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Alpha Wolves #8 | Finding Gems | Tatsumeeko
Recorded: Jan. 19, 2024 Duration: 1:06:33Space Recording
Full Transcription
I was raised by the wolves.
I was raised by the wolves.
I was raised by the wolves.
Me, I can't break a commitment, I just seen people fuck up the whole team cause they couldn't play their position
Hey, I've been talking about dating, bitch, you know the road ahead was paid with good intentions
I see myself as my nemesis, I contemplate in forgiveness, I think I lost all my innocence
Hope my life depend on this, this ain't no simple suck to shit
Try and steal and you get picked, that's what you motherfucking get
I feel safe for taking risks and I can't eat this on my own life
Put my back against the wall, just to see how much I grow, dawg
I was raised by the wolves, ate to they fools
Runnin' through the night, playin' with your life
Goin' against the pack, that's risk in your life
Better play it right, better play it right
I was raised by the wolves, ate to they fools
Runnin' through the night, playin' with your life
Goin' against the pack, that's risk in your life
Better play it right, yeah, you better play it right
I was raised by the wolves, played on my toes
Always in the game and never played by the rules
Try to let me leave, sit under my knees
Pick myself up and turn my back to the breeze, oh
Get a million, I'm really mama, look at me
With all these diamond chokers, man, it's manning out of breath
Thought that you would feel it cause some branches of my tree
But if you and myself don't know I'll always be around
Don't let me down, you said you'd die for me where there's a ground
Ice on my ribs, ice in my veins
But it's a cold, cold world, man, you can be pregnant or you can be praying
I was raised by the war, enter the floor
Run through the night, playing with your life
Go against your back, that's risking your life
Better play it right, better play it right
I was raised by the war, enter the floor
Run through the night, playing with your life
Go against your back, that's risking your life
Better play it right, you better play it right
hello hello it's me again that you were hoping for sam but you're stuck with me again tonight
sam is unable to make it so i will be taking over as the host once again had a little bit of a one
week hiatus but we're here we're gonna have some fun with this we've got a sick panel we've got a
game that i love and i'm super excited to chat a little bit about we've got a glass of wine in hand
thanks to peyton he set the mood a couple of weeks ago and i haven't been able to join one of these
shows without one since then and then i've got three absolutely ridiculous intros that sam has
written that i have to try and work my way through and we're gonna jump right into it because i'm a
little scared and i want to get it over with to be honest with you so with that ladies and gentlemen
get ready to howl with excitement for the leader of the pack in crypto research the barky boy who
never cries wolf when it comes to unearthing web3 treasures he's the alpha of analysis fearlessly
baring his fangs of facts and figures he's the lead researcher of our pack ensuring that we only
hunt down the most lucrative opportunities and leave no stone unturned in the vast landscape of
cryptocurrencies he's the lichen of the ledger with an uncanny knack for separating diamonds from the
dogecoins he's got a howl that echoes through the valleys of volatility ensuring we're always on the
trail of the next big catch so get ready to run with the pack welcome to the panel the wielder of
wisdom the invoker of nft insight it's spark see what up what up good to have you uh back again
knock my man you're uh you're an st host so let's get this going yeah but hold that comment because
this is the tricky one here sam added like four words in a row that start with the letter c so
we're going to give this one our best bet with a whopping 650 000 followers in web3 he's the sultan of
the cybersphere setting the social media scene ablaze with his scintillating insights but hold your
horses he's not just any creator he's the prince of curation prudently picking the most pioneering
projects that are lighting up the crypto cosmos as the architect of this thing of ours he's
masterfully molded a mega community community where collaboration cultivation and ceaseless
enthusiasm coalesce from colossal coliseum of web3 gaming now with his brilliant brainchild nexus
labs he's unfurled the next level utopia for web3 gaming investors and enthusiasts alike
he's the boundless benefactor the nexus navigator it's hustlepedia
yeah you you absolutely killed it this time on the intro by the way no interruptions no nothing and
the the perpetual uh pioneer of of whatever the the triple p entendre you crushed it pleasure to be
up here with all your boys again yeah it'll be a fun one johnny i'm excited to get into it and and
last but certainly not least get ready to embark on an epic odyssey with the wolfish wizard of the
gaming realm this wolf's keen sense helps him definitely navigate the gaming market's turbulent
terrain with the grace of a seasoned pack leader as a director of marketing for champions ascension and
the luminary founder behind our very own wolves dow he's no stranger to conquering the challenges
as colossal as mountains with the determination of a wolf on the hunt he fearlessly spearheads
these endeavors always hungry for the next opportunity yet when the work day ends his love
and commitment to his family mirror the protective instincts of a devoted wolf safeguarding and
nurturing his young pups please welcome to the stage the curator of canines the patron of pooches
it's peyton it's uh i'm looking at the reed knock he forgot the last name but it's all good
and i just stopped just say completely gone but no i appreciate one day i'll get it i'll get it one
day you're the only one that probably write it this knock but like i want to be the sam presti of web3
gaming that's all i gotta say well we'll do our best uh to get that the next time we host the show
um we've got a bunch of really fun stuff tonight i just wanted to kind of kick things off and
shout out to the sponsor for tonight's episode tatsumiku um they are one of the coolest gaming
projects in the salon ecosystem they've been around for a very long time i'm super excited to dive into
things and chat a little bit about what they're building um but we'll get to that later in the
episode the only other thing that i wanted to mention is we do have two blood loop whitelists for
their upcoming minutes and a couple days here that we're going to give away so we're going to give one
away to somebody who is retweeting the space uh now so you know like retweet make sure that we share
get some more people in here and then over the course of the show we'll be asking for comments
and we'll pick a couple of you guys or one of you guys out of the comments there to kind of give you
that whitelist opportunity as well now with all the housekeeping out of the way we're going to jump
into the first topic tonight and i think that this is one that one i'm really excited to to chat a
little bit about because i think it's something that is sort of like behind the mists and mirrors
in space and it's understanding how to find projects um and and how to understand whether or not these
are projects that are worth following so the the question to the panel and this is an open question
here is there any use in actually trying to find projects super early anymore there was a period of
time where you wanted to find projects when they had 50 to 100 followers nobody else was paying
attention to them because it meant that you were probably going to be able to get some sort of access
into their ecosystem but it feels like the tide is turning a little bit here so is it worth finding
these projects at an early stage or do you think it's really just about getting in that last two
