Karel Vuong on TreasureDAO and building the Nintendo of DAOs

Transcript

how do you interweave the economies as well which is also a really hard thing and so it's like if in this one game I'm creating a resource and then this other game I'm using it and I have ways to kind of intake it into my game and then I'm gonna craft something with it which then can be used on a character which is also used in the other game and also maybe three or four other games and so you kind of have this like built-in from the ground up and I think you can only kind of do that when like you're well one like maybe still small and still Grassroots and very Hands-On but also in a kind of ecosystem where we're more peers then we're more than and less

competitors which I think is the state of gaming right now welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to learn how to use web 3 business models to build thriving communities in sustainable Revenue today's the doer Spotlight and we have with us Corel from Treasure Dow if you have not heard about treasure Dow and you're in web3 or if you're new to web3 this is such a great podcast for you because this is somebody who's building an entire ecosystem within the gaming space treasure that was building the decentralized Nintendo

they're building the decentralized platform upon which a entire gaming ecosystem can be built and they're doing it in so many exciting ways we dive into so much of this in this episode we talk about the what it takes to build an ecosystem that involves a token that involves a nft Marketplace that enables new games to come on board but also new players to come into the ecosystem and connect and then we also talk about what it's like to build with Community to build IP from the bottom up and how you can involve people in building the culture of a game

and the culture of the IP that you're building we also dive into some future games and some future projects that are coming out on treasured out and we can't not have a conversation without talking about marketplaces we don't dive into the royalty side of marketplaces we more so Focus today on Trove Marketplace which is Treasures own Marketplace that they built that focuses on arbitrum nfts Treasures built upon arbitrarm they're on that layer two but this is a way that they have strategically decided to create a vertically integrated Marketplace and what does that mean and how can more doers and builders in the space think about building their own Marketplace it's really really interesting model that I think we're going to see more more people do this is

going to be a banger of an episode thanks so much for showing everybody really hope you enjoyed Today's Show before we get into it let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsors the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from

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code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for membership nfts if you're an nft Creator you can't rely on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft memberships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build on unlock learn more at unlock Dash protocol.com today with us we got a true doer on the show and you know how you know this is a true doer this guy dropped out of school because he wanted to do so bad he just wanted to get down to building Corral

welcome to the show my man how are you I am doing incredible thanks for having me on the show all right well Corel is the co-founder and CEO of treasure doubt and Carl I was so stoked about the show but before we get the treasure down let me just give a little bit of a brief background on who you are so you dropped out of school as I mentioned before and you can tell us maybe why did you drop out of school let's hear it from your remote yeah well so I went to a school it's called the University of Toronto nothing against the school school is great I mean I was always someone who just liked being Hands-On and so somewhere along the way and I was just I was coding I was building stuff on the side I just

wanted to do that and so that was really the pathway for me and so I ended up moving to the valley for a bit started working on the startup and the whole kind of shebang came back home was still kind of doing and so kind of got sucked in and never really went back and I'm sure my my parents love that to make fun of me for it and not finishing to this day but and nothing against Toronto I like you said both of us are from Toronto so shout out Toronto shout out to the six all the love there UFT is a great school just not for doers because some of us just we just have that itch and so you as you mentioned you moved out to SF you got involved in project management software engineer did that for a few years and then you joined a

pretty exciting fund the Damaris family did I say that right the demary family get that wrong every time the demaray family which is one of the wealthiest families in Canada and you joined there you were employee number one at this fund that they were building you worked your way up to become Chief to of staff to the CEO you left it 14 billion assets under management over 250 people from being number one like what a ride that must have been We're not gonna jump into that today although I'm sure there's many stories you could share out of that but through it all always playing gaming we're the love for gaming it was informative like growing up and I'm part of a an immigrant family the we didn't

have too much on them to kind of provide and so the one thing that kind of brought us together now brother Kevin and I think a lot of this is really from early years there's not much else to do and so we had commuter games we had dial up internet where we'd wait in front of LimeWire and wait for things to download and eventually you'd have a game that you could kind of play and so that was really just everything we could kind of do around that time and so we did everything together we played a bunch of games I mean for me I was like Starcraft blizzard all the games that kind of came from that and loved and kind of grew up on and so it was a perfect kind of storm eventually to get to where I am today of just being and

kind of being so immersed in games I love it it's a dream come true for sure so before we go down we explain how that led to you being involved in Treasure now and then going full time at treasured out I just gotta ask who if Kevin's listening to this who's the better gamer who would win it depends on the game depends on if it's Starcraft it will be me oh yeah you heard it Kevin come back we'll get you on the show you can get your you can get yours get back a girl so let's jump into first before you explain who treasure Dao is and it's definitely something that

