Unchained - All the Ways Crypto Can Make Gaming More Fun - Ep.203

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Marguerite deCourcelle is co-founder and CEO of Blockade Games, which is releasing the role-playing game game Neon District the day this episode comes out. She discusses her background in art, how her love of video games led her to discover Bitcoin in the early days of the cryptocurrency, and how she helps create the next phase of web 3.0 content creation and distribution. Topics include: how Marguerite became involved in crypto and what led her to co-found Blockade Games her work on Pineapple Arcade and Plasma Bears the problems she sees with gaming and how blockchain technology can solve them how Blockade Games is utilizing blockchain tech Neon District, a blockchain-based RPG game with active gameplay and animation that uses NFTs and farming the difference between ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens and how each is utilized in Neon District how they have been marrying NFTs with DeFi through the NIFTEX exchange how an open economy challenges the dynamics of gameplay and how they account for this in their game design why a decentralized profile can be so powerful in gaming the types of users Blockade Games hopes to attract with Neon District why they are using the Matic Network how blockchain tech within a game changes the business model for Blockade as opposed to a traditional gaming company whether she thinks conventional gaming companies will be disrupted by blockchain technology the problems in content creation business models and distribution and how she thinks blockchain can solve them her personal token, COIN, how it is connected to CRED and how the two work together and people earn them what Coin Artist Liquidity Mining is and how it works   Thank you to our sponsors!  Crypto.com: http://crypto.com 1inch: http://1inch.exchange   Episode links:  Marguerite: https://twitter.com/coin_artist Coin Artist: https://coinartist.io   Yield farming NFTs: https://www.coindesk.com/nfts-yield-farming-defi-buzz-explained   Crypto puzzles: https://www.coindesk.com/theres-more-money-to-win-in-the-310-bitcoin-challenge-heres-some-hints   Blockade Games's seed round: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-puzzle-artists-blockchain-gaming-startup-valued-at-13-million   CoinDesk podcast network with Marguerite: https://www.coindesk.com/what-artists-love-about-crypto   Delphi Digital podcast with Marguerite: https://www.delphidigital.io/podcasts/marguerite-decourcelle-building-towards-a-neon-future/   Delphi Digital report on Coin's E-den syndicate: https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/social-tokens-the-rise-of-the-coins-e-den-syndicate/   OpenSea store for Alex Botez chess pieces: https://opensea.io/collection/get-pwnd   Blog post about the Alexandra Botez collaboration: https://coin-artist.medium.com/bringing-chess-to-ethereum-5969d9cfa07a Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. Subscribe to Unchained on YouTube, where you can watch the videos of me and my guests. Go to YouTube.com slash C-U-Shaned podcast and subscribe today. One-inch exchange is Defi's leading Dex aggregator that discovers the best trade practices across all dexits. One-inch was launched in May 2019 by two White Hat hackers at ETH Global's ETH New York Hackathon. One-inch has reached almost $7 billion in overall volume in just over a year. Crypto.com, the crypto super app that lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto, all in one place. Earn up to 8.5% per year on your BTC and more than 20 other crypto. coins. Download the crypto.com app now to find out how much you could be earning.

Today's guest is Marguerite DeCursell, co-founder and CEO of Blockade Games. Welcome, Marguerite. Hey, Laura, thank you for having me. So you've had a pretty long history in crypto and there's been a lot of things you've done. It's really fascinating. Tell us that story and, you know, how you got into this whole space. So this story starts a long time ago in 2013 when I was actually really into gaming. So I had these amazing gaming GPUs. And at the time, the person I was with was in the military and they were in like network, they were a network engineer. So they discovered Bitcoin around this time. And at this time, we could still use our GPUs for mining Bitcoin. So we made a few rigs. We participated in the race for the GPU battle that happened. But right on

the other side of that was the A6. race for the best A-6s and setting up those rigs. So we took our funds backgrounds of building computers and gaming and participated in the mining, early days of mining, which is when script coins really came about, like light coin, things like that, and started participating in the culture, I guess, of what we call today now crypto-Twitter and that community. From there, though, my actual background was fine art. So I had been a curator and gallery director. for over five years prior to mining the cryptocurrencies. And so I started to try to think about what is a distributed system,

what are these decentralized of networks? How do they work? What is a Bitcoin? Because it was a pretty abstract idea when you're being challenged with what is money. And I started following Andrea Centinopoulos early on. I pulled people onto these different, like similar to what we're doing right now, onto podcast shows and just ask them a bunch of questions because as a creative, I was really curious about what does it mean that these computers are essentially racing to solve these

cryptographic puzzles. And when they do, one of them unlocks a Bitcoin reward and that is money. And everybody on the network, all the computers agree that that is money and they check it. And then they track. So that was fascinating. So I started actually making artworks first, portraits of people in this space that I thought were interesting and participating for different publications like Bitcoin Magazine. And then eventually I found myself starting to encode information into these portraits. First, it happened with Andreas and Tonopoulos. I started using zeros and ones. And then I realized, oh, those zeros and ones could mean something. So the next one I did was of Amir Taki and Cody Wilson, which was my very first crypto puzzle. And it was themed

a dark wallet because it was a project at the time of this idea of using a wallet to mix Bitcoin for a nominity. And when I was making it, I realized, oh, I should definitely hide something because of the theme. And when I posted this on Bitcoin Talk, I had no idea how viral it was going to go. It became one of the most viral threads in Bitcoin Talk in 2014. And it was kind of like, what did I do? So first, we had set up a few phases of this, what I call a puzzle trail. So one step leads to the next step and you uncover pieces as you go. And it was all across the internet. We even hid information on different wiki sites. I had to go and convince moderators of these wikis to let me hide this information there. And anyways, there were

different events along that first trail, like, such as a Minecraft server, where all of a sudden, these characters from Bitcoin Talk and Crypto Twitter were coming on board to this Minecraft server we were hosting that was a part of this whole puzzle trail. It was just my first real experience and deep dive into the crypto community from this creative angle. And it blew me away because I was not really your technical cryptographer. I'm not going to be contributing to our ecosystem in that way. But the playfulness that we unlocked in that first puzzle blew me away. And it led to basically six years of that type of work for different projects, helping people educate their communities as a tool for community building. And it also, that type of crypto puzzle work

attracts talent, dev talent, which makes sense if you think about some of these different processes to uncover talent. Like, you know, the CIA, we joke, they put out puzzles, cryptographic puzzles, and, you know, people that can crack them are deemed, like, as maybe suitable for, you know, it's like as a way to recruit essentially. Um, anyways, we, I've found so many amazing developers. So naturally, over those past six years, our projects became more ambitious, we were pretty much making full-fledged games.

