The Wolf Of All Streets - This Web3 Gaming Platform Set To Onboard 3 Billion Players – And It Pays To Win | Tom Kopera

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

Sponsored by Elympics, check it out here: https://www.elympics.ai/ I sat down with Tom Kopera from Elympics on The Wolf Of All Streets to explore how they’re changing the game for real in Web3. We talked about their play-to-win model, partnerships with top IPs like Pudgy Penguins, and why Elympics might onboard millions of gamers into crypto without them even knowing it. This isn’t just a pitch - it’s already live, and I had to stop myself from playing too much. Tom Kopera: https://x.com/tomkopera ►► Elympics Elympics is the multichain entertainment layer bringing the next 100M users to crypto. By bridging global brands and IPs to Web3, Elympics empowers developers to easily build and deploy blockchain-enabled, multiplayer skill-based games — distributed seamlessly across superapps and social platforms. With its Play2Win token model, Elympics rewards players, creators, and communities—ensuring fair play via a decentralized node network (DePIN). 👉https://www.elympics.ai/ ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Investments Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:00 What Is Elympics 4:00 Play-To-Win Explained 6:00 Pudgy Penguins Deal 8:00 IP Partnerships Strategy 10:00 Infrastructure For Developers 12:00 Token Utility & Launch 14:00 Revenue Flywheel Model 16:00 Non-Crypto User Onboarding 18:00 Building Through The Bear 20:00 Deepin Network & Nodes 22:00 How To Participate 24:00 Final Thoughts The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

See you at the Pango Clash Arena. I feel like 2021 again. It's exciting. 5.5 million plus gameplays hosted. 350k on-chain tournaments. 50k daily active users. 500 plus game developers. 40 games. Adding cinematic IPs, sports brands, celebrities, top NFT collections. Deepin Network building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes. AI gaming, launching AI agents for competitive play at tournament hosting, and games launch pad offering early investment opportunities in new games.

Crypto gaming is back and better than ever. I spoke with Tom Kopera, the CEO and founder of eLympics, a platform with major brand partnerships that's reinventing the way that people win to earn crypto. You can check out this platform. You can play a number of games with some of the largest brands in crypto and beyond, like Pudgey Penguins, and you can actually earn crypto. The tokenomics are solid.

The interest is there. And this is poised to lead the revolution in Web3 gaming. You have to listen to this sponsored interview. Tom, we're here to talk about E-Lympics, obviously, which is a project that you've been building some absolutely incredible games already built some amazing partners. And to be totally transparent, I was going to review it, which is totally out of my nature. They sent me the site and I said, what am I supposed to review? Can't I just talk to the, you know, talk to the guys who built this like I usually do and let them break it down for you. So, invited you on so you could do it yourself. Make sense, 100%. I'm ready for it, you know, happy to do it.

All right, Tom, so listen, I've got the sites here. Can you give us the TLDR? What is Olympics? Why does it matter? Why are you building this? Yeah, so you can think of Olympics as a multi-chain entertainment layer that is actually bringing together developers, players

and big brands and IPs under the umbrella of competitive gaming that we call Play to Win. Why it matters is because it's a completely new way of entertainment that is sitting in the intersection of gaming and blockchain. And it's actually super charging and enhancing both. It's resolving problems on the monetization side, bringing a major use case for blockchain in Web3 gaming as well. So, you know, this is something that is actually bringing the first,

for the first time, the truly multi-chain games to the table, being populated across social messaging platforms and super apps. So we've had Play to Earn. This is different, right? This is much different. All is much different. High is different. Yeah. So with Play to Earn, the problem

was I remember myself, 2020, that's where we started the journey. And people were pitching me Play to Earn. I was like, all right, it sounds cool. It's flashy, but it's not sustainable. And that's the main problem. Like printing tokens and incentivizing people for attention and being engaged in the game this way,

inflating the token is not sustainable. In the case of Play2Ware, this is a model that is real, that is actually bringing real revenues to real people by real people. So all it works is like, I can challenge Scott now in the Pengu Clash competition. Pengu Clash is a game built, Pudgy Peng is now in Frac, right? So we can have like a little, I don't know,

