Wallets, SFTs and gaming as the route into web3

Transcript

g m g m welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform your business and build thriving communities this is Jaybird and I'm here to keep you on the Forefront of technology so that you don't fall behind on today's doer Spotlight we're talking with Michael Sanders we're going to be breaking down the three must-haves for web3 to fully realize its potential what are they number one we need to create great content that breaks through to a mass audience so that we can onboard a

billion people in the next decade or as Michael thinks the whole world in the next decade number two we need to make it way easier for developers building web 3 games and building web 3 apps is hard it's slow and it's complex we're going to talk about how we solve that and number three we must improve the user experience and remove the friction of wallets and onboarding to web3 and we're going to break down how Michael and the Horizon team is doing that also on the show a few other quick points of things that I really enjoyed our discussion around we talked about how ownership of in-game items makes gaming way better huge unlock we also talk about semi-fungible tokens have you

heard about semi-fungible tokens what are they and why Michael thinks that semi-fungible tokens are going to be bigger than non-fungible tokens and we're also at the end stick around to hear what is the one sft that Michael will never sell so today on the show to discuss and break this all down for you is Michael Sanders Michael is the co-founder and chief Storyteller at horizon horizon is the creators of the web 3 trading game skyweaver which I believe is the best blockchain game there is currently if you haven't played it you're gonna want to Horizon also are the creators of

sequence which is the all-in-one developer platform that makes Web building apps and web3 games easy and simple and they're also the creators of nifty swap which is a semi-fungible token Marketplace that makes trading web free Collectibles instant because there's liquidity and you don't need to deal with the trouble that you deal with of trading nfts currently super stoked for this one it's gonna be a banger Michael welcome to the podcast great to have you here awesome thanks so much for having me Jay and hey everyone oh man so excited I still I still remember we were chatting about this just before the show uh the first time you told me about crypto and web 3 uh at

a um a Liebert uh all day I dream concert uh and you were just you were so early in the space and so excited and so I took me a few years to catch up but I finally made it yeah I mean we all dive in at different times but those are really special conversation and yeah very fond memory totally all right we'll start off Michael just tell us how did you first fall down the web 3 Rabbit Hole how did you get into the space yeah I heard about Bitcoin on a CBC news report back in 2010 as this decentralized hacker money and I immediately thought this is the future and I dove in and uh and then in 2014 about a year before ethereum's launch I

had the pleasure of meeting vitalik buterin and you know I'm I'm still convinced he's an alien from the future here to teach us about technology economics and love and I fell in love with the notion of web3 back then before ethereum even launched and we weren't calling it web3 of course but it was about this next generation of the internet with new applications new experiences new economies were both the users and the creators shared in the value generated by the ecosystems they participated in um so yeah since that time I've been like extremely enthusiastic about crypto and web 3 and um yeah and you know and then in uh 2017 I met my co-founder and our CEO at Horizon Peter kyotica and um

you know I had spent a lot of time thinking about like how can we actually usher in crypto and web3 technology so that people and entities around the world will actually use and benefit from them but I didn't I didn't have that many good ideas and then I met Peter and to my knowledge uh you know kind of like middle of 2017 first person to have ever conceptualized blockchain video games and as soon as he said it I thought holy this is it this is how we can welcome the world to web3 and do it in a really fun and loving way and uh so we founded Horizon shortly thereafter and you know here we are and okay so I love what you just said we're gonna Usher the world into what three in a fun and loving way okay so

but let's talk about first how are we going to do that but before we talk about how we're going to do that what are the you know you've been in the space for so long you've built this incredible company uh what are the challenges that you see that are sort of not allowing us to onboard more users not allowing more people to join in and the fun of this space yeah so we believe every person will be a web 3 participant likely within the decade but what's currently throttling adoption is user experience the developer experience and the content shortcomings so put it simply one there's not enough great content that

resonates with mainstream audiences and two it's because in large part it's very difficult it's hard slow and complex to build web 3 games and applications third even if you do build a great application you're still left with all of the friction around the wall and onboarding experience to web3 I I don't think you could have put the challenges in a more simple way thank you for articulating those so well for us uh okay so the question on my mind and the question on everyone's mind I'm sure is okay how how do we solve those three challenges so what I'd love to do is sort of go through each one of them and break down how you guys are solving

it at Horizon but also just how you think others Builders players participants in the space can be part of solving those challenges so you mentioned the first one which was uh or you maybe didn't mention this first but the first one I think we should tackle is the there's not enough great content that breaks through to the mass audience so how do we solve that and let me Let Me Maybe reframe that question looking at gaming as possibly a solution to that what does gaming enable us to do in order to solve that yeah I think gaming will be one of the

biggest drivers of web 3 adoption and and in large part it's because blockchain affords us so many advantages to both players and to game creators so there there's different components to this right like first off there's ownership of digital items and video game items this is hugely important because up until now you know video Gamers they're spending 50 billion 100 billion dollars a year on in-game items that they don't actually own you know they can't really they can't sell them they can't trade them unless they do it on a gray Market which you know it's difficult there's risk associated with it um but with web 3 you have your items securely registered to this neutral

