Dave Swinbank

Interview

Dave Swinbank

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dave by the amazing creator behind Project 76, Amie Lew, and after talking to him via Twitter messegers Dave agreed to answer some questions:

Please introduce yourself to our readers and give them some background as to what brought you into the world of NFTs My name is Dave Swinbank, I’m 37 and British. I have worked in offices and retail. As a manager, in sales, managed renewal books and been an analyst between an Ops dept and a Dev team. My friend had been badgering me about crypto for about 6 months and then showed me NFT’s in July/Aug 2021. I have always collected things; football programmes, visitor/guide books, football stickers and more. The thing that made me excited was the unique end user ownership when I saw Sorare. I could own it, I could play with it, I could build a team with it and it was mine. As I delved deeper into NFT’s, I got missold on a couple of projects and lost a decent sum of money. Then I found CrypotGoonz, Friday Night Punks and Cartridge Punkz. Since then, everything has changed. I found them all in the early weeks of September 2022.

Do you have any personal NFT projects that are running currently? Polygon Alliance, which is not an NFT project as such and I will give you more details after I have talked about the other projects.

CryptoGoonz. We have just launched our own game, GoonzWarz in Beta, to our community. This is a playable battle simulator. Your DeadGoon or AstroGoon can be used to fight other DeadGoonz or AstroGoonz held by other Goonz Holderz. The launch was very successful with 500 battles in the first 4 hours. Our Beta launch is open until 30th June. We will be implementing the Weaponz into a new NFT collection which will give added playability to our Holderz, and add a tactical element. You can play via the Portal link on our website.

I found CryptoGoonz in Sept. Just after ‘they’ dropped and I won a giveaway. The artist and founder, CryptoAbsolem (Chris) had seen some instant traction after reducing the price. He formed a team from the interested people shortly after. I did my first giveaway on Twitter on the 24th Sept 2021. I had 64 followers on Twitter before that giveaway, I am now at over 20,000. From early Sept the growth and our build has been exceptional. It has come from nothing. It is all organic and all of our reinvestment has gone into the build.

We had to rejig our team in Nov/Dec 2021 due to personal circumstances and since then Absolem and I have pushed everything and I am now a Coowner of the project.

CryptoGoonz has 10 Eth volume on our OpenSea storefront contract - our first 3000, Goonz, Femz and Zombz. We have seen success moving onto our own contracts with Deadz and Astroz. Astroz are currently minting now for 15 matic. The last part of this collection will be released in July, CyborgGoonz.

We have a storyline, or GoonzLore, to go with every drop. Each series of drops will have a feature length story that will connect with a comic book (under creation), our Sandbox experience (we own a plot of Sandbox land) and a way for holderz and creatorz to interact with the Gooniverse by adding their stories as we expand.

The opening up of our Gooniverse is planned to be in Q3/Q4 this year, and is part of our story. To achieve this we have on-boarded a dev, we have verbally agreed to have a Sandbox builder continue our experience build, we have a Super Secret Summer Drop planned to boost engagement and have fun and we have our next series planned - Goonimalz.

Our Dev has helped us add some excitement and fun into our mint. We have hidden 10 Legendary Astroz in the mint. They are all 1/1’s and not generated. They will be worth 67.5 matic to the holder when the mint closes. There is a 2% chance of rolling a free mint when you purchase. We have a further 5% of the mint to go back to our holderz, and they will help us decide how. And we have merch to give away to holders when we reach certain mint milestones.

We have got an experienced builder for Sandbox, who is highly regarded for his voxal art. He will be making sure our experience has room for a playable experience, a community area and much more. We have partnerships with Elegant Elephant Society, Cartridge Punkz and Umbria Network, I am a cofounder of Polygon Alliance, as well as multiple relationships throughout the Polygon and NFT community. These relationships continue to add value to our build and there is always an exciting prospect just around the corner that we never expect.

Our aim is to have fun whilst we do all of the above!

