B3 Co-Founder: The Democratization of Gaming in 2025

Transcript

We're focusing on talking to indie game developers in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, um the Middle East, ones who maybe aren't getting funded by big studios like the Ubisofts of the world, and they're really looking to blockchain to figure out a path where they can bring their game to market. There's a mobile game experience here that I think I think these indie game developers are better suited for and this this structure is better better suited for, but crypto lacks that. you guys wanted to kind of build this B3 ecosystem on top of of of base, but then also allow uh builders and developers to build their own kind of game chains within the B3 ecosystem. New we needed something novel and that's going to come from the indie game developers who are going to build something so unique, something so

special that it's going to revolutionize the world over. Welcome back to the rollup, your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at therollup.co/ventures. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome partners. [Music] [Music] The intersection of AI and crypto is moving fast and soon an agent will be managing your onchain transactions for

you. But without guardrails, it's a disaster waiting to happen. Newton locks agents to your intent with cryptographic proofs and real penalties if they slip. Learn more at magic Newton onx. What's going on guys? Welcome back to the rollup. Today we have an episode regarding an upand cominging gaming chain focused on all of the fun things that can happen when you sit down with your friends online and have a good time. That's actually what we're doing today. We are sitting down with our friends and having a good time today. Robbie, good to see you. And Victoria, welcome. Welcome to the rollup. Thank you so much, Andy. What a great intro. I should bring you along to all my podcasts. We can have a good time, sit down, hang out with your friends. With our friends. With your friends. So, it's your first time here. Um, Victoria,

welcome to the rollup. As I said, Rob and I are a pleasure to have you and would love to understand a bit about your background and um kind of how you went from uh Coinbase to earning entrepreneurship rewards in Bulgaria to then where you are now. So, what's what is your story and why gaming? Oh, wow, Andy. Uh, good question. So, it's a long story. I'm going to keep it short. I'm going to give you the TLDDR version of the story. Um, I was actually hired in at Coinbase uh in 21 to lead a lot of the partnership and brand efforts for the creative ecosystem and Coinbase NFT, which rest in peace, I don't know, so sad. It was a good product up until it wasn't, and uh, Coinbase wallet. And

then when um we kind of worked on some of those pieces alongside uh myself, I had Daryl who's one of my co-founders on the business development team, Char who was one of our engineers, who's also a co-founder of G3. Um Sammy, who used to lead DeFi, um also a co-founder of ours on the foundation side of things. Um and so we all worked together at Coinbase for a long long time. Um, and our team was something was called something uh along the lines of like the cryptonative team within Coinbase itself because Coinbase has two sides of it. There's like the the finance bros deal with the Black Rockck and then there's like the cryptonative side of things where it's the base team and it's a lot of the staking stuff. It's a lot of the USDC

stuff. So, um, we were on the crypto native side of things, working through, um, a couple of new initiatives when Jesse came up with the idea of, hey, why don't we launch an L2 and bring everything that we currently have within the centralized ecosystem of Coinbase on chain. And so, that's really where building out the chain alongside um, my co-founders, now at B3, took off. We um, were a very, very small team at the time, 12 people. I think internally at Coinbase, not many people believed we could succeed because of how small the team was and because of what an uphill battle it really was. It's easy to now look at Bass and say, "Well, they were always going to succeed." But realistically, when we were first starting base, that was not the case.

Um, there's a ton of FUD. People were like, "Why are you guys launching another L2? There's a million of them. Why can't you just buy optimism? Um, this is going to be the KYC Fed chain. You're going to make everybody KYC to transact. It's going to be a horrible experience." And so despite all odds, we actually did launch it. We had a great launch punch in summer, which is something I led worked on. Um and then we brought in players like Friend um that really really blew up and helped us in those early days. And then friend pets of the world and like one after the other uh they started game builders. And during that time at Coinbase um we were kind of monitoring what was tracking and what wasn't, what was working and what wasn't. And uh based on the conversion

rates of the 100 million users that Coinbase has, whenever we would send them an email or an inapp notification saying, "Hey, there's this cool game that you could try on base on chain." Um the conversion rates would shoot up through the roof. And so for us, it was like, okay, um clearly gaming is a thing people care about. And specifically when we started doing user interviews, we realized gaming is something people are familiar with. They've been playing games for decades now. Their kids played games maybe at one point in time. they themselves played when they were younger or still continue to play on their phone. Um, and so when you pair something like crypto, which is very scary for a newbie, um, where, you know, the potential to lose all your money and more um, is online every, you know, transaction, every time you sign a

