Bankless - Crypto Gaming Panel | Loot Squad, Yield Guild, Illuvium

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

The magnitude of crypto gaming is increasingly clear, for those paying attention. For Bryce Johnson of Loot Squad, Gabby Dizon of Yield Guild, and Kieran Warwick of Illuvium, crypto gaming is inevitable. Existing at the intersection of finance, gaming, and culture, this sector has a gargantuan addressable market. Axie Infinity has tapped into the passion and potential of dedicated communities, building an entire economy around its protocol. As the traditional gaming market flounders, new strides are being taken to revolutionize how we game, how we work, and how we own. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 ZERION | Your Gateway to the Metaverse! https://bankless.cc/Zerion  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​  💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 6:00 What To Call This? 11:16 Play-to-Earn 15:56 Loot Squad 19:38 Yield Guild 24:21 Illuvium 30:54 How Big is Crypto Gaming? 37:43 Community 42:32 Making People Nice 50:00 Will Games Still Be Fun? 58:15 Ponzi Games 1:01:24 Crypto Gaming Roadmap 1:07:14 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources Bryce on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brycent_?s=20  Gabby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gabusch?s=20  Kieran on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KieranWarwick?s=20  ------ 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 

All right, Bankless Nation, we are super excited because it is panel time at Bankless. These are some of my favorite episodes. Generally, we put together the best panel of subject matter experts. And we just beat a topic to death. We take you from zero to 100 and give you an understanding. Today's panel, I'm especially excited about David, because this is all about GameFi. The GameFi Revolution, that is, gaming meets finance, all on crypto, crypto gaming, ever since David, our conversation with Ariana Simpson from A16Z, where, you know, she went over

the bull case for crypto gaming. I have been obsessed with this topic, like super interested in learning more. And so this panel, I think, is an opportunity for you to learn more, for David and I to learn more with our three fantastic panelists. You want to give a quick shout out and who we're about to talk to, David? Yeah, absolutely. And just to go on with the whole GameFi conversation, I think this is the part where crypto gets really, really fun and fun by design. We are beyond the parts of the crypto world where we are talking about finance and protocols and all like code and stuff.

Blockchains. I know you and I, we're both Diablo 2 fans and we've been using Diablo 2 metaphors to explain crypto. and now this is where it feels like it becomes real. And so we brought on three people across the GameFi industry. One of my questions is like, are we calling it GameFi? Is that what we're calling it? Because we need names for these things. So we are bringing on Bryson from Lute Squad, Gabby Deeson from Axi Infinity,

and Kieran Warwick from Illuvium. And these are different components of a greater GameFi economy, crypto gaming economy. each one with their own perspectives to add to this conversation. Ryan, shall we go ahead and get right to the conversation? Yeah, David, we definitely should. Before we do, guys,

we want to give a shout out to one of the sponsors that made this episode possible. We've been talking about them for the last few episodes, and that is Xerion, because Zirion has some hot new ways to display your NFTs, flex your NFTs. It's already been my homepage for my DFI portfolio. Now it's kind of my homepage for NFTs.

And David, you tweeted this out, earlier this week. I want to know how you did this, man. You put like your Cryptopunk on your, is this like an app on your phone? Yeah, it's a little widget. It's a Zerian app with, and I actually had to put my actual Cryptopunk owning address and verify it in the ZerRN app. So I couldn't have just load up anyone else's address. I had to load up mine. And I thought my tweet was pretty clever. If you are like me and you don't check any of your notifications on your phone, you can make your phone prettier by putting your cool NFTs on there using the Zirion app. You tell me you don't check your notifications. I see 18,000 emails here, David. I think a few of

those are for me. Yeah, that's where they are. They're going to probably sit there. Yeah, they probably are. If you want to talk to David, talk to them on like the new social media channels, Discord or Twitter, emails is a little bit trickier. But Zirion is cooking up some cool things with NFTs. Put them on your Apple Watch as well. Thanks to Zirion for telling us about that. forming the bankless community. So guys, before we get to our sponsors, slight correction, Gabby plays a lot of Axi Infinity, but he is actually from Yield Guild Guild Games. So sorry about that, Gabby, and we will get to that in a second.

There you go. Kind of related, right? Sort of a new sort of Dow built on top of Axi Infinity at some level, but also not Axi Infinity. So guys, we are super excited to get to the meat of this panel. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot.

No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grant. program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a Unigrant at

Unigrantz.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof of work systems, and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators.

And that is what we need to make this industry. stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32-Eth and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32-Eth, and you need to pool your Eth with others so you can access staking yields. Lido offers a solution for both.

Simply go to Lido.fI, choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible, and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Tara, or Seoul, and get liquidity on your stake, go to Lido.fI to get started. Hey, guys, we are back with the GameFi Revolution. This is our crypto gaming panel. Do we even call it GameFi? We're about to find out. We've got Gabby here from Yield Guild Guild, which is a talent guild in crypto gaming.

We also have Bryson from Lute Squad. You've heard all about loot and what they are up to, this whole ecosystem that is being birthed around it. And we have Kiran from, Kieran from Oluvium, which is a new crypto game. I think forging some new territory. gentlemen, it is fantastic to have you on bankless. Welcome to the GameFi panel. Oh, thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. We called this thing, the GameFi panel at first. Like, that's what's in our show notes. But I'm actually not sure if we should call it that because like these terms are up for debate, right? Is it Crypto Gaming? Is it GameFi?

Is it something else? Can we talk about that for a minute? So first of all, do you guys like, do you guys like the name GameFi? Does that work for you? Gabby, what do you think? Fucking hate it. What should we use instead, Gabby? Look, I've been in NFT space since, like, early 2018, and it was called crypto games or blockchain games,

and then it was NFT games, and now people are talking about Play-to-Earn. And now because of Defy and games are coming out, and people want to call it GameFi. But it just sounds like, it just sucks as a name, honestly. Are you saying, Gabby, do we have to come up with something better? Like, yeah, why do you hate it so much? It just sounds like a derivative of

Defi, and I don't think that's actually what it is. And there's actually a lot of, I would say, convergence between what NFTs are doing and Defi and how it builds towards the kind of open metaverse that we've been talking about. But yeah, I just hope 10 years from now, it's not GameFi that wins out as a term. Kieran, do you have a different take on this? What's your take on GameFi? Like it, Hayden? I mean, for, I don't, I don't head it at all.

