GAMESTOP NFTs via ImmutableX | Robbie Ferguson

GAMESTOP! is announcing they're partnering with zk-rollup Immutable X, to open up an NFT marketplace! Immutable and Gamestop are also creating an up to $100 million fund dedicated to supporting the gaming ecosystem on Immutable X. ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 - Intro 3:55 - How Big Is This? 6:01 - What Gamestop is Doing 7:51 - What Immutable is Doing 10:35 - Driving a New Business Model 13:20 - Why ImmutableX? 15:10 - What's Being Built 18:09 - The Gamer Experience 22:30 - The $100M Fund 25:15 - The Power of High Volume 27:55 - Criticism vs Utility 31:31 - What's After Gamestop? 33:20 - Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Robbie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xferg?s=20 ImmutableX: https://www.immutable.com/ Gamestop Announcement https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gamestop-forms-partnership-immutable-x ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, welcome to the livestream. This is Ryan Chon Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman. This is an episode we generally don't do, but this news is so big, we felt like you deserved a livestream. You deserve a livestream with this kind of news, okay? Because this is, you know, two of our favorite, well, actually, three of our favorite things. So we've got GameStop on the one hand, we've got Immutable, which is Ethereum Layer 2 technology, and then we also have NFTs and the confluence of those three things, because GameStop and Immutable just announced a partnership that we are about to dig into today. David, are you feeling excited about this news, man?

• 0:43David Hoffman?

  Dude, absolutely. There is this seemingly growing trend towards, GameStop has been circling around gaming, NFT-type gaming for a while. There's been a bunch of speculation as to how they're actually going to do that, and now a big piece of the puzzle to answer that question has been unearthed. And so, there's so many things to untalk about. Not only are they using Immutable to create their NFT platform, but they're also bringing $100 million with them to bootstrap the gaming ecosystem on Immutable. Where is that money coming from? We're about to find out. So we're going to bring Robbie, the co-founder of Immutable, onto the show, right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 1:25David Hoffman?

  Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DeFi. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DeFi in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on Slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time. Slingshot is available on Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, saving you from the high gas fees and low transaction fees of the Ethereum L1. There are no fees to trade on Slingshot, and any positive slippage is given to the users. Trading on Slingshot is a social experience. You can even set your chat avatar to your favorite NFT, or soon, a Slingshot 2099 NFT avatar. Once you bridge your assets to Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism, go to app.slingshot.finance

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  to trade, and use the chat box to share your trades with others, and find other tokens to ape into. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with built-in privacy and ad-blocking to keep you in charge of your digital footprint. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3: your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser, no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market.

• 2:53David Hoffman?

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• 3:38David Hoffman?

  Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon. You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.1, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, and friction-free.

• 3:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back. Super excited to introduce you to Robbie Ferguson. So let me read out the headline here. "GameStop Taps Immutable X for NFT Marketplace, Also Launches $100 Million Gaming Fund." Robbie Ferguson is here. He's a co-founder of Immutable. It's great to have you back on Bankless, Robbie. How are you doing?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, doing really well. Thanks, guys.

• 4:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good time to come back, right? This is, uh, this is big news. How big is this, do you think, Robbie? It's like, um, is this, uh, is this gonna have repercussions across, like, NFT, across gaming, across, you know, crypto? What's the magnitude of this?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the reason we're excited about this is GameStop, in addition to having such a core part of gaming history and legacy, is also one of the most fanatically empowered fanbases in the world right now, which is what crypto is running on, right? Like, that's community, it's incentive alignment with people rather than power going to companies. And so I think they're in a very exciting position to launch an NFT marketplace, aggregated for gaming, and sort of pivot the company into that space. They've built an incredibly credible team, lots of crypto natives, and we're really thrilled to help power them with a fund as well. So our goal is to be very large. I think the other thing is we're seeing really large games companies be interested in the space,

• 5:16Speaker 02

  but they're not fully committed yet. And so I think this is a really interesting place where you have like a Fortune 500 company actually going all in in trying to build, you know, an NFT marketplace and truly work with long-term play-to-own games.

• 5:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're going to unpack all of this with you, Robbie, but I feel like this is sort of a convergence of two communities, right? So we have kind of the fanatic fanbase of GME and GameStop on the one hand that are analyzing this deal and have been looking at GameStop for quite a long time. And then we have the crypto community on the other side, which is like, you know, a different world altogether. And these two communities are kind of meeting at this intersection point with this partnership between GameStop and Immutable. And I'm wondering if it's just worth it to talk to both communities, right? Because there are some people on the crypto side who might not be as familiar with GameStop and what they're actually doing.