wallet, uh, in your wallet, um, when you pair that with gaming, something that people are familiar with, all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, like, let me try this. Maybe it isn't so scary. I'm comfortable with gaming. Let me try like an arch game. Um, and so that was really an aha moment for us where this vertical and gaming specific is something that could really really hit and deserves to be scaled on its own in a dedicated meaningful way which is really how B3 came about. So that's the Coinbase to B3 segue. Um, and the folks that I started NPC Labs with core contributor to B3 um are the people that we worked on base together with. So, I I just kind of like went into B3 in the basement and started just poking around and like it's so

intuitive. It's actually really fun and you it's really easy to like just get started, which I think is kind of a contrast to traditional crypto apps because you go through for a while there was like you got how to have a wallet, how to have gas in the wallet, how to have do this and that. And you guys partner with some some onboarding tools like Privy make that super easy. kind of leading into like the whole chain abstraction realm and and just generally make it super easy for people to to try it and use it. Um maybe we'll get a little bit more into like the the structure and the culture that that you guys are going for. But I wanted to start by asking like generally like something that sticks out right away is

this like Apple has its arcade, right? The feeling I get when I go to B3 is like it's like an arcade for Coinbase and that makes it super intuitive to use. It's all these mini games. Was that kind of the idea or generally what was the inspiration here as to like okay this is something that we can make fun and engaging on chain and then how did you how did you see that play out? Did it play out to the way that you expected or did it kind of take some take some twists and turns along the way? Yeah. Uh great question. I think the inspiration was actually Mini Clip and addictingames.com. I don't know if you when you were a kid, you used to play any of that. Um, that was the inspiration for us. We when we were first building out uh B3, there was and

kind of thinking through the architecture of it, there were two parts of it. The first was what are we building that's novel and meaningful on the gaming side of things that's actually going to move the space forward? Um, like everyone's tired of the casino games and the multi-level Ponzi schemes. And so it's like if we're going to build something and we're going to make it meaningful, the infrastructure has to be there to support that. Um, and that's where B3 open gaming comes in and we can touch on that a little bit later. Alongside that, the other big problem which is not something that's very sexy in terms of solving because there's not a lot of money in it. Um, and that's visibility and discoverability. And so right now if you wanted to see all the possible games available across base and optimism and Ethereum and Redstone and Arbitron like

where do you go as a new user? How do you see all of those games? How do you participate and engage? Um and so that discoverability was something that was um that needed to be fixed. And so that's where basement.f fun comes in. Uh we called it basement because you play video games in your basement. Um and it's really meant to be a discovery surface for all onchain games. We're not limit limiting it to just V3 or just base. Uh we have we're integrating Z. We have Avalanche games on there. Uh we have so the entire ecosystem really is it's meant to be a place where you're able to see everything that's available.

Um and the reason we say there's no like money to be made and it's not a sexy problem to solve is because traditionally in this onchain gaming space, everybody's trying to build a mode around themselves. You're trying to create a wallet solution that limits your users from ever leaving you. you're trying to create a game where the currency is limited to this closed loop ecosystem so they never leave you because user acquisition is so hard and so expensive that when you actually get a user to play one of your games it's like I can't possibly have them leave and go play Parallel or go play Maplestar Universe across another chain um that's just not my goal here and so I want to keep people closed off in the system and that's exactly the problem of why like gaming in this vertical hasn't taken off. Um, it's really a bit of a

joke even in the traditional gaming world. Um, not even a bit, it's a big joke. You can't ever go into a forum or on Reddit and proudly be like, "Yep, I'm an onchain gamer." Um, as you're talking to PC gamers or like console gamers, it's just non-existent. And so I think for us it was really this collaboration over competition play where if we want to make meaning a meaningful impact in the gaming vertical we first have to build out infrastructure and something novel and special um on the tech side of things. And then from a user perspective we have to make it easy. It can't be complicated and we need to collaborate with other ecosystems so that even if you come in because you're an Maple Story Universe player on Avalanche, you might c like cross-pollinate, go play

