Interviewed and Compiled by: Peng Sun, Foresight News
Interviewee: Rahim Mawani, Silly Dragon
In the past two months, Silly Dragon has ventured into NFTs, DeFi, metaverse, and will be developing a VR GameFi game on Solana Mobile.
On Halloween in November 2023, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko appeared in Amsterdam at the Solana Breakpoint 2023 conference dressed in the “Silly Dragon” costume. Subsequently, on December 5th, the memecoin “Silly Dragon”($Silly) was officially launched on Solana, starting from an initial value of 0.00002875 USDT and reaching 0.15 USDT within just over 20 days, marking a staggering increase of over 5200 times.
However, the Silly team is not content with just creating a memecoin; their aim is to develop Silly Dragon into a powerful cultural movement. This cultural movement also experienced a temporary halt in $SILLY’s price shilling in January, leading to a temporary decline in $SILLY’s price over the past two months to around 0.019 USDT.
Nevertheless, in recent days, there has been a price rebound in $SILLY, currently fluctuating between 0.05 and 0.06 USDT. Concurrently, Foresight News has invited Rahim Mawani, the Head of Community Growth for Silly Dragon, for an interview. He will share insights into what the team has been working on over the past two months, the progress of ecosystem development, and the future direction of Silly Dragon.
From Cosplay to Memecoin
Please introduce yourself and your team members. What are your roles, and what
were you doing before Silly Dragon? How did you all come together?
My name is Rahim and I am the head of Silly Dragon community growth. I am focused on enhancing our brand power through strategic partnerships and alliances in the Solana ecosystem. Previously I was a community manager for Solana Collective, our global ambassador program for Solana Foundation at the time. I found the project from my friend David who is our leading core contributor who assists with community initiatives and other partnerships beneficial to the growth of Silly Dragon. The other core team members are co-founders SillyDev, our leader developer and SillyDragonRed our COO who oversees everything and manages our art and design with his anon artist. We met on X and decided to work together to elevate the spirit of prosperity in the Solana community at large.
What do you attribute the success of Silly Dragon’s over 230x gains in December
to? Aside from the cultural significance of the Chinese Lunar Year of the Dragon, what symbolism does Silly Dragon hold in Western culture?
Inspired by the Co-Founder of Solana, Anatoly also known as Toly, who wore the silly dragon
costume at Solana Breakpoint Conference during Halloween weekend; Then on November 8th, 2023, he tweeted “Year of the silly dragon”. After this, we were able to gain his endorsement, as he began following us and reposting us on his X account. This is an iconic series of events that has continued to gain traction and support from him and other Solana ecosystem elites. Our art has become a magnet for positive energy and inspiring good vibes to keep the silly dragon spirit alive across the world. Silly Dragon is the mascot of Solana. We strongly believe in the Chinese Astrology as well. Together, we have a cosmic magnetism that keeps us aligned with the good energy to bring abundance to all.
Beyond Meme: The Cultural Movement of Silly Dragon
You mentioned on Twitter that Silly Dragon is not just a Memecoin but is evolving
into a cultural movement and a community-oriented social financing plan. Can you
elaborate on this shift from Memecoin to building an ecosystem and undertaking
projects?
Yes, we were inspired by a meme moment of the Solana founder in the dragon costume and we will always be a meme coin, but we are growing a movement that also reaches into other areas of the Solana ecosystem. With our innovation in NFTs, Metaverse & VR + expansion into DeFi, we’re preparing for a shift into GameFi as well. Our goal is to spread the spirit of $SILLY Dragon into every corner of Web3, starting here at home on Solana.
Will Silly Dragon replicate the IP-based success route of Pudgy Penguins, focusing
on “brand” and cultural peripherals to expand market influence? What sets Silly
Dragon apart from other memecoins and NFT projects?
