Bankless - StarkWare Sessions #8 | Cartridge Starknet Gaming with Tarrence

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Sometimes, the frontier is at a crypto conference. We’re returning from our adventures in Tel Aviv with nine exclusive interviews with some of the key players in the StarkNet space.  Wish you could make it to all the crypto conferences, but don't have the time? Don't worry, Bankless brings the frontier to you. Cartridge is building out the legos necessary to produce a robust gaming ecosystem in Starknet. With the compression capabilities of zk technology, the possibilities for game logic is astounding. Gaming infrastructure is a key building block of the metaverse, and Cartridge is helping us get there. ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn  https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow  ------ 🚀 JOIN THE NATION:  https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   👻 PHANTOM | CROSS-CHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Getting Starked 7:55 zk-Rollup 9:30 On-Chain Gaming 13:00 What’s Possible? 16:30 Downstream Effects 18:30 Owning Valuable Assets 22:45 The Stack 27:00 Cartridge 30:42 Starknet is a Game 33:30 Get Involved ----- Resources:  Tarrence https://twitter.com/tarrenceva  Cartridge https://twitter.com/cartridge_gg  StarkNet https://starkware.co/starknet/  ----- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And sometimes that frontier is at a conference. Like last weekend, where over 1,000 developers, founders, builders, and investors attended the Starkware sessions in Tel Aviv in order to participate in growing the Starknet ecosystem. This is Bankless's Starkware Session series, which are nine byte-size episodes interviewing the founders, builders, and ecosystem developers of Starknet. Every once in a while in the crypto world, a conference happens, but, not everyone is available to attend. Don't worry. Bankless has your back because I go to basically

every conference that's out on the frontier and I bring an entire podcast studio in tow with me in order to make sure that the Bankless Nation stays on the frontier of what's happening in crypto. In this interview, we were talking to cartridge. Cartridge is building out all of the Legos that is needed to produce on-chain gaming in the Starknet world. We of course know what Web3 gaming is. Web3 gaming is like gaming with assets. You have games, but now you also have assets in your game. It's different in the world of Starknet because we have the compression technologies of ZK rollups of ZK tech, we can do much, much more than just assets in our game. We can put much more of our game logic on chain. Perhaps smart contracts on Ethereum are put for putting business in

finance logic. Well, since we have so much more compression power on ZK rollups, we can put more game logic on chain and have that actually be viable due to how much compression is in the world of ZK roll-ups. And so cartridge got started trying to build an on-chain game, and then they realized that first we need to build all this normal game infrastructure that other games are also going to have to do if they also build on Starknet. So first, we have to build the tools, the player databases, you know, the player profiles, all this kind of stuff. And then it can incur a blossoming of more and more and more on-chain games on Starknet. So that's the pitch. We're going to go into more of these details and so much more. So let your imaginations run while. But first, a moment to talk to some of

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and I am here with Terrence, who's going to walk us through the world of StarkWare gaming, StarkNet gaming, excuse me. Terrence, tell us how did you arrive on Starknet? What brought you here? Yeah, definitely. Thank you for having me. So my journey on Starknet started about, I would say, November 2021. We had recently launched the Dope Wars project, which was based on loot, and was our on-chain gaming ecosystem

with a Dow associated with it. And as part of like the secondary royalties, bootstrapped the Dow that was governed by the players that have minted like this free to mint NFT. And we started a grant fund where we would just grant people, like the Dow would choose to grant people building on interesting things, contributing to the Dopper's universe. And someone came to the Dowell with this idea to rebuild this game called Drug Wars, which is what Dopos was based on, fully on chain on top of StartMed. And this is very early on in the Starknet kind of like iteration cycle is right before Starknet, you know, even had a main net available. And we built out a fully on-chain game that was very early on and kind of opened my eyes to what was possible, this idea of putting everything on-chain, not just the assets,

