#1491 John Linden | How Crypto & Gaming Are Shaping The Future

John Linden is the CEO of Mythical Games. In this conversation we talk about what’s going on in the gaming world, why gaming is always at the tip of the innovation sphere, how this has infiltrated into the crypto world, and what it means for the future. =======================Reed Smith is a dynamic international law firm dedicated to helping clients move their businesses forward. With an inclusive culture and innovative mindset, Reed Smith delivers smarter, more creative legal services that drive better outcomes for their clients. Their deep industry knowledge, long-standing relationships and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Learn more at www.reedsmith.com=======================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast.

• 0:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got a great episode with John Linden, the CEO of Mythical Games. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on in the gaming world, why gaming is always at the tip of the innovation spear, how this is now infiltrated into the crypto world, and what it means in terms of being able to own your own assets, how these games are making money, and why they're getting so big. Why are six and a half million people playing an NFL game? That type of stuff is going to change the way that people interact with these games. I really enjoyed talking to John. He is a wealth of knowledge. He's been in the industry for a long time, including working on things like Call of Duty and many other games you've probably played. So here's my conversation with John Linden.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Reed Smith. The practice of law has the power to drive progress, to move businesses forward, and support them in achieving their goals. By seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles, Reed Smith is focused on outcomes. I personally use them as my law firm, and I think that they are fantastic. They know that your time is valuable and that your matters are important. Their deep industry knowledge, longstanding relationships, and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Reed Smith delivers purposeful, highly engaged client service that drives progress for your business. Go to reedsmith.com to learn more about the best lawyers in the game. reedsmith.com. Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot.

• 2:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity. Polkadot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications. Polkadot offers tons of unique features, a shared security model, along with the new auction model and significant implementations like ASIC banking. Given these characteristics, it's easy to understand why Polkadot is gaining more and more traction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms.

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com.

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So John, I thought our great place to start the conversation is, games have always been fascinating to me. When I was a kid, I played a lot of games. I think a lot of people do that. Entertainment value is a huge driver of the economy, different activities people do. You have a very storied career in what I consider traditional games, not kind of crypto game stuff, but just traditional games. You worked on things like Call of Duty, et cetera. You were at Activision Blizzard for a while. Talk about like, what is the psychology as to why games somehow seem to be at the tip of the spear of innovation? And they really drive so many of these behaviors? And I might even argue that something like a Bitcoin ends up being successful because people are replacing gaming with like this new digital online currency in the early days or something.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's a, that's a, that's a big question there. Well, thank, um, so I think, yeah, we, like I said, games have been, you know, really, really fascinating to watch over the last, you know, many decades, right? And I think there's been, I mean, now we have half the world's population are in games every month now, which is just absolutely amazing, you know? And I think, yeah, the core of gaming is interesting because it's kind of a, it's kind of a release, getting away from society to some degree, right? You can be in this other place. You can be with this somewhat anonymous group of people that you're able to interact with and really do what you want to do, right? So that's always been, it's also why I like things like Ready Player One, there are always this big dystopian worlds because people are trying to Escape and it is an escape from reality. So I think that's, that's kind of the core piece we see with gaming. And from that though, what's been really fascinating has really been digital identity.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  I think digital identity, you know, I've kind of told people before, one of my, one of my favorite stories is my kids now. Their Spotify playlist is as important to them as our cassette tape or CD collection, you know, used to be, right? And, and you know, it is part of their identity and gaming really drives that. That's why you see so many like Fortnite skins, you know, well, that's, you know, why, you know, why, why also do people spend money? On, on, on buying an old Fortnite account on eBay, like it's a free account. Well, it's because I missed that one skin and that skin means something to me. It has value to me as a consumer. So there's just a lot of that economy has kind of been built out from, you know, what, what is gaming, right? This, this escape from reality.

• 5:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And people with like the Spotify accounts, what they don't want anyone to mess up their algorithm. They want like the playlist to kind of go the way that they like it or.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's just, it's just like it's becomes, it becomes who they are, right? Like I said, I remember, I remember we had cassette tapes and we show off our cassette tapes or CD collections to everybody. And that, that was, that collection made us who we were. Now it's all done digitally and they don't own anything. That's the amazing part with the, with the Spotify playlist. It's just, yeah, it's just an algorithm and I put my, put my algorithm together, but it defines who I am. And I think that trend, the digital identity side is really, really from gaming, really, really kind of, kind of goes through, you know, what, what all these consumers want to see, you know, really helps define who they are.

