The Startup Ideas Podcast - From Community Manager to C-Suite | Jiho, Axie Infinity

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Today's guest shows the power of community by sharing a personal story of how Discord changed the trajectory of his life. Jiho (@Jihoz_Axie), the Co-Founder of Axie Infinity, tells the story of how he went from community manager to C-Level Executive at Axie Infinity. As the co-founder of one of the most successful play-to-earn games to date, Jiho has tons of knowledge about NFTs and video games. He joins us on the pod to discuss the player-owned economy, the new GDP, and the value of crypto money markets.An important note: We recorded this episode before the Axie Infinity hack. So while we wish we could’ve brought it up with Jiho, it happened prior to the incident. However, we discussed takeaways on the Axie Infinity hack in our episode with Danny Trinh.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comTHIS EPISODEJiho: https://twitter.com/Jihoz_AxieSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. If you love high-quality meat and fish we can’t recommend them enough. We personally love their NY strips at the moment.Right now they are offering free ground beef for life and $10 off your first order. But this offer only lasts until Saturday at 11:59 PM EST. Use the code ROOM at checkout and make sure to go to butcherbox.com/room to get the offer.►► This episode is also brought to you by MarketerHire. MarketerHire provides on-demand access to pre-vetted, top-tier marketers who can freelance as much or as little as needed.They’ve made it easy to hire great marketers. With pre-vetted talent and expert hand-matching, you can add a proven marketer to your team in less than a week.Go to marketerhire.com to learn more.

With Axi, we're looking to be a relatable, fun, nostalgic entry point into the world of crypto. Nostalgia is the most powerful of human emotions. We have gamers, right, our generation. We grew up playing games like RuneScape, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Starry Valley. These experiences evoke really powerful emotions. And when you can basically evoke that emotion and then attach crypto to it, right? you have a way to get people down the rabbit hole. And I think a much, I don't know,

in a way that makes a lot more sense to, you know, billions of gamers worldwide. Just got done filming with Gio, the chief growth officer and one of the co-founders of Axi Infinity. Blu my mind. Crazy stuff. Yeah, Axi is one of the largest played Aaron games.

And he shares a glimpse of the future that kind of blows my mind. Yeah, we talked all about play to earn, understanding it, how it's the natural progression of a lot of the gaming industry, and what the world might look like in the next 10 years. Super excited for you guys to check this one out. You're going to love it. Enjoy it. What is up, you guys? Today, I am so excited to share with you one of my favorite companies, Butcher Box, my go-to resource for all my meat needs. If you've been following me by now, you know that I love meat, steak and beef for my favorite food in the world, and I really can't get enough of them. Well, Butcher Box has me covered.

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It's like the Web 3 future. So you're going to guide me on this journey down and play to earn land. Because I grew up, I was like a Pokemon guy. I love Pokemon, World Warcraft, Met. Like, all this stuff I played. I love video games. I haven't been as close to it recently. Invested in the space a little bit.

I think it's awesome. But I'm stoked to talk about video games today with Gio. Yeah, I mean, I've never told you this. But I actually played professional Counterstrike. No way. When I was like 16. Really? Yeah.

How did that come about? Did you practice? And you were like sick at Counterstrike? Yeah, pretty much. Dude. Yeah. This reminds me so much. much. You know Josh, but Josh has three, so Josh Fabian, founder Metafi, has three kids, I think

three, four, and two of his sons are like top 50 in the world Pokemon players and they're little dudes and they go up against adults in this like strategy game and they're just complete savages, like destroy them. And so I'm imagining you as a 16 year old kid or 15 year old kid, like little baby Greg rolling around destroying people in Counterstrike. Totally, yeah. Me and my clan actually competed in. the qualifier for the world cyber games in maybe 2004. No way. Which was a long time ago.

I love that. So, yeah. I need pictures. We're going to need to check receipts on this. There's one picture of me, which is insane, which maybe I can dig up. We're going to dig it up. We're going to throw it into the Discord after we get done with this because we're going to need to see this picture.

I need to see 15-year-old Greg. I'm going to get memed. Yeah. I've got like the longest cyber. Anyways. I can't wait. Yeah. So what are we going to dig into today?

I mean, we've got a lot to cover with Gio. Have you, well, I've been just, I've been thinking about play to earn a bunch and also learn to earn. Have you seen rabbit hole.g. What is learn to earn? So play to earn, we're going to dive into it, Gio. Like, we'll talk about all the definitions and get into it. Learn to earn.

I've never heard of. So what is that? Learn to earn, well, I'll explain it by the example, like rabbit hole. So the way rabbit hole works is you earn token. from decentralized applications by learning about them. So, for example, Uniswap is one of the biggest protocols that exists in decentralized finance. And they'll basically give, let's say, you know, 10 uni tokens if you go on a rabbit hole quest. And the rabbit hole quest is all about learning about how Uniswap works and how to actually, you know, use.

some of their protocol. So Uniswap is happy because they've just acquired this new customer who is vetted, right? They've actually learned how to use the protocol, and they've actually, they've got, you know, quote unquote, on-chain reputation. So meaning you've learned how to use Uniswap, and it's almost minted to the blockchain. So it's like, you know, Greg Eisenberg learned this. And that's really the concept of Learn to Earn. Yeah, that's really cool.

