Technology, Connected - What Is Digital Ownership? Robby Yung on Web3, Gaming and Decentralized Identity

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands, joins Thinking on Paper to discuss how Web3, gaming and decentralized identity could shift ownership of the internet back towards users.The current web is largely controlled by platforms that own the infrastructure, data and relationships between creators and audiences. Web3 proposes a different model in which users can hold digital assets, identities and community memberships directly rather than accessing them through a single company.In this episode, we discuss:What digital ownership means in Web3How decentralized identity worksWhy gaming has become an important testing ground for blockchainWhat Animoca Brands is building through the MocaverseHow blockchain could reduce costs and remove intermediariesWhy creators struggle to own their audiences on existing platformsHow digital communities can share in the value they createWhat happens when ownership becomes a form of participationWhether Web3 can build a more open and user-owned internetRobby explains how blockchain infrastructure could give creators, players and communities a direct stake in digital economies. He also examines the practical challenges involved in moving from platform-controlled access to portable identity and ownership.This conversation is about the future of the internet, the creator economy and whether users can become participants in the systems they help build rather than remaining customers inside closed platforms.Please enjoy the show and share it with someone interested in Web3, digital identity and online ownership.--Chapters(00:00) Introduction Disruptors & Curious Minds(01:06) Hello Robby And Animoca Brands(01:24) Lesson From 30 Years In Technology(06:25) Stablecoin Transaction Volume V Visa(11:18) Audience Infrastructure and Bi-Directional Value Exchange(15:56) The Evolution of Web3 Gaming(22:13) Investment Strategies in the Web3 Landscape(24:08) The Zed Run Case Study(27:21) User Acquisition in Web3: The Ongoing Struggle(31:19) Sustaining Attention in DAOs(32:10) What Is The Mocha Network and Mocha ID(45:34) Decentralized Identity--LinksThinking On Paper: www.thinkingonpaper.xyzInstagram: /https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/Animoca - https://www.animocabrands.com/

Disruptors and Curious Minds, welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper where we unpack the future with the people building it, push it around, see what it means for us as humans. The squishy stuff meets the silicon, meets the hardware. We spin it all around and try to identify the meaning and we're all headed with this stuff. My name's Jeremy. This is Mark. I'm going to let him tee this episode up. We're excited to have our guest on today and unpack a lot of things. Yeah, anyone who's been around, including for any length of time, would have heard of some of the Anamoka.

Ed Investment portfolio, sandbox, ma'amass, open sea, Axe Infinity, a polygon consensus, magic Eden, data labs, UGA labs, put your penguins, by over 540, some of them may or may not still be in the portfolio. We're going to talk about all of that

with Robbie Young, CEO of Anamoka. Welcome to Thinking on Paper. Thank you for thinking on paper with us. And before we get into all of that, I want to start with a different question. I first got introduced to you when we were prepping a panel in Paris for Paris, blockchain week. And I was very impressed by your poise, by your zen-like attitude, by your

calmness in a world of crypto that is particularly the opposite of that. And yet you're the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. You've been in the space for years. What do you do differently? I don't know that I do anything differently, but first, thank you for having me. I appreciate the chance to chat with you guys. I think, you know, if anything, one of the things that I learned about tech. I've been in tech for a long time, more than 30 years now. And I think one of the things that's always true about the technology industry, above all else, is that everything changes. And it just depends on whether it's changing more quickly or less quickly, but it's always quickly. And so part of, I think, charting a path to success, whatever that means by your

definition over time, is really about, it's much more of a marathon. It's about the endurance and about just having the perseverance to get to the finish line. And so I think you can't sweat the small stuff and the volatility. And yes, the blockchain industry has more of it than other segments. But it's not that different. I mean, it's just got like more amplitude, so to speak, on the shock waves. But it's still about trying to figure out what the future holds and trying to constantly be agile enough to pivot with the times as technology changes, market sentiment changes. things that interest customers change. It's almost like a great way to navigate life is the idea of moving with things and moving with a lot of the changing things that are happening. But there's an innate human desire to control stuff. Get your arms around it and control it. But when you're running a company, there has to be a point where you're kind of like,

hey, I'm moving with all this stuff. All right, now it's time to zoom in and grab something and take hold of it. So can you provide an example maybe of like some in an instance where you're, hey, we're moving with these things, we're trying to understand it, and now you're kind of like, oh, man, we can lock in on this thing and take some action on it. Sure. So I think you're right. There is definitely a kind of a need-jerk human instinct to try to get control over things

because chaos is uncomfortable. And I think that's something that often makes entrepreneurialism and technology as well challenging for some people because they don't like the uncertainty. They'd much rather have a job where, you know, You know, you can have a steady paycheck and clock in from 9 to 5 for a year on end. I think that, you know, we're kind of at the apex of this uncertainty, meaning that we need to be comfortable with a level of uncertainty that's intrinsic to the business. And the reason I say that is because what we're trying to build in the blockchain world essentially is a version of the internet. As you know, we call it Web 3, so hopefully internet, V3, so to speak.

