CVA Podcast: Saro McKenna, Dacoco / Alien Worlds

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host trash ahmed ready to kick off another bite size episode of the crypto valley association podcast a special thank you to seba bank for supporting this initiative as they pursue their mission to redefine finance for the new economy now let's discover together the growing trends of this fast-moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains today we are joined by sarah makina ceo and co-founder of dakota builder of decentralized autonomous organizations and the publisher of alien worlds one of the largest blockchain games in the world so let's dive straight in and

uncover the hidden world of daos hello sarah how are you doing today hey sharaz it's great to be here lovely to join all of your swiss and international guests wonderful it's a pleasure to have you and how about we kick this whole episode of by hearing about how you first got involved in the blockchain uh blockchain world yeah so we started life as a team being a block producer which is like being a minor on a number of chains especially eosio chains so those are the chains that run the code base that was developed around the the launch of the eos blockchain uh so we were a block producer in particular we were kind of unusual in being a block producer that was organized as a dac at the time we

were calling them dax decentralized autonomous community and since then we've started to use the terminology dao which has become more industry standard but it's the same thing so we were at the time one of the largest stacks because we were revenue generating as a block producer we were one of the only block producers that was formed as adapt and we kind of had to learn how to do that create the code and also the sort of community technology for how to bring a group of people together to do something as kind of complicated as being a block producer so that was a great lesson and we took some of those learnings through to subsequent projects as dakota and then ultimately decided to combine all of that learning and our love of taos and

building dows with nfts into the game alien worlds which then became hugely successful we were the first alien worlds was the first game to exceed 100 000 users the first game to exceed a million users and then to exceed two million users and for a time we were actually the largest dap by users in the world it's a rapidly evolving space so that kind of numbers go up and down in terms of our ranking but yeah huge growth and we're really excited now to be delivering our road map and empowering our community to build on alien worlds incredible yeah looking forward to hearing a little bit more about alien worlds but maybe we stick on to that coco now and

now i understand why it was that coco as well so so tell us more about what you're doing with regards to the building of daos yeah so the code base that we use is really powerful in building multi-sig permissions that you can layer up on top of each other to create these dows so a dao is a tokenized entity that combines within one single unit of measurement which is the token the token that sits at the core of the dao it combines in that one unit both stake and value so by stake i mean voting so if i have one dow token i have one vote power within the dao and i can obtain

that dow token either by working within the dao so normally there are worker proposals that are a kind of important part of how a dow functions the dao can get people to do work for it but also you know you can normally buy the dow tokens and and by buying tokens that also secures the dow from takeover so you can either put in financial value or your own working value and this is how the dao expands and we think it's a very natural governance mechanism on blockchains it's a very good way of using a blockchain and using tokens to organize groups of people towards a common purpose and really rapidly but also with longevity and legacy mechanisms built in bring a group

of people together so that they can do something that they define and they and they define the rules of how they engage with each other i see wow incredible and would you like to talk to us a little bit about some of the use cases or some of the examples that you've helped support you mentioned eos a little bit before but i think there's also liberland as well yeah so we weren't involved except as a blog producer on eos but we did create eos dac which was a block producer and formed in the dac a project that was conceived at the time of the launch of the eos blockchain and we could see in particular my co-founders who were mainly driving that could see that bringing a block producer together as a

dac would be a really great way of mobilizing a community around block production so block production or mining normally i'll mention that block production on these chains is not environmentally intensive in the way that mining on bitcoin is so that's why we use the term block producer rather than minor because you're not actually doing a lot of work in order to do it but it's still a value generative activity right so you know normally chains have some inflation that they direct towards node validators or block producers and so using that as a starting point that's a really great way to bring a community together because you you know you've got this entity that that's then generating revenue or generating value so the conception was that that value could

then be disseminated towards a group of workers who could then use that to create the code base and the other mechanisms to build more dacs and to help more dax so we had a concept of building something called what we were calling at the time the dac factory which was a sort of standardized set of processes and a really easy way for people to click through and create their own tokenized dac and it was using the exact same software that we ourselves used as eos dac so that project i think we one of the things that we found was that it was possibly a little bit too early to get businesses to adopt dac technology as a way of actually running their their