I mean, it's a natural sort of play adjacency to play to earn. It's really interesting to think about like normal world, non-web-3 applications of that exact thing, like how companies might be able to integrate learn to earn. Because if you think about like a bank, a credit card company, new financial services infrastructure, they benefit so much from people understanding what they're building in the product suite. And so I wonder whether there are ways to like leverage that idea by just like, teaching people more, and now suddenly you've acquired a customer effectively. And it's more interesting in the Web3 context because now you have people that could be developers.

They should do a developer camp where they teach you how to code on Solana, or they teach you how to code on top of Ethereum, and then you get one ETH for doing the course. They pay you to take the course because now they have new developers that are building on top of it and creating this whole ecosystem effect. Yeah, I think I think that that's where it's all going. I actually did a thread on this where I believe that in the future, you'll have your resume on chain and you'll be able to apply at a job and then within 60 seconds get that job because those people know that you are great at Uniswap

or you understand how to code in rust or solidity or whatever and you have these badges to prove it. I think that's the future. I got like a ton of backlash from that thread, like thousands of people being like, you're completely wrong. So it was the idea, sorry, I want to go deeper on that just for one second before you extend. So the idea of it being on chain would mean that you would have your resume. It would also have like credibility scores on chain associated with every skill set

that experience you say you have. So people could have in a trustless way you would know when you went to it that that person had been stamped of approval and had executed a number of things really high quality with whatever that skill set is. What's stopping me, yes, that's exactly how it works. What's stopping me from going on LinkedIn and being like I'm the head of magic at McDonald's? Totally.

Nothing. So what I do like about applying blockchain to this is it's vetted. You know, I went through rabbit hole and I've learned this skill, and therefore I've proven. Yeah. That really is interesting. It's interesting to think about derivative businesses you could build off of it too of like, how do I, like, it would be very cool to say,

I'm going to, like you did crypto college, you're teaching a bunch of people how to build in Web3. If I'm an enterprising person, I might actually go buy a bunch of those NFTs, stake them, stake a bunch of people at scholarship, and say, I want 10% of your first company. Like use it as my venture investment in them and say, if you're going to go build in this space, I'll buy you your ticket into this thing. But I'm the guy, now you have to give me a 10% of it. stake. Or when you raise your first round, I have to have priority access at a 20% discount to whatever you raise at in order to invest. And it's sort of like, I mean, it's what these incubators

are doing in a lot of sense, but it's for a Web3 Worlds. You actually are paying, I mean, like you're giving them their ticket to the learning experience. And even cooler when you think about the actual protocols doing it. So like Solana paying to have students go into a Salana boot camp because they know that it's going to create and foster a broader ecosystem. Kind of a cool idea to like think about what the businesses are that could be built around that. Yeah, I think, I mean, it makes sense, right? Like so with crypto college, like we were a course teaching about NFTs, Dow's, and social tokens, and we had 150 people who are builders, right? They're building, they've now like, they're vetted, they've learned how to do this, and a lot of them are building

successful projects. It makes sense that either us as, as crypto college or some external group comes and basically, yeah, stakes or lends out these admission tickets. And then you would imagine that there's a smart contract that's baked into it that basically says, yeah, I get X percent of your revenue or I get Y. And that's the beauty about Web3 and crypto is that you can just bake that into the code of the smart contract. Yeah. So this learn to earn thing is really interesting. I want to talk more about.

it with you because I think there are a bunch of cool I feel we could do a whole episode on learned earn yeah I think there's like a bunch of really cool applications of it too to like dive in more understand some of the business opportunities that come off this and also like can you create kind of learned earn services that then you know you can plug into older world companies and figure out ways to foster new kind of ecosystems around your existing like old world web two company and product so I really do think that's interesting I do want to bring in jeho and dive in on play to earn because the video game aspect and what they're building is super super interesting and i think we need to go deep on it and he's he's the guy to bring in he's the guy so let's

do it bring him in we'll jam on it hey this is jeho i'm uh the co-founder of axi infinity coming at you live we are live in miami or nfti balsam like nfti baffle yeah there's youtube podcast Spotify um and then a community. So we built a whole thing around Discord alongside it. Oh, nice. I should join your Discord. Yeah, it's going to be cool. We'll go in, like, after the episode drops, we'll invite you.

Discord changed my life. Yeah. Really? Yeah. How so? That's how, you know, like, I saw the wire article that a Crypto Kitty sold for $150,000. It's like, what the fuck is a crypto kitty? But this seems really, like, kind of interesting.

This seems accessible. I was always a gamer. I was always a collector. I wasn't, I wasn't into crypto when it was about trading. I already knew how to trade options. So if I wanted extreme volatility, I already knew where to get that. Yeah. So then I saw that a crypto kitty heads in 2017, like December 1st or something like that.

So basically four years ago to the day. Right. Yeah, exactly four years ago. Happy birthday. Discovered CryptoKitties. And it was an interesting community. Like people were doing interesting stuff around it. I built.

I worked on a project called Kitty Hats that was building accessories. on top of it, right? So, were you at Yale at the time? No, no, no. I graduated. I was a quad recruiter for a couple of years. No way. And some of the smartest people that I was talking to, that I'd been talking to, all super interested in Ethereum and smart contracts.

