Axie Infinity and Illuvium are Changing the World | Crypto Gaming Panel

Transcript

all right bankless nation we are super excited because it is panel time at bank list these are some of my favorite episodes generally we put together the best panel of subject matter experts and we just beat a topic to death we take you from zero to 100 and give you an understanding in today's panel i'm especially excited about david because this is all about game fi the game five revolution that is gaming meets finance all on crypto crypto gaming uh ever since david our conversation with ariana simpson from a16z where uh you know she she went over the bull case for crypto gaming i have been obsessed with this topic like super

interested in learning more and so this panel i think is an opportunity for you to learn more for david and i to learn more with our three fantastic panelists you want to give a a quick um i guess shout out and who we're about to talk to david yeah absolutely and and just to go on with the whole game fly conversation um i think this is the part where crypto gets really really fun and fun by design we are beyond the parts of the crypto world where uh we are talking about finance and protocols and like code and stuff like block chains i know you and i we we're both diablo 2 fans and we've been using diablo 2

metaphors to explain crypto and now this is where it feels like it becomes real and so we've brought on three people across the game phi industry uh one of my questions is like are we calling it gamefly is that is that what we're calling it because we need names for these things so we were bringing on uh bryson from loot squad gabby diesen from um from axe infinity and kieran warwick from uh elluvium uh and these are different components of a greater game five economy crypto gaming economy uh each ones with their own perspectives to add to this conversation um ryan shall we go ahead and get right to the conversation yeah david we definitely should before we do guys we want to give a shout out to one of the sponsors that

made this episode possible we've been talking about them for the last few episodes and that is xerion because xerion has some hot new ways to display your nfts flex your nfts it's already been my like home page for my d5 portfolio now it's kind of my homepage for nfts and david you tweeted this out earlier this week i want to know how you did this man you put like your crypto punk on your uh is this like an app on your phone yeah it's a little widget it's the xerion app uh with and i actually had to put my actual cryptopunk owning address and verify it in the xeron app so i couldn't have just loaded up anyone else's address i had to load up mine uh and i thought my tweet was pretty clever if you are like me and you don't check

any of your notifications on your phone you can make your phone prettier by putting your cool nfts on there using the xerion app you tell me you don't check your notifications so i see eighteen thousand emails here david i think a few of those are for me yeah yeah that's that's my that's where they are and they're gonna probably just sit there yeah they probably are if you want to talk to david talk to him on like the new social media channels discord or twitter uh emails is a little bit trickier but xerion is cooking up some cool things with nfts put them on your apple watch as well thanks to xerion for telling us about that and informing the bankless community so you guys before we get to our sponsors slight correction uh gabby uh plays a lot of action infinity but he is actually from yield guild game

so uh sorry about that gabby and we will get to that in a second there you go kind of related right sort of a new sort of dow built on top of axi infinity at some level but also not axi infinity so guys we are super excited to get to the meat of this panel but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the

token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uniswap out apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost 3 billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dow no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless

and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless the era of proof-of-stake is upon us proof-of-stake systems like ethereum terra and solana allow the industry to move away from the hot loud and wasteful proof-of-work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators and that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized individuals must play their part in crypto network validation and that is what lido is here to do lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button by delegating your stake to lido's network of nodes you can access the yield offered by proof of sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards do you have

32 eth and want to stake it to ethereum but running a node sounds intimidating or maybe you have less than 32 eth and you need to pool your eath with others so you can access baking yields lido offers a solution for both simply go to lido.fi choose which assets you want to stake and deposit them to the lido validating network lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol so if you want to stake your eath terra or soul and get liquidity on your steak go to lydo.fi to get started hey guys we are back with the gamefi revolution this is our crypto gaming

panel do we even call it game five we're about to find out but we've got gabby here from yield guild which is a talent guild in crypto gaming we also have bryson from loot squad you've heard all about loot and what they're up to this whole ecosystem that is being birthed around it and we have kieran from uh kieran from elluvium which is a new crypto game i think forging some new territory gentlemen it is fantastic to have you on bankless welcome to the game five panel well thanks for having us thanks for having us thank you so much we called this thing the game 5 panel at first like that's what's in our show notes but i'm actually not sure if we should call it that because like these terms are up for debate right is it

crypto gaming is it game fi is it something else can we talk about that for a minute so first of all do you guys like do you guys like the name game fi does that work for you gabby what do you think [ __ ] hate it what should we use instead of gabby look i've been in nft space since like early 2018 and it was called crypto games or blockchain games and it was nft games and now people are talking about play to earn and now because of d5 and games are coming out and people want to call it game five but it just sounds like it just sucks as a name honestly are you saying gabby do we do we have to come up with something better like why yeah why do you hate it so much um

it just sounds like a derivative of of d5 and i don't think that's actually what it is and i and there's actually a lot of i would say convergence between what nfts are doing and d5 and how it builds towards the kind of open metaverse that we've been talking about but yeah i i just hope ten years from now it's not game five that wins out as a term kieran do you have a different take on this what's your take on game five like it hated i mean for for i don't i don't hate it at all i mean at the end of the day you're you're defining what decentralized gaming is and and just coining it a catchy sort of a name for us we're completely decentralized and have been from day one so for us it's kind of fitting but i

mean gabby has been here longer than me so so maybe we should go with what he's saying oh geez hate it so far what about you bryson what do you think about game five the term oh man i feel like i'm coming into this and i'm willing to just elect to go with the og's presence i've only been in the seat and i think for about since april so it's the best meme that wins it's not what the ogs think that's totally true okay so like david and i have said this so many times we actually we didn't really love d5 as a meme when it came about because it was just like to us not all of this stuff is decentralized right and there's a spectrum of decentralization when you just call all of the finance that we're creating on top of crypto decentralized it's

