A couple weeks ago Bobu (a character in the Azuki universe) announced that he would be going live on Youtube.
This is something I wouldn’t normally take note of, but if you know who/what Bobu is it gets more interesting.
Who is Bobu?
Bobu is Azuki #40, but fractionalized into 50,000 tokens back in March 2022. Bobu initially started out as an experiment, allowing many people to own part of an Azuki instead of one owner, while exploring decentralized governance with Bobu’s IP.
Today Bobu has its own governance forum, fan art, merch, and has been a featured in different community activations and experiments like Bobu Chat.
So when Bobu announced that he was going to be on Youtube, it caught my attention. The title is “Bobu the Engagement Farmer” after all 🤔
Bobu the Engagement Farmer: Becoming an influencooor
The 50-minute stream shows Bobu the character and NFT brought to life. Throughout the stream, Bobu engaged with the chat as a real streaming influencer would, calling out users and responding to their comments.
How did this this all come together? Fortunately, the Azuki team shared details around how this was all put together:
Azuki partnered with Hallway, an AI startup that brings characters to life
Bobu didn’t have a script and instead had Azuki and Bobu lore preloaded into his personality. From there, Bobu could pull in context from the live chat and respond in a way that brings in historical context as well, just as ChatGPT can with its Memory function
The livestream details of the bedroom setting and Bobu’s character design were created by the team to make the overall environment more realistic
Live co-creation
Towards the end of the stream, Bobu took suggestions for merch ideas (starting around 42:30). As the chat lit up, the Azuki team designed a t-shirt to commemorate the stream in parallel.
As the stream came to a close, viewers were directed to BobuFans.com to claim the exclusive t-shirt. Although the t-shirt may seem poorly designed to some, it appropriately reflects the spontaneity, delightful chaos, and the main character that many in the Azuki community have come to know and love.
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Bringing character IP to life
The leading NFT projects are bringing their lore, characters, and world-building to life in a variety of ways. A few recent examples:
This weekend Yuga is holding the first playtest of Project Dragon, a team shooter game that brings in multiple collections from their ecosystem.
Pudgy Penguins partnered with VanEck to promote the launch of their Ethereum ETF. Honestly, if Pudgy Penguins were featured in a cult recruitment video, I would consider joining 😂
Doodles is premiering ‘Dullesville and the Doodleverse’ at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
And this is on top of many other efforts in parallel including but not limited to social media, events, and product updates.
With the Bobu livestream pilot experiment complete, we can see other ways for the concept to expand:
Bobu can bring community members’ Azuki or Beanz NFTs ‘onstage’ as special guests. Or even the characters from their anime anthology series.
Doodles could create an experience where fans can interact with the main characters to explore the Doodleverse further
Pudgy Penguins can create a personalized interactive onboarding experience for Pudgy World based on how the user arrived to the website or what they hold in their wallet
These are large undertakings with many considerations, but the possibility of this happening is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Expanding the concept of character IP
Applying Hallway’s AI tech makes the most sense for characters or human streamers today, but it doesn’t have to be.
Memecoins
As memecoins continue their volatile pump and dump cycle, teams continue the never-ending quest of one-upping each other with ridiculous names, unique campaigns, and loud influencers. Will there be a team that brings their memecoin to life via something like Hallway?
Prediction markets
As I covered earlier this week, Polymarket is bringing a new dimension to the prediction market space. What happens if Polymarket creates a character that users could engage with and hear live commentary about various prediction markets, just as we do with commentary during sports matches, markets on business shows, or reporters on the news?
If/when Polymarket user create their own prediction markets, could creating AI-enhanced characters draw more attention to the market, thereby drawing more attention and betting volume?
The larger question I think about in this future state is what happens when tokens and markets become personified? Ridiculous today, reasonable tomorrow?
Anyhoo, it’s always fun to see teams like Azuki experiment and create new ways for community to engage and get fired up. I hope they keep exploring what this could look like with Hallway.
Other interesting things
Base introduced the Onchain Content Network, partnering with several notable partners. Distribution is a moat when it comes to attracting developers and building out an ecosystem. Examples of how they’re promoting the projects with partners: Magic Eden, Floor, OpenSea, Rainbow, Roam, Layer3
Building something cool? Share it with me, let’s chat!
See you next week!
