EthCC 2: Matias Nisenson

okay guys how's it going good sorry about that anyways when when I first connected my computer was I thought it was my computer making the noise so I'm glad it wasn't my name is matthias with experimental which is a blockchain gaming company a blockchain gaming studio and i'm gonna try to explain you what and how it was to build a blockchain game we built crypto Wars for the last year it was a huge challenge both technically and you know marketing wise so I'm gonna just go for it this title was basically because we literally fund you know self-funded the operations of crypto Wars for the last year and we finally go to a product you know that users love and are you are using or actually using which is weird you know in the crypto space at least for now this is just a small you know a really small intro with myself I have the typical entrepreneur intrapreneurial life or bio you know I I drop off of college you know I just I just founded a tech company when I was like 20 or something like this then I sold it to a European competitor then I went and started working for a VC you know I deployed a couple of million euros in in several tech startups and I finally got into the blockchain space I'm here we're now so this is just you know for you to know why you know what's my background and this is a bit the timeline of the last year that's been you know super crazy for all all of us I think in every in every particle of blockchain we had a bullish market then we had this shitty bearish market you know any changes a lot even if you don't want it and you're you know you're behind the tech and you don't care about the price and all this stuff you know it's it's a huge difference between last year and this year but I'm gonna go step by step and I'm gonna show you this slide you know times many times for early so you understand how the journey has been let's start in the beginning yeah okay so one year ago we had this idea we said okay blockchain gaming could be super cool if done the right way but there were many many technical issues so it was at that point just basically a dream the dream would look like at least our dream would look like a strategy game which is completely skill based so there is no randomness it's not betting it's not gambling it's nothing like that it's skill based so your decisions will determine your outcome basically the idea is that the users own their assets so they can make money out of the game they could potentially leave out of you know of their of their gaming experiences and eventually you know if the developers you know if as we do are wrong you know we do whatever like we take bad decisions or we don't do our jobs faithfully they could just fork the out of our game and do you know a new game using our code and that would be amazing if that happened not for us but for the community and they could you know they can potentially do mods underwater it it you know whatever the fact they want that would you know this was basically the dream but it had many problems one of them being scale there was no way to scale a game like this you know I here go L to like layer 2 solutions or an existent like there was nothing then there was no support for m'lila and how do you do a game if you can do mobile it's like you know in China it's like 90% of the market or something like this so it was a problem as well transactions were super expensive you know gas cost is you know it's impossible to play a game where you have to pay you know gas for every transaction and then you have to sign every single one of the transaction so the UX was a nightmare as well again this was only a year ago so you know things go fast even though even though we had all this Pro we decided to blindly you know start coding to blindly start writing lines of code I know this is a shitty movie by the way yeah but it was a good example and we say to go for it we say to self-funded you know we just made you know a decent amount of money selling our last company so we decided like okay why not okay and this was around here right then the bull market came the bull market came and an American BC fund this is like for you to understand how early the market is this was the only thing we had a landing page that said okay we make up you know we make amazing blockchain games we had a few drawings here whatever but we had nothing nothing literally not even one line of code right and this American PC came and said like oh yeah I trust you guys I'm gonna give you two million dollars we said no to that we thought it was I don't know like not decent or something anyway so I'm gonna fast forward a full year where we worked our asses off every single day and the bear market came and we said okay I think it's you know it's it's been enough time and in enough risk of our own we invested out saying this year My partner Luciano and myself we invested about like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars or something making the you know the game and everything and a year of overtime that at that time you know I was making a really decent salary in the VC firm and Lucho my partner was making a super good salary as a CTO in another company so it was it was a lot of risk we decided it was time to raise some money and we decided what we needed was half a million dollars and we went for it we just closed this like literally today or yesterday but we really struggled to do it and we struggled to do it having the first fully decentralized strategy game on the world like we literally built that you know it was a working product an amazing team that we can show that you know it's ten people that work every single day full-time all