Pod Insights Bankless Immutable Live Reveal: Scaling NFTs to a Billion Players with L2/L3 About this episode Co-Founder & President, Robbie Ferguson and Co-Founder & CTO, Alex Connolly join us to reveal something very important: the next chapter of Immutable.
Tune in to find out what it is and what it means for the NFT space!
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
6:15 What’s Holding GameFi Back?
12:00 Immutable’s BIG Release
15:32 Why Multichain?
20:27 The Interoperability Layer
23:11 Network Effects, Security, & Fractal Scaling
45:15 Liquidity, Multichain & Bridging Dynamics
53:41 Wen Games?
58:00 Rarible x Immutable
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Resources:
Robbie Ferguson
https://twitter.com/0xferg
Alex Connolly
https://twitter.com/0xconnolly
Immutable
https://www.immutable.com/
https://twitter.com/immutable
Spectrum of Chain Chart
https://imgur.com/oaGPuuE
Unified Ecosystem Diagram
https://imgur.com/j32AzjH
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https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures
Transcript 11,634 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:11 Ryan Sean Adams? Bankless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode. We're doing a deep dive today on scaling NFTs with our friends at Immutable. And this is a particularly important topic in the whole scaling NFT strategy. David, can you give us a preview of who we're talking to and what we're talking about today?
0:30 David Hoffman? Yeah, we've had Robbie Ferguson from Immutable on the show a number of times before, but he has brought his CTO Alex Connolly along with him because we are going and doing a deep dive into some of the technical aspects that is going to create a revolution in both Layer 2 technology, as well as NFT technology, as well as gaming technology. But you and I, Ryan, are going to do our best to make this simple, make this digestible for the rest of the world, because what they have going on here, I think, is going to solve a lot of people's concerns about the future of Ethereum scaling. As we all know, the gas fees on Ethereum suck, I guess, and then we're all trying to move on to the same Layer 2, so that we can have all these composabilities.
1:12 David Hoffman? But the issue is with, we can't just have one single Layer 2, we're going to have many, many Layer 2s. And so how do we restore composability while also having cheap fees? And so this is the conversation that we're going to be having today with the Immutable co-founders. And just to really kick things off with context, last September, Vitalik Buterin wrote a research post on the ETH Research Forums titled "Cross-Rollup NFT Rapper and Migration Ideas," which is a proposal for how to make NFTs cross-rollup-friendly, allowing NFTs to move across the entire Layer 2 ecosystem. And today, what Immutable is announcing is their solution towards solving the cross-rolup composability issues. So what does this mean?
1:54 David Hoffman? This means we are going to have many, many games with many, many chains, with many, many assets, and all of those things are going to be completely abstracted away. And so users are not going to need to be DeFi degens to be able to play their DeFi game. Game developers are not going to have to be smart contract developers to build a game. And we're going to talk about all the different layers of complexity that exist to make this magic happen, while on the surface level, it doesn't feel complex at all, Ryan.
2:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, this is super cool. This is a way to have your cake and eat it too, right? We get all of the scalability of layer twos without losing composability. And what that just means is we have the ability to atomically move liquidity from one place to another, be able to trade with one asset on one chain to the other. It's all interwoven, it's all composable. We get to preserve these money Legos. David, speaking of having your cake and eating it too, dude, we gotta do a shout out to Alchemix. They wanted us to tell the Bankless community that their product is here. It's fantastic. I believe they have released some new token economics to power this thing. But the base is, there's only two points in time to get ETH. One is before the merge right now, the other is after.
3:07 Ryan Sean Adams? And so if you're like me and David, you're holding your ETH. And yet at the same time, you might need some liquidity on that ETH. You might need to use some cash in the real world. Alchemix allows you to take a loan out on your ETH without selling it and without being subject to liquidation. A little bit of a magic there where they're pulling yields forward in order to make that possible. And you can get into the mechanics of how that works. But David, they've also released some new token economics. Do you have some details on that and where can people learn more?
3:38 David Hoffman? Yeah, there is a link in the show notes if you want to dive into this. That's bankless.ccAlchemix with a capital A. In addition to just having stablecoin pools, they also have ETH pools. So you can pull out an ETH-denominated loan and have that ETH-denominated loan pay itself back over time. Overall, Alchemix has a lot of cool new things coming. So look forward to all of those things coming up in the future.
4:03 David Hoffman? You are muted, Ryan.
4:06 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm still muted. All right, David, we're going to get right into the podcast with Alex and Robbie from Immutable. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
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6:49 David Hoffman? Welcome, Bankless Nation, into this fantastic show where we're going to discover how exactly Immutable is scaling out NFTs and GameFi to a billion people. In the bottom-left corner, we have Robbie Ferguson, who you've seen him on Bankless before. We've had him on a number of times. Robbie, welcome back.
7:06 Speaker 02 Thanks, David. Good to be here.
7:07 David Hoffman? And in the bottom-right corner, first time on Bankless, we've got Alex Connelly, the CTO of Immutable, also co-founder. Alex, welcome to the show, man.
7:14 Speaker 02 Thank you very much. Super excited to be here.
7:16 David Hoffman? So we have a lot of stuff to get through, a lot of material to get through, but I want to start with this very, very high-level question. We're coming off of the absolute mania of 2021, going into 2022. GameFi has definitely embedded itself into the minds of more or less everyone these days. But I'm still yet to be playing a game. I haven't found a Web3 game that's quite for me. Robbie, what would you say is really holding the world of GameFi back right now?
7:45 Speaker 02 I think there's two answers. The first is, we don't have a platform which is easy for mainstream gamers to use at the scale at which these games will operate, which is 100 million players or more per day in the largest cases. And the second reason is that great games take time to build, and often the lagging time on these is at least a couple of years. And so although we've seen a huge influx of DeFi, of profile picture projects which look attractive and can be built in a month, it's really, really hard to build long-term games. There are very few which will be releasing, you know, up to this point. But we're going to start to see over the next 12 months, more and more of these games come out, and the average standard of game rise dramatically.
