Hey, we got jason jason hitchhock, excuse me chasing the hitchhock in the house. Welcome, sir
Greetings what's going on? Thanks for having me. Hey, man, my pleasure. How was uh, how was he thember?
Oh my gosh, he thember was great. I loved it. It was my first time going
It there was I mean I went on behalf of third web and so like I had a view of it from
someone who works at like a developer tool that's
working with a lot of different players in the ecosystem and it was just really interesting because
It was interesting because we're a year and a half old and so like
Our tool started as like a no code low code tool and over the last year
developer tool for advanced devs
and used by every kind of developer and it's
We have a lot of new functionality. And so
And we've grown a lot and so like our sort of there was a lot more people aware of us
We had really great, uh, it was really cool seeing coinbase
Uh, we spoke at that it was like standing room only we had a really great reaction
Uh, we launched the first game
On base it was called cat attack
It's like a silly game. Um
But it's done two million transactions, uh in a few days and over 500 000 players
Uh, we had really great meetings with all like a lot of big companies that we kind of really wanted to pin down
I I met a lot of people working on really cool things
Like I live in miami and I I feel like I go to
crypto events here and I feel like I meet people who aren't really working on things like
They have ideas or they say they're working on something but they really just want
To actually fill you out to see if they can help you with events or something
It's like it feels like I don't know we call them time ruggers
Like they're people that like they get your time and then they rug you
Um, I did not meet time ruggers in in eath denver
Uh a lot of cool companies using soulbound tokens for credentials
A lot of really interesting analytics tools people are trying to figure out
You know in the same way that like google analytics does tracking of like full funnel attribution
Met some interesting attribution solutions. There's like an emerging ad tech
A lot of really interesting security companies that are like doing really advanced stuff
Um, where like these teams of phds who used to work for the government doing like red team hacker stuff now, they're forming
Companies that serve crypto companies to do more more advanced security analysis and service
It was interesting. I met the authors of eip four three three seven
To talk about account abstraction because we're working on a smart wallet
Um, and it like I learning about like what you can do with a smart wallet's interesting like if you can imagine
What's going on? Like if you imagine your metamask wallet, like that's a smart contract. What if
What if you could have a customized interface and functionality of a wallet?
And like the wallet is going to be like the next app store
Where you're going to be like deploying interesting apps
It was cool meeting all the defi protocols that I know
Like that I use during defi summer
So, I don't know I could go all over the place. It was a great energy
I have a lot of reactions to like how companies operate at these things. I think a lot of companies do the wrong thing
Ask me whatever you want. I'm not you know, you do know
I mean you you laid a lot out for us and
I wanted this twitter space to be kind of a one-on-one with jason hishcock and
So in the future we could do a deep dive in a third web
But let's start with third web. Give us a give us a high level breakdown of what third web is
What problems it's solving and how developers are utilizing it and how is it making a developer's life easier on a day-to-day basis?
Sure. No, I mean team me up
So third web was started by this guy furcon ryan
He was he was the founder of a company called app loving which is worth googling
It's like one of the world's largest like think of zinga
But like bigger than it ever was at its peak and today they're like one of the largest mobile game publishers and ad networks
And he was like the cto, um, and that's a complicated product
Furcon was also like a professional poker player serial entrepreneur. I connected with him
At an ideal lab called monkey inferno where we built a whole bunch of apps
um, one of them was acquired by twitch it was a streaming app and then uh after that when like sort of
Defy summer and then jpeg mania happened
He we saw top shots and he was doing like he was at his house had a bunch of hackers over
And they did a hackathon. He's like how cool would it be if we could make
A protocol that was like top shots for anybody like what if you had an nft collection?
