Bankless - Coin Artist on Building *real* Crypto-Games

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Marguerite deCourcelle, known by her persona Coin Artist, has been in the crypto space since 2014. Marguerite pushes the boundaries at the intersection of art, games, and crypto, carving out a career for herself as an artist and creator.   Although her focus is certainly in crypto gaming, it might not be what you’d expect. Her endeavors have a cypherpunk feel at the protocol level, innovating creative ways for NFTs to interact in our wallets.   Alongside discussions of her work at Blockade Games, we explore emergence, embedding data in the blockchain, and the untapped world of meaningful crypto gaming.   ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis    ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/    🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/      ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:    ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum    🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha    🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot    🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini    🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave    🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants    ------ Topics Covered:   0:00 Intro 4:30 Coin Artist 7:49 Early Days of Crypto Art 12:34 Gamifying the Blockchain 16:50 The Technology Crossover 24:33 Bombing & Bitcoin 30:43 Permadeath & High Stakes 38:05Winning Hearts and Minds 42:30 A Utopian Vision 48:00 Emergence & Complexity 53:17 Blockade Games 57:55 The Motivation for Profit 1:04:10 The Thrill of the Game 1:09:17 Fighting for Crypto’s Soul 1:13:22 New York City 1:16:33 The Crypto Social Game 1:23:47 Curation 1:27:43 Optimism & Advice   ------ Resources:   Marguerite on Twitter: https://twitter.com/coin_artist?s=20&t=2V5r_ik50UfcZMaCSB0HgA   Blockade Games: https://blockade.games/   Neon District: https://portal.neondistrict.io/   Skyweaver: https://www.skyweaver.net/   Boys Club: https://twitter.com/BoysClubCrypto?s=20&t=2V5r_ik50UfcZMaCSB0HgA   Ethereum: The Money-Game Landscape https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ethereum-the-money-game-landscape?s=w   Conway’s Game of Life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life     ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.   Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cipherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, we're talking with Marguerite Day Corsel, which you might actually know as coin artist. Coin Artist has been around in the crypto space for a very long time before there has even been as much room as there is today for the intersection of art, games, and crypto. Coin Artist is definitely an artist type, hence the artist in the name. And she's focused on crypto gaming, but not in the way that you probably are hearing crypto gaming with what you think of it today with games like Axi Infinity, where you have NFTs and they do stuff. Marguerite is focused on a much more cyperpunk version of crypto games as in like how do we have interactions of the NFTs in our wallets? How does like if a

two NFTs of the same game end up in the same wallet and interaction happens? Something a little bit closer to Conway's game for life or just something about embedding data in the blockchain rather than just having like a normal game that has crypto assets embedded in it. So you'll hear us unpack what that means and it's this very untapped world of gaming that has not yet been built out that I hope does eventually become built because it sounds really, really fun. And Marguerite slash coin artist is one of the people building out this world over at Blockade Games. And we also talk about the physical center of the Metaverse, which is New York City and what's

going on with New York and what it means to be social in the world of crypto in this day and age. So all these conversations and more are coming your way right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet, with built-in privacy and ad-blocking to keep you in charge of your digital footprint. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. What's Web3?

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slash go bankless. What's up, Margaret? How's it gone? Hi, David. How are you? Oh, this is fantastic. I think a lot of people will actually know you as your other name, Coin Artist. I think that's kind of where I want to start this talk, is where did Coin Artist come from? So Coin Artist, actually, it came in 2014 when I was just discovering Bitcoin, and I discovered that there was this place called crypto Twitter, which was yet to be called crypto Twitter. But it was all where these industry thought leaders were expressing their opinions about Bitcoin. And it was the first thing I thought of because I was an artist, as a fine artist.

And I was like, okay, I'm making a Twitter handle. What is it going to be? And I was like, well, coin artists is really generic and not a cool story at all. But at the time, actually, also I was known as YT instead of Marguerite or coin artist. And YT came from, if you've read Snowcrash. It was like this superhero. Like, how could I make this character persona? And so I was that person anonymously, basically until about, like, 2016.

Like, people didn't even know it as a woman. Making crypto puzzles and playing around with creative technology, the intersection of crypto, art, games. It started really early on. Before you discovered Bitcoin, I want to unpack the art side. What kind of artists were you? like a painter or a digital art or what's that? Yeah, I was a traditional painter and drawing.

And for me, I did, so there was a lot of magazines at that time that needed art, cover art. Like, even just, like, I remember doing a picture of Andradea Centinopoulos for Bitcoin magazine for one of their articles. And it was in that process of making those portraits that I started playing around with different concepts. So one of the projects with Amir Taki and Cody Wilson, they were working on. something called Dark Wallet at the time. And Dark Wallet was all about obfuscating Bitcoin transactions, like acting as a little bit of a mixer as a wallet. So I was like, hmm, I wonder if I could hide

something in this, you know, to like play into that obfuscation. And that's when I realized that a Bitcoin like private key, the numbers and characters could be turned into all kinds of pattern making to equate to that information, you know, how you can take binary and binary can then equate to basky. So then, like, how could you make these different patterns into the art and, like, basically hide things in plain sight embedded into the artwork? So that's when I had that, like, little aha moment. And I shared it on Bitcoin Talk.org, Satoshi Nakamoto's forum. And people just loved it. It just became like this big viral thing. And as an artist, I was like, what did I do? So, like, I kept, so I teamed up with people along the way and we continue to make these pieces.

and it only became more gamified and more complex over the years, but that's how it started. So when people talk about the, let's combine art and crypto, if you tell them those words, they're going to think like, oh yeah, you're talking about like NFTs and Web 3 in 2021 or 2022. But you were an artist that got inspiration from crypto back in 2014 before Ethereum even existed, like before we even had smart contracts. And there's like one level of crypto art where there's crypto and then. you can illustrate things about it. But you jumped right into a deeper connection behind, like, the ethos and values of crypto and being an artist with, like, the integration of, like, you know,

private keys in actual art. Can you talk about just like what you saw in the early days of being coin artist as the potential intersection behind crypto and art? Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say initially, the creative started looking at blockchain, like a new, a new medium. And how can we interact with it. And there were some fascinating things. Like you can, so it's this decentralized ledger, but you could store all kinds of information on it. And so when it was cheaper, people hit images. They had ASCII images. They had all kinds of information. And how can you interact with the blockchain in a creative artistic way? There was a lot of people, you know, it's, I can't totally recall at the moment, but there were a lot of fun experimental projects. And Rea Myers is someone who I

worked with early on. And they were a part of that explore to. group now is the head architect at dapper but so anyways there was just a lot of like like what can and I think we all loved the idea that the technology was so new so people had to like in the hiding in plain sight thing and just the Satoshi Nakamoto like his his lore so it was really inspiring for us to think about how could the blockchain be this new medium and like bitcoin itself was maybe as a transfer of value was a little less interesting as far as like the union it, but it was more like things you could embed on the blockchain that was pretty cool. And like using hashes, like we did things like make fake addresses to make like trails, digital trails that led to

information that if you put it all together, you got something. So it was just kind of this neat process because of the fact that there's no third parties involved and it all just exists out there. So understanding decentralized and distributed networks, it was really a fun, playful time. And I think that's actually a big missing piece right now. Like for example, a lot of the creatives, an artist just skip that step. They are now with the interface and making, like, minting an image that they feel like as an NFT, but you're missing the whole, like, deeper meaning and how that ties into the networks that could be way more creative or, like, artistically driven as an entire process. I think you have some people making those steps, but, you know,

it's interesting. You saw this back with different cryptos that people didn't really care about how interesting the technology was. They really just cared. about the user experience. So it's interesting to think about two, these artists that are making extra efforts to make, like, for example, Josie Bellini today just launched cyberbrokers and it's all on chain using SVGs and my CTO at Blockade Games is a part of that. Like, he helped with that launch. But just this deeper conversation about these assets being on chain and what this art