I mean, at the end of the day, you're defining what decentralized gaming is and, and just coining it a catchy sort of a name. For us, we're completely decentralized and have been from day one. So for us, it's kind of fitting. But, I mean, Gabby has been here longer than me. So, so maybe we should go with what he's saying. OGs hate it so far. What about you, Bryson?

What do you think about Game 5, the term? Oh, man. I feel like I'm coming into this and I'm willing to just elect to go with the OG's presence. I've only been in the seat and I think for about since April. So not too long. It's the best meme that wins. It's not what the OGs think. That's totally true.

Okay. So like David and I have said this so many times. We actually, we didn't really love defy as a meme when it came about because it was just like to us, not all of this stuff is decentralized, right? And there's a spectrum of decentralization. When you just call all of the finest that we're creating on top of crypto decentralized, it's somewhat misleading, to be honest. So we were like- People don't get the whole decentralization part of finance anyway. So if we're trying to

communicate to normies, like, do normies care about the D part of D-Fi? How much do they understand whether it means? Yeah. So we very much like preferred open finance at first, but like, defy-st catch on, right? D-5, like, I don't know, something about it. The memetics of it, it was more transmissible. It was more viral and it caught on and we lost out. So we capitulated. So Gabby, you might have to capitulate on it. It's not too late, okay? You'll create a better meme. So I think that play to earn is actually the best meme. It's kind of a derivative from free to play, which was the last business model of games in the last maybe 10 to 15 years. And people are saying, oh, play to earn, it's not like good enough. It should be play and earn or something. But you don't

create and try to create a meme that's 10% better. Your meme has to be 10 times better. And I think that play to earn is actually the best meme that encapsulates. is happening with NFTs and defies and video games and the Metaverse. And if someone wants to be Play to Earn, they need a meme that is 10 times better, not 10% better. Well, we can see if we can stick with Play to Earn into duration of this panel. And maybe if we can, we're optimistic about the Play to Earn label. What about just PTE, you know?

Just like short form now? Yeah, yeah. That's it. David didn't like GameFi either. And then you know this panel, the GameFi panel. So go figure. May the best meme win. That's right.

Let's talk definitionally a little bit. So play to earn is kind of cool because it describes really what we're doing with crypto gaming, which is we're sort of flipping the industry on its head, right? Rather than users paying for a game, they're actually an active part of this open economy and they're earning as part of it. Maybe Gabby, you could tell us a bit. what's special about crypto gaming and play to earn? Sure.

So play to earn, I would say, is built, first of all. So you have smart contracts, then you have the finance part of it. Then you have assets, which are like the NFTs. And play to earn was added on top of that. We're using these NFTs in a game environment gives you some kind of reward token, which has value in the game, which means if I have a reward token and I sell it, I get something out of it. It might be ether or it might be something else.

But for it to have value, someone has to buy it and maybe use that in the context of an online economy, which could be a video game or a virtual world. So that is like in essence from a very like 50,000 foot level, what play to earn is. I am using my skills and my time to earn some form of resource that can be basically traded for money. Kieran, what would you add to that? What's different about crypto gaming? Is it this play-to-earn aspect that Gabby has emphasized? Are there other pieces that are important as well?

Yeah, so my take on it is, for us especially, we're going after two types of gamers, right? There's the gamers who weren't necessarily gamers in the beginning, but now they're in a developing nation and they have this opportunity to play to earn. And so our game definitely caters for those people. But then I think the more North American gamers that are used to playing your League of Legends, World of Warcraft, the earning side of that is just going to be a bonus.

And so I think it's a little bit dangerous to just call crypto gaming play to earn. I think the fact that you can have ownership over your assets, if you go and tell a Fortnite player that, that, hey, you can now sell your skins on an open market and you own those and it's verifiable, that's a huge, huge selling point. And it might not necessarily be the fact that you can earn, you know, 20 bucks, 30 bucks a day out of playing this game. So I think we've got to talk about both. Bryson, we talked about these two pieces, right?

So owning your own assets and also play to earn, these do seem to be important components. Would you echo these comments? Would you add anything to them? What's your take, Bryson? Yeah, I would say that both pieces are extremely important. You know, being someone who does content, I came from the CSGO community, and we used to sell skins on the Steam marketplace, but we really didn't have any true kind of asset power over these skins.

And when Steam decided that they wanted to, you know, get rid of kind of CSGO gambling and skin selling, they did it at the drop of a hat. We had no kind of say, no voting, no staking. And playing CSGO, like, it was kind of like my first unofficial approach to realizing what this kind of NFT ecosystem could be without realizing there were NFTs there. But I think that there does need to be a very good consensus in terms of the level of entertainment value provided to American-based users and then also the balance of Play-to-Earn because I look at gamers in the United States, most of them, like 99% aren't making money

playing video games, whereas Play-to-Earn opens the gateway for millions of people, average everyday people, to be able to make an income playing. So I think there's a powerful medium and having both of those involved. Okay, let me just stop like very quickly right here and just like in my point of view, Play to Earn encompasses the entire like ownership and being able to sell those assets and being able to financialize them. I think like the biggest misconception and this is just my definition is that when you say play to earn specifically, it refers to a cohort of people who basically don't have any money

and then they are trading their time for money to play the game. I think it's the whole financialization of the game economy that is played to earn. And like I don't want to spend the rest of the hour kind of splitting hairs between definitions, but that's what I think. Is open gaming an interesting term for this industry as well? No? Why do you think, no, Gabby? It doesn't really mean anything.

