Early signs of a crypto gaming boom with Piers Kicks

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show that's smoother than your phone screen after peeling off the plastic for the first time I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we're joined by Pierce kicks founding partner of Deli adventure and lead of the gaming team at Deli digital in today's episode we are diving into the mind of one of the leading thinkers in the intersection of blockchain and gaming Pier has been in this space for years years and really has the understanding of where we're at we've been talking about gaming and blockchain for gosh for years but we're not we haven't seen the activity that we all expected we're all wondering is that

coming are we finally there and today's episode's really going to give you guys a lot of insight into where we are now with blockchain and gaming but also where we are going in the next 12 months is so exciting and there's so much opportunity here for you guys to capitalize on so buck up guys this episode is going to be absolutely incredible before we jump in we are hiring right now if you guys love crypto if you want to join the milroad team we're looking for a new head of partnership somebody that can help us grow our podcast grow our newsletter and be part of taking crypto to the next billion users click the link in the show notes check out our career page and apply today before we jump in we're just going to take a moment to hear from our sponsors meanwhile is the world's first

licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy they do everything in BTC you pay in BTC they pay claims to your family in BTC you take out policy loans entirely in BTC when you need liquidity protect your family from life's uncertainty and a broken Financial system build intergenerational Bitcoin wealth while the cost of living skyrockets in dollar terms plus get all the tax and legal benefits of life insurance now in Bitcoin visit milroad world's first Bitcoin life insurance Pierre welcome to the milk Road Show hi thank you for having me very excited to be here man super excited to have you my

man want to start off with gaming and blockchain feels like the most obvious marriage in the world but yet we have we have not really seen it take off let's let's just start at the beginning for those who who do have not thought about the cross the intersection between gaming and blockchain why does gaming and blockchain makes so much sense when there's already you know billions of gamers in the world they're not using blockchain and they're doing just fine absolutely I mean I think at the kind of highest level it's just this idea that um these Concepts that are very baked in and embedded in crypto um you know natively digital value the stuff that was unlocked with nfts in terms of like

digital property rights of being able to have you know basically provable digital scarcity on the internet for the first time you know many of us have long thought that the most uh obvious sort of intersection of you know um actual applications basically where that would make sense and resonate with an audience is in games right people that have grown up spending you know a [ __ ] ton of time exploring these environments getting very involved in the economies around big mm RPGs if you've ever played World of Warcraft or Runescape or whatever and yeah now for the first time you have um yeah basically the technology to actually give users ownership of assets around video game economies you look at something like a fortnite that you know multiple billion dollars a year in Revenue that's primarily driven by these

like one-way microtransactions where people are actually just licensing skins basically from a from the game operator you have like you're treated you know incredibly poorly in terms of like what you can actually do your actual agency over those assets right you get banned if you try and sell your account um you get shut down obviously there are gray markets that try and allow this stuff but it's not really you know endorsed at all and so I guess yeah the the highest level and most exciting part of this is like taking the demand has been evidenced by the existence of these massive gray markets and orbit of all these major game economies and actually baking that straight into the game design itself and being like actually we're going to treat our users like grown-ups and we're going to understand that there's a huge amount of sort of

like economic agency and complexity that can be unlocked by giving that power to the players and you know hopefully there's all sorts of interesting emergent behavior that comes with that too which uh you know remains to be seen basically yeah we'll talk about some of that behavior what is the size just just give us an idea of the scale of these gray markets that exist today yeah I mean it's hard to get accurate numbers on them right because like the reportings or whatever but you can look into things like um you know sort of player auctions and some of these other like forums that exist around games you can kind of infer like we're definitely talking like you know billion dollar um markets and aggregate around um various titles and yeah you know expect that to kind of continue to grow basically I

mean many people some of your audience may be familiar with like the csgo like skin Trading that's a particular instance of where you know there was an entire industry a gambling industry that was built off the back of being able to basically use Counter-Strike go Skins as your like medium of exchange to like yeah basically go to all these casinos and stuff um you know often they weren't really like KY seeing users and stuff as you'd expect and so it's pretty insane how elaborate lots of this has become but as I say difficult to get like concrete numbers on F for obvious reasons of course but but just as an order of magnitude we are talking in the billions and this is in Gray markets where the friction would be enormous it's not it's not liquid it's not Global it's not easy to do this stuff like and

