Standing Out In Crypto Today with Arsenal NFT Owne

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. And today I am joined by Cap, the project owner of Arsenal. How's it going Cap? I'm good man, thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm excited to get into the realm of NFTs with you because I have been bullish on NFTs for a very long time. I've

been playing with them since 2017 with crypto kitties. So I'm really eager to learn more about Arsenal. But before we get into it, let's hear your origin story. What's your background? How'd you get into this whole space? Well, I'm an IT guy by trade. I've been a network engineer for probably about the past 10 years. I've been into crypto since 2009. I remember by Bitcoin at

like 200. And it just seemed like the next logical evolution for me. See, NSL Amatec guy. Something like this is brand new to the space. It's pretty much a revolution in currency and technology as far as I'm concerned. So it definitely appealed to me and captivated me. So it was only natural that I gravitated toward it. So what was it that kind of kicked off Arsenal

and can you walk us through everything that you're trying to accomplish with it? Well, I've been in DeFi since probably about 2018 since its inception. And I've watched it grow to the monster that it is now. But I feel like in the space itself, there's a lot of things out there. There's a lot of people doing cool things. But there's still a lot of people doing

the same old stuff. The same old rebases and high APYs. I mean, to me, that stuff is just Ponzi base. You're just trading money back and forth between all the members that have put their money in. There's no real sustainability in any of that stuff. I was a part of quite a few platforms. And I think what really got me into starting my own project was

losing $80,000 at the start of the year. So I got a lot of money. I got a rug poll. I don't know if you heard about Arbick's finance. I'm tired about them. Well, I remember just during the whole sort of craziness of 2021 and 2022, there was rugs everywhere. Oh, terrible. Yeah. Terrible. I mean, I could name five or six off the top of my head,

dude. It was, it's bad. But I think that was the turning point for me where I realized, this is ridiculous. As big as the space is, it kind of is the wild, wild west yet. You know, you have all these developers that are anonymous and they hide behind the discord. Nobody really shows their face. And as far as I'm concerned, the people that have showed their

faces, we're supposed to be trusted people in the space. And they end up doing a lot of damage as well. I'm not going to name drop, but I'm sure we can all figure it out. So, you know, it was at that point that if you're going to create a new project, you're going to have to do a new project. A project that the revenue needs to

come from the outside. If you're just trading money between each other, then it's Ponzi based. It's not sustainable. You're going to have to bring new people in in order to the fuel the environment consistently for everybody. So I created this project, kind of in the lines of what other projects do. A lot of these projects like Olympus Dow and you know, time Wonderland, they've amassed a

treasury. But they're not going to be a lot of damage. They don't really do anything with it. Like they have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting there. To me, that's money that could be used to build other DeFi applications and products and share the money with your community because they're the ones that got you to where you are. And to me, the rewards, you know, some

of these people put in like myself that I lost, put in chunks of money. And then these sites only offer you like, you know, 15% or 20% APY. If you stake your token, meanwhile, they have hundreds of millions of dollars just sitting there. So the goal of my project was, you know, via the bonding app to a mass, a treasury and take that money and build

other DeFi products that create revenue from outside of the ecosystem and then pay back in stable coins to the token holders based on the percentage of the circulating supply that they're holding. So can you walk me through the, just so I can wrap my head around it, the bonding app because I'm familiar with bonding curves and things like that. Could you walk me through what exactly

you're referring to when you say like the bonding app? It's basically you buy tokens are native token a NFT at a discount. Right away. And the way our bonding app is set up 10% goes to project fees to cover the costs for our servers and our databases and all sorts of fun stuff. We have run in the background. And then 20% of that goes to purchasing

an NFT at market price. And the other 70% goes into what we call the Warchest, which basically is the community vessel for the funds that are going to be used to build community. And then the applications and other DeFi apps. And when I was reading into it, I saw the spoils of war was like the kind of concept around the smart contract. Right. Yeah. So I

mean, it's kind of in line with the whole war theme we got going on. You know, the name Arsenal. It wasn't picked because of the football team or soccer. It was picked more so as Arsenal, like something in our toolbox. You know, we plan to have a whole bunch of things at our disposable. That's going to make money for the community. So that's more of where

the thought process was. But the spoils of war. I think it's pretty unique. There isn't any other projects out there doing that right now. I don't know if you saw the graph on the page, but the spoils of war. It calculates over a 30 day period based on your holdings. So there's two air drops. The first air drop is what your percentage of holdings is based

on that 30 days against circulate. So for example, let's say we have apps that generate revenue that total $5,000 for 30 days. If you're holding 50% of the circulating supply, then you're entitled to 50% of the spoils of war. So you would get an air drop for $2,500. And then the second air drop is basically a combination of the A&FT tokens in the liquidity. The 30

pool and our bonding contract, because they're part of the overall A&FT contract and rewards are to be paid out to the bonding pool and the liquidity pool. But if that was the case, nobody would be there to claim it. So we've redirected the payouts for both of those as a second air drop to be split evenly amongst all holders. Got it. I think I'm confusing. No,