$10 entry fee. Like you pay that, I pay that, we have $20 price pool. Whoever wins, wins it all. Right? So that's one of these examples. And then the whole monetization happened based on real miners paid into the game place, right? And then it's distributed, the rewards are distributed to developers, like a little cut out of the price pool, the majority of the price will go to the winner, right? It splits on chain absolutely instantly, very transparently and verifiably on chain and this is like a new monetization model that is real, that is sustainable, that is there to stay. I like that you have to win, right? You don't just get paid the same to play, you don't just get paid to participate. You have to actually go in there

and get good. So you're incentivizing people to spend more time improving their skills to make sure that they actually earn. That's what I'm assuming. That's it. That's absolutely true. Obviously, in all sorts of different ways, we are incentivizing people that are keeping playing with say their in-game currencies, different items. So you have opportunities also if you don't win, but it's always good to win because then you have most out of the competition, right? What's the most popular game?

Is it Pengu Clash, Clash of Orbs, Cut the Zero, I've got them all right here. Clash of Orbs, Pengu Clash, Cut the Zero, Sweet Rush. You've got a lot and some pretty like incredible partners here. Yeah. It's a lot of them. That's true at the early stages of the infrastructure. We were testing like more of an arcade type of the games,

hyper casual games and Sweet Rush was very popular at some point, I mean, still is, but now obviously it's outperformed by Pengu Clash and is the power of a very strong idea. You see what's happening on the market right now. Project awareness is growing and also, you know, game is growing too. But we do have a lineup of multiple different IPs. Like, Doodles are coming already announced a couple days ago the game. There is like Flappy Bird. There are some undisclosed Hollywood based IPs. Like one of our advisors is actually, yeah, he used to be head of gaming at Disney, you know?

So he'd bring a lot of IPs to the network. Just, you know, all these announcements will be done across two weeks, but there's like a huge lineup of strong IPs. Yeah, I can see that. So what does it look like when you do a partnership with people like this? As you mentioned, everybody now knows Pudgy Penguins, right?

They're kind of where the outstanding winner of, I think the entire last cycle, toys and Walmart, token goes up, NFTs are up, everybody loves the Pudgy Penguins. Do you approach them and say, hey, we want to build a game for you? Or do they come to you? Do you know them? I'm just wondering what the mechanics are of doing all of these partnerships. It's always like when someone has a brand, there are a couple of ways what to do with the brand. First of all, you care about proliferating the brand

across multiple different channels, being chains, platforms. So there was an opportunity for Pudgies to tap into the Telegram user base, like a billion plus multi-active users. So that was the opportunity. And since we are very close, we are reading with Ton Foundation.

And then we presented some ideas how we can convert a brand into the Play-to-win world. And then it clicked, right? So that's how we did it. Overall, I would say, speaking to these Hollywood IPs, they all want the same thing. They want to cross-point the brand across multiple different environments. They want to monetize it too. And the value proposition that we're bringing is very straightforward. Not only we bring these opportunities to them and getting this distribution, but also we kind of bring these studios

that are building games for them. So we're really the entire ecosystem where everything we build in our infrastructure. Talk about the infrastructure more. How does this build? How do you make it easy for them to basically be onboarded and launch something without spending months and months and months of development?

And so here's the thing to understand at its roots. The games I'm talking about, these are like real-time multiplayer games, which is something that is very exciting, very engaging, and at the same time, very difficult to build. So if you imagine for a while you're like a small game studio's studio three people only. If someone tasked with building multiplayer again,

you'd never do that. It was just, oh, no, no, I'm not going to even tackle that. So what we do with our infrastructure is that we obstruct away all the complexity, being like multiplayer networking, security, anti-fraud systems, hosting. Everything that is difficult there is done by our SDK. That breaks it down into value proposition that any developer on planet Earth can easily build such a game.

We're talking about like a couple of weeks in building. And then the same goes for blockchain. So what blockchain brings to the table is like instant access to distribution of funds across these competitions. And then developers not having any idea on smart contracts could easily build it with our SDK. So basically, end of the day, we bridge like two million game developers across that's from Web2 across to the Web3 world. So it's like a massive building power of people that can now build blockchain-able games without prior experience and knowledge about it.