So it was in 2017, end of 2017, that artists I had been working with, artists that were better than myself and faster that I had found along the way, and the developers that were brilliant, that we decided, as the cryptocurrency markets, you know, they started to rise.

We had the Bitcoin bull run, One of my most famous pieces was solved, had been unsolved for three years, had five Bitcoin in the prize. We are at this place in our history, our Bitcoin history, where we decided it was time to do something more ambitious and more serious. So we founded BlockCath games. That is the game company. And we've, you know, we've released multiple different projects along the way. But that journey of how we got to where we are today has been pretty fun and organic. My CTO of Blockade, his name is Ben Heid He was getting his PhD and in computer science and security

and I managed to talk him out of it. He only had one term left and I was like, then you know, you don't really need to finish his PhD what we're doing is so much cooler. And ever since then, I mean, so yeah, anyways, Laura, that's been that journey here in a nutshell and we can talk more about those different projects under Blockade Games if you'd like to. Yeah. Well, so just one thing I wanted to clarify about the puzzles, was it that once they solved the puzzle, then it would give them the private key that would enable them

to take the bitcoins locked in it? Yes, that's usually the final step. So along the way, you might get hints about how to uncover the private key when you get it. But it's going to be information that's encoded, it's been shifted. There's a cipher key required. I mean, there's all these little pieces that you collect along that whole trail that when you get to that final string of information, you'll know hopefully how to uncover it. And then for that one puzzle that was then solved for three years with the five Bitcoins in it, how much was it, how much money was it worth in U.S. dollars when you put that money in? And how much was it worth when the person finally solved it? I believe Bitcoin was about $120 a Bitcoin when I loaded it.

And then let's see, when it was solved, the sum was 50,000. And at the peak of that, it was worth 100,000. So when it was worth 100,000 was when this whole wave of reinterest came around it. And it was a couple, actually, the group that solved it, they had worked on it pretty much for three months. And I knew that it was close to being solved. I watched it being like on the Bitcoin talk thread. People are really close, but then they just would talk themselves out of it. Like, oh, I'm never going to be able to solve this.

So it sat really close to being solved for a while. But those developers who actually did that, they went on to, I don't know if you're familiar with the Pineapple Fund. I am. That's the person who at the height of the bubble, it just decided to give away roughly $86 million in Bitcoin because they had more money than they, really knew what to do with. Exactly. Yep. An amazing individual. And they reached out to me when this puzzle was solved and asked if we would do more work like this, if they contributed funds for us.

So that's when about that time, February 2017, 2018, we made Pineapple Arcade, which was, we have since taken it down. But it was since, it was all these different arcade games that were crypto-themed, such as a Pac-Man, but it's actually the Bitcoin chasing, you know, And then we had a Minero, a coin that would disappear. So we played around remaking a lot of these old classic games, but they had in them cryptocurrency prizes. So if you played a certain way or you figured out some Easter eggs, just like the old 80s games, a lot of times they had Easter eggs.

You would unlock prizes. And then actually the Pineapple Fun person himself created his own trail. That was an in real life puzzle hunt that started from the arcade and then led people running around Australia to win some Bitcoin, which a lot of people don't know this story, but there were people that went to the extent of hiring, like people in England, hiring people through like almost a Craig's ad,

the version to get people in Australia to go run around in national parks in the middle of the night and look for these landmarks. It was, yeah, it's just, our space is really wild. I love it. I love it. So one other thing that you did along the way was Plasma Bears. And so why don't we just kind of fill in a little bit more of the history? But and then we'll get to Blockade Games and Neon District. Yes. So Plasma Bears actually came after Pineapple Arcade. It was, as we were exploring, how would we build what we're working on right now, which is Neon District? As we were really trying to wrap our heads around what we wanted that to be, the user experience. And one of the number one things was a free to play blockchain game so that it could be open and inclusive. So Plasma Bears was basically, we tried to come up with a really fast application that we could build, web-based application, that took some of these bigger picture ideas to just test them out and see what kind of tech

stack would be required to build the larger version, which was Neon District. So Plasma Bears is essentially a, it's like a build-a-bear, if you imagine a builder-bear, where, but, But it's five separate NFTs, non-fungible tokens. The head is one. There's two arms, two legs, and then the belly. We worked with artists in the crypto space, which back then, places like super rare and known origin were still just kind of coming together. This was also in 2018, in the end of 2018, early 2019.

But I reached out to these different artists because a lot of them did really neat texture work like GIFs or GIFs. And we then basically skinned the bear parts with these GIFs made by these different artists. So we made a huge library of those skins. So you could have aesthetically different looking bears. There were whole sets, but there was this game of trying to complete the set to if you wanted to. But then you would take these bears on a text adventure. And as you played the text adventure, you would receive like bear parts that were had better stats. So they had a breakout of, you know, their agility, strength, things like that,

associated with each bear part. So you were basically leveling up your bear piece at a time so that when they would go on these text adventure missions that were rated by difficulty according to the different stats. Yeah. So it was neat because the bears also had personalities. So if you had mostly sad bear parts, your bear all of a sudden would be an animated sad bear on your web page.

