Crypto Gaming Panel | Loot Squad, Yield Guild, Illuvium

The magnitude of crypto gaming is increasingly clear, for those paying attention. For Bryce Johnson of Loot Squad, Gabby Dizon of Yield Guild, and Kieran Warwick of Illuvium, crypto gaming is inevitable. Existing at the intersection of finance, gaming, and culture, this sector has a gargantuan addressable market. Axie Infinity has tapped into the passion and potential of dedicated communities, building an entire economy around its protocol. As the traditional gaming market flounders, new strides are being taken to revolutionize how we game, how we work, and how we own. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ 📣 ZERION | Your Gateway to the Metaverse! https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​ https://bankless.cc/go-gemini%E2%80%8B 💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 6:00 What To Call This? 11:16 Play-to-Earn 15:56 Loot Squad 19:38 Yield Guild 24:21 Illuvium 30:54 How Big is Crypto Gaming? 37:43 Community 42:32 Making People Nice 50:00 Will Games Still Be Fun? 58:15 Ponzi Games 1:01:24 Crypto Gaming Roadmap 1:07:14 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources Bryce on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brycent_?s=20 Gabby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gabusch?s=20 Kieran on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KieranWarwick?s=20 ------ 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.

• 0:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Bankless Nation, we are super excited because it is panel time at Bankless. These are some of my favorite episodes. Generally, we put together the best panel of subject matter experts and we just beat a topic to death. We take you from zero to 100 and give you an understanding. Today's panel, I'm especially excited about, David, because this is all about GameFi, the GameFi revolution. That is gaming meets finance, all on crypto, crypto gaming. Ever since David, our conversation with Ariana Simpson from A16Z, where she went over the bull case for crypto gaming, I have been obsessed with this topic, like super interested in

• 0:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  learning more. And so this panel, I think, is an opportunity for you to learn more, for David and I to learn more with our three fantastic panelists. You want to give a quick shout out and who we're about to talk to, David?

• 1:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. And just to go on with the whole GameFi conversation, I think this is the part where crypto gets really, really fun and fun by design. We are beyond the parts of the crypto world where we are talking about finance and protocols and like code and stuff.

• 1:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blockchain.

• 1:29David Hoffman?

  As I know you and I, we were both Diablo 2 fans and we've been using Diablo 2 metaphors to explain crypto. And now this is where it feels like it becomes real. And so we've brought on three people across the GameFi industry. One of my questions is like, are we calling it GameFi? Is that what we're calling it? Because we need names for these things. So we are bringing on Bryson from Loot Squad, Gabby Dezen from Axie Infinity, and Kiran Warwick from Illuvium. And these are different components of a greater GameFi economy, crypto gaming economy, each ones with their own perspectives to add to this conversation. Right, shall we go ahead and get right to the conversation?

• 2:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, David, we definitely should. Before we do, guys, we want to give a shout out to one of the sponsors that made this episode possible. We've been talking about them for the last few episodes, and that is Xerion, because Xerion has some hot new ways to display your NFTs, flex your NFTs. It's already been my like homepage for my DeFi portfolio. Now it's kind of my homepage for NFTs. And David, you tweeted this out earlier this week. I want to know how you did this, man. You put like your CryptoPunk on your, uh, is this like an app on your phone?

• 2:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a little widget. It's a Zirion app with, and I actually had to put my actual CryptoPunk owning address and verify it in the Zirion app. So I couldn't have just load up anyone else's address. I had to load up mine. And I thought my tweet was pretty clever. If you are like me and you don't check any of your notifications on your phone, you can make your phone prettier by putting your cool NFTs on there using the Zirion app.

• 3:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're telling me you don't check your notifications. I see 18,000 emails here, David. I think a few of those are for me.

• 3:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's where they are. And they're going to probably just sit there.

• 3:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they probably are. If you want to talk to David, talk to him on like the new social media channels, Discord or Twitter. Emails is a little bit trickier, but Zirion is cooking up some cool things with the NFTs. Put them on your Apple Watch as well. Thanks to Zirion for telling us about that and informing the Bankless community. So guys-

• 3:34David Hoffman?

  Before we get to our sponsors, slight correction. Gabby plays a lot of Axie Infinity, but he is actually from Yield Guild Games. So sorry about that, Gabby, and we will get to that in a second.

• 3:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Kind of related, right? Sort of a new sort of DAO built on top of Axie Infinity at some level, but also not Axie Infinity. So guys, we are super excited to get to the meat of this panel. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 3:59David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported 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, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. 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. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need- Need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO,

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. The era of proof-of-stake is upon us. Proof-of-stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof-of-work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators.

• 5:26David Hoffman?

  And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-stake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32 ETH and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32 ETH and you need to pool your ETH with others so you can access staking yields? Lido offers a solution for both. Simply go to lido.fi, choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof-of-stake stays as decentralized as possible

• 6:11David Hoffman?

  and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra, or Sol and get liquidity on your stake, go to lido.fi to get started.

• 6:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, guys. We are back with the GameFi Revolution. This is our crypto gaming panel. Do we even call it GameFi? We're about to find out. We've got Gabby here from Yield Guild, which is a talent guild in crypto gaming. We also have Bryson from Loot Squad. You've heard all about Loot and what they are up to, this whole ecosystem that is being birthed around it. And we have Kirian from Aluvium, which is a new crypto game. I think forging some new territory. Gentlemen, it is fantastic to have you on Bankless. Welcome to the GameFi panel.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks for having us.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us. Thank you so much.

• 7:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  We called this thing the GameFi panel at first, like that's what's in our show notes, but I'm actually not sure if we should call it that because like these terms are up for debate, right? Is it crypto gaming? Is it gameFi? Is it something else? Can we talk about that for a minute? So first of all, do you guys like, do you guys like the name GameFi? Does that work for you? Gabby, what do you think?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I can hate it.

• 7:28David Hoffman?

  What should we use instead, Gabby?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Look, I've been in NFT space since like early 2018 and it was called crypto games or blockchain games. And then it was NFT games and now people are talking about play to earn. And now because of DeFi and games are coming out and people want to call it GameFi, but it just sounds like it just sucks as a name, honestly.

• 7:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you saying Gabby, do we, do we have to come up with something better? Like why? Yeah. Why do you hate it so much?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  It, it just sounds like a derivative of, of DeFi and I don't think that's actually what it is. And I, and there's actually a lot of, I would say convergence between what NFTs are doing and DeFi and how it builds towards the kind of open metaverse that we've been talking about. But yeah, I, I just hope 10 years from now, it's not GameFi that wins out as a term.

• 8:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kieran, do you have a different take on this? What's your take on GameFi? Like it, hate it?

