Suresh and Dave chat with Angela Dalton CEO Signum Growth Capital

In this episode of the Web3 Marketing Association Podcast, hosts Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji are joined by Angela Dalton, founder and CEO of Signum Growth Capital, to explore the intersection of gaming, NFTs, and Web3—and what it means for marketers.

Angela shares her career journey from equities and investment banking to becoming one of the first esports analysts, before founding Signum to advise at the crossroads of culture and crypto. She explains how video games have long served as a proving ground for digital ownership, with skins and in-game items functioning as early forms of social capital. NFTs, she argues, are simply a natural extension of behaviours gamers already understand.

The conversation covers the explosive growth of digital assets in gaming, the rise (and pitfalls) of play-to-earn models, and why the future lies in “play and own”—where identity, property rights, and interoperability across platforms reshape how people engage online. Angela discusses examples such as Burberry’s Sharky drop in Blankos and Balenciaga’s collaboration with Fortnite, showing how brands can enter authentically if they align with existing gamer behaviours.

Beyond gaming, Angela highlights broader structural shifts: the need for interoperability across blockchains, the role of Polkadot in enabling cross-chain communication, and the opportunity for marketers to simplify and humanise Web3 education. She argues that Web3 isn’t just about technology—it’s about building fairer systems where creators, communities, and companies share value more equitably.

For marketers, the key takeaway is clear: Web3 is not just a channel, but a cultural shift. The brands that succeed will be those that respect community norms, embrace transparency, and help bridge the gap between complex technology and everyday human behaviour.

Transcript

Speaker 00: 0:00

If you want to understand the intersection of many forces, Web3, the metaverse, games, skins, decentralized, autonomous organizations, you can do a whole lot of research or you can go straight to the source of some fantastic information. And that person is Angela Dalton, the founder and CEO of Signum Growth Capital, here today on the Web3 Marketing Association podcast.

Unknown: 0:29

Music

Speaker 02: 0:32

From the studios of NMD+, comes the Web3 Marketing Association podcast. The latest thinking at the very cutting edge of marketing. We aim to bring you insightful and interesting discussion about Web3 and the metaverse and other emerging digital trends. And here are your hosts, Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji.

Dave: 1:00

Welcome to today's episode, and we're delighted to welcome Angela Dalton. Angela's CEO and founder of Signum Growth Capital. So Angela, do you want to tell everybody a bit about yourself and introduce what you do?

Angela: 1:16

Sure. Thank you so much for having me. So I had a very traditional background in equities and investment banking, always in technology, starting in 1999, right out of University of Chicago, started doing semiconductors and then just moved my way kind of up the stack, spent most of my traditional career for the last, you know, 20 years before I started Signum in media and video games. So I started going to the big video game show in 2003 and, you know, really I've been fascinated with gaming forever. And it's pretty interesting because from a media perspective and always being in big media firms, it's really a subsector that most people don't really care about. And what always excited me was this idea that engagement and behavior was really shifting away from the TV. And I have to say I was wrong because I did think that the TV ever advertising budgets would go down much more dramatically than they have. But gaming always represented kind of this area where this new engagement, new behavior, and really the seeds of the metaverse really got started. And then I was at Guggenheim. I was the first esports analyst back in 2015. And then I got into Bitcoin. And I was just blown away by the elegance of Bitcoin as a technology. And then I met the gentleman who finalized the ERC-721 standard for NFTs. And the two together, video games, Bitcoin, and NFTs, I had this epiphany that people had been buying, selling, trading digital assets for decades in video games. And so this is really interesting to us because it's behavior that's already happening. And so one of our mantras is merge onto the highway of behavior that's already happening. So I decided to leave Guggenheim and focus on this intersection, which is the idea that as we spend more time in online spaces, property rights will become more and more important. And then the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, also inspired me around that time with the of the line and creators are moving to the front of the line. And these long food chains with a lot of intermediaries and brokers is going away. And we're going to get to a world where creators are closer to consumers. So that's really what inspires us. And I'd say we advise in all areas of culture meets crypto is what we call it. But we've been the advisor to the Web3 Foundation in Switzerland on the launch of Polkadot since 2019. We advise ARK Invest and then on the affiliate of Sigma Growth Capital invests in technologies all the way from seed stage to later stage companies.

Dave: 4:00

Wow. Quite, quite, quite a story. million subscribers and I think Call of Duty's got 400 million. I mean, these are huge numbers of people who are on these platforms. Do you see this as a sort of real frontier of thinking around what's going on?