somewhat misleading to be honest so we were like people don't get the whole decentralization part of finance anyway so if we're trying to like communicate to normies like oh do normies care about the d part of d5 yeah how much you even understand what it means so we very much uh like preferred open finance at first but like device catch on right like i don't know something about it the mimetics of it it was more transmissible it was more viral and it caught on and we lost out so we capitulated so gabby you might have to capitulate on it's not too late okay you'll create a better meme so i i think that play to earn is actually the best meme it's kind of a derivative from free to play which was the last business

model of games in the last maybe 10 to 15 years and people are saying oh play to earn it's not like good enough it should be play and earn or something but you don't create and try to create a meme that's ten percent better your meme has to be ten times better and i think that later in is actually the best meme that encapsulates what is happening with nfts and defys and video games and the metaverse and if someone wants to beat later they need a meme that is ten times better not ten percent better well we can see if we can stick with play to earn into a duration of this panel and maybe if we can it's so we're optimistic about the play to earn label what about what about just p to e you know just like short form no yeah david didn't like game fight either

then panel the game five panels so go figure maybe the best meme win that's right let's let's talk um definitely uh definitionally a little bit so um play to earn is kind of cool because it describes really what we're doing with crypto gaming which is where we're sort of flipping the industry on its head right rather than users um you know paying for a game uh they're actually sort of an active part of this open economy and they're earning as part of it maybe gabby you could uh you could tell us a bit what's special about crypto gaming and play to earn sure so play to earn i would say is like built first of all um so you have smart

contracts then you have the finance part of it then you have assets which are like the nfds and plate urn was a level like added on top of that we're using these nfts in a game environment gives you some kind of reward token which has value in the game which means if i have a reward token and i sell it i i get something out of it it might be ether or it might be something else but for it to have value someone has to buy it and maybe use that in the context of kind of a an online economy which could be a video game or a virtual world so that is like in essence from a very like uh 50 000 foot level what play to earn is i am using my skills and my time to earn some

form of resource that can be basically traded for money kieran what would you add to that what's different about crypto gaming is it this play to earn aspect that gabby has emphasized are there other pieces that are important as well yeah so so my take on it is there's for us especially we're going after two types of gamers right there's the gamers who not weren't necessarily gamers in the beginning but now they're in a developing nation and they have this opportunity to play to earn and so our game definitely uh caters for for those people but then i think the the more north american gamers that are used to playing your league of

legends world of warcraft the earnings side of that is is just going to be a bonus and so i think it's a little bit dangerous to just call crypto gaming play to earn i think the the fact that you can have ownership over your assets if you go and tell a fortnight player that that hey you can now sell your skins on an open market and you own those and it's verifiable that's a huge huge selling point and it might not necessarily be the fact that you can earn you know 20 bucks 30 bucks a day out of playing this game so i i think we got to talk about both tyson we talked about these two pieces right so owning your own assets and also play to earn these do seem to be

important components uh would you echo these comments would you add anything to them what's your take bryson yeah i would say that both pieces are extremely important you know being someone who does content i came from the cs go community and we used to sell skins on the steam marketplace but we really didn't have any true kind of asset power over these skins and when steam decided that they wanted to you know get rid of kind of cs go gambling and skin selling they did it at the drop of a hat we had no kind of say no voting no staking um and playing cs go like it was kind of like my first unofficial approach to realizing what this kind of nft ecosystem could be without realizing there were nfts there but i think that there does need to be a very good consensus in terms of the

level of entertainment value provided to american-based users and then also the balance of plate iron because i look at you know gamers in the united states most of them like 99 percent aren't making money playing video games whereas you know plato earned opens the gateway for millions of people average everyday people to be able to make an income playing so i think there's a powerful medium and having both of those involved okay let me just stop like very quickly right here and just uh like in my point of view play to earn encompasses the entire like ownership and being able to sell those assets and being able to financialize them i think like the biggest misconception and this is just my definition is that when you say play to earn specifically it uh it it

refers to a cohort of people who basically don't have any money and then they are trading their time for money to play the game i think it's the whole financialization of the of the game economy that is played to earn and like i don't want to spend the rest of the hour kind of splitting errors between definitions but that's what i think is open gaming an interesting term for this industry as well no well why do you think no gabby it doesn't really mean anything like i i don't know what to think of when i hear open gaming yeah because even even we have perhaps an open financial system but games are likely still going to be built by uh developers and studios um and so i think that that is going to be

a difficult part of the whole thing to decentralize maybe kieran can uh give us some illustration when we uh talk about projects and i actually think that's where we should we should go next so each each of you comes from one of uh one of the few not too many projects that are working in the game phi play to earn ecosystem and so maybe each of you could illustrate what your project is how it fits in and maybe also how it fits and how it's a model for other projects or other patterns to be integrated into this whole play to earn movement bryson we accidentally got your introduction wrong with uh implying it was part of the the loot ecosystem that was me bryson sorry man uh so so with

that we'll start with you bryson could you uh correct us on what uh loot squad is and how it fits into the world of play to earn gaming totally uh no problem with the whole new definition i've gotten on tons of calls with people and they're like oh are you related to loot for adventurers i'm like nah nah nah they're a little bit different we were here just to be clear you were here first okay so you owned loot first okay you are the ogs it kind of at first i was annoyed by it because i was like okay they're they don't know we exist we don't know they exist but like we're using the same name and you know there's always going to be some branding stuff there but um what loot squad is is we're like kind of a social gaming community and we're looking to build out