• 5:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, uh, in these games, how many games in the traditional world, uh, have items, products, et cetera, that could be transferred between them? So I'll give you, you know, an example of, uh, Call of Duty and maybe Madden football. I don't think there's probably that many things that you're bringing between those two, uh, games and kind of the traditional world. Is that the norm or the, is that an outlier example, but most of these games actually that people do want to bring stuff between them?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I think it's, it's not necessarily, there's, there's this whole concept of interoperability. There's been this, this myth of, of kind of web three for a long time. And I think there's really a couple of parts, right? One is, okay, cool. I actually have a football, you know, outfit or, you know, jerseys on or whatever. And I'm going to bring that into another game. I don't think that's as big of a, a big of a reality as people really believe it to be.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  People want that.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  To be a big use case, but users aren't telling you that. Yeah, I mean, it sounds it sounds great on paper, right? But I think there's a couple of things with it. One, there's just a big production issue, right? Trying to get assets, you know? I don't know a single creative director of a game that would be like, yeah, sure, just bring anything you want into my world. Right? So there's already there's already kind of a production issue, but I don't think it's really as much what people want either. I think what becomes interesting is when you can actually trade one asset for another asset, right? I've built value in one set of assets. Could I express that value, you know, somehow through through another asset? And like, give me an example, what in the traditional world? So, so, well, I'll use one of our one of our games. So we have a game called NFL Rivals. And what's really interesting is is it does have this web three economy behind it. And people can come in and you can buy, put it on a credit card. And let's say I want a Patrick Mahomes and he's $400.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Sure, I could put it on my credit card. I could use crypto to buy Patrick Mahomes. But to the general consumer, the average consumer, that most of them still are not going to put $400 on a credit card for digital asset. So what we've done is we create a system called Quick Trade. And this is that step towards interoperability. I think this is interoperability within one game right now, but you can start seeing where it goes. So what I can do now is I can have Patrick Mahomes say, hey, I want to, I want to trade for that. I want that $400 of value. So I hit trade and it shows up on the left side. This is what I want. On the right side now, it takes all of my digital assets. And we have an order book now about 50,000 deep, 50,000 item deep to where I can start selecting maybe items I don't want anymore. And as as I select them, it's being priced in real time. So it's like, okay, cool. I'll select these four Green Bay Packers. Maybe I don't want anymore and it's pricing them up.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, $400, $400. So now as a consumer, I can hit trade and I receive what I want and I got rid of what I don't want. And to me, that's the start of interoperability. It's like boarding, it's like digital boarding. It is, but what we actually did behind the scenes is we real time bought from one seller and we real time sold to four different buyers. So we ended up having a six party transaction in one atomic web three transaction. And to me, that's the power of web three, right? Is we've now taken potentially six or seven people around the world and transacted in a moment's notice. And to me, that's the start of interoperability, right? So you start off right now with NFL for NFL, but we have a new game FIFA coming out or we have a pudgy penguin game coming out. What if I could eventually trade a pudgy and this for for Patrick Mahomes, right? So what if I could actually start trading across games?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  And to me, that's when digital assets become really powerful because now you're able to use the value of them to get something else you might want. And how about?

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, let's say Patrick Mahomes, if he's able to like acquire better skills or have more points. So you know, whatever the different games are, are you able to actually go and acquire them with their enhancements? Or is it just like, hey, you start out square one like everybody else?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  That's a great, that's a great question. It really depends on the game designer. You have to be very careful because sometimes that could be a pay to win. Sometimes that's actually encouraged, right? So it really depends on what the outcome of that game is, but we've seen it both ways. We've had it to where the stats transfer. We have our new FIFA game, some of the stats won't transfer. You know, you have to re-earn it yourself, but it really depends on the game. So, so I think you have to be very careful because you can kind of destroy the entire economy if you're not careful with that.

• 9:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Gaming definitely leads in innovation in many ways. What are some examples from history that you're aware of where games really kind of were the Trojan horse? Maybe for things to kind of become more mainstream.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think a lot of different things. I mean, I think if you think about just some of the, the, the depth of some of the games, right? These, these games that constantly had, had new forms of entertainment that you're, you're, that was constantly evolving, right? And I think what we saw, we've seen that for, for decades now. And I think your games like Call of Duty, you start off, hey, I have a one time, one time purchase. And then suddenly it's like, oh, there's a whole new set of content. A lot of times it's almost like a new game. So now I can just kind of extend that out and I think you're seeing more of that. I think frankly, a lot of mainstream linear media, the way they distribute TV shows now can kind of be, you know, related to what we used to do in games. So we've seen a lot of that happen in terms of just how distribution works, how entertainment is basically delivered. I think gaming has led the way in a lot of that.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Uh, I also think it's still the best value for the money, right? You think about it, you go to a movie one time with your family and you might spend 120 bucks, you know, for a two hour movie, uh, for four people, gaming, you could play for hundreds and hundreds of hours on a $50, $60 purchase. And I think that's where some of those concepts of downloadable content, DLC or microtransactions came from. We've also seen the same thing with creator economy. And I think that's the other really interesting thing we've seen in gaming is that there is more, you know, as soon as you have this user generated content aspect, two things really happen. One, you start having more content. than any one's studio can make on their own. And I think that's a pretty interesting thing. Now, and then what that also does is not only do you have all this huge amount of content for, for your consumers now,

• 11:08Speaker 02

  but you also have stakeholders now. So now you have people that are, are wanting that game to win, right? Because they're helping create content for that ecosystem. So I think, again, I think gaming has kind of led the way on, on, how do you do that? How do you basically bring this creator economy together? So that anybody can kind of contribute or anybody can eventually kind of monetize or make a living within these games.

