NFTs & Metaverse

[Music] [Applause] [Music] uh we're going to be talking about nfts and metaverse um for this panel we'll have four amazing people join us we have dylan from figma we have rohan from diaper labs we have marguerite from neon district and moderating this panel will be drew austin from red bee adventures and um i'll uh welcome all of them here and uh have uh drew sort of go into introducing all of our panelists and having them talk about who they are so without further ado let's welcome our amazing panel hello how are we doing everybody good how are you doing i'm doing good are we jumping right in ready to go yes you are lead the way let's go let's do it all right hi everybody i'm drew austin uh i'm a managing partner over at red beer adventures uh and just to really brief uh i'll do we'll do a quick round of intros because um i think everyone here has just got such an awesome story and then we will uh we'll jump in and start talking meta verse nfts and and see where it goes um so my background i've been a founder 15 years in different frontier technology companies and over the last 12 months started up a venture capital syndicate called redbeard ventures have been very active in the blockchain metaverse nft space uh investors investing in two of the companies up here with dapper and marguerite's company as well from so um i uh we've invested in a variety of different metaverses from you know wilder world to super world to sandbox and uh art marketplaces like super rare and uh gaming companies like zed runs so we're you know we're really active in the space we're really excited about um investing in these in ecosystems like the flow ecosystem and some of the companies that are building on top of flow and um and i'm a personally i'm an active investor in nfts themselves i'm the top 50 portfolio holder on top shot and big stable on zed run and i uh and a lot of sandbox land that we develop and then recently we just released our own nft project called uh knights of d-gen which is a really cool project i did with a great team of people and we're having a blast man just learning and building and creating and investing and just meeting great people so that's been my my story uh marguerite you want to uh introduce yourself real quick yeah absolutely thanks drew um so margaret d corcell and ceo of blockade games we're building neon district which is a cyberpunk rpg we have uh dynamic nfts that evolve through the gameplay i've been in the space the blockade has been around for about four years now i've been in creative technology and in the crypto space specifically since 2014 um was one of the first artists in this space i've gotten to be here and see the entire space evolve as we've been exploring what's possible for creatives with blockchain technology so um of course i'm having a blast watching all the possibilities and iterations on nfts and where we are today um everything from like loot you know and seeing like people explore the different gamification um tactics plus just fine art in general watching sotheby's and christie's take off and get around behind nfts this year it's been a blast so anyways i'm very passionate about the intersection of the metaverse gaming fine art um and yeah awesome dylan you want to go sure hi everybody um good to see y'all my name is dylan uh i'm the ceo and co-founder of figma and we are a design platform so trying to make it so you can do everything from whiteboard and brainstorm all the way to design ui and ux to get that code into production uh and my interest in nft started really with the crypto punk's launch uh started to track it then um i was really lucky to kind of be earlier on the earlier side there and then uh with openc was thankful to me being a seed investor and have tried to be supportive and active in ecosystem sense uh and it's been amazing to watch this past six months eight months nine months whatever i don't know what time is uh and to see what's happening in the world of nfts um i uh i i think it's just an absolutely fascinating um primitive that we're going to see be explored in so many different ways and i think even on this call you know we've got you know a few different ways that it's being explored that we can talk about i remember actually at east denver when neon district launched uh from the hackathon project and i was like that's [ __ ] cool you know and so it's just awesome to think about like at this event what will be the projects that'll be like the next neon district uh or or actually i remember um when uh my wife then girlfriend was at either waterloo and she's like man i just saw this really cool thing it's called cryptokitties so there's been so many amazing projects that have come out of the youth global ecosystem and i can't wait to see what's going to come out of this one that's awesome ro yeah thanks drew um my name is ron garrett goes-luff co-founder and ceo of dapperlabs we've been big believers in the nfc space for for a while uh authored the original erc 721 standard on on ethereum built cryptokitties most recently focused on nba top shot and taking the nfts to the sports world and you might have seen we announced the la liga partnership a couple days ago another big one uh coming next week and we're also the original developers behind the flow blockchain uh which at this point has several thousand developers uh and fortune 500 companies building on top of it um but you know i have a very soft spot in in my heart for global events exactly because of what dylan mentioned uh i don't think crypto kitties would have happened if it wasn't for heath global and just bringing the community together giving you know we put little pictures of cats on pokemon cards and it was sort of the first time you know it's like hey cats can be collectible too uh and uh and sort of getting getting that kind of energy uh to kick off the project was was super critical so i'm really excited to be here and to talk nfts i think we're absolutely at the start of this journey and so everyone here is right place right time you know four years ago maybe we were a little bit early we had to grind a little bit but um i think the next quarter is going to be going to be super fast all right awesome so let's start a little bit let's like i think it's really interesting we have so many different approaches i think there are some things like it was kind of you know it's obvious when you think of blockchain and nft