infrastructure like the ethereum network and all of the different blockchains that connect to ethereum um and so the ownership is decentralized and means that the user it's actually their property right and they can play with it they can trade it they can sell it if the you know if they get bored of the game they can exit the ecosystem and go take their resources elsewhere and that's that's really important um furthermore it actually enables you know something that people in the space call composability which is the notion of building on top of a particular item or asset or function so for example like let's say you have video game items well with composability you could build out

lending services or the opportunity to create guilds around those and communities around those items and you know things that we'll imagine further into the future but it like leaves a lot more um creative space around it and then another thing that it really helps with uh with game creators um and ultimately benefiting the users too is that I think we can shift Focus from value extraction uh and more towards um like symbiosis amongst users and creators and I'll explain this in the sense that you know in traditional gaming game creators they have to put

out a ton of content regularly you know and and then they sell that content in order to you know keep the game up and running and to keep the community engaged and I I think there's still there's still a place for that like web three video games they're definitely going to need to put out content and they'll need to do it at a regular Cadence but I think some of the pressure of needing to monetize it so frequently uh will be alleviated by the fact that it it might be better to actually encourage like really healthy economies and game designs where players are transacting and trading a lot amongst one another and and then the game creator could actually monetize transactions and activity occurring in the marketplace or

in in the game ecosystem um so this way you're actually as a game creator and Builder you're actually optimizing for velocity of activity rather than just extracting value by selling something uh anymore and and I think there will be like hybrids and you know different ways of orchestrating this but it provides like a new landscape in terms of how to think about monetization um and then another thing right that kind of ties into the ownership of um game items is that I think players will feel a greater sense of ownership over the game the community and the success of that ecosystem more so than they would by not getting to own the digital items it's like you're you're a

part owner of the whole ecosystem in some sense so you want to see it Thrive and I think right it creates like greater forms of evangelism and ambassadorship and just Community amongst and Community um so I think those are a few things and like there's you know there's a lot more but I'll kind of yeah pause there right and so all of that is unlocked by web3 and blockchain enabling the ownership of in game items and you said before so there's 50 to 100 billion spent on in-game items currently yeah per year wow and so what is who who's participating in building these Solutions right now and what is the

current what is what is the current gaming uh offerings look like because I think one thing that a lot of us are seeing is um in order for a game to thrive it needs to be fun right and uh a lot of the current blockchain and web free games not that they're not fun but they're they're basic and that's okay because it takes a long time to build a game and we're still very early but you know maybe just frame for us like what's out there right now in terms of the games uh and what do you see as coming down maybe over the next like several six months or something like that yeah so yeah just just like you said Jay like all of the

kind of enabling technological solutions and advantages around spending and symbiosis and economies like none of that matters unless there's a really engaging and fun or strategy experience of a game for players to enjoy none of that other stuff matters so right you know like what we've focused on is right from the beginning of our of Horizon at the end of 2017 we we focused on building something that anyone could enjoy independent of their web free knowledge and making a very fun and strategic game first and foremost and so we built Sky Weaver which is this Trading Card Game you know some of our team have worked on Magic the Gathering that you know most famous perhaps trading card game of all time maybe besides the Pokemon

um we have people who've worked at Big gaming companies like Ubisoft and wargaming and elsewhere who really come with the the knowledge uh and experience of building fun and great games uh that don't necessarily have any web3 experience right because we knew that the content first and foremost is what's most important right um and and so for us it's about building a great game that happens to be you know powered by web3 and has all of these web3 superpowers and economic incentives Etc um but not relying on that those incentives and and those Technologies to sell right for example um so I think uh yeah skyweaver is like a really good example of one of these

pieces of breakthrough content and we haven't hit our like full inflection point yet you know we have hundreds of thousands of players but we're I'm we're still anticipating that it's gonna like really pop you know and we're working towards that and making the game even more engaging um and then there are I think we're now starting to see and have been seeing a lot of uh incumbents from the web 2 Gaming space and whether we're talking about someone like the really big AAA Studios like who everyone knows the names of like they're looking at web 3 of course and then we also have Builders from within those companies who are you know leaving to start their own web 3 gaming companies because they've they've seen the opportunity and they've

they've seen how it can better serve players and creators um and and then so it's ranging from like Indie startups of super small teams uh some are web3 native and a lot are coming from web 2 and don't aren't web3 native um so I think the content that we're gonna see like exploding in the next few years is is going to be amazing because there's so many people who are now building towards this and take a little bit of time because as you mentioned it requires a lot of dedication and energy to create a game that's worth playing yeah for sure one of the other things that always comes up when I think about gaming when I'm talking to somebody about game web through gaming is people always say that we're going to be able to take Goods

