Building games in the Cronos ecosystem: dev tools and services

Transcript

power [Music] hi my name lead is kronos chain i'm going to say a few words about chronos but more importantly i want to share our perspective on what is going to happen in defy and in gaming this year so that if if you're a founder if you're a developer if you're an investor you know what to pay attention to

and what to look forward in our current bear market so just a few words about kronos uh chronos is a chain uh it is the fifth largest evm chain in the world and it is a chain that is supported by crypto.com which means that if you are a developer and you're deploying your application on chronos you have access to an addressable user base of 50 million people it's a chain that is focused on retail defy and on gaming uh two very appealing types of use cases for crypto.com and retail users all around

the world and therefore we have a unique perspective when it comes to seeing what users want and that's what i want to share with you today and to finish with you know for those of you who are developers in particular game developers i'll give some information about developer tooling that is available on chronos and how we can support you if you are about to launch an application so let's start with a very brief overview of chronos so chronos as i said it is a chain that uh comes from a project more or less spun off from crypto.com

and today it is the evm chain that is the most integrated with crypto.com products crypto.com being one of the largest exchanges in the world with 50 million users it's an evm chain it's a it is the first evm chain that is built on the cosmos sdk and that means that it's positioned as kind of a hub or a gateway that brings together users of the centralized exchange the evm and ethereum ecosystem and the cosmos ecosystem with bridges and interoperability between all of them because it's an alternative layer one

it's also fast cheap and eco-friendly of course and it is a chain that was launched at the end of last year so it's live since november 2021. the partnership with crypto.com brings a lot uh in terms of access to the user base but also you know beyond that it's really important to understand how this positions chronos in the entire web 3 landscape today you have around 350 million people around the world who own crypto out of them probably 30 to 50 million are on ethereum and other chains

already self-custody or you know self with the self-ownership of their own crypto through self-custodial wallets this means that the vast majority of crypto holders today are simply users of a crypto exchange and that user base of people who are already familiar with crypto but not familiar with with web3 is really what we're talking about when we're talking about the next generation of web3 users and so what we're trying to do is really not to create a new ethereum killer or killer of anything what we're trying to do is to bring this vast majority of crypto holders to the

real promise of web 3 which is self custody defy mft and web 3 gaming so we're trying to help the ecosystem we're creating a chain where those users are going to be able to experiment with defy and game phi but we don't aim to keep them within the world garden you know if for them the next step is to go to ethereum or another evm chain or cosmos chain that's great for them so if you're a user of chronos you can take advantage of all those integrations between the crypto.com app the crypto.com d5 wallet the chronos chain and another chain that crypto.com uh sponsored which is the

crypto.org chain and like i said before you can transfer tokens back and forth between the left hand side of that slide which is the evm world so all the vm chains and the right hand side of that slide which is the cosmos world which is linked through ibc the ibc protocol an interoperability protocol that exists for cosmos chains we've launched at the end of last year but things are going pretty well for us so like i said we are the seventh largest chain overall fifth largest chain amongst evm chains and in terms of key metrics we're getting close to a million users on the

chain depending on the days we support between 200 and 400 000 transactions per day which is between 20 and a third of ethereum mainnet we have 300 applications deployed on the chain and the total value locked was close to 5 billion before the market crash and now it's at 1.5 obviously so after that short commercial [Music] period let's talk about what you're probably more interested in which is what we're seeing for the rest of the year so of course our focus is really on

retail defy and on game phi and we have lots of applications already on chronos but we think that there is room for more and there is room for more innovation so i'm going to talk about what that innovation could look like and really the thing that you need to keep in mind is that this innovation is going to happen in the context of a bear market where as an application developer you can't really bet on the fact that people are going to buy your token or use your application simply because they think they're going to be able to sell your token for a higher value a few weeks down the line so tokens are going down which means you need to get back to the fundamentals of

how your application is going to build to to make money and build its treasury and how the value that is created by our application is going to be redistributed to the community and the ecosystem so let's look at defy first in defy there are four main ways that you generate value revenue or yield the first one is you're betting that people simply buy what you're selling because they think it's going to be worth more tomorrow and of course you know that driver is uh not as promising now than it was a few months ago secondly you have real ways of

