Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What?

All summer, crypto advocates had been spinning the bear market as an opportunity to “build.” Karkai and Malavieille assured me that World of Women had enough money in the bank to weather the current downturn, assuming it followed the same one-to-two-year trajectory as previous crypto winters. “The partners that are reaching out to us now, they’re not looking at our floor price or what the market looks like,” Karkai told me.

In the basement, the team was discussing an upcoming World of Women Monopoly set, with each color on the game board corresponding to a different planet. “Are there only women on these planets?” Olivier asked. The presence or absence of men in any WoW-inspired universe would require an explanatory backstory. Now the group’s task was to brainstorm possibilities. “Something must have happened,” Karkai said. “We need a conflict.” Perhaps, she suggested, “there was a terrible revolution where all the women were hunted, and, basically, men wanted to take over.” But if the goal was inclusivity, she noted at one point, “this has to be a positive transition.” Maybe, she proposed, the women had escaped to form their own civilization, and the men would eventually be inspired to “reach out” and merge. It was starting to feel as if George Lucas had sold the rights to “Star Wars” action figures before conceiving of what had happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Online, Karkai speaks the lingua franca of gracious executive enthusiasm. “I want to thank everyone that has been part of our journey in any way,” she tweeted in a thread celebrating World of Women’s first anniversary. (Her followers often reply to her tweets with “gm”—“good morning,” the web3 world’s preferred expression of content-free positivity.) In person, Karkai’s reliance on the language of “empowerment” and “creativity” comes across as either carefully inoffensive or guileless.“She doesn’t quite know how to bullshit people,” Malavieille told me.

Helping set the leadership tone was Snow, who’d left her job as the director of entertainment at Meta in May. Snow started out at Google under Sheryl Sandberg, and followed a path she’d seen taken by many other “Lean In” acolytes: from corporate tech director to “cool startup” C.O.O. Even dressed down in a tropical-print dress and sneakers, she stood out amid her new colleagues in WoW T-shirts. She had finalized the company’s first org chart, and the team had begun interviewing marketing firms. The goal, she said, was to take World of Women from N.F.T. project to “global web3 brand.”

The pivot is by now a time-honored plot point in startup origin stories: a company starts out selling one service, only to become a payment app or a rideshare platform instead. Another tech company in World of Women’s situation might have drawn on a deep bench of programmers or on an unexpectedly useful scrap of code, but World of Women lacked these assets. What it did have was a growing brand and a small but devoted cohort of fans—perhaps none more devoted than its new C.O.O. Snow bought her first WoW in January for 10.8 Ethereum (about thirty-two thousand dollars), just as N.F.T. sales reached giddy new heights. “I still feel like it was amazing money spent,” Snow told me. “No matter what the price paid, it was completely worth it to be in this community.”

Amid the broader downturn in the crypto market in recent months, the idea of community has taken on new weight among true believers. Participation breeds a sense of intimacy, and long-term success depends on drawing people in. Lana Swartz, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has followed the communities around cryptocurrencies and web3, observing the way they rely on a “blurring between sociality and selling” that has long been present in multilevel-marketing schemes, and, more recently, in the business of influencing. “That’s the environment in which N.F.T.s for women touch down,” Swartz told me. “It’s not unfertile ground.”

According to ownership records, there are some fifty-six hundred unique WoW holders and some eleven thousand seven hundred WoWG holders, with significant overlap. The World of Women Discord, meanwhile, has about sixty thousand members. The company’s internal figures suggest that most members of the community are based in the U.S., the U.K., or Canada, and are in their thirties; slightly more than half of them are female. Malavieille told me that the company hoped to take cues from its community when it came to next steps. Did World of Women fans want to play games in the metaverse? So far, it seemed like they were eager to meet one another but not particularly interested in video games.

“Fandoms are what make projects happen,” Alex Hooven, the product-strategy director at FOX Entertainment’s web3 operation, told me. For Hollywood, an N.F.T. collection’s built-in audience, with its core of vocal supporters ready to provide free promotion, is appealing even in the absence of much narrative content.

When the World of Women team met in Lisbon, the ideal model—the one with the most ardent fan base, and enough plotlines to expand endlessly—seemed to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kempf raised a brief objection. “We are not a story company or a movie company like Marvel,” he said.

But, for the moment, Karkai was adamant. “I think that, moving forward, being realistic, we really have to build a strong universe,” she said. Otherwise, she continued, “at some point, it’s not going to be relevant anymore.”

When Karkai was a girl, she believed that she could speak with her dog, Iris. As she tells it, her family couldn’t afford after-school activities or video games, and she was an only child who inhabited a world of fantasy. If she saw something shiny outside her window at night, she felt confident that it was a fairy. Magic seemed real. “I really believed in it strongly,” Karkai told me. “But I didn’t want to tell anybody, because every time I would try to say something like ‘Oh, magic exists,’ someone would be there to kill that for me.”

Karkai recalls that after her parents divorced, when she was ten, she escaped further into the imaginary. She watched epic franchises such as “The Lord of the Rings”; old favorites, including “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz”; and classic Disney films like “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio.” She thought she might like to make movies one day, too. “I always knew that I wanted to do something creative,” she said.

At seventeen, she took the money she’d saved working for six months on a farm and moved to New York. (Karkai, who grew up speaking three languages and now speaks five, was fluent in English.) She found an apartment near Washington Square Park, took long walks, and ate a lot of instant oatmeal. Once, she attended an open house at New York University. It would have been “a dream to study cinema there,” she said. “But obviously it was an impossible dream, because it’s so expensive.” Unable to find work in New York, she travelled as an au pair and then moved to Paris, where she shared a studio apartment and took film classes while waitressing, babysitting, and bartending. She met Malavieille at a Halloween party—she was dressed as Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction,” and he showed up without a costume.

Karkai says that she grew up in Southern Europe and in the Middle East, but she now prefers not to share more than that publicly. An emphasis on pseudo-anonymity is not uncommon in the crypto world—famously, almost nothing is known about the purported inventor of Bitcoin, who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. Just as Karkai sought to make the WoWs inclusive by effacing points of difference, she seeks to forge a public identity that is indeterminate.

At interviews for entry-level jobs in Paris, she remembers, the same thing kept happening. “People would ask me, ‘So, where are you from?’ ” she told me. “And then, when you get into detail about those things, people start judging you.” She found that Parisians were willing to be quite direct. “ ‘I think that, culturally speaking, there are too many differences,’ ” she recalls someone telling her. “You know, ‘We don’t have a lot of foreigners in the company, so you would not fit in.’ ” Karkai’s side projects proliferated. She started a cooking blog, and one of her pictures—of a rhubarb pie tiled in red and green stalks—got attention on Reddit. She became interested in photography and created preset filters for the photo-editing software Lightroom. Malavieille “believed in every single little thing that I started,” Karkai said. “He would tell all his friends, ‘So, Yam Yam has this new blog, or this new Instagram, go follow her and like all her posts and comment and stuff.’ ” But Malavieille also had the credentials and professional success that Karkai lacked: a college degree, steady work as a program manager. She felt the strain of relying on his financial support, and she believed that his colleagues looked down on her.