Imagine super mario or sonic the hedgehog. They became the most iconic characters built around the frenzy of their game. Silly Dragon is the web3 iconic character that has yet to be recognized by the world, this is very early. Our brand will grow as a reflection of our various Solana ecosystem integrations and game development. Silly Dragon is not just a meme-coin, it is the only meme-coin that our Solana co-founder endorses most frequently and is inspired by him as well. Our 8888 PFP NFTs have taken a bit longer because we’re working on integrating them with Token extensions, the future of Hybrid DeFi making our jpegs liquid, ahead of the curve. We will not replicate anything or anyone, we aim to innovate as we go and stand firm as a leader in the Solana ecosystem and Web3 world at large. We have a collaborative growth mindset, among many dogs and cats, there is only one Dragon, $SILLY and this is our year.
What are the short-term and long-term plans for Silly Dragon? Which areas will you
prioritize, and is there a financing plan?
In the near term we are working on enhancing our brand power, marketing, merchandise & increasing our content creation and production to make people laugh, have a good time and spread the good energy to go positively viral. We are planning strategic collaborations that will be beneficial to the overall growth and development of our brand and movement. In the longer term, we are developing a leading / cutting-edge game and exploring the realm of AR/XR to integrate new interactive spatial technology into our mobile game. This aligns with the Solana ecosystem goals and objectives to onboard +1B users to Solana. Our priority is to increase the engagement in the existing community with fun and unique initiatives that allow us to grow together in joy, positive energy, abundance & prosperity as we scale our Dragon. We do plan to work with new and existing market makers + VC investment firms to grow our treasury and enhance our $SILLY Dragon DAO overall. Since the community owns nearly 100% of the supply and has access to the liquidity pools, the co-founders have allocated a fractal of that (bought back) to grow $SILLY Dragon. We will work with our partners and the Solana Foundation grants program to expand.
Over the past two months, what progress have you made in building the
ecosystem?
We have a variety of success during our retracement period over the past couple months. We launched a Zebec Instant Card for $SILLY holders to cash out to visa or Mastercard. We sold out all of our 3333 Tolys Dragon Avatars on 3 Land with our partners Indiglow Studios that were mintable in our currency $SILLY. Shortly after we launched our own $SILLY NFT Marketplace on 3 Land. We partnered with Back an Underdog and Metaplex team to airdrop the Solana Mobile community with cNFTs. Silly Dragon was also activated by Hey Wallet enabling anyone to send $SILLY on X via Solana. We have attracted support from various teams across the ecosystem including Orca, Kamino Finance and many more. We now have a Validator live on Solana which was recognized and endorsed by Solana co-founder Toly. Silly Dragon is a leading contributor on the Solana Mobile Chapter 2 Leaderboard ranking as high as #11 out of thousands. Our focus now is on curating a new website, deck & flight map that reflects the growth and maturity of our $SILLY movement and collective dragon power. We also partnered with Solana’s leading NFT Marketplace Tensor on a Chinese Lunar New Year of the Dragon themed party in Toronto. We are making our mark all over the world.
Can you introduce the Silly Dragon metaverse project SILLYVERSE and how you
use the $SILLY token to mint the entire metaverse as NFTs in Apple Vision Pro VR.
What is the relationship between these two, and how can regular users participate in this?
SILLYVERSE is a collaborative initiative with our partners at 3 Land enabling our community to mint, create and design their own metaverse in $SILLY with a chance to showcase their designs and win cash prizes. We were at a Solana event in Utah, USA where we met with other Solana Foundation employees and projects such as MarginFi who were able to experience our SILLYVERSE in XR on Apple Vision Pro for the first time ever. We were also able to do a mint for one of them using the VR and made a video to showcase the example. If anyone would like to purchase the Sillyverse on 3 Land, they will be made available again soon, linked on our new website.
Toly mentioned that 2024 is the Year of Silly Dragon, and the Solana Foundation
has invited you to develop on-chain games on Solana Mobile. How will the Solana
Foundation support Silly Dragon’s development this year? What groundbreaking
developments will the combination of GameFi and Solana Mobile 2 bring to the
Solana ecosystem?
Solana Foundation has been kind enough to provide us with any resources, assistance or
guidance to aid us in our game development growth. We are in the process of preparing a plan for our application for a game development grant. Solana Foundation continues to share with us the appropriate support and guidance on technical growth, marketing and business development. We have no official public endorsement at the moment. We aim to bring AR/XR to the forefront of Solana Mobile in our game with our partners at Indiglow.
