Full transcript: Kieran Warwick on London Real
2:32 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Kieran Warwick, the entrepreneur, gaming pioneer and blockchain advocate.
2:51 You are the co-founder of Illuvium, an open world NFT collectible role player game widely considered to be the first AAA blockchain-based video game built on Ethereum. You were first introduced to crypto during your time in the technology platform Blueshift, which was founded by your brother Kain, an early pioneer in decentralized finance. Here you helped successfully onboard Australian exchanges to the world’s first over-the-counter crypto exchange. After this, you began developing Illuvium, which has experienced a rapid rise with the native ILV token price now over $600, giving you a market cap of over $400 million.
3:24 You were named in Cointelegraph’s top 100 influencers in crypto on blockchain, and your goal is to become the first protocol to truly onboard millions of people into cryptocurrency. Kieran, welcome to London Real.
3:36 Kieran Warwick: Thanks so much for the introduction, that was awesome.
3:40 Brian Rose: Hey, it’s great having you here. You know, Kieran, I think we will just jump right into this, because I think Illuvium is based on an experience you had a couple of years ago when you jumped on to Axie and started playing what ended up being, you know, a real pioneer in the space of play-to-earn.
3:57 And, you know, I personally jumped on to Axie about six months ago, and look, I’m no spring chicken, I’m 50. I was gaming when I was a teenager. I used to play Atari, Nintendo, I used to play Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple 2 Plus. But I hadn’t gamed in a long time, and I’m in this space talking to people like Yat Siu of Animoca Brands, and I thought, you know what, I better get in there. So I went on Axie one Sunday afternoon, I bought my Axies with the Ethereum, they played, you know, and I thought one of them died and I lost 300 and I was like, okay, it was interesting and I’m glad some people are making a living, but let’s just be honest, I didn’t play it again.
4:33 And you know, a couple days ago I was on The Sandbox on their Alpha and I was playing around. We had Sebastien Borget on, and again it’s incredible, it brings a lot to the table, but it’s not exactly the game that’s going to captivate my imagination, uh, like some games in the past did. And I’m wondering if that’s a similar thought to why you created Illuvium, or what your experiences was with, like, blockchain-based gaming and kind of what you want to do.
5:02 Kieran Warwick: Started looking at the space, I wasn’t necessarily looking to start a GameFi project. A GameFi didn’t even exist back then. It was something I was looking to build a DeFi protocol and I pitched my brother a bunch of different ideas and said, “What do you think? What do you think?” And he was just like, “You know, go back to the drawing board, back to the drawing board.”
5:25 He’s pretty, he’s pretty hard mentor to have. But then I found gaming in blockchain and it was actually Axie Infinity that I started playing, very similar experience to yourself. I went and bought five Axies and one land plot and I jumped into the game and I played it for I think an hour and I was like, “Yeah, it’s just not doing it for me.” You know, I love this whole concept, like the ability to own your own assets and have them verifiable on the blockchain was the aha moment for me.
6:08 I didn’t really care about the game. I knew if we could bring to blockchain what mainstream studios have right at a building right now and the type of games that true esports players and mainstream players are gonna play, plus we have this new technology and the ability for them to earn and have ownership of their assets and all of the benefits that come with NFTs, I thought this is like a no-brainer. And it was just from that moment onwards it was like, we got to build a game.
6:51 Brian Rose: And that was in 2020.
6:53 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, that was 2020. Uh, it was, I think it was like June or July in 2020 that I found Axie, and I then went to Grant, first, our art director, to get him on board. He’s also my brother. And then we both went to Aaron to get him on board to do the game design.
7:20 But from that day forward, it was like, the next day I called them and I was like, “I’m like, we’re doing this. Like, this is an opportunity that it never ever ever comes around. Like, we have to take this.” They were both doing other jobs, right, and I’m like, “Quit your jobs, you know, let’s go all in on this.”
7:42 Brian Rose: Hey, baby, one second here.
7:44 Uh, I think we have an alarm goes off whenever we have a really good guest here, so this is just after. One sec, it always happens when a point was really well made. But you know, one thing I notice about you, Kieran, is almost the audacity of what you did, because here we are, what, 20 months later and you’ve now built something that is probably what you wanted, something better than what was existing. And yet so many people at the time would have thought, “There’s no way I could start from scratch, you know what, and build something that’s going to be better than Axie, which was blowing up at the time, it continued to get even bigger.”
8:20 You know, does anyone ever ask you that question? Because it’s kind of audacious. Now in retrospect you look like a genius, but at the time you must have had to really have some belief in yourself to think that you guys could pull it off without the gaming experience, with all that. All that is that true?
8:38 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, I mean, what Kain was like, “Look, I don’t really know, you know,” when I pitched him he was like, “Okay, this is, you know, this is much, much better, but I don’t know if gaming is gonna catch on.”
8:50 Like, it just wasn’t a thing back then. Like Axie had been building for three years and they developed a very basic product, and so there wasn’t, there weren’t many people in DeFi, and you’ve got to remember these are crypto native people, they’re gamers at heart, right? They’ve always been using the computer and the internet and stuff like that. And so no one really, I mean, obviously there were teams building and there were other people that realized this, of course, but, um, yeah, I was being told I was crazy, insane, you know, all sorts of stuff, from even Aaron and Grant, you know, my co-founders, because they were looking at it and they’re like, “It’s just, that can’t be, you know, that game can’t be that basic and have a market cap like it does.
9:48 It’s just in pot, like we don’t,” they couldn’t wrap their heads around it because it’s so insane. But it’s not the game, it’s the technology that’s the key here. And so once they find, like once they do, and neither of them had any crypto experience whatsoever, and so once they dug in they were like, “He’s right here, you know, this actually could, you know,” we never expected it to be as big as it is, like definitely not. And I had some pretty grand ideas of what I wanted it to become.
10:21 But yeah, now that it’s real and we’re playing the game, like that first moment that I saw it and I started playing, I was like, I almost can’t even believe this is true now.
10:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, and just to put some perspective, I mean, uh, I had Yat Siu of Animoca Brands and he was talking about a seed investment he made into Axie in early ’20. And he said, “Brian, we scraped together that round.” He’s like, “Nobody wanted to know about blockchain gaming.” And this is, you know, early ’20, this is two years ago.
10:54 And uh, he said, “Okay, then the DeFi summer came and then, you know, people started playing to earn on Axie.” But he said, “You know, you don’t understand, even early 2020 people didn’t want to know in the blockchain space. They didn’t see that vision.” Obviously DeFi summer hadn’t happened and of course the DeFi then empowered the GameFi, and then meanwhile you’re building Illuvium at the same time, and yeah, so yeah, now um, fast forward to today, you’ve got some visuals of what this beta launch is going to be like, and if it’s okay with you I want to play a few on the screen right now.
11:30 Um, we pulled the video that’s been on your YouTube channel, so we’ll go ahead and play that on the screen. Um, but if we can roll this, we’re looking at now some of that single player stuff that’s happening, or that Arena, uh, with some of the games playing. What are we looking at that’s going to come in the beta?
11:50 Kieran Warwick: We, uh, it’s very likely right now we’re in discussions about having an open beta for the survival mode, which we’re looking to release a little bit faster than uh, than we initially thought, and that’s because survival mode is pretty much done.
12:05 The only thing we need to add to it is the player versus player component, and so we’re yeah, we’re very, very close to making a call on whether we go with that and then continue to polish the other game modes and then release them later, because I, Grant and I are playing the survival mode and we’re like, just get it into the hands of people, like they need to play this. But at the same time, when we, you only get really one chance at a real launch, right, and I think we, it’s a little bit different to mainstream, given that there really isn’t too many decent games that are out now because they take so long to build usually, and so yeah, I mean it’s it’s been pretty crazy, but yeah, we’re like, you know, two, three weeks away from getting this into the hands of people.
13:17 Yes, it’s super exciting.
