Metaverse: The Digital Universe - TOKEN2049 London 2021

hi everyone um great to be here to talk about metaverse the digital universe so let's uh kick off with an intro from everyone and perhaps seb you could you could start at the far end sure hey everyone my name is sebastian bourget i'm the ceo and co-founder at the sandbox which is a gaming virtual world that allows players and creators to make food assets game experience and monetize them through the use of nfts i'm also the president of the blockchain game alliance which now counts more than 250 members pushing for adoption in blockchain within the gaming industry uh hi everyone yeah i'm robbie cochran i'm a co-founder and ceo of chain guardians chain guardians is a play to earn gaming eco system uh we have multiple products in there including a turn-based rpg an nft proof-of-stake mining platform and most recently our sister project chain boost which is a launch pad incubator protocol hey guys my name is uh piers kix and i lead the crypto efforts at bitcraft for one of the largest and most active game investors globally broadly investing in this uh synthetic reality thesis the convergence of the physical and digital worlds spans things from sort of volumetric video to network latency infrastructure to in-game advertising engines even uh sort of brain computer interface stuff we've done recently um and i also venture partner at delphi where we've been very active all around the ecosystem on the tokonomic side and also on the investment side yeah hi i'm alexander uh one of the co-founders of sky mavis and axi um some of you might know us we uh make we're making a digital pet universe where you use your game characters that are nfts to harvest different resources and that again has enabled players across the world to make a living for the first time i would say at least at scale in in in games so yeah great thanks um so a bit about myself um justin bannon co-founder of boson protocol so we're building the sort of decentralized backbone of commerce and we're starting with the metaverse um building out a space in decentraland called boson portal that's enabling brands to sell physical products as nfts directly from the metaverse so excellent so it wouldn't be a panel on the metaverse without starting with the standard question uh what is the metaverse and perhaps we we could start with you alex this time yeah sure so i think the definition of a metaverse is still being you know figured out fully uh so everyone is trying to i mean big tech is trying to co-opt it into their uh businesses and then you have you know blockchain or the decentralized space on the other side um so for me what i would say the metaverse is is supposed to be an open space where people can own their assets they they can work together and they can play together eventually and i think you know we're heading into that uh into that area uh especially you know when you have products like axi and other games who are enabling some of the you know amazing new benefits that that that is being possible uh using blockchain tech yeah thanks for that i mean axi is certainly trailblazing the whole sort of metaverse economy so kudos for that peers um yeah i generally prefer to focus on the metaverse versus uh you know referring to sort of individual projects you've actually got an official definition that i often plagiarize so yeah it is it's um the metaverse is a persistent live digital universe where individuals share a sense of agency social presence and shared spatial awareness along with the ability to participate in a extensive virtual economy with societal impact and that last part there is a from tim sweeney of epic games who points out that this isn't just a incremental improvement to our digital experience it's like a you know real next chapter in our journey as a digital species so yeah yeah i think that's very comprehensive and sort of plagiarism proof i've never actually been able to execute that definitely live i'm not going to try it but it's uh a comprehensive one robbie yeah i'm not i'm not sure why you made me follow peers with that definition um but no i mean you know my my background is let's say um education and um prior to being the co-founder of chain guardians and i like to look at the individual meaning of the words if we look at meta meaning basically beyond and then the verse is obviously let's say you know a sean version of universe so beyond the universe if you want to look at in that sense um you know that's a that's a good starting point but you know it does depend i guess on your individual like viewpoint on on whether you want to look at a metaverse on a macrocosmic or a microcosmic viewpoint right the macro being very much what piers has described but most people or many people within the industry would probably consider a metaverse to be uh more specific in sort of like a project and then those projects may form together to make them multiverse so for example i would in my kind of definition of a metaverse would look at the essential end as a metaverse i would look at um sandbox as a metaverse that's it well all right what can i add to what's the sandbox well fourths the definition of malevolence is essentially a set of digital parallel universes where us human beings will be living various activities such as playing games working interacting socializing etc through a 3d avatar which will be a representation ourself and in this space we believe like 99 of the content will actually be made by users themselves through ugc and one percent will be essentially ips and brands that will come and interact with users and through the use of open technologies like blockchain and nft will be really pushing forward a new digital economy that will turn into new jobs and opportunities for everyone okay i mean my view is uh more of a sort of omniverse view if you like i think if you look at humans you know we we exist physically yeah over the last couple of decades increasingly we've had this kind of digital presence and it's connected to us and i think we'll see that with you know spaces um having having digital uh you know kind of shadows if you like and also digital things having physical counterparts and i think you know increasingly we'll see this kind of omniverse view um okay so