affairs so we did sort of have early users of our software in particular a community called crown and a community called vigor and some others who did take it up and ran with it but we found that the kind of mass adoption was a little bit harder to achieve because possibly the technology was a little bit too early stage for a business to convert its operations into being on chain and into being organized as a dac so that was when we kind of began to see well how what's another way that we can get people to use this technology learn this technology and and not only the technology but sometimes i call it kind of the social technology of you know how do you organize yourself into a decentralized community that's still

creating value remaining focused able to hold people accountable for workflows and so on you know there's a reason why systems and structures tend towards hierarchy i think and it's because you know that is one way of getting things done if you're going to create a decentralized structure a decentralized community you have to figure out how to actually make it work at a human level right in addition to at a technical level and so i think we were learning all of those things about you know how do you create t sub teams and groups of people that can do things and how can they be accountable to the dac and how can you structure worker proposals in a way that that makes sense and it incentivizes people enough but also holds them accountable and so on so as part of all that you know we realized

that there was a real role for people learning how to use this technology both the tech but also the kind of social processes that had to go along with that and so we thought well maybe a game would be a more accessible way a more scalable way to do that something that would reach more people and of course at the same time the wax blockchain was emerging which is a chain that is nft focused and a lot of our community members had gone from previous chains to to wax and so we had a lot of we had a sort of natural community there and so the idea to combine nfts with dows was really the the foundational idea behind alien worlds

wow okay wonderful i mean that transitions so well into into alienware i mean maybe you can tell us a little bit more i watched the really cool trailer two alien worlds maybe tell us our listeners a little bit more about alienwares and how you came up with the idea uh around this yeah so alien worlds is a metaverse in which there are six planet daos that are competing for the scarce resource which is trillium so you show your support for your planet dao by staking trillium into that dao and then voting on that planet for the councillors that you'd like to to represent you there's also a mining activity a mining game in which you sign up you get given an nft and all the

things that you need to start playing and you can within a couple of minutes start earning trillium and nfts it's real proof of work mining so you know that is a you know the same mechanism as bitcoin mining so it might be a little bit hard to become a bitcoin miner today but you can become a trillium miner and be using all the same tech and and you can do that within minutes within our mining game so those are the kind of pillars of the functionality right now is the mining game and dows the competitive dows and the voting and elections that are happening on the taos very shortly we we are releasing functionality on bsc on the binance smart chain so we're one of the only projects that i know of in fact we're the only project that i know

of that has gaming logic running on on three chains so we're based on wax bsc and ethereum so our new gaming our new game that's being released on on bsc is called missions and that's where you can send spacecraft on missions and curate a collection of nfts that you get as a reward and those nfts have utility within the missions game so we also have future functionalities so for example a fighting game in a thunderdome quests and future mechanics but one thing i will say is that all of those games that we're building are really just the kind of genesis game ideas that we as the founding team are putting together and releasing to the community for use what we have

seen is an explosion of people themselves community members themselves delivering their own gaming little mini games and also their own products and services into the metaverse commercial activity has really blossomed on alien worlds and i think that that so you know the metaverse is really everything that people do with trillium whether that's us or other community members and this is why the metaverse is a far more it's really a platform for people to take forward their own community projects and their own commercial projects yes well i see and it really sounds like the next level of mmorpg you know like playing for example world of warcraft in real life practically i mean it's it's incredible being an ex-gamer to see some

of this innovation and to transition there i mean you spoke about metaverse it's a buzzword that we've heard so much lately can you explain maybe what what is the metaverse what is a metaverse yeah it's interesting because you know we started to conceive of ourselves as a metaverse about 18 months ago when we were designing how all these mechanics would work and in the last few months it's really become a word that other people are playing back to us rather than us being the ones introducing it into the conversation so that's interesting i mean obviously facebook's statement that they you know want to become a metaverse and you know would like to sell to sell their hardware into that proposition has helped to define that but we're a very

