Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Jérôme de Tychey: Cometh – The Blockchain Game at the Intersection of NFTs and DeFi

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Cometh is a game on Ethereum that lets users own yield-generating NFTs, integrating both DeFi and NFT features into a single, fun gaming experience. As a player, you control spaceships (also called astronomers) orbiting around giant stars and your goal is to position yourself close to the asteroids (also known as smart asteroids) passing by. When you are close enough, you will be able to mine tokens from that asteroid.Jerome de Tychey, founder of the project, joined us to chat about how the game works, interactions with AMMs and lending protocols, and the future of blockchain gaming.Topics covered in this episode:Jerome's background and his involvement building the French Ethereum communityJerome's role at Ledger and ConsenSysAn overview of Cometh and how the game worksHow Cometh interacts with AMMs and lending protocolsThe game’s native tokens: MUST and DUSTCometh's use of Polygon and the launch of its own layer-2 networkHow Cometh taps into the existing NFT worldThe potential for games built on top of existing DeFi infrastructureThe future of blockchain gaming and NFTsEpisode links:ComethDocs on ComethGithubGeckoConCometh on TwitterJerome on TwitterSponsors:CowSwap: CowSwap is a Meta-Dex Aggregator built by Gnosis. It taps into all on-chain liquidity - including other dex aggregators such as Paraswap, 1inch and Matcha - offering the best prices on all trades. It provides some UX perks (no gas costs for failed transactions!) and protects traders against MEV. - https://epicenter.rocks/cowswapThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/416

Welcome to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. I'm Sebast Sincuuchin. Today I'm speaking with Jerome de Tichet, who is the founder of Kometh and also the founder of ECC. I'm sure if you've heard them on the podcast before in that context. And today we're going to be speaking mostly about Kometh. And just full disclosure, I'm an investor in this project. But before we speak to Jerome about Kometh, I'd like to tell you about our sponsor this week. Dexas are great, but they're vulnerable to...

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I'm sad I had to give you an investment sheep to get on the podcast. But that's definitely worse it. Yeah, no, but you know, it's funny because I was thinking about this before. And I first found out about Khamath because our mutual friend, Simon Polaro, was, you know, came into the office one day when, you know, when I was working at Aidan. And he was like, I saw him like doing something kind of weird on the screen with like these ships and stuff. And I was like, Simon, what are you doing? He's like, oh, man, I'm sticking my must tokens. I'm getting dust.

And I'm like, you know, building these ships and everything. And I said, okay, that's, that's too much for me. Like, and I just went back to work. And then, you know, as, as time went on, I started, like, learning more about the project. And, yeah, finally, like, ended up investing in the project. But, yeah, I think this is, you know, really a cool project because it, it, it introduces people to defy without actually, like, knowing. Like, people could play the game and, like, not know that they're interacting with all these defy primitives and I think that's what's really powerful.

So, you know, our list was probably know you as the guy who organizes ETCC and we had you on the show a couple of times when we went to the conference. But, you know, tell us a bit about yourself, like who is Jerome de Tichet and how did you become involved with the Ethereum community?

And, you know, I think what a lot of people don't realize is like you had a really important role in the early days of the French Ethereum community. So tell us a bit about your journey. This journey has been an amazing one, like most of the people that have been a little early in the space. But it's been great also because we had resources like EPCenter. So it was like when we were preparing this interview, I told you like one of my childhood dream, like a blockchain childhood dream, was to be one day on the epicenter because like I learned a lot watching some podcasts.

I remember Vlad Zemfier's early podcasts. and others like Rick Dudley and so on or even Vitalik on the podcast. It really convinced me to get even deeper on Ethereum and learn a lot from this podcast. So I used to try to do research in economics. I started a PhD back in 2011 and I couldn't find the proper financing. I couldn't find the proper subject. I was struggling and decided to be an economist in private institutions, in public institutions. Back in those days, I learned about Bitcoin.

The very idea of doing money without central bank was very appealing. I felt it super interesting. And looking back, I was teaching courses in economics at different university, and I'm now also a professor in economics at an engineering school. When I realized what Bitcoin could be or what crypto asset could be, I also realized the lack of understanding of money, even in economics courses. So it was my rabbit hole. I wanted to get deeper into it. I wanted to understand it better.

I wanted to participate to whatever movement was going on at this stage. and I soon decided to do some mining. Did bad investment in mining because I bought GPUs when the network was switching to FPGA and then to ASICs. So every time there was a change in the technology, I was less and less effective in my mining return. And I discovered Ethereum this way. Like I wasn't too connected with the crypto communities. I didn't participate to the ICO in the early days,

but when the network went online, I just switched my miners there and tried to do something. This is where I got to meet people from the French ecosystem, like Simon that you mentioned before, and we were trying to get people together in 2015 about just meetups to discuss Ethereum, just meet up to discuss how to do a smart contract, how to run a mining software at scale,

how to make sure that those things work. Can we overclock our GPUs? What could we do? So this is how the nonprofit used to be called Assets, A-S-S-E-T-H. Hence, why many people ask us, why would you call anything as-if or as-et, like what is this thing?

We started off this nonprofit to get a little legal structure around the meetups that we were organizing. And back in those time, I was working for the European Commission. On the French side, I was a statistician and economist for some of the studies that the commission was publishing. And while the giant leap was going to Shanghai for DefCon 2, I got many, many good adventures happened there. I met lots of good people. I think our pass, yours and mine cross maybe a little later in Shanghai.

And, you know, this is where the whole adventure really, really started. I met Joe Lubin, we were fantasizing about opening an office in Europe. I had just had an offer from Ernst & Young to start their blockchain team. It was 2016, yeah, about time. And also the foundation, Vittalik and back in those days, it was Min Chan. We were looking at organizing events similar to DevCon in Paris or in Europe. So they put us in Dutch, like Itcham, France, and the It's German. Foundation and the organizers from HeadCon to have them set up atcon in Paris.

So we did HeadCon in 2017 and we liked it so much, like organizing an event like this in Paris was so great that we decided to do the same thing every year. And so far so good. I'm knocking on wood. We managed to organize this conference every year ever since. So 2017 for the Zero Edition, Edcon, Paris and then HCC, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. and on the side I was following my my own career in the space

so I worked at Einstein Young for about a year and a half and then I work at Consensus for about two years and then I worked at Ledger for a year and a half and now I'm my own boss working on Kameh and having lots of fun along the way Asset changed the name to become Ethereum France the website was created by Simon Porro

and then we decided to take this brand instead of assets because it's easier for for speakers to say Ethereum France instead of assets. The brand is a bit stronger. And yeah, we are at the moment preparing to open the sponsorship, the call for sponsors and the call for speakers for SEC next year, July 2022. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you guys in Paris. And also, congrats to the Liscon guys for hosting a beautiful conference that happened last week. And shout out to Gnosis.