let's move on to you know kind of the building part um you know we're we're all sort of involved in building or funding building um you know what's your sort of contribution to building the metaverse um and perhaps perhaps we'll start with uh robbie this time uh yeah absolutely i guess from if you're looking at them everest is the kind of macrocosm and chain guardians place within within that macrocosm i think one thing that's important is that we i think as as builders as founders of projects um that we have some kind of standards and some of these standards are not wholly agreed upon in many cases and i'm not talking about just standards for technology for tech or for code like for example whether we use a gltf for 3d model but also standards in terms of like you know ideologically speaking uh you know what where we believe let's say what is the op like what how does open look and how we can work towards the open from an ideological point of view and i think for from chain guardians and from from our perspective we very much kind of i feel um try to champion some of the let's say um openness and kind of interoperability and the power of let's say empowering users um and part of that is for for example through the nft mining platform um which is essentially a a web ui ux enables users from different different chains uh to come and stake their nfts to earn yield like with with our token with the chain guardians governance token but also for partner ecosystem tokens um so we can add nfts from our partner projects to that protocol and that's one example of of how we're building within the metaverse environment yeah super cool um and and seb i know i know what you're building and it's also super cool can you share with everyone i would say our contribution is really to focus on building a truly open nft media bus where by starting by offering on our platform all the tools that enable creators to make their own nfts play and interact with them into our virtual world launch their own business games experience etc and monetize them so all of that is live and we have already well we've sold for more than 60 of our map we have more than 12 000 unique landowners who will be offering all sorts of experience into their lands we have an ecosystem behind with game studios who are going to be the first builders and participating into this adventure so that's that's something important but going further like what it truly means to be open means like we not only want people to make their nfts and use them in sandbox or potentially outside of sandbox into ordered apps but we also want to allow any nft owner to play with their existing nft such as like crypto art displaying it or their nft avatar collection like crypto punks me beat bald ape etc for those of you who are familiar turning them into characters which then takes life and you can do so much so many more things with them and that's uh that's our contribution i would say yeah i know it's great and we're really looking forward to integrating boson protocol into sandbox in the near future so cool um peers um yeah perhaps uh slightly less direct on my side versus these guys building projects but you know our objective is really to sort of provide a robust financing and sort of network landscape basically for projects that we're engaging with so between the work across both bitcraft and delphi there are a lot of synergies so on the delphi side generally get involved very early on with projects help advise on token economy design and other key sort of strategic decisions early on and equally on the bitcraft side on sort of game design bringing in you know people that can help support the projects um and so that's kind of our objective in terms of our you know our contribution here excellent excellent and alex i don't think there's anyone in the room that doesn't know what you're what you've built but uh perhaps for the one person that doesn't you can you can outline it yeah so i see our role in the space as educators so right now we have about two million daily active players um and about fifty percent have never used any crypto application before so the first thing they discover is actually or they want to they are crossing the chasm like it's really hard to begin playing axia right now you're basically on an island you need to get to the island somewhere you can swim a lot of people are drowning basically they can't get to the game itself because it's so hard so right now we're trying to you know build that bridge and that means educating the the players about what's happening here what does it mean to own a private key you know what is a private key i mean i my email is full of people who actually have you know the thread or the topic in the email might might be even their seed phrase so i mean that's the level of education that we have to to to deal with we get about 500 support tickets every day from people who have never they have no idea about what this is so and you know 25 of them have never even had a bank account so when we when we see our role here it's mostly about how can we teach these users about you know what is the blockchain what other benefits does it enable than just you know maybe making some money even if that's what they come in for at the start so they see you know the the benefits that that's possible and they try to cross the chasm it's hard but in the end you know it's going to become easier and i still see that we're so so early but imagine like if we have two million players now and it's so hard to get started what happens when it's going to be super easy i mean that's what i'm so excited about and that's what i think our contribution to the space is rather than focusing on you know the the openness and the interoperability you know we actually took a step back the only thing we're focused on right now is growing how can we teach these people and open up the benefits just in our world at first and then eventually you know uh go and join the the broader metaverse or the broader ditto universe later excellent okay and some really interesting concepts on kind of open versus growth that we will unpick um to kind of give an overview of what we're doing at bozon protocol um our long-term vision is to is to be the the decentralized backbone upon which all