• 8:20Speaker 03

  I mean, for, for, I don't, I don't hate it at all. I mean, at, at the end of the day, you're, you're defining what decentralized gaming is and, and just coining it a catchy sort of a name. For us, we're completely decentralized and have been from day one. So for us, it's kind of fitting. But I mean, Gabby has been here longer than me. So, so maybe we should go with what he's saying.

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  OGs hate it so far. What about you, Bryson? What do you, what do you think about GameFi, the term?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Oh man, I feel like I'm coming into this and I'm, I'm willing to just elect to go with the OG's presence. I've only been in the scene, I think for about, since April, so not too long.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  It's the best meme that wins. It's not what the OGs think.

• 9:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's totally true. Okay. So like David and I have said this so many times, we actually, we didn't really love DeFi as a meme when it came about because it was just like to, to us, not all of this stuff is decentralized, right? And there's a spectrum of decentralization. When you just call all of the finance that we're creating on top of crypto decentralized, it's somewhat misleading to be honest. So we were like-

• 9:24David Hoffman?

  People don't get the whole decentralization part of finance anyways. So if we're trying to like communicate to normies, like, oh, do normies care about the D part of DeFi?

• 9:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much do they care?

• 9:34David Hoffman?

  Do they even understand what it means?

• 9:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so we very much like preferred open finance at first, but like that didn't catch on, right? D5, like, I don't know, something about it, the memetics of it, it was more transmissible, it was more viral, and it caught on, and we lost out, so we capitulated. So Gabby, you might have to capitulate on it. It's not too late, okay? They'll create a better meme.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  So I, I, I think that play to earn is actually the best meme. It's kind of a derivative from free to play, which was the last business model of games in the last maybe 10 to 15 years. And people are saying, oh, play to earn, it's not like good enough. It should be play and earn or something, but you don't create and try to create a meme that's 10% better. Your meme has to be 10 times better. And I think that play to earn is actually the best meme that encapsulates what is happening with NFTs and D5s and video games and the metaverse. And if someone wants to be play to earn, they need a meme that is 10 times better, not 10% better.

• 10:29David Hoffman?

  All right, well, we can see if we can stick with play to earn into a duration of this panel. And maybe if we can, it's, we're optimistic about the play to earn label.

• 10:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about, what about just PTE, you know? Just like short form now?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  David didn't like gamefi either, and then he went on this panel, the gamefi panel, so go figure.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  May the best meme win.

• 10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. Let's, let's talk definitionally a little bit. So play to earn is kind of cool because it describes really what we're doing with crypto gaming, which is we're, we're sort of flipping the industry on its head, right? Rather than users, you know, paying for a game, they're actually sort of an active part of this open economy and they're earning as part of it. Maybe Gabby, you could, you could tell us a bit, what's special about crypto gaming and play to earn?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Sure. So play to earn, I would say is like built first of all. So you have smart contracts, then you have the finance part of it, then you have assets, which are like the NFTs. And play to earn was a level, like added on top of that, where using these NFTs in a game environment gives you some kind of Reward token, which has value in the game, which means if I have a reward token and I sell it, I get something out of it. It might be ether or it might be something else, but for it to have value, someone has to buy it and maybe use that in the context of kind of an online economy, which could be a video game or a virtual world. So that is like in essence, from a very like fifty thousand foot level, what play to earn is.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  I am using my skills and my time to earn some form of resource that can be basically traded for money.

• 12:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kieran, what would you add to that? What's different about crypto gaming? Is it this play to earn aspect that Gabby has emphasized? Are there other pieces that are important as well?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so so my take on it is this for us especially, we're going after two types of gamers, right? There's the gamers who not weren't necessarily gamers in the beginning, but now they're in a developing nation and they have this opportunity to play to earn. And so our game definitely caters for for those people. But then I think the the more North American gamers that are used to playing your League of Legends, World of Warcraft, the earning side of that is is just going to be a bonus. And so I think it's a little bit dangerous to just call crypto gaming play to earn. I think the the fact that you can have ownership over your assets.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  If you go and tell a Fortnite player that that, hey, you can now sell your skins on an open market and you own those and it's verifiable. That's a huge, huge selling point and it might not necessarily be the fact that you can earn, you know, twenty bucks, thirty bucks a day out of playing this game. So I I I think we got to talk about both.

• 13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bryson, we talked about these two pieces, right? So owning your own assets and also play to earn, these do seem to be important components. Uh, would you echo these comments? Would you add anything to them? What's your take, Bryson?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say that both pieces are extremely important. You know, being someone who does content. I came from the CS:GO community and we used to sell skins on the Steam Marketplace, but we really didn't have any true kind of asset power over these skins. And when Steam decided that they wanted to, you know, get rid of kind of CS:GO gambling and skin selling, they did it at the drop of a hat. We had no kind of say, no voting, no staking. And playing CS:GO, like it was kind of like my first unofficial approach to realizing what this kind of NFT ecosystem could be without realizing there were NFTs there. But I think that there does need to be a very good consensus in terms of the level of entertainment value provided to American-based users and then also the balance

• 14:25Speaker 04

  of play to earn. Because I look at, you know, gamers in the United States, most of them, like 99% aren't making money playing video games, whereas, you know, play to earn opens the gateway for millions of people, average, everyday people to be able to make an income playing. So I think there's a powerful medium and having both of those involved.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Okay, let me just stop like very quickly right here and just like in my point of view, play to earn encompasses the entire like ownership and being able to sell those assets and being able to financialize them. I think like the biggest misconception, and this is just my definition, is that when you say play to earn specifically, it refers to a cohort of people who basically don't have any money and then they are trading their time for money to play the game. I think it's the whole financialization of the of the game economy that is play to earn. And like, I don't want to spend the rest of the hour kind of splitting hairs between definitions, but that's what I think.

• 15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is open gaming an interesting term for this industry as well? No? Why do you think no, Gabby?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  It doesn't really mean anything. Like, I don't know what to think of when I hear open gaming.

• 15:35David Hoffman?

  Because even even we have perhaps an open financial system, but games are likely still going to be built by developers and studios. And so I think that that is going to be a difficult part of the whole thing to decentralize. Maybe Kiran can give us some illustration when we talk about projects. And I actually think that's where we should we should go next. So each each of you comes from one of one of the few, not too many projects that are working in the game phi play to earn ecosystem. And so maybe each of you could illustrate what your project is, how it fits in, and maybe also how it fits into how it's a model for other projects or other patterns

• 16:17David Hoffman?

  to be integrated into this whole play to earn movement. Bryson, we accidentally got your introduction wrong with implying it was part of the loot ecosystem.

• 16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was me, Bryson. Sorry, man.

• 16:28David Hoffman?