pretty much the coinbase of plato arms so our idea is using content to build a very strong empowering family within the loot squad we have streamers we have play to earn users and at the end of the day we feel that building platforms on top of play to earn with consumer-based products is the future of allowing more dollars to be spent on play to earn ecosystems so we're very much kind of taking a bullish approach to building out a very strong foundation in terms of our scholars and allowing people to have the empowerment of playing these games but also looking at how we onboard millions of american users in the future and i think it's through giving them a player and aggregator where they can not only invest but kind of spend their time within guilds and infrastructural

systems so our guild approach is a bit different than some of the others in the space um and luckily uh both of the guys in this call are two that i'm collaborating with directly and uh partnering with so uh it's cool to be in the space bryson is that like um if we're trying to use old models um like from the esports world are you is loot squad like a league that you join or how should we think about this um so i would think from like a very open-ended and cultural standpoint we're very much like almost like the 100 thieves of nft gaming if you're familiar with kind of traditional gaming organizations um we're not like uh moving in the same direction of ygg we're there in my opinion like being the leader in terms of being able to index across multiple players games

but we are more so like a traditional gaming organization who's looking to kind of expand on traditional infrastructure by focusing on creating consumer based products so not really kind of in the same mold um but we we do feel like there is a ton of space for for multiple players bryson what's a hundred thieves sorry my gaming days are like my world of warcraft days are a few years behind me yeah you can tell by the caller yeah so 100 thieves they're a traditional gaming organization that does a lot in the spaces of like league of legends and call of duty and some other games um but they're very much seen as kind of the content mecca of the gaming scene for the traditional world whereas like we're focused on trying to replicate the content aspect of that uh for the nft gaming or play to earn

gaming world and i think both of those terms kind of go synonymous in a sense kind of like what gabby was saying earlier i like the idea of saying p2e a com like a com encompasses all of kind of nft gaming and player and entertainment and all of that so by the way i just want you guys to know david hoffman was wearing the color yesterday in our conversation with andy yang i was in a teacher a politician we're with a bunch of gamers i know i flip-flopped it gabby let's turn to yield guild what is yield guild how does it fit into the whole play to earn revolution and how might it be a model for other organizations as well so yield guild is what we call a play to earn gaming guild so what we are actually is kind of a coalition or a

federation of guilds that on board player communities from around the world it started in the philippines at the axe infinity last year but now we have communities from all around the world that are playing these different games and yeah deriving some kind of earnings from them so we started with axi but since then we partnered with a lot of different games including eluvium including star atlas other games like guild of guardians ember sword so we want to be the gateway for people to have jobs in the metaverse whether you're you're an ordinary player you're in esports you're a content creator we want to give the basically become the entryway for that for people to come into the crypto economy and start earning their living creatively no

matter like how they want to do it and if there is a barrier because it costs something to get started in one of these games it might be purchasing an nft being part of the group we want to erase those barriers and have anyone come into these games and become a part of the crypto economy is it true that you have a moist owl as part of your founding team gavin yes i love moistness is my technical co-founder and he's fully aim on and yeah i think you and ariana talked about that last time right yeah it was hilarious yeah i love it gabby can you check my thinking on this um i think one of the prominent early premonitions before crypto was even a thing that the world of play to earn was coming regardless was the fact that world of warcraft had a sufficiently robust

in-game economy that actually you could actually make enough money in enough gold in world of warcraft to actually support yourself as as a player uh and then also something that world of warcraft pioneered was actual guilt people in discourse before dalles were even a thing forming and banding together to share resources and to join in together to fight the bosses uh and so for me yields guild is it's actually it's it's a dow right except it's a dao that allows for um organizations to form across any plate to earn game and then the the dao itself has its own um self-sustaining economic model based off of those players but then also

can take that model into uh you know more maybe traditional routes such as like content production and you know whatever else the dell wants is that all right yeah that's right so guilds have existed in games for over 20 years if you go to any mmo starting from probably on ultima online world of warcraft runescape guilds have existed and later in us existed except that they were kind of like gray or black market it could it was never really um in the terms of service that you could exchange these assets for real money but people were doing it anyway because they were valuable and some people wanted to spend time to obtain these assets and some people wanted to spend money and what play to earn does is that it puts the assets of these games on the

blockchain which kind of legalizes the kind of asset exchange part of it makes it pretty easy and part of the actual kind of game economy or the rules of the game and the guild itself now is basically a group of people like a guild in a game like world of warcraft that now has a treasury that is essentially has a bank account of assets in these different games and we use that treasury and we've raised money from some some investors like ariana and recent horowitz to invest in these assets and then lend them out to the players so that they can play these games earn an income without having to spend any money upfront i think that instantiation of assets that you access when you play these games is really really important because that

really goes it's really where it goes these guilds of you know runescape and world of warcraft that form because people just want to hang out with their friends online and play games but once the assets are involved once there's actual digital assets that goes from you know a bunch of friends you know hanging out playing games to an economic body an economic unit that with uh kind of in the same way a company has goals and aspirations and targets uh which i think um could help blossom a lot of color into the world of gaming yeah so in in terms of nfd assets and tokens we have over 30 million dollars of assets in axi we have over a million dollars of assets in the libyan for example so it is serious money like having a guild that has thousands of

players from around the world playing these games this is like all of my childhood dreams come true i gotta say that's like happening i feel like a little too late for it because like i'm not so much in the gaming scene nowadays but man it's it's all happening too late you're perfect let's let's turn to you uh kieran what is elluvium and how does it fit into this whole play to earn environment so we're fully decentralized game uh from from the from the heart uh essentially we are building a game very similar to to pokemon but with the battle systems of a league of legends team fight tactics and so we've sort of merged these two genres together

