TL;DR:
I’m KongTracker, and I’m joining the RKL team.
We’re bringing in new mods to help support for what’s to come.
Expect weekly updates from the RKL Team. (Subscribe here!)
Most people in the community know me as KongTracker. Since I found RKL in late August, like many of you, I fell in love. I was already familiar with TopShot, BAYC PFPs, and Axie Infinity, so what’s not to love about bringing the best ideas from all those projects together. Since then, I filled my personal roster of Kongs, traded for my rare fur(!), built the RKL Discord Bot, and chatted with hundreds of people about RKL, helping dozens find their first Kong in the process.
I’m thrilled to inform you all that I’ve joined the RKL Team as employee #1. I’ll be focused on our community. Like many of you, recently I’ve been longing for more frequent communication between the team and Kong holders. What’s going on behind the scenes? Is anything happening? What are announcements #1 and #3? When will we find out? Can we see more!?
I’m in the extremely fortunate situation as a community member who’s been able to peek behind the curtain (under NDA) to say: You have no idea what’s in store for RKL.
Surprisingly the problem with communication is NOT that the team has nothing to share but rather committing and building the best systematic way to share content with the community. A lot of my role will be about “How to share” rather than the “What to share”.
How to approach this role:
Something I value about the RKL community is that we’re not shilly. Internally the RKL value is “Let your work speak for itself”. My goals with this role will be:
Strengthen communication between the team and the community.
Support community engagement efforts
Strengthen Communication
Boy oh boy… The RKL team has been busy… We want to prepare the community for the content that’s coming. In that vein, I want to introduce some new mods to the team.
@Aron - Our resident Hoodie bot and !nazty gif connoisseur.
@Konglomerate - A true OG believer in the project. Better known as CindySparkles to some of us. Konglomerate has been a staple in our community and a much needed voice on the EU timezones so VapourKong, Naz and Direkkt don’t get too lonely.
Our moderation team will be more vigilant to remove spam from all channels and keep conversation in the right places. (mainly trade talk staying out of #general)
Weekly Substack/Discord Announcements:
When I got to see what the team has been up to, one of the most shocking things was just how much is going on. While Marcus, Nick, Naz, and Sick are executing on the RKL vision, I’m here to make sure the community is informed.
There will always be initiatives that are not yet ready to be shared, but there’s more than enough progress by the RKL team for us to share on a consistent basis in order to keep the momentum of the project.
This is our commitment to the RKL community: You’ll get weekly content from us every Wednesday. They might not aways be splashy announcements, but The Rebound
will be our constant open official communication channel.
*Our big announcements will continue to be livestreams in the traditional Courtside Chat format, with a summary issue of The Rebound to follow.
Support community engagement
As we learned with the Art Kongtest, our community is extremely talented. I’m so excited for the day clubs are released and the community can run wild building their own franchises and showcasing their talents. I’ve seen efforts in 3D Graphics, Logos, Writing Fiction, Art, Music, Video EVEN Socks and a baby onesie!
Till then, I’d love to figure out ways for us to put the community’s talents to good use!
If you have an initiative you want to get off the ground my DMs are always open and I’ll support you as much as I can.
If you need some inspiration, here are a couple of community initiatives we’ve seen in the last week that we’ve loved!
ethwave.eth’s !iamkong gif was a completely independent initiative that was only brought to the RKL teams attention after the work was commissioned and completed! It is now fully integrated in our discord bot.
Floyd putting together rumbleclubs.xyz which serves as a directory for all the unofficial clubs that Kongs have begun building.
Aron’s RKL team gifs: Aron saw these types of gifs in other discord servers and quickly whipped up a set for the RKL Founders. They are all live in our discord under the bot command for each founder’s name. (Besides Sickpencil who’s command is !goodpencil)
All Things Courtside: Kongsy and VapourKong are teaming up to launch a podcast about RKL and the Metaverse with a new episode airing every Friday!
Who am I?
For now, I’ll stay as KongTracker. Professionally, I’ve traditionally worked in product, data and engineering roles. I’ve worked at Twitch as the sole data scientist on their ads product. During my time at Twitch, We migrated ad publishers and built out the payout/reward mechanisms for `Watch Ads to Earn Bits` (WATEB) which optimized for user retention while maintaining profitability. I built my own models and spent some time as a professional gambler/DFS player, eventually landing at TheAthletic working on their fantasy/gambling offerings. I’ve raised millions from top VCs for my own startup and now I’m extremely excited to serve the RKL community! In addition to my responsibilities as a Community Manager, I’ll be leveraging my experiences to bring additional value to the RKL internally.
!iamkong
#WEAREKONG