How To Build A Web3 Gaming Empire With Jeff "Jihoz" Zirlin

Transcript

that could be a really immersive really fun gaming experience but that's only possible if they they share infrastructure NTS that had like pretty strong communities but the team wasn't shipping any what is a publisher stack like what does that entail welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing on today's show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at tholl up.co ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners Redstone is def's modular Oracle supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin

staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model join the Redstone exhibition today [Music] so so Jeff um I don't know if you remember our first podcast episode uh we we were defi slate in 2020 you you don't even freaking remember it this is what I mean and this was like actually had this was like June 2020 so actually like the token hadn't even ripped the ecosystem hadn't grown and as part of the podcast uh as as a a thank you you you gifted me a piece of axi land when ax was like I

don't even know man actually it was like 10 bucks damn I'm not even going to say what that got to or like what happened but that is our lore Jeff so welcome back to the rollup now from def5 Slate days we're live in Bangkok thanks thanks for joining yeah thanks for having me yeah it's it's been a pleasure to see you guys grow and kind of evolve into Ronin now which has got massive users um and just kind of that Evolution so big big congratulations and how are you feeling about Thailand and just you know the space as as a whole everyone's super bullish so I mean yeah I mean it's been quite a change in the last couple of weeks um it feels it really felt like uh momentum shifted and uh I think

there's a lot of reason to be optimistic The Vibes here in Bangkok are stupendous it's actually my first Devcon uh so I'm here exploring uh soaking things in and uh yeah it's been great good yeah and I think you know a lot of people are familiar with axi from kind of back in the day but maybe not I haven't really been keeping up with the times um despite the growth that you guys have had so maybe you could catch us up on you know how how things have been going in recent months and even a couple of last years it's a bit reminiscent of last cycle right where 2018 2019 even 2020 we were just heads down building uh you know made a lot of improvements and then blew up uh with as the cycle uh started to heat up that was 2021 I feel

like a similar thing has been happening uh where you know Ronin has gone Way Beyond axi right um we had a game called pixels hit 1.5 million da right they're generating I think $1.5 million a month in Revenue right so proving out that hey like this infrastructure works it worked for axi now it's working for the next generation of web 3 games so yeah you know it's been a lot of our focus is you know still maintaining and keeping updates to the axi universe uh a lot of like economic experiments um but also right B how do we build this web 3 publisher stack what are all the right considerations how do we help with distribution right um so yeah that's been a lot of what's consumed us what is

a publisher stack like what does that entail yeah so that's what we're looking to Define um generally in web 3 not just in gaming right you have a lot of technical Founders that need help with distribution right they can build but they're not super sure how to sell yet right uh so because we had this dormant right or relatively untapped player base in axi right that was already knew how to play web 3 games already had a web3 wallet downloaded um that's been proven out as like a good initial distribution channel for these game developers they can get their first 10K 20K uh you know their golden cohort of initial users and testers and right

basically then scale from there so yeah we help them with you know we help uh the games onrun in right with uh distribution we have 12 million emails we have 15 million Ronin wallet downloads we can send P notifications obviously like we have our channels right so a lot of it is that and then there's like the solutions engineering right like how do we improve our docs uh how do we make it so that deploying on Ronin making a game on Ronin is like more selfs serve and less like manual handholding yeah I think that's one of the big things Rob that we've been talking about right is like this building these infrastructure stacks and then being able to be a means of distribution for application Builders to come in CU like what do devs want right Dev want their their their stuff to be

used right like they want users they want real time activity and so one of the core things that Rob and I've been battling with is like this idea of right now a lot of the crypto ecosystem is like very like PVP in terms of fighting for a small pie whereas uh if we can go out and actually kind of build distribution channels to non- crypto native users and I think gaming is a really big example of this then you know we can we can basically focus on on a blue ocean rather than kind of fighting for what we have here and I feel like uh Ronin is a great example of this for new application Builders um like what what are some of the distribution strategies that you've seen that work or like when application Builders come to you game Builders they're like okay we want to