is that like gaming has a place for it sports cards have a place for it like you can get or has a place for it does anyone find it interesting what are your thoughts on this pfp movement the profile picture like i think that is it's like it is fascinating to me that of of all the things that like really would have struck a chord with people that these pfp concepts and communities really took off and i'm curious your thoughts like i mean marguerite what do you i mean you've been in this space for so long and you've been involved in some of the like i i would say some of the more like complex but also powerful concepts behind nfts this is kind of simple in a way but but powerful in itself so you know what are your thoughts on it you know what i think is really interesting about that is it is like the most tangible like i feel like when we think about the beginning of nfts and how people can understand what they are like the fact you can have these generative experiences of creating these images there's really no like in most in a lot of cases there's not a real formula that's like a gamified formula to them they're just like here's this drop and then we've generated all these like and then there's just rarities assigned to the different versions that are created which i think back to cryptokitties and how much more cryptokitties was like way more sophisticated and conceptually with like how they had dna and just the components so i find it interesting that people the complexity and what was interesting with as far as smart contract development around cryptokitties as well is not being utilized in most cases with these pfp projects it's really just the art like it's it's like this visual understanding of the transfer like this you can we can transfer the the images and people are just excited about that like it's just like they're really excited about the most simple part of the entire like world of what we're developing around nfts and actually dylan with eath moji like i have an ethmogee emoji was one of the first pfp sort of like projects where you have an avatar and actually i believe you worked alongside the openc founding team prior to open c uh on emoji and so like you know you had this composable it's a composable avatar essentially and how come like and it's user driven so you can build them how and like when are we gonna get from people from this phase of being given these generative pieces to where they get more excited about having hands-on like building as far as the outcome um i think i think like the whole everyone's learning that a limited distribution of 10 000 assets only for the function of like this idea of creating rarity but then we're like paywalling out any continued distribution of that model it doesn't really work and i think everyone that's building games like rohm knows i know you know this the the real um trick is to have a super wide distribution and then introduce rarity in a way that's protected by a game design that can build the ecosystem so anyways i think that it's great that people are exploring art and they're experimenting with crossover of community and intersections and interests but i do think everyone's learning very gradually that um like you see people in real time asking like oh there's we like this is a problem and how do we solve it and so people are walking through this path together and they're all walking towards gaming they just haven't realized it yet so we're all like so we've all been here what four years building this and so we're just waiting [Laughter] and so like the funny thing is for me so i bought my my first collectibles my first nft ever was i well maybe it was a cryptokitty but the one i really remember was super rare's art for some reason i don't know that's what really like completely transformed my perspective i think it was the end of 18 2018 and i bought some art on super air and i was just like that was it for me i was hooked because the concept made so much sense now i preached art i preached and at crypto to a lot of my non-crypto friends and no one came near crypto until top shot because that's that that was what got my social circle to finally have text groups that they actually were active in where we were talking about crypto and nfts every day so like rome what are your thoughts on this like on how on top shots roll in it's bringing these new people into nft community and then seeing them migrate to pfps and how that's going to translate into further you know the further evolution of the space you know tell me what your thoughts are look i mean i i think the profile picture uh you know i have a board ape you know i i think i'm a supporter of all of these projects but i think they're still pretty small they're much more status games for the ultra wealthy than they are um you know anything that that can sort of directly translate to to millions or hundreds millions of people and then you know if you look at even you know art like art blocks has about 20 000 19 000 total owners um [Music] the the only projects that sort of get close to breaking double digits triple digits um are you know zxc and top shot and it's because they they have that funnel that marguerite's talking about where you can kind of get started with you know without a huge investment and and you do stuff you can you can kind of you can get into habits in a sense and i think that you know the profile pictures um are are today kind of a um an amazing sort of um you know a an experience for for the wealthy and i think that that's that's been you know i in particular the board api call has pulled it off really well where they're creating so much community value out of out of the assets uh but they're also a hint towards what's going to be coming i'm sure some of the folks here heard that twitter is putting in authentication for for an entrepreneurship you know you can kind of say hey this is you know my avatar and to marguerite's point i think what the masters will want is more customization is more um you know just interactivity with their with their product maybe earning things for their avatar as as things grow and that's a big reason why we've been really big fans of genies um leaned in with the genius team because we think they're they're taking kind of a gen z first approach to saying well if we're all going to live in digital worlds and we need digital identities how do most people want those digital identities to work now