And they were fun to gift. So this was all free to play. So we had people that were children all the way to my parents and other people's grandparents able to go to this web game. It was on at the time what was called Loom Network, which was an Ethereum Layer 2 network, which is no longer around anymore. But it allowed players because it was so cheap and we could just take care. care of everything on the back end. We could control, you know, run the nodes. It was somewhat

centralized. Like, you wouldn't think of this as a financial network. This was a playful exploration. So anyways, yeah, it was so cool to have people playing and not cost anything and sending bears across social media. So you could drop a claim link to a bear on Twitter and someone could click it. And then to own it, all I would have to do is put in basically a username password and that bear would be in their inventory. And then we had a gateway where you could spend those bears out to Ethereum. Interesting. So, you know, I mean, this is like really fun and fascinating.

It just sounds, yeah, like a fun thing that anyone could do. But obviously, you're using blockchain technology for a reason. So what problems exist in gaming that you think blockchain technology can solve? So for my own gaming experience, I have multiple times gone through the process of what's called grinding, which is where you're playing these games and you're trying to get to, let's say, level 20. And once you do, maybe you realize the characters that you were developing along the way

aren't the ones you actually wanted. This is something you would see in World Warcraft, something like World of the tanks, a lot of open world games. And that's frustrating and you get burned out. So players go through something called burnout. And I felt like blockchain opened up this opportunity from our experience with crypto puzzles

and seeing people feeling incentivized for the treasure hunt, that digital treasure hunt experience to unlock something valuable, I felt like we were in a place where the actual journey itself could be the process of creating the value, and therefore when you leave, you're leaving with that value with you. So while people would tell me the crypto puzzles, they felt like, well, even though I didn't win, at least they learned something.

You know, that's like, I guess, a positive way to look at it. But in this case, you could learn something and also have almost memorabilia from, it's like having swag from the experience, having, there's people that have played neopets. And there's a game called neopets. And they talk about how, wow, if I still had my neopet today, that would have such sentimental value to me. So these are basically digital goods. And your game assets being digital goods.

And as a space, as a content creator space, we are unlocking. currently what is possible with digital goods and digital durable goods. So there's this time, money investment problem that blockchain games are exploring. And then there's also, as we're talking about that Web 2 content and Web 3 ownership and trying to close the gap between the two, what we're finding is we have unlocked basically a new type of development ecosystem for, for companies. creatives, essentially. So while we have the financial markets and in cryptocurrency for fungible assets, being able to have uniquely identifiable dynamic and now like even with interactive,

as we're exploring interactive non-fundable tokens and we're starting to use programs as NFTs, that the space is evolving so rapidly, I guess, that this developer playground and content creator playground that we're co-developing together. is fascinating. So I think as any content creator could probably speak to the problem of creating something virtual or digital and it not feeling like you're capturing the value of being able to sell it historically. And now we're at a place where artists are just basically flooding into our space because of this new opportunity. Interesting. Yeah, I totally understand that as creative myself. So why don't we then now talk about your company, Blockade Games. What are you doing?

So we're using the idea of, well, I'll speak more specifically to Neon District in a second, but when we think of digital goods, I think of how they still require some sort of bridge to interact with them. The game is that tool. So we're basically creating a platform in which users can take their assets that they own and have a way to interact with them and develop them, craft them and bring them into, make them their own essentially. And so, like, the game is that tool to bridge the gap in my mind between the content creation Web 2 and the ownership of Web 3. The blockchain part of the game is actually just the fact that you own these assets.

They live on the distributed networks. What we wanted to do with that was create Neon District, which is a cyberpunk role-playing game. Think of Final Fantasy 7, any Final Fantasy game really, or Zelda. These games are immersive storytelling, very, very rich in storytelling about the hero's journey, character development.

So, role-playing game from, if you think of Dungeons and Dragons, or a lot of board games, where you have a dungeon master that sits at the table with you. There's an emphasis on, story and being immersed. The other part with the games, though, is the art.

So even like Final Fantasy as an RPG really broke the ground as far as beautiful art and games together. So Neon District wanted to tie, since our community, a cryptic community seems to resonate really well with cyberpunk and that sci-fi genre, we wanted to make it really rich and beautiful. if you've ever read Snow Crash or Neuromancer or like any of these classic sci-fi books, it has this pretty edgy feel to it and it's very colorful. So we've spent a lot of time actually developing. We have over 10,000 art assets that you can use and craft me at CyberPump characters.

And you can swap out the different components like I was talking about plasma bears before, where it's five different NFTs that you compose into the bear. it's similar with these cyberpunk characters. Except it's much, they're much more complex as far as their character class, meaning the types of characters they are and their role they play in your gameplay. So we've unlocked not only that artistic composing part,

which I'm very passionate about just with my own background, but also the ability for player versus player and taking these assets that you own, showing them off against another player. So what we see on December 15th is, for the first time, after three years of development on this game, you will be able to invite another player to play against your own characters. And you're going to be learning how the game mechanics and everything work. There's a lot to the actual game mechanics of Neon District, such as there's card games involved, there's your characters or tributes.

But the most exciting part is it has active animation, it's active gameplay, which is pretty big. There's not very many PVP active games in blockchain. I don't actually know if there is one at the moment. They're usually passive. Okay. Yeah, this sounds really interesting. One thing I was wondering is you talked about kind of like certain complex things that you could do. And I heard an example that you gave on another show about the dungeons.

Can you walk us through that and how, you know, that's kind of like a uniquely crypto thing where do you know what I'm referring to? Which part of the dungeons? About how you can create these contracts that people have to sign when they start. And then, well, so I'll just say it. You were saying that basically you could design your own dungeon and you could have some kind of stipulation that, you know, if the other person loses, then they have to forfeit all their assets. Yes. So in the future, I imagine that we could do something. Oh, it's not part of the game now. Not currently. But it is something that's on our minds about how we can, for example, right now you're going to have the PVP rollout. And then Q1, you're going to have

the campaigns, which is basically being a, it's kind of like a dungeon sort in, in that way, but it's player versus computer. So we've set up the story. We've set up everything you're going to experience and the drops. We are basically acting like the dungeon master. But beyond that, there's opportunity for players to collect backgrounds, art, different components, land, and pick plots on grounds, establish what would be considered a raid. So if you're familiar with the World of Warcraft, again, any of these open world RPGs set up a raid in which you can create a boss character who could hold the center of your dungeon. You can drop monsters.