We were doing such a great job. And I've been using KOSOP and testing it out in LISCON. It's pretty nice. I mean, with regards to ETC, I'm always just so thrilled that there's such a great conference happening in the city where I live. And I don't have to travel to go there. It's like, I can just go home. It's really great. And I mean, this year was amazing.

given the context, I think it was like a huge achievement to be able to, like, host ETC in such a context. I wanted to mention about ECC that we are still doing this conference. Well, we are doing this conference as a non-profit and try to keep the same vibe of, yeah, just it's at cost, just come, have fun. If you don't get a ticket because whatever reason it's sold out, just get there and enjoy the side events and so on. but from an organizer's perspective, we are seeing this shift in the ecosystem where now people are coming to SEC to do business. They know they are going to meet people

that will be partners, will be potential clients, will be potential colleagues. So it's really nice to see how our ecosystem matured through the eyes of the conference that we organize. And I hope that next year we will finally get to bring Asian projects to Paris because that was one of the one of the things I regret the most over those years. I think 2019 we were too young and still too much in the beer market to really get people to travel. 2020 people were ready to travel but got denied traveling. In 2021 it was too unsure for

people to travel. So what I want for next year is that we really bring people from all over the world, not only the Western world in Paris, because it feels like so many things are happening in Asia that we are missing out, and we could continue accelerating and goering the cake for everyone by getting those communities together. There you go. So if you're in Asia and you've got a cool project and you want to pitch Jerome, we'll put the links in the show notes and where you can do that. So I just want to talk briefly about your role at Ledger, because you recently left Ledger as I think it was a global head of customer success. or like some customer facing role. Because Ledger is such a pillar, I think,

in the French crypto ecosystem. And like in the global ecosystem, like broadly, what did you take away from that experience, like working there? So the full title was global height of client success. So it's like a clearly a role that's big and small at the same time. I was in charge of both the B2B and the BTC. satisfaction of our clients. So whether you are

the holder of the donor of a nano X or whether you are a client for ledger custody solution for enterprise, ledger vault, you will at some point have had to deal with me on the support, on what

features you wanted, or what improvement of the of the wallet you wanted. The experience. Well, So first off, when you change job in the middle of COVID, it's tough to get to manage a team of 35 or 40 something, 40-ish number of people. So large team and transition was kind of hard to manage large team in the middle of COVID,

so you don't get to really create a human link. So I had to work a lot on this to make sure that the team kept this cohesion. and also it was both an exciting time for Azure because they were starting to fundraise, the bull market was turning off, but also they unfortunately faced some difficulties with the data leak notably or with, you know, crypto in general, like new things happening all the time, new requests all the time to integrate XYZ. So personally I had a very good time there. This was a very demanding role,

but I learned a lot being in touch with individuals like Pascal Gautier, like Ian Rogers, like Jean-Michel Payon, the guys in charge of the B2B division. And I got to see what a blockchain team that was trying to tackle the whole blockchain because leisure is really not focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are focused on anything crypto, focused on getting people into crypto one way or another.

So I learned how hard it could be to support all of those network at once. I learned also to see the constraint through the highs of very security-focused people, but not really from a smart contract perspective, but on how to keep your key safe. There are certain things that ledger hasn't tried yet. And I cannot say if they will go there or not at some point. But, you know, the example of smart contract, smart contract what is, like Ignoressafe, for example, is doing,

is something that it's not taboo, but just weird from a purely pure ledger set of mind. those things are evolving of course but when I arrive at Leisure I was like hey so cool guys I come from consensus we are doing lots of stuff about about smart contract security like a smart contract as secure let's go and they were like probably probably rightfully so well guys we focus on making good key generation and making sure that the people know what they are signing so this kind of this kind of approach was really an enrichment for me and I'm glad about my time there I got about the transition that I did between Ledger and Kometh, and they were very supportive.

So, yeah, I advise anyone that find a role on the job list that is at Ledger to definitely consider applying its really good ground and really good team. Yeah, I wonder how, I mean, how Ledger is going to evolve as Crypto becomes more mainstream. Because, you know, I think for like a lot of people that are coming into this, now. Like, you know, there's like been the cycles, right? So, like, people that came in in 2016, 2017, I think were fairly technically minded and, you know, had a good understanding of, like, how cryptography works for the most part and, like, the importance of holding keys and stuff. The people I meet now that are getting into crypto are, like, just, just like, you know, regular people. They're like, total normies, you know? And, like, I went to a party a couple weeks ago, and, like,

four or five people were asking me about crypto and how they can buy an FD's. And it's like, it's a total new class of people. It's not the same as like in 2016. It's like your neighbor, right? So the meme of you standing with your glass saying like, they don't know, I'm a ash mask owner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't work.

Totally. Yeah, yeah. Like, hey, you're the NFT guy. Tell me how you can be into crypto. So this, I mean, it doesn't help that I walk around wearing like t-shirts that say leave off a gate, NFT. But, yeah. So, and I think for these people, like the risk.

associated to like holding your own keys and like storing those keys. It's it's too much. And I think that it's too complex for like this kind of audience. And so, you know, not to like, not to plug, you know, a competitor here, but like I've been working on another podcast called The Zen Crypto show with my friends over at Zen Go and, you know, we're trying to educate people about crypto. And like the experience there is, you know, there is a tradeoff with regards to like who holds the keys because it's like a multi-party thing, like they have a key and you have a key. But I find

that for a beginner, I mean, that's something where I can go to and say like in five minutes, you're set up, you're secure, you can have crypto. And I wonder where Ledger is going to sit in this evolving ecosystem where they continue to have this product that relies on key generation. You're right. It's a tough question. And I, I don't have a definitive answer to that, of course. I kind of remember the time where you were into crypto, like in 14, 15, 16, even 17. People were telling you, like, okay, so key generation, use a treasure or a ledger, and also run your own node.

You have to run your own node. People were like running your own node. We didn't have come into play now? Who is running their own node? I'm running a node, but because doing other things. But if you're just a user, if you're just buying whatever NFT on OpenC, you're not running your own nodes. You're even potentially paying with credit card on OpenC. Yeah, I mean, I run my own mail server.

And there was a time, I think, when people ran their own mail servers. But at some point, people just started using Gmail. And not to make this a whole conversation about, you know, about like this steering. But I think it is a pressing point that people are not going to. continue using solutions like ledger if there is this kind of technical burden and like this responsibility to have to keep your keys. Yeah. Right, right. But when you, when you open up a ledger and you do the setup, and over the past two years, the setuping a ledger has improved a lot. You can always improve the user experience, the user feedback on what it is to start using the product.

but in any case it will come down to this hasling like okay now you need to generate the key now you need to write down the 24 words look at what metamask is doing you install metamask you start using metamask and every time you do a transaction and tell you like did you do your backup so you should do your backup that's a good way to just not force the people into getting into it but at least the

the advantage of ledger of a resolution is that you are doing this asling once in the beginning and you have to do it. So you have to do this little litigation on key security, key reliability, key responsibility. It's never enough because once it's done and you start trading, you forget about it. And at some point you remember that you give away your 24 words to your best friends, which is now not your best friend anymore. it's super tough to find to find the right spot of this.