Parallel, and then once you've played Parallel, you might want to play Infinagods. Um or if you played the Infinity and so on and so forth. Um so that's that's the that was really basement and that's why it was built and that's why we keep um iterating and it's definitely not perfect in any way, shape or form at this stage in time. We continuously make improvements to it, but Mini Clip was the inspiration for it and it's really meant to be the homepage franching games. I think one of the things that that is also particularly exciting for us from our perspective about B3 is is we've been we've been holding quite a strong take around purpose-built chains, wanting to have blockchains that are meant to be built specifically for a reason. uh like technically as well as architecturally

and also this general idea that there's going to be a lot of chains that we need to scale horizontally and have whether it be niche specific use case chains or app specific chains or kind of however you you want to call them even game chains right I think is what you guys call them at B3. Why did you guys come to the realization that you guys wanted to kind of build this B3 ecosystem on top of of of base but then also allow uh builders and developers to build their own kind of game chains within the B3 ecosystem? What was the core idea behind that and why did you guys choose to to scale this way? I think it's really twofold. So, first and foremost, I think we we genuinely do believe that Bass has

a fair chance at becoming the the like the home for the onchain economy based on all the efforts they're making on bringing people onchain, on ramping, off-ramping, all the tools that they're building and the focus that they have. And so, if they're focusing on the DeFi, the liquidity, bringing users in, um once those users land, they have to have something to do. And you can only get so like there's only a certain audience that finds the DeFi side of things and trading on like an aerodyome attractive. People want to figure out what else they can do. Gaming as like I said the conversion rates when we were at Coinbase were incredibly promising, more promising than NFTs, more promising than music, more promising than DeFi even. Um and so gaming deserves a fair chance at

winning. And the only way to do that is you don't have a multi-purpose chain kind of focusing on it in the two minutes of free time that they have um on a monthly basis, but rather a dedicated team that understands the pain points and that addresses them and builds out the products that need to be built out even if again there's no money in it. Um at the end of the day, a lot of the bigger m like multi-product ecosystems are focusing on the pieces that make a ton of money and so they're overlooking the missing components that aren't generating as much revenue in favor of the ones that aren't. And that makes total sense for us because gaming is so nent and onchain gaming is so nent still it makes sense to build out these tools and products. Um the reason we scaled horizontally with our game chains

as a part of um the B3 open gaming ecosystem is because we talked to a ton of indie game studios developers web 2 folks that are evaluating web 3 and we kind of wanted to understand where the pain points currently are. So many of these folks don't want to compete for block space. They don't want to compete for transactions. They can have spikes in gas when they're doing estimates on gameplay. Um, and they also at the L2 level can't necessarily afford even 5 cents um, per transaction when you're talking millions of volumes. And so for them, the L3 and kind of scaling up made most sense because at the L3 level, uh, the transactions are gasless. And so their users are able to play and they're

able to place anything necessary, any component that's necessary on chain, um, in order for the gameplay to function. And then in addition to kind of the limitations of of an L2 in terms of cost, there's also growth and scaling. You get to a point like if you started in the very early days of like a GTA for example, GTA was was great. Then it blew up hundreds of millions of users. That point in time when you when you have grown so quickly, you need your own tech. You need your own tech stack. You need every component to be focused on just what your users need and for the gameplay to be smooth and seamless. So that's where the game chains come in.

They're not meant for every single studio. They're not meant for every single indie um game developer, but rather they're meant for the ones that need their own stack and they also don't necessarily have like the web 3 smart contract developer side of things figured out or they don't know how the infrastructure runs itself. And so oftent times I think a lot of these gaming studios lean on maybe like a rollup provider and say like oh well maybe we'll just work with one of them and then they can handle everything for us. The problem that they start running into is gaming is very specific outside of what a rollup provider um sets you up with. You need additional pieces, additional indexers. You need support from NFT um created tools and marketplaces. And when you start digging

into what you actually need as a game developer to set up your own stack, to run your own chain, it's $3 to5 million a year in costs and you need to have a full-time team stacked against running this. And so all of a sudden it's like, okay, so I'm only good as long as I don't grow to be big enough. And when I am big enough, I'm going to have to pivot from game development, from creating fun games experiences, and I'm going to pivot into infrastructure. I'm going to need to hire a whole new team, and I'm going to have to spend a ton of money on it. And so for us wanting to solve that, that's where this open gaming ecosystem came in where we're going to handle all that for you. we're not going to charge you $4 million because we form partnerships with every