ultra wealthy for sure they want like you know you want the picasso on your wall right but not that many people can afford that um and so um and so there's sort of how do we how do we bridge from from here to there um is is going to be really um an interesting an interesting exercise totally totally and unless i'm telling like the you know i think it's always funny and you're like you know you're very much involved in creative and art and this stuff is like in your world like i sometimes find it funny how like my friends now talk about art and it's kind of like it's almost like to the point where like we're at a bus stop they see an app oh look at the art on that bus stop like it's like you know anything is now art art has become the car it's really getting spec it's really interesting now people's definition of art like oh did you see the art on that camel i was like oh god but um so what is you know what is your thoughts on on how this is like what this is doing for the art world as well in the creative world and is it creating is it a good thing is it a bad thing what are your thoughts there oh it's a great thing i mean i think and obviously i'm highly biased in the answer i mean i'm i'm really you know a significant portion of my net worth is in nfts but i i think um the question of what is art usually drives art forward and regardless of whether we see uh nft art markets crash when a cryptocycle comes i wouldn't be surprised right uh you know sometime the next two years maybe sooner uh quite a bit sooner we'll probably see a crypto crash crypt is a cyclic asset it's not going to be up it up forever despite the mania that we're all in right now um and that doesn't mean that it doesn't have significance uh i think there's great significance here and i think that uh you have to basically separate the significance of sort of the conceptual from the actual monetary volume value that's changing hands and that's kind of why i think that the term collector is sometimes overused because you know there's a lot of speculators in the space that's okay uh speculators are sort of like creating liquidity pools for people to be able to buy this artwork and be able to invest in artists but i think if you zoom out to just um some of the macro trends that are going on you know we're going from a physical economy to a digital economy in a digital economy people want digital goods because they're living online right and i think that as we are navigating the digital economy um you know whether it's a profile picture you know i i've thought that several times oh man profile picture projects are dead and then i'm always reminded of sort of like the was it the patent office you know in the early 1900s 1800s whatever it was and they're like oh yeah i'm not sure any more patents will be exist will uh will exist after some time we should probably just shut it down uh you know and it's like you know then you see projects like four-day port api club where you see projects like the noun project where you've got actually uh this incredible group of people coming together to be able to buy a noun every single day contribute the funds to a dow and have that dao then be able to vote on what they should do their first act actually being charitable contribution which i thought was incredible um and so i think that uh every time we think that we see the limits of some type of the medium we're going to see further innovation because we've taken somehow we've created this honeypot for the world's creatives and they've come to it and they've realized that there's actually some money there as well and that for some of them they can actually subsist off that and from there that unblocks their creativity and i think that uh you know loot is another great example of that i'm obsessed with it uh haven't obsessed since it launched you know it's such an exciting project to me because here's an example of rather than having a franchise like sports or a created universe like neon district which are both amazing right um but instead it's like let's go world build together let's go figure out how as a community we can create a new world which i think really gets the definition of metaverse um you know no one really knows what metaverse means it's this collection of loose terms right now i'm pretty sure it's something to do with decentralization i'm pretty sure it has something to do with like yes and principle of improv i'm pretty sure it has to do with like building on each other's works and derivative projects and loot to me is right at the center of all those things and so i get very excited about that project and just see what comes from it so that's awesome so like let's so next driver of growth you know like so i guess my theory if i think about the thesis here it's like i saw you know we were in the speculation phase with crypto from like 2013 to 18. then there was the ico bubble that crashed the winter hit [ __ ] companies died good companies built and out came d5 and i think d5 brought utility an entirely new wave of value to the tokens that were able to sustain that winter um were well-funded with great teams and be able to then rise above and now have a phenomenal utility of kind of rebuilding the financial infrastructure from the ground up i you know in my perspective and you know margaret you might even say this was farther back but like i feel like we've been the two in the nft space since 2018. that's just my view maybe it's like 2017 or even 16. um and it's been a speculation phase as well like people speculating buying selling it's the the the the the foundational principles are we like to buy dope [ __ ] and we want to make money while we do it and like that's kind of a lot of the i actually kind of disagree with that i think that there are uh i think it's important that their people know there's a corner of the internet that's like long-term collectors that believe uh that there's a canon being created of nft art and that art like for example i'm a member of fingerprints dao which takes the thesis of you know they're the sort of on-chain art that is going to be the sort of native art form uh for nfts in blockchain and their entire philosophy sorry which one was that you said uh fingerprints now and their philosophy is to this is what i started to get really involved i asked the creator um he had bought an autoglyph that i wanted and i said hey you know can i buy that off of you guys and said