but to build it much more like the first version of the internet, which was very decentralized and very open, with the open source software movement at its heart, because one of the things that we've observed, particularly over the last 20 years or so, is the incredible success of the open source movement. The internet has given birth to this idea that the world can collaborate en masse online. And the best example of that, of course, is Linux, which is the operating system that pretty much every server in the world now uses. And it would have been, unthinkable back in 1995 to build a major piece of software that every serious business and government in the world runs on that's essentially free and maintained by a bunch of anonymous people in the

internet. But it does actually work. And what we're trying to do in the blockchain world is go back to that idea of being able to collaborate across the internet and to benefit from all of the shared skills and intelligence of people collaborating at that scale, because the way we see it, you know, if you think about developing a piece of software, how can any one company possibly have the same brainpower as the rest of the world? Now, it doesn't matter how big that company is. It's not the same as the size of the world. And so I think we've seen lots of successful examples and, you know, we have famous blockchain projects like, you know, the original Bitcoin project and Ethereum and many, many more.

that are all open source projects and that have been built robust tech that other people are building on top of now for years. But one of the challenges with that kind of open source software is it's uncertain because you don't control it. And the point is that nobody controls it. It's kind of a public good that we all benefit from. Okay. Sorry, that was a long answer.

That was a good answer. And I want to continue on that thread, play a little game. I want to play a little game of, let's cheer Jeremy up about Web 3. Because we've been doing a thing on our paper for a couple of years. We started as a web three podcast and it evolved into other technologies. But keep coming back to Web 3. And Jeremy and a lot of our listeners have definitely lost heart of late in Web 3. And everything you said is true.

But where do we see the fruits of this ideology happening? Are there any concrete examples you can say, is this something that's for emerging markets? Has America and Europe missed the boat on this? How can we paint a picture for Jeremy? So he's, yeah, we can cheer him up. Okay. So, game back on board.

First order of businesses to get Jeremy excited. So I think the easiest way to kind of level set is to think about what it means when we say Web 3, meaning we're talking about the entire internet, which means that it's not application specific. Meaning, if I walk up to anybody on the street and said, what do you use the internet for? I'll get as many answers as I will, people I walked up show on the street, because the internet is not any one thing. It's not even any hundred things. It's everything, frankly. And so I think Web 3 is kind of the same. We have lots of applications that have been very successful on Web 3, but the point is not those applications. The point is the underlying technology that facilitates those applications. But maybe we can talk about a couple of them. So the one clear one that everybody talks about are stable coins. And stable coins are

essentially tokenized currency. U.S. dollars are the most popular. And a tokenized U.S. dollar is essentially a token version of a US dollar that sits on the blockchain that can be exchanged from one blockchain wallet to another. So basically anybody can go on the internet, download a piece of software, open a wallet, and exchange these stablecoins with each other. To give you an idea of the scale of their success so far, we already have more transaction volume in stable coins last year, even the year before, frankly, than all of the transaction volume of Visa and MasterCard and PayPal combined. So stable coins far outpace that transaction. level.

But, hold on, can you help you understand what that means? Because that's blown my mind. When you say it as that phrase, I'm like, what? Yep. So much more money is transacted on stable coins than there is transacted through traditional credit card payment systems on an annual basis. But the amazing thing is that even though those number of transactions are higher, the universe of people or accounts conducting those transactions is much smaller because arguably

only about 200 million people in the world are using stable coins at the moment. Well, people, institutions, accounts, whatever you want to call it. And about 6 billion have credit cards. So if you think about that, that's amazing. And why is it so popular? Well, it's so popular because it's really useful, right? Think about how hard, how challenging it is just to solve international payments. You know, if I, I live here in London, if I want to send money to Jeremy in the US, I need to convert the currency, I need to go down to my bank, I need to open up a telegraphic transfer, fill out the forms. Three days later, he gets it, and I'm short, you know, 6% or 10% or whatever the fee is on that amount. If I send him stable coins, then it costs me a negligible amount

of money and transaction cost, probably on the order of less than a dollar, regardless of whether I send him a dollar or a billion dollars, and he gets it instantly, well, within a minute. And anybody can send it to anybody without the need for. for a bank in the middle. So that's an amazing innovation because think of all the people in the world who don't have easy access to bank accounts. Think of all the banks that say, well, if you want to send a transfer of money, we have a minimum of $100 or $500 to send. Otherwise, it's not worth the paperwork. But I can send Jeremy 10 cents if I want. You can be infinitely small or infinitely large and it's the same cost. So when you have a payment system like that that enables everybody in

the world to pay each other at almost no cost. That's actually quite revolutionary. And so one of the obvious places that we've seen big uptake on this are, of course, in emerging markets, because payment options for people in emerging markets are more limited, typically. We had a little bit more on that. So we had an episode with someone from Circle, I believe, that talked about using these rails and this infrastructure to get humanitarian aid where it needs to go in very volatile environments and communities where banks are largely corrupt and totally agree that from a payment perspective and an ease of transaction perspective is it's a very powerful technological infrastructure. The transaction volume was very surprising, like the low amount of the lower

amount of people using it, but higher volume of transactions is really, really interesting to me. What are those transactions? It's everything. It's a mind-bending amount of money. Sure. bring out of visa and... It runs the gamut from market traders in Nigeria, buying and selling vegetables and using their mobile devices as payment rails, to, you know, hedge funds and banks settling between accounts, you know, in the tens and hundreds of millions.