So obviously there's a token associated. We saw, I think, a full cycle of people trying things with tokens that were either the first iterations or largely unsuccessful. Now you obviously find it to be the right time to do this and to launch a token and to have that token be at the core of the ecosystem. So tell me first about the token, how value accrues, why it's different, and then why the timing now in your mind is good because there's always the market, I think, to consider as to when you're going to launch. We've been thinking on launching the token even earlier on, right? And we need to accomplish a couple of things and actually timing

naturally aligned into the fact that Ethereum is breaking out. And then we have this positive vibe on the market looking forward. I believe Q4 will be very, very strong. A lot of founders are preparing launches at timing as well. So I believe this timing is a very perfect fit. It's the beginning of the wave that is coming. It's good to be in. It feels good, right? And then at the same time, how are tokens different? Let's start with the understanding what happened in Web3Gaming tokens.

Most of them were just tokens to incentivize players and just hyper inflationary tokens. It could have been done, right? It's just, you know, we need to forget about it. We're completely different. We are infrastructure tokens. So think of us more like the blockchain layer, let's say. First of all, the token is facilitating all the operations on the network. So anything that happens, like any match, it's always like token is involved in multiple different ways.

Either the fact that developer needed to stake the token for the game to even provide the operability, hosting, security, et cetera. So they kind of rent all of that by staking the token. Node operators, the participating network, need to stake as well. But also we are sitting on the real revenue, like percentage of every single transaction on the network. We use it to the buybacks, we're distributing that to the community as well. There are token gating features and then token is also like an internal currency

of value exchange between node operators and game developers. So in a lot of use cases, in our white paper on NBX.AI, you can read it all. But yeah, there's a lot of different value accrual mechanics. So as you become more popular and there are more games, how does that value directly accrue to the token and benefit token holders? Because at the end of the day, that's what people want.

They want to know that, I can't let them do that. Like investing in a company in the stock market, you see what their profit is, and you get a piece of that. I think a lot of people's criticism of tokens, as you kind of put it at the beginning, was that that didn't really happen. There's the token, and there's the project, and there's the people, and they weren't necessarily all connected. and there's the people and they weren't necessarily all connected. I'll be like very short this time. So the more games, the more demand, the perspective of developers need to buy the tokens, take it to even deploy the game itself, the more game success is having, the more token is needed.

But then on the other side, the more players, right? The more transactions, more transactions, there is more revenue, more revenue. There's more buybacks. So this is like a flywheel here. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I'm reading some of your numbers. 5.5 million plus game plays hosted, 350K on-chain tournaments, 50K daily active users,

500 plus game developers, 40 games, 30 studios. So this is already extremely active and popular even without the token having launched. That's correct. That was our philosophy. We wanted to deliver on a business side first and we consider this point in like a real, like a starting point, frankly speaking. We've been building this project for three years,

like very concentrated, very focused, very heavy bet on the vision that wasn't very popular in 2022 among their PlayTour hype and metaverse hype. We already envisioned how the future is going to kind of converge between gaming and blockchain. Now it's happening and we are like feeling like we're meeting like this core gaming infrastructure for this new wave.

Right? And then we're going to expand from that to multiple different chains, different platforms. We're going to integrate that cone-based wallet pretty soon as the new kind of venue for games. And that's going to grow exponentially because we're in fraud. We stuck up all the time. So in a sense, we had a feature.

Apple, let's say, pay as a theater on-ramp. It means that all the games are equipped all at once. All these 40 games that you mentioned, all at once are equipped with this feature. We have the chain. All four games can be immediately in the different chain, right? So it's like a huge power that is growing and stucking up. Yeah, I clicked through it, obviously, as you can see here, when you click on these games, it doesn't really seem like you need to be a crypto native

to just go play the games. I mean, when you click on Pengu Clash, it obviously takes you to Telegram. But like, I don't need to go through multiple, from what I mean, when you click on Pengu Clash, it obviously takes you to Telegram. But like, I don't need to go through multiple from what I saw multiple complicated steps of wallets and seed phrases and stuff to simply go play the game. So what will that look like when the token is integrated into it? Do you think that this will be, you know, simple enough for any average person for grandma to play it without being totally down the crypto rabbit hole? Absolutely, because as a matter of fact, we are not gonna plan to use our token

as any kind of token that is a payment means by players into the competitions. We are leveraging existing tokens, especially ecosystem tokens. So let's say when you are entering Pengu Clash, you have a choice, You can just play casually, just train the game. You can now play with in-game currency. We call it FISH. So basically, you can earn that currency by progressing within the game. There's no money involved,

