The Wolf Of All Streets - Animoca & VCs Discuss How They Make Money | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

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Hey guys, how are you? Hey. I am well, how are you? Good, Jonathan. Good, Lawyered. Robbie. Hey, how are you? Good, mate, good. You've always got the perfect mic. What setup do you have for the mic? I think it's just a good day. I'm on a desktop with a headset.

No, every day you speak, you've got the best mic. What headset do you use? Hang on a second. It is... It's a Poly. I don't know what that is. P-O-L-Y? Yeah, like Polyphonic, the old conference call company.

Interesting. All right, cool. I'm going to check it out. Let me send it to my team because it's always perfect audio. Oh, good. Yeah. Romy, by the way, not Romy.

Nastya, I know you're listening in the team. Can you tell me in the DMs, is my mic better than Robbie's or Robbie's better? I don't mean this as a competition. I mean this so that I should change my mic or not. We could set up a pair on Polymarket and see. Yeah. Do you use Polymarket? I don't.

I don't. But I observe it keenly. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's just gaining a lot of traction. We've worked with them a while ago. It's gaining – it could work with them again. Gaining a lot of traction. I use it always for the – instead of using the polls, I use it for the presidential candidate, the likelihood of who's going to be president.

It's like yesterday's. So right now, sitting Kamala at 53 donald at 44 yeah pretty yes i always use that as a guide um do you watch politics at all i do i do can't help it oh wow okay but you never give your opinion i i i notice i'm happy to give an opinion but uh but yeah no, happy to weigh in. I mean, I'm an American who lives in Europe, so I have in the UK particularly, so lots of spicy politics. Your thoughts on the shift from – before we dig into the story, the news with Adam Ock, and I've got a lot of questions for you. Your thoughts on the state of the US political system and the craziness we've seen over the last couple of months? I guess as a lapsed American who hasn't lived there in a while, I just don't understand.

I mean, I kind of understand it, but I also don't understand it. I find it a little bit disheartening just because I feel like there's a lot of unnecessary polarization because people are feeling, you know, people are blaming the wrong things for the problems that they're experiencing um you know there's a lot of income inequality and people who don't have enough opportunities and stuff and and it's much easier to blame somebody else yeah i don't blame you another thing is i don't i don't disagree another thing is you notice is

that people like to blame the current administration whether it's the current one or the previous one the trump or biden administration or whatever president they blame them for things that have nothing to do with them so a lot of like for the state of the economy for example the state of the economy is just so complex where the president has such a small role and it's based on so many factors decisions made 10 20 years ago decisions made by clinton or bush are impacting the economy today yet always the incumbent is blamed for it and it's a political politically famous it's you know politically uh and that's why like it's very the decisions are very short-term focus you see a lot of these decisions by the the the policymakers or the the the presidents um that are based on making sure the economy is okay today sacrificing the future state of the

economy and that's for political purposes. So I think it's more of a systemic issue there or lack of understanding by the – Yes. Although I do think on the downside, as we saw here in the UK a couple of years ago with the brief premiership of Liz Truss, I think the leader of the country can also cause panic, frankly. And so I don't know if it's possible for them to make a difference on the upside, but on the downside, we've seen that because you can panic markets by just seeming to not have a grasp or control on your economy.

Yeah. So I wanted you guys to, we'll go through the news. I haven't even read the news today. I had an urgent thing to deal with. So I'll read the news, see if there's anything of note, and the panel will tell us any interesting news. But the first thing I wanted to talk about was news that came in two days ago. So Animoca, where is it? Animoca is considering an IPO in Hong Kong or the Middle East in late 2025 or early 2026. And you've got almost $300 million in cash and stablecoin reserves. Oh, wow, that's not even liquid, though, because it has invested in about 540 Web3 projects. However, its valuation has fallen from $6 billion,

almost $6 billion in 2022, to $1.5 billion at present. The reason I wanted to have this discussion with you, Robby, is kind of obviously we watch Animoca really closely to kind of get an idea of what your strategy is. We've learned a lot from you guys in kind of determining what our strategy is as a company today. And we're not alone, I'm sure. So the first question is, you know, your comments on this news, you know, why the IPO? Why listing?

Also, you know, you're sitting on a fair bit of cash reserves. Is that waiting for the market to correct? What's your thesis? What's your plan with that money? And then we can dig into the valuation as well afterwards. Sure, no problem. So I think, as you know, we were previously listed on the Australian Stock Exchange up until 2020.

And at the time that we delisted, we always said publicly to investors and shareholders and such that we intended to relist the business at some point in time when it was appropriate. And that is still very much the plan i think the question of timing is frankly more market dependent than anything else and i think it's particularly complex in our case because we're in obviously the web3 crypto space um are, you know, there's lots of new ground to be forged here, when it comes to accounting rules, and regulation and other things, just because there are not a lot of companies in our space who have gone public before. And so there's, you know, lots of things will be considered by regulators and investors for the first time in public markets. So I think that

that's something that, as you said, for us, we're thinking about as something looking into 2025 and 2026, most likely. And obviously, we are a Hong Kong headquartered company. So if we're thinking about market venues, then Hong Kong would probably be the first place we would at least consider. And going into your cash reserves as well, I was going through the news, there's nothing interesting by the looks of it today. I was going through Ryan and Scott's agendas, nothing there. But going into the cash reserves you're sitting at, which is $300 million, how does that compare to cash reserves a year or two ago? Has that gone up or gone down? I'm guessing it's gone down since you've raised cash. How much have you raised? Good question.

Off the top of my head, don't know, but I would have said probably in the last five, six years, somewhere around 600 or so. Something like that. Okay.

And you've invested about half of it. Well, both invested and we make money too. So I think the important note is the last time we put out a public note and obviously we're in a weird space because we're unlisted, but we are still technically a public company because we still do have thousands of shareholders. And so we do have to treat information disclosure as a public company. So the last time that we publicly released numbers was in first quarter. And we announced that we had balance sheet assets

of about 1.5 billion. And as you said, roughly 300 million in cash and stables and about 600 in tokens. And that would be obviously liquid tokens. And I think, you know you know for us it's always a little bit frustrating because obviously you know the market valuation of equity um is not always tracking how we feel the business is because i think when you have a complex business particularly in a new space like web3 um you know people tend to pick on whatever's the easiest way to value you so oddly

we're valued at the moment apparently basically based on cash on hand as opposed to placing any value on the 550 companies we've invested in or the operating business that's so because it's easy because it's easy they're like well you're sitting on a billion and a half, so we'll value you at a billion and a half. But how is that? So, okay, that's weird. So just going back to your assets, you're sitting at $1.5 billion in total assets. Out of it is $300 million in cash and stables and cash. And then you say $600 million in liquid tokens? That's all public information just for the audience. And then you're sitting on another $600 million in locked tokens, I guess, correct? Yes, correct. Okay.

So how is that possible? So you're sitting at $300 million cash. How can you be valued at exactly what your assets are, moving away from the brand equity, et cetera? Is that discounting the locked tokens value? And is that locked tokens with – how do you determine if a token is worth, let's say sitting on 50K, let's say a million dollars worth of a token, but there's only, you know,

liquidity is like 5K a day. Do you still count it? If you don't mind me asking, do you still count it as like a million dollars in liquidity? No, we only count tokens as being liquid if they trade, you know, like five million bucks a day or something like that, that they actually trade. Oh, wow. Okay, so that means you five million bucks a day or something like that that they actually trade.