project is. I don't know. I just feel like there's a huge gap in education now. And I wonder how we're going to recapture that or if we do. recapture that. I actually don't know. Everything's so financially driven, and that's maybe the bubble that everyone feels. But I don't know if that conversation comes back to the interesting innovation of the technology behind everything, you know? Like, it seems like people are just more excited about making money in new ways. Yeah, I think with what you kind of just described where

you kind of laid out this Easter egg like MMO RPG like art hunt using by embedding data straight into Bitcoin where you had like fake addresses that meant something and it leads you down a trail. That felt very gamified. That felt like the intersection of like art and games, but using data inside of a blockchain to be the board on which this game is played. Whereas like now in the NFT web three world is really just like very external to the blockchain. It's like yeah, we just use Ethereum to mint our NFTs, but everything else is external. It definitely has to do with like the rising transaction fees and we can't really play with data on the blockchain in the way that we that we once did. But is my intuition,

right that you were really interested in kind of making this like this shared ledger that we all have that can host data and turning it into like some sort of like artistic game rather than just like you know sending bitcoins around like how important was the gamification of it yeah absolutely I mean I think all of the projects that we participate in since 2014 had some sort of magical moment where we're playing around with blockchain technology to kind of demonstrate something that otherwise wasn't possible um something that we did in 2040s. 2019 was called, I forget the actual title of it, but it was a humans versus zombies headless game in which we sent NFTs. We air dropped NFTs and half were human NFTs and half were zombie NFTs. And then there was this scoreboard website. All it said was how many humans there were and how many zombies there were. If you sent a zombie to a wallet that had a human in it, then you didn't like transfer your zombie. What happened was you, minted a new zombie asset into the human's wallet, and it then turned their human into a zombie.

And so then on the scoreboard, the zombies are, you know, gaining a zombie. And you could use an antidote. And then the human B gets frozen? The human NFT gets frozen or something? Well, the NFTs are non-transferable. Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they're in your wallet. And then it's like basically a virus. Right. And it's an on-chain virus. It's an on-chain virus. Yeah. And it doesn't use a central application. And so anyways, we just launched this out of hackathon. I think it was like, am I maybe Harvard, a Harvard hackathon? I can't totally remember. But just this idea that with smart contracts, you can make this entire game, just using smart contracts. You don't need to have an actual game like application. And that was really interesting because there's so much

more of that that could be done. But do people care about that? Like, do they care about that game experience? It seems like everything is monetarily driven. So how do we actually inspire people to play in ways that just like with traditional games. Like how many people just sit down and play games because they're awesome and fun and interesting? They're social. How do we bridge that gap with where we are today with this financial motivation, which is really turning off a lot of gamers, like actual gamers? They think this whole space is going to be its complete scam or is a scam. And then you can see it already that the games that are trying to launch are already angling at those pre-sale items to have the highest prices as possible to price people.

out and then build this toxic community and then you're going to be turning off all the gamers and then will you ever launch a game? I don't know, but that it feels very ICO in that way. It's just like ICOs, but with extra better marketing because we brought in all these 3D professional, you know, artists now from the game industry because these NFTs are selling. So how long is it going to take for us to actually, or will we ever get over this probably bad reputation we're about to spin up just in the same way the ICOs? Like, ICOs never came back. They rebranded. They came up with all kinds of different, you know, acronyms to basically be the same thing as ACO.

But they really did that stigma stuck. And I think that games and NFTs are at the same risk right now. I totally want on complete tangent there. But, like, anyways. No, it makes a ton of sense. I think what I'm hearing is like there's this domain, this category of crypto games, which are very, very foreign to like the typical crypto games that we see today, like the wolf sheep game or like.

Axi infinity, which are very just like driven by the value of the assets. But I think what you're alluding to is like there's this category of like on-chain games where the playing field is Ethereum or L2s or just whatever is in the blockchain rather than just like, you know, NFT assets and and something like that. Like how how big do you think the world of just like on-chain? What do we even call this, this category of game? If we're not calling it crypto games, because that's been co-opted by this whole like NFT number go up, toxic value movement. Like what do we call the versions of games that are like on-chain, like the virus type games that you just explained?

Have you thought about a name for this? No, I mean, but that is using NFTs, right? And I think at the time we were all saying blockchain games. You know, and if we weren't using NFTs, no one thought NFTs was going to stick as far as an acronym. So it was really interesting that it did because everyone was thinking, this is terrible. We shouldn't use NFTs. We should say something else. So we all were all trying.

We're like blockchain games, crypto games. like trying to explore other terminology, but NFTs is what's the, and maybe the mystery because people didn't know what it was. And I don't know if you're going to be able to differentiate decentralized assets and the different models. Because, well, if you think about gaming, you have all kinds of different types of games. Like, you know, you have an RPG, you have a rogue-like.

You have a, there's just like different ways to label games. I don't know if crypto is going to really be able to get more finite than just. I don't even know. What do you think about when you hear games, like crypto games? The first thing you think of an NFT game or do you think of crypto? Yeah. Well, so like the virus example is actually something that I have pondered about or daydreamed about.

It's like what happens when we can have like assets? Can you have like this virus asset that just like naturally accidentally run into? Like damn it, I caught the zombie virus. Now my wallet is a zombie wallet. Like it doesn't meaningfully impacts my wallet. Like I still do all my things. but now it's got the zombie token in it. Like, damn it, now I got caught by the virus.

I just have always wondered about, like, is there this world where just, like, there's these assets in our wallets that have meaning inside of a particular context? Kind of like the game, as in the game that everyone just lost because I brought up the game, sorry? Like, stuff like that on Ethereum. How big of an arena is that? Because, like, there's a few examples that I can think of,

but I'm also not the most creative person. And I take your point is it, like, how niche is that? if everyone needs to be good at like using block explorers, everyone needs to be able to write their own transactions, like this isn't up to the wallets, this is up to like ether scan and stuff like that. And so it's a lot harder of an audience, but it's actually what feels like the new thing as we're actually using this technology in ways that we could not have used this technology in different ways. Like, you know, you can play Axi Infinity without having assets, right, in theory. But like with a zombie virus wallet game, like that is brand new. That is something that like,

and I think that's something that's similar in this. this category is the Dark Forest, that ZK roll-up game. I don't know if you've played that. So maybe this is one of those things where it's kind of a concept now, but maybe we need ZK. Roll-up technology to make these transactions super cheap and instant. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I think like, I think you're right. We're going to be playing around with different technologies, but I think like even the crossover of defy games. Is it DeFi Kingdom over on Harmony Network? It's pretty popular. So there's like different types of games on different networks that are. people are playing with and interacting with. But yeah, I think the cost of playing. So for example,

like in, so I'm with walk-in games and one of our missions was to make a free-to-play game. So how do you put everything on the back end? So the players just having this experience interacting with decentralized assets that could become valuable over time based on their gameplay. And how do you build for that? And it's true. Like even on Polygon, so we launched on Polygon, it's becoming more expensive now. Is it scalable and going to be sustainable for us to continue that way? So it's going to be on our roadmap to explore what are alternatives and what is the cheapest way for us to keep that free-to-play experience. But yeah, I guess like the different types of games. So there's all kinds of things. I think like remixing of content for memes, for example, let's say you

make a meme and it's got composable layers and it's in your wallet. I could see someone sending another like meme to you and it affecting and changing your meat. Like we can remix media. and content based on our interactions across wallets. And I just think of this as like being a fun thing to do and for nefarious purposes as like trying to, you know, if you want to bomb your friends with something. Like I just, I want that to exist. And I want to know how I can.

And I love the idea of sending a bomb to a friend almost like, like you're trying to sink a ship. And they have assets in their wallet. What does this mean? Can you unpack that a little bit and illustrate what that means for listeners? Yeah. So let's say you have NFTs that are susceptible to some sort of a bomb that I send and I could blow them up.

Okay. If I send it. Maybe it just cost me. Maybe there's some sort of mechanic there that makes me really consider about sending this bomb. Like maybe you have something in your wallet that if I do this, it's actually going to blow back at me. You know? It's a trap. And I don't know.

