Bankless - The Rise of Axie Infinity | Jeff 'Jiho' Zirlin (SotN 7/13)

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Axie Infinity has exploded into the mainstream in 2021. Is it just a game? Is it an economy? What does Play-to-Earn mean? Join David and Ryan as they explore the world of Axie Infinity! ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini  🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ 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 

Hey guys, welcome to another bankless state of the nation. This is the episode where we talk about something big that is happening in the crypto community, in the bankless nation. Today, that big thing is Axi Infinity. The crypto game, you may know something about the growth has been absolutely phenomenal. This community is like a small nation at this point. We're going to dive right into it. David, how are you doing today, man? Absolutely. Fantastic. I've always just thoroughly enjoyed the intersection of Ethereum and gaming, as many. in the Bankless Nation are as well. I'm sure they're gamers.

I'm a gamer. I like games with scarce assets. I like collecting games with scarce assets. And so I'm just, I want this world to be built out. And it really looks like Axi Infinity, which has been around for a while, but has really just absolutely exploded in the last few months or so,

is really working on that intersection of scarce assets and games. And people like games and people, humans like scarcity. So it seems to be a logical intersection. David, you know what? And we've never actually, like, had games with truly scarce assets. They've been centrally controlled, centralized controlled scarce assets, but they've not been true scarce assets.

And that is part of the innovation here. And you're right that, like, AXI first came on our radar a few years ago, right? I mean, we've written stories in bankless about AXE for a while. So while this might seem like an overnight success story, it's like a three-year overnight success story. These guys have been grinding. And when I say grinding, they've been building like hell. They've been creating an impressive, very immersive game.

They've been scaling. Maybe most importantly, they have been crushing it in terms of building out their community. And it's an incredible community. It's like extremely international. So a lot to talk about here. And as David was saying, this is not just, as you were saying, David, the third person here. This is not, what's exciting about this is, it's not just Axy. This is a harbinger of things to come.

Like, I think we are going to see the gaming industry completely revolutionized over the next 10 to 15 years by games like Axy. So take Axy, right, and then like extrapolate what it can do, but also extrapolate that to the gaming industry writ large. And you have a pretty massive story here. That's why it's important that we're covering it on bankless. Absolutely. Like, I can only imagine how much more addicted to video games I would have been when I was young. If there was financial incentives. You would have been super rich.

Super, yeah. Me and a bunch of other people, right? But like, just imagine when we have economic incentives, which are already working, like World of Warcraft is a massive economic platform. Imagine if we add just real world economics where you can take your real world value or your now real world value in the game and take it outbound. Anyways, we need to get into the conversation with Jeff. All right, guys, but before we do, what's new?

A few things that are new. just launched the bankless job board. David, I'm going to show this on my screen really cool, because I'm super excited about the bankless jobs board. So we've talked about your bankless journey. Of course, you can use defy. You can buy crypto assets. You can also work in the crypto industry. We've got already close to 20 jobs on the job board just launched yesterday. I've got seven in review. I've got to review these jobs and approve them. But software engineer at Arbitram, senior designer pulled together. These are jobs for crypto natives. So check that out. We'll include a link in the show notes for you there. As far as other announcements, David, we've got some really

exciting podcast content, show content coming up. Staking panel tomorrow. What time are we doing that? We are doing that a little late. It's going to be a late staking panel because, as we all know, proof of stake works equally across the globe. Therefore, stakers are spread equally across the globe. And so that is happening at 11 p.m. Eastern Time, 8 p.m. Pacific time. And we have the teams from a rocket pool from Lido and also from Coinbase staking. So we have the complete spectrum of centralized to decentralized staking services. And so we are going to have a staking panel with the three premier staking services out there to help you understand what it means to stake your ether. We've got also the Arthur ZeroX podcast that just dropped yesterday. That is the story from somebody

who got in defy in 2018, went from six figures to nine figures and now has a $500 million dollar fund, the largest D5 focused fund in Asia. An absolutely incredible story. And the insights from the Arthur Zerox conversation were just jam-packed, full of really interesting content during this crab market. That's when you can start to absorb content because you're not looking at price the old time. So go check that out.

Also, David, we are recording a podcast, I think, in the next couple of days. And that is being published on Monday. What's that one going to be about? I know we're both excited about it. Yeah, this is going to be with Tarun Chitra, and this is one of the podcasts where the guest actually is informing us as to what we need to talk about. And so Tarun, he's a gigabrain. He's one of the M-EV thinkers and innovators in this space, but also just really pays attention to mechanism design. He's a frequent co-host on the Zero Knowledge podcast, and he is teaching us all about the history and current state of electronic markets.

And so we are going to get schooled on electronic markets with Tarun Chitra coming on Monday. My favorite episodes are the episodes where we get school, David. Those are some of the best ones. I expect to get schooled during this episode, by the way. All right, before we begin, want to ask the question, I ask you every single time at the start of State of the Nation. That is, what is the State of the Nation today, sir? The State of the Nation is gaming.

But gaming is different now. Gaming, interestingly enough, gamers, there's a lot of games out there that have farming mechanics where you go when you play the same parts of the same game over and over and over again to grind and collect stuff in the game to level up. That's the same thing with Axi Infinity, but now it's actually farming tokens and stuff and just experience and leveling up your assets on Ethereum. So the state of the nation today, Ryan, is gaming. We are learning how to game with all of our digital assets. This is the play-to-earn business model. Super exciting. All right, we are going to introduce Gio from AXI in just a minute, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors who made this episode

possible. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version two has a ton of cool features that makes using the Avey protocol even more powerful. With AVEA, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. One of my favorite AVE features is the ability to select a stable interest rate. Once I've selected a stable interest rate, I'm protected against any interest rate volatility that may happen in DFI, and allows me to plan my DFI finances

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This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools can make asset indices, but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Balancer lets you collect the fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity. Additionally, Balancer smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fees based on market conditions, or even liquidity boot bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity. At Bankless, we use a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAPT shirts to much success. V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you.

In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield in DeFi without sacrificing liquidity in the pool using asset managers. Balancer's vault architecture lets you trade between balancer pools at a fraction of the cost versus other platforms. And you can even take advantage of dynamic fees, which automatically adapt to changing market conditions. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in Defi by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. dive into the balancer pools at app.balancer.fi. Hey guys, we are back. We are here with Jeff Gio Zerlin. We are going to call him Gio for the rest of this episode. That's what he goes by in the Axy community. He's the co-founder and the growth

lead of Sky Mavis. That is the studio, the group that created AXI Infinity. And Gio and the AXI team have really grown this into one of the largest communities into the world in the world. I think we're going to start with some growth metrics. But like this is rivaling Fortnite inside, at least in terms of Discord server. That's how big this game has gotten over the last three years. It's grown into an internet native economy with an internet native community. It also calls itself a Nation. Bankless Nation, you might be familiar with that. Lots of cool themes coming up. Geho, it's great to have you. Welcome to Bankless. Thanks for the invite. Super happy to be here. Dude, we are super excited to have you here. I think some people have been sleeping on Axi

for a while and some people may have heard of it like a couple of years ago and then just haven't paid as much attention to it. Of course, there's tons of users, tons of gamers where the opposite it is true. You guys have brought many into crypto. But let's talk with this kind of growth story because your recent explosion has been crazy. And I think this is why Axi has been on everyone's radar. Why has Axi Infinity exploded in growth over the last few months? I want to talk about a few things. User growth, revenue growth, 25 million daily volume, 50K NFTs sold per day, 250K daily active players, 200,000 Discord members that's on track to pass Fortnite

as the largest Discord server in the world. This is absolutely insane. Why are you guys growing this fast over the last few months? It's a culmination of factors. I think the Axi community, you know, SkyMavis, we built throughout the bear market. It was brutal, right? Nobody cared about NFTs, nobody cared about Ethereum,

and nobody cared about blockchain. We just kept building and talking to users, figuring out issues, right? And it took a while to put all the pieces together, right? Building a blockchain game is probably 10x harder than building a kind of conventional mainstream game, right? You need to get the gameplay right. It needs to be fun. Then you also have to get the game economy, right?