Like I don't know what to think of when I hear open gaming. because even we have perhaps an open financial system but games are likely still going to be built by developers and studios and so I think that that is going to be a difficult part of the whole thing to decentralize

maybe Kieran can give us some illustration when we talk about projects and I actually think that's where we should we should go next so each each of you comes from one of the few not too many projects that are working in the game five play to earn

ecosystem. And so maybe each of you could illustrate what your project is, how it fits in, and maybe also how it fits into how it's a model for other projects or other patterns to be integrated into this whole play-to-earn movement. Bryson, we accidentally got your introduction wrong with implying it was part of the loot ecosystem. That was me, Bryson. Sorry, man. So with that, we'll start with you. Bryson, could you correct us on what a loot squad is and how it fits into the world of play to earn gaming. Totally. No problem with the whole loot definition. I've gotten on tons of calls of people.

And they're like, oh, are you related to loot for adventurers? I'm like, no, not. They're a little bit different. We were here first. Just to be clear, you were here first, okay? So you owned Loop first. Okay. You're in OGs.

It kind of, at first I was annoyed by it because I was like, okay, they don't know we exist. We don't know they exist. But, like, we're using the same name. And, you know, there's always going to be some branding stuff there. But what Luke Squad is, is we're like kind of a social gaming community. and we're looking to build out pretty much the coin base of Play to Earn. So our idea is using content to build a very strong, empowering family within the Lute Squad.

We have streamers, we have Play to Earn users. And at the end of the day, we feel that building platforms on top of Play to Earn with consumer-based products is the future of allowing more dollars to be spent on Play-to-Earn ecosystems. So we're very much kind of taking a bullish approach to building out a very strong foundation in terms of our scholars and allowing people to have the empowerment of playing these games, but also looking at how we onboard millions of American users in the future. And I think it's through giving them a play to earn aggregator where they can not only invest,

but kind of spend their time within guilds and infrastructural systems. So our guild approach is a bit different than some of the others in the space. And luckily, both of the guys in this call are two that I'm collaborating with directly and partnering with. So it's cool to be in the space. Bryson, is that like if we're trying to use old models, like from the e-sports world, is Lute Squad like a league that you join or how should we think about this? So I would think from like a very open-ended and cultural standpoint, we're very much like almost like the 100 thieves of NFT gaming.

If you're familiar with kind of traditional gaming organizations, we're not like moving in the same direction of YGG. We're there, in my opinion, like being the leader in terms of being able to index across multiple play to earn games. But we are more so like a traditional gaming organization who's looking to kind of expand on traditional infrastructure by focusing on creating consumer-based products. So not really kind of in the same mold,

but we do feel like there is a ton of space for multiple players. Bryson, what's 100 Thieves? Sorry, my gaming days are like my World of Warcraft days are a few years behind me. Yeah, you can tell by the caller. So 100 Thieves, they're a traditional gaming organization that does a lot in the spaces of like League of Legends and Call of Duty and some other games. But they're very much seen as kind of the content mecca of the gaming scene for the traditional

world, whereas like we're focused on trying to replicate the content aspect of that for the NFT gaming or Play to Earn gaming world. And I think both of those terms kind of go synonymous in a sense, kind of like what Gabby were saying earlier. I like the idea of saying P2E encompasses all of kind of NFT gaming and Play to Earn and entertainment and all of that. By the way, I just want you guys to know, David Hoffman was wearing the color yesterday in our conversation with a bunch of gamers. I know, I flip-flopped it.

Gabby, let's turn to Yield Guild Guild. What is Yield? How does it fit into the whole Play to Earn revolution? And how might it be a model for other organizations as well? So Yield is what we call a Play to Earn Gaming Guild. So what we are actually is kind of a coalition or a federation of guilds that on board play. communities from around the world. It started in the Philippines, at AXI Infinity last year, but now we have communities from all around the world that

are playing these different games and yeah, deriving some kind of earnings from them. So we started with AXI, but since then, we partnered with a lot of different games, including Illuvium, including Star Atlas, other games like Guild of Guardians, Embersword. So we want to be the gateway for people to have jobs in the Metaverse, whether you're an ordinary player, you're in e-sports, you're a content creator. We want to give the, basically become the entryway for that, for people to come into the crypto economy and start earning their living creatively, no matter like how they want to do it. And if there is a barrier, because it costs something to get started in one of these games, it might be purchasing an NFT, being part of the group,

we want to erase those barriers and have anyone come into these games and become a part of the crypto economy. Is it true that you have a moist hour? as part of your founding team, Gabby? Yes, out of moistness is my technical co-founder, and he's fully A-N-on. And, yeah, I think you and Ariana talked about that last time, right? Yeah, it was hilarious. I love it.

Gabby, can you check my thinking on this? I think one of the early premonitions, before crypto was even a thing that the world of play to earn was coming regardless, was the fact that World of Warcraft had a sufficiently robust in-game economy that actually you could actually make enough money, enough gold in World of Warcraft to actually support yourself as a player. And then also something that World Warcraft pioneered

was actual guilt. People in discourse, before Dow's were even a thing, forming and banding together to share resources and to join together to bite the bosses. And so for me, Yield Guild Guild is, it's actually, it's a Dow, right? Except it's a Dow that allows for organizations to form across any play-to-earned game.

and then the Dow itself has its own self-sustaining economic model based off of those players, but then also can take that model into more maybe traditional routes such as like content production and whatever else the Dow wants. Is that all right? Yeah, that's right. So guilds have existed in games for over 20 years. If you go to any MMO starting from probably Ultima Online World of Warcraft, Roonscape, guilds have existed. And later in as existed, except that they were. were kind of like gray or black market. It was never really in the terms of service that you could exchange these assets for real money,

but people were doing it anyway because they were valuable and some people wanted to spend time to obtain these assets. And some people wanted to spend money. And what later earned does is that it puts the assets of these games on the blockchain, which kind of legalizes the kind of asset exchange part of it, makes it pretty easy and part of the actual kind of game economy or the rules of the game. and the guild itself now is basically a group of people like a guild in a game life world of Warcraft that now has a treasury that essentially has a bank account of assets in these different games.