people are still making it happen so take that and put that on chain and think about how I mean the benefits are just so obvious so let me ask you this next qu why not yet why haven't blockchain and gaming taken off so far well I think first of all there was obviously like the big trigger period right in which there was like this huge amount of speculation in the sort of like 2021 era of like holy [ __ ] you know this is actually a sort of possibility and people really Ram with a lot of that stuff right we saw these assets like run up massively and basically we kind of just had a classic instance of you know sort of expectations not really matching reality like the reality of game design is that you know you're talking two to three years minimum to deliver like

anything that's like you know even like a remotely polished product and obviously it's a very ADHD kind of industry that we live in and so that difference between um the feedback loop of game design and what people have become accustomed to within the crypto Market is where a lot of the disappointment came from from like a price action perspective I think now um you know the question is very valid so we're now whatever approaching like three four years on from that there's been literally you know billions and billions of dollars going into funding you know web 3 game studios so like you know where is everything where's the product and so you know I'm still wholeheartedly aligned with that question right I think the these next 12 18 months are a big kind of showand tell otherwise we would have sort of start to run out of excuses right we've had the

time we've had like the de cycle we've had the funding now and so yeah I think there's a lot writing on these next 12 to 18 months but uh you know we kind of like see it sort of bation of like degree of integration of blockchain and like who those respective audiences are right so you can kind of think about this as a spectrum from like the very light touch simplistic integration of what off the Grid's building with Godzilla that we'll get onto right which is basically just Marketplace technology sort of in-game assets like every asset that um enters the economy does exist on chain and it's like freely tradeable beyond that and then you can go to these um you know more kind of intermediary steps right like I'm going to build uh a game that has certain economic Loops that exist on chain so one of the ones I

like to cite recently is a game called Cambria which is heavily inspired by old school RuneScape and basically they've replicated something called The Jewel Arena which is where people used to stake you know 5050 odds give or take head-to-head One V one and um it's where many of us got addicted to gambling for the first time and um they basically built that which is you know all of the games off chain apart from these like smart contracts that do the escrow around the gambling piece and so that's kind of like an interesting approach where you find a kind of Niche um where you know there's like for this one it relies kind of heavily on the nostalgic element that draws people in um that's kind of as I say has the game all existing offchain and then some economic pieces onchain and then you know you can

go all the way to the other end of the Spectrum which is this idea of like fully onchain games right that all game State all logic should exist on chain obviously there's huge like technical complexity that comes with this we have all sorts of scaling constraints that make this like not really a reality yet but if you zoom out and think about you know people call it the autonomous worlds thesis the idea that you can build these game environments that are infinitely composable you know you can build different front ends to them so you might have the same game state but you might be in like a little candy like like you know Candy universe and I might be in some demonic one but that's like a pretty interesting idea as well so we have all these different kind of um uh you know Avenues and kind of like

degrees of integration we've seen so far so so you think it's really just time then we just haven't had enough time plus we also as you said live in a a crypto world where everything needs to happen now and fast otherwise attention goes elsewhere totally and sorry what I meant to say as well and talking through this like distinction is I think there's been lots of like small success cases right of the game that yeah yeah so like C right um very simple I've given you guys the like overall of what it does but just with that Jewel Aruna product right they did $100 million in volume in the first three months right across base and blast and so they have a 4% fee baked into that

one and a half% of that goes back to like player referrals to incentivize growth but a two and a half per fee basically going to treasury like by any measure that's success right that's an incredibly successful product and it has you know a relatively small audience we're talking like thousands of players Max and so I think part of the beauty of crypto is that you can actually basically have these massive whale audiences that monetize way deeper than anything you'd even remotely like conceive of In traditional gaming and that's still successful from like a monetary like numbers perspective right and so I think we have seen really cool stuff along the way we've seen stuff like that world PVP game right where um you had each country had uh its own token and people could bid up the market caps and whoever was like in the first

place at the end of a given period would get to call in a tactical nuke and take the treasury of another country that kind of stuff really fun but it's not your conventional like game succcess like big flashy thing what is the big game success what is the big flashy thing well I'm a big believer that's Godzilla um with Off the Grid you know these guys have been building for five years um like over100 million do invested the team's 370 people now um you know the actual core devs behind it are the guys that built Warface and scaled that to 140 million people and over a billion dollars in lifetime Revenue the creative direction is like Neil Blom camp and Charter cotley uh you know made a ton of these legendary Sci-Fi movies like District N9 chapie alium um and then the writing for the