to four weeks before mint payton i see that hand go up let's go over to you yeah i think uh there
definitely is um i think if you get in early enough and there's a few tactics to do that um you can talk
with the team that's how wolves started um and i still stand by that from a community perspective if you
are a leader of the community being able to get in there and talk to the founders before the collab
managers are hired is a huge deal um explaining just giving them advice uh being you know hustle
probably does this spark and i do this for for um for wolves as we go in there we try to give them
insights on anything like that and then uh we can get insecure whitelists and stuff for our community
just because they're just thanking us there but once those collab managers come in they know the space
right they're like we know that these are valuable and all that stuff so if you can get in there before
them that's that's great but even if you are a like solo participant there's a lot of different
ways in which that you can find a project early and then also just give value from like a community
perspective i was a community manager for azra the people that stick in there if you think that
there's a very high conviction project right uh there is a huge upside for you to give value to them
by just like talking every single day because the last thing that a community manager wants is a dead
discord so i that's all i'll stand by that um there's probably the stuff but i'm that's more from
the builder's perspective yeah i love that and i think that there's a lot to unpack here with this
but before we move to spark i want to just issue a challenge to those of you who are listening in the
comments give us your earliest alpha any project that you follow let's say it's got 100 to 500 followers
share with that group and we'll give one of the blood the whitelist away to somebody who's got
a project they're excited about that is super early on in that process spark see over you
yeah it's interesting i think um on what payden said i do think there's something to that in terms
of you can get more access to the team and prove yourself if you're there early um i feel like the
opportunities to do that are less nowadays often by the time the discord is open the project already
has a lot of eyes on it so it's not there's not as much of an opportunity to do that um you know it
used to be back in the day that if you find a project early it would be you know automatic whitelist
via the og role in the discord you know you find the twitter you put them on notifications and you look
out for that that discord link um the walls were doing that non-stop back in the day um or you had like
a huge advantage in these whitelist competitions because there were so few people monitoring the
project that you know if uh they're doing an ama and they're doing best questions there's like 10
people that rock up to the internal ama um and i don't think we really see that anymore especially in
this like semi bull market whatever it is especially when gaming is a prominent narrative um projects just
don't have any incentive to give whitelist out to early people or they don't think they have an
incentive to do that um you know they often would use it to put themselves on people's radars at the
very beginning uh they want people to retweet and like and nowadays they throw a quest out and like
a thousand two thousand people do the quest for them and you know i think there's i think there's too
many people looking for new projects it's too easy to find new projects nowadays uh quests are like the
new way of of getting whitelists um there's definitely less value nowadays i think if we're looking at roi
on time if it was me and i was looking to choose between hunting for projects to find them early or
something else in the space in gaming i would be using that time to look for play to airdrop opportunities
um early testing games that haven't announced whitelist yet but you know that if you test
the game you've probably got a good chance that sort of thing i think there's probably better roi
there at the moment also pd over to you johnny what do you got for us yeah i'll just kind of
reiterate what was said um so as far as like project founders project um you know nft founders et
cetera very valuable to make that early connection and kind of have that alpha that inside track to
teams kind of like what peyton said um i think like for investment purposes like like spark mentioned
like it's just not how it was it's not like oh most projects these days don't do the first hundred in
discord get get a whitelist like you know there's the few and far between thing but being like the
first one on the scene for any given project definitely doesn't hold as much weight as it once did and
like um i don't know as far as even alpha like no one's gonna like there are some people that hold
you know weight in the space they bring you alpha they're the very first ones to give it to you maybe
you'll remember that they were the first ones but once everyone on the timeline's already talking
about it no one really like oh this guy is the very first one to talk about this it just doesn't
hold as much weight as maybe it once did in the space so uh for a project founder to have that inside
track for his community to be able to get in on or etc i think that that's huge and i also think
like it's obviously great to be early on things and you know drive awareness to them but i think
the importance is less now that crypto twitter is where it's at because you can you can find what's
going to happen in the space coming up uh very easily through twitter so you know it finding alpha
isn't as hard as it once was it's very widespread uh very nice to have the knowledge firsthand and
like be the first on the scene but i i think the importance of it is much less at this point
yeah i think that that's a fair point and it's something that we we talk about a lot in space
really the consistency of being a part of that community is almost i would argue significantly
more important than just being there early and not contributing at all payton over to you i was just
going to caveat um a lot of this because i think we're speaking at it from like a trader or roi
perspective but there's also an opportunity for like jobs right like mods community managers
and being able to be there early uh is extremely important um and i that's what happened with me at
azra that's where i got my whole start right i i think i joined azra at sub 1k um in terms of discord
and twitter following was even less and i got to take my time breathe a little bit figure out and research
and then create a video i know easier said than done um create a video and and edit it and like
post it before anybody even saw azra right um and there's there is i think a little bit of alpha there
for people that want to get started in the gaming industry um because you have a little bit more leeway
because the the gaming industry in terms of web 3 is very very young
so i want to ask a quick follow-up question here just as i think for a lot of the people who are
listening this seems obvious right getting in early opens more doors gives you more opportunities
i think that that part makes sense but for somebody who wants to get in early is maybe new to the
ecosystem how do you find these projects to begin with give us you know your 30 second answer we'll
start with i'm gonna pick on you payton because you were speaking last how do you find new projects
to get in early what does that process look like for you yeah um follow smart money so crunchbase is
probably one of the biggest ones um uh you find funding that go into things and they find discords
and some people don't give their discord links but they get the discord on the back end so you can
find it through that way also job recruiters um a lot of people don't think about that in terms of
linkedin jobs or recruiters um figure out what they're actually hiring for and that's how i found a
