Embark on an enlightening journey into the world of intellectual property with the charming Pudgy Penguins.

This transcript unveils how the Pudgy Penguins community is pioneering the art of IP creation in the Web3 space.

Discover the strategies and insights behind building a brand that resonates emotionally with its audience, leveraging user-generated content, and fostering a supportive and creative community.

From the nuances of digital branding to the future of Web3 gaming, this conversation offers a deep dive into the world where creativity meets technology, led by the whimsical Pudgy Penguins.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:16 G m g m, everyone. We are back with a new track with a new space to for this week. We got the hustle with us today. Very, very excited for today's show to be talking about what the Pudgy penguins are cooking. Still waiting for a few people to join. All of my co host karma is rugging a bit. She has issues with adjoining the spaces. Spaces has been giving us a bit of trouble today, noticed it earlier, on the modern market as well.

Legendary 00:02:48 Some people were joking in that spaces might be built on Solana judging by how it is done, but that's maybe not to go that way. And let's welcome the people who we already have on stage. Shiv How are you doing? Welcome to the stage, my man. We haven't spoken in quite a while, actually.

SHIV 00:03:11 Hey. How are you guys doing? I'm excited to be back on the the CCX space is absolutely crushing it. I think last week you guys had to pick someone keeps on, and that was a fantastic space. I decided to bring out the Huddl and also pudgy gaming as well to talk about the different things that we're doing, building the IP. With the pudgies, and, yeah, I can't wait to get into it. And a few of us are sort of trickling in, so excited.

Legendary 00:03:37 Absolutely. Yeah. Raj, welcome to the stage. How have you been my man?

Raj 00:03:42 I've been good. It's been, it's been a very, very busy February. NFT Paris is creeping up. So, honestly, everything other than NFT Paris has just, like, been super distracting to me, but, Yeah. I'm doing good. It's nice to be here.

Legendary 00:03:58 Nice. Didn't know if you're going to NFT Paris as well. We're definitely gonna see each other there. That PA welcome to the stage. I also haven't seen you in quite a while in spaces, at least in the spaces that I've been hosting. How have you been?

ZP 00:04:11 Been good. It has been a while. GMGM. I'm sad that I've been missing some morning markets and everything. I roll work has been very busy with the football season, but excited for that to come to the closest weekend and kinda trying to get back into the web 3 world, but very happy to be here. See Carmen just joined, so I'll take it back to you guys.

Legendary 00:04:31 Absolutely. Thank you so much for being with us. Lorenzo, welcome to the stage as well. For joining us today. How are you doing?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:04:39 Doing great. Just another day in Pudgy World.

Legendary 00:04:42 Just another day in Pudgy World. Love to hear that. Karma, checking in with you. Is everything working? Is x letting you up on stage?

Karma 00:04:50 Yes. The queen of getting ragged has arrived. Hello everybody. Lovely to see so many Pajep penguins on stage. We still have people streaming in, but I'm just genuinely excited for the chats today and would love to pick your brains huddle on so many different topics, you know, starting from IP building all the way to onboarding and gaming. Like, there's just so many topics we can jump into today.

Legendary 00:05:20 Absolutely. And let's let's let's start with it. As you said, we have a lot to cover. You mentioned IP. Shive mentioned IP in in his interest. Well, maybe start with IP then and get straight into it. Pudgy, so definitely building one of the strongest IPs in the web 3 space. And the team has made a very, very big bet on the toy segment. Shive, you obviously also did a lot of video content around the toys. Was it was it clear for the team that this is a vertical that they want to get in from the get go, like, from your conversations with with the team with Luca. Was it something?

Legendary 00:05:56 Luca had in mind ever since he acquired the brand that this is the vertical they wanted out to build. And how has, you know, this this journey progressed and evolved from your perspective?

SHIV 00:06:08 Yeah. For sure. I think this question is actually better for Lorenzo because the whole licensing from the community was his idea. Soon after they acquired the pudgy spot, a lot to give my perspective. I think it was a fantastic vertical. And the reason why I say that is The final system from normies getting into web 3, there's too much friction. There's too much friction when it comes to looking at Okay. I need to set up a mess. I need to send crypto. There's so many different fishing points where oftentimes it pushes people away to even consider looking at NFTs. And if the word NFTs and Web3 already pushes people away, we'll have to focus on.

SHIV 00:06:48 But when you look at the toys, everyone loves the toys. You fall in love the character. You fall in love with the penguin through the social media, and the toys have a QR code into Pudgy world. Which is also utilizing the tech behind the scenes and actually onboarding people. And it's those touch points that actually makes things more frictionless That makes sense when it comes to getting people on board into this space. But of course, I'd love to hear Lorenzo answer this question because this was all his idea from the job.

Legendary 00:07:20 Yeah. Absolutely. Then let's get straight to you Lorenzo.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:07:23 Yeah. So when we purchased Pudgy, there was only really 2 thesis for actually making that purchase. We got a lot of questions around, like, how do you value that? Like, Why are you buying that project? And, the first was community. You know, the community was super strong. They had kind of pulled through know, through coal and, you know, obviously, kind of the market had taken a turn for worse at that point, but, you know, the project was still holding, I think, point 7, point eight eight floor. And you know, the vibes in the community were a little scattered, but everyone was still there and wanted to be around the penguin. And so that was really amazing.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:08:03 And the second thesis We thought it was the only actual PFP project, that could reach mass adoption, and people could resonate with outside of our small crypto sphere. And, you know, from that, we wanted holders to be able to build with our brand. And so that's kinda where the IP licensing thing came in. We wanted, you know, to change this traditional consumer model, which is you know, through IP and and basically every other industry into a participant model. And, the only way to do people along with the journey.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:08:38 And so, you know, we implemented inner Igloo's where we got, you know, regular feedback from the community on the different things that we're doing and then ultimately allowing them to participate in when the brand goes to market, which is through licensing and seeing your toys on the shelves of the largest retailers in the world. And so, yeah, really excited. And I think it's been a blessing thus far, and But, yeah, the biggest thing was IP and community when we started this thing.

Legendary 00:09:07 Those are 2 very, very strong thesis to have and build on. What gave you that very strong conviction on your second thesis that this is the IP to build on. This is the IP that is compatible with reaching a mass market.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:09:22 It was kinda purely based on the cuteness and that we all liked it. So it was actually all of our first PFPs. It was Lucas first. It was my first, first one we ever purchased. And it's because when we looked at kind of a market, when you looked at, like, apes, when you looked at punks, when you looked at penguins, that was the narrative really early on, kind of when penguins launched. And, you know, when you actually take a deep dive into those PFPs and the meetings behind them, you know, punks is very much on the art side. It is the OG.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:09:56 Will kind of always have that stamp in time, but, you know, can the mass market really resonate with a pixelated image of, you know, different characters, you know, we felt not, but it is an amazing art piece and something, you know, that is really legendary in the blockchain space. On the eight side of things, you know, it wasn't as friendly of a connotation. And some of the traits weren't as friendly as we thought needed to be in order to kind of galvanize a really large audience, you know, behind the PFP. And penguins are cute. You know, penguins resonate with a really large group of people.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:10:36 There's no group of people that, you know, I mean, why would you hate penguins? And I think through each generation, you're seeing, you know, different penguin IPs come up. You know, you got penguins from Madagascar. You've got Happy feet. You've got club penguin, and, you know, those are some of the most fun movies and things that families and kids actually resonate with. And so That was it wasn't a really well thought out thesis past that. You know, cute IPs are the largest IPs in the world. And so the fact that penguins were cute, the fact that, you know, there was familiarity from past penguin IPs with a general large audience were probably the 2. Biggest factors.

Legendary 00:11:16 I feel like that makes a lot of sense. And as you said, it's hard to take offense in a penguin. Right? It is a very family friendly animal slash IP to be building on. But a follow-up question, we we've seen many brands we've seen several founders in this space, kind of trying to copy the Pudgy playbook, to, you know, determine what makes the Pudgy playbook so successful And how do you basically go? Because we've been speaking a lot about brand building in the previous CTX spaces. How do you go from, like, building a brand to expanding and extending that into building an ecosystem?

Legendary 00:11:54 So building away from you know, strong community, strong IP, being trending on Instagram, on Giphy, to having a toy line, to be talking about gaming, and to have so many other things. Like, what is the process to scale from a brand to an ecosystem.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:12:10 Yeah. I think probably one of the biggest things is you have to understand what a brand actually is. You know, a brand is something that can have products and can have no product Right? It is something that is a little bit nebulous. And so when building an IP, it can be difficult to understand, like, what is your actual core product? Right? Like, what is the core product of Pudgy penguins?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:12:36 You know, some people might say it's toys, other might say it's gaming, you know, you might say that, you know, it's the content on Instagram, but ultimately, it's the likeness of the character and how that character resonates with a really large audience emotionally. And so that's a really difficult thing, to think about and to quantify And so, you know, the way my IPs are monetized is through secondary means traditionally. Right? Like, you're selling toys, you know, you might have a game. Right? Like, you might be doing all these other things, but, like, are you a toy company? Are you a gaming company? No.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:13:13 Like, those are means of monetization for your underlying product, which is like how you emotionally resonate and how many people you know, are interested in your brand. So, you know, transitioning away from community is an interesting framing. I think we're trying to build a much larger community because ultimately, you know, The best thing that's ever happened to us is that we had a core set of believers and people who resonated with our IP, and that has given us a really large advantage when going to market.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:13:47 You know, traditional IP takes anywhere between, you know, really 15 25 years to build to create that emotional connection with any subset of users. And so the fact that that was kind of built in through, you know, the NFT model and, you know, finance is slightly aligned between, you know, the builders and the people who are supporting and participating has given us, you know, an an immense advantage when actually going to market. And so we are just trying to increase the amount of people that have that, you know, really strong emotional connection to the brand and to the penguin.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:14:25 And so all of our funnel basically works to do that. And so it's different for a web 2 audience over web 3 audience because they are not financially aligned and, you know, in that mission from the start, but, you know, it starts top of the funnel with content and story and proliferation of the penguin itself. Right? Like, the goal is really to be the most popular penguin. When you hear penguin, you think pudgy penguins. You don't think penguin's a Madagascar, you don't think happy feet, you don't think club penguin, you think pudgy penguins. That is like really high level goal of where we wanna be. And so that's, you know, done through a couple different channels.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:15:04 The first is, you know, on Giphy, Next, we have Instagram content. You know, we're looking to integrate a lot more story on that side of things because, again, you want a deep emotional connection with people because that's when you're actually able to push people down the funnel and then those monetization channels become really interesting. After you've kind of gone through, like, the content distribution and the IP proliferation stage of things. You know, you're looking at, like, products that people can interact with. Right? Like, web 3 is a traditionally very digital world.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:15:36 I think it can be difficult for people to resonate with digital things, especially if they're not, you know, video games or movies or really, really well done video games and movies. I think, you know, often people it kinda comes in and out of their life. And it's something that doesn't really stick that great. And so we want it to have physical product. Right? This is something that you can touch every single day This is something that can be part of your life when you wake up, when you go to bed, right, like, when you're with your friends, you know, it's always in your mind, right, like, there's always a touch point for you there because you own it, right, and you're seeing it constantly because it's in your house.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:16:15 And so, again, just trying to create another deeper emotional connection through that process. And then you have, right, like, some of the digital things that we're doing, which is Pudgy World, which is really amazing. And I think will be the primary vertical where we actually tell the Pudgy penguin story and allow people to get a deep emotional connection with the brand. And then after that, you've got trickled down into the NFT communities themselves, right, like really core believers and people that wanna participate in the brand that have taken you know, that emotional connection, which usually stops at consuming in web 2, and they want to become a participant. Right? And so therefore, They buy a PFP. They engage in the aid in their igloo. Right?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:16:55 Like, they are now what I would maybe deem as, like, core community. But I think at all levels of that funnel, the goal of the IP brand is to create community, right, like, to create people who love your brand, who wanna be a part of your brand, because you don't like, your product is the character or whatever you're trying to proliferate. It is not the game. It is not, you know, the toys those are secondary means of monetization, and is not what you're actually trying to do.

Legendary 00:17:28 I love that very insightful answer, and I also loved how you put it. That pudgy is not a gaming company. It's not a toy company. And you also, you know, mentioned that the community has been a tremendous asset in building this this web 3 brand that obviously has the mass market reach, but it also puts you, like, in a very unique position because if you build a traditional web 2 IP, you don't have that core group of NFT holders that have that already, like, strong emotional connection. Those have sort of a financial connection, obviously, with with the collection, with the brand.

Legendary 00:18:04 And you mentioned that this has been a tremendous asset, and I think that the value of communities and where at least for, like, web 3 native participants is a very, very clear one. But on the flip side of that, what would you say is or some of the challenges that come with, you know, having having this core group of holders who are also like, you know, owners of of the PFPs apart from the, well, communication and expectation management. Which still is one admittedly one of the biggest challenges in this space that many founders, many teams are facing.

Legendary 00:18:39 But apart from that, what are some other challenges that you see with that with unique proposition of building a web 3 brand.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:18:49 Yeah. I think the biggest it all really comes down to leadership and vision and getting people aligned in, you know, that vision itself. It's, Again, it's kinda nebulous, but, you know, we've seen, you know, through blockchain and things, the rise of, like, you know, DAOs and other things and often that stuff kind of waivers and doesn't really get to the end goal and doesn't really complete the mission.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:19:18 Because there is kind of no head of the snake, and that doesn't mean that all ideas need to come from that, you know, particular person or that particular group, but that particular person and group needs to be responsible for executing. On those things. And I think a lot of times in web 3, people sometimes get caught up in in just the decentralization of it, and they think that you know, working with community means listening to every single idea and implementing every single idea. And, you know, that is the best way to win. You know, well, from what we found, we are like the muscle to the community's brain.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:19:57 Luca talks about this all the time, and it's really What that actually means is, like, we are there to filter and execute on the best ideas from this mask, you know, mind. Right? Like, how can we bring the best ideas to the surface? How can we lead this project? How can we share an actual vision that people can get aligned with? And they wanna to be a part of it, not because of what they are getting, but because of, you know, why they are participating. And so that's really the core thesis on, I think, what has been such a huge success with Pudgy is, you know, you really want that level of leadership. It's not just interacting with the community.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:20:37 I think that that's maybe where people get it wrong. It's not just providing updates and saying hello and being in the chat. It's a level of leadership and a level of vision that is really important to keeping everything aligned. And from that, I think it's been a monstrous success you know, when we look at, you know, the initiatives that we've done, whether it be Amazon or Walmart, like, we would not have that success without the community. Right?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:21:06 And so that really is the spark that allows you to grow much faster than a traditional IP is when everyone is aligned, when everyone believes in your mission and vision, they can support and you give them a path to actually support that vision, then they can go out and do so. And so we would not have had our Walmart deal if Amazon had not gone so well, and Amazon would not have gone so well. We did not have our amazing community behind us because launching a penguin brand on Amazon does not reach number 1 on the toy chart. The 1st week until it sells out. Right? Like, that stuff just doesn't happen.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:21:42 And that's because you know, often traditional IP brands don't have that level of involvement early on. And so it can be this really amazing tool and but if it's not curated properly and it's not led properly, then, you know, it it can become a reliability for some founders and something really unruly that is difficult to deal with, but we've had an amazing community. They always have our back. They're always here to support us. And we do the best that we can, you know, to lead with that vision and to take their best ideas and actually go and execute them.

Legendary 00:22:16 Very, very insightful answer. And I think you covered some very important points on on the leadership side of things, before I check-in with Karma to hear her thoughts. I do have one more follow-up question for you. We obviously have loads of, penguins lots of Huddl members in the audience, but we also have quite a few in the audience who are not at least judging by the PFP a Padji penguin or not part of the Huddl.

Legendary 00:22:41 And for those, I would like to ask because you mentioned, you know, how important it is to filter out the quality ideas not about, like, doing everything that the community says, but really getting the best ideas, to the foreground, getting them in the spotlight and executing on them how does that filtering process? How does this how does the communication with the community work to make sure that, those stakeholders are being heard that you can get access to the best ideas and eventually can can execute on them.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:23:10 Yeah. So something we started actually right after purchasing the project was something called inner igloo. And so this happens every 2 weeks. Luca, you know, gets on stage inside of our Discord. And, you know, anyone who owns a big pudgy or a little is, you know, is welcome on that stage. And he talks a little bit about updates. It's a little bit about things that we need to support with, you know, from the community side. And then he opens the floor for discussion questions and things that we have questions as a team about. Right? And so this is really where we're getting regular and honest feedback about the different initiatives and things that we're doing.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:23:49 And some of the greatest ideas that are implemented within our toys and other things that we're doing have come from, you know, members of the Huddl and the inner and the inner reclue, which is really, really amazing to see that those ideas actually get put in a practice and then are seen on the shelves of Walmart. You know, from there, it's really about taking those ideas and those things and bringing them kind of back to the team and then debating and discussing you know, what we think is the best path forward and is in line with our vision and in line with the mission and then ultimately going and executing on that stuff.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:24:21 But It really all starts with creating an open forum and then having a guided discussion around the things that you want to know about how to improve the brand. I think it's less around like, hey. What should we do at Pudgy penguins? Like, that would not be a very informative or helpful conversation for either the community or for us. Right? Like, there is no leadership in that. Right? There is no direction. And so But the best thing that you can do is interact with the people who are using your product, right, which is community.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:24:54 And you know, by interacting with them, by getting real market feedback, you're able to actually improve on the things that you're doing. And so I think this is another thing that's really important for startups is, like, getting active feedback from people. Right? Like, how many people in your market are you talking to about your product. Right? What metrics are you deciding to look at to determine the success of your product? And then how are those people? How is that people's feedback actually, you know, showing up against those metrics? And so that's really what inner Igloo is. Right?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:25:29 Inner Igloo is that feedback system on the things that we're working on, right, so that we can make better so that we can improve them for the people that care and love our brand. And so they have tons of ideas, and that's amazing. And, you know, it has been probably the most important thing for the brand thus far and how we're and it helps us iterate very quickly on the things that we're doing.

Karma 00:25:52 And I'm gonna, jump in right now because you've shared so many thoughts that I want to riff off of Lorenzo. And quite frankly, it's hard to even decide where to start. You shared a wealth of knowledge, but I'm going to move maybe in between IP and building in public. The main topics. So something I always remember obviously Luca sadly couldn't join us after all today, due to some, you know, locksmith and scheduling issues. However, what I always remember from all the interviews that he's ever given was that the genuine web3 brand is not just about integrating the blockchain.

Karma 00:26:30 It's actually about how you build and how you involve your initial, very engaged audience. It's not just about the technology of it, but it's generally a new paradigm shift where instead of people just being passive consumers, for, you know, some of the first times, they can actually actively contribute bottoms up from the very start of when the product is created. And I generally believe that Padji penguins excelled at that very open communication. And managing expectations of their holders, which we see time and time again in the space, is one of the most difficult things, right?

Karma 00:27:09 So much of the disappointment, so much of FUD, in this space very often originates from just bad communication or this mismanagement of expectations. And I think Padji pigments, you know, there's just so much we can, we can learn from you guys in that regard. And then another thought I wanted to share, and maybe Lorenzo, you have something to say, you know, back on this is I'm thinking back to the previous spaces on IP building we had, which was with Azuki.

Karma 00:27:38 And we talked to them, and he shared a very, very important thought how It's very, very soon your IP will be much more important than the actual products you've built because the barrier of entry to building, you know, games, building, animations, building, even anime, are being lowered so substantially by AI that it's no longer a mode to build something very big. Like, you know, the effort you have to put in is lowered day by day. So It's going to matter even more who are the actual characters in your product. Do people care about them?

Karma 00:28:15 Do people have that incredible, you know, emotional bond with them? So I guess, you know, do you have any thoughts about this? And you shared quite a few already, but is this AI and, you know, lowering the barriers of entry, and IP becoming the new mode? Is this something you talk a lot at budget penguins?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:28:36 Yeah. I think I we haven't integrated a ton of AI into the stuff that we're doing. I think that, you know, cost to get to market will naturally go down through, really, any industry that you're building in over time. And so I think that that is applicable. I think, you know, The really important thing to look at is, like, where are the trends of brands going? I think, you know, we'll see that the traditional brand dies ultimately and In 20 to 30 years, this is something that I've heard from the all in podcast. If you guys don't listen to that, I think you definitely should. Right? And it will be kind of be based around the influence Right? So, like, our penguin is our influencer.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:29:15 That's where we're creating our emotional attachment. That's ultimately where the value is derived because you know, our product, again, is not a gaming company. We are not, you know, a toy company. We are an IP company. Right? So that is measured on the proliferation that of the IP and how people understand it and how people want to be involved in it. And so that is really where the value is. Right? So, like, when you look at Mickey Mouse, what drives the Mickey Mouse sales? The love for the IP drives those sales. It's not that there is a cute mouse product. Right? Like, that is a mode of monetization.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:29:52 It's, you know, that their Disney's product is the IP. That's why they're super fierce around it legally, right, and wanting to protect it and make sure that, you know, It is upheld in the way that they believe it should be upheld because that is the actual underlying value. Is that emotional connection with that many people, and you can monetize that through a bunch of different ways. So I I would agree, like, you know, cost of creating something in any industry will just naturally go down, you know, over time. But, you know, being an IP company means actually being an IP company. And so you are not any particular product.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:30:31 And so that, that is always important to keep in mind.

Karma 00:30:34 Yeah. Absolutely. Fun thought, the IP on the early version of a Mickey Mouse, you know, one of the most iconic like the black one from the very, very early movies has actually expired recently. And we've immediately seen a surge of, you know, people integrating it into different indie games, different content.

Karma 00:30:56 But none of it ever really got that much traction because just the powerhouse of IP that's still associated, you know, with the main, with the main owner is is still strong, but certainly, you know, this building in public and open IP discussion is something that's very much, you know, being being, proliferated right now.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:31:16 Yeah. The building in public 1 is really interesting. I think, you know, it'll ultimately comes down to, like, creating a level of trust. Right? And so, like, being a good leader is is maintaining trust with the people around you and allowing them to participate as if they are on a team. And I think that that is probably also why you'll see expectations for other projects and things get out of control is because ultimately the community does not trust. Right? And, like, it's difficult to have trust with so many people in such a large group, but it's really important. Right?

Lorenzo 🐧 00:31:49 And so by being open, by being honest, right, like, you create that level of trust with any individual, and you just have to do that at a mass scale. And so it's think that that's probably one of the other biggest keys that we've learned is just be open and honest if things are taking a little bit longer, tell people, right, like, you know, ask for their feedback on things, create those emotional connections with them personally. It will certainly help guide you. You know, we treat the community Like, they are a team member. Right? Like, they are working within our organization, and they are, you know, helping us build, and we we wanna have that you know, level of transparency there.

Lorenzo 🐧 00:32:27 Now, obviously, can we share everything all the time? No. Right? Like, there has to be some mystery in NFT, but that doesn't mean that you're creating a lack of trust and a lack of communication.

Karma 00:32:40 Absolutely agree. And for us as well, it has been an amazing journey, you know, at ZTX, to build with the feedback from the community and implementing the ideas and from people that we are building for in essence. So amazing false Lorenzo. I will, however, now pivot towards more of creator questions in the UGC. And maybe I will give the mic back to you legendary. It will be, you know, very larping from me to try and pretend I'm, you know, the biggest creator here on stage.

Karma 00:33:12 So, you know, off to you, and I'm sure we can, we can have an amazing discussion about integrating content creators into the brand proliferation.

Legendary 00:33:21 Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for the segue. One one final point, though, on what you just said, Lorenzo, I feel like this is such an important point that balance between being transparent, communicating transparently with your with your community, and also, like, keeping a bit of a mystery is something that a lot of projects seem to struggle to find the right balance with. Because being mysterious about a couple things doesn't mean that you suddenly become an intransparent brand and stop talking or communicating at all. With your people.

Legendary 00:33:56 And I feel like Pudgy has been doing an excellent job at at striking a very, very good balance. In this communication challenge. With that being said, as you just said, Karma, we we're heard a lot from the IP side of things from the building and public side of things, but I do also want to pivot. A bit into the perspective of individual creators, wanna go straight to UShip You were very early to make a bet on building your brand around that little pudgy have been tremendously successful in doing so. Walk me a bit through that, you know, journey and thought process from your perspective as a creator?

SHIV 00:34:35 Yeah. I mean, the thesis was pretty simple. Very early on being run into space for a very long time, seeing a lot of different PFP projects. One thing that they always told you was you have access to the IP rights of your PFP, but they just left out that. And one thing I realized with Pujis is and something that actually Lorenzo told me is what point of IP if you can't leverage it. And seeing the way that Pudges was building, attacking the IP vertical, you know, billions of impressions on Instagram, TikTok, Giphy, people fell in love with the Penguin very early on without knowing it's an NFT.

SHIV 00:35:15 People could look up my pudgy pen win without realizing it's an NFT, and they don't need to know it's an NFT, but they fall in love with character and how that makes them feel. And as my journey as a creator, someone who's making a personal brand, moving through the space, It made perfect sense to push my brand with a pudgy morseau with a little pudgy reason being, when I made my bets pretty early on last year, there wasn't many little pudges on the timeline.

SHIV 00:35:45 And I realized this was a vertical that was challenging, but I love a good challenge because it's very common to see big penguins around, alongside other, obviously, other NFT projects as well. Leading the charge where no one has really gone before was super exciting for something I was to take on pretty early on in my career. And I understood that building alongside this team was fantastic because there was clear cut communication. There was this element of building a public There was in Igloo's where, it's also a focus group where ideas come to life.

SHIV 00:36:20 And being inspired by the way that team the team built, it was a no brainer to join this process, and building alongside the little pudges, the penguin, Huddl web, ultimately the web 3 community has been super fruitful. You can take a scroll down on this Twitter space and see developed penguins that showed out no punches included. You know, this is, incredible to see because it's what that has gone in day in, day out. To really showcase the power of the penguin, and I wouldn't change it for anything.

SHIV 00:36:55 So It was very easy conviction to make very early on, just kind of comparing the way that the space was moving. People want transparency. People want clear cut communication. People want to know how things are going. I mean, what are you seeing now on the timeline? You know, you're seeing a lot of whales calling things out, especially communication. The way that this space is moving needs maturity, and seeing the way that punches are doing it very early on, it was a no brainer.

Legendary 00:37:28 Yeah. You you made some fantastic points. Absolutely agree on your thought process when it comes to to the communication. I also love how you specifically mentioned going, for the little pudgy because it was a vertical that wasn't very, very occupied back then. And, I mean, we've spoken about a couple of times in in real life as well. It was a very similar thought process for me. The reason why I wanted to become slots men, how you started to call me quite a while ago was because nobody was using the Azuki elemental animals as, as their IP So definitely resonate with that, very much.

Legendary 00:38:08 You also mentioned the important point of, you know, wanting to leverage the IP and that being a main asset of going for the Pudgy penguin is going for the little Pudgy. And we do have, a ton of creators in in the audience, aspiring creators in the audience, how do you go about leveraging, you know, the IP of your little pudgy in your content, that you're creating? What are some of the things that you learned along this way that you could, you know, pass on to to other creators?

SHIV 00:38:38 I think it's It's funny, right, because the way that I view my penguin is very much of myself. I think there's a penguin out there that anyone can relate to. And build something meaningful with it.

SHIV 00:38:51 And the way that I go around utilizing the IP My Penguin is it's pretty funny because I can go out and showcase the content I'm making to my web 2 friends, and they don't need to know anything about what is happening in web 3, but they could still enjoy what I'm doing and experience it, through the penguin, I think it's it's been pretty interesting because a lot of people have so many connotations when it comes to web 3, PFPs, and a lot of different things, but me going out doing what I love to do showcasing it through my penguin reduces so many different friction points that not only is it enjoyable for me, but it's enjoyable for the people outside our echo chambers.

SHIV 00:39:42 Now seeing where the growth is gonna be this year and the years coming, I think it's super exciting to, realize that the growth also comes in from my side as well because We're all collectively pushing this together, right? And the beauty about web 3 is there's so many varieties when it comes to content. And it all comes together because at the end of the day, we're all somewhat ambassadors for these projects.

SHIV 00:40:11 I mean, you rock in your elemental erocking my pudgy, everyone rocking their PFP, you know, it's it's growth that comes in and out in and out and I think the best way to describe it is everyone eats because if I'm growing, the IP is growing, Hojipem was just growing, and vice versa. So, yeah, I think what I realized is when I create something, everyone can enjoy regardless of, what the content is.

Legendary 00:40:43 Yeah. I I I think this is a fantastic concluding point and especially that you say you're it's about the content that I create. It's not about the tech that I use. It's not about the fact that this is, a PFP that I own. It's an NFT, etcetera, etcetera. But really about the content in itself. I think we did tackle the IP topic from quite quite a few angles and going back to the title of the spaces. It's still a gaming spaces, and we have a plethora to still cover on the gaming side of things. When it comes to Pudgy, so I'm gonna pass it, to you, Carmen, to set us up for the gaming side of things.

Karma 00:41:22 Absolutely. And, I've been looking forward all day to Grilling Raj on some questions, to be honest. And for for those of you in the audience, which, you know, may not be completely up to date or just just haven't really followed that much. The Pudgy World experience, which, you know, allows you to gamify some of the Penguin penguin interactions is in pre alpha. Now usually alpha is the very first testable version of a game, and, you know, it might crash and not have all the features on the software.

Karma 00:41:57 And then beta, just, you know, explaining some terms of a game is version with all the features that with bugs and possible crashes. So we have Pudgy world in pre alpha. Just before I joined the spaces, you know, I made sure to, like, time the time took me to, like, log in and check it out. It was under 2 minutes. Meaning that, you know, you guys are really optimizing for very quick very easy onboarding for anybody, not just people who are, you know, versed in juggling 52 or 52 wallets. So I'm just wondering, Raj, could you, you know, maybe explain to everybody in the audience? You know, what's the goal of Pudgy world?

Karma 00:42:36 How it relates to the IP you are you are working on and how this gamified aspect is going to grow? Because I know on our end, you know, in ZT X, we will also be integrating, social log in with email very soon into the new release of our beta. And we are looking forward to opening up this completely new and easy way of interacting. So, yeah, take it away.

ZTX 00:43:02 Yeah.

Raj 00:43:02 So I I I just wanna clarify. Pudgy Gaming is not affiliated with Pudgy World. We we're just a sub community that really, really enjoys gaming, but I'd love to, you know, give my input on it. I think with Pudgy World, it it's in a very unique situation to where the more the IP grows, the more and more people that are gonna be, you know, they're gonna be exposed to Pudgy penguins. And I think Pudgy World is really, really interesting.

Raj 00:43:31 And the fact that it has potential to do everything that, you know, when I was a kid and something that I really, really enjoyed was club penguin, webkins, all these, like, little immersive experiences with an IRL toy that I would buy. And I think Pudgy penguins has a really, really good opportunity to capitalize on something like that. And and it's it's crazy to see that that these brands like webkins or club penguin, they don't really exist too much anymore, and that experience for little kids is just it it's seemingly gone.

Raj 00:44:09 And I think Pudgy World is the perfect example of, you know, it's it's it's it helps get the kids in there, but it also just hits a bunch of different demographics. I I I always say this on spaces. I'm like Pudgy World has potential to just to hit the it you can do kids, parents, you know, people that enjoy NFTs, digital experiences, whatever it may be, and It wouldn't be crazy to see a million people, you know, daily, monthly, whatever it may be playing pudgy world in the future.

Karma 00:44:46 Yeah. Amazing. And thank you so much for clarifying the distinction. And, you know, I didn't mean to confuse it. I just, you know, wanted to really segue towards you as the, I would say resident gamer on the panel or one of them, for sure, Shiv, I saw you have your hands up. So, please jump into it.

SHIV 00:45:04 Of course. Can you just repeat your question again on, Pudgy World, Alma?

Karma 00:45:08 Yeah. Bay basically, what I'm trying to do is give the listeners an overview of what it is and where it's going. And, you know, how the game switch are accessible right now. You know, there is a PingoDage, there is chess. How do these small games, you know, integrate into the entire ecosystem? How do they help grow budgeting wins.

SHIV 00:45:30 Yeah. So I'm also gonna pin up a graphic to help, but understanding the funnel system that we've always wanted to create. Of course, 20222023 was very much hitting the IP vertical. And making sure people fall in love with the penguin, the brand, those emotions that are associated with the relatable content and the variety. And memeable stuff that comes from the penguin. Now when you buy these physical toys, how can we go from the physical toy into the digital collectibles? And it's about creating those seamless, funnel systems.

SHIV 00:46:07 That being you buy a digital toy, so you buy a toy, you scan the QR code. And like you said, comma, within 2 minutes, you can log in to Pudgy World. Now Pudgy World is meant to be an experience where people can come hang out and play alongside some of their favorite penguins. Now very early on when Amazon Amazon toy drop happened, Pudgy World was very much in its infancy stage, and it still is but we understand that we can't just have a toy and have a very lackluster game.

SHIV 00:46:41 So building out this game is gonna be super important this year, and I hope you guys are really looking forward to it because it, like, exactly what Raj said and just rallying that is it has a chance to retouch the heart of a lot of people coming from gamers, especially like us lobbying web 3 gamers as well, that we understand the importance of UGC content and how much that can also proliferate the vision. You see so many people posting about their toys and the experience with it and collectibles. That has a chance with project world as well.

SHIV 00:47:13 People going out there, having fun with their friends, doing cool stuff, having a an incredible experience without realizing, Hey, there's an underlying NFT involved. That's how you get 100 of 1000, if not millions of people into web 3. It's through these seem seamless interactions where you're going down the funnel system and you're just enjoying the experiences. Similar to when I was a kid, I'll go to the Disney store I'll buy club penguin part card packs, I'll go to club penguin and enter the code, and now I I can enjoy the game on a it'll be an incredible experience. It's a similar thing.

SHIV 00:47:53 You know, you love the characters. You love the way that it makes you feel. You love the penguin. And then it's it's an experience that elevates your connection to it. And it all falls underneath the brand and eventually You have die hard collectors that love it so much that they wanna collect these entities.

Karma 00:48:16 Yeah. Absolutely. And I agree that as a part of a funnel, I think it will end up being one of the most successful steps to really engaging the audience. And something I wanted to follow-up with is, you know, in the early stages of web3 gaming, when we were talking about web3 games, there was this very, very big push to on chain notification of everything. Unless everything you were doing was on chain, people just felt like you aren't really, truly building and web3.

Karma 00:48:48 Now I'm insanely happy to see this has changed significantly, you know, needs to be on chain. You can integrate in different ways to really optimize performance and the experience for the users. So just because, you know, for overview, like, how are you how is Pudgy World integrating web3 to really balance in between the user experience and the web3 component in it.

SHIV 00:49:22 Yeah. For sure. I mean, Carmo, you just signed up to Pudgy World, but one thing you didn't know is that it actually created a wallet in the background. It's using the tech without you realizing there was no point throughout that whole sign up process where you create signed contracts you read something you didn't understand. It was as simple as signing up with your email, and on the back end of things, it's utilizing the technology. Now as this builds out, more of that tech is gonna be used. Something that we had early on was you can trade the assets. You can trade the traits. For example, if I had a wizard hat in Pudgy world, I could sell that.

SHIV 00:50:02 I could trade that. But right now, it's on pause because there are better ways of implementing it. But just think of that as one case scenario, right? You can have true digital ownership of assets you own. Similar to you NFTs. I mean, it is an NFT at the end of the day and making sure that throughout the whole process, people don't realize that, Hey, it's actually an NFT. But you just sell it, you're just trading and selling assets. On top of that, we've always understood that you live and die by your community. You know, community is always gonna be your backbone when it comes to your product drops, your activations, and your experiences.

SHIV 00:50:40 And from licensing community penguins to integrating community penguins in Pudgy World. It's a way of galvanizing the community to rally behind this. I think cache, first of all, welcome to the Sage. You're the perfect example of this. Cache is actually in Pudgy world. Check out her banner. Right? So her character, her penguin is in Poggi World. Now you can imagine, right, as Poggi World continues to grow. More penguins are gonna be in Poggi World, right? Your favorite penguins, your favorite creator's influence as founders or leaders are gonna be in this game where people can go enjoy those experiences.

SHIV 00:51:20 And if you check the image I've pinned to the, board is, you know, from IP growth to community, you get the community into the funnel systems you've created, and those people are naturally going to go out there and represent that. They have an emotional attachment to it. So that is something that, you know, Pudgy World brings, utilizing the web 3 tech, And in my opinion, it's one of the finest ways to use this tech that doesn't have a lot of friction points.

Karma 00:51:49 Yeah. I feel like you've just, connected the 2 topics, the IP and the gaming in the most perfect way, just, you know, bringing up this example. It's absolutely incredible. And something I wanted to say is, you know, you've also outlined how smart accounts work.

Karma 00:52:06 So for those listening, you know, this ability of logging in with your socials to web3 applications, has not really been around for that long, this, like, abstracted accounts and smart accounts, abstract building the wallet for you on the back end when you log into application, even without previous knowledge of web3, that's something which is really unlocking completely new onboarding strategies this cycle. And there has been immense technological steps done on this in the past months and continuously improving on it. We're also right now integrating it for ZT X.

Karma 00:52:42 And quite frankly, it's a complete must have if you're truly thinking about why their audience the next steps, I'm sure for, you know, like, for many penguin games as well, there are still difficulties in, you know, how do you balance having your game on chain and paying, gas transactions for users. But also here, you know, we are seeing like many, many new developments, including, you know, we have very much faster blockchains now. We have cheaper transactions.

Karma 00:53:13 And these are immensely valuable because no player is going to come in, register with their penguin, and, you know, then learn how to trade on binance just to buy a little bit of dust to cover, cover the transactions. So really, really excited to see how all these applications will continue, you know, evolving and developing for the, quote, unquote, normal users. I know that at ZT X has genuinely been spending months now refining exactly this flow. So it's it's always good to compare notes I see you have your hand hand still up, so go for a shift.

SHIV 00:53:49 Oh, yeah. No. I just wanted to touch on that. You know, the the gas, fees is always gonna be a sticking point as well. So I know it, Albatrum, you know, gas is super optimized and it's actually incredible. And with Pudgy World, you might be wondering, well, how are you creating these wallets, you know, Fresh wallets, how are you guys trading assets around? Surely, that must cost a lot. Well, Pudgy World is partnered up with ZK sync. So we're using Polygon when it comes to creating these wallets and everything. And it's all gassless. I mean, it's all covered by ZK sync, so I just want to give a major shout out to them. Yeah, I mean, these L2s especially on need, definitely the way to go about it.

SHIV 00:54:27 I mean, oh, John is a fantastic example of this as well.

Legendary 00:54:34 Perfect. Shiva or Raj whoever wants to take it, I do have a follow-up question on that. Because we did touch on, you know, pudges being an IP company, 1st and foremost, with different verticals, with the toy line, with, the gaming side of things, how important do you guys think that it is to basically create touch points across those verticals. So for someone who has the first touch point with a pudgy brand via buying a toy, how do they get you know, a gentle nudge to learn about, hey. There's also a gaming world that I might want to experience. There's more to that IP than just the toy that I've bought.

SHIV 00:55:15 Rod, do you want to take this? I could balance on it.

Legendary 00:55:20 I think Raj just dropped down from the stage. I will try to bring him back up and you maybe can take in the meantime shift.

SHIV 00:55:27 Yeah. So your question is for someone who's looking in, right, while the points where they look into, hey, this is an NFT I just wanna get your question correct.

Legendary 00:55:36 Yeah. Not not necessarily NFT. Like, when, you know, say I have no clue about Pudgy penguins, I, you know, go to the toy store and see the toys that's my first touch point with the brand. How it basically does my my user journey progress and how do I learn about, hey. There is a gaming world to this. There's more than just the toy that I bought.

SHIV 00:55:54 Oh, this is, yeah, fantastic. So, you know, from from the graphic I pinned above, I think it definitely helps visualize this as I explain it, right? So for someone who for example, I walk into Walmart or Target or Smith, wherever it is, right? And I find a pudgy toy. So you're, you know, you're at the point of the funnel system where you're interacting with the licensed products. And you might recognize it. And on the packaging, it'll have the socials, it'll have the final systems created. You know, there is a QR code that leads to Pudgy World but also everything there is when it comes to the vertical of IP, right?

SHIV 00:56:34 You know, the Instagram is a massive factor, the TikTok, you know, the Facebook to all these other social media platforms that we're creating. And something that we're doubling down on in 2024 are these verticals, right? So you pick up a budget way for whatever reason it could be. Really like it, you might wanna buy it for your girlfriend or nephew, whoever it is. And on the packaging, the funnel systems are created, so you go and check out these socials. And you create a deeper bond with what it is.

SHIV 00:57:09 And those lead to going down the rabbit hole of okay, this is more than just a toy. It's it's a brand. It's a game. Oh, wait, there's a collector's experience with a digital assets such as the NFTs, but also collectibles as well. The limited edition drops. So there are different ways people can go through their journey I'm not gonna say which one people might go because I think that's the beauty of it, right? One person might just purely enjoy the toy, and that's completely fine. Someone might enjoy the social media platforms.

SHIV 00:57:43 And how about that, I think the beauty about it is you enjoy the IP the way you want it to be. I'm sure there are PoggiPenwen Collectors that might or might not care about the social media platforms, and that's completely fine. I think the beauty about a decentralized ecosystem because that's essentially what we're in, is you enjoy the experience the way you want it to. Not everyone's a gamer, and that's fine. Some people love, the IP vertical. Some people love the collector side of things. I think the beauty of it is you make the most out of it the way you want it to.

Legendary 00:58:19 Yeah. I think that's such a good point because on the one hand, you know, you've been describing how the funnel works for the overall IP. On the other hand, you are also acknowledging that different consumers, different brands, enjoyers have different first touch points in the user journey and the user experience, and they might not care about all the verticals and you didn't create the funnel in such a strict way that it only works if, you know, you go toy first, then gaming, then you learn about the social media just making things up right now. And then you see, oh, that's an NFT, and then you get interested in that. So, well, that might be a journey that works for someone.

Legendary 00:58:59 It doesn't have to be the journey for everyone. And I think that, flexibility is so so very important. Building on that, though, where do you think Shift will, you know, the gaming side of things for pudgy penguins be in 3 years? Like, will it become a very, very significant vertical? How do you think that this will, you know, evolve over the next few years?

SHIV 00:59:26 Of course, I think Pudgy World is a key focus of the funnel system from people buying these these toys and going down this digital journey, I think it's, it's something that's super important, something that we've recognized pretty early on from when we drop the toys that the importance of Pudgy World is pretty fast. And being someone who spends a lot of time in Webster gaming, seeing the way that these projects are building out games.

SHIV 00:59:57 It's super points on super important to understand that we make a game that is truly enjoyable that people can go out and create content with. I think the importance of UGC content is super important. You know, you have these celebrities, you have some of your favorite influences, Twitch streamers, etcetera, showcasing pudgy toys. I mean, we had Kais in that show a pudgy toy in stream. You've had a ton of different creators post about pudgy toys. You could imagine when Pudgy World drops in its full flash that people are going out, creating gameplay, doing cool stuff, That is all a final system that attracts people into what we're doing.

SHIV 01:00:37 And out of the hundreds of thousands to millions of people that have interest in that, even if even if a small people become die hard fans, that is still massive when it comes to people having their eyes on the NFTs. So at each touchpoint of, like, the funnel system, they're they're super important. Each one's super important. But yes, as a natural gamer myself, I'm really looking forward to the growth of Pudgy World, and I think this is also way a part like with Pudgy Gaming also plays into it because they're also cooking up things on their side.

SHIV 01:01:10 So keep an eye on that, but it's really I think when it comes to is how can we rally each point that we have, right? Each each part, each point of the funnel system is just as important. I wanna make sure that that message is valued. So, yeah.

Legendary 01:01:27 Yeah. Very much. I appreciate the answer. And I also like how you tackled, the your your insights from that UGC first perspective and would be very curious to hear from your side, Carmen, when it comes to ZTX what role that focus on UGC plays for you guys when it's about, you know, shipping new features, developing the ZTX ecosystem, what are your thoughts on that?

Karma 01:01:53 Yeah. I feel like the UGC discussion is kind of like blood, like, flowing through the web3 veins, right, and through a lot of, like, the gaming space veins. What I mean by that is basically, you know, none of the large social media networks create any content themselves. Like, we are all the product and content creators are who make the world go around in these spaces, to be honest. And I think any brand or project that doesn't support and create a space for content creation to thrive will have a very, very difficult, you know, difficult time staying relevant.

Karma 01:02:34 Now for ZDx specifically, you know, we are backed by Zepetto. Zepetto became big and we are speaking about 430,000,000 lifetime users, it only became big because it put UGC and content creation as their number one priority. So from the content creation tooling that's available in Zepetto all the way to, you know, entire programs for boosting creator content for, you know, like, discovering new creators that gets suggested to users. All of those initiatives are genuinely what makes this platform so lively and and such a hub of social interaction.

Karma 01:03:13 And ZTX is going to continue on and see it in the exact same way. I actually strongly believe that the metaverse we will see not not win, but be one of the most successful ones. And all types of gamified interactions that will become successful will be very, very heavily socialized. You know, you see it already in the space, like, you know, look up even, you know, examples like front tech, you know, it only blew up so big because there was such an insane social layer to it.

Karma 01:03:47 Look at Nifty Island, which, you know, launched with so many social and interactive ways for communities to connect. That's exactly the vertical that we want to, you know, scale with ZT X. In I'll buy, you know, in a slower fashion because we do we do have this immense, you know, legacy background to think about and onboard But I genuinely and truly believe that in this space without UGC and without empowering UGC, you are as good as dead in many cases. And and and I shift shift hand immediately shut up. So go for it, brother.

SHIV 01:04:27 I think Zepetto is, like, this DTX is just a fantastic example of UGC content. I mean, where you guys are. I mean, it's it's a testament to UGC content, right, and how much of an importance that is. Kind of just going back to this UGC as a whole, especially podgy world. Everything that we try to do our apologies is making sure that it's for the community. It's for the commune like, the community is aligned on everything we make sure we hit the mark and those expectations. Now when you think about Pudgy World, well, guess what?

SHIV 01:05:07 We really have a massive community of penguins that love the brand so much that they're gonna play this game post on social media and go out there. From 20,000. They'll pudges to 8000 Biggs. You already have a community galvanized when it comes to this game, and that's what games are looking for. A community to go out there, post about the content, play the game, and I ultimately enjoy it. Now When you have a brand that's already recognizable, hitting the IP vertical, people feel confident to go out and, you know, showcase this game. And people not being like, Hey, what is this? But recognize it, Hey, oh, that's Pudgy penguins.

SHIV 01:05:46 I've seen this stuff on Instagram. I've seen this stuff on TikTok. That they have a game, I'm gonna go and play this because it looks super fun, and the community's already going out there and showcasing the content. So it's all a final system that always comes down to the community. If the community enjoys it, the community's gonna go and represent it.

Legendary 01:06:09 Yeah. That's a fantastic, fantastic point that you've been raising shift. And I think we have had an excellent conversation so far. Those are gonna be respectful of everyone's time, both, everyone who's joining us in the audience as well as our speakers. So, I do want to slowly move to wrapping up the spaces, but before we do that, shift a final question for you, obviously, we touched on many things that pudges are cooking. If you had to pick a singular thing for 2024 that you are most excited about when it comes to pudgy penguins, what would that be?

SHIV 01:06:44 Oh, wow. You put me on the spot here. I think naturally with this conversation we've had today with gaming and being someone who plays a lot of games, I'm really looking forward to Pudgy World. Really looking forward to just jump in and have fun as a dope experience, but also, super grateful for the IRL experiences that I've had, you know, from the events that I had in 2023, even the little ones where, you know, legendary, we met on a yacht party in in London. I'm super grateful for that. I think events is something that really brings the community together.

SHIV 01:07:21 So I'm really looking forward to the events happening this year as well. And hopefully, I'll see you guys during NFT Paris. NFT Paris is gonna be a big one. The announcement's gonna come out soon, but it's really something that brings us together. And at the end of the day, we're humans with social creatures, and eye roll expenses and meetups go a very long way until they'll find those bonds. So that's what I'm really looking forward to.

Legendary 01:07:44 Man, I couldn't agree more with that. Really, really resonate with your take. Karma, I wanna throw it to you for the final words and to wrap us up for today's face.

Karma 01:07:54 Yeah, for everybody headed to NFT Paris, like, please, please, please do reach out. I'm insanely excited to meet everybody. And each one of you that will be there. It's always such a flurry of activity and, you know, legendary chef with Met in the past, but never in Paris. That just hits different.

SHIV 01:08:12 So excited for that for sure. Farmer has insane dance moves, and you would only witness it in Paris So stay tuned for that. That is a that's a reason to book your hotel and tickets to come over to see that happen.

Karma 01:08:27 Okay. Someone will be buying me drinks. Okay. Anyhow, ship Oh, okay. You put me on the spot here, but she was also an excellent dancer. Why are you coming yourself down? Before this devolves into a further discussion on who is better, I wanted to thank every single one of you for joining us today for and everybody in the Huddl for, you know, wanting to share their experiences, their building building journey, something I really value about these spaces is that we are talking very openly about the experiences in our building journey.

Embark on a journey through the innovative realms of Pixelmon and Playember, as we dissect the valuable lessons learned from Palworld's success.

This transcript captures a vibrant discussion among gaming visionaries, exploring the nuances of game design, user engagement, and the strategic development of gaming IPs in the Web3 era.

Dive into this insightful narrative that blends expertise and creativity, highlighting how these gaming titans draw inspiration and chart new paths in the ever-evolving digital playground.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:37 Gmgm, everyone and welcome back to our weekly spaces.

Legendary 00:03:18 Very, very excited about this week's episode. We will have a bit of a of a deep dive into both, pixelmon and playmber, but also more touching on, a couple of different topics, one of which is gonna be the hyper casual gaming sector, how gaming, connect to AI. The other topic that we really wanna dive into is IP. Especially since the fall, the whole timeline over the last couple of weeks, or the last 2 weeks was fall with the tremendous success of Palworld.

Legendary 00:03:57 And I definitely wanna hear from our panelists, wanna hear from both John and Julia today, if if there are any learnings in there, for web 3, for web 3 gaming in specific, And also, Play Ember had a very, very successful mint that we wanna dive a bit into a pixelmon just had a very almost on the personal note, very lovely announcement announcing their ambassadors very happy for everyone who is part of their team.

Legendary 00:04:29 Obviously, including myself, very happy to be, part of that lineup myself, but With that of of the way, I think we have, an amazing discussion planned for today with that being said, Julio. Welcome. Welcome back to the stage you've been with us before. How are you doing? How is your week going so far?

GiulioX 00:04:50 Hey, thank you for having me. Week's going well. Can't say we can't say you got a lot of free time put it that way, but there's always an opportunity and there's always a fire. But, you know, I guess that's That's part of things going well. There wouldn't be fires if people didn't care, and there wouldn't be opportunities if people didn't care. So, very, very glad of the opportunities we have, at this point in time, and this is one of them. So thank you for having me.

Legendary 00:05:21 Absolutely. What's what's the last fire? You have to put out.

GiulioX 00:05:25 So I I just, unfortunately discovered that we weren't we didn't have the right process in place. So, you know, we we gone up, a bit in terms of attention and popularity in the last couple of months. And, I realized that our ticketing system in this court had gotten a little bit unattended. So effectively a customer service, failure And, I think failure on my end, because we should have been really having KPIs and and daily reports and escalation processes and average resolution time, particularly, and all of those things that actually in ecommerce are really good at, and I failed to implement over here.

GiulioX 00:06:04 So a little bit of a little bit of interest in customer service, but it'll get fixed.

Legendary 00:06:11 Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And I also love that as a bit of a spicy icebreaker question, So I'm gonna throw it straight to you, John. Welcome back. What is the last fire that you have to put out?

Jon Hook 00:06:23 Well, on a personal level, my tire went on the drive home this morning. So that was like a personal story that wasn't ideal that screwed up my morning. What does it say? I mean, it's not a fiery. I think at the stage we're at, I mean, a bit like what Julia is saying, I think you you've you've constantly got a filter through, like a lot of the exciting opportunities coming your way, but there's also got to be some level of prioritization in here. Map to, you know, kinda short term what we're we're deploying and also just at a basic human human level.

Jon Hook 00:06:54 There's only so many hours in a day and there's a limit to how much hatred I can take from my developers at the moment, and it's really important that they don't burn out. I think it's it's really trying to manage, constantly manage that, you know, expectation and commitment to the community and holders versus, yeah, trying to continue to build and grow the business in a sustainable way. And, you know, every every day, you know, at times that can feel like a a fire because you're you're trying to keep a lot of people happy in the business driving forward. But my tire's fixed, so I'm happy about that.

Legendary 00:07:29 Love to hear that and definitely agree. That balance is super, super important if you want to approach things in a sustainable long term way Ashley, welcome to the stage. Any fires you've been putting out recently? Well, that's in web 1, web 2, web 3, web 4.

Ashley 00:07:44 You know, I I'd like to, you know, come in right with you guys, but I just got back from, Spain last week. I guess the only fire that I was putting out is severe jetlag. Ira's there just because, like, She's having to go in and out of town because she lives in North Carolina. I live in Texas. So, you know, it's it's a very exciting time, but, I guess so it's more stress and excitement rather than anything else. So I guess those are good problems to have.

Legendary 00:08:21 Definitely good problems to have. And I think for many, many reasons this week in in in January or at least those 3 days in January that we have this week are the most exciting ones. Carmel, welcome to the stage. How have you been any fires for you to put out?

Karma 00:08:37 Hello. Hello, everybody. Incredibly excited for this panel. And thank you, John. Thank you, Julia, for tuning in in the midst of what is very, very exciting and stressful period for both of you. Also, thank you for every single person joining. Very, very untypically to my life, there are no fires at the moment other than constant travel. Majority of my life just consists of, you know, future proofing different decisions against my future stupidity. So recently, I've been I've been actually doing very well.

Karma 00:09:10 The the Twitter spaces here with you legendary have been like as very, very steadfast rock in my calendar every single week. So, maybe that has contributed to it, a little bit of stability in the digital life.

Legendary 00:09:27 I love it. I love it when our spaces become the stability, the the rock in your life. With that being said, let's let's get into it. John, I would quite like to start with you since you have successfully, very successfully minted out last week. Since we've started on a on on a spicy note, let's fits by seat. And let's not start with the warm up question, but with the maybe the more challenging one in hindsight, would you still have done a free mint? Am I hugging?

Ashley 00:10:05 Voice John. No. No. You're not working. He isn't unmuted yet. I don't think.

Legendary 00:10:12 All ready. Then maybe let's give him a bit of time.

Playember 00:10:16 Come back on stage.

GiulioX 00:10:17 Hey, guys.

Playember 00:10:19 Hey, I'm I'm Hugo. I'll I'll I'll step in whilst Whilst films having some having some problems. It yes. I think we would do a freemint again. Yeah, it it allowed us to kind of really grow our community. And we're we're kind of really was obviously a stressful time, but we're really happy with how smooth the mint was, and we can already kind of see the the sprouts of our community, kind of really, really starting. Obviously, you're going to have those flippers, right? But yeah, I think we already have a few wells.

Playember 00:10:57 I think have something like 2020 holders above 20 NFTs each. We're kind of having 1 to 1 calls with them. So yeah, really, really enjoying, enjoying talking to the, to these big holders and the community yeah, so in short, we, we definitely could.

Legendary 00:11:23 Interesting that you mentioned the the fact that you have your 20 ish whales that you wanted to have the the one on one on one calls with them. Is it something you had initially planned, or was it like you will see and wait for the whole destruction then just reach out your biggest holder, how did that initiative came to be?

Playember 00:11:43 Yeah. To be honest, it was completely natural. I've actually just had a, I've just had a telegram from John saying, I can take over.

Jon Hook 00:11:50 So Johnny. Yeah, sorry. I just got completely rucked. Yeah. I mean, some of it is natural. Like as Hugo was saying with some of the some of the whales, it's it's really important that that we give them you know, kind of transparency information so that they can position accordingly, but some of these have been going on since before before mint from people that have been very interested in what we're doing, in what we're doing. So, you know, continuing to do that, like this week is just nonstop calls, in in some shape or form.

Jon Hook 00:12:24 And it's just really important at this early stage to, you know, just particularly with what's what's happening this week you know, we've been trying to do that for a long time. This isn't something we just decided around mid. You know, say with our our investors, we have very regular calls with them. And I think I think the best thing is is is the is the 2 way process. You know, some of the announcements that are coming out you know, this isn't something that we we can take credit for at all. It's very much a two way process with some amazing, you know, amazing leaders and creditors in this space.

Jon Hook 00:12:57 And that's probably the most enjoying thing is very much just not feeling alone in any of this and having the support and you know, brain power of of of not just our community, but other communities that we're welcoming in. So, it's it's really interesting working through this and you know, just kicking this around to see the best best path forward?

Legendary 00:13:20 The last thing we we had you with us on the ZTX spaces, you made point that, to you, it is super important to stay humble to not assume anything getting into the web 3 space And now you're obviously focusing on collecting feedback on having that conversation with your holders with the whales as well, do you think that, say, your typical your your average holder having maybe 1 or 2 MBs, and the whale holders have different demands or different expectations. And how do you manage to basically get both opinions from both subgroups in.

Jon Hook 00:13:57 Yeah. We we we're still learning. Right? Everyone everyone has as as much like, as much importance, whether you you you have 1 or whether you have, whether you have 50. You know, obviously we have sort of separate channels based on, the amounts you have. But in terms of balancing priorities, really try and treat everyone the same, right? So really when we start thinking about the the gains dropping, there are some similar questions in both channels in terms of you know, rightly so what what does that mean like for us as a holder?

Jon Hook 00:14:32 I think we're we're trying to you know, take, take a position here is particularly with everything happening right now. It's like the fund and one of our key pillars that playing but has always been about is kind of making great games. So we don't wanna have that barrier whether you're a holder or not into our ecosystem. Of course as an MB holder, there's gonna there's gonna be some extra, you know, benefits in in game entertainment that you should enjoy as someone that you know, invested in, in in what we're doing. But on the on the flip side, we also, you know, it's been operational for a while now.

Jon Hook 00:15:07 Any gamer should be able to come in and contribute to the ecosystem, and get entertainment and, you know, rewards tournaments, etcetera, even if they're not an NMB holder because we, you know, we're we're we're building this for the mass casual gaming market and there's a few billion of them. So that might completely damage the economics of our our system if we had like a 2,000,000,000 Genesis collection.

Jon Hook 00:15:33 So yeah, in summary, we're we're we're listening to everyone, trying to balance, you know, time obviously in Discord, but also, you know, being in important spaces like this representing play ember, you know, balance with one on one calls with, you know, a whole range of people in the space.

Legendary 00:15:51 Very, very well said, and I definitely do agree with you. Julia, I want to loop you in into this conversation talking about contributions to the ecosystem, you've announced a total of 10 ambassadors today joining the Pixelmon ecosystem with the goal to propel the brand, to propel the IP, and just to get them, them on board with Pixelmon, how maybe walk me a bit through the process. How did you come up with the ambassador program?

Legendary 00:16:23 What would make it a successful a program for you, say, in 6 months from now looking back to it, what are your thoughts on that?

GiulioX 00:16:32 Yeah. I'm so sorry. Thank you for bringing it up. We we've been working on this for a while. To be frank with you, it's, it's something that actually came up as an idea while we were. And it it's relatively well known now that we've done what is called as a private round or a strategic round. In the last, couple of months. And and during that round, frankly, we ended up meeting, yeah, great founders which was really what we were initially looking for.

GiulioX 00:17:07 Some, very, very strong strategic, partners but also we ended up meeting a lot of, people with a very strong network in the space that understand the space inside out and, whose opinion matters in two ways, the first one they are a great pulse, of what the space needs, and wants.

GiulioX 00:17:36 But at the same time, they are, if their opinion ends up being positive towards you, their opinion because of you know, how they behaved in the past tends to matter, also to to others to their networks. And what we realized is that effectively, these people could bring to the table, more, and we wanted them to be closer and have essentially a closer relationship with them.

GiulioX 00:18:04 And so so, you know, we we ended up branding it, as a separate program, but it is effectively ultimately a program that wants to create long term alignment between ourselves as a project, our community, and this group was of ambassadors. So so the core of it, when you ask me, why, you know, how how do you keep it successful? So I think success is gonna it is measured by alignment of incentives across these parties. So effectively, you know, we don't need someone to do short term marketing for Pixel on Pixel for better for worst is very well known.

GiulioX 00:18:45 Thanks are mainly still to the original Mint and and slowly now for a bunch of other reasons. But, so so what we do need is, effectively, groups of people with strong reach and strong opinions, have an alignment of interest to that of the team. And, you know, for lack of that better words, so to be actually very direct about it, that means long term incentivization alignment, not short term incentivization alignment. So not paper post, but align long term on the, outcomes. And, and that's what we put in place. And I, you know, we'll know if it works.

GiulioX 00:19:24 If in 6 months, the incentive are still all aligned.

Legendary 00:19:29 Yeah. That's a very, very good point. And I think that's also the the challenging side of things to actually find a set of incentives that works for long term alignment and to find a set of people that have that long term incentive and who just don't see it as basically the next thing they can show on their timeline and then move on to the next project. How do you how do you make sure or how do you how do you find those people where you think, okay, this might be a good long term fit? Obviously, time will tell, but what's the process behind that?

GiulioX 00:20:02 So, I think there's there's a few slides to that. One is, inbound and the other one is outbound. So by inbound, I mean, effectively, I think the first layer, to this was actually to see who naturally came to us. And by that, I don't mean people coming in and and and asking us, but I mean, people that either were already caring for the project already talking about it independently or participating in our discord, independently.

GiulioX 00:20:35 People that were referred by people that we trust So there was just, you know, Angelio can introduce you to this guy. He writes great newsletters. With deep content on the space. Can I spin up a telegram chat between you and him? And and, you know, we got to know each other and then, I subscribed to that newsletter and few weeks later, and they're thinking, well, I think we should align each other more, clearly, on incentives. So that's the inbound side And I'll tell you, I think out of the list, we are looking probably at 80% inbound.

GiulioX 00:21:09 And then once we have that 80% inbound, so once we had you know, essentially thought that way there was the 2nd layer, which was effectively, okay. Now it makes sense to spin up an ambassador program. How do we spin, you know, how do we how do we add another, tool free to it At that point, the it's basically a round of chats within the people that we follow, we listen to, and our team listens to, and, then we try and reach out to them.

GiulioX 00:21:43 But, yeah, I'd say the ones we reached out to, probably 20% while the ones that we ended up happening to talk to either were 80%. And I think it's it's nice that way because it means there was an interest pre predating, any, let's say, commercial intent So it's it's an organic relationship from the get go is what you're saying.

Legendary 00:22:11 One one follow-up question on that because we do have, lots of creators on state or in in the audience with us. If a creator wants put themselves in a position where they might be able to get a deal with a brand like Pixel Mona Partnership and Ambassador with a brand like Pixelmon. What what advice could you give to them to put basically the best foot forward?

GiulioX 00:22:35 Yeah. So, look, my point is, I think especially, pick someone is what I would call a complex ecosystem. Compared to most NFT collect NFT projects, we have, a bit more, collections out there. Those collections have different individual utilities. Some are burnt. You know, the serums are burnt to create, pixel months, but you gotta check if a pixel been evolved or not, but there's a lot of we we are looking to streamline it, but there's a lot of complexity to it.

GiulioX 00:23:09 I mean, even just understanding our fraction wise IP, and royalty system, and what ultimately a Pixel 1 NFT represents, which is an IP shard it's not just a, PFP or in game asset, etcetera. These are layers of complexity effectively, you know, for me to explain fully pixel onto somebody, I probably not fully, but at least give them a high level idea of what the incentive structures are, I'd need 15 minutes of one on one time with me alone talking in a long monologue.

GiulioX 00:23:45 So then what I start really appreciating are people that talk to us or talk about us. But going one level of depth deeper into explaining our ecosystem. I truly appreciate the, you know, that the participants to the ecosystem that just understand and take the time to digest an aspect of us.

GiulioX 00:24:13 I mean, it can be, you know, seating that frankly decrypted our game design going backwards in my replies and our, newsletters to a level that even some members of my team had an, you know, non the gaming team, but the peripheral teams hadn't gotten to. He had truly understood some of the details, and it was obvious the moment I started speaking to him that homework at a deep level had been done. It wasn't just, oh, here's an interesting project. Let me, you know, superficially talk about it.

GiulioX 00:24:52 So again, I think for me, it's, the best advice is probably a founder 1 doesn't want people to just speak about him or his project. He wants people to help him communicate depth of complexity. And that means, go a few layer deeper, show that you fully understood and appreciate that. And it can be even finding a mistake. Yeah? That sometimes is the best.

Legendary 00:25:24 Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Wanted to add that. If you have such an understanding they can spot mistakes in the complex and that means you are really, really knowledgeable on what's going on there. Actually, I do wanna bring you in into that conversation and hear from you as a creator and get your thoughts on how you position yourself as a fellow creator to work with brands in this space?

Ashley 00:25:52 You know, it's all about, figuring out, like, where your strengths are because, like, your strengths are not my strengths, and my strengths are not your strengths. And trying to go outside of that is gonna be like an unnatural fit for both audiences. So I just go based off of, like, hey, which brands do I already have a good relationship with? Which ones can I do do I have a lot of interest in? Sometimes it's as simple as seeing a brand that you really love that you would represent anyway, regardless of whether you're an faster or working for them or not. And then you go into that, you know, with full support.

Ashley 00:26:30 And a lot of the times, the connection is pretty natural. Or, you know, like, some of, like, the most recent ambassadorship that I have with Magic Eden You know, I've, I've been a big Magic Ian fan for a long time. I've been, you know, friends with a lot of the team, so that was a very natural fit. A lot of the content creators, they try to kind of, like, be an all, what is the word that I'm looking for? They they try to do everything. And you don't need to do everything. You need to do the thing that you're good at, and you need to refine it. You need to work on it, you need to become the best at it.

Ashley 00:27:08 And I think that's, as a content creator, how you establish really meaningful partnerships and make your content not only more meaningful, but just better generally.

Legendary 00:27:20 Yeah. Don't be a jack of all trades. Find your specialty laughter advice Cramer would love to get you into this conversation as well. We've been planning this show, and we, we've spoken quite a lot about IP. We spoken a lot about power world. And, I would love was to pivot a bit into that direction and then hear your thoughts on that.

Karma 00:27:41 Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, let me apologize for refocusing the conversation in a slightly different direction. But it's something I've been thinking and, you know, having both you here, like with Pixelmon and Playaumburg experience, we obviously want to pivot towards the direction of mobile and high for casual gaming as a topic. But before that, I really would love for us all to just exchange some thoughts about the power world. Success.

Karma 00:28:08 Now not necessarily just because it's, you know, like, the hot new thing and an exciting new topic, but I also believe the history of pal world team is you know, very, very keen to many, you know, more junior in these studios building within web3 right now. You know, some of the founders do have web3 background experience, even if power itself is a fully web 2 game, it was a small studio, which with, you know, relatively low, I would say, low supply of, you know, time and work hours has created a huge blockbuster.

Karma 00:28:45 So I'm going to direct this to you, Julia, first, because obviously there are parallels being drawn between success of Palworld, success of the monster hunting type of game as a wider narrative, Do you see any particular take takeaways from power success? Is there any type of a way that you are looking at it and trying to take something out for Pixel Moon itself.

GiulioX 00:29:12 Fantastic question. I mean, it's a as you can imagine, I've heard this quite few times, in the last few weeks, and we've had these conversations internally. Now maybe maybe one step back. I think what power world proves which is something that I think not many people had doubts of once you stopped and thought about it was that there is a massive, massive market for over sixteen year old, targeted monster collecting games.

GiulioX 00:29:47 And particularly for monster collecting games, outside the traditional Nintendo devices. So for Monster collecting RPGs, not on, switch. I think in Pixelmon, sorry, Pokemon is by far the highest grossing IP franchise ever. But every single RPG they've made is on one device, and that device has only sold 50 mile 50,000,000 pieces, worldwide. So again, metabolize this.

GiulioX 00:30:24 The biggest consumer IP in the world only runs its RPGs on a device category with 50,000,000 devices. So then you make a good game, that targets a slightly older age group because people that love Pokemon have aged, and one of them, and, you put it on a device that wasn't targeted earlier. And again, the game loop is great. I just explode. I think that's confirmation of market size. If ever we needed it, if it's there. The the other layer is then, you know, can you learn anything from this in terms of game design.

GiulioX 00:31:04 So what I think is genius of it's it's so simple but it's genius, is that, you know, you start thinking, stop thinking of demands just as an army of duelers, start thinking of the moms as a workforce. And hopefully down the line, an expansion they could add or somebody else could add, start thinking of the Monza as an army, not of dualers, but an army of many when you can send them on, like, raids using 2030. Maybe you start with a bit less, but whatnot of your mons.

GiulioX 00:31:42 So that simple variation, think of your mom's as, or pals in that case as a workforce. In addition to a, combat force is so deep, but effectively it flips the game. It becomes rust plus Pokemon put together, and that's great. We are looking at a lot of what they've implemented. There's a lot to learn there, not just in terms game design, but also pragmatic design. Like, a lot, that game is done in a very pragmatic way. They haven't over invested in animations. They've used a lot of off the shelf art assets, but they but it just works because the underlying design is so great.

GiulioX 00:32:21 And the sum of the parts work works. So, we are trying to learn from it, but also, I mean, now it's being done also you don't wanna be a me too. I don't think it's enough to just say, oh, I'm gonna do power world, but on web, on on on the chain. Now that that not gonna be enough, not for a project like us. So, yeah, there are learnings. But we whoever wants to do that needs to innovate really strongly on top of it.

Legendary 00:32:54 I do I do have a follow-up question on that. You describe pal world as essentially rust plus Pokemon. So, basically, it's 2 very successful brands, 2 very successful IPs blended together into a new thing and or to successful concepts blended together.

Legendary 00:33:11 And with with that description, the question that came to my mind is, how important do you think is it to build your own IP to stand out Do you even need to have your own unique IP to have your own unique brand, or can you be successful by just not just by by putting together 2 different concepts that maybe many people will describe how well as Rust plus Pokemon and nobody really cares too much about the IP. Where do you land on on those two sites?

GiulioX 00:33:42 So I think in its I believe, put it. I mean, and and then I've I maybe listens to too many, speeches that games come, but I believe that effectively one can build you can build a $1,000,000,000 revenue game, by just creating a great game loop and making it smoothly on the right devices.

GiulioX 00:34:08 But it will be very difficult for you to then create other product, say other games in other genres, or a TV series or merchandise, unless you in the process of creating that game, you really focus and think through what is the IP emotional value. Of it.

GiulioX 00:34:33 So there are fantastic game loops that don't survive it's first to release or if they survive it, it's only in the form of, okay, number 2, number 3, of the same exact genre. It works for premium games, not for free to play. And there are said, let's say, average to good games, but with a very deep IP that managed to spread across in general. So, I mean, I I think Powell, you know, now they've they've proved to be very great execution.

GiulioX 00:35:12 So I don't wanna speak poorly of any but maybe the only angle where it seems like the focus was a lot less and very different from how we had picked someone who had been thinking thinking. We've always put the monsters design and the world building first. So we've always thought ultimately we're gonna live and die on how I'm how from the emotional connection between players and our monsters. Yes. And how they think they think they will fit in this world, which is Pokemon meets game of Thrones. The one we we are thinking through.

GiulioX 00:35:44 And instead it's pretty evident that that, the team at, Powell thought a lot more about we're gonna live and die on the game loop and, we're gonna have an AI generate the monsters and, you know, they could look this that, but ultimately, they are functional. They're not strategic. So I think it's different choices. I think an IP might be a little bit derisked because you can spread it, you can make different bets on different product. And, have more longevity.

GiulioX 00:36:18 But again, you know, if you can just, in a week, you have, more than a 100,000,000 sales on steam, you can probably say that, you did things in your own way focusing on your own strengths and those strengths were game design.

Karma 00:36:32 Yeah. Absolutely. And there were some amazing takes in there. I do believe I agree, and I think for Pixelmon particularly, you know, considering that some of the monsters, not to say all of them, are such an important part of the NFT ecosystem, It also lends itself, of course, to spending so much time and so much love into the design of these, to just incentivize the ownership and generally first something to the community that they will be, they will be, you know, proud owning.

Karma 00:37:05 Whereas for power world, these are a means to an end and certainly just fun element of the game, which they can afford to be a bit more, AI influence, I would say. And I would now love you know, to bring Play Amber to bring you John into this conversation back with not the same, but a similar question, going in the direction of IP.

Karma 00:37:29 Now, you know, having followed the PlayAmber, mint schedule of having followed your marketing, I do love the MB mascot, and it is for me emblematic of building, you know, IP, building something that people emotionally connect with isn't in form of simple mint graphics. It has been incredibly a active, and you've genuinely, you leaned into that strategy. So could you expand on that? You know, like, that building your own IP how the ties to play Amber as a wider ecosystem, and if there are any takeaways that you've also seen from power or from other players in the space.

Jon Hook 00:38:08 Yes. So, I mean, if if we start with with with Powell, I mean, I agree with, a a lot of what Julia said there. I think you know, for us in in casual games, I think what they've done very cleverly is you skirt this fine line between a character that feels very familiar but you always stop and check with the lawyers where you then start getting into a IP infringement. And the last thing you want is Yeah. Or or, yeah, or or or you don't, you know, I think that I think a lot of people just accept that risk.

Jon Hook 00:38:39 You know, I've seen a whole bunch of, like, casual hyper casual ads that have literally got Pokemon characters in, that if, you know, Nintendo had better things to do and went through every single casual ad in the past year, they'd probably have, I don't know, like a 100 lawsuits. So I I I think they played that very well. Like, the, you know, the the characters you know, I'm pretty sure there's a couple that, maybe a bit too close, but I think that that theme is something that has been around and free to play gaming for a long, long time. It's just, again, as Julia said, I think it's it's not just the character.

Jon Hook 00:39:11 It's just that they also it's, you know, they created the IP but obviously they applied the kind of like survival genre elements as well. Right? I don't think it was just because of the the IP there. So then the the other interesting thing is actually if you read read up on the team and, you know, again, very similar just to game development, game development is hard. You know, they'd previously previously shipped 3 other games with sort of various success. And then, you know, went back the drawing board completely switched from like unity to unreal. And and now they've had that hit game. So I've seen that many times working with with studios quite often your first attempt is is not the one that is to hit game.

Jon Hook 00:39:51 It might be, you know, number 2, 3, 4, 5. It's the team's ability just to a resilience to learn and go again. So so when it comes to us in, IP, you know, very similar approach you know, build building like gaming IP, you know, can be a long and expensive process. So for us, we just follow the same approach we always have, which is which is you know, a scientific one, you know, start creating a few concepts, start using, our audience to tell us what what they think has started putting a few you had a few few ads on like tiktok, YouTube, etcetera, to see the kind of direction and, you know, characterization that that worked.

Jon Hook 00:40:32 And then I think we deliberately drew the line and then started to, you know, that's why I find fascinating about building IP in Web 3 is very different is then kinda letting the community take over and giving them MB and seeing what what it meant to them and and and the root they took that in. And it's really interesting because of course, MB is 3 d, but we've seen some beautiful, like, two d characterizations of it, you know, from, you know, like MB and an anime style, you know, MB and a more almost like Mario Kart kind of environment. So when we think about building IP in web 3 in our ecosystem, you know, we our ecosystem is all about a collection of things.

Jon Hook 00:41:11 We're not going all in on on just envy, right? There's gonna be many other characters that come along. But I think that, you know, a good a good reference point when you think about sort of free to play games is is sort of how how king did it with, you know, their candy crush IP. There's a sort of recognizable, IP there. Then there's some, you know, new characters and record recognizable IP across sort of bubble witch saga, because you're you're dealing with a very sort of diverse audience. So I think that's the sort of line that we are thinking as we start to develop, you know, MB and and friends and other characters and and different genres is which IP is gonna work for audience.

Jon Hook 00:41:52 But yeah, that's the that's the key thing from power world is just it's really important with human psychology to build on that sense of familiarity I it's something that immediately I feel like I know this, but there's something very new there for me to explore.

Legendary 00:42:08 Yeah. I feel like those those are all really really great points that the 2 of you made. Julia saying that you take a very successful concept and apply it to a device that everyone has, and is not as limited in distribution as the Nintendo is. And you, John, mentioning the, a, the importance of IP, but also, b, that sense of of familiarity when you're, like, first exposed with with an IP, with a product, with a game.

Legendary 00:42:36 But also the fact that it often, like, takes more than one try to get to this point to have this kind of success and we it is in human nature to only see the success story and then think something is an overnight success where that's a content creator, an influencer, a game of product being built. We just see the last step of the journey, and we assume that is the entire journey. With with that being said, though, I wanted to build on Julia's point, namely that distribution on devices that are way more, popular or way more frequent than Nintendo.

Legendary 00:43:06 And obviously, a device their own has is a phone, bringing us to the hyper casual to the mobile gaming side of things, which in web 3 is, obviously a growing segment, but maybe face face is some, unique challenges because I still think that most people don't really interact with, web 3 with the wallets, at least not with the main wallets and the mobile phone. It's still, like, more of a laptop to desktop thing to do.

Legendary 00:43:42 On the other hand, gaming is obviously the mobile gaming market is growing the fastest. So I can imagine that building web 3 mobile games has its own, set of challenges that are unique to the fact that you're building, that game in a WIP's re environment and not in a quote unquote traditional web 2 environment and would love to hear your thoughts on that, John.

Jon Hook 00:44:09 Yeah. I mean, there's there's there's a lot in that. So if we if we break it down, I think kind of top top of funnel where where that's being lent into is is is really bringing in these you know, mass consumers and helping them discover web 3 gaming, but just in a way that they're very, very familiar with. And it, you know, it's gonna disappoint a lot of people in Web 3. That part is not the sexiest part, right?

Jon Hook 00:44:36 And it doesn't need to be, right, to really start getting them engaging and get their trust, trust to move them along this, you know, game journey into exploring, you know, the things that we all care about, we need to help them understand, you know, why ownership plus trading is something really exciting and empowering. And of course, to do that, it's back to power world. You need, you know, a a game and characterization that feels familiar that then encourages them and, it excites them to do that.

Jon Hook 00:45:07 I think the real the really big opportunity here for for for all of us is and I talk about this a lot is what what there is and what no one has cracked yet, and with, you know, with some partners, we're we're gonna take a very good run at it. Is really what that web 2.5 model looks like. Right? What does that web 2.5, web 3 modes of this is a mouthful, isn't it? Web 2.5 we've gotta come up with a better name for it, but like web 3, mobile casual game, like, what is the you know, what is the game design model? What is the economic model that works to allow, you know, web 3 gamers to come in and really enjoy it?

Jon Hook 00:45:47 And and get everything they want from the game, but also welcome in web 2 to create a really big community like around that concept. So, you know, in the early days of of of free to play, it was like when when supercell came along, they cracked it and then all of a sudden every developer was like, right. This is this is the model. We now understand exactly how to do that. And we just don't have that blueprint yet. So that's where we're gonna have a, you know, we're we're gonna apply what we what we know how to do, which is, you know, take a data led approach and it's gonna it's gonna change.

