Yat Siu: Animoca Brands – From NFTs & Blockchain Gaming to the Open Metaverse. Ep. 525

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Sebastian C and today I'm very pleased to be speaking with yatsu he's the co-founder and chairman in adaman Brands they're a game development studio and Venture fund they have helped incubate and have invested in some of the largest web 3 games and nft Brands uh yat is recognized as a really forward thinker when it comes to the impact of web 3 on digital ownership on culture uh and and uh on on sort of the broader impact of web 3 on the economy and so very happy to have him today and chat about a whole bunch of things including of course nfts the metaverse blockchain

gaming um and uh and a whole bunch of other spicy stuff so yeah thanks for joining us today it's a great pleasure wonderful to be here and look forward to having a spicy conversation I guess well I try to make it spicy once in a while but um but also hopefully I think like you know I I was we were were talking about this earlier on epicenter we we we tend to cover a lot of infrastructure stuff I mean all of us host here at epicenter like have been in crypto for like you know eight or nine or 10 years and and um and of course you know when you've been in the space so long and you've came up with Bitcoin and ethereum you sort of tend to to to gravitate towards infrastructure at least that's been the case for us and so gaming in

nfts is something that we haven't covered a ton on the show like obviously we've talked about them we've had some folks on but it's it's definitely one of the you know the topics that maybe comes up every couple of months like you know we had a mutable on recently but I can't remember before that like when we last talked about nfts so probably during the last cycle um but um you know before we get started like what sparked your interest in um in nfts and you know at which point that Anam Moka decide like we're going all in in this uh this interesting new technology and Industry well I mean I think we got into the space really actively through you know crypto kitties uh in 2017 our studio fuel powered was actually

involved in helping build a part of crypto kitties uh and actually uh the the co-founder of fuel powered um ended up becoming the co-found one of the co-founders of daa labs and that's sort of how that evolved and we ended up becoming shareholders and of course Publishers of crypto kitties uh you know literally a month and a half after their launch uh in Asia so that's kind of how how quickly we sort of went in the space but I think the main lens as to why we're so fascinated with nfts or its potential anyway at the time was that it was really about the cultural power in these economies that are being built around right so when we think of sort of the classic way that you might think of in L1 L2 for instance you know we do have this lens that we think of them as

like National economies of sorts like you can't measure them as a business you measure them essentially as a sort of you know it's Community Valu it's Community Network essentially it's almost like like a nation state um and one of the the things that you create more depth in any nation state if you think about the physical world is culture right in fact you know we describe culture as the deepest tvl of any healthy economy right when you think about what we purchase in the real world whether it's fashion and clothes even the real estate you know cars you know most of what we're buying is actually not its utility I mean we don't buy a car just to take it from point A to point B if we did then we'd go for the cheapest possible car there is but no we buy Ferraris we buy Lamborghinis we by

rolls-royces or by Teslas because they have statements and the same goes for fashion items whether it's birken bags or sort of expensive shoes or you know watches I mean who buys a Rolex to tell the time really right so so these are sort of the cultural Investments we have in that space and one of the biggest areas of culture investment in digital time that we spend time on is gaming right gaming is a space that has over 3.2 billion people that play which is basically almost 2third of the world's internet um it is probably the cultural thing that we do online that has its own sort of you know new kind of um sort of meme framework and culture framework that is gaming native as in digitally native uh

it's also the larger as an industry in comparison to music and film um with over $200 billion um sort of of of Revenue in the gaming in the gaming industry last year and this year will probably be larger this does not include anything related to web 3 for instance so so these are sort of factors as to why we felt that it made sense because Gamers themselves also already have a sense of digital ownership even though they don't own anything right you ask a gamer who plays fortnite and he has skins in fortnite he's not going to say yeah I rented those skins it's it's it's it's great it's like going to the tux for my prom night no they're they they think they own it right and when they own currency inside a game Virtual currency in this case they think of it

as currency they own which is not that far away from cryptocurrency at least in terms of the Concepts so we focused on gaming not just because of our own background as a gaming studio but also because we felt Gamers had a more natural path of adoption uh which I think is you know playing out when you think about sort of what happened with x infinity you know in 21 or sandbox for instance and now basically you know when you think about onchain activity actually gaming is one of the biggest onchain activities throughout you know any chain for that matter uh so I think we're seeing those patterns evolve uh in web 3 yeah I think uh economists you were talking about Rolexes and Ferraris and all you know economists I think call these positional Goods you know where I I think that's the technical term for it

and uh there's a whole there's a whole sketch by a sort of some somewhat emerging French comedian where he goes to Switzerland and you know he goes and buys a Rolex to see about whether or not he feels better and uh our our French listeners will will know what they're what I'm talking about it's quite funny but yeah but basically he sort of like talks about these positional goods and and I think I think nfts I always when I saw this I thought like this is just like nfts I mean nfts are about you know um about an outward statement right I mean you own an nft you put it on your like pfp or whatever or like you own a skin in a game and it's more of an outward statement about things that you identify with or ideas that you might identify with or a community that you

might identify with and I think that that's incredibly powerful and you know we're talking before the show about how like a lot of people in web 3 you know don't um don't get it right like there there is I think like a a divide in in the blockchain industry where you have like a lot of people that are focusing on crypto infrastructure defi these sort of like Financial Primitives and then there's an entire other sector or part of the industry that's you know really you know behind this sort of like web 3 branding gaming nfts and and gradients in between how mind you but I I think that the the folks on the infrastructure side maybe don't understand this so well because their monoliths and avatars are the D5 protocols themselves right they're sort of associated I think like very much to so of like the culture

behind and the memes behind the coins themselves rather than like the nfts is that something that that you've observed as well or like how do you how do you you know account for this divide well so first of all I don't think there's a huge difference it's just a matter of how you understand the narrative in your own construct because again it comes down to culture and so really when we think about nfts we think about nfts as a way in which you can encapsulate culture in a deeper sense because of the fact that it is now unique in its nature so the example I often give is wedding rings you know wedding ring in in itself could be argued to be quite fungible certainly when you go to a Tiffany store every wedding ring is made the same way weighs exactly the same and has the same

value but the moment that ring goes into the ownership of you know you and your partner it becomes non-fungible in nature it becomes something special and it shares in the culture of only the two of you and maybe a small community that's arounded and that's really when we say non-fungible is what we mean we don't necessarily mean that it has to be unique in the sense that it has to have a different coloration you know that's obviously the more outward expression like what we see with the random pfp generations of something like Bard Apes but it isn't actually the true meaning at least from a human perspective of non-fungible you know think about the things that we collect in the physical world we don't want to give up maybe a tennis racket that we used to win an important tournament or if we climb on