different type of metaverse so we're a social metaverse and we're a social metaverse because we have abstracted economic concepts into blockchain structures that then allow people that incentivize people to behave competitively and collaboratively so all we've really done is to create trillium the token these dow structures and a few competitive dynamics and what that has done is it's abstracted an economic layer of activity that has really prompted people to so basically people are incentivized to earn more trilliums so that then they can grow their power and influence within the metaverse people have that then come together in collaborative units to compete with each other because

that's the the mechanic that that exists and they're competing with each other in order to to win more trillium and extend their power and influence within the metaverse so that is a very different conception of the metaverse from the kind of ar vr or sort of spatial metaverses that some projects have taken forward which we think are really interesting and you know really interesting and great projects very different from what we're trying to do so i mean a metaverse is some kind of an abstraction of reality in the digital space right and as such it needs to be bounded in some way right a metaverse is a particular space that's bounded and is distinct from what is outside of it now that boundary can be conceived of

as a sort of physical boundary right like a neighborhood or a district a space that is built out like for example built out in ar or vr so that then you kind of enter the metaverse you might put on a headset or you might interact with it visually through a user interface you walk around you look to the left you look to the right you walk forward you do things within the metaverse and so on so that's one conception of how you would bound a metaverse and give it a kind of spatial identity that's not what we've done we've conceived of the boundary of the metaverse as being everything that trillium touches right so everything that you can do to earn more trillium whether that's your own commercial activity right so you can just you know you could walk up to somebody else in the metaverse and offer them a service

like i'll do an nft drop for you and they pay you for that well that's part of the metaverse right you didn't have to put on an arvr headset to do that you had all you had to do was make a connection with somebody else offer something and then you were away so our conception of the metaverse is what is bounded by these economic mechanisms what that means therefore is that it's far more total right so the metaverse comes to where you are right you can meet someone else in real life and that's part of the metaverse you can have a conversation with somebody on telegram and that's part of the metaverse you can offer a commercial service and that's part of the metaphor as long as it's something that trillium is touching or being involved with it's part of what is going on

that has proven to be very quick to market very scalable and very compelling for people because you know although it's a very interesting r d initiative to kind of build out these big arm vr landscapes not many people that i meet actually want to spend a huge a huge amount of time in those environments what they actually want to do is augment their lives with value meaning meeting other people that they want to meet and so by by abstracting an economic layer and by using trillium is the thing that bounds the metaverse that means that you can add alien worlds to your life you can bring it to where you are you know

you know eventually your children could be could be playing an nft game or going to school within part of the metaverse it doesn't mean that they have to that has to be removed from what they're doing in the rest of their lives it means that you add these components of activity that are economically valuable to you from the metaverse into into your own life where it is and that's actually been what's happened so far so we've had communities take up the gaming communities take up commercial activity and that's part of why this has scaled to be the market-leading blockchain game i think we're now the number two but um the massive growth and scale that i think we saw was due to the fact that it that we were able to to go to where people were and meet their needs in their own lives

wow incredible yes and maybe talk a little bit about the nft side which has been quite hyped up lately as well with collectibles and the ability to earn collectibles in game which really connects i would say a lot of it let's say the traditional world or the real world to this world as well would you like to speak to us a little bit about that yeah absolutely so within alien worlds nfts have utility so they have attributes that are read by the gaming smart contracts and have powers so you know if you have a particular type of shovel versus a particular type of extractor that will have different power to mine within the mining game and similarly later on minions will have different attack and defensive

attributes as part of the fighting game for example and weapons similarly so our nfts are not primarily collectible they're primarily actually utility nfts within a game that allow you to do things within alien worlds and that was all made possible by the fact that our nfts are on the wax blockchain and now on the bsc blockchain which are you know smart contract chains that can actually where you can encode fairly sophisticated into relationships as opposed to one ethereum where collect where nfts have to be primarily collectible right because there's less that you that you can that this the smart contracts can read off of their attributes so so that's how nfts fit into our metaverse they're they're like tools or their signifiers of power and things that you can do that's quite a

