New Models in Gaming - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Well, thanks everyone for having us. Uh, my name is Mac. I'm head of strategy at Metiplex Foundation. Uh, Metaplex is the protocol that underpins all the tokens and NFTts on the Salana ecosystem used across a range of use cases ranging from memecoins to RWA to gaming. Uh, I'm excited to be moderating this panel today on new models in gaming and I'm joined by four thought leaders in the gaming space.

Maybe we could do a quick round of introductions. Uh, sure. I'll start. My name is Yat, chairman, co-founder Animoka Brands. Um, I mean, we're more than gaming, but we have today over 628 portfolio companies, of which 233 of them are in gaming, so we're very long gaming.

Okay.

I'm Jeff Jerlin. I'm a co-founder of Axi Infiniti and the Ronin Network. Axi is the number one NFT project by alltime volume with over$4 billion dollars in NFT sales and we are in the Guinness Book of World Records for that. Yeah, Ronin is a gaming chain uh for games, consumer apps, and uh gamification. Hey everyone, my name is Sebastian Bou.

I'm the co-founder and global ambassador for the Sandbox and ambassador for Sunchain. The Sandbox is the largest decentralized virtual world. Uh we brought on over 400 major brands and 8 million users to crypto, have had million of creators, 1,500 games live on our map. And Sunshine just been announced yesterday, actually um this week in the conference. It's a creator-driven chain.

Our goal is to be like the financial backbone of culture and to prove that loyalty has value. Every interaction can be on chain with points on chain, creators token, and like grow the value and offer more for content creators.

I'm Robbie. I'm the co-founder of Immutable. We've been building in the space since 2017. Today, Immutable has over 700 games building on our chain. Just 2 months ago, we onboarded two multi-billion dollar public companies, Ubisoft and Net Marble.

And our mission is how do we take the technology of web 3 gaming loyalty and tokens to every game on the planet this year?

Great. Maybe we'll start with our first question. Y I'm going to kick it over to you. uh you obviously have great insight into this industry investing in many of the the protocols actually all of them here.

What's that?

I'm we're investors in all of them here.

Yeah, there you go. You see it all. Um how would you summarize the state of blockchain gaming today and how has it evolved over the last several years?

So I mean okay so a couple things. One actually the state of the activity of blockchain gaming is actually very high. I would argue that onchain activity for gaming is the highest amongst everything whether it's AI or even in DeFi and so on. how our sentiment for gaming hasn't been so great, right? So, this reflected in token prices for the most part and I think if I had to sort of sort of look at it this way, tokens um you the people who play the games and the people who buy the tokens aren't necessarily the same people, right?

And we see this a lot from the applications. So, there was the ven diagram might be a a percentage of them, maybe 10% or something, but they're two different audiences. And I think you know what this group has done really well is sort of manage the combination of audiences that are actually investors in a token uh versus the ones who are playing the game. So they're kind of two different universes and bringing them together. I think there's been a lot of uh web 3 gaming projects started by a lot of web 2 founders that have entered the space did not understand that dynamic and frankly I think in some ways sort of put the market down a little bit because they looked at more of the failures than the successes.

That's kind of one way to look at it. Um and I think the other one is that gaming as a macro sentiment which we think is changing now but broadly has been bad. So meaning the gaming industry hasn't been growing, right? Less children are being born, right? You know, uh revenue has been flat, the the revenue per user is flat because while real money has sort of money has been increasing in supply, actually the cost of the game is broadly the same, right?

So this will all change, right? But that means that the broad sentiment, the investor sentiment for gaming in the stock market also has been relatively low. Like you look at a company like Roblox, you know, it has a I think it's 50 $60 billion market cap over like 380 million users. If that happened to be called X with a social network, it' be worth 10 times your I'm just I'm just saying it's just sentiment, right? Um and tokens in the crypto world mimic essentially sentiment in the real world.