is super a exciting for the future of gaming but also just exciting for web 3 because you guys are anybody who's in it web3 Enthusiast looks at an ecosystem that you guys are building and it's so impressive because you're using the Dow model you're using the marketplace and nft infrastructure and you're using community in such a powerful way and I'm just I'm so pumped to dive into all of it but let me just ask how did you kind of lead into treasure Dao what was your sort of entry point into the team yeah for sure I mean I won't go deep into the pre-treasure life but you know right like we were still doing stuff in kind of crypto at this kind of firm and

so it was always like adjacent to kind of everything I was doing and so as we were kind of launching our crypto funds and doing a lot of this kind of investing on as well it was always something that was kind of like top of Mind of like hey I'm spending my evenings and weekends and whatever very little time I had which I think resonates with a lot of people before they dive into the rabbit hole and yeah I mean it was just exploration and seeing this Tech that was kind of being built in I think at the same time I think it's it would be disingenuous uh not highlight which I think a lot of people kind of come into the space for which is like oh shoot like you can make a ton of money and so I can't say that

was what ended up happening for me I think for uh between that between the kind of just I think the ownership of the tech and all the stuff that it enables like that's a really cool thing and I think for me like I'm constantly kind of just enamored by like all this stuff and so around that kind of time frame I started getting a bit deeper into nfts and came across this thing called loot which eventually led into kind of treasure a happy to give the rundown on loot for those who don't know as well without going deep into Luke can you yeah so the one sentence I don't know if I can do in one sentence probably not it was a challenge yeah so so regular nfts they're represented by I mean typically represented by like some

visual image loot kind of flipped the model on that and was like here is like black kind of cards white text on it there were eight words on it and it was more of a like a building block if you will so it's kind of left up to whoever was on kind of the the holder side or just the community at large she was part of this kind of ecosystem to kind of do what they wanted with it and so I think that was just a really impressive and kind of Novel way of approaching it which led into a ton of different kind of derivatives or extensions of what this quote unquote kind of loot

metaverse could be and treasure was one of the derivatives that kind of spawned from that and so loot was kind of the like fantasy style like equipment it was like a helmet and a chest plate and a sword or something that kind of represented what you could kind of form around with kind of a number of game items and things like that yeah and web three game items because I think as we all know there's gaming Industries just it's ripe for disruption it's at a place where you've got these walled Gardens and then control and you don't have you don't have the opportunity for this exciting interoperability that web3

enables for ownership that web3 enables I don't think we need to dive deep into the problem of what's going on with gaming currently and why that why it's so exciting what I want to focus on is okay what does Treasure Dow offer and I'm going to pass this one over to you because I'm still trying to figure out the elevator pitch on Treasure Towers it's there's so much to it yeah right I mean so first and foremost we like to use an analog which I don't think actually captures it fully but it does a good enough job and we like to say that treasure is building essentially a decentralized Nintendo and so it is kind of part game publisher and part gaming ecosystem we have really set of games

that we kind of build ourselves but then we have Partners who we work with who are building their own games and these are game studios these are other builders who are are kind of in the mix well it kind of unifies and connects everything all together and underpins this entire ecosystem our set of kind of resources which we have this common kind of token it's called Magic it's the currency of treasure and then we have these building blocks in the same way that kind of being inspired by loot what if you had these game assets that you know are shared across a number of games and used in a interoperable kind of way wrapping it all together we have just

infrastructure just all the kind of tools things that you would need as a game but also as a player to really kind of immerse yourself and kind of build and participate in this ecosystem so that's a Marketplace that's a automated kind of Market maker and a number of different kind of elements there that we have kind of built for the community we say decentralized kind of Nintendo because it's always been kind of bottom up and Grassroots so when we started we gave everything away for free as a fair launch kind of free men for the nfts and it's function functional as a dow and so a lot of it is how do we kind of foster this ecosystem again like maybe even Polar Opposites of Walled Gardens we

want people to kind of come in and build with us and there's a process and ways to kind of do that to maybe formally be recognized by the Dow as like a game that is powered by treasure and so that's really kind of unpacking that that overall sort of term but I'm excited to just kind of see what's been built out and that's been over over a year now we have over 30 people that were kind of working with us and with the Dow kind of full time we've done a lot with our Marketplace and continue to kind of build a ton of games and it's an exciting kind of path we're on it's incredible it's been a year you guys have got 30 full-time people in the Dow which I mean even just we don't need to