like really good engineers marketing people illustrators designers whatever and the most important thing the validation of a few thousand actually not hundred users which is the most important thing even though we had all this we struggled to raise five hundred thousand dollars when you see people you know that they raised like 100 million with nothing this is what a bear market looks like anyway so this is the lesson always you know always raise money when you don't need it coming back to this I'm gonna now we would be here right I'm gonna tell you a bit about the the market itself the market situation right now and then I'm gonna go to the you know to a happy part where we have users and the game works and everything so the blockchain gaming industry today this was last year I think in this same room or maybe one of the others who knows but you know same conference at least and we were talking about scalability all the time you know it was a whole conference everyone talking about scalability I think scalability is still an issue but I think 2019 is gonna be the usability year there are many things we need to fix on that side and so here you know it's a basically a comparison between the last year problems and today's problems you know gas codes the throughput of the network transaction signing desktop only most of the things worse were sold using side chains and delegated proof of stake I'm not sure if you're familiar with this but I'm not gonna get into this because it's gonna take me forever and then you know last year it was only desktop there was no way to run a game on a while and then you know trust while it came out I trust wallet you can basically browse you know any any websites on the theorem network with no problem and then loom and all these layer 2 solutions that are delegated proof of state came out as well and now you can basically play a game in any browser it doesn't need to be a web 3 browser you know any kind of router so right now you can play our game crypto Wars in literally any any bro a while but these are the problems I think we have to solve if we want random people you know the average Joe average Joe to join our games basically you should be able to buy like a couple dollars of eath without making it a nightmare and a week on everything then how how do I hold my ear safely and not get hacked and all this stuff recover the keys everyone's talking about that and then interact with the network which is so it's also a problem you know meta masks and all these things are not really UX friendly user friendly as I said scale is not quite solved but I think we're getting there we all know that layer 2 is one of the solutions there is proof of concept you know we saw it work there is as I told you delegated proof of stake there is proof of authority networks there are many things that have shown potential right and this is just one of when we just launched the tournament this is what happened so every time we had like 500 trade sanctions at the same time the network would go down and then 500 transactions at the same time and we're going to go down go down but even having you know 500 transactions is it's definitely a level up to say it in a way but it's funny how at the same point you know the whole network would go to just to for you to have a scale of how small these industries nowadays we only have 20,000 active users monthly which is nothing it's literally last year we had a hundred and twenty six thousand users in the whole year so again the industry's really really really small at this point this data was provided but the breather anyway so this is this is the same claim we made that last year we think blockchain gaming will will bring massive adoption of cryptocurrencies of blockchain technologies and all this stuff because the rationale it makes a lot of sense right the the the fact that you can own and truly own your digital assets makes a lot of sense for the users for the developers for everyone else the the fact that you can you know that the the assets are interoperable this means you can play I don't know crypto kitties and they plays play crypto Wars and use your you know your cat from crypto kitties in crypto Wars or some weird thing like this data is that you can you know use your assets in every single game then it's you know it's liquid it's a liquid market you can make money out of the of your gaming experience you can sell your assets you know it's super interesting and then we always say we always talk about safety and fairness just because it's an open public that database yeah so basically you can check whatever is going on no you know the developers can't do unfaithful stuff basically anyway so if we say all this stuff is going on why is it still such a small market right and this is just like you know a small thing I loved III love maker I love the whole thing but I think it's not the cleared up like I don't see I don't see my mother my sister or any of my friends who are crazy about soccer for example saying oh I'm gonna buy a stable coin you know this sounds fun I'm gonna learn how to you know do wallets and all this stuff to buy a stable coin I think this is great for people who already know about cryptocurrencies and they then they have a solid way to keep their value you know safe but I don't think it's gonna drive new people into a community anyway so coming back why is it such a small market if we have all these benefits right and it's it's really simple it's a chicken and egg problem if there are no users and we don't have users now there are no games because why a big company why would any big company invest money on a blockchain game if there is no market