  So so with that, we'll start with you, Bryson. Could you correct us on what loot squad is and how it fits into the world of play to earn gaming?

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Totally. No problem with the whole new definition. I've gotten on tons of calls with people and they're like, oh, are you related to loot for adventurism? Like, no, no, they're a little bit different. We were here first.

• 16:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just to be clear, you were here first. Okay, so you owned loot first. Okay. You're the OGs.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  It kind of at first I was annoyed by it because I was like, okay, they're they don't know we exist. We don't know they exist, but like we're using the same name. And, you know, there's always going to be some branding stuff there. But what loot squad is, is we're like kind of a social gaming community. And we're looking to build out pretty much the coin base of play to earn. So our idea is using content to build a very strong empowering family within the loot squad. We have streamers, we have play to earn users. And at the end of the day, we feel that building platforms on top of play to earn with consumer based products is the future of allowing more dollars to be spent on play to earn ecosystems. So we're very much kind of taking a bullish approach to building out a very strong foundation in terms of our scholars and allowing people to have the empowerment of playing these games,

• 17:35Speaker 04

  but also looking at how we onboard millions of American users in the future. And I think it's through giving them a play to earn aggregator where they can not only invest, but kind of spend their time within guilds and infrastructural systems. So our guild approach is a bit different than some of the others in the space. And luckily, both of the guys in this call are two that I'm collaborating with directly and partnering with. So it's cool to be in the space.

• 17:59David Hoffman?

  Bryson, is that like, if we're trying to use old models like from the esports world, is Loot Squad like a league that you join? Or how should we think about this?

• 18:12Speaker 04

  So I would think from like a very open-ended and cultural standpoint, we're very much like, almost like the 100 Thieves of NFT gaming. If you're familiar with kind of traditional gaming organizations, we're not like moving in the same direction of YGG. We're there, in my opinion, like being the leader in terms of being able to index across multiple play to earn games. But we are more so like a traditional gaming organization who's looking to kind of expand on traditional infrastructure by focusing on creating consumer-based products. So not really kind of in the same mold. But we do feel like there is a ton of space for multiple players.

• 18:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bryson, what's 100 Thieves? Sorry, my gaming days are like, my World of Warcraft days are a few years behind me.

• 18:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you can tell by the collar.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  So 100 Thieves, they're a traditional gaming organization that does a lot in the spaces of like League of Legends and Call of Duty and some other games. But they're very much seen as kind of the content mecca of the gaming scene for the traditional world. Whereas like, we're focused on trying to replicate the content aspect of that for the NFT gaming or play to earn gaming world. And I think both of those terms kind of go synonymous in a sense, kind of like what Gabby was saying earlier. I like the idea of saying P2E encompasses all of kind of NFT gaming and play to earn and entertainment and all of that.

• 19:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So. By the way, I just want you guys to know David Hoffman was wearing the collar yesterday in our conversation with Andy Yang. I was in a t-shirt, okay?

• 19:34David Hoffman?

  A politician, we're with a bunch of gamers.

• 19:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know, I flip flopped it.

• 19:39David Hoffman?

  Gabby, let's turn to Yield Guild. What is Yield Guild? How does it fit into the whole play to earn revolution? And how might it be a model for other organizations as well?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  So Yield Guild is what we call a play to earn gaming guild. So what we are actually is kind of a coalition or a federation of guilds that onboard player communities from around the world. It started in the Philippines, it acts in Infinity last year. But now we have communities from all around the world that are playing these different games and yeah, deriving some kind of earnings from those. So we started with Axie, but since then, we partnered with a lot of different games, including Illuvium, including Star Atlas, other games like Guild of Guardians, Ember Sword. So we want to be the gateway for people to have jobs in the metaverse, whether you're an ordinary player, you're in esports, you're a content creator.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  We want to give the, basically become the entryway for that, for people to come into the crypto economy and start earning their, living creatively, no matter like how they want to do it. And if there is a barrier, because it costs something to get started in one of these games, it might be purchasing an NFT, being part of the group. We want to erase those barriers and have anyone come into these games and become a part of the crypto economy.

• 20:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it true that you have a moist owl as part of your founding team, Gabby?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Yes, Owl of Moistness is my technical co-founder and he's fully anon. And yeah, I think you and Ariana talked about that last time, right?

• 21:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was hilarious. I love it.

• 21:07David Hoffman?

  Gabby, can you check my thinking on this? I think one of the premon- early premonitions before crypto was even a thing, that the world of play to earn was coming regardless, was the fact that World of Warcraft had a sufficiently robust in-game economy. That actually, you could actually make enough money and enough gold in World of Warcraft to actually support yourself as a player. And then also, something that World of Warcraft pioneered was actual guilds. People in discourse before DAOs were even a thing, forming and banding together to share resources and to join in together to fight the bosses. And so for me, Yield Guild is, it's actually, it's a DAO, right?

• 21:47David Hoffman?

  Except it's a DAO that allows for organizations to form across any play to earn game. And then the DAO itself has its own self-sustaining economic model.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:00David Hoffman?

  Based off of those players, but then also can take that model into, you know, more maybe traditional routes such as like content production and, you know, whatever else the Dow wants. Is that all right?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So guilds have existed in games for over 20 years. If you go to any MMO, starting from probably Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, guilds have existed. And later in us existed, except that they were kind of like gray or black market. It could, it was never really in the terms of service that you could exchange these assets for real money, but people were doing it anyway because they were valuable and some people wanted to spend time to obtain these assets and some people wanted to spend money. And what later and thus is that it puts the assets of these games on the blockchain, which kind of legalizes the kind of asset exchange part of it makes it pretty easy. And part of the actual kind of game economy and the rules of the game.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And the guild itself now is basically a group of people like a guild in a game like World of Warcraft that now has a treasury that is essentially has a bank account of assets in these different games and we use that treasury. And we've raised money from some, some investors like Ariana, a recent Horowitz, to invest in these assets and then lend them out to the players so that they can play these games, earn an income without having to spend any money upfront.

• 23:19David Hoffman?

  I think that instantiation of assets that you access when you play these games is really, really important because that really goes, is really where it goes to these guilds of, you know, RuneScape and World of Warcraft that form. Because people just want to hang out with their friends online and play games. But once the assets are involved, once there's actual digital assets, that goes from, you know, a bunch of friends, you know, hanging out, playing games to an economic body, an economic unit that with a kind of in the same way a company has goals and aspirations and targets, which I think could help blossom a lot of color into the world of gaming.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in, in terms of NFT assets and tokens, we have over $30 million of assets in Axie. We have over a million dollars of assets in the Lubium, for example. So it is serious money, like having a guild that has thousands of players from around the world playing these games.

