Bankless - The Dawn of Crypto Gaming | Robbie Ferguson

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Robbie Ferguson of ImmutableX returns to Bankless to discuss Immutable’s impressive growth and the momentous wave heading towards crypto gaming. The intersection of NFTs, culture, scale, and gaming are all on a collision course. Immutable is powering TikTok’s first ever NFTs, and with a 10x increase in volume, well over 100 projects are building on Immutable X Token Launches. Crypto gaming is coming. And for ImmutableX, it’s already here. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 DHARMA | Trade on Polygon! https://bankless.cc/dharma ------ 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 10:00 Robbie & ImmutableX 17:08 Layer 2 and Partnerships 24:19 Building on Immutable 32:00 Starkware and Technology 40:45 The IMX Token 45:12 Data Availability & Fees 49:46 Centralization & Developing 55:15 Gaming & Value 1:03:43 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Robbie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xferg?s=20  ImmutableX: https://www.immutable.com/  ----- 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 

Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. David, you are on the ground somewhere. You're in NFT, NYC. How's that going, man? A ton of fun. There's actually been a ton of surprises. Quentin Tarantino showed up at NFT NYC. What?

Yeah, to talk about... I heard about this. Yeah, he's talking actually right as we speak. So yeah, a lot of cool things happening at NYC, NFT. That's awesome, man. Well, I can't wait to hear more about it, but today we're actually going to be talking about an NFT related to concept. It's sort of tangential to NFTs, but it's very much related to crypto gaming and the metaverse and everything else associated with this. This is the dawn of

Crypto Gaming with Robbie from Immutable X. David, why is Immutable X a story that is emerging? And how is that going to scale out this dawn of crypto gaming? Yeah, the story of Immutable X, I think, is a really, really fantastic one. Immutable started off as a gaming studio focused on building crypto games, famously Gods Unchained, which is like a Harstone kind of. of type game, but with actual NFTs for the cards. And in the process of making this crypto game, the team over at Immutable Robbie, they figured out that the Ethereum L1 is not going to be the place for the home of crypto gaming. So they needed to build out a scaling solution. This is back in like 2018, 2019. And by the way, I love how they figured that out by actually trying to build

something. It's not like a pie in the sky. Like maybe it doesn't, you know, maybe it's not going to scale. They actually tried and it didn't work. Right. I mean, the game was fun to play. it's just like as soon as gas fees stopped being one gway on Ethereum back in the good old days of the bear market, everything about like crypto gaming broke. And so they realized that they needed to scale on a layer two. And so they have produced immutable X, a ZK rollup using Starkware's technology and now have produced one of the probably the fastest, most scaled, NFT optimized layer two that we have available to us today. And so this is just coming, just launching right around now. They have their IMX token with just came out and a bunch of crypto games and just Metaverse-related software gaming infrastructure

is being deployed on Immutable X. And so we are going to explore all of what's going on with Emutable X with Robbie, the CEO of Immutable. I feel like this is a story in three parts. Like, number one, it's about scaling NFTs. Number two, it's about scaling Ethereum in general. And number three, it's about the start of the Metaverse, which we believe our thesis is it's going to start with crypto games. And Immutable X is really the intersection of all three of these things. I love the also, another piece of the Immutable X story is they didn't take shortcuts, okay? They went the hard route of building on layer two and maximizing for decentralization, which of course, with our modular blockchain thesis, this is very much, we think, a long-term game

and very much a part of the future. So they've also, David, some stats. They're powering TikTok's first NFT release, okay? Right? Like TikTok, the social media platform. They've just seen a 10x increase in volume over the last month. They've had 115 projects that are now building on Immutable X, and they just broke Coinless's registration record for a coinless sale. And that was actually since broken by Gods Unchained, which is a game on top of Immutable X.

So a lot of wind in their sales as we're entering this conversation. I can't wait to hear more from Robbie. Yeah, not just that, but ESL, which is not something I'm familiar with because I'm not really deep into the e-sports league. But apparently ESL is apparently the largest e-sports organization, hosts esports tournaments all around the world, has almost a million followers on Twitter. They are partnering with Immutable X. And so Immutable has done a fantastic job of outreach and onboarding,

just non-crypto-gaming stuff into the world of crypto gaming. So we all know that NFTs are blanketing the earth right now. And as it relates to gaming, Immutable X has done a fantastic just like BD effort building out their partnerships. If you want to get your head wrapped around the Metaverse as well, this gets into some announcements and things we've got that have just recently come down the pike. Take a listen to our Metaverse podcast. It's actually called Mental Models for Web 3. It's very much about Web 3 and the Metaverse.

These things are tied together with Chris Dixon. And he lays out five mental models for Web 3 in this transition from Web 2 to Web 3. And I think like if you're looking to get from 0 to 60 really quickly, that is the best way to do it. go digest everything that Chris Dixon says in that episode. That episode came out on Monday. Another update for the bankless nation, David, we've got Dharma who's scaling some things as well. Dharma, of course, is a smart contract wallet that we've talked about before on bankless. David and I are hugely bullish on smart contracts wallets. And the thing that's been holding them back is no longer going to be the thing that's holding them back, which is high gas fees.

because they're starting to build on Polygon. They're starting to build on layer 2s. And Dharma has just rolled out its Ethereum and Polygon experience. It's really awesome. What I love about this, David, is that this is the easiest way to go from bank account, from the old fiat world, into crypto. It's like seamless user experience. So the old way of doing things, of course, the way you and I came across that bridge into

cryptos, you go to Coinbase, you buy your ETH, you wait a few days, you have to get it from your bank account. to Coinbase, of course, and you have to transfer to MetaMask, you have to bridge to Polygon, transaction approve all of this. Not with Dharma, okay? This is how easy it is. You download the Dharma wallet on your app, on your phone, okay? You connect to a U.S. bank account.

So whatever, you have Wells Fargo, you have Bank of America, just make the connection. That's another two to three minutes. You get to choose from whatever token is on Polygon and, you know, almost 80,000 tokens available for you. The tokens that you want. Everything you want, right? And then Dharma helps you always get the best rate. So this is the new defy, the new smart contract wallet experience. I think that is going to bring mainstream to crypto.