And maybe there's like there's just ways to think about that and these different crossovers of NFTs and projects that could exist. And yeah. And like just playing around with your friends in ways like that where it's. not a big deal, but there's almost an element of permadeath, but it's also just kind of funny. And then there's some sort of retribution that can exist and reward systems that could exist and badge systems that could exist, all on chain. And I think, like, I think there's a lot of room to play there. And everyone's so focused on trying to make, like, if you think about it, everyone's like, the next big AAA game and it's going to have the coolest art. And these assets

are going to sell for so much money. But really, the fun is, like, very much more accessible than that. It's just how do you inspire people to want to play? Because even if you think about it, these blockchain games, no one's actually like playing them for fun. There's a grind component of can I earn and like manipulate and exploit the system and make some crypto and then go sell it. But no one's actually playing crypto games for fun at the moment. And what is a differentiator between a crypto game versus just a traditional game? And as a game company or as a creative, why would you do one or the other? If you're just trying to do something for fun, why wouldn't you just do a traditional game. So if you're going to use blockchain mechanics or game mechanics that are

new and exciting, how are you going to leverage them to actually inspire people to want to interact in that way? And will they want to interact with an app, go outside of OpenC, you know, spend time on a third-party website? We haven't seen that yet. And I don't, I don't know if interactive NFTs are going to be the answer where you can play the games directly from the OpenC website. So you can play things like like a Minesweep. There's things that exist right now using I-frame support directly in OpenC. OpenC is like playing minesweeper. You could have my, anyone could play with this particular NFT that's owned by one person. And then you can be signing the winner and having a leaderboard that of everyone's

interacted with it and like the leaderboard of this particular interactive NFTs like output if that makes sense. And you can do all kinds of like from that basis. You can do dungeon crawlers. I could host a raid. I could put assets up for a bounty without people ever leaving OpenC for example. If you think about most casual crypto-NFT collectors, they probably do not leave the OpenC website very often. Right.

Because that's not where a number go up is, right? That's kind of the trap of where we are right now. Right. I want to go back to the bomb NFTs. I think that's really cool. And just for listeners who are fearful about their like bored ape or their crypto punk getting exploded, this wouldn't work like that. All the assets that would interact with like this bomb thing would only be part of the same ecosystem.

So it would be an opt-in thing. It's not like your NFTs are going to go explode. But like, the idea is that, like, you could have an inventory, like you do in a game, and you have assets in there. And I don't know, maybe this game is about how many assets can you destroy by sending a bomb? But, like, you could also, in theory, have, like, an anti-bomb shield. And you could not host that in your wallet, but you could make a ZK proof that you have one. And then if you get bombed, you can show your ZK proof that you actually have a bomb shield. And all of these things are, like, technically possible with cryptography.

And the cool thing about Ethereum or blockchains in general is that, you know, these things are inherently turned base because they go one block at a time. So every single block is one, like, unit of time in this like blockchain game because there is no middle time between blocks. And so like this substrate on which we play on, these blockchains are so conducive to like this turn based strategy game. And no one's really been able to like fully tap into that power yet. I think making factions and alignments and playing around decentralized identity and like exactly what you're talking about is so fascinating because people would be like what what just happened. I also love the idea. Like you said, your board ape would be safe. But you could allow people to opt in into like wrapping their board ape or like, you know, making it so like they could submit assets with the fact that the higher value the asset in some sort of scoring generating system would allow them to have more weight when they hit.

you know, and then also reward system and payback if they're successful and defend their base. I think when you think of your wallet, it's really fun to think about it. Like, you could build a tower defense and like defender base. And, um, and then also like, how are you sending resources to help other people hire you like teammates and how can like you create this ecosystem, which I think is actually like a part of the future here. It's just I don't know yet how it makes money and that's the like so how can you sustainably make money because even just a crypto payout reward it's not really tied to any anything valuable right like but i would like to say this is a big difference why gaming and nfts took off on ethereum versus bitcoin is because of that

capability to bootstrap so because bitcoins are limited you know developers have to walk into the space and have their own bitcoin and then they're holding on to the fact that bitcoin's going to keep going up, but they had to buy into it. Whereas in the Ethereum space, you can start your project, you can come up with your own tokens, NFTs, your own ERC20 token, and you have this whole economy, you can just bootstrap and launch, and with value generation, and then ride on your reputation, like, if you can deliver. So that is such an advantage. So, like, it is potential that you could have these kinds of ecosystems in the Ethereum or similar networks. It's kind of sad to see Bitcoin not actually take off in that same way, but it's also maybe okay that Bitcoin's

one purpose is to be sound money. And I think a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts have a hard time with that. I think early on when Vitalik was interested in colored coins, in counterparty, I was really listening in that time period because it was creative use cases that I wanted to see happen on Bitcoin. But there were so many challenges because of the fact that a lot of decisions would affect the end goal of does this make Bitcoin sound money? And if it doesn't answer that question, then they generally said no. And so even with Lightning Network, there's potential here to get creative on top of Bitcoin. But the rate of adoption on Ethereum and other places where you can bootstrap faster and you have more users that don't need to be as technically inclined has a faster rate of adoption,

but the downside is that nobody is as technically inclined. Also, like there was like a natural schism, right? Like all the sound money people got, I guess, for better or for worse, got pushed out of Bitcoin. I guess some people saw that as a disappointment where do you feel like particular alignment with Bitcoin like to this day? Because this crypto world is very, very tribal. And when people get into the space, the timing of when they get into the space kind of impacts how they perceive the space, right? So like people that got in in 2013 generally are Bitcoiners more than they are Ethereum. And fewer people make the pass over to Ethereum later and later in time. Do you wish that Bitcoin was a good substrate for, like, gaming type activities?

There are a few Bitcoin gaming projects. Gosh, I can't remember it off the top of my head. But, like, I think most of the Bitcoin gaming efforts are, like, playing traditional games with, like, a Bitcoin kickback, almost like a... Like a Satoshi every now and then. Yeah, you know how, like, Lolley rewards work where you have that WebThru plugin and based on your, like, purchases, you're earning Bitcoin as a reward? It seems like they're mostly like that where you can get this reward of Bitcoin based on gameplay, which is pretty interesting. I think that's interesting still, but it's not as interesting, in my opinion, like, creatively as what we can do with, you know, just the different combinations of smart contracts and interacting with people and the mayhem that could pursue across decentralized networks. You said the word permadeath.

Yeah. And I want to go into that. Can you talk about the role of what Permadeath is and talk about the role it plays in gaming? Well, Permitaph can actually mean a few different things. But in this particular case, I mean, are you familiar with, like, Yvon Online? I know the game. I have not played it. So in Yvon Online, I asked Helmer, who is the CEO of C.P.C.

I can't remember the acronym of Yvonline. And I was asking him about how he was going to fix spotting. So they have a real economy. And what happened was they decided to flag players that look like they could be bots and allow everyone to come and harvest. So they get flagged and everyone nearby gets a notification and can go over to them and like acclaim all of their assets. It doesn't blacklist the player.

It just allows their assets up for grabs by the larger community who can get there first, which is a really interesting thing because you can't necessarily defeat bots, right? But how do you make them a part of the core part of gameplay? I also, in that case, like, Permodeath is not necessarily your account dying, but you've lost all of your assets. You've experienced, you know, huge loss. In NFT space, I think it would be so exciting. I don't know if you've ever played Dark Souls where you... It's my only gaming series that I swear by, yeah. So you die and you, and you, totally die and you have to start over at the very beginning of the game, which is really infuriating

for a lot of people. And some people hate it so much to throw their controller, but at the same time, they love it. So, like, that for me sounds so exciting because I can imagine, so even in our current game that we're thinking about the design that we are building, thinking about horizontal opportunities for people that want to play at a de-rest in more of a de-risk fashion, and then a vertical where you know you have horizontal dungeon crawlers and then imagine you have a vertical like dungeon crawler where the higher you up you go in social class the higher risks you take the more you're putting up to lose and if you lose you like you drop you socially you like basically kicked out of society to certain extent could go all the way down to like the street level the time that you put into the game

is deleted well to some capacity you have to figure out like what would people be willing to do and also what assets would they want to put in escrow to lose? Is it characters? Is it gear? Is it, you know, like what parts of this is going to be acceptable for people to experience? And honestly, I feel like since people are so emotionally attached to their NFTs, that like losing them would be very, like, I'm thinking about this for me. I would love that.

