Oort Digital Presents Web3 Builders:
Creative Organization DAO
Welcome to another edition of “Oort Digital Hero Stories.”
This feature showcases people building innovative services, platforms, and products in the web3 space.
Last night, Josh Roybal, the Head of Marketing at Oort Digital, had a call with Gawain Bracy, the Founder of Creative Organization DAO. The Creative Organization Dao is a gamified blockchain platform for independent creators, fans, and brands to collaborate directly and earn rewards using play-to-earn (P2E) DeFi incentives.
Creative Organization DAO believes in the future of the creator economy and is introducing a platform to launch an asset NFT for creators and brands to incentivize NFTs.
Gawain Bracy is an African American and a creative smart contract developer. He is the blockchain innovator at Urban Uprise Crew, a community of international artists and musicians who have united to form an exclusive club of creatives, influencers, and collectors.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Hello, good evening from me, and good morning on your side.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Hey, how’s it going?
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Well, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I really love what you guys have created and been working on. So I think it’s an awesome thing to share with other people who are also building, and I don’t know. If you notice, I have a little AI in there. That’s going to transcribe everything for us. Okay. And, you know, since we all kind of come from different backgrounds, I also think that’s one of the cool things you know, like if you ask different lawyers, you know, what’s your story to become a lawyer? They’re all like Well, we went to law school, you know, and with Web3, everybody got here in a completely different way, and I always think that’s really, really interesting. So I would love to hear how you ended up where you are now. How did you transition from what you were doing before into this space?
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see, how do I start? But basically, I think I should start maybe with my education, so I went to college, right? I mean, I could pull it back a little bit further because it matches. So growing up, I was always in music classes, and I learned how to play the piano. I had a private piano teacher, and I went to schools for the arts. So in those art schools, I was exposed to all the various arts, even though I was there for the music. I was gifted in music, so I got to experiment with drama. Maybe the only thing I experimented with was dance because I wasn’t really into it, but I definitely dove into drama with my friends, and as far as musically, you know, I played in an orchestra. I played the double bass. I learned that instrument in addition to the piano, and, you know, I got to play for, like, a local symphony orchestra, and I played for, like, the University of Florida. It was like an all-bass orchestra, which is really cool. And so we all learned a couple of songs, did a concert for the University of Florida, with all the bases covered, and also got a jazz band. I played in a jazz band. I was in middle school at the time, so I was really young.
So, jazz band, I got a tour to Montreal, where they have a jazz festival, and I played the double bass there and at the jazz festival, and later, you know, my music took me to I end up missing around My Space days. I got picked up and moved out to Los Angelus Hollywood and worked with like Disney. You know, like singers and kids or whatever. What do all these various Disney shows and stuff and produced music for a lot of these kids and did stuff like different movies and things that Disney was releasing and then I moved into like Interscope and did Music for them and met Dr Dre and like, William and dead mouse and all these different people. And, yes, Jay Z and Beyonce. So, it was really a great journey for me creatively. You know, and getting my feet wet into the industry but I quickly realized how unfair the industry was, how dark the industry was, what type of underlying personalities helped run the industry. You know, I mean, it looks great on TV, but everything behind the scenes is very gray and dark. So, I actually decided that you know, I wanted to do something to help the industry by alleviating a lot of the gatekeepers.
There’s a lot of sexuality, like sexual harassment, that goes on. There’s you know, from both parties, male and female. It’s just a lot of this is a lot of things that just, stifle the creative process. So, I said I had an idea of okay, I’m going to try my hardest, you know, after I ended up leaving Interscope because I just got tired of getting screwed a couple of times as a music producer and people fingering pocketing money, like things that were due to me. So, I decided to start my own company as an independent label, and I ended up signing independent artists.