across from one game to another and I just help me wrap my head around this because I I'm not like is that actually possible like I've heard people say oh yeah you're gonna be able to take your you know you buy a sword in one game and you're gonna be able to take it to another game and like is that is that is that gonna happen if it is gonna happen like how will that happen or is that just a misinterpretation of the way web3 is being used yeah I think in theory it's cool though in practice it'll be very hard to achieve um you know there are I think it's perhaps more easily achievable in certain ecosystems like imagine you're a big game publisher you have tons of different games maybe you can figure out

a way to have an item that interoperates amongst all the games but even still then you know you have different like game directors for each game that aren't necessarily thinking about like the interoperability with this other game like they're just trying to make a game first and foremost so where so I think it actually makes less sense with game items that impact let's say strategy or the economy in a game because it's just so hard to about it's hard enough to balance a game item in one game let alone like games or something where I think it it will see it appear first is more in metaverse experiences um more social utility items such as like digital fashion or what your avatar

is wearing um and and navigating a metaverse realm I think that makes more sense to have what you know those types of things interoperate in different experiences and even still though you know there's there's challenges there with respect to how do those items or that fashion manifest in different virtual worlds in different metaverse environments or different gaming environments because the graphics in Roblox are different than the graphics in Nifty island or you know so but you could still have that same item and it could just appear differently but yeah there's still um so that's where I think the interoperability and bringing items from one world to another make a little more sense to me at this time and you know

I'm sure there are many other ideas out there right right yeah one thing that uh I'm reading Matthew Ball's uh metaverse book right now and one thing that actually really helped me was his chapter about defining the metaverse because it's so it's so nascent and so difficult to understand really what it is and one thing he explained really well and I'd love to get your thoughts on this uh was this idea that what we are currently talking about is the metaverse is actually a virtual world and so a game would be more like a virtual world and then we'll have meta galaxies which would be a like Roblox would be possibly an example of meta Galaxy or maybe even it's actually bigger than Roblox it's something where

they're all using the same standards and they all interact and then we'll have metaverses which is like the internet today and just like everybody's on it and connecting does that does that definition breakdown make sense to you how do you think about it yeah I think it makes a lot of sense and I think Matthew ball is definitely a Visionary especially with respect to storytelling and articulating what these things can be um so you know especially when the words first started becoming popular you know because it's obviously a coined back in the 80s but um when it started becoming popular kind of during the pandemic you know that's when I started talking about the metaverse is like at first I thought there should only be one metaverse not

metaverses um I guess you could make the same argument about universes though so yeah anyway it could be a multi metaverse um so but the way I imagine the let's say we just use the metaverse as an example and I think yeah the things should interoperate interoperate within the metaverse so you can actually bring Goods to different places within whereas if you're in a contained environment that you can't interoperate with that is a virtual world so it's like exactly like video games like skyweaver would be one virtual world amongst a much larger set of other Virtual Worlds I also think something like Roblox is a virtual world but it just happens to be a much bigger

virtual world maybe the meta Galaxy is a good way to or I don't know something Galaxy is a good way to describe that but then like kind of the overarching architecture that standardizes all of it and allows everything to interoperate kind of like the HTTP protocol which you know you mentioned at the internet or like web series like the ethereum or evm protocol being the underlying based player as what kind of enables the entire metaverse okay let's I wanna I wanna lead it you bring up protocols and I want to lead us into the next problem that you brought up at the beginning of the episode so uh and that problem was building web 3 games and apps is hard slow and complex and I

think one of the reasons is because of the lack of standardization and the lack of protocols but I won't you lead us in why is this a problem and how can we solve it yeah I think it's most difficult to build web 3 applications and games because it it's still a very nascent space so the protocols are new and they're hard to work with um you know whether we're talking about ethereum or polygon or binance smart chain or Avalanche or optimism or arbitrum um they're all like it is especially for someone new to the space like they're they're difficult to engage with

um and and so that means building an application hard because you have to like not only do you need to achieve this great piece of content you need to solve all this underlying infrastructure right which like that's a whole basis um and we actually had to do that you know and we knew we would have to do that when we set it out to build the company we were like okay to actually create Sky Weaver and to create a seamless experience for users we're gonna have to solve a lot of the infrastructure problems and fortunately for us like you know half of our founding teams core competency is in architecture and open systems and Open Standards and open source technology and

developer tools so when we started building skyweaver we were solving all of our own pain points along the way and ultimately productizing each of the solutions we developed and now it's become what we call sequence which is this all-in-one developer platform it's a stack of tools including like a smart wallet and different token and nft and sft apis and like on-ramps and transaction services and Marketplace tools and like node and data services and you know sdks whether you're building with a Unity engine or an Unreal Engine or on mobile and so we put all of these things together under the sequence uh brand as like this all in

one place where you can come to start building your web3 game or application right right and amazing that you guys have done that it's incredible and I think you nailed it when you said it's it's a big challenge when you are a startup and a small business and you you don't have infrastructure so what are you supposed to do you're supposed to also build the infrastructure at the same time so I know one big way that you guys have really contributed to the space and we mentioned semi-fungible tokens earlier is by co-authoring ERC 1155 uh so I think first question maybe you can explain what is ERC 1155 but I'd