sorry our entire point of view in philosophy and i was like sign me up i want to be as involved in this doubt as possible because that was exactly what i was looking for um and and so i i want i do want to just correct that because i think that not everyone is a speculator in the space sure okay so i think that's totally fair i would say i guess from my perspective the broad audience and if you think about see most of the buzz in conversation has a lot to do with speculation there are people that are dealing absolutely but i think the most driver of use around us nfts in the short term in the near term at least from what i've seen with my networks of people that weren't even crypto people that are now entering the space is speculation of price and speculation of value it's speculation of long-term or short-term value but then like i guess my point being here is that then they're like we go through this speculation phase just like we did with crypto there will be a winter eventually at some point and out of that i think you come to the networks which is the true native whereas the native home for these assets okay but in between that i think the metaverse is still a ways away true ways away what do you think are the nearest term next innovative drivers of adoption of nfts uh marguerite it looks like yeah so i actually i'm gonna throw this at dylan um i really believe that there's two spectrum like this when we think about the spectrum of innovation and what you're seeing why we might experience winters because there's a lot to be built still and on one end we're going to be exploring interactive nfts and uh what what infrastructure and framework will want for that across across all the different applications you know what we're going to need from our marketplaces to support that across the different applications to the other side is a no code remixing platforms which i think dylan is completely positioned to just knock it out of the park everything from his proof of concept with emoji to like now his platform with figma like so i want to know when is uh when are we going to have a no code remixing platform dylan well i don't know what that but the uh in terms of when that will be but i'm certainly not building it right now but i love the idea of remixing uh and i love the i think actually uh some examples of that recently just to call out some projects i think are really cool here uh one that i saw was deaf beef um and death beef has a series of projects they're basically audio visual experiments the blockchain they have the c code to render the projects in the smart contract and then they have a series of different artwork one of them series three is called entropy and for entropy whenever it's transferred the artwork changes and degrades kind of like if you have a record vinyl the more you play it uh the more scratchy it gets it's a similar sort of fashion that's cool another one that i thought was really interesting um was uh blitnauts and but maps and so but maps basically you had uh this entire process they used to basically mint on chain uh the artwork itself uh you could do things like compose and translate the color palettes as well as to draw and then from there you could buy the whip maps if you had missed that phase and actually meant what's called a butt knot which is sort of the next character in their created universe um also partially on chain and i think that that was also really interesting as a derivative work um the third that i'll point out is kind of similar to both ideas which is this project that not many people have seen yet called animal coloring book uh which is an example of basically you discover the properties of the nft as you are then minting it and then transferring it so every time it transfers it's an additive thing sort of the opposite of the series three uh you know def beef example it's you know you like have a nft called uh cat and i have some outline of a cat and then i transfer it over to you marguerite and you get you know the outline of the face and then i trans you transfer it to rohan and he's got the eyes and he transfers a drew the eyes are kind of like googly eyes you know and and uh it's just really neat because you kind of discover the nft as its transfer and i think um one thing that is going to also be really important for nft use is zero knowledge proofs um i think if you think about remix ability composability uh and also just gameplay you know if you are playing world of warcraft and you have your bag of items it's really important that people don't know exactly like what's in your um and zero knowledge proofs i think you could actually use them in the future i'm not saying that that we all have figured out exactly what it is today but one day we're going to have a world where people can play these games and have items that others do not know they have and i think that'll be just as important as the status games that people are playing on twitter today with profile pictures ron what do you think what do you think are you going to be that's awesome what do you think are going to be the next like major near-term drivers of unique adoption um well i think you're seeing it kind of across the board and i just want to say you know it's true that crypto is cyclical and will go through up and down markets and especially um nfts that rely on a lot of speculative energy would be affected um gaming historically does really well in sort of recessions of all kinds entertainment is something people need through thick and thin and and you know i mean we launched stop shot during a time and nobody cared what nfts were um and people came to it i mean admittedly there was an excitement about trading cards you know game basketball games weren't happening and so you know it just kind of tapped into a zeitgeist in a in a particular way even even back then but but it wasn't related to sort of crypto in particularly nor kind of the markets more generally um and so i think especially if if we go when we go through sort of that cycle you'll see nft projects that are much more about the communities they're serving and much less about tapping into a sort of stream of you know a speculative energy in a way to kind of market make and get into uh as the olympians sort of and i think that that will be good that'll be good it'll be a good chance for people to get in at the ground floor um i think that gaming is is the the sort of driver of you