• 11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you see these games, uh, there's a lot of different types of games. There's sports, there's, you know, shooting games, there's whatever. There's a certain type that is being, uh, kind of more popular with the users who are more digital native or, or kind of into, whether it's Bitcoin, digital assets, whatever.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  So I, I think honestly, we, it's funny, we've had that exercise, like what game couldn't you make with this? And there are some, there's some, I think, I think if you have a big cinematic linear story or even a branching story, that's a little harder to do. I think anything that has kind of a multiplayer aspect, um, definitely works. So really.

• 12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What is most popular in your?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Most popular right now, I think for, for web three, I think sports. I mean, I think we're, we're, we've picked, uh, picked some good, the reason we picked sports is just because the collector mentality is there, right? The competition, the multiplayer aspects. I think sports is the biggest. I think RPG and, and so like a role playing game or a first person shooter are going to be big ones as well. There's been some people trying to do it, card games, which is another big genre of, of games normally. I think, uh, you know, I think there's an entry. I don't know if the card games have been done quite, you know, well enough to, to, to kind of hit the true mainstream. But I think, I think a TCG game or something like that would work as well.

• 12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting about when you talk about gaming, I think a lot of people think like, you know, your kid or you, when you were younger, sit down, maybe when you're still older, you sit down and play video games, right? But there's also things like Candy Crush and kind of mobile type games. There's obviously the Zyngas of the world, uh, but you're also talking about things like Solitaire or, you know, poker. I would even argue that some of the sports betting stuff is, you know, that's borderline entertainment gaming.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  It is. Yeah, it is.

• 13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're getting in kind of this weird world. Um, so, you know. Are there areas that you see gaming hasn't pushed into yet? Or is it really just like, hey, this thing's infiltrated now?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  No, I think we're, we're heading that direction. I think, you know, we, last year, we had a couple of games now start to hit millions of players for, for web three. And that's, that's a great start. But we see games that have billion players, you know, in the, in the non web three. So I think we still have a long way to go. I think this year, we're going to see a couple of games now hit tens of millions of players. And I, I think it's within a matter of a year or two.

• 13:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like the FIFA and stuff.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  We think FIFA, yeah, is going to be easily, easily, you know, 10 to 100 million players in that game. Same thing with the pudgy game. I think there's, we have a couple of them now. I think there's other games out there that we'll start seeing, you know, 10 million plus. 10 million plus now starts getting into a pretty thriving economy. But I think we're, we're not too far off to have 100 million or, or even a billion, billion player game at some point.

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And are people putting money into these? Like, you know, when I used to play Madden with my brother, I'd beat him every time.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course you did, of course you did.

• 13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  21, nothing, game over.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Of course you did.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But we didn't put money in the game. Like, we bought the game. We bought the system, right? Obviously, our parents had bought the, the TV and we plugged it all in or whatever. But there was never a point where we were even tempted. They, we were never even asked, you know, hey, do you want to put more money into this game?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably would have been dangerous, right? If, if they did. But it seems like gaming now has really changed. There's, you know, stores and you can buy things. And it just feels like this is headed in a world where game producers have really figured out ways to better monetize the IP that they're creating.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, I think it's, it's new models that come out of that. So I think, you know, there, there's still a lot of hybrids out there and which is great. You know, some, some, and there's still some very dedicated gamers that are the same way. They're like, I'm going to put this money into the game and I'll never pay for it again. And there are games that do that. It's, it's dwindling now, to be real honest. Because I think what's happening now is that these games are kind of games as a service, right? They, they, they continue, they continue on. I think I read somewhere, there's, this is a non web three game, a game called No Man's Sky. I think they're on their 36th update over nine years. And these are like beefy updates. This game has really morphed, so, you know, really morphed 36 times over almost a decade. And I think that's entertaining to people. You know, you put, you put your time and effort behind, you know, something you love. And the idea that content is constantly coming out is, is very appealing.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  And so I think we had to kind of move as an industry, we had to move from, hey, we can't sell you a game for $50 and you're still playing nine years later, but we're still putting a lot of content out. It used to be you put out the game and we're done. We move on to the next game, right? But now it's these living, breathing economies and living, breathing worlds. So the, the, the models have kind of had to shift a little bit.

• 15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I remember talking to Matthew Ball, uh, who was at Amazon Studios, I think for a while. And he was pretty early to this idea of, uh, he, he used the terminology metaverse. But I think that metaverse to him was different than what kind of other people were thinking about. And he was thinking more of kind of these worlds where, uh, there was IP, that IP would show up in a game. It would show up in a movie, maybe it would become a TV series. There would be physical products, you know, stuffed animals, like, uh, maybe an amusement park. Like, like it was basically the, the melding of all of this together. Disney probably is, you know, one of, if not the best at doing this. Do you see that happening with some of these games that are being built, you know, whether you guys are building them or elsewhere, kind of this new digital world?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, I think, um, I mean, kind of the whole world of transmedia, I think every game developer we love has this kind of transmedia property, right? Cause it does give you opportunities. What I do think is interesting is, is generally like at, at the Activision's or whatever. You generally, you'd have to have a mass market before you could do a transmedia type play, right? You really had to build up, I've, you know, these big franchises that everybody loves first. Then you could think about some of the other pieces out there. And I do think this whole concept of web three started to shift out a little bit. You know, there are more opportunities to, to kind of, hey, bring this in, hey, I have access here. And that is the power, I think, of web three, right? Is I have, I have kind of ownership over this asset, therefore I can get access to the other, other pieces.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  So I think we're starting to see more of that happen. Um, you know, again, I, I, you know, the whole, the whole metaverse thing is a whole other, a whole other topic for sure. But I do think what we're heading to is we're heading to this kind of these interconnected worlds, right? And I don't think it's, I don't think it's one system. I don't think it's Roblox. I don't think it's Fortnite. I think it is literally a 3D internet's coming, right? To where