Jon Hook 00:46:20 So, you know, what we what what our thesis is at soft launch we'll invite everyone in, get their feedback, and then we'll go again, and we'll update it, and then we'll keep going until, you know, it's a point that everyone's really enjoying it. And and like power world, you know, maybe we don't get it right first time, but I think this is this is the real upside for all of us and the huge growth growth area and we're committed with, you know, everyone in the space that we're talking to about this because we're not doing it on our own.

Jon Hook 00:46:50 We generally believe that because of the speed that we can build these games, we we're pretty confident that we will find that model sooner than later, and then we just want to empower everyone else to to to build on it and start creating and, you know, start building on top of it, right? Because I think that's then where this grows very quickly. But yeah, the the the classic web 2 hyper casual model you know, there are some things we can do to fix that that we will be rolling out, but I think this bit that I've just been talking about, that's the far the far bigger and far more exciting opportunity for all of us.

Legendary 00:47:28 Thank you for that very, very detailed answer and breakdown Julia, I would love to bring you into this conversation as well and hear from you what role mobile gaming plays in the overall Pixelmon ecosystem.

GiulioX 00:47:42 Well, look, the way we think about it is, I'll take a step back. So if you think about the, just web3 adoption at the moment, we have a system, a setup where let's be honest, there's still a lot of, adversity and negativity, predominantly by, death top players predominantly in North America. That's, that's truth number 1.

GiulioX 00:48:15 Truth number 2 is that, generally, more the the more casual the player the more, open that player is to try, innovative product and to not judge a book by its cover, but just play around with it a little bit and then uninstall it if they want. If they're not happy with so let's say experimentation is probably higher on mobile. Third, you go back to, you know, pure, you know, what is crypto out.

GiulioX 00:48:51 It was born, as currencies and as currencies that, were potentially a better alternative to your national currency. Know, or at least to to your trust in the inflation or emissions of your national currency. And just statistically, you know, this might have changed with COVID statistically, developing countries tend to be less, tend to have higher inflation rates than trust their currencies less and trust crypto as an alternative more.

GiulioX 00:49:22 So and developing countries are predominantly mobile device driven, not just in gaming, but just in everyday, tech life.

GiulioX 00:49:32 When you put these free truths together, I think you know, it starts being quite, logical that ultimately the mass player base, for blockchain based games, statistically, at least, you know, of course, there can be one product that can drive 20,000,000 desktop users to crypto, to blockchain gaming, but absent that, stand out, unicorn effectively statistically, mobile seems to be the better bet and the bet that better fulfills the product, to technology fit to community fit.

GiulioX 00:50:15 So so when you you take that, all that in in, we realize that someone that our flagship product hunting rounds had to be a mobile, it had to be a mobile first. And, then only as a second crossover device, go to stop. And so and and all the other hyper casual, products had to be, very digestible on mobile browsers, And if anything, you have to optimize more for a mobile browser than for desktop browsers. So, pixel pals is as optimized as we can, to browsers.

GiulioX 00:50:50 It's actually harder to optimize for mobile browsers than it is to make to optimize for apps, because you're less adaptive, having using the browser, to screen size, etcetera. But we we've done it that way. Our flagship product is a is a mobile product, which is hunting rounds. We are also building one desktop product but, that's more because we want to ensure that the IP touches everyone. Yeah, our big bet, is on mobile. We adopt the same philosophy with our venture side in liquid X, when we make our passive investment tickets.

Legendary 00:51:31 Thank you. Thank you very, for the very, very detailed breakdown. Cramer, I would also like to bring you into this conversation here from ZT X's perspective, how you guys think about mobile.

Karma 00:51:43 Yeah. What a good question. The the more than $1,000,000 question. Well, quite frankly, I think it very much depends for us on on and I will expand on this on the time frame of onboarding our web to audience. Now bear with me here. So our backer and, you know, the company that we are enabled by IP and tech of Zepetto has over 400 and 30, um,000,000 lifetime users. But over 90% of this user base places a petal, the web to counter part of the app on mobile.

Karma 00:52:20 Now the reason why we decided to start developing ZT X, the web3 counterpart on desktop instead, is because it's operationally easier for us to figure out the complexities of the in game economy and of different, like, balancing mechanism of game loops, like, you know, how fun certain and sticky certain loops are. It's much, much more easy for us to figure this out in a more comprehensive desktop version, which allows us more, you know, freedom then immediately constrain cells to mobile. And for many of Lena, more complex games that Cepeta releases, that's a bit similar.

Karma 00:53:00 Some of them are only available or mobile. Some of them are only on on desktop. Now, of course, because the goal is to pull over the audience from the web to counterpart over time, mobile version of ZT X or mobile ZT X experiences are only a matter of time.

Karma 00:53:19 It's just very much a balancing act of how soon do you want to invest into switching to that onboarding strategy because quite frankly, the biggest and, you know, most challenging part is having that economy balanced, you know, having the token, having the all the resources that you can farm and utilize in game, be in equilibrium, and for users to be able to exchange these resources at rates, which, again, create a sustainable economy. It's something that's incredibly difficult to do.

Karma 00:53:53 It's, you know, tokenomics on steroids, and we really want to make sure that this is in balance before we move over to that web to audience via mobile. So I think for ZT X, it's a much, much different, you know, balancing act because we do have that backstop of our web to audience, which we know we can tap in tap into. So our timelines are just a bit different. Now this was a lot of a lot of words to say that, you know, certainly across 2024, 2025, mobile is going to be a big topic for us.

Karma 00:54:28 But any release dates are still very much something I cannot share at this moment.

Legendary 00:54:35 Gotcha. Thank you very much for for sharing your thoughts, though. Even if you can share share the release date, Julia, I do have a follow-up question for you. You said Bigbeds or mobile mobile product is first, but there will also be something to be built out on desktop. Do you think that is important that there is a connection between those two platforms? So should there be any any touch points for people going for the desktop product with the mobile 1, or is it important to keep those 2 completely separated?

GiulioX 00:55:09 So I think that there's two layers to that. No. So I think let me, the way I think about it is So there's the game layer and then there's the IP dash blockchain interoperability layer. So on the game layer, I think it really depends on the game genre. What we're building on desktop is effectively a Brawler meets a, Musa style game. I don't know if you've ever played dynasty warriors when you were younger or one piece pirate warriors. So effectively, it's that kind of fight against the horde in, co op or or single player. Now that is a product that stays on desktop and doesn't go to mobile.

GiulioX 00:55:49 Hunting grounds is a product that because it's an RPG, it's built to be optimized for mobile. So just to, essentially, the asset packs are optimized for mobile, for mobile device, power, the, the gameplay loop is thought for a mobile player, so somebody who spends x minutes of attention span, not X Hours. But because of the genre, it makes sense to also have a PC version. That if somebody wants to sit down comfortably and play it, he also has PC. So I think the choice of whether your multi platform or not is, depending on the product.

GiulioX 00:56:25 But I do think all of these products, if you're really building a web3 IP, should have interoperability at some layer in assets. So the monster NFT, the L2 monster NFT should have interoperability from the desktop product, to the mobile product, to maybe even the product for PlayStation, but by logging into a back end account and, making sure you target, to your account.

GiulioX 00:56:52 And the way we are trying to solve for this is not just through the NFT, the L2 layer 2 NFTs of the assets in the game, but also by unifying one product in the back end, which is essentially a gamer account management system that is shared across all of our games. So effectively, you have, you can, you have the same account in, that you would log into a hyper casual browser game as you would log into the death op game as you would log in to a completely separate mobile game.

GiulioX 00:57:30 So we have a unified user profiling And that then allows us to say if you have this NSD asset in one game, you should also have access to it in the other game. That that's that's one answer. That's the answer to your question. Then sorry. I I'm I'm gonna hear jump in with a little bit of a I I know we're hitting time. So I wanna make a small announcement, that goes outside, of the the normal, question flow, you tell me if you're gonna give me a space to do that in a moment or so, a little bit of alpha. If not, I'll do it now, but if if there's a separate question, then I'll I'll just with later, separate slot.

Legendary 00:58:07 Just just just go for it now. We are always here for the alpha. So we're not gonna toner to later, but just go straight for it.

GiulioX 00:58:14 Yeah. So look, I think 2 preambles here. I, as I said, we're very big believers in mobile, and we think mobile is plans from, you know, genschen impact, full open world RPG on mobile. Mobile is the biggest player category, all the way to super hyper casual teams. So and and we've made it very clear. When we are building for mobile, we are our mobile product is ultimately what you a high fidelity, high definition and essentially open world RPG on mobile. At the same time though, we recognize that the hyper casual market is huge.

GiulioX 00:58:50 We also recognize that the players that are good at doing hyper casual are hyper specialized at it. And, it's not something we need to necessarily build in house. Secondly, we've said a few times, we see Pixelmon as an open We want we want pick someone to be everywhere. We want our characters to be adopted, licensed, and used.

GiulioX 00:59:12 And and today, I want to, you know, announce the first high scale, licensing and usage of our characters through a, of the actually of, not our characters, but our communities' characters where where John and I connected, a few weeks back and, we decided that play Amber and pick someone are gonna work together. It's not just a normal partnership. It's not a white list here, white list there, raffle here, ruffle there. Nothing against those, but this is, like, play Amber and Pixelmon will be building a whole, new Pixelmon, hyper casual mobile game. It will be created and published by Playember. On top of everything we're doing.

GiulioX 00:59:51 So on top of the 5, 6 games we have in development, in in the next year and a half. This is gonna be built by the Play Amber team that are I mean, they've got tens of millions of downloads on their Android account. Just go check it out. Launching sometime in Q2, you know, how timings are in gaming could be out of Q3, but we're targeting Q2. And, Yeah. We're really excited about this, and I really thank John for the vote of confidence and then picking our IP for to bring into his ecosystem of a 100 plus million downloads.

Legendary 01:00:26 Holy shit. That is some serious alpha. John absolutely would love to hear from your from from your perspective as well on that partnership.

Jon Hook 01:00:35 Yeah. I mean, look, it's like, it's our absolute privilege. If anyone's gonna say thank you, it's me. Just really enjoyed, talking to Giulio and and the team about their vision and standing where they're going and sharing ours. And this is what I was kind of talking in code earlier and also messaging Julia on Telegram in terms of, like, are you gonna say it? Am I gonna say it? But you know, this for me is just really exciting. We are both committed now to, delivering these, you know, blockchain powers like mobile hyper casual casual gaming experiences, and and delivering this.

Jon Hook 01:01:10 And, you know, as you've you've heard the timelines, we don't have to wait till next year, where we're gonna drop the game. This is gonna be out relatively soon. And we're really looking forward to doing this with the, you know, amazing pixel community. So, you know, from our side, just, you know, wanna thank, you know, their their team for the kind of vote of vote of confidence and trust, and, yeah, honestly could not be more excited about this.

Legendary 01:01:38 Love to hear that, mate. I think that also says a lot about how we approach, corporation, competition, coopetition, to bring out that word again in this space. And that that collaborative aspect is something that I truly, truly love to see in in web 3 and very excited to hear that news. I absolutely had no idea that this is coming at no idea that you guys plan to announce that on our spaces. So it is on me to say thank you for, sharing that with us and and our audience. Carma would love to hear your first thoughts on that as well.

GiulioX 01:02:14 And and, and sorry, well, you came first. So we our team just posted 1 minute after I spoke if you wanna pin it up. You really came first. Sorry, Carmen.

Legendary 01:02:23 I interrupted you that. Love it. I'll I'll pin it in the meantime.

Karma 01:02:26 Karma go for it. No. Thank you so much. And this this is just such a joyful moment. Know, having these spaces, not just as an exchange for, you know, great thoughts, for builders, for the listeners as well, but Also to hear that, you know, very, very first announcement of what I personally generally consider a very, very big, you know, meaningful collab and I was even caught up. Apologies for for choosing the wrong road, like alignment. I would say alignment. That's incredible.

Karma 01:02:55 And I'm stoked beyond belief, I think this is going to not only supercharge the user acquisition, which I believe we all agree is the most difficult problem to solve in this space, but also really, really helps propagate that, you know, thought of, hey, let's grow the pie together and, you know, aligning the communities like you said before, alignment of incentives is is what will really drive this space forward. So kudos to you guys for, for achieving this, this incredible acceleration. And I know I'm going to be looking at the official announcements now as well.

Karma 01:03:31 Very, very excited for these spaces to become, you know, the pillar of of, use in the web3 space, like it did just now.

Legendary 01:03:39 Yeah. Absolutely love that. And pinned pinned the announcement on top. I also think we we covered so, so many topics in today's basis as we're approaching the closed, I want to throw it to you first, Julian, then have a closing question for the both of you?

GiulioX 01:03:57 Oh, yeah. Sorry. I I'm I'm gonna keep interrupting today. I'm I'm terrible. So I was supposed to add something our our holders are collecting badges. It's a key part of the, you know, upcoming big event with Mon and the budget for today is Amber, just like Clay Embers or EMBR. Sorry, sorry for the technical intersection.

Legendary 01:04:22 Absolutely. So Ember, EMber is the badge before today. With that being said, we obviously have the massive, massive alpha announcement now, but I would love, to hear from both of you, John and Julia on basically, quote, unquote, and individual level. What is something that holders that a community can look forward to over the next couple of weeks or months, John going to you first.

Jon Hook 01:04:51 Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, this, I think this is what we've been very open about is what we're committed to doing, is just simply building and shipping. So you're you're gonna see more of these level of announcements that I mean, I think Giulio we didn't write this, but basically said exactly that this isn't just another collab and maybe we'll do something in a couple of years and we'll throw a massive party, you know, just an absolute commitment to, yeah, trying to solve some of the, you know, the the challenges that we that we have at a gameplay and distribution level.

Jon Hook 01:05:26 So that that's that that's what you can expect from, expect from us. And, yeah, I'm just seeing my telegram right up from the team, just a mixture of excitement and be like, John, what have you signed us up for now? So I I I hear, I'm I'm really excited just to get get building because it's what we love doing. So, yeah, back to back to work, Hugo, get off spaces, please, and and and start coding.

Legendary 01:05:54 Love to hear that. Julia, your same question for you. What is something that the Pixelmont family can look forward over the next couple of weeks months?

GiulioX 01:06:01 I mean, it's a pretty busy period. So, in in no particular order. I mean, it's it's no secret that the, mon protocol, whitelist, wait list sale is, is coming soon. I think there's around 10,000 wallets already in waitlist, and that's nonholder wallets. Our holders still have a bit of a bit of wallets. Have a little bit of a wait list code. So do go and hunt them down, ask them for it if if you wanna participate.

GiulioX 01:06:36 With that, then comes our, a farming game, which is a the 1st farming PDP, turn based, card based game. I I have seen at least, web3 based, very excited of it pixel pals. And then then, I mean, in in no particular order also, and there'll be farming opportunities, surrounding Mon protocol, and, maybe Mon protocol itself, Mon itself, in a matter of weeks if not month in a singular level. So that it's a lot. Let's see if we can pack it all in.

Legendary 01:07:16 Absolutely. Love to hear that. Thank you so much for sharing, and Carmela, on to you to close us out for today's show.

Karma 01:07:23 Yeah. I'm still reeling back. Very excited. And, you know, quite frankly, I'm already thinking ahead to us jumping back on these spaces in a few months to, you know, to look back and and look at the the results of this incredible partnership. I think in a few months, the entire market is also going to look very different and we can talk about the takeaways. Hopefully, we are going to be talking about the all the successes and and plus about, you know, maybe pivots that we sometimes have to make.

Karma 01:07:57 Incredibly excited and just want to, again, extend heartfelt thank you to you, John, to you, Julia, to all the devs who sadly are being ushered into the basement as we speak, to not see the light of day for at least a couple more days now. Well tune into the ZT X Spaces next week, as we have just seen evidence by this amazing co announcement, it is the place to hear the alpha. It is the place to hear from the teams before they announce it to their teams themselves. So yeah, thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you to all the listeners. And thank you to you legendary for always being a legendary co host. Thank you everybody.

Immerse yourself in the visionary journey of Azuki, a trailblazer in the Web3 space, as they navigate the intricate process of building a robust intellectual property.

This transcript offers a rare glimpse into the strategies and philosophies driving Azuki's success (despite the scandals surrouding his founder & community members)

From embracing community co-creation to understanding the nuances of digital branding, the conversation illuminates the path to creating enduring and engaging digital identities in the ever-evolving Web3 landscape.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:20 GMG, absolutely love feedback with our weekly spaces with ZTX.

Legendary 00:02:58 And for today, we have planned something that a bit different to the latest spaces that we have been doing. And Carmen and I have been on a call and have been strategizing a bit. And We kinda realized that with so many of the gaming projects that we've been speaking about, often it came to the point that many games, many projects start as a single product first. They start with a game with a very, very specific focus.

Legendary 00:03:26 And many of them want to scale, want to build up their own ecosystem, eventually want to have their own a world of games, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, but they are just not yet at that point.

Legendary 00:03:39 And they also highlighted many founders did that It is so important to, like, focus on one thing first and then start thinking about how you can scale from a product to an ecosystem and for that reason, we thought given the, 2nd anniversary of Azuki and given the plethora of announcements that we've seen around that, that there is no better guest and no better brand to have with us on stage than, them and and Azuki to kinda talk about what it takes to grow a brand from a single product to an ecosystem that focuses on more than one individual thing And, also, we have seen a knot in into gaming.

Legendary 00:04:23 We have seen a Suki announcing that they do want to have one of the focus points on gaming, on a hyper casual mobile game featuring the Beans IP, which I'm also curious to hear more about that thought process and more about where this, basically line of thinking in the overall strategic lineup is coming from And with that out of the way, then welcome to the stage. It's been a while since we chatted last time. How have you been?

Dem ⛩️ 00:04:52 Hey, legendary. It's great to be up on the stage, especially on the 2nd anniversary of Azuki and with so many Azuki in the audience. And, man, I'm so impressed by how far you've come and and all you've grown, this last year. So it's amazing to be on on one of your stages. Finally, thanks for having me.

Legendary 00:05:09 Thank you very much. Thank you. Parma, welcome to the stage. Are you feeling a bit better? How are you doing?

Karma 00:05:16 Hello, everybody. Yeah. I'm I'm on the 6th side, but I'm actually feeling really elated. I'm in New York right now, just traveling And I woke up today, and everything is completely bathed in snow. It looks like in a fairy tale, I'm looking out of the window right now and It just, yeah, it just looks like a fairy tale. I've never seen anything like this in New York, gorgeous thing to wake up to. And of course, an even better panel jump into. So, you know, just yesterday, I was on the simplified spaces.

Karma 00:05:48 It's with Who's Dow, and we discussed, gaming and CTX is is very frequently tuning in to share our experiences. And we were discussing even on that game gaming spaces, the power of IP and how important it is going forward for the gaming, you know, sub niche for the hyper casual gaming niche. So I'm really excited to jump into the conversation today and show just how intertwined IP in the gaming is, and there is just no better IP to discuss this with than Azuki.

Legendary 00:06:23 Couldn't agree more with that. Ashley, welcome to the stage. How are you doing?

Ashley 00:06:28 How have you been? I am fantastic. I am I've been super busy. I feel like this year, I feel like all of us had that, you know, weird holiday season where we don't really do much, and I feel like now I've made up for that a lot. So super excited to have this conversation, actually. I've been a beans beans holder for a while. And, so, yeah, I just I just love the fact that, you know, web 3 is going in a more gaming direction. I really want more RPGs to be honest. So that's that would make my day even better, to be honest.

Legendary 00:07:04 The one thing though I would have to add is I love RPGs, but when do we find the time to play all of those? Like, I've been thinking to give Balderskate, 3 a try it, but then I realized I just don't have a 110 hours to put into the main campaign now. So this is the only caveat to that. Hassanza, welcome to the stage. When when I'm scrolling through the audience, I see so many elementals, Azuki's beans, and that's absolutely amazing. What are your thoughts on on the panel on the audience? And how have you been?

Sanza 00:07:36 Hey. Sorry, voice crack. I didn't drink water. Like I should have have started talking. So good. So good. Good morning. I first of all, I'm I'm doing great. Doing great. I also do not have a 110 hours into gaming like yourself. Unless my daughter wants to start playing with me in which case then maybe. But now I I absolutely have been loving everyone kind of unseeing Azuki for what we kind of always knew was always here. I'm just beautiful to see people just kind of bring bring into their conviction as a little bit as well. I, you know, I don't know if you know legendary.

Sanza 00:08:12 I started a group chat called Garden Central for people who are new all Azuki elemental and beans. Because I found that there was a little bit of a lack of of of a group chat for all holders to kind of talk and reconvene. So we've been busy, not gonna lie, and that's that's that's a testament to how how well Azuki has executed with the announced men over the last couple of weeks. So really, really excited for, Derek to hear them today. You know, my my man my man is is when, you know, when he gets on his soapbox, he gets on his soapbox, but everyone better be taking notes. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

Legendary 00:08:50 Absolutely. Love to hear that. Yeah, with that out of the way, let's let's get started. Maybe let's, start with you, Dem, And let's not, start with diving into the plethora of announcements, but start on a personal note. How did you feel from, you know, in over this journey over the last 2 years from, via Zukkimen to getting to the 2nd anniversary, how that how did it feel on a personal level?

Dem ⛩️ 00:09:17 I got I got pretty emotional. I'm not gonna lie. As you may know, I was at Google before as a product manager and I had achieved a certain level of success there, and I was leading my own team, but but I was very unfulfilled by the work that I was doing at Google and the fact that I was launching product to millions of people, but everything that I launched kind of turned into numbers and metrics. And it it just felt very dehumanizing. And so when Sagabond called me 2 plus years ago and said, hey, like, what do you know about this course? I I didn't know anything about this card, but I was just, like, looking it up as we talk. And I was like, yeah. Yeah. Discard. I know I know so much about this or put me in coach.

Dem ⛩️ 00:09:57 And so I just I I couldn't miss the next thing that he launched after after having seen what he did with the CRX protocol. And I just, you know, I just sort of fake it till I make it. You know, I just sort of manifested, this role, and and it's been it's been such a fulfilling journey. Even though it's been tough at times and and we've lost the trust of people and and we've made mistakes, overall when you look at the community and how interconnected it is and and how much people believe in the brand and and and want to succeed and how much they've built themselves of that brand, how much they put into it.

Dem ⛩️ 00:10:31 It puts me in a situation personally where I am with probably the best team that I ever work with, with a ton of resources and a, and a ton of things to, to develop and build, but also building something that it's quite personal Like, sometimes we think of Azuki as, like, a really big brand in the web 3 space, but in the overall concept of brand, like, in the in the in the real term of, like, how big a brand can be there, they're they're quite small. Like, we we make product for for a very passionate, group of people.

Dem ⛩️ 00:11:00 And so to to reach the 2 year mark, on such a strong note, with such a strong year ahead in terms of what we can release and the things that we can develop this year, it's it's a blessing and and to have been given multiple opportunities by our community to learn from our mistakes and and come back again. It's exciting. So it felt nostalgic, but it also felt really energizing to to reach this point and, you know, and to see that what we were putting out was really resonating with people. After 2 years, that that that gave us all a lot of energy.

Legendary 00:11:33 Yeah. I can absolutely relate to that. And 2 years is a very, very long time in crypto, like, feels more like 2 decades in in a web tool life. I mentioned it a couple of times that you have those 3 more than one focus point, you actually have those 3 focus points that you outlined in in the announcement, 4 days ago. Anime, physical, gaming.

Legendary 00:11:57 I think over the course of, our conversation, we will definitely dive into all of those But why don't you give us, like, a headline overview of what those individual aspects are anime physical gaming and what is happening in those verticals.

Dem ⛩️ 00:12:14 Yeah. I think the I think the tweet was necessary because we had started Azuki as a metaverse anime brand. And and we want to evolve into something much greater. We've always had a dream of being a decentralized anime ecosystem, a decentralized anime brand. And it was very important to put it into such simple terms as 3 branches or 3 pillars of the IP strategy because We've been doing really exciting things, but we saw from our community and from the wider space that they were not really connecting the dots as much as as as we thought they were.

Dem ⛩️ 00:12:51 So this is not a change of our strategy. This is not like a like a pivot. It's just a a a way to encapsulate it in as simple as as as possible terms that that we can then repeat in terms of narrative and in terms of the space understanding us. So this is just an iteration of what Suzuki has always been. We've always talked about decentralized brand building. We've always talked about co creation. We've always had an anime aesthetic. We've always had great physical products that we made with a lot of love. And we've always had gaming people within our company.

Dem ⛩️ 00:13:25 We always had a gaming DNA when you look at Hoshi Boi previous projects or when you look steamboy, who was the lead character on Overwatch, there was always a game like component in what we did. And so it was really important from a storytelling perspective because this space is so narrative driven that we now could go into 2024 and tell people very clearly, we're becoming a decentralized enemy ecosystem and the way in which we're gonna grow that IP and reward our community is through anime, is through physical goods, and it is through gaming. And it's that simplicity, I think, that we're gonna carry into this year terms of the energy that we ring on the on the storytelling that we do.

Dem ⛩️ 00:14:05 So it was important to put it together, but it it's but it's not a pivot, you know, like, we've been doing this. Like, we're not new to you know, we're we've been we've been doing this, but it's it's important to tell that story, you know, in a clear and concise way because some of the points were not being connected, as strongly before.

Legendary 00:14:20 Is it fair to say that the connective tissue, the glue between those 3 verticals is the IP, is the brand, that Azuki is building?

Dem ⛩️ 00:14:32 Absolutely. And I think it's more important than just the connective tissue. It is the whole thesis for the brand. Because as we enter a world in which you can create so cheaply with AI Technology, you know, to enter a world in which we're so like, heavily interconnected online. And as we enter a world in which you can have part ownership in the characters and in the IP of any single brand, it will become more and more important how strong the IP is on top of which the ecosystem is built than the actual ecosystem building. I mean, you can look at it from a gaming perspective, like the barriers to create a game were so high before. You needed so much money.

Dem ⛩️ 00:15:11 You need such a strong team. The thesis is that in 5 to 6 year time, is going to take actually very little to make a game, and it's all about who are the characters, what is the world, what is the story that's who's gonna draw people Same thing with animation. Like, it used to take so much money to make animation. And now that that that that caused that barrier to entry gonna decrease over the next 10 or 15 years, and it's all about, it's all gonna be all about who are the characters, who what is the world, and what is my connection to it.

Dem ⛩️ 00:15:39 And most importantly, the fact that we can give people ownership of characters, you can give people ownership of different parts of the IP through the method of NFTs, that is gonna be a differentiating factor between companies that are billed centralized and they build their IP in a centralized way, and they're constantly chasing down and shutting down any cocreation and companies that embrace co creation that are like co creation first that invite co creation and that are able to accelerate past those centralized brands because at their core, they're already sharing a flywheel rewards for people that co create with them.

Dem ⛩️ 00:16:16 So it's not just connective tissue. Like, IP, like, that is the thesis. Like, that is the future of Azuki as a brand, and and we think that that is the future of brands. The future of brand is really, really strong IP that is decentralized first and open to co creation.

Legendary 00:16:32 You mentioned a couple very, very interesting things in there. You said on the one hand, you know, anime is It is a very competitive segment. The entry barriers are getting lower. AI is definitely, a tool that will allow many, many more people to explore building projects, trying to build their own IP, etcetera, in in the world that shapes out like this and in a sector as competitive as the anime market, which I feel like that many people, are still underestimating.

Legendary 00:17:04 And, you know, we have a very, very gaming, strong audience and just taking that that minute before I get to the question to compare those two markets real quick If you look at the gaming industry as a whole, the market size for projected to be for 2024 is 272,000,000,000 US dollars. The anime market has been at 25 ish 1,000,000,000 last year, so that's already a tenth of the gaming market. And if you look at the growth rate at the CAGR, the compounded annual growth rate, it's actually, the anime market is growing a bit faster than gaming.

Legendary 00:17:40 And if you look at those numbers in in 2030 where they're projected to be, the anime market will be at 63,000,000,000 and gaming will have grown to 426,000,000,000 US dollars. So it is a very, very competitive sector. It is a sector that's growing so fast, even faster. Also, it's not by, a large margin, but even faster than gaming, and you have AI as a technology coming in where many people will have an easier way to try to build their own IP. So what does it really take in a competitive landscape like that? To build, a brand to build an intellectual property.

Legendary 00:18:20 That's truly outstanding and unique.

Dem ⛩️ 00:18:28 Oh, did did he cut out? I I I stopped here in Lending Drake.

Legendary 00:18:31 Can you guys hear? Can you guys hear me? Or did I lose everyone?

Karma 00:18:36 No. We can hear you.

Dem ⛩️ 00:18:37 We can hear you. Right? I can I can hear you?

Legendary 00:18:39 Yeah. Yeah. Where did you lose me then on my long ass monologue?

Dem ⛩️ 00:18:45 I think I think you were talking about, like, gaming and anime the growth rates.

Legendary 00:18:48 Okay. I'll I'll I'll I'll sum it up real quick. So I said gaming sector very competitive. Anime, very competitive. Anime is growing even faster than gaming. And in a competitive landscape where, anime draws a lot of attention where AI makes it easier for people to try to build their own brand, their own IP, what does it take for a brand like Azuki to build an IP, to build a brand that truly stands out amidst that competition.

Dem ⛩️ 00:19:16 Of course. I mean, the number one thing is a set of characters and a story that really truly draws you in. And and that is down to us as a team to create I think one misconception when we say decentralized brand building, it sounds like everything's gonna be pushed out to the community and no work welcome from us. And I think that is the wrong way to think about it. I think, the key to success here is that we create characters, and we create a narrative, and we create a world that is incredibly compelling, and that draws eyelids both from, like, web 2 and web 3 people.

Dem ⛩️ 00:19:54 And so with our short form anime series, the goal is that we can prove that the Azuki IP is not just super powered by the fact that it is NFT enabled, but also by the fact that we can create a really high quality piece of content of anime with really veterans from the industry and and with very well respected people and that that story can capture your regular anime fans attention. So it needs to be a really strong story, and it needs to be really strong characters. There needs to be a commitment across the board to higher than average quality. And I think that's an advantage that Azuki has because the way that we're built and the way that we're resource, we don't have any, like, VC money.

Dem ⛩️ 00:20:34 We don't have any of those, like, restricting factors for larger companies where they have to cut in costs and they have to cut on production and quality because they have these, like, sort of targets of year over year. You know, we're not tied down by those things. We can come in really hard with really high quality products. And then I think the secret sauce and the reason why we will eventually, you know, perform much better than centralized IPs is that we're open to co creation. So if we do a great job of creating a really compelling universe with really compelling characters that are very, very much like attracting the attention of web 2 people and web 3 people, and we continue to deliver very high quality projects and really high quality products and experiences.

Dem ⛩️ 00:21:14 Since we're open to co creation, we will then attract, and we will continue to encourage creator within our community that are rewarded by a flywheel to, to do their creation And then we will have not just sheer labs pushing for the Azuki IP, but all of these different nodes in the network also pushing for that's stage 3, but that's the differentiator, right? Because, like, everybody can everybody that's talented can create great characters. Everybody that has a lot of money can create very high quality products with no compromise for cost, but the final stage, you know, like the final leg of the race when you're really to head with the final competitors.

Dem ⛩️ 00:21:51 That's where if we've built the right flywheel to encourage co creation from our community, then all of a sudden we've got 100,000 of people pushing for us while they're running out of steam, and they're just this one centralized company that's building the IP altogether. So it will be a multi year process to, like, sort of build all of this out. But I think in the end stage, when they're sort of running out of Jews, they're sort of running out of steam and fumes, we will have a flywheel to reward our creators, and we will have all of these innovative ideas that centralize IPs often miss out on. Like, one one story that I go back to a lot is the story of Twilight and 50 Shades of gray. I don't know if you guys have read 50 Shades of gray.

Dem ⛩️ 00:22:30 I'm pretty sure Ashley is aware of 50 Shades of gray. I don't know why. I think Saundice has heard it as well.

Ashley 00:22:35 Maybe the audiobook.

Dem ⛩️ 00:22:36 Oh, I I've, you know You're aware. You're familiar with the material. 50 Shades of gray started as fan fiction for Twilight. So so it started as a story of, you know, Edward and and and then, like, you know, doing the dirty, but the twilight people didn't want that. They didn't want that creator in their community. So they're like, no, you can't build within our ecosystem. You can't build and and co create with us. Get out of here. So the author, she was a very smart woman. She was like, alright, I'll just create my own IP. She's sold more books than Twilight. She's sold more movies than Twilight because frankly, the idea is brilliant.

Dem ⛩️ 00:23:10 And and and the twilight people as an IP, they've lost out on all of that value because they were not built for co creation. So it's not that like Twilight just sat around and waited for their community to make dope stuff But when the community of toy like make dope stuff, they were not built to accept that and incorporate it into their brand, and they missed out on like a 2x3x growth on their brand because they were not really willing to co create. So I think at the end of the race, if we execute all of the things that are in the playbook. At the end of the race, the last bit of advantage would be that cocreating piece.

Legendary 00:23:45 I love the focus on cocreation and I also like how this is a pattern that because you mentioned the Twilight story, that is also a pattern that we see in gaming very, very often. Right? So many popular games or franchises where actually mods off other games' data being based on on on the Warcraft IP, is one of the first examples that always comes to my mind. And I also liked how you explained that building a decentralized brand doesn't mean just pushing the work on the community.

Legendary 00:24:18 And, obviously, you've been doing a lot of work to to grow the Azuki IP, also outside of x, outside of our little, a bubble in here. And I think it was in April, in April of last year that you unveiled the partnership with, IPX formally aligned line friends and line friends being that that global character brand that originated from the line messaging app and, has obviously millions of users in in in the States, but even more users in Asia.

Legendary 00:24:58 And has built their own IP has built their own merchandise and has been doing a lot to well, grow that and nurture that IP. We've seen pudgy penguins, following an approach where they absolutely dominate GIFI dominant Instagram, half of the physical toy lines, we, see a ZT X that they follow a playbook where they now partner up or with with stickily.

Legendary 00:25:28 And I think all of those partnerships, acquisitions, collaborations in whatever form they happen, very, very important to grow a brand from, like, a singular position to something that can carry a whole ecosystem that exists outside of a bubble. And I also think, I definitely wanna hear more about that.

Legendary 00:25:52 And I know it's a year old news, but I find it very relevant in the context of talking about IP about that IPX partnership, how, that has, basically evolved and if, if, if possible, how that fits into your thinking of cocreation and also here, for the sake of, basically having multiple views on that from UCARMA after that on the collaboration with Stickley.

Dem ⛩️ 00:26:24 Yeah. I think that's gonna be a great question for when, Wiz Wang or head of growth gets up on sand's spaces. So let me let me just show a espresso shot later today. You're gonna have a list there, and she's gonna be talking about IPX. And then tomorrow, we're gonna be doing a discord stages at, 6 PM where we're gonna have Feb and we're gonna have a Steam Boyd talking about our partnership with Dentsu. I think what I would say in a more general term is whenever you decide on an element for your IP strategy, it needs to be, like, a net add to what you're trying to build. And so when you decide to bring in a partner, you need to bring in a partner that has skills or capabilities for assets that you know, you do not have.

Dem ⛩️ 00:27:03 So for example, one thing that line friends has figured out is an in store experience that feels really premium and luxury and cute, but at the same time is in, like, prime location. So the bean the beans brand was all over gangnam, which was the, you know, the best sort of shopping neighborhood in, of, in, in order of Seoul, it is like where all the luxury stores are. They have a location. They're like a physical retail location that is beautiful. It's a really experiential type of store. And so to be able to put our products and our IP within that cons context really elevates it. So when you look at somebody like line friends and IPX, the resources that they have are of course production resources.

Dem ⛩️ 00:27:42 But more importantly, physical locations. Like, they were putting 247, a beans video on Times Square all of all throughout this week. As people were, like, walking around, they were seeing beads in Times Square. Like, that is something that they bring to the partnership for free. Same thing with Dentsu. Like, Dentsu is an amazing production agency, but they're also a really, really large advertiser with a lot of, like, really strong brand connections. So not only is Dentsu helping us connect to legendary directors like Goro Tani Gucci in terms of the anime production because they have such a wide range of skill sets. They're also suggesting us partners and sponsorship partners for the garden tour events.

Dem ⛩️ 00:28:19 Like, when you can find a partner or you can find a strategy that benefits you in multiple dimensions, then you're onto something really exciting. Like, why is Pudgy so smart? On one hand, the Jiffy strategy is brilliant because it gets a lot of people looking at their GIFs, and it gets a lot of people, like, being a great aware of, like, what the pudges look like. But at the same time, they're able to use that production to create custom GIFs for their community, which the community really enjoys. They feel like really recognized by it. So, boom, they found an element of their IP structure that does multiple things for them. That's so much better than getting you a partner that just does, like, the one thing. You know?

Dem ⛩️ 00:28:56 And I think that's why you have some partnerships that are more of, like, a one and done, like, Oh, this was cool. This was exciting. Like, Museum of my homes. You know, we were able to do something with Patrick Mahomes. He's a great quarterback, but You know, there weren't there weren't like a whole set of capabilities that help each other out, but when you look at a more long term partner or a long term strategy, it needs to give you multiple things at once. For it to be worth all the time and investment.

Legendary 00:29:19 Yeah. I also liked how you said that such a long term partnership at the end of day needs to be a net add for your brand. And I have one more follow-up question before I'm gonna throw it to you, Carmen, on that. If you partner up with a company or with a project that is to be a more long term, a more sustainable partnership. And liking the case with, IPX is actually something that touches the heart of your brand touches the IP and works like in very, very crucial parts, of your brand.

Legendary 00:29:51 How do you make sure that that partner actually understands the DNA of your company and the DNA of the brand that your building? Is this something that only time can tell? Is this something where you have to purely rely on gut feeling or are there a couple of criteria that you can apply to them? Did I cut out again, or did, them lose me?

Karma 00:30:19 Karma, can you hear me? I can hear you perfectly fine. Them, are you still with us, or were we just confused as to which one of us should be answering the question?

Dem ⛩️ 00:30:28 Actually thought that was a question for you, Karma. How many times?

Legendary 00:30:33 No. What that that was a question for you then, though.

Dem ⛩️ 00:30:36 Alright. Can you repeat it then? Because I was like, I was like, alright. I'm off the I'm off the spotlight now.

Legendary 00:30:41 It's Karma's time. Taking taking a moment to hydrate. Yeah, the question was when you when you have a partnership, like the one with IPX that is sustainable, that is long term, and that touches, the heart of your brand, the is your IP? How do you make sure that that partner really understands the DNA, of your brand, of your company, of your IP. Is it something that only time can tell? Is it something where you go by gut feeling, or are there a couple of criteria that you can find?

Dem ⛩️ 00:31:10 It's it's time and especially when it's an international, partnership, it it's travel time. So Wiss Wang and the team and Sagabaughn and and Elaine had to travel to multiple times to visit their stores and to sit down with them and show them our Twitter feed and show them our community members and their creations, and they had to show us their products and their production.

Dem ⛩️ 00:31:33 And we have to talk about our history and we have to go back into, like, why certain decisions were made with our IP, and they had to tell us certain stories and and sort of the lore of the brand, like sort of those intra intra company, intra community things that are very, sort of, you know, central to to to us. And so that's why the IPX partnership wasn't, as quick as, like, the web 3 mind would expect. You know, the web 3 mind would be, Okay. The partnerships announced and the products are in store like 2 months later. We really took the time to make sure we understood Brown, and we understood the cast of characters and what they meant.

Dem ⛩️ 00:32:11 And they trusted us to treat those characters well within our ecosystem, and they understood beans. They knew who these characters were and what they were doing in the world, and they understood our community and why our community was so engaged with beings and that takes time. It takes travel. It takes trust. You know, and and it's and it's it has to be done right. And so I think it's really good that we took our time to do this thing right. And I think now there's a very strong understanding between both IPX and ourselves about what our IPs are and what our capabilities are and, what we can trust each other on and we can bring to the table. And so that's unfortunate because web 3 doesn't always necessarily give you the time to do that. There's a ton of pressure to rush things.

Dem ⛩️ 00:32:50 There's a ton of pressure to, to bring figs out the door. And I understand also from the community that you know, it can be frustrating to see things not move at the speed, that other projects might move or that other, brands might move, but I think it's crucial. I think it's crucial, and we're lucky to have a core community that's patient enough and experienced enough, and that has run their own businesses and that has been in these negotiations before that they understand it. Because otherwise it will be very, very difficult to do what we do, but, you know, when you can finally show them the end result and they look at it and they're like this field. Right? I think that's actually a really good point of, like, re earning the trust of the community.

Dem ⛩️ 00:33:28 So we're lucky to have a community that gives us time to do things, right? And we don't take that for granted. And so we take, we take all that time that they give us to make the best product possible and make sure that it feels right at at launch.

Legendary 00:33:41 That makes so much sense. And I like how you highlighted the the value of travel time in, you know, a space that is so digital as ours. It probably something that we don't necessarily think about at the first glance. Carmel would love to loop you into this conversation. And here from from your side, a, what is going on with stickily and ZT X and what is the IP play, the thinking behind that?

Karma 00:34:08 Yeah. And I will need to zoom out in order for, you know, like, my plug to make sense within the realm of the IP discussion that we've been in. And something I really, really value about everything you've just outlined then, like, you really drill in on the long term vision and the individual steps and considerations needed to do this quote unquote right. And I think that's that's, you know, the fundamental of it.

Karma 00:34:35 So at ZT X, we are building something slightly different than Azuki, whereas Azuki is building, you know, IP first and product seconds, which in my opinion is the best way for NFT projects to grow and, you know, expand. ZT X is building a platform first and IP second, with the consideration that, you know, We do have the web 2 business. We have Zepetto behind us with 400,000,000 users plus.

Karma 00:35:05 So there is the backing that is necessary for us to pivot build a platform and start onboarding an audience second, you know, whereas, whereas for the majority of NFT projects, it's the inverse. That's that's the case. And one thing I wanted to echo that you also said is the timeline of things. In web free, we genuinely are living on incredible speed. I don't think or rather, when we approach brands for, you know, future fashion collaborations and digital fashion, drops that we will be doing at CTX.

Karma 00:35:42 And we have been doing at Zepetto the normal work length or the work timeline with with a web to brand is usually counted in, like, you know, 6 months plus. Like, you start at, like, 6 months of ideation slash planning, and then you go from there. Whereas in web free, you know, the timeline is absolutely insane. Like, you feel like if you send someone a message and they haven't responded in 24 hours, they will just never respond to you. Like, this has died a very premature death. I'm sure you you will all relate.

Karma 00:36:18 Sometimes when it's, like, you know, pre whitelist stage, someone doesn't have to respond in an hour and you immediately have a feeling like, it's so over. Okay, this was just like a funny, funny degradation. But in terms of building IP and building a very, very sound platform, Another thing that really resonated with me, that you said, was how gracious and how important it is to have the initial community that will allow you that necessary time and will allow you the ideation that is necessary for you to deliver the best product to them.

Karma 00:36:52 I feel like very, very often the, I would say the missteps we've seen in this space, the missteps we have seen I mean, misstep is like, you know, a very valued way to to call it. So please bear with me. But some of the things which haven't gone as well as we have hope for in this space, I feel we're largely due to the immense pressure from communities on those teams. And, of course, to a large degree, this is justified. We all want the projects to do well. We all want them to really advance and, you know, outperform all the other ones. Is that 0 sum thinking?

Karma 00:37:28 But so very often, the projects which will build robust ecosystems and robust IPs need to really measure their steps and rather execute at the highest level of quality at a slower pace. Then, you know, keep iterating in a very, very quick succession on things which may or may not be a hit. So, yeah, these were these were some very, very loose thoughts on, you know, everything you've just said and how it resonates in context of building a platform rather than an IP. And I think these are universal lessons that many, many projects could take to heart.

Legendary 00:38:11 Yeah. Love love that reflection. And one topic I really also wanted to dive a bit deeper into is, the collector status 1.0 because I think it perfectly ties into our IP conversation. Has one of the challenges, in my opinion, at least for, particular brands in web 3, PFP projects in web 3 is that you, on the one hand, have the overall collection.

Legendary 00:38:38 On the other hand, you want to drive, exposure to individual elementals, individual key's individual beans and want to actually make people be excited about specific traits, specific trait, combinations, And for me, one of my hypothesis when I, changed my PFP to my elemental slots was exactly that. There is not, like, I wanted to be the number one slot in the web 3 space, and the slot wasn't occupied as a brand by a content creator back then. And I found this guy, right, with him and just went on that brand building journey.

Legendary 00:39:17 And I think I'm not the only one who has seen something very specific in their Azuki, in their bean, in their elemental, and then went with it. And you have recently introduced the collector status with the tears, with, new emblems, Can you maybe before we get into into the discussion into some of the more detailed questions that I have on that, outline the thinking behind the collector status, how that came to be, and how it fits into the existing, collector profile needs with the existing emblems.

Dem ⛩️ 00:39:55 Absolutely. Collector status is very integral to IP building, but at the same time, it's a very targeted product. And it's not like the end all be all for the Suzuki ecosystem, neither from, like, an IP growth per se perspective or from, like, rewards to collector's perspective, It is a very target, and it, and it's the version 1.0 of what will eventually become the whole collector status experience.

Dem ⛩️ 00:40:21 But, but the reason why it's so important to IP building is that there was already this behavior of buying an Azuki or an elemental or a beans that you love and then shopping around the collection and falling in love with different trades and falling in love with different types that is not just the collector behavior. It is also an IP building behavior.

Dem ⛩️ 00:40:45 The more time that our fans and our community spends looking at all the different elementals and learning about the different domains, and looking at the different Azuki and looking at the different weapons and trades, the more time that they spend there, that's time that they're spending in the universe. That is IP building. Like, that creates a connection between them and the characters and the world because these characters are built very much within the universe.

Dem ⛩️ 00:41:10 And so creating a numerical system that enshrined the value that we give to the more rare Azuki to the super rare Azuki to the spirits, to the kigurumi, to the gold, creating a system that, like, rewarded people from appreciating that was very, very important because as an IP company that wants to build characters, We don't want NFTs to just become tokens.

Dem ⛩️ 00:41:37 We've always said that the art is a wrapper for the token, but if we really hyper financialize NFTs, AZuki as a brand loses a huge advantage that it has over other collections, which is the death of the collection and how enjoyable it is to find that one Azuki that really represents you as the brand. Now the goal of collector status is really to reward type of behavior that's not rewarded anywhere else. There's all these other systems that will reward you for providing liquidity for giving out loans, for taking out loans, for bidding, for buying, for selling, for dumping, all that shorter term behavior is really well enshrined within other systems like blur.

Dem ⛩️ 00:42:17 But the long term collecting, trading, building, curating a collection, really appreciating the rarity. Like, that is not really appreciated anywhere in the current systems. It's very important to assign these numerical values that are not they're not based on what we think about the rarity of the collection, blah blah, they're based on the existing marketing market behavior. Like, markets are really powerful. And so we looked at what was trading above floor We looked at what trades already had a community built around them. We looked at what trades people were being excited about, and we're like, let's really try to find a set of numbers.

Dem ⛩️ 00:42:52 That allow the short term people and the long term people to agree on the potential value of of an NFT. Because right now, the only measure of value for NFTs is being enshrined by other systems. And so everything's turning very short term, very buy it, sell it, buy it, sell it, flip it, flip it. But with this system, what we're starting to see is that a short term trader and a long term collector with long term conviction, they can now have a more clear discussion about what the true value of one of these NFTs are because there's now point system with it.

Dem ⛩️ 00:43:27 Obviously, it's such a complex system, and there's so many factors at at play that we're gonna need to iterate on this. Like, I'm held. It's not being taken into consideration right now. This long term holding behavior, community contributions, which are huge. Like, all of those things that people do outside of just collecting are massive. And so I think that's why it's also a very targeted system. It is very it's being very targeted at the collector at, like, the long term collector and an holder, and it is not the end all be all, but we can only release one product at a time. I think if we had released you know, 6 or 7 products at a time, it really would have cost like a lot of confusion. And so we have to keep it simple.

Dem ⛩️ 00:44:05 We're very happy with the reaction of the market and with the reaction both long term and short term collectors of it. I'm also getting a lot of feedback about, you know, this thing we could have done better and that thing we could have better, which is healthy. Like, that's exactly at the stage at which are in terms of the development of the product. Like, we need to hear from the community what could have done best. But I think what's very important for me to say out loud is that long term collecting and spending a lot of time looking at the collection to try to optimize the points and try to maximize the points that you get out of the collection. That is actually a good behavior for IP building. You know, like, that's the old joke of, like, I came into this collection just, like, flip it, and I became a community member.

Dem ⛩️ 00:44:45 Like, we have created a system now where even if you're coming in as a flipper, and as a short term holder, you're gonna have to read through all of our emblems out in order of, like, our fluffy lower stuff and blah blah blah blah. And you might just fall in love with that one animal, and you might just fall in love with that one red OG, Azuki, and you might just fall in love with that one kigurumi. And so maybe we can turn more long term short term flippers into longer term, but more importantly, we can reward long term collectors and those that appreciate of the collection, we can reward them. We can show them with points, and we can show them with with badges and and with these progression system. We can show them just how much we appreciate them.

Dem ⛩️ 00:45:24 So It was a very important release, and god, I was so nervous launching it because there's so many factors to play. So even though it wasn't perfect at launch, it did get a good reception, and now we get some time to really look at the feedback and keep improving it.

Legendary 00:45:40 I love how you said that you used the the market data to also establish, a bit of the the points ranking. And I also liked the decision that you made on purpose to not have the protocol support to not have lending, liquidity farming, other points farming on on external platforms as part of that, but really focus on that long term holding behavior that you want to incentivize.

Legendary 00:46:08 And when when you guys posted the update on the collector status, you mentioned that the longest discussion, the most difficult discussion was transparency versus clickability, do you want to make sure that all the points are known and be as transparent as possible so that everyone can make an informed decision versus do you want to keep the magic of not completely revealing the formula and the secret sauce behind all of that and keep a bit of the collecting magic.

Legendary 00:46:43 And in the end, you made the decision, to go towards transparency and show how, the the specific point values work What was the deciding factor that swayed the decision pro transparency in the end?

Dem ⛩️ 00:47:02 Yeah. We're lucky to have, you know, some really smart people working on this product that are not me because I'm not very smart. So location TBA and and Sarah, from our team. Sarah is our new VP of Product and and location TBAs is one of the co founders. They were most involved in this decision making. And I was pretty happy with how they laid out, like, the the advantages and the and the disadvantages. And I think at the end of the day, the compromise towards more transparency was important because we have a more holistic understanding of their NST space now, and you can't ignore the short term traders.

Dem ⛩️ 00:47:40 You can't ignore those people that are hustling on the intraday trades and on the swing trades and that are flipping and that are providing liquidity. And so if we had over invested in the storytelling and in the lower aspect of it, we would have missed a chance to create a common language between some market participants and other market participants. And and the goal the whole goal of collector status was to try to get the market to appreciate what our long term collectors already knew, which is that the Azuki collection is very deep. It has a lot of really different traits that are very cool to collect and to discover.

Dem ⛩️ 00:48:18 And so if we had really obfuscated the point value to a point where a trader couldn't really understand it, we would have missed a chance to create a bridge between are super fans that love a red, a Zuki, or a blue, a Zuki, or a gold kigurumi, and the people that are just here for a quick clip. And so We're pretty happy with the balance that we struck, but it's something we have to say vigilant because once you gamify the collecting experience, it could become overly gamified. And so, you know, I think world, you know, Sarah is a big nerd and location is a big nerd. We all talk about different video game systems. They were talking about location TV always talks about civilization.

Dem ⛩️ 00:48:57 Personally, I'm a Dungeons and Dragons nerd. And in Dungeons and Dragons, like, Of course, there's rules and there's numbers and there's math, and you can minmax your characters to hell. But if you really wanna have a great game at the table, you gotta keep the telling alive. And and you cannot let one single player just be doing, like, very complex math all the time and boring the hell out of all the other players. And so We need to stay vigilant that this gamification of the collecting experience serves as a language between short term traders and long term collectors, but it doesn't become this, like, insane game of point maximization that just completely destroys our culture.

Dem ⛩️ 00:49:36 And that's that's just gonna happen through iteration, and we're happy to have a community that's very vocal when they don't see something that they when they see something that they don't like. And so we'll just keep listening to them and and try to find a happy balance. But, you know, given how high the launch was and all the factors.

Dem ⛩️ 00:49:54 I'm very happy with the decision that Sarraf and location made here towards more transparency because we are seeing short term traders be able to value, a mid rare now based on the point system that we establish even though they might not care so much about the fact that it's a kigurumi and it's a cat and it's so cute and it has a sword, but they're like, oh, you know, I can see that it's worth this many points. So, therefore, I'll buy it and I'll hold it, and I'll wait for somebody who appreciates the art because I inherently think that, you know, the point value increases its valuable and slower. And and I think we're we're happy with that at this point.

Dem ⛩️ 00:50:29 Well, we'll keep on pushing for a better and and more advanced system, but it it is quite an meant, and I'm very happy that tariff and location made made that decision.

Legendary 00:50:37 I think that the and the analogy is just fantastic, and my inner nerd is cheering it because it makes so much sense. Right? You enjoy the storytelling. You enjoy the narrative. And, yes, there there is fun in min maxing, but that can't be everything for a brand that is building and and IP ecosystem. Carmel, when we spoke about the collective status, I know you had many, many, many thoughts on that, so I would absolutely love to hear from you.

Karma 00:51:05 Yeah. This is a brilliant topic. And, you know, for those who are just tuning into the spaces, like, you know, what could potentially a metaverse like ZTX and an NFT slash bra, you know, like, IP project like Azuki have in common. And the fact is that you can just learn so much from rather. And I remember, you know, months ago even back when we were still designing the UI, the look of the ZTX platform, the user experience, I'm going to be honest with them.

Karma 00:51:35 Like, the the Azuki Collector profiles were, for me, one of the main example I was bringing up to my team in our, you know, meetings on on the user user journey within ZTX on how I would love to involve and then tangle the user into the ZT X space. And now bear with me as I spend on this on this topic because it's generally something that I believe everybody should be looking into. Now for those of you who have never seen an Suzuki Collector profile, you know, maybe your the ZT X community, it's almost like your online calling card.

Karma 00:52:13 You can feature all the NFTs you own within the Azuki ecosystem. It sort of like really like blows up your NFT. Like, it extends the background onto your entire screen. So it just looks like a gorgeous deliberate page rather than something you were viewing an open sea. And you look much more at someone's identity than just their inventory of NFTs. It's it's a very, very emotional experience, even looking at, you know, someone's at someone else's you then also see their journey within the ecosystem.

Karma 00:52:44 You see different emblems, which signify, you know, different trades that they've collected You also see different badges, which can be awarded for participation in community sprints, community missions. Now apologies then. Like, I should I I'm like, woman explaining Azuki Pro us to execute community, but this is this is for the benefit of the CTX community here.

Dem ⛩️ 00:53:03 It's fascinating to see it from your perspective, actually. So I'm learning on time.

Karma 00:53:06 Keep keep keep keep moments explaining, please. So, yeah, so when I was looking into it originally, it generally seems to me like the first successful instance, of of establishing, participant's identity within an ecosystem in a shareable way. Because you also get your own URL, it's azuki.com slash collector slash whoever you are. I'm right now looking at Dingerlinx, you know, page and just simply over his NFTs. So It it gives you not only a link that you can share with your fellow community members. It gives it gives your NFTs.

Karma 00:53:46 It gives your collection a home. Which fills, you know, a part of the ecosystem, again, rather than just the clinical cold and emotionless front page or like your collector page of an open sea. So this was an incredible move, and I haven't seen it done remotely as well as Suzuki did anywhere in any capacity. And now, of course, you've also added this point system where people can, you know, acquire ranks, different traits, like, select boost you in different ways. It's an entire gamified presence. Now, okay, like, I've synced enough. Now, what's my point here?

Karma 00:54:24 Now, for the majority of not just NFT projects, meta versus games, What you care about as a project, what you care about as a team is retention. How long do you get to keep the customer, keep your community member within your ecosystem. And this was a brilliant move to keep them within that ecosystem even more. And help them identify with that ecosystem in a very, very tangible way. And this is something the majority of games, gaming projects also have to look at. You know, no matter what you're into, you know, you look at parallel, you look at, I don't know, Star Atlas, all those different games want to achieve the same thing.

Karma 00:55:04 They want you to be really involved within the within the ecosystem. They want you to be involved in the story, and they want the highest possible user retention. They want to retain you on their websites. And similarly down the line for ZTX, you know, your ZT X avatar is going to be your identity within that metaverse, and we want you to identify with that person. With that, digital you, and we want to create a page, create a home for all your assets, for earlier interactions, for the digital fashion that you are accumulating for different aspects and different NFTs that you craft in game.

Karma 00:55:43 And to select finish this entire tangent, the Azuki Collector profile is always going to be, for me, exhibit a of how we want to do it. And what we want to strive towards over a long period of time, because, of course, for a game, it's going to be significantly more complex than in Azuki's case, which you know, static static NFTs, but just an incredible, an incredible example of how one project can learn from another, even if they are in completely different verticals. Because we are all at the end of the day standing at the same well of user engagement.

Karma 00:56:20 From this initial very small pool of web free user base, we are now expanding towards, yeah, IP. Enemy. We are like hyper contextualizing. And in terms of games, you know, we really need to learn from that in order to also understand how to retain that user base and make them very, very passionate, advocacy, sorry, advocates for us. Just like the Azuki communities. Okay. This was a very, very long tangent, but I think you see them how it, like, it has featured very heavily in all my discussions with the team. So it was great to see also from your perspective how these collector profiles have grown. And it also pivots me towards the topic.

Karma 00:56:59 I think that we wanted touch up on legendary of, marketplaces. You know, it's not that far removed from, like, you know, the realm of possibilities that eventually, the majority of large projects will also have their own marketplace. Now I know this meta comes and goes and, you know, OpenC still retains, you know, stronghold over everything. We all love liquidity. We all love just like a one stop shop.

Karma 00:57:27 But I think as these, you know, IP metaverse gaming projects advance and become bigger and bigger, the NFTs will become more and more complex, it's going to significantly become much more difficult for the for the marketplaces to display all those, you know, all those important metrics. For example, if you're buying a gaming NFT, it's very difficult to see an open sea what the utility is, how that NST will look like in game.

Karma 00:57:57 And my personal little, anticipation, is that we will see more and more projects 2024, 2025 advance and have integrated in game, in experience, marketplaces, and purchase opportunities in order to come away from the clinical collective PFP marketplace experience. But this is just something I wanted to throw out there and would really love to hear what you think about that then.

Dem ⛩️ 00:58:27 Yeah. I mean, on the wider point of how you build a great product and and, you know, you'd you'd look in at our our product, I I really appreciate that. And I and I think it's it it looks really good for CTX in the future. Because you can only build great product by by looking at and being inspired by other great product.

Dem ⛩️ 00:58:48 I love to share one of our biggest inspirations for the collector profile, which was actually, Rohitosan, who is, one of our advisors for a long time and and sort of a legend in all sorts of collecting circles, and a conversation that he had with Sagabon on on a tour of his house, He is a massive Ferrari collector collector, and he keeps all of his, Ferrari collectibles in this glass sort of grand glass, collectible space in in the garage.

Dem ⛩️ 00:59:19 And and he sort of he he showed that to Sagabaugh and and said, whatever you make whether it's something big or something small, you need to imagine that the collectors within within your community, that people that fold your brand, they're going to want to show it at the center of their home. And and whenever they bring somebody over to their home, it's gonna be a special moment for them to show that. To to everyone. And so I think that was one of the physical spaces or inspirations that we took away from.

Dem ⛩️ 00:59:47 This idea that whether it's an NFT or whether it's a physical product or whatever it is, it needs to fill a place within within this glass exhibition space that that are that are, you know, communities going to use to to show to their friends. And so it was one of the main inspirations for the for the collector profile. I think that on the topic of retention, we're maybe in a different position interestingly. So, like, I've always fought to increase retention and reduce churn in the products that I was building. And it was all about, like, how we can increase it.

Dem ⛩️ 01:00:23 And I think with Suzuki, we have, sort of backwards problem where we have already such an engaged and loyal community And we're now just trying to build products and experiences that justify their commitment and their long term stay in power. These people that have been with us for 2 years, like, It is more about just making them feel rewarded for all the things that they've already done. And so, you know, I think collector status is less of, like, a forward looking effort to increase your attention and more of like a backwards thing of like, hey, we saw you taking all of these rares and these mid rares, and we saw you creating communities around all of these trades and, like, we want to reward that experience.

Dem ⛩️ 01:01:02 We we want you to feel like we also get it. Like, we also love that the fact that you're doing this. And so it's interesting. And I think that's one of the differences between building and web 3 because through the power of NFTs and through the power of, like, those sort of decentralized ownership, your starting point is not that you have to build an audience. Your starting point is that you already have an audience, and now you gotta build product that they'll love and engage with. And that's always been something that Azuki has had to deal with because We very early on acquired a very excited community and a very loyal community, and now we had to deliver on their expectations. And that will continue to be a big challenge into 2024.

Dem ⛩️ 01:01:42 And it's a very interesting topic, which is the topic of expectations. Now whatever we do something great, our community really celebrates and they feel justified in their past conviction, but also they take whatever we did and they create like a 10 x expectation for what our next delivery will be. Which is kind of a dangerous road to be on. On one hand, it's like amazing to have that passion. But, you know, if I mentioned something like oh, Japan Airlines might be a sponsor at our next event. The instant reaction of unnecessary community member is like, oh, we're all getting free tickets. Sponsored by Japan Airlines to go to the event. And it's like, that is such an unreasonable increase in expectations.

Dem ⛩️ 01:02:18 Like, do you know how hard it will be to even hype theoretically launch that partner, like, actually onboard them in time, but but it is it is just the the fuel, like, the rocket fuel that drives web 3 projects forward. And so, I mean, you know, as far as, like, is it bad or is it good? It's actually great. You know, like, it's better to be building with the with the raw materials of, like, such massive passion for a brand than to be trying to get people excited about something that they're not really excited about. It is a completely different challenge, and so you have to switch the way that you that you think about it. So I don't know how well that answers your question, but it was something that I really wanted to talk about. So I just took it to what I wanted to talk about.

Legendary 01:02:58 So And it's such an important point, right, the expectation management and the user retention. As you said, the expectation wouldn't be economy tickets wouldn't be business class, but it would be 1st class tickets because we are in web 3. Right? And I think this is also one of the reasons why we thought that having that that fireside chat with you would be such a valuable discussion because many games that we are talking about, many founders that we are talking about typically are in the stage of user acquisition. They are pre launch. They are maybe just about to launch a token, and they are not yet in the user retention phase. And this is why I love to you connected user retention with the collective profile.

Legendary 01:03:38 And, we only really touched on the the anime side of things a bit. We didn't get into the gaming. We didn't get into the PBTs. So, I do think we have to to do another round of that, fireside chat, in in in in the future. Because we've been running for a bit more than 1 hour, and I do want to be respectful, of everyone's time. Both everyone in the audience as well as our speakers.

Legendary 01:04:08 But before we go, then one final question, out of everything that's basically on the horizon for Azuki, what's the number one thing that excites you most for 2024 and beyond if you have to pick 1?

Dem ⛩️ 01:04:23 That's a great question. I think it's the fact that we have strongly decided to communicate our north star, our direction as a brand, our our narrative, more frequently, more transparently, and to more people more often. And so we have really listened to our community And they've said, we love the secrecy, but but we love the surprises, like keep the surprises, but we need to know what direction you guys are going. So that we can all pull in the same direction. And so what I'm really excited about, you know, there's really big things.

Dem ⛩️ 01:05:02 We're releasing a short form anime in April. We're look we're working on long form content anime. We're looking we're working on short form anime content. We're working on partnerships, physical products. We're working on hyper casual gaming experiences, we might, you know, we we might work on a on an additional game on top of that. I mean, there's all these things that are exciting because they're finished and they're ready to launch and there's all these things that are exciting because we're in development phase for them, but I think what's going to really change the vibe and the energy of being in the garden is the fact that we now have a cohesive, coherent narrative that we want to repeat over and over and over so that our community really understand it.

Dem ⛩️ 01:05:42 So I'm gonna be on spaces a lot more. We're gonna be holding a monthly, like these tight stages tomorrow, we're doing the first one in anime, but we will do one in other topics. And I think it's going to be that, like, acceleration co creation through better communication, like more clear and more more current and more, open communication with the community while also keeping surprises and exciting things and, like, a little bit of hype, oh, here and there, you know. So so I think it's just gonna be a year where we get to talk about what we do more often. And our community is less confused about what's happening in the Suzuki world, and they have a very much more clear image.

Dem ⛩️ 01:06:22 And that way we can move away from this energy that we've had in the garden of like, what's really gonna happen? Should I really be holding this or whatever? And my get just get excited about the things that are actually being launched. We don't have to get excited about this, like, fake hype or, like, these images that we built in our brains. Like, we can just be like, okay, this is releasing at this date. Oh, that's really cool. Okay. The beans are in the IPX store right now. That's very cool. I think that's really going to change my job, and it's really going to change our relationship with the community, and it's going to allow us to do more co creation.

Dem ⛩️ 01:06:53 So, yeah, that, that, that's better communication more more more clear north star, a bunch of stuff to deliver and and still some mystery, some secret stuff that nobody knows about. That that that's such a great mix for you for a start of the year.

Legendary 01:07:07 That is such a good answer. I really appreciate it, especially also from the perspective, of being a holder myself. With that being said, Karma, why don't you wrap those up for today's space?

Karma 01:07:19 Absolutely. Well, I've been searching for my elemental for, like, 2 months now. I just can't find any with, like, black, wavy hair so that it actually fits me, if someone has one. I I I thereby encourage you. No. Jokes side, this has been an incredibly illuminating conversation, and I really appreciate everybody's time.

Karma 01:07:44 I won't repeat myself, but I do want to highlight again that it's very, very incredible how much you can learn from other projects in the space, even if they are not in the same vertical as you and we keep these spaces on a weekly because there is it's it's one of the single most ROI friendly things we've ever done at ZT X, just talking openly with other builders, with other communities, and knowing exactly which directions to take, or which angles to consider as we expand our product in order to learn from everybody else because, you know, many people have done this roller coaster ride before or in front of you.

Karma 01:08:24 And you're just missing out on all the important lessons. They might they may be able to, you know, pass on to you along the way. And for our community, I also wanted to say that I know everybody is incredibly eager to jump back into the ZTX beta We are earlier in the stage of, you know, expanding our product and, Azuki is. But our entire team is working very diligently on getting in the back online after we have to implement some changes. So stay tuned, please.

Karma 01:08:54 We're going to be back with more updates very, very soon and relaunching that beta, allowing everybody also from the garden to jump in and check out CTX is the absolute priority right now. So looking forward to that for sure, and thank you then. Looking forward to more discussions like this in the future.

Dem ⛩️ 01:09:11 Yeah. I hope all the, elementals and Azuki and beans here give CTX to follow, give legendary a follow, and and give Karma a follow. You guys are definitely asking all the right questions, and I'm excited about the way that you guys think about product. And legendary man. You I've, I I've never been a host in one of your spaces, but it was such a great experience. So thanks for having me up. And I hope that, you get a bunch of fellows from all these Suzuki and beans out here. And you do become the number one sloth in the in in the garden.

Legendary 01:09:39 Love it. Thank you so much. And thank you again for your time, and thank you to everyone in the audience have a fantastic rest of it Tuesday.

Discover the 'Play to Airdrop' concept revolutionizing the Web3 gaming world in this engaging transcript.

This comprehensive discussion provides a deep dive into how new incentive models are reshaping player engagement and rewards in the gaming industry.

Our panel share their insights and strategies, offering a unique perspective on integrating financial incentives with gaming experiences.

Explore an innovative approach, blending gaming fun with rewarding player participation.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:26 G m g m. It's good to be back with the CTX spaces. It's good to be back in 2024 with our first space that We'll start on a bit of a different topic, I would say.

Legendary 00:03:01 I feel like for the last year, the last spaces, We have focused a lot and rightly so, in speaking about the token matter in speaking about air drops in speaking about all of the hype that goes around projects that have or had a token launch, And the question is or the question of, was how sustainable is that movement and what's next? What's gonna happen after the token meta? How will the space evolve.

Legendary 00:03:30 And I'm pretty glad that we have the lineup that we have today with, both playmber with John from PlayAmber and lost local from Alagocchi as well as Charles from Lifty Island. Joining us a tad later in the show. So that we can talk a bit about different concepts. I feel like Avagotchi did a lot of stuff in the past, like the play drop, that many people are probably not aware of anymore or were around at that time that were quite innovative back then.

Legendary 00:04:00 Play Amber obviously gets a lot of the mind share on the timeline right now and is taking quite a creative approach, I would say, and quite a successful approach when it comes to their communications and to their marketing as well, to their questing as well. So I'm quite, quite happy to have these panelists with us today. And with that out of the way, GMTU karma, my co host, how are you doing? How has your new year started so far? And maybe what are some of your expectations when it comes to 2024, some of your prediction, not even necessarily around web 3 gaming, but in general.

Karma 00:04:38 Hello. Hello. DMGA, g n, and everything in between, no matter where you are, in the world. My 2024 has started great. To be honest with you all, I've kinda hated 2023, so I couldn't wait for it to be over. Even though I tend to prefer burn markets to the bull market. So right now, my predictions concentrate mostly on hey, us getting towards actually playable games.

Karma 00:05:06 What I mean by that is, you know, while we are all excited and almost amazed at the amount of of games being built in the space, we still haven't moved beyond majority of them being in beta, being in early player stage, And I'm just honestly most excited for the second half of this year when we are going to enter that that moment where I believe most of these projects will start to release more polished version, more updated versions. So Kind of like my approach is, hey, still heads down building. Not that much has changed. And 2024 is for sure going to be in sanely exciting.

Legendary 00:05:47 Love to hear that. John, welcome to the stage. How are you doing? What are some of your predictions for 2024?

Jon Hook 00:05:54 Yeah. GMGM, everyone. Predictions for 2024. Man, if you if you ask me just about mobile gaming, I feel a little bit more confident about, like, web 3 gaming and crypto. Can I just limit it to, like, what's gonna happen this week? Is that alright? I can't even think about that.

Legendary 00:06:11 Absolutely. That's still part of 2024.

Jon Hook 00:06:14 That works. Yeah. I mean, this week, everyone's waiting for the the ETF narrative, right? That's what's all over my my timeline. So is this ball where I'm gonna look like the previous 2, or is this thing just gonna explode and be far quicker than maybe a few of us that are planning some fun things would have liked. But I'm just super excited that web 3 gaming is front and center. Like, that for me is, like, the biggest thing right now. It's just great. And the other great thing is a lot of us have all been there together through the bear, right? It's not like we just suddenly arrived and we're we're just kinda spinning up a project.

Jon Hook 00:06:49 We've all been working really hard, like, behind the scenes for the past year, pulling together, you know, I remember, like, you know, been doing spaces in the bear and it was like ten people. So it's just amazing to, like, look down and see everyone here. So for me, look, I mean, I I know it's obvious, but I'm really hoping that for web 3 gaming this year, it's it's gonna go up a level. You're starting to see amazing folks like Infinity Gods, you know, AOFs. I think specifically within web 3 gaming this year might be the year of web 3 mobile gaming. To really, you know, bring web 2 in, but also bring, you know, web 3 into mobile as well.

Jon Hook 00:07:27 So I think, yeah, ETF, let's see and then web3 mobile gaming.

Legendary 00:07:32 Yeah. Absolutely. And I love how you went both ways with your predictions on the one hand. Web 3 gaming going mobile, but also mobile gaming, mobile gamers coming into web 3 as a result of that. Lost local welcome to the stage as well. How are you doing? And what are your predictions for 2024?

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:07:51 G m g m. I'm doing great. Just getting my day started on the West Coast right now. Predictions for 2024. I'll keep it simple. We're up only. You know, I'm sure we'll see some volatility along the way, but I think everybody's, feeling pretty good about the state of the market and the state of the space. So you know, I'm ready to, ride this whole trend up.

Legendary 00:08:15 Love to hear it. And with that being said, that we are up only, I think that is the most important message, and we can close the space after 8 minutes. There's nothing more to add to that. Jokes aside, Charles. Welcome. Welcome to the stage. I'm glad that you were able to join us today. As well. How are you doing, and what are your predictions for this year?

Charl3s 00:08:34 Hey. I'm well. Great to be here. Oh, man. I'm I don't know if I'm good with predictions, But I'll I guess, my my hope is that we see, like, you know, a couple, like, really killer games live and out. I think my view on, like, the web 3 gaming category is sort of, like, I've seen a lot of, like, web 3 gaming is inevitable and, like, I I I find it hard. Like, I I really think there's gonna be so many flops, and it will really be about whether, like, 1 or 2 connect And for me, that isn't anything that's not promised on any level.

Charl3s 00:09:05 It's, really, like, do a couple projects, do something really interesting that sort of validates the whole space, just like Axi did where, really, if you had didn't have Axie, you wouldn't have web 3 gaming, basically. Like, they validated the whole category. So it's a I'm I I really think, like, you know, we're we're looking for those 1 or 2 gyms. I think there'll be a lot of, a lot of flops too, so it's gonna be it'll be interesting.

Legendary 00:09:28 Yeah. I think that's a very fair point to mention with with all the hype. I think we have to be aware that not all of the projects and all of the games that are competing for players that are competing for attention span will make it in the long run. Next, how are you doing? Welcome to the stage. Any predictions, expectations maybe, for 2024 from your side?

N3XT 00:09:51 Thanks for having me. Pretty much I agree with Charles. I'm just hoping for, like, one gem that will hit in 2024, you know, and Hopefully, it's gonna be a good one and that will just, you know, pick, like, pick a bit of attention of, like, 2 gamers. And, you know, then it just up only. But until then, you know, just saying cautious and, you know, exploring around and seeing many games and trying to play them. So, yeah.

Legendary 00:10:19 Love to hear that. And, obviously, also love to hear up only a second time in this space in the first ten minutes. Hopefully, that's not a top signal, though. Anyhow with with that out of the way, let's straight get into the main topic of the space. The title is play to airdrop. And I said it, from the get go, the really cool thing about this stage is we have a nifty island who are about start their open beta. We have, who have tons and tons of experience in this space and have done something quite similar to play to a headlock in the past and have similar plans for the future as well.

Legendary 00:10:57 And we have Play Amber who are, again, dominating the timeline and are cooking something are doing, great, great things with the questing as well. So it is interesting that we basically get to visit projects that are in different stages of of their development. And I think that will definitely add to the conversation. With that being said, I think Charles, your open beta is to start on the and correct me if I'm wrong. Is it 18th or 17th January? 17th. So it's, Wednesday. Yeah. This this next week, unfortunately. Next week, it is in in 8 days.

Legendary 00:11:37 And, obviously, with the trail and all the content that, you know, you and the team have created and put out, you made it quite clear that the the overarching topic is played to Adrop. Can you maybe, you know, elaborate a bit for our audience, what they can expect from the open beta and what basically the thinking behind that play to to adrop campaign on your end was Yeah.

Charl3s 00:12:04 Absolutely. So on January 17th, we'll be rolling out not a little experiment or a demo or kind of vertical slice or anything like that, it will be kind of a full fledged open web 3 game world where every user has their own island, they can customize it in all manner of ways, build it up, host crazy custom games on it, and compete in prize fueled quests. That that's what's coming. You'll be able to play as, I think we have just under 200,000, unique token gated avatars, now assimilated into the game. So that is across a 120 communities. So it's basically all of web 3 will be there.

Charl3s 00:12:43 All the big NFT communities will be there. Be building islands, playing games, and competing in play to airdrop. And play to airdrop really is a way of us solving the cold start problem that Open Game World's and have. They're fun if everyone's in there. They're not so fun if nobody's in there. So, played airdrop rewards people for playing the game. Farming on an off chain currency called blooms that can be used to upgrade your island and, acquire NFT rewards. And then also for sharing and evangelizing the best thing you can do during play to airdrop is share your island link a lot. Highly recommend doing that. Referring users and driving quality engagement to your island. So Yeah.

Charl3s 00:13:19 Really, I mean, I can talk about the rationale around it, of course, you know, at nauseam, but I'll stop there just. That's, you know, that is factually what it is.

Legendary 00:13:29 Gotcha. And sorry. I had to step up for a quick moment because I just wasn't able to mute myself on on the space. You know, you you said you want to stop then basically not to go into all the details of all the singing process behind it, but maybe just one follow-up question on that. Was it always clear clear from you from, you know, your perspective, the team's perspective, you want to do, a play to ad hoc campaign structured like that, or have you explored other thought options, as well?

Charl3s 00:14:03 So I think we've always want to do play to airdrop. We've considered a few different mechanisms for delivering it. We had a kind of a battle pass model that I think at some point in time, we might do. But we're considering that. Would have involved kind of issuing new NFT inventory. And over the summer, it really felt like that was sort of the worst thing we could ask if our partner projects was like, hey. Do you wanna do some kinda, like, co branded mint because I think just the the market was one where people weren't excited to mint new stuff. But but so in but in any way, we've always wanted to do it in some form.

Charl3s 00:14:38 For us, like, we really think putting a token out there is this incredible, you know, accelerant to growth. And we've always wanted to do it in a way that drives usage of the product. So we've, like, wanted to say, like, hey, just like during DeFi summer, you know, DeX's and lending protocols, went from nothing to, you know, institutions within the space because of how they put their token out. We think it can be done the same way in games. We can get everybody in suddenly, you know, Nifty Island's just part of the meta. It's just like, Hey. Okay. I own NFTs. Well, of course, I I play in Nifty. Of course, we have avatars in there. Of course, I'm sharing my own link. We think that's how we achieve ubiquity. So, yeah, it's always been something we wanted to do.

Legendary 00:15:20 Gotcha. Gotcha. I would also love to get you into the conversation lost local because I think it was in 2021 that, Avagocchi did the the play drop in in the godci verse. Can you maybe you know, it is quite a while ago, and I think that not everyone who's in this space has been around back then. Can you maybe elaborate on that concept a bit and what that meant for the, token, basically, ecosystem back then for Ava Got you, the PlayDrop. Absolutely.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:15:52 And I will admittedly say, that was a little bit before, my time at Avagashi, and I've got, way more information about our upcoming, drop. However, this was very, very early in the space, as you know, based on the date that you mentioned. We launched ghost token in 2020. So knowing that our, long term plan was to create a gaming environment that lives in web 3, we wanted to figure out how we could put that token to use and start to reward our players.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:16:23 That initial play drop was you know, the very, very 1st stage in us creating, a roller based system utilizing Ghost token, for our players So, you know, it was a it was a very basic mechanic at the time, but, you know, it was basically us kicking the tires on the ecosystem, figuring out how we start to create interest in, play and also let our community know exactly where we were headed.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:16:52 So, you know, it was it was very early in the process and and what we're working on now, as we approach you know, actual adoption and actual products that are gonna get in the hands of the public. We've we've got some pretty exciting stuff in the form of, you know, a similar play to be rewarded model for our upcoming founders pass.