CryptoGoonz Website - https://www.cryptogoonz.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/Crypto__Goonz Astroz mint - 15 Matic - https://mintastrogoonz.netlify.app/ Discord - https://discord.gg/rrp4BkPh Dave - https://twitter.com/Davc_s Dev - https://twitter.com/BriThaCryptoGu1 Sandbox Architect - https://twitter.com/SleepyPirateNFT

CartridgePunkz I am a partner of CartridgePunkz with TheMattyverse. Matty offers educational resources and guidance to the Crypto and NFT community and is a Ledger Affiliate.

CartridgePunkz is a collection of unique punk portraits inspired by the nostalgia of retro video gaming. Our goal is to create a tight knit web3 gaming and play testing community.

We are in our first phase of minting. It will be a deflationary token model with burning mechanics will be introduced in our second set, CartridgePrikz. It is an organic build slowly gaining momentum. Our community is helping us make decisions and we have onboarded 3 members of our community into our team. Cody, Skully and VDK have offered a lot of support and helped us with our growth.

Our burning mechanics pave the way to offer upgrades from 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit to 128 bit etc. This means that the inflationary mechanic allows us to keep growing and expanding the collection and keeps the project evolving and upgrading.

As a non-established NFT team, we have built this project from scratch with little to no money and as such have needed a way to create capital in order to grow the project to fit our vision. Therefore, we see our first 333 unique minters as our crowdfunders and want to reward them for their trust and loyalty. These members will receive an OG333 non-transferrable NFT that proves they were the first to mint from the contract. With this POAP NFT and the OG333 status we will provide perpetual perks from not only

CartridgePunkz but everything in the Mattyverse. From first looks at sneak peeks to a direct say in how the project grows and evolves, these members will have special benefits above and beyond what regular holders get and they will keep the status even if they sell all their CartridgePunkz.

https://cartridgepunkz.neocities.org/ https://twitter.com/CartridgePunkz - https://twitter.com/themattyverse https://twitter.com/Cod1ngD, https://twitter.com/marc_1001 & https://twitter.com/Vdk_Music

Reading one of your previous interviews online it’s very clear that you are incredibly passionate about building a community and ensuring that you have a solid business structure. Can you tell me why this is so important? Structure is important for multiple reasons. And I don’t mean structure in terms of leadership and roles necessarily. But in terms of processes and management.

I have seen multiple projects gain momentum and then lose it again, including us at CryptoGoonz (twice). It always appears to be down to a lack of structure. Most often that the project appears to be stalling in Dev, when in fact it is just taking time to execute. And the communication behind that is ineffective or non-existent. There is not much worse than radio silence when people are asking questions. It erodes trust very quickly. And that trust takes a lot longer to rebuild, than it does to lose.

With processes in place for project management, you can be much more aware of your commitments and timescales. This makes it easier to set expectations for you and your community in terms of those timescales and what you can achieve. This in turn makes communication more manageable, enabling you to share relevant information in a timely fashion and holds you to being accountable.

Managing expectations is so important for you and your community. Over promising and under delivering is one of the few things worse than radio silence for eroding trust. Working hard to understand you, your projects and your community's limitations are important. If you are not sure it is possible, you probably shouldn’t be promising it. Or at least make sure you promise it with provisos, that tell people it is dependent on certain things happening.

Budgets. You need to manage your income effectively to re-invest in the right areas of your project. Looking at some farming/staking/liquidity options with a percentage of your income, could help you boost your reserves. Investing in metaverse land could be important to your end goals. Budget accordingly and stick to plans. Remember that crypto is volatile, and most businesses have a rainy day pot. Have fun, please remember to have fun even if you are adding processes. Processes are there to help you and your community achieve your goals. If a process doesn't work for you, find one that does that helps you.

You have, in partnership with others, built an amazing community which offers both information and paid services, please tell me some more about this and what your goals are….. Polygon Alliance wants to make Polygon the No 1 place for NFT's and DeFi. Learn, Grow, Support. Our main aims are to use Crypto and NFT’s to build others up and to keep tools accessible and services affordable.

