The Future of Trading Card NFTs | Overpriced JPEGs with Franklin Fitch

Transcript

[Music] hello hello welcome to overpriced jpegs my name is carly riley today on the show we have the head the director the head the director of growth and marketing for the sci-fi trading card game parallel frank known as fitch inverse online he is on the show talking to us all things parallel this is a project that i've wanted to look into for a while you know it's been on my radar folks have talked about it i know people who have been hyped about it and i just never dug in deep so spent this week doing research on it and i have to say i am incredibly excited about this project

and its prospects i do not own any parallel cards as of this moment but will likely go buy some today tonight tomorrow at some point because i i actually really believe in this project important to say not financial advice i am not a registered financial anything please please do your own research but i am i am very impressed by what this team is building and the quality at which they seem to be building it so frank gets into all of it if you are new to parallel new to the the trading card game world i i think we strike the right balance between going deep on this project in some ways but also keeping it interesting if you are newer to this space i hope i don't know you can let me know but definitely check this out i think this project is

potentially like a beacon for what nfts can do in a really cool way and just across everything the real world the metaverse and frank gives us his best guess as to when parallel as in when he thinks parallel might be out and playable for at least some people in the world so check it out listen find out the answer to that and many other questions about parallel and make your own determination about what you think of this project oh first though a word from our sponsors xerion is the perfect place to view the entirety of your crypto portfolio all in one spot not only does xerion aggregate all the tokens across all of your wallets but it

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wallets into the xerion interface and supercharge your defy experience and enrich your nft lifestyle that's z e r i o n slash bankless i want to give a special thanks to overpriced jpeg partner blockblock not only because they are a sponsor of this show but also because they are my employer blockblock is an innovative blockchain lab we work across nfts and the metaverse and our goal is really to push the industry forward with every new project we take on we founded and currently run the meebitz dao which just partnered with larval labs to create more metaverse friendly renderings of me bits which is awesome we are also partnered with a sundance award-winning filmmaker to build the first dow that

will own a feature-length documentary film we have a ton of cool projects down the pipeline and are really looking for cool people to partner with on this so go to blockblock.io to subscribe to our newsletter and be kept up to date about what we have going on and also to check out open roles we have available we'd love to have you apply come work with me coming out blockblock.io welcome fitch thank you so much for being here really excited to dive more into parallel a project that i've sort of observed from the outside for a while and been kind of curious about and i was really excited to have an excuse to dive deeper into in in preparation for this conversation

so fitch you are the uh head of growth director of growth for parallel but you were saying to me before we kicked off here you know it's a it's a fairly flat organization it's a lot of everyone's sort of all hands on deck doing what you need to do to bring this game alive i want to start just with with you and your background and like how did you end up here yeah so um educational background is in psychology i did undergrad and sort of existential psych i thought at the time i might become a philosophy professor which is kind of funny so i guess an incidental fact that doesn't often come up on podcasts that i do but it's it's interesting to juxtapose that with what i do now but then um did sales after that for a couple years and um was

good at it but it wasn't kind of fulfilling in a life sense uh so went to grad school to kind of continue to pursue education level up a little bit uh moved out to la went to usc and did a program in applied psychology mostly focused on consumer psychology and org psych so marketplace behavior stuff like that you know how do people make decisions in the market how can you influence behavior in the market and uh started consulting after that and was kind of working in some big data scraping linguistic analytic sort of methodologies at one of the biggest research firms in the world and we had a lot of tech clients and um i found up you know my way into kind of being the guy who did the tech uh the

tech clients you know so facebook and yeah millennials yeah they're like take it they they understand you right so um you know when you when you work in an online industry and your clients are tech you're eventually going to find out about crypto and um i think i first heard about crypto in 2016 you know obviously seeing conversations online uh through my work which that was my my job at the time and then i had a good friend tell me hey like this crypto stuff is really interesting i think ideologically you you'd really like it um and what year are we talking here what year is your friend this was 2016.

this was okay kind of towards the end of 2016 and uh read the bitcoin white paper around that time i was like whoa this is this is really really cool and so coincidentally around that time the company that i work for in la bought the company in chicago so made the transition there chicago at the time had a really burgeoning crypto meetup scene uh so i got to meet luke martin uh korean jew trading uh bitcoin birch bunch of those guys and uh and it was really cool and obviously you know chicago is one of the or if not the trading capital of of the country and so there was a lot of you know is it more trading i mean trading in general like the this i'm in new york city what are you gonna you're gonna try and you're gonna try and say this to a new yorker

no you you guys got stocks unlocked but people forget that the cme owns the new york stock exchange so um that's uh they they've got eight or so they've got their hands in everything you know so uh but anyway long and short of it was um i decided i wanted to work in crypto i was at the time working you know eight to ten hours a day in my day job and then i would go network for like four to five hours after that and then somehow find my way back home to work on like my little startup crypto brand that i had and um i kind of used that brand to get me exposure to get a job at a startup exchange in chicago and then that experience was was good and bad um but i think you know led me to end up finding nfts via a company called

block party which is where i work prior to joining parallel and was running uh the growth for block party so i had consulted with them in the past and they were like hey we're we're kind of pivoting from blockchain ticketing into nfts i said nfts what's that and um the founder vlad uh and shiv told me about it on a call to founders and i was like this is revolutionary again felt like that moment of reading the bitcoin white paper and i'm a lifelong kind of art enjoyer so to speak and i could see all the ways that this was going to impact culture and i was like sign me up you know i was ready to leave my prior job at the time and so i worked with block party started at the beginning of last year and obviously that was ended up being really

early to the nft swing this was before anyone even in crypto really cared about it by and large and um you know being that early i kind of just became obsessed and was hunting for every project that i could and ended up being really early to nba top shot really early to art blocks and really early to the one that would be really life-changing for me me which was parallel um so i was actually on a clubhouse um before twitter spaces existed you remember everybody was doing clubhouse oh yeah oh yeah for a couple months yeah yeah it was the it was the thing and guys like ryan hawthorne and dave krugman and ravi vora um they had we had this little crew and we would we would do club houses and on one

an account popped up called parallel and it was the parallel logo and this is before parallel like even had a twitter page i think and um turns out it was the founder sasha who we call kalos online and he was dropping some knowledge i mean he was saying some really really interesting stuff and i messaged him i said hey you know really was interested in what you were saying there he's like let's you want to do a call right now and i was like huh and he was like do you want to do a call right now and i was like yeah like it just felt like one of those moments i have to say yes to this right oh of course yeah it's also so crypto it's just like i don't know we were just jamming in a you know clubhouse moment and now we're suddenly

dming and we'll move it over to telegram in a minute or whatever yeah crypto's like a now now yeah now exactly yeah so i said yes and he showed me the parallel website and i think it was like before it even was public and i i had this like eureka moment i was like this is amazing like this is what i was waiting for in nfts you know i'm a huge gamer too so it was like the mix of gaming the art was stunning the website the design was so slick um and i was like man i have to have some of these cards and he was like well i'll let you know that the pre-sale is about to happen so pre-sale comes up you know i buy a couple cards uh turns out to be i think the highest roi investment i've ever made in my entire life um

and you know it just started off my obsession with parallel and so you know for for months and months i was kind of waving the flag as a community cheerleader so to speak like hello like please pay attention to this i'm telling you guys this is like the next big thing in nfps which it turns out it kind of was um and you know i i one day i think i had some wine and i messaged kayla's online and i said hey man just letting you know it would be really cool to work with you and he was like okay you know what do you what do you want to do and i was like oh i didn't expect this to go to go that way um but you know we we continue to have that dialogue and um you know i kind of started the process of joining parallel

so that's how it happened it's amazing so i i feel like you had several eureka moments over the course of that story which is bitcoin then nfts then of course parallel i want to dive into that to a couple of those uh but but obviously your instincts seem to be quite good now you know jury's still out on parallel hopefully people make their own mind up after this conversation you know it could fail i suppose spectacularly but but of course it has established itself as an incredibly reputable project so um the eureka moment with nfts it sounds like that was maybe 2019 or so or what because you joined no party in 2020 or was that more like 2020 what what year are we in that would have been beginning

