How Parallel is reinventing gaming with blockchain and AI

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that blockchain gaming is going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to constantly build and invest in web 3. there's been a lot of hype around parallel as of late which is one of the bigger I guess web3 not one of the biggest web 3 games but one of the most like well known I think at the moment just especially going through the media Etc and this episode did not disappoint it was learning about what parallel's done one is just like refreshing to see

someone build and execute on what they said they're going to build and just like consistently do this in an open transparent but also just like ship and ship and ship and ship and they've just done an incredible job so far and they're really like carving a path on you know how to build a Webster game um so really cool there we get into their next game that they're building called colony which is just the most mind-blowing thing ever which is including nfts and blockchain but also Ai and this you'll see if you're watching on YouTube anyway you'll see mine and Jay's eyes just go huge and we're just like whoa what are you building right now so this was a mind-blowing episode from all angles everything just so impressive yeah you gotta stick around to the end to learn

about colony because the way they are building a game where you can interact and influence an AI Avatar that then acts autonomously from you so you play it your AI Avatar is playing the game without you and earning and creating digital assets that are built on chain and then selling and buying those I mean it's just wild to hear these stories of what is happening in this game which is really creating a potentially an entirely new category for gaming and kelosh talks about his mission there and why he believes that and how his sort of upbringing playing

games led him to this point and the whole team yeah just an unbelievable episode and really a great example of a few things one how do you build in order to bring not just web 3 people into an ecosystem in a game but also normies colors talks about how they're doing that so you don't need to use blockchain in order to play this game but then you can use blockchain and what the way you present blockchain to people is the key of what makes that decision point of whether they want to take that next step and he talks about how they do that it's really clever and really creative and that it'll it will give you that inflection point of oh I could have made

money if I was doing this or I could have owned assets in this game which I could then buy or sell or trade like very very powerful the way that they're building this and also just amazing because as Kai said hot you know really like one of the hottest brands in web 3 right now but still in closed beta so yeah I mean over 200 000 on the wait list currently investment from you know Paradigm investment from the founder of YouTube like it's a big deal what parallel is doing and um and obviously the community since they've launched they're in beta right now but those who are applying it and are using it are like this game is amazing so they've just done an incredible job all across the board and so this episode was well

how do they do it what are they doing what tech stack are they building on what are the limitations that they've had what are they expecting in the future so it was like if you are in the gaming world if you're building in gaming but also just if you're building on blockchain this is just an incredible episode to just like from a Founder who's doing it and still doing it uh who's done it and still doing it it's um there's just a lot of good insights I think from from how he's building parallel and Keller's background is so strong that as you mentioned it's not his first startup you know he spent 11 years in Trad Phi working at TD Bank Kai one of Canada's largest banks he also spent many years in consumer mobile tech he was the CEO of buns which you

probably don't know buns if you're outside of I don't even know if Bud's outside of Canada but basically a leading Online Marketplace for buying selling and trading Goods in the physical world so he has this really strong background in consumer Tech and he talks about how he has transferred that knowledge over to parallel and as you mentioned Kai they raised 50 million dollars from Paradigm at a 500 million dollar evaluation two years ago I can only imagine where they're at now and where they're going to go with their next raise you know we're talking about one of you know one of the this businesses in the space that really has the potential to onboard a lot of people and to be you know you're guessing a

billion why didn't you know I didn't he got nervous you got I got nervous I got scared I got scared onboarding a billion is not easy man this episode's gonna teach you how so make sure you check it all out and then stick around by the end to just be completely mind-blown about the thing they're building that's gonna onboard eight billion people uh but before we do that let's take a second to hear from our sponsors modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to

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Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early GM Carlos welcome to web3 Academy so excited to have you on the show today thank you for having me yeah happy to be here first off huge congrats man congrats to you and the entire team that you've really taken web3 by storm over the past month with the closed beta of parallel TCG launching amazing that a closed beta is getting so much hype I know you've got over 200 000 people that have signed up that are trying to get access to the beta but not everybody is able to get access right now as you figure out how to basically scale and build this game

to Millions which is really why we're so excited to have you on today first I just want to ask neither you nor your Founders come from a gaming background yet you've built such a successful game how have you done that yeah I mean we come from you know consumer Tech and blockchain so we built a number of different things but games in specific are new to us in terms of building them obviously a lot of us play a lot of different games the game was designed by Koji Nagata and he's the head of gaming with Connor and Carson on his team as well as a number of others who contributed to it but yeah I mean we just you know it's a relatively new for us to not build

consumer Tech but focus on an actual game that comes with its own unique new learnings and so some of the stuff is applicable that we did in the past and then there's a whole like kind of net new category that we're still learning about and kind of making adjustments to Factor the game in a way that we feel like is going to set it up for scale and success in the future it was kind of uh something that we really thought we wanted to do and we've just learned as much as fast as we can and as much as we can along the way and what was it that made you want to jump into blockchain gaming you mentioned that you grew up playing games and I know I've heard your co-founders say the same that you guys are all big Gamers as kids your

experience coming from sort of mobile consumer apps and consumer Tech you know you could have could have gone a lot of different directions you also have your background in finance how did that first sort of yeah let's do this moment happen trading card games aren't really trading card games anymore like they're like they're ccgs right like you can't really trade any of your cards in these digital games that was part of the fun of it all as a kid and I think we just started to talk about what we like how the technology can actually be used to make the game more fun and try not to shoehorn it into places that didn't make sense but try to make it such that the ecosystem could make a lot you know be more fun than with the technology than without it

so I think ultimately as we looked at what was possible with smart contracts and our experience in that space we wanted to find Opportunities where we could make a game better as a result of it and like you know no one really publicizes a game being like this is an Amazon web services game like no one does that so like you shouldn't really it's just a game if it's good it's good right the technology is like a facilitator of scale or utility or X Y and Z and so I think we tried to approach it as pragmatically as possible which is like how do we start off by creating a world we really think is compelling a game that can be really compelling and can use this technology in a way that adds utility that it wouldn't otherwise be

able to you know have like I think the question we try to ask ourselves is like what's uniquely possible with this technology and how do we demonstrate that in a way that everyone can understand and say this is fun and this is cool you're stealing my questions here oh that's my next question so before we jump into TCG parallel TCG and also we want to talk about Colony then sort of next game that you guys are building which involves AI as well let's just take a step back what is it about the tech that does make gaming better it's in the way you implement the technology that can like really offer

new kind of paradigms or facets to how games work the best way to like articulate my thoughts on on this is like games are a really great non-threatening delivery mechanism for change in technology right like it's like they're fun and like it just it kind of passively allows you to do things that are like you're not the consequences of having earned something in a game are much more light-hearted but you're still learning that things can exist in a scarce a scarce way as a result of like blockchain and so like you're kind of learning this stuff passively by playing this game and being involved in this world our IP that you really like but really ultimately you're kind of benefiting by learning how the technology Works in this maybe a way