single um infrastructure provider you may need and we've gotten discounted rates and so we'll cover all the costs. You just bring fun cool games on chain where we're able to be meaningful on impact and kind of get this vertical going. Yeah, that that makes sense. And you know, you you kind of describe the value proposition to these indie game studios. I I think a lot of times as crypton natives we're kind of like we're almost like looking for a solution or like looking for a problem to to our solution. Um in the sense that like you know we've got this blockchain you know we believe in this technology and we're going out we're trying to we're trying to foster these use cases. Um and you know I kind of put myself into that camp

as well. I I'm curious like you know given that a lot of this technology was built for finance um and now we're you know kind of layering gaming on on top of it. Do you do you find that you know you're kind of going out and you're trying to sell these people on on the blockchain on like financialized games or I guess a little bit more generally like when when gamers come to the chains and they're they're looking to play are is their primary motivation for playing onchain games to make money or are they trying to do something else with onchain games and does this unlock new applications, new games that aren't possible offchain? Yeah, I I think when

we think about onchain gaming generally, we think back to like what has hit or what has been a success in the past and some of those big successes have either been um multi-level marketing schemes or casino like games. And so naturally, we tend to think like well the only thing that blockchain could be used for when it comes to um gaming is in order to create this like onchain casino. Um, and it's all play to earn and you lead with this like you stem to make a ton of money should you play these games. And I think what's kind of being overlooked is what we're focusing on which I think I don't know if you game or not, Robbie, but um the I I dabble. You dabble all

the games. I I dabble. Yeah. Incredible. Um, well, I I'm I'm sure you felt it, but if if you played games as a kid, now playing games as an adult, um, there's this lack of progress that's been made in the last like decade and a half where we consistently see the same sequels and remakes be pumped out. were on like the last of a seven. Even though like that game came out such a long time ago, but because HBO is putting out season two, it makes sense for them to pump out another remake so that the marketing can alive and they can squeeze out as much money as possible. And so in the web 2 gaming space, what's happening is the the space has grown old and stale.

There's these monopolies of publishers that dictate what games get built. um and they solely focus on how much money they can extract once the game goes live. And we as players are just forced to play what gets put out in front of us. Um games from indie studios that really revolutionize the world. Something like a Minecraft couldn't get funded from any of the big publishers. And so it's one of those moments where studios are trying. There's a ton of indie game developers that have incredible ideas they want to bring them to market, but because a tried and, you know, true and safe uh game like The Last of Us is going to generate a ton of money for a huge publisher, they're not going to focus on the indie

game developer. And so for us, it's not so much leading with, hey, you know, you bring your game on chain and you can launch a token with it. Like, sure, like that makes sense for you, great. Like, we love that. I'm happy for you. But I think what we're actually trying to do is create a way for indie game developers to be able to get published um and to be able to bring their games on chain in a way where users decide what comes online and users decide what gets published because at the end of the day we're the ones playing it. And so if we put that power back in the hands of a user and we enable indie game developers to create something special where a blockchain is just used as a technology, it's not it's not a blockchain game, but

rather it's a game that's using blockchain the same way you would use AWS or anything else on the back end. Um similarly here we we can create those like moments where we feel something again when we play video games where where there's like soul put into this because like the game developer was really passionate about the project rather than just trying to squeeze money out. And so that's been our focus. We're focusing on talking to indie game developers in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, um the Middle East, ones who maybe aren't getting funded by big studios like the Ubisofts of the world, and they're really looking to blockchain to figure out a path where they can bring their game to market, build out enough of a market, too, where the users kind of take control of some of it, um

and kind of become ambassadors, uh for this game itself, and bring it to market in a meaningful way. So this lowers the the barrier to entry for game developers. So like you know for for developers that you know maybe are interested in in creating a game but don't know exactly what the startup cost or or resources are that are required they would need to go to AWS. They would need a publisher and they would need to go through this whole rigma roll to end up getting the game published. But you're saying that blockchain brings that cost way way down so that someone with with an idea can bootstrap their game off of all of the existing infrastructure and resource that are available in the blockchain world.