8:26 David Hoffman? Alex, what would you add to that?
8:28 Speaker 03 I think there's a big trade-off here between the games where they are sort of gamified economies, right? So that's where you're basically having a DeFi-like construct, but with a game you are where it sort of feels a little bit like a game, and a game where it's fundamentally built to be a fun game that you can play, and then you're sort of soft onboarded into crypto. At the moment, most of the games that have been built are the first one, right? So those economic games, and those are great, but for most players, they just aren't very fun. And so the reason that you're not playing them so far is that we haven't actually been able to build the type of games that you would play, even if you didn't yet know about your NFTs and crypto. We think it's really necessary to have that soft onboarding so that people can use this technology for the first time without having to spend $2,000 on virtual sneakers.
9:13 David Hoffman? I think when we all hear the word "gamefi", or "web3 game", or "asset-powered game", we more or less think of the games that we all played in our childhood: World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft. But when we find items in these web3 games, just like we did in our old games, they're actually items, they are actually assets. But other than that, the blockchain element, and at least this is how I interpret gaming in my mind, web3 gaming, where the blockchain elements just aren't present in the game. I don't have to be signing Metamask transactions. I don't have to be worried about gas fees, and everything just happens instantaneously. And so they look and feel like the games of my childhood, but they are also with real-world assets. Robbie, a same question, but back to you. Like, why haven't we found this yet?
9:56 David Hoffman? What are the ingredients that we need to really get to this point of gaming?
10:01 Speaker 02 So, I think we need a few things. The first is, as we'll talk about in today's episode, the scale and user experience that enables, you know, billions of players to eventually play these games, which is the total market of gamers in the world. But the second is, I think we need really robust gaming playbooks so that games in the web2 era can come into web3 and actually be able to build things successfully without being economic experts. Because when we look at every previous paradigm of success for gaming, whether it was mobile gaming as pioneered by Supercell, whether it was social gaming as pioneered by Zynga, or whether it was even free-to-play gaming, which had massive backlash on gamers and games industry folks alike when it first came out.
10:46 Speaker 02 The commonality between each of these industries is they only truly took off when a winner developed content in the space and then turned that content to playbooks for everyone to use. You know, they they reskinned Farmville and Mafia Wars into 10 different skins of games and created the playbooks that any publisher could create, you know, social graph incentivized marketing for for Facebook. For Supercell, it was developing the playbooks that people could just build, you know, mobile games and and Gacha games at scale. We need that moment for Web 3. We need it to be, hey, here's how you take an MMORPG and develop it into a play and earn economy, which empowers creators and players inside that game.
11:28 Speaker 02 We need, hey, here's how you develop a mobile, an RPG at scale with exceptional user experience. And those are the playbooks that Immutable is investing in.
11:36 David Hoffman? And so the, this is a line I have later in the show, but I'm going to pull it up here, where the future of game fi, or Web 3 gaming, or asset-powered games is not that game developers become smart contract developers too. It's that the smart contract developers build the scaffolding to allow the game developers to continue to be game developers, yet also just pull in assets. And I think that, I think it's a great transition to what, at a high level, what you guys are announcing here today. So as we are going through the whole rest of this show, unpacking all the details, Robbie, can you just explain what Immutable is releasing here today?
12:14 Speaker 02 So Immutable is releasing the first cross-roll-up liquidity solution, which will allow games to have their own dedicated L2 or L3 instance, which means that now World of Warcraft can come on board, and their 100 million players can have a dedicated, you know, 10,000 TPS on multiple instances of it, while we fundamentally solve the reason that multiple roll-ups would suck today, which is siloed liquidity and siloed orders. Assets can't be easily traded between them, and the orders can't connect anywhere. So with Immutable's open order book, we solved a fundamental liquidity problem with NFTs today, which is that assets traded on one marketplace or venue cannot be matched against assets traded anywhere.
12:56 Speaker 02 Which is really going to be a fundamental thing that would prevent gaming liquidity from taking off. With this announcement today, our cross-roll up liquidity platform, we're basically supercharging those highways. So now not only can you trade from any marketplace, wearable, GameStop, OpenSea, but each of those can have the TPS required to support the next billion players on Ethereum.
13:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Hey Robbie, so a quick question for you. I think some people are still, you know, you're almost talking about a problem ahead, maybe a problem that many of the game publishers and developers, and certainly you guys see right now, which is like, hey, we don't have the composability, we don't have the ability to move from one roll-up chain to another. A lot of people are still stuck on the first problem when they think about crypto games, which is like, the ETH gas fees are too damn high and like transaction speeds are too low. Could you give some other context for actually what main problem a mutable is solving? And then also fit that into the next horizon of problem set, which is like,
13:57 Ryan Sean Adams? you know, making sure that we have liquidity and composability, we can trade assets from one layer two to another. But like, the question of why layer two is in the first place? And will this actually fix gas fees on Ethereum? What would you say to that?
14:12 Speaker 02 Right now, if you trade an asset on Ethereum layer one, it'll cost you anywhere between, you know, 20 to hundreds of dollars in gas fees, depending on how congested the network is. And the problem with this is if you're creating an economy where you want to create tens of millions of NFTs per day and have players trade these NFTs as part of a real economy, it doesn't make sense. Why would you pay $50 in gas fee on an item that costs, you know, a dollar or $2 to trade? And so what we're fundamentally doing is bringing a scaling solution where the consumer and business-facing gas cost is zero. If you want to mint 100 million NFTs on immutable today, it costs you literally $0 in gas fees. And the reason we're so passionate about that part of our tech architecture,
14:54 Speaker 02 you know, which no other side-chain or scaling solution has, is because what's most important is an economy can be generated where you don't know the value of which these NFTs will trade, you know? It's just tokenizing stuff, like you can own these assets in real life. And the reason that's so important is now players can onboard without having any ETH in their wallets and start to earn and trade instantly. But also, games can just create real economies where they don't have to worry about, you know, Paying millions of dollars in minting costs to create a true economy in the first place, and they can just monetize through a player incentive aligned manner as they take these secondary fees.