• 17:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So, so we've been, we've been looking a lot into things like cloud gaming, right? And you think about cloud gaming, it's, it's one of the biggest missing links in entertainment right now. So if you think about it, if I want music right now, it's on demand. I want a movie right now, you can get it on demand. I want a video game, I need to go download 80 gigabytes to my hard drive, hope I have enough space. And every time I turn it on, there's another two gig update. And the reason for that is that it's just how the tech is done, right? To where you can do cloud gaming right now, but you have to have a dedicated GPU in the cloud for every single player. You can't, you can't. Co-share a graphics GPU. And so what that basically means, if I want a million people in my world right now, I need a million GPUs in the cloud. Well, they're also used for things like, you know, crypto mining and they're used for AI, right?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  So, so there's, there's, there's an issue there, right? There's a cost issue. It's doable right now, but I think GPUs run about $2.50 per hour. So it'd just be a very, very expensive proposition. What I think we're going to see now, and we have a company we acquired called Polystream. And what they've done is they've kind of shifted the tech into more of a CPU model. So we can start doing this at scale. And as you do it at scale, you can start having, you know, entertainment on demand and gaming. And I think once you have entertainment on demand and gaming, you can start jumping between worlds, right? And we even have a prototype called portals that we've shown to where I can literally be in one video game, open up a portal inside that game to somebody else's game and walk through that portal and instantly be in the other world. So I do think this concept of metaverse is coming. Web three is really the, the, the piece that binds it all together though.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  When your identity and your commerce and, and everything about you can move from world to world, now you have a 3D internet.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Why would you want to open one of those portals and kind of walk through into somebody else's world? Like what would be a use case?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  That's a great, great. So one, one we were, we were talking about, so imagine like a GTA, right? So GTA six is going to be coming out, hopefully in the next, you know, 12 months, we'll see. And, and in that game is, is this big city, you know, and, and I could literally walk up, let's say I walked up to an arcade machine. Would be pretty interesting to be able to be like, hey, I want to play arcade game. And I can literally jump into that world and play somebody else's piece within another property. And I think there's a lot of things like that. You could almost think of almost like a digital mall or digital world over time to where I don't have to have everybody building in my digital mall, but, but I have my storefront and my storefront jumps into their world, right? So, so if you can have the ability to jump.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Technically like rent the storefront.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And they get like true digital real estate and you're driving users to these platforms.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  And if you could actually do that, so imagine like a Sega, right? All these companies have tremendous amounts of IP. And if I could actually re, if Sega could reuse their old IP in new digital storefronts, that becomes pretty interesting, right? So if you are asking, if you're asking Sega to recreate one of their IPs in their, in your own digital mall, you know, system, and yeah, there's a lot of work to redo that work. You're probably not going to get that world, that, that, that work moved over. But if you could suddenly literally be like, hey, I already have this, you can move it into mine. It starts becoming this interconnected 3D system.

• 20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating to think about just how much this is changing so quickly, but it also mirrors or recreates what the real world, you know, kind of living is.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, no.

• 20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, it blows my mind. When you think of where you guys have built a lot of these products, where did you start and where are you now? Is it the same place or has it evolved over time? And how do you think about the tech stack?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  So we've been doing this since 2018. So it's been, we've been, we've been very early. We were probably arguably a little too early. You know, it's been interesting. We were, when we started off in 2018, what really brought me in the space from the traditional gaming space? So I'd just, you know, come off of five years of Call of Duty, had a mobile game company that we did a big Marvel game that had top 25 games. We had had a lot of success in the traditional games and then I'd sold that company in 2018. And I was like, you know, I started seeing this thing called CryptoKitties and I was never really a whale in games. I'd spend 30 or 40 bucks. I never was one of those that spent thousands of dollars in a game. And the next thing I know, I dropped $600 on these 2D images of cats. And I'm like, what the hell just happens? You know, that's not my, my psychology is not, not what I, my normal behaviors. And that's when it kind of hit me of what this could become, right?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Because for me, the reason I kind of analyzed this, like, why did I do that? Because it wasn't entertainment anymore. It was an asset. I could decide if I gave it to you, if I sold it at a loss, I sold it at a profit, I destroyed it. It was my choice as a consumer, what I did with that asset. That was the big, that was the big aha moment right back in 2017, 2018. And so we jumped into the space and we, then we immediately saw this thing of like, okay, we want to bring this to the masses. We're not trying to sell $200,000 NFTs. We want to sell normal items. And then we had this problem of like, well, if I sell a $20 item and I'm paying $60 in Ethereum gas fees, that's a challenge, right? So we were the first ones to kind of jump on. We jumped on maybe a blast in the past EOS, EOS back in the day, one of the first proof of stake.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  And that was our first take. And the reason we love proof of stake is the costs were just much less. You know, it's actually, it was something we could do to actually bring normal price assets to the consumer. So we went down that path for a little while.