At Comuth, for example, we are at the opposite side of the spectrum. If you were to use our game, we would ask you to connect with a wallet. You have one, you don't have one, never mind. Just put your email, and we rely on MagicLink, which is a wallet provider based on emails. So every time you log in, you receive an email saying you want to log in to Camuth.

Yes, I want to log into ComF. And now you are using this key to transact on our smart contract. So we take away the liability from Commerce onto MagicLink. Yes. But once we see that the player is accumulating some decent amount of valuable tokens, we try to nudge them onto a better solution, onto using agnosis safe, using a ledger, using a thing. And we have this concept of player profiles that is an externally owned account

where the MagicLink account is the reference for playing. But whenever you want to do something weird, something more defy-oriented, we led you into getting something more secure. But, you know, it's a really good approach. I like that kind of gradual approach to, you know, getting to a more secure solution. There's no one-size-fits-all. And it's going to be our industry's challenge for the next two or three years

until eventually Apple or Samsung start to put the wallet in the enclave. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good chance we might get there. So this has been a long enough intro, but this is really interesting. I can go on about this stuff. So, yeah, tell what is Cometh and, you know, what kind of game is it? What's your goal as a player? Like, what is it, for people who are not familiar, maybe with gaming so much, like what are some other games that they may be familiar with, at least just by name,

that kind of resemble Khammed? So we had a first, so now under the name Kammeth, we have different games, not only just one, but at the moment two are alive, and another one is about to be released. So we see yourself as a Web3 game studio, blockchain game studio, because we emit some assets, we emit NFTs, we emit some NERC 20 that are used in our games. So we see our games as an infrastructure where you can use the NFTs that you've purchased from us or the tokens that you've acquired from playing our games. the very first game that we published was kind of similar to the dinosaur you get when you don't have internet. You need to avoid black holes and asteroids coming to you when you're just moving your spaceship. You're talking about like in Chrome when your internet's not working and you played with the little dinosaur jumping over.

Yeah, we did a proof of concept of this based on the on the NFT that we minted. And then we start trying out another game. that for us was a way to test the limits of what blockchain can do in terms of gaming. So Kammath, the game that was live from February to end of September. After this, we put the game on Ayatus before deploying a new one, was a real-time strategy game. So you had to position yourself in the space. And the only way you could position yourself in space was to pay another player to move you.

So it's a concept we invented called Gravity Pulling. Sebastian, you have a spaceship. I have a spaceship. I want to get closer to you. I'm paying you to drag me towards you. And why would you pay anyone to drag you in space? Well, you want to position yourself on the trajectory of approaching asteroids. And if you get close enough to those asteroids,

you will be able to mine the tokens that are on those asteroids. So we started off with this concept of you launch your spaceship in the space. your spaceship is orbiting around a star. Many players are doing the same. Your initial position is sort of random. And we have asteroids popping up randomly and you need to get close to them. And then we observe what the players did.

So the players were leveraging their position when they were in a good spot. They were upping their price. When they were in the bad spot, they were pushing their price down. They were anticipating where the asteroids were going to pass by and changing the price accordingly.

So we're jumping from one solar system to another and collaborating with each other to do those jumps effectively. And then we started to host esports tournaments. So large-scale tournaments were up to 1,000 people played together at the same time. And that from, I think 1,000 people playing on the same map is something that's really hard to do in the traditional gaming space.

well it's weird after traditional finance here comes the traditional gaming so traditional traditional gaming you have a server you connect a certain number of players on the server

and if you want to connect thousands of players on the server it's start to become a network challenge connecting thousands of people on the blockchain is what the blockchain was made for the only drawbacks

is that the game cannot be entirely in real time it has to be turnbase or turn-based or done base with real time, so you can only do an action every four second, but we can adapt that to the gameplay so that it feels natural to play this way. So that was the second game we published, and we had a little success with this, about 10,000 players tried this game, and gave us a lot

of feedback to build better games next. And the way we are going to continue onto this is by building up an ecosystem of game that are all fitting together onto a large exploration space, drama, and role-playing game. But every time we ship a standalone game that get plugged into the whole ecosystem, and we battle-test it and improve it as time go. Okay, so Khamath is becoming or will become an ecosystem of games, all these sort of like mini, mini games or more or less big games, you know, like all in this ecosystem. And when you're playing, you know, those interactions happening between those different games.

So you might have like an MMRP over here and you might like have some other sort of gameplay over here. And then these games sort of interact together via the D5 primitives that exist underneath. Yeah, that's right. Imagine this flow, you arrive in the game. where you get a basic introduction of what you can do with this. You're the captain of a spaceship. You can recruit crew members. You can equip your spaceship with XYZ items.

You can showcase your NFT in your spaceship. And you get to explore the space around you. You get to mine resources on different asteroid. You can get to go to a crafting bench where you can try to craft stuff. And soon enough, you realize that there are games of player that you may join and have more of a social experience. there are some quests that you can do and learn more about the story behind the game or the story

behind the project financing this guild for example, this guild or this quest. You may encounter another player that is aggressive and he will ask you for a fight or you may run into an angry mob and have to fight

this opponent. But the fighting of an opponent is something that we call combat battle and combat battle will be the next mini game that we are going to release. And as we balance and improve this game, we will make it fit into the global exploration side of it.

You just said something here that just clicked with me when you said financing guilds. And I couldn't help but just picture an ecosystem where you may have investors that are coming in and financing teams through a Dow and essentially getting like a return on that investment through the Dow, just like you would finance like an e-sports team or anything like that. It's like, yeah, it's super interesting.

It's just lots of different ideas come to mind here. Two approach to this one that we have already tried, and another one that we will try in the short run, is that some of the esports tournament that we had were restricted in access to some kind of spaceships. So if you have a rare spaceship or a mid-ing spaceship, you can access the top-tier tournaments. It means that only if you were able to mint those rare NFTs or find them by chance or purchase them on the secondary market or on the primary market, you had access to those tournaments. Now, not all of the top spaceship owner are the best players. So we created a rental system where a player can say, hey, here.

Here's my chance law, beautiful spaceship that we are in the game. Here's my chance law. If you want, you can rent my chance law, and I'm renting my chance law to any players that is in the top 50 or the top 100. And we have a revenue sharing scheme where you get 95% of your income with this spaceship, and I get 5%. This was the rental service that we put in place for the first game. We are continuing to build on top of it for the next game.

But we want the players that are investing in those NFTs that have effects from one game to another to also be able to feature them and lend them to other players. Some guilds of players are already accumulating some spaceships in that view, preparing for this kind of thing. And the other thing we can do with, you know, you mentioned about financing guilds and so on, is that content creation can be brought into the game in the form of an NFT enhanced experience. So let's say you have an AVE NFT,

like you equip this AVE NFT, and now you get access to 3 or 4 AVE quest. In those AVE quests, you get special things that were, that were a special experience that was created by our team and the Avey team, getting you to different systems, getting you to different game mechanics. And at the end, if you manage to win the quest, you can win a little bit of AVE token

or win access to a specific thing related to AVE. So it gives those social NFTs or just a beautiful piece of art NFC that were created by those projects, also a game utility and can be enhanced with the rental service that you can say, well, I had this quest, I managed to go into this quest. So now I'm going to lend my MFT to Sebastian. So Sebastian also will have this same experience as me. How many users are playing the game? And I don't know if this – what is the game's market cap?