13:18 Brian Rose: That’s exciting, and when I watched that video it’s fun, you know, it looks pretty cool, it looks pretty exciting. And again I’m paying massive homage to the Axie people and everything they’ve done, and they’ve got the assets and stuff, but again your game looks like something that’s going to be fun to play and it’s kind of exciting and it’s got that whole 3D aspect in there, and I guess that’s what you always wanted to have that.
13:41 Um, and again right now it takes so long to develop these, and so I was just on The Sandbox and obviously it’s a very different proposal and a very different experience and it has its utility, but again if you want a game that people really enjoy playing, that really want to get in, and you want to turn people into gamers with your blockchain game, uh, are you pretty happy with what you guys have produced and what you’re about to drop?
14:06 Kieran Warwick: Extremely. Uh, it’s surpassed expectations.
14:08 Like, yeah, I’m, you know, I like to hype things up, I like to market things, you know, I’m a pretty bullish person and whatever, but when I first started playing this game I was like, “I actually can’t believe this,” like because I was like addicted to Teamfight Tactics, which is half of the game that we’ve sort of modeled it off, that at least the auto battler component, and I’m just like, I love that game. Like, I love, love that game, because it’s very similar to chess, there’s so much strategy that goes into it, and when I played just the survival mode, which isn’t PvP right now, so I’m only playing against the computer, which is never going to be as enthralling or immersive as playing against another real player, and I was like, “Oh my God, you know, we need like just, there’s nothing like,” like had I come across this I probably wouldn’t have built a game, to be honest, because I would have said, okay, you know, it’s not a super green area, there’s big games that are coming out, I’ve never built a gaming studio before, that’s probably a little bit insane, let’s go with something else.
15:32 So yeah, I’m so proud of it, it’s amazing what the team have done.
15:36 Brian Rose: Well, congratulations on that. How do you think you were able to do it? I mean again, like you said, you know, we’ve got massive companies around the world. I’ve been schooled on gaming and people have said this business is bigger than Hollywood, music and something else combined, it’s like such a massive industry that people sleep on sometimes.
15:55 How do you think you guys, you know, were able to develop something ahead of the big gaming companies, ahead of some of the blockchain protocols? How do you do that?
16:06 Kieran Warwick: So we just went all in, and that’s my mindset all the time. But we’ve got 200 people in our team, which is one of the largest blockchain teams in the world, right, of any project, and we just said, you know, we’ve gone out and we’ve raised 50 million dollars, we’ve said we’re going to develop a AAA game.
16:27 You can’t develop a AAA game in the time frame that we set, which was absurd, to say that, you know, in 12 months we’re going to build a triple A game. But you know, it’s the team. Like, these 200 people are experts and they’re so incentivized to make this work because they all got tokens when they signed on, and you know, they can really see the tangible benefit to that now, and we’ve done it in such a flat way where we literally try and get experts that don’t need hand-holding, just purely because we don’t have the time, we don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources into, and we’re not in the same, like every single person is remote, which is the other super crazy thing, right?
17:20 Like, I’ve met 12 people on our team, like actually, and and so we’ve gone after, I would say it’s our hiring ability, you know, going and getting people that just get it. They hit the ground running, they think, “Wow, this is so exciting.” They understand NFTs, uh, you know, the next thing that gaming is going to move into, and so they just work ridiculously hard. Every single one of them is, you know, gunning for this delivery, and uh, yeah, you know, I’m just the guy that put them into a room, you know, and they’re all working amazingly well.
18:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s a big accomplishment to get that many people focused on one thing going forward. If people are coming in now and they don’t know much about Illuvium, how do you describe it to people? Do you call it, uh, play-to-earn or is it a free-to-play? Um, if someone’s listening that maybe owns some crypto or doesn’t even own any crypto and is kind of metaverse curious, what is the selling proposition for people when they come on here? Is it just fun to play but also you can own your own assets and then you can potentially own land, or how do you actually describe it or even sell it to people?
18:40 Kieran Warwick: So we’re building our own universe of games, right, so we want to get to a thousand people in the studio in the next couple of years, and with that we want to build up a product suite, so it’s not just going to be Illuvium, there’s going to be multiple other titles that we build over the next sort of five to ten years, and the starting point for every single one of those games is not how much people are going to be earning, it’s how much fun they’re going to have, right, because at the end of the day we don’t have the ability to give an unlimited amount of rewards for playing the game, right. At some point you need to have people go, “Okay, I’m okay with playing this game and not necessarily making money, I might actually spend five thousand dollars on Illuvium, right, I buy some assets and I do some in-game stuff and then I get a solid two years of enjoyment, like proper enjoyment, where I’m with my friends, I’m in tournaments, it’s like immersive, I’m, it’s World of Warcraft type stuff, you know.”
19:57 You get them in for, you know, that period. And if they’re exiting from that and let’s say they only recover 3,500 of their 5,000, they’re okay with that, they’re thinking, “Wow, that’s better than Fortnite where I dropped 2,000 on skins and then when I left, you know, I, they just sat there in that centralized entity.” It’s like, “Wow, I actually recovered some.” Oh, and if you’re lucky, in a good circumstance you might come out and with ten thousand dollars when you sell all of your assets and you may double your money, but the key is that you get the choice as the gamer, and that’s what mainstream studios are not giving their customers right now, and that’s the secret sauce here, is just giving the power back to the players, because once they get it they’re not going to hand it back, I guarantee it.
20:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, really well said there. And so you think the play-to-earn really exploded obviously in ’20 and ’21, but you think from a long-term perspective that’s not going to keep people coming to the game and staying to the game, that’s only going to motivate maybe certain people and certain economic situations in certain periods of time. You’re thinking for the long run this has to be something that’s like old games, work, just fun, you want to show up and do it, and yet you own all the assets, which is what the open metaverse is all about.
21:25 And so you’re very clear that’s the direction you want to go to, as opposed to say mimic a play-to-earn model that, say, Axie is done.
21:33 Kieran Warwick: No, yeah.
21:34 Brian Rose: And talk to me about owning these assets, because I know early on you bought some, I think some land in the Axie verse and saw how that as an asset, you know, appreciated over time as the game became more popular. I know you also have those type of, you know, land assets in in Illuvium as well. Talk to me about the thought on that, and is this also potential some of the motivation of playing the game, to own part of that game going forward?
22:01 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, it’s an interesting one. It’s different to Illuvium, it’s on mobile, and so I’ve you’re right, I bought Axie’s land very, very early on, and the thing that struck me odd, I only bought that due to the rarity of how many plots there were going to be versus how many players I thought there would be, but there was no utility, and so yeah, they were saying there’s gonna be utility, but it was just, let’s sell some land. So I was kind of a little bit skeptical of that, and uh, and then when I said to Aaron, “Hey, I want to do some land, like let’s sell land, but we need to make it have some sort of utility,” that’s when, you know, he goes to work and he’s amazing at game design, and him and Johnny, our CTO, they basically built this mini game where you’re utilizing your land and your mining resources from that land and then you’re selling it back to users in the main game, and so it’s a way for us to integrate the two, and as a land holder you’ll probably make about five percent of the revenues that of the in-game revenue in Illuvium.
23:23 Brian Rose: And so one thing I see you introducing really on, and you can really see this on your YouTube channel as well, which I find fascinating, is that you’re almost using the game as a way of introducing GameFi and DeFi to your gamers and maybe even to the world. And uh, I know this is intentional, I gotta put my hat off to you. Uh, I mean we have our DeFi Academy here and I’m trying to teach people this as well, but for you to do it with gamification and doing on the YouTube channel is fascinating, because you’re literally showing people how they can stake, I think, their ILV and work with the land.
23:54 Tell me about that, was that always the intention from the beginning, and how can people, you know, use the GameFi aspects of Illuvium?