lot of things you want to go into a little bit more advanced you go into apis for twitter and figure out
what their um find a curated list of people that you would tend to follow johnny would be on my list
for sure see what they follow and um go from there but that would be probably my tips for somebody that
wants to be an alpha hunter um it's a lot of research yeah one of the things that we did uh just a
quick little personal anecdote i i worked bd at magic eden and in the really early days before we had
established any sort of relationships one of the ways that a lot of us did outbound research was
literally to follow people like johnny and payton and sparksy and go through their most recent
followed accounts because typically these are guys who are in the know they're paying attention to
things that are happening in the ecosystem i would literally spend hours scraping through influencer
follow lists to see who's followed who recently how many of those influencers have also followed that
account maybe this is something worth paying attention to there was also something i don't
know if drop calendars are really even a thing anymore but you know about a year and a half ago
two years ago there were like dedicated websites for all the upcoming mints i think the process has
definitely gotten a little trickier when it comes to finding teams early but like payton said right
find the community find people that you trust or you you look up to within the space and listen to
the things that they've got to say because a lot of the times they're the ones who kind of lead the
way with with the alpha and the next big project that you should be paying attention to so definitely
important something that you should all be doing if you're looking to one get involved in communities
um i definitely think that that's the way and you get to build a relationship with the founders
but two it's a great way if you are a flipper and a speculator alone to get in early and hopefully
get some whitelist for some projects that you feel really good about long term somebody in the comments
i believe it was zach d um mentioned and shout out coin games which is a very early stage team uh
kevin lambert from their side one of one of the leaders on on that side is a an incredible developer
with a great history that is definitely an early project that you've got here for free there's the alpha
go follow coin games they're definitely a team to watch over the course of 2024.
all right moving on to the next topic um we have had one of the most ridiculous 90-day periods that i
can remember in the web3 space we went from the depths of the bear to really pretty euphoric highs
all the way pretty much right back down over the course of a 90-day period and i think that this is a
really good time to kind of look back and reflect for anybody who's new in the space and the theme here
is uh round trips how many of you guys on the panel let's start here how many of you guys have
had your nft your gaming bags specifically ride all the way up and then ride all the way back down
over the course of this 90-day period and did you hold those assets intentionally uh let's start with
johnny so you're not talking about last bull to this time right you're talking about over the last 90
days is that correct yeah the the most recent cycle we've all got bags of from the last bull
yeah well i think i think my my bags of shit are the ponzi games the the end game tokens the little
bits of them that are still in my in my bags from from my my dirty hot wallets from those time periods
but no i mean um and the and the people in tto oh no um like i definitely i'm a profit taker so like
if i buy something at the bottom even if my bag just doubles or triples uh you know some people in
crypto might think oh that's not enough for me but that's the whole mentality and the reason people get
wrecked right so i'll take my initial bag out as soon as it does a couple multiples like
i mean if a project 5 10 x is and you're not taking a little bit off the table oh but i want
the 100 x like all right but don't be surprised if you get that drawdown of 70 again and then let's
see how you feel at that point in time right so um i'm a proponent of taking profit take some
money out of your place and not to mention we were just talking about being early on things
it keeps you liquid for future opportunities so that's the way i kind of approach it i feel
comfortable about what i am holding um at the moment in time like for the long term but definitely
like if i just entered a position i took some profit off the table my learned my like longer
term gaming bags that i have like i'm pretty confident those will materialize through the cycle
but uh like you know the gaming chains the big studios i'm holding those long term but
any of those plays that i just saw a big opportunity on i've definitely taken profits
on so i'd say it's like 50 50 my long term bags are still there uh but i definitely understood the
volatility and if something did too many multiples i'm going to protect capital
johnny said something that i want everybody listening to take away from this and it's to take
profit be a profit taker there's this mentality there's this really stupid thing that goes around
on the web 3 space where you only need three 10x trades to make a million dollars
as if it's that fucking easy of course you need to take profit on the way up you're not going to
just find three 10x opportunities back to back and have things go your way sparksy i saw that hand come
up over to you yeah quickly on the profit taking topic um i think there are people in the space that
need to be told that they should take profit more often and there are people in the space that need to
be told to grab their balls and fucking let it ride a little bit um i think it can be very
different advice depending on the person especially coming out of a bear market there's a lot of
people with bear ptsd uh that just can't hold through like a small correction anymore even though they
think it's going up a lot or they um you know mental gymnastics themselves into being really bullish
into really bearish in the space of like one candle uh so i i yeah i think it can be uh different
strokes for different folks there um in terms of like the gaming bags i haven't round tripped anything
um from this cycle i've pretty much we spoke about this on a previous episode i think that as we get
more and more saturated with gaming mints the the all hype no substance ones are going to bleed out
their liquidity into the solid collections so i think so far i've picked well like fableborn tatsumiko
uh infinigods they're probably my biggest three um and they have all held up really well i think
fableborn is still at like all-time highs last i saw so they're going good um on the gaming tokens
front i sold a bunch of mine before the etf and only bought back into a few it's like shrapnel which
has uh had some pretty rough price action recently i managed to get that out sort of near the top
um but i mean yeah my nft bags especially i was willing to watch them round trip a decent amount
here because they're illiquid and hard to like take profit on in large amounts and i believe in them
long term and i don't want to try and get cute and maximize my profit by trading in and out of them in
the lead up to that uh so so far so good on that front johnny back to you yeah it's like the perfect
back and forth because mark mentioned something it is a problem right people don't let their bags
materialize enough because they'll sell on small downturns just because it's such a fear-induced
market and um and it goes both ways like you have to be able to see it through potentially on stuff that
you have high conviction on and not get shaken out by these moves after something's done
this amount of x's you're gonna sell on a 20 downtrend that's just crypto for you and
it really is like time in the market beats timing the market with most projects now there are big
