DeFi by Design EP#90: The Future of GameFi

Transcript

welcome to D5 by Design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and enrich it's your boy Andy and welcome back to the D5 site YouTube Channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what's going on guys welcome back to episode 90 of the D5 by Design podcast I'm repping the D5 slate merch today go and buy yours for 3 000 eth for one shirt at our store at d5state.com no I'm kidding um yeah we're here today in the midst of some chaos in the market in the world we've got FTX has just collapsed last couple weeks uh we are just in a absolute Matrix of of a world as you could call it but excited today to dive

into kind of a big topic of the previous kind of excitement in crypto which is play to earn game five and kind of bringing users into the blockchain web3 era uh through this kind of concept because I think there's a big big uh connection from that world and crypto and kind of bringing those together is going to be really interesting for the future of our of our user base so yeah Rob excited to chat more about gaming and uh anything else that we can come up with man how are you totally yeah doing well so I'm happy to be here happy to have Matt on the show today and uh chat about all things game five I think it's one of the things that you know uh has really uh that blockchain has really taken by storm and then there's a few

other pocket Industries but today we're going to focus on game five and uh all the benefits and improvements that this newest web 3 you know Nar that's the narrative but all the the technology and benefits underneath the Hood um Can it can improve the GameFly industry and really like take it to the next level so our expert of the day in the room here is Matt of decentral games and I am happy to pass it over to him and uh let us kick it off so how you doing today Matt doing great guys calling in from Sunny London uh you know it's uh always bright and sunny over here uh things are good in spite of the what seems like continued chaos of the the crypto markets right now but

you know we're fortunate enough at least like personally and as a as a company uh we we haven't been directly impacted with the latest Saga of crashes um so Silver Lining at least that um yeah we're kind of heads down over here nice so to start off do you like the term of game five or do you think it's like cheesy and corny and not accurate or do you think it's good you know I I try not to get too hung up on terminology I think it's certainly been very accurate for kind of the the subset of web 3 that we're kind of discussing right because it has very

much been I think especially last year it was a bit more Phi than game uh and I think a lot of the early games that came into the space that were just really focused on I guess driving as much attention as possible through crazy rewards were basically just D5 protocols right with like Graphics in front of them that made it look like a game and uh that kind of has shifted out a little bit but yeah I think it makes sense because especially when we have D5 GameFly social fire which is probably going to be another big kind of trend that we talk through in a few other

areas it it's easy to section it out how different do you think and I'm gonna I'm gonna add some kind of color around this question but generally how how different do you think Defy is from GameFly and the the kind of like context of that question I is kind of like this philosophy that Finance is a game in a sense and I'm curious if you agree with that and like if we if we kind of find common ground that like Finance is a game you know are there winners and losers and then like kind of like what what is the objective of this game yeah so I to a certain degree I uh I

agree um but I think one of the the challenges with that a lot of like game five projects face coming kind of into this new space is they obsessed a bit too much on like the financialization of of gaming right gaming is gaming and if you want to attract the mainstream into gaming like the financialization of games is not the path to forward to doing that in my opinion I think that can be one additional layer but there's so much more value that can be created on top of existing gaming infrastructure

outside of just purely like Financial incentives I think the conversation naturally leans towards that because we look at yeah like a lot of the the most recognized names in the early early stages of play to um the axes of the world the steppens of the world right and like in all fairness even decentral games like we launched in October of uh 2021 in amongst the frenzy and I'd be lying if I said that we didn't lean really heavily in at the beginning to the financial incentives it was incredibly powerful for bootstrapping player liquidity but utterly

unsustainable to have as a long-term kind of piece of value so I think it can get lost in amongst that a little bit so I do think certainly now and in the past six months we have seen this Breakaway from game Phi and D5 and they're starting to decouple a little bit and be a bit more distinct prior to that yeah they were kind of one and the same and there was very few interactions like people were grinding for financial rewards inside the game and that was it that can exist but you know that is it very extractive and when you're trying to build a game economy

there has to be like inputs as well as outputs and I think in defy you know you can have value extraction but in many many cases there's always inputs like the challenge often comes with like over leverage and things like that when that creates like additional extraction in game like building game economies they're so much more fragile and smaller and um I think that they're more prone to like larger swings one way or the other so you know that there's elements here it's it's an economy that you're kind of building both within like a D5 protocol and a GameFly uh protocol but they are very different types of economy right