So it was on my radar. And then I saw CryptoKitties. But then, right, it kind of was just a proof of concept, right? It was like, it's like, let's not try to turn this into something that it's not destined to be. but we knew that, okay, like, right, there was problems with the economy, right? So we needed to figure out, like, how can we get people to actually just, right, like, want to hold these pets rather than just, like, breeding and selling, right? We needed there to be more verbs, more utility, right? I think of utility in terms of verbs, right?

Like, okay, you could breed, you can collect. What else, right? Okay, battle, right? That's a cool way of thinking about it. I've never thought of that, utility in terms of verbs. Makes a ton of sense, though. Super logical. Battle, collect, build, harvest.

Yeah. These are all verbs that we're trying to bring to Axis. That's so cool. Okay, so Discord, you ended up, like, you got into Discord channels because you saw that things were going on with it and stuff was happening. You would talk to a bunch of smart people that were getting into it. And clearly, then you started paying attention to it. And so, like, what actually brought you from there then to the AXI story?

Yeah, so I joined AXI as a community member, right? So I hopped in. I think there were 10 people that were regularly chatting in the Discord at that time. And yeah, I met the founders, Trump, Masamune, they were talking about their vision in the Discord at the time. It was like, and I said, hey, like, this is something that could work. It's right. It has that collectability aspect and the scarcity, but there's also, right, this plan for

long-term fun and utility. And I was like, I saw that as the perfect formula for building an amazing community. Um, or, yeah. So, did the game exist at that point or was it just a vision? It was, yeah, so I arrived on the day, I think, that the axes were unveiled. So there was a month where people were buying tokens, NFTs that you couldn't see. Actually, this is now like a common strategy, right? But at that time, it was, people were like, is this a scam?

Is this art ever going to be revealed? And then as soon as the art was revealed, I think people felt safe to kind of tell me about it. So then I arrived. You could see the axes, right? I bought three and I was like, okay, like, what do we do next, right? Like, we need, we need to, we need to start building. What did that cost when you first bought them? Do you remember? The axes that I got were like 0.15th each or something. Like, these are origin axes, right? So I think, you know, there was a chance that you could get a, when you were buying these original axes, right, there's only 4,088 of them, hard cap, origin axes.

and around like basically each time up one of their body parts or a gene was rolled there was a chance that it was a mystic part right so they're uh six body parts um so it's like around like a 30% chance that would have a mystic part mystics are like limited collectible yeah uh or kind of like the holy grail within oxy rights i think like mystics are i think around 30th right now each it's so cool because um like now we're all familiar with these terms. Like, you spend time in the NFT world, you understand rarity, understand all the different properties. But in 2017, it was like, this is weird. I don't understand it. It's like the Chris Dixon thing of like if it looks like a toy, you know, might be the thing of the future. People were saying that, like in the early days of NFTs, right? They were just, they were, and I'd seen that, I think Andreessen invested in Crypto Kitties. It obviously became that Rapprolabs later. I was like, okay, this is a space. This is going to be an entire market.

So I was kind of looking for an opportunity to get involved as a builder in a project, right? So, yeah, I found Axi as a community member and just started trying to help out. So I was helping with the community, doing some writing, keeping the Discord chat liquidity high. You guys are kindred spirits, man. So you're the CEO of Axi Infinity, right? No, I'm a co-founder, Growth Lead. Head of growth. CGO, I guess, in terms of...

So you can go from... a community member to a sea level executive by just literally partaking in the community and contributing. Like, you know, when you started, I would imagine, joined that community, your first, you know, you never thought that you'd be, or correct me if I'm wrong, did you think that you were going to be the chief growth officer of this big thing? I don't know. I was just taking a day by day. Like, I was just hanging out, meeting new people. And, yeah. It's kind of the web three.

I always think about Greg's going to make fun of me for this probably. Like, I am a, I'm still a ludite, and I still am, like, developing my understanding of all these things and embracing it. And I think of all of these things in, like, prior to Web3 analogs. And I think of this as, like, a story of, it's like the person that starts as, like, the stockroom floor and now is the CEO. Like, Walmart, actually. I think the CEO of Walmart currently is a guy. that like started as a store man like he started as a store clerk i mean right before this we had cat cole who wasn't she a hooters she was a hooters waitress and became the head the head you know and i think i think

the you know the 2021 2022 equivalent of that is you start in the discord we're hiring like incredible talent from the discord right now from the community so cool that's so cool So I want to get into the AXY story for sure because I think it's amazing. I've done a bunch of research and reading on you and the story. But maybe we start like let's set the stage for people that are listening, people like me that probably don't understand it quite as much, with just like a little bit of kind of definitions around it. So can you guys talk? You guys know this much better than me.

Can you talk about like free to play and then how does that transition and what is play to play? to earn me. Yeah, sure. So in the, in the, in the, in traditional gaming, right, like the developers, the app stores, the publishers, they're all, right, they're all working. And they're working together. They're selling a product, right? They're still either selling skins or game copies, um, selling loop boxes, right?