So we're super excited to partner with Dharma who's sponsoring this to get the word out about their new release. Go check out that app. Oh, last thing, David. What do bankless nation members get? Actually, anyone listening to this, get. What do they get if they sign up using the code in the podcast? Yeah, they get $50.

the best asset ever on Polygon. So if you sign up using bankless.c-sac-d-S-C-D-H-A-R-M-A, you get $50 of ETH deposit into your account on the Polygon Network. So no fees even related to that, too. Paying you. They're paying you to download this app in real money, too. That's how you know you're loved. They love you with $50.50 in ETH. All right, guys. Well, let me ask you, David, the question I ask before every single state of the nation, which is this. What is the state of the nation today, sir? We are gaming, and that has been the state of the nation before. And I think it actually might have been the last time we had Robbie on to talk about Immutable X was also the state of the nation was gaming, but now the games are actually

here. Things like God's Unchained, Illuvium is coming online. There are many, many games coming to the Immutable X layer two. And I can't wait to ignore work and start the game. Apparently the games are going to start paying me. Sir, sir, sir, that is work. Okay? Yes. Right. We're fusing the two. We're fusing work and fun in these crypto gaming economies. You no longer have to justify while you're playing a game because you're actually going to work, aren't you? In a way. Honey, can you get off the computer?

I've got to bring home to bacon. Sorry kids. Daddy's working right now. Yeah, and that world, that metaverse world where we're paid to games is being built right now as we speak. And part of that story is Immutable X. Well, the title of this episode, guys, is the dumb. of crypto gaming because we really believe it is in the earliest of phases. This really is the dawn of crypto gaming. So we want to thank those sponsors who made this episode possible and then

we'll be back with Robbie for our discussion. 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 grants 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

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When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH, so whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com slash go bankless. Bankless nation, I'm here with Robbie Ferguson, who's the CEO and co-founder

of Immutable. Robbie, welcome back to the show. Thanks, David. Great to be here. Cheers. We've had you on the show before, two times actually, one time for a show about Immutable, another time for a panel on scaling layer 2s. But for a lot of new listeners to the bankless world and to crypto at large. So can we just speed run the last like two years of immutable history? Like where did you guys start? How did you guys get here? What are you guys up to now?

Yeah, absolutely. So founded originally four years ago, nearly now. And we started off in NFT gaming. So we saw NFTs come out in 2017. I've been Ethereum since 2015. Bitcoin is 2014. And I was absolutely obsessed with NFTs when they came out. this is going to change the future because finally you can own anything rather than just

fundable stuff and most of the world's made up of anything. And in particular, I thought gaming would be the vertical that would take off first because you have a massive centralised analogue for demand where people spend a hundred billion dollars on stuff they don't own every single year. And so we started out building literally a prototype game on Ethereum called Etherbots. That was literally four years ago now and then expanded into God's Unchained, which actually just launched its token last week. So that's really exciting. But really, of the last two years,

we've been focused on building NFT infrastructure for anyone to build very easily on Ethereum. And so now we're actually powering Disney, Marvel, via Akomi, powering ESL. We have a couple of exciting things, I think, coming out between

when this is recorded and when we go live. We just closed our Series B. We're about to have the immutable X token float, literally on Friday. So, yeah, we're making big moves, and we're excited for the next scaling step for Ethereum as well. The immutable story, I think, is so fantastic because it really, really starts with you guys making gauze and chains. The immutable, correct me if I'm wrong, but started off like, hey, we have this great game.

It's called goss unchained for all the Harstone players or Magic the Gathering players. This is a game like that where you actually own your cards. But the problem was that, like, building on the Ethereum L1 wasn't good. It was just bad. It's a bad experience for the users. bad experiences for the developers. And so you guys were primarily focused on building the game. And then you realize that building on the L1 sucks.

And so that's where the story of immutable X comes in, the actual layer two. Can you just kind of go through the experiences of why building a game on the L1 is bad and why building on the roll-up is better? Of course. And actually, we always wanted to make infrastructure because I'm not a game developer.

My vision for games is that I love them and I love playing them as a kid, but I'm not an expert game designer. but we wanted to take a leap out of, you know, Valve to, you know, speak of Satan after move a couple of weeks ago, where they built Counter Strike Go and then leverage that into Steam because having effective primary content is often the main way you can, A, build a successful platform, but B, get the users for that platform initially. And so we thought of a similar thing with Godsend Chained. Like, let's take literally the coolest exemplar of how you can use

NFTs in gaming technology, which is a trading card game, and kind of popularize it through that and then use that as lessons to build this NFT platform for scaling. But the lessons were crazy, which is like it's very, very difficult to scale a real mainstream game on Ethel 1. There's been a massive amount of volume on L1 recently, but they've all been in speculative assets where every NFT trades for, you know, at least a grand. And 40 bucks in gas fees doesn't really matter if it's, you know, a couple of percent of the overall price.

But if you're a game developer and you want to mint, literally, you know, we're working with customers who want to mint hundreds of millions of NFTs a day, you can't. can't do that in L1. And in fact, you definitely can't do that in any other alternative L1. You really need the sort of speed that a roll-up is going to bring. And the other thing was how do we want to design the nature of just the integration itself? And that was we didn't want to build them in a smart contract base. We want to build something with API based. So you could literally like drop it in a Unity client, very, very simply build your gaming infrastructure on top of it. Yeah. And just to recap, going through some of the basics, one of the things,

reasons why we love crypto gaming, asset-based gaming, is because, like, again, for so many reasons why people collected baseball cards or Magic the Gathering cards and why Magic the Gathering cards actually had secondary market value is because people own them. And then we get into the world of things like Heartstone where it's the same game, same format, but like it's imbued with the magical powers of a digitally native game, but in the same time you lose the ownership, right? You lose the actual ability to own the own cards. And so this is where like things like Crypto gaming really come into the story here where you get the power of owning your own cards, and then you also get the power of the digitally native platform,

which really imbues the best of both worlds into the same story. Precisely. Yeah. I mean, like the cool thing that I think gaming did was it showcased, one, how you can utilize, like, I think there's a great degree of similarity between gaming and Web3, in that they're both leveraging sort of like cost of acquisitions. retention mechanisms and so when you look at the advantages that Web 3 is going to bring it can actually be said in terms of those traditional cost benefit measures

so like look at cost of acquisition of the gaming look at file coefficients all of these things if you turn the items users are earning into real assets you suddenly have fundamental improvements on these like core aspects of economics of gaming and then you get into the exciting things of like well okay that's just sort of improving Web 2 gaming what is Web 3 gaming look like in terms of an entirety of paradigm. And that's well, like you have share to earn, you have different nations, economies,

and you kind of invert the relationship of the creator-consumer relationship. And instead it's like UGC is creating the content. But I kind of see exciting things in both. I see the Web 3 or skeu-morphic as the popular word is right now with translation is how can you take the traditional metrics on which people have competed in gaming

for the last two decades, which is cost of acquisition, retention, ARPU, and use gaming to make those nuts. Like, you know, your retention is 10 times higher because not only are people earning actual economic value, but they own the underlying protocol. And then you take that and you say, well, awesome, but let's also start innovating in terms of Web 3 monetization and Web 3 UGC. Fantastic. Okay, so let's fast forward to where we are right now in Immutable's history because we are

at an inflection point of Immutable's history. Like, it's showtime for you guys. Great. Yeah. And so like, tell us about like just what's going on, like right now with Immutable. Yeah. So we've had a crazy few months, to be honest. So last month we tripled Polygons and FT volume. We launched TikTok's first ever NFT play. We're working with some of the biggest brands in the world. But the thing I'm actually most excited about is the fact that the majority of our value from last month came from people who just built on our protocol without, you know, having to work with us directly. like we obviously talk to them and work with these people, but like it's not like a big brand we're onboarding.