and you know very similar to pokemon we've got 150 alluvials that you walk around in this open world and you're trying to catch as as gabby was saying that all these uh alluvials are on the blockchain we've built this uh decentralized marketplace where you can go and either you know battle these alluvials or you can go and sell them there's a whole bunch of other components within including like mining uh there's you know skins that you have there's enhancements and so we're we're really trying to i guess up the ante in in the space in terms of bringing the first aaa title to blockchain and i know that get that that

that gets thrown around a lot these days and it's a bit of a a buzz word for for a lot of games out there but you know to to bring that level you need a team that can sufficiently deliver that and and so what i mean by that is is having hundreds of people working on the game and you need you know millions of dollars to be able to deliver that and so we've gone and raised you know over 50 million dollars and and we're looking to to expand on that again and yeah we're looking to build out our team to you know the size of your likes of ubisoft and and blizzard to actually deliver what i believe is is

going to be one of the first games there's obviously other other games building at the moment but to actually deliver that experience of real fun gaming not so much you know gamers looking for for something to earn and and obviously in our game were set to give out something like 600 million in in yield but it's more we're targeting the the fun side of gaming first which means you know super immersive addictive strategic gameplay and then the cherry on top for us is the fact that you can obviously go and sell these assets and and earn you know quite a bit of money plus you know we're going down the route

of an esports game where you know we we want to be up there with with guys like dota which you know are putting on prize money tournaments of like 35 million plus with us you know we want to break those records and having you know nfts and and and having a token that like we do at the value we do we have that possibility so that's kind of what we're doing by the way i've seen some of the eluvials like sneak peek that kieran showed us and they're [ __ ] amazing nice and i think it's going to be actually trivial for this industry to just shatter records of reward distributions because it's hooked right into finance it's hooked right

into crypto so it makes a lot of sense uh karen you you said that eluvium is a decentralized game uh can you unpack that what does that mean do you mean something more than just the users own their own assets or or what else about elluvium is is decentralized so yeah i mean first of all like i call it a decentralized autonomous studio right so we we're we're 140 people now and and we're growing at a rate of of knots it's literally 10 15 people a month adjoining i've met five percent of those people right there they're across 30 different countries and they're all contributing to to building this game that's the the first

step there the the second thing that we did and this is a bit of a node to kane from from synthetics his thing was um yeah i know i sorry i think the biggest thing that we did is we literally said we we even before our tge we airdropped a bunch of tokens to a lot of the synthetics community a lot of our initial um early adopters who came into our discord and we said all right you guys now have a token we want and it was called pre-ilb and so it had no other value apart from being

able to vote and what what that voting was was made to do is actually put in a put in place a council of five individuals that the token holders thought would be the best people to essentially make the decisions based on on the protocol right from a from a decentralized finance standpoint from a gaming standpoint and so we've we've given the ability for literally all our token holders to to have a say in adding new characters to the game for example in doing balancing in in changing things like our tokenomics and and so we've already had multiple

examples of where the someone has written an iip which is an alluvium improvement proposal very very similar to how ethereum works again synthetic works but we're the first ones who are literally doing it in gaming and that was a little bit scary at first but now that we're seeing this play out the community that the benefits that you get from from giving power back to the community is just it is it's amazing to see right there's so much buy-in from people and we think it's going to transpire to a basically a lot more trust a lot more uh in-game

purchases just purely because people think and and and literally are building a game by the you know with their own input from the community which you know it's it's really really fascinating to watch look kieran since uh since you brought him up we mentioned him a couple times um you kane is as your brother right kane of synthetics we've had him on bank list before is he uh older brother younger brother curious yeah so we i was actually having a chat just before this with david but um he's nine years older so just to clarify that for everyone out there he's trying to spin this this narrative that we're like two years apart or whatever but uh yeah though he's he's very much

my my older brother so the reason i ask is because like you know it's like bankless likes analogy and maybe there's an analogy here of like game phi play to earn is sort of like defuzz younger brother that's now entering into the ring here and i have a question for you because i i'm sure you've had conversations with kane and others in the past but this goes into like the total addressable market size of this and and i'm curious what you think do you think that defy is bigger or do you think crypto gaming is the bigger total addressable market size this is maybe a a cane versus kieran sort of discussion too so which is bigger

so okay so so the addressable market for d5 is basically it's it's limited by the population of the world right everyone can join decentralized finance everyone needs finance the the difference is that it's very opaque right it's very taboo it's it's like i don't understand it there's there's so many people that just dismissed defy purely because of the complexity the advantage that that we have as you know a d5 game is our addressable market is something like three billion people so it's it's not the whole world but it's you know nearly half and so

for us it's it's so easy for someone to understand especially now that these layer twos are coming out which which make the the experience in the game seamless exactly like it is in mainstream the the opportunity here to and we're already seeing it with axi right the opportunity to to bring people into the crypto space is it's you can't even measure it right like we're trying to get to 100 million players and my thing is you know it's not a screw uk like we just brought in all those people because i'm also a massive massive investor in the d5 space i think it's a matter of bringing them in and then once they have

a metamask wallet once they start seeing okay i'm earning a little bit of money i need to go on to maybe open c or these other decentralized exchanges to to start selling these assets they're going to without even realizing it they're going to start adopting crypto and so the d5 maxes out there who are like oh this is just another flash in the pan it's going to go away i think they need to you know embrace what's happening here and and yes these these are normies as we call them but very very soon i'm expecting those those normies to start adopting other crypto protocols which i think is is good for the entire ecosystem so i take your point that these things are very