I was in LA, so I was like, “It can be hard to find artists.” Alright, cool. Let me just, you know, find someone who I can just vibe with and do our thing with. And I ended up finding a Middle Eastern artist. She was signed with the dream at one point, and, you know, she had her story, and I was like, “This is exactly what I’m trying to stop.” You know, this is ridiculous. Like, why do you have to have a relationship to get the money, and then once you’re in a relationship, if the relationship doesn’t work out, you don’t get the money because the relationship didn’t work out? It doesn’t make any sense. So, we started that product. I mean about that project, and we did very well. I kind of thought it, I was like “look, you’re Middle Eastern, right? She was from Kurdistan. I was like, “You’re from Kurdistan; your background doesn’t even equate to sexism and all that stuff.” It doesn’t even make sense to me. Like, why even go down that route? And I was like, “Let’s utilize your background,” and let’s make that unique. And play on that because that’s who you are. So, we took that we made like our own sound, we kind of like took elements of like other like Moon baton and different electronic type of rhythms and things and we created our own sound. And this girl’s first concert in the Middle East was over 3 million people, including kids on the power lines and stuff. It was crazy. But that showed me something that gave me, you know, a vision to say, “Okay, you can do things differently.” It’s possible; you just have to do it differently. And I was then put on a course to figure out how I could permanently find a way to change the industry. I knew it was going to take time to do it, but at least I can make some sort of platform that can help facilitate that to the point where you don’t need a deal at all. You can literally, you know, make the compensation that you want to make as a creative. And then we’ll also you know, we’ll also you know, we have the tools that allow you to invest that that compensation that you’ve made creatively through like you know, obviously like defy and these different things. So, my background as an engineer, as a developer, you know, I went to school for that and college. I’ve developed for 10 years in corporate, and for the last three years, I’ve been in the blockchain. So that’s kind of like, kind of historical data of how I got around here into this space
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Yeah. Wow. Very cool story. I love what you’re saying. I went to this little jazz festival in Montreal. Montreal Jazz Festival. That’s like the most famous jazz. Yeah, and when work encourages us to try to change the system, you know, I lived in LA for 15 years and was also in the music business. And it seems like everybody has this fatalistic approach; you know, they’re just like, “Oh, that’s the music business.” That’s the way it is. But it’s awesome that you’re like, “Well, no, it doesn’t have to be that way.” You know, I don’t I’ve never met anybody that said, you know, so, so Bravo. So that brought you to a new company. And is that what you are into? Or where do you work?
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
So yeah, that brought me to the catering of independence. So I started that indie label. And then that artist I ended up getting signed by Sony in Germany. Yeah, Sony Germany. So, that’s what happened. And now she’s still making great music to this day. And now my focus is on our new product, which is a Creative Organization DAO. And what we are is a DAO that builds platforms for creators to flourish using Web3 technologies. So you know, this month is a very unique month for us because we just completed quite a few milestones over the last three years of building and, you know, research and development and everything that goes into that. And we have three platforms. That we’re going to launch one involves, well, our overall scope of bringing creators, fans, and brands together on one platform.
We figured out that in order to really bring creative standards and brands together on one platform, it’s going to need a couple of different things to make it work. And in order to do that, we created one platform for video content. So I guess, in a sense, it’s almost like our own network for creators. I guess that’s the best way to explain it overall. So it’s all governed by creators; we use Snapshot, PO apps, NFTs, and whatever to handle the governance and things that go on within the creative community.
And then, we have the actual platforms where you can curate they say. Alright, we’ll take the first platform I mentioned. We call it creative TV, and it is a streaming platform. And let’s say we have a list of shows that various creators may have made, or pilots, or whatever you may want to call it, and we as a community can say, “Hey, I really like this show,” and we do some voting. We do votes through that governance system using snapshots and then we broadcast like we showcase those selected shows or content on the homepage, which the platform is actually token gated, so you can’t see the other you know, the other content users or creators unless you have, you know, the NF T to get access to the additional resources, but everything else is basically curated through the community on the first page.
So everything from you know, we’ll have a feature video so like, let’s say there may be a brand or whatever they may be us as a community can charge that revenue. And you know, and then you also vote as to what brand would fill that slot, and then that revenue would be distributed into the community. So we’re basically building our own distribution pipelines. We have a metaverse; we partnered up with Stageverse, so we’re creating content within those. We have a new podcast on Spotify that ties all those differences together; it’s really another outlet. So we’re using, like, a show that’s coming out this month within our metaverse. So we have a video podcast and Spotify that we’re using as a platform for our entire community to build out into, you know, some form of entertainment. So kind of like I envision it kind of like an MTV sort, right? So, there’s going to be various content on this podcast, but it’s sporadic like you have commercials in between that we made.