They're literally just building on our APIs permissionlessly. That's definitely what excites me the most, I think, because a, when you look at where the future volume in this protocol is going to come from, it's probably not going to come from us doing big deals with brands. I mean, that's exciting. It's an important part of the business. That's where I think it's important that a company like a Mutable is here to fend off the heavily VC-backed, you know, competing layer ones, because all of them are going

nuts with BD teams and like Ethereum needs one of its own. But the thing that most excites me is like this flywheel of people just building because it's from that massive long tail of like 10,000, 100,000 customers, like, you know, indie game devs, people building PFP projects, whatever is the next thing that you're going to have the biggest hits. Like the way I like to think about it is, you know, immutable was literally a random inbound customer to Ethereum. And like we didn't ever talk to the Ethereum team. You know, I tried it very, very, points and got various reactions, but like, it's not as if they're there to help you with custom success and support and integration. It's just like, hey, we're here building us. And that's the

benefit of Web3 as well. It's like you don't have to rely on that platform. They're not going to fuck you because they can't. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I love that analogy of like immutable didn't have to ask to build on Ethereum. And also people don't have to ask to build on immutable. Yeah. Really, that's where you get that Cambrian level explosion of developer, just activity, right? And like, eventually, like, users always follow the developers no matter what. And I do actually want to start with some of these like big names that have come on to immutable. TikTok being the big one. And so I'm a little bit curious.

These big companies like TikTok are like other companies in the space that are non-crypto companies. The crypto world has been like trying to get other non-crypto people into the crypto space for a really, really long time. And so like 2018, 2019, it was just like the crypto world scratching at the door. It's like, hey, like come do crypto things. and then all of a sudden, like, we get NFTs on Immutable from TikTok. Can you tell us a little bit of that story? Like, did they come to you? Did you go to them?

Like, what got them through the door? Like, what convinced them? How did that whole thing go down? Yeah, so I think they originally reached out, and we got connected them to the stockway folks who obviously worked closely with. And, yeah, it's crazy. Like, if I told you a year ago, TikTok would be building NFTs on Ethereum, let alone in a layer two on Ethereum, I would tell you,

It's crazy. But obviously, that's a signal of just how far the industry is coming here. But yeah, I think it's really exciting because I think it showcases a couple of things. The first is that major companies are doing this quite thoughtfully. This obviously isn't TikTok going all in. It's not as if their P&L is based on this right now. But what it is is them looking to understand, A, what is this industry about? Like, how is this going to impact their future?

because every single major company around the world right now, like if you're the head of innovation of a major social network, gaming, tech, SaaS company right now, and you're not looking at NFTs are going to impact your monetization three or five years.

Like, you're not doing a job, like you're fired. And especially if you're in UGC, like this is the thing, this is the threat. User generated content, right? Exactly.

Yeah, sorry, the folks at home. But literally this is what, you know, when Christensen talks about the innovative dilemma, this is what people are terrified of. And so you have this kind of carrot and the stick of, well, you could build a far more

successful business on top of this model, but also you can't afford to not understand how it's going to impact you and be able to participate in this new world. Right. So that's TikTok. And TikTok coming to NFTs, we love that. I think TikTok has something like a billion monthly active users. A billion now. Like, absolutely insane.

Like, that's one eighth of the whole entire planet that you. uses TikTok. Do you have any details about how the NFTs will actually work inside of the TikTok app? Do you don't know anything about that? Yeah. So, I mean, from TikTok, this is just an early play where they're looking at like creating moments for their top creators.

But, yeah, obviously the exciting thing is like they have the biggest repository of UGC in the world. I think that it is a very exciting opportunity for them to look at, well, like, how do you take this from a patronage model or a advertising model, which is, you know, the most web two kind of monetization model you can have. And ultimately, not particularly rewarding for creators.

That's why creators have to own their own stuff through sponsorship, content, whatever, and looking at making that digital native property, they can monetize. Obviously, that's a big leap for the company. This is not what this deal is. This is just an early exploration. But, yeah, we're excited to support them on that journey. Fantastic. And congratulations on landing the partnership.

There's another one I want to talk about IMVU, which is, according to their website, an avatar-based digital experience? Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so they're like a kind of social metaverse. I remember seeing their ads when I was like a kid. Yeah, they've been around since 2004. They're an old company. I'm really excited about this because there are companies where NFTs just fit.

Like it is the native way that they will enter and monetize and do everything. It's not something being slapped on top. It's literally like, okay, this is how people are going to own stuff in the game right now. and so while I won't reveal like the details of how they're going to do it, InVue is one of those companies and so I'm really, really excited, you know, it's similar to a company like Second Life or ones where it's really probably the earliest prototypes of people sort of building social metaverses or self-actualizing in a digital environment. So yeah, I'm really excited at that. And then the next partnership that I want to go to is ESL, which I didn't know ESL before

studying up for this interview, but apparently ESL is like one of the largest e-sports leagues. And so they have also chosen to build on immutable. What does that mean for them? What are they actually building when they are building on immutable? Yeah, so they're doing, so they had like a CSGO kind of pro-esports brand of NFTs that we're doing with them. We're really excited because like CSGO is a sick property. I used to play as a kid. I think our CTO is a professional like CSGO player or like TF2 player.

And so, yeah, the goal is basically kind of making moments out of those e-sports content. That's all kind of fully licensed through ASL. So, yeah, they're really exciting as well. And obviously, gaming is a niche that we have a particular focus on. So that's cool. So I love this metaphor of the Internet itself is defined by the applications that are on it, right? Like, we have this thing called the Internet. It's a bunch of protocols.

