Moderator: First, please let Leo Wang give a brief self-introduction. What was the background for choosing the CreatorFi track of Web3?

Leo: Hello everyone, I am Leo Wang. The name of our project is Hibiki Run. Hibiki is a Japanese name. Friends who like to drink or have lived in Japan may know that there is a whiskey called Hibiki. This name means sound and echo in Japanese. It means sound. Overall, we think this name is very touching. When we started this project, we had a core idea, which was to turn it into a game project with a music ecosystem. I am the founder and CEO of this project. I went to Canada for high school and college in 2007. I studied for my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, majoring in computer engineering and business finance. I have a certain technical background. In the early years, I also worked in technology giants for a long time. I have been to IBM, AMD, Amazon and other recognized novice training camps in the industry. After I came out, I went to some science and technology companies, such as PingCAP, which is our old friend and old rival of Ant Financial, and some others that I will not list one by one. In this process, I have always focused on distributed systems and databases.

Due to the impact of the pandemic in 2020, I had almost no social interaction, which gave me more time to focus on my independent thinking and to do something valuable. I first withdrew from two web2 startup projects that I led, and then devoted myself to the concept of web3. We started Hibiki at the end of 2021. Now our team has 16 people, distributed in different continents. R&D and design are in North America, and community and operations are in the UK and Japan. Why did we choose web3 and the creator economy or CreatorFi track? At that time, looking at the entire web3, each sector was still a hot spot, including GameFi, SocialFi, CreatFi, NFT, etc. After countless market research and analysis and brainstorming, we felt that the gameification of NFT and the creators were a good combination. At the same time, there has never been a similar project on the market. We believe that this can bring some positive externalities to this project in addition to tokenomics, as well as some consumer scenarios. We finally chose headphones as a more universal digital asset and integrated the concept of music. Our ultimate goal is to create a game life music product that everyone can accept.

Host: Hibiki brought the gashapon culture popular in the Japanese community to WEB3. Leo, could you please tell us about the gashapon culture?

Leo: If you have lived in Japan, you will find that there are many gashapon machines at bus stops, subway stations and various places. As an entertainment tool suitable for all ages, gashapon carries many IPs and some of Japan's own culture for a long time. No matter how old people are, they are keen to play gashapon to collect them. One of the core game paths created by Hibiki is to realize the user's ultimate digital asset collection by listening to music and playing games. Gashapon can perfectly connect creators and collectors. We envision that in the future, in addition to distributing game props, gashapon can also take on more creators' launchpads and some of their external creative content. This is a decision made based on a deep understanding and research of Japanese culture. It is our vision to input music-related creator content through a culture with Japanese characteristics.

Host: Please let Leo introduce to everyone the product progress, development pace, user participation methods of Hibiki Run, and whether AIGC has been included in the product planning.

Leo: Before answering this question, I would like to go back to the creator economy I just mentioned. Our team has also done a relatively in-depth study of creator culture. For the entire creator economy, Japan has an output of about 13 billion in creative value every year, but the scale of NFT in Japan is still relatively small, and there may be only 1.4 billion in the entire creator economy. From the perspective of overall creative content and NFT culture, the previous series of Japanese traditional culture and two-dimensional content, such as Karate, Dragon ball, Godzilla, etc., have a relatively large impact on the design and influence of the entire NFT. For example, Cyber ​​Punk uses some Japanese elements. We have seen that Japan has a relatively large and potential web3 market, and on this premise, we introduced the topic of creator economy.