synergistic and crypto gaming is maybe the gateway drug to the rest of d5 i totally agree it's maybe it's many people's first banking experiences you know comes by way of crypto gaming and d5 but which one's going to be bigger kieran do you think do you think crypto gaming is going to win like a bigger market out there so in the short term we're absolutely going to crush d5 it's it's not even there you go not even an argument i mean i i kane and i are extremely competitive to the point where it's almost it's uh it's almost unhealthy and and so i'll say again i think you know

the the amount of uh the amount of dollars that can go into d5 is you basically it's you can't count it right like it's it's so large that that i think you know at the end of the day we're going to win in the short term but 10 20 30 years from now i think d5 will will eventually win out but then you look at it and it's like are we part of d5 you know is is gaming part of that so i don't know it's kind of they they come hand in hand so i don't think there can be really a winner apart from the short term which i just wants to see two brothers fight and that's what that's yeah a little bit i i just want that a little bit but but but also like in a

healthy way kieran and you know don't make it unhealthy for sure but but gabby maybe we just came full circle to game fi again so here's the way i take a look at it d5 is the gamification of finance game 5 is the financialization of games these are actually no different you're just coming at it from kind of the opposite ends and when you combine them what you have is basically play to earn and the metaverse where um if you watch ready player one people own their assets across different game experience buying uh buying these assets and owning them and then taking them basically to their whole virtual lives with them so i think they're just opposite ends of like the same same outcome

yeah how come they didn't have uh blockchain and like ethereum and ready player one it felt like they were missing that technology right or do you think it was just assumed oh it was just kind of under the hood i think it's always been there bryson what do you think about this is this uh total addressable market is this how you know gaming goes mainstream and crypto goes mainstream how big is crypto gaming in your opinion yeah i honestly think that d5 is going to going to depend on gaming more than the gaming side of what we're doing with depend on d5 and the reason why i would say that even though they're both interconnected like for example the the best way to get you know your money or get your crypto onto your ronin wallet right now like when i first started you

were going through and you were swapping this is before axs was on my coinbase you were swapping ethereum and you got to give the ethereum and a wrapped ethereum and to do all these steps you know you're touching a lot of d5 concepts but at the end of the day i think there are tons of people who are you know going to jump into the gaming side of things that might that could care less about whether or not they're using d5 protocols but just know that they're playing a fun game so i think they kind of go hand in hand but i think gaming provides more to defy in terms of long-term sustainability because i know for myself i started in gaming not even realizing i was using deep high and ended up now it's like oh now i want to use more d5 things because of gaming

so i think gaming is a way of bridging a lot of these gaps i want to turn the conversation to something that i also see alignment between the traditional current gaming industry and what we see going on in the crypto world and that is the emphasis on community uh community is something that crypto has intimately become under uh understood where if you don't have a community you kind of don't really have anything community is what supports bitcoin it supports what supports ethereum and it also is what supports all the applications that are built on ethereum and the same thing is true with gaming studios gaming studios are into like uh very sensitive to what their community has to say about their

game and community feedback about how the game should be designed is something that gaming studios thrive on and without that they tend to die so now we have these two worlds that are coming together and they're already both powered by community and so i want to ask this question to gabby first how do you think about the intersection of community and play to earn gaming like it does this how when these two worlds collide what happens okay so first of all um communities have always been very integral part of any successful game so game communities have been around forever but having played to earn games with community that is basically

powered by web 3 within these dows with a token form of ownership it just makes everything more explosive because now your communities are empowered by ownership and this is really is really different from what happened in basically game communities where you're fans of the game you're very uh you could be very uh like a big fan a big defender of the game but ultimately you didn't own anything right um and now that uh your gamers are basically co-owners of the game ecosystem that you have it just really changes their relationship where in a sense they're your co-creators they may have an economic stake in it and just the level of participation the level of loyalty um and yeah just the way that

people are integrated the community and the team and sometimes like the community is part of the team it is something that's never really existed in in the game industry before the community is part of the team i absolutely love that line i'm definitely going to be using that in in the future bryson i want to turn the same question to you how does the role of community change once we integrate financial assets into these games that we play i think community continues to just like hyper scale not only games but at hyper i think against hyperscale financial protocols and endows and and everything of that sort i mean look at what ygg uh myself at loot squad everything that we've done up until this point has been built off the backs of building a strong community and having uh the sense of empowerment for uh

bringing other people along this journey and allowing them to reach their goals and helping them follow their dreams so i think community is going to be like a very huge focal point to the future of how we build and then long term you look at like traditional gaming versus you know what you see in axi and alluvia and in other nft games the communities are much different because there is this aspect of defy and money involved people are less likely to be toxic people are less likely to want to you know spread fud about a game or people are less likely to like treat other players with disrespect because at the end of the day everyone wants to make it and by doing so showing that the community is great it provides level of validity to projects it provides level of validity

to guilds and overall the ecosystem of nft gaming as a whole david and i were uh talking to someone earlier and we were describing like what's happening in crypto gaming i found myself like uh starting to call e-crypto gaming like users or like customers and then i like stopped myself because that's like the existing traditional model of gaming where you'd have users and customers and i'm not quite sure what to call these new ecosystem participants in something like axi like do we have a term for this are they like community members are they citizens like because they're more than customers and they're not users so what are this new breed of ecosystem participants that are

