Witek Radomski - 2022 Is The Year Of The Metaverse: Why Blockchain Gaming & NFTs Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Full transcript: Witek Radomski on London Real

2:41 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Witek Radomski, the software developer, technology expert and gaming enthusiast. You are the co-founder and CTO of the Engine Network, a gaming community platform which you launched in 2009 and grew to over 20 million users with 250,000 gaming communities worldwide. In 2017, Engine made the move into cryptocurrency by launching Engine Coin, an ERC-20 token aimed at improving the game’s market through the implementation of blockchain technology.

3:12 You famously wrote the code for one of the first ever NFTs and have been responsible for establishing a variety of blockchain products including Affinity, a next generation blockchain on Polkadot. Your aim is to give mainstream gamers and developers simple and accessible tools to build their own part of the decentralized metaverse. Witek, welcome to London Real. Thank you. It’s an honor to be on.

3:34 Hey, it’s great to have you here. Nice to have some more people in Vancouver. You know we’re good friends with people like Gabor Mate out there, Dave Asprey, Bulletproof Exec, so keep doing what you guys are doing out there. I haven’t visited, but I hear it’s absolutely beautiful, so I’m going to come see you for sure. Witek, super excited to have you here. We first spoke about Engine back in 2019 and a lot of my students in my DeFi Academy bought into the protocol back then and they are super excited to watch this.

4:02 Funny enough, I was literally just on a phone call with a British reporter talking about how I’m gifting NFTs to all my family and my students and even some of my team members here. And the reporter paused for a second and said, Brian, what is an NFT? And I gave an explanation, but I thought, you know what, I might as well start there and ask you that question. And maybe then that leads to NFTs for gaming because that kind of changes. I think the lens that you look at NFTs, but I will start with that very basic question.

4:33 How do you answer that thing? So an NFT is a digital token on a blockchain, but it means it’s non fungible. So it’s one of one. Instead of a cryptocurrency where you can have a million or 10 million or 21 million, NFT is a unique ID. So if you have that ID, you’re the only person who has that ID in the world.

4:56 And so that can be used in so many interesting ways. We’re living in a digital world right now, a digital space. So when you want to identify something that you own, that only you own, you can use an NFT for that. Wow. And it’s such a strange name because it’s these three letters, but it means so many different things.

5:14 And I was trying to say, you know, you know, there’s so many unique things in this world. We forget how many things are actually unique and not that are fungible. We’re used to things like you said, cryptocurrency. You know, pretty much one Bitcoin is the same as another Bitcoin. It might have been mined at a different time.

5:29 Pretty much one share of Apple is the same as another share of Apple. I don’t care if Rihanna happened to have owned it before. But when you get to non-fungible things, I mean, every business is unique. Every piece of real estate is unique. Every one of us, I guess, is unique.

5:43 So as humans, we’re used to unique things. But when you stick them on the blockchain, people don’t know what they are. And again, the first version of them was pretty much JPEGs. And I think that’s thanks to you and the protocol you wrote back in the day, which probably birthed, you know, crypto kiddies and all that. How do you view that first wave of what we’ve seen known as NFTs versus maybe the future?

6:06 Well, people, you know, first started making NFTs, I think, for gaming. Some of the first use cases, like I mentioned, crypto kiddies also from Vancouver here where I live. They’re really just trying to express this idea where you can own something in a game, right? And we were a gaming company in the beginning, so we were thinking about how, like, we were looking at Ethereum and all kinds of tokens on Ethereum, and how to use this in a gaming context. And we looked at games, and everyone owns unique things inside these games.

6:39 They have unique characters. And games have these millions of different kinds of items. So we think that both fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens are really interesting in the game. Like, I’ve been playing games my entire life, and I’ve had probably 20 years of online gaming where I have spent thousands of hours inside these games. I want to have access to that, my characters, my history, the items that I own.

7:07 But a lot of those things have basically vanished, right? So I think this technology, a lot of people are interested in it because then they can take these items, these characters, these experiences, their assets, their digital property with them into the future. Yeah, you mentioned gaming. Then, you know, look, I’m 50. I’m no spring chicken.

7:27 I haven’t probably actively gamed in about 10 years, although I did go play Axie Infinity a few weeks ago just to get myself into it. I bought some Axies. I thought they died. I thought I lost 300 bucks with Ethereum, but they came back. So it was a great experience, and I had a great conversation with the Atsu of Anamoka Brands.

7:42 I’ll probably reference today. But, you know, I played Atari back in the day. My dad brought it home, and I was playing Pong and playing the Tank game. And then we moved on to Nintendo. Then I moved on to computer games on my Apple II Plus, Castle Wolfenstein.

7:56 I think I’m remembering. I haven’t said that in 30 years. But like you said, I can’t access any of those experiences. I couldn’t even go back and take a peek, you know, because they’re all gone. Imagine if I could go just, you know, watch one of the games played or access those characters.

8:12 And we can’t do that because none of those things were ever NFTs. They were just owned inside that closed metaverse of the gaming world. And so for people out there that maybe don’t consider themselves gamers, I guess that’s the way to think of it. Think of it if you could go back and maybe access some of these life experiences you had. And you want to make that so going forward we can always have ownership of that stuff.

8:35 Yeah, exactly. And it’s funny you mentioned the past. I started off, you know, Nintendo, the original Nintendo and the PC. I mean, an old 486 computer, played Wolfenstein, played all that stuff. I probably shouldn’t have been playing that stuff that early.

8:52 But then, you know, there was a Game Boy. And my first experience with something kind of like these NFTs was the Pokemon game. They have this amazing idea that you could link two Game Boys together. You’d be collecting these Pokemons inside the game. You’d link two Game Boys together.

9:08 And then you could trade your Pokemon with your friend. Or you could fight with your friend. So that was like, wow, this is like revolutionary when I was a kid, right? And now we want to bring this sort of concept into the future and actually let you own these things. I mean, one of the most crazy things is that you are spending these hundreds, thousands of hours online, whether it’s in games or on social networks or whatever you’re doing, you know, now we have the Metaverse coming, right?

9:38 With Facebook and Meta. You don’t want to be, you don’t want to have the opportunity for being de-platformed in the online space or just for your identity to be erased, right? This is you living inside this world. Your brain is inside this digital world. Yeah, I mean, that’s a whole, another interesting conversation about, you know, ownership of data.

10:00 I mean, I had a guest on called Digital Colonialism. It might have been Yat, who basically said, you know, we were trained that we shouldn’t own our information because we grew up on these web two versions of Facebook and YouTube where we freely gave up our information, our identities. And then later, potentially that information was, you know, used or controlled or taken away. We’re not even used to owning our own info in terms of an NFT. And so you almost have to re-educate the public and say, hey, hold on a second.

10:30 You should be allowed to take these things with you. You know, this is your time, your vibrations. And look, I’ll just quickly say, you know, VTech, you know, last year I almost lost my whole YouTube channel. And it was a travesty because it was my whole business. But on a personal level, it was 9,000 videos of my whole life for nine years.

10:49 You know, my vlogs, in my intimate moments, my movies. And if that had been deleted, I had no copy of that. Not to mention a copy that was referenced in through basically the world of life and search and all that. And so at one point, that kind of bothered me that someone else could control, you know, some weird part of my identity. The same thing happened to me, actually.

11:14 My wife, she didn’t want to put her real name on Facebook, right? And we had, you know, all our photos, our history, you know, our dating, all the stuff on there, on her Facebook profile. And because she didn’t want to share her ID and share her real name, that all got deleted. And after a lot of, you know, attempts to talk with Facebook, they still said it’s irretrievable. That’s just terrible, right?

11:39 We lost so much data. Yeah, I think people need to kind of look at it from a few lenses to just realize that, you know, it’s not just tokens on games and gems and pieces of armor, which again are very important and are big pieces of, you know, people’s work and identities. But again, it’s every photo, every conversation, every piece. So it’s worth thinking about that ownership of your digital rights going forward. And it’s worth having this conversation about that.

12:05 Just to finish on NFTs, before we get into kind of NFTs for gaming, you know, again, you were there, you saw the CryptoKitties, you saw the CryptoPunks, and then this year we’ve seen NFTs explode. I’m guessing, you know, January of 2020, this didn’t, nobody saw this coming, but now it’s been this explosion. We’ve seen the JPEG basic stuff go up to crazy values. I had Justin Son of Tron here 10 days ago. We just spent $15 million on a board ape.

12:33 And bless him, you know, he likes to spend money on art. But what do you make of that kind of craze in the NFTs, just before we move on to NFTs from Metaverse? Yeah, I think people, you know, NFTs entered the public consciousness. It entered the, everyone knows when the NFT is basically now, right? I mean, I had my parents ask me about NFTs and they don’t even really know what I do.

12:56 But, you know, so, you know, people obviously wanted to jump onto the next wave, right? They saw that, oh, crypto, oh, NFTs are coming. This is going to be the next thing in crypto. And, you know, they drove prices of NFTs through the roof. A lot of the early people in the NFT space, you know, saw, you know, their NFTs get worth, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

13:19 And, you know, that’s great. I mean, it spread the word about NFTs around. But I think it also sort of painted NFTs in a certain light. You know, we’ve been trying to spread the word about NFTs for the last four years with Enjin. And we, you know, we had these giant booths at the Game Developers Conference, you know, and we were talking to all kinds of crazy game developers and NVIDIA and all these people.