As you know, we have a couple of different NFT collections, like the Urban Uprise Crew. We just launched a nouns project called Creative Kids; we’re partnered up with T-Mobile, and we’re giving devices to underserved children around the world to preload with creative applications to help them flourish in the creative space. Once our products come out, once we get done with Beta, we’d like to use creative tools preloaded onto those devices. So, we’re just building like that network of effect to have for creators with AI and all these different things going on left and right I think it’d be great to have somewhat of a sovereign nation for creators to creatively, you know, do human work, right? So that’s kind of the gist of what it is that we’re building.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Yeah, well, and you’re using Web3 the right way. You know, I see a lot of brands or a lot of people who want to use the word “Web3” for marketing, to show that they are cool, or to show that they are early adopters. But I’m actually going to use it as an example because a lot of people talk to me about this. You’re using it, and you’re actually kind of one-upping YouTube because, you know, with YouTube, a lot of crappy content goes out until the algorithm learns that it’s crappy, you know, and then it downgrades it and doesn’t show it to anybody anymore. But you guys use your community to be that first filter before it even gets on the front page or gets out there to the public, which is awesome. It’s like pre-curation, so nobody gets that bad experience to begin with to downvote because the community has already done that for you. Yeah!
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, I agree. Like I mentioned earlier, in my space days and things, that’s kind of how I got into, like, moving out to LA and stuff. Well, a lot of people in my generation still use YouTube to the fullest extent. I’ve never really used it to its fullest extent. even my wife, right? My wife loves YouTube; she watches things on YouTube, unlike me, who’ll go on HBO Max. So I was also that kid who, on Saturdays, used to love to wake up in the morning and watch TV, right? And we don’t have that anymore. And you know, those things. I really learned to appreciate how content is consumed these days. Because now I look at the younger generations, as they all have iPads or iPhones and whatnot, and they’re swiping through all kinds of content. Like it’s insane like I see my little cousins, like, literally do y’all like elementary school, and they’re swiping through TikTok, and I’m hearing all sorts of things that I don’t think they should really be even, you know, engaged into at all. So it’s very interesting how, even in that perspective, how, you know, basically technology, or not even technology; content that’s on the technology we use. It’s kind of like raising our children, and parents are not monitoring as much as they used to. They’re not getting that alert: “It’s 9 o’clock; do you know where your children are?” We are not getting that anymore. and it’s kind of strange. So we with Creative Kids and another thing that we kind of want to, you know, and back to your point with that curation, right?
That initial showcase page We also have a page for kids where we’re utilizing the nouns project and using, you know, building out content there where we’re doing, like, colouring books, or like we’re creating, we’d like to create, you know, shows and things like that. The kind of learning shows and things so we can teach kids and give them hopefully build out additional content to give them through their course of growing and also understanding even what Web3 is. So you know, if we can figure out how to scale that even the young age to explain what web three is by the time they’re really using it, which by then, maybe like their lunch money, maybe in crypto who knows. But by the time they start using it, they already understand and have a better understanding as you know, what’s going on
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital),
so yeah, and in life that’ll give them an edge; I think we covered that early. connected to it like that.
Gawain Bracy (Urban Uprise Crew)
I didn’t know as much financial stuff as I do now because of the blockchain, definitely. Right.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital),
It makes it more fun to learn. Absolutely. It’s not like your dad’s boring.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, even I mean, just even like understanding of NF T’s Right? like just understanding how. What’s an asset? Like, some people may not have ever really well, I mean, I’m an African American, like, financial literacy isn’t something that’s taught to us in the beginning, I learned from my own, like research and discovery. And, you know, I really, I think that kind of stuff. And that’s just from my own experience; I’m not saying that anyone from anywhere else may have had this experience.