Angela: 4:45

Absolutely. I think that what still surprises me, if you look at the industry estimates for TV advertising, it's about 160 billion per year for the next five years. It's just kind of flat, landing in empty living rooms. A lot of the behavior has shifted to these gaming environments. Gamers are traditionally very savvy around this idea of like, keep advertising out, keep your product placement out, keep your pay to play out, all of these kind of money schemes. And we see it in NFTs as well. A lot of the gaming companies are pretty anti-NFTs because they think of it as a money grab, or as the CEO of Discord said, spams, scams, and frauds is what he's trying to clean up on Discord with NFTs. And I do think that the early experimentation and the early activity that we've seen is that. I mean, a lot of it is that. So we don't condone that at all. That wasn't our initial vision. But what I do see is a really interesting breakthrough, which is this mentality that gamers have. So instead of just of this if instead these dollars come through a different screen, which I call the NFT screen, and embody characters or embody social capital in the same way that Epic Games makes several billion dollars from selling skins. All skins are our social capital. It's a way to build identity and social capital in an online space in this way that we would have worn clothes or carried designer bags. And so one of the companies that we had invested in very early is called Mythical. Mythical tapped into this idea very early and they did a drop in their game. So their game is called Blankos. It's a block party game. Think of it as aged up Roblox where people can go and make their own games. There are many games happening at once, but the characters themselves are really cool, very similar to the classic toy industry. And the first luxury brand, that was dropped inside a game as an NFT was the Burberry Sharky in Blancos. And it sold out in 30 seconds. It was not only the character, it was the Burberry armbands, it was the Burberry pool shoes that Sharky wears. I didn't get the character because I was too slow. I just got the armbands and the pool shoes. But the fact is that the reason this caught our attention is because it is not typical of gamers to embrace things like this. But they embraced it because it's similar to skins. It's similar to activity that They're already used to, and they're already building social capital in an online space, something that is very authentic. So it's a real opportunity, I think, for brands to authentically enter this space where we're seeing massive engagement.

Dave: 7:30

Yeah. My mind was completely blown. Balenciaga did something similar with Fortnite, where they launched

Speaker 05: 7:36

a

Dave: 7:36

range of clothes. That was incredibly successful as well. I thought just simply for the PR that Balenciaga got out to the it would have paid for itself anyway but it was just a fascinating insight as you say that if you're not a gamer the whole idea of actually buying skins and things is it doesn't make sense but then you know if you are a gamer it makes perfect sense doesn't it

Angela: 8:01

i know that the listeners can't see my background but i just changed it because this is the lens beyond and this is what i use for my background

Dave: 8:09

oh nice it's interesting so nfts and gaming seem to be a mega trend. I mean, one of the things that we've been talking about is play to earn. Do you see that as something which is of interest and will become more and more popular as time goes on?

Angela: 8:27

I don't think it will in these initial format. I think this was a really interesting experiment. And I do think that it will continue. But the challenge is that we want to reach the two and a half billion gamers. The content has to be really, really fun. And game loops are very hard. Games are very difficult to create. It's like a multidimensional, you know, movie script or TV show. But at the end of the day, it's content. And I think what play to earn represents more is grinding in a game to make money. And I think that once you turn it into that kind of a thing, it's not as much fun. So one concept we're really excited about is, you know, and I'm bringing up Mythical again, but they just announced a deal with the NFL. They're referring to it as play and own instead of play to earn. And that makes sense to me because, again, if you're associating yourself with certain assets and those are becoming your identity, your social capital inside these online spaces. And again, these could start with games, but they could evolve to workspaces and other activities inside the metaverse. I think that we will see more ownership and that's why we care about property rights. So more collections of things that might represent represent who we are in the same way that right now people always go to LinkedIn. But I think in the future, it'll be pretty easy to look up one's digital assets or NFTs and the display of the groups and various activities they want to associate themselves with.

Dave: 9:59

So the NFTs could be things that are bought within games themselves. But, you know, potentially the NFT would sit on a wallet, which sits outside of the game, because I guess one of the things that I wonder is, is there a moment in where you get more interoperability between games platforms? Is that something that may happen? Or can you move your NFT between different games platforms?