know adoption for millions of people um other than you know what i think what we're doing in sports is um is something that you know top shot itself can go from a million users to a billion users you know we're nba fans we're going to uh we're expanding to 3 4 billion sports fans with soccer etc but kind of seeing what let's say projects like chain monsters are doing where they're taking simplified gameplay from things like pokemon but giving true ownership giving trading creating meta economies around it that's going to do that that's going to be exciting for people through through thick and thin um and then the on the flip side is sort of music um i think it was chris dixon that said music is the industry or the biggest gap between sort of what the customer wants and and even sort of what the artist is able to do or are able to monetize because there's so many kind of middlemen there's so many established interests there's so many kind of red tape in between and and whether it's sort of projects like sort of record shop or audience or others i think there's there's um that there's so much opportunity and kind of bringing fans closer to people that care about um and so those are sort of three spaces so sports um gaming music are kind of what i get really excited about totally and i think it's interesting that like i mean i i think most people i speak to are incredibly excited about play to earn and the play to earn concept and and great gaming and i still think we're so early in that area like i you know i look at axiomfinity and it's like a it's kind of an odd game to be the game that's like the face of of a play to earn in my in my opinion but like i actually think there's a step before that which is owned her so there's like own to earn and then i think that we get to plato and i think the own to earn is kind of what we're seeing where defy is kind of shedding is kind of leaning into the nft space and by having certain types of assets you can like i think music could be the perfect perfect home for the own to earn economy which is you know a lot of people are now talking about are you going to get royalties by owning a piece of a piece of an nft that when music is played you get a percentage of those royalties what are you guys thoughts on that before we move into plato except i think it's super exciting i mean the idea of nfts is a productive asset which is also part of marguerite's reference to eath mochi sergey i said it creates freedom for people to have to have those passive income streams is so important yeah exactly and that was also partially the idea of emoji was the base layers that you could have or even just the things you built on top of that if you made a derivative work then you would get some income off of the new mint um the uh but yeah i think that um yeah that's that's an exciting very exciting idea and also just the idea of having some way to have the rights to an artist that you really like it actually will bootstrap new artists and ecosystem because basically you're betting on then you're saying okay let me go discover indie artists find the ones i think i'm going to take out that are going to take off get rights to some of their music or fractionalized rights to some of their music of course and then from there that will actually create income for me if i'm right and so it it enables this sort of uh class of people that are these super fans of uh what's next in the muse in the music world to actually monetize their passion and i think that could become really really big really fast uh i also think that just as long as we're talking about other categories of what could come with nfts it's just um i think we're all still trying to imagine what this metaverse concept can be and how this patchwork of decentralized systems will come together and no one knows yet but um i think that there will be a world one day that more people are spending time in online we're already seeing that we're already spending time online we're just not doing it in a very interesting way and so um you know i think that you know when i grew up i played neopets right and that was like a huge part of my childhood um i think that you know if you think about the fast forward of that to world of warcraft to uh other mmos uh to then okay games like dark forest which i think are are way more interesting than axe infinity to me because that's an example of a complex strategy game that basically incorporates nfts as game items is built in webgl on a layer two years and zero knowledge proofs in order to mine uh portions of the map that you can't see otherwise like you know there's so much uh exploration that can happen here it's only a matter of time before the first tripling game comes out with nfts but it's also just a matter of time before someone builds a virtual world that actual goods and services will be represented and and uh property will be presented as more nfts we're seeing some of that but i think we're going to see a different level soon and i can't wait i'm really excited for what that will be so that's like making me want to go in a couple different directions but i'm going to start here first um well one let's talk play to earn for a quick second because i think there's before i get into the metaverse part of this which i really want to get to what are your thoughts on the future of work when we think about plato like how does it impact the future of work because i like have some like weird philosophical thoughts on like you know what could happen to society if this like takes off the way it could margarite what are your what are your thoughts on on how played up like how played i can also come from an hr text i just sold an hr tech so like i think of when they think of play to work they think of like digital transformation i'm sitting here thinking like dude we're all gonna be working in the metaverse like that's the future of work but like what is your thoughts on the play to earn and future of work kind of uh situation yeah so i think that the challenge we've and the challenge that we're facing right now uh with building out these experiences is plato earn is really boughtable unless it is protected by a very strong game design and so even in d5 and even dark force dark force like it's really a game of who can build the best spot which is a game sure but is that fun for the person that's just trying to participate and walk in as a normal casual uh player