Let me level set to Mark Teed up. You know, let's make Jeremy happy in this. So full disclosure, I was involved in a number of Web3 projects, like early on related to music and sound and audio, and I was helping advise some large companies in that. And I believe in this idea, this reinvention of the internet and came up with a couple of interesting terms. I'd love to hear how you resonate with them. But now we're able to develop what I used to call audience infrastructure, where you're able to create these micro pathways to your real true fans and automate something that goes both ways.

This like bidirectional value exchange. Right. So it's not a broadcast from someone to the audience. It's this enablement of this pathway that I thought was really cool. I just never saw it used to the potential that I had in my head. How do those terms resonate with you, this audience infrastructure, this bi-directional value exchange? We come from the gaming industry.

So when we entered Web 3, we were a mobile game company. So I think a lot of the lens of how we think about software often comes from building consumer products. And so for us, the idea of the creator economy really resonates because when you think about areas that have been most. popular in pretty much every form of entertainment. It's the medium in which mediums, in which media, in which people can make their own stuff, whether it's YouTube or SoundCloud or games like Minecraft and Roblox. I think it's about consumers expressing themselves in these new social

entertainment spaces. And that's one of the things actually that Web3 does really well. Because, again, it provides that infrastructure. What's the biggest gripe amongst content producers on big streaming platforms. So they don't make any money. And why don't they make any money? Well, there are a few things that I think are universally hated. Spotify royalty rates is one of them. But YouTube is a perfect example,

kind of like what we were talking about just now with stable coins. So if you're a YouTube producer, you make your money by advertising as YouTube's model. But the problem is that you don't receive any ad revenues until you exceed a certain amount of views. I don't remember what it is, 10,000 views. or something. It's a reasonably high bar for most creators that really cuts out 90-some-odd percent of creators because they don't meet that threshold for an individual piece of content.

It cuts out thinking on paper. Well, and this is hard because the question is, well, why, right? And the reason is because their infrastructure does not either allow them to scale the ad revenue to that extent, or they just choose to focus on managing, you know, the hits. But there's no reason that actually it shouldn't be able to scale. infinitely and they shouldn't be able to allow that kind of revenue share infinitely, but the payment infrastructure costs money, right? Just like you go to any shop in any town and you'll always find this sort of duality of people who accept American Express and people who don't. Because American Express, as everybody knows, charges higher fees than Visa and MasterCard. And the fees make a difference. If you know that it's adding three, four percent on every transaction and then when you think about

online, mobile transactions, you end up. with Apple and Google taking 30% off the top of everything that happens through their platforms, that's very, very material. And so if you have a world where you can bring down that transaction cost to essentially, you know, close to zero, all of a sudden you open up all kinds of new potential business models. And I think what we've seen, particularly in the Web 3 community, is an explosion of products that are much more, I'd say, fan-oriented. And what I mean by fan-oriented is They are smaller products in terms of audience, but cater to people who are really crazy fans about something. Because the low-cost nature of the infrastructure allows you to build a product that can be sustainable with an audience of thousands, right?

Or tens of thousands. Not tens of millions. Because the monetization level is much higher when your margins are higher and you don't have to pay all those fees to third-party platforms. A thousand true fans. Kevin Kelly, shout out to that episode. So a big part of this is that. that audience infrastructure it's like read right i own the book in it christ dick and dixon dixon you can't take your audience with you and so these platforms can take 30 percent and not give you the

royalty because you know you use spotify or nobody listens to your music you go on youtube or nobody watches your videos and that that's a big part of this puzzle isn't it and maybe again blockchain offers a alternative path yes music reference you still got to have the the right song you got to you got to the right song that someone wants to listen to you the right idea that people want to participate in, but this is just a means for, it's not an easy button to get all of that stuff, but it's a means for like the one or two man shop to get their stuff out there and enable that Thousand Truth fan's mechanic to operate. You mentioned gaming as, as, you know, the animoka piece. That's kind of where you got your, got your start. Is Star Atlas in your portfolio?

It is, yes. So, all right, I remember when that first came out. And we talk about Axi Infinity, too. I mean, that was one of the first ones. It was like, holy cow, these guys are enabling. economies, you know, and all I read the Star Atlas white paper. It was like reading a political on a national economy. It was pretty incredible. I remember so Star Atlas was the first one. I mean, Axie Infinity was like, wow, that's really interesting what's happening there. But Star Atlas has had a different production value, I think, or a different, the game pieces were more intricate, like it seemed more well thought out. How is that doing right now? What's the latest with Star Atlas? I haven't haven't been in there in a minute.

Good question. Neither have I. I actually haven't seen anybody from the team in a bit. But I think Star Atlas is one of those games. It's in that category of what we were called AAA titles. So those are the titles that tend to have much higher budgets, typically have higher production value and are associated with what we call hardcore gamers that are gamers that spend more time and money playing the game, rather than as opposed to casual gamers who spend less of both.