What if people could come to your collection and also get
A booster pack that opens like some random nfts come out and it's a cool 3d effect
And as he was building it
He realized that like he just all the developer tools like there were no developer tools or like they they were inadequate
Um, hold on my phone closed. I don't know if you can still hear me. Yeah, I can I can still hear you
Oh, you can all right. Cool. I'm just on my lock screen. Um
So then he was like unimpressed with developer tools and he's like one of those
Tony stark 10x or engineer types and so he's like i'm gonna build the dev tool that I want
And then so that's what he did. Um, he's so a year and a half ago started
Just iterating on pack protocol and turning it into a full suite of tools
Which is everything you need to build a web3 application. And what do you need? You need a few things
You need contracts and so we have a massive library of contracts that are all audited for everything. You can imagine
When vitalik blogs about soulbound tokens boom, it's in our app a week later
Um, you can we we've indexed every contract on every chain and they're all in our app where you can search
Uh, and they all come up and you can just copy them and deploy them or you can migrate your contracts over that haven't been public
Very contracts then you also need a wallet. So we have all you know, we support all the wallet connections
You need storage. We're built on ipfs
Uh, we we we let you spin up storage easily. You need rpc nodes, so you can do that with a click
You'll need authentication
Maybe you need gasless relayers and so on and so forth accept payments
So what we are is everything in one spot kind of like the amazon
Like when you're managing your apps and websites like we have every service provider
Every feature every function you need all the infrastructure
To spin up your app and what's interesting is we abstract away the smart contract code
Into sdk's so you don't even need to know solidity. You can know javascript
Golang we have a unity sdk just anyone can interface with smart contracts with these languages. So make them really accessible
70 000 developers have used us in the last year to push smart contracts out
Uh at any given moment our contracts account for like 40 percent of all the transactions on optimism
Um, we power rsdk is used to power
You know coinbase's nft marketplace. We power shopify's web3 experience
Rarible if you go to a wearable protocol website, like that's that's rsdk under the hood
So we're working with a lot of really big names
And we partner with coinbase on a big video game solution. So yeah, a lot of people use us. It's a dev tool
If you're thinking about building stuff people should check it out
And what I do there is I run their ecosystem team. So
My job is to you know, our I partner with
You know incubators accelerators vcs
That have web3 portfolios and I'll help
Introduce their portfolios to third web because it helps them build faster and learn faster
And we'll do workshops i'll mentor them
Startups i'll give them industry connections if they need them
And we'll do whatever we can to help them succeed
And I also do the same thing with all the different blockchains. We support 700. So i'm in touch with 700 blockchains
Zk sync they got, you know new evm coming out
You know, like we support everybody so yep
So jason, do you think that obviously these tools have evolved and evolved to the point where as you've mentioned
Developers can now even if they don't know solidity use the language that they are familiar with
And and build a build adapt and it even lets them save a lot of time through different again
But the way that i'm understanding it is it gives them tools it gives them ways
To do things that in the past might have taken them hours in maybe a matter of minutes. Am I right? Absolutely
Yeah, and if you think about it, it's already really hard to build an app in general like this is not easy
Like even if you use like these low code things if it'll take time
And then in web3, there's just a very steep learning curve of new languages
And services they're not all aggregated. It's like good luck googling and finding what you need and learning it
It's going to take you time
And then when you want to do simple things
it's still going to be like a thousand lines of code and
What our stk does is we've abstracted a lot of that code away like we instead of
When developers when you're doing a startup
What you're really building is a learning machine
On like what your market wants you come up with a hypothesis like all right i'm building for like teen girls in north america
And you're like, what do they want like i'm I want and then you'll
You'll you'll come up with a product version of like the hypothesis that you have like oh
They want to make their friends laugh
Like here's a product that might make them do that
And you're going to try to build the least amount you need to build to go give it to your market and then you're going
Like what what they did with it and then you're going to learn from your measurements and then from your learnings
You're going to iterate and you're going to come up with the next version of your product. You're going to make the least
Amount of work possible to make another change so that you have enough change that you have a new hypothesis
That you can then measure and learn from and the build measure learn loop in web 3 is really long
It's long and it's expensive because it takes so much work to build these apps
It's hard to find solidity devs. They're they're unicorns. Everyone's fighting over them
And that whole process then takes time and so what's interesting though?