but all of the rules and the properties and everything that governs the loop of this game. And so that's what really brought me to Starknet and was the beginning of the journey that has brought me today to building cartridge and helping out the ecosystem of on-chain gaming on Starknet Evolve. I definitely want to really just dive headfirst into the world of on-chain gaming and how that's different from what people might be used to when they hear Web3 gaming. But first, the fact that this got started off of the Lute project, I think, is really interesting because this is actually the second gaming community that I've heard come out of Lute,

the first one being Magic. but the magic ecosystem came out of, again, like that whole loop phenomenon, but that went to Arbitrum. Why did you and why did others come to Starknet? Like what about Starknet has really attracted you? Yeah, so actually, so we originally, a lot of the Dupors ecosystem is actually on optimism. So we built out very early on in the optimism ecosystem. We built on fully on-chain rendered NFTs to represent, like in Dopors you have a hustler,

which is your item. And then all the items that you got. like on the original card, we're bridged to optimism as individual items, so you get like your gun or your, you know, like your Air Force Ones or your gold chain and stuff like that, and you can, like, assemble them onto your character, onto your hustler,

and those are all stored and rendered on-chain. So that was, you know, an early experiment of having a fully on-chain NFTs that are, like, interoperable and composable, and people can kind of, like, play this game of equipping, like, the dopest hustler. So we were kind of open to, I mean, it was very apparent early on that you can't build, especially, you know, during the bull market of like late 21, whatever, where Ethereum gas prices were like north of 100 guai. You can't really build a game on chain and expect people to interact with it.

So we were very, you know, eager to explore different options. So we started with optimism and then started building out. And optimism was, you know, much more production ready at the moment in time. and started building out on Starknet. I think with Starknet, it's really, there's a set of constraints that it loosens versus EVM chains. One is around the complexity of the smart contracts

that can get a little bit tricky to deal with when writing solidity. And the other is this idea of fractal scaling and exponential availability of compute that you can put on chain, which I think makes Starknet particularly interesting for building games on, as well as some other properties, like account abstraction that, you know, obviously everyone's very excited about.

Yeah, there's so many different ways to start this conversation. Account abstraction, definitely one of them for needing to have the necessary infrastructure to really onboard people into gaming. But I think that really, that big unlock is the ZK element that allows you just to do more. Can you talk about the ZK roll-up and what it's allowed you to do when building on SarkNet? Yeah, definitely. I think it really just allows you to have a lot more bandwidth for, like, express. in computation on chain with the future, like potential avenues for exponentially increasing that through, you know, fractal scaling or client-side proving. So you even have, you know,

properties of like private information that are easily incorporated into the Starknet, like, blockchain by producing a proof on your client, you know, allowing for like hidden information and then putting that on chain, as well as different data availability solutions that are starting to come to market. So when you think about a game, there's obviously like a spectrum of assets that require different properties, right? And so as you want to put more and more of those games on chain so that they like, you know, inherit the properties of the blockchain, like the hardness and the persistence and that they can be around forever, you want, you don't want to, you know, necessarily want to pay the same amount like per byte, for example, for, you know, like a core item versus

maybe like some illustration of an item or like a 3D model of an item. So I think like that's another very interesting avenue that ZK. Rollups and Starknet have been innovating in that is going to be like crucial to building fully on chain games. Yeah, so fully on chain games. Can you compare and contrast these what a fully on chain game is versus what perhaps a more what people might know as a Web3 game? How is this different? Yeah.

So I think like baseline, they have some similarities, potentially. the Web 3 games generally, I would say, are characterized by assets living on chain and taking advantage of the capability of the blockchain for, like, player ownership of assets and the ability for people to trade them in secondary markets. So, like, opening up this idea that gamers should own their assets, they should be able to sell them, they should be able to, like, accumulate them over time, potentially by playing the game and potentially get paid for the game, right? There's, like, people working on different dynamics, and, like, I mean, I would say,