Like you know, don't tell me that AI protocols in crypto are more used than chatbt or perplexity. No, it has to do with sentiment, right? And so when gaming sentiment increases, we'll see better sentiment in terms of the tokens, but underlying performance of blockchain um assets in gaming is actually very strong and we're bullish on it, which is why we keep deploying. Anyone else have anything to add? I mean I want I I want to echo uh yacht where if you look at traction for for example for Ronin people don't know this but the amount of activity that's happening on Ronin right now is actually much higher than it was at the peak of the AXI boom where web 3 gaming sentiment was at its pinnacle.

Ronin was actually the fourth most used chain in all of crypto in 2024. So this has been the institutional cycle, right? Um, and I do think that it will take an institutional push by the industry, probably by a lot of the people on this panel to get web 3 gaming rerated to where it should be based on the valuation. The liquid funds, the VCs, right, that allocated to gaming, they're kind of tapped out of capital. And so I do think it will take right bigger whales, bigger buyers uh of these tokens who see the concrete progress that has been made right.

uh you know you see data where for example the on Ronin the retention rate is actually 17.5x higher than Salana which basically concretely demonstrates that gaming is actually a much better use case for onboarding retail and keeping them than memecoins and so yeah you know there is a lot of progress that's been made I do think that for crypto gaming we've been as founders a little bit too focused on being heads down building making sure that you have actual usage actual uh users but at the same time in crypto if your token isn't going up you're perceived to be doing poorly right

and I just want to echo one point here perceived being poorly is not necessarily by the people playing the game but it's by the people who own the token and then that perception spreads because the investor sentiment which is not the player sentiment basically starts to percolate. And I would also say that the majority of web 3 games don't have an understanding on investor relations, right? That wasn't part of the permit. You don't go to a game studio and say, "By the way, you have to do investor relations now that you have a token." Like, what is that, right?

They're not focused on this. Whereas, if you go to a DeFi protocol, they're finance guys. They totally understand basically what it means to manage investors and have that relationship. So a finance related project that is directly finance related is much easier to sell because the people behind it understand it whereas there's a sort of cycle I would this this group here understands it well but there's been many that haven't right and so maybe just to sort of close that thought bringing in institutional appeal so yesterday uh Alphon a NASDAQ based company u announced an acquisition of gaming one of our portfolios um and also buying tokens what it did was it put web3 gaming at least as a narrative into the NASDAQ and that's just it's a small project but it's the beginning of what basically saying wait hold on gaming and web 3 can actually be institutional as well it's not just L1 L2s right and I think this will be the beginning of many many gaming projects saying wait that's interesting and of course a lot of them are like oh the token actually went up 80%. Not financial advice, but the point is that again there's excitement and what we all know in tokens is that pricing is attention, right?

And so it becomes this flywheel. So people have to be ready to be presenting themselves to investor. You have to be professional investor friendly as well. You have to be able to go on Wall Street now as well and present yourself, right? It needed Tom Lee to get Ethereum to where it is, even though I had no relationship with Ethereum before, for instance, right?

Um and so I think we're entering that phase. Um, and the other thing I'll put out, you know, retail hasn't fully entered crypto yet, right? It's been mostly institutional buys, right? So, that to me is bullish long-term because it means that we still have a a market to go. But that means that the retail buyers, which is what web 3 gaming has been mostly depending on, isn't there institutions on the sidelines because they're like, "What's gaming?

I don't get it. Is it like the gaming industry that's hit driven in traditional world? I don't know what's going on." Right? And I think things like that or public companies is a way to say, "Oh, okay.

This is institutional. Let me understand it. Right. So, I think it's the evolution. We're going to get there.

It makes sense. And I'm guessing it won't be the last DAT we see.

No.

Uh maybe. Yeah, Sebastian. Sure.

Go ahead.

Few things I can add to that. So, like I think blockchain gaming is more fragmented than ever. Like 8 years back it was easy. You picked just Ethereum as a go-to chain and you build on that. Today there is like so many ecosystem you can choose from.

