Robbie Ferguson - How Scalable Blockchain For Video Gaming is Transforming the Digital Universe

Full transcript: Robbie Ferguson on London Real

2:46 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Robbie Ferguson, the entrepreneur, NFT expert, and blockchain gaming pioneer. You are the president and co-founder of Immutable, a layer 2 protocol that leverages the power and security of Ethereum to provide scalable blockchain infrastructure for video games, offering users instant trade confirmation with 9,000 transactions per second and zero gas fees. Prior to Immutable, you built an automated capital gains tax platform at KPMG, which was licensed to Australia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and in 2018 you launched Gods Unchained, one of the first digital, collectible trading card games built using blockchain technology.

3:26 Last month, Immutable announced a partnership with GameStop to launch its NFT marketplace alongside a $100 million fund dedicated to supporting Web3 game development. Your goal is to make the minting and trading of NFTs accessible to all, acknowledging that that future generations will spend most of their waking hours in a virtual reality world. Robby, welcome to London Real. Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever had my vision and goal in life so succinctly summed up and so that was absolutely correct.

3:55 Fantastic. You know, first of all, congratulations. You just announced a funding raise and I’d love to jump into some of the details because those are big moments, you know, for you guys. But before we jump in, for people that don’t know much about immutable, How do you explain what you guys are doing there to the average person in the streets and even to some of the cryptocurrency aficionados? How do you kind of convey what you guys are doing there?

4:20 It’s probably different for both of them, but fundamentally what immutable is, is a global platform that allows businesses to create and trade NFTs scalably and efficiently on Ethereum, the most powerful blockchain in the world. And we also connect liquidity across anywhere you want to trade NFTs. So if you decide to sell an NFT inside a video game marketplace, someone can buy that very order from GameStop’s NFT marketplace powered by Mutable or OpenSea powered by Mutable.

4:52 And so where there’s connective tissue or the global backend for liquidity of unique assets. And you got a bit of a gaming background and you spent a lot of time playing games, Creating your own games and this was always one of the big missing factors in games. We spent so much time there I mean, I’m old enough to remember the arcades in San Diego, California 10 tokens for a dollar, baby What was going in there playing Frogger playing Galaga and then later we got the Atari we got the Nintendo and then I was playing Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple 2 plus Lord knows how many assets I created over the years and yet I could never take them with me right and and this is something that I guess it’s it’s quite a simple problem that’s never really been addressed is that really essentially what immutable is gonna do allow people to to I don’t know find the value that they created while playing precisely and that’s just the start that’s just gaming ultimately what we will see is NFTs eat pretty much any unique form of value in the world so it will start with digital native assets it will start with video game items, it will start with digital forms of art, it will start with tokenizing IP and royalties rights as we see with sort of the musicians who are getting paid more in the last year than they ever had before from platforms like Spotify. But where it will go to is you owning everything. And I think the really, really powerful thing about Web3 and NFTs

6:21 In general is not just digital scarcity, but the ability for users to be in charge of their own economic destiny on platforms that are traditionally controlled by big businesses. So it’s no longer Facebook owning your data, it’s no longer Twitter owning your data and monetizing it. You are ultimately the one owning your tweets, owning your images, owning your content, owning your financial instruments. And so whether it’s really sophisticated, whether we’re tokenizing in-game item or tokenizing a, you know, a Banksy or some red digital art, whether we’re just tokenizing the most basic information line or tweet, ultimately everything is going to be traded by this data standard.

7:00 Because that is fundamentally something which allows users to own it rather than the businesses. Yeah, and that’s an important concept for people to understand. You’ve even talked about the wine industry, the secondary market there is so big. You know, tokenizing, we’ve heard real estate, tokenizing all sorts of assets. One of my students here today talking about tokenizing a race horse the other day.

7:19 I mean, the possibilities are endless, and yet do you find that most people still have a hard time getting their head around, you know, even owning their own data on Facebook is quite, it’s quite a big leap for people to make, right? Of course, because the companies who have sold this technology have every incentive to make it seem as normal as possible for you to give up every single right, for you to give up. Data that you don’t know about, for you to give up, IP that you don’t know about, and for this constant erosion of the right to privacy because it’s not just to consent one time, technology keeps getting better and better.

7:53 And so what you’re giving away becomes more and more valuable until if it’s an economic model of your marketing behaviors, they essentially have a perfect model of how you’re gonna spend and that keeps improving year over year. And so we’re giving away higher fidelity forms of our data each year and there’s no norm that suggests to counteract that. And so exactly what you said, which is, you know, you grew up playing games and you never thought, hey, why don’t I have any rights to this stuff?

8:21 And so to me, it’s not about how do we pay people thousands of dollars for playing a game. That’s obviously not sustainable for everyone. What it is about is shifting the narrative so that instead of people expecting to not own anything and that they get a war deal, they get entries in a centralized database, the default is like stuff in real life, like owning your phone when you buy it and even those are being eroded by the right to prepare, but the ability to actually have control over the things that you should have control over.

8:50 Yeah, it’s a powerful moment. I think I had Yatsu here of Anamoka Brands, so I know just was one of your investors recently and he called it digital colonialism. You know, we give them our information and they sell it back to us because we just don’t know any better. And this is just the truth, but when people step back and realize that wait a second, my health data could be an NFT that I get a return on every year if I give it to a platform or my search data when I connect to a platform like Facebook or YouTube is valuable to me and maybe I get an annuity every year or my photographs or my face recognition.

9:24 I don’t know. These are all potential NFTs that we could all own in the future, earn returns on or at least have the ownership of that data more than anything. Sliced, and I mean, even think about your insurance contract for your house or term deposit you might have at a bank. All of this stuff, we just trust in existing financial systems. And so fundamentally, all the innovation of an entity is taking the core innovation of Bitcoin, of fundable cryptocurrencies, and allowing that to be expanded to every form of unique value in the world.

9:56 And the vast, vast majority of value in the world is unique. It’s not currencies. It is everything else. And in fact, even if you think about shares in the stock market, they require a unique data format to be stored and traded because you have different types of share preferences, you have different strike prices, you have different classes of stocks which have different imputed voting rights. And so even on things that people would traditionally think, hey, this is fundable, this just requires this ordinary technology, it actually requires NFTs.

10:28 Yeah, it’s an important point. I’d love to jump into kind of that definition of NFTs, but I’ve had guests here and say even Bitcoin is, you can tell if when one was minted, as opposed to another one was minted. So they’re not as fungible as you might think they are. And like you said, all Apple shares, each one was issued at a certain time. Some were on the IPO, some were secondary.

10:49 Yeah, like you said, they’re less fungible than you think they are. And so maybe we jump into this three-letter word, which I think is now more searchable than crypto, according to Google searches recently, NFT. I think probably one of the most misunderstood acronyms in the world, I think the world heard about it when Banksy sold his 5,000 days and all of a sudden people thought, oh, NFTs are digital things that cost ridiculous prices and maybe we’ll never get a true understanding of this with people.

11:19 But how do you start by talking about fungible tokens versus NFTs? Like you just said, most of the things in the world are NFTs, that’s an important place to start. Yeah, I think I agree, which is NFTs are misunderstood. And what we’ve seen in 2021 is luxury NFTs. And it’s like saying to someone, hey, a JPEG or an image is only memes.

11:42 It’s just a very, very small vertical use case of that instrument, of that data construct or standard. And so right now NFTs are horrendously mispriced as a collectibles asset class, as basically being like triad, which don’t get me wrong is an awesome new sketch. I think it’s brilliant that artists can be economically empowered and that you can have this idea of digital scarcity. I think it’s awesome to invert this concept of provenance and make it so that provably, only a digital entity can be unique and even real world art can be, have questioned authenticity by what we’re going to see and what immutable is focused on is how do we start tokenizing everyday stuff?

12:23 Stuff with utility, stuff you wanna trade, not for the reasons of speculation and seeing it go up in price because you actually wanna own and trade that asset. And one of the first protocols that we see as being really important in that segment is game. Because, for instance, in God’s Unchained, the trading card game that Immutable makes, the average trade value is two bucks. And people trade these assets because they want to use it to win a tournament or to win a game.

12:48 And so we’re talking about tokenizing things that everyday people want to own and trade to use, not just to speculate on. And that is the lens in which I think we can see the future of the industry. Because if you look at the adoption curve, The vast majority of value is not coming from the 50,000 odd rich collectors collecting people’s and sort of the expensive TFP products. They’re brilliant. Again, don’t get me wrong.

13:13 I really love what they’re doing and I think there’s huge innovations around incentive mechanisms through things like BAYC, like Port-Apes and fractionalization. But the value is in the long tail. It’s in how do we take this to a billion users across gaming? How do we open up liquid markets for things that are traditionally non-tradable? How do we take term deposits and make them tradable and suddenly have an efficient market for global interest rate?

13:38 And so what the power of this stuff is, is providing liquidity to everything, creating the global market for any unique asset. That’s incredibly powerful. It’s off the trend of financialization that we’ve seen exponentially increasing over the past two decades, and it’s absolutely inevitable over the next two decades. Yeah, and I want to talk about how you’re doing that with immutable and these, you know, zero gas fee transactions before we get there Were you surprised at the narrative arc of the NFT?

14:06 And you have to admit is probably the greatest piece of PR That that you guys or anybody could have received because it got so many eyeballs on the space Again, such a high search term on Google people know what it is. I gave my 17 year old daughter an NFT She thought I was the coolest dad for a couple days You know and but it was a pretty amazing way to draw focus and attention some call it the gateway drug of crypto right now What do you make of what happened in the last 18 months? Did you see any of that coming?

