Jérôme de Tychey: Cometh – The Blockchain Game at the Intersection of NFTs and DeFi #416

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto founders builders and thought leaders i'm sebastian uh today i'm speaking with jean duttice who is the founder of cometh and also uh the founder of ecc i'm sure if you've heard him on the podcast before in that context and today we're going to be speaking mostly about cometh and just full disclosure i'm an investor in this project but before we speak to jerome about comment i'd like to tell you about our sponsor this week dexes are great but they're vulnerable to problems like med failed transactions and high gas costs cow swap tackles these issues head on and offers a new type of trading experiment it's built magnosis cow swap is a metadex aggregator that's right it's a dex aggregator aggregator

and it fights mev by matching overlapping orders directly so if no coincidence of wants that's where the cow comes from is found then trades are settled on a variety of underlying on-chain amms depending on which pool offers the best price so give cow swap a try and enjoy perks like no gas fees paid on field transactions optimized transaction management for multisig and dows as well as some other fun and entertaining surprises head over to cowswap.exchange and start swapping today jerome thanks for joining me uh today thanks for having me i'm i'm sad i had to give you uh an investment ship to get on the podcast but that's definitely worth it

yeah no but you know it's funny because i was thinking about this before and i i first uh found out about cometh because our mutual friend uh simon simon was uh you know came into the office one day when you know when i was working at adan and and uh he was like i saw him like doing something kind of weird on his screen with this like these ships and stuff and i was like simon what are you doing he's like oh man i'm staking my must token so i'm getting dust and i'm like you know building these ships and everything and i said okay that's that's too much for me like i just went back to work and um you know as uh as time went on i i started like learning more about the project and um and yeah i finally like ended up investing in the project um but

i think this is you know really a cool project because it it it it introduces people to d5 without actually like knowing like people could play the game and like not know that they're interacting with all these d5 primitives and i think that's what's really powerful um so yeah our list is probably know you as the guy who organizes htc and you know we had you on the show a couple of times when we went to the conference but um you know tell me tell us a bit about yourself like who is jealous and how did you become involved with the ethereum community and you know i think what a lot of people don't realize it's like you had a really important role in the early days of the french ethereum community so tell us a bit about your journey okay okay okay and this this journey has been

um an amazing one like most of the people that has been a little early in this in the space but it's been it's been great also because we had a resources like ep center so it was like where we preparing this we were preparing this uh this interview i told you like one of my childhood dream like a blockchain childhood dream was uh to be one day on ep center because like uh i i learned a lot uh watching some podcasts i remember vlad zen fears early podcasts uh and and and also like like rick dudley and so on or even vitalik on the podcast it really convinced me to to get even deeper on ethereum and learned a lot from this podcast so i i used to i used to

try to do research in economics i started a phd back in 2011 and then i couldn't find the proper financing um i couldn't find the proper subject i was struggling and and decided to uh to to be an economist in in private institution in public institutions uh back in those days i learned about bitcoin the very idea of doing uh money without central bank was very appealing i find it super interesting and looking back i'm i was teaching courses in economics um at different universities and and i'm now also a professor in economics at an engineering school

when i when i realized what bitcoin could be or what what crypto asset could be um i also realized what the the lack of understanding uh of money uh even in in economics courses so it was my rabbit hole i wanted to to get uh to get deeper into it i wanted to understand it better i wanted to to participate to whatever movement was going on at this stage and um i soon decided to do some mining they did bad investment in binding because i bought gpus when the the network was switching to fpga uh and then to asic so every time there was a a change in the technology i was less

and less effective in my in my mining return um and i discovered ethereum this way like i wasn't too connected with the with the the crypto communities i i didn't participate to the ico uh in in in the early days but when the network went online i just switched my miners there and try to do something this is where i got to meet people from the french ecosystem like uh simon that you you mentioned before and we were trying to get people together in 2015 about just meetups to discuss ethereum just meet up to discuss how to do a smart contract how to run a mining software at scale how to make

sure that those things works can we overclock our gpus what could we do um so this is how the the non-profit called this used to be called asset a-s-s-e-t-h uh hence why many people asked us what would you call anything as if or us like what what is this thing uh we started off this non-profit to uh to get a little legal structure around the meetups that we were organizing and back in this time i was working for the european commission um on the french side i was a statistician and economist for some of the studies that the commission was publishing and

while the the the giant giant leap was uh going to going to shanghai from for deathcon 2. um i got many many good adventures uh happened there uh i met lots of good people um i think i'll pass yours and mine cross maybe a little later or in shanghai um and you know this is this is where uh the whole adventure really really started like um i met joe lubin we were uh fantasizing about opening an office in europe um i had just uh had an offer from elston young to start their blockchain team it was 2016 yeah like about time

um and also the foundation of italy can uh back in those days this was min chan we were looking at organizing uh events uh similar to defcon in in paris or in europe so they put us in dutch like ethereum france and uh and um and the german foundation and and the organizers from edgon to have them set up etc in paris and so we did that got in paris in 2017 and we liked it so much like organizing an event like this in paris was so great that we decided to do the same thing every year and so far so good i'm uh knocking on wood we managed to organize this conference every year ever since

so 2017 for the zero edition edcon paris and then hcc one two three four and five um and on the side i was following my my own career in the space so i worked at anste young for about a year and a half and then i work at consensus for about two years and then i worked at ledger for a year and a half and now i'm uh i'm my own boss working on gameth and having lots of fun along the way uh asset changed the name to become ethereum france uh the website was created by simon simon porvo and then we were we decided to take this brand instead of assets because well it's easier for for uh no

for for speakers to say interim friends instead of assets and the brand is a bit a bit stronger um and yeah we are at the moment preparing to open the sponsorship the call for sponsors and the call for for for um speakers for htc next year july 2022 i'm looking forward to seeing all of you guys in in paris and also uh congrats to uh to to the least count guys for hosting a beautiful conference that happened last week and shout out to ignosis we were doing such a great job and uh i've been using cowswap and testing it out in lisscon it's pretty pretty nice i i mean with regards to like ecc i mean i'm always just so thrilled that like

there's such a great conference happening in the city where i live and like that i don't have to travel to go there it's like i just go home at night it's really great and i mean this year was you know amazing um given the context i think it was like a a huge achievement to be able to like host etc in in such a context i wanted to mention about dcc that uh we are still doing this conference we are doing this conference as a non-profit and try to keep the same uh same vibe of uh yeah just it's it's at cost just come have fun if you don't get a ticket because whatever reason it's sold out uh just get there and enjoy the side events and so on but from an organizer's perspective we are seeing this uh this

shift in the in the ecosystem where uh now people are coming to acc to do business they know they are going to to meet people that will be partners will be uh will be potential clients could be potential um colleagues um so it's really nice to see uh how our our ecosystem matured uh through the eyes of the conference that we organized and i i hope that next year we will finally get to uh to bring asian projects to uh to paris because that was one of the one of the things i regret the most over those years uh i think 2019 we were too young and and still too much in the beer market to really get people to travel 2020 people were ready to travel but got denied traveling