13:43 And, you know, they’d be seeing this for the first time. And they’d be like, well, it’s kind of cool, but, you know, not for us right now. But we kept pushing. But now, you know, these people are seeing the NFTs as, oh, well, it’s just a new way to, you know, sell something or monetize, you know, and, you know, oh, JPEGs, like this is not going to take off. But I think we’re in that phase where, you know, now everyone knows about it.

14:08 People are criticizing it. But some interesting people are going to start looking at how they can use this technology beyond just JPEGs, beyond just trading and making money off of, you know, selling your NFT to the Mexico. Yeah, I think you just reminded me like a Gandhi quote. Like, first they ignore you, then they criticize you, kind of enjoying you, right? So this is a great media footprint to at least get people to acknowledge NFTs.

14:32 Like you said, four years ago, you couldn’t get anyone necessarily to pay attention to them. And people don’t realize, you know, the CryptoKitties and the CryptoPunks were, you know, they were like, what is this, you know, a few years ago, until they start going for seven figures. It is an amazing, I kind of hate to say it, but gateway drug for blockchain, for DeFi, for crypto, because it gets people’s attention. And I’ll tell you, Witek, the best observation I had was when I got gifted my first NFT.

15:01 BitBoy Crypto gave me one of his Saturn Alliance things, and he sent it to my MetaMask wallet. And I checked this dude out, and I was like, wow, he’s kind of cool. And I checked him the next day, and maybe he was still there. And then when I showed my daughter, who’s 17 years old, she was like, oh, wow, that’s cool. And, you know, when you’re 50 years old, it’s very hard to be cool as a dad.

15:20 Now, when I sent her her first NFT, then I’m telling you, I became the dad of the year. And I’ll say one more thing. I could have given her a Porsche, and it wouldn’t have been as valuable as that NFT. So again, I won’t go into, you know, the analysis and the forecast, but just at an emotional level, it creates connection. It creates interest with people.

15:43 So there’s got to be something more there than just some ape bubble or some monkey bubble. There is really something here that transcends humanity, but it’s just hard to put your finger on it. Yeah, I mean, well, you want to feel like you have something special, something that nobody else has, something that can also show off. You know, I mean, the thing about crypto punks, they’re part of a collection. So, you know, there’s many people who can have crypto punks, but you can have a specific one.

16:10 Right. Same with, you know, BitBoy, Pluto Alliance. It’s actually Pluto. We’re actually working with BitBoy on that, to put that on infinity. They’re trying to determine, it’s a bunch of aliens trying to determine if Pluto is a planet or if it’s not a planet.

16:23 Okay. It’s like a cool storyline there. But yeah, I mean, I have, you know, I’m a comic book guy, and I have some, you know, signed versions of comic books that I’m so, you know, I keep, you know, in perfect condition for the future. And we want to have that feeling we can show it off to our friends. And in the digital space, you know, where we’re so hyper-connected with everybody.

16:42 I mean, NFTs are a great way to do that. Yeah, it is called Pluto. I think my guy’s in the Saturn Alliance. I think that’s right. And again, the crazy thing is, is that BitBoy gives to me that.

16:52 And you know what I did? I bought a few more and started sending them to people as well. So, you know, it’s fascinating, the viral aspect of this as well. And we’re just untapping and seeing what people value. I had Stanley Kuchev in here of Aave, and he was in studio.

17:09 We talked a lot about borrowing and lending, but then he showed me the 2,000 NFTs he owns on his phone. And he was saying, I go to conferences and I show these people these things. And he went on to argue that it was more valuable than a piece of art at his home. And he had an artist that created this piece of modern art, and he said, I want the NFT of that. And the artist said, well, what are you talking about? Sure.

17:30 And later he tried to argue with the artist that the NFT was worth more than the actual piece of art, and the artist started listening to him. So again, as we blur between real identity and digital identity and digital flexing and, you know, provenance on the blockchain, you can see there’s real value here. And this is just version one, right? Or version two. Yeah, we’re just scratching the surface because we’ve now, people know what it means to own something and own an NFT.

17:56 But I think the real tipping point will be when you can do something with that NFT. When that NFT is recognized in virtual worlds and different apps and maybe across many different worlds. Yeah, and maybe we talk about that now because you look at NFTs for the metaverse and then the multiverse. Maybe before we jump there, how do you define the metaverse? Like when your parents say, you know, what’s going on with these NFTs?

18:22 How do you explain the metaverse to them? Yeah, I mean, people are using the word metaverse or multiverse. We can just kind of call it all one thing. I mean, some people are saying, you know, oh, we’re making a metaverse like Roblox is a metaverse, right? But the way we see it, it is the ability for many different worlds to connect together.

18:42 So that’s digital worlds like video games. You have a video game world. It’s a fantasy land and you have this one where there’s a sci-fi universe. And then, you know, you have websites, you have marketplaces, you have social networks and even the physical world. Connecting those together and being able to use your identity and the things that you own across many of these different worlds.

19:05 So we actually did an experiment a few years back, probably in 2018. We started, you know, talking to a lot of game developers, bringing some game developers on, showing them let’s, you know, let’s do something with these NFTs. We created a bunch of NFTs like a hammer, a sword, a shield. And we said, hey, is there any way you guys can all use this in your different games? And these are completely different games.

19:28 Some of them are sci-fi, 3D adventure games. One of them is a pixelated, you know, fighting game where you have fantasy characters with wooden swords. And, you know, across about seven or eight of these games in the beginning, people started implementing it. So when you get the metal sword in the fantasy game, it’s a magic sword. When you get in the sci-fi game, it shoots, you know, electricity.

19:51 And it looks similar in each game, but it behaves slightly differently. In one game, it’s 3D. In another game, it’s a little pixelated sword. And so we had like seven, eight games using these same items. And people could get one NFT, and then they’d want to explore all the different games.

20:07 Now we have about 30 games using these same items after a few years. So I think that was an interesting experiment. And we could see this extend as, you know, as Facebook launches meta, for example. You want to be able to go and have your digital swag, your fashion, things like that shown in that world. And you want them to transfer into different worlds as you move around.

20:31 Yeah, is that almost composability in the NFT space? Composability is, I guess, a little bit different. It’s basically being able to have an NFT that has other NFTs on it. So let’s say you have a pet in a game. You can put the hat on the pet, and you can give it an armor, or you can give it different things.

20:53 You can have a sword where you put gems in it, and it becomes an enchanted sword, things like that. But yeah, we basically want people to be able to take their identity, take their items, move around the digital world. And it’s going to be very weird and difficult in the first few years, I think. Because everyone’s thinking in this walled garden mindset still, right? Every game has its own little creation, and they don’t think about extending into other games.

21:17 But as these new protocols develop, and as metaverses start becoming a thing, everyone wants to connect everything, you’re going to be able to move around this digital space, have your identity follow you, have your history be logged, and have full ownership of that. That’s so cool to think about. You mentioned Facebook’s meta. What do you make of this good, bad, something to look out for, upside, downside? Oh, that’s a huge one to unpack.

21:46 So I think it’s great. I saw this when they first purchased Oculus, right? I was like, wow, Zuckerberg is a genius. He knows that VR is going to be huge in the future. And I was a huge VR fanatic.

22:01 I had the first Oculus developer kid, and the second one, and then the consumer set, and now I have the Quest 2. And so I can see that these VR worlds are powerful, and Facebook wants to push this. We see VR, AR, all this stuff happening in the future. But it’s kind of scary, because I’ve looked at a lot of studies. If you look up studies on VR and the effect it has on the brain, it’s kind of startling.

22:31 We’ve seen what Facebook did with, they did some experiments with people’s news feeds, where they would kind of slightly modify what you see on somebody’s news feed, maybe slightly negative articles. That person would start feeling bad. You give somebody slightly more positive articles, just slightly tweak the algorithm. The person starts feeling better, more happier, more positive in life. And that is just child’s play compared to what you can do in VR.

23:00 They’ve done studies where when you put on a VR headset, and you go look in the mirror, and you’re Einstein, you’re suddenly Einstein. Your IQ goes up. You do an IQ test in that VR world, you’re suddenly smarter. This is remarkable, that it can just change your brain like that just by seeing yourself as a different person in VR. You can use that for a lot of positive things, but it could also be used for, if it changes your brain in that way, it could be used for some scary things.

23:29 They’ve done experiments on rats, where they were able to actually shut down the hippocampus of the brain when a rat was in the VR world. That’s kind of scary, but they’re trying to use that to maybe noninvasively treat certain conditions, epilepsy, mental disorders. This is a technology that can have significant impacts on your brain. We want to make sure that whatever world this turns into, we don’t know what it’s going to look like in a few years, but it’ll probably start with being able to jump into meta, talk with your friends, do things at work with your colleagues.

24:10 Then it’ll expand and become more realistic and more all-consuming, I think. You’ll have AR glasses probably from Apple in the next few years. We want to make sure that you have your sense of identity. You have some sort of control and power in that world, and you’re not just being fed whatever the corporations want to feed you. Wow. You make some really powerful observations.

24:36 Imagine that’s the effect of a news feed, which is 10 headlines, and then imagine a VR world with so much subtlety that it’s another 10,000 orders of magnitude of the experience and how it could be tweaked and A-B tested to get a variety of results. I put on Oculus Headset last year. A bunch of people at the office got crazy about it, and we all got them. I went on the Jurassic Park ride, and I went over the waterfalls and someplace in Africa. The funny thing, actually, the menu room was one of my most calm, peaceful places because it was like this beautiful house overlooking this place that looked like Rio de Janeiro, and it was just like a swinging chair in the background.