60-h hour campaign is uh is Richard Morgan who wrote alra carbon amazing book Trilogy and uh and Netflix show as well for those that haven't seen it and so some of you guys may have seen uh you know Off the Grid pop up on the feed lately because it made a massive Splash with this big like um uh twitch campaign with all the big streamers that launch but yeah it's sort of like firmly landed on the map of like you know the like Pro Gamer circuit as well with this recent event they did OTG All Stars which is 600k prize for basically Invitation Only bringing all of the biggest North American streamers that saw it in like the top three most game uh top three most streamed game on Twitch once again as did its launch week and so I think we're basically on that grind up now to

this being like you know in the big leagues alongside things like Apex Legends which anyone would regard as um you know a kind of big success from a numbers and a revenues perspective Off the Grid might be the first game that's built on chain that really does make it I mean I I will say we we have a a meeting every morning at milk Road where the whole team gathers called crypto Newsroom and we just talk about what's going on in crypto and I don't remember the last time we talked about gaming to be honest and then a few weeks ago somebody was like yo has anybody seen Off the Grid and you know usually the Milkman would like laugh whoever brought this up out of the room right like it's like come on gaming like is not really there yet but but we really started to

look at the numbers and everyone was like oh [ __ ] like this is really something my main question is what I always get afraid of when any project blasts out of the gates and it's very interesting to hear you say that they've been building for five years so it's not like this is a a meme coin that just came out of nowhere and exploded it's so much more than that obviously but I always want to know how much of it is incentive based versus how much is of this is like actually sustainable people want to play the game regardless of the incentives can you can you break that down for us yeah it's very simple in this instance it's absolutely zero right there's like no incentive there's nothing there's no airdrop campaign it's like the sheer uh virtue of the quality of the product basically you know I've

got almost like 10,000 hours in Shooters and I genuinely believe this is like one of the best um shooter games I've ever played it's pretty hardcore right like you need to be rolling with the squad to be like super competitive at it but for those that get into it like the the movement the Cyber liim systems like this is a truly unique product and so yeah it was very much by virtue of that I think the only caveat to that that I could share is that like uh for like the user perspective there's no incentives whatsoever but like obviously they did a paid streamer campaign right this is like not a this is not a revolutionary on new like go to market like lots of people have done it Apex did it most famously back in 2019 but beyond that you know there was a couple of paid

streaming to begin with but it was insane to see these streamers who had been paid like every single night streaming way past their paid period right they were loving it and like um that's the kind of stuff you want to see you want to see the biggest streamers in the world saying holy [ __ ] this is like steam Marketplace but cheaper and more transparent and that this is just yeah basically improved Marketplace technology and so it feels like it really did to like you know cross that Chasm that we've all been waiting for which was let's get the blessing of the mainstream right like the big streamers are very much like the spokes people for for gaming a lot of the time and yeah well we've got their blessing now and so um with that comes great responsibility right to follow through and deliver and

um yeah I mean I'm I'm spending a lot of time in in the trenches with that team and I'm very confident that that's EX exctly what's going to happen What are the numbers how many people are playing the game so yeah since launch they've hit like 11 million wallets basically um which is which is insane obviously that's actually being under reported somewhat because um first of all they had some like limitations around Xbox they were stuck in the Insiders program at launch which was capped to like 70,000 people which has since been lifted and so they're now going to basically have um yeah there's like a marketing campaign happening with Xbox which is pretty exciting we're like at the point where you can see obviously everyday um like active Wallets on chain um those are sitting at like 6 700,000 I think um need to need to double check