no tokens involved, just the in-game currency like a software. And then if you decide to go for like a tokenized rewards, so basically you want to go and play for tokens participating within these competitions with entry fees that are covered in tokens, you need to have TomToken, for example, for Telegram or for other chains, you know, other tokens. And then even if you're not crypto native, you can fiat owner from Apple Pay, right? If you are, then you just connect your wallet. So there are like multiple different steps in this onboarding process. And the first one is absolutely not, hey, create a wallet

because otherwise we're gonna throw you off. I wanna know from a builder's perspective, you talked about starting this in 2022 basically, right? And that was just, I guess, after the hype wave kind of ended, as you mentioned. So what gave you the conviction to build throughout the entirety of the bear market and to believe that you could be successful

with this model when so many people were failing or collapsing or really just giving up, right? We saw a lot of great ideas actually die a few years ago because people didn't wanna wait three years to be able to build and launch and see the fruits of their labor. Yeah, yeah. I think by nature, myself and other core contributors at our protocol, like we're all these type of people that are very consistent and rejection is just a fuel, right?

Obviously, the idea you're building towards needs to have some merits and the idea you're building towards needs to have some merits and it just needs to have some reasonable ground. And I think what helped is that the background of people are contributing to Olympics is a combination of Web3 and Web2, like you know, venture building, a lot of startups built out and exited. So I think the added value is like we started to, among the hype 2022, we looked at everything from the perspective of a bet saying that it's going to be like more and more rational, so to say, if I may say so, like more kind of revenue driven sector. So we started to ask, I guess, probably different questions than many people at that stage.

And so we got the Fernandesers, right? And we're not discouraged by people living in short time periods of little hypes for a week or a couple of weeks or a couple of months and just evaluating the reality through the lenses of a very short term. So the more you build it, the more you see the results, the more people are helping you, the more people understand you. So it got easier and easier and easier, I would say, I mean, easier, it's a lot of work all the time, don't get me wrong. But that's how we build a conviction around something big. And that's how I

learned personally, that, you know, timing is everything. And to time something properly, it doesn't mean like, oh, I spot the opportunity when everyone else is spotting it, it's the need to be ahead, like, you know, maybe a few years. Yeah, so I'm looking at future plans. So you mentioned new blockchains expanding to Tanbe's for top 50 chains in 2025, big IPs, adding cinematic IPs, sports brands, celebrities, top NFT collections, deep in network, building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes, AI gaming, launching AI agents for competitive play and tournament hosting, and games launchpad

offering early investment opportunities in new games. I think it's fair to say you have a lot of big plans in the next year beyond just launching. That's so cute. Scott, I can surprise you with the answer. It's all gonna happen. It's all gonna happen because we had these kinds of plans every year, every quarter, and we just deliver all of that.

We were promising Apple pay out of the fiat on-ramps. I'm laughing, saying, but we all delivered that. There's a team of almost 40 people at the moment working on this protocol. So it's like a lot of manpower to pull it off. So I'm pretty convinced that it's all going to happen. The AI gaming is not just a vision. We are already executing towards it.

And it's actually a cool example. I will tell you why. Because think of the reality in a way. So far, there are AI agents with not so many use cases. And think of it this way. Competitive gaming is the use case where agents can actually compete against each other. They have wallets, so they can also generate revenue out of these competitions.

You can train these agents with all the data that we have on the network because we track every single match, every single move of every single player. A lot of data can be deployed towards training. Also, this competitive environment means that I can build a bot or agent, let's call it this way. And I can train him in a spectator mode. He can follow my moves, et cetera. So and we're going to deploy it.

I think it's just a matter of a few months and then it's going to be out there. The AI side makes so much sense, obviously, with what's coming. Clearly, you have great partners for this IP and going to a number of blockchains makes so much sense. Can you tell me more about the D-PIN network, building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes? Cause that's really interesting to me. I think everybody who's in crypto at the core loves the idea

of more decentralization and the ability to participate in the network. I think a lot of use cases out there are pretty artificial frankly speaking, like people are doing nodes for the sake of doing nodes. I will build different, like all the concepts that you see in the road model or everywhere else, they're having some kind of substance behind it. I'll explain to you how the deepening is going to work here because it's resolving a real problem in competitive gaming. So all it matters here are

latency things like you need to optimize for that. And if you want to like fuel the network, the worldwide competition is like people in Nigeria, they want to compete. If it's fueled by giants, but centralized data centers, we trained it with multiple of them. There's no close enough big data center to facilitate a good level of competitions at these kind of environments.