Oh, wow. Okay, so that means you're sitting on a lot. Yeah, no, we're very conservative in terms of our definition of liquid because you really, I mean, if you call it liquid, you need to be able to liquidate it. So that's, I'm talking about the lock 600 million in lock tokens, that's liquid lock tokens, right?

Does that include SAFs that you've invested in that haven't launched? No, it does not. Oh, wow. Okay, hold on. That's even more unfair. It's a fascinating conversation. So why are SAFs not counted? Do you release the value

of the SAFs as well? We don't. But the thing is that one of the things that's difficult about our business is that it's very big and we've been very active as an investor. And so accounting for all those investments in a very granular way is quite challenging, frankly, because so many of them are based on unlisted

assets, some tokens or mostly tokens and some equity positions. And so I think it's frankly just simpler for an investor who's looking at the space and they're like, well, you know, Animoca Brands is a relative large cap in the space. And here's something that we can grab onto because boy, I mean, they're sitting on this much in balance sheets. They've got to be worth this plus, plus, plus. And, you know, previously they closed rounds at higher prices. And honestly, that's why we really feel like we're a value proposition. And we do have shareholders, existing shareholders, and some of our major shareholders who've been continuing to buy in the secondary market because they believe it's undervalued. Yeah, it's a fair point.

So there's two ways of looking at it. One of them is it's value, like depending on the valuation now two ways of looking at it one of them is its value like depending the valuation now is i wouldn't call it bull market valuation which but if it is bull market valuation you discount a lot of those token values um but we're not at that state like all out coins are already discounted and you know they're already kind of bear market prices right now which is fascinating but it's really interesting to see a business like yourself sitting on 300 million dollars in cash 600 $600 million in liquid tokens, and $600 million in locked liquid tokens. And that's having 5 million or plus or on average, you said 5 million,

but say plus or minus in the daily trading volume. And that excludes any illiquid tokens that you hold or the value of SAFTs or projects that haven't launched, which I'm sure is pretty vast considering how much you guys invest. And to look at a valuation of 1.5 is pretty surprising to me. So it doesn't, I didn't expect it to be that. Yeah. So please feel free to buy some shares. I'm sure there's a lot. If anyone interested, obviously it's not the point of the discussion, but there's, you buy on the secondary market because it's delisted from ASX years ago from the Australian Stock Exchange. Yeah.

But yeah, it's interesting to see that you guys are listing it. But, you know, honestly, it's one of those things. It is a frustration for us because it points to the fact that it is, you know, it is difficult to put a value on some of these businesses and then figure out what are the appropriate discounts to tokens and things like that. And we just have a bigger problem than many people because we're quite spread out. So frankly, there's just a lot of mechanics required to doing all the accounting. Yeah, let's dig into strategy. I think a lot of people in the audience will be interested in learning more about what is

Animoca. And we've got others, not just Animoca, on stage. We've got Tim from Lunar Capital as well. We've got Thomas. We've got Gareth. So it's a pretty stacked panel. So, Robbie, the question I have is you're sitting at $300 million in cash. You've raised about $600 million. How profitable is the business, if you don't mind me asking? Is that public as well? It's not public.

Oh, okay, okay. Fascinating. Can I ask, like, what information can you share from a legal perspective? The reason I ask and the reason I think it'll be interesting for the audience is what your revenue model is like. So for example, I'll kind of talk about us briefly to kind of make it easier. So for us, we invest, so we get tokens unlocked. So if we liquidate those tokens, that's money coming in. We offer services. We have a marketing arm as well. I know you guys, I don't think you do marketing, but you have an incubation arm. So we do marketing and we incubate projects as well,

but that we get paid in tokens for both marketing and incubation and sometimes fiat as well. So that's our model. We've got like the marketing brings in the liquidity to invest because we don't like raising money. We just use our own money. Incubation, which is more long-term and of course investing. We'd love to know what your strategy is. Sure. So essentially, the business breaks down into kind of three buckets. We have our core operating business, which is our games slash entertainment business, where we make games content. We have game studios around the world.

We make mobile, web games, PC games, et cetera. These are all web three, and that's the core business. And then the second bucket would be what we call asset management. So asset management would be all of our investing activity, whether that's through Animoca Ventures, Animoca Capital, which are two dedicated fund vehicles that we have for both early stage and late stage Web3, or investments that we make off the balance sheet, which are typically strategic investments. And then we have a third bucket, which are services. And services basically include everything surrounding the lifecycle of a token. And this is something that grew out of our core

operating business, which was as we had our studios in-house launching more and more tokens for their projects, we realized that they all kind of needed the same thing. They needed tokenomics, they needed go-to-market strategies, they needed marketing and KOL management. And then after they listed, then they needed to work with exchanges to list their tokens on centralized exchanges. Then they needed liquidity provision after the fact. And so as we grew over the years, we started doing more and more of these services for our own projects

and then realized that we should also help to do these for companies that we invest in. And then now we also sometimes do it for third parties as well. So that's kind of the services business. Fascinating. Can I go to this? The first one is just creating games and in-game,

working with games from our gaming studio, correct? Correct. And what was the second bucket? So the second one was asset management. So all our investing activity. Okay, perfect. Easy. Cool.

And which one do you say is the most profitable? We actually look at it as a group because there's a flywheel effect. So what happens is that as we make investments, those investees provide us with tokens first that we receive in those investments. And those tokens feed into our team in Hong Kong that manages all of the aftermarket liquidity provision. So as we make investments in companies, we add to our crypto balance sheet from which we can then deploy to engage in market making services and liquidity provision. So as we make investments in companies, we add to our crypto balance sheet from which we can then deploy to engage in market making services and liquidity provision. And also, all those services, of course, help to ensure that we have hopefully better than average outcomes with, you know, companies in our investment portfolio, as well as obviously our own studios.

Fascinating. I'm just taking notes as well. All right, last question that would kind of open it up to the panel as well. It's not the last question, but one that will open up to the panel. Is the strategy, you're sitting at $300 million in cash. We've talked about it briefly in a few other spaces. Where was Animoca's focus prior? And what changed in this bull market versus the last one in terms of your general strategy in all three buckets?

So I think that we do more services now than we did before. So two years ago, we didn't have the capability to do any of the liquidity provision in-house. And now we have a team that came on board in early 2023 that does that for us. So we actively manage our balance sheet. And that has really, I think, gave us a lot more options about things that we can do both with our own portfolio companies as well as with partners. And I think we continue to invest, obviously,

as you know, because we co-invest in so many things. So we're very active investors in the space. I think the only thing, maybe in terms of our core games business that has changed in the last year or two is we're making more casual content. And we have less so called AAA projects in the pipeline. Because I think one of the things we're and we you know, we launched like Friend of Galaxies is arguably the first AAA game launched on blockchain. And one of the things that we struggled with was,

aside from the fact that those projects are obviously, they have big budgets, they take a long, long time to gestate. And in an industry where things, technology, sentiments, user interest changes so fast, it's very challenging to set out on a project that you know is going to take two or three years to develop because you just don't know what the market will look like at that time. And people might not even be using the L1 that you started on at that time. So that's much trickier. And so we think things that have shorter development life cycles are actually much more in tune with where Web3 is

at the moment. Fascinating. Look, I want to open up to the panel here, Tim. I'm going to go to you next and anyone can jump in or put your hand up. It's mainly the question is your strategy in this market versus previous markets. They're pretty selfish questions, but I think the audience enjoys them as well, seeing how the people that have been through various cycles and have done well, made a fair bit of money, what their strategy is in this cycle. For us, we're extremely bullish. Well, and I talked about it yesterday when everyone's talking, complaining how the market is very quiet. It's actually a very exciting time for us to incubate more projects, invest in more projects, very heavy investing in this kind of quiet period.