Traditionally, they're taking close to 100% of the revenue generated by the game. Right? There are some like black and gray markets. but it's not, yeah, they're kind of difficult to access and use. So our model is a lot different, right? We're very focused on the community, the player-owned economy. So we see it as we've kind of lowered taxes from close to 100% to around 4.25%, right, which is the fee on the AXE marketplace, right?

So rather than selling axes directly, we monetize by just taking a percent or a cut of all peer-to-peer, player-to-player transactions on our marketplace. So the original, I just want to read it back to you guys and make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So like earlier, think like Fortnite. Everyone knows Fortnite. They, you know, Epic Games, like has this massive ecosystem that they've built. the game is free to play and you go buy skins or you buy different attributes or whatever within the game. All of that money, it sounds like, is going to epic. Like, they are the 100%. That's the rent.

The way you put it, I thought was great. The rent, they're taking it. The players get to play. The utility the players get is that they have fun. There's no like, you're not earning anything. And the difference here when you start thinking about play to earn is rather than that company taking 100%, that whole pool now is basically for the players and for the ecosystem. system and the world in a way that you're creating and the actual company AXI takes a clip.

Like it's a tiny percentage that gets taken, I don't know, 5% or something. It's also like an important thing to recognize too, right? People are also spending within AXE for reasons that they spend on traditional digital items, right? Like they're spending for fun. They're spending for status, right? Like AXE is an incredibly fun game and it's an amazing community. This is actually what backs the economy. That's also why it's so hard to replicate, right?

If it was just about mechanisms, then everyone would just copy the mechanism. And there would be all these thriving NFT planner and games right now. But there aren't. There's only one, actually. Because I think it has to do with that idea of the social capital backing the economy. Can you talk more about that? So what makes a great play to earn game? What are the ingredients?

I think there is a lot. I mean, you need, I think, an amazing. and community, something where the way that I think about crypto in general is like, are there products where the community is doing a majority of the work already, where a middleman is extracting the value

away from that community? And can we cut out the middleman and basically reward the community for the work that they're already doing? So I think that any product that has the community, like user-generated content, right? That's brilliant.

Anything that has a high, amount of work being done by users with large existing middlemen is ripe for disruption. So that's how I look at it. So, yeah, I think like the Roblox model would work better, right? If they opened up the economy even more. You know what, Roblox actually was very irrelevant for a long time until they allowed people to actually cash out the Robox. So it's a more open model.

That's why it's like, that's why it's actually catapulted. But we're taking it to the natural conclusion, which is like giving as much as possible to the community. So we need to go deeper on this because that was brilliant. So just as a framework, find a business or an industry where the community is creating the vast majority of the value. And if there is a rent collector sitting there that's somehow harvesting most of the value from that, it needs to be disrupted. And it likely will be disrupted by something that looks more like. Web 3, and that is more decentralized and community-oriented. I think it's so interesting to think about the incentives that you're relying on to advance these spaces too, where like with the prior

versions, you are relying on the fact that like Epic or whatever the developer is will continue to reinvest those profits to enhance and make the ecosystem better and continue to make the game better and make it more engaging and fun over time. With this, you're actually not relying on anybody because it is in every player's best interest to make the ecosystem better so that they can earn more money in it. And so they all have that. They want to reinvest. Many of the players, right, you can see each of them as a digital pet store owner, right? And actually, Magic is actually more of a decentralized model too, right? Where there's a secondary market, there's kind of like this economy. Each store owner, right, is kind of incentivized to host Magic nights, right? And

They have like Magic Friday, I think. I used to play tournaments. Right? So it's more of a decentralized model, right? So, but I think like, yeah, one of the things that NFTs do, in my opinion, is they give the characteristics of physical collectibles, like trading cards, to digital assets. Can we talk more about that?

So magic, I've always wondered, like, who was, like, why they were throwing these magic tournaments. Like, can you talk more about the, first of all, I didn't know that you were, like, a magic nerd? I wouldn't say I was a magic nerd, but I love magic cards, post. Pokemon. I was a Warcraft guy. People were into that kind of stuff. Like magic. A lot of them, like, were super early to act. They see the model is just like taking that physical world model and applying it to a borderless future.

I just, when I look at him, I see like Stanford baseball pitcher. Fun fact, the Stanford baseball team, my freshman year, the entire team on all of our road trips would be sitting on our computers playing World of Warcraft together on the way to games. hilarious. Narrative violation. Yeah. violation. But yeah, going back to magic, like, do you know about their model? Because I'm, I've

recently been obsessed around taking sort of like older community models and bringing it online. So, just curious of you. Yeah, I'm, I'm, like, I studied it a little bit in the early days of Axy. And I saw that basically physical events were really important to their propagation, the proliferation of magic, right? Where, yeah, store owners and, right, like, they, they basically we'll, the Wizards of the Coast, they'll send merch basically and I guess appoint people. There's kind of like this bureaucracy or whatever, and they have this whole framework for basically hosting events. And I think there are like thousands of them, right, every Friday, all across the country. It's funny because we talk about the metaverse, right? We talk about this digital

place. But so many of us forget that physical is where community is actually. So for something like magic where there's a huge secondary. market, right, just like AXI, the community is really important because people need to be spending, right, for that flex, right? So in Magic, right, why do people buy, why would anyone buy a Black Lotus, right? They might see it as a store of value, but it's also, right, it's like you get to tell the other people in the Magic community that you have a fucking Black Lotus, right? Similar, right, similar dynamic in the AXE community, right, with all the collectibility. And it's that, right, like status that drives a lot of the economic activity as well.