You can customize and define the experience. You could set the rules, and then you could place bounties. People could see what prizes they have a chance of winning if they go and explore this dungeon. But there could also be stakes placed, such as. But if you lose, this is what you're going to lose. And it would be something where if you agree to that contract, that asset, that whatever you've risked would probably go to escrow.

you would play the game. If you lose, you would lose that asset in escrow. You don't have to do it that way. You can do it so there's much less at stake. But the idea that we can do that is pretty fun. And I am someone that loves the idea of Permadeath with these game characters. So if you tell me that there's an opportunity to go do something high risk with my game characters that I have maybe crafted and spent a lot of time on, when I lose one, it's going to be devastating. But when I win, it's going to be amazing. And I think the this is a, like emotionally, you're going to have to sign something away that says, you know, you're not going to cause trouble if you lose. But, um, but I think the emotional feeling, even when I play, there's a game called darkest dungeons. Um, and it has characters that's almost similar where you send them on dungeon quest like this. And they're emotional. So they go crazy. And you have to keep them, uh, you have to keep them abstain and healthy. Otherwise, they start to perform badly in the dungeons. And sometimes they even hurt each other or there's all these little things about their psychology. But anyways, they die. And when they die, it could have been

a character that you've been taken care of for a long time and you have rehabilitated multiple times. It's just devastating. And I imagine, because we haven't done this yet, but I imagine it's going to have a similar feeling. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunity for players to, like I said, the game works as this tool layer for us to give you something that becomes an interactive playfield. And there are some other new behaviors in gaming that I think non-fungible tokens or cryptoccollectibles are enabling in Neand District. Like I've also heard you talk about farming there. How are you using that? Yes. So the farm like farming with, there's two different ways that this could happen. One is in game where you could, while you're actively playing the game, you could be accruing different cryptocurrencies or different. NFTs unlocking as a reward for your gameplay.

There's also the idea of actually, so recently I launched a token, a personal creator token called coin as a way to interact more with my development developer community and my content creator community. And if you, for example, were to stake a game character, maybe it's a high level game character and you're staking it, it could have a chance of having a nice yield on coin or some of these other, like, there's another token called CRED, which is basically the underground, like, street credit currency of my community. But so, like, there's a lot of playfulness that we can have where you can play, because

it's not all locked into one application, we can take these assets. And, yes, we have an 1155 and a non-fundable token farm. We have 721 farms. We really just have knobs and leverage the pull and play with as far as giving gamers new opportunities to explore what they can do with their assets. And so just explain the difference between an ERC 721 versus 1155. So a 721 is its own, like, is the contract, whereas the 1155 NFTs all exist within the contract.

So they are not uniquely identifiable as the same way as a 721 is. They are, like, consider 1155 a batch. Oh, okay. Which is like better for developers and a lot of ways for, um, just resource, like resource management. Okay. And you've also been doing some fun things with NFT farming and sharding,

which sort of marries NFT with Defi. Can you explain how that works? Yes. So there's an exchange called NIFTex exchange. And what it's being used for is taking things like high value game assets and high value art assets, basically anything that's an NFT that's considered high value.

And the sharding is basically, it gets charted into ERC 20. So the ERC 20 becomes a fractionalized representation of the NFT. What we did was we created a farm where you stake, you can stake coin, cred, or if we were working with a partner, right now it's RNG, which is Richard Kim from Galaxy Interactive's community. It's like a gaming focus community. Anyways, they're staking too right now, but we switch that out sometimes.

Anyways, you take these tokens and you can stake. And what you're yielding then is this ERC20 fractionalized representation of the NFT. And when it's complete, then what happens is we turn on the shotgun clause. The shotgun clause means that anyone that now owns one of these shards can make a bid on the entire asset. And what will happen is that will price their shards. So if I own 10%, and I've put up one-eath bid, then my assets are proportional to that. So if someone wants to out, they can either buy my shards from me, off of me, or they can counter my bid. And we've seen some of that activity, but what we found is because of the nature of how involved it is,

it's what I would call inventory management with the high, when we were doing the high turnaround of the different farms and the different pieces, that we're going to focus more in the future longer farming times with higher valued pieces. So that it's really something that people want, which is, I think, I love the concepts and they're very cool, but we're still really early. So right now it's definitely experimental. But yeah, there's something to pay attention to you because fractalized ownership of NFTs, if you think about, you know, this in regards to the Mona Lisa or something else, art like historically, then we saw an Axi Infinity asset, one of the axes started out at a 40E valuation. prior to being started, and then the bidding war for that AXE went on beyond 140Eth. I don't even know what it finally settled that, but pretty wild how it became a whale game, essentially. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news.

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and virtually everything in between. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Well, yeah, that's what I was wondering about. When people can just buy their way into highly skilled players or owning valuable objects or into high levels of play, how does that affect the dynamics and the fun of playing the game or how do you kind of like account for that in your game design? Absolutely.

So actually, historically, having open economies and games is like, it's something that big game companies stay away from because it's so hard to do. So it's not, if you talk to, let's say, Fortnite, Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, it's not necessarily because they're not doing blockchain because they don't believe in the technology. It's because it's a very hard, difficult thing to do. So, yes, you, like we saw, I think it was Doom 3, the, no, Diablo, sorry, Diablo 3, had an open economy and it destroyed all the whales bought all the high valued assets and then the game was no fun for anybody. So it's the auction house. It's something that a lot of people point to when

they say this does not work. But if you take something like Magic the Gathering, for example, which is a lot of the backbone of the Nien district is inspiration is card game meets RPG. So in Magic the Gathering, for example, you can have a high value card. But if you don't know when to play that card at the right time, it doesn't really matter that it's valuable. I mean, it can be valuable for lots of different reasons, for the art, for the addition that it was a part of historically, that it was owned by a pro player at one point and won in a certain tournament.