Everest then we will stick to those clothes that we can we don't throw them out because they are entirely unique to our history our Legacy why do we care about things like ancestry why do we want to look at our history why are we inspired when we see a flag right of some Nation or some stories I mean these actually form our culture it's who we are but the construction of the story itself is the shared culture meaning that fungible tokens when you think about things like you know and I don't mean just meme coins I mean just even things like you know ethereum or Bitcoin in and of itself ownership of that is already a kind of culture but it's not really as individual it's more of a collective culture that is shared across the communities there and maybe what the the challenging thing that I think most

people struggle with isn't the culture side it's the fact that they don't think culture has value often right they think culture is hard to Value versus you know versus um you know something that is maybe like like like currencies or gold or infrastructure there is a utility behind it and it's true the utility is important but when you think about us as people and this is the part where I would say if you're you know maybe very technically focused and you don't care about what you wear for instance you're you know then maybe L people in crypto don't you know they just I guess they just wear the t-shirts depends I you know it's funny I talked to some I talk to people and then they have this really fancy watch or they have this really expensive car right and you like a

second why did you buy that car oh because it drives really fast uh sure like you know try that and you know why do people dve you know Buy buy really fast cars in Hong Kong which have really narrow streets and you can't really drive fast right um so you're making a statement about who you are and it's a it's again membership of a culture and of your own culture for instance and I think as people this is really defining us these stories these narratives and by the way if we don't have them we make them up in our own head right we start creating our own narratives in the absence of those that are shared by others but we want to be able to be a member of something and share those stories like sharing these stories in a vacuum isn't fun at all it's not human

so we want to share them and I think in the initial days the fungible token was one mechanism around that but the non-fungible I think just creates a much deeper expression and a much more personalized expression which is I think you know why nfts are so powerful yeah I I'll I've I've retained from that that uh I'll have to let my wife know that her her her wedding ring is super special because it's nonf fungible with any other wedding ring so yeah just make maybe taking a step back here and focusing on Anoka a little bit so what is the investment thesis of Anoka and H how is Anoka um different from how other you know typical investment funds operate well so first of all the investment

funds of Anoka different because it primarily certainly historically has come from balance sheet so we didn't invest as a fund we invested basically from you know corporate H that meant that basically we have you know we don't have a fun life cycle right that meaning that we can hold things for the long term and we also really made these investments in the past really about how we helped build the sort of ecosystem and also how it hopefully plays out in the ecosystem that we're building so for instance when we you know made the early investments in openc actually you know we we we had probably most of the trade volume in office that wasn't very big you know back in 20120 and 2019 of an Open Sea were probably you know the the top nft

collection back in the day and we didn't want to build our own Marketplace we just thought it made sense to use them and have them focus on the expertise of marketplace is while we focus on building games and have all portfolio companies that were building games such as ax Infinity trade their nfts on open SE back in those days right so that's kind of what what we were focused on um and and so that's that's how we thought of it uh but of course as time went on we felt that it was important to help see the ecosystem broadly such that Anoka has now over 450 investments in web 3 and growing because we see these Network effects Compound on themselves so even if you know the project itself might not have the highest single returns we actually their existence in

our ecosystem helps you know facilitate the growth of you know a dozen or two dozen other companies and they all build Network effects and then they help each other out because in web 3 you have the ability to build on these networks in a permissionless manner right you don't need to have an API access I can basically just you know um you know launch my nfts on openc and trade them pretty much from the get-go um or whether this is a sort of lending protocol or whatever like it doesn't really need permission and so the fact that we can then make the direct connections helpful to perhaps you know feature it or do some marketing benefits but from a technical standpoint the integration is pretty much straightforward because of the fact that most of it can be done sort of through this permissionless nature that is on

chain so anyway that that is U that's sort of the thesis of around sort of building and compounding these Network effects on top of it um which is also one of the reasons why we started sort of building out moche as a way to help sort of know connect and unite these uh so that we have a better way in which we can help construct these these Network effects so Anoka is thinking of the way of of web 3 like constructing almost like a nation and so that means that we spend and invest in a manner where we think these Network effects develop that way so for instance investing in Guilds uh we've done quite a few of them them isn't necessarily because we thought that each Guild is going to be the biggest home run ever but rather because we know that they will on board web 3

Gamers um they will educate them they will tell them what to do and and and maybe share in the value or sort of you know buy the goods that can be rented to the players as an example um and in so doing training them about web 3 so so that's that's valuable because that means every other one of our games in the ecosystem we've done over 140 games plus our own like phandom galaxies or sandbox or re League orami for instance and they benefit from the fact that these guilds exist in our ecosystem because they help train and onboard them right so that's kind of how we think about our investment thesis um which is a bit different from traditional BCS which are obviously because they're a fund with third party money have to be very uh very much more directly um sort

of returns oriented plus they have a life cycle right so timing matters to them so for instance in the early days in 20 you know we we couldn't raise any money from traditional VCS in 2018 2019 and most of the people by the way didn't disagree with our thesis they didn't say oh web3 gaming isn't interesting or back then they call it nft or blockchain gaming they understood the thesis they were just worried it was too early and the reason why it mattered is because their fund life cycle was maybe already 5 years in and if the cycle is wrong then they might be have you know they might be sitting on this investment for 4 years or 5 years and there would be no exit and then they have an unwinded at a loss right so timing really matters

which is why it often appears that funds are very momentum oriented but in a way they almost have to because they're the fund life cycles are limited yeah interesting and um yeah how has the the bare Market affected say anok's Investments over the last 12 to 18 months I mean I guess more like yeah something like 12 months and you know has the thesis evolved as a result of the market downturn well I think the thesis if anything is strengthened because of the fact that Builders are going to build in a bare Market are the ones you really want to invest in right I mean you think about sort of from a vintage perspective which ones were the companies that really made Anoka well known um were the ones that we invested

in between 2018 and 2020 those were daer labs and daxi Infiniti and wax and decentraland and sandbox and Open Sea right I mean you know and then later on yugul laabs I mean these are the companies that Define the space right and we got at you know in them in the early or first stage rounds and they basically are the ones that have sort of helped shape that first wave and sort of in the bare Market you know those opportunities come about because also the builders who believe in the space will build in this environment because it's not necessarily just about the money right in this case they're sort of much more Mission oriented because Frankly Speaking if it's about the money you'll have pivoted to aied to some other industry out there that seems more obvious to raise capital from for