And, you know, partner with a lot of projects on the marketing side and preparation for the bull run. At least that's what our strategy is. Tim, we'd love to know what yours and go to Juan afterwards. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Mario. So we are actually quite similar there. We have been in the market since 2017. So in ups and downs and what you realize in the down cycles, you need cash.

And then when you deploy that cash, then in the up cycle, you can get a lot of benefits and it can go really well. So our strategy at the moment is to make sure that we have enough cash reserves to keep our business going. We're about 30 people, so we have enough cash reserves to keep our business going we're about 30 people so we have enough for us to pay staff but rest we invest in incubation and acceleration and making bets basically for the rest of the market because i think people that are in crypto we are here for the a lot of us are here for the long term and you need to keep cash but also make the long term strategic yeah it is it is tricky because you've got when in periods like this cash is the roi on cash in my opinion if you're expecting a the real bull market to start in like let's say january whatever

it is you can't time it but then it's holding on to cash is difficult knowing that things are going to get better but at the same time you need to have cash for when the market really, where the bloodbath really begins. Or if you're wrong and the bull market does not start in a few months. So it's just a very tricky balance. I mean, it's one of the toughest things in crypto. But my question to you is, you said you incubate projects as well. Now, Anamok has raised a shit ton of money and they're very profitable. At least they generate a lot of money. We don't know if they're profitable or not. They generate a lot of money. My question to you is a lot of these smaller studios have an issue of liquidity when you incubate projects. How do you, do you get, do you charge fiat?

Do you charge unlock tokens early on or just lock up long-term as most other incubators? And if you do lock up long-term, what's your liquidity strategy? Yeah. So I think we probably have worked with maybe 10 Animoca projects. Always nice to see quality products working with Animoca.

A little bit similar to... Because we need primarily PR as a service where we charge fiat, primarily to get in the cash. And then when it comes to incubation and investment and a lot of like the profits we can reinvest into incubation and acceleration and then of course i think in turn whether we hold like maybe like a good six months that we lock up in defy in on solana and base in various defy where you get like a good 15% yield on it. So I think it comes down to having a balanced business where you can get in cash to at least make it sustainable

and then invest like the bigger parts into tokens. We do quite a lot of advisory. But of course, an advisory is usually 12 months cliff and then it's a year or two before you will realize any sort of liquidity event. So it comes down to balancing the business, balancing the different parts of it. And internally, we make sure to structure it very well because we also primarily use our own capital. So you have to balance it so that you have enough fiat stable coins coming in to keep the business going growing and so on and then invest the rest in strategic bets i i didn't see you here

as well jed before going to one because one i wanted to get an update from you on the bitcoin and ectfs uh but jed good to have you as well um same question uh breed vc and you know i've asked a lot of questions i'm sure you've had comments on all of them i'm just sitting here taking notes i'm nerding out with this discussion yeah thanks guys um so multiple cycles uh it's really key to stay consistent um and not get lost in the hype cycles and the down cycles. It's actually like down cycles, it really does flush out a lot of the opportunists in terms of builders. They're basically tourists.

They come in here. It's a quick way to raise money. And then a year or two goes by and then we get typically a bear cycle. And so if you do have cash on hand, that is the moment to really be in a position to deploy. As a fund manager, it's significantly harder to raise money. But if you can, I mean, you really can't control the timing. But the best scenario is like you just finished raising your fund as the bear markets begins. In terms of like strategy for a fund, you know, our industry is like based on a lot of narratives and it's really important

to get zero to one innovations. And that's kind of what drives each cycle. And if you could kind of get in front of those zero to one innovations, you're going to do incredibly well. So typically for each cycle, there's been like capital formation, zero one innovation. So like we had in 13, the proof of work mining coins, 17, we had the ICOs, 2020 2020 we had liquidity mining um on d5 2021 more

speculative nfts and then this cycle is kind of weird there really hasn't been in my opinion a zero to one um innovation um and i don't even know i'm not even sure this is a cycle this is kind of a weird cycle so us is us strategy is really trying to figure out what is that zero to one innovation and really really doing a lot of research talking to a lot of people um and um you know de decentralized ai you know was was kind of potentially one uh meme coins is another one um but uh yeah we're looking at a lot of different consumer. Something that I've been really interested in recently is

intents and interoperability between chains. I do think that potentially has the legs to potentially be a big zero to one innovation for this cycle. It's a long-term approach. Wash out the tourists and just keep going. You think decentralized AI was was overhyped i think that cycle's kind of nearing its end we've seen

that already in inequities yeah i like i don't know if you've ever seen that chart where it's like um the hype cycle then like yeah they've gotten his hype cycle yeah so i would say it's coming down it's on like the downtrend um it's not like it was crazy back in April, May. If you had any kind of AI chops, you could raise that like a $50, $100 million valuation. And to be honest,

a lot of funds have deployed pretty significantly to that. And so we're seeing the same use cases happen again and again. Decentralized GPU clusters, verification of inference. So I think the bets kind of have been placed. And so it's a lot harder for for decentralized AI companies to raise them than it was back in during the hype cycle.

Agree, agree. Thomas, I'm sorry, I'm you will go one as well. Jumping guys and quant kind of the question I always have for you is obviously getting your thoughts on the discussion so far, your strategy at Bitwise, which obviously is a different world to our VC world, but also how the inflows and outflows looking as well. Juan would love that update. And again, massive shout out to Bitwise for always coming on these spaces and giving us updates, a smart strategy. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Thank you, as always, for having me and others from Bitwise. Bitwise, most of our AUM right now is in the liquid side. Of course, we've done well with the Bitcoin ETF this year. We're excited about the prospects for the Ethereum ETF. We do have a private fund of funds, a hedge fund, and are looking into other venture vehicles. But those

are smaller parts of the business right now. I'll give a quick overview on the flows for the ETFs. And then I did want to ask Robbie from Animoca a question. So on the flows, it's been pretty muted. This week, both Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF flows are basically flat. I think Bitcoin ETFs are down 3 million net and ETH ETFs are up 1 million. So call them flat. Last week was a bad week, of course. And since the launch of the ETH ETFs, their net outflows, they've seen net outflows of 400 million, which is to be expected. You know, it's kind of repeating in many ways what the Bitcoin ETFs did. First month or so were net outflows overwhelming the inflows, given the outflows from the large grayscale funds.

And we're seeing the same thing with the ETFs. Those outflows from the ETF are starting to whittle down. And now we just need to see the pickup in demand. Obviously, with the macro conditions right now and the volatility, things are pretty muted. Investors are more risk off. So inflows are not quite picking up yet. But as most people here saw, Morgan Stanley was just the first of the big wire houses to approve Bitcoin ETFs. And then I'm sure they'll approve ETH ETFs on their platforms as well. So we think those flows are going to pick up. We've been saying this since the ETFs launched and more wire houses will come.

