Steven Vasilev, co-founder of RTFKT, on the studio's upcoming avatar project and how RTFKT uses NFTs as passports into games, wearables, AR, and physical goods. The project he describes here launched as CloneX.
Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca
Recorded remotely in late 2021, Steven tells David Cash how RTFKT built a fully 3D anime avatar project with more than 200 traits, and why the presale set aside 10,000 of the 20,000 avatars for RTFKT holders. He explains how the studio gives holders day one utility through airdropped wearables for The Sandbox and Decentraland, physical sneakers through forging, and AR filters for making content. They also talk about why RTFKT turns down most brand partnerships, why game players will demand true ownership of digital items, and why the avatars live fully on chain.
Chapters
- 00:00 Intro: Steven Vasilev, co-founder of RTFKT
- 0:25 The next evolution of avatar projects
- 1:13 Day one utility in The Sandbox and Decentraland
- 2:31 NFTs as passports: sneakers and wearables
- 4:08 Why anime, and why fully 3D
- 6:13 AR filters and content creation
- 8:24 Avatars as identity
- 10:59 A creator-led, community-led brand
- 13:41 Airdrops, forging, and scarcity
- 16:42 Saying no to brands
- 18:05 Digital ownership and the future of games
- 20:12 Matrix, Evangelion, and new identities
- 22:53 Why on-chain matters
- 26:04 Thanks and sign-off
Speakers
- David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
- Steven Vasilev, co-founder of RTFKT
Key topics
- RTFKT's upcoming avatar project
- Anime-inspired, fully 3D avatars
- Interoperability across The Sandbox, Decentraland, and games
- NFTs as passports into experiences
- Physical sneaker redemption through forging
- Airdropped metaverse wearables
- AR filters and Snapchat lenses
- Avatars as online identity
- V-tubing and streaming with avatars
- Holder presales and community-first drops
- Scarcity and brand partnerships
- Digital ownership in video games
- Non-gendered avatar design
- On-chain data and decentralization
- Creator royalties
In their words
"We treat NFTs as passports into experiences." Steven Vasilev
"Our goal is for people to use these avatars as their identity." Steven Vasilev
How to cite
APA: Cash, D. (2022). Steven Vasilev on RTFKT's upcoming avatar project [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/JJ3X_vd5-VM
Chicago: Cash, David. "Steven Vasilev on RTFKT's Upcoming Avatar Project." Recorded late 2021, remote. YouTube video, 27:09. https://youtu.be/JJ3X_vd5-VM.
About NFTS.WTF
NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.
More interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@davidcash888/playlists
Recording details
Recorded late 2021. Originally published January 2022. This edition: archival re-release with chapters and captions, 2026.
Transcript
Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.
[0:04] Okay so for everybody listening slash reading right now I'm here with Steven this love of artifact and we're here today to talk about his upcoming avatar project which I'm very excited to talk about. Steven how are you doing today and what should the people expect coming up soon and then we can delve into some details. Sounds good, yeah now I'm doing good. Well it's going to be the next evolution of avatar projects we're trying to do everything in our power to take the game into its next state of evolution in terms of one design quality utility so we're super excited we've been sort of working very hard the last three four months on this project it's super ambitious which people will see when we release it and yet excited to tell you more of what we've been working on. Awesome awesome so we've seen a lot of attempts at avatar projects over the past few months but I know that you guys are quite groundbreaking and you always do things differently how do you feel about the concept of the open metaverse using multiple platforms how are you guys taking advantage of the current platforms that exist in this upcoming activation maybe just telling us like what you're using etc.
[1:12] Yeah so we see day by day the metaverse is evolving we're taking the krypton native approach so we're working with platforms games such as sandbox, decentralized land to provide sort of day one utility for the avatars and also other products that we release and we're actually in talks with big AAA game publishers to also begin the conversations of moving into this NFT ownership reality so we're right on the forefront of what's possible and we're trying to push the limits to create what we envision where these assets become interoperable in big IPs and games and can be used in different environments. I love that so I know you guys have been promoters partners with these metaverses especially the XR metaverses that currently exist like decentralized and sandbox for quite some time for people who are watching or reading who might not be so familiar with the process walk us through how at least you guys take advantage of wearables especially through decentralized I mean I've been a big fan of the way that you guys activate in the wearable space but I would love to hear your maybe intro to people who might not be so familiar with XR metaverses and how they can you know add value to an NFT purchase.
