IlluviTalks #4 - DeFi Gaming: Was Axie Infinity a Success? + Community Building & Mass Adoption

What can generation 2 defi games like Illuvium learn from Axie Infinity? What is different about building DeFi communities versus centralized/legacy online communities? Will gaming drive the majority of DeFi adoption? Our expert panel of Brycent, Rich and Charles Jansen tackle these topics and more!

Follow Our Host & Guests
Andrew Wall (aka Awall) - https://twitter.com/awallcrypto
Brycent: https://twitter.com/brycent_
Rich: https://twitter.com/DickKingz
Charles Jansen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chajansen/+ https://twitter.com/CharlesJansen

ABOUT THE GAME
Illuvium is an exploration looter and collectible autobattler game built on the Ethereum Blockchain, releasing on PC and Mac in 2022. Play and earn in a graphically-rich, vividly-realized sci-fi adventure and conquer the wilderness to help your crash-landed colony flourish.

Race across stunning alien landscapes on your quest to uncover the cause of the cataclysm that shattered Illuvium. Hunt and capture Illuvials, powerful creatures who have ruled the land unchallenged until your arrival. Train and fuse your Illuvials into powerful evolutions. Build your ultimate Illuvial team to take into battles and tournaments in PvE and PvP Arenas. Use your creativity to build unique synergies to outsmart your opponents and progress to the top as become the most legendary Ranger on this planet.

Illuvium’s collectible NFT games feature crypto token assets with functionality and a gaming use case, interoperable across the Illuvium universe and the larger DeFi metaverse. The decentralized NFT collection offers players a user-maintained custody never before possible in mainstream gaming.

#IlluviTalks #DeFiGaming

♊ Terms and Conditions ♊
Content on the official Illuvium website and social media does not constitute financial advice. You are responsible for doing your own research and seeking independent professional advice about your involvement with the Illuvium DAO and any Illuvium products or services. Illuvium products (such as tokens including ILV, sILV2, Land NFTs) and services (Illuvium game) are not financial products and accordingly the Illuvium DAO is not licensed by any regulator. Please be on constant alert for scams. You should read and ensure you understand the terms and conditions available on the official Illuvium website before engaging with the Illuvium DAO or any Illuvium products or services.

🧠 Learn More About Illuvium: https://www.illuvium.io/
🏔️ Explore the IlluviDEX v2: https://illuvidex.illuvium.io/
🎮 Register For BETA Access: https://play.illuvium.io/
🪪 Build Your Personalized Illuvitar: https://www.illuvium.io/illuvitars

Transcript

here we go here we go boom there it is eluva talks is back baby and today we're talking all about the d5 industry learning from gen 1 d5 games what can we carry into gen 2 d5 games like alluvium how do you build define communities how is it unique and of course how do we get to mass adoption with defy or is that going to happen at all and the way that we figure these questions out is by bringing in the most stacked panel on the internet starting first with somebody who needs no introduction but we're going to give him one anyway and this man is the creator of the loot squad a content creator helping web 3 organizations build and scale organic community one of the big personalities out there in our space bryson what's up buddy yeah what's up andrew thank you so much for having me it's always a pleasure when i get to chat with you luva fam and i'm glad to be here awesome glad to hear it and of course we've got other folks on the panel as well we've got elluvium's community manager do you know his name his name is rich and here he is on camera what's up rich welcome to the show how's it going guys glad to be here you know it's been a long time coming in andrew finally made me do it so here i am i finally made him do it so i made him get on camera you know there's nobody i can think of that knows more about d5 community building than bryson and rich so i wanted to get them both on the show to talk about this topic today both from a game studio perspective and then of course as a content creator out there building communities and then of course our final guest to bring that ice cold corporate perspective to everything is charles janssen who's the head of get this corporate title are you ready for this he's the head of defy transformation at s p global ratings and this is a part of a billion dollar mega corp that's a publisher of financial research and analysis the heavy hitters are here today charles what's up buddy well good happy to be here yeah 125 billion in market cap and interested in in d5 not just me but at the company level so happy to be here thank you for having me absolutely of course all right so let's go over this agenda everybody because it is going to be interesting today it's all about the game fight industry we're covering gen 1 d5 games defy community building how we get to mass adoption and of course a live q a so any questions you have as audience members bring them to us and we'll answer them live and there is an audio version of this show available on literally every podcasting platform just go to elluvium.buzzsprout.com pick your podcasting platform we edit it and make it super clean for you to enjoy on these platforms go do that go follow especially on spotify right now and it goes without saying we're going to talk about fun stuff that we're passionate about defy gaming etc but nothing we're saying today is financial advice so if you think what we're saying is financial advice you're wrong this is just research materials that maybe you could use to learn about nft's gaming in our space and i'm glad you're learning but we are not telling you to buy or sell anything on this show and of course if you have not already go to elluvium.io louvitars to build your louvitar today you know what i'm gonna do play the trailer of course enjoy