also love to talk about how you guys went about co-authoring a standard and what that looks like and the the need for more focus on building these standards because I think that's it's something that's so um uh so so soft and so difficult to wrap our head around you we all went to we understand business maybe but we don't necessarily understand like developing protocols and developing standards unless we're from the you know super talented Mega star Horizon team of Architects yeah none of those standards were developed by me I'll have to definitely acknowledge that it's um yeah we have absolute Geniuses on our

team like from high up to working like deep down in like low level stuff um and it was actually uh Philippe castonguay our director of product who co-authored the ERC 1155 multi-token standard AKA semi-fungible token standard and what it is I think I'll I'll start by kind of making some comparisons and just laying some like groundwork definitions okay in that I'll I imagine most people listening to this podcast or maybe not all but have heard of like erc20 standard this is for fungible tokens the famous cryptocurrencies like ether and Matic and usdc um these are all erc20 tokens each one

is fungible with the other which means that you know they're equivalent uh and then we have the ERC 721 standard the nft non-fungible token standard and the the nft standard was kind of just emerging as we were building skyweaver and thinking about the future of games um and it's excellent for unique one-of-one items you know particular artworks uh real estate um anything that there should only be one copy of however for video game items most video game items this doesn't make sense because like if you think of a trading card game for example um and for anyone who's not familiar

think of like Pokemon um you know there's each card uh you know you could have the Charizard car or the Pikachu card right or like in skyweaver I'll use the Pandora card as an example each silver Pandora card needs to be fungible needs to be interchangeable with any other silver Pandora card because they're equivalent and and but then the Pandora card is not slangible with the fun guy card they're not equivalent you can't trade them one for one and so this is why we needed to create the ERC 1155 sft standard I'll just I'll call them sfts moving forward so semi-finals sft yep and what what these enable is um the much healthier

markets and liquidity four different items and this applies to games or metaverse experiences or you know a lot of different projects like it has wide ranging applications but so it enables healthier markets liquidity for those markets and price Discovery so really making them perfect for video game items because you can imagine like if you're playing a game and like I don't know you need particular tools like maybe you need like shovels or maybe you need weapons or you know need cards there needs to be liquidity for those to enable trading and if each one is a one of one you don't know how to price something you don't know its value and then you could have all of these similar items being posted up for sale and

you're like why are they all at different prices I don't know which one to buy so sft is enabled so that you can actually have like standardization and pricing and then you can it's easier to know the value of something um and and so yeah sfts are really powerful for gaming and we took it a step further we actually uh created something called the Nifty swap protocol which for anyone listening is like uni swap for sfts so uni swap for web3 video game items and metaverse goods and really much any web3 collectible so what it does is it allows um so we built the protocol it actually Powers something called the sky

Weaver market and we're soon releasing Nifty swap dot IO which is a general Marketplace for all different web 3 collectibles all different sfts and so what it allows the user to do is instantly buy or sell these game items uh and this is a big difference like if you look at um something like open C open C is the Premier destination for nfts and will continue to be so I believe like we're not we're not competing with them because they're focused on ERC 721s and you know put up bid orders they you know when you when you're trying to sell something you place a you press a price and there's like this acceptance and time process um but with sfts and when we built a

Nifty swap it's it's instant you just like see the price that you can sell it for you press the button or boom you've sold it you get your usdc or you know you want to buy something you see the price you can do it it's instantaneous and it's all done in a decentralized manner um so yeah that that's in part why like sfts are really really important for moving forward and makes it a lot easier for game creators because it's just it's a much more uh versatile and applicable and actually efficient standard for these applications so what is this is fascinating semi-fungal tokens so interesting and I instantly understand the use case for it in terms of games I've two questions you can take them one at a time is one is uh who else

is making sfts right now is it only games or is there any other use cases for it outside of games and also is is do you see how do you see this sort of long term is this going to be the case where um I as a user as a player uh you know buy something uh will I be buying and selling these things in the game will each game have their own Marketplace or will it be the case where I'll take it to a Nifty swap or to an outside Marketplace uh so to tackle those questions one at a time yeah so uh first question a bunch of different mostly games are the ERC 1155 standard like we

actually co-authored it with the sandbox um years ago so this sandbox has some uh sfts in their game um cool cats is also using sfts um they also have an nft component as well just right well you know no both exist um parallel is a game that has sfts alluvium is a game that has sfts sunflower land is a game that has sfts and um you know more and more coming out I think another space for where sfts make a ton of sense is digital fashion so like you know if you have a t-shirt or something in the metaverse like there could be a thousand copies of it you can create limited editions Etc right you could in theory have an nft too right but it's just it's just different right a one-of-one piece of clothing is

different than one that there's like a million copies of and then like so like when I think of sfts like video games digital fashion and then whatever is coming in the metaverse like because the way I imagine it is that we will there will be many aspects of the physical world that end up translating into the metaverse and then there will be tons of differences I'm sure but it could be that like I don't know we might have furniture in the metaverse you know um and and that furniture like it makes sense to be sfts we might have car like well we will have cars in the metaverse or some other like Transportation devices for teleporters you know and those could be sfts um anything where there's multiple