So we think into the end of the year, flows for both ETFs will pick up. So we're bullish on that. And then my question for Robbie was, on the Animoca investment portfolio, what sector of the industry have you guys been focusing investments on this year? In terms of valuations, where have you seen the biggest lift in valuations this year, if it's that same sector or a different one of the portfolio? Okay. So I think in terms of diversity, it's still pretty diverse. I think some, you know, our core business is gaming, but actually in terms of investment strategy, we invest across Web3. And I'd say half of the portfolio is probably loosely what we would call infrastructure-type businesses,

anything from L1s and L2s to wallets and custody solutions and you name it, people building infrastructural tech. And I think that this year, it's probably been a combination of infrastructure and entertainment products, mostly games. And I think the focus has particularly been on situations that have had token launches prepared, you know, that weren't able to get things out the door back in 2023. And so we had a lot of kind of pre-TGE positions in the first half of this year.

And I think that probably took up the bulk of the activity. Thank you. Let me go to Lloyd and Gareth. Go ahead, guys. Gareth, good to have you back. It's been a while. Lloyd? Yeah. Which NFTs are you buying today, Lloyd? I'm joking. I'm not buying NFTs anymore. One day again, just holding the old ones. What I was going to ask is, in the traditional VC

model, you don't usually have unlocked tokens coming. Let's imagine we're in a bull market. I guess the way I can phrase the question is last time we saw a bull market, I assume that there was some round-tripping of tokens because as a VC, there's really no exit

like you would expect, maybe a go public exit or something like that in this industry. You sort of have to take profits. Do you expect to change the way you take profits this cycle as opposed to last cycle? That's a great question. That's a great question. Robby, do you want to take that one first? That's a really cool question. So that's just for the audience to understand that when we invest in projects, we have lockups. But the good thing about our investments versus traditional VCs is unlocks start really early. So that's the difference. Now, there's always a debate on whether we should sell the tokens in the bull market and then hold them in the bear market or buy back in the bear market because of the unlock schedule and the high FTV strategy of projects when they launch at a high FTV. Or hold them because you believe in the project.

And there's a good argument for both because if you hold them it shows belief in the project that's what projects are looking for but if you but at the same time if you don't sell them when you know the markets are inflated um then you're not being responsible for your investors we're not being a responsible business person there's always that that kind of tricky position um every investor is in and I know An investor is in. And I know Anamoka's strategy, from what I know, has changed as well. But I could be wrong. We've got the CEO here. So yeah, I feel like Mario, you kind of answered it for me there. I mean, I don't think there's a simple answer to that because every situation is quite different. Fortunately, we do now have an in-house team who has the pulse of the market and I think has a great sense of the ability to be able to liquidate positions or scale down positions and the impact that that will have in the market.

Because, of course, any investor, the last thing that they want is to make an impact on price if they're exiting any part of their position. And so that always has to be done very, very carefully and with people who have full knowledge of how the market dynamics are working. For the most part, we're actually in a very fortunate position because we are long-term investors. And we do think that we're still relatively early in the industry to begin with. So for the most part, we're a holder. And I'd say, you know, to a lesser extent, we do trim positions on things that we feel are maturing, if that makes sense. Yeah, the tricky position you're in though, Robbie, is that when you have those tokens

at a high value, even if you believe in the project, one argument would be like, hey, you should sell the tokens when you know the markets are inflated and then buy back later when the unlocks have obviously totally agree which is which is why we will as i said we will trim positions because it's it just makes sense you know if something is up 5x you should take a little bit of profit and and keep you know keep your stake in there yeah i think if you're a big investor now obviously sometimes you know i'm okay right it's big broker writes big checks, sometimes they're a bit smaller. But if you're a big investor, I think that strategy is a lot more sensitive, you got to be very transparent with the project. If you're writing small checks, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50k, depending on which round,

but generally they have less of an impact on price. But if you come in, especially if you're incubating a project, that gets really tricky, because you have to be in it for the long term. Otherwise, an incubator selling their tokens will just really... Oh, for sure. And I think that's the underlying any decision you make, you cannot have an impact on price, you know, because our job is to be there to be a positive signal to the market that we're supporting a project. So the last thing we want to do is have any negative impact on price.

I agree. I mean, that's the catch 22, right? supporting a project so the last thing we want to do is have any negative impact on price agree i mean that's the catch-22 right yeah i mean the catch-22 is if you know you want a vc to support their projects you want it to be long-term and not dumping tokens um and that reputation gets out there right like animoka i never dug deeply but i always remember hearing that they always you know mostly held their tokens and then then I remember thinking when, you know, the blood came thinking, well, I guess that was a mistake, but really, you know, it's not like, as you say, if you're expecting it, you're expecting adoption, then that's the game plan.

You got to stick with it and you've got to be able to, you know, like you said, trim positions wisely, but you know, not easy dumping your projects on people because, and I mean, like I said, you already have a reputation for doing that wisely i think thank you chad yeah it's um it's definitely a delicate balance um as a fund manager you have your fiduciary duty to your lps um and then plus you need to support your portfolio companies so um you do there's a few things. So like, if you are leading deals, like you are the big check, like 80% of the round, and you do have,

can have price impact. It's actually, it's a much harder spot to be in because as Robbie mentioned, you can, depending on liquidity, you can really hurt the price. And there are some things that you can do to limit that. You can go through OTC desks who can spread out the sales over a long period of time across different exchanges to help with the impact. But being a smaller investor, like an angel or a smaller fund or a smaller percentage of the round, it is much less impactful. And it is a bit easier to argue the case that like, hey, we've been locked for four years, right? And I think it's pretty fair to take profit. I think also just having open communication with the founder is pretty key. Like there are funds out there that get these horrible reputations of just being like dumpers on day one. And that

sticks with you. And there's, there's even another factor in how you structure your fund. So like a lot of these funds out there, like sometimes structure themselves as like a three year plus one plus one fund. So you're actually a for seller at the at the end of your fund fund life. So more traditional ventures, it's the typically 10 year funds. So it gives you gives you more runway. But what's what's great about crypto VC is you do get liquidity early, and you still still can give DPI back to your LPs, to your investors without the fund running out because you do get that liquidity. But if you do have a 10-year or longer-term life cycle, you're not a for-seller. So yeah, it's a delicate dance. And I think you just need to

really be pragmatic around both sides of it. Let me go to Gaurav on that point. Obviously, me and Gaurav have spoken a lot privately about this. And. Yeah, let me let me go to go off on that point. Obviously, I mean, you go off and spoke a lot privately about this and Gareth, I'm gonna go to you because I'm sure you've got comments on the what's been discussed, but I've got more questions for you afterwards, kind of digging into the market and the news of the week. You can give us a quick recap. Go have good ceiling. Thank you. My question is, sort of starts from where Robbie elaborated on the public listing,

and then we went through the various verticals of how Animoca is structured. I've spent hours and hours talking to Yat and so on. So my question here is uh robbie we are all in the same boat almost i mean when i say all i mean mario's company my company and and animoka which is we are looking for a stash of token no matter how it comes investments uh services and and even co-creations and then taking that into a public company uh where it sort of becomes a micro strategy of altcoins instead of bitcoin and people's you know public money sort of gets a interface to the stash of altcoins would that be right to say like to begin with my question let's say um yes if i'm understanding it correctly um i mean you're talking about just generally how how capital is flowing from more traditional assets into you know i guess the more unusual

exactly now now if you agree and i mean it's not rocket science and i i did mean what you understood i think uh but uh but now as soon as you come to that point i i usually like quoting uh cz's statement uh from abu dhabi finance week uh where he said no matter what kind of investments you are into you can call it web 3 or web 2 uh the only way of investing uh is long term and yes i know and this is his statement by the way way, not word by word, but what he meant is, and yes, I know 99% of our holdings will go down to zero, but the 1% will make up for everything else. And by the way, that fund of that time made closed at 64x before all the Binance and CZ debacle happened.