• 24:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is like all of my childhood dreams come true. I gotta say, it's like happening. I feel like a little too late for it because like I'm, I'm not so much in the gaming scene nowadays, but man, it's, it's all happening.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  You're not too late.

• 24:23David Hoffman?

  You're perfect. Let's, let's turn to you. Uh, Kieran, what is Illuvium and how does it fit into this whole play to earn environment?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  So we're a fully decentralized game from the heart. Essentially, we are building a game very similar to Pokemon, but with the battle systems of a League of Legends teamfight tactics. And so we've sort of merged these two genres together. And, you know, very similar to Pokemon, we've got 150 alluvials that you walk around in this open world and you're trying to catch. As Gabby was saying, that all these alluvials are on the blockchain. We've built this decentralized marketplace where you can go and either, you know, battle these alluvials or you can go and sell them.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  There's a whole bunch of other components within, including like mining. There's, you know, skins that you have, there's enhancements. And so we're, we're really trying to, I guess, up the ante in, in the space in terms of bringing the first AAA title to blockchain. And I know that gets, that, that, that gets thrown around a lot these days. And it's a bit of a buzz word for, for a lot of games out there. But, you know, to, to bring that level, you need a team that can sufficiently deliver that. And, and so what I mean by that is, is having hundreds of people working on the game.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  And you need, you know, millions of dollars to be able to deliver that. And so we've gone and, and raised, you know, over 50 million dollars. And, and we're, we're looking to, to expand on that again. And yeah, we're, we're looking to build out our team to, you know, the size of your likes of Ubisoft and Blizzard to actually deliver what I believe is, is going to be one of the first games. There's obviously other, other games building at the moment. But to actually deliver that experience of of real fun gaming, not so much, you know, gamers looking for for something to earn and and and obviously in our game, we're set to

• 26:37Speaker 03

  give out something like 600 million in in yield, but it's more we're we're targeting the the fun side of gaming first, which means, you know, super immersive, addictive, strategic gameplay. And then the cherry on top for us is the fact that you can obviously go and sell these assets and and earn, you know, quite a bit of money. Plus, you know, we're going down the route of of an esports game where, you know, we we want to be up there with with guys like Dota, which, you know, are putting on prize money tournaments of of like 35 million plus with us, you know, we want to break those records and having,

• 27:18Speaker 03

  you know, NFTs and and and having a token that like we do at the value we do, we have that possibility. So that's kind of what we're doing.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  By the way, I I've seen some of the Illuvials, like sneak peek that Karen showed us, and they're fucking amazing.

• 27:33David Hoffman?

  I see. And I think it's going to be actually trivial for this industry to just shatter records of reward distributions because it's hooked right into finance, it's hooked right into crypto. So it's a lot of sense. Karen, you you said that Illuvium is a decentralized game. Can you unpack that? What what does that mean? Do you mean something more than just the users own their own assets? Or or what else about Illuvium is is decentralized?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, first of all, like, I call it a decentralized autonomous studio, right? So we we're we're 140 people now and and we're growing at a rate of of knots. It's literally 10, 15 people a month are joining. I've met 5% of those people, right? They're they're across 30 different countries and they're all contributing to to building this game. That's the the the first step there. The the second thing that we did, and this is a bit of an ode to to Kane from from Synthetix.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Sorry.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  No, but but I think the biggest thing that we did is we literally said we even before our TGE, we airdropped a bunch of tokens to a lot of the Synthetics community, a lot of our initial early adopters who came into our Discord. And we said, all right, you guys now have a token. We want and it was called pre ILB. And so it had no other value apart from being able to vote. And what what that voting was was made to do is actually put in a put in place a council of five individuals that the token holders thought would be the best people to essentially

• 29:28Speaker 03

  make the decisions based on on the protocol, right? From a from a decentralized finance standpoint, from a gaming standpoint. And so we've we've given the ability for literally all our token holders to have a say in adding new characters to the game, for example, in doing balancing, in in changing things like our our tokenomics. And so we've already had multiple examples of where the someone has written an IIP, which is an ILVIM improvement proposal, very, very similar to how Ethereum works, again, synthetic works, but were the first ones who are literally doing it in gaming.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  And that was a little bit scary at at first. But now that we're seeing this play out, the community, the the benefits that you get from from giving power back to the community is just it's it's amazing to see, right? There's so much buy in from people. And we think it's going to transpire to a basically, a lot more trust, a lot more in game purchases, just purely because people think and and and literally are building a game by the, you know, with their own input from the community, which, you know, it's it's really, really fascinating to watch.

• 30:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Karen, since you brought him up, we mentioned him a couple of times. Your Kane is is your brother, right? Kane of Synthetics. We've had him on Bankless before. Is he an older brother or younger brother? Curious.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, I was actually having a chat just before this with David. But he's nine years older, so just to clarify that for everyone out there. He's trying to spin this, this narrative that we're like two years apart or whatever.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  But yeah, no, he's, he's very much my, my older brother.

• 31:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the reason I ask is because like, you know, it's a bankless likes analogy. And maybe there's an analogy here of like gameFi play to earn is sort of like DeFi's younger brother that's now entering into the ring here. And I have a question for you because I, I'm sure you've had conversations with Kane and others in the past, but this goes into like the total addressable market size of this. And, and I'm curious what you think. Do you think that DeFi is bigger? Or do you think crypto gaming is the bigger total addressable market size? This is maybe a Kane versus Kieran sort of discussion too. So which is bigger?

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And so, okay, so, so the addressable market for DeFi is basically it's, it's limited by the population of, of the world, right? Everyone can join decentralized finance. Everyone needs finance. The, the, the difference is that it's very opaque, right? It's very taboo. It's, it's like, I don't understand it. There's, there's so many people that just dismiss DeFi purely because of the complexity. The advantage that, that we have as, you know, a, a DeFi game is our addressable market is something like three billion people. So it's, it's not the whole world, but it's, you know, nearly half.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  And so for us, it's, it's so easy for someone to understand, especially now that these layer twos are coming out, which, which make the, the experience in the game seamless, exactly like it is in mainstream. The the opportunity here to, and we're already seeing it with Axie, right? The opportunity to to bring people into the crypto space is it's you can't even measure it, right? Like, we're we're trying to get to a hundred million players. And my thing is, you know, it's not a screw you, Kane, like, we just brought in all those people. Because I'm also a massive, massive investor in the DeFi space. I think it's a matter of bringing them in.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  And then, once they have a MetaMask wallet, once they start seeing, okay, I'm earning a little bit of money. I need to go on to maybe OpenSea or or these other decentralized exchanges to to start selling these assets. They're going to, without even realizing it, they're going to start adopting crypto. And so the DeFi Maxies out there who are like, oh, this is just another flash in the pan. It's going to go away. I think they need to, you know, embrace what's happening here. And and yes, these these are normies, as we call them. But very, very soon, I'm expecting those those normies to start adopting other crypto protocols, which I think is is good for the entire ecosystem.