So it's difficult to know where to get started. Some of those ecosystem are more gaming front end more supportive into like bringing users to the developers tableable runin that's super important and the fact that it's fragmented you don't really realize like the sum of all those players because they are more silosed ecosystem where like there's no liquidity essentially the second thing is like content discovery is broken like that's been already the case in the web two gaming industry freeto play like the top grossing title haven't been moving for years now but there's been a recent change in regular regulation that allows game developer to have alternative payment solution than the app store and Google play store and a lot of game have been reverting to have like external payment solution and sometimes crypto payment solution to drive more revenue for them and to drive like more players to them and then I think like the attention game like everyone is looking at like how can we like channel our growth so that strategy launching memecoin alternative payment solution accepting crypto payments there are like different ways to bring players in at the end of the day to the core product. And it's interesting because there's always visuality between like how a blockchain game is performing. Is it performing well because it has like the large user base as a core product or is it performing well because the token price is a proxy of like the attention it's getting.

Next question. Um so Robbie, you sit at a very interesting intersection I would say between kind of web two gaming and web 3 gaming. I'd love to hear more about some of the innovations and trends you're seeing there. I would love personally in a year from now for us not to even use the phrase web 3 gaming or web 2 gaming in the same way that Stripe doesn't call themselves a web 3 payments company but Pat Collison's on the record saying that stable coins are the equivalent of room temperature superconductors for financial infrastructure and I think personally this is where crypto is going is how does it fundamentally improve the business models of existing companies and incumbents to an extent that it's irreplaceable And this is really what we're seeing with stable coins. We're seeing this with prediction markets.

And I think we're now seeing this with gaming. The fastest growing product that Immutable has offered this year has been to web 2 games. Studios like Net Marvel, studios like Ubisoft who are entirely focused on how can they acquire players more efficiently, monetize them more effectively, and ultimately provide them with a better experience. I think the day that web 3 gaming scales is the day it simply becomes infrastructure that makes games companies business models better and players experiences better. And that's the inflection point literally in the last 6 months that we've seen.

So I'm I'm pretty excited in terms of narrative. I like I couldn't care less about where which particular point of the cycle narratively we are. Fortnite has twice as many players as all blockchains in the world have users, right? So there are going to be more users which come on board to a blockchain via games than any other category combined. They're not even going to know it's a wallet.

Most of the signups to a mutable player wallet today have no idea what a crypto wallet is. And so we've gotten to this point literally 18 months ago you couldn't have done this certainly from a regulatory perspective and now you have this from a user experience perspective as well. So I think we're entering the commercialization era of of uh of blockchain. I think it's a convergence of how does this tech make existing businesses better and I think we're going to see 100 million users from existing games on board uh onto the blockchain in the next 12 months. Jeff, do you have something you want to add?

So, one thing that we're seeing on Ronin is the Ronin game that you have never heard about is actually Ragnarok Online. So, Ragnarok Online is actually kind of an old school Korean MMO. uh it's we have a license for gravity to run an NFT powered server right so this is an interesting model where we've taken this old MMO still has millions of players we've created this kind of special economic zone right it's like okay if you're a Ragnarok online player you don't like crypto you can be on the other servers but if you're interested come on this server and experience the benefits right so on that server only 20% of the community are Ronin gamers uh or from our community. The other 80% are totally new to crypto. They're transacting on chain.

They may not even know it and but they they've been onboarded to the chain and they just know that hey on this server I have the ability to trade in ways that I do not have on the other servers. So this is already happening. You know, we're working with Gravity on this, which I think is a huge victory because the Korean IP owners are notoriously Korean Japanese IP owners are notoriously very difficult to work with. But we found a way to make it work. Now that we have one case study, boom, it's something that can be replicated on Ronin, but also across the entire gaming space.

I think that over the last six years, many in the space have been a little bit combative, even myself included. I do think that now right the people on this stage we're kind of the last of the Moheakans when it comes to crypto gaming and you know we need to band together we need to work together and we need to share our findings share our learnings because I do believe that attention capital are now going to converge and coales around the remaining teams that continue to innovate and continue to push the space forward. Yeah, maybe just double tapping on that a little bit. So, in kind of the past cycle, right, a lot of these gaming tokens were very much focused on speculation. Do you see the role for tokens within gaming changing?