Back to the progress of Hibiki products, Hibiki officially started development in February 2022. So far, we have been polishing the product and developing the community for a year. I also saw many of our users here. If there are any who participated in the Alpha Beta Test of our project last year, they will know that our product has been polished for a long time. At present, without issuing coins, the number of registered users of our product has exceeded 100,000. The main user group is of course distributed in Japan, and there is also a relatively large group in the Russian-speaking area, and finally Europe and North America. In mid-January of this year, our product landed on the Polygon mainnet and can still be downloaded on Apple store and Google play. The R&D team of Hibiki are all friends and former colleagues who I know and trust. They all have rich experience in large companies. In terms of development rhythm, we have implemented a very streamlined development process. Regarding the user participation method, I just said that we will create a Play to Collect model, which is a game experience and path to collect by playing games and listening to music. The word Play is actually a pun, including Play music and Play the game, which is to use some gamified methods to allow players to unlock the playlist by unlocking the headphones and explore music. Some of our main games and music will be connected to some large platforms. We will first launch some music streaming in the product to give users a music experience. This is the first step of play. The next stage is to enter our gashapon machine section. Users earn tokens by listening to music. These tokens can be used to play gashapon machines, thereby obtaining some content from external creators and our own game props. In this way, the gashapon machine becomes a gamified tool. Finally, there is Collect. After users or players have collected some NFT assets, they can pledge these core assets to obtain our governance tokens. This is the complete process of Play to Collect. Of course, we will definitely create a Free to Play stage first, so that users without web3 experience can also enter the game in a simple way to experience it, achieving zero threshold.

Moderator: Leo, please tell us briefly, if we compare with Web2 products, which Web2 product is Hibiki similar to? In addition, are the music contents on the platform mainly emerging artists or more popular and large-scale artists?

Leo: Our benchmark web2 products are more inclined to value some platforms for creators, such as Pixiv, Patreon and other digital collections or digital creation platforms. The core difference between Web3 and Web2 is that Web3 will have a circular economy, which has brought about a qualitative change in the production relations. In Web3, according to the different demands of each person, whether you are a creator or a collector, you can get certain incentives. Whether you look at the music platform of Web2 or Web3, I personally think that music collection has not been accepted by most people. First of all, NFT itself has been developed to date, mainly based on pictures. It represents your social status. Whether the picture can be used or not is very intuitive. Secondly, music itself is still a relatively niche thing, but I personally think that in this track, if it can make music collection more interesting through certain production relations, it may also be a big highlight. One of the core highlights of our main focus in music is to let artists design NFT products that represent their own playlists, such as headphones. Users unlock the artist's playlist by purchasing the corresponding NFT, realizing the process of experiencing music through collection. In the future, we will connect with different platforms to allow some long-tail art or independent artists to concentrate their songs on our platform and present them in the form of digital assets. This is a development direction of our Hibiki Run. For example, we are currently connecting with Audius and the Japanese music platform called Sound Desert. We will also connect with some other web3 platforms in the future.

Host: Has AIGC been included in this product planning?

LEO: We may launch AIGC in the first quarter of next year. In our future plan, we want Hibiki run to become a lifestyle and entertainment brand under Hibiki verse. We will make AIGC a content tool to assist players and creators under the framework of Hibiki verse. Our investor Yi Lu is the founder of Weibo and one of the top AI KOLs in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also a consultant for our products. He gave us a lot of guidance and suggestions on AI. There are several reasons why we have not vigorously promoted AIGC at this stage. First, the current consumption scenarios of AIGC are still relatively limited. Generally, AIGC functions are used for modeling and rendering at the project or entrepreneurial team level. In fact, the performance in the downstream consumer market is not that good. Secondly, AIGC plays an auxiliary role in our product form. It only increases the productivity of creation and will not subvert our core assets. It cannot replace the IP and copyright created by independent artists. In the future, users can still do some secondary creation or collection based on the purchase of artists' digital collections. Finally, because AIGC's model is still relatively simple, for example, the models in Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are not very rich at this stage, we may bootstrap the content of the creator economy and then make a larger application of AIGC.

Host: What core needs of users does Hibiki Run meet? What is the product concept behind it and what early benefits can it provide to users?