Then deploying the network that is decentralized, anyone can join, and we can localize, we can optimize for latency with that. This is something that is actually increasing the comfort and just increasing the accessibility of the whole service, of what's happening on the network. That's real. Plus, I know that it can be optimizing the costs of the performance for

game developers and create economic opportunity at the same time for another operator. So it's building something tangible, something that is resolving the real business problem and something that creates a profit opportunity almost for everyone, either cost savings or pure profit. So we're sitting here recording, it's Wednesday, July 23rd, but the TGE I'm looking is actually tomorrow, July 24th.

So when this comes out, because we require editing and things like that, this will have launched. So how can people participate to listen to this and wanna get more involved? Yeah, so yeah, 2G is tomorrow. I'm excited, obviously, there's a lot of work. I can't believe you have time to talk to me today. Yeah, it is pretty crazy, but I enjoy it.

I see, I guess, mentioned at the beginning, it's great to talk to passionate people. I consider myself as such and I can talk about it for hours. TGE tomorrow will be listed in the 2CoinGate magazine. So I know these exchanges facilitate training, obviously, decentralized exchanges as well. It's very easy to get your hands on the token, the staking program as well. So all of these things, how you can get involved, our stakers will be invited further on to multiple different campaigns that we've been organized with games. So there's going to be even more opportunities as obviously strong A-cars to read

tokenomics, understand the long-term value of the token and the whole vision, because it's going to fuel everything, this agentic AI gaming. This is like another use case holder for the token. Like everything that is on the roadmap is always going to tie back to the token. I feel like 2021 again. It's exciting. You know, like there haven't been that many conversations over the past few years where people are actually still deeply committed to trying things and launching things and building things where there's actually millions of people using it. So it's really nice.

It's really nice to have the energy again beyond just Bitcoin ETFs. It's sort of racking. But besides just Bitcoin ETFs and what the United States government is doing, which is what we talk about a little bit. So anything else that I might've missed that you wanna tell people, obviously,

as this will have just launched, they're gonna wanna clearly test out these games and participate. So just the kind of last second here, if I missed anything important. For sure. I guess like kind of final thoughts. What I wanted to say is that what we're building, I believe, is something that Web3 Gaming and crypto hasn't seen before. It's just something unlike anything that you've seen. It's unlocking a massive opportunity because there's like 3 billion players. We're building something that can onboard like all of them into the experience that is blockchain fueled, but then it's like very friendly. 2 million game developers as an opportunity,

if you compare it to like maybe 30k of solidity developers, it's like a magnitude better in terms of like amount of people that can build and contribute. So we are connecting these two worlds, web 2 and web 3. We're connecting like traditional gaming and the beauty of blockchain. And then we believe there is like a holy grail to be discovered at the intersection and I feel like we're building it. So it's gonna be like a huge wave coming up

with all of these developments. Good luck, man. I'd love to have you on down the road and kind of get the update on all the things you've built, all the games that we played. I've been testing the games are actually fun and very addictive. I need to stay away if I want to actually be productive

in my life. They're very confident this is gonna do well. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Everything that's happening in the Telegram ecosystem that you have Pudgy penguins and it's on Telegram and they're launching their wallet. It seems that that flywheel is gonna be really, really good for anybody in your kind of arena. 100%. And we are just expanding even beyond. So there's like plenty of opportunities,

you know, across different platforms and different chains. But yeah, Telegram is like a primary venue at the moment doing very well. So I can also say like, invite you to test out these games. See you at the Pengu Clash Arena. I'll see you there, man. Get your username and crush you. The problem is I'm probably going to stink. And if I want to win, if I want to earn, I need to win. You need to train.

Yeah, you need to train. I feel like send my kid in there or something with my name. And my kid will obviously be better than this than me and get them trained up to make me some money. That's child labor, right? That's not allowed yet. All right, that's not allowed. Tom, man, thank you so much.

I appreciate your time. This is great. Good luck. Thanks a lot. Thanks for watching!