And so I think, you know, the reason that the white paper is like a political treatise, is because the idea behind Star Atlas was to build it. What they did really well was to build a community and to build a community around lots of different things, around a love of the beautiful graphics and lore that they created, as well as around some of the ideas and the philosophy of what they were trying to create around the game as well. Because at the end of the day, it is a social experiment.

All big games are inherently social to them. And people go and play these games, not because they want to play against the computer, as we called it when I was a kid, but because they want to play with other people and hang out with other people. And particularly young people these days, a lot of these game spaces are literally just kind of a town hall where they're spending time hanging out with each other as much as they are having some kind of action-oriented play. I love that. The games are social experiments. It's really interesting to think about that. And think about like the Starbucks analogy where Starbucks,

wanted to create that, what do they call it, like the fourth place, you know, a place where people kind of get together. And more so than now, more so now than ever, those spaces are digital. And so, all right, so let's look at across the portfolio. You've got multiple social experiments in the works, right? What are, what are some of the interesting things that are bubbling up trend-wise that what related to, you know, how people interact, what they see is valuable. And of those nuggets, like, what are the most interesting ones to continue to iterate and evolve? There's a lot of stuff going on. And from our perspective, you know, we obviously do a lot in gaming because those are our roots.

But we do a lot across the Web 3 ecosystem of different kinds of projects to, you know, some of it is more like institutional financial services and infrastructure and things like that. I think that gaming still is moving ahead of pace and frankly having a bit of a resurgence as far as the narrative within Web 3 goes at the moment. And that's thanks to a lot of projects. that have been building over the last couple of years, finally coming to market, you know, with either new token launches or new game content

or new, you know, sequels or things like that that kind of galvanize supports and interest around them. And there's some great ones out there. I mean, if you've played stuff like Cross the Ages, for example, or, you know, some of the titles from revolving games, and off the grade is probably the most famous at the moment, just because they are the first, Web 3 game to be able to be played on console, traditional PlayStation as well.

So they kind of broke into a new, you know, a distribution platform that was previously closed to Web 3 content. And so these are, I think, exciting a lot of audiences. I think in addition, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on at the intersection of AI. I think you'll see a lot of entertainment content increasingly be AI generated. And when I say AI generated, I mean that in the most positive way, meaning that you're going to enable, use. to be creators, but on a level and scale that hasn't been possible before. I mean, if you think about it, one of the reasons that TikTok is so popular, in my opinion, is because they also have great creator tools that make everybody feel like they can be

a creator on the platform. And that's really important because that was always a barrier to entry. YouTube has been around for a long time, but not everybody uploads videos to YouTube. Because, you know, you need to, if you want it to be any good, you need to create the content in a particular way. Whereas I think TikTok is more forgiving. Everybody knows it's made on your mobile and they've got filters and all kinds of tools to help you do that. And so I think as we lower these barriers, we're going to find that AI is going to bridge some

of that gap and allow us to create content that five, 10 years ago we would have thought was professionally made by studios. And it's literally going to be made by individuals with a voice prompts. And we're starting to see that now. Evo, is it in Flow, the new Google platform? we're starting to see some videos which are doing the rounds and dividing opinion or less dividing opinion. I think now the quality is unarguable. Yes.

And that's an interesting point. Okay. Because listeners are going to get into the Mockaverse and the Mocker Network, centralised identity in a minute. But I just want to go back to that creator audience infrastructure. We've had a lot of guests over the years who have been the founders and of these creator crypto platforms, writing platforms. movie creation platforms, a lot of writing platforms. And almost without exception, they've all made the shift. They've all changed their direction.

The communities that they've built up around writing or creating movies have all gone. It's all become about AI. And my question isn't really about that. My question is about you and Animoca and your investment. And you haven't really dropped the ball. I'm sure you have behind the scenes dropped the ball on some investments. But publicly, they all seem to be, you know, hitting them out of the park. investments. How, what's your strategy about choosing who you invested in how? And has that changed

in the last six months with the AI pluriphrifan? So I don't think it's changed in the last six months. I think that as you know and anybody who's familiar with our investing strategy knows we invest very broadly. We have a very large portfolio of small investments. And one of the things that was quite deliberate about that is because we understand that we're in a, I mean, as odd as it sounds seven years into our journey in Web 3 going on 8. We're still early. And so we understand that it's, you know, it's far from clear who are going to be the established leaders and even what the genres and content areas and technology areas, you know, are going to be. Things like stable coins obviously seem quite established, but there's quite an open field in so many other

disciplines. And so one of the ways that we address that is by investing very broadly. And so we make small investments at an early stage, and we're very prolific about it. So we have close to 600 investments now across the space. And the idea is that with that strategy can kind of hedge on the one hand, because we have, you know, a horse in every race, so to speak. But at the same time, it helps us to learn, obviously, because we learn from all the founders that we work with and lots of people smarter than us to understand about what they're doing and what they think is important. And I think the other part of it is that we are a strategic investor, unlike many in the space who are professional investors, meaning venture capital firms.