24:05 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, I think introducing the different DeFi elements, like governance, like staking, it makes it, it definitely was a plan from day one, if you remember, um, early on I wasn’t looking to build a game protocol, you know, I was literally looking to build a DeFi protocol, and so for me I was kind of more a fish out of water on the game side, and that’s where Aaron came in and, you know, he’s amazing at that, but we kind of just work together to integrate as many DeFi elements as possible. And so yeah, the way that I see it is if we achieve our goal and we start onboarding tens of millions of players, they’re going to be introduced, that the system introduces them to DeFi with revenue distributions, so we literally give back 100% of revenues back to the people that are staked in the protocol, and so there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever that anyone holding ILV shouldn’t be staked in the protocol.
25:15 So if you think about that, 10 million people, now you don’t need ILV to play the game, so perhaps it’s not going to be 10 million people, but it’s going to be a fair chunk that kind of go, “Wow, this game is amazing and I love it, I’m gonna buy a piece of it so I can vote and all that kind of stuff,” and yeah, with that they’re going to get all of these benefits, and uh, it’s yeah, it just makes it a more immersive experience for the user. And who knows, that might be the catalyst, and not just us, there’s probably five or ten other games that, like, triple A’s that are building in stealth mode right now, and they’re gonna do the same thing, you know, they’re going to bring in these users and they’re going to introduce them to different DeFi elements, and that’s when I think we’re going to see true mainstream adoption of crypto, because you’re talking, you know, three billion gamers out there, it’s not a small amount.
26:25 Is that what it is, so everybody who plays a game on their mobile on anything, it’s like half the world?
26:33 Kieran Warwick: Or, you know, now now it’s loose, right? Like there’s people who play like 10 hours a day, and then there’s people who play, you know, once a month or whatever, and it’s Candy Crush on their phone, but it’s a huge market, you know, it’s not, and the craziest part right now is out of like the 300 or 400 million potential crypto native people, they’re not necessarily gamers who are playing Axie right now and Pegaxy and Fancy Birds, they’re literally people who had like full-time jobs in third world countries, so we’re technically not even taking those three, taking from those three billion people, we’re creating new gamers on top of that market, and I reckon in the next four or five years this could be a 50 to 100 million person market, you know, where you’re talking 10, 15, 20 different games out there where people can actually earn a living off.
27:39 Brian Rose: It’s insane, it could literally change the fabric of the world, won’t it? Uh, 100% passing revenues back to your token holders, I mean that is something that, you know, the CEOs of an old school gaming company, I mean they would be falling off their chair in the conference room, right? They’d be like, “There’s no way we can do that,” even for Web 3.0. Uh, Kieran, that’s an extreme. I mean you’re literally passing through those revenues right through.
28:02 Was that a conscious decision, because you said, “This is how we’re going to maximize growth and this is really what we should create in the ideal version,” because a lot of founders wouldn’t even go to that extreme?
28:16 Kieran Warwick: I mean, look, it’s either gonna go, it’s either going to be sitting in the vault, and we’re already, the treasury has about 13% of the token holdings, and they’re staked as well. So people always ask, “But if you’re giving all the revenue away, how do you pay stuff and whatever?”
28:34 That 12% of in-game revenues is going to be paid out to the treasury as well, and that’s how I get paid and core contributors get paid and whatever, and uh, so yeah, that was 100% the biggest, like sticking point, because it was like, “Are we seriously gonna do this? Like, are we actually, you know,” we didn’t know that we’re gonna have enough revenues and whatever, but the network effects of saying that we’ll only take a small percentage, I like 100,500, a thousand times, and so that’s why you can’t be short-sighted in crypto, you just can’t. You have to, the people that think long term are the ones that I follow and watch it really, really closely and try and learn from, because you just, a flash in the pan in this space is just, it’s never going to be anything, right?
29:37 It’ll go to zero and that’s it, you know. You need to build things with substance, and you know, we just backed ourselves and said, “You know what, if that 12% isn’t that much revenue, we’ve already raised money, so we have this, you know, three, four, five years of uh, runway, so be it.” And it did exactly what we thought, that the network effects were just insane.
30:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s like the ultimate form of backing yourself and actually showing the world that you’re 100% on your vision is when you put together a monetary policy like that with your treasury.
30:15 You’re saying, “We’re literally all in on this, you know, enough to where we got so much revenue and we’re trusting this process so much.” Um, that says a lot, and it’s the big vision, and it’s one of the things. I had Stani Kulechov in here, I know he’s one of your investors, and I was talking to Stani um, about what he did, you know, with Aave and how he said, “Brian, like my job is to come to work every day and make good code, and if the community uses it, we win.
30:39 My job isn’t to say we’re going here, we’re going there.” And we talked about how VC is almost inherently Web 2.0, VC in itself by the definition is always thinking, how do we get our return, how do we get our equity back, I’ll pay back, and so I asked him like, will VC ever be able to fully move into 3.0? And we had a little bit of a debate. I mean, we’re coming from this capitalistic world and you were involved in a lot of businesses and startups as an entrepreneur in the past.
31:03 I mean, you have to really shift your entire mindset of something we’ve been taught, well, hundreds of years of capitalism, right, to go forward and just say, “I’m going to trust this process and universe.” I mean, is that what it’s like?
31:20 Kieran Warwick: Honestly, yes. Like you were literally taking a leap of faith, and you know, we were lucky, we raised our money down first, and so literally we had no agreements, no SAFTs or anything like that, and so we’re completely decentralized framework.
31:37 Our number one, uh, our largest investor, they put in a million bucks from an email, you know, and that’s so like, uh, do I feel for the VCs? Like, I obviously invest in a bunch of different projects as well because it’s, uh, it’s a bit of a hobby of mine. But yeah, changing that for me it was easy because of my, you know, that the project that Illuvium is, it’s, you know, it’s embedded in that, so for me I’d already changed my mindset, but I know that initial, like, is this actually happening, like it 100%, like it’s weird, and it is something that, yeah, VCs are gonna have to come to the party, because again what we are doing with these products is we’re giving the power back to the community.
32:30 That’s what Stani would have been talking about, and that, you know, we always make a joke that if the community decided, we have an elected council, if the community decided for us to go and start scrap Illuvium for whatever reason and go and build a first person shooter, we got to do it, you know. And now I don’t think that’s gonna happen because the council is trying to you know, build the business, the DAO up, but the scary thing is it literally could happen, and that’s the flip side of that. It’s like when you empower the community, uh, then that’s always an option, which I guess is the whole point of empowering them.
33:13 Brian Rose: You’ve even said, “I’m not the CEO,” and that the decisions are coming ultimately from that council, elected, or part of the DAO, which is all in governance and the tokens, right?
33:24 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, I’m a core contributor, you know what I mean, some people just need a title, and I’m like, you know, if you have to, I guess you would say that I’m what would be called the CEO, right, but I’m a core contributor like everyone else, man.
33:39 Brian Rose: That’s just, it’s all, it’s a fascinating shift to watch how this space happens, and again you can’t argue with the traction, the value locked, the market caps, to where this is now, but it’s, I think it’s going to take a lot of human brains some time, uh, to morph.
33:55 Although I was talking to Roneil Rumburg of Audius recently and I said to him, you know, when you pitched your model to the VCs, which is basically a similar model, right, we’re just, you know, empowering the artists and connecting peer-to-peer, and he said the VCs are good about getting an idea that they don’t understand that could scale. So he did say, in defense to them, while they are used to getting their return on their capital, he said they do like crazy disruptive ideas like a Napster or like this. So he said you’d be surprised how they could engage and go with it.
34:24 So maybe this mindset will happen sooner than later as far as the shift.
34:29 Kieran Warwick: Well, they only need to get one or two right, that’s the other thing, you know. Like when we were raising, our first phone call, on the call they said, “We want to take a million dollars,” and I was like, “What is this? Like, what, you know,” and again that’s going back when GameFi didn’t exist, it wasn’t, that term had not even been coined yet. It was literally, you know, Axie, and their revenues weren’t crazy, their users weren’t crazy, yet hadn’t spiked, and they were just like, you know, this guy’s got a whole bunch of conviction, his brother’s, uh, you know, in it with him, and his other brother has demonstrated that he’s capable of building products, let’s do it, you know, let’s just throw it in.