actually working in the game they're not employees either i don't have a term for it yeah i think everyone has different definitions i know for myself we like to at this point just call them our axie family because it was the axie fam it makes a lot of sense um but gabby you've been around a lot longer tonight what is your your opinion on that i think citizen is actually a nice term to put it um yeah yeah just guild members for us because our members are part of different game communities as well but they're also part of the yield guild community and the sub guild that we're in um yeah uh bryson you said that uh this collaborative nature makes people nicer and i'm a i'm a big fan of overwatch and overwatch is famously toxic because then

when you head into a competitive game everyone just finds somebody else to blame and i recently tweeted out this line blockchains make people nice and what i mean by that is uh kind of a take too long to explain but more or less like having a transparent system kind of enforces honesty and collaborative nature so like are you saying that when we integrate financial assets into our games everyone's just going to stop being toxic and start just being nicer to people i'm i'm a firm believer of that i think when i first got an axi infinity like the first transaction i made it was like kind of a private transaction was somewhere where i sent them uh you know like a thousand dollars for two axes and in the traditional world like i remember when i would go and try to buy like an

elgato game capture so i could screen record from someone on twitter and then the guy just like scams me for like 80 bucks whereas it's like an axiom like oh i can send a thousand dollars this person no now of course i do not recommend anyone doing this so if you're watching but it's like my experience my first time i was like wow he actually sent me what i was looking for you know i had people vouching for him so i do think uh you know keeping scammers on the community is something that all of these games are looking to do so i disagree that uh like blockchain makes people necessarily nice because it hasn't rubbed off on kieran here is a super competitive guy but like so how i see it is that like there uh there's zero sum and they're positive some games and if we are playing a

positive sum game then people are actually uh kind of incentivized to helping each other if the game is zero sum if i'm getting into a match where either i win or i lose i get zero or i win then the environment becomes toxic right so there are elements of play to earn which are zero sums there are elements that are positive some what i see now is that it's still a growing market we're still at the very start of onboarding how many millions of players a few billion players into this economy so i think for maybe the next few years it's going to be more positive some than than it is zero sum zero sum is this why bitcoin maximalists are so mean and toxic sometimes gavi yeah i i think so because for them the world is there's only so much bitcoin and the only game

is to accumulate more of it and with ethereum there are so many games you can play there's so many communities you can join and honestly it's a lot more fun joining a dow playing a game becoming a streamer and finding so many ways to win if there's only one way to win then you're either winning or you're not karen i've intentionally left you last for this question because like you said you are building a game which requires improvement proposals by the community and as as uh as we've said the community members are now part of the team so what's it been like trying to build a game with the community shoulder to shoulder what's that been like

yeah so the the crazy thing for us and thanks for that uh jab gabby that was that was nice of you but um but yeah no so essentially we've got governors right we literally have everyone who holds a ilv token is it's a governance token and you have the ability to shape our protocol from a d5 standpoint and a gaming standpoint and so empowering those players and i mean truly truly empowering those players giving them decision power right that's that's what it comes down to has created we've we've got something like 200 000 community members and

we're still you know a ways away from releasing the game and i think that is built upon the fact that they actually get a choice in in the matter and if if something that we're building doesn't make sense to them they'll step up and they'll you know talk within themselves we've got all different measures and and channels for for people to be able to voice their opinion and it really builds this camaraderie where like we've got crazy crazy crazy people who that spend you know 15 hours a day in our discord and it's it's to the point where like they're they're seeing things that i don't even see anymore because i'm you know busy out there getting partnerships

and stuff like that and i come back and i'm like holy [ __ ] what is going on here and so yeah i think community is everything and and i was such a massive believer in that purely because when i started investing in the space the protocols that had the the community backing and and the really positive communities they were the ones that the the token price you know kept on going up and it wasn't even almost about that you know at a certain point you got to deliver a product right but prior to that you know if you're building something and and the the people that you're building it with literally the the contributors and for us

anyone can contribute with these proposals so we essentially have 200 000 people contributing to what alluvium is going to end up being which again it's it's it's very very rare we it's it's not been done before in this in this uh measure and and so you know for us yeah i echo what what bryce and gabby are saying community is absolutely everything at some level it almost seems like community is the product yeah yes yes i mean they're essentially partly the builders you know they if they're not physically coding the product but if they're the ones who are

sitting there saying hey this is what we would like to see this is the new character that we would like to see in the game then you are you're part of the the the building economy of of the game yeah so here's what i noticed fundamentally different with web 2 and web 3. in web 2 you wanted a founder to be a really good product builder and then the community could follow later the best web 3 founders are the community builders and who eventually figure out what the product should be because they co-create that product with community so if you're a superstar product builder who doesn't know how to build community you're actually not going to do well in web 3 whereas in web 2 there are a lot of people like that where they just built

like funding and teams out of people who are superstar product builders it's not gonna work for for web3 wow that definitely falls in line with the mental models we have of these organizations and economies being opt-in economies you actually have to choose to enter them and so therefore you need as a leader to convince people to enter your community and once you do you have a vibrant community and the world is your oyster guys there are some things that i have some critiques about um whether whether or not like if we turn this whole game fly thing into an economy does that just actually kind of ruin the point of playing games does it make it no longer fun so i want you guys to chew on that answer while we cut to a sponsor break here we go when you shop

