It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone! As a team, we have been ideating and building Mogul since 2016 and have seen many different market cycles and narratives. As we look back on 2022, there were certainly plenty of ups and downs to learn from and share our insights with the community. From major world events, to a looming recession, to major product developments, and successes, 2022 was a year of change.
Some of the biggest headlines of the year included:
- The war in Ukraine
- Celsius, Voyageur, 3AC, & FTX bankruptcies
- Increasing interest rate hikes across major economies
- Netflix share price down 50%
- The successful ETH Merge
- The abundance of layoffs in tech and crypto
As we reflect on the past year, it’s important to remember both the highs and the lows; evaluating each to see how we can improve our business and community. It is through these experiences that we grow and learn, and it’s what will help us to succeed together in 2023.
Mogul Accomplishments in 2022
- Showcased Mogul at ETH Denver with prominent artists
- MEXC exchange listed STARS on their platform
- Partnered with Bybit NFT
- Showcased Mogul and the upcoming Mogies launch in Dubai at 3 different crypto conferences
- Sold the first-ever NFT at Art Dubai
- Launched our NFT marketplace contracts across ETH and BSC and integrated them into the Mogul platform
- Alongside Netflix, Mogul headlined the CMPA Prime Time 2022 digital conference
- Launched Mogul quadratic voting on BSC (already on ETH) to support more cost-effective governance and voting across the Mogul platform for STARS holders
- Showcased Mogul at Crypto Bahamas and invited Access Pass holders to the events
- Integrated fiat to crypto purchasing on the Mogul platform to allow users to purchase crypto directly on their Mogul dashboard with a credit card
- Launched the new Mogul website with an emphasis on attracting more creators and moviemakers to use the Mogul platform
- Sold out the Gowns for Good NFT collection auction for an average of 7 ETH per NFT; featuring Mogul on an Oscars commercial on national television
- Successfully monitored the ETH merge and stabilized the Mogul platform
- Improved the project submission process on the Mogul platform with the integration of DocuSign for creators to directly submit their projects on Mogul for consideration to be listed on the Mogul Movie Launchpad
- Partnered with the Steve Harvey Foundation and showcased Mogul at their annual golf tournament in the Bahamas
- Ascendex exchange listed STARS on their platform
- Partnered with FalconX, a premiere market maker in the industry, to support the STARS token ecosystem
- Had business development team members attend Bitcoin Miami to create partnerships
- Unveiled our Mogies collection at the ETH Toronto / Futurist Conference in Toronto; selling out the Mogies pre-sale in the process
- Released the Mogies trailer
- Sold out of Mogies collection via a unique dutch auction process
- Announced the creation of the Mogies animated series and released the animatic trailer to our Mogies holders
- Twitter verified the Mogul account on their platform
- Mogul team members spoke at NFT Seattle to showcase Mogul and our Mogies collection
- Made significant UX/UI upgrades to the Mogul platform dashboard to allow users to see all of the activity across Mogul
- Partnered with over 20 different companies, including: CryptoCart (to use STARS to purchase gift cards), Ism Toys, Nearverse, Darkhorse Films, Earn Craft, Beem, Trace Network, Bubble Maps, and many more
- Launched a 12-month STARS staking program for our holders directly on the Mogul platform with custom smart contracts
- Launched 6 movies through the Mogul Movie Showcase (most of which will be launching their NFT movie collections exclusively on Mogul this year). These movies include: Babel, Billionaire Bunnies, Jancroon, Retrogression, Lazarus, My Father’s Son, Revival, and Antara
- In an effort to streamline the Mogul product and have more movies launched on our platform, we launched the Mogul Creator Portal product. This product allows movies partnering with Mogul to create movie-based NFT campaigns with no code using the Mogul administration system
- Produced over 15 episodes of Mogul Live with industry experts such as Jordan Ver Hoeve, Erick Tran, and other Hollywood experts
- Conducted over 35 Twitter Spaces with industry experts such as Mario Nawfal
- Presented the Malibu Crush premiere in Los Angeles and Australia; inviting our NFT holders to attend this exclusive event
- Burned nearly 3.5M STARS tokens through Supernova events
- Integrated Wallet Connect to the Mogul platform to allow all self-custody wallets to use the Mogul platform
- Moderation of our communities, specifically in Telegram, has been taken on by community members passionate about the project, which is an amazing sign for the growth of our communities and shows that Mogul is stronger than just the internal talent working day-to-day on the project
Our efforts in 2022 have been to support the following goals:
- Reward our NFT holders with in-real-life (IRL) events close to Hollywood
- Scale the Mogul platform to launch more movies and thus pass on more rewards and benefits to our NFT holders and STARS holders
- Make STARS more accessible globally and give more use cases within the Mogul platform
- Advertise Mogul across the world in a cost-effective manner to grow in users and the size of our community
- Improve the Mogul platform to increase revenue for the Mogul ecosystem to pass on these rewards to our community
What’s in store for 2023?
