SPEAKER_00
With Axie, we're looking to be a relatable, fun, nostalgic entry point into the world of crypto. Nostalgia is the most powerful of human emotions. We have gamers, our generation.
We grew up playing games like RuneScape, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Stardew Valley. These experiences evoke really powerful emotions and when you can basically evoke that emotion and then attach crypto to it, you have a way to get people down the rabbit hole and I think a much, I don't know, in a way that makes a lot more sense to, you know, billions of gamers worldwide.
SPEAKER_02
Just got done filming with Jiho, the chief growth officer and one of the co-founders of Axie Infinity.
SPEAKER_01
Blew my mind. Crazy stuff. Yeah, Axie's one of the largest played-iron games and he shares a glimpse
SPEAKER_02
of the future that kind of blows my mind. Yeah, we talked all about play-to-earn, understanding it, how it's the natural progression of a lot of the gaming industry and what the world might look like in the next 10 years. Super excited for you guys to check this one out.
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We've got, I guess, the natural future of where people are saying video games are going. It's like the web 3 future. So you're gonna guide me on this journey down and play to earn land because I grew up, I was like a Pokemon guy.
I love Pokemon. World of Warcraft met like all this stuff I played. I love video games.
I haven't been as close to it recently. Invested in the space a little bit. I think it's awesome.
But stoked to talk about video games today with with Gio. Yeah, I mean,
SPEAKER_01
I've never told you this, but I actually played professional Counter Strike. No way. I was like
SPEAKER_02
16. Really? Yeah. How did that come about? Did you practice? And you were like sick at Counter Strike? Yeah, pretty much.
Dude, yeah, this reminds me so much of, you know, Josh. But Josh has three. So Josh Fabian, founder of MetaFi has three kids, I think three, four, and two of his sons are like top 50 in the world Pokemon players.
And they're little dudes and they go up against adults in this like strategy game and they're just complete savages like destroy them. And so I'm imagining you as a 16 year old kid or 15 year old kid like little baby Greg rolling around destroying people
SPEAKER_01
in Counter Strike. Totally. Yeah, we, me and my clan actually competed in the qualifier for the World Cyber Games in maybe 2004, which was a long time ago.
I love that. So yeah, I need pictures. We're going to need to check receipts on this.
There's one picture of me, which is insane, which maybe I can dig up. We're going to dig it up. We're going to throw it into the discord
SPEAKER_02
after we get done with this because we're going to need to see this picture. I need to see 15
SPEAKER_01
year old Greg. I'm going to get memed. Yeah, I hope so.
I've got like the longest cyber anyways.
SPEAKER_02
I can't wait. Yeah. So what are we going to dig into today? I mean, we've got a lot to cover with
SPEAKER_01
Gio. Have you, well, I've been just, I've been thinking about Play to Earn a bunch and also Learn to Earn. Have you seen rabbit hole.
gg? What is Learn to Earn? So play to earn, we're going to
SPEAKER_02
dive into it Gio. Like we'll talk about all the definitions and get into it. Learn to earn.
I've
SPEAKER_01
never heard of. So what is that? Learn to earn. Well, I'll explain it by the example like rabbit hole.
So the way rabbit hole works is you earn tokens from decentralized applications by learning about them. So for example, Uniswap is one of the biggest protocols that exists in decentralized finance and they'll basically give let's say, you know, 10 uni tokens if you go on a rabbit hole quest. And the rabbit hole quest is all about learning about how Uniswap works and how to actually, you know, use some of their protocol.
So Uniswap is happy because they've just acquired this new customer who is vetted, right? They've actually learned how to use the protocol and they've actually, they've got, you know, quote unquote, on chain reputation. So meaning you've learned how to use Uniswap and it's almost minted to the blockchain. So it's like, this, you know, Greg Eisenberg learned this.
And that's really the concept of learn to earn. Yeah, that's really
SPEAKER_02
cool. I mean, it's a natural sort of play adjacency to play to earn. It's really interesting to think about like normal world non web three applications of that exact thing, like how companies might be able to integrate learn turn because if you think about like a bank credit card company, new financial services infrastructure, they benefit so much from people understanding what they're building and the product suite.
And so I wonder whether there are ways to like leverage that idea by just like teaching people more and now suddenly you've acquired a customer effectively and it's more interesting in the web three context because now you have like people that could be developers like they should do a developer camp where they teach you how to code on Solana or they teach you how to code on top of Ethereum and then you get one ETH for doing the course like they pay you to take the course because now they have new developers that are building on top of it and creating this whole ecosystem effect. Yeah, I think I think that that's where
SPEAKER_01
it's all going where I actually did a thread on this where I believe that in the future you'll have your resume on chain and you'll be able to apply at a job and then within 60 seconds get that job because you know those people know that you are great at Uniswap or you understand how to code in Rust or Solidity or whatever and you have these these badges to prove it. I think that's the future. I got like a ton of backlash from that thread like thousands of people being like you're completely wrong like.
So is the idea, sorry I want to go deeper on that just for
SPEAKER_02
one second before you extend. So the idea of it being on chain would mean that you would have your resume. It would also have like credibility scores on chain associated with every skill set that experience you say you have.