So from that perspective, wouldn't it make sense to simply just keep holding our positions now that you're planning to go public? Those positions will still mean value and valuations, and the world will bet on those valuations and buy your stock. So you still have value coming in from the traditional market and a realization of that value. I know it's not like the same, but it's still getting you a realization of value from the traditional world. So you don't really have to sell things or trim positions or, you know, get into the nitty gritties of managing investments.

Would that be a better business or, you know, this daily job of trimming and getting back and buying back and, you know? So I think, yeah, no, I get it. And thank you for the question. I think the idea behind, it depends on where the market is in terms of capital availability. And so I think you end up in a position where you look to trim success stories, both for, I think it was as lawyer or Juan was saying before, just as a fiduciary responsibility

to your shareholders or investors, but also in an environment where perhaps there is less new capital coming into the space. And I think one of the things, while I'm the first person to say that I really think, you know, 2024 on the whole has been a great year after what we experienced in 2023. But I think one of the things that we've been missing is there's not been a lot of new capital coming into the space.

And unlike often the discussions we have here where we're talking about retail, I mean, actually institutional capital coming into investing in Web3 companies specifically. So later stage investment, for example, coming into not just our company, but companies across the space. And so in the absence of that, then obviously, we need to think about how we deploy our capital, you know, and recycle capital from existing investments. Gareth, I wanted to go to you as well, just kind of getting your comments on the discussion, and slowly segue into just kind of recap of the week. Yeah, sure. mario always a good uh pleasure to be with everyone um my one question to robbie

before we we jump into sort of a wrap of uh my highlights of the week in terms of news was um just your thoughts robbie on on investing in l1s i remember a big news for me from animoka was investing as a ton validator and obviously obviously, there you're investing in infrastructure, you're investing as a validator, and in return, you get ton tokens. If you look at the numbers of users that Telegram has, and their integration of ton as the underlying blockchain for all of the different blockchain functionality that they're bringing into Telegram, that to me is a smart money move. I'm not a venture capitalist, i'm a journalist but i my question to you is is this one of the the smartest moves that you guys made and in retrospect would you have invested more as a validator and uh in uh infrastructure like ton

and is this sort of a safe play for vcs to kind of have a more stable revenue stream as opposed to taking equity in various crypto startups that at the end of the day, we just don't know whether they're going to live for a very long time. Sure. Thanks, Gareth. I think, so first of all, we love Telegram. And we've loved Telegram for a while. As many of you might know, we actually have a game studio called Gamee, which has been making games for Telegram already for about five, six years. So we've been actually the largest maker of entertainment products on Telegram for a long time. And so we were very pleased to finally see Ton come into being after, you know, some sort of stops and starts with Telegram's initiatives

in Web3 over the years. I think that, you know, so that's Telegram. We love Telegram and frankly, whatever, you know, spare capital we have, we put into Telegram whenever we can. And we do that now through the form of lots of projects that are launching on Telegram and building in that ecosystem. I think in terms of just generally this idea of being a validator, I think it's just another great way to participate a little bit more actively in the Web3 ecosystem and support protocols or environments that you think have great thriving communities. And it's essentially

another, you know, another way or another instrument through which you can invest your capital behind ecosystems that you think will grow in the future. And Gareth, my question to you now is, and Thomas will be the same one, is first Gareth, news of the week, state of the market, would love to get your thoughts, and then Thomas getting your thoughts as well on just the markets in general. And you can dig into your strategy too. Yeah, sure. Just quickly, I mean, obviously, I'm not a market specialist myself.

I'm more of a generalist. And I think I'll just highlight big stories for me this week. I think the biggest one was the US government a couple of days ago moving another 10,000 Bitcoin. No one really knows the address that they've moved it to. I mean, we know that they haven't moved it to a big exchange and sold those coins, but they're moving Bitcoin around and it's either making people uneasy or it's making people excited at the sorts of Bitcoin being sold at a fairly cheap number. That to me was a big one.

And I'll leave that to the market analysts on the discussion here today to take over. And then another really big one for me, which I think was really underreported, was the news of Apple opening up the NFC chips on iPhones to third-party apps. And Circle moved really quickly on this. So, Jeremy Allaire came out and said that USDC would work very quickly to release an app that allows you to tap and pay with USDC on iPhones. And this immediately made me think of apps like Wallet of Satoshi, which is a Bitcoin lightning app. If all of these apps and maybe even some cryptocurrency exchange platforms that have apps start developing this functionality for people to tap and pay,

with iPhones especially, just thinking of the network effects of that, it could be really massive. And honestly, I do think it was underreported and tried to get some of our journalists to reach out to the likes of Wallet of Satoshi and that sort of thing just to talk about how many people are actually looking into this and what sort of impact it could have on driving forward, you know, crypto enabled

tap and pay payments. Another interesting one for me was an investigative journalist putting in a FOIA request to the FBI to ask for some information about what they know about Satoshi. And the FBI basically said, we can neither confirm or deny if we have information on Satoshi. So, you know, people are asking these kind of questions. And I found it very curious that they responded in that manner. I would imagine that all of the big law enforcement agencies around the world have information and some sort of inkling

as to who they think Satoshi might be, whether it's an individual or a group of people. I, for one, have no interest in Satoshi ever being sort of doxxed. I don't think it'll ever happen anyway. But I think it's a very important reason why Bitcoin's value proposition is what it is today. So yeah, those for me were some big highlights. Mario, I did see your points on your tweet earlier today about some of the other big news items, which are pretty good as well.

There's also, there's three pieces. One thing I've been talking about is more political is obviously Kamala. If Kamala is the next president, what's her position on crypto, especially with what the polls are looking like. And you guys have put out three interesting pieces. One I talked about two days ago, which says, this is by Andrew Singer. He says, crypto could get boost from younger tech savvy Harris administration. They've got another one here from Vince Quill. He says, Vivek Ramaswamy predicts Kamala Harris may adopt pro-crypto position. And they've got a third one here from Zoltan who says kamala harris may continue the biden administration's crypto crackdown so we're getting mixed messages obviously you know there's more details in each tweet

um but you know as you can see from those three stories you guys just report the news and of some opinion pieces but in this case reporting the news and what others are saying and you see crypto's kind of split on what kamala's position will be on crypto. Where do you stand with everything you've been reading and seeing everyone's perspective on this? I'm very torn between it. And I think that the lack of clarity from her camp says something. Also, the movement of this Bitcoin right now is very curious. I think if the U.S. government right now was to sell some of the Bitcoin, it would tell you what their position is going forward. And that's assuming, you know, if Kamala Harris was to win the elections going forward.