go down the legal structuring formation how you manage salaries of like 30 full-time people but that's you start starting a company and getting to 30 people within a year is pretty rare so it's amazing how within a dow you guys are doing that you're such a leading example of Dow growth with so much success so okay let me just play this back to you so I'm a game developer I get to come into Treasures ecosystem I don't have to make my own token first of all complex tokenomics got to figure that out second of all I don't have to worry about my token being smashed in prices and that affecting my ecosystem which as we've seen so many times so many web 3 games have really failed

because of the speculation on their token and then all these staking rewards and these high yield promises and then the token struggles to keep up so I don't have to worry about any of that in your ecosystem I can just come in boom token already exists I get to use it it's got great liquidity and then it's got this amazing Marketplace behind it so so I can access the marketplace all my in-game items can be sold super easily I can buy and sell am I I also probably have access to a large community of Gamers right guilds and all these people who want to play the game so that's huge marketing for me as a as a game developer I mean I'm sitting here I'm not a game developer but if anyone out here is listening you should be

building on Treasure right this is the place to be so okay so I've got the full did I get that right did I miss anything in my We'll add one a couple maybe a couple of things so the token and the whole Magic kind of connection we've seen a number of models kind of come to light right as a builder you can choose if you want to use magic entirely and we've had a good example of that someone raised a ton of money they use four and a half million events to buy a ton of magic and they're using it for their game which is like a great kind of a proof point that is still being proven out they're actually launching very soon it's a game called battlefly but you also have different models where as a builder you probably also want as well

to maybe maintain and have freedom on your token kind of economics and how all that works and so we are seeing kind of like different models kind of form one where maybe they're using magic entirely and that's amazing another where they have their own token there's also a way for a magic to kind of be folded into it which is also awesome and kind of Blends itself to how do we Foster an ecosystem where a number of different models can exist and have that kind of tied together the other point I would add is I think beyond the community the ecosystem the tech I think there's a big Point around just like distribution and kind of just like go to market right and

so a lot of the stuff that we do is like how do we help to drive attention and kind of cross-pollination of the games across the ecosystem and so that aids and just like growing community and the player base and all that stuff I think the secret sauce which I think needs all of these ingredients to kind of be put together is the this point of like interoperability that is kind of Novel but also practical and comes to life because we are an ecosystem and because we have this token that links everyone together and then there's also just like an implicit where kind of all in this together and see it's kind of this like Rising tide that saw boats kind of

perspective it's less of I think what we're sort of seeing right now in kind of web through gaming which is almost like web 2 like brand Partnerships where it's like oh like X game I'm gonna incorporate your game nfts and characters into my game and you can kind of play this Loop and and I think we're also still early in that journey I think for us it's a bit of that but it's also how do you interweave the economies as well which is also a really hard thing and so it's like if in this one game I'm creating a resource and then this other game I'm using it and I have ways to kind of intake it into my game and then I'm gonna craft something with it which

then can be used on a character which is also used in the other game and also maybe three or four other games and so you kind of have this like built-in from the ground up and I think you can only kind of do that when like you're well one like maybe still small and still Grassroots and very Hands-On but also in a kind of ecosystem where we're more peers than we're more than and less competitors which I think is the state of gaming right now wow I just um my mind is blown because I'm sitting over here excited about the interoperability of taking sword across a game and you're like we're going way deeper than that we're going to take that sword we're gonna take it to a new game you're gonna

turn it into some mega sword and then you're gonna bring it back to this game like oh my gosh so let's just touch on interoperability because it is I think it's the thing that is sort of the one of the really exciting parts of web3 gaming but nobody really has seen it yet or done it well yet as you said it's so new and so nascent and everyone's just experimenting right now is there like is there a specific example you like to give of where you see it down the road this could be an entire podcast I think there's so many nuances and ways to approach it you have like lighter versions deeper versions that you can

kind of go I mean I think for us like we see interoperability almost as it's like an interwoven gaming ecosystem and that's underpins by resources so you can have interoperable kind of shared across games also infrastructure but then you can also have game mechanics so imagine if you had seasonality or just based on something that happens in another game it's winter the winter spread heads into this other game and it affects it slows things down which in turn impacts other components and so you have just it kind of goes beyond the assets at that point and because things are on chain you have