that you're that you're trying to focus on building yeah the the financialization of games I I see kind of the picture of painting how they become kind of further away from what a game is really meant to be and I think there's plenty of to to unpack and you mentioned player liquidity like I'm definitely still like keen on kind of diving into what that means and before we do maybe we can just touch on like the flip side of the financialization of games taking it from from the angle of instead the gamification of Finance because we kind of had Finance we had games and they started to converge in this like web3 like ecosystem by the

games getting financialized and the finance getting gamified so do you like do you see that convergence kind of playing out over time where they get like the the line between financing games kind of continues to get blurred or like for the sake of games and for the sake of Finance should those continue to run in parallel um so so I'll actually start with I think the gamification of Finance is a net negative for for kind of like the world um I I think that it can lead to really bad outcomes some of which we've seen play out this year

um but like if we look at Finance there's there's two sides to this right where it's like accessibility increases um but then openness to risk and understanding of risk also like increases prior to a lot of defy I think earlier crypto was like the very early gateway drug into like open finance where it's like okay before I had to and even when I was like at the start of my career like buying stocks was not easy right like when I remember when I bought Facebook stock at the IPO and like I still had to go through like a broker

and it was like a pain in the ass like and that's not a long time ago and now you know pretty much like every app you can just quickly download it's like bang Let's Go Robin Hood whatever even Banks like I like I can hop into Revel in my stocks right it's just like you know it's super easy but there was this friction that came prior to that that was really annoying and like excluded big chunks of the kind of like general population but it also created these like layers of friction that basically like in some cases was good friction because people had to really think through their financial decisions and while like that's not always the best way to curb

some of this I think we went like one level further I think Robin Hood is like the perf like the poster the poster child for for this and they really did lead the way in opening up stock and Equity investing to in particular uh like the Gen Z kind of uh and and Beyond like cohort of of individuals and just kind of made it as easy as kind of venmoing someone's cash and it became synonymous like investing in equities is something that pretty much anyone that's in like college right now is probably doing that isn't really what was happening even 10 years ago so then kind of like prior to that you had like

Bitcoin and eth and at the time like Litecoin and a few other smaller kind of tokens where it's like whoa all of a sudden I can just buy these assets and sell them they're really liquid and there was still a few hurdles that you had to go through and then the Ico boom happened in 2017 and then we kind of came into this like divide again where a load of these icos were like oh you have to be an accredited investor to be able to invest in them and these ones you don't and then it was like oh okay this is friction and then D5 just leveled it and just went okay not only can you now buy equities online ever right nice and easy through Robin Hood or just by basic like Network tokens

oh you can you can borrow you can play in Futures Trading and like more complex derivatives you can leverage trade like things take into crazy and it's like in many cases not only do you not even need to be 18 right like there are basically no levels of friction so then it gets kind of like all right access is lower education on like these Primitives are really low and then we start gamifying things and then it gets really dangerous because people are like oh it's kind of like a a game it's like you hear the stories where like people have spent like thousands of dollars on like Candy Crush because they were just like ah just a game like I didn't realize right and you know that's not always a good thing

especially when people don't realize they're doing it so I think that can be it's like my very long-winded way of saying like I think what it does come with a lot of this with gamification and the blend of finance and gaming is a lot of Education that needs to come for individuals and I think that the nft boom that came near the end of last year in particular that coincide with gaming a lot of people had to kind of learn things the hard way and it was like two one of two camps people that actually really wanted to play games which were in the minority at that point and people that wanted to speculate on the uh non-fungible assets and they were the minority sorry the majority and now it's

kind of like leveling out and you know there's less speculation and it's much more about okay how do we actually just go in and create really interesting games people want to play and then put the focus much more on okay and you can have ownership of these assets I think we're just starting to uncover what that actually presents in terms of value but I still think it's very much untapped and there isn't a lot of like understanding of what it truly means to kind of own assets from a value perspective yeah and I think you've raised a good point about the speculative nature of the entire world in terms of just kind of the the adoption of these apps like Robin Hood like crypto

