Re:Envisioning Web3 | Fireside with Insight.Chimp

Before the guest came up, the room sat through a fired-up Gary Vee clip on patience, outside validation and instant gratification — "I'm fascinated by people thinking that gratitude is the same word as complacent" — including the line that the biggest fear is for people having success, because complacency and pattern recognition set in. The through-line: gratitude as fuel, not as an excuse for laziness.

Jed picked it up simply: when people ask how he's doing, "I'm good, I woke up today." A good frame to open a Friday space on.

Insight explained that Timpers was a Photoshop YouTuber with 40,000 subscribers who stumbled into NFTs on X in early 2021, did commissions for FaZe Clan and gamers, then worked with Nouns. Insight, fresh out of university with an English degree and working restaurant shifts, built his own lane — a Substack newsletter interviewing teams and creators — which is how he learned the space from the inside 15:18.

Not trading, not money — the access. Insight described going from a post-grad bubble where nobody in his circle ran a business to DMing founders and writers he'd never otherwise reach. Jed agreed that the network is the real alpha, and that most people don't know how to use it. Insight admitted his wife has told him he goes too far in people's DMs.

Timpers gifted Insight a Bored Ape after he'd "earned his stripes" — early enough that the gesture wasn't as wild as it sounds today. That fed into the Boring Ape Chronicles, a six-part derivative art series with a story called The Quest for the Diamond Fleece. Full-set collectors received a Diamond Fleece NFT they could burn to reveal one of 100 Genesis Chimpers. Insight noted two Diamond Fleeces are still unburned, three or four years on 30:58.

Insight's answer: the constant tension between building for now and building for later, in a space "built on quicksand" where something is correct one minute and sunk the next. Chimpers grew grassroots with no VC, watched metas skyrocket without chasing them, and in hindsight was glad to have left a few cards up its sleeve.

Insight described a team that lives in DMs, group chats and calls at any hour — "as silly as it might sound" — because absence plants seeds of doubt. Jed matched the energy with a story about answering a call at 3:45 in the morning from a holder with one Regen, because something felt off.

The 2023 realization was that discovery had to happen where everyday people are. Three years of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook later: 3.7M followers, hundreds of viral videos, collabs with Fugglers, Kung Fu Tea Boba, Molang and Moriusa in Japan. Insight's thesis: nobody is getting onboarded by financialized NFTs — they get onboarded by characters, entertainment, stories and relatability. NFTs are the ownership; the brand is the distribution.

For years Chimpers was perceived as conservative, not degen. Insight said the reasoning was simple — tokens split liquidity and the NFT community usually picks up the pieces. Token Works changed it: fees from volume flow back and automatically buy NFTs off the floor, so the link to the NFT is built in. Chimpster launched fair, with no allocation to team or community, and the team market-bought it with their own money 50:53.

Addressing the question of whether pixel art is hard to build IP on, Insight said pixel is Timpers' DNA and isn't going dormant. The social-media illustrated style — from the team's Korean artists — had grown into the brand's public face, creating a disconnect with holders. The fix is a metadata update letting holders carousel between the two: no second collection, no mint, no sale, "purely a bonus for holders."

Jed, closing: next time Insight is in New York and they don't get steak, he's fudding him. Insight is still gutted about the missed T-bones from a couple of years back — "all the photos in the restaurant and my mouth is watering." Jed's resolution: "neither one of us are going anywhere for the next 25 years, so we'll definitely make it happen" 1:04:14.