this new mechanism that can inform what you can do with just like game design which is like a huge kind of white space and having these not just kind of new capabilities but also limitations of what can be on chain and what can be I think it lends itself to just like a whole ton of experimentation and so I think the this definition of like interoperability is there's still so so new and I think there's so much to to kind of uncover here yeah it's so true it's so deep as you said and I wish we could go full out on this show but there's so many other things so many other great things to cover yeah sorry if I can just add I mean I think the one big thing for us is like you have games you have players and I think what

interoperability like adds on top of this is a whole kind of like one plus one equals three kind of mechanic where it's like you have greater Network value and just like the sum of the part that the whole is greater than some of the parts in this for sure I'm just curious about how you guys work as a Dao and as a ecosystem and maybe we actually could just focus on one specific example of interoperability is there designer game designer meetings where you guys get together and you jam out on this stuff and make sure that you're creating the infrastructure for this type of game design because or is this or is this type of interoperability all going to be permissionless where I don't necessarily need to talk to another game designer I

can just build build my story on top of their story or build it in yeah I think we're not at that stage yet of full permission lesson we're actually going through this exercise now of there there are already quite a few ways that we're expressing interoperability within treasure but part of it is to you kind of have to like put out a framework and put out like a starting point for people to know and really understands what's happening and to kind of spark that just creativity and oh moment of like oh I can do this with this asset and I never really kind of thought about that and and also I think so so there's a coordination part which I think is always going to need to be there and I

think we'll have to facilitate that for some time but I think it's because it kind of operate in this manner and I think if you go back to just traditional kind of groups of entrepreneurs like it's almost like a Founders group where you have other builders who are building games they're going through similar things whether it's game design or just how to do I go through this legal stuff what about my taxes all of these different things that we can as like a community of Builders but also players you can kind of align around like a common theme and similar kind of experiences that you're going through take us through the Journey at a high level of treasure that we talked about sort of the some of the future things and where we're going but you guys are

at I believe over 260 million in market cap Marketplace volume on sorry not Marquette Marketplace volume on Magic total so far how did you guys get there you've done you're the number one number two platform in Marketplace next to open C do you get that right no that I'd love to be there but we are not quite there yet that was I think earlier this year on a single day we did oh it is that's right a ton of volume definitely a very different market then but yeah I mean I think the journey so starting out from Loot and I won't go through every detail the morally derivative we launched we actually

wanted to be the money for the looters from a magic kind of standpoint that's that kind of thesis of oh well we can kind of tie everything together you need this to connect the ecosystem they went down a different path they had this thing called a gold and then we also created these again these Primitives which were eight words on a card gold Lumber a carriage things like that that you could kind of use as building blocks we kind of took that and had this evolution of the thesis of hey well what if they were like at least two games that were simultaneously successful but also using the same token and using these kind of shared resources which we

haven't necessarily kind of seen being interwoven in this sort of way so we launched this thing called Bridge World which was a kind of set of characters from its name it was really meant to kind of sit at the center of all of treasure and Magic was the kind of the name of the game it was kind of a strategic kind of tabletop like game as well and then you had this other brand and kind of now a game or soon to be a game called smallvers which they were represented by these small brain monkeys and their cue increased over time as you kind of stake them and as the collective kind of population IQ increase the world Advanced and which was a really kind of neat mechanic and so we launch these two

kind of projects and really it was the seed this thesis of again simultaneously two games using the same resources we needed to build infrastructure for it because we were moving to arbitrum which is a an ethereum L2 a layer two and so you needed to well one we knew and still believe that this is the future of kind of ethereum eventually you will hit a scale and require really everything to be on an L2 in order to kind of keep up with all this and also things were really expensive back then on on the layer one if you wanted to build gameplay you definitely couldn't do it there and so we moved to arbitrum we actually took the kind of eight words on a card

turn them into their own individual nfts so gold became a thing Lumber became a thing and so they we could then do more with that kind of as in-game assets and so yeah we moved everything over there wasn't a great Marketplace we wanted to use our token Magic on it so we created that it's called Trove today that also has its own journey I think over time it we started to bring in just an ecosystem of other builders other game studios who like the vision who wanted to plug in and connect and build with us which really kind of leads us to where we are today and so the whole decentralized Nintendo ecosystem kind of thesis or narrative it's still be it's beginning

to play out and so these games are plugging in we have many more game partners that are that we're in talks with that are soon to launch or announce publicly that they're joining treasure and I think it's I think we're up to maybe 10 games now kind of across the board and many more in the pipeline yeah how many are currently underdeveloped I mean all actively building 10 of them have been announced that we have two that are kind of pursuing to you to launch and I think we have four or five more that are kind of in in stealth and to be clear these are and this is where the decentralized kind of name comes in right it's it's games that we're not building we partnered with others to to build these yeah yeah which I mean but you're providing the