Legendary 00:17:17 Can you share a bit more on that and maybe also share, a bit of if if you can talk to that, how how that will work Absolutely.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:17:28 So we have a handful of titles, launching this year alongside the Avagashi virtual gaming console. So what our founders have been working on here is is really exciting, because it it goes well beyond just a a gaming type we are creating a a truly 360 gaming ecosystem that's gonna utilize Ghost as well as our crafting tokens and, glitter, which speeds up time, as a means to reward and encourage players to join our ecosystem and and get involved.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:18:03 As part of this, we're gonna be releasing a founder's pass this spring, which will have assets for our first three titles going live. Those titles are Liquies Escape, which is currently in, open beta. So if anyone wants to check that out and you've got an iOS device, you can go to the Abigache game center on our website and, become part of the test light there. That's a mobile puzzle game. Then we have Gotcha Guardians, which is our tower defense model and, Spirit Force Arena, which is our, arena Battleer.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:18:38 In this founder's past, we're gonna be releasing a ton of assets for those 3 titles, potentially more, along with a bunch keys for, various loop boxes. The model that we're using to do this, however, this will be a Dutch auction mint. But we are going to be incentivizing folks leading up to that mint with the opportunity to play various games and, accomplish various in game questing. And by doing that, there'll be 7 achievements that you can you know, conquer. And in doing that, you'll receive almost, a third off of the total mint price.

lostlocal.eth 👻🦇🔊 00:19:19 And that will increment incrementally happen as you are, getting through these achievements. So we what we wanted to do is we wanted to obviously bring more players into the ecosystem But we also wanna give them tools so that they're rewarded for being early, and participating in this experience. So, we thought this was a really, really interesting way to motivate play as well as letting folks walk away with, not only assets they can use, but, getting those assets at a bit of a discount for participating.

Legendary 00:19:55 Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense, and I also like to hear basically how you know, that that line of thought has evolved from 2021 to what's still big then was, an innovative concept but now has matured and has gotten way more complex than it was back then. Karma, I see you with your hand up. Would love to hear from you as well.

Karma 00:20:15 Yeah. I have to admit I was just, like, you know, really interested. It's kind of like, play to discount in a way where you still need a buy in, but via your active participation as a player, as a community member, you get to, yeah, just have something, like, at the more affordable rate. I think we are going to see more and more of these, you know, blended systems and blended mechanisms for discount while also still maintaining people's buy in. And I'm just really excited for that. To be honest, with you. Like, I just haven't heard about this, this, model before.

Karma 00:20:54 And the reason why I'm excited about it is something I wanted to say is I know everybody loves free mends, but there is something special about how having to buy something, having skin in the game. And I think very often, that play to air drop narrative helps assure that even if people, you know, drop off afterwards, at the very least, they had a chance to try out your product. They are more likely to come back if you refine, maybe come back later, what we know about web3 is that the audience is incredibly easy to reactivate.

Karma 00:21:31 That's just something I wanna throw in the arena where in traditional web 2 gaming, if you release something and the audience doesn't like it, your game is absolutely dead. To the point where if a game, you know, for example, gets leaked before its release, even if millions were pumped into its development, very often a project cut because they will just never be able to reactivate that community, reactivate that hype.

Karma 00:21:56 That's very different in web3 where You can basically lie dormant for a few months, and as soon as you release new bullish catalysts, new bullish update, with a little bit of marketing, you are able to very much reactivate that, just like have a fresh start. Maybe not a new lease in life, but you can keep iterating. And I think those, like, you know, play to discount, play to air drop, play to earn whichever way we want to call it, are really interesting strategies for us to keep reactivating the communities, keep rewarding them as we refine our products. So that's just something I wanted to throw in there.

Karma 00:22:34 I think it's very interesting how these models evolve.

Legendary 00:22:39 Yeah. Absolutely. And you also have to, you know, appreciate it kind of as an evolution of our last spaces. We talked about a great deal about how, perfectly adverts are suited to what TGEs are suited to drive user acquisition, but not really the perfect model to go into user attention and to keep users or gamers engaged. And of course, there's, like, still a lot of economic challenges in the long run on how to create a good token design. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Legendary 00:23:10 But I do like that with those play to Adrop or play to discount as you just named it models, you basically, like, form that very proactive behavior from the get go. You form that feeling that you have to do more than, you know, just mint and wait for a token to come, but you have to participate to be able to Reep Grata benefits. I think, Encarna is doing something very, very similar with having both an ad hoc for the holders, but also having an active campaign for those who want to play test the game.

Legendary 00:23:48 So it's as, you know, very often in life that we don't see, like, a single model in isolation that works perfectly, but we see the blend and the combinations of of many more models But you also mentioned, you know, obviously, the comps, the marketing behind that, behind getting the attention. And I think that's also the perfect moment to loop John, the co founder of play and we're into that conversation because as I already said, play Embraer and the Ambulist are dominating the the timeline dominating the interest, right now in web 3 gaming, what is What is the secret sauce behind that, John?

Jon Hook 00:24:29 Well, I mean, the the the secret sauce is hopefully part of it is actually coming to this space having been around for a while in web 2 and been humble and not assume that we we're just gonna replicate that success in web 3. You know, we've been here for a couple of years. And what we've been trying to figure out is how do we replicate our success in web 2 distribution, user acquisition onboarding in web 3, and what does that player experience look like, for the audience that we're trying to bring into web 3 and grow. So there's some really great points and, you know, really interesting view Karma just put in about play to discount.

Jon Hook 00:25:07 And and I think part of the the reason it's starting to work is we're not necessarily reinventing the wheel. Right? A lot of these behaviors gamers know how to do, like, rewarded video. It's called rewarded video. Right? We all know that you watch a video and you get a reward. It's just in web 2, you know, it's a skin that it's just some off chain item that you you you don't get a direct financial benefit from, but there's just a fun benefit in the game. You've got you know, platforms like skills, right? Hugely successful IPO at the time where you've got you know, play to airdrop, e g, winner Tesla. Right?

Jon Hook 00:25:44 So you've got a lot of existing behaviors in web 2 that we can build on.

Jon Hook 00:25:48 I think the key difference in web 3 is course 1, you you've got a different set of technology that you can now build on to put some of these behaviors or on steroids but I think specifically when you start thinking about this play to air drop discussion, it's then creating something really powerful that you just don't get in web two games, specifically casual games, which is this extra motivation for players to hang around in an ecosystem And if you start to bring in UGC opportunities for them as well, and there's loads of great low code tools in web 2, like, build box, for example, it's just incredibly powerful, you know, like, I agree with coming.

Jon Hook 00:26:26 There's nothing more powerful than than someone actually pet buying an object. There's also equally nothing more powerful than than someone creating a piece of content or a game, sharing that on social media, bringing their friendship group directly into that play and to play their game with them and all getting rewarded for that. And that's when you start to see really interesting network effects. It's just been very hard to do in web web 2, because of the, yeah, the the the technology challenges.

Jon Hook 00:26:55 So I I think for for us, it's you know, we're we're still at the start of our, our journey, but it's about building on top of sort of data points we continue to see as we bring web 2 in. But being laser focused on the different audiences we encounter in web 2, but also web 3 from a motivation standpoint. And to what everyone else was saying is just then designing loops that cater to those motivations, but also, you know, overlap and don't cannibalize each other.

Jon Hook 00:27:26 And, you know, I agree with Charles about, you know, GEO sort of trailblazing with with with Axi and, you know, you you listen to GEO and that initial idea, initial, learning early on that it was like one whale that basically got them through the first, their first cycle. And and the key learning there is again that balancing and designing an economy that allows, you know, whales or people that may not be active in terms of playing the game, but allowing them to heavily financially contribute and be rewarded from, you know, investing in that ecosystem.

Jon Hook 00:28:00 Whilst also be bringing in and continue to build a player base that, you're driving towards and teaching this open market model. That, you know, are are are directly benefiting from those early community members or whales that are, you know, pulling them into that web 3 direction. So yeah, that's just a little bit in terms of, like, how we we think about it and how absolutely all these different player motivations you know, should be able to work together.

Legendary 00:28:30 Absolutely appreciate the the line of thinking behind that. And you said, you know, two things that really were standing out to me. You have all that experience in web 2 yet from the get go. You said you approach the web 3 space in a in a humble way in a way that had the expectation that WIP 3 is obviously, different to web 2. And you also said specifically that those network effects are difficult to achieve in web 2 for, technological reasons because of technological barriers and are more, achievable in web 3.

Legendary 00:29:07 Could you maybe you know, elaborate a bit more on that, on that concept?

Jon Hook 00:29:14 Yeah. Of course. So if if you look at, I mean, some of the great casual businesses in, in web 2, you know, if you look at let's look at just casual games is where we focus. You had nearly $12,000,000,000 spent in in app purchases last year. Right? That $12,000,000,000 of money in, not through ads, people putting money into a game, and it's just mental that none of that gets returned to to gamers, right? We are all heavily financialized in web 2. Where does that money go? It goes to the ad networks. It goes to the different people involved in distribution. It goes to the app stores. It it's just it's just crazy.

Jon Hook 00:29:53 Yet, you've got players there saying, Hey, I love these games and putting 1,000,000,000 of dollars in. So with web 3 like technology, we now have ways, and like incentive loops to be able to you know, redistribute that. So, you know, as a as as as a player, you know, I can I now own an asset and I have complete control? However, whether I want to, you know, play and increase the value of that that asset, and I do nothing else with that because I just love playing the game, and I just wanna keep you know, or you now have the option that you can you can benefit from that. I can I can sell, I can buy another item to accelerate my progress?

Jon Hook 00:30:34 And what that starts to do is teach players that, hey, actually, this is this is really, you know, this is really great. I can actually get it, get if I decide to stop playing a game, I can get a little bit of money out at the end of it, which you can't do in web 2.

Jon Hook 00:30:47 So imagine all those people playing candy crush that have poured hours into it and loads of money, this really simple idea that at the end of it, if I just wanted to walk away and sell my account or sell my progress, I could get, you know, 50 bucks a $100 you know, for web to mass casual gamers, that's just a very simple to understand idea, but then start to imagine that you've got a connected ecosystem of of of these casual games where, you know, quite often unlike, let's say RPG games, let's take over world, for an example, where it's, you know, a a very significant investment, and and one large game.

Jon Hook 00:31:23 In casual games, usually you have a you know, a a series of 3, 4, 5, you know, if you look at OmniOM as an example, I don't know, 10, 15 games, I built around a character IP, but there's no transferability of that IP between games. You can't transfer your progress. So so that's what I mean about how web 3 technology can now solve those those problems just by allowing people to move between game a, b, c, and d, and transfer progress assets with them. And then it's entirely down to them, you know, we try and create an ecosystem for the do to do that, but it's entirely down to them what that motivation is to do next.

Jon Hook 00:32:02 Do they, you know, are they are they trading to lever up and accelerate progress? Is there motivation, you know, playing to win? Is it playing to earn? And again, all of that is possible through, through web 3 technology.

Legendary 00:32:16 Absolutely appreciate the deep dive. And I love that you went beyond just talking about the financial incentives to play a specific game, but also talk about on chain profiles, talk about how progress, how achievements, how unlock, in specific games can now be viewed, across games. And I think that is also something that, Avagotchi is working on, I that you lost local switched from your personal account to the, official Ava got your account, and I would love to have you chime in on the topic of, you know, on chain gaming profiles and and your thoughts about it.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:32:54 Yes. I'm much more adorable now. Yeah. Player progression and player profiles. This is, you know, at the center point of what we're trying to build over at Evagache. And and a big part of why we are doing the discounted mint for players. All of these games were only able to be developed by having the community there to give input and to be the active beta testers So it's only right that we, you know, reward those players for helping us build all these gains in this entire ecosystem.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:33:29 So through Avagashi and, you know, through many of our partners as well, you know, we've got really awesome launch partners in, 1 Kin and Carve and hyper play. You know, all of these platforms, are gonna be offering a different player profiles and the ability to track your in game and cross game, you know, achievements. And, we are focused very much on creating a player reward system that utilizes badges, drip rewards, all of that good stuff to make sure that our players are receiving the most benefit by playing our games through our portal.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:34:09 So I think that's gonna be a very interesting part of this entire equation moving forward is, there's gonna be heavy incentives across the board for people not only to play these individual games, but to access these games and to action access other gaming experiences, because we do have now the ability to track all of that progress across the board and across games, which is extremely exciting, because as you mentioned right now, for most players, the experience is extremely fragmented. They've got achievements that are spread out across different platforms, different consoles, different gaming ecosystems.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:34:50 And, you know, at Avagache, we see an opportunity not only with our internal games, but with partner projects to allow some of those rewards to carry over, create incentives to bring players into our ecosystem as well as drive our players out to external game gaming projects, that we also support and believe in. You know, so that's kind of the high level, way that we're approaching this. We're seeing it across the board. We're seeing lots of folks focus on, how they're gonna reward the players, and and we think that is definitely the right approach.

Legendary 00:35:29 Gotcha. Yeah. That that makes a lot of, you know, the m pretty much, agree with business that you're putting on on those on chain profiles. And I would love to, you know, get you back into the conversation. With us, Charles, because John did speak about, you know, the way how we are incentivized. It's 3 to do things. We literally have Chrome extensions that reward you for sharing your bandwidth. So to some extent, we're at a point where basically all actions so many actions have that, you know, financial expectation.

Legendary 00:36:08 And you launch with a big open beta, you launch with a big plate Adrop campaign. And I think for my, you know, my thought would be that it can be quite challenging to then out how much of the intro open beta is generally driven by the game by the game experience. People who are incentivized to get the air drop.

Legendary 00:36:35 And also in that, like, how do you basically, you know, plan to establish feedback processes so you make sure that you get the best feedback for the beta and you can That let's call it quantum. Outdoor hunter. You're sorry.

Charl3s 00:36:54 It was cutting out a little oh, Sorry. Did you did you get the, the the question, or should I I got the gist of it. Got the gist of it. Sorry. No. No. I I did. I did. I got the gist. Sorry. It was just cut out, and I thought you were done talking. But, yeah, it wasn't right. So, yeah, good question. Let's see. So we, I mean, we the way the plate air drop campaign is set up, we didn't want it to be kind of like an endless grind.

Charl3s 00:37:23 Where, you know, you you you have to spend, you know, 24 hours a day in the game to be competitive for it because if if there's no upper bound there in terms of time spent and reward that you can extract, then people who are sort of want to live normal lives and maybe play a game a little bit, but not kind of, like, ruin their lives, you know, we'll we'll be scared away. And then like, really, really determined farmers, we just kinda dominate it. So we intentionally have some upper bounds on what you can farm, like, in a 24 hour period. For that reason.

Charl3s 00:37:57 And and so what I think we're gonna see a little bit of is, like, there's a few actions you'd be able to take each day that are gonna be, like, the most efficient ways to, you know, keep progressing in the play to air drop campaign. And kinda what we're gonna wanna see is, like, the delta between that and how much more people play. So it's like, oh, this person already done their daily challenges, and they've done a few other things. They've really, you know, they've maxed out most of what they could do for the day. But they're continuing to play. They're continuing to share. These are the sort of things we're gonna be looking for. Perclivity to share is, one of the most important things we're looking at that is incentivized, but only to a point. So I think, you know, it won't be easy to disentangle them, but there are some things we can do there.

Charl3s 00:38:37 And then the key thing for me too is that It's like if you lead with prizes and incentives, the game has to always be about prizes and incentives in my book. So it's like, It's not that Play to Airdrop ends, and then nifty Island just becomes, like, Fortnite or something where I'm like, okay, there's no more, there are no more prizes. We we our our goal is just to make the prizes more sustainable. And and that will look like a couple things. We have our quest system where you can give away NFTs or white list spots through the game.

Charl3s 00:39:07 We're gonna be flushing that out and really hope that it becomes part of the meta for just how people do 2 drops that are, kind of whitelist giveaways that are bought resistant, more fun, actually build community in the process of giving them out. So That's sort of an endless stream of prizes that I think people will like. And then and and then I'm always down to jam with it. If there's anyone who's, like, a gig of brand who wants to hash this one out with me, let me know. But I'm really interested in, like, you know, skill based wagering and sort of more financialized games that can be built on top of nifty. And and those are probably, you know, 2 of the things that I'll be most focused on beyond open beta. I already find myself thinking about it a lot, even though we have a impending launch. So Yeah.

Charl3s 00:39:44 It's gonna continue to be about prizes beyond played airdrop, but we also hope that people play beyond the narrower requirements of played airdrop, and we'll be measuring that.

Karma 00:39:54 Yeah. And let me jump in here. I think it's a good way to phrase it to say that play to air drop is more often not a hook that gets people in, gets them to try out, gets them to help you in the initial stages where your product really needs the feedback, needs the really active engagement. And we all know that the web3 space, especially the web3 gaming space is quite predatory. Now I don't mean that necessarily in a very negative way. It's just how incentives are structured.

Karma 00:40:26 If you can be paid more for, you know, like, 10 minutes of your time elsewhere, a game must be really excellent for you to give up the other financial opportunity. We are all here at least partially in crypto because we were attracted by the new monetization strategy. That's just the truth of it that is, you know, unavoidable. But just utilizing that very skillfully to get that first hook, Get people to try something out and get them accustomed to just like a fun environment, which keeps changing, keeps, you know, keeping them on their toes.

Karma 00:41:01 Like you said, Charles, the rewards, as long as the platform is set up in a way that allows other people to come in, their words can keep changing because other people will keep building their own experiences within that platform. And wagering, I personally believe, you know, previously we told we talked a little bit about, sort of, like, predictions for 2024. I believe that wagering types of bets, and sort of decentralized bet making, is going to be really, really huge for metaverse type experiences going forward.

Karma 00:41:38 That's certainly something that we are looking at at ZT X as well. A little bit of alpha, you know, of course, without day or any details. But, yeah, like, any type of a big platform that allows users to interact socially will eventually converge into some kind of a betting platform. That's just we are just hazardous by nature, not just us, you know, in web me. But, sorry.

Karma 00:42:04 This was just a little bit of my thoughts, but I wanted to direct the conversation back into the Select AirDrop Hunter versus organic engagement member, direction and speak a little bit about, you know, something called civil resistance in games, something, in the direction of how do we actually diversify between that predatory farming engagement and the actual community that cares. And once stay long term, even beyond the rewards.

Karma 00:42:38 And I would love to, you know, pull you in John here back, and maybe hear your some of your thoughts about this. You know, I believe that while we really love those initial rewards, it does set up that unrealistic expectation of always being financially rewarded for every single action. And Bill's a very don't pitchfork Me, but a very entitled community, which is rarely easy to retain long term. So, yeah, just would you mind sharing your thoughts about that?

Jon Hook 00:43:10 Yeah. I mean, first of all, I'd love to jam with details of this skill based gaming. Like, I'm fascinated by that model, but yeah, I mean, so when I think about our web 2 audience, this is interesting to us because they're they're coming in with no motivation to, at all. They're coming in 1st and foremost because they've seen one of our ads on an app network and they're like, hey, that game just looks really fun. I'm gonna play it. And and that's that that's their hook in. And then when they're there, and we've done loads of testing over the past 2 years, on ad networks on TikTok.

Jon Hook 00:43:47 Any any actual sort of incentive to come in related to a token or NFT, performs really badly in terms of as an acquisition tool versus, you know, web web 2 prizes, you know, no surprises is something that they understand. They're very comfortable with. You know, PayPal, Fiat, they they they understand that, and it's been around for a long time in, you know, like, skill based gaming, right? Like real cash cash prizes? So I think part of it is just rather than fighting, just accepting the motivation of, you know, that audience that you are, are building for.

Jon Hook 00:44:25 And wording is, I agree, is really key as soon as you, you know, play to win is nothing new, you know, play to farm is nothing new, you know, play to air drops existed in in in other forms. But yeah, with the web 3 games, that's also again, like, to my intro. We we didn't assume anything. But what we wanted to do was get exposure to, what we call a crypto curious audience. So an audience who are coming into a game with a financial motivation to earn from it because we we just wanted to you know, talk to them because with, you know, our web 2 games, typically that community isn't something that's living in Discord.

Jon Hook 00:45:04 So what we did is we we partnered with Ebersi and we deployed 5 games on the Lightning Network. So you can play these games and you can earn, you know, fractional amounts of of Bitcoin. And what we saw was was was pretty pretty obvious is that it wasn't really about the game. They would play any any game, and were making fast calculations about the game they could earn the most from. The most interesting thing is once we got past that point, the real surprise was they actually then really cared about the the game, so that's the earlier point about network effects.

Jon Hook 00:45:40 They really cared about the game, and were openly suggesting in discord new game mechanic and Gacha mechanics, that we could try that we did. So in, like, Bitcoin cast away over weekends, we ran live treasure hunts in the mobile game where we we hid fraction amounts of Bitcoin in the little treasure chests, and the community loved that and they were then more receptive to then bringing in friends to play the game because they're now understanding that, okay, this is a fun game.

Jon Hook 00:46:08 We've directly contributed to the early economy of this game, they understood because we were very open them about how to sustain this kind of model that, you know, again, the more players you get in the more we can balance this game through ad revenue that is rewarding you for your time. So early on, that really surprised us once you kind of get past that barrier of I can play this game, I can earn it, I cash out, you're not trying to rug me, they're more inclined to sort of be open and realize that you're actually here to build a game ecosystem. But there's no getting away in that model that the initial entry point is an expectation that I'm coming here to play and earn.

Jon Hook 00:46:48 And, you know, that that that audience for that for that type of model for sure, and we saw it in the last ball run they will be as they they will be there for as long as you as a developer can sustain that ecosystem. The minute you can't sustain that ecosystem and there's something else where the players can figure out they can get, you know, quicker earnings or rewards that they're gonna go there.

Jon Hook 00:47:09 So I think that's something that is a real challenge to Charles's point that as soon as you label your game in that space, it's a problem in so far as if you can't figure out to sustain that long term, then, yeah, you're you're going to struggle to, you know, maintain that game or ecosystem I think for us, it's it's very much about bringing people in, and making our ecosystem about, you know, playing fun games about collecting, not just one thing, collecting a series of things within this really funny ecosystem, and making sure that you get rewarded for that and then designing a system where those rewards, you know, of course, are sustainable, but are rewards that actually something that that you give a shit about rather than just coming in and this is all about, you know, earning a specific type of reward.

Jon Hook 00:47:59 Sorry, Carm. I can see how you have that, but yeah, that's how we think about Yeah.

Karma 00:48:03 No. These were amazing thoughts. Oh, sorry, legendary.

Legendary 00:48:08 Apology for connecting. Go ahead. I'll I'll go after you.

Karma 00:48:12 Yes. So these were amazing thoughts, John, and I fully agree with everything you've outlined. Something I wanted to just throw into the general audience and, you know, something that I've just been thinking of, maybe this is directed mostly to Ava Goci because you guys just have the most experience you've been you've been playing this game the longest. What I often wonder about is We've already mentioned, hey. We are now transitioning to looking towards DeFi.

Karma 00:48:42 You know, DeFi has been, about much longer than our web3 games have been live, they have at least another cycle or 2 behind their belts so we can look at the distribution of air drops in DeFi distribution of rewards in DeFi, and try to select draw conclusions as to how the potential attainment of participants could look like, for for the players themselves.

Karma 00:49:07 So again, this is a very open question, but I wonder, Have you noticed as Avaguchi ecosystem has been growing, or have you been trucking, how many of the wallets keep returning if there is a correlation between wallets that, you know, have sort of, like, earned the most rewards and how often they return Or has there been no correlation whatsoever? And this is a bit, you know, like, of an open question.

Karma 00:49:34 I know at ZT X, we have certainly noticed that the wallets that participated in the play test, we have 2 of them, and then we opened the beta these wallets kept coming back and kept coming back in a very regular manner. So I wonder if there are any other takeaways from other projects like that?

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:49:56 Yeah. I think that absolutely, you know, at Avagache, especially, we have a very, very, dedicated user base and a very loyal community that's been around with us. Since the beginning. And, you know, obviously, they've been a massive part of us building everything that we've had. If we didn't have them informing and, giving feedback as well as participating, the project would never have gotten to where it is now. On the tip of DeFi, we definitely see a lot of our users take advantage of our token ecosystem.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:50:35 Many of them obviously did find the project through DeFi. So it was a, you know, a little bit of a of a backwards, kind of path to getting to us where we see, obviously, in the future, more of the public will likely find out about DeFi after playing our games and learning a bit more about our ecosystem. I think that the long term vision there is we have these tokens and we want to give our users and our community benefits for holding those tokens in addition to playing our game.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:51:13 So all of these, DeFi protocols that are out there and all of these partners we've got that offer LP pairs, those are all things that we think you know, the public will have an opportunity to participate in at, various levels based on their appetite they have obviously been a very big driver in how we developed. But I I think that now as we move forward, the focus is absolutely for us on gaming.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:51:42 However, we wanna make sure that this financial ecosystem that we develop as a necessity inside of the game can also be taken advantage of for anyone on the outside that sees the financial benefits.

Legendary 00:52:01 Absolutely. Love love to hear how you think about Connect thing, the the gaming set of things, with the DeFi set of things.

Legendary 00:52:08 And I also absolutely loved, John's take by basically playing that user journey, it sounded very interesting how, John explained, you know, first, the game looks at what is the biggest opportunity out there in terms of the games establishes if, you know, the threshold is there to be worth their time, And then is, then the second step is getting involved in the game, caring about the game, giving feedback, and based on that, I would like to ask you another question with local as, you know, a team who is building multiple games at a time how do you basically approach that potential competition that could stem from that and exist in between or between between your games because some of them might, you know, draw more gamers, draw more users because, people might think that playing ace specific game in the ecosystem or doing a specific, type of game in the ecosystem might be more lucrative.

Legendary 00:53:12 So how do you deal with that sort of internal competition.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:53:18 So at this point, Honestly, I think we're avoiding that competition by really approaching this entire endeavor as a gaming studio. Our founders onboarded an amazing team across the board. We've got different game directors for every single one of our titles. And they all come from a traditional gaming background. So for us, I think it comes down to intention.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:53:46 We are building games that are fun games to play with the strategy of, believing that if you create a good product everything else on the back end, all of these benefits, the ability to track, player profiles across across different games and different ecosystems. All of those benefits are gonna make themselves known, over the past couple years as we attend more traditional gaming conventions, like GDC, We are seeing that the narrative is now shifting to web 3 becoming a utility layer for gamers across the board.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:54:23 Less is it's going to be less in our opinion about web 3 games and more about web 3 benefits around games. So that being said, I think if you are building games with making them fun and then allowing those rewards to be the secondary benefit of having a good time by playing those games.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:54:47 You're gonna make it if you are building a game that is designed to incentivize rewards first, you're gonna end up with one of the social 5 platforms, which at the end of the day, is masquerading as a game, but often really just like some type of dopamine treadmill or some type of, you know, lack of a better word. It is a bit of a pyramid scheme where you've onboard more people. You're receiving rewards for onboarding, and, and that just kind of trickles down. So, you know, to keep it short, like, We just wanna make good games. We wanna reward the players.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 00:55:26 We believe that this is the future of gaming. So if we do that, everything else will fall into place.

Legendary 00:55:34 Absolutely agree with that. And and as you said, it's it's not sustainable if the main point of the game is to just onboard more people to keep the machine going to keep the pyramid building, then that's not gonna turn out to be a sustainable, game at all. And at the heart of it, is still that the game needs to be fun. And I like, how you, Karma did, you know, share a bit about the the plans for ZKX and explain the human notion of when there's a social platform, when whether it's a gaming platform, whether it's a social platform, per se, a metaverse, whatever form it is, And there is room for communication.

Legendary 00:56:11 People will have the notion to want to wager to want to bet and including that notion of decentralized betting. And I think that also goes, like, hand in hand with, what those local just said that At the end of the day, nobody really cares about, is it web 3? What's the tech stack behind that? They will care about is the game fun and is is the metaverse? Is the social experience, whatever, is open and inclusive enough for them to be able to do the things that they want to do while that's talking, chatting, having fun in a game, or or, or wagering placing bets.

Legendary 00:56:47 And I would like to hear more about that from you, Karma, to the extent that you are able to share what basically that thought process behind including or thinking about including, wagering as in in whatever way in in in the ZT X space.

Karma 00:57:07 Yeah. And I'm going to be very, very broad, in my fault. Like I said, we we are thinking about different things. We are pursuing different projects. But, like, the foundational thought process behind it. And quite frankly, I don't think that's just for ZTX. For every single project on this panel, you know, we really curated it so nicely. Avaguchi, Play Amber, Misty Island. These are not just, you know, contained singular self standing games per se. I wouldn't may maybe maybe the other founders will disagree. I wouldn't I wouldn't describe them as such.

Karma 00:57:44 It's much more like a platform, you know, whether we call it a publisher, whether we call it, you know, a social platform, etcetera. It's It's an ecosystem which allows players to interact with each other, but also to some extent, participate in building an expansion of that world. Now this is either via UGC. This is either via, you know, like, just more in-depth economic structures, like ownership of assets being able to then take these assets out of the platform, build particular, you know, financialized products on top of that.

Karma 00:58:20 And at the end of the day, betting, you know, any type of of something like that is just an add on that can live on top of any other game. And, you know, in Charles, you mentioned, not just in this space, but in some other the island spaces, there will be different mini games in Misty Island. Like, you you enter you you go into an island of your friend, but, like, what do you do then? Like, you want to play, you want to have fun. So there it it isn't that far removed from reality that you can then say, hey.

Karma 00:58:53 Like, maybe me and my decent friend, we really want to play a round of something, like go karts, like some simple hyper casual game, and whoever wins gets this NFT, that, you know, that I have. Like, it just adds an additional layer of excitement, adds additional layer of higher stakes to it, that at the same time, you can entirely tweak yourself with your friends. You do not subject to, you know, like, pre arranged. I don't know. I personally, for example, really hate playing ranked matches or, like, any type of competitive games online because it's stresses the hell out of me.

Karma 00:59:30 But when it's something, you know, like, lower stakes that I can agree upon with friends, yeah, don't laugh at me. I'm horrible at first person shoot shooters. I still have trauma. All my friends were so good. I was always just, like, the worst one they've had to carry me. I will never recover. But, yeah, this is why I'm building a mess of hers without without guns, story of my life. Anyhow, back back to the back to the wagering. I think I think it's just a natural thing to give people more control over the gameplay. Any type of wagering betting does just that.

Karma 01:00:06 Simultaneously raises excitement and gives people more control over the gameplay, I think many projects will see that integrated. For financial reasons, for excitement reasons, for publicity reasons, as long as they can, of course, meander around different, regulatory concerns. Which are, you know, like, very, very nebulous. And, yeah, I see I see Charles's hands showed up.

Karma 01:00:29 I'm just going to close this point off by saying, at ZT X, similarly, you know, we will be thriving towards these mini games similar to our web 2 counterparts at petal, where you will be able to, you know, eventually once we are once we are there, integrate those wagering And I look forward to seeing, you know, the growth of Misty Island. I think it's going to be an incredible thing to behold and looking forward to chapter Charles more on these betting mechanisms.

Charl3s 01:01:01 Yeah. Cool. I'll I'll just add on. Really appreciate that. Thank you. And, yeah, I think with this one, basically, there there's so much appeal or kind of wagering based games. Part of it is that there's really only two ways to monetize an on chain in an on chain way, and it's either you're selling more inventory like, more NFTs or tokens or whatever that is, and and and really no one wants to do that indefinitely, because it's just sort of a runaway inflation problem as you dilute and dilute. And then the the other, the other business model is really the only other business model I've seen in crypto is just taxing throughput of some kind.

Charl3s 01:01:35 That's what Binance does, Uniswap, OpenC, you know, that's the really, it's just either you're issuing inventory or you're taxing throughput and wagering kind of can potentially offer you to do both, but it it very clearly is a case where you could tax throughput, which gets really appealing. And, yeah, I think from, like, a gain perspective, the thing we're trying to nail down. And if people have thoughts or if there's anyone out there who wants to build one of these things, let us know. But where I'd love to take Nifty would be that basically We see people building their own kind of financialized games that have some NFT inventory that gates your ability to play it on your island or to host it. And then you know, they're launching this cool game through our marketplace.

Charl3s 01:02:15 The game has some sort of wagering financial throughput mechanism that gets taxed and shared between the people who host the games on their island, the devs for the game, and nifty island, that'd be really fun. And I think there's a whole bunch of different genres that haven't been tried yet. That could be really fun. Like, there's obviously wet skilled, like, kind of dooling and wagering. That's great. But the thing I find really fun too, just to get a little bit more, you know, kind of speculative about it is, you know, imagine, like, a war between 2 or 3 or 4 NFT communities like the ladies versus 8.

Charl3s 01:02:47 And you replicate the Trump Biden token model that we saw during that election where it's like, you know, if milady's win, milady token expires at $1 and 8 token expires 0. If apes win and milady's lose, milady token goes to 0, AP token goes to 1, and you could have a really fun thing where these communities war against each other, and you have a prediction market where people can kind of play the meta game around it. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, All very complicated to do in practice, like, just to actually make it fun and work, but there's just so much stuff like that that I get excited about. And yeah, I think it it clearly has to be where the secret sauce for this, you know, industry is.

Charl3s 01:03:25 It's it's it's gotta be something to do with money. It's gotta be financialized on some level. That's that that's, kind of the whole reason the space exists. So, yeah. Doesn't mean it can't be genuinely fun too, but but I think that enhances the fund.

Legendary 01:03:40 Yeah. It not only enhances the fund, but it also adds skin, skin in the game quite, quite literally. And I think it builds on top of what we see in web 3, which is a bunch of very, very passionate communities, whether that's specific games or whether that's specific PFP communities. And just by, how you are integrating the PFP and other communities in Nifty Island that is the perfect setup to have a bit of competition and have some some challenges between those subgroups in web 3.

Legendary 01:04:17 And, of course, if there is financial incentive of this a bit of betting, tied to that that will help to keep interest high because then Anyone wants to can have, a stake and and skin in this in this game. And you also mentioned that, you know, if if someone is interested to build that or if if that could build be built with the community that they could essentially reach out to you.

Legendary 01:04:44 And at this point, I would also love to hear, from you lost local because I know that, you know, you mentioned that we got you as a gaming studios on the one hand, working on multiple games, but I also know that there are community created games in the Avagogy ecosystem and would kinda like how, you know, that came to be. Is that an initiative that you fostered? Is that something that started to exist organically? What is, going on with the community created games in in your ecosystem?

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:05:13 Absolutely. So this is a great this is a great topic and something I'm really excited to talk about. From the very beginning, Avagache as a project for many people, the game has been building the game. So our DAO is one of the most active in the space. We are the 2nd most of DAO on Snapshot next to Abe. So we have a voracious community who is actively voting on SIG props and initiatives constantly for the development and direction of Avagashi and all of the games being built on the platform.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:05:47 So as we approach the launch of got gotcha gaming console, pixelcraft Studios, the company that I work for, that created Avagashi, has been working on some of the titles mentioned gotcha Guardians, Liquies Escape, Spirit Force Arena. In parallel, we've got awesome community members that have brought ideas to the Dow, proof of concepts for various schemes, and then have gone through the process of getting funded by the Dow and then have been developing games alongside Pixelcraft as independent game developers.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:06:22 And then we at Pixelcraft will help launch and get those games live inside of the Gotcha gaming console. And the goal here is to really foster community that is not only playing these games, but responsible for the direction of the entire ecosystem and also responsible for individual titles. Inside of the ecosystem. Additionally, we are extremely eager to bring in outside communities and partners to build many game and full game experiences inside of the Avagache ecosystem for Gachi console.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:06:57 We think Avagaches make a wonderful addition to anything. So it's always better with Agachi. So we're very interested in speaking to communities that are looking for a place to launch a gaming experience. Perhaps they have a 2 to 3 year time horizon on their main gaming experience, and they're looking for a place to deploy something to keep their community busy. In the meantime, our ecosystem is a perfect place to do that. So our community has taken advantage of that 1st and foremost, knowing that was coming down the pipe. They've been working behind the scenes individually on coming up with games, and some of those games are already up for playtest. We've got dropped.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:07:37 We've got Gautje Crawler. We've got, so many so many titles coming out. I believe there's 10 titles, coming out with the launch of the console and half of those titles are community based. So, yeah, if there's any questions about that process or about, you know, any of that, I'm more than happy to answer.

Legendary 01:08:05 Gotcha. Yeah. And I think that's that's a pretty, pretty impressive lineup I also would like to, you know, get you, John, a bit back into into the conversation.

Legendary 01:08:15 Obviously, you're a bit earlier in in the WIP 3 journey, not obviously not in the overall experience in the gaming space, but I would quite like to hear from you, you know, what your thoughts are on this conversation that we've been having on, on wagering, on on having, a skin or a stake in the game and on that ability to add this let's say, financialized layer on top of the game that is not necessarily played to airdrop, but is a bit, like, standing on the side of the game is not even DeFi is really that ability to have a bit of an extra stake in the game, bit of an ability to to gamble or to wage on something is is that something that you think can be, sustainable and can help drive genuine interest, or is it something that you think need where where you think that there needs to be a clear line that it doesn't turn into, like, a gambler's paradise or into a a casino at the end of a day?

Jon Hook 01:09:21 Yeah. I mean, great question. There's a there's a lot to, unpacking that. So, yeah, I think I mean, who who doesn't love gambling? Right? It's just like a massive dopamine hit, and it's, you know, it's it's just like one of the most decent things about web street, right? We're all you know, who doesn't love a bit of speculation, but at a game mechanic level, it is really exciting, right? And but again, they're not quite the same games.

Jon Hook 01:09:43 If you look at skill based wagering games, then again, you're you're coming to that game with the mentality that you're gonna wager you're sort of accepting, but you're not necessarily gambling per se, but you're accepting the element of, yeah, wagering in a in a tournament, you know, to try and get as to high level tournaments or higher winnings.

Jon Hook 01:10:03 And then there's, you know, where I where I look at web 3 gaming that's sort of getting some traction is you know, people like Infini Gods, for example, when you look at, you know, what web 2 are going mad for in, say, like, coin master, it's not gambling per se, and the same in monopoly go by the way, but if you look in those games at the meta around raiding, right? That's a really interesting, like, additional game loop that fits perfectly in the game, but but effectively what it is is gambling, right?

Jon Hook 01:10:35 So you you have this extra strategic decision and, to basically decide if you want to go and effectively raid someone else's, you know, bank or or or base. But there's a risk reward there because you you could go and raid and you'd be successful, you could go and raid and lose everything, or whilst you're out raiding, someone could raise you know, your base that you've been been building up. So I think when you think about that application in web 3, I mean, that kind of mechanic for me is just yeah, it's great for gamers, but I think it's great for web 3 gamers that love a bit of speculation because you've got a decision to make there.

Jon Hook 01:11:11 Do you you know, the risk reward, do you try and go for that, you know, bigger, you know, speculative reward by starting to rate other players, or do you just protect what you have. And then when you start thinking about token design and token syncs, I would imagine something like that potentially if done correctly could be a really in token burn mechanism. If you can encourage, you know, more and more players into that route that they are doing this raiding mechanic, and again, you, you know, you can set the controls somewhat, then I'd imagine that that could also be fun.

Jon Hook 01:11:45 But but yeah, I think there's many great games in Web 3 if you wanna you know, if you just wanna go go gamble, whether it's like the humble coin flip games or, you know, some of the bigger, like, web tree casinos or horse racing games around, I'm really excited for like what, you know, what they're doing and where they're going. But again, it comes back to what we've spoken about before. It just depends on your audience I'm with Karma, right? Some people just have an aversion to skill based games because, yeah, they just don't have that appetite for risk or again, it's a certain type of player.

Jon Hook 01:12:16 So it just comes back to building what makes sense for, you know, for your players, but you know, a 100% agree with the sentiment that, you know, gambling and web 3 on paper is is like a match made in heaven.

Legendary 01:12:31 Absolutely. My inner degener keeps, smiling. And I also think that you you have to find the right balance, and I think this is probably one of the trickiest things when you think about, you know, game theory that is attached to all those, well, not if you're, like, in the proper casino setting, but all those skill based gambling games. You have a certain element of game theory, and I think that nailing the complexity of that is really, really challenging. Because on the one hand, you don't want for it to be, super easy where it's just very blatant and straightforward.

Legendary 01:13:09 To figure out the best strategy and to play according to that strategy, but you also don't want to overwhelm your players with, an enormous amount of complexity so that they simply, you know, lose the fun and interest in figuring out how to approach a game. And as you said, it all really, really depends, on your individual audience. And with that being said, we've been going for a bit more than 1 hour. We have an amazing start into, our first gaming spaces with ZT X this year. Life listeners are definitely at an all time high with 930 people listening in life.

Legendary 01:13:49 That is an insane, insane number. And I want to be respectful to everyone's time, both everyone who's with us on stage as well as everyone in the audience. So what I wanna do is because we started a bit off on, you know, speculations, forecasts for 2024.

Legendary 01:14:08 So I kinda wanted round it up with something a bit more solid And that is the question, to all of our speakers, what is something that you know, our audience, the players, Aaron, who's listening in, can expect from your project, from your game in 2024, would love to start with you, Charles.

Charl3s 01:14:33 Sure thing. So I'll be repetitive here, but on So not tomorrow, day of the week is a Tuesday. So not tomorrow, but next Wednesday. So January 17th, the Nifty Island will go fully live. Into full open beta. That means an open web 3 game worlds where everyone can have their own island, build it up, host their own custom games on it, compete for crazy on chain prizes, with, alongside a 120 of the best communities in web 3, that means playing your sappy seal, your pudgy penguin, your crypto hunk, your board a, if your cyberkong, etcetera, etcetera. So, that will go live, and there'll be a play to air drop campaign with it. It'll be really fun.

Charl3s 01:15:11 The goal is to, you know, create this game world that serves as a public good for all of crypto, the gaming layer for NFTs, you will be able to earn the token by playing. It's gonna be fun. It's kind of a no brainer to hop in there, but do your thing if you don't want to. That's fine too. I would recommend it. And, beyond the initial launch, I think you're just gonna see us deepening the product. You know, we're gonna launch with a few games you can play on your island. The goal will be to deepen those games, open them up, let third parties create their own games within Nifty, introduce more financial consequence into the way you interact with people on their island and things like wagering, things like what we've been talking about. That's kind of next step.

Charl3s 01:15:51 But, yeah, no, I think you'll see This will be, you know, a true, full fledged launch with really fun incentives, and it's not coming, you know, q 3 2025. It's coming January 17th.

Legendary 01:16:03 So come on in. We'd love to hear that quick follow-up question. If someone who isn't familiar with nifty island wants to join the better, what do they have to do?

Charl3s 01:16:13 The good news is, you just have to you just have to come in there, January 17th, so there's no prerequisite assets you have to own. Bring the NFTs you already have. If you're excited about things that are on chain, there's a good chance you're eligible for rewards. So the the way to find out is to tune in January 17th. Also recommend following the Twitter. And, well, you may wanna turn notifications on for that because there's gonna be a lot of, like, time gated quests with pretty considerable rewards. So, Yeah. I'd recommend turning notifications on for the nifty account, January 17th onward. You're gonna see kind of really crazy challenges. Think Dookie dash, but over and over again, you know, on player created islands, it's gonna be good.

Legendary 01:16:53 Love it. And we have all the official accounts up on stage for your convenience John, the very same question to you, what can people expect from Play Amber in 2024?

Jon Hook 01:17:04 Well, I think I think from us, if you've been following along, you may or may not know that we're doing a mint relatively soon. So, that's absolutely coming. I think what you can expect from us this year is more great games to enjoy. There's gonna be a lot of characters, and IP that you're very familiar with in the web 3 space. Joining MB, in our games. And also MB is gonna be popping up in some really fun web 3 games. And you know, also a new part of our business. We love making games. We love self publishing our own games. But we've also started to co develop fund and publish the party games.

Jon Hook 01:17:43 So the first one that's gonna be out in soft launch at GDC is, is with CallCATs. A really nice match 3 mobile game. So you're gonna also start to see, you know, more more of those types of games with amazing web through brands and PFPs who really want to extend their IP to that web to audience, collabing with a to, you know, come up with those kinds of games. So that's that's what to expect from us.

Legendary 01:18:11 Love to hear that. And the very same question to you, lost local can people expect from Avagotchi in 2024?

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:18:18 The 3 main words, Gachi gaming console. So that's the big, big focus this year. We are extremely excited to go live with that console and a handful of games. So that is, you know, the centerpiece of everything that we're presenting, this year and our focus. But more immediately, we will be partnering with a few different projects leading up to that launch. Next week, there's gonna be a very cool tournament from a project called Nitroleague, which is a car racing game. You'll be able to play racing a very, very cool Avogache themed race car. So keep an eye out for that.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:18:55 And of course, please follow the official Avogache page. We're gonna be all over the place in the upcoming months, demoing our games, a massive presence at Ethereum Denver, massive presence at GDC, a presence at, NFT Paris. And, of course, all of this is going to be leading up to our founders pass.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:19:17 So make sure you're paying attention to the Avagashi official page because we're gonna be giving those opportunities for folks to knock out those 7 achievements, start building up those discounts, and then eventually all leading up to that Dutch auction mint, which will be filled with some really great assets, putting you way ahead of the pack once these games go live. So, cannot cannot stress enough. If you're a gamer and you're passionate about web 3, definitely pay attention to what we're doing.

Aavegotchi 👻 💜 01:19:47 One of the most OG projects in the space and we think people are gonna really, really love what we have, you know, to bring out to the public in the form of this founders pass and Gotcha gaming console. Thanks for having us.

Legendary 01:20:03 Absolutely. Sounds fantastic. And, Karma, now to you for the closing words for our space today?

Karma 01:20:10 Of course. Well, first, let me say that, you know, we're also incredibly excited for this year at ZT X. Our first step is to relaunch our beta. We survive fell fell victim to this success. And generally didn't expect the amount of players we had in the initial 1st week before the Christmas And we are now, like, upgrading the login flow and more and really excited to to get this back on track. Of course, we will continue, you know, expanding on the initial game loop.

Karma 01:20:43 We are going to continue integrating our ZT X Genesis Homes going then to proceed with lending strategies where owners, it's all about catering to different groups of players where whales or larger holders will be able to rent out their assets. And players will be able to, you know, participate in a very, very affordable manner. So, yeah, very excited about all of that. Definitely gonna be syncing with Charles to discuss some more on all those potential wagering, discussions. And, yeah, John, Charles, lost local.

Karma 01:21:20 Honestly, this has been an readable discussion as evidenced by us running over 20 minutes late, all time high in listeners, I'm sure umbilis hype helped a little, but I would like to I would like to think that it's it's all of our contributions that's really, really bring value to the space and to the listener And to everybody who is listening, make sure to follow all the speakers, make sure to follow all the projects, these truly are amazing trailblazers that are going to change how the gaming looks in the next months, and we are going to see lots of them. So I'm truly excited.

Karma 01:21:57 And on a humorous note, lost local, if you're ever bored of web3, I can see an incredible career for you in narrating, just basically anything. Like, gorgeous, deep voice, I honestly want to have you on all the time.

Join us in the excitement of the BETA Launch Party, a pivotal moment in the journey of ZTX.

This transcript takes you behind the scenes of this groundbreaking event, showcasing discussions on the latest trends in gaming, the future of digital economies, and the enthusiastic community embracing this new era.

With insights from key players and a glimpse into the vibrant world of Web3 gaming, this celebration marks more than just a launch;

It's a gateway into the future of interactive digital experiences.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:54 G m g m everyone. Very, very excited for today's space.

Legendary 00:03:30 We're not on it's it's not a Tuesday for those of you who might be doubting that we are hosting it on Thursday this very last week before Christmas and managed has been an insane December of 2023. It's been a very, very last quarter of the year. And I'm I'm quite excited for this phase. I'm also quite happy that we have such an amazing panel of speakers with us today. And I kinda kinda wanna start with a bit of a different question today because we also have a different space today. We're not talking about token design.

Legendary 00:04:03 We're talking about onboarding the masses, we are solely focusing on the ZT Expeda celebrating our launch party Christmas vibes are on. So the question really is, in 2021, everyone was talking about crypto, about NFTs, about JPEGs, to the families, at Christmas was talking about that with the friends as well. In 2022, we kind of avoided that topic. The quest now is what do we do in 2023? Do we mention JPEG? Do we mention Web 3 gaming, or don't we, shift Paji Privilege question goes to you first. Welcome to the stage.

SHIV 00:04:47 Oh, my favorite party is always the ZTX beta launch party. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be surrounded by a bunch of good friends and family. On this amazing day. You guys are not jumping on the beta launch. What are you doing? Get that loaded up. Sorry, legendary. You wanna repeat your questions? I I got a bit hyped there.

Legendary 00:05:05 Absolutely. Absolutely. So, look, in 2021, you might have been talking about JPEG's encrypted to your family at Christmas dinner. In 2022, you might have not done that for reasons. What are you gonna do in 2023? What's the plan? Do we talk about crypto or not at Christmas?

SHIV 00:05:22 Instead, we send them pudgy gifts. That's what we do during, this is what we do in the family group chat. We don't sell them, tokens or anything. We sell them gifts. Send them the Instagram, send them the toys. That's what we're doing this Christmas. That's how we onboard.

Legendary 00:05:38 Love it. Love it. The very, very subtle mass adoption via the Pajitoys. Ashley, welcome to the stage. What about you? What's your Christmas slash crypto JPEG strategy?

Ashley 00:05:49 You know, I think that I've talked to my family a lot about crypto. In fact, I have, NFT ornaments on my tree. So it's kinda in their face. So I'm just gonna keep talking about it until they finally, you know, get their stuff together and actually join me I I convinced my sister already, so that's at least good.

Legendary 00:06:10 Love it. But wait a moment. Did you say NFT ornaments?

Ashley 00:06:13 On your Christmas tree. Oh, okay. So so I got a, like, a pudgy clip, and I use that little clip. It's not really supposed to be used this way, but I used it to hang it on my tree because I thought it would look super cute. And then, spotty Wi Fi is doing this pudgy santa too. And he sent me an actual Pudgy penguin's ornament, like a real one. So I feel pretty privileged right now.

Legendary 00:06:42 Love to hear that. So it seems like we have 3 options. We talk about crypto. We don't talk about crypto, or we go for the pudgy mass onboarding route. Sanjay. Welcome to the stage. What's what's your tactical approach for Christmas?

Sanjay 00:06:57 I don't know. To be honest, like, my approach is probably just gonna be, you know, like, staying home, meeting friends, or, like, my family's a little bit far away, so I'm probably just gonna meet some friends go out for dinner and then just come back home and be back on the computer and the laptop, either making content or either just buying an these or something recently been going crazy. That's my Christmas present for myself.

Legendary 00:07:19 Love it. The market doesn't stop on Christmas Eve. That's the beauty of web 3. Eliza Welcome to the stage. How are you doing? What are your thoughts on JPEG and crypto as a Christmas dinner topic?

Elisa 00:07:31 Hi, guys. Happy to be there. Glad to see all my friends on the panel. Glad to see Ashley here. And yeah, so I I don't know. I I don't think I'll speak about it just because Christmas for me is like, does my entire family, and we're a really big family. So Yeah. I think I I'll just get into too many debates. But my close family, you know, has been, peeled My brother's really into Bitcoin since, like, way earlier than me, and he's younger than me, so it's funny. He's got even my mom's in Bitcoin. So Yeah. I feel like my family is pretty skilled.

Elisa 00:08:08 I've been trying to convince my dad to get into some, blockchain engineering because he's a dev. But yeah, he he works at bank. So, I don't think it's gonna happen. Yeah, no, I I probably won't talk about it. Maybe give some NFTs. I think that's that's like the number one thing. Actually, it's a pretty easy to gift, so I think I'll be doing that.

Legendary 00:08:29 Yep. Very, very fair take. I love that. Same approach for me. Close family. Definitely knows about what's going on. My mom, my mom, Charlotte, my mom, she's six years old, and she has a very, very good about idea about NFT floor prices specifically when it comes to my biggest backs in the holdings. She tracks them like me. Next, welcome welcome to the stage. What about you, my friend? Do you talk about JPEG's NFTs at Christmas, or is there a topping that you draw the skip?

N3XT 00:09:00 Yo. Yo. Thanks for having me. It's actually pretty funny because the Azuki that I bought currently and my pets Zuki that they sold is actually kinda chosen by my mom. So my mom actually likes NFTs and Bitcoin, which is actually pretty weird to say, but, you know, on my father's side, he doesn't really care at all. He only knows, oh, did you buy that Bitcoin? Now it's like 40 k. And I'm like, well, kinda. Yes. No. Like, why do you care now? But, yeah, you know, my, like, some part of my family is into it, so I'm pretty glad. You know, I can talk to mom all the time because when it goes down, I complain a lot, when it goes up, I'm pretty happy.

N3XT 00:09:40 And I buy myself stuff sometimes, and she's just like, where's the money coming from? I'm just like those pictures, mom. So, yeah, that's pretty much it.

Legendary 00:09:50 Shout us with empty moms. We we absolutely love them. Karma, welcome to the stage. What are your thoughts on this? Conclude us on the topic of of JPEG's and Christmas.

Karma 00:10:03 Oh, Jesus. Like, honestly, we could make, like, an tire stand up comedy show about my memories, antics, and crypto. My dad is like a Bitcoiner who believes that everything else is a shit coin. Nevertheless, he does, like, scalp and, like, day trade ship for some reason religiously for 2 years now. And professionally loses money in that day's rating. My mom on the other hand is, like, just an absolute NFT degenerate In fact, 2 years ago, Christmas was ruined because someone outbid her or like some kind of an open sea auction, she was absolutely livid she wouldn't shut up about it on a Christmas table.

Karma 00:10:41 So to whoever, like, actually wishes that their family wasn't crypto to any extent whatsoever, think again. It is hell. It is awful. Your parents will have divorce takes you have ever heard in your life. And you will have to sit there and eat your soup. It is nevertheless very entertaining, I honestly, if if the entire web free journey just know, doesn't work out for me. I'm just going to start recording my family and selling it as a podcast. Like, imagine a group of angry polls arguing about layer ones. Over Christmas dinner.

Legendary 00:11:15 It's fantastic. I don't know. It sounds like something that I would not only watch, but would love to be a part of, would love to be a fly on the wall, and follow that conversation would definitely definitely be very, very, entertaining.

Karma 00:11:33 Well, maybe I'm going to invite you next year legendary. Let's see if we will also bet whether or not you will survive.

Legendary 00:11:40 Love it. See, this was the plan for that awkward, awkward silence to get that invite out of you. And last, but not least, I think that from the official, ZT X account, Rudy is joining us very, very curious to hear your thoughts on the Christmas slash NFT topic?

ZTX 00:12:04 Yeah. GM. Thanks. Thanks, everybody, for for showing up. It's a great crowd we have. I was thinking about this literally earlier today. I was thinking maybe I'll buy some soul. I'm probably, like, $80 too late, but could buy some soul, or maybe, like, sweet moonbirds. I don't know. I think it's kind of interesting. But, yeah, I'll actually be spending Christmas with some people that actually, took a leave of absence from crypto after 2022.

ZTX 00:12:36 So they've been in the space, wrote wrote it up all the way up, wrote it all the way back down, like most of us or all of us And then they just said, fuck this. I'm not gonna be in crypto for a while. So I'll see if we can get a convo going, but it's it's sensitive. I don't I don't wanna, like, you know, mess up the mood.

Legendary 00:12:55 Fair enough. Absolutely. Gotta keep the peace, at the Christmas table. With with the Christmas plans out of the way, let's dive into, today's show. And, actually, we before we get into the Ztx beta, I think we have to look back at 2023 a bit from from the perspective of CTX because loads and loads of things had to happen this year. For the beta being able to be live now. And, Karma, I would kinda love to hear from from your side what were some of the highlights at Ztx, in in 2023 for you personally?

Karma 00:13:36 Oh, yeah. Jesus. It has been a long time coming. And, you know, releasing the beta this week has been a watershed moment for the entire team. I've personally been a part of ZTX for over a year and a half now, and Let me tell you. It has been, you know, just one sprint after the next. It is absolutely astonishing to me. What an incredible amount of work, power, workforce, talent, and breadth of expertise.

Karma 00:14:05 It's act it's actually required to build even simplest of games, and then even much more to build something, you know, as ambitious as ZTX that incorporates not just a single player game loop, but also in the future, so many social aspects. So it has been genuinely, a very varied and learning journey every single step of the way. And I think the major milestones that we have seen, you know, as a community, are, you know, distilled down from a much, much longer work period of our team behind the scenes?

Karma 00:14:40 So this year, this past year, certainly with kicked off with, you know, the mint of our ZT X Genesis Homes. And, you know, we meant that at the genuine bottom of the NST market. It was, you know, like, a very serendipitous situation where through, you know, very, very careful allocation to early community members for presales, like, we were able to really build one of the most faithful and passionate communities I have ever seen, and we were able to do that at the genuine bottom.

Karma 00:15:16 So many people have, you know, just stayed with us across the past months, and it has been a wonderful journey. Same, you know, if content creators, with friends here that join our spaces, we've generally built connections that stem from way back into the bear market, and we really grown together, you know, many of the faces I'm seeing in the audience right now, guys, like, I've seen you at, like, you know, like, 5, 6, 7,000 followers posting, you know, things with which go to, like, maybe 10 likes.

Karma 00:15:47 And just grind it out for months, you know, with the belief that we will eventually arrive at the wonderful, you know, vibrant space that we are in now where, you know, we are seeing so many games launch. Everybody is looking at web free gaming. So sorry, I'm I'm getting, like, a bit sappy here, you know, pre Christmas. I'm, like, preparing myself for facing my Polish family. By, by by, you know, like, by pet folks from my wet free family. But, that certainly, you know, the launch of the NFTs the air drop that we've done, you know, air dropping 4% of the entire token supply to early supporters.

Karma 00:16:25 I think ZTX back in October was generally a liquidity event that very, very few people anticipated in wet free gaming. And we've only, you know, delivered on our promises since. And following the play tests, you know, with all your feedback, refining behind the scenes and merging into this beta right now, these are certainly the steps that were to me, you know, clear, clear path towards ZTX in 2024 as a larger game. But I would love to hear from Rudy as well, you know, like looking into the past, what was maybe 1 or 2 major milestones that's to you to find this year.

ZTX 00:17:06 Oh, man. It's like way to put me on the spot. I was literally grabbing some ice I had to run back. I mean, it's been an eventful year for us, obviously. I think of, you know, obviously a couple of play tests and if team end, took listing official beta launch and a lot of many events during different conferences. I think, though, just very personally for me, the mint kind of kick started a lot of things. I mean, to me, that was almost more important than the token listing.

ZTX 00:17:47 In a way, arguably. But, yeah, I think that's when we first had some some kind of a tangible asset that, we could hand to our community. And then, obviously, it was very fun to see that floor price go up. And then the token listing was also obviously a very important event, but not because we listed more because it was tied to the air drop. And, there's been a lot of really cool, air drops and projects that came out this year.

ZTX 00:18:21 And, I think for us, a, something that really felt good was how well, how well we rewarded our OG backers and our, you know, our loyal loyal community members and friends, I I don't know. Maybe I'm maybe I'm, like, completely have a distorted vision of things, but I hadn't seen anybody who, you know, was a part of that air drop. You know, voice negative sentiments.

ZTX 00:18:56 I think almost a 100% of the people that were a part of our community that participated in the air drop were extremely happy. With how it went, how it was done. And so I think that that was started by, obviously, then it's the NFTment, right, because that was a big component of the air drop. But so to start there, get to the TGE rewards our early community members, I think that was kind of a nice, you know, a to z kind of a moment. And of course, now we've started a new new cycle, a new chapter with the beta offering in.

ZTX 00:19:28 So maybe, you know, if if you ask me this 1 year from now, we'll have, like, more cool stories, but for me, it was the mint and then the the air drop.

Legendary 00:19:39 Absolutely. Love love to hear that. And I also have a follow-up question based on what what the both of you said, but before I get to that, Akarma, I loved what you said about having watched some of or most of the content creators while with us either on stage or in the audience grow over over this year. It is more than a cliche to build your brand, to build your following, to build your niche in the bear market. It is the reality even who managed to build and and work through the bear has accomplished so, so many things I mean, just shouting out Eliza real quick, you just hit 20 k followers.

Legendary 00:20:14 Shift obviously has been killing it both with little pudges, but also joining CDIFY as their lead advisor for for the spaces growth side of things. And so as everyone else on stage, And this is, impressive to see in that very, very short time frame also given the fact that we've only been in this more bullish sentiment of the market for a bit more than 8 weeks for a bit more than 2 months. With that being said, however, going to the follow-up question, Karma, you specifically mentioned that, you know, you minted at the bottom. You minted before all of that bullish sentiment was back in the market.

Legendary 00:20:51 In hindsight, would you would you change that if you, you know, could forecast the future to mint in a more bullish sentiment, are you actually happy to have built that community in in more of the bear market and then attract the people who are, more invested who, you know, are not here for the hype because they were here before the hype. If you, if you could pick what would you pick? And I'm also very curious to hear the thoughts from from some of our panelists and speakers on that question.

Karma 00:21:24 But, Karma, first one. What a good question. I mean, I feel like I see this every single time you ask me something, but, genuinely, what a good question. I have I'm I'm, like, very, very split on this because on one hand, in terms of the quality of the community we have built, I think a lot of this is due to the timing a lot of it is due to the just by virtue of minting at the bottom, there was very little interest for Webster Gaming back then and who was interested was in it for a long run.

Karma 00:21:58 People realized that, hey, this is going to be, you know, a journey we are going to see, you know, like, refined and and great games in 2024, 2025. I want to position myself now with brands I believe in. So I think that was a huge part of it, and I think that actually, you know, just worked very, very positively for asset ZTX. On the flip side, however, you know, just looking at the froth in the market right now, I think that if you're a brand with, you know, very, very good backing, very good positioning, you can achieve even higher valuations.

Karma 00:22:34 So even just, you know, like, very selfishly, like, thinking about our holders and and the the future of the collection, I think that technically, we would be sitting at a higher valuation if we had minted right now. We've seen some really incredible spikes in the market. But I personally concentrate on longevity, and I think this has really set us up for success allowed us to, you know, build for months now. Already with the collection, with the token out. And that's that's what I really value. I think, you know, just being in it for the long run, So that's sort of like my my 2¢ on this.

Legendary 00:23:11 I definitely agree with the sustainability thought. In the long term orientation, but would be also very curious, captain to hear from you. You've been obviously, over over the last year. And would love to hear your thoughts on timing the market if you could to basically be there in the most hype moment versus like building a more resilient community in the bear. I mean, I think you kinda nailed it there.

CaptainCK.eth 🏴‍☠️ 00:23:36 You know, I think it's building a more resilient community. You know, I I talk about ZTX often and in this light being a project that's really been super, super successful coming out of the bear, you know. And with that, I think, I mean, to answer the initial question, I think it was totally the right decision. I think it's made such a more powerful and resilient community. Like, if you actually look at just the economic of the collection, like the actual volume to, to floor price movement ratio, the listings, all of it.

CaptainCK.eth 🏴‍☠️ 00:24:14 Like, all of it points to the fact that ZTX holders don't wanna sell, you know, and I think a huge portion of that is because people didn't really buy ZTX to make money. You know, whenever you look at the people and and the way that the mint initially went. Like, it was it was a slow mint. You know, it it made it to public. People had the opportunity to mint as many as they wanted. You know, and because of that, only the people who are buying purely for conviction made it into the community and it it built such I mean, in my eyes, a stronger community than you're gonna be able to see in this new meta because now you have all of these flippers who are who are purposely you know, targeting all of the gaming minutes to get in, as early as possible.

CaptainCK.eth 🏴‍☠️ 00:24:52 And so you just don't get the same holder base in in a bull cycle as you do in a bear. That's such a such a good thought.

Legendary 00:25:00 Yeah. It is you are absolutely right, and I also remember the mint having participated myself in both the whitelisted as well as in the public phase of it that you had ample of time to maintain. There was no rush and there was no gas war going on. Compare that to to the over world mint. It was a completely different setting in the market and those people who minted and did hold back then they didn't have the expectation of that very, very generous adult.

Legendary 00:25:27 They didn't have the expectation of nailing another hyped gaming mint that hopefully does a 10, a 15, a 20 x and comes with a token, which is the playbook that we're seeing today, it was a completely different motivation and reasoning for minting back then. And if you were to mint today, love, love, love that point Karma, any any additional thoughts on that from your end?

Karma 00:25:54 Honestly, just incredibly excited to keep delivering value. I mean, I know it's a cliche, but, you know, the one off air drop that we've done was just the beginning. And, I'm very, very excited for everybody who, you know, keeps putting their faith in ZT X and, and, you know, keeps supporting us for this journey.

Legendary 00:26:13 Talking about the journey, we talked we talked a lot about the past. We talked about what what happened in in 2023. I think it time to get into the title of the space. It is a launch party after all. The ZT X beta is live. What is what is going on with the beta? What can people do? What can people expect from it? How can they access it? Give us all the details? On the beta police karma. Of course.

Karma 00:26:40 I'm gonna jump in, and I'm sure Rudy will want to also chime in with his, like, highlight reels. So, for everybody listening, what you can do starting immediately, starting actually, like, you know, over 24 hours ago, you can go to ztx dot io, and you will immediately see a big frontal button to download ZTX. So ZTX is not played in a browser, you need to download a launcher, which we build ourselves, and that's actually an insane advantage for you as a player.

Karma 00:27:13 Because from the moment you have downloaded and installed the launcher, we are able to push different updates and inform you of different patches as they come out. Without you having to download the entire thing all over again or, you know, waiting for, like, certain maintenance times. So that's what I would do first thing. With any decent, you know, internet collection connection, you can actually start playing ZT X within 10 to 15 minutes if you start downloading now. Including the install time.

Karma 00:27:42 So once you do enter ZT X, if you've used our avatar builder in the past, you will be able to, you know, potentially potentially have a look and import that avatar, see your avatar, which you've created in the past, if you connect with the same wallet, if not, the first step to your journey will be to create your digital self. And that avatar builder alone guys is incredibly fun. We regularly monitor on train activity, and we see some people, some wallets reconnect every week. Or every day, even now that the beta is live and changed different aspects of their appearance.

Karma 00:28:21 Some people spend genuine hours just selecting eyebrows, it is fascinating to see. So I'm sure you will have lots of fun. I know many people here on stage have, you know, like, created their avatars in the past and had lots of fun. And then once your digital self is ready, it's really time to jump into your plot of land. Well, plot lands in ZT X are free and accessible to all. So imagine ZT X as a little bit as a mixture in the Sims and animal crossing in its current stage.

Karma 00:28:53 You have a piece of land where you can plant different resources, Each of these resources has a different growth time or in harvesting time. And once you harvest them, you can also craft new NFTs and new items out of these resources. Now why is that exciting? Well, that's exciting because you suddenly have the ability create NFTs out of in game resources, decorate your home. You can also craft wearables, some of which will be limited edition in the future, and address your avatar.

Karma 00:29:26 So what you're looking at is a very, very foundational level of single single player gameplay which we will then continuously expand and update on. And one last thing I really want to highlight because it's very important to make it clear is it's very often that you see better of games that are out there. And, you know, maybe they last a week or 2, but then they are taken down by the team and then the waiting time begins for the actual official release. With CTX, it's going to be a bit different. That's why we released that launcher.

Karma 00:30:00 If you remember me speaking about it, it's because, you know, from now on, ZTX is on the main net. And from now on, we refine and improve it together. So while we may have to take it down for maintenance times, etcetera, of course, it's still very early in development, The general idea is to continuously improve it, the version of the game that's out there right now. So that's the beta. Think of it as just the first moment ZTX is there live on main net and allows you to jump in and participate continuously and build your own digital world. So it's a persistent beta.

Legendary 00:30:39 It's a continuous experience. It's not a 2 week event. That's that's amazing to hear. Rudy, quick follow-up question for you on that, a, the eyebrow that the or the times the time spent, the hours spent on designing eyebrows in the avatar builder, should that be a KPI track to to track when it comes to user retention and be, on a mysterious note, what's what is your highlight of this beta launch?

ZTX 00:31:10 Eyebrows was not in the list of KPIs. We have nostrils. We have mustaches, but not eyebrows at the moment. But we could, collect further feedback from the community and decide what other facial parts to include. And, but but, you know, actually, you know, not limiting this eyebrows, but, slightly going off on tangent, but, look, it's been, like, what, less than 48 hours, since we launched the beta, it's very early for us. Right?

ZTX 00:31:45 And we've, you know, we have, like, We have a really nice team. Like, very professional seasoned people from different parts of different industries coming together to build this. We have, like, hardcore gamers in our dev team and our design team. We have, you know, we have this dude who's, like, one of the first five or ten people at Epic, and he was one of the very, very first design, game designers on type of games.

ZTX 00:32:16 And, you know, people like that to, like, the dude that was, like, the, that spearheaded all of the, creative branding and, you know, design for roadblocks all the way up until their IPO and then after their IPO. And so you know, we have, we haven't be because we have, like, different, a roster of different people that have done a lot of things. When we were planning for this beta and when we were designing the application, we had, many, many spreadsheets of different scenario that could happen. Hey, what if, what if this happens? What if that happens?

ZTX 00:32:56 And then so we try to come up with different game plans for different scenarios. But, honestly, like, as you guys know, that the plan goes out the window. Everybody's got a plan, like, my Tyson until you get punched. Right? So you don't know what's really gonna happen, and we're just shooting in the dark. So although we had different plans, We just wanted to get this out there and then start looking at data and then use your feedback. And, you know, It's been 2 days.

ZTX 00:33:28 But when this becomes 2 weeks, 2 months, we have increasingly more data to work off of, and I think that's going to impact how we tweak, different types of rewards or different types of gameplay, UI design. And, obviously, a lot of things. It's it's an evolving beast.

ZTX 00:33:47 Now, I bring this up because I think that it is quite possible not committing to anything, but it's very possible that we will look at user data and then, try to work with try to come up with a new set of KPIs that better reflect, you know, what our users are enjoying And, how can we, show appreciation for more loyal users and, you know, fans of, of the entire game loop and the experience. Now that may look like, oh, okay.

ZTX 00:34:24 Like, we realized that placable object, you know, like furniture types of objects or wearable objects, certain types of things we want to amplify a bit more. So maybe, like, if you possess if you've crafted, a certain class of assets that kind of shows that your hardcore ZTX, you know, so maybe we try to tweak things here and there so that, those people could be recognized better. But, you know, all of this, we we don't know. We'll look at continue to look at the data daily, weekly, and then, you know, alter our strategy, accordingly.

ZTX 00:35:01 So that was off on the tangent, but that's kinda related to eyebrow stuff. And, what was your other question?

Legendary 00:35:11 The other question was what is, you know, the the highlight of the beta? But before we get into that, actually, because you talked so much about data, and you also just said it, it's only been a bit more than 2 days that the beta is live. Is there any any metric, any any key data point that has been, standing out for you so far, or is it way too early to ask that question?

ZTX 00:35:36 It is early, but also it's kind of it's related to so there's on train metrics that we're looking at and And then there's off chain metrics that, because we're built on Unity, we need to use the Unity, analytics and sometimes the Unity analytics are not as it's not necessarily customized for ZTX. Right? It's a it's a broader general offering for anybody that builds on Unity. So, you know, we we we then we gotta we have to, like, deep dive into things ourselves.

ZTX 00:36:08 So for those, technical reasons, I think it's a little bit early, but, I will say, yeah, there's been, there's been some hardcore, dark matter farming people out there. So we will, we will see how that how that goes. But, yeah, it's, at least it's it's not, obviously, we we expect people to to be passionate about collecting rewards and and emissions. So that's fine. But, yeah, we we noticed that, yeah, there were there's been some people, like, added. So, which is, which is great.

ZTX 00:36:48 And going back to your question, Well, highlight for me, honestly, well, it it it's nice it's nice to see the logs, the the records of people doing this, doing that because then it's, like, Okay. It's live, and people are using it. And the, like, now humans are interacting with with something that we've been working on. So just just the fact that there is now an accumulating set or sets of data was, great for me.

ZTX 00:37:23 I I don't have a particular feature or part of the, initial version that, you know, I I love more than others. I, you know, I I think I think everything is, I mean, I think it's it could all all be upgraded and made better, and we will make it better. But Yeah. There's no, like, one feature or design aspect that, I have preference over, but, It was a bit of an odd feeling for me personally because, when it when it went live, I I wasn't, like, Woo.

ZTX 00:38:01 We're like, okay. Great. It's it's it's out. Okay. Now now the real thing begins. So it was, it was there was a dual sense of relief, but also now more I wouldn't call it anxiety, but, anticipation at what's what what we need to do. There's more responsibility. There's a lot of stuff we wanna ship. So So, yeah, I I it was kind of like a a weirdly calm moment to just ship it. But, yeah.

ZTX 00:38:35 So, me, I'm just I'm actually more, curious about what what we can deliver when and just always that future road map. I think I'm just kind of more thinking about that.

Legendary 00:38:49 I love the very very honest and very insightful take and you sharing how you felt, you know, once the the beta went live and that there is more to it than just being excited, happy beta is life. We've done that, but that there's also that feeling okay now the real work starts now. There's so much to do so much more data to track, to build on. So definitely appreciate you sharing that. Sanjay also know that you have, question is you with your hand up, so I'm gonna throw it straight to you.

Sanjay 00:39:20 Sorry to just jump in and like, quickly ask, can anybody, like, from the team or, you know, like, just answer what dApp dark matter is and also wanted to mention that, shout out to the team and Karma for giving away a ZT X home this Christmas. So if you are if you wanna take part in it, make sure to jump in the beta. Take a screenshot and post it. And also Carmel, maybe you can tell us more about the dark men. Oh, yeah.

Karma 00:39:46 This is this is actually perfect segue to what Rudy was saying, you know, this bringing the beta out there, putting it on train, putting it on main net is just the first step. Now the true word begins. And the work begins along, I mean, alongside other things with the dark matter. So currently, the dark matter, is one of the resources that you can, you know, like, farm in Ztx And the special ability of dark matter is it allows you to craft capsules and craft capsules on the other hand can be opened in order to reveal the ZTX tokens inside.

Karma 00:40:25 So, you know, it's like a part of the Circular game economy where CTX token has utility in game because you can utilize it to skip skip particular, you know, farming times, You can also utilize it to, you know, craft certain rare objects. Sometimes, you know, that crafting recipe will ask for a small ZTxp. And that's again, just the start. On the flip side, in order to allow players without having to, you know, invest their own capital to allow them to, you know, also have some funds in ZTX, they can craft these capsules and open them for ZT X.

Karma 00:41:01 The the idea being that, you know, as we onboard millions of users, which is our main goal of ZT X and everything, you know, everything Citrac leads towards that goal, we want to ensure that anybody can jump in directly with no costs and can just start playing right away. And from that moment onwards, it's your choice. Is how deeply you immerse yourself in that in game economy, but it's not a requirement of you to be, you know, barred away from a game because you first need to buy, I don't know, an asset or a token for, like, a few hundred bucks. So that that's dark matter.

Karma 00:41:40 It's one of the resources which allows you to craft capsules with ZTX. In it. And, what I did want to remark is that, you know, one of the first first updates I'm inching into the future legendary. We filed your prompt. I'm sorry. One of the first, states that we are hoping to introduce within the season 1 of ZT X, and we can talk about season later, but is actually introduction of the ZTX Genesis Homes in game.

Karma 00:42:12 And once they are fully integrated as the Genesis homeowner, you will be able to farm you know, limited resources, which are, among other things, like Genesis dark matter. So then you can craft capsules, which are, you know, higher in DTX content, because you have that very, very valuable Genesys asset of ours. Alright. Yeah. That was that was, a bit of a mouthful, as you, as you can see, Rudy has a tendency for tangents. I have a tendency for tangents. That's the CTX business team. United in monologue.

Karma 00:42:46 And yeah, I definitely also wanted to, tell everybody to check the pinned tweets We have an incredible giveaway. Again, one Genesis home, with, with, you know, our partners. It's a Christmas giveaway. And then for everybody, we also have an amazing UGC competition. So if you jump into the ztx.ao, try out the beta and, you know, post your feedback. It can be a video form. It can be the thread or just tweet form. We are going to, you know, have a look at all the submissions, and many lucky people will win not just ZT X tokens, but also ZT X Genes homes.

Karma 00:43:22 I think it would be really lovely of you all to check it out and, of course, give it a like, to spread the word. Absolutely.

Legendary 00:43:31 Love to hear that. And since you had this little glimpse into the future of the, Genesis home, of the Genesis Homes in in ZT X, in the ZT X beta, is is distant also the part when Genesis homeowners and holders can expect to visit their homes in CTX, or will this then come at a later stage? Yeah.

ZTX 00:43:58 So, you know, we're we're heading into Christmas and New Year's So we won't be as, as heads down coding as as usual for a bit. And then once the new year hits, the year they're having, once that hits, I think, you you can expect, an update build. I don't want to promise on the timing, but it's not very far. It's not far away.

ZTX 00:44:34 You know, like, as most of you, may know at this point, we tend to, like, under promise and then try to over deliver and, like, We're human, so I, you know, may maybe things can get delayed, but so far, we just like to, talk about roadmaps and timelines, when we have a pretty high level of confidence that we won't disappoint. But anyway, it's not far away. Yeah, expect another update, in the weeks to come.

ZTX 00:45:08 And when that update hits, for now, our plan of record is to enable, you know, Genesis homeowners to access their homes and then enjoy the unique benefits, that come with owning a Genesis home or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. So, yeah, the that will be live in the next, release.

Legendary 00:45:35 Love love to hear that Alpha on, on this space. Maybe also a follow-up question on that since we are looking at into the future, looking at future releases, what are some of the other things that are on your roadmap for the next here for 2024 when it comes to ZTX.

ZTX 00:45:57 Okay. Yeah. So We are not sure of the order in which these things will happen. Because at the depends on a few things. I think it depends on, things like the composition of our team, like HR resource issues, what are the users, reacting more, for, and then general industry conditions, how is crypto infrastructure changing, how fast is it changing in relation to what?

ZTX 00:46:34 Like, wallets, ramps, securities, mobile, what's happening. So I think there's a few external variables and internal variables, but there's a there's a couple of things that we, want to to deliver. And, one of those is the the idea of, mini gaming experiences, casual gaming experiences, you know, you could call it portal games, you could call it whatever.

ZTX 00:47:06 But you look at, our legacy business, web 2 Zepetto, which, I also managed for quite a long time. And then, I've always been a lot more bullish on crypto and NFTs, was in the crypto space since early 2017. But, you know, I have spent a lot more of my time, just working on ZTX. However, I was managing webtouza pedal for a few years.

ZTX 00:47:40 And at at the the the industry or the category of business that Zapeto is in, you know, obviously, it includes the likes of, Minecraft and Roblox and such. And for those types of platforms, it's a platform. It's a platform. It's not a single title game. We're not talking about, a Fortnite is a single, you know, it's a single title. With, with mods and maps, I mean, it's, it's kinda different. It's more diversified, but still, it's a single title.

ZTX 00:48:15 It's, It's a league of legends as a single title, but, platform is not a single title. It's meant to include different titles. And that's, also what we plan for, ZT X. So being able to offer the 1st of those, mini gaming experiences that have nothing to do with the core game loop with the, currently, our animal crossing type of, hey, collect resources, craft, harvest, in the craft. Like that, that's that. That's how you make money. That's how you express yourself.

