Alien Worlds - How a Game Set the Stage for DAO Innovation - TOKEN2049 London 2022

so the first thing I suppose that we need to talk about is what's happening in the markets right a little bit bumpy some of us have been busy in the morning and yesterday and I think you know those of us who've been around in crypto for a while have seen a number of these types of Cycles this one you know a little bit different involving some of the largest institutional players but what I think that really speaks to is the importance of utility right the importance of fundamental usage people using cryptocurrencies being involved in project um and really taking the emphasis off speculation and then all the leverage and so on that can be layered on top of that and one of the best parts of the market that we've seen utility really make an impact is in gaming blockchain gaming huge amount of capital entering the blockchain gaming space a lot of users are discovering crypto for the first time in blockchain gaming and I'm going to talk about why and why we are seeing that happening in alien world so I'm Sarah McKenna I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dakota we've produced the game Alien worlds which is the largest blockchain game in the world by users so we're a decentralized game we're built entirely on chain which is fairly unique and we believe that partly because of that on-chain construction we've achieved this Mega scale of being the number one game by users okay so we feel that gaming is the gateway to utility within crypto to adoption within crypto people downloading their first wallets but of course the concept of digital Goods within gaming is not new right so digital items have been around since about 2006 so that's the year in which they were the first downloadable items within games and already in the sort of previous Incarnation before crypto but when there were digital items within games there were some pretty big volumes happening there so in around 2015 a platform called opskins that was a trading platform for in-game digital items had already reached a hundred thousand dollars of daily trading volume and in fact the opskins team later produced wax which is the blockchain that we're running on but that shows kind of the the progression of this way of thinking about gaming and the assets that people earn within gaming which is that those digital Goods can be things that people own and can be things that are traded although at that time it was in the pre-blockchain Incarnation of that and then just to give you a bit of a sense of scale of what we're talking about and why this is such a big story Beyond blockchain uh this is the number of hours per week that people spend in the US playing games 16 and a half hours per week is the average person in the US and their amount of time spent gaming and globally 210 billion dollars are spent in gaming okay so I'm just going to set the stage a little bit with another concept which is the metaverse so the metaverse is the context within which a lot of blockchain gaming is happening um this is a 15-minute talk so we're not going to get too deep into sort of metaverse theory but um what it's important to know is that a metaverse is basically a digital space and a space is a persistent place that people go to do something they conceive of it as being a single space they're coming together and one of the important things about that space is that they're able to interact directly with each other right like so if we're in normal space I can interact directly with you guys here I don't have to sort of go through a central person or ask permission for that normally within a single space we're able to interact directly and that's also one of the features of the digital space that is a metaverse is that people are able to interact directly with each other and one of the best things that blockchain technology enables us to do is that kind of direct peer-to-peer interactions right without making recourse to essential intermediaries okay so we Define a metaverse which again we're talking about blockchain gaming so we're talking about the metaverse because these two concepts are interrelated the metaverse is the space in which a lot of blockchain gaming is happening today one of some some of the features of a metaverse is that it should be built on or involve interoperable blockchain so you should be able to Port your assets your account your identity your reputation your levels the person and the things that you have between your gaming activities on different chains all within a single metaverse um you should own those things immutably which is of course what blockchain technology allows us to do and there should be the capacity for people to be autonomous to self-organize to set the rules of their own engagement with each other and this is the really key thing that we're introducing to the whole Space so I was mentioning that Shane and I used to bump into each other when we were block producers and building the stack technology and we're now building this exactly the same technology we call it Dows now that's what this part is Dows enabling self-organization for groups and communities so people coming together on a blockchain are dows and we see the Dao as the differentiator for the metaverse proposition so there are metaverses arising in the world today that don't have Dows or don't foreground Dows we really see that as a missed opportunity and you know we think that Dows are fundamental to what the metaverse can do because a Dao is a way for people to come together on chain a Dao is a tokenized group of people it's a it's an account on the blockchain that has permissions governing it so that the transactions and the assets that are held within the chain are subject to the rules of that account so if you have this blockchain account and you have a group of people collectively managing that account one of the great applications for that is collectively managing gaming assets those same gaming assets that we were talking about a few slides ago that started back in 2006 and then had Arisen by about 2015 to be digital assets that weren't on chain but now that they are on chain they can be governed within Dows and this allows for Collective management of these assets and management of these assets across gaming environments rather than being within a single game okay so what then does the Dow allow people to do so here we're talking about a historical model of how producers and consumers would interact so this is like the normal economy where somebody produces something and somebody else buys it so you produce bananas you grow bananas and then I buy that from you it's a relationship like that where I pay you for the good in question and with the Advent of the internet and web 2 models of transactions on online what we saw was that we did have a sort of second important thing or third important note arising which was content creators who were hyper important within the system but they did not have co-ownership of the system right so in this case the producer would be the platform owner like Facebook or Google and this play in this case the consumer would be actually