Maybe Sebastian, I'll turn it over to you.

But I wouldn't say they all speculation or majority speculation. I think it was a lot of experimentation and trying to like find models and we're still trying to find the leading models. Um, so yeah, I definitely see now like the DM developers like because at the blockchain game alliance which I'm president of like we have 600 members with a new gaming industry. We're seeing now models where like a lot of games are like leveraging stable coins instead of their own token because it those tokens they carry distribution with them like as soon as you say I'm accepting Bitcoin E or or USDT USDC like people are willing to come and spend them and they have more trust and more confidence because they are like tokens with a brand with a name as well. You're starting to see now like game experiment with multi-chain strategy.

So they could have issued their NFTs over a point of time or certain chain but now they will go to Solana for example to launch a memecoin so they attract a different category of user and an interesting brand. Also we're starting to see um developers who are more realistic about the expectation they can have from having a token and being more careful around like air drops and rewards all the play to earn uh traction. And uh some developers like pixels for example have like or sandbox we've pushed for this metric called the return on reward spend where we're more careful that for every single token we distribute a greater percentage of that token comes back circulating into those game economies. I think pixel has reached something like 40% of that after a lot of iteration sandbox in the past season five we were close to 80% meaning like we convince actual players to spend real money real token yeah before they play and they earn their rewards that's a good scheme I think that's a sustainable one um all the logic around uh prediction markets and real money gaming where people are starting to build up the meta gameplay on top of core games and betting small amount of token to play versus each other. I love that strategy because it's inherently very viral.

You want to bet not against random player. You want to bet against your friends and because you lose a very small amount if you don't win actually it doesn't matter so much because it's your inner circle but the K factor you get like it's a user acquisition hack like every single user that come will invite around his circle and all the users that are close to them to play with. So those are some of the strategies that are nonspeculative, more core to game play and that have built up to successful experiments and hopefully new business model.

Yeah. D you have something to add?

I mean I think one of the things we have to look at is the state of the industry broadly. So there's about 4 500 million people on centralized exchanges and there's about 10 20% of that on basically uh onchain. So if your token launches on a centralized exchange then one should not be surprised that they're going to speculate. I mean because their only purpose of having the the only purpose for someone to have a token on centralized exchange is specifically to speculate. Maybe it's long-term, short-term, whatever.

Right? So, I think that's one issue, right? Um, so when we get to and the teams here are all building more onchain and these economies build on chain, I think two things will happen. One, um, as the onchain economies grow, you'll have a little bit more stability because the utility is going to be more obvious because it's onchain. Uh the second thing is that you can also think about you know it wasn't possible today but uh before but now you can actually consider an entirely onchain token launch maybe even without a centralized exchange right that's possible I mean you've seen this happening more and more and they're smaller but they're sustainable and then the audience that buys a token is away from the pure speculation if that's what you want or not want right so so there's a determination how you launch the token is introducing essentially the kind of customer/ buyer that you have right right and and the reality is that the majority of the people who buy the token in a decentralized exchange are looking for trade and the other final thing I would say is that the markets have become more sophisticated four or five years ago we didn't have any depth in per markets now you have a lot of depth in per markets right and so that means that because you have all these derivatives people are playing around with the token if it has liquidity irrespective of whether it's a good game or not the token just trades because the token is the product in and of itself and if you're a game you struggle with the fact that there's an externality coming through because you're now dependent on something else.

And so unless you've built your ecosystem and your community and your company to withstand or deal with that, like you could say, you know what, we welcome speculation. It's part of it. But if you're so where a lot of web 2 founders have struggled in web 3 is that they want to kind of suppress a speculation. And to me, the parallel is a little bit like, you know, they were trying to be Europe, right? Basically, from a capitalist standpoint, they're saying we're not accepting the market.

We're trying to control it. we're trying to sort of tame it and then actually it just failed. Um so so I think there's a there's a little bit of an attitude towards that but you can now launch tokens differently so that you may not have that speculation if that's not what you want. Uh but you'll sacrifice it in the with liquidity, right? So that's that's uh sort of the the balancing act for now.

