Driving Mainstream Adoption through Media, Entertainment & Video Games - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

stand up hey everyone yeah my name is Brian um so yeah we'll be I'll be talking about driving mainstream adoption of uh web 3 and crypto through uh media entertainment and video games um so uh quickly about my background in my previous kind of life I was a random marketing agency who's one of the top marketing agencies in America at one point um and we built a couple hundred million reader digital publication I was writing for sites like Forbes and rolling stone and you know building this big marketing company but hated hated the management of that exited the agency the very first meeting I took after I exited the agency was somebody that said it was a 2014 and they said you should take a look at this thing called ethereum and um fortunately I was able to buy some and uh you know from there made hundreds of investments in the crypto space um now we have a VC fund called Apex block capital um and uh most interestingly recently I was a judge on the first mainstream crypto TV show called the next crypto gem it's out um it's out on Amazon globally um in uh October 2nd um so it was a really interesting experience it gave me a perspective of thinking about how does a mainstream audience perceive crypto right um and what kind of projects can you show them that they would even understand because if you think about a defy application for instance from a mainstream audience it's very confusing and very difficult to understand so there's certain types of projects I want to talk about in this presentation such as video games that I think are you know in the next few years could really Drive hundreds of millions of people if not billions to crypto in web 3. um you know beyond that the show just just it was educational there was a lot of breakaway moments where people you know uh would would learn about crypto and we talk about hey an erc20 token is XYZ this is how how Bitcoin Works um George uh cryptos are us was another judge on the show he's one of the biggest YouTubers in the crypto space um and Leia Halpern as well who's in the on the Bitcoin side um was also part of the show you can go to the nextcryptogem.com to see the first episode is on distro TV now so you can check that out um but um beyond that um here's why you know if you think about crypto um video games are a good analogy um they're a driver of culture when you see them eventually make it to the movies and make it to TV you know it's made it at that point um other traditional forms of onboarding people to to hit various industries were magazines um and the problem we have now is look at an event like this this is amazing there's tens of thousands of people here but we're kind of as much as it seems like everybody in the world is here it's still actually a very small community I bump into people all the time that I you know from one degree separated away from that that you know you know so we have to get out of these walls somehow um and I think that there's these three categories I think entertainment is one of them of course but today I really want to talk about video games um video games as I learned on the show were something that you could show people that knew nothing about crypto or web3 and you could say hey this is a video game your character in the video game is an nft or a digital asset that you can take out of the video game your gold in your game is a token that can be trans you know transferred around in and outside of the game it was an easy concept for people to wrap their head around um gaming this is an older uh stats here but these are some of the stats around gaming gaming is actually bigger than TV music and film Revenue wise I mean this is back from 2018 Gaming's even bigger than this now it's a massive massive industry and my theory about gaming in web 3 and crypto is it's not that it's not that web3 has to replace all of gaming I see it as buckets right I see it as you'll have your you know your traditional games your fortnite's and your world of warcrafts but you'll have your other bucket of games over here where um you'll people will want to own those digital assets um because people spend so much time here here's why but here's why web3 gaming is going to be a thing in more and more as time goes on people spend so much time on on their video games that it's it's more and more over the last few years because of the the interactivity of gaming and the cus even AI for instance um the the games nowadays they there's more and more depth to the game you spend more and more time in the game so you feel a part of that game your character you feel like you're part of your character in the game um and blockchains are a real good match for gaming I'm going to tell you why um so this is an analogy the vitalik uses all the time he was playing World of Warcraft they nerfed his character he started ethereum so let's look at why their ethereum is so similar to video games um the economies in video games for instance they're just like virtual economies and defy applications and you know all the nfts and the digital assets are very similar from blockchains and video games the game rules themselves um are very much like smart contracts um D5 platforms are just like game engines unity and unreal so there's all these similarities between video games and smart contracts that vitalik was playing video games quit video games and they changed it built ethereum there's even Concepts from video games for instance called Soul bound tokens and these Concepts made it to uh ethereum they come from video games so kind of seems like it's a perfect match for video games um so if you think about that I'll give you everybody a history lesson on gaming real quick so gaming games started as closed loop they started as closed loop games they would play Mario Brothers or Mortal Kombat or any of the first kind of games that came out closed loop essentially means that you play for a little while and then it's you die you lose Game Over The Game's done right then they send people's thoughts and said hmm okay well what can we do to keep people playing longer so they created endless level games where just new levels are created over and over again Flappy Birds you know um in different kinds of uh Candy Crush type games where they would just be a new level all the time you can constantly play it over and over again then they said