35:22 And so we had no trouble raising capital at all.
35:25 Brian Rose: And why was that? Is it because of your conviction obviously, and you know you’ve got people around you that have had great track records and they’re super smart, but again back then that still takes a lot of faith.
35:40 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, and I mean the crazy thing was that I needed them to trust that Aaron had the ability, because he hadn’t, like, he designed multiple games before and he’s coded multiple games before, but he never really, he’d never published anything, he never released anything and did it properly, you know.
36:00 And he was actually thinking about doing it, uh, in mainstream for the past couple of years prior to Illuvium, and uh, and so it was a it was pretty insane what we were proposing, but I think people got the fact that, hey, if they actually could build a triple A game here then it’s gonna go crazy, you know, that console. Like there was enough pieces there, you might not have seen it if you, you know, one day you see an article about Axie or another game or whatever and you’re not really thinking about it, but when it’s all put together and we constructed a really good pitch deck, and you know, I I do have conviction because I believed it. I was literally like, “Just give us the money and you’ll see what’s happened.”
37:01 And obviously I had already bootstrapped it, I think I put in like something like $400,000 myself, and so they saw, like when you’re going into these capital raises, i s the founders that talk to me that are like, “Oh, if you just give me the money first and then we’ll go and build it,” it’s kind of like, we had already gone and built a whole bunch of stuff, we had, uh, 3D models of our, of like five of our characters already, and so it was like, these guys are actually gonna do it. You know, and so, you know, getting them across the line with Grant, is going to make this the best graphics he possibly can, which is going to easily be up there with mainstream, that was like, he’s had 20 years experience, that was like tick, easy. But then they would say, “What about Aaron?”
37:51 And I’m like, “You like, you just have to trust me, the guy is a freak, like beyond smart, it’s insane.” And I said, “Just, I’ve already had this, our game design doc vetted,” it was 1,200 pages by this day, like just ludicrous, and we’d had it vetted by three or four game designers. Nate Wells, who’s a game producer for BioShock and the, uh, the art director for like one, two and three, he read it and he was like, “Dude, who is this Aaron guy?” And I’m like, “It’s my brother.”
38:31 And he’s like, “This is exceptional.” And once I heard that, I was like, I then it was game over for me. So then when I was selling Aaron, it was like, “Trust me, you know, we’ve already got people that have verified this, it’s gonna happen.” And they believed it, and you know, here we are, and 15 months later and we literally have a game now. It’s kind of crazy.
38:59 Brian Rose: And like, let’s jump into that. What is the game like? If I’m jumping into Illuvium, what is the world like, what are my intentions, what are some of the experiences I’m going to have when I go in there?
39:15 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, so there’s, uh, seven different areas for you to travel into, so you basically crash land on this alien planet, you have a, uh, drone that’s with you, it’s like your sidekick, and it’s an open world, and so you walk around, you start off, it’s free to play so you don’t need to invest anything to get in, and you can either go the free-to-play route, which still allows you to collect NFTs, they will have a value because you can level them up, and then there are going to be people who are like, “I don’t want to level up, so I would just buy a higher um, level to zero,” and uh, you go into the world, you start capturing, you start battling and capturing these Illuvials, there’s 150 unique ones to collect in all the different regions, and you, so that’s the open world component, and then there’s the battling component, which is like ranked mode, where that’s where, you know, you get down to the really super competitive stuff, where it’s an auto battle, and so all of this strategy is done before you actually start, like once you press play the outcome is the same, right, it’s not going to change, and so uh, you have to make sure that it’s literally like playing a game of chess.
40:51 If you can, you can position, you can have all of the, a perfect board that you can position a character one tile off and it will go and start auto selecting a character that’s like a tank when you want to go and take out the op damage and you’ve lost, and you look at that and you’re like, “God damn it, I know I just, I misclicked or whatever.” And so uh, the auto battle part, that’s the part that I think is going to be super addictive, like the replayability. I’m playing the survival mode now and I’ve got a bit of a wager on with, uh, my brother at the moment.
41:31 I stupidly bet him a million dollars’ worth of ILV and so we’ve just been going hard at it, but it’s so addictive, like it’s just, yeah, it’s so much fun.
41:42 Brian Rose: So if you’re actually playing it, this is a really good sign, and and you literally eat, breathe and drink this game as well, and you’re still playing it, uh, with your brother.
41:55 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, I mean look, I don’t get as much time to play it as I want, and I’m really the type of bird like, I couldn’t play, I need it, I need an opponent, right?
42:07 I have to have the competitive side of it, otherwise a game becomes boring for me, even if it’s amazing, within like three to six months I have to have that interaction with other players and stuff like that.
42:18 Brian Rose: Okay, and so that’s all going to be a part of this uh going forward. Um, talk to me a little bit just about metaverse, and maybe we’ll just zoom out quick here. Um, you know, it’s a word that’s been talked about a lot, a lot of people don’t know what it is, a lot of people are experiencing different versions of the metaverse.
42:36 Uh, when I have people like Yat Siu on or Robbie on from Immutable X, they’re all stressing how it’s so important that we create the open metaverse before someone else creates the closed metaverse. Uh, just want to get your thoughts on that. Do you find that you have to really explain to people what it is sometimes, or do most people kind of understand where we’re going?
43:02 Kieran Warwick: I think people are starting to understand it now, it’s very much physical things being turned digital, you know, being immersed in a digital world where you can buy things like real estate like you normally would in the real world, and things like art, you know, we’re digitizing art, and for the first time ever digital art can be verified that it is the true, uh, the true one of one.
43:28 And uh, gaming is another thing in the metaverse, you know, there’s things like Sandbox and Decentraland where they’re really, really uh, promoting the whole experience of coming here and build your own world inside of our world, and uh, and so it’s interesting, uh, I think the one thing I’ll say about the metaverse is that it’s always sort of positioned as this utopian world where everyone’s assets can come in and play and whatever, and that’s not like that, Ready Player One vision is still very, very far away now. Games like ours or ecosystems like ours, because we have the NFTs and it is on the blockchain, we have the ability to actually give these people the ownership of these assets, and so yeah, it’s, uh, it’s pretty crazy what’s happening in this metaverse.
44:46 But you know, I think in our world we will have interoperable assets, meaning you can bring one Illuvial out of one game and maybe start playing, like, a racing game that we build or something like that, using your character that we have control of because it’s inside our ecosystem. And even still there’s complexity there, there’s difficult stuff that you need to build, and you know, you need to balance things, it’s a fine art to say that we’re going to have thousands of projects where you can, you know, someone can bring their Axie into Illuvium and all that. Like, we’re a long way off from that, right, but it’s getting there.
45:30 Brian Rose: Right now I appreciate you saying that, because like you said, people talk about this future metaverse where you bring everything in and it all transfers in here, but I guess from a tech perspective that takes a lot of work, and maybe it’s not what everyone wants right away, maybe people just want to be able to own their NFTs and move them and sell them, and that’s already a massive advancement over the traditional gaming experience. Um, and yeah, what about closed metaverse, what about companies controlling the metaverse, is that something you worry about, or is that not as, uh, you know, a daunting issue that we face as a species?
46:06 Kieran Warwick: A closed metaverse is not the metaverse.
46:08 There is only a single metaverse. I don’t care if Facebook changed their name to Meta or whatever, they’re playing inside the metaverse. You, like, you literally, there is a single metaverse that everyone is building in, and the idea is that it’s decentralized, it’s permissionless, it’s, you know, anyone can access it. There’s things going on like our tokenomics where in our game all of the revenue gets distributed to people, so it’s definitely getting there, but we have to be realistic.