25:23 I just found it super peaceful just to be in there. It was a very strange experience. Obviously, Mark really saw way ahead of the future. I mean, did he get Oculus back in 2008 or something? I mean, it was a real early investment in the technology, and rebranding to meta is probably the best single piece of free press the entire blockchain industry could get, right?

25:45 Because now everyone knows that word, but I guess the danger is that the control will become, I guess, 360 degrees, and that’s a little dangerous. Well, Facebook wants to do this the right way. They mentioned crypto in the original announcement, right? They mentioned blockchain. But obviously, people will jump to the easiest thing.

26:07 They’ll jump to buying an Oculus device or whatever the next device is and just jumping to Facebook’s experience. But at least Facebook wants to open up the doors. They want to have an open API. They’ve done a lot of good things in the software space where they develop tools for software developers. So we want to ensure that, sure, there’s going to be some centralized meta versus like Facebook and all these different games and game stores out there, but we also want a decentralized world.

26:39 So when things don’t go the way that people want in the centralized world or governments put on extreme regulations or tell you what you can or cannot do in that digital world, you can jump to the decentralized world. Then you can jump to the blockchain that supports your values, right? Whether that’s sort of libertarian values, free speech, whatever you believe in, you can jump to that. That’s really what Satoshi was talking about in the first place with Bitcoin.

27:06 The freedom, that code is law, right? What’s in the code? You jump to the network that you want to live in and want to experience. Yeah, I hope that becomes an option. We’ll see.

27:18 I mean, I had a long conversation with Yahtzu of Animoco Brands and he said in not so many words that this is the fight of our lifetime for an open or a closed metaverse and that it is by no means decided whether we’re going to win that fight and we all need to stay vigilant and develop great code to allow there to be an open version, you know, or one that’s immediately accessible, which you would argue right now maybe doesn’t exist for the financial system. It does for a small percentage. Do you think it’s that dire or desperate?

27:47 Do you think it’s something that’s one of our main concerns in the next 10 years? I think so. I think just like artificial intelligence, creating this metaverse in a responsible way is one of the greatest responsibilities for humanity. You know, this is powerful technology, very powerful technology that can pull levers inside your mind. And, you know, even cryptocurrency itself can pull lots of emotional levers and people, you can see people, you know, both creating fortunes and also going bankrupt and getting really addicted.

28:20 So we need to build this world responsibly. We need to give people power. We need to ensure that, you know, maybe not just the first guys who got in a long time ago are the guys that are now the crypto overlords and have all the power in the world. And people who got in later don’t really have that much power. You need to build all kinds of networks and systems and governance structures so that everyone has a fair chance, everyone can be creative, express themselves, have an identity and yeah, so it’s very important.

28:49 And that’s why in our vision, we want to help build this metaverse. We want to build that decentralized, you know, open source sort of people power version of this metaverse. So you have that opportunity. Yeah, so let’s talk about the mission of engine because I find it pretty interesting and I think I grasp it. Maybe I’ll start with the biggest complaint I get from my DeFi Academy students, which is gas fees.

29:13 Every week it’s like, Brian, I don’t want to pay the gas. I don’t pay the gas. And I say pay the gas because it’s your tuition basically. You know, you’re learning how to do a yield swap. You’re learning how to do a liquidity pool.

29:22 You’re learning how a hot wallet works. Just do it. And that way the lesson is worth the gas. But it’s continually a complaint. And the reason I bring it up is because I think it speaks on what you’re trying to do with engine.

29:32 As in Ethereum, it’s incredible. It’s open source. It allows so many people to create the smart contracts and do everything they want to do. But it’s not optimized for NFTs or metaverse. And therefore, I mean, it struggles now with a lot of things.

29:47 And therefore, you see a need, I believe, for someone to go and specialize and optimize for something for this specific niche, which I believe is metaverse and NFTs. Have I got this right? And maybe you can expand. Yeah, we actually started talking about this issue with game developers back in 2018. I would go up to a big AAA game dev and say, you know, you need NFTs in your game.

30:11 And, you know, someone sat down with us and said, OK, let’s look at what this is going to look like. And right away, the biggest thing is, oh, users are going to have to download a wallet. Oh, no, that’s not going to happen. You know, how are we going to bring on millions of users and have them download this wallet and back up their seed phrase? That’s not going to work.

30:30 Secondly, they have to own Ether to use this stuff? Like, no way. That’s absolutely impossible. And it costs this much. Even back then, it cost $1.

30:38 But that’s like, if you’re doing a lot of trades inside a video game where maybe just the game itself costs $50 or $60, you don’t want to be paying $1. And now it’s like $20 or more per trade or transaction. So we started looking at this very carefully. Like, these are the main friction points, grabbing that wallet, getting the cryptocurrency, and then the super high fees that are on Ethereum. How can we solve this?

31:02 And we’ve been thinking about this for years. And with Polkadot, this new network that we’re building on, we realized that this gave us an avenue to make a custom blockchain that is focused on NFTs. It’s not focused on the world’s computer and miners or stakers getting all this revenue off the network. It’s based on people making NFTs, making the NFTs super efficient on the back end. Like, when you think about Ethereum right now, to make a token, you have to go launch a smart contract, which is a whole bunch of new code, and that contract has its unique functionality.

31:40 The tokens behave in certain ways. So that means no token, no smart contract can trust each other. They’re all alien code. This one’s alien to the other one. And so they have to have all these barriers around them, this permissions, like, you don’t touch my tokens unless I let you, right?

31:57 And that adds a lot of computation and complexity, steps that people have to go through. What we’re building with Affinity now is a chain where NFTs are native. And when you want to mint, let’s say you want to create a million or 10 million NFTs, you just have to put a teeny bit of data on that chain, saying, I’ve minted a million NFTs or 10 million NFTs. You don’t have to do this millions of times in a row. And when you’re trading these NFTs, they all have native functionality for that.

32:28 You can craft them, you can trade them, you can burn them, you can mint them, you can do all this kind of stuff natively. And that means we can keep the costs so low that it will be fractions and fractions of a penny into the future. And I think that’s the way that this new blockchain universe is going to expand. So you’ll have blockchains that are super hyper-focused to what they should do. And those will be hyper-performant.

32:56 They’re going to allow you to build games that support tens of millions of users at a time playing the game, putting tons of data on the chain, interacting with millions of people. So yeah, all these things we’re trying to solve, like this whole onboarding thing, our vision in the end is for people to be able to jump into a game on their mobile phone or go onto their Xbox or PlayStation and just start playing. They don’t even know they have a blockchain wallet.

33:24 They don’t even know they’re using crypto in the background. They’re going to be able to do transactions, they’re going to be logging all that history. And then at their own time when they decide, oh, I have something that’s worth that much or I really value this character in my game, they can go and back it up and put it into cold storage and get their own mobile wallet and things like that. So we’re doing a lot in the backend to make this easy and make this seamless for people.

33:50 Okay, why choose Polkadot? Why not choose Solana? They’re hot in NFTs right now. So we looked at a lot of blockchains and I really love what Polkadot is doing. So we’ll talk about Polkadot and Solana.

34:03 So Polkadot, it was made by Gavin Wood. He’s sort of the main figurehead in Polkadot. He was actually the inventor of Solidity for Ethereum. He’s one of the co-founders of Ethereum. And the way that he built Polkadot is this sort of modular framework.

34:20 So when you’re building a new parachains, new blockchain as part of this internet blockchains, you don’t have to go reinvent the wheel, spend years coding a blockchain. You have all these modules, you want this kind of governance system you slotted in, you want this kind of consensus, you want all these kind of different things inside your blockchain. You put them in like Lego bricks and then you can code the parts of the blockchain that are really unique to what you’re doing.

34:45 And so now all these blockchains share the same DNA. As Polkadot grows, many parachains will appear. Eventually you have hundreds or a thousand parachains and they’ll all have different bits of DNA that can talk to each other. These parachains can now communicate. So when we have NFTs on Efinity and somebody wants to go and get some cryptocurrency or trade some crypto in order to buy an NFT, they can go onto Akala or go onto one of the other parachains, do their DeFi stuff, do their trading, come back to Efinity and now they have the currency.

35:19 And it’s all cross chain, it’s all interlinked. And I think that sort of approach of building this network of blockchains is super powerful. And when you look at Solana, so the thing that I don’t like about Solana is that they’re trying to vertically scale. When you think about computers and networks and architecture, how you do DevOps, you don’t want to have, generally you don’t want to have a giant super powerful supercomputer because sure it’s fast as heck, but if you destroy that computer or if something happens to that computer, the network can go down.

35:58 So Solana’s nodes are really powerful, but because they’re so powerful, they’re super expensive, not many people can run them. And it’s very centralized. So we’ve seen Solana go down many times already. And sure it’s doing some really cool things, but they’re focused on that vertical scaling. They’re still focused on more of like the Ethereum style model where you have this sort of supercomputer blockchain that can execute all these kinds of transactions.

36:25 We like the approach of Polkadot, horizontal scaling, robust security, the code base, Rust, everything that is made on Polkadot is cross compatible, cross chain. We see Polkadot extending kind of these tendrils into every blockchain and being this network that hooks everything together. So we really like that approach. No, I appreciate you saying that. We’re big fans of Gavin Wood and Polkadot.