I would love the risk of losing my assets. and gambling in that sort of capacity, but with a skill-based gambling. So like playing Magic the Gathering. Imagine you're playing a Magic the Gathering tournament and you're playing with your deck and then everything you're playing with is going to be up for grabs by the person that wins the game.

That would be pretty cool. Because then you can even have this ledger of, let's say someone is just crushing everyone, they're going to have this history of all these NFTs and who they took them from. And that's like, that's such a flex. that doesn't really exist today, right? I think that one of the reasons why a lot of people just hate Call of Duty

is because as soon as you die, you just respond, and then you just go and do it again. So you have people, like, throwing themselves in Call of Duty into just the middle of just a firefight in ways that we, I mean, it's a video game, obviously, but just there's no death penalty because, like, if you die, you just go do it again. But then there's versions of Call of Duty where there is a death penalty where, like, you actually die and you have to just sit for 15 seconds. And people's behavior in the game changes because of the penalty. of having to wait 15 seconds.

Like, people are just, like, approach the game a lot more carefully. Like, they really don't want to die. Yeah, they don't want to be in time out. That's a great way to put it. But that's just 15 seconds. That's just asking you, like, here, your penalty is you waste 15 seconds of your life before you wait to respawn. And I think an amount of just, like, emotional engagement and emotional captivation

that comes when, like, if I die here, I lose my NFTs, which are, like, a part of my wealth that starts to like mimic a lot of like real life right like people never run into call duty in the way that they would actually run into a war zone because that's just not the right behaviors but then like if we start talking about like metaverse games like blockchain games if you actually have something to lose which is why people love and also hate dark souls at the same time like if you have something to lose while you go and play and there's real value at risk and you actually are putting the time and energy and like blood sweat and tears on the table while you play these games, human behaviors around these games are likely going to change.

Yeah. Well, and I also think it makes it really exciting to think about how you could. So there's something else I'm thinking about. So for example, the game we've been building as Neon District, it's a 2D game. What if, though, as you go up in society and you're having these tournaments and this permanent experience, you have the opportunity to start collecting 3D assets for the future game, like a future expansion of the game. And like, and it's like you're creating singing.

of the current assets, the 2D old school game. But imagine this progression instead of having like, you know, the first version of Final Fantasy, one, two, three. What if it was more of a like linear where they're all connected and fluid and you're like progressing out of one game and earning your way into the second and to different types of the experience and different types of the game modes based on your achievements within the certain like construct from the start and everyone has to go through that funnel or you buy into that funnel.

But I think that's where you can really protect the integrity of the free-to-play game with people that put in the work to grind at the beginning. But then also, if you want to buy into the cooler versions you can, but you're buying from people that played through them. So I don't know. There's a lot of interesting ways you can think of game progression and the fact that these NFTs can have multiple file types associated with them. And the game developers have the ability to update,

if they design it this way, update all the metadata. the different files in different ways to create those additional experiences. So it really is a whole new, like that's where I get interested and I feel like those are the places where we win gamers. Is like because they've never had that. Imagine, imagine playing all of your Dark Souls franchise games in a way where your past work mattered for future experiences. For you, especially when we think about decentralized identities and how important those are going to become, I think that's where you win loyalty with that hardcore fan base. Yeah, we've definitely seen a lot of like NFT and crypto gamer hate coming out of like the

gaming industry, the gaming community and all the anti-NFT community is kind of what you're saying with the ethos of which you're building at Blockade games. Is that like something that you're hopeful can like win over the hearts and minds of these people that currently mostly hate our industry? I think like I don't want to say that we're going to single handily prove to all gamers in the game industry that there's value here. What I would like to do is seed the ideas and the creative ideas that with other developers, that there's other opportunities that resonate and that people will enjoy.

For example, when I did my Twitter account, right, I hit 50,000 followers. And I worked with this company called LinkDrop to whitelist all of my followers up to 50,000 followers. And if they were whitelisted, then they had the ability to claim for free their first NFT ever. And the response to that was huge. It was like a 90% conversion rate of everyone that clicked it. It was a brand new wallet, essentially. So like if you think about that, how many people are lurking out there and waiting for invitations and wanting to like participate? If you make something friendly and inclusive, people want to participate. So it's more about seed. And I've had a lot

of people talk to me afterwards that that was a really powerful moment for them. It was either their first NFT or they realized that you know you didn't have to participate like and it just meant a lot because it was this so in this in this in this case it was this um compilation of all of the followers they were a part of a um an image that you know that was like of me and like my history but like it had all my users of the followers on Twitter they were a part of it you could zoom in and find yourself and they were part of the story so I think like that's something that we have to realize and like everybody is a part of the story and how can you. you appreciate them and honor them and not make it a cash grab?

Because the minute you have that separation, you create a toxic environment. And so that's the, I think, anyways, that's the largest challenge I see right now. And I do think that acceding creative ideas, showing people that you can have inclusive activities, that it doesn't have to be high value to start, that you can have a gradual value creation process is going to be the way to have that loyalty, long-tail revenue, and also ways to unlock our users to have ownership in the entire universes that are being built. That's something that I'm really passionate about is you have so many creative developers, artists, just how can they participate in this ecosystem?

If you're waiting on the developers to ship content, chips in the storytelling and the user's just to get to consume, there's no active participation back, there's no conversation back, then that's like basically the same model that exists today with game companies, which is the difference now with decentralized networks is that, and these open source communities that a lot of us have come from, is that we should be empowering the user to be a participant in the conversation so they can add value to the NFTs they're holding,

their NFTs can become more valuable and not just in a way of being like devs do something, But literally there's pipelines there and bridges that exist that they can add value to the narrative and content creation process. Yeah, I definitely want to go into that because that's a big theme that I think we see across the board is that the whole concept of like tokens and communities. Tokens can allow communities to have a voice in ways that they didn't prior. Like in the trad world, you would have the artist on stage with a one way flow of artistic creation out to the consumers of that. But then when you instantiate a community inside of a token, or NFT or some sort of commute group or Dow or whatever, the community gets a chance to reverberate what they see as value back to the artist.

And it can become a two-way conversation. We're seeing this with People Pleasers' new project, Shibuya. I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, yeah. That was it? Okay, good. Good for me. No, no.

I mean, I don't know. So something like that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. But like the community gets to dictate the next chapter in like a story of an animated series, right? Like it's actually up to the community to determine what happens next. Can you just like paint a picture of like the utopia that's created when we have a world of games and arts and communities that allows the communities to be a role in its creation? Well, so like even, okay, so this is a actually huge vision that I have right now. Everything from in real life experiences, right?

So think about Dungeons and Dragons and you have a game master hosting an event and everyone playing this board game and having this experience. right like i honestly feel like we're in a place where if you open up the opportunity to have something like a star wars franchise that everyone gets to participate in the core part of the storytelling which has potentially multiple different veins of that storytelling happening that's like maybe canon it's like star wars canon in this case but then you allow people that who are super fans to have guidelines and ways to participate and add on to their own like they understand that enough of the context. There's a big enough wiki. People can contribute to the wiki and building outside stories and side experiences. And then you have the in real life experiences. So currently

today, when everyone gets together for NFT events, it's like TV's on a wall and drinking and a DJ. And like that's the best we can do for in real life NFT experiences. But honestly, what we could take that is things like with a slight game of, like, like, you're just, you. You could have kits that include gamification, inter-life NFT minting, how it fits into the overall, like, universe that everyone has kind of agreed upon. And being able to host these parties, like, I think about even the joy that people had in the almost complete pyramid schemes of, like, makeup companies or other products where people get together and they just love getting together and hearing their friend talk about some sort of makeup and everyone buys it, you know, and they have these, like, it doesn't need to be totally pyramid scheme like that. but we can do better than this complete disconnect that's happening right now. And I do think like the universe and the shared vision of this like place of lore is a, is a, a unifier.