Like this whole idea of economic freedom for gamers. It only works if, right, there are true property rights. You think very thoughtfully about how to enable these. secondary markets for the players, right? So there's the in-game economy. And then there's the scaling. There's the infrastructure, right? We, you know, we love Ethereum. We use the Ethereum and we still use Ethereum, right? So basically, we had to scale, right? So we built this East Side Chain. It's called Ronan and migration to Ronan after, right, like two or three years of building up this really strong base of the community. We migrated to Ronan. And this just allowed,

like for transaction throughput to increase and, you know, all these, unlocked the player market, the secondary market, unlocked so much latent demand for axes. A lot of people, right, who've been watching, saying, oh, like, this seems really interesting, but the gas speeds were a little bit of a turnoff. When we made that transition to the side chain, it was like, okay, now I can finally jump in.

I think a lot of people thought that at the same time. This is like so cool because we did, We did a series, a podcast series, Gio, not too long ago on bear market builders, but it was all focused on like the DFI protocols who didn't give up during the bear market, right? It was like synthetics and AVE and like Nexus Mutual and a few others. And we recorded that, did that in 2020. And this was like on the back of DFI summer where all of their ideas were basically validated, right?

And it felt really good. Now I feel like is the time for Axi Infinity and what you guys are doing with crypto games and the ability to own your own assets on the blockchain on Ethereum. Now all of that work that you guys put in over the last three years during the bear market is being validated. I'm showing some numbers here. This is this is sales volume, guys. Monthly sales volume here. 25 million. Is that daily?

Daily. Absolutely insane. Here is the number of axes being bred. An axi, by the way, for people who aren't familiar, maybe we should just mention that. What is an axi? There's these cute little, like, kind of, how would you describe these? Like, monsters? Yeah, I think of them as fantasy pets that you can battle and collect. Okay. You can earn some crypto, learn about Ethereum, earn some Ethereum. So 80, 60, wait, let's see. see 50K of these things being bred on a daily basis. So this community is absolutely exploded. And I think it's all thanks to the work that you guys were doing during the bear market,

because so many Crypto Game Studios and so many others just gave up. I want to talk specifically about layer two, because that seemed to be a catalyst for your growth. But before we do, why didn't you guys give up like the rest of them during the bear run? It was so easy at that time. There's a lot of factors. At first, I think we always knew that we were on to something really special. The community, right? Even when it was super small, they were making musicals, they were getting tattoos, you know, they were building tools. So we saw all the kind of ingredients. It was just about how to amplify this and get to the next level. And we saw that, okay, like, if we can, you know, if we can scale, if we can, you know, have some sort of ERC20 token. integrated into the game or ERC 20 tokens integrated into the game. Yeah, so it was like, I think we always saw the next step, right? And we were talking to the users and they inspired us. Our community inspired us every single step of the way.

And yeah, there was always, right, like there were always little signs that we were on to something. And yeah, I think, you know, the team that we have is super special. A lot of us, like, are lifelong gamers. So it's like, you know, we compete and we like to win. I think that's part of our culture. So, yeah, it was never, giving up was never, it was never an option. I think, yeah, it was also, a lot of us, right, come from, like, product development backgrounds and understood that it's actually, right, the way to win is to be early to the right market and just keep building, right?

Like, the bear market, actually, we like that because other people aren't trying to catch up to us, right? They're having a lot of issues, like fundraising, like, with morale. So the bear markets, that's 100% where, you know, the opportunity is, right? And you cannot form a community like axes during a bull market, right? You just attract only these mercenaries, right? It's like all these people who are more about the hype in the tech. Obviously, there's a combination of both in every community, but it's really important to have as kind of the pillars, as the foundation,

these people that are really in it because of the, right, like the economic, the economic revolution that's happening. And, yeah, I think like we have enough of those types of people in our community that, yeah, we thought that it was just about building towards product market fit. And, yeah, it's me. One thing that I was thinking, as Dave and I were going through the agenda for this yesterday, was basically like if you're in and this is a message to bankless listeners, if you see an amazing community that's somewhat underground.

It's a dare market, but like doesn't have mainstream attention, but it's just an amazing incredible community that's somewhat underground. That is a signal for you to go get involved. Like maybe not financial advice, go buy the asset, right? Because good things happen out of good communities. That is a key insight. I think that is repeatable. That rule has never been broken in crypto.

It really hasn't. Jeff, I have a question for you. And there are so many topics that we want to get into. We want to get into the mechanics of digital assets inside of the game. We want to get into AXE's relationship with Ethereum versus L2s and what it means to have revenue. But first, I want to ask a question, why now? Why is AXE blowing up now? Because DFI summer was a year ago.

And then the NFT mania was like six, you know, five months. to go. And, you know, there's both NFTs and tokens inside of Axi Infinity, but it seems to have claimed its own success under, for its own reasons, under its own merits, without some sort of just like fundamental catalyst behind the ecosystem or whatever's going on in the rest of crypto. So why is Axi Infinity blowing up right now? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think it's not, it's not simple. They're a variety of kind of intertwined catalysts, right? You know, we've deployed to Ronan in late April, and since then, we've been growing around 30% a week.

It has spiked. So all metrics basically at least 30%, Discord users, volume, DAU, traffic to the site, all going up around 30 to 35% per week. It's within the last week that things went 50 to 70% and it's like, everyone in crypto kind of started taking a look at us. Also, right, it's kind of like we're in this, as you mentioned, we're in a crab market, right? So it's like we're doing really well for most of the year, but everyone in crypto is doing really well. But I think like this fact that we've kind of in some ways decoupled from a lot of the rest of the market. Like our economy is doing quite well.

Even though we're in this kind of flat to down market right now, I think it's really, people are bored, right? And they're looking for something interesting happening in crypto. and right now, right? Like, we happen to be where the growth is, where the excitement is. So, yeah, I think that's a lot of it as well. So, Jeff, I want to, we want to go into all those questions that I was talking about, but I want to just illustrate what the gameplay of Axi Infinity actually is. So maybe can you describe what it's like to play Axi Infinity?