Yeah, and it creates a world as you continue to scale it, both physical and digital, but you're sort of just, what you're creating is not a game anymore. It's like an entire ecosystem, really a nation of Axy players that's borderless. And so it doesn't matter if all the articles about the people in the Philippines that are earning a living wage playing Axi. It's amazing. It's like you watch these videos. And it's very inspiring that there are people that are doing this.

And then there's someone in America. And like you go and host an event at Arbazal and people that have never met, never connected in person in any form or function are now all of a sudden connected in this cool, very real way. It doesn't matter the color of their skin. It's like very global. It's really, really cool. That's one of the things that I love, just like the promise of it that I love so much is that borderless aspect to it. One of the things I want to also ask about is like, what are the challenges? with the unique, I don't know, drawbacks or challenges of this plate-dern model.

Like with AXE, you had this massive hype cycle, you know, like Pachy had his piece on it, and there was all this press and everything and, you know, the prices of everything spiked. It's obviously, like, with every hype cycle, it pulls back pricing. So, like, how do you think about that aspect of the played-earned model where you're going to have natural, like any market fluctuations in the prices and how it impacts players in gaming? Sure. I mean, this has happened too, right, like where we built all through throughout 2018, 2019, right? Axy prices went from, right, the cheapest, you know, kind of run-of-the-mill axes went from, I think, $5 to $0.20 or something. But that was really important for the community. That was character building. That volatility actually creates fermentation, a fermentation process.

So it's actually needed, right? Like, every strong crypto community needs to go through a bare market together. Unfortunately, maybe you're for better or for worse. I think that's how it works. I think that's also one of the hard parts of starting a project now. And a lot of projects come to me for advice on like, how do you build a community? It's like, but they're operating in a totally different market, right? Like the same things that we did back then are not going to work now. It's like the Lindy effect.

Have you read any Taleb? I know like he's like somewhat hated in the Bitcoin community for like anti-Bitcoin, but hit the Lindy effect of the whole idea of like the longer you've survived, the longer you're likely to survive. And so being hardened by the, those periods of pain actually leads to more survivability of it. I think it's a great way of putting it actually. Like, you need those moments.

I'll also say there is one of the drawbacks of like this whole narrative around play to earn. I prefer, we prefer to call it play and earn, right? But one of the drawbacks and narrative is that, right, the community aspect, the, you know, the fun of the entire ecosystem, it kind of takes like a backseat to, you know, this thing that's kind of a new innovation, right? There are so many fun games out there. There are a lot of amazing communities out there. This is kind of a fundamental new innovation, but sometimes it takes a little bit of the spotlight off of the rest of the ecosystem and also the stuff that basically allows the played-Earn model to work. And then people start saying, oh, like, played to earn,

like, how is this sustainable? Because they don't understand how fun the game is, how awesome the community is. Fast forward 10 years from now, what percentage of the game is, what percentage of the game gaming market is play and earn versus traditional as you define it. I think that these digital economies are become, right, some of the largest economies of all time, right? So, like, it's more like how many games will there be that are larger than large countries or something, right? With economies that are larger than large countries. I think that there will be, I think that there will be hundreds of millions, if not billions of players playing, you know, participating in these, yeah, digital worlds, right?

We're already saying that our digital lives, our digital identities are becoming increasingly more important. The pandemic, right, kind of expedited that. But now it's like, okay, we're using the digital world as kind of a way to funnel or to sift through who we actually want to spend time with in the physical world as well, right? So I think it's also that unity, that fusion is super bullish for everything that we're building. And is the vision, can you walk us through a little bit of the vision of AXE in the sense of like, could you see a world where people not only come to Axy to just play, but they go,

maybe there's quests that have real world implications or like, do you see it more as like a potential like virtual world where it could be serious and fun or do you see it just fun, like the, you know, hey, we're just trying to build like the most fun experience and then there's some on-chain revenue, et cetera. Yeah, actually, like, so we just had an internal discussion about this, right? It's like the world, they want to see it like, oh, this is a fun game, right? But as stewards of the ecosystem, we think a little bit more in terms of, like, what are the archetypes of players in this ecosystem, right?

So right now we have like battler, competitive battlers, right? We have scholarship managers, people that are renting out their axes. We have scholars, right? They're kind of just farming tokens to survive. then we have the collectors, right? They're really into the aesthetics and the scarcity aspect of it. And then we have people who just, they hold access and they stake it, and they're also contributing to the ecosystem.

There are people who, right, they trade the SLP token and this provides liquidity for it. Why? Because it has interesting correlations to all other, basically, asset classes. Because it's kind of like a, it's a uncapped coin that's kind of tied to the value of human effort within our ecosystem. So it's kind of like a weird correlation thing. So basically, there are all these different archetypes, right? And we need to also think about, when we think about the future, what are the future archetypes of people that we want to have in our ecosystem? So it's a little bit, I think, a more precise way of thinking about it because, right, fun is

very subjective. And some people believe that they're the arbiters of fun. But it's, to me, it's like, yeah, it's not specific enough. It's not something that you can build scientifically with. So you hit on something there that I think is like one of the most mind-blood. Like it fucked me up the first time I was reading about it, to be totally honest, which was like this whole idea of the physical world, real-world economies that are being built outside and alongside adjacent to AXE. And like the scholar thing is a perfect example of this.

