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For National Basketball Association fans of a certain age (hands up), we remember Baron Davis as the electric point guard who, in 2007, led the Golden State Warriors to defeat the heavily favored Dallas Mavericks. Davis is fearless and passionate and knows how to get a crowd excited.
He still does. Or, more precisely, since his turn to entrepreneurship, Davis has worked to excite and engage the community across a variety of projects – offline and online and now Web3. With The Black Santa Company, Davis launched a mix of block parties, games, mixed media stories, clothing, books, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to celebrate diverse and inclusive storytelling.
The Black Santa Company is as multi-hyphenate – many different things at once – as Davis himself. He can rap, he can act, he can cook a smart business plan. That was harder for athletes to do 20 years ago. “When I do beats and rap, you can’t put out an album as a basketball player,” Davis said in a Zoom interview. “Now, 20 different athletes put out albums and their fans support them.”
To encourage more athletes to become creators, Davis created Web3 tools to empower creators and help them engage with their communities. Enter his newest venture, SLiC, which stands for Sports Lifestyle in Culture. Ultimately, Davis envisions SLiC as a multi-hyphenate mix of platforms, production studios, community centers, publishers, and streamers connecting fans and creators.
One of the first verticals Davis will launch is SLiC Images, which aims to be a decentralized platform, file storage product, and licensing system for photographers – both professionals and amateurs. “If a picture says 1,000 words, we want to capture history now because on blockchain and Web3 those words can live for 1,000 years,” said Davis, who opened up about the purpose of SLiC, how he sees athletes using social tokens and utility tokens in the future. future, and why even in a bear market, despite all the negative press, NBA players who know web3 are “still passionate about it”.
The interview has been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.
Let’s start with The Black Santa Company. Was it part of your journey to NFT and Web3?
Baron Davis: We’re out throwing Hollywood every day. Multiple producers, directors or studio executives. Finally, we got an offer from the studio and they told me they would pay me to stay independent from the project for two years while they developed it.
And I was like, “Yeah, I have the whole vision of being able to bring on a group of creators.” And because of who Black Santa is, it’s going to feel communal and we need to be able to license IPs for small businesses.
Correct. You want to sit at the table.
I don’t want to go around Hollywood with the Hollywood elite and sell my brand, sell my community, sell my culture.
And then NFTs appeared. So that’s how Web3 came about. It’s like, “Let’s make Web3 and simple NFT for our community.”
What is the purpose of SLiC Images, and what problems does it solve?
The problems we solve are, one, photographers never own a market. Another one is, think about the way photos are shared and the way people take photos and random photos and selfies at conferences or basketball games. When you see LeBron [James] shot [breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record], everyone in the arena took out their cameras. There are 1,000 photos of LeBron’s last shots. With SLiC, you can view, nominate, and identify specific photos for use and licensing.
Ah, so in theory, SLiC will be a platform for everyone in the arena to store their photos, on-chain, and they’ll actually own them and be able to license them, not just give them to Instagram?
Very. If a picture says 1,000 words, we want to capture history now because in blockchain and Web3, words can live for 1,000 years. So we looked at that and said, “SLiC Images should be a database where you can go back to 2023, 20 years from now, and type in a date and then all your photos will appear and they’re yours. ”
Interesting. So is it almost an Instagram competitor, in a weird way?
Yes, it’s just a longer process [with Instagram]. If you’re making a documentary, or if you want to use photos for a flyer, right?, our goal is to create a database for that photographer, that gallery, that publisher. And now the next great documentary or Hollywood film or festival will have the ability to access those photos.
Intelligent. How does it feel to launch this in a bear market?
I think it really affected us. We’re just a small design shop, right? We don’t have the greatest visibility yet. So when we got out, the market was crashing. But we are builders.
I bet you still keep in touch with NBA players. What do you think their attitude is now about crypto and Web3? Do they worsen in a bear market?
I’d say for those who know and understand it, they’re still passionate about it. I think they’re waiting for the right opportunity and the right platform.
For us, we want to invest in culture and we want culture to sit at the ownership table, so it’s a true partnership. Because I want to buy NFTs, pictures, highlights, photos, trading cards knowing they’re coming from the players, or from someone who’s actually a part of it, right?
As opposed to just uploading my photos to Instagram and waiting 10 years to find out if I’m ever going to get paid for content that isn’t mine anymore.
You’ve commented on utility tokens in the past and how you see them as different from social tokens. Can you decipher it?
Oh, man, I’ll give you all the sauce. So there are two use cases of tokens I believe. For us, from the SLiC side, social tokens allow you to interact socially with talent, content and experiences, things like that. You can get benefits, you know what I mean? You can earn and win auditions, tryouts and stuff like that. Since you are a participant, you probably don’t own the resources, do you? You may not have the financial resources but you do have talent, and there are ways to get to know people socially through social media and enjoy their work. So I believe social tokens let you into the community.
The utility token is your membership, right? It means that you are part of something. You can bid on something. You can use your tokens to participate in various things. You can use your token to support the project. So really, when you think about utility, you think about participation.
Some people buy tokens to store them, right? Some people buy tokens to use them. And some people buy tokens because they want to see what happens. So for us, when we started working on our token structure, it was more about utility.
What are your predictions for how athletes will use the tokens? Do you think it will be widely used?
Well, if I predict SLiC and if I predict the future, I believe if tokens are the utility, and if we look at the evolution of the internet, if we look at the evolution of blog sites or fan pages or Instagram or followers, we’re communal.
Our greatest responsibility as athletes is, in no particular order, to our families, the game, our team, the city, and then the fans. And you know that it is the fans who make you feel good about your work. So I feel that athletes have the ability to create infrastructure and systems through SLiC, right?, where they can interact with their fans through their tokens.
So is this type of token a future vertical for SLiC?
That’s the future of SLiC. It’s also SLiC now, you know what I mean?
Think about the New Age athlete. Back then, when I was doing beats and rapping, you couldn’t put out an album as a basketball player. Now, 20 different athletes put out albums and their fans support them.
And as a human [athletes who are also entertainers] start realizing, “I have to align myself with the community,” we want to be that goal.
Let me try to synthesize this. You point to an important cultural trend, that over the last 10 or 20 years, athletes now have the ability, agency, and tools to be creators in many different aspects of their lives.
Even if crypto didn’t exist, it’s already happening in a wider trend. And can Web3 help accelerate this trend by removing the friction from systems and empowering them to have true ownership and engagement with their communities? And SLiC can help with this. am i warm?
Very. I like the way you say it. I’m glad this was recorded. [Both laugh.]
Before we finish, what other projects are you excited about?
I’d say on the gaming side, the metaverse. We have a project, “History of the Game”, where our goal is to build a digital Hall of Fame of storytelling for basketball. We have a mini documentary, and you can walk around and watch this documentary on the digital tunnel.
Do you want me to show you? I can show you?
[Over our Zoom, using his phone, Baron Davis then gives me a sneak peak of a mini-documentary of LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the all-time scoring record. Davis directed it. He explains that it’s just a rough cut. It’s an immersive doc that you watch as you walk through a Hall of Fame-esque tunnel, with videos playing on both sides of you.]
It will eventually live in the metaverse we are building. That’s where we’ll save the work we’ve done. And now we can create NFTs in our metaverse. So SLiC, as a production entity, created these assets, and these storytelling assets can now be transferred to our museum. We may host award shows, concerts or special storytelling in a virtual environment.
Congratulations on this, and good luck to you and SLiC.
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