But really, it's like Facebook, Google, YouTube. It's the apps that we use that really define what the Internet. is. And so you started off with immutable as a gaming platform. Here's a layer two for NFTs for gaming, right? But now we're also getting into like TikTok doing moments and, you know, this Metaverse company. So when you look at all of the onboarding that Immutable has done with the companies around it, what is immutable? Like what is the through line of all of these companies that are building on a immutable? If it's not a crypto gaming platform, which it is, but it's more than that now, right? And so So from that perspective, the satellite view, what actually is immutable?

Yeah, so I mean, what I'd really describe it as is the NFT platform for the world built on Ethereum. And, you know, we aim to be the global back end for owning digital stuff. So if you want to create an NFT at Gob and Sachs because this is your new vertical in financialization, we want to be there. If you're creating an NFT in music because you want to empower artists to have better control over royalties or permissionlessly allocate things as, you know, different songs are spun up from different threads of IP, we want to be there. If you want to create a game that's minting

hundreds of millions of assets per day to everyone playing World of Warcraft, you want to be there. If you're doing a PFP of Crows, we want to be there. Crow's PFFB, I've not seen that one. Yeah, their niche is unfilled. They went nuts on Ethereum, or not L2 actually. But, yeah, at the end of the day,

like what we've discovered is game, and this is always kind of our vision, but like if you solve the gaming, that's probably the most difficult use case you'll solve for because the complex kind of functionalities and edge cases cover a lot of different things. And ultimately part of our thesis is that people will want to own their own form of distribution or idols.

So when I see, you know, like let's think about a Fortnite coming into the space or a major gaming organization and I'm not, you know, picking any names in particular. But when they do that, they will want to, have their trading experience be in the Fortnite client. And so our thesis is we want to be able to support that from a back-end perspective on Ethereum, but we don't necessarily need to own the marketplace or whatever. They can use whatever they want.

They can build their own. They can integrate with OpenC, all of that stuff. Right. Yeah. For the long-term bankless listeners, the Protocol Sync thesis comes to mind where immutable is not the front end. It's the back end, right? It's not a marketplace.

It's a marketplace for a market. marketplaces. Exactly. Right. And so it gives self-sovereignty to the actual companies that come and build on immutable. When in the same way, it goes all the way down, right? Ethereum gives self-sovereignty to immutable. Yeah.

And the cool thing about Roll-ups is that self-sovereignty is passed along to the companies that also build on immutable, which is really, really important. Yeah. You said it, but I could. That's fantastic. I want to get a peek into the whole, like, BD side of thing. So you said a mutable, or excuse me, TikTok reached out to you guys. Yeah.

What is the actual, like, BD? strategy for Immutable. Do you guys have a BD strategy? Or is it like, hey guys, like we're here, like come build on us? Yeah, right now it's handle inbound. So like, we're getting... It's not a bad place to be. No, it's not. It's not. So we're getting like 50 to 100 inbounds a day, wanting to build an immutable. So we're literally just desperately growing our team so we can say hi to these people rather than kind of just replying to them with boilerplate emails. So that's goal number one. goal number two is try and maximize distribution of our NFTs so you know work with as many marketplaces as possible work with as many aggregators as possible and then yeah number three is

ultimately like this is a massive war like every single blockchain is out there with billions of dollars from whatever VCU name it looking to win this space and the reason they have to do that is no one is going to build on any L1 apart from Ethereum unless they're getting paid big bucks to do or unless some, you know, BD person is taking the right every step of the way and offering MGs. And so, you know, part of me kind of a little bit philosophically is like, you know, Ethereum needs its own warriors to be bringing people into its ecosystem, which I'm excited about. And, you know, we want to be there. We want to have a massive BD team.

We also, like, I still think, candidly, the vast majority of the volume of the mutable X is going to be able to just building because, and that's what we're really optimized for, right? So the metric I most care about immutable is if someone wants to build an NFT business from the second they want to start using us to the second they launch, how long does that take them? And I want to get that down as short as possible so people can build whatever they want whenever they want. Robbie, what's your favorite use case of a mutable? Which game do you like to play the most? Yeah.

I shouldn't because I'll be too biased. But they're really exciting things. Obviously we've got our internal content. Unchained in Guild of Guardians. I'm really excited for what they're going to do. Now the God's Unchained token out. The Guild of Guardians token about to come out. And the IMX token, look, at the end of the day, our goal with the IMX token is to be able to supercharge every single ecosystem which builds on us. So anytime someone trades in that protocol, they are earning a piece of the underlying protocol. So that means, like, no matter where you're coming from, if you're coming from InVU, if you're

coming from TikTok, like you're all literally becoming an owner of immutable X protocol, which I think is really cool. And we definitely want to get into the token conversation because everyone loves the token conversation. And there's also a few, like we're going to, in the second half of the show, we're going to get into the technical sides of the immutable roll-up. It's a ZK roll-up. There are things to discuss there.

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AVE.com. That's AAVEE.com. And we're back. All right, Robbie, let's talk about the technical details of the Immutable X roll-up. So it is built on Starkware, but it is not Starkware. It is something else. own roll-up kind of in the same way that DYDX also built on stockware, not actually Starkware itself. So can you talk about like how is there a flavor to Starkware that immutable X is? Like how does that work? It's not Starkware, but it's something else. Why is it different? Well, it's a different layer of the stack. So we use StarkX obviously is the like the the core technology for generating these ZK proofs the end of the day. That's not where we play. And then we do kind of all the rest of the work. So app track into APIs, create our back end

order book, which is like really our strategy as a company is, what matters most in people building NFTs is user experience, security, and liquidity. Like, those are the only three things people ever care about when they come and build an NFT project. User experience is when mainstream customers can come to me, can I create something frictionless? And that's frankly where, like, I think Ethereum needs the biggest improvements because you need to be able to purchase something frictionlessly with a credit card.

you need to be able to onboard if you want to, with an easy kind of custodial wallet onboarding, and then be able to choose to offboard. And so those are the kinds of problems that are looking to partner or solve through those sorts of mechanisms. Two, liquidity, this is the thing where I think Ethereum has by far the biggest advantage, which is, at the end of the day, companies want to have revenue and volume. That is the goal of digital property. If no one trades your property, if no one cares about the universe of physics in which your property lives, no one's going to trade it.

And so our thesis there was always build on Ethereum rather than compete with Ethereum because it's incredibly difficult to generate liquidity apart from it. In fact, you know, the majority of liquidity we're seeing elsewhere is either heavily propped up or within a really like siloed walled garden, whereas Ethereum is like this open internet. And so the choice is, well, you know, is it going to be valuable to owner.com on Microsoft Services Network? No. In fact, they no longer matter.