14:34 So obviously long term we fundamentally believed in NFTs otherwise, we wouldn’t have built an NFT business and it dropped out of university, which I did and to start it way back in 2017 but I certainly did not expect the literally we went from something that no one would ever know about if you ever saw it to being a household concept in the year about every few days and that is pretty rare in the spacesuit a year and for the first three years of the company when we were building immutable X and we were building out these examples of how to use this platform through things like Gods Unchained. If you go to Gods Unchained.com which is you know one of the blockchain’s most popular games it’s a trading card game that we make we actually don’t mention the word NFT anywhere, and we haven’t since the start, because we thought it’s crazy.

15:19 It’s like mentioning a deep technical concept to an end user. It’s like trying to explain HTTPS and enter an encryption to a user who’s coming to your like encrypted website. It’s just crazy. Just show them the benefits. Say your password is secured.

15:33 Say your communications are secured, show them the green lock. Um, and so we really just thought, and I still think there’s a lot of truth to this, the benefits of NFTs should speak to themselves. You shouldn’t have to say to a user, hey, you have an NFT. You should say, hey, you have guarantees over how many of this item can ever exist. You can sell the item.

15:52 The item is worth real value. No one can take it away from you. Your publisher can’t pull the rug from underneath you and economically change the rules of the games. And I still think there’s a lot of treat to that, not necessarily in always hiding away the NFT. But we have to create use cases and applications which stand alone, which create an incredibly good experience without having to sell it as NFTs, because only then are we actually realizing the value prop of this technology.

16:19 But parking back to your question, it’s insane. I mean, it’s pretty wild to be on the inside track and seeing something which literally no one knew about become a household name, but it’s also pretty cool to see one of the fastest emerging markets in history kind of crystallize so quickly. And what we’re seeing is this catch up that, you know, Traditionally, we saw people experiment and create innovative technology, and slowly they build more traction, and finally early VCs come in, and crypto has really turned that on tech, which is capital is there from the start, people are there to fund experiments, and I think that’s actually awesome.

16:59 I mean, sometimes it means you over-allocate capital, but really what it means is you just get to the endpoint, which is transformation of society for the better of people much much faster because I promise you what we’re currently investing in web3 and crypto will look like nothing compared to it just being the state of the world just like the valuation for investments we made in the 90s in the internet are nothing compared to business as usual today for information technology companies. Yeah and you’re right it’s happening much much much faster when you can tokenize it and get that capital right away and it’s a little bit of your business model which I’d love to go in later as far as how you use your tokens in a way that’s very web 3.0 not 2.0 and like you said almost cut out that loop that’s been in the tech business for what 67 years since semiconductor started where you got to go get the VC talk them into it they invest they got the web 2.0 mentality where we want to get the returns so then it’s not open source you don’t really give it to the user and you end up building something that doesn’t always work whereas this web 3 mentality you have to think of it really differently and I’d love to get those thoughts from you as a president, as we come in through.

18:07 You’ve talked about NFTs, and I think this is a quote from you, where you said, like, look at the total addressable market of NFTs, it’s insane. Nothing has ever emerged so fast, from 100 million in gross marketplace volume in 2020 to over 23 billion in 2021. Can you think of anything in history that’s accelerated at that pace? No, even the information age, which has been the defining catalyst in human history, did not progress that fast. So, no, I mean, yeah, I think it is absolutely insane.

18:42 And you’ve gone on to go further and you said, to me, the gaming NFT use case is like .01% of what’s going to be in even 12 to 18 months from now. That means, what, 10,000 times bigger, 12 to 18 months. Am I getting you right on that quote? I don’t know if the time frame will be 12 to 18 months, but absolutely over the next decade. And gaming will be a very small fraction of what NFTs will ultimately trade in terms of value.

19:09 We’re talking about every form of unique financial value. We’re talking about intellectual property. We’re talking about centralized registry assets like timeshares. We’re talking about physical assets like wine, like sneakers with projects like StockX. And so we’re really talking about stuff, both digital and physical.

19:27 It is the super set of every form of unique value that humans interact with and use to fulfill their lives. And we saw the wave of DeFi. And ultimately, what DeFi is, is financial services that are decentralized. And financial services exist to service people’s interests. And those interests are fundamentally stuff.

19:46 Like, we have the ability to create options around things. One of my favorite stories is, I think it was Bridgewater, don’t quote me on that, who created the options contract that allowed McDonald’s to create chicken and nuggets. Because otherwise, they didn’t have the stability on one of the core ingredients in order to create stable cost of goods. And so, ultimately, DeFi is secondary to actually being able to tokenize style, to create real value for people who wanna use these items.

20:17 Yeah, it’s a great point. I actually grew up in the 90s in the derivatives marketplace in New York City, and I ran a fixed floating swap book, which doesn’t sound very sexy. Go out to 30 years, you could pay me a floating rate, I’d pay you a fixed rate, I’d make you go market on any size, both ways, it was a fairly new derivative instrument. But little did I know, as a 22 year old kid, pricing deals, I was actually helping the facilitation of dams being built in Africa, student loans being issued, pension funds being able to pay out things early.

20:48 Because of that finance aspect, I was empowering a lot of marketplaces. And like you said, even with options contracts, you’re making previously unviable ideas now viable. When I saw the DeFi Summer of 2020, I was like, holy, you know, wow. I had been keeping an eye on crypto for a while, but when I saw that and the total value locked, I said, wow, this is something that cannot be ignored. And you know, when Yatsu was here, strangely enough, he said, Brian, if it wasn’t for DeFi summer, we wouldn’t be where we’re at in gaming.

21:18 And I thought that was the first time I ever saw someone in the metaverse space acknowledge that that liquidity that was provided there helped propel things and we saw that with Axi, et cetera. So as I tell my students, we have a DeFi Academy, it’s all linked. You know, you can’t just be like, I just look at Bitcoin or I just look at DeFi. You have to know what’s going on in the metaverse. You have to know what’s going on with NFTs because they all kind of pull the shirt a little bit and it all goes in different ways.

21:43 So I’m curious what you think about that. I completely agree. I think the DeFi funnel is instrumental to more capital allocation to crypto, to innovations in tokenomics that are used in games today. And I still think tokenomics and gaming is finding its feet. I think it has been a very lossy economic leap so far, as in we have a lot of value being pumped into these systems out to people.

22:06 And I don’t necessarily know whether they’re sustainable right now, based on how lossy these games are through retention. They’re just not good enough yet as instruments. But we’re going to start seeing the fundamental tokenomics I think in there. As these games get better, we’re going to start seeing games that outcompete web2 games by orders of magnitude. Because I mean, these games are operating on razor-thin margins, especially in mobile gaming.

22:33 You literally have in China billboards of two mobile games that are identical. One is a clone of the other, like you have a clone of Flash Royale, and it advertises itself as having cheaper in-game transactions. They’re saying, hey, you can buy your hero new boxes in my game for $0.50 versus $1 on this one. That’s how commoditized it’s becoming. And we have the possibility to create a incentive structure between publishers and players that is just so much better.

23:00 And the backbone of that stuff is built on the efficient distribution of value and incentives, like that’s all it is. And so, I mean, the thing that really sells me on why NFT gaming makes sense is currently the biggest games in the world spend billions of dollars on ads, acquiring users, and those billions are paid to Facebook and to Google. None of that goes to players. And so when people say it’s zero sum, or it’s negative sum to create these true economies, it’s absurd because I could take a fraction of that value, put it into packing a meaningful economy for players, and you will have your player growth solved.

23:37 People will play your game because of getting value to them. They will share your game because you can incentivize sharing. And they will stick around because they own a piece of the pie, because they have exposure as a co-owner of a cooperative of this game. And it’s just a much better business model. And that’s a microcosm for how the entire ownership economy is gonna transform everything.

23:56 NFTs will be the fundamental primitive by which people engage with their social media applications, their financial applications, how they self-actualize. And at the end of the day, the businesses that will succeed are the ones that share value in the way that helps them grow the fastest and exist the longest. And by definition, because your stakeholders and shareholders are no longer people in the public markets, it’s literally your users, it has to be a pro user or pro player application.

24:24 Yeah, those are some big concepts, Robby. Sharing between businesses, you know, pro user or pro customer, pro community. I mean, if we’re honest, those things don’t really exist in the web 2.0 world, do they? You know, Google doesn’t share with Facebook, doesn’t share with Amazon, doesn’t share with Apple. Only insofar as economic incentives limit it, right?

24:44 Right. Like that’s at the end of the day, which is what governs everything. Right, and it’s rarely pro user. I was speaking with a guest last week and I was talking about how it’s been, I’ve been 10 years on YouTube and I was talking about how I ran in the background a parallel email list. And we both realized that I was basically trying to get the data that I wasn’t being given by my Web 2.0 platform.

25:07 I was talking to Ronil from Audius and he’s like, well, we give you the data of the customers. And I was like, I spent years just trying to get my customer data via the web two point interface. And it was this painful process where obviously it was a little bit of an antagonistic relationship. I got it anyways. But yeah, what we’re talking about is sharing it, right?

25:27 And empowering those users and saying here, go ahead, go peer to peer, create amazing value, create an amazing marketplace, change the world. The growth from that, the benefit economically, is just gonna be orders of magnitude bigger, right, than this old model. Absolutely, I mean, the ability that people can make a startup and make an idea in a product and instantly have a core user base, instantly have core product market fit or assessor is the cause of how much value they are to give away to these early users.

25:57 And so, you know, really the thing to me is incentives. Like that’s the big innovation of Web3. By creating digital scarcity and by creating true self-custody, you enable the fundamental requirements that commit better incentives. And at the end of the day I think that’s why a lot of web 2 audiences, whether it’s gaming or whether it’s in the rest of the world are so skeptical of what web 2 promises, because it sounds nuts to say, hey, the company now cares about you because it’s what people virtually signal for decades and is not true because companies are profit-minded.