Correct. Exactly. So if you have an incredible game that you're passionate about, you have a team, you're ready to go and build, you're going to be bringing the next World of Warcraft um on chain, you can't get a single publisher to believe in you because you've never built games before. It's your first time or it's a passion project for you. being able to bring them into B3 and have the community use B3 tokens to fund you to give you some of what they already own. Um, it's like a GoFundMe type experience where I now have gotten the $200,000 that I need in order to bootstrap this and get the first like playable alpha out there for the community to then decide, is this fun? Is this good? Is this great? Do we want to continue funding it? And then once the game actually launches and

there's monetization mechanics, that's where the community makes their money back. they're almost like shareholders in the game. And so 50% of the revenue the game makes goes back to the users until they're made whole. Um, and then the game can continuously make money from there. And so you bring the game online, you bring the game on chain, you are a publisher of it. Um, and you've decided that you know it's good enough to make it versus something that it just isn't. Or, you know, again, in the big publisher space of things, they they just don't care about novel new experiences. They they only care about the bottom line. And we've seen so many games where there's been a rabbit fan base, people have been really impressed with the game itself, but because the publisher wasn't able to make enough money in the first quarter of the game

being released, they pull it off Steam, they pull it off the PlayStation store, and as a user, you don't have the ability to continue playing it. Um, sure, you get a refund for the initial game that you, you know, that you purchased, but you it's just out of your hands. It's out of your control, and that's a shitty experience. Innovating finance global institutional and onchain. Deep liquidity to drive capital efficiency. Now maximize yields on institutional grade liquid staking with me. Unlock trillion dollars of capital via Fitbitcoin. All of this secured by Mantle's treasury of billions in stables and ETH capital pools. This entire

ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned VCs that are aiming to create the next generation of banking and financial technology. This is Mantle. I just feel like there's a bit of a hole in the thinking here where we're just going to assume that we can lower the barrier to entry to create a game that's going to be relevant or even close to as good as anything that we would actually play. So if we look at the top 100 games in the world, top 50 games even, you know, and if you get all the way to the top 10, it becomes even more blatantly clear, like these games costed tens of millions of dollars to create and for a reason. There's the developers that build those games.

They're not going to be working for anything less than, you know, a a significant multiple six figure salary, equity, etc. I just think that there's a a large hole in our thinking if we're just going to assume that having a token and then having a blockchain and then being like, okay, we can fund games at like the earliest of stages and assume that these games are going to become anything of substance is to is to basically look at reality and be like, okay, the games that are actually worth anything and have users and have real, you know, real demand, they they probably spent tens of millions of dollars to create and they take five years or four years. So, like I'm just not sure how we're like like I mean

maybe I'm missing something, but seems like we're trying to just throw a blockchain on it, throw some funding at some under developed gaming people and assume that they're going to create anything of substance. And if that's like the entire thesis of this of what you guys are are doing, then I think you guys may have a rough patch ahead of time where you're realizing like, well, we need like why not just focus on one really really good game, put a lot of money into it to hire the best people and take a shot at going big instead of just funding a lot of small stuff that is likely not going to amass to anything. But maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic, but the reality of gaming is that it's very hard to break into. So, I just don't see how how anything that comes of of this without

substantial funding as well as talent is going to amass into anything of of substance. Yeah, Annie, you're you're not wrong. I think it actually goes back to what Robbie said a little earlier where you said oftent times crypto and blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Um we're like, well, we figure this ledger thing out. Let's just slap it across everything and like hopefully something works. And some pieces have worked, others haven't. Um, you're not wrong in saying like how could you possibly think that you could create the next GTA 6, which took like billions of dollars and just decades to complete, and it's still not out yet. Um, and the the answer is we don't. Um, we're not looking for AAA GTA 6 like experience to

throw money at or to throw money at a multitude of them. I think one thing that can be said for certain is you never know what's going to hit. And in uh onchain gaming, nothing has necessarily hit just yet. We've had some games that have had some, you know, some type of success, but not necessarily the levels of success you would want to see. And I think oftentimes it's because we're putting the cart before the horse. Like blockchain is relatively novel as tech, specific to gaming. And so to expect to take a AAA game and slap it on the blockchain and it's just going to work is unrealistic and delusional to be quite frank. We need to start from the building blocks. Gaming wasn't built with like a GTA 6 type experience from the get-go. We started with arcades and