So people could have in a trustless way you would know when you went to it that that person had been stamped of approval and had executed a number of things really high quality with whatever that skill set is. What's stopping me, yes that's exactly how it works.
SPEAKER_01
What's stopping me from going on LinkedIn and being like I'm the head of magic at McDonald's. Totally. Nothing.
So what I do like about applying blockchain to this is it's vetted. I went through rabbit hole and I've learned this skill and therefore I've proven.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah that really is interesting. It's interesting to think about derivative businesses you could build off of it too of like how do I, like it would be very cool to say I'm gonna like you did crypto college you're teaching a bunch of people how to build in web three. If I'm an enterprising person I might actually go buy a bunch of those NFTs, stake them, stake a bunch of people's scholarship and say I want 10% of your first company.
Like use it as my venture investment in them and say if you're gonna go build in this space I'll buy you you're taking into this thing but I'm the god now you have to give me a 10% stake or when you raise your first round I have to have priority access out of 20% discount to whatever you raise at in order to invest and it's sort of like I mean it's what these incubators are doing in a lot of sense but it's for a web three world. So you actually are paying, I mean like you're giving them their ticket to the learning experience and even cooler when you think about the actual protocols doing it. So like Solana paying to have students go into a Solana boot camp because they know that it's going to create and foster a broader ecosystem kind of a cool idea to like think about what the businesses are that could be built around
SPEAKER_01
that. Yeah I think I mean it makes sense right like so with Crypto College like we were a course teaching about NFTs, DAOs and social tokens and we had 150 people who are builders right they're building they've now like they're vetted they've learned how to do this and a lot of them are building successful projects. It makes sense that either us as as Crypto College or or some external group comes and basically yeah stakes or lends out these these admission tickets and then you would imagine that there's a smart contract that's baked into it that basically says yeah I get x percent of your revenue or I get y y and that's the beauty about web three and and crypto is that you can just bake that into the code of the smart contract.
Yeah so this learn to earn thing is really
SPEAKER_02
interesting. I want to I want to talk more about it with you because I think there are a bunch of cool I feel we could do a whole episode on Learn to Earn. Yeah I think there's like a bunch of really cool applications of it too to like dive in more understand some of the business opportunities that come off this and also like can you create kind of learn to earn services that then you know you can plug into older world companies and figure out ways to foster new kind of ecosystems around your existing like old world web 2 company and product so I really do think that's interesting.
I do want to bring in Jihou and dive in on Play to Earn because the video game aspect and what they're building is super super interesting and I think we need to go deep on it. And he's he's
SPEAKER_01
the guy to bring in. He's the guy. So let's let's do it.
Bring him in we'll jam on it. Hey this is Jihou.
SPEAKER_00
I'm the co-founder of Axe Infinity. Coming at you live. We are live.
In Miami. Jihou. For NFT.
SPEAKER_02
Balsam. NFT model. Yeah there's YouTube, podcast, Spotify and then a community so we built a whole thing around Discord alongside it.
That's gonna be nice. I should run your Discord. Yeah it's gonna be cool.
We'll go in like after the episode drops we'll invite you. Discord changed my life. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Really? Yeah. Like that's how I that's how you know like I saw the wire article that a crypto kitty sold for 150 thousand dollars. Like what the fuck is a crypto kitty? But this seems like kind of interesting.
This seems accessible. I was always a gamer. I was always a collector.
I wasn't I wasn't into crypto when it was about trading. I already knew how to trade options. So if I wanted extreme volatility I already knew where to get that.
Yeah so then I found I saw that a crypto kitty had 2017 like December 1st or something like that. So basically four years ago to the day. Right yeah exactly four years ago.
For your anniversary. Happy birthday. Discover crypto kitties and I was like it was an interesting community.
Like people were doing interesting stuff around it. I built I worked on a project called Kitty Hats that was building accessories on top of it. Right so.
Are you at Yale at the time? No no no I had graduated. I was a quad recruiter for a couple of years. No way. I was doing like. Some of the smartest people that I was talking to that I'd been talking to all super interested in Ethereum and smart contracts.
So that was on my radar. Right and then I saw crypto kitties. But then right it kind of was just a proof of concept.
Right it was like it's like let's not try to turn this into something that is not destined to be. But we knew that okay like right there was problems with the economy. Right so we need we needed to figure out like how can we get people to actually just right like want to hold these pets rather than just like breeding and selling.
Right we needed we needed there to be more verbs or utility right. I think of utility in terms of verbs right like okay you could breed you can collect what else right. Okay battle right.
That's a cool way of thinking about
SPEAKER_02
it. I've never thought of that utility in terms of verbs. It makes a ton of sense though.
SPEAKER_00
Battle yeah battle collect build yeah harvest yeah right these are all verbs that we're trying
SPEAKER_02
to bring to Axis. That's so cool. Okay so you so Discord you ended up like you got into Discord channels because you saw that things were going on with it and stuff was happening.