copies of an item it makes sense as an sft um you know there's also a component where you can kind of build in the build in the royalty payments I mean I think that can exist for nfts as well but um uh yeah so that's like like I don't even real I don't really know how to like fully think about all the potential before building it I just think there are tons and tons yeah I do think the sft standard will be even bigger than the nft standard um and and then where people trade these so great question um it's interesting because like as a company we actually we have the skyweaver market directly inside skyweaver which is powered by the Nifty

swap protocol that we built because we wanted to have a Marketplace in game that's super easy for the players to go to and it's very intuitive and all the sky Weaver Market displays are skyweaver game items right like trading cards and crystals and other items there are no items from the sandbox in the sky Weaver market and that's intentional um also if you have a Marketplace in your own game as a Creator you can monetize uh you can take transaction fees right and like so you're capitalizing on the velocity and providing your users like a super seamless experience um that said there are many games that don't necessarily want to build their

own Marketplace and it's for a variety of reasons like sometimes it's a resource constraint um sometimes or they're just trying to get to Market faster or you know as an empty swap grows in popularity and we're even seeing it now prior to us officially having launched it like we'll launch it this fall um but we have some folks testing it um they they even just want to like build it for convenience and because they think it could be a better user experience because they're like oh if people just know like trade game items on Nifty swap just like yeah just go there and do it um you know kind of like it's a bit different but like well people go to steam because they know video games are there people go to open C because they know nfts are there it's like oh just go to Nifty swap

because there are any items there that said I'm sure many games will still want to build their own uh Marketplace in-game and like what we've created with sequence you know as part of the sequence offering there's the Nifty swap protocol in it and we're building an SDK as well so it'll be easy for you to um create your own Marketplace or because everything is interoperable and like standardized in the web3 and ethereum ecosystem someone can use the whole sequence stack and then they could also decide to leverage Seaport which is like a Marketplace protocol that openc has created which is it's different but like you know so you can build different kinds of marketplaces because maybe you don't want the Nifty swap one right there's like different different use cases we'll call for different solutions yeah what are we going to call uh I'm

just so curious because you know you're as the chief Storyteller at Horizon and you're so good with words and framing things one thing that always comes up for me is the challenge of language right and you know if you want to enter web 3 right now like you've basically you've got to take a you gotta carry a dictionary around with you right you know in terms of both in terms of the the actual um like protocol language and the what I'll say I'm trying to think like the more dictionary stuff and then also you need like a slang dictionary just to understand like GM and friend and like so okay what do I'm just curious if you have a stance on what are we going to

call are we going to call sfts sfts and we're gonna call nfts nfts uh or like I know meta you know they've they've been pulling in um the ability to I think it was just about a month ago when they now you can post nfts on Facebook and on Instagram but they don't call them nfts they call them digital Collectibles just curious if you have a a word that you guys are throwing around and is it going to be the same word for STS and nfts are we gonna have to have different language yeah we'll be honest with you man it's been it's been a journey like since we started the company like we weren't thrilled about the term nft we're like I mean No One's Gonna Get like nft or like non-fungible token like well we knew no one was going to say non-fungible token

right and like right some of us we kind of thought nifties was a cool word like Nifty and there's a bit of Groundswell about that years ago um but then it was just the term nft blew up you know like it was like okay and like we knew that skyweaver cards weren't technically nfts they weren't technically non-fungible tokens but we started doing surveys on Twitter like does it does something have to be a one-of-one item to be called an nft it's like the OverWatch was no like as long as it's all right well it's an nft and we're like okay well okay so everyone just has this like cultural understanding it's like the Lexicon right that yeah it's an nft so we we referred to skyweaver cars as nfts just because like you know to to uh lower the kind of education requirement if someone

kind of already so you can you can leverage that term and so now we're we're pushing the sfts because um well in one part you know a lot of people aren't excited about nfts you know for sure gaming world for example like they think it's kind of crap um so even just like repositioning in a bit saying like hey like yeah you don't like this but like these are different um so at least like consider it maybe you can come at it from a different angle I don't know if that'll be enough to solve it right but I do think that we're going to push this narrative forward um others are they're kind of tuning into it there's a bit of ground swell around it so it feels very much at like the dawning of a new age like that sfts could be like

nft 2.0 not in the sense of like replacing nfts but in creating this next wave of momentum around the web 3 ecosystem and I don't know maybe we'll land on like even kind of better terms than a three year acronym but you know it's hard to predict because we we've decided we're going to push sfts so okay you know that being said if we learn if there's new insight right like we'll we'll for sure and if we see a better opportunity we'll adapt uh but I think that's the that's the path forward for now and yes I think there will be nfts and then there will be sfds pink boy so keep your keep your web free dictionary handy because there's just