no that's not fun right so um how do we build out experiences online that can engage an abstract human puzzle solving part of our um capacity that is different and is not boughtable and that actually is pretty complicated to build those kinds of game designs so i think that the space is currently exploring what has worked for the gaming industry and for a lot of these problems and protecting economies and we're trying to adopt them also uh with with our blockchain game economies so with the play to earn model um honestly games and the likelihood of games failing is is gigantic and that's why games it's really hard for investors to invest in gaming all by themselves now we've done this brilliant idea of adding like blockchain applications which are also very likely to fail that have never been experienced built before with games that are also innovative and very likely to fail and everyone's just going to try to figure out what formulas are working so that's why i think it's totally okay that people like loot were starting very small at a proof of concept we're finding the most like fundamentally sticky thing about the experience and then i believe we're going to see projects that are successful from there get funding because they've proven a sticky formula and they're going to be able to go build a whole concept and game universe around those experiences so i do feel like right now to iterate iterative uh building fail or build fast and fail hard you know it should be everybody's especially if you're just a engineer and you're just trying to get like a proof of concept off the ground but i i don't think it's the right move to go do something crazy ambitious like build your own blockchain ecosystem simultaneous with like building a whole new aaa game studio even if you have industry experience on one of those fronts bro hum i remember when rohan launched flow and i was like are you sure that that's a good idea anyways like that's so i i'm really excited about seeing all these little projects get off the ground because there's so much potential in various ways of um so it's great seeing things like loot and these other projects being incredibly successful and you can see that there's something magical there in the community to get behind it all right so before i move on to my next question i have to let rohan respond to being called roham is it is it crazy to have to building your own blockchain while you're building a game studio while you're building uh games and ip and all this other stuff yeah i mean it was nuts and [Laughter] we almost weren't able to do it and don't forget we also had to build the payment rails right dapper wallet today is is still the best user experience for uh crypto payments and and you know we process over a billion dollars uh there and you know it's fully compliant fully sort of uh a regulatory you know um very kind of well-lit experience the kind of thing that the nba and global uh brands want to use um that's why genies is plugging into adapter on flow because they're going to be bringing the billions of fans of you know their partners and their artists and all those things and what are those folks going to do go download metamask you know it's just not going to work have to acquire cryptocurrencies it's just not going to work um and then when it comes to flow you know when when you're looking at ethereum you're looking at uh l2s like there there's and then you know other other blockchains there are security trade-offs moving off of youth maintenance but each main net is too expensive for most things and so when we when shopify was looking for a blockchain um and for shopify uh partners to be able to win 10fts um they chose flow and when other fortune 500s are looking at um the kind of network that can support not just the scale or at the cost but also the user experience the customer trust we choose flow flow's got 2 million active wallets right now million of those verified unique users from dapper millions of those you know and across the other sort of non-custodial ecosystems those are normal people they're not um you know they're coming to play train monsters and play nba top shot and uh use record shot shop and all these things they're not coming to um you know we don't really have yet the the kind of d5 ecosystem that that would uh bring kind of the traders and and the speculators well even though that's possible so it wasn't crazy absolutely but but no question we made the right call because you know and now i'm looking at what's happening gas wars and ethereum we're looking at a smart contract has we built our own programming language you know cadence is the cadence was built from the ground up for uh not just nfts but also the kind of smart contracts we need the more complex kinds of smart contracts that hey we had to write four years ago for crypto but b when you come into dow's when you come into composable games um you know it's it's every single um every single step you know has to be thought of so you know we didn't do it lightly right like i spoke to vitalik multiple times we went through every other layer one um um uh architect and and you know from from sort of um and then we spoke to some of the later two teams although back then it was considered ron did you ever consider building a layer two as opposed to going like building like a version of like a matic in your own for your own instead of that we always think look like we're not interested we weren't interested in saying let's build a band-aid solution we're interested in saying 10 years from now who's building the right trade-off space for consumer apps and no one was and no one is right like the paths people are taking are are either splitting things into layer twos going down the road of charting um reducing decentralization all of this stuff and flow today isn't everything it'll be in five ten years but we're very confident it's the right trade-off space nobody was thinking oh we need to write our own spark contract language everybody's thinking oh let's use rust that's a great idea or you know solidity is fine it's been around for four years we just disagree nobody is thinking of re rethinking web3 you're saying well why not have you know metamask etc and then just use centralized wallets when you need it we disagree we think you need a wallet application interface that lets users um juggle lets users take custody of that same wallet right cycle keys through