instance uh whereas if if you're a big believer in web 3 you will basically continue to build in the space um because you you know you're that passionate about it or or you see the the impact and purpose around whatever it is that you're building right so so those those are typically the best vintages so while the Quantum of um companies we invested in is reduced not because we necessarily don't want to make these Investments because there just less of them that are good right um we still deployed capital and you see us make multiple Investments um big and small I mean for instance today we just announced a participation in ton and becoming you know um you know one of the largest validators for instance um in that network but also you know previously we like literally you know

days before we announced investment in another gaming project called fana right um so we continue to invest um in the space we haven't we haven't really stopped cool well yeah I mean uh as a as a first-time fund manager you know raising in this market uh I I fully agree that now is like the best time to invest um you know we're we're investing in in infrastructure Primitives along the you know the modular stack and drop ability Primitives things things of that nature not not so much in in gaming and nfts at for the moment at least but um but it really feels like you know we're going against the grain in terms of you know what what what people are telling us right you know I got so many blank stairs when I started raising the day

after FDX collapsed and um and so you know now we're very happy to be be able to deploy currently think about all the projects that you know you would have invested in over the last 12 months whether these are tokens or even live tokens for instance even you know one of the big opportunities in the last 12 months wasn't necessarily private Investments but public ones in the sense that Tok already trading and you would have had incredible returns if you did that but you needed to have conviction in web 3 to do it if you didn't have conviction in web 3 if you were like I'm not sure about this and it's hard but if you knew that you know and you believe that this was something that was here to stay and the fundamentals are what they are then you know you don't mind if it's one

or two years of a bear because eventually it will come back and that's exactly what we've seen I mean you know even something as large and fundamental as Bitcoin has essentially doubled in value from its lows from say 12 12 or so months ago yeah absolutely so let's let's talk I mean you talked about mocha ver and I'd like to maybe shift to nfts here more specifically um and would love to you know understand like what what is verse and what's the vision here but first I think one thing I'm curious about is you know Adam Moka has I think lots of connections with big Brands and has sort of been a been a force to get Brands to understand you know web 3 and these

Concepts and and adopt them what what kind of big brands are you approaching nfts utilizing nfts experimenting who are the early adopters and who are are the most um Forward Thinking when it comes to adopting web 3 well generally I think the most Forward Thinking brands that we've seen have been the luxury Brands and the fashion brands because in some ways they probably understand virtual value the best right you know like when you actually buy a birken bag you know how much of that value is the materials or the pure utility of holding things in the bag and the answer is of course nothing right that's not why you buy it right so what you're buying is 99% virtual in its construction and that

is you know when you talk to them about the metaverse and you talk about sort of you know what's important and why people buy the things that they do which is about culture and Community they get it so that's one of the reasons why they one of the first ones in the space and continue to be investing in that space um whether it's land or nfts and you know they they buy board Apes they decorate on them they address the community so they think they're quite forward which is one of the reasons why for instance in Europe particularly France especially Paris has actually interestingly enough been a hot bed of nftp innovation I mean it's not just sandbox or or sort of there's dogami or there's like many other companies or like you know the their wise life beyond like these stud is all evolving out of

France because they understand that very very well for instance right so so that's kind of um those are one type of Brands the other ones that's interesting has been sort of the financial services in Asia right for instance you know institutions like hspc Standard Chartered DBS um you know all of these sort of financial institutions uh and also real estate companies like new world and Su K and all those guys have actually been very active in web 3 because they also understand the value of these things like in the case of you know for instance like an hspc one of the reasons they would be building on Sandbox isn't because it's look looks like Minecraft and looks like a game or metaverse but it's because the average land owner in sandbox has about half a million to million dollars worth of

assets that is visible on J so these are perfect private banking clients right and in some ways it's not that different from you know basically you know opening up a shop in you know Fifth Avenue for instance or in Beverly Hills because you want to address that customer that audience and reach out to them right so so you know those are the type of you know early institutions that get it and in Japan for instance you know our our our investors and partners are groups like mufg which is the one of the biggest banks in the world um and and mitsui right and again these are financial institutions they get it and I think there's a correlation here as well those who understand Financial systems well also are ones who are more easily attuned to web 3 whereas the type of

Brands and companies that are maybe not as oriented towards sort of you know the value of sort of things um are less likely to be attuned to them uh because of the fact that that's not their reach and also not their strategy and approach and many of their natural customers might also not be that audience right so if you're a luxury brand the kind of people who can afford you know a Rolex right for instance or lvmh type of stuff are more likely going to be people who are also more financially literate and therefore the connection between that and web 3 is much more natural you actually you talked about web 3 and financial literacy in a talk recently uh I saw a snippet of it on Twitter and I was wondering if you could

expand on uh what you what you were trying to to I mean the first point that we discovered in this sort of Journey of web 3 is that most of the world is not lited and the way that we Define Financial inclusion is you have a bank account and therefore you're financially included yes you can get your pay check but what you do not very much you get your paycheck and you spend it how many people actually make investments or actually think about their capital or understand even compound interest I mean if they did then they wouldn't be taking out you know you know credit cards with like crazy interest rates for instance and all that type of stuff right um which is one of the reasons why you know I guess traditional Finance continues to take advantage of people like that

because they lack financial literacy right it's it's one of the reasons why regulation has to exist in order to sort of control these type of predatory tactics that we see uh the traditional finance companies have done because they make money from it and get away with it and you know I think the the the you know you look in the US the first time experience that most young people have on true finances is student deck and it's a Hot Topic obviously but it's a problem because you know your first experience is essentially one of you know intened servitude but basically taking a loan that you have to repay probably for the next decade or plus so before you can even begin to build your own Financial portfolio for example right and that's just not a great outcome and it also ensures you know a a

setup that is really not very strong and it gives a sort of negative feeling towards finan and so this aspect of Financial Freedom becomes aspirational which is kind of crazy if you think about it um so so the thing that we believe in is that if you can teach children and basically algebra and all sorts of math concepts and you can certainly teach them about compound interest and financial systems like you don't need to understand complex derivatives that's not what you need to know but you need to have some Financial awareness and so we believe that it's entirely possible for our kids to basically build portfolios small as they will be um so that by the time they go to college even if they if they want to or need to they'll have you know ways in which they maybe can pay for their