And I do think like some core game rules are unifiers. So even just like Conway, I was just showing a friend this yesterday, Conway's Game of Life, is this simple rule set that existed before computers even existed. And then it today is still proving out new pop. permutations that are possible within this game, which is very simple. It's like this grid where there's these cells and cell is alive or dead. And like people from this simple rule set came up with things like factories and spaceships and other permutations that are really interesting and excite the entire community. But I think like to peel it back from there,

with NFTs and art and storytelling, content creation, empowering people around the world to participate in a place where all they need to do is show up, have a little bit of a skill and have fun that like we can we can access something that maybe we've never done before. You know, like imagine Magic the Gathering being a little bit more decentralized, a little bit more accessible, allowing their users to have a little bit more input. You can have your tournament cards, which are official tournament cards that, you know, like these are the ones that we will accept. And then you can have the creative sets, which Magic has always done the different creative sets and seasonal renditions. So anyways, I think like that community participation and,

and empowering the world through these decentralized technologies is where we all win together because of the fact that we've never been able to onboard everyone in the world into an economy. And this is the first chance to do that and doing it through a creative lens and a lens that's easy to understand like game rules is the best way to get crypto into everybody's hands.

And when you do that, then you have an entire empowered world that is not dependent anymore in the success or failure of a nation state, but rather as like a global like humanity as far as like what we think is exciting what do we want to collaborate towards in the future. So I think it's like this we're really early, but I think the vision is there and how we can bring up everybody together based on simple shared loves and talents. The passion is clearly palpable. So I'm already a big fan of this whole vision.

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in order to experience defy and NFTs the way it was always meant to be fast, cheap, and friction-free. One of the other themes that I think that you're touching on that I think is pretty core to crypto is emergent and pushing complexity towards the edges. Conway's Game of Life is like one of my favorite metaphors to kind of explain defy. I used it in a relatively old article called Ethereum the Money Game landscape, which was eventually a prelude towards yield farming where all these like defy apps were all competing to get points and what are those points. their ether and they have these conway anyways they use conway's game of life for that conway's game of life like ethereum is a state machine as in it progresses one state at a time and what you were saying with like even though this game of the conway game of life was before computers but enabled by computers much more expressive because of computers you could do more things but it's it's such a simple rule set there's only like six rules for conway like if this then that statement is for conway's game of life and it creates like this

immense infinite playing field for other people to play on it, and they get to create the structures that you listed off, the factories, the spaceships, the gliders, the floaters, or whatever. And what was created is not in the rules. It's a manifestation out of the rule set itself. Kind of in the same way that Bitcoin is supposed to be maximally simple, yet you can manifest so much more on top of it. And Ethereum is supposed to be just a very simple expressive state machine, but so much can be expressed on top of it. I think what you're leading into is there's this world of games out there that could in theory just have a very relatively simple rule set, but when you design it right, it creates a lot of emergence and allows people to create

the stories rather than the stories being creating the stories. Is this all right? Yep, absolutely. And I think like the emergent quality there that you're touching on is the most excited. It's the thing that sense of discovery and I'm actually contribute, like as a user that's participating in this rule set in the universe and there's a discovery being made and contribute to that, I think that's one of the most exciting things that I could experience. And I think that's why I also focus on that idea of a magic trick as us using blockchain technology to show people and see ideas and be like, look what you could do, though. Like, this isn't this interesting and inspire people. But when you do drive people to being like,

oh, wait, we can create these entire ecosystems that perform a certain way that maybe wasn't the underlying point, but it did come about. And how do people organize? around them and continued value creation around them is going to be so interesting. And I do think that's where things get exciting. It's just we're stuck right now in the very early stages of just understanding, you have to understand that digital art wasn't transferable and wasn't even a viable. Like unless you were being contracted, it wasn't a viable means of income, really, to be just be independently a digital artist.

you need to have some sort of job. Even just being an artist, it's always difficult. But so now that we've unlocked this door, that digital art is transferable, that was really exciting. And I think people are hung up on that. But the deeper meanings of where this could all go, it's just how do we bridge that gap? And I think that's up to a lot of us that understand the magic points and these different connections, like you're talking about, the emergent behavior, like ways to inspire people,

inspire to play, it's just, I think Dark Forest actually maybe is touching on that more than a lot of other projects, but in that specific way, there needs to be more of that genuinely driven, like, I want to show people what's possible blockchain. I want to show people what's, why is it more interesting, and not it be about just monetary only and bottom line only. So with that, I think it's finally time to dive head first into what is going on behind the scenes at Blockade Games. So can you give us the pitch of what Blockade Games is and what you guys are building? Yeah, so Blockade Games is a game studio that we kicked off January 2018. And it was actually the, when CryptoKitties happened, I had been waiting for a non-influptible

token type, so a metadata token, right? Something that could capture a player's experience in a way that translated to value. And that didn't exist really until that moment, or at least it wasn't clear that it existed. There was things like colored coins. There was things like metadata coins, but they weren't, you could always like wash them, per se. They weren't like binding. They wasn't using the smart contracts in a way that this was a whole journey progression

that creates value over time. And so when CryptoKitties happened, we were like, okay, we're going to launch the game company now. We're done with our side projects, educational side projects. We're ready to go, like, build this RPG. We wanted to make a cyberpunk world of warcraft RPG and use users' interactions and their choices and specializations to create assets that became more valuable over time and wanted to be free to play. So we had a lot of wants and it was actually pretty difficult to figure out. How to thread the needle.

Yeah. So we did something called Plasma Bears, which a lot like Gary V is really excited about. A lot of people are pretty excited about except for the fact that we launched it on the Lume Network. which was early layer 2 type. It was like layer 1.5 network that died. And so what happened with those plasma bears is we made this complete free-to-play game. And then we built a bridge from Lume Network to Ethereum.

So everybody that had plasma bears and transferred it over at Ethereum had their bear. But there were millions of bears made and crafted and they're composable. They're like build the bears. And we worked with people. like X copy, who's now very famous, like maybe one of the highest selling NFT artists today, which was just because I liked him back in 2018.

I was like, oh, we should work together. And we made this game. So anyways, of the 1,200 bears that were transferred over to Ethereum, now they're, you know, an ex-copy bearer sell, you can't buy one cheaper for 100 Eath. Damn. But it was completely free to play game, you know? Like, that wasn't the purpose. So we took that tech stack and we innovated on it for,

Neon District, which is something we're still focusing on, which is that, so it's similar in that build-the-bear concept of where you can compose and create a character, and then you play with a party of characters, and you take them instead of, in Plas and Bears, it was a text adventure, you know, as a means to not worry about the game mechanics or animations or any of that. But Neon District, it's definitely more about that turn-based battle experience, and then the outcome, and then how you are accumulating what's called neon, which is an in-game currency that is non-transferable, that you use to funnel into your NFTs to, to, and progress them and turn them into higher level characters. So anyways, I guess at Blocky Games,

it's still that vision. Everything I'm talking about in this whole conversation is how do we create this experience where people get really excited about what's possible with NFTs? And yeah, I guess it doesn't need to start at a high value. You can start with a zero value asset and it can evolve over time to become more valuable based on your choices, your input. So then it becomes a conversation. It's collaborative. And then your decision makings, when you go up another player, you can build any deck essentially you want with your characters and how do they perform against another party's characters. So it's a little bit different than what exists today. It's not as complicated and deep as what it could be with a AAA game. Like, you know, a Dark Souls game,

but it's still trying to prove that the user can be an intimate part of the conversation of the progression of their assets, and then where does the value come from? It seems like you're trying to build an ecosystem a game that is very, very true to the ethos of crypto and also not trying to cut any corners. As in we have this technology, we have this way of imparting meaning into this game. We have this a way of allowing individuals to have control over their assets and them be the admin of their own story in the game. And that's very admirable.