ZTX 00:48:49 That's how you decorate your real estate, you know, and that's how you participate in the economy. But that aside, we wanna have gaming experiences. And of course, I think those gaming experiences will also have a degree of economics tied into them. Where you could be participating in an economy there as well with, obviously, our our tokens and such. That's one. The other thing is, further development of the downtown of the the 4 districts that we have for for Genesis homes.

ZTX 00:49:28 And, being able to offer a virtual real estate that is not just your home, but, a more of a collective, like, a communal area type of, real estate, the districts, basically. And each of them will have a different feel and different experiences so, I guess districts slash downtown.

ZTX 00:49:54 And then the other one is, it's, going mobile, and, you know, there's, if if if you're gonna target the masses, then of course, I, you know, we you need to be thinking about mobile. And Zappetto is a mobile native application.

ZTX 00:50:19 And, rightfully so considering the demographics, but, we purposely didn't start out with, a mobile offering because, we felt like there were more tools in the Shack available for a non mobile crypto product, initially. And then also, Yeah. We wanted to, this is, this is very subjective, but we wanted to, try to deliver a more high fidelity, visual offering first. And in order to do that, we we wanted, higher specifications in the device.

ZTX 00:51:00 I think general rule of thumb is this is very subjective, but I think, it's easier to go from top to bottom, like, start with something high quality and then, like, kind of dilu offer more casual experiences, more lightweight experiences. I think it's easier to go that way rather than start out very low fidelity, and then move up into higher fidelity. So, I I think that's a couple of the reasons why we started out with PC, but, obviously, you know, we want to get into mobile.

ZTX 00:51:37 So having some kind of, light version, that is for mobile is also something on our minds. Again, I don't know which order this this will happen. We kinda have an idea about it, but it involves other variables. So those are just, a couple of the things that we would like to update, in the, in the next year for CTX. Very, very much.

Legendary 00:52:02 Appreciate the breakdown and also appreciate how much detail, you went when it comes to the reasons for why you went PC first and then mobile, and I would love hear from you guys because I know you also have very, very strong thoughts, when it comes to mobile gaming, but specifically also on that approach to not launch with mobile first to have the desktop version first, build on that, and then go for the lighter mobile version. How how do you feel about this strategy?

Elisa 00:52:33 Well, I just wanna say, like, I'm obviously not a death, so and Deb's always, always have reasons to the reasons sorry, to the reason. Yeah, I guess to the is why they build, why how they build. So doing PC bus, I'm sure had, like, you know, technical reasoning behind it. But actually a lot of games are doing this you know, PC first or like MacBook first and then moving to mobile.

Elisa 00:52:58 I guess it's because once you have, you know, the, like, in commerce, like, the more complicated game version built out, it's easier to then, like, I guess, dumb it down or make it, like, fit fit for, mobile. So Shotbound is another game that's doing this. Parallel is another game that's doing this. And, like, so many other games, like even, like, the traditional gaming industry that, adapt mobile later on. So yeah, I find this really British and, I, yeah, I didn't know you guys were going to mobile. So this is the first time I hear of it and, makes me very, very excited.

Elisa 00:53:35 Because it does open the doors to so many more people, like, even in my community, like, so many people are always asking, okay, is this on mobile? Like, can I participate? And often these are actually the most active people in my community that are like the most interested in in everything that's being built. So Yeah. I'm always it genuinely makes me happy, like, from my heart, to know that these people will be able to participate, and yeah, very, very good move from CTS. I love it. Thank you very much.

Legendary 00:54:05 And also talking about mobile applications, I think we have to take a quick sidestep in talking about, stickily, stickily being a mobile app that allows you to create memes, stickers, use them in WhatsApp and I message in Telegram. And while this might sound completely unrelated to what we've been talking about, there is actually, a strong, strong connection to ZTX. I think it's a piece of news that not many people have seen or read so far but the ZKX team has been incubating a web 3 version of Stickley for the near future.

Legendary 00:54:42 And Carma, I would love to hear more details about that piece of news. Yeah.

Karma 00:54:48 So I'm going to provide a little bit of a background to that, and then I'm going to switch split pass on to Rudy because quite frankly, the amount of alpha that I cannot be trusted not to drop, is, you know, like, off the charts So when you have when you have your, you know, like, cofounder and founder of of CTX ads, at the same spaces, you would rather not say the wrong thing. So, stickily in itself is an app that allows you to create occurs for social media applications. And what does this have to do with a metaverse, a web free metaverse like ZTX?

Karma 00:55:26 Well, what I really want everybody to I want everybody to dream a bit bigger. Right now, this beta is the very, very fast step in our journey. Towards something that we see as much more of a social media platform, social platform in general than just a singular gain as metaverse is are sometimes seen. And in order for this to actually come into fruition, in order for this to be socially engaging, we do have to look outside of just the 3 d immersive world and see into what actually makes people, you know, engage with certain peace and engage socially in the first place.

Karma 00:56:05 And different stickers and ex exposing, I would say, like, you know, quote unquote, normie audiences, to your IP via just very relatable characters, very relatable content used in everyday conversations. Is actually an incredible marketing strategy and incredible exposure strategy. We've seen it with pudgy penguins. We've seen it with chimpers. We've seen so many of those, you know, exciting NFT projects step outside of just the bubble of crypto twitter and pushing their IP into, you know, be it, Instagram, be it read it and more.

Karma 00:56:40 So integrating stick early into sort of like the repertoire of what DTX is working on is just going to allow us to expand to other platforms and start this, you know, very much social media, so like groundwork. Now I would love for Rudy to maybe determine whether or not we can share something more.

Legendary 00:57:02 Yeah.

ZTX 00:57:02 I mean, I think so there was recently some articles written about this. If you Google, like, ZTX and stickily, I think you should be able to find some things. But, yeah, it's, so we started Zapeto was, like, August, August of 2018. And then, like, 6 months later, It was more than 6 months later, but, like, it was like the, like, q 2 of 2019, I think.

ZTX 00:57:33 We, just have, like, we get bored, and then we just kind of try, you know, designing things on sprints and then see if they work or not. And Yeah. Some sometimes it doesn't work, and it's fine. We scrap it. Sometimes it works, and it sticks. And then we, you know, put more time into it. And then, stickierly, it was one of those things that we just kind of Well, it's not a complicated product. You know, what what can we do something with stickers? It was basically the idea. And then so we tried it out. We created a version, and then it it kinda stuck.

ZTX 00:58:06 And, yeah, it's, in in the 4 years that it's been live, Securly has quickly grown to become, I I'm pretty sure it's the number one app in its category, like, number 1 UGC sticker app. It's a it's a very specific category, to be honest, but yeah, so, you know, there's been, like, almost 10,000,000,000 stickers created, 30,000,000 monthly active users. That's actually more than Zepetto. Like 50% more than a battle, but, obviously, the product is it's very different. Cipetto is a very complicated product.

ZTX 00:58:44 Anyway, what what it does is, like, you know, you you could, like, find us on the App Store or Google Play and, it very it allows you to very quickly create your own stickers and then, export them, publish them into, WhatsApp, imessage, Telegram, and we thought that, well, this is a world of memes that we're living in. I mean, crypto in in particular, crypto is a mess. It's let's be honest, like, meme driven industry, and that's fine. Money itself is a meme. Everything's a meme, honestly.

ZTX 00:59:23 Everything is just what the buyer says it is worth, and you just, you know, pump the meme, and that's part of life. Anyway, so we thought, okay. Like, literally, this is a mean platform that we have. And, how do we expand this into web 3 because we also wanna bring, just like we're doing with Zapeto, we wanna bring, like, more web 2 people into web 3. We thought this would be a nice thing to to work with. So but, obviously, we've been very busy with CTX. You know, everything that happened this year. So it kinda got a little bit back burner, but then we were like, oh, okay.

ZTX 01:00:03 Like, if you know, ZTX is out. Let's, we've been kind of working on the stickier ideas for a while, so let's kind of get on this. So yeah, it's it's we're going to offer some, you know, web 3 version of, a sticker creating platform. And, I think we want to kind of gather our thoughts before, we announce more, details but, it is there. You know, we've, we we've already lined up some, investors and partners, for this new project.

ZTX 01:00:42 And what we wanted to do for this was tie it back, to the ZTX ecosystem, and the Ztex community. You know, obviously, ZTX is a platform that continuously produces and generates assets, generates 3 d assets, avatars, wearables, placeables, things that can be easily, memified or created into stickers. And, also, there's no reason for us to not work with other IP, other collections like a pudgy or a sappy seals or whatever it is.

ZTX 01:01:21 And so, yeah, we we think there's 1, there's a it's a there's a great crossover from ZTX assets, living, you know, in a three d environment to a 2 d sticker in format. I think there's something very interesting there. And then for these, sticker creators and communities to be able to generate additional revenue based off of the platform, the the sticker platform. I think that's very interesting. So yeah, we'll we'll we'll be, you know, providing more updates on this token project.

ZTX 01:01:56 But, when we started this, we wanted to also tie this back into the ZTX holders and the Genesis homeowners, and and, you know, figure out some way to, make sure that people can, oh, I don't know if I should say this. Well, figure out some way for the ZTX community to participate in, the upcoming Securly project. So, we have some ideas about how to do this. It's not it's not rocket science.

ZTX 01:02:37 We we just, wanna be a little bit more selective when we when we, go ahead with a with a new token launch, but But, yeah, the the the the the heart of it is that, yeah, you know, there's a second thing. And then, it's like our our little brother project. And, we will connect it, with the ZT X community, and there will be a way for ZT X holders and and, you know, Genesis homeowners to, get in on the on the upside.

Legendary 01:03:10 Couple couple of thoughts on that. A, I loved how you said pump the meme. It's part of life. I think it would make for a great, great standalone clip. Jokes aside, you you said it yourself before. Right? You're not building a single title. You're building a platform. You're building an ecosystem, and I like how you approach that certainly very, very complex task can also think about something like stickily. And I think Shiv, you can you can certainly speak to that from your perspective.

Legendary 01:03:42 If you look at the Pudgy's community and they're extremely strong presence on on other social media on Instagram, specifically, apart from x, as well as their presence in the real world with the Pajit Toy line, how much do you think, that this brand presence, contributed to the success the Pudgy ecosystem. Sorry.

ZTX 01:04:11 Is that for me? No.

Legendary 01:04:12 It was for Shift, but I think Oh, yeah. Zoom you might might might might not be with us. Norris, in that case, I actually wanted to also ask you very, very similar question, Ashley, since you are a very, very prominent creator, also focusing a lot on video content, have been there for definitely more than one cycle, have seen a lot and have seen a lot of brands who started branching out, apart from, or, yeah, started branching out and not only focusing on X, And how important do you think that this strategy is for, the success and growth for web 3 native brands?

Ashley 01:04:53 You know, I I think that, you know, there's been a trend, like, with Instagram reels, like the cute meta, I think, and that's been really good for a lot of companies because, the best way to attract people. Like, the the problem that that we've seen in many cycles, like, I've been through, gosh, I I've been here since early 2021. So I've seen a lot of ebbs and flows.

Ashley 01:05:20 You know, Instagram used to be a place where, you know, on on you know, NFT on the NFT side specifically where there was a lot of scams and there was a lot of negativity when it came to crypto and NFTs And now we're seeing people are openly, you know, adapting in in adopting in a tease, and and even, you know, celebrities. I've seen celebrity share Pudgy penguins, you know, little animations in in the cute meta has people like you've reached you know, kids go on Instagram all the time. You reach children with, like, really nice, like, pleasant content.

Ashley 01:05:58 Nothing inappropriate for them, and that's, like, the way to attract people because when people see their kids are interested, they wanna look, and then they get interested in themselves. And not only that, you know, creating this relatable cute content. A lot of people is just, you know, when they get home from their day, you know, from work, especially, you know, in what to they just like to relax and watch, like, funny videos or just cute videos and kind of take their mind off things. And, you know, even for me, like, when I'm, you know, feeling like, a certain kind of way, I'll go on there and, you know, it's cute to see those kind of things.

Ashley 01:06:33 And and I think that's just like the positive change that we needed because, like, Twitter, in my opinion, or ex, you know, whatever it's called these days. I feel like it's it's all about people, you know, making memes and having fun, you know, messing around. I I feel like it's more adult themed. And then Instagram is like reaching people that are more like, interested in, like, cute meta and, like, watching actual content. So I think the closer that we get to people, like, steering their content towards, like, mainstream. I really think, like, the cute meta is, like, the best way.

Ashley 01:07:10 Like, absolutely the best way And then, with the gaming meta now, I feel like I feel like now that a lot of Twitch streamers are really popular. Like, that's the new meta as well. I think we'll see a lot of gaming streamers from the web 3 side really bridge that gap to web 2 through gaming content. I think that's, like, the first step into getting more, like, I don't know, mainstream adoption and, like, fun adoption. Like, I just imagine, like, you know, a content creator, like, this probably would never happen, but it would be cool if it happened.

Ashley 01:07:44 Like Kai, you know, Kai is, like, one of the biggest streamers in the world had Nicki Minaj on his, you know, on his platform, just imagine if, you know, he he found one of the games and he featured it on a stream. Like, there would be, you know, millions of people. It'd like, oh my gosh. This is amazing. And it wouldn't even have to be, like, n f t, like, in your face, it it would just be games and something that everybody can enjoy. So, you know, making it more palatable for people instead of so niche is is the main way that we can, you know, do what we need to do here. Yeah.

Legendary 01:08:20 You're raising a a couple of very, very good points. A, doesn't have to be NFT in your face for mass adoption. And b, also, you mentioned, you know, you have the cute meta. You have the gaming meta. And when two trends come together, they have a massive, massive impact. We've seen that a bit also on the ordinal side of things. And when ordinals started to meet the gaming, you have the Bitcoin caps, you have that preset. It was, what, a 150 times oversubscribed because you have two trends that are meeting that are converging, you know, just creating, massive, massive viral momentum.

Legendary 01:08:56 Quick, quick side step from that, I wanna take a minute to scroll through, the comments and give a couple of shout outs, first of all, to, to Dave who has been posting that they're downloading the Zapeto app, as we're speaking, then, Maui is on a mission to craft some ZTX capsules And personally, my favorite comment from, and I hope I'm not butchering the name too much. Jamie Jun, asking you, Karma, do you take reservations for the Christmas dinner at your house, De Jong Mom, and Bitcoin dad sound super fun to be around. So I think you should make this a bigger thing.

Legendary 01:09:35 There's definitely demand for that. Yeah. Definitely.

Karma 01:09:39 I mean, I take 3 reservations. You can premen a white list for, the, Christmas dinner at Karma House 2024, 2 Eve to be seated next to my dad, 3 Eve to be seated next to my mom, you know, depending on your just risk tolerance, I really like to diversify, is going to be really fun. That, the detail everybody should know though is that my parents are no longer together for 10 years now. So that that makes the entire scenario even funnier.

Legendary 01:10:16 I I love I love how you instantly went for, making a white list for that, how you instantly figured out price structure, 23 ETH, and I think I think I'm I'm gonna leave it at that, at least for the Christmas side of things, And maybe How do you know the o n? And maybe go a bit back to what Ashley has been saying before to, to the Meadows meeting and to something to a point that Rudy has meant, made before when we talked about the facial features in in the avatar builder. It's actually a question that I wanted to ask a bit before what you got.

Legendary 01:10:54 So engaged with our conversation. They didn't have the chance to do that, which is something, like, from my perspective, if someone who's been a gamer for basically most of his life, I've seen Avata builders evolving and evolving and evolving and I've seen many Twitch stream us taking the time to try to build avatars that perfectly, you know, resemble, that perfectly resembled them. And but on the other hand, we are also in a space where, you know, we are all building our digital identities.

Legendary 01:11:31 We are all, not all, but a lot of us are using our cartoon pictures, whether it's Nizuki Lamental, whether it's, youths, axi infinity, a little pudgy, and all, all the other NFTs that we have, in the audience. And I'm kinda kinda interested, you know, to hear this has been more of an open question to hear your thoughts, how those 2 things basically can coexist because I, myself, played around with the Avatar Builder in in the Playtech and really enjoyed it.

Legendary 01:12:03 And I myself am also, you know, building my digital identity, around the the Azuki elemental around the slots. So the question is, how do those 2 exist? How important do you think that, the digital avatars and, like, the customization of avatars, are for, for gamers specifically, would really love to hear from, from whomever has thoughts on that. So just put your hands up. In the meantime, I would like to hear your thoughts, Karma first. Yeah.

Karma 01:12:36 This is a brilliant, question, especially because, you know, I used to, for example, done at the God's PST. Now, I still love it. I still love it, but now I've I've switched, you know, very firmly to my CTX PFPH just feel like it it's actually funny, you know, legendary you and I met. And like the first thing you said, like, wow, you actually look like your avatar. Yeah, I do. And I think that's just, you know, something that's very difficult to actually achieve with a be some people preferred that way. And it's just more creative. But for me, that's just creating an avatar that actually looks like me that I can identify with has been a huge, huge thing.

Karma 01:13:15 And I think as we as we move forward with all those, you know, immersive 3 d presences and different experiences. You know, we see right now we have so many, so many incredible games being built. Just, you know, a few days ago, we've seen this incredible trailer from Misty Island, where so many IPs, so many NFT collections are already pre integrated, from cool cuts to sappy seals and more. And it's going to be a lot of fun for those, owners, for those holders to play with that product Very likely, many of the players that will try out Nifty Island because of that could not have done so beforehand.

Karma 01:13:54 They will be incentivized beef because they already have an emotional, connection with their PFP. But on the flip side, you know, for asset ZT X, Of course, we want to expand the possibilities of, you know, what IP you can integrate and what options you can choose for your avatar. But at the same time, I think the number one consideration in everything we do is scalability. And so for everybody that, you know, might not be that into building games or might not have the behind the scenes, knowledge.

Karma 01:14:28 Every single animation that we integrate into Ztx the, you know, sitting on the furniture, crafting items, etcetera, is very tightly connected to how the how your character is rigged. So as soon as the proportions of that character, as soon as even the height of the character is changed, for example, if it were to be a sappy seal or like acute paji penguin, it actually instantly breaks the entire framework of the majority of the animations. And makes it significantly more difficult to scale the, the interactions within the game to the level that we will need to onboard ours a pet audience.

Karma 01:15:05 So this is not me saying that one approach is better than the other. But as we've discussed today, you know, we are trying to build a very, very solid foundation first before we start adding cherries and cream on top. So right now, we're in the foundation stage it would be difficult for us to start diversifying this character options too early, breaking the framework of the actual game loop that we are trying to create. So in the future, 100% expect activations of different IPs and integrations, we are going to be moving towards UGC see and releasing different tools even for creators themselves to, you know, build 3 d objects for ZTX.

Karma 01:15:44 But for now, We are going to stick to our avatars and make sure that the game just works as smoothly as possible first.

Legendary 01:15:53 Love the very detailed answer and also love the your your thoughts on other APs, in the future of CTX. I would really like to hear, Sanjay, your thoughts on on the digital identity as a creator who is not using a digital avatar who's not using a PFP, but who is using, a picture of of themselves. Yeah.

Sanjay 01:16:21 Thank you for asking this question. I think, I think I I envy I envy people who have a digital character and, you know, especially if they're doing, a good job with their branding spelled, especially like legendary, you know, shave, next and, rated and couple other people, you know, a bunch of people. Right? A lot of people out there. So, you know, I envy them, and they're doing a really good, great job.

Sanjay 01:16:43 And I think it's it's a lot, it's a lot appealing as well because I think because, you know, like, it's easier to create content around, verged tool persona versus, let's say, post yourself, then you would have to, like, you know, do a lot of videos and you all have to take a lot of pictures and you all have to be, like, basically, like, an influencer on Instagram. So I think the difference is huge there. And, implementing that in a game or, like, in a metaverse, like, ZTX or, like, an ecosystem like ZTX, I think there is, I think there's ticket. There's a couple of ways you can do it. Right? Like, for example, Misty Island, a great game is coming out right now, and there's a lot of IPs involved in the game.

Sanjay 01:17:23 People can play the game using their NFTs, or sorry, use using the NFT characters, or there's, couple of, you know, KOLs and influencers who are also going to get their IP in game. So, like, you're basically, you know, you are going to be in game as yourself. So I think that could be something cool what ZTS can do or, you know, other ecosystems like ZTS can also do But, again, this is like, you know, a custom work thing. It's not like a act access accessible to everybody. Not everybody can do that. So it does it doesn't, you know, like, create some sort of, like, confusion that, oh, who should be allowed to have an IP and who shouldn't and whatnot.

Sanjay 01:18:03 But, but I I I would love to see, you know, like, some of our custom characters in ZTX but at the same time, the the the way you can edit the avatars in Zt X is amazing already. Like, you know, my last avatar in ZT X was it looked a lot like me. It looked very much like me, and it only took me, like, you know, if minutes to edit. I think if I was editing it a little bit more, it'll be looking more like me.

Sanjay 01:18:29 So I I think they are already doing a great job, but it does it is a little bit more challenging for people like legendary who are not docs, and they have a PFP of a sloth or, you know, and, and Azuki to kind of match those with ZT X where ZT X is going for a very realistic human look versus, you know, like a slot. So I think I think there's there there could be a way to bridge this gap. But again, you know, this is just the beta. Like, I mean, there's there's obviously a lot coming, in the future. So I I wouldn't, I wouldn't count it out yet.

Legendary 01:19:04 Very, very thoughtful take, and very much agree. There is On the one hand, if you have, a very powerful avatar builder, you can allow for so much customization and not have the drawback that, as you mentioned, with nifty island, where also we'll have Mysloth as a playable character, which clearly puts a lot of work on the team to make that possible. As for the one part, in the meantime, I haven't been docked for the last play test of CTX, but I did docked in the meantime, and I do do stream my daily, web 3 news spaces on YouTube have been doing that for a bit more than a month. So At least I don't have to worry about that part anymore.

Legendary 01:19:43 I can use the Avata builder to, craft a realistic legendary and to not try to somehow make it look like a sloth So that pressure has been taken off me. With that being said, we've been running for way more than 1 hour. I think we could discuss, this topic and could could stay on the digital identity for more hours, but I think it's been it's been a very fantastic discussion. I wanna be respectful of everyone's time, both, everyone in the audience, as well as our panelists.

Legendary 01:20:15 So I think, especially before Christmas, where everyone's still super, super busy, that's a good moment to get to the end of the show, and Karma, I'm gonna throw it to you to wrap up the space for us. Yeah. Well, thank you.

Karma 01:20:28 Thank you. Thank you. Well, first things first. You heard it here first. The first mini game in CTX is going to be a simulator. And legendary is going to be the major partner in that. Thank you very much. Jokes aside and switching to the end of the spaces, I generally wanted to say huge, huge thank you to every single one in the ZT X community that has, you know, believed in us over the past months from the very hard, you know, waiting for the bear market to now us picking ourselves up again a little bit as an industry you know, receiving all this influx of attention and building alongside really amazing games that are going to market right now.

Karma 01:21:08 It's going to be a very exciting year for us all. For ZTX specifically, you know, kicking it off in right now in December having that on main net for the first time and refining from now on is going to be a beautiful journey. I urge everybody to remember that it is still a beta, even though it's a magnet. So we are doing our absolute best, but there will be no quirks to be figured out along the way. And I just genuinely look forward to all the integrations, partnerships, digital fashion, and more that ZTX will see us develop in 2024.

Karma 01:21:45 I'm also going to give Rudy, you know, an opportunity to close this off and wanted to, again, extend also wishes of very, very happy crisp if any of you celebrate to everybody. And please check out the pinned tweets and participate in the UGC competition. Now, Rudy, please put a cherry on top of this wonderful cake and take us towards the end. Oh, that's a high bar.

ZTX 01:22:16 No, just, I I I don't have much you know, new alpha or or anything like that. I wanna thank legendary and, you know, Sanjay, Ashley, Lisa, chief, chief, next, all the all the, you know, panelists and our friends that we've been fortunate to to work with. And I think we'll continue to, try out new things and, you know, hopefully work together on on new things.

ZTX 01:22:45 Now that you know, we have a second token project, but that beyond that, you know, like, lots of new product, level features and upgrades for next year planned. And, yeah, I just, it's been a good year. It's been a rough year, but it's been a good year. I mean, hey, 44 Cape Bitcoin, ETF coming, and then everything going on with everything else good year. Next next year should be a lot more epic.

ZTX 01:23:20 And, yeah, we we will keep cranking out new, new features and new updates and builds. And, all I want say is I am 99.9. Maybe I should be a maybe I should just be a 100 or 200 percent confident that 1 year from now, let's do this again.

ZTX 01:23:44 1 year from now, we will all be majorly happy, and we will have not just DTX, but, I mean, all of us working on whatever we're working on, we will have hit new highs and a new tier of metrics for whatever we're doing. So, it's gonna be a great year to look forward to Yeah. Sure. There'll be pullbacks and dips and all that, but, overall, we should be looking at a really nice end of year in in a year's time. So personally very looking forward to the year ahead. I think all of us as DTX are also thinking the same.

ZTX 01:24:22 We're heads down building and we'll we'll continue to, you know, honor and reward our our community and OGs, next year as we've done this year.

Dive into the complex world of token meta in Web3 gaming with this enlightening conversation.

Our discussion unravels how tokenomics play a pivotal role in shaping game design, player engagement, and the overall economy of Web3 games.

This transcript offers a deep dive into the strategies behind token utilization, examining how they impact the gaming experience and drive innovation in this emerging field. Join us for a comprehensive exploration of token meta, where gaming meets the cutting-edge of digital economics.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:22 G m g m, everyone. Very, very excited for today's show. Very excited about the stacked panel that we have and that we are revisiting the token meta. We did have tokens as a topic on the show. I think it was a bit more than a month ago.

Legendary 00:03:04 And the trend obviously has continued. It is completely dominating the timeline gaming projects who launched a token who will launch a token, who are rumored to launch a token, or who don't talk about a token at all, but I feel like the attention is heavily, heavily focused.

Legendary 00:03:23 On the token meta, and it's definitely something we want to get into today's show to kinda understand a bit more, what And the role of tokens in web 3 gaming is just beyond user acquisition to talk a bit more also about, user retention and to have a maybe a bit of a critical look if if that can be sustainable. We've seen token Meters in previous cycles before. But it's definitely something that we haven't seen in a gaming meta since we just didn't have the chance to get at the point in web 3.

Legendary 00:03:58 Where games are live, tokens are live, and just see how those ecosystems, can work out in the long time. And with that being said, I want to get straight into it. And Carmen and I were chatting a bit off stage, about bed time routines in crypto and and web 3 specifically. And I thought that would be a fun question to kick the things off. Brian, wanna start with you. Welcome to the stage. Do you have a crypto bedtime routine? Is it a specific token price project, something you do before you go to sleep to bed that is web 3 or crypto related.

brydisanto.eth 00:04:40 A legendary g m g m. This is a this is a funny one because I think my bedtime routine is probably not sleeping because you get sucked into your phone and it, you know, before you know it, it's 4 AM and you don't know where your time has gone. You know, my my latest bedtime routine and obsession funny enough has been friend pet that, you know, the little Tomagotchi leaderboard game on base. It's it's nothing in terms of, like, a big investment, but it is super accessible as a web app. And it has the degener tendencies of being able to attack people steal their points and earn a little bit of a ETH and token passively.

brydisanto.eth 00:05:17 So that's probably my my biggest one. The other one is I have this big long watch list of specifically web 3 gaming tokens. My friends at, at Shrapnel on that list, prime, all of the chains, I am X, Avacs, just to see, you know, what is the pulse of the market? How are things moving as different time zones wake up and go to sleep. And then of course, you know, my my long lost love wool from Wolf Game, the one that I've been holding since The original bull market in 'twenty one is is near and dear to my heart. We'll see what happens there, but when I look at often.

Legendary 00:05:55 Love love to hear that quite an extensive routine. Still looking at my wool bags, still checking them as well. And I love that you brought up Friend Pet. I remember the first time I explored friend pet, and I tried to explain that immense pride that I felt to my girlfriend that was fast enough to bond someone in the top 20 and actually take a considerable amount of points, and she gave me, a very confused look. Let's let's put it like that. Going to you, sneaky, I think it you sneaky from from joining from the Shrapnel account. Welcome to the stage. What about you? How does your web 3 bedtime routine look like?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:06:33 It is sneaky Chase behind the Strathnole account. Thank you so much, legendary, for the invite up here. So my web 3 bedtime routine it's, I do some dual, tabbing or multi tabbing going on. So in one tab, I usually have a shrapnel Twitter DMs going. I get a little spicier at night. So not as not as composed in the DMs then, but it's, a fun time for sure. And then, you know, where I am, I live on the West Coast on Basin, LA.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:07:06 So, actually, at my night time is when, gas fees are the cheapest, in terms of, Main Net ETH. So if I have any, like, Main Net ETH transactions. I usually do them at night. And then, like, Brian DeSantis said, you know, definitely you know, who's who's a true gaming DJ, and if you don't, you know, have some farmers, some land, and some wool bags that you, consistently check-in on and wonder if the shepherd will ever, bring them back to prominence. But, also something that I've lately been into. One of our partners, play Alchemy has a really fun, discord game.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:07:46 So it's it's really easy to play on your phone or just casually at night. So I've been having a lot of fun, getting into play Alchemy more.

Legendary 00:07:56 Love love to hear that and love the alpha on the west Coast to do your transactional maintenance before you go to bed. For me, that's the European morning, and that's exactly what I do. If I get up early, my 7 AM, that is the time to manage your main net liquidity pools because otherwise, it gets hella, hella expensive. Cocoa coming coming to you. Welcome to the stage Thank you for joining us from AOF verse. What is your bedtime routine in web 3 looking like?

Koko 00:08:28 GMGM, really glad to be here. So mine is a little bit contrary. For me, web 3 is like extremely stimulating anytime I start going down a rabbit hole, it's it's like the the opposite of helping me go to sleep So I actually have a very strict rule of, trying to not look at my phone. I mean, I know it seems impossible, right? But what I do, what I've found is really how if I get an idea and I, oh, I wanna look at, this token or I wanna start scrolling on Twitter or I wanna look into something.

Koko 00:09:00 I, I put it on a to do list for the morning, and, typically I'm not a morning person, but if I just think of my to do list when I wake up, it just like, again, it's like a zing waking me up out of bed. So avoid web 3 if if I actually want to try and sleep.

Legendary 00:09:16 I love it. That is actually the first sensible answer that we we had on on bedtime routines so far, definitely not in the camp. I mean, the camp would dream about looking, on on things web 3 related in the morning, but I'm also phoning my hand and can't go to sleep because the bedtime routine and the bags and tokens that we all need to look at get longer and longer and longer. Yellow. Welcome to the stage. Is your bedtime routine on the healthy side of things, or are you also a late night agent?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:09:47 Hello. Hello, everyone. So good to see everyone. It is actually on the very bad side because I I'm based in Asia. So before my, night, it goes usually like this because it's the most active space sessions like, during my nighttime. So I do a couple back slips first. And then I went to my, computer and, like, do some Fortnite while listening to Karma or, other people's spaces. And then I do a few front slips. And then, I would you know, be ready for bed, right? Like, go to toilet or shop.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:10:24 And then I thought I'll be sleeping, but end up, I was like, oh my god. Another spaces. Oh, and then another one. And then probably Ashley would Ashley Buchanan would, like, probably post another video, and then I'll be, like, laughing my ass off. And then I I'll I'll be like, oh my god. Another spaces. And then, like, it it continues. Like, and then I will fall asleep into, like, listening to spaces.

Legendary 00:10:46 Thank you. Yeah. Love love love to hear that. Also love the shout out to Ashley, in the audience. Definitely enjoy her video content very much as well. Sanjay, welcome to the stage. What about your bedtime routine?

Sanjay 00:11:02 Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Bedtime routine, to be honest, I I have a lot of, like, let's say, a lot of my bags, like, staked or in, like, farming pools or or all all of these, like, liquidity pools and all of that stuff. Or, you know, so, like, before I go to sleep, I, like, just check on my bags, make sure they're still there, make sure, you know, the numbers are going up. And, it's okay if the price doesn't go up, as long as the token number is going up, I know eventually it'll be worth it. If not, didn't like the short term. And, I also nowadays, I also like to go check my open sea as well. So I every night for the past 2 months, I've been going to bed happy.

Sanjay 00:11:39 I do wanna I can't say the same for the past 6 months, but for the past 2 months, it's been great.

Legendary 00:11:45 I love to hear that. I think at peak bull, bedtime's bedtime routines will be, like, 4 to 5 hours long. Abby. Welcome to the stage. What about you? Where where are you on your web 3 bedtime routine?

Abhi 00:11:59 GM Jim, thank you for inviting me to to the stage. Unfortunately, I see Sanjay on the stage, but it's his birthday. So happy birthday, Sanjay. Only day I will now flood you, but, you know, happy birthday to you. So in terms of my bedtime routine, there there's 2 components. So one is I I I barely sleep maybe 4 to 6 hours per day, but every time before I go to sleep, I I pray that ZTX Beta comes out the next day because I I don't pay attention to Twitter anymore. I don't really know what happens. So that's what I do before I go to sleep. Up that the beta goes up.

Abhi 00:12:34 The second thing I do is I look at my notepad and and tell and see that Yellow Panther told me to keep my eye on the CTX token and the chart looks good ever since you said that, is the second thing. And then the third thing is, you know, to to to pretend that I I like Sanjay, as well is is the third thing. So that's the 3 components for me. When I do get the chance, to sleep, which is not very often, but appreciate being here on this panel. And I guess that also means that I can one one beta.

Legendary 00:13:06 Love it. Very, very diverse, a bedtime routine. Karma, Michael Host, we hear we heard so many different bedtime routines. I think we heard one healthy answer by Coco. And we heard, like, 7 degenerate answers, including myself. What about you? Will you increase the healthy ratio with your bedtime routine?

Karma 00:13:29 Yeah. Oh, boy. Like, wet free game in token meta spaces at, like, 4 pm on a Tuesday. It's not where you come to hear about healthy bedtime routines. Let's be honest. Well, this is, this is, by the way, a great, great icebreaker question. I love it. If you witnessed my bedtime routine, you would, I don't know, like, it would feel better about yourself for sure. I'm currently traveling and just renting this RBND, which is parton. It is Spartan. There is a bed. There is a big table where I work, and that's about it. I leave like SBS wished we believed he lived.

Karma 00:14:09 So so Abhi to circle back to your question, we are very, very hard working on releasing the data. In fact, the PR, the press release is going live very soon. I think within the next twenty 4 hours, you are going to be very, very happy seeing something on the timeline. But yeah, you know, like we said, q4 2023, and we are going to hold ourselves to that promise. I'm looking forward to that.

Karma 00:14:37 And also looking forward to today's topic, of course, I feel like you know, token meta is a very big broad umbrella topic, but all of us over just the past 3 months, have seen how incredibly important it has become, not just for gaming projects, but also for their NST releases, where, you know, majorly, many of the past releases, many of the past mints have almost become a vehicle for early token drops, you know, both for, you know, maybe regulatory reasons because it's easier to distribute, but also because it's just such a great way to start liquidity, kick start the community.

Karma 00:15:17 And, you know, I'm just very, very excited to see how the projects today on final approach this and how they think about taking it forward in a, you know, sustainable manner?

Legendary 00:15:28 Absolutely. Love love love to hear that. And let's get straight straight into it. Let's get into the token meta. Coco, I would quite like to start with, asking you a question. I think we said in the intro, so many projects are teasing a token, launching a token, implying an air drop And we obviously, in web 3, we are in an attention, game. Is it is it even possible to garner enough attention on the timeline as the web 3 game.

Legendary 00:16:02 If in in absence of a token, they obviously, AOF is launching their own token as well, but kinda wanna flip that question and, ask you if you think that if a new game wants to get traction is has they think they have a sustainable model, so they would be able to pull up a token, would there even be a chance to get enough attention without, a token launch tied to their NFTment?

Koko 00:16:32 Oh, that that's a that's a very tough question. I mean, it really depends on, I would say, who you're targeting. I mean, if you if you're trying to build a game and you have built a a a solid community and you're building, like, out your IP, then your game can get attraction and mentioned just from being, you know, a solid game. Like I've said before, it's, we've getting a lot of players, new players downloading the game from TikTok, and that's a really strong source of of, player base for us that I suspect has very little to do with our NFT itself, and our token.

Koko 00:17:10 So not to say that you can't, get traction, but I guess you, if you're looking for, the, web 3 community and what's activate that community. I think, you know, there are tried and trusted tested routes that people use, whether it's a NFT, whether it's a, airdrop, whether it's a token. I think with NFTs in specifically, I'm gonna say this knowing that I haven't specifically done this in AOF first, but it's, giving, your community a really solid specific, list of reasons why they would want to hold it, right?

Koko 00:17:47 And without an airdrop, there needs to be like clarity around all the other things. Otherwise, why would someone spend money on doing it. I mean, again, free mints, people would just probably speculate, but it's a it's a very tricky, a plan. And I'd say, like, you'd have to plan it out if you weren't going to do it an air prop. Give people a reason why they would wanna hold it for system?

Legendary 00:18:10 Yeah. I think I think that's a very good answer, and I, have actually a follow-up question on that. We spoke on another spaces on basically onboarding web 2 gamers. You guys obviously have more than 4,000,000 followers on on the TikTok accounts. And you spoke to the, basically, importance of the web 3 community helping in onboarding the web 2 players, helping in educating them, and not putting all that pressure from the very get go in terms of learning what wallets or learning what exchanges are and learning. Okay. There is an in game token. There was an air drop.

Legendary 00:18:48 Other games might do air drops as well. Where do you think in in in the journey when it comes to onboarding web 2 players, is the right time or the right step to also then explain the actual web 3 economy in that very specific game to the traditional web 2 player base who's just still learning about the web 3 tech once they are onboarded and play the game and just just learn about what's going on in the background more and more over time.

Koko 00:19:24 Yeah. I think we're very used to in web 3. A lot of people coming in and expecting things like a tokenomics document, a white paper. And I I think if we really peel it back to the web 2 player, they just wanna play a game that they're not necessarily going to even enter 8, the economic mechanics of, your token economy. So, for them to be introduced to Web 3, I really think it first needs to be, seamless experience, play the game, get involved and have have a, an emotional and personal connection to the game, whether that's, through the is that you love the gameplay that you love.

Koko 00:20:03 And then I think one major step in, building an affinity to a game beyond IP is, who you're playing it with? Do you have a connection to, the people that you're playing it? Do you see regulars? Do you make friends? Right? And that social connection is where we think is the gateway to web 34 web too. Generally speaking, if you are going to be introduced to a new concept that maybe you've heard, but don't really understand. It's usually your friends who might introduce you to little bits and pieces of it, and that's what we're banking on.

Koko 00:20:37 So, our Web 3 introduction will come at the point of actually, we're we're not we we don't have a very specific pathway to Web 3, like, so let out. We just are, planning for it to be happening in the social spaces that happen inside of the game. So our clan system will allow what what we believe are historically siloed communities, web 3 players, and web 2 players. And once they kind of make friends.

Koko 00:21:08 And once our other game, for example, is out and as we build out our ecosystem, there'll be more and more opportunities for the web 2 player to be introduced in a very natural and, authentic organic way. That is specifically a benefit to them.

Legendary 00:21:25 I think that's such a such a beautiful way to do it. And it's, as you said, it's very, very organic. And I think, and would love to check-in with you Sanjay that also from a content creator's perspective, that is something that's very enticing.

Legendary 00:21:39 If you have a couple of games that you enjoy playing, you get yourself into, into a into a well organized skills, into a big guild that then has both, like, 1 more web 3 native players as well as, fresh, quote, unquote fresh web 2 players, and you then can establish yourself as a voice who can help to onboard them, can help to create content, and explain what we, agents, are doing in web 3. I think that this is a a very, very good way to also grow as a content creator. How do you feel about that, Sanjay?

Sanjay 00:22:16 Yeah. I think, you know, I think, that's definitely a great way to go as a content creator, especially in the space right now. I think there's, like, you know, like content creators and projects and games and games, we're all basically helping each other at this, at this moment. So it's like, you know, we when we work with, let's say, ZTX, we are working with ZTX. It's not, it's not like, you know, we're kinda, like, working for ZTX type thing. So, like, you know, we've grown together takes helps us grow, and we help them grow, or, like, we help them, get their name out, and they basically help get our name out as well.

Sanjay 00:22:49 And I think that is very beneficial to, like, you know, creators and just kind of communities as a whole, and it works with guilt as well, a same same thing. Right? And Eventually, you do it long enough, and then you can become that top leader or that person who does have this experience because, you know, like, you go through playing all these games.

Sanjay 00:23:09 You go through, being in the ecosystem for so so long that you get gather this experience, and now you can kinda, like, guide a guild or you can guide all these, like, platforms or projects and, you know, yeah, kinda like be the voice and help them navigate these water and especially when it comes down to, you know, like this topic, the topic of this discussion is tokens and stuff. So, for new gamers or for, you know, let's say, let's just call original gamers. It's it can be very tricky. Like, what is token? Okay. I bought 10. For example, I bought 100 v bucks. Why is it 20 v bucks why is it, you know, 120 V bucks?

Sanjay 00:23:45 So it's very difficult to kinda, like, explain the these type of things to to, you know, like, a normie, you might say. And and, I think we need more people who have been in the space for long enough with enough experience and we've seen the fluctuations and kinda like give them give these new people, you know, like, exactly how these tokens, that can plan and work out, in long term.

Legendary 00:24:10 That's such a beautiful, beautiful answer. Couldn't agree more with that. And, talking about more experience, more fluctuations, and more time in the market, Brian, I wanna I wanna go to you, specifically because Infinigold has been building for a long time has been building in the bear market. I personally met the team. I think it was 2021 at Vecon in Minneapolis, that was shortly before the launch, of the of the first passes. And you had partnered up with communities.

Legendary 00:24:43 You had playable experiences throughout the bear market, and now we are suddenly shifting in a bull market where everyone is, talking about tokens. There's so many free ments coming up. I spoke to a couple other founders who have been building for the last 3 years had domains 3 years ago, and or 2 years ago, and they felt like super pressured because They are struggling to get attention. They are thinking to do new mints. How did how did you guys go about building in a bear market, having those gaming experiences live?

Legendary 00:25:17 And do you feel a pressure now that suddenly, web 3 is trending and everyone's talking about the token meta, or is it finally a relief that we are in this very environment?

brydisanto.eth 00:25:32 You know, it's it's a really great and and sort of nuanced question. I I think the first thing is, you know, there you have to parse out real teams versus teams that are just opportunistic. I think for us with Infinigads, we've always been building real games and real experiences and I think that's the root of everything we do. You know, we very much view web 3, whether it's NFTs, or tokens or anything in this space is additive on top of that. And as the way to really reward our loyal holders, players, community members that are so involved in what we do.

brydisanto.eth 00:26:08 You know, I think from day 1, we've had immense convection in what we've been building. And I don't think we've felt pressure from the market, you know, other than just doing right by our holders and community. And I and I think that goes down to planning. It goes down to releasing things that are prudent. You know, and I think just being conscious of how the market reacts to things. And that just comes through experience.

brydisanto.eth 00:26:32 You know, you see so many projects release 1 NFT collection as their Genesis, and then they dilute supply, you know, a couple of months later, you know, and really screw over their earlier entrance, you know, I think being mindful of how releases impact, you know, their people and not trying just to extract liquidity, you know, from your fiercest advocates is really important. When I look at the market now though, you know, I don't feel pressure. I think we view it as opportunity more than anything to really add gas, you know, on top of everything that we've been building you know, I think as a US based company, which is really important to to caveat, you know, there are the restrictions.

brydisanto.eth 00:27:12 I'm so envious of companies that launch tokens and projects in Asia because you're you have so much flexibility around how you can talk about things, how you can market things, when you can do certain things, in the US, you know, we have to be really cautious, you know, about SEC scrutiny, you know, how things are received, So and and I think that's important as well. So as we think through a release, you know, it it has to be by the book.

brydisanto.eth 00:27:40 It has to be well thought out and there's immense cost, you know, not just in terms of financial resources, but also just our brain power our energy, our time that's taken away from building games and experiences that goes towards seeking out advice and doing due diligence and going the process of launching something. But what I will say on timing is, you know, I think this time of year, if you look at December into January, everybody and their mother is looking to launch a token.

brydisanto.eth 00:28:11 And I think you're going to see a lot of premature releases from projects and companies that are trying to capitalize on the market, and that can come down to tea collections that can go to token launches. And I think that strategy, while it might seem flashy and sexy right now, and it might generate income and hype right now for those projects. You know, I I think probably will come back to bite a lot of people because once you launch a token, you know, you've released this whole can of worms that you can't go back on.

brydisanto.eth 00:28:45 And it really does start to peg itself to everything you do both from gameplay to NFT releases and beyond. So what I'll say just to close, because I've been on for a while, you know, we do think a lot about a token in ERC 20, but we take it really seriously. You know, we know once we do that, we can't go back. And I think attention is a big piece of it. You know, there are so many people fighting for attention right now in this December, January timeframe. We don't feel any pressure to release and launch something huge, and fight with that.

brydisanto.eth 00:29:17 I think we'd rather wait, until there's a little bit more of an opportunity and and sort of avoid, where we think we can capture the narrative and and really control that for a prolonged period.

Legendary 00:29:28 Appreciate the very, very detailed answer, and you touched on 2 very important topics, timing on the one hand, regulation. On the other hand, do want to get into both of those, but first, Karma is here with your hand up.

Karma 00:29:43 Yeah. So, I basically just wanted to add to the topic of timing because it's it's hugely crucial. And I feel like in a lot of discussions, in a lot of, you know, the hype about tokens. We we also forget that for any project you will be looking at, one of the major reasons to really a token is also always going to be funding, funding, runway, and just ensuring that your can actually be brought to fruition in the best possible quality.

Karma 00:30:15 And I sometimes feel like in many of these conversations, you know, the community seems to forget that while you know, getting free money might be a nice utility in the short term, look at the economics. The biggest portion or one of the big portions is always going to be, reserved for long term funding of the project. For the foundation of the game, for developer costs. And, you know, not to demonize projects for it, they release equity in order to secure their future.

Karma 00:30:46 And then it's it's more of a question about, you know, structuring these incentives in ways that you know, do not disadvantage communities who want to support and get in early. And so, sir, this is a regular foundation of what I wanted to say and bring it back to the timing aspect, right now with market heated up this badly or at this badly, you know, you know what I mean? Like, it's not a it's negative, but it can, directly to negative outcomes.

Karma 00:31:16 I do feel like it also makes sense for many projects not to rush overtly, but if you're at the precipice, you know, like, you're still, like, on the fence, like, oh, do I wait a few months? Do I not wait a few months? I do feel like it's justified in some cases to front run and make use of really, really advantageous market conditions, in order to secure that runway for your project. So you know, just playing the devil's advocate a little bit here, but I think it's something we we also need to consider, as we discuss these aspects.

Legendary 00:31:53 Yeah. And, and, and that's a very, very good point that you're making. Also in terms of timing, I do have a follow-up question for you.

Legendary 00:32:00 And the same follow-up question then, for sneaky from shrapnel in terms of a different aspect of timing, namely, which is launching the token and then having a game that is ready to play that has a token syncs do you feel that there is a certain pressure on the time frame in in between launching token and being able follow-up with a game to follow-up with a beta or with another experience that uses, the token, or do you feel that is also healthy to a certain extent to not have token launch and game launch at the same time so the market can establish a price for the token.

Legendary 00:32:41 Then a couple of weeks, a month, 2 months, whatever pass. And then you have a first gaming experience. How do you think about that aspect of timing come first?

Karma 00:32:50 Yeah. Oh, I mean, in the ideal world, you sit down with your team and the engineering and the marketing and the product leadership all agree on a wonderful timeline that we then execute, you know, holding hands and walking off into the sunset. Sadly, this very rarely work this wonderfully, not because, people don't want to, but because there are so many additional factors, external that your team simply has no power over. One of them, which maybe not everybody has insight into, it's not always fully your choice as to when you can list on exchanges.

Karma 00:33:30 It is not always fully up to you, which connections you can make in the right time what their already agreed lineup of launches is, how it agrees with your project lineup in the first place. And then on top of that, there are also additional problems of, you know, maybe, yeah, regulatory concerns. You are just like about to, you know, integrate with someone and you know, your your lawyer is stinging you in the middle of the night, like, have you actually considered this so that you cannot sleep anymore? Okay, this is these are like very niche examples.

Karma 00:34:02 However, I think listing a token like TGE in general token generation event, such a huge event for the company that it never truly depends on you only. Ideally, of course, you release it can be listed, there are multiple syncs immediately so that there is a very sustainable economy going on where that token is not just out there sitting in our wallets for speculation, but you can actually utilize it and and actively actively have it integrated in the game.

Karma 00:34:36 I will bring it down to the example of ZT X, you know, where we our our token went live in on October 16th, I believe, and our beta is now about to launch. For us, due to dates, different, you know, development timelines, we really want to token out there before our beta went live because we were working on integrating that token into the beta And obviously, it really, really significantly eases our, like, you know, engineering and development when it's already out there on main net.

Karma 00:35:08 When it's already had some, you know, some weeks, some months to, you know, exchange hands, make its way into the time enhanced into the actual players that want to accumulate before the beta launches. So it was a very, very conscious decision, but I do believe we we were really hoping that the beta would launch slightly sooner, you know, sooner after the token So of course, that is ideal, but just wanted to point out that in many cases, I think even teens that don't miss certainly have a product out there immediately after token launch might not always be due to just their planning, you know, how it sort of, like, came to be Yeah.

Legendary 00:35:47 I really, really appreciate it, Anson. There's so many external factors when it comes to launching a token. And I think that some, like, sometimes as as a, like, community member as a fan, it is easy to forget about them and just see that a token, a beta, or something else has been postponed, where there is so many complex things going on in the background. I'll be before we go to you, I wanna hear, from Shrapnall, I wanna hear a sneaky Chase perspective on the same question of the timing between launching a token and having a playable experience ready from Shrapnons perspective?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:36:23 Yeah. So we thought about it in a in a few different perspectives when we thought about when do we actually release our token? And one of the things we thought about is, is when do we want to enable, token utility in terms of when will it actually be usable? Because at that point, we'll sort of need a token to exist for people to use it. And then, you know, what also went into sort of our decision matrix is like, okay, like karma is saying, this is you know, token generation events are pretty significant, execution executional beats in terms of it sort of like a all hands on deck requirement.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:36:59 And so when you sort of look at your production calendar and you're you're lining up these sort of big releases like, okay, hey, beta release, or token release, how much overlap do you, like, ultimately want to have, versus, you know, how much lead time and, and all of that moving into open beta when these tokens are actually usable. So, you know, very similar to other projects, and I think you're gonna see you know, that ultimately, you know, projects are gonna have to launch their tokens before there's a beta, before they're usable, because ultimately the token needs to exist for users to have it to be able to use it.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:37:38 Now, how big that lead time is, you know, can can, you know, be determined by projects and their own, you know, individual priorities. Like Karma said, you know, we We also wish we launched our token, I think, in October, and we wish that our, you know, beta toolset was coming out sooner, so people would actually, be able to, to use and utilize the shrapnel token because without that existing, we're in sort of this, dead period where it's it's highly speculative froth, right? There's not a lot of utility that's happening with the token, but there's a lot of speculation happening.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:38:14 And so you know, it's it's our job as developers really to get, more of the utility, syncs online so that we can get a better gauge of, you know, real, token sort of price and value, abstracted away just from the sort of speculation and froth that seeing in the market. So, you know, hopefully we'll get the the beta here coming soon in January 2024, and we'll be able see how that impacts, our token.

Legendary 00:38:47 Love to hear that then. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you for very detailed answer as well. Abby, you have your hand up. Go for it.

Abhi 00:38:56 Yeah. I think I think there's been a lot of interesting perspective so far on the importance of the actual tow token generation event in terms of from a milestone perspective, From my own personal perspective, a token generation event is the most important moment in in a web threes company's history because that 99% of the time games are not profitable. As of now, and the only way that you are creating runway is through your token.

Abhi 00:39:28 Therefore, if you believe it, it it makes sense to launch token at this given point and there is enough logic behind that, then I think there's no reason for you not to. But if you are rushing the token launch, to extract liquidity. That is probably the worst decision you can make because you're rushing the most important moment in your company's history. So that's that that's my ultimate perspective because a lot of games are pre revenue. They're still in development. And unless they are comfortable that this is the best go to approach, for instance, CTX mentioned, it helps with the development of the beta because their game is in circulation.

Abhi 00:40:05 They can monitor the numbers of the number of foretolders, the trading activity, the price, and and other metrics, which may help them quantify with their their further game development. I'm sure their data science, scientists have a lot more power in terms of what they can do and make assumptions based off that data rather than referring to other games data to create, different scenarios.

Abhi 00:40:28 So I think from from my perspective, as long as you are confident that this is the best time to do it, because there are a lot of dependencies in terms of you may wanna increase your runway because you wanna scale the team so that you can do certain things and push development further forward you're you might be receiving pressure from investors. You may be receiving pressure from exchanges. And, ultimately, the timing is the most important thing. And if you rush to extract liquidity, that will impact you in the long term. And if you take too long and you're not you are unable to launch a token in a the market, you won't be able to raise as much as an ultimately that that will enter your development as well.

Abhi 00:41:07 So as long as you're launching your token in the right method, I spoken to the right people on how to make it happen in the most effective way possible, you want to prioritize launching an market conditions, which is why we've seen overall delay there, NFT by 6 to 12 months, and they were able to then they will be able to raise a lot more from an NFT perspective, and I'm sure it's the exact same from a from a token perspective as well.

Legendary 00:41:34 Yeah. Real really appreciate your perspective on that and the, additional thoughts on nailing the timing to extent the wrong way. And that, also encompasses not only, like, launching in a success, in a healthy market environment, but also just being aware that you get enough attention around your own token launch and that you're not launching on the same day you're maybe a niche game with the biggest triple a game that there is in the space because as you said, that timing in that moment is for many games. The one of the most defining and determining milestones in in the journey.

Legendary 00:42:12 Brian, I see you with your hand that appears to hear your thoughts on that as well.

brydisanto.eth 00:42:16 It, you know, it occurred to me, you know, if you're listening to everybody and looking at the panel, we have 3 companies in in gaming studios up here that have live games. In in shrapnel AOF and infinigads with King of Destiny. I think when you're a company that has live games and mark and building out those games as your priority. I think your token strategy becomes a bit different because, you know, at least from our perspective, We view the token as a tool to drive, not just UA, but also retention and loyalty in our games. And I think, you know, when we think through launch and and timing and roll out.

brydisanto.eth 00:42:52 You know, a lot of it is with how do we best, you know, accelerate and improve King of Destiny? Our mobile title and in future games, and really think that up with a robust UA strategy, you know, when you think about traditional spend, that way when a token does hypothetically come to market, you know, you launch it with utility. You launch it with a player base that's in the 6 to 7 figures. And you're generating significant revenue through traditional IEP and and, you know, traditional means. I think that equation looks very different for projects and games that don't have something in market or need to fund fundraise because they're pre launch. So, you know, I think it's different for everybody.

brydisanto.eth 00:43:31 Karma said it well. You know, companies that have fundraising needs, you know, have a build cycle ahead. You know, we'll obviously launch for different reasons, but think as a market participant, if you can identify the companies in the studios that have live products and gain with a lot of traction and then are gonna launch a token. I think that outlook to me looks fundamentally different when you think about sustainability and and you case and volume and all those metrics?

Legendary 00:44:00 Yeah. I very much agree with you. And talking about mobile gaming, Coco, I would love to hear your thoughts on that topic of timing as well on the one hand. And on the other hand, we also spoke a bit about, token syncs and obviously how when a game launches, there is utility for the token.

Legendary 00:44:17 We also love to hear your thoughts on basically the amount of token syncs in the sense of when a first game first launches with a token, whether it's a beta, or already a public launch, do you think that all the token things need to be ready at the launch, or is it obviously something that's developing over time and basically as the end game and the end game meta will develop. So we'll token things, token things develop. How do you think, about that aspect of launching a game?

Koko 00:44:50 Yeah. So in in specifically in relation to token sinks. That's something that we've, definitely had to consider in, in our game. So, we have, live token. If people don't know, it's caught because we're a part of a 2 token ecosystem. Right? So AFC, we didn't actually do very much marketing, around the of that and it and it actually was a pressure of the the game release that actually, you know, we launched it almost like stealth, actually, back in June. And, that was because we needed to prepare for it to be inside of the game.

Koko 00:45:26 We've almost also discussed the fact that we recently, a team that originally had a Q1 AFG, launch, and we tried to, you know, as we've discussed, push it to, push it a month ahead to see if we could capitalize on this kind of, buoyant euphoric market, but it it just couldn't be done. You know, listing a token takes time, but that also has implications for the game.

Koko 00:45:53 We had conversations with the developer, our developing team about releasing the token inside of the game because a lot of the game mechanics take place inside, but when you do that, you kind of are, generating tokens out of thin air even though it's on a centralized aspect. So, our team doesn't feel comfortable with, with that, with, with delivering the token without a specific, token sync in it.

Koko 00:46:21 But to have all the token syncs ready, I think that's probably, not necessarily that important because for example, we have an ecosystem, we have a second game, the token syncs will only grow. But to have enough token sinks and a plan for, being able to generate enough demand. So for example, in our game, you download the game and you're playing, and you can You the every single player is generating demand for the tokens in the game because in order to battle, in order to do anything really in the game, you need the tokens. And those tokens in many different places in the game are actually being bought directly off a liquidity pool, a decks liquidity pool.

Koko 00:47:01 But in order to sell, it's a slightly more complex task. And that is, one of the things that we mentioned before, if you wanted to become a web 3, wanted to integrate with web 3, maybe, profit from, the work that you did inside the game, then you have to take that extra step to connect your decent, you know, self custody wallets to our hub and to, you know, learn the process of selling.

Koko 00:47:24 So in that way, we've she got a game that generates demand, makes it super easy to buy, but has an extra step in order for you to actually sell, and that's, for us, been a really great, mechanic to, show confidence, to, to, for example, exchanges. And there's many discussions that happened the background about, you know, do you know how to launch a token? Do do you know how to do you have good market makers to to manage that token? And and one of the questions is, do you have syncs?

Koko 00:47:55 So I just think it's infinitely harder for a project to launch a token and there's no syncs, because that will be a question you'll be presented with, when going to exchanges.

Legendary 00:48:06 Yeah. That's that's such a valuable, valuable perspective to add to that. And also on on the token things, you said it is not necessary to have everything ready once, you know, the game launches. I would be quite curious to hear from you, but well, as from, all the other games that we have on stage, how long are you thinking in advance on on an internal road map when it comes to token things, when it comes to developing the game, is it something that you think it has when 3 years, 5 years, is it longer than that, or is it just too unrealistic to think ahead for the next 5 years when it comes to developing games future, games features and and token things.

Koko 00:48:49 Well, to be totally honest, I wasn't a part of the the token design, but I know that, for the for the planning of this project, the the biggest chunks of the token design and the syncs were built with the first two games in mind. And then once the structure of those had been built, then it's almost like a a template for any future games.

Koko 00:49:11 So it is hard to really imagine something that can happen in in the future with with such an spans of potential, which is another reason why we actually have a 2 token system because, we our second token or actually our first token, which is the utility token, AFC army fortune coin. It's a soft cap token. So we minted a 101,000,000,000, and theoretically, we could we can mint more.

Koko 00:49:41 And the thinking behind that was, you know, we wanted that's the access token, and that that needs to be, sustainable a way that we can, give new players enough just to get started in the game so it's free to play. But if it gets to a point where we have a lot of games in our ecosystem, virtual shop fronts, e commerce, and all the things that may demand this token. We don't want it to become, prohibitively expensive. So we can then play with the levers of, you know, minting more in order to ease that.

Koko 00:50:15 So you have to plan with the ability to change potentially, but it it, yeah, it's very, very difficult to plan like 5 years ahead in this space.

Legendary 00:50:24 Yeah. Really agree. And and I appreciate your last comment because having that, flexibility and being able to adjust to certain factors in the future is so so important on the one hand, but it's also super, super difficult because most of the things, once you've done them, and you launched your token, you obviously can't change them. So having a couple of things that you can adjust in the future potentially is super, super helpful. I see both Karma and, Shrapnel with the hands up. Karma, I'm going to you first, what are your thoughts on that?

Karma 00:50:57 Yes. Such a fascinating topic. So, you know, we are talking about 2 really big aspects. Like sustainability and flexibility. And you would think that the 2 are mutually exclusive like, either you stay flexible or you build, like, a robust system, which is sustainable. But I actually think, especially when planning for long term, in a space as, you know, new and constantly developing as web 3, the 2 are actually very, very closely connected.

Karma 00:51:27 So if you want to be sustainable, you also need to leave yourself in a leeway, allow yourself in a leeway and flexibility when designing these incentive structures. And, you know, we heard also the term like soft and hard currency, and I just wanted to stop and maybe for some listeners, which are not, you know, asked it into the topic, explained that the way we integrate, tokens into the in game economy It's usually to devise a soft currency, which is more of an in game thing. You know, you don't, you can't always take it off like this, like, out of game. It's not fully on the chain.

Karma 00:52:07 It's sometimes just in the database. And then you have a hard currency, which is usually the token sales, like, you know, it is an ERC 20 if you're on on on on EVM or something similar on a different train. And one of the reasons you want to do it is because you can then play with both of these and their relation to each other in order to just make more sustainable, incentives. You know, maybe you can't necessarily off ramp everything you have at any point in your wallet of hard currency, but instead, you can, you know, exchange it into the currency in game and do some more utility functions.

Karma 00:52:48 So yeah, I think it's it's a fascinating conversation to have. We will see how these different systems will work out for different games. You know, look out for these, like, soft and hard currencies. Many games have them. Even for us at DTX, we have our It's hard currency. But in game, you can you also have gold for, like, in game trading of different resources and then different ways to exchange one into the other. So, yeah, just the this relation between sustainability and flexibility is certainly something I wanted to remark on. Yeah.

Legendary 00:53:21 And I love that you mentioned, soft and hard currencies and and how important they are to creating a balance in the long term. And I know this is a very very challenging topic and question because, again, we are in an extremely volatile space, but on the other hand, you're designing to economics that have unlocks over the next couple of years. I think I looked at big time. I'm not sure if it was 5 or 7 years until the token is fully unlocked. Albeit that it has, a rather low circulating supply initially.

Legendary 00:53:50 So that kind of puts that challenge to, you know, think ahead for for such a long time in a space that is as dynamic as as web 3 and web 3 gaming, in particular, sneaky Jay, you had your hand up before. I'm curious to hear your thoughts as well. Yeah.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:54:05 And so I was just gonna, piggyback off what Carmen was saying. About flexibility. And at Trapnell, we take a a very, data driven empirical approach to sort of our tokenomics and how we analysis our in game economy. We're really fortunate that our head of economics. Francis is a former aerospace engineer, so this dude's literally like an X rocket scientist.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:54:29 So he's made all these simulations and models, you know, inputting different syncs, inputting, you know, looking at how men, how much assets are actually being take off of our internal marketplace, you know, onto omni chain and, like, third party marketplaces as well.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:54:45 And so you know, we have a 1 year sort of high level overlook on how we expect, sort of tokenomics and token usage to play out because again, that influences, you know, all the other buckets of of you know, token allocations in terms of community rewards and incentives, marketing, and so all of these are connected, So you really have to have some good data about, okay, like, hey, what's actually happening in the in the game itself? So, you know, beyond just our models and predictive, sort of behavior.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:55:18 We're looking at once we actually go into early access and have players playing the game, it's so important to actually have know, syncs active even if they aren't, you know, all of them so that we can get some real in game, data from the actual player to see how well or not well it aligns with our models so that we can better adjust, you know, our forecasting so that when we do do our budgets for the 1 year, 3 years, we can be a lot more confident in our spend and our numbers, that those are, like, you know, somewhat realistic secondarily, you know, I would say that it this becomes even more complicated, you know, for tokens that are that are to be more expansive than just, you know, their primary title.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:56:02 And for example, for us, you know, we're hoping that shrapnel in terms of the Shrap token gets integrated into other titles, ecosystems, and projects so that you can use, you know, Shrap token to you know, purchase cosmetics in another game or use it as, as a, as a medium to exchange other items. And so we have an entire, foundation called radon Network, guidance, who is actually pushing, you know, the proliferation of the Shrap token and adoption outside of just, us as a a title. And so you know, that's that adds an an another variable.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:56:40 So when you're thinking about how it affects, you know, your game's economy is that all these other projects and titles could potentially also be incorporating Shrap tokens. So, you know, to sort of bring it back to, to home is, you know, you have to have, you know, some sort of plan, but I think it has to be very, very flexible and not too rigid because, you know, real time data and real time usage is gonna, you know, dictate, a lot of those outcomes. So you're you're you're gonna have to be nimble for when your token's actually being used and be responsive to that? Definitely. Definitely.

Legendary 00:57:18 I agree that It is so important to stay flexible to stay on top of all the data points and be able to adjust to to the best of your ability. Also love that your, head of token design is, a rocket scientist quite literally And I think actually if if, you know, all jokes aside, token designing is extremely complex. It is like designing a whole economy. In isolation. And at the same time, you also want to build a game that is sorry. You also wanna build a game that is enjoyable.

Legendary 00:57:53 And you have whole nations that are failing at designing, a sustainable currency for their own country that are struggling with, inflation rates, etcetera. And, yes, the game economy is less complex. It's not a perfectly accurate comparison. Then a real life, country with its own GDP, but still game economy is extremely complex. And, again, it's not the only thing you do. You also have to build a game that people want to play. Brian, I wanna come back to you.

Legendary 00:58:25 When when you explained some of your thoughts to you, on the one hand, talked about timing, but the other topic that you touch on, and that I kinda wanna bring back is, regulation. And you said as a US based company, obviously, it is a bit more more challenging to do things. You don't have the flexibility necessarily as Asian companies flipping that scenario on the head. Don't you also think that this could actually be a positive thing because at least it's my feeling, regulation, will be coming.

Legendary 00:58:57 We are in, what looks like to be the next bull cycle and regulators will crack down on whatever is trending and they will crack down on web 3 gaming eventually. So if you are in a country or in a jurisdiction where you already have an entity like this, you see who love cracked down on crypto, and you are launching, at some point, a token in an environment that is heavily regulated, isn't that then, a competitive advantage to others who are still facing potential future risks due to regulation? Yeah.

brydisanto.eth 00:59:35 I I I think it's a really interesting environment to be in. Ultimately, regulation is a really positive thing. We just need clarity to understand what's coming down and when and and what are the ground rules. But I think what it does you know, once the US gets its shit together and that regulation does come down. I think the companies that have built products and and tokens and NFTs and anything in this space by the book, you know, in in a way that has been prudent, and above board, I think are gonna be the ones that really thrive because they'll be in a position to really go on those new rails.

brydisanto.eth 01:00:14 And I think it really positions all of us to be leaders, you know, in in this space, once that comes down. So again, it's it's the same thing we saw with the internet. It's the same thing we saw with, you know, the mobile gaming market early, there's always a period of uncertainty with new technology and and new things being released. And I think the ones that are capable of waiting through the noise, using their best judgment, and then coming out of the other side, I think, with, with momentum, are are the ones that we'll see as the big winners over the next 5 to 10 years. So from my perspective, you know, we have the best advisors around us.

brydisanto.eth 01:00:51 We have incredible legal teams around us, you know, monitoring the markets. I think having that, you know, as you said, launching the token and web 3 products is really complicated, you know, It is an immense undertaking. I think anybody who thinks they can do it alone with with smart people of all different disciplines and skill sets around them. Is deeply mistaken in my mind, but, you know, I think everything we've we've heard, we've learned, everybody we've spoken with, you know, who has deep knowledge, From my perspective, I think we're heading for greener pastures. I think it's going to get really exciting.

brydisanto.eth 01:01:27 And I think IG, you know, we're in a position you know, both financially in terms of product and also upcoming releases, to really, I think, accelerate, you know, once those stars align. Love to hear that and love the very, very sustainable perspective that you're taking.

Legendary 01:01:43 Sanjay, I saw you with a hand up, quite interested to hear your thoughts as well.

Sanjay 01:01:49 I was going to talk about it, but I'm not sure if that's, like, the topic of the discussion, but, you know, I'm great that Brian mentioned, you know, regulations is great that we need all the, we needed to kinda like, you know, go to the next step. But I also think that we need, you know, running products, which, you know, normal people, traditional people can rally, rally and make it regulated. For example, I love to give the example. I've yapped them out a couple of times before, and I'll do it again. You know, like, for example, when Uber, you know, like, the application came out to came out to Canada and, you know, they just dropped the application, right, in the Apple store. And that's it.

Sanjay 01:02:29 And they let people just decide what they wanna do with it. You know, the government was fighting them. The, the taxi services were fighting them. Everybody was fighting Uber, but they did not care. They did not go to the government and, like, try to, like, make a man before launching the app and deploying the app. What they did was they let people get used to the app, let people enjoy the app, and then people, like, We all normal people were the ones rallying for Uber and then the government and the taxi service and everything had to cave in. Right? So I think this is the biggest thing which I see in this space is like, you know, there's like industry. There's like companies.

Sanjay 01:03:07 There's like projects who are just solely focused on regulation. But then you know, like, what's the point of that? Like, if you don't have a good product, you know, like, there's so many good projects on the space right now. Once these projects become super mainstream, and there's, like, millions of people playing it. Regulations will need to happen. Like, they can't just fade it anymore. Right? So it's like, I think product before it's like the egg or chicken type thing. Like, I think product needs to be before regulations and regulations will just be managed for you after. Very, very, very thoughtful take.

Legendary 01:03:40 And I very much agree with that, especially with the Uber example, I think Uber's a great example for a company that, obviously try to scale as fast as they could and admittedly didn't have that regulatory clarity on so many fronts and so many different jurisdictions that it just went ahead with the product launch they had great, great legal teams, but to a certain extent, they had to accept that they just need to fuck around and find out what's gonna happen to then bring that regulatory clarity of course, by doing that, as Bryce said, you wanna play it by the book as much as you can, and you wanna be as transparent and as compliant as you can so that you have a good chance then to also be in a position to shape that regulation that is to come.

Legendary 01:04:25 But to some extent, you cannot prepare for everything that's coming, especially if you're building at the at the bleeding edge of, a technology like web 3, Brian, go for it.

brydisanto.eth 01:04:37 And I think to Sanjay's point about leading product first. I think part of it is also being bold and coming up with creative solutions that kind of bend the rules. You know, one of the things if you're familiar with our ecosystem is We built this platform called the shipwright. We didn't wanna lead with an ERC 20 token too prematurely for a lot of different reasons. So what we said was, well, why don't we craft an experience that can slot into any of our games that, you know, feel familiar to people but we also think plays within the rules. And effectively all it is is you play our games.

brydisanto.eth 01:05:11 You can win or earn, you know, virtual currencies, power ups, you know, the types of things you'd find in Candy Crush or Clash Royale or or any familiar gaming experience And the only difference is we've handed that slice of the economy over to the players. So we don't sell that specific token or power up. It's purely sourced by players. And what you can do is you can mint a bundle of the, that currency or power ups on chain as an ERC 1155. And then you can sell that bundle to another player, break it down on our platform, and then they can accumulate that in game currency that way.

brydisanto.eth 01:05:51 We've run that platform though for the last year plus it's what we're debuting again in our mobile game, King of destiny. We think it's a really compelling bridge, until, you know, an ERC 20, knock on wood, wink wink, nudge, nudge, you know, is more viable us and we're ready to take that plunge. But, you know, we also think about it in terms of experience. You know, if you think about a mobile player, How do you make web 3 and blockchain invisible and feel native and not feel clunky? The way we think about that is You you win a virtual currency through playing the game, beating tournaments, attacking friends.

brydisanto.eth 01:06:28 You you accrue this thing and then you can just go to our marketplace. It it looks like our game. It feels like our game. You can craft this this token, you know, into a piggy bank. We call them. It's a little tainer, of the token, and then you put it on a marketplace, and any player can go to the marketplace, use a credit card, use fiat, and buy that piggy bank from the player, and we've sort of built our economy from day one around that tech and then architecture.

brydisanto.eth 01:06:55 And we think it's a pretty unique and creative solution for the time being, until we wanna go more, you know, web 3 heavy And then, of course, the onboarding piece, the tech piece, the abstraction layer becomes key because I think forcing mobile players that don't know and don't necessarily care about blockchain to participate isn't the right way. You know, if you think about gamers, like, they don't give a fuck if playing a game on, like, AWS servers or another, you know, another layer. They just wanna play the game progress and and win cool items and stuff.

brydisanto.eth 01:07:28 And I think you can do that in a way that that feels natural without shoving block chain, nomenclature, and concepts in tech and people's face? Yeah. I I very much agree, and I love the analogy.

Legendary 01:07:41 It's it's the same with surfing the internet. I don't care if the website I'm visiting uses cloudflare as the DNS is hosted on Amazon Server or wherever else. You just don't care about a good user experience. And, obviously, the Blockchain experience, you said, if if it's there, it shouldn't be clunky.

Legendary 01:07:57 And, Yellow Panther, I would quite like to hear your thoughts on on that user experience, side of things, how much do you think that the blockchain elements should even be in the foreground is it even important for for a not us, web 3, native people, but, like, for traditional gamers, if they're playing a game, is it even important for them to know that there is the wave 3 economy in the background and that there might be NFTs, is it something that they can just learn along the way Or do you think that especially as it is still the case that many traditional game, players, gamers are quite skeptical when it comes to web 3 that they are, being made aware of the fact, hey, that game is actually using web 3 technology.

Legendary 01:08:44 Where where do you lean on that? Yeah.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:08:47 I mean, it ultimately depends on who your audience are. For me, mine is pretty wet too heavy, especially on eggs. I'm I'm just speaking and lingos that, you know, web native people are understanding, not not typically for the web 2 people. But on the perspective of gaming, right, the best way I would say e even though it's web 2 or web 3, I think I'm sorry. Even though it's web 3 game, right, it has to, like, has, you know, not not too much of a barrier of entry.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:09:20 And then, you know, all the wall stuff is too complicated for some of the, newcomers, right, especially if they're coming from web 2 and they're playing the first game. Right? So, based on my experiences, I have actually been to, like, you know, in real life game conferences and also, several, IRL activations. Right? From what I understand, it's like people only, the the people actually interested in a few clicks to play the game, right, rather than having to set up your wallet and so on. And I feel like web 3 people are also the same. They don't wanna hassle, especially if you need to bridge from one chain to other.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:10:00 I think this is one of Eliza's biggest headache and also of her most hate thing to do. But from those activation, I learned that, you know, it has to have low, low barrier of country in terms of, like, onboarding. Right? And not only that the game has to be immediately understand standable to a web 2 gamer. And then it has to be easy to play and so on. Right? Don't make it too complex, but for me, I really think that, you know, this Let the tech do its thing on the back end and let the game do its thing on the front end. This is what I always say.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:10:38 And I think, you know, several games here, you know, Shrapnel is a huge, huge, example. In this case, it's like, let the game do its thing. Right? We barely talked about the NFT aspect or the token aspect. Right? So kudos to, like, this kind of game as well. You know, ZT X. I was actually in, recently I was actually playing at their web 2 games at Peto. It was literally few clicks. I'm in the game, and, actually, it was a rabbit hole. Because I I found out that your character can, like, do, TikToks.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:11:14 They do it for you, and then within, that spectrum you can actually lower up games. And within a few seconds, you are in the game, and then you're playing an actual game with other people. So this is the title game that will find a huge success in Web 3. And on the in game asset part, I'm gonna, like, go on a little bit more it is important, right, for gamers to own your assets. Right? It will only, they will only care about it if they find the game fun or interesting. Or they wanna come back to the 2nd day, that's a win for a web 2 game. Right?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:11:48 Because nowadays, a lot, web 3 games are either in alpha or beta, they can't really show the full potential. Right? But if a game is live and you're able to show, gift or give them a reason to come back, they will also give you a reason to buy your asset. Alright? It gives them a reason to buy your asset and it give give, like, gives them a reason to actually tell their friends. And then a friend and a friend. Right? The work the power of, word-of-mouth in gaming is huge. Like, huge. Sorry.

Legendary 01:12:26 My unmute button was lagging a bit. Thank you very much for your very, very detailed take. And I especially love that you mentioned, the different user groups and the different, customer segments that is especially complex in web 3 when you have people who, as you perfectly said, just want to play the game and don't care about bridging. They don't wanna go to Orbit of Finance and learn what layer 2 they need need to bridge to, to be able to have funds there, to get NFTs or whatever it is. And then you have the opposite of the spectrum.

Legendary 01:12:57 You have people like me who are happy to bridge around because I'm using a new bridge every time that doesn't have a token yet, and I hope I get another air drop in my bags And at the end of the day, you also have to be realistic, and find out who the biggest customer segment is, and that's a 100%, not me. That's a 100% the gamer who just wants to play the game and doesn't care too much about bridging around and wants to have as little steps as possible until they can play and enjoy the game. Sneaky chair, I saw your hand shot up immediately on the topic. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah. Thanks.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:13:34 I think, in terms of user experience, especially for a web 3 game, it it depends on sort of your goal and ultimately, you know, the scale that you wanna attain. Right? If you wanna be just sort of a niche, web 3 game that, you know, is attracting sort of crypto native users. You know, and that's it. And, you know, you can have a lot of the sort of, crypto forward and blockchain feature sort of front and center, right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:14:01 But, you know, if you really are trying to go for millions of current players, and sort of had deep tration into, quote, unquote, the web 2, gamer marketplace, you know, to be quite frank, like Yellow said, 99% of those players, you know, don't give a hoot about blockchain or NFTs. You know, what they care about is quote unquote this, like, blockchain technology, making their gameplay experience feel worse than what they can alter alternatively have, that's like comparable on the market. So, you know, when we looked at blockchain integration for shrapnel, we had to do a couple of things. Right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:14:39 How do we remove the friction, from blockchain, but still enable all the benefits that we think it has in terms of player ownership, immutable, transmutability in terms of, of, you know, if we don't exist, all the assets and everything still this on the the blockchain after us. And then how do we all wrap that into a seamless player experience? You know, that is very similar to what people are used to. But doesn't give people the headache.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:15:05 And so, you know, how we look at this in terms of our perspective is we really wanna make sure that there's a playable option for everyone regardless of their blockchain interest, and then we layer in the blockchain on top of that to make the options better. And so how does this sort of manifest in our ecosystem. So we're gonna be we are currently available on the Epic Game store to be wish listed. That's gonna be our primary distribution platform for our release. So, you know, your normal gamer, go to the Epic Game store, download our game, totally free to play. You don't need an NFT, you don't need to set up a wallet, to just get into the game and start playing to see if you freaking like it or not. Alright?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:15:45 Step 1. Step 2, if you like the darn thing, That's great. Hopefully, you play it more. And then what becomes revealed during your player experiences are the benefits that blockchain technology empowers, for example, like, you get a really cool skin, right, tied to your account, or you go you go buy it on the marketplace. Right? It's that happened in in Fortnite, right? You get some v bucks, you go buy a skin on the marketplace, and then, you know, let's say for whatever reason, you want to, you know, send that skin to your friend or you got a new account and you want that skin on your new account, right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:16:20 If you're doing Fortnite, you're like, oh, wait, hey, The skin is sort of stuck on this account that I acquired it on. So it's quote unquote mine, really can't do a lot with it in terms of transfer it or even get rid of it without going to, like, some black market third party sites. So, you know, we take things that seem sort of obvious to make sense. Like, oh, hey, you know, that skin that you got in our game, you know, transfer it to someone else. Sell it on our marketplace.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:16:50 Take it out of our platform, and hopefully, you know, we have these, tie ins where you can ultimately take our vanity assets and bring them into different meta verses or different digital experiences. Right? So show the user like, hey, this technology actually empowers you to do a lot more than sort of what was the traditional gameplay experience, but don't add any friction to that. To make it sort of cumbersome to them.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:17:17 And so, you know, we're really thankful that we have a great technology partner in terms of Ava Labs, and Avalanche subnets actually give us the power to have our own dedicated blockchain space independent of what else is happening on on chain. So you know, if I'm a if I'm a player, right? I don't wanna have to worry about gas fees for the game that I'm playing because, you know, I care about the game that I'm playing. I don't care about this mint that's going on somewhere else or, you know, some degenerates are going crazy on dex's and are trying to just, you know, buy space, priority from each other, and, you know, I can't just get a simple action in the in my game.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:17:56 And so it's really important for us you know, to make sure that our player experience was was sort of isolated away from all that so that they could continue to play the game, you know, without sort of that interruption. And by having an avalanche subnet, we're able to have all of our marketplace transactions, all of our minting of NFTs, still be imprinted on the blockchain, but in a way that's, you know, gasless to our users, so that, you know, the the user experience doesn't feel any different than any traditional sort of in game marketplace, in game option house that they're used to.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:18:33 You know, in Diablo or World of rec forecast, something like that. But, you know, on the back end, they don't see this, but, you know, all the back end, all of this stuff is being imprinted and encoded on our AVAC subnet so that there is a history of that immutability so that there is you know, discrepancy, in that in that ownership. And so, you know, we're really about showing off what the technology empowers without creating, without adding friction to the actual gameplay experience.