then arcades slowly migrated to like um consoles and then we have PCs and we had upgrades. So, I think we we take this like AAA quality, a Call of Duty, whatever it is, and we think it could just be brought on chain and it's going to be good enough or better, and that's unrealistic. What we need is something new. What we need is something novel. And that's going to come from the indie game developers who are going to build something so unique, something so special that it's going to revolutionize the world over. Similar to like Minecraft. Minecraft is not does not have the best graphics. You know, if you saw the game as it was being developed, you would have been like, "What the is this shit?" Like, "Who's going to play this? This is horrible." And yet, um, one thing we know to be true is

there is something special about every um, like new and innovative concept. And oftentimes what we believe to be like the next standout isn't actually the next standout and it is a complete flop. Um, and so it's really being able to allow these indie game developers that have something special try and put that out there and for the community to decide. So it's not necessarily us going out and finding a bunch of games and just hoping that they work. Um, it's Gen Z. It's kids who have B3 token or any other token and they just want to fund some of these things and see if they work out. If they don't like that is the name of the game that is publishing. I think what you guys are missing is a mobile experience. Like when I go onto this basement, it reminds

me of the games that I was addicted to when I was like 14 playing on my phone in class and I was like playing Flappy Bird and Doodle Jump and Fruit Ninja and I would play them for hours at a time. Those are the kinds of games that I see on on B3. And and you know I I'm I got a high score in back backboard shot or bank shot. So, if anyone beats 3,000, hit me up because you got some you got some skills. But the point is that like there's a there's a mobile there's a mobile game experience here that I think I think these indie game developers are better suited for and this the structure is better better suited for, but crypto lacks that and blockchain rails hasn't

quite developed a mobile experience. So, how do you think that will fit into the into the structure of like the road map? And yeah, maybe Andy wants to No, I mean pile in there. I just like that's an important part, but then you start to get into like distribution and then you start to think like okay where's the edge for whatever these gaming whoever these indie game developers are where is their edge and then why can't something just like Pudgy Penguins go and create a better easier game and just you know push it to all their community or something that already has like that distribution of the mobile edge. Anyway, I I wanted to talk about off the grid, but we can talk about mobile because I think off the grid is the only thing worth talking about right now in the crypto gaming experience. Again, I'm

being pessimistic just because like I just want to keep it very real, but like off the grid is doing pretty much everything offchain. I think they just have like skins trading on chain, I think, right now. And like they're crushing. So, I don't know if there's any if there's any any like lessons there, but that and and the mobile stuff is both particularly interesting from my lens. curious to to understand anything on that or distribution. Um I'm just going to throw the problems at you and just see kind of like what sticks. So don't take it personally. No, Andy, please give me all the problems. love it. Drive on this Um so to to answer the mobile question first because I think it's just like really easy, Robbie. It's like you're uh you're on the team or something because we we do have a mobile app that's being reviewed

by Apple right now. Uh that is going to be going live next quarter, early next quarter. So definitely been something in development, definitely something that we recognized and after doing a ton of interviews and talking to the children of the world over um everyone's on their phone and anytime we've introduced them to Basement, they've been like, "Yeah, I I want this as an app and I want to play these games like in between classes um whatever with my friends, I want to compete." So mobile app is coming uh Q2, early Q2, watch out. And then uh Off the Grid, I think we we love Off the Grid.

We love their team. Um they're they've actually been working with Daryl, my co-founder, uh back when they were still making a decision in terms of like what where to launch and what um chain to go with before deciding on Avalanche. They were evaluating base for a little bit. Um and they actually ran into exactly kind of what we're trying to solve for here. Base is a general purpose L2. The time we didn't have any plans for app chains or any type of L3 level scaling. Avalanche did and so Off the Grid went with the Avalanche team and they've been um quite successful in that regard. When you u mentioned that like they're not really doing anything on chain except for trading skins. I think that brings up an interesting point um that I think a lot of onchain gaming like maxis like die on a hillover, which is what

constitutes as an onchain game and what doesn't. And there's like this community of people that firmly believe that every action has to be onchain in order for a game to be considered an onchain game. otherwise you're an imposttor. And I find that to me such a funny thing to like who who the is the arbiter of that? Like why are you deciding what a game developer uh you know is if they're using the tech in a in the right way or in the wrong way. Um if if like that's defeats the whole purpose of crypto where we're just trying to do you know things in a way that makes sense for each and every one of us. And so even though just skins or just I don't know NFTTS or they're gonna have the guns token soon and um and that's going to be