oh yeah i could watch it like 500 times in fact literally i have perfect let's get into our topics for the episode everybody the first one of course being axey infinity and gen 1 d5 games and of course the big name when anybody thinks of when they think defy games is axie and somebody who is very involved with axi and has built you know communities around that generation of games and obviously is moving into gen 2 now is bryce and i want to ask you man do you feel like axey infinity was a success if so why or why not i'm just curious to know your perspective now that we're down the road from axi being the big boy game everybody was talking about what are your thoughts on that ah it's interesting i look back at like what we saw from axi in the early days and of course there were tons of people who made money playing uh this game where you could you know grab the assets and earn a little bit of their native token or currency um but you know on the other side of that there were tons of people from retail retail gamers and those from retail audiences that lost in that same coin so uh you know you're looking at a thing of you had people in one place uh earning but people in another place that were investing with the hopes of earning but the overall speculation uh around the game is that is where i think most of the downside came in and ultimately i do think that to a point axi was a success in terms of creating a world around a tokenomic economy regardless of if they meant for it to happen as quickly as it did or not but at a point it did become in my point or in my opinion a failure in terms of you know we saw the launch of a game and we saw the launch of tokens and staking and all of these things that ended up being a great use case for games to now look at and say this wasn't the best idea and me being someone who my web 3 gaming journey originated in axi you know i around december kind of saw the writing on the wall i tried my very best to tell people that this was something that um needed to be addressed and the way guilds were building out and the way people were owning these assets it didn't make sense for me and for myself it was like okay i need to take a step back and understand that this is a market that is going to be very dangerous if we continue to perpetuate tokens and staking and earning and all of these speculative ideologies over gameplay in creating a world where transparency ushers in a generation of d5 related gaming products because i do think game fi has a place uh in the overall web 3 gaming ecosystem but um we saw a kind of a a very high point in axi and now a continuous low so i would say an excess a success to a certain extent uh but more so a greater learning experience for the wider web 3 gaming world got it so what do we think i'd be curious to know what you think rich what do you think are some of the learnings that the d5 gaming community and maybe game studios around the world can learn from gen 1 games like axi to bring into gen 2 games what are some of those like just dead obvious learnings or ones that maybe we haven't thought of what are your thoughts there i mean like uh like bryson kind of said you know with uh in traditional gaming even like legacy games we don't have much you know you're not holding the founders or the the creators of these games accountable for much of anything you know like you don't have much say in how stuff happens um and i would say that's a huge difference with like d5 gaming communities or or even crypto in general you know people have access to these founders and you know it's all we have dows now so people have a lot more say in um what goes on and what they expect of um from from the founders and the builders you know in the communities so it's not as easy as you know just not giving the founders not giving any information you know games coming out when they want doing whatever they want like that's a big thing with alluvium you know is like they're uh we're very transparent about everything that's done you know like we have grant sharing stuff like every every week now you know even it was daily before that but i mean like it's just d5 communities are held to a higher standard now you know with uh people having access you know and being right there in the community right at the forefront of the founders and all that stuff being built right in front of their eyes so there's an expectation now set by gen 1 games and maybe moving into gen 2 that you you will get access to the people building the game they will show you them building the game in progress and you now have the expect there's not that legacy gaming to uh sort of relationship where maybe they give you a trailer leading up to launch maybe they sprinkle a couple bits in there and then they release some half uh you know half baked game and then it's a surprise the expectation now moving from gen 1 to gen 2 gaming is that you're going to be able to see how the cake is made the whole way through so you know exactly what you're going to get at launch is that if i can add if i can add to that yeah i think on big learning from axi one of the really big learning is on the need for sustainability and the need for a game that people would play even if money was not involved so i'm not really aware right now what are the the amount of users in axi i assume it went down but if we want game fight to really you know reach hold on hit pause there i can show you the number of users in axi right now according to a website um according to a website i don't know whether this website is true or not but according to axiplayer.activeplayer.io supposedly there are 125 000 people playing right now according to this uh and 700 000 active players so according to this for axi so i'm not sure yeah it was 30 days ago and it was millions a few months back right well right so i don't i don't know how this is trended over time but it's it's still it's trending it's not it's not dead let's say it wouldn't be fair to say it's dead but you know i didn't say it's dead i'm just saying that technically there's one of the big points that is evolving a lot and we see it is a play to earn is really changing into a play and earn of play and own that thing and i think that just the the main way things can evolve and go forward right because the money you distribute to slp or anything else has to come from somewhere so if you start to have games that are really enjoyable and and will touch then on what else we could have in the uh in the game later on but uh the main thing is really getting a lot of people but then having this possibility to just continue growing in a sustainable way without the need of having more and more people so that you maintain the interest in like the financial aspect of the game that makes sense to me um i have to ask though you know as we move from gen 1 let's call it franchises and we're moving into generation two where the eluvians maybe star atlas maybe other games that are at a higher level of graphical fidelity and what have you are coming into play do we think that and bryson i would love to know your thoughts do you think a franchise like axey infinity that came out in the previous generation of games can stay relevant in future generations do you think that's possible if so how if not why not i'd just be curious to know your take on that i mean i just think it's all it all goes back to public sentiment i know you know for myself and many you know american-based content creators that stepped away from the game like our ideology behind it is public sentiment shapes uh kind of the growth and yeah they can release things in other games that also kind of suffered similar fates around tokenomics can keep releasing things when you think of the american public and consumer audiences that are the audiences that you want to bring into these web 3 based games you know the things that they remember and now that they take into account from axi or not the highs of axi infinity it's not even oh well they you know launch their own decks and all this stuff no it's hey you got hacked for 600 million and bloomberg put out another article that showed and depicted how many people lost money playing your game that also wasn't fun past a certain point for a lot of users so i mean from my perspective i think yeah they'll keep building they have a ton of money they've raised and you know i wish them the best but i'm not keen in nor do i believe that they are going to lead the gaming category uh throughout this web two i mean this web 3 b2 revolution

