Jérôme de Tychey | Cometh: Building a videogame as a gateway to blockchain and DeFi

and yeah so i think most people know me like most of the people who have joined this car already met me before um taipei is currently this situation where you cannot meet a lot of people um but i'm really excited to have three speakers with us today so uh jehovah and congo are like main speakers for today's event um and then you see from mass network this will be he will be sharing briefly at the end um yeah and then like i feel like a lot of people are very excited about this topic um me personally i feel like i need to go back to france at some point i think there's an ecc event coming up this month um i was there last year it was really good um it was a bit too cold but it was it was pretty good really enjoyed it and yeah yeah the soon the ecc event is coming up on the 20th to 22nd this month and it has a lot of like has a lot of side events also so yeah it's not just this one conference event but also like a lot of companies are hosting their like workshops and events and like cheese and wine parties um we have uh we have a website with all the with all the side events if you want to check it out it's a hccweek.fr but you know the problem is like you have to be in paris to be it's easy week um but at least the the talks of htc are all live streamed for free um so if you want to look at the we want to participate remotely yeah okay yeah um so yeah we are very excited to have johon who is a organizer of ecco so he's here in france group um also ledger and ethereum consensus i think i used to work for consensus for three years yeah are they still having an office there uh there's still an office in paris so two four years ago i opened the paris office of consensus and i run it for three years um and it's uh yeah it's a it's still it's still an office uh also although the team is getting more and more remote okay we took the habit of working remotely so i'm not sure if they will keep the office next year uh or move to a wework because consensus has a as a good relation with wework and they have offices all over the world we rework so i'm not sure if they will keep the office but i can tell for sure that there's still a team of consensus in france um and then now you have switched your sort of like attention to another project called commerce yeah that's right um so yeah well happy to have you and um so john is the chief economist of commerce and he'll be sharing with us very briefly about how to play his game yeah take it away okay um so thanks so much for for having me and giving me your attention during this small presentation uh it's going to be short uh but it's going to focus on the on the problems we've been trying to solve and and giving you a demo of the of the game and uh if you like what you've seen and you want to get involved or trying it out uh you'll see the onboarding you can you can do it yourself or i'm happy to to give away some nfts through guessing so uh do reach out to our host if you want to to try it out um so comet is a is a new adventure for me i'm super happy to to uh to participate to this project because i like gaming i like i've been a gamer for years i had to stop when i had a wife and a kid but now i'm coming back to gaming as a as a worker in this industry and what i've observed in the blockchain space for the past 10 years that it's it really can bring a whole new dimension to what gaming is today uh if you hear uh if you heard uh vitalik speak about why he was interested by blockchain ethereum he often you often give the example of his experience as a gamer on world of warcraft and that's exactly what blockchain can do it can really bring gaming to a place where people own the game people participate in the game and the economy of the game is owned by the players and and not and not by the editors or the publisher of the of the game which is really interesting and i'm glad we get to explore this dimension now um and during my past experiences where was that where was that uh when i was at ledger when i was at consensus when i was working for instant young uh we clearly realized and i think you would agree that getting on board into blockchain is currently one of the hardest problem that we have in our industry uh getting someone to use a wallet getting someone to have crypto underwater and so on and so forth it's really it's really painful so those are the the problems that we wanted to tackle with with comets so what we built so far is a real strategy game uh and some casual games uh one casual games on the side uh where the the the players of true ownership of their assets so there are based on erc 1155 or c71 and there are valuable tokens as rewards inside the game so when you play comments you you grab some tokens you it's a play to earn game at the moment but you get to have tokens and we use those tokens as a way to onboard people into blockchain like we distribute tokens like liquidity pull tokens like defy related tokens so we take the stance that when newcomer starts to play and suddenly uh he has tokens that have a value um he tends to be nudged into well what is this token what can i do with it and try to discover the project try to to get involved with this it's easier for in our mind for people that are starting in the blockchain to start with tokens they can already use they can already try the different protocols that are linked to the game that we have developed are based on the blockchain engine so we rely on blockchain primitives like the clock of the the timestamp of the block uh like the the some randomness extracted either from an external sources these are from the block itself we use the blockchain as a server where we can load multiple players for example and we are starting to do esport tournaments uh directly on the blockchain and in order to continue uh onboarding new players uh inside of the broader picture of the blockchain uh we plug different services in a hub on top of the game so you get to purchase crypto inside the game with a partner you get to access to nft shops soon you'll get to also have interoperability with other nfts you may have and we try to start exposing device services so that the players that have accumulated tokens they can use those tokens in various partners so one of our biggest hurdle is to really simplify the blockchain onboarding the long journey towards the simplest blockchain onboarding so in order to acquire a user we could just focus on the crypto retail talk to everybody in crypto and tell them like hey try your game try our game try your game we want to take a different approach and try to