And not cutting corners in crypto is such a difficult thing to do because every time there's a mania, whether it's the ICO mania or the NFT mania or now the crypto gaming mania, it's because people found a way to cut a corner and skip to the end where like the assets are trading for $50,000 on OpenC. Like that's like the end goal. And some people just realize that they can actually just skip right there via some sort of like scarcity Ponzi game. But that's not what I'm seeing out of you.

What I'm seeing out of you is a commitment to the bare bones of what the technology has, how this technology can enable a game. Has it been like enticing? Have you felt like the pull to like sell your soul and try and do some of these like NFT games shenanigans? Well, let's hold on. Let's not forget that I made a crypto puzzle back in 2014 where I seeded that wallet with five Bitcoin. when Bitcoin was worth like $250 per Bitcoin.

And then that particular puzzle wasn't solved until January 2017. Maybe in 2018. I can't totally remember. And so the puzzle was worth $100,000 at the time of being solved. And so the motivation there... This is the same puzzle that you talked about earlier? This is different. I made a lot of puzzles.

This is one of them. Made a lot of puzzles. All right. I made a lot of puzzles. And this is one of them that just took a longer time to be solved. and the motivation wasn't like, oh, well, I should pull that money out because obviously it's cooler. No, it was really cool to put that money in at $250, like $250 and to be $100,000. And to see people like get inspired to solve that.

And then someone did win it. Like the motivation there is just to like do it. And this is where the artists really come into play, right? Like the creatives and artists, they're not necessarily like driven by money. you have a lot of artists that exist in the world that just want to do cool shit because that is like what they want to do with their life it's not to have a ton of money um and that to me was like a powerful moment and i had a lot of people be like why didn't you take the money out and it was like cooler that i didn't And seeing it solves and someone pull, like I'd like to describe it as a sword from the stone, is so exciting and validating. I did something and it became more valuable over time.

Someone took that money and it was an experience for everyone. I want that same feeling with the game and the game assets. I want that same like I started with nothing. I'm walking through. I'm creating value. And like all of a sudden I have something epic and amazing and it's a part of this huge. story and it will only get bigger. And I'm a contributor to that.

Like that's what I want because I want that to exist in the world. I don't feel like that exists. I don't feel like people have the opportunity to really go like in a way that's pleasurable or a way that feels meaningful. I don't feel like it exists. And I want it to be more present. This metaphor is just abused to death in the crypto world. But like Ready Player 1 where we have all of these people in this world and the world actually

matters, right? The universe, the oasis universe is like where people like live their lives and play their games and whatever. But then there's the meta game that like the Willy Wonka, I can't remember the name of the guy in Ready Player 1, but like he's basically Willy Wonka. He leaves like the meta game behind where like if you can find all the Easter eggs and if you can unlock all the puzzles, you get the keys to the kingdom. How much of this like inspiration from or acknowledgement to like something like Ready Player 1 have you thought of? I read Ready Player 1 around the same time around Snow Crash and some other sci-fi books like Damon and Freedom. in 2014 when I was being red-pilled into the crypto space. But honestly, if you were a gamer, it made so much sense that with Bitcoin, it was internet money.

And if you understood internet money, you understood like, oh, okay, this transcends, all these applications is going to be like a currency across the internet. So I would say that those narratives, though, are inspiring in the way that you think about, when you think about the Metaverse, I mean, like Snowcrash coined the term Metaverse. with Neil Stevenson. But, like, Diamond Age is another one that's really actually more of a hopeful story and how education could be. So, I don't know, like, I guess, like, the digital treasure hunt Easter egg component

of what could exist is definitely, like, something I would like. It's just the reality is most people and most people in the world, it's such a niche audience. I think games that are more inclusive in a way where it's not just only a few are going to be good enough to get this one prize that exists out there. It's more like your time and value and how you participate can equate to value based on just the fact that you're contributing is that is more of the narrative that is inspiring as opposed to this race to get something at the end that's going to be potentially life-changing. Um, I, what happens is you just have too much of a fall off. So actually I was just talking to a friend the other day about Satoshi's treasure, which was this digital treasure hunt that happened. And it had the massive prize.

But you just can't inspire people to move, travel around, go to great lengths at this like chance of success. I think the chance of success needs to be way more clear that the fact that I'm giving in some time, I'm definitely going to leave with something more valuable than what I put in because not everybody can afford to just have an educational experience. So like if we're going to have a blockchain game that actually like onboards a million players, it can't be something that requires like a $20,000 NFT to enter first off. And you're also saying it has to offer some sort of like prescribed path for people to engage with or some at least some very clear set of rules.

And it probably also has to be like free to play, right? Because you can't take it entry. Are these all like components of how you lead your team over at Blockade? Yeah, absolutely. And also like whales want to get beaten. Like they don't want to be cool because they have money. You know, they like, having money is cool, but they actually want the like guy that is really skilled to come up and challenge them. The people with all the wealth and power want to be dominated.

Is that what I just heard? So like and and they want it to be fun. they want it to be like, okay, I had the money and look really cool, but I also, I can defend myself and I'm awesome because strategically, I'm still amazing. It's not about the money. The money just made me look good. They want to have that narrative. And the person that has nothing wants to have the narrative where they went and challenged the person that did have all the money and they just like took it to them. So these are narratives that we want to exist. When you silo your whales and you're like, this is a whales game. To be honest, they're like super bored. Like,

no one cares. Like, I mean, so great, you've got a high-valued PFP. Now what? Like, that's what always happens is like, what do we, what do we do now? Right. So now we're going to be a part of Bored Apes and we're going to have a Rolling Stones, like, article. And then we're going to have this, like, concert and you have to get in based on if you have a Bord Apes. But honestly, you can tell it's not this intermixing of personalities and, like, the thrill of having the high-valued assets is that's not being leveraged right now. And sure, access is one thing. And access is, and community-based access is one thing, but it's actually the thrill of being just a standalone individual that's talented or skilled for your own, your own individual reasons that allow you to

be a participant in, that's you plus your asset. It's not just the asset, right? And that's where you get to leverage that sort of like passion. That's really, really cool. What that made me just think of is like we have all these like blue chip NFTs, right? We got, Cryptopunks and Bored Apes and I guess those are maybe there's probably some other blue chips up for interpretation. But then there's like the side of the NFT world that like rotates all the time. So like right now we're on to like doodles and Azukis and like a few others. And like I wonder if the game is like because as soon as some NFT project gets like higher than like one ETH, it starts to price out like 90% of people.

And so then as soon as it gets too high, the 90% of people have to move on to a different NFT because they got priced out. And then the whales probably try and figure out where all the small fish are going. And then they buy the rairs out of that pool. And then it turns into another whale game. And then the other people have to move on. And so, like, I think the realization I just had is that, like, it's this trap. It's like this, there's never any sort of like stable equilibrium because there's always

people segregating because we haven't been able to generate a platform where the small fries and the big whales can actually coexist at the same. time in the same place. Yep. No, totally. And you have your people that are spreadsheet kings mastermining their way into the ecosystem and participating and like trying to start from the ground up, right? So like that's, how do you do that process just make it more fun? Yeah. Amazing. It's really, really cool. The other thing that came to mind is that I think it's actually really interesting that we've been using Dark Souls as a metaphor here because like the lore of Dark Souls is that you are one of an infinite number of depending on the game the most recent one is ashen you are

ash and you're made of ash and there's millions of you and basically like zombies and if you are the chosen one it's like a chosen one type story you will be the one to like rise up the ranks you will grind through the levels you'll get more powerful you'll find a better sword and then you will kill the boss at the end but like in the part of the lore is that there are millions and millions and millions of you and you are just a speck of dust inside of a sea of other other ashen ones other tarnished other other chosen ones whatever but like it's all about the story of like rising out of the ranks and being able to grind like being on a platform that is equal and accessible by everyone and it's up to you to actually grind through the ranks and destroy the boss at the end of the game so i think it's

funny that we've been using the dark souls metaphor to talk about this and it kind of like a similar thing yeah no no totally like i think that's it is ever it's the hero's quest yeah oh the Heroes Quest. Love it. Love it. Marguerite, do you want to talk about any more

game-related stuff because I also want to talk about New York at some point in time, but I don't want to close the book on games too soon. No, I mean, there's just a ton of games.