36:54 I just had Alex Fazelle of Swissborg in here and we did a whole broadcast about the parachain auctions and we participated in Akkala and Moonbeam and A-Star and those actually won. So we’re in and I really do appreciate their parachain technology. It’s just interesting because there’s really only a handful of potential layer one solutions for you to partner with. To quote Stanley Kulichev, ETH 2.0 is happening sometime in the next decade. So we can’t necessarily wait for that.

37:25 So I appreciate that you’re looking elsewhere. But did you consider things like Cardano or Avax or any of those other kind of layer ones up there? And did any of those things have potentially something to offer? Yeah, we looked at Cardano. I mean, the technology was interesting.

37:41 They’re a UTXO based model. So it’s more like a Bitcoin style transactions. And while you can embed really cool code in these transactions, this is not an ideal blockchain for NFTs, in my opinion. We’re used to thinking in this sort of human way where you have an account that’s your account and you’re going to keep that account and get NFTs onto that account. That is more intuitive for receiving NFTs and transacting with NFTs and knowing this is VTEX account and this is Brian Rose’s account.

38:17 And so we looked at a lot of blockchains, but we think that really Polkadot is the future for this sort of blockchain. And I mean, recently we saw this pretty bad hack on Cardano recently, the security flaw that now requires everyone to rewrite their smart contracts on Cardano. That’s really unfortunate, right? With parachains, it’s a bit more decentralized where every parachain can really be its own entity and develop itself in its own way, solve its security flaws independently.

38:58 Also, I’m guessing you started looking at these things 12 months ago or so? No, we’ve been looking for a long time. So actually back in 2018, we saw the gas prices creeping up and they were only maybe a dollar back then or something like that. But we started thinking about how this is going to scale because a dollar is already too expensive. So the first thing I did is we went and hired a bunch of PhDs from Europe and we started working on state channels.

39:29 So sort of like Lightning Network or right in for Ethereum. And we started trying to see, can we scale this using state channels? This means a lot of people can kind of do transactions between each other and you only put the end result of those transactions on the blockchain. So you can do a thousand transactions between a group of people inside a game, put the end result on the blockchain. But we realized that is not enough.

39:56 We don’t just need scaling. We need basically interconnecting this with all the blockchains, right? And to do that on a state channel system was not good. So Polkadot, the thing that I love is the cross chain compatibility, the interoperability. So we want to actually invite anyone on Ethereum to bring their ERC721 tokens in, bring their ERC1155s, bring all their games onto Affinity and back out and go to Binance Smart Chain, go to Tron, go to whatever blockchain you want to use, right?

40:31 Have it in an open world. And I think Polkadot and the projects on there are trying to do that. Moonbeam is doing Ethereum virtual machine on Polkadot and Snowfork is building bridges to Ethereum and we’re going to invite all other blockchains to build bridges into Polkadot. Nice. Yeah, all my students are asking for all those cross chain bridges and I’m telling them they’re coming.

40:54 So I’ll quote you as well. What do you make of these layer one wars? I mean, it’s really heated up in the last six months. Obviously, Cardano finally launched our smart contract. Obviously, the parachain auctions happened.

41:06 You know, Avax is coming up and signing deals with companies like Deloitte and Touche and MasterCard. Terra Luna isn’t too shabby. I’ve had Silvio Mercalli of Algorand on here and I always joke you’re running out of Ethereum co-founders. At some point, there’s not many left. I would be hard pressed if there are many other candidates that will be a layer one solution.

41:29 What do you make of all that? What do you see that maybe we don’t see? Well, it’s interesting, right? Yeah. The thing I like is it’s not just like the old days just clones of Bitcoin.

41:41 Like, you know, Litecoin, you know, slightly different, you know, algorithm. It’s actually they’re trying to do blockchain in unique ways, which is good. Those blockchains will all find their purpose, their niche that works, they work perfectly in. So Cardano, Solana, you know, Ethereum, Polkadot and all the other layer ones, they’re all going to find a really good use case because they’re introducing interesting technology into the world. But the thing that I find interesting is that there’s also this sort of war of land grabs where, you know, there’s these mega partnerships worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars being formed where, you know, sports leagues and you have major brands, you know, siding with one blockchain or another.

42:30 And a lot of the time, these are sort of paid deals where, you know, they have to put a lot of capital in and get the brand name behind them. So it’s kind of pay to play in a way. And it’s interesting to see that. I’m hoping that the technology and, you know, the network that forms with people is going to be, you know, key to this. But I think, you know, a lot of these blockchains will need to do these land grabs.

42:54 Yeah, it’s fascinating right now to watch. Why not make the engine layer one? That seems to be the business model du jour. Did you think about that? Well, we’re doing it sort of with Efinity.

43:05 So Efinity is a parachain. And it’s almost like a layer one because I think of Polkadot as a layer zero where it’s sort of, you know, a relay chain. It’s handling the security, but all the parachains are really the layer ones. And so the roadmap for Polkadot in the future from what we’re seeing is that, you know, as we bring on large games that have millions, tens of millions of people, you don’t want to put all that data directly onto the Efinity parachain.

43:32 So we’re going to have parachains that have offshoot parachains on them. So, you know, maybe you have Call of Duty having its own parachain because it has so many transactions and so many users. You know, you have some MMO, large MMO game with tens of millions of people having its own parachain. So they don’t flood the main network. And I think that, in the next couple of years, that’s the way that the Polkadot network will evolve as well.

43:55 Wow, that’s super exciting. What do you make of Metaverse and the plays? Some people, well, I think you’ve actually called 2022, Year of the Metaverse. We’re seeing all sorts of kind of fascinating projects and Sandbox and Snoop Dogg’s building his mansion there and Axie Infinity, the whole, you know, play-to-earn model of tens of thousands of people in the Philippines making a living out of it. You know, there’s so many different strands.

44:21 There’s so many different media pieces. You know, what do you see there as things we should pay attention to and maybe other things we shouldn’t pay attention to? Yeah, you mentioned Sandbox. I actually remember talking to the guys at Sandbox really early on when they were trying to conceptualize their game. And one of the cool things they did is they actually wanted to support two token standards, ERC 721 and 1155, so that they’ll be more compatible, right?

44:47 And we see, yeah, we’re seeing a lot of these different games and metaverses and sort of these like worlds where you can own land. I think these are sort of the early, still the early ideas that are kind of defined as blockchain gaming. So one of the bad things is I think I talked to game developers, like guys building, you know, big games that have, you know, tens of millions of dollars in development budgets. And they hear blockchain. And there’s always some guy that’s like, oh, we don’t want blockchain, you know, we don’t need to have more, you know, ways for nickel and dime people inside games.

45:24 And they see that in that light. Axie Infinity is blockchain gaming. That’s all it is. We want to inspire people to use blockchain in a bit more interesting way. I think that the current games and the current metaverses are only the tip of the iceberg of what you can do.

45:41 So instead of just focusing on trading, making money, doing all that stuff, I mean, think about what creative tools, what kind of painter’s palette do you have with blockchain? Just like with VR, what can you do with VR? You can create probably the scariest games in the world where things are jumping at you literally, you know, and you can create really intense games that affect your emotions, you can create vertigo. With NFTs and with blockchain, you can do things like have people collaborating together, bringing their own NFTs together to solve things inside of a game.

46:17 People having to search outside of your game and go to different worlds to find NFTs to then bring back to your game and solve things. Having players crafting and creating things, like bring that creativity and let them craft and own something inside the game. You know, like there’s so much you can do inside a game. Our goal next year is actually just to create this sort of painter’s palette and put it out there as this wiki or this knowledge base to show game developers and people building anything, businesses, anything on the metaverse, what kind of new experiences and emotions you can tap into with blockchain, not just, you know, trading and making money.

46:55 Yeah, that’s a really important point. And again, I got myself on Axie Infinity a couple months ago because, you know, I have conversations with amazing people like you and I teach this stuff in the DeFi Academy. And one of the things that surprised me is that Yahtzu from Anamoka Brands said, if it wasn’t for the DeFi Summer of 2020, gaming wouldn’t be where it is today. And I thought, wow, that was quite an important homage to pay to say that basically the funding, the financing markets helps creative markets.

47:22 And it was a great observation. So I got on there and I had to buy my three Axies. I had to get my ETH out, pay the gas. Then I got the Axies in there. Then the Axies went to battle some other Axies.

47:33 I figured out how to do that. Then one died. Like a minute later, I was like, oh my gosh, that was like 300 bucks. And then he came back, but it was a little clunky. Honestly, I think I would have preferred my first Atari console.

47:45 But again, I was new to it. I know it’s kind of like a card thing and I get it. I’m just saying, I see what you’re saying. That’s probably what most people know, blockchain gaming. And again, Axie has been super successful and hats off to them and the early investors in them like Yaht and all those people.

48:01 But like you said, it’s not, it doesn’t compare very well to traditional gaming where you have a very immersive experience. So, I guess what your guys are trying to do is try to bring that palette to where people can really think about creating the next level game on the blockchain and not have to create something that probably is slow and expensive based on the Ethereum network more than anything. Yeah, and on that note, you know, Ethereum, like sorry, basically what I want to say is gaming has always been about pushing technology from the very beginning, like, you know, started with Pong and then color came in and, you know, all these different technological advancements for side-scrolling games like Commander Keen and John Carmack invented a way to make side-scrolling look really smooth.