that seems to have a little less consequence because it is a game so I think there's this beautiful marriage between games and blockchain because of that like not like that kind of like fun fun element of things but some of the stuff that obviously like really matters right is just the ability to own your assets and and have that be you know immutable and that comes with its own problems right too like people lose their wallets people lose their keys and then their cards go investing or people click on a contract and something unfortunate happens and so it's just like this way to start learning about something right a new technology or relatively new technology I would say it's new exactly anymore but just to interact with it in a way that like isn't like Buy sell Buy sell it's more just like

play a game and oh I got a cool card or I'm gonna be able to make another car and so I think the more we can install fun into the experience of interacting with this stuff and the more we can really clearly articulate why it's beneficial like I think one thing we don't do very well is like say why it makes sense and so when it comes to like parallels TCG like one of the reasons it makes sense is like you can't own your cards and when your cards can't have scarcity as a TCG without a digitally without blockchain so just like solves a problem and two is like you can transact them with other people just like you could in elementary school and trade your Pokemon cards trade your magic cards or whatever it is and so I think we try to approach it as

much as seemingly possible from like just a really practical standpoint which is like what is uniquely possible as a result of this technology and let's do that and let's make that as simple and clear as possible from the communication and product standpoint so that everyone can do it and everyone can understand the benefit I really like that you bring up uh this idea of it being a non-threatening or like an easy on-ramp because that is that's something we've been talking about for a while in the view that I think that everybody in the space has always has been saying hey gaming is going to be the thing that onboards the next billion right it's always up there with like the top potential onboarding ramps and I know that you guys we'll talk about this

later I don't want to dive into this yet but you know that you guys have built the game so you don't have to participate in the blockchain side of it you can actually come in without participating in that and then if you want to move over to the blockchain side you can do that so I think that's really amazing the way you've built that I also know that you when you were younger and gaming you were selling skins yourself right and like how did you sell skins back in the 90s it was the way it came about was there was a guy in sarsi's tribes I didn't know him in real life it was a tribes was like a pretty popular like kind of third person shooter type game that was like the first multiplayer online kind of like Halo and there's a guy who taught me how to

extract different skins and then Implement them on different in onto different characters and I started to kind of use that to my advantage to kind of build clout within this very large tribe it was like a clan and it ended up becoming the leader of the tribe and I ended up disbanding the tribe because I was like 12 years old right being like Oh yeah I'm gonna this like I'm gonna take it over and disband it literally I did to stand the largest tribe largest plan after I got leadership role but I was really just like interacting with people and they would be like how do you have that skin and like I explained to them and I would just like say like oh send me like whatever two dollars on PayPal and I'll give it to you but yeah like I think from coming back to what you were saying

earlier the TCG right like you can come in and play the game for free it's a free to play game you don't need to own cards you don't need to own erc20 Prime which is the reward token from the ecosystem you can just come on the play and but every time you win a match you're met with this screen that says you would have won X amount of prime and there's you know battle pass rewards that at the end of a season you'll have a choice if you want to Mint them or not and so really like the thing we're trying to do is to say like play this game and if you want to see the value of blockchain you can choose to Mint this thing or not if you choose not to you'll probably watch other people be like oh it's worth money Five Seasons from now

and I should have minted it so like the best way to demonstrate the value of this technology is to give people the choice in it let them either choose for it or against it if they choose not to that's okay but they're probably gonna pay attention to that same card in a couple of months when you know you're on season five or something and be like oh I didn't realize it was so rare and I should have minted it and it'll click the first time they'll be like I get it it's scarce it's maintained that supply and it's tradable and mine's not because I chose not to so I think what we need to look at is how do we educate people like by making it super applicable to something really fun that they're into and um and it usually just comes down to really simple interaction right or just

like you can play the game you can win but you won't win the reward if you don't have the 40 cards in your deck being nfts and you can play you can unlock Battle pass stuff but if you don't if you choose not to Mint it at the end of the season you know you don't get you know you may not be able to trade it so I think like highlighting the idea that you own The Thing versus The Thing dies with your account probably the opportunity and I think some of that has maybe carried over from you know my other games I played as a kid and yeah that's kind of how we all ended up you know in with building the way we dealt it I think we just want it to be for everyone um I don't think I don't think watching

should be like and I know this is like maybe maybe a little bit ideological but like I think you know the technology is really for everyone I think anyone in a space can agree with that but you know I think to to achieve that I think you have to build it in a way that allows everyone to participate irrespective of their technical knowledge like the barrier to entry has to be zeroed out and then allow them to choose the path that they think is best for them and and educate them along the way as to what the differences are and I think that's such a key ux that people need to understand like Builders is like blockchain doesn't have to do you don't need blockchain for the entire game like you said you can play the game blockchain just power certain components

and we have a similar way that we run our product which is Webster Academy Pro and newsletter we have a premium version of it where you pay with it with normal credit card it's processed through stripe and you get our premium content but then if you want to attend events events you want to get like discounts and perks you've got to Mint our nft that's associated with that membership and so again it's like you don't have to touch the blockchain to be a premium member of ours but if you want the additional benefits then you've got to Mint it and that's because that stuff's just not possible without minting something in your wall we can't do it with stripe unless we like built out some ridiculous API et cetera and so it's just like it on boards people in a way where it's just they have to have it

in order to get those sort of benefits so I absolutely love that it's a really cool idea I got a question when building this you talk a lot of people talk about gaming of how different difficult it is to build a game right this is kind of why like D5 has taken off way before web3 game is taking off so you can build a defy app pretty quickly you don't need to worry about ux it just needs to kind of function on the blockchain whereas for games to take off you need it to function on blockchain and you needed to be a good game which is like probably not very easy I assume I've never built a game so I don't know so I have two questions one can you talk to me about the timing like when did you guys start building parallel how long has that

taken and then just like maybe you can touch on the web 3 side is it really slow to just build the game or is it really just hard to integrate blockchain into the game and then is there like a lot of limitations and things currently with technology that is like held you guys back or if you can just kind of touch on that a little bit that'd be super helpful yeah the the blockchain and smart contract sides like the easy part actually yeah I think um obviously you've got to have a well-designed game and again that's credit to the game team and you want beautiful cards and that's credit to the art team there's a lot of nuance like especially with card games and making sure the mechanics are the game resolve correctly because there's so many permutations that are possible like this person played this card and that affects

this card and so I think originally I was like oh you know card games are probably easier was not right there at all I thought that was the case I couldn't have been more wrong and then now we're going through this this kind of exercise where obviously we're in closed beta we've got to prepare and figure out any issues in closed data around bugs around scalability of server side which we've seen and just like different things that you encounter and like they don't work the same way that the consumer mobile applications would work and so you kind of have a new learning curve across the board which is like the precur you know the precondition to being even having a shot at this is having a fun game like and that that's difficult in and of itself but then you have all the technical differences I don't think that the smart