Legendary 01:19:07 I'm so glad that you brought up the topic of the dedicated subnet is, as you said, extremely important to make sure that players can play the game at all times. And you can't make an announcement. Sorry, guys. You can't play on this weekend unless you pay a couple hundred bucks in transaction fees because Yuvalabs is having another mint, and there's nothing we can do about it. So that's definitely such a valuable aspect. And I feel like for people who haven't been around for the last bull cycle, they forget how crazy gas fees get. And even if you're not on on main network, obviously, it is absolutely insane. And even nowadays, if you, play around with providing the query and need a couple transactions to add or remove liquidity.

Legendary 01:19:46 Specifically, you end up paying 200 bucks on that, and that you to be way, way worse in in the bull market. But even from a traditional gamer's perspective, if you're used to having, I don't know, 1¢, 2¢ transaction fees, and something's going on. And then suddenly, that's $2 and you have to do 10.20 transactions even that becomes absolutely in unacceptable. I also wanna take a moment quickly to thank everyone in the audience and our speakers, we typically run for 1 hour. We've been running a bit longer today.

Legendary 01:20:18 I think this is a super, super interesting topic and definitely appreciate everyone's time for, joining our stage and space so far. Karma, I see you with your hand up, Go for it.

Karma 01:20:32 I have to admit I completely it completely escaped my mind just now what I raised my hand about. I bet I just want to add to one of the points from one of the wonderful speakers who have really shared incredible insights today. But, you know, I know that we are already well over time, it has been such an incredible spaces. I think, obviously, it's not a surprise that token meta for all of us is a very, very thrilling topic.

Karma 01:20:59 Something we are all looking at, whether internally on the product teams, on how our token can be better, can have better use cases or as a community member and holder, hey, does it make sense for me to hold this or utilize it in the game, or is it better for me to just you know, utilize it as a speculative medium as we all love doing.

Karma 01:21:23 Yeah, I've generally appreciate everybody's stakes and I think this is one of the I think most enjoyable spaces on the token, side that I participated in, we've touched upon everything from, you know, valid it is for teams to utilize tokens as run away because that at the very end of the day is what they are for. All the way to regulatory concerns and what to look out for when you as a user are actually, you know, evaluating the sustainability of of economics. So, yeah, hugely, hugely appreciative of every single person who came here today.

Karma 01:22:01 And everybody who gave us over an hour of their time lit learning and learning alongside us. Absolutely.

Legendary 01:22:09 Couldn't couldn't agree more with that. Maybe let's let's end on a lighter note and give each, of our speakers, each of the games, a chance to share something, with us, with everyone in the audience, that their communities can look forward to for their game. Cocoa, I'm gonna start with you with something the AOI 1st community can look forward to. Yeah.

Koko 01:22:34 So, currently for the month of December, we are doing some fun exciting giveaways of our our free NFT Mint that we did. So if you missed out, and have been on the sidelines, you know, stay stay tuned. We'll be doing lots of giveaways. And then on top of that, in terms of gameplay, we do have our, major feature release, for army of tactics, which is the demigod and crystal forge feature. We unlocks the ability to mint our in game NFT, the demigod, and gives, that all important utility, to RAFG token, which should be coming up soon as well. So, yeah, lots to be looking forward to.

Legendary 01:23:13 Personally, very, very excited for this what's next for Infinigos?

brydisanto.eth 01:23:19 First off, thank you guys, legendary karma ZTX for hosting. This has been a ton of fun. And and thanks to all the other panelists. It's it's great being up here with you. You legends and Chads, big Big updates for us. Our our mobile game, King of Destiny, is coming is going global to 177 countries within the next week or 2. It's currently live in the app store in Google Play in Four countries. So if you're in the US, Canada, Philippines or Australia, you can download that now and play. If you know, monopoly go or coin master, it's it's similar to those games. It's in the luck battle genre. So look out for global access in the next week or 2.

brydisanto.eth 01:23:58 And the other piece of alpha, I will leave with everybody when you play our tournaments you can earn, an in game token called fate. It it looks like a purple starburst. That's that token that will have the on chain compatibility. So you'll be able to mint it on chain into a piggy bank in the next month or so. And you'll be able to sell that to other mobile players. But probably more importantly, you'll be able to use it both as a currency and a crafting material for, some releases and allocations in the future. So, I would recommend playing it, enjoy the game. It's a ton of fun. You know, it's it's you can play 5, 10 minutes per day casually.

brydisanto.eth 01:24:38 And you can earn a little something along the way. But thanks, guys. Love the last minute, alpha.

Legendary 01:24:45 Sneaky today, what's something the Shrapnal community can look forward to? Yeah. Definitely.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:24:49 We have early access coming in January 2024. So if you want to be part of the 1st public wave, that gets to actually play shrapnel, you're gonna need an extraction pack. We're selling extraction packs now on our website, and we're doing a ton of giveaways on Twitter. If we haven't done one already or even if we are doing some, we'll do more with legendary karma and ZTX. So be sure that you're following, our awesome hosts here on the stage. That you can stay tuned for some of those giveaways for extraction packs so that you can get early access to shrapnel.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:25:24 And, we are gonna be having some exciting announcements about activities and events that will be going on in early access that I believe will make the pack you know, a lot more, increase in demands once we announce those. So we're gonna make, early access, definitely an event to be at. So, I can ensure you that, we're gonna make it worth worth your while playing. So be sure to grab one of those packs and follow legendary karma and ZTX so that you can stay tuned for a upcoming giveaway. Let's go.

Legendary 01:25:57 Even more alpha, we love to hear that. Karma, same question for you you close us out for today's space. Of course.

Karma 01:26:05 Well, before I, you know, loop back to ZT X, I also want to celebrate us here on this space is, hey, we've been hosting the web free gaming spaces, the ZT X spaces, as I internally call them. For, you know, months now. And we've just hit over the course of this space at peak 240 concurrent listeners, guys, It is absolutely incredible. You know, yeah, let's just emoji it out. Let's just pat ourselves mentally all on the bugs.

Karma 01:26:36 It is incredible to have seen over past months weeks, the increase in interest, the increase in activity, see the creators that have been grinding it out in web free gaming space throughout the bear market really become rewarded, finally build the audiences grow the audiences that they deserve. And here among the projects, you know, thank you so much for so many kind words from all the speakers here. It's also such a joy to see how collaboratively we have been able to speak, you know, have just an open dialogue on this space is It has been such a value add for everybody involved and, you know, just pure joy here.

Karma 01:27:14 And now looping back to what can we also be excited at ZTX, everybody already knows, hey, the beta is finally a bonus. Very, very soon. We set Q4 it is towards the end of Q4, but we all know how development cycles go by now. We are absolutely ecstatic to bring it to you in the best possible manner. We can can if the smoothest experience and the best art. And for everybody who wants to have a little bit of a peek behind scenes and, you know, join me on our internal town hall, tomorrow at Zt X, join us tomorrow in the Discord. We have a Discord town hall.

Karma 01:27:53 It is 2 pm, Central European time. That is 8 am EST. And yeah, we are just going chat and look at, you know, the exact timeline, we are going to look at some upcoming surprises at CTX. Other than this, looking forward to the next to next week, which is going to be packed with much, much more. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for joining us today.

In the dynamic world of Web3 gaming, the conversation often focuses on gameplay and innovation, overlooking the critical aspects of infrastructure and security.

This transcript offers an in-depth exploration of these foundational elements, crucial to the integrity and success of Web3 gaming.

Featuring insights from experts in the field, we delve into the challenges and solutions that shape the secure, reliable platforms necessary for the burgeoning Web3 gaming industry.

Join us as we uncover the often-unseen yet vital facets of gaming's next frontier.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:31 GM, everyone, and welcome back to our weekly show. I think we have a pretty, pretty interesting topic to talk about today. Obviously, the market is in a massive, massive run. WP 3 space is growing. So is Web 3 gaming. And if if if we see that kind of growth, we almost never think about infrastructure. We never think about what's going on in the background. We mostly think about the games. We think about are they fun to play, but we don't think about security. We don't think about data.

Legendary 00:03:11 We don't think about the technical infrastructure and the frameworks. That happen behind the scenes. And this is exactly what we want to highlight in, today's space while not games themselves both of the projects that we wanna talk about today are contributing to growth in in 2 very, very different ways.

Legendary 00:03:30 On the one hand with a very holistic security framework and on the other hand, with analytics and, data accessibility, And I think that's a very, very relevant conversation to have, and I'm very happy that we can have it today with helbon security on the one hand with click on the other hand as well as with, our content creators with Yellow Panther, with Eliza, and with Sanjay and with, Mauritz joining me from the ZT X side today. With that out of the way.

Legendary 00:04:08 More, it's welcome to the stage, how you're doing, how you're feeling about the market.

Moritz 00:04:14 Yeah. GM, Jim. I'm, of course, feeling good about the market. I mean, the the market overall looks pretty decent. And, also, I think, like, a lot of the audience, it's also, like, heavily into both the gaming. And, yeah, if you look at the market there, it's it also looks very good. And, yeah, I'm very excited for the topic today. I think infrastructure and security might not be the most interested, interesting topic but I think it's definitely one of the more important topics in the 3. Yeah, and I'm excited to to learn a bit more myself because security is definitely not my field of expertise.

Legendary 00:04:54 Yeah. Very, very much agree. I think this will be a very educational space, for all of us. Scott, welcome to the stage from Halborne's side. How are you doing? How are you feeling about the market? Is it hard to focus when all numbers are going up?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:05:10 1st, thank you so much for having Halborn here today and myself. Really appreciate the work that you're doing in the gaming space. And you know what? I've been in the space since roughly 2013. Building infrastructure since 2017. So I I enjoyed these, these up and downs in the ecosystem. You know, when we're down, it's a great time to have your head also down focusing on what you're building. And hopefully, it's a great game that's gonna draw mass adoption into the space. But, yeah, it's nice to hear the ecosystem outside of the core builders and developers and players talking about pricing going up.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:05:48 So we'll see what happens in the in the next bull run.

Legendary 00:05:52 Love. Love. Love to hear that Lisa, welcome to the stage. How are you feeling? Are you still traveling?

Elisa 00:05:59 Hi, guys. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here. Funnily enough, we actually mentioned, stuff about security in the space I was just in right now, So it seems like it's a topic a lot of people are thinking about. And yeah, I'm I'm in Japan right now, so still in Asia and coming back to Europe next week, and it's gonna be pretty crazy. I have like a mint during my flight, so Yeah. This war on is insane. Like, it's just nonstop, but yeah. Hope you guys are all doing well.

Legendary 00:06:31 I love love to hear that. Are you prepared for potential delays on your flight for the mint? Do you have a backup plan for that?

Elisa 00:06:39 So I'm, yeah, I'm pretty scared, to be honest. So my plan is to get, like, the most expensive wifi plan of the flight and I just have to pray that nothing goes wrong. I maybe need a backup plan where I maybe ask, like, yellow Panther to I don't know how to do it, though. Like, I give him my seed phrase, I guess, and humans for me. I don't know. But Yeah.

Legendary 00:06:59 It's I don't know. Love it. Quick side note on that. I once did a mint when I was in a spa, and what happened is a blackout, and I wasn't worried about blackout. The only thing that really worried me at the moment was, do I still have internet? Can I still mint? I don't worry about the apocalypse. But the mint was the focus, and it did work out. What about UEL Panther? Did did you have any in flight mint experiences so far and how you're doing. I don't know if it's just me, but I can't hear yellow.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:07:36 Is it just me? And I think that is answer.

Elisa 00:07:40 I can't hear him either.

Legendary 00:07:42 Gotcha. Maybe you wanna drop off stage and and join us again, and then we'll have another try. In the meantime, Sanjay, welcome to the stage. What about you? Did you have in flight mints, or is it something on your on your wish list?

Sanjay 00:07:56 It's I don't know if that's on my wish list, to be honest. I mean, I prefer, you know, my very stable connection at home. I can't, like, I guess, first world problems, I can't imagine, like, not having really good internet on my fingertips. So I'm happy just minting from my bedroom to be so much. I mean, I I prefer going on my computer, so I'm connected with the ethernet cable rather than the Wi Fi because I do not wanna miss any chance of minting anything in this market.

Legendary 00:08:22 Love to hear that. Love to hear the excitement. With that out of the way, let's let's type actually into today's topic. And I wanna do it. Let's see if we can get yellow up on stage with us and maybe check with him quickly. Yellow, can you hear us? Can we hear you? Just checking again. Hello. Wonderful.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:08:47 So sorry. I just wanna say, wow, Elijah, trust me so much. I'm so touched. No one ever said Okay. I'll give y p my seed phrase. No one said no one ever, but, yeah, I I I did not have, those kind of rush men issue. And stuff like that, luckily, but I'm just so happy to be here. I'm ready to learn about infrastructure and security.

Legendary 00:09:13 Love it. And I also love the trust in giving away the seed phrase. I think that is the most trustful, almost most romantic thing someone could say in web 3 possibly. With with that out of the way, I think I wanna do things a bit differently today. Typically, what we don't do or what I personally don't like doing is necessarily have an intro, have an intro around. But I think as with with Halborne and with that more technical side of things, and again, it is an infrastructure topic is maybe a bit more on the technical side of things.

Legendary 00:09:47 It would be super helpful, Scott, to understand from your side what it actually is that that Halbon is doing Obviously, when you go to the website and you look at the services, you see security advisory as a service, you see advanced penetration testing, smart contract audit, devops, plus automation and very, very impressive list of partnerships, but it would be very helpful, to just hear from you a bit of an intro what it actually is that Halburn does.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:10:18 Sure. Completely understand. You know, I find in conversations, one of the first questions. I ask other companies and people in the space. So you've heard of Halborne. Great. I really I I love that that our our team is getting brand awareness out there. But tell me, like, what do you actually know about Halborne? And a lot of people say, oh, you guys do smart contract audits. I was like, well, yeah, you you are right, but that's a fraction of what we do here at Halborne. So to give you a little context, Halborne's been around since roughly 2017.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:10:51 We've really come from the understanding that web 2 infrastructure still exists and web 3 integrates with web 2. So the things we like to focus on for the ecosystem at large are very traditional requirements of breaking down architecture security, risk assessments, getting into cloud security audits, thinking about that design phase in the early stage project of, you know, your cloud configuration. Let's get into your physical network segmentation. Maybe you need some like DevOps, team members, and we can offload that for you.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:11:31 Of course, we do smart contract auditing. But we get into infrastructure audits. We get deep into the CIC pipeline. We get into web app, mobile app, layer 1. We do layer 1 pen testing. We get into specific languages, whether it's polygons, ZK sync, Ethereum. We we do it all. One thing I like to frame ourselves as, we are very preventative group. We are not there. Like, you get hacked. You may need some type of instant response. We're the ones that wanna prevent that from happening in the first place.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:12:11 So we work with groups all the way from very native web 3, all the way to large enterprise and that could be, you know, a unisewap all the way to a circle or a grayscale or a even like a BNY. Right? But for this sake, we'll talk about a lot of the gaming, companies and ecosystems and what they're really focusing on and how we could best protect So that's a thirty thousand foot overview of how we sort of frame things, in that, like, very holistic approach I hope that answers the questions.

Legendary 00:12:45 That that that is that is super helpful.

Legendary 00:12:47 And as you said, let's dive a bit deeper and let's focus also on the gaming side of things because I feel like the majority of exploits that make the headlines are on protocol level, are on they do make the headlines when suddenly a couple 100 mil are gone, especially when it comes to locals that either have large treasuries or just a bridging protocols But if we specifically focus on web 3 gaming and web 3 games, how or where do, web 3 games become a target for malicious actors, what what are some of the dangers or risks that you see there?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:13:28 Oh, man. That's a a great question. You know, games are really you unique, right, because games are collecting and storing so much different information that really needs to be protected. So if you think about, from name, email, country, username, age, languages, you know, gender, purchase information, passwords, friendless, personal interests.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:13:56 These are all things games, whether, you know, a gaming a specific gaming device or a gaming activity that they're relating to from your rankings, your chat applications, your, data about your contact, These are all areas which need to be thought about. And so if you break down the type of platforms that people are looking to protect. You can think about game 5. You can think about online gaming, the mobile and app store game. You think about the all the different NFT and metaverse games that exists. Within those, you have to look at the payment and escrow services.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:14:35 You have to look at the client side and the council based apps or even like the MMO ecosystems or the play to earn and play to play to play, what's like play to earn, play to earn, and play to play. In these aspects, infrastructure is a key part of that. How we protect that. We're looking at the basic logic of the business hacking that's taking place. You could look at the, custody risk assessments. You could think about the anti cheat and anti bot bypass that are being put into the games.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:15:14 Of course, smart contracts are a very key part of this. Even people preparing for the VR AR of the metaverse hacks. Right? You we could get into the cloud shards and, hyper version testing and tests that are taking place right now and some of the firmware assessments within the hardware, if that is applicable, Gotcha.

Legendary 00:15:37 Let's let's try to get a bit more as a as a follow-up question into into the detail of how such a, security process or working together with a company like Halborn that focuses on the holistic, security approach would work. So I say I'm a web 2 game studio. I enter the web Three space. I wanna come up with my own mobile game. I wanna come up, like, so many other games with my own token, and I just wanna onboard the web 3 community to my mobile game.

Legendary 00:16:10 What are some of the touch points aside from smart contract audits where basically you would fulfill that need for security and what you mentioned quite a few things. You mentioned anti cheating systems and many, many more. So in, in this case, you have this new game, this, this web to gaming studio building a new web 3 mobile game. They did the smart contract audit. What would, like, some other concrete things be that you'd work on with to secure not only the users, but also the infrastructure that the game is building.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:16:48 Yeah. So, a step by process would look something like, we would kick things off with some initiation after, you know, doing some advisory work, talking back forth with them seeing what their goals were. In that, we would be putting together different technical reviews. We would understand the key project and initiatives that they want to accomplish, put together what tech stack that they're working with, understand that process, and then are architect and road map that out. From there, we would get into some type of security and risk assessment.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:17:22 After that point, we get into our security service roadmap consensus that we all agree upon. Then it goes into continuous and ongoing improvement. We would be taking a look at the web app. We would be doing mobile pen testing. We would get into the game logic testing We would then look at the cloud auditing and configuration aspects from there, depending on the game itself. And I'm sure they will have some type of payment gateway or micro transactions. We would then do some type of micro transaction audit.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:17:54 We would get into their cloud flare configurations because that's a huge contentious point of, some type of, DDoS attacks that have been taking place recently. You know, then if it's something in the metaverse or some type of NFT contract, we would get into some type of audit with the NFTs. And we'll have our team on standby at all times. Some type of dev security ops or scam detection put in place. The great thing is working with how born you're going to have your customer support in place at all times. You have a dedicated account manager.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:18:28 You'll have your assigned to security engineer specialists you'll get your project management dashboard to integrate with. Then we have our communications and client approvals to go back and forth. So one of the things that we really pride ourselves on is we just don't dump our findings at the very end. It's a constant communication and back and forth with updates, fixes, updates, fixes. And then at the very end, if you wanted to make the report public, we can do so, or we keep it private, you know, it's, to the company to the company's liking.

Legendary 00:19:08 Gotcha. That that that makes a lot of sense. And let's maybe is maybe flip the script a bit on on the follow-up question. I saw you had a post on x, a gaming security challenge asking what is has basically the most critical impact on the user side of things is that clicking unverified links in the game chat, downloading free versions of paid games from unverified sources, downloading game extension packs from unverified sources and using public wifi when transactions are involved. The answer was, the downloading of free versions of paid games from unverified sources.

Legendary 00:19:46 And I think That's also something that we've seen, in web 3 as well. Not necessarily with free versions of paid games, but I also remember personally that I've been targeted by, a fake game studio wanted to partner with me as a content creator And they said, look. We want you to do a play test, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And here's the and I think I'm can also speak for some of the other creators on stage, and I'm certainly not the only person that's received messages like that. Here's the game demo, download the game, and test it and then do your video, whatever on that.

Legendary 00:20:25 And with, obviously, the target, being to, to get access to my wallets by doing that to get access or control of the computer that I'd be downloading the game on is this a, Scott and and attack vector that you see becoming more common as well, the popularity of web 3 game games increases and be how can users, you know, whether it's content creators who gamers protect themselves against attacks like that?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:20:58 Oh, man. That that's a great question. So let me let me break this down in in two ways. 1, internal to companies, we offer security awareness training and also social engineering readiness. This really falls under our social engineering readiness, and I I really wish people would take just a little bit more time to, you know, trust, but verify. Right? That is a poor ethos to this whole entire ecosystem, right, trust, but verify.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:21:33 So when you're excited about a game or someone's trying to partner with you, do as much as you can to verify the links, looking back at you, if if it's like https, seeing who you who sent it to you. And you know, triple verifying because it is fishing is a very, very, very, very, very common, but successful method of attack from the gaming ecosystem, from the traditional Web 3 ecosystem that even well, well known investors today have been fallen to phishing attacks and, you know, wallet trainers.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:22:09 So, yeah, it's it's always good to take that extra step of verification to make sure if someone's approaching you, you don't know them at first. If you can maybe you know, qualify them by mutual connection or asking companies that they've worked with and qualifying them. You know, some of the best people in the space have fallen prey to hacks like that, unfortunately.

Legendary 00:22:37 Absolutely. You're a 100, 100% right on that. And we'd also love to hear from, our creators, yeah, I'm gonna throw it to you first. How do you go about basically vetting a new project where you maybe are not aware of the company that's behind it? What does your process as a creator look like? Keeping in mind that, obviously, when you share that, you have a big audience, and there will be people going to the profiles and to the website. So how do you go about analyzing a new project?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:23:06 You know, I feel very fortunate for the projects that we do work with. We try to always do our best work. We try to give the best customer support. We look at teams that we work with. We think about this space in longevity. Yeah. You know, it's not just quick money. We wanna be there for the long haul. And in doing so, in treating every company that we work with, like family and partners, we get a lot of referrals. And the referrals come through a trusted source which is very much appreciated. If not, if it's something new coming through the pipeline, you know, we do our we do our own diligence.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 00:23:46 We look at the founders. We look at you know, what they've done before. You know, we're having conversations with them on Zoom and or in person. So we're we're vetting these projects you know, as best that we can. And sometimes we can be quite selective on the groups that we work with. Just, you know, If you're looking for a quick audit or stamp of approval, we're probably not the best auditor or security team for you.

Legendary 00:24:13 Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. And I would also like to hear from, our content creators on stage how they go about, you know, looking at new games, looking at new projects. Yellow Panther, maybe you could you could answer that first. If you see a new game, that hasn't been on your radar before from a team that you don't really know how you go about finding out more about the company or that that team before you share it with your audience?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:24:42 Yeah. I think, I think legendary, you actually gave a really good, social, I I forgot what's the what's the word about, like, a social hack. I I got that once, like, I think, like, unfortunately, like, 2 years ago or something, but it was exactly how he described it. So from then, I actually learned and talked to a lot of people and learn from my experience from it. And I think the first thing when I get a DM or a email, I will actually check the social first and whoever my mutual is following or not.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:25:17 The biggest red flag is always, seeing seeing a game and no one's following it. That's the biggest one. So and the second mid red flag, is actually lesser people following it, like ten people or so. That is also something that you need to be aware of. It might be something new or it might just be, outside of your, know, your bubble, and stuff like that. Because some games, like, for example, Japanese games and stuff like that, they actually have a really tight bubble. And only people that are in Japan in Japan knows about it and stuff like that.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:25:53 And the 2nd most reliable is actually I trust my friends. Like, I will trust I will cross check with, Sanjay, Eliza, Raven, and other creator fan. We have a group, and we will ask questions, we won't just, like, go ahead and I'll say, okay. Okay. Just give you a link and download. Let's work No. No. It's actually a longer and more tedious process because, we all know how dangerous web tree is. Right? And I think what, hellborne and, you know, ZT X, this partnership is actually very meaningful because Z ZT X is, like, from Zepetto, right, And even myself, I played the Zapato game, and they had, like, so many users.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:26:33 I partnered with some of the Zapato creators, and they have so much followers. Right? And these creators might not have, the knowledge about, you know, how to protect themselves. And I think this partnership will help more, web 2 gamers, that are onboarding and coming into web tree, you know, we we'll do them a very big favor and protecting them to, a lot of sources and vulnerabilities that they do not know about.

Legendary 00:27:04 Love the answer and also love that you brought up. Having a look at the at the mutual followers, I think that's a very, very helpful thing to do on x. Obviously, it's not as you said, it's not a full due diligence process, but it can be, very helpful to get, like, a first indication of some level of trustworthiness. Eliza, have you been targeted before, in in the way that I or Yellow Panther have been describing just before. And also the same question to you, how do you look at a new project that you're not that familiar with?

Elisa 00:27:40 Yeah. I've I've had loads of times where I could have messed up. I think one of the biggest ones is like fishing links. I also it's not so much like when downloading a game, but this school service, in my experience, have been, like, extremely, risky. Like, I was once managing a server and we were, at level 3. If you know, this call, you know, that at level 3, you have custom invite link. And we lost we lost the level 3 for, like, I don't know, a couple hours.

Elisa 00:28:13 And someone basically sniped the link, and had whipped up like a whole new server that was identical, except they basically added a collab land to it. So For those of you who don't know what that is, you link your wallet and it was a trainer. And luckily, no one in the community, got hurt because they noticed straight away and, and, you know, people in in web 3, are quite savvy with that, but yeah, really, really scary stuff.

Elisa 00:28:43 Like, you always need to watch your back and you always need to double check, triple check, and to be honest, I I feel like I I should almost be more cautious. I don't download any games unless I've met the team, like, on call or yellow panther, Sanjay, or any of my really close creative friends recommend it and say it's all fine and I triple check the link. But yeah, security is always on my mind. Like, even the other day, I hosted, like, kind of like a crypto 101 session with my community, and I showed them how to make a safe, which is like a multi sig.

Elisa 00:29:22 And yeah, always trying to think, like, you know, what, what can I share that I know to my community and I'm not I'm not even that savvy, right? Like I, I could know more and I could be more careful, and yeah, the my community actually shared, like, a few things with me, like, what is it called? Revoke dot cash. Please again, triple check the the URL, but yeah, revoke Door Cash and it basically revokes, like, all of your, previously signed I guess, like, connected websites. It's beyond connected websites.

Legendary 00:29:57 It's like All the allowances for tokens or NFTs that you might have given out to a malicious smart contract. Exactly. You can revoke them with tools like revoke dot cash, and either scan itself also has a functionality to do that and the super, super helpful to actually and sorry for for cutting you off, but such a valuable point that you're making for checking just the allowances that you've given out to contracts because even if it's not a malicious contract, but say you're trading, I don't know, say, a trading Ape coin for ETH, and you can give out a limited allowance for a 100 Ape that you wanna trade into ETH.

Legendary 00:30:35 Or you can give it an unlimited allowance for an unlimited amount of aid that you allow, a debt to trade on your behalf. And if that gets hacked and you have the unlimited allowance open, all your AP or all your NFTs, whatever the allowance is, might potentially be at risk by doing that. So that is a very, very valuable point. And also, another another thing that you implied essentially is just ask questions Like, you don't need to know everything yourself, and there's no stupid question when it comes to security. Just talk to people and and get a second or a third opinion. I had the very same thing, by the way, to happen to me with, the Discord.

Legendary 00:31:14 I had, a couple of invite links that once they were used that they got sniped and exactly the same story, fake collab land bought, fishing for or not fishing or just trying to get access to to the NFTs of users connecting with it. But, again, same outcome as, with you, someone was savvy. To see that because I didn't even see that fake disc whatsoever within 5 minutes, and we got it resolved pretty, pretty quickly. And nobody got hurt.

Legendary 00:31:44 What I wanna do now is introduce, actually, take a quick break from the security talk and introduce our second guest click I said it at the beginning of the show, we're gonna do things a bit different and differently because we talk about infrastructure and security and not everyone might be that familiar with what's going on in the background and click, a, welcome to the stage who is joining from the team. And b, if I go to your website, I see identity articles connecting web 2 and web 3, prove any data that you own in web 2 to a third party and bring it on chain while preserving privacy.

Legendary 00:32:24 Can you explain what click does exactly and give a quick intro on the company.

Clique 00:32:30 Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. And great to see some friends here as well. How's it going YP? Once again. But, yeah, click at its core. We were really focused on building out chain reputation, and making, you know, connecting users' data, right, that that is totally siloed in web 2, allowing them take ownership of that and then helping them find use cases for that in web 3. Right? So a good example of that is in gaming. We've been working very closely with Ronin. And soon also working with Arbitstrom as well to essentially help users prove their gaming history.

Clique 00:33:05 So things like, how many hours you spent on Steve and specific genres, how many way in order favorite games, how much money you spent to instant seasonality, things like that. Obviously, when it comes to user data, right, you were taking this data from the user privacy really big element. So, you know, we're backed by a team of great researchers from, you know, Cornell, Princeton, so on and so forth. And what we do is we use different cryptographic tools I won't go too deeply into it. But, essentially, when your data is being proved through clicks or oracles, neither are or the the place that the data ends up on, whether that's on chain at the ID, is none of your private data is is actually revealed to us.

Clique 00:33:45 Right? So there's only that proof that's generated in secure environment. So let's say more than 1000 hours of steam steam games played in RPG games, not your steam ID, your IP address, your age, your location. It's all fully protected. It's black box. It's not visible to anything other than your front end. And that's something that we really pride ourselves on as well.

Legendary 00:34:04 Gotcha. So it is it is a 0 knowledge proof. I am not disclosing if I want to prove that I have, I don't know, a 1000 hours you said, spent in Fortnite. I'm not sharing publicly nor on chain, my username, my my steam account, whatever it is, but I just, as with any other kind of of sero knowledge proof, I can bring on to improve to whatever the statement is that I want proof, but I'm not disclosing the data, my data behind that.

Clique 00:34:33 Is that correct? Yes. Exactly. And so, when you generate a 0 knowledge proof, the environment itself usually still has to handle some of that data. Right? And so what we've done is we've created, you know, we're using trusted execution environments, with from SGX, you're essentially able to create this environment where the proof can still happen without, the without the environment actually seeing any of your as well so that there's there's no risk. Right? It's fully compliant. You're really only getting that proof on change to to prove that. Let's say you are a real gamer to a game.

Legendary 00:35:06 Gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. Before I go to my follow-up question yellow, I see you with your hand up.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:35:12 Go for it. Yeah. I just wanted to say, I actually met Jaden, since the pair. I think it was June or July, last year, 2022. Right? Like, this guy is, like, a definition of a builder. Like, you know, when when I first saw him, he was explaining all these things. Right? I had zero clue. I just pretended. I understand, but Nope. I have no idea what he's talking about, but, you know, as as Tango, I I started to understand better. And now it's just so good to see them working with Ronin and other, blockchains and, you know, ultimately for a web tree gaming. So I'm just super happy.

Clique 00:35:47 I just wanted to share that. Love. Love. Yeah. We've been here a minute, YV.

Legendary 00:35:53 Love love to hear that. Sanjay, I wanna I wanna throw it to you because I, also as a gamer myself, I found found that super, super interesting, hearing that I can take all of my quote, quote unquote, track record, my play history, my game time, and bring that on chain, without obviously disclosing who I am and without having to disclose what my usernames on other gaming platforms have been so far. How how do you feel about that as a, as a content creator as a game or yourself?

Legendary 00:36:26 Is it something you could see web 3 games, using, those those kind of data points maybe for achievements maybe to create different onboarding experiences depending on, basically, the skills or the play history, of the gamers. So just to learn more about the ecosystem, I found it super fascinating, but would love to hear from, your side as well.

Sanjay 00:36:52 Yeah. I think it's I think it's great, not just for not just for the players, you know, like, to have their have their statistics on chain and proved and, you know, like, not alter it, but also for, like, other games and other, other ecosystems who might wanna be working with Clay or might wanna be working with the infrastructures, like these.

Sanjay 00:37:14 Let's say for a game is looking for, you know, specific type of audience or specific type of gamers, would they wanna cater towards they can come to something, somebody like Click or like, you know, these infrastructures, and they can target those gamers directly rather than, you know, throwing a dart in the in the dark, dark is in the dark. Okay. Yeah. Trowing a dart in the dark, and it's like, you know, not not sure where it's gonna hit. Not sure which camera is gonna, like, you know, like, know about it or which game are there, kinda like targeting.

Sanjay 00:37:44 So I feel like this is not only going to solve, like, just gaming issues, but it's also going to solve a lot of, like, marketing issues and, you know, like, us, marketing budgets. You can, you can allocate the budget more accurately. Sorry. My brain is just like going all over the place thinking about how this could be used. So I think there's, like, so many options here to be, export. And, in my opinion, I think this is a huge for any game who would wanna work with such infrastructures.

Legendary 00:38:11 Yeah, man. Absolutely love to hear that. And I also I've been while while you were speaking, I've been thinking, about beta testing. If you're looking for beta test is for your game, and you want them to have a certain level of experience that would be, a very, very good way to go about it I wanna I wanna follow-up with you. Was it was it Jaden from Click?

Clique 00:38:32 Just to have the name right?

Legendary 00:38:33 Yeah. Jaden. Wonderful. Wanna follow-up with you. Is that something when you work with, with companies, games, the protocols, Is it something that always happens, like, on a game level that they have a specific request in terms of data that they want to access or on a protocol level? Or are you also thinking about basically having those on chain game profiles for lack of a better name that you want to create to be publicly accessible. I would love to hear more about, how how that works in reality for you guys.

Clique 00:39:07 Yeah. That's a great question. And so the approach that we take here at Clique, when it comes to building is is really to be customer centric. Right? I mean, I can go give a long spiel about, you know, building things that are not scalable entrepreneurship, but basically, the idea is we really take the time to talk to all of our partners and get, you know, down and dirty into what they really need. We before we built the gaming pipelines, we interviewed over 200 games to figure out what are the datasets that are mostly applicable so there's there's two points here. Right? Every game is gonna have their own specific needs. Right? If you're building an RPG game, you wanna know who are the top players in in in, like, World of Warcraft example, right, if you're building a mobile, you wanna know who are the top players in Delta too.

Clique 00:39:46 But what we find after, you know, all those interviews is that, at least at the ecosystem level, there is a benefit, to having a base on on changes in profile. Right? So how many hours you spend in specific genres? That's helpful for every game on the ecosystem. So we work closely with the ecosystem to get that basic dataset on chain first. Afterwards then, we work very closely in partnership with the games themselves to create value for their own specific games. Right? And and and this, if you think about it from, you know, serving the users better, it makes a lot of sense. Right? As a user, I I have my basic profile, I can already be targeted by by different games for air drop campaigns or work campaigns, access to early beta. Right?

Clique 00:40:23 Once I'm in that ecosystem, then these games want to retain you. They wanna engage you. They wanna give you better, better, like, personalized UX. Right? That's also something we're working with. Running on very closely. You wanna start to build out your reputation in that ecosystem and in that game. That's when you want to start proving different things about yourself, more in-depth from specific chain data sources and also tying that back together with on chain data sources. Right? So, for example, you are a pro player in DOTA 2, then you come to a mobile in web 3 and you have a lot of really good on transaction, a lot of anti behavior, you don't dump.

Clique 00:40:54 We want all of these things to build out, to contribute to your LTV towards the user so that the games know that they want to retain you and they put in the effort to to to take care of you. Right?

Legendary 00:41:05 Yeah. I love I love to hear it, and I love, also that you you mentioned Adrop campaigns, use a segmentation to find out what kind of users have, what kind of experience. And that reminds me of, what Bitcoin has been doing with the Bitcoin Passport. Obviously, if you are protocol, if you're a game, And you you want to know who of your users are actually real users who are Sibyl's trying to farm a game of specific airdrop.

Legendary 00:41:32 And, they've introduced, the GitC cipation in in in Dallas or dollar protocols like Snapshot, ETH Transactions, etcetera. And, basically, they apply 89 and more than that criteria to, assign a score to that and find out how you is this wallet attached to a real human user, or is it not? And the same very much goes for for the gaming side of things.

Legendary 00:42:02 If you want to, target specific gamers, specifically active gamers, you want to have that that kind of proof and the kind of track record to be able to determine that.

Clique 00:42:15 Yeah. In fact, the kind of reason we started building in gaming, and I think I told this story to Yellow Panther before as well is I actually, like, I'm a lifelong gamer. I used to be one of the top 50 players, for auto, like, TFT here in in Singapore. So I'm a huge fan of auto battles. Right? And I see all these auto battle games building in web 3. And I want to, like, I want to be a part of their community. Right? I want to contribute. I wanna say like, hey, you know, I think the semi pro players or the competitive players who wanna see these things in your game loop. But I can't prove it to them when I'm in the Discord. Right? I don't have the time to be, let's say, farming away hours chatting with people in the Discord to prove my reputation. And so I was like, hey.

Clique 00:42:53 If we could push these credentials on chain, and we partner. And so we have partnered with with Guild, actually, where now for polygons official discord, if you have different sessions from us. You actually get a role automatically assigned to you, a gamer role, RPG player role, things like that, that allow these games to better NFIU, and and it helps them, you know, really build that community up from the grassroots from the onset, which is something that we're really, really looking to push for. Gaming is very nascent compared to, let's say, defi or on chain governance. And we want to apply those similar principles here as well.

Legendary 00:43:27 Yeah. Love love love to hear that. And then also goes just beyond the game, right, it goes, across games because you mentioned auto broilers, hero broilers, you have something like, like, battle plan by pixel vault, 3 versus 3 auto broiler, and they basically will have, a soul bound token that kinda keeps, track of your performance in the game of your skill set in the game. But in an ideal world, you'd want that to be available. Obviously, beyond that game, you want that, to be available universally, no matter on what blockchain or on what game or instead of which gaming ecosystem you're navigating.

Legendary 00:44:08 What I wanna do is to also welcome Lewis to the stage. Lewis is a web 3 security researcher and also an engineer at Halbourne. I saved some of the more technical questions that I would love to ask, Luis, to you. We've been speaking in at the beginning of the show more about the security side of things.

Legendary 00:44:32 We've been speaking about, the different areas that that the hell born covers when it comes to, a holistic security concept, speaking about how we can protect users, some of the biggest pitfalls But I would like to flip that question back again basically to, to web 3 games. There's so many new teams entering the space, building in this space who might be familiar with building again, but maybe might not be as familiar with with operating in web 3.

Legendary 00:45:02 And what would you say are some of the mistakes that you see, founders, teams building in web 3, whether it's web 3 or web 3 gaming specifically. What are some of the mistakes that you see those team make the most most frequently. Welcome to the stage.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:45:20 Hello. Nice. Happy to be here. Well, actually, if we try to identify what are the common vulnerabilities that affect, web tree games, it's a mix between bulnerabilities that already exist on, let's say, all the school games, web 2 games, for example, and also some new kind of attacks that affected specifically to work today. So, let me give you some examples. We have the typical issue with input validation.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:45:50 So we have to consider that a player, if the player introduced an input like the direction, speed, or whatever, this input needs to be validated on all that instances. In a all school game, we have the client, we have the server. But now in web 3 games, we have another, important actor is the blockchain. So, what happens if you validate, an input on the client and on the server?

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:46:24 So an attacker can go dearly to the to the smart contract on the blockchain and try to do an unauthorized, action directly there. So in this case, for example, you see that you have a more complex, environment, so you need to to make sure that you have to protect the input to validate the input in every one of those instances. And this example I gave you, that attackers interacting directly with the smart contract is a typical example of what, it's a common mistake on our web tree games. Another another kind of of vulnerability that appears a lot.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:47:03 It's, vulnerability re related to signature replay in web field authentication. What I mean? Many many, depths, including web field names, of course, use a web authentication that basically it's you have your wallet, on your browser, for example, you have to sign a messages, a message. And if you are able to sign that message correctly, the the game validates your identity and let you inside the game. So what happens, at at first sight, it's insecure.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:47:44 But what happened? We here, we have 2 drawbacks. The first one is what happens is the message that appears in the in the game, it's always the same. For example, that a message is welcome to Acme game. So the signature you create signing that message is always going to be the same. And what happens if, let's say, another application use the same message. You, player, sign the message most of the time. You, even don't don't see the message, you sign that message.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:48:24 And this signature that was captured by a by another party can be reduced in the game. I'll hang over because that party will be able to impersonate you of course, have access to all your your assets. So that's, something to to be to be careful with. And the other thing, this kind of messages, even can be worse because if you fix the message, let me explain that.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:49:00 The server give to the to the player to sign a a specific message, a message. But what happened if the user is able to change the message? So that could also be, something to be, careful about when dealing with web authentication. And finally, well, something that is very typical, it's game logic vulnerabilities and access control. And this is typical for web 2 or web 3 and other kind of of of games. And what happens?

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:49:33 Let's imagine that you have a list of assets that belong to you as a layer, those assets are identified with IDs, in data came. But if you don't protect or you don't validate that those IDs belongs to the player, someone else can modify, his or her request and instead of using, their own IDs, they can change for another IDs. And this is a very, very common, vulnerability.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:50:08 So I a new player that has only, very weak sword as repo. I can change my ID for another ID and I can start guessing different IDs, for example, and I can have access to stronger weapons. And of course, those weapons, those assets are part of, the the in game economy. So in that in that kind of scenarios, a malicious player can, break into the in game economies of the game.

Legendary 00:50:43 Gotcha. So you you basically address 2 things, and I wanna break it you, on the one hand, spoke about, the signature. On the other hand, you spoke about, game logic and game logic testing. And I think the the the example with sword is a very good one. And taking taking that even further, you said that's a risk that can affect game economies. So for example, say we have a game, say we have just making something up. We have an MMO, and there's 10 different tiers of I don't know. Well, let's let's maybe let's maybe stay with big time with big time as an MMO that I know.

Legendary 00:51:20 And in big time, you can craft items, and there's multiple levels of forges, for example, that you can have to craft items with very rare forges, obviously, being better crafting things.

Legendary 00:51:31 So you're saying with the game logic, testing or with the with with the game lodging risk, what someone could do is pretend to have one of the rarest forges in the game and then basically craft a massive, massive amount of rare weapons, sell them at the market, create an inflation for those specific items or if there's an asset that, I don't know, boosts your stake in rate for a specific token, simulate or pretend that they have those.

Legendary 00:52:02 And by having that tight connection to the in game economy, because we're talking about either tokens or NFTs that could actually pose a significant risk to the game economy. Is that an accurate summary?

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:52:16 Yeah. Exactly. And not only, trying to impersonate other, payers asset, but also to destroy asset from other players. It also has happened, in the past.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:52:28 So, as long as the player have access to operate, to modify other players' assets, it have a direct impact on in game economies as, for the consequence you mentioned, you can create inflation, you can, create more demand or or more offer of certain assets, you can have, let's say, a black market of assets and, and it also, impacts the the aim economy.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:53:04 So that's why it's so important, to try to test all those edges on the game and also consider, what seems low likelihood scenarios because if they are low likelihood, of course, but also possible. So it's part of the things, that need to be tested on again.

Legendary 00:53:27 Yeah. Especially if we're talking about, low likelihood scenarios that can have a very, very significant impact. We've also been been speaking about basically user protection security before how we can protect ourselves from, fishing attempts and other kind of impersonations. And you mentioned, apart from the game logic, you also mentioned, the the signatures that it can be, abused. It can be faked.

Legendary 00:53:56 And I have a very, very specific question on that, which maybe goes a bit away from gaming, but goes more into, like, a general good practice while navigating web 3, because we talked about, Eliisa mentioned revoke dot cash to revoke, allowing allows that we gave up for smart contracts. And, the question that I have is if you use a wallet that not MetaMask. So you use don't wanna name it. And the names just say use another wallet that has, transaction simulation.

Legendary 00:54:29 Transaction simulation simulation is feature that just explaining that because some people might not be aware of that, is a is a feature in a while at the basically shows you the expected outcome of a transaction. So say you are on a malicious website and you think you're claiming an ad drop, which is a very, very typical scam that's happening while in essence, you are, giving access to, I don't know, to you, Azuki elementals, and the attacker can then, steal those those NFTs from you.

Legendary 00:55:02 And what transaction simulation does in those wallets is it shows you the outcome of the transaction that you're about to sign. So say, again, you're thinking you claim an ad hoc, but then transaction simulation shows you wait you're actually allowing someone to take away your Azuki elemental, and then you would kind of clock that. This is not a transaction that you want to sign. You are on a malicious web side. Long story, I think the context was was needed for that.

Legendary 00:55:29 My question is, is transaction simulation, a feature that also can be, for lack of a better work, like bypass, abuse in any way, or is it something that I, as a use in web 3, can rely on and be like, nope, if the transaction simulation says the transaction is good to go. I'm protected, or should I also be careful in that case? Because it can be abused to manipulate it in any way.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:55:59 Yeah. In security, there is a concept that it's called, layers of security. So in that sense, transaction simulation, it's one of the layer of security because obviously, it helps you to understand if you're in a fake, page that tries to steal your your these or or or try to send your your assets to to, malicious and others. But what happens? Let's remember that this wallet, it's a piece of software.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:56:33 And as a concept, a piece of software can be tampered, can be, even, what happens This is very it's very typical. It has happened with a wallet. It has happened also with games. Appears on a on a Twitter, or a web page, that's the current, there is a new version of the wallet of the game. With new features that are, let's say, better or only for a close group of, testers.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:57:09 So, a user, a player, very eager to try these new features. What happens? They go to the the the original, the the real web page, they don't find this new version. They switched to the this webpage or this, Twitter thread that appears a link to download the latest version with those features. So they download and the wallet, they don't know the game.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:57:40 And what happens seems to be seems to be the real, software but it has already been injected with formal issues, code. So in that case, for example, even with that Fisher, this can be bypassed or worse. It can be blacklisted or blacklist zone sites. So imagine you use your your wallet, with this feature and everything looks to seem legit and okay.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:58:15 But when you when you when you use this wallet to another, let's say, while listed malicious web pages, that, the wallet, the start start, that doesn't work as expected. So that kind of attacks happens. Let me, talk about any scenario. Some years ago, you remember there was a fever with Pokemon Gold. So what happened?

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:58:47 Pokemon Go, had many features, but basically, they, need that you walk around the workaround to find the the Pokemon. So what's interesting is that so verb documents appear on some parts that maybe are far from your phone. So you need to work that that's the idea of the game. But some players, didn't want to to walk too much. They they just wanted to go to a mountain to a lake to find rare Pokemon.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 00:59:21 So appear in the in the web page, a version of Pokemon Go that has some way to control how do you move your your your avatar instead of moving by walking, you you you can just, move the avatar with some buttons in the game. So what happened? Yeah. Of course, you were able to to to move your avatar around the world, and find the various, the the various Pokemon, in the world. But what it was the drawback here that was version of Pokemon Go was infected.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:00:00 You were able to catch more Pokemon but, attacker weren't able to catch your your data. And that's something to be careful of. It happened as a I mentioned with game, it happens with software with new features. So trying to summarize the question is, it's a very, very useful, Fisher. Yes. Definitely it is, but it's not it's not, that's super valid because it doesn't exist in security. It's one of the layer of security. And, obviously, just talking about that signature. The signature is not a transaction per se.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:00:37 So it's a it I mean, it doesn't go to the blockchain. It's just a cryptographic operation. So, in that case, for example, this feature, are not going to touch, in case you go to a to a malicious website. So Yeah. Just, it's just another layer of security we need to add to, for for our our backtrack of security. But it's something, in general, a good for, for security of the transactions.

Legendary 01:01:07 I absolutely loved and and got goosebumps, with the with the Pokemon Go example because I was enjoying Pokemon Go a lot, and I remember those websites that showed you where some, particularly area Pokemon with particularly high IV, high high staffs, were responding, and I did see that version where you could spoof your location. And, I didn't go for that, but I also didn't want when I saw it, didn't have an idea that this is actually going for my data because it has a malicious component to it. And I think that's often the temptation. You see a new better of something.

Legendary 01:01:42 You see something that promises, to have new features that you might be looking forward to. And it might even have those features, but there still might be a malicious component to it. So I think there's such a good example. Alyssa would love to loop it, to loop you in into this conversation because over the last spaces, We've been also speaking about user onboarding. And, we've been speaking about how we go about basically saying that web 3 gaming, 1st and foremost is gaming.

Legendary 01:02:12 And that we don't want to overwhelm, basically, if we talk about getting new people into the space, we don't want to overwhelm them with all the, specificities and challenges of how blockchain works, what happens in web 3, but they will be onboarded to those features eventually if they want to use them. But then we also have, that aspect, that additional aspect of of security. We'd love to know how you think about that as a as a content creator when you, also address people who are not as familiar with web 3 necessarily.

Legendary 01:02:47 Is it something that you want to to integrate or that you're already doing with your community that you want to help onboard them or help them learn more about security. I'm asking you specifically because you also mentioned the revoke dot cash, example before, or is it And and when does this come in the onboarding process? Do they learn about the game first? Then they learn about blockchain and security? Like, what's the order of things that you see for that as a creator?

Elisa 01:03:14 Well, what a good question and, yeah, really difficult to answer, I think. Because I I don't think doing a perfect job at it. And, like, some members like, it it's still it's still really, like, some members are interested in in the web 3 and some aren't. So I'm not onboarding everyone. Like, I'm not doing forcibly.

Elisa 01:03:39 I'm I'm really just doing, like, onboarding, those that wanna be onboarded, and those that do wanna be onboarded are willing to, learn and like putting the time to understand like, you know, risks and like best practices and things like that. So yeah, I think we're still at that point where like you do have to learn, and I know we we always talk about, like, seamless experience and all of that, like, logging in and, like, you know, maybe like Blockchain being in the back end and stuff, but I do hold the belief that there will always be some sort of learning involved.

Elisa 01:04:15 Even if it's not like you know, very hardcore, like, we will have to always kind of get used to the fact that things are different, like, having Blockchain makes like, there's a layer that's different, and that's, like, added on. So Yeah. Not everyone is willing to learn that, and I think people will learn that for a game they wanna play, or if there's something compelling enough on the other side, like, all of us here have, you know, learnt and, you know, it's it's not always fun. Like bridging is is not fun at all. I I absolutely hate it.

Elisa 01:04:49 But I I still do it if it means, you know, minting something or if it means, like, playing a game that I really wanna play. So, I think, yeah, friction could be ameliorated, but at the same time, like, I think there's always gonna be that on like a a small scale. So, yeah, it's, you know, acting, fancy, great example. Like, they onboarded 1,000,000,001,000,000 of people, and, it wasn't, like, at that time, it was even worse than now, like, the the UX UI, right? And these people still figured out. So I think, yeah, it it depends on, like, motivation as well and you can't force people to to be interested.

Elisa 01:05:28 So, yeah, It's a tough one. I I don't have a good answer for this one legendary.

Legendary 01:05:33 Sorry. No. I I think I think it's a very it's a very, very good answer. I know that's a very tough question. I even have a tougher follow-up question, but also would love to hear from from you, Yellow Panther, and Sanjay as well. Who's are we responsible as content creators for that to at least point out security risks? Is it more the responsibility of the game to educate the players about, the security aspect of things. Is it a joint effort, that essentially everyone is even if not responsible for that, but everyone should have that at heart, this interest at heart so that we can grow the space safely.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:06:14 Yeah. I'll I'll let Sanjay go first because the time went first.

Sanjay 01:06:22 Sorry. Sorry, my bad. I just, can you can you repeat the question, please?

Legendary 01:06:26 I didn't hear that. Sure. I'll I'll put it a bit short. It's a it's a it's a difficult question, but do you think we as content creator is responsible to educate people about security and security risks for best of our knowledge in web 3? Is it the game's responsibility? Should we just obvious I mean, the obvious answer would be we all should do it to create a better experience. What what are your thoughts on that?

Sanjay 01:06:47 Yeah. Great question. You know, I know a lot of, creators, influencers all around the world, or they like to use the word, you know, no financial advice or no advice. Or, you know, do do your own research and and all of that. Right? But I think in the end of the day, if, if a gamer or somebody from the community or a viewer just wanted to, do their own research. They might not need you anyways. Right? So, like, I mean, if I want to learn about the new iPhone, what the new iPhone is releasing, I'll go to Marquis Brown, Brown's. Sorry. I don't know if I have, I'm pronouncing his name right.

Sanjay 01:07:22 I'll go to his YouTube channel and I'll watch what the what the iPhone does, how it performs, if it's worth my time or not, and that's it. I'm not gonna go to website and read the white paper or read the whole, document on how the iPhone really works. I'll trust that guy because I know that he's a great influencer. And he got me covered. He will still tell me that, oh, go ahead and check yourself, but I I well, I will trust him regardless. So I think it's our responsibility. Even though, like, you know, always do your own research because we can also be wrong sometimes, especially in the web tree space because there's a lot of funds involved, and, you know, there's a lot of bad apples.

Sanjay 01:07:58 But I think, I think when when projects come to our profiles and they are, like, you know, learning about a new project, when men, sorry, when gamers come to our profile and learn about new projects, they they just wanna, like, you know, they just they just want the right information and they wanna trust somebody so they can rely on somebody and they can you know, they don't wanna do all the all the research by themselves. They don't wanna go to the white paper. They don't wanna look at the smart contract. They don't wanna look at who's the backer of the project. You know, like, you know, who's who are their part is this legit. They don't wanna go to VC's, portfolio and see if the project is listed there or not.

Sanjay 01:08:31 That's our job, and that's that's why we are the ones who you know, like, give these projects basically like a green check that, oh, yeah. We looked into your project. We talked to your team 1 on 1. You guys are doing a great job. This is a good this is a good good apple in my opinion. You know, always worse comes to worse. Anything can happen in this space. At the end of the day, but I I do truly think that think that it is our responsibility to kinda, like, you know, show gamers and viewers and community members what is good and what is bad.

Sanjay 01:09:04 And then, and then, you know, and then let the community kinda just kinda like rely on us a little bit, you know, like, we don't want them to do all the work either because then what is the point of us being on this influencer panel in the first place?

Legendary 01:09:19 Yeah. I I love love to add the answer. Scott, give me give me one one quick second, and I'll go to you in a second. I love the answer because it means stepping up and it means proactively taking responsibility and not saying, yeah, look. Everyone can educate themselves it's not my my goal as a content creator to do that. I'm just here for the vibes and to share a cool game with you. And if you lose something or lose your because you haven't educated yourself. That's your loss. And I love that you didn't say that, but went for the proactive part taking responsibility.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 01:09:52 Sorry, Scott. Go for it. I was just gonna add to that. Maybe what the content creators do, are or, you know, talk about the games that have been audited. And the content creators know that, the companies of these games took that one extra step to make their environment more secure. So we're not just talking about cool games, but we're talking about games that also are gonna provide a a great security experience for the end user. And that's one of the things I loved about ZT X. Right?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 01:10:25 ZTX whole goal is about empowering creators and communities, and that's how Halborne feels about empowering creators in the gaming ecosystem, the enterprise ecosystem, web 3 in blockchain in general, to empower them through security. So we couldn't be more proud to partner with CTX in in their seriousness for creators, communities, and security. So great job, ZTX. Really appreciate everything you've done for the ecosystem.

Legendary 01:10:53 Love it. That's almost the perfect, perfect way to close out the show. And we've been going for a bit more than an hour. I do have one last, follow-up question before I would like to close it for today. I think, we spoke a lot about different security issues about security risks. But if either you Scott De Lewis, whoever wants to take that would have to pinpoint it to the single biggest challenges that you guys see facing games right now, what would it be Yeah.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:11:24 Sure. One key point, that I think summer summarizes everything. It's called security end to end.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:11:36 What it means, it's that the security, doesn't need to be consider since the inception of the game development, trying to understand what are the threats that could affect that, that to the game, try to do some test along the game life life cycle and consider that the security test or ethical hacking penters that you do when, again, it's almost done. It's most it's more like a final exam.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:12:14 So you are supposed to be prepared and ready from, the starting of the process, not just at the end. So if there is something very important, to all of us to bring to our home, it's, consider that security is not non ending process and should, I mean, the sooner you you put security in your process, it's more efficient and it has demonstrated, with different studies that you can, you can take more than double of the time in launching in launching your product if you don't con don't consider security from the beginning.

Luis Quispe Gonzales 01:12:53 I think that's, what summarizes everything.

Legendary 01:12:56 Security is the continuous process, a a like that a lot, Scott, did you want to add anything to that?

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 01:13:04 You know what? I think Luis did a great job summing it up. I was going to say it a bit differently, but, yes, it is end to end security. Is thinking about from the beginning of your creation of your project all the way through to post deployment and not thinking about, hey. We got a smart contract audit. We're good to go because a smart contract audit is like protecting your your front door. You're putting a lock on your door. But you have to think about your yard, your fence, your windows, your roof that your your your foundation, there's so much more to protect than just your front door. And end to end security really sums that up.

Legendary 01:13:41 It's such a good analogy, and I wanna I wanna close it up on that note. Before I do that, I want to thank everyone in the audience for, joining our space today, taking your time appreciate, especially because, again, infrastructure security might be a bit more of a difficult topic. So really appreciate everyone joining us today. Also, thank you both, Scott and Lewis from Halborne for, joining our discussion as well as, Jade and from Click who had to leave to go to a follow-up meeting.

Legendary 01:14:15 And last but certainly not least, thank you to you, Eliza Sanjay, and Yavapentin, for joining us on stage today as well, and have a fantastic rest of your Tuesday.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:14:25 Thank you, everyone.

Scott Gralnick 🦇🔊 01:14:26 Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Great conversation today.

Delve into the intersection of gaming and Web3 technologies in this insightful discussion with experts from Skyborne and Mocaverse.

This transcript offers a unique glimpse into the evolving dynamics of game economies and the integration of financial incentives in Web3 gaming. I

t's a thought-provoking exploration of how these innovative technologies are reshaping the gaming landscape, offering fresh perspectives for gamers, developers, and enthusiasts alike.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:19 GM, everyone. Very excited for today's space. Last week, we had quite an interesting discussion on user acquisition. We did get a bit into the playtesting side of things into how we look at play tests to, also study user behavior.

Legendary 00:02:57 And today, we kinda want to connect that behavioral dimension a bit with web 3 game economics and also the financialization of this space. And I think this is actually the perfect day to do it. Yesterday, we had, blur season 2 ending We had another blur air drop. We had blur launching blast layer 2 solution, promising something that probably will be a token, and obviously triggering loads of users to deposit, I think, way more over $40,000,000 into that new protocol. And, clearly, blur has been often criticized that all the volume it generates is because it's financially incentivized because there's an air drop that people are hunting.

Legendary 00:03:37 And I think it is quite challenging to navigate a landscape, also in web 3 gaming, where, a lot of players, a lot of community members might have financial expectations, might be looking forward for a token, whether it is in the reward for a playtest or a white list for creating content. And in that, arena in that playing field, I think it's also then difficult to evaluate what is genuine engagement, what is engagement that was maybe driven because of an incentive. And how can you convert that initially financially driven user acquisition into a more sustainable player into user retention, actually.

Legendary 00:04:16 And I'm very pleased to have a fantastic panel on speakers with us to discuss exactly that we have Tyler with us who's the head of projects at an Emoca brands. We have Yellow Panther and Apex is too excellent. And truly outstanding content creators in web 3 gaming with us. We are still waiting, for Zach from Skyborne. And of course, we also have my co host, Karma with us today. And, Karma, I know it is 11 pm for you. It is quite late. You're currently at YGG Summit, if I'm not mistaken, how are you doing? How's the conference so far?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:04:55 Hello, everybody. First, I'm going as always to ask if you can hear me alright because the Wi Fi here has been a bit dodgy in the hotel.

Legendary 00:05:02 Works. Wonderful. I can hear you perfectly.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:05:06 Amazing. So, yeah, you know, warm greetings to every single listeners from the Philippines. I'm in Manila. I'm at the YGG wetfree games summit. So now it's alright. It's gamers, creators, developers, and, it is both but to everybody by Yield Guild Games. You know, we partnered with Yield Guild Games for our play tests early on and really looking forward to expanding into Southeast Asia and really working on building communities very globally for ZT X. You know, I won't go into too much detail here.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:05:41 I know it's not the topic of the, of the hour, but just in general, I want to share some insights. It's incredible to see how much more, yeah, I wouldn't say accepted, but how much more ubiquitous web tree gaming is in Southeast Asia. I think I haven't truly grasped, you know, the size of the community and size of the active player base until I actually sew it with my own eyes. And so, you know, the amounts of people really excited to attend the exposed see, you know, the showcases of the newest games. It has been a true flurry of activity.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:06:16 And in fact, you know, I'm literally just made it back the hotel from a dinner with, you know, like, with the co founders of Axy Infinity who field good games. So overall, an incredible networking event and yeah, but today, very excited to dive into Skyborne and, you know, also more covers and discussing some of these some of these aspects of the economies.

Legendary 00:06:39 Love to hear that love to hear that the vibes are good and that the acceptance for web 3 gaming is also significantly increasing. Tyler, you've been traveling quite a lot as well over the last couple of weeks. How are you doing? Are you going to any conferences soon, or do you need a break from from the conference based travels?

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:07:00 I keep saying that, every conference, I think starting from August. So, like, this this would be my last, last trip for the for 2023, but I realized I keep saying the same shit, and has been 3 trips already since last time I talked about it. I think my next trip could potentially be in Taipei Blashing week or, or Dubai, by the end of the week, the the year.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:07:27 And next year, early next year is, like, long trip to the US and, yeah, just trying to get my, kind of, like, mental and physical health ready for all those travel seasons.

Legendary 00:07:42 Yeah. Definitely important to be prepared. It is intense if go from conference to conference and you still have, work that needs to be done a business that needs to be run. It gets really, really intense Skyborn, welcome to the stage. I think it's Zach speaking on the Skyborn account, the community manager.

Skyborne Legacy 00:08:02 Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on here. Happy to be with some legends. I, like, I personally follow Apex and Yellow Panther, and they're some of my favorite creators. So I'm kinda geeking right now, so very happy to be here.

Legendary 00:08:13 Love to hear that. Yellow, welcome to the stage. Are you at YGG Summit as well at the moment?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:08:20 What is up, everyone? Yellow Panther here. Always good to have legendary and karma. Thank you so much, Skymon. I've been following you guys for a while now. And you guys have been popping in terms of volume and, you know, floor price and so on. So congrats. And, of course, Hello, Tyler, and Apex. Great to have you guys. I'm not in Philippines tomorrow, though. I I actually just got back from Seoul. I'm not even in my house for, like, 24 hours. I have catch another flight soon. I'm just trying to do a lot of content catching up with work.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:08:51 But, basically, I went solo for, League of Legends World I get to see Faker win after 7 years because I I watched Faker since I was like, what, 14 15? And then I haven't seen watching play for so long because he had never he never won. So great great to be back.

Legendary 00:09:11 Love to hear that Apex, welcome to the stage. Are you traveling, going to any conferences, have anything planned, or are you enjoying the fomo of hearing everyone else talk about the conferences.

apix🎮 00:09:22 Jim, Jim. I was actually at devconnect last week, so I was in Istanbul talking to some cats on the streets. And getting some overflow. I have a normal home and ensuring the cold and wet weather ensure love to hear that.

Legendary 00:09:39 I left Austria for London, and I definitely enjoy even colder weather in London and Austria, but anyhow, let's let's dive into today's topic. We do want to talk about game economies, about financial incentives. And Tyler, I would quite like to start with you since you have a tremendous network behind both MOCA Verus and animoca and obviously knowing that Umoca's portfolio is not only gaming, but has significant, significant exposure to gaming. It seems that so many games, web 3 games create financial incentives to attract users.

Legendary 00:10:12 And in your opinion, if everyone kind of does that, do those incentives at some point become a 0 sum game Or does it, like, really become mandatory for a web 3 game to think about some kind of financialization, some kind of incentive system that they need to create because otherwise it would be infinitely harder for them to attract new users or players.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:10:35 Yeah. So I think the, the old meta about play to earn or pay to play is, is kind of shifting right now right now is I think it's free to play, play to own, and, it's not really playing to earn, but basically you you I I I think in terms of web 3 gaming, what's very interesting and I think is underutilized right now is really wet free.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:11:30 And what's amazing about wet free is that you you're able to building that incentive layer and having a core supporters to to actually spread out that influence and and build the user acquisition. So I think that is the the new matter. And, I I see, a lot more kind of like projects not going for the pay to play, kind of route right now. And, is really having the, play to own, and user is able to basically level up and actually grind the way up in order to own NFT.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:12:05 And, apparently, for Wells, right, like, I think the space need a good mix and good balance ratio of Wells and also players So, well, so, like, if you want to jump the key, would definitely, like, just sweep the NFTs and just get a head start. So, I would say wet free gaming is interesting that way. And, we'll we'll love to see more games actually leveraging that incentive player.

Legendary 00:12:31 Yeah. I I I very much agree with that. I also think that we had a space a couple of weeks ago where, Jeffrey the way the easy said from a arena that often those web 3 economies are also a whales game, And if you want to basically succeed and if you want to design your economy, your token, whatever the incentive layer, whatever it is, right, you have to also keep in mind that to some extent, it is a whales game.

Legendary 00:13:01 Is it something you would agree with, or is it something that you think is just overrated to focus on the whales because ultimately you want to build a game out, whatever ecosystem out for the long run, and go for mass user adoption and not so much have to worry about the whales.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:13:18 Yeah. So I think it's not exclusively for the whales. Right? Like, basically, I think when we design product and, also the game theory around the platform that we're building right now, we're very mindful about, like, different types of personas and the ecosystem that it's just very naive if we think that, though, whole, user base are going to be pure gamers who love the game and so on. Of course, we would love to see that. Right? But I don't think that's the reality. The reality is that the the personas consists of 3 main personas. Right? 1 is the root gamer who loves to play the game. Second is the grinders grounding for rewards. Right?

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:13:57 And then or the air dry farmers and so on. And then you got the wells as well. Right? Like, different personas have different characteristics. So, for example, Wells have money, but they do not, for example, like, have time to to play the game. And, and then basically, for for people and gamers and and and writers who actually engage the game, they actually get, like, a good upside in terms of, selling the NFTs to to the wealth as well. So I I think it's a really balanced is, to be honest.

Legendary 00:14:32 Yeah. I I love to take and I love, how you attribute it to those 3 personas, the gamers, the grinders, and the whales. Would love to shift to use Zach from Skyborn too. Here are your thoughts on that. Tyler also mentioned designing that incentive layer mentioned those different personas that we have in web 3 gaming. And when you design the game economy for Skyborne, obviously, quests alive. There's some resource farming going on. Do you think about how to design those quests and resources and the basics of the economy first? And then how an incentive layer could be added to that, or do you do that?

Legendary 00:15:09 In one step, I would quite like to learn more about the process and maybe also hear your thoughts on the different personas that Tyler just mentioned and how you factor them in.

Skyborne Legacy 00:15:20 Yeah. Definitely. Let me see. There's a few questions there. Let's so I'm I'll start with the whales because I think that that's an interesting, concept. Whales like, outside of, like, web 3, like, your mobile web 2 whales, they they come in and they spend a bunch of money, but they're never looking for a financial incentive. The whales in web 3 are different. They spend to to buy into an ecosystem. So there's a big difference there between a regular web 2 whale and a web free whale. And when you're building, like, general games, you have to keep that in mind. It's it also, fun fact, they don't like the term whale in web 2, you do not call them whales.

Skyborne Legacy 00:15:59 You call them, like VIP users or something along those lines because they actually take offense to the term whales. So something to keep in mind for, like, at least for mobile gaming in my perspective, on that. Now as far as incentivizing goes, I think that all games should incentivize. I just don't know if it should be a financial incentivization. Right? Like, it it it could come down to, like, what we consider in with 3 space soulbound, like NFTs or something along those lines. A good player will always make money from any game they play. It doesn't matter like, what game they're playing. I I, as a young child, made US dollar playing runescape and roll to Warcraft.

Skyborne Legacy 00:16:38 And I found a way to get incentive from, like, US dollar from from that perspective of, like, selling runs or selling gold that I had farmed or something along those lines. It is an interesting topic though to speak on because actually as of recently, World of Warcraft had taken back their, like, play to like, play to win type of, scenario. They're basically it's interesting, right, because we want to incentivize our people to to play games just in general gaming. But we see right now a shift amongst the larger games stepping away from that.

Skyborne Legacy 00:17:11 Whereas, like, well, the Warcraft just put out, like, an announcement where players that play the game to farm gold to buy what they call a Wow token, which can be exchanged for time, is no longer something viable. It's no longer something they're gonna support because of, basically, either they've been incentivizing people to log on and play and farm the ecosystem, but the ecosystem isn't growing because There are too many individuals that are trying to take from it and not enough people adding to it. And so I think when you add that incentivized layer of like, hey. Come play my game.

Skyborne Legacy 00:17:41 You really need to keep that aspect in mind because if you over incentivize or, you you don't do it like like perfectly, you don't craft it out with, like, the game design in mind, it it can flop real quick. And now you have a bunch of players that are unhappy or a bunch of players holding assets that they no longer want. It's it's a very fine line.

Legendary 00:18:02 Yeah. Indeed is a very fine line. And I also liked how you made the distinction between Wept 2 whales who rather be called VIPs. You obviously have the VIP tier systems in so many mobile games where depending on the amount that you spend, you go up from VIPT. VIPT is 0 to VIPT at 12 if you spent, I don't know, 5 figures in some cases, maybe even 6 figures on the game. And you definitely have the difference in how you address those players. And, Karma, I would love to get you into the conversation because Obviously, we've been speaking a lot on the spaces. And you mentioned how the ZTX is building its user base.

Legendary 00:18:42 It's been doing the play tests and how onboarding the players, the web 2 players, the Zepeta community is something to be done later on in the next next year. And with that in mind, do you also think about the different needs of, say, the whale persona in the web 2 version of Cepetto and how they might basically change over when it comes to onboarding to ZT X and that they then might have completely different requirements and and things that they want or expect from the game.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:17 Yeah. This is, you know, a brilliant a topic to dive into. So let me maybe first unpack with how we see the timeline because that's influences our decisions. So for ZT X, you know, we have the backing of the petal with 20,000,000 monthly active users. So we are very conscious of not trying to onboard people too early. So we see it in 2 phases. Right? Like, the phase 1 is, hey. You know, let's all come together existing web free players who are web free native and want to help us refine the game, that's step 1.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:52 And then step 2 is actually onboarding the Zepetto user base, which is web 2, and needs, like, significantly more, significantly I would say help in figuring out the game. And before we can actually do that, we need to have significant amount of different integrations in CT X. You know, it doesn't really help you trying to onboard new user base when you still only have enabled a MetaMask log in. Like, just the friction is there.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:20:23 So that's why 2024, very likely the second half of twenty twenty four is when we will, you know, significantly really push into the existing Zapato user base. So what are we doing until then? Until then, we really are looking at different types of players. And, you know, Tyler, you know, on Skyburn accounts, we've also heard the definition between Whales or VIP users and the actual active player. I think even when we think about active players, we can distinguish it further. We have the casual players and the I would even say grinders, you know, like the maximizers.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:00 And for each one of these groups, we are definitely thinking about different incentives and different game loops. If you're a whale, you know, you will have the ability to rent out your assets because you are short on time, but you have, you know, the Genesis, NFTs, the homes, and your possession So you would like to rent them out to other players in order, you know, to receive a split of the, of the in game income.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:26 And then on the flip side, maybe you are a gamer who just starts out, you haven't had the money to buy 1 of the Genesis assets you can still, you know, enter this this relationship with a senior player with a whale and and place it, like, with their Genesis assets. Or if you are just a casual player and you're not interested in any of this in-depth stuff, you just jump into the game and play with without ever having to buy anything at all. I think not creating an additional hoop to jump through is a very, very important part to not just, you know, totally lose your audience.

Legendary 00:22:06 Yeah. I think that is a very, very important point that you're making. And I love the, that very strategic approach. And I quite would like to go to you, Apex, 1st and then also to Yellow Panther to get your perspectives in when you think about this, financial layer when you do a playtest, when you review a game, is it something you factor in?

Legendary 00:22:34 Is it something you think about that those incentives might impact the community, the community growth, or might even impact how someone is posting about the game because they might be incentivized in any form or sorry to do that, or do you try to, on purpose, separate that from your game analysis and rather focus on the core game, the gameplay loops in dead, Apex first?

apix🎮 00:23:01 I think often when it's playtest, the financial layer is not as present yet because, you know, it's just a kid. They haven't minted. They haven't dropped a token. It's more of like folks on the gameplay. So then, obviously, you cannot talk too much about it, but, like, from the perspective of a content creator, the world's rights engagement is usually, oh, can I make money with this? It's like a lot of my audience and my piece audience probably too. You can give them alpha on okay play display test of CTX and maybe make a $1000, which, I mean, actually happened, can drive a lot of engagement.

apix🎮 00:23:39 So, in that sense, it kind of depends if the game has potential. And if you like okay, this is actually like something worth talking about and something which there's an actual value for for the audience, then It's almost like a must because as a content creator, you obviously wanna maximize, your impressions and your engagement.

Legendary 00:24:03 Yeah. I think that's fair enough. Yellow pants, I would love to hear from you and then soles, and see where they hand up, we get to you in a second.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:24:11 Yeah. I mean, I pretty much align with, APAC C has a lot of great alpha, you know, especially recent ones like draw tags and then the pet and then the blast as well. I think everyone's talking about blast right now. That's not really an alpha.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:24:26 But, basically, In terms of content creation, it is definitely way easier to, drive engagement, when there's incentive But and on the flip side, what I really like to do, especially with, my new series YP place every Thursday, We actually stream games that, may or may not have incentives, right, and it all focus on gameplay and how, we drive UA and also how we actually help these games to, grow in a sense that it's not on the speculation site.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:24:57 So, actually, as good content creators, I think it's good to have a balance of both, but ultimately, it is, way easier to get engagement when something is, of hype is of, incentives. But, like, for example, this, earlier, I actually shared about, Ubisoft's new web g game title, right, but it has no incentives at all. It is all speculation. It's all hype. So, you know, there is also different kinds of games when it comes to that.

Legendary 00:25:31 Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate that very, very honest and transparent take, and the Ubisoft news and also the Ubisoft MoCAverse partnership is something that I want to get into a bit later, but first, Saul's welcome to the stage. You can see in your ex buy your your game designer and behavioral economist. So, I think that your take on this could be really interesting.

Sols 00:25:55 Yeah. Thanks, man. It's one of the topics that I really love actually. And, on the point, it a little bit annoying to come right at the end and say this, I take that. So, bear with me. But just to kind of as a kind of like a mental exercise. If we take a step back for a second and we kinda review this term incentive, In this space, we technically have a slightly different definition than if you were to take a couple steps into kind of a more, I wanna say a more pure game development space. So outside of web 3, game development.

Sols 00:26:35 And what I mean here is, for example, like the, the scenario that Yellow Panther was just mentioning about content creators, needing incentive. So what he's talking about when he says incentive is like a monetary incentive, but at the same time, if we take a look back through our kind of digital history, and you look at, being able to farm likes and followers in, like, previous Twitter or in early YouTube, these things didn't have a monetization letter, but they had plenty of incentive.

Sols 00:27:10 There's, really, that there's really, like, when we look at the human experience, there's so many ways that a human being can derive value from an experience or a situation. And every single point of value is a potential incentive. What we have now in the same way that computers allowed us to better regulate that kind of like attention energy where it could manage certain things and better regulate the user flow in the same way now.

Sols 00:27:48 We've added some extra tools. Some extra components to that toolset that allows us to regulate certain interactions. So At that point, we go into kind of like the monetary aspect, the economic aspect, and this is a kind of different design conversation.

Sols 00:28:09 I don't wanna go too much into, like, true rabbit holes, but, just to very quickly touch on the idea of, like, economies, most of the time when you're designing an economy, you can always you can always you always have some ratio of an action back to time. All value in the game is able to be expressed by time.

Sols 00:28:35 And most of the time, someone is trying to essentially, like, reduce how long it takes for them to achieve something, but right now, and most of the time, these things that people are working for become symbols of all of the previous effort, and this layer has been majority locked away from users. There's millions of opportunities, many different examples.

Sols 00:29:01 At the moment, I think, we're getting caught on specific models that have been successful with this, like, ever evolving crypto meta but I think if we just take a look at the history of video games and our first true expressions of, like, digital value where there were stories where, you know, people would have, like, really like in my fight because some guys stole another guy's sword in a video game. And people didn't understand. Like, how can you get so emotional about, like, this digital item?

Sols 00:29:35 And other people had to explain, like, there's a whole layer of like, human struggle that goes into obtaining this thing. It's easy to see it as just a game item but really this is a symbol of several months of high intensity effort. And there are many ways to create those kinds of outcomes in a video game. It's like we can probably think of 1,000,000,000 of different examples. And this is something that we haven't really, separated into an asset class to make it very familiar.

Sols 00:30:11 But if you look at like, MMOs, especially, they've already had active markets and very strong expressions of almost all points of this what we call, like, this monetary layer, along with all of the very simple sizes, like, just the visceral feedback, you know, strong particles, a good feedback, level up system, a thumbs up, showing a badge to your friends. All of these things are also solid incentives, not monetary, was to solve incentives that say, you know what? This guy achieved this big thing. So if that, I'll I'll pass it on.