of 2020 okay and what was the pitch that you heard why did it click like what was it that because people have both reactions right like some people hear it and they're like this is the dumbest [ __ ] i've ever heard why did it click naturally for you yeah i think that being in crypto as a full-time professional for years prior to that had kind of um how should i say this made me more open to like radical ideas like paradigm shifting ideas and it's funny we actually have a card now in parallel called paradigm shift because uh it's very representative of a lot of the ethos of what parallel is but that was what it felt like to me i think the two people who explained it to me were

critical in that so we had shiv who was the original founder of block party who's now spun out a company called moonwalk which is doing some really interesting things um partnerships with esports teams and some other uh big sports organizations to do like tokenized rewards um tied to nfts even too and then uh vlad who is now the ceo of block party um which is pivoting from nft ticketing into nft primary marketplace and also kind of offering um you know like white white label services essentially that's their other business line so these two guys are experts you know shiv just really really smart guy has exited multiple companies before builds great products in crypto and he explained to me from like the

what the users could do with this side and how this was going to affect the average consumer and then vlad explained vlad used to be an art dealer right so for the better part of a decade sold fine art and he broke down the art side to me and i was like oh man like this is going to hit it's going to hit all of it it's not just going to hit art art's the first domino to fall right but then you know immediately i could see the rise of collectibles immediately i could see the applications to sports teams and organizations and major brands it was just you know and then gaming obviously the thought of that started to mature in my mind um but it was just one of those things where it was well explained by subject matter experts who knew their respective

fields and were able to tell me hey look this is going to be the juice you know this is going to be the big thing and i was able to see it um kind of because like i said there was less intellectual barrier do you think your gaming background in the sense that you were i think it sounds like recreationally a gamer or even your academic background sort of what you would you had studied were were either of those critical conditions to you being as receptive as you were to the concept i think so you know i think that um gamers you know and the example that floats around the crypto world is runescape you know runescape um as a game i think taught a lot of the principles that are now very relevant in crypto web 3 and nfps runescape had this concept called the

grand exchange and it was literally like they have gold pieces you know and you can trade them in actual marketplace that's peer-to-peer marketplace and in inside of a gaming world is that not what we're kind of now building with web3 right uh it's pretty mind-blowing to think of like how many precursors were in that one example so so yes and then i think like i'm a huge fan of i ended up writing my my grad thesis on um narrative identity theory and so it was like how can stories be told through this medium and something i've talked about with some of those guys that i mentioned ryan hawthorne dave ravivora uh is that you know the nft and blockchain layer is its own storytelling and creative medium right look at uh marat pock in his

recent merge project right that is using the blockchain and web3 as the actual creative medium you know the art itself is little blobs they're circles is that compelling i don't know you tell me right but when they come together through this interactive experience of merging now you have something really beautiful and really special and i think there it just kind of became apparent to me that there was a lot of ways that this could actually be used as a creative medium not just uh economic or facilitated medium for commerce it was like through that interaction peer-to-peer comes all these new avenues for creativity all these new avenues for storytelling all these new avenues for game play right so i think yes the answer would be

those those experiences were relevant because i was able to see that a little bit deeper into the fact that hey this is actually a new way to be creative too so speaking of gameplay let's get into parallel which it sounds like was your your third eureka moment in this journey yes yes it was for folks who are totally new to this i don't wanna don't wanna uh stay there for too long i wanna get into it uh probably for folks who are maybe a little bit more familiar but give the high level you know 30 seconds what is parallel so parallel is a sci-fi trading card game right and depending on industry terminology what you want to use there's tcg which is trading card game there's ccg

collectible card game it's both it's it's all of those things so the idea is uh there are five different parallels and they represent five different divergent paths that humanity took and so there was this cataclysm the story being set you know i think it's approximately 1 000 years in earth's future um there's a cataclysm around the need to create sustainable energy the cataclysm ends up kind of beginning to irradiate the whole planet and so humanity is now forced to have this oh [ __ ] moment of we have to figure out what to do so they create four massive ships four of those ships go in four different directions and end in four different places one group the poor basically is left behind so again you have like a

realistic story here and that's what i love from a story perspective about parallel so again these uh over time the idea is based on where they went and what happened to each of these destinations of humanity they evolved into distinct races right and these races have different qualities uh you have organ core which is kind of ended up people they end up merging with their ships so they're mechanized you have markolian which landed on mars ended up becoming like high science militaristic society um so on and so forth right and each of these forms up a play style or a set of play styles and you collect cards from each different parallel and some of them are leaders some of them are foot soldiers some of them are units some of them are modifiers in between

and you build a deck and so the most close analogs would be like magic the gathering or hearthstone it's in that same genre of games where you create a play deck most play styles are going to be based on one parallel that you build a deck around and then you you pick your leader which we call a paragon and then you know you've got your deck and you go do battle with someone competitively and you're playing against their best deck and uh there's a whole bunch of different strategies in the game that unfold with uh the actual gameplay mechanics how you build your deck which champion which paragon you choose but that's the core of it you know you're picking one of these races you you build and you collect your deck over time either as nft or physical cards which we can talk about

and then you you do battle competitively and you can either play casually or you can play ranked gameplay there's going to be all different kinds of ways to play uh parallel be you a professional or not and the game itself has not launched yet we've got bits and pieces of what it's going to be but the cards have started to be launched and so people have these cards and are like waiting with baited breath and eager anticipation for what the game itself will really be i know the big question and i'm gonna have to ask and i'm gonna ask her at the end of this it's when is it coming out when do people get to actually start playing parallel i know i know you'll probably have some like you know canned answer about like oh well you know whatever but

we won't get there yet oh okay i want to know uh and you alluded to a little bit of this earlier but what drew you to this project as just a fan who heard kayla speak and was like oh my god yeah i think the initial hook right with the bait was hearing how intelligent he was on that clubhouse and so that made me say i got to learn a little bit more about this guy and then he showed me betting on a project based on the team uh that's what i'm willing i do yeah i do um but i think separately from that the what i saw was like a vision of the future you know and he showed me the site and i it was i kid you not like i had been waiting for this um because mind you i had for

almost an entire year been working professionally in nfps which you know in this space is like five years so yeah i had like all this built up anticipation and visions of what this could be in the future and um was very much working in that capacity of block party like thinking about the future like what's coming next how do we build towards that so i knew like you know pax was one thing that i had talked with vlad about i was like anything that comes in a pack as nfts is extremely dynamic right that is what we need to be looking at say more about that and why you think that's true and what what parallel has done well with pax because i actually think there's a couple of different things with the pack launches the way they've done it that that's really smart and i would love you

to to kind of tell folks a little bit more about that couldn't agree more i think parallel took pacs to a higher level than they had ever been before in nfts but you saw with nba top chat so you know going back to that point that i was early in nba top shot this was summer of last year and i went through the experience of buying the packs the mba top shop packs and it was like the randomness the um the sort of betting nature of it almost like you're gambling a little bit you know you're gonna get something out so it's not gambling in the sense that i might lose it all but there might be something really really good in there and it's random and it's it it unwraps and it's and it's kind of shiny i did think that nba topshop did a great job

with their pack opening experience this was mind you before nba top chat had some of the issues that people have you know brought up of late about them um this was the glory days say like live shows that would happen while you waited to get your pack drop right like they they made it a real experience the whole yeah it was like light and sound and you know the actual cars themselves have motion and they're players that you can identify with so it's very dynamic ux like i was like whoa like this is this is powerful you know and i thought to myself like what could happen if we had gaming like this and that's what parallel was you know at the time parallel didn't even have packs uh when i first saw the site it was just what they call the ps15 the very first

cards that uh ever released they're like the power nine for magic the gathering if there's any nerds listening to this but um you know they're the most powerful kind of original cards in the game and um so they were just there on the on the ux you know the cards themselves but you know the i knew that there was going to be pac mechanic implications in the future and and that turned out to be true so we've now had pac drop one pack drop two pack drop three likely coming late february we'll see nothing set in stone there so um that's that's what i knew was coming and so the pack thing was really really cool the art when i saw parallel was the best art i think i'd ever seen i think period in nfts it was like