But I think that it really changes the landscape of things that we can do financially once more people understand the literacy behind it because I mean, I can tell you some of the cool things that we’ve built within platforms but it wouldn’t make any sense if you don’t understand how an underlying works like Flash loans and things like this, that have you have to understand like the underlying to get to some of the deeper understandings and then those are those things that maybe we all as a community in Web3 can figure out how to make that more digestible, you know, throughout that morning.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital),
Yeah, I think it’s it, you know, and I see it happening every day, just a little, little by little, you know, I’ll see something that even a year ago was really clunky and didn’t work. Right. And somebody’s fixed it, and it’s a better user interface. Now, for example, I really love that we’re getting there. And at the same time, I’m the Head of Marketing for Oort Digital, which is a utility platform. You know, that allows any project to jump in and add utilities and add gamification, puzzles, and, you know, just things to create more engagement.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, so that you do puzzles for driving engagement? Do you also, because I’ve also heard of this same use case for mitigating? Like bots and things?
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
as well? Yeah. Well, it’s not that. it’s basically like let’s say you create a project and you have some fun things for the community to do or you have your roadmap. Well, a lot of projects run into the same problem, which is that eventually you kind of run out of things to do, you know, and community is kind of like watering a plant or something; you know, you have to keep watering it for it to grow. And you have to always be thinking of something new and coming up with something interesting. And a lot of projects have trouble with this.
And now with all these new brands coming into the space, they’re trying to move their membership loyalty programs to use NFTs as that, but they run into the same problem too. You know, it’s easy in the beginning, Do some rewards, and do some giveaways. But how are you going to keep those people engaged for a year, or two years, or three years? And your customers—you really want a customer for life, right? That’s when you’ve done it perfectly. And so, what we do is provide these tools so that you could keep your customers engaged and coming back and thinking about your brand and interacting with it in a way without sales pressure in a way where they just feel valuable. I also like what you’re doing with the DAO.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, that’s really cool. I think that’s very important. because you’re right. Keeping the consumer engaged, is very important to any company, and I think even, you know in our case, right, well, we’re looking we’re our goal was to solve for, you know, software, the creator ultimately, but also as a result, it solves for the brands and the fans too, which are also consumers. So, I guess so like, I’ll walk through kind of like a flow and how our platform kind of functions.
So, as mentioned, we have a couple of platforms that we’re going to release, but our core platform doesn’t really have a unique or special name or anything for it yet; it’s just the creative platform for now because it was the initial one we started with, and it’s basically like a brand can submit for an NFT campaign. So let’s say you know, you have a need for maybe you have a care.
We’ll leave it general, but let’s just say we have a character, a model, a product, or whatever, and we want to make it into an NFT, a digital asset, right? some sort of NFTs, whatever. And in order to get that, we submit this campaign on-chain, and the creators can then see that this campaign is available to submit. We were using Loom video or whatever it is to give us a visual, but kind of like a Loom video, you get five minutes and you can, you know, share your screen and the brand can tell us about what it is that they want. And then the creator can watch that video back and see what it is they’re looking for. Then they can submit to that campaign. And it then votes those submissions within the governance into a top-10 list of the governance, using the snapshot, PO apps, and things like that. So in order to get a PO App, if you’re familiar with PO Apps, it’s like the proof of attendance protocol, meaning that you may have attended something or been a part of this unique event in order to receive this PO App.
So once you receive a PO app, you can now vote on Snapshot with that PO app. We wrote a little strategy that allows you to vote on governance on Snapshot. And then once you vote, you then receive a gift, and you can claim a new PO App. So you know we’re following. We’re following the progress of this campaign. And now you have that new PO app, in addition to the PO app you had in your wallet to vote with, so you got like two badges. Let’s say you have two badges in your wallet now. So now that the top 10 list that’s now curated of different creators is then chosen by the brand and the winner there could be actually a top that could be a couple, it could be a one, two, and third place or whatever.
But whoever the winners are there then you know the distribution of funds is then sent to them through the brand. And then the fans who voted for those winners, the actual winners of the campaign, get sent into a chain-link raffle where they’re eligible to actually win a free NFT as a result. So now the brand and the creator can tap back into these new consumers that were a part of this campaign. And you know, go from there, right leverage that unique relationship over time.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Awesome. Yeah. I can envision it. I’d love to take a look at the demo or see what you guys have going on sometimes, and how I can better understand, as an artist, how the platform works and how a member of the governance is. Where does an investor come into play? Or how does that work? Like, let’s say I just want it to be; I want it to support the network. Is there an NFT I can buy, or how does that work?