bring the people from the the gaming community or or the casual people that just like to play a game one once in a while to get them to actually try this and stay for the blockchain or stay for the game if they really like the game so we tried to simplify this as much as possible so now you connect with a wallet huh you don't have a wallet you can use your email so we rely on a provider called uh magiclink to handle the custody of the of the of the key but from our point of view you are just logged in with your email if you don't have any cryptocurrency in your wallet you can use a fiat to crypto onramp pay with apple pay pay with with credit card pay with bank transfer and get crypto and we managed to really push the fees super super down so currently it's um it's it's still competitive uh until uh ten thousand dollar if you want to to to uh swap more than ten thousand dollar to a crypto using our fiat to crypto on-ramp it's more competitive to go with crack and coinbase finance and so on but below that mark the fees are so low that you can directly do it from from the from your credit card and so on um there is a coupon system uh so when i mention like you should just reach out to the host if you want to try it out i've given away a couple of coupons so you can try to try the game for yourself um and once you're there you get two experience at an ft shop if you want to purchase an nft purchase a special special spaceship or look at what you can do with it uh there is first uh first contact there's a shop and of course there is the game so in order to keep the fees quite low um we deployed on polygon um before that we tried xdi uh we also went live on the on the army trump test net uh the different version of the arbitrary test nets and we really liked it but uh polygon was uh the most mature solution when we decided to go live and we will look into other solutions to to continue having a friendly environment for for people that are not moving uh hundreds of thousands of uh of crypto from one address to the other uh they are fine on using a scalability solution or ao2 solutions so i wanted to share that with you so if you are a dev developer and experiencing the same problem um do not hesitate to reach out i'm happy to share our experience and and see uh and and get your feedback or give us our feedback on what you guys are building because i think we will as a community go to uh the greatest on boarding together it's still very hard to avoid the step number one avoiding connecting wallet is is hard it makes you a custodian that has lots of lots of responsibility but we are working on being able to combine the number three and number two so that people can purchase nfts and get a little bit of crypto in one go um but right now you still need to do the round ramp and do the things and so on uh we miss uh the the crypto shopify by the way that's a good idea for a venture build the crypto shopify and in terms of security of course logging with your wallet create a single point of failure uh the services that we use uh may go bankrupt or disappear uh so pretty soon we will have to migrate uh everyone that has logged in with their email on a news slave know this safe like setup so that they have a backup if something happened to their email or something or something else but yeah let me let me show you uh what uh what the games look like and uh what we expose in our game and uh my goal here is to convince you that if you want to introduce your friends to crypto uh that's probably the the easiest way to do so so when you arrive on game.com.io you are automatically logged in with your email if you have one or with metamask or or one of the partners take down so if you don't have a wallet you just click on your email here so for example that's my email yeah here we go sign in and it turns out i'm already logged in but if you were not logged in you would have a pop-up saying open your mailbox you've just received an email you confirm that you want to log in and that's it you are logged in i can click on play and start playing but before that let's look at what's available so as a new player you go to the you can stake uh some tokens and this is how we are going to start exposing um financial services defy services that that wants to expose their expose their strategies and so on we will put them here right now we have a system for people to earn more nfts so if you stake some must token you get the opportunity of redeeming some some new nfts and we have different collections and we partner with different communities to create collections of spaceships and letting people unlock those spaceships by by staking in this in this tube services if you want to purchase an nfc we have a shop here so when you purchase one of those nft uh paying in in matic you automatically receive a little bit of matic token a little bit of must token so we have a currency inside the game so you get ready to play right away if you have um if you purchase one of those if you don't have any crypto on your account uh you can click on buy crypto and you get this uh this um widget here and you get the opportunity of uh of directly buying crypto from uh from this um from this uh from this widget uh i oh yeah oh by the way taiwan is not supported yet anyway um you can go on the kiosk and that's where you wouldn't go if you want to redeem your code and then we drop some codes to new players or people that we want to onboard the game and you just click and you get the thing there is a referral program of course uh if you want to onboard new people you can invite them and earn some crypto you can check out your profile so that's uh very common ways of of exposing what's inside your wallet and what's cool with our game is that you can land also so if you have a if you have a a a spaceship and you don't want to play it you can put it on rental here you can select the spaceship for rent and you share the revenue with the person that owned the spaceship you can create an offer and post whatever you want here uh and lastly we have a small uh automated market maker a fork of a few knee swap where you get to uh you get to swap the token against another basically and it's working with your email as well if you want to to try it out but let's go back to the game you go so as a new player you're logged in with your email uh you read him a coupon or you purchased some crypto and got something and now you're invited to go into the game so here we go so the main the main map for you is looking at your nft here uh so you have this beautiful spaceship you have these helper boats that tell you like okay how to jump uh how to