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Open Social Marketplace on Hedera! Calaxy and King Solomon (Part 1)

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Calaxy

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews Calaxy CEO Solo Ceesay as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
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What is up everybody, Solomon here I hope you guys are having a fantastic day as you guys know within Genfinity's Hedera Corner in collaboration with HashPack we are nailing out multiple valuable interviews across the Hedera ecosystem. Today is certainly a valuable one we have Solo Ceesay CEO and co-founder of Calaxy app. How are you doing today Solo?

Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
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I'm doing well I appreciate you guys for having me on today.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
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So this is going to be quite the interesting interview in my opinion just because Calaxy has been in the Hedera community ecosystem for quite some time now. I guess as a primer can you give a little bit of a background about Calaxy in general? How it got started just maybe a little bit of a brief overview.

Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
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Yeah absolutely so like I said, appreciate having the forum to speak to you today. My name is Solo Ceesay, I'm 28 years old, previously was an investment banker I had attended the Wharton School the very Wharton thing and worked in investment banking for a number of years. My journey to Calaxy is very interesting so my co-founder his name is Spencer Dinwiddie he plays on the Dallas Mavericks he had a wild idea of wanting to tokenize his contract a number of years ago/ My older brother is actually best friends with Spencer and my brother texted me one day saying β€˜hey I'm not quite sure what you do at work every day, you spend a lot of time at the office about 100 hours a week whatever it is, but whatever I was able to put together what you do sounds a lot like what Spencer's trying to do with his NBA contract. You guys should talk’. This might have been for almost five years ago at this point, and that's kind of where we started. So Spencer became the first NBA player to securitize his NBA contract, he fell in a lot of swords doing that, took a lot of bullets, he was actually sued by the NBA for doing that. But winning by creating the bond like structure and the securitization, he was able to get that off which is a very big win but also kind of gave way to a lot of different things that you saw within the World of Sports and crypto and web 3. You saw the NFT project NBA Top Shot erupt not too long after that. Spencer was an early investor there too so our journey to this is definitely one that's been around for a while, and that was kind of what started our journey. We eventually were going to be a capital markets engine of some sort that allowed influencers or musicians that have a bunch of intellectual property or NBA players, or pro athletes, with large contracts to securitize themselves to unlock trapped liquidity but then we saw a bigger audience and a bigger market to address, which was the influencer or public figure scene. When it comes to monetizing the things that they do. Not necessarily the intellectual property, that's a little bit more opaque and tougher to explain but people work always going to be remembered or always going to be confident or comfortable with the idea of monetizing their time. So we saw the rise of platforms like Cameo, Patreon, Only fans, fan time, all these other types of creator-centric platforms and we thought hey why don't we use the world of blockchain, tokenization, Hedera and create an easy mechanism for a fan and creator to meet. And a creator could sort of capture the value of that experience and the fan to get a more intimate experience. They could have ever imagined due to the lack of latency and all that stuff the benefits of the Hedera network, and so that's how we got to Calaxy today.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
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Yeah and you touched on it briefly but I always like to ask you know because especially with when you guys started. I mean it's kind of night and day now I mean Hedera's always been on my mind I've been in the Hedera community since I think whenever testnet was out there and used to scroll through apps and get micro payments streamed to you. So I have to ask, Why did you guys choose to build Calaxy on Hedera? Just like yeah kind of what the thought process was around it because you guys have been around for a while.

Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
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Yeah no that's a great question. So I actually got to give Spencer the credit for that. So Spencer not that I'm not a huge Hedera stand fan whatever I've always been a big fan of them, but at this point in time when it shows to building or choosing where we chose to build I didn't really know as much about the landscape of the options as much as he did. He definitely taught me a lot of what I knew so thinking three, four years ago we were thinking about layer ones Hedera was like you said way way way deeper in the shadows than it is today. But I think it really is attributable to a few things. One, we really liked the founding team, we really like the idea of Leemon and Mance, you Know what's there not to like. I think also the idea of the buy-in that we had from large recognizable, public well-respected public institutions around the world was something that really made it compelling for us because we want to be one of those one day. The idea would be a full circle moment where one day Hedera's governing council has Calaxy on them. That'd be amazing one day. So essentially it was kind of those things obviously it's asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant, super scalable the developer solutions within the community are maturing as well now, which has been really nice and so I think for us it came down to those main things. And you know as young black entrepreneurs like myself and Spencer, we saw that there was a lot of credibility that could be, you know, given to us or that we could borrow essentially, by kind of hitching our wagon to the Hedera train, and it's definitely been really great and we also want to bring a lot of that activity. The activity that Hedera is looking forward to that mark to the ecosystem so influencers celebrities that sort of market the consumer-facing applications of web 3 technologies, that's what we excel in, that's who we know that's our friends, and we want to be able to bring them Β there so it felt like it was a mutual match.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
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100% and you touched on it also. As far as you know all of the other platforms that are very web 2 based right now like Only fans, and Patreon, so from the Calaxy standpoint what's going to differentiate like how are you going to put that value proposition and really empower that, whether it be an influencer, or an athlete, or a celebrity, or a content creator. How do you guys kind of draw that line between web 2 and Web3 not only to make it easy for these people to come on and to utilize your platform, but to really give them more than what they're getting in these other platforms that exist out there right now, because I think it's a massive value proposition what you guys are building.

Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
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No absolutely and I think right now the best way to think about Calaxy is an experiential marketplace and admittedly our vision has changed so much over the years. But I think at this point pretty narrow on what we want to solve, but we want to create the best forum for our creator and fan to meet. We want to create the shortest distance between a Creator and their payout, and we want to create the shortest distance between a fan and that experience that they want from the Creator they know and love. And we don't want to define the scope for what that looks like and so when you think about The web 2 Solutions out there, Cameo is a one skewed products, Only fans own one skewed product, and the way in which creators connect with their fans varies from product, from person to person, let alone from industry to Industry. Like Ezekiel Elliott will monetize himself very differently than his celebrity chef Hoppy, or even Spencer Dinwiddie or even, Diana Taylor the music artist, or so on and so forth So we wanted to create a very playground environment if you will, for creators to test out different things that make sense for the communities. So offering things like video calls or face-to-face conversations like we're lucky to have today video messages like Cameo subscription like products like Patreon, and Only fans, NFTs because we're in the web 3 ecosystem we want to create point and shoot NFTs and all those types of things and also a nice cohesive ecosystem to be the interface for all this type of activity. Because when you think about the web 3 universe it's not about ownership and it's also because of that it's you don't own anything so it lives in different parts of the world very fragment, and we want to create that instant easy to use or sort of we want to create a very simplistic model where a creator can have a centralized place, funny enough, but in their own place for their top 10 percent of their Community to hang out. And for them to add those personal relationship with and monetize and lastly I think a great example of this and how it exists, and what web3 for an analogy is you know there's Twitter, Discord and you know Telegram and all these different channels but the mechanisms for you know one-to-one experiences aren't even that great and it's all over the place, and like we want to create a easy to use holistic ecosystem for you know imagine the board ape yacht club one day to have a nice place for the community and like the idea of DAOs and stuff like that. The idea of community and having the tools is super important and so through familiar features, and things like that we want to be able to connect to those people but also introduce some new cooler ways to think about how we could leverage and utilize the amazing technology that we have, Hedera and bring it into a new experience there.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
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No and I couldn't agree more. I mean I think those silos as far as like especially with web 3 and crypto like you talked Twitter and Telegram and Discord they're always going to be there but if you create almost a hub where you can have all of the relevant information, and really make it user-centric and user-friendly, and Creator Centric and friendly, because I think you nailed it. Every Creator is going to be totally different for how they want to utilize the platform and I'm sure you guys have done the all the market research and everything else you look at something like Patreon with how much they take off the top from content creators, I mean it's anywhere from eight to fifteen percent and that doesn't sound like a lot but that's a lot and I was looking into your guys's ecosystem a little bit so you guys do have like the creators Calaxy Foundation which are these you know Creator tokens that are going to be able to be launched and from my understanding the Calaxy token is kind of the fee mechanism that's going to be kind of the engine that runs the Calaxy app. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship between your guys's tokens and how you would envision the creator tokens to work within your ecosystem?

Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
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Yeah no absolutely and so when you think about the Creator's Galaxy or I guess taking a step back how do we use Hedera. So there's Hedera the layer one, and then this, the creators Calaxy protocol which is a layer two on top of Hedera, which is a decentralized permissionless ecosystem dedicated to content creator monetization. So within this world we envision a lot of different apps or you know dapps like Calaxy built on top of The Creator's Calaxy protocol to leverage and utilize what is essentially the power of the $CLXY token. As you mentioned it has gas fees but it also is governance. So the idea of what fee mechanisms or the buckets in general can be updated, augmented, through the use of improvement proposals similar to how Hedera does it. So essentially the way it works is, you know, there's the decentralized protocol for NFTs and social tokens, and Calaxy is one of the applications that utilizes this infrastructure for the use case that makes sense right. We believe that the use case for Mass adoption for Tik Tok, for Instagram influencers needs to be an easy to use interface to do things like launch NFTs, or use social tokens. And a web 2 like friendly experience and so that's essentially how the ecosystem works and so the $CLXY token is gas and governance for that ecosystem, and Calaxy is adapted on top of that protocol, and we hope that there's a number of different applications eventually we hope that switch of the world or Instagram looks to integrate social tokens into the platform they could use that infrastructure all In Hedera.

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