infrastructure layer that allows them to build on top and it's so exciting to think about the potential it's so early you guys must just sit around and be like oh my gosh there's 10 right now there could be 100 200 a year from now I don't know maybe I don't know I mean let's think you tell me that'd be amazing I mean a lot of numbers game it's a hits game right and so as we identify and partner with like really great games oftentimes those are the ones that bring the most attention again if you look at Nintendo there's Marios or Pokemon Animal Crossing like the names that you can probably identify as like IP that is on that console is kind of far and few in between that said though I think what

we want where we want to land is a portfolio of games that is diverse you should have a huge selection regardless of what kind of games you play to be able to enjoy they should be across the different genres different themes some a lot of them should probably be mobile that's definitely going to be the future of a lot of web Theory kind of gaming and we hope to have that coverage over time totally okay let's talk about you mentioned small verse and is it pronounced it's pronounced small verse but it's spelled it's m-o-l okay so it's not smokers it's this is such a cool game big fan of it the characters are just amazing it does have that real Mario feel to it it has that brand stickiness and that IP that yeah

makes me it's fun and it's it's engaging and it's family friendly so you mentioned that this was one of your sort of first plays and you mentioned that you did a free mint can we just talk a little bit about what the strategy was behind that how you're really focused on this like bottom up brand creation bottom-up culture bottom-up IP creation yeah so the Genesis for that was in order to participate in the free mint you needed to draw a picture of a monkey and so the art was kind of created draw a picture or add your Discord ID submit it in the chat and there was then it was locked for future submissions went through every single thing kind of one by one

and to make sure we could kind of add these people to the mints and that was really kind of the starting point so it was really meant as a way for people to kind of gain exposure to what we were planning and on the course of building with with magic and treasure and over time it just emerged as I mean something that kind of caught fire right there were folks like the Gary Vee's that were kind of joining the community you had Mario gotzi from kind of the German soccer team and a whole bunch of other kind of large folks crypto but also non that were kind of coming in and because they kind of resonated with us it was something that didn't necessarily kind of take itself to too seriously right and I think that was also kind of the

beauty of I think what this Brands could emerge as and so I think where it's going is it's almost kind of becoming this culture of one is small we are kind of silly not serious sometimes we're a little stupid but it's all about growing and it's all about kind of going through this together and I think the big thing that kind of comes out of this community is that there's a certain kind of look of the brand and the moment someone enters into the ecosystem someone will get in front of this person and ask them like hey like what do you like is there a character that resonates with you and someone will create a custom like small brain for them which has the kind of look and feel of it to kind of invite them bring them in and so it kind of

spawns a Creator and r artists kind of community also from the bottom up as we were doing all this it we had a kind of storyline I mentioned the whole kind of population as kind of growing technological advancements and so we had this kind of narrative that was going on where all the smalls were on a planet they there was a natural disaster they had to fly to space they went to the moon they came back and so you had this kind of also something that didn't really take itself too seriously and we were just kind of having fun with it but it created a bit of a white space for a brand and a franchise to emerge which I think as you look at a lot of web 3 Brands what kind of resonates the most with people it's the things that people

can identify with that they can laugh with and kind of be call themselves as part of the community and so that that's something that we're leading into a lot and the game is being built around this amazing I think it's so interesting this free to own model that web3 enables particularly really the way it can work for web 3 games and I think what we first saw was we saw play to earn and we saw C and their success but really only actually was able to achieve that success and pretty quickly we saw the issues that come with that where it becomes too expensive to play the game it's tough for new entrants and but this free to own model that you guys use what

would you say to which if you were to talk to somebody who's building a new game what would your advice be would you tell them to go free to own would you tell them to what would what do you think is a good framework to use for a new entrant yeah yeah you know what and we have these conversations every day with new Studios or developers who are building it kind of depends on your starting point honestly and I think there's oh there's definitely I think a big stigma of what I think there is a the past cycle of huge mints ten thousand bringing a ton of money and then obviously there are certain groups that just kind of left which is not great that said it also is great if you're there to build and you're there to do something with that because it

means you have all the means to a kind of continue kind of chugging along and building towards your vision I think there's like a question of alignment especially if it's a huge windfall that you get from it you don't really have the necessary incentives to keep going I think on the free to own side and this ties into a very topical and recent conversation on royalties because if you start free how do you make your money and your Revenue so you have to have I think well an evolution of the model the one thing that we've been kind of seeing is the 10 000 kind of nft Collectibles start was is restricting because your audience can only be a cap of ten