to, you know, different degrees of success, obviously, what we've seen from, like, you know, play to earn and stuff like that. So I think, like, you know, that's like the first, just scratching the surface of the properties that a blockchain brings to the table that makes sense for games. On-chain games, you start to see, like, a lot more of that logic start to live on chain. So, you know, with Web3 games, you're still reliant on this promise that there's some off-chain game that's going to implement these assets. It's going to make them useful. that like your your assets are going to derive value from right whereas on-chain game we start put all that logic on-chain like incrementally and like eventually potentially everything right so the rules that the properties of those assets or those items like I don't even really like to

call them assets because it like you know it's a very financialized term like when you think I start thinking about like a whole gaming ecosystem being on chain there's really a ton of different like objects that exist or in this universe and maybe something in your gaming inventory. Yeah, and some of them might be tradable, some of them might not, some of them might be issued by the ecosystem. So yeah, all of those things, or even the properties of a boss, right? Like what is, you know, the

class of the boss and stuff? Like all of these kind of things start to live on chain. They're legible by smart contracts and people can start to make assumptions about this foundation that it's not going to go away beneath them, right? Like, so in traditional gaming, even in Web 3 gaming,

it's hard to build a game on top of another game, right? We've seen it like many times over with franchises like Warcraft or GTA, where a developer builds like an ecosystem alongside that maybe like takes advantage of like some game and mods it in a certain sense. But it's very hard for them to turn that into like a sustainable business model because you're kind of, you know, always at the whims of the original IP owner. So you like if you become too popular, like, you know, then probably lawyers get involved and like maybe you'll figure out like an exit strategy or like some kind of acquisition, but it's very hard, for example, for like an investor to, or even a person to invest a lot of time into building

something that they think they can last on top of like a fragile foundation. You know, it's like a similar property that you get when you build on top of Twitter and then like all of a sudden they close the APIs off, right? And so with on-chain games, you get to have a foundation that you can make assumptions about and you can start to build in that universe can compound, right? So I think that's like the big contrast of the properties that the blockchain gives to unchain games that I think are going to, you know, over time, it's a very emergent, like very early on in the ecosystem. But over time, because the efforts were compound, we're going to see like an incredibly vibrant, like, you know, massive ecosystems of these parallel like on-chain universes that anyone can contribute to and monetize and be compensated for expanding. And so just to reiterate what you said, like, we have Web 3 games, which is really just about the instantiation of in-game assets as tokens. But the game itself is rendered and not really, it's like the game itself is just like a normal Web 2 game.

It's a trad game. And so what we're talking about, and specifically the magic of ZK. Roll-Ups and why we're here at Starknet is because you, because of what a ZK. Roll-up is, you actually can do more things, as in what ZK. do is just reduce the cost of computation down to their absolute minimum. And when you can reduce, when you do reduce the cost of computation, all of a sudden, what is viable to put on chain actually increases. So have you thought about after assets, what goes on chain? After like, now that we have much more commoditized computational costs, what can go on chain next?

What makes sense to put on chain? Yeah. So I think we're seeing a bunch of different experimentation with this. Like I mentioned, the dope was ecosystem, we experienced. but we experimented with fully on-chain NFTs and rendering, and there's a few projects, obviously, doing that on Ethereum as well. On Starknet, we're starting to see fully on-chain games like Moomu by Topology, which is they've built a fully on-chain physics engine

that deals with processes and is basically like a very fun but technical game where you set up different state machines to kind of achieve this objective. You should check it out if you haven't, Moomu by Topology. There's another game like Influence, which is a space exploration game, which is a lot of fun. And that game as well has some NFT assets that they issued initially that are incorporating into the game. They have crewmates and asteroids. And then they've built out this very immersive experience on-chain, fully on-chain of how you explore this universe, how you travel through the universe, how you can land on an asteroid and start to mine resources from the asteroid and build like a civilization.