contract side is the difficult side at all I think it's the games you know game side and particularly server side that's going to probably be the most interesting to learn and adjust and make the right changes and then but beyond that I think you know the differentiating factor and the trick is how you implement it all right like how you think about some of the stuff we're discussing earlier is around like how will you introduce this stuff to people and how you approach allowing everyone to play and how you approach dealing with a limited Supply a fixed supply of a card or a fixed supply of a token because six supplies and games that scale don't go well together right like if you have something that only has I'm just going to make an example like a parallel card has 50 a common card is 50 000 addition size

any game which is 50 000 players is not a successful being like just that's just a matter of fact in the traditional gaming world but then if you only have 50 000 cards how does it scale and so you need to think about smart contracts and and how you you know in our case people who own cards can create more cards and they can do so with the erc20 the reward token Prime and we call those Echoes and but Echoes can't make more Echoes only the original cards can and so like how do you create a positive some game or like a non-zero-sum game where you know uh the people who own the cards in the studio benefit together so if the studio scales and a bunch of people come in and play the players who own the cards are the ones who get to meet subsequent demand

for cards but like you have to solve that problem because if you don't you're just gonna have really expensive cards in a very small player base and so you kind of you have this like couple sets of problems one is like make a good game and a great IP and then you have like game specific technology that like you need to become very good at very quickly and then you have how does it all how do these smart contracts integrate with it in a way that is logical and allows you to scale and allows you to realize full Market potential it's definitely different I think that jokingly in the early days said oh this can't be like more than 20 30 harder than building consumer applications I was wrong and so you know but you just as fast as

you humanly can you're always just trying to learn and adapt and make changes to to get better as a team and to improve the the game The Experience for everyone it's so interesting and I think we'll dive into the smart contract not the technical side but more the tokenomic side of as you said like how you manage supply and demand with both a ERC token where you need to ensure that people aren't just selling off your token and there's no there needs to be enough utility and you've really thought that through it so we'll get into that before we do just want to go back to Kai's first question how long have you guys been working on this for when did you start the story or the world of

parallel and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the background and the lore sure yeah so parallel has been kind of a work in progress for the last two years like for contact's sake right I like to contextualize things the best I can based on traditional games is you know Hearthstone took about six years to make do you get to close beta and they already had an existing IP parallel has done it creating the IP and created the closed beta game in two years so I think we've really started to you know took a hard look at how traditional Studios make games and tried to innovate and find ways to improve that process and I think we found efficiencies that otherwise wouldn't have been and I think that the world the story right is originally I just kind of was playing

games with my friends and I came up with this kind of General narrative I thought was really compelling which was like these five different groups of humans there's you know a cataclysmic event on Earth a wire charge on collider has an incident they're in search humans are in search of an infinite resource of energy source it ends up having to create an X creates an exodus where everyone has to leave the planet you know the marconians which stands for Mars colonists colonized Mars you've got the oddencore who kind of end up mining asteroid belts and kind of outer rings and to to adjust to their lifestyle of harsh environment where they don't actually inhabit a planet they start to augment themselves with technology they become cybernetic almost you've got the gathari who go in a deep space mission to Europa the moon of Jupiter and in that process you know lose the

ability to their children naturally and so they start to start cloning as a means of species survival and so and then you've got the Shroud who prior to this event we sent our kind of brightest minds and scientists into deep space and they were sucked into a black hole they meet this kind of thing that is not not human not from our Dimension and come who they are and so and then you've got the Earth and you were left on Earth as in all stories right you've got this kind of group that's left behind and urethane are changed you know in this maturation process of the earth becoming an energy source and everyone detects this energy source and decides to return home to claim what's rightfully theirs is they're all human and they all believe it's their own planet and obviously con you know conflict ensues

when there's something of value between humans so really I think the story we wanted to tell was one of you know Interstellar aspirations I think that's super relevant planetary change again relevant and just human difference so like three themes that we felt were relevant to today's Zeitgeist and conversation I think that came about also because we felt like a lot of the narratives from you know big studios and IPS are starting to like hit like c-string d string storylines where we're not talking about a major story anymore we're now at the subplot of the subplot of a character and I have to say this is controversial but like I always say this because like I do believe this to be true it's like something comes after Star Wars right like there's always something that there's more stories that the humans are gonna humans are gonna tell about you know or even if

they're Fantastical in their sci-fi we have more stories to come and to tell that are different and compellent and so parallel wants to be exactly that and so I think our goal is to continue to develop the world in IP and develop the game and the offerings and that's kind of how it all came to be in a bit about you know who all each of these parallels are it's amazing it's uh not only is the story in the background so well developed and it's incredible that you've built it in as you said a much shorter time than what other leaders in the space have done but also you've built this incredible Community how are you able to build this community before you even launch the game and you sold or

I don't know if you sold them or if they were free but you have six million nfts I believe this is the number correct me if I'm wrong there's something like that it's like 180 cards that are 11.55 so they have Edition sizes yeah so I don't know the total number probably like five and a half million six million sure yeah we sold them yeah we didn't how did you do that before you even had a game we just told people the honest truths right like I think like in a space at times where people are like super pumped and like excited and like you should buy this it's gonna go to like that like we don't do that we're just like hey man we're gonna try and make this game and like we could fail maybe who knows right like it was really early we were just honest though we're

like we have this idea for the game here's how we think it's gonna work here's what the cards do in the game things are subject to change like this was the conversation we had with anyone who was interested in what we were doing if you want to support us that's awesome and we're going to do our very best to make a really good game and people just decided to support us I guess they could see that we were like actually gonna make a real game although we just took the approach of like let's just be honest with everyone and tell them like we haven't built this yet and we are working on it and here's how we're gonna approach it and here's our goals and our aspirations for it but like only do it if you feel like you actually really want to play this game

where you think this these cards are something that you're into I think over time right like we had our first ps15 was the it's called pre-sale 15 cars we sold 15 cards and that gave us just enough money to bring our artists in-house and and let them keep working on the next set and then we had six pack drops leading up to the game to kind of create the base set of cards and which are what you can find on openc today and over time you know more and more people start to take an interest and see the art and I think that's a testament to the art team and start to see progress on the clients that we're working on and where we were going with it and realize that like oh these guys are actually working really hard to make something great so I think over time

confidence just got built as we just continued to make progress irrespective of market conditions and what people were saying if it was stood or bad it didn't matter we're just going to keep going and you know then lo and behold kind of you fast forward two years later you like find yourself in close beta of a game that people really like it's funny though because sometimes I think there's so many different things that are marketed to everyone in the space that like when someone actually does the thing that they say it's a little bit like surprising yeah yeah yeah so I mean that's essentially all we did is we just did the thing that would be such we're fittings new if you still have a lot of work to do like I don't like to celebrate it because like you know we're always trying to fix there's always something

breaking or something we have to fix and like something we have to adjust and we're constantly focused on you know what needs to be corrected in the short term where are we going in the long term and let's invest in those two areas we don't want this just to be for like you know a couple thousand people on the internet who are into crypto this should just be something that everyone can play and it just solves a lot of problems and becomes like a bit of a thing that people can point to which is like yeah but that game does it really well and look how it uses blockchain and it's just it makes sense that's where we want to go and we want you know the IP to be broadly distributed can you walk us through sort of where you guys are at now and I mean for those that aren't in