Legendary 00:30:45 Yeah. I I love that. So not only that you extending the conversation that we don't have solely financial incentives, but there's more to that. And also tying it to an asset history where there's a sword that someone used to grind for a year or months that doesn't necessarily reflect in the if it's a web 3 in the NFT itself, also there's been a couple of games who kind of tried to separate that. I know we had, video game freak from reboot, Pixel Vault, with the, with with the Battle Pass game, where they basically said on the one hand, obviously, you have the assets that you're on in game.

Legendary 00:31:23 On the other hand, you have your player profile that reflects everything that put into it all your achievements, all of the struggle, sweat, blood, and tears, which is in a Solbon NFT that you can't really trade. So we already are kind of trying to tackle those concepts but very much agree with you. That is a difficult thing to do and something we need to speak about more often. Karma, I see you with your hand up quite curious what your thought on this is.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:31:47 Yeah. Well, first things first. Thank you, Saul, for sharing your expertise and sharing this valuable insight. I don't really have anything in particular to add to your point. You've laid it out in me, you know, incredibly. I actually wanted to loop back to what you said at the beginning generic. You know, to what extent do these, game economies, these, you know, like, air drops, let's call them financial incentive instead of just incentives, to be clear, to what extent is it a bit of a peer pressure from, you know, on your environment?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:32:21 And yeah, I basically wanted to say that I think very, very often, be it launching a token, be it launching an NFT collection for an early game fighting for attention and fighting for early players is generally a matter of you know, life or death in terms of marketing. Now what I mean by that is the user acquisition cost in web free is legendarily high because the user base that we currently have has an incredibly high opportunity cost. And this in terms means, you know, for every second that people could be spending playing your game or even checking out your early game.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:03 There are 5 other games that will pay them for their time in their tokens or in promises of air drops. So I actually did want to say that I feel like we've, like, run ourselves into this weird corner where unless you have something monetary to promise, you are going to really struggle, you know, on the timeline. And we all know that timeline of Twitter is currently how the majority of web free games are discovered.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:32 And it is I I could keep going on and on, but this is all, you know, like huge network of problems that we when you want to play a normal game, usually you discover it because, you know, it's already up there. It's polished. It's done. It's it's a ready product really product that you are buying with your money. In web free, on the other hand, you very often have these, you know, indie games, indie teams, which needs the help and need the feedback along the way, meaning they need to fight for the early attention. It the entire dynamic is complete different.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:34:10 And I think it's going to be very, very difficult to break out of this, you know, wheel of token farming, playing the game of the week only to then switch to the next narrative. I think we're going to see a lot that, this bull market. And it's only when, you know, all the implementations are there only once we move away from web free gaming being the main marketing ploy for some of us. Only then will we see, I think, a little bit of a freer marketing where we don't need to rely on these financial incentives nearly as much.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:34:47 But, you know, I would love for someone to disagree with me. I've just from from the perspective of a marketer, I can say for a fact that the token launch, the NFT launch is always a very, very important thing discussed widely in the company because everybody knows that's when, you know, user acquisition would truly kick off.

Legendary 00:35:07 Yeah. You are a 100% right. User attention in web 3 is so expensive, and I think that's obviously also been the case before web 3 gaming just because of the scale, because of the scale and size of opportunities that participants in this space have when, you know, talk to a couple friends today. Do we think it's a good idea to put money in blast? What expectation would you have on the return? Someone said might be 50%. And then the reply was, I don't wanna lock up my money for a couple of months to just make 50 sentiment because they have way better, alternatives to that.

Legendary 00:35:42 And if you think back to the traditional world, stock market, think S and P 500, think MSCI World Global Stock index does 9% the year on average in the long run. And we are in a space where we talk about conservatively in investment doing a 5x. So it's a completely screwed set of expectations that, we have What I really want to do is before I go to you, Saul, I wanna hear, from Zach from Skype. So you're reacting to commerce take quite a lot. And I wanna also hear your thoughts on that, on that peer pressure when it comes to this financial incentive layer.

Legendary 00:36:16 And then, Karma, you also mentioned that many games come from an indie background, but we also have Tyler with us who from Mokkaverse announced the partnership with Ubisoft today, and that's something I want to get into. To hear the perspective from, already very, very established gaming studio with which is one of the biggest in the traditional gaming world But let's go to use act first and hear your thoughts on this peer pressured incentive layers.

Skyborne Legacy 00:36:44 Yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt, I just it it there was that, like, a cost of user acquisition that Carmel was talking about, and I get to talk with my marketing about this all the time. And, he just states, like, web threes. You like, usually, you're okay with paying a couple dollars or bring a user into a game. Right? But again, web 3, it's like, not only is it almost three times that price, but then you have to do something outside of just bringing them the game to keep them sustained because there's no game that's built yet to with, like, I guess, a a a large enough loop to keep somebody sustained on their own outside of an incentive, like, to to continue playing.

Skyborne Legacy 00:37:22 I think we may see this slowly start to change as games get flushed out more and there's, like, more of a reason to just play the games. But we also gotta think, like, web 3 is just a small niche. Right? It's a small niche of investors. It's a small niche of people that wanna own collectibles, and it's a small niche of gamers.

Skyborne Legacy 00:37:40 And so like, while focusing on web 3 gamers is important because you you want the people that understand the technology on your product, it's also important to keep in mind that There are so many other gamers out there that, like, are interested in decent products and, like, like, focusing solely Twitter and, like, not having that Instagram presence, not having that TikTok presence, not having that social media presence will will take away from that. And it's the the issue that I think that I've seen, like, personally is, just from, like, a consumer is, you know, they'll the same person that'll like, comment and retweet you on Twitter doesn't follow you on Instagram.

Skyborne Legacy 00:38:18 And so, like, be and that's because the nature of web 3, it's all Twitter. Right? It's where we all exist. And so for, like, for a game to grow, they need to grow across all socials. Right? Like, the the place I stumble across games the most is on TikTok by just scrolling through and finding a game. And if we don't have the support to get the reach for those games from the consumers already within that aspect, I think there needs to be a reevaluation of, like, what type of people that you're onboarding. While you do want the web 3 people, You also want the people that are open to the technology, but are really there for the game.

Legendary 00:38:55 Yeah. You definitely have to approach this in a in a broader way. Karma, so you're instantly raising your hand on that. Would quite like to hear from you. And then also give Sols a chance to come back into the discussion. Carmen, you are on mute.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:39:14 Oops. Ah, boomer mistake. So something I wanted to say, you know, just, it's so funny when you you just said, you know, don't concentrate on one, on one platform because the the viewership is very different. Fully agree. Fully agree. I think Apex, this is something you very often mentioned that, you know, like it's atrocious how we're all marketing within a bubble of Twitter. And that's fair enough. Something very funny I noticed here in the Philippines actually just wanted to mention to you guys.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:39:44 It has absolutely opened my eyes I was talking to many creators over the past 3 days, and I was absolutely shocked to discover that many of them have a much, much bigger viewership on Facebook, then actually on Twitter or Instagram or Twitch or anything. Facebook is one of the biggest social media, gaming, you know, giants here in the Philippines. And many creators actually stream, share and build entire communities and guilds on Facebook predominantly. I'm going to be perfectly honest with you.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:40:21 It hasn't actually crossed my mind to utilize Facebook effectively in any type of marketing campaign so far in my life. So yeah, it's just it, again, shows how very well you need to tailor it to your audience and how the requirements can very much change and I'm sure we will see more of it. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm sorry to, you know, like, throw the mic ahead, but I think we should hear from yellow punter on this simply because, you know, we are in the Philippines right now, and he's just so familiar with Southeast Asia. I'm sure he will be able to add so much to what I just said.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:40:57 Yeah. You're you're totally right, Karma, that the the people who use Facebook, it's incredible in Asia, and they're still using up to today, especially our parents as well which is, they always send us some stuff over there, and they use Messenger as, instead of WhatsApp and Telegram. So it's just like a a regional thing. But I also wanna say that, when it comes to user, you know, cost per marketing and stuff like that, it is way cheaper there, but then I'm not too sure about the quality. Right?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:41:30 So it's always like, a debate for marketers like us, whether we wanna go, for audience. If we we have a free to play game, obviously, we will want to go to, Facebook and stuff like that because the cost of marketing, the user positions way lower and stuff like that. But when it comes to purchasing power, I would say it's totally different ballgame, when it comes to Twitter versus Facebook, just by 2¢.

Legendary 00:41:56 Yeah. I think that's an interesting way to look at it. I also had a call with a a founder recently who said that, his catering for both web 3, web 2 audience, web 2 audience cheaply to acquire via ads on meta, web 3 audience more difficult to buyer, but has a completely different, purchase demographic than the users or gamers. He gets via the, on on Meta. So you had your hand up for a while. Would like to get you back into the conversation with us.

Sols 00:42:29 Yeah, man. There's there's a lot to take in there. The I wanted to to have it on mine. It's a little bit annoying, but if we take a step back again, just to kind of, like, visualize the space There's a there's a old proverb story about 4 sons arguing about what a tree looks like.

Sols 00:42:52 And the father takes them and kinda sets up a schedule and sends 1 in each season and gets them to come back and explain and obviously each season, the tree is, like, vastly different, and they eventually come and realize that it's kind of like, all different parts of the same thing. Very similar to the old, you know, like, 4 blind men and the elephant.

Sols 00:43:15 I wanna say, like, If we go back to what Tyler was explaining about the different personas, we could almost look at those proverbs and see those, like, different aspects as the different personas or the different phases in kind of the maturity of the market. Mostly, when we look at, for example, where we are in web 3 now, for sure, it poses lots of opportunity.

Sols 00:43:41 Like, we see, we we all know web 2 games make, like, significant revenue, and this is, like, essentially the base value proposition of a web 3 product, but the web 3 product is a little bit different. The the web 2 product is kind of like a time sink it's something fun for you to play. The current web free product is more like, investment tool. And there's, for sure, different opportunities because you can access things, kinda like a different pace, different weights and stuff.

Sols 00:44:18 That's why we can see, you know, market caps market caps run up to crazy amounts. Deb's getting significant amount of resource and stuff, and this is the honestly, like, this is the reality of where we are now that really skews the perceptions. When we're looking at kind of these products, we almost have to break them down into several layers and look at each layer in detail. Otherwise, the kind of average of the the mass becomes really blurred and, difficult to understand.

Sols 00:44:58 So for example, let's say these free to play games, their majority going for, like, the cheapest user possible, highest amounts that's possible because of this, like, average, low a statistical nature of a whale with, you know, like, a 5% chance to get a whale. So you need the other 19 players just to fill the room and say, wow, that's a cool hat.

Sols 00:45:23 So this is a very different thing from aiming for a guy that's going to come in and buy something and leave it in a wallet for, you know, 12 months waiting for potential revenue stream.

Sols 00:45:40 At the moment, I think we're a little bit skewed again because of the current examples in the market, But for sure, there's a distinction to be made of, like, the actual, like, business model versus the game model, and how the token affects the the business they are in terms of, you know, are you buying a share of the product or the studio versus the player layer, which is like, how does this token represent my effort in the game? How does this change my interaction or my user flow in this experience. So I think the like, those things are so different. And I yeah.

Sols 00:46:17 We could then go on to, like, a conversation about how these tools can be used to improve engagement, increase retention, reduce user acquisition costs long term with all these quite different things, but I think we'll see more and more examples as the market matures.

Legendary 00:46:33 Absolutely. I think I think this in itself could be a topic for a complete 1 hour, 2 hour space. What I really want to do is something that I, kind of teased before MoCAverse announced the partnership with, Ubisoft and Usource introduced also basically non financial incentives. And if I read through the announcement by mock averse, it says partnering with Ubisoft's strategic innovation lab to support Ubisoft's web 3 initiatives allowing players to earn and redeem realm points for exclusive access to both digital and RLL benefits and rewards.

Legendary 00:47:08 And the realm points, obviously, a concept that has been, introduced recently by Mokkaverse, as as kind of a loyalty program that also allows mockovers to partner up with other studios, with other projects, and use the ground point program to create incentives that aren't necessarily, financially driven in the first place. Would love to hear your take on that, Tyler, maybe you could also explain the round points a bit in more detail for those in the audience who are not familiar with what they are. And then give us your take on that partnership announcement with Ubisoft.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:47:46 Sure. I I guess, be forward that just to share a little bit view as well, like, how we think about game economy design. So we do have a a very experienced game design team, like, few of them coming from Ubisoft and some of them are machination expert to basically simulate different persona and how the game economy and token would be flow to different buckets and and so on. And, so so in terms of game economy, like, we we always consider different persona was, which which I, earlier mentioned about.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:48:20 And in and then interestingly, because the announcement with with Ubisoft and having that strategic partnership is really you I think it's very exciting to see is, like, the huge game publishers, are having a dedicated Webfree teams coming into the space. And it's not just Ubisoft, but through animal in Japan. Like, we actually have quite bit of interaction with large gaming, other, Japanese gaming publishers as well, such as, like, Sega, Nanko, Square, and Nixa Nada. And interestingly, I'm not sure if everyone those as well, like spray index. And Ubisoft actually invested in Anamoka.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:48:59 I quite heard on as well. So, so so I would say it was pretty exciting and really moving forward at the product level and how we work together. And, yeah, we we we can't wait to bring growth to, champion tactics and in the future more battery games coming out out of, UV soft. So the RAMpoint itself, what we want to do here is basically the MoCA is the first onboarding layer.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:49:27 You need a MOCA ID actually to participate in the ecosystem and, the ID itself is also able to basically having different reputation point system and also, the rest of the leveling and tier getting attached to the ID itself on chain. So what we're building essentially is around, like, 3 main pillars. One is identity. 2nd is social and 3rd is growth. And everything on the platform is being built around free pillars.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:49:59 And in terms of social is gamifying the social experiences between all those MOCA ID users, carrying their ID reputation point system leveling and so on. And in terms of rewards from the round points, we also do balance the these end rewards, which is digital assets sometimes, and also at the same time with in real life rewards well for the web 2 users who are very new to the space, and we don't wanna scare them off with, let's say, like, oh, we do, like, a huge took and drop or something like that. And then, like, everyone would just leave PSD. They feel like it's speculative.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:50:38 So so there's a program to actually balanced by 2 and by 3 and so on. And there is, like, a meta. What we're building is actually the meta layer on top of the MoCAver's partner network. And that MoCAver's partner network is being c by the animal brands ecosystem, which is quite exciting because, I think animal guy and and us, we have been talking about 450 companies and all that, but, you know, like, what's truly valuable on top of the 450 companies is actually having the meta experience and being able to build the network effect of the whole ecosystem.

Legendary 00:51:19 Yeah. I think that is that is not only the the really valuable part but also the really challenging part to leverage that network when you have so many portfolio companies. And when you want to build a program like the realm points that works across the ecosystem, it really becomes incredibly complex. And, the follow-up question and Tyler, for you, how do you handle that complexity when you have so many portfolio companies? I know we spoke in another space and you kind of said, you can't start ecosystem first.

Legendary 00:51:52 You have to start on the ground level then kind of work your way up, but I still can imagine that it is incredibly difficult to do that?

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:52:01 Yeah. So that's a great question. So in in terms of the reason why we set, like, been in that meta experience as well and why we have basically a few things at the meta layer as a infrastructure meta layer is. First, identity then you got the on chain point system, you got the reputation system, and then you got the account system. And just imagine, like, all these are being the shared public goods in the metal layer. And a lot of people misunderstand metaphors is, necessary necessarily a first run and avatar running talking to each other.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:52:34 Like, that's only one form and shape of metaverse, but what actually is truly a metaverse is the meta layer on top of more than one applications or products or games. So, I think to basically work with, many different companies, I think or a few challenges. Right? Like, for example, interacting or playing a a hyper casual game is very different than playing a AAA game.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:53:00 And in terms of difficulty, like, basically need to have the, index the difficulty and actually, like, balance it out because because like, for example, one game play in the hyper casual game is not very equal to one game play in the AAA game. And all those needs to be balanced in a way, that the that the round points are being evenly or fairly distributed in that way. And and I would say the mix of the, the Mokever's partner network is very important as well.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:53:33 So if we look at the hyper casual game, Meta, I would say, like, probably around, like, when when mobile gaming is is very strong. And the the ad spend is actually huge, and the the ad arbitrary is is amazing. Back then, and now you see, like, a downtrend of ad revenue. Right? And then the D 1 to D7 of hyper casual game is super short. So What does that mean in terms of, like, the whole network is? Basically, you can what you can do is hybrid casual game players coming in and able to attract massive volume of users.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:54:09 And those users participating in this network, and then now you can basically, through those incentive layer that we're building and to come come in public goods infrastructure to basically, bring those users to, the rest of the network as and then able to basically attribute that success back to the hyper casual game. So this is the power of network, and I would say, like, really, we're we're not limiting busy hour network to animals brands.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 00:54:39 Like, we basically work with, I think half of the season 1 partners that we work with are not portfolio companies, but I would say affiliated with us in some way or, or or or, basically, like, people that would meet, and and and friends and partner network, or Mocavers as well.

Legendary 00:55:01 Thank you so very much for that. A detailed detailed breakdown and your thoughts on basically the ecosystem behind the partners and and portfolio companies of any MoCA slash MoCAverse. I think this whole discussion on incentives, whether they are financial or non financial, is both really interesting, but also extremely complex.

Legendary 00:55:23 So I quite would like to take a step back from that and, flip flip the switch a bit and go to you Sanjay, with the question if you think about an upcoming game, or if you were to advise an upcoming game, that doesn't have an air drop that's upcoming doesn't have NFTs that people can grind white lists for, but might even launch their game or might launch playtest, what does it take for you, or what would you say does it take for that game to gather interest to be something that people want to test.

Legendary 00:55:59 Would it be, I don't know, something like a great trailer where you see gameplay of the game, would it be popular creators speaking about it? So what other things, apart from this financial and non financial layer would attract people to specifically web 3 game where I still think that marketing works way way differently from the web 2 games.

Sanjay 00:56:21 GM, first of all, and sorry I'm late. I was just stuck in an aerial meeting. But, I, legendary, great question. I think, I think financial side is obviously very, very important when it comes down to web 3 gaming, as we all know. But if you wanna take away from the financial size, I think watching people have fun is, I think, is one of the easiest and one of the most efficient way to get other gamers or other viewers hooked.

Sanjay 00:56:48 So instead of, I think instead of, you know, working with creators and telling every creator to make content by themselves, I think bringing the creators together hosting some sort of tournament, paid or non paid. I don't know. Doesn't really matter. You know, hosting some sort of tournament where all these creators and all your favorite gamers are having fun together at the same time, creating content, videos, and then repurposing the content all over social media. You know, everybody playing together having fun. I think that is one of the easiest way to attract gamers because this is, this is like the human mentality, right?

Sanjay 00:57:24 When you go to a club, when you go to a bar, and you look at a table where people are laughing, people are enjoying, that table is always going to look more interesting than any others where people are not enjoying or maybe there's just one guy sitting and having a drink. So it's, I think, I think this just comes back to the human mentality where, if we see somebody having a lot of fun, if we see somebody enjoying, we wanna join in the fun. So this is like a no brainer and, I think more games should take advantage of it and, actually repurpose the content after they have worked with the creators because, you know, we we all know that a lot of games don't do that. They don't really like, you know, post the content by themselves.

Sanjay 00:58:02 They don't really repurpose it. So, so yeah, that's something or games can kinda, like, take a look into?

Legendary 00:58:10 Yeah. I think this is a very, very beautiful analogy. The table with people who are having fun, who are talking, who are laughing, and kind of think about the content creation angle when you might bring a couple content creators together, whether that's a tournament, or whether its, cooperative play that they are sharing or streaming together. Before I go to you, Apex and yellow to hear your thoughts on that as well, I see you with your hand Karma, take it away.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:58:37 Oh, I actually just wanted to selfishly excitedly share the game that I'm excited for that. I don't think we'll be launching it or at least I don't I haven't heard about it yet. So this is actually a very, very interesting case study for marketing of a game with digital collectibles without actually pumping, you know, like, all the attention into NFTs. There's a game called moon for at Moonforce Game. I'm not paid by them. I haven't invested in them or anything. I just genuinely love their content and love the visuals. They are known for, you know, like, very, very beautiful, like Pixel and Nostalgia.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:59:15 And it looks like a type type of like a, you know, Farmville slash animal crossing type of a, you know, a game. I have never since, you know, never saw them mention a token. Never saw them, you know, launch a collection or early NFTs. However, I am so hooked to their feed. I I genuinely, I love their visuals and animations and select back stories about the characters. I have never been disinvested in the game before it came and just wanted to share this a really interesting, you know, case study. Maybe I'm just very profiled.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:59:51 It's, like, precisely the aesthetic that speaks to me but I also think, you know, I over analyze their feed in terms of marketing, and they just really found their niche. So there are ways to do it. Whether or not it's applicable to every single type of a game, I don't think so. I think they are very lucky as they can rely on a lot of, you know, visual, nostalgia and just very wholesome type of content, which does not work for all franchises. But clearly possible. And I'm very excited to, you know, follow their progress.

Legendary 01:00:25 Love to hear that. And if if nostalgia work it hits home hard. I mean, look at courtyard, look at the Pokemon card drops that they are doing. They are certainly that that popular because they are using the Pokemon IP and are kinda triggering everyone's nostalgia, getting everyone excited But also you said something as a side note, you said, you know, you wanted to share the game, but you're not invested in the game. You're not being paid by them to share that game. And it it has become so much second nature to disclose that every time when we say something, hey. I actually like this genuinely. I'm not being paid to say that.

Legendary 01:01:00 Because so much is driven on financial incentives, and this is why I think that having this conversation in this space is so, so important Apex would love to hear from you. We heard Sanjay speak, also on the importance of basically the competitiveness of the game on Esports to drive more interest, to games itself. Do you think that for a game to really be able to take off in in the web 3 space. It needs to have an esports component or competitive component to it, or at least that it is way easier if it has one.

apix🎮 01:01:34 I think esports is tough because I've seen a lot of games really go try to emphasize, oh, yeah. We have an e sport. So, like, we have really 4 on establishing other than esports kind of ready game, but you don't really create an e sport as a game yourself.

apix🎮 01:01:59 It's kind of the community to people, grinding, competing, and so on, and obviously needs a lot of network to get over, like, a certain threshold to have a lot of people playing, trying to become really it, but also people enjoy watching the best players in the world compete and, you know, watch their streams, videos, and so on. And, I mean, we see it in, in any sports, big esports game right now. It's tough to monetize it that esports organizations are not really best businesses. So I think designing with esports in mind is a bit overrated.

apix🎮 01:02:40 Yes. Of course, some some game designs just make sense. You have a competitive game. Hopefully, that's going to be esports graded. I don't think that you can force it too much as in the game. So, Yeah.

Legendary 01:02:53 I think I think that is a very fair take, and you kinda see it when, I don't know, mobile games here collect the games. I'm just forcing a PVP mode on top of it to somehow, incentivize people to either spend more because there's no other players you can compete against to have a couple tournaments. So something going just the forced PVP layer that to some games feels very natural, but to some, you can clearly see it is being driven by that notion to want to be esports compatible. Sanjay, I saw you're raising your hand during Apex's tape. Want to get to you and then also give Yellow Panther a chance to chime into that conversation.

Sanjay 01:03:29 Yeah. Apex mentioned a great point about esports and, as like, as a gamer myself and, you know, I've dabbled a little bit into trying, pro gaming and stuff in the past, when I was still younger. But, I think the I think if you look at, some of the top games in the world, which are, let's say, Fortnite and Call of Duty, if it if if your goal is to make revenue, if your goal is to make, you know, to make your game a household name that every every regular person day in and day out plays it, which is, you know, mass adoption as we see it.

Sanjay 01:04:06 I think three sports is not the way for you to go because even Fortnite itself, throughout the years, they have kind of gone gone away from esports. Like, they used to host World Cups. They used to host tournaments all the time. They used to their their game used to be very difficult, but now it's a very simple, very, you know, casual base. A lot of people can jump in and have 10 kills and win the game. It's not it it didn't used to be like that. So if you if you wanna be a big game, if you wanna make moves in the space, then you just need to follow what other big games has done, or reinvent the wheel. Adding Esports in your game is not reinventing the wheel.

Sanjay 01:04:45 Versus it's actually going against what the big dogs are doing. So I think, I think adding esports, you're just kinda like cutting down such a big part of the gate, such a big audience and you're scaring the regular folks away who are very important as we have seen, you know, call of duty, make the game more casual. People call it can be game, but it is very casual now. More people are welcome. And same with Fortnite with their no build zone and whatnot. So, yeah.

Sanjay 01:05:15 As much as I love watching competitive, I love watching people play Fortnite tournaments, It's something just so exciting, but, in the end of the day, it is it is very daunting when if a new person looks at the game, and thinks that, oh, this is how the game is. You know, they're never going to try the game at all. So, I mean, I would just recommend games to just stay away from esports until they have their, like, super core base. And then maybe later, they can kind of, like, jump into it.

Legendary 01:05:43 Yeah. I think there's a very, very fair take. Yellow Pen's the one to give you a chance chime in, and I also saw you, Zach, from Skybon, before that you had your hand up as well. So we'll definitely go to you after yellows take.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:05:55 Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with them. I was literally at League of Legends World finals, and I was just texting, Han Tao about it. It was like, Man, man, I wish there's a e sports, scale like this for wet tree in the coming years. And he he just said, yeah. Just wait 10 years lull. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense because these, esports, right, take a long time to develop to their fan base up to today. Right? Basically, whatever Riot games or, DOTA drops, right, the fans will eat them up. Like, they will gobble them up. Like, you know, it will be sell out in the instance.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:06:35 So, like, I I just wish, some games in web sheet will be able to go to that extent, but, of course, I totally agree that not all games suitable for web, for esports. And at this at the same time, I just I just think that there's so much growth when a game have not just a great game, you know, social aspect, but also esports aspect. So if there is a aspect in that game or in certain games, I think it is a bonus and it's a huge advantage if it is utilized properly.

Legendary 01:07:09 Yeah. And I love that you're also mentioning the the social aspect is an important part of it as well. Zach, you had your hand up before. Did you want to come in on this?

Skyborne Legacy 01:07:19 Yeah. Just about the esports thing. I thought it was interesting. So for me, I'm a World of Warcraft Maxi. I've been playing it for since it came out, like, 14 years now. I've I pick it up every year. And so that's, like, what I use is, like, a good basis. And I think it's interesting. We talk about esports and, like, how it is vital. At the same time, world of Warcraft to win from esports a long time ago. Yes, there's an aspect of their game that is player versus player, but they don't that's not an esport thing any It's like, you know, it's a rating held within the game, and that's it. They used to do giant events where they'd invite out all the best players, and it would be solely about that.

Skyborne Legacy 01:07:52 And now the only time you get to see, like, the esports side of World of Warcraft is during blizzcon where they invite, like, the best teams out to come play against each other, but that's not even like, what we'd expect from esports whereas, like, the best players are constantly playing on a competitive level. You just don't get that from World of Warcraft and, like, I'm not a big, like, shooter guy. I don't really play a lot of shooters, but World of Warcraft is, like, one of the largest games I think that have existed, like, since like, in our in at least our recent time. Right? It it had one of the largest, like, daily active users at one point, like, like, like, 10 years ago, but still it for an MMO, it's been absolutely phenomenal.

Skyborne Legacy 01:08:28 And so I think it's interesting that, like, World of Warcraft has shied away from esports, and it kinda goes to show that esports is, like, more or less in addition to a great game that has a really fun economy, but even then it's not vital for, like, that economy to to be successful. Right? Because some of the biggest streamers from World of Warcraft our PVPs. They do the arena. They don't really do, like, the rating or the player versus environment aspect, but they don't do it for esports. They're not out there for money. They do it because they're good and they like to stream. And I think that that goes back to, like, the game being good. Right? That's that's what exists around it.

Skyborne Legacy 01:09:06 Is esports is just like that cherry on top if you have a large enough player base and you can get some sort of funding. But even then, you it it is so much more on to esports that doesn't necessarily make or break a game. And I, again, the example I look at is World of Warcraft where they've shied away from esports and they've only gotten more competitive within their game and more successful, like, overall.

Legendary 01:09:29 Yeah. I really resonate with that so much. And especially the part of the skill based PVP that you can just can stream for the sake of it without needing an puts layer on top of it. And it actually goes back to the point that Apex made before saying that, on the one hand, you have the game loop itself. The PVP mechanisms itself. And then often, the esports component is a more community driven aspect and you can't really force it from, the game devs' perspective. I think this has been a really, really fantastic discussion so far. But I also wanna keep, track of the time.

Legendary 01:10:08 We've been running for a bit more than an hour. I really love that we pivoted a bit away from the financial incentives to also talk about those non financial components and other things that can get people interested in web 3 games in particular Really wanna thank everyone who's been with us on stage, Tyler, Zach, Yellowpanta, Sanjay, Apex, Charles, and, of course, thank you, comma, for joining us.

Legendary 01:10:33 And, of course, thanking everyone in the audience for spending, the last hour with us And before we wrap up, I wanna give, you, Tyler and Zach a chance to share one thing about that the community, whether that's Skyborn Mockovers, could be excited for something you're personally looking forward to, I'm Tyler First.

Tyler Durden | ⦿⦿⦿ 01:10:57 Yeah. I'm I'm really looking forward to, busy bringing on board and and all the partners and the users joining network and actually really, really having a lot of fun there. And, our goal is to gamified the shit out of the the whole end to end kind kind of used her life cycle, I would say, and and, really looking forward to that to to be be at the whole ecosystem together with with all of our partners in the network.

Legendary 01:11:26 Awesome. Love to hear that. Zach, what's something that the subscribe on community can look forward to?

Skyborne Legacy 01:11:31 Man, I'm not sure if I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but, quarter 1, we're expecting friends and family play test and community play test for the mobile game, which is currently codename Phoenix flight. Don't tell my marketing director. I told any of you this, but this is kind of like the goal that we have for, quarter 1. And then as we roll into quarter 2, more features will be revealed on Phoenix flight, hopefully. But as of right now, it's the friends and families aiming for for quarter 1 and not even quarter 1, but, like, like, mid January.

Legendary 01:12:06 Love to hear that. Love hear that bit of alpha at the end. And don't worry. It is a small space. It's not the case that there's a bunch of content creators here. We're just waiting for alpha. That they can share and post. Karma, I wanna throw it to you for the closing words.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:12:22 Yeah. I'm I'm laughing to myself here to be on when I heard, you know, that you said, Hey, I will get in trouble for saying this. I was like, oh my god. Are you launching a token? I just thought to myself, this would have been a perfect closing to this. Financial incentive space. No, but, incredibly excited for you. You know, it's going to be a huge milestone for Chyburn and looking forward to playing myself. If I am invited to their friend's circle, but, yeah, huge Thank you for sharing it on the spaces with us today. And for every single person that listened also for me and from this Demino, big, warm hug, and thank you.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:13:01 And I'm looking forward to sharing some more insights from the Philippines from the web summit, you know, next week once I'm back home, hopefully, or maybe in Seoul. And, yeah, thank you so much to everybody who has joined today.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:13:15 I'll see you tomorrow, Karma.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:13:17 See you tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Let's post something together.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:13:23 Stocks, docks, docks.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:13:29 Sanjay is only thumbs down because he cannot join us.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:13:32 Next time, Sanjay. We will fly out.

Delve into the heart of gaming's evolution with a focus on user acquisition strategies.

This discussion peels back layers of gaming industry tactics, offering insights into how games attract and retain players in an increasingly competitive digital world.

Discover how user acquisition is being redefined in the gaming sector, setting new standards for player engagement and community growth.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:34 Gm gm, everyone. And welcome back to our weekly show. We had a fantastic conversation last week And this week, we really want to dive into what I think is actually one of the most interesting topics when it comes to web 3 gaming.

Legendary 00:03:12 Diving into user acquisition might sound boring at first, but I really think, if we're looking at the current sentiment in the market, And if we're looking at how we've been discussing back and forth, is this a bull run, but the number of active trading wallets still super low.

Legendary 00:03:29 It's still like only almost 9 k people who are trading where new users coming from, how we will get new users will web 3 gaming be the vertical that finally drives new interest into the space, and that all ultimately kind of leads back to talking about user acquisition, And for that reason, I'm also super happy that we actually have, quite some diverse projects that we can talk about user acquisition strategies today.

Legendary 00:03:54 From, obviously, ZTX with my lovely Coast Karma when it comes to a company that has such a solid, such a massive foundation in an already existing, community with Zapeto to pirate nation where we've seen a constant development over the last year with new updates being shipped almost every week and really onboarding the arbitrage community but also getting the perspective in from, content creators on the gaming side themselves because ultimately a lot of community building, a lot of user acquisition comes down to, working with content creators, but also partnering up with other, companies, or even sometimes competitors in the space So getting that all together and talking about what makes the user acquisition strategy in web 3 successful is a topic I'm super excited for with my monologue out of the way, Karma, how are you doing?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:04:55 Absolutely beautiful. Very, very happy for this panel. You know, overjoyed to see Pirate Nation, to see this here join us. I can't see other speakers yet because I'm getting slightly rugged, but, you know, all the everybody joining us today is just always a joy to have on stage, and I'm looking forward to this convo. I am actually in Dubai. I'm traveling a little bit. And, today, I saw Birch Khalifa.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:05:23 So just half an hour ago, I was in the highest building in the world and, you know, just like very, very pumped, to jump from that place to now, you know, sitting here and chatting to you guys.

Legendary 00:05:37 Love to hear that. Eliza, welcome to the stage as well. You are traveling or you will be traveling soon. I didn't remember from the last time we spoke.

Elisa 00:05:46 Hey, everybody. Thank you, legendary. Great to see you all of you guys here. Yeah. I'm traveling this Sunday. To go to YGG Summit, and I will actually be seeing Carmel there. And then, following that going to Japan, so it's it's definitely gonna be interesting for me because we won't be able to create content at my usual PT setup. But luckily, I'm going to Japan, so you know, they're very high-tech. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find like a streaming cafe or something. So, yeah, glad to be here and very excited for this conversation.

Legendary 00:06:19 Absolutely. Don't worry about having streaming cafes and tech access in Japan. Sanjay, welcome to the stage What about you? Are you traveling? Are you stationary at the moment? How do you think about content creation when you're on the move?

Sanjay 00:06:32 First of all, thank you for having me. And, yeah, I do a lot of traveling every travel from my room to the kitchen and then back to the office, which is also in my house. So, yeah, I do a lot of traveling around in the apartment. Probably like 300 for the hundred steps per day altogether. So, yeah, probably about, hopefully, I'll hit 600 steps today. So, yeah, but excited to talk about user acquisition and web through gaming any day. You know?

Legendary 00:06:58 Love it. And, look, that you're joking about that, but for me, that was a massive change in my life when I took my daily news show, the modern market, from audio only to live streaming that on YouTube, because I was used to walk around during the spaces and, like, get stuff done in my flat or just walk around for inspiration. And now I'm, like, all stationary and have to look somewhat into the direction of the camera. So that's definitely been a big change. So love the love the movement within your own home. This from Pirate Nation, and the, the head of business at the company behind it, a proof of play. Welcome to the stage. How are you doing, traveling stationary at the moment?

Dith 00:07:39 Yo, Jim, everyone. Caught me at a sort of slightly odd time. So one of the funny problems they haven't solved completely in ecommerce is that some companies like to give you a really wide delivery window. And so long story short, I've just had some furniture arrive unexpectedly. So if you bear with me 5 minutes, I'm just gonna get it up into my flat, and then I'll be able to actually, contribute to the spaces, properly. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to share a few thoughts about, user acquisition and, what we're working on at Fire Nation.

Legendary 00:08:18 Love it. So we will transition from a furniture acquisition to user acquisition in just a couple minutes, but actually getting getting into the main topic first, quite would like to start with you Karma for an opening question. Basically, I'm really interesting to start the conversation with you because Zepeto has this massive web 2 community ZTX is building a web 3 community first.

Legendary 00:08:47 You spoke about many times how you're going for the web 3 community first, take the learnings there, and then go for basically acquiring the web two users to and and diving and leveraging the leveraging the community that you already had. And across that journey, my question is, what has been the biggest difference so far that you've seen when it comes to acquiring acquiring users in web 2 versus acquiring the user's game, whereas in WIP 3.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:09:20 Yeah. That's, you know, the hits the nail on the head. The question behind today's spaces. The very, very quick answer to that is we haven't actually seen the extent to which we can onboard the web to user base yet because ZTX as a product is not yet ready. So let me maybe zoom out and see, you know, just how we approach this problem. Well, the wet free space is still so small. That for a larger project, especially something social like a metaverse, user acquisition very quickly turns into user onboarding.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:09:56 Because there's only so many existing digits that you can actually, you know, engage. Now, the way we see that ZT X can be simplified into 2 phases, phase 1 is feedbacking and improving the initial early beta game with web free native community. And our phase 2 is onboarding the web to users from the I don't know if it's just me, but comma, you are rocking for me. Oh, that is really, really bad.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:10:29 In that case, I am going to force you to go to someone else first, and I'm going to try and reconnect, with maybe, you know, another, another line.

Legendary 00:10:40 Yeah. Absolutely. Then let's let's quickly, switch gears on that. And maybe you've mentioned the point of how user acquisition turns into user onboarding. And since we have both Eliza and Sanjay with us as content creators, and, partnerships with content creators with KOLs influences, however you wanna call them, play a big, big role And I know Eliza, it's something you've been talking about for a very long time.

Legendary 00:11:08 How, basically, when it comes to onboarding people, it's not only about educating them what web 3 is, but also like forgetting about web 3 for a moment and actually talking about the game at heart and talking about why this is something, to be excited about. So I would quite like to know from you when you partner up with web 3 games. How do you approach that challenge that on the one hand, you obviously have a massive reach within the web 3 community.

Legendary 00:11:36 And there's maybe not the question of user onboarding because those people might be very familiar with how Web 3 works, but then you also extend your audience beyond that and you have users, gamers who are maybe not that familiar. And you kinda serve a bit 2 different target audiences at the same time when you create content in partnership with a game that you're interested in?

Elisa 00:12:00 Yeah. Really good question. I'd say, like, the the instances in which I've, like, witnessed web 2 players that school them, you know, experiencing playing a web 3 game has been, like, in my discord, so it hasn't necessarily been through my Twitter content. And I'd say the main the main thing is really just, yeah, the onboarding process. Like, I used to think, Oh, making a wallet a is not that complicated and, you know, to any to any gamer really, it shouldn't be, too much of a hurdle because we are pretty techie.

Elisa 00:12:39 But there's also something else, which is, you know, the younger generation has a really short attention span and unless you're telling them, oh okay, play this game and you can make a $1000 today, like there's no real incentive to creating a wallet because to them it's just playing, yet another game. And sometimes the financial incentives, you know, don't remotivate a younger player. Like, I'm talking about people who like 18 to 20. So in in the playtest that I've ho hosted, the most recent successful one was Golden Tides, and, they basically just needed to sign up with Gmail.

Elisa 00:13:19 So there was no wallet creation necessary and I continue to host play tests for games that have this kind of onboarding just because I don't want to lose people and I also don't want them to have like a negative perception, of the games that I'm, you know, encouraging them to playtest but I would, to be honest, like, my main thesis about this is, is to do with IP and If there's an IP that's good enough and familiar enough, people will be willing to to play the games like I I am very bullish on, you know, NFT projects now moving towards actually thinking about, okay, how can we expand our IP?

Elisa 00:14:02 How can we make our IP familiar and, just like a bigger brand, obviously Pudgy Penguins is a massive example. But there are other brands that are starting to follow their footsteps like cool cats, imaginary ones, sappy seals, and imaginary ones is actually, now working on mobile games. Grates is also a very good example. And yeah, I think people, you know, when they recognize and I and they're like, oh wait, I've seen this before, they're more willing to actually play it and yeah, that that's my main thing really.

Elisa 00:14:38 I think if players like an IP and like the look of a game and and think it's something familiar, they're more likely to go and play it.

Legendary 00:14:47 Yep. Yeah. I think that's a very good take, and I think that, thinking just beyond the game and thinking how you can build an IP around it that might create multiple touch points with the brand than just having that single activation the game is such a such a valuable strategy. Sanjay would love to get you into the conversation before I'll check back in with Carmen to see if her connection is working again.

Legendary 00:15:12 How do you think about games basically extending beyond the game itself, trying to build a broader ecosystem as a part of also the user acquisition strategy because ultimately if we take the example by Elisa, thinking about Padji penguins, by having the toy lines in Walmart, they just create so many more touch points with the brand than before.

Sanjay 00:15:35 Yeah. You know, I used to work in, in sales in the past. I was not that of good a salesman, but, you know, I I went to a lot of classes and sales classes. And and, you know, they taught there that to to to buy something, a customer or a person has to see the object or has to see the brand at least nine times before they decide or even think about buying it. This is like some statistics like the sales company came up with. They have to see it at least nine times. So, like, if you show a game like one time to a player or a gamer.

Sanjay 00:16:07 Most of the chances are no matter how good the game is, the chances are they are not going to play it, or maybe they might just take a look at it, but they're not, like, inclined to play it. And that's what that's something like we mentioned, you know, like me, Eliza, wipe you down there. You know? A rating as well. We mentioned with some games we work with is that, if you want a one off partnership or one of something like that, it's much chancellor is not going to work because people are going to look at it one time, and they're gonna forget about it the next week or the next month. So you have to at least show them multiple times again and again. And not just one one platform, but on different platforms. So, you know, you wanna use the acquisition. You gotta get out of Twitter.

Sanjay 00:16:43 You know, like, most of the people in this space are not really full time gamers and not spending 8 to 10 hours a day gaming. So you gotta go to TikTok. You gotta go to, you know, YouTube and Twitch and all that. And, and, you know, like, putting these IPs in the stores where, like, when you go, you walk up to a store and you see Fortnite, you know, toys everywhere. And now that just reminds these kids that, oh, I gotta go back home and play Fortnite. And then you go to, you go to, like, McDonald's or something. I don't know if McDonald's have a collab with Fortnite, but they probably will eventually. And, you know, like, you buy a Fortnite happy meal or something like that.

Sanjay 00:17:18 So the more you can come in front of the customer or like just just organically be present in front of them, the higher chances that they are going to indulge in your ecosystem. So Pajee Pangoon is doing great job that they have these pajees around, but I still think right now they don't have, like, an end product? Like, where does the person go after they buy the pudgy? Right? Like, oh, they got they look at this pudgy, click is buying it. A couple of YouTubers have it in their, in their house and whatnot. But what can a normal person, you know, like a normal kid can do apart from buying the toy alone. Like, yeah, they can buy the toy from Walmart, but where does that go after?

Sanjay 00:17:58 Right? So I think they're probably creating some mini games and stuff. I think they have one game. I don't know if it's public yet or not, but, you know, maybe make it more public so people can be like, oh, that's that game I can play, and I can go back home, and I can, you know, have this toy and also play this game. So, yeah, there's a lot of work needed, but, again, user acquisition is not the easiest job. Probably most toughest job and the most important as well. So this conversation can just keep going then going and going.

Legendary 00:18:24 Yeah. Absolutely absolutely agree with you. And I think those are some very, very good examples. Carmel, welcome back to the stage. Just wanna catch up quickly. On what we've been extending the conversation on.

Legendary 00:18:38 The the question that I had for Eliza was basically how she thinks about the two points that you mentioned very early on in your statement, which was the user acquisition that then also blends in with user onboarding because we have to educate people about web 3, and both Eli and Sanjay made the point that, it is so important to not only think about the game, in itself, but think beyond that, think about the ecosystem, are creating, like, the Pudgy penguins are doing with the toy brand that just ultimately creates so many more touch points with the brand.

Legendary 00:19:09 And I would love to get you in on that knowing how many collaborations with brands Zepeta has also had and also knowing how collaborations can be a fantastic tool to acquire more users and basically leverage other communities.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:24 Yeah. And I hope I'm back I'm just going to apologize for, you know, dropping off. I am consistently being rocked guys. Can you hear me alright? Just to quickly, you know, confirm. Works perfectly right now. Okay. Let's dive straight into it. So I completely agree with everything that had been said. I was, you know, it was possible for me to follow the majority of the conversation. But if I were to simplify the entire conversation and bring it back to the with basics. I think before a user can even discover whether or not they like your app, whether they like your game, what before they can even discover if your game is fun.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:20:05 Currently what I personally as a user find the biggest hurdle is usually just a simple logging into the games. Even thinking back about the first DTX playtest, which, you know, was a very, very early version, but nevertheless, we wanted community feedback. It was clear from the start that only Savvy web for users would ever actually participate and play and feedback because the only logging login, flow that was available to us was actually utilizing MetaMask and utilizing MetaMask mobile. So that instantly cuts you off from any onboarding attempts early on.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:20:45 But this is, you know, changing. And here, I wanted to say that the onboarding itself just is so closely correlated with how the technology is advancing. We all depend on blockchain tech. We all depend on these 3rd party solutions that help us abstract accounts and help us actually make logins and utilization of blockchain so much easier for for, you know, just basically newbies. And these solutions have really advanced over the past months. So what games are now able to do is create something called smart accounts, abstracted accounts.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:22 Which means that while your game has elements on the blockchain and while your users have ownership of their assets, You do not need to undergo the entire loop of educating them about the security and self custody of assets. You do not need to teach them about how they, you know, need to stir store their seed phrase and retrieve it if something goes wrong. Instead, what you can do is create social logins and create the, in a way, a Metamask wallet or login enables you to then create an account in game, which is a one stop shop for all interactions.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:59 I am criminally oversimplifying, and I'm sure this is going to, you know, add to this a bit later on as as is incredibly savvy in that regard. But if I were to simplify, the technological progress and integrations, which are now possible, are really allowing us to invite users who have never interacted with MetaMask, to access games via social logins and obstructed accounts. You know, in a very, very easy manner or at least easier than it used to be just a few months ago. And that really opens the doors.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:22:34 So last example, and I'm going to, you know, to pass the mic back to you, you know, after the beta launch, CTX will work to add support for Zepeta account. As an option for creating and managing ZT X game accounts. Now this means that any existing Zapato user and Zapato being, you know, a web to app that backs us and has over 430,000,000 lifetime users by now, these users will be able to join ZTX with virtually no additional setup required. And the same will be possible with social logins, be the Gmail and other accounts.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:23:08 And you can then go even further and combine that with on ramp integrations where instead of, you know, having to leave the app and onboard your funds, you also have frictionless buying in game. And I think this all is going to genuinely help us have a quick start for completely new users that has never even touched a MetaMask before. And I think that's going to be genuinely huge.

Legendary 00:23:35 Yeah. I think, social logins, the ERC standards action are so, so important for the space to still acknowledge that the technology exists in the background, but not for the user from, like, day 1 to learn everything anew, as to just be able to onboard them. Because I also think taking the other extreme and just saying that the technology in the background doesn't matter. People won't care about if it's web 3 or not.

Legendary 00:24:02 Might be true in the future in the long run, but it certainly not true in the short midterm, in my opinion, also because I think that when we speak about web 3 gaming, we speak a lot of times about in game economies. We do have the connection to, economies that are ultimately fostered and leveraged by real money. And for those reasons, I do think that, it will play an important role to at least acknowledge the the tech that is in the background, even though most of the users don't really need or want to know how it works in the background because you also don't care about that in a similar vein.

Legendary 00:24:38 When you go shopping, on Amazon for whatever things you want to buy. This, I wanna check with you. Are you back with us on stage?

Dith 00:24:48 I am. Yes. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for the patience. Just really awkward timing, on a delivery there, but I'm back at my desk now, hydrated, moisturized, all that good stuff.

Legendary 00:25:01 So Wonderful. And ready ready for my question. Yeah. So the the the way how I onboarded to parrot nation was via 1 of the parleys, the, collaborations with other communities I think for me it was I missed out on the on the yoga pads where I'm a whole guy then. So the infinity gods, was it the other way around? I don't fully remember. But, I definitely remember seeing them over and over and over on the timeline. And I quite would like to know from you how you think about those community collaborations? Do you see them as a very, very strategic element to get exposure to multiple communities?

Legendary 00:25:39 Do you see them as as as user acquisition tools in the sense of it is easier to acquire users from web 3 native communities who already know how to maybe even navigate a layer solution because for some, it might be a challenge to even get on arbitrum. And then you basically save yourself the time to do the user onboarding and educate them about arbitrary? Like, how do you position, those parlays and community collaborations within your overall user acquisition strategy?

Dith 00:26:10 Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the great question. So Well, maybe to share the context. Power Nation as a game has been live for, a year, about a year now. We're coming up to the 1 year anniversary in, like, 2 weeks. When it launches in a very, very early and rural states, There wasn't a whole lot to do in the game. It's pretty basic, but we've come a long way since then. We've been launching, a game update almost every week. Since launch. So it's improved a lot. The game is more fun. But we've also invested in that onboarding experience. So Right now, there's the custodial wallet option.

Dith 00:26:49 If you arrive to the game and you have an existing wallet, you've already been onboarded to F Three. Great. You can connect with an existing wallet. And if you don't, you're completely new to the blockchain. You've never owned any crypto. You can have a wallet created for you. Use the social login you get into the game. One of the things that we've done, because we are a fully on chain game, meaning all game logic runs, on chain. Now you can't really have that happen on Ethereum L1 because it's just too slow and too expensive. So one of the things that we've done is allowed some of our NFTs to live on Ethereum L1, which is where, you know, people like to trade is where all the liquidity is.

Dith 00:27:27 It's where most of the market participants sort of you know, enjoy, NFTs, but gameplay to address the fully on chain scalability question runs on arbitrary Nova But, of course, you know, again, thinking about the user, experience, people don't like to bridge. They don't like to switch networks and so on. So we've abstracted away all of that.

Dith 00:27:50 If you've never interacted with Arbitrum, I mean, many people have, obviously, it's a it's a fantastic ecosystem, but if you haven't, then, you know, we don't have any of the, I think typical issues where you need to understand what this ecosystem is, how it works, how you add it to your MetaMask and do an expensive and long bridge. You kind of arrive on Pirate Nation. There's a, a kind of a, like, a pop up where we explain what's happening, like, gameplay happens on l 2. So you check a box, you sign one transaction, and then then that we could kinda take care of everything for you.

Dith 00:28:24 So gameplay will run on arbitrary Nova, which is super fast, super scalable, and you never need to, bridge. You never need switch networks and so on. This kinda, like, feeds into, I think partly answering your question, but also what what Karma was saying is that you really have to think about how you make it easy for users to get in. And we're, at this point, fairly sophisticated in that onboarding funnel. Like, we look at every step, every screen, every click that the user has to make even once they get into the game. Right? How do we make sure that we don't lose a new player within the first five minutes of the game. One of the things that we had seen, a few months ago was, like, players are getting into the game.

Dith 00:29:01 But then they're getting stuck, not knowing how to craft their first ship. And you kinda need a ship as pirate nation. A lot of you you need a ship to do combat, which is, like, probably the most fun thing in the game. So we're like, okay, how do we make it, like, really easy for people to get to their ship? Like, let's make that the first quest. So that helped a bit with, like, conversion through this, like, user onboarding funnel and then say, okay, it's not enough to make it the first quest. Let's actually, like, make it a pop up that hand holds the player through that first quests. So, like, we make sure every player coming into the game within their first minute has a skip, which is like a basic ship. And then okay, like, what's the, you know, where's the next drop off?

Dith 00:29:40 And, you know, we're looking at that funnel, you know, stage by stage and optimizing all along the way so that you basically, what you wanna have happen is, like, if ten people arrive on your gaming website dotcom, how can you get, like, as many of them? Ideally, 10 out of 10, but, you know, no site converts perfectly. So how can we get 9 or 8 of those ten people into the game past the first hurdle and experiencing the first sort of like fun loop that gives them that sort of like crunchy satisfying bit of dopamine that as good games do make you wanna play more. Right?

Dith 00:30:13 Like, that's you kinda have to get them to the fun as quickly as possible, without losing them at any point in that funnel now, finally, I have this terrible tendency when someone asked me a question to add a ton of context. So thanks for bearing with me. But, finally, to answer your question about the parleys, I think yes. There there's intentionality to who we're partnering with and why. And I think the the obvious headline there is that these are many of the high quality communities that have, either gone to market with a very clear value proposition, clearly speaking to gamers.

Dith 00:30:52 So, yeah, they're a newer project, but it's very clear who they're trying to attract and kind of community they've already curated or it's an older project at which point a lot of that community curation has already happened through the natural ebb and flow of trading and people who weren't interested in that project for the long term have probably left and people who are really enjoying it I've stayed on. I think like a good example of that is, is Wolf game. Right? Like, it it's a mature community. People at this point know what that's about and why enjoy it and why they're there.

Dith 00:31:25 So, you know, that's kind of a, you know, a game and an ecosystem that has some similarities to what we're building in terms of, you know, how the core product functions and and and and and other things. So we've been intentional in selecting communities to parlay with. We still have, many exciting ones in the pipeline.

Dith 00:31:46 And I think the one sort of maybe unique or different challenge we have from other games being fully on chain is that I mean, today, if we wanted to scale to 10, 20, 50, 100,000 players, very confident we could do that without really, you know, investing heavily in a marketing budget. We've essentially sort of spent nothing on user acquisition to date. But our challenge actually becomes in, the cost of that scale. Right? We run fully on chain and as scalable and as economical as arbitrary Nova is, it still costs something. Right? We're paying for gas for our players.

Dith 00:32:26 So the reason that we're not today scaling to hundreds of thousands of players is largely because we're building the underlying infrastructure and answering some of these hard questions that haven't really been answered before. Right? There's no fully on chain game today that has hundreds of thousands of players or millions of players. And hopefully, you know, we're we're part of the pack leading the way and then figuring that out. But, you know, that that's kind of a, a technological piece to that we have counterbalance against the question of user acquisition as well.

Legendary 00:32:57 I think that's that's a fantastic, perspective that you share and also really appreciate all the context that you embedded in it. I do have 2 follow-up questions, but I wanna go to Karma first, because I know you also wanted to share something on that perspective.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:13 Yeah. Actually, I had a I had a fun question in mind just to throw to the audience, but this really, like, jolted my memory. So I wanted to first maybe share something that we really sympathize with on ZT X side. You just mentioned that, you know, anything you do on chain, especially when you, take over the costs that users incur, can really quickly add up. And it's something that you know, just as a member of the audience, maybe you might not be thinking about, we all always scream.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:42 We want on chain elements and games and we want, you know, as much ownership of our assets as possible, but then very quickly adds up, especially as in game smart contracts tend to be quite complex. And as such, also utilize more gas. But the example I wanted to actually bring up was the, like, soft onboarding campaign we've done on Zt X side a few weeks ago. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to test the interest from web to audience Now that web or 2 audience is not yet ready to be onboarded. ZT X is not nearly as far along the way as we just heard pirate nation is.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:34:22 We are, you know, like, we are approaching our beta launch in a few weeks. So it will be a while until we have the smart accounts and social social abstraction in place. But what we wanted to do is see how high is the percentage and how high are the numbers of existing web 2 users which would be interested in a web free product. How many of these users would be interested in claiming as free digital collectible for the first time in their lives? So what we did was we displayed a link to existing Zapato users, the majority of which never utilized blockchain before, And what they were able to do is they were able to claim a digital collectible.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:35:02 It was a hoodie, which down the line, they can use both in the petal as an interoperable asset as well as in ZT X. So it's just a wearable for your avatar. And on the end of the user, on the user end, they truly never left as a petal app. At some point, you know, it took them to to, like, a screen where where, you know, the claim was successful. But on their end, they just claimed that they're just horrible. On orbit rooms. And, however, we've onboarded 200,000 new wallets to orbit room in under 24 hours.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:35:38 We actually had to stop this, this entire campaign early because the gas costs were completely ruining us. Now this is a bit of an exaggeration, but we did cut off the campaign early because 200,000 users claiming a digital wearable for free is something that, you know, very quickly approaches multiple figures, and we know for us, it was just a soft test. So in the future, these users can reactivate their accounts and, you know, enter straight into ZTX from Zepetto utilize their asset But I wanted to say that, you know, these things are incredibly costly.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:36:17 And until we have, you know, even faster, even cheaper solutions, it's going to be very difficult for gains for brands, for projects to actually take over the costs necessary for onboarding. Yeah, so, like, really excited to see where this goes and really excited to see the strides that are being done. But it's certainly something we should on the community site consider you know, as we as we think about onboarding, someone has to pay for the onboarding part.

Legendary 00:36:47 Yeah. Absolutely. And, it it is important to keep that in mind, right? You're using a scalability solution. You're using Avidroom Nova, whatever the two solution that might be. And, yes, it is by many, many, multitudes cheaper to interact with the blockchain there, but, however, once you go at scale, there is still significant cost to that. And I love the point that you made on onboarding, the 100 k wallets and having digital collectibles.

Legendary 00:37:16 And I also love the point, that you made this when you talked about how on chain parrotationist is a game, and you also brought up Wolf game, which I found quite interesting. Wolf game now obviously being part of being acquired by by Pixel Volt and being integrated in reboot. And I get to play both the game by reboot battle plan and, parrot nation.

Legendary 00:37:43 And I wanna get to a very, very specific point because I noticed when playing parrot nation, I have beautiful log that shows me everything that is done on chain, on behalf of me that I don't have to obviously pay the transaction costs for, but I can see the on chain interactions Whereas, battle plan, like, choose the specific strategy to also do the transactions for you and Albert Manova on the back end. But don't share that info with you. So you don't you I mean, obviously, you can look it up on the blockchain, but you don't have it as accessible within the game. To see which elements are transactions on the blockchain.

Legendary 00:38:18 And if my question to you would be, that lock that you have that shows all the, on chain interactions that happen on behalf of the players, what is the strategic thinking behind that. I quite like it, but I would love to hear your perspective on it first.

Dith 00:38:36 That's a, yeah, interesting question. I mean, The strict strategic value. I I don't know if there's strategic value. I think, you know, that was a feature that we had in the game since launch. And when we launched the game, no one was really talking about fully on chain games. And then 6 months later, over the course of the summer, suddenly it was pretty clear.

Dith 00:39:04 This, like, bubble emerged where, like, fully on chain games are becoming really trendy and if you'll start talking about autonomous worlds, then we went to, like, ECC, and it was almost a bit of a meme how many, like, VCs were, like, sniffing up this fully on chain gaming tree of, like, yeah, we need to, like, fund on chain games and it's the future and the rest. And, like, you know, we'd kind of been trying to get that message out there for the 6 months proceeding. So, I mean, the real answer is that feature was in the game before I even joined the team, but I suspect the original product thinking was was it worth me or did anything?

Dith 00:39:40 Like, being a being like an early fully on chain game, we we had a role to play in the ecosystem to let people know what that meant and to show them how it actually looks in the game. But if you think about it through the lens of like, okay, what's the value to the player? It's a harder question to answer, right, because it comes back to this point of like, and, you know, a few of us have made this point. Gamers don't really care about the underlying technology. They do to an extent if they are web 3 natives because they're asking the question of Yeah. How can this technology or this underlying ecosystem enrich me? But if you ask your average web 2 game or it's a, like, I don't care.

Dith 00:40:18 I don't care if this game is in unreal or unity or it runs on AWS or GCP or it's fully on chain or not. It's like, I just wanna have fun. So I think it's interesting. I would flip the question back to everyone to see who thinks we should still have that feature in 12 months when we have hundreds of thousands of players. And most of them, when they've joined pyronation, It'll be the first time that they're doing anything on chain. They they may not know that they're doing anything on chain. Right? So, you know, is that something we we would wanna keep at that point in the game sort of life cycle, possibly not. Like, does it add any value to those players? Does it confuse them?

Dith 00:40:58 Does it need to be hidden? Maybe, like, you know, it's kind of like upfront center right now when you complete a quest to, boom, the sort of transaction proof pops up so it's a really interesting question, but, you know, I think, hazarding a guess, it was part of our, like, early educational sort of effort in, raising the profile of fully on chain games.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:41:20 Yeah. And I'm happy to jump in first and, you know, share my thoughts. In the meantime, anybody who would also like to, you know, pitch in, feel free to just you know, throw your head hand up. This is actually something, you know, when we, when we met in Paris, something we discussed I still remember something you said that there was a time, where no amount of on chain nest in a game was enough for the maximalist. There was there is a particular group of, you know, really, like, web free, affectionate is out there where no matter how much a game puts on chain, it will never ever be enough.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:00 And I remember, you know, talking about it, with with you with Pirate Nation team and it because it is impressive to, you know, to what extent Pirate Nation is on chain. And we were talking whether or not it will make sense as we onboard a larger and larger audience because for these upcoming audiences, it will likely matter much less. They will majorly just, you know, care about the quality of their gameplay and whether or not it's fun, whether or not they have, you know, their assets. So I personally believe that it will become increasingly less important to feature, you know, these options front and center.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:39 I know that for asset GTX, you know, while we are trying to give as much visibility, especially at in the better stage over asset ownership and give players their own accounts where, you know, they can have an overview of their history. We are actually cutting down on scoping these features because we believe the UI should be, you know, as clean and as simple as possible. And this is very likely because, you know, the majority of the audience we will onboard is fully what too, but I still believe that it will just become less and less important how much is on chain. To the majority of audience.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:43:17 It will always remain important to it, to a smaller, smaller group of of absolute, you know, like, aficionados, I hope you will agree with me here, Keith, but I also think it's perfectly fine to disagree.

Dith 00:43:30 You know, I think the the thesis for why games should be fully on chain is, hasn't been answered in a practical setting yet, right? Like, it's still early in this arc. But, the second someone builds space nation on top of pyre nation. And you could start doing that today, by the way, because if you're building something fully on chain means the game is like, natively open source, right? Natively compostable and remixable, and any dev right now can start using our use all of our smart contracts that comprise the game. Right?

Dith 00:44:09 So you can mod, you know, extend the game. And I think on people are only gonna really get it I think, you know, beyond the sort of, like, very, early part of the curve, which is this, like, niche early adopter part that we're in now, only gonna move to the next part of the curve, and people will only get it once they see it and feel it. Right? And it will happen, but you we we are early. The way games over time have, I mean, if you look at some of, the world's most popular games, they started as mods, right? Like everyone knows the Counter Strike example, the the DOTA example, and there are others.

Dith 00:44:48 So there's this value in, building open source games and games that are fully on chain for that reason because, yeah, maybe your game makes it and, is massive and people really enjoy it, or maybe it's the mods that it. And I think the other thing, which, again, most gamers have kind of taken for granted, but it will eventually happen is that many of these kind of web 2.5 games that are not fully on chime on chain will rise theme eventually and will stop development and the teams will give up and move on because that's just what happens. That happens in every product category around around the world, right?

Dith 00:45:26 Starts ups are hard, games are particularly hard products to build. And when people start seeing their favorite, like, web 2.5 game cease development, and that's it. The game is the game. And it's never gonna progress or develop from there, or maybe worse that the developers are really, out of cash and can't even support server fees, and the game has taken offline, you know, it's those kind of catalysts that I think are gonna shift the the spotlight a little bit more back towards, okay. Well, you're telling me if this game was, like, fully on chain, then it would actually run forever, and we wouldn't have this problem and the community could own it and take over development of it.

Dith 00:46:04 You know, that may maybe, you know, if some of these points will reach that, I think give I think the narrative for fully owned chain games more of a practical setting than a theoretical one. Because right now, it's kind of all, like, thesis sounds really good, but as I say, it's still too early for, for, you know, I think the mass audience to to care. And I think ultimately the way that it manifests itself is not from, a technological narrative, but actually from, a gameplay narrative, right?

Dith 00:46:38 Like, I answered this from more of a an on chain perspective of why this this matters, but, again, putting it through the lens of, like, fun first and what players give a shit about, then, it's about someone making space nation and that game being, like, really, really awesome. And then people discovering like, oh, okay. The only reason people were able to make that was because the game was based on Pirate Nation. Was, like, built on this, like, globally open source protocol in the blockchain. So I know we've deviated from user acquisition, but those are my thoughts on on chain gaming.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:47:26 Alright. Well, I'm gonna jump back in because I think either I am getting ragged again or legendary is. Yeah. Definitely legendary. Alright. I'm actually gonna, you know, I would love to loop back into the convo, Charles, you know, co founder of Misty Island. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'm not sure, you know, at which, at which moment you were precisely able to to jump in today, but we had just been unpacking the topic of to what degree does it matter for the entire game to be on chain?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:48:05 And whether or not as we expand user acquisition, the the answer to that question might change and might actually, you know, the weighting of that might become different. I'm wondering if you would like to share a few thoughts, you know, from your perspective.

Charl3s 00:48:19 Thank you, Karma. Appreciate you having me here. So when we look at what features of a game should be on chain or off chain, We're pretty pragmatic, like, I think a lot of the people on this panel are that in the end, it's all about a use case, and it's about who's the target market, and what sort of user benefit can you provide them and how are those unit user benefits made much greater by putting something on chain and in some cases, it may be advantageous to keep it off chain. So I think even with, like, you know, there there is a within the kind of crypto enthusiasts, crowd. There's definitely people who get quite philosophical about this, and that's fair.

Charl3s 00:48:56 But I think when you look at what people do with their feet, they tend to favor applications that make pragmatic choices. So if you look at like Uniswap, it's not all on chain the front end is off chain. And and that makes sense. Right? That enables a good user experience or, OpenC or blur are also kind of hybridized solutions. Maybe quite a lot of it lives on chain, but there's plenty in many cases order books that exist off chain. And so I think every application's making pragmatic choices. Some just have the luxury to put more on chain given what they're building.

Charl3s 00:49:30 When it comes to games, we see it as being fundamentally, it's about, you know, a game has to acquire users, retain them, and find some way to monetize. And so we look at saying, what can we put on chain? That kind of gives us some new superpowers in those three dimensions. And when it comes to user acquisition, we're really excited about prize based play. The ability not just for a game to issue prizes to its users, but for users to issue prizes to other users, which we think is uniquely facilitated by leveraging the blockchain.

Charl3s 00:50:03 So having a sort of open prize system where a user can come and lock up a cool NFT they've made or a soul bound token or some ETH. And challenge other people to compete for it. That sort of open prize system helps solve an activation problem for people, for for games. And and I think is an experience that especially crypto natives really love. So that's 1. And then also on the activation end, cross IP stuff is made far easier by using open ledgers.

Charl3s 00:50:31 So if you look at a lot of the work we do is taking groups like, say, sappy seals or board apes or me bits or even we've been messing around with some Pirate Nation avatars, which are the avatars are in the metadata, which is a great move. And the way we look at it is saying people care about these things that exist on chain. And if our game experience can speak directly to that user, by featuring their IP, by featuring avatars and characters they identify with. That's a way of pulling people in. So you've kind of got prizes. You've got cross IP stuff. And then the last side of it for us would be around the creator economy.

Charl3s 00:51:09 So We think that NFTs are an amazing way to monetize user created assets, games like Roblox rely on microtransactions, people buying a cool hat or a backpack or a sword for their character. And by giving these things provable rarity, users are likely to be willing to spend more on them. And what's exciting about that isn't just that the game can monetize through that, but that a creator economy can be stimulated around it because if you're a game artist, right now, you have no relationship with the end user. You can actually sell goods directly to the user that they can use in games and in other games.

Charl3s 00:51:47 So I'd say prizes, cross IP stuff, superior creator economy. These are the things we're focused on. And then game logic and game state, We're not quite as advanced as a pirate nation on this front. For us, a lot of the the nature of the game involves a lot of, like, real time combat where it's like, you know, you're playing a team death match or capture the flag. And there's some of that you could communicate to the chain or, you know, put on chain. But a lot of it is very difficult to. It would just be tons of small unique actions that would be hard to put on chain, at least right now. And so, yeah, we're pretty pragmatic about it.

Charl3s 00:52:23 And the way this relates to user acquisition for me is that, I think I look at it as if a user, there's sort of 2 paths you can walk along here. Once a user deeply identifies with something that exists on chain, like they have an avatar they love, or they have a board a profile picture, right? That user is is is is much easier to activate suddenly because you can see who they are on chain. You can kind of get a sense of what matters to them. And you can provide compelling incentives to pull them in. You can leverage the IP that they're passionate about and use it for user acquisition.

Charl3s 00:53:00 The I think the tougher path that will have to be cracked, but as more challenging is getting a user to care about something on chain in the first place. So it's almost like the internet's a great activation tool, but if someone doesn't even have an internet connection yet, you're, you know, you're in a game of persuading them to get that. And so it's it's harder. It's not to say it can't be done, and consumer apps will do it. They have a reason to do it. We're very focused on users who already love things on chain.

Charl3s 00:53:29 We think that groups like, say, sappy seals have done a lot of the hard work of getting a user to be excited about on chain, on chain goods And so once a user already cares about that, there's a ton you can do. They already have a wallet. They know what a token could be worth. They are excited about on chain prizes, and you're suddenly playing in a very kind of ideal circumstance for leveraging crypto to get them to engage with a platform. So I think for us, like, we're catering to the niche of people who are already excited about NFTs, about tokens, and then kind of leveraging cross IP stuff and prizes to get them to play.

Legendary 00:54:10 I really love how you got in, at this point of the conversation and and have this comprehensive picture on how you think about user acquisition but why also to you the thought of what is on chain, what is off chain matters, matters from a user acquisition perspective, because you take this collaboration perspective standpoint, partnering up with, Kent Pappanas, with the boomers, etcetera, and obviously tapping into communities who already on chain assets. So then the question really becomes relevant for you. How, what what the assets that are already on chain. How can we use them in the game?

Legendary 00:54:47 And it becomes more than something that is just personal preference were nuanced because it becomes part of the user acquisition strategy. And I also love the point that this made before flipping the question and saying, will it matter in 12 months? Because right now, I am one of the users who really likes to see the log in in the game, not because like I'm on Chain maximalist, but just because I'm so curious to see what's happening behind the scenes, and now it is still the very web 3 native people, that we are onboarding. And this is why I think that thinking about what is on chain versus what is off chain is so so important also in the light of the user acquisition strategy.

Legendary 00:55:27 And with that being said, Yellow Panther, welcome to the stage. I would love to pass it to you. And hear from you as a content creator, if you are looking at new games, either because you wanna partner up with them, you wanna play them, you're building your tier list, Is that something you're looking at? What of the game elements are on chain, off chain does that matter from your perspective as a game or content creator? Or is it something that's not as important and not the top priority for you?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:55:54 What is up everyone in Yellow Panther here? Life from Thailand. We just have, 2, events, over 2 days. And interesting question.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:56:07 Like, if you talk about user acquisition, I was actually just with Jackal, with Sing Jin and a few other wolves, And we were talking about user acquisition and, regarding how I view and tier, certain games, I actually the whole user experience, from a to z is very important, because I not only go from my perspective, but I also go from my audience, either, web tree native or not, web tree native perspective as well. So it is like a full full on, rating, right, not just like a, like, just based on gameplay or based on hype and those kind of things.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:56:47 But, basically, we were saying, and I was observing, right, let's just say Asia, right, not all countries are crypto, the crypto adoption is very high. So I I do believe that, you know, games that, do not have onboarding, barriers are actually have more advantage, right, in comparison to, you know, what Eliza and Sanjay already mentioned if you need a wallet and stuff like that, it does have a higher barrier of entry for newer, gamers and and non crypto native people.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:57:24 And which I think is very important, right, it's just too early for some of it. And we all have this picture painted that, you know, either web tool or web tree, it doesn't matter because in down the line, we all know that it's gonna just be come gaming. And the tech is gonna be behind it and so on. And it does have to be, you know, it does still need to take a lot of work because even in Thailand, right, not everyone is interested in gaming, web tree gaming, because of wallets because of a lot of ongoing issues and also, like, even regulation. Right?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:58:02 But then in my opinion, it at the end of the day, it does matter. Right? And, you know, with now all the attention span that you know, these gen z's have or, like, gen alpha. It's just very short, and we have to keep it short and simple. Within a few clicks, you can play the game, and that's just my perspective. But if you talk to me in terms of, like, on Chain Gaming, I personally have a lot a lot of, conviction in it and also belief in it because it is very cool and it is very suitable for us web tree native people, I will say it's it is on the advanced level.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:58:41 And for games like pyronation and other games that, you know, other people are looking at, I believe that, you know, in the future, it will have a very strong audience and it will be people who truly understand the web tree gaming and not, web 2.5 gaming and so on.

Legendary 00:58:57 Yep. Yeah. I think that is a great perspective because you are, you know, mentioning how all of the on chain, profile is super important and on chain activities are super important. But ultimately attention span, that's a very important one. It's super, super short. And you wanna onboard people and you wanna get them to play the game, and it's perfectly in line with what, Tiff said before. You start part of nation. You will need to get to the point where you do crafting. You craft your ships, but if you don't know how to get there, you will have forgotten about that. And we will not even notice it. You won't get to the point. So then just start it by having a pop up and showing people how to craft the ship first.

Legendary 00:59:35 And I think this is one of the aspects that makes you so complex to build in in web 3 gaming because you have those different target audiences, and you have so many people in audience groups want different things. And on some you can compromise, on some you probably can't compromise. You have to have some kind of adaptability or flexibility. And then you also have the additional challenge that you want to do things in the right order and the right order might look very, very different for different games.

Legendary 01:00:01 And that constitutes such a complex strategy in my opinion that you need when you build web 3 games and a massive, massive part of that is also something that we touched on, which is working with, content creators with gamers, like yourself, like Eliza, like Sanjay.

Legendary 01:00:17 And I kinda wanna flip the switch a bit on this and go to Ulyssa and ask you because you've seen we have so many creators, in the stage as well, if if someone is a creator and wants to get, you know, is highly passionate about gaming, web 3 gaming and wants to get in your position, where you are able to work with games, you're able to advise games to do the play tests, and ultimately to partnerships with games what would you advise to creators who want to get in the position that you are in right now?

Elisa 01:00:48 Wow. I love this question. I would say, so I actually answered this question kind of recently, because someone asked me, and I've been seeing a lot more creators pop up. And honestly, I I really love to see it because we need more creators. We need more, people that are good at communicating. There's many such cases where there are very, very, very talented game teams, but their devs Like, devs don't tend to be, you know, public facing. They tend to not really like, marketing and putting themselves out there. They'd rather just build the game.

Elisa 01:01:24 So as creators, we actually have a pretty important mission where, you know, sometimes we even have to go, like, kind of chasing these teams and asking them, hey. Like, can you give me, you know, some key information? Can I please playtest and, you know, putting these these games on the map? Yellow Panther is actually really, really good at doing this. And, yeah, I think as a content creator, there's a lot she sees out here. There's a lot of web 3 games that don't have any coverage, because they may be, for example, less hype or just don't have like a a very experienced marketing team.

Elisa 01:02:00 So I would say, you know, look out for those smaller gems because personally, I've We tested a lot of games recently that I think deserve a lot more followers, than some accounts that have a lot of followers already. And yeah, all they need really is is someone to help them, be the messenger kind of, right? And yeah, I'd say in terms of, like, growth as a creator, it's tough because you do need time, like, you need time to build relationships anytime to write up your content, you know, do video. But I would say consistency is the number one.

Elisa 01:02:39 Like, people need to see you on their feed every single day. So even if you have, you know, another job or yeah, your your time is, you know, occupied somewhere else. Just make sure you you're tweeting at least once or twice a day. And that doesn't mean, you know, a thread once a day, but maybe try, like, you know, 2 threads or 2 videos a week, something like that. Like, You don't have to release quality content every single day, but, you need to kind of be at the forefront of people's minds. And the only way you can achieve that is by churning out high volume, like literally just being there all the time.

Elisa 01:03:16 If you look at any of the biggest content creators, that is literally what they do. Like, if you look at, I don't know, Wales, Wales, Twitter or even YP's Twitter, Sanjay's Twitter, like, they're just very active, right? They always remind you that they're there. And, so in a way, like, you need to understand the attention economy. And number 2 is network. Like, who you know and the connections you make is everything.

Elisa 01:03:43 I was a content creator last year and I definitely wasn't, like, as successful as today, and I still have a long way to go, but I would say that the people I met along the way, like the friends, the builders, you know, they've definitely helped me also achieve what I've achieved. So, network is is really huge And you should never see relationships as transactional. Like, at the end of the day, relationships are relationships. Like, every single builder and created that I know I genuinely have, like, a connection with them and a bond and I try to help them.

Elisa 01:04:17 And I think that's only something you can do when when you're passionate because you actually genuinely from your heart, want to do that, right? If you're not doing it for money, you're you're doing it out of pure passion, so don't rush don't rush making these relationships. Like, you know, most of the relationships I have today, like, they actually took a while but you also have to be willing to put yourself out there. Like, I think the first relationship I I made was with Loop from Treverse, and I literally just DM ed him over a year ago now and was like, hey, can I please interview you for my newsletter?

Elisa 01:04:54 And I interviewed him over Discord it wasn't a call. It was literally just text and I posted it and he posted it. He reposted it from the Treeverse account and my newsletter got some traction like that. And, yeah, just keep experimenting. Keep creating content. Keep networking. Like, you will get there. The space is still so smooth. Like, there's so much space for us to grow. And Twitter as a platform is also gonna keep evolving, so I would definitely make the most of that. Like, if you look at live streaming, for example, it's just beginning on x. Like, if you wanna be an x live streamer, the opportunity is there right now. I have that, answered your question.

Legendary 01:05:34 It more than answered my question. You covered so, so many fantastic points that resonate with me as a content creator myself. Only one thing that I would like to add, to that before I pass to you Sanjay to also get your perspective in is building what you said, right, post at least once or twice a day, don't be afraid to post more often. Don't be afraid to even repeat yourself because it's never going to be the case that you do a post. Now you do a post saying 4 hours and you're going to reach the same audience. You never reach the entirety of your audience with a single post.

Legendary 01:06:07 So even if you repeat yourself with some of the things that you say, that ultimately doesn't matter because, as also Yellow Panther said, attention span is so short. You need to keep that momentum in your favor. You need to keep that energy going. And part of that is repeating yourself on purpose. I will finish my tangent in a moment, but it's like such an important point that you made. Gary V also said that, right, he's been saying the same things for 8, 9, 10 years, more than a decade even, and he's been asked why he does that.

Legendary 01:06:38 His answer is, look, it I have to say that often because, a, it just takes time before people act, on what I'm saying, and they need to hear it five times, six times. It's especially true if we pivot back to web 3 gaming when we talk about onboarding people, new technology, so many things that need explaining, it's just not enough to say it, a single time with that being said, Sanjay would love to throw it to you to get your perspective as a creator in on that question as well.

Sanjay 01:07:06 Yeah. I think Elisa covered, all the topics very well. And, you know, same thing. I guess it just goes back to the same first point I made that the more people see you on their timeline, the more people see your name popping around spaces and, you know, collaboration with other creators. For ex, for example, legendary X Sanjay, thread or something, you know, Eliza X Yellow Panther video or something like that. Or like a live stream, the more people see it or the more projects see it, the chances are that they wanna work with you even more. I did, I did like an hour master plastic seed world the other day, and this is what we basically covered. You know, like, we wanna be in front of people every day, a day in and day out.

Sanjay 01:07:45 And I understand, you know, there's a lot of people who are who are not very comfortable in tweeting every day or multiple times a day. I'm not comfortable tweeting multiple times a day. I'll I tweet, like, maximum 1 or 2 times a day. Because I want my profile to look clean for whatever reason. Right? Like, I mean, I'm still in my Instagram zone, I guess. And, but at least I'm always replying to people. I mean, I do at least, like, a 100 replies a day. So I'm always, like, you know, under people's comments. People are always seeing my face. They're always seeing reading my comments. They're always reading my opinions. So there is a less barrier of, like, perfection when when you're replying to somebody's post versus when you're doing it on your own channel.