What's the goals? Like, what's the game mechanics? What do you do? What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the end goal of Axi Infinity? Yeah, so right now, so we don't look at Axi as just one game, seen as an entire universe of games. The product that's on the market right now, because that's gotten us to its current level of traction,

is this kind of pretty basic card battler. So basically, you fight two teams of three axes against each other. There's both PVP, so you can fight against other players. It was PVE. You can fight against monsters called chimera. And, yeah, the goal is to basically, use your energy. So you start each round of three energy,

or a certain amount of energy. And the goal is to basically use those energy to play cards that are going to give you the best chance of winning. So it's kind of like you have to know what your opponent's axes are capable of playing. You need to know like your team really well and kind of think of counters.

And yeah, it can get quite complex, especially with the mind games. And you can even skip turns and basically like save your energy for a larger kind of more devastating combo later. So it's quite basic, but I think it is, you know, pretty proven. It's like a very interesting, I think, kind of Card Battler and Canon. And some people might think that it's similar to games like Slay the Spire, you know, Harstown is kind of like a combination of a lot of the card games we grew up playing,

you know, over the last 10 or so years. And so what's the progression like as you get better, better at the game, do you like level up? Do you find more scarce items? Tell us about the progression. Yeah, definitely. So when you, so when you win a battle, you actually earn these tokens called smooth love potions, those are actually what's what are required to breed or create more axes. Right. So we don't sell axes, right? So all acts, like almost all the axes that exist out there, except for very few that were created during special kind of primary sale events. All those axes are created by players.

And in order to actually create an axi, right, you need to use those tokens. So the creation of an axi is kind of like a proof of work system where each axi is the result of real time spent in game. And I think that's one of the key mechanics. And yeah, I think like, for example, the smooth love potion, this is, I think, like, the first time that human effort has ever been kind of like tokenized into an asset. That's really, really cool. And that's definitely a topic that we want to dive into more when we get to the assets section of this conversation. But first, you said something that the AXID Infinity

or the gameplay that Ryan is showing right now on screen, that's just one possible game of future Axy Infinity games. So these characters, these little cute little Axy Infinity monsters can go and in the future, be a part of other games that is built out of your guys in studio? Definitely. I mean, first of all, we are also deploying a huge, upgrade to this current battle system called, you know, kind of like in crypto, we call

everything V2. Right. So yeah, we have a battles V2 coming out hopefully later this year or early next year. But then, yeah, we're also working on land, right? So land might be something similar to clash of plans, rise of kingdoms, where you're actually, you own land plot, you can build it, build it up, build structures on it, harvest resources, right? Imagine if you're playing clash of plans or Farm Bill, right?

those resources are actual tokens. I think that's a dream that a lot of people have actually had since, like, D5 summer. I tried to kind of, you know, sound the alarm saying, this is actually what we've been building. It just takes three years. Like, none of you guys are from the D5 community are actually going to build it. Like, we're going to build it. Like, it's just give us, you know, give us some more time. So, yeah, like the land system, I think, is going to really resonate with a lot of people.

That's also on the way. And then long term, right? Sky Mavis, you might think of us as the AxiCorps developers right now. We're never going to be able to build enough content, I think, to satisfy the number of players that we hope to have within the ecosystem. That's a good problem to have. Yeah, hundreds of millions of players. I don't know, you know, the sky's limit.

We believe that in order for us to be able to scale and scale the content within the ecosystem, we really need to allow, right, community members, other game developers, to come into the Axi universe, use the IP. And yeah, so one way to think of it, one way to think of Axi is, you know, kind of a protocol for internet monster games using this awesome art. There's so many game developers out there who are really smart. They know how to make games really well. What do they lack?

They lack understand. They lack art. They lack a passionate community. And they lack an ability to get funded or under, or basically, how to put together kind of like an in-game economy. So there's a lot of things that are kind of inherent with the Axis model. You just need to come in, right, like with the urge to build and make something awesome. So a long term, we're going to have an SDK, and I think that's going to really unlock so much latent talent.

This is so cool. So if you're like back in the day, like a mod developer, right, you could just like plug right into not only this SDK from a technical perspective, but you're really plugging into this economy, this whole economic incentive mechanism that AXE has really built up. Let's talk about this for a minute, Gio, because I want to get to kind of the assets. And an interesting way to maybe frame this is for some of the items that we're talking about, like the smooth love potions and the axes themselves,

like what are these things exactly? Are some of them NFTs? Are some of them ERC20s? Could you just suss out? in like bankless native lingo, defi native lingo, what these things are

and what are the scarce elements of the game? What are the tokenized elements of the game? Yeah, definitely. So the actual NFTs within the game, these are axes, as well as the land plots, the land items, right? So these are the unique tokens. The resources within the game

are the E.R. C20s. And we also, so we have, we have two tokens right now within our game. There's the smooth love potion and then there's the access governance token. These are both ERC20 tokens. Fun fact, we actually also, back in the day, as kind of a fun experiment, we dropped die. We dropped AVE token. This is like, you know, way before, like, I kind of remember this. Yeah, this is way before Maker Protocol blew up, way before Avey. I think we had the old Avey tokens. So it's like super, super long time ago. Yeah, the lend. So, yeah, we, you know, we, we did some cool experiments where, yeah, these DeFi protocols. This is also, like, the key to sustaining this economy long term is, right, like, like, exogenous actors, right?

Like, they're, like, saying, okay, this is an interesting distribution channel for my token to get it into the hands of people who are a strong community. That's a crucial point. I think maybe we can talk more about it later. But, yeah, so that's just what I do you think of it is, like, the game characters, right? as well as the homes for the pets, they're non-fungible tokens. And then the kind of the in-game resources are EERC20. And they're all connected to you, the DeFi, like to Ethereum and sort of the the composability of defy. So if you have a smooth love potion, right, there's like a uniswap market for that.

Is there a uniswap V3 market for smooth? Yeah, there's actually, I've heard really good things about the V3 pool. everyone like you need to join the school like it's super it's there's a lot of volume they're trying to like they're trying to school me on you know v3 is it's a tough piece to tackle even for like a d5 then right um i've been so busy so they're they have like people messaging me like yeah like even people are getting onboard into xey because they just find out that the sLP v3 pool is like awesome so yeah that's that's the amazing thing right is like in the future not in the future,

gamers, an increasingly large number of gamers will start to demand that your in-game resources have liquidity on Unisop or a similar AMM, right? That's the big, I think that's the, that's one of the core discoveries

that we made in 2020 that has gotten us to this point, where we realize that in the future, right? Like, gamers, games or like the growth and marketing people and their team on teams, they're not going to be like looking at, like, oh, like, what's our Facebook ad spend looking like? What's our Instagram ads been looking like this month? Right? That's like, that's really, I think that that era is over for at least

like, yeah, a lot of indie game games. They're going to be looking at like, okay, like, you know, how can we incentivize more liquidity for our in-game resources? How can we build up more liquidity? Right? Assessing that rather than these like, you know, marketing budgets and things like that. Yeah, it's somewhat like, I think in the future it'll be like if your token's not list on uniswap, does it even exist? You know what I mean? Like if your asset's not there, where is it? I do believe that a uniswap or the successor to uniswap will become the biggest marketplace

for human exchange the world has ever seen. And like digital items are going to really push the envelope there. So, okay, so we've got the composability of defy and that includes obviously all the ERC 20 tokens like AXS or love potions. then also axes could be sold in kind of the composability to the NFT market. So you could sell your axi on OpenC or something like that. Can we talk a little bit about the token economics? I know you mentioned token economics for love potions.