well i think you're muted andrew yeah you're muted i know rich is extremely biased i took a drink of water i always mute when i do that thanks for letting me know rich is extremely biased because he's community manager for luvium so you're out on this question charles do you agree with that sentiment about axi do you feel like the franchise and the brand and it's not just axi any game that came out earlier there's even like splinter lands and there's all these other games that came out that that got player bases in gen 1 defy gaming and obviously need to last throughout future generations do you think any of these intellectual properties that are in the market are strong enough to carry forward or are new stronger intellectual properties going to replace them it's really hard to say i think the first mover advantage is always something huge now they will have to transform a lot and add a lot and and create the type of game i was describing before where you actually want to play it even if you were not paid in any way to to play it so i i have no idea really what is there on their pipeline and if there is anything of the quality that is needed for that quality doesn't has to be just graphic when you look at minecraft and candy crush you can make crazy amount of money with game which are uh like not that crazy on the graphic side but but i think it's it's a hard transformation for them now the field is so it takes years to create new games so the competition will take a lot of time to actually reach to a level of visibility uh that axi already has so i think they still have a chance to to transform but they would have to to act quick and and readjust not just on the graphic and game etcetera but actual on the tokenomics right on how do you transform you were showing the curve of slp and i didn't look at it for a while it seems like it's lower than than where it was in 2020 how do you recover from that so so it's going to be it's going to be hard uh smart mind could probably do it but we'll see what they do but the competition is going to be increasing for sure i mean and like as uh as bryson was there i mean as charles was saying you know with the first mover advantage um like they also have like the first failed advantage you know they they had a they had a good thing going i mean i got involved in axi in the beginning and i made a little bit of money and then i kept going and i lost some money you know i was breeding axes and i was like i didn't know what i was doing you know i was basically just throwing money in a pit at that point and uh you know it's and i think it got worse and worse you know i i eventually just got out of it you know but um obviously people that came in late i think uh yeah they're gonna have a hard time crawling back you know but yeah like bryson said too they do have money so i mean i hope the best for him but yeah it's gonna be a difficult road for them for sure well and to your point i think some of the things that i take away from my time there was yeah you have all of this money but you also have to take into account that money was raised on the backs of a lot of extraction by the way of you know scholars playing the game but a lot of retail investment from gamers in those consumer audiences like north america um in europe and places like that that were putting in money uh based on the certain ideology of this game uh providing some level of income so i think for myself i would love to see them come out and be a bit more transparent in terms of just apologizing for how you know how shitty things got for a lot of people uh because it really to me makes no sense for games and ecosystems that we're building during these moments to come out and say hey you know um we just want to let you know that we raised a lot of money and we know this is a bear market so we can use the whole bear market explanation as to why things aren't as good as they were back then when we know it was more than just a bear market in gaming but then the play to earn space had been in a bear market for quite some time but additionally just say hey we had no clue things were going to progress in this way with our token but we also didn't do enough to alleviate pain by letting people understand the risks of getting involved in this early stage so we truly apologize i think a lot of web 3 games that went into moments in the early stages where people lost a ton of money you can't just attribute it to the bear market coming out and apologizing and showing a level of just pure i would say empathy for those people is something that i would love to see more games do i mean that would be really nice for that to happen of course emotionally that would be good for the community that would be good for the space but the reality is if they came out and made an apology like that they would be in some way admitting that they made some economic or financial mistakes which then means that they might be taking on billions of dollars in liabilities of co for global users and then opening themselves up to things like class action lawsuits and what have you from the users if they admitted that they made a mistake so they may want to i'm let's give them the benefit of the doubt maybe they do want to say they're sorry maybe they do feel they're sorry but i guarantee you whoever their legal team is if they're worth half of the retainer that they're paying them they would tell them that they could never admit publicly they made some financial mistakes with smooth love potion for example and the idea of infinitely printing uh printing money but hey governments do that across the world and you know they never admit that they're wrong either right and there's no central banks ever admit that they're wrong for printing money no it's all about you know transitory inflation and we're going to adjust things and we got things under control but you know what probably happens in those conversations as well when they're having cocktails and burgers with their buddies they know that printing money hurts the economy but they can never say it publicly because they're just in the business of printing money i digress so it sounds like we've all made moved on from maxi infinity let's move on to the next topic then building d5 communities something that's near and dear to the hearts of all of us here on this show i have to ask from a man that literally does this for a living what is different about building defy communities versus like centralized legacy online communities are they the same thing rich or is there anything unique in this space truly what's your thoughts there man um yeah i mean like i kind of touched on earlier just uh you're expected a lot more you know you have a lot of uh you have a lot of people that directly invested money you know um it's not as simple as you know oh i bought call of duty you know i'm i'm part owner of you know activision or whatever it's not as simple as that you know you have people throwing money at you and expecting something back you know um so it's it's a lot more accountability uh than typical communities that that everyone's dealing with myself our moderators you know um uh the founders you know everybody uh everybody involved in the the web three projects they have a lot more account which is a good thing you know it's it's a good thing i think for most projects you know um uh being transparent forcing like forced transparency and and urgency to build something and you know wanting to build something good you know like like grant always says you know uh they want to uh build the best they can you know and it's not only because of them but they also feel like they owe the community the people that are there um the best that they can do you know it sounds to me like there's like a closeness if you will a connection and defy that you aren't getting through legacy corporations or companies and i'm wondering whether this is gonna stay is this gonna stick i mean as organizations and games and studios get millions of users tens of millions of users hundreds of millions of users do you think we'll be able to retain that closeness over time mean bryce and i