You would talk to a bunch of smart people that were getting into it and clearly then you started paying attention to it. And so like what actually brought you from there then to the Axi story. Yeah so I joined
SPEAKER_00
Axi as a community member right. So I topped in I think there were 10 people like that were regularly chatting in the Discord at that time. So and yeah I met the founders Trump, Masamune they were talking about their vision in the Discord at the time.
It was like and I said hey like this is something that could work. It's right it has that a collectability aspect and the scarcity but there's also right this plan for long-term fun and utility. And I was like I saw that as the perfect formula for building an amazing community.
Did the game exist at that point or was it just a vision? Yeah so I arrived on the day I think that the Axis were unveiled. So there was a month where people were buying tokens NFDs that you couldn't see. Actually this is now like a common strategy right but at that time it was people were like Adam Bomb story.
Because people were like is this a scam is this art ever gonna be revealed? And then as soon as the art was revealed I think people felt safe to kind of tell me about it. So then I arrived you could see the Axis right. I bought three and I was like okay like what do we do next right? Like we need we need to we need to start building.
What did they cost when you first bought them? I think the Axis that I got were like 0.15 each or something like these are origin Axis right. So I think you know there was a chance that you could get a when you were buying these original Axis right there's only 4,088 of them hardcap origin Axis and around like basically each time up one of their body parts or a gene was rolled there was a chance that it was a mystic part.
Right so there are six body parts so it's like around like a 30% chance that it would have a mystic part. Mystics are like limited collectible or kind of like the holy grail with anoxity right. So I think like mystics are I think around 30 each right now.
It's so cool because
SPEAKER_02
like now we're all familiar with these terms. Like you spend time in the NFT world you like understand rarity you understand all the different properties but in 2017 or what it was 2017 it was like this is weird I don't understand it it's like the Chris Dixon thing of like if it looks like a toy you know might be the thing of the future. People were saying that like in the early days
SPEAKER_00
of NFTs right they were just they were and I I'd seen that I think Andreessen invested in crypto kitties it obviously became Dapper Labs later so like okay this is a space this is going to be an entire market so I was I was kind of looking for an opportunity to get involved as a builder in a project right so yeah I found Axis a community member and just started trying to help out so I was helping with the community doing some writing just keeping the discord chat liquidity hi you guys are kindred spirits so you're the CEO you're the CEO of Axi Infinity right no no
SPEAKER_01
no I'm a co-founder growth lead head of growth cgo I guess so you can go from a community member to a sea level executive by just literally partaking in the community and contributing like you know when you started I would imagine joining that community you're first you know you never thought that you'd be or correct me if I'm wrong did you think that you were going to be the chief growth officer of this of this big thing I don't know I was taking it day by day like I was just
SPEAKER_00
also having fun right yeah I was just hanging out meeting new people uh and yeah it's kind of the
SPEAKER_02
web three I always think about Greg's gonna make fun of me for this probably like I am a uh I'm still a ludite and I still am like developing my understanding of all these things and embracing it and I think of all of these things and like prior to web three analogs and I think of this as like a story of it's like the person that starts as like the you know stock room floor and now is the CEO like Walmart actually I think the CEO of Walmart currently is a guy that like started as a store
SPEAKER_01
man like he started as a store clerk I mean right before this we had Kat Cole who wasn't she a Hooters waitress and became the head the head you know and I think I think the you know the 2021
SPEAKER_00
2022 equivalent of that is you start in the discord we're hiring like incredible talent from the
SPEAKER_02
discord right now from the community so cool that's so cool so I want to get into um I want to get into the axi story for sure because I think it's amazing I've done a bunch of research and reading on you and um and the story but maybe we start like let's set the stage for people that are listening people like me that probably don't understand it quite as much with just like a little bit of kind of definitions around it so can you guys talk you guys know this much better than me can you talk about like free to play and then how does that transition and what does play to play to earn
SPEAKER_00
mean yeah sure so in the in the in the in traditional gaming right like the developers the app stores the publishers they're all right they're all working uh and they're they're they're working together they're selling a product right they're still either selling skins or game copies um selling loot boxes right traditionally they're taking close to 100 percent of the revenue generated by the game all right there are some like black and gray markets but it's it's not uh yeah they're they're kind of difficult to to to uh access and and use so our our model is a lot different right we're very focused on the community the player owned economy uh so we see it as we've kind of lowered taxes from close to 100 to around 4.25 right which is the fee on the axi marketplace right so rather than selling axes directly we uh monetize by just taking a percent or a cut of all peer to peer player to player uh transactions on our marketplace
SPEAKER_02
so the original i just want to read it back to you guys make sure i'm understanding it correctly so like earlier kind think like fortnight everyone knows fortnight they you know epic games like has this massive ecosystem that they've built the game is free to play and you go buy skins you buy different attributes or whatever within the game all of that money it sounds like is going to epic like there the 100 percent that's the rent the way you put it i thought was great the rent they're taking it the players get to play the utility the players get is that they have fun there's no like you're not earning anything and the difference here when you start thinking about play to earn is rather than that company taking 100 percent that whole pool now is basically for the players and for the ecosystem and the world in a in a way that you're creating and the actual company axi takes a clip like it's a tiny percentage that gets taken out of
SPEAKER_00
