Theodore Agranat - How Gunzilla is Onboarding Mainstream to Web3 - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hope everyone is enjoying the first day of token 2049. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, with that said, uh I would like to show you guys a video. Welcome to the world first real Holy shile.

It's an absolute banger. A tick tock. What goblin? You can just use the blockchain as a tool to make your marketplace. 20 of the top Geese Force professionals and content creators drop on into Teardrop Island.

We've given out over $600,000. Zero Thank you. So that's um a little bit about who we are. So for those that don't know, Gonzilla Games built the world's first AAA web 3 gaming ecosystem called Gonz. We built this ecosystem with one singular purpose in mind and that is to onboard mainstream to web 3.

What we've accomplished since last October when we launched early access is half a billion transactions as well as onboarding over 15 million unique wallets. Why is it important to onboard mainstream? Well, Bapraider reported last summer an all-time high of daily active wallets. They reported a 70% increase over earlier that year. And that number was 10 million wallets of daily active wallets.

They said it's also not sustainable because most of the increase was attributed to farming and airdrops. So in order to succeed in our opinion as a web 3 project, one has to onboard mainstream users. What is the problem currently with onboarding mainstream users? Currently the issue is that most web three projects feel like it's an education issue of educating a person how to set up a wallet, how to on offramp fiat, and how to swap tokens. In our opinion, it's not an educational issue.

It's simply showstopper. Regular folks want nothing to do with these very complicated steps. I always use a little anecdote and that is nobody ever walks across Time Square, points at the pavement and says, "Oh, I wonder what fiber optic cable is underneath my feet and what speed it runs at." Yet in web 3, that is what is usually being touted. Oh, 150,000 TPS finality and all sorts of other things like that.

So, what we've done is we've abstracted away all of these complex things. A person never needs to set up a wallet. A person never needs to own or off any fiat. A person need never needs to swap any tokens. Our flagship product, Off the Grid, is also the first ever blockchain enabled game available on PlayStation and Xbox.

The person simply downloads the game. It's free to download, free to play, and plays. In the background, all the other processes are kicked off. A wallet gets set up. All the in-game items, you know, convey full asset ownership through NFTs.

There's a peer-to-peer marketplace where folks can trade their assets etc. I'll dive into so many details with this presentation here. So, Gonzilla Games was founded by Black Corv and Alexander Zol 5 years ago. They themselves had built prior to this a project called Warface that onboarded 150 million gamers. They also built the largest gamer matching engine in the world called Plink that currently has 18 million registered users as well as some other really cool projects.

Gonzilla is currently over 400 employees worldwide, most of them in our headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany and consists of some of the best game development talent in the world. What is the vision? The vision is not to build the best free game. division is to build the best battle royale shooter in the world. What we've done to that end is develop what we call the battle royale 2.

0 experience which includes 60 hours of story line on both sides of the conflict which has never been done before. So as you're playing a battle royale experience you can literally complete story missions and story lines. In addition to that we have obviously peerto-peer marketplace that has never been done before currently on you know PlayStation and Xbox within the whole kind of gaming experience. and a variety of other very very unique approaches. Our leadership consists also of the world's head of acclaimed sci-fi film director who was onboarded as a co-founder by the early team Neil Bloom who's the film director behind District 9 Shappie Elisium of Matt Damon and a couple years ago he also created the movie Gran Turismo of Orlando Bloom.

The Gonzilla products include, of course, our Gunzi ecosystem that consists of a custodial and non-custodial wallet, an NFT marketplace, an NFT minting engine, a visual blockchain scanner, and a variety of other tools. It includes our flagship product, Off the Grid, which as I mentioned is the first ever blockchain enabled game that launched on Xbox, PlayStation, and obviously also on PC. And it includes Game Informer, which is the oldest US-based gaming magazine over 33 years old, an iconic gaming publication that we acquired recently. Business model is fairly simple. It is rooted in, you know, real world business.

We have an optional monthly subscription for $12 a month. We charge a 5% fee on all of our marketplace transactions. And of course, we got the gas fees on our GunZ chain. So, what have we accomplished? In addition to the initial items that I've mentioned, we're the number one free-to-play game on the Epic Game Store, surpassing even Fortnite.