• 22:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And did you need it to be decentralized or not really?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I've gotten that a lot. We don't technically, I mean, I think you could pull off. I mean, look at Roblox. Roblox is basically a centralized web three application in a way, right? To me, there's a core difference, right? If you really believe on where this goes, and if you really believe in the crater economy, I do think it has to be decentralized. I think it has to be open, because I mean, again, no, no, I'm not, no shade at like a Roblox, but Roblox is controlled by shareholders and they could easily be like, you know what? We want to boost our earnings this quarter, so we're going to raise the price. Not that they would do that, but they could. They have the power to raise, raise whatever, change payment terms. And I think if you truly want a crater economy that I think can reach a trillion dollar industry, I think a crater, an open crater economy is a trillion dollar industry. It has to be transparent. It has to be immutable, right?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  It has to have all these different properties that are native to Web 3. So I, I really believe in the, in what we're doing. Could we rebuild it all for one game? Sure. We could build it centralized for one game and we've seen examples out there. But I think for a truly interconnected global economy, I think it has to be decentralized.

• 23:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Where are you guys building now?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Where was? So we are building on a Polkadot structure or on infrastructure right now. So we have our own chain that we helped get, uh, kind of set up through a foundation called the Mythos Foundation. It's awesome. Actually about 22 other companies have joined Mythos recently, so big, big game developers. And, uh, we've been building this kind of decentralized gaming system, um, you know, on top of the substrate, the Polkadot substrate ecosystem. And I've gotten the question a lot, why, why? You know? And I think to me, there's been two really important things. One, our chain now is actually, uh, has more NFT transactions than the other top nine. I think we're second only to Ethereum in sales now, mainnet Ethereum. So we have more sales, daily sales volume than Solana, more daily sales volume than Polygon or Immutable or anybody else base out there right now.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Uh, in terms of transaction volume, if you take our transactions that we do on a, on a monthly basis and you combine the other nine top chains combined, we're, we're doing more transaction volume. So we can push volume. We know how to push volume because it's gamers. Uh, the reason we kind of chose the Polkadot infrastructure was really two things. One, we could have our own chain tech that's really made for gaming. So the Mythos chain is really, it's not made to, to do a lot else besides we're really focused on gaming and entertainment. And we can have our own chat tech and our own DAO that manages that. We have the security of Polkadot, which is actually really good. I mean, I don't think there's ever been a case that Polkadot's been, you know, kind of hacked. It's never really gone down. It just goes. So I think the tech out there is super powerful. And when we're connecting consumers with fiat

• 24:44Speaker 02

  systems or with Apple and Google or systems like that, having that reliability and having that stability and growth is really, really important.

• 24:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I actually don't know the answer to this, but I think if I, you know, we had a live audience here of many people in our audience. Somebody would raise their hand and be like, well, can you just do this on top of Bitcoin? Right? Like Bitcoin's like the most decentralized, the first, it's the largest, like, like it has some advantages or many advantages to it. But you were talking about kind of the speed and performance and like talk about the difference there. And what's interesting to me is I remember when there was a big debate about decentralization of smart contracts and, you know, the Bitcoin is like, hey, we're going to bring the Bitcoin. Other people are like, we're going to do it elsewhere. And Binance Smart Chain came out and a bunch of developers left Ethereum and went to Binance Smart Chain for like a couple of weeks.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was first time I was like, oh, wait a minute, there's a bunch of applications where actually decentralization doesn't matter at all. They just want cheap and fast.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so not to say that that's good or bad or whatever. It was just like very obvious. That's what they were optimizing for.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Versus, I think a lot of people who hold, let's say Bitcoin, they're optimizing for security. But now people are trying to build on top of it. And so actually a lot of those people, they want the decentralization, but they also want speed and performance.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like you want it all, right?

• 25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Dynamic. And look, I am not by any means a, you know, technical expert or any of that stuff, but like watching the decision making of companies we've invested in and stuff. It's like, people are trying to figure out like, what is the right mix between, I'm trying to build something that's got to be cheap and fast.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But I do want, you know, decentralization or security. It's like, you know, talk a little bit about that.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  I think, I think you're exactly right. There was always the, the product triangle, right? You can, you can, you can pick two of the three. And I think that's, there's a little of that. And I think, I mean, to be really open with you about like the Polkadot ecosystem, I think it has the speed and it has the scale. If you, if I put a third leg on that triangle with them, it's probably the ecosystem and they're probably a little slower on the ecosystem right now. They have a lot of great, amazing projects, but it's not maybe quite as developed of the ecosystem as the other ones. And we chose, we chose scale and speed.