um you know they're definitely in that I read uh this book called devil take the hint notes definitely in like the later stages of like an overall speculative kind of um environment where a lot where men women and children are all investing in trading and you know we kind of saw that boom which is interesting because crypto was has has fed off of that and you make a point that kind of the financialization of nfts as well as gaming uh you know and just kind of making your finances as part of of a game which kind of we saw with D5 food farms and then games and nfts it didn't really end that great for a lot of people right you know all of us for the majority of people as well on a lot yeah

like all all three of us I'm sure got burned plenty of times right so it's like yeah yeah yeah so I mean we're now I think we're starting to see a shift though now which is that nfts and I read a tweet about this and I really agreed with is it and nfts now I believe are not so much for the ability to make money off of them because there's no liquidity there no one's flipping nfts anymore there's no buy this and mint this and I mean there's it's few and far between now it's kind of about history Community uh and kind of being a part of of this group right like owning a crypto Punk first nft owning an eight right cool um penguin's cool right there's all these different types that are now like I think truly starting to enter that

collectible era um and I think this is a this kind of segues into me or into this thought uh that I have for you which is do you think that kind of bringing uh games uh to the masses in the blockchain world um is going to kind of be this different era of of onboarding where it's not so much about the money but inside of these games there's Collectibles and there's these own token economies that may potentially uh exist and Thrive without the actual Market the price of Bitcoin or ether or the S P rather the actual supply and demand of Gamers and needs of different types of in-game assets right I'm curious what you think about kind of onboarding people into these economies

that are almost silos of the broader crypto or blockchain World um and less so dependent on it um if you will for uh a financial need but kind of or just part of their own little world yeah well I I think you touch on an important point which is kind of game economies like they need to be able to be self-sustaining and actually this this is something that's happened way before web3 right like there are many many examples of game economies that have some form of in-game currency and that can take many different forms and there needs to be balance with that the outcomes of

imbalance can be very very different because like at uh an economy uh kind of crashing I think obviously the most uh famous example of like a web 2 more close to a web 3 economy um of recent years is things like second life right where they had what like the London Dollar in there and it was like I mean it was artificially kind of floated in many cases but it was like operating like a cryptocurrency in many cases and I think that for gaming though you mentioned for a lot of the nfts right now like punks Apes Penguins et cetera Etc right what this is this is about is there's one level here that's

speculation the speculation only comes when there's like intrinsic value placed on those assets and where that intrinsic value comes from is like ultimately feeling a sense of status and community in amongst this I think gaming is like one of the best examples of where this happens because if you look at the evolution of games right there's just been like some of like the core fundamentals of games have remained all the way through from like early console days but we've just added these additional layers of value on top of the game experience that's largely come through technological developments right so you start with like basic console gaming and it's like okay me versus the computer right I'm like okay like

whether it's like Mario on the NES I'm just playing basically against a simulation and then as like gaming got a little bit better and like the the original PlayStation came in it was like whoa Graphics stepping up computer AI is getting a lot better this stuff's getting really tough if you're playing like metal gear solid and it's like I'm just getting wrecked right but I'm not playing against other people until oh all of a sudden I've got like my buddy comes to my house and we're playing together uh like uh with uh kind of game pads then kind of something started happening where you've got all right things started in their very early stages going portable right game boy came to the scene and it was like okay now we've got Pokemon we can go and there was this very early stage where

it's like I can connect this game boy to another game boy with this like really janky like uh cable and we can like trade Pokemon and like this is in-game assets right and like you through trading you could generate new Pokemon you know that's like minting and breeding like these these are all of the basic premises that came through Tech developments and then came broadband internet connections and it was like holy [ __ ] now we're a level where we can play online multiplayer and massive online multiplayer and what the the level of value that came on top of that because you've already got the piece around I've got these in-game assets right I've got these like valuable

Pokemon from Game Boy right I've got these high scores all the way back from like arcade levels and then um uh in like World of Warcraft and Etc I've got these like really rare assets that I that I own now I can compete with other people competition's always been there though at a at a bigger scale but now it's a community right it's like I have a social layer to this where not only do I care about competing in the game but I care about like the social aspect I can meet people I can chat to people it's still kind of like confined but when that kind of game dies down in popularity well so does the community and the uh and the social aspect and ultimately

like game developers could just go boom we're we're cutting off the the game right it's like ah bummer right like all of my game assets gone and I gotta like go buy the new version and start again damn that that's really shitty for me right web3 comes in right and and we're still in the very very early stage of this to take everything that's happened before and we say okay and now you're going to have this like massive online experience but not only that you're going to own the Assets in this game and people like uh cool I guess but why and I think this is where there hasn't been enough of an application but it's going to become much much more is this interoperability and portability okay I take these assets