So the main game that we run from February to September had 10,000 unique players with only a little bit more than 4,000 spaceship minted. So the rental service worked very well. We had about 5,000 rental contract that were created. So players had the choice between getting a really cheap spaceship and trying out the game in a reduced area. Like the size of the game when you had this nearly free spaceship or sometimes free spaceship was not really big. Or they get to rent a better spaceship and go in the wild. So 10,000 players tried the game.

About 2,000 played monthly at the peak of the game. And a little bit more than 700 was playing daily. The game was very active in terms of transaction being signed and sent to the blockchain. One of our key achievement is that we managed to overflow the number of transactions counted on polygon scan. So here's for the achievement. for quite some time he was saying minus one, minus one transaction on the must token. Because when you are interacting in the game

or you had to transfer must to the players in order to move, the game token is called the must, M-U-S-T. And there is 1 million musts in the... that have been minted, and it will be ever minted. And the price of the must, I think today is $120 or something. Now when it comes to the locked value in the game, it's difficult to answer because most of the spaceship in the game are in the game.

So does it count as value? And not all of the mass token has been distributed. So who knows what's the... Well, it's difficult to find a good model to frame your analysis. Okay. So, okay, what's the TV? What's the number of players? Okay, let's go.

I mean, no, I'm out. More on an activity based or on a content creation base, maybe that's the right approach to look at it. That's cool. So let's dive into like the, you know, the back end little bit, like what's under the hood. And, you know, talk about the different D5 primitives that exist sort of like underneath these games. So like I understand there's an AMM, which is kind of like a uniswap clone. And does the renting like have some sort of a lending and borrowing protocol underneath it?

So the rental system was bespoke. the idea is that we create an account that you transfer your so we create a smart contract account you transfer your NFT to this smart contract account and and then me as a as a renter I would look at the contract that are open for for rental and they have a condition saying if you want to rent this you send the owner this amount of token to enter and they have they have a constraint on every time you mint something

a certain portion of what you've minted or what you've gained in the game will be sent to the owner as well. So the rental system it works is a simple, externally owned account with different roles. The owner of the account will be the person that own the NFT

but the operator of the account will be the renti. And now this rental account manage a white list that is the contract that the person is allowed to interact with and those contracts are the contract of the game of course so it's a straightforward way to do rentals in the first place we have some improvement and things we want to add to this rental system

and we'll work on this for the next version of the rental system on the side of this rental system there is a as you mentioned an IMM Uniswap fork we call it comment swap. It's not co-swap. It's comet swap. And it's a decentralized exchange built on top of Polygon at the moment. And at least a lot of gaming project in this AMM. The reason why we wanted to have an AMM is that the fees that are generated by the AMM are sent into the game. So the more the activity of the AMM, the more things are sent into the game. And also, we rely on the AMM to to create game experiences.

So in the next version of the game, something that we are working on right now, actually, is the crafting system. So when you have two resources, you can combine them into a new item, but how much of resource A and how much of resource B you need to put in is actually based on the state of the pool from A to B in the AMM.

So we rely on the routing, on the routing of the AMM to create dynamic recipes for items. So this way we are stabilizing the economy of the game so that if there is an excess of any resources, it doesn't translate into an excess of any items that can be crafted with those resources. And when you dig deeper and deeper on applying decentralized finance services,

whether it's in-house or sort-party-based into a game economy, you find out that you can build game economy that are much more advanced and resilient than existing games. So crafting system is only an example, but we can look at different topics in the same way. The next step for us will also be to give access directly from the premises of the game

to some other services. like AVE, like Picklefinance, like sushi swap, like Steakdow and so on, to make sure that our players, while they are playing, are also getting educated on what they can do with that token or what they can do with them. So, I mean, why did you build your own AMM though? And, like, I mean, because, like, there's so much more liquidity in, in other AMMs. Like, are you able to tap into some of that liquidity elsewhere?

And I guess, like, there's a, if all these primitives exist, already, what's to stop someone from building a game like on top of Avey or on top of like uniswap or any other like existing defibrative? They should definitely. So one of the one of the driver for us was to be able to properly manage our own token list. So it's it's in the white paper. So I'm not giving away any alpha here. But whenever we integrate new resources, so like we are going to use the whole chemical

chemical elements as resources in the game. So we want to make sure that you're mining, gold, your mining silver. Gold and titanium. Gold and uranium. Okay. So you have gold and uranium. So, like, it's our new tokens that we need to list.

We wanted to have the end on how much training fees was sent to the LPs, how much training fees was sent to the game itself. We tried to make a link between having the NFT and, and having a say in the game, having a stake in the game. So the fees that those simple defy-primitive collects are meant to be redistributed to the players or are meant to go either directly or through the game to the players. So relying on the third-party decks for the IMM

was clearly not considering this IMM as a public utility for the whole game, which it came into, came clearly as pretty soon when we start to conceptualize the game. On the other side, I think landing protocols is really hard if you don't have the proper liquidity. Today, the game can very well live with not so big liquidity, not so big volume, because it's restricted. to the community of players we have.

And so I think we are very happy by running our own decks at the moment. It may change in the future, but it also facilitates so many things in terms of integration and ease of use for our players that it's fine to do so. But I think the next play, if we were starting to have liquidity problem,

would be to use an aggregator like one inch of power swap and expose that to the players. It's just that the top. token that we want to features, the token that we want to showcase, we want to have direct access to them and to how the IMM is dealing with them. Also, if you want to do some liquidity mining operations, like giving away some must to some liquidity providers, it's much easier to have the end on your own IMM in this case. And right now, it's not to cover some for us to entertain it and manage it.

So we will continue this way, I think. So you mentioned must. So talk a little bit about the native token or tokens must and dust. What are the roles in the game and how do they interact with each other? So the must token is the utility token of the game. And when you are staking must, you are getting dust. Now, what can you do with the must? With the must you can pay for in-game transactions.