world-class aaa game studio art um incredible incredible stuff and i thought to myself wow what happens if they ship this to the masses you know like one of the strengths of magic the gathering was they had great art early on it's very iconic sort of classical style and i think parallel had the chance to be you know innovative in terms of delivering that quality of art but sci-fi allows for higher fidelity more realism more exploration of light and color you know than than high fantasy does and that's one of the other points in the tcg ccg genre there really weren't any standouts in terms of uh sci-fi right you think about it's all anime monsters like pokemon or yu-gi-oh or

it's high fantasy like hearthstone and magic the gathering where's the great sci-fi now maybe there's something that i'm missing but i've looked into it and i haven't found any standouts in that genre so that was the other thing sci-fi is kind of in the zeitgeist right now you know you have foundation expanse dune you have all these classical franchises just getting more shine right now and parallels happening in this whole zeitgeist and i think sci-fi is also more appreciable by a broader audience than something like high fantasy which may people may be like that's a little too nerdy for me you know so you see a lot of like broad appeal of parallel and um i love sci-fi too so you know just seeing that site it kind of was like a vision a brief glimpse of the

future and i was really able to put myself in that position of imagining what this could be and i said this has the highest upside of anything i've ever seen in nfts that was my initial conclusion and based on those reasons i just described and probably some others as well i want to ask you more about the team before i do i i just want to make sure we close the loop on the pack drop piece because you talked about the randomness and i think that is one of the things that's brilliant here is you can buy a pack for 18 or 20 you know whatever it in crypto right but affordably and then end up with something that's worth many thousands of dollars these masterpiece pieces or these assets and these other things that we might get into a little bit more in a bit so i think that's one

piece of um it allows you to build a really big community and get people really excited to have that randomness you never know what you're going to get you might get some amazing cards as part of the experience are there other things about the experience you you want to highlight and then i want to ask about the ar piece to some of this because oh yeah there's some special stuff there too yeah i think parallel you know the point that i missed i think was well two things one price points um of packs allows you to come from that which minds you at the time also we were still in that kind of bespoke one-of-one you know pfp were just kind of getting really kicked off around this time so one of ones in nft were already one or more eth generally speaking

um those are cost prohibitive for the average person and you know pfps as soon as they mint out which if you don't have e for gas all these things become prohibitive you know and um the parallel came in and said let's do packs for like 30 40 50 bucks and let's do it in such a way that doesn't require gas we'll have you know a reservation system and then you you end up paying gas later when um the actual transaction goes through and so it mitigates the the gas cost you don't have gas wars so there's a way to kind of massively reduce the price point that's one thing two parallel went i think way beyond even what nba topshop did in terms of pack opening experience it was just dynamic like the first time you open a parallel

pack you're like this is the [ __ ] i mean this is too cool you know the sound like they had their own sound design for the pack opening experience and it's it's like jujit [ __ ] like the cards like slide it sounds very sci-fi you know and it's just like man that is that is cool and then you know the packs open the cards kind of turn up and as you're about to get into i think you can actually or you will soon be able to open packs in augmented reality so the team is not done innovating on the pack opening experience they're aware of how critical that is to the grandiosity of the experience and they're just getting started in terms of innovating with that so the team

yes how many people are on the team at this point what does it look like in terms of you're talking about building a game building lore building art like building a development side the undertaking here is huge what does the team look like and and tell us a little bit about the the kind of core founding team and and you were obviously really taken with them what's uh tell us a little bit more about the team yeah so the team now i believe we're at 32 people um every every group in parallel is kind of its own like cluster and we all interface with each other um to whatever degree is required on any

given day so have you know game design team and there's four people there you have art team and that our team has been growing quickly um because art is obviously the one of the backbones of parallel so we have you know our team that's at um five or maybe we're at six members now we just made multiple hires actually so um that is really exciting some of the people that we're bringing on are like you've seen their work on television you know in some of your favorite shows and movies and it's like really truly world-class stuff i was blown away when the one uh one of the women that we're bringing on to the team i saw her portfolio and i was like that's like that's my favorite joke

that's my favorite show just the logos the show intros those you know like that's all my favorite stuff you know um so that's really can you tell us can you can you can you drop what shows i can say that one of them um involves many different houses battling for thrones you might say in a game performance right subtle let's see if the audience can decipher that one let's see if they can figure that one out no i think she'll be announced pretty soon anyway so probably not leaking too much there but um yeah pretty incredible stuff and uh you

know just on down the line so it's all these little clusters now and then there's kind of operations and then you know uh my department of growth and marketing so you know the team is continuing to scale out we're also now in the phase of contracting other entire companies to work on our behalf so ar is a good example of that ar is extremely time intensive and high fidelity work and so in order to scale that up you really kind of do need to go contract a full team to do that so we have two wizards in-house for ar these guys are like if i told you their background um you'd be like wow that's kind of insane you know big multinational corporations running their ar departments uh fortune 500 you know that type so and you know

experience with big gaming companies too and they're helping us scale up through working with entire other companies and teams um so i would say parallel has its core nucleus is about to get to its full fruition in terms of size and probably will do so by some by maybe midpoint next year but we're in the point of looking at contracting other companies in some cases potentially buying other companies to be able to scale to because like you said to create a triple a game it's a massive massive undertaking and certainly we aren't um cheapening any of that right we're aware of how significant it is we're aware of what needs to be done to get to the

level of quality and that involves huge resources in terms of you know human resources uh and otherwise so we're at that we're at that stage where it's like the core team is getting close to full size probably will be somewhere between 40 and 50 when all is said and done and then you know we're going to be working with or acquiring other companies and so it sounds like ar is a big bet you're making there and maybe there's some acquisitions around that is vr is the metaverse how does that play into your calculations do you see it going there at any point yeah i think i think the whole idea of using ar primarily for parallel which you're right to say that it is woven into parallels dna like we actually use that phrase internally like it's in our dna you know um

it's to bridge the gap you know and it's not only what i think people look at and they see is it's bridging the gap between the digital and the physical which is true um the common anecdote that we give internally is the jaric the holochess game from star wars you know parallels meant to be eventually playable in ar right um after the game comes out that's going to be one of the one of the deliverables so you'll actually be able to play parallel you know with glasses on in 3d space which is mind-blowing right but it's also you know these ar objects and this is a discussion that we've had recently are meant to bridge um kind of our digital with the metaverse so they're a go-between the idea is that

every card is going to have an ar object associated with it that is composable that i can plop into maybe decentraland or sandbox or whatever metaverse is the is the zeitgeist of the day so you know parallel is designed to be compatible uh digital to physical and digital to metaverse as well and that's like the idea from from the jump is that it's actually going to be compatible both ways let's talk about some of the game specifics here and you mentioned earlier something that i actually didn't fully follow so it may have been something i missed in my my due diligence for this which is uh distillation though i would be surprised if you missed thank you uh distinguishing between the playing cards and the nft piece is

is there are there two different elements here yeah no i that's a great thing to clue out on so um we actually teased publicly one of the systems that we're going to be using for this and it's called string and so the idea is you actually have um identifiers that so it works both ways there will be an nft version of the game to play there will be a digital version of the game to play that doesn't necessarily have to be nfp and there will also be a physical uh playing card version of the game and there is also a way to connect all of those things together and that's true right yeah this is an undertaking y'all are y'all are trying to innovate 10 ways from from sunday i know and and just to

reiterate that our core deliverable very much is the core desktop game client um but you know the funding from having a really successful nfp franchise is significant you know and and parallels already making i think more money in terms of revenue in the first half of a year of its operation um in terms of actually having products on the market then a lot of well-established aaa game studios so it's not like we can't achieve it i think the question is you know are we being ambitious enough right we always have to kind of go further but the string system connects all that stuff together so it basically says it is possible or it will be possible at some point um in you know parallel physical pack opening at least this is