• 6:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there are some people who are coming from the GameStop side who want to learn more about Immutable. Can we just talk about those two camps for a minute? So what is GameStop doing in, like, in general? What has their strategy been? Talk to the crypto natives for us first and why they're an important company to partner with.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  So GameStop is a incredibly, you know, historic legacy brand in gaming. Millions of people around the US all remember buying games from GameStop as a kid and their favorite experience is going in stores. And obviously, a couple of years ago, we had this massive community following of GameStop, where people became obsessed with sort of creating the new version of what it could be. And I think they've done an exceptional job in figuring out, well, where should we go next? And an NFT marketplace, which can capitalize on that cachet and probably the most rabid fanbase in the world right now for any company, is an exceptional move by them. So we're really excited to partner with not only their kind of historic 50 million customers,

• 7:16Speaker 02

  but also this new vision of what they're building. And it's not just, you know, a sexy headline. They've built an incredibly credible team. They've built a large amount of full-time staff working on this project. And they're working with what we think are pretty good people in the space like ourselves. So I think out of everyone to work with powering one of their NFT marketplaces, I mean, obviously, you know, we work with every NFT marketplace under the sun where we're talking to most people right now. If you're wondering, you're watching this right now, please reach out. But we're really excited about the distribution that GameStop can bring and also their relationship with massive publishers and games companies around the world.

• 7:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, let's talk about the immutable side then. So for somebody who's from the GameStop community, has never heard of immutable. What is immutable? And they probably in this press release saw some other terms like layer two and maybe Starkware and some other terms that maybe didn't make sense. What is immutable? And can you talk about what this means for GameStop?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  So Immutable X is an NFT scaling platform. And it's built on a theory, which is the most popular blockchain and has the vast lion's share of NFT trade occurring on it. What we do is we make any NFT trades cost zero gas or transaction fees to use. Typically, these will run up to fifty to a hundred dollars when a network is congested. We also make it completely secured. So you may have heard about six hundred million dollar bridge hacks this year. In fact, there was one two days ago that blew up on Twitter. There's been massive vulnerabilities with side chains or alternative layer ones. We use Ethereum security, and that means it's very, very difficult to compromise users' assets. We're also completely carbon neutral, and this isn't just a tagline. We're not just paying

• 8:56Speaker 02

  a huge amount of money to to carbon offset. The reduction in carbon footprint is drastic, more than ninety nine point nine nine percent, because we compress what we're using on the Ethereum blockchain. We use it as a settlement layer. And finally, is we're specifically designed to bring liquidity to high-volume projects. So really, the NFT market has been dominated by luxury NFT sales over the last year. The bulk of the twenty three billion dollars in volume was expensive JPEGs like four date club or crypto plugs. We think they're exciting, but as a company, we are focused on the democratization of digital ownership. So how do we take items inside video games? And instead of having players just collect them over five years,

• 9:40Speaker 02

  be able to trade or sell them like you would if you bought cards in real life. And the same for other verticals too. And the best example I can give here is God's Unchained, which is one of our trading card games, has more than twenty two million NFTs, which is more than every other Ethereum game combined. And the average trade of one of those NFTs is two bucks. And that's what we're excited about. It's not expensive, ridiculous sales. I mean, they're cool and they're exciting because they show the power of like digital art. What we're excited about, though, is how do we create true long-term businesses? Where players or users buy and trade this stuff for their utility reasons. And we make that incredibly accessible. Every time you trade on a marketplace, that order shows up everywhere. So we operate as a global liquidity backend.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And adding on GameStop into that distribution means that every game developer or user who trades with us now has GameStop's marketplace as another venue of distribution. So we're really thrilled.

• 10:35David Hoffman?

  I think this is a fantastic landmark or turning of the page for GameStop. And really, one of the reasons why GameStop has this massive following, this massive energy behind it, is because of the story of what happened to GameStop during the COVID crisis. And what happened during the COVID crisis was that a bunch of hedge funds decided that physical, brick and mortar businesses are just not going to make it. And so they tried to short GME into the ground, and then that created this possibility of the Wall Street Bets types to really steward the populist side of GameStop. It's like, no, you're not going to short our company to the ground. We're going to short squeeze you. And it has turned into this massive narrative behind the Citadel hedge funds versus the

• 11:18David Hoffman?