technical description i think the kind of emotional layer is that nfts are are fun they're far more human i think than fungible tokens right it's i mean we all love bitcoin but i don't suppose you would say that you have a kind of personal relationship with your bitcoin collection you know we don't use that kind of terminology and yet you can with nfts right you can have you're collecting your different avatar nfts your different tools we have community members that have created youtube videos showing in detail what they describe as their mining rigs and how they select different tool and land combinations for their particular mining strategy they go deep into the different attributes they trade them with each other they trade strategies with each

other you know this is a kind of i mean this is much more what we think of as as gaming right when you can really develop a strategy and figure out what you want to do advise other people get their input and this is also how people you know when i talk about a social mediverse it's people finding their tribe right so if you're really into the mining game and you get onto our channels where people are talking about mining strategy that's how you get to know other gamers who then maybe you will go off with and be part of the dow structures so um yeah the nfts are a really emotional um kind of component i think people form a strong emotional and connection with their nfts but they're also they also have utility and i think in the future we're we're

looking at creating collectibles nfts as well but for now our nfts are utility nfts within the metaverse and i will also say that our community has created a lot of nfts community nfts and dropping those community nfts are quite a big part actually of what incentivizes users to to be in the metaverse and to interact with the metaverse there's a whole business called alienworld butler which reads all of the chain data so because all of our gaming logic is on chain anybody can read it can look at it right and so he has a ton of data aggregation and data analysis it's pretty intensive on on servers you know to to to read all of those gaming actions but he can see the different patterns of mining

and offers as a service to create and drop nfts for on behalf for example of landowners so if you're a landowner in alien worlds and you want to incentivize people to mine on your land more you can go to alien worlds butler which is just a private company and he will arrange to do an nft drop we also have community groups that have created their own nfts we now have you know other games as sort of marketing and promotion coming into alien worlds and dropping their nfts to spread the word about their projects it's a very vibrant landscape wow in incredible and it's great to see that the usability the utility of nfts as well and that they're not just kind of there in your gallery or or something yeah like this and so we've been

following that point i mean our so then our nft is i mean just just hype i mean it's a bit of controversy lately where people are like oh well it's very hyped up but seeing actually the usability of these nfts i mean it seems like this is it's just the beginning i mean what are your thoughts yeah i mean i think that anything that people can own and use especially when that's within a project that gains a certain amount of scale is likely to have longevity for the long run you know so once you own an alien world land nft or an alien world's tool nft you know that is something that you own it sits within your wallet you know you can see it on the blockchain in a block explorer

you know that's something that then even another project could or indeed a community group within alien worlds can create games that would there where you can use that nft in their game right so because it's decentralized it doesn't really rely on any one project or team to kind of validate how you can use your nft which would have been the case in in games previously where you know if you had leveled up to a certain level that didn't really have meaning outside of the walled garden of that particular game whereas in a decentralized game once you have earned an nft it's yours and you know especially once that game has reached or that metaverse has reached a

certain level of scale you know you can really imagine that lots of other community groups and projects will will say oh look there's a hundred thousand of these nfts in it you know out there sitting in people's wallets let's create a game that uses them right because then you're going to attract a bunch of users over to what you're doing so there's this kind of built this is also actually how we feel about dows they build in legacy systems right so with a dow token holders can sell they can buy they can move in they can move out but there's a sort of continuous mechanism for the governance to to keep going even if the group of token holders fluctuates over time there's legacy built in and similarly with a blockchain metaverse or a game like this i think there's legacy built in because

the nfts exist and and you know later on people are going people are going to want to create meaningful use cases for them so um i think that's quite a powerful thing that we haven't yet seen sort of generation two three four of how the existing nfts out there end up getting used yeah i i see well in incredible and as we slowly approach i mean the end of this episode unfortunately maybe you can tell us a little bit more about why you decided to create a lot of this out of zerg out of the crypto valley in system yeah that's a great story actually um we were really looking around at different jurisdictions that would be the best place to sort of set up shop uh we looked at gibraltar we looked at malta

we looked at a couple of other jurisdictions and um i think that we we really liked at the time the fact that the zoo government was for example accepting taxes in in cryptocurrency you know once a government is putting skin in the game like that you know that they're firstly they've gone through an effort to understand even what the technology is they don't have a sort of aversion or fear about it they were obviously positive we also i have to give credit to we we met a great entrepreneurial and extremely competent lawyer in zug who was really keen to you know help us incorporate the company and connect us up with you know banking and insurance