I take them out of the game and I can bring them into another game right or I have assets that don't belong in this game I have a punk right and I and I love that and I know that a bunch of other punks are playing in this game ecosystem I go in and I can use my punk in that game ecosystem it has utility all of a sudden I'm not only like having a new experience across different ecosystems different games different metaverse platforms different social fight experiences as well all of these pieces start connect together so that it kind of doesn't really matter and I start to change the direction of my experience across a whole host of different platforms and then when you kind of think about how that really changes the social experience you can

build your own experiences in there it doesn't need to extend just games right this is like okay now I can kind of get access to events offline online I can maybe have like physical items that are able to be redeemed as a result of holding these assets and it just kind of like starts beginning to create a whole new layer that actually is just not possible with web2 like this is not possible to do with web 2 not just from an incentive perspective from a tech perspective and that is the value proposition we're still quite a way away from truly delivering on this but I think this is going to be like the most common thing like today the closest thing we have to

this is um the you know you you'll have your Twitter profile and you'll sign in to different apps with Twitter we don't really think about that right but that is like interoperability that's portability I'm taking my profile and I'm using all of like the information in that profile to create new entry points into different platforms ecosystems games check out the lot this will begin to happen on an asset by asset level and uh we'll start to see people getting very very creative where today game development begins with kind of like the game the story The Narrative and then you build the assets within it whereas like this is going to get interned inside out and there's going to be

popular games that appear that are kind of fun for a while and you know most games have like a two-year life's lifespan anyway and then those assets people are like ah I guess we'll build new games and new experiences around these existing assets and they continue their life and that Community persists and grows and evolves bigger I know I've been like rambling on for a while but like I think this is like the story in my mind for the future of where game fire web3 gaming goes to and why I think it's so valuable uh long term yeah it hits on a good point about Community too and I'll I'll I'll let Rob give his his input as well here that Community is is so available uh via nfts

and Via these um Assets in games and the ability to cooperate uh for outcomes that are beneficial right we've seen like multiplayer games already absolutely blow up in terms of like user cooperation but if you can add on a different level of either a financial incentive or kind of a overall Better Community incentive through nfts Collectibles um things like this you kind of take the traditional era of gaming and you add another layer to it which really boosts the community aspect which I'm definitely excited about overall um yeah Rob yeah I just I think as those worlds start to collide in terms of

interoperability where this Twitter profile is now you know used to log in and all that information is ported into another another uh like application World um when those start to form into token economies those like tokenized worlds start to collide and as they do the the biodiversity of the internet starts to starts to expand where now we have like a Twitter profile interacting with like the Google profile and that's completely web too but then you have a Twitter profile interacting with you know a a crypto Punk nft and now that spawns like a whole new set of applications and functionality that is born from the combination of a punk and a Twitter

profile and you know we have like some of the biggest web too like most prominent web 2 companies starting to in uh include wallets into their applications Instagram right is now like letting you like connect your Rainbow wallet and kind of like hold nfts in your in your Instagram account and as like the portability of I think that's a great word because it just kind of shows how mobile like these oh these assets are and now they're also irrevocable where even if the game shuts down like they're not taking those assets from you and telling you to upgrade and then start all over you just you just take those assets from your one application not only can you take them to a new

version of that application and continue to hang on to them you can take them to an entirely different application combine them with the assets of that world and now you have the diversity between the original World the new one that you're combining it into and then you can start to do that across you know magnitudes more of applications Beyond two you can do that to three or four or five applications take you know the the punk or the punk plus a penguin take those over to Twitter take those over to Instagram and now there's like so many combinations of multiple different worlds as they start to collide there's you know greater possibilities and uh there's greater levels of social coordination that can arise from combining uh multiple different communities

