Happy Monday Elrond Fam,
We are thrilled to start off The Faceless Many Week! Again, we want to thank Evan Mann (@Evan_Mann) for sitting down with us for such an awesome interview. Each day we plan to give you segments of our discussion that we broke out into a few different themes. Today, we want to introduce you to the team and their backstory to help with your DYOR. It is so important to look into the people behind the projects you are thinking of investing your precious EGLD in, so we hope this will be a great start to learning about TFM.
Randy: Tell us about the team and how you came together.
Evan: “Mack Lorden, the Oracle, founded Faceless Crypto and launched it as a discord community shortly after he started posting educational content on TikTok. He wanted to do more in the crypto space, but in his circle, he was the person who knew the most about it. So, to try and build a network of others, he started posting. He created the discord, and I know you know a lot of discord communities are “Wen Lambo?” and “Wen Moon?” - lots of shills. They’re not very safe nor informative and educational.
Faceless Crypto, I think because of Mack’s ethos, attracted a real quality type of individual. Lots of curiosity, many diverse interests. And, after Faceless Crypto had been rolling for a while, myself and the other TFM co-founders were in the chat, and Mack said “Hey, I'm looking for help to build this thing out and take it to the next level.”
The fellows, who became the architects, are the ones who answered the call. It was six of us together at first. And we started talking about what the future could look like. We all had a passion for always-free education and believed that the narrative of our space - of get rich quick, of fast money - was unhelpful and missed the big picture. In five years, most crypto will have very little to do with currency. Most NFTs will have little to do with art. The way most smartphones have little to do with making phone calls. So, as we talked about how to build this thing, an NFT launch was the natural first step to help us give people buy-in, to raise capital for a treasury, and really start hitting the ground hard to bring some of these other things to fruition.”
Randy: Is everyone based in the U.S. or are you all over the place?
Evan: “We have a global team. There are ten architects and builders - that's what we call our core contributors and co-founders. Our artist for the Faceless Many, Carlos, is a nomad. He's primarily based in London, but lives and travels all over. We have colleagues in Australia, colleagues scattered across the United States, South Africa, and we have community members from all over the world, but most of our core team is located in the U.S.”
Randy: Let’s talk about the artist; Carlos. The art is amazing, how did that come about?
Evan: “This is a wild story. So, we're in the Faceless Crypto discord, and Mack had put out this call for help to build the future and was asking for artists. He wanted to know who was in our community that had an art project and was interested in maybe doing an NFT. Carlos, who goes professionally by the moniker QSTOM, shared some art that he had done, which was frankly phenomenal. Super detailed digital stuff, and very humbly was like, “I don't know much about NFTs, I'm an artist in the digital medium.” Mack was blown away by his art and decided to get to know him better. He found out that Carlos was a 20+ year veteran of the digital art and graphic design industry. He's an Academy Award winner. He's an Emmy Award winner. He's worked on Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Mirror; he's done campaigns for companies like Nike, Chanel, BMW and is near ubiquitous in the digital art graphic design space. And so, here he was just kind of humbly like, “I don't know what's going on, might do an NFT, felt cute, might delete later or whatever.” Haha.
So, Mack told him about the vision of Faceless Crypto - to lead the Financial Revolution and empower the Faceless Many - and Carlos was like, “Well, let me noodle around with that and see what I come up with.” He created this graphic that was this dark, comic book/graphic novel sort of character, with these purples and blues holding this sword above his head, in this sort of meta-universe, cosmic background. It looked as if he had just slashed it down across this globe in the foreground, which was split in half with cryptocurrency on one side and fiat money on the other.
And he said, “what do you think about this?” And it was basically a final product, and it was SO COOL and detailed and nuanced. You know a lot of these NFTs are like 8-bit, and pixelated, which is a style, but you know this master craftsman just noodled this thing together for us, which before we even had a story, told this story.
I can remember in one of our earliest meetings we were looking at this art. We decided we were going to do an NFT collection and loved the concept, but what was the story going to be? And we were talking about the mission of Faceless Crypto and I remember saying, “Well, that's the collection right there. The Faceless men. The collection should tell the story of these people, and it should tell the story of how they are rising up to rewrite their financial future. They have come to divide the earth with the light of this new technology and bringing that light to the regular people will make it whole again. It will make it new. It will make it better than it was before.” And, that's the story right there.”
Randy: Why Elrond?
Evan: "Well, the first reason we were interested in Elrond is because Mack is the Oracle, and has been hip to Elrond for years. All of us, to different extents, are bullish on the Elrond network. We love the products they’ve built. We think the Maiar wallet is a best-in-class user experience. We see how much that team hustles, how responsive they are to their community. We loved that it was a carbon neutral blockchain, and that it was carbon neutral in a non-greenwashing way. It wasn't, like, carbon credits that just replaced the harm. Many people reading your article may or may not know that most transactions on the Elrond blockchain consume about half the energy of a Google search. Super bullish!
It’s very fast and cheap; less than a penny for a transaction cost. And we liked the idea of helping to build out the future of the ecosystem, establishing ourselves as a first-mover in the Elrond NFT space. We saw it had a lot of potential as we were doing our due diligence, exploring several blockchains for The Faceless Many. We were also looking at Polygon and Immutable X for some of these same reasons. Fast, scalable, layer 2's on Ethereum. We liked that security while avoiding the gas. But ultimately, as we were sourcing development talent, we decided on Elrond. We encountered some obstacles, some difficulties (and I'm happy to talk more about that, too, because it might be helpful) but, since starting, we have seen that it's even more flexible than we initially thought, in terms of programmability.
And let me add this, too: we were really bullish on the future of $EGLD as the first layer token of Elrond. We think it's super undervalued, looking at the market cap, and it made sense to work on a blockchain where, in the future, we had reason to believe our investments (and our NFTs) would go up in value--good for us and good for our holders.
So, we're bullish on Elrond but, I want to clarify, I'm not really a speculator. If all my investments went to zero, I would still be a wealthy man for the things that I have built; my network, my products, my platform, my outlook, in ways that have nothing to do with money.”
-Randy