# Re:Envisioning Web3 | 1-1 Fireside with Henry the Grape (CyberKongz)

Host: Jed (@jed_131) with co-hosts Lyss (@Lysss302) and SLICK RIC (@richj530) · Fri, Apr 10 2026 · 1:39:10 · ~9 active speakers

## TL;DR
- Henry the Grape (@HenryTheGrape) walked through his full arc: Coast Guard → house flipping → flooring and rug store → NFT Boxes mod → CyberKongz community manager → Council → the guy with the microphone.
- The centerpiece was the SEC saga: subpoenaed Friday, January 13, 2023, 27 months of investigation, over $1M in legal fees, a settlement offer the team refused, and a case ultimately closed with nothing found — while the rest of the space, by Henry's account, moved on without noticing.
- Deep Kongz history: Mio's 1,000 Genesis dropped on an OpenSea contract at 0.01 ETH with no Discord and no X account, pre-dating Bored Apes, then banana, babies, VX, Sandbox land, and runes.
- Henry on the current meta: he's openly skeptical of the IP play and done repeating "rising tide lifts all ships" — "until I'm proven wrong I'm right."
- Death Star explained from the inside: a strategy token born in a Discord voice chat, deliberately ominous, "pure fuckery," and by Henry's own grading a successful experiment that bought the community a few weeks of fun.
- Open invite: anyone who shows up in the Kongz Discord and verifies gets a Wall Street Kongz pass.

## Highlights

**[13:55] Who Henry actually is.** Forty-three, three daughters (20, 17, 14), ex-Coast Guard out of Clearwater, former property manager and house flipper through the 2008 crash, now a flooring and rug guy in Western New York — "I kind of joke like I rug people for a living." His brother Huda, who works at CryptoSlam, is the one who taught him most of what he knows about web3.

**[18:15] The half-ETH bear.** His first NFT and first community were both Pranksy's NFT Boxes — a Genesis box bear he paid half an ETH for that's now worth about four dollars. The follow-up is better: at NFT London he got a selfie with Pranksy, who immediately realized he'd doxxed himself and started insisting he wasn't Pranksy [19:34].

**[22:41] The Christmas tree with ice skates.** Having concluded that NFTs were a thing where "all you need to do is create something and put it out there, and somebody dumb like myself will come buy it," Henry photographed his daughters' figure skates under a mini Christmas tree, listed it for an ETH on Mintable, and waited. "I got my line in the water." Nobody bit.

**[24:48] Kongz origin story, told properly.** Mio — a tattoo artist out of work during COVID — put 1,000 Genesis Kongz on an OpenSea contract at 0.01 ETH with no Discord, no X account, no plan. 990 sold (some fat-fingered down to 0.001). The Discord came because people asked for one. The legendary auction proceeds went to Orangutan Outreach. Then came banana as a passive yield token, the 4,000 babies bred from April to December '21, Sandbox land, and the VX collection. Henry's framing: Kongz were "as organic as it got," 200 people to 50,000.

**[30:51] Leapfrogging the apes.** Kongz launched March 3; Bored Apes a month later — Garga was in the Kongz Discord shilling them. By autumn the two were trading places on the way up, 30 ETH to 32 to 40, with Genesis Kongz touching a 200 ETH floor. Henry himself faded the mint ("I saw these neon monks in my feed, and I'm like, that's stupid"), then traded an ape to Inverted for his first Gen in June and found a Discord where no question was too dumb to get answered [32:14].

**[43:14] On the IP meta.** Post-SEC, Henry says what he thinks and attributes it to himself, not the team: the IP play is "literally the riskiest thing that anybody can be doing right now," and until someone outside the space cares about an NFT IP, he'll hold the position. He's happy to be proven wrong eventually — he just expects to have been right for much longer first.

**[44:43] How Death Star happened.** The team admired Token Works' strategy tokens, couldn't retrofit their own freshly relaunched token, and spent months asking what *they* could do. Adzy had seeded the idea of an "attack strategy"; Henry, a Star Wars guy, started spitballing in an evening voice chat. The reaction — Kongz are rage-quitting, we're supposed to lift each other up — got a flat answer: "ain't nobody lifting us up." It ran to a five or six million cap, got the community a few weeks of euphoria, and gave the team real data for whatever's next.

**[50:33] The SEC, start to finish.** Friday, January 13, 2023, 3 p.m., a subpoena, and Henry Googling securities attorneys in Buffalo. The enforcement agent, he believes, found them via a 2021 Yahoo Finance article about passive income from gorillas [1:08:06], and was asking where the $239 million from the wrapped ETH contract went — a question that told him they were being pursued by an entity with unlimited resources and no idea what it was looking at. When the project (offshore, hard to serve) wouldn't accept service, the SEC began subpoenaing *holders* [1:10:44]. The eventual settlement would have required burning treasury NFTs and all banana, dropping banana from the ecosystem, and a notice on the website — so they fought. Floor went from 20–30 ETH going in to 3–5 ETH coming out, with legal counsel advising them not to do anything that made money while everyone else ascended.

**[1:15:30] The part that actually stung.** Not the SEC — the silence after. No flowers from the big names, no call, no "way to go." Henry's read on it is unsentimental and he's stopped pretending otherwise: he dropped CEO from his X profile [1:19:18], he can't say "we're all gonna make it" anymore because he doesn't believe it, and his job now is simply to make his community the best one in web3. Lyss [1:18:35], Uncle Mac, SLICK RIC, Jazzy and Sufz all told him in turn that the story reframed how they read him — and that they preferred the unfiltered version.