and 2021 it was too unsure for people to travel so what i want for next year is that we really bring people from all over the world not only the western world in paris because it feels like so many things are happening uh in asia that we are missing out and now we could continue accelerating and growing the cake for everyone by uh getting dodos coming together there you go so if you're in asia and you know you've got a cool project and you want to pitch jerome uh you know we'll put the links in the show notes and where you can do that um so i just want to talk briefly about you know your role at ledger cause you recently left ledger as uh the i think it was a global head of customer success or like some customer-facing role um

you know because ledger is such a pillar i think in like the french crypto ecosystem and like in the global ecosystem like broadly what'd you take away from that experience like working there um so the the full title was double head of client success so it's uh it's like clearly a role that's uh that's big and small at the same time i was in charge of both the b2b and the b2c uh satisfaction of our clients so whether you are the holder of the the owner of a nano s on the no x or whether you are a a client for uh ledger custody solution for enterprise ledger vault um you will

at some point have had to to deal with deal with me on the support on what features you wanted or what uh what improvement of the of the of the one that you wanted the experience well uh first off when you change job in the middle of kovid it's um it's it's it's tough to get to manage a team of uh 35 or 40 something uh 40-ish number of people so large team and transition was uh was kind of hard to to manage large team uh and in the in the middle of in the middle of kovid so you don't get to create a human link so i had to work a lot on this to make sure that the team kept this cohesion um and also it was both a an exciting time for ledger because they

were starting to fundraise the bull market was turning off but also they unfortunately faced some difficulties with the data leak notably or uh with uh with um you know crypto in general like new things happening all the time new new requests all the time to to integrate xyz um so personally i i had um i had a very good time there uh this was a very demanding role um but i learned a lot being in touch with uh individuals like uh like pascal gutierrez like ian rogers like um uh jean-michel the guys in charge of the b2b division

um and i i got to see what a what a blockchain team that was trying to tackle the whole blockchain space because ledger is literally really not focused on bitcoin and ethereum uh they are focused on anything crypto focused on on getting people into crypto one way or another um so i learned how how hard it could be to to support all of those network at once i not also to to see the to see the constraint for the eyes of very security focused people but not really from a from a smart contract perspective but on a how to keep your key safe there are certain things that

ledger hasn't hasn't tried yet and i cannot say if they will go there on or not at some point but uh you know the example of smart contract uh um what smart contract wanted like uh like hypnosis safe for example is doing is something that it's not uh taboo but just weird from uh from a purely uh uh pure pure uh ledger set of mind uh those things are evolving of course but when i arrived at ledger i was like hey so cool guys uh i come from consensus we are doing lots of stuff about uh about smart contract security like a smartphone like secure let's go and they were like probably probably rightfully so well guys we focus on uh making good key

generation and making sure that the people know what they are signing so this kind of uh this kind of approach was uh really an enrichment for me um and i'm i'm glad about my my time there um that about the transition that i did between ledger and cometh and they were very supportive so yeah i i advise anyone that uh find a role on on the job list that that is a ledger to definitely consider applying it's a really good brand and really good team yeah i wonder how i mean how ledger is going to evolve as as crypto becomes more mainstream because you know i think for like a lot of people that

are coming into this space now like the other there's like been the cycles right so like people that came in in 2016 2017 i think were fairly technically minded and um you know had a good understanding of like how cryptography works for the most part and like the importance of holding keys and stuff the people i meet now that are getting into crypto are like just just like you know regular people they're like total normies you know and like i went to a party a couple weeks ago and like four or five people were asking me about crypto and how they can buy nfts and it's like it's a total new class of people it's not the same as like in 2016 it's like your neighbor right and so the the me the meme of you standing with your with your glasses saying like they

don't know i'm uh i'm a hashmaster yeah yeah it totally worked totally yeah yeah like hey you want the nft guy tell me how you can be into crypto so so this i mean it doesn't help that i walk around wearing like t-shirts that say leave you updated but um yeah so and i think for these people like the the the risk um associated to like holding your own keys and like storing those keys it's it's too much and i think that's it's too complex for like this kind of audience and so you know not to like not to to plug you know a a competitor here but like i i i've been working on another podcast called the zen crypto show with um with my friends over at zengo and you know we're trying to

educate people uh about crypto and like the experience there is you know there is a trade-off with regards to like who holds the keys because it's like a multi-party thing like they have a key and you have a key but i find that for a beginner i i mean that's something where i can go to and say like in five minutes like you're set up you're secure you can you can have crypto and i wonder where ledger is going to sit in this evolving ecosystem where they continue to have this um this uh this this product that relies on on key generation you're right it's a it's a it's a it's a tough question and i i i i don't have a definitive answer to that of course um

[Music] i i kind of remember the time where you were into crypto like in 2014 15 16 even 17 people were telling you like okay so key generation use a tracer or a ledger and also run your own node you have to run your own node or like running your own node to ever come into into to play now who's running their own note i'm running a note but because doing other things but like if you're just a user if you just have a if you're just buying a w whatever nft on openc you're not running your own node you're even potentially paying with credit card on openc so yeah i mean i run my own mail server and there was a time i think when people ran their own mail servers but at some point

people just started using gmail right and not to make this a whole conversation about you know about like you know this is the steering but but i think it is a a a pressing point that people are not going to continue using solutions like ledger if if there is this kind of technical burden and like this responsibility to have to keep your keys yeah but right but when you when you open up a ledger and you do the setup um and over the past two years the setup being a ledger has has improved a lot like you can always improve the user experience the user uh feedback on on what it is to start using the product uh but

in any case it will come down to this hassling uh like okay now you need to generate the key now you need to write down the 24 words look at what metamask is doing you you install metamask you start using metamask and every time you do a transaction i tell you like did you do your backup so you should do your backup um that's that's a good way to to just uh not force the people into into getting into it but at least the the the advantage of ledger over the solution is that you are doing this as link once in the beginning and you have to do it so you have to do this little education on key security key reliability key or responsibility

it's never enough because once it's done and you start trading you forget about it and at some point you remember that you give away your 24 words to your best friends which is now not your best friend anymore it's super tough to find to find the right spot on this center at cometh for example we have uh we are we are like at the at the opposite side of the spectrum um if you were to use our game uh we will ask you to connect with a wallet you have one you don't have one nevermind just put your email and we rely on magic link which is a a wanted provider based on on emails so every time you log in you receive an email saying you want to log into kamf

yes i want to log into gomav and now you are using this key to transact on our smart contract so we take away the liability from commerce onto onto magiclink yes but once we see that the player is accumulating some decent amount of valuable tokens uh we try to nudge them onto a better solution onto using diagnosis safe using a ledger using a thing and we have this concept of player profiles that is an externally owned account where the magic link account is the the reference for playing but whenever you want to do something uh something weird something more uh defy oriented we let you into getting something uh more secure but you know