46:44 I don’t want to be sitting here saying, we already have so many people in the mainstream that have given NFTs a bad rap. The last thing that I want to be doing is sitting here saying, “Hey, yeah, we’re going to get like 78,000 different assets and bring them all in and this is going to be the most amazing experience,” because these mainstream gamers are not stupid, they’re going to go, “Oh, the crypto guys are talking crazy talk again.” Let’s leave that for another five years.
47:16 I’d rather zoom in, zone zone straight into the, you get ownership of your assets, you don’t have to go to some crazy black market to sell your assets, you literally, it’s a marketplace that we set up, we encourage it, that’s what we want to get across, right?
47:36 Brian Rose: So deliver that simple value prop, focus on doing that and doing it well, that’s that short-term vision of what you want to contribute. Go ahead, sorry.
47:47 Kieran Warwick: And if you think about that, right, I want that for every game, yeah, right, I, you know, people say like, “Are you scared of competition?”
47:58 Whatever. No, I’m like, yes, build more, better games, because it’s going to help the overall narrative to say, yeah, there is a Call of Duty equivalent, you can now sell your skins in that game that’s better, that’s a better experience than COD, and then over time if that game actually is as good or better than COD, the players are going to migrate across.
48:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s inevitable. You said NFTs have been given a bad name, what did you mean by that?
48:37 Kieran Warwick: So a lot stems from, you know, the energy consumption of creating them and, you know, the minting costs, and for us, we’re building on Immutable and they’re carbon neutral, and so for us there isn’t any effect, but there is a bad, you know, there’s just a cloud, you know, if you look at Reddit forums and whatever, like there’s just a thing about NFTs right now in the mainstream media that is not getting a good light, and it doesn’t help when people are like, “Oh, they sold a JPEG for 1.5 million dollars,” and it’s like, you’re not dive deeper, you can’t be short-sighted, you’ve got to dive deeper.
49:29 Why is someone buying that thing for 1.5 million dollars? And it’s like any new technology, right? Like, I seriously think we’re so early here that it wouldn’t bother me if we’re two, three, four or five years away from people coming across, it’s just standard, like any, like look at the internet when it first came, adoption will come.
49:48 Brian Rose: It’s interesting, you know, because NFTs, like you said, um, a lot of times they get the headlines, they get the focus, someone paid 15 million for a Bored Ape and someone did this with this, and it’s kind of this weird headline moment, kind of like back in the day Bitcoin was like, “Oh, I made X on my Bitcoin,” and you’re thinking, you know what, that’s, you’re missing the point of what’s happening here.
50:12 We’ve got crypto asset, we’ve got this, you know, permissionless system, we got, and so, you know, NFT has become this acronym that now is polarizing and means so many things to so many people, and a lot of times they understand it only as one thing, you know, “I flip my Tom Brady NFT” or “I did this.” Whereas you brought up Immutable X, I was talking to Robbie, uh, Robbie Ferguson, who’s one of your fellow Aussies, and he said, “Brian, if you look at our website we don’t use that acronym NFT, because if we do our job right you don’t know it’s an NFT, you just know you own your assets and it’s awesome and there’s a marketplace, that’s it.”
50:56 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, and I think that’s the 10-year vision, right, like there will not be, it won’t be blockchain games and mainstream games, it should be all games, it’s just, it’s a standard that, you know, and obviously, you know, maybe 10 years is a little bit too soon for all games to move across, but by that stage I’m very, very confident that you’re gonna see the top studios start building games inside blockchain.
51:23 Brian Rose: And so just to finish out NFTs, like how do you end up describing that to, you know, your parents, or how do you kind of see what that looks like in the future? Do you think, like, our data will be an NFT, or do you try to think of not using that term and just saying we own assets, like how do you have that conversation with people?
51:43 Kieran Warwick: It’s tough because like, NFTs in the mainstream, terrible. NFTs in crypto, they’re like, “Give me it, I love NFTs,” you know.
51:51 And so we’re kind of traversing this fine line where it’s like, we want to show the mainstream people that, hey, this technology exists and now there are fun, engaging games that you can play utilizing this technology. And so yeah, I think it’s definitely I think it’s definitely something that we need to be wary of, and I think it will move to a situation where we’re not saying anything other than maybe not even saying ownership, maybe that’s just assumed by if we do our job right in educating and marketing our products, then you’re right, we literally should be able to say, “This is game,” and people understand that they own their assets and they can just go and sell them and that will just become a normal thing.
52:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s also been one of the best gateway drugs to crypto, and you probably have been surprised and amazed the last two years to watch this NFT craze, and again as much as it might not represent what’s really happening, you probably would have to say it’s probably one of the best things to happen to crypto and defying gaming because it gets the eyeballs looking there.
53:10 Brian Rose: Um, well, would you agree with that or not?
53:14 Kieran Warwick: 100%, absolutely. I, but I would say the reason it hasn’t, the reason I would say it’s not true mainstream adoption right now, even though Axie has onboarded three, four million players, something like that, like that’s huge, right, that is a massive, massive funnel. The problem with that is the type of player that they’re onboarding isn’t your typical DeFi investor. Now our players, I’m way more aligned to that given that, and look, we appeal to developing nations as well, I think Philippines is probably going to be our largest market, but at the same time our game is targeted towards esports players and, like, professional gamers, and so the North Americans, the Koreans, the Chinese, like the ones that have big, big money as well.
54:13 You start onboarding those guys and then they change their banking from being, you know, traditional to DeFi, that’s when you go, okay, now we’re actually seeing the market go up as these new games come out, you can literally see a correlating line showing the growth. That’s what I think is going to happen, and I think that DeFi people are kind of like, “Well, it hasn’t really moved the needle right now,” and I think that sort of explains why now.
54:43 Brian Rose: Uh, while we’re on DeFi, you obviously were watching the DeFi summer happened kind of right when you were creating this game.
54:51 You’ve seen where it’s come in the next two years. Uh, what is your take on the state of the art of DeFi? Um, I mean, the reason Mommy here talking to you right now is because a year ago I looked at the DeFi summer, I had missed it, uh, and I looked at what was happening in total value locked, and I used to be a derivatives trader in New York City on fixed income, and we used to structure a lot of the things I saw, you know, Stani doing, and I thought, you know, you can’t ignore this anymore.
55:16 And I had guests coming on my show since 2013, Max Keiser was talking about crypto and Andreas Antonopoulos here in ’15, ’17 and ’19 talking about the future of money, the internet and money, but DeFi hadn’t happened, we weren’t using that term yet, but when I looked at that I thought, there’s no going back on this, this is happening. Um, how have you seen this DeFi market progress, and is it as far as what you thought it would be?
55:46 Kieran Warwick: It’s definitely hit, it’s hit a slow point at the moment, and I think the reason for that, or one of the big catalysts for that, is the congestion on Ethereum.
55:57 We need scaling solutions, and you know, we wouldn’t even be able to run our game on Ethereum, it would not be possible to run our game on appearance, we would have to go to either a totally different chain, which you definitely don’t want to do, or do what we did. And so a lot of DeFi protocols are now starting to move to layer two solutions, and once people aren’t paying, you know, three, 400, I mean it’s gone down now, but you go back three months ago and you’re paying like 250 for a transaction, then you’ve got to do two transactions, you gotta, like, authorize, then you gotta, maybe you’re transferring into the currency that they want you to use to be able to stake, so you potentially, like, down 500 bucks just to start staking. Now that for a new user that’s just been introduced to it, it doesn’t even matter if you show this magical APY of a hundred percent, when they’re like, “My bank pays me 0.5, what is going on here?
57:04 I have to part ways with such a large sum of money when I don’t know.” I think that is hurting these protocols, and so I expect there to be another DeFi summer coming up once these layer twos solutions start really, really rolling out, and there’s a bunch of them that are building some awesome tech. I think, you know, you’re gonna see, because it’s banking, right, everyone needs to use money and I just don’t think that there is a better system for handling money out there.