you think that d5 communities or game studios or protocols are going to run into the same issue is that closeness and that transparency and that connection going to erode when those hundreds of millions of users come into this space be curious to know what you think i think that we will see a bit of like a bit of space happen there and it seems natural to me because as you scale up it's just not like i remember in the early days you know it's like 100 people it's easy for me to interact with everyone consistently and respond to every tweet now i'm tweeting way less because it's just way more difficult to to make sure i'm having a conversation with everyone but i think you can still do a great job at managing your community by putting levers in place or things in place like for example um you know having a discord that's active and community managers and people who can speak on your behalf and breaking it down into almost like a higher hierarchy approach to bringing new people in and making them feel valued additionally things like newsletters and even tweeting tweeting is a great way to to interact with your community even if you're not responding to every message so it is much harder as you grow and in the long term you're not going to be able to chat with everyone even all of your stakeholders who hold the assets but it's those town halls and those moments where you're really interacting with folks that can keep uh the community still pretty high in terms of community sentiment that makes sense i you know as we look at every techno technology in history whether that be web 1.0 or and then web 2.0 and then now 3.0 are we going to follow the same trend where the companies and the organizations that uh create the smoothest experience the fastest speed um and those are the ones where that attract the most users and those are usually centralized entities microsoft apple amazon what have you right amazon is a great example you don't have as a greater diversity of stores in the world anymore why because amazon made buying things easier by centralizing everything in one entity so the reason why i bring that up is that's pretty much how technology has worked since the information age started and the internet started centralized stuff is better at than decentralized stuff at delivering speed and convenience to customers and that's where the majority of customers go so i feel like this is a good question for an ice cold corpo like charles i know you're not ice cold but i'm just going to brand you that way can defy thrive given that pretty much every example in the past shows that centralization tends to dominate as new technologies go to market so do you think defy even has a chance here or is it just a is it just over by by the nature of technological adoption what are your thoughts there no i think it can really thrive it really it really depends how you look at it also and and what is uh defined so there's a pure world of like decentralized finance and not including anything which is not actually a protocol but when you see that an asset manager like blackrock now is uh doing a trust to to buy bitcoin and work with coinbase to to get people into crypto through their aladdin platform what you see right now is there is a crazy

