On September 28th, Conflux and Odaily held the event "When Thinker Meets Artist", hoping to connect the artist market and the mainstream market through this event, and jointly explore the combination of art and innovation.
At the event, Conflux Brand Director Liu Chang delivered a keynote speech on "Playing with the Roasted Universe". From drawing comics, to making emojis, to shooting vibrato, Liu Chang shared with us many interesting attempts of Conflux on the road of promoting baked children. The following is the transcript of Liu Chang’s speech, edited by Odaily:
Let me first talk about Conflux from a personal perspective. Do you know baked boy? This is our mascot, it is a beaver, why choose an animal like a beaver? Because it is a very smart animal, and Conflux is also a team composed of a group of highly educated and high IQ talents.
As you can see, Bazai always puts on a look that faces everything indifferently, with a very distinctive style.
I think Conflux is the team that likes to talk about mascots the most in the industry, or it is the team that likes to build a brand around the mascot. With the rise of the concept of the metaverse, we have gained some dividends from this matter, and many people inside and outside the industry are slowly recognizing the baked boy.
(The main promotion is Roast Boy) We have been doing this for two years, and the initial idea is actually very simple. Some friends who were in the circle in 2019 may still remember that the project parties at that time liked to package the founder’s IP crazily and look for people’s platforms everywhere, but Conflux was not willing to do this. For us, one is that our team has a very orthodox academic background. For example, Mr. Yao Qizhi, the chief scientist of our research institute, is the owner of the Turing Award and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, so it is impossible for us to do those things. In addition, Conflux is still a very self-disciplined team. After communicating with us at the time, we found that looking at the whole of China and the world, many entrepreneurs have overturned because of one or two wrong sentences, and finally they can only be forced to fade out of people's vision. You Do you think these people did it on purpose? In fact, many times it is not. It is easy for individuals to make mistakes, but mascots can’t make mistakes. Some mascots have been cute for decades or hundreds of years. Maybe not everyone likes it, but few people would say they hate it.
Another point is that the most important thing in our industry is decentralization. Since everything is decentralized, why do we have to create a detached founder? A young man in his twenties talks to everyone every day. Does it run counter to the ideals you advertise?
As you can see, we will use the image of Roast Boy when we participate in various activities. Everyone is Roast Boy. Zhang Yuanjie is Roast Boy today, and I may be Roast Boy tomorrow. Roast Boy can always represent Conflux.
We all want to break the circle, but it is really difficult for this industry to break the circle. At the beginning, we wanted to do science popularization. Like this bull market, many people made money through the blockchain in 2018 and 2019, but unlike now, there were not so many people thinking about feeding back the industry. We feel that since no one wants to do such a stupid thing, let us do it (popular science).
Our way of popularizing science is to draw comics, and introduce technical content such as algorithms and mining to everyone through the images and stories of Bazi, Bazi's mother, and Bazi's family. We have been working on this for a while, and found that this matter cannot be continued, because although comics seem to be a little more interesting than articles, the content is still the same. You can’t understand hardcore algorithms and technical introductions when reading articles. , I still can’t understand it in comics. We have no choice but to give up this road.
Later, we made many other attempts on this road, such as drawing some themed comics on some key festivals through Baking Boys, but it will not be used to talk about technology, because we feel that technology should be handed over to professional people. Yes, the image of Roast Boy is still not suitable, although our setting for Roast Boy is a Conflux programmer.
We also made a series of physical blind boxes, and sold more than 7,000 at that time, which was far beyond our expectations. Later, we made some peripheral emoticons, and now we have made the fifth and sixth sets. This matter is actually hard to explain. When uploading the emoji package at the beginning, Tencent did not approve it, because the subject of the upload was a subscription number, and the subscription number itself must be registered with the company, but as long as the blockchain was involved at that time, it would not work. Various attempts have been made to no avail. We have given up for a while, until one day we suddenly found that uploading is possible. This matter is actually one of the problems of centralization. It may not work one day in the future. We cannot decide the development of the situation and can only do our own work well. .
After the expression pack, we made some peripherals, such as dolls, pillows, etc., and we also tried to build a Taobao store. After that, I went back to the old question - how to break the circle? Let more people know about us.
Later we started to make Douyin. At first, we wanted to use Bazai to shoot some videos of big-headed dolls (similar to Nima, the king of manga), but found that the effect was very bad. The reason for the badness is that, first of all, the IP of Roast Boy is not so powerful that everyone knows it; second, this kind of big-headed doll has no expression. Everyone who plays Douyin should know that many jokes need to be shown through a series of expressions such as reversals. Without expressions, it is very disadvantageous. They are all jokes. Why don’t I watch a young lady say it, but I want to watch a big head. Of course, it is impossible for us to use this big head to explain technology to everyone, so we can only find new ways.
Later, we began to explore the form of animation, and the direction is still to do science popularization instead of making jokes. After all, we are not an Internet celebrity operation company. Now that we want to talk about popular science, let’s talk about the most basic, what is Bitcoin and what is mining? We will explain it in a relatively interesting way, and the effect is better than just making jokes, so we still have to keep trying.
Next, the concept of the metaverse emerged, or in other words, these projects such as Cryptovoxels survived. We thought that since this thing can survive, it should be suitable for baking. So we started buying land on Cryptovoxels and building on it. We are one of the first teams to make these attempts in the name of an institution. At present, we have three lands on Cryptovoxels, one for our own use, one for others, and the other for others to build. If there is a display of works or other You can find us for any cooperation needs. We have accumulated a lot of experience in various Metaverse projects.
Regarding NFT, we have also made some attempts. We did a 3D version of the Roast Boy image, because 2D things are relatively less refined. We made a version of the animation based on the 3D image. We use the image of the baked boy to explain NFT to everyone. It has been eight episodes so far, and it is still relatively exquisite. You can go to the video account to see the content.
The industry we are in is changing very fast. With the explosion of NFT avatars, we have also made a series of avatars called PixelConFi. These 12 are all done by our own team. At that time, we also called on community members to change their avatars together, and the effect far exceeded expectations, and everyone liked it very much.
Later, we thought that we might never be able to draw by ourselves, and the working method of PixelConFi was not very suitable, because the workload was relatively large, so we mobilized the power of the community. In the second issue, we made the so-called "Magic Change". We released a basic version. The second creation allows users to play freely without violating some rules, such as changing its eyes or adding some accessories, but Mouth and nose cannot move. The final result is that everyone made a bunch of particularly interesting patterns, and the overall effect of the activity is very good. Now, this has turned from a small activity into a project, and I believe it will give us more surprises.
All the people here today are familiar friends, so I will speak relatively quickly. As for the metaverse, everyone can talk more! In the future, we will continue to make more attempts in the multiverse. If you have any cooperation needs, you can come to me at any time, thank you!