that's a really good approach i i like that that kind of gradual approach to you know getting to a more secure a more secure solution there's no there's no one-size-fits-all and um it's it's going to be our our industries challenge for the next two or three years until eventually apple or samsung try start to put the wallet in the enclave yeah i mean i i think that's a good chance we're going to get there uh so let's uh this has been a long enough intro but this is really interesting i go on about this stuff um so yeah tell what what is comment and um you know what what kind of game is it what's your goal as a player like what is it for people who are not familiar maybe with gaming so much like what are some other

games that they may be familiar with at least just by name that kind of resemble uh cometh um so we had the first uh so now under the name cometh we we have different games um not only just one but at the moment two are live and another one is uh about to be released um so we see ourselves as a as a web tree game studio blockchain game studio um because the we emit some assets we emit nfts we meet some any rc20 uh that are used in our games so we see our games as the as an infrastructure where you can use the nfts that you've purchased from

us or the the tokens that you've acquired from playing our games the the first the very first game that we published was a kind of uh similar to the the dinosaur you get when you don't have internet you need to avoid the black holes and and and asteroids coming to you and you're just moving your spaceship you're talking about like in chrome when you when your internet's not working and you play with a little dinosaur jumping over yeah we did a proof of concept of this based on the on the nft that we minted and then we we start trying out a another game that for us was a way to uh to to test the limits of what blockchain can do in terms of gaming

so cometh the game that was live from february to end of september after this we put the game on ayatus before deploying a new one was a real-time strategy game so you had to position yourself in the space and the only way you could position yourself in space was to pay another player to move you so it's a concept we invented called gravity pulling sebastian you have a spaceship i have a spaceship i want to get closer to you i'm paying you to drag me towards you and why would you pay anyone to drag you in space well you want to position yourself on the trajectory of approaching asteroids and if you get

close enough to those asteroids you will be able to mine the the tokens that are on those asteroids so we started off with this uh concept of you launch your spaceship in the space your spaceship is orbiting around a star and many players are doing the same your initial position is sort of random and we have uh asteroids popping up randomly and you need to get close to them and then we observe what the players did so so the players were leveraging their position when they were in a good spot they were upping their price when they were in the bad spot they were pushing the price down uh they were anticipating where the the asteroids were going to pass by and changing the price accordingly

they were jumping from one solar system to another and collaborating with each other to do those jumps effectively and then we started to host esports tournaments so large-scale tournaments where uh up to 1 000 people played together at the same time and that from uh i think 1000 people playing on the same map is something that's really hard to do in the in the traditional gaming space well it's weird to try after traditional finance here comes the traditional gaming so traditional traditional gaming you have a server you connect a certain number of player on the server and if you want to connect thousands of players on the server it's it starts to become a network challenge

creating thousands of people on the blockchain is what the blockchain was made for the only drawbacks is that the the game cannot be cannot be entirely in real time it has to be turn base or turn based with real time so you can only do an action every four seconds but we can adapt that to the gameplay so that it feels natural to play this way so that was the the second game we published and uh we had a we had a little success with this about ten thousand players tried this game um and and gave us a lot of feedback to to build better games next and the way we are going to continue on to this is uh by building up an ecosystem of game that are all fitting together onto a large exploration

space uh drama and and role-playing game but every time we ship a a standalone game that gets plugged into the whole ecosystem and we but battle test it and improve it as uh as time go okay so comment is is is becoming or will become an ecosystem of games all these sort of like mini mini games or more or less big games you know like uh all in this ecosystem and when you're playing you know those interactions happening between those different games so you might have like an mmorpg over here and you might like have some other sort of gameplay over here and then these games sort of interact together uh via the d5 primitives that uh exist um

underneath yeah that's right imagine this uh imagine this this flow you you arrive in the game you get a basic introduction of what you can do with this you are the captain of a spaceship you can recruit uh crew members you can equip your spaceship with uh xyz items you can showcase your nft in your in your spaceship and you get to explore the space around you you get to mine resources on on different asteroids you can get to go to a crafting bench where you can try to craft stuff and soon enough you realize that there are games of player that you may join and have a more of a social experience there are some quests that you can do and learn more about the story behind the game or uh the story behind the project financing this

guild for example this guild or this quest you may you may encounter a another player that is aggressive and he will ask you for a fight or you may you may run into a an angry mob and after you have to fight this uh this um these opponents but the fighting of an opponent is something that we call cometh battle and comet battle will be the the next minigame that we are going to release and as we balance and improve this game we will make it uh make it fit into uh the global exploration side of it you just said something here that just clicked with me and when you said financing uh guilds and i i couldn't help but just picture

an ecosystem where you may have investors that are coming in and financing teams through a dow and essentially getting like a return on that investment through through the dow just like you would finance like you know a an esports team or anything like that it's like it's like yeah it's super interesting it's just lots of different ideas come to mind here yeah well to to to approach to this uh one that we have already tried and another one that we will try in the short run is that um some of the esport tournament that we had were restricted in access to some kind of spaceships so if you have a rare spaceship or a mythic spaceship you can access the top tier tournament it means that only if you were able to

mint those those rare nfts or or i find them by chance or purchase them on the secondary market on the primary rockets you had access to those tsunamis now not all of the top spaceship owner are the best players so we created a rental system where a player can say hey here's my here's my chancellor a beautiful spaceship that we are in the game he is my chancellor if you want you can rent my chancellor and i'm renting my chancellor to any players that is in the top 50 or the top 100 and we have a revenue sharing scheme where you get 95 of your of your income with

this spaceship and i get five percent uh this was the the rental service that we put in place for the for the first game we are continuing to build on top of it for the next game but we want the the players that are investing in those nfts that have effect from one game to another to also be able to feature them and and lend them to other players uh some some other some some guilds of players are uh already accumulating some spaceships uh in the in in in that view like preparing for for this kind of thing and the other thing we can do with uh you know what you mentioned about financing gears and so on is that um content creation can be brought into the game in the form of uh

nft enhanced experience so let's say you have a an avi ave nft uh like you equip this rv nft and now you get access to three or four uh requests in those requests you get special things that were uh that were a special experience that was created by all team and the avid team uh getting you to different systems getting you to uh different game mechanics and at the end if you manage to win the quest you can win a little bit of avid token or with access to a specific thing related to avec so it gives those social nfts or just a beautiful piece of art nfc that were created by those projects also a game

utility and and can be enhanced with the rental service that you you can say well i had this quest i i i managed to go into this quest so now i'm going to uh i'm going to lend my nft to sebastian so sebastian also will have this the same experience as me how many users are playing the game and i don't know this what is the game's market cap [Laughter] so the the main game that we run from february to september had 10 000 unique players with uh only a little bit a little bit more than four thousand spaceship minted so the the rental service worked worked very well uh we had about five thousand rental contracts that were