48:50 Doom and Wolfenstein came with these sort of two and a half D engines, game engines and they had real 3D with Quake and, you know, the gaming is always about pushing that technological boundary and now, you know, after all this stuff, we had, you know, network games, massive games where millions of people are playing, VR. Now, you know, where are we going to go? Where are we going to tap into new technology to make this a more immersive experience? I don’t think we’re at the point where you can mind link yourself into a game, but, you know, you can have dozens of new creative tools inside games.

49:25 So, you know, that’s our vision, just to inspire game developers that are building real games, entertainment, interesting social experiences and even businesses. I mean, honestly, we want businesses to use these tools to gamify the business, to gamify the brands, to make them more immersive. Instead of just being a consumer watching TV or being, you know, a spectator at a sport, you want to be involved in some way. Maybe you can go and, you know, record a clip of an amazing play inside of a stadium and then maybe you can turn that into an NFT and you’re one of the few people who did that, right?

50:03 So there’s a lot of ways to gamify that we’re exploring. We did that with Microsoft and we’re going to push further. A lot of businesses are interested in this. All right, let’s talk about this because this is really important and I’d say any business people, entrepreneurs, to pay attention because, like, I’m the worst, I’m guilty of this more than anybody, VTech, because I think, okay, I’m in this business here. I try to produce the best content in the world.

50:27 I produce the best academy in the world to get people, you know, to learn the fastest. But, like, I’m not a gamer. Like, I leave that to the gaming professionals and I was speaking with people more and more on this show and I spoke to a guy in Hong Kong that’s got a brand called Hi and, you know, it’s basically getting people into financial services and he said, Brian, you know, we use gaming, you know, when you have a WhatsApp interface and we play games. And it’s like, what are you talking about playing games?

50:53 I mean, I worked 15 years in the banking industry. There’s no games being played, right? It’s like, you know, you don’t play games. There’s no laughing, you know? And so, but that’s the wrong approach because humans love to play, right?

51:05 And so, I think people need to stop siloing themselves and saying, I’m a software company, I’m a media company, I’m a car company, I’m a whatever, a coffee company, and think, no, you’re, you interface with humans. So, if you don’t have gaming somehow in your interface, then you’re gonna be left behind, I guess. So, just tell me, did I get that right? And if so, how do you start these businesses taking steps, whether you’re S&P 500 or a small company with 20 employees?

51:34 How do they start thinking about this? Yeah, I mean, gaming and the, gaming is actually the easiest way to start kind of interacting with crypto because you are naturally, you know, doing something fun, right? And when you’re looking at a business, I mean, we’ve talked to all kinds of businesses, ones that I’ve never, would’ve never imagined would be interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain and NFTs. You know, we worked with BMW to make an interesting thing where you drive your BMW and you collect these points, these vantage points, and then you can trade them for, you know, something in the crypto universe, whether it’s an NFT or some sort of cryptocurrency.

52:14 I mean, that makes you want to drive your car more, right? We’re looking at the travel industry, we’re working with the United Nations. You know, how do we incentivize people to come to a country that is, you know, maybe has had a lot of struggles in the COVID pandemic, and people don’t really want to travel there. Their travel industry is completely, you know, destroyed. How about making souvenirs and landmarks that they want to push people to?

52:41 How about you collect digital souvenirs in these countries? And then maybe if you collect enough of them or you collect like 10 of them in the country, you can go and have some, you know, free food or you can get an actual physical, you know, pin that you can bring with you. That’s something you can do, and you can spread that across the world and gamify the travel experience. When you think about, you know, any business, we’re working with Microsoft right now, with Azure, where you have this giant developer community worldwide.

53:11 And Microsoft wants these developers to post articles, join their events, learn things. So they get badgers. They get these badger NFTs for everything that they do. And, you know, now we’re going to be expanding that further. You’re going to be able to collect like hats for your badgers and shirts.

53:29 So if you go to like a GitHub event, maybe you’ll pick up a GitHub hat for your badger and equip it. And, you know, that makes people… We were shocked. We thought this would just be like a little, you know, points program or whatever, but no, people love it. There’s so much positive feedback because they want to collect these things.

53:47 They go to the events or blog posts just to get the next badger. Wow, that fascinating stuff. And if you are a business and you want to start this process, this gamification process, or maybe you want to do your first NFT, right, I’m sure you get text messages every day and that you have to ignore, saying, oh, yeah, I need to do my first NFT. And you’re thinking, oh, my gosh, here we go. Another Burger King or another this or that.

54:12 What are the dos and don’ts on kicking this off for a business? Obviously, we’ve seen some mistakes happen in the past, but also doing nothing is also a mistake, isn’t it, Witek? So you can’t wait until 2023 to launch your NFT or your gaming play. So what is your advice to people out there? Well, think about what you want to achieve.

54:32 Do you want to engage and re-engage your customers? Do you want to attract new customers? Think about when you put an NFT out there, it’s going to be there for thousands of years. It’s going to be there forever. No one’s going to ever be able to remove that NFT.

54:48 And so you’re putting your brand out there. Think about what kind of utility you want to provide for your customers. Do they have loyalty? Can they trade those NFTs for something? Think about utility.

55:01 How can you engage people with your business more by using these NFTs? Then in terms of implementing this, we offer something called Engine Cloud where you can literally go in there, create some NFTs. And I think a lot of the first steps would be just make some NFTs, try some ideas out. Don’t just do it internally in your company, in your business. Show different stakeholders, look, I made this NFT, what do you think about this idea?

55:30 But think about really utility. Don’t just create NFTs just to jump on the hype train. And do you need to be on OpenSea? Do you need to be in a major public exchange if you’re in the NFTs? Or is it important to have that secondary market of liquidity?

55:45 And then do you need to think about what platform you’re going to create it on? Well, it depends on what you want to do. So for Microsoft, for example, people don’t really trade these NFTs. They’re just your personal sort of badges, right? What we’re doing at Engine is we’re trying to make the marketplace a bit more open.

56:05 So instead of having these sort of central websites like OpenSea and Rarible and SuperRar, where you have to go and list your NFT, we want to build a framework so that anyone can build a marketplace. So when you go into a game, for example, you can just talk to the NPC at the game that’s like, hi, I have all these items for sale. And then it’ll show things from the on-chain marketplace. You go to the dark lands, and now you see the marketplace of the dark lands of the game, where you can buy the dagger or whatever.

56:35 So we want to build a framework that anyone, any website, any business, any game can build their sort of micro-marketplaces that are branded. Users know that they’re dealing with the official marketplace. And so we’re launching a central marketplace as well called NFT.io, but we want it to tap into all blockchains. So you can bring your items in from anywhere, show them off on NFT.io, and then have this also focused brand experience. Okay, and when will all this stuff be ready and launchable from your end?

57:08 So I mean, we are right now trying to get the Affinity parachain slot on Polkadot. Right. The way this works, yeah, this way the way this works is we have to participate in this auction where people are putting their dot tokens, staking them towards a parachain. So we were just by a hair. We didn’t win batch one, which is the first five.

57:32 That was a pretty bare-knuckles fight. But the five projects that won, we really support them. We’re now starting into batch two. So there’s going to be another six parachains launched in batch two. First, we have to get that out there.

57:46 So in Q1 next year, we’re pretty confident we’ll get a slot. And we’re going to be launching in Q1 as well. We’re launching a new wallet, our new NFT Marketplace, our new platform, which is a complete redesign. The way we built it is now game developers can install this on their own servers, on their own infrastructure. They can throw as many requests onto that platform as they want and never be rate limited.

58:11 So yeah, it’s all coming in Q1. But let’s talk about those parachain auctions because again, I participated in them. And again, I’ll be throwing the rest of my dot because I’ll go back on there. I kicked off and went obviously for the Moonbeam and the Akalas and the A-Stars and watched that whole process. And it’s crazy because literally they’re fighting it out.

58:32 Like you said, it’s bare-knuckle and one overtakes the other and then one wins and gets that precious parachain slot. What do you make of Polkadot’s way of putting these up for auctions? I mean, I guess it’s a little frustrating, but also it’s a great way of making sure that really high quality projects get that high quality real estate, right? It’s almost like Sandbox. And it’s almost being kind of blessed by the Polkadot network in some way and supported as opposed to anybody can start a token on Ethereum.

59:02 Am I seeing that the right way? And what’s it like actually as a company on that experience? It’s actually a really complex topic. These auctions are super stressful for a parachain team that needs to launch a parachain because it’s a zero sum game, right? Like you don’t win the parachain out of them.

59:21 You have to wait for the next batch. But on one hand, yes, it does bring the project with the most support, the most community support up to the top and they win those chains first. But I think in the beginning, what we’re seeing is there are a lot of large dock holders as well that need to back their portfolio projects, right? So there is that happening right now. But I think as more parachain slots get released, when it turns into 50 slots or beyond, then a lot of the dock will have spread around.

59:56 There’ll be a lot more people holding dock tokens. And so we’ll have a more organic community sort of game where really the most technologically innovative projects will come to the top. I think it’s working, but there are whales in the beginning. It’s a bit of a whale game right now too. And there’s only going to be a hundred parachains by definition on that.