So there's different reasons why something can be valuable. And then the when to play the basically imagine, imagine like a sledgehammer. and you know a sledgehammer is going to be very powerful and decimate your opponent. But let's say what you actually need is a screwdriver, a certain type of screwdriver, and you have to use it at a precise moment. Now, that is a lot harder, and you have to be smart and thinking ahead and have the ability to use that asset at the right time. That's the difference in the different style, like how you design the game.

It's called a wide game design versus a vertical game design. So the vertical game design is basically a power. ladder to become the most powerful, whereas the power is distributed in Neon District across a wide, so it's a wide design. Okay, yeah. So I guess even if you could buy some of the fancy players or objects or whatever, if you don't use it well, then you're just going to have wasted your money because you'll lose it right away. Yeah. Well, you just, you won't understand how to use it and you won't be able to recognize. It's the strategy and the mechanics of the game, it's like chess, right?

It's like, it's basically like chess on steroids is how like strategic the game is. Okay. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about how games can use blockchain technology and also turn to more on how all this can affect creators. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Crypto.com, the crypto super app that lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto, all in one place. earn up to 8.5% per year on your BTC. Download the crypto.com app now to see the interest rates you could be earning on BTC and more than 20 other coins. Once in the app, you can apply for the crypto.com metal card, which pays you up to 8% cash back instantly. Reserve years now in the crypto.com app.

One inch is a decentralized exchange aggregator that sources liquidity from the top dexes and liquidity sources to save users money and time on swaps. One inch is capable of finding the best possible trading paths and splitting them among multiple market depths. Recently, the one inch team unveiled one inch version two. The main highlights of V2 are Pathfinder, an API that contains a new discovery and routing algorithm and a new intuitive user-friendly UI. The V2 improvements ensure the best rates on swaps while dramatically cutting response time. Back to my conversation with Marguerite Descourcel.

So one other thing that I've heard you mention about how blockchain technology could be used in video games is for big decentralized profiles. What does that mean in gaming? Like, why would a decentralized profile be so powerful? So this is something that actual game companies are really interested in. I know firsthand that, for example, Epic Games has slots, that they basically have slots for different user ideas. identities that they're a placeholding right now. And so this distributed network of a decentralized identities, taking that off of the game companies as far as being in charge or being responsible for user identity is a big deal.

It means that we can allow players to opt in to things they want to be targeted for that's outside of a game company. And the game companies can pay attention to that information that users are sharing. And so for privacy reasons, this allows us to interact better with our users that want us to interact with them. So if I am a certain type of gamer, I'm playing these games, I'm sharing this information, I'm a social influencer. I can select that I'm a social influencer. I can put in and like verify across my different social influencing accounts. Game companies can see this information.

They can see what I like to do. what I'm playing with. With blockchain assets, if I'm sharing that information, you can see what types of assets they have. Game companies can target you as a user and give you other opportunities that, almost as gifts, one,

it allows us to find our users better or different types of users better. Yeah, so those are the different reasons why decentralized identities are exciting and profiles are exciting. And so are you, trying to angle Leon District or any game that you create through BlockKaic games toward crypto people, or are you trying to draw in regular gamers who would then have to be introduced to some of these

new blockchain-enabled concepts like NFTs and farming? And if so, then how do you introduce those concepts to them? So originally, the vision was to just drop a game to the mainstream market and let them uncover that it was a blockchain game. But what we've seen, since actually decided to do, since we developed such a core crypto community is we are going to use that audience first and foremost as we basically iterate on top. So instead of waiting for the entire game to be done with all the features, which would be needed for a public release for mainstream gamers, you would need to have all their normal things they would expect in a game. With the cryptocurrency gaming community, we can actually release early

earlier. So we're releasing early and we're going to be adding those features as we go, but off of what our users want. So the goal is to still end with a game that the mainstream user doesn't need to realize that it's a blockchain game. But we're going to go ahead and start with our cryptocurrency community that we've already cultivated. But for just a regular gamer, do you feel like there will be a learning curve for them? Like, oh, now I can sell this, you know, valuable sword that I earned or do you know what I mean? Or do you think it'll just be pretty natural and easy for them to get those concepts? I think it's going there's going for right now, for this next year, at least,

there is going to definitely be a learning curve. It's going to there's going to be all this whole, we need to have the magical moment that happens for users to be like, that might, if you can think back to the first time you sent a Bitcoin, right? to somebody else, and it actually, maybe you actually paid for something with it a long time ago. And you're like, what did I just do? We need that same experience for the gamers and these, and with this content. So being able to have this sword and sell it and now you have your first cryptocurrency, and maybe you actually didn't spend any money to get it. Maybe it was literally

just your skill set that allowed you to cultivate and craft this piece. Maybe it's a sword. and you go and you sell it, then so in Neon District, we can cover your back-in transactions. So we can get you to the Ethereum main net since we're on a layer two solution at the moment without you actually having to have cryptocurrency, but maybe you have to spend, you know, cover something for the transaction. It can also be your in-game currency

that you have just accumulated along the way. So you make this transfer to Ethereum. And now that marketplace will prompt you to have your Metamask wallet or whatever wallet you'd like. So that whole onboarding marketplace process, at least for this year one, year two, we will love to have our own marketplace enabled and people to just trade directly from the application itself. But regardless, my point is the magic moment of being able to trade that asset that

maybe you never put any money into other than your gaming skill and your time and get your first cryptocurrency. And if that's the way you get your first cryptocurrency, I think that's going to be such a hook for people to understand these economies we're creating. Well, so you mentioned that you're on a layer two network for Ethereum, and that was something I was going to ask you because obviously one of the biggest problems in crypto, sort of generally, but especially in Ethereum right now, is, and in particular for these smart contract type transactions, is the scaling issue, you know, bumping up against the throughput on some of these chains. So what blockchain are you using? And is it something where if your game, takes off even as much as crypto kitties probably could have done it, you know, because it was limited by Ethereum. It didn't really grow as much as people thought. But if it were to take off as much as crypto couldies might have, then will your blockchain that you're currently on

being able to handle that? So it's a, we, I was actually just talking to Ben on Blockade CTO this morning and exploring about like, okay, so what if we hit a million users, a million daily users, like what would it look like? And you're still going to have scaling problems. This is not like a magic solution. It's though it's optimized so that 7,000 transactions per second for the Madic network, which is what we landed on. And it's also, there's still the opportunity, though, with, as I'm sure you've been following with Ethereum 2, with optimistic roll-ups and how successful those are. So if we hit a place where we start to bottleneck because of transaction scalability, we can explore doing something like a roll-up as well.