the intention i should always couch things in in tension but you will open up the pack one of the cards you get will actually unlock an nfp for you right and so you take that you use the string system check in the card you know by scanning it excuse me and you would be able to get an nft that is unique to that card and also your special edition cards in parallel the ses are meant to be tied intrinsically to physical cards as well you know unique hollow cards so it's it's it's a an experience that's um composable again is the word probably to use where if i want to use the nfts to play the game i can and i can unlock special things with that but i don't

have to if i want to just get a digital experience of the game with starter packs for a nominal amount of money and i mean less than a hundred dollars to you know get fully set up and play at a competitive level that's also possible and if i want to get physical cards and play you know either just analog or with ar on top i can do that too so it's it's designed to be full full faceted so if you have that physical card that gives you an nft does that nft you get from that physical card pack is that mostly aimed to be a collectible or you're saying that could be part of an nft pack you're building to play the game as well yeah yeah exactly and i think the nfts are

probably best looked at as like collectible versions of the gaming experience is probably the best way to phrase that also they will unlock unique aspects of the gaming experience for you so owning the nfts will have a lot of different interactions with the the broader ecosystem a lot of that will be detailed in the upcoming much anticipated prime proposal um you know there's there's a lot of information about that in there but you know in terms of collectible artifacts they are themselves intrinsically valuable and they also will unlock so for example if you play a special edition nft version of a card through the the desktop client you know gaming experience you probably have some unique animations and things that show up that

don't show up otherwise so that's kind of the way that we're thinking about design it's like the nfts can unlock a little bit more but the core game experiences for everyone regardless does not require nfps uh to any extent it's just that the nfts are there to augment and possibly improve upon the integratedness of the experience and so the packs themselves that people are buying and that i can go online and get on openc those are not nfts so the the packs um which packs do you mean the the core like i guess distinguish that for me then i guess this is a a yeah there's physical there's physical card packs that you'll be able to buy in the future

sure but right now these drops that have been happening digitally yeah those are those are all nfts that you get out of there yeah so the idea is that when the when the game is actually close to launch there will be versions of playable decks that you'll be able to access for next to no cost because what we what we definitely don't want to do is create an experience that's uh pay to win right any anything close to that there's not gonna be a competitive advantage in terms of gameplay to having the nfts over just having um a starter deck digital version of cards right or having the uh equally relatively inexpensive physical card packs right that the idea is anyone can play at any sort of um

you know wealth level but if you want to go into that really deep tier of collecting and unlock some of those special experiences alongside the core you know competitive game you can do that through the nfts and and also kind of participate in the economic ecosystem that's around the game in unique ways that's also unlockable through nfts um again as that as that paper will detail so highlight some of the the cool things you can get as part of these packs that people are buying i want to ask you a question about the i think the masterpiece cards but i know those assets maybe you know i'm sure there's a lot but pick you know a handful of cards that you're like these

are all super exciting i want to i want to tell folks sort of what what these are and why they're awesome yeah i think it's important to answer that question by answering like what's the rarity of parallel cards because a lot of people don't necessarily understand this there's there's you know common uncommon rare uh legendary and each of these can kind of be in special edition or not form so special edition is the more desirable form uh it's more limited it's like the holographic if you've ever you know seen pokemon cards that's the easiest explanation excuse me so you know the idea is there those are the tiers and then there's stuff kind of beyond that even in terms of rarity that's not playable cards but um are also extremely sought after so very rare um the rarest is 250

edition cards the very rare legendary special editions are like the highest tier playable cards that you can get generally speaking there are other cards that have already been issued that are extremely extremely rare um one of them which is kind of um an homage to elon musk is the first son of mars and uh it's a really really cool card it's like a gravestone on mars and it's um i believe the lore behind it and i was kind of one of the people to guess this early on is that it was like the first um leader of the marcolions when they landed on mars their first great leader that's his gravestone so it's a it's a really cool card and it was one of the ones i attached to early on there's only five of those and it will be playable in

non-competitive play and it's a super flex right like it's imagine you're playing someone and they drop one of those you're like oh [ __ ] yeah it's over you know it's i'm done you know and then there's another one of one playable card that will be possibly you know some adjustments to that um how that's actually going to interact with the game but the priming so the whole idea is you know the parallels are coming back to battle for earth itself and earth is represented on a card a one of one card that was sold at auction at the very beginning of parallel called the priming and um that's obviously like the holy grail the cup of a carpenter you know everyone wants that and i happen to know the guy who has it and he's not going to sell it so um you know there's uh

there's cards like that and then there's the assets and stuff so you talked about masterpieces masterpieces are a one-of-one representation of a card right and all the trading activity that happens on that card you're gonna get um you know a portion of that by owning the masterpiece the numbers right now one percent of whatever the um portion of trading activity is in that card so those are highly sought after i think the highest sale that we had was like 1.6 million dollars on one of those uh if i believe correctly and so there's there's a lot of big sales on those to spell it out for folks what you're saying is if you own a masterpiece card you get one percent of sales for all masterpiece cards so as master if a masterpiece card sells for

1.2 million all the other holders of masterpiece cards together collectively get the equivalent of one percent slight direction slight correction fat so if i have an ashes to ash's card right of which there's thousands of these cards in their in their future iterations oh i understand where you're going with this okay finish all of that and i have the ashes to ash's masterpiece i get the trading activity for that for ashes so it's the it's the masterpiece if you separate the two words it's probably easier to think of it that way it's the masterpiece of that card that's represented on it and so that's like the one that gets a little bit of uh that kickback in terms of the economic activity on that card and so again there's a lot of extra details that will

be made clear about this you know in the in the upcoming um prime document like how this ties into everything else but um it's a really really cool function and it's it's a way to kind of give back to the community who's participating in the governance of this uh ecosystem right and and so that's a really neat thing there's also other cool stuff like prime keys or one of the the most sought after ones prime keys you can think of there's more that i can't say but right now we know that they're kind of like the ultimate utility key in the parallel ecosystem we had a lan party um in new york for nfp nyc at the penthouse with this like crazy hotel and we you could win gaming laptops and there's all this stuff you had to have a prime key to get in right

so you know there's the key into physical events there's key into digital experiences there's more that i can't talk about so you know there's other assets like that we know there's a catalyst drive right now we know there's a core we know that there's some way to combine prime keys and catalyst drives we don't know what that's going to do we know that the core might have something to do with all that so there's i think what parallel team has done is kind of hint at this much bigger economic engine and ecosystem that's sort of bigger than parallel to an extent and also running alongside it and facilitating what's happening in parallel so it's going to be really really cool i think when people um understand all that stuff and are able

to see all the machinations of it but yeah there's stuff and we're talking about you know market value of 100 000 or more for a lot of these things that i've talked about and so when people there was a stream uh that we had where somebody pulled open and opened up a catalyst drive and we just freaked out you know because you can imagine market value's like three hundred thousand dollars so somebody just somebody's paid like 20 bucks and pulled a cash drive literally literally right like you know 20 40 50 depending on which pack you know it comes out of and they pull a house out of it you know and it's so those moments are special and and i think parallel team has made sure that we're putting more value into packs than we're extracting out right that's like a really really core part of what we're

trying to do we're trying to make it so that no matter what when you get a pack it's it's a plus plus ev thing for you right like you should expect that it's going to be a valuable special experience in every way not just economically but in terms of the specialness of the experience the the sensory nature of it right the sound the the you know colors the feeling of it it's supposed to be special and that's why they're going to lengths that they don't need to go to right and creating this augmented reality pack opening experience because it's about that's the ethos it's like we want to give you value we want your experience with parallel to be categorically special let me ask you a very uh

let's call it nitty-gritty question that hopefully doesn't get you in hot water i honed in on this masterpiece card uh thing specifically because that revenue back model i think is really interesting and i actually think is something that's very powerful and distinct in the world of nfts that this is we we sort of can do that for our communities but it does start to bump up against like the limits of security laws right like did your team have to think about that do they think about that are they nervous about having a card where we're saying hey if you own this card you get money back is there regulatory are there regulatory fears around that well i mean i think there's there's