• 26:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  And, and I think, um, but I think you're right. I mean, eventually, I'm hoping eventually all the chains get to all three. But I think we had to choose, um, what, what we needed right now. Uh, I always love this as well to where people, so when, when I was at Call of Duty, um, I, I want to say we, we, we did 1,800. No, wait, sorry. What was it? We come, we did 2 million matches or 1.8 million matches a minute in Call of Duty. Right? So if all we did with Call of Duty was, is record the instance of match started, match started, match started. We would take out every chain in the world, right? Combined probably right now. So, so gaming is on another level, right? And we don't do that. We don't record every match because it would take, it would take out, take out most chains.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  So I think what we figured out is like, okay, let's record what we need. I'd love to have more data on chain, but I just don't think we can push it that hard yet. So we only record kind of the financial aspects that we need to protect it, that we want transparent. We want out there. So things like mens and transfers and quick trades and sales and that's all we record on chain right now for, for our games. And, um, I think as time develops and as, as tech develops over time, um, we'll be able to record a lot more out there. But yeah, we kind of chose for speed and scale and a little less on the maybe the ecosystem development side.

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What are people using as a currency inside of these games? You know, um, when I first started paying attention to Bitcoin, it was like, oh, obviously Bitcoin versus the dollar.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It now seems like stable coins are driving the dollar higher in terms of adoption and Bitcoin is winning.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:08Anthony Pompliano?

  There's other assets that are, you know, doing great.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And continue to grow. So how do you guys think about, you know, kind of like, not the asset in terms of the Patrick Mahomes or whatever, but actually like currency.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Currency. Yep. So we have, uh, so the mythos, the mythos chain uses the mythos token. So the myth token. It's a, it's, uh, it's a ERC 20 token out there. Um, you know what's, what I love about where we're heading with this is we now have millions of transactions a month. And when we first set up that mythos chain and we were proposing through the Dow, we kind of helped figure out the gas fee. And honestly, we didn't even burn the gas. We didn't know what to do with the gas fee. So I just hold it in account. And we started running this and we wrote, like I said, we've now run 30 million transactions through this and we set it painfully low. So, so basically the way we see it right now is consumers are coming in, they're using fiat, mostly fiat right now, uh, to purchase the coin behind the scenes. And it, it actually transacts in that. So we were looking at the tokenomics of how does this play out, right?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  And I think my view, and maybe veronically so, in my view, I've, it's my fourth company. And I think in terms of fundamentals and I'm like, how do we build something that's truly sustainable? Consumer sustainable tokenomics that can really last forever. That also rewards people securing it, right? But it's, it's very easy to do for, for consumers. And so what we do right now is we, we, we just actually announced we're going to seven X the gas fee. Because now we have 20 plus million transactions and we can kind of see like, okay, we set it too low. And we're going to basically seven X that in the next couple of weeks here. And we are going to start burning that, that transaction fee. So, so basically the, the players, players now are, are, are using Fiat and ramps to buy the token.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Um, what's also really interesting is only 24% of the people that buy or 24% of the, of the tokens they buy have ever left the ecosystem. They just can, like gaming consumers are different than crypto traders, right? They buy and hold. They just buy and hold and what you can see, you can see just the, the wallet stored value just keeps climbing every single month that stored value climbs. And then from those balances, they're spinning over and over and over to buy their assets. And then from that is the, is the gas fees. So, so what we're doing now is, is with that burn already, this is pre pudgy coming out, pre FIFA. We'll be burning about a million and a half tokens a month or about, you know, 18 million a year on a fixed, a billion fixed supply.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  So we're already now going to be deflating the, the, um, supply by 2% a year already. And then we've also set up now our staking reward. So people that want to hold the token or gamers, eventually we're going to auto stake for them to where they can, they're getting kind of this interest off of this. And we're, we're setting that at kind of a 5%. We're already at a 2% deflation against that. I think with FIFA and pudgy coming on board, those two games alone, um, we're going to be burning significantly more than even the staking rewards come out. So I think we'll have by the end of this year, we'll have probably, I think it's the first, maybe the first and only consumer sustainable tokenomics that is every year will end up with paying out of strong staking rewards will still end up with a deflationary supply.

• 31:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Could you do the payments with stable coins? Or do you feel like there's an advantage to having like the native token?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, we like the native. We could. We could. Um, you know, in fact, we were going to be adding some stable coins. So people that maybe don't want to risk of holding a token, they can kind of convert into that. But we are, uh, the chain does basically all gas fees and everything runs through, through our own token. Yeah, through, through the, through the foundation. So we, we like it because there's also more and more opportunities. And also, if you have a deflationary model over time, it's kind of a Bitcoin phenomenon, right? And I think the difference between what we're doing is, is we're not putting hash power against it. We're putting more and more and more consumers against it. And I think that's, that's kind of the scarcity model is people are going to keep buying these consumers buy the token. Regardless of price, they don't care if it's 20 cents or $20 because they're trying to get a hundred dollar credit. A hundred dollars worth of, of credits essentially to buy Messi to get Ronaldo, right? Something like that.

• 31:53Anthony Pompliano?