five percent or something it's also like an important thing to recognize too right is people are also spending within axi for reasons that they spend on right traditional digital items right like they're spending for fun they're spending for status right like axi is an incredibly fun game and it's an amazing community this is actually what backs the economy that's also why it's so hard to replicate right if it was just about mechanisms then everyone would just copy the mechanism and then there would be all these thriving nft planner and games right now but but there aren't there's only one actually because i think it has to do with that uh idea of the social capital backing
SPEAKER_01
the economy can you talk more about that so what makes a great play to earn game what are what are
SPEAKER_00
the ingredients i think there there there there's a lot i mean you need i think an amazing community something where the way that i think about crypto in general is like what are are there products where the community is doing a majority of the work already uh where a middleman is extracting the value uh away from that community and can we cut out the middleman and basically reward the community for the work that they're already doing so i think that any product that has the community like user-generated content right like that's brilliant anything that has a high amount of work being done by users with large existing middlemen is ripe for disruption so that's why that's how i i look at it so yeah i think like the roblox model would work better right if they opened up the economy even more you know that roblox actually uh was very irrelevant for a long time until they allowed people to actually cash out their roblox so it's a more open model that's why it's like that's why it's actually catapulted but we just we're taking it to the natural conclusion which is like you know giving even giving as much as possible uh to the
SPEAKER_02
community so we need to go deeper on this because that was brilliant so just as a framework find a business or an industry where the community is creating the vast majority of the value and if there is a rent collector sitting there that's somehow harvesting most of the value from that it needs to be disrupted and it likely will be disrupted by something that looks more like web3 and that is more decentralized and community oriented i think it's so interesting to think about the incentives that you're relying on to advance these spaces to where like with the prior versions you are relying on the fact that like epic or whatever the developer is will continue to reinvest those profits to enhance and make the ecosystem better and continue to make the game better and make it more engaging and fun over time with this you're actually not relying on anybody because it is in every player's best interest to make the ecosystem better so that they can earn
SPEAKER_00
more money in it and so they all have that they want to reinvest. Many of the players right you can see each each of them as a digital pet store owner right and i actually magic is actually a more of a decentralized model too right where there's a secondary market there's kind of like this economy each store owner right is kind of incentivized to host magic nights right they have like magic friday i think like where they have tournaments right so it's more of a decentralized model right so but i think like yeah one of the things that nfts do in my opinion is they give the characteristics of physical collectibles like trading cards to digital assets. Can we talk more
SPEAKER_01
about that so magic i've always wondered like who was like why they were throwing these magic tournaments like can you talk more about the mod first of all i didn't know that you were like a
SPEAKER_02
magic nerd i wouldn't say i was a magic nerd but i love magic cards pokemon i was a warcraft
SPEAKER_00
people were into that kind of stuff like magic like these are a lot of them like we're super early tax so they see them they see the model is just like taking that physical world model
SPEAKER_01
and applying it to a borderless future i just when i look at him i see like stanford baseball
SPEAKER_02
picture fun fact the stanford baseball team my freshman year the entire team on all of our road trips would be sitting on our computers playing world of warcraft together on the way to
SPEAKER_01
against hilarious narrative violation but yeah going back to magic like do you do you know about their model because i've recently been obsessed around taking sort of like older community
SPEAKER_00
models and bringing online so just curious about you yeah i'm like i studied it a little bit in the early days of axi and i saw that basically physical events were really important to their propagation on the proliferation of magic right where uh yeah store owners the store owners and right like they basically will the wizards of the coast they'll send merch basically and i guess appoint people um just kind of like this bureaucracy or whatever and and they have this whole framework for basically uh yeah hosting events and i think there are like thousands of them right every friday
SPEAKER_01
all across the country it's funny because we we talk about the metaverse right we talk about this digital place but so many of us forget that physical is where communities so community
SPEAKER_00
so for for something like magic where there's a huge secondary market right just like axi the community is really important because people need to be spending right for that flex right so in magic right why do people buy why would anyone buy a black lotus right they might see it as a store value but it's also right it was like you get to tell the other people in the magic community that you have a fucking black lotus right similar right similar similar dynamic in the axi community right with all the collectability um and that it's that right like uh status that right drives a lot
SPEAKER_02
of the economic activity as well yeah and it creates a it creates a world as you continue to scale it both physical and digital but you're sort of just what you're creating is not a game anymore it's like an entire ecosystem really a nation um of axi players that's borderless and so it doesn't matter if all the articles about the people in the philippines that are earning a living wage playing axi it's amazing it's like you watch these videos and it's very inspiring that there are people that are doing this and then there's someone in america and like you go and host an event at our puzzle and people that have never met never connected in person in any form or function are now all of a sudden connected in this cool very real way it doesn't matter the color of their skin it's like very global it's really really cool um that's one of the things that i love just like the promise of it that i love so much is that borderless aspect to it one of the things i want to also ask about is like what are the challenges of the unique i don't know drawbacks or challenges of this plate earn model like with axi you had this massive hype cycle um you know like pakky had his piece on it and there was all this press and everything and you know the prices of everything spiked it's it's obviously like with every hype cycle it pulls back pricing so like how do you think about that aspect of the plate earn model where you're going to have natural like any market fluctuations in the prices and how it impacts players and gaming sure i mean this has happened