1:00:17 Actually, there will be more. So they actually have a pretty aggressive plan. I think they want to go up to a thousand at some point. So yeah, there’s going to be, I think, 50 a year right now. And isn’t this mindset somehow the opposite of blockchain where you should be able to build it and they will come and develop as you wish?

1:00:35 I mean, there’s a little bit of a, you know, kind of a strange conundrum in there, right? Well, at the same time, you know, you want to be able to, this is the thing, Polkadot is a network that, you know, has a certain capacity. The real chain has a certain capacity and you want to own a slice of that real estate, of that security, right? So for these parachains, you know, when you own that real estate, you don’t have to pay any transaction fees to Polkadot.

1:01:04 So essentially that auction, that staking of a dot gives you that piece of that chain. Now you can do whatever the heck you want with it, right? It’s sort of like, you know, if you own a booth at a sports stadium or if you own a piece of real estate in the real world, you can do whatever you want with it. You can rent it out. You can, you know, build houses on it.

1:01:24 So that’s the way it works. And I think it is a fair thing because it is a sort of limited piece of real estate. But Polkadot also has, firstly, it has parathreads. So if you want to pay as you go, just like you do on Ethereum, you can use parathreads. There’s also other networks like Kusama, you know, which are a little bit lower cost that lets some of the more experimental projects build there as well.

1:01:47 It’s a strange game, Crypto. Now, I spent the first six months of this year running to be mayor of London, right? I’d never had any interest in politics before, but I went and did it because I was a little bit tired of the way things were being done in the world and in London. And I got a real introduction to what politics is. For me, blockchain is some strange mix between marketing technology and politics.

1:02:09 Like, if you can’t get your message out there and you can’t get people’s attention, then, you know, you can have the greatest tech in the world and it won’t matter. You can’t use the build-it-and-they-will-come analogy because I think most developers would agree that’s not true. If you don’t have the hype, the use case, you know, the eyeballs, you could have the greatest piece of tech in the world and it won’t be used, or you can have the clunkiest piece of high-gas technology and it will be used.

1:02:35 How do you approach that, you know, weird, maybe it’s a trilemma in some ways, and is there a lot of marketing and politics involved, as well as the code? I think you hit the nail on the head, squarely on the head. It is not just about the technology now. What is blockchain? It’s code is law and community is creating a network around that, you know, that code or that sort of philosophy.

1:03:00 So we’re trying to create a vision. We’ve had a strong vision. We’re trying to push it out to the community. We want that vision to happen. And so now we can gather the community, all the people that want to see this vision happen, they’re going to support this blockchain.

1:03:14 That is a spot-on analogy. And so, yeah, we have to have a strong marketing angle. We have to have a strong marketing team. We have a strong tech team, and we have to promote and, you know, put our philosophy out there. We can’t just say, you know, we have more TPS.

1:03:30 We have more, you know, we have more technology than the other guy. We want to actually achieve something in the world. And what do we want to achieve at Engine and Affinity? We want to make it easy, frictionless. And for people to use blockchain, build on blockchain, use NFTs, we want that vision to happen in the next few years.

1:03:50 Yeah, that’s an amazing goal, and I appreciate you acknowledging there’s a lot of weird, complicated pieces, you know, to getting there, right? Someone on the other day, we’re talking about Solana, and they were talking about the fact that it’s not the most decentralized protocol in the world. But they said, look, a great UX goes a long way. And you almost were both laughing because, you know, that’s not the reason that, you know, Bitcoin was created. And, you know, we talked about the trilemma, and, you know, the UX is not one of the trilemma pieces the last time I checked.

1:04:17 And yet it does make a difference, doesn’t it? You know, when you got a thousand people in Lisbon at the Solana conference, you know, really excited about the project, you know, all of a sudden you get a lot of dev on the back of it, and then you get the NFTs with the rocketing prices, and it almost becomes this own machine itself. So you kind of have to acknowledge that that is a part of the equation. Well, the user experience is the biggest thing. And that’s why I keep saying gaming is going to be a major tipping point.

1:04:46 If you think crypto and blockchain is big now, wait till, you know, your kids are playing blockchain games. All the major games have blockchain or NFTs in some way. That UX, that experience of just playing a game, interacting with these things in a sort of virtual space, making them more physical, making them more visual, making the wallets, you know, feel seamless, not, you know, really technical and nerdy. That’s going to be key. Like, I really want to see, honestly, I want to talk to my, you know, virtual assistant, whether it’s Alexa or Siri or Google.

1:05:22 And I want to say, mint me an NFT, you know, give that NFT to my kid so when he does his chores, so he can go buy something in the game with it, right? Or use it in this game. So I want to have that easy, seamless experience. Yeah, it’s so important. I mean, when you go to Starbucks and buy a coffee and use your credit card, you don’t know the payment processor.

1:05:43 You don’t know all these things happening beside the scenes. You don’t know the make of the router going on the Wi-Fi. You know, it just works. And that’s okay. You don’t need to know.

1:05:52 But right now, we’re seeing the opposite of that with a lot of these UXs. You know, you have to do XYZ and come up the curve. And there’s something to learning, but yeah, I agree. The future is not having that. I was talking to John Woo of Avax last Friday, and he said, Brian, the key is getting access to users.

1:06:08 He’s like the old business model was you get the capital, you use the capital, you build the brand, you do the marketing, you do get the funnel, and then you get the user. And he said, what we offer is we plug people straight into the community. And it’s not this kind of old school web 2.0 game. What are your thoughts on that statement? Is the community and the user group just paramount now, whereas money is probably easier to find than harder, and maybe some of these other old school things aren’t as important to, say, a company like you or developers?

1:06:42 Yeah, I think getting the users, for us it’s the game developers, and the game developers will bring in users, right? So every game can bring in potentially millions of users. Then those users start using the blockchain ecosystem. And through that, you have the community then supporting the blockchain you’re building. And money is important.

1:07:04 Money is going to be important because a lot of brands that are really established in the world are going to be thinking of, how can we profit off this? How can we sell our brand to a blockchain company? So there’s going to be a lot of pay to play. We’re going to be selling right now. Tons of brands say, oh, we’ll do Metaverse if you pay us $10 million, right?

1:07:24 And then you get access to our brand for a few years. But I think on our end, building it from the ground up, talking to game devs, talking to people who need this technology, bringing all the users in from all different networks, from the games they want to play, and organically getting them into this space. So that’s a great goal. I mean, you’ve been watching this space now for a long time. I know you first got exposed to Bitcoin back in 12 or 13, and then obviously you guys went in in 17 with your own coin.

1:07:55 Like, what do you make of this crazy trajectory? And also, what do you see for the next few years? Yeah, I first installed Bitcoin. And I think it’s a great goal. I think it’s a great goal.

1:08:11 Yeah, I first installed Bitcoin QT Wallet, I think, in 2011. And I’m actually part of the transhumanist and sort of futurist communities in Vancouver. So one of my futurist friends said, oh, you have to check out this technology, Bitcoin. It’s mind-blowing. But I installed the software.

1:08:32 It was kind of really clunky back then. And I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. But I didn’t really read the white paper. So later in 2012, I read the white paper. And that blew my mind, right?

1:08:44 I said, wow, this is going to be insane. Like, people were talking about smart contracts, which were just a sort of hazy concept back then. They called them colored coins and things like that. But I realized that this could turn into something that firstly transforms the financial industry, transforms the world, the way people think about money. And then it will transform the way people think about ownership and computation, give people power to do anything they want without restrictions, without…

1:09:15 This could be bad in some ways. You have dark nets. You have all this kind of stuff. And especially in the early days, they were demonized. But there’s way more positive stuff happening in the blockchain space.

1:09:25 So now I still see this as sort of the tip of the iceberg. People have discovered crypto in the last couple of years. They discovered NFTs. Now, generally, anyone on the street can talk about this stuff. But now we’re going to see brands integrating this and companies and games and countries.

1:09:46 So I think in the next few years, blockchain will be a part of your everyday life. That’s why we need to develop this really carefully and responsibly. We don’t want it to turn into a panopticon. We also don’t want it to turn into this… There was this crazy post on Bitcoin talk way back in the day.

1:10:05 And some guys said, I’m from the future. You guys have to stop this madness. Bitcoin is going to go to $10,000. It’s going to go to $100,000. And eventually, people will live in citadels, these smart cities where you have to have Bitcoin in order to even be part of society.

1:10:23 And then everyone else will be sort of the poppers living outside of the citadels. And it can go that way if we build it the wrong way. You could have these smart cities. People are creating smart cities now. They may become crypto-powered and sort of further divide society.

1:10:42 So what kind of society do we want to build? This technology is unstoppable. No matter how hard governments will try to squash it, prices will crash, prices will go back up, but it is unstoppable technology. So we need to build the right kind of technology, same as AI. It’s going to be very, very scary, but also bring us a lot of opportunities.

1:11:08 I mean, I haven’t even touched on what will happen when an AI can own some cryptocurrencies. I think we’re going to see that at some point in the next decade. You’ll have an AI hiring people and paying them in crypto, and that AI is untouchable. That’s going to be pretty weird. Well, I think Andreas Antonopoulos was here in 2017 or 2019, and he posed that idea of, say you had an Uber driver, but now you have a driverless car, and now that car has access to capital via crypto and can start creating businesses and making business decisions.

1:11:42 That’s a little frightening. Imagine if a company could spring up anywhere in the world. There might be a need that was, like you said, identified by an AI that could quickly test it. But the world could get really crazy, really fast. Yeah.