But I really don't think that's going to happen in the immediate feature. So with the 7,000 transactions per second that we'll have on Maddock, we have the ability to have a pretty robust, vibrant game of awesome users. And why did you select Maddoch? You said also that it was very easy to connect to Ethereum. So how does that work? Yes. So we have both Maddoch has their gateways.

we have gateways to Ethereum. It's very cheap. It's something like one 10,000th, the cost of making a transaction on Madik than it is Ethereum. It's, it's the, they match their addresses. So your Ethereum and Madic address are, are the same. And it's also, it's 100% EVM compatible. So if you're an Ethereum developer and you wanted to build on Ethereum

and you feel like you're somehow being bottlenecked because of Ethereum more it's too expensive and the user experience isn't what you really wanted it to be. Maddick was a solution for us to get all those things we wanted and still have all the benefits of Ethereum essentially. So it works right now as a layer two, which is, I guess, in my mind, it's probably the most successful layer two currently. And how does having these different blockchain technologies in the game affect the business model of blockade games as opposed to a traditional gaming company? So we can have, we can take cuts from the secondary sales across as these assets trade over time. There is, you know, the question of yes, we're not a walled garden

where we're going to be reaping the benefits of the rewards of all the sales. But that's also like we were talking about the new content, this new developer ecosystem, where when you build very robust communities that are rich, and so in our case, it's going to be rich in story and also just the experience, what happens is developers come and build supporting basically experiences for these assets. And they do this because there's one, a lot of these indie game developers are very highly experimental and they're not doing it necessarily for the money. They're doing it just to see what happens and because it's fun and here's a community they can interact with that's established and maybe they really resonate with the genre. So the open, that open

developer ecosystem that this unlocks is something that hasn't really been explored yet. You can look at examples like Minecraft and other games that have developer ecosystems. But in this way, like if let's say I'm a developer name, I have collected a whole bunch of a certain type of asset, I can build an experience around that. So now all of a sudden, those assets are more valuable. We saw that with CryptoKitties, where they took a certain type of cat, some developers took a certain type of cat. They bought a whole bunch of them.

And they created a game, a racing cat game just for those cats. And so then the Dapper Labs team was like, well, what just happened? Why are these cats so expensive? And so, like, there's just a lot of opportunity for people when they own these assets to explore new business models themselves. The business models that are spinning up all over the place around content from just being an artist. So things that don't even have utility at all, just from brand recognition and content

creator recognition assets are selling. I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to people like Beeple. People like People. People. He's a pretty famous artist. His work is selling like crazy. He's a traditional concept artist. Definitely we're checking him out.

There's the musician, the indie musician RAC. And he's teamed up with other. So since he's doing the audio, he's teamed up with other content creators, like the visual side. And they're selling these NFTs that, once again, they don't have utility. They're just collectibles. So when you think of game assets as actually being something with utility that are playful, like I would like to argue that I think it's going to be a strong. and more defensible ecosystem at large than what people anticipate.

And so this isn't like super germane to the crypto audience, but I am so curious, do you think that traditional gaming companies will be disrupted by this technology, or do you think that they are just going to end up taking advantage of it and incorporating it into their existing games? I think that users are going to really enjoy the idea of asset ownership. ownership and when they start to realize they can have business models themselves around games that they interact with. So if I am a Twitch streamer and people are dropping me game assets that now I own, and my audience is also participating and I'm getting, I'm being gifted assets to give to my audience,

my streaming audience. And as I interact with these assets, they become more valuable. so now people are buying them from me at a much, like, for a much higher price just because I played with them and they're my fans. That whole business is going to be something hard to pull people away from, especially as we see this. I mean, streamers and content creators are really taking off all on its own. So you add that additional Web 3 ownership component to it. And it's going to be, I think we're just going to have so many fun creative indie. developers coming over and collaborating with these content creators, that game companies will have to come up with some sort of strategy. And it might not be blockchain, but it might be something

that feels or looks like blockchain, some sort of user experience that mimics it to keep people interested in staying over where they are. But yeah, when people are making money and becoming more successful for doing exactly what they already were doing already, that's why I started. That's why I the blockchain space really taking off. Yeah, it's something that I'm really excited about. And you're actually already taking advantage of this a little bit. You know, you're an artist or more generally a creative person. And that's a group of entrepreneurs that traditionally have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to traditional content distribution models. So what problems in content creation business models do you think blockchain technology could solve? And how are you already kind of trying to do that

with your social token coin. Yes. Right. So actually that, like you were talking about, when I first got into this space as an artist, man, I was shipping artwork around the world, paying for shipping it, competing to get into these galleries,

which would then take 50% of the cut of my art. I was not enough for it to be a viable, like, livelihood where I could support myself. As we're seeing artists come into our space and support themselves, And granted, it's going to, I'm sure, get harder to be seen or recognized as it becomes more populated. But the fact that we have the tools and people to capture the value of direct sales like this to consumers right across the internet using the blockchain and these assets and asset ownership, that to me was so powerful. And we're just unlocking. Like, we're just seeing these artists and the artist markets really take off.

It was funny to me because I feel like this was something that was apparent a few years ago. But somehow the wider cryptocurrency and Ethereum communities just, they almost had like bliders onto it. But now it's actually becoming mainstream popular and cool. So there's a coolness factor that's happening too. But so anyways, the social token or the creator token with coin, as I've built a fan base since the beginning with doing the crypto puzzles. And, you know, I tend to, people call me a people collector because I find talent and I pull them in and I keep them close. And so I have a lot of artists and a lot of developers that I think are awesome. And from there, they bring in others that we all think are awesome.