But they haven't, you know, they haven't sold any of this Bitcoin yet. But if people like Donald Trump are saying they want to keep it as a sort of stockpile asset or someone like RFK Jr. saying, hey, we want to make it a strategic asset and accumulate 4 million Bitcoin. And then the current administration goes and sells some of the Bitcoin that they're holding, you know, some of this 200,000 Bitcoin that they have. That would kind of tell you something. The very fact that there's still mum on the subject makes me think that there is some sort of indecision about what the overall stance should be. I mean, the SEC has made it pretty clear with the way that they've been regulating the industry and going off to various players. I don't know. I also, I don't live in the United

States. I don't claim to be an expert on US politics, but it's very curious. And I think that they're probably just buying as much time as they can. But people like Trump are pretty smart. They look at, you know, like Coinbase's sort of crypto campaign saying there's 50 million crypto users in the United States. It's a huge user base to pander to as a politician. And it's quite surprising that Harris's camp is not really jumping on that bandwagon yet. So I don't know. I mean, some of the comments she

made this week about trying to slash prices and stuff, either, you know, it's just distraction tactics or they don't really understand how their own sort of system is working. But like, if you're telling people that it's going to make their lives better if we force people to make the price of goods cheaper, that does not solve anyone's problems in terms of the greater sort of financial uncertainty that we're all living through at the moment. So I'd love to see them be a lot more friendly to crypto, but I just don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. And maybe we won't even hear anything from them before the elections. It's going to be very curious to see what happens,

honestly. But yeah, we're trying to report it as objectively as we can at Cointelegraph and kind of report the facts. And hopefully we can get some good information out of their camps. And some of our journalists are trying at the moment. So we'll just have to wait and see how the reporting goes in the next few weeks. But we're going to be going pretty hard with our reporting up to the elections and really try and dial into what the angles are crypto-wise getting closer to the data. I appreciate that update. And Thomas, good to have you.

It's been a while as well. You know, everyone's talking about this week being a very boring week. We talked with a few people on stage today and what their strategy is during these times. We'd love to get your thoughts on first the state of the market in general and also what you're doing right now. Thanks for having me. You know, state of the market, you know, for us, we're a distressed, focused investment firm. doing right now? Thanks for having me. State of the market,

for us, we're a distressed focused investment firm, so we're involved in all the crypto insolvencies. I really can only give the perspective of what we're seeing. We saw Kraken pay out on Mt. Gox, which is great. We've seen BitGo in waves, it appears, to be paying out.

A lot of Bitcoin is at the market um i suppose someone could really run the numbers there was a great piece from alex over at galaxy on this um when the distributions were happening that he didn't think it was going to have a large impact on the market although i haven't really been following the bitcoin cash price too much so i don't know um if people have been watching those order books but impressed to see the market sort of take it in stride, you know, for the most part. And actually, I believe when the Bitco, which is over $2 billion in Bitcoin, hit into people's accounts, I noticed that the price of Bitcoin actually bounced. It's kind of interesting. It sort of went above, like immediately when it hit the account, I saw it sort of, the price was moving above $61,000, $62,000 for a minute and then sort of pulled back. So, you know, from our perspective, it's great to see that just because when you're involved in these big insolvencies and restructurings,

you're always worried about price impact. Very similar to like the venture capitalists, right? Got, you know, your big portion of the market and things like that. So, I mean, that's kind of what we see. I mean, and I don't know, for us, you know, we're a boutique firm. And yet, you know, I guess in the more larger sense, the Black Rocks and Fidelity's world, in our area of like sort of distressed world, you know, every week, every day, you know, we get more and more sort of traditional finance guys looking at crypto distressed in special situation deals, which is great for the ecosystem of crypto in general and um for you guys is your strategy based on on um you know you're hitting all-time highs in this cycle in the next few months by this by end by next year and potentially the bull market ending end of next year so essentially the cycle repeating itself and what are your thoughts on all the macro fears

that everyone's been talking about th Thomas, you're muted. Bottom left corner. Thomas, you got to unmute. Three, two, one. All right, Amber, how are you guys? Amber, are you there? Because I know your other account is not coming up. Cool. All right. We've got Amber not coming up. We've got Thomas's mic not working on this point on a Friday late afternoon. I can't delay forever. Robbie, it's a pleasure speaking to you. Thomas, your mic is still not working. I think it's just glitching out for you.

If anyone can hear Thomas. How about now? It is. It is. Yeah, cool. I found a question for you. Okay. Yeah, just to kind of the – we've had so many spaces on the macro fears that we're seeing.

So I want to get your thoughts on that. Right. Well, I mean maybe someone has already said this on the, you know, y'all do great content for the crypto space, but there's a famous investor named Seth Klarman. He always says, you know, you worry top down and you invest bottom up. And for us, we really have to do that. It's already, you know, really hard and complicated and you have to be thoughtful about what you're doing. You try to do good work. And over the long run, you can have more impact on the bottom up approach

uh than you can from the bottom someone's in italy someone's a holiday in italy thomas i am i am i live here a good part of the year my team my team was there yesterday uh they're taking a few days uh two of my executives were there for three days now they're in greece but uh but later they went they went on the they went on those little scooters and they just went randomly different towns they wanted me to come with them i'm like yeah no i got i got spaces scott is on a boat right now i got one of us has to be responsible um but yeah so but you sort of invest bottom up one deal at a time one transaction at a time um and actually the only thing i only thing I will tell you from a macro standpoint that's coming on this, there are a number of litigation finance deals and other deals that are tied to legally driven special sits that involve crypto.

And people are really worried about what the government's going to do with this. I guess there was a comment from Trump about turning, as you guys said, said like turning the strategic reserve and it's like well hang on a second the whole point we're doing this special situation investment is we think we're going to get you know 500 bitcoin back or a thousand bitcoin back and so if we get stopped out and bitcoin 5x is we don't get to 5x so it's causing a little bit of like turmoil i think in in terms of the calculus um for some of the people's and some of the participants in our market. If there's not one headline, it's another.

There's always headlines. I appreciate it. Amber, are you there? Yes. It will be a Mark, though. Mark, I'll call you Amber. No, I'm joking. Mark, I know one of your colleagues

was meant to come up as well. It was a pleasure to have you, man. Likewise. Thank you, Mario. Not at all. It's our final discussion for the week. I'm going to Mark, one of your colleagues was meant to come up as well. It was a pleasure to have you, man. Likewise. Thank you, Mario. Not at all. It's our final discussion for the week. I'm going to wrap it up with you guys. It's going to be an interesting discussion. So tell us what Ember is. It's going to be an easy one to understand. I'm a big fan of gaming in general, so these are the favorite discussions of mine. And the questions are very easy. The metrics are asking.

Gizi is up here as well so tell us what is amber of course so jibberthorpe is a morpg it's made by brightstar we're uniquely student team of award-winning venture founders former pro players from esports world champions um gaming industry with veterans lifelong mo fanatics so i have an idea to create an MMO that really goes across any platform, PC, browser, mobile, through a modern rewrite of the games industry business model in favor of the user, exciting competitive

gameplay, and instant playability. So essentially, Embersword is our love letter to gamers across the world. It has the fast-paced combat of ARPGs, combined with the skill-based abilities of MOBAs set in a persistent MMORPG fantasy universe. It's free-to-play, no pay-to-win, no loot boxes,

no buy-in, easy-to-play but hard to master, and it features tradable digital collectibles. It's easy to play. Okay, before we... Let's not mix it up with too many things. So it's easy to play, hard to master. It's a very important point. Sorry. So one of the issues we hard to master. It's a very important point. Sorry.