and you know it's a very they recently did a testing event with a bunch of like a few thousand players and everyone was fully unchained on StarcNet and playing this game and it starts to create like these interesting behaviors where you know one of the cool things was people started building

civilizations on these asteroids or like machinery on these asteroids to kind of like make a picture right and because it's on the blockchain it's almost like okay now the game itself is like you know like an NFT in a sense, right? Which is like a cool, like, emergent behavior. And then you have the realms team, obviously, building a few different games on Starknet and pushing the barriers

of what's possible there. And that, too, is a fully on-chain game where all of the rules that govern your realms and how you, like, can, you know, build armies and the resource management and all these kind of things is all on chain. So, you know, I think the next thing that makes a lot of sense to experiment with in the Starknet ecosystem is the rules and the logic. There's not so much experimentation about putting the assets, like, media and stuff fully on chain just yet. I think that maybe will come with different data availability solutions as those are rolled out. But yeah, it's very, a lot of experimentation around, like, just the core logic that governs why an asset, like, makes sense for this ecosystem. And you touched on it, but I really wanted to drive this point home.

So I want to talk about it a little bit more. What do we get when we put more of our games on chain? Like there's this vision of crypto gaming as like composable games where your items can transcend across games or your character can transcend across games like game composability. When we put more and more of our game on chain, whatever that logic may be, what kind of properties do we get out as a result of that? Yeah. So I think it's like you described like interoperability and composability are two big value

propositions. We've yet to achieve a great deal of that. I think a lot of that will come through some standardization in how games are built and represented on chain. And so we have an effort that we're working on with the Starknet community called Dojo to build

out an unchain gaming tool chain for developing smart contract or games on top of Starknet. And that, like, I think, has the capability to standardize a lot of those primitives and allow for interoperability and composability much more easily. You get the hardness of the blockchain so the guarantees that the things on it are going to exist as long as the

blockchain will exist right and the blockchain gives you this this property where anyone can can propagate the blockchain at some point in the future right like if someone if you if no one is mining bitcoin and you want bitcoin to continue you just mine it yourself right and the the chain will continue propagating so you can get that same property for a gaming universe right today you might have a centralized publisher, you know, like the longest living games are like, you know, Warcraft, like franchises and Blizzard and stuff like that, but at some point Blizzard is going to shut down the World of Warcraft servers or something, right? And if you, your options are kind of limited, especially now that servers, servers weren't designed to be

run by anyone, right? Like, in theory, they could like open source it and you would need probably like a DevOps team to like figure out like how to stand this stuff all up. Whereas like, blockchain games are inherently designed to be replicated to be robust to this, that anyone can continue propagating this universe if they're interested in it. I want to unpack that metaphor a little bit and dive into that.

I've used Harthstone, which is another Blizzard game, which is much like Magic the Gathering for people that are familiar with that. Same kind of game. You own cards and then you play them and this is a server-based, and so unlike Magic the Gathering, which is played

in person, Harstone is played virtually. Similar to Magic the Gathering, you buy cards. You buy cards from Blizzard, and then those go into your inventory, and then you battle other people. The problem with Harstone,

and what was actually nice about Magic the Gathering, is that when you buy the cards, you actually own them in Magic the Gathering. In Harstown, when you buy the cards, it's just a database log. Yeah.

And so if we want to go through this progression in Web3, the first phase of Web3 gaming is like, well, no, now you own your assets. And so, like, when you actually buy Gauz Unchained is now this Web 3 version of Hartsone, where you actually own the tokens as cards. And so then you can play the game, but you actually own the cards.

The issue with that, though, is that there's still a server, there's still a client that is needed to be maintained in order to play the game. So if the company behind Gars Unchained goes down, you can't play the game anymore. Yeah. So it's great that you own your assets, but you also need to own the game too. Or otherwise, like, the game itself will be rugged in all the reasons why you own the assets in the first place. The utility just drops to zero. I think it's a great comparison.

I think, like, really what you can say is, like, a lot of the properties that Magic the Gathering has by being, like, a physical item in the real world can now be given to digital games that live on the blockchain, right? Like, if you have a deck in Magic the Gathering, you can play it no matter what. No one can stop you, right? Like, as long as you have a deck of cards, you can play it with whoever we want. But you're also limited by the physical constraints of the real world. Yeah, you are. So you don't have like, you know, like RNG or you can't play over the internet and stuff like that. Well, you could roll a dice, but, you know, but, yeah.