26:33 They exist to make a profit and in the paradigm of web 2, the only way you can really make a profit is in general by extracting that. But when you flip the fundamental incentive mechanisms and you allow or you actually force the most successful companies to be pro-user, that’s really what it’s about is that forcing function, then suddenly that’s the default equilibrium. That’s the fit for the market is a company which is pro-user. Yeah, it’s an incredible concept.

27:03 I hope people are kind of understanding it. And again, just to reference what you said, a big game developer in a closed environment It might come out, I’m gonna spend $2 billion on marketing, I’m gonna go blast it on the platforms and hopefully you’ll buy my game. You can’t take your information out of the game and you’re saying, well look, I’m the president of Immutable, I’m gonna take that $2 billion and issue it as tokens to the users. I’m gonna issue it as funds to marketplaces so people can innovate on this platform and you’re making a conscious decision that yeah, this is how I’m spending our treasury on these very different aspects.

27:36 I’m not gonna give a third to a half to these platforms. I’m not even gonna market to you, right? You’re not gonna try to sell me. You’re gonna empower me and give me ownership. You’re one of the few presidents that I’ve heard really articulate that, Robbie.

27:50 And I don’t know, did I get that right? Or maybe you can go a little further because some people, you get asked questions a lot of times, well, why are you allocating tokens here? Why are you putting a chunk of tokens there? And you’re like, this is how we grow this. This is the only way to grow this.

28:03 Yeah, and again, it’s not a magic business model. giving players more value. And that can be measured. And you know, when I talk to people, big game developers from the web to your world, and they say, well, this is cool, it’s interesting, we’ll have a core dev team on this, we’ll look at it defensively, but why would I do this? You can say to them, well, you care about three things, you care about cost of acquisition of users, you care about lifetime spend, and you care about retention, maybe some other smaller mechanisms. But all of those metrics can be measured and are quantifiably improved by using an NFT-driven business model. When users actually own their assets, their lifetimes then go through the roof. They’ll spend ten times more because you will spend more on a house that you can sell than one you can’t sell by a large factor. It is an asset rather than a ability to use something in a confined ecosystem. When you own assets that give you exposure to the future of Success the the game, your attention rates skyrocket, and your viral share implements these skyrockets.

29:06 You’re happy to share this because it’s part of your identity. And when you can incentivize people to adopt your game through Play to Earn, your cost of acquisition comments. You can say, hey, we’ll literally pay you $5 if you can get to use tutorial. And that is profitable, because otherwise you’re spending $20 to acquire through a leaky bucket of Facebook and Google apps. And so it’s this brand new way of distributing in a way that aligns incentives between the people actually bringing the value.

29:34 And I think the perfect example of this is, let’s look at strangers. They have, for the 15 years they’ve been around, arguable, whether it’s more like 10 as a popular profession, only monetized through patronage, which is nuts. Patronage is the monetization model used by barons to pay bards back in the 1700s. And so to say that that’s how we should measure and reward people who are streaming digital content in the 21st century is simply insane. And now we can say, well, hey, we can actually measure the exact value a stream brings to a game in terms of eyeballs.

30:13 And when Ninja wins a Fortnite tournament wearing a John Wick skin, he can sell that exact John Wick skin to a crowd of clamoring fans via a Twitch overlay. And all of the added value to that NFT is value that he keeps. And so you rely on incentives between the distributors and the actual gaming publishers themselves. Yeah, it’s a great analogy. And we’ve seen it happen with crypto, right?

30:35 We’ve seen the fact that, you know, you can share it, you can be invested in it. We’ve seen that have this, what, triple digit year-on-year exponential growth. And now you’re saying, well, yeah, this is what NFTs are gonna do. Probably it’s the second order, it takes a little bit more understanding for people, but everything you’re saying makes a ton of sense. And I’d love to jump in to how you guys plan to solve it because it’s important to think about how you approach this problem.

31:02 Robbie, the biggest complaint I get in my DeFi Academy is the gas fees. Everybody’s complaining every week about the gas fees because what I try to do is I get my students right into these DeFi protocols so they can understand them quickly. Sometimes it’s their first yield swap, it’s their first liquidity pool, it’s their first hot wallet. And I get them through to do it on the Ethereum chain because guess what, it’s where the liquidity is, It’s where the simplicity is.

31:24 And they end up soon complaining about gas. This stops a lot of things from happening out there transaction-wise. Tell me how you decided to approach this problem, why you decided to use the Ethereum chain, but also how you can lower your gas to zero because that’s how you can start trading $2 NFTs. We’ve pretty much been at the call face of trying to scale Ethereum since day one, since December, 2017, because back then we launched the first multiplayer game on any blockchain, it was called Eats.

31:57 And all of the logic of this game was on-chain, it was on smart contracts. And so today, if you try and run around, it will cost you $5,000. Like, it is the most gas inefficient thing. And we learned a lot about what should actually exist on-chain versus off-chain. But we also had to learn a lot about scaling Ethereum from day one.

32:13 And so when you hear about things like matched minting or deferred minting, these are things we invented along the way in order to try and short card optimizations on Ethereum, but really they are mandate solutions. And what we ended up really looking at is what was the possible scaling futures for blockchains? Was it building an entirely new blockchain, sometimes known as alternative L1s like EOS or Tron or Solana, which is popular today? There’s been plenty, and there’s been plenty of them called eight killers.

32:47 Is it building another blockchain with a bridge to Ethereum called a side chain, like Polygon? Is it using a state-channel-based solution, which we looked into? Is it using an optimistic-based scaling solution, or is it using a zero-knowledge, follow-up-based scaling solution? And these two came a lot later in the base. And this stuff, plasma and state channels, never really worked out.

33:13 And fundamentally, the reason we don’t want to build a new chain either is we strongly believe that network effects are going to determine what fundamental chain wins. And I’m not saying Ethereum is going to win, but right now it has by far the most network effects. And we think it’s really important to use them to be where everyone wants to be and also to be where the most security is. And by far, Ethereum is the most secure in terms of getting through at a cost to attack the network, in terms of decentralization of nodes and actually people who store full copies of the block history, which is necessary to ensure sort of data decentralization.

33:47 And to the knee of this question of, well, what’s the best layer-2 scaling solution? Optimistic or zero-knowledge roll-ups? And optimistic is great for some things in the medium term like DeFi. If you want to scale NFTs, it is hands-down zero-knowledge roll-ups. And so that’s a long-winded way of saying, we arrived at this choice with very high conviction.

34:04 We arrived at the choice of stark waves, exceptional as providing them the space with very high conviction. And what this allows us to do is to take a whole bunch of user trades or creations. So trading an NFT from user to user, you’re creating it as a business. And we can basically fit 600,000 inside a single block of Ethereum, where this actually enables us to do more than 10,000 transactions per second when Ethereum reaches three. And this is not a magic 10,000 per second.

34:36 This is not a, you know, I won’t name names, but pretty much every other TPS out there is theoretical. This is what we’ve proven in production. We’ve done tens of millions per hour. And so what this enables is the planet scale that is required to support all of the stuff we’ve discussed on this call. If you’re gonna do term deposits for billions of people on earth, you need TPS that makes Visa look like a turtle.

35:01 Like you need the ability to have throughput that is incredibly efficient, but also never loses its security. Because at the end of the day, we’re talking about organizing trillions of dollars worth of stuff in the long run. And if you don’t believe me, Vitalik himself has said Ethereum will be all in on $0.12 as the scaling solution for the future. And so that’s pretty much what we do. And the very short technical summary is it’s compressing.

35:24 It’s like uploading a zip file of activity to Ethereum itself. And that means it’s really, really efficient in terms of carbon footprint as well, which we completely offset. And I think I’ll leave it there, actually. I think that’s very good enough for the tech. That’s helpful.

35:39 So you’re actually using zero-knowledge proofs, because I know a lot of other, you know, networks are thinking about using them. They weren’t yet practical to use. I think I had Professor Silvio Macaulay here of Algorand, and who I think might have, you know, wrote one of the original papers on zero-knowledge proofs. But even he was saying that’s gonna be something that’s more realistic in the future for our network. You’re using this now.

36:01 Yes. So we’ve been using it in production for nearly a year. And I think you’re exactly right. So there’s a lot of solutions out there today where they’re saying, yeah, through knowledge is coming in a year, in two years, while they kind of shuffle you into a intermediary scaling solution. And we just, we’re never happy compromising on the security of users assets or the scale that was needed to support the business.

36:26 And so for us, a single user, having their assets stolen from them is a crisis event for the protocol. And so we really, we put that first. And that’s why we never considered any custodial solutions primarily as well. It had to be self-custodial by design. You just always had to take custody of their assets.

36:45 And so the things I’m really proud about our protocol is if immutable goes away, if, you know, for whatever reason I leave tomorrow and immutable goes to dust, you can always withdraw your assets to layer one Ethereum. And that’s what is really important is that ability to say, hey, I literally have Ethereum and FTS. And that’s what gives them the premium value as well. Yeah, that’s an important point. Could there be a time in the future where you immutable plugs into Avax a year from now or two years from now?

37:14 Well, we’ll see. Okay, all right. But right now the network effect is so clear that you’re not thinking about that. You’re just thinking about moving your tech forward. Ethereum is the place to scale for right now.

37:24 Everyone wants to use it. Building the best platform and then with the best technology partners is what we’re gonna do. And their high traffic scenarios or high gas fees don’t affect you because you’re running your own ZK tech inside of that. And so you use it for security. I mean, I guess you do have to cross it, you know, with all of your batch transactions, but then it’s so small.