the beta that aren't playing kind of like what's possible in the game and then sort of I don't know loose timelines of like where you plan to go from here like I guess what's next and feel free to you know not say whatever you don't need to say or don't want to like walk us through you know whatever you can no no that's the tough questions come on come on we try we try to be as transparent as we can without ruining surprises for people right but right um so right now we're in close data there's a couple thousand people playing and testing and finding bugs with us and we're refining those problems and adjusting them and the purpose of the closed beta is really to find what's not working what's breaking and remediate those issues but in the beta right now you can connect your wallet save

multiple wallets and then use your cards to play the game and each card you know different card type has a different visual treatment so like special edition cards have like this foil Finish versus first editions which are more like Chrome looking PL cards which are perfect Loops are animated in the game and they have different effects there's voiceovers you can play match make with other people play and kind of ranked mode rookie mode there's an onboarding tutorial we can look at your collection manage it you have your Renown which is like XP at the card level so there's all kinds of depth to the game and people are just beginning to explore that like what that looks like but really the game right now is primarily the path that people experience as they come in they play rookie Q they learn how each of the five

parallels works and then it unlocks rank mode where you can get on a leaderboard and start earning primes for beating other people and the way that works is as you kind of build your decks in the game you can set which cards you're using from your collection so if you own nfts you can set nfts and that way you win when you do when you are in prime or you can just use Apparition cards which are non-nft cards you can buy non-ft Cards in the game and those are called operations you can open up packs in the game so you could do a lot right like it's a good solid starting point and on the game experience side I think there's other areas architecturally where there's something to be desired I think we want to focus on but and then I think what's coming is a

number you know more about fixes more balancing changes and tournaments which is like a huge one so the way Rock we looked at like you know the industry in the market and so like who has the best intraday tournament structure and like we think rocket league is the example to look at you know multiple introduced tournaments you can kind of casually hop in play for an hour or two and then just like leave and not think about it again so we have you know tournaments coming Cosmetics so Paragons are your like Shiro characters on the field we have Paragon skins custom Paragon emotes we have a planet full expansion set so 130 approximately 130 more cards to diversify the play pool so that you have different you know strategies that are new and emergent so we have a lot that we're going to be shipping on the TCG

side between now and end of here and like really all that's focused on is like to kind of communicated areas I'd communicate as like what we're actually doing is we're putting in the features and functionality that we believe can be very important for full full release and we're trying to find everything that's breaking at scale and remediate those problems and that way you've got like a finished game that is stable for full release that is your objective so it sounds like super practical and pragmatic and it is it's just like those are the things you want you want like a good game that like is it's offering and you want a game that is stable and fast and and sure and so that's what we aspire to I love that and we always I mean everyone's

always talking about the app that's going to bring the next billion and then I always laugh and go there's no way that our Tech is ready to bring in a billion users and I'm curious if you were to open it up today and just like let that 200 000 or whatever is in the wait list or more come into the game is it the blockchain side of things that would break like would that work or where are the like limitations to scale at the moment yeah yeah I mean the server side I think we we're working on a couple of known bugs that would be the first thing to break like it's breaking under current load at times so I think like that's where we're focused today I believe the way everything is designed from a blockchain standpoint be it like ecosystems Prime emissions game syncs all that I think

that is actually relatively sound and obviously the load of that would be dependent on the networks that we reside on for those smart contracts so you know most of our Fe and SD cards are on ethereum mainnet whereas The Echoes reside on base I think we're just going to see more and more capacity and throughput availability on l2s and l3s in the future but like when you have like a couple hundred thousand people signed up to play a game what you don't want is to just like open a Floodgate right what you want to do is like progressively over time open it more and more and find out if you have any issues or dependencies or problems because sometimes it's not even on your side sometimes it's like a partner right like you have some third-party service

provider that's doing something and you're like oh that's breaking so it's a bit of a process but I think like if you open the floodgates today would we be ready I'd say no because we're still in closed beta I think when we're ready will be when we're in open release but do I think that like the space could handle a couple hundred thousand more players you know people collecting cards and interacting with the smart contract decide I don't see any issue with that outside of maybe having significant cost increasing gas fees now is that a fair answer it's a great answer I also was going to ask which chains you were using and you answered those for me so that's great too I guess follow up to that any specific reason you chose that Tech stack ethereum plus I mean bass which

just launched but any like thing that led you towards that yeah I mean base from a cost standpoint is is obviously one benefit to the player or the gamer um but also like when you think about a bunch of new people coming in and you ask yourself like okay it's hard enough to build a good game like just let alone try and solve the problem of making it easy for people to interact with blockchain for the first time like that's its own Mega problem and if you ask yourself like who's the best at that if you're like honest with yourself the truth is is the group that or the company that's on done that the most or with the most success is coinbase and so why not work with a company that makes that their Cornerstone and I can make my cornerstone the game like

they're great at helping people come into the ecosystem I'm great great at introducing them to the ecosystem by a great game and like that's a good relationship and so they're just also really good to work with and they're they're super responsive and they've been nothing but supportive to us so I think it just made sense for the emissions of our erc20 and for Echoes which are the kind of hards you can replicate from your original cards for that to exist on base and then you know for pack drops in our FD cards or SD cards or PL so like our kind of first edition base set cards those all just on ethereum and I think like there's obviously like a history to ethereum that is you know odds provenance to nfts that are minted on it so we view that as valuable and just like I've always been interested in in

ethereums you know ethereum as a result of what's possible what you can do with it from a smart contract standpoint an interesting number of people contributing to it and and that from a attributor's standpoint the one thing to think about obviously is that you know that comes with increased cost because more people are trying to do more things on this network generally the idea is like you know you want to be where everyone is from you know your primary card issuance and then you want to be in an ecosystem that's specific for your game's operation for game specific functions which are and like and the way we handle it's a little clever right like all we do is we say connect your wallet to parallel.life and sign a signature with your wallet and we save the wallet to your profile and then

when you log in with your email and password on Parallel perilous client the game client it just pulls everything in your wallet and if you finish the game it checks your wallet again to make sure you didn't sell something so you can't use it if you don't have it anymore and so like I think we're trying to like do it as cleverly as we can and simply as we can base and ethereum allow us to do that while also offering us a lot of flexibility from an EDM standpoint you want EDM compatible networks right that's for sure yeah absolutely and so we'll get into the economics thing I think is coming but also in terms of just like the ux of this when you're selling buying trading any of these cards is it are you guys building your own Marketplace do you already have one

or is it you got to use openc obviously parallel and go into a different app to do that or what's your guys thoughts on that yeah so so right now the way it works is people can buy and sell cards on openc on pseudo swap on a bunch of different exchanges and the marketplaces I should say but the echelon Prime Foundation you can check out Echelon echelon.io is the foundation that governs the erc2080 prime token that's an elected member elected members in the community that are put into place to represent the foundation and the web through gaming ecosystem manually and they have a deliverable this year to I believe it's this year later this year to launch a Marketplace specifically for parallel arts and specifically for Prime