build on Ronin like what do they get the most excited about from the distribution side so we have very like we have this passionate Community uh in places like the Philippines Indonesia Vietnam Argentina Venezuela Brazil uh and we can activate that Community right for the different games that are coming on to Ronin so pixels uh when Luke uh the founder of pixels reached out to us it was like Hey a lot of our players are actually from your community uh we've seen that they're really good fits like we want to migrate our entire game over to Ronin because we know that the rest of the community is going to love this thing right so uh we also like we have all the tools that you need and they

just work right like we have an nft Marketplace we have a a we have a DEX we have a wallet all those are pretty vertically integrated amongst each other which creates this smoother uh user experience right so our you know experience we didn't initially want to build a blockchain a wallet everything right uh we deployed on ethereum um in 2018 right we were from the crypto kites Community we deployed axi Infinity on ethereum but we knew that we would have to think about long-term scaling right off the bat why because obviously crypto kites uh clog the entire network right but we didn't want to build that ourselves right so we explored things like Loom Network which is like an early like plasma solution it was kind of it was kind of on the right direction but

it was just too early you can't build your startup on top of another startup right so that's basically why we built Ronin like to build all the tools that we needed for uh building to scale axi and then right the idea was like hey we prove it out with axi then we can do it again we were starting to see that play Playbook unfold right the hypothesis was we could recreate that axi magic with other games uh using the same infrastructure and uh you know we have some indication that that's working through case studies like pixels yeah that that's exactly what happened um and what you know one of the things that kind of was most exciting to me when I was thinking about web 3 gaming was this idea of world's colliding there was actually like it's kind of a blast from the past but I used to watch like Fairly

Odd Parents and Jimmy Neutron and they did like this mashup episode dude that was wild and so there was like there was this Vision that for web through gaming where you can have a game over here and then you could have a game over there but if they if they you know are synergistic and composable like these D5 money Legos from from D5 summer that could be a really immersive really fun gaming experience but that's only possible if they they share infrastructure and and you know I guess the question here is like how how can we make that a reality what is kind of the infrastructure that is providing the network effects to pixel and and axi what are you know H how do those Network effects manifest in in today's terms all right so a network is a system that gets basically more valuable the

more connected it is right with each subsequent uh connection um and the idea right is that because this is a gaming Network right like every every subsequent user basically adds more value because that provides right more player liquidity the games actually get more fun to play as you as you have more people in the network right like axi originally the PVP card battle game right we thought of we thought of the use of incentives there because it was like Hey if we use incentives to get to a certain number of players this game is actually going to be more fun and that's basically that's what's happening on Ronin right like every successful game that launches comes brings net new people into into

the network and it makes it right uh an easier Road for like the next game that's supplying on Ronin right cuz you have a larger audience um so yeah you know I think in terms of like the inner op uh you know I actually see that in terms of like user acquisition right so pixels did this really well where they were integrating different pfps and nfts to use as your character skin in the game right so there wasn't much utility to be honest right uh it was more just like hey you can use your character in this game and that was a great top of funnel uh mechanism for them where right it's like you're let's imagine imagine you're holding this useless nft right

nothing is happened since 2022 all of a sudden uh this game says Hey like you can use that nft in this game as a skin you're going to check it out right uh so that was an interesting insight for me from the pixels team was they they said hey like the ones that are actually working out the best are not necessarily the most popular nfts uh it was more like the the nfts that had like pretty strong communities but the team wasn't shipping anything got it yeah I mean that's an interesting kind of uh dynamic between like reactivating uh dormant assets or just like dormant communities from different uh from different GE geographical locations or just different online organic communities and I think like one

thing that that Ronin has has done well is actually like get users like wow we have users on chain like not Bots like real users right and so you guys have some pretty impressive stats on your chain um and kind of those users are active on a daily and a monthly basis uh talk to us about kind of like what some of those stats are uh why those users are so kind of fervent on Ronin and kind of like how you guys have built Ronin to be very uh like like what other builders can learn from ronin's catering of their users and like how you guys have done such a good job of keeping those people on your chain yeah so uh the Ronin wallet has been downloaded over 12 million times uh Ronin has

around 950,000 daily active onchain addresses around 4 million monthly AC onchain addresses I think it's right by number of users the fifth most used chain right now sometimes it's number three it's fluctuating a bit um and yeah we've we've put a lot of focus on users uh I think a lot of platform and ecosystem Builders right they just try to build better Tech and then try to do good BD and and hope that uh people choose them right or they have to compete with large grants our approach is very different where I'm not saying it's easier or harder this is just the approach that was viable for us was hey we built our own killer game killer app proved it out uh Ed that used the chain