created so players had the at the choice between uh getting a really cheap spaceship and trying out the game in a in a in a reduced uh area like the the size of the game when you had this nearly free spaceship or sometimes free spaceship is was not really big or they get to rent a better spaceship and and go uh and go in the in the wild so 10 000 players tried the game about 2 000 played monthly at the peak of the game and a little bit more than 700 were playing daily the the game was very active in terms of transaction being being signed and sent to the blockchain

one of our key achievement is that we managed to to overflow the number of transactions counted on on polygon scan so here's for uh his folder achievements for quite some time he was saying minus one minus one transaction on the bus token because when you are when you are interacting in the game you have to transfer most to other players in order to to move the the game token is called the must must and there is one million must in the that have been minted uh it will be ever minted and and the price of the must i think today is 120 or something and now when it comes to the locked value in the game it's uh it's difficult to answer because like

most of the spaceships in the game are in the game uh so does it count as value and uh not all of the mastercam has been distributed so who knows what's the what's the well it's difficult to find a good model to to to have uh to frame you or your analysis hey it's okay what's the tvl what's the number of players okay let's go i mean no i'm out uh more on uh on an activity based or on a on a content creation base maybe that's uh that's the right approach to look at it that's cool um so let's let's dive into like the you know the back end a little bit like what's under the hood and you know talk about the different d5 primitives that exist uh sort of like underneath these games so

like i understand there's a there's an amm which is kind of like a uniswap clone and does the renting like have some sort of a lending and borrowing protocol underneath it so the the rental system was uh was bespoke um the idea is that we create an account that um that you transfer your um so we create a smart contract account you transfer your nft to this smart contract account and and then me as a as a renter i will look at the the contract that are open for for for rental and they have a condition saying if you want to rent this uh you send the owner this amount of token to enter

and they have uh they have they have a constraint on every time you mint something um a certain portion of what you've minted or what you what you've gained in the game will be sent to the owner as well so the the rental system it works is a simple externally owned account with different walls the owner of the account uh will be the person that owned the nft but the operator of the account will be the will be the the rentee and now this rental account manager whitelist that is the contract that the person is allowed to interact with and those contracts are the contract of the game of course so it's a straightforward way to do to do rentals uh

in the first place uh we have some improvement and things we want to add to uh to this this rental system and we'll work on this for the next version of the rental system on the side of this rental system there is a as you mentioned an imm you need swap fork we we we call it comet swap uh it's not it's not cow swap it's comet swap um and it's uh it's a decentralized exchange uh built on top of polygon at the moment in that list a lot of gaming projects in this in this amm and the reason why we wanted to have an amm is that the fees that are generated by the amm are sent into the game so the more the activity of the amm the more the more things are sent into the game

and also we we rely on the amm to uh to to create game experiences so in the in in the next version of the game something that we are working on right now uh actually um is the crafting system so when you have two resources you can combine them into a new item but how much of resource a and average of resource b you need to put in is actually based on the state of the pool from a to b in the imm so we rely on the on the route on the routing of the amm uh to to to to create dynamic recipes for items so this way we are stabilizing the economy of the game so that uh if there is an excess of any resources

uh it translates itself into uh the not it doesn't translate into uh an excess of any items that can be crafted with those resources and when you dig deeper and deeper on on applying decentralized finance services whether it's in-house or or third party based into a game economy you you find out that you can build um game economy that are much more advanced and and resilient than existing games so uh crafting system is only an example but we can we can we can look at different different topics in the same way the next step for us will also be to to give access uh directly from the

premises of the game um to some uh some some some other services like ave like vehicle finance like sushi swap like stackdown and so on to make sure that all players while they are playing are also getting into educated on what they can do with that token and what they can do with them so i mean why did you build your own amm though and like i mean because like there's so much more liquidity in [Music] in in other amms like are are you able to tap into some of that liquidity elsewhere or and i guess like there's a i i if all these primitives exist already what's to stop someone from building a game like on top of ave or on top of

like you know uniswap or any other like they should just steam defibrillative they they should definitely um so one of the one of the driver for us was to be able to properly manage our own token list and so it's it's it's in the white paper so i'm not giving away any alpha here but uh whenever we integrate new resources so like we are going to use the whole chemical um chemical elements as resources in the game so we want to make sure that uh we have like you're mining gold you're mining silver gold and uranium okay okay so you have uranium so like it's those are new tokens that we need to list uh we wanted to to have the end on uh

how much a trading fees was sent to the lps how much trading fees was sent to the game itself we tried to make a link between uh having the nft and uh and having a say in the game having a stake in the game so uh the the fees that those simple d5 primitive collects uh are are meant to be redistributed to the players or i mean to go either directly or through the game to the players so relying on on another on the third party decks for the for the imm was clearly not considering this imm as a public utility for the roller for the whole game which which which it came into came into uh

came clearly as pretty soon when we when we started to uh to conceptualize the game um on the other side uh having um [Music] i think lending protocols um is really it's really hard if you don't have the proper liquidity today the game can very well live with uh with not so big liquidity not that's a big uh not that's a big volume because uh it's restricted to the community of players we have and so i think we are we are very very happy by running our own decks at the moment uh it might may change in the future but it also facilitates so many things in terms of integration and ease

of use for our players that it's it's it's fine to do so um but i think the next uh the next play if we were starting to have liquidity problem would be to to use an aggregator like one inch or power swap and expose that to the players it's just that the token that we want two features token that we want to showcase we want to to have direct access to to them and and to how the the imm is dealing with them also if you want to do some um some um liquidity mining operations like uh giving away some most to some liquidity providers it's much easier to have the end on your own imm in this case and right now it's not uh it's not too cumbersome for us to to

entertain it and manage it uh so we will continue this way i think so so you mentioned must um so talk a little bit about the the native token or like tokens must and dust uh what are the roles in the game and how do they interact with each other so the the the most token is the utility token of the game um and when you are staking must you are getting dust now what can you do with the must uh in the most with the most you can pay for in-game transactions so most of the of the game products or most of the services in the game are labeled in in must so if you wanted to come close to your spaceship i would have to pay you invest

and the dust again when you are not using your must just take your must and get some dust and with the dust token you can redeem new nfts or you can redeem some some some operations in the game like new spaceships or new piece of art from the game or some advantages so like participating getting a ticket for the next tournament you get that by by staking rust and using your dust in that uh in that respect uh the dust is a is a transitionary token for for us um because we are um we are about to to run our own scalability solution or to to to use our own scalability

solution and use that scalability solution to to really give a free-to-play experience to our player so one of the things that we haven't chatted about yet is uh how expensive it is for a user to actually play on the blockchain um well you have to pay for your transaction that's the thing so if you are going to bring people from outside the the blockchain space into the blockchain space with your game you have to figure out how you want to make sure that they are they are they are paying for their transaction are they pay for the fees of the transaction so when you look at um at companies like uh well games like axi infinity or or what uh what

