🔮 Gazing into Zeneca's crystal ball (Issue #65)

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Former professional poker player turned NFT personality, advisor, and collector Zeneca needs little introduction. He’s staked a claim as one of the leading voices in Web3, and is now the co-host of one of the sector’s most popular Twitter Spaces, ZenDaily.

Our investment lead, Jadid Khan, met up with Zeneca in Dubai to talk about his circuitous route from poker to Web3, the long-term prospects of PFP projects, and the peculiar consolation that comes from losing money with your friends.

Jadid Khan: What prompted you to move to Dubai? I mean, aside from the weather, are there big incentives?

Zeneca: Yeah, the weather's great. But tax is the biggest incentive. Also, it’s a really big hub, because so many crypto and blockchain people have moved here. But there’s also activity around AI, NFT, AR, VR, anything tech, really. It’s a very tech-forward place. So, there’s this osmosis that happens. You can connect and network with a lot of talented people, which is amazing. Right now it’s a really amazing place to set up a business.

JK: Does the timezone mess with you? How do you structure your life to deal with it?

Z: I used to live in Germany — which is only three hours behind here — and I would basically be awake until 6 am every day and work a US-timezone schedule because a lot of my team is there. But then, to do that here, I’d have to be up until 9 am. And I was like, “I just don't want to do that.”

So I went in the other direction. I try and have a fairly regular sleep schedule and manage everything else around that. It's really difficult to schedule meetings with people in the US because it's literally 12 hours from here to the West Coast — or 11 with daylight savings now — which makes it tricky.

But it's also a silver lining because, though it sucks for real-time work, it cuts down the number of meetings I have, which lets me get more work done, and sort of forces me to be better at async work. I’m trying to look at it from that perspective.

How did you go from poker to crypto?

I was a professional poker player basically straight from high school. I did that for about 15 years, and I tried a couple of other things. I went to law school for a year and a half, and that just wasn't for me. And then, I got interested in crypto.

A lot of poker players make the transition to crypto. I think it's very organic and seamless. There are a lot of similarities between dealing with money and risk, and financial assets, and making and losing money in the swings and all of it.

In 2017, I got interested in Ethereum because the price was going crazy. I thought, “Let me get in and see if I can make some money.” And I did… and then I lost it because the bear market hit. I left because I lacked a deep conviction about the underlying technology. I looked at crypto as a way to make money rather than as the future of the world.

Then 2021 rolls around, and, again, the price is going up, and I'm starting to pay more attention… like most people do when prices go up. I started researching DeFi and NFTs, and once I got over thinking NFTs were a scam and I saw what you could build with DeFi, I was convinced it was going to change the world. In March 2021, I went all-in.

When did you realize you were good at poker?

So, the thing with poker is you don't have to be good. You just have to be better than the people you play against. I identified that pretty early on. In high school, I was 17 and playing with friends. And I'm obsessive. So when I find something I really like, I buy all the books and go online, read all the forums, and everything like that.

I just knew strategy, and I thought most of my friends didn't. So I was able to apply that and start winning. I went online and started playing freerolls, so I wasn’t even depositing anything. I loved it, and I was constantly coming out slightly ahead. That was when I was, like, “Alright, I've got a strategy and it works. Let me just deposit some real money.” And it just kept working. 

Then, you know, over time you obviously have to keep getting better, because everyone else gets better. But it's really just about staying a little bit ahead of the curve. I was never a world-class, amazing, great, brilliant poker player, but I was always good enough to stay ahead of the curve enough to make a living for 15 years.

Fifteen years is a long time…

If you'd asked me when I was 18 if I would still be playing 15 years later, I would probably have said no. I knew that I didn't want to be playing forever, but I didn't have a really good alternative path or way out. Towards the end of the last five or six years, I was pretty burned out and pretty over it. It was a grind.

I would play to make some money, but I was trying to find something else I could do. I went back to law school, and that was fun and interesting for six months, and then it got boring and hard… so I gave that up. But I really enjoyed my time there. And then crypto came along and I realized it was where I could spend all my time and energy.

What would your advice be to people that are coming into the space?

Some people want to make money. Some people want to be creators — whether as an artist, or a founder of a business or a project. Some people want to be part of a community. Some people want to just collect things. So it's basically impossible to give universal advice.

But the general advice I give is this: Be patient and don't rush into anything. Learn, see what's going on in the space, and come up with a plan and a strategy. No matter who you are, or what you want to do in the space, you're going to be well served if you have a strategy going into whatever it is you're doing.

Most people rush in, and they get Shiny Object Syndrome or FOMO. They see other people buying a thing, and think, “Oh, I'm just gonna buy that and see what happens.” I did the same. And what happens to everyone is they end up getting rugged, or they buy something that goes down in value, and they regret it later on.

If I could go back — and I think it’s true for most people — I would have preferred to have taken a step back and just been a bit more patient coming in, and then maybe made more sensible decisions.

There’s a sort of top 10 of projects now that seem to hold their positions, relatively speaking. Do you think any of them will stand the test of time?

I think 99.9999% of all projects will be irrelevant in a decade. In terms of the ones that we all know about — we'll call them blue chips — I don't really consider them to be blue chips. Because, you know, you don't think of blue chips losing 90% of their value in 12 months in the traditional market.

What people consider the blue chips, the projects that have been around for a year or two, maybe they raise funding, and they've got a good floor price. I think a lot of them will make it and be around. But that doesn't mean the floor price is going to be what it was at the peak of 2021 or anything like that.

If 10 years from now, Doodles, Moonbirds, or whatever, are still around, then they will have found a way to deliver and drive enough value back to their existing 10, 20, or 30K holders. But I think it's a difficult journey there; some will certainly fail. It’s an interesting business model because the holders, they don't own equity in the business or anything like that. They own a collectible.

