The Builder Signal Episode 3

[Music] Welcome to the last episode of the summer signal. It was a pretty hot summer out there with more than 500 projects submitted to the onchain summer, 403 new projects, and a total of 243 mini apps, which is like pretty insane, right? though that's that's right 243 new mini apps that you can test out try out play with at the base app right now. So um like everything good in life everything comes to an end. So onchain summary is sending but we will continue this stream under the name of the builder signal in the future.

So if you want to be hosted if you want to be interviewed if you want to be streamed on build on base you can ping me and we can find a way to make it happen. So, thank you all for watching and until the next one. [Music] I'm really happy to be here with Tara on the show today. Tara is um one of the co-founders and the chief creative officer at Cat Town, which is like a game about cats, something that I really love. So, pretty excited to have you here.

Tara, how are you?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me on today. Um yeah, it's delighting to be here. It's good. It's actually starting to turn cold here in Ireland, so that's why I'm like kind of wrapped up a little bit.

Um, so yeah.

Cool. Okay, so uh we'll go like straight to the questions. First question I have for you is like in a world where we reward and shape behavior with dopamine hits, how does a game like uh like Cattown help build meaningful interactions? I think what it really comes down to and where this is where crypto in general is all about ownership. It's all about self-custodial and with you know traditional web 2 gaming and platform gaming what we see now increasingly is microtransactions where the players are gaining absolutely nothing from you know buying a skin most of the time they won't be able to really trade it.

Whereas with crypto now players will be able to like actually own the assets. So, for example, in Cattown, we had an NFT collection, the Founders collection on OpenC. So, with those characters, if you own an NFT, you can equip the cosmetics and like the skin onto your character in Cattown. So, we're trying to bridge the gap into that and it's real ownership for the players and real value that kind of can be delivered back to the players. So, whenever we release that collection, you know, you know how NFTs can absolutely just kind of go parabolic at times whenever it just hits the right season.

So I think having these kind of crypto assets that can give value back to the players and for early investors as well is paramount because it also kind of can help the problem that we're seeing with the traditional web 2 of kind of microtransactions where that money and value isn't returned back to the player. It just goes into you know the publisher or the developer. Um so that yeah

so like re returning that value back to the player uh like the the hypothesis is that that that's basically that that helps create this more like meaningful uh interactions within a game like

yeah I think it it helps like build a sense of community. So for example uh Cattown is kind of based off of Animal Crossing and that game I don't know are you are you familiar with Animal Crossing? Have you played it at all?

I'm not. No,

no. It's uh it's kind of like a life simulation game, but in it they have their own currency called bells, which you can use bells to buy furniture or clothing or you can kind of see where I'm going with this with the aspects of uh cat town. Um, interestingly enough, Animal Crossing had a system called turnipss where you would buy turnipss from this uh NPC character who would just kind of wander about. And the idea was to talk with your friends on certain days because the value of turnups would go up and down such as like, you know, thin and crypto and whatnot. So, the idea is you talk to your friends to try and see who has a better rate on their island.

So someone would go to the island, get a better sorry, a better return on their investments and then put it back into the game. So they've historically, in my opinion, web 2 has kind of had these aspects, and web 3 just seems like an obvious choice for where it's going to go, but it actually gives the players more of a say now. So for example, Cattown has kibble as its underlying token in its economy, and this actually gives players the ability to be stakeholders. Now, you know, you're not we're not basing it off of, you know, VC backings or, you know, we're not reporting to someone. We have we build directly with our community, with our stakeholders who are our community.

So, it's really I think where we're seeing this evolution of like where games are going is kind of community focused. Um, sorry. Great. So like if you can imagine like uh the greater vision for like Cattown or even like the category for onchain games uh in 10 years from now like how would let's say it wins let's say it really transforms the industry and the world a little bit how would that look like?

Oo how would that look like? Uh that's

or how would you like it to look like?

How would I like it to look? Uh ideally I could see a lot of games as I was kind of saying about you know gamers are getting rewarded for playing games. They're getting you know uh a less predatory market is what games have been and developers can also see a return because working in the traditional web 2 space I've worked in a mobile game studio. It developers don't make a lot of money from it. you know, the actual people building don't make a lot of money, whereas crypto is now going to enable developers and builders to be able to fund themselves while also following their passions.

So, I think that we're kind of entering this honestly it's like a transformative time for like creatives and I think that that's what like base and like this industry is opening up to is that it's going to allow creative people who want to build to be able to build freely creatively and also be rewarded for it. So in 10 years from now, I would love to see loads of indie developers who have like been able to like self-start, self-fund, and just get their dream out there without the the fear of all these costs that will come or I have to go out and pitch to these, you know, uh companies to make money to even get off the ground. Um I think Cattown has kind of shown that um we've been like community funded essentially with our ERC token and people holding it. So we have we I think Cattown has show has kind of stood out as like a way to be like you can have a successful project based off of just community and like a strong community that believes in the project. So uh I what I hope for is that like other companies and businesses will be able to avail that in future but

I love that vision Tara I really love it and uh I hope I hope uh it comes true. So, uh, the last question I have it's, uh, it's related to Cat Town, but not specifically to the game. So, uh, it's a cat question. So, the question I have is like, are cats the best animal in the universe? And if so, why?

If you were to ask me personally, cats are my my favorite thing ever and on the planet. And yeah, uh, but I know not every I know some people really don't like them. Uh, so I'm not going to say they're the best thing on the planet. But to me they are. I know the idea of a comp.

Is that a compound answer?

Is it?

Hopefully not.

Okay, cool.

Uh,

what do you think?