commerce can run um sort of like a clearing rails but um our protocol uses nfts encoded with game theory to regulate transactions between buyers and sellers without an intermediary and so naturally the metaverse is a great place for us to plug in and start so enabling brands to sell physical items in the metaverse as nfts um and and so this whole metaverse commerce is where we start excellent um so let's move to a more contentious question we've all been sort of largely agreeing um why do we think the metaverse needs to be open and again appears i'm going to initially direct this one to you because i know you we you've written extensively on it we've discussed it extensively and and i think it's it's a fascinating topic yeah so i think um sort of at the macro level uh it's important from the perspective of you know if we're talking about these increasingly immersive pervasive and interconnected digital environments that significant chunks of the human population are going to begin to uh engage with um it's very important that um these sort of platforms are you know credibly neutral infrastructure that are kind of owned and operated by everyone um obviously we're now aware of some of the shortcomings of sort of web 2.0 and maybe some of the platforms um you know drawbacks in the form of you know undue rent extraction sometimes in the form of privacy costs um in in the form of you know arbitrary censorship in some places um so these are the kind of things that i think at the macro level um are very important and we do have this new technology and new infrastructure to solve some of these problems and then from the actual user perspective if we want to attract uh people to these environments and we want them to dedicate meaningful time and capital to these um virtual worlds you know establishing robust things like digital property rights and whatnot uh you know a pre a prerequisite um for these things growing as big as uh we suspect they can so for me um those are some of the sort of important reasons around open versus clothes and kind of uh the world that we're heading towards okay and and alex i mean is that a view you share or you know where do you sit on this sort of open closed spectrum yeah i think it's a very utopian uh kind of scenario that that you are um talking about here and it's definitely something that that we believe in as well i think you know from axi's point of view we started out very very decentralized i mean you had to send a transaction just to go to battle and your opponent had to do the same you know they they battle against each other and it was just a terrible user experience so in the end uh we needed to make concessions and i think that's everything what like that's a lot of what blockchain is about right now because when you look at probably what i would say is one of the most precious resources is block space so as much as we want to use the block space to you know fill in with information about you know player data what does a match how does a match play out you know it turns out we can't really do that so we need to make concessions and put things off chain and that does not really resonate too well with having a very open universe and then you also have the ip side on the like the intellectual property rights on the other side so how open should they be for example i think that's a very interesting topic that it's probably not being discussed enough uh and especially when you look at you know for example on ethereum these profile picture projects like board apes like punks and even axes what does it actually mean to own an nft uh does it mean that you can have you know intellectual property rights to to do to create something i mean probably not but a lot of players actually think that a lot of people who buy these pfp projects they think that they can you go make a an agreement with adidas or something like that now this is about education and i think you know it's it's we are we can't we need to get to we need to kind of uh uh walk before we can run so that's kind of where where where my point of view is i think it's a little bit too early still okay so that feels i mean yeah trade-offs are an integral part of of what we're all doing i guess there's a question there i mean and progressive decentralization is a very practical means to an end but i guess do you see the same end destination in terms of an open metaverse or as as piers does yeah i think i think i said that uh initially when i was defining it that you know i believe in a truly open platform and i actually believe that ethereum is that right now so when i look at the metaverse i can say that when i'm walking or when i'm looking at openc or wearable or any of these other platforms and i see assets for sale that is actually the front end for the current metaverse because we don't have anything else so you can you can think about it it's just like there's going to be building blocks they're going to be you know a waste to see that in in another form than just a web page and that's the representation that might be the sandbox or any other or any other platform that is coming up webiverse there are many many cool things happening but it's still early so yeah excellent thank you and uh seb can you talk talk us through your views on openness and where's where sandbox lies there well i would say we're mission driven here and we're seeing an acceleration in the space with what facebook and mark zuckerberg is speaking about or team sweeney they are pretending to be meta versus themselves and i think if we just accept the definition of medievals as like being large corporate virtual world which are closed economies and close environment to be and to claim that definition for themselves and we don't push on the other side for something better something more decentralized something where user truly on their digital asset their identity for through avatar their currency being their own bank hence being self-serving and being able to use those assets across multiple apps in the ecosystem across marketplaces across all your games then we're not moving the market along and we're not really changing the line so for me it's becoming more and more important to be open to accept the creativity in the space to accept that some projects are