and so I think we've seen a number of different collections start to you know take a position on this whole like royalties open sealer and we think we're a little bit fortunate because parallel cards are 11.55 and like a lot of marketplaces don't support 1155s um so happy coincidence um uh but I think because this game is so unique in the way there's so many cards right like it almost begs for a custom solution I think a foundation decided to go down that road with another Development Group that they work with called chainsafe systems and chainsafe systems are also worth looking up I mean they're like open source maintainers for ethereum Cosmos polka dot I think all kinds of different groups right a foundation's working with

them to build and deploy a Marketplace specifically for parallel cards that all exists outside of the game right yeah let's talk a little bit about prime mentioning Prime how is prime used in the game how do you earn Prime yeah so the way you earn Prime is the number of cards in your deck so you have a 40 card deck and it's comprised of any one parallel and Universal cards you can mix Universal cards in with any other parallel but you can't mix parallels you get a bunch of cathari cards you get some Universal cards you got a 40 card deck when you have those cards in your in your ownership of your wallet you can set them in the game client so you're like I want to use this card that card you go play a game and ranked if you win and ranked you win in a mission of prime

and then you can take that and you can either you know go to payload which is like this kind of random gumball machine like thing for with cards in it it's got like a million cards in it you can just put some Prime in and get some more cards you can get your card signed by the artists there's something called an autograph which is has a visual treatment in-game so you can get your card signed and those are like a kind of rare subset of cards you can spend it to make an echo which is again another card that you can use to fill out your deck give to a friend sell to someone else who needs cards and then there's like things like Cosmetics right that we have coming like Paragon skins Paragon emotes that are only available in Prime you can use prime to

vote on decisions and governance from the foundation side there's a lot you can do already today I think like five percent of the total supply of prime has already been sunk used by the community so it's not like something that's everyone's just hoarding people actually do use it and so that's how you'd earn Prime and or use prime within the ecosystem and what do you see as in the future when somebody wants to play and join the ecosystem will they need to buy Prime to get in or will more likely be play to earn so every time Prime is sunk in the game the vast majority of it goes back into the play to earned pool and this comes down to this problem around a fixed

Supply token being emitted as a reward and eventually depleting your play to our employer becoming like you know hyperinflated so every time someone spends Prime the studio parallel Studios our side of work uh keeps only five percent of that throughput and the vast majority of it goes back into play to earn so that that pool is replenish and the circulating supplies out of control I think then if someone's coming in and never having played or heard of parallel and if someone tells them about it they're just going to play the game for free they're going to realize that if they did have cards they could earn Prime and they're going to make a decision you wanted two ways they're going to say I just want to buy a bunch of prime so I can go and buy Cards really quickly from payload and start playing and earn more or they're

going to say I'm just gonna go buy Cards and with ether with dollars and I'm going to or maybe hit it get a pack drop if the pack drops are happening at the time and I'm just gonna earn a little bit by bit until I get to where I want to be and I can get the Skins I want I think it depends on urgency like if you see a skin and you're like oh there's only five left you're gonna be like I'm not gonna risk it I'm gonna go kick some ether take some some credit card and buy some prime or whatever you're gonna do and get that skin so that I know I have it if it's urgent and if it's not urgent I think you're just gonna feel like okay let's get some cards let's play this game and let's try it out and I earn

some prime like over time I've accumulated some of this and you're gonna be like what can I do with it you're gonna be able to use it on different things if we think of other games the biggest problem and you kind of touched on it but I'd like to just dive a little bit deeper but the biggest problem has always been the erc20 in the games which end up getting inflated away right it's happened with active Infinity it's happened with step in with I don't know a bunch of others this is just kind of how it always goes and so it sounds like what you're saying is um people can buy Prime if they want to just like get quicker access into the game like get cards and things like that and then in terms of selling it I guess is it just that your emissions are very

low so they're not really making a lot of money so to sell it doesn't make sense but to use it for more in-game stuff does kind of make sense how does that work when this opens up and people start playing this thing like crazy how do you like make sure that this token does not just get inflated away I think you have to watch the data no one should profess to have the answer to this I think the data should be like your your barometer here but I think the objective is to as you have you know increasing players you have increased increasing emissions and like the way it works is that the you have five games on a daily basis and ranked their best five games get taken and those are what you get from your admission on a daily basis and it works

out like I think at 100 Emissions on a daily basis it works out to like 1.25 Prime with like a full deck of nfts but no keys which are like boosters to your your Prime emissions so the answer there is it's hard to get Prime out of the game right right um and and then the second thing is like what you want to do actually is and this comes back to Echoes and this is gonna this is gonna get a little convoluted I'm gonna try to do my best to articulate this correctly but Echoes have this uh Dynamic pricing structure where like if a first edition card costs I'm just going to make up a number okay like 100 bucks that goes let's say create an echo of that same card because you you have a first edition to replicate it costs I'm just going to say uh if it costs a dollar to

create a for a first edition it costs 40 cents let's say to create the echo so when you go to create the echo you're paying the 40 cents in Prime but you're subsidizing the cost of creating the card with time because you're playing games in the game and you're earning Renown which you need which is like XP at the card level you're earning this thing and you're spending both Prime and renowned to make this Echo so you've made an nft now of the same card you own and you've paid 40 cents let's say to make it and every time someone makes the next card it gets more expensive and more expensive and more expensive so the optimal time for people to replicate cards to meet subsequent demand is when it's at floor or low and essentially

what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a system whereby it's actually more economical to use a little bit of prime than cell Prime to get liquidity and you're trying to allow people to keep their cards so that because no one wants to sell their cards if you have like a bunch of cards you like you don't want to sell them you want to sell replicated versions of them and so how do you solve these two problems I think the answer is like what you create is a system whereby there's an incentive to regularly consistently sync Prime as it's emitted and the reason you do that is because it's cheapest when no one's making your Echoes so if no one's making an echo of a card it's a floor you take that opportunity because you get it for cheapest which gives you a better margin

on your sale when you sell a card so you're consistently having the syncing as you're consistently having this Edition and that gives you an incentive to make cards as your exit method method rather than sell the token because it's more efficient and then it allows you as a byproduct to keep your cards but still obtain liquidity right so it's quite a nuanced thing that we have to watch once it's in production but generally speaking and I try to share this stuff and tweet this stuff out because I want people to like think about it as well right like it's like it sounds logical and it sounds like it makes sense and obviously the Practical you know implementation of it is obviously where we'll find out the truth

of the matter but I feel like that way when I share these ideas prior to just like doing them and deploying them people can be like actually that doesn't make sense right or people can say okay I thought about it as well have you considered this it's more like an open way of pumping about it right how does it what are your thoughts on so at some point basically what you're saying is that the sync what you're saying is you're paying Prime to basically make more of these trading cards and which makes sense as there's demand at the sell point you reach a threshold where there's no new people coming in whether that's at a hundred thousand a million or a billion people at some point the game is going to kind