Uh, so yeah third web accelerates that by like we've we've built everything for you
And so instead of you rebuilding things that already exist
Take it off the shelf. We've built it. We're smart contract experts
Use our templates modify them use our infrastructure. It's already there
Don't you know, you can plug in somebody else but we got defaults for you
It's like go think about your user experience and what's unique about your technology
um, if I were like an investor in a company and they told me like oh I
Like I coded these things from scratch. I would be disappointed in them because they weren't spending their time
On learning and you learn on like new things and so like that's where we come in and really help people
tools are yeah tools like like third web and ones like it will evolve to the point where
People don't even need to be developers anymore. They can just plug and play they can just choose parameters
What they want adapt to look like and and your solution does the rest
I don't because I think maybe our notion of what it means to be a developer will change like maybe there's
Because like for example, we're working on like a new kind of interface for coding. That's kind of like
if a command line like if you know a text editor if it was like revolutionary when those things came out and like
You like the way they like highlight colors and like they're interesting and like they understand the code
we're working on like an interface where
what you do what you what you'll do is you'll click on like er on like standard token standards and like when you click on them like
The code just appears in the editor in front of you
And there could be like fully developed apps like in an app store and you'll click on those
And your your smart contract will just build and it will get increasingly complex as you add
Standards and functionality to it and then you'll be able to push it live
And then when it's live you'll still have this interface
So that when you want to make changes to it, you just keep on layering on your changes
And we think that's going to be like a revolutionary interface for how you code. It's something that's like cooking up right now
I you know, i'm not i'm not a futuristic like I don't know how to code i've taken learn to code classes like several times and
All I can do is make a blackjack game and I don't really understand like how that stuff works
I've just decided like I don't know how to code. Um, and i'm just gonna
If I have ideas i'll find someone who can you know, have a good enough idea
Jason we talked a bit about what excited you at eth denver and I wanted to focus a little
Uh a little bit more on some of the some of the innovations that you highlighted, right? So one
What excites you the most as far as
Account abstraction providing solutions to different problems in the industry
What are some of the things that people what were some of the conversations that people were having around account abstraction?
And what are some of the ways that you see account abstraction helping you as a daily user of of web3?
products and applications
Yeah, well, I think at the end of the day the thing about account abstraction is like
We all have these frustrations around the user experience of managing wallets and keys and all these things and that's kind of like what?
account abstraction solves
We're going to be entering a world where
Users don't need a what like like a metamask type wallet
They're going to have like new kinds of smart wallets and we'll see what form those take
I actually don't know what they look like to be completely honest
so I would just say like in that world like worrying about account recovery and
Like losing your seed phrase like that's going to be a thing that's gone
The my my big takeaway from that regardless of implementation is that
This is the type of thing that is necessary for mass adoption
Like in the same way that like there was a time
Where I remember like i'm 37. Uh, i'm a millennial
Um, I remember watching the internet grow and for a long time
I was like explaining to my parents like this is a cool website
You should go there and they would always like appreciate that I showed them cool websites
But like they weren't discovering them
And then when the ipad came out like it was literally never again. Did I show them something new?
The ipad sort of had this onboarding effect for that like taught
Mainstream users how to use software and the internet
In a way that like they could discover and really take advantage of leverage software
And so I think smart wallets, uh and account abstraction is sort of
One very big piece of the puzzle that will like allow people
To use crypto in a way that's familiar to how they use the internet
Like they won't be installing some like it won't feel
Like they're installing metamask or some other product like wallet and like and calling it a wallet
It'll be more baked into the website
Absolutely. The future of web3 mass adoption is when everyday folks
Including mom and dad and grandma and grandpa are interfacing with all this great stuff without recognizing they're doing so
in the way that we recognize
what it takes to to make a metamask wallet and
store your assets in a non-custodial way and a decentralized hardware wallet and then connect to a
Connect to adapt and enter a liquidity pool and and you know
Go through all the transactions and all the steps all this stuff's gonna happen seamlessly on the back end at the touch of a button
um, I like the analogy that you drew with the internet and I say like the internet was revolutionary and the
innovation of the iphone and the ipad revolutionized the way that people are
Are interfacing with the internet because that you know, it no longer
We no longer are in a world where you would have to go on a computer
I had the same same experience with my family is like they didn't really get online until the iphone and ipad came out
Um, and I feel like a lot of people in other countries are in the same boat. It's like mobile games are so big
tell us a bit jason about the