37:46 Yeah, we’re still gonna pay gas. Right. And absolutely, I mean, as part of our treasury strategy, we hold Ethereum. We have costs not only in Ethereum, but this is where you have things like E3.0 coming out, which will mean we can operate even faster with even higher levels of scale. When’s E2.0 coming out, we reckon?

38:02 Your guess is it’s good of mine, but I think hopefully in the 2020s. Yeah, Stanik Khulichev was in my studio and he said sometime in the next decade, and then he smiled. And you know, Stan, he’s a big fan and has a huge protocol on there, but he said that. So look, I appreciate you addressing that. So when I, now, let me actually ask you something.

38:28 We minted our first NFT a few weeks ago and I did a live stream broadcast here, Robbie. It got watched by like one and a half million people and we took some kind of documentary style photographs that day and I thought, you know what, we’re gonna mint 100 NFTs, I’m gonna embed a piece of video inside the NFT and we’re gonna give it away to 100 of our most loyal users. And I thought that way I can finally get some experience in NFTs and not make all the mistakes everyone’s making, all right?

38:53 Now I went to look at what was out there and everyone’s chirping in my ear about what network to use And I said, I’m using Ethereum and I’m gonna go on OpenSea and I’m gonna pay the gas and I’m gonna send you these things because I want this thing to work. I recognize that’s where the volume is. I teach students every day who can barely figure out Ethereum blockchain, let alone some other layer one. And we embedded the video and it was a little hectic and each one got a unique name and I minted them all myself on a Sunday evening.

39:22 But it worked and guess what? They’re out there, they’re in people’s hands. There’s a secondary market, they’re on OpenSea And I was very happy with that decision. And I’m wondering what you think of that? Because for me, I thought I need a low risk scenario here, but I still want to pull the trigger.

39:39 And I just knew it was better not to play around. And I did it, I did it with the OpenSea interface and ended up working really well. Obviously, if immutable had been an option, I would have used that and will be in the future. But I don’t know your thoughts on that and was my risk analysis similar to yours? Yeah, and look, I mean, it was not assigned to 100, you know, and actually a one-off kind of thing.

39:58 It’s more of a establishing an ongoing business where you’re gonna be creating and trading this stuff on an ongoing basis. But what you said is exactly right and it’s why we made our choice to use EK roll-ups, which is people want Ethereum-level security. They want Ethereum-level liquidity and they want something that is ridiculously easy to use. And so we have Ethereum-level security. We allow you to have liquidity that is across every single application or trading that you could use and I’d love to dive in more into that as well.

40:26 And we literally use APIs like Stripe to build on, other than you’re applying any smart contract knowledge at all. And so your sentiment is a very common one. People want to do premium NFT projects on Ethereum. It’s where all the activity is, all the liquidity is. And people are happy to pay gas fees for that.

40:43 It means you get a better price or you sell more assets. So at the end of the day, liquidity is key. And people will always balance that against carbon neutrality and cost a good soul. But if you’re doing a like high value, low volume NFT project, it’s a great place to be. Yeah, let’s talk about trading platforms because you guys are creating one with GameStop right now.

41:06 That was a big announcement. Obviously you had the TikTok deal you announced, I think a little last year. Talk to me about these moves you’re making in these marketplaces and why it’s important that you’re doing it and what you’re trying to do. Yeah, so right now what we’re seeing in the NFT landscape is siloization of liquidity. because let’s say you are Fortnite and you’re creating NFTs, hypothetically.

41:28 First off, you want people to trade inside Fortnite. That’s your business. You keep eyeballs, you create brilliant experiences. I think Netflix literally came out and said Fortnite was the main forward competition. People are competing for attention.

41:42 And so that’s where they want users to trade. But there’s a problem, which is then if a user sells an asset in Fortnite and all the buyers are on OpenSea, because that’s where a huge amount of the volume and demand is, or huge amount of buyers are on game stocks. They’re all this awesome gaming and IT marketplace. This problem, which is this ask can’t connect to this buyer over here. So what Immutable does is it operates as a global back end.

42:06 It opens up the order book. And we literally call it the open order book, which means that someone selling in Fortnite can be bought from GameStop or from OpenSea, or literally from APIs if they’re a programmatic hedge fund and they’re trying to market make one in-game items. And the reason this is so powerful is it creates global liquidity across every single instance that NFTs will be traded, but it also allows each of these parties to take their fees. So we’re allowing incentives for participants to create the best possible economy.

42:35 And the reason I think this is so meaningful is we’re going to see a lot of demand coming from everywhere and a lot of supply coming from the origination or the applications themselves. So traditionally what we’re gonna see is, let’s say you’re a game, players will wanna sell items inside the ridiculously basic user experience back then. They shouldn’t even know it’s an NFT. I got a sword, great, I’m selling that for a buck. But a huge amount of your professional liquidity is gonna come from these pro trading platforms.

43:06 I think Coinbase, it might be OpenSea, might be GameStop, immutable token trades. And so what we’re doing is we’re kind of connecting those buyers with those sellers. And the other thing we’re doing is we’re allowing the best possible marketplaces and the best possible trading experiences to emerge because if you’re a new marketplace, you can actually come and you can have access to all of these orders. You can start trading things and you can differentiate on the user experience that you create in the exact same way that we saw Craigslist become 100 companies.

43:38 Airbnb, it became Upwork and each of those had the best possible user experience for the vertical that they were focusing on. Is there anything to stop these games from allowing you to plug in as they try to keep their closed meta-verses? And we can talk a little bit more about that. I mean, will Fortnite let you in? Will these other places let you in?

43:58 Look, we can’t force people to do anything. We can’t force people to use NFTs, but I think the financial impetus here is, A, they want volume. They want the maximum liquidity in volume. And that means you have to, you want to combine liquidity from everywhere while still being able to control the parts the business that you want. And marketplaces like GameStop or OpenSea are going to have huge places in these ecosystems because they’re going to aggregate eyeballs, they’re going to create the best possible experience of finding the goods that everyone else wants to trade or buy.

44:27 But what is really important is that ultimately, even if big game companies don’t do this in the next few years, it’s where the equilibrium will go. If you don’t do this, you’re not offering enough value to end users. And so it’s just like, well, people clinging to Microsoft services network rather than embracing the power of the open internet. It’s just inevitable. Yeah, I was having that conversation about Microsoft and people were calling the Ethereum, the Microsoft office of the blockchain. I mean, Microsoft still has good market share.

44:56 It’s still holding on to that closed world. Do you think it’s only a matter of time before, you know, people want to want access to their closed world systems? Completely. We’re seeing this demand happen already. We’ve seen it happen over the past two decades, and the more and more infractions that people subjected to when the incumbents exercise their power over these closed worlds, the more we’re going to see massive shifts.

45:27 You know, we saw huge backlash when, you know, Robin Hood or the financial institutions basically came in on a game stop and stopped the public from being able to invest. There was huge backlash, and each time this sentiment occurs, people say, well, hey, what’s happening? What’s going wrong here? Why don’t we have the power or the white, the access that we thought we had? And so as we see more and more of these, we saw the same thing with OpSkins and Valve and Steam.

45:58 And obviously, Steam is right now kind of putting up the moats, they’re putting up the guard rules and saying, hey, we’ve got a beautiful business that makes $10 billion profits from the marketplace and the economy that we control every cent of. And people have access to zero real dollars to value from, so why would we keep that up? And what we’re seeing is, A, other competitors come and say, well, hey, we can offer way more value to users. We can take way lower fees. We can break down monopoly practices in the industry. But, B, we’re also seeing consumers say, well, this is ridiculous. I’m going to switch and they’re just voting with with their wallets, and the reduced network effects and moats in crypto mean that users can vote with their wallets more than ever before.

46:39 We saw this with Yiwiswap and SushiSwap. It will go down in M&A textbook history. Kids will read about this a century from now as the first ever vampire to kind of accompany. They literally took half of Yiwiswap’s liquidity overnight. And obviously, Yiwiswap has survived the brilliant team.

46:52 They developed their own token. But the ability to do that in crypto is actually an incredibly good thing, because it means that you’re not just creating value by virtue of being the biggest or being the first. It’s by having the best application, by having the lowest fees, by creating the most value sharing for the users of your network. And people can always say, hey, I’m gonna leave this network or this nation state. There’s this fantastic book, Neil Stevenson, Diamond Age, which is like old as hell.

47:23 I don’t know how these science fiction authors do it. I think it was the 70s, but it’s basically a society where you can choose what government you want to live in and what type of citizen you want to be and you can literally switch cities and it switches your obligations, it switches your rights, it switches kind of the tax you’ll pay and the benefits you’re entitled to. And I think that’s kind of where we’re going to. When consumers have ultimate choice and ultimate freedom, everything becomes a market decision and you get incredible competition over things people thought would just fixed like fees on massive technology companies, like rights for being a citizen of a particular company, like the kind of taxes that you pay, or the kind of benefits that you’re entitled to, or how your tax dollars are spent.

48:06 And so I think this is the financialization of everything, but it’s also the opening up of competition for everything as we break down modes that are inherently anti-competitive. Yeah, you’re the second person to bring up the vampire attack with SushiSwap in so many days. I think Ronil from Audi has brought it up. And for people that don’t know, they basically, maybe I’m probably gonna butcher this, but they pretty much copied the user experience, dumped each one of a bunch of Airdrop tokens and said, why not come use our system?

48:34 And they basically kind of hijacked the marketplace from one place to the other. I guess it was a lower fee ultimately. And the user ended up winning, I think, by that. And they showed that there were no barriers to entry in that marketplace. Is that what we saw there?