might fail but we're also seeing an explosion of new opportunities typically the avatar project which starts with just characters pictures but could become so much bigger with additional utility provided by other applications in a space like virtual world in sandbox which had gamification socialization and many more things and at the very essence of that disruption is true digital ownership through nfts and that's what we're pushing for excellent excellent okay and and robbie um can you elaborate a little more on uh chain guardians and your vision for for an open metaverse yeah absolutely um i think very similar to seb you know we do believe in an open meta person we believe in working towards true digital ownership and empowering the users and the communities to monetize um and so on and so forth rather than being the product themselves actually um owning what they create and all of that funds or fees or whatever goes to the actual platform on and we we it happens all day every day in our lives i mean i i read something the other day which i think spotify has like takes 84 of revenue for you know music creators so just as an example um you know that is what we want to avoid with the open metaverse if you create something you should be the principal benefactor of that um and and yeah we subscribe to the exact same thesis of sebastian in that regards but i also have to acknowledge exactly what um alex has said there because as a blockchain gaming project ornament builder um you frequently run into the more decentralized you make something uh user experience issues um for a start people don't like waiting for the blockchain to confirm it's like as simple as that and the mixture is is vast between format from out what we've found anywhere between the users who want like pure decentralization wherever possible versus those that just want it to work and want it to work fast so you have to try and strike a balance between the two for where your project is and where your community is um you know before moving forward because otherwise as as axis demonstrated like you're not going to make a success of your project um if you just you know basically ignoring all the user feedback and just saying yeah but it's decentralized because how much does the user really care in the end we need to as i think alex has also talked about there we need to as as a collective uh individually both as a community and the users and also as as project owners ourselves um we need to educate we need to educate you know users and communities why it's so important that we work towards decentralization and i think as long as a project like alex is saying well you know we've probably been a little bit more centralized in terms of how we do things acknowledges that longer term the vision is to move towards decentralization i think that that's a good base to start from yeah i've got some great points there um i mean at bozon we've got very very similar kind of challenges our long-term vision is is is to enable sort of open commerce and and prevent um you know the the kind of extraction and capture that you see with web 2 platforms but right now um i mean the first products that we're building are supported by quite a bit of centralized scaffolding other you know there is just no other path to decentralization so um yeah i think we're all kind of largely in accord there um and so this question to to peers and you know i know we've had some conversations on this topic um how how do you think crypto will will open up more traditional gaming i think um i think already um you know large publishers are sort of paying attention to this stuff as as they should be um i think uh we'll probably see in the relatively near future most games beginning i won't say most just yet maybe too enthusiastic but um many games um some games beginning to experiment with um at least you know sort of purely cosmetic non-balance impacting sort of skins to deeper monetize that top point one percent whatever of the spending player population um can totally see that happening sometime soon i think fundamentally though um these larger companies are going to struggle to compete with the more crypto native models right where you do have that um sort of community ownership dynamics the shared economics and that sort of crypto native component which allows you to you know experiment and iterate in ways that you just can't as a traditional sort of corporate structure um so you know i'm excited to see larger publishers get involved i'm excited to see you know ip that we all know and love get involved um but as i say i think they're probably on the back foot with a lot of this stuff okay and alex what's what's your your view on disrupting traditional gaming are we already doing it i know so so what i think is um i'm of course you know actually we're talking to some of the largest game studios in the world um and it's interesting uh you know money is always green so when the money is there the attention is there and when you look at the i think appears you touched on it you know the the the amount of economic value that's being you know captured or transacted inside you know axi as a specific example here like we had over 2.2 billion dollars worth of nfts traded purely on our own you know that network and uh and game and then when you when when you when you see you know the amount of value that we capture from that so we have a we take a 4.25 cut of each of those trades um and then you look at you know how much value is these other traditional game companies capturing they take everything so that's why the economies or the digital economies will be so so much bigger because you're actually enabling uh players to make money inside of these games because you're not taking everything so it means you can make money on the long tail and that's when you get much more powerful communities much more you know interesting ip um which which people have you know a much stronger connection to and that's why you see for example in the philippines and across the world that you know people are making real life businesses they're making meetups everything kind of actually related i think we're just the trailblazing here and that kind of recipe will be copied of course but but you know for these traditional game