And we use that treasury and we've raised money from some investors like Ariana and recent Horowitz to invest in these assets and then lend them out to the players so that they can play these games, earn an income without having to spend any money up front. I think that instantiation of assets that you access when you play these games is really, really important because that really goes, it's really where it goes to these guilds of, you know, runescape and World of Warcraft that form, because people just want to hang out with their friends online and play games. But once the assets are involved, once there's actual digital assets, that goes from, you know, a bunch of friends, you know, hanging out

playing games to an economic body, an economic unit that with kind of in the same way a company has goals and aspirations and targets, which I think could help blossom a lot of color into the world of gaming. Yeah. So in terms of NFT assets and tokens, we have over $30 million of assets in Auxi. We have over a million dollars of assets in the Lubeum, for example. So it is serious money, like having a guild that has thousands of players around the world playing these games. This is like all of my childhood dreams come true. I got to say, it's like happening. I feel like a little too late for it because like I'm not so much in the gaming scene nowadays. But man, it's all happening.

Karen, perfect. Let's turn to you. Kieran, what is Alluvium and how does it fit into this whole play-to-earn environment? So we're a fully decentralized game from the heart. Essentially, we are building a game very similar to Pokemon, but with the battle systems of a League of Legends, team fight tactics. And so we've sort of merged these two genres together. And, you know, very similar to Pokemon, we've got 150 alluvials that you walk around in this open world and you're trying to catch.

As, as Gabby was saying, that all these alluvials are on the blockchain. We've built this decentralized marketplace where you can go and either, you know, battle these alluvials or you can go and sell them. There's a whole bunch of other components with it, including, like, mining. There's, you know, skins that you have. there's enhancements. And so we're really trying to, I guess, up the ante in the space in terms of bringing the first AAA title to blockchain. And I know that gets thrown around a lot these days. And it's a bit of a buzz word for a lot of games out there. But to bring that level, you need a team that can sufficiently deliver that. And so,

What I mean by that is having hundreds of people working on the game, and you need millions of dollars to be able to deliver that. And so we've gone and raised, you know, over $50 million. And we're looking to expand on that again. And yeah, we're looking to build out our team to, you know, the size of your likes of Ubisoft and Blizzard to actually deliver what I believe is going to be one of the first games. There's obviously other other games building at the moment, but to actually deliver that experience of a real fun gaming. Not so much, you know, gamers looking for something to earn. And obviously in our game, we're set to give out something like 600 million in yield. But it's more, we're targeting the fun side of gaming first, which means, you know, super immersive, addictive,

strategic gameplay. And then the cherry on top for us is the fact that you can obviously go and sell these assets and earn quite a bit of money. Plus, you know, we're going down the route of an e-sports game where, you know, we want to be up there with guys like Dota, which, you know, are putting on prize money tournaments of, like, 35 million plus. With us, you know, we want to break those records. and having, you know, NFTs and having a token that like we do, at the value we do,

we have that possibility. So that's kind of what we're doing. By the way, I've seen some of the eluvios, like sneak peek that Kieran showed us, and they're fucking amazing. Nice. And I think it's going to be actually trivial for this industry to just shatter records of reward distributions because it's hooked right into finance. It's hooked right into crypto.

So it makes a lot of sense. Karen, you said that Illuvium is a decentralized game. Can you unpack that? What does that mean? Do you mean something more than just the users own their own assets? Or what else about Aluvium is decentralized? So, yeah, I mean, first of all, I call it a decentralized autonomous studio, right? So we're 140 people now and we're growing at a rate of knots.

It's literally 10, 15 people a month adjoining. I've met 5% of those people, right? They're across 30 different countries and they're all contributing to building this game. That's the first step there. The second thing that we did, and this is a bit of an ode to Kane from synthetics, his thing was. No clue who that is. Yeah, I know.

Sorry. I get that a lot. I don't. No, but I think. the biggest thing that we did is we literally said we we even before our TGE we air dropped a bunch of tokens to a lot of the synthetics community a lot of our initial early adopters who came into our discord and we said all right you guys now have a token we want and it was called pre-ILB and so it had no other value apart from being able to vote and what what that voting was was made to do is

actually put in a put in place a council of five individuals that the token holders thought would be the best people to essentially make the decisions based on the protocol, right? From a decentralized finance standpoint, from a gaming standpoint. And so we've given the ability for literally all our token holders to have a say in adding new characters to the game, for example, in doing balancing, in changing things like our tokenomics. And so we've already had multiple examples of where someone has written an IIP, which is an alluvium improvement proposal, very, very similar to how Ethereum works, again, synthetic works, but were the first ones who were literally doing it in gaming.

And that was a little bit scary at first. But now that we're seeing this play out, the community, the benefits that you get from giving power back to the community is just, it's amazing to see, right? There's so much buy-in from people and we think it's going to transpire to basically a lot more trust, a lot more in-game purchases, just purely because people think and literally are building a game by the, you know, with their own input from the community, which, you know, it's really, really fascinating to watch. So, Karen, since you brought him up, we mentioned him a couple of times.

You know, Kane is your brother, right? Kane of Synthetics, you've had him on bankless before. Is he older brother, younger brother? Curious. Yeah, so we, I was actually coming a chat just before this with David. But he's nine years older. So just to clarify that for everyone. run out there. He's trying to spin this, this narrative that we're like two years apart or whatever.

But yeah, no, he's, he's very much my older brother. So the reason I ask is because like, you know, so bankless likes analogy. Maybe there's an analogy here of like GameFi, play to earn is sort of like Defi's younger brother that's now entering into the ring here. And I have a question for you, because I'm sure you've had conversations with Kane and others in the pass. But this goes into like the total addressable market size of this. And I'm curious what you think. Do you think that defy is bigger or do you think crypto gaming is the bigger total addressable market size? This is maybe a cane versus Kieran sort of discussion too. So which is bigger? So okay. So so the addressable market for defy is basically it's limited by the

population of the world, right? Everyone can join decentralized finance. Everyone needs finance. The difference is that it's very opaque, right? It's very taboo. It's like, I don't understand it. There's so many people that just dismissed defy purely because of the complexity. The advantage that we have as a defy game is our addressable market is something like

three billion people. So it's, it's not the whole world, but it's, you know, nearly half. And so for us, it's so easy for someone to understand, especially now that these layer twos are coming out, which make the experience in the game seamless, exactly like it is in mainstream, the opportunity here to, and we're already seeing it with Axi, right? The opportunity to, to bring people into the crypto space is, you can, you can. You can, you. You can, can't even measure it, right? Like, we're trying to get to 100 million players. And my thing is, you know, it's not a screw you cane, like we just brought in all those people, because I'm also a massive, massive investor in the defy space. I think it's a matter of bringing them in.