• 34:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I take your point that these things are very synergistic. And crypto gaming is maybe the gateway drug to the rest of DeFi. Totally agree. It's maybe it's many people's first banking experiences, you know, comes by way of crypto gaming in DeFi. But which one's going to be bigger, Kieran? Do you think you think crypto gaming is going to win?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  I think.

• 34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  A bigger market out there?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  So in the short term, we're absolutely going to crush DeFi. It's it's not even.

• 34:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Not even an argument. I mean, I I Kane and I are extremely competitive to the point where it's it's almost. It's it's almost unhealthy. And and so I will say again, I think, you know, the the amount of the amount of dollars that can go into DeFi is you basically it's you can't count it, right? Like, it's it's so large that that I think, you know, at the end of the day. We're gonna win in the short term, but 10, 20, 30 years from now, I think DeFi will will eventually win out. But then you look at it and it's like, are we part of DeFi?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  You know, is is gaming part of that? So I don't know, it's kind of they they they come hand in hand. So I don't think there can be really a winner apart from the short term.

• 35:33David Hoffman?

  Brian just wants to see two brothers fight. That's what that's what he's doing.

• 35:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I I just want that a little bit, but but but also like in a healthy way, Kieran, and you know, don't make it unhealthy for sure. But but Gabby, maybe we just came full circle to game fi again.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  So here's the way I take a look at it. DeFi is the gamification of finance. Game fi is the financialization of games. These are actually no different. You're just coming at it from kind of the opposite ends. And when you combine them, what you have is basically play to earn and the metaverse where if you watch Ready Player One, people own their assets across different game experience, buying buying these assets and owning them and then taking them basically to their whole virtual lives with them. So I think they're just opposite ends of like the same same outcome.

• 36:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, how come they didn't have a blockchain and like Ethereum and Ready Player One? It felt like they were missing that technology, right? Or do you think it was just assumed?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Oh, i- i- it was just kind of under the hood. I think it's always been there.

• 36:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bryson, what do you think about this? Is this a total addressable market? Is this how, you know, gaming goes mainstream and crypto goes mainstream? How big is crypto gaming in your opinion?

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I honestly think that DeFi is going to going to depend on gaming more than the gaming side of what we're doing would depend on DeFi. And the reason why I would say that, even though they're both interconnected, like, for example, the the best way to get you know, your money or get your crypto on to your Ronin wallet right now, like when I first started, you were going through and you were swapping, this is before AXS was on my Coinbase, you were swapping Ethereum and you had to get the Ethereum and a wrapped Ethereum and to do all these steps, you know, you're touching a lot of DeFi concepts. But at the end of the day, I think there are tons of people who are, you know, going to jump into the gaming side of things that might that could care less about whether or not they're using DeFi protocol.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  But just know that they're playing a fun game. So I think they kind of go hand in hand, but I think gaming provides more to DeFi in terms of long-term sustainability. Because I know for myself, I started in gaming, not even realizing I was using DeFi and ended up now it's like, oh, now I want to use more DeFi things because of gaming. So I think gaming is a way of bridging a lot of these gaps.

• 37:43David Hoffman?

  I want to turn the conversation to something that I also see alignment between the traditional current gaming industry and what we see going on in the crypto world. And that is the emphasis on community. Community is something that crypto has intimately become understood. Where if you don't have a community, you kind of don't really have anything. Community is what supports Bitcoin, it supports what supports Ethereum. And then it also is what supports all of the applications that are built on Ethereum. And the same thing is true with gaming. Studios, gaming studios are into like, very sensitive to what their community has to say about their game. And community feedback about how the game should be designed is something that gaming studios thrive on.

• 38:28David Hoffman?

  And without that, they tend to die. And so now we have these two worlds that are coming together and they're already both powered by community. And so I want to ask this question to Gabby first. How do you think about the intersection of community and play to earn gaming? Like, does this, when these two worlds collide, what happens?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so first of all, communities have always been very integral part of any successful game. So game communities have been around forever, but having play to earn games with community that is basically powered by Web3. Within these DAOs with token form of ownership, it just makes everything more explosive. Because now your communities are empowered by ownership. And this is really, is really different from what happened in basically game communities where you're fans of the game. You're very, you could be very like a big fan, a big defender of the game, but ultimately you didn't own anything, right? And now that

• 39:32Speaker 02

  That your gamers are basically co-owners of the game ecosystem that you have. It just really changes their relationship where in a sense they're your co-creators. They may have an economic stake in it and just the level of participation, the level of loyalty. And yeah, just the way that people are integrated, the community and the team. And sometimes like the community is part of the team. It is something that's never really existed in the game industry before.

• 39:59David Hoffman?

  The community is part of the team. I absolutely love that line. I'm definitely going to be using that in the future. Bryson, I want to turn the same question to you. How does the role of community change once we integrate financial assets into these games that we play?

• 40:13Speaker 04

  I think community continues to just like hyper scale, not only games, but it hyper. I think you can hyper scale financial protocols and DAOs and everything of that sort. I mean, look at what YGG, myself at Loot Squad, everything that we've done up until this point has been built off the backs of building a strong community and having the sense of empowerment for bringing other people along this journey and allowing them to reach their goals and helping them follow their dreams. So I think community is going to be like a very huge focal point to the future of how we build. And then long term, you look at like traditional gaming versus, you know, what you see in Axie and Aluvia and other NFT games, the communities are much different because there is this aspect of DeFi and money involved. People are less likely to be toxic.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  People are less likely to want to, you know, spread fun about a game or people are less likely to like treat other players with disrespect because at the end of the day, everyone wants to make it. And by doing so, showing that the community is great, it provides a level of validity to projects. It provides a level of validity to guilds and overall the ecosystem of NFT gaming as a whole.

• 41:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  David and I were talking to someone earlier and we were describing like what's happening in crypto gaming. I found myself like as starting to call crypto gaming like users or like customers. And then I like stopped myself because that's like the existing traditional model of gaming where you'd have users and customers. And I'm not quite sure.

• 41:42David Hoffman?

  What to call these new ecosystem participants in something like Axie? Like, do we have a term for this? Are they like, community members? Are they citizens? Like, because they're more than customers and they're not users. So what are this new breed of ecosystem participants that are actually working in the game? They're not employees either. I don't have a term for it.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think everyone has different definitions. I know for myself, we like to, at this point, just call them our Axie family. Because the Axie fam, it makes a lot of sense. But Gabby, you've been around a lot longer than I. What is your, your opinion on that?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  I think citizen is actually nice, that term to put it. Yeah, yeah, just guild members for us. Because our members are part of different game communities as well. But there's a part of the guild, guild community and the sub guild that we're in.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:33David Hoffman?