And so our goal is really the property which is going to matter is the property which lives in the set of physics that everyone wants to use. Ethereum. And then finally, of course, is security, which is kind of, it's not something people actively ask for, but it's just table stakes. And people don't realize they want it until something goes wrong. And we've seen examples, Salana going down for 24 hours, the $600 million polynetwork hack, the $2 million bounty, which was paid out to an $800 million exploit on Polygon the other day. So at the end of the day, I think that this is the thing I was never happy to compromise on it from company, not just for the people building on us, but also because I don't want that existential risk.

Like, if someone lost millions of dollars because there's security vulnerability and protocol would build, that would be awful. It'd be great to just build, be mutable for three years. And then in the back of your head is like, is today the day that the bug comes? Is it tomorrow? So it's like, oh, oh, and it's a ride. So, like, now I have to deal with this. Like, it's a distraction from bailing the actual business.

Yeah, it's what I call the sand philosophy or sleeping at night, which is like, I generally try to optimize toward that. That's great. I'm going to use that. Yeah. So, yeah, I think those are kind of the three tenets. We looked at when building immutable, and it's exciting to see a lot of that value proposition come to live today. And the core things we're focusing on is, like, maximizing liquidity, maximizing user experience. So on a very narrow perspective, again, like, DYDX also built on StarCware.

Immutable also built on Starware. Why is it not the same L2? Like, have you guys changed something about the actual technical details that make it the NFT gaming optimized? Yeah, so how does that work? They're different implementations of StarkX, right? So, like, I don't think NFTs are as supported on DYDX. They're fundamentally different architecture. It's not like they have a global order book, which is being used.

And also, they're not a platform. they're sort of more like an exchange product, right? And incredibly successful. Like, I love that team. But, yeah, and obviously we're going to see a trend toward L2 composability, L2 interoperability. I'm really excited to see how that space plays out and like kind of play a defining role in it. It is still early days.

And at the end of the day, the friction between them is still going to be reasonably high, at least for a year or two. So, yeah, it's definitely something that we're interested in keeping close tabs on. And the roll-up conversation, it's always a very complicated one. It takes a while for a lot of people, including myself. I know this from experience, understand the details about roll-ups. So can you talk about why a ZK roll-up, a zero-knowledge roll-up over an optimistic roll-up? Can you just kind of hash that out for our listeners?

Yeah, of course. So for listeners out there, the main difference between a ZK roll-up and an optimistic roll-up is in the nature of the proof that they use. So a ZK roll-up uses a validity proof, and optimistic roll-up uses a fraud-based proof. and the differences between those two is a validity proof is valid from day one and a fraud proof can be proven to be fraudulent and that's kind of how it relies. And so it was actually this amazing Twitter thread. I forget who wrote it.

Maybe we can find a link and drop it, but it's like the ZK city versus the optimistic city. The ZK city, like you have to show papers to get in and you're not allowed in unless it's valid papers. And the optimistic city security is like you can walk in and there's a bounty on your head and anyone can kind of shoot you and claim the bounty. And so, like, fundamentally, I think ZK roll-ups are a superior form of roll-up technology. The short-term advantage to optimistic roll-ups is EVM compatibility, which is why lots of

the more sort of defy-focused platforms that are using optimistic-based roll-ups, which is awesome. But for NFTs, you very much want, A, fast withdrawal times, which you don't have with optimism, because you have to wait for those four proofs. Seven days for the listeners, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which is an arbitrary number. We've just chosen seven days, but there is a window of time where you have to actually submit the fraud.

It's like, oh, I actually captured the guy. I got the guy with the bounty, yeah. And obviously, you can make market makers. So you can have people kind of provide liquidity on either side, assuming some risk. You can't really do with NFTs because I can't loan you a one-up-one Cryptopunk or value that Cryptopunk effectively. And so it just doesn't work for NFTs.

And the other thing and the major thing, the people don't actually think about is cost. Like, the way we run, especially in the Lidium, is drastically, drastically cheaper. And so when you look at any reasonable sort of scale, like let's say you're doing 100K NFT trades a day. The difference is between, I mean, you pay nothing for trades under Mutable X. You pay nothing for mints. But the difference in terms of the actual cost is like between fractions of a cent and like anywhere from literally a couple of cents up to like 20 cents, 50 cents per NFT transfer, which is just I think very, yeah, it's a lot of cost.

Totally. Yeah. And we talk about arbitram and optimism as like the, I think the D5 branding is really, really right, right? Like trading on Uniswop on Ethereum costs like $20 to $60 on Arbitrum and optimism. It'll cost like $2 to $5, which is really good, really, really good. But when we talk about gaming and the velocity of some of these assets, $2 to $5, like how things do you want to do inside of a game like a hundred things inside of an hour two to five dollars that

really adds up and so it really starts to matter to get down to those fractions of a penny and the the actual just computational power of a zK roll up the actual compression that cryptography allows that's what gets us to that fractions of a penny of of costs yeah yeah and and obviously we're able to put that data availability into a committee if we want to so we like we support volition which is you You can either have all your data on chain or use a DAC, and optimism at the moment is forced to just keep their data on chain. In fact, yeah, it's very difficult for them to move away from that. Absolutely. So you hinted this before we went through the sponsors, but about users of the immutable platform owning the actual platform because when they do things, they will get the IMX token.

So let's actually go into the IMX token itself. What is the purpose of the IMX token? What does it do? How does it fit into the whole entire ecosystem? Yeah, of course. So ultimately, like, the goal of the IMX token is to be a utility token that is driving growth in the network. And so it's very different to a, like, a native consumption token. We never force users to buy it.

I actually hate those models because they just cause massive friction to end users. And at the end of the day, like, our heroes have to be the people building on a mutable X. If it's not ridiculously easy for your customers to trade NFTs, we're not doing our jobs. But what we do have is a 20% of all fees for the protocol. call must be paid for an IMX. We do as a swap under the hood to avoid friction with the end user. And then basically like the vast, vast majority of these tokens, I think like 70% or so is literally paid out to use the network. So some of that's in grants, developers building on us. So come reach out and we can allocate you some. Some are two users. In fact, the vast majority

are literally two traders and users. So anyone who performs some active value to the network, whether it's trading, depositing, creating an NFT, will be earning IMX token. I actually really like the model which we're doing it, which is we'll basically tally the 24 hour volume and then whatever percentage of that, and you'll get like coins along the way, and then whatever percentage of the total sort of volume you've participated in for that 24 hours, you were in the daily allocation of IMX tokens form. Yeah. You said 20% of the fees are paid in the IMX token.