And like the creator of the game, I mean, like, from my understanding, I'm not big into Magic of the Gathering, but there's like a formalized, like, tournaments and stuff like that where they have stricter rules around, like, cards that are allowed and interpretations of them. but if you don't agree with that in Magic the Gathering, if you have the deck and you're just playing with your friend, you can make whatever rules up you want, right? And I think that property doesn't exist in digital games, right?

Like, for example, if you're playing, like, let's say, League of Legends or a Hustar or whatever, and Blizzard or Riot decides to, like, Nerf a card, there's no way for you to opt out of that nerve to say, like, well, I'm going to play with my friends and we like that card. But, like, with the blockchain,

with a game that exists on the blockchain, you have that optionality. You not only have this ability for players to be involved in that decision-making to potentially nerf an item, which I think will provide a lot of legitimacy. In a lot of gaming ecosystems, there's this idea of this top-down decisions coming and nerfing things that people get generally quite upset about. And with the blockchain, you enable this bottom-up, if all the players agree this is out of balance, then let's balance. and you also have this ability for like

optionality, right? Like you can constrain the games in certain like in a certain mode while still allowing like other modes to exist in parallel or like other people to build different experiences that are slightly different like if you you know if if there's a game

built on top of like the digital version of Harstone like a fully on chain game like there might be someone that says like look like the games I think it could be better balanced like this and maybe we introduce these cards and they're free to like, you know, inherit like a lot of that, like, the foundation of the original game and provide a new experience that's better on top of it without this like, you know, this worry that

if you are competing with this original game, that like, there's like going to be some adverse consequence in the future. Okay, so I can, I'm pretty good at daydreaming. I'm pretty good at imagining things. I can imagine some sort of like MMMO RPG that's as fully on chain as possible. and there's hundreds of thousands of people and they're all playing it and it's all super fun but first we're at Starknet

what we got is Starknet there's also this thing called cartridge but help us go from Starknet to 100,000 people playing this MMORPG we don't just get to skip there what are the necessary steps in order to get to that point like what are the base level infrastructure we need to enable something like that yeah I mean I think yeah

we're decently far away from that I think there's a attractable path to achieving it. I think one of the biggest gaps in the short term is just standardization around how games are represented on chain and building out tool chains that enables people to more easily build games on top of Starknet in particular. And that's like, you know, like taking learnings from the existing gaming industry. Like there's, you know, like standardized ways of representing games and patterns and architectures that people have used for a long time

and have a lot of inertia and that we can build on top of the blockchain. So there's something called like entity component systems, which is a lot of game engines use this to represent the state in a world and the state transitions of that world. And so that's something that we're building with Dojo

is a fully on-chain, a tool chain for building fully on-chain games that abstracts a lot of the semantics of like the smart contracts and all this stuff underneath and allows people to like very concisely and easily build games on top of Starknet and take advantage of those properties

without necessarily having to be exposed to, like, you know, the rabbit hole that's usually necessary to understand like a smart contract state model and stuff like this. So just making it much more accessible. So I think that's like, you know, one of the first steps to enabling this. I think, like, you know, once we have compelling games

on top of Starknet, you know, Starknet itself is not, is an exponential increase in computer available on top of Ethereum, but itself could not manage the throughput necessary for a single, like, very well-adopted game. And a lot of the constraints that Starknet is optimized around is around, like, security and more like defy use cases. So I think, like, a logical next thing is layer three's or, like, executing on the fractal-scaling

roadmap. So that's, like, layer-three solutions that have properties that are more tuned to what a game need. So, you know, like in D5 or in Starknet, you probably want, like, decentralized sequences, right? Because, like, you know, you're touching financialized assets and there's a lot of, you know, the adversarial model is very different. For an on-chain game, you're probably okay with, like, a centralized sequencer with high throughput that's checkpointing to Starknet. And then you can easily exit to come back down to Starknet if, like, the sequencer is not, like, propagating the world state, like, in a way that, like, the players want. So I think like the next step is going to look like

centralized sequencers, layer three sequences on top of Starknet, tailored towards specific gaming universes that are just checkpointing to Starknet. And then another dimension that I think is quite interesting is Kleinside proving. And so the ability to compute, like today you can do it actually in the Starknet ecosystem. There's provers that you can compile to Wasam and run In your browser, there's a really exciting project called Sandstorm of someone working on this. And there's like some standards coming out that's going to make it much more feasible to do in the browser as well computationally.