15:33 David Hoffman? And so this is of course bringing and collapsing the cost of being a game inside the Web3 space down to zero. But Alex, I want to throw this next question to you. Why can't we all just do that on like this Starknet or one single ZK rollup? Why do we have to have many chains?
15:51 Speaker 03 Great question. What this comes down to for us, and this speaks to immutable's positioning in the space as well. Just as you asked before, why are we looking so far into the future, to next year and beyond? That's partly because we speak to these game studios every day. We speak to all the major game developers in the world. We speak to all the major indie studios, to the mid-market studios, to AAA studios, and we get to hear what they're thinking about building and what they would need to make that happen. And the truth is that what they're looking for often is a little bit different, and they want to make slightly different trade-offs. Some of them absolutely must have their own dedicated rollup because they need hyperscale. Some of them need different guarantees around privacy or around data availability, or they want to have different sequence of structures
16:34 Speaker 03 to enable better resiliency. Or for some rollups, people are comfortable paying a low gas fee for each transaction. Some rollups, people are saying, okay, well, we have to find some way to subsidize these costs to make them zero. Our big belief is that in that end state, if we want to have every major game, which has non-fudible tokens and truly owned assets built on Ethereum, we need to ensure that we can actually offer them the rollups that make sense for those games. And that means we have to support multiple rollups rather than everything just being on one rollup.
17:06 David Hoffman? And I think if you just like take it at face value, it makes sense that game developers aren't going to want to share space with other game developers. They're going to want to spin up their own chains, just because that's just kind of what they're used to. They want more control over the way that their their layer two, their ZK rollup, looks and feels. And so we've got a graphic that you guys threw us before the show, talking about some various spectrums of L2 designs that are available to be chosen by any sort of game designer that was interested in making a crypto game. So Alex, can you walk us through some of these different choices that a game designer would make and why they would optimize for some and instead of others?
17:49 Speaker 03 Absolutely. So I think I'll start by talking to the top half of this chart. On the right is the technology that Robbie was talking about earlier. So we've partnered with the Starkware team, we've worked extremely hard to basically build the best infrastructure in the world for building NFT games. And on the right, you see that StarkX offering. That's what's live today, which is an application-specific rollup, which is extremely optimized for the needs of NFT projects. So most NFT projects can deploy today, they can experience really strong scale, like experience, you know, an incredible trading experience with no gas fees and instant confirmation of transactions. But the trade-off there is that you lose composability and smart contracts. So because it's application-specific, you can't write custom functionality.
18:32 Speaker 03 Well, this is okay for many NFT games. For those particularly more gamefire-oriented games who need more complex tokenomics, they need that smart contract support, right, or solidity support. At the top left there, you see what everyone in the community is also extremely excited about at the moment. I'm sure you guys have had Uriad previously talking about Starknet and what that's going to do. This is an early-stage product, but it's one which is going to be increasingly important for Ethereum over the course of the next year. That's a product where you have some trade-offs are reintroduced. So you have a gas fee mechanism, even though the gas fees are substantially lower. But you do get in return that awesome power of smart contracts, composability, interoperability.
19:16 Speaker 03 On the bottom half of the chart, if you're a game developer looking at the bottom half, it's essentially the same benefits as the top half. But you're also getting the benefit of much more control over your environment. So you can tune it to your game's particular needs. It's not just about the total theoretical TPS. I think this is an important point for many people to realize. The total theoretical TPS is one number. But also remember that if two major games decide to launch a midnight promotional event, where they want to mint a million NFTs to a million players, and they decide to hit the button at the same time. It's important that Ethereum's infrastructure is resilient to that use case. And it's extremely important that that doesn't result in a bad user experience or which turns people off game.
19:58 Speaker 03 And so there are all sorts of reasons why you might want a particularly customized rollup solution. But the obvious trade off is that you won't have access to the apps that have been built elsewhere in the ecosystem. So I think the big challenge for us to solve as we look at this graph and we see this as, hey, how can we solve the problems of game developers? How can we offer them the environments that they need to be successful? Is how do we avoid fragmenting asset liquidity and order liquidity on each of these roll up platforms?
20:27 David Hoffman? So as we lean into this world of many, many chains, I think it becomes pretty obvious, especially with these kind of crypto, deep crypto native games, there was the whole like loot phenomenon where these one single assets will be a part of many, many games. And in that world, that's going to be somewhere on the left side of the spectrum, the Starknet side of the spectrum, where you do need that interoperability. But in order to have that, you have to pay gas fees. And so even though the fees on Starknet are very, very low and affordable, it still is a design choice to have to click a transaction on your game to make that thing happen. And so that is one end of the spectrum. On the other ends of the spectrum, there are completely gasless, from a user perspective, gasless games, where everything is taken care of and each one will have those own verticals.
21:11 David Hoffman? But you guys, and we'll talk a little bit how this actually works. But the thing that you guys are announcing today is that it doesn't matter what chain is on. It doesn't matter where your money is on. It doesn't matter where the assets that you want and what their chain is on because of this interoperability layer coming out of immutable, everything all interoperates pretty seamlessly. Robbie, is that, is that all right, my tracking here?
21:32 Speaker 02 So the really unique thing about this is every roll up by default in today's model would have its own siloed asset book and order book. There's no improvement in liquidity, even if some game has a massive success on one roll up. And the problem is, everything in the world comes down to liquidity. The most successful financial markets are the ones where you get the price by going and trading there. Now, this problem doesn't exist as much in fungible token markets because if I even have half a percent of the fungible token supply and I'm, you know, running an AMM on Ethereum and USDC, people will just up our inefficiencies. But it can't work that way with NFTs. Every single NFT market is unique and it's really, really tricky to build this global liquidity standard that allows players and users to trade any unique in-game item anywhere.