Angela: 10:27

It's a really great question. If you would have asked me to give you questions, which you didn't, I would have put that in the top three. We have recently invested and we advise a company in the UK actually called MyNFT. And they are building a marketplace on Moonbeam, which connects to the Polkadot network. The idea is really just what you said, interoperability, because right now we're not seeing rights protection that we need to be able to see for this, again, to hit mass market and to get into the real marketing budgets. I think IP rights are extremely important. And I think right now it's early in the technology days. So what they're working on is a marketplace which solves that issue. And Polkadot itself is an interoperability protocol, which nobody in the future is probably going to be talking about the back end tech. And the way we do right now, it'll just happen. And users and consumers won't even know it's happening because it'll be happening in the background. But I think we need to get to a world where blockchains are talking to each other, where we are able to send assets between these blockchains. Because unlike Web2, Web3 has developed in a very siloed way where these ecosystems are very protocol specific. So let's say you get into XYZ layer protocol, then you want to get involved in the entire ecosystem around it. That's how the community builds. It's very natural behavior, but eventually these communities are going to want to talk to each other in the same way that we never wondered when we went to a website if we could get to another website because we had this underlying protocol layer that connected everything.

Dave: 12:02

That's incredible to understand. That actually is how using blockchain technology, how that interoperability may occur. And I think you're right. This feels like the web 25 years ago, when you kind of looked at it, everyone talked about TCP IP and all the protocols. And now nobody understands any of those protocols. We just sort of sit and watch TV and surf websites and do all these other bits and pieces. So it's really, really interesting. Are all is marketeer. So we were kind of keen to understand a bit more about your thoughts around marketing and advertising within this metaverse and around Web3 technology. What are some of your thoughts around what's going on at the moment and what might happen in the future?

Angela: 12:51

So I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg renaming his company Meta is really that meaningful. It really feels more like a me too, in my view, because it's not at all the ethos that anybody on Web3, I think, kind of envisioned when we got into this world. A really interesting announcement came from Frank McCourt, billionaire, owner of the LA Dodgers, and he is building a new social media network. And at Davos last week, they announced that they will be building on Polkadot. What he said was something that we've been saying in a different way, but he said the way the technology, meaning Web2, is currently architected is fundamentally flawed and doing a lot of damage. And he was talking about surveillance, specifically surveillance of usage, where our data is extracted and exploited in unhealthy ways. The name of his social media network that is going to be built in a decentralized way is called Project Liberty because it this is about democracy. And they found it in Kindred Spirit and Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot. And that is more about advertising creates a human conflict of interest between me as the consumer slash user and you as the content creator. Because when 95% of the revenues are advertising dollars, there's some obfuscation going on. There's some convincing going on. There's some, I just want to know the truth. I want to be able to double click on the truth. And I think that's the world we're heading into, which is why when Facebook is 95% advertising revenues, it's going to be really hard for them to pivot unless they want to change the entire company. So I think right now what they're doing is slapping a title on and hoping to figure it out.

Dave: 14:38

Suresh, is there anything new

Suresh: 14:40

we're kind of interested to know from Angela? Absolutely. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Angela, for joining us. Like Dave said, we are a community of marketers and your background has been in TMT and you've pivoted successfully and marketers have to continue to learn as one can see your career where you've gone from web one to web two to web three and now a huge proponent of it. Where do you think marketers should start? And at what point in time do you think marketing and the technologies will come together? What's the intersection? Any thoughts?

Angela: 15:12

Yeah, that's a really great question. I was listening to a YouTube video this weekend. There's a bill that will be proposed in Congress. It's a bipartisan bill proposed by Congressman Loomis and Person Gillibrand in New York, and they are proposing a bill around crypto. And it was pretty interesting because I was listening to these podcasts over the weekend. The speakers were Ted Cruz and Caitlin Long. So a lot of Bitcoiners are really supporting this bill. I think it's going to be very bullish for Bitcoin because it's already been deemed a commodity by the SEC, not a security. You know, we're making a lot of progress in the other tokens world. You know, hopefully we'll be in a point where these tokens are not viewed as securities because they're fully decentralized and because they're just a common layer. Polkadot is a common layer of security, highly secure software that's operating in the background that allows these blockchains to talk to each other, as I mentioned. However, when I was listening to them, I was thinking, wow, we in Web3 do a really bad job at education. And marketers do a really great job, usually, in boiling things down and making them much simpler than they actually are so that people can actually understand them. And I had an epiphany back in 2017 that is related to this and where I think marketers can play in because I view myself as a generalist in tech, which I think has served me so well because I always try to boil things down to what is happening here. And if I had to explain this to my mom, how would I explain it? And I think that, you know, back in 2017, I got really excited about blockchain video games and the potential And then I went and met with a bunch of teams. And I'll never forget, one of the teams was a group of cryptographers, as they were. And imagine a group of cryptographers from MIT sitting around. And I said, well, I'm so excited about what you're doing. And how much do you know about video games? And who has a video game background here? And one of them said, we're cryptographers. You don't think we'll figure out video games? And I thought, whoa, the gap, like video games. is a really big, complicated industry, just like media. And I think technology people underestimate nebulous ecosystems and people in media really underestimate how important it is to understand the technology. Anyone who can bridge that gap is going to have a very long career in Web3.