What's the 80%? Is that up to the actual market participants? How does that work? So, no, that's literally how we make money and how stock buy makes money. Wait, the 80%? Yeah. Okay, so 20% of IMX fees are paid to the immutable layer two as in the... The token. Okay, so that 20% that goes to the people running the actual roll-up, the sequencer, which is you guys? And then, so 80% goes between us and Starkware, and then 20% goes to the actual token. Okay, yeah. Okay, so 20%, so there's a bunch of transactional volume on the roll-up, 80% gets split between you and Starkware, 20% gets burned? 20% gets actually bought, basically the fee has to be paid for in that, and then it's distributed to all existing owners of the IMX token.

Yeah. Okay, so when it comes to allowing people to own the roll-up, right? Like ownership of the roll-up. Can people, like, be part of the validator of the roll-up itself? How is the decentralization of the roll-up possible? Or is that even on the roadmap? Yeah. It's a great question.

So ultimately, it's very different in that, like, you don't really need validators in the same way you do, like, a layer one or kind of a consensus mechanism in that we can't lie. The trade-off you do make is sensitive resistance. So, like, obviously, we could just not include a transaction. But we're moving towards, A, decentralized sequencing and inclusion of those transactions. But B, also things like composable sequencing. So if we want to throw away one trade, we have to throw away every trade. because you can include kind of like cryptographic details of previous transactions. So we make it very, very tricky for us to throw those things away.

And at the end of the day, it's a brilliant trade-off because if we're censoring you, just remove your stuff. But we can never lie about your stuff. We can never steal your stuff. Like, that is the fundamental guarantee. That's the power of cryptography. Exactly. Yeah.

But it's very difficult to have a, like, no compromise in the trilama. This is by far the best compromise you can get. Did that answer the question of actually? Yeah. So, like, is the, the, sequence or the thing that is actually making the blockchain happen. And again, the power of roll-ups is that we can actually centralize this thing because cryptography is the check, right?

Like you can be centralized, but cryptography and roll-ups connect these things back to the L-1. So is there just like one server that is the immutable server that that is the thing? Or is it like a few servers? How does that work? Yeah. So in terms of including transactions, it's literally just us. But again, you know, that's something where you can move toward decentralized, like sequencing and inclusion.

But of course, there's also the Data Availability Committee. And then on full-C-Rollup mode, which will be rolling out, like, in Q1, so Volition, you can choose which vault state you want to participate in. You know, you wouldn't need a DAC at all. Yeah. Okay. And just to hash the data availability thing out, this is getting into some deep Ethereum, like technical stuff.

But data is really, really important when you write a transaction and goes into Ethereum, it gets embedded into the blockchain. Same thing with roll-ups. When you make a transaction on. a roll-up, the data goes into the roll-up, but actually not with immutable, not with the ZK roll-up that you guys have built, the data is elsewhere. Can you just kind of parse that out for our listeners? Where does the data live and what are the differences that makes the roll-up?

Yeah. So what we are implementing is volition, which means you can choose as an end user. Do you want your data to be stored basically in validity mode or in ZK roll-up mode? The difference is one will be stored by a data availability committee and one will be stored on chain, always the transactions are still like irrefutable. The main difference is, in validity mode, you're just storing the hash route of the Merkel, like the Merkel tree. In full roll-up mode, you're storing every single delta in the branches of that tree. And basically that means in the latter state, you don't need a data availability committee

to provide you with the information you need to reconstruct that proof back to L1 in order to withdraw your assets in a nuclear case, like immutable as evil, starkware, is it. evil in a data availability committee you would just go to any one of those committee members and grab that data it's very different to a set of validators because you don't need consensus among those like that dSE you just need one of them to tell the truth and so we can literally up like just upload this stuff to IPFS but at the end of the day like this is a great tradeoff for users to make or for games to make they can be like well look here's our view on security users with assets above a certain value you might want to use like full zika rollout mode they're paying

more like 10 cents per nfti transfer So the Lidium mode for like hundreds of millions of NFTs a day and true scalability. I think this is where we want the spectrum of tradeoffs to be able to play. Right. And yeah, so the idea is that when you take data, which is really, really expensive as it gets onto Ethereum, less expensive when you get onto a roll-up, but still something. If you take that data and put it in a different place, that's where you get really just scalable, very cheap, very fast transaction.

So that's definitely the strategy there. Yeah. Other ways scalable, one is long. like, you know, literally do 300 million NFTs in a day and it's affordable. Right. And so earlier you said that it doesn't cost anything to mint on immutable. It doesn't cost anything to trade on immutable. It does.

But what you're saying is that it's actually not paid by the user. And because it's gotten so cheap, immutable is actually taking that cost. Because as all blockchains have, there are resources available. We have certain amounts of throughput. We have certain amounts of data that we can give people. But because of the actually the way that immutable is designed, it does cost something, but immutable is actually taking that resource cost upon the team and not the user. I mean, yeah, it'll cost us eight figures a year.

That will increase as we get larger, but it's polylogorhythmic, so our costs are broadly fixed. The main thing we'll do is increase the frequency of how frequently upload roll-ups, which will linearly increase the cost of this. But yeah, so we're using Ethereum as a settlement layer, and we're just kind of rolling up. to it. When you say it'll cost eight figures a year, what is that cost? Is that like running the hardware? Literally uploading proofs. Okay. Or uploading proofs to what? To Ethereum. Okay. So submitting transactions to Ethereum, you've estimated that that's going to cost you eight figures of year of just gas fees to Ethereum. Yeah, as we give to the scale we want. And then obviously there are, there's actually non-trivial computational costs, at least in the real world. They're just

relatively trivial compared to actual blockchain costs. Right. And so that's hardware costs you're talking about. Like there's actually like a super computer somewhere like doing all that stuff. Yeah, this is ridiculously computationally intensive. Like these proofs are not simple to generate. They're just simple and compared to like blockchain work. Totally. Totally. Okay.

So, yeah, so eight figures a year. That's the gas fees paid to the Ethereum L1 blockchain. Yeah. Is the, so the 80% of the fees that takes that is taken by a mutable split between you guys and starkware, is that where some of that money goes for? Is that where's the connection there? Yeah. I mean, that's used to pay for the wallops.