always a desire to do things in a compliant way right and so you know that was a concept that um all the legal consultation that we had said that that was good you know depending how it was structured and so again i think um not to kind of half answer this uh but a lot of the documentation that's upcoming um in the prime document et cetera et cetera there's more there um that will categorically explain this stuff and not just this question but like all of the questions right um you know we're talking about a really really substantial set of documentation here that's been reviewed by top lines in the space you know obviously paradigm team who invested in parallels helped with their vast wealth of knowledge um

you know extensive legal consultation on it you know uh our own kind of mulling over what it is that our visions and goals are and and why did we do this in the first place i mean it even talks about like why did parallel get built you know it's so it's uh why did parallels say it again why did parallel get built in the first place so it kind of starts there and we go through everything after that and so i think this document will kind of answer all of those questions and i would encourage people to be a little bit more patient you know to to wait for those answers to be forthcoming but yeah it's certainly something that we actively considered and you know not a question that we're shy about uh discussing when does that document drop and should folks be on your discord to

i can't say yet okay but i think every everyone knows that it's coming soon right it's it's um i guess to be humorous about it been coming soon for a while um but you know i think when people see it they'll understand and appreciate why um because it is so far-reaching and there's implications that are you know in in some of the documentation around this that are bigger than parallel you know there there's implications that are the entire way that the future of play to earn ecosystems might work and probably will work so um an extreme amount of effort and energy has been put into it such that it is um implications of it or even beyond parallel itself everyone is talking about the metaverse these days and we're

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businesses including uber starbucks walmart target and other web 2 companies use code bankless when you create your on juno account and our friends at juno will air drop you 50 in eth when you set up your first crypto paycheck sign up at onjuno.com crypto to get started that's o-n-j-u-n-o dot com slash crypto so you came on heading up growth and marketing talk to us about what that growth of marketing has been sort of from day one until now you know even prior to you joining this is something that has had a lot of community hype for a while i think the art is what you hear over and over again from folks like folks who don't haven't been keeping up with any of the updates about what the gameplay is going to be like bought in because i

thought the art was sick so how did you grow that initial community how did the founders if it was prior to you grow that initial community and then how have you been thinking about growing it and marketing it since you came on board yeah i guess my journey starts before well before ever coming on the parallel team you know like i said i was one of the the earliest cheerleaders it was like me and bitcoin bitcoin palmer and jay and silva um garrett um you know there were some people that were like very very early in parallel and we ended up being we ended up getting like a honorary card because we were one of the first five people to participate in parallel and are kind of the greatest community champions if you will so it started there it started from i think a genuine recognition of the the greatness

of parallel and the potential of it such that people became super fans and there's that thousand true fans you know kind of thesis and that's that's very much parallel story is people just loved it it's worth highlighting that you've got merchant for example who's pretty well known in the in the gamer space and has his own youtube channel like has clearly a following that he could push it out to he was one of the you know kind of three co-founders of it so i always want to highlight for folks because there's a lot of people who ask me like oh i'm trying to start a project or how do i get noticed or you know they're having so much success and it's like well these people did have followers in the space and then delivered something really amazing and it was that combination that sounds like that lit the initial fuse

for this is that is that correct 100 right i mean speaking in terms of the the founding team you know sasha um who kind of is he's a ceo parallel um in many ways sears the ship you know he's he's the last person to say that he is the leader but uh that's why he's the leader um you know he is a guy that uh has this is not his first radio he's he's built successful businesses before so he he kind of had a team that he was able to rely on that could immediately start work on parallel and and hit the ground running um and then you know had influence in the industry and contacts and people like me that found it early and i have a fair amount of influence in the nft world myself and you know guys like jn and garrett and palmer like i

said who each have their own spheres of influence and then those kind of connect to other spheres and so on and so forth i think having um economic model with the the pack drops that's designed to put cards in a lot of people's hands we're over 30 000 you know unique wallet holders right now for parallel that's a huge boon for us in terms of growth because you know there's this whole thesis that we talk about internally of card in hand like if we can put a card in people's hand something changes in their their mind now they're kind of hooked right and so we wanna you wanna put cards out there for people there was a tremendous amount of charity giveaways things like that you know i think it just formed around um discord primarily we had a great nucleus you know we kind of had a lot of fun in

discord we would play games together you know we would do a lot of voice chats and you just had the formation of something that felt like it was going to last and you know continue to grow at at really rapid pace and we're approaching 50 000 people in discord now um which is really exciting that's that's getting to pretty big territory and we think that we can hit you know three four hundred thousand by next year end of next year that's our goal anyway so you know that would put us up there with some of the biggest games in the world be they nfts or not um and so you know we we feel like it's just continuing to um treat the community who got us here the right way and nurture that and then we start to knock on the people next door it's kind of our thoughts on

growth so obviously there's adjacent communities to us in broader card collecting there's hearthstone community there's magically gathering there's influencers and content creators relative to these spaces that we want to go talk to and say hey look we're not going to do the shill thing where we give you money to talk about us but we think you want to talk about us anyway like come sit down with us have a conversation let's send you some cards let's send you some nfps you know let's show you the ar modules now let's talk about if there's any monetization here but we want people to love it you know and and i think it's attention to detail excellence at every level um and continuing to enrich and grow community organically that's been our strength obviously getting into the beginning of next year we're gonna start to look at spending some money but

there's been very very little money spent uh thus far it sounds like what i just heard you say and tell me if this is right is you've had some really organic growth by virtue of the players who were a part of the team early by virtue of having an amazing product that people gravitated toward and therefore you had natural word of mouth and you're now starting to move into a phase of i don't know call it more disciplined planning where you're saying hey we're in the process of or we're about to start targeting you know the these existing gaming communities maybe they're not nft native but they're tcgs etc and we're going to start making this really concerted push

into other communities to grow across the key key kpis where we're really tracking discord twitter sort of these digital spaces is that a fair summary of that's not an idea that's exactly it i mean part of the reason that it excites me from like a you know investor perspective is one of the things i think that's tricky about the space and actually i'd love to know your thoughts on this writ large but is we say we're early in this space all the time and on the one hand i think we very much are early from the standpoint that i i believe one day everyone will own nfts in various forms whether they know their nfts or not and so we're obviously not there yet so we're very early but that doesn't mean that all of like that we haven't priced some of that

expected growth into some of the projects yeah even into some of the currencies themselves like you know you can be early and not be underpriced so i wanted to ask that about you you know make the case or or tell us what you think from like an investment perspective getting into parallel now how much is like the hype of the product priced in how much growth do you still see there being it sounds like there's maybe a lot um yeah give us your your take on that well i mean i think there's a couple parts of the answer here that are important on the one hand parallel kind of has already ridden up a major uh market cycle of speculation you could call it and um

that led to prices that were at the time unsustainable i think and have come back down significantly from there um and so now you're looking at cards you know that the full price of cards is twenty thirty dollars again you know and special editions are forty 40 50 again for floor price and obviously gas is a little bit difficult you know we're now getting the whole l1 versus l2 thing and um talking about some other infrastructure to support that but we did just get listed on ftx us and ft market which doesn't have gas right and um you know there's there's probably more things like that in the works so you know we can think about the use of centralized exchanges to kind of mitigate some of those costs around gas and then

now you're looking at you know the cost of entry to great special edition cards really really choice cards um from the first and second releases less than a couple hundred bucks you know it's sometimes 30 40 50 i mean is that a good buy to me hell yeah obviously i can't really be giving market advice but not financial advice yeah if i'm looking outside of my role you know i own a ton of parallel cards you know and all of which were bought before i worked at parallel in fact i'm not really even allowed to like touch cards for the time being um so you know i'm a huge believer in the future of this i think if you want to look at you know magic the gathering um and some of their more rare cards as as analogs for this you could do that but you also have to

appreciate the other point that i wanted to make nfts allow for more liquidity right buying and selling physical rare collectibles is difficult you know you have to have assessors you know you have to go through grading services like beckett's you have all this stuff that's associated with doing it you know if i want to buy or sell a rare car think about all the logistics a piece of art you know uh a trading card so nfts remove all that so there's there's kind of an inherent extra value premium that's associated with that that ease of liquidity coming in and coming out and so i think that's one of the unappreciated points about nfps that you know a lot of them do have excess premiums due to speculation and