I agree and you know I think uh that this this piece around just everything starting from like the assets is is a lot for any regular gamer that's a non crypto native to first of all get their head around and also like for most people to even see the value in today because I think like the the world we're going to live in over the next 10 years can change dramatically and I think with the past 10 years that we've seen an accelerated rate of growth when it comes to Peck in particular on consumer Tech but most notably the way that we socialize online

um has has changed enormous amounts probably more so I'd argue in the past 10 years than the previous 50. and it's it's really kind of changed a lot about like the way Society in in general like likes to spend their time and communicate with with one another with with gaming um and thinking about how we get to this point of like having portability and everything can be like switched across different platforms and combined together like this is this is the goal one of the big roadblocks right now and I want to come back to the whole wallet piece by the way because I think that's a whole thing to unpack but one of the big robots right now is everyone's building walled Gardens right

like the irony of like decentralization and being like at the Forefront of a lot of not just my three-bit crypto is the astonishing amount of like walled garments that are being created that aren't like interoperable or like collaborative first you have the race for the metaverse being the prime example of this like of course like meta and Co want to create another wall guard and that's kind of expected but even like open metaverses decentraland versus the sandbox right versus even like Other Side by Buddhist they're all building on their own game engines they're not actively looking to support like interoperability between the two most games right now that are being

built on web3 are building on their own kind of private game engines uh in like a closed loop environment and sure like some of this stuff can be taken out and built and placed elsewhere but it gets tougher and tougher when things aren't built with this in mind to begin with um so I think that's going to change a little bit and it's going to kind of blow up um and I think next year what a lot of companies and those in the gaming space and also in the regular consumer Tech space one of the big narratives I think we're going to be talking a lot about is owning the whole wallet stack um there's a lot that's kind of happening here and like the wallet is a huge point of friction for onboarding

even web 3 users like wallets suck like they're the absolute worst like I think we've like grown accustomed to using things like metamask and stuff but if you actually take a step back it is horrendous experience like especially if you're even using like a hardware wallet stuff like that like to to get that out like mobile experience is basically non-existent right and what we're starting to see is okay like traditional Tech uh and big play some space Reddit being a great example building their own kind of fully managed wallets in their like Reddit Vault this the data that they have within that is incredibly powerful and owning like the

full wallet stack versus just integrating like other wallet providers is pretty valuable when it comes to having more and more data to be able to use especially if you're building games and or D5 protocols right so I think this will be talked about a lot but one of the first handles that needs to be overcome outside of the interoperability piece is just how do we get more of the uh more Gamers into games by removing the hurdles of onboarding because it's high friction process right now yeah wallets are a big thing I mean that's why FTX was such a disaster man is because

it's just such a process to do self-custody still um yeah it's just a pain I mean the best solution that we've came up with is uh multi-cigs that are uh you know easy to kind of maintain but even those are just a pain to do confirms and like um kind of figure out how to have the right amount of signers and and all that and the hot wallets are just freaking not safe and then centralized exchanges who knows so it's like man so yeah definitely custody in but from an onboarding perspective the custody and the and the wall experience is more of like a making the interface easier to understand so somehow making the the kind of onboarding experience

similar to that of a fintech app right I think it would be kind of kind of a in a big step forward by the way congrats on the second anniversary of uh decentral games it's uh saw the Tweet here looks good yeah um definitely down to talk about that so how are we uh how are you guys framing your application and game kind of for the onboarding of crypto users as well as kind of folks who are who are new to the space who are just either poker players or Gamers yeah so what are this like interesting intersection right of like crypto and poker which surprise surprise quite a big quite a big like overlap in the Venn diagram there uh so

we for for anyone kind of watching and listening that uh isn't familiar with what we do at the central games we have a flagship kind of game which is ice poker which is a kind of free to play uh poker game similar to like a Zynga poker of the traditional world where you're not actually like bit like playing cash games and betting um but it has like a full game economy around it we're built initially inside the central ad we account for the majority of decentraline traffic around about 60 um and then we also have a separate web app uh that is like our tournament mode kind of game and

so on one hand right like one of the things that one of the reasons why we built our own kind of web app and eventually will have like a native app once the whole industry figures out how the hell we deal with the Apple situation right but uh we we realize you know onboarding is really really difficult onboarding people into a 3D metaverse is close to Impossible yet we somehow managed to get like uh at our Peak like tens of thousands of daily active users which is a huge achievement in itself like we nearly broke decentral end and like we realized to kind of scale and we needed something separate that pulls in areas of like decentraland but um we need to make this wallet