the nba top shot and and and lava labs games are doing they are running their own infrastructure because they want to make sure that the players are actually having this free-to-play experience but at the same time you want to limit them into how many actions they want to do because you don't want anyone to spam your chain when you are when you are running this chain um so we see dust as a good way also to uh to meter the user's activity so in the in the next game what's going to happen is that if you are staking must you are getting dust and when you are using uh when you are playing you can actually uh rely on the dust that you have accumulated to pay for a transaction yeah so i hadn't considered the

transaction fees actually like a reaction needs to pay for transactions you would feel that uh being on polygon you get no transaction fees but yeah the the this chain is uh is victim of its success uh it's getting more and more expensive for players to um to to transact on this chain and at cometh we we are looking at optimistic product solutions whether it is optimism of our often lab uh we spend a week in lisbon uh doing tryouts uh on our own fork of abitram uh we will continue to test other solutions like start net and trying to figure out how we can best pay for the infrastructure of our player so the the ideal situation would be that

you are a new player you are getting uh you are getting a free spaceship you are exploring the game you are starting to like blockchain um it's amazing but you know you've done 10 or 20 transactions today and it will tell you like hey tomorrow uh you'll have 10 new transactions but we will only pay for 10 transactions per day if you want to do more just take some must and you'll get a you get access to this infrastructure that we are paying for our players yeah i want to i want to come back to the to the scalability and like this this arbitrary fork that you're working on um but uh but before that i i i'm i'm really kind of interested in this i guess it's the the permissionlessness that comes around this so like there's two aspects one is like we discussed

earlier or people could start building it you know interfaces on top of existing d5 protocols and like you said they should and you know this might happen as i guess as um as these platforms move on to layer twos where transaction fees are lower there's more there's more scared of scalability and where composability is maintained right so like if you have like a bunch of d5 platforms like on uh polygon or some other two then the opportunity opens up for people to start building like games or other like interesting interfaces on top of these things but then there's also the other uh aspect which i think is interesting and and really lends itself well to gaming and that is that players could build their

own sort of in-game assets by minting their own nfts and building their own um assets and it's kind of similar to how um people like have been building game mods like for you know for for so many years right like all these game mods that exist and all the games that you know people play you know what what's the level of permissionlessness here that exists like can can people to start building their own assets they say definitely candle uh like there's there's no limit into it uh right now the the next iteration of the game like the comet battle um so the battle system of the game that we will release pretty soon

i think it's a matter of weeks now well we we look at all the nfts that you have on your wallet and we let you use those nfts as skins and and even mint real in-game items from them uh if you fit certain conditions so if you decided to create an fts of your t-shirt uh you can literally use this t-shirt as a something you you put on the wall in your spaceship or something that you showcase to other players when you are playing against them um but that's that's only a first i mean uh the all the whole scholar system of action infinity was built by fans people wanted to to use this and wanted that to happen and the team was busy delivering something

else so they just let mothers uh create their own mod and create what is now uh the key features of x infinity um i'm i'm not 100 familiar with uh the the game mods economy um i think there is a distribution scheme that is available in uh in in steam and so on if you want to sell some schemes if you want to sell some some stuff um but it's it's much better from uh from a blockchain perspective to to to be able to directly incentivize people to um to actually build stuff so we are we are very proud of our crafting system uh and we are sure that people

will start building on top of it saying like hey i'll get the crafting system optimizer to look at the stages of the market for all the items that are available and will and will tell you to craft xyz and put them on the market directly like it would be pretty cool to build that we won't have to have to build it but like anyone can build it and it's uh it's just relying on basic d5 primitives so just go on and build it uh yeah you end up having something it's cool it's cool so they consider the overlap that that can then happen between like different games so like you know there could be like comments and then some other games and the composability allows for those skins and those mods to overlap and to like jump into other game ecosystems and like uh universes i think that's like a

really interesting idea yeah it's it's um from from a yeah from commerce perspective it's uh it's an amazing way to do cross pronunization like uh say we create a a set of uh of quests for anyone that has a doki doki finance nft pretty cool gasha points uh catch up on the project where you put some coins in in the cash upon machine and the cash upon give you uh a special nfc so we could very well uh build up a collaboration whether it is decentralized permissionless or really centralized like a it's it's us from the commerce team talking to the doki doki finance team and telling them like hey let's do something like we create a special quest for for your for your nfts

and anyone that has this nfts in their wallet can have access to these special quests or maybe we have it as a as a community request like uh we realize that all of our community members have doki doki finance nft as well uh they are going to ask us to put that on the roadmap like hey create special content if we have this kind of nfd's and maybe we can just uh do a call for call for content like guys we have a 10k to spare on creating this content like uh who wants to take it out and uh and yeah it's it's it's a way to make the game evolve uh by getting the community directly involved um which can be could be done by with in a

centralized manner but it can be done in a much much more streamlined manner with the blockchain uh i remember the the the days where we had a bounty network uh product that was unfortunately stopped but uh it was really good to to find freelancers like you could just ask for a task on bounty network and you grow your network of freelancers and eventually you find even full-time employees for this way so i'm i'm really keen to see where the the whole gaming ecosystem will be in the next uh in the next six to 12 months is because they will get integrated pretty fast so you um so cometh was launched uh on polygon and now you're getting ready to launch your own arbitrary fork

uh how important was it for you to have your own l2 and what are some of the challenges that come with that running our infrastructure for the players are is is getting more and more of a necessity we haven't really set up mind into whether we're going to use this technology or that technology or whether those technology are going to be mature enough so that they can even service us for that um but it's now become clear to us that um from a user experience we we cannot um we cannot not be on our own infrastructure if we could we were running on our own um ethereum chart and and be with all

the game on the ethereum child uh but that's that's not going to happen between now and probably the next 18 or 24 months so looking at what big projects like uh like like flow and running did to to their respective games um you you become the master of the infrastructure for your players so polygon is is a very good scalability solution is a very good way of getting more throughput for your users and the the success that they have in terms of of number of daily active addresses is just mind-blowing because so many people were wanting to move their if wanted to move the token and use products that they couldn't on the on on the ether magnet

because of the fees but yet putting so much throughput like one block every four seconds leads to to rpc problems leads to uh to some network instability and also to the network getting any more and more expensive uh don't get me don't get me wrong it's it's very fine it's very cheap and it's working very well for for your daily usage on on polygon uh but from from a game developer perspective we cannot say to our players like guys we're sorry the rpc endpoint is it's down we run our own and we pay for subscription but those days it's not that good or oh we sorry today there was a crash on the market so everybody is super active and the gas price is not 30