And then once they have a metamass wallet, once they start saying, okay, I'm earning a little bit of money. I need to go on to maybe OpenC or these other decentralized exchanges to start selling these assets. They're going to, without even realizing it, they're going to start adopting crypto. And so the D5 maxis out there who are like, oh, this is just another flash in the pen, it's going to go away. I think they need to, you know, embrace what's happening here. And yes, these are normies, as we call them. But very, very soon, I'm expecting those normies to start adopting other crypto protocols, which I think is good for the entire ecosystem. So I take your point that these things are very synergistic. And crypto gaming is maybe the gateway

drug to the rest of defy totally agree. It's maybe it's many people's first banking experience comes by way of crypto gaming and defy. But which one's going to be bigger, Kieran? Do you think, you think crypto gaming is going to win? Like, do you think it's a bigger market out there? So in the short term, we're absolutely going to crush Defi. It's not even... There you go. It's not even an argument. I mean, I, Kane and I are extremely competitive to the point where it's almost...

It's almost unhealthy. And so I will say, again, I think, you know, the amount of dollars that can go into Defi is you basically it's you can't count it right like it's it's so large that that i think you know at the end of the day we're going to win in the short term but 10 20 30 years from now i think defy will will eventually win out but then you look at it and it's like are we part of defy you know is is gaming part of that so i don't know it's kind of they they come hand in hand so i don't think there can be really a winner apart from the short term Ryan just wants to see two brothers fight. And that's what that's what he's doing.

I just want that a little bit. But also like in a healthy way, Kieran, and you know, don't make it unhealthy for sure. But Gabby, maybe we just came full circle to GameFi again. So here's the way I take a look at it. Defi is the gamification of finance.

GameFi is the financialization of games. These are actually no different. You're just coming at it from kind of the opposite ends. And when you combine them, what you have is basically play to earn and the metaverse where if you watch Ready Player 1, people own their assets across different game experience, buying these assets and owning them and then taking them basically to their whole virtual lives with them. So I think they're just opposite ends of like the same outcome.

Yeah. How come they didn't have blockchain and like Ethereum and Ready Player 1? It felt like they were missing that technology, right? Or do you think it was just assumed? Oh, it was just kind of under the hood. I think it's always been there. Bryson, what do you think about this? Is this total addressable market?

Is this how gaming goes mainstream and crypto goes mainstream? How big is crypto gaming, in your opinion? Yeah, I honestly think that defy is going to depend on gaming more than the gaming side of what we're doing would depend on defy. And the reason why I would say that, even though they're both interconnected, like, for example, the best way to get your money or get your crypto onto your Ronan wallet right now, When I first started, you were going through and you were swapping. This is before AXS was on like Coinbase.

You were swapping Ethereum and you had to get the Ethereum and a wrapped Ethereum. And to do all these steps, you know, you're touching a lot of Defi concepts. But at the end of the day, I think there are tons of people who are, you know, going to jump into the gaming side of things that might, that could care less about whether or not they're using Defi protocols, but just know that they're playing a fun game. So I think they kind of go hand in hand. But I think gaming provides more to Defi in terms of long-term sustainability. Because I know for myself, I started in gaming, not even realizing I was using defy and ended up now, it's like, oh, now I want to use more defy things because of gaming. So I think gaming is a way of bridging a lot of these gaps.

I want to turn the conversation to something that I also see alignment between the traditional current gaming industry and what we see going on in the crypto world. And that is the emphasis on community. Community is something that crypto has intimately become understood, where if you don't have a community, you kind of don't really have anything. Community is what supports Bitcoin. It supports what supports Ethereum. And then it also is what supports all the applications that are built on Ethereum. And the same thing is true with gaming.

Studios, gaming studios are very sensitive to what their community has to say about their game and community feedback about how the game should. be designed is something that gaming studios thrive on and without that they tend to die. And so now we have these two worlds that are coming together and they're already both powered by community. And so I want to ask this question to Gabby first. How do you think about the intersection of community and play to earn gaming? Like when these two worlds collide, what happens? Okay. So first of all, communities have always been very integral part of any successful game. So game communities have been around forever, but having play to earn games with community that is basically powered by Web3 within these DAOs with token form of ownership,

it just makes everything more explosive because now your communities are empowered by ownership. And this is really different from what happened in basically game communities where you're fans of the game, you're very, you could be very, like, a big fan, a big defender of the game, but ultimately you didn't own anything, right? And now that your gamers are basically co-owners of the game ecosystem that you have, it just really changes their relationship where, in a sense, they're your co-creators, they may have an economic stake in it, and just the level of participation, the level of loyalty, and yeah, just the way that people are integrated, the community and the team and sometimes like the community is part of the team it is something that's never really existed

in in the game industry before the community is part of the team i absolutely love that line i'm definitely going to be using that in in the future bryson i want to turn the same question to you how does the role of community change once we integrate financial assets into these games that we play i think community continues to just like hyperscale not only games but i think it can hyper-scale financial protocols and Dow's and everything of that sort. I mean, look at what YG, myself at Lute Squad, everything that we've done up into this point has been built off the backs of building a strong community and having the sense of empowerment for bringing other people along this journey and allowing them to reach their

goals and helping them follow their dreams. So I think community is going to be like a very huge focal point to the future of how we build. And then long term, and you look at like traditional gaming versus, you know, what you see in Maxi and Aluvian and other NFT games, the communities are much different because there is this aspect of defy and money involved, people are less likely to be toxic. People are less likely to want to spread fud about a game or people are less likely to like treat other players with disrespect because at the end of the day, everyone wants to make it. And by doing so,

showing that the community is great. It provides level of validity to projects. It provides level of validity to guilds and overall the ecosystem of NFT gaming as a whole. David and I were talking to someone earlier, and we were describing what's happening in crypto gaming. I found myself starting to call e-crypto gaming users or like customers. And then I like stop myself because that's like the existing traditional model of gaming where you'd have users and customers. And I'm not quite sure what to call these new ecosystem participants in something like

Axy. Like, do we have a term for this? Are they, like, community members? Are they citizens? Like, because they're more than customers and they're not users. So what are this new breed of ecosystem participants that are actually working in the game? They're not employees either. I don't have a term for it. Yeah, I think everyone has different definitions. I know for myself, we like to at this point just call them our AXE family because the AXEFAM, it makes a lot of sense. But Gabby, you've been around a lot longer than I. What is your opinion on that? I think Citizen is actually nice, the term to put it.