it and you know it's all of these like bits and pieces where we couldn't convince anybody to sort of adopt our approach and we didn't want to just build a appendage to to someone else's network we think that this is the right trade-off space and someone's going to eventually figure it out and so we said well let us all figure build it ourselves launch it with the nba uh bring on board and i know blow up open the gates right let anybody build on top um let anybody host nodes and that's the that's the path that's going down you just want to add one thing i'll keep it really short i think both roham and margarita are correct in different ways here so marguerite point one of her points was you need to if you want to be a successful gaming company you need to watch a lot of things do it really fast test your concepts and iterate on them i think it's absolutely true games are a hit business uh you know rohm's point was that usability matters you gotta do whatever you can to get usability to work uh even if it means doing the crazy things and i think that um we do need more people that are gonna do really hard long-term projects in this ecosystem dark force for example is one of those like i was really impressed with them because they integrated a wallet into the gameplay on top of layer two right and they went and did a lot of ux improvements because they also said metamask like no one's going to use it and that's not the way the future of gaming is going to look and so we're just in a stage and i also from figma have that bias you know took five years from going from starting figma to making our first dime uh from a customer right and so it's like these things take time uh and i think that um you know if you work on gaming maybe try to do these short sprints but sign up for a long time period and know that it's not all gonna work uh and if you wanna do like the large big project that's [ __ ] awesome go to it you know and find ways to fund it and use the community that's around you to support you uh and try to rally those resources okay so i wanna i know we don't too much time but i wanna hit the metaverse stuff for a quick second so my big question here do you think the metaverse takes off and when i say take off and i know so don't you actually have like kind of opened up the definition of a metaverse in a bunch of directions but in the guest release division in my head do you think the meta that the metaverse takes off pre-vr or do we need i think it already has okay look at roblox roblox is the metaverse okay so do that that's the that was my i guess that's kind of where i'm going it might not be a metaverse that we like in terms of it being decentralized it might not be a metaverse we like in terms of like you know it's a lot of kids using it it's not like a lot of adults using it but you know like i bet a lot of kids really want roblox instead of dollars right now yeah so your so your thought your your person your approach is you're i guess like so do you think that vr is even needed for the metaverse to thrive uh i i think i think that um it's vr ar are technologies that are coming and um over our lifespans uh they'll be just as important as mobile devices or screens um when exactly i cannot tell you um but i think they will become that and i think that people are already living online uh and i think that the fidelity at which they experience these metaverses will go up yeah i guess i guess because that you know when i think about this it's like if we are if we you know we're buying assets for a digital world um we're spending more and more time in the digital world the the the theory that i have is that eventually our digital world needs to become more immersive to facilitate a truly um kind of almost almost human-esque like experience um you know marguerite what is your perspective do you think like do you think vr is going to play a big role in gaming and in some in the driving of adoption of nfts and is it do we have to just wait till apple decides to throw their hat in the ring like what's what's your thoughts here no i i think like the open metaverse is going to win um and i think that um i don't think that i think users love collaborating and building and having the tools to participate and you can't do that and have that same ownership experience in a walled garden like no one wants to go build facebook's metaverse like no one's attracted to that um and i mean maybe there's a certain user but i can tell you the broader like everyone that wants to build the communities doesn't want to do like facebook's work for them um and so like i think that already like a little bit what dylan said is we're already here um i think that the little experimentation in the collaborative building i think that is the beginnings of the metaverse i don't know that there's going to be a definitive moment i i think there's just going to be intersections of projects that emerge and like they just continue stacking on top of each other and then people are going to work on those tech stacks to make different experiences possible and then people are going to have apis that connect i think you first of that is openc i think openc is the hub of the metaverse right now i think the game is inventory management and that's the bottom of the funnel at the moment and um instead of like everyone focusing there and you're talking about speculation like for example neon district we have 130 000 asset owners now and and so and it's a free to play game so people can onboard and with that wide distribution since it's free and you can just walk right into the game and then we introduce scarcity and people can use their accumulation of the indian currency neon which is not a token it's just you know like wow gold to buy and participate and compete for these rare assets um that is like for me we're creating our own universe there's a definitely an emphasis on creating our universe but it's a particular intersection and i have no doubt there's going to be overlapping like then diagrams of where neon districts and our user base like participates in other communities but i do think like giving your our users tools to help build out side quests help build outside stories have a star wars type universe where we drive major narrative experiences properties create the core economic value but give the opportunity and the bridges for other side economies to be building off of is going to be like that model