Maybe a quick refresher on that. It sounds like you actually have to play the game in order to earn it. So it's like time spent in the game earns the love potions. It's like a proof of work. Farming love potions. And then also the token economics. of AXS. So does someone earn that or how does that work in general?

Could you talk about those two? Sure. So SLP, smooth love potions, right? This is kind of, it's uncapped, it has kind of like a reflexive supply, right? So you can earn it by playing the game, you know, doing PVP battles or fighting monsters, and then you burn it by breeding.

So we look at the, basically look at the minting rate from playing and we look at the burn rate and we can make economic adjustments. We can sometimes increase the amount SLP needed to read if we see that not enough is being burned and too much is great. So in some ways, right, like there's some, there's a lot of math that goes involved into that.

And hopefully over time that can be done by like an algorithm and we're done by governance, just like the maker stability. And then, yeah, so that's kind of basically how that works. And it's crazy. It's a phenomenon in the Philippines. There are, it's like a trend where businesses are now, now starting to be like, hey, like, we're cool. We accept SLP. You can come buy, I think, like, cakes. There are apartments where you can pay your rent. This is like a kind of a, you know,

this is a trend. And it's something to watch in the Philippines. It's super interesting. Access on the other end, this is the governance token. It has a cap supply, right? Like, we emit it through playing the game, but in more kind of very specific ways, right? So you can earn it by getting at the top of the leaderboard. you can earn it by kind of contributing to the community, right? So like, you know, we're increasingly starting to rely on more like, you know, decentralized doubt kind of contributors, right? People who are helping out on the community side of things over.

We do contests as well, right? Like we pay it, we just had an amazing video, short video contest that came out and we paid out the rewards and access for that, right? So we have different distribution mechanisms to get it into the hands of the community members. What's actually being governed over with the AXS tokens? What does that token, what's the power behind that token? Yeah, sure. So right now, you know, governance has not been implemented yet.

But what is happening is that so 4.25% of all the NFT volume within our ecosystem, right? It's like $300 million this month. 4.25% of that is going into a community treasury. We also have breeding fees. So part of the breeding fee is paid in SLP, the other part is paid in and access. So, yeah, basically these feeds, right? It's like it would be very, it would be so centralized, right? To centralize for us to, you know, as the game developers, to take, you know, the entire marketplace fee, these breeding fees, right?

In the end, it's like we would be kind of this is extractive middlemen. So, you know, one of these works with Delphi, digital on this actually, where we basically created its governance tokens where long term we can basically put over control of that that treasury to the doubt to the Dow members. Yeah, I think I think there's also a lot of other things that could be decided by governance. For example, like, you know, maybe like policies and punishments on automation, right? It's like a lot of people ask like how can, you know, all blockchain games should have required should allow a bots, right? Like that's like that's like some, some people think that. Maybe like I understand why they would think that if they haven't built a blockchain game,

talk to users, right? Like our users, they really hate, they really hate bots because they feel like it's like automating them out of the job. It's competing with them. It's unfair, right? So, you know, if we were, right, like, yeah. So I think like something like that could also be decided by governance as well, long term. Also maybe perhaps, right, you know, content within the universe. You know, there might need to be like certain, like, restrictions and, you know, rules around, like, you know, very use of content, but it should, long term, it doesn't make sense for us. This guy means to do that. So those are just some of the things, I think that. I think this really fits into the overall theme of crypto and defy of itself, where the token allows

the users or participants of an ecosystem to become also the owners of the ecosystem, right? It really changes what it means to be a play-to-earn game where, you know, you play to earn what, money or ownership in the actual platform. Like that's the cool new thing. And back in Defi summer, we talked about these governance tokens, like, oh yeah, if you're a user a compound, you get comp token issued to you, now you own part of compound. That's like if Uber was issuing Uber equity to every time a driver gave a drive or a rider took a ride. Like, oh, same model. Now it's about games. And so now we have these gaming platforms where the users can grind their way into ownership around the overall platform. And that seems to be the quote unquote new paradigm that Axi Infinity is really tapping into.

We know that gaming communities are some of the most passionate in the world, right? So imagine when you actually give them ownership of the game, right, how much more they're going to do to help it. So I think that's really what we've seen. I also, right, like we talk, we think a lot about decentralization, and there are different layers at which you decentralize things and timing, right? For our users, the things that they want control of are the peer-to-peer exchange of game assets and eventually ownership of the entire game. Those are the things that they care about the most right now. In terms of, right, the data storage, they're okay with a side chain for now and then being with the ability to, settle back to Ethereum.

I feel like you guys have played this really well, right? There's some uncertainty. There's always market narratives in crypto, right? So like all of these Ethereum killers popping up and does a game like Axi deploy on those? Does it stick with Ethereum? All of these layer twos promised in the future, right? At one time it was plasma.

Do you remember those days? And then it turned into kind of roll-ups. And we're on the cusp of seeing some roll-ups in production, but they're not there yet. and you needed something sooner. I just feel like AXI has played the platform betting game in a very good way because you've benefited from all of the defy composability of Ethereum, right? And like the settlement guarantees of Ethereum were necessary, but you've also deployed your own layer two where those settlement guarantees are not necessary.

So it's like a really smart way to play the game because you haven't lost that composability. I'm curious to learn a bit more about, I think you call it Ronan, which is your side chain solution. How should we think of this? So we generally, on bankless, we divide it into kind of two things. We've got side chains that aren't economically secured and don't have the security guarantees of the Ethereum main net. And then we have roll-ups that provide most of the security guarantees of the Ethereum mainnet and the economic guarantees. So Polygon is probably more of a side chain or something. like arbitrium or optimism of roll-up is more of a layer two. So what is what is

Ronan and is it more like a polygon or is it more like kind of a layer two? Yes, it's definitely a side chain. I don't want to like mischaracterize ourselves as a layer two. That is something that you know is hopefully within the long-term roadmap right right now right it's like you know we made a very pragmatic and practical choice for our users based on, you know, we're product people, right? So we listen to the users, we talk to them. It's like, what do you care about? But yeah, I think long term, right? Like, you know, the security, as more funds are also deposited in Ronan, we just actually hit, I think, 200, over $200 million, right? As that number starts a balloon, there's going to be more questions and we'll need to, you know, maybe upgrade

and look at different solutions, right? So does that mean that, okay, like, we have validators who are posting Merkel proofs to the main net, or Merkel trees of some form, possibly, right? I just, we need to look at it, right? It's obviously if everyone starts doing that, if everyone has a side chain, or everyone has a layer to you,

and everyone starts posting, it's like you start those, that starts to balloon in fees, right? So it's like then, it's like I've heard that, okay, maybe there's going to be another roll-up that the roll-ups post the roll-ups to that then posts something that's then rolled up onto Ethereum, right? So it's still up in the air. You guys are early here, though. So what do you think, though?