companies i don't really see them as a threat because they can't move fast enough and they're also scared because you have to relinquish control of somehow of your project and you know the worst thing that can happen is you know you launch something and you lose control of it and you can never you know you can't take that back uh so it's it's pretty scary but i mean that's amazing for us right yeah and for everyone else who's building in the you know coming from that crypto native approach but at the same time you know you don't have to have everything open you can start you know with nfts and then slowly you know evolve from there but i think that's going to be the expectation and the place where you can unlock the most value not only for yourself but also for your players and that's going to just make it everything bigger yeah i think it's very difficult to convince a board to relinquish the profit extraction imperative yeah um so robbie uh to you how do you how do you see crypto will open up more traditional gaming yeah i mean uh alex has hit on a lot of the really key points here um but i think that it again it goes back to um let's say a traditional gaming company is a business you know they have they have shareholders and there are people who they're there to make profit and money um so from the very start what you're doing is you're shifting that that you know basically the balance of the financial and the wealth back to the community in large and empowering them to do that and i think that is any traditional gaming company what going to want to open that kind of worms of going you know what sorry shareholders you're now getting 80 percent lesser and we're going to shift that back to the player base i i don't necessarily think that they will but beyond that you know these huge issues around for example we know that the crypto space is is regulatory speaking quite uncertain at times or volatile so to speak and again traditional gaming companies are making huge profits from traditional games and right now we're still you know blockchain gaming is a little bit of a splash uh in in that big ocean so the the risk for them albeit like alex i've also spoken with several of these other larger traditional gaming publishers at this time the risk doesn't outweigh the reward currently but as more and more people adopt blockchain and blockchain gaming and our role as pivotal as educators in that um we might see that they pay more and more attention because just like alex says where the money is that's where they want to be but they have huge issues around for example even digital like digital assets and rights you know nfts again empower the user if you look at the terms of service on any gaming publishers kind of website or whatever you don't own any asset that you have there it's like you know there's huge waves of wealth coming through counter-strike global offensive skins for some of the earlier stuff with valve and whatever it's like you know they shut down every possible way you could have selling those guns even though you know theoretically i bought it you know open whatever chest same with world of warcraft if they just decide to delete your account you might have spent 10 000 hours playing that priest or whatever it is you played unlucky mate you broke our terms of service they have to relinquish all of that control so it might they might and i think that they are getting the heads turned a little bit and they might dabble with some ip stuff but in terms of full-on adoption i can't see it for a very long time which like alex says is just is just brilliant for us yeah yeah i agree with you i think you know the property rights tend to drive economic growth in in most domains whether you know physical or digital and i think the the property right aspect of of crypto is is is a massive driver versus you know traditional seb what's your view well i have two perspectives on topic first of all as a president of the blockchain game alliance some of our members have been like traditional game companies like ubisoft gameloft atari square nx many others they've been members they've been following the space for a long time educating themselves and trying to find strategy to actually apply nfts decentralization crypto defy dao etc to their business model which like alex said is proving very difficult because it's going to impact the way they've always been thinking their business model etc however we're starting to see a big shift now and that shift i'm seeing it in my capacity as a co-founder of sandbox as we're definitely talking with more and more game studios as well as ips and brands and one of the way they have to access the space and under the metaverse is actually through the sandbox and other decentralized virtual world some of them have started to make big moves acquiring virtual land virtual presence and uh well i think we're at the forefront of this now with more than 165 ips and brands that include walking dead zepeda porrero care bear smurf will even launch a snoop dogg recently who are entering the space and going to build new type of experience natively decentralized with nft first in mind and that applies those those rules where they finally accept to let the users own the asset build their own games publish experience with them monetize them and do more things relinquish control over it so that might be the transition forward for all those larger game companies and brands for entering the space yeah i agree and i think i think this economic driver to have like you know nft type ownable assets um is so strong that i don't think the traditional players will sort of be able to to resist possibly um okay so i mean that's the kind of a lot of this is the sort of ball case for um for for crypto gaming but um in terms of of a sort of an open metaverse what what do we think the the primary threat um is to an open metaverse and i'll direct that firstly to to robbie well i think a huge let's say power struggle may occur depending on what huge corporations such as like google and facebook decide to do right um and as we know typically speaking they would as a user of those services you you are the product right you you are the data point or whatever and i feel like facebook and um google and bigger corporations