experience better and you know the kind of the cliche of like the bear Market being time to build has actually been somewhat of a godsend for for us because we have been just heads down double down without distraction on solving for this so okay how do we like take out just like start with supporting as many wallets as possible I think next week we're about to launch a fully full integration with like web 3 off where we kind of have our own like custom wallet solution credit card check out as soon as you go in so you can hop in buy an NFP go through and like our nfts are like they'll give you access to tournament stuff it's like five bucks but buying that in our native token is a pain in the ass right like we're on

polygons you've got a bridged polygon like the moment I even have to say that web2 users around right it's like most web3 users are uh we've been integrating um with a great platform called Bridge uh b-r-y-d-g-e I have no affiliation by the way to any of these uh products that I mentioned uh but it kind of manages like end-to-end bridging in like a really simple way so again we can get people easily to get the assets they need to start playing the game so they don't spend 90 of our time explaining crypto and 10 the game and that's like it can be like the other way around and if anything could be like three or four percent crypto and the recipe about the game um so that's been kind of like our big focus is just like how do we cut down

these steps how do we not make people have to think about and worry about a wallet um and introduce like self-custody maybe even a little later down the line for people because yeah the reality is most people don't even want self-custody like it's a burden yes it's great but the experience really sucks right now and as someone that kind of like bought their first crypto in like the end of 2016 start 2017 it hasn't got any better if anything I preferred when I used to just use paper wallets like it was a bit easier right like I used to just be worried that this piece of paper would like set on fire or something but you know now I'm just like consistently worried that like my metamask is getting like scammed I'm gonna come into like

fishing stuff even with my ledger Ledger gets hacked and gives away my email address and address which is great uh you know it's like it's just horrendous so it's just like no good thing you try to explain that to like everyday person there's a reason why we use Banks is because having cash under the mattress is a [ __ ] nightmare right so I think like we we need to kind of get more progress on this uh on this side of things and the wallet needs to just sink into the background and so people can focus on the actual thing they want to do and not clicking like a million confirmation messages and trying to get their like pin numbering correctly into the hardware wallet and everything like

all day and you've got like a repetitive strain injury from like clicking right on your Ledger until you hit approve right so it's like you know these kind of things need to just go uh basically uh so we're trying to like work within the Realms of what's possible but building towards that uh kind of moving forward yeah it's kind of like we got ahead of ourselves with web3 trying to do like all this like even like sign in with ens sign in with ethereum was a narrative going there for a while and we just didn't even Master like the web two and a half like sign into this web three game with Twitter or Google or Apple and like those are like the the wallet options if you will with the most users and and they have like the most accounts

so it's just most natural for a user to step into a web 3 Type game with one of these pre-existing uh sign-in options um agreed yeah just go ask a puma to um like for the first time use Apple pay and then you will see which is in my opinion one of the most beautifully designed simple but complex products that exists it's like the biggest no-brainer you'll ever have to use Apple pay I like for years now I have just never used a wallet I just don't I don't own a wallet really that I take with me anywhere I should have my phone every the rest of my life like my parents cannot fathom the fact that this happened and you know like when you go and you actually just take a little refresher

and say for someone that's not used it that isn't kind of from like at least a millennial era like getting them set up on Apple pay like then you realize imagine trying to have them custody assets like my like my parents like have that like Bank details written on pieces of paper that they're like in like the most ridiculous settings like I hate to think how they would manage private keys so you know there's a long way to go uh basically yeah it seems like there's kind of two paths available um there's like the uh like you know right now we are kind of like it went web two and a half people don't really want self-custody they don't really realize kind of like what the pitfalls of like just Twitter logins and and like

having you know uh digital assets owned as part of like that Twitter or Facebook account like kind of the potential damage that could cause but we're still kind of in that Mo that that phase where people are still like you know accepting of that because they want to try a game so we're in like that web two and a half stage it seems and then and then to get from web two and a half to web three where like that it is truly self-custody someone has you know private Key Management of some sort there's either gonna be the social recovery way of like that's kind of the way to manage Keys through social recovery you know delegation and and um kind of like uh backstops of uh losing any passwords or keys and then an alternative path maybe