LEO: When it comes to core needs, we need to deeply analyze the user portraits in our products. From the development of our products to the present, the product form has undergone relatively large changes, and has also experienced relatively long changes in the macro market. So far, it can be simply divided into the following three different user groups. The first is the Speculative Trader that every project has. Their needs are relatively simple, that is, how to execute the rules of the game in the most direct and simple way to get some rewards. These are also the earliest Crypto bro groups who bootstrap our community and can help us promote it on their own. The second is the group that likes or has studied Gamefi professionally. This is mainly concentrated in Japan. They have a relatively in-depth study of GameFi, creation, and games. They can help us post some technical documents, twitter, study mathematical formulas, etc. They are a relatively native Web3 group. Another category is the collectors who are very interested in music and digital collections, including fans brought by these artists, etc. This type of user group is more Web2. These are three completely different groups, or groups with less overlap.

We have been polishing our products so far, focusing on several major directions. One is the token model of the game, which involves the balance of the game; the other is the overall experience of the game, which includes visuals, smoothness, sound effects, animations, the speed of deposits and withdrawals, etc. These are all things that core Web3 players will pay attention to. Then there is the content, such as what the gashapon machine produces, how to bring up the creator economy through a good game method, and how to make it more exciting and fun. Our product concept is to allow these three types of users to find a comfort zone in our community. If users want to get what they want in our products, of course, this demand point requires a long time to iterate. First of all, we must have a strong and robust back-end anti-cheating mechanism. Another very important point is to have a spirit of craftsmanship that always focuses on optimizing the visual experience.

The earliest users who participated in Alpha should know that our UI UX has iterated dozens of versions. We cached them bit by bit, and used some algorithms to classify high-quality songs into different genres and push them to users, so that users can explore different content every day. For early users, we put a total of 10,000 pairs of Genesis headphones into our gashapon machine, and then distributed 25 to 50 pairs every day as a lottery. As long as you insist on using our products every day, there is a great chance to get some core game assets and future tokens. These activities have not stopped until now, and they are some benefits we can give to users. Moderator: Compared with Web2 products and Web3 competitors, such as Sounds.XYZ, what are the highlights and product innovations of Hibiki Run?

Leo: In terms of music, we have been benchmarking and studying some competitors, such as our friend Spotify. From the perspective of music experience, if there is a project that wants to subvert Web2, whether in terms of copyright, distribution model or music experience, I think it is unrealistic. Existence is valuable. The reason why Web2 can become so big is that their experience has been polished for many years, and their traditional distribution and some protection of artist copyrights are of great value.

After my in-depth research, I think the advantage of Web3 may be more reflected in the direction of independent artists. According to my investigation, there are about 70,000 registered independent artists in Japan, but the focus of their traffic on traditional Web2 platforms may be on 1% or 5% of such big IPs. The living space for independent artists is very narrow. Most of them have experience in nightclub DJs and singing, and this part of experience is what can really support their survival every month. Spotify's advantage is that it will promote some big IP-dominated and trendy things to the public, including YouTube and Tiktok, which also have similar algorithms. Hibiki hopes to allow these independent artists or long-tail art to have their own unique profit points, such as through tokens, distributing their own nfts, or their own peripherals. Hibiki's positioning in external content is long-tail art. We hope to allow these artists to get more exposure through our platform and let the artistic value return. We hope to make ourselves a very unique independent artist market leader. If you pay attention to the music track, you should know that Sounds.XYZ received 20 million in financing in the A round two days ago, and their investor Future Money is also an investor of Hibiki. In fact, in terms of Music NFT, the promotion is still relatively niche. Because the people who really understand investing in music are basically the more professional groups in the music circle itself, or some independent investors in music. Sounds.XYZ focuses on the IP operation of top artists, which is a core value of their $20 million investment in this round. For example, Sounds.XYZ helped big IPs such as Snoop dog to maintain their Community and build a large operation matrix to attract more big IP artists. They used a better Web3 concept, and some of their infra is also very good, which can support the entire operation matrix.

The highlight of Hibiki is that it is a more universal thing, executing the digital music collection campaign through a simple game mode. In the future, we will also use some AIGC methods to allow users to re-create the works they purchased, enriching the user's entire collection experience. Through this game mode, more people can accept and reach it, which is a unique positioning of Hibiki.