We are what you'd call a corporate VC, I suppose, because we invests our own money off the balance sheets. And so all the investments we make need to be strategic to the company in some fashion. So we try to invest in things where we can be partners or collaborators from a business standpoint to help them to have a more successful outcome. And if there's a path for that, then it makes sense for us to perhaps make a financial investment. You mentioned horse racing or referenced horse racing. I can't help but think about, you know, this was one of the early ones. And I don't know if you guys invested in this one, but Zed Run was one.

That was big, wasn't it? Man, that had a run. But now I guess they're sunsetting that. Or maybe they already have. I think it was 2025. What do you think? Like they're sponsored by Stella R12. There was a big brand partnership.

Partnership, yeah. So was that part of your portfolio? portfolio or no? Zed Run was not specifically, but yes. You remember it. Big success, of course. So, all right, so from the outside end, this is always an interesting way to look at it. Like if we're unpacking Zed Run, right? They had this came out and, man, it was gangbusters, right? And as Mark mentioned, there was brand partnerships. You're in the Stella Atwa race and like all of this. And people are actually making good money in it, selling their horses, horses worth for the couple hundred Eth, I don't know, whatever it was. What did they do right and what did they do wrong if we were kind of Monday

morning quarterbacking this thing? So I think one of the challenges, the biggest challenge in Web 3 at the moment still is acquiring users because there are not really traditional user acquisition channels. The problem that we've had in Web 2 is that really everything in Web 2 has become siloed around, you know, a handful of tech giants. So they're the ones who command those audiences. It's why, you know, what you were saying earlier about, about people on music sites or creating videos or writing content, end up continuously pivoting because it's hard to find audience. It's why people still pay 30% to Apple and Google to launch mobile apps because that app store still provides a route to finding an audience, even if it's extremely low margin and getting smaller by the day.

And those app stores, you know, were incredible 10 years ago because the return on investment when there were relatively fewer competitors in the app stores meant that, you know, you were acquiring a big audience and you could monitor. them really well. That's gotten much harder as it's gotten more competitive over the years. So I think in Web3, one of the challenges, and this goes back to Zed Run, is maintaining attention from a relatively small pool of users as we try to grow out the pool of users that's in Web3 and a lot of the early Web3 games and pretty much all of the ones that you've mentioned followed a similar user onboarding journey, which was very crypto-native.

It was centered around the idea of self-custody, meaning that you have to your own tokens. You have to have your own wallet. You have to have, you know, your own account. And this infrastructure is very unwieldy for traditional audiences who are used to just, you know, signing in with their Gmail account or they're connecting their Apple account or whatever it is. And so you need to figure out how to bridge that user acquisition journey together with giving them an experience that's different from their Web 2 experience. This is where I think increasingly actually AI will start to bridge some of that gap for us. the beauty of having those AI assistance is that we can ask the AI assistance now to take care of a bunch of that for us, meaning when you get onboarded to that, whatever, that new horse racing experience, it just greets you and says, welcome, can I set up an account for you, right? And it does all the rest. And then it can actually go through and do the nitty gritty of setting up wallets and all of the Bitcoin or blockchain infrastructure in the background so that you can still maintain all the advantages of that infrastructure, but with hopefully

some of the simplicity that we're used to with Web 2 products. I want to jump in for a second on the idea of maintaining attention. I think that's really important. It's something I saw as a trend. I did a study on really like a year-long study on DOWs. I wrote for a particular publication on DOWs every week. And I would research it because I love the idea of what DOS could be. But I think what humans do really well is they come together quickly

and with some fervor around a new idea that's generating a lot of noise. oh man let's jump into this room hey this thing's great and then like six months the idea of community is they don't really have a plan beyond that right so maintaining attention is massive for for these communities so what are what are some good examples of communities that you've seen that are doing a good job of long range vision and keeping people engaged and doing it a little differently can i just add my my opinion on kite no you can cookie and how it seemed the attention mind share economy has seemed to Kaito seems to be propping up crypto. It's just mad. I don't, I can't see it being sustainable. I don't know if you have a different opinion on any of this, Robbie. But, well, I guess one of the things that that's a reminder of is coincident to some of the challenges that we've had in Web 3, in terms of the Web 3 market turbulence over the last two years. Obviously, the primary channel for customer acquisition in Web 2.3 has been Twitter. And the dramatic changes that have gone through. that algorithm there and creator payments and the incentivization going on on Twitter mean that it's much harder to try to plot a strategy to build an audience there, a real audience. And I think that's been a big challenge because, again, we have to kind of rewrite the playbook all the time. And that's hard. I think it's actually one of the reasons that we're, that inspired us originally to build out the Moka network, which we were going to talk about. I think also that DOWs are fantastic.

love Daos. But I think, unfortunately, unfortunately, Daos are like democracy. It's the best worst form of government, meaning all forms of government are terrible and democracy's the best of them. Because the problem is that it's not perfect, right? And you go into it with lots of great ideas, but it can be subject to all kinds of things and Dao's are the same. As wonderful as it sounds to give everybody a vote.