move from tradfi player into d5 ecosystem as well to be part of it and what i think is they will just merge so both will continue to exist you'll have stuff like like maker which are pure dow totally decentralized and you'll have all the things which are a bit more centralized i won't mention some protocol but we know that they're not as decentralized as as maker is and right now you have more or less 30 to 100k forward users of defy and between two and five million uh user of defy so so it's really nascent and and they are you know jp morgan was speaking that they are looking to tokenize uh treasuries to bring trillions into defy so that it could be used as as collateral and and other things so i think the two worlds are slowly merging we see that with the adoptions of uh well there's a new part of d5 that is just you know 12 to 15 months old which is the financing of real world asset with d5 money so you got all this protocol like centrifuge maker maple clear pool goldfinch true fight taylor exeter which are doing uncollateralized or under corrupted lies landing and and slowly just the two world merging so now what is really interesting is how d5 can be and probably will be included with game fight and one of the um some of the podcasts i've seen in the past with somebody from illuvia with santiago was was great and i love what he was saying i think he's he's spot on it was last year i think and he was explaining how you know you got um wechat which started like as a ripoff of what whatsapp but then now on wechat in china you have your money there you order a pizza there so can we get to have a game which is really immersive maybe at some point with virtual reality but even at the beginning without that and and you start to interact with a lot of other things within the game you know even i think kiran i saw a tweet from from him i think last week where he was mentioning how you know defy is basically going to be the bank of the gamer in game 5 etc and that's exactly what could happen like if you don't have you know to pay a price for that if you're really playing game and you're in illuvium all day and somehow you can just connect to operate and pay with the ease you just earn by selling whatever illuvial you got or whatever competition you know like a leviathan arena fight you just did people could do that i use uber it as a random example but it could be the same with a lot of thing where technically you start you know earning maybe through competition in this game or just selling in this game and maybe aeronam is not the best world but like getting some money from work you're doing or play you're doing and then well instead of you know one of the big uh critics that i receive when i present d5 protocol to a traditional investor is on how complicated it is to get in right you say oh yeah let's say random example you want to invest in in illuvium and stack it okay you need a wallet now you need a seed freezer don't you know all the risk around the seed phrase and then you need to go into well first you need to get money in so you need some centralized exchange account it takes days you need to verify then you need to transfer out be careful if you got one character wrong the money is not going to to your wallet then you need to swap then you need to stack that's all the things are just too complicated it's ridiculous the number of steps required of course yeah and the first time i saw that i showed that to somebody which is really really important he told me look that's really interesting but most of the money in the world maybe 99 90 plus percent is in the end of people that are 65 70 and above they're not going to do that right so um if we i can't even get my mom to make a coinbase account getting her to get a defy wallet and go through all these steps i mean forget about it it's never going to happen that's why you got your dad hooked up with the with the hardware he's only 60 so he got he at least started okay once you get above 60 i guess it's impossible but you're on a good rant here and you're bringing up a good point that we need better platforms tools technologies and support to make onboarding easier the question i have here right well immutable is one of those pieces but the the question i have here if traditional finance is going to merge with d5 like you're saying and i think you have a good view on this you literally do this for a living and they're going to all it does it really continue to be defy at that point if almost all of the money coming from sovereigns coming from you know all sorts of funds vc's et cetera all the big money in the world comes in to use d5 technology is it still decentralized if all of the centralized money and centralized entities are using that technology does defy still exist in the way that it does today or does it fundamentally change i'm just going to open that up to the floor here right because 99 of the money in the world has yet to come in to d5 and come into the space when it does come in is it still defy at that point i'm going to open it up does anybody have any thoughts on that i can start quickly to trigger so first is what is decentralized right the platform if we look at ethereum will continue to be decentralized the protocol when you look at something like clearpool they got a permission pool and permissionless pools but the protocol is i will be soon enough uh decentralizing and end up being a dow so so they are just different pieces like if you look at usdc is that d5 then it's centralized they can just stop using tornado cash it's still crypto finance it still work on decentralized uh rails and my view and maybe maybe yeah it will definitely evolve and not be exactly the same everybody needs and is willing to have regulation you know when i got in uh being a crypto native myself and started to speak with all those uh protocol because we spoke with all the our traditional clients also with all the protocol one of the fear was you know how we're going to be rejected because we're you know the mean ice cold as you say uh trite fi how will d5 react to that and actually we've been extremely well received like everybody is looking to to thrive which i would differentiate from maybe the bitcoin community which care more about surviving whatever happened here it's all about okay how can we get those trillions in and how can we just make that the next platform for the next financial system and some part will be more decentralized and some part will be less decentralized but but overall i think it's it's it's really interesting and and definitely a field of the future yeah i think it'll be uh i think it'll be a combination of both like you're saying like uh i mean some of the projects that even you know decentralized is uh kind of a term tossed around a lot today and that doesn't mean the same for every project you know and uh in the end like you're saying um having these centralized systems isn't a bad thing for bringing in money you know it's trust people want to be able to trust their systems like you said it's uh if you lose your seed phrase i mean that's pretty that's pretty universal that if you lose that your money's gone you know so having centralized exchanges feels safer for people although you know considering the things that have transpired over the past few months like we still have some uh some room to grow you know and uh some growing that's that's one way to put it that's one way the room to grow is one way to put it right there that makes sense i i want to ask one more question i'm going to bring this to bryson right now we're all using um web 2 technologies right even to do this call we're doing right now and through twitch and twitter and youtube going live here we're pushing all of this web 3 stuff but we're still using web 2 technologies and platforms and tools and what have you to build communities in this space is there a world what is the web 3 community building platform look like let's open up our minds are we just still gonna be using this web 2 stuff with video and audio and podcasting like cavemen or is there going to be a web 3 version of this and what does that look like or is it just going to be the same stuff because we're you know all the we we do a lot of talking about web 3 on web 2 platforms i don't see us talking about web 3 on web3 platform so what's your thoughts on that well i it's weird because i mean even though most would consider twitter like a web 2 company of course their web 2 company i mean i consider them like the community hub of the metaverse currently and like that's where i go when i want to talk about anything happening in web3 so i see it as a hybrid approach i don't think that we need to be looking at new social media channels or need to find uh social media channels that are only web3 native as a way to make us feel like we're in uh web3 but i mean what's the what's the purpose of it is it oh every web3 platform has to have a token or every web3 social platform needs a token or is it just you having data or ownership over your data that you're providing on the platform i think that we can have a hybrid approach of if a technology or ecosystem play comes out that is something that should be leveraged we jump into it but i i think we push ourselves further away from adoption if it's oh you know we need to just make sure we find uh the only platforms that offer us a way out of what our web 2 kind of our web 2 strategy currently