it takes solving that Apple kind of like uh like friction as well where there's like built-in native uh like wallet ownership into the physical Hardware and just like you know Apple pay is just built into to Apple with you know just double click the sign button you know maybe triple click the side button and you have access to like your your digital assets rather than your Fiat assets and that private Key Management is just stored right locally in the machine and you know maybe if you you know it's maybe a combination of the social recovery and the hardware wallet I know Solana you know has like a its own phone that it's launching yeah um and it seems like maybe those are two

paths to uh kind of mass adoption of self-custody maybe you see a combination of those and and others that can ultimately bring the masses onto like web3 applications securely safely so that they have ease of access and it's a smooth user experience yeah I I think you know we're talking a little bit earlier about evolution of gaming right and like the introduction of new technologies that kind of came into into play to actually like have like big kind of unlocks along the way um I think this is another another case where where this is going to be pretty

prominent um for sure uh I it's uh I just think that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done for us to get kind of close to this to to be honest yeah it's a long and winding path you know web two and a half really kind of only on the the the the pretense of it you know we're still not even able to sign into most web free games with Twitter or apple or or some web 2 login so the idea of self-custody and you know locally stored wallets I I think is Maybe I mean probably years you know if not if not longer on the down the line I think that we're gonna see

um so I think what cilantro doing while I actually think that the Solana phone will fail um this is like my opinion I actually I put a deposit down on them just for like the history of owning one of them which will be hilarious I think similar to my purchase of the Snapchat spectacles which I I also thought was a hilarious purchase at the time but like these paved the way towards new patterns in like what becomes normal um there's very few examples over time where there's been like just just one like first mover has actually like completely Innovative and take it Forward I think like probably the only example of that that I would say has

happened of modern times has been the iPhone and pretty much everything else is not been the case it's been like the things that are followed after and people have slowly developed a pattern towards kind of getting there and I think this will be the case with what I've kind of like prehensis like almost like decentralized phones or like blockchain ready phones I don't think we're going to call it that I think it's just going to become more natural I also think that more banks will in this like 10-year time Horizon we will start to see digital assets being held within your native bank account which like you know the irony of that is obviously not lost on me uh but most people will prefer it right we're going to see huge waves over the past over the next five

years of Central Bank digital currencies which are going to pave the way for net like government-backed digital currencies and there's a lot of bad stuff that comes with that there are also some good things that that come with that but I think like the banking infrastructure is going to eventually have to embrace digital currencies uh does that mean you're going to be able to have Bitcoin in there I don't know but like you know you're gonna be able to have something I think when that starts happened that gets in the wallet that gets into your your phone or whatever other devices we're using at that point and I think this like an underlying theme of like additional Tech that's going to kind of take place we're also going to see huge developments in augmented and mixed reality I'm kind of

less bullish on VR but like I think that VR is going to play a big role um in the in the future but I think AR is going to be a bigger piece all of this kind of together plays really nicely into not just like The Narrative of crypto blockchain attack being like proliferating but in particular like the gaming layer on top of that being a massive subset yeah most definitely and it brings in that that uh that ease of use which is the big the kind of the big drawdown of uh of a lot of games now and like you said bringing the credit card um ability right bringing in as much kind of that to make you guys web 2.5 if you will as possible which allows you to

eventually have the user base and the technology to basically help teach these people and and shift people who are already invested into things uh in a time in a financial sense then kind of show them the next steps right so it's much easier to get people from there to the next step than from zero to one um I'm curious kind of how you guys are specifically on decentral games like how you guys are incentivizing users now um you know with I know that you mentioned there's less Financial incentive in terms of probably like liquidity liquidity rewards and things um but you know how are you guys doing that and also you guys have done a good job of of like keeping things active throughout this time it'll actually probably one of the top if not top one

or two or three games that have actually kept users and kept activity going on chain so curious about kind of what why do you think that's been happening and also how I guess they they kind of go hand in hand how are you incentivizing these users and and yeah yeah I mean I I think so there's been a lot of things that we've done that have been really critical to Our Success some of those we did on purpose some of those we've got lucky with right and then there's been many things that we did that we look back on and we say damn regret doing that a little bit but then there's been like you know the the good side to that in the short term and then the bad side to that you know these are all very intermingled I think the first