57:45 Brian Rose: Yeah, the single biggest complaint I get from my students in my Academy is gas fees, single biggest complaint, um, because I pushed them into DeFi protocols for the first time, so like they go on Uniswap, they go on Aave, they even execute a liquidity pool so they can understand the concepts, and again I’m gonna do it in very small size, but then they see the gas fee bill and I just say, look, it’s tuition, you pay it because you’re going to learn this for the first time. And then I say, look, there’s help on the way, because I’ve had the Avax people on the show, I’ve had the Hedera people on the show, I’ve had, you know, uh, your fellow Ozzie Michael Kong from Fantom, I’ve had that, I’ve had Polygon’s Sandeep on the show, and I said, look, there’s help on the way.
58:23 Matter of fact, you got some great smart minds building layer one and two solutions, but besides what you’re doing in metaverse, I’d say that’s where a lot of the brain power is going, but oh yeah, it’s yeah, it’s not here yet, is it, and it’s still maybe a little ways off and that’s hurting things right now.
58:48 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, without a doubt scaling Ethereum is definitely, uh, dampening DeFi, but uh, yeah, I’m not concerned. I think, you know, there’s a ton of protocols that are building awesome stuff and have really, really good services and products, and yeah, once we solve the scaling issues of Ethereum, which I would say, you know, by the end of this year most protocols would be looking into layers at least by that search, if not they’ve already launched on a layer 2.
59:25 So uh, so yeah, I’m still really bullish on DeFi, absolutely 100%.
59:30 Brian Rose: Why did you choose Ethereum to be uh your blockchain, you know, for what you’re doing at Illuvium, and then maybe talk a little bit about how you’re working with Immutable X?
59:43 Kieran Warwick: It’s just the network effects of Ethereum, like everyone’s building on Ethereum, like going out is going outside of the Ethereum ecosystem is pretty scary for me. I just don’t see, I, you know, there are a lot of ETH killers out there and whatever, but I just think there’s so much work going into Ethereum and obviously, you know, Polygon and whatever else like that, they’re out there and they’re also doing a lot of good work, but there’s just, they’re too far ahead, there are too many devs in the community now that are working on it and want to see this thing scale, and I just think that there’s going to be so many improvements as we go along with Ethereum.
1:00:31 And why, you know, when you’re talking about a market, there are some people that literally will look at a different chain and go, “Nope, I’m not investing in that, doesn’t matter what it is, might be the greatest thing in the world.” Now there’s not many people out there that go, “Oh, that’s on Ethereum, I’m not gonna go into that.” You know what I mean? So that was the decision there. And then uh, Immutable X, we researched a bunch of other solutions like zkSync and uh, Optimism, we looked into, and just from our perspective we really liked the fact that they had actually built Gods Unchained prior, and so they had two years of experience, and it was that first meeting with Robbie that we had and I was like, “Yeah, I think even if they don’t have all the answers right now and they didn’t back then, you know, a lot of it now is solved and whatever, but I just knew, I liked the fact,” and certainly, you know, Aaron and our Solidity devs did a bunch of research into it at a technical level, and a lot of them are promising the same stuff, but in terms of you know, low minting fees, gas costs, super minimal gas costs, super fast transaction times, which is what you need with a game, but security is paramount.
1:02:06 Now I mean we just saw what happened to Ronin, the side chain of Axie, that’s what we didn’t want to do. We, yeah, yeah, that, like at the end of the day we’re building a game or a game studio, we got to focus on what we do best and let protocols like Immutable do what they do best, and uh, yeah, it’s turned out to be a good call because all of the testing that we’re doing is working out really, really well.
1:02:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Seeing, uh, yeah, you reminded me Robbie had that whole experience with Gods Unchained, so they’ve been gamers before, so they get it, and they’re building something for those people, and it’s like it’s in their DNA a bit, right?
1:02:55 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, yeah, and being Australians we can talk, you know, we speak for them obviously, you know, every single week we’re on the phone with their teams and it’s a huge, huge partnership, so the ability for us to, and I think even the ability for us to be close to them post launch is probably going to be even more important than pre-launch, you know, because at the end of the day we are using their network and we need and we’re going to be bringing, you know, we’ve got like 1.5 million people that have registered for Illuvium now, there’s gonna be a truckload of traffic, and uh, yeah, you know, we’ve tested it and they can handle it, so it’s good, but you know, if something was to go wrong I like the idea that they’re a team on our home soil.
1:03:47 Brian Rose: Yeah, let’s talk about the Aussie factor, because I mean I think as of now they’re the third largest tech company in Australia, is Immutable, obviously you guys are moving up there as well.
1:04:00 I had Michael Kong of Fantom who’s relocated, but he was down there as well. I was telling you earlier off camera, a huge chunk of my students in the DeFi Academy are from Oz, like punching way above your population weight by like 10x, you know, like 20.
1:04:20 Kieran Warwick: We tend to do, we tend to do that, like we’re pretty good at sports and you know the Olympics and stuff, we tend to do better than our size, but it’s crazy and I think a lot of that is to do with uh, Havven launching, which turned into Synthetix, that being a hub, and you know Kain being such a strong advocate for DeFi.
1:04:46 I think, you know, it gets people thinking and they go, “Hmm, he builds a protocol, maybe I can,” and now I’m in a group with, I think there’s now like 46 Australian projects that I’m, that are building, and mostly DeFi projects, not so much gaming, but uh, yes, it’s, I don’t know, it’s crazy, like there is certainly something about Australians and crypto.
1:05:12 Brian Rose: Yeah, you know, I’ve been broadcasting for 10 years and we’ve always had a big Australian audience. Um, you know, you guys are always kind of thinking ahead of the curve, like again about physicality bodies, mindset, all of that, um, and so it doesn’t surprise me that you guys are making a lot of this stuff happen.
1:05:34 Um, it just seems to be that mindset and, you know, again, audacity down there that you bring to the table. Um, you mentioned, uh, your brother Kain, and we’ve also talked a bit about the Warwick brothers, you’ve got Aaron and Grant as well. Um, tell me about the family, and you know, also Kain’s here next week on the show on Wednesday. I actually saw him when he was here for the Token2049 conference, I think, in October as well, but talk to me about what Kain contributed, and then you know what’s in the water in your family home?
1:06:06 Kieran Warwick: Um, blood in the water, competitive. No, there’s, we, our father was a professional tennis player, and so you can imagine this sort of, you know, soldier-like upbringing that we had, and it was all about, you work hard, you know, at that, it doesn’t, you know, nothing else matters but working hard, and so all of us have a really, really big work ethic, and uh, and yeah, you know, he’s the type of, he was the type of father that was just so hard on us and results driven, plus you got four boys in that dynamic as well, and so not only are you competing to, like, show your dad, like, “Hey, I did this” or whatever, you’re showing your brothers as well who are like, “You suck, you know, you’re never going to be able to do that, blah blah blah.” Like we, it’s just a ridiculously competitive family, like yeah, it’s pretty insane and still is to this day.
1:07:18 Oh yeah, like when so how it all actually started, how, when I was like, “All right, screw this, I’m building a protocol, like I can’t handle this.” I was driving with Kain and I just started trading, he was like, “Please, can you just start trading, you’re gonna love it.” And I’d made like a million dollars in like three months, it was just stupid, and I’m sitting there and I’m like, “I’m the greatest man alive. Like, I’ve made a million dollars, like, what are you into?
1:07:49 Like, are you kidding me? I’m gonna start a trading company and I’m gonna start trading for other people,” and so, and like all of this stuff, and uh, Kain was like, “Yeah, but dude, it’s too late, like my project is, you know, worth billions of dollars, you’re just never going to be able to catch me.” And I was like, “Huh, is that right? We’ll see about that.” I said, and he was like, “What do you mean?”