I just want us to be able to be proud of our space and what we're doing as game developers. And I want to see, for example, it would be so cool to see blockchain game developers at GDC, giving retrospectives on, like, making a blockchain game. And what went wrong and things they learned.

What's the GDC? GDC is a game developers conference. Oh, okay. It's coming up actually here at the end of March. But the thing is, like, you don't see that. You don't see that in our space. You don't see game developers being like taking that sort of like the same level of honesty that a lot of indie game developers take.

That game developer conference is so great because it's like salty, crusty game developers that like have died really hard, like, you know, big deaths of their game. And this is what they learn and they're sharing the story with you. And I would love for us to get beyond this marketing hype of trying to be like the best project out there and like sugarcoating everything to be like making it is hard. And this is what we learned. And like this is what we were trying to do. This is actually what happened. And like I'll take it to that place of comfort where us as game developers in the crypto space could actually like learn and thrive.

And I don't know if we're going to get that. I don't know how long it's going to be. But because of this immediate monetary injection that the games experience, it feels like people can't talk honestly. Yeah. Do you think that we are just early and this is the golden age of blockchain games is ahead of us? Or are you concerned that there's like a fundamental values misalignment that might not be overcomeable? Yeah. I think it attracts.

I think what we have is an area that attracts a lot of bad actors. And I think it's going to ruin the integrity. of a lot of the people that wanted to play with the technology. And it's going to be hard to differentiate the two. And I don't know, I don't know how it's going to go. Like, I wish I could say, well, obviously, we're going to go over it. And like, blockchain is obvious and decentralized assets are the obvious answer. But I don't know if that's true.

Like, I truly do not. And I've known a lot of things. I have a lot of North Stars in my life. And I don't know that we're going to make it through this time period because it's going to be incredibly exploited. Well, I usually leave the call to actions at the end. but if people want to come and try out Neon District or any of the other games, I don't know if you guys have developed more games other than the Neon District.

What's the right call to action for people to get a taste of what we've been talking up today? Also, Neon District, the MVP that was launched in January 2020, is still live, but it's getting a massive update right now with the V2. And then we have the larger game that's coming out with it this year. So it's like if you're interested in a free-to-play game and playing around with NFTs, definitely NeonDistrict.io, and you can see what that's like. But it's definitely a work in progress, and it's definitely not user-friendly at the moment, but still people are motivated enough to, like, figure things out.

So definitely check out NeonDistrict.com. And there's going to be other free-to-play games that'll pop up, I'm sure. So Skyweaver, I love that development team, Horizon Games, as the people have made Skyweaver. And similarly, they're very passionate about building these experiences with decentralized these assets. It's not necessarily about this money grab. So there are some different existing projects out there that are worth checking out. And I think also inspiring each other to build and create, you know, like you don't always just have to wait for the next air drop. You can also get creative and playful in small teams. Well, we will definitely get links to those games in

the show notes. Marguerite, I want to talk about New York because about a couple months after I moved to San Diego, you message me and it was like, you should move to New York after, I think it was after like NFT, NYC or something. And I was like, Marguerite, I just moved to San Diego. It's too late. But then like six months later, I actually do end up moving to New York because of how all the crypto people are there. Can you give to the listeners just the pitch of the crypto pitch for New York?

Like, why might somebody be interested in New York? Yeah. So I thought about this before I had moved here last summer. And this is before I fundraised for Blocky Games. I really thought about if we're going to build a metaverse for Web3, where is that going to happen? And I thought about Miami. I thought about L.A. I thought about London.

And honestly, the highest concentration is here in New York. We have Nifty Gateway here. We have Gemini. We have Open Sea. We have a ton of the Brooklyn artists that are really experimental and in the Coda's art. genre. And I think like this is a great place to come and get centered, grounded network. So basically the New York community is so dialed in to international communities. And also you're in this like VC land, right? Of people that want to invest in you. Not necessarily do you need VC money, but it's like even

VCs have a lot of knowledge about startups and things that, you know, can go right and wrong. So the The community here is just very friendly. It's concentrated, just in the matter of the fact that Manhattan is super concentrated. And it's very welcoming. So also women here. The women community, I love like the boys club, which is happening. And I know you've probably done some podcasts recently with the boys club. But I love the edge of it. It's not about like being a woman and it's not like the women's club. It's just like the super edgy. Like we're getting together. We're going to trade some assets and like guys can come to you. But it's a friendly space for women that are very entrepreneurial.

And I don't know if you get that anywhere else. So I'm really excited about this space in New York in general and also NFTI, NYC. This has been an ongoing development for a while. I am personally moving to Denver, but that's for different reasons. And also the engineering space over in Denver is really great. But as far as like launching a startup, connecting with content creators, people that want to actually build the metaverse, this is the hub. contenders would be in London for gaming for blockchain gaming there's you know there's quite a few people out there um L.A if you're a content creator you just want to be more social or if you're into

that sort of party Digen culture which is still viable even if it's not like you know building games so yeah I would say those are the hubs and but New York is the serious grind and people here are not going to waste your time you're going to get connected you're going to contribute and you know, that was my pitch. In my head, I've kind of categorized you as one of the crypto socialites, because I saw you at all the conferences and you were being a crypto socialite before even I got out of my apartment during COVID. But I wonder if you would consider yourself a crypto socialite before even crypto is what it was like today. Like what about 2017, 2018? If there was one,

what was like social, in real life, social life like back before COVID, back before like crypto is what it was today. Because like the generation of 2020 to 20 to 21 crypto is very, very different than the 2017, 2018 crypto. I'm just wondering about like your, the history of crypto socialization because I really got into it in the 2020s. Yeah. No, so actually it wasn't like that. I actually was terribly afraid of even doing podcast, public speaking. I just wanted to hide in the background and like make my art and like put it out there and let people experience it. And I didn't, like I told you, I was anonymous basically until 2016, 2017. I wasn't wanting to. I wasn't wanting. I was. I was to be an individual in the space, I wanted to just participate.

And then I would say like in 2017, I started public speaking more. What was socialization like back then versus how it is now? I mean, it wasn't about the parties, right? It was actually about the technology. So you'd go to events in 2016, 2017. You were learning about the tech. And I was seeing artists and what they were doing. The party culture really didn't pick up until, you know,

Maybe that first really great bull run in 2018 with that big consensus conference in New York. And like I was on a yacht, Anthony DiOrio's yacht. He helped launch the Ethereum ICO and he had this huge like yacht party. And that's kind of where it would like shifted. But then you had this massive bear market that happened. And then the party culture came back with the NFTs. But it's like you still have like, for example, Eat Denver was still a really cool experience in the fact that it's so concentrated with developers, which is why it's one of the most popular conferences.

So if you kind of look at that, the fact that people are really hungry to go and participate in the developer conferences versus like Bitcoin Miami, which is coming up, and it's exhausting. Like, I don't want to go to those things anymore. They, like, wear me out. And so like, no, I'm not, I'm really not a socialite. Like, I just like, I was trying to figure out and connect with all the people. But it's it's not the path. Like I, if you were to sit back and be like, did I enter and make these choices because I wanted to go party all the time? Or did I like want to go and make something really cool?