48:49 Or did I miss a beat there? Yeah, the big element was they created this massive upfront incentive scheme to be able to move liquidity over. And that was really interesting because it gave those people who helped bootstrap the network early access and early ownership of the protocols. The people who helped make the protocol win. Traditionally, in Red 2.0, kind of fintech space, you see that start of the adoption curve the hardest thing to do.

49:15 Like it’s your first 100 users, 1,000 users, 10,000 users, the trickiest. I think it’s a beautiful thing to be able to smooth out that adoption curve with rewards that disproportionately reward early users and early consumers. Because if you no longer value just being an older company, you actually get more competition around who develops better products, who offers better themes, who offers better systems. And so in this case, I think Uniswap offered a brilliant product and they were able to create a token and bring people back with their ecosystem.

49:47 But the fact that you can do this just shows how powerful the competition because of the low barriers to entry and the low sort of friction to use a switching there is in web trade. And tokenization almost changes everything, right? Nobody ever taught this stuff in business school, not that you went to business school, but probably better. I mean, no one ever taught these tactics and ideas because you can never tokenize it, you can never realize that value, let alone the concept of passing that value onto your first 100,000 customer.

50:16 I mean, this is brand new. It reminds me a little bit of maybe some of the, you know, the Raiders in 1980s in New York, you know, with the junk bond Raiders, right? I mean, they would raise capital and go by a company and the RJR Nabisco guys were crying because they never saw this financial technology before. This is almost maybe the next wave of that. Yeah, and I think it’s powerful because it says to people, traditionally in the S-curve of technology adoption, what you have is platforms grow.

50:44 And in the early days, incredibly useful for users. They’re very cheap to use to try and onboard as much as possible. PayPal famously said if they were throwing money off the roof of the building, they couldn’t have given away money as fast as they were during their PayPal share to use PayPal promotion, but they gave you $20 for sharing with a friend. That was the first of its kind of emotion. So it’s this incredible platform of getting on users. Then you go through the maturity stage, the adoption cycle, and then you enter rent extraction and value creation. And that’s when when you say, well, hey, I have all the network effects.

51:15 With the balls in my core, I own all the content, all the rights, I own all the information. And if you switch anywhere else, you have no network effects. You can’t do anything. And so I’m going to jack up beats. I’m going to start making an incredible profit.

51:29 I’m going to misfloat the company, et cetera, et cetera. The beautiful thing about Web 3 is you kind of invert the cycle. You say, well, if companies get to hear another company with a fairer system, you’re going to say, well, hey, comes to show to us that incentives are there, so we can motivate the biggest actors who are gonna kind of move those network effects across. And also you have so much less friction in order to create these kinds of financial applications.

51:54 And so you kind of prevent this from happening in terms of a switching cost perspective, but probably be more importantly, there’s no company to make that decision in the first place because the owners of the network are the ones receiving the fees. They’re the ones who are benefiting who kind of adopted it from early on. And, you know, even with immutable, the way that, for instance, the foundation that we work with is a structure of the incentive systems is such that we can do these constant emissions.

52:21 So even if you’re joining DBWQ system eight years, you’re still earning a valuable part of the secret system. And I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s really awesome. I think it’s, you know, loyalty points for flights on steroids. And so it’s equally the greatest genius incentive creation that we’ve ever done, but it’s also one of the most powerful redistributions of wealth at the kind of corporate governance or company philosophy creation level that we’ve ever seen.

52:48 Yeah, there’s so many new things happening here. There’s like fractalization, tokenization, and then this whole kind of DAO empowerment back to the users where, yeah, you make a point. You’re like, well, not only are we front loading this, you own it anyways. So you wanna make the decisions that are good for your own token equity in the long run, which means everyone wins. It’s a lot to get your head around.

53:08 And even, I had this question with Danny when he was here, I said, VCs by nature are web 2.0. They are in this mindset of, guess what, we’re gonna create the capital and then we’re gonna extract the value on the backend and we’re gonna take it all. And so how do you retrain a VC? How do you retrain that mindset even? It takes a real philosophical paradigm shift.

53:30 I mean, maybe you’re young enough-ish to be born into this, but I mean, do you see a lot of older entrepreneurs or 2.0 people struggle with this concept? Of course, absolutely. I think the notion of inverting the traditional business concepts is unusual. Equally, there are people who have fully embraced it, and they’re just saying, well, okay, this is the deep paradigm. The protocols that embrace these elements of creativity and reputivity rather than hanging between them are the ones that are going to win, and they’ll buy pieces of those protocols.

54:03 And there is a lot of sort of chatter being thrown around around how a lot of protocols are VC owned, et cetera. And I think that’s really important. It’s why no matter who controls the equity removal, it has no impact on the decentralization of the technology. And so that, I think, is fundamental, which is the technology itself and the benefits of bringing users must be completely decentralized. It’s also why the foundation is allocated the vast, vast majority, like 65 plus percent, to be given away to users of immunovirus protocol, whether they are end consumers or whether they’re business partners.

54:42 But ultimately, I think that the VCs are creating an incredible service as well, which is they are creating, you know, they’re allowing the risk. That means thousands and tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and computer scientists can come to this space and just built. They have the capital to do so and we can accelerate the future time frames of this world existing by about a decade. So I’m all for that. I’m all for the allocation of capital and a place that must exist. And the quicker we get there, the quicker we get there are economic lights for everyone.

55:14 Yeah, I think you’re making reference to that kind of Twitter spat that happened with Jack Dorsey and Mark Andreessen where they were kind of back and forth with the VCs control it and the VCs shouldn’t control it. So it’s good that you mentioned that. You just a raise. I think a two and a half billion valuation. I know Anamoka Brands was involved and I think one of the Singapore state funds was involved. Maybe you could tell us more about that. Was that an equity raise? How does that help you to move forward? And even as on the ground, I mean, what does a president need to know about doing a raise like that?

55:46 Anything you can tell us? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I absolutely raised $200 million, $2.5 billion, led by Tommasic who’s the 300 billion US dollar under management Singaporean sovereign wealth fund. So, I mean, they’re incredible to work with. I’m really pleased to be working with that team and they’re doing the investment into crypto.

56:06 They just like, you know, FTX is round for reference. And the other strategic was Tencent, which was brilliant. That was one of their first investments into any NFT company. So that was really awesome to have that signal. I think what this does for immutable is a couple of things.

56:21 One is we’re 170 people today. We want to bring that to 350 this year as fast as possible. We’re going to support on building the execs, and this really gives us the five hour to go to market incredibly effectively there. It is absolutely a war. We are seeing the platform wars in streaming times 10 on steroids.

56:40 It is insane what is happening. And so we need to have a massive war chest in order to ensure that the future is not on a side chain where five signatory keys control tens of billions of dollars value, but it’s instead on something that is truly decentralized, where people can actually own their stuff, where no matter what, they can be drawn to Ethereum, no one can ever transfer in their behalf. That’s really important to me. And it’s also really important that it’s not owned by Facebook.

57:05 We’re talking about the physics of the future universe that people will live in. They will self-actualize and live these digital lives. This stuff matters. The other thing we’ll be able to do is do M&A. So to buy strategic partners who are going to be really critical to delivering better for our customers or to buy Aqua Hires.

57:24 You know, the war for town is so tough right now that building Aqua Hires at scale and building that capability is actually very important as part of your hiring strategy. What was that term you used? Aqua Hires? Yeah, what is that? It’s basically an acquisition where you’re not buying the assets of the company, you’re just buying the people.

57:42 There you get the team. And you said it’s an all out war. This is with other layer two protocols, layer ones, meta, all the above? Yeah, different blockchains. Like it’s the blockchain wall, right?

57:54 It’s all the e-killers who have ever existed saying we’re going to deliver more value than Ethereum through whatever particular marketing claim they’re making at that point in time. I’m sure there’s been some interesting innovations that Ethereum is by far the most secure. It’s where all of the layer two activity is happening. Look, I don’t know whether Ethereum will win. What I do know is that no matter what, it will be a modular business.

58:16 Will be layer twos on X, whatever that X is. And you raised equity, not tokens. And maybe you could just talk about how that works. And then yeah, you use that as cash then for your war chest, et cetera. Absolutely, yeah.

58:32 And that’s a choice you made. Absolutely, yeah. We didn’t sell any tokens during the round, which we never sold any tokens apart from the public sales we did. So yeah. Okay, got it.

58:44 And just, you mentioned other layer twos. I had Polygon on here, Sandeep Nawal, many months ago. And I know there may be the obvious layer two competitor, or one of the ones that’s out there doing business. I know you think you said your first day of business, or one of your early days of business, you were doing kind of triple the volume in NFTs. I don’t know, can you comment on some of the competition out there?

59:05 And are they doing something different than you because you’re focusing on NFTs? Or is your technology ultimately better? Do you expect more competition from something like Polygon? Yeah, so I mean, look, Polygon’s being bought today as a side chain, which means it’s a new layer one blockchain with a bridge to Ethereum. And they’ve had a lot of security incidents.

59:23 Like, I’m not gonna speak to them, they’re a great team, they’re doing cool stuff. But what we fundamentally believe in is, A, an NFT-focused future. So we don’t focus on DeFi, which a lot of these other scaling protocols do. We are obsessed with, how can we create liquidity for unique assets? We think that’s where the future is going.

59:41 We think that’s the most important platform build and to build security and ease of use at every layer of it. If you’re a game developer or you’re a financial business or you’re a, you know, mom and pop store trying to create that, put it in your wine in your store, because that is your economic mission moving forward. It should be ridiculously simple if you just turn this stuff into NFTs. It’s just turning stuff into tradable things. It’s like, you know, uploading file attachments or taking a photo, what’s the name of the email, this is the primitive of the new world and web 3 and has to be ridiculously easy to use.