So most of the game product or most of the services in the game are labeled in must. So if you wanted to come close to your spaceship, I would have to pay you in must. And the dust token, when you are not using your must, just stick your must and get some dust. And with the dust token, you can redeem new NFTs or you can redeem some operations in the game, like new spaceships or new piece of art from the game. some advantages, so like participating, getting a ticket for the next tournament, you get that by sticking rest and using your dust in that respect. The dust is a transitionary token for us, because we are about to run our own scalability solution, or to use our own scalability solution

and use that scalability solution to really give a free-to-play experience to a player. So one of the things that we haven't chatted about yet is how expensive it is for a user to actually play on the blockchain. Well, you have to pay for your transaction. That's the thing. So if you are going to bring people from outside the blockchain space into the blockchain space with your game, you have to figure out how you want to make sure that they are paying for their transaction, are they pay for the fees of their transaction. So when you look at companies like, well, games like Axi Infinity or what the NBA Top Shot and Lava Labs games are doing,

they are running there on infrastructure because they want to make sure that the players are actually having this free-to-pay experience. But at the same time, you want to limit them into how many actions they want to do because you don't want anyone to spam your chain when you are running this chain. So we see dust as a good way also to meter the user's activity. So in the next game, what's going to happen is that if you are staking must, you are getting dust. And when you are using, when you are playing, you can actually rely on the dust that you've accumulated to pay for a transaction. Yeah, I hadn't considered the transaction fees, actually. Like, every action needs to pay for transaction fees. You would feel that being on Polygon, you get no transaction.

transaction fees, but yeah, this chain is victim of its success. It's getting more and more expensive for players to transact on this chain. And at Kometh, we are looking at optimistic pull-up solutions, whether it is optimism of our off-chain lab. We spend a week in Lisbon doing tryouts on our own fork of arbitram. We will continue to test other solutions like StartNet and trying to figure out how we can best pay for the infrastructure of our player. So the ideal situation would be that you are a new player, you are getting a free spaceship, you are exploring the game,

you are starting to like blockchain. It's amazing, but, you know, you've done 10 or 20 transactions today, and I will tell you like, hey, tomorrow, you'll have 10 new transaction, but we will only pay for 10 transactions per day. If you want to do more, just take some must and you'll get access to this infrastructure that we are paying for our players.

Yeah, I want to come back to the scalability and this Arboretum Fork that you're working on. But before that, I'm really kind of interested in this, I guess it's the permissionlessness that comes around this. So, like there's two aspects. One is, like we discussed earlier, people could start building interfaces on top of existing D5 protocols. And like you said, they should. And, you know, this might happen as. I guess as these platforms move on to layer two's where transaction fees are lower, there's more there's more skillability,

and where composability is maintained, right? So, like, if you have, like, a bunch of D5 platforms, like, on Polygon or some other layer two, then the opportunity opens up for people to start building, like, games or other, like, interesting interfaces on top of these things. But then there's also the other aspect, which I think is interesting and really lends itself well to gaming. And that is that players could build their own sort of in-game assets by minting their own NFTs and building their own assets.

And it's kind of similar to how people, like, have been building game mods, like, for, you know, for so many years, right? Like, all these game mods that exist and all the games that, you know, people play. You know, what's the level of permissionlessness here that exists? Can people to start building their own assets? They definitely can. Like there's no limit into it.

Right now, the next iteration of the game, like the Cometh Battle, so the battle system of the game that we will release pretty soon, I think it's a matter of weeks now. Well, we look at all the NFTs that you have on your wallet and we let you use those NFTs as skins and even mint real in-game items

from them if you fit certain conditions. So if you decided to create an NFTs of your t-shirt, you can potentially use this t-shirt as something you put on the wall in your spaceship or something that you showcase to other players when you are playing against them. But that's only a first. I mean, the whole scholar system of Axi Infinity was built by fans. People wanted to use this and wanted that to happen. And the team was busy delivering something else.

So they just let motors create their own mod and create what is now a key features of Axi Infinity. I'm not 100% familiar with the game mods economy. I think there is a distribution scheme that is available in Steam and so on if you want to sell some skins, if you want to sell some stuff. But it's much better from a block. perspective to to be able to directly incentivize people to actually build stuff so we are

very proud of our crafting system and we are sure that people will start building on top of it saying like hey i'll get the crafting system optimizer but look at the stages of the market for all the items that are available and will and will tell you to craft xyz and put them on the market directly like it would be pretty cool to build that we won't have to have to build it but like Anyone can build it and it's just relying on basic Defi primitive. So just go on and build it. Yeah.

If you end up having something like this. It's cool. It's cool. So they consider the overlap that can then happen between like different games. So like, you know, there could be like Cometh and then some other games. And the composability allows for those skins and those mods to overlap and to like jump into other game ecosystems and like universes. I think that's like a really interesting idea.

Yeah. It's from a From a From a From a From a It's an amazing way

To do cross-proignization Like say we create a set of Of quests for anyone That has a dokey dokey finance NFT Pretty cool Gashapoints Gashapon project Where you put some coins in a Gashapon machine

And the Gashapoint Give you a special NFC So we could very well Build up a collaboration Whether it is decentralized Permission list or really centralized. Like, hey, it's us from the Commerce team talking to the doki-Doki finance team

and telling them, like, hey, let's do something. Like, we create a special quest for your NFTs and anyone that has these NFTs in their wallet can have access to these special requests. Or maybe we have it as a community request. Like, we realize that all of our community members have dokey-Doki-Di-FINCEs. Well, they are going to ask us to put that on the roadmap.

up like hey create special content if we have this kind of NFTs and maybe we can just do a call for content like guys we have a 10k to spare on creating this content like who wants to take it out and yeah it's it's it's a way to make the game evolve by getting the community directly involved which can be could be done so by even in a centralized manner but it can be done in a much much more streamlined manner with the blockchain. I remember the days where we had a bounty network, a product that was unfortunately stopped, but it was really good to find freelancers. You could just ask for a task on bounty network, and you grow your network of freelancers,

and eventually you find even full-time employee through this way. So I'm really keen to see where the whole gaming ecosystem will be in the next six to 12 months, because they will get integrated pretty fast. So you So Kometh was launched on Polygon And then now you're getting ready to launch your own Arbitrum fork How important was it for you to have your own L2 And what are some of the challenges that come with that

Running our own infrastructure for the players is getting more and more of a necessity We haven't really set up mind into whether we're going to use this technology or that technology or whether those technologies are going to be mature enough so that they can even service us for that. But it's now become clear to us that from a user experience, we cannot be on our own infrastructure. If we could, we were running on our own interim chart

and be with only game on the interim chart. But that's not going to happen. between now and probably the next 18 or 24 months. So looking at what big projects like Flow and Run-in did to their respective games, you become the master of the infrastructure for your players. So Polygon is a very good scalability solution. It's a very good way of getting more throughput for your users, and the success that they have in terms of a number of daily active address is just mind-border.

blowing because so many people were wanting to move their if, wanting to move the token and use products that they couldn't on the ETRM Mainnet because of the fees. But yet, putting so much throughput, like one block every four second leads to RPC problems, leads to some network instability, and also to the network getting any more and more expensive. Don't get me wrong. It's very fine, it's very cheap, and it's working very well. for your daily usage on Polygon. But from a game developer perspective, we cannot say to our players,

like, guys, we're sorry, the RPC endpoint is down. We run our own and we pay for a subscription, but those days it's not that good. Or, oh, we're sorry today. There was a crash on the market, so everybody is super active and the gas price, it's not 30 gigaway, it's 2,000 gig away.