So how do you drive value to that? It's through building a brand, building IP, and then hoping that people find those valuable, or finding a way to add utility. And that's also difficult to do. There were a lot of projects in 2021 that no one even talks about now. And I think the same will happen for the projects people are talking about now in five or 10 years’ time.

What do you tell project founders when they ask how to remain relevant?

It's all an attention war basically. If you want to be relevant today, then figuring out how to generate and maintain attention from the world is the most important thing.

But it's also okay not to have attention. If you have runway, and a plan, and a product to build, and you can be heads-down building, and then pop up in a year or two and be like, “Hey, we've built all this cool stuff.” That's one other avenue. It just depends on the route that you want to take.

But we live in an attention economy, and that’s true even if you take NFTs and crypto out of it. It's still attention driving everything. I think spending more time in marketing and community building, and understanding how the attention economy works is probably the number one piece of advice to founders.

How do you explain what ZenAcademy is to someone who’s never heard of it?

At its core, ZenAcademy is a content and media company, providing primarily educational content to teach people about crypto, NFTs, and now just technology in general. All the way from onboarding — What is an NFT? What is a blockchain? — to how to launch a project, network, find developers. It's really the whole journey.

And within that, we have a whole bunch of different stuff. We have email courses, video content courses, newsletters, podcasts, a Twitter Space… we do a lot. We have a PFP coming out, too. It's sort of like throwing all the spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. We’ve gone 1,000 feet wide and one inch deep.

Now it's about figuring out where we want to allocate the bulk of our time, energy, and resources over the next year. And I think it's like doubling and tripling down on content because I think it's our bread and butter.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the PFPs you’re putting out? And what are the ZenChests?

When we entered the space in November 2021, we did ERC-1155 tokens [called letters] because we were just a membership utility token. I didn't feel like we needed 720 tokens, and gas was really high at the time. So it was a way of optimizing. Then we realized over the course of the following year that there are some pretty significant restrictions with that token format and the way it interacts with apps and even marketplaces.

We wanted to move from that to an ERC-721. We also knew we wanted to do a PFP project. We were thinking about how we could structure it in a way where we get from a letter to the PFP. There were so many different options, but we came up with this model where you can burn your letter to receive a ZenChest, which is effectively an unrevealed PFP.

It’s like a Clone X Vial or a Renga Black Box. It could have a really rare 1/1 PFP in it. It could have a generic, standard, common PFP in it. That's the role of the ZenChest: it’s the unrevealed PFP 721 token. When the PFPs come out, people will have the option to burn and get a PFP, otherwise, they keep the chest.

That’ll create some fun supply dynamics where the more people burn, the more PFPs there are, but the fewer chests there are. And then maybe there’ll be some 1/1s that haven't been revealed yet, and people will start doing some fun game theory and math and being like, “Well, okay, I want to open another one.” It’s that fun, pack-opening experience.

Is the PFP intended to serve as an onboarding drive? Are you trying to make it easy to approach for people who’re new to the space?

The PFP hasn’t been designed for beginners and onboarding. For that, we launched a new NFT called Student IDs. They’re free NFTs, unlimited supply, open forever, soulbound — so you can't transfer them or trade them. They're purely designed to be a person's first NFT.

You mint one, and then you're in the ecosystem, you can join the Discord, you can verify you have a ZenAcademy NFT. They’re dynamic as well. Each one has a unique number on it. And we'll be able to update them with Badges, you can put a PFP in there, and all sorts of stuff. So that's our onboarding, top-of-funnel mechanism, and just getting as many people an NFT as possible.

I see ZenAcademy as a three-tier system. We have the beginners and onboarding NFTs in the Student IDs. Then we have the PFP as the intermediate offering for more advanced participants — especially because a lot of them have been in the space for 18 months now, so they're no longer beginners.

Then we have The 333 Club, which is this small, exclusive community of builders and founders and people more serious about the space who want to be in that tight-knit group.

What does it take to succeed in the Web3 and crypto space?

I think of it similarly to how I think about poker. People would always ask me, “How smart do you have to be to win at poker?” But it's not about intelligence — there are people way smarter than me that just could not make it.

It's about having a special set of personality traits. It's temperament. It's understanding psychology. It's keeping your cool. It's resilience and tenacity and all of that. I think it's very similar for crypto. If you have those things and can stick it through, you're probably going to make it and be part of something really amazing. And, if not, then, in five or 10 years, when it's more mainstream, everyone will come flooding back, and you might’ve missed big opportunities.

Right now, a lot of projects and companies are just in survival mode, trying to wait things out. I’m optimistic, though. There’s so much happening, and infrastructure is improving so much that it’s hard to imagine things not turning around. I think there’s also been a change in the public mindset about crypto and Web3. It’s been negative for a long time, but I think it’s slowly shifting.

Big companies are getting involved, and people working at them are starting to get interested in participating in their Web3 efforts. That’s really interesting to me.

What’s the best thing about the Web3 space for you?

I’ve made more friends in the last two years than I did in the 10 years prior. Nothing ties people together more than making a bunch of money together or losing a bunch of money together.

It hurts less if you lose a bunch of money if everyone else around you is also losing a bunch of money. If you’re a group of friends who all bought the same rug pull you can all laugh about it. But if you did it alone, you’re like, “I’m such an idiot! How could I do that?”

That’s the joke, right? Misery loves company.

You can find Zeneca on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter, Letters from Zeneca.

You can find Jadid Khan on Twitter.

This week’s newsletter was edited by Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson.

Patrick Lawler designed this week’s Badge.

Metaversal Badges unlock unique experiences and opportunities for bold Metaversalists. More Badges mean more chances to reap the rewards. Join our growing community and stand a chance to be rewarded in unexpected ways.