studies or have a portfolio of their own and we'll understand what they're getting into as well as a result of of all of this um sort of you know Financial stuff that's happening around them that they don't understand until much later in life right so so we think that's a key skill that's needed but you can't learn this in school in part because the teachers are financially illiterate as well right they don't have portfolios in fact teachers are amongst some of the least paid people in the world and therefore you know they live basically paycheck by paycheck even if they knew something about financial literacy they can't even experiment because the other thing about financial literacy is an appetite and an understanding of risk right and if your life is essentially living sort of you know hand to mouth type of thing then

risk is becoming a very it's like a luxury that you simply can't afford to do so so we have to sort of train and experiment with that at a younger age with obviously not of things of Great Value and we think web 3 and blockchain gaming is a great way of doing it because as children we learn through games and to play anyway but now as the world has evolved from physical to Digital Play I mean we spend in many cases something like half of our time awake or even more in some cases online in one form or the other so we've can create essentially experiences where you learn about financial literacy that way then it evolves us essentially as we get older and in gaming we're already dealing with virtual currency and we're already kind of dealing with sort of skins and some kind of goods but right

now in webd games you're not allowed to trade you're not allowed to sell them you're not allowed to create any Financial value small as it may be B because it's against the interest of the those web 2 game studios but in web 3 you're free to do all of that and so in that environment we believe that gaming web through gaming um can actually bring in financial inclusion as it has done for instance with axi Infiniti back in 21 and 22 where millions of Filipinos who don't have any formal education don't understand anything about money but were able to open a crypto wallet and basically receive trade and spend and fund basically in crypto and that just just means that it's you know if they can do it then it's accessible to the

world yeah there's there's an interesting kind of like parallel to an article I read I read recently I forget the who wrote the article but I have I have to look for it anyway but but basically the article sort of claimed that uh the the like the Zoomers and the generations to come after them um we're going to be or you know we're demonstrating um some amount of uh delusion about their actions in the real world because they grew up on the internet and because they grew up this is I'm paraphrasing here but because they grew up in uh in sort of like a virtual environment with no real repercussions uh a lot of them were sort of socially awkward and and you know did

things in the real world that you know were not in their best interest or uh that sort of um mirrored or echoed the types of behavior that they would have on online and I I thought it was interesting I mean I don't know if there's like any sort of real you know uh sort of research behind that but I wonder here with the risk thing right with the you know financial literacy thing you know if you if you sort of you grow up uh taking the sort of fake risks in a web 3 game or some sort of like digital environment you know are you more predisposed to then like taking you know unnecessary risks in the real world where the consequences going to be very different I know this is sort of getting like deep and philosophical here but no no no it's a good it's a good point but

I think this is by at the heart of many design questions when you think about designing games or experiences and even when you think about that designing Financial systems in defi for instance that's a part of that right so first of all I don't generally subscribe to that view because if that were true then we take the view that we need to protect people from things of information or financial literacy or whatever that may be right and I mean I remember so I'm you know I was I was there in the early internet in the early '90s um you I was a ACC surve user in the 80s and you know many of the arguments that were made at the time was around too much information is bad we should basically limit access people you know aren't smart enough um you know they're going to abuse all of that right and you

know basically you know these were incumbent sort of information monopolies that didn't like the idea that suddenly there could be user generated content and that it could be citizen journalism and that there could be someone out there who was not working for a newspaper or magazine that suddenly had a voice right and that somehow seemed threatening and the same was by the way true when YouTube came about and then people said there was no way that the gber Press yeah exactly right or the car yeah exactly right I mean so so there's there's always that type of um scenario where you have persistence because change is scary in some ways but also it's disruptive and I think the key point being is it's disruptive in which way and I think you know broadly speaking anything that makes access more

egalitarian more democratic we think is positive right versus the opposite meaning that if it is becoming more elitist or more controlled that's negative because even though abuses will happen on a net basis if more people have knowledge it becomes more of an insulation of issues for instance if most of the world was financially literate then the ability to perform Financial crimes is very small the reason why Financial crimes is possible is because most people don't know what they're doing right or they get entitled and so we need regulation for good reasons because we need to protect people because they truly don't know but how do we Define that well net worth okay but hold on right that means in some ways if I don't achieve that net worth I never have the ability to get

there in the first place therefore how am I actually able to participate right so the system had good intentions but ended up having an effect that you know to protect them had to find them a way to identify whether you were financially literate or not which isn't the same right you could be financially literate and not have a lot of money and therefore still be the right person to do that I mean you know think about financial you know financial institutions every person who starts off as an analyst in in in one of the big Banks didn't start off as a Millionaire right they came fresh out of school they probably have student debt they have negative equity right and yet you know they got the opportunity to work there right um so which means that we can take people who are not financially sort of

you know um successful and bring them into the world of financial success and and if most of the world had then we think it's more self inoculating and the same is true for information as well right in the early days we just simply believed what the newspaper wrote right and today Frankly Speaking we realize that newspapers are as biased as us maybe even more so and so we take a more nuanced perspective unfortunately that hasn't been good for seeking Truth uh it has been confusing for people who always thought that maybe there was one source of truth but now we realize that there's multiple sources and we need to take perspectives and we need to analyze and we need to basically not take things for granted the way that we do right so to me I think of it as as a net positive to as long as it becomes more open and

Democratic this kind of touches on another topic that I wanted to ask you which is you know about I think like I think web 3 games um probably because of axi infinity were you know quite used in sort of like the Philippines southeast Asia what what is it that most people in the west fail to understand about these markets and their relationship with uh with through gaming and nfts so I actually think that the West in particular us more so than even Europe has taken a very negative view to nfts and because of the view they have on crypto and more specifically The View on capitalism so the point is that you know there was a recent Pew study that showed

that I think 60% of Americans under the age of 30 preferred socialism over capitalism this analysis would have come out say a decade or so ago in the US I would have been impossible but today actually being anti- capitalist is a political platform and you know I I mean party members in the US are basically campaigning against capitalism effectively maybe they don't say it in that way but in effect they are going to war against capitalism you know it's a you know billionaires are a fault in the system you know you know the working hard isn't really fair right inherited wealth you know you know all these things are basically things that have become points of attack and for good reason because over the last two decades or three decades or so labor has