The massive growth that we've seen from AXE this year, was the side chain, Ronan part of that growth? Was it required even for that growth, do you think? Yeah, I think Ronan was super important in that growth. But yeah, I think like the EVM compatibility just made things so much easier for our community, right? It's like, you know, our marketplace is all in ETH, right? Like we're doing, we're doing like insane amounts of ETH volume each day on our marketplace. And yeah, like, you know, I think I just saw today that the Ronan bridge,

the kind of like the Ronan deposit contract is, was the number. number one gas burner on Ethereum today. More than UniV2. I think on a normal day, we're like up, you know, consistently in the top three with Uniswap and Tether for the last month. So, yeah, I'm super excited about EIP 1559 too, because then people are going to be like, yeah, like they're going to be rooting for us, right? Even more because they're like, yeah, like our Axi is burning ETH today, right?

I think that's like something that I'm so excited for. That is absolutely what my reaction would be. Even the people that aren't involved with AXI will be rooting for its growth, along with every other game on Ethereum just to burn more and more ether. Jeho, there are so many more things in this conversation that I want to get to, but I want to kind of recap this summary, this section real quick. When we view the relationship between Ethereum and AXE, more from a satellite's view, how would you say, why is Ethereum so important to AXE?

It's got these defy apps that provides, you know, financial services to these assets. It provides, you know, onboarding for users. Holistically, how would you say is Ethereum's role in Axis success in development? And we wouldn't be where we are without Ethereum, right? Like, we, it was our, it was like our main home. Now it's kind of like our summer home. It was our main home for two years. Now it's kind of very like our home country, right?

that we would still go back and visit and have really strong, like, remittance links with, right? You might think of it like that. There's massive amounts of value transfer going back and forth. So, yeah, it's, it wasn't amazing. It was, it's like Ethereum allowed this all to happen, the Ethereum community. Yeah, I think, like, it just also allows really quick innovation, right? So it's like, okay, now it's like all this AMM stuff happened on Ethereum. like, okay, like do we need our own decks for our game?

Does that make sense? Right? So I think like all these experiments that happen in EVM native systems, right? Like they can be transferred and transported. We might create something on Ronan, right? That can then, okay, like help out another EVM compatible side chain or layer two or even something on main net, right? So all this basically, right?

It's like everyone is speaking the same language. And that's so key. It's like for the first time, right, it's like this, there's one unified financial system that's all speaking the same language. And yeah, I think like the value that gets unlocked from something like that, it's unfathomable. And I think it's going to create amazing things in the future. So yeah, you know, I hope that AXE kind of also inspires, right, like other game developers to build these types of games. And, yeah. Guys, I just keep smiling during this episode because everything Gio is saying is just so cool and

it's so exciting. And we have so much more to cover with Gio. We're going to talk about the internal and external economy of AXI a bit more. We're going to get into the users, really unique global demographic of users. We're going to talk high level about where Gio sees the future of gaming and digital assets. If you are liking this show so far, make sure you subscribe. to Bankless YouTube. We put these videos out on the regular. So if you are enjoying this conversation, then make sure to like and subscribe. And before we get to the second part of this conversation,

we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap 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

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is the Gemini crypto back credit card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. 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 my cash back in ETH, so whenever I buy you, 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. Guys, we are back talking Axy Infinity, the economy, the digital nation that has been spawned out of this game. Super cool. We're here with Gio. Gio, This has been incredible so far. I think one area we haven't covered sufficiently is talking about the users of Axi.

Who is playing Axi Infinity? We have so many different player archetypes, right? We have, you know, the collectors who are really into the scarcity and the aesthetics, right, in the art. And, you know, I think they're super important to the ecosystem. We also have, right, like the people who are, kind of, you know, really into the competitive scene of AXIE, right? They want to be at the top of the PVP leaderboard. They want to win all the tournaments, right? They're also able to, you know,

get some nice access winnings from doing this. Then you have a play to earn grinders, right? They might be playing four to six hours a day, farming, love potions. They might have, you know, they might not have been able to even afford an AXI. They might have borrowed them from a friend, a family member, one of these other public programs. You know, we have the liquidity providers, right? They're, you know, they're interested in, like, you know, trading the Axi market, doing these kind of short-term strategies. Yeah.

And wait, wait a second, Gio, you said somebody can actually, like, borrow an Axi and play with it. So they don't actually have to buy. You can, like, borrow. Exactly. So as the expected earnings of a, right, the theoretical future earnings of a team of axes rises, so too does the price of a team of axes on the marketplace. So this is obviously it causes a dilemma where, right, like over time, and historically the price of vaccines has gone up and it's like, okay, like, you know, how do you make the game

accessible? How do you get people into the ecosystem? So this system has developed. It's called the scholarship system where people, where people People who have a lot of axes, but not enough time to use them, are able to lend their axes out to these scholars who are people who, right, they have a lot of time, they want to play Axi, but they don't have, you know, the hundreds of dollars that it takes to get started with the game. And then so oftentimes, right, these scholars will apply to a program with a resume or a CV or even like a video. They're getting really creative. Some programs are only taking streamers.

It's like an amazing growth hack. So they're applying. Then they're in many cases even signing like contracts to basically say, okay, I'm the scholar. I'll get this percentage of the tokens earned on this account while I play. The rest will be taken by the original, right, the owner of the account. So it sounds like a, it sounds like Gio, a built-in franchise type system. Exactly. I think that's been one of the keys to the growth is AXI is a system where anyone who, right, they're interested in blockchain, they're bit entrepreneurial, they're great at community building.

They can come in. A lot of them have come in and, right, they've kind of built these guilds, right, around themselves. And, but yeah, there's, you know, kind of a real earning ability. with these guilds. So yeah, there's something, there's also even, there's a, there's a, there's one of these scholarship organizations

called Yield Guild Guild, YG, and then they're even like, I think they raised the series A. So they're like going out there and raising capital and, you know, there's so much interest on this idea of the metaverse, the metaverse immigrant worker, right? Who, right, because you're able to earn, you know, 50, 60, maybe $70 in these play to earn economies, at least in Axi Infinity. Yeah, people are kind of migrating into these into AXE right now.

And, yeah, Yield Guild Guild is helping. Jeff, was this whole scholarship phenomenon in lending out your AXIS was that infrastructure that the AXI team built out, or was that community-driven, community-derived? I like to joke that the community got the idea when they were playing Animal Crossing during the pandemic. You had Tom Nook who was getting people to do all this work for him. And they're like, yeah, I need to become Tom Nock with my axi. Get someone to work for me.

But yeah, it's primarily from within the community. We made our account system architecture flexible enough to enable this. And we're, but we weren't sure whether people would start doing. So, yeah, it's kind of like a little bit of both. We're also, potentially, this might be a leak. We're looking at, you know, if we can make an official version of it, what that would look like. But it comes with a variety of issues.