Yeah, I I think you're spot on and in fact that's something we've been innovating on at Metaplex is fully onchain token launches and so a handful of the largest and most successful token launches on Salana over the last 3 months have actually been launched through some new technology we built and I think you hit the nail on the head which is being really intentional about the community that you're building can make a huge difference. I mean, I want to give a shout out to uh sort of punk strategy is an interesting innovation. A lot of kinks that need to be sorted out, but it's a strategy that cannot work on a centralized exchange because every time you trade the token, basically there's a 10% tax. There is no way a centralized exchange can survive on a 10% tax. They're not going to do that, right?

If you trade the token, it wouldn't be because it would allow it in the traditional sense. It's decentralized. So, you could take the token out. So, now you have a mechanism where the royalty and the revenue model is embedded on the trade of the token. You could do it as a market maker or you could do it this way, but it only works when you launch it in a decentralized fashion for instance, right?

Um, and so that's the beginning and you know volume is low compared to the tokens that are here clearly, right? So what do you want, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.

Maybe changing gears a little bit. So Jeff, I know uh you announced recently a new L2 um uh Ronin's L2. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I think there's been some evolutions there and the direction. Maybe you could share more with the audience.

Yeah. So we built Ronin as an EVM side chain. We started working on it in 2019 based on all the things that we learned while building AXI. We were super early to exploring Ethereum scaling. If any of you guys remember, we were one of the first builders on something called Loom Network.

So back in the early days, Ethereum scaling roadmap was largely just promise and potential and a lot of startups that were trying to get something that was workable. Loom Network eventually closed down, leaving us without a scaling solution. So we learned a hard lesson, right? Do not build your startup on top of someone else's startup. But over the years, Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation, especially with the new leadership, largely delivered on this L2 ccentric roadmap.

L2s are much better. And and when we launched Ronin, the vision was always to eventually come home to Ethereum. And this is really just the fulfillment of that promise. And for us right we uh the governing validators of the network opted to go with the op stack you know for us it was always a lot of kind of coordination and effort whenever we wanted to upgrade the chain upgrade the code base we want to focus on what we do best which is building applications and distributing content and we also want the uh incentives of the chain to reflect that. Right?

So whereas in the past we were wasting a lot of the RON emissions on staking rewards for the validators, now that we're in L2, we're outsourcing basically our security to Ethereum. We can use those rewards to reward the builders, the developers that are actually adding value to the network as well as the users that are high LTV. basically in a gaming sense or basically the users that are missionaries rather than mercenaries and we think of this system as like basically proof of distribution. You can also think of it as like Kaido for gaming, right? Kaido optimizes for top of funnel mind share whereas we're kind of working on the system that will right create builder reputation and rewards as well as user reputation and rewards around the actions that are specifically valuable for a consumer gamification chain.

So Robbie I think you've taken a little bit different approach right to building the infrastructure and the stack at Immutable X. Why did you make the decision that you did? Yeah, I we actually went through a very similar journey honestly early on. There were a lot of scaling potentials out there. It was essentially science projects.

Uh we took the choice of we we thought inheriting Ethereum security was really important from day one. So we actually originally worked with the the Starkex team. The problem was it's not EVM compatible and EVM compatibility is now I think really a requirement for composability and interoperability. Um, we launched 18 months ago a mutable ZKVM which is a ZK rollup powered lay scaling solution on Ethereum but is fully EVM compatible. And I I think generally that's where the the puck is going.

But our approach has also been how do we abstract away interactions with the blockchains so developers and users don't have to know what a smart contract is, what the the unique re-entrance seat bugs which are exclusive to blockchain paradigms are. All of these things inhibit actually people developing. So you can build on uh immutable. You can build essentially a complete economy with purely API endpoints similar to Stripe. And and that's really where we we took our our vision from.

Um and if you sign up to immutable play, you can literally go to play.mutable.com which is our wallet and loyalty and engagement system for games. We we've gone 0 to six million users uh in in 18 months. You don't even know what a private key is.