And like that gives you the property of hidden information as well as like you can generate these proofs on the client side that are very easy to verify. So you get like another layer of like exponential growth of compute available. And so I think all those things are, you know, probably going to have some kind of role in building this, like, future, you know, fully on-chain game, massive multiplayer online game, as well as probably like state channels and different data availability solutions. So really, like, we need to execute on the full, like, roadmap to enable that, like, future. It's like the abundance of compute and the full spectrum of tradeoffs available for things that want to live on the blockchain. So you said the word standard a lot and going back and I kind of see this world of on-chain gaming following the same footsteps of Defi, which is on-chain finance. But Defi didn't come about until we had the ERC 20 token standard. And then all of a sudden applications could start to reason about the assets inside of them.

And that standard uniformity of assets made it easy to have these assets be compostable. Same thing with NFTs. We didn't have NFTs until we had the ERC-721 standard. And so there seems to be this inevitable hurdle that must overcome before an ecosystem arrives, which is the standardization hurdle, which I think that goes to what you're doing at cartridge. Can you walk us through what cartridge is and how the idea of standardization is so important? Yeah, so at cartridge, our goal is to accelerate the advent of on-chain gaming. So we're working on dog fooding, we're developing a few games ourselves,

and then solving a lot of the problems that we see in the ecosystem and working with the community to solve them. So initially our focus has been on onboarding users, and we've built a solution called the cartridge controller, which deals with player interaction and identity, and leverages something called WebOthen to use the secure enclave in your device to issue credentials and allow people to sign up for, and start executing transactions on chain, which is a single click, like a face ID or a biometric finger scan.

So that's like one of the things that we focus on quite early on with cartridge. Now with Cairo 1.0 maturing, and the ability to like kind of start building up the stack for on-chain games, the tool chain. We're working with the ecosystem, with the community of games, like the realms team with loaf and silver at brick, and a bunch of other talented contributors like Annie and a few others, on building the dojo tool chain. And the dojo tool chain is really this idea of standardizing the primitives that people are using on-chain to represent games. So it is an implementation of an ECS system, and it has like some cool, properties of like verifiable client-side state and stuff like that that we've built into it.

And it's already, the nice thing about ECS systems is it's already a standard in traditional gaming, like the traditional gaming development. And so it's not like we have to necessarily invent something new. We just need to build a way to represent like ECS systems on top of Starknet. And so that's what we're focusing on like in the short term. And I think like that level of standardization is going to bring to your point, like the advent of, you know, powerful infrastructure built around it. So like once we have a standardized ECS system or way of representing state for games and the processes and the functions that change that state over time, you can start to build a powerful infrastructure that applies to all the games, right?

And then if someone is building a game on Starknet, they get all these things for free. It's like if you issue a token on Ethereum, you obviously do it on your C-20 so you can put uniswap, right? It's like you know like the equivalent, I guess like one way to think about it today is like the on-chain gaming ecosystem with NFTs today is like NFTs are interoperable

in a financialized sense that they can trade with each other but it's not like interoperable in the sense that like you could the properties of them are legible on chain and you can have functions and stuff like that. So just like surfacing that level of interoperability

is going to and standardizing it is going to enable this, I think, this future. Continuing with the progression of defy as a mental model idea, I've always been a fan of the idea that Uniswap is an individual defy app, and compound is also an individual

defy app, but these things also hook into each other, and they're also hooked into AVE. And actually, every single defy app that's on the same L1 is also really just one big structure, because they're all interoperated with each other. So, like, instead of individual defy apps, there's actually just one big

defy superstructure, and that's because of the composability of these systems. 100%. And I kind of think that's perhaps the way on-chain gaming also plays out, as in like, we have this one on-chain game, and then we have a second on-chain game, but then they'll start to be, like, composability between these two things. And then a third on-chain game, and this is all of a sudden, this is actually not just individual on-chain games, but actually Starknet is the game. And it's actually many, many, many games.