The game that you guys helped build on base and also tell us a bit more about base
I've been very curious about base. Um, i'm hoping to get them on for a twitter space sometime in the future
But I just find it exciting that coinbase came out with their own layer, too
You know helping scale ethereum and also driving that mass adoption to the
To everyday folks and then coinbase has done a great job on that end
But would love to hear from your own words what you saw and kind of um, what you think
There's a mixture of what i'm going to say
That's like from a third web perspective and then another part is going to be like just my own
Because like I don't have complete information on like what their thoughts are. Um, but uh
So cat so cat attack that's the game. It's like a game that uh, our principal dev waki made
So it's like a game where you mint a cat I and I want to find the link. I almost should share that. Uh, but
I'll post it in chat later. Um, or if you google cat attack third webs tweeted about it
You basically you mint an adorable cat
And it's a level one cat and then you like send your cat to another wallet and then it evolves to like a level two
cat and it's a grumpy cat and then
Then that player if they if you send a grumpy cat to another wallet
It then turns you get like a ninja cat
And then once you have a ninja cat you can start attacking other players that have cats in their wallet
And you kill their cats and the goal is to kill as many cats as possible before yours dies
And that's it. That's the game. It's kind of kind of crazy
But in two days, uh 500 000 people played it. Uh, there were 1.8 million transactions
It's one of the it was the first game. Uh, that's like a giant amount of transactions for anything
Um, so that was pretty cool
Coinbase was excited about it. And then
You know, we have a really tight relationship with coinbase. They're one of our investors
Uh, we are their preferred infrastructure tool whenever startups like sign up for coinbase cloud like they kind of get sent our way so we can help them
Uh, because like when people are using third web, they're able to ship faster and work better
Um, and so like why did they come up with base?
I think coinbase is probably this is like now i'm taking off my third web hat. It's like
They're looking to diversify their business
An exchange, you know turning revenue on an on trading
They have many services that they're trying to build out and prove that they can earn revenue from
so like coinbase cloud is one
You know, I have like this is where I speculate like what's the business play and my guess is like
You know, they have a relationship with a hundred million people with accounts
I bet that they want to be the on-ramp
To crypto and so they have this blockchain
Uh, I don't fully understand sort of like how they benefit from like
Well, no, I do I I have I have a speculation like if like for example defi
Like they had a lot of launch partners like we were one they had all these
defi protocols on there and more are coming
And so like like velodrome is there
um, what's going to happen is
They're going to probably try to make like usdc like the like the money like the the stablecoin of that chain
Becomes like the chain for a hundred million sort of retail users
That as like crypto develops and I think everything we see in crypto today. We have like a funny conversation about it
It's all sort of like the guts of like what apps should be
Um, like it's kind of interesting like these are all building blocks
We have all these lending and borrowing protocols. We have nfc marketplaces
But the next thing is like we're gonna these are all protocols that will plug into other apps and have bigger bigger
Like have better interfaces and so like avay, you know lending
That's something that like lots of other apps are going to build avay into them
And you know, I would predict in the future that users don't directly use avay
They use avay through other interfaces and so like that's where we are in crypto
It's like watching all the code come together. It's like what if as the internet was being built?
I don't know. We were all excited about like the dev tool like redshift or you know
so I think like coinbase makes money on usdc like you you go mint usdc from circle and then like that goes into
Or I think you can mint it through coinbase that then goes into like treasury bills and like they're in interest
and so if they're what if there's trillions of dollars of usdc on um
On this chain. So like I think that's like part of the play
And then I don't know like
Yeah, we'll see from there. Like it's kind of an experiment. I'm sure they'll figure out other ways to monetize it
And then I think what's going to happen with
Like, you know, they run a sequencer and like that's a part of the business model of of the chain
And so like as the chain grows they're going to get paid
Uh, i'm i'm going to guess that like I know like I saw like
I saw people tweeting out like documentation that was edited like
Like the sequencer doesn't get 20 percent
It just says it's like they're going to get like some percent and I like I would just speculate that they have some sort of deal
Um, and then I bet so as that grows
Optimism is going to stack, you know, they're going to stack eth
And then there's going to be other large orgs that like are like wow coinbase did this with optimism
We should do this with optimism and like optimism's business might be being some sort of
commercial partner to these like
These these types of chains. Um, I like i'll make up a name like maybe like if epic games decided to get into having a chain
If if their ceo decides to change his mind on crypto
Maybe they would be more likely to consider optimism
Because coinbase built on them and then you know
They have so many players and that could be like another valuable sequencer that optimism owns and every single one of these leads to
Like another revenue stream for optimism. And so if this like catches on
You know, you can just imagine, you know, what if they become?