Yeah, yeah, just guild members for us, because our members are part of different game communities as well, but they're so part of the Yield Guild Guild community and the sub-Gyld that we're in. Yeah. Bryson, you said that this collaborator of nature makes people nicer, and I'm a big fan of Overwatch, and Overwatch is famously toxic. When you head into a competitive game, everyone just finds somebody else to blame. And I recently tweeted out this line, blockchains make people nice. And what I mean by

that is kind of a, it would take too long to explain, but more or less, like, having a transparent system kind of enforces honesty and collaborative nature. So like, are you saying that when we integrate financial assets into our games, everyone's just going to stop being toxic and start just being nicer to people? I'm a firm believer of that. I think when I first got an Axi Infinity, like the first transaction I made, it was like kind of a private transaction was somewhere where I sent them, you know, like $1,000 for two axes. And in the traditional world, like I remember when I would go and try to buy like an Elgado game capture so I could screen record from someone on Twitter.

And then the guy just like scams me for like 80 bucks, whereas it's like an axi. I'm like, oh, I can send a thousand dollars this person. No, now, of course, I do not recommend anyone doing this. So if you're watching, but it's like my experience, my first time. I was like, wow, he actually sent me what I was looking for. I had people vouching for him. So I do think keeping scammers on the community is something that all of these games are looking to do. So I disagree that like blockchain makes people necessarily nice because it hasn't rubbed off on Kieran.

Kieran's a super competitive guy. But like so how I see it is that like there's zero sum and their positive sum games. And if we are playing a positive some game, then people are actually kind of incentivized to helping each other. If the game is zero sum, if I'm getting into a match where either I win or I lose, I get zero or I win, then the environment becomes toxic, right? So there are elements of play to earn, which are zero sum. There are elements that are positive sum. What I see now is that it's still a growing market. We're still at the very start of onboarding how many millions of players, a few billion players into this economy. So I think for maybe the next few years, it's going to be more positive sum than it is zero sum. Zero sum. Is this why Bitcoin maximalists are so mean and toxic sometimes, Gabi?

Yeah, I think so because for them, the world is there's only so much Bitcoin and the only game is to accumulate more of it. And with Ethereum, there are so many games you can play. There's so many communities you can join. And honestly, it's a lot more fun, joining a Dow, playing a game, becoming a streamer and finding so many ways to win. If there's only one way to win, then you're either winning or you're not. Karen, I've intentfully left you last for this question because, like you said, you are building a game which requires improvement proposals by the community. And as we've said, the community members are now part of the team. So what's it been like trying to build a game with the community shoulder to shoulder? What's that been like?

Yeah, so the crazy thing for us, and thanks to that jab, Gabby, that was nice of you. But, yeah, no, so essentially we've got governance, right? We literally have everyone who holds a ILV token is, it's a governance token, and you have the ability to shape our protocol from a defy standpoint and a gaming standpoint. And so empowering those players, and I mean truly, truly empowering those players, giving them decision power, right? That's what it comes down to. has created, we've, we've got something like 200,000 community members and we're still, you know,

a ways away from releasing the game. And I think that is built upon the fact that they actually get a choice in the matter. And if, if something that we're building doesn't make sense to them, they will step up and they'll, you know, talk within themselves. We've got all different measures and channels for people to be able to voice their opinion. And it really builds this camaraderie where like we've got crazy, crazy, crazy people that's been, you know, 15 hours a day in our Discord. And it's to the point where like they're seeing things that I don't even see anymore because I'm, you know, busy out there getting partnerships and stuff like that.

And I come back and I'm like, holy shit, what is going on here? And so, yeah, I think community is everything. And I was such a massive believer in that purely because when I started investing in the space, the protocols that had the community backing and the really positive communities, they were the ones that the token price kept on going up. And it wasn't even almost about the, you know, at a certain point you've got to deliver a product, right? But prior to that, you know, if you're building something and the, the, the, people that you're building it with, literally the contributors. And for us, anyone can contribute

with these proposals. So we essentially have 200,000 people contributing to what alluvium is going to end up being, which again, it's, it's very, very rare. It's not been done before in this, in this measure. And so, you know, for us, yeah, I echo what, what Bryce and Gabby are saying. and community is absolutely everything. At some level, it almost seems like community is the product. Yes, yes. I mean, they're essentially partly the builders. They're not physically coding the product,

but if they're the ones who are sitting there saying, hey, this is what we would like to see, this is the new character that we would like to see in the game, then you are. You're part of the building economy of the game. Yeah, so here's what I notice, fundamentally different with Web 2 and Web 3. In Web 2, you want a founder to be a really good product builder, and then the community

could follow later. The best Web 3 founders are the community builders and who eventually figure out what the product should be because they co-create that product with community. So if you're a superstar product builder who doesn't know how to build community, you are actually not going to do well in Web 3, whereas in Web 2, there were a lot of people like that where they just built like funding and teams out of people who are superstar product builders, it's not going to work for for Web3. Wow.

That definitely falls in line with the mental models we have of these organizations and economies being opt-in economies. You actually have to choose to enter them. And so therefore you need as a leader to convince people to enter your community. And once you do, you have a vibrant community and the world is your oyster. Guys, there are some things that I have some critiques about. Whether or not, like, if we turn this whole GameFi thing into an economy, does that just actually kind of ruin the point of playing games? Does it make it no longer fun?