We are a community of builders, collectors, creators and more. We were formed from several Discords and a community of builders and creators built on Twitter Spaces hosted by https://twitter.com/Be-

lugaBayNFT, myself and various other people from October to March, Polygon Community and Project Spaces. Polygon Alliance was founded by Beluga, https://twitter.com/SethiusArt and myself. We are supported on Discord and Twitter by a multitude of amazing people.

We are offering networking, resources, services and tools to help people achieve their potential. We want to keep services affordable and tools accessible. We do this through a network of Spaces, our Discord and our Website.

We follow these core values - care, compassion, consideration, empathy, kindness, love and trust. We want to build people up and are pushing for equality of opportunity for all. We believe that crypto and NFT’s make this a possibility.

We are not purely Polygon and have Ethereum, Solana and Wax artists that are very welcome and offer value to a larger NFT community. We have recently built communication channels with Polygon, PolygonDAO and are offering what support we can to https://twitter.com/OnePlanet_NFT, to help them with their migration from Terra to Polygon.

We host regular community events. MyCreativeOwls curates the Polygon Showcase in Spatial and we make these more successful every time, the next one is in July. JMibster (CryptoMIBS) hosts community competitions via her marble gaming platform. We have hosted two Charity Auctions, one for the People of Ukraine in March. One in June, for FCancer.

Follow these accounts to find some of the Spaces hosted in our community; https://twitter.com/TroglodyteSoci1, https://twitter.com/MyCreativeOwls, https://twitter.com/Komards_NFTs, https://twitter.com/ MegaRetroNFT, https://twitter.com/DaturiansNFT, https://twitter.com/Crypt_O_Manimal & https://twitter.com/ nftcoinlaundry. These will lead you to more people who host other valuable Spaces within our community.

Our website is full of resources for anyone interested in Crypto and NFT’s. It has an option for you to list your art or project. And we have recently added a verified by Polygon Alliance aspect to. Please check our website out here - https://www.polygonalliance.com/.

There is a video on the home page that explains what we are, maybe better than I have here. We are not only Polygon. We support and have projects from other networks. We have Ethereum, Solana, Tezos and Wax creators in our Discord.

I have been lucky enough to be in a number of your Twitter Spaces, you run these in a different manner to others can you outline what you do and why? They are back every Mon-Fri, 2-4pm EST. Without Beluga right now. Called #ThisIsNotAShill, hosted by me, co-hosted by https://twitter.com/Cynthia_Stnkmp, https://twitter.com/dave_subzero & https://twitter.com/PolygonHoodie.

Beluga and I created a platform to give everyone an opportunity. When Beluga opened them up, there were very few Polygon NFT spaces and creators on Polygon weren’t getting air time. Beluga started and a few days later I joined. That was in October 2022. We ha a months break in April, due to personal circumstances but the have been running again since the first week in May.

People who support the community get a space to talk about their updates. Other than that, it is an open platform that is for you. We want to keep the format short. People get 2-3 mins to talk about them, their art/project, celebrate their wins - or someone else's, ask any questions, raise any concerns or worries and build relationships to collaborate and grow. We believe that together we are more and individual artists/creators can work better together. To help exposure, add value and fill out their builds. We also know that returning and talking regularly will build brand recognition for people. We have done this for

We let people be emotional, we let people talk about things other spaces don’t, it is your show, for you. And whilst you are talking, it is your floor, for you. The only things we don’t allow are rudeness or bullying.

It is extremely difficult for a new NFT artist selling 1 of 1s to be “found” especially if they are working on their own. What would you recommend to small independent creators that are trying to find their way in the world of NFTs, how can they build their community and effectively market their NFTs? If you are in NFT’s to drive change to your personal circumstance. Then you need to know you are setting up a brand at minimum and a full business in a lot of cases. One person cannot do everything. One person cannot even manage the 5+ popular social media outlets we have, and that doesn’t include Discord. You need to build a team. You start this by building relationships. Build relationships by treating people like people. If you are a new artist and want support, then you should support others. People want to feel like people. It is important, too often they are treated as money trees, or statistics.

Remember not everyone will support you back, that's ok. It shouldn’t stop you supporting others. If you do this whilst showing off your motivators and values, then you will find like minded people. Like minded people will have similar goals and potentially be more willing to work together.