catalysts across the space that will drive projects drive hype uh maybe it's big announcements
partnerships whatever the case is game launches we've seen it with prime and big time like the tokens
went absolutely crazy uh at that point in time i think shrapnel like spark mentioned like i think that
one could come back around their uh their game launch as well if that gets that that really social
hype feel across the space and um on the profit taking side like uh definitely if you don't take
profit someone else is gonna take it on you like and i think a big thing in the space right is like
people have loyalty to projects and while you can have your favorite projects just don't marry your
positions because that's how you're gonna get stuck holding them until next you know next cycle
i think you guys have hit on something that i i feel is really important so a lot of us and johnny
the way you phrase that i think was time in the market is better than timing the market and i couldn't
agree more i think that this is one of the most important concepts for a lot of people in the space
but that said over the last 90 days we've had pretty euphoric highs and there was a lot of
shit that entered the market and i think for people who are maybe less experienced than the three of
you guys here on the panel it's really difficult to kind of identify projects that you need to
you know take a multiple of you know maybe a good one or two to three x's and you're out and it's
harder to understand which of those projects that at a two or three x you're like you know this is
something that i can sit here with and i'm i'm fine if it moves you know half the cost or it goes down
or it goes up i'm here for the long haul with these with this collection what are some of the
identifiers that you guys look for when you're trying to find a project that you feel good
about holding regardless of short-term market movements what are you looking for in a team
in the utility of that asset in the community do you have any advice for the people listening
payton over to you oh sparks unmute unmuted so we'll go to spark see first then to payton
yeah i mean it's a it's a big topic um we could probably do a few hours on it but i guess if i was
going to try and tldr it um if i want to hold on to a gaming project for a long time i want it to be
a game that is close to game launch or it is during a bull market and the team has proven themselves at
being able to generate hype and they've proven themselves as being able to navigate web3 and
appeal to web3 speculators so it'd be one of those two so yeah a little bit uh different um don't
agree don't don't disagree with spark but for uh me it's really just figuring out actually the price
of it of entry um versus how competent the team is um i've gotten better uh over the course of two
years i've been a little bit smarter on not just going for just like the team on the the founder
and the ceo but also like the pm you know the ops guy uh are they going to be able to drive it um are
they going to be able to do things uh in the bear market that is going to set them up or at least
survive until the bull market to be able to do things you know capital uh what are they spending it
on um like a perfect example is bornless right bornless you saw in the bear market then picking up
traction uh within the web2 audience it's like okay that that those kpis are probably going to help
them raise in the bull market right uh i see gray down there in terms of ai arena you see that person
very smart astute um person that is probably going to handle capital very well um but like you know
isn't going to be shouting from the rooftops to go like buy their nft so those are the people that i
really want to bet my time into if i'm going to be here for a long haul it's like okay the value of
this nft as a current state does not reflect what the team can do to survive the bull market
and and have a lot of value
yeah i think the types of trust and and the perspective that you're talking about comes with
spending time in the ecosystem right listening to the founder speak having them on shows like this and
talk a little bit about what they're building it helps to build some conviction in the project and
the vision johnny over to you yeah i think they they've hit on a lot of the things that i look for
one thing that i've kind of like i i really like a good marketing team because obviously we know hype
drives a lot of the stuff in the space but one thing i've stopped caring about as much is like
every single team that's come through the door they always say x riot games x activision x epic games
and you're like okay what did you really do there right oh i built fortnite like did you really like
or were you just a single dev that worked on one little piece of fortnite right so like that really
grinds my gears when i see that type of stuff so like uh if they have some linkedin profiles i
definitely go try to check that out and see exactly what their role was but one thing um you know
individual games are i think are shorter term bets for me because i look for those catalysts like um
you know big game launches those types of things and that really drive hype and the ones that are all
over your timeline but then for me the stuff that i'm willing to hold on to i think it has to have that
network effect like avalanche has tons of quality games solana has tons of quality games imx has
right now not a lot of high network activity but they're gonna have a lot of big games launching
over the course of the next 12 to 18 months which could bring a lot of catalysts to the chain so like
stuff like that that has a lot of games underneath its umbrella that stuff i'm obviously highly
confident that is going to come through and and be a big winner long term but uh yeah that's kind of
what i look at like how much rate like how much chances at success does a single game have if they
let you down three or four times with lack of updates it's probably leaving your portfolio right
but uh these big platforms that are going to have lots of games underneath them they have multiple at
bats to be able to get a home run yeah i think that that's a good way to look at it right it's about
how many uh i'm canadian so we'll go with a hockey reference here how many shots on goal
do you have right before you you kind of give up on a team and i think when you look at it from
a platform perspective obviously there's a lot more opportunity there payton i saw that hand go
back up over to you i actually just want to toss it over to you i think out of everybody here you've
seen the most projects now um so i just want to kind of throw it into your court you know being bd
and magic eden you see people that do launch pads but also people that come up to you and um would just
like to know from from your point of view uh from the buffet of options that you've had at magic eden
uh is there any constant traits for people that are successful yeah i would say and i talk very
broadly about this uh on a number of shows and on twitter often my personal favorite trait in a
founder is somebody who knows what they know and knows what they don't and what i mean by that is
every group uh every founding team has a set of core competencies and when you're looking at games you
you hope it's building a game or building a world or building in web 3 and building communities but
what's more important than that to me because i feel like that's becoming table stakes right the
experience johnny mentioned it i've got experience at xyz studio everybody's got that the real
differentiator for me is a team who understands what they don't understand we don't know how to build
a web 3 community so we're going to reach out to people who do and help us pay that attention we don't
know how to launch an nft so we're going to go to a platform like magic eden and talk to people who
have launched plenty of nfts to me that is one trait that across the board when you look at the top