  Stimmy check apes who all need to ape together. And it's turned GameStop to be this symbol of the people. While at the same time, COVID was happening and the leadership around GameStop was like, yo, maybe the brick and mortar route is not actually the route for the future. Maybe we need to get into the metaverse. And this kind of seems like the headline. It seems like GameStop gets into the metaverse using Immutable. And this partnership really seems to be about really showcasing where GameStop really thinks the future is. And the future is using NFTs and cheap NFTs and many, many NFTs enabled by Immutable to really start to open up these digital, virtual worlds that we all know are coming.

• 12:01David Hoffman?

  We're just waiting for companies like GameStop to build them. And they're using Immutable as the backend to really start to build out their new business model. That's my take on this story of GameStop. Robbie, do you want to add anything to that story? Or how do you feel like I did with that one?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  It's a brilliant summary. I think the GameStop team is now very visionary. I think they've got a great set of executives who know where they want to go. And I think they also have a very credible technical team building this marketplace. So we're pretty excited to partner with them on this journey. And I think that... When you look at the power of Web3, you've got true ownership and the other big value prop is incentive alignment, which has never really been before possible at this scale. And that's all companies do. They organize individuals to achieve a common goal. And a community incentivized by a common goal of creating an NFT marketplace, which can be fueled by the power of play to earn loops and tokens and Web3-designed communities, is going to be one of the most powerful entrants to the market that we've seen.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  So I think we're seeing the merging of one of the most rabid fanbases in history and an incredibly evangelistic fanbase and incredibly switched-on fanbase with something that can turn all of that into true value and market share. So we're pretty excited.

• 13:19David Hoffman?

  So Immutable and Immutable X is not the only NFT marketplace. It's not the only NFT backend that GameStop could have chosen. So why did, what about the properties or features of Immutable X? What, in your opinion, were the reasons why GameStop decided to partner with Immutable X? Like, what is unique about Immutable X that GameStop was like, yes, please?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So I think there's a couple of things. The first is our focus on gaming. So Immutable is really, as a scaling solution, focused on NFTs. Obviously, that's why we're dedicated to, if you want to build a complex DeFi protocol, go and, you know, use something else. Like, that's not what we're focused on. We're focused on making digital goods accessible to businesses. And that means the APIs we use to allow you to build on us are ridiculously, ridiculously easy to use. And I think that's incredibly significant for games because they want to come in and make something easy. They don't want to muck around with smart contracts and they want to have an economy that is secure and safe. And we make all of that easy to do. So if you have a large brand like GameStop, who's going to be pitching? I mean, when GameStop launched this thing, the amount of inbounds they received

• 14:24Speaker 02

  from developers wanting to build was like insane. And so we enable all of those developers to come and build something that's secure, that's scalable, that's carbon neutral, most importantly, without actually having to muck around with smart contracts. The second thing is like our core focus on gaming means that we have, you know, a really, really strong pipeline of people that we're going to work with. So does GameStop. And so I think collaborating on that and kind of working the go to market side together is part of the reason. I think the third is we've been in talks for a really long time and mapping out this product for a really long time. I mean, by far the better half of the year. So this has definitely been been something we've thought through quite deeply. And obviously, we want to work with as many NFT marketplaces as possible. And I think GameStop is going to be an incredibly significant entry to that market.

• 15:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Robbie, can you tell us exactly what's being built first, do you think? I mean, you've been saying NFT marketplace, right? And there are, of course, so many different types of NFTs. You know, even even within the gaming subsector of NFTs, there's like items, there's collectibles, there's cards, there's, you know, skins. There's things we haven't even thought of. Do you have any inkling on what GameStop is going to build first as part of this NFT marketplace?