a closed loose loop token that's meant for people to you know transact and do whatever with. Um as an indie game developer you shouldn't be limited with like you can't play in this cool kids club unless you bring everything on chain and if you just have their skins like sorry man you're not really an onchain game and you're not really a part of this and not really going to push you or support you. Um so I love what they're doing. I think it it's an a really great use case of like you use blockchain where it makes sense versus just slapping everything on chain for the sake of it all being on chain. I I think I just have like one more like before we wrap which is like maybe you could help legitimize this entire like sector of the industry in our minds like

what is kind of your like what are your metrics look like? How many users do you have? Like how many are are they really like driving significant activity? like how much adoption have you gotten, traction, that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. So, we did things in a very unorthodox way when we launched um B3. We ran our test net for one month because we don't give a about people trying to farm it and like farm an airdrop. We launched our mainet immediately after just a month in test net. Our test net despite the fact that it was just one month was the largest test net in terms of users because we had an actually playable experience. So some of the games you see on baseman.1 right now uh we had on our test net you could connect you could play you get a high score you got test

net tokens for it and so it was a userfriendly experience which actually encouraged people to try it versus test nets are developer experience you try a bunch of your developer like it works it doesn't work whatever um so that drove a good amount of numbers for us and got people familiar with baset fun um when we went into mainet the biggest problem that I think people have when they first or like ecosystems have when they first launch a gaming ecosystem. It's like where do I get all the games and what do I actually present to people to play? And so, we didn't over complicate it. We're not interested in competing with other ecosystems or trying to poach games off of other chains to come on our chain.

That's uh futile efforts. We don't we really don't care. Um, and so instead we started with really simple mini games and mini apps um that could be reskins, telegram based games, very very simple for people to just come in, start playing right away, start earning experience points, getting on leaderboards, and that was enough. um within a couple of months I think of this approach we had 50 or 100 games and then when we finally made it to our TGE which was just a month ago again we went straight to TG after nine months of being live on mainet specifically because we did not want bots we did not want farmers and we did not want people to think that if they're going to go on and play crossy chicken for 45 minutes

that they're going to make life-changing money from their airdrop and So, like we've always been working under this uh kind of with this intention of you're early because we're early. Like we're trying to build something new here. We're trying to build something um special here and doing things in the way everybody else has always done them is not going to get us there. Um and so even with our airdrop when we um ahead of time our CTO Sean took like three lines to find every single farmer and like and then posted a huge blog post just like It was I mean you should read it. It's really funny. Um of like what he did, how he did it, and how he found all these bot farms. And he got so much like hate mail and death threats

from the bot farms. Um he had to like take down his entire telegram. You start from from scratch. Pissed off a lot of people, but it worked in our favor. Um because if you take a look at our TGE and the way we did it and the amount of holders, amount of stakers of B3, people are actually holding, people are actually staking, people are actually using it to support games and buy NFTts. Um and so we really put the token into the hands of real users versus people that are just going to dump. Um and uh so we have six million uh folks participating um on a monthly basis. We have about 100,000 playing on a daily basis at any given time. Um, we I think hit 300 million transactions recently.

We have 150 games. We recently announced a big partnership with Atari. We're going to bring a lot of the IP that they're acquiring from indie game studios and devs. We need we're like 80% there and just need like 50k infusion to really get the game to market. um and use some onchain like uh pieces to to make a novel experience for users. And so we have a lot more that we're unveiling and then we have uh six game chains launching. Um all of them are live on test net. We've announced three. Um we have three more to announce and then the first one going live on mainet is going to May. So we're super excited.

I do have one one more and that that is super exciting. I uh I noticed that you guys made like a pretty significant splash on launch. Um and uh you know the the base L3 allows you to have like this massive throughput. Um you also chose to use Celestia for DA. We're big fans of Celestia here and just generally supportive of of their scalability thesis. Maybe you could touch a bit, you know, it's probably a bit of a technical question, but could you touch a bit on like why you chose to use Celestia for DA and as an L3 for gaming? What do you use DA for? Like why is DA important?

And what kind of like I guess what I'm trying to get at is like why is it important that you use something like Celestia for DA and not like Ethereum or or another another DA option? Yeah, I I think it honestly always comes down to cost for us um and throughput and then being able to offer the best kind of infrastructure stack for game chains. If we try to think in like way far into the future, if one of these game chains, it might not even be B3. B3 is the first of our gamechain ecosystem.