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Definitely, when it comes to actually supporting the network. Even as an initial investor, we have different ways you can help support the network. So, as I mentioned earlier, we have NFTs. As you mentioned, we have announced a project called “Creative Kids,” which is the gateway. We have the Urban Uprise Crew, which is another collection that is a gateway. One is on Polygon, and the other is on Ethereum. And, you know, by choosing one of those NFTs, you kind of feed into our ecosystem. And we have the membership passes to give you access to our platforms. So those NFTs grant you a free membership pass.
There are certain pages you can’t access because they are token-gated, so you’d need to have that NF T to see certain pages. Now. Going back to your investor role: That’s one way of starting the investment process. Another way is we also are a DAO. So, we have a DAO where you can actually invest with ERC-20 tokens. I think we take various ones, but we’re on Polygon, so anything that’s on Polygon will walk you through that, and you can actually invest things like Matic or USDC or DAI or whatever into our DAO. And we actually have shares as a result that are given to you as an investor. So that’s another way you know, you can get involved as an investor.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Awesome! I’ll definitely check that out. You know, I was in the music business for a long time, and everybody always wanted to teach me an instrument, but I never took them up on it. because I always wanted to have that fan view. As a manager, I thought it was kind of important to have that relationship with music on the fan side to be able to help the artists from that fan viewpoint. But absolutely, I love musicians, and I respect them a lot.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Something unique and different that we’re bringing is—and since you mentioned that, actually. So you are a person who enjoyed a fan’s POV, right? So, how cool would it be if that point of view actually earned you passive income? Right. I think that’s probably one of the biggest things that I think maybe most people are trying to figure out. How can we incentivize these people who like to watch us and enjoy the entertainment that we put out?
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Yeah, give them skin in the game.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, give them skin in the game! that may even open up the door to where like, you know what, I think I could do this, you know, even if you have a little bit of passive income to be able to do maybe what you need to do, right? Get that perfect lighting that you may need or, you know, that little lighting kit or that little podcasting kit that you need to pick up; you know, it’s 300 bucks or something. You know, I think that’s a good start even to get more creatives into the space, but you know, so we found a way to start a passive income, and we’ll keep building from there. But we have some really cool tools that I think people are gonna be really impressed with and, you know, in how we kind of changed the landscape of just consuming like music and consuming brands and you know, for you to actually get passive anything is I think, is a breakthrough.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Yeah, I think so. Everybody wants that. That’s a great teaser for people to stay tuned for that passive income. I think that would be great to figure out, and we only have a few minutes, but I want to make sure somebody reads this article. They get excited, and how do they get involved with you, or what would be their first step? Click on the website, or what?
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Absolutely. The first step is that we have a link bio page that takes you to all of our links. So I always recommend that page, https://lnk.bio/CRTV which is the link bio.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Okay, that’s like a link tree, and it goes everywhere, or better for his crew. Okay. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this interview, and hopefully, we can stay in touch. We also have some NFTs that are part of the game that we have, and I’d like to give you one if you’re interested. It lets you play into the ecosystem. And then, before we publish this, I’ll run it through again and send it to you to make sure everything is right. Sometimes the AI completely scrambles up stuff, so I don’t want to put something out there that you’re like, “What?” I didn’t say that. So I’ll make sure I give that to you.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Isn’t that how media works these days anyway? I’ll meet up anyway. Okay, cool.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Yeah. Great! And let’s stay in touch; we’d love to have you in our Twitter spaces sometimes.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Yeah, we’ll just keep bouncing off each other. We’ll keep diving. well, as I said, we started the little podcast that we’re going to start kicking off, but we’re in the process of, you know, grabbing a couple of interviews, and, you know, we’d love to schedule some time to sit down with you and chat about your experience and your journey and things like that.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
Awesome. Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’m down; count me in.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Cool! Thank you, Josh. I appreciate you as always.
Josh Roybal (Oort Digital)
All right, You too, have a good morning.
Gawain Bracy (Creative Organization DAO)
Okay. You too, buddy. Bye
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