basically underperformed greatly in comparison to Capital and unfortunately those people who have not been in the capital class and have basically been in the labor class which is still the majority of people in the world like in America for instance um they've basically been on a net basis are probably making less money than their than their parents have and that's basically um unprecedented in the case of you know recent history and also means that people who don't have access to this money then look at money as feudal themselves it's like that's unfair like why do you have this right whereas I remember when I first went into the US in the '90s even though it was a recession it was still about sort of a meritocratic approach which was like if you work hard you'll make it

everyone just had this goal and if you had success and you made money then it was celebrated as you know self-made men and or or women or whatever that may be uh that's kind of that narrative doesn't really seem to exist anymore right um and you know when I was basically stuck during covid in California I you know I began to understand this when I started seeing sort of the sentiment you know what was happening in San Francisco for instance right I was stuck in in the barrier uh and sort of this sort of sort of incredible anti sort of you know um sort of campaign against those that had had wealth or you know Silicon Valley people even you know who are working in silic Valley companies it wasn't even related to you know founders of these businesses uh people really didn't like

them because because of the fact that um you know they were wealthier and it seemed unfair to them and so now you take this into the world of gaming which is by by its design quite meritocratic in terms of skill if you're a good gamer you don't have to pay money to be a good gamer and then you introduce things like nfts the first reaction you have is wait does it mean that I need to suddenly pay thousands of dollars to enjoy my favorite game or even worse if someone who spends thousands of dollars does he mean he is better than me now in the game and he show things present themselves in a way that I couldn't anymore whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa right that's something we just we can't have right like and and I think this is something that's not just felt inside um

sort of the gamers themselves but also in the studios that make games because game designers and game developers themselves are kind of in the same category now you go to Asia for instance the opposite is true where people are excited the biggest game studios and game companies in the world I mean outside of ourselves like Square en or or SEO and so on they're all embracing web 3 and they're talking about tokenizing their gameing systems and they're talking about nfts and blockchain because they are excited about property and I think this has to do with the history of Asia as well you think about a place like South Korea you know which is one of the biggest gaming places in the world today 12th or 13th largest GDP 40 years ago its GDP was smaller than North Korea it was one of

the poorest countries in the world and actually that is true for most of Southeast Asia if you look at Indonesia if you look at Philippines if you look at all these places these were for the most part pretty desolate places Philippines bit of an exception but that's a different story but anyway China for instance also you know hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty over the last 40 years uh so you know how is it possible property rights basically embracing capitalism right I mean yes you know China may have the sort of communist mantle but it's as it's more more capitalist than most of Europe in terms of you know when it comes to economics and business and so that Embrace and people have benefited from that have basically seen how you know that worked and so they're excited

about capitalism and I sometimes joke about this uh but it's sort of somewhat true you know the American dream seems to be more alive and well in Asia than it is in America itself and so things like web 3 property rights nfts U you know land and sandbox uh you know these are things that actually excite them and they see the opportunity because in living memory this has benefited them in the real world versus what they have experienced in the US I think that kind of Echoes the you a lot of ways I mean you you grew up in Austria right and and so I'm here I'm here in France and I think there is this uh this sort of like working class sentiment that you know at least in

France I'm not entirely sure about like Austria I think this kind of overlaps with Germany a little bit although also def but like there is this workingclass sentiment that you know uh work is a burden uh that uh mer like sort of like this anti-rac uh kind of ideology that you know permeates through some you know some aspects some parts of a society you know and I think that that in a lot of ways echoes in the sentiment that like crypto uh is not like a serious thing or that it's like that it's a scam right it is like sort of down playing this thing that is inherently erratic and um and I sort of like see

that all around me and then I you know sort of Wonder um why like why why the US I mean I think in the US it's particularly like uh interesting how there's been this shift from like uh Theocratic ideology to like this anti- capitalist sort of ideology yeah so I mean I mean I grew up in Austria um in the 70s and ' 80s and you know that was still the time when there was the Iron Curtain so basically you know going from east to west and my mom used to work in the Eastern side of Germany in East Berlin so when I would cross over to see her uh you know it was a totally different world and I think it did shape my thinking around why capitalism is better why we need property rights although back in the day when I was a

kid I didn't really think about it this way but it certainly is a vivid memory that I have in terms of sort of the desolate environment that was I mean it was literally 1984 in east east in East Germany for instance um but the other thing is that you know in the social Democratic countries um meaning Germany and and Austria and maybe just a certain extent France I think France is a little bit different but still sort of shares much of the same sentiment you can't really talk about money in the same way you know like money is um it's almost dirty to talk about money um you know and then I went to the US and then every was like money money money right and look at my stuff that I bought and then I came to Hong Kong and that was basically capitalism on steroids where

it wasn't it was it was like it like everything was about money and if you didn't have then you were worth nothing and then you had the other side of the problem which was the extreme side of what happens when you have sort of excess capitalism and where you basically sort of you know capitalism at all costs right it didn't matter um basically at what expense it was right so you so there was you know so that definitely shaped the thinking but I think also when you look at Germany and Austria and I think the the the the American influence in the early days is that work and labor was considered good right I mean it was it was pure if you worked hard that was how you identified yourself and that was kind of the really it was the Protestant and eventually Evangelical sort of perspective AB ma

actually came from like from def it was not the Nazis I mean they stole it they stole a lot of things but this this sentence you know this this philosophy came from the Protestant uh philosophy right and of of like work sets you free work makes you a better person and and so you know a lot of people confuse that but yeah no absolutely and it was so of this I guess the um original sort of Martin Lutheran perspective which then you know because of the first wave of immigrants basically went from Europe to the US were basically um very Protestant or I guess Evangelical in nature and so they brought that work culture with them and it worked for them as well because it was a new land it was a new

opportunity and you had to work hard and sacrifices were made but also because everyone started almost at the same ground zero right so you didn't have the issues of inherited wealth you didn't have the issues of you know a king or king queen or royalty that basically sort of had structures around limiting your success and these monopolies that were established right and so that worked for a while but of course you know in the US in the last 20 30 years you know inadvertently um partially because of the inflation of money right and partially because of the econ economics involved and and um you know money and because of the way that inheritance works and so on money became in its own way if you had money you would make more money if you had money

you could get to better universities you could get access to better education and suddenly this whole meritocratic idea was destroyed because it's like wait I can't get into that school even though I seem to be pretty smart working hard doesn't give me that effort um and and and and that's really I think kind of what America is searching for I think the Battle of America's soul is kind of based a little bit on on that over the last uh sort of you know I would say decade in American politics and which I think is impacting as a result um um sort of the perspectives on on crypto and web 3 and you can kind of see that from the perspective of the democratic versus the Republican party you know where their battle lines are being

