The Wise Ones Podcast Eps. 5 - @SerjKorj, Founder of $DEPLAY | AI and Blockchain Developer

We present to you the fifth episode of The Wise Ones Podcast. Hosted by
@Wisemenmentors

For this episode, we're sitting down with Serj, the founder of $DEPLAY |
@deplaydotfun  the first music prediction market built on Solana and a builder who walked away from licensing deals with Apple and Samsung to bet everything on crypto.

Serj | @SerjKorj spent years building AI technology in Palo Alto, licensing it to the biggest smartphone manufacturers on the planet. He bumped into Tim Cook at a Whole Foods, pitched him for 15 minutes, and three hours later had three Apple VPs at his showroom. Tim Cook gave him his personal email and one piece of advice: "I read all emails, but only once."

His previous @solana project hit hundreds of millions in market cap. Multiple hackathon wins. Followed by Toly, Raj, Austin Federa, Vibhu, and the entire Solana ecosystem. He earned every follow through years of building and shipping.

Now he's focused on one mission: bring the next billion users on chain through music and play.

In this conversation, we explore:

- The Tim Cook |  @tim_cook moment: How a Whole Foods conversation led to Apple VPs at his door, and the one sentence that shaped how he approaches everything.

- The streaming mafia problem: 99% of artists earn zero from streaming. $DEPLAY is breaking that system.

- How $DEPLAY works: Artists upload tracks, prediction markets auto-create for each song. Fans predict if it hits top 10, top 3, etc. Artists earn a cut of every prediction in real time via smart contracts.

- 5-10x more per stream: Artists earn five to ten times more than Spotify paid instantly to their wallet, not months later in a PDF.

- Everything on chain: Every play tokenized on Solana. All data transparent and verifiable. No black boxes. No manipulation.

- The onboarding breakthrough: No seed phrases, no wallet setup. Users play first, discover crypto second.

- Telegram Stars: 900 million users can predict using in app credits. Win real crypto. Zero friction. They don't even know they're using Solana.

- The Seeker phone play: Native lock screen integration. Raj called it out specifically. This is what Solana Mobile is betting on.

- The flywheel: Every artist brings their fans. 1,000 artists with 1,000 fans each is a million new Solana wallets. That's how you scale adoption.

- Nearly 1,000 artists onboarded: Organic growth. No paid marketing. Just a product that works.

- The 2030 vision: One billion users onboarded through gamified crypto experiences. Not through tutorials through play.

This is a founder who's been building since 2014, already took a project to hundreds of millions in MC, and is now going after the biggest target in crypto: real consumer adoption at scale.

We hope you enjoy.

@SerjKorj | $DEPLAY 

@deplaydotfun 

@solanamobile
@toly 
@rajgokal
@Austin_Federa
@vibhu
@SolanaFndn

About The Wise Ones:
The Wise Ones Podcast sits down with the builders and strategists shaping crypto's future before the mainstream catches on.