we see that across the industry even in company evaluations but i think there is an import importance around that ease of liquidity coming in that not everything is an inflated price just because it's easy for money to come in and out of it that just means money it's easy for money to come in and out of it you know um there's there's a reason associated with that do you have like some magic gathering comps off the top of your head like how many how many players worldwide are there for magic gathering or card holders or or even some of those price comps that you were talking about and i actually want to ask you about some of the game play that was designed based on magic as well but but let's start there let's do hearthstone i think

hearthstone has more players so yeah in 2018 there were more than 100 million registered hearthstone players worldwide wow you know it looks like their annual player rates differ but we're we're in the hearthstone players in 2020 number of active hearthstone players more than 23.5 million so and we're talking about 30 000 who currently own parallel could play parallel in theory in with the nfts with the nfts and that's an important point is that we are gonna right now um even if by the time the game launches were only a couple hundred thousand um card holders that doesn't mean that our player base couldn't be five to ten x that because there's all these other ways that we're going to open up to play the game so i think that's an important point um

excuse me we have a lot of different metrics that we're using internally to kind of look at what success looks like but i think if you know we're talking about within one year of the game being deployed and publicly playable i think that we we could should and will have a million person and i was player base highlighting the 30 000 holder piece as actually a positive right because it just shows if you buy the premise that you all are doing this well and i personally do it's you know please make your own decisions about that folks but um you know that's just insane room for growth if you compare that to some of these other top games and if you believe this has the potential to be a really top game yeah you know and axes kind of become global

i think by really leaning into play to earn elements which there will be for parallel more again more coming on that soon i think that uh understanding and actuality of the plato earned elements will be a huge driver of growth because it's one thing to talk about it it's another thing to have a game where you can actually have urn elements um that's deployed in public so i think that's going to be huge for us there's a lot of catalysts between now and you know let's say um not end of next year but the beginning of the following when we feel like some kind of public form of the game is going to be out there you know i think that there's going to be versions of it that are out there prior um in some kind of limited capacity

obviously we've talked about the fact that certain members of our community based on you know their support and which you know nfts they hold may have access to versions of it earlier for you know betas and demos it's already been publicly talked about that we have a version internally at parallel that we're already playing um it doesn't look good because no graphical work has been done to it but the game engine is there right and that's pretty remarkable like i think that people by and large don't know that and if they did they would kind of be impressed at the pace at which we're we're moving here so we have a version actually i'm getting pings in in slack right now to uh to do some play tonight uh and the cards are there cards that

haven't even been released are in there and we're we're play testing well there is a podcast if you want to know more if you want to know about the game testing and how it's going you all do have a podcast called life in parallel really does focus primarily especially the earlier episodes but even even getting into some of the later episodes on like game design and game play and how to think about that so if you if you're a nerd out there who's especially interested in how to design a game uh they definitely get into it i'm curious like what was the the thinking in terms of launching a podcast with everything else you all have going on is that something you would recommend for other projects as part of a marketing plan i i think it's great i mean uh koji who is mr gone you know we known as mr

gone and discord um has podcasting experience and background and so i think he comes into that with knowledge of how to produce content obviously you reference merchant uh connor um he comes with content creation and you know streaming and all that kind of background and podcasting and youtube and so and so forth so he comes in with that experience carson who's one of the other members of the team he's very polished uh he i believe had some streaming experience as well and now we've added a guy laser edition alex um who has done you know casting for mtg events and stuff like that and um commentating so these guys are all really polished you know they're they're

good speakers they're they understand kind of the nuance of this and some of the technical difficulty that can be associated with it so i would say that's one plus that parallel has you know the other factor here is that we kind of had to do this because there's a lot going on and so it's those four names that i mentioned that's the game team the game team does the podcast we don't the rest of us don't do the podcast you know they will bring us on when they want to have us talk about something but the game team does the podcast and like you said you nailed it that podcast is focused on the game because the the game is the part that's continuously evolving right and there's a ton of nuance to it and things that haven't been revealed yet and it's a place to do reveals it's a place to talk

about you know the nuance of cards it's a place to talk about why they built the game in the way that they did and are leading the direction that they're leading so i think it's really important if people maybe don't understand that that bigger picture game aspect for parallel and want to go there because it's a absolute treasure trove of information i think i've listened to every episode three times because i'm trying to understand too i work here and i still am trying to just get as much of their brain power downloaded into me as possible i appreciate it because i have a personal beef with all of the twitter spaces we do you mentioned clubhouse earlier but and i've ranted about this on twitter before but like the the sort of obsession with twitter spaces in this

industry i'm like i'm sorry i have a job granted it's in blockchain but i still have a job and i can't just like hang out at 2pm on a wednesday for two hours to listen to y'all just chitter chatter so that i can get 10 minutes of the nugget that i wanted so i'm a big fan of content that is recorded that i can go back to and listen to at my leisure at 2am when i have a moment or whatever the case is and it's structured too right that's the other structure it's well done it is a well done podcast i i and it made total sense to me when i saw you had it uh it made total sense why it would be really helpful for a project of this scope to to have that place to explain something in long form like if we were just selling nfps i

agreed yes what's there to do a different story you know but there's a lot of other stuff that is the actual stuff that's happening here that is merits that um exposition you know okay i want to do one last question on the the nitty gritty game stuff here and then i want to do a couple bigger picture market macro questions with you and and then i i'll let you go so something i alluded to earlier how did magic the gathering influence this project both in terms of way things you've taken from magic and then also maybe areas where you feel like you've improved upon magic gameplay yeah i think to answer the first part it influenced it tremendously it would be hard to

overstate how much it influenced it you have to realize listeners not you specifically any listeners magic created this genre this genre didn't exist before magic so magic is the progenitor of this entire thing that we're talking about um and it it has formed the backbone for basically every successful franchise that has ever happened after that in this in this um this sort of genre you know the the five parallels the number there's a reason for five and kind of the colors associated with them that's magic the gathering you know red white blue black sona you know that's where that comes from um in in many respects you know that was the the inspiration

for at least the number being five and then having their own colors that loosely you know correlate to magic so i think any successful game that launches in this um this genre is heavily heavily influenced by magic and you'd be kidding yourself if you said that you weren't um because they created a tremendously successful core game concept you know the art is obviously magic art is great it's a completely different style but i think there was some inspiration in terms of just wanting to have really quality art that that was important from the beginning for parallel many of the parallel cards you will see are interesting takes on you know historical

magic or hearthstone cards many of them are brand new too right many of them are hey we've never seen this before so there's there's i think um equal parts inspiration and representation within parallel of core concepts that magic introduced to the world and then there's also parallels as a company constant desire to be asking ourselves what hasn't been done right and you can tell through this whole conversation the ar the string you know everything that we do the pack opening experience is always asking ourselves what hasn't been done yet and how can we be the ones to do it and in the gameplay experience that's no different so the concept of paragons isn't um new necessarily there's there's other concepts that are similar um in

magic and a couple other different games but i think paragons was great to bake in as standard to the game so the idea being if i pick a parallel there's three commanders for each parallel basically and that forms three different macro play styles now within those i can be very innovative and do what i want but it helps noobs you know if noobs come into the game they're like i don't i've never played a tcg before where do i start but i think parallels cool we wanted to kind of cater to that and also experience players who want to innovate within those play styles but it gives you like a big play style to click hey i like that right i like shroud but i like this within shroud and maybe some other person likes this with intro or that and there's three different options for each

people and then experienced players can mess with the nuance of all that i think the main innovation in terms of gameplay that parallel introduced is the idea of power and power banking um land cards in magic are intrinsic to the game right but many have considered them restrictive so the idea is in magic i have to play what's called land to generate mana mana can be thought of as energy and that's how you power the cards that's how you are actually that's your fuel to be able to play more versus less powerful cards on a given turn in parallel you take actual cards that are future playable they're real they're playable cards they're not just static um you know mana generating cards so to