And we convert people off Facebook ads at a 35% conversion rate. That's basically like social uh B TOC companies uh conversion rates. So we we very much are the back end has to be secure but the front end has to be dead simple for this to to be scalable.

That's really helpful. Maybe Sebastian, I'm going to kick it over to you. Uh so you recently had a pretty big announcement about Sand Chain. Do you want to share more with the audience what that was?

Absolutely. We just announced the Sand Chain yesterday. It's the birth of the creator nation and the creator chain. Um, essentially our mission at Sandbox has always been to empower anyone to become a creator. It started in 2011 with our 2D mobile game.

Just by touch of finger, you shared your creation and other could play it. 2017 it evolved became like a 3D virtual world blockchain based with NFT entre and a no code game maker. So people could make game for the first time. We joined at that time anuka brand became one of like part of the family, one of the largest token and flagship project over the years. Uh, and we kept updating that tool.

But we also saw some uh like the struggle the challenge that content creator have in general. Not just like people who are building vauil games on sandbox in general but any content creator like they're always facing the similar challenges. It's essentially about like content discover sorry essentially around like the discoverability around like building up their community growing their community building loyalty and retention and furthermore like access monetization and access to funding. the $250 billion uh credtor economy is essentially offchain at the moment. So there is a huge opportunity to take all the revenue that's there.

Do you know that like it takes an average of 30 days to 60 days to collect your payout as a content creator on like YouTube, Tik Tok and all those platform? I think like define onchain mechanics can help solve that and we can definitely allow like creators and their fan and their audience to engage in a more meaningful way to drive more value for them. So, Sunshine offer um a three part solution. One is like a point system, a dual point system with like creator points that are coming on chain that allow them to launch their quest, our mission, give out points. Those point can be swapped, exchanged and so on.

Sandpoint points across the network that are rewarded for participation to the network and the past action as well including like having sand having land and so on on sandbox and creators token offering them new ways to monetize and in the future with vault and defy mechanic access to funding. All the sand chain is leveraging on the existing sand token. So we are not launching a new token. We're building up the sand token that is the top 100 cryptocurrency listed in 80 countries including US, Korea, Japan. And this is like a token that's now mean for like a universal payment token.

It can mean distribution and it will be accepted by thousand of apps and games and services. Awesome. Um, so we're coming up on the last uh 40 seconds or so. Yacht, you want to close us out? What are you looking forward to in 2026?

Go 20 26. Well, first of all, I mean, I agree with the general sort of consensus on the panel that we're going to get like hundreds of millions of users basically on boarded because of gaming. But I think the difference that we will see here uh and I think this is the pathway and many ways I think AXI actually sort of really showed the way there early days and Sand Sandbox as well as as basically the the metaverse of of its time is that when you onboard someone into crypto, you actually make them financially more literate, right? And the depth then comes from the fact that oh I play a game I get something I learn about money I have a token I don't know what it is and the next thing you know they have a portfolio and they might do stuff in DeFi and might do other stuff and consequently actually when you onboarded someone into web 3 generally speaking you actually teach them about money and so actually I think what's happening here as an industry is we're actually improving the state of the world by making people more knowledgeable about money right the the world is divided between those who know money and those don't. there's a small percentage of those money and that's where all the wealth is right and actually crypto is kind of like that right and then you have the mass of the world majority I think it's like less than 10% of people in the world have a stock portfolio right and so I think that's part of the bigger mission here as well which is that and and what I'm excited about is that as you onward people into the world of crypto gaming actually they have an asset and once they have an asset they start saying oh there's some value and from that begins a journey where they actually become more free and more liberated from a financial sense as well and I I think that's what we're really excited about and why we keep pushing this industry because we know that's going to get big in this way.

And then all of those guys who have made money and learned about money actually become part of that ecosystem and they contribute differently as well. And you know, now we're going to get to billions of people that have financial literacy. What does it mean for the state of the world? Very different.

Well, maybe with that we'll close it out. Thank you everyone and for joining us today and thanks to our speakers for putting on a great panel.