of level out what happens at that point expansion sets okay so you what you what ends up happening is the train card games are so the totally totally great question right it's like let's imagine you reach 100 million players and we've tapped out every one of those people has cards from the out the base setup they all have nfts in the base set why would you make more adaptation that they said he probably wouldn't right there's no more demands for them but on a semi-annual basis on trading card games and this is where they're unique is you issue expansion sets because games become stale if you don't issue new how do you need the mobility game and so how do and then so if the addition size is the same as the previous Edition size you still

have now have this massive run on demand for all the expansion set cards to get replicated and then in the next expansion seven and so it becomes a bit of like um like it is not like a clear perfect process like by any standard and I'm not professing to have the answer I'm just theorizing as to how I believe this should be solved but the answer is that like we have our first expansion set called planetfall and that's scheduled to probably come up to the market for pre-sale around October probably distributed and put into game around December January and that's 130 new cards right so I think the answer is it's not like we're talking about Echoes and card replication it's like it's the only

thing it's not right like tournaments tournament sync Prime every time you enter a tournament a piece of that goes into the sync if you buy Paragon skins Paragon emotes if you buy Glitz the in-game token not token in-game currency you can use prime and so there's a lot of different ways in which we can do this but I think the interesting part about the Echoes and the reason I bring that up is just like there's economic incentive to to do it when to do it consistently at the lowest price like it's like let's say you do it and it's like one hour interval and then every hour you're gonna probably do it to get as many of those cards as you can prior to the open release in theory right this is my theory this is what I would do I mean it's being like pragmatic and not

pragmatic um like if you're like taking a capitalist approach for a second yeah I want to accumulate as many of these as I can prior to the open relay so that when people do come in and want cards and the cards that are f e and essies are two expensing they can get a cheaper version but I've already accumulated as many as possible as cheaply as possible right right pattern logic says that that's the way to go but that is not the only it's just a good example because the emissions are often looked at as like this consistent stream of outflow of token and how do you create a consistent inflow of token back into the ecosystem and the answer is by offering an incentive to do so and the only thing I can think of that creates consistency in that is is Echoes but it doesn't mean

that people won't like people spend tons on autographs right people spend tons on which are just cosmetic and like where people start to see some of the Paragon skins and the Paragon emotes like do you want a custom emote do you want a custom skin for your Paragon do you want a custom field back like these are things that Gamers traditionally spend on so I think it really comes down to just making stuff people want that's so simple right but like yeah I think the answer is like I don't know if I'm right I don't know at all I'm right I don't know if we are right like the collective we as Community but I believe that we're doing things that are different that are logical and we're trying to gut shot I try to gut check them as much as I can so that

I'm not like batshit crazy believing that I have some solution that may not work the thing is ultimately you can continue to update and be agile and make changes and add new syncs or Burns or new expansions or whatever as you learn more like that's kind of that's how all business works right you don't need all answers from the beginning I think you're going with us a healthy sober thesis right and I think you try to like keywords sober like because it's like easy to like see these things inflate and become really you know but I think you want to go in with the sober healthy thesis communicate that with everyone so we're all on the same page as to how we think it works and and then observe the data and communicate as to what you

believe needs to change if so and it should always be in the interest of the sustainability of the ecosystem if that that's the goal right I think like games businesses and networks they're all predicated when you're like oh yeah but like what happens when it stops scaling like all of them are predicated on scale everything we do as humans from a business standpoint from a network standpoint it's all predicated on scale and like we see companies Flatline when they when they top out and then what they do is they end up starting to spend more on customer acquisition costs so like grow their scale beyond the natural means and so I think like the system we designed is predicated on scale I I think that is intentional but that's why you see like yeah but you need people to want to play the game they want these and that goes and but I

think the leading indicator of whether or not we're we're doing a good job at that today is you know the secondary value of first edition and second and first edition cards and the demand to get into the Beta right like in those two indicators are positive which means that maybe there is maybe there is demand for people to build to buy really cheap cars to play the game and earn Prime just like you can maybe not I don't know right it seems to be working so far and all you can do is ship and adjust and change course there is no secret to building great products you just have to try and some will work and some won't and you adjust as you go I want to shift gears to colony because yeah you well you've

talked about how you've been able to create this efficiency to build parallel TCG which is the trading card game that's currently in closed beta that we've talked about so far this episode somehow at the same time you are also building another game that is AI based I have no idea how you're also doing that but it feels like this is the I it feels like maybe more of your baby because it's the game that I think you most wanted to build and most wanted to play but it's a little bit it's a bigger objective it also from our and we talked about when you release your avatars for Colony as it was the first time we had

seen somebody really used six five five ones in a use case which we should explain that for users who our viewers who don't know what that is but let's just take a step back tell us what is colony and then we'll dive into the mechanics and the details of it yes I'll maybe I'll tell you about how this came to be as we create cards in the early days like a happy accident that we found out was like the actual the artists were working in 3D and then flattening the image that's how they work and so one of the things we early on did was like okay let's refine those 3D if it's like a good example it's like a Lancer tank if it's a Lancer tank let's like take that 3D Lancer tank and refine it make sure it's like ue5 object that we could use

and like it was just like future proofing herself it's like how do we get the images off the cards and so as we created this space set of cards it almost acted as pre-production and like I said earlier you know Hearthstone took six years and had the IP typically when you're creating an IP you'd like spend time just creating the IP for a number of years and then integrate the IP into a game we kind of had to like speed run it or do double duty here where we made the IP on the cards as pre-production and then as we did that we kind of built out this library of 3D objects and equipment so it ranges from like guns characters Vehicles Landscapes all kinds of stuff that started leading me you know as we start to look into ue5 and what was possible there if we took this Library

as we kind of got pretty close to completing the base set we're like this library is pretty pretty chock full of some really you know interesting pieces of equipment and vehicles from the world and like what happens if we start putting it into ue5 and looking at what that might look like if we use this library to make more games and so we experimented with that we created maybe one or two demos in two days just like taking characters dropping them in putting Vehicles putting guns in like making a little bit action out of it and saying like is this where we wanted to go I think what I concluded pretty early on was like you know I'm kind of known for saying this a bit as like if you think about like arpgs you think Diablo right like if you think like there's there's

category leaders in these segments and like you're always going to be second fiddle to the category leader whereas when we saw this kind of open ai's release in the scale at which it kind of grew where like this is an opportunity where if we integrate this correctly into a game and use these 3D objects this three object library to kind of make the game visually appealing it could be a new category and you know Koji or Mr gone likes to call it a game a one and a half player game and because the player is this AI character you're not the player you're like it's devil or angel on its shoulder or its coach yeah and you're negotiating with it like you can't just be like go do this thing I don't care so a lot of times I'll be

like you're talking to me wrong you don't think you're like and so but it has its own so it's the Avatar is the character it's a 721 and you'll probably have Apparition versions just like you would select non-nft versions so everyone can play but the character has a 6551 wallet so the the AI intelligence has digital possessions of its own that it's able to obtain from the simulation or you can literally just take your C20 Prime and drop it into its wallet and they can go spend it with other AIS it can go to the bar it can buy beer it can and every time it creates something it's emergent so like if it might want to create something an example I always use is mint tea one of the colonies limited is death spiral and the AI decided that the the human