more and more lingo coming at you uh okay I will say I really do like Webster Collectibles or like tradable Goods or that that stuff's pretty intuitive so yeah yeah I think those things work I feel like I feel like we're gonna land there long term I don't know uh yeah I don't know I mean we're certainly not gonna say ERC 721 ERC 1155 like you know there's just no way uh we're not all you know Elon musk's of the world who have a brain to handle that uh I'm certainly not uh okay I just want to touch quickly before we move on from this point a little bit more on building interoperable standards and protocols um do you have any any advice uh for

um and I know you're not necessarily an architect on your team so maybe maybe this isn't necessarily you're the right person to ask but uh if if we have listeners out there who who want to participate in building interoperable standards or want to build protocols how can they get involved with that or actually what we probably have more of is we probably have listeners who just want to learn about the standards and want to understand them um how would you recommend going about that yeah I mean we're so if you go to sequence.xyz we're going to be updating the site soon to be even more developer focused but increasingly over time there will be content and also like

documentation about how to build with our tools and explanations in there as well as to like what they mean um so I think that's a good place um and then I mean if you go to ethereum.org you can find a lot of kind of I was going to say lower level stuff but there's a mix like you can you can learn a lot by just navigating around there about like different protocols and I would say a great idea would be to join the sequence Discord because there's just like conversation in there that can be a little more organic and more you know multi-directional than just like consuming content um but yeah you know other than that like Twitter there's lots of people talking about it YouTube

I feel like the challenge that I see is that um there's no clear way to monetize building a standard or building a protocol right it's harder to and you know we're sort of stuck and this brings up this bigger question around you know web3 versus web 2 is you know we still we do live in a world where you know we need to create value and develop income and build businesses right and so the the balance of and and maybe I'm wrong like I I look at poapp for example I'm fascinated by poapp like there's a there's a protocol that I think most people have used uh it's you know proof

of attendance protocol if you haven't heard of it uh and it's it's simple but like I don't know if you know like it's pull up a business like I look at them and I'm like I can't figure out the business model so I think that's kind of where I think a lot of people get stuck is it's it's easier to go to where the money flows right and so um you know I don't know maybe we need I'm not sure what the what the answer is what the solution is and I'm just sort of talking out loud right now but it's uh yeah it's I think it's a tough one yeah um I mean that's you know that's why we built products right like we monetized our Solutions because you need to monetize as well and um for example the ERC 1155 right like we don't make money

from that but it's a standard we've it's like a public good as Battalion talks about right it's right something you contribute to the ecosystem so that others can leverage and build from it um so I think it's just about like understanding why you're building something and like is it all good is it to serve the ecosystem and or is it a product that can also serve the ecosystem but has a clear monetization model in it you know and if you're going to pour all your love and energy into building something I think it's very good to be clear about what your intention with it is and like you need to make money from it you got to think about that fairly early on um yeah and that's a great you know labeling is a public good is a great way

to label it because once you once you put it under that category uh it does change the way you view it and there's other ways to fund public goods right like that makes me think about Bitcoin grants as an option to fund a public goods so yeah great point there okay let's move on to the the third problem that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode uh which I'll remind our listeners because it's been it's been a little bit but that was the friction of wallets and onboarding the user experience I mean this is a big one that I think we all we all struggle with and we all wonder when it's going to get better uh talk to us about that problem and how you guys are solving that yeah so we've solved it with the

sequence wallet uh the sequence was part of the whole like sequence developer platform the kind of key distinguisher uh with sequence compared to the other products in the platform is that the sequence wallet is the only one that the end user is going to know that they're interfacing with right like the end user will have a sequence wallet they're not going to care about like a node Gateway for example but um yeah so the the sequence wallet it what it does is it really makes web3 easy fun and secure for everyone like you don't need to know anything about web3 to use this or nothing about crypto like you just go in two clicks you can create this secure non-custodial multi-chain multi-sig multi-key smart

contract wallet and I know that's a lot of words that like a lot of people won't understand but basically what it's doing is it's granting you this seamless and secure access to the world of web 3. and so you you mentioned smart contract wallets uh and I I believe that you guys also developed another standard here uh around smart contract wallets can you tell us a little bit about that standard and more so probably what's what is a smart contract wallet and what does it enable yeah so again as our director of product Philippe he he co-authored ERC 1271. shout out Philippe yeah yeah way to go what a guy these things um share

it to many people on our team too like Peter our CEO and just everyone across the border like true Geniuses and Visionaries and um they um yeah so Philippe created co-authored ERC 1271 standard to enable Smart contract wallets um across the ecosystem and a smart contract wallet um I'll use a comparison so most people in web 3 are probably familiar with what's called an externally owned account or short form eoa probably don't know the term but this is what this is what it's technically called and it means that the wallet is governed by a single private key so you know if you've used some of the popular wallets out there you know that there's a single private key um so would metamask be an example of