So because it's like big family, essentially, and we called, so my token coin is actually a part of what we call coins Eden. And it's a syndicate within the district. So I have declared myself the boss of the syndicate. And I established the token economics so that I was the boss and I'm the largest holder of the token. And I get to say what happens at the end of the. the day. But and then there's this whole hierarchy of, um, of the syndicate. And you can work your way up through like having more coin, um, to have different roles. And those roles, we will apply different

functions as Neon District evolves the game. But the idea is that we potentially will have multiple syndicates and people could come in and stake a syndicate. And with, um, there's something called collab dot land, which interacts with discord. So it reads the, the tokens that are in my wallet, my coin or it could read any of the tokens I have, but in this case, in my Discord, it's coin. And people are automated into these different roles that are private. So they're not accessible to anyone that's not basically a part of the syndicate. This is where, this is the community I go to when I'm doing something crazy. Like I want to start a new farm and these are the mechanics. I'm thinking of, I just, you know, very rawly drop those ideas to these folks

and we brainstorm. We all decide what makes sense, doesn't make sense for our community at large. And from there, I'm actually able to take coin. And for developers, like there's this project called Beyond NFT, which is a project focusing on developing interactive NFTs, which I'm really excited about. So we will support that development with coin. The idea is that as we target where our funding goes,

we bring that value directly back into the community. by interacting and playing with it. So, for example, we just made on the side of Neo-District development. I got really into chess. I've always loved chess, but the Queen's Gambit happened. And it clicked to me that this is a perfect game for the Ethereum ecosystem to play with. As far as being able to make chess pieces, defining since now NFT support web files, 3D objects.

So we make these 3D objects. We set basically what was needed the specifications of those chess pieces for an artist. Then we also set the specifications what would be needed for a chess web game. We put bounties on that game development. We are actively developing chess pieces.

Other people now are sending me messages of the chess pieces they're developing. And this idea that we can have chess wars with different assets from boards that could also be NFTs, environments that could be NFTs, different types and variations of chess games. Anyways, going on a tangent here, but talking about, I guess, cultivating interesting activities that where developers can shine, content creators can shine,

artists can make now basically these 3B sculptures and, you know, paint them, texturize them however they like. And it has immediate utility. So I was talking about before or how all this high-end value art is selling, but there's no utility. But when we make things that are universally have utility, it adds this playfulness that allows us all to interact with each other, which anybody in the space knows that we are obsessed with our community. Like across crypto Twitter, even just the developer space,

a content creator space, we are very social. So bridging that social into some sort of fun gameplay is going to be really neat. Anyways, Laura, I don't want to keep rambling. Well, one thing that wasn't clear to me. So when people buy these different 3D chess pieces and stuff, then where do they use them? Is it just like a specific blockchain chess game that they can use them in? Or can they take them like, yeah, how does that work? So basically any developer that supports the files, the objects and designs a game, a version of the game, all of them are supported in these various games.

So, yeah, there's a lot of, we put boundaries for that development. We have, I know, two groups that are actively developing games currently, and how they monetize it, that can go a few different ways. They can issue their own chess pieces as part of it, or they can also, like, maybe take a fee for when two people decide to go PVP. Okay. And so just to go back to Coin, what is it that people do with Coin and, you know, how do they earn it or how did you release it or, and you did talk a little bit earlier about,

at how that's then connected to yet another coin called CRED, but if he could just go over again, like, what the difference is between the two and how people earn these? So the reason I launched coin was actually earlier this year when COVID hit, we had been fundraising for about six months. And it became apparent that it was going to become, it was a different landscape for fundraising for a while. And we didn't know how long.

So actually, Blockade really, we got lean and we started bootstrapping from that point forward to get to actually where we are right now with our launch date. But in the meantime, we decided, okay, we need to really lean on our developer friends, our community, our fans, to help us get over the finish line. So launching coin was a way to bridge again. So I had, I guess, previously been straight out of the community. My projects had always been just collaborative with the community side by side. When launched blockade, it became this separation. And I felt it and I actually didn't like it for, you know, two and a half years just almost like this wall of, I can't really interact with my people anymore in the same way. Because now it's, there's just this weird dynamic about, well, I'm not hired for Blockade.

I'm not like, there's a different conversation. So Coin allowed me as a, as my individual self, not being under Blockade to reconnect with my user base. and what I did was I fractional I myself what I said was so you have to you have to roll with the story because it is just basically abstract but I minted an NFT representation of basically my brand identity and then fractionalized it so sharded it into ERIS and 20s so from there we distributed to everyone that was a long-time holder of so a trophy holder which is people that have historically solved my puzzles across the years they have something that's called a trophy to a key, a founder's key, a Neander's key, and the Aud District Founders key.

So we had some distribution in that regards. And then I sold crypto puzzles. I made a series of crypto puzzles that you had to own the crypto puzzle in order to have access to the experience and to solve it. And then it had a pretty large bounty of coin associated with it. From those sales, I actually took the Ethereum and I seeded the Ethereum and Coin Pairs. on Uniswap. And we started at Lowe was actually 10 cents a coin when we launched the market at that price. And then the market naturally just went up to 30 cents a coin. And from there, it has fluctuated quite a bit. But the whole, I guess the exciting part about that is it's now allowing the success of everything we're doing, what the community does, what I do,

if blockade will accept coin, it becomes this like ecosystem where everybody can share a little bit more directly in the success of things we're involved in. And when we add, when we decide to basically incubate different projects and they want to stay a part of the ecosystem, that value comes back to us. So with the cyberpunk genre intersection that I sit at with Neon District, in this past year with coin, I've actually been connecting with a lot of cyberpunk type content creators, both audio, like in music styles that are associated, like synth wave, different art styles like that. And we've actually made now a more robust cyberpunk community of these types of content creators, which, who have accepted coin,

who now want to work for coin, and also have found different people, I guess, that we resonate more closely together as content creators. What all of this I see is a major win for as we're rolling out Neon District, because the idea of Neon District is to have a very rich developer and content creator community around it so that we can explore all these and keep playing and being experimental about what is possible with NFTs. And you also have something called coin artist liquidity mining, which translates to calm. What is that? And how does that work? So in order to keep our, basically, so there's enough liquidity for us to basically sell

if we need to use some coin to pay for development for whatever projects we want to support. we are allowing people that want to support the community and efforts. Basically, they become a liquidity provider by providing Ethereum and Coin to the Uniswap. Oh, I said. And then they receive what's called a liquidity provider token. That's proof that they did this. They bring this over to coinartist.aio.io, where we have the liquidity mining initiative. So you stake that token.

