Chris Chris 11.12.2021

The Ultimate Vision for Graceful is to create innovative products that let you easily pass crypto Wealth to Loved Ones II An Interview with Greg Rogers

Greg Rogers is co-founder of Graceful.  He began his career in NYC as an entrepreneur, building and eventually selling two companies to AOL/Time Warner.  He then became an investor for Techstars, an early stage fund and accelerator, where he was based out of London.  With Graceful, Greg has returned to his roots as a founder, now developing a company for Web3.
 
Chris: What is the concept behind the Graceful NFTs? How does it hedge against inflation? 
 
Greg: The ultimate vision for Graceful is to create innovative products that let you easily and intelligently pass crypto wealth to loved ones.  In our parents and grandparents' time, everyone received US Savings Bonds as gifts for birthdays, weddings, graduations etc as a way to help them kickstart their savings and wealth.  That massive $350B a year market is largely gone now.  Our goal is to bring it back - but built for the crypto age.  Our holiday NFT drop coming on Dec 15th is a way for us to launch our brand and community.  The people who choose to mint our NFTs will be given whitelisted access to our first product The Crypto Smart Card, coming in Q1.
 
Chris: What is the base price for the White Rabbit- A martini celebration rarest NFT going in for auction?
 
Greg: Our holiday NFT drop is titled "Follow the White Rabbit."  It is based on the crypto metaphor of going down the rabbit hole.  The collection was created by UK artist Justin Metz inspired by his now famous Economist Magazine cover that showed Alice (as in Alice in Wonderland) looking down the rabbit hole.  When the Economist auctioned that cover as an NFT, it sold for 100 ETH.  As a result, we are releasing 
 
Chris: What is the Crypto smart card? 
 
Greg: Our first product, The Crypto Smart Card, launching in Q1 will be a "nested" NFT that can hold crypto assets like cryptocurrencies and other NFTs.  It is meant to be given as a gift to a loved one as a way to get them started in accumulating assets on the blockchain.  In short, it is a way to pass along wealth to a new generation just like the savings bond used to be.
 
 
Chris: Please share more about your founders. How did you come about with the vision? 
 
Greg: The founding team are long time friends who have spent the last year thinking about Web3 innovation.  Graceful came about when we tried to give crypto to some friends who were getting married.  We found the experience of doing so to be clunky and inelegant.  We are going to fix that.
 
Chris: You chose the Market Eden market place which is very new. Any specific reason for not going with the traditional Opensea?
 
Greg: We chose Magic Eden because we are doing our holiday mint on Solana and thus needed to choose a marketplace that supports Solana-based NFTs.  We chose to build on Solana because we did not want to pass along the really high gas fees that everyone is dealing with on Etherium.
 
Chris: The NFT artwork looks like a dream! What is unique about each NFT piece? In other words, how did you craft unique NFTs and define rarities?
 
Greg: The NFTs themselves are works of art having been lovingly hand drawn by Justin.  In terms of creating different versions of the scene, we did something rather different.  We took the completed picture and then began deconstructing it.  Each deconstruction from the completed scene to the colouring to the inking became a different rarity level as we made each one a smaller and smaller mint size.  For example, "The Ashcan" is a term that comes from comic book parlance to describe the artist's original sketch.  They are usually very rare and in this case, we are only minting 10 of "The Ashcan."
 
Chris: Last but not least, how can we keep updated on what's latest with Graceful?
 
Greg: The best way to stay updated on Graceful's news and progress is through our Twitter