22:17 Speaker 02 And so the fundamental thing we're doing is we're building this liquidity bridge and platform across every single rollup. So even if that ends up being a thousand servicing, you know, tens of thousands of different games with millions of daily active players each and then interactive content like TikTok. Ultimately, what we've done is created the global pool where any asset can be traded on any rollup on any marketplace instantaneously and in one single atomic transaction. That's seamless to the end user. And that is what builds this this sort of gravity and massive network effects around liquidity.
22:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Robbie, is that any rollup or is that any rollup in kind of the Starknet ecosystem or like ZK rollups specifically?
22:55 Speaker 02 Any immutable supported rollup, of course. Yeah, like that's that's what we're doing.
22:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, so any immutable supported rollups, that would be right now kind of, you know, ZK sync tech more sort of Starkware, is that correct?
23:06 Speaker 02 That will be that will be Starkware.
23:08 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, got it, got it.
23:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Can I ask you guys, you know, the the bigger question here, high level question here and, you know, maybe allow you to to kind of explain this a little bit. So this is another graphic that you guys helped to help us understand what's going on here. It's just we've got these different layers here. And of course, we've talked so much on bankless about layer two, which is this layer that sits on top of Ethereum and that's where kind of the rollups reside. And we've talked about, you know, kind of that being layer two being the new frontier. That's where the new property is, the new block space is. We also have this diagram, a layer three is kind of like built on top of a layer two. I'm wondering if you could explain that. But before we explain everything in that's depicted here, can you give us the high level of like,
23:54 Ryan Sean Adams? why are we doing layers at all? Like, why are we doing layer two? Why not just for what you said, you know, gaming publisher needs hundreds of thousands of TPS, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of TPS. Why don't they just launch their own chain? Create their own separate chain. Why are we doing, why are we going to all the work of doing layer twos in the first place? Robbie, you want to start with that? And I'd love to loop Alex in too.
24:16 Speaker 02 Sure. Look, I think the one's very easy, which is network effects and security. Every single other L1 or sidechain which has been created so far has an inferior security model to Ethereum. In some cases, this means users lose billions of dollars. I don't think I need to call out, you know, the recent examples, but I will. Either it's the $600 million Polyp Network hack, this $600 million Ronin Bridge hack, the, you know, $40 billion demise of Luna, which was more due to game theory and economics than the underlying security of the consensus mechanism. But the reality is that security fundamentally matters when we build the architecture of these blockchains. Now, end consumers do not care on which blockchain something is built,
24:58 Speaker 02 which is why Immutable is so passionate about making sure the best possible prices and the best possible user experience for playing what is going to be the most popular consumer apps built on the blockchain in the next decade, by far, gaming, are on Ethereum. Because we don't ultimately want to build infrastructure which is insecure. We don't want it to be owned by Meta and have 52.5% fees. I mean, this stuff is really, really important because whatever platform wins now and becomes the default will set the standard for what security, fees and decentralization looks for how people own digital stuff.
25:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, so the Luna thing, I think, reminded the ecosystem, you know, when we had that meltdown. It's like there were so many developers actually like scratching their head and going like, now what? We have invested months developing on top of this Layer 1 ecosystem in Luna and now it's completely disappeared underneath us. Like, the economy has completely collapsed and so has the security, by the way. All of the security budgets completely went to zero. So it had to be like, you know, trying to open a storefront in the middle of the Weimar Republic, right? It's just like, everything's collapsing around you, you know, fire, everything's burning. And so that does, we, once in a while, I guess we get these reminders, Robbie,
26:14 Ryan Sean Adams? that, hey, security does matter when it's a hack or when it's a collapse of an entire Layer 1. Alex, what would you add to that? And can you explain this diagram that's in front of us for a minute?
26:24 Speaker 03 Sure, just to round that off, we hear this from the perspective of game developers. So we're out there in the market, we're talking to the people who are building these games. And what they're telling us, even if users are okay, they're happy to sort of, they don't really understand what's going on. It's hard to explain the different trade-offs, you know, what's the difference between a sidechain and an L2? But game developers, particularly the game developers who are looking to build long-term games. That's a multi-year investment, that's millions of dollars of upfront upfront capital that's being invested in those games. They want to build on the best tech and also they want to build on the winning ecosystem. They don't want to be left somewhere out on an island. And right now, that makes Ethereum extremely attractive to many of the world's top game developers. We just have to get the user experience there. In terms of how we get the user experience there, that's where we think this diagram comes in.
27:09 Speaker 03 So we've heard a lot on the show previously about Layer 2. The concept of Layer 2 is actually extremely simple. How can we take transactions, process them on Layer 2? And then roll them up to Layer 1 using a ZK rollup or an optimistic rollup? Where we're verifying that all those transactions actually happened on the Layer 1. So if you're not verifying on Ethereum Layer 1, you're not an L2. The way that you should understand Layer 3 is that essentially we can take the exact same concept. And then do it one more time. So remember that process that I just described? How we take a lot of transactions, we generate a proof for those transactions? And then we verify that proof using a smart contract on a base layer?
27:52 Speaker 03 Well, we could do the same thing where we gather a number of transactions on Layer 3. Generate a proof for those transactions and then verify that proof in a Layer 2 transaction. Which remember is going to be later verified itself in a Layer 1 transaction when that transaction itself is rolled up. What this is called fractal scaling. And what this means is that we are able to use, through this shared state of Ethereum. We're able to build the types of things we discussed earlier. So different rollups with different trade-offs, which can be even cheaper, which can make even deeper trade-offs.