Some people pay more attention and are more informed about their vote than other people. And this is something that's true in politics and it's true in Daos, deciding where to spend their treasury money on building a game product or something else. And so the question is how to keep those people engaged. And I think that the best communities that we see with long-term engagement over time have to have a variety of different stimuli, some financial, some experiential, some social. And I'm going to shout out a friend of mine in the video game business. And that's a game called Eve Online and a studio called CCP, which is here in London. Because Eve Online, for those,

who aren't familiar with it is one of the legendary what we call MMO-R-PG, massive multiplayer online role-playing games. And Yves Online has been continuously in operation for more than 20 years now. And in video game terms, that's like running into a T-Rex when you go down to the shopping center. Because video game platforms change every five years or 10 years. Like change completely. Just think back to how many, you know, Nintendo and Sega and other. consoles that you might have had over the course of your existence. And so the reason behind their success is that they have an incredibly passionate community. And the best analogy I can give for people who aren't familiar with the game is it's not dissimilar from, for example, people who love

Dungeons and Dragons. It's a game that requires a huge amount of imagination as well as, you know, receiving visual stimulation and keeps people engaged in very, very complex interactions, social interactions, battles, et cetera, and these kind of strategy games appeal only to a very small type of audience, but they love it and they stick there for years and years and years because they love it just the same way that you may have your poker game or your bridge night that you've had for a decade with your friends because it's a particular kind of experience. And that poker night, you know, you enjoy it because you can win money, you enjoy it because you enjoy playing the game you enjoy it because you like just

you know bullshitting with your friends and drinking but if it was just any one of those you might not come back each week it's that it's that magical mix of those things maybe warhammer should be the next web three I mean maybe there's something to be said maybe like the call physical

experience with a digital layer on top I'll put a link into Jeremy's Dow articles and the episode with Kevin Kelly and all the stuff we've spoken about dows a lot thinking on paper at XYZ for that Let's move on to the Mokkaverse and the Mokka Network. Could you walk us through each of those, how they relate to each other, and what problem

they're trying to solve? Sure. So the idea behind the Mokkaverse originally was, you know, our company philosophy is that we think of the beauty of Web 3 is facilitation of network effects. Network effects being that, you know, kind of like Moore's Law, essentially about chips, you know, that there's a great theory about network effects that's essentially every incremental participant in the network, both adds value to the network, but also receives value from the network. And that as networks scale, people could incremental, people can add

disproportionate value to the network. Because unlike, you know, telephone networks or radio 100 years ago, we don't just broadcast from one place to everybody else now. Everybody is interconnected. And so the value of that network increases with each incremental person on the network. It's why everybody thought Facebook was so magical 10 years ago because when you signed up for your account, all of a sudden, you found all these people you knew. That was why people signed up because you knew that you'd find people that you knew. That was the magic of it. And particularly, I guess, because then you could gloat about what happened to everybody since secondary school, right? And I think that those network effects are a key factor of why Web 3 is so successful,

because as we start to tokenize content and tokenize applications, those tokens are interoperable between applications. So it facilitates those network effects. Everybody who builds on Ethereum and uses Ethereum adds value. Every time somebody builds a new application on Ethereum, Ethereum is more valuable because there's more stuff to do there. There's more stuff you can use your eth for, et cetera, et cetera. And so we wanted to try to figure out how do we lean into this idea of network effects with what was becoming a bigger company. So we have lots of shareholders, we have lots of employees, we have lots of investees, and we have lots of our own, you know, video game studios and other things. So the universe of EniMoka brands kind of, you know, one degree of separation was getting quite big.

And so what we decided to do was we decided to build the Moka network. And originally it was an NFT collection that we gave to all of those people at all those different levels. And then it became a token and a decentralized ID. And the reason we hit upon decentralized ID was because we realized that increasingly as we start to try to build audiences in Web 3, one of the things that we, one of the true superpowers of Web 3 is the ability for you to authenticate something as being true for very low cost and at scale. And so, for example, you can have a wallet and I can confirm, you know, how much fun, how many

funds or tokens are in that wallet. But I can also confirm, for example, a piece of personal information if you have that tokenized in your wallet, right? You could tokenize, for example, a chest x-ray that you got at the GP. And then I could access that in your wallet and know that it's a valid chest x-ray, right? Or that it's validly yours and associated with you. And so what that leads to eventually is this idea that when you think about how the internet was constructed, Originally in Web 1, as we talked about, everything was highly decentralized. Essentially, everybody created their own website, and we all meandered around the web, and we browsed and we surfed.

Those were the words. To everybody's individual server and web page and website. Then all of a sudden, we underwent this huge sort of, you know, kind of that moment in the tsunami when the water gets sucked off all the beaches and everything gets sucked out into the ocean. and Web 2 is essentially the consolidation of all that, where rather than having the entire internet full of lots and lots of stuff, essentially you just go to five or six websites

for everything that you do, right? You go to your app store or you go to your YouTube or you go to your Spotify and find what you need there. And that consolidation is not necessarily a good thing. It limits customer choice and it makes it very difficult for new entrants to be able to compete because essentially all these audiences are siloed. And the second problem with that is that you as a user probably have many, many identities

across the internet because you've given your personal information to Apple and Google and Facebook and Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. And you've opened accounts at all these places. And they don't talk to each other. Partially, this is due to data privacy laws, particularly GDPR in the EU. But it's also due to the fact that those platforms have tried to build moats and emotes, you know, a moat is a fancy tech word for a monopoly, right? Let's call it what it is.