[2:30] For sure so with us how we approach this is we release and sell an NFT we treat NFTs as passports into experiences to say I bought a cyber sneak NFT from artifact we have different utilities that we add so we're most known for allowing physical redemption of the sneakers in addition to that we also air drop which is the process of dropping in a free NFT someone's wallet of decentralized and sandbox wearables so they can express their identity and ownership of that NFT across different worlds we're openly and actively exploring as many different possibilities and ecosystems as possible we did something recently with avatar an avatar company where you can create your own avatar and export it into different games like VR chat so as more and more publishers and ecosystems open up to the concept of NFT and ownership we want to be there to allow our holders to showcase their identity or their product in as many different ways as they want absolutely and it really is self-expression identity I mean with the metaverse and lovely conversation that I get to have quite often is how you know we're moving past base identity we can now be whoever and look and then you look however however like like I'm seeing hopefully we're fine I got a little feedback but I think we're yeah we're good now so with this project coming up what are you excited about in terms of people being able to express themselves differently through these really exciting characters I'm sure there's going to be some visuals in the in the articles that they can see what we're talking about yeah definitely so we're huge fans of anime and we feel like anime spans this culture that we're in very heavily before crypto punks or the current avatar projects myself and the founders and loads of friends we always have profile pictures of our favorite anime characters so that was the general gist of why we chose to do an anime project the second thing we've done is everything's 3d modeled so we've done over 200 traits we actually calculated we can generate over a billion unique and designing 3d assets compared to two these a big task and if you look at all the leaks we've revealed so far the quality is video game triple a studio we assemble the chris who's our creative director who comes from the video game and skin industry assembled a team of veteran game designers and we put a lot of work into polishing every single of the 200 traits to look good another thing that people don't realize while looking at the avatars is doing 3d anime is very difficult a lot of companies fail when you make an because anime is known for the 2d style and we really managed to perfect the image where it still looks like a 2d anime anime character but it's fully 3d and us having the 3d models for all the traits allows us to plug into meta versus and have the 3d models ready for use so that's what we're really experimenting with and the main goal was to make the best visual looking avatar project that's on the market we all love how they look in the community reception to the leaks has been insane so we're really excited about it absolutely and I love the way you talk about the leaks because at least for me one of the most exciting things about your team as a company is the way that you guys advertise by integrating you know meta versus fixtures and bringing them into the real world through the power of AR so I did see your most recent Instagram posts and some of these recent teasers again using the AR filters in like real situations I would love to hear from your perspective how that idea came about and how that's been so effective for you guys as a brand for some people who might not be aware for sure so Benoit who's the other co-founder of artifact comes from the gaming and he's being very deep in tech so has Chris in terms of AR and LIDAR and new technologies that are becoming sort of mainstream and for us we've always been since inception big believers in AR as a technology especially with the snapchat lenses that are coming out apple's patterns and we believe that it will take one big giant like apple to mainstreamify the technology so right now how we see it is coming from the sneak industry myself sneakers have become tradable assets similar to why we do NFT sneakers because the whole process can be simplified is people buy sneakers take a picture to post on their Instagram or social to show that they have that item and then they can flip it and sell it so we allow that same function say if you buy one of our NFTs you don't want the physical item for some reason you can still create content using AR we partly do a snapchat to allow people to have these experiences so when our new website comes out it'll be clear that owners of the NFTs can access exclusive AR filters to showcase and create content which is another form of self-expression so we're big believers in AR and right now we're filming a vision project which should be coming out by the end of the year which is our vision of what the future of NFTs AR is going to look like so that's a really big project to keep an eye out for absolutely that sounds amazing and that does definitely lead to some of the other questions that I have but before we get into the future of AR and the future of the metaverse I would love to talk again about this this project and how you guys are playing with identity because you know you were mentioning the power of these AR filters and how we can use them in the real world but I also do think as we bring this as we