right when they already have market for mobile they have market for consoles so why would they do that and then if users don't have games why would they start you know learning about blockchain stuff so it's no users no game no game no users no users no infrastructure no infrastructure no games and it's you know basically an eternal loop there but this should be easy to solve right there are many companies getting into space such as we did you know we did it completely blind completely blindly we invested our money we took the risk and it you know it's working out more companies are doing so Yui soft I think they have like 14,000 employees and they just announced they're gonna do a blockchain game and they have a blockchain team and they're hosting blockchain events so you know it's it's it's already happening I'm not sure if you are familiar with these two VC funds but these are like the biggest funds in America and racing Horowitz and Union Square Ventures both just invested in on a blockchain gaming company which is amazing news because these guys you know are the guys who invest in the in the Facebook's and the two years of the world so if they invest in this technology is because they really believe it might work in a massive way not just like in a community and small community way and then $0.10 I don't know if you have ever ever been to China but and send this like this mega corporation that controls basically everything and they're doing blockchain games right this is this is just like you know I've been to China I stayed in China for a month a couple months ago and it was you know Chinese usually as you know as if you could have a a crystal ball and look at the future in this case Chinese also that I've been there and you know I was telling everyone that we had I don't know like 3000 users or something like this and Chinese people were like like they literally have blockchain games with millions of users the only thing is you know the political situation in China is completely I mean the political social economic and every other situation you can think of is really complicated in China so all the block chains are private and if you have a private blockchain you know just how about a database which is the same thing but if I think in the West we could potentially represent you whatever they did you know to get to this point but we're open block chains such as acid theorem open and decentralized and the whole thing but this is it's an eye proof that it could actually work anyways so coming back to the to a timeline to the past it's our last company the one we sold to the future millions of users just like in China but open and public we say we don't like how it works in China how how is it supposed to be in the West or in the whole world or whatever this is our our vision for for crypto gaming we created crypto Wars which is a strategy game as I said it's the first one to be fully decentralized it fully runs on smart contracts and if you want it is something similar to clash of clans in the sense that you have to build a village you have to build buildings you have to mine you know your research is someone an army and go attack your opponents this is crypt wars this is just for you to have an idea how it looks like I know it looks nothing like clash of clans I don't know if you tried it but how many of you knew about crypto Wars before this ok let's go anyway so it looks like this you know it's a much more transactional game you know being you know fully running on the blockchain means that you can't you know move your your character to the right move your character to the left you have to be really thoughtful on what what kind of transactions and actions the users the users can make so this is why it looks like this much more transactional this is your dashboard this is where you create and upgrade all your buildings as you see well you can upgrade to live level 5 here and everything will run from there this is something pretty cool we launched a couple months ago it's just you know the same business model than done for Knight to say in a way we sell skins that are just aesthetic like they don't modify your game experience there you know they just make you look good or better people went crazy you know about this some of the like some of the bows and the swords and these kind of stuff sold for like or $1,500 stuff like that anyways so this is what we launched yeah I think we launched it like a couple of months ago there is a free one if you want go check it out it's marketplace dot t-- 1 1 dot io yep well these are all all obviously NF T's right non-functional tokens so in 21 this is a bit of our crypto Wars ended up working out 50% of the people who played crypto Wars in the first tournament spend more than 50 more than 10 hours a day for seven days straight like we literally had people that didn't go to work and then when when they lost the tournament they were like dude but I didn't go to work I need the money and I was like okay that was your shitty decision of mine we had over 450,000 transactions in a single week which was great for a first test of a blockchain game a couple of years taking pictures go ahead and this is what happened I showed you this graph before now I'm gonna explain it away we're running on a thing called luke loom network loom has an amazing team I think they're like 80 80 people and they're basically trying to solve scalability problems right will layer two solutions with side chains basically the main net which is you know the main blockchain and you have a side chain which is much faster and doesn't need you know sign-in for every single every single transaction and gas costs