generating revenue which is people paying a transaction fee on a trade that you as a protocol are facilitating or people paying a fee or interest for crypto assets that they borrow through the through your protocol and that they need to pay back later with interest and finally there have been many attempts at uh creating yield in crypto by linking crypto with uh traffic assets so real life assets however you know for the time being and for the rest of the year we don't anticipate that this is going to be meaningful in any way and so for now it's really more the pure crypto world and the pure digital assets that remain

the main ways to make money we've had uni swap v1 v2 v3 and you know dozens or even dozens of protocols and hundreds of forks of protocols so a legitimate question is you know is there anything left to invent and we think there is and there is is you know especially because um of what i highlighted on the previous page you need to find ways so that when investors are putting liquidity into your protocol they're getting a higher share of the transaction fees or interest that you're generating from the users of that protocol

and so that means that going forward everyone is going to work on making d5 protocols more capital efficient so that the capital that is put as liquidity captures a higher share of the transaction fees and relies less on early adopter rewards we are going to see therefore in addition to more efficient more capital efficient protocols we are going to see faster and more liquid exchanges and so exchanges that rely on other books probably of chain to start with with settlement on chains are going to be a big innovation area for this year of course we're going to continue to see

protocols that work on cross-chain interoperability providing investors with the ability to very quickly relocate their assets from chain to chain from protocol to protocol and from crypto asset to crypto asset and finally we are going to see a proliferation of solutions that allow greater amounts of capital to come into public blockchains through whether it's retail or institutional capital and so that means solutions that are sponsored by crypto exchanges but also all kinds of things that make it easier and safer for institutional investors to put their money in d5 like crashing with you know fire blocks bitcoins and other institutional

custodians in gaming let's look at the fundamentals again so in gaming up until now you could simply generate traction around your web 3 game with magic money you know making users believe that what they're buying from you today is going to be worth more tomorrow but of course this is becoming less and less prevalent so what can you look at you know you need to go back to the fundamentals again and those fundamentals are that people pay in gaming if they want to win if they want to save time if they want to socialize and have more

fun and in the web to world they also um pay with their time and you know of course advertising has always been a huge source of revenue for casual games in addition to the you know the challenge of making the the business model work you also need to think about the fact that uh web 3 games are extremely extremely challenging to design properly first of all the notion that you're going to buy assets in a game and they're going to be you know yours forever and usable in other games that notion is largely flawed because most games don't survive more than a few months

so of course if you're a huge franchise you know you may be creating a sword that is going to be used across multiple games but 95 of games are not going to get to that level secondly the psychology of play to earn gamers you know has been really uh the curse of players like axe infinity and others as we've seen increasingly and if your model focuses on attracting those players first it's going to be very challenging subsequently to be successful with regular users bots are a big problem in web 2 gaming and of course that remains too inward for gaming and of course we're all aware of the

fact that crypto on you know crypto onboarding is very confusing for uh game game users so what uh we're looking at you know at chronos is really game creators who have um you know clear-eyed understanding of the economics of their game the progression of the user within the game and you know don't just use buzzwords and magic money as the solution to any problem first of all in any game what you need is a well-functioning in-game loop so that's the center of this slide an in-game loop does not require blockchain at all

usually it's an it's a game loop that involves user playing for free or not for free in your game acquiring experience and skills gaining experience points and achieving wins and being able to reinvest those wins and points into assets or skills that make them more successful and allow them to enjoy the game more and so if you are building a game you need to think about that in-game loop first before you even start talking about magic money and blockchain gaming where blockchain comes in play is in you know enhanced ways that you can monetize your game

and so on this page we've tried to break down what it really means to create a business model with blockchain and also what it really means to play to earn in green we you have the sources of money and it's really important for you as a game developer to make sure that there is money coming into your game game monetization has been a science for game developers for many years it's not straightforward at all you can probably not figure it out you know on on the back of an envelope you have battle passes subscriptions uh loot boxes all kinds of concepts that have been developed by game developers for years and your you know it it would be really

advantageous to you as a game developer to hire someone who has some experience with that and is able to build spreadsheets to create proper monetization strategies so you need to get money into your game and of course you also need to sell to create and sell valuable in-game assets and so that's where nfts are going to come in and where the blockchain is going to make things much easier for you and finally when we talk about play to earn i think it's a it's um the notion that has been perpetrated in the media that you can simply you know spend your day clicking on a button and make some money of course that you know that will not be able to

