Image via OddKey.co
Would NFTs be wider spread if the barrier of entry—or understanding WTF an NFT is—was lower? It’s possible. Think about how many creatives could be riding a lucrative digital wave if they could crack this code, right? Setting up the right platform to allow safe transactions of digital art would be a gamechanger, and with the debut of OddKey.com, the new NFT marketplace from media giants Todd McFarlane and Steve Aoki, the game may be changing.
Their marketplace, which is powered by Metaplex, was designed specifically to make it easier for creators to enter the NFT space and sell their work safely. McFarlane did it back in 1992 when he co-founded Image Comics; their entire make-up was the creatives behind the books retaining ownership of their creations. Aoki—through Aoki Industries and Dim Mak—has been a driving creative force, merging pop culture with future innovations in sound. His love of collecting, Spawn, and tech has effectively gotten us to where we are now.
“We’re not here to dictate people’s taste,” Aoki told Complex during a recent interview about OddKey with McFarlane “We’re here to deliver what they want, and hopefully so will some of the other creative people that come.” For those of you who want to get in on OddKey early, there is a raffle being held where you can win 1 of 6,666 SPAWNOKI NFTs, putting you ahead of the OddKey game.
During that conversation, Todd McFarlane and Steve Aoki spoke on the origin of OddKey.com, their vision for the marketplace, and their hopes for how this new venture can help creators explore their visions while safely entering the NFT space. “We are literally building the road,” Aoki says. “We’re the architects of the future.” Here’s what we learned about OddKey, from McFarlane and Aoki themselves.
The Origin
“Todd and I have been friends for years,” Aoki explains, “and I’m always trying to figure out how to work with this crazy guy. I got into NFTs summer of 2020, and since then it’s literally taken over my life. Music is my mainstay, but NFTs and digital art and collectibles have just run rampant for me. I’ve always wanted to do a marketplace where it really made sense for creators and artists, and, honestly, who could I do it better with that’s been doing it already? Image Comics. Todd McFarlane. This is what he’s known for. He’s known to support artists, and he’s created something and dominated against giants in the industry by doing it his own way; by allowing so much creative control for other artists. We’ve been working on this for the greater part of this entire year before we even set this up. It isn’t like, ‘Yo, here’s an idea. Boom.’ We took our time to make sure that it was done, in the truest sense, to really be about artists and careers.”
Todd McFarlane, on the flipside, wasn’t familiar with NFTs at all. “I’m a bit of a boomer,” he jokes, “I need to be dragged a little bit into these places, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the youth [are] always right, because they’re sort of the future of everything that ends up happening, whether it’s music, television, fashion. The old people who sort of turn their nose up at NFTs and crypto, I think they’re going to miss the party, right? These are the same people that go, ‘Why would I give a credit card for an online product?’ They’re going to miss this.”
McFarlane explains that he and Aoki have “figured out a common space here,” not just for creatives in the world, but for McFarlane himself. He explains that OddKey will allow him to put out Spawn art as well. “I haven’t put any Spawn art out literally since its inception,” he admits.
“We came up with a model that basically is as good as it can possibly be for Steve and I,” McFarlane continues. “We’re going to take that model and we’re going to open it up to the creative community and say, ‘You get the same deal as Steve and I are giving ourselves.’ We did this 30 years ago with Image Comics, where we came up with a way to basically own your own property, keep all of your intellectual property, keep the vast, vast majority of the finances, and you’re in control of it. We just want to create a safe haven for it.”
Safe and exciting. McFarlane stressed that many creatives have few options; you can get in bed with, in his words, “a bunch of three-piece suits,” or you can build in a community birthed by the founders of Image Comics and Dim Mak. “We don’t have to do quarterly reports,” McFarlane says. “We’re just going to experiment, we’re going to be fearless.”
The Marketplace
Aoki calls the OddKey marketplace “one of the most important parts of why we’re doing what we’re doing,” explaining that “it’s one thing to create, but you have to have the ability to sell. You have to have a community that supports that. What Todd’s already built in the IRL is a vast community that loves comics, love sci-fi, and the idea is we can onboard all of that in different scales. We can do stuff that’s a lower price point that anyone can get involved in or we can do a higher price point for the things that the higher-end collectors are going for. One of our missions is to build this marketplace where it’s easy, it’s efficient to sell, buy, or trade, and build that community up.”
That marketplace opened up the possibilities on how McFarlane could share the back catalog of Spawn-related art that he’s amassed over the last three decades. “In talking with Steve,” McFarlane shares, “he had some ideas, and it was like, ‘Hey, Todd. You can have your cake and eat it, too. You can keep the original artwork that you have, but we can create some other, new, cool stuff.’ Now people can have ownership of Spawn art—in some cases one-of-ones—and it will be Spawn-related for the first time in three decades.”
“This is an experimental landscape,” Aoki says. “That’s what’s exciting. It’s literally anything that’s out there. This is why I love NFTs, because we are literally building the road. We’re the architects of the future, and it’s democratized in a way where it doesn’t matter if you’re part of an investment group or whatever or you’re me and Todd, just with some crazy, weird ideas. We’re like, ‘We’re just going to fucking do it,’ and we want other people like that to join us in that world.”
Breaking the Fourth Wall
But how far does that go? Over the summer, I learned about The NFT Gorilla, which was looking to sell an NFT of a toilet for $1 million dollars, or something. It may be one of the zanier NFTs I’ve heard of, and asked Aoki about that side of the game and how OddKey would come into play. “That’s what I love about this,” Aoki said. “It’s broken the fourth wall. You think it’s just only digital and it only lives in this place, and I always have to explain to a lot of people that don’t understand what NFTs are and what digital collectibles are, but people live and die by it. It’s a community that represents your identity.”
Aoki wants to be clear, though: they aren’t looking for “crazy ideas for the sake of crazy. If people just want a single drawing with four seconds of music on it and that’s the hottest thing that people want, we’ll give it to them. We’re not adverse to giving them everything from what they expect to [going] all the way to the other end, which is experimental surprises. We’re just saying, ‘Since we don’t know what they want, since we don’t know what’s going to work, since we don’t know what the appetite is,’” they are going to be very open to the content and creativity that the community will be presenting in their Marketplace. “They haven’t been exposed to enough ideas yet to know which one of those flavors, if you will, of NFTs is basically going to be their favorite,” Aoki continues. “We have to basically just be ready to do all of the above.” Aoki’s hope is that OddKey becomes “the Baskin and Robbins of NFTs, where we’ve got 31 flavors. We’re not here to dictate people’s taste, we’re here to deliver what they want, and hopefully so will some of the other creative people that come. But because it hasn’t been defined, the space hasn’t been defined, it means that if you want to come to us with an idea that isn’t already been seen, then we may actually be the ones that are basically silly enough to do it.”
McFarlane says that, with OddKey, they are “trying to keep that as efficient, environmentally friendly and sound, and as cheap as possible, so the entry to even get into the space is wide open. It’s a lot lower than what you expect. We really want to onboard and invite a lot of people that actually never even did NFT in the first place, but-”
“Like Todd,” Aoki interrupts with a laugh. “But that’s the whole point. There’s a lot of creators, a lot of artists, that are like, ‘How do I get involved?’ This marketplace is for them.”
As McFarlane puts it, OddKey is “just an extension of what Steve and I have already been doing with our careers.”
For more details, head over to OddKey.com.