Q&A
you said stay loyal to your chain, so why does bubblegum have two products on two blockchains?
because each one is alive for its own reason. $ROUNDTRIP lives on solana because it's conceptual art, a live concept running inside the trenches it talks about. the music videos aren't a concept. they're the work itself, so they live on ethereum, minted to last. neither one waits on the other.
what is $ROUNDTRIP?
it launched as satire, and as a living example of what her songs are about. it isn't everything, but i still care about it and want it to win. once the scams stop, i believe the real coins will stay relevant, and that's when roundtrip wins. no promises though. as much as i wish people took the time to understand what i'm doing, i can't promise anyone important will. i'll just continue doing my thing.
you said no bundles, but the bubblemap on pumpfun says your wallet is attached to a bunch of wallets.
i'm not sure the bubblemap on pumpfun is the actual bubblemaps.io, but whatever they're using links any wallet i've ever sent anything to as my own. so when i sent tokens to old friends who have a crowd and a following, instead of them telling others about it, i ended up with a bad bubblemap lol
who were those wallets you sent 10M tokens to?
i sent some to a couple of people with big followings, thinking they would totally get it. they didn't really get it, and even after a month none of them have acted on it. one dumped it because it was a pumpfun token, and one bought like $20 of it <3 the rest only said "bullish on bubblegum" and then didn't buy or talk about it at all.
back in the day, gifting someone 1M tokens of your 3k mcap token meant you were serious about something, but it wasn't taken that way, so i stopped sending stuff and left it at that.
so you never bundled?
i tried once. i tried to do a real friend bundle, inviting good friends to help me hold 60% of the supply, but nobody was up for it. my autism is too hardcore, and i couldn't really explain the project back then. i was just making a roundtrip coin as a joke, and also as an example to other artists that they could use the creator fees to pay for subs and the things they need to create.
why not just bundle it with your own funds?
doing it with my own funds just adds to the problem. most artists can barely afford their tools, let alone buy up their own supply. this coin was supposed to fund the art, not the other way around. this is a prime example of what this whole system was supposed to be like, and it shows how much it isn't.
what's wrong with the system?
you get this launch-a-coin mechanism that's really fun at first, but then nobody really supports tokens unless they're bundled.
why put the art on ethereum?
attention is on memecoins right now, but eventually people return to God, to what was always valuable. solana is cheap and easier to manage, but ethereum is still home to the most valuable nfts. so all of her music videos will be minted through scatter art.
is bubblegum just music?
no. i also use video as part of my art, and the music isn't complete without the videos. the official roundtrip will be released as an album, but the original art itself will all come out as music videos. that's my medium.
what's the difference between the minted music videos and the videos you post on x?
the minted ones will take a lot more effort, just like the songs attached to them. weeks of work, using different mediums and styles, whatever the budget allows in whatever time we're in. my x edits take a day or two and all look pretty similar because i already have a style there. the minted ones are where i'll get experimental. minting anything is new to me, so i'm excited to see how it goes. the best part about music videos is they're always different.
how are you gonna mint a video? isn't that kind of impossible?
not really impossible anymore, thanks to arweave. it's permanent storage where you pay once with AR, and then all these random computers around the world keep copies of your file forever, because there's an endowment that keeps paying them as storage gets cheaper. it's better than regular p2p, where your file just dies the second people stop seeding it. on scatter, it will show a 15 second loop as the preview and open to the full music video. thankfully my songs are never longer than 2 minutes.
what's the rumour about an ai influencer? is that really happening?
it's an idea i'm exploring, not a promise. i've already made an ai music video, but i keep going back in to add my own edits and my own hand. an ai influencer, or anything in claudia's territory, only works if it's fully ai, and letting go of that control is the hard part for me. there's still a lot left for me to explore with these tools.
what's the bubblegum mcp?
it's a toolkit i'm building so that, eventually, anyone can create their own content with bubblegum. for her to outlive me, she can't depend on me alone; other people need to be able to make her too. honestly, it's hard to feel the urgency until her crowd grows, so it isn't a priority right now. but i'll keep building it and make sure it gets finished.
so what would people use it for?
setting my personal feelings aside, it would make a great promotion and marketing engine. but i'll admit, i'm a fan of the format myself. i love barbie videos and want to make my own with my songs, and i love taking trending videos and recutting them with my music.
what's next for the videos?
i consider myself somewhat of a filmmaker. the more i evolve, the more the videos become the art itself.