Sanjay 01:08:23 I understand that people want it to be really good or really perfect when they're on their own channel, which is not good, but I understand. But if you can't do that, then just go and start commenting on the people's accounts. You're applying to people's accounts, throw in your opinions, throw in your thoughts there. People will read that. You know, like, nowadays, people spend more time under a post comment section versus on their timeline. Like, they will scroll the timeline so fast, but as soon as they catch one post, they're gonna open that post, and they're gonna start reading the post. They're gonna start reading the comments because you know, they wanna know what other people think about that topic before they think about their topic for themselves.

Sanjay 01:08:58 This is all like psychological, but, you know, I think there's a big part of that involved in X and in every other platform, TikTok, huge in comments section. Common section gets more like sometimes in the video itself. So Yeah. I don't know where I was going with that, but, basically, you know, again, you know, networking is great. DM people, you know, Yellow Panther was the first creator I deemed or the first person really I deemed in the whole of web 3 space, and we've been so close ever since. And I never deemed him to get something out of it. I literally just went on my timeline and I see Yellow Panther everywhere under comments sections, under tweets, you know, posting videos, this and that. And I was like, yo, this guy's working like 16 hours a day.

Sanjay 01:09:38 I have to DM him. I was like, yo, bro, you're killing it. I see you all over my timeline. Shout out to you. And then, you know, and the rest is history. So don't force it. Just let it come organically and, just just build general relationships. You know, it'll go a long way for sure.

Legendary 01:09:54 Yeah. That's a fantastic point. And and you you said it perfectly. The comment section is so so important. It is the case on on TikTok on Reddit on x. And X is a good example because this is ultimately how monetizing as a creator on X works. Right? You're getting paid for the amount of, replies views in your comments section by blue verified profiles because x as a company knows that this is the real estate to place ads in because people will scroll those comment sections and attention that is directed there is hugely, hugely beneficial. And if you reply to replies, obviously the algorithm gives you a boost on that because it wants to foster that, organic conversation.

Legendary 01:10:34 Look, I don't wanna pivot this into a completely interface talking about about content creation and algorithms, but I did think it is a very, very important point because we had so many creators with us to get that perspective in as well. What I want to do is go to you death with a question we spoke a lot about of collaboration.

Legendary 01:10:53 We spoke a lot about how to, collaborate not only with creators, but with other games where that's from, the perspective of the parleys, where that's the perspective that Charles put in from from Nifty Island, partnering up with top tier projects in the space, where do where do you draw the line between, you know, collaboration and competition? Because you are also obviously collaborating with other games who are targeting the same audience to some extent. They're targeting the same base players, and players have, say, a certain amount of time that they are willing to play whatever game a day it is.

Legendary 01:11:30 So we are very, very collaborative in the web 3 space. Which is something that I love. But is there a point where you say, here I have to draw the line to, to competition, is there like this, what we learned in business school that I hate I hate the word. It sounds absolutely terrible coopetition, blending together competition, and collaboration. So how do you think about the line between collaborating with other games, projects in the web 3 space, and and drawing the line to competition?

Dith 01:12:00 And I know it's a tricky question. Oh, man. It's so funny that you have also, been through that very cringy, business school session on, competition. I have to use the word one thing. That brings First time they use it after business school. Some business school memories. Yeah, it is a cringy term.

Dith 01:12:22 No, look, I think while while games are only serving web 3 natives, then it's not really about having competition with other games and really just having competition with whatever the most attention gathering thing is at any given point at any given moment. Right? Like, someone had mentioned earlier on this space that there's, you know, this fun sort of NFT pump going on for the last couple of weeks. But if you look at the number of, like, unique active wallets, okay. It's crept up a little bit.

Dith 01:12:57 Some people are kinda coming back, or it's the same people activating their second and third and 4th wallets because, you know, God knows we, at this stage, each have 10, 20, 30, 50 each. But it's still a very small audience. Right? So really the competition, I think, for games. I'm not just referring to us, but for games that only serve a web 3 audience right now is, is we're still participants in the attention economy. Right? And it's still a fact of, like, hey.

Dith 01:13:28 There's a finite number of hours, in the day for people to spend online looking at web 3 things and how they wanna spend their time. A lot of these people are not just doing one thing. Right? Like, I think at least in my personal sort of circle of friends, people play games, they trade shit coins, They flip NFTs. They form protocols. Like, they're doing a lot of stuff.

Dith 01:13:52 And so really the answer, I think, becomes one of, like, well, you know, and and also how do you eventually get to 100,000 players or a 1,000,000 players that every game should be looking to answer is just like, what what's your route to get there that you're no longer, like, playing this very insular 0 sum game of fighting for a finite number of attention and actually you build a game or an app, with onboarding smooth enough and abstracted away, has that abstracted away friction enough. And it's actually fun and good enough to stand on its own own own two legs outside of a, financially sort of inclined, audience.

Dith 01:14:32 Right, and that, like, a normal gamer would wanna play, not caring about the underlying tech. So, you know, a little bit of a politician's answer, but that that's really how we answer it ourselves. Like, we are collaborating with a ton of different games, a ton of different, I mean, even other web 3 projects where we just like what they stand for, how they've operated, how they've crafted their brand. Like, our first parlay ever was with the Pudgy penguins, for obvious reasons. Right? It's just an awesome turnaround story. We love what Luca is doing. We know that that's a very thoughtful, mindful, active community, and so on and so forth.

Dith 01:15:09 So, you know, we're we're very collaboratively oriented. We we don't think about competition much today because it's just simply way too early. And I think when we do think about competition, it will be months down the line where our game is on mobile. It's in the app store. And what we're trying to do is, is really grind play the effect, like, going back to user acquisition. Right? You need to play a pretty competitive game in, and it's a it's a game of mathematics. Right?

Dith 01:15:44 It's like, how do you bring on board good users without spending too too much and add dollars and have a game that's good enough for those people to wanna spend time in and for those free to play players to wanna spend their money in. And that's where it all comes back full circle. Right? Because once we achieve that, then this whole ecosystem makes sense to our early supporters, the web 3 native, who've been in the game early, understanding it, contributing to the economy. Some of them are, harvesting and, you know, preparing for this eventual future by gathering resources.

Dith 01:16:19 And that's where, you know, I think we'll we'll probably be looking at things through a more competitive lens, games like, you know, the the games that are played by millions of people that are enjoyed on mobile devices, like the laid some monopoly game, for example, is absolutely killing it. And that's probably where we'll start to think a little bit more about who we're shoulder to shoulder against in terms of competition. I think, you know, the reason that your question is so interesting right now is because the market has suddenly become really exciting in the last 2, 3 weeks, and there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of noise happening. There's a lot of pumps happening.

Dith 01:17:00 But the big question is, like, whether we're even really out of the bar yet. Right? And and I, you know, personally NFA, I'm not entirely sure. Right? I think we're not out of the woods yet. We don't have a massive influx of new wallets coming in and it remains high time for games and projects and communities to be really as supportive as we can be of one another. Right? This is not the time for anyone to lose their minds just because the last 2, 3 weeks and start, you know, looking at everyone to their left and right as competition.

Legendary 01:17:35 Yeah. That's that's a very, very good take, and I love that you introduced that element of thinking about the market and thinking about the volatility of the market specifically when comes to user acquisition. And when it comes also to thinking about drawing the line between, collaboration and competition, And I would love to hear your perspective on that, Charles, how you at Nifty Island think about that line between collaboration and competition. And if that is something that's also influenced by the state of the market.

Charl3s 01:18:08 Sure thing. So for us, we look for kind of partners where there's a very clear win win. And for us, that means the sort of NFT communities I think they've, despite a lot of the FUD, were maybe coming out of that era, the ticket 6 months back, and I think it was kind of nothing but negative news about NFT communities. I think the accomplishments of those groups are underrated where they still crush it on the timeline. When you look at the accounts and the projects that generate the most engagement.

Charl3s 01:18:42 It's groups like Pudgy penguins just like Dith said and and others that generate a ton of attention. And they also, when you speak to people who are in those communities, you'll need many who say, Hey, I just actually got into crypto in 2021. I mentioned Apache Pangolin, and that was kind of my moment where I got excited about things that are on chain. So you kinda have this enduring triumph in terms of attention. And then, many of these projects are responsible for activating people and bringing them into crypto growing the pie.

Charl3s 01:19:12 So for us, These are groups where their bread and butter is creating an awesome community and winning on the timeline, getting lots of people excited about it, and trying to grow the number of people who are excited about, their community, but on chain stuff in general. For us, those projects by their DNA typically are not gaming companies. So they might maybe during the kind of peak of the bull run, everybody wanted to be a gaming company, or thought, you know, that we infinite money and infinite capacity to do anything. I think now the bull market has really helpedfully caused these groups to double down on their core competencies.

Charl3s 01:19:49 So for us, we come to them and say, you guys, you know, should have your IT and games, not just Nifty Island, but other games. We can help facilitate that And, you know, in a single day, usually, if they already have game assets, we can get them in, token gate them and and get them ready for, for, in ex having an experience in Nifty. So we've really looked at those NFT communities as one where it's just a clear win win We can come to them and say, hey, we don't need to wanna charge you anything. We see the community is awesome. We wanna give them more to do. More prizes to win. More things to build together a new canvas for you to grow your IP and grow your resonance and to have so much fun together that people can't ignore you.

Charl3s 01:20:29 So that that group for us, that that kind of cohort has been great. I think we've got about, like, 60 plus NFT communities that are ready to use the game at launch with avatars and other three d assets. So that's been our bread and butter. And then I think with other games, it's, you know, there are some cases where probably they're going for a very similar user, target user to us and, and maybe the use case is very similar. But in a lot of other case, and in those cases, you know, it just might be, Hey, maybe it's not a fit.

Charl3s 01:21:00 But in many other cases, they're making a game that may target web 3 enthusiasts, but it's just com a completely different sort of game, and we're not under any delusion that will be the only game people ever play, right? That'd be that'd be crazy. And so with those, it's like, you know, say you have a game that's like a, you know, it could be anything like a turn based strategy game or a role playing game. If they have game assets, those game assets represent a considerable investment that they might as well use elsewhere, especially if their underlying business model revolves around people being enthusiastic about the NFTs they own from that, their community owned from that project. So those are the kind of win wins we look for.

Charl3s 01:21:39 NFT communities where they're not gaming companies, but they're masters of community and attention. We can help them, and and kinda keep them out of the costly experiment of trying to build a game. And then for games, they have tons of game assets lying around might as well leverage them in another place so long as they don't feel that we're kind of chewing up attention that they're going for. So there's just so many win wins, I think, out there. And, And, yeah, so, so, on a whole, like, there's a little bit of concern around competition here and there, but really in the open game world genre, there's so little that's live. And it has product market fit, but it's not really like a major concern.

Legendary 01:22:21 I I love that perspective, and I also loved how you put the IP of the projects and partners that you're working with at the center of it. I think we've been we've been having a fantastic discussion so far. I also really wanna be respectful, of everyone's time, both in the audience and our speakers. We've been running for a bit more than 1 hour 20 so far.

Legendary 01:22:42 And what I would really love to do is because we've spoken about so many dimensions of user acquisition from collaboration with content creators, from thinking about collaboration and competition to on chain versus off chain elements is, to throw it to you, Karma, to help us summarize, the the different things we talked about user acquisition maybe from the light of, the CTX and how you approach user acquisition based on everything that we've been talking about to close us out on today's basis.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:23:15 Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much, and thank you again to all the speakers. These spaces of ours, you know, these these weekly meetings and panels have really been gaining steam. And there are many users who can't join us live always, but love listening to spaces. So we will get in the habit of doing just a quick recap at the end so we can repost it for the audience with, time captions. So everybody can jump into the discussion a bit easier. So bear with me as I can now summarize for everybody. This was an incredible spaces. We have heard a great outline from, you know, OX diff from Pirate Nation, again, pushing boundaries in terms of how completely untrin it is.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:23:55 And how the commitment to on chain maximization of your game can shift over time as the audience changes. And then on the other hand, also assures compatibility and that this on chain component can assure that other users can build on top of your product, expanding audience and IP that way. And then we spoke to Charles, the co founder of Misty Island known for amazing cross integrations, and he shared his thoughts on the role of cross collaboration and cross pollination of IPs within the Ansteaka system and how partnerships grow on to increase the reach of both partners is done correctly and in an organic way.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:24:33 And Webster gaming is heating up. I think we are all feeling it, that we are back vibes And we see an influx of new creators to the space who want to concentrate on what we're gaming. Growing and onboarding a user base is as much a goal creators as it is for projects. And we have some OGs here today, Eliza Sanjay and Yellow Partner, who has been creating for a long time throughout the bare and dry periods of gaming content, and they shared pointers for others on how to really grow and, you know, ensure a stable, influx of new audiences to your content creation endeavor.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:25:12 And towards the end, we have summarized how competition is not top of agenda for early projects right now, at least not for the participants here today. How this web free space is so small that in these early stages, we all concentrate on early web free native cohorts of users And that user acquisition very quickly turns into user onboarding, which is only ramping up truly right now. I think we are all waiting for, you know, 2024 to truly take off.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:25:40 Similar how for us at ZT X, phase 1 is feedbacking and improving the early beta with web free native community, And after the beta launch, ZTX will work to add support for Zapeto accounts as an option for creating and managing ZTX accounts. This means that any existing Zepeta user can start playing ZTX with virtually no additional setup required, and the same will, of course, be would be possible for social logins Gmail and others.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:26:07 When combined with on ramp integration, ZTX will create, you know, an accessible and frictionless entry into the world of web3 And I think these are goals that are shared by everybody here on the panel and many other web games that are coming up. So, you know, it was a true joy speaking to everybody today, and I'm hoping that this summary going forward is going to help many others get even more value out of these spaces, even afterwards. We're shared, you know, stamps.You know, I would love for everybody to, if there aren't final thoughts and final mentions, to say good byes now. Again, as always thank you to every listener who has given us over an hour of their time today and to everybody who is listening , you know, a bit later because they couldn't join in their timezone. Thank you guys !

Enter the realm where gaming meets finance, exploring the impactful role of financial incentives in Web3 gaming.

This transcript takes you through a series of playtests and mini-games, showcasing how monetary rewards are being used to transform player experiences and drive engagement.

Get a glimpse of how these incentives are creatively integrated into gaming mechanics, setting a new course for the industry.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:27 GMGM everyone. What a fantastic day to host this space. We have so much excitement in the market. We have seen a significant move in NFT floor prices, particularly in gaming projects.

Legendary 00:03:07 So many of them are up in the 2 digits. We have a fantastic panel of speakers today. We have Shreptnil with us. We have, Pixelmon, CEO, Jewel joining us as well. Obviously, we have, Apex, Yellow Panther, Sanjay, Moritz, and, of course, my amazing cohost karma. And to add to all of the excitement, I think it was the talk of the timeline yesterday. We had that wonderful Simpsons episode talking about NFTs. Karma, did you have a chance to see it or see some of the clips from the episode?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:03:41 Hello, everybody. The clips, of course, I have to admit, I don't think in my entire life, I've watched a singular episode of the Simpsons in full. It's a medium I consume only in short burst of, clips. But certainly, maybe, you know, if I do get to actually watching an episode, this is going to be the 1.

Legendary 00:04:03 I think this is definitely the one to start with. Welcome. I think it's Tony, the Marketing Director from Shrapnel under the Official Trapnil account. Welcome to the stage. Did you have a chance to see the episode or some of the clips?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:04:19 GMGN. And, yeah, I'm a huge Simpsons fan and did in fact see, a bunch of clips. I haven't watched the the whole episode yet, you may have noticed we had some announcements today that have been keeping me busy, but it looked funny as shit. And I'm glad the, the Simpsons are with us.

Legendary 00:04:33 Love to hear it, and we will definitely get into today's announce in a bit, Julia, welcome to the stage. Did you see the episode? And do you think that this, more frequent mentioning of that we see, like, in mass media and entertainment show serious is a good thing or is it overrated?

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:04:53 Ah, I saw some clips. I saw Bart, on the black board writing. And if these are not dead and then whatnot. And, yeah, I think overall, it's positive. Frankly, my point of view is until and that's perfect personal preference, but until South Park doesn't address us fully, a nice long episode. We're not there yet, but, overall, I think it's positive. It's about normalizing it and, yeah, bring it to the masses.

Legendary 00:05:20 What we're doing too. It's definitely about normalizing it. Yellow Penta, welcome to the stage, South parker Simpsons, which one would make him more bullish on the NFT market?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:05:29 Yo. Obviously Simpsons, man, they always predict the future, and we are going up only right now. But, yeah, happy to be here. You know, we have the best host in town long, legendary and karma. Let's go.

Legendary 00:05:43 Love it. Thank you so much. And Simpsons were definitely early, by the way, to talking about Bitcoin I looked it up yesterday on the Bitcoin Wiki. They were the 2nd show, to talk about Bitcoin in 2013. Good Wife was the only show do that before them in 2012, and they actually had a dedicated episode to that. Apex, welcome to the stage as well. What's your pick? Simpsons or South Park for NFT Mass adoption?

apix🎮 00:06:09 I have to go with Simpsons too because I used to watch it daily when I was younger, and I don't really watch too much soft work, so it's nostalgia for me. That's the predicting factor.

Legendary 00:06:26 Karma helped me out real quick. I couldn't hear it at all, unfortunately. So I did have to turn on the captions, but it was a bit slow with that.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:06:34 Oh, don't worry. So for Apex is the nostalgia factor with the Simpsons. And, you know, Twitter sometimes rugs. So in that case, you know, I'm going to be your guiding ears for all things Apex.

Legendary 00:06:47 Wonderful. Thank you so much, Sanjay. Welcome to the stage where are you on this debate? Are you team Simpsons or team South Park?

Sanjay 00:06:54 Good morning, everybody. I got a B Team Simpsons too. I I actually do watch a lot of Simpsons. I have watched a lot of full episodes. And, the show has been going for, like, 25 years or something. So you can't you can't, bet against that. You know?

Legendary 00:07:10 Yeah. That's definitely going on for a quarter of a century. That's quite a long. More it's welcome to the stage. Quick one to you. How are you doing Simpsons or off part make your pick?

Moritz 00:07:21 Yeah. I will go south park just because I watched more episodes of that in the past, yeah, quick and easy.

Legendary 00:07:29 Gotcha. Gotcha. Alisa, welcome to the stage. Same question to you. What's your pick?

Elisa 00:07:35 Thank you. I never watched either, but I'd say probably the sense the symptoms, it's more iconic to me.

Legendary 00:07:42 Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, with with that intro, definitely, let's get into today's discussion last week. We did speak quite a lot about tokenomics, we spoke about both user acquisition, user retention. For today, we actually wanna speak about building communities, go to market strategies in quite an exciting environment and environment where actually the games for most projects at least are not launched yet.

Legendary 00:08:09 They're about to be launched And the challenge is, certainly, how do you build a community when the main product isn't isn't isn't even released, isn't even life yet, quite would like to start asking you, Julia, a question, from your experience in building games, from your experience as, you know, CEO of Pixelmon. How do you think that web 3 gaming communities in particular differ from traditional gaming communities is there even a difference is there an additional need to build communities more strongly in web 3. What's your perspective and done?

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:08:46 Great question. So, look, I think the 1st layer is, in in what we would wish is to have communities that are as aligned as possible to, gain traditional gaming community but with a plus and probably that plus sitting on the monetization side of things, the typical web free community, web free gaming community is, yes, made of gamers, but they just for fact that they're early adopters of this new technology. They are, more monetization, more analytically, more, economics of games oriented gamers.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:09:25 I think that's also essential and ultimately finding, the sustainable and long term way to implement blockchain and, blockchain technology or items in games. So it's great to have that, angle in that plus. It also means that when essentially we speak to our community, we probably over index on talking about, monetization strategies, monetization loops, as well, of course, as the usual, fun and game loops, but probably more than a, web 2 gaming community would do, which probably under indexes on that side of things, particularly early particularly before the product is live. So that would be one great difference.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:10:05 A second layer of difference I think is down to loyalty, I feel that whether it is because there is an angle of personal investment also from a monetary standpoint, depending at least if you're NFT based or token based project. But there is a, there is a stronger loyalty and stronger passion, to some extent, certainly, again, versus a non live web two game, probably when they're live, they start matching, but for a non live community, they're extremely passionate about what we're building is what I see.

Legendary 00:10:37 Yeah. I think, both of those are very, very good points, especially also the economic, dimension of it quite goes in line with the news that we've seen from Shrapnel today. Definitely wanna touch on that. Shrapnel shrapnel will be listed. Later this week, I think deposits are starting today. The shrapnel listing on Bibit will be tomorrow. And it's also quite interesting if you look at, the order of things at, the playtest, the community building that has been happening so far.

Legendary 00:11:13 And now the listing announcement, and from that perspective, the same question to you, Tony, how do you feel about the difference between building the the web 3 community in particular for a game and also connecting that to the economic dimension and to the order in which you want to do things. From building the community from having the play tests and from ultimately also listing the token.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:11:37 Yeah. It's a great question. And, you know, I think that There's a lot of there's a lot of, like, big words and complexity that gets thrown around when we talk about this, but, ultimately, I think it boils down to understanding, that there are different types of customers for every product. Right? So, like, And this is particularly true of gaming products that have live services, with with tradable, marketplaces, and and that's not a web 3 thing. Right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:12:03 Like, I I worked at EA Sports for a while, Madden Ultimate Team And FIFA Ultimate Team have vibrant secondary communities that actually trade with real real world money outside of the ecosystem and kind of a gray market and and those customers of the game, were some of the most important customers for me when I worked there. I, I, sorry. I just got a text from someone. I, I would I would have a entire, strategies focused on how we get people that were playing on the sticks is what we called it, which were like playing the game and, like, really enjoying the the, the motion of people throwing the football and kicking the balls and shit. And then people that were playing, Madden and, FIFA of the marketplace.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:12:43 Like, they weren't actually even playing the game. They were just, but and selling cards assets, with other players, because that's genuinely how they enjoyed playing the game. And there was no real there's very little real money actually being strange share. Right? It was it was literally just trading our our fake money back and forth. And so that, you know, I think as long as web 3 developers keep that in mind, we can apply a lot of the learnings from the last generation to what we're doing now. Like, these these in game economies are have been run by the type of economists they're run that are making to economics papers for years already, right, because they are economies that drive 100 of 1,000,000 or if not 1,000,000,000 of dollars of of revenue in the case of a fortnight.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:13:20 And so I think that from a from a, a community building standpoint, it's just really important to have messaging and touch points, you know, sections in your Discord, spaces that you that you host, Twitter posts that you put out and threads that you put out that are really focused on each one of those And so at Trapinal, for example, you'll notice that right now, we are just pumping out a shitload of gameplay content. Right? Like, if you look at our feed, it's it's just video after video, of us playing the game and shooting each other and and getting excited. And the reason for that is that right now, we're running we're ramping into our early access December. Everything's really focused on getting people as many people to get extraction packs as humanly possible so they can play the game. We're giving a ton of them away.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:14:00 People are buying them. And so right now, all of my marketing is focused on the game is fun, shooting people is cool, finding shit is cool. And then as we move into, next year, when we start launching the monetization aspects of the game, right, early access. We're not gonna be selling people shit in the game. Right? It's it's early access. You're gonna be playing the game, and you can enjoy it. But, like, we're there's not gonna be a ton of, come give us money for this stuff until probably next year. And once that goes into place, then there's actually something for people to, evaluate and buy and trade. That's when I'll start really ramping up the, things like sharing videos and and, content from people who are creating marketplace items.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:14:37 And selling them and trading them with each other, to go and and speak to and be excited about with that trading audience so that people that are playing trapped in the marketplace and not trapped in the here. And so, again, your original question was, how do I think about web 2 and web 3 in growing community and the difference between the 2? The, I think the biggest I don't even know if I would say difference, but the key strategy that I found is just really understanding your customers, your customer types, and speaking to them really intentionally.

Legendary 00:15:05 Yeah. That's a that's a very detailed answer. And I also love that you straight went into, essentially, but it's the the go to strategy of Shrapnel and all the different aspects of it. And, you know, from an from an outside perspective, from people following the game development, following your content, It all seems very polished. Obviously, it's AAA quality.

Legendary 00:15:25 It it almost seems from the outside like a very smooth sailing, especially now that we are in phase in the market where people finally start to get excited about web 3 games, but I'm certain there have been challenges along the way, would be quite curious to hear from you what was one of the biggest challenges that you faced so far as a part of the go to market strategy.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:15:48 Oh, man. I'll be honest with you. I just said all that shit about knowing your customer and and being able transfer knowledge from web 2 to web 3, but I will be super honest with you. I'm I'm, like, pretty good at web 2 video game marketing. I've I've sold millions of video games to people that were Amazon for 12 years. You know, I created Twitch Prime, which is one of the most beloved video game loyalty programs in the space. It's got, you know, 40, 50,000,000 members. And I sucked at web 3 marketing for the 1st year. I was doing this. I was terrible. I I I cofounded a company with a couple guys, and we made a little indie game. And I I actually reached out to one of my co founders at one point. I was like, dude, I I saw this. I'm terrible.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:16:25 We gotta bring someone in to, like, teach me how to do what I did in web 2 and web 3. And luckily, we we did address that. We we got a couple of people and really be tight with us on on our go to market. And I just put, like, basically lived in Twitter spaces with them for about a month. And and, you know, got to got to the point where I I think I have a better handle on the space now. It seems like our our results are reflecting that, but, you know, little things like when you're shipping AAA game and you're and you're selling it, most of the marketing strategy is wrapped around what we call like beats, right, like like the beat of a drum.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:16:59 And so you look for opportunities, within the narrative that you're telling to drive hype, drive drive drive excitement. And those are things like big trailer drops or announcements that a new character is being introduced to a to a long running series or a new character is being back brought to a long running series or something. Right? Like, those are kinda monolithic events that everyone at the company spends weeks working on and, like, perfects the trailer and perfects the the copy. And and then and then rolls it out. And that's just, like, not the way Web 3 works at all. Right? Like, like, I I'll give you a great example that we're working through at Travel right now. I don't know if you saw it. We posted can I pin something to the top? Is that okay? Go ahead. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. So we posted this we posted this video yesterday.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:17:38 I don't I'm I'm paired up at the top here with you. And it it just the video slapped. It, like, it's it's awesome. We have this new video editing team that is just kicking ass and and doing a great job. And we had some people in the studio that were like, holy shit. I didn't see that. And we should, like, talk about how we how we bring these assets to market, before we before we just released them. And luckily, the studio's gone to the point now. We're just like, hey. We just we're gonna do we're gonna do the right thing for people who are following us and give them as much cool shit as they can consume. And if there's, you know, a second or 2 or a clip or 2 that we would have done differently. If we would have spent an extra week working on the video, that's okay because we wanna get this out and and really be building in public.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:18:17 And so I would say that's been the biggest challenge for me, and and really, the, the large organizations with a deep history of success in the entertainment industry. That that's what I'm seeing them struggle with as well. The good news is, as you can see above, like, we're we're getting past it and people seem to be liking it.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:18:35 No. This this really resonates with me a lot. Especially, you know, you've just shared the path from you know, having enough experience in the web to equivalent of what you are doing now, but having to undergo that radical shift not alone, but with help of people from within the space. And that's something I just really wanted to double click on. I think the fundamental shift difference between a web 2, a pre marketing. For us at GTX, very similar, Zepetto, a web 2 business with 430,000,000 lifetime users.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:08 And a very, very substantial backing in terms, you know, not just financial, but in terms of experience, how to do things, how to, you know, maybe thoughts about community building are construed in the team. And there was also very, very long and, you know, just a process of adapting the faults, the go to market strategy, to the actual reality of web free, which is so different. You know, instead of bringing out a triple a game that took you 5, 6, 7, 10 years, you have products not yet live that you are building a the around in a very grassroots manner. And that's the exciting part.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:47 Really, really great to see, you know, the way that shrapnel has been up the barreling forward lately, completely rooting to for you guys. And I actually wanted to direct the same question to you, Julia X, I really love how, you know, ZT X RAP Nell and Pixelmon are all in different stages of their go to market strategy. That makes for a very fascinating conversation. Same question. What, you know, in all the past months in all the past journey have you found was the most challenging?

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:20:19 I think I'll give an answer that it's pretty much a bit the opposite of what, Shrapner was was giving, which is, I mean, I come from, tech. I come from launching ecommerce health tech platforms. We got an app out there with, you know, 200,000,000 users per year. But all it was consumer tech. That's where I come from.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:20:42 And then 2 years ago, I entered gaming, And I find this, very different way of building this, I mean, I called it back then 5 years of, digging a well, digging a hole, going into it for 5 years and coming out with an amazing product, versus and and and making sure that every little piece of communication outwards is super careful and a video needs to be you know, as as I think Shrapnel just had edited and re edited multiple times before putting it out there.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:21:15 I think I found instead that web free game development reminds me a lot more of consumer app development, which is the app is developed and enhanced on the go. You go to market within X months, not years, and then you just upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, and you put the foot on marketing, in a gradual way so you keep enhancing, your customer base and just observing that retention of AB testing that behavior until you optimize it enough and press a little bit more on the gas and then optimize a little bit more and then a little bit more on the gas.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:21:55 And anyways, when when I arrived in in in and and put together a gaming team 2 years ago to develop the PixelONE IP, I realized that there was this culture clash between the tech developments print, operation and developing with the users versus developing without the users with the tester groups that are under NDA, if anything. And And that shift in mindset that, had to be done with the, gaming team, I think, is what was a little bit hard, for us culturally finding that middle ground.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:22:32 That that the pure consumer tech background guys found a lot of, an easier and a smoother entrance into the web free gaming type of development, the transparent development, the collaborative development. They actually found it very liberating because not only they could observe data, they could actually talk to the, to the customers while testing with them. While the AAA gaming profiles from Ubisoft Blizzard and Rockstar were a little bit, off placed by the speed of testing something directly with the community under my level of transparency community.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:23:10 But, yeah, we found our our grounding and I think we've we've now reached a very nice middle ground where we keep developing together with our test groups and our code has full transparency on what we're doing.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:23:23 Yeah. And I'm going a Portuguese legend there. I'm gonna jump in back with just a short anecdote, you know, everything you've just said really resonates again. And I remember the first time you know, as as we develop CTX, we want to show more and more of, you know, yep, just where we are, that work in progress sharing is something that we all in web free love. You just mentioned, you know, open and transparent communication. That is, you know, the fundamental layer of building trust in WIP Free. It's a very different space. And we all collectively share lots of work in progress content.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:24:00 We show what we are currently building, how we are progressing. We sometimes even share, you know, mistakes of or pivots. That's not necessarily something you do in many other, you know, branches. And I still remember the first time suggested to our 3 d team that we could share, you know, some of the early versions of, you know, our NFTs, our 3 d models, which were not necessarily perfectly, you know, like, picture airbrush and, you know, like, with all the meshes applied.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:24:30 And I I will never forget that meeting because it really represents what you've just said where people with background where you're expected to always put forward just the absolutely perfect, utmost 100 percent version of everything are now confronted with this direct exchange with the community where the feedback is very but you also want to show something behind the scenes. And there is a long process of education, which, you know, when you do it right, both the team and the community wins just so much, in this process. And I feel like we are we now have a very good cadence of of that.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:25:06 It's lovely to hear that that, that journey has also been had on other teams.

Legendary 00:25:13 Absolutely. And I feel like this is something that that truly stands out in the transparency, in building web 3 communities, building web 3 games. But also as a, as a follow-up question on that to you, Julia, you know, you spoke about, basically improving in iterations, being able to live test, being able to ab test certain strategies, certain aspects.

Legendary 00:25:38 And I would quite like to know now that it's been 2 weeks that, Kevin D adventure has been live as a mini game a, what role do these, let's call them interim games leading up to the main game play to you and, b, what are some of the learnings that you can basically implement for the main game from a mini game like, Kevin D adventure.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:26:06 Great question. So maybe kicking off, it's doing very well considering we've put 0 marketing dollars behind it. We launched it within our community and the communities we partnered with. It's been life in our 9 days. It had 8000 active players and around the 40 percent a 7 retention, so far around 500,000 gameplay sessions, played. Now these are not crazy numbers. They are numbers or but but they're interesting organic numbers.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:26:42 They speak probably more about the power of Kevin as a character than, of us as a development studio. Why are we doing this? So we've done this, for a number of reasons. I think the first one was creating smaller strike teams kinda like supercell game development teams, so smaller teams, compact with fast development and test cycles. Again, back to what I was saying earlier comes comes quite naturally, to the team under organization we've got.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:27:15 If anything more naturally, than the separate large, 3dmidcore gaming, studio. They are completely separate teams. So imagine a team of 5, one leader, and, 14 members, for the mini games working on prints of 2 months with then 1 month of learning from each release. We're going to be releasing 1 of these per quarter. And this doesn't interfere then at all. Thanks to that with the development cycle of the big three d games.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:27:52 The, what are we learning from So I think that there's there's 2 layers there. I think 1, the first one is, back end, blockchain integration and tool development. It is allowing us to test all of our analytics platforms built in house, for blockchain so that combine game data and data for live dashboarding. It allows us to test, our setup with L2s and the flow of the L2s and the AB test simple things, like, do we ask, at which point, do we ask for, wallet login if at all?

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:28:31 And when we ask for it, how do we ask for it? Do we ask for it, when the user has acquired certain items, or do we for it when they use a score as a certain score and wants to register it. So what is going to push them more into tying a wall for going from guest to wallet? Is it gonna be an achievement as in a score, or is it gonna be assets and resources they wanna to register. These are all micro learnings, but they're very deep behavioral learnings when you then think about applying them to a bigger scale and multiple games.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:29:05 It, it's, again, maybe it's because I come from tech, but really, like, I think products are The products have to become great over hyper optimization over time, and it is the little detail that ultimately will make the bank or break it. The other layer of learning is going to be is not present in this first mini game, but in the other mini games, there's going to be some layers of, you'll see some layers of the first key statistics and the progression, metrics, we're gonna be testing stuff like pixelm unhappiness, that is a secondary step.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:29:44 Also in the main games and see how the users react to it versus pure combat and pure skill. So there'll be a soft their side. It's the relationship between trainer and Big someone in the game, testing pure gameplay loops in a in a wider sense and behavior against them. And then last point, while doing all of this, we are aware of the opportunistic potential upside from it. Meaning as we, as our mini games we develop become more and more original, the first one, of course, was more of a flappy birds inspired, but the second one is already very original in some of its loops.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:30:23 We are aware that ultimately hyper casual games are a huge industry and can be hugely profitable. If we see traction from an organic perspective, what we'll do is go from browser based to app based and monetize it independently. So there might be an upside down the line, but yeah, the reason we're building is the first two points, and that might be the potential upside.

Legendary 00:30:47 Yeah. That that makes a lot of sense, and I love how you also spoke about the the behavioral aspect, the user flow testing side of things, but also how you add it to that, that the potential mobile gaming market for hyper casual games. Also plays a big role. I mean, ultimately, I mentioned this on this space earlier today. If you look at a studio like Activision Blizzard, look at their revenue from from digital purchases, I think that last reported number was a bit more than $4,000,000,000. 2 of which was mobile games. It was 4.21.1 each was PC gaming and console gaming, but the mobile gaming number is the one growing the fastest.

Legendary 00:31:26 Yellow Panther, I see you with your hand up, quite would like to hear from your perspective as a content creator, as a game or yourself, how do you think about these mini games in the lead up to the actual game to be released as a strategy that we've also seen employed by, ugal apps with multiple games so far.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:31:51 Yeah. That's awesome. I think what Giulio shared was amazing. I just wanted to, ask, have you seen, me and Eliza's activation video for, Pixel One's Kevin Adventure?

Legendary 00:32:06 Yep. Have seen it.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:32:08 Yeah. Basically, we we helped drive multiple activation for both Shatnam and also Giulio. I think both were very successful, and I personally think that, you know, the the mini game leading up to the, you know, medium and also bigger games. I think it's a very good strategy because we are in tree and people, pick someone actually know that these people are impatient. Right?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:32:32 And then basically, it's ultimately a way to keep the a committee engaged and ultimately, buy more time for the team to build more, solid products and a solid games for the, basically, the release. Right? So I think it's very effective and I foresee the next game. I I did had some sneak, snippets, and it is gonna be a may amazing one. So better watch out for Pixel One's next game. And also, Trapnell, you guys have a lot a lot of things to say.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:33:07 You know, like, suddenly the the launch, you know, you you got our, chat groups bombarded, you know, like, everyone was just talking about, what is this trap? No listing? What? You know, this is crazy.

Legendary 00:33:22 Absolutely. This was one of the reasons I was so excited for the, for the timing of, the spaces Tony would love to get you back into the conversation building on a point that Julia mentioned earlier talking talking about flash of cultures in some of the internal teams.

Legendary 00:33:40 And you mentioned the point, you know, connecting that to the Shrepto can that I would find quite interesting to learn more about, you said you obviously have the the token designers planning, the, token ecosystem, But is there, or has to have been in the process of designing the Shrap token in your opinion, a clash of cultures when you have token designers and game developers coming together? And was it the case that, you know, Token designers know a lot about token design? Game devs know a lot about building, and entertaining a game, but don't necessarily know much about the other side.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:34:21 It's a great question. And and this goes back to it it's so interesting because it I got, like, a lot of those to falls. And a lot of those working dynamics, they they do exist in web too because the same people, like, literally the same people that are that are doing to economic a lot of the cases for these video games are people that came out of, web 2 economies. One of the one of the folks that we use, gentleman named Toyte, head of Germany. He was, very deeply involved in, a lot of the original, Zynga games. Right? Like, a lot of those those early microtransaction games.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:34:58 And then he left the video game industry and went and, you know, ran like a hedge fund somewhere and and did a bunch of of I banking. So you're international banking stuff. And then he came back to the space after he retired from banking because he's got all this this experience. He's in he's in web 3 now. And I think the big difference that that I've seen and and where the really where the rub comes in that's a lot different is the fact that there's real real world value that is more easily extractable from the experience than in the web 2 games.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:35:25 And when you're, when you're playing when you're playing with funny money, and the economy, the health of the the health of the economy affects, like, the title you're working on that year, but not necessarily the title that is gonna make or break the company forever, the stakes are just different. Right? And so, like, you're willing to do wacky things. I'll give you a great example. This is the dumbest thing I I I ever saw anyone do, and it was it was just incredible. In in web to sorry. When I worked at Amazon, I, I worked on a team called the coins team. It was the there's still I think they still exist. There's an App Store on Amazon and if you buy apps, you get coins and you can use those coins to buy more apps. And we have this product manager who's a psycho path.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:36:05 And he was convinced, that giving away as many coins as humanly possible would jump start the, the Amazon app store ecosystem and bring all these developers that that would help us drive demand through, you know, having good content on the platform. He was wrong. And so I came in one day, and this dude had not gone home from the office the night before. He's sitting at his desk just looking cracked out, bloodshot eyes. And, like, I I feel okay saying this. I'm an overweight guy, but he's, like, a little short, overweight hobbit looking guy. And so he did he just looked rough dude. And, I was like, Tyler, what the fuck's going on? He's like, Tony, I did it. I've I've I've solved the puzzle.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:36:38 And, the night before he had gone in and created a promotion that gave everyone points when they bought a free copy of Grant Theft Auto. We gave them exactly enough coins to go buy another copy of a a different Grand Theft Auto on the store, and they would keep generating coins. And so we called it the the GTA apocalypse or the GT apocalypse because we gave out, like, $8,000,000 in free content that we had to pay EA for because we still pay EA when people download a premium game even if they're not paying for it. Right? It's, you know, it's fun of all of this all of this crazy conversation internally, like, should we have done this? Was worth the money?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:37:16 Turns out it wasn't, but, like, that, that that action in a in a web 3 environment would have, like, destroyed the business. Right? As opposed to just being a thing that was a a fuck up and we were like, hey. Don't do that again. You don't get the keys to the promotional tools anymore at a at a different company with with especially, you know, in web 3 again where there's real money's changing changing ads. Like that would be astrous. And so, you know, I think those are those are some of the some of the key learnings that I think and some of the tension that's come with these folks migrating from web 2 into web 3 having had a lot of success, on those platforms and just needing to understand that while a lot of the samples are the same.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:37:54 Some of the execution is, like, dramatically different because, again, it's, like, it's it's not a fake penny. It's a real penny.

Legendary 00:38:03 Yeah. I love I love the analogy and I love the Amazon coin story. And I think also the the important addition to that is not only is it real money if that is your token design and it's live on the blockchain. And that's the distribution mechanism that you went for. You just can't change it and be like, yo, let's let's do another token and just structure that in a better way. I mean, you could do it, but at that point, you potentially already lost, your market. Look, we we spoke about mini games. We spoke about the community ability, the community activation side of things.

Legendary 00:38:36 I also wanna get into the other aspect, so to speak, into play testing because realistically, you can either have a mini game as as the lead up to the launch of the game where you can have playtest to give your community a hands on experience. Carmel would like to get you into the conversation ZTX obviously has had multiple play tests, a, what were the biggest learnings from them? Did you go more about the gaming experience? Were you more interested? As Julie mentioned, for in the behavioral learnings? And b, what did you, or how did you collect the feedback from those play tests?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:39:13 Yeah. Oh, man. Like, the story about the Amazon coins, is a great segue into the learnings from the playtest. So just to set the scene, you know, at ZT X, we are pre beta launch, the beta is expected within a few weeks, you know, q 4 And our latest milestone, before the token launch, before the TGE, was the latest number 2.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:39:35 So this was an early version of the game where where community, it was actually a very open play anyone was able to to join, people were able to, test the entire game loop in a simple manner where the game loop of ZT X is imagine, you know, animal crossing on the blockchain just to put it simply where you can plant resources, harvest them, and use them to then craft new items, which in the playtest weren't NFTs, but in the better version will be.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:40:07 And for us, thank you for delineating this incredibly important, aspect of, you know, in game economy, like, as opposed to web 2 games where we have, you know, just like in game currencies, which are very it's a closed system. As soon as something is in web free, you can, you know, take it out of the game. You can have parties built, you know, financialized products on top of your token, on top of your economy, which then add, you know, either sell or buy pressure There are token syncs and and token faucets.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:40:44 All of this is an incredibly complex, ecosystem. And for us, one of the things we wanted to test in within the playtest was, you know, the speed at which people would be able to craft items. How do we balance the speed of, you know, different resources growing to the users actually being able to collect them? How do we cap the amount of items, you know, so NFTs that can be crafted, from from those different resources?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:41:15 All of this is going to play in extremely important, in a row within the balance of ZTX token, the prices of different ZTX resources in game, So to be honest with you, in addition to playtest, just being an open stage for feedback, like, you know, do you like the control? Do you like the artistic vision we went for? Of course, we want to hear all that, but on a very deep level, every playtest I think is a very important test of the economic strategy that we've started to take.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:41:50 And not to say it solved the problems or answered all of our questions, I think it's going to be a very long path, but some of the learnings from it were completely fundamental, and will really help our our team balance you know, the times in game, the length of sessions, and and how we add different aspects, to make the crafting process a bit more balanced.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:20 I think, you know, I think over time, we're seeing more and more gains take the approach of instead of, you know, putting everything on one card and trying to release something very polished right off the bat, it'll move quickly, break things and then fix them with open back seems to be a very, very good approach. And that's certainly something we are taking at ZT X. I wanted to throw you know, I'm going to pass on the word very soon, but wanted to throw another aspect into this. One of the reasons why we love Playtech so much is because at least the GTX for us, we are very conscious of the audience we are building for.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:58 So in the 1st, you know, month of ZTX existing, we are building almost exclusively for web free native folks. And we in web free, we have a higher tolerance of iteration. We have a higher tolerance of yet moving fast and breaking things. Done, I would say the traditional web to user base, which accustomed to much more polished products. So it's also very conscious, you know, choice for us as ZTX team.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:43:28 To have this open building approach, open feedback loop before we transition to onboarding web user base from, you know, from the peta, which is our existing web 2 project. Yeah, and really, truly excited that. But we've mentioned already that, you know, in integration of smart account logins and abstracting away the entire, like, you know, blockchain blockchain and wallet connection takes a lot of time and a lot of resources, hence better is still going to be just the first iteration of that.

Legendary 00:44:04 Very interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing how you think about the playtest since, in particular, the web 3 community first learning from then before you then onboard the web 2 community. I would also like to hear from both of you, Apex Sanjay, from a content creator from a gamer's perspective. How do you think about playlists? How do you approach them? Is it? Do you play a playtest to see if a game is entertaining to you? Do you approach that in a more strategic way, also knowing that in 3, we might ship builds very early on. So there's much more room for feedback and improvement.

apix🎮 00:44:41 Apex first I think so I play a lot of play chess personally because I I like just covering the games.

Legendary 00:44:52 CapEx, you are on mute.

Sanjay 00:44:55 Oh, no. Okay.

apix🎮 00:44:55 I can hear you. Okay. Then just to let you know you're getting your so, yeah, anyways, I played a lot of glitches really early on, which is interesting. I think design the playtest is actually almost a challenge for, game designers because I've played playtest, which went on for, like, weeks weeks. And at some point, you just you don't care about anymore. And then I feel like you can't really collect any valuable data anymore, but at the latest, they are so short that you barely find any time to properly try the game.

apix🎮 00:45:32 But then it kind of also depends on what the game developers expect the players or, like, me as a creator, often, I'm often in touch with the teams. So sometimes they're looking for, okay, can you look around for bucks? And fork glitches or whatever, which might track the game and other player other, teams might be more interested in generally feedback on the game book. But yeah, I think it's it's dangerous for them to release plate tests too early. I think Shrapnold is probably doing a good way.

apix🎮 00:46:04 A good taking good approach to trying the game, return the lead a lot because if the game doesn't really identify your holders and the community can lead to a lot of fun. And people can dump your NFTs and then flow first drops and sentiment is low and this kind of kinda hurt you, to to check the way of your project a lot. So you need to be really careful in releasing them too early if you stand yeah, people get upset quickly in in your 3, especially if they hold assets and see themselves as investors. So yeah, that's, that's, that's something which is really dangerous, I think.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:46:45 Yeah. Absolutely. And I, in fact, I actually remember Apex, you and me jumping on a quick call before we released any playlists for ZT X and That was, you know, one of your pieces of advice to not release it too early. And it was incredibly valuable. I still remember that conversation. Yeah, I think you just mentioned something really important, you know, about the incentives. It's billing and web free. You have this direct feedback loop, not just via, you know, very loud and outspoken community members on Twitter and Discord, but also via direct feedback of your token and NFT prices.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:47:22 And I sometimes feel like, you know, releasing these too early, like you just mentioned, can lead to immense pressure because you are just as a studio, as a company, sometimes you do need to try out things. It needs to make bold moves, which not everybody may like, or which may not directly translate into success, but are just, you know, maybe growing that not everybody will understand directly.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:47:45 And I sometimes feel like we are caught in this very, very difficult spiral or I sometimes see projects caught in it, where this direct feedback of token price is being, you know, just like going down just sets a very bad precedent and makes some people maybe a bit too afraid to take bold moves And I see shrapnel, you know, raising their hand. I, however, unless, you know, maybe I am writing, but I believe Sanjay, you had your hand raised beforehand, before a we gave the word to Apex. So maybe Sanjay, and then we go back to Shrapnil?

Sanjay 00:48:24 Yeah, I'm gonna just, I was just gonna, like, kinda, agree with Karma, but, like, Sharpen can go first. I think they might have something, to talk, to karma first. So I'll I'll go I'll just go Sharpen first.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:48:34 Oh, thanks, man. Sorry. I was just gonna say, I think it goes back to your product life cycle and understanding the customer types. Right? Like, and it's funny. We were literally just having this conversation internally at travel, 2 days ago. I don't know if you noticed, but we're we're giving out a ton of extraction packs right now. These are, like, our early access things. I think, I think Eli's actually just posted a a giveaway for one of them. And amongst the team, we were like, hey. You know, if we if we give a bunch of these things out, then, you know, fewer people are gonna buy them. And we had a really robust conversation around, and this is my perspective in ultimately it it went out as you can see because we're still giving them out. But, you know, my perspective was, hey.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:49:14 We actually it doesn't really matter if we make a whole bunch of money on these extraction packs. Like, what matters is that we have a bunch of healthy players in our ecosystem ready to, create a flywheel that will ultimately support the long term value of whatever assets we have. Right? And so, you know, doing things like announcing that we've sold 6 figures of these extraction packs is is fun and exciting, but, like, not really the goal right now. Right? The goal is to say we have a 100,000 players that all of those people are getting ready to come in and buy shit. And so, you know, we're we're we're constantly balancing that.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:49:50 And my my perspective really is that you have to, while while the web 3 space moves very, very fast, and it's super important to grab the tile, tugger by the tail and ride it, you have to have some sort of horizon that is, like, what is the ultimate goal here? Right? Like, so there's no there's no ambiguity in my mind. Like, the goal from, like, my job at Trapnell is to make Trapnell is to is to make travel a really fun video game and a really vibrant, economy that people spend money Right? That's that's my whole focus.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:50:19 And all of the other things, the price of the token, the price of the NFTs, how much money we're making from extraction packs, All of those are are really, just like knock on effects from my from my job being get a ton of people in the game who are willing to, invest time and money in the in the entertainment product. And so I think as long as you maintain that horizon and you build with those people in mind, you're you're likely gonna be pretty safe. It's working out for us so far, but, you know, knock on it.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:50:44 Oh my. I I really have to jump in just quickly because you patched up on something we were also just discussing, within the team where in order to genuinely make it as, you know, building such big projects, you have to have multi year approach, which does not always align with goldfish attention span type of the current, you know, like, Twitter timeline. And this is not, this is not me, you know, putting anyone down, I also have a goldfish attention span when I scroll through other projects update on Twitter. That's just the nature of the space. We're discussing this, as a project at ZT X Two.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:51:22 And what we aligned on was that in general, to make it long term, you have to switch from this React emotional state, to, I would say, long term stoicism with a healthy dose of flexibility. That's that's how I would, you know, structure this.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:51:41 And it's it's definitely something that is yet again, you know, tested and tested upon every single milestone, because you have this very early, and very passionate community built around the early product that community, of course, will be incredibly outspoken and vocal about every single step you take that early on. They are your main consumers. So while being very, very open to the feedback being given to you today and now, you simultaneously must think about what the higher importance of goals, you know, in months or even years to come, if you already have that roadmap.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:52:21 So, yeah, definitely a tough cookie, but that's why we love the space, isn't it? That's what's what's really challenging here.

Legendary 00:52:30 It absolutely is. Yeah. Sanjay, I wanted to give you a chance to get back into the discussion with us.

Sanjay 00:52:37 Yeah. I kinda wanted to just go back to what, legendary asked about play test. I think one main point nobody mentioned the right now is, play tests are good. You know, like, you we gotta keep the community involved. We gotta show them that, yeah, so you're doing something. I mean, the game's gotta show them that, yeah, they're building. They're bringing out something. Can be too early either, you know, because you wanna you wanna launch a good product. Because if you launch a mediocre product, even if it's a play test, people are gonna just talk negatively about it, and that's something you don't want.

Sanjay 00:53:03 But I think one of the main reasons playtest is important in my opinion and and I take part in it and I give feedback to the games and, and the projects is because when you're building a project like shrapnel or ZT X, you are building a project for years years years as developers as part of, the team and you know the product inside out. So you you're kind of like stuck in that bubble because you don't know how an outsider or a newbie is gonna know or, how to play the game or how to how to go through your ecosystem or how to interact with everything.

Sanjay 00:53:36 So doing this playtest give you a good, good, good, like, idea of how people are going to react when they just turn on the game for the first time. And they're they're just thrown into the battlefield or thrown into the meta So I think the biggest reason for these playtest is for developers and for the team to kinda learn, okay, this might be a little bit too located. Let's dump this down. Let's up this. Let's down that. So this is this is like one of my main reasons. When I jump into a game, And if I see that the game is really confusing or, you know, it's not very gamer friendly or, you know, goldfish mind friendly, then I will let the team know that, hey, you know, gotta dummy down a little bit. Like, this is too confusing. I don't know where I'm clicking.

Sanjay 00:54:15 I don't know what I'm doing. So I think this is one, like, a really good point. I want as well. But, yeah, Karma, Tony, YB, Apex, great points.

Legendary 00:54:25 Yeah. Love that. And I think that's a very variable a valuable perspective that you're adding. And we we spoke a lot about playlists. We spoke a lot about mini games, but also the importance of the economic side of things, where that's the token design, where that's the sustainability of your in game economy to not go down the Amazon coins route that you mentioned before, Tony. And what I'd quickly like to ask on that is is it almost a requirement for games in the web 3 space to offer financial incentives when it comes to mini games when it comes to play tests?

Legendary 00:55:02 ZT X had the token ad hoc for playtesters, Julia with the Kevin the Adventure again. There is a prize pool. There's a community tournament.

Legendary 00:55:11 The shrapnel token announcement of the listing that everyone excited in a space where so many web 3 games, and I know this is a bit of a spicy question, are launching their own token or offering financial incentives, you will have at the same with, their a price pool that they had to increase after the community, criticism is it almost a requirement that if you do something in this space as a web 3 gaming studio that you think about how to include the financial incentive would quite like to hear from you, Tony, and then head over to you, Julia.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:55:51 Yeah. You know, I think that I think that Obi Wan Kenobi was correct, in that only 5th deal in absolutes. And so, you know, I don't know that, there's a there's a set thing you must do in in with anything regarding the space right now. Everything's super new. You know, we could be selling magical toasters in 2 years as opposed to NFTs based on the way the space evolves. Right? What I will say is that I think it really depends on your game's level of intrinsic versus an extrinsic value. Right? Like, and that's, and, you know, with with Trapinil, what we're really trying to do is create a sense of intrinsic value over the things that you own. Right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:56:29 So as opposed to playing Trapinil, and trying to win money, we believe that the a large majority of our players are gonna place capital and try to win cool shit that they wanna show off to other people and and play with and and form our relationship with, and we've built a lot of systems to support that. Right? So, like, for example, I have almost every skin for jacks in League of Ledge I've spent 1000 and 1000 of dollars on on Jackskins in League of Legends. And, what I can't do with my Jackskins in League of Legends is like, understand anything about my performance with those skins. Like, when I'm wearing them, do you know, have do I what's my win loss rate?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:57:05 Like, cool, cool high rights from when I was playing the game with, you know, while wearing those things. That's all intrinsic value. Right? Like, I I just like having them. I'm not gonna trade them. I don't expect it to make me money. We feel the same way about our our cosmetics, for example, and we're building a lot of things like our profile, and our our sharing mechanisms and the way that we celebrate kill scenes and replays to really pay off that intrinsic value.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:57:30 I've also worked at at companies, and I'm I started my own last year and before I worked at Shrapnel, that that really focused on enter extrinsic value, which is I think what you're talking about where the reason that I'm doing the thing and the reason that I'm playing the the flappy bird version of of or the, sorry, the the Pixelmont version of Flappy Bird is because I hope to extract some amount of of dollars for it. Right? I think my buddy Koji from parallel set it great on a previous basis, like, if you if you play it now, if you're the type of person that's gonna sit down and play one of those those experiences that are really meant to be, like, phone experiences that you play, like, on the toilet or in the bus or on the train. If you sit down and play one of those for, like, 8 hours straight with no financial incentive, like, you might be a psychopath. Right?

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:58:10 Like, this they've been they're not designed to actually be played that way and consumed that way. And so I think that, you know, if you take that kind of mindset, it it helps you understand who you again, what customer you're selling to. I think they're both valid approaches. But in one case, I think with the extrinsic value, what you're doing is you're paying people to, break a behavior that they would otherwise not, develop on their own. So that that's that's how I that's how I think about it.

Legendary 00:58:36 Absolutely. You know, I ask a spicy question. I get I get a spicy taken answer. I love it. Look, we we've been running this space for almost 1 hour. We have more than 200 people live. We plan to run for an hour, but we have so many more questions to go to and jump to. Unfortunately, what I have to do is I am back to back in another space that I need to host and hop on, but I did speak to my co host, I spoke to you, Karma, and you are more than happy to also extend the space and run it for another 10 ish, 15 ish minutes So what I will do is I will show myself out.

Legendary 00:59:10 I will say thank you to all of our fantastic speakers to everyone in the audience I'll obviously be back with you all next week and see myself out and enter your car.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:59:22 Course. And thank you so much, legendary, you know, a little sea of hands as we see you off. But, yeah, Tony, Julia, I hope you have another 10 to 15 minutes. This conversation has been an absolute blast. However, of course, I want to be respectful of everybody's time if you have to leave at any point. You know, go ahead and do so. Maybe we can just stop here for a second and see if everybody is still good to good continue.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 00:59:51 Oh, I'm good to go, Karma. Thank you for that, for checking on us.

Sanjay 00:59:56 Yeah. You got me going now. I just had my coffee.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 00:59:58 We can't just end it right now. Just This is all I do. This is it.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:00:01 We're launching a token this week, and this is what I do. Let's keep going. Well, as this was I have suggestion. No sleep on the strap. No launches.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:00:11 I mean, I don't know. You know, Yellow Panther. I know that you're not in the US, but we have, like, 3 or 4 of the crew. Coming to stay at my house tonight and come into the office tomorrow and just stream for several hours while we while we play.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:00:22 I'm not sure. I'm not sure if if we can talk about the group chat that just suddenly pull us into.

Elisa 01:00:30 I'm so jealous. Hush. Hush.

Legendary 01:00:31 Hush.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:00:32 Hush.

Legendary 01:00:32 Hush. Hush. Alright.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:00:34 Alright. As soon as legendary left, the space is descended into chaos. Well, let's let's call it back to order. No, we are we are all I did. I think, everybody's feeling that we are so back types of vibes today. I'm going to loop and boomerang as back into discussion, you know, we've just touched upon the, you know, the financial incentives. And we touched upon something, you know, interesting, interesting value. Let's let's select, grab that as our anchor for the father the further convo.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:01:10 And I'm going to jump in and restart by saying that every single piece of incentives that you need to consider building a project, especially a gaming project in web free is very, very tricky. It's a double edged sword, but a double edged sword, which try as you might, you cannot avoid, at least right now in a market where there is no better currency than attention. So An example I really want to bring up is, you know, ZTX launching a token. We knew for almost 2 years that we will be launching a token.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:01:46 And we decide very, very consciously to air drop the majority of early supply to our early supporters and to the holders of our NFTs. However, you know, with the beta not yet live, with the token not yet being able to be spent in game, that, of course, then translates into, of course, selling pressure of the token. So when I say it's a double edged sort. On one hand, we con you know, committed to rewarding early supporters and early players of the game of the playtest who help us refine that product.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:02:22 But on the flip side, you know, air dropping 1,000,000 1,000,000 of dollars to a community will always lead to a selling pressure, which the project has to absorb. So as we talk about those financial incentives, I think it's always a very tricky game of rewarding your community versus long term performance of the assets whose price you do need to keep up in order for your project to keep being attractive to the speculative part of your community. Which in early, you know, tranches of your product will always be the majority.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:02:56 So I'm going to pass it back, you know, to to you, Julia, how you see these tokens these incentives in general, and user acquisition in web free, and then we can boomerang back to Sanjay.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:03:10 Yeah. Thanks. So I think maybe I will abstract for a moment. The incentives in terms There's incentives that are e sports or skill tied, and then there is, the massive, essentially, community angle and what ultimately is the balance between rewarding the community, but not, let's say ending in a situation where the community self destructs through sale pressure, if you want.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:03:43 May maybe going on to the first point, when we think about the and I love the thank you for for for the terminology and the intrinsic and extrinsic, drivers of behavior. We ultimately want to distinguish what is the objective of every product we get out there. The objective of Kevin the adventurer is data gathering. It doesn't have the objective of, existing as a product more than 6 months from now. It's there to give us a lot of information. And that information requires that we have a large amount of people playing it.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:04:20 And, but more importantly, that we have a subset, top 3, 4% that play it a lot. And that's why these prizes, but those prizes are related to the top free performance in a hyper scale oriented game. So it is ultimately a if you want any sports of of hyper casual games. If instead we are talking about if we were to go out there and when we do it within our community, for example, we have our freebie game, arena, our bro combat roller, that is being tested by around 200 people within our Discord, that is a no incentives environment.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:04:57 And it's a no incentives environment because instead the type of feedback we want is highly subjective, normalytical. We want them to tell us how they feel playing it. And and that is something you shouldn't reward monetarily because you would skew the feedback. So so maybe that's, that's the touch base on the the use of incentives that we've been doing at this point in time.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:05:21 And ultimately for media incentives in game, it boils down to ultimately a large economic economic equation, which is, are you building a circular economy that where there's more that goes in than what goes out, or are you building a closed economy where the gamers are the investors and you're essentially in a 0 sum game. I think some of the early web free games, as much as they were successful in play account, ended up probably, you know, not making it through into the bear market because the economy was a 0 sum game.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:05:58 You need to ultimately create an economy where whether there's intense incentives or not. And whether those incentives are monetary or not is a decision that you based on what you, what is the outcome you want from the game. But the ultimate point is no matter if they are monetary or not, it can't be a 0 sum game. So mornings to go in and people need to be in for fun more than for the incentive. That's one angle. The other angle is how much do I give to a community that gave Pixelmon? And and I'm gonna freeze your own your point Karma in a very pixel one way.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:06:35 Pixel one raised 21,000 ETH from a community. It had an a very bad first reveal liquid ex acquired a turnaround. It's a 100% community funded project where that community has been hyper loyal through a slump, like no other NFT project has seen, in terms of PR, and it has come back from it.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:06:58 So the problem you described is exactly the conundrum that I'm going through, in these 2 months, which is how do I reward somebody to whom I owe basically my pre seed, my seed, my series a, my CSB, my CSC, my CSD, and that that have been hyper supported throughout and not knocked down the the whole thing. But at the same time, not get to a situation where I am, self destructing, by giving too much too fast. I think the answer is very complex.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:07:32 It lies ultimately on timing your syncs, with your four sets as the economic design guys would say that is why whether your game is live when you go live or it comes live later, I'll you need syncs and those syncs need to be time wise aligned to your fores. And if at any given point in time, your syncs are way too much bigger than the sorry, the force, it's way too bigger than the sinks, then you're going to put yourself, hi, I'm I'm mixing my words. If the faucets are, you know, way bigger than the sinks, you're gonna put yourself in a difficult position.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:08:09 And, that is particularly dangerous at the beginning. For your game is live. I think Yuga has seen this. No. They had that big early sync that was land. Couple of smaller sync where the mini games, but now they're in a difficult space because there is no ongoing sync.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:08:28 We didn't speak about that earlier because, it's a it's a topic that we don't talk too much about, but ultimately a set of mini games, an ongoing set of mini games, multiple ones is an ongoing sync, if they're done correctly, that can maintain, cell pressure for a few months while you build games, which ultimately need to be there. Otherwise, at some point, yeah, you don't have enough to absorb the forces. Sorry, that was, verbose.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:08:58 No. It was verbose, but it was detailed, and it gave us an incredible insight into how you see this. So, you know, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. Yeah. I oh my god. We we touched upon so many things, you know, syncs and faucets. Before that, you said something, you know, about having the ultimate goal of your product as your north star at all times. And I think that something that both as community and as project, members, we very often see differently.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:09:29 There despite our best efforts at communication, there is never everything we can reveal to the community itself, no matter how well meaning we may be. So it's very often that steps that may not look like, you know, maybe the best well timed ones from the community standpoint have multiple so behind the scenes reasons for the team itself. Just to loop it back to the topic of the ZTX token, in particular, you know, for us, it was incredibly important to have the playtest before the token release, but the token release, the initial air drop to the community, before the better release.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:10:08 The reason being that the better is the first instance of the game happening on MainNet, and enables us to actually integrate the token, for in game, you know, just different actions, which then actively, function as the syncs for the token. Had that token not been live already, it would have been substantially more difficult for us to currently be working on that magnet integration and testing these, testing these use cases. So there's always more to it than the simple go to market strategy of marketing even though I would have preferred it that way.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:10:44 And, we are now going to pivot towards a more personal question, just being conscious of your time. Something I wanted to ask, on a very personal level is, you know, all three of us here on stage, you know, Julia or Tony in terms of us free, you know, representing projects, I wonder if you could go all the way back, you know, to the start of your first time, your project, you know, starts this starts its Twitter. We've discussed playlists mini games, financial incentives, what is the one thing you would have done differently in this go to market strategy, knowing what you know now?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:11:24 And I would love to hear from you, Tony, first, and then back to you, Julia, before we wrap this up for today.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:11:33 Yeah. You know, that's a great question. I think about this all the time. If I and I started I started to travel about a year after the game was in development, and they'd launched their first NFT collection, but, our our first NFT collection, but, from from Travel's perspective, I probably would have lost our operator collection later than we did. We had some, some considerations when we launched it that were, driven by, roadmap plans that ended up getting pushed out because of, you know, the world exploded when, you know, FTX and SVB both exploded at the same time.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:12:09 And so if I had to go back and do it over, I would probably be I would probably have lost our operator collection, like, 2 months ago, 3 months ago leading into all of this early access activity that we've got going on. And, you know, what the announcements that we've had today. And so I think that's been that that would be the biggest thing I would do that being said, I feel like if that's the if that's the biggest mistake that we made that, that we would go back and fix, we're in a good we're in a good spot. Because, again, the focus really is to make a killer kick ass video game here. So I feel I feel worse, but I was like, man, the thing I would've done I would've done differently is go back and make a cart racer instead of a shooter. But I don't feel that way.

SHRAPNEL 🔺 01:12:46 Like, I'm I I think we made the right decisions on what we're building that's important.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:12:51 Yeah. We we are definitely cherry picking and nitpicking here, but nevertheless, you know, some of that insight is always useful, especially when you haven't been a part of the team from the beginning, you know, sort of, like, dive in and there are things you might have made be changed, but, I mean, you you will have joined the team because of your conviction in the first place. So it's all just, you know, it's all just details in the end as long as the vision is there. But maybe you feel differently, Julia?

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:13:16 I mean, similarly, we acquired Pixelman and decided to turn it around. And, well, you all got all you guys know what the the first NFT drop was like and it wasn't successful. The one just pre position. But on the other hand, that's why we've got Kevin. And I think, part of me would also say, would would you do it again if it if it meant getting Kevin? Would you not do if it meant not having Kevin? I don't I'd be on the fence. I'm a big believer in Kevin, even as an independently standing IP.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:13:51 But look, I think that the main thing, that if I were to broad phrase, is that there tends to be the, the fact of releasing NFTs and having NFTs in circulation tends to create, what I would call, neatly designed depth. I don't know. I I just made up the word. So and by design that, what I mean is while game design is an iterative process where you wanna effectively maintain as much flexibility to change and iterate your design over time.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:14:28 Having NFTs in circulation before the design is formed up, creates a certain set of economic expectations, if you want, from the community. That then act as depth in the game design flow. So then what you're trying to do is you're trying to, somehow patch changes that are driven by game design because you have to let game design drive. Ultimately, if you don't there's no point in the whole thing. But then that means you're always going back and patching holds, you know, on making a change to the collection, new art, releasing another sub collection.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:15:06 And and they're doing that because design game designers made a change, which has at some point potentially gone against an economic expectation that was embedded in the NFTs, always it, of course, but it was there. And so then you're doing something to make sure that you patch that, change if the economic expectation was big enough. And that is, and that is a inefficient, game to play.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:15:35 So I think if if I went back, I would probably reset a lot of the, stats and expectations around the NFTs early on, create a much wider mentality of change an iterative game design process in the community, which I didn't early on, and hence didn't prepare them for that level of rebalancing and change along path. Yeah, that's, maybe if I went to go where to go broad strokes on it.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:16:04 No. This was absolutely incredible. And I want to and huge, huge thank you to both of you. You know, Giulio here from Pixelmon and Tony here joining us on the official Shrapnole account. You've been absolutely amazing, and this has been a combo filled with insight, both for, you know, our live audience here and for everybody who is sneak to this afterwards, we have heard about the vision of the projects. I think the most time we spend speaking about the balance between rewarding early community and maintaining equilibrium for the long term growth.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:16:38 You know, building games is a balancing act and even more so in a dynamic web tree environment where the narrative and sentiment changes in the wind of financial opportunity So, this has certainly been an incredible conversation. I look forward to hosting these panels, you know, on an ongoing basis, and both of you are, of course, welcome anytime. So is any other speaker here to the audience here? If you don't follow everybody speaking here, on stage right now. I don't know what you're doing. Click the follow buttons and join us next week as well. You know, these these conversations are certainly enriching for everybody involved.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:17:16 And thank you for giving us over an hour of your time today, everybody. Absolutely love you all, and have a lovely morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you are.

GiulioX (Right-of-Game) 01:17:29 Have a good night everyone. Thank you.

Sanjay 01:17:31 Thank you for listening, guys. Take care.

Legendary 01:17:33 Bye.

Step into the intricate world of token economies in Web3 gaming.

This discussion offers a deep dive into the strategic use of digital tokens, examining how they influence game dynamics, player behavior, and overall market trends.

Uncover the complexities and ingenuity behind token-based economies, revealing their critical role in the burgeoning Web3 gaming landscape.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:04:17 Gm happy Halloween, and welcome back, everyone. Sorry for being a couple minutes late, we had a bit of issues with X, starting the spaces, but we are all good now. And I'm very excited for today's discussion. Just last week, we held a spaces that was very centered on web 3 gaming and the future of web 3 gaming.

Legendary 00:04:44 And there, we only skim the surface of toeconomics And today, we're actually diving deep into the nitty gritty of token design, and we will discuss, if we're actually need tokens in gaming, do all games need their own token. We will go beyond the discussion that we had last time that was mostly centered around tokens and user acquisition to talk more about token design and how that can help with user retention. We'll have a look at CTX's own token launch and the TGE that happened. I think it was 2 weeks ago, but time passes so fast in this space.

Legendary 00:05:22 And ultimately also speak a bit to the challenges of creating a sustainable token design, and keeping in mind that web 3 is very volatile. Not only when it comes to prices, but also when it comes to the audience size, which can be very, very cyclical we will talk a lot about token design today. So just a quick reminder that nothing that we say here on stage is financial advice, and I'm very, very happy that we have a fantastic panel of speakers, to discuss things around token designs. We have my cost karma. We have meta alchemist.

Legendary 00:05:58 We have the G Way, and we have VTF video game week with us. Before we get started, Karma, welcome to the stage. Happy Halloween. Do you celebrate?

Karma 00:06:11 Hello, everybody. What a joy to be on Stasis again? Do I celebrate? Quite frankly, when I was a bit younger, especially when I was a student, Halloween used to be like the largest joint celebration for me and my group of friends. Simply because, you know, regardless of your religion, you tend to spend Christmas, you tend to spend Easter, you know, like, traveling around, visiting your family. And Halloween is a bit more an ambivalent holiday where people can actually get together. So we kind of made it, you know, just a joint celebration, even despite our families never celebrated it. And I think that was lovely.

Karma 00:06:47 But to be honest, if I had a chance, something on my bucket bucket list is certainly celebrating Halloween in US, at least once in my lifetime. That must be amazing.

Legendary 00:06:59 Oh, definitely there is a different Halloween culture in the States. I remember the times when I was studying at UT Austin at Metcoms and celebrating Halloween, there was way, way different from what we call Halloween back in in Europe, especially in Austria. VGF worked through the stage. I know you're a gaming Maxie, but are you a Halloween Maxie too?

vgf.eth 00:07:22 GM? A little bit. Yeah. I I I enjoy Halloween. I I go back and forth from spending time with, family and using it as a time to celebrate with friends. So, unfortunately, this here, spent it, you know, at home. I the last couple of years, I've had the privilege of being, like, traveling while, enjoying Halloween. So, this year spending some some time with family and it's been a good time so far. So spending some more time with family tonight looking forward to it.

Legendary 00:08:02 Love to hear that. The gray welcome back to the stage. Thank you for being with us last week. Thank you for coming back this week to continue the conversation. On Economics. How are you doing? Is Halloween a big thing for you?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:08:14 Hey, guys. Hey, legend. Thanks. Thanks for having me back and looking forward to this conversation. Halloween is is it's a fun holiday. I think, you know, when I was younger, you know, obviously, you go out trick or treating. So those are those are some really memorable evenings. I I live in Canada. So Halloween is also a little bit bittersweet in the sense that, it it also signals that the winter is coming. So sometimes you get, like, a mixed bag of weather, know, 7 years, you actually get a little bit of snow on how Halloween night when you go out and trickled treat. So, just just definitely a sense of nostalgia, to my childhood.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:08:53 But this year is a little bit different. I have a newborn. He's, like, three months old, so I think we're gonna keep it a bit low key. We're gonna have some fun dressing up a little bit today, but, other than that, no big plans.

Legendary 00:09:05 I love to hear that, and definitely, the smart choice is to keep it low key with a newborn Meta Alkomist. Welcome to the stage. How are you doing? Are you planning anything exciting for Halloween today?

Meta Alchemist 00:09:16 Nothing much, brother. You know, just working as usual and but, you know, old Halloween used to be, fun, like in college or when I was a kid, but, right now, I'm not really doing much, to be honest.

Legendary 00:09:33 Definitely definitely share the sentiment as well of the good old days in college. One more thing before we get started, just make sure to click the comment button in the, bottom right corner, share your thoughts in the comments. We will definitely read through them, repost the spaces so more people can join. And let's get straight into the discussion. I would quickly to start with you, the gray as you were with us last week. And we spoke about the the 0 sum game that tokens can be in web 3 gaming in particular. If everyone has a token, then is it really a strategic advantage anymore?

Legendary 00:10:11 But you also pointed out that you know, many gaming projects might not generally require their own token. So starting a bit with a with a spicy question there, in your view, what does it take for a game to truly merit its own token?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:10:28 That is a very spicy, spicy question to start off. With. Maybe where I'll start is, just a general comment. When when when people kind of analyze tokens or projects and thinking about, you know, from an econ design perspective, you have to keep in mind that there's no one size fits all answer to any of this, right, So, you you really have to understand the underlying project itself, the game economy itself, and also what it's, kind of business objectives are.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:11:01 All of those things factor into, if and how a token is necessary and or appropriate, for for a particular project. So, to be honest, I don't have strong view, when it comes to many other gaming projects because, frankly, I just haven't haven't had the time to really dig into them too much. I can only speak from the perspective of how we think about, AI arena, for example.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:11:30 And one of the things that I want to highlight for people is a very simple question to ask, when you're looking at whether or not a project requires a token is to ask yourself a question like, what is the main objective of this economy? It's a very simple question, but, you know, I, I would, I would bet a lot of times people can't even come up with an answer. If you cannot come up with an answer, there's probably a reason why that that that you're probably struggling with that.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:12:06 And and and that may be the starting point to an exploration of asking whether or not a project really needs a token. Just one quick, kind of point on AI Arena as a case study of this in AI arena, especially the web 3 version of the game. We intend for it to be the competitive league, if you will. Right? You can think about it as our desire for it to become like the Esports version of AI Arena, thereby, the main objective of that particular competition is for the best most exciting and powerful AI to be developed and trained by a human player.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:12:46 That's the objective. So from there, we we thought about whether or not a token has some type of utility or usefulness, in supporting that objective. And the answer is yes. And I wanna spend the entire time talking about the intricacies how we design the arena, but I just wanna allude to that a little bit just to frame this conversation and answer your question of, you know, how how do you even, you know, very simply try to diagnose whether or not, a project or a game, requires a token?

Legendary 00:13:23 That's a, it's a very, very good perspective to share. And I quite would like to get you into the discussion meta alchemist you know, talking about do we even need a token? Let's say we get to the point that a game says a producer says, yes. Might make sense to have a token for our game for our system, and you raised a very, very good point, namely how can token designers work together with game designers token designers are not familiar with game design on the one hand, and then you have game designers. On the other hand, we're not really familiar with token design.

Legendary 00:13:55 How can we bridge that gap and basically make sure that when game designers meet token and ecosystem designers that the expectations and the goals are aligned and that we don't have this mismatch.

Meta Alchemist 00:14:14 I mean, in terms of that legendary. Like, they need to, definitely delve deep into, you know, what the token is for. But, you know, if you just look at most games, actually, those, are simple aspects like, the token, needs to be, done in such a way that, it actually creates an incentive mechanism for players. Also, it needs to be done in such a way that the token can be used in a way that, you can purchase certain things from the game and, progress through the game.

Meta Alchemist 00:14:46 Or, the token can be used in such a way that you can actually create, you know, just, extra, you know, value for the whole economy, through, just, creating a high market cap token because if you have a high market cap token, you will likely have a big investors and big money coming in, and you can even do but, like, in a nutshell, like, there is actually, multiple, like scenarios for a token to be effective in the great free gaming, scene.

Meta Alchemist 00:15:20 But, like, just like you mentioned, the only problem that, we need to solve in the beginning is, how can actually, game designers and token designers actually work together in a, you know, balanced way because, let's say you're creating a system in which you're giving so many rewards, but then that will kill the economy.

Meta Alchemist 00:15:42 Or, you're creating, you know, game, with no, connection, to token economy, and you're just trying to, sorry, you're just trying to implement, talking in such a way that, you know, it has a function, then that's not gonna work either. So like, in the beginning of the game, while you're designing the game, you gotta really think, of it as like a, you know, one of the most core aspects of the game. And I think, to be honest, every single web tree game, needs a token.

Meta Alchemist 00:16:18 And, the reason is because there's so many advantages that you can actually bring towards it, through, like, one is user adoption. The other, the other one is, being able to have that treasury. The other one is having a much more, deeper economy. So for all these things, I completely, believe that, you need to have a token if you're creating a victory game, but if that token basically has no function and you're just trying to create that just to incentivize players and stuff like that, that game is gonna suffer a So, that's why the game designers and token designers needs to work together.

Meta Alchemist 00:16:57 So the things actually connect and players actually field like their part of the experience a lot more.

Legendary 00:17:04 I think that makes a lot of sense and that there is also something where I would love to hear from your perspective VGF because I think the case of Pixel Vault is a very, very one for those not familiar in the audience, Pixel Vault had a tremendously complex NFT Ecosystem that that was built in the last bull market in the last bull cycle with, 2 tokens, with planetary NFTs, with many, many more aspects to it.

Legendary 00:17:34 And ultimately, you made the decision, to revamp that, to streamline that into and to reboot reboot g g to only have, the g g token. And you have that particularly challenge that on the one hand, you had an established community, that came in from the NFT collecting side of things that came in from from from the old ecosystem, but now you are streamlining that into reboot. You love to make that analogy of comparing reboot Gigi to the arcade where people can go in.