They've tried to monopolize your information and your attention so that you don't go outside their walled gardens to other people's sites. And so as a result, all this replicated infrastructure adds cost, which ultimately must come from consumers in some form or another. And it limits consumer choice and we've all sacrificed our personal information. So what if we decentralized all that information? And we said, you know, all that user information, your credit card information, your demographic information and stuff, Why don't you as the user just possess that and bring it with you from place to place like you do in the physical world? I carry a wallet with my, you know, my ID card and my credit cards and I bring it from shop to shop. I don't just sign up at one shopping mall and then, you know, everything is just one click when I'm inside that shopping mall.

That's not how the physical world works. So we're trying to replicate that in the Mocha network essentially by giving everybody a Mocha ID, which you can sign up for, you know, free of charge on the internet. And once you have the ID, you can then start to build your online reputation and store your personal information in that ID. And what we want to do is we want to appeal to people to think differently about how they share their public information, their information online, right? You want to give people the opportunity to both maintain their privacy if they want to maintain a strict amount of privacy or share lots of information. And it should be up to the user to

decide what they want to do. It should be all our, you know, our individual. choice. Some people might want to share. Other people might not want to. But once you put that construct in place, then you can actually enable services that encourage or discourage that sharing. So for example, if I have new Web3 game and I'm trying to onboard new users and so I say, hey, I want to onboard new users. I'm going to give anirdrop away of content to people, right? then I could order thatirdrop in preference of people who have a more positive or a more negative reputation. Because if you store your online reputation, I could say, look, if you share more online information of your history of interacting with other games, let's say, Web3 games,

and I can see from your history that you're a good customer, then I'll give you a bigger air drop, right? Because you've shared with me your history and shown me that you're a good customer. And so I'm going to give you a reward for that. Whereas the person who's completely anonymous, and I don't know, are they going to just take my merchandise and dump it and not actually play my game? Well, maybe I'll give them less of an airdrop because it's more opaque and I don't know as much about them. So I'm actually giving an incentive to the person who's more open with their data. And I think this is a really important concept because the idea in Web 3 is that we want for people, number one, to have autonomy over their own stuff and their own information. But number two,

there should be some kind of fair exchange of value if you decide to share. your information. It should not be the presupposition that I get all your information as the platform or the provider. And that's terms. Exactly. And then you just have to stuff it. Yeah, there's so many complexities, I think, with decentralized identity that I've been kind of struggling with for a long time. Years ago, and Mark, Mark's going to giggle. But I always bring up open mustard seed from MIT, like back in the day, had this idea and it wasn't blockchain-based. It was database driven. And it related to personal data stores. and automating different identities to different things that you connect to.

It's very philosophically kind of the same thing. But you have this thing with decentralized identity that someone has to like put it together. Someone has to create these tools for decentralized identities. Traditionally, people build technological infrastructure. They incur costs. And like you said, it has to get into a cost recovery bit by charging the consumer something or doing something with sponsorship or whatnot. So you build all of these, all this tech infrastructure and then you have to monetize it, right?

And the way you monetize it, you keep people kind of on the platform. How does that balance with, because it's quasi central, it's quasi-decentral. Like, talk me through that spectrum. So the cool part is like with the Mocha ID, for example, if you have an application, you know, you create a, whatever, a cool music application and you want to onboard users who have a Mocha ID, all you have to do is integrate the MoCA SDK, and then you can essentially read everybody's mocha ID, and that's all it requires. And you as the application don't need to be responsible for managing everybody's personal information, which is nice, because not everybody wants to have,

you know, the responsibility of maintaining a database that obviously could be subject to getting hacked and all kinds of stuff, because the beauty is that each of the users actually carries around their personal information from place to place. And then what we use is we use zero knowledge proofs to confirm information between the parties. So for example, if your music site requires creators to be above the age of 15, let's say, then you could use the zero knowledge proof to confirm the age of a MoCA ID holder who shows up, but you don't actually have to possess their driver's license or their knowledge of what their birth date is because actually the proof will confirm it for you without having to give you that

information. And that's, I mean, that's a brilliant piece of tech, frankly, because again, it maintains the privacy of the user, but it facilitates the exchange of or the confirmation of data that, you know, a responsible business needs to have in order to make sure that it's, it's servicing its users, you know, within the bounds of the law or whatever. So it's almost access to this, this community of, in a way, there's a bunch of other things to it. but access to a community of users that are already in this MoCA network, right? And so Mark and I are building the game, and it's not necessarily Web3 yet, but we want to figure this thing out.