It's used to grow up business. That's how we make money. Yeah. And the reason I like it is our incentives are always aligned with end users, which is like we take bips on trades. So we want volume to maximize. It's a, the other thing I like is we don't force users to use a native token. So like when you use a side chain, you have to buy the sidechains token. At the end of the day, we just want people to be able to trade as frictionlessly as possible.

And so like our promise is volume. Totally. Yeah. So just to make sure we hash this out for the listeners, there, we talk about immutable as like it's a, permissionist platform to build on. But then under the hood, there's a lot of revenue going to a centralized team between you guys and StarFair. And while we do want ownership of Immunable to be spread out and distributed, there's also

that 80% fee that's baked in that connects to these two companies. What would you say to a listener that says, like, well, like if you bake that thing in, like, how do we actually have ownership over immutable? What would you say to that concern? Yeah. Well, I think ownership comes down to a few things, which is governance. and fee entitlement and sort of exposure to upside of the protocol. The exposure is the thing we're sharing through the Immutable X token.

Like this thing is sort of exposed to, you know, it's necessary to be used for transactions that we swap. So obviously there's no friction for end uses. And so like in terms of that, people absolutely do own the protocol. And then to the second piece, I think, which is governance, like, obviously there's going to be governance value to IMX and we want to increase that over time. But it's also not needed because there is no level of sort of centralization that has to be decentralized. Like the way that it's constructed is you can have an operator like us and you can still completely not have to trust this thing.

And so I guess that's my perspective. And it's more of in this sense like a sort of growth in utility token than it is something that is trying to decentralize governance from day one. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, and that is the power of roll-ups of all flavors, and especially ZK roll-ups, is that, like, well, actually, the whole entire thing about ZK roll-ups and having, like, this immutable connection to Ethereum, no pun intended, is that, like, there is no, we don't need a king. We don't need governors. Like, that's what cryptography replaces. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Let's talk about the developer strategy from my limited understanding of cryptography, which is actually pretty good, as far as, I think. Yeah, I think so. developing on a ZK role is difficult, right?

There's a bunch of back-end infrastructure that needs to be built out. I believe there's this native coding language called Cairo, which is different from solidity. What's the strategy for lowering the barriers for developers to coming on and building on it? And that is our company strategy, which is abstract everything into APIs. Like, we want to be, I'm always loads to say the X for Y,

because it just makes you seem like a shitty version of that company. But our kind of technological approachability, we want to be very similar to Stripes. So you can come and build on us in literally an hour or less. You never have to talk to us. You can start trading with APIs. People have literally built a marketplace on us in 48 hours with two deaths. So that is crazy compared to what that would take you on L1. And obviously, we're handling all of the sort of throughput requirements and things that'll normally be a nightmare to support.

So our goal is to take all the best bits of that technology and then just abstract it into a ridiculously easy set of restful APIs. Okay, so say I don't know what the typical coding language for a developer is in the Web 2 world. Maybe it's JavaScript, something. I don't know. I have the normal set of skills that a developer would have in the Web 2 world, and then I get like pitched by this gaming company and we're building on immutable. What skills do I need that I wouldn't have brought to the table already to build on immutable? Literally, literally not. None. That's the whole idea of, anyone who can use an API, which is any developer, will literally be able to use immutable.

That's okay. Conversations over. All right, there we go. Okay. One of the questions I want to ask and just pick your brain about is if I mint an NFT on a mutable natively, and that netaMpte becomes really, really valuable, and I want to take it elsewhere. And I take it to Ethereum. We have this data availability committee, which is the data is in a different spot than Ethereum. What does it mean for me to take it? my NFT off of the meatable and onto Ethereum. So I will, and this is often a common misconception, the data is not the metadata. That's in that committee. Okay. That is literally the, it's like the delta in the leaf state of the tree, which means the transfer data.

It's not the actual data associated with the NFT. That's still wherever your normal L1NFT is, which is like, you know, often on some form of IPFS or like AWS server that you're pointing to with a, with a, with a, fact, your JPEG's not on Ethereum. It's somewhere else. In vast majority circumstances. So, yeah, like, it literally is withdrawn to L1. It has all of the same properties as L1.

Like, that is really our guarantee, which is counterfactually, the exact thing that secures all of your data in L1 is still associated with your NFT when it's on L2. Otherwise, there's no point to this whole thing. And so if you wanted to even store it, like, this is actually a really cool thing. It's like, if you wanted to store it with immutable metadata, and again, not a pun, like, as in non-mutable,

God, sometimes I regret this company name. You can do that and you can do it by what we call a kind of counterfactual blueprint, which is actually my favorite thing, which is something that has to be passed the L1 contract when it's withdrawn. So you could actually store a bunch of data which is counterfactually stored on L1 for very, very few little gas, like literally zero gas. And so if you wanted to put an image on all of that data, the only thing you'd be capacity constrained by is the size of that blueprint.

Right. Okay. going in a completely different direction as we come to a close on this. Robbie, you're a gamer. I'm also a gamer. I love Diablo too. Famously, Ethereum got started because we wanted the immutable games. For the people that don't understand that reference, Vitalik made this joke that there was this spell in World of Warcraft. Drain life.

Yeah, drain life. Yeah. And it was like the, it was why Vitalik's World of Warcraft character was so powerful. And then Blizzard, the centralized company, like, nerfed it. And he was like devastated. And so he made Ethereum. because we wanted this immutable, like, it's not really why, but like, it's a funny joke. Robbie, what games did you play growing up?

And then what games are you excited for to play on Immutable? Yeah. So I was a massive RuneScape nerd. Ah, yeah, RuneScape. Yeah. Um, I love Roonscape. Um, like, I still get nostalgia when the original login theme is played. Um, I played a bunch of NeoPets, actually.

That's a massive confession. Um, but I was obsessed with it when I was younger. I loved like the economy of it, like, just trading. Um, It's an interesting game. It also kind of pedals gambling to kids, which is maybe why I got my obsession for crypto trading. And then I was a League of Legends addict.

I was really bad. I was like Silver 3 at best, and I had invested 3,000 hours over year 11 and 12, which is like your final two years in high school. And I am basically called Turkey now because I have such an addictive personality that I can't play games. Replace your addiction. with building.

Yeah. Not bad. Not a bad trait. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I'm probably most excited for every single game building on Immutable. So come and apply. Fantastic. Getting into the conversation about crypto gaming more broadly.

Yeah. Metaverse gaming, Crypto Gaming. What are you excited for with Web3 as it changes the game? Yeah. Full of puns today. Changes the game about gaming. Like Web 3 is going to do, it's going to put assets into games. What are you excited for with that world?