Host: How does Hibiki Run support the interests of creators? Can you disclose the current project operation data, such as the scale of artist cooperation and NFT market data?

LEO: Supporting creators’ income actually means knowing what the demands of these independent artists are. As creators, they are more concerned about how much income they can get through primary sales, which may also mean the market’s recognition of their works. At this level, we will add primary sales to our products in the future to allow independent creators to enter our platform. Our product was only launched in January. After about seven months, the current operating data from the product level shows that there are already 100,000 registered users. One of the main directions now is to cooperate with artists on large Web3 platforms, mobilize the music resources therein, and let the artists put their digital assets with us to jointly support the music of independent artists. Our cooperation with independent artists has just begun, and we are currently cooperating with four to five independent artists. In the future, in addition to Audius, we will also have in-depth cooperation with Sound Desert, a music platform under NTT docomo, a relatively large telecommunications company in Japan. After these events are done, we will increase our efforts. In addition to Japan, we may also invite some artists from Taiwan or Southeast Asia to settle in our platform.

Moderator: Please let Leo introduce Hibiki Run’s dual-token economic model, the roles they each play in the economic system, and the IEO plan.

Leo: It should be three tokens, because our product itself is a dual-token model. We call it HUT (Hibiki utility token), and HBK is Hibiki Token, Govern token, and another token is matic, which is a native token of our Polyon mainnet. However, at this stage, our HUT and HBK have not been officially issued. IEO will be held at the end of August this year, and listing will be done on several exchanges in mid-September. Our IEO token is HUT, and its function is to be used in games and music to assist your game world, such as upgrading headphones, charging headphones, and playing Gachapon consumption. HBK will have different functions in different stages. In the first stage, some core games will be unlocked in stages, such as Mint and Remix. In the future, more consumption scenarios will be added to the entire Hibiki ecosystem, such as some uses of AIGC, secondary creation of some collectibles, etc. This series of things will be attached to HBK. In the future, we will also support HBK in the buying and selling of core game assets, and then there will be Multi-Chain Integration, which will be planned and implemented in the future. The reason why we want to issue the first game token at this point in time is that we want to promote the creator economy through the value of this token. Because if there is no token asset, it is still difficult to do core partnership. On this basis, we think that the market is getting better and it is also a good time.

The governance token will be listed next year, and we will sync with the community regularly, so I hope everyone will pay attention to our Hibiki Run. There will be a Founder’s Chat (AMA and founder dialogue) every month, and I hope everyone can give more suggestions.

Audience Interaction:

Question: Hibiki Run has started community building in Q2 of 2022. I would like to ask Leo if there are any results in community building, or what the current situation is.

Leo: We have several different partners in our team. Alex is one of our core partners and he is our community operations member. We were already building the community in Q2 last year. We didn’t do much promotion at the time, but a large number of early OG Japanese users entered our community, which laid a strong foundation for our promotion of the Japanese market. We now have several relatively large groups on Discord. One is Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, etc. in the Russian-speaking area. These are some relatively OG cryptocurrency trading groups. The communities that are growing faster now are those in Europe and North America, and there are also some Southeast Asian communities in places like the Philippines, Thailand, and India. Overall, our community is now composed of 40% Japanese users, 30%-40% Russian-speaking users, and 20% North American and European user groups.

Question: Will we promote some more interesting activities in the community next?

Leo: Actually, when we were building the community last year, we have done some very interesting activities, including our design of Hibiki's music theme, the sound effect design of the gashapon machine, etc. We have also recently designed a Hibiki banner and a Hibiki run banner. In addition, we plan to cooperate with the NFG platform in the next one to two weeks to do some reward activities, such as generating some good-looking avatars or community images for users through AMA participation, and doing an issue about the combination of avatars and headphones. We have already designed a version of Hibiki's PFP Series, but it has not been released. At present, our community members are still using headphones as avatars. I hope that this time, through this more fun approach, we can let everyone enter our community and interact.