Recap · August 31, 2025 · 25:48
Tong: Building in Crypto, AI Media/Content, Web2 and Web3 Products and More | TG Podcast
The Signal
Tong, founder of Hollow World, explains his bet that generative video will make content creation accessible to nearly everyone—and that attention, speed, and taste will become the scarce inputs. His company is building AVA Studio, an agent layer that turns a prompt into a finished video production, then using crypto rails to let creators own and launch IP.
Key Takeaways
- 01
AN AGENT ABOVE THE MODELS
AVA Studio is not training a foundational video model. Tong describes it as an agent and aggregator that selects among current models and assembles the script, music, sound, scenes, and production around an idea.
- 02
TASTE STILL MATTERS
He expects AI to do production work for people who lack the skills or taste to make content, while people who can spot and remix a trend quickly retain an edge in capturing attention.
- 03
CRYPTO IS THE OWNERSHIP LAYER
Hollow World began around NFT avatars and digital identity. Tong says crypto gives creators ownership of IP, an existing native community, and distribution through IP communities while the product aims to compete for Web2 users too.
On the Record
“AVA Studio, I would say, is like a meta-agent on top of a video aggregator. We're not investing in our own models right now because that's still the game of the big companies.”
“You have a personality and you have taste, right? I feel like AI influencers are going to do the work for most people who don't have taste, but they need help on the actual taste-making.”
“I feel like it doesn't really matter that we wouldn't care because it would just be like the new norm. For videos specifically, it's better for creators because it lets people who don't know how to produce videos get the most out of these massive distribution channels on top of short videos.”
The Breakdown
From robotics to animated avatars
Tong traces Hollow World's path from computer vision and 3D digital twins at Bright Machines, through Matcha at 0x Labs, to the NFT cycle. He began with tools for animating NFT avatars, built Hologram around collection-level animations for projects such as Pudgy Penguins and Mads, and kept pursuing the larger idea of digital identity after the market fell. The original product let avatars appear in Zoom calls and livestreams; the longer-term proposition was that a character could carry not only a look, but a customizable personality and set of expressions.
AVA Studio's full-production prompt
The current product is AVA Studio, in private beta with roughly a thousand testers. A user can describe an idea—such as a market video—and let the agent select the model and generate the scene, script, music, sound effects, and compositing. It is not a product Tong expects to perfect before opening: the practical threshold is fixing the bugs that would make a new visitor leave and being able to handle a viral influx. A coming launchpad is meant to support different forms of onchain IP.
The next AI-coin wave needs products
Tong thinks the first AI-token wave largely rewarded personality and attention around Twitter bots. He expects the next one to demand products with utility and traction, rather than just AI-themed speculation. Video models will keep improving as US labs ship and Chinese competitors catch up, while AVA benefits from those improvements without owning the base model race. In his framing, the company is a meta-agent on top of a video aggregator: as a better model appears, the studio can improve with it.
Attention after synthetic media
Threadguy presses on a future where feeds are mostly generated. Tong's answer is that AI can make production accessible, but creators still need taste and fast trend recognition. He does not see the tool as replacing a streamer with a distinctive personality; he sees it as expanding the number of people able to make something legible and polished. The relevant advantage, he says, is noticing a trend early, putting a personal spin on it, and capturing the first attention around it.
Why a crypto company makes video
For Tong, crypto is not an afterthought: creator-owned IP has been part of the company thesis since its NFT work. He acknowledges that conventional AI builders can be skeptical of crypto, so Hollow World has to be deliberate about branding while maintaining a serious Web2-quality product and giving its community a role in how AVA is used. He describes AVA as the core coin around AVA Studio and says credits can be burned for the product's AI use, a balance between product branding and holder expectations.
Competing through aggregation and curation
Google and other giants can wrap their own models in polished interfaces, but Tong says that also confines users to one vendor. Hollow World wants to aggregate the relevant models and make creation feel native to terminally online communities. Its target is one-click, viral-ready templates, though he says it needs more creator content before that promise is consistently real. The company has seen individual templates reproduce the kind of clips that travel on TikTok; the open question is collecting enough of them to make that outcome repeatable.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