create the metaverse you know through AR and virtually people really do start using wearables and especially avatar projects as their identity so do you see this upcoming project like do you see people buying these as they're not just their pfp but as their new identity um that progressing that's why we went for the the avatar project is because we seen people how they create communities and we experienced it ourselves when we started the company we bought punks and we were welcomed into the punk community which is an amazing community and we really like the concept of people using our punks as identifiers right um so that was the why we went for avatar uh I'm trying to say as much as I can without leaking just you know like 10% of the information is public and we've got a lot cooking up but our goal is for people to use these avatars as their identity the brand we've created that's releasing this project is its storyline is set in this whole concept of identity and what the future of identity could look like um and we expect with the utility that we're planning to integrate in as many virtual worlds also provide the 3d models for our users to download rig into games or mod into games and also v-tubing uh the models eventually will be rigged so people can use these avatars to v-tube and create their own content or twitch streams uh using their identity so we think that's a big part we're also trying a lot of innovative mechanics in terms of the smart contract and functionalities um and here we've got pretty wild drop plan in the whole experience has been polished uh the website is full web 3 with 3d assets and we've got an amazing storyline and artists who are supporting the project um we're super excited awesome no it's funny because uh you know I actually had a call with whale shark this morning and he definitely does the v-tubing you know he has this whole avatar and it's amazing to see like what that stage of the future is going to look like so I'm really excited to see that and like the newest level of unlockable content um I also just before I do want to talk about unlockable content for a moment because I think that's quite important yeah but I would also love to talk about the idea of like this identity um I don't want to say identity crisis it's almost the opposite um but you know you guys have worked I'd say when I say that you guys are community insiders I think that's almost an over uh an understatement because you know we you are the community of this community you built is the Define the crypto community um and it's it's one and the same at least from my perspective and I think a big way that you guys did that is creating community around um successful projects like your partnership with the punks your partnership with apes etc um so I would love to hear from your perspective um how those kinds of conversations came about and how that helped dictate this very identity driven avatar project yeah so it comes down to the nature of our brand we're a creator led brand a community led brand an open source brand so the way we approach things is for and by the community an example of this is for the avatar presale we're dropping 20 000 so we made 10 000 exclusively available to our nft holders so if you own an artifact nft you can mint up to three for 0.05 which is $150 and what that caused is over 14 million in secondary sales and our price went from I think one eighth to seven eighth or eight eighth now so we're generating a lot of wealth for our community so we always put them first and in regards to partnerships uh we've been contacted by literally every brand uh from brands that we aspire to be like or wanted to work with and um we have a very strict approach we one check if they're native to our community or represent who we are as creators two that we have the creative freedom and control and that we don't have to go through marketing departments and third we can put our brains together can we do something that we couldn't do to individuals no so why we focus on the crypto communities we believe it's a very powerful community it's a small group of people that together can achieve big things and they all are under the same mentality of building this open metaverse and the only way we can achieve such a concept like this is together so we find it better to collaborate internally within the community and pick exclusive or brands that we admire and we think that we can do something big for the community to collaborate collaborate with um so that's sort of our analogy and how we approach the market actually excellent absolutely that's I love the way that you guys go about it especially in terms of community engagement um and I think that a big part of that community engagement is you constantly provide more value than people could ask or think of by continuously elevating the level of unlockable content that you guys include with your NFTs so I think that's a big conversation and I'd love to talk about like as as you know you create long-term roadmaps to facilitate you know integrating games like sandbox etc and I would love to hear your thoughts on how other maybe other projects or your project perpetuate this idea of adding immense value and especially the idea of being accessible across multiple metaverses hopefully with the end goal one day to have an open metaverse or an actual metaverse where we can be interoperable and I mean that would be the goal but I would love to hear your thoughts on on that process and timeline.