and then what you're earning back is a percentage over time of coin and also a bonus token called CRED. So CRED is this currency that basically is proof that you have contributed to the viability of the coin ecosystem. And what we do with CRED is across our different stores, such as the chess store, such as neon district assets, basically credit holders can just place an offer in credit. And we generally will just accept it. We'll also have limited opportunities with cred. So, for example, there's an asset called the Death Night that is one of the most surprised prize set possessions in theon district as far as the Cympunk outfit for this

character. And there's a blade that's coming out, the Death Night Blade. So there's a few people, myself included, has worked really hard to get the complete that set. There's not very many of them. There's only 25. There's going to be 25 of these blades. and we're talking about allowing there to be an auction using cred as the way in which you can. So one will be like the loopbox option to get, which is a random chance of getting this blade,

but then also an opportunity for cred holders to have the opportunity to make bids on the blade. And the only reason you would have cred, it's not listed anywhere. The only way you could get it is from being an ecosystem, you know, someone that has helped the ecosystem through the liquidity mining. And yeah, so there's a lot of ways. with the game, both the game company, through other exploratory projects we do, that we can really, I guess, honor the credit holders. And not only that, but credit holders are actually bartering credit with each other, now with assets, which is pretty cool. So it has, like when I referenced before, it becoming like the underground currency. It is like the next level cool currency. If you're

credit holder, it's almost like, you know, you're one of us. I love it. I love it. The end group. So I was so curious. I mean, you kind of talked about, yeah, just like your role as, you know, a creator of the games, but then also your individual persona or just your individual relationships, frankly, in the crypto community. And I wondered, so when you switched from doing the games to offering this token, what was the reaction to that? When I switch. You mean like alongside doing the games? Well, not switched, yeah.

But like, you know, when you introduce this new social token, what was the reaction to that? A lot of people were excited. Well, so I was exploring with the whole social influencer space in general because I personally don't really want to be a social. This is a lot of work to be a social influencer. And I don't really want anyone. But what I see is that there's such an opportunity for new businesses there, business models around having a creator token social token and being a social influencer. So I actually, the reaction was excitement, really. I would say that I had a lot of positive reaction.

I think if anything, I get in trouble sometimes when I push things too far. Like, you know, if there's a red button, I'm probably going to push it sometimes. And there's a case of people just getting really grumpy on crypto Twitter about girls taking selfies and then tokenize. them or taking pictures of themselves. I just thought it was silly. So anyways, I just, I had fun and did my natural trolling with that where I would still, like, I would make it and still sell it. And, and there's a fine line there that there's a lot to be discussed in that area. But social influence and what it should be like seen as and how it should be marketed. You know, that, that's a space that will be explored. But anyways, so the social influencer

piece, though, I've taken that idea next level where taking it off of me so much as being at the center and looking at people like Alex Botes, who actually is co-owner of the chess store get poned, which is what we launched. This is what we're basically where we're minting these chess pieces from on open sea. She's a very accomplished chess player. Yes, she's very, and she's incredibly talented both at chess and actually also engaging and entertaining. She has a dynamic with her sister. They're both influencers. Her sisters, they're both gamers. And then they also do these intense chess matches. And she's a great educator. So what people don't understand was a lot of these social influencers is that they are like educators, entertainers, like just all these things all at

once. Her being able to give these chess pieces to her audience as a gift, us figuring out how do we do that? How do we bridge this gap with people that may not have a metamask wallet? So we're exploring those ideas. But also, when she can actually play against other people with these 3D objects when we have the games developed and we can do giveaways afterwards with these pieces that we're played with, we're going to be starting to really explore some of the ideas I'm very excited about and I think is the future. And I just, I love that. I have was given this opportunity to work with her. I actually, it was funny because I was a fan of hers. And then I found out that Alex Sotella, who's a CTO of OpenC and her, went to school together at Stanford.

So we were able to close that gap really fast as far as like, let's do this crazy idea. And I couldn't be more happy that she's been willing to explore it with us. Great. All right. Well, this is one super fun. Where can people learn more about you, Blockade Games, Neon District, Coin, Calm, CRED, and anything else you're working on? Yes. So things that are related to coin artist.io is the site that has a sidebar that has information there. My Twitter, coin underscore artist, is probably where I'm most active. The neon district

account is neon district RPG. That's the Twitter account. In the bio there, there's the link to the Discord. The Discord is where we do all of our community interactions. And that's where Coins Eden lives as well. So if you ever become a coin holder, you'll have access to. spend to the private syndicate as long as you have five coin. Yeah, that's, I think that's pretty much it. The game is coming out. The first phase of the game is December 15th, and that will be targeted. The first pass will be for trophy holders and got key holders. And from there, we will keep releasing invitations to folks that want to come play. Perfect. That is the day that this show comes out. So, yeah, I think people will be excited to play. All right, well, thanks so much for

coming on Unchained. Thank you so much, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Marguerite, Blockade Games, Neand District, and more. Check out the show notes for this episode. Don't forget, you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel. Go to YouTube.com slash C slash Unjained podcast and subscribe today. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yun, Daniel Ness, Bossie Baker, Shashonk, and the team at CLK transcription. Thanks for listening. Thank you.