28:28 Speaker 03 And you can build those such that they share a settlement layer in Ethereum. So you can see in that L three slot, you have a number of different designs for what a layer three might look like. There's the application specific rollups. There is the private Starknet. There is another version of Starknet on top of public Starknet. All these things which can be built customizably to the needs of world-class games. But which can settle all the way back to layer two and will be even cheaper than layer two transactions. So this is a, I think, a huge, a huge innovation. And if you want to read more of the technical detail about it, I really strongly recommend the Starkware Fractal Scaling article.
29:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, so and within this layer three, Alex, this is what you're saying. What you've just rolled out does is you're connecting all of these chains within, within the layer three. You're connecting liquidity, you're enabling the ability for assets to move back and forth. You're providing that composability, sort of the glue that will connect this entire layer three. So it's not like a whole bunch of different chains in layer three. It's just almost like from a, from a developer perspective, or maybe from a user perspective. It's one deep liquidity pool, one pool of inventory of assets. Just, it's almost like looking at one chain. Am I understanding you correctly?
29:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's, and it's not just about layer three. It's, it's layer two and layer three. So it's wherever you have these, these EK rollups, right? And you are user, you own, let's say, I'll, I'll take the example from earlier. You've got an asset in World of Warcraft, right? Which is operating as a, as an L three application-specific rollup to do like hyper-optimized targeting of people at, at planet scale. And you've got a, a public Starknet because you were doing scalable DeFi there. And you want to purchase the asset that someone else has listed over there. Having to go through all the process, like the, you know, moving things around between, between rollups, right? Bridging orders between it will massively hurt Ethereum's ability to service the best games in the world.
30:24 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
30:25 Speaker 03 What we're providing is basically the ability to take that order from the World of Warcraft rollup and to fill it with the ETH that you have on Public Starknet.
30:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, so we've encouraged people in listening to the bankless to go start to explore the layer two that they want to live in. So like go tour the neighborhoods, go look at schools, you know, go look at the rows and the infrastructure, the traffic patterns and figure out where you want to live. Let's say I want to go live on Public Starknet. That's going to be my layer two or one of my layer twos because that's the cool thing. I don't have to just pick one. Now we have all of these other kind of layer three metaverses, one of which is my favorite game. It's World of Warcraft meets NFTs and it's the best thing ever. I have another game that's MMORPG type game. I've got another game that's like a first person shooter, whatever. And I also have this whole NFT ecosystem on layer three. You're saying
31:15 Ryan Sean Adams? that because I'm living in the Starknet ecosystem in layer two, that's the neighborhood I've chosen. It's like I'm right next door to all of these other mini metaverses, right? And like I can swap my assets back and forth. It's not even a thing. And that's what Immutable is providing, the ability for it to be all seamless, interoperable, same wallet user experience. I don't even know that I'm moving, I'm teleporting from one, you know, neighborhood to a different city because it's all at my fingertips. Is that correct?
31:46 Speaker 03 Exactly, exactly. And I think Immutable's vertical integration is what allows us to offer that like full seamless experience. We really want to be there as the platform to solve these problems for games. And that requires you to build all the intermediate components to actually make this happen. I think there is a, there is so much value that we can offer to users here simply by giving them much greater liquidity than they have right now when they're moving between these rollups.
32:12 David Hoffman? Okay, so I'm going to do my best to tie all this together because the IMX community is incredibly energetic and they're always, every time we bring you guys on, they're always in the chat and people are asking for just a little bit more elaboration. So I'm going to do my job to summarize absolutely everything that I can here. So we got Ethereum at the bottom and that's of course a blockchain that we know and love. And what we are Talking about earlier with all of the varying spectrums of varying rollups that you can produce. You can produce generalized ones, you can produce application-specific ones. And the cool thing that Immutable is helping companies, gaming companies do, is to spin up their own particularly suited flavor of blockchain. And that's going to be in the L3 layer. And so World of Warcraft, Diablo, all of your favorite games,
32:57 David Hoffman? there might be web three versions of these things. And they're all going to have perhaps their own specific blockchain. There's also going to be games that are built on the public and open blockchains like Starknet. But there's going to be many, many, many chains. There's probably going to be up to one chain per game. And all of that does is breaks composability. Like you can't just live on one chain, especially when you exist in gaming. And so while we're seeing these lines go to all these different chains, think of like an application-specific Starknet or a Stark X Validium or a Stark X Rollup. These are all different ways to construct a game in ways that a gaming developer might choose to best suit their game. Now, instead of having just, how many are there?
33:40 David Hoffman? Five different types of blockchains in that L3 layer? Multiply that by numbers of games. And so you guys call this fractal scaling. And I want the listeners here to think of a root system that is growing out of the public Starknet. For every single game, there's a new root. And so this is what allows this whole gaming ecosystem to grow. And that increases in complexity, it increases in surface area, and it increases the ability to onboard users into a particular flavor of game. Because that allows that game to be maximally useful based on of the ZK blockchain tech that is built upon. And so there are no limitations based in the blockchain world for what a game developer can build in the Layer 3 layer.
34:25 David Hoffman? And that Layer 3 layer ultimately gets settled on the Layer 2, which ultimately gets settled on the Layer 1. But the whole entire thing, the reason why you'll notice the box that surrounds everything, is the Immutable X ecosystem, which is this mesh network to allow your asset on one game to hop to another game. If your Ether is on one chain, but you want to buy an asset on a different chain, it doesn't matter what chain it's on because of the Vitalik paper that I talked about in the introduction. And so I'm just super bullish on this thing. I'm gonna do a, throw a bone to all of the listeners out here who are here because they probably like the IMX token. All of that value, all of that economy is being funneled into the immutable ecosystem.