  Bryson, you said that this collaborative nature makes people nicer. And I'm a, I'm a big fan of Overwatch. And Overwatch is famously toxic. Because when you head into a competitive game, everyone just finds somebody else to blame. And I recently tweeted out this line, "Blockchains make people nice." And what I mean by that is, kind of a, it'd take too long to explain. But more or less, like, having a transparent system kind of enforces honesty and collaborative nature. So like, are you saying that when we integrate financial assets into our games, everyone's just going to stop being toxic and start just being nicer to people?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm a firm believer of that. I think when I first got into Axie Infinity, like, the first transaction I made, it was like, kind of a private transaction with somewhere where I sent them, you know, like a thousand dollars for two Axies. And in the traditional world, like, I remember when I would go and try to buy, like, an Elgato game capture, so I could screen record from someone on Twitter. And then the guy just like scams me for like 80 bucks. Whereas it's like an Axie, I'm like, oh, I can send a thousand dollars this person. No, now, of course, I do not recommend anyone doing this, so if you're watching. But it's like my experience, my first time, I was like, wow, he actually sent me what I was looking for. You know, I had people vouching for him. So I do think, you know, keeping scammers out of the community is something that all of these games are looking to do.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  So I disagree that blockchain makes people necessarily nice because it hasn't rubbed off on Kiran.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Kiran is a super competitive guy, but like, so how I see it is that they're zero sum and they're positive sum games. And if we are playing a positive sum game, then people are actually kind of incentivized to helping each other. If the game is zero sum, if I'm getting into a match where either I win or I lose, I get zero or I win, then the environment becomes toxic, right? So there are elements of play to earn which are zero sum, there are elements that are positive sum. What I see now is that it's still a growing market. We're still at the very start of onboarding how many millions of players, a few billion players into this economy. So I think for maybe the next few years, it's going to be more positive sum than it is zero sum.

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zero sum, is this why Bitcoin maximalists are so mean and toxic sometimes, Gabby?

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so because for them, the world is, there's only so much Bitcoin and the only game is to accumulate more of it. And with Ethereum, there are so many games you can play, there's so many communities you can join. And honestly, it's a lot more fun joining a DAO, playing a game, becoming a streamer and finding so many ways to win. If there's only one way to win, then you're either winning or you're not.

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Kiran, I've intently left you last for this question because like you said, you are building a game which requires improvement proposals by the community. And as we've said, the community members are now part of the team. So what's it been like trying to build a game with the community shoulder to shoulder? What's that been like?

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the crazy thing for us, and thanks for that jab, Gabby, that was nice of you.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  But yeah, no. So essentially, we've got governance, right? We we literally have everyone who holds a ILV token is it's a governance token. And you have the ability to shape our protocol from a DeFi standpoint and a gaming standpoint. And so empowering those players, and I mean truly, truly empowering those players, giving them decision power, right? That's that's what it comes down to. Has created, we've we've got something like 200,000 community members. And we're still, you know, a ways away from releasing the game. And I think that is built upon the fact that they actually get a choice in in the matter.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  And if if something that we're building doesn't make sense to them, they'll step up and and they'll, you know, talk within themselves. We've got all different measures and and channels for for people to be able to voice their opinion. And it it really builds this camaraderie where like we've got crazy, crazy, crazy people who that spend, you know, 15 hours a day in our Discord. And it's it's to the point where like they're they're seeing things that I don't even see anymore. Because I'm, you know, busy out out there getting partnerships and stuff like that. And I come back and I'm like, holy shit, what is going on here? And so, yeah, I think community is everything.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  And and I was such a a massive believer in that purely because when I started investing in the space, the protocols that had the the the community backing and and the really positive communities, they were the ones that the the token price, you know, kept on going up. And it wasn't even almost about the, you know, at at a certain point, you got to deliver a product, right? But prior to that, you know, if you're building something and and and the the people that you're building it with, literally the the contributors and for us, anyone can contribute with these proposals. So we essentially have 200,000 people contributing to what Alluvium is going to end up being, which.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Again, it's it's it's very, very rare. We it's it's not been done before in this in this measure. And and so, you know, for us, yeah, I echo what what Bryce and Gabby are saying. Community is absolutely everything.

• 48:06David Hoffman?

  At some level, it almost seems like community is the product.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, yes. I mean, they're essentially partly the builders. You know, they they're not physically coding the product. But if they're the ones who are sitting there saying, hey, this is what we would like to see. This is the new character that we would like to see in the game. Then you are, you're part of the the the building economy of of the game.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's what I noticed fundamentally different with Web two and Web three. In Web two, you want a founder to be a really good product builder. And then the community could follow later. The best Web three founders are the community builders. And who eventually figure out what the product should be because they co-create that product with community. So if you're a superstar product builder who doesn't know how to build community. You're actually not going to do well in Web three, whereas in Web two, there were a lot of people like that. Where they just built like funding and teams out of people who are superstar product builders. It's not going to work for for Web three.

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  Wow. It definitely falls in line with the mental models we have of these organizations and economies being opt in economies. You actually have to choose to enter them. And so therefore you need as a leader to convince people to enter your community. And once you do, you have a vibrant community and the world is your oyster. Guys, there are some things that I have some critiques about. Whether whether or not like if we turn this whole game fi thing into an economy. Does that just actually kind of ruin the point of playing games? Does it make it no longer fun? So I want you guys to chew on the answer while we cut to a sponsor break. Here we go. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto?

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high. Gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible prices without taking any commissions. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your order across multiple liquidity sources. If Matcha sees that it gets you better pricing. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pulls the liquidity for me into a single, easy to use platform. Matcha also allows for you to make limit orders on chain. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. New to Matcha is an integrated fiat on-ramp.

• 50:37David Hoffman?

  So you can purchase crypto directly with your credit or debit card and have that fiat be instantly traded for any token that has liquidity. When you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz slash bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid die markets.

• 51:19David Hoffman?

  Gemini just launched their Earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemini.com/goBanklist. And if you trade more than a hundred dollars within the first 30 days after signup,

• 52:04David Hoffman?

  you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/goBanklist.

• 52:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with our crypto gaming panel. And a short little anecdote, once upon a time, I absolutely loved going to the gym. And then I got a job as a personal trainer. And as soon as I did, as soon as I started working in the gym, I hated going to the gym. I never wanted to go to the gym again. As soon as I was done, I just left. So my question is, if we make these games also the same places where we work to generate revenue, does that kind of defeat the purpose of gaming? Doesn't that just suck the fun out of things? Gabby, what say you?