So we're still still in the future. That is insanely cool. Two things come to mind. The protocol sync thesis comes to mind, which is the concept that, like, you could have built Axi Infinity, the game and used Ethereum, as you've described it and just built the game. But instead, you built something deeper. You built something that people could build on top of,

which allows the community. It gives agency to the community, say, hey, you have permission to start tinkering with this game that you play. And no, it's not just the game. The game is one feature of a more vibrant ecosystem, much more fitting to call this thing a nation. And so I love that.

And I'm also reminded of our conversation with Josh Rosenthal, who talks about how there is going to be an absolute new paradigm of what it means to be a laborer, a worker, a part of a digital organization, part of a digital community, digital nation. And it's just completely changing the game with what it means to almost do anything, really, be a gamer on the internet, be an entrepreneur on the internet, be just an economic actor on the internet. And so this is definitely one of those examples of there's this community out there that is really taking on, taking this opportunity by the horns,

than doing whatever they were doing by playing like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch or whatever, I've been in the Web 2 world. So I think that's really, really cool. I want to go into the demographics of the community a little bit more. It's largely Asian-based, Asia-based, is that correct? And then what parts of Asia does Axi Infinity particularly find resonance with? Yes, our game is, or Axi is huge, and the Philippines right now, I think around 60% of our users are from the Philippines. I think some of the largest streamers in the Philippines, if not the largest,

are also starting to stream max the infinity there. It's kind of like a really special thing that's happened there in the Philippines. To a variety of factors. But yeah, so that's where in 60%. We're also starting to gain traction in places like Indonesia, Vietnam. Yeah, but also South America, right? So like Brazil is huge, Venezuela, Argentina is growing. So it's really, it's like it's almost like COVID.

It's something that's like it started, it started in one place and it was super small. But then right now it's just, it's right. I saw photos of people and it looked like a school in Africa learning how to play Axi together. That was like mind blowing. Like I need to, I need to hunt down and see what's going on there. Like I bet in the three months we're going to see like so many people in Ghana, Nigeria. because they can speak English quite well, so they kind of can interface with the rest of the community. That's one thing that we've seen is like, you know, being able to speak English,

I think that if a country can speak English and has, like, low minimum wage, that's like a perfect storm for AXE. You know, obviously localization will help in the future. But yeah, we also have, like, lots of Ethereum's, right, in the community who are, you know, a lot of them are from, you know, the U.S., Canada, North America, and Europe. in northern Europe. So we have a decent mix. So one of the most impressive things to me about AXE

is that it's got almost a quarter million daily active players, which really indicates to me that AXE has succeeded in getting a significant amount of people over the crypto hump, as in like AXE requires some sort of Ethereum native infrastructure in order to play it, and people seem to be figuring that out. How have you guys, give us your secrets,

how have you guys gotten so many people using Ethereum infrastructure. How have you like ease that onboarding process? Yeah. So the, we actually just hit 500,000 daily active users today. Oh my God. The data is out that I,

that we put out there gets outdated, you know, every week, right? So yeah, we just, we just hit half a mill, a huge milestone. And yeah,

I think it's, you know, it hasn't been, it's been actually leaning in to what makes a crypto game and an NFT game special, right? Like, focusing on the economy in many ways and giving economic freedom to our players. I think, like, the more we focus on that and making this a game that would never be possible on traditional Rails, you know, I think really doubling down on that and making sure that

people understand the benefits, right? Making sure that they understand the benefits of peer-to-peer in-game markets for both the game assets as well as the in-game resources. Right, there has been amazing work done by our community, right? Like, one of the things that we build towards is for our crypto-native users to start onboarding their friends and family, right? So a lot of our users who are, right, like they might be grandmas, aunts, uncles, they were actually onboarded by hand by one of our community members, right,

who was like, this product is so life-changing and amazing. And this community is so much fun to be part of. I want to do this. I want to share this experience with someone that I love. If you have your users thinking like that, it can actually be a quite difficult product to get onboarded on. You know, like in Korea, so I'm actually currently in Korea. I'm half Korean.

Like all old people, all grandparents, they know how to use cacao talk or they have cacao talk on their phone. None of them like actually set it up for themselves. All of their children see it as their like filial duty to set it up for them. Like in the future, that is actually how blockchain adoption is going to happen. It's like this, this myth of like, yeah, like a lot of everyday people, they're never going to get like, no matter how simple we make it. Obviously, we need to keep making it more beautiful, more simple, right?

Like, I'm not trying to, like, say that. But, like, there's still going to be still on the level of complexity when it comes to, like, you know, because of a high-tech, you know, new fintech technology. So, yeah, I think a lot of it has to, it is about, like, you know, onboarding, personally onboarding, your friends and family. I'm getting them involved. And then, yeah, having something that once they do start,

once they have it on their phone, they're going to get a lot. I think that's another key with AXE is like, right, it's like the number, the amount of time that people are spending on mobile phones, looking at mobile phones is skyrocketing. And I think we're, and especially in emerging markets, right, where, you know, a lot of people, they don't have bank accounts, but they have a phone. So in the future, I think, and we're, I think like we're going to do some really awesome stuff with this in the future where people, they might not have a bank account.

They start playing AXI Infinity. They get some access, some SLP, some ETH, and then they get issued, right? They might get issued a card that they can then spend. So it's like kind of like really being onboarded into the kind of legacy system, but through this backdoor of, yeah, of the EVM. So this is so cool, right? So like this is why Bankless Nation, if you're listening to this, this is why we've been so excited about games for so long.

is because it offers this unique backdoor that like regular defy and regular crypto doesn't offer, right? And here's the secret. When I'm like distilling from what you just said, Gio is it's fun. People just want to have fun. And you know, like, God bless Bitcoin, it takes itself way too seriously, right? Digital old. Fixed cap supply. Ethereum at some level, too.

I mean, these are like financial assets and we use like financial terms and is it a capital asset or what. Like the thing with Axy is just so damn fun, right? Like you just like you want to have the important people in your life, your friends and family, partake in this cultural game with you. And so you onboard it. The only time in recent experience, I remember something like this is when Pokemon Go hit the U.S., right? It was big for a while. like kind of this like location-based game and like everybody was onboarding everyone else. The same thing is happening with AXI specifically in places like like the Philippines,

but it's also spreading to other countries. And what's so cool about this is this is going to be the gateway drug to the rest of crypto and to defy. And it's kind of like a backdoor, as you say, Gio, like a secret hack of getting people to go bankless. through gaming. And it hasn't quite been tapped in such a way that I've seen. And this is maybe the first time that we've seen it start to hit something that like half a million daily active users, that is absolutely massive for anything in crypto. So man, I'm just bubbling over with excitement. That wasn't even a question. That was just a comment. That's awesome. Yeah. I think one of the

key things to wrap around with Axi, wrap your head around with Axi, is that you can come into the ecosystem, right, with just the desire to learn and a lot of time on your hands. And right, you can make a nice TV, get accepted into a scholarship program. You know, at this point, you've never bought, you know, you never bought crypto and then you start, you know, you get accepted. You start earning some, some love potions, maybe even some axes, then boom, right? You can, you can sell them on you can swap V3 for some Eath and then, okay, you're onboarded, right? We've always in crypto, we've taken for granted, oh, like, of course we should pay these miners, you know, we should pay them in crypto for solving math problems, right?