formed absolutely I mean we we've kind of departed here from the topic of nfts but this is this is really interesting I mean let's uh let's maybe really back in um you what are some of the other use cases for that you're really excited about I think everybody knows about the pfps and you know like gaming skins and maybe to some extent some Financial applications like using nfts and you know uh uh to to represent liquidity positions or even you know domain names in the case of of ens but what are some of the like in the next cycle what are going to be like the hot like the really interesting nft use cases that you're most interested in and that Anoka is investing in so I mean first uh mean gaming applications obviously the

utility side but the one thing that we think is really important when it comes to nfts is you can not marry and include the financial aspect of nfts in and of itself right even if it's not intrinsic you know and before it was just in the trading patterns but now basically you can actually really have it as a way in which you can share ownership and things um on an individual basis so for instance I have two examples one of them is in games and the other one is in education which we're really excited about and that's something we're really pushing with open campus and Tiny tab um but let me first talk about the gaming example in rec league for instance if you're you know basically owning the nfts then if a web two gamer plays the game he doesn't have to buy the nft but

he can rent them which is effective what they do in all the games he may think of it as buying the skin but effectively he's renting it the owner of the original nft of that design now receives a revenue share directly because it's his nft right it's like and and that actually creates a nice blend between the web 3 and the web 2 gamer that can still enjoy the game but they have different ways in which they interact with that Financial layer shall we say right uh because the web two gamer only want to pay a dollar or two to enjoy the experience he doesn't want to buy and own something and that's okay right same people why people rent a house versus bu a house for instance or rental car versus bi bio car for instance right so so so I think the new wave three games

that are coming out are more elegantly sort of marrying the blend between the two and I think you know in 24 we're going to see some very interesting developments because many of these games are about to come out for instance and then the other area which I'm really excited about is what's happening in vcation you know for instance with um you know most recently we just did another batch of sales of what we call Publisher nfts and publisher nfts are nfts that teachers created to create learning content could be like English Spanish whatever courses and these courses are currently being rented essentially or sold in in places like tiny Tab and they they earn a yield right you know they might make $10 or $50 or $100 a year it's paid for by parents or teachers who then give it to their kids right think of it as a as a

kind of corsera or a a sort of you know YouTube learning program where you pay a subscription fee and whoever makes a Content gets a fee for that but now when you own the nft or that course content you now own basically the revenue stream from that you also can promote it so you can make it more famous if you want or more more desirable or improve on it and you know maybe make more Revenue so you is yours now but the point is that you a teacher is now able to create their own yield instrument and one of the problems is that before selling on these type of intellectual property assets wasn't possible or feasible because the cost of doing so was very high so unless it made at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year you wouldn't

be able to sell it on to someone because the cost of the lawyer the contract rights and the whatever that you need to do negotiation was just too lengthy so you just couldn't do it but that's a problem for for instance places like for instance Venezuela or Philippines where teachers might only make $10 or $20 a month and where whatever content they create uh might only generate an additional $1 or $20 a year right so that's nice add-on income but it's not going to be life-changing but now I can buy that same content maybe for $50 or $100 and in so doing I get a 20% yield But the teacher basically makes half a year of the salary and that becomes life-changing and that changes in of

course what happens when we did that is that the teachers then start to make more content and start to create businesses around it and that's basically what happens when you have property rights and intellectual property protection right you can build foundations of businesses on top of it I mean if you didn't have property rights in the Democratic institutions that we live in today if America didn't have property rights then you wouldn't have businesses and you wouldn't have mortgages and banking facilities and a way in which you could have Capital formation which is basically now possible with nfts that can be represented because through a transaction of lesson at a dollar I can have the contract rights the IP rights the fin where the money goes everything done in one single transaction um and I don't need a lawyer I don't need all that kind of stuff uh to be able to sort

of do that and I think this this is really powerful not just for developing countries but also for any other place for other type of assets that you want to sell or offer and opens up intellectual property rights management to every segment of content creation um so for instance even with something like that ified you know dancers are not able to immortalize their moves as nfcs and again that sounds Whimsical and silly and stupid you might say why would you do that but you know these dancers have had their moves ripped off by big games like in fortnite who basically turn them into emotes and emojis and they don't give credit to the creators because they had no way of basically in sort of demonstrating that they were the creators of this and again nfts can

solve that so there's many cool use cases that are evolving and many more that we haven't even imagined that I think think uh will sort of really create space in the culture and entertainment and education space you know in in the kind of web 3 infra like crypto infra we we've seen like this modularization of the stack and also a modularization of the application Level is this also happening in the nft space I mean it sounds like it right from what you're describing right like how how does that like overlap well I mean what happens is that we describe it generally as interoperability but really what happens is that owning an nft or nfts makes you the owner and the plat and the nfts themselves platforms meaning that companies and businesses

are now building experiences Stacks or even new chains on top of the ownership of essentially the uh the the the nfts in question because they become targeted audiences and customers like you know the example I gave about people who are interested in sandboxes because they want to address the customers of sandbox right or for instance if you want to build something for people who own board Apes they don't do it because um you know they just love board Apes but because the board Apes represent a community of very high netw worth individuals um or for instance you know one of the web 3 games which is also part of our portfolio called pixels as is becoming very successful but we built on Ronin and Ronin is a chain which is basically um some you know supported by the guys behind um a Infinity Sky M uh

and why did that sort of take off because people on Ronin were Gamers on AI infinity and so it was natural for them to basically play another game um you know within the network because it had already a mass network effects of that effect so the the the thing is that you know the culture layer as it were represented through nfts allows basically people to then compose all sorts of brand new experiences on top um because it's on chain that's exactly the beautiful part about it and its permissionless nature I mean they could be vampire attacks but the reality is that it's a value to the owner right if I own this nft then I create value I I receive potentially valuable experiences because people will build to reach me as

opposed to I have to go somewhere and seek permission you know to have access right I mean today in web 2 games if apple or steam doesn't like you then forget it you're you're you don't exist for instance right you don't have a way for gamers to to reach out to you for instance properly because they are The Gatekeepers and here essentially you know it's decentralized down to the point to the end user yeah that makes sense you know do you think that that met the that web 3 games and you know this concept of the metaverse do do you think that the value here is decentralization in the long term right because like having a fully like bu building a powerful brand or a