that but um again there's like so much uh technicalities that go into this right because at the launch period for example in game the way any asset enters the economy is you can loot these hex cubes which basically you can take to extraction sites and after the game if you successfully extract them you can decode them which in the context of the game law is you basically downloading a 3D weon blueprint and actually printing the weapon and what it's actually doing is minting the asset on chain and so during the launch period they basically made it so like hex extractions weren't showing on chain basically to cope with the load and everything and so once that gets turned back on again for example then there's like active addresses are going to spike um but yeah overall incredibly pleased with the launch

period as I say it's very much on everyone's radar now and then yeah clever marketing initiatives like this OTG All Stars tournament that's going to be running once a month with the 600k prize po you know the real focus of that is to ensure that like Pro Gamers can actually build a career in it as opposed to like you know having to go play these other tournaments elsewhere and um yeah the way they've structured the prize breaks down breakdowns of that is like super impressive right so like if you win one of the eight games then your team gets like a 60k uh prize pool I believe it is so yeah feedback from that was really strong and obviously it's an iterative process the one that's happening just after Christmas or around that time very excited for as well brick what is the the crypto blockchain

component of of the game so as I say every so every single asset that enters that game economy comes from players looting them on the island tear drop Island it's called where the game takes place and so is it like fortnite the game like everybody drops into an island Ro people in Battle Royale yeah okay exactly so it's teams of three um right now it's this extraction Royale mode so it's not full battle royale there's 60 player lobbies it's going to be 150 when the full battle royale enters um this extraction Royale mode is similar to the Resurgence game mode and card if anyone knows that which is basically if you die that's not it you're not out straight away you basically have like a 30 second timer and you can keep dropping in until a certain point through the game's progression at which point that shuts

down basically and so it promotes this like super high intensity um super high intensity to the game uh which is great fun but anyway you loot these items you decode them afterwards they exist uh on like on chain basically the full marketplace you have like total transparency into everything right so like if I manage to one of the things that I love for example like what this very simplistically already gives rise to is serial numbers right so um basically every single item like you like low serial numbers just from The Collector element of it right is something that people have always like strived for in games it's like a cool thing where that exists and so you have a monthly battle pass uh it's called OTG Pro which like has obviously a Content track that you can progress through already something

as simple as putting serial numbers and doing it on chain means that the grind every time the battle pass resets set each month if you're the first person to get to level 50 and the first person to Mint whatever like that pack is then you obviously get the low serial number and so already it has like these cool dynamics that make it way more interesting and fun to play and then yeah there's the very obvious fact that um you know you can withdraw those assets to like a third party Marketplace like magic Eden or openc and sell those and so it's like probably the only Battle Royale in the world where you're like paying for your monthly subscription you can only pay you can pay once and if you're even remotely decent at the game you know you never need to pay again if you don't want want

to you can pay for your monthly battle pass subscription in the in-game token as well in gun which you earn you know um for getting wins and extracting hex's and obviously also selling stuff on the in-game marketplace so um as I said they're not trying to do anything like overly complex or ridiculous they're like keeping it very simplistic in what the integration looks like um and uh that's what it looks like from the user perspective from the investor perspective which I think a lot of your audience might be interested in um there are these validated nodes that exist and basically um there's 10,000 of them they're nfts they have differing Rarities but they basically are the like in-game economy validators and when State um there's like pretty substantial

I think the target is something around like 30% of um gross revenues end up flowing to these um node holders and so you know when you zoom out and look at the competitor set of like yeah biggest battle Roy in the world that are doing you know um a bill plus a year in Revenue I mean obviously that's the high end but that's you know what we're going for with a game of this kind ofct product like this this kind of um Quality it's like pretty substantial numbers that you start looking at right and so um I think buy yeah I mean that's what's really cool right it's like owning like a piece of equity in one of these massive video games Studios that's like you know liquid and you can sort of um have all this like insane insight into like you know obviously everything

about the economy's function Marketplace like you can see battle pass subscriptions on chain all this kind of stuff it's like you know it's like what if we built a worldclass game product and put absolutely everything out in the open and gave people a way to like yeah participate in the actual um you know upside of that game like that's what this is that's what crypto is all about like you couldn't have defined the ethos of crypto better than than that is it free to play Can Can anybody anybody can play the game f free to play and so the parts that you need to I mentioned that battle pass subscription OTG Pro it's like you've got to pay monthly um if you want to interact with like the marketplace like if you want more load out slots like there's um you know functionality that if you're like