Like I've seen it with, I think what is it, YGG, like the yield guild games. Is that what it stands for? And a few others that have kind of pop. up that are basically, they've built real world physical businesses adjacent to AXE to kind of support the ecosystem that's being built, not supported by AXA. It's just companies that have like enterprising entrepreneurs that have gone and realized they could stake people to go and play in the game. The same way, honestly, as like what we've done with athletes in the past, like Russian tennis

players have been backed by these like oligarchs to go and build a career and then they take a percentage of their earnings. That to me is like this seminal moment of what you're doing. that all of a sudden there are economies being built outside of you where you're like, oh, this looks like a country where you have all these random economy points. Did you guys, was that like a vision that you had or did you start seeing it and say, holy shit, there's really something to this? It's something right, like, I don't know, like you, there's fog of war, right?

So you just go and you try to get to product market fit. In the early days, we saw that, right, Axi was more than a game because people were spending so much time on the Discord, right? Like, that was kind of like their home. So we saw AXI in the early days as maybe a social network, but we couldn't pitch it as a social network when we had only 200 people in the community. But early on, we saw that there was something very special happening with the community. You know, we all had, you know, a thesis that these digital economies would start to rise.

But yeah, you know, it was definitely, right, like to see, yeah, to see people start building on top of it, right, to see even physical businesses are starting to accept Axis and SLP as payment to lure, right, more foot traffic, right? Like, if you know that there are a lot of, like, Axi players in your town, you can get them to come check out your business by accepting our in-game currencies, right? So this is a marketing strategy. It's a user acquisition strategy for businesses in the traditional world. So, yeah, I think, like, what is a nation? Like, how do we define a nation, right? Nations typically have, like, right, like a kind of an economy, maybe you can.

culture, national pastimes, sometimes languages. I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, develop within AXE. Uh, physical borders are maybe like, you know, the last, uh, component of it. I think that we have a chance, you know, over the next 15 years to, you know, potentially acquire some distressed real estate from a thought sovereign nation, uh, and maybe set up a special economic zone or something that could be recognized by the UN. Um, so. So, yeah, we've already started issuing statements to the legacy governments of the world, right? Because they're like, oh, like, we heard that the central bank of the Philippines was interested in an ASE and asking questions about it. And so we didn't know how to get into contact with them.

So we put out, like, an announcement saying that, you know, we encourage our players to pay taxes if they have to. Or if they're, you know, local, I guess, governments are requiring them to. Yeah, I think, I mean, on one hand, I hear you, Sahel. Like, you're not even saying anything, but I hear you in terms of, like, it's wild that you can start a game, bring people together that eventually leads to, like, a country. On the other hand, it kind of makes sense, right? Like, you've built an economy. You've built like-minded individuals. You've built culture.

You've built community. We just had a conversation with Meltem. And Melton, you know, what Meltem was saying is, you know, the future, basically that there's going to be these like new churches and new cathedrals. She's actually trying to build, I mean, like the church of Bitcoin. I don't know if it's Bitcoin, but basically like an actual, you know, treated as a religion for tax purposes and you can put your gains into this so that it's allocating on a tax efficient basis to go do it. It's kind of, it's a crazy concept. but not that crazy when you break it down to the atomic unit of it actually. I mean,

it's not like my fraternity, right? Like was like some, I think it was like a nonprofit organization or something, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, how many people play AXE approximately?

We have 2.8 million daily active users. So millions of people, right? Like Iceland is 400,000 people. You think about it. We have, I think, two players in Iceland. It was a long time where I was like, fuck, I can't. Like, Iceland, I think Iceland, like, we just didn't have anyone there. I was like, who wants to be the first?

Yeah, right. Yeah, and I think like, so, I mean, you're bigger than Iceland. You know, you're five to six times bigger than Iceland. Yeah. And it makes sense that, like, yeah, like, you might want to acquire, you know, some people might want to move to this place. It makes a lot of sense. I'm starting to see people describe the scale of the Axia.

economy as in terms of GDP. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like the tipping point, right? We'll start saying it that way. Well, old is, you know, gross domestic product. New is game domestic product.

Yeah. The first time I ever thought about this question, like you asked, like, what is a country? You've all know, Harari as that book, Sapiens, which everyone should read if they haven't. And he goes into that. Like, what is an organization? What is a company? What is a country? It's just shared belief.

at the end of the day. And it's just like you have a shared belief in something and there's community. Like all of what we're talking about here, it's community. It's bringing it together. Like money, what is money? It's just trust. Like you have cut common belief. That was actually the opening line to my thesis.