[13:41] Yeah it links back to what I said before as we treat NFTs like passports or like games a game is released and it's constantly updated and refined to fit the needs of the consumers or that we call them collectors specifically and collectors are people who invest in our products who believe and push our ecosystem forward so we feel obliged to provide value in return right we're not in it just to money grab people and disappear right so we do that through airdrops that's one system which is providing free variables and different metaverses that relate to the item that they have in addition we're most known for forging which is our process of using the NFT to unlock a physical item we've built our own internal team to create highly customized full merch and we have our own sneaker department. Sneakers is a very hard industry for independent brands to get into just because it's high overhead costs to get set up and we want to democratize that to creators we do a lot of collaborations with creators and split revenue 50-50 on big collaborations so for us it's just always reviewing what we've released we're very serious about scarcity we don't over-distribute and once we release something we generally won't release it again and if we do it will be a variation so it keeps that collectability because we've seen in the traditional world brands like Supreme losing their momentum and collectability because they overproduce and wash out cultural culturally relevant items so it's that mix of scarcity and utility our goal is to keep providing utility every year to every project we've ever done and for example when we did the ferro shoe redemption and the Jeff Staple anyone who took part in our forge process to redeem a physical sneaker we gifted them another NFT so it was the ferro super collector and the Jeff Staple OG pigeon and they are now selling at 70th so we're basically dropping NFTs worth 70th and we've seen a lot of people generate wealth and that's what really keeps us going is we believe this technology is here for the creators to compensate creators and the royalty part is very interesting so we like to reinvest a lot of our capital into building these ecosystems and yeah push the industry forward really absolutely and you guys do more than share the wealth I mean it's constantly providing value and innovating in ways that you can provide value which I think is really important in this space where like you said we do see a lot of cash jobs and people just trying to enter for the sake of it and I do I put you on this short list of brands I think that are quite you know integrity based where you won't necessarily just do a project because it comes across your desk and that it sounds cool it has to be saying no that's sort of become our brand DNA that we just we do what we want and it frustrates a lot of brands and we've had calls where people are just snooping for information or how to get in and why the space is so special is it's so community based and this community understand what's genuine and what's not and it's very openly criticized projects that come into the space with wrong intentions so that's the main thing I think is the community best thing about the space is that it's open source and then sometimes depending who you are you know if you have something the worst thing about the space is that it's open source you know all the other ones out there one way or another somebody dissecting your smart contract you're going to know like every little detail absolutely um maybe maybe on that point that might be interesting because I do want to kind of guide this I don't want to keep you forever but I do want to guide this conversation just towards then towards the idea of the futures and to have this upcoming project coming out um but I do uh love the idea I don't remember what I was about to say let's talk about the future I feel like that's a better one um so in terms of taking this model and bringing it into this next phase like you were mentioning briefly the idea of Google Glasses the idea of you know Apple or one of these bigger companies coming in and creating a solution that will allow people to really view AR and metaverse activations more easily I suppose um how do you see the world changing and how do you guys see yourself being a part of that maybe tying in this project yeah so I think the future is very hard to predict like even now what happened with NFTs is quite hard to fathom and how quick it's moving um and we believe now even NFTs who can create utility even just on the art form works what we believe in in terms of where the future is going is the concept of ownership right now people spend thousands on video game assets and they don't have any actual ownership so we believe we'll reach a point in time where the consumers of these games will demand that they have digital ownership through the form of NFTs in their game it could take three to five years because game publishers they make a lot of money through their digital sales so they don't really want to split that but eventually I think the consumers will demand it and we're moving into a future where people will have more digital assets than physical we believe and the mediums of expression like AR we think we envision the future where everyone's walking around with AR glasses and plain outfits but in AR they're driving like a cyber Lamborghini in full artifact gear right this sort of ready player one scenario is where we think the future is heading because the future is just a remix of the past and what we experience through pop um mainstream culture with films like ready player one is giving people the ideas of the future that they want to create so we see it moving in that direction that's perfect I mean I had another question but I I do want to talk about the idea of imagination in this space is so underrated and so important and a lot of the conversations I have with you know metaverse builders or people I would consider like really integral in the future of the metaverse often allude to sci -fi films and the past I know you guys have a deep rooting and anime but I would love to hear if there's any specific reference point that you guys come back to in terms of the future I know you mentioned ready player one but is there any is there any like personal reference point for your team of the future that you would like to see?