playing seriously you're going to want to have and that's um like 12 bucks a month subscription so I actually think that like conversion funnel aspect to that is really strong which I do like but otherwise fully free to play and one thing I haven't emphasized yet which some people like I'd hope they're aware of by now if they but if they haven't heard of it this is fully live on Console as well it's the first game to ever like bridge that Gap right like that's always been a huge like question mark and unfortunately obviously there's it's never going to be revealed how that's done right secret Source um but it's exciting and it's huge huge validation and it's a huge Testament to the hard work of the team um because yeah you know the Battle Royale Market is like one of the biggest gaming audien

out there and the majority of it lives on console and so obviously yeah live on Playstation Live on Xbox LIVE on GeForce now you can play it on your freaking toaster Smart TV mobile phone through through Cloud now it's pretty cool so uh TI I want to come to your house and see where your house is I imagine I walking in your house and you got like the Apple Vision Pro in your playing game and you put that on you walk over your toaster and you're playing a game pretty much pretty much I got some weird [ __ ] around here you mentioned this a little bit at the beginning of who built off the grid let's just dive into a little bit of the background of that and you touched on a little bit already so I don't want you to repeat yourself but tell us a little

bit about the team behind it yeah so I mean Godzilla games is the name of the studio and as I say these guys were running something called um kch Kev before which um basically worked on a game called Warface which grewed to 140 million people um the krych team had also worked on stuff like you know um the Far Cry series like Crisis games um had helped build like parts of the cry engine which was the gold standard in like game engine development at that time and then yeah as I say the really unique aspect I think is having yeah Neil Blom camp and and shelter who's worked with his entire career like basically the entire visual aesthetic of that Universe this like grungy dystopian um environment is like so [ __ ] cool so like the core premise of the game the whole law of it is that um it's set you

know in the in the the near future and basically there's this like IRL Battle Royale think sort of like Hunger Games that anyone can sign up for and so you have everyone from freaking Navy Seals to some gamer who thinks he's like you know has a chance of this stuff and they can all basically go to compete in this like massive game show this huge Global phenomenon where there's like a hundred million prize pool for whoever wins and the only condition of entering this game environment is uh this this um whatever this IRL Battle Royale is that you need to have all of your limbs surgically removed so they take you know your arms and your legs and it basically equips you so you can use these cyber liims and one of the cool revolutionary mechanics of uh Off the Grid is that instead of

like having load outs or perks or whatever it all lies in the Cyber liims so you know my left arm might be like a Recon drone my right arm might shoot like a you know like a centax and my legs might allow me to run super fast or like jump super high and so it unlocks as wicked dynamism because as I'm going through the map I might pull out my sniper blow someone's arm off they'll leg it and I can switch my arm for theirs and keep moving so like it's a really clever really Fresh Approach um that actually came from Vlad the the CEO and founder that initial idea but what I'm trying to emphasize here is like the depth of the World building and the law um and kind of like the vision and creative Direction overseen by Neil blond Camp it's something like truly

special um and uh yeah I mean literally the smallest smallest tip of the spear is what people have seen so far I'm uh yeah can barely contain my excitement every day about what's coming so I I feel it man I feel it The Vibes are high okay so are they crypto native the the Godzilla team like what made them build this on chain well yeah I mean I think um from from vlad's side right like he's uh I think some of the earlier games he' worked on he wanted to take in this direction and had met met had been met with like corporate red tape and whatever I think for anyone that spent a lot of time you know playing games and growing up with them it's like obviously like higher player agency economic agency is like something that's super [ __ ] exciting and so yeah that was

like one of the core founding ideals around this right of like let's build something that is world class and let's um yeah let's put that economy on chain and kind of like see what comes with that and one thing that is super exciting as well is like you know core to that whole thesis of like why putting stuff on chain is useful is like the whole idea is that basically people's willingness to spend is massively Amplified when they know that there's some kind of residual value when they know that they can actually own the stuff when they can collect it when they actually as I say are treated like a admin not a US if you like with your inventories and um yeah the idea is that these economies are going to grow way bigger than anything we've seen before as you know you open them up um uh you