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So my question is, if we make these games also the same places where we work to generate revenue, does that kind of defeat the purpose of gaming? Doesn't that just suck the fun out of things? Gabby, what say you? So I think that presumes a very narrow definition of games where all I do is basically play games to have fun. The narrative-based games, the games on your PlayStation and Xbox, they're never going to go away. and honestly, if it's a narrative-based game,

there's probably no economy in it, and it's not going to be a blockchain-based game. If I just want to have fun with a good story, I'll fire up my PlayStation and play, you know, like game, yeah, just God of War or something, right? But if I want to play a game, be in a social circle where we're earning things of value, which used to be games like World of Warcraft or RuneScape,

I would rather own those assets and make money for them, because I'm already working for them in a social environment, paying money and getting value out of it. So I think that's actually a lot more fun, being able to own those assets. And actually, NFTs are a lot of fun. Even these collectible PFPs that you just buy and trade and flex on Twitter, it's already a ton of fun.

So, yeah, I think that, like, I can have a lot of fun and make money at the same time. I guess part of your point is, like, I remember the days of Diablo and the World of Warcraft. Like, people were grinding anyways, right? Like they were grinding. They were working hard. It wasn't always fun. Sometimes it was, but it wasn't always fun. But they were grinding for, I guess, the flex or for like legitimacy or credibility.

You know, my level 60 warlock. Look at me. How much time I've spent to level up to this point. And so I guess maybe part of your point, Gabby, is like people are doing this anyway, but they don't actually own the product that they're working so hard for and grinding so hard for in many of these games. Does that hit a little bit? Yeah, that's right, especially in these games that have very rich economies in them. Why cannot I own the value of the value that I'm creating for the game economy?

So I think that's just more fun if I wanted to do that. And if I wanted to play a story-based game and not think about making money, I can go pick up another game. Karen, do you have an opinion on whether or not adding in finance to games ruins the whole point of games? look, I think if you make it the whole basis of the game, then yes, right? And I think that's what we're seeing a lot with the games that we have right now. There's a reason why North Americans and, you know, the Chinese gamers and all these guys that go and play God of War and War and War to Warcraft and League of Legends,

there's a reason they're not coming into the space yet. And the fundamental reason is, and this is my personal opinion, maybe this is why I'm not so nice, but I just don't think that the games in blockchain right now are built to be fun, right? They're built for people to earn. And while that's good for, you know, developing nations out there and it's building these new economies, and I think it's super, super important to still encompass that. inside your game, I think you fundamentally have to create a game that is fun, right? That people actually want to play.

And if you all of a sudden ripped out that economy, they're still going to be sitting there playing your game. And if you get the balance right and you have, you know, enough mechanics inside your game, enough strategy, enough of really, really high quality graphics, which is what allures people to these games in the first place, then. you're going to have people playing anyway. And then when you, you chuck on top the fact that,

hey, you can go and sell these assets on marketplaces and make money. You can also win a tournament and get yourself a whole bunch of tokens that are highly, highly valuable, even to a small degree, just little achievements here and there throughout your game where you can earn money.

That is the cherry on top, right? And I think that's what's missing right now. And it's no doubt, it's coming. And I'm a believer of give it 10, 15 years, PlayStation 8 is going to be on blockchain, right? That everyone is going to move to this because the demand is coming from the players. And as soon as players are playing a game of the quality of a AAA game, which there's many, many titles that we could mention, as soon as you get that, and then they're sitting there and they're like, okay, so now I'm I'm having heaps of fun like I'm normally used to, but I'm also earning a whole bunch of money.

It's like, mom, sorry, go away. Not go for yourself. Go away. I'm actually earning more than you right now. I'm working down here, mom. I'm working, but I'm also having a whole bunch of fun, right? And so I think you have to start with the fun factor and then you sprinkle the defy aspects all the way through it. And that's what's going to open the eyes of all of the mainstream gamers, which is a very large part of what we're targeting at alluvium.

But again, also inadvertently, the yield that we're giving out is also going to attract the likes of the Axy players from your developing nations. So we're trying to do both. It's interesting. There might be, I think I'm going to plus one on that. There might be something to that. I'm just recalling our conversation with Ariana Simpson once again where we talked about, like we asked her the question, hey, aren't these like, what do you, how do you respond to the criticism that all of these crypto games are just big giant Ponzi's basically, right?

It's like this, you know, flywheel, there's nothing behind it. And her response was, well, well, actually, the utility is the attention. The utility is the fun. The utility is people actually want to come play the game. And maybe what you're saying here in is that if you don't, don't have that underlying utility, then there's not very much that's actually backing the new open gaming economy that you've just created. It's kind of hollow. It's kind of hollow. And it could go up, but then it's going to come down. And the baseline value proposition is how many people

are here in the game for fun? Does that resonate at all? 100%. Absolutely. Absolutely. The value creation, you know, if it's just new play is coming in, and eventually that stops, right? Eventually there's a point where you hit this point where there's no new players coming in and if that economy doesn't have that value creation in built in it, and the players are actually happy to go and buy skins and enhancements and things that don't necessarily make them more money, you just touch it gets them to the point where they're level 60

and they're flexing like in World Warcraft, that is why we're here. And I think that's when we're going to see, you know, games, the longevity of games. That's where you're going to see the five, 10-year cycle of a proper, like an MMO in the mainstream. So, yeah, that is perfect explanation of it. Yeah. Bryce, you're a streamer. So you play these games and then you're also who are streaming them.

Do you have any experience with this whole dynamic about does it lose its funness when there's money involved? Well, I definitely think that it's important that your game is like fun outside of the monetary aspect. You know, I grew up playing Pokemon. So I very much am very like keen on both Axi and Alluvium in terms of the fun factor being there. But I will say like in my kind of understanding of where my audience comes from and how it is

explaining this to non kind of crypto folks about how gaming is, it is a lot harder for me to bridge into American mainstream audiences with gaming just through playing Axi. It's something that I work on and I have an entire content and media team where we strategize on how we do this. So that is something to take into account. But I think across the future of blockchain or NFT gaming's in general, there's going to be tons of opportunities to play games that people enjoy. A lot of times for me, I do enjoy playing Axi.