[20:10] Not really again it comes down to the three founders we all have different films and animes that inspire us and that we sort of bring together like Matrix, Evangelion we sort of combine everything and just create what we believe will fit in that future kind of creating what we want the future to be and why I think it's really amazing in the NFT space is avatar projects have become people's identities a lot of people have gained confidence in not being their real self so someone could say I'm a wizard I'm the wizard of NFTs and put their punk their picture as a punk and create their own storyline or the NFT wizard who's to say they're not exactly so we're seeing this sort of like you said adults are showing off their sort of childish side and creating these storylines and expressing themselves in new ways and that's really deep rooted in our avatar project we've created a bunch of traits that allow people to showcase different identities we've also made it non-gendered in the sense that you can choose to have a male or female body we don't define the sex of the face they all use the same base head but have features that can differentiate them so we're really trying to build something that's already set in the future and create the norms that we want to see and that's our role I feel like in this place is to innovate and test things out and sort of help guide our community and what we're building into the future we want to create that's so excellent I think it's the idea of identity and being more transparent but we really are it's interesting because through an avatar project it seems like you'd be concealing your identity but often when we're put when we have an avatar on we're more authentically ourselves because we're not worried about being judged by others because you know we have this almost like intermediary this like wall being the avatar between like your physical self and your identity online which I think is really exciting one of the last things I wanted to talk to you about I did a thesis on decentralization as an anthropological device so like how it's affecting society so this is like really one of my favorite conversations and one thing you said I think related back to some of my research how you said you know basically in other words but the future of all of this is really on chain or anything that's not on chain like you were saying with video games is eventually going to fall off so to me that's all about transparency and being open source as a company so I would love to get a message from you maybe just other people who are operating the space about how important it is to facilitate and maybe even delay projects or work a little bit harder to make sure that they are on chain and to make sure that they are open source yeah I feel like as there's more more awareness into the space the importance of on chain data will be crucial because there's some projects for example where they're not fully on chain so that means you could spend a hundred thousand dollars on an NFT and then they go one day and change the image to a meme frog right so there's these sort of scenarios I think a good example is Chris who's the other co-founder he comes from the steam industry game skins and there was a scenario where someone's account got locked by steam and he had millions of dollars of skins in there and he committed suicide and it was a horrible thing and that sort of shows how important it is for you to actually have true ownership where the item can't be changed or the company goes bust for example and the servers go offline and you lose everything we also saw it with nifty gateway all the NFTs that are held on the platform in nifty gateway's wallet right so if the company say something bad happened they lost the wallet your NFTs are gone so ownership is super key and that's why we're seeing such a boom decentralization as well it's key to the whole industry and that's what we keep super native to our brand like all of our avatars are on chain and it's kind of annoying because we had ideas of interoperability and evolutive items that where the images change but we chose not to do that just to stay fully decentralized so I think as time progresses there will be advancements in terms of how on chain and how much can be off chain because there's some limitations to having everything on chain it's easier via metadata it always is but I think it depends really on the company as well that's interacting with the space and what their goals are because for some artists maybe having their data on chain isn't the most crucial part of what they're building or the ecosystem but yeah no the future is definitely on chain people need to own what they pay for and I feel like that's what's so revolutionary about the space especially the royalties having lifetime royalties is a concept familiar to many game skin designers but to the majority of the world they haven't experienced that and especially artists it's groundbreaking to be able to profit off the work you've created after an event has happened that has caused your work to appreciate or your talent is acknowledged so I think that's very crucial it's one of the most incredible parts of the space and I mean it all boils down to the same you know don't trust verify if you can verify it just makes you know if you're ever nervous about a transaction going through you just check your ether scan it's like it's right there you need a call there's no customer support you are the customer support I mean I'm a huge yeah I love this space I've been around for a few years and I really love what you guys are doing I don't want to keep you for much longer because I know you have a million things going on as do I so I can only imagine what you have going on so but just just for the people who are reading or listening it is also up to you when you would like us to post this if there's anything specific you want to mention but where can people go where should they check out this project if they're not already also back for sure no definitely follow our twitter which is our tfkt studios we post everything on twitter first and if you're super keen to learn more join our discord we're actually posting an nft bible which is an onboarding guide for how to operate in this new world and set up your metamask to prevent being scammed and how to purchase one of our drops so join the discord follow us on twitter and you can also get me on twitter uh zapto be happy to help