founders in the space people who come to mind immediately jeremy horn paul and katie bettner
these are people who have a wealth of experience they understand the game better than just about
anybody else and they still reach out to third parties and say hey we don't understand this particular
aspect or we don't understand it as well as we would like can you help us out that to me is the
single biggest green flag that exists in a project creator if you're honest about your experience if
you're honest about the things that you don't know i feel really good about holding your nfts for a long
period of time pain over to you i just want to shout out like mike from planet mojo we've been with me
spark and and sam have been working with him um and i know you probably recently had a talk with him
knock but with the wealth of experience that he's had in the gaming industry 20 plus years of it
for him to be humbled enough to hear a bunch of dgens freaking talk to him about how things work in
web3 was the most bullish indicator that i've ever had in a founder i'm just like dude you're freaking
awesome yeah i'll give two two quick shout outs here we'll move to this next topic the first is mike
mike is all of the accolades from the traditional gaming world he knows that he doesn't know a whole
lot about building effective web3 communities and he's done an excellent job reaching out to people
like you guys who do he has been very upfront from the first day i met him over a year ago about his
lack of experience in the space and he has done everything that he can to educate himself and
surround himself with people who know better that's the type of founder that you should be excited about
on the other end of the coin i'm going to give a shout out to a very good friend of mine a guy i
literally grew up with down the street from he's listening right now nikki g he's building a game he's
somebody who understands the web3 space better than just about anybody that i know but is a
relatively new game builder and he's surrounding himself with people to help push him in the right
direction those are the types of people that you want to attach yourself yourselves to if you're
looking for long-term investments because they're the types of people who will always educate themselves
hoping to push the ecosystem forward peyton over to you no i just uh would like to just say to the
people in the comments post the founder that you're freaking think is like amazing uh at this
specific thing would love to love to shout them out love it and with that i'll actually want to
move over to something that a couple of people have mentioned in the comments it's the the game called
bornless so i want to pick two collections against each other here and we're going to play a little
game um we're going to talk about dimensionals uh built by sasha this is like a slay the spire style
game it is incredible both of these games we've had the opportunity to play last year at 3xp um
one of the coolest artworks and overall aesthetics in any game in the web3 space i'm personally like
super excited about the game itself and on the other side of the coin is bornless it is a truly
terrifying game um it's a shooter it's a ton of fun also got the opportunity to play this at 3xp um these
are two teams who have been building in the space for well over a year they spend plenty of time
within the ecosystem they've joined spaces they've gotten involved with communities they have similar
sized collections dimensionals is about a thousand piece i believe the bornless uh very aptly listed
their collection at 666 which is great both of these collections are trading at pretty much the same
price at about 0.4 eth now they've got entirely different utility the games are almost nothing alike
this is a completely unfair comparison but i'm going to make you guys compare them regardless
you've got to pick one of them what are you taking and why payton because you're laughing i'm
going to pick on you oh of course you are man uh i'm still trying to develop the thesis okay if i have
to pick one um are we okay so uh i will pick the bornless um and mostly because by proxy uh i know their kpis
i don't know the kpis of dimensionals uh from shasha but i also don't want to sleep on him because
he's been part of mino games he's lost it he you know launched a lot of apps he probably knows how to
run a mobile campaign and i think that game will do really well i do know that bornless has 190
000 wishlists on steam and their collection is at 666 uh and uh they are going to be starting up their web
three campaign soon um so they did a builder's call we were the first one that they wanted to
kind of just test the waters because yogi uh is a uh josh he's uh he's a wolf and so he wanted to
just get him and his founder to kind of uh shake off the rust uh which they did not and they didn't
have any rust on them so uh they're going to be driving um some of like web three campaigns here
shortly dimensionals i don't know um i haven't talked to sasha in a while i know he wants to set up
a call soon so maybe it is spark see what you got for us yeah i mean there uh if i take the dgem
perspective of just which would i rather invest in right now um the bornless utility is still
technically to be announced in the new white paper coming out but i know that previous versions of the
white paper promised the token um and we've been told that the utility that has been promised
previously will still exist so i would have to believe that there is probably a token involved
but the i guess the ambiguity that exists now means that when that is announced you know people could
be happy all over again for a token that was sort of already coming all along we'll see um as far as
i know there's been no token talk at all from dimensionals so look on the utility front like in
this sort of environment right now i'm going to be picking tokens all day every day i think in terms
of the games themselves there's a lot to like about both um i do generally prefer betting on mobile games
we're talking like long-term success and i know dimensionals is set to be mobile at some point but like
like payden said bornless has 190 000 steam wishlists they did that by the way with absolutely zero paid
marketing it's it's hard to understate like just how fucking impressive that is and how much more
measurable web to appeal that is than any other web 3 pc game like it's it's ridiculous so for me
bornless would be the pick so the next couple of topics here i kind of want to preface with this
anything that you hear on the show is not financial advice this is four dgens up here chatting about
their experiences and i think it's pretty important just because we're going to dive into some
things with the next few topics here but i'll give you my personal anecdote here what the bornless has
done from a steam wishlist perspective is not just impressive from a web 3 pov it is flat out
ridiculously impressive from any game in any ecosystem that exists on earth 190 000 pushing 200 000 wishlists
at a game at their stage of development is so insanely unheard of that it's something that i'm surprised
we haven't been celebrating more and you know with their web 3 campaign coming up i'm sure that we'll
have a lot more conversations about how incredible of an achievement that is they're definitely a team
worth taking a bet on me personally i'm taking a bet on dimensionals just because i feel like the
dimensionals game itself has a little more mass appeal to it bornless is pretty hardcore it's a horror
game it's a shitload of fun it's even more fun when you can scream at friends when you're playing it but
dimensionals is something that i can see people playing like on the bus it's something that is
casual enough with really enticing graphics sasha really showed over the last campaign that he put
together that he deeply understands how to play the web 3 game and i think that from a hype and speculation
point of view he is definitely somebody that you want leading a project that you're looking to