looks like because although we're very much in the world of web 3 i don't see a world where these social media platforms our channels change youtube's always going to be the best place to you know ingest video content and then have that replayability and you know that's just because we all use google now unless google decides to completely stop taking everyone's data which i doubt they do because you know that's just in their business model always going to be web 2 native so yeah i don't know i feel like you might be you might be kind of a boomer here on this one and yeah i want to push back on that so i was um i was around for the transition from web 1 to web 2 and then i like really jumped into the space as web 2 is emerging and people that were in web 1 or the previous world said the exact same thing you did about newspapers tv and radio yeah exact same argument people are still going to read newspapers right everybody laughed and went yeah we're still going to listen to the radio right yeah you're doing that right now with youtube and assuming that people are going to be watching and content on that because that's just what people do right now i don't know i feel like you might be falling into the trap because you grew up in this space that i mean unable to see what the next step looks like you know what i mean we have tick tock but tick tock is definitely not a web three and then it'll never be web 3 i think like where content goes is we start seeing everyone focus on more short form content because for the most part we all have like the attention span of like a yard dog running around chasing cats and chickens so that's i mean i think from the perspective of yes new platforms may like pop out here but i don't think they're going to like grab significant market share to the point to where youtube becomes obsolete overnight i mean we might be 30 we might be 30 40 years down the road before we see something like that happen got it so you think the entrenched players here in web too the youtubes the twitters and what have you these are lasting players similar to maybe how radio as a as a broadcasting medium lasted for decades and tv lasted for decades you see like youtube and the social platforms of today lasting for decades we'll see like the crazy thing behind it is they're just all consuming each other's own thing so like for example we saw uh you know twitter take uh you know spaces from how clubhouse had their own little spaces world now twitter is like the leader in that category just like instagram you know consumed uh stories that used to be you know very prevalent for snapchat i'm sure they still are and now youtube instagram and twitter i mean youtube instagram and tick tock all have short form content so it's almost like there's an arms race of social media platforms kind of battling each other to see who can consume as much outside technology that is trending within the attention spans of individuals so yeah i do think there'll be another competitor just like how tick tock came about but i also think that these uh traditional platforms will just also look to almost like battle against it or you know arm themselves against it to create a level of um defensibility but i do think to your point long term there will be new things that come out and change the space as well one one example maybe just to go so so if you go back to the movie ready player one you know which is always kind of huge as this would be the metaverse in that kind of world we where totally agree we're really far from that nobody goes back to outside of the matrix to look at an app on the cell phone so now if all entertainment were was to go in some type of metaverse maybe the content will be also there etc so there's just different way to look at it so one would be this if there is a metaverse then maybe web 2 would be in bad shape because content will just be moving there in new kind of thing which are just not a website or an app and then there is actually really quick by metaverse are you referring to a 3d immersive world is that what you mean by yeah in that case yes yes so to be able to replace something like youtube it cannot be a window within a game on a 2d screen so that's like super futuristic kind of way then there is actual kind of defy angle on what if the content creator we're receiving more or almost everything of the money that the the page is receiving or the advertisement is receiving i'm not totally sure of the number here but i think youtube gives back like 50 of everything uh they got from um advertisement to the community and that's why 45 45 i think it's really good i think it would be really hard for some protocol to give more than that and and and and to the to the actual uh you know influencers and also give to the token holders as well new distribution and have operating costs so in a way google is already when they give 45 percent they're already kind of acting like a google or youtube they they're kind of giving the revenue distribution that you would expect from a d5 protocol so and and there was some i forgot the name streaming or something like that some some protocol that did that in 2017 and i i don't know where they are right now i kind of agree with bryce and on the aspect that just from a defy angle it's going to be really hard to just give more compensation to get the crater in but now in a huge metaphors yeah maybe i mean like we are stuck really quick we are stuck interacting with each other through squares and rectangles right now and i really want to kick this one i wanted to bring this one up with rich here because you're living on discord every day so i'm looking at this particular square all day long discord which is a huge let's call it the biggest private community if you will of this world of the d5 world defy gaming world there's gotta be a better way for us to interact with each other than through this square rich what are your thoughts on the private community and the future of that what does a better version of discord look like for the d5 gaming and web web 3 space does it have to be this square with us just doing basic media sharing and what have you in it is there a better way uh i mean i don't know i i fought against discord for a long time you know but uh i was also in telegram so you know a lot of people hate telegram as well um but i think charles makes a good point of you know future future wise you know metaverse stuff seems to be where it's heading and you know with that you even look at like like i think someone in chat was just talking about uh like these old companies can just reintegrate into the web 3 space you know like what stops youtube from just inserting themselves into our whatever our metaverse looks like at that time you know and uh even discord you know like or all these all these platforms we're calling web 2 platforms you know what stops them from just moving into the whatever the next whatever the next phase is you know if it is a metaverse where we're all in a highly immersive environment you know what stops youtube from being there you know um so i think yeah like there's i i just i don't have a problem with discord i guess but yeah i'm there every day you know like uh it's hard to see what the future is gonna to bring for that okay that's fair that makes sense i just wanted to bring that up because i it feels like such an early web 2 experience to be on something like discord and when we think about this space i think about what's the transformative technology going to be if we knew i suppose we'd be the steve jobs of whatever the next technological revolution is right speaking of technological revolution we've got to get into our next topic let's talk macro here let's talk about how the millions tens of millions and hundreds of millions come into this space and i want to kick this over to you first charles will gaming in particular drive the majority of defy adoption i've asked guys that are ridiculously biased like crypto stash this question in the past he's like absolutely and everybody i interview who's like gaming only says yes as somebody who's really looking at the macro and looking at this maybe from a bit more of an objective perspective do you think gaming is going to drive the adoption or is it just going to be regular everyday stuff like regular finance stuff let's say for example what are your thoughts i think there's like the biggest thing of all is a tokenization of everything which more and more you know really big player believe is happening and these convince is going to happen so it means tokenization of real estate tokenization of derivative tokenization of intangibles and tokenization of everything that you have in the financial market also securities extra which then allows for um fraction fractionalization and the creation of even more derivatives i think that's one of the really big thing in all the real world asset now game 5 for game game like games in general are just ridiculous industries when you look at how much money they get right it's amazing when i look at how much money fortnite is making selling skins so and i actually have a friend in in japan that spent uh 600 it was before kind of d5 on on getting a red cape for a 2-day game on a phone and it just tried until he got the red cape because he wanted the great cape he spends 600 he earns maybe three times that amounts but he was happy at the end because he had the right cape so there's