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does that kind of defeat the purpose of gaming doesn't that just suck the fun out of things gabby what say you okay so i think that uh that which shows a very narrow definition of games where all i do is basically play games to have fun look the narrative based games the games on your playstation and xbox they're never gonna go away and honestly if it's a narrative based game there's probably no economy in it and it's not going to be a blockchain based game if i just want to have fun with a good story i'll fire up my playstation and play you know like game yeah just god of war or something right but if i want to play a game be in a social circle where we're earning

things of value which used to be games like world of warcraft and or or runescape i would rather own those assets and make money for them because i'm already working for them in a social environment paying money and getting value out of it so i think that's actually a lot more fun being able to own those assets and actually nfds are a lot of fun even these collectible pfps that you just buy and trade and flex on twitter it's already a ton of fun so yeah i think that like i can have a lot of fun and make money at the same time i guess part of your point is like i remember the days of you like diablo and the world of warcraft like people were grinding anyways right like they were grinding they were working hard it wasn't always fun sometimes it was but

it wasn't always fun but they were grinding for i guess um the flex or for like legitimacy or credibility you know my level 60 warlock look at me how much time i've spent to level up to this point and so i guess maybe part of your point gabby is like people are doing this anyway but they don't actually own the product that they're working so hard for and grinding so hard for in many of these games is that does that hit a little bit yeah that's right especially in these games that have very rich economies in them why cannot i own the value of the of the value that uh that i'm creating for the game economy so i think that's just more fun if i wanted to do that and

if i wanted to play a story based game and not think about making money i can go pick up another game karen do you have an opinion on whether or not adding in finance to games ruins the whole point of games look i i think if you make it the whole basis of the game then yes right and i think that's what we're seeing a lot with the games that we have right now there's a reason why north americans and and you know the the chinese gamers and and all these these guys that go and play god of war and world of warcraft and league of legends there's a reason they're not coming into the space yet and the the the fundamental reason is this is my personal opinion maybe this

is why i'm i'm not so nice but i just don't think that the games in blockchain right now are built to be fun right they're they're built to for people to earn and while that's good for you know developing nations out there and it's building these new economies and i think it's super super important to to still encompass that inside your game i think you fundamentally have to create a game that is fun right that people actually want to play and if you all of a sudden ripped out that economy they're still going to be sitting there playing your game and if you get the balance right and you have you know enough

mechanics inside your game enough strategy enough a really really high quality graphics which is what allures people to these games in the first place then you're going to have people playing anyway and then when you you you chuck on top the fact that hey you can go and sell these assets on marketplaces and make money you can also win a tournament and get yourself a whole bunch of tokens that are that are highly highly valuable even to a a small degree just little achievements here and there throughout your game where you can earn money that is the cherry on top right and i think that's what's missing right now and it's it's no doubt it's coming and i'm a

believer of give it 10 15 years playstation 8 is going to be on blockchain right that everyone everyone is going to move to to this because it's cut the demand is coming from the players and as soon as players are playing a game of the quality of a aaa game which there's many many titles that we could mention as soon as you get that and then they're sitting there and they're like okay so now i'm now i'm having heaps of fun like i'm normally used to but i'm also earning a whole bunch of money it's like mum sorry go away not go [ __ ] yourself go away i'm actually learning more i'll give you right now i'm working down

i'm working but i'm also having a whole bunch of fun right and so i think you have to start with the fun factor and then you sprinkle the d5 aspects all the way through it and that's what's going to to open the eyes of all of the mainstream gamers which is a very large part of what we're targeting at alluvium but again also inadvertently the the yield that we're giving out is also going to attract the the likes of the axi players from your developing nations so we're trying to do both it's interesting there might be i i think there are i'm gonna plus one on that there might be something to that i'm

just uh recalling our conversation with uh ariana simpson once again where we talked about like we asked her the question hey aren't these like what do you how do you respond to the criticism that all of these crypto games are just big giant ponzi's basically right it's like this this you know flywheel there's nothing behind it and her response was well well actually the the utility is the attention the utility is the fun the utility is people actually want to come play the game and maybe what you're saying here is that if you don't have that underlying utility then there's not very much that's actually backing the new open gaming economy that you've just created it's kind of it's kind of hollow and it could go up but then it's going

to come down and the baseline value proposition is how many people are here in the game for fun does that resonate at all 100 abs absolutely right the the value creation you know if if it's just new players coming in and eventually that stops right eventually there's a point where you you you hit this point where there's no new players coming in and if that economy doesn't have that value creation in builds in it and the players are actually happy to go and buy skins and enhancements and things that don't necessarily make them more money you just touch them it gets them to the point where they're level 60 and

they're flexing like in world of warcraft that is is is why we're here and i and i think that's when we're going to see you know games the longevity of games that's that's where you're going to see the five ten year cycle of a of a proper like an mmo in in the mainstream so yeah that that is perfect explanation of it yeah bryce you're a streamer so you play these games and then you're also who are streaming them do you have any experience with this whole dynamic about does it lose its funness when there's money involved well i definitely think that it's important that your game is like fun outside of the monetary aspect you know i grew up playing pokemon so i i very

much am very like keen on both axi and alluvium in terms of the fun factor being there um but i will say like in my kind of understanding of where my audience comes from and how it is explaining this to non-kind of crypto folks about how gaming is it is a lot harder for me to bridge into american mainstream audiences with gaming just just through playing action you know it's something that i work on and i have an entire content and media team where we strategize on how we do this um so so that is something to take into account um but i think like across the future of blockchain or nfc gaming's in general there's going to be tons of opportunities to play games that people enjoy a lot of times for me i do enjoy playing axey i'm going to enjoy playing

alluvium when that comes out um but there might be someone who doesn't enjoy axe or someone who doesn't enjoy alluvium or some other game that that comes out but having a very wide range amount of games is important and understanding that not every game is everyone's cup of tea and i think that's like privy to like understanding how this discussion will go as we come down to the final question here in this panel i want to thank all three of you for the time and insights that you've given us here i want to ask this final question zooming all the way out so in the very grand scheme of things if we are looking at the next two years in in crypto gaming and then also the next 20 years in crypto gaming if crypto gaming had a road map what would it look like like what are we