SPEAKER_00
to right like where we we built all through throughout 2018 2019 right axi prices went from right the cheapest you know kind of run-of-the-mill axes went from i think five dollars to 20 cents or something but that was really important for the community that was character building that volatility actually uh creates fermentation a fermentation process so it's actually needed right like every crypto strong crypto community needs to go through a bear market together unfortunately maybe you're for better for worse i think that that's how it works i think that's also one of the hard parts of starting a project now and a lot of projects come to me for advice on like how do you build a community it's like but they're they're operating in a totally different market right like the same things that we did back then are not going to work now it's like the
SPEAKER_02
lindy effect have you read uh any to lab like he's like somewhat hated in the bitcoin community for like he hits on bitcoin but hit the lindy effect of the whole idea of like the longer you've survived the longer you're likely to survive and so being hardened by those periods of pain actually leads to more survivability of it i think it's a great it's a great way of putting it actually like you
SPEAKER_00
need those moments i'll also say there is one of the drawbacks of like this whole narrative around plate plate earn i prefer we're we prefer to call it play enter right uh but one of the drawbacks narrative is that right the community aspect the you know the uh the fun of the entire ecosystem it kind of takes like a backseat to you know this thing that's kind of a new innovation right is there there are so many fun games out there there are a lot of amazing communities out there right this is kind of a fundamental new innovation but sometimes uh it takes a little bit of the spotlight off of right the rest of the ecosystem and and and also the stuff that basically allows the plate earn model to work right and then people start saying oh like plate earn like how does this how is this sustainable because they don't understand how fun the game is how awesome the
SPEAKER_01
community is fast forward 10 years from now what percentage of the game gaming market is play and earn versus traditional as you define it well i think that these digital economies are become
SPEAKER_00
some of the largest economies of all time right so like it's more like how many games will there be that are larger than large countries or something right with economies that are larger than large countries i think that there will be i think that there will be hundreds of millions if not billions of players playing you know participating in these uh yeah digital worlds right we're already saying that right our digital lives our digital identities are becoming increasingly more important uh the pandemic right kind of expedited that uh but now it's like okay we're using the digital world as kind of a a way to funnel or to sift through who we actually want to spend time with in the physical world as well right so i think that's also that unity that fusion uh is is super bullish for
SPEAKER_01
everything that we're building and and is the vision can you walk us through a little bit of the vision of axi in the sense of like um could you see a world where people not only come to axi to just play but they go maybe there's quests that have real world implications or like do you see it more as like um a potential like virtual world where it could be serious and fun or do you see it just fun like the you know hey we're just trying to build like the most fun
SPEAKER_00
experience and there's some on-chain revenue etc yeah actually like so uh we just had an internal discussion about this right is like the world they want to see like oh this is a fun game right but as uh right stewards of the ecosystem we think a little bit more in terms of like what are the archetypes of players in this ecosystem right we so right now we have like uh battler competitive battlers right we have scholarship managers people that are renting out their axes we have scholars right they're kind of just farming tokens to survive uh then we have the collectors right they're really into the aesthetics and the scarcity aspect of it um and then we have people who just they hold access and they stake it and they're also contributing to the ecosystem there are people who right they trade the SLP token and this provides liquidity for it why because it has interesting like correlations to the rest to all all their basically asset classes because it's kind of like a it's a it's a uncapped uh coin that's kind of tied to the value of human effort within our ecosystem so it's kind of like a weird correlation thing so basically there are all these different archetypes right and we need to also think about when we think about the future what are the future archetypes of people that we want to have in our ecosystem so it's a little bit I think a more precise way of thinking about it because right fun is very uh subjective and some people believe that they're the arbiters of fun but it's to me it's like yeah it's not specific enough it's not something that you can build scientifically with so you hit on something there
SPEAKER_02
that I think is like one of the most mind-blowing like for it fucked me up the first time I was reading about it to be totally honest which was like this whole idea of the physical world real world economies that are being built outside and alongside adjacent to axi and like the scholar thing is a perfect example of this like I've seen it with I think what is it ygg yield guild games that's what it stands for um and a few others that have kind of popped up that are basically have they built real world physical businesses adjacent to axi to kind of support the ecosystem that's being built not supported by axi it's just companies that have like enterprising entrepreneurs that have gone and realized they could stake people to go and play in the game the same way honestly is like what we've done with athletes in the past like Russian tennis players have been backed by these like oligarchs to go and build a career and then they take a percentage of the earnings that to me is like this seminal moment of what you're doing that all of a sudden there are economies being built outside of you where you're like oh this looks like a country where you have all these random economy points did you guys was that like a vision that you had or did you start seeing it and say holy shit there's really something to this
SPEAKER_00