Legendary 00:18:12 They pay with Gigi tokens to be able to as the games, and play them and potentially depending on the skill level being able to earn more, tokens back than they earned. So how how did that thought process go for you to balance the token design on the one hand to balance the game design, but also to keep in mind that you had this massive community built back in the bull market.

vgf.eth 00:18:40 GM. Yeah. That was that was quite a lot. It did I I think to approach that I I did wanna highlight something that Gway had had emphasized there, and that's that the reality is that most tokens don't have a purpose to exist. Like, uh-uh, like, call it like it is. Most of these tokens are or or let's say many are just vehicles for speculation.

vgf.eth 00:19:14 Their primary utility is that their the number may go up. A lot of times, the actual tokenomics and token design are not intrinsically designed with the game game experience in mind. And so I I think that is an issue that a lot of, games, game economies, token designs, are either have seen in the last couple of years or will see into the future.

vgf.eth 00:19:49 And I believe that we may even get in get into it a little bit in this conversation, but, in in relation to our fraud, project. 1 of the primary challenges was, okay. We have this complex ecosystem involving multiple tokens.

vgf.eth 00:20:06 And stakeholders, you know, whether it be collectors that have kind of been along with us along the way, you know, some of our, like, whale holders of varying degrees, whether they were, you know, collecting pow token, for example, or, via staking their comics had had accumulated a lot of the punk's tokens or via our planet sale had, you know, got involved in the Dow ecosystem.

vgf.eth 00:20:38 And so we had this interesting balancing act of trying to equitably and and reward those holders for being early act act active participants. But then also you know, reboot is not Pixel Vault. Pixel Vault is not reboot.

vgf.eth 00:21:04 So how do we have this this token design that accurately and and, you know, fairly incentivized and rewards these these players for helping seed reboot, but that those that are coming in after the fact are not, you know, gate kept in such a way. And, I do have to give a a shout out, the, Pixel Vault Corps Committee.

vgf.eth 00:21:31 They are a good selection of just a a very broad subset of of our holders and they were instrumental in the feedback of helping to to craft and formulate this. We we got it to a place where we thought that we had a a fairly good, you know, kind of landing of how how it would be received by the community.

vgf.eth 00:22:02 And, it was really working back and forth and iterating with core committee that we got it to a place that no matter what the token holdings you may have, that it was a a really good accurate and fair compensation and and incentive and reward, no matter what part of the ecosystem you were involved in, And so that was that was instrumental in that kind of feedback loop and coming to market with reboot.

vgf.eth 00:22:32 So, yeah, I'm really just particularly excited for games that, like, are not just leveraging parts of web 3 technology, but are only enabled via leveraging web web screen technology.

Legendary 00:22:48 Yeah. I think that is a is a very, very fair distinction. I think it's also interesting to hear those different perspectives coming into the, Gigi token creation because you said, you had people collecting. You had people from the planet daos, with all different interests in the ecosystems, in the system, you are reflecting that in the DG token as well by tackling gameplay, tackling rewards, governance, validation, ISES, etcetera. But I also would love to hear from you, Karma. I think we had quite some spicy takes so far.

Legendary 00:23:19 Do you think going in line with what Meta Alchemist also said before that it is almost inevitable that most of the games in web 3 will have their own token?

Karma 00:23:32 Yes. And no. I think the majority of games will always have a token simply because in terms of marketing, economy and even funding funding. It's just such a lucrative and attractive item to, you know, dangle in front of everybody. I do sympathize a lot with what has just been said. I think, you know, for the majority of games we have seen maybe in the last bull run, which, you know, really color our perception of wet free gaming.

Karma 00:24:01 For many of them releasing a token with a way of funding the actual game, you know, very often, realization of how difficult it actually is to launch a successful game, hit these teams a bit, you know, in a delayed manner and that I think very often influenced how the tokens were released and designed. And now, you know, we are now undergoing this very, important shift, I think, in this space where teams who have been building for a while, who have substantial experience, and the actual back to deliver on a high quality game experience are now going to market with products which have been in development for a while.

Karma 00:24:41 And these long developed products just have a completely different set of expectations set for themselves because they have the, you know, the just of the backing, they've had the time to think and build for the bear where the user acquisition is so difficult you are working on worst case scenario, which can only get better with time, you know, once the ball goes into swing. So I generally think that our perception is very colored, but these early and, you know, often unsuccessful attempts, and we will now see a much higher quality of delivery, quality of, you know, a tokenomics in game economy.

Karma 00:25:20 And, you know, from the from the thumbs up. I think that other panel speakers, agreed to with me to an extent. In terms of DTX, you know, for us, I think it's also important to delineate, you know, web free gaming is such a broad good. Currently, we throw everything in there. But if we look closer, we see very, very different products. We have games which are just shooters, you know, like one of experience. We have, you know, pixel experiences, which appeal to nostalgia and are more of an RPG immersive environment.

Karma 00:25:55 And then we have like ZTX, things like, you know, other metaverse products, which are much more of an entire ecosystem that is being built. And specifically for these ecosystems, I think the answer is not why a token, but why not. If you are building a wide ecosystem, you need common denomination, and you need a very, very well controlled, economy within that, which you can only do and really construct if you are in control the token syncs, token, you know, emissions, you can't do that unless the token is generally designed for you.

Legendary 00:26:33 Yeah. I think you mentioned quite a lot of very, very important points and actually want to connect on the last point speaking about token syncs because last week, we did speak a lot about user acquisition and how that can benefit, gaming projects. And, again, today, wanna speak a bit more about the other side, about the user retention.

Legendary 00:26:55 And I would absolutely love to go to you meta alchemists to here, bit your thoughts on, a, even if we now have, you know, more complex games that are being developed that people, projects use to bear mark it to think about the game design, the token ecosystem design, what are in your opinion, what what makes a good token sync, what makes a sustainable token sync, and also how do how can we deal with the risks of of token hyperinflation in games?

Meta Alchemist 00:27:28 Oh, it it needs to be connected to, the, progression of the game legendary. So, like, to put it to a very, very basic, stuff.

Meta Alchemist 00:27:37 Like, let's say you're progressing through the game and you want to go to, the next level in, in a character from, level 20 to level 25, you need to actually have, some certain skills in order to, you know, get more value from the dungeons you're entering or basically, something that will actually upgrade your character, then you may need a token or something that actually, like, that you need for upgrading your, buildings in a certain game or buying certain, packs, for example, in TCG games, trading card games.

Meta Alchemist 00:28:18 I mean, it needs to definitely be connected to, you know, the game progression itself. And, if you can actually arrange the game syncs and token syncs in that way, then it will work. But if you will actually try to, you know, just create, certain stuff, just to be able to create a a game sync and token sync, then it's not gonna work. People are gonna be like, okay. Why do we have this system? This is not connected to the game. And, why are we actually, needing to, use our tokens instead of just being able to sell those tokens. So then most people are not gonna be using the game syncs anyway.

Meta Alchemist 00:28:57 So it's it's definitely, needs to be connected to the gaming experience. But, like, in terms of, like, even tokens themselves. Like, I want to add a couple things to our karma set. Actually, you don't even need a token, for even the biggest ecosystems. Because, mutual currencies always existed. And, you don't need to really have a token in order to be able to, create a that is big. So, that's actually, not the purpose of a token.

Meta Alchemist 00:29:28 A token, basically does a much higher function in the economy of a game, which is actually, you know, making sure that the developer can have the funds to be able to develop better stuff because, most of the games in this ecosystem from what I've seen, from launching a lot of games at C Defy. They need a lot of actually resources. And, not every single, game is gonna have a ton of resources. And because of that, this ecosystem needs tokens in order to grow.

Meta Alchemist 00:30:02 And the tokens themselves also, put, reward mechanism into, gamers and players. And you can do that through, NFTs as well. You don't need a token really for that. But let's, put it into perspective this way. Let's, let's say you're actually building a great game and then your total market cap actually goes to 300, 400 dollar, a $1,000,000 market cap. And that means that, the project, while, it's growing with the game sync and the value that they're providing, they will be able to actually recreate some of the, tokens themselves too.

Meta Alchemist 00:30:39 And they will be able to generate income or they will be able to get tokens from game syncs and then they will be able to generate income to create a better game. So, the the purpose of the token is not actually, the economy, but it's actually, a way to reward users, but also a way to develop better products and someday, you know, certain games are gonna have a 1,000,000,000 of dollars of, token mark caps and, let's say, like, let's look at Gala games, for example. You know, they have, such a high market cap. They had such a high high market cap that they could actually develop, like, a ton of games, because they had a huge market cap.

Meta Alchemist 00:31:19 And oxie Infinity because they had actually a great, token of economy in the beginning. They could actually do a lot of marketing. They could do a lot of stuff. So it's not only affecting, the players in a good way when you create a good token economy, but also it's affecting the progress of the company, which then you know, resonates with the users because they will be getting more value out of it too. That's how I see tokens actually. Like, otherwise, you can just create a virtual currency and you're fine with it.

Legendary 00:31:48 You know? Interesting. I I like how you look at it from that funding perspective, but also from the scalability perspective, connecting those two saying if the market cap is higher, you obviously have the resources to generate more income to work on on broader things. For those that there was another point stood out from what you said. You said for the token things, they need to be progressing throughout the game.

Legendary 00:32:12 So once once, you know, a game matures a bit and the player base reaches the end game, whatever that might look like in the game, will there always be the need to create new content, staying in, you know, you mentioned dungeons staying maybe a bit in that MMO world create new higher level areas to just keep that progression system going to basically have new token syncs, or can you create a system that does not need the new fresh content to have new token things for end game and is in in some ways almost self contained.

Meta Alchemist 00:32:48 I would say you need fresh content, because if you don't have a fresh content, then why would, players, you know, pay expert tokens to use the same, things. So you need to actually produce a new innovations, new content, new exciting ideas. So, you know, players are gonna be like, holy, cow. Like, I need to actually have this. I need to you know, get this month or I need to have this, new, you know, skin or, anything like that. So you need to, side people with, things that you actually create, and then you can create tokens around that.

Legendary 00:33:27 Yeah. Very much agree with with that perspective. Vijay, if I see it with your hand up, what are your thoughts on this?

vgf.eth 00:33:35 So I I agree with what was just said, but I wanted to push back on something that was mentioned a few minutes ago where, it it was said that basically games should or or can always have tokens.

vgf.eth 00:33:53 And in my in my perspective, this this example of, like, game design involving sort of this evergreen content, the the desire in for, almost this live service model to be constantly iterating and providing, new value, new experiences, new updates is why not every game needs a their own token.

vgf.eth 00:34:23 This is why, sort of platform and, you know, ecosystem tokens can't exist is not every game design should be perpetual or evergreen or need to be this live serve model in order to exist, in my opinion. Like, I would being being constrained to a type of game sign that requires a game to live on forever, essentially, in order to to sustain a game game economy, is a constraint I I don't agree with.

vgf.eth 00:35:01 I believe that game designers should be able to to design game experiences and and that may not require its own token, though leveraging an existing token may be of benefit.

Legendary 00:35:14 Interesting meta alchemist. I definitely wanna hear your reply on that. And then the way you are reading my mind, absolutely wanted to get your perspective in as well.

Meta Alchemist 00:35:23 Yeah. So, in terms of, what I mentioned, actually, like, there is this, like, different between, needing a token, and, like, whether it will be actually helpful for you to have a token So, like, if you actually look from that perspective, me, Jeff, like, let's say you created actually a great game. And then, that's how, Xfinity actually, did. I mean, for his time, it was a great game. And then they started to build new games or, let's look at parallel right now. They have Prime, and they're building new games.

Meta Alchemist 00:36:02 So most of the, gaming companies who create actually a great game and they have a token, inside that, they can always, start to build, more games and then turn it into an ecosystem. So So, and that is actually, like, applied in such a good way in our ecosystem that most of the users love that. Like, they wanna see, okay, how can I actually play another game from the same, game studio, which we are seeing very often? So it doesn't need to be like, okay, we created this token and then we cannot make use of it.

Meta Alchemist 00:36:39 If you actually create another game, that the token can use or even, you can actually, provide, UGC systems, for community to create, even stuff with the NFTs and, tokens that you have, then you can actually utilize those tokens in even more interesting way. So What I'm saying is I don't think every game needs a token, but I think for every single game, if they utilize a token in a great way, not in a crappy way, but a great way, then they will provide more value to their community and to themselves. That's what believe in.

vgf.eth 00:37:16 I appreciate the clarity. And and just to to follow on that really quick, and then I definitely wanna hear Goya's thoughts here.

vgf.eth 00:37:25 One thing I would highlight there is I I do think that, you know, kind of building a game economy leveraging a single token and a studio being able to leverage that into building it into, you know, a grander ecosystem type token, is the viable avenue, but it doesn't you can't you can't overcome poor token design from the onset, which is where I think we're we're seeing a lot of, struggle from from some existing tokens right now yeah, legendary talking to, like, you know, the hyper inflationary question that you had earlier.

Legendary 00:38:03 Yeah. So it was, like, it's also a bit of a chicken problem because you have some starting building the game first and trying to pivot into an ecosystem. Others try to build the infrastructure first and then actually find partner who build the games on their platform. It's not always that straightforward to know, you know, which way to go first, but the way I definitely wanna hear from you, and then we'll go to next Yeah.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:38:24 Maybe I just I just wanna make a comment to kinda bridge what both Alchemist and BGF set. I think I think as an observation, and not, I'm not saying whether it's wrong or right. As an observation, there there's really, like, call it, 2 spheres of utility when it comes to tokens. One sphere is the macro utility of the token gives you the ability, to on one hand, like attract audiences. So customer acquisition marketing, on the other hand, build ecosystem wealth, which can become resources that you can leverage to improve your ecosystem over time. So I think that's what Alcon is just highlighting.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:39:04 And, I think from his perspective, he's saying that, you know, especially in web 3 gaming, this could potentially become a source of like superpower. And you can, you can scale to staggering degrees of, gaming economies that haven't, we haven't seen them web Right? So on that basis, I think a lot of projects, and I think most projects in are intoxicated by the prospects of that, that they launch a token without giving too much slot about the other sphere, which is in game utility.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:39:39 And this is what with DGF is saying, which is, well, yes, it's one thing to launch a token, but if you don't do it properly, you're likely gonna fail. And that likelihood is really, really high, because these economies systems are very, very complex. So in fact, it is a double edged sword. Right? Because there is this, incredible pull on the, financial economic, prospect side of things. And then there is the very daunting, practical realities of actually making it work for your economy, for your game.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:40:18 But I think the observation is more likely than not, web 3 projects will launch a token and the reason that they do launch is they're overvaluing the former, which is the customer acquisition, the prospects of we can build something really big. But they haven't put too much or enough thought into the ladder, which is how do you actually make this work in your game?

Legendary 00:40:49 Yeah. I I think that's an excellent take, balancing and bridging what both meta alchemist and VJF said before. Next, I wanted to come to you next. Well, no pun intended.

N3XT 00:41:00 Welcome to the stage. Hello, hello. Thanks for having me. I was I wanna to jump on Gway, actually, because he briefed perfectly. I was going to play, like, bad side because if you look at the token itself and let's say you have a token, you get it in your ecosystem and everything else and what Meda said Alchemists about creating, you know, multiple games for one company. That's all great, but now if you're looking from gamers perspective, let's say I'm a gamer, and now you have a token, right? But that token is now, let's say, 5th bucks per token.

N3XT 00:41:39 And, like, say, early users will be rewarded. Right? You have a token. You have multiple tokens. You know, you are going through the game and everything working. But do you onboard the new people? Like, if your game is based on the token and it's requiring token to do something in the game, but token is, let's say, 50 bucks per token. That's a high entry point for, anyone new trying to get in game. So there, you're coming into a big problem there. Right? But if you hyperinflate the token as a example, and the token keeps going up for no reason, then you come to a problem again.

N3XT 00:42:15 But if if it's like deflationary and your game is say very successful and it runs for years years years and years and the token gets basically extinct, but then So, like, people really need to think before creating a dog. I was just trying to bring the points of before making a dog can think really about this because just imagine if you're because everyone in this space wants the docket to be like 100 bucks, right? But if it's 100 bucks, new place cannot afford to you know, if it if your, let's say, NFT requires 100 token to upgrade, that's, you know, 100 k. Like, no one is gonna pay 100 k to upgrade NFT.

N3XT 00:42:55 So, basically, your game is dead. So, yeah, I just wanted to throw some, you know, let's say negative side to to the tokens.

Legendary 00:43:02 So, yeah, Sure. And I think the token sustainability is is a very important aspect as well, and we'll definitely get into that a bit more. I think we initially plan to run the space for 1 hour, but I think we have a very, very good discussion going. So we quite like to go a bit beyond that if everyone on the on the panel is happy with that. Obviously, if you would have to leave at the hour mark, feel feel free to go and I do think that we have quite a few more points to touch on. Before I go to my next questions, VJF, I saw you with your hand up get get back in on us with that discussion, please?

vgf.eth 00:43:41 Just wanted to to bring it back around to something Karma had said earlier that there's there's no one size fits all to any of this. Right? We're we're painting with very broad brushes, based on, you know, our our personal opinions, the perspectives of the the companies we may represent, but when especially when looking at token and and game design.

vgf.eth 00:44:06 One thing that I think goes unnoticed or is maybe a little, more complicated and months than many many people, dig into is that for many of these games, ecosystems, they're they may leverage the token as an opportunity to monetize, or one avenue to monetization, whether that be from the perspective of funding of the team, VCs, leveraging it as a early, you know, early liquidity event. And oftentimes, that can be extremely difficult. To come back from.

vgf.eth 00:44:47 So I think token distribution and and getting that equitably and fairly attributed. And I'm not I'm not necessarily judging because for some for some developers that may be a viable means of monetizing.

vgf.eth 00:45:08 But it's I I think historically, we've seen it taken advantage of in a way that's almost, not not malicious, but, overly extractive in a in a way that is not advantageous to the user, to the gamer, and that the the people that are essentially having to buy in are buy at these inflated prices, and it's, it's not sustainable.

vgf.eth 00:45:39 So it's just, I think sustainability is such, again, a double edged sword because you want something to be reliable and sustainable while still being able to, you know, participate in that upside.

Legendary 00:45:53 Yeah. That's that's a very interesting challenge that, games certainly do have to balance. And you also mentioned, you know, there is no one approach fits all we are painting with a broad brush and kinda staying a bit on on that analogy, you can make the argument that, the GTG token is painting with a very broad brush because it has so many things that it wants to cover. I'm currently on the on the website looking at the g g token overview And I see, its utility being in gameplay by binding DG to game credits. I see it for, rewards for price collaterals.

Legendary 00:46:32 I see it as a governance tool. I see it as a game validating and matchmaking tool. I see the aspect mention of content creators, but as well as prices, where players can earn g g wrapped as proof of skill tokens. And if you have such a complex, ecosystem. And we just spoke about token utility, and we just spoke about tokens and how games could already struggle to basically create only in game token utility. And you have those 6 different criteria, not criteria aspects listed of what the DG token wants to do. How do you approach that strategically?

Legendary 00:47:12 Because you add even more to something that's already complex, but by that, you also make the token very interesting.

vgf.eth 00:47:19 Well, we were we were talking earlier about how you know, for many of, for many tokens, they struggle to find a reason to exist. Gigi definitely does not have that problem. I I think fundamentally, the the g g token is it it the concept of reboot comes down to the the collateral of everything in the ecosystem with the the underlying token.

vgf.eth 00:47:47 So whether you're talking, you know, the the liquidity in AMM providers, the words providers staking for for validation, the the in game assets being collateralized with Gigi. So that, the assets can be portable, within games in in reboot. I think that that is really what provides, a lot of that ease of friction. So there is a of this, quote, unquote, utility provided to the token in the the avenues of choice for the gamer for the user.

vgf.eth 00:48:28 But it should be simple to approach. Right? Like, fundamentally, we use we use the the metaphor of the arcade. You go into the arcade either load up your game card with credits, or you put your quarter into the machine. Right? And in reboot, that kicks off this on chain transfer value.

vgf.eth 00:48:49 It's what jump starts the machine of you collateralizing the the game session paying out the AMM and liquidity providers, doing the on chain transfer of value dependent on the skill of, presented, you know, by the gamer presenting the opportunity to potentially pay out even more than was collateralized for the game session based on their skill rating and the amount of challenge that they take on.

vgf.eth 00:49:23 So it is it is complex, when you get into the nitty gritty of it, but at its at its face value is the gamer putting a token into the machine and how many tickets come out.

Legendary 00:49:37 Thank you. Thank you very much for breaking down that complexity. I wanna shift gears a bit and get you either way back into the discussion. On the thread that we kind of dissected last dissected last week that you shared, which was very, very interesting. There's one more final point where it didn't have the chance to touch upon. And I wanna do that now, you shared that regulators will begin to focus on gaming tokens this will take some time as they're always behind the curve. And you also said, I hope your favorite gaming projects have lawyered up right now.

Legendary 00:50:11 Definitely wanna hear more on your thoughts about how regulation will affect, like, the ability to create a good token design and how you at, a I Arena approach that future challenge.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:50:28 Yeah. I think, I mean, regulation is one of the largest variables in all of this. When it comes to token design and econ design, to be honest, my observation of the space right now is, Most projects probably are aware of, regulatory, call it what's the right word, like, regulatory considerations that they need to, embed into their planning.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:50:57 And yet, they act in a way where they clearly violate, regulatory guidance that's, existing out there, maybe not specifically to the gaming ecosystem per se, but certainly you've seen, enforcement actions taken by, you know, the SEC and other regulators against, you know, broader crypto fraud mix, and all of those things do apply to, wet free gaming as well. And, it it is it is quite a challenge.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:51:24 I mean, just to highlight on a couple of things, you know, the, this, this conversation around using tokens as a way to raise capital, I mean, that clearly becomes in the crosshairs of a, potential securities question, when when projects pursue that path.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:51:45 Now it could be a differentiation depending on which projects are launching through which jurisdictions, and maybe there are different jurisdictions that may have a more favorable view on, such a question, but certainly in the North American region where we are the SEC, has been rather clear, that, you know, any type of capital raising mechanisms token, whether it's a token or an NFT, you're you're you're kind of playing a very, very risky game with them because, they have reinforced this, and they will likely continue to enforce this.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:52:23 In addition to that, there is also, the considerations around, you know, how how, you know, if you if you were a project and you needed to retain control of certain economic levers, like emission, of, supply for key assets does that, all of a sudden make the entity, which is usually like a company, a, a, a, a, basically, a focus of centralization, right, because you you can't really make an argument the entire kind of system is fully decentralized because there are key actors here that have outsized influence on mechanics with the economy.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:53:06 And then the other thing is just how actively you market the token itself, can be used against you, from a security regulation active. And then in, on top of all that, there's the other kind of sphere of regulation, which is gambling laws. And, and that perhaps is even more precarious for a lot of projects because a lot of game mechanics have spiritual similarities gambling mechanics. And there's a lot of nuance in here.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:53:37 But I'm hoping that projects are taking the time, to speak with legal muscle to understand whether or not, certain mechanics that they're introducing the game whereby there is a token tethered to it becomes, in fact, gambling and just a word of caution on the gambling side. Like, gambling laws are much more unforgiving relative to securities laws. Right? Like, securities laws is more kind of punitive damages in terms of money, fines, and things like that. Gambling laws are strict liability in a sense that people go to jail for those.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:54:13 So, there's a lot of things and potential considerations when you're designing a system. None of this is to discourage people to explore and experiment, but but I I think people just need to be very, very powerful and thoughtful in terms of how to manage those, regulatory risks when they're when they're kind of launching a gaming project going forward.

Legendary 00:54:34 Yes. It is an amazing objectives that you just shared on on the regulatory risks, and I absolutely love that you also went into the connection to gambling loss because I can only speak from a u a u perspective, but definitely the European Union loves to have a very strict eye on how his work when the EU deems them as is actually gambling and then likes to crack down on them. I, but I do wanna take a step back on the on the con session and reset the topic a bit a bit.

Legendary 00:55:03 We did speak quite a lot about the user retention side of things, the longevity, the sustainability of token design, But before that happens, obviously, we have the TGE, we have, often a token air drop, which it gets the user base excited because we said, right, from a user acquisition standpoint tokens are a great, great tool, and we've also now seen that change in the market sentiment that starts to look more positive, which definitely seems to accelerate some of the project's plans to launch the tokens.

Legendary 00:55:40 We even if we look at our own panel, we had CTX with the recent token launch, we have, reboot with the anticipated g g, token launch. We have, NRN from airena. We have s funded has been launched from CDFI as an ecosystem token quite a while ago. And also other games, Shrapnel, age of Diner, have the token upcoming, but I wanna get to you Karma with, ZTXs, TGI being a very, very recent memory Could you provide an insight look a bit into that process and mindset, of the the token address the initial token distribution, how you approach that strategically?

Karma 00:56:21 Yeah. Absolutely. That's actually a incredibly fascinating topic that I could But so, you know, we we tend to sometimes conflate these two terms, you know, TGE and air jobs. So TGE token generation event, just for those who may be tuning in, that's the first time a token is created on chain and becomes available and the air drop is just how more often than not that initial liquidity is distributed. A TGE does not need to evolve an air drop at all. Or, you know, it can involve different liquidity mining or liquidity distribution.

Karma 00:57:01 In in the case of ZTX, we decided for the initial liquidity of our token to go very largely to the community. So upon TGE, which happened on October 16th, we air dropped 4% of the entire token apply across our community. And these were the holders of our NFTs, but also active players of our earlier which were small play tests. And I wanted to talk very, very openly and very honestly about why we took this approach. Because, quite frankly, while users, we absolutely love air drops. That's, you know, the backbone of the backbone of of NFTs and web free.

Karma 00:57:41 In terms of user retention, Airdrops are actually notoriously horrible. Now let me expand on this with a few examples. For example, maybe one of the air drops that most of us were most aware of, where, you know, the optimism, the arbitrary air drops, like, the huge air of the layer 2 hours. And in terms of the increase in active addresses on these networks, you know, measuring before in the in the month before the air drop and after the air drop, for optimism, it led to 200 and 50% increase in activity.

Karma 00:58:18 For arbitrary, it led to over 100% increase in activity. However, if you act actually then continue to, you know, watch the retention of these users that receive the airdrop. And by retention, I mean, do the same users that got the airdrop come back to the network and actually keep participating, it's an absolute drop off over in like 4 to 5 months, and that percentage stabilizes well below 20%. So anywhere below 20% is how many people you will retain in your network after given them di job.

Karma 00:58:56 Anything above 20% would be absolutely fantastic. Happens very rarely, very, very often it trends towards, you know, below 10%. These are just two examples, but, you know, there are there are many, many more that we can't unpack right now. Even when we look at things like, you know, NFT marketplaces, you look the trading volume represented by air dropper recipients, it always trends towards 0, and ex an exception may be blur where, you know, like top 10 addresses account for however much percent of the trading volume.

Karma 00:59:27 What I'm trying to say is that from the perspective of a company, doing an actually quite risky business because you know that the majority of the liquidity that you are air dropping is not going to contribute to active user base. And of course, you can develop the various strategies that help you increase that retention. You know, maybe instead of just air dropping the talk to users' wallets, you make them fulfill certain missions on chain, or you make them fulfill certain KPIs in game before they can claim their airdrop.

Karma 00:59:58 You can get very, very creative with all those claiming processes, but the truth stands that an airdrop is only know an initial interest event. And I think for us at CTX, it was a very, very conscious decision to go with a community urge regardless because we had a very, very long building period, and for us, the absolute priority was to establish a very small but very in hence faithful community that we wanted to consciously reward.

Karma 01:00:29 So upon RTG, you know, we distributed 1,000,000 of dollars in airdrop, However, the price that we are paying for it is our token slice having to absorb that in liquidity from the community. And I think it's just something that every single project needs to be very, very aware of, and decide whether or not that is this is the right way for us. It was it definitely the right thing. We always knew that we want to reward the early adopters. And then once beta launches later this year, so the beta of ZT X, That is when the token is going to actively be incorporated in the game.

Karma 01:01:05 That's why we wanted to have it released before the beta so we can start working on this, you know, on the back end. And I think for us, it's going to really lead to what we needed. That initial tight need community that feels rewarded and appreciated for the early support. And we found that community, we can't really refine our game get to the point when we start onboarding web 2. So, yeah, I think I think AirDrop's TGEs can be very, very big double edged sword, but they can be navigated, you know, with very high accuracy, depending on your goals.

Legendary 01:01:43 I definitely like how you, describe that initial distribution, the ad drop as an, basically, initial interest event I I see you met a Alchemist with your hand up. And when I get to you, and after that, I would like to also get VGF into that discussion, and hear your thoughts on, the initial token distribution. I have a specific question for you, but let's go to Meta. Okay, miss Yeah.

Meta Alchemist 01:02:12 I was gonna, you know, mention, like, most of the air drops, actually, that I've seen this ecosystem. They work, quiet good, like, for example, Uniswap. I mean, when they, introduce the Uniswap, token. They just made sure that so many people, could use the platform. In our bedroom, they did it in such a way that right now, RBTRUM has one of the biggest, you know, LPs in the whole ecosystem. They draw a lot of people into it.

Meta Alchemist 01:02:46 And, you know, there was, also, you know, many other, air drops that actually failed too. And, like karma touched on great points over there. But one of the most important points is probably how you gonna be able to convert, the people that, you ear drop the tokens into your users. And, you know, it's seed if I, for example, people in 2021, we started, with an air drop too. And, it was, completely an air drop. Like, we didn't raise any funds we didn't have any VCs.

Meta Alchemist 01:03:22 It was like a pure air drop, which is, like, very, very rare in the ecosystem. But, you know, we did a lot of education back then. And, we told, people about how to use our platform, what how it, like, seedify is gonna be beneficial for them and, what kind of elders that they're gonna be driving, from Citi. And we also did a lot quizzes back then. And, you know, people who got the ear drop from, and by not holding any anything, but just, going to the those educations and, taking the quizzes and stuff like that.

Meta Alchemist 01:03:58 You know, in the bull market, they took, about like $18,000 if you if they actually completed all the quizzes, all the air drops, and stuff like that. And we actually did what we promised them. Like, we, told them, okay. We are gonna bring you the best projects in the ecosystem, and, we will be able to, put you into you know, the frontier of 3 gaming. And that really happened. I mean, we, ran from, you know, 0 $350,000,000 market cap in circulating supply.

Meta Alchemist 01:04:32 So it is actually possible, to air drop and make sure that like, you can convert to users. And it's the greatest user acquisition, method for sure because, like, in our case, for example, there was, 30,000 people who joined, with the air dropping, we could keep a lot of them. And a lot of them actually bought more tokens because they wanted to, use them for they got a lot more benefits. But in a nutshell, what I want to say is if you're, doing an air drop, just make sure that, you have the ways the strategy is to convert to users into users.

Legendary 01:05:11 Thank you for for sharing your perspective on, the initial ad drop and also how you did tackle that that, that user retention, part of it. If you, Jeff, I mentioned they wanna come to you, especially from the lens that I know that the the reboot token, the g token will have a high allocation for the existing community and just hear your thoughts on how you, just how you think about that initial token distribution?

vgf.eth 01:05:43 Yeah. So for g g in particular, the total allocation towards existing community or existing token holders was ultimately, I believe, somewhere in the ballpark of 42%. Which by just about any is incredibly high.

vgf.eth 01:06:07 The the reasoning for that was both very complicated and can be distilled very simply of, like, our desire and need to incentivize and reward our existing participants and those that had gotten us this far, but also because with with this token distribution, we have high confidence that, distribution in this way with the asterisk, of the, the distribution and and drip while it is a high allocation towards the community, the circulating supply, is is fairly linear, it it's not a just mass, liquidity event at the onset.

vgf.eth 01:07:03 That enabling our community to have such high incentive, in the in the Gigi and reboot eco system, is we want active participation, whether it be in the, like, people playing the game, battle plan, is, is going to be Pixel Vault's sort of flagship built on reboot, but also in the form of liquidity and rewards provision, eventually in the form of validation as well.

vgf.eth 01:07:36 And so that there there are these different avenues of participation other than just playing the game, and we that the community being active participants, and that is of greater net value than holding, you know, holding back more of that supply of Gigi. And, one thing that we had touched on on the topic of, like, user acquisition reboot as a platform, does also incorporate, affiliate rewards as part of that means of user acquisition.

vgf.eth 01:08:13 Because it does track, the user flow of who is referred on chain so that the avenue in which they are referred does have an immutable on chain stamped part of that, like, on chain transfer of value so that, via content creators or affiliates and things like that, those users can actually incentivize and reward, the creators that may have brought them in ecosystem in the first place.

Legendary 01:08:50 Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that perspective. Look, we said we wanted to run a bit longer than than 1 hour. We're approaching the 1 hour 15 mark. So I could continue this conversation for hours and hours, but I wanna be respectful of everyone's time, both everyone in the audience as well as our panelists. So, what we'll do is I wanna hear from you, the quake give you a chance to share your thoughts and and perspective and kinda put a bow on this topic on how you think about that initial token distribution and then we'll start to wrap up the spaces.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:09:27 Thanks. I'll be brief. Yeah. I I think the initial token distribution, whilst very important, a lot of thought has to go into it. And I think all of the panelists have already very interesting and important, comments about it. I think from our perspective, it goes back to, again, what our intended objectives are within our game. So I as as some contexts, in AI arena, effectively how kind of like 2 versions. They're not different versions of the game as much as they are, almost like segregation of, tiers of players.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:10:06 So the web 3 version of the game is, focused on competitive players. And over, over time, that those competitive crop will become more and more like, call it professionalized. And so our initial kind of distribution of our assets, whether it's NFTs and tokens. We've been very deliberate over time to try to find, serious players that, could become competitive and could potentially form the initial professional players within our game.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:10:38 And they will play in on the web 3 rails with this token economy where there is true financial, value at stake so that there is consequence to how they play. Now when you think about the overarching design of a game them. That is a very small group of people. Right? We, you know, we don't intend to, provide this type of to everyone because quite frankly, most players don't care for that.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:11:07 Most players wanna just come in casually and join the game, the core game loop, and potentially find other ways to get involved in the, community or the economy, but not through kind of serious competition. So from the perspective of our NFT launch as well as our token launch, we've put the competition at the core of how we distribute these assets. So starting with our NFTs, people had to qualify, during our playtest to compete in what's called exclusive access and only those exclusive access players are able to win our NFTs.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:11:46 And immediately, you you get better alignment where NFTs are starting to end up in the hands of the players to have proven themselves to be playing at a competitive level. Thereby, they're less likely to turn around and just dump your asset on the market because they find utility in the game, and they wanna make use of this asset, in the future when the game goes live. A similar kind of, inspiration is going to underpin our token launch as well.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:12:15 At the heart of it all is going to be a, a massive competition where we are going to kind of invite everyone to participate, and then your allocation of tokens is dependent where you end up in that competition. Now there's gonna be a very low floor in the sense that most people are going to benefit to certain degree some allocation of our tokens, but then it gets really exaggerated at the top to really, really focus, the best player because the bet is once we launch the game on Web 3, those players are gonna come back and they're gonna be focused on this version of the game.

Legendary 01:12:52 Love it. Thank you so much for, sharing that. And I also wanna take that moment to think everyone on the stage to thank our panelists, Meta Alkomist, the Gway VGF. I think it's a very, very difficult topic to navigate. So air drop, questions, TGE questions, use acquisition and retention can be very, very complex. I appreciate you taking the time of course, I wanna thank my cost karma for, co hosting the space with me and sharing your perspectives on CTI Thanks. Thank you to Sanjay. Thank you to Next who's been earlier with us.

Legendary 01:13:29 And thank you, Turban, in the audience, for your patience and being with us, before we wrap up, I wanna do a quick fire round with, meta alchemists, then the gray, then VGF very soft question, to close us off. What is something that players, people in your community, fans, can look forward to over the next coming weeks or months. May I welcome this first?

Meta Alchemist 01:13:56 I mean, they can probably look for, playing other games before seed world is live. That's what we are trying to do right now you know, internal strategies a little bit because there is some more time and, in the meantime, we want to make sure that all our, community can play other games and, we are creating some strategies around that region.

THE GWEI | ʌı 01:14:24 For us, it's our kind of, test net competition that's coming up. We're we're targeting for that to launch January of 2024, so we're a couple months out. Look out for more information that's coming starting in December.

Legendary 01:14:39 So, more info to Thank you so much. VJF, same question to you.

vgf.eth 01:14:46 Well, the testing for battle plan is currently live. Each week, we've been adding new waves of, play testers. So if you have not gotten in on that, I highly recommend doing so. And for what to look forward to, I would say this next, update which is, like, if everyone has kind of been playing god mode up to this point with access to all the brawlers and a bunch of the load outs This next version is gonna be the closest to what it will look like in production where you have to unlock all of those avenues via the in game progression.

vgf.eth 01:15:26 So I'm particularly looking forward to that.

Legendary 01:15:30 Love it. Thank you so much. Carma, I wanna hand it to you for the closing words. I also know it is the spooky season. It is Halloween today. There's been something going on with the ZKX Genesis, home holder. So one of your your closing thoughts and also the Halloween side of things.

Karma 01:15:50 Yeah. Absolutely. So we were, you know, overjoyed today to have airdrop to our community a set of Halloween seemed wearables, happy Halloween to anyone who celebrates. So let me just, you know, dive into this very briefly before we, you know, say goodbye for today. This drop is just a small preview of what's in store for ZTX's future. We are working behind the scene and many more wearables, and to become a powerhouse for digital fashion, including partnerships with well known fashion brands in Ps. And this, of course, necessitates a full in house team of 3 d artists and fashion designers.

Karma 01:16:27 And as we test and prepare ZTX meta for launch later this year, that's going to be our major milestone to look forward to. Instead of just keeping these tests experiments in digital fashion to ourselves, we have brought them to an exquisite level of quality and airdrop them to the community so if you are an owner of ZT X Genesis home, check your wallet and happy Halloween. And if you are a holder of ZT X, please also do not miss the ZT X Staking, which our friends at Sushi And Steer protocol have just launched recently, you know, had to discord if you need help or or, you know, details on that.

Karma 01:17:05 And now pivoting back to the spaces, I also, you know, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for every single speaker day, it's always such a joy to exchange thoughts, exchange, you know, experiences as we all build together in a space. And also thank you to every single one of the listener have given us over an hour of their valuables, you know, time today. Thank you, everybody, and, you know, hear you again next week.

Legendary 01:17:33 Thank you so much and happy Halloween, everyone.

Dive into a forward-thinking exploration of gaming's next frontier with industry leaders.

This transcript unveils a world where gaming and Web3 converge, revealing how this blend is reshaping the landscape of digital entertainment and user engagement.

Join us as we unravel the potential, challenges, and innovations driving the future of gaming in the Web3 era.

TRANSCRIPT

Legendary 00:02:21 Gm, gm, everyone, and welcome to our ZTX spaces. Welcome to the future of web 3 gaming.

Legendary 00:03:02 I'm absolutely delighted to host this space today with my co host Karma on the ZTX main account. We have a fantastic panel of speakers. We have the way the co founder, of AI Arena. We have Hilal with us, the co founder, of Valeria Studios, we have amazing creators with us as well. We have Yellow Panther. We have Apex, and we have Lisa. And we also have Moritz with us on stage 2 absolutely fantastic panel. And it's been 2 very, very interesting days, I would say, Everything is green. The charts are looking great. Apex, you posted yesterday.

Legendary 00:03:40 The market's up, NFT's up, mood is up. Definitely feel the same sense of excitement. However, sometimes I think it's easy to get caught up in charts when everything is green. And the, there is a danger of getting a little less productive. What about you karma? When the market's green, do you find it a bit more hard to focus and get tracked it by the charts or charts, or doesn't that change a thing for you?

ZTX 00:04:06 Hello, everybody. Lovely to be here. Again on spaces, also really pumped for the panel today. And yeah, legendary, I have to admit I am a prime example of a person caught in that never ending circle of it's over. We are so back. At least least in social sense. You know, I think if you work in web free full time over, you know, maybe a cycle of a few months, you really learn to look away from the charts.

ZTX 00:04:37 And unless you're a very active trader, over time, it just stops really mattering that much, you know, the price fluctuations, let's not be naive. Of course, I feel better when everything is green and my portfolio is pumping. But this ebb and flow is just something you get desensitized by, I think, over over a longer period of time?

Legendary 00:04:58 Yeah. I I feel that been in the market long enough that emotions get less and less, but there's still a sense. There's still a sense of excitement. Hilar, welcome to the stage. I saw you with your hand up. How you feel about the market and the distractions that come with green candles and charts?

Hilal 00:05:15 Yeah. I just wanted to say it's not the charts necessarily that distract me. Like, I never really checked the charts at all, but, man, the timeline on these days when when we're pumping like this, it's just way too entertaining because it's way too many good shit posts. It's way too funny. The timeline is distracting. That's that's the that's a real distraction. So I think it's okay to when when these type of big events happen, take a minute, go through the feed, see everybody's reactions, just kind of taking the moment, enjoy it, and then get back to work. But, yeah, not really the charges necessarily, but the timeline is just way too good. Content way too good at these times.

Legendary 00:05:50 I love it and definitely share that feeling its way as well. The great one I hear from you what's more distracting these days? Is it the charge, or is it the x timeline?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:06:01 Oh, man. A little bit of both. You know, the vibes are back. It was I mean, we've been we've been grinding through, like, a pretty pretty crazy period of time, right, for, like, the last, whatever, 12 to 24 months. But certainly this, this, you know, surge last night, is, you know, a lot of people are probably screaming, like, inject this into my veins because we need more of this. I think you know, you can feel the momentum, really picking up. So it's exciting. I think it, you know, picks up the adrenaline, but I I think for builders, you know, we have we have a job to do.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:06:42 We need to focus on the product first and foremost. So try not to get distracted by it, but, you know, I have a lot of friends here on stage and, you know, it it is entertaining to just follow follow all that activity and vibes on the on the time mind. So I think it's a little bit of both personally.

Legendary 00:06:58 Absolutely agree with that. And even as a content creator, often, I have, like, too many ideas and things to put out for a day but I also find myself in on on days like this to just scroll and see what other people are doing and shit posting, out do you feel about that as a creator, Lisa, welcome to the stage?

Elisa 00:07:17 Thank you, guys. Thank you for having me on. Maybe I'm a bit of a weirdo, but I definitely prefer when, the market's down just because it I feel like it gives me that sense of comfort. Like, oh, we still have time to build. We still have time to grow. And, yeah, when it's when it's the bull, I just remember last bull, like, everything is, sped up. The fomo is real miss out on, like, 10, 20 things a day.

Elisa 00:07:51 So, yeah, it's it's definitely, like, reality setting in that we need to kind of, like, hurry up. Like, we need to keep building and and kind of do it faster now. We need to get out of that comfort zone where we're just becoming a little bit slow, I feel. But, yeah, but I agree with Wayne. Like, at the end of the day, you just you just, keep working and keep having conviction in, like, the thesis that, you've been having, like, you know, for me, Stephanie, Webster Gaming.

Elisa 00:08:22 I'm already starting to feel a bit fomo like, oh, maybe I should be accumulating more on like, out altcoins, all that kind of stuff, but then I kind of think to myself, you know, don't let the euphoria get to you you have a thesis, you know, web through gaming, that's what you believe in. Just just keep building in that. Thank you for having me.

Legendary 00:08:42 That's a that's a fantastic perspective, actually. And I I do resonate with that. You know, myself hosting a daily news show with my co speech rec was in the audience with us as well. A couple of weeks ago, we had the feeling we could keep up with what's going the news. That was a good feeling that you do your show. You do your 1 hour of talking and a half the feeling that you covered the day, but it's definitely not the case anymore. Yellow Panther. Welcome to the stage. What about you? Do you feel more comfortable in a bear market that gives you more time to build, or do you feel more comfortable now than we have a couple days of more action and green in the market.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:09:20 21,000,000 Bitcoin 1 CTX. 21,000,000 Bitcoin, 1 Yellow Panther. I mean, I I've been building. I mean, we've been building for the past one and a half years already. I'm just super, excited because, you know, recently, I get to meet a lot of founders and like that, which you do you you probably will not have the opportunity to do that during a bull market. Right, because there will be so much noise, so much distraction all around. So the best time to build is, you know, the past one and a half years. So whoever is still here, you know, kudos to you guys.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:09:57 But, you know, no matter the bear, the bull, you know, we still do what we do on a daily basis, Like, you know, legend, there is still gotta run his show with beach checks. You know, Maurice's still out here, making dog threats, karma's still out here with her amazing voice. But, yeah, just super happy. And and I think today also reminded us and encouraged us that, you know, encouraged us that we made the right decision to not give up and still pursue till today, and this is just a little taste of it.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:10:27 And I think when the actual bull actually comes, So I think you guys will actually feel a lot more better and a lot more rewarding and, like, you know, all types of feet.

Legendary 00:10:38 Absolutely agree with you. And there's not only only one yellow Panther. There's only one Apyx as well. Welcome to the stay How are you doing? Love it. Moritz, do I even have to ask you if you're looking at the charts these days as a trader?

Moritz 00:11:01 Yeah. Honestly, I'm not I'm I'm mainly trading NFTs. I don't create crypto. Like, all my crypto that I have is, like, buy an old, but I I've been definitely looking at the charts, these past days more than once per day. And, yeah, one thing that I wanted to mention is actually that we saw the, like, like, the excitement for web 3 gaming, heating up before the crypto prices went up, which is kinda interesting. Of of course, I don't want to say, like, there's a correlation. It's just a coincidence.

Moritz 00:11:32 But we feel like talking about the web 3 gaming will lead the next full run for such a long time now, and it's just funny to see that, like, we saw web 3 gaming heating up in the last 2 weeks and no finally crypto also growing up.

Legendary 00:11:46 Yeah. No. That's actually a, a good point. And I think the sentiment even on a medium term perspective over the last couple of months changed from the point that we talked about games that we are excited to play to not really managing to keep up with all the play tests and all the gaming news that have been coming out over the last couple of weeks, specifically, and that's definitely a massive, massive change. And with that being said, I also wanna get into this discussion. We have quite a few topics to cover.

Legendary 00:12:16 Gonna talk a bit about onboarding user experience in web 3 gaming, get a bit into economics, but also, more into the future of web 3 gaming, which, after all, is the title of our spaces, quite what quite what I'd like to start with, a question to you, Halal, you made a post on X a couple of days ago saying that every game will have the own marketplace that will act as a one stop shop for the ecosystem. The floor is no longer on blur. It is on the Valeria marketplace. This is quite a significant move.

Legendary 00:12:54 This is a significant announcement to make. Could you share a bit more on the rationale on the thinking behind focusing on crafting and, having your own marketplace that basically unites and brings together your ecosystem.

Hilal 00:13:12 Yeah. That's a great question. I think the biggest thing for users of your game, and, I mean, we saw this last bolt on as well actually moved away from all of the marketplaces and had their own marketplace on on Ronin. It's just convenience for the players. And it's the team's ability to fully customize the marketplace to have the best user experience for that audience. So every game has different, every game has different unique things to it with depending on how the NFTs are used in game, depending on the ecosystem, the economics of the of the NFTs.

Hilal 00:13:50 So for us, we have our in game assets, then we have outside of the game assets. We have our token, and it's a I wouldn't say it's a complex ecosystem, but there are a lot of different moving parts and having them all in one spot makes it much better from a user experience and also just the way the marketplace opens up within our web app itself directly takes you to the Valeria marketplace where you can have your magic and equality, non custodial wallet, take those, assets you get in game. We have dichotomy set up on the back end. Covers all the gas fees on matter. And then theres can just trade and, without even interacting with crypto at all.

Hilal 00:14:28 So just having that freedom to fully customize the experience for the user to make it make the onboarding experience as seamless as possible, but also just make the user experience enjoyable instead of having to send them to a bunch of different web pages, having, like, a one stop shop is just the, the convenience factor. And I think once you players in your game. It's it's what makes the most sense. You you can control everything. You can have the the royalties there be implemented. ERC 721 C and 11 55 C. So, yeah, I think, I think it's a no brainer in the end free games.

Legendary 00:15:04 Yeah. Useful centric design is clearly key. Speaking of which from, from your perspective, you know, you talked a lot about user experience, a lot about the importance that people, you don't see that crypto's necessary going in the background that they have the most seamless experience. What other elements when you talk about the market place specifically make it truly user centric in your perspective for a web 3 game.

Hilal 00:15:34 I would say, okay, another side benefit that I just wanted to add in before I answer that is when you have the, the own token within that marketplace, a lot of the users, kind of stay within the system. So we have our Vowel token. And whenever somebody sells land, like, we've seen this so many times. Somebody will sell land for, like, 7000 Vowel tokens. And because they got the Vowel token by staking their land. It kind of feels free in a sense. So you use even though, like, there's a there's a liquidity pool, there's a value for that token out there in the market, the market can choose whatever value that may be. They stay within the ecosystem. They'll take those vowels, and then they'll go spend it on boosted pack.

Hilal 00:16:13 So or they'll go spend it on in game assets. So I think that ties into the user experience where you could have that one token across 4 different collections and it kinda keeps the user in there versus constantly cashing out, cashing out, cashing out, or using Ethereum where Ethereum, you might use it here for this for this asset, but then go a different entity collection, go buy some yoga assets or go buy this asset or that asset. So the the user the user experience for having that one token across all four different collections, makes it very convenient.

Hilal 00:16:46 And when you have it denominated in that token itself, so it's it's a trick where guess the mobile games you'll see in the industry, they have, they have so many different currencies within apps that the user in the end doesn't really know how much they're really spending. They get lost in the sauce where it's like, I'm using 4000 gold coins and 7000 gems, but they don't know that's like 500 they just spent. So when you have just the the currency there, it it makes it a lot easier to for gamers to just spend that currency versus having, like, a USD value or even ETH, which people tied to, like, an investment versus just like a gaming utility point.

Hilal 00:17:25 So that aspect as well that, yeah, I'd say it's a super beneficial for the user. Yeah. And and the game and the game company itself too.

ZTX 00:17:36 Yes. Sorry, Hila. I would love to add something, you know, I completely resonate with the points you've just made. And this really closely resembles how we think about it on ZT X's side as well. So, you know, not to disclose too much, but fully agreed on every single point, especially about creating these closed loops where the assets can be used in a very easy manner. I always like to compare, you know, the way we utilize OpenC or other marketplaces currently to just lane shopping for anything else.

ZTX 00:18:10 Like, how weird would it be if you were, let's say, researching a pleasure and the website that you doing it on, you know, you're looking at their at their products. You're looking at their mission statement, etcetera. But when you actually go to shop, it sends you an entirely different third party marketplace where all different brands just have their content intermingled. It just it does really make sense from any aspect that you look at it.

ZTX 00:18:37 And I think the way we've grown to say about assets for for games and click for web free games, NFTs is still very much colored by early era of NFTs, which were mostly PFPs or, you know, very much, you know, fine art and collector items. We think about this big marketplace where very diverse offering is browsed through. But that very often doesn't allow a game to actually showcase the utility of these assets. You know, it's just like a a picture. That works perfectly for a FP.

ZTX 00:19:10 It doesn't allow you to fully display the utility, the abilities that an entity can grant you any boosts in game. So I fully agree, and I think as we know, advance and and evolve those gains, displaying the utility and, you know, ways to utilize NFT assets going to evolve well beyond, you know, just like a placeholder image on a joint marketplace.

Hilal 00:19:35 Yeah. I think just to oh, I just wanted to add one more for the, like, the marketplace itself has such a, it's such a different experience versus open sea or glare because we, we can actual announcements posted within the marketplace, or we give updates to all of our users, anybody using that marketplace, anybody, all of our players is, there's a social feed within the the marketplace itself where people can post, like, like, a Twitter feed, or people can ask, like, trades, or people can talk about the game. So they're like, there's a social feed within the place where people can can converseate and and join together there.

Hilal 00:20:07 And then there's the the announcement page, and then there's you could have mints from, like, new mints, like new skins, new cosmetics, new sales directly in the marketplace. You can have a season pass in your game that then gives you a discount Mints directly on the marketplace. So I think, when you have your own system there and you're not reliant on all these other companies, the, the possibilities are endless and it just, and yeah, it just makes for a better user experience.

Legendary 00:20:33 Yeah. I think that's a very, very strong point that you're making.

Legendary 00:20:36 We've seen in the past with when when when blur launched back, obviously, had the incentive for people to move from open sea to blur, to farm the tokens there that we are as a community rather platform marketplace agnostic, and we don't build up loyalty with marketplace that easily, but once you have that extra information, once you have the ability, you know, to have that social feed coming to have info about the game to have specific discounts that are tied to your own in house marketplace, then you also give your users, your players a reason to be more, loyal and to be more interested in actually using that marketplace versus go shopping somewhere else.

Legendary 00:21:21 Apex is here with your hand up. Did you want to come in onto this discussion?

apix🎮 00:21:24 Yeah. I think another cool Cool. As part of that, if you launch your marketplace and a layer 2 is that you protectantly cover the gas fees for your users, which is kind of like, if you have an NFT marketplace, which is still similar to to marketplace, as we know, or you have to pay gas because you have to have a wallet and so on. It's still quite a lot of friction, especially for normal gamers, which is they don't know the game on their phone or whatever, and then they wanna sell an NFT and then they have to send them a wallet, get some money to to pay for gas or whatever. And if you launch your own Marketplace.

apix🎮 00:22:02 It's really easy to make that gas less, just cover the the small costs when you want an efficient leg or 2. I mean, after playing games like Pirate Nation, for example, who cover all the gas costs as a fully unchained game, and definitely makes the the oil experience so much much more easy.

Legendary 00:22:20 Yeah. I like the way how pirate chain does it where they also have the little notification log where they show you the transactions that happened and kinda used that to connect the game to the world of, web 3 and blockchain in a very very smooth, in a very smooth fashion that doesn't distract, doesn't take away and doesn't, you know, slap the WIP 3 component necessarily in your, in your face.

Legendary 00:22:48 Eliza, I also want to ask you because you've been, you know, reacting quite enthusiastic on these points before, how important do you think is it as a creator and gamer yourself to have that streamlined user experience when it comes onboarding new players to a game?

Elisa 00:23:06 In terms of marketplaces or just in general?

Legendary 00:23:08 In in terms of marketplaces, but maybe also in terms of not having necessarily the web 3 barriers that are paying for your own transaction fees, having your own wallets, but also specifically in terms of marketplaces.

Elisa 00:23:21 Yeah. No, for sure. I actually love that you brought this up because I was thinking about this this morning and I was thinking of like my goals in terms building my community. There's a lot of opportunities right now for, bringing, like, my community into play tests, but I'm very I'm very wary of of, like, exactly what you just said, like, the onboarding and whether it's gonna turn off. Like, I wanna make sure that, if I introduce them to, like, a web 3 gaming playtest, that it would be a good experience and they would maybe, you know, be interested in future play tests.

Elisa 00:23:58 So, yeah, I think, I think the whole wallet thing is a big one. I've considered, like, maybe hosting a seminar to, like, teach them how to make a wallet and, like, security risks and stuff because I'm not sure, you know, the wallet aspect is gonna be completely eliminated. I know a lot of projects, including CTX, you know, have, made it more seamless, but I still think, like, it's a core part of crypto and, self custody, having a wallet. So I don't think it's completely gonna disappear. In terms of the marketplaces, Yeah.

Elisa 00:24:37 I mean, this is a big one also just in terms of security, like, you know, if you're not familiar with OpenSea, how are you to know that something in your hidden tab is, you know, a scam and that if you accept it, whatever, like, they can drain your wallet. Like, there's so many ways, one is at risk. So I definitely think games should take it under their own responsibility and have their own market places ideally within the game so that, you know, the user is sure that this is like the actual real marketplace. I feel like there's a lot of risks if you're redirected to say Chrome.

Elisa 00:25:17 You know, literally be a fishing website, like, how are you to know that it's not? Yeah, I I did I it's it's a tough on, like, I I just think I need to be, like, also putting education out there. Like, it's it's gotten to that point. I'm I'm not convinced we'll see, like, completely seamless products just yet. So if if we wanna start already onboarding people, I think, yeah, we just need to perhaps educate, Yeah. Wish I had a metal answer for this one.

Legendary 00:25:54 No. That's that's a fantastic answer. And that's also a very, very important point that you're mentioning when it comes to, the security aspects of thing. 1 on crypto X, we kinda learned if there's news, there's an adverb that has excitement something the safest way is to go to the official projects page, to see if there's a link or post about that, and only then to follow that. And, obviously, that level of, like person's mind because they just don't have that same experience with scams and fishing links just being thrown around all the time.

Legendary 00:26:31 So having a way to access the marketplace from the game itself is a very crucial thing. And Carmel wanted to you because it's something that I've been thinking about myself and going a big back and forth on it.

Legendary 00:26:46 How do you, or where do you stand on the question whether a marketplace for a game should be in the game itself directly accessible from the game, basically without having to have a break having to leave that goal on the website and access it there, so I can just access from the game itself and stay within the game versus having that standalone marketplace where I might be able to have more features like, social feed or other things going on and have a reason to kind of interact with the game without necessarily needing to open and play it because it just can go on the marketplace in see what's going on in there because it just have a lot of information that I get there.

ZTX 00:27:27 Yeah. The the answer is, I think, why not both? So quite frankly, in terms of smart contracts, a marketplace is a relatively, to do. Also, because marketplaces have existed for such a long time now that there are, you know, plug and play solutions with are just being rehashed in terms of, you know, the front end and some social aspects collecting page.

ZTX 00:27:52 It's more about the UI by now than it is about actual engineering effort, you know, not to say it is not an engineering effort, but I'm sure you, everybody here agrees, similar to token staking, you know, inter staking has existed for such a long long time that you have now, like, plug and play solutions that you can just adapt. So if you go, go to the length of creating a marketplace, you know, for your company, for your game, for your product, it is from then on pretty easy for you to insert certain loops from that marketplace into your game.

ZTX 00:28:29 So I think it's as as long as have that infrastructure in place, which, you know, the majority of games are building or have already in place, it's pretty easy to integrate it. The question remains then when and how to integrate it in order for it to be seamless. Because, you know, just like walking up to a certain item in game, having to then deal with, you know, 15 pop ups, which overwhelm you with information is not a solution either. So I think it's then down to, you know, your game mechanics, your UI team to refine these loops in a way that they make sense.

ZTX 00:29:07 You know, for example, in ZT X, we we have different game looks like, for example, crafting and harvesting or, you know, digital fashion place you draw. So something that will for certain, have to happen in ZTX is, you know, as you explore around, maybe you walk into a digital store of your favorite brand, you can walk up and try it on in three d in game, which out leaving the main game, but, you know, as your avatar, but then you can also very seamlessly enter a panel which allows you to by these wearables right away.

ZTX 00:29:45 You don't have to, you know, now spend however many minutes exiting our location and going to the marketplace, which would lead to an insane, you know, like, drop out in user conversion, everything will happen very seamlessly within the name. And I think that's incredibly important for a social platform and a metaverse like ZTX, but I can also imagine for any type of a game, like beat a shooter, beat an RPG style, you know, exploration, open world situation. So important for you to not rip the player out of the immersion in game.

ZTX 00:30:22 You know, at the end of the the a day, we love games because they allow us to immerse ourselves, have this escape, you know, sort of widen out our experience. Think a marketplace exchange of assets is just a small piece of that, which can sometimes completely rip you out of that immersion. You know, you suddenly have to, like, pull wallet up. That's like a huge, a huge, topic that Apex until I'll also raise. Yeah. So 1 her percent, and at ZT X, we see it very similarly. The the the marketplace will very much be a feature that, you know, we will roll out sooner.

Legendary 00:31:00 Yeah. You're raising a fantastic point when it comes to game immersion. You don't want to. I was, I was playing big time with Moritz on the weekend. You don't want to be mining or and assume as you get your item, get a notification, get a pop up. This is, a golden the price is up 18.5% in the last twenty 4 hours. This is the floor price on the marketplace. It would completely break the gaming experience at that point. End. I I want to get you into discussion the gray and also change, change gears a bit on on our topic.

Legendary 00:31:34 You made a post very recently, and we talked about, you know, a bit of the euphoria being back, a bit of the excitement being back. And you made a post title the web 3 gaming, Andrew Goldrush has begun, and you raised quite a few points in that. And there's two specifically that I wanna take out, one of which was, every gaming project will launch a token now after the initial hype phase most tokens will be down only. And then you're making a very interesting point when it comes to user acquisition saying all of this is basically 0 sum for web 3 games when it comes to user acquisition tokens, a powerful user acquisition tools.

Legendary 00:32:15 But when everyone has access to the same tool, then no one really has an advantage. And this gold rush also trends towards an API war, which project is giving you the best yield on your capital and time. So in your opinion, what do games need to consider to ensure that their token design and that the token strategies are genuinely value driven in such an environment.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:32:43 Yeah. Thanks for the, for that lead up. I think this is a really important, discussion to have I think the starting point is to recognize that, the web free gaming space in terms of users is, you know, very very small. Spaces are doing their part in expanding that audience set. Right? We're all working together to, you know, create better games within the web, web free space and really break through to try to attract more and more gamers into the space.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:33:21 I think that's 1st and foremost what's needed for a true kind of adoption bull market to take place. We're early, and there are a lot of promising games and checks out there, and I think, quite a few of these will stick. And in some sense, it will be inevitable. However, if you zoom in to where we are right now, we are not there yet.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:33:44 So as we go through this hype cycle, what happens is, you know, the early movers, that have already listed there or launched their token, they're they are the ones that are kind of sending the signal that, the liquidity, the interest, the hype, is coming back. That's gonna draw more attention of people who are in this space that are active, and all those people who have been dormant to come back into kind of the speculation sphere of tokens. But we we've seen this movie over and over again, whether it's bear mark as bull mark is, it doesn't really matter.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:34:20 Because every single project is able to launch a token, what ends up happening is you create this macro incentive for the people who are involved in this space to basically spend their time finding the next thing that's gonna give them the highest return, right? And ultimately, that's return on your capital, but basically it's a return on your attention. And in the context of, you know, a lot of gains that are going to be releasing and coming to market relative to time, which is every person's primary constraint.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:34:56 We just don't have enough time to dedicate to all the things that we're interested what you get is you get this kind of like hot potato effect, right, where mobs of wallets or users move from one project to another basically farming the returns. And this is not, this is not like a, this is just an insight that everyone should have because if you've been in this space long if you've we would have saw this, seen this with everything.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:35:20 You know, whether it's the NFT meta, the white list grind, you know, DeFi summer L1L2s, right, the, the whole L2 narrative between, like, you know, who's gonna be the next L2 that's gonna launch a token and do an air drop can pain to the whole blur meta, like, this has repeated over and over again. It's gonna happen with wet three games, and the key constraint is time and use at the current moment. Having said that is not to say that, you know, projects shouldn't, you know, consider launching a token full stop.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:35:52 There are very good reasons, where a certain type of cotoken design when it's, done specifically to augment and enhance the or game loop could be actually very effective. One of the other points that I make in that post is, I think project should probably think a bit more about wallet share and how you basically corner Wales wallets in terms of you know, having them have exposure to your token in terms of ownership and basically try to lock in their wallet share as much as possible.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:36:28 Instead of what projects are generally focused on is trying to acquire a larger kind of DAU in a very, very small pond today. I can assure you that DAU is not that sticky. They are going to move on to the next thing that is basically, the the the shining object and perhaps offers, higher yield because they're just coming out of the gates. So in, in some sense, I think, within where we are today, you need to think a little bit differently, but then the ultimate view and the vision is still to basically expand the broader pie of web 3, and ultimately I think, everyone can benefit from that.

Legendary 00:37:07 Yeah. You made you made some very, very interesting points, which I want to dissect a bit and kind of take them by step. The first one was a bit on timing. You said if you launch a token, you kinda want to find the right timing for that. You don't want to be the first one to do it to end up providing liquidity for the projects launching after you. You don't want to the last one to do it and just completely miss the hype cycle by that altogether. Carmen, I quite would like to ask you CTX recently launched the token.

Legendary 00:37:41 Can you share a bit on the thought process on finding the right time to do the launch, not only given the general market iterations, but also looking at the basically web 3 gaming hype cycle itself.

ZTX 00:37:57 Yeah. Absolutely. And quite frankly, I love all the points you've just made by, I disagree to some extent with some of them, diplomatically, I would say I'm, like, in the middle. Between your opinion and then complete opposite. And let me let me unpack. So we just said, you know, you don't want to be first. You don't want to be the last. And I think timing matters immensely for the, you know, how successful a token launch is.

ZTX 00:38:31 But it also depends a lot how you define that success excess of the token launch is defined by the short term price movement. And that's how we encrypt or are, you know, just used to defining the momentum, the success of a project.

ZTX 00:38:51 I, however, believe that if your company, as you know, potentially a multi year execution strategy like for us at ZTX, launching a token is, of course, a very important milestone, but it's term token price is actually pretty insignificant for your execution as a team, as you move forward.

ZTX 00:39:13 So what I mean by that is that while, of course, we would all love for a token price to go up, I can, you know, use CTX token as a good case study, where for us, with our TGE, that is token generation event on 16th, we actually air dropped the majority of the initial liquidity to our early community. So we air dropped 4% of the entire token supply on that day. There were no lockups. There was no claim. People, you know, we didn't make people spend gas to claim anything. We just air dropped it to their wallet and took care of all the costs.

ZTX 00:39:49 And of course, on one hand, that is an incredible liquidity event for the community you know, it made a very big splash. On the flip side, however, we, as a company, have to accept it. Like you said, air drops do not necessarily lead to full user retention. Users have spent, you know, months supporting us, months, you know, trying to, of course, qualify for that airdrop, we have to take into account that, a a large part of these new newly created holders will actually, you know, monetize that token.

ZTX 00:40:24 And hence, a company who chooses to do an airdrop has to take into account that the downward pressure will need to be absorbed by the company itself. That's something we just took into account. So I guess what I'm trying to say is while I don't disagree with any of the points you've made, I also think that an airdrop in terms of marketing community building and also this initial distribution which you need. Like, sometimes you need the token out there to start integrating it into your in game economy as we are doing.

ZTX 00:40:57 That's why we really needed it out there before we released the better of our game, you know, post play TGE, and we are now integrating on the inside, was super important to us specifically in our very long term strategy, to release that in this trajectory. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to provide a counterpoint how, even if I agree with you, I also think some there are, you know, certain aspects which outweigh, the potential negatives in the short term.

Legendary 00:41:28 Great. I see with your hand up. I I know you wanna come back into that discussion. Take it away.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:41:33 Yeah. Maybe just a quick point. I wanna be I wanna be clear. I I actually agree with everything that that you said. The way that I wrote that thread was a little bit tongue in cheek. In a sense that, is more predicting what will happen with a lot of these projects when they they are, probably not being too judicious or responsible with how they are, launching their token because they are swept up in the hoopla of the hype cycle that's undergoing. So they see it as a quick money making, proposition as opposed to a thoughtful, long term kind of strategic, lever that they can use to augment what it is that they're building.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:42:12 So, you know, from a from a builder's perspective, the proper way of doing so is exactly what you've just outlined. And I think projects need to think about it from that strategic lens. Right? It's not, and a lot of it comes with, being disciplined. To to draw a contrast in terms of, like, what we are planning with ai arena, honestly, like, we're pretty cycle agnostic in terms of timing. At the end of the day, like, market conditions does not dictate when we launch a token is all predicated on do we feel prepared and confident in the structure of what we are launching?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:42:50 And does it augment our product go to market strategy, all of those things. I think fortuitously, it's aligning with where macro is headed. I think, we're kind of lucky in that respect, but it's certainly not with, the perspective of trying to time the macro liquidity conditions, though, because I think if you do that is is probably not the the the the best approach So I just wanna say that, like, yeah, in the context of how I wrote that thread, it may come across as making these comments, in a certain way, but it was more in some ways ingest of, observing what is likely to happen in this space.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:43:29 And it's a word of caution more than anything.

Legendary 00:43:32 Yeah. And I think it's a very, very, very fair word of caution. The second thing that I wanted to pick out from your thread was, and you made a very strong statement on that, which I love. You said web 3 is a place for whale games. Don't fight it. Embrace it, how do you think that a game can best embrace this whale game nature on the one hand Well, on the other hand, also making sure to ensure a balanced game economy.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:44:02 Yeah. It's, it's a really good question. I don't know if there's any simple answers. I can only, come at it from the perspective of how we thought about AI, Reno, in the in the way that we've built it. Maybe a first point just on the insight of, the will game nature of web 3. And I think he'll all made a very interesting, observation or a point earlier. In the sense that, players when they are in cap, they're captivated within a particular kind of like game loop, kind of lose track in terms of the value that they're exchanging. Right?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:44:39 And that that is true within a game, but if you observe what Web 3 is, if you take the entire entity of Web 3 and crypto, it is just a financialized game. Right? And I think we've all had moments where, you know, even, even the concept of ETH or Bitcoin is a bit abstract in the sense of what is that really worth in terms of, like, US dollars in fiat terms.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:45:06 You know, it's very easy to spend one ETH on an NFT and not really think about what that means when you translate that to something like food bills that you would spend on a weekly basis to feed yourself, right, So that insight is important because when you think about Web 3, and I use this analogy in my conversation with someone else the other day, I said web 3 games are going to prove that, monetization velocity is going to be staggering relative to anything that we've ever witness in web suit.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:45:38 And the reason is in general, like, in general context of, like, human life, let's say you go out, you probably, nowadays, you might have, like, a credit card or, you know, historically, you probably just had some cash in your wallet. You're basically like pre loading something with a amounts of money that you can spend, and you're limited to that kind of consumptive power. Even if you go into a casino, you probably go into it with this, like, risk management view of, I can only risk a $1000 because I know, you know, I left to my own devices. I may just ratchet up too far, and I come to regret it. Web 3 does not have such guardrails, right?

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:46:17 And your wallet the way to think about it for kind of digital natives is that your wallet is basically your entire life savings or your 401k. Right, or your retirement account. Like, a lot of people hold a giant amount of their wealth in these wallets. When you start to integrate that into, like, DeFi, into gaming, into all of these different patients, it's it becomes much less friction in terms of how things how people think about their spending behavior here, that insight can drive games design as well. Right? So from our perspective, from an AI arena perspective, the game is focused on competition.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:46:53 And what we want is actually, for, for people to basically come together over time, and almost like collectively work on building the best AI to dominate the, the competition, which is at the heart the game. And one one of, like, the real world analogs that we use to, like, loosely model our our our game off of is Formula 1. If you think about what Formula 1 is, it is a whale game. Right? And, you know, a lot of these, like, constructors and companies hire a lot of engineers to best drivers in the world. They make massive amount of investments for this very high, purse, if you will, or reward.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:47:33 At the end of the day. And the monetization is around the edges in terms of the audience around the sport. And and in doing so, what you're able to do is actually your, you can instead buys a lot of, like, capital spending from the whales that drive the game forward. And what you create is a very compelling competitive product that suck attention into it from the periphery in terms of fandom, in terms of people who can casually enjoy your game. And, and, and over time, you can use this like central at us to really galvanize and create more DAU around the edges that you can monetize in other ways.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:48:06 So I don't know if that interests your question specifically, but you know, it it it's really how we think about the business model behind AI arena. And part of that, the starting point, and where our token plays a big role in is really to kind of galvanize this almost like investment view from a lot of the whales in to into our game first and use that to really enhance the competitive product that we can leverage to a large audience and captivating their attention.

Legendary 00:48:36 Yeah. That's a, that's a wonderful perspective and especially love the point on the spending behavior. Hilar, as a founder yourself, how do you approach this whale game nature of web 3?

Hilal 00:48:49 Yeah. I think that's one of the most appealing parts of building in web 3 and having that web 3 user base because when you look at traditional mobile games, free to play mobile games. I believe it's something across the line of 95% of users don't spend any money, or it's like 5% of users make up 90% of the spending total in game. So it's, like, it's really, really concentrated at the top where it's just that 5% is absolutely stomping on everybody else, and they're funding the entire game. And that 5% of users, the spending threshold, to be a part of that 5% is laughable in web 3 terms.

Hilal 00:49:28 People spend a $100 and now they're a whale in a web 2 game. You spend a $100 on gas fees in web 3 games. It's like, if you spend one east in in any web in any web 2 game, quote, unquote, you're, like, the top the top, the cream of the cream. You're one of the highest vendors ever here. It's like you're you're a small fish. So I think it's something how we researched it was one web three user equivalent to almost a 100 traditional web 2 mobile users in terms of spending power, purchasing power. So you could have a 1000 web 3 players. That's like having a 100,000 regular web 2 mobile players. So it's in terms of just pure purchasing power.

Hilal 00:50:08 And that's, that is really a feeling for, for many web through gaming studios for, for, for builders in the space because because of that strong purchasing power. So I think, and where does that come from? That comes from the fact that when you spend this money, you own the asset. You can actually trade it, in the future. It's not fully sunk cost. It's the ability to level it up, trade it, use it across games, all that stuff plays into the part as to why people are willing to spend more. So I think, from my perspective, we're when we're building up the product, we, it's it's really, really important. It is at the core foundation of how you monetize your your game. And, Yeah.

Hilal 00:50:47 I mean, the research in there is is is really, really strong, and it's, it's bullish, man. It's bullish.

Legendary 00:50:54 I love the research on that, and that that ratio web 3 to web 2 gamer. I quite would like to get your perspective yellow Panther into this discussion as a gamer yourself. We talked on other spaces, low about the challenges when it comes to onboarding traditional gamers to onboard the WIP 2 world, who the WIP 3 games. Do you think that this difference spending behavior is an additional challenge? Not basically the web 3 users are more likely to be power spenders, or is it just that in, at the end of the day, every game, no matter if it's web 2 or web 3 that has a monetized component to it has to deal with whales.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:51:32 Yo, to be honest, after going, you know, in the trenches on ground, going to both web 2 and web 3 gaming conferences, I can tell you that as long as the game is fun and it has the the reason No. You you give the gamers a reason to spend in the game or love the game. You will automatically attract wills and also attract, like, Daiheart supporters, right? And I was just recently over this weekend, I was just at, Gamescom Asia.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:52:05 Gamescom was originally from the biggest one of the biggest gaming cons in the world, but basically in Asia, you know, I see some of these super fans you know, queuing up for Spiderman 2, queuing up at PlayStation booth, Ubisoft, all these big names. Right? And it just reminded me how early, like, web tree gaming is because I realized that it actually takes time. To have, you know, wills and, you know, supporters to spend money in your game. And we are so early that that we already have several wheels and huge spending power.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:52:44 So I just can't wait to see how it progresses in the next 10 years or 20 years down the line because, web tree gaming has attracted more of the people with highest purchasing power and spending power in my opinion. And as we grow, as a industry, I think the spending power and you know, more wills, from web 2 will also come into web 3. So I think, like, for example, like, Ganshi Impact, like, one of the biggest, MMORPG by Hojiverse.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:53:17 You know, the people that actually spend there is, I would say, it's the you know, the the wheels make up, like, I think 3% of the entire game, right, but they they actually, spend the most. Out of everyone else, you know, the normal people. And when I'm when I'm talking about spending, right, that they they we're we're talking about a lot of money and it's like not just the, you know, 1 Eve or 2 if it's actually like, you know, 10 Eve at one release, 20 Eve at one release, and so on.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:53:48 And surprisingly, we are also seeing, similar trend in, you know, in ZT X, you know, Jeffrey, Gree, think that guy is a huge supporter in several projects. And, also, we are looking, we are seeing similar trend in, you know, both axis infinity, and also, parallel. Parallel has a huge, huge supporter in terms of, you know, a die hard you know, fans that actually would support every drop. And I think the next one, it's coming this week, and you guys I I don't know.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:54:21 I I wanna share the numbers with you guys, when it actually drops and see how many people and how fast it will sell yeah, so the spending power, it doesn't matter web to a web tree to conclude. As long as you give them a reason to spend and a good game, a good IP, then it will seat in its own way.

Legendary 00:54:39 Thank you for sharing your perspective yellow. It's been a fantastic discussion so far. I could carry this on for ages. But we do have a hard stop on the hour mark and want to be respectful of our speakers and of our audiences' time. So before we wrap it up, a quick question for both of you, Hilal's first, then Gway. It would be wonderful to hear what's next from the horizon for each of your games and ecosystems could you both share a milestone or an update or something that fans and players can look forward to before we wrap it up? Allow first.

Hilal 00:55:15 Yeah. I think the the biggest thing is our private beta is coming out really, really soon within the next I wanna say possibly next week, possibly in the next few weeks. And that's the we had the application up. It's one of the tweets around, like, a fifty to a hundred people will put in there. And then the public beta shortly after that. And then into the full release, like, we're we're 2 to 3 months away from from everything coming together and everything launching. So that is probably the biggest thing We also have our fidgetal, booster box.

Hilal 00:55:43 So it's a, fidgetal product where within each booster pack, you can play a tabletop game, like a traditional card game, like, u g o poke Pokemon, but there's also a QR code where you can scan the QR code within each pack and then mint the equivalent NFT assets on chain and then use those assets within our game and a future upcoming game. So, that was a hit, NFTNYC as a promotional product, and now we turned it into a full fledged product, and it's getting, a ton of interest the presales for that come out in, November as well. So I think that's the 2 biggest things on the horizon is our first founders set, digital set.

Hilal 00:56:21 And the beta, the beta for our for player games.

Legendary 00:56:25 Love it. Thank you so much. Definitely excited about digital. The gray, same question to you.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:56:32 Alright. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. This is always fun having a great discussion with, high caliber people. So yeah, with respect to AI arena, yeah, big things coming down pipeline. The, the main item that I wanna highlight is, obviously, we're gonna be launching our airdrop campaign probably in the next couple of months, we're targeting the start of, the core focal point of that campaign will be an incentive incentivized test net competition, which will likely start in January of 2024.

THE GWEI | ʌı 00:57:08 Details to come, think we're, we're going to be, trying out some very interesting mechanics in terms of this entire campaign. Can't share too much around that just yet, but, we'll be exciting once we get the ability to share more of that information. So, in terms of timeline, we're working very hard and judiciously towards that kind of January kickoff to this campaign, and we intend to be launched on MainNet by, late or late Q1 2024 or early Q2 2024 in terms of the game.

Legendary 00:57:44 So, looking forward to sharing more. Alright. Thank you so much, and thank you so much to all of our speakers. Thank you so much to everyone in the audience for joining our discussion today. Karma, I will leave the closing words to you.

ZTX 00:57:59 Of course. Thank you so much, legendary, for being a legendary host. Well, Hilal, I am really, really excited for the milestones of both Elyria as well as AI arena, you know, coming coming, from a very intense sprint at ZTX with our token launch And we are also, you know, right now, working towards our open beta ourselves. I know how insanely challenge it is. And at the same time, at the same time, incredibly rewarding.

ZTX 00:58:30 So, you know, all the more love to you guys, And all the more joy in, you know, spaces like this where we can openly exchange not only our experiences, but also, you know, outlook, sometimes the agree a little, or just show different, different perspectives on, you know, many, many roads leading to Rome. Also a huge thank you to every single content creator who has joined us today. At the very end of it all, guys, we are all building for people like you we really should and must be listening to your feedback openly like this.

ZTX 00:59:05 As I think you can provide some of the best insight terms of how the products can be improved. And also a huge thank you to every single person who has tuned in today in the name of ZT X, you know, we love hosting these open conversations, but also from me personally. You have given us an hour of your precious time in the and thank you so much. You know, I'm encouraging everybody to follow every single speaker right now here stage if you haven't yet.

ZTX 00:59:33 And also please tune closely to ZTX and to our, to our timeline because very soon, we will announce a discord event, a discord town hall with some special alpha this week. So, you know, keep your eyes on our timeline and see you next week on the next panel and in discord on the town hall later this week. Have a lovely day, everybody.

apix🎮 01:00:01 You too. Bye guys.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 01:00:02 Thank you guys.