Anything else you would like to add? I I think they are the best animal in the universe, not only in the world. And that if someone doesn't like cat, it's because they don't know them.

What is it? It's like uh it's if people don't like cats, it's like, "Oh, you don't like something you can't control or something like that."

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like they're independent, you know? They they hang hang out with you if they want.

So, yeah, that's it for today. I thank you a lot for participating in the uh summer signal uh on the summer signal and uh good luck in the onchain summer.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. [Music] I'm really happy to have Kieran on the show today. Uh he's the co-founder of uh base Minecraft which actually enables the tokenization of Minecraft servers which is like if you ask me a killer app. So here and everyone wants to know like base Minecraft is like one of the coolest projects we've seen on base.

What happened?

So, what actually happened was base Minecraft got reported to Microsoft after we won the base batches buildathon third place. And two weeks after we lost 12 Minecraft servers, they all got disconnected. So, we had broken one of their rules about play to earn. So, our we're kind of just restructuring to not be breaking their rules, right? Because Minecraft's owned by Microsoft, right?

I do not want to get sued by Microsoft. But I do want to monetize these Minecraft servers and help people because it's really hard to monetize a Minecraft server. If you have to use PayPal, hook that up to a website and hook that up to the Minecraft server. That's something that not everyone's going to have the ability to do, right? Like you have to be knowledgeable about coding and all that stuff to make that happen.

So, our idea is to just make a really simple all-in-one basically what it already was, but just like without the play to earn aspect and just really focus on the monetization aspect and just help people cuz um if we could help people monetize with crypto rails, we could even help them launch tokens. They just can't earn them in the game anymore. So, you know, we're coming back with a version three. This will be our third iteration of base Minecraft. So definitely looking forward to getting back to um not tokenizing servers but just helping people monetize this time and so the framework we're going to be using it for other games too.

So it's it's it's a good little experiment that happened to be honest. C

can we go a little deeper since you mentioned V3? Can you tell us a little more about V3 and what's coming? Yeah. So, the whole idea is to really hone in on the just traditional monetization, but through crypto rails. It currently has that, right?

You're currently able to buy something in Minecraft with Ethereum or USDC or the servers token on our website that already exists, but it's really kind of like a confusing system and there's no like transaction history. There there's a lot of stuff that could be done to make it way better. So, the idea is just to really hone in on the fact that it's not about tokenization anymore. It's about uh standard monetization. And so, uh going from there with V3 based Minecraft, it'll be about having servers launch their own tokens.

And then, uh offering, you know, they could offer discounts on items if they use those tokens versus like USDC or whatever. So, there's like incentives to uh own these tokens in some kind of way. So, we can build systems that still reward their token and incentivize them to like tokenize, but they can't be earned in the game anymore. That's the on Minecraft at least can't be earned in Minecraft. So, kind of building a V3 within those parameters now cuz we we kind of um our version two it it did have play to earn in it, but we weren't really um you know, you're earning a crypto token.

We didn't consider that like play to earn to be honest.

Gotcha. So like Minecraft and you know a bunch of you know of the like massive games uh that are out there they seem they are like obvious cases right for tokenization like why do you think they are not doing this themselves?

Um I think it's so gamers they gamers in general are very fearful of crypto right they think it's going to be the next version of microtransactions. They've seen, you know, all the memes, the hawka rugpool. They've seen, they have a really bad view of crypto. And so it has to be done right and it has to be done. It can't be like you take an established like intellectual property and then throw it on top because then you're going to like disenfranchise all these other users.

They might not like the upgrade, right? So it has to be something new, something that does it like on the back end. No one really knows what it is. and it has to be inherently non-extractive and give an actual use case to the creators. Like maybe they earned something in this game and now it's usable in a different game.

That's a perfect example of the use case of crypto when it comes to gaming and so they're it's not really going to make sense for them until they see it in action. And then once they see it like happening in real time then you can kind of like reveal like what's why it's working that way, right? because like it oh it's a NFT asset that you own or whatever. So I think the real use case for crypto with um games it it could really explode to that to that event, but I don't think like big games are going to be adding it. I think it's up to someone like me to come along and add like a plugin and just kind of uh you know do little experiments.

And I I like I like the idea of base Minecraft being something that I've recently found could work with any game. like we could we can mold this to work with like Grand Theft Auto, Rust, PAL World, and I just have to kind of play those games and learn how those economies work. So, I could set it up and then we can make something happen. So, I'm looking forward to doing that in this year. So, Minecraft was really just the beginning cuz you know the whole stack that we built it it could work with any game.

Any game.

Love to hear that. So, just one last question. We have like one more minute. So like if you can like you know look into the future and you know like imagine the uh you know a bright future for technology you're building like how would that look like if it if it gains like massive success how could it transform the whole industry and the world maybe right because it's a massive industry. Well, the thing that's um the thing about gaming is that it kind of like envelops all industries.

Like you have developers, you have creators, and you have just gamers. So, there's so much potential, right? Uh like game game creators, right? They're having issues monetizing also. And I think bringing games on chain offers the people routes uh to do the stuff that they love, right?

they could, you know, play games and earn or they could make content earn or in my case, you could develop and earn which changed my life, you know. I think it's going to be there's something for everyone, right? I think the technology is uh so expansive in so many different directions that really it's going to be unique to everyone. But for games, very wide audience. I really like that there's tons of creators, tons of gamers, and tons of developers.

It just has a big wide audience when you focus on games. So I think games will pay like play a big role in the future of um crypto development and growth.

Awesome. Okay, Kieran, that was my last question uh for the summer signal this time. Thank you so much for being here and uh good luck with B3.

Ah, thank you so much. I'll see you next time.