speak and you play them face down in a bank and that's how you generate your power so now it forms this whole nuance of for one eliminating the need for the card draw the excess card draw that just goes to land right that's one thing two it creates a new dynamic where i'm actually interfacing with the bank and so there's all kinds of cards that will instantaneously reveal certain cards from your bank and kind of blitz your enemy with that right so imagine i've got this secret little reserve you don't know what's in it and i play one card and it's now pull three out of your bank so stuff like that and then now it's like this espionage aspect comes into play there's a lot of cards that allow me to snoop on your bank and you to snoop on my back and so now you can kind

of see what am i brewing you know what i've got on the field but what am i trying to hide from you you know and it creates a really fun mechanic it's a poker game yeah it is like a poker game and i think it's going to be when people experience the gameplay i think it's going to be a ton of fun and it's something that we don't really see in major tcg franchises and and i think that's one thing that's that's really exciting obviously the other stuff we talked about um is more like augmenting the experience of gameplay but when it comes to actual gameplay i think paragons as standard and power banking to remove the need for land that's my that's my big game changers for parallel for folks who are now super pumped and

want to get started here yes what's the best next step where do they go should they start collecting things on open c which you've referenced have become more affordable at this point what's next yeah i'll give them a few things here one you definitely want to follow parallel on twitter so that you can just stay on top of all the information that's coming out it's a lot i i appreciate that it's a lot we have a really really big guide to parallel coming like super cool looking document it's sweet that will be circulating so you'll get that if you're following on twitter you'll see it first join the discord because the discord's like a layer deeper where you have other experts in the community who can help

you if one of the team members isn't around you'll literally get someone to answer your questions for you in there and there's a huge amount of information in discord like staggering now so that's great there's a bunch of blogs we actually had the community go out there and write their own intro to parallel blogs recently um so all those blogs are in discord as well and they're great like what's this all about i wrote my own um called why parallel so if you search you know why parallel nft sci-fi maybe i don't know whatever you've got to add isn't that your name on there i think yeah on medium so you can check that out i wrote that with not so fast who's another community leader um i think it came out as a great kind of big picture objective analysis of like why is this

interesting and um and what should you do and then yeah we'll link to that that's something i have on my resource list here perfect yeah and then pick your favorite parallel um that's important and you can actually go into discord and you can pick whichever one you like the most your name will you know color will change to that and that'll open up a special chat room that you can go in for that parallel and listen to voice chats and talk to other people who picked that same one that you did it's really kind of a cool thing um and then once you pick that parallel start to look on openc or if you prefer to use ftx nft marketplace and see which cards you like and you can start to build your collection don't feel like in a rush to buy a billion things right now that's not you

know the way to play it but you want to start right you want to start you know card here card there there's no need to go buy 30 at once i have done that at times but um it is it is certainly not you know required that you do that it's just one of those things that start to get familiar we want you to learn the story and learn the experience and appreciate what it's all about um and speaking of story that would be the last thing that i would recommend if you've done all those other things and actually probably prior to picking your parallel you want to read more of the story you can go to the website parallel.life and you can click the story section and you can read the whole story like the background and each of the parallels expanded stories as well and that'll

help you pick that was like the one of the first things that i remember doing and being like wow like this is really really cool and that led me to pick marcolion um i was gonna ask so marcolin is your parallel marcolion's my parallel yeah i kind of always you know vibe with that like um that vibe you know they've got a stormtrooper vibe it's like you know it's kind of like sparta to me they seem like kind of very spartan of like they're militaristic they're disciplined they're not necessarily the bad guys they're just like but they are militant it's a little cold it's a little cold but it's a little yeah but it would you know it's it's cool outfits and big lasers and it's very it's very like space you know and and i i thought that was

very aggressive that's the other thing is i i in games like like this in strategy games i always play a blitzing style or i tend to play a blitzing style like civilization you know i would go with japanese because the samurai once you got to the feudal age you could blitz and usually win in one move right um you had to wait until that point and build your troops but once you got there it was like you could strike the killing blow and marcolion is very much you're that's exactly right the game plays oriented around that you know um catherine lapointe who's one of the paragons in markolian is designed to blitz that's what she's you know we've got some early play decks that we've been building um and one of them is catherine little

points blitz deck right and so yeah that's exactly it and it also favored that that game style do you get nervous about all the hype for parallel like do you get nervous about how excited the community is like as much as you're excited for them to see the game do you have moments of like oh my gosh what if we don't live up to all this hype uh no actually i don't and i mean that honestly in the past in business ventures that i've been involved with the answer would definitely have been yes because i think parallels reach like heights that um are only going to get much higher and maybe at some point in the future but like there are some pieces of news that we have internally that haven't come out yet that like if you think you've seen some stuff now

just wait you know so um even hearing those things i'm like no you know what like this is that cool this is that cool i think that i think that we've built something special here i say we in a loose sense you know um having kind of just participated from the beginning but not been part of the team something has been built here that's very special i know uh sasha would wag his finger at me for for not including myself in that uh explicitly speaking but yeah it's really special you know i think the community can sense it and i think what people will see over time as more comes to light about what's been done and what will happen um it it feels earned it feels earned so no i don't feel daunted by it i i think

there's a lot to do you know there's a lot to do and um it's going to keep us busy for years to come but as long as we remain grounded and we keep the value of you know adding value to the community first and doing things the right way and doing things honestly and doing things to a standard of excellence that's beyond what's required then we'll never feel intimidated by the the levels that we reach and it's probably worth mentioning something that comes across when you start diving into parallel is like there is a dream of this is beyond a game this becomes a a movie or tv franchise or like you know this is something like star wars where the lore gets really built out tremendously as well and you end up with one of these just kind of

massive ips that spans many mediums is that fair to say that that's you know within the you know in 10 years when we're back having this conversation that's hopefully what's what's in the works or been achieved yes it is and um discussions that we've had internally about that part of the vision since the beginning has been that and some discussions and things opportunities brewing now that are pretty amazing um in that direction so yeah i think parallel is is a multimedia ip franchise right it the first deliverable is this you know ccg game and we want to do that to a standard of the utmost excellence and

build these incredible engaging experiences around it but from the beginning the store the story has been um solid enough to have a global franchise built on on the back of it so that is uh that is where we're headed i'm debating if i want to ask you the the big win game question now or or save it till the very end i'm going to save it again or after i'll walk it now all right when game when game yeah and and you know these answers are my answers they're not the team's answers right so i'll just i'll say that um i believe that we will have some form of gameplay in a limited sense of people who've been in the community for a while in their hands end of next

year um in a limited sense right this this is based on the fact that we already have an internal internal playable client what we don't want to do is we don't want to put something that's not polished like it currently is now in people's hands publicly but if we have our community diehards who've been there since day one and they've been through the whole journey with us you know do we have to have the ultimate polish version to give them no do we want more public play testing yes so based on all these kind of things i i feel like we're going to be at that point where um also the the full alpha deck you know or the full kind of alpha playset will have been distributed by the end of next year so

all of the cards that would be required to fulfill the original alpha set of parallel will have been out in the public so we'll be able to have all those added to the game client and kind of account for all the ways that we think gameplay might look so from a play testing standpoint internal client standpoint um i think that we would be we would have some version that to a limited extent we would be willing to have other people play in the community and and not probably the entire community because by that point the community is probably going to be huge it'll it'll be a sandbox alpha type of yeah a sandbox we'll have early supporters and a pass for a limited number of folks to start playing the game and and you all can see what's what's working once it's out in the

hands of folks yeah and i think i think people people internally are scared about you know answering that question for good reason especially the game team is the most cautious but um that's just my take on it is we're going to have some kind of sandbox version uh towards the end of next year i believe and then i would imagine some point um be it q2 q3 you know the following year we would be out there in the public so um you know that's that's my intuition now again not an official couching at all and couching or you know your but yeah we've already made impressive progress and and i think to get to the like fully public public playable aaa version that's going to take a lot of you know