• 52:43Speaker 02

  So I think that Reshoom's a very narrow definition of games where all I do is basically play games to have fun. But narrative based games, the games on your PlayStation and Xbox, they're never gonna go away. And honestly, if it's a narrative based game, there's probably no economy in it. And it's not going to be a blockchain based game. If I just want to have fun with a good story, I'll fire up my PlayStation and play, you know, like game, yeah, just God of War or something, right? But if I want to play a game, be in a social circle where we're earning things of value, which used to be games like World of Warcraft and/or RuneScape,

• 53:24Speaker 02

  I would rather own those assets and make money for them because I'm already working for them in a social environment, paying money and getting value out of it. So I think that's actually a lot more fun, being able to own those assets. And actually, NFTs are a lot of fun. Even these collectible PFPs that you just buy and trade and flex on Twitter. It's already a ton of fun. So yeah, I think that like I can have a lot of fun and make money at the same time.

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess part of your point is like, I remember the days of like Diablo and World of Warcraft. Like people were grinding anyways, right? Like they were grinding, they were working hard. It wasn't always fun. Sometimes it was, but it wasn't always fun. But they were grinding for, I guess, the flex or for like legitimacy or credibility. You know, my level 60 Warlock, look at me, how much time I've spent to level up to this point. And so I guess maybe part of your point, Gabby, is like, people are doing this anyway, but they don't actually own the product that they're working so hard for and grinding so hard for in many of these games. Does that, does that hit a little bit?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, especially in these games that have very rich economies in them. Why cannot I own the value of the of the value that that I'm creating for the game economy? So I think that's just more fun if I wanted to do that. And if I wanted to play a story based game and not think about making money, I could go pick up another game.

• 54:49David Hoffman?

  Kieran, do you have an opinion on whether or not adding in finance to games ruins the whole point of games?

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Look, I I think if you bake it the whole basis of the game, then yes, right? And I think that's what we're seeing a lot with the games that we have right now. There's a reason why North Americans and and, you know, the the Chinese gamers and and and all these these guys that go and play God of War and World of Warcraft and League of Legends. There's a reason they're not coming into the space yet. And the the the fundamental reason is be and this is my personal opinion. Maybe this is why I'm I'm not so nice. But I just don't think that the games in blockchain right now are built to be fun, right? They're they're built to for people to earn.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  And while that's good for, you know, developing nations out there and and it's building these new economies. And I think it's super, super important to to still encompass that inside your game. I think you fundamentally have to create a game that is fun, right? That people actually want to play. And if you all of a sudden ripped out that economy, they're still going to be sitting there playing your game. And if you get the balance right and you have, you know, enough mechanics inside your game, enough strategy, enough of of really, really high quality graphics, which is what allures people to these games in the first place, then you're going to have people playing anyway.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  And then when you we you you chuck on top the fact that, hey, you can go and sell these assets on on marketplaces and make money. You can also win a tournament and get yourself a whole bunch of tokens that are that are highly, highly valuable. Even to a a small degree, just little achievements here and there throughout your game where you can earn money. That is the cherry on top, right? And I think that's what's missing right now. And it's it's no doubt it's coming. And I'm a believer of give it ten fifteen years PlayStation eight is going to be on blockchain, right? Then everyone, everyone is going to move to to this because

• 57:04Speaker 03

  it's the demand is coming from the players. And as soon as players are playing a game of the quality of of a AAA game, which there's many, many titles that we could mention, soon as you get that, and then they're sitting there and they're like, okay, so now I'm now I'm having heaps of fun like I'm I'm normally used to, but I'm also earning a whole bunch of money. It's like, Mom, sorry, go away. Not go fuck yourself, go away. I'm actually earning more right now.

• 57:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm working down here, Bob.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  I'm working, but I'm also having a whole bunch of fun, right? And so I think you have to start with the fun factor, and then you sprinkle the DeFi aspects all the way through it. And that's what's going to to open the eyes of of all of the mainstream gamers, which is

• 57:57Speaker 03

  a very large part of what we're targeting at Alluvium. But again, also inadvertently, the the yield that we're giving out is also going to attract the the likes of the Axie players from your developing nations. So we're trying to do both.

• 58:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's interesting. There might be, I I think there I'm gonna plus one on that. There might be something to that. I'm just recalling our conversation with Ariana Simpson. Once again, where we talked about like, we asked her the question, hey, aren't these like, what do you, how do you respond to the criticism that all of these crypto games are just big giant Ponzi's, basically, right? It's like this, this, you know, flywheel, there's nothing behind it. And her response was, well, well, actually, the the utility is the attention, the utility is the fun, the utility is people actually want to come play the game. And maybe what you're saying here is that if you don't have that underlying utility, then there's not very much that's actually backing the new open gaming economy that you've just created. It's kind of

• 58:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  it's kind of hollow, and it could go up, but then it's going to come down. And the baseline value proposition is how many people are here in the game for fun? Does that resonate at all?

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Hundred percent, absolutely, right? The value creation, you know, if it's just new players coming in and eventually that stops, right? Eventually, there's a point where you hit this point where there's no new players coming in and if that economy doesn't have that value creation in built in it and the players are actually happy to go and buy skins and enhancements and things that don't necessarily make them more money, you just touched on it, gets them to the point where they're level sixty and they're flexing like in World of Warcraft. That is why we're here and I think that's when we're gonna see, you know, games,

• 59:52Speaker 03

  the longevity of games, that's where you're gonna see the five, ten year cycle of a proper, like an MMO in the mainstream. So yeah, that is a perfect explanation of it, yeah.

• 1:00:05David Hoffman?

  Bryce, you're a streamer, so you play these games and then you're also who are streaming them. Do you have any experience with this whole dynamic about, does it lose its funness when there's money involved?

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  Well, I definitely think that it's important that your game is like fun outside of the monetary aspect. You know, I grew up playing Pokemon, so I very much am very like keen on both Axie and Alubium in terms of the fun factor being there. But I will say like in my kind of understanding of where my audience comes from and how it is explaining this to non kind of crypto folks about how gaming is, it is a lot harder for me to bridge into American mainstream audiences with gaming, just through playing Axie. You know, it's something that I work on and I have an entire content and media team where we strategize on how we do this. So that is something to take into account. But I think like across the future of blockchain or NFT gamings in general, there's going to be tons of opportunities to play games that people

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  enjoy. A lot of times for me, I do enjoy playing Axie. I'm gonna enjoy playing Alubium when that comes out. But there might be someone who doesn't enjoy Axie or someone who doesn't enjoy Alubium or some other game that comes out, but having a very wide range amount of games is important and understanding that not every game is everyone's cup of tea. And I think that's like privy to like understanding how this discussion will go.

