Meet the Visionary Transforming the 'entertainment datasphere' with a decentralised approach More recently, Shan, who is based in Melbourne, Australia, launched Redacted, a platform that aims to be the Google AdSense of Web3: an entertainment atmosphere aggregating on-chain and off-chain data.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Back in 2016, Shanjan Kumar ventured into the world of cryptocurrencies, embracing the meteoric rise of initial coin offerings (ICO) through getting into the early stages of projects such as BNB, amongst many others. In April 2021, he minted several Bored Apes as the collection launched, which soon hit record prices of over $400,000 per Ape, serving to be one of the most recognisable NFTs of all time.
More recently, Shan, who is based in Melbourne, Australia, launched Redacted, a platform that aims an entertainment atmosphere aggregating on-chain and off-chain data.
According to Shan, notable Web3 personalities like Dingaling, Grail.eth, and gaming giants FaZe Banks are part of the project. Redacted said in a statement to Entrepreneur Magazine that Yat Siu, the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, also made a "strategic investment" into Redacted.
The company aims to be an ecosystem that integrates and incubates the best products. Six are currently under its ecosystem, with a combined audience of over 1,000,000 users.
Early Years in Crypto
Shan's fascination with technology took off during his studies at Monash University, where he earned a full scholarship to one of Melbourne's top engineering schools. In the early years of his career, Shan joined Advanced Robotics Australia as a mechanical engineer, dedicating countless hours to designing robotic components.
Years later, Shan transitioned into Tesla, continuing his work throughout COVID, with valuable contributions at Tesla's Berlin giga-factory.
"After spending a long time working in tech, I came across Project Godjira, a Godzilla-inspired art collection where I became the face of the project. With the ethos of being frugal, we wanted to prove that we could go against the grain and the meta of the time of 10k collections." Project Godjira's NFT collections rose to 12 ETH at the time, or close to $50,000 per piece. By 2021, Shan and the team at Project Godjira brought over $10M worth of whitelist value for their holders. As the bear market hit between November 2021 and December 2022, royalties and revenues dried up, making it more difficult for the company to provide value to its customers.
The company transitioned to an advisory and consultancy service shortly after, which helped over 15 projects go to market with token and NFT launches. "Our most recent project has been Darewise, an Animoca subsidiary, as we helped them launch their Bitcoin Ordinals and Sparks NFT collection," Shan says.
PG collectively launched NFTs with over $40M+ trading volume while raising $10M+ for its projects.
The entertainment datasphere
Currently an ecosystem of products built on Ethereum, Redacted was born with the ethos that attention is the key to winning in web3. Leveraging the team's previous experience, Redacted was created by constantly evolving and engaging with the Web3 users until they found a long-term product-market fit.
The leadership team at Redacted combines impressive backgrounds from global top-tier companies such as Tesla, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Kraken, and LEGO with some of the most influential web3 thought leaders in crypto, gaming, and NFTs.
Redacted incubated six products under its ecosystem, including Project Godjira (PG) NFTs and its venture arm PG Capital, which invested in exciting early-stage products.
One of the incubations is an NFT marketplace that uses advanced AI analytics to combine the best features from platforms such as OpenSea, Blur, and Gem. Magically currently has over 30,000 monthly active users.
Maxis, another platform under the ecosystem, serves as a gaming marketplace with over 16,000 active wallets and over 2,500 ETH in volume over the last 90 days.
Recently, the company launched MultiFarm, a token farming platform that generated over 400,000 active users. Redacted is helping projects increase their social followings and driving users to their projects.
"Our ecosystem partners include MON Protocol, DEXTools, Alphabot, Qorpo World and many more with over 2M+ combined wallets. We aim to rival the biggest L2s and eventually L1s with 50+ projects under the Redacted ecosystem by 205," says Shan.
A driving force behind Redacted's longevity and success is the RDAC ecosystem token, which ultimately aims to cross-fertilise users from several of its products and reward usage within the ecosystem.
"We aim to be an on-chain and off-chain data aggregator which people can use for audience tagging + targeting, the Google Adsense of Web3," says Shan.
That said, blockchain technology still needs to catch up to mainstream adoption and mass use, as it is beset with issues surrounding ease of use and security. Despite volatility and the current state of web3, such as dried-up retail liquidity, Shan stays bullish. "If we can solve the issues around the pros and cons of decentralisation vs. centralisation for RWA, this is a multi-trillion dollar market."