Seriously. I mean, it's crazy when you break these things down to the like boil them down to the root. I just that like I just think it's fast. I also think it's fascinating. If you're a builder and you're looking for a new startup idea, what you have an Axy. and probably there are a couple other things out there that have a similar fervor around them right now but not many is a group of 2.8 million people worldwide

that are highly, highly engaged with something that have a ton of needs that you can go and create something for exactly those needs. The people that were doing these scholar programs staking are doing that. But like, there are going to be unique banking and financial services needs that come off of people that are playing on a regular basis. What can you go build?

that like services those people really, really well. So we just actually just launched a Dex, a decentralized exchange. It's called Katana. I believe it's the second large. There's $1.4 billion locked in it. We only have two pairs, Axis Heath and SLP Eth. We also have a USDC, eth as well. So we're getting stable coin access to people in the emerging markets as well.

Where did it previously happen? Was it like FTX or something where they previously did it? People were using like Binance a lot, like Dex is on Ethereum and stuff. There's a lot of like friction around, right? Like basically you claim the token within our ecosystem for playing the game. Then you have to like transfer out of the ecosystem to, right, to sell it. Right. So yeah, like it's, it's, I think it was a huge catalyst for us.

Yeah, I think they're. A huge thing for you guys, this is just a random idea that I'm having right now. But like in terms of creating stability within the ecosystem as well, and I've talked about it with several people, like rich people don't sell the assets they have. They take loans out against it. Never have to sell it. They live off of the loans. against it. That will eventually happen in the AXI community. And then you won't have these massive

price swings and volatility within the market because people will be leaving their SLP within the ecosystem. Sure, sure. You can like have financial services infrastructure that gets built outside it that allows people to actually take a living wage as a claim against their what is in the next. The next thing, maybe maybe you agree. Like I think maybe one of the next things that we should build on Ronin is something like, right, something like AVE or a compound, a money market, basically. And this will basically allow, right, like, people to get liquidity, right, from their access holdings without having to suffer a taxable event. Could you, could you explain what AVE or compound is to, to, right, you know, regular normies?

Yeah, like, so AVE and Compound are crypto money markets where you can basically deposit tokens and receive a stable coin loan based on the value of those assets, right? So, yeah, you might be able to, right, let's say you deposit $100 of a token of, let's say, ETH, you can then draw maybe $20 of stable coin, right? And this basically allows you to get liquidity from your crypto without having to sell it. And, yeah, you can also, right, like on the other side, you can also borrow from these money markets if maybe you want leverage or you have some need for ETH. And the reason this is hugely valuable, I mean, in a normal, in a non-Axy context, is like if I

have a ton of Bitcoin, but I bought it at $100 and now it's worth $60,000 and I want to go buy a house. I can't do that if I, like, I sell my Bitcoin, pay a huge tax on that game, and then go buy a house with the cash. This allows you to leave your Bitcoin. You never have to pay the tax and you can draw money against it and then go and buy it. And so in the Axi Infinity case, why it's interesting is people wouldn't have to sell and convert to Fiat in order to pay for their food in the grocery store down the street. They could leave it in the game, which, by the way, has the nice benefit of creating price stability in the game, which drives more people in and continues to drive appreciation and growth of the ecosystem.

But they can still draw against it to go buy their food and live on a day basis. So that's like pretty impactful. Potentially important product. You know, we have to do a lot of education, right? So we see AXI as an accessible, cute, nostalgic, community-driven kind of rabbit hole into the rest of crypto as well, right? So you start with the game in the community, but then you start to learn, okay, how to stake, right? How to pull liquidity. You start to all these other verbs, right, get unlocked, right?

Steak, farm, deposit, borrow. And, yeah, 50% of our users have never used crypto before. Yeah, that's amazing. 25% of them don't even have a bank account. So we have to do a lot of basic financial and crypto education. So people are learning incredible amounts. I see AXI is also like an education platform in some ways. There are a lot of educational like content companies coming to us, you know,

saying, hey, Lou, they would want to have us reskin their course with AXIS so that it's, right, like, people actually use it. Yeah, I mean, this is like, you're creating so much value for the Web 3 and crypto ecosystem by educating people. in this way. It's also what you're saying is the reason why I haven't invested in any financial literacy, like, platforms or businesses is because I fundamentally believe that financial literacy happens through actual, like, action and putting skin in the game. No, seriously. And like, it's not me taking a course on, like, how to invest. It's by actually having skin in the game and learning it by feeling it out and like fucking up, feeling the pain of something and getting rug put whatever, like ends up happening. But that, like, the amount of value that's being created by

taking something that looks like a toy, people get on-ramped into crypto, and now they're red-pilled to some extent, starting to see what the future looks like, all of these different things happening. And suddenly we have, you know, it's 2.8 now. It's 10 in a few months. It's like, it becomes very, very powerful long term as you compound that. Super exciting. Do you, you mentioned Axie, you know, when you first started Axie, you know, as a social network.

do you think in play to earn and play and earn the way it works is there's like multiple worlds that you end up in so for example like in social like there's multiple areas right there's twitter for this there's instagram for that there's ticot for this do you think it's one big world in plan earn or do you think it you know you can imagine a world where maybe axi create separate worlds so i think that And we're just riffing, right? This is all like very hypothetical and speculative, right? But I think that there will, yeah, I believe that there will be multiple worlds, but I believe that there will be certain assets starting with ERC20s, like money kind of and tokens. That will, right, like kind of be borderless because these things with like a, I don't know, liquidity and a dollar value, or it's easier to port them between worlds, right? But then, obviously, we get into interoperability.