held the AI like you know what my well upset my family says have some in tea will make you feel better so yeah I decided to go plant mint in the garden we did a couple days for it to grow picked it when it picked it in 1155 of mint leaves was put into its wallet it could have sold that to other areas if it wanted it would have a value it then made went to the kitchen made tea out of it it got a cup of tea in its wallet after the leaves were destroyed as an 1155s and then it consumed it in the AI governance structure which is called the dungeon Mastery I gave it plus two plus three plus two happiness and plus two health for consuming it and so it's like this entirely new paradigm and it's it's difficult to keep it on its

rails like so it's early we did a pre-alpha with the public and I always tell people like ask the public what they think because that will be the best Testament rather than me telling you but essentially what I wanted to do was bring the world breathe more life into the world meaning like take it off of the cards and we're going to continue to develop the TCG that's our priority obviously but this is like our thing that we think is really meaningful and important to get right and to do that we took their 3D library that we've been accumulating as we built a base set of cards and used that to power this game in ue5 we're still in the process of you know most of the intelligence engines and systems we play with right now are in 2D I like this kind of like wireframe like version

of the game or hooking it up to the ue5 engine still and the reason this got created was like I was thinking about well one the AI team was just like yeah data engineering team had lots of experience in AI already and they're like we're gonna do this we're just gonna show them and first I was like I don't really get it like why would people like care and then like I started to play with and I was like this is groundbreaking yeah but I looked I started to like stop after I played with it for a couple weeks with some of the the team and then played with some of the public I kind of like stepped back and I was like why is this so relevant it to me this is what I concluded was that like okay I'm turning 40 this year I've spent my

whole life playing games but I don't have time to play three hours of Call of Duty anymore like I can't do that okay well also like the young people like they're gonna break your ankles are so good yeah like our reflexes aren't there anymore it's not to say that these games are not enjoyable but like I just can't play long term my life doesn't allow that and then I also find no enjoyment in like mobile casual games like they're just don't do it for me like I can't go to dinner and be like hey I had this great Candy Crush [Laughter] I mean so I think like what I conclude is the Russians like hardcore games we grew up at games our whole lives now we're like this cohort of young men and

young young men and middle-aged men and women or whatever you want to call us well like we have responsibilities we can't play games for hours on end but we still like ancient we're gonna probably play against the rest of our lives so what is that going to look like and what I concluded was like we went from Hardcore games like Call of Duty to like and and then to Casual games and we're likely going to go to this place of playing passive games where you have a relationship with this character you're not the player like the world's constantly evolving the world's you know your character's constantly changing you're able to prompt that character and help them navigate the world they're able to prompt you and tell you if they've found something interesting and there's scarcity in the simulation as a result of it being all assets being on

chain and governed and like even the way it generates the assets is super interesting I think like the character decides it wants to make a space guitar and this happened that it asked the dungeon master which governs the kind of like layer of the world that says like if this is totally out of scope like don't allow it but it just breaks the illusion right and you don't want that so it says yeah you know what there's a bar you could play Space you could play guitar space guitar in the bar it calls a trained version of stable diffusion that we train on our or our own assets and mints generates the image into the 11th of the space guitar and then mince it on bass and deposits it to the wallet and then that character can then decide the value of that guitar and sell it to

another AI who can play it okay time out here time out so you're saying the AI comes up with an idea based on something that's happening in the game yeah and then it creates tea or a guitar yeah and it's all AI That's deciding if this thing should be in the game or not and then it mints it and there's no human interaction of this thing there are entities being minted on base right now you're telling me that are just part of a metaverse world essentially is what this is yeah that is being led by AIS and they're just creating things like teas and guitars inside this game and it's all being minted on bass yeah 100 yeah so so in in 48 hours in 48 hours the 15 people that were in the public test the AIS that

they were interacting with did 3 200 transactions with each other and with the system and they created things like one guy decided in we you know one of the people who was you know interacting with his agent is AI was Avatar told them to make a mixtape and so it literally minted like a futuristic looking mixtape and it even has the songs that the AI created from the mixtape and they're actually like bangers no way like it's this thing that is like I always try to tell people this and it's like we're early I don't want to like like we're trying our best to get to a consumer deliverable version close to the end of the year it's all very unknown but we're getting we're making really good progress it's not like anything anyone's ever experienced it's

not a game that like you can point your finger at like the closest thing it's like to is like somewhere between having a dog like a pet right because you're like you care you end up caring about the character so much that you're like like some people still message me and say like make sure my character's still alive come on man like you're calling it alive but like once you play it you're like okay I got it it's when you feel when you get like some of the characters you can kind of designate and create your character's Persona when you set up the game and so if you get in sync with your AI or your avatar it starts to feel really good and you're like I'm on the same Pages I'm on the wavelength with this character I don't want this character to go away and like they have

memories they're able to plan they're able to create attributes to things like it's really interesting and I think so you can expect to be able we'll be doing another public opposite pre-alpha test probably in the next couple weeks if you wanted to you could open it up and like it could swap tokens on you know on YouTube If you give the AI prime it now has the ability to decide how to manage that Prime so could that Prime could it go to the bar and spend all that Prime and now it's on yes so that what's happened where they drink I'm so silly they we've had that happen we've had one guy was spamming the agent to tell him to do things and then all of a sudden the agent just stopped what he was doing went to the med Bay and laid down and

then we asked them like why are you in the med Bay and he says there's a voice there's voices in my head that won't stop wow this is wild yeah yeah I mean it's not your answer to the prime sync though right is other games like this now they can use it as a currency in this world so now there's more ways of using it outside of just you know to to create new Echo like nfts right so yeah so like another way to contemplate this is like okay so there's a car called cart called supply drop and supply drop just like you can make an echo of a card you could have it that people can pay a fee in Prime just like you could to make an echo of the card to make an echo of the equipment on the card and so now the supply drop cart has this

lar rifle on it it's like lar rifle and you could pay the same fee and compete with people who are creating cards to create equipment and that same fee in Prime is sunk and now you get a 3D piece of equipment of a rifle that you can then drop into your inventory of your character right so like there's a lot there's a lot of things that cannot get unpacked here I try to be very careful about like not over promising here because it's like it's so early and it's so nuanced but it's like I also try to point to people other people who've played it to talk to them because it's like they'll tell you right they'll tell you it's incredible but like we're not I'm not certain yet that we'll be you know where we want to be because obviously we've got to work make sure the TCG

scales and is healthy and everything is good there but we are uh like there is a dedicated team of resources specifically focused on developing this and we do plan on having some pretty material progress for end of the year but like because it's so emergent it's hard to predictions well first of all I think in a few months time as this becomes closer to reality we got to get you back on and like show us this thing yeah sure somehow because this is just absolutely mind-blowing Jay I'm not sure what else you have to wrap up but I just have a question one how big is the parallel team it sounds like a pretty new company you guys I think you said about two years now and I'm just curious like how big and then in terms of funding for this did it all come from the parallel

nfts like you had talked about that's what allowed you to guys keep the artists on and that did all your funny come from there or do you guys have like backing from others yeah so we're 55 people that's internally I mean we probably have another 30 people supporting us externally right through developing auxiliary systems with us because like games are not built by just one little group obviously we had six pack drops those are you know relatively successful for us which is amazing the community supported us so thanks for that and then we also had Chad Hurley the founder of YouTube is an ambassador and supporter of ours you got to tell the story of how you got him in I just dropped them a note right and said like hey man we're making this game and it's like really cool and like here's some of the cards and it's like