definitely something there plus how much more would he spend if he could sell it later on because it was you know plan own which do not exist really right now so well similar to collectible card games which is a is maybe the closest physical world or real life example close to what you're talking about where you open pack after pack after pack i used to go to card shops in the 90s as an old guy and people would do literally that they dropped 600 bucks to try to get the shaquille o'neal rookie card so that sort of gambler mentality has existed for a while and obviously if you can have it as a collectible that's worth money that adds fuel to the fire but people just want to gamble for things they like no matter what it's just kind of baked into our psychology right yeah but it's more than that it just it seems that james is way more into that than any generation before and just think that there's all those kids with which now are you know not that much of a of kids everybody that played fortnite as a kid and asked for christmas gift to get some credit to be able to buy skin it's just in their blood right now right so so it's definitely something that if you can make it easy enough to to interact with will get a lot of traction and will generate a lot of money and will be a big industry is that will it be the the biggest industry of all i don't know i think there's also really big thing in in the world but it's definitely uh a very big thing and then there's another aspect and it's um what has been discussed a lot around nfts and heidi is a trojan horse for decentralization because a really big difference between an nfts at least now and tokens is you got a lot of people they say yeah of course i got some e6 star and they all have it on centralized centralized exchanges now all the people that got into nft it's a really different audience that started this these moles last year most of them if not all of them almost got it on a real wallet or you don't have an nft on coinbase or binance you have an nft on your wallet so it got people to really get in and got the experience of interacting and now i got some friends in new york that are going to nft gated um wine testing in some uh new york places uh yesterday or the day before we saw that eileen which is um a protocol done by uh kane from from snx they are starting a seed investment gated also nft gated with this lizard so there's definitely something which is changing just in a way of everything work and if you got a game or a combination of many games that just create something that is really immersive and you can just do most of what you would do on your computer or phone in it yeah it's gonna be just huge like you know who really enjoy on home banking like is it an amazing experience when you go in your home banking what if it was just part of a game and everything is moves and are you talking home banking are you talking about using like an app so you don't have to go to the atm or the bank is that what you mean by that yeah yeah just uh sending money to your sister or paying your bill like it's not going to a physical is ridiculous at this point i mean i have to go from time to time because i have a business and they make you go in to the physical place if you have a business but outside of that as a individual i mean there's literally no reason to go to a bank unless you're maybe trying to apply for a loan and even in that case there's like 15 platforms online you can click a button and you get the best rate and you can click another button and you have like a hundred thousand dollars so it's it's pretty wild you don't need to hold banking is everything now yeah but even the plat my point where i totally agree but my point was the platform of home banking are not something amazing in the sense of you love to interact with them they are convenient but but if you can get in some type of metaverse or some type of game where you could do some of this while not leaving the game you know there's a lot of um data provider that did everything they could so that you don't have to get out of their platform and and i have to see it's kind of the idea i see where you're going so if you're already in the game and hooked on the game then you might be able to bring in financial services or these other items and to expand on that ecosystem and to uh if you've already got the attention of the user you're saying through a game then maybe all those everyday normal financial items would be handled through that game ecosystem is that what you're saying yeah and let's say i'm somebody stacking elluvium or is expecting to get an entry of money in two days because they've been you know there will be a revenue distribution but right now you don't necessarily have it you need to pay some you know electricity bill and you can just do it by taking automatically alone from you know clear pool or ivy or anything like that through the game and you don't have to really think of all the mechanism behind it and it's automatically taking your loan paying repaying there's a lot of things that can be done to just simplify life you got all this concept of buying and pay later all with app now but what if you could just do it through also loan and nfts and a lot of different things i think it's it's really everything is nascent there's a great uh podcast video from raul pal with uh one of the crystal bank punk where they explain how you know you could just have 12 people in the south of france that got room 203 of a hotel for a weekend and they both did for 300 or euro and then you got somebody that just finished a big contract that did not book any holiday but now you can go on holiday if this reservation of the retired couple was an nft could just bid on it for twice the price they don't care because they can go in a month it's the same for them they made money and now they can stay longer or they just got what if some was financially within yeah within a platform that you know people are using that makes sense i i see on this topic bryson i see you stroking your chin on twitter thinking about how we get this space out to um more people all the time and you're just tweeting your thoughts and i like your thoughts because you're good at being a great normal person in the way that you think about this so i want to ask you this question why would users want to use this complicated defy stuff we're talking about with the wallet and the security and what have you over cfi or other centralized structures like don't people just want sp speed and convenience and ease of use why are they gonna go through all this trouble do people really care about security are they just gonna go for the easy thing what are your thoughts there man i think that most people are fine doing the easy thing it goes back to the whole idea of most people not having the attention span i mean when i first jumped into web3 and i realized how much stuff i had to do the first week i actually like stopped doing it was like i'm not doing this crap and then i came back a week later because i was like uh maybe there's something here and and i just kind of endured the pain of learning it but i mean i personally think most people would do better with some sort of custodial person or ecosystem taking care of the difficult inner workings of wallet stuff so almost like a hybrid approach not completely centralized but also not completely decentralized i mean think about it how many people need to be able to navigate and store 40 you know seed phrase words across five different wallets on four or five different blockchains most people probably shouldn't handle that i mean i probably don't handle it in the best way myself uh so it's like i don't either yeah yeah so i i mean it's like the everyday user probably doesn't need to handle that part of it i know for myself like if there was some ecosystem or custodial wallet ecosystem that came out that was like hey we 100 will never touch your funds move your funds do anything with your funds but we will handle the storage of your seed phrases for you and do some other things i mean i think that would make more sense and but i do think that d5 yeah but could you could you ever believe them though i mean because a government could come in and say well you're either arrested and in jail or you that is true go ahead and let us get control of all these funds and they go here you go here's all the keys i'm going home to my family says hundred percent right metamask institutional and and some other uh custody custodian are doing exactly that mostly focusing on institution because institutions do not want to do exactly everything you said yeah maybe yep yeah but metamask can freeze wallets right as we've seen uh in story so there it isn't truly decentralized it's somewhat decentralized right metamask institutional it's like a different offering maybe we ever get to a point where things are truly decentralized because i mean to your point meta basket at one point they were stopping people from certain countries from interacting on certain platforms or or sending and receiving crypto so that's what i'm referring to and so i understand institutional is a different product from metamask but does it have the same protections or does it have an impenetrable protections from them blocking in certain ways the service in certain countries no no once you've got a custodian well you're just tied to the role of this custodian but like