actually to to scale that out and then boom right like we have this proven uh case study we are our own uh dog fooding experiment and then uh you know we brought it out and it was like because we went through that process of building a game we knew right like what are the things that are important right we're able to prioritize uh what we actually built out for the chain right so we knew that hey a Wallace is going to be super important like uh some sort of nft marketplace a de and those were really like a lot of the core components that we had to build uh and we chose to prioritize um so yeah I think like we've gotten users because we're supremely practical uh we are the users uh of our own infrastructure as well um so I think like basically that

that really tight relationship between right like our game building prowess and our infrastructure prowess that's something that's pretty unique and uh I think has allowed us to prioritize uh the expansion of our ecosystem in the right way interesting I think like what's funny is that the the valuation today of crypto assets tied to the fundamentals is still like disconnected right so like uh Ronin being in the top five uh user based chain you would think that like there would be a extreme valuation premium directly correlated to Ron the asset uh how are you thinking about RW the asset as it persists in the Ronin chain and in that ecosystem um and and

kind of like what's the what's the way to think about run the asset as a as a core function of ronin for the community imagine if the world's GDP moved on chain guys say GM to safet the newest protocol by safe isn't a blockchain and it's not a new layer 2 it's a transaction processing Network built to send money anywhere and swap anything on thousands of layer twos from a single ival balance in sub 500 milliseconds it's fast it's smooth and it's simple and it's built with safe multisig level security in mind safet unlocks smart accounts across multiple chains allowing users to supercharge security scalability and speed so get started

today at net. safe. Global and remember to follow at safe onx welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for frax and fractal the new L2 out of the fra ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal is a modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through

its Evolution the FRX ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this frax L2 joins the existing Suite of frax products including fra Swap and frax lend you can see frax faery the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still

early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity yeah so R is a gas token uh you know uh is used for gas on Runing uh but we've also done some interesting things where we've kind of socialized core utilities right so for example we have a aex Unis uh Katana which is actually Unis swap V2 Fork right we'll upgrade that to V3 V4 moving forward but that Dex actually has the fee switch already enabled at 05% and that feeds fees into the treasury uh we have a similar mechanic with the nft marketplace on runin the Mavis Market where there's a uh 5% uh fee that goes into the runin treasury right so it's

used as gas um uh you can stake it uh to also validate transactions uh but we also have this like other I think unique aspect of it which is basically the socialization of core utilities um on the Ronin chain and that being another alternative source of of fees yeah when you know fundamentals are basically underrated right now uh to say the least uh that will not always be the case uh I believe that Bitcoin and memes had like some sort of a regulatory moat uh during the previous administration uh that will is now eroded and I think that Builders were very limited when it came to the ways

that they could consider adding utility uh to their tokens and things are about to open up a lot when it comes to experimentation um I believe that so last cycle we did a lot of experimentation with distribution of tokens right emissions of tokens farming air drops uh the whole nine yards play to earn is in my opinion just a novel uh reinterpretation of D5 farming mechanics in gaming 100% uh but so that was last cycle I believe that this cycle a lot of the experimentation and exciting new things will actually be uh around utility of tokens right buy back and burns uh new basically ways of uh creating uh uh D demand and this ties to

the mem coin Bitcoin thing right where it's like like okay meme coins people buy them cuz they don't have to fight the unlocks right so if you don't if you're very handheld uh if you're basically very restricted with the types of utility that you can explore for these uh utility tokens right like it's you're in the worst of Both Worlds right where you have unlocks but you are unable to actually give the token substantial utility right and that's shifting now basically yeah and that right so that's not where you guys are locked into right because you guys have this net this network of users um and there are uh effects that you can have with this gas token uh it doesn't have to be tied to fundamentals but you have the community right and so the idea is that um there's Community uh these

communities form these mimetic properties they rally around sort of like uh a certain set of Community Values and then that leads to kind of this mimetic value monetary premium thesis so I just want to what what what I want to ask is like how why do you think uh the community that is so vast on on Ronin hasn't quite uh like turned into monetary premium yeah right because you have the seed there right you have the community I'm sure this this community right it has values right but why have like what what is the the Gap that is getting crossed into monetary premium kind of like how how do we cross that Chasm yeah