that are basically redefining themselves and i think it was alex who touched on this as well or maybe said as meta versus um and marketing themselves as such to users um could pose a big problem both in terms of let's say education but also in terms of how these virtual worlds are created as well excellent piers what's your your view on this yeah similarly i think um obviously we've got some uh major threats in terms of mobile app distribution um in terms of uh you know as we start talking more and more about vr as well obviously facebook dominating that whole market with oculus there's huge sort of um platform risk on that side of things i think more broadly uh regulatory heavy-handedness just for the crypto ecosystem at large um could negatively impact a lot of this stuff um but then i also think certain aspects from within right um a lot of this stuff is well definitely very early days still um obviously there's a lot of money at stake um you know we uh on the governance front etc we have um you know a number of things still to figure out and so i think you know lots of uh lots of obstacles and hurdles to overcome from from within crypto as well as those uh sort of exogenous threats that i described yeah good points good points alex what do you what do you think could uh what's the biggest threat do you think to the to an open metaverse i think the genie is already out of the bottle i mean we're going there anyway uh the the the truth is like the the largest risk right now is probably that it can be set back maybe 10 20 years if there are major you know smart contract tax actually i think that is one of the the more concerning things to me uh especially as you know more and more money is being locked up people are starting to speculate they get super bullish and then suddenly you come to realize that hey that you know the infrastructure isn't really there um and when you when you think you have a product that you want to go to market with and you want to enable the the benefits of let's say blockchain as you know the beginning of the openmetaverse where people can own their you know game characters at least and their identity well you need to start to see is there a distribution channel that i can actually go to market with at the same time allow people to own the the assets uh for for our case i mean it turns out it wasn't so we had to actually make you know the blockchain and the distribution channel so you can't find axi on ios or you know the the the or google play store you have to go to our website uh and that in itself makes it really really hard for new products to go to market because there is a massive you know as mentioned a war going on where you know these legacy company wants to you know capture so much value uh but as i said i still think we're gonna get there maybe i mean in terms of time scale you know 10 20 years uh or that could even be aggressive uh because it's going to take time for people to learn more about what it is what it actually means so okay owning my asset what is that people and even owning art at least you know for the good thing about gaming is that it's so clear okay you have an nft it's represented as a game character if i have it in my wallet i can use it if i sell it okay i can't play the game anymore that's super obvious but for uh nft art piece it's not as clear what does it give you when you sell that when you buy it so i mean there's a lot of education there and all of these things are connected uh to it so that the risk here is you know that you know that it also gets co-opted by big tech where they might say hey you own it or they might give you a small piece of it and it's easier for other people to learn about it rather than you know going through the or or kind of crossing the chasm when they actually own their assets so i guess that's a that's another thing yeah yeah a great point and seb where do you where do you stand on this point the biggest threat to an open metaverse time time is really the big challenge like when we started about four years ago we were pioneers we were almost like the visionaries pushing the vision and all the largest companies they were looking up at us and say they'll never work they they can try you know but they're not really seriously considering us as a threat now uh definitely metaverse is being used as a marketing gimmick but a lot of those even larger companies and every day in the press you will read again about epic roblox or facebook using the term and misusing this term beyond what we're trying to do and truth is like those companies have been existing for like 10 years 14 years maybe sometimes more and they have like user base large of 200 500 million users even in four years of existence having built where we are which is already great we'll need more time to provide a whole platform with all the tools everything we need to achieve the similar scale in term of adoption term of user etc good thing is this year and and i think axis has been doing an amazing job we are now talking no longer in thousands of users but in millions of users so i thought that would take us maybe three years more but we're here in 2021 so maybe if we keep out on that pace and everyone here contributes to spread out the world and be engaged we could reach the 10 million by next year and further faster yeah i think on the time uh question uh ray kurzweil always used to talk about innovation operating on exponential time and that's why you know we're we predict it's 10 years out but in exponential time that's like 18 months or something right so i think the the difference here is what is a metaverse like when i see a matterers i think things should be more open you are you're in the endgame when we're talking 10 million users yeah for sure next year or maybe even 100 million i mean that's that's not it but you know what is actually a metaverse like i don't i mean i think it's a pet universe it has its own ip it has its own art you know people can make their own games in there eventually but the metaverse is you know connecting everything together i mean that's really player one where you know you have your game characters from sandbox from axi from from chain guardians and then there's another world which you know you are interacting with all them together