Like, oh, of course we should pay yield to people who already own these assets, right? But it's actually the thing that we lack is adoption, right, from everyday people, right? And I think that gaming gives some way to do that, you know, incentivization to everyday people, right? Like so far we've incentivized security through mining and proof of work and now, you know, proof of stake, right? And we've incentivized holding and, you know, just depositing an asset, right? But like, we need to incentivize, yeah, you know, using an asset or using a product in a way that doesn't require capital in the beginning. So I think that's like one of the key breakthroughs that AXE has managed.

And I think that it's getting more and more stuff like this is coming. It makes me super exciting. If I have a question about your guys' Discord and your guys' community in there. I think most people in Ethereum and Defi will be familiar with what it's like to be in a Discord server and partake in the community there. but I think the Axi Infinity Discord might be a little bit different because your guys' Discord is over 200,000 people. Tell us about how the story of it getting that large.

What was it like before it was that big? And now that it's this big, how has it gotten organized? What's it like to be in a 200,000 person Discord? It's been amazing to see it go from the days of maybe 10 people, 20 people, you know, talking about the future. It actually makes me a little bit emotional to think about, okay, those things, those grand visions that people were talking about, right? Like, it seems like we might actually make it happen. And I'm sure, like, everyone there, like, they're ecstatic and things have gone, you know, so much better than they ever expected.

So, yeah, it was, you know, it was really slow building, right? Like, during the bare market, people didn't care about NFTs. There were days where I would go to sleep and wake up and nobody had said anything in the Discord. That feels bad. This feels like nobody's using your product. Like, you know, yeah, it feels bad, right? But yeah, I think, like, you know, the community really got stronger and bonded during the bare market. And, you know, thankfully, we get giving them, you know, little small updates and new products to work with until things kind of hit a tipping point.

And now, yeah, it's insane, right? Like, we have to be so, we have to be so thoughtful about the way that we organize. all of our channels. It's almost like, yeah, managing the Discord server channels is almost like, right, like a product design thought process, right? Where you have to be like, okay, they're joining and they're touching this. Okay, like this needs to be at eye level. So it's really, it's really, it's really intense.

And it's gotten to the point where, right, like certain channels are just overrun with with, with, with, with people coming in. But yeah, it's a really special feeling. And yeah, it's on track to become the largest discord on earth. We actually gained, I believe, 130,000 people this week in the discord. So we went from 240 to 370. For reference, the Fortnite Discord is the largest discord in the world right now. It only has 750,000 people in it.

So we're actually on track to become the largest discord in the world. if we maintain that growth rate of the last week in three or four weeks. So yeah, I hope it happens. We actually, if anyone from Discord is watching too, like I always have to DM all this Discord support staff on LinkedIn to get our server. There's a max server size that you can have.

You can only have like 100K and then like 250K. And every time we hit that cap, I have to DM their entire support stuff on LinkedIn. So yeah, if anyone from Discord is there, When we hit the next server limit. Just bump it already. Like it's going to happen. I think actually Discord might face scaling issues due to Axi channel one day.

So that brings me to my next question. How 200,000 people, that's too many people for any one person to be able to keep track of or even a group of people. So how has the AXI community kind of like self-organized into more bite-sized manageable sizes? Yeah, I mean, so I think, so there's part of it. Part of it is like moderation in the core discord, right? So we have like community members that step up, right, almost, you know, in a kind of very doubt-like fashion where they're self-managing, they're helping the new players, they're doing support, right?

And sometimes we oftentimes will even hire from within the community, like people doing that kind of stuff or look to hire. But then, yeah, also we have, right, like other kind of sub-satellite discord. So some of these discords are related to the different scholarship programs. So they'll have like, you know, all their scholars, their guildmates slash scholars in one channel and they're able to communicate quite well with them. And then, yeah, they're also like kind of more private exclusive clubs, right? I think like part of NFTs, part of the whole game that we play with NFTs is about status and power, right? Who has the rare stuff?

So a lot of the people who own the rare stuff or they like to hang out together and talk about, I think community, even work together, you know, they might even start projects, become business partners. So yeah, I think like that's, there's a whole other aspect of actually that I think is super important, right, is the social aspect, right? Some people, right, they just see it as a way to, you know, they're not like necessarily looking to earn a return. They might just, you know, want some of the rare stuff, meet some of the other people who have that rare stuff and hang out with kind of like-minded individuals. I think one of the amazing things is that for so long we were as a species, like basically confined to hang out with the people who are near us physically, right? But now it's like we can subdivide based on like our ideals, right?

It happens to be that a lot of the people who own mystic axes or, you know, something like that, something super, some super rare NFT, they have a lot of like the same interest, right? So it's kind of a cool way to filter for the same. people that you might want to be friends with in real life. Gio, are the, uh, the, the, the, the crypto punks people different from the, uh, the Axi owning people culturally. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to start anything. Um, I don't want to start anything like that, you know, crypto punts community is really

awesome. Um, I think they're, they're amazing. Um, there is definitely some overlap and there are also some differences. Um, right? So I think we're a little bit, right? Like, you know, we're trying to experiment. Um, um, um, you know, we're trying to experiment. Um, um, um, and do new things, whereas, right, like, crypto puns kind of various, like, we know the rules. It's like, okay, there's 10,000, right? Like, you can use them as your profile picture. Like, you know, so, so yeah, I think there's a little bit of a cultural divide,

but there's also a fair amount of overlap, right? It's like, I think, like, in crypto, we're always like, yeah, like, oh, it's fun to, like, you know, make, you know, it's kind of fun to, like, start these little tribal wars. I think I'm also, like, you know, I can, like, have a thing against, like, you know, Bitcoin holders sometimes. But yeah, it's like, I think like sometimes also like, you know, we should try and focus on our similarities. Like we're all much more similar to each other than we are to everyday people or muggles, like as I like to call them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a little bit like, you know, when it's good, it's a little bit like sports rivalries. But when it's bad,

it gets tribal and weird and not awesome. But we've seen this play out in other places in crypto. It's funny that it's also playing out in the kind of the digital asset gaming. realm. So let's maybe talk about this as we as we come to a close geo is Axi has learned some key lessons, I think, through going through kind of the bare run and then building up to this point, right? Lessons about, you know, community and how digital assets can be so transformative and digital scarcity and economics and even this emergent behavior that you hadn't anticipated. Project forward for us because this is like Axi. in the scheme of the gaming industry is one experiment here. But how is this crypto technology going to

change the gaming industry and what things do you think will start to see coming out of the gaming industry? Because they got to be taking notice. If you guys flipping Fortnite as the biggest Discord server in the world, every game studio has got to be taking notice of what made you so successful. So what are the lessons that can be applied here and what are we going to see in the gaming industry? Yeah, I think that actually will be kind of a category defining NFT game player and game. So like maybe the angry birds or something like that. The world of Warcraft for them most. So yeah, I think we're going like I think whenever you give people a group of users, freedom, more freedom, you start to see a lot of really interesting

behaviors start to emerge. I think this is one of the fundamental innovations of crypto, right? But now we're just applying it to gamers. We're giving gamers free markets. We're giving them true control and ownership of their assets, as well as the games that they play. So we're going to see fanatic game communities start to arise with backing the developers that really get this model well. I think the most fanatic communities the world has ever seen are going to be NFT gaming communities because of the incentive alignment. And I think it's just going to be incredible. I think that we're going to see a lot of like amazing experiments. But I think that we're also going to see the incumbents be kind of slow to react. There is a lot of open questions. They kind of

raised your eyebrows. Obviously they're, you know, they're watching. now. They're still, they're still, they're still don't really know how to pull it off. A lot of it has to do with building for three years in a bare market, to be honest, right? Because like, I don't even know how I would, right? Like, even if you knew how to build AXI and copied it, like, could you actually reproduce its success, right? I mean, that's, it's like the same thing with Ethereum, right? Like, all the eth killers that they say that they can make better tech, but it's all about the community, the developer community. Uh, I think like with AXE, right, like, yeah, we have, uh, you know, we just, we have something special that couldn't just be kind of like copy pasted.