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is, I think, why we're partnering, right? So we're working together on the go to market perspective is their, you know, default kind of gaming partner. And our goal is really, how do we get long term gaming businesses? And so to me, that is, how do you have businesses with negative chain that grow over time? And for reference, if you look at something like God's Unchained's volume, it's not like a PFP, which is like this. It's literally a million dollars every day. And that kind of consistency is important because it shows you're generating utility that is real, you know, user driven demand. And so businesses or gaming businesses that want to generate long term businesses where the NFTs are a core part of incentivization and growth loops.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  So what we're interested in and maybe collectibles inside of that within the gaming sphere. I think it's a broad remit and obviously we're going to be assessing for what we think is exciting. Personally, my two bets on what's going to be big this year are kind of high volume NFT projects, which use play to earn and share to earn loops incredibly effectively to grow the games. And what we're also going to see is The quality of gaming content just skyrocketed because right now, like, there's a few NFT games. The quality generally is actually pretty low in terms of the games themselves. And that's just because it takes a while to build this stuff. They're like movies. You can't build a good game in six months. You know, we've been building Gotham Chain for three and a half years now.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  And so we're going to see the quality drastically kind of equilibrate to industry standard for what games should be. And I think that will also help with the brand of gaming for major and mainstream users right now. And the other thing I'm really excited about is UGC and unlocking meaningful economies. Because if you look at what NFTs are incredibly powerful at doing, it's creating efficient markets around long-tail petrogynous assets. And if you look at platforms that have been most successful in the last decade in gaming, they are ones that are open to creators defining the supply. So Roblox, Mantico, like Epic Games and the stores, which allow, you know, third-party creators to start attributing value. Minecraft, which has been such a giant success story for Microsoft.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  All of these platforms, you can now create true player incentives for end players rather than paying them cents on the dollar. And I think this is the general trend of Web three. Stop giant tech companies from extracting value while paying creators literal pennies. And instead empower them to get fair prices for their assets. Where instead you probably monetize via secondary marketplace clips or owning a share of what the community owns. And having incentive alignment as you go toward a common goal.

• 18:10David Hoffman?

  So I really want to drill actually down into the details of what GameStop is actually building. Does this make them something closer to like Steam or Origin? If you're telling me that developers are coming to GameStop knocking on the door, saying, hey, we want to build using your backend now. Like, well, what's actually being built? Are they building just like the, like the virtual digital asset marketplaces for games that already exist? Or are they allowing game developers to come build on their platform to tap into digital goods? Like, what does it look like? What ultimately will this look like from the consumer or the gamer?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  So obviously, if a game is going to come and, you know, build, the goal is come and use immutable access APIs, which make it really easy to use. I think that's what we're kind of bringing to the table is the ability to build an NFT gaming business and have those assets distributed and traded via this massive NFT aggregator. So I'd say it's probably more similar to, you know, a Looks Rare, a Fractal, an OpenSea in the early days. And obviously, the business strategy will evolve over time.

• 19:08David Hoffman?

  Okay, so it's a place, for those that aren't too familiar with Looks Rare or OpenSea, these are NFT marketplaces that you probably heard in the news for things like Board Apes or CryptoPunks, or, you know, insert your profile picture NFT here. But you're saying that this, it could be an NFT marketplace that is generalized for many, many types of different games, many, many types of assets. But because they're built on immutable, they are probably more likely to plug right into games. And so if you are playing your game, but you're really missing that sword, maybe you go to the GameStop marketplace to check out what swords are available, so you could buy the swords there. Is that perhaps the take?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Precisely. And my favorite thing about what we're building is, we really view the future of trading as occurring not only in these giant aggregators, but also inside the games themselves. Because that's often where the best experience for a player to sell something might occur. And the beauty of what we've built, which is our order book that operates as a backend to each of our marketplaces we integrate with, is you could be, let's take a hypothetical, inside, you know, Minecraft or Illudium, who we do work with, and sell your asset that you earn via a play to earn system inside the game, which is frictionless, and you can hide all of blockchain from a user, and then to have someone on GameStop say, come and buy us from GameStop's marketplace, because those

• 20:27Speaker 02

  orders automatically connect liquidity on immutable access order book. So that's really cool as well.

• 20:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robbie, I hope you stick around because we have a few more questions to ask you, particularly about this $100 million fund where some of these numbers are coming from. There's an SEC filing about this partnership. It was that big and you can bet the Wall Street Bets community has dug into the details of this. I think we're the top hosts right now. Yeah. Well, we have some questions we're gonna relay about those filings and the finances behind this, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 21:01David Hoffman?

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• 21:45David Hoffman?

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• 22:27David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 23:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back. We're talking with Robbie Ferguson about this Immutable and GameStop partnership. Super exciting. There is a number thrown about in the headlights, and I think this is part of a GameStop SEC filing as well, which announced this $100 million fund. There are some token economics going on here. Can you tell us about that? So where is the $100 million coming from and where is it going? What's its purpose?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  So the Immutable X token is where it's coming from. And obviously, if you look at the tokenomics of that token, the vast majority of that we are giving away or the foundation is giving away to community members who want to grow the platform. And so some of that is through user incentives, where every single person who trades on IMX gets IMX. And the other is through business partnerships. And so this is essentially us saying, hey, we're going to earmark $100 million of that to games companies specifically who want to build an Immutable X's APIs and platform and order book and distribute via GameStop's marketplace.