  What do your former colleagues, kind of, uh, the ones who are left behind in the traditional gaming world? What, what do they think about all this?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  It's really interesting. So, so I think at first they thought we were a little crazy, to be honest, like what you're doing what, you know? But I think what we're seeing now, so, so NFL has been a great case study for us. And I think FIFA is going to really shift the momentum for the traditional gaming, gaming companies. Before they're like, okay, we get it. The same question you asked, why does this need to be decentralized? We can do this centralized. But what we're seeing now is that those trade volumes, players are really loving it. So NFL, the first year, we, we just finished season two of NFL. So the first year of NFL, 80% of our revenue came from traditional gaming, uh, revenue. So 80% came from in-app purchases and the app stores and things like that. 20% of our revenue came from secondary trading fees. Like, okay. And then the gaming is like, okay, 20%.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  This year, because of that quick trade and things like that I mentioned, um, 35% of our revenue came from primary. 65% of our revenue for NFL came from secondary. Now people are like, oh, over half of your revenue is now coming from this.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause they don't have that.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  They don't have any of that.

• 32:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So basically they're looking at it and they're saying, wait a minute, I could essentially triple my revenue to a degree.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I was able to create some sort of secondary market.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I think we are just now getting to point, you gotta, and you gotta remember, game, game companies can be very skeptical. Uh, I remember, I remember a funny conversation with, with Bobby Kotick to where he was talking to us about mobile and we're like, can we get? Into mobile and he's like, yeah, it's only it's only a $25 billion industry. You know, and then the next year is like more games came out. We're like, can we please get into mobile? And he's like, ah, it's only a $70 billion industry, you know, and it's growing. And finally, it's like, okay, we're gonna buy King, you know, so game game companies can be a little little slow because they're they're they're chasing a bunch of things, but they they want to see big swings before they really dive in. And I don't think we had a game that had millions of people that are creating a big impact on revenue until now. So we're starting to see that shift and you're starting to see a lot of people like hmm, what's?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  We need to be watching this. So so I think we're going to be moving from watching the space to entering the space very, very rapidly.

• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And is it something where as they come in, all boats rise together? Or is there a little bit of a zero sum? Yeah, there's only so many gamers. Yeah. So if they have good games, that puts more pressure on you guys.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  A little both, a little both. I think there's noise, you know, but I think we have a lot of noise in web three right now, too. There's a lot of people that want to jump in and it's like, you know what I want to do? I want to make a video game out of this blockchain tech. And it's like, that's that's hard. It's painful. Talk to anybody in the gaming industry for a long time and and it's it's a it's a very stressful industry. So it's very hard to get a game made. It's a harder one to even ship it and it's really, really hard to have one that's sustained, right? It's a high failure rate in traditional games. So so I think I think, you know, people, people are coming in. There will be more noise, but I think overall, I do think, you know, I think everything will rise because I think as you get more and more people out there, we're already figuring out ways now to be like, cool. Okay, Pingu has a token over here now and we have a game over here and we can use these, you know, and then the penguins themselves are on Ethereum.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  And and I think we're starting to get to a point in the industry, we can kind of make all the different pieces work together. So I think as more content and more gamers come in, it's a it's a positive because we can we can make all types of new things work.

• 35:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you think about who's building this stuff? Are these young people who are kind of digital native into crypto and stuff? And they're the ones who are running towards this or is this a mix of also kind of, you know, legacy 30 year veteran gaming?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Engineers?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  I think, well, there's, there's, I'd say there's two sides. I think web three game gaming is kind of lumped into one big, one big pool. I think there's a couple of really interesting things happening. One, there's, there's younger developers that are building something completely different. And it's going to take a while, right? That's some of its niche. Same thing in games, you know, indie indie game studios are, you know, there's a lot of them. But indie game studios also have a tendency every now and then there'll be a breakout and it changes everything, right? So I'd say a lot of the shifts in, in gaming have come from the indies did it first. And then the bigger studios kind of took some of that learnings and they, they made it on a, on a bigger, on a bigger, you know, percentage of the market. Uh, I think we're seeing the same thing in, in, in the web three gaming. I think you'll see some smaller groups that are testing the waters and doing stuff.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  And probably most of them will fail, but there'll be a couple of pieces that are like, oh my God, that was cool. How do we do that again? Right? So I think there's that portion of it, but I do think we're starting to see bigger developers come in. People that have been around for a long time, which is really important. Yeah. You mentioned, I think before, like some of the games haven't been fun, right? Well, it, it takes a skill set. It takes experience, frankly, to get through that. Even then you can fail pretty easily on a game. Yeah. There you, but, but, but having that experience and having that, um, yeah, a skill set, you've already done it many times. Definitely puts it, puts a, gives you an advantage for sure. So I think as we get more of these in there and some of my favorite games that are coming out soon. Are from people that have been around in the industry for a long time.