are lower yada yada but still you know even though they're doing an amazing work an amazing job things are not great and there were tournaments we hosted two tournaments one like a month ago the second one ended ended yesterday both have I don't know like a lot of lag like it was super laggy it was super you know like the network got clogged every single time so the blocks would pass really slowly a single block is supposed to you know to pass in like five second five seconds and some took like ten minutes so it was really hard to play at some point but it also like in you know in some other points it run really well but anyways we had this kind of downtime like two three four times a day which is not good but you know it's again these guys are in alpha we are in alpha we were the first game to deploy in the new network so you know everything is pretty new pretty innovative and I think this is the right the right approach so it's gonna take time but at some point we're gonna have stable blockchain games with thousands of users well this slide was obviously made by tech person right not like the others but yeah I'm not gonna read this I'm not gonna try to explain this but basically what what lucha who is my my CTO is saying here is it's really hard to build this you know it was a crazy challenge that we are still trying to you know to solve or to do pass by but yeah that I mean that the main problem here is you're you know you have to support like hundreds of thousands of transactions in real time and every time the network goes down or whatever happens you have to try to fix you know backward like to look back and fix all these transactions that had problems all these have you know has to be done in our back-end and then show it in the front you know it's it's really like a big challenge I'm gonna blow this presentation so if you want to read this in in detail yeah yeah you can do it okay so as we had so many problems with aetherium and with loom and with with everything a lot of new players started appearing right you know you probably heard of drone you probably heard of us Neil and a thousand more that you know just appeared out of the blue we said no to every single one of them some of them were offering like $100,000 $200,000 just for us to port the game into their network that's how they do stuff they pay developers to you know to switch to their network and as if you don't really believe in that you know in the technology it's an obvious thing that you would change right because why not you're offering me money you tell me it works better than aetherium why wouldn't they do it well this is our explanation to that we wanted to build a blockchain game and a blockchain game is supposed to be decentralized it's supposed to be open and all the you know the characteristics we like to see in a blockchain game so this was like a good metaphor that that I came up with basically you're trying to build an electric car right and the electric car would be the decentralized and open game on the blockchain and then you say Oh electric cars you know have like really low autonomy you know it's gonna go for I don't know two hundred kilometers and that's gonna beat and then you say oh I can solve this problem with gas I'm gonna throw gas into the car okay well that's not an electric car anymore and that's exactly what iOS drawn all these networks are doing they're basically you know sacrificing the centralization for speed and that's what that database is right like a sequel or or in any of this so yeah we're not gonna do that and this this is the end of it the idea is we're gonna host a crypto Wars tournament that is starting in about one hour that's gonna start we're gonna have either prices the price for the winner is gonna be too easy and this tournament is sponsored by the gay the guys at stake capital who are who are right there they're one of the notes of the validator notes in loom in the loom network so thank you guys and make sure to subscribe subscribe there it's gonna be a three day long tournament whoever comes in the top three positions it's gonna win easier if right so make sure to do that I'm gonna I mean if you want sorry if you want the presentation I think the best way is just shoot me an email and I'm gonna shoot you back the percentage if you want to join our tailoring group that was you know there are discussions every day they're pretty interesting stuff and also like game funds and this kind of thing make sure to join and that was it guys thank you if you have any questions again do we have time for questions or have you thought of using innovative business models like something more on the economy part or the business more part of this yeah yeah yeah so the idea is to have three or four different revenue streams one is the skins I showed the second one is basically to be able so we don't want these games to be you know two-way pay to win games we don't want that we want them to be free to play and definitely not pay to win so the idea is that you can take crypto into your village for small boosts and then you can you know you can gain whatever more attack more defense whatever but that also makes you a better target right because you have crypto that people can steal so in that way we would take a commission of all these boosts and that you know that's one of the rainiest streams and the other the last revenue stream is basically taking a commission on the exchange part of this users will be able to have like p2p resource exchange and that's one of the of the other business models for now it's only skins we're just thinking you know for the future thanks anyone else tell okay cool thank you [Applause]