I think I think there are a couple of updates that will help with that and you know tradition Al the Ronin Community has been a little bit isolated from the rest of the ethereum community we started out on ethereum and we've always kind of uh been exploring scaling right the basically the history of our block space I think is really interesting right first on ethereum then some partially on loom Network then right through the through the side chain uh so I think a couple of things first great Ronin is currently uh curated or like a permission chain right uh and there are a ton of builders that want to come on to our approach has been a little bit different where we want to we wanted to initially curate uh and have like very

high signal high quality uh games we felt like we could pick some winners then okay we learn a lot through that and then we scale that up because we don't want to scale up like a system that we don't understand how to uh H how it operates right so basically we'll be opening up the Ronin chain um for like permission list deployment um I think that'll be a huge Catalyst where okay a lot of new Builders will start exploring and introducing their uh respective user bases uh to the chain uh two is right like exploration of our long-term scaling strategy right so I I believe that uh Ronin is a bit discounted and when it comes to monetary premium because right now it's seen as

an ethereum evm side chain and but uh I I think that as we solidify our plans for long-term scaling right that will uh that's an opportunity right to become closer to the rest of the ethereum ecosystem right depending on uh what we choose right whether right now we're like uh working with the polygon cdkit uh for example right to basically uh deploy um zkm on top of ronin right so I think that's that's another uh Catalyst that we have uh up and cominging and I think third is just the narrative right like we've been focused on getting real users right so you can't do everything right uh we've been focused on getting users and uh adop and we prioritize that rather than

right just trying to Market to uh crypto whales and stuff like that right I think all it's our approach is more to to get users to get uh demonstrable traction uh and and to kind of go from there whereas I think a lot of projects right mainly focus on token marketing um and and that side of and that side of the coin uh whereas we you know we've seen that traction eventually uh manifests or turns into uh you know market cap yeah because you can monetize it you can do once you have that base that Foundation especially in this new regime as you kind of alluded to you can then build off that right whereas starting the the the other way you kind of put your the the wrong foot forward

first and so yeah and to your point earlier you guys have done a great job with retention and and so you guys have planted the seed you've gotten the community and and I I think it it's a more sustainable strategy yeah so as we kind of wrap up but my uh last question is uh around the the rise of axi infinity and kind of the key lessons that you learned from this m mic rise meteoric rise of of axi infinity as a as a community and as a gang like for other Founders who who will eventually watch this and experience hopefully exponential hockey stick growth themselves of community of token price a follower count of audience of of distribution what are some of the

lessons that you learned throughout that process on keeping your head straight building for the community and just kind of uh looking back on that well I'll take this opportunity to plug my ebook it's called the web three game and growth handbook I've gotten really great feedback on that kind of like a compilation of a lot of the lessons that we learned primarily on distribution right like I think everyone knows everyone is really good at like product development and Engineering in web3 and we're less systematic about growth uh so that's really what that book is about uh so you know for me uh a lot of it was like uh you know how to use token incentives uh for growth and also like some of the drawbacks of that how to specifically Target uh people uh and to have them join our ecosystem we used to

give out like targeted giveaways of axis to cryptokitties players to them to Central land right so uh how to Pivot into something that's uh trending right so uh last uh cycle or like in 2019 we realized hey like nobody cares about nfts but everyone loves dii uh so let's uh explore what we can do with like different def5 protocols right and that ended up uh oh having a lot of implication for right the birth of player earn which is basically just a combination of gaming and defi um so yeah you know I think like axi the axi community has a ton of shared experiences shared trauma over the years uh and you know I I think that's one of

the biggest lessons right is like that people are here to make connections um what you know of course people are here to right gain economic Financial Freedom for themselves um that's always going to be like some aspect of crypto of course but you know there is a ton of value in the communities and the memories that you're creating and you know we've had to think a lot about right like how do you create like uh almost like emotional uh or like yeah emotional value in your ecosystem that's not just like relying purely on incentives yeah well Jeff thank you so much much for joining us today coming out here I hope you have a great week in in Bangkok uh it's quite hectic so keep your head hunt straight

and uh thank you man yeah thanks for having me guys cheers