The sort of app chain, you know
So that's what that's like what jason speculates
But like I honestly don't know like when we have when we when we're in conversations around
What what this is all about we're like a technology provider
We're helping onboard devs to ship on on their platform
It's we're not like it's not around the business strategy
I mean, we all know the potential that coinbase has and it it's fun to speculate. I think you did a great job of
Speculating potential angles that they meet they might be coming from
It is fun though jason to watch all these defy legos coming together, right? I mean, especially
If you look at where we were two years ago
And look at where we are now and look what we're headed two years from now
I never thought about it that way
But yeah, I could see a lot of other dApps and other solutions is integrating of a lending for example
all these little webs coming together
I think that wanna I want to talk about
The soulbound token utilization that you mentioned at ethan
You said you saw people leveraging soulbound tokens for their businesses
What were some examples or what are some examples that you can share with us based on?
I'll share a few and a lot of them are kind of similar. So
An example was this company
And this guy sam is the ceo. I met him at the zk sync booth
so what node guardians does is they want to
developers to do good or activities that are good for the ecosystem
Like there's things you can do. Like I don't know i'll make something up. It's like
Like if you're running a validator, it's like if you
Like test some code on like a new test net
Okay for like the new sdk that they're testing if you do the test, you know
They want to give you a soulbound token like that's like hey
Here's experience and like that's given to you in the form of a soulbound token and like you level up you get experience
That that soulbound token is a credential. It says you did this
And you can't trade it. You can't borrow against it. It doesn't have a photo. It's data
That's associated to your wallet that says you've accomplished something
and they've decided they've used that framework to sort of like be
The stats of their game and their game is all about doing things that are good for crypto
And making it fun and I really liked that that was clever
Another company is called ayah gigs. They're in tech stars right now
And what they do is it's like if you take a course
Like solidity development and like you ship an app. They give you a soulbound token that says you did this
And that could be really interesting. Uh, because like what if
What if that becomes like a thing, you know
Like that got me thinking like like I met um, I'm forgetting the name of the company
But I met a a company that's a crm
Which is kind of like one of those things where you have all the customers in it
Like you track like are they a lead are they an opportunity and we met now I closed the sale
It'd be really interesting. Like what they were they were doing is they're saying hey
When you your sales record at the end of the quarter you're going to get an nft that says these are your sales results
Great now. It's like and it's minted by the company. So it's like
In a world where this is adopted and you're like a hiring manager. You're like i'm hiring sales people
And instead of looking at resumes someone showed up you looked at their wallet and you're like, okay
It looks like you were in the top one percent of sellers
At you know google cloud and you sold four million dollars worth of products and you also have three good job tokens from
These like vip clients like and you have actually a few of these from different companies
I don't even need to see your resume. Like I don't care where you went to college. I see results
And the I know I can trust them because this nft
Was clearly minted by those companies. I can see that it's official
And that to me was really interesting how you could use that data. I mean
You could you know, they were talking about how
Yeah, so that was interesting another I see like
Well third web uses them too, um, like I see like one of my colleagues out in the room and so like we have
One of the things we do we invite founders
That we work with into into like an executive networking group and they all get soulbound tokens
And we have a website they go to and if you don't have the token the website has like a closed door
But if you have the token then the door opens and then you can see our events that we're doing
And again, these are soulbound. You can't transfer them. You can't buy them
And we don't send people event bright tickets, uh for your email
All you do is you go to this website and you click a button when and you claim your seat
And then we also have a store like and then what we do is as we come out with new features at third web we we sort
Of build them into this and so like now we have a shopify store that your soulbound token gets you swag
And so like it's it's our way of dogfooding our product
Um, yeah, man soulbound tokens. They're really cool. I think the idea of them as credentials is really interesting like you can imagine
You're a google employee like imagine your employee becoming that becomes your id badge
Like your soulbound token is what logs you into slack. It's what lets you sign contracts
It's also like that token will emit your salary in stablecoins into your wallet. I met a company that streams money that way
And when you get fired, you know or you quit the token gets burned, you know
Or it it becomes like a legacy token
really clear to me like where where that like at first I was like trying to get what like I wondered what the use cases were but
Sort of that's that's interesting to me
Yeah, it's super interesting to me as well and I didn't realize that companies are actually utilizing soulbound tokens as we speak
But I guess you got to see it firsthand at east Denver
Um, I can see even soulbound tokens one day representing college diplomas
Why not I mean it proves that you went there and you're always carrying your diploma with you
Like I could see everything on linkedin being on a token
Likewise, um, okay Jason, so
I don't remember if you and I talked about this on our intro call, but I I
Want to talk about game phi web 3 gaming crypto gaming, whatever you want to call it. Um
Let's start with this. What are your thoughts on the future?