mine a comet uh what to do and so on um you can add some music so i cut the music because it's it's a little bit uh a little bit uh high volume so here's how to cut the music you go there you can check out your wallet you can check out the must allowance how much you allow the contract to spend for you and you can check out your items if you have some i don't have any items so the goal of the game is to interact with other players so all the squares that you see here on this map are actually players uh here we are in the academy so everybody is playing the same spaceship but the differences between one spaceship to another is how much they charge to make you move the goal of the game is to interact with other players in order to put yourself close to one of those comments so here is one comment here what you get on this comment is lb token dragmatic to must so if you are close enough to this comment you will mind the token that are inside of it and the only way of uh being close to a comet is interacting with someone else so for example i can click on this guy and it tells me i can jump and i will end up here but in order to jump i have to pay a little bit of must to this player and every player can choose how much they charge for this pulling services and and you can you can see on the on the map that there are players that are purple there are players that are green the purple players are the expensive players where it costs a lot for you to jump on them and uh and you have to pay a lot to to to to to use their services so what we observe in the game is that the players are changing their prices and anticipating that they are going to be in a good in a good position so they they try to extract some value with the position they have in space and now i think oh i'm not sure i'm going to hit the comet so you hit the comet if the comet passes in the in the area that you see here you can check your mining range it's a small mining range 15 kilometers it's not that big and uh unfortunately i i i missed it now i didn't i didn't hit it but we can try another one like for example uh say this one maybe let's see and every time you hit the comments uh you earn some tokens so it's uh when i say it's a play to earn game uh let's see if i can uh if i can put myself there in time so the main source is oh my goodness i'm really not good today yeah let's see so one of the randomness elements inside the game is how much it will how long it will take for your your transaction to be mined okay now i get it yeah see uh i was able to mine a little bit so i i earn uh i earned one cents uh with that action uh so that's the the academy setup where uh the players are uh trying out uh their best to uh to um to mind the game and learn how the mind the comments and learn how the game is played and every every eight hours we air drop to the players a ticket to a play in the grand prix so we are running our first uh our first uh esports event called the polygon galactic grand prix i'll let you check it out so uh if you want to try the game in the in the academy and finish in the top 10 of one of those one of those sessions you'll get your ticket to participate to the to the grand prix that has lots of lots of prizes and is it's being uh sponsored by uh the the the polygon the polygon foundation outside of this academy the game is much bigger you have a different solar systems with lots and lots and lots of players in those uh yeah see here lots of players as i said and those players are are not uh typically the the the com the the the simple uh spaceship that i've shown you before uh those are a spaceship with much more much more capacity much more much much more better stats and so on and we partner with different projects so if you have an interim project and wants to go live on polygon and wants to showcase the collection of spaceship you can reach out to me here you see the aviguchi spaceship you see the pickled finance spaceship the badger dao spaceship the alchemic spaceships so we partner with those projects to create those collections and eventually showcase them in the in the esport tournament if those projects perform well um maybe if you still can see my screen i can show you what the what the game looks like outside of the uh of the academy uh so you get a sense of how big the the game is right now let's see so in here we have many more spaceships uh yeah those are this is another one this is another one um so all of those spaceships are uh every time single players uh some players have multiple spaceships but on average uh one player has 1.5 or one point between 1.

5 1.4 spaceships and and they all play with each other and and sometimes they create guild sometimes they try to leverage their position so you see typically the players that are outside in the author ring they tend to use a a much higher pool price than other players and a comet just passed by so you see this line of players here they just all lined up to to mind the comments so outside of the academy the reward for for the players is actually around uh one or one point two dollar per mining uh that's quite quite something um and we have people playing playing uh all day long about 8 000 unique players right now and 700 playing uh playing on the daily basis and we are we are just missing out your participation so what are you waiting for so in the in the short run we are going to continue upgrading this game building better better better game mechanics things that are more and more fun to play and on the side we also develop [Music] casual games that are not really played to earn yet uh around around the same the same nfts so here's is one of them if it's it's loading yes it is but you have to avoid the the asteroids that are passing by and and the rates of asteroids and of uh enough uh black holes is actually based on the on the the ash of the block where you uploaded the game um so yeah that's that's what we're building and we hope that uh this is going to be a good introduction to blockchain to people that don't know about it and don't know where to start uh you win lp tokens you win tokens and you get to learn how to use them and the money that we distribute inside the game come from our sponsors and also the fees that we collect on the device services that we expose uh yeah yeah here we go yeah that's it thank you thank you all for listening i hope you enjoyed it and uh if you have any questions i'm happy to take some and uh and answer them um in the in the next three to six months we are going to develop a mobile version with an application for it and hopefully it will be even easier for you to interact with it