I get it. I think that the terminology between all these different models is interchangeable, like a lot of air drop, the word air drop, a lot of people associate that as a jumpstart to kick off a project, whereas this is more of a distribution in terms of how I'm viewing it. But from the high level, this is a bonding app that people can get involved in.

And then you, you know, I think that's a good thing. And the team are making investments in NFT-centric kind of DeFi apps out there that are external to that bonding app, right? And then profits from whether they're staking or I guess a follow-up question is what apps and what NFT-centric applications are you are being invested in? So I have a slew of ideas for NFT-centric applications.

I'm not really telling anybody what they are because I think they're going to go over really well and nobody's doing it. So I don't want to, I don't want to give up my thunder and playing these pretty close to the chest. But I'll just say that right now, NFTs are only scratching the surface of what they're capable of. I think so many people are just focused

solely on the art and the music, which I also think is, I think that's a big deal also. To artists and producers to be able to mint their own music and get a fair portion of what their collections are worth. But I think NFTs are capable of a lot more. And that's kind of where some of my other ideas focus on that nobody's doing right now.

So I can't really divulge that. I don't want anybody to beat me to it, you know? Got it, got it. So the war cycles are 30 days. And that is the kind of cycle. So the cycle in which the spoils of war contracts release the distribution slash air drops to those. Got it. The other thing that's unique about our platform, once we build these applications, pretty

much all of them. If you can pick any DeFi application you want. But your payouts are based on the price of the token that's affiliated with the platform. So your perfect example. If you buy it, you can buy it. Buy a coin at $200. Who cares if you're making $300,000, $325,000, APY, you buy a coin at $200 and it goes down to $2.00. It's going to

take you that much longer to make your money back. Yet alone, make any money at all. So I think there's, I think people see these high numbers sometimes. I think, I don't know if, you know, we've become conditioned to see this as a fantastic thing. But when you sit down, you know, you're going to have a lot of money. And then think about all the possibilities

and all the things that could happen, especially if it's tied to the price of the token, you could be looking at some pretty disastrous things who cares what the APY is. So for our apps, we've, we're going to pay out and stable coins. Our A and F T token is more of an IOU. You know, you hold so many. You're owed so much in stable coins.

early days where everybody was trying to attract liquidity into their pools. And you had these just sort of crazy numbers that people were throwing out. But yet it wasn't really realized by a lot of newcomers that that was in the token itself. It wasn't in something like a stable coin or something that actually was a stable. It was something that could go to zero. And in

many cases, it did. And those APYs were irrelevant because they were just sort of making zero on top of zero over and over again. So, I think that's a good point. There's a lot of looking back on DeFi summer. I think that was in 2020 and just sort of the crazy, craziness that happened around that. I'd love to get your take on where we are today

in terms of the ecosystem as a whole. Like you, you've really designed some pretty clever tokenomics. I like the idea of the size of the bag that you hold is correlated to the amount of stable coins that you get from profits that are external. I think that that's a very clever model. But I want to know from your perspective, where the whole ecosystem is with DeFi.

I'll be honest. I don't really think it's any better than it was a couple of years ago. I think everybody's still stuck in that mentality about high APYs. And I think especially over the last year, probably, I think a lot of people with all the rug poles are disheartened. I think a lot of people got into a lot of these things. Because some of them were

still brand new at the start of the year. But these crazy APYs, there was a lot on the avalanche blockchain. There was quite a few on the avalanche blockchain. And it just seems like everybody did the copying and pace move and whole handful of them did the same thing. Just pretty much rugged everybody. So I think a lot of people are still kind of reeling from

that. I know I'm not happy about my losses. That's for sure. But, you know, I think there needs to be people out there that can show the community that there are people out there trying to do the right thing. There are people who have the best intentions. But I think it's going to take a little bit of time for people to vet those people and kind