1:11:59 So it’s going to be a brave new world. It’s going to be scary. Anytime this new stuff comes up, these new technologies, it’ll shake society in different ways. But I think we all at the core, we still want to have human experiences. We want to have freedom.

1:12:16 And so we want to build this in a way that people still have freedom. They have choice. They can join networks that grow, but think the same way. Yeah. Yeah.

1:12:27 Freedom is such an important word. I didn’t really understand what freedom of speech meant until last year when it was taken away from us. And I had to really think long and hard, and I had a lot of great conversations with people to really try to explain what that means, freedom of speech, or even the freedom to hear someone speak. And we kind of went down that road, and then when I was running to be mayor of London, at one point I was surrounded by five police vans, and ten police officers came out, and they banned me from campaigning.

1:12:54 I thought that was kind of crazy. Like the verb of campaigning. What does that mean? I can’t talk to my phone in the middle of the street. And it was weird, so we were kind of pushing for free and fair elections.

1:13:04 And now this whole financial freedom concept is really important. I think I was talking to Dan Held recently, and he said, Brian, without financial freedom, it’s almost pointless talking about the other freedoms, because if you don’t have the financial freedom, maybe the other ones don’t even matter. And so it’s an important concept, and it’d be interesting to see how we use these networks and maybe your networks going forward. I mean, last year, I wasn’t this well-versed in the crypto and asset block markets, or blockchain markets.

1:13:35 Also, they weren’t as developed, but we didn’t have many options, you know? We had the major social platforms. We could create our own, which we did, and there wasn’t many other ways around that. With the things we’re talking about now, it feels like we’ll have lots of other options with privacy and connection and ownership. But do you think we’re a little ways away from that, and do you have any thoughts on some of those concepts of freedom?

1:13:59 I think we’re so far away from that, because people are using these centralized platforms, like, you know, they’re using centralized social networks where you can be canceled. They’re using, you know, like Patreon that can just shut down your whole livelihood, you know, Kickstarter, all these kind of major platforms that grow. And the problem is, the audience is then on that platform. So to even do anything, to even get any sort of success, you have to go onto those platforms, and those platforms are controlled by people who may have, you know, their own opinions of what you’re doing.

1:14:30 So I think it’s going to take a few years. It’s going to take a while before networks that both give people enough autonomy and control appear, and people need to understand what this means. I think, you know, we’ve seen a lot of instances of deplatforming and voices being squashed, and people need to really understand this. I think it’s going to take a lot of education, you know, and people will eventually start migrating to the platforms that are decentralized.

1:15:01 It’s inevitable. Yeah, I don’t think people have any idea of what’s going on. Up until last year, I thought only weirdos got censored. You know, I thought it was always the other guy. And I had nine years of conversations sitting here in my studio talking to people calmly.

1:15:15 You’ve watched many of them in the past. And then that one day on April 6th, YouTube decided that that one was going to be taken down, and I was flabbergasted. The worst part is that most people didn’t know it was happening. So my YouTube channel became the Mr. Rogers channel.

1:15:29 So we’d only talk about the happy-feely, you know, things with warm sweaters and slippers, and everything else had to be on another platform. And that was me. Most people would self-censor themselves and not even talk about that and maybe not even know. Guess what? The public doesn’t even know it’s necessarily happening because they just go back to the feed.

1:15:47 Like you said, well, the feed, the feed. And so even getting the concept across that we’re all being somehow, you know, given a filtered version of information based on a lot of things, it’s hard for people to see that. Now, when you get things like last year happening, you get a nice, you know, paradigm shift. You get people like Michael Saylor saying, wait, something’s wrong here. Maybe I shouldn’t be owning dollars.

1:16:11 Maybe I should own Bitcoin. That can help. But I feel like we’ve got a long way to go on the education side. We do. And I mean, even looking at what’s happened with COVID and, you know, the elections before that and in the States.

1:16:26 I mean, the internet has evolved in this weird way where you can go into these crazy echo chambers and just, you know, silo yourself in one echo chamber or another. And all other views that don’t follow the narrative are basically deleted, right? And I feel like the internet was a little more open back, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, but it’s been evolving this way. So I think decentralized tech will let people express any view possible. And you’ll be able to join networks that are free speech networks and be able to, you know, persist that stuff forever.

1:17:01 So I’m really looking forward to that. Yeah, me too. And all the stuff happening with blockchain and everything you guys are working on, it’s the only positive step that I’ve seen. Without that, I don’t know, it would be a pretty scary world to be in that. And looking at central banking and monetary policy, it’s nice to see at least some frameworks of an alternate reality.

1:17:21 And I’ve had long conversations with people like Jeff Booth and talking about deflation, et cetera. You guys recently formed the Affinity Metaverse Fund and set aside $100 million to support people building Metaverse projects. Just tell me a little bit about that and, you know, how people can learn more about that and what you’re trying to get, you know, developers to do. Yeah, so we have a $100 million fund. We currently have about 70 partners in our ecosystem.

1:17:46 And our goal is to grow the blockchain, gaming, Metaverse ecosystem, NFT ecosystem in the engine sphere to $1,500 or potentially $3,000 in the next year. That is a massive goal. Looking at, you know, every day, we have to bring on this many people using this stuff. But what’s going to help us is the ability to fund these projects and any interesting ideas. Anyone who’s willing to build something cool on the Metaverse, we can put funding towards that.

1:18:14 That’s going to help a lot of the little guys that have, you know, great ideas, have great technical teams that need funding. And we can bring in other investors from other areas and really that $100 million is going to be a lot more actually that we can put towards these amazing games and projects. Yeah, that’s super exciting. It’s always nice to see, you know, a nice chunk of capital that people can go and access and put into work. What’s your single biggest challenge as, you know, CTO of engine?

1:18:45 I mean, what is the hardest thing? Single biggest challenge? I have so many challenges. Give me the top five. Well, okay.

1:18:55 So, I mean, this last year, we’ve grown, we’ve over doubled the size of our company. So we are now, you know, over 60 people, and we see ourselves going to 100 people in the next year. So that’s been a massive challenge, just kind of going through the different stages of, you know, small company to medium-sized company or, you know, small, medium. Going into like, how do we keep this company open, thoughtful, where everyone has a voice, everyone can be creative, but, you know, not go into complete chaos, right?

1:19:27 Because we’re developing, you know, five, six different products at the same time. Another challenge has been, you know, with everyone who’s built on Ethereum, how do we migrate their projects over to infinity? How do we let them bring their user base without spending tens of thousands of dollars on the migrations? Another big one is really talking to game developers. We have to educate.

1:19:52 There’s a lot of education happening. We’ll see NFTs in one light, like I mentioned. We need to show people that there’s so much more you can do with them. And that’s why in the next few months you’ll see, you know, this sort of painter’s palette of what you can do with blockchain. I think stretching what people have ever thought of possible.

1:20:12 So those are a few of the challenges. Another one is, you know, a lot of people are going to pay to play. You know, brands want to get, you know, the next number of millions of dollars in order to use technology. And there is people with a lot of money. There’s a lot of chains that might not be the best technical solution for that, but they’re throwing millions down, right?

1:20:33 So there’s a real land grab, and we’re going to be part of that fight as well. Yeah, so I mean, there’s just challenges everywhere. It’s a really challenging space, but that keeps me alive. Every day there’s something new, and it’s moving so fast. I think I have to learn about new blockchains every day.

1:20:52 It’s kind of crazy because there’s a new chain launching. There’s a new project launching. There’s a new game, a new platform. It’s crazy. The whole world wants to get on this.

1:21:02 So it’s a lot to take in. It’s so fast. A couple of things you said there. When you say land grab, so a protocol will throw kind of tokens at someone or they’ll pay to play. What does that mean?

1:21:14 To give them parts of the blockchain to come and develop on their platform? Is that what you mean by that? Well, I actually see projects. I mean, look, this is happening for brands and even for developers. There’s a lot of poaching happening.

1:21:27 New blockchain comes up, gives people a million dollars worth of tokens for the best developers to come join them. There’s brands that have an established identity, Sports League, whatever it is. And they’re talking to multiple blockchains and seeing who gives them the most money to use that brand. So there’s a lot of that kind of stuff happening. I think that will settle down in the next couple of years.

1:21:53 There’s still going to be IP deals and brand deals, but people will eventually move to the technology that’s best for their use case because beyond just licensing fees, you want to actually start doing something beyond just making a few bucks. We are actually talking to a lot of these brands that have tried this sort of approach and then realized, you know what, we don’t want to be in a walled garden. We don’t want to be limited to like one blockchain. We want to be part of the wider metaverse.

1:22:23 How do we do this? How do we explore the metaverse? And the coolest brands, some of these are global brands, fashion brands, sports leagues. They actually see now that the metaverse is going to be an open place and they want to make their tokens or NFTs compatible with any wallet, any blockchain, not just one provider. So that’s a really good thing to see.

1:22:48 And I think over the next few years, that will evolve to do that way. It’s almost like the philosophy and like the mission is so important in this space. And it’s almost like the metaverse and NFTs, it almost exposes that. If you’ve got a brand that’s maybe been hiding behind some great products or a great, you know, television experience, and then they go into the NFT space, you kind of get to see what they’re all about because like what are they doing?