35:09 David Hoffman? And the way that the IMX token is useful is that it's a staking token. So as there's these fractals of chains getting birthed, because every single blockchain game births its own ecosystem, its own economy, ultimately, that, all that value of all those transactions on that chain gets put into the IMX token. Thank you, Ryan. It gets put into, it gets put into the IMX token. And so like, imagine an insane amount of like, surface area for all these blockchain games, and it's all being collapsed down into the immutable core ecosystem, which ultimately gets settled on the Ethereum Layer 1. So, for all of you, all the YouTube people who are talking about how way too complicated that is,
35:53 David Hoffman? I hope that that was the explanation to really drive this home. Robbie, Alex, did I mess up anywhere? Is there anything that you want to add?
36:02 Speaker 02 I'm gonna take that two-minute snippet and put it on our homepage. No, I, I completely agree. And I think the really important thing to remember is that the whole reason that Ethereum is the greatest, most liquid place to kind of deploy an NFT project today is because all of the wallets are shared, all of the network effects are shared, all the composability between smart contracts is shared. That is what generates this business machine. And what ties it all together is the security of the consensus mechanism, and the robustness of that network that exists today. What we're now saying is we can take this scale, create zero gas costs for any game developer, any application building on it, while preserving all of that same benefits of, you know, shared liquidity, shared order and asset state, shared network effects.
36:47 David Hoffman? Alex, is there anything you want to add as well?
36:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, the way I'd round it out is by saying, if all that sounds complex, right, there is a lot of complexity there. The goal is to make sure that both to game developers and to users, right, that just looks like a really, really seamless ecosystem environment, right? So you as a game developer, you just say, hey, get me the user's wallet and initiate a trade, right? It doesn't matter to the to the game developer how you're funding that transaction, where the where the funds are coming from across the lot. This is the crucial point, and this is why we see ourselves, we are like really in the business like of of obviously building these scaling solutions, building this liquidity infrastructure. But we are just in the business of getting the best games in the world to build on Ethereum. And we think that that is what's necessary to unlock everything we talked about in the introduction. You have to make the user experience awesome, and you have to make the developer experience awesome.
37:35 Speaker 03 You need the empowerment that all these different tools give you and all this complexity on the backend. But you need, you you actually genuinely need some of that infrastructure to build some of the mechanics that your games need or to support the user count that you want. But unless we're able to successfully abstract a ton of that complexity away from particular users and honestly developers as well, right? No one is going to be able to build that type of planet scale Ethereum game that everyone wants to see.
38:00 Ryan Sean Adams? It's the bottom line of what you guys are saying is that like, okay, Ethereum is now scaling and we're open for business to define. Like, we are we saying, are we going as far as saying we've now solved the scalability problem? So if you are worried about building your game in crypto, like, don't be because it's now solved. Would you go, I know Alex is the engineer, so he's feeling, ah, it solved the problem. I don't know for sure, but like, but like, is this kind of what we're saying in this first section here?
38:30 Speaker 03 I think this is the path to solving those problems for Ethereum. I think the ZK rollups, ABM compatible ZK rollups and just ZK rollups in general are here ahead of schedule. I think the one of the few things in the Ethereum roadmap that has been consistently delivering at a really, really strong pace. And we think there's some amazing tech that's been built there. And that tech is going to be the foundational piece that allows Ethereum to go fractal and to get to that number of users. There is now a much clearer path, I would say, for Ethereum to scale, right? Then even some of the monolithic, you know, sort of high, high TPS alt ones. There is a much clearer path to how Ethereum is going to scale to build, to have the biggest games in the world built on it than there is for any other blockchain.
39:11 David Hoffman? Guys, there's a few more conversations that I want to get through. I want to differentiate this strategy between just going multi-chain. And I think that is definitely worth something parsing apart. And also, Robbie, I know that you gave me a line yesterday about how ultimately, the way that this ecosystem works with this mesh network of interoperability, that's also ultimately how Ethereum grew into having such high success. So I want to have that conversation. I also want to talk about win games, because these are, blockchains are cool, but games are also cool. And so I want to hear about your guys' BD relationships and who you guys are working with. And that also will lead into a conversation about Rarible. And so we will get to all of these conversations right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.
40:02 David Hoffman? Oh, my sponsor files have gone somewhere. So we are still live. So we're going to roll into the second half of the show while I figure that out.
40:12 Ryan Sean Adams? One question I just wanted to ask while we get into multi-chain is, Alex, and this kind of relates to multi-chain, but you made that point about
40:23 Ryan Sean Adams? just Ethereum right now and its scalability path being even better than some of the monolithic chains. And of course, over the past few months, we've even seen some of these quote-unquote "high throughput, high TPS, monolithic chains", we've actually seen them go down, like there have been outages. Imagine if that's your platform, it's not just like World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, the Alpha, all your favorite games on the same platform, and then bzzzz, power goes down, like none of them work. Can you talk a little bit about the scalability limitations on monolithic chains versus this? Dig into that a little bit more and contrast that with maybe where David was going with kind of the multi-chain strategy?
41:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, so- Look, I think at the end of the day, blockchains are technology. And technology can have challenges, particularly early-stage technology. I think it's easy to forget now, Ethereum has been around for and has been almost entirely stable for most of the past year, seven plus years. There's been a ton of work that's been invested in building out the core infrastructure of Ethereum to make it the most reliable and most performing infrastructure in the space. You'll see this now with a lot of the Ulte ones that are coming out are simply forking Ethereum instead of turning down the security parameters for a while. The danger of this for many game developers is, A, you're reliant on a development team
41:46 Speaker 03 that is less competent, less credible, and less aligned to the ethos of building great blockchains. And so we're seeing a lot of developers come to us concerned about these types of uptime incidents that you've seen on other chains. Obviously, there's nothing you can do that will totally and categorically eliminate all types of downtime. But seeing chains go down for eight-plus hours where they're not processing any new transactions. Imagine if that's the midnight launch that you've poured $50 million of your game's marketing budget into.
42:15 Ryan Sean Adams? And it's more likely to be at launch time, right?
42:18 Speaker 03 Exactly, exactly. And that's right at the moment that you critically need that scale. That could be the point that things fall over.