**[1:22:11] The British diagnosis.** Uncle Mac's theory: Henry didn't come out of the SEC bitter, he came out *British* — specifically Yorkshire. Henry, who says he has the closest affinity in web3 to the Brits and worked for years with Adzy and Enzo, took it as the compliment of the day: "That's like finding out I'm like 6'2 and not 5'8."

**[1:32:40] Discord dad.** Sufz offered the community-member version of the same chip-on-the-shoulder story: no big budget, so he supported a project with time and content — so much time that his kids started calling him Discord dad — and then it rugged a year later. Hence his caution now, and hence the appeal of hearing a founder who went to bat and said so plainly.

## Topic timeline

| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| [0:29] – [11:05] | Open, music, motivational audio montage |
| [11:05] – [13:55] | Intros, Bills Mafia, girl-dad talk |
| [13:55] – [18:10] | Henry's pre-web3 life: Coast Guard, flipping, rugs, brother Huda |
| [18:15] – [24:21] | First NFTs, NFT Boxes, Pranksy, the ice-skate Christmas tree |
| [24:48] – [32:14] | CyberKongz origin: Mio, banana, babies, VX, Sandbox; leapfrogging apes |
| [32:14] – [38:00] | Faded the mint, mod → CM → Council, Wall Street Kongz |
| [38:00] – [44:43] | Innovation, runes, interoperability, the IP debate |
| [44:43] – [49:55] | Death Star strategy token |
| [50:33] – [1:06:31] | The SEC case, in full |
| [1:06:46] – [1:13:08] | Q&A: future enforcement, holder subpoenas, the cost to the floor |
| [1:13:11] – [1:30:42] | Community responses; Henry on authenticity, flowers, "our town" |
| [1:30:51] – [1:36:38] | Motion's connection odyssey, Sufz, Slick's sign-off, close |

## Notable quotes

- "I kind of joke like I rug people for a living." — Henry the Grape [14:13]
- "This was a place that was filled with people that would literally it was almost like chat GPT for web three. You could ask any question and you would get a response and you would get it quickly." — Henry on the 2021 Kongz Discord [32:14]
- "No pearl clutching in the casino, no crying in the casino." — Henry on the reaction to Death Star [46:02]
- "None of those people are better than any of us. Make no mistake, not a single one of them. They may have got luckier than a lot of us, but they're not better than any of us." — Henry [1:15:30]
- "That's like finding out I'm like 6'2 and not 5'8." — Henry, on being told he's gone Yorkshire [1:22:28]
- "This is all of our space. Like, this is our town... let's at least like recognize the people who are out there like doing the community patrol at night." — Henry [1:29:37]

## Who said what

- **Jed (@jed_131)** — host; steered the conversation chronologically, pressed Henry to tell the SEC story in full because he thinks the space doesn't grasp what it cost, and spent a good portion of the back half accusing Motion of aura farming his stage.
- **Henry the Grape (@HenryTheGrape)** — the guest; candid on Kongz history, Death Star, the IP meta, and 27 months with the SEC. Repeatedly declined to be glazed, offered Wall Street Kongz passes to the room, and explained exactly where his current bluntness comes from.
- **Lyss (@Lysss302)** — co-host; opened the format, flagged Henry's Bills allegiance as the real headline, and said hearing the SEC story straight from the person who lived it changed how she reads his hot takes [1:14:53].
- **MainNetThanos.eth (@Maximill15)** — asked whether the SEC can realistically come after NFTs again post-Trump-coin, and why Kongz specifically got picked [1:06:46].
- **Uncle Mac (@Unclemac)** — bought a Kong VX mid-Space as a thank-you [1:13:11], then diagnosed Henry with a Yorkshire temperament.
- **SLICK RIC (@richj530)** — delivered the man-to-man respect for standing on principle [1:23:00] and closed with "Get right before you get left" [1:35:27].
- **Jazzy** — gave the long, warm audience-side reaction: she'd always found Henry blunt, and the story made it make sense — "you went to bat for the league, not the team" [1:26:08].
- **Motion (@MotionMetaX)** — spent half the Space silently being accused of aura farming, then arrived with app-update problems and a bag of fresh Regens [1:30:51].
- **Sufz (@Sufz3_)** — the Discord dad story: time given, project rugged, chip earned [1:32:40].

## Worth a full listen

- **[50:33] – [1:06:31]** — the SEC account end to end. The $239 million wrapped-ETH misunderstanding, the terms of the settlement they refused, the Wells notice issued after the election, and the quiet apology-plus-closure from the new SEC. Summaries flatten it; the pacing of the telling is the point.
- **[24:48] – [32:14]** — unbroken Kongz origin history from someone who was on Council, including the banana/babies mechanic, the Sandbox bet, and the autumn 2021 floor-price leapfrog with the apes.
- **[1:13:11] – [1:30:42]** — the stretch where the room responds one by one and Henry answers each. Girl-dad solidarity, basketball-team headcounts, the British diagnosis, "is Kongz a disease?", and "this is our town." It's the warmest and funniest part of the Space and the reason it ends where it does.