that okay exactly so and you know there's there's advantages to this but if you ever lose that private key or someone steals it it was gone and you know we all know that user experience that the wallet you just mentioned is not not that great and it's not going to be what on boards like the next billions of people to web3 right um and that's not a discredited to them because I grip tremendous kudos to the metamask team like they've helped really bootstrap and you know get a lot of things going um but now we're like we're ready to enter this new era you know so with sequence being governed by multiple private keys it it enables user friendliness and better security so as an example it

means that one of the keys can be tied to a social login so now this means like if you go to sequence.app you can create your wallet in two clicks like you can log in with Google or Facebook or um Instagram or like whatever social application you want um and then boom two clicks you have this secure wallet we're also enabling the ability to extract a single private key like you can do that by like 99 Point whatever percent of users aren't going to want that or care for it it also means that like um let's say you lose your cell phone in an Uber and you don't you don't get it back right like you can go and log in from a different device and kick your device off and then like rotate that key

out so it means that like it's affording you a greater amount of security because like you know if you ever lost your private key to a eoa wallet and an Uber well good luck Gone Forever stop I mean by placing token the the driver of the car would have to know what it was for it to be useful but uh right you know um so yeah it's like like if you go play skyweaver like a lot of our players they don't they don't know they're really crazy they don't know they're creating a web 3 wallet like it's just this is creating a game account but boom you have this wallet and what's really important is that it's non-custodial um so you know like there's custodial wallets which means that it's essentially like a traditional bank

account in that whatever you put in it whether it's nfts or sfts or eth or usdc or crypto um you're actually relinquishing ownership of it over to the custodian um they have full control of it this is why people always advise like don't leave your tokens on in exchange a centralized exchange um and similarly there there are games that do this they have custodial wallet Solutions which I personally think is short-sighted um I I think it will matter a lot um things will happen you know someone gets hacked and then boom like everything's gone um and then and then you're faced with this notion of like oh well do we just do does the game creator replace everyone's items that were stolen but

then like now you could you're doubling everything up and then the thief still has everything so now you have duplicates and it affects um so it's not like a quick fix to just say like oh insurance covers that because no now you're affecting the economic supply of things um whereas a non-custodial wall it means that the user is in custody of their assets like sequence we can't like we can't touch anything you have like we don't even like it there's no access to it by anything um that's that's same with metamask but just seeing that like we've harmonized like this secure like non-custodial nature plus this multi-key architecture plus this seamless ux so that anyone can use it yeah which is such a big unlock

because I think that right now there's just the wallet is a big it's a big hurdle for a lot of people to get over right like uh I I even get confused using my wallet all the time you know you get a transaction you know oh you need to sign this should I sign this what is this you know I'm looking at it I'm stressing I'm sweating like it's it's a rough it's a rough experience okay so so smart contract well it's like sequence is so could somebody would it be worth somebody going and using sequence to manage their nfts and their tokens or is it made specifically for just game items oh no no for sure yeah it makes a lot of sense like it in

fact it has like amazing nft support you know like you can view your collections like in gallery mode and you can see the artwork or whether it's a video like you can see all the metadata you can see the price that it traded at on like a market so like all just built into the wallet so not only can you make you securely store and trade from your wallet like you can actually experience your nfts in your wallet um so yeah it's amazing for that you know like it has built-in on-ramps into it so like if you want to go uh Fiat to crypto you can do that we're enabling something called smart ramps shortly with our partner wire so that you can go directly from credit or debit card to buy an nft or an sft um and yes that that's really helpful because it actually like increases the

success rate of Fiat to crypto transactions um yeah like we even enabled developers to enable gasless transactions uh via sponsoring the transaction so that the users don't have to pay gas and that's really good for onboarding new people who might not have like Matic token to interact on them right now um and yeah it's like it's this multi-chain wallet so it's compatible with all evm chains um and for anyone who doesn't know what that term means it stands for ethereum virtual machine so this consists of networks of course like ethereum polygon binance smart chain Avalanche optimism arbitrum uh and and more and more coming online like everyone's really striving to be evm compatible

um so yeah it's like gives you this there's there's built-in swap functionalities for token uh there's built-in bridging so like you can access everything from this same uh seamless beautiful UI and it gives you like it grants you access to all these different networks all these different applications um yeah so it's really powerful it's incredible oh my gosh thank you shout out to the team again let's uh this is amazing what you guys are building for the space and this is exactly what we need more of uh okay I want to switch over to sort of wrap up uh and do a little bit of speed round uh but before I do anything else you want to share before we get into the speed around uh I

know we had a whole bunch of things to talk about in the episode and I think we've gone through most of them but there's just so many things to discuss anything else you wanted to bring up I I think we've talked about it all man if anyone wants to know like about more just go to horizon.io and then you'll find links to each of our different products yeah awesome and we'll include uh all the links mentioned uh we talked about sequence we talked about Nifty swap uh both sequence wallet and sequence the developer platform we'll include all those links in the show notes as well as the Horizon uh link as well uh while we're on the topic where can people find you online if they want to reach out to you yeah I'd say Twitter's probably the best it's just at underscore Michael Sanders