1:23:13 But if they come in with this really great mindset, and I talked to Raul Pala about this, and he’s like an NFT should be a way not to extract value, but to add value to your customers. That simple philosophy alone could probably save so many brands, so many pitfalls, billions of dollars in mistakes, and just say, guess what? We’re not going to approach this the way we might approach, you know, a lot of the things we do, which is world domination, crush and kill, but maybe we should just try to add some more value to our customers and maybe think about giving something first would probably save them a lot of time, right?

1:23:51 They think that way as opposed to next quarterly results. Am I off on that? You’re spot on. We’ve talked to celebrities and musicians, for example, that want to do some NFTs, and they look at some, some of them have failed where they just released a JPEG and are like, you know, I was here, spend millions of dollars on this JPEG, and their fans get really pissed off when that happens. So the ones that see this, they want to build a lasting experience.

1:24:21 They know that their brand, their name is the most crucial thing to them, and they want to build something that gives their users a stronger connection to them, gives them their users lasting value. And yeah, so people have to start thinking that way, and naturally, I think people will think that way, and the world will move that way, because the brands that do it right are going to be the successful ones and the ones that everyone flocks to. Yeah, that was so true.

1:24:47 Two more things you said there. Look, growing a company at that rate is so difficult. I would say the 30 to 60 is maybe more difficult than the 60 to 120, which is definitely more difficult than 120 to 240. I remember Tony Shea, the late Tony Shea, who started Zappos, great book, you know, Delivering Wow, or Delivering Happiness, I think is what he called it. I think the previous company he had was a software company, and he said, I remember at one point I was walking in the hallways and I didn’t know the employees, because they had gone from like 100 to 300.

1:25:17 He was doing some software tech startup. And he said, that’s when it all went wrong. Like, we just lost our way, the company, just because nobody knew what the hell they were doing. So, like, what you’re doing now, it’s so complicated. From a technology perspective, from someone like you that maybe is used to code and smart contracts, trying to manage people.

1:25:36 Oh, my gosh. It’s like an alien universe, right? It is. It must be challenging. It is.

1:25:43 It’s something that we’ve had to struggle with over the last year, but we are starting to find our way. One thing I found really useful is to just have one-on-one conversations with everyone in the company. Just schedule a meeting, you know, just chat, you know. And then you find the most remarkable concepts and ideas coming out of people. I want everyone in the engine to feel like they are, you know, they have some creative control.

1:26:06 They input, they ask questions. And we want to keep it somewhat flat in that way. Obviously, there has to be hierarchy when you’re growing a company. But we want to have that communication across all departments, across all people. So, you know, that’s been helping.

1:26:19 And, you know, now we go towards 100, hopefully, and we’ll see how that goes. But as far as you were saying, it’s not as hard as going to 60. Yeah. And it’s such a fine line. I’ve had this conversation with somebody recently where, you know, again, now you have COVID and people on Zoom, and so you don’t have the in-person, so sometimes it’s easier to miscommunicate.

1:26:38 And then you got everyone saying that everything is going to be a DAO one day, and then I’m like, but there’s also a place for leadership and for vision. And, you know, it’s not obvious to me that we’re all ready to move to these centralized, autonomous, token governance DAOs where everything works. I still haven’t seen an example yet. So, where do you go in between? You know, like you said, keep it flat, but you got to have a direction.

1:27:03 And I guess these are the questions we’re all asking, you know, right now. Last part is, this space moves so fast. I mean, I was in the dot-com startup boom. I was in New York City. I was working as a CFO of a luxury retail brand.

1:27:15 And things were moving fast then. And the markets were hot. But this space feels not only 10 times, maybe 50 times faster and more complicated. And VTech, I’m here talking to OGs like you twice a week, right, for 90 minutes each. And I’m talking to hundreds of students in my academy from 54 countries.

1:27:35 Some of them have their own funds and dApps asking me really hard questions. And I still can’t keep up, right? And like you said, you’re the CTO, and I got to learn a new blockchain every day. I mean, how can this continue? And it’s going to continue, right?

1:27:52 This is exponential growth? Yeah, well, it is. But I think people will, just like with software development and Web2, people will find methods, you know, formulas, protocols that work regardless of what you’re doing. So people kind of know what a token is now. They kind of know what an NFT is.

1:28:12 And cross-chain communication, like, those standard ways of doing things will be established. And I think, you know, everyone working together to build this metaverse, building these protocols, you know, that’s going to make it a little bit easier, I think, in the coming years. So you’ll be able to, everyone will understand what these things do, and then, yeah, you’ll become more familiar. And how do you personally manage to stay so calm? Do you got, like, protocols that you do or mindsets or activities to try to keep, you know, somewhat centered in a world that can pull you, literally, 24-7?

1:28:49 Yeah, I mean, I try to keep, you know, somewhat fit, just, you know, go run every day. And also, I think the most important thing I do, and I’ve been doing this for quite a while, is when I have ideas, when I have thoughts, when I talk to people, I write them down. I open up a notepad or open up notes on my phone and just write it down. No matter how silly it is, I write it down, and then that makes it concrete. So then, I don’t have just ideas coming at me and flying around, and I’m getting confused.

1:29:19 I’ve written it down. I can then judge it later. I can think about, do I want to develop this idea further? Do you want, you know, it really solidifies things in your mind. And that keeps me calm, so I know what is what in the world.

1:29:33 Yeah, that’s really good advice. I’ve had a lot of authors on my show, and they say, once they’ve written the book, it almost clears their brain to where they can move on to the next book. But until they’ve actually solidified and crystallized and properly flushed out the ideas, it’s almost like they don’t have the brain bandwidth. So there’s something powerful there, writing as well, either handwritten or even typing. Yeah, exactly.

1:29:57 So it’s building like a mind map of your personality. And now, I have so many notes, like thousands of notes about everything that I can look back over the last few years and reference them. I’ve got to put that into a database at some point. But it’ll be interesting, I think, to see my mind map evolve over the years and my mental state on paper and on digital forms. So it helps me a lot.

1:30:21 Yeah, I found old notes of things recently, like five years ago, and I’m like, huh, some of those are crazy, but some I actually did. Like, it’s weird to see how that flushes out, you know, sometimes years later from those brain cells. Yeah, I have a little notebook where I was trying to figure out how to do an NFT, right, before we even started getting into crypto. I have all these notes and diagrams and charts, and they’ll be interesting to look at. Actually, we’ll have done that in a couple of years.

1:30:47 Wow, that is super cool. Transhumanist party, Zoltan Istvan, is what I had on the show, right? Like seven years ago or something, when he was running to be president, transhumanist party. I think I just had a flashback. Yeah, Zoltan’s awesome.

1:31:02 Yeah, I don’t even remember if he was here, it was great talking to him. Final thoughts, anything we didn’t cover, or anything that people, you know, in this space, should just maybe remember to think about going forward to 2022, you’re the metaverse, as you call it, and beyond. Yeah, just, you know, I think the metaverse is going to be decentralized. There’ll be a centralized metaverse, there’ll be decentralized metaverse, we’re building that part. Try to think, try to be open-minded when you want to build NFTs, when you want to build this kind of world.

1:31:34 Think about what can you do that’s new? What can you do that’s not just, you know, oh, you know, this company’s doing it, so I’ll do the same thing. I’ll just launch an NFT just because, you know, that’s a cool thing to do today. How can I use this NFT in a way that no one’s ever done before? What can I do to make this cool, interesting, useful?

1:31:52 How can I change the world with it? How can I make the world a better place with it? There’s so many opportunities that we would love to tackle that we just don’t even have the bandwidth for, so it’s up to the community, to the world, to really embrace this technology and looking forward to the next few years. Yeah, super good advice. Yeah, find something that’s value-added, it’s not about your balance sheet or ego, and something creative, and you’ll probably end up doing the right thing in this space.

1:32:20 How can people contact you, get involved in Efinity, or tap into the fund, all that good stuff? I’d follow you personally. Yeah, sure, so my name is Witek Radomski. I mean, I’m vitek at engine.io. If you want to email me, check out enjin.io to see our website and what we’re trying to build.

1:32:39 If you want to help us in the crowdloan that’s coming up here, go to efinity.io, and please support us. We want to get Efinity launched. I’m going to go – I can go stake that now, right, and jump into that one, yeah? Batch two, we’re actually starting later today, so yeah. Okay, good. All right, I’m in on that.

1:32:57 I’ll go do that now. I’ve got a little experience now on those parachain options. I think when we first talked about them a few months ago, I don’t know if you guys were in the schedule or not in the first batch, so don’t worry, we didn’t forget about you. Really appreciate everything you guys have built. Again, you know, we’ve been talking about you since 2019, and a lot of my academy members invested in you guys back then, and yeah, really appreciate all the work you’re doing.

1:33:21 So I think this is a fantastic idea, tons of value add. Love to keep helping you guys in any way we can. So thank you so much. Next time, let’s do this in person. You’ve got to get to London, and I definitely need to go to Vancouver.

1:33:32 I know so many people there, and I need to hang out, and I’ve heard so many beautiful things. So next time, let’s do this in person, shall we? Let’s do it. I’d love to come to London. All right, fantastic. VTech, there he is from Enjin.

1:33:43 Go check him out. Check out the website. Get in contact. gaming is the future. Think about it in your business.

1:33:47 I’m going to start thinking about it right now. Appreciate you, VTech. Stay on with me, but we’ll wrap this show up. Appreciate everybody on London Real. We’ll see you next time. Take care. Bye.

1:33:56 Bye.