of forget about all the other craziness that they have. That happened. So I just think the community in general has their guard up right now. Yeah. Yeah. So what stage is Arsenal at now? Like, what can you share with us in terms of status that the project is at? So we've been live for probably about like a month and a half. And the project is pretty

much ready to go. We're doing some advertising. And I know, cryptos are a very complicated thing. You know, I'm a tech guy. So I kind of, it's a little easier. For me, because I've been versed in tech for a decade now, but even still learning. There was, you know, some brand new terminology and brand new things that you had to get acclimated to. And I think

some of the mechanisms that are out there and my bonding app included. I think a lot of people are kind of, you know, they're intimidated by because it's it's something that's not used to often. It's something that's not seen too often. And right now, I think, you know, I think that's not the reason why I'm not happy about it. Now we're in the middle of developing

a fiat on ramp for people who want to participate in the ecosystem without actually learning crypto. We're currently working with our web developer to develop a new site. That's a companion site for Arsenal NFT to kind of on board people who just want to use fiat via PayPal to kind of get them in the ecosystem and active without actually getting their hands dirty. And do you

see this as something that, you know, because you have some pretty in depth tokenomics that I really enjoy by the way. Because I think you're playing around with tokenomics for quite some time. And I, I majored in economics and game theory. And I'm obsessed with a lot of the different attributes that projects come up with because it's just a beautiful example of, you know, some really,

really cool things that used to just exist in a textbook to me. So it's fun to see it in action. So, you know, I really like the idea of the sort of marginal contribution from each person that's holding percentages of these tokens. I guess what type of governance or what type of power could I have as, you know, obviously I get a percentage of the stablecoin

returns. But are you planning on doing any sort of, you know, governance, Dow, or a global component? Yeah. So we do have a snapshot.org page. And once we amass enough money to make our first project, the amount of tokens that you hold is also going to be used to vote. So we're not really going to touch anything in the war chest without permission from the community

because technically it's, it's their money. And my field, if we're using everybody else's money to build other applications and everybody should have their fair share and fair, their fair share, and what we do with it. So I definitely would like to utilize our snapshot.org page to give everybody a vote and a voice in the direction that the project takes. Yeah. So shifting gears. The finale question

is what you're excited about. So when you wake up in the morning and you're checking your phone, what is it outside of arsenal that gets you hyped? Anything technology. I mean, I'm a network engineer at a local resort here. And, I just, I don't know, man, there's just something about technology that appeals to me. I'd like to tell everyone I never work a day in my

life, because I go to work and I love what I do. And I play with servers and all sorts of switches and routers all day. I'm like a kidney candy store, man, I can't explain it. Nice. Getting excited about technology. And a bonus question for everybody that's listening. I do want to know, you know, where you see this going over the next years, three years, what

is the moon shot view of arsenal in your in your eyes? Like what, what could it become? I think it could be huge. I'm really excited right now about our fiat on ramp, because I've had so many people that, and I've been invested in crypto since 2009. And so many people come to me and they want to get involved, but they don't know where to go.

They don't know what to do. And I kind of show them and they're daunted and they're like, hey, if I give you money, can you just do it for me? So that's kind of where the idea of the fiat on ramp came from for people that want to get involved, but don't actually want to get their hands dirty. And I think it's an untapped market to

be honest with you. I think there's so many people who want to take a step in that direction. But, you know, just don't have the time to learn it, because there is a huge learning curve. Let's be honest, man, especially if you're not a tech savvy person, it's definitely going to take you some time to comprehend all the mechanics and everything behind it. So to me,

I think that could be our moonshot is onboarding people who want to get involved and only use fiat, but still hold crypto. Yeah. Well, sir, yeah, I mean, I had a lot of fun going through the tokenomics. I love talking about this, just because I'm, I went to permission list, the conference in West Palm Beach with DeFi. And it was really fascinating. Just learning all the

different things that people are building. And now is the time that the true builders, you know, are out in building. So it's fun to see these types of really detailed, you know, platforms that you're working on. Yeah. So those are all the questions that I have. Where can people go and learn about Arsenal? Arsenal. LNFT dot org. Every single link you'll need is on that home

page right there. Stop in the link for the discord is there. Drop in and say hello. There's a newsletter at the bottom. Sign up. Stay up to date. That's pretty much it, man. Awesome. Awesome. Well, wherever you guys are listening on iTunes or Spotify, definitely check all the links in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything that is Arsenal

cap. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.