What happens when assets are in games? Yeah, I think. So I'm really interested to see how a few things play out. The first is I'm interested in this sort of core play-to-own growth loop and seeing how that starts to impact growth trajectories of games. I mean, crypto is the only industry we've ever seen where you can literally bootstrap a company to the same sorts of metrics that unicorns would love to have after a decade in a week

because of economic incentives, like, you know, liquidity farming, yield farming. And so applying that same idea to games and using that to drive, like, growth in retention via share-to-earn, play-to-earn campaigns, as we saw with, you know, massive successes this year is really interesting. So I'm excited to see that kind of hit the mainstream and become literally the core playbook for game devs. Like, oh, yeah, you want to build a successful game in the same way that people now focus on, like, day-one retention, day-7 retention, day-30 retention, like core loop,

first 32nd kind of gameplay experience. I want people to be thinking about, oh yeah, what's like, what's your, you know, tokenomics, what sort of viral sharing scheme you're using? What's your vesting schedule on tokens? Like, these are things that will be part of the playbook for anyone wanting to create a massive game in the future. The second thing I'm really interested in seeing is the inverted incentives where people are building content for the actual NFTs. And so obviously this is that one of the things people love to talk about most, which is, You know, the classic paradigm is you create the context in which that content is valuable. People then purchase that content.

And now the focus is on creating the universe where the content is permanent and anyone can build an experience on top of it via incentives. And so that is fascinating. And that is actually the model that already games like Roblox are obviously moving toward, which is like core avatars and people can build incentivized experiences on top of that. Now take that. And instead of making it a shitty Web 2 centralized experience incentivization ecosystem, but make it Web 3, and anyone can permissionlessly build, and you can gain far higher share of revenue, I'm pretty excited for what this

ends up doing. And then my broad thesis is that, like, you know, Clayton Christensen's famous thing is like, commoditize your compliments, which is any complementary goods to the service you offer, you want to make as cheap as possible because they're going to increase the premium in demand for your good. And the complementary goods of like gaming or pretty much all digital content people consume today is like the cost of creation. And the cost of creation is plummeting. It is like going to be at zero in a few decades.

You will literally go to GPT3 or like GPT17 and you'll be like, make me a game with X, Y, and Z. And it'll just create some experience for you on the fly. And when you have the cost of creation so cheap, what matters is A, what do people care about and B, what do people find valuable? Because with infinite content, the value is actually selection in that, you know, I was always obsessed by this crazy thought experiment growing up, which was like a book. And the book would generate a string of ones and zeros in like an infinite number of multiverses. And then you could submit, and I'm going to butcher this, but you could

basically convert that data and then anyone in the multiverse could submit. submit a number and whichever one of the multiverse is submitted, the highest number, would be the one that all the universe is resolved to, like the ones and zeros. And so the theory was, you could generate any piece of content and then, like, let's say, transform it into a movie, and then submit that movie to the Oscars application process, these ones and zeros. And 99.999 for a while would be nothing. It would be garbage. They wouldn't convert into movie formats. Then some portion would convert into movie formats and some portion would convert into the most compelling, beautiful. Oscar winning content ever. And that would be the one and you type in a number of Oscars you won.

I mean, that's a nuts thought experiment, but it actually is kind of the universe we're moving toward two, which is with infinite UGC, all that matters is how do you select what humans find valuable. And that is where crypto incentives and gaming incentives is going to be amazing. You know, it's going to be how can we create the universes that people care about for the content that everyone already values. And one of the lines that I try and get into Bangal's listeners' heads

is the cool, the really cool thing about crypto is that it aligns human values with the market value of our assets, right? Those two things are bridged. And what you're talking about is like, and why it's really, really important to collapse the costs of transacting on an on immutable and building on immutable. Yeah. And also simultaneously making a building on immutable permissionless and censorship resistant as in anyone can do it. So anyone can build the cost of building or the absolute minimum. We can finally build things that fundamentally align with the things that we want. Yeah.

Right. And what do people want? Like, well, growing up, like, people want to game. Like, people really want to build games. People want a game. And I often think about, like, where is humanity headed over the next century? I think we all, like, hopefully we don't settle into AI is evil and kills us all and puts us into eternal conscious torment. That wouldn't be nice.

In the upside case, we're headed toward post-scarcity. we're headed toward, you know, the way that people are going to find meanings in their lives, probably living forever, probably living with no form of economic input. Like, humans aren't going to be economically valuable apart from human to human labor in kind of 50 years, 100 years. Maybe that's actually pretty aggressive, but like, I think probably a century. So the only thing that matters is then, A, how do we find meaning and B, what stuff economically matters? And in both cases, it's like crypto and gaming. Like, people will live by playing games because that's the only we can do is create artificial meaning and find meaning with each other, which I think is cool.

People have met that. They're being like, people won't have a purpose in life. I'm like, people's purpose is not to work. People's purpose is to live and experience and find meaning. And I don't think that has to be rooted in the creation of economic value. And then B is, well, in a world where everything's post scarcity, perhaps the only thing that Matt is he's going to be bragging lines, in which case, buy a crypto con. Robbie, it's fantastic to hear the perspective of a founder who has that idea and vision for

the future of the world and then can also talk about the fundamental properties of ZK roll-ups and go very, very deep in the weed. So it's not surprised that Immutable has seen the success that it has. So congratulations on all the success so far. We've talked about the IMX token. And just because we're going to be talking about it, this is not mean it's an investment advice or that this. This is an idea to buy it.

But everyone loves the token conversation, so let's finish that off. You said the token floats this Friday. Go into those details. Actually, I don't know the exact date, so I don't have to put my team angry me. But yeah, I think it's pretty soon. And it'll be obviously floating on a few exchanges. Centralized exchanges? Yes.

Okay, yeah. Right, because I guess you guys wouldn't necessarily mint the uniswap contract because somebody else probably will. And then I'll just end up there. Yeah, look, whatever people do is whatever they're in top. do. And so if you come and like transfer your assets on the Ethereum L1 to the Immutable L2, is it kind of like polygon where you need to have the IMX token on that network too or how does it? You'll never need to buy IMX in order to use our network. Okay. Okay. So it's just about owning the platform, right? Yeah, exactly.

What exchanges are going to have the token? So the one we've announced so far is Quibi. Okay. Yeah. And then there's a few others in the pipeline, which are not ready to disclose? Potentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'll leave this one to the team and to how he relates it. Okay, awesome. Well, Robbie, thank you for coming on Bankless. Once again, you're a pleasure to talk to, as always.

And I wish you the best with the future of a mutual. Thanks, David. Cheers. Boom. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber

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