powerful IP or even leveraging existing IP costs a lot of money um and requires a lot of funding and you know is the value here that these networks are truly decentralized or that we have record of ownership and sort of you know uh audit trail of ownership you know is is the censorship resistance aspect here as important as say you know with financial as assets or like more fungible assets so one of the things that we love about the space is the irony in the way that in some ways the more you give up control the more value is retained in the network in the community so perhaps

the best parallel I could say is that if Bitcoin happened to be you know um if they happen to be a set of miners that basically controlled hash rate of Bitcoin for instance what would the value of Bitcoin be at that moment it would basically sink down to probably almost zero because it would be so heavily compromised and nobody would trust it the same way right and so there's a lot of reasons why people don't want to see that happen and in a way maintaining its decentralization is retaining your self-interest right and that's actually I would say very true in in sort of what they talk about L2 and l1s as well um in the early constructions and also in the game systems that are out there because it's

early it is pro often working on the premise of the promise but if the promise is you know broken or is something you don't have faith in then you move on to the other one that actually says they'll do that for you right and so again you know ethereum for instance is you know even though it has expensive gas and you know it's it's it's you know it's it's it's not you know the most efficient the fact that it is so decentralized is actually one of the main reasons why you know most of the volume and most of the valuable assets exist on ethereum because you know it's the one network that is hardest to compromise whereas there's you know examples of many other you know l2s for instance that are arguably much cheaper much more efficient but yet yet

don't have the same traction despite its technical efficiency because they haven't Capt captured sort of the cultural aspect of it which is the trust of the network which comes from decentralization but also from you know the way that they've built communities around it and if the community can't have a sense of ownership then actually they you know um because you know they don't have control over it so as it were then they start to um it it compromises the trust in network which by the way is is the same as it runs for Nations and governments and countries as well right I mean you know um you know I live in Hong Kong and you know China is an extremely well-run country I mean you know if you if you've experienced it things are efficient uh stuff gets done

much faster than in the US right you know you can build Railways and train stations and stuff you know with no fuss and yet there's a liquidity discount you know in businesses and companies in in in China and why is that it's because there is a perceived centralization risk right and we've seen that effect if China wants to make a change they can make that change in good and bad ways right in a very top- down Manner and many people in China have been affected by that and while prior to covid a lot of people were lauding the fact that China was really efficient in everything they did and many you know people in the US were saying hey you know it's just much more efficient this way we should

just all go towards that kind of setup and then you know when the decision was flipped the other way it's like oh hold on a second wait a second we're not sure about that right whereas in the US it's chaotic it's the other way around if you want to make a change it takes forever to get that change and you have to go through voting and you have to go through institutions and you have to lobby and it may never happen but that means that your property rights in that sense is secure right you know that if you someone wanted to be CH making a fundamental change to the ownership of your things you know um outside of you doing illegal stuff obviously then it requires such a major constitutional change that most of the country has to agree which probably won't happen right and therefore you have a premium for

that right um so so I think the same principles apply in in in blockchain obviously because it's young um and you know the markets are still early in development you know you have these early developmental cycle issues so you have you know you know um price imbalances and you have sort of you know these things that happen when when when projects emerge and you know because of the speculative nature because capitalism is heavily embedded in web 3 you also people who participate in ways that might not seem logical because you know because of greed for instance right um that's however in distinct from the long-term value so so these might be short-term issues but these are not uh these these aren't the ones that build long-term value long-term value are the

ones that Embrace decentralization which means also gaming projects if they want to succeed for the long term have to be decentralized nft collections by definition are decentralized right I mean if you end up maintaining 80% of the supply of your nfts it'll have a very different feel than when the community owns a majority of the NFC collection and has a right over very interesting points um yeah I I think this uh this sort of like premium for decentralization even when when talking about nation states is a good way to look at you know uh economies of different countries and or or even different re different areas right I mean you it's a it's good to look at it

um you know we've got a couple more minutes here and I do want to ask you a little bit about uh mocha verse and some of the the the the brands that um that Anoka has uh in his portfolio yeah what what is the mocha verse and what's interesting about this IP I think Cool Cats also is one of the brands that uh in the in the portfolio is is somewh we invested in it's kind of like um similar to board Apes but it's cats and you know it's the internet who everyone loves cats um you know and it's it's that to me is you know I guess a classic pfp we just did a partnership with them outside of the investment with uh the Japan operation with AB Animo

Brands KK we're basically turning them into sort of you know I guess a manga brand as well in Japan and opening that up so that should be pretty exciting um and that's really about the culture and Community side of things and and so this brand actually has like a a a a show like there's episodes and characters going it's going to have stuff it's not there yet right so our partnership is basically helping them build up some some cool developments uh and which by the way is just another example of what you can do with with cool IP uh and you know just as a parallel I would say rarely if ever in my own history have I seen you know Major Brands evolve um the way that they have with sort of influence and financial capacity than

those brands in web 3 right if you look at Yuga Labs with board Apes if you look at cool cats if you look at even our own Mo or if you look at sandbox or you know auki for instance right or you know Pachi Penguins or so on right I mean these are all incredible um projects that were non-existent Brands some two three years ago right and have now become brands that are maybe more influential than some longer standing Brands out there right so that's that that sort of demonstrates you know the power of sort of you know how web3 community building and sort of capital formation can can give effect now what is moochae moochae is really a way for initially uh we have an nft collection as well that starts it off this way and you know

the M ID um is the next phase which we've started to launch which is the way in which you create soulbound nfts that essentially create a digital decentralized digital identity right um and I think the the the whole concept around this decentralized D is that you have a way in which you can now address our community uh in a sort of permissionless manner uh that is also uh sort of I guess in some ways verified so one of the experiences we had you know as we launch games uh we we we sometimes do kyc so because of an nft tment we did this with other deed we did it with re league and a bunch of other games and every time we do this we have to re kyc because the wallets get tossed

around right so for instance in our most recent in our most recent sale I think something like 30 or 40,000 wallets in our allow list ended up in the hands of people that were not actually doing the kyc Because you can trade your wallet like wait a second that that's an issue so that's the first point the second point is that you know it's costly to do kyc over and over again and so if we end up having you know again with the with a u sort of did you don't have to disclose who the person is but now you know that it's kyc and so it means that I can do an nft Mint or I can do something with them without actually necessarily having to recc and pay money time and time again um so that's again something of valuable uh and of course we have with