Suresh: 17:44

Fabulous, which is what we are aiming to do with the Web3 Marketing Association to try and bridge those gaps for the marketers. And also, in many ways, to try and get the collective power of marketers with their view on doing the right thing via their brands for their customers into the Web3 space so that all the things that you mentioned earlier in terms of everything from rug pulls to poor experiences and all that needs to go away. And I think we have a collective reason for us to exist in some way and a collective duty of care for us to do something about it. I have another question for you, which is you wear multiple hats. You're an ambassador for Web3 and Polkadot. You're an advisor to large and small organizations. You're an investor. And wearing your investor hat, where do you see the big groundswell? Where is capital flowing? They always say, follow the money. So where should we be looking in terms of growth opportunities for brands to lean in? What would your advice be?

Angela: 18:42

I have a big screen for Web2 companies that are entering Web3 by just doing what I suggested that Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Without the ETH And I think that I would go to companies that value community and value a bottoms-up ethos and a culture of transparency and community and collaboration. The idea that the creators of value get paid, not the centralized entities who co-opt a zero-sum game. We're exiting this world of a zero-sum game, and we're going into a world of many stakeholders. It's like there's money from the outside pouring into these companies. Those are the investors. Then there's all the people inside these companies that are workers, working, working, working, working, creating value. And then this money pours back out to the investors. And I think that model is going to evolve to a model where all of the creators of value in the company are also stakeholders in the company. And as that value accrues to the entity or the company or whatever you want to call it, will earn in a more fair way that value creation. And I know it sounds very utopian, but I definitely see enough companies embracing it and wondering about it. It speaks to younger generations pretty loudly. And that's where the talent will go.

Suresh: 20:06

Amazing. And do you think DAOs will get legal standing in markets and they can actually be set up as entities?

Angela: 20:14

You know, we're not there yet. The DAO report from the SEC laid out very clearly that the tokens, at least in that case, for securities. I think it will evolve in a natural way. It's very difficult. Like the technology works for DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. So you can apply technology and get, you know, a very disparate group of people from all over the world together with a common goal. And everyone owns tokens, everyone has a stake, but then human behavior takes over. So the technology might work, but it's very difficult to, you know, like, what if I'm working for 10 DAOs? How do I prioritize my time? You You know, what if I'm the organizer of a DAO and I want to continue to turn the power over to the community? And I do, you know, because every decision is made through voting and governance is owned by the communities. But what happens if there's a hack? Who takes over? Or maybe they can't take over in a truly decentralized network. Polkadot Web3 Foundation gave up the keys back in 2020 when the network launched. So the community truly owns it and leads it. But I think what we'll start seeing is very atomized versions of companies. So very very specific problems that need to be solved where people who can solve those problems will come together through the scale of the internet, right? So it's a really fascinating way to surface the best talent quickly using the scale of the internet to solve a particular problem. And it also is gender blind, ethnicity blind. It's more about capability. Now, the flip side of all of this is that right now, at least, A lot of these early adopters are technologists. They're software developers. And the average person doesn't understand exactly what's going on. And that can be really dangerous because we have a responsibility in the industry to make sure that we are taking care of the average person on the street and the person that doesn't understand these networks. Because at the end of the day, if there are a few people who get together and create a digital asset that is traded on an exchange publicly, and they have more information, than the rest of the world, it is their responsibility to take care that they don't take advantage of that material non-public information in the same way that a public company shouldn't do that with their stock.

Suresh: 22:30

Phenomenal. I agree with you on the information asymmetry, which is one of our theses as well around how do we create learning modules for marketers. And there's information asymmetry on both ways to your point, which is the technologists need to understand customer protection, customer rights, experiences, all of that, and the market need to understand technology and ensure that Joe Blog on the street understands what they're actually selling and mis-selling in some cases, as we are seeing nowadays in the world of Web3. Dave, I think we're nearly to time, so back to you.

Dave: 23:04

Thank you so much. I mean, it's been an incredible half an hour. I think there's probably got more questions rather than answers, but I think everything you've talked about is real food for thought. So thank you so much for coming on and being so clear in terms of your views and yeah we really appreciate your time

Angela: 23:24

okay let's do it again be fun thanks so much to you both

Suresh: 23:28

thank you

Speaker 02: 23:33

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