With crypto markets surging and once-existential regulatory concerns melting away hour by hour under the Trump Administration, industry leaders are tacking hard to aggressive growth strategies unthinkable even months ago.
Enter Doodles, one of the struggling NFT sector’s top brands.
Under the stewardship of former Billboard executive Julian Holguin, Doodles weathered the yearslong crypto bear market by building out one of the most prominent awareness campaigns in crypto—snagging partnerships with the likes of McDonald’s, Adidas, and pop music sensation Pharrell Williams.
But now, the company is changing course, replacing its seasoned top executive with the NFT collection’s original artist, disavowing convoluted corporate tie-ins, and launching its own token.
Scott Martin, Doodles’ creator and new CEO, told Decrypt all about his big plans for the company—which involve ending its “extractive” corporate-focused practices and pushing assertively into the ballooning meme coin market.
As Martin sees it, Doodles has in recent years struggled to simultaneously please its crypto-native holders and grow as a brand fit for all consumers. The artist has come to dub the tension between these competing goals the “futon effect.”
“We’re trying to be a bed and a couch,” he said. “And ultimately, it’s uncomfortable.”
Martin points to Doodles’ collaboration in the fall with Rubik’s Cube as a prime example of this failing strategy. Putting Doodles characters on the popular toy? Sure, that’s savvy marketing. But going further by selling packs of Rubik’s-themed digital wearables for Doodles avatars that “don’t do anything,” in his words?
“That’s extractive and forced,” Martin said. Such moves have angered Doodles holders, he explained, and in the process alienated the core user group the project needs most.
“Without community, Doodles is an empty shell,” Martin added.
The CEO says Doodles will retain powerful partnerships with McDonald’s and Pharrell, because those still serve as effective means to increase brand awareness. But gone are the days of making holders jump through hoops to nab on-chain collectibles that might appear, in a vacuum, to link the concepts of mainstream commerce and blockchain—but in reality are desired by few actual consumers.
So, out with what Martin sees as on-chain gimmickery. In with… meme coin degeneracy?
On Thursday, Doodles announced plans to launch its own Solana token, DOOD—following in the footsteps of other prominent NFT projects, including Pudgy Penguins and Azuki, which both launched speculative coins (called “culture coins” by some) in the wake of Donald Trump’s paradigm-shifting November reelection.
DOOD will be deployed on Solana, the current hot chain for meme coins, with a supply of 10 billion tokens. But the Doodles team also plans to deploy a future bridge to Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, where Doodles has previously built products.
Under former President Joe Biden’s crypto-skeptical administration, such token launches would have likely curdled into legal nightmares. But in today’s brave new world, the sitting U.S. president has his own meme coin—and the water’s looking mighty fine for everyone else to jump in, too.
Martin said DOOD will “initially hit the market as a meme coin.” He then hedged, though, adding he’d rather not “call it a meme coin, per se.” Eventually, once U.S. securities laws are properly navigated, he said, the token will “morph into more of a utility coin” that will underpin a gamified ecosystem of Doodles-related apps.
What sort of utility, and what sort of apps? Martin said his team—as one example—has drawn up plans to dangle “a large, very expensive sculpture” from the ceiling of an art gallery, and let users spend DOOD tokens to slowly lower the artwork into a car crusher.
Such concepts epitomize what Martin sees as “the mantra for [Doodles’] new direction”: allowing the audience to finish the story.
Briefly putting aside the question of whether Doodles needs to destroy rare artwork to justify its place in the world: Does the company really need to launch its own speculative token to enable the destruction of rare artwork?
When asked outright why his company has opted to launch a coin, Martin struggled a bit, conceding himself that any existing crypto token could just as easily have supported an interactive Doodles ecosystem.
After a minute, though, he then offered a fairly blunt explanation.
“We have a fiduciary duty to bring value to our holders,” he said. And DOOD could be “a very competitive and valuable asset in this new market.”
What sets the new Doodles apart from the old? Maybe the answer to that question can’t be found in any ideological distinction between hawking metaverse boots and shattering Picasso sculptures. Maybe it’s as simple as being finally able, now, to say the quiet part out loud.
Edited by Andrew Hayward