it's it's something right like I don't know like you there's fog of war right like so you just go and you try to get to product market fit in the early days we saw that right axi was more more than a game because people were spending so much time on the discord right like that was kind of like their home uh so we saw axi in the early days as maybe a social network but we couldn't pitch it as a social network when we hold had only 200 people in the community but early on we saw that there was something very special happening with the community uh you know we've we all had you know a thesis that these digital economies would would start to rise uh but yeah you know it was definitely right like to see man to see people start building on top of it right to see uh even uh physical uh physical businesses are starting to accept access and s lp as payment uh to lure right more foot traffic right like if you if you know that there are a lot of like axi players in your town you can get them to come check out your business by accepting our in-game currencies right so this is a marketing strategy it's a user acquisition strategy for uh businesses in the traditional world so yeah I think like what what is a nation like how do we define a nation right the nations typically have like right like a kind of an economy maybe culture national pastimes sometimes languages um I think it's it's it's we're starting to see all that uh develop within axi uh physical borders or maybe like you know the last uh component of it I think that we have a chance you know over the next 15 years to you know potentially acquire some distressed real estate from a thought sovereign nation uh and maybe set up a special economic zone or something that could be recognized by the UN um so yeah we we we've we've already had to start issuing statements to the to the legacy governments of the world right because they're like all like we heard that the central bank of the Philippines was interested in an axi and asking questions about it uh and so we didn't know how to get into contact with them so we put out like as an announcement saying that you know we encourage our players to pay taxes if they have to or if they're if they're you know local I
SPEAKER_01
guess governments are requiring them to yeah I think I mean on one hand I hear you say like you're not even saying anything but I hear you in terms of like it's wild that you can start a game bring people together that eventually leads to like a country um on the other hand it kind of makes sense right like you've built an economy you've built like-minded individuals you've built culture you've built community um we just had a conversation with Meltem and Meltem you know what Meltem was saying is you know the future basically that there's going to be these like new churches and new
SPEAKER_02
cathedrals um and she's actually trying to build I mean like the church of Bitcoin I don't know if it's Bitcoin but basically like an actual you know treated as a religion for tax purposes and you can put your gains into this so that it's allocating on a tax efficient basis to go do it it's kind of it's a crazy concept but not that crazy when you break it down to the atomic unit of it actually
SPEAKER_00
I mean it's not like microchrity right like was like some uh I think was like a non-profit
SPEAKER_01
organization yeah right yeah yeah yeah exactly and it's you know how many people play Axie
SPEAKER_00
approximately uh we have 2.8 million daily active users so yeah millions of people right like Iceland is 400,000 people do you think about it we have I think two players in Iceland it was a long time where I was like I can't like Iceland green yeah I think Iceland like we just didn't have any anyone there I was like who wants to be the first yeah right yeah and I think like so I mean you're bigger
SPEAKER_01
than Iceland you know you're you're you're you're five to six times bigger than Iceland yeah um and it makes sense that like yeah like you might want to you know some people might want to move to this
SPEAKER_00
place makes it makes a lot of sense I'm starting to see people describe the scale of the Axie economy as in terms of GDP right um so yeah yeah I mean that's like the tipping point right when we will
SPEAKER_01
start saying it that way well old is you know gross domestic product new is game domestic product
SPEAKER_02
yeah the um the first time I ever thought about this question like you asked like what is a country you've all know a Harari as that book sapiens which everyone should read if they haven't and he goes into that like what is an organization what is a company what is a country it's just shared belief at the end of the day and it's just like you have a shared belief in something and there's community like all of what we're talking about here it's community it's bringing it together like money what is money it's just trust like you have cut what is money that was actually the opening line to my thesis seriously but it's I mean it's crazy when you break these things down to there like boil them down to the root um I just that like I just think it's fast I also think it's fascinating if you're a builder and you're looking for a new startup idea what you have an Axie um and probably there are a couple other things out there that have a similar fervor around them right now but not many is a group of 2.8 million people worldwide that are highly highly engaged with something um that have a ton of needs that like you can go and create something for exactly those needs the people that were doing these scholar programs staking or doing that but like they're going to be unique banking and financial services needs that come off of um people that are playing on a regular basis what can you go build that like services those people really really well so we
SPEAKER_00
just we just actually just launched a dex a decentralized exchange it's called katana uh I believe it's the second large there's a 1.4 billion dollars locked in if we only have two pairs Axis ETH and SLP ETH we also have a USDC ETH as well um so we're getting stablecoin access to people in
SPEAKER_02
the emerging markets as well where did it previously happen was it like FTX or something where they
SPEAKER_00
previously did it or is it like Binance a lot like DEX is on Ethereum stuff there's a lot of like friction around right like basically you claim the token within your ecosystem for playing the game then you have to like transfer out of the ecosystem to right to sell it right um so yeah like it's it's I think it was a huge catalyst for us uh yeah I think they're a huge thing for you
SPEAKER_02
guys this is just a random idea that I'm having right now but like in terms of creating stability within the ecosystem as well and I've talked about it with several people like rich people don't sell the assets they have they take loans out against it never have to sell it they live off of the loans against it that will eventually happen in the Axi community and then you won't have these massive price swings and volatility within the market because people will be leaving their SLP within the ecosystem sure sure you can like have financial services infrastructure that gets built outside it that allows people to actually take a living wage as a claim against their what is it