We were awarded game of the year by Decrypt and Games GG last year. We were also ranked among the top free stream games in the world on Twitch with over 130,000 concurrent viewers. So as I mentioned, Gonzi is our own layer 1 blockchain integrated fully into our flagship title off the grid. With all these tools that we built, we will be offering this as a SDK based and API based solution for autoa games both in web 3 and in web 2. The early traction includes, as I mentioned, over 15 million unique wallets hosted on Gunzi.

At peak, we had 900,000 daily active users. Over half a million peer-to-peer trades were facilitated in the past 30 days alone, and over 75 million transactions were processed in the last 30 days. The gun token was launched a little over a month ago on Binance and we currently have over 100,000 users subscribed to our OTG Pro subscription. Over 8 million hours of live streaming watched on Twitch alone. Um on the right side here is a chart that compares our daily transactions to some popular chains.

As you guys can see, for less than 6 months of activity in our test net for the early access launch, it's pretty much off the hook. The road map is pretty, you know, straightforward. We are continuously upgrading our offthegrid flagship product with new content, new game modes, etc. This is the launch solo mode which was a highly requested feature as well as a few days ago we launched crossplatformbased squads and friendship lists and matchmaking. And for Gunz the target is to onboard other AAA games into our ecosystem and make it just as easy to have mainstream onboarding to those games as it is for off the grid.

To find more about us, to find out more about us, you can reach us on X Gun by Gunz or for the game itself, Play Off the Grid. To try out the game, proof is in the pudding. You can try out the game by going to playoffthegrid.com or scanning the QR code and download the game on PlayStation, Xbox, or Epic Games on PC. We also are fully integrated into the Nvidia GeForce Now program, allowing users to play the game on mobile, Mac, older PCs, as well as TVs.

Having said all of that, I'd like to open it up to any questions if there's any audience members that have questions. Okay. I have a question. What is your current main market that you're looking for to attract more gamers? What the main market is?

Yeah. So, thank you. There's two answers to that, right? Number one, currently the game is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and then the Epic Game Store with a minimum system requirement of a 3060 GPU or higher. It's a very very visually advanced game with, you know, never before seen graphics in the battle royale genre.

So, it is fairly system intensive unless you use of course GeForce Now. So audience number one is of course one that has access to these hardware devices and that's part one of the answer but part two is currently I would say the majority of our players on consoles maybe around 80% uh the other 20 is on PC and I would say geographically we definitely have a very very strong player base in North America but we just launched a campaign with West Call the biggest kick streamer in the world um from Latin America and we started having massive massive demand in Latin America. We started recently localizations of our game into various different languages including Japanese. So we have a fair amount of Japanese players as well. Europe is a very very strong market for us and we continue expanding you know with localizations to onboard users really anywhere in the world.

Yeah, my question was uh why build your own L1 rather than go with Ethereum for example or build off of a scalable L1 or L2? What's the incentive behind that for you guys? Great question. So why build your own L1? Well, as I mentioned in the presentation, our number one thesis is that people do not want to be bothered with setting up wallets, swapping tokens, or on off ramping fiat.

So in order to abstract everything away and do everything automatically for the user, the number one priority for us was to be able to use our own token for gas fees because then we can abstract everything away and do everything for the user on their behalf. And if they wanted to directly interact with the assets, for example, our blockchain is natively integrated into OpenC, they can take custody of the asset, connect to OpenC, list the asset for sale, and quote unquote cash out. So that was really our initial prerequisite. In addition to that, these days, thankfully, because of the Avalanche ecosystem, it is made fairly, you know, easy to be able to set up your own L1, you know, on top of Avalanche. And that is exactly what we did.

So, we did try out a number of different solutions and that was the solution that worked and addressed our goals. So, that's what we proceeded with. Any other questions? Good. Hey, Ryan from Decrypt here.

Um, you previously said that the game will have to be treated a little bit differently on consoles because obviously they're not as pro- crypto as maybe an Ethics Games are. Do we know the details of how the game will be different on consoles yet? So, currently the game itself is identical, right? The game players experience is identical. Um, everything else as it relates to the marketplace and whatnot has not been announced yet.

So, we are not ready to talk about that yet. However, we did release a white paper on the 31st uh of March of last month and that outlines all of the components that we currently are able to talk about. And good seeing you here, Ryan. Thanks for joining. Anyone else?

We probably have time for one last question. Nope. All good. Well, thank you so much, guys. Appreciate everyone joining here.

Cheers.