I'm more bullish on vertical interop. So that's in our case, right? One team of axes, many different games built by many different developers in the Axi universe, right? And then eventually maybe like, right, like having standards to port them between, right, like, I see it more as an attack vector. Like if there was a game that was bigger than Axi

that used NFTs, I would give those NFTs some utility. I would try to give them some utility. in AXE to basically take their users. So actually we did this with DeCentraland in the early days, where we said that everyone who owns land in DeCentraland can get free axes. And we just gave out a lot of axes to DeCentraland landholders. And then we had the land sale, and a lot of them ended up becoming members of the community

and getting stakes in land, which I think changed a lot of lies as well. I like that. my last question for you is a sort of a look into the future like can a traditional gaming company effectively become play to earn and try to participate in this future or is this a new future that has to be built by people that are organic on the ground play to earn or play and earn I think that these grassroots products that are built by users, I think they have advantages. I also believe that there's room for traditional players to come into the space. I think it really is highly dependent on the team and their kind of internal chemistry.

I think that, right, like, this model can be applied to a lot of games, right? Especially where there's kind of, there's rarity, there's scarcity, there's collectibility, there's a strong community, there's user-generated content. I think those are the ingredients that would fit well for some kind of port. I think that I also, I'm super bullish on, all right, so you're a traditional game developer. You have like a pretty good game. It's like a nice game in terms of mechanics, but maybe like there's something off with the IP or the art.

I would love for them to come, right? Just re-skinned the game with AXI. Incubated. And then it becomes part of our ecosystem. And then they have distribution, right? This is like community as a service, right? It's like your product has no adoption, but it's a good product. Okay, just like making an Axy product and then all of a sudden you're going to have millions of users.

So is like Axy Infinity eating the world? Like maybe, right? Where the gaming world at least to start. It's like all about, right, the future is all about user community aggregation and distribution. Right. So if you have that, this is what DFI protocols are learning that they can't do because there's no IP. There's no like, there's no, there's very little brand. loyalty when it's just like, I don't know, clicking some buttons, right? It has to be attached

to content. Yeah, and the way it's set up is you can have as many sub-communities as you want within the Axy world. It's already happening, right? There are thousands of different guilds, right? Many of the guilds, right, they say, oh, like, they're metaverse guilds or whatever. They're all for the entire player and ecosystem, but the only thing that they're actually playing where they have live users, the only, you know, economy that they're participating in, and And on a daily basis is AXI. Yeah. We have a common friend.

This guy, Josh Fabian, runs this company, Metify. And it's like coaching, one-on-one coaching for gamers. You get coached by an expert. And he was telling me recently that AXE is like their number one requested thing. That they want coaches to coach AXA because it's so valuable. People can actually go earn money doing it. So then they're willing to pay to invest in that. So it's another example of like a cool ecosystem being built on a good opportunity for a lot of our influencers,

do. They're looking for cool ways to monetize their time and out there within the ecosystem. So, yeah, I would love to chat with him. I'll connect you with him for sure. He's phenomenal. They're about to announce a big, big fundraise, big bright future. Well, thank you so much for joining us, man. This was epic. I mean, I personally just learned a lot too. So selfishly, I feel much smarter on everything that's happening in the space. And I'm bullish on the future for you guys, man. It's so, so cool. Awesome. That means a lot. Yeah. It's an Axy world and we're just living in it.

Exactly. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Hell of an episode, man. That was a lot of fun, great conversation. It was like pretty cool just how open he is about their vision and talking about the whole story around it. And it's a really ambitious vision. So I loved it. What was your one big takeaway from it? I'll give you a couple takeaways. Number one, he started off as a community member and then became a co-founder. I knew you were going to love that. My community guy. No, but honestly, like that, that was really cool. And it just goes to show you that, like, you're not just joining a community. Like, you potentially could be joining something that's going to change your life by joining one of these Discord.

So super, super cool to hear that. And the other thing is that game domestic product is the new gross domestic product. I liked that a lot, too. I loved talking to him about this whole. infrastructure and startups and businesses that are being built adjacent to AXI. They have nothing to do with it. And there are all these entrepreneurial people who are attaching themselves to this fervent community and building really cool products, profitable products and businesses alongside

it. And that to me is like a very cool framework for people in our community to think about is like when you find a fervent community, it could be AXI Infinity players. It could be Harley Davidson riders. What can you go build for that fervent community that matters to them and that will attached to them, that can be a great profitable business. There's so many opportunities out there, and that was really cool to me to see. And also just the next 10 years, I'm really looking forward to seeing this vision that he

explained actually play out and see, is he right? Is it going to be a billion gamers worldwide doing this play-to-earn thing? It's a big vision. So I'm excited about it. I had a blast. I just learned a lot. Let us know in the Discord of what you think about play and earn. Yeah.

And let us know if you got any play and earn game ideas. Yeah, we want to get in there. We're going to chat about it. We'll bring Gio into the community after he's stoked on it. He wants to invest in the platform too, he said afterwards. So we're looking forward to it. Let's jump in there and jam. Today's episode is brought to you by marketer hire.

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