SPEAKER_00
I think the next the next thing maybe maybe you agree like I think maybe one of the next things that we should build on run-in is something like right something like Aave or Compound a money market basically um and that this will basically allow right like people to get liquidity right from their Axis holdings uh without having to suffer a taxable event could you could you
SPEAKER_01
explain what Aave or Compound is to to right you know regular normies uh yeah like so Aave and Compound
SPEAKER_00
are crypto money markets where you can basically deposit tokens and receive a stablecoin loan based on the value of those assets right so uh yeah you might be able to write let's say you deposit a hundred dollars of a token of let's say ETH you can then draw maybe 20 dollars of stablecoin right and this basically allows you to get liquidity uh from your crypto without having to sell it and yeah you can also write like on the other side you can also borrow from these money markets if maybe you want leverage or you have some need for ETH and the
SPEAKER_02
reason this is hugely valuable I mean in a normal in a non-Axi context is like if I have a ton of Bitcoin but I bought it at a hundred dollars and now it's worth 60 000 and I want to go buy a house I can't do that if I like I sell my Bitcoin pay a huge tax on that game and then go buy a house with the cash this allows you to leave your Bitcoin you never have to pay the tax and you can draw money against it and then go and buy it and so in the Axie Infinity case why it's interesting is people wouldn't have to sell and convert to fiat in order to pay for their food in the grocery store down the street they could leave it in the game which by the way has the nice benefit of creating price stability in the game which drives more people in and continues to drive appreciation and growth of the ecosystem but they can still draw against it to go buy their food and live on a
SPEAKER_00
database yeah I think it's a potentially important project a product you know we have to do a lot of education right like so we see Axie as an accessible cute nostalgic community driven kind of rabbit hole into the rest of crypto as well right so you start with the game in the community but then right you start to learn okay how to stake right how to pull liquidity um you start to all these other verbs right get unlocked right stake farm deposit borrow uh and yeah 50% of our users have never used crypto yeah that's amazing 25% of them don't even have a bank account so we have to do a lot of basic financial and crypto education um so people are learning incredible amounts I see Axie is also like an education platform in some ways um there are a lot of educational like content companies coming to us you know saying hey Lou they would want to have us reskin their course with Axie so that right like it's people actually use it yeah I mean this
SPEAKER_02
is like you're creating so much value for the web3 and crypto ecosystem by educating people in this way it's also what you're saying is the reason why I haven't invested in any financial literacy like platforms or businesses is because I fundamentally believe that financial literacy happens through actual like action and putting skin in the game and no seriously and like it's not me taking a course on like how to invest it's by actually having skin in the game and learning it by feeling it out and like fucking up feeling the pain of something and getting rug put whatever like ends up happening um but that like that the amount of value that's being created by taking something that looks like a toy people get unramped into crypto and now they're red pilled to some extent starting to see what the future looks like all of these different things happening and suddenly we have you know it's 2.8 now it's 10 in a few months it's like it becomes very very powerful long term as you
SPEAKER_01
compound that super exciting do you um you mentioned Axie you know when you first started Axie you know as a social network do you think in in in play to earn and play and earn the way it works is there's like multiple worlds that you end up in so for example like in social like there's multiple areas right there's twitter for this there's instagram for that there's tiktok for this do you think it's one big world in planner planner or do you think it you know you could imagine a world where maybe axie creates separate worlds so I think that when we're just
SPEAKER_00
riffing right so it's this is all like very hypothetical and speculative right but I think that there will yeah I believe in that there will be multiple worlds but I believe that there will be certain assets starting with ERC 20s like money kind of or in tokens that will right like kind of be borderless because these things with like a I don't know liquidity and a dollar value or it's easier to port them between worlds right but then right obviously we get into like interoperability I'm more bullish on vertical inter interop so that's in our case right one team of axes many different games built by many different developers in the axie universe right and then eventually maybe like right like having standards to port them between right like pop I see it more as an attack vector like if there's a if there was a game that was bigger than axie that used NFTs I would give those NFTs some utility I would try to give them some utility in axie to basically take their users so this is actually we did this with the central land in the early days where I we said that everyone who owns land at the central land can get free axes and we just gave out a lot of axes to the central land landholders and then we had the land sale and a lot of them ended up becoming members of the community and you know getting stakes in land which I think like changed
SPEAKER_02
a lot of lies as well so like that my last question for you is a sort of a look into the future like can a traditional gaming company effectively become plated earn and try to participate in this future or is this a new future that has to be built by people that are organic on the ground
SPEAKER_00
plated earn or play and earn I think I think that these grassroots products that are built by users I think they have advantages I also believe that there's room for traditional players to come into the space I think it really is highly dependent on the team and they're kind of you know internal chemistry I think that right like this model can be applied to a lot of games right especially where there's kind of there's rarity there's scarcity there's collectability there's a strong community there's user-generated content I think those are the right ingredients that would fit well for some kind of port I think that I also I'm super bullish on all right so your traditional game developer you have like a pretty good game it's like a nice game in terms of mechanics but maybe like there's something off with the IP or the art I would love for them to come right just reskin the game with axi incubator and then it becomes part of our ecosystem and then they have this distribution right this is like community as a service right it's like your product has no adoption but it's a good product okay just like making an axi product and then all of a sudden