• 24:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool. I'm going to pull this from the SEC filing as well. So it looks like there's a $100 million grant for what you said, for NFT content and the community, and then also potentially a grant of up to $150 million in IMX tokens based on some certain milestones that the company would achieve. And I imagine these milestones are Um, a GameStop type milestones. And there's a number like the simple ones execute the contract and, uh, you know, start launching this thing. But there, there are some milestones around transaction targets. I'm curious, um, what, you know, what these, uh, are about, like, what are these transaction targets? Is there some incentive to, you know, increase volume on this GameStop NFT platform?

• 24:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you talk about that 150 million? Yeah, and the milestones.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, obviously our goal is to have long-term incentives for, for us as partners. And the goal is within two years, have more than $3 billion US worth of NFTs traded on GameStop via Immutable X.

• 25:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And $3 billion, okay.

• 25:17David Hoffman?

  And I, I want to actually unpack that a little bit because, um, NFTs on the Ethereum L1 are not, that, that ecosystem is not really a high-volume ecosystem. It's a high-value ecosystem because like CryptoPunks are like a quarter million dollars. But, uh, Immutable X is going for the other end of the spectrum. It is really trying to incentivize total aggregate, just trade volume, like how many trades? Uh, and that makes sense to partner with games and gaming ecosystems because, you know, gamers do a bunch of transactions in their economies. And so it's kind of a high-volume, uh, fake digital world that's now becoming a real digital world because it's now becoming into assets on Immutable.

• 25:56David Hoffman?

  Robbie, can you just go into the, the business model behind, uh, the Immutable X and why it's, it really, really wants high-volume stuff rather than high-value stuff?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Of course. So first off, we like high-value stuff. It has a place on our platform. If you look at the book games drop with Gary V, we launched a few weeks ago. There were, you know, over $50 million of GMV in the first few days. There were hundreds of assets traded for tens of thousands of dollars, many for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those are awesome and our goal is to provide maximum liquidity. So if you can't get the best possible price for your high-value assets on Immutable X, we're not doing our job. And that's why we built an Ethereum is because it natively has that premium for assets based on its security, liquidity and interoperability. What I am saying that is in terms of our target customers, we want businesses where there are going to be millions of users.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And within the context of those like low value trades, there will absolutely be high value trades. Look at gaming, you often have vast majority of revenue coming from whale customers, but then the context of hundreds of thousands or millions of people wanting to play that game and bring overall value to the ecosystem through utility driven demand. And I think that's the core thing. We are obsessed with utility NFTs. We want people to be buying NFTs for a reason, whether it's to own land with utility or to use the item in a game or because of some awesome stream of prominence. That's the stuff that's going to weather a bear market. That's the stuff that's going to grow and that's the stuff that will be able to take us to a billion players. So that's kind of why our target audience is core long-term gaming businesses.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  And obviously Immutable X is completely permissionless and open for everyone to use. We've had literally over 1,100 people building our test environment. That number was at 180 on November 1st. And the goal is to be able to allow anyone to build a successful NFT business in terms of what we spend our active company efforts on. We're very bullish on gaming and like long-term, high-volume NFT projects.

• 27:55David Hoffman?

  So I'm assuming there's a bunch of people watching this stream coming from the GME, GameStop side of things, as well as just like, you know, the trad gaming side of things as well, who are perhaps hearing about Immutable for the first time or just really learning about the possibilities of NFTs with games. Do you have any recommendations for them? Where can they go to actually get their hands dirty in NFT gaming with Immutable? Do you have any like favorite games that you like to play that people that are trying to figure out what the hell this thing actually is that GameStop's building? Where can they go get a taste of that?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. I won't be too biased and mention just Immutable customers. So obviously the big thing has been Axie Infinity last year was a major, major game and paved the way for lots of ways people think about tokenomics. God's Unchained, I think, is the second most popular blockchain game in the world right now by players. We have hundreds of thousands of weekly active users. That's been growing kind of 10 times every three months, which has been pretty insane. And that's designed to be really mainstream. So like your favorite trading card game, it's ridiculously easy to use. Something I talk about is for the first three years of building this game, we never even mentioned the word NFT and we still don't if you go on god'sunchain.com. And the reason is the value of NFTs should not be, hey, you're using an NFT game. It's hey, you're playing a game that

