The Humans of The Open Web Sandbox is a series that provides a small background behind the contributors engaging with the NEAR ecosystem through The Open Web Sandbox. This edition’s character profile is Carl Fitz — our international marketing guru. So, who is Carl and what does his journey to the Open Web Sandbox team look like?
Who is Carl Fitz?
Born and raised in the UK, Carl studied Communication and Media Studies at university. He later worked in multiple roles within the marketing industry including event management and TV advertising up until twenty years ago where he and his family looked for a change.
Carl moved to Italy where he now works in a completely different role — farming and brewery. This is complementary to his love of gardening and his desire to spend time with nature. Carl’s thirst for knowledge in this new role has seen him participate in the full manufacturing process of his beer company from planting seeds to bottling to printing his own labels. His brewery company also provided him his first big push into the cryptocurrency space.
First joining the cryptocurrency space in 2017, Carl has seen the growth of cryptocurrency to a stage where blockchains provide tangible use cases to both individuals and businesses. After being exposed to the potential of NFTs, Carl more recently joined NEAR Protocol where he participates as an artist on Paras with his own virtual brewery. Carl was the first artist to begin minting digital beer labels as NFTs on Paras and is interested in growing this into a decentralized brewing company. While NFTs have largely resulted in the virtualization of pieces of art, Carl hopes that he will be able to turn this on its head and link the NFTs of his beer labels to physical products that NFT owners can obtain.
Carl has also participated in various other activities enabled by NEAR such as the “hackathon” in Spring 2021 and setting up his own DAO to enable other ideas to come to fruition.
This display of creativity and resourcefulness combined with his marketing experience resulted in the Sandbox team reaching out to Carl to invite him as a moderator. He’s now looking to apply his marketing experience to the Sandbox to help both it and the wider community grow together.
Carl hopes that the development of cryptocurrency and Web3 will continue to break down geographical barriers and support tasks being achieved more effectively and efficiently than what could be done previously.
He also thinks that the new wave of gamified platforms could be what triggers the migration of many diverse communities coming to the Web3 space.
How has he joined the Sandbox?
The Sandbox team is proactive in finding talent and invited Carl as it looks to build a hub of talent that can be deployed to the wider community effectively.
Carl intends to lead the “taskathon”, a micro-marketing project which will take the form of a live short-term event where individuals will be incentivized to explore the different use cases for NEAR Protocol.
He is expecting to start the “taskathon” towards the end of September and hopes to improve on similar events in the space. He hopes to make this as simple as clicking on a link on your phone to join and sees the potential of social tokens and NFTs as a means of piquing people’s curiosity. This will later translate into physical events where people will be able to join together in-person to learn and celebrate NEAR.
This will hopefully continue the rapid growth of the Sandbox, creating an environment where contributors, prospective Guild leaders, and veteran members of the NEAR community can collaborate with one another in helping develop and promote the NEAR Ecosystem.
What are Carl’s long-term ambitions for the Sandbox?
Appreciating the existing efforts of the Sandbox team to build a fruitful environment, including the infrastructure surrounding the existing talent available in the Sandbox, which he notes is akin to a CRM database. In relation to Sandbox, he notes that if the team does not know what skills and people are available, then there is little information on how to go forward.
With his expertise in marketing strategy, he hopes to deploy his skills in a bid to develop the Sandbox into a hub that will support the Network for the long-term future. Carl reiterates that knowledge of the space is the single most important prerequisite to creating a strong foundation and that any gaps in technical knowledge or even knowledge of the best resources to gain support demonstrates a significant flaw in any system.
He hopes that this will support new people and new businesses that want to take their first steps into cryptocurrency.
To achieve this, Carl intends to have most of the necessary tools embedded in the Sandbox by the end of the year. He also notes that in combination with the necessary tools, the Sandbox needs to also continue working on their usability to support this growth.
For more information on Carl Fitz and his foray into the Sandbox and the Decentralized Brewing Company, feel free to reach out to him on @cryptocredit on discord.
If you would like to know more about Sandbox: https://nearguilds.com/sandbox/
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