hopefully turn a profit on so my personal pick there is dimensionals and with that we'll kind of
segue into uh less hypothetical picks we talked a little bit about those two games and which of the
two you would pick let's talk about what we're actually recently buying and i'll pick this off with
my most recent buy and then i'll spin it around the panel leaks and alpha for some of the things you
guys are looking at and this might be a little boring and unimaginative but my most recent gaming buy
was wild card wild passes this is a team who has been in the space for a very long time their wild
passes have been fluctuating over the course of the last last 60 days honestly i personally buy them
pretty much every time that they dip you know 10 to 15 because i believe pretty deeply in paul and katie
and what they're building the game itself is a ton of fun a lot of us have had our hands on it we've had
the opportunity to play the game and experience just how deep it is that is something that i always look
for um i tweeted about this a little while ago i don't like chasing the coins i don't like chasing
the hot new nft collection i lose just about every single time that i try to do that um but i've chosen
wild card because they've got a long horizon so with that let's share some alpha johnny let's go to you
first yeah yeah of course um man it's like obviously uh i'm not going to include uh pre-sale and flip nfts
cough cough underwhelming uh pfp reveal crypto undeads but um that one i i i'm not going to
include like i said so we'll we'll kind of go uh on the token side the most recent one i bought
uh was the root network um it is the official blockchain of futureverse they have a lot of
different gaming experience going to be built on that uh chain and more importantly i just feel like
when the metaverse narrative comes back it's now going to be front and center they're doing the
official ready player one metaverse that was announced i think like 10 days ago so like
they have the ip for ready player one and i think if anyone from the outside pov is going to come in
and there's another metaverse run which i think there will be right we see all the gaming hype
i i do think that that narrative will resurface just like a lot of things do in crypto um so that's
one i did recently take a position in as well uh just knowing that when people come through the space
they're going to see that ready player one partnership and they're going to deem it up
there with the the metaverse uh top coins from last cycle
spark see what do you got for us
yeah i actually forgot that i bought uh some root this week as well um so yeah i bought it
for a similar reason uh the apple vision pro is coming out on the second of feb i believe
and last time the news came out that apple was releasing it there was some metaverse speculation
a few coins pumped a bit uh i remember render did a lot of work on that there i bought some render too
for that reason um and yeah this time i was looking at what's like a new token that's come out that also
might be able to piggyback on that like a shiny new narrative um and i was looking around the walls
discord and remembered that futureverse have the root token like johnny said they've got that ready
player one um partnership which i think makes it very easy to connect the narrative between that
token and the metaverse and i think the apple vision pro is also like a pretty easy fit into
that narrative so yeah i bought some in the run up to the uh to the second of feb release i'll see
what i do after that but i would agree that that sounds like a good bet on a metaverse resurgence um
and despite me being very much down on the metaverse bags from last cycle and the over promises i do
think that it makes sense that there will be another metaverse cycle again at some point um other recent
buys i bought some uh gmt for their gas hero game that's come out so it's like a simulation game it
really targets it targets two groups it targets play to earn grinders who farm resources to sell to
the second group which are the whales who are competing for a prize pool and status and whatnot
um it's it's pretty interesting how they set up their economy and their ecosystem for it
the prize pool is entirely based on in-game revenue uh it's currently at three million for this month
which i think is like a pretty insane uh narrative right there um everything about the game revolves around
burning or locking up gmt i think they've locked up 1.5 million dollars worth since it started um
earlier this month uh they've done crazy volume numbers they've put polygon at like number one in
nft volume above ethereum a couple times uh it's huge in asia it's probably why you haven't heard lots
about it um so like look it's gmt has a massive market cap um but i think it's worth a punt um i'm
following like a dune dashboard that tracks all like the player numbers the in-game spending
the gmt burning so as long as those numbers are looking good i'm going to continue to hold
otherwise i'll just cut it um but yeah i thought that was an interesting one that a lot of people
are fading probably because they have uh some negative thoughts towards steppen yeah and and just
to reiterate there the the team behind that is fine satoshi labs or fsl they were the creators of
steppen on solana they've launched gas hero in i think it's still technically like a closed beta
environment they are a team who definitely understand the web3 gaming ecosystem and always
somebody that i pay attention to johnny over to you yeah it was more just coming in to agree with
sparks the last time we saw metaverse tokens run really hard was right before the reveal of the apple
uh vision pro and i think you know after the launch even like right around this launch
like i i feel like it's a common thing that we'll see projects maybe throwing teasers out that they're
looking to build on you know apple vision pro and what better ip to do so than potentially ready player
one so that the root network definitely has that going for it uh find satoshi labs he tweeted today so
i think they found him uh and then last but not least i do have to hop off boys i i have another
engagement i have to hop to um but i really love jumping on these spaces with you big brains every week and
uh thanks to everyone in the audience for showing up every week but um knock peyton spark it's a
pleasure but i gotta run thanks john for always coming out man always great to have you man uh one
really quick thing before we move to our the ama that i'm super excited about uh one of the things
that i've been thinking about lately and we're hearing it kind of solidified here in this space
is that the promise of the metaverse is almost like this self-fulfilling prophecy everybody who was
here during that bull run of 2021 was like oh my god the metaverse is going to be a thing
the market crashes they off for two years they come back we're still talking about metaverse to
them to the outsider this feels like holy the metaverse is still a thing two years later it's
going strong it feels like we're going to have another metaverse play for sure because for people
who are not familiar what's been going on in the space it seems like we've just been talking about
it non-stop for the last three years which is kind of hilarious to me um with that we're going to move
into the ama i believe we've got david the founder and ceo of tatsumiko um tatsumiko is a really cool
uh sort of life sim rpg with social elements that's played across the discord and mobile they've got a
10 000 genesis collection on solana i believe they minted it would have been like late december 2021 is
that right david yeah that's right okay awesome yeah i i distinctly remember minting this nfti
christmas eve um and i've been holding them since i'm a big fan of the game and the ecosystem and
everything that you're doing we'll kick off the ama i gave a very high level overview but let's hear it