1:08:21 I was like, “I’m going to build a protocol and I’m going to make it bigger than yours,” and he was like, “Come on.” And we’re, uh, it’s not at this circulating, uh, price is less than theirs, but the fully diluted is, uh, is certainly, uh, a lot bigger, so it’s, uh, we’re halfway there to succeeding there, but that’s the dynamic, right, you know, like literally that type, like him going, like, “Please don’t even try,” and now us actually doing it and then Kain turning around and being like, “My God, all right, I gotta go in now,” and it’s not about money or anything like that, it’s just about winning, being better.
1:09:04 Brian Rose: That’s, yeah, that’s a beautiful thing, you know, that’s healthy and also it creates value for so many people around the world, so I don’t know, I feel like that’s missing sometimes, you know, that competitiveness definitely in the crypto space.
1:09:21 Kieran Warwick: Like, when I came out onto the blocks people were like, you know, it was very polarizing having this guy come out and say, “Well, the game’s a so we’re gonna build good games,” and that, you know, and obviously respectfully I, you know, I said, you know, actually what they stumbled upon, what they built is genius, it’s incredible, you know, utilizing NFTs in game is the secret sauce, as I say, but you know, you got to call a spade a spade, and I’ve played games all my life and I don’t care, like I’m not gonna drink the crypto Kool-Aid and be like, “Oh, everyone loves each other and these games are amazing.” No, like we need to push this board otherwise what are we doing, you know. And so it was very polarizing at the start to have someone so competitive being like, “I want to beat that game,” and it was a, you know, everyone loved Axie, a huge community, but now I think people can see, okay, he’s actually, they’re actually delivering on this, and you know, the reason I’m so confident is because of the team.
1:10:36 It’s it goes from Aaron, Grant, all the way down, their freaks at what they do and they love what they do, and when you see all of these people working and producing update after update and you’re seeing improvements, you’re like, “This is going to happen,” so that’s why I’m so confident.
1:10:57 Brian Rose: The default in this space is to be kind of collab and peace and love, which I get, and it’s kind of part of the future and it’s a bit of Web 3.0 and a bit of a community empowerment, but do you think it also needs that healthy sense of competition and, you know, aggressiveness?
1:11:16 Kieran Warwick: Would I say yes, absolutely, and I mean it’s funny, right, like Kain has said to me in multiple cases, it’s like, “You gotta, like, tone down your TW, you know, like you just going hard here.”
1:11:30 And I’m like, “They’ve, I’ve literally seen you get into so many Twitter wars with people because you like ride off a chain or like say this,” and so like you’re the same as me, you’re just competitive, you see someone who comes along and is trying to build a better product than you and you’re like, “No, I am going to build a better product than you,” and part of that is marketing it, and if you’re not willing to go out there and back your product and say, “Hey, no, like we are not going to stop until this is better or be best, that’s it,” then I don’t know, I just feel, I just felt like that was missing in like in mainstream. You see, there’s people who are hired to do these jobs to go out and be like, “This is going to be the most, it’s great,” and to be honest in the gaming space it’s a bit of a problem where people overhype a game and then under deliver.
1:12:25 I was just coming out and saying, “Hey, we’re actually going to build a good game,” right, and you know, some people liked it, some people hated it, but uh, it’s real now.
1:12:34 Brian Rose: So yeah, that’s fantastic. And I, there’s a few people in the business that really go hard on the protocols, uh, Emin Gun Sirer, uh, for badax, I call them the Conor McGregor of, uh, the blockchain, because you know he was calling out all the layer ones and the layer twos and the layer zeros, they’re all copies of Bitcoin, they’re not doing anything special, and we are.
1:12:55 Kieran Warwick: And uh, you know, but he does it with a tone, because you know he’s trying to also solve the problem too, so again I don’t know, I think that’s healthy, you know, to have people like that out there, and again it ultimately means better tech, better value for the customer and more adoption, you know. Yeah, I guarantee you us coming onto the scene made Axie go harder in whatever, I don’t know what, in whatever forms, hire more people, you know, raise more money or build a better, get, like they immediately were like, “If we stay like this, it’s, you know, clearly the leaks that they’re showing are higher quality, we’re going to be left behind,” and so I think yeah, it definitely is a good thing.
1:13:39 Brian Rose: Uh, just finishing up a relationship with Kingdom, you guys are competitive but also he’s a good mentor as well, and you guys kind of listen to each other as well as compete, and you still have that relationship where each other’s judgment’s important.
1:13:55 Kieran Warwick: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, from, uh, an investment standpoint, he will, you know, we will usually talk about different things, he’ll ask my opinion on things and whatever, and obviously I’m constantly trying to get as much knowledge out of him as possible, he’s a pretty hard guy to get a hold of, even being his brother, but uh, yeah, it’s an awesome relationship that we have, we always have, like, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my issues with my brothers, both Aaron and Grant mainly, not so much Kain. Um, but yeah, our relationship and bond is very, very strong, we’re pretty similar in our mindsets.
1:14:43 Brian Rose: Yeah. Um, what does the Libyan look like, say, five years from now, 2027, and like what’s your biggest challenge as a, not as a CEO but as a, what did you say, a contributor?
1:14:57 Kieran Warwick: A contributor, yeah. Uh, where, okay, so building that universe that I spoke about, so having Illuvium Zero, the mini game, the land game, having, uh, Illuvatars out there, which is your branding, your NFT that you use to showcase yourself, having the main game with the Overworld and the auto battler, and then starting to build out things like expansions for Illuvium, because I think that, uh, I want to build either a MOBA or an MMO, either raw, I think we should expand into that, which is making that Overworld like that World of Warcraft experience where it’s just super immersive, massive terrain to go through and you’ve got these huge bosses which you need to combine, like teams of six, to take them down.
1:15:53 That would be an awesome expansion, I think, but again, and it’s not my decision, it’s the council’s, so uh, you know, we obviously, the community listens to us because we’ve got the the best source of information and we’re the ones actually building it, so it’s likely that they’ll listen to what we’re suggesting, but it might not be, and uh, and so yeah, so I guess zooming out, two or three different titles in our universe, you know, ecosystem, and uh, yeah, a thousand people in the studio, like a mega, mega, you know, just building game after game after game. You know, Aaron has so many games, the good thing about him not publishing an idea of his or again or building a game of his in the last 15 years is he’s got like 15 years of, uh, ideas in terms of, uh, games, and so yeah, we’re just going to keep on building and building and building.
1:16:58 Brian Rose: And what does the world of DeFi, crypto, everything else look like in five years, what do you think will be at that point?
1:17:09 Kieran Warwick: I honestly think that we’re gonna start to, you know, if in the next five years we should definitely be up to a billion people in that, uh, that are native to crypto and invest, whether they, uh, just purely staking or whatever in, like, stablecoins to get an eight percent APY instead of a one percent. I think it’s again it’s inevitable.
1:17:39 Right now there’s the scaling challenges, once those are fixed I think all bets are off for, uh, centralized banking. I just, it’s too powerful to not have that intermediary when I’m transferring you money, you know, that permissionless ability to send something, it is send money should be the way that it’s meant to be. Why is there someone who takes a clip, you know, five times over in this process when it’s my money and it’s the person, the recipient’s money, you know, that’s it’s two parties, that’s it.
1:18:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, I can see the DeFi part of you coming out, that DeFi monster coming out. Um, so right now what about maybe a couple hundred million people that are enabled in the DeFi ecosystem, or there are crypto natives, it’s like I think that the numbers are, it’s pretty hard to tell, but I think the numbers around 300 million, right, that a crypto native, so that they’re a large chunk Bitcoin holders, which theoretically then, you know, yeah, that, yeah, doesn’t mean they’ve crossed the bridge into DeFi, but yeah, so maybe a billion people, but in five years they’re actually in these protocols like you said, staking, lending, using stablecoins to transfer assets. You know, I started my career on Wall Street and so I saw the banking world for 15 years, I worked in Chicago and London as well, and um, I saw what they’re doing and I see the banking system is like what you said, I mean it drains global GDP six, six or eight percent of global GDP every year, I mean it’s, I know what it is.