thousand if you're building a game you want to reach tons more than that and so I think we're seeing a bit of a maybe a hybrid where it should be free to play you can part participate if you want to then take an asset unlock something gain a small bonus or it's cosmetic or something you then have something you have to pay for which lends itself I think well but it also means that it's it you don't necessarily have like the starting point of unless you have the funds immediately so if you're a builder I think it kind of depends on your personal circumstances I think we're seeing just different combinations of all those models kind of come to light

but you have like Founders passes the true believers who will come and be part of your community build with you and contribute especially if you're very bottom up they have the front row seat and they helped you with almost that kind of initial seed funding so it'll differ yeah it's amazing there's so many it's I think it kind of comes back to what you said before one of the best parts about this space is it's just like the biggest wide open ocean that any of us have experienced in Tech but that's also a challenge right and so when you have all these models which is another reason why treasure can offer such a great ecosystem product isn't necessarily the right word in this case it's more like

the opportunity to become involved in an ecosystem where there's help early on because I'm sure for a lot of Builders out there it's tough like we talk all the time on this show so many of our of our guests they're not just building a product they're also building a standard they're pushing through some proposal on ethereum they're also trying to create some back-end infrastructure to build on top of so it's so great and so helpful when we have organizations Dows like you guys who are really taking care of the whole thing so that somebody can come in and be like I just want to focus on this is one thing that I want to do absolutely I think the there's always that question of do you just build it yourself or partner with somebody and

you have to also have to weigh that out I think because of the space there are so many tools at your disposal that you should be able to pick up and plug in together which I think is the beauty of it and so we we also wrestle with that question ourselves of what can who can we partner with to really kind of speed things up and have this available for the other partners we bring in to to kind of plug in so yeah I mean it's I think there's a lot out there I mean Kudos everyone who's still building and doing in this environment it's it's an easy time I think for many to want to exit but I think the people who are sticking around will be better for it for sure yeah it's a time when it's this is when the most valuable opportunities

will be built this is one of the most valuable products will be built but it's also it's it's a challenging time and it's tough for the space to be it's never easy when mentally you're drained every day because there's so much unfortunately media negativity but we don't need to get into that on this show we keep it on the up and positive here so you mentioned marketplaces I want to come back to Trove your Marketplace that you guys have built and also the future Marketplace so let's just start at the beginning give us the the lowdown on Trove what's true when do you guys create it what sort of where you guys at yeah so created at last November serving treasure it used magic solely as the

sole denomination so everything was flowing through in Magic that overall what has contributed to the kind of volumes that we've done today close to 270 million primarily through magic we at some point down the road I think in June this year we ended up opening up to the rest of the ecosystem on Arboretum and this was really as a way for us to serve the needs of everyone else who was here it was again we were super early on the L2 a lot of the infrastructure was still being built out then and so there was an opportunity for us to also kind of Meet the demands of people who were asking to kind of plug in even if they weren't the treasure game so it made a lot of sense and I think over time

though it kind of caused and created a bit of a Divergence in what was the treasure game project and what was just a general collection on arbitrine could have been a pfp could have been a Music Arts and access pass and and there also was not a lot of support and so down the road fairly recently actually openc ended up supporting Arboretum you had a number of other come out and start supporting arbitrim and so it kind of led us to have a really kind of moment to kind of stop and think of again with this focus on gaming should Trove continue to kind of maintain this role and so just two weeks ago we ended up launching a really kind

of large update to tro really to turn it into this destination for gaming on Treasure a lot of the team we grew up on games we use a lot of the tools that we use to play games where you know deeply inspired by something like a like a steam that helps to drive both distribution but then there's a whole other side of it which is as a player it kind of ties and brings your experience across games together and so as we think about Trove it's turning into this kind of vehicle that we can use to help people learn explore get into all the games that we have within treasure participate and we're wrapping it all together through again going back to the

whole interoperability front these kind of new planned features that we have around Badges and achievements makes total sense the whole soul bound tokens has been a kind of topic that's been discussed but you know you can kind of use this to really prove that the reputation you have the contributions you've made in the space things that you've done in the game all of this can come to light and so you already see this in web 2 but you know it's something that we can kind of bring forward in web3 and work with a lot of our partners to enable and you also have what we are kind of building towards which is almost a like Global kind of XP system that for the games and also for the marketplace you also want to have