I'm super into this he's like let's talk and immediately he's like I want to you know be involved with you guys and he's been in every meeting almost with us since we started this company been nothing but a champion and supporter if you're ever considering interacting or you know he's just an amazing entrepreneur and the guy's a legend right so it's just amazing that you just dm'd him no he responded and then became a lead investor yeah well and then he connected us with the open source fund it was run by JJ who's honestly again an incredible person who's just super supportive and then Paradigm again you know absolutely heroic they invested 50 we did a 50 million dollar round with Ms leads and so I think like we've had a great success on our own as a business selling

cards right and we've also added a lot of people who came to support us to make it possible I actually had one thing I wanted to say if I can go back to Colony for a second because it struck you're saying you know hey what happens if I gave a bunch of time and they can go drink it away there's another interesting example where someone got clever because the way that people get erc20 Prime in the simulation if you don't have any is you tell your avatar go to the mine get wrong minerals are it has an RNG on what raw minerals you get out you refine it and you turn it into the repository and you get your C20 Prime for it one person decided to tell the Avatar to go to the mine get raw minerals go to the refinery or fry it into gemstones

and then once they got that refined minerals it was like look like a crystal they then took it to the workstation and said make it into necklaces and they made it into necklaces and started selling it to other AIS and made more pies than they would have for turning in the gemstone for this AI is the entrepreneur this guy's gone yeah he's like oh yeah very interesting very very interesting stuff but yeah anyway so to come back to it yeah the teams he was 55 people they're amazing I'm super fortunate to work with them and the people who support us both in the community and the investment side are in you know nothing but kind and great with us and so we have a lot yeah we have a lot to to prove still and to

deliver okay I want to tell our audience how they can get involved if people want to play parallel TCG obviously I think everyone's going to want to play Colony I know I'm super stoked on that whenever it comes out how can people get involved how can they get into the ecosystem yeah they can just go to parallel.life and sign up for uh the open release there's also also uh Colony pre-registration site I think so you can sign up for that if you want if you're really interested in Colony yeah I always recommend to people like play the game first right like wait for us to get out of closed beta you know play the game experience it it's free to play like get a sense of it and then decide if you want to like go off and you know get cards or get

tokens or whatever you want to do if you want to learn more about the Toca economy side of things and how that all works I recommend checking out the foundation at echelon.io you can follow us on Twitter at parallel TCG I think that's probably the the starting point and as we progressively open up you know as we you know resolve any issues we're navigating from a closed beta standpoint and move into open release we're obviously going to begin to add people to the build in time and scale up and so you'll have a chance to play just like everyone else and it'll be fun and you'll enjoy it amazing can't wait okay just a couple of fun speed round questions uh before we wrap here uh I'm just gonna go with two

questions today because we've already gone overtime on this episode first question one thing you bought recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be a digital good I would say I have I bought um it's a Casio watch but it has the I don't know if you guys remember these it has like a an infrared sensor on the front it's only the 90s and like you can change the channel on televisions and stuff yeah I remember that I had that watch yeah so all the cool kids in like high school had it and lost the TV on the yeah like what happened what I I came across one recently and I was like oh man like I remember wanting one of those so bad like it it it's just like a simple little plastic watch but

it does have an infrared TV remote on it that's by the thing I bought recently for about it was like 68 bucks or something and wait is this from the 90s or is this one yeah you want to see it I have it yeah again it's got the calculator too right it's also got the calculator on it yeah that's a calculator yeah I remember this no all right you see the infrared part on the top there right yeah yeah so messing with your with your kids or with your wife and changing the channel just kind of like I think it were one day and I was like oh this is really cool it was an impulse purchase that was probably silly but I like it I think it's cool it reminds me of like a time when technology was a little bit more analog

and I think what it does for me is it reminds me that like there are ways in which we can use technology that can create magical and kind of interesting moments and I think like the first time I saw that I was like that watch has an infrared remote I was like it gets just a weird combination but I was like that's amazing so I think that's what it represents maybe to me is looks like childlike uh or youthful sense of watching technology or bald in a weird and obscure ways that like probably doesn't make a whole lot of practical sense but it's also like kind of cool okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it

if I had a billboard that one million people have one billion or one billion I always like how there's a difference there's more videos I probably just have like I mean I'm not going to use this on a personal like level if there's a billion people they're gonna see I'll probably just have like a giant like parallel just say parallel and like the URL to parallel and just a beautiful I take 90 like 99 of it would just be a gorgeous image created by the art team of you know a great battle or something that looks like a Renaissance painting and a Sci-Fi Renaissance painting that just says parallel probably something simple like that because I feel bad having an opportunity like that presented to me and using it like for personal so isn't man oh I don't know

why do you have heard anything good have you heard a good response to this it's interesting yeah you know what I would say it's pretty much split 40 take the marketing angle and promote their brand sixty percent probably take the more personal level and say a personal Mantra be kind is the most common answer which is always refreshing and nice to hear that people think that we need to focus more on kindness and love for each other you also dropped a few in this episode that I was thinking that I might put on for you when you said just do what you say and that was your simple advice early on you know so like that's a good one if you're a builder like

don't be afraid to say it in public but then you actually have to deliver on it and you add another one that I can't remember right now oh when you said you were talking about your products you just said businesses and heart just make great products yeah I'm just thinking thank goodness it was me who did this interview and not Mr gone because Mr gone Sartorius for saying send your East to Mr gandotte so you probably just have a giant poster of that right uh yeah it's nice to hear people have really nice things to say to the world I sense that's the question is what do you want to say to the world right that's the question because I guess on a personal level no pressure there's no right no right or wrong answer I probably feel selfish using it for personal benefit and opportunity

like that came up to hit a billion people with a billboard I'd probably use you for parallel well no no doubt your team and that your entire Community appreciate having a leader who is so relentlessly focused on building something great that's why you guys are I think that's why we believe so much in what you're doing it's so clear that you have this conviction to build something that goes Way Beyond what you what exists right now the way you're building a new category the high fives kudos to you and the whole team it's really incredible can't wait to continue to watch The Journey thanks so much for joining us today Carlos really appreciate your time my pleasure thanks for having me and if I can just say

thank you to everyone who supported us along this journey to get to this point and the Journey's not done we have lots to do but I appreciate everyone who's been there for us so thank you and thank you to for having me well thanks so much for listening and everybody have an awesome day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3.

make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and webview are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one