from you what is tatsumiko what are you guys building give us like the 45 to 60 second elevator pitch
on the project for anybody who's new to the experience okay yeah thanks for having me on the
spaces so i think you just described like five seconds of the uh intro you know um it's a live sim rpg
it's playable across discord it's playable across mobile we actually started development of tatsumiko in
uh 2020 and uh it's a pretty unique approach like we're using a lot of the social aspects of discord
to kind of like uh grow the game and to introduce new types of game mechanics and features so i think
it's something that's a bit unique compared to usual mobile games i don't think you hear about discord games
games or full-scale discord games but that's essentially what we're doing uh yeah
awesome yeah i think one of the things that's really exciting just as a quick aside the the
discord ecosystem is something that i think gamers live on naturally so the approach of meeting gamers
where they're already at is a really interesting one spark see i saw that hand come up first
yeah so i should probably just throw out there that i mean for those that have been following me
they would already know i'm a massive tatsumiko fan um i also minted back in uh late 2021 and after i
sold everything i owned in crypto in march 2022 they were the only uh project from that last run that
i bought back into at some point over the bear so huge tatsu fan uh david so knowing you guys for a
while you guys have a pretty interesting backstory uh or lore as you will um what can you tell us about
the history of tatsumiko yeah before i get that first you know definitely thank you all for your
support i know that there's probably a huge bunch of uh holders here so our history yeah i mean our
history is uh a bit long so bear with me i guess uh you know we didn't always start out as a company so
um we were actually a community project so i think like our journey on the path to building tatsumiko
started back in like more than 10 years ago actually back in 2011 if we really want to go all the way
back the history right uh we ran a gaming community that had around 120 000 players so it was a bit unique
back then we attracted new players to our community by developing special game content for our game
servers so kind of like through that experience you know i realized that hey i enjoy games development
but i also like being a community builder right all of the ups all the downs the problems the highs the
lows so of course building our own community came with its own challenges i think one of the biggest we
experienced was back in 2015 so around like four years since the foundation of a community
uh we wanted to migrate the community to discord so imagine trying to convince like 120 000 people
to use a new platform like discord when they've been using team speak for the past half a decade
not a very easy task so uh well i mean luckily for us uh we did have a whole bunch of volunteers right
we built a platform called tatsu.gg and that was like a platform and infrastructure to integrate
content modules directly into discord so the first things we built for that platform were like the
leveling systems social progression modules i think you guys would be very familiar with all this stuff
right you see it on a lot of discord servers i mean fun fact we are the ones who pioneered all of this
stuff we built a lot of libraries apis we basically built up the ecosystem such that now it's a
flourishing ecosystem on discord i mean but that's an aside thing you know uh we basically did this back
then to recognize community contributions adequately reward our community contributors and users
and so like for a while we updated that infrastructure we updated the content modules but in 2019 we
decided to try something new you know we decided to develop our first game for discord a first game
module called tatsu gotchi so it turned out to be a small success and we realized that okay you know many
of the users we have on tatsu.gg are actually very similar to gamers you know they are high value they're
sticky they are loyal users i mean of course we had to cultivate that but it opened to us the possibility
that we could build a full-scale community-based rpg game that millions of people across discord could be
playing in together right and at that point in time we had grown to around like 600 000 discord servers
using tatsu.gg we had like around 50 60 million activatable user accounts already you know so that's
what gave us i think enough conviction to go out there look for vc funding scale up the team to meet our
vision you know so i guess uh this time around you know at this current point in time instead of like
migrating 120 000 players onto discord we are gonna migrate like 120 million users onto tatsumiko and
of course onto web 3 as well right and so that's a bit of our history you know
yeah i love i love the idea that the game that people can you know get their hands on and and get
involved with today is less of this like eureka moment where you just kind of came out with a
game it was more the culmination of like years of working in the discord ecosystem understanding what
things could or could not be done within that space realizing that the community that you had built um
are pretty much you know a gaming based audience and then leveraging that to create what has become a
really cool ecosystem within the tatsumiko game to me that feels like true lore behind the
development of the game rather than just like oh we had this idea we built it and and kind of here
we are it's a lot of fun for people to dive a little bit deeper than that payton over to you
yeah i just said like maybe two questions um kind of you you kind of touched on it a lot david so
maybe you don't need to spend too much time on it but like how far along is the game in development
and like maybe for people that have been in the ecosystem where like what are the things that
are upcoming releases that should people be looking for as a holder i'm also a holder full disclosure
sparks he told me about that uh whenever he was picking up one and i said yep i'll pick one up
too um and so yeah any upcoming releases and everything that for people should know too would
be great to hear oh wow yeah thanks thanks for supporting us uh how far is the game along in
development we actually have a build that we're putting out there soon so this is of course going to
be a curated set of people but uh it's what we consider at this current point in time technical
pre-alpha so after this uh around like q2 would be the full alpha and at the moment we've completed
a whole bunch of game features so with live operations games a lot of development goes into
the back-end infrastructure so you can keep producing content long after the game is released so
we've completed quite a lot of that infrastructure and now we feel that we're ready to test a lot of
these things with the community you know with the holders as well so that's how far along we are
yeah so uh as paid mentioned him and i are both holders uh in the interest of my own bags uh the
the pastors have been seeing a lot of interest recently uh how do you guys see the me colony nfts
fitting into the whole tatsu ecosystem oh this is actually a really good uh question so for me colony
passes uh we intend for this to be i mean it is a genesis collection after all right so from the
gameplay perspective me colony passes currently actually already provide in-game benefits you know
they already provide things that our users can use in the game but i think like the
the reason why we first released the passes was actually to show our web 2 users that
web 3 technologies uh sorry to put this so bluntly we're not a scam so i think you guys are very aware
that in the web 2 space um a lot of people think that crypto and web 3 technologies
are not good for the gaming ecosystem right and so of course for us we have tons and tons of web 2 users
you know we had to convince people that okay web 3 technologies are okay that we were solving a