And it happened on Ethereum, it happened on Polygon as well. So we would like to be able to, to completely separate the game activity from the on-chain activity, but still keeping the game activity based in the blockchain. So the games that we developed have their game state stored in the blockchain, executed and stored in the blockchain. All the defy-primitives need to stay in sidechains or main nets or whatever you want to call them that have bigger security primitives.

But we want to have the game happening and the game interaction. happening in an infrastructure that we can pay for and we can maintain for our players. So optimistic world-ups at large are a very interesting solution for this because they offer the security primitive that you can get out without us through the trustless bridge. It takes some times, but you don't have to trust us for this. Or you can accept to trust us and we are a liquidity provider in and out. And compared to the ZK roll-ups, we imagine that we are going to have to change quite often our contracts. So it may be a better proposition of value for us to use optimistic rather than ZK,

but we are going to do some triads on the ZK roll-ups as well to make sure that we are not missing something. And yes, as you mentioned, we are getting into arbitram, and we think that the Offchain Lab team is really proficient into what they do. I hope that in the short run we'll have dedicated roll-up deployers, role-up maintainers that can service application like us. Till then, we are doing our R&D and continuing to improve the future infrastructure that we will be deployed on. But it's good for us to be able to say to our players,

oh, guys, we're sorry, the second story is down. So no in and outs over the next two hours. It's our problem and here's updates on what's going on. Rather than having to rely on a third party telling us that, oh, stay tuned. We are going to update you and so on. We want to be responsible for this. It's better for the overall experience. Are you concerned that, it's like one thing that I think is really important here.

And if we go back to what we discussed earlier and like all of the composability and the interactions with like other NFTs outside of the. the cometh ecosystem and interaction with AMMs, etc. Like as this ecosystem grows, are you concerned about composability starting to present a problem? Because like if all of your stuff is on one layer two, you need to create bridges basically with all the other layer twos or all the other platforms.

How does that like work? Yeah, so it's definitely, definitely an issue. So also something that makes us a little bit more bullish for our use case on optimistic then on Z-Ks. Like I said, it's not

selling stone. We are trying out and considering different options. But the composability inside an optimistic world-up is quite more doable as far as I know for the moment.

So that's one thing. And then if you put yourself in the shoes of the players and you're like, getting uranium, getting gold, crafting this new new thruster with uranium and gold and putting that on the market or using that for yourself. And at some point, you get bored with the game and you want to sell those items. Well, you say those items on OpenC or they get in market and you get some EVE or you get some Matic for it or you get USDC for it. And then you want to do something with those tokens that you had.

You want to put them on Ave. Do you want to put them on sushi swap? well, we are not going to beg those projects to come and be live on our roll-up. And, I mean, they should stay where they are and they should follow their own lead. But as long as the roll-up of the SELAB solution that we use is plug into a bigger chain with all of those public utility, we can streamline the interactions between the roll-up and those public utilities for them and give them a good experience on using that and eventually also paying for the gas for them so that they can use it for almost free.

And then the possibility problem, we are coming back to how we frame the thing from a user perspective. The player profile for us should be an externally owned account where ERC has a good way of logging in and using a game-only wallet that can be connected with your email or can be connected with a notification on the phone or something that is really handy

and then you don't have to carry over a specific IoT for it, whether it is ledger or treasor. But once you are creating your user profile, well, why don't you declare that you want all the whizrow to go to this account that you secure with a ledger? Or why don't you once say that you have this, this is your polka dot address and you have lots of polka dot NFT on it?

Oh, this is your Tesos address and you have lots of Tezos on it. So once you declare, that from your player profile, for us, it's not easy, but it's doable to fetch the data that you have on your wallet and tell you like, oh, that's cool. You have this Tesla's NFT. Do you want to showcase it in the game? You can use it.

That's fine. We collect those data for the players, and we give them an enhanced experience, just looking at the other wallet that they have. Now, of course, getting real, composability, not just read, but also write, it's going to pose challenges. I don't know where it will be going. If there is any good project or a good initiative to enhance the composability from a right perspective between different chain, we would gladly participate to a

Gitcoin operation with them or give away some funding and grants for this. Because it's going to be key in the future as I don't expect the blockchain system to over centralized or over merge into just having two winners Bitcoin and Ethereum. All the chains are here to stay and other solutions are you to stay in for the greater good because they all have a specific value proposition for the users. So let me ask you this. If you had not been so invested in Ethereum and, you know, like in that ecosystem, try to extract your, you know, Jerome de Tisse,

the guy who's like, you know, launched a theory in France from your personality. You're like, why not build this on like something like Solana or on Cosmos where transaction scalability is like not an issue and you have full composability with other apps? Like, technically speaking, I'm just like playing devil with advocate here. Like technically speaking, that feels to me like a better solution because you don't have this issue with composability,

especially with a game where the cost of transactions needs to be super low near zero, and you have lots of transactions. It's like every action is a transaction. So we are not building on Solana. We may or may not be building on Solana in the future. That's still a possibility for us. How to take that.

Well, I think it's a bit early for us not to go on a metric chain like Ethereum. When you want to build on a new chain, and by new chain, I say not fully EVM-compatible chain, so not an EVM chain. My own experience with starting in the early days to do some diesel stuff, some Cosmo stuff, some PolkaDol stuff. I've run nodes on those chains. I've tried to... I want to experience the chain by myself.

I want to run a node. I want to try to do a smart contract. I want to install the wallet. I want to, like, spare $20 of the local token and try to use apps and make my own decision, make my own feeling about this. We haven't tried enough, deeply enough, Solana to have a final decision

on if it's good or not to go there. But trying out other protocols, the experience was, all the time the same. Like the first years, there is a need for socialization, a need for reusable code, a need for reusable audited public utilities code

that you can pick and install. You need to have a good access to a wallet. And I heard a very good thing about Solana's wallet, by the way, before you decide to put five-person full-time on translating your stack into this new chain. What's good about Ethereum and the EVM franchise is that everything is already built up and everything is being redeployed.

So I go on NIR protocol, I go on AVA, on Avalanche, I go on whatever EVM chains. I got the whole comfort of having access to sushi swap to Curve and Avey. I got access to the ERC 721 and 1155 standard they deployed everywhere. I got also sometimes access to a good market like OpenC. So it feels just direct to go there because we are at a stage of maturity where we are not preparing for having 10,000 users.