So one of the issues we've had in free-to-play games in the last cycle is that they've made the barrier to entry too high, you know, getting a wallet, the costs involved, et cetera. And then the gameplay was just very easy. So what happened is that the incentive for the average Joe to go in was too difficult. And then the incentive to play for the fun of it was no longer there just to make money because it was just such a simple game so what you said now is that you guys have made it very easy to start playing the game um but then you don't have to pay anything etc but the game itself is very complex true yes i mean it has it's really really deep There's all the things you kind of would expect

of an MMORPG, of course. But the thing is, we made the technology that the game is founded on. And that means that anybody can jump in there with a link. Within five seconds, you'll be in the game, no matter where you are in the world, as long as you have a 3D Plus connection.

That is why it's really easy to jump into. And then we made it in a way that makes it super, super compelling and kind of easiest to get into in terms it super, super compelling and kind of easy just to get into in terms of the UI and how to kind of place that you shouldn't have any issues sort of figuring things out right away. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. I was just taking notes as well. And when did you guys raise your capital? Just quickly, I'm trying to find you, find your details online.

Of course, of course. I mean, we had a couple of rounds so we started in 2018 then no we had a couple of rounds like appreciate we had a seed and then we had a seed plus all the way back in late 2021 and ever since then you know we've just been going forward we had some land sales did you sorry just mark mark did you guys correct me if i'm wrong. You guys listed your token in the last cycle, no? We just listed here during summer with the current token. And of course, now that we announced that we're potting up in metal, we started looking over our tokenomics and there will be some future news about that. What we're kind of tinkering around with.

That's going to be super exciting. So can't go too much into detail for that right now. But the token that you have now, it's listed this a couple of months ago? Yes. Or not a few years ago? No, no, no. It's just a couple of months ago. We listed it on June, like late June. Congratulations.

Okay, I confused you with another project. That's why I was trying to Google you. You heard me typing in the background. Gizi, how are you? Mario, we can hear your hyperbaric chamber pushing oxygen. Yeah, no, I'm not in it right now. So, Gizi,

good to have you, man. So, digging into, without understanding the gameplay further, before doing that, my question is more about your thoughts on Web3 gaming in general, where it is today,

compared to where it was in the last bull market. Earlier with the whole metaverse hype, you know, play to earn was probably the most hyped cycle in the most hyped narrative in the last cycle. This time around, we're seeing a lot of these games materialize. It seems appetite is still there, you know, me and and others on stage including what we were talking about you know gaming being one of the main narratives that we're still

focusing on but the the the excitement is not what it was prior i'd love to get your question from you and of course i want to dig into exactly what amber is like how the gameplay works and some of your metrics as well but can you give me your thoughts on the state of web3 gaming me or uh were you talking to mark yeah no you gizzy okay gizzy yeah gizzy sure uh first of all my name is grant it's just i don't use that name anymore because people think that i'm money and not a real person so i go by gizzy a little bit more often but uh hi uh i do come from you know more of a like games publishing background work on quite a few games before and so when i look at the market today i really think that actually is evolving very similar to how any time a new technology is implemented in gaming market like uh when you know

online was put into online games or when consoles were put into console games or even mobile became like this kind of mobile games industry it just it takes time for the right business model and right commercial models to be implemented correctly to be able to capitalize and create sustainable games. Usually you see that first generation of like super massive successes, but none of them are really that sustainable given their they're really just leveraging the hype and like kind of the FOMO of a new technology. So with Web3, I'd say this first generation of play-to-earn games, a lot of them weren't really innovative or any super exciting games. And anyone who tried to copy that business model

really weren't able to succeed. And then you have a lot of R&D, a lot of people really experimenting and people really creating something really genuine like Ember. And then eventually you find the teams that are able to create something really experimenting and people really creating something really genuine like ember and then you know eventually you find the teams that are able to create something that's actually truly sustainable and massively successful and that's i think where we are figuring out like i'm looking

at the game i'm looking at the game like just you know i'm watching the video while we're talking it's actually really nice gameplay really really nice graphics as well i i was surprised um obviously i'm getting very surprised this year because compared to the last cycle slide and day and but figuring out the tokenomics is very difficult it's not only get the players onto the game but just get daily active users but just gonna maintain a healthy churn so what are some of the strategies that you guys have used to first onboard play that she dig into your matrix to see if those strategies are working.

The game is live? Yeah. So we have a playlist going on right now that's been going super, super well. Over 110,000 play sessions. Players from all over the world have spent around 41,000 hours in the game so far. And more than 800,000 impressions. Is that a beta or the full game is out? No, it's like a beta.

So it's like a playtest. It's just a tiny piece of the world. It's on testnet right now and we're looking to go into an early access version later this year and then for the full version next year. Okay. And what are some of your metrics that you could share?

Of course, more than 120,000. I could say that the average play time is really, really high. So it's around like one hour and 20 minutes, which is super good. That's interesting. Yeah. I'm just taking notes of the metrics. And first, thanks for having us on your cap table. I'm pretty happy the more I dig into your website. So thanks for that. But just back to the questions.

All right, so how about daily active users? Have you shared that metric or can you share that metric? Well, I mean, some of the tests are done now. What we can say is that, you know, we had 110,000 play sessions. And how about the churn? How was that? So the play time was high, which is a good note. Have players come back to the game to play again?

Sure. I mean, I can say that day one, we have around 50, 51, 52. And then day three is just about a little bit below that. Okay, nice. How many days has it been so far? Come again, sorry? How many days has it been

that it's on the test net? About a month. Okay, about a month. And how many players did you start? You say 52, 53. Do you mean... No, no, that's a percent.

Oh, okay. Okay, okay. He gave me a heart attack. I'm like, the numbers are that. 52, 53 players? How do I break it to him that this is not good? We have an issue.

Okay, cool, cool. No, I'm sorry. So it's been 52, 53%. It's kind of gone down. But how does that compare? I know it's test net. How does it compare generally to games in the test net? Well, I mean...

Is it good, is it bad? By the way, if it's high, you can work on it. It's very early, obviously. Oh, of course, of course. Obviously, it's high, you can work on it. It's very early, obviously. Of course, of course. I would say it's really, really good. I mean, it's all organic. So overall, it's super, super good stuff. There are some more metrics in there, of course, we're keeping a little bit tight so far, but the cohorts and everything is looking really, really good. Especially depending on that, you know, it's essentially just a tiny slice of the game so far. There's so many other things that's going to go in there. Nice. So you've listed your token earlier this month. I want to ask you a tough question here. So when these games launch a token, the token price, and I haven't looked at your token price,

I have no idea how it's doing, but the token price is mainly sustained by two sources of demand. Number one is obviously speculators. I think the value will go up. And number two is people buying the token to actually use the token. So the first question is, how do you... And then you've got the VCs that are getting unlocked. So I'm going to break my question into a few parts.

First is, what's your cap table look like? So I know what VCs are on your cap table. Oh, yeah. I mean, we've got a bunch of guys in there. Of course, Animoca is in there. Oh, shit. Of course they are. Of course they are. Why am I surprised? We've got Del bunch of guys in there. Of course, Animocus in there. Oh, shit. Of course they are.