generate sustainable games so you need to break play to earn into three components you have trade to earn first trade to earn means through gaming and true and true investing you have acquired in-game assets that are valuable you can sell those in-game assets and make some money and so that is trade to earn secondly you have perform to earn this is very common you know in large multiplayer games where you have championships tournaments that players pay for and there's a prize at the end of that what blockchain makes possible is really to make that process much more scalable

because you can distribute payments to winners at a much greater scale at much lower cost and so instead of having one big you know a few big tournaments every year in real life of literally you can organize thousands of micro tournaments within your base and distribute prices thanks to blockchain so that's what we call perform to earn and finally we think that a very important component of blockchain is the ability for early adopters for the passionate community and for the hardcore players to own part of the game and so that's where you know there is a token involved you can create a token currency that represents governance and ownership rights into the game and you

need to find ways for own holders of that token to gain to to to to to capture a share of the revenue and the treasury that your game is created and so that's what we call own or stake to earn those three things are really different and the idea for example that you can create a currency that you know people used to pay for assets in the game and that's also expected to increase in our mind you know probably doesn't work the monetization part the payment part needs to be reliable and relatively stable you know your core users need to be able to know that they need to pay

they're going to pay 2 euros 99 every month if they want to access to special assets whereas on the other hand the token that represents a share of ownership in the network can increase but that's not the same token so to summarize uh we think that there's a lot of room still to innovate in defy and in game file and with respect to game five what we want to see from game developers are you know plain language and clear logic around the business model and the various roles of the tokens involved we want to see unique economics that work in the short term because as i said you know most games are not going to make it past 6 months or 12 months so

you need to break even fast we need we want to see blockchain developers that don't try to put everything on chain blockchain exists for specific reasons and just you know trying to put everything on chain on solana just because you can and it's cheap doesn't make any sense and finally you know you shouldn't reinvent the wheel from scratch you should hire in your team people who have experience in game design in-game monetization in business plan and of course in blockchain and so the track record of the team is very important in our in our mind just to finish

so if we want to talk about next steps so at chronos we have developed or chronos play chronosphere is a collection of development tools and integrations to make it easier for game developers to create games on chronos our first integration was the chainsafe unity sdk we have since published plugins and sdks for game developers with unreal with c plus and of course with javascript for web games we are creating all kinds of payment and user management tools integrating with user-friendly wallets like magic and web3hots and so there's a whole range of tools that as a game

developer will make it easier for you to develop games on chronos we also have support programs for developers that you can learn about more at chronoslabs.org such as an incubator a hackathon currently open for applications that is happening with morales a grant program an accelerator program which is starting next week and all kinds of strategic partnerships so talk to us if you are interested to learn more in summary you know chronos is the ability to tap into a 50 million addressable user base ability to tap into tremendous

demand of those users specifically for retail defy and game fire applications robust technology that leverages the best of ethereum and cosmos easy integration and connectivity with all the other chains with more than 50 cryptocurrencies existing in wrapped versions on chronos and finally you know chrono slabs which is me and ella who is here in this room who is providing support to developers if you want to bring your project to reality we have two minutes for questions [Applause] a new christian

hey um how important do you think it is that games are fun to play and by very visually appealing because now we're seeing the sort of opening out of the metaverse and games where you can get multiple players interacting with each other and like doing a shoot-em-up or something do you think that this will take over as opposed to something a bit more traditional like god's unchained which is just simple card game mechanics so i think there will be um you know something for every audience in the web to world the

you know we have seen a generational shift from big franchises to casual games so casual games today represent the majority of the game market and most of that is on mobile and so i you know i think going forward this secular trend is likely to remain uh games that are mobile friendly and can be played you know in the subway or during commute or in the bathroom you know remain a mainstay of the game industry but of course you know i think that the idea that now you can you know with better computing power you can bring you know hundreds of people together in the metaverse like um what you get labs did with the other side uh like last week i

think you know i think that's uh um a very compelling notion and it opened a lot of door for doors for innovation now i i don't know you know i think the first other side experience was a bit overwhelming and like of course everyone was very excited to be there and to be able to run and hit it you know and run against each other and go in the other direction a little bit like it was the the case in the in the spielberg movie the ready player one you know i think once you've done that a few times it's not clear how you have fun and what is the user progression but for sure it opens a lot of doors for further innovation which have nothing to do with blockchain by the way which is just about you know the greater availability of computing power and the

great work that improbable did with respect to managing servers with more players than what was possible in the past another question all right thanks