okay awesome we'll put that in the link to this in the show notes as well uh okay speed round uh everybody's favorite part of the episode uh a couple questions coming at you quickly first what's an nft that you'll never sell okay so it's actually an sft of course of course sorry and um it's it's a Pandora card from the game skyweaver um I have a few copies of each like the gold and the silver uh but it's actually yeah it's a crazy long story but the artwork for this card was designed prior to me ever even meeting our chief designer and when he showed it to me he was like oh this is the first female

character in Sky Weaver and I looked at him like holy like that looks identical to my fiance and so I sent it to her and she was like that's me I'm like I know and um her name is Pandora and the mythology of the name Pandora is that uh Pandora's the first woman ever um and so this was the first female character created in the game skyriver and had no name at the time so I was like well we better name like can we name the card I'm like everyone's like yeah of course like that's crazy because they look so much like and her last name is skies and the game's called Sky Weaver so I was like so yeah now that like that was in the conceptual stage so now that the Pandora card exists as like

an sft like I definitely oh no it's not I'm not not looking to sell them like are you are you tapped into another dimension Michael yeah yeah like that's unbelievable and I I have met Pandora and I can confirm that she does look exactly like the Pandora card I also have to mention Pandora has one of the best giggles and laughs there is out there shout out Pandora if you ever get a chance to meet her in person or maybe I'll have her on the podcast sometime just get I'll get her I'll get a sound bite of her laugh so I can play it okay uh a one or any web3 projects that you're following or that you're excited

about currently yeah I mean actually a number of the ones we're working with like on the sequence front um so cool cats um I think Cool Cats is really cool like a really cool nft project that's building out their gaming experience um there's also uh there's a group called super gaming I'm really excited to see what they're building um I really like Nifty Island it's a Freeland metaverse and um it's in an alpha right now and I just think yeah I think they have some like really cool ideas and Community already another game called Dark Earth uh Mecca chain and a whole bunch more that like yeah who are like big web 2 players who are coming

into web3 that I don't think I can share too much like publicly about them yet but they're like some you know some of the biggest game creators in the world like they're like we're working with them and talking about bringing their games into web3 so I'm really excited to see what they create because they're like so incredible at creating games and experiences like okay how like how awesome is this going to be in the web 3 ecosystem incredible it's really interesting that you bring up a Nifty Island as a free land metaverse uh and I think we'll have to maybe do another podcast or something in the future and one of the topics is gonna have to be metaverses and should they be selling land or should it be free land because that is a really interesting topic which

I also have opinions on cool yeah there's another game uh sunflower land that's really cool um there are a whole bunch uh time Raiders Wild Card yeah a bunch of I'm talking about mostly games I guess just because that's most of my attention has been for sure lately and yeah I hear you man like Freeland versus paid land like we intentionally made Sky Weaver free to play um so that you know it's just more accessible um yeah yeah cool okay something you've bought recently uh or it could be at any point some of you've purchased for under 100 that brings you Joy yeah I'm so not not that recent I mean many years ago but gymnastics rings

um I think they're they're incredible like movement and fitness and health tool and you can kind of go anywhere with them like you can hang them for a tree or hang them from a bar somewhere so um yeah and they're really fun and they're great okay where where do you usually where's your go-to at least in your house are they at your office like where's your go-to gymnastic ring spot they're they're in my house they're hanging in my house now um I have like a full gym and like like squat rack and you know all the way around kettlebells barbells Etc and um also like a lot of room to move and dance um that That's essential very important and then the gymnastics range we used to have them hung in our Horizon office but

then the pandemic hit and haven't we haven't had an office since but then I also really enjoy hanging them outside like in a forest or in a park that's like that's a really nice experience cool cool I love that okay final question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on that billboard love and play love and play it's I was gonna say I love it but that's it's powerful words incredible simple Simplicity and I did you know I did notice your email sign off is is love

which is really you must be the only person I've ever emailed with that uses that as a sign off I feel like that word is reserved so much for for family and for for for loved ones it's not necessarily used so much I don't know maybe there's an uncomfortable uncomfortable part about it but it's not used enough uh I think in the day-to-day language but it's so powerful yeah yeah I feel like I've always perceived this signing off emails with love is just like an opportunity to insert a bit more of that or to acknowledge that it exists you know and like I've had a lot of people comment on it too you know they reflect and I think you know too like sometimes you're

talking about a serious issue or like a business issue and like signing off there like knowing like hey like it's it's all love you know like we're just we're trying to work towards things together um I you know like love is also one of our company's values it's one of my life's guiding values and I I believe it's the fabric of existence so I just want to like as a send-off just being like just like remember that you know beautiful couldn't be any better way to end an episode I I feel like I often tell our our listeners I love them maybe I don't say it enough but it's it's it is a it's an important important word to use and uh you can't use it enough so Michael I love you thank you so much for

coming on the show today it's just been a wonderful time I love you too brother and thank you to everyone listening I love you all as well fantastic have a great day have a great week everybody and uh look forward to catching you next time on the show Cheers thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of

this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one