gigaway it's 2 000 gigaway uh and it happened on ethereum it happened on polygon as well so we would like to be able to to completely separate the the game activity from the on-chain activity but still keeping the game activity based in the blockchain so the the the games that we developed have their game states stored in the blockchain executed and stored in the blockchain uh all the d5 primitives needs to stay in in in sidechains or or or mainnets or whatever you want to call them that have bigger security primitives but we want to have the game happening and the game interaction happening in an infrastructure that we can we can pay for uh and and we can and we

can maintain for our players so uh optimistic wall-ups at large are a very interesting solution for this um because they they they offer the security primitive that uh you can get out without us uh through the food the trustless bridge uh it takes some time but you don't have to trust us for this or you can accept it trust us and we are a liquidity provider in and out and compared to the zk roll ups we imagine that we are going to have to change quite often our contracts so it may be a better a better a better proposition of uh value for us to use optimistic rather than dk but we are going to do some triads on the zika roll ups as well to

make sure that uh we are not missing something and and yes so um as you mentioned it's uh it's it's we are getting into uh abitram and uh we think that the option lab team is really proficient into what they do um i hope that in the short run we'll have dedicated uh roll-up deployers uh world of maintainers that that can service applications like us uh till then we are doing our r d and uh and continuing to improve uh the future infrastructure that we will be deployed on um but it's it's good for us to be able to say to our players oh guys we're sorry uh the sequencer is down uh so no in and outs over the next two hours it's our problem and here's updates on what's going on rather than uh having to rely

on a third party telling us that oh stay tuned we are going to update you and so on uh we want to be responsible for this it's uh it's better for the overall uh overall experience are you concerned that it's like one thing that i think is really important here and if we go back to what we discussed earlier and like all of the uh composability and the interactions with like other nfts outside of the um comet ecosystem and interaction with amms et cetera like as the secret system grows are you concerned about composability starting to present a problem because like if all of your stuff is on one um layer two you know you need to create bridges

basically with all the other layer twos or all the other platforms how does that like yeah so it's it's definitely uh it's definitely an issue um so also also something that make us a little bit more bullish for our use case on optimistic than on zk's like i said it's we all it's not a it's not selling stone we're we are trying out and and considering different options uh but the composibility uh inside an optimistic wall up is quite more doable uh as far as far as i know for the moment um so that's that's one thing um and then if you put yourself in the shoes of the

players and uh you're like getting uranium getting uh then getting gold crafting this new new uh new thruster uh with uranium and gold and uh putting that on the market and uh or using that for yourself and at some point you get bored with the game and you want to sell those those items while you say those items open see you already get in markets and you get some e4 you get some magic for it or you get usdc for it uh and then you want to do something with those tokens that you had you want to put them on aved you want to put them on social swap well we are not going to to to beg those projects to come and be live on our rollup and i mean they should stay where they are and they should follow their own lead

uh but as long as the the roll-up of the cdb solution that we use is plug into a bigger chain with all of those public utility we can streamline the interactions between the roll-up and those public utilities for them and give them a good experience on using that and eventually also paying for the gas to for them uh so that they can they can they can use it for almost free um and then the possibility problem we're coming back to uh to how we uh to where we frame the thing from a user perspective uh the player profile for us should be an externally owned account uh where erc has a good way of of logging in and using a a game-only wallet that

can can be connected with your email or can be connected with another notification on the phone or something that is really handy and you don't have to carry over a specific iot for it whether it is ledger or trezor but once you are creating your user profile well why don't you declare that you want the older wizro to go to this account that you secure with a ledger or why don't you want to say that uh you have this uh this is your polkadot uh address and and you have lots of parking lft on it oh this is your tesla's address and you have lots of uh nft on it so once you declare that from your player profile for us it's uh it's uh it's not easy but it's it's it's doable to to fetch the data

that you have on your wallet and tell you like oh that's cool you have this uh um this this this nft like uh do you want to showcase it in the game you know you can use it and that's fine we collect those data for the players and we give them a in enhanced experience just looking at those what is that they have now for of course getting getting real composability uh not just read but also right it's going to pose challenges i don't know where it will be going uh if there is any any good project or good a good initiative to to enhance the the composability from the right perspective between different chain uh we would gladly uh participate to a git coin operation with them or give away

some some funding and grants for for this because it's going to be key in the future as uh i don't expect the blockchain system to over uh centralized or or over merge into just having two winners bitcoin in the ethereum uh all the chains are here to stay and also solutions already to stay in for the greater good because they all have a specific value proposition for the users so let me ask you this if you had not been so invested in ethereum and you know uh like in in that ecosystem tractor extractor you know the guy who's like you know launched a theater in france from from your personality

like why why not build this on like something like solana or on cosmos where transaction scalability is like not an issue and you have full composability uh with other apps like technically speaking i'm just like playing devil's advocate here like technically speaking that's feels to me like a better uh solution because you don't have this uh issue with composability but especially with a game where um you know the cost of transactions needs to be super low uh near zero and you you have lots of transactions it's like every action is a transaction so we we are not not building on solano we we may or may not be maybe building on solana in the future um that's that's

still a possibility for us how to how you can see the inner contradictions [Laughter] well i think it's a bit it's a bit early for us not to to go on a metro chain like ethereum when you want to build on a new chain uh and by new chain i say uh not fully not fully evm compatible chain so not an evm chain my own experience with uh studying in the early days to to do some diesel stuff some cosmos stuff some polka dot stuff um i've run nodes on those chains i've tried to i i want to experience the chain by myself i want to run a node i want to try to do smart contract i want to install the

wallet i want to like spare 20 of the local token and try to use apps and make my own decision make my own feeling about this um we haven't tried enough uh deeply enough solana to to have uh to have a final decision on where is it good or not to go there but but trying out other protocols the the experience was all the time the same like the first years there is a there is a need for solidization a need for reusable code the need for reusable you audited public utilities code uh that you can you can pick and install um you need to have a good access to a wallet and i heard very good thing about surrenders wallets by

the way um before you decide to put a five person full time on on translating your stack into this new chain what's good about ethereum and the evm franchise is that everything is already built up and everything is being redeployed so i go on the on on near protocol i go on ave on an avalanche i go on a on whatever evm chains uh i i got my own uh i got the the old con the the comfort of having access to sushi swap to to to curve and ave um i got access to uh the the the erc 71 and 1155 standard that deployed

everywhere i got also some time access to a good market like like openc so it feels just direct to go there because we are at a stage of maturity where we are not preparing for having 10 000 users we are preparing for our 200 000 users so from a strategic perspective do i go on a change that already has those 2000 users and i'm going to to try to get a a a subset of them or do i go on a change that i've just launched with many promises many good people building on top of it and and that may or may not be there when i'm ready to go there um it's it's it's a tough strategic

decision to take um and also you get pressure from your community from your investors from whoever saying you should really go on solana because it's new and it's great or you should really go on dfinity because it's new and it's great but then when it comes to politicization you want to have the product that works and we've seen so many so many projects that are super ambitious in what they want to deliver and encounter so many blockers so many things that they need to solve before before we being even ready to ship we don't want to fall into that trap uh we ship and ship and ship and ship and at some point if we encounter a big