But if Parallel, who's building Prime Chain, um, and they release their third person shooter and it has one tenth of the success that like Halo had, um, all of a sudden, you know, the cost that you know, 6 million players, 200 million transactions are insignificant because if you actually hit scale, if you actually bring in a meaningful amount of users and they start playing and those transactions get posted, um, it becomes ridiculous in terms of costs. And so right now may not not necessary at all. We could absolutely use uh Ethereum as the DA layer uh like not necessary. It's really forward thinking um into the future and partnering with the best infrastructure partners that would be

able to handle the scale. Um and we really believe Celestia to be that. We validated a number of partners um in the very beginning and Celestia was was truly the best in terms of being supportive. They're focused they they're really focused on gaming too which is interesting. I think uh TA layers generally it's like what you get, you know, you you don't necessarily have an opinion. It's like anybody can work with us. We're not going to focus on this or that. Um but I think we're actually number two or three um in terms of usage for them and in terms of like scale uh amongst uh some of the other folks that use them for DA. So that's why um Celestia's really futurep proofing the B3 gaming ecosystem for should we hopefully have a standout that that's really what it feels is it's like you

guys are kind of like laying the foundation and placing a bunch of bets across the entire onchain gaming industry and kind of in hopes that one of them blows up. And I think mobile is going to be pretty crucial to that to that success. Um but generally I I I I think you're right. kind of like trying a bunch of things out, seeing what sticks, hopefully one blows up, and having the infrastructure as a technology company ready for supporting that that one winner. Yep. Yep. Couldn't agree more.

Cool. I think also just to close out, one one final thought is I always find it funny that, you know, Vitalik invented Ethereum to save his World of Warcraft character that got nerfed. Like I I just think it's hilarious. He basically reinvented the financial system because he got mad about a he got triggered about a video game character. So that's always always funny to think about the origins of this whole thing. I mean when you think about it like gaming is really one of those verticals that could make it like big in in crypto. And it's generally overlooked because I think of the type of the type of person that comes into crypto, right? We all are predispositioned in one way. um shape or form to to be financially like

mindful of of certain things and be excited about things that maybe like annoy me or like a mom in Nebraska be like what the why would I give a about trading on a deck and um I don't care when it comes to gaming it's something that's universal played it inspired tens of bills with Ethereum I'm sure both of you Robbie you said you're you're an amateur esports uh player so it's cool um and I think we've all played games either as children or we have them on our phone. If you look around on like the subway or a plane, every time you walk by anyone, any passenger, everyone's always like playing Candy Crush, playing soda sort, playing something. It's a way to pass time. It's a way to kind of uh experience a a bit of reprieve from the

daily life and from the that you're dealing with. And so it lends itself and blockchain and the tech behind it is actually able to create something special. We haven't seen it yet, but um you know, if we're going to build anything, we might as well focus on a vertical that we're all passionate about and excited on our team at NPC Labs um and has the opportunity to be the it's really blue ocean out there, so has the opportunity to to hit. Yeah. Even the people that are like choosing to allocate like the B3 token into these games, they're just playing a different game, right? And they're just trying to like hit hit winners in a in a different game.

NPC Labs is a pretty hilarious company name by the way. Thank you very Yeah, we're we tried. We tried. Our foundation foundation. Are you a gamer? What's your preferred gamer? What's your preferred games? Yeah. So, I I grew up like I was I was little. I was 5 years old and my dad got me a Sega and I played Mortal Kombat as a 5-year-old. That I think really shaped my identity. Um, but I I actually like adventure games, if you will. So, I I like The Witcher. My favorite game of all time is Bioshock. Um, big fan of that. I think Horizon Zero Dawn's awesome. So, a lot of console games. Um, is kind of what I play. What about you? Very cool. No, my

parents didn't they didn't let us have any video games until we were like 15. So, we'd always just sneak out of the house and go play like Call of Duty at a friend's house. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Yes. those moments, right? Just that was magic. That was absolute magic with like friends together probably in a basement. It was the best for sure. Great vibes. So, Victoria, thank you for coming out. It's been a pleasure and uh best of luck with B3 and congrats on the success thus far. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. Thank you.