problem for these people so that we could get their buy-in i think i see a few of our web 2 users in
these spaces as well yeah so we had a problem at the time which was we have an in-game economy that has
around like 7.7 million p2p trades to date right and if you're familiar with mmo games people buy and
sell items for money all the time on black markets so that was happening for our game as well and of
course inevitably you have scams that happen and of course when you have scams you know they complain
to the developer to us and of course being developers even though it's something that you
know it's a gray area we feel that we need to make the space or the experience more secure that's why we
decided to use web 3 technologies right but how would we tell our users that this is okay i mean the best
way would be to show them that it's okay to show them that it's not gonna burn the environment it's
not a scam you know these are digital assets that you own and you can trade with each other that was
the whole point in the beginning for the me colony passes and so i think we spent a six month campaign
to kind of like educate them and once we had a core group of users who were basically you know
who basically understood why we were using web3 technologies we released the nft project and i
think at this point in time 40 percent of the me colony passes are actually held by who were originally
web2 players you know they've converted to web3 and i believe this is something that not many projects
have successfully done so far like there was the initial intent of me colony passes within our
ecosystem right and so if we're now talking about the web3 side of things you know so we see these
passes fitting in as uh some kind of uh vehicle you know to sorry excuse me yeah a vehicle to a crew
you yeah apologies like let me fix it off
so we see the nft passes as a way for people to buy into our ecosystem right so with tatsumiko we're not
just building a game uh we're also building this infrastructure this distribution network where we have
millions and millions of users so the plans we have for the nft apply to the entire ecosystem and of
course apply to any future catalysts future um value or utility events and so these passes represent
kind of like a sort of a gateway to any future drops you know any future benefits not just for the
web2 users but also the web3 people right and we are going to have sorry we're going to have these
events um one is coming up very very soon so yeah that's kind of like basically how we're approaching
the nft is how we're approaching dummy colony passes
awesome david thank you so much i oh sorry please go ahead sorry david thank you no i was just gonna
answer a follow-up question so one thing for for me i've been a community manager for um some
web3 gaming companies and have set a couple of discords uh you obviously have like way more knowledge
on this and one of the actually infrastructure that has been developed relatively well in the web3
space is like discord role management uh type of things and also integrations with nfts and metadata
have you guys really like explored much of that and um yeah i would just like like to know maybe in
terms of what you're thinking about having so much experience in discord how you're looking at like maybe
metadata or nfts integrated through that way oh yeah actually there are quite a few solutions out there
doing this uh in fact are you referring to projects like collab land or uh you know great eight yeah
for sure like i don't know like you know in in different like kind of being very creative about
like creating channels or different types of things and maybe where you have to actually connect
your collab land get a role and then you know progress down a quest or something like i don't know just
that you know there are times of things but have you guys like really maybe explored uh some of that uh
aspects of things of maybe using that infrastructure integrated with with the game oh yes of course
we definitely have explored these things because like for us uh integrating with web3 projects and
web3 communities is one of the key aspects of tatsumiko as well i think you will see some of this
happening in an event that we're going to be having uh later this month or early next month you know
so please wait for that right um but it is central and integral to our plans for crypto web3 nft projects
whatever to integrate into the game as well so this means that if you're holders of another project you
know if we do collaborations we want to be able to see certain things happen in game it could be items
it could be special quests you know it could be um special events like i am very excited for these types of things
amazing
that gets me so excited sorry knock i didn't mean to interrupt you
so excited it's like a community manager like just that whole aspect of discord has not been explored
enough within like the web3 ecosystem we all live on there
david you you just got me even more bullish thank you for for coming up here um and i'm not just
saying that because you are up here for sponsorship or anything like that truly very excited
so so david i i i feel like that i know the answer to this question because we've been talking about
how you guys are building a game based on discord but for anybody who wants to get involved in the
tatsumiko ecosystem what what are the steps where should they go where should they find you what sort of
assets that they need to get involved give us the rundown on how somebody brand new to the ecosystem
maybe they're excited about it after hearing you speak here on the show how do they get involved
with tatsumiko yeah i guess the first is you know you could join our community on discord.gg slash tatsu
i think that's the easiest way to get involved or you could follow our twitter uh we're gonna wrap up
a lot of our twitter activity as well you know but of course if you're sold on this you want to be a
part of the community you want to be first future events you want to really get straight into it we
do have the nft collection the me colony pass it's on the salon of blockchain right and of course um
yeah apologies and of course we also do want to join spaces we want to collaborate with different
projects and companies so if you're one of these you know we would love to be
there with you talking to your community as well getting to know a bit more
amazing i appreciate you coming up on stage david uh like i said you're you're a team that
i personally have been holding literally since mint day uh back in december of 2021. it's something
that i tell basically anybody who will listen to me about super excited about the ecosystem that you
guys are created i appreciate you coming on stage and chatting to us a little bit about the game and
who you guys are the the history of how you got to where you do where you are i think it's something
that we don't see a whole ton of in the space and it helps to paint a little bit of a a fuller picture
when it comes to understanding how teams operate why they operate the way that they do um and where
they're going so really do appreciate you being on stage with us and with that guys that is the end
of our show um we've got aka 29 and zach d hit me up in the dms we're going to give you guys those two
blood loop whitelists appreciate you guys for commenting and sharing the show uh for everybody
else you'll be back to the regular host sam next week but i'm sure i'm going to come back and hijack
this thing at some point peyton sparks thanks again for allowing me to come on stage and join you
guys it's been a ton of fun david thank you for joining the show and walking us all through the
ecosystem that you guys are created i know a lot of us are really deeply excited about the game that
you're building and we'll be sure to continue to follow along and get our hands on it in the future
uh thanks again guys for tuning in appreciate you all peace