problem we switch to another chain but focus on chipping and having things that can be used by our by our by our users well as an investor that's the answer i wanted to hear no but i think like i think you're right that you you get the you get all the stack that comes with the e like being in the evm franchise um well we should we should make sure that we are not uh we are not getting uh resting too much like uh yeah it's the evm franchise everything is ready so are we are we being um are we being too comfy or so comfy that we don't want to use something else uh

we need we need to to to stay curious and and continue to try out new things yeah yeah i mean my i guess like the thing that i see as the biggest advantage of being on you know a chain like like salon or even like building a cosmos um sdk chain is the the user experience of um especially when attracting new like non-crypto users like we are we're all you know familiar with transaction transaction fees and like moving things in and out of polygon and arbitrarily and like having to bridge and this sort of thing but to uh to a novice user or like a total like non-blockchain user who's

just like hey this is a cool game uh i heard it uses a blockchain but like i just want to play this game all those layers of complexity um are unknown and then you know as a game developer you kind of have to like like build the game dynamics that kind of like mask those so it's like moving to another like another galaxy is like bridging over to another thing like you have to create and so there's like it's it's there's two parts to that there's one is okay it gives opportunity creates opportunities to create interesting game dynamics in terms of the interface but at the same time it's like all this kind of technical complexity yeah well let me uh well all the nfts or the spaceship and fts that we've minted are uh initially minted on ethereum

because we we don't want we don't want to have them we want we want to have them uh to give them the canonical existence on the biggest variable chain okay well that's right we meant on interview so we started to mint on it i mean in july in in january uh 2021 uh some people bought those nfts and we were saying them hey in four weeks we are launching the first version of the game is going to be on polygon it's going to be super fun but let's let's go and then the the date arrived i think it was the ninth of february and we're like okay guys the bridge is ready uh we had deployed the bridge we had uh we had uh made sure that our contract were both on

polygon and on uh in on ethereum um yeah that's that's another constraint that we haven't mentioned is that uh if you are not running your own um your own infrastructure on the on the scalability solution that you are going to use uh you need to rely on the the team behind this uh the core team behind this scadabit solution that you are using and get some of their bandwidth and ask hey do you want to like here please help me out i need i need a copy of my erc71 contract here and there so another holder that you have to deal with but then the date arrived the bridge opened and you'd say people are like hey guys send your spaceship on polygon first step oh sorry approve the sending of your

spaceship on particle send your spaceship on polygon okay now switch your metamask to polygon and we were one of the other supporter of the uh the pull request on metamask to make sure that uh we can push the change of uh of network directly on metamask which wasn't available before february so imagine sorry so to change the network you have to open the network tab in the parameters of your metamask and add this add that oh damn the the pop-up just closed so you have to do it all over again oh my god then now you're on polygon uh thanks god polygon is giving out uh one party one matic to everyone that's new

to the chain so you have some magic to pay for your transaction good for you so now you go on the website of commeth and you you approve your spaceship and now finally you send your spaceship in in in play so who in their right mind would do five transactions between two networks in order to play a game yet we had to bring people to do that so it was it was so cumbersome um and unfortunately on the 9th of february we had a little dip on the market and the gas price went from that 30 degree away to 200 and people are like i cannot play it's too complicated and but luckily for us like the aviguchi guys had their community do that the same day

as us so we tried to hold our hands and and push the people to do that but yeah it's it's so so much all so much uh so so many things to to do from one chain to another that um it made us realize that we want to keep the users at the same place as much as possible and only get them through these kind of hurdles when uh they are about to do an action that's going to benefit them financially uh at first so keeping the game on a scalable infrastructure and keeping the keeping the the the defy and blockchain stuff and also blockchain stuff on another infrastructure that has better security primitives we're trying to stay pragmatic there so

maybe not solar next month but uh what else maybe one day cool well i'd like to take a step back here because we're we're running low on time we've actually gone over the the time that we usually uh you know to spend on these episodes but uh we'll we'll go over a little bit you know like i i s i'd like to ask you like if you look at if you look at the the gaming industry like it's a multi-billion dollar industry and like i see ads for these kinds of games all the time right like the ages of empire and like all these farming games and whatever and like people play these games and they spend lots of money like buying basically the currency that allows them to like play this game and um you know this is an entirely new model

where well there's more interaction and interrupt interoperability between you know different games so like games are not siloed the ability for users to generate content and then sell that content on secondary markets and even have that content interact between the games is much higher so there's less friction and like less siloed ecosystems you does the gaming industry the current gaming industry in particular like the mobile gaming industry which is massive do they have an incentive to move towards a model like this or does it really disrupt their model uh fundamentally like where where is the industry heading in terms of like siloed uh ecosystems

so yeah i'm glad we still have time because it's not a yes no question is it [Laughter] yeah i know so my my my my gaming years i was uh playing uh warcraft warcraft yeah that's that was like year 2000 2002 3. uh and then the these massive games called the world of aircraft just happened dragged thousands and millions of players there um and this is where we get the first cryptocurrency i'm

not the i'm not the first one saying that but like the gold of world of warcraft was sold on ebay um it was it was a currency that has value that has was being transferred between players way before bitcoin um i think vitalik famously said that uh he he got into blockchain because he was he was uh tired of having his favorite characters being nerfed in world of warcraft and and players that were selling their accounts selling their best gears or selling gold and and being convicted by blizzard got their account banned or or got their their subscription terminated

we are going from there to a massive interconnected uh game asset industry uh that's going to definitely change how the what what the business the classic business model for a game is so i understand that uh if if blizzard is looking at me jerome just joined world of warcraft play play three more three weeks and be like well i want to be level 60 right away and sebastian is selling his account so yeah how much do you want for your account 200 yeah set down i'm buying your account and blizzard will say like well now jerome is level 60 he will have access to the the final stages of the game uh but

i couldn't have milked jerome for 12 months he's on his way from level 0 to 60 so like my subscription model is uh is done like the subscription is your nft the subscription is your account you are selling your account you're giving away a subscription to someone else luckily like i i can i can as a blockchain game studio i can say well i get two or three percent on every trade on the secondary market as long as you do it in in my market you can go otc of course but uh i can maybe get a get a get a few uh a few pieces of revenue on these secondary market and i'm very willing to take this trade off of putting everything out of the market and liberalize it

and just getting a cut even a small cut on the volume that going to help the studio continue to create content for those assets i think that's a much more sustainable uh sustainable uh model than trying to systematically appeal to to to to tricks uh to psychological tricks to to keep people from playing and and buying and being uh and being uh addicted to the to the game into the mechanism of the game just by saying hey this is out you're paying for the nft once uh you're paying for some transaction eventually you can resell your nfts you can do this you can do that it's an open market and we are