it really depends what you do with it if you're trying to do something that is illegal then yes getting a custodian is probably not a great idea now if you just want to play video game in which you could interact with interact with defy then it could so something uh and i know it's one of the topic you're interested in is around how government and regulator are looking at the field and i spoke with acc i spoke with the fca i spoke with the mf and and and different like that and part of my team is going to washington uh next i think in two weeks there is first there is a lot of lobbying you got the blockchain association you got different associations like that which are really trying to uh teach and and bring literacy to to to staffer and and help as much as possible and then you have and that's one of the amazing thing you have with defying crypto right now is nothing is bipartisan like there's huge clash between the left and the right in most countries it's true in france it's true in the u.s it's true in latin america it's true almost everywhere but for this you have a lot of bipartisan initiative in the u.s and you got uh senator loomis from wyoming and senator gillibrand from new york creating this bill trying to well enable the field plus you got the executive order from uh from president biden so so there's really a lot of of of thing moving here and with regulation will will everything will really change so if now you have you know it's kind of safe regulation at least in some jurisdiction then the use of custodian is not the same kind of issue that you would have and you know when we look at moonpay and imx i know exactly how it would work but they do they did mention that you could just buy and sell and get back the money from your ease through just credit card and i spoke with some other i forgot the name but i spoke with some other game and some other platform and what they're doing is basically they they hold the wallet for you so you don't have to think about anything but if you want to take ownership of it you can at any point and i think it's probably one of the things that will happen right first you need to get people in players that hate nfts players that hate defy you get them a good game they don't need to think about it's on the blockchain or not but then when they want to do something else they find out that their run fire is worth x amount of money and suddenly they'll be way more interested in the feel and you just converted them so it's option right it's the it's the opt-in to the ownership side of the asset so you could just experience the game for the entertainment and then if you want to opt in to owning the assets and the whole wallet and what have you then you can opt into that and during a transition period that totally makes sense you made a comment a moment ago of uh you only need to worry about uh custodians if you're doing something illegal right until the government determines what you're doing is illegal so it's possible government might determine that d5 games are illegal at some point or some games are or whatever i'm just saying you know making the assumption that legal versus illegal has you covered yeah until the government doesn't like what you're doing and they make it illegal so i just i don't trust interesting i got that the the interesting part here is that the government the government at the end of the day care about voters because that's how they got elected and and that's exactly why now you got every uh well many senators and and people in in congress that are just pushing and and and doing the reflection around what should be done around uh defy in general because it's not just for them it's also an international competition like you got basically all the country looking at how can they you know be number one there australia is going doing well singapore is doing well switzerland is doing well the fca now they're out of the of the european union the uk is really trying to see how they can you know get access and become important there also you got me cane in europe which is far from perfect but it shows that they're thinking about it so if you get to a point and that's the order matters but if you get to a point where game 5 has hundreds of millions of players and you're not really doing anything illegal you know related to something which is really really wrong you cannot just make something that everybody is using illegal without expecting to not be elected on the next election and and stay there and and that's a good balance you have in in democracy i'm pretty initially i was thinking more like you now i'm pretty bullish on the fact that there are a lot of reflection and a lot of big player pushing and helping and lobbying so that defy will be a thing and will stay i think overall it's agreed that defy is not going away so well i'll try to share this bullish view it's my voice it's my job to take the counterpoint on your view to make it an interesting discussion boom we're going to go around the table you guys have to instantly tell me the one thing that define gaming needs to do better the number one thing and then tell people where they can find you rich i'm putting you on the spot number one thing d5 gaming can do better and where could people find you uh making a fun game that people just want to play you know just to play it um and you can find me on twitter it's uh at dick king's in case you guys didn't know who i was so he is the dick kings indeed bryson number one thing defined gaming can do better and where can people find you it's a ridge's point having a fun game to start and then having a go to market strategy that is effective and you can find me on twitter at brycent underscore highly recommend following that twitter account it's one of my favorites and charles one thing let's just say d5 in general can do better and where can people find you okay cool i was going to answer for the game fight game game fight can do better go for it the on and off ramp making them as easy as possible and i think you get a lot of people in just like that complementing this with what was said before to have a fun game you can find me on on linkedin and so i'm sure there'll be the link in the description got it and my answer to the question is um i just think we need a game to go mass market to get hundreds of millions of players and to prove out to the entire gaming industry that this is viable and guess what's going to happen everyone else is just going to copy paste what they did and then all of a sudden this multi-billion dollar industry will explode we just need one player to be successful i you know who i think it's going to be thank you so much for watching iluva talks this week we really appreciate it we'll be back once again next wednesday same channels same time really appreciate all of our guests and on youtube there's a link in the description please follow all of their accounts and let them know that you discovered them from the show we really want to spread the love out there on social media adios everybody and have a great day

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