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

  As we come down to the final question here in this panel, I want to thank all three of you for the time and insights that you've given us here. I want to ask this final question, zooming all the way out. So in the very grand scheme of things, if we are looking at the next two years in crypto gaming, and then also the next 20 years in crypto gaming, if crypto gaming had a roadmap, what would it look like? Like, what are we about to unlock in the short term? And then what's it also going to look like in the long term? So without giving you any time to think about that, Bryce, let's start with you.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness. In the short term, I think we'll see a lot of crypto games come through. I don't think we'll see a lot of winners long, like for the intermediate to short term. I think there's going to be a bunch that come in. Some are going to get completely wrecked, some are going to do well. And for me, as a content creator and in building, I try my very best to go deep on games before I like can truly commit to saying, okay, this is something that I believe in. But in the long term, I think there are going to be some blue chips where we look up and you have like the mad end of NFC game, where it just stays around a long time and people continue to put money into it. And I'm very just bullish on the entire industry. I think we'll see large gaming developers and publishers, as well as, you know,

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  the Twitch and YouTube and their gaming departments very much getting behind content creators in these games. And I'm very interested to see how all these games continue to build out. So I think that the NFC gaming space is going to be here for an extremely long time. I don't see it going anywhere.

• 1:02:53David Hoffman?

  Deep future is, is, are we headed towards Ready Player One, Bryson?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like to, like, I don't know the whole Ready Player One story in terms of if there's VR or AR involved in terms of like how the metaverse will work. But I do think that I spend right now, probably 97% of my life is interacting with people that I met on the internet. So, you know, I feel like I'm already

• 1:03:16David Hoffman?

  That is the metaverse.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  That is the metaverse. So, you know, I would say that we're already there.

• 1:03:23David Hoffman?

  Gabby, since you seem eager to respond, how do you think crypto gaming will develop in the short term? And then how do you think it'll develop in the long term as well?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Let's start long term because that's the thing that I think I spent a lot of time thinking about. I think the future of work is going to be in the metaverse. It is not just games that you're going to play. It's where you will go to work. It is where you access DeFi. It's where you have your most valuable assets. And I think just the future of value is going to be inside these virtual worlds, which may or may not be games, which where you will access what we now call DeFi. And these are all going to be built on top of some kind of open ledger, where we are going to store that value. I fully think that the world is headed there and we call it the metaverse.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  And right now it's in the form of games that may be slotted into genres like an RPG or, you know, card game or like a metaverse land game. But, you know, like the games now that are trying to be like blockchain or gamefied games, it's like the first TV shows that were basically like radio shows with a static picture on them. Right? Once we unlock what like basically the future of value, the storing value in NFTs and fungible tokens, putting them in a virtual world where we are interacting all the time. We can prove that digital ownership. We're basically starting to build the early building blocks of the open metaverse now. And I think that is just where all the value will be flowing in the next 20 years.

• 1:04:56David Hoffman?

  Aaron, take us home. What's crypto gaming going to look like in the short term in one to two years? And what's crypto gaming going to look like in 20?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  So I'm a, I'm a big investor in the space. And I used to, as I said, I used to invest in a lot of DeFi protocols. Now I've got a lot of gaming, a lot of games coming to me, a lot of game studios coming to me saying, "Hey, do you want to get involved?" And so my short term outlook is that there's going to be

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Tons and tons of games that come out in the next 12 months that are what we in the mainstream, what you would call indie games, right? And they have their place. There, there's so many indie games that, that have ended up going viral and they're awesome. And, you know, if you, even if you look at something like Monster Infinite, right? They're, they're literally doing a fork of what Axie is. Now, I'll, I'll preface this with Axie just got 126 million dollars. So I fully, fully expect them to, to start building out their, their game and getting a whole bunch of new team members in. So I'm actually turning quite bullish on, on Axie. But, you know, I think in this short term, as, as Bryce said, there's going to be a lot.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Some make it, some get wrecked. But in the long term, I'm now speaking to teams that have come from these huge AAA studios, and they're just going to keep on bringing more and more talent. They've, they've seen the light of, of crypto gaming. And the, the trouble that we have is that it takes a very, very long time to make a game. If you look at GTA, right? Their last release took eight years to make. And so we could be waiting a long time before we get our, our, you know, World of Warcraft style of mobile that's, that's on in, in crypto gaming. But I'm very bullish on this space. I just mentioned, you know, PlayStation, I think Microsoft, I think all of these guys

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  are going to literally start getting at, at least the involvement of, of, of some form of NFTs in, in their, you know, marketplaces and stuff like that. So, yeah, I'm, I'm super bullish. I think we're going to a very, very good place. And, and yeah, I can't wait to, to see the adoption that we can all create.

• 1:07:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, this panel's been phenomenal. You, you three have taken us from zero to 100 in, in just a little over an hour. As we leave, Bankless listeners always love the alpha. You mentioned some projects there, Kieran. I'm wondering if you guys could just name some hot projects that folks should pay attention to, any, just anything that comes to mind. You don't have to give the description. Bankless listeners who are curious can go look them out. What's, what's coming down the pipe? What is hot right now, Kieran?

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  I don't. So they're all sort of in they're in stealth mode. So for me, I can, as I have invested in them, I don't really want to be showing it. I don't even know.

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  The ones you can name. You want the ones you can name.

• 1:07:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is there anything you can name?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Look, so, so I just, so there's, there's a couple of little indie ones. There's, there's a group that I made a tweet, right? About Flappy Bird and said, someone needs to build Flappy Bird. And the team that is building the crypto Flappy Bird, the fancy birds is what they're calling it. I think they're going to be one of those really good short-term games. But then you've got, you know, Guild of Guardians, you've got Ember Sword, you've got Star Atlas. There's, there's all these bigger games which a lot of people know about. I really don't want to uncover these other ones because I think I definitely would get in trouble.

• 1:08:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some of those names are even alpha for me because I've not heard of all of them. Gabby, what other projects would you add to the list here? Anything cool?

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I really like Illuvium. I think we're very much looking forward to the release of the game.

• 1:08:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bryson, anything you had?

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  I'm not bullish on much, but I love Axie. I love YGG. I love Illuvium. And now I'm very keen on a game called Cypher. I think it's one to look out for.

• 1:09:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome. Guys, this has been perfect. Thank you so much for going through that. We really appreciate the panel.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Bankless listeners, as always, got to remind you, none of this has been financial advice. This is crypto gaming. It's not financial advice. Okay? Bitcoin is risky. Eth is risky. Crypto gaming is risky as well. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are on the frontier. This is the metaverse. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:09:35David 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 we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:10:20David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build.