Of course they are. Why am I surprised? We've got Delta Digital. Oh, wow. We've got some old guys in there, like Bitcraft as well. From the beginning, from our pre-seed,

we had the Avengers and Galaxy Digital. Adventures. We've got YGG in there. Bro, we've got to work on your pitch. We've we gotta work on your pitch we gotta work on your pitch we gotta know where to start with like the boring stuff gotta dig into exactly who's backing it what makes you exciting because like i think people don't understand this thing you first backed by an incredible cap by incredible investors the gameplay is really impressive

and i was looking at your team as well in the meantime very briefly so i don't have enough time to look into it but just a very very nice game but you know good graphics is one thing figuring out tokenomics is a is another very important aspect of it um but then seeing who your cap table is like so you got the right people advising you um and and can you tell me more about your team of course we have a really solid team you know we have all the big ones in there we got people people from Blizzard, we got people from Riot, Disney, Marvel, people who work on The Walking Dead, Family Guy, a bunch of big games, so World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Wargaming on War Thunder. So they have a lot of experience in doing this stuff. Nice. I'm having a look at your... trying to find your more details on you on... oh, there they scripted right?

Perfect. And tell us, what do you think the game will launch in full? You or Jeezy, whoever would like to answer that one. Sure, I can take it. So we're looking to go into early access later this year, probably towards the end of the year, which will have a portion of the game available to come in and check out.

And then we want to go to a full version of the game next year. There's going to be four nations in the game that you can play in. There'll be one new nation each year following that. Okay. And another question is, so you're listed on Gate at the moment. You've kind of been conservative

on the exchanges you list on, despite having a pretty stacked cap table and backers and a pretty solid team. So what's your listing strategy like is it why did you only start on gate have you looked at other exchanges when you listed or did you want to save money what was your your approach there of course so we kind of wanted to be honest and just kind of when you're looking at pretty much every game talking out there um you know it tells a bit of the same story so you want to try and take it slow and just go by a few at a time.

So we have a bit different strategy. Of course, now with Mantle, we're planning a few other things in terms of that with the tokenomics that we will announce. But we're also especially looking at localized exchanges and all these different things. So it's a pretty wide strategy, I'd say.

Also because, of course, it is on testnet right now. The game isn't fully fixed just yet. So we're just trying to take it a bit differently than sort of like the traditional way, I'd say. So essentially, you're avoiding that massive hype at the beginning and just having a token underperform afterwards, just kind of maintaining that capital. And when you get to a position where there's more organic demand

for the token, that's a better time to start uplisting, et cetera, instead of just putting it all out from the beginning. Is that a fair oversimplification? That's a fair oversimplification. Nice, Jeezy? Oh, yeah. I was going to say, I'm going to be getting quite involved into this project

and into this tokenomics. And one of the reasons that we're really going to take it is going to be... Oh, before I kind of go into that, just a little bit of context. We designed the tokenomics for Kazin, acquired 26 million users in about 90 days and started the whole Telegram gaming era.

We did the tokenomics and we're right now working on MetaSyme, which is another MMORPG, which has one of the most recognized actually token and definomics, I guess, in kind of the MMORPG space and we decided to pick up Embersword to go in and really go deep we think that was one of the best projects out there so we decided to go in deeply and help support with our experience our background to go into

this one and the direction we're really gonna take it is much more focused on as Mark said much more on the player empowerment and taking it as not trying to overhype everything and trying to get too much speculative value into it and really build it up with true gaming value and true gamers. I'm enjoying the projects

that we're getting on stage. I'm going to send my message to my team saying, guys, well done. I'm showing these discussions. So one last question I have for you is how do you deal with the issue of the token price impacting the success of the game like a game could do really

well but if the token price is let's say it does it just goes up up up when you launch and then just goes down 95 would you find it would you say it's difficult to get that token chart healthy again in general or do you think when there's organic demand those buyers don't really give a fuck about the chart because they're buying the token to play the game. So therefore, if a game does get the fundamentals right and figures out proper tokenomics within the game, then the token price should correlate with that no matter how the performance has been so far. In other words, because every startup in crypto, and I'm talking on gaming here, but every startup in crypto essentially becomes a public company from day one.

There's that fortunate aspect of immediate liquidity, but also unfortunate aspect where the chart starts to determine the success of your business and the sentiment around your business, in this case, your game. Would love your analysis on that, GZ. Yeah. So, I mean, like we do have some really close relationships with a lot of decentralized exchanges. So I need to be very careful with how I say this, but when a game launches their token on a centralized exchange, there's going to be a lot of speculative power like inflating the token price.

A lot of people trading this token, not a single one of those users are going to come play the game. So you're exactly right. At some point, there's going to be an adjustment because the token price is completely detached from the actual gameplay value. Now, when that adjustment inevitably does happen,

one of the things that will really depend on is whether or not the game is actually profitable itself. If the game is profitable, it has real gamers, real players spending money in the game, then through the tokenomics you can accrue value to that token and eventually catch it at its essentially even if it drops down. And in the end gaming it's not really actually about how many people are investing in the game it's much more about how many people are playing and spending money in the game so as long as that player base is secured which i think ember sword is very much on track there to be able to do the idea of a kind of like uh that's the only way of that kind of game fight death spiral that has been really killing all these other games out there

i agree i think it's a good answer um guys and that's for the audience that's probably the most important point um just a general point and for any project that's listening right now obviously vcs um final question guys it's a more broad question to wrap up the space and wrap up the week is anything exciting to tell the audience about that's for you or gz or mark whoever would like to take that final question i Sure, sure, of course. I mean, first of all, like, you know, we're here with Ujizi because we just went on Mantle. Going on there means a lot for us. Congratulations.

Oh, yes, definitely. So very excited about Mantle. We're looking to make the EVM transition. And from a development perspective, we just wanted to look ahead further in terms of partners, ensure that we can scale all the aspects of the Amazon economy. And of course, we have a game that's high quality, highly accessible, dues our engine. So now we have this real opportunity here to actually help the adoption movement, which we always talked about. And it's really imperative that we want to make all parts of the user experience as seamless as possible. From logging in, providing local payment solutions, transactions fees, all this stuff.

And Managing Vili provides a lot of those tools. I swear, discussions like this is what excites me. When everyone's bearish on VC-backed tokens because of how the market is performing right now, these discussions are a good reminder of, hey, when you start looking at the fundamentals, you look below the hood, below token launches and how they're performing. You start to see that, you know, more likely than not, these are good times to get into that space. And that's I'm talking from a personal perspective. And like I would want to double down.

I can't double down more because we're already at peak. But I'm like more confident with our strategy. Discussions like this. I appreciate it, guys. Amber, GZz congratulations for the partnership and being involved and what you guys have done at mantle and and amber um you know after this discussion you know the answers to the questions from why you're listening on just gate and not one on all exchanges to talking about the gameplay and your metrics and what you've been focused on

and looking at your team pretty fucking stoked i'm on your cap table so thank you so much really appreciate it for everyone else we'll see you again on monday scott will be unfortunately back from his boat trip he'll be with us on monday appreciate it all for anyone that wants to check out amber they're on stage and they're in the title they should be in the title oh no they were in the title and they will change it back thanks everyone see you next week bye