okay that's cool but I want to play with my buddy over here and and uh Singapore and I'm in La we should we should make them connected online right um so they created games like Call of Duty where we could play virtually all over the world together so those are online multiplayer games then they said well let's go even further Let's uh let's add some more player agency to this let's customize it to you where we can now with AI you can get really in depth you can customize the gaming experience to the particular player um and then so what happens with the agency the in the customization of gaming is that people spend so much time playing their games they spend tens of that thousands of hours hundreds of hours so after a while you're thinking well you know it would be nice to own a piece of that um and people spend so much money on games as well that ownership is the next evolution of gaming where because you're spending so much time you're putting all this effort into the games so even if you don't do a professional even if you just do it casually you're putting lots of time and energy and effort into these games and you want to own a piece of that um you know your character itself could be you could be owned um in obviously the gold in the games another reason why gaming um basically is if you think think about this think about traditional games right you don't see people putting their Call of Duty skins or their fortnite skins character as their profile picture on social media but what do you see you see web free games these are nft projects but you see nft projects that have games in various games they represent them on social media so they're rocking those pictures all over social media like no one has ever done before in video games um so that for that reason the virality the network effect of web 3 games is increasing more and more and that's why I believe and I'm seeing firsthand that wow not only do people or people spending so much time they want to own a piece of it but now that I own a piece of it I want to Market it myself and that creates this flywheel this Snowball Effect of web3 gaming where people are essentially a marketing engine for the games where they never were before in previous sort of Worlds um so this is interesting too and I had this happen to me as a gamer you know uh playing World of Warcraft or whatever game you're playing in the web 2 world if you want to sell your character no no no no that's not allowed you're banned but in web 3 it's encouraged you're encouraged to to sell your nft there's royalties involved you know it's it's beneficial for everybody the project creators the game creators can make money from it you can make money from it and it's incentivized and encouraged to build a market not to not for the no one out there is arguing that you know the game creators of the world should make more and more money they're saying well shouldn't we share a piece of this with the people actually helping us build these communities um this is really interesting defy kingdoms was actually in the TV show by the way um the next crypto gem so I learned a lot about what they're doing um so if you think about a game a web 3 game um on the surface level you have this game right but guess what it actually is a swap a liquidity pool um nfts tokens so you're learning about all these aspects of defy through the game so not only is it a fun thing not only can you own it but also you're teaching people through gaming how to use defy so what is it it's an onboarding tool so because it's an onboarding tool you can drive in in defies kingdoms case they're bringing hundreds of millions of Trends hundreds of millions of transactions to blockchains so what they do is you know if the only one that's a gamer here you would know that you know you have your zones like a World of Warcraft launches a new Zone in D5 Kingdom's case they want their new Zone as a blockchain a new blockchain they go from Avalanche to polka dot to ethereum or whatever chain they're on and they can bring 100 million transactions 100 million transactions and it's not only about the transactions it's about exposing those audiences to those tools on each blockchain so a lot of people just think like gaming is this thing that you know it's for some Niche audience but it actually plays very hand in hand with defy and a lot of D5 adoption have come from these types of games and it kind of gets the you know gets a bad reputation because of play to earn and stuff that didn't really work out but it's not even about that it's really about usage and driving adoption um through the games Alpha District's a game we're working on here's an example um you can have a triple a quality game where your character is an nft your gold in the game is a token and it on the surface level you just have a storytelling platform a game of 3D world that you're just playing along and you know the old argument was well you don't want to confuse players with having to download a wallet and you know it is figure out nfts and all that kind of stuff but you don't have to now there's tools and Technologies out there to have the game and then behind the scenes if they want to they can take the the nfts and the tokens outside of the game um yeah and I remember some Gala games was telling me and a couple others told me the number one support ticket they had previously before changing the methodology was I lost my seed phrase so that was a problem but it's now being fixed uh due to this um so quickly quickly recapping um you know Vulcan forged here is another great example of an adoption a driver of adoption in gaming you can monetize your gameplay through that's another thing too it's it's not only about earning money perhaps but you can monetize in different capacities by owning these assets um gaming bigger industry than TV film and music combined depending on how you look at it from either a revenue or user perspective players spending so much time in these games that it only makes logical sense that they want to own a piece of that obviously we know it's a perfect match for blockchains because ethereum for instance literally came from a gamer playing games and realizing hey there's probably a way to make some of these game rules like a smart contract and create some of these economies very much like I saw in the games so anyways I'm out of time but I just wanted to share that with you with why I'm bullish on web3 gaming thank you [Applause]