thanks very much for sharing um anyone wants to ask any questions to john anyone oh let's see very cool thanks uh so when the player minds a comment the the the money comes from the d5 services that we exposed so right now when you are using comet swap the the the uni-swap fork that we use uh we take a small fees on each trade about 0.05 that we redistribute inside the game and um also the nft sales if we get say 10 ether out of the nft sales we match those 10 infer with our own token create lptoken on if to must and distribute the lp token inside the games so on a monthly basis we distribute about 80k to 100k to the to the players and the more volume we get the more players we get the the more the more fees we are able to distribute right now uh the game is still in its infancy so we are not uh like overloading the rewards uh but it's based on the activity that we have around the game um and uh and sometimes like with the polygon grand prix uh we get to have a sponsors that that want you to showcase what we are doing or want to use our platform as a as as a mean of uh of doing advertisements and in this case the rewards comes from those sponsors so i think it's purely webtree uh on top of polygon right now uh and if the user have an email i can say how can they got their private key with the wallet so this wallet has no private key the way the way it works on magiclink is that the magicling is hosting a a amazon uh what's the name again ashikopvald yeah they run a nashikov vault in amazon and for each new email they create a new set of private key and public key and give us back the public key so that we are just uh we are just displaying the public key of the of the wallet so comment has no access to uh to the to the private key um and for the user to extract the private key um it's a process that we don't want to expose to the players right now what we would rather do is uh let the players migrate to agnosis safe with their email-based uh wallet and then claim the control of their news is safe using their own wallets but we don't we don't want to have them uh from the get-go install wallet and and try it out but rather like have a soft onboarding like hey okay you have an email it's fine to to have a 10 or 20 on on this and rely on the security of of magic link but as you get more and more money on those keys you should claim it and use it for yourself and as a user if you have your your your email wallet you also able to transfer the funds that you have on this wallet out right now it works for erc 71 and next week we will allow this for ese 20 and all all the type of tokens so you don't have to retrust us you can just earn some some tokens and send them back where you want or you can log in directly with your metamask and then join someone all right so as i said there is a there is a coupon system that let us distribute the nfts for people that want to try the game uh so i i give out uh some uh some some coupons to yesin so if you if you want to try it out just reach out to her she will send you a coupon and you will just have to go to the kiosk on the on game.com and claim your coupon to try it out um oh yeah one questions uh or for field on boarding do you use the credit card to buy matic or your token oh so you use credit card so we are working with ramp network uh so it's it's regulated in the uk uh it's handling the chargeback for us so it's pretty fine we are taking zero fees on that there's just the fees of a ramp network that i think they they tried to mutualize the the risk of uh having a chargeback on credit card but you can purchase a matic token and i think you can also purchase usdc uh on on the on on them uh if you can only purchase matic token you can purchase my titan and swap it to usdc on comment swap and you should be able to buy the must token with credit card we have a legal opinion on the form of the token it's not security but we are not integrated yet with a ramp network directly um i have a question i think i can also talk so right now your game is mostly around hunting those comments to to to mine some some tokens but i think from the gaming aspect that uh could become boring eventually if it's always just uh finding the next comment do you have any plans for like uh like some more features of of the game of course and uh in the thanks for for for pointing where it hurts uh if you if you play for three hours the game uh waiting for the next comment and passionately waiting and so on it can be boring and we know about this uh so a different way forwards for us is uh first to develop new games where you can use your nft and play around and have a different setup um when you are not playing and not liking the game or getting bored you can still put your spaceship on leasing or sell them but moreover for us we have a long stream of development where we want to add new features in the game some in predictability on how the comets are behaving and also going the the competition side of things so uh uh game game mode like uh like capture the flag uh or team vs team like capture the flag so you have a the comment is actually containing a big flag the first person that keep the keep the flag is going to be hunted by other people and if you get close enough to the people that have the flag you steal the flag from him and also introducing items so that the game becomes more dynamic um how can we collaborate to make special types of spaceships uh well fine here's my handle on telegram and on twitter uh do reach out i'm happy to chat happy to extend our presidency in asia and at the same time um and yeah so when it comes to increasing the the games uh mechanics and increasing the game modes and so on uh we have we've been focusing on adding uh new features for the onboarding over the past six months so we were live since six months so basically uh it started six months ago and now in the in the next six months we are going to focus on uh bringing more attractivity more more fun into the game than just uh positioning yourself and mining some comments but that's right this is where where we need to uh we need to improve a lot and and still we think that uh having a having a game arena where you have thousands of players that come from all over the world and are playing directly with the blockchain and experiencing the blockchain limitation or like one transaction that doesn't fit in this block but in the later block and so on is a is a fun way to uh to start to experience blockchain and eventually build a new type of game of those primitives so uh that's that's where we're heading so thanks very much john for your sharing and for your little qa session so