putting camera to iron but a version that's that's playable by our community i really do believe we'll have some kind of form of that in some limited capacity by the end of next year i want to ask you a couple just bigger picture macro questions before we we sign off here a couple things that you've talked about on your your twitter for example and something you referenced earlier you mentioned that art was like the first domino to fall in this space of of nfts and i'm curious i i've asked this to others before what's the story in your head as to how nfts go mainstream and i'll tell you you know maybe things happening in parallel

no pun intended you know for me i'm like it's concert tickets that's like or sports tickets like it's tickets to me is how this ends up everywhere i'm curious what is your thought on how and when this all really tickets is probably a really important part of the answer obviously i have some background in that um but yeah i mean tickets are a pretty cool use case for nfts that maybe most people wouldn't think about but like i said block party that's where black party started was blockchain ticketing and so i've seen it in in action and and it's pretty cool um it disrupts a lot of things you know i think really we have to start with scaling um scaling is going to be the most critical

thing obviously we have optimistic roll-ups and all these different things coming e2 merge and there's some cool stuff in 2022 that will be massively advancing i believe the scale at which ethereum specifically can operate and uh reducing kind of the economic payload and all the other annoyances obviously there's a lot of ux that needs to improve so those are like foundational things i i do think ticketing is one interesting area that things could break through obviously gaming you know and that's removing my bias i felt like that before i started working in nft gaming i was like man that's gonna be because games are ubiquitous everyone plays games and so if we can take all these powerful my pushback on that is like a ton of my friends don't play games i mean maybe

they play an iphone game but i don't even know that many of them do so i think that's why for me gaming is this massive use case but it's not necessarily the mainstream use case it's sort of a a community in and of itself that's huge and growing for sure but not necessarily everyone anyway everyone that's a good point um i too often am stuck in the world and the people around me are in yeah um i guess the better way to say that would be their their global games are global yeah multi-billion player bases and um you know the i guess the something in between all of this is like nfts as experiential devices and like using nfts to get you into

something right so a company giving you i think l'oreal just did something where it's like free nfts like you get the nft then the nft does something for you i've seen other examples of concerts of that right um i think that that's it's like similar to ticketing and it's kind of just right in that realm that you might call it ticketing where it's like nfts as keys is has been my thesis for you know basically the entire time i've been in nfts they unlock something so companies or large scale experiences that put nfts in your hands and those nfps do something in the digital and physical world for you that is a vague answer but i think that's the answer and that's you know again call that ticketing call that whatever you want um

i think to onboard a bunch of users to be ongoing nft users i do think gaming is the correct answer and then by association people will you know that sort of gets us from where we're at to the next you know circles um or radio radii around us uh and then you know kind of mainstream uh i don't know what what exactly leads us to complete mainstream but i think one of the answers to mainstream is that like just you get an nft you don't have to buy it you get it and then oh wait this does something cool it's not like getting some money or something like that it's like this has specific purposes and things that it can unlock for you and i think that will kind of start to blow people's minds and get

people in the general public who may not be gamers or anything like that interested the the tag along bit to this is when they go mainstream will they be called nfts and this i want to just yeah i was going to say you you sounded off on twitter a little bit about what terrible branding nft is say on say something on that yeah and this was like an argument that i had at some point last year with some people about it and they were like art critic types who were like pro nft and i was like you guys don't get it like you you don't understand what i'm talking about like you're talking about the sort of point accuracy of the term which i ironically it's not even accurate now that so many of the things

in the nft industry are 1155. are they non-fungible no so why are we calling them nfts but at the time they were like well non-fungible token is technically i was like you're missing the point right you're missing the point you know i don't call a car by the exact mechanics of a vehicular you know whatever yeah that just doesn't make any sense you know you brand it it's a god it's a ford it's whatever you know um and so that's what i think we have to get to is some more abstracted representation i mean i like digital goods digital collectibles digital assets digital items um digital art you know it kind of encompasses all of that it's it's just what nfts really are is a way to do

digital stuff it's not the term for the thing that happens digitally the term for the thing that happens digitally should be different based on what you're doing nfts are just one of the things that has to happen it would almost be like calling anything with a tie or tires does that make sense you know it's like no it's a motorcycle no it's a car no it's like okay just because it has a tire doesn't mean it's like just because it uses nfp doesn't mean it's and you should call it nft that's kind of what i think about it we're talking about a world of being able to create digital scarcity and then within that there's you know a million different use cases for digital scarcity

and we're lumping them all into like you're either a token or a currency or an nft and that's a incredibly limited i want to expand on that point there because you talked about and this is how i thought about it for the longest time like there's nfts and there's stuff within the nfps i think the better visual illustration in your mind is there's nft layer and stuff that happens on top of it and other layers that could be under it too right it's just infrastructure it's just infrastructure and nobody describes the things that happen on top of infrastructure by the infrastructure that's not the way that we describe things as human beings so i think once that becomes more apparent to people which it

will over time then and as more specific applications get built on top of the infrastructure it'll quickly become a case where we realize this is no longer a good descriptor and that's what i fundamentally think it is not only because the word is cursed now amongst furries on twitter it's because fundamentally it's a bad it's bad language it's bad use of language you know so i don't know i've been i've been diatribing about that since some sometime last year so last question it's sort of topical lots of debate about where the market will go you know some people panicking when i think you tweeted a joke about this or maybe it was it was somebody else i was looking at but like it goes down by like a hundred dollar like you see twitter freaking out and you check the price of

eath and it's like down by a hundred dollars and it feels like what um but you've been a proponent it looks like of you know we're not necessarily in a bear market or it's not going you don't need to be bearish that you think there's you're kind of bullish yeah i mean tell me about that i'm still macro bullish i think right now the fed meeting this week has probably spooked the markets and there's just a lot of uncertainty and perception of risk um and there was a lot of inflated values in the market as well a lot of room to bleed um typically around the year end you're not going to have that much by buy side liquidity step in especially when there's you know macro fed scares right um so i think that's probably why we're we're slipping and sliding right

now and probably also some parties that be who want to profit off of this who are you know able to make the market do what they you know sing and dance so um i think that that's kind of the situation that we're in i i'm not i don't think that we couldn't be in a bear market it's certainly possible that that's gonna happen if we are i don't think it'll be that deep and bloody i really think that by probably q1 we're we're gonna be back you know with prices going up consistently again and maybe even by later december it's possible that after this fed meeting things start going you know resolving and going up again i mean i'm not yeah i'm not like macro bearish yet and if we are gonna have kind of a blow-off or

similar situation um where a consistent bear period starts i don't think it's happened yet i really don't the q4 tends to be good a good time for for crypto you know i could very much see people go home for the holiday and you know get their christmas or hanukkah money or whatever it is in and you know like yeah start to start to put it back into the market in some way and i think it'll be interesting next year in the in the ramp up to eth2 what happens i think you know you're you're likely to see a ramp up of eth in advance of that anyways this is all of course just speculative what we all do it's fun well i'm in agreement yeah but but macro i agree with you i'm i'm so macro bullish awesome frank thank you so much for joining me thank you for for again i'll

say it for the third time thank you for joining me on the the back end of cobia recovery for sharing all of this uh i'm really excited to see where parallel goes and definitely we'll be tracking it closer from here and uh fitch inverse on fitch inverse i keep i keep uh emphasizing it wrong fitch inverse on twitter if you want to follow frank and uh parallels it's meant to be built right that's kind of the verse and pitch inverse it's clever yeah it was like um when inverse bra you know got banned and became inverse bra and then yeah i got banned on twitter and i became involved and then i got banned again and then we became fiction verse yeah do i want to know what you got banned for or it was literally nothing like i i made a joke with somebody and um i think the

phrasing of it like got me auto banned and it was like a friend of mine and didn't like didn't even use any curse words or anything like that it was it was a literal joke and then my second account i just accidentally connected to my phone number from the first account and got auto banned because they were like oh no that's you it's the same person so yeah it was stupid i mean just frustrating to build up the the work on twitter and then you know get clipped twice but uh here we are so here we are awesome well thank you so much [Music] hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from

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