really this way of like gamifying your experience not just as a player and not just through the games but you know having this kind of surface within the Trove kind of marketplace so so there's a kind of marks I'd say evolution of just being much more gaming Centric creating the infra for players and game Builders to kind of tap into all these different things which will really help and surface like how do we get your game in front of the most as many people as we can how do we create these experiences and these features that will help to drive even greater kind of exposure utility across not only kind of within your game but also outside of it and there's a whole ton of other things

that we have planned as well and so sorry so can Will Trove stay for non-treasure arbitrum nfts yeah so so with that it's focused solely on gaming now there are with openc and with all the other kind of marketplaces out there we'll have there's coverage for generalized marketplaces which kind of feedback to you I think your original question of I think having that like maybe vertical sort of focus on gaming it kind of lets us do more than we could have done if we try to build something that was meant for everyone and so I think with this Focus we're we'll have a lot of games they will be on Treasure but even games that are still on arbitrum and just the

broader ecosystem maybe they won't use magic but it's really I think as a way for us to support any game that is like building in within the broader kind of network for trove to be there for them yeah it makes this concept of vertically integrated marketplaces makes so much sense just to give a random example not related to gaming but I want to purchase a new music nft for our podcast right now and there is no good ux Marketplace for me to go find a music nft you have to go to the existing marketplaces which don't focus on music so it's not like they're giving it to me in a nice player or I

can listen to it where I can Shuffle they're not giving me they're not giving me rankings across collections of like this is the best song within this collection so it's the same thing with gaming that it allows you guys to create this experience and we talk so much about onboarding billions of people like there's a reason that Reddit was able to onboard two three almost three million people in such a short period of time this summer because they made it super easy ux now obviously I also had a massive community that fit with that with what they were selling but I think that this yeah this concept of vertically integrated workplace really will allow onboarding to be much more seamless is that how you guys are

thinking about it yeah definitely that's the exposure of like this game is they have a tournament or they have a world boss and hey everyone come and band together to bring that boss down yes power to the people exactly so it's like it's those experiences that you couldn't necessarily kind of do if you weren't focused on something yeah you have other marketplaces that you know oh this thing is minting or we're selling this new thing and coming by but I think it kind of goes beyond that to doing a bit more I think this whole kind of proof of play concept of the whole badges achievements you can kind of have that built in we've had this for a while but you know there's like a tab in which like the actual game loads but it's in the

marketplace so you can buy something and not even leave the marketplace but just start playing with that asset there so you have a lot of these things are just it's like tailor made for that sort of use case and I think I mean for the future of this and your kind of music example is a great one I think there will be like much more focused kind of marketplaces out there will probably also be maybe not even a need for marketplaces entirely for projects that have that sort of Brands built and that Community built why do you have to give that two and a half percent to a third party if a lot of the things are kind of running through your own Marketplace if you're playing games you don't have to go to eBay or some other Marketplace to buy that asset you just it's what

directly within the game right and so I think we'll have more of those kind of use cases arise and I think the infrastructure is kind of being built out for that and that's also something that we someday also want to be able to do as well for our game Partners wow is there anything you guys don't want to do well and it's always a good question because not focusing is also the tough part right and you can take on way too many things and I think for us we want to build the things that matter the most and that Builders will benefit the most from though I think there are a handful of core elements here that is all about how do we make treasure the best and easiest place for you to come and build

and all of these things kind of fit within that and then there's a player side which is how do we bring the best games and have great content that you just want to play and find Delight in right and so I think it's having a bit of that filter on as you go down this path of product development which is a tough thing not easy focus is tough and steering the ship and having that Vision it's hard particularly in your case where there's so much potential and so much opportunity I appreciate the honest answer that it is tough okay we're filming this on November 22nd this is on this is going to come out in a few weeks at the beginning of December but I know Trove has an announcement tomorrow what's happening what's going on what can people be excited about now that this is coming out yeah yeah oh that's

exactly what I said we're wrapping it into this kind of gaming focused destination for Treasure so that's a big one the other side is I think part of just getting into magic and treasure and being on an L2 arbitrum is that there's a lot of layers and Hoops that you have to kind of jump in jump through so we're we're partnering with moonpay to power kind of the Fiat on-ramp experience so you have a credit card you have bank account you should be able to jump in and get access kind of immediately through that which is going to be great and so yeah I mean it's all about this kind of theme of gaming or doubling down on that sort of focus and then it's also kind of putting our kind of flag into the ground of the next kind of Frontier