the real problem here is who is actually going to decide the value of these assets inside that one world so what's going to be strong what's going to be weak i think actually you need a crypto billionaire to to make this at first who doesn't have the incentives to actually you know give these assets or turn that make them more powerful inside that you know specific one world so that's what i'm looking forward to but i think we're still um a couple of years out on that one yeah i think for me i think the biggest threat is the kind of the the wolf in sheep's clothing you know the sort of the the facebook that looks and sounds like an open metaverse and has got teams of really good kind of you know proposition and pr people designing something that looks indistinguishable from an open metaverse but underneath there is this kind of value extraction back door and you know but um we shall see okay um so we've got a few minutes left could we open up for questions ah just here one two hello hi um thank you guys that was awesome um alex i think you picked up an interesting point at the end which was you know there are sort of multiple meta verses and you know i like this idea of a true uh meta universe where they can all axes can talk sandbox can talk to punks or whatever my question is you know i think one of the reasons that i think might not happen is because each of these mini meta verses like for example the actual one has a value accrual mechanism which incentivizes you to spend time in axi accrue value to a axs and slp and that seems to be a disincentive from the agglomeration um towards like the meta universe that you think of do you think this um you know where do you think this is a serious obstacle to creating this true ready player one vision and then sort of related to that interesting because justin has sort of with both on it sort of uh uh i think that sort of inter inter metaverse model it seems that that is where value will accrue between the meta verses you know maybe like a credit union for the metaverse um sorry i realized that's a variety of questions but uh yeah i think interpret from that i think you're definitely touching on it and that's why i said you need a crypto billionaire to do it because this has to be a public good actually that's the way i see it uh and that's why i look at ethereum as the beginning of the metaverse to an extent because you know ethereum is owned by you know the ethereum holders um and that's you know the underlying blockchain but you know what about the the graphic side of it uh so these are definitely real questions but the only thing i can say from the axis side is what we're focused on is getting people onboarded into it educating them you know we need to teach them about the private keys what it doesn't mean to own their assets and then eventually uh you know everyone else who's adding value to the axie nfts i mean that's great for us because that means you know you hold an axi and you can get access passes to not only axi games that we are making that the community is making but if you look at you know the metaverse as another game experience that's amazing and maybe there will be even several ready player one universes but the and then there will be other ways to extract value uh but yeah it's it's it's quite far-fetched but amazing and so cool to think about it's just uh yeah as i said like that's a let's kind of walk before we run and then try to get the users on board at first and then eventually you know some some smart guys maybe you know after accident who knows in 10 years maybe we can do something cool there well i think the the problem with the crypto billionaire thesis is that for jeff bezos he didn't stop at billionaire today so yeah if if i may add like it's not just about extracting the adding value as well like and i think this is the last question right guys so you you mentioned earlier that uh it wasn't possible to um have a metaverse in the app store um why is that and what would you need what nuances need to change to make it possible to live in the app store as well who who would you like to answer well i'll start with alex but i think they would have a yeah i think maybe i answered it maybe pierce yeah i mean largely um you know obviously the app stores take their sort of 30 fee on all sort of uh economic activity or in-app payments and whatnot um the structure of these economies is such that um they wouldn't be able to do so generally speaking and so these things often don't get approved um there are some early instances of things like getting through test flight and whatnot which are just nfts where you know you just authenticate your stuff or maybe on a web wallet or something and can view it in game but um that's largely where the problem stems from is that these guys want their you know sort of 30 fee on any mobile app distribution and so pretty much incompatible it's also like there is no infrastructure that enables this in a good way so if you want to buy an asset on the app store you just rent it it's the same you know standard model but you won't get it in your wallet for example you need to go through the coinbase wallet or you know any other wallet uh coinbase might actually have removed their browser nft history all that stuff because of the regulatory issues like i mean this is a minefield and that's why you just have to uh leapfrog it if you can or try to at least but i mean of course it would be great if we could ship the axia app or sandbox or any other app and actually just say that when you're buying something you get the blockchain asset but the point problem is there is let's say players want to trade against each other then suddenly there is a um they make money like it's basically the creator economy so they're trading against each other there is value extracted does it mean that apple should take 30 of each of the trades between the players like the answer to that is no obviously because the players wouldn't accept it so you would have to take apple's cut on the other cut that the company is getting i mean i think we yeah i think we've run out of time there so brilliant and yeah out of time yeah we could talk all night and perhaps perhaps we will but just to say thanks for an incredible panel and thanks for inviting me you