• 29:12Speaker 02

  gives you more value, that allows you to sell things, that allows you to trade things, and that gives you real economically meaningful guarantees. And this isn't bullshit. Like, look at history. Opskins, which was a Counter-Strike GO skin marketplace built on Steam, was a $300 million company that was killed overnight because Steam decided to shut down or restrict trade locks on assets. People in Eve Online care so much about governance around the in-game economy, but they send a delegation of 10 expert players every year to spend a week at the company's services, uh, servers, guaranteeing what changes they're going to be making over the next year. We've seen time and time again, how much people care about these economies, like this is their lives, and it's

• 29:56Speaker 02

  only going to become more serious and more meaningful. And to think that that's going to be owned by a database, or owned by a company like Facebook, is disgraceful. We need to build true property rights. And that doesn't mean speculative scammy NFTs. What it means is you play a game and at the end of two years playing it, maybe you can sell your items, or you can have fun trading with people for low values. That's when we're going to see true mainstream games grow and kind of be the Trojan horse to crypto behind it.

• 30:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I feel like this is why there's so much values alignment between the crypto community and, and kind of the GME GameStop crowd is because it's all about the little guy versus the big guy here, right? It's all about like, individuals should own their own property rights. We shouldn't be able to be deplatformed, whether it's on Robinhood, or whether it's in like a game that we play. But there's still lots of skeptics out there. And, you know, we've used the term NFT a lot in this, in this episode so far. And you said even God's Unchained, like, we don't use the term NFT. It's just about individual, like it's your property rights, like true ownership is really what an NFT means. But what would you say to some of the criticisms? Why do you think there's some pushback out there in the traditional gaming community about

• 31:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFTs? And how would you address that criticism, Robbie?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  I think we have to prove ourselves. I think we have to generate a mainstream game that has hundreds of millions of players and you don't even know it's NFTs under the hood. It's as simple as that. I think talk is useful to showcase intent and what we're building towards, but until we do that, we haven't actually proven our value. So that's kind of my, my short take.

• 31:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  One last question for you, Robbie. We talked about this a little bit when we had you on for our See the Nation show a few months ago, but the business development side of immutable is just absolutely killing it. GameStop is just one of many very significant companies that has come to be built on immutable. TikTok also comes to mind. What's next? What comes after GameStop? Can you, any other things that you can tease?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we'll be launching many, many marketplace integrations over the next two quarters. Obviously, we've already announced our integration with OpenSea, which is actively being worked on. We'll be working with many more major gaming partners as well. Obviously, there's now more distribution with partners like GameStop being added to Immutable X. So yeah, I'm really part of the BD team. I'm also really proud of the product team because if you go into these conversations and you have a shitty solution, you won't win them, right? Like there are numerous dead L1 blockchains out there just offering giant buckets of cash to try and win deals because they don't have a solution that people fundamentally want to use, which is why that number of 1,100 developers building in our test net organically quadrupling since November is so exciting because

• 32:42Speaker 02

  sure, you can go out and pay heavy grants to win big deals. It's much more difficult to build a developer platform that businesses organically want to use and that traction is what excites me the most.

• 32:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is awesome. This is, I think, an exciting time to be in crypto, exciting time to be in gaming as we see like these gaming studios being swallowed up by larger and larger companies, the Microsofts of the world. It feels like we need digital property rights in our games more than ever. That's, that's what the metaverse actually is. It's not about Mark Zuckerberg's virtual world and some lobby you go hang out with. It's about digital property rights and NFTs, immutable is part of that story and now so is the GameStop community. Robbie, thanks so much for joining us on Bankless. It's been a real pleasure, man.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Thank you both. Always a pleasure.

• 33:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, if you'd like this episode, David and I talk routinely about crypto things, NFT things, all things that we think are worth paying attention to. Subscribe to the Bankless channel if you're watching this on YouTube and hit the like button as well. David, anything else we should say before we sign off?

• 33:46David Hoffman?

  Well, one of the things that has always made me really, really excited about crypto is that it's just going to infiltrate my life and hopefully make it a lot better. And that includes the games that I play. It's been a while since I've been a deep gamer, but I really think I perhaps will get into it when some NFTs and crypto economics make the games a lot more real, a lot more lifelike and a lot more fun. So Robbie, thank you for helping build out a bunch of really cool environments that I hope I get to play with in the future.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Well, I believe we can get you addicted again, David.

• 34:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like David needs another addiction in his life. Guys, as always, none of this was financial advice. All of these things are risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is a frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 34:33David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where

• 35:16David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.