I'm going to enjoy playing Aluvium when that comes out. But there might be someone who doesn't enjoy Axi or someone who doesn't enjoy Alluvium or some other game that comes out. But having a very wide range amount of games is important and understanding that not every game is everyone's cup of tea. And I think that's like, privy to like understanding how this discussion will go. As we come down to the final question here in this panel, I want to thank all three of you for the time and insights that you've given us here. I want to ask this final question, zooming all the way out. So in the very grand scheme of things. If we are looking at the next two years in crypto gaming and then also the

next 20 years in crypto gaming, if crypto gaming had a roadmap, what would it look like? What are we about to unlock in the short term? And then what's it also going to look like in the long term? So without giving you any time to think about that, Bryce, let's start with you. Oh my goodness. In the short term, I think we'll see a lot of crypto games come through. I don't think we'll see a lot of winners long, like for the intermediate to short term. I think there's going to be a bunch that come in. Some are going to get completely wrecked. Some are going to do well.

And for me, as a content creator and building, I try my very best to go deep on games before I, like, can truly commit to saying, okay, this is something that I believe in. But in the long term, I think there are going to be some blue chips where you look up. And you have like the Madden of NFC game where it just stays around a long time and people continue to put money into it. And I'm very just bullish on the entire industry. I think we'll see large gaming developers and publishers as well as, you know, the Twitch and YouTube and their gaming department's very much getting behind content creators in these games. And I'm very interested to see how all these games continue to build out. So I think that the NFT gaming space is going to be here for an extremely long time.

I don't see it going anywhere. Deep future is, are we headed towards Ready Player 1, Bryson? I don't know. I'm not like too, like I don't know over the whole Ready. player one story in terms of if there's VR or AR involved in terms of like how the metaverse will work. But I do think that I spend right now probably 97% of my life is interacting with people that I met on the internet. So, you know, I feel like I'm already that is the metaverse. That is the metaverse. So, you know, I would say that we're already

there. Gabby, since you seem eager to respond, how do you think crypto gaming will develop in the short term? And then how do you think it'll develop in the long term as well? Let's start long term because that's the thing that I think I spend a lot of time thinking about. I think the future of work is going to be in the metaverse. It is not just games that you're going to play. It's where you will go to work. It is where you access defy. It's where you have your most valuable assets.

And I think just the future of value is going to be inside these virtual worlds, which may or may not be games, which where you will access what we now call defy. and these are all going to be built on top of some kind of open ledger where we are going to store that value. I fully think that the world is headed there and we call it the Metaverse. And right now it's in the form of games that may be slotted into genres like an RPG or, you know, card game or like a Metaverse land game. But, you know, like the games now that are trying to be like blockchain or game-fying games, it's like the first thing. TV shows that were basically like radio shows with a static picture on them, right? Once we unlock what like basically the future of value does storing, value in NFTs,

in fungible tokens, putting them in a virtual world where we are interacting all the time, we can prove that digital ownership. We're basically starting to build the early building blocks of the open metaverse now. And I think that is just where all the value will be flowing in the next 20 years. Aaron, take us home. What's crypto gaming going to look like in the short? short term in one to two years and what's crypto gaming going to look like in 20? So I'm a big investor in the space and I used to, as I said, I used to invest in a lot of

defy protocols. Now I've got a lot of gaming, a lot of games coming to me, a lot of game studios coming to me saying, hey, do you want to get involved? And so my short term outlook is that there's going to be tons and tons of games that come out in the next 12 months that are what we, mainstream, what you would call indie games, right? And they have their place. There's so many indie games that have ended up going viral and they're awesome. And, you know, even if you look at something like Monster Infinite, right, they're literally doing a fork of what Axi is. Now, I'll preface this with Axi just got $126 million. So I fully fully expect them to start building out their game and getting a whole bunch of new team members in. So I'm actually turning quite

bullish on AXE. But, you know, I think in this short term, as Bryce said, there's going to be a lot. Some make it. Some get wrecked. But in the long term, I'm now speaking to teams that have come from these huge AAA studios. And they're just going to keep on bringing more and more talent. they've seen the light of crypto gaming. And the trouble that we have is that it takes a very, very long time to make a game. If you look at GTA, right, their last release took eight years to make. And so we could be waiting a long time before we get our World Warcraft style of mobile that's on in crypto gaming.

But I'm very bullish on this space. I just mentioned, you know, PlayStation, I think Microsoft, I think all of these guys are going to literally start getting at least the involvement of some form of NFTs in their, you know, marketplaces and stuff like that. So, yeah, I'm super bullish. I think we're going to a very, very good place. And, and yeah, I can't wait to see the adoption that we can all create. Guys, this panel has been phenomenal. You three have taken us from zero to 100 in just a little over an hour as we leave bankless listeners, always love the alpha. You mentioned some projects there, Kieran. I'm wondering if you guys could just name some hot projects that folks should pay

attention to. Just anything that comes to mind, you don't have to give the description. Bankless listeners who are curious can go look them out. What's coming down the pipe? What is hot right now, Kieran? I don't. So they're all sort of in, they're in stealth mode. So for me, as I have invested in them, I don't really want to be chilling. I don't really want to be tell us. The ones you can name. We want the ones you can name. Is there anything you can name? Look, so I just, so there's a couple of little indie ones.

There's a group that I made a tweet, right, about Flappy Bird and said someone needs to build Flappy Bird. And the team that is building the crypto Flappy Bird, the Fancy Birds is what they're calling it. I think they're going to be one of those really good short-term games. But then you've got, you know, Guild of Guardians, you've got Embersort, you've got Staratlas. There's all these bigger games, which a lot of people know about. I really don't want to uncover these other ones because I think I definitely would get in trouble. Some of those names are even Alpha for me, because I've not heard of all of them. Gabby, what other projects would you add to the list here?

Anything cool? Oh, I really like Illuvium. I think we're very much looking forward to the release of the game. Bryson, anything you had? I'm not bullish on much, but I love Axy. I love YGG. I love Alluvium. And now I'm very keen on a game called Cipher.

I think it's one of look out for it. Awesome. Guys, this has been perfect. Thank you so much for going through that. We really appreciate the panel. Thanks for having me. All right, bankless listeners, as always, got to remind you,

none of this has been financial advice. This is Crypto Gaming. It's not financial advice, okay? Bitcoin is risky. Eat this risky. Crypto gaming is risky as well. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are on the frontier. This is the metaverse. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.