for me is basically a microcosm of what i think will be the macro of the metaverse and i i think we are already building the tools and the assets that will be a part of it yeah one thing i'll add to margaret's points uh which remind me of is just how important distribution is it's a really boring topic when we're talking about the future but just if you're building a game you need to be distribution um and that's a huge channel for you uh and so i think like that's one of the reasons i'm so excited about things like loot is because it creates an inherent distribution channel which is all the holders of flute especially as that ecosystem gets built up and people know where to look when i think about the open metaverse i think one of the challenges that we have to solve to make it work uh which i also heavily subscribe to like marguerite i really want that to happen versus like having some you know evil monopolist overlord which is basically every other metaverse font fiction they all have one um and i think what's important is how do we create distribution for people that are creating projects in this open metaphors very cool okay so uh we only have three minutes left so i'm going to ask a quick question for each person real quick name a project that you're excited about right now an nft project we got like everyone's got their own little pet their own little like fun projects they're excited about um i'll drop one that i think is pretty cool because you guys just mentioned uh uh loot there's a project uh a buddy of mine was it is involved in building called geohashes and i think geohashes is super interesting because it's also another derivative project but they built this derivative project over google earth so anyone that needs to use mapping and locations and proximity they created this whole really interesting model around like a geohash encodes a geographic location into like a short string of letters and then you can you know then you can do whatever you want with that building building block so i thought that was like in the spirit of loot i think we're going to see other building blocks like that that are going to come out and now i'm really excited to see what games and what ways people utilize this stuff so that was one that i just thought was worth calling out um dylan which one uh tell me one that you're excited about i've already talked a lot about loot death beef uh others um might be is it d-e-a-f yeah d-e-a-f-b-e-e-f um i think that that's just uh uh the the potential of on-chain media there is really exciting what i'll talk about instead uh is just sort of what i'm calling the nft chain rule which is basically that a means value is proportional to the number of derivatives that are made off of it and so i think like as you're looking at projects so there's a meta answer but as you're looking at projects i think that the the projects that will have the most value are the ones that will ultimately spawn derivatives um and i think that uh that's one thing to keep in mind as you're looking at different projects do you think the derivatives have value there's a huge debate about that uh no i think that actually the derivatives create value i know for the thing that they create drifters on i agree with that part the question is do you think the derivatives that are created are also valuable if they also have derivatives that's well played well played margarite what do you got yeah so actually i'm launching a new interactive nft in a collaboration with tim king he's also known as illustrator and we made it interactive nfc with so it's with beat mixing taking stems of a famous artist that we were working with for a major brand for a big drop it's one of their first like like this big brand's first drops and um anyways it's a game also so as you as you remix the stems according to how it's supposed to be produced there's little you know of course with me making crypto puzzles naturally there's like like a crypto puzzle type game a whole inter like the remixing but the fact you can even do this from open seas asset page directly with iframe support and i'm excited about this because of a couple things one interactive nfcs and gaming directly from asset pages but then two um the fact that with music and stems i believe like this is a proof of concept imagine you could have an entire library of stems in which people could use for remixing purposes to create new content new interactive nfts for different experiences you can have live streams of djing um and and and like having audi like the visualizers that match and so you could have these nfts that are showing you've got a dj streaming or a radio station that's playing i just there's so much to play with so i'm excited because that's kind of like a side project i've been working on and it's um dropping in about two weeks very cool very cool roman what's exciting robot what's exciting for you uh i already mentioned train monsters they just did a million dollar uh drop last week which which went really well chain monsters yeah that's the sort of pokemon um uh derivative derivative of it uh and and people are starting to kind of think about what what does it mean to go on top of these things um the dr seuss app just went into testing and that's cool because it's mobile first um it's also trading first so it's less about um you know flipping for high dollar amounts more about trading and completing sets and and then this sort of thing so um y'all should sign up sign up for that um and as an art platform i really like versus and all of these are flo versus sort of um totally uh on chain um the actual site itself is um uh it is also serverless and and it's uh it's really neat uh setup because it kind of pits the big whale against the community and it says well will will the thing become a one-of-one or will it become you know uh more of an addition where uh multiple people can have access so that's interesting those are some of the uh some of the more uh someone else i'm playing around with today awesome awesome i know where can we find you guys what's uh twitter handles real quick dylan i'm coin underscore artist okay and i'm at your austin guys this is a lot of fun cartoon thanks for having us this is great thank you guys thanks for having us ron thanks again for this amazing talking thank you very much we're moderating drew this is great thanks again everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] you