We are preparing for having 200,000 users. So from a strategic perspective, do I go on a change that already has, those 2,000 users and I'm going to try to get a subset of them? Or do I go on a chain that I've just launched with many promises, many good people building on top of it, and that may or may not be there when I'm ready to go there? It's a tough strategic decision to take. And also, you get pressure from your community, from your investors, from whoever saying, you should really go on Solana because it's new and it's great,

or you should really go on DFINITY because it's new and it's great. But then when you come to politicization, you want to have the product that works. And we've seen so many projects that are super ambitious in what they want to deliver and encounter so many blockers, so many things that they need to solve before being even ready to ship. we don't want to fall into that trap we ship and ship and ship and ship and ship and at some point if we encounter a big problem we switch to another chain

but focus on shipping and having things that can be used by our users well as an investor that's the answer I wanted to give no but I think like I think you're right that you get the

you get all the stack that comes with being in the EVM franchise We should make sure that we are not We are not getting Resting too much Yeah, it's the EVM franchise Everything is ready so are we Are we being

Are we being too comfy or So comfy that we don't want to use Something else We need to stay curious and continue to Try out new things Yeah Yeah I mean My

I guess like the thing that I see as the biggest advantage of being on, you know, a chain like Salon or even like building a Cosmos SDK chain is the user experience of, especially when attracting new like non-crypto users. Because like we're all, you know, familiar with transaction fees and like moving things in and out of Polygon, arbitram and like having to bridge and this sort of thing. But to a novice user, or a total non-blockchain user who's just like, hey, this is a cool game. I heard it uses a blockchain,

but I just want to play this game. All those layers of complexity are unknown. And then, you know, as a game developer, you kind of have to like build the game dynamics that kind of like mask those. So it's like moving to another galaxy is like bridging over to another thing. Like you have to create.

And so there's like, there's two parts of that. There's one is, okay, It creates an opportunity, creates an opportunity to create interesting game dynamics in terms of the interface. But at the same time, it's like all this kind of technical complexity. Well, let me, well, all the NFTs or the spaceship NFTs that we've minted are initially minted on interior because we don't want, we don't want to have them, we want to have them to give them the canonical existence on the biggest available chain. Okay. Well, that's right, we mint on Ethereum. So we started to mint on Ethereum in January, in 2021.

Some people bought those NFTs and we were saying them, hey, in four weeks we are launching the first version of the game. It's going to be on Pentagon. It's going to be super fun. But let's go. And then the date arrived. I think it was the 9th of February. And we're like, okay, guys, the bridge is ready.

We had deployed a bridge. We had to make sure that our contract were. both on Polyon and on Ethereum. Yeah, that's another constraint that we haven't mentioned is that if you are not running your own infrastructure on the scalability solution that you are going to use, you need to rely on the core team behind this, the core team behind this scalabit solution that you are using

and get some of their benefit and ask, hey, do you want to please help me out? I need a copy of my ERC-7-1. contract here and there. So another role that you have to deal with. But then the date arrived, the bridge open and you'd say people are like, hey guys, send your spaceship on Polygon. First step. No, sorry. Approve the sending of your spaceship on Polygon. Send your spaceship on Polygon. Okay. Now switch your Metamask to Polygon. And we were one of the supporters of the the pull request on Metamask to make sure that we can push the change of

of network directly on Metamask, which wasn't available before February. So imagine. Sorry, so to change the network, you have to open the network tab in the parameters of your Metamask and add this, add that. Oh, damn, the pop-up just closed,

so you have to do it all over again. Oh, my God. Then now you're on Polygon. Thanks God, Polygon is giving out one MATIC to everyone that's new to the chain, so you have some MATIC to pay for your transaction. Good for you.

So now you go on the website of Kammath and you approve your spaceship, and now finally you send your spaceship in play. So who in their right mind would do five transactions between two networks in order to play a game? Yet we had to bring people to do that. So it was so conversome. And unfortunately, on the 9th of February, we had a little deep on the market, and the gas price went from 30 gig away to. 200 and people are like I cannot play it's too complicated but luckily for us like the Avegochi guys

at their community do that the same day as us so we try to hold our hands and and push the people to do that but yeah it's it's so much hurdles so much so many things to do from one chain to another that it made us realize that we want to keep the users at the same place as much as possible and only get them through this kind of hurdles when they are about to do an action that's going to benefit them financially at first. So, keeping the game on a scalable infrastructure

and keeping the defy and the blockchain stuff, lots of blockchain stuff on another infrastructure that has better security primitives. We're trying to stay pragmatic there, so maybe not so la next month, but who knows, maybe

one day. Cool. Well, I'd like to take a step back here because we're running low on time. We've actually gone over the time that we usually, you know, suspended on the years episodes, but we'll go over a little bit. You know, like, I, I'd like to ask you, like, if you look at the gaming industry,

like it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and, like, I see ads for these kinds of games all the time, right? Ages of Empire and, like, all these farming games and whatever. And, like, people play these games, and they spend lots of money, like, buying, basically, the currency that allows them to, play this game. And, you know, this is an entirely new model where, well, there's more interaction and interoperability between, you know, different games. So, like, games are not siloed.

The ability for users to generate content and then sell that content on secondary markets and even have that content interact between the games is much higher. So there's less friction and, like, less siloed ecosystems. Does the gaming industry, the current gaming industry, particularly the mobile gaming industry, which is massive. Do they have an incentive to move towards a model like this, or does it really disrupt their model fundamentally? Like, where is the industry heading in terms of, like, siloed ecosystems? So, yeah, I'm glad we still have time because it's not a yes, no question, is it?

Yeah, no. So my gaming years, I was playing Warcraft 3, Frozen Tron. Rockcraft and Frozen Tron. Yeah, that was like year 2000, 2002, 3. And then these massive games called the World of Warcraft just happened. drag thousands and millions of players there. And this is where we get the first cryptocurrency. I'm not the first one saying that,

but the gold of World of Warcraft was sold on eBay. It was a currency that has value, that was being transferred between players way before Bitcoin. I think Vittani famously said that he got into blockchain because he was tired of having his favorite characters being nerfed in World of Warcraft. And players that were selling their accounts, selling their best gears, or selling gold, and being convicted by Blizzard got their account bound or got their subscription terminated. We are going from there to a massive interconnected game asset industry.

that's going to definitely change what the classic business model for a game is. So I understand that if Blizzard is looking at me, Jerome just join Waterfordcraft, play three weeks and be like, well, I want to be level 60 right away. And Sebastian is setting his account. So, yeah, how much you want for your account? $200, yeah, set down. I'm buying your account. And Blizzard would say, like, well, now Jerome is level 60. he would have access to the final stages of the game.

But I couldn't have milked Jerome for 12 months on his way from level 0 to 60. So like my subscription model is done. Like the subscription is your LFT. The subscription is your account. You are selling your account. You're giving away your subscription to someone else. Luckily, like I can, I can, as a blockchain game studio, I can say, well, I get 2 or 3% on every trade on the secondary market,

as long as you do it in my market. You can go OTC, of course, but I can maybe get a few pieces of revenue on this secondary market. And I'm very willing to take this trade off of putting everything out of the market and liberalize it and just getting a cut,

even a small cut on the volume that's going to help the studio continue to create content for those assets. I think that's a much more sustainable model than trying to systematically appeal to tricks, to psychological tricks to keep people from playing and buying and being and being addicted to the game and to the mechanism of the game just by saying, hey, this is out. You're paying for the NFT once. You're paying for some transaction eventually.