So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see if it can't, right, like how translatable these models are to different communities to different games. The thesis, though, is that, you know, they will be. It just, it just will require a very thoughtful execution and community building. And what are your thoughts, Gio, on, like, emerging markets and kind of, like, emerging countries? Because it is the case that, like, some people in the field, Philippines are making living wage by playing axes every day. Do you think this revolution will happen in emerging markets? And do you think it will kind of like start there at some level?

I think I think so. So this is what we're seeing. So here's some numbers. There are 3 billion gamers in the world. There are 2 billion under-employed people in the world. There are 2 billion pet owners in the world. And Surreta, I think like, yeah, the best, the best, you know, NFT games, best crypto games are going to be at the intersection of all those markets. And yeah, so I think like you could theoretically say that, you know, in maybe 20 years, there might be two billion people. There might be two billion people, you know, in these metaverse economies, in these digital economies.

And the number of gamers might now be, at that time, might be 4.5 billion. because there's all these people who are not playing games because they're unemployed, they're underemployed, they don't have time to play games, right? They need to figure out how to survive, right? Those people are people that should be playing games, right? So it's like we're actually increasing the pool of potential gamers by, I think, by quite a lot. So yeah, I think, I think, like, if I had to do a prediction, I think like one billion by 2032, yeah, a billion players in these, metaverse game economies and kind of play to earn metaverse workers. And Gio, this reminds me of a section we touched on briefly but didn't really go too much into

and I want to make sure that we cover it before we leave this podcast. The $25 million in daily volume going on in the AXE economy plus the 50,000 NFTs that are sold per day, I'm guessing those numbers are already stale, judging by how every other number that we've produced is already, like seven days old already. But you said something earlier that the AXI team isn't capturing these fees. These aren't fees captured by the AXI team. So when we look at $25 million in daily volume, is that all going to players,

as in players are earning all of that money or at least the majority of it? Yeah, so those are peer-to-peer, right? So it's $33 million today and peer-to-peer transactions. And the ecosystem fee is 4.25%. of those transactions. And so, right, the Sky Mavis, the inventors, I like to think of us as the inventors of Axi infinity.

None of my teammates say that yet. Maybe I'll convert them. SkyMovus, the inventors of Axi, right? Like, we have exposure to that fee by holding approximately 18% of the Axis supply. And so the 50,000, probably larger of NFTs being sold per day, $33 million per day.

That's the income spread across all of the AXI players over the world on a daily basis. $33 million per day. Like, no wonder you guys call yourself a nation. The GDP of that is absolutely insane. Do you have any numbers today as to, like, to, like, how, if you think of AXE as, like, an employer, how many employees, or what's the labor force magnitude of AXE Infinity?

Yeah, so you can think of it is, like, probably, I would say 80%, maybe 70, 80%, like, let's go with the power, power roll, let's say 80%, it classified as Metaverse workers, right? So that's like I mean 420, 400 some odd thousand under Metaverse

workers. And then yeah, like kind of a monthly volume of 30 times 30 is like almost a billion dollars, right? So yeah, we start we start we're starting to we're starting to get up there and and i think like i think the the

nations of the future are going to be opt-in they're going to be people who are united by a by common beliefs and ideals and they're not going to be right like uh based on physical boundaries right and i think that's an antiquated concept like you have to be part of the nation that you were you know you rolled out on day one so i think that it's that of all things that we've talked about on this podcast illustrates the power of the intersection of Ethereum and gaming the most. If you can build a game that users want to play and you can find a way to leverage digital assets and Ethereum's defy, then you can start to produce something that produces more value for the world than like the bottom like 50% of all nations out there. So, Gio, like congratulations on building one of the most successful.

I don't like the word employers, but like revenue generating for its users' systems, economies, ecosystems of all time. That's absolutely crazy. I think one cool, if you go to token terminal, right, it shows kind of like, you know, the different revenue generating protocols.

Actually, this week generated $33 million in protocol revenue. Bitcoin only generated $5 million in fees. So yeah. If you switch, if you switch like the view to like maybe metrics or something,

for some reason, I just want to show the, I just want to show the chart with Bitcoin on it. But yeah, you guys can, you guys can digger around at home. Yeah. Where's, I think you want somewhere in here.

No, it's not. There's one view where you can also compare it against Bitcoin. And that one is my favorite. I think if you press metrics, try pressing metrics in the top left. Metrics in the top left. There you go. Wow. Wow.

Right behind Uniswap. Yeah, and go to Weekly. That's like, I think, like, the most. Wow. It's almost Ethereum. That's insane. It's for a good week. This is incredible.

all that. Well, Gio, this has been an absolute blast. Yeah, so excited for what you guys had built. What's so cool is this is like a crypto gaming native economy, right? Not a lot of Fiat on ramps here because you don't really need them. You guys instead have created an economy on the other side. So we are super excited to see where this goes. We always like to end these Gio with some action items for folks. If people want to get started with AXI or learn a bit more about it, where should they go. Yeah, I think you can follow Axi Infinity on Twitter. That's just at Axi infinity. Try joining the Discord. Discord.g.g.s.g. slash Axi. Yeah, I think YouTube has so much awesome content, too. It's like if you type in how to get started with Axi or Axi Infinity starter guide,

I think that's key for us is that we're able to leverage these channels like Twitch, right, Twitch viewership exploding and YouTube, right? Like, we have all these content creators training out content for onboarding. So yeah, I think YouTube also has a lot of amazing content out there. Also, if you just say, hey, Axi family, I'm looking to get started. Can someone help me? Like 30 people are going to show. You'll get swarmed.

All right, guys, those are some action items for you. Speaking of great content on YouTube, bankless channel, have you subscribed yet? If you are still listening, make sure you hit that like and subscribe button so we can get bankless YouTube to more people to. Gio, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been an honor, gentlemen. Thanks for having me. And yeah, we'll talk again soon. All right, guys. Let's end it with some risks and disclaimers. Of course, none of this was financial advice. Eat is risky. Crypto is risky smooth love potions. There's probably some volatility too.

You could lose what you put in. So be careful. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.