piece right is we came in in the absolute like hysteria of the then play to earn kind of frenzy in last October we launched uh our game so we've been operating for a long time prior to this building uh game experience and yeah it was just a Feeding Frenzy right at the time and we look back on it and we say okay well we we probably shouldn't have went so wild with token incentives at the same time yeah you know it's one of the reasons why we got so much attention very early on and it was enormously powerful for building like the nucleus of the community but we realized that you know

we had to shed our skin a little bit there because there was a huge amount of people effectively just there for just the rewards a huge amount of value extraction happening so when the bear Market started to come in you know you really feel that so that was one of the bad things we did but also had fortunate elements at the beginning one of the really good things we did which I don't think we realized quite how important this was but we were definitely conscious of it is we did not do the whole like breeding of nfts that just basically like hyper-inflated the supply and ultimately the emissions of of tokens so we had a completely fixed Supply so all we ever did was like primary mints where we would like introduce smaller amounts of Supply at a

time um whereas I think when you look at the likes of stepper and axi they just stepped into hyperinflation the only way that they could sustain it was through the Ponzi of new users coming in right like that was it so we kind of shut things down a little early supply three backs on some of the rewards and then we'll be completely shifted near uh the second quarter of this year was a whole new reward system the reward system instead of just kind of like people could come in play for free like borrow one of the nft wearables and play and earn real rewards cash out right like the the money printer we we instituted this kind of like idea of like you play and accrue effectively like points in a

in a balance then you could redeem for in-game assets right and it's much more about like playing to earn Collectibles which have a value in themselves and can be traded if you want or you can then use those to earn like smaller rewards but you have to like be actively participating in and burning in the game also in our games right like you have like one piece of this which is that then you have a tournament mode which is like completely EV negative like that can actually scale infinitum right and it's like actually creates massive deflationary effects across our entire like token economy so we have like a very rare piece in this where it's like actually very sustainable economics incredibly rare in in GameFly that's

people talk about that and you know we've talked about in the past like it's a really really big thing you know let's let's cut the crap it's the bare minimum like you basic this binary you either have that and you can go on to do something on top of that or you don't have it and you're gonna die it's just a matter of when right so the next layer on top of this is where I think a lot of games uh are trying to like do stuff which I applaud right it's like AAA game studios building these like incredible like um like RPGs and like amazing like games that are trying to compete with point two these went through game elements is crazy difficult to build a triple a game like that is just a runaway success like for everyone Fortnight that's like

500 000 like that die if probably Millions to be honest right so that's really difficult really expensive really complex we're not AAA game studio right we have a team that's built out of experienced game designers manifest developers and engineers uh obviously like web3 and crypto experts and poker experts and we've taken a game that people know and love and we're bringing in a new experience a new format with that additional value layout that I talked about on top of it that is what kind of keeps people involved and enjoys like this game that we can keep building on and iterating on and our Focus has been so much less on

like just pure rewards and actually like building out really interesting gamification into the game like the community really care about like the standings they can earn a piece our governance is surprisingly active and has remained very active they like we have a full Dow with a treasury that we fund a lot of our development through uh we're one of the largest land holders inside the central end even at kind of the current market value of like treasury assets I think we've got close to 20 million in our treasury right now we have Runway uh to to last us through their Market um and we generate protocol Revenue okay like you know we're gonna probably do somewhere between like three 3.5 million dollars this year in just like protocol

Revenue right most games aren't doing that and uh you can see that on token terminal like completely transparently we have external Revenue through manifest advertising we've Diversified Revenue we have like the third largest polygon validator node we have an eth validator node right like we have like in-game like spend of course which is huge for the internal kind of non-inflationary like token Burns things like that it's a very Diversified kind of set of revenue streams that we're creating that mean this is not just sustainable from oh like token inflation but actually as a game Studio an ecosystem a dow well all of this together I think that's

a piece of why we've been able to keep the momentum behind kind of what we're doing epic well thank you for the explanation and uh wishing you the best for growth in the coming months and years as well as we kind of push forward into uh new times with the market and just pushing forward uh with the the tech so definitely going to have our community check you guys out on Discord Twitter uh get involved on the website can jump in and start playing instantly just in the browser um so yeah thanks for coming on and uh it was a it was a pleasure Matt now I pledge was all mine guys thanks Rob thanks Andy and uh yeah I'll uh I'm sure I'll be seeing you in the wonderful world of crypto Twitter cheers Matt cheers