our 450 portfolio companies with you know the millions of of of of users in in that Network and the addressable space being actually in the hundreds of millions we can now create a way in which we can sort of combine and connect essentially all of these users in the kind of I guess social network not really saying Social fi but really in Social Network where then third parties who are not necessarily part of Adima can now benefit from its Network effects as well like meaning if you're launching a game you can use mocha ID and the mocha verse to launch that um and access this community without actually necessarily having to be a portfolio company for instance right which currently is quite manual right we we we we launch we do a partnership we do announcements we do that kind of stuff

um and you know that's okay but that actually ends up becoming quite tedious whereas now you know basically we can create essentially our own our own I guess we could call it like a quasi L2 of culture where everyone who can participate in workovers can now get the benefit of that and the other thing that we've also done is we've added a governance layer so if you own the mo nfts um you basically are able to vote on our on our treasuries um so the most famous example that we've done with apoin so we have um basically you know millions of apoin that is basically um with the moovers community which is decentralized the ownership of the nfts and they vote basically um you know on our treasury or part of our treasury what they you know what what icoin as

you know from a from a dow perspective can or cannot do uh and is interesting in the beginning obviously it was viewed a little bit sensitive because it's a separate community that has a say in itcoin but you know we thought that was better because it ended up bringing the two communities together uh and now many sort of moovers holders have board apes and apoin and apin holders have MS and they've become an integrated Community as they' kind of become a kind of super pack if you will for apoin uh and have ended up creating you know these interesting political structures that have become more inclusive and has grown the ecosystem as a result which which is what we think will happen broadly across the board uh and for us that's how we want our communities to grow you know we have large token reserves and and and

token balances but we don't want to be the ones that are sort of you know voting on them we want our community to basically um to have votes over them because it also teaches them about the space and you know gives them a sense of ownership uh even if it's not economic um and that's basically giving them you know rights to or tokens from a governance standpoint and that's how moovers plays a role as well so it's kind of almost like a dow of dows if you will um in its it's in its top level construction it's a dow dow cool well I you know I I I've got so many more questions that I didn't get a chance to go through but this has been really fascinating and um you know I want to thank you so much for your time and your really thoughtful aners uh you

know before we wrap up here what's the end game I mean you know in in five to 10 years what is this space going to look like and you know maybe because I I didn't use the metaverse Buzz word yet I'm going to ask you this like how does the metaverse tie into the endgame um you know I like I think in the next couple years we're going to start seeing Apple glass and Facebook glasses and you know all these sort of a AR um devices you know does does it tie into the end game and yeah what's your your sort of long long-term view here so first um when we talk about the metaverse um specifically we mean the open metaverse we talk about digital property rights

right as the foundation of that and things like AR and VR and you know screens and other great experiences are wonderful and that they enhance and deepen our experiences but they're not the meaning of the metaverse itself right so and I think this is a part where a lot of people get confused because you know you are already kind of in the metaverse when you're playing a game and having a VR goggle doesn't actually make that experience uh sort of you know more fundamentally different yes it's deeper as an experience it's more immersive right but ultimately if you're not owning the things that you do in the metaverse it's all meaningless anyway right so we think the foundation starts with property rights and that's only possible in web 3 and blockchain

right whether that is on this chain that chain that doesn't really matter in fact we believe in a multi-chain future um that's the other thing and so when we think of the endgame what we believe in is that you know because we spend so much time digitally because of most of the value is constructed and built in a digital way um we think that the end wouldn't call it an end game it's ever evolving but you know the way that we're advancing to I think it will sort of give us ownership in everything that we do online so meaning the new social networks of the future the games that we play in the future the environments that we're online we through our participation become essentially owners of the network we become stakeholders uh which basically means to me that um you

know it's just a fair form of capitalism right which is going kind of wrong with Sher the capitalism where only a select few get to benefit from the benefits of something and everyone else is just there to be extracted from whereas in this kind of stakeholder capitalism everyone basically um you know through their contribution gets to share in that because you know today if I'm a user in Instagram um actually I contribute value I basically work for Instagram I you know I bring my users there I engage with them but actually what do I get is you know it's it's it's it's likes which is basically the cheapest zero value currency there is right you know um you know which you know arguably we could say is probably the bigger scam out there because you're giving them a form

of a of a zero value token that really doesn't mean anything um but it gives you the illusion that it's something of value um and the platforms benefit but in this future network you know whether it's in games or whether it's in social networks you basically ACR value in the networks that you help construct cuz after all if there's no users Instagram Instagram's value is zero and that's why whether be true for games and every single digital experience and so we think that really what will happen and we think there'll be thousands and tens of thousands of these experiences and we will have ownership in our various communities big and small that we get to participate in we will um you know we will see a reshaping of capitalism so meaning that I think this could be the

way in which capitalism is rescued from this narrative where people say wait actually capitalism is this beneficial Force because without capitalism we won't have entrepreneurship we won't have Innovation we won't have the incentives it's just gone a little bit off the rails we used to have things like antitrust right which which helped break up monopolies which they've become powerless in the data Paradigm and so web 3 actually is the solution to that and so you know sort of a I guess thought experiment I sometimes give to people when they ask me to think about this more deeply is to say well you know why for instance isn't every Uber driver also not a shareholder in Uber right it doesn't make sense to me but now because of that you know Uber in the future is

going to have driverless cars but the people who helped make Uber are the drivers you know and and now they're going to be basically pushed out of a job eventually with driverless cars because Uber doesn't really need them um and and that is one of the reasons why there's so much frustration and this by the way isn't only in the case of uber it's in the case for everything that's happening in the classic show the capitalist framework um and and I think in in the web 3 through tokenization effectively you make everyone a stakeholder big and small right nobody said you had to have the same value or the same contribution right capitalism doesn't work if everyone gets exactly the same right that's more like communism but but um through your effort and your work and your contribution to

the network you receive essentially something of value right perhaps it's sort of a kind of different inter iteration of proof of work although not you know obviously in in sort of the in in the blockchain narrative but it is essentially you know if you think about the oldest forms of value in our capitalist economies it was it was our work that we did and the proof of work that we performed in the physical way so I think that's basically the next step that we can sort of come back to in this future metaverse that's sort of building out in in in web 3 and blockchain hot take the future of crypto is proof of work yes that's what let's end on that sure cool well yeah thanks so much for

for coming on the podcast it's been great chatting and uh yeah hope we can do this at some other point we didn't even talk about AI we didn't really we we didn't really go in depth on gaming um maybe I can get you on my other podcast we could do another another show there a little bit more in depth on the gaming side but yeah thanks thanks again and look forward to cheing soon thank you for having me