1:19:17 Um, I saw the racket that it is, it’s even a mind game that’s played with people they don’t understand, um, they never really had a relationship with their money, but they don’t teach you money in school, right, like all these basic things, and so it’s crazy, right? I mean I had Robert Kiyosaki in here, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, um, old school guy, and, oh yeah, yeah, he tells the story, he raised his hand when he was in school and he was 10 years old and he said, “When are you going to teach us about money?” And they said, “No, no, we don’t teach you money here.”
1:19:43 And he said, “Why are you teaching me history and chemistry and Spanish?” Uh, I’m like, “No, no, we don’t teach money in the school system,” and he’s just like, what’s going on? And so we’ve been born into this world where, um, we’re a slave to a paycheck, and um, as Robert said, what poor people work for money, rich people make money work for them, which nobody likes to hear, but it’s the essence of entrepreneurship and even asset ownership. Uh, my daughter, she’s managing, yeah, yeah, just managing your money, right?
1:20:09 My daughter’s 18 now, she’s got stablecoins that return a yield. When I was 18 I had a ’68 Ford Mustang and there was no yield, you know. So I feel like we’re making progress, but I’m also curious if you think that, you know, between regulation and the central banking system there are going to be bumps or a lot of resistance along the way, or do you think because the tech’s so good, it’s peer-to-peer, it’s decentralized, that it will happen either way?
1:20:35 Kieran Warwick: I think it’ll happen either way.
1:20:37 I think the banking system is going to have to severely adapt to what the next three, four, five years presents, but yeah, there’s going to be bumps along the way, you know, we’re talking different regulations in hundreds of countries that you need to get over, and that’s why DAOs, uh, are so important, because they theoretically, until, you know, the legal advice that we have is that DAOs aren’t recognized as a legal entity, and so the advice is, we can’t really tell you what to do, we do, because even if we give you advice, when it actually is solidified in and the laws are made, we might have given you the wrong advice, so, you know, do your best and obviously try and be ethical, and we always have, but you know, this model of DAO first, I just said to you, you know, we raised five million dollars with nothing, no agreements, no legal entity, nothing, how can you shut that down?
1:21:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, you’re right, that’s people believing in ideas, right?
1:21:54 Kieran Warwick: But there’s 50,000 people around the world that know about Illuvium, that, you know, participate in Illuvium, like how they’re all theoretically core contributors, they’re all contributing, we contribute our time and effort and in some cases money, the other 30, 40,000 they contribute money and that’s their contribution, they’re saying, “We believe in this thing, we get to steer the ship,” and so happy to give you, you know, ten thousand dollars. It’s like the Kickstarter sort of model where it’s community-driven products and they’ve proven to be so much more powerful when you’ve got thousands of people that are saying, “Yeah, we built this,” rather than, “Hey, we’re one company, what do you think?”
1:22:52 You know, it’s like it’s just a different paradigm.
1:22:56 Brian Rose: And like, also final question, I think five years from now, do you think that people will be much less reliant on a fiat currency, do you think a lot of people’s world or majority of transactions will be in crypto assets and be through DeFi platforms, or do you think we still have kind of a long way to go before that happens?
1:23:18 Kieran Warwick: Not the majority. I think, you know, we’re adoption is going to pick up and it’ll hit this inflection point, which it definitely hasn’t hit yet, but it will hit this inflection point and it’s just gonna hockey stick, the amount of user growth there’ll be, but again, you know, there are a bunch of things that need to be set in place, and uh, there’s a lot of smart minds that are building it, there’s a lot of smart minds that are now seeing Web 3 and going, “Oh, I, you know, this is the next thing, I need to be a part of this,” and so I expect products to obviously get better and better and better and easier to use, things like onboarding people using credit cards instead of, you know, having them deposit in some random way and then they’ve got to go to a centralized exchange, then they’re going to transfer out, it’s so complex, but like I think there’s going to be a much better onboarding process in five years’ time, it will get to that point where you’re like, “I’m just, I’m just using these products, I don’t even care that there’s a blockchain behind it,” and uh, but yeah, you know, it’s probably going to be 10 to 15 years before we start seeing majority move to crypto or at least holding crypto.
1:24:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, I totally agree. Um, for anybody who’s been completely excited and interested in this, what are the next steps they can do to play the game or to also get the coins, stick the coins, follow you guys, or even help you guys develop?
1:24:58 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, so the staking is live, you can purchase some ILV and get amongst it, that will also allow you some governance rights, so you’ll be able to vote in, uh, council members, and uh, and then yeah, just check out our Discord, that’s where our main community is, we also have Telegram as well, but uh, yeah, jump in there, um, try and digest the Medium articles that we’ve put out and uh, read the white paper, it’s very detailed of the plan that we have in place, and uh, you should from those, from, you know, a two-hour deep dive you should get a pretty good idea of why people are bullish on us, right?
1:25:43 Brian Rose: And also your YouTube channel is not too bad, people can get a nice little taste of what the game’s looking like and also how they can jump into the DeFi aspects as well. Mm-hmm. Great stuff. Um, final thoughts, uh, carrying on gaming, metaverse, or anything going forward, um, are you enjoying this time as well, are you able to kind of being like, “I’m having fun doing this,” or is it sometimes overwhelming? Uh, what what’s it like to be you?
1:26:09 Kieran Warwick: It’s, look, yeah, I mean it’s a lot of work, right, like it’s it’s just a lot of hours that need to go into it, which is, you know, draining over time, but I’m pretty used to that, and you know, my brother’s a super resilient as well, and I mean Aaron especially, the guy’s just a cyborg, he just keeps on going. Um, but the stress of, you know, like we did, like this is a fully diluted, what are we at, like six billion dollars or something, like, did I think this would happen? No.
1:26:48 And you know, you start getting listed in stuff and people start putting out news articles about you and you’re like, “Jesus Christ, is this really happening?” You’re kind of pinching yourself every day. Um, which is weird because I’m a very confident person when I say it’s going to happen, but still it doesn’t matter, like now that it’s happened it’s kind of like, what is even going on here?
1:27:14 Brian Rose: You said the big moment was when your mom asked you about how to buy some ILV, right?
1:27:19 Kieran Warwick: That was when, yeah, like I’ve been going hard at business ventures for years and years and years, I’ve done multiple with Kain, I’ve done one with Grant, uh, I’ve done a couple with other colleagues and whatever, and nothing Kain and I had ever built or any of the products myself, my mum would was with, and I’ve asked her every single time, like, “Hey, can you, you know, you want to chuck 20 grand in or 10 grand in or five grand, and it’s going to help, it shows that you,” and they’re like, it just fizzles out, it’s not even like you get a response, whereas this was like, I didn’t need the money or anything in this circumstance and my mum called me and was like, “Hey, I want to buy this,” and I was like, “Well, well, well.” So that was, uh, that was definitely a penny drop moment for me where I was like, okay, we’re we’re serious here.
1:28:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, now you’ve hit the mainstream.
1:28:16 Kieran Warwick: Yeah, yeah, when I get messages from friends in, like, high school that have seen one of my episodes, I’m like, “Oh okay, it’s a little bit bigger than I thought.”
1:28:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy. Well, that’s fantastic stuff. Um, look, congratulations on the success, I know it’s taking a lot of hard work and I got a lot of work ahead of you.
1:28:32 Uh, everyone’s super excited, uh, to listen to this and watch this today. You guys got a great protocol, people are really pumped for this game, and uh, yeah, just thanks for doing what you guys doing. Uh, wishing you all the best in the future, and uh, get to London and we can do this next time in person.
1:28:49 Kieran Warwick: 100%, thanks so much, Brian, that was, I had a lot of fun.
1:28:52 Brian Rose: Now that’s fantastic, thank you so much.
1:28:54 Thank you, everybody, for watching the London Real. Uh, go check out this protocol, uh, check out everything they’re doing, a living, it’s fantastic, and obviously play the game as well, and uh, we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, everybody. Bye.
