That's important.

Hodl Up: That is very important. And I fully agree, because we're gamers as well, and I have a lot of friends who aren't into crypto or Web3 and have no problem paying hundreds of dollars for a skin that's just cosmetic. But with an NFT in gaming, you also get utility. There are games where you can buy land and farm on it, for example. So you're not just buying something that looks good; you're buying something that can bring you value, both in entertainment and in money at the end of the day. But the problem is: do people who get into NFTs and gaming come for the tech, or only because they see it as a lucrative opportunity? I know people who tested all these Web3 games just because they liked the idea of earning money while playing, not because they liked the games themselves. How do we convince them to be in it for the tech as well, not just the money? Personally, I don't like the connotation that crypto automatically means more gains. I've lost more money than I've earned. But I'm in it for the tech, because I like the technology and I think it's the future of everything we'll do.

Quicks: It's such an interesting conversation, because crypto is perfect for gamers. It's everything they're used to, like Discord, and they'd be able to handle all the technology. The problem is the stigma the original games created: crypto is a scam, NFTs are a scam. To break that, you need to make fun games. Gamers will gravitate toward any game that's fun with a good, engaging game loop, and when you get some good streamers in the mix, that's when people stop caring whether it's an NFT project or an on-chain game. Gaming studios also need to make it as frictionless as possible. Gamers don't want to go through the process of going to a marketplace to buy an NFT. They'll pay the $10, $20, $60 or whatever to play the game, but you have to make it seamless for them. Everything under the hood has to be on-chain, but everything they see has to be just like a normal game they log on and play. So those are the two big things: making it frictionless for gamers and making fun games, then getting those games out to the public. I love what the Solana Gaming team is doing. Shout out to Jorge and the whole team; they've been absolutely crushing it on the timeline, putting out videos and game loops, and it's exciting. We've got Star Atlas coming out this year. DeFi Land is out right now. We have a lot of exciting games on Solana right now. It's just about getting them to the masses and making more fun ones.

Hodl Up: I love Star Atlas, by the way. I've never tried it. I think they have a beta version.

Quicks: They have Starbase out right now, where you can go around and mine resources, but the actual game launches in Q4, later this year.

Hodl Up: Personally, I love the whole idea behind it. Maybe because it's my genre of game: exploring.

Quicks: Dude, at Breakpoint, if you were there, they had the Star Atlas impact event with all the computers set up, and it literally looked like a bunch of Iron Mans running around, flying across the screen and shooting at each other. It looks so cool, and they've been working really hard. I love seeing Solana teams that have kept their heads down building in the ecosystem. Portals is another one. I love what their team has been doing, creating a metaverse, and now they have games. They're actually working with the X team to integrate Grok AI into their platform, which really enables new experiences, and I think that's important too. You see how popular games like Minecraft are, and the whole metaverse idea when Sandbox and Decentraland were around, but Portals is doing it right, man. They're creating the experience in-world, and they've made it free to play and build now. There are a lot of exciting games, like BR1, the shooter, and EVIO, and so many others that are fun and playable right now, but they need attention, and that stigma needs to be broken.

Hodl Up: That's the hard part, the stigma, because it's been building for years now.

Quicks: It is.

Hodl Up: When it comes to gaming, and not just gaming, don't limit yourself to that: which partnerships benefiting Solflare would you like to go deeper into?

Quicks: Definitely. First and foremost, our partnerships with all the Solana events. Shout out to the Foundation and the whole team who work hard to put these events together. We love supporting them. We think it's amazing exposure, and again, we're here to push the Solana ecosystem forward. We've done Spaces with a lot of the top projects, and we've done event campaigns with the likes of MonkeDAO. We're really big into the Solana ecosystem. We just did our NFT mint campaign for the rebrand, and we partnered with a lot of teams on unique custom artwork for the NFTs. We have a lot of upcoming plans. The Solana Seeker phone has taken up a lot of our backend and mobile team's time, but it's an exciting partnership. We're always open to new partnerships with teams building in the Solana ecosystem. We're working with Solana Gaming, and we're about to start streaming soon, so we'll be doing a lot more streaming, with games, deep dives into platforms and Solana news, and just being more active in the Solana ecosystem. We have an amazing team. I also want to shout out our ambassadors: anyone rocking the badge on Solflare is an ambassador, chosen for their contributions to the ecosystem to represent Solflare. And shout out to our Guardians, our community. You've been absolutely amazing, showing so much support and helping us get the word out about Solflare. If you're watching, which I know you are: GFG. This is the way.

Hodl Up: Since we're pretty limited on time, I'd like to wrap it up with one of the most used words in this space: bullish. What are you bullish on right now, other than Solana?

Quicks: Other than Solana, of course. What's crazy is I use that word in daily life. I'll be at a restaurant and say, "This is a bullish idea, can I get this?" and when they say, "Yeah, we've got it," I'm like, "Oh, bullish, let's go." Or they say, "Oh, we're sold out," and I'm like, "Oh, bearish, I just got rugged on my croissant." What am I most bullish on right now? Do you mean tokens I'm holding, or...

Hodl Up: Whatever you feel comfortable sharing: a narrative, a project, a sector of crypto, DePIN, DeFi, whatever.

Quicks: Personally, I think DePIN and gaming have huge potential to onboard the masses, as well as payment systems, which is why we're focusing on the cards. So many areas experience hyperinflation, and their local currency just isn't sustainable, so being able to reach these communities...

Hodl Up: You're literally changing lives.

Quicks: Exactly. That's the most impactful part of what I try to do. What I'm most bullish on is being part of the Solana ecosystem. Every day I get to wake up and... I'm one of the few who doesn't care about the money. I'm not rich, dude, but I really don't care about making bags. I care about building a legacy: helping push the Solana ecosystem forward, onboarding more users, getting more people to use Solflare. That's my purpose, and I feel like I'm living it every day. I'm so excited and bullish on Solana in general. I truly feel that this blockchain, the technology, is undeniable. I only own three tokens: Bitcoin, Solana, and a bunch of Solana assets in USDC, which is also on Solana. That's basically it. I run DeFi plays, I have my NFTs, I take part in community events, and that's it. I'm just here for the long run. I think a lot of people need to start shifting to that mentality, because we have a limited amount of time before it's inevitable: Solana will be in front of the masses, and then it'll be a lot harder to build a brand and carve out your own sector of the ecosystem when you're competing against millions of other content creators and developers. People who have been in the ecosystem for a long time: make your voices heard. If you're watching this right now and looking for a sign, this is it. Whatever you're doing in life, if you can do things differently from everyone else, if you see things differently and offer value, bring it to Solana. Offer it to a project or a platform and just take a chance, because you can always go back to what you were doing, but you'll never get the chance to go back to this time in Solana and be this early in history. We're only in year five. What's it going to be like in year 25? And what did you do during this time?

Hodl Up: This is literally one of the main reasons I love crypto builders like you. I got emotional listening to you talk about why you like crypto, and Solana specifically, why you like to build, and the long term. We'll wrap it up right here, unless you have anything else to add to the episode.

Quicks: No, man. Do you have a catchphrase at the end that I'm supposed to say? Like, "Tune in to Hodl Up every Tuesday at..."

Hodl Up: You just did. You just created it for us. Let's go. Thank you very much. If this didn't convince you to get into Solana, I don't know what will, man. This was amazing. Shout out to Quicks for making this happen, and have a good day.