1:00:14 So that’s what we stand for. And we also really stand for, how can we create the best possible cost basis and user experience for gamers? And so this is really important, which is if you look at other solutions, the cost basis for creating an NFT is still like $0.10 or $0.20. Or when Polygon became congested, it was crazy with the Tulip game, where there was the sort of civil attack on gas. And what is really important for us is that if you’re a gaming developer, you pay precisely $0 per creation of NFT or trade of NFT.

1:00:49 And that means to a lot of Warcraft, you have the ability to be flexible with your economy. You can have users create assets along their journey that aren’t worth very much, and some of them might be. And that gives the ability to actually create a real economy. And that’s what we’re really excited about as well. And so we’re absolutely focused on gaming and NFTs.

1:01:10 We’ve obviously had some cornerstone customers, like TikTok and social media. And we’ll have other cornerstone customers in verticals we really care about. Fundamentally, our focus is high volume, utility-driven NFTs that people have a real reason to use it for the long term. We’re less interested in Flash for Pan, PFP projects. I mean, some of them will absolutely last forever.

1:01:30 Believe me, I don’t think for what age it’s going anywhere. But what we really want is how do we create businesses where end users and end players get a better experience at doing something they’ve always loved, whether that’s in gaming, whether that’s in art and social media. And so that’s what we’ll see from our center next year. How do I do it for free? How can I do it on immutable for free?

1:01:51 Is that just something that you’re kind of paying for that transaction in the long haul in order to build the marketplace? Yep, so we pay for all the gas costs, batched. And instead, the way we make money is by taking small clips on trades. And the reason we like that is it’s just a much better incentive model, because our incentive is our hospice incentive, which is to maximize liquidity and maximize volume, rather than having a blunt instrument of how many people want to use a network at one time is however much the overhead for transacting some value is, irrespective of how much that value is.

1:02:22 Okay, so you take a percentage of the trade, not a flat fee. Yes. A bit like Stripe. Well, actually Stripe takes both, I think. But yeah, that’s that model.

1:02:31 Okay, understood. Tell me about these partnerships, GameStop. Why partner with them? That was a big deal. Obviously a big name.

1:02:38 They have a lot of customers, but also kind of a 2.0 model. You guys are in the 3.0 space. What’s happened in there? Yeah, so GameStop A has built an awesome team. I mean, look at who’ve been hired.

1:02:49 They are really credible people from the first place. I knew a lot of them when they started the project within talks for like the last 10 months. And so that was a really important part of why this deal made sense. Two is, they have the biggest audience and community right now when you look globally. It is insane.

1:03:08 And so when you think about who’s going to be a really effective gaming product in NFT marketplaces, it’s going to be someone who has the audience to bring eyeballs to those projects, who can bring rating fans. And crypto is all about community. That is this famous quote, I think, by Marc Andreessen, which is market size is more important than a team is more than a product when developing a startup. And I think in crypto, it’s community is number one and then it’s marketing product.

1:03:39 It is really fundamentally what determines as your product people die, people care about what you’re doing. And so to be able to tap in and partner with that community has been really awesome. And C is we really think we can add a lot of value to what they’re doing, which is they’re gonna have a massive audience, they’re gonna have insane amounts of games wanting to build and tap into GameStop’s fan base and community. And what they need is an ability for those games to build NFT businesses ridiculously simply and then have all of those assets tradable on GameStop’s marketplace.

1:04:10 I think another reason is we can now bring all the gaming content already building on immutable into that marketplace too, because every God’s Unchained order, every God of Guardians order, every Envys order, Alluvium order or Planet Quest will show up automatically on GameStop. And so that’s really powerful. Nice, and that’s all launched or there’s more stuff coming soon on that NFT marketplace? All of those products I just mentioned are already live or building on a real estate.

1:04:38 Okay, and this API is interesting because I used a little bit of arbitraging back in the Wall Street days. So I think it’s fascinating, this concept, and just so people don’t know, there’s a futures contract that’s traded maybe in the Singapore Exchange versus the Chicago Exchange, or maybe a treasury bond versus a swap versus a series of futures contracts. And a lot of people in the market, not everyone try to arbitrage those. And by doing so, it brings the price to be the same in each marketplace.

1:05:04 I guess you guys kind of want to facilitate that, which will facilitate volume as well. And if immutable is the backbone of that, you can just start seeing a lot more volume, a lot more maybe price discovery on some of these NFT assets, where it might’ve been- Obviously, in fact, there’s no need to even arbitrage if two marketplaces are supported by immutable because they’re sharing the same orders, which means that someone can purchase here and have it be sold here. And this is a really powerful thing, rather than having all these inefficiencies in the market, which is what arbitrage is designed to solve.

1:05:35 Those efficiencies are solved from day one. Liquidity is everywhere. A buyer can connect to a seller everywhere. And that’s what’s really important. Let’s talk about meta.

1:05:47 Is this something we need to be concerned about? Obviously, the rebrand itself was probably the best piece of PR for your business globally because people have said, what? What’s the new name? What’s this new word? But what are the things we need to look out for as this closed metaverse is potentially owned by Facebook slash meta?

1:06:03 Yeah. So look, the best explanation of why they rebranded comes from Peter Thiel, which is in his classic Seminole startup tech Sierra one talks about how, you know, smaller companies want to appear like they dominate a smaller market share, like they’re their biggest fish in a small pond. Bigger companies and that’s just show like dominance of market share inquiry. Bigger companies want to say, hey, I’m just a tiny fish in a very, very big market. So Google is not 99.5% of search. It’s a tiny fraction of the internet or a tiny fraction of information that people access. And Facebook, really, the reason they rebounded to matter, a strong motivating reason is instead of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, like things that really, I don’t know if they should have been able to execute those M&A’s. It’s hey, we’re matter where this decentralized company around the future, it’s this giant world around individuation and self-actualization in digital environments. And these are just tiny pieces of that. And so that’s ingenious. And kudos to them, even though people laughed at the transition, they got what they wanted, which is I think they have positioned themselves to get more life and lifespan and longevity on a series of extremely strong power in different verticals in sort of social media. And in terms of do we need to be worried 100% I mean, if I have nothing in particular, against the leadership say it better, but it’s really this divide between Web2 and Web3.

1:07:39 We don’t want a company whose incentives are wrong to own the infrastructure of the future world because they can, with impunity, say, well, hey, the set of physics, the set of rights that I told you are real or not. What matters is that people in this stuff, that it’s decentralized, that it runs on a blockchain like Ethereum, because what we’re really saying is how should the digital property rights that will run trillions of dollars of value over the the next centuries of the world they decided. Because what’s decided here will continue for a very, very long time, because of the network effects of that platform.

1:08:12 Yeah, I mean, when Yatsui was here, he said it’s the most important fight of our lives, maybe of humanity, is keeping this metaverse open. Because when it’s closed, so many things are happening with your brains that, yeah, how do you turn that around? I’ve had guests here that have said, they did the newsfeed study where they altered your newsfeed on Facebook by a slight bit and they can make you more angry or more depressed, you know, let alone the Metaverse VR feed, it’s a little scary, like you said, for that to be closed and maybe not irreversible.

1:08:45 Do you think it is the most important fight in humanity is to keep the Metaverse open? 100%, just like the internet not being Microsoft services network and it’s that being the internet was incredibly important. And to the credit of Microsoft leadership today, I think if you asked, hey, do you wish? MSN had won, they would say no because the sheer amount of financial value that was opened up by having an open ecosystem is insane and having a small chunk of that is far more valuable than owning a centralized server that some people can interact with and where there’s no composability and no ability for third parties to contribute to that ecosystem.

1:09:22 You could not have achieved a fraction of what humanity has achieved today without the internet. And I think the really important thing and why Yara is exactly right is this is a fight. It’s not just an equilibrium that trends towards openness. In fact, moments in technology progression in human history are often decided by very, very small arbitrary things. In fact, when email was first invented, there was a proposal to attach a fee to every single email that was sent.

1:09:51 The HTT protocol, which has been around forever, was actually, there was an incredible amount of effort that went into that, making it so efficient and so on, lasting. And so these small technical choices have huge impacts upon the interoperability and way people can build these businesses in the future. We absolutely must ensure it’s decentralized. We absolutely must ensure that people have access to self-custody, even if they don’t always want to use it, that they can always take control of their keys, lest we end up with the situations we’ve seen in the world, with people being financially deplatformed in a whim.

1:10:30 And sometimes it seems convenient because you agree with the philosophy of the government de-platforming people. I think it’s an incredibly dangerous precedent to set because we’re saying that if the winds of government change, if the tides of a political sentiment move, you can be standing on the opposite end and suddenly everything you’ve worked for is gone. I think that’s very, very scary. I think we need to move to a future that is less fragile where people can independently protect assets and that is connected instead by the right economic incentives.

1:11:01 And again, not just because if I have any authority deeply on the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, but ultimately global peace is an incentive spotlight. You have to economically tie everyone’s interests together. And that is fundamentally what both results is how do you coordinate things at scale in a way that is a hundred times better than it’s ever been seen before. It’s a good observation. Max Kaiser, who was my guest back in 2013 on the show and we had a different studio.

1:11:29 I recently said the reason the war exists is because of fiat currencies, and he said the solution is going onto the blockchain, and I haven’t gone down that route entirely, but we’ve seen recently a few examples. In Canada, in Ukraine, in Russia with the ruble, where you’re seeing for the first time that man, your financial security and independence and sovereignty is, it’s closer to being gone than you think it is. And I think I had Dan Held here, or one of the OG Bitcoiners, who said, Brian, freedom of speech is great and we had a big fight with that in 2020.