Does you share this vision? Yeah. I mean, I think that vision or metaphor expands just to life in general in a sense. But yeah, I think like that, there's the meta game. I mean, right now we're in the meta game of building games, right? And on chain games on Starknet, and it's a lot of fun because it's a great ecosystem to be in. It's like everyone, there's so many people that do this for fun. You know, I think that's like a common attribute of people involved in the Starknet ecosystem

is they're here for like out of pure intellectual interest of like what is really? on the bleeding edge and it's like a game and it's fun for them, right? But yeah, I think definitely, I think like similar, like I think similar to like the evolution of defy on Ethereum, like the kind of the paradox, you know, like a lot of people say, you know, know, on-chain gaming is very early. But the games that are built today and the things that are built today are probably because they have this property that they can like live on perpetually, the stuff that's built in the next few years probably has the highest chance of being like the next big thing, right? So while it's so early and like hard to figure out like what it,

what are the paths we should go down or like what should we invest in, like the when getting the right formula is going to be like, you know, like when Hayden was working on like constant product markets and everyone like no one really like knew about them and then all of a sudden, you know, the uniswap is like the size of coin base, you know, so I feel like it's. something similar will happen once we figure out something cool that players love, that people love to build on top of, that it manages to attract a critical mass of people modding it on building new experiences and building sustainable business models on top of of entertainment for players.

I think it's coming soon, and yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. So if we've piqued the interest of any of the listeners listening to this, who do you need the most help from? Who could you get the most assistance from out of any of these listeners? What kind of developers? What kind of developers? Who do you need help from?

Yeah, I mean, I think like the ecosystem could use with just a lot of experimentation, and we're seeing it. There's like a lot of different pockets of people building different on-chain games and different experiences with different constraints, some on, you know, Ethereum, Mainnet, some on Polygon. I think it's, like, important for people

to continue experimenting with those and for people that are interested in the space, to try them out and provide feedback and be a part of that feedback loop. I think like there's a large contingent of like the traditional gaming industry that is very hesitant on blockchain technology because of the financialized properties of it. But I think like there's a lot of properties that the blockchain can enable for games that any game developer would want. I mean, if you're building a game in like a traditional game, especially if it's a game, that fits into the constraints of the blockchain, like something that's turn-based and has

like shared state and potentially like adversarial models and stuff like that, like, it would be significantly easier to build a turn-based game as a developer on top of something like Starknet once the infrastructure is solid than to build out like and manage that whole backend yourself, right? You get to start experimenting like like you get a lot more leverage being able to take advantage of all these other pieces outside of the financialized. component of things. So I think like having bringing those people that are familiar with traditional gaming, the industry and game development into the blockchain space and getting them excited to take advantage of these properties outside of the financialized stuff, which, you know,

can leave a lot of sour taste in a lot of people's mouth. I think that is going to be critical to building like, you know, like the future that you talked about of like a massive like AAA quality, MMRP, online game that's fully owned by the players and it has these like properties of composability and interoperability and actually just being like something competitive with what a studio, like a centralized studio with a billion dollars can do today. Well, Terrence, I hope we've piqued the interest of many, many, many bankless listeners and made them optimistic about the future of on-chain gaming. So thank you for helping me tell that story.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. And if anyone wants to chat about it or get involved in the ecosystem, feel free to reach out on Twitter or join the Discord and or just find me around. What's the website? Cartridge.g. Awesome. Thank you, Terrance.

Thank you. Cheers.