SPEAKER_01
you're gonna have millions of users so it's like axi infinity eating the world like maybe right where the gaming world at least to start it's like all about right the future is all about user
SPEAKER_00
community aggregation and distribution right so if you have that this is what d5 protocols are learning that they can't do because there's no IP there's no like there's no there's very little brand loyalty when it's just like I don't know clicking some buttons right it has to be attached
SPEAKER_02
to content yeah and the way it's set up is you can have as many sub communities as you want within the axi world it's already right there are thousands of thousands of different guilds right
SPEAKER_00
these are many of the guilds right they say oh like they're metaverse guilds or whatever they're all for the entire player and ecosystem but all the only thing that they're actually playing where they have live users the only you know economy that they're participating in on a
SPEAKER_02
daily basis is axi yeah we have a we have a common friend this guy josh fabian runs this company metafi and it's like coaching one-on-one coaching for gamers you get coached by an expert and he was telling me recently that axi is like their number one requested thing that they want coaches to coach axi because it's so valuable people can actually go earn money doing it so then they're going they're willing to pay to invest in that so it's another example of like
SPEAKER_00
sounds like a good ecosystem being built a good opportunity for a lot of our influencers too yeah right like they're looking for you know cool ways to you know monetize their time and out there within the ecosystem so yeah I would love to chat with you yeah you should get I'll connect you
SPEAKER_02
with him for sure he's phenomenal and they're about to announce a big big fundraise big bright future well thank you so much for joining us man thank you thank you this was uh this was epic I mean I personally just learned a lot too so selfishly I feel much smarter on everything that everything that's happening in the space and I am uh I'm bullish on the future for you guys man it's so so
SPEAKER_01
cool awesome that means a lot yeah it's an axi world and we're just living in it exactly thank you
SPEAKER_02
so much thanks guys thank you hell of an episode man that was a lot of fun great conversation it was like pretty cool just how open he is about their vision and talking about the whole story around it and it's a really ambitious vision so I loved it what was your one big takeaway from it I'll give
SPEAKER_01
you a couple takeaways number one he started off as a community member and then became a co-founder I knew you were gonna love that I had one my community guy no but honestly like that that was really cool and it just goes to show you that like you're not just joining a community like you potentially could be joining uh something that's going to change your life by joining one of these discord so super super cool cool to hear that and the other thing is that game domestic product is
SPEAKER_02
the new gross domestic product I liked that a lot too I loved talking to him about this whole infrastructure and startups and businesses that are being built adjacent to axi like they have nothing to do with it and they're all these entrepreneurial people who are attaching themselves to this fervent community and building really cool products profitable products and businesses alongside it and that to me is like a very cool framework for people in our community to think about is like when you find a fervent community it could be axi infinity players it could be Harley Davidson riders what can you go build for that fervent community that matters to them and that will attach to them that can be a great profitable business there's so many opportunities out there and that was really cool to me to see and also just the next 10 years I'm really looking forward to seeing this vision that he explained actually play out and see is he right is it going to be a billion gamers worldwide doing this play to earn thing it's a big vision so I'm excited about it I had a blast I just learned a lot let us know in the discord what you think about play
SPEAKER_01
and earn and let us know if you got any play playing earn game ideas yeah we want to get in there
SPEAKER_02
we're going to chat about it we'll bring jihou into the community after he's stoked on it he wants to invest in the in the platform too he said afterwards so we're looking forward to it let's jump in there and jam today's episode is brought to you by marketer hire with marketer hire you can get expert marketers on demand it's easy and fast what's marketer hire simply put marketer hire is a marketplace for marketing talent they built a network of expert marketing professionals pre vetted by top marketers from well-known and high growth brands and then they use their proprietary marketer match technology to match clients with the best marketer for every single project and they match them fast typically within 48 hours or less there's zero risk you don't sign or pay anything unless you choose to work with someone many of my startups in the portfolio are using marketer hire and absolutely love it if you're a growing business you will too check them out today at marketer hire dot com again that's marketer hire dot com and tell them saw he'll tell them saw he'll send you what is up you guys today i am so excited to share with you one of my favorite companies butcher box my go-to resource for all my meat needs if you've been following me by now you know that i love meat steak and beef for my favorite food in the world and i really can't get enough of them well butcher box has me covered they've got the 100 grass fed beef that i love free range organic chicken wild caught seafood for my wife and a little bit of everything in between there's great flexibility you can mix and match boxes choose when it comes to you so there's really something for the whole family and it all comes at an unbeatable value generally less than six dollars per meal i've loved butcher box and i know that you will too today we're so excited to be sharing with you a special offer free ground beef for life as long as you keep a subscription going with butcher box you can find that offer special for our listeners at butcher box dot com slash room again that's free ground beef for life by going to butcher box dot com slash room you're gonna love it join our free community at trwh.com