• 36:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What are like two or three predictions you have for this whole world? Maybe over the next 12 to 24 months?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  On the, on the gaming side. Uh, so I think one prediction, I think we'll start seeing games, like I said, 10 million plus, um, players, which is going to wake up the rest of the industry.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's pretty big, right?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  It's big. It's big. And I mean, NFL, we, we've hit six and a half million in our games already. But I think we're going to start seeing 25, 30, 40 million players. And I think that's going to wake up the industry. I think we're going to start seeing, um, some new forms of social come out of this. And I think that's really interesting. So if you think of the gaming industry right now, um, a successful game is one thing, but once you have a successful game, this kind of fractured ecosystem starts developing around it. You have content on socials, you have esports over here, you have streaming on this platform and it's pretty broken. And I think what, what we're going to see is we're going to see web three will start. Kind of uniting some of those ecosystems together to where you, when you do have a single token or a single currency, or even more importantly, a currency that could easily be swapped instantly for another currency.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Now these ecosystems are playing, playing nice together. So I think social is going to dominate kind of what happens next. We need great games first, but once we have that, things like community tournaments, things like, you know, cross trading amongst games of tokens and assets. Those are the, that's when we really start seeing some, some phenomenal growth of what happens. So I'd say those are probably my, my two biggest. And I think we'll see, like I said, we'll see or start seeing some real great games come from great developers.

• 38:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you cross over 10, you get to 20, 30, 40 million. Is that like, you've now penetrated, you know, US schools and all the kids are talking about it. They're going home, running home and trying to play the games. Or is that still kind of more a niche compared to the, the legacy?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  That's, that's a great question. Um, I don't know the exact, exact number on it. Um, but I think, um,

• 38:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Like how many people play Call of Duty?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Call of Duty? I mean, it's, so, so on, on the, on the, on the console side, probably about 50 million.

• 38:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  But it, which is great.

• 38:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  On the mobile side, it's over 500 million. So.

• 38:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. So it's that heavily skewed to mobile?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  But most of the money's in the PC console. Yeah. But yeah, no, I mean, just, it's just the, the, the audience, right? You have this global huge audience that can play that game. So yeah, I think, I think they've hit over 500 million installs now.

• 38:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And how many, uh, how much of the focus is on like US-based console players versus, you know, mobile international? Obviously they have 500 million of them. That's a lot, but the monetization plays a big.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  The monetization plays a key thing. And that's, that's the other thing that I think this is where web three will, will, will make a massive permanent impact on gaming. The reason that frankly, yeah, Call of Duty mobile or Call of Duty mobile is, is very fun. It's very accessible. It's, um, you know, but most of the money still comes from PC console. Okay. It's mostly, it's not mostly US. It's pretty, pretty worldwide, but, but it's, it's a different player, right? Not everybody has a PC or has a console. Um. What we're into, I'll even use FIFA. So EA, there is no FIFA mobile game anymore. There's now EAFC, which used to be EA FIFA. That game, though, had 500 million people a year play the mobile game. But it didn't monetize very well. So why didn't it monetize very well?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Because a lot, a very heavy percentage of those players were in Argentina, Southeast Asia, you know, Brazil, you know, different parts of the world that it's very hard to get money out of them. But what I think is really exciting about what we've done with Quick Trade is I can now just play the game and I could earn something of value. And now, when I go to trade that, I'm actually, so I'm actually trading with people around the world. So you're starting to mix the cohorts together. Some of them could be whales in the United States. Some of them could be speculators, some of them be collectors. We don't care. The system, system doesn't care. It's just trying to find those, those trades in real time. And when we do that, we're generating transaction fees on everything. So even a player in Argentina now can make money for the developer without spending a dollar.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  So, so time now becomes crazy. That's a permanent effect of gaming. Once we prove that out, I think every game in the world, every company in the world is going to be looking at it. Because no one has really effectively figured out, how do you monetize? Outside of ads, ads have been one, and ads kind of wear on people. But ads have been really the only form of monetization outside of, outside of in-app purchases. And I think we have an opportunity to say, hey, trading actually also makes it work too. Because you're converting their time into money for somebody else.

• 40:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to think about kind of the evolution there, right? You just keep inventing new ways to, hey, if you've got eyeballs, there's a way to make a business. What's the 60 second pitch on Mythical Games?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Mythical, like I said, we're really trying to build, build a new economy. You know, we really want to basically give the power of ownership back to the players, give new forms of economy, whether it's player to player, player with a game, you know, just give them new ways of how they can transact. So we've been working, like I said, we've been working to build that chain tech and what we call the mythical platform. So, so basically, it's the chain tech through the Mythos chain and the Myth token. It's the marketplace tech to do these kind of, kind of real time crazy transactions that make gamers money. And then it's the games on top of that. So our, our mission is basically to build the best platform out there to really open up these economies for any game in the world.

• 41:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And where can we some people to find you?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Uh, where find me? Um, I'm at, at John was taken on Twitter because or X, sorry, sorry. I'm still getting used to that after years. Um, and, um, or at Play Mythical.

• 41:58Anthony Pompliano?

  At John was taken?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  At John was taken.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great handle.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Because John was, John was taken.

• 42:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That's incredible. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

• 42:08Anthony Pompliano?

  This is super cool. And, uh, I think that, uh, games in general are something that is like, uh, very Lindy, right? Games are not going away. People want to be entertained and, uh, new form factors, new technologies are always interesting to learn about. So thank you so much.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.