know and give users more agency and uh obviously you know bigger economy more volume there's also an increased service area to monetize that right obviously Marketplace fees all sorts of other interesting dynamics that get unlocked with time and so there is very much a business case as well as an idealistic one yeah yeah incredible what blockchain is it on so they built um their own layer one uh like using the Avalanche Tech stack it's called gun z um obviously you know people are always looking for we we see this like massive um surplus of infrastructure especially in gaming right um in our research teams year ahead report they identified that I think it was something like there are 106 new gaming chains layer one twos and threes launched to the 250 new games

that were announced this year and so obviously that's ridiculous you have a lot of these infrastructure providers who are like you know putting the cart before the horse if you look at the history of like the traditional games industry and and not even just gaming right like it all starts with a big breakout application right so halflife 2 is what like gave writers to steam right like one day updated and became that the same with fortnite one day updated and became the epic game store it's how you build ecosystems axi right that's how Ronin emerg right you need to start with the thing that Aggregates a ton of players and so what Off the Grid has here what gonzilla has here is very special right they've like done the hard part they've built something that can tracked a massive audience and now the sort of Empire the ecosystem building is

a is a very delicate line to walk but um yeah very excited about the sort of curated approach that's going to be taken to like what the second third and fourth titles are on that whole ecosystem and tight stack we don't talk about Avalanche a ton on the show not not like no disrespect to them great team doing great things why did they pick Avalanche does this make you bullish on Avalanche I'm actually unsure about the uh initial reasons exactly I think it was like the best combination of technical tra tra off at the time but I don't know the ins and outs um I through this investment that we've made I've been spending a lot more time with like the Avalanche team and the ecosystem and being yeah very very impressed with what they've um yeah been able to achieve I think a lot of the

stuff they've got in the gaming pipeline you know they've got some very heavy hitter titles Beyond just um Off the Grid to uh be paying attention to and so um yeah I think uh I feel like the hard Parts the really killer applications right and they seem to be doing a really good job of um yeah uh that yeah yeah you nailed it that's definitely the hard part and that's the part that we all need and paint paint a picture for us so let's say Off the Grid is this game and and it continues to go the way it's going what would that look like for for guns the chain that their their chain how big would that chain become how much volume in transaction could that chain get yeah so I think it was in the what like either the opening weekend or the

the weekend that followed um and bearing in mind like as a alluded to earlier like you can kind of a lot of games can choose how much does or doesn't exist on chain right and you see a lot of projects just like register arbitrary um arbitrary actions on chain to boost transaction counts uh the stuff that like does show up on chain for um gun Z and Off the Grid uh is like very um conservative I would say right it's like actual transactions battle pass subscriptions uh stuff like that um and so yeah that hit about 4 and a half million transactions in a 24-hour period um during it launch week and base at the time had just hit its alltime high of like six and a half million transactions something around there and so all of a

sudden like you have something that went from not on anyone's radar to Bam like this is like the third or fourth most used blockchain by transaction count and granted for a period but it's like holy [ __ ] it shows you how quickly that can change and so if this keeps going the way I think it will then you know the path towards like you know 10 million transactions daily 15 million transactions daily like isn't that far out and as I mentioned right opening up more platforms more Avenues to play um obviously more of like economy functionality coming online as well with different game types all this kind of stuff so um I think it'll really get there um in terms of like yeah actual volumes on it as well um difficult to say right we need to kind of see um once the token goes live once all of the like

Marketplace Integrations to um you know allow users to take things out to other marketplaces and stuff we need to see what happens with all of that um but yeah obviously expecting this to be huge like if we zoom out for a moment and look at what the big like breakout consumer applications of crypto are like I mean arguably the latest one was pump. fun right and you had all this hideous Black Mirror dystopian [ __ ] happening on live streams we've learned learn the importance of um actual moderation there but you know it's pretty undeniable that yeah like gaming as a consumer category is like the largest on the planet one of the largest on the planet and so yeah expect that to go um very very big you you mentioned the to token so there's no guns token now but there is a token

coming can you give us any details so yeah there is there's the gun Z guns whatever you want to call it um is a is the chain gun is the token there is a token that people are getting in a transacting on the marketplace right now um but it's still on it's still in testet basically um and so all of those are going to be wiped when the full like main net migration happens um that's yeah expected to happen soon is all I'll say um and uh yeah at that point yeah the the gun token will be live um you know it very much is like the ecosystem token like sort of utility token like Med of exchange across this whole economy and so um yeah as that grows I think it's going to be uh yeah very interesting to see what happens on the you know price