Of web 3 gaming i'm not talking about
And by the way, no disrespect to to you know, the guys that
kind of set the trailblaze
But um, i'm not talking about like play to earn where people are playing
To make money i'm talking about a video game that is first and foremost fun
Addictive engaging to play that people come and want to invest their time into
Regarding some compensation. I mean you can just name a few i always like to refer to world of warcraft because I think that wow
Uh, wow classic especially was the greatest mmo rpg ever made sure you can go back and forth on this
But then you add the notion of asset ownership on top of that and you add the utility
Uh, the utility token that is represented in the form of a fungible token
Um where people can trade on the open market or or that company's proprietary anti marketplace
But would love to know your thoughts in the future of web 3 gaming and whether you think it's going to be something that takes over
Sure and like why should anyone care what I think about web 3 gaming? Um, i've never worked at like a game publisher
Uh or a game studio, but I spent eight years in the gaming industry
Um working at different kinds of service providers that worked really closely with game companies and I also spent two years at twitch
Um and made a streaming app for content creators
So i've been around it and i play a lot of games overwatch i'm into it. Um
You're right. Like I i've made a tweet about this today. Actually. I was my thought was like
Like I see people talk about gamefi. I see what they describe as gamefi
But I don't agree that it's gamefi and I also like web 3 gaming isn't all gamefi. I think what I see is
Like token launching mechanisms kind of like an ico
There's like this thing called like liquidity mining and token emissions
And I see those get wrapped in like 18 bits 16 bit skins
and like you have a warrior and you walk around and like you're collecting gems and real and like you can sell them and
What's really going on here is you're just like earning like sort of just ponzi tokens, which is fine
Like it's a form of gambling like like a pachinko machine or something. It's a new kind of like silly game. That's high risk
And like maybe some reward
But what I think gamefi and then like web 3 games in general
I think like the unique property that crypto introduces is like
digital assets that you own so like
Like I think we want to have gamefi until we have
like the power of fandom behind the assets like
If you go watch videos of world of warcraft legendary item, uh people like that earn a legendary item
Um on youtube like anyone who's played wow knows that it can take 50 100 200 hours
and an insane amount of luck
and tremendous coordination with a lot of people
To earn all the items it takes to eventually get lucky enough to earn
That rare item and it is like
Some people are lucky enough to have won in their entire life with world of warcraft
And so like they're really emotional videos of someone earning that item. They had to go through a lot
And they're really they're prized and like people will sell their account on ebay
Because someone values they want to get that sword
Um, and so the same is like with counter strike
There are markets for buying and selling skins. There's rare skins
There's like a real like one of the most famous clips in the history
Of counter strike is this guy
Who like throws the rarest most expensive skin gun of all time like over a wall
To distract somebody and like there's a reason like that clip wouldn't be as famous if that skin wasn't on the gun
And so like the reason why those skins are valuable is because the the intellectual property the game
Has cultivated a powerful fandom and a player base
That values these in-game items in the context of their fandom
And so we currently don't have
Any games or ip yet that have these intense fandoms?
Like I remember playing ocarina of time
When I it was like the first time
When I when I first played that game
I remember the quest I went on to go earn the big gore on sword
And like I had to use like a magazine to learn about it was like nintendo power
It was like here's how you got a guy, baby
Yeah, I didn't even know it's like there's a sword that's huge
It's like getting a new item in zelda was like the best part of the game
And like I was like I will do that quest I will I will it feels random and it's not necessary
But i'll do it and like I lose my sword and holy shit
And like I just remember the thrill of getting it and
You know, I valued that item and so what's going to happen like this is why nobody
like value like like land digital land like in decentral land and like these other
Sort of things like you hear about people buying like nft land plots
But like none of these apps have anybody using them
Nobody's hanging out in these virtual spaces. And so like this land really isn't worth anything
Nobody values it but the the little value that it does have is in the larger context of the nft fandom
And I think that's what's going on with nfts in general like
That's a separate point i'll come back to sort of like what are like where are nfts today?