1:12:00 So I know what it’s like to be subject to the whim of governments and companies. Two years later, they don’t seem to care when I say those same things. But Dan said, if you don’t have financial freedom, you can’t even talk about freedom of speech or freedom for elections, because if you’re being controlled by your money or lack of money, you don’t even get to the speech part. And he has a good point. And I think we’re seeing some real world examples of this in the last couple of months that are a little scary.

1:12:26 And there’s this tactic being used by governments around the world. They take the extremes of the situations happening today, and they create exceptions forms. They say, well, hey, we should have exceptional legislation. We should have martial law. We should have the ability to repurpose legislation that was previously for terrorism to target domestic dissidents.

1:12:46 And I’m not weighing in on whether these people are right and wrong. Often the domestic dissidents are idiots, and I’m not defending their actions. But the ability to repurpose that legislation is incredibly dangerous because those extremes aren’t going to go away. The government in four years’ time, in eight years’ time, is not going to say, oh, cool. The extreme circumstances have now stopped.

1:13:05 The world is marginally more peaceful again. Here is the relenting of all the power that we took, and here are all these laws set back to the defaults. No, that becomes the new norm, and this is this constant edging or attrition of people’s rights by the incumbents in power. And so it’s an incredibly dangerous thing to see anything other than a hard principle around financial sovereignty, around personal sovereignty, when it comes to these principles. It’s why they exist, is so when government does change, when they do have an opposing view, you are protected.

1:13:37 And so clearly the solution can’t be politics. Clearly it has to be, you can’t touch my stuff. You don’t even need my permission, legislatively or otherwise, because you don’t have the keys to my gold under my house. And what happens when we have a digital currency and we’re seeing this play out in China versus the US, it starts to get a little more interesting when it comes to watching you, censoring you, et cetera. How are you seeing that play out and things we need to learn about both those situations?

1:14:11 So is the question, how are we gonna see, could you rephrase the question by? Is it dangerous to see China and their digital yuan and some of the ways that they’re using that to control population? Is that something to be alarmed about? And also their actions toward crypto? And is it something we should be now watching to potentially happen in the US or other countries?

1:14:31 And is that our argument for an open entrepreneur-based stable coin, for example? Yeah, it’s very interesting. I think we’re gonna see with things like the digital yuan effectively taking all of the conveniences of digital currencies and actually needing more for benefits which is soft custody which is street scarcity like it’s essentially going to be run by them at the end of the day and so it’s scary because they have a better form of money that is more effective it can be traced better. I mean at the end of the day it really just comes back to why we actually need to and I still have huge conviction in Bitcoin at the end of the day because it’s something which everyone believes and everyone trusts in and that you say a more effective store of value than, in my opinion, gold. You know, I’m a huge fan of I think the Winklevire will laugh at when they said Elon Musk is going to make it rain down gold one day and it’s going to be worthless. But it’s true. Like physical scarcity is actually far less potent than digital scarcity. And so we need to switch these new methods of value protection and distribution and storage as soon as possible. You mentioned Peter Thiel earlier and I love a bunch of his quotes and it’s a great book zero to one. Competition is for losers, one of his greatest statements and obviously he was talking about kind of big companies and small companies. Because of Peter you dropped out of college and were able to

1:15:57 Pursue your goals. I’m just curious about how that all happened. Was that a great decision you made? Have you met Peter? Have you been inspired by him as entrepreneur. Yeah, I haven’t been able to meet Peter because of credit. So one day, and obviously, look, he’s down to controversial things. I don’t align with all his beliefs. I actually dropped out before I got the teal scholarship. So we made it the bots and that was profitable. And we kind of built it from there. But I mean, it’s an incredible community. The ratio of successes and like value-generated per teal fellow is absolutely insane.

1:16:35 In fact, I don’t think there’s any, they don’t take any stake, but I don’t think there’s any VC as efficient in terms of like dollars spent per size of company created or entrepreneur in the world. It’s absolutely insane. I think there’s like seven unicorns and they’ve had like 150 people all selected under the age of 23. Wow, and that’s, you get like a grant, like $100,000 from Teal Foundation to go pursue your company and drop out of school and you’re saying their ROIs are just off the charts?

1:17:05 Yes, yeah. And look, I think, you know, it was invented as a joke against the, it was like the anti-warred scholarship saying, well, hey, we should do things a different way. And I think one of his other quotes is every great lawyer had a brilliant future in their past. And I think this stuff is true, which is, and even if you look at Australia, only just starting to shift ambitious students coming out of university saying, hey, I don’t have to go and work 100 hour weeks in an IB, or a law firm, I can do something that makes me happy, I can build something, I can work in web three.

1:17:38 And so, I believe strongly in that vision, and I believe strongly in allowing people to refuse traditional paths in favor of just building. And what we’ve seen in web three, I think, is the biggest enfranchisement of entrepreneurs ever, as well, as creators. Yeah, it’s super powerful, and it will probably take decades to shift, but you’re right, we’re heading in the right direction. And I went to school with guys, including me, they went on to law careers and investment banks and we didn’t even know why we were doing it sometimes.

1:18:06 And I had a bunch of my buddies from MIT, they quit their law firm jobs and got out early. I remember on the way out, the other lawyers used to say, how’d you get out? How’d you get out afterwards? Oh, after they left, how’d you get out? And they were like, I just walked out the front door.

1:18:20 And they were all trapped in there and waiting for the partnership and stuff. Couple last things, Robbie, you said before that in five decades, kids won’t spend time in real life. You’re not saying that’s a good thing, but they’re just not going to. I appreciate you saying that, that the metaverse is gonna be such a big part of our kids’ future. I got two boys, they’re four and five years old, and it’s just weird me getting to terms with this, but I know it’s gonna be the future.

1:18:46 Just your thoughts on that, and do we need to prepare ourselves for that? Is that a reason to fight for the open metaverse? It absolutely is a reason to fight for the open metaverse, because the worlds that they’ll grow up in, their form of value will be digital. And so you want them to be able to have the same rights to that as they were to any object in the physical world. That’s enshrined by the laws of physics, way to do and sure this is enshrined by the laws of economic game theoretic incentives.

1:19:14 In terms of, is this a good thing and how people live their lives? I think it’s very much, can we solve the problems of how to design technology that is good for humans? I think web3 is fundamentally a big paradigm shift in favor of that, because it unlocks economic incentives. That means companies succeed when they are pro-consumer. And that is the only thing that matters.

1:19:35 It’s like in climate change. Nothing matters except economic incentives. The only way we’ve seen corporate change, even for things like pride or pinkwashing, has been when it is economically advantageous that companies do that. It is that simple. And I’m not saying that on individual or anecdotal instances where people can be compassionate or humane means of companies.

1:19:56 And we’re rewarding that more and more in leaders today, which is awesome. But at scale, companies that are driven by fiduciary responsibilities, that is the only thing that matters. And so we have to make sure economic interests are aligned with human interests across every facet of society. That’s what we’re doing with the environment, more and more. And by pricing negative externalities, which the NFTs are incredible at, we can do that more efficiently than ever.

1:20:19 But it’s also really important to do things like time well spent. How are we designing algorithms and the addiction of technology Like, for instance, I have a thing against any algorithm you use that I refuse to look at because it is designed to track your brain by definition. And the human brain is not designed to cope with this stuff. And so we will need to figure out how can we create systems of technology that empower people as the world becomes increasingly digital?

1:20:43 Because I think a virtual future can be an incredibly beautiful future. In fact, we may be in a virtual reality right now, but it’s important that that’s designed right. It’s important designed with the right incentives or in terms of how people spend their time and how people can own their stuff. Is that virtual reality a simulation now, or if we just are honest with ourselves, everything is virtual, because we’re talking through a computer screen and everything’s digitized.

1:21:06 Which one did you mean there? I meant a simulation, but you’re totally right. But if we were in a simulation, it’s time to make the simulation better. Exactly. And craft it how we want it.

1:21:19 Robbie, just curious for you, as the president, biggest challenges you have for the next 18 months. I mean, you’re talking about doubling your team size. I mean, that’s no joke. I think Tony Shave Zappos did that at his previous software company and wrote a book how he was meeting people in the stairwells and he didn’t know their names. And if six months later is his first software company collapse, which is I think why he put a lot of effort into the customer experience and the inside.

1:21:46 Is that a big challenge for you and how are you able to do it? You’re obviously at war, you have a war chess. What’s it like being you? I think hiring is something we have gotten really good at over the past six months, and it’s a never-ending staircase, but it’s the most important thing to be good at as a company. I think you have to start the right executive leadership, and so that’s what we’ve been focusing on the last six months, and it’s about net compromising on culture.

1:22:14 So I would much rather hire 100 billion people than 300 okay people. I think that when you can put amazing people in a room, feel like they can trust each other, feel like they can say anything to each other, you know, Rata Kana is incredibly important to me. Like, come to work, have fun at the time of your life, and build a career-defining opportunity. That’s what we’re about. And if you go and leave in four years, because you can now get paid astronomical sums of money because of the work that you’re credited for doing at Immutable, that’s all you want.

1:22:42 And so, really, we’re interested in taking the top 0.1% of global talent, giving them the top 0.1% opportunity to allow them to have their lives and paying them top percent compensation for it. And it’s just about optimizing that funnel, as we go about that. And even though with those three numbers, it’s still hard to find good people, right? It’s a constant process, isn’t it? Oh, it sure is.

1:23:06 That’s why referrals are like our main source of highest. Okay, you sounded a bit like Ray Dalio there with the radical transparency that I know he preaches at Bridgewater. Are you a fan of that as a culture of style? So we don’t practice radical transparency. I think that’s a slightly more extreme variant.

1:23:22 We practice radical candor, which I believe is not the single word code. It’s, I forget the name, it’s a famous author. It’s a brilliant book, one of the best books changed my life. And it’s more about just being completely direct, but also completely compassionate and thinking about the end user. And radical transparency is really about, I mean, the way Bridgewater is run He’s a very unique culture.