Mogul’s mission is to reimagine film production, distribution and fan participation using the power of the crowd through blockchain technology. The benefits of using blockchain include transparency, tracking, security, and stakeholder ownership.
Our vision is to be the future of film through the power of the crowd.
The core Mogul platform has been over-developed in 2022 in a great way – we now have the tools to accomplish these goals in a more efficient manner and the dashboard experience to support a growing user base. We expect, with the exception of Mogieland, that development time on the core Mogul platform will be significantly reduced and more time can be spent improving the product.
The Mogul product has made major strides in this mission, launching a film financing portal where filmmakers can raise funds and exploit NFT rights on their film through NFTs, creating partnerships with networks of over 6 Metaverses with film studios for films launching on Mogul to stream and premiere their films in Metaverse locations to engage their NFT holders, and re-engineering the Mogul quadratic voting portal, where fans can vote on key aspects of the production process.
Our goals are in scaling and becoming the premiere place where Film3 lives and projects come to to leverage NFT technology to exploit movie rights and engage fanbases. In addition, a big focus will be in the creation of protocol revenue for the community. When we analyze successful products and tokens in tangential niches to movies (music, sports, etc.) they are all excellent at creating protocol revenue and passing those rewards on to their supporters to continue growing.
We want to be introspective while listening to the community, partners, and industry titans in entertainment in how they can best leverage Mogul. This will help us to grow, scale, and align with top partners.
From Mogul, expect:
- More movie launches
- Progress on the Mogieland launch
- Progress on the Mogies animated series
- Metaverse collaborations
- STARS accessibility partnerships & integrations
- More IRL utility for Mogies & Access Passes
- More multi-language communities being grown and built
- Bear market marketing strategies to grow the community
- Premiere partnerships
In regards to Mogieland, which many of our community members are very excited about, Mogul President Lisa Sun posted an introspective explanation of Mogul’s thought process and timelines that you can read here.
In summary, Mogul’s thesis has never been more true. Studios are learning and becoming more inclined to use NFTs for their movies. With the Metaverse, the short-term hype has died down since the rebranding of Facebook and the subsequent run-up, but fans and moviegoers are still showing that they want a way to deeply connect globally to their favourite films. Mogul is not simply launching Mogieland to increase hype, but to build a connected ecosystem of content consumers and content creators. Right now, metaverses across the industry are lacking users, posing barriers to meaningful partnerships to be made with top studios. We are continuing to build and strategize a proper rollout for Mogieland so that the launch meets expectations across the industry.
The lack of consumer interest in metaverses throughout the back half of 2022 is illustrated by the Google Trends analysis, showing the search volume from consumers for the word “Metaverse” across the last 5 years.
Where are we looking to improve?
We want more movies to launch on Mogul now that we have the best platform in the world to support FIlm3.
Other goals to improve on are:
- Launching more voting opportunities for our community to vote on aspects of movie production in partnership with the films launching on Mogul; whereby giving more use cases for STARS on the Mogul platform and including our community more in the script-to-screen process
- Qualify, close, and launch more mainstream movies to launch on Mogul that have global appeal
- Streamline our business development process to decrease the time to market for films
- Decentralize and involve the community of token holders more in the decision-making processes through voting
- Growing our leadership team to bring in esteemed professionals in entertainment to help bring Mogul to the next level
- Partnering with public film investment vehicles to bring more capital to the Mogul platform
To accomplish these goals we have revamped our business development process and coupled it with our technology to operate at a better scale.
We have improved our movie vetting process, have decreased our time-to-market for NFT campaigns by months, and have adjusted our onboarding documentation for filmmakers to make it clear on how they can succeed using Mogul.
We will be putting these to action in 2023 and evaluating how we can continue improving these processes.
How does value accrue to our community?
We want Mogul to become a circular protocol, where Mogul is striving to achieve goals that benefit our community, and vice versa. This can be done with small tweaks to operations to make sure that we’re providing circular value.
As you know, as part of STARS token economics, STARS are removed from circulation via supernovas when STARS are used on Mogul. Mogul movie profits are also used to reward holders and vote on where the funding will go. Thus far, the movies launched on Mogul have not yet reached profitability due to delayed distribution and production on the filmmakers. These are variables that Mogul does not control and was a primary reason why we, in 2022, embarked on producing our own animated series (Mogies) where we could control more variables to reward our holders.
In order to create larger supernovas, provide more perks to our holders from movies, and have protocol revenue to allow holders to vote on, we need to launch more films via the Mogul platform.
More films launching means that more STARS will be spent on the platform, more movies will offer rewards to our community, and more movies will have a chance at reaching profitability.
We expect Q1 2023 to bring our community more leadership to the Mogul team, more capital partners, and partnerships with premiere exchanges.