You have released various NFTs. What utility will these NFTs have in the future, and
how will they empower the ecosystem and users? What is your perspective on
NFTFi?
All our NFTs are unique and have their own utility and some are simply collectibles. The
Chibi NFTs are a rare 50-animated PFP Collection. We have a Dragon Avatar primed for 3
Land metaverse use. Sillyverse is a customized world. The Red, Green & Gold pocket
dragons are collectibles that have been royalty rewards for those who collected and traded actively, also may be redeemable in the future for perks & surprises for our early supporters. The other airdrop cNFTs to various communities are gifts of memorabilia as POAPs for attending events. We are generous, living in abundance with our $SILLY dragon energy. We also have a 3D NFT surprise gift for our whale holders which will be announced soon. Our final NFT collection will be our 8888 PFP Collection which is currently being developed with Hybrid DeFi Token Extensions to make our JPEGs liquid. Our NFTs are our brand signature on chain and each digital asset represents the expansion of our broad horizons. The future is bright for our $SILLY dragon community and we are exploring ways to integrate our NFTs.
Many elements of Chinese culture are present in your Chibi NFTs, what does
Chibi mean. Will there be more Chinese elements in future PFPs and games?
We are very open to learning more about Chinese elements from our community and
welcome creative ideas in our discord. Chibi means small and cute style, a form of anime.
We are definitely open to integrating more Asian elements in our upcoming PFPs and game. We find the Chinese culture very inspiring and resonate with the energy of the traditional art.
Stick to the Original Intention
$SILLY’s price has experienced a continuous downturn in the past two months, the
confidence and activity in the Chinese community seem noticeably affected. Some
people jokingly suggest that you should “shill more, talk less.” However, I notice that there are over 20,000 SILLY holders. How do you view this situation, and what actions will you take to boost community confidence?
We have actually grown to over 32,000 $SILLY holders during this time, thanks to the
airdrop of rewards to our cNFT holders for the Dragon New Year campaign. We are not
interested in shilling or degenerate narratives of classic shitcoin pump and dump schemes. We are building a professionally driven and naturally inspired movement regardless of the low price action or harsh feedback we have endured from the Chinese community at this time. The Chinese community specifically needs to understand the dynamics at play here. We are continuing to build and we will be here and soon the price will continue to reflect our growth, hard work and unique initiatives. The confidence boost will come naturally when the price speaks for itself. There is a proverb, when you build it, they will come. We are building.
You mentioned the team currently has only 5 people but is undertaking over 100
projects. Do you find yourselves overwhelmed? How many hours do you sleep each
day?
We are working diligently on expanding our team while delegating. Our projects are
prioritized by what we feel is most influential at the moment. We are not overwhelmed, we are finding a great balance in health, work and rest. I rest about 6 hours, spend an hour on yoga, qi gong, meditation and/or fitness daily. I am working about 16-18 hour days since joining Silly Dragon (10 days into project launch) and I am committed to our motto of $SILLY to a BILLY!
I see that you have ambitious plans in various fields such as DeFi, GameFi, Metaverse, NFT, and more. The current market situation indicates that surviving in any of these fields is challenging, let alone excelling. How do you plan to stand out in such competitive landscapes with limited resources in your team?
We have an infinite abundance of resources. We have access to some of the smartest
individuals on the planet, who are wealthy and resourceful. Nothing is lacking here.
We plan to focus on spreading joy, staying unique in our creative expression and having a creative, collaborative mindset with a positively open-hearted approach to not only attract the right developers, builders and designers with great IQ but EQ too. Our supporters will come naturally and we stay iconic by focusing on being authentic while doubling down on our niche of AR/XR, Mobile & Gaming. We are fearless innovators with the entire Solana ecosystem available to us. Solana is the most efficient blockchain community on earth.
Lastly, what do you envision as the future positioning of Silly Dragon within the
Solana ecosystem? What impact will it have on the Solana ecosystem?
Silly Dragon is the spirit animal, mascot, and cheerful symbol of Solana. $SILLY will
represent the future of mobile gaming in web3 at the forefront of XR as a leader in cutting-edge spatial technology that overlaps the digital dimension with the real world, aiding Solana in onboarding +1B active users enabling our greater ecosystem to thrive and flourish as one.