1:23:46 I think it’s really cool. And one day I’d love to experience that, but it’s not the way that we’re on. And I don’t think it’s the right fit for everyone. Yeah, I definitely don’t think you want to jump right from zero to 100 on radical transparency in your business or relationship. It gives everyone salaries on a big screen at the front and every meeting being recorded.

1:24:02 I mean, that’s, it’s very radical. Yeah, it’s interesting for sure. And props to him. What about you personally? I mean, as a president, are you finding it’s important to spend a few hours a day, you know, talking to people like me and putting out the vision and constantly communicating.

1:24:18 I think I was talking to one of the former metropolitan police chiefs here in London, and he said, Brian, my job is communication. And I was thinking, you know, doesn’t the police force know what you’re doing? Pretty much, and he’s like, nope, every day I have to communicate, communicate to the citizens, to the police force, constantly communicate the vision, constantly communicate the updates. Is that something you find yourself doing more? So they’ve done a study which says If you’re the CEO of a large organization, and the study this has done, it was a 70-person organization, how many times do you have to say something for it to reach sort of the lowest level of the hierarchy of that organization?

1:24:55 And it is 17. And personally, if I’m gonna tell you something, like feedback, I have to say it’s your average, no less than seven times for you to get the message. So communication is everything. Say the same message, say it all the time, and make sure it’s important to sell to our values. And so absolutely, that’s quite what we’re doing.

1:25:13 Stuff like this is really important because right now, I think we have the best team in the space. We’ve got incredible people working on it. We’ve got an incredible product and we’ve got incredible tokenomics. And what we have to do is help tell people this, help customers this so they can build the best games on us. Help tell game designers this so they can design games that are more pro-consumer and pro-player but are also economically secure and help tell the market this story so that they can understand the vision what we’re building towards.

1:25:42 So absolutely, it’s really important. That’s super helpful. And you have a community too, so you have to constantly communicate to them as well. You personally, I’ve had a few layer one CEOs and some other people that they look a little disheveled at this point in their journey. I’m just wondering how you personally, just keep everything somewhat balanced so you can be the best you.

1:26:03 Is there training routines or mental routines? Obviously you don’t consume the news feeds. Have you got a process? Yeah, I have some principles. I view myself as a sim, so I think, like literally in a sim, you have all these bars and the four important ones to me are socializing.

1:26:22 I’ve got to socialize well pretty much every day, sleep, I’ve got to get pretty much seven hours every day, exercise, I have to exercise vigorously every day and I’ve got to eat well. And if I hit those four things, if I don’t hit one of these pillars and I feel off, I kind of discredit in my mind why I’m feeling that way. And I say, well, actually, no. This narrative you’re creating doesn’t matter. These are off.

1:26:44 And that’s what’s great in that feeling. And if I’ve got all those and then I feel off, I’m saying, OK, well, it’s time to dig the deep up. But that’s been the biggest benefit for me. I’m a big fan of structure. I think it serves you incredibly well.

1:26:56 And I’m also a big fan of Web 3 is amazing in the decentralization of incentives and the possibility and the types of companies you can create. But having a decentralized, anonymous company, it’s really tough to thrive in. And so what I’m actually really proud of is the fact that we have completely decentralized Web 3 product. That is, all of the best stuff around what Web 3 stands for in terms of principles and flexibility. But in terms of the company that we’re building, and in terms of the people we’re building, it’s very much the best of anything in the Web 2 world, which is a really clean and purposeful org that gives people simplicity and clarity.

1:27:34 A team that works together and kind of holds each other accountable in the best ways. And, you know, we prioritize it in communication and having fun at work and establishing real relationships and having clear sort of brightness of future and clear up mobility. And so all of the things that make you building an exceptional machine of normalization in web two, we try and build just with this web two product. I’m glad you said that, because I’ve had a few people on my show say, you know, the future is the Dow and we’re transitioning to where there won’t be any people here and the community will make the decisions, just look at them funny and I say, I don’t know, this sounds like we need leadership more than ever.

1:28:12 And so, yeah, I guess you just kind of answered that question, but you know, is that what you guys are gonna do, continue to have, you know, important people that are leading the charge because it can’t be done by what, consensus from the community? It definitely can. I think they’re just different functions. So if you’re coordinating people tactically on a mission, I think you need like the company, structure of the company works really well for that. If you’re deciding the principles or sort of the way a DAO operates over a decentralized mechanism, it’s probably really important that’s decentralized.

1:28:48 But right now governance has not prudent to have a strategic edge in the efficient management or strategic direction of an initiative. What it is good at is decentralizing control and also as a form of basically regulatory arbitrage. But until we see more effective forms of, and like governance has been botched in Dallas time and time again, it’s like people have just forgotten basic principles of governance, like vesting, like the ability to have the right incentive mechanisms, the right delegated authorities, that we’ve learned, you know, we’ve basically built these things since the early 1900s.

1:29:23 And because it’s now a Dow, seem to have to relearn all these lessons. And so I think even when it is being done as DAOs, there’s no reason you can’t import a lot of the same incentives and governance principles from web too. And I think that’s why we’ve seen a high rate of corruption in DAOs and sort of just poor behavior or misaligned behavior from founders in some instances. Yeah, I’m glad you note that. Just a couple final things. Five years from now, so 2027, what does immutable look like? What What does the world look like?

1:29:53 Are we transacting in Bitcoin or a stable coin? Or what’s the state of the layer one wars? What do you think it looks like? Yeah, so I think we want to be hundreds of millions of users of immutable throughout all of our partners and customers. And I think by then we’ll be much beyond gaming.

1:30:11 It’ll be all, how have we transformed finance meaningfully in that scale? How have we brought liquidity to products of financial instruments that previously did not have it? So that’s really important and our other vision is as the world tokenizes. How do we ensure that? This layer of financial connectivity is never lost. It’s never siloed and it’s ever centralized. So that’s really important to our vision as well You may have to remind me in the same part of the question. It’s late here. Well, what was our second part of the question?

1:30:44 There wasn’t maybe oh, yeah. No, is it were we transacting in Bitcoin? Is there a stable coin that we use? What does the rest of that market look like? I think that NFT transactions, fiat on-ramping, and the ability to transact directly in credit card is going to be massive.

1:31:00 And under the hood, it will still be decentralized systems, but your ability to just purchase in an NFT anywhere with your credit card is going to be really important for on-ramping. And then you’re suddenly in the ecosystem. Then you can use your crypto, whatever you might have in your wallet, or your stablecoins. And things will absolutely be stablecoins, not made in a lot of cases. want to buy, you know, and whatever the state thing is stable towards, I don’t know. But we’re certainly a while from Ethereum being the conceptual peg in terms of people how people conceptualizing value. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe 10 years, maybe 15. Just final thoughts on anybody that’s tuned in here. Yeah, just from your perspective at Immutable. Look, I think we’re pretty thrilled with the way that even today the community has responded to this announcement.

1:31:50 We’re really excited to continue our journey of bringing high-quality long-term NFT projects with utility to the world and gaming is the first battleground that we’re really stepping put into. So a few days ago we announced Justin Hulo, who’s the general manager of Southeast Asia Live Games, who’s joining us as chief studio officer. We’ve also just brought on John Boris and Jill Findlay and its executives who ran 100 billion dollar companies and the goal is really how can we bring both the platform and the studio all into this fundamental goal of creating this future for decentralized ownership of staff that matters. And so if you’re someone in our community, if you’re not, thank you for everything you’ve given us so far and expect a That’s a lot of us as we continue to build up this vision.

1:32:40 And for people that want to plug in developer-wise, hiring-wise, or even just consumer-wise, what are the next steps they take? Yeah, so if you’re a developer, come to Immutable, click on Contacts, and reach out. Or you can just start building on our APIs. We are completely free to use. There’s no commission required, and you can be anyone in the world and start building us on missionlessly.

1:33:03 If you want to apply for a job, search leader immutable and just click on the top link or DM us on Twitter. And I’m sure we’ll find a way to get in touch. And the last one, again, you’ll have to remind me. If, you know, if I’m a consumer say, I just minted my NFT and I went on OpenSea and I couldn’t use immutable, you know, or if I want to engage with the protocol or get the tokens, what’s the next steps we should take? Yeah, I think come hit us up in Discord.

1:33:30 We’ve got a massive community there, hundreds of thousands of people. We’d love to have you hear from you about feedback about where we go next. I mean, the thing we really pride ourselves on and what we’re gonna be increasing our transparency on in the future is how can we quickly respond to feedback? How can we really listen to what the community wants as we build up this future of digital asset trading? Robbie, super impressive stuff.

1:33:51 I’ve been watching you guys for say the last eight months and you know, it’s amazing what you’ve accomplished just in that amount of time because I’ve been watching kind of your journey. So again, congrats on the big raise, that’s impressive. the big hires as well. And again, I mean, you have a very, like I would say, understandable value proposition. I wouldn’t say simple because executing is challenging, but it totally makes sense.

1:34:15 It’s like, this is what we want and need in the future. And I can see this empowering all parts of the future. And I think a lot of people can get this too. So yeah, wishing you guys all the best. It’s exciting.

1:34:25 It’s nice to see people like Anamoka buying into you. I mean, this is all good. And I’ve heard a lot of people like you talking about us fighting for this. open metaverse and it’s a great theme and maybe one we can just kind of close with. I think we all need to make sure we fight for this open metaverse and participate in it. So thanks so much Robbie. Wishing you guys all the best and next time get to London let’s do this in person. Yeah absolutely. Alright fantastic. Stay with me here. We’ll say bye to everybody here at London Real.

1:34:54 Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time. Take care.