You can resell your NFTs. You can do this. You can do that. It's an open market, and we are building an infrastructure for those NFTs and those tokens. So come and have fun with us. And if you like what you say, saying, well, you are a community member. You are a member of this infrastructure as we are, and we are here to continue delivering content to you. So I really hope that we'll see a supercharged version of successful mobile games that we see today. but we have a blockchain state, we have a blockchain mindset. And yeah, let's see if Apple store and Google and Google so will let us leave there.

But as long as they do, I don't see why we wouldn't succeed in this. So, yeah, I know that Apple did appeal to the decision of, I don't remember which, which trial it was that say that they shouldn't take 30% of every in-game transaction or in-app purchase. Yeah, it's the whole Fortnite thing. Yeah. Epic games, yeah. Yeah, but Epic games seems to be very open to this. So definitely Epic Games is a place where NFT games is going to thrive.

I hope iOS and Google Store will be the same. So just crossing fingers there and hoping for the best for the gaming industry with the Russian mindset. Yeah, I mean, the mobile ecosystem. system and the mobile stores essentially are, I think, one of the big barriers to this taking off. I think, like, it may take a while. I mean, at some point in the past, you know, Bitcoin wallets were forbidden from the Apple App Store. That has changed. And there does seem to be a shift now with, like, there's new rules now about Apple letting app makers, allowing them to get their customers to go outside,

they have to pay. So there does seem to be a shifting mindset. And as crypto becomes, I think, more mainstream, these things are also going to come with their own, their own complexities, but also probably open up a little bit more, I think. You also said, like, will the current games, mobile games adapt to blockchain?

there's a fairly good reason for them to adapt because the community, the blockchain community, the people that are having tokens on their wallets, the millions, I don't think it's a hundred of million people, but the millions of people that have ether on their wallet are actually a community that is really loving crypto, really loving blockchain, and they want to play blockchain stuff.

They want to play blockchain games. So there are a niche of its own that needs to be serviced, that needs to be entertained with proper games. So that's why blockchain games are thriving in the first place, in my opinion. And mobile game developers should definitely look at this niche and try to address them with a blockchain-minded game. So it's a good trend, and I hope we will meet them halfway. Like us, blockchain-native companies,

trying to build games that is played by your sister-in-law and your mother-in-law and your nephew that didn't know anything about blockchain, but like, hey, it's a blockchain game, I want to try it out. And on the other side of the spectrum, the game loft and the likes that will say, well, that's cool, I can build Condi-Crush chain or Cronny Cush et. Kondi-Crush-Het. Hey, is Kondi-Krashet? It's Kondi-Crash, but on the blockchain, on the interim blockchain, yeah, let's just do this and try to appeal to this emerging community that wants to have fun

with our games on mobile. Yeah, I mean, I think there's no doubt that, you know, there's an opportunity here for, you know, gaming studios to do this. Now, whether or not they will do that shift, I mean, essentially, like, these are now, like, very big companies with hundreds and thousands of employees, investors, some of the were publicly traded companies.

Taking that sort of risk, I think, is not open to all of them. I mean, like, you know, even like a company like Ubisoft, which is right, just down the road from here, you know, they have a sort of blockchain studio innovation lab and like they're doing some interesting things, but like they're, they have, like,

that is a very complex sort of strategic shift, I think, for a company to say like, okay, now we're moving everything onto blockchain, it's a risk. And I don't see like lots of companies doing that. And I think that there will be some form of disruption here in the space. I'm not saying like all gaming companies are going to stop existing tomorrow, but there will be

like a good set of them that where their model is getting disrupted from this in the next like five to 10 years. And shout out to Ubisoft because they launched their rabbits as NFTs on Ethereum during HCC this year. And all the proceeds of these NFT sales are going to UNICEF and other GNO that really was into black.

blockchain that created a unisov created a blockchain funds for for for emerging countries so they are definitely uh in ubysop is definitely going uh going deep into this technology and and experimenting with it and getting ready for whenever they will think their their community is is mature to to be to be using those tools um so that's uh that's definitely something that's going to happen i think i'm glad they are down the road and uh can't wait to to have opportunities to collaborate with them Cool. Well, we're definitely pushing the limits here of the length of this podcast. But no, it's super interesting. I think it's just a testament to the fact that we haven't really done a lot of content on gaming. And I mean, I come at this from like a non-gamer perspective because I don't play games. I mean, I play them once in a while. Like I'll play, I don't know, something on my phone or but I've never played. Opening block. It's a crypto game, right? Opening golfing, oh, wow, what are going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a promotion every time you open.

But you know, I never got into the whole like, I see, like, I never got into the whole world or warcraft thing or whatever. But I still, like, I'm an observer of the space. And, like, one of my good friends worked at Ubisoft. And so, like, I think it's an interesting industry. And so, like, I think that's why there's so much here to discuss. But before we wrap up, like, you know, what's coming up for comment in the next, you know, year?

What's the roadmap here? And then I think you guys are hiring. So maybe this is your chance to make a call to our. audience. Yeah, so we're definitely hiring. We're different, we are hiring for lots of roles. If you want to do data on, data on blockchain, data analytics on blockchain, we're looking for for guys to do this. We're looking for any, any, any, any full stack dev that's, that is passionate about blockchain, passionate about gaming and wants to get their ends on. They, they want to get their ends dirty. Which are to me, we have, we have, we have

roles open for this. If you have more of a, of a product or Australia, strategy mindset, do reach out as well. The way we like to enhance the team is just meeting people, meeting people that are passionate about what they want to do with us, and just growing the team and just not specifically opening roles and try to grow from here. The next steps for us is doing a little release, probably at the Cone Gecko Conference,

happening on the 16th of November. So do stay tuned because we will have lots of announcement there. If you want to keep track of the game development, you can go on commentf.io and subscribe to the mailing list. You will also receive some NFTs if you're subscribed there, so do subscribe. We want to have a big product launch in Q1, 2022. So that's one of the next steps for us. And another shout out to do not this for sponsoring this episode first,

but also for the awesome work that they are doing not only on, on cowswap, but also on Gnosis Guild. That's definitely the type of utility that we are going to try to use for our guild needs on on comet. And yeah, Sebastian,

thanks again for, thanks again for having me. It was a pleasure of being there. It was a pleasure to finally be at Epicenter after listening to so many of your episodes. Technically, you've already been on episode twice. Oh.

Well, yeah, but interview for ATCC doesn't count. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It kind of counts. Congrats to the all Epicenter team for being such a longstanding quality podcast. I hope I contributed to the quality

of this podcast. And yeah, thanks for everything. I think so, yeah. I mean, hopefully this will be one of, you know, many episodes that we do on gaming because there's just like so much happening in this space. Absolutely. Maybe Epicenter gaming is like the next thing.

Well, the next big thing is cool, thanks a lot, too. having a Twitch channel with you playing blockchain games, with your non-blockchain background. Just tune in and watch Sebastian play X-Infinity, play Kamath, or try to make a living on my crypto heroes or whatever. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'm going to start his Twitch channel.

All right, man, thanks a lot. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device,

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