building an infrastructure for those nfts and those tokens so come and have fun with us and if you like what you say saying well you are a community member you are a member of this infrastructure as we are and we are here to continue delivering content to you um so i i really hope that uh we'll see a supercharged version of uh successful mobile games that we see today but with a blockchains we were blockchain states with a blockchain mindset and um and yeah let's let's see if uh if if if apple apple uh uh apple store and and io and google saw will will let us live there uh but as long as they do i i don't see why we we

wouldn't succeed in this uh so yeah i don't i know that apple did uh appeal to the decision of uh of uh i i remember which trial it was that uh say that they shouldn't take 30 of every in-game transaction or in-app purchase yes the whole fortnight thing yeah epic games yeah yeah but ap games seems to be very open to this um so definitely epic games is a place where nft games is going to drive um i hope ios and and google saw will be the same uh so just uh crossing fingers there and uh hoping for the best for the gaming industry on the with the production mindset yeah i mean the the mobile ecosystem and

the like the mobile stores essentially like are i think like one of the big barriers to this taking off i think like it it it may take a while i mean at some point in in the past you know bitcoin wallets were uh forbidden from from the apple app store that has changed um and there does seem to be a shift now with like there's new rules now about apple um letting um app makers uh uh like allowing them to get their customers to go outside they have to uh to pay so there does seem to be a shifting mindset and as crypto becomes i think more um mainstream

these things are also gonna you know come with their own uh their own complexities but also like probably open up a little bit more i think you also said that would will the will the current games mobile games adapt to blockchain there's a fairly good reason for them to adapt because the the the community the blockchain community the people that are having tokens on their wallets the the millions uh i don't think it's a hundred of million people but the millions of people that have ether on their wallet are actually a community that is really loving crypto really loving blockchain uh and they want to play blocks and stuff they want they want to play blockchain games so there are a

niche of its own uh that needs to be serviced that needs to be entertained with proper games uh so that that's why blocks and games are thriving in the first place in my opinion uh and and mobile game developers should definitely look at this niche and and and try to address them with a blockchain minded game um so it's uh it's it it's it's a good trend and i hope we will meet them halfway like uh us blockchain native companies trying to build games that is played by uh your your your sister-in-law and your mother-in-law and your nephew that i didn't know anything about blockchain but like hey it's a blockchain game i want to try it out and on the other on the

side of the spectrum uh the game game lofts and the likes that will say well that's cool i can build uh candy crush chain or chronic crush at candy crusher hey it's connie crashed uh it's candy crush but on the blockchain on the interim blockchain uh yeah let's let's just do this and uh and try to appeal to this uh uh emerging community that is uh he wants to have fun with our with with our games on mobile yeah i mean i think there's no doubt that you know there's an opportunity here for you know gaming studios to do this now whether or not they will do that shift i mean essentially like these these are now like very big companies with hundreds and thousands of employees investors some of them are publicly

traded companies taking that sort of risk i think is not uh open to all of them i mean like you know even like a company like ubisoft which is right just down down the road from here um you know they have a sort of blockchain studio innovation lab and like they're doing some interesting things but like they're they they have like that that is a very complex uh sort of strategic shift i think for a company to say like okay now we're moving everything on to blockchain it's a risk and i don't see like lots of companies doing that and i think that there will be some form of disruption here in the space i'm not saying like all gaming companies are gonna uh like uh stop existing tomorrow but there

will be like a good set of them that where their model is getting disrupted from this in the next like five to ten years and shout outs to uh to to ubisoft because they they launched their rabbids uh as nfts on ethereum during ncc this year uh and all the proceeds of these nft sales are going to unicef another oh gno that that really uh really was into blockchain that created a units of created blockchain funds for uh for for emerging countries so they are definitely uh ubisoft is definitely going uh going deep into this technology and experimenting with it and getting ready for uh whenever they will think their their community is is mature to to be to be using those tools

um so that's uh that's definitely something that's that's going to happen i think i'm glad they are down the road and uh can't wait to have opportunities to collaborate with them cool well we're definitely pushing the limits here of the the length of this podcast uh but no it's super interesting i think like it's just um it's just a testament to the fact that we haven't really done a lot of content on on gaming and i mean i come at this from like a non-gamer perspective because i i don't play games i mean i play them once in a while like i'll play i don't know something on my phone or but i've never played anything i've never really been it's a crypto game right oh wow what are going to happen yeah that's a promotion every time you open it but you know i never got into the whole like

yeah we see like i never got into the whole world of warcraft thing or whatever but i i still like i'm an observer of the space and like one of my good friends worked at ubisoft and so like i think it's it's an interesting industry and so like i think that's why there's so much here to discuss but um before we wrap up like you know what's coming up for comments in the next you know year what's the road map here and then i i think you guys are hiring so maybe this is your chance to make a call to our audience yeah so uh we're definitely hiring uh we're differing we are hiring for lots of roles uh if you want to do that down data on blockchain data analytics on blockchain we're looking for for guys to do this we're looking for any any any full stack

dev that's uh that is passionate about blockchain and basically about gaming and wants to to get their hands on they they get they want to get their ends dirty reach out to me we have we have rules open for this if you have more of a of a of a product or a strategy mindset to do reach out as well uh the way we like to enhance the team is just meeting people meeting people that are passionate about what they want to do with us um and just growing the team and just not specifically opening roles and and try to grow from here the next steps for us is uh doing a little release probably at the coin gecko conference happening on the 16th of november uh so do do do stay tuned because we will have a lot of announcement there if you want

to keep track of the game development you can go on comment.io and uh subscribe to the mailing list you will also receive some nfts if you subscribe there so do do subscribe uh we want to have a big product launch in q1 uh 2022 um so that's that's one of the next steps for us um and uh another shout out to to know this uh for sponsoring this episode first but also for the the awesome work that they are doing not only on on cow swap but also on gnosis guild uh that's definitely the type of utility that we are going to try to use uh for our guild needs on on on comet um and yeah sebastian thanks again sir for

thanks again for having me uh it was a was a pleasure being there was a pleasure to finally be at uh at ep center after listening to so many of your episodes i mean technically you've already been on episode twice well yeah but interview for hcc does it yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like congrats to the whole epicenter team for being such a long-standing quality podcast i hope i can contribute to the quality of this podcast and uh and uh yeah thanks for everything i think so yeah i mean i i hopefully this will be one of you know many episodes we do on on gaming because there's just like so much happening in this space um maybe maybe epicenter gaming is like the next thing

well the next the next big thing is thanks a lot who is having a having a twitch channel with uh with you playing uh playing blockchain games with your non-blockchain background just tune in and watch sebastian play x infinity play cometh or try to try to make a living on the or buy crypto heroes or whatever yeah yeah that's right i'm going to start his twitch channel [Laughter] all right man thanks a lot thanks for coming in cheers