of it which is these different kind of tools features products around the whole proof of play the achievements this like XP system we want to builders kind of get to Market quicker and there's a whole theme of also just content distribution there's so many content creators out there as well and so how do we kind of work with them to kind of Drive attention to their audiences and their game but help kind of work with them on that side of things too so you can wrap a lot of that into really this kind of marketplace and so you can only do so because it's now focused on gaming incredible I love it okay I want to give people a chance if I'm if I'm a player and I want to join I want to play one of

your games what's the path how do I get involved yeah I'd say post this update you should be able to just go to troph trove.treasure.lol there will be a games page you can jump in under get a feel for what these games are some of them are free to play you don't even have to pay anything which we think will be the norm for moving forward or for a while and so you should be able to test it out if you do want to get magic get any of this you can use that Moon pay kind of widget or a number of other means to gain access to it but I think the most important part that we try to stress is just to have fun doing you know doing this and learning more about everything

that's kind of going on I'm not just in in within treasure but within the space across the board amazing I love it and where can people find you online if people want to connect with you if Builders want to connect if they're thinking hey we might build our game on Treasure yeah yeah Twitter is the best spot twitter.com okay let's jump into a speed round before we wrap up here got three questions coming at you quick opportunity for our listeners to get a little bit to know a little more of the personal side of Corral okay what's an nft you'll never sell that's a good one my first small brains that I got from drawing a stupid photo

on a napkin and took a photo of it that's a terrible photo or a terrible picture of it but you know it's it's one of the Blue Chips of arbitrum and of treasure amazing amazing and that drawn just like what was the inspiration for the drawing oh well I mean it was there was a prompt right and so it was just draw I mean it was there was the original picture of the small brain so I tried my best to do it when I was out and borrowed someone's pen to to draw it on the napkin and are you an artist take care of it no not at all it was I will say it was probably a low effort submission that ended up getting me access to this which is good but you know I was fortunate to be among kind of

that group who was maybe like early enough to know that this whole crazy thing was going on which it led me to to where I am today there you go awesome okay another web3 project that you're excited about could be within the treasury ecosystem it could be outside yeah I mean I'll I have to say something within our ecosystem it's this game called The Beacon so they're creating this like Rogue light sort of RPG Dungeon Crawler game they've been at it for quite a while kind of building and so we spent a lot of time kind of working with them trying to convince them to build it within treasure which was a process but I think it was just as a player though super excited by it had their play test on the kind of well in the lead up to

their kind of launch on November 25th and so it's been a good sort of run to kind of just try it out test it play it and it's just it's really fun there are kind of dungeon crawling kind of elements to it you can you have a house and a settlement you can kind of decorate but it's really kind of novel in how they're approaching the web three components of it which I think is a ever-growing and evolving kind of design space to kind of work through and they're doing it really well and if you're listening to this it will be a few days about 10 days past the mint date because I think the founding characters meant on November 25th you said yeah exactly they will have I think a pet pet eggs mint which is going to be out in a maybe a couple days from here

so so that might be live as well but you know it's also something again it's free to play so you can start jumping in and start earning things and take it out of the game and just do what you want with it it's that's the beauty of ownership so fun I love it okay final question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it that's I mean if it definitely is a treasure ad I mean if we have that you can't help themselves sure if we have that exposure we have to it it's say I mean our tagline is the magic of play right and I think it's there's something that is kind of special about that kind of line right because we're we're in this because there's something

kind of beautiful of playing there's something kind of magical about the space and what we kind of do with it and it's a spin on the token that we have but I think most importantly it's like we're in here because we can kind of create something that is new and different and expressing new modes of playing I think playing and gaming has different definitions now let's not just picking up a video game you can play by even trading nfts you can play by creating if you wanted to be a Storyteller and active and some Dao or some Community or playing within a game you can play in that sort of way and I think all of the means are I think will start to resonate across the board right

and so if we have a billion people watching that's that's the sight to see we don't have a billion people on our podcast yet but we'll get there and we'll definitely get a billion people treasure as well because because we're all in this together and wag me we're all gonna make it thanks everybody for listening and today Carl this is a fantastic conversation really appreciate the time and everything that you guys are doing for the space it's a it's a deep bow for all your hard work and the way you guys are leading us forward it's super exciting and I think you guys are going to be one of the big onboarders for sure so I'm calling it here could be one of the big onboarders of 2023 is treasure doubt check it out everybody thanks again Crow thanks so much for having me it was a

pleasure cheers everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one