all the people that were giving meaning and value to that platform You by posting your photos and all of your comments were giving that platform value but you didn't own any of that right you were just giving up that value and in fact you were being monetized through advertising and the best that you could hope to do if you wanted to monetize that situation was to become an influencer like the best content sharer but you still didn't have an ownership position what's happened with the Advent of the Dows so this way of managing people and assets on a blockchain is that we have this so what we had a sort of straight line turning into us you know semi-triangulated system but without ownership we now have a circular relationship okay so people are on the same level everyone is a co-owner of the system because it's being described by the tokens of that system now not everybody might have the same ownership right so Dows are stake weighted that means that if I have more tokens I have more of a say in what happens and that's for lots of reasons mainly around security and securing the Dow and ensuring that decisions are being made by people who have a lot of investment in that system but so it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody owns the same number of tokens and therefore has the same say but they're all on the same level right nobody has a sort of preferential type of role within the system everybody is a cone or on the same terms it's just some people might own more of the system than others because they put more into it so I think you can even if like a lot of the detail here is not something you want to take in I think what's interesting is that we've moved from a linear to a triangulated to a fully circular model of co-ownership and managing of assets and I think probably most of us can see that that's likely to involve a lot more people caring about the outcome of what happening in the system and a lot more people wanting to drive the value of that system forward okay so talking about alien worlds my project a little bit so we're on three chains so we are an example of a metaverse that is operating within interoperable blockchains there's more work to be done in terms of interoperability but um the token is is interoperable between the three chains our fungible token Trillium sees around 10 million dollars of daily trading volume uh we also have about 10 million daily on-chain transactions but in our context a transaction is a person playing is a play action right so every time somebody plays the game that's happening on chain you can see it on a block Explorer pretty unique right you play a game and then you go over onto a block Explorer and you can see that play action like a mine action or a stake action we also have about 240 000 daily active users or unique accounts playing the game and just to give you a sense of how the trajectory of the project happened so we launched the sort of in-game economy in November of 2020. a few months later in May of 2021 we launched the Dows as blockchain accounts where you were able to stake and they were competing each other with each other for steak and so the Dows are competing with with each other within alien worlds and then about a year later so just this month or just last month a couple of weeks ago we opened up those Dows to voting so we now have community members voting for each other in our six Dows that are competing against each other within the game we have about 60 community members running to be custodians on the Dows this is the largest implementation of dows in blockchain history involving the most number of people uh super super exciting quite a historic moment actually for blockchain technology because it's involving the most number of people within daus oh right and so November 2020 we opened up so just in fact a few days ago we opened up those Dows which we're calling syndicates to custodian control and this is just giving you a sense of our scale versus axi and a plan to other games in the space in terms of users or or daily active wallets playing the game okay so I we we saw before that progression from a linear to a triangulated to a circular kind of model of participation and ownership and one of the things that it's really useful to see is what's the consequence of that why does that matter well it means that everybody is building the system together so in our case that's my company that I'm the CEO of to Coco but we have other game developers that are not connected to decoco who are building products services and games and family and world's metaverse we have our Dows right so these six Unchained Planet entities and we also have a galactic hubs fund and other developers all of these parts of the community are building games lower tools and events and they're building it because they're financially incentivized to do it they're part of something they own the tokens together it's not just my company working a way to try and develop all of the IP the games the content the events all of us together are doing that and that's incredibly significant in terms of gaining scale but also in terms of maintaining a highly vibrant Innovative environment okay so this is just to give you a little taste of How It's organized so I mentioned 6 at Dallas these are actually kind of real Maps so these show the land on the six planets land land is our nfts in our metaverse and you mine on these six planets so you select a little piece of land that you want to mine on and then you earn the fungible token Trillium which you then stake back into the planets that gives you voting rights on that Dow you can run to be a custodian yourself so each of these is governed by a council that's voted constantly by the members of that Dao and then the each of these Dows so these are planets but they're Dows they control the planet treasury so that's a treasury of Trillium it could also hold other types of cryptocurrencies that are interoperable with it and so the custodians the player elected councils of those treasuries govern those treasuries and can allocate them to the purposes of the community wants so those councils then consider the governance proposals and they improve them all on chain completely transparent you can check it all in a block Explorer and so what are they actually building and evolving they're building third-party um games we've just had a fighting game released by a third-party developer they're building lures tools games and events my time is nearly up so I'm going to move through this is showing essentially that governance system that I just described some of our numbers and we've got 70 candidates currently running on the Dows 100 plus votes have been cast um six million plus Trillium is used in voting and as I mentioned we actually only opened the voting and the governance up recently and I think the main thing is that I'd like to encourage you all to become a custodian so this is really a unique moment in blockchain history because this is the biggest implementation of Dao's to people that we've seen in history any one of you could become an elected custodian go to play.alienworlds.io and be part of this moment in blockchain history