You need to communicate effectively and be accountable. It is OK to not get something done. But talk to someone if they are reliant upon you. Give them the same common courtesy you would expect. Understand that a lot in this space is opinion and others are entitled to theirs.

I will not sign a non-compete. And I will never ask anyone that works with me to sign a non-compete either. That restricts collaboration and creativity in my opinion.

This has worked for me. Polygon Alliance has a lot of builders and creators open to building new relationships, you could always check us out there too!

Team work and collaborations are becoming more common and many people with similar interests are very keen to help fellow artists, how do you go about finding someone that you can trust that can help you grow in the world of NFTs? I have believed this since day one. It is what drove me to move into NFT’s more from Sorare. They work completely on their own platform. There is a lot to say, but I would say this. Those that trust get burned, this isn’t a bad thing and enables you to learn and put things in place to mitigate this happening again. You should keep trusting.

This is what I have done. I did it, and do it, by showing myself as a person and being vulnerable. I told, and tell, people my values and my ideas, and I express my emotion openly. I work with people that show me that they are like minded in their words and their actions. I look for people that want to build others up.

Polygon Alliance is adding more tools to do this, more effectively. We want you to be able to trust the people in there, and KYC and audited contracts for verified people/projects are one of the ways we are making this happen.

Many people say that Web3 and NFTs will change the world and that the ability for artists to sell their own work and receive secondary sales commissions will heavily impact on professional galleries that change 40 to 50% commission on each sale or that companies that currently have a monopoly on social media will also be massively impacted by the raft of new independent social platforms that are emerging. What’s your view on the potential impacts of Web3 will it be a gamechanger or simply an alternative for a different younger audience? They have the potential to change the world because every aspect of the ownership can be visible. You know what you own. In terms of the NFT and the rights that come with it. As long as the creator has been clear.

As a creator you decide what you sell and how you sell it. Does the buyer get any rights for their purchase? As a purchaser you know what you are buying and what the NFT represents. It should be transparent and on the blockchain. Imagine broadcasting sports on web3 directly from your team, because the NFT you hold for this season is your subscription and access to everything else, such as tickets or hospitality, do ESPN or SKY still need to exist… the potential is insane.

In terms of third parties (agents, commissions, record companies etc.), there is the potential to take them out of the game for sure. NFT’s bring ownership back to collectors and creators as above. We are finding that the skill set of some of these third parties are relevant. How we amalgamate our skills together will depend on if we stay stuck in the same ways or not.

It comes down to the individual. Do you want to change the game or are you happy playing along, taking your cut? If you want to change it, you kind of have to play it at the same time. Or at least understand it. As a society we need to value time and effort a little more and money a little less to achieve this, in my opinion. I feel that we will move in the right direction and it will be because of the accountability that can be wrapped into Web3 and NFT’s.

I recently read some stats relating to US NFT Buyer motivation, this suggested that the main reason people buy NFTs are for a return on investment, with others buying simply because their friends and work colleagues were. What do you think the main reason is for people to buy NFTs? The above - and NFT projects and buyers need to realise that makes those projects securities, stocks and shares essentially. The purchase expects a return on investment. The buyers should not be assuming that unless they are told that. If they are told that then the creators best be compliant with security regulations in their country and the country of the marketplace they are selling on…

In our community it is often to support your friends or because you enjoy the art, as much as it is for future profit. The hope is that supporting your friends enables your community to grow together.

Other reasons could be you collect a specific thing, you believe in the technology that NFT represents or what is attached to the NFT (either physically or digitally). I have seen a lot of sports fans enter the NFT world.

With the current situation with the value of crypto do you see any future for people buying / selling NFTs or was it just a passing fad that will disappear? Yes I do. I see the potential for a really bright future. Instant transactions that should be transparent, and unique end user ownership, give people around the globe much more opportunity. To see it flourish, it is on us as builders and creators to make sure the tools remain accessible and the services remain affordable. Why? To ensure that we give the best possible chance of equality of opportunity. We have the potential to drive a global society where diversity doesn't mean compromised opportunity.