about to unlock in the short term and then what's it also going to look like in the long term um so without giving you any time to think about that bryce let's start with you oh my goodness um in the short serve i think we'll see a lot of crypto games come through um i don't think we'll see a lot of winners long like for the intermediate to short term i think there's going to be a bunch that come in uh some are going to get completely wrecked some are going to do well um and for me as a content creator and in building i try my very best to go deep on games before i like can truly commit to saying okay this is something that i believe in but in the long term i think there are going to be some blue chips

where we look up and you have like the madden of nfc game where it just stays around a long time and people continue to put money into it um and i'm very just bullish on the entire industry i think we'll see uh large gaming developers and publishers as well as you know the twitch and youtube and their gaming departments very much getting behind uh content creators in these games and i'm very interested to see how all these games continue to build out so i i think that the nft gaming space is going to be here um for an extremely long time i don't see it going anywhere deep future is is are we headed towards uh ready player one bryson i don't know i'm not i'm not like too like i don't know the whole ready player one story in terms of if there's vr or

ar involved in terms of like how the metaverse will work but i do think that i spend right now probably 97 of my life is interacting with people that i met on the internet so you know i feel like i'm already that is the metaphor that is the metaphor so you know i would say that we're already there gabby since you you seem eager to respond how do you think crypto gaming will develop in the short term and then how do you think it'll develop in the long term as well let's start long term because that's the thing that i think i spend a lot of time thinking about i think the future of work is going to be in the metaverse it is not just games that you're going to play it's where you will go to work it is where you access defy it's where you

have your most valuable assets and i think just the future of value is going to be inside these virtual worlds which may or may not be games which where where you will access what we now call defy and these are all going to build to be built on top of some kind of open ledger where we are going to store that value i fully think that the world is headed there and we call it the metaverse and right now it's in the form of games that may be slotted into genres like an rpg or you know card game um or like a metaverse land game but you know like the games now that are trying to be like blockchain or game

fighting games it's like the first tv shows that were basically like radio shows with a static picture on them right once we unlock what like basically the future of value does storing value in nfts in fungible tokens putting them in a virtual world where we are interacting all the time we can prove that digital ownership we're basically starting to build the early building blocks of the open metaverse now and i think that is just where all the value will be flowing in the next 20 years erin take us home what's crypto gaming going to look like in the short term in one to two years and what's crypto gaming going to look like in 20.

so i'm a i'm a big investor in the space and i used to as i said i used to invest in a lot of d5 protocols now i've got a lot of gaming uh a lot of games coming to me a lot of game studios coming to me saying hey do you want to get involved and so my short term outlook is that there's going to be tons and tons of games that come out in the next 12 months that are what we in the mainstream what you would call indie games right and they have their place there's so many indie games that have ended up going viral and they're awesome and you know if you even if you look at something like monster infinite right they're literally doing a fork of what axi is

now i'll pre-face this with actually just got 126 million dollars so i fully fully expect them to to start building out their their game and getting a whole bunch of new team members in so i'm actually turning quite bullish on on axi but you know i think in this short term as as bryce said there's going to be a lot some make it some get wrecked but in the long term i'm now speaking to teams that have come from these huge aaa studios and they're just gonna keep on bringing more and more talent they've they've seen the light of of crypto gaming and the the trouble that we have is that it takes a very very long time to make a

game if you look at gta right their last release took eight years to make and so we could be waiting a long time before we get our you know world of warcraft style of moba that's that's on in uh in crypto gaming but i'm very bullish on this space i just mentioned you know playstation i think microsoft i think all of these guys are gonna literally start getting at least the involvement of of of some form of nfts in in their you know marketplaces and stuff like that so yeah i'm i'm super bullish i think we're going to a very very good place and and yeah i can't wait to see the adoption that we can all create guys this panel's been phenomenal you you three have taken

us from zero to 100 in uh in just a little over an hour as we leave bankless listeners always love the alpha you mentioned some projects there kieran i'm wondering if you guys could just name some hot projects that folks should pay attention to any just anything that comes to mind you don't have to give the description bankless listeners who are curious can go look them out what's what's coming down the pipe what is hot right now kieran ah don't so they're all sort of in they're in stealth mode so for me i ca as i have invested in them i don't really want to be chilling i don't even know the one the ones you can name i want the ones you can name is there anything you can name look

so i just uh so there's there's a couple of little indie ones there's there's a group that i made a tweet right about uh flappy bird and said someone needs to to build flappy bird the team that is building the the crypto flappy bird the the fancy birds is what they're calling it i think they're going to be one of those really good short term games but then you've got you know guild of guardians you've got ember sword you've got star atlas there's there's all these bigger games which a lot of people know about i really don't want to uncover these other ones because i think i i definitely would get in uh in trouble some of those names are even

alpha for me because i've not heard of all of them gabby what other projects would you add to the list here anything cool oh i really like illuvium i think we're very uh like much looking forward to the release of the game bryson anything you had i'm not bullish on much but i love axi i love ygg i love alluvium and now i'm very keen on a game called cypher i think it's one to look out for awesome guys this has been perfect thank you so much for going through that we really appreciate the panel thanks for having me yes awesome all right bankless listeners as always gotta remind you none of this has been financial advice this is crypto gaming it's not financial advice okay bitcoin is risky ethan's risky crypto gaming is

risky as well you could definitely lose what you put in but we are on the frontier this is the metaverse it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bank list experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the

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