42:25 Speaker 02 This is with games with like, you know, 50,000 players. We're nowhere near the type of games that even make a dent in the real world. So this stuff has to be able to scale to those experiences. And to give traction to the numbers that Alex is saying, immutable's uptime is right now 99.9x%. Where you know, x can vary month to month. But when you look at something like Solana, you look at something like Polygon, you know, these are both in sort of the 95% to 97% ranges based on downtime over the past couple of months. Which is not to sort of show there's a particular, but like monolithic architecture really can't support the scale alone. But we need to to get to the next 100 million players on Web3.
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45:58 David Hoffman? And we are back. And so Robbie, I want to take this conversation into just a conversation around overall liquidity and how multiple chains kind of feed off of each other. Because if we have this mesh network of chains that all have this layer of interoperability where assets can go from chain to chain to chain, this is meaningfully different from a multi-chain strategy where if AVE, for example, deploys on the Ethereum main L1, but then also Polygon, but then also Avalanche, they actually have to split up their dev resources. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about every time a new game comes and deploys a new ZK rollup and brings a new player base, they're adding their own unique economic energy to a shared pie. They're adding more players.
46:43 David Hoffman? They're adding more money. They're adding more liquidity to this whole ZK rollup ecosystem that you guys are pioneering. Can you talk about just like the inversion of just like splitting and dividing versus collecting and converging?
47:01 Speaker 02 You have assets, you have orders, you have composability and you also have wallets or currency ready to be spent. And what we're doing is making sure that any improvement, any one of those inputs can bring shared value to every single other application or game built on immutable. So I'll give a specific example. Let's say Alouvium becomes absolutely massive, which I absolutely think it's going to, and it gets, you know, like 50 million DAOs and it needs its own dedicated L3 instance. And someone onboards onto Alouvium, they've never played another game before, but they like buy some ETH or they buy some NFTs with credit card. Now, anytime they sell that, they sell that on the Alouvium in-game marketplace and it's
47:44 Speaker 02 bought on the GameStop marketplace or the Rarible marketplace. Anyone can purchase that with ETH from, you know, a completely different wallet, from a completely different game that they've on-boarded to. And then over the top, we have Immutable's open water book. So the problem this solves is right now, if they were sold in the Alouvium in-game marketplace, not on immutable, they could only be bought from that same location, which is a fundamental problem because the places that people will trade NFTs are as numerous as the places that people trade real stuff. Like we're talking about the data standard by which people will own digital goods. And the most important thing is that if I sell it somewhere, it can be bought anywhere and everywhere. And so the fundamental difference we're building is rather than just offering a myriad of sort
48:29 Speaker 02 of, you know, multi-chain scaling solutions where someone can use the application on this instance, but ultimately it's still every blockchain racing to build liquidity and to build success. Every single game and every single application adds users, wallets, liquidity and interoperable sort of composable smart contracts that can be used by everyone. And this is the infrastructure that's going to be needed to sort of take. Ethereum to the next billion players.
48:55 Speaker 03 And we're just to just to build off the top of that, I think it's a really important point to note here about the about bridges in general, because obviously a lot of projects have gone multi-chain, you can sort of bridge your funds into, you know, from Ethereum to Solana. Bridges are by far the most fragile point of the entire blockchain ecosystem. They are more fragile than the consensus mechanisms of, you know, Alter Ones, right? They often have a very small group of multi-sig signers. These blockchains can't actually talk to each other. So what happens is people are locking up funds here. And there's a group of people that are saying, yep, issue them some funds over on, over on, you know, back on E, right? And that can obviously result in people printing money, bugs can result in people printing money.
49:37 Speaker 03 We saw that with things like the wormhole, the wormhole smart contract bug, right? Not so not like not even hacks, just brittleness in smart contracts can cause big issues. When we're talking about people moving assets between rollups, because those assets share a settlement layer. So because they all rely on Ethereum, at the end of the day, whether on L2 or all three, because it all all points back. You can move assets between rollups with none of those major security trade-offs that people who are just building in a multi-chain world have. And so like they're fixing, it's fixing one of the most fragile points of the current blockchain ecosystem, which is bridges.
50:10 Ryan Sean Adams? I hate bridges. I hate insecure, unsecured bridges. I think they are kind of the worst thing that we are introducing in this generation of blockchain architecture. I almost feel like, David, we should rename this podcast Bridgless.
50:26 Ryan Sean Adams? That's what you're talking about.
50:26 David Hoffman? Because like the worst bridges are actually banks when they are just multi-sigs. Those are just like a bank of another flavor. And I think the, a theme of, of, well, now 2022, but like we had some catastrophic bridge hacks in 2021 and 2022. Uh, over a billion dollars. Uh, and then we also had the collapse of the Terra ecosystem, which was like almost $50 billion. And so we had an insecure L1 and we had insecure bridges represent the majority of the losses of the entire crypto ecosystem for its entire lifespan. It all happened inside the, the last like nine months of time. Uh, and so this should be in stark contrast. To what is going on here where we have strong cryptographic bridges inside of the same
51:08 David Hoffman? shared ecosystem with shared assets and and just to drive drive this home about the usability of this when we do want to scale blockchains up to a billion users and a different and a billion players who are going to invest billions of hours of time into these whole things we need to make sure these things are secure and the beauty ultimately of this this ecosystem is that you do get that security but also this it's probably going to be like the same wallets that users use because of that it's all in the same ecosystem so like if you have like your one wallet on one game that's probably going to work in a different game and regardless of where the destination of your ether is on one chain you can still use it and so users are
51:52 David Hoffman? going to be using these bridges in the background not knowing it but we can actually feel secure about these things and obfuscating away so much complexity from the users because of the fundamental secure primitives that we have in the background Robbie Alex you guys want to add on to that
52:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the one thing I'll add is that the blockchain space is particularly as it's become more commercialized over the last few years constantly in this kind of tug of war between people who are racing to build the commercially most important things which is how can we onboard users incredibly easily and create a good experience for customer facing applications and how can we bridge liquidity which is ultimately the most important thing to sort of bootstrap new networks versus how can we all do this in a really, really secure way how can we make sure that this infrastructure is going to be around for the long term and I think the worst thing that could happen is the most commercially successful applications in the short term are built on completely insecure technology and unfortunately we've actually seen
52:53 Speaker 02 that you know essentially twice in the last nine months and both of these instances pushed back web three adoption they they pushed back developers from trusting what we're building they pushed back consumers because you've been burnt you know you bought thousands of dollars of lunar or whatever and I think the most important thing that we want to do is Is build the easiest possible to use commercial solution for building web three games to allow users to, you know, scale to these sorts of heights and have the best prices for assets. But to always do it while preserving a self custodial protocol, 100% user security. And we'll never kind of violate those standards along the way because we know if we want to go the next five, 10 years and build something, people have to have fundamental reputational trust
53:38 Speaker 02 in Ethereum and what we're building.
53:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, guys, so we have the technology, you guys are helping to release it, we have the block space, we have the scalability now. The question we want to return to is, okay, when games? When are we going to get the games? And I just came back from the permissionless conference last week, I was talking to some people in the game pie space and, you know, they're builders, so they're not bearish. But game pie is very bearish right now from a market sentiment, right? It's like, kind of, Axie Infinity has gone down quite a lot. It's impacted a lot of the gaming economy in the Philippines and other places. And the market in general is kind of bearish on it. But Robbie, you're in the trenches with the builders and you're talking to the game studios. Is there some hope here? Should we be bearish?
54:26 Ryan Sean Adams? Or is there a reason that we should remain excited about game pie? And if so, what are those reasons?
54:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, so my strong belief is that the success of games should be entirely decorrelated from the general crypto markets. And I think that's what it's going to help provide this. We've seen crypto markets have reduced beta every cycle, right? Like they're becoming reduced in volatility, even with a, you know, 60% down, 68% down from ATH. It's like less than 2019 and 2018. And so what I'm really passionate about is games will truly be driving success on web three and mainstream success. And we almost stopped talking about it is like game pie being in a beta mode. Because it's, well, hey, there's this game over here that has 100 million players. And there's this game over here with 50 million players. And under the hood, people are using NFTs. People are truly digitally owning their items and experiencing 10 times the value
55:19 Speaker 02 they could get through a web two game. And that's when the narrative is obsolete. Because the product is there, the adoption is there. And the leading indicators that we're seeing today that mean we are going to arrive at that are many sheer amount of talent and venture capital pouring into Web three games in the space. You know, every single VC, if you're in gaming right now, fifty percent of your pitches are for Web three. The majority of funding is going into Web three games rather than ordinary games right now. And out of the top ten most mainstream game developing company in the world worth tens of billions of dollars, more than eight of them have full-time Web three teams focused solely on exploring this strategy. I mean, like, that, that's, and I'm not saying they're going to launch this year and next year because
56:01 Speaker 02 this, this is a massive change and they're the incumbents reaping the benefit of the current model. What we have to do is take the alluviums of the world, you know, the, the planet quest, the Ember Sword, the Guild of Guardians and God's Unchained of the world and say, hey, we can create an experience that is ten times better than that competition. And that forces them to get their act together and say, oh shit, we actually have to go build this now. Like, that's the classic kind of innovator's dilemma. So I'm, I'm feeling extremely confident. I think the reason it will take longer is games take time to build. As I said, like, alluvium is building, building for nearly two years now. They have more than two hundred full-time employees and, and like, you know, a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars. The only reason they're getting to a stage where they can release this kind of like AAA game in the next six months is because of the fact they started so early.
56:47 Speaker 02 Now we're seeing those games having been built over the last year and the next year. I think like, we're no longer going to see sort of crappy quality play to learn games be successful. Every single game you play that rises up to the top of the market is going to be a credible double or triple A game.
57:02 Ryan Sean Adams? That, that's incredible. Alex, you have anything to add to that as we close?
57:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think the future is extremely exciting for Web three games. And all you have to do is, is zoom out a little bit, right? There are, there will obviously be, be market sentiment that's caused when you actually don't have many people playing these games. Just as Robbie said, the key thing that all builders can do and our message to everyone, we're talking to many game developers. But if you're listening to this podcast and, and you're not a, you're not a game developer.
57:29 Speaker 03 The future is extremely bright as long as you build things that people genuinely want to use, right? And actually, there can be a lot of noise in times of great hype where people are just using things because it's there. Right? In times where there isn't quite as much frothiness, you can actually focus on building a product that people genuinely would play and would love, right? Even if they're not earning anything to begin with. And I think that's actually a, a, a big blessing for builders.
57:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Amazing. Alex, Robbie, how far we've come. Thank you so much for joining us in this conversation for everything that you guys are building over at Immutable. We appreciate you.
58:01 Speaker 02 Of course.
58:01 Speaker 03 Thanks very much, David.
58:02 David Hoffman? Before we sign off, however, since we're here, this is going to be completely adjacent, but also immutable relevant. Robbie, what's going on with Rarible?
58:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we announced today that Rarible will be integrating Immutable X into its marketplace. So it's the second largest energy marketplace in the world by volume today.
58:22 David Hoffman? Well, I feel like on a different day, a different week, that would have been a show in of itself, but sadly, we are out of time. So guys, thank you so much for coming on to the show and diving deep into this very sci-fi sounding future that seems so close. Guys, thank you.
58:39 Speaker 02 Thanks, guys.
58:40 Speaker 03 Thank you very much.
58:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Disclaimers, everybody. Of course, none of this was financial advice. All of crypto is risky. Eth is risky. So are Layer 2. So is DeFi. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. This is the gaming frontier now. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
59:00 David 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
59:43 David Hoffman? we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we
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