and accountants and all the things that that a company needs and we found that there was a really great professional services environment in in zoo for a crypto company like ours um i will say that at the time we didn't actually realize that that we would end up becoming as large as as we've grown to be you know so i'm really grateful actually now that we that we did select duke because i think it's a great place for us to continue to scale and grow and and have really great professional services and a really great regulatory environment around us yeah i'm really grateful that that that it all turned out that way incredible yeah it's always lovely to hear the inspiring stories coming out of our very own crypto valley and uh as we wrap up the the episode maybe you can give us a little bit of macro

perspective about where you believe the blockchain space as a whole is is heading in the next year five years 10 years and just the future ahead yeah i mean look i i think that the the evolution of the internet has been one of the technology making empowering people possible now it hasn't always resulted in people becoming empowered right i mean we can see in a way the progression of social media is that that that's the type of technology that can really be great for people can bring people together it can also end up being something that that just extracts value from users and in which users themselves

are the product so you know i think that what we can see so far is that there's a possibility for users and people to be extremely empowered by blockchain it's it's a technology that allows people to own and track their ownership to contribute to systems like dows in a way that where they can see that their contribution is delivering value that that they then own similarly with nfts i think whether these systems and structures end up empowering people is is what we all have to ensure and ends up happening right so continuing to create decentralized structures in which users have a say in how the system progresses in which users learn about

how to code and how to participate you know these will be really important in actually ensuring that blockchain remains decentralized remains you know empowering to users and doesn't tend towards what sometimes systems can tend towards which is a more exploitative you know relationship in which users become sort of the product that gets monetized so you know i'm i'm extremely excited and i mean i really back blockchain as a technology because of its capacity to disintermediate kind of value extracting middlemen who don't necessarily do much and instead allow users to share with each other peer-to-peer and not only share but actually

own and build things that they you know it's sort of a more fundamental thing than just sharing which is kind of what social media is it's actually where users become the producers and the owners of the systems that they're in and i think that's a really powerful construct and i and a powerful economic contract powerful social construct and i think it's up to all of us to ensure that it continues to be decentralized and continues to work for people and also that as i mentioned you know education is key like the technology is still really nascent and still too few people know how to code with it you know i mean i know that because i'm constantly trying to hire people who can do it and there aren't that many of them right so you know the more people learn how to code with blockchain languages

and as i was mentioning the kind of social technology around that as well like how do you how do you organize decentralized communities that are still fulfilling to be part of and that are still you know value generative in the long run i think that's a really interesting thing for us all to think about you can probably tell that i'm coming at this answer from the perspective of someone who founded a dap and runs a dab right rather than someone who runs an exchange or is an investor you know i don't run a crypto fund and so i'm not going to give you a kind of macro take on where prices are going because to me that's kind of not what we're trying to do is to build a technology and and um social processes that empower people and so yeah five ten years i i see this as

as the future i see dowse actually as quite foundational to that future as i mentioned it's a native blockchain structure for organizing human activity and tracking stake and value so i think that's a really important story as part of it and yeah i'm just hugely excited to be part of the space i think it's it's um it's a wonderful um way that that people can be empowered wonderful sounds like technology for the people very very inspiring and well thank you so much for joining us today sarah do you have any final words for for for our listeners uh today regarding where they might be able to find more about what you're doing uh any anything yeah absolutely please come and be part of

the metaverse meet meet friends and and meet other people that that you want to create create stuff within the metaverse so you can find us at alienworlds.io we have a really vibrant telegram and discord channel where you can meet other people you can play the mining game at play.alienworlds.io and we also are releasing we have a big release this week and next week of our missions game on the finance smart chain so please look out on our channels for announcements about that and and send spacecraft on missions to curate a collection of nfts incredible well great and if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website cryptovalley.swiss where we host plenty of events

educational material and even provide information on how you can join our growing community so thanks again sarah for joining us thanks so much it's great to meet you today pleasure stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland bye [Music]