Is this where the AI, is it Air Kit? Is that what you call? Yes, correct. So we would take the Air Kit and that would basically fold our game into this, into this network of. Yeah, it would allow you to, exactly. It would allow you to read all those wallets of the users. And what we wanted to do by establishing that SDK is essentially allow for a quick scaling of the network

because then what we're doing now is we're appealing to other Web 2 networks, you know, whether they're like the Sonium network in Japan or others, because what we can do is onboard entire Web2 networks en masse to create MOCA IDs. And we think that this is a much simpler entree than convincing people to set up Web3 wallets and buy tokens because the ID can be a very quick gateway to facilitating then the next step, setting up a wallet, et cetera, et cetera. But it gets them on board into being Web3 ready, if you will. You mentioned Sonium, and you mentioned earlier,

playing Web3 games on PlayStation. And is there something there with Sonium? So, nothing, nothing that I'm hiding. No, but I mentioned it particularly because of off the grid, from Godzilla. And they've been quite successful so far on console as well as Steam. I think Sony is actively experimenting. So Sonium is the biggest experiment so far, creating their own blockchain,

specifically for doing this kind of stuff. I think actually the best example of a traditional game company making inroads in this area is Nexon, the Korean game company, who just came out, just launched their token, actually, for their Maple Story Universe game. Maple Story is one of the success stories of mobile gaming. And in fact, you know, they invented the free-to-play model, which most games are based upon these days. And they just launched their token last week, a little over a week ago, but very successful. And it's a nice example because Maple Story has also been around for,

you know, 15, almost 20 years. And because it was designed as a traditional, you know, hyperinflationary game economy, meaning that they just create new game items and you buy new stuff, then eventually over time, they wanted to see how they could address that inflation problem. And so they discovered blockchain as the solution to that. So it wasn't for them about just how do we use blockchain because we love blockchain and it's cool, which is how a lot of other of us came to the industry. For them it was, look, we have this mega hit game, which is a multi-billion dollar franchise for us. And we've got a problem, which is inflation. And how do we solve the inflation problem?

And blockchain seems a natural way to do that. That's interesting. One quick question. So I want to take this down for folks that aren't as familiar with, the Web 3 side of the fence. How would you explain the difference between, say, like the App Store right now and what you guys are doing? Sure. So I think the main difference is that what we're doing is decentralized.

What we want to do is we want to create a network of networks so that essentially you can travel around Web3 and build your reputation based on your decentralized ID on your MOCA ID. And that reputation will serve you well. think, you know, if you have listeners in America, Americans will be intimately familiar with the idea of a credit score because that means a lot as far as your financial health goes in America, whether you can get a mortgage or a loan or anything like that. And the idea behind that is essentially, obviously, the higher your credit score, the better your credit will be. And it's in your interests to try to maintain that score through positive behavior. We kind of wanted to do the same thing with the MOCA ID. We wanted in the Web 3 community to incentivize people to have

positive behavior and disincentivize negative behavior and do that through essentially the transparency of on-chain transactions because we can see what you buy and sell and how much time you spend doing things and whether you're the kind of community member that we want in a particular application or you're not. But the beauty is that it's just about transparency and about individual choice. And I think that's an important thing because it again gets away from this kind of sort of fiefdom monarchy approach of Web 2, where it's really the platform that decides everything. I mean, as you said, Jeremy, in your intro, in Web 2, we don't even own the content that we pay for and supposedly buy.

Anything that removes the fiefdom is good in my book. And I think this goes back to the beginning of the show, where we spoke about onboarding the bankless in these emerging markets. I think it all works together, these emergent parts, to bring decentralized identity in ZKCings to these other markets where we can build enough momentum perhaps to be. remove some of the power of these Google logins and these Apple logins. Jeremy, I hope we've gone some way to reigniting the Web 3 fire under you. Forget a bit more optimism into it.

Listeners, we've got many shows. We always bring this together. We've got shows on ZK. Things, we've got shows on decentralized ID. We've got shows on crypto wallets. We've got shows on gaming. We spoke to Sebastian Borger from Sandbox. We put all those links in the show. Thinking on Paper to XYZ. Thank you for thinking on paper with us, Robbie. I'll leave you with the last. question from our special guest, Kevin Kelly, a few weeks ago. We're not asking this question to everybody who comes on thinking on paper. And this question for you, for everybody, was, what should humans be?

And we've added little brackets. And how does technology help get us there? And you can answer that how you like. What should humans be? Yes. That's a little bit deep for a Thursday. Yeah. And that's an hour in.

We drop that. And then you have to answer that and then we'll wrap the show up. Okay. How existential do you want to be? What should humans be? Honestly, I think we should just be nice to each other. I think there's too little of that. Help us do that. I think technology helps us do that because it gives us the opportunity to connect with each other. And I think that in that, I have to assume that that connectivity that we have, despite the inordinate amount of time I spend on Twitter, I have to assume that all that connectivity is actually more of a positive than a negative because it allows us as humans to come together across time and space. in ways that we never have before. And I think that that's definitely a net positive. I love that. And, yeah, we're largely a technology show, but we're a bit of a culture show as well. And I love, like, in the lab- Or a human show.

The show, keeping humans in the mix. This was great, Robbie, the idea of kindness. We talk about empathy all the time. We talk about all of these threads that are the human pieces of the puzzle that will hopefully continue to maintain us and let us thrive as we move through the future. Thanks for joining us. This was amazing. I'm definitely re-inspired to dig in more of what you guys are doing.

But please stay in touch. Please let us know how things are going. And we'd love to hear some updates from you. And Mark will put a bunch of stuff in the show links for you. Well, don't forget, we're all going to make it. Yes, we are. There you go. There you go.

Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on paper. Thank you.