action and token front as well but it's uh pretty obvious by now that this is like yeah biggest biggest launch of the uh well in a long time and and probably the foreseeable as far as games go yeah and and it wouldn't be far-fetched that we could be sitting here a year from now and gun Z could be one of the most active chains in the world like it could be a top top 10 top five maybe even a top three chain I mean it sounds crazy to say right now but as you said that they've done it one day and if they can continue and get the activity and get the interest and everybody starting to make money from the game by playing the game and it's but it's it's a great I mean it's just it feels like I

mean and you know again like second third fourth titles that launch on there right it Aggregates it builds on top right now it's settled at like just under three mil transactions a day but you know I'm still expecting a lot of growth from here in terms of reaching that like steady state of like player audience um but yeah as I say like this um as an ecosystem as an as an infrastructure provider it's an incredibly attractive place for others to build right if you're building like a AAA facing product you're like okay this is the ecosystem that's been validated by you know the streamers by the mainstream Gamers that's been given the blessing to like that thing that was always e crypto scam is now like oh [ __ ] this can actually have can actually improve the user experience here um and you know they've got through all of the

approvals with you know Playstation Xbox consoles like this becomes a very attractive place for others to build and so yeah what you um you know described as a hypothetical I think is uh yeah uh i' ascribe a reasonably High likelihood of it happening I'm very excited for it let's go let's go crypto and gaming I can finally put it I've had it on my prediction list for three years now or every year I've said this is the year of blockchain and gaming and it's yet to happen but I feel like Piers I can put it on my 2025 list finally it's gonna happen yes sir I mean um as I say I think it has to right um I think we're seeing lots of like smaller scale successes and I don't mean like it's just smaller in terms of audience numbers but they're doing incredibly

well right if you look at like the Ronin ecosystem and what they've been able to achieve in terms of like amassing this massive audience who are incredibly Crypton native very like crypto competent and adopt this very curated approach bringing new titles onto the platform and channeling users into it and making sure all of those are winners like that's been amazing to see but that's like um you know what I mean the the otgs of the world with the big flashy like oh my God everyone like is you know the sort of mainstream heads all time and kind of what I described at the beginning of that like spectrum of like degree of Integrations like a lot of the titles on something like Ronin I think U you know it's hugely successful in the right definitely in terms of like you know dollar outcomes Investments and

stuff um but as I say it's like slightly different uh types of audiences I think for these different ecosystems but one thing is certain is when we talk about consumer applications gaming has the potential to reach to grow very fast and reach the masses and Reach people who are not crypto native and onboard them through pure account abstraction they don't know they're using block chain they're just I mean I I saw a video you posted of a streamer playing Off the Grid and basically like explaining to his audience on Twitch that this was onchain and why that made so much more sense and it was fascinating to see he's just like yeah

they're just using blockchain as a tool like duh why wouldn't we do that steam we're all using steam Marketplace let's just use blockchain instead and it's like it's like that light bulb's finally going off in Gamers heads and they're finally understanding it yeah I can't stress enough what a big deal that is you know I was uh you know I have tremendous conviction in the approach that gunzilla has taken and obviously the products but even so heading into that laun Treet right you're like there are so many unknowns about how audiences are going to react and like if you look at the history of any even remote coverage of like crypto blockchain and gaming on YouTube or whatever it's like littered with people that seem seem to like yeah take you to the stake or whatever over it um so uh I uh yeah very

glad to see you I think that's like I can't stress enough what a big you know Crossing that Chasm this has been like a huge [ __ ] win this year and um yeah excited to build on it okay uh we're going to pause here pier and we're going to go to part two of this episode so everybody tuning in you guys are going to have to listen again to hear part two we're going to talk about AI we're going talk about gaming in AI but actually we're going to talk more about just Ai and crypto because you've got some interesting thoughts on that and that's something we've been talking about more and more in the show and a large could be the biggest narrative I think of 2025 possibly uh everybody thanks so much for tuning in today have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's

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