(2021-08-09) Coffman Cryptopilled

Drew Coffman: CRYPTOPILLED. At the beginning of this year I knew next to nothing about the world of web3 or crypto. Six months later, I quit my job to take a full-time position in the industry.

In February of 2021 I started hearing rumblings about NFTs.

To participate in web3, the first thing you have to do is set up a wallet.

With ETH in my wallet, I began the process of creating my first NFT.

One of the first steps any prospective NFT creator has to make is determining which platform it will live on. When I first started, there were a few options open to me: Foundation, Zora, and OpenSea. The former two were both invite-only,

Thinking about what type of art I wanted to create, this immediately appealed to me, as I didn't have a singular key piece of work that I wanted to upload. I intended to publish a collection that felt like it would fit nicely within the space. Years ago I had taken a series of photographs of cups of espresso

I had been taking photos for 15 years and no one had ever bought my work. Now, I had sold half a dozen and made $1,000, all by pressing buttons on an online marketplace.

I instantly began thinking about the next project I wanted to mint. I had been working on a video project months prior and abandoned it because I didn't know where it would belong. A short-form music video set to a friend’s music, it didn't fit on my YouTube channel and felt like way too much work to just post on Twitter or Instagram. Could this exist as an NFT? Maybe! I re-assessed the footage and, with my friend's blessing, finished the project over a weekend and minted it, this time to Foundation. And…it didn't sell!

I once again collaborated with my musician friend and worked for 48 hours to create an NFT I called ‘◇ 𖥂 ◇ // modular patch’, a vaguely ominous looping video of kaleidoscopic visuals set to a synth score, all playing out within a CRT television screen. I felt extremely proud of it, not only because I loved what I made but because it felt web3 native.

in one of my best moves, I bought into FWB, a token-gated community.

*FWB (Friends with Benefits) is a community that you can only access if you’re holding a certain amount of their token in your wallet. Once you hold that amount and apply to join, you get access to the Discord and the insights of the people within.

That's it! Mostly. Since I joined, FWB has created new initiatives to add more value for owners. They’ve held in-person parties, created city guides, and now send out a weekly TL;DR newsletter to catch people up on the most important news in and around web3.

At the time of joining, it cost me approximately $500 to enter (and at the time of this writing, entry is valued at around $1,750)*

In web3, if you join a token-gated community like FWB and realize that it isn't for you, you can just sell the coins back and walk away

FWB set up a governance committee responsible for ensuring that, among other things, proposals were being understood and seen by members

FWB posted an application form for members to join their governance committee

The governance committee came with a stipend, making it my first paid role in web3 — and they paid in crypto

I began hearing from many companies with many openings. I realized that a background in Community and Marketing was a major strength in this industry. Tons of projects had momentum behind them and developers were in desperate need of people who could take the reins of these burgeoning audiences

I joined Aito’s team to work on building out his vision for web3.