You know, I think we're just a little lost right now in that conversation because everyone's just really excited and that excitement just translates to parties. Yeah. One thing I always noticed about you when I see you in real life is you always have the most, maybe vibrant is the right word. Expressive is definitely the right word. Expressive outfit on. your fashion sense is like killer and so it's funny to hear you say that like you were kind of shy in 2017-2018 because i don't get any of that from you now and it's just funny to watch like because you kind of like you like straight up sparkle in your outfit when you walk around whatever

conference we're at wherever a party we're at can you kind of go into just just a little bit of that just like how you decide to like curate an outfit yeah uh well so in the same way that like I think the technology should surprise and delight. I think it's always fun to lean into the fact that, you know, you can play as a character. You can bring a little extra sparkle in a way that surprises people. And I like to do that because it breaks this, like expectation of different stereotypes. So there's times where even, like, wear a cape. And we saw this in number, too, people, like, teams of people wearing capes around.

And it's kind of like this, let's be a little different. let's think outside what people would be expecting and like for example I have like these glitter sparkle boots and they always light people up when I wear them and I think that's the kind of thing that people want with their applications and their experiences in general in this space as well so honestly at eat Denver um so I have I have little boys and I was allowed to bring them in to the VIP and we were all told to wait there for just a little bit and then the eat Denver organizer walked in and he's like I have a surprise for you just one second and so then comes in the buffercorn, right?

And the buffer corn is there. And my little boys are playing with them. For listeners that don't know, Buffy the Buffacorn is the unicorn buffalo mascot of East Denver. So think of just like a guy in a football mascot uniform. Right. And then the little boys are playing with him. And then I turn around to get like a glass of water for someone.

And I turn back and he's taken off the head of his costume. And it's Vitalik. And it's Vitalik there in the Buffacorp. So I can say that I'm not the only person that like wants to. surprise and delight both with technology and also just in your in real life persona and who you are and the joy you're bringing to the world like I think it's just a narrative about and also it's like it's really good to remind yourself that we're doing this for each other so collaborative what are you bringing to the table how are you contributing and I think that story is more than just walking to a

party with a VAP pass and being cool right there's a difference between doing that and what we have today and then what we want for the future. And so I think like, so yeah, that's probably a lot of what I do. What I do is because I think the surprising delight just carries over. One of the lines from our Chris Dixon podcast that stuck with me is Web3 has made the internet weird again, which was like a big relief to Chris because Web 2 just felt so stale to him. But Web 3 is like weird and weird stuff's happening.

When you tell me like people are wearing capes at East Denver, teams are wearing capes at Heath Denver and you like to like dress as like an avatar. of sorts and kind of like stand out in a way that you kind of want your internet avatar to stand out. It kind of feels like we're trying to bring the metaverse into the real life. We're trying to make the physical world a little bit more like the digital world, while we're also trying to make the digital world a little bit more like the real world. That seems to be a little bit of what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's going to be more playful.

How do you inspire people to play? And absolutely. I think that's something I'm actually really focused on right now is how do we fix some of these in real life problems in a way where we're so disconnected by the work we're doing online in a way where we're not taking away from our real life experiences, but where the technology becomes complementary to it. So, yeah, I think those are all the next big questions to solve. All right, Marguerite, the last line of topic that I want to go on involves a sort of a pseudo-vorzach test. So I'm just going to say one word, and I just want to see what comes out of your brain after I say it. Okay. Curation.

Oh, is the aesthetic law. Is the aesthetic law? Okay, now can you unpack that for me? I was saying this because I'm just bringing on in a blockade games, the lead cyberpunk curator. And in his descriptions, I labeled him as aesthetic law of kind of the quality control of the company. And in that, like, if it's, we're not hitting. his curation, like, acceptability meter, then it's not good enough. And as a company, we're failing.

We're below bar. So, like, aesthetic law, meaning this is what's acceptable and we should be striving above. So in other curated experiences, I'm sure this is the same thing as aesthetic law. Like, are you going to make the cut for whatever this criteria is? So, yeah, for us internally, we've brought in someone that's an expert in the cyberpunk curation. How about inside of the context, of just like your friends, your loved ones, the experiences that you want, both in the metaverse and outside in the real world, how does the importance of curation impact these things? So I think curation is a form of art, right?

Like it doesn't necessarily have to be exclusive, but in this context, you're thinking of a flow of an experience. You're like how one thing relates to another and how aesthetically all together. It's this cohesive space or level that resonates. And I think curation has a place. So, like, in regards to, like, what was the question with my friends and other people? I mean, you can allow yourself to feel left out by not being included in a story, particular storytelling version of a curated experience.

But honestly, the curator's job is just to pull the things together they think all belong together. And to tell this, like, experience or offer an experience or tell a story in the best way possible. And that's usually by, like, threading connections across the mediums. And how do you do that in your life? Is that a fair, fair, is that too open-ended of a question? How do I do that in my life? What experiences do you try and curate for yourself? And what kind of experiences do you try and curate for others?

Yeah. So I am a queen of making playlists. I love making playlist and I curate them and I think about the flow and I like get rid of songs and I don't like that song there and then I like to share them with people that I think like would experience them in ways that I like you know like I so in curation in my life like that's something I think about I also think about quality control of my friends I think about people around me I think about projects I involve myself in who am I advising yeah there's a lot of curation as far as You know, curation is just another word for filtering and filtering for what lens and what sort of desired outcome.

So, yeah, it's just like, so yeah. Marguerite, what makes you optimistic about the future? Am I optimistic about the future? To think about that. Like how you like to say it was optimistic. Are you not? I just kind of assume everyone in crypto is. What makes me optimistic is the fact that I honestly think we're going to be able to create tools to allow people.

people to be creative in environments in which maybe they otherwise would have not had these opportunities. I think that, I think if we look at the inclusive nature of, if you've ever been to an East Denver event, if you've ever been to one of these Web3 events, you'll see that there's just really like, how can I help you? How can I empower you sort of ethos that exists? And I think that's going to extend and spill over to a lot of what we're building. I think it does already do that. And I think as we do that heavy lifting for people, we're going to just create a better future because the more voices at the table, more talent, the more skills, the more empowered and educated people, the better problem solvers you have in the room. And the more people that are going to say no, it's stuff that they don't like or things that are against that positive outcome. So I think, like, that shift and becoming, having autonomy is going to be huge because once you plant that seed, you can't take it away.

Like people will not forget what it feels like to have like to be autonomous. Is there any bit of advice that you followed that has been immensely useful to you that you think is worth sharing to listeners? That is a good question. I guess something that I've thought if you were shy, like I was really, really shy and you feel like inferior. Like you don't have anything to contribute to you. you know the best thing you can do is especially if you have a skill set like being an artist and it's really hard to get a traditional job in that capacity finding ways to contribute and building up your reputation how can you support others how can you bring value is a great way to get

started with that reputation based background which will allow you to have this foundation to build this individuality on top of it doesn't need to start all at once it can be slow over time but just being a contributor actually is what has unlocked for me some of the best opportunities. And also you contribute in a way where you showed up and you did something magical and people remember and then it give you better opportunities. So looking for those opportunities where there's space for you, where you can contribute, where you can win, and allowing that reputation to build to lead and design your own career, it can seem scary. But honestly, it's so much more freeing than I think trying to work underneath like a corporate structure where things are way more restrictive

in this sort of economy that we have in space that we have. It's like the more you show up and the more you deliver and more you prove yourself, the more doors that open just left and right. And you get to choose like which one is best for you. Whereas you don't really get that in the like traditional corporate structure. So I mean, maybe to some extent, but I've really enjoyed that as a creative. And it's like the minute you trust yourself is when you really start to unlock your potential and stop living out of fear. So what's surprising is I've been in the space so so long

that I take that for granted. I see a lot of talented people really struggle with that and struggle with that fear and like the doubt and belief in themselves that they can actually catch themselves and they can find ways to create value. So look at people that are successful, people that are doing things that you're attracted to, show up, contribute, and like take a leap. All right. Thank you for joining me on Layer Zero. Thank you, David. Cheers.