I think they're kind of like where apps were when the app store just came out and we were just fascinated by like
Like remember when you would have like the night sky app on your phone and like you'd never had a smartphone before
And like you never really had accelerometers
You know on a device unless you played like wee tennis or something like that just came out, too
So like the nintendo wee was new accelerometers were new you have an iphone
And like you pointed at the sky and the app changes and it shows you a constellation and you were like, holy fuck
But like nobody really used that app. It was just to demonstrate how cool that technology was
Apps like there was like the iam rich app which was like went viral like only 10 people bought it was a thousand dollars
And they were just fascinating and like nfts today are like
They're demonstrating the mechanics of the blockchain and the new properties you own this
And everyone's like holy shit
And you can trade it there's money and so people are fascinated by that mechanic
And there's like a world of like trading happening like the great trading game is happening
I I look at the nft industry right now as like one big open source game
Where you can enter the game and you can either be a player that trades
Or you can contribute a collection and introduce the increase the supply
and liquidity is moving around
And roadmaps are used to signal potential events where liquidity could show up
And that's it. Um, it's all one big trading game and that's totally fine
That game is like a new kind of gambling that we have
Um, and like people will say it's about the art
And maybe it is to them, uh, or it's about the utility
But like i've never there's nothing in my life like that. I've been a fan of where i've like asked for utility
I've just enjoyed it. And I think when people say when utility they're really asking like when when price catalyst and
People join these communities. They say they're in communities
But I think these all these communities are really they're looking for alpha and they're looking for more
How do they front run the ball of money rolling around?
And so I would to go back to games. I think what's going to happen is what happens when we have games that have digital assets
And we have fandoms that value them, you know
When will we have we're going to have a generation eventually of games where when you you own the item?
And so like the skull trooper skin in fortnite that says like you were there in season one
Like you'll own that and then you'll also
We talked about these d5 protocols as primitives those games might have those primitives plugged in
You'll take your wallet. Maybe maybe games will introduce like
Like I forget what is is it blend dao where you can borrow against your nfts? Like why wouldn't you build a borrow against?
Your your skins, why wouldn't you be able to borrow against?
You know your your rare items that people really care about or what if you could lend them out?
Like maybe you have a powerful sword that you don't really use
Um, you could lend it out and earn earn fees
Maybe someone's willing to pay you some fees so that they could play with that really amazing item and wow their friends
You could sell it. Hey, you like this is already like I always call this like there's this thing
It's called like a revealed desire. It's like in the same way that like
You know when like there's a big grass here like there's sidewalks and like people cut the corner
And it forms like a like a path that's not on the sidewalk like a like a dirt path
Those are called desire paths by architects and like they sometimes lay down sidewalks or they just let it be
I think like there's revealed desires in our behavior around technology
And we're seeing a revealed desire around selling in-game items and we've seen it for years
csgo skins sites all the time selling items on ebay people want to do this they they're willing to fight hard
To break terms of services to figure out
How do I communicate that this item and this this count is real?
And they want to like break through the fear and the chance taking the buyer is going to take like this feels shady
What if I what if I get banned from ebay? Like what if it was all legit? What if it was all a part of the process?
that's all that's really interesting to me and so
That's I think as like games
You know gdc is coming up. Well unrelated. That's as game developers conference like it's
Games are games and like we're gonna we have new properties
Um that are going to be in those games, but I think it's fundamentally going to come down to intellectual property
a while ago a couple years ago
Um at gdc who worked for hbo
And we were talking about nfts and virtual reality and he was like man
You know how I wish we could go back in time and like redo game of thrones because like how cool would it be?
If at the end of like you tune in live it's a big episode
And at the very end of the episode a qr code appeared on screen
And like you hold up your phone and you scan it and it's like hey true fans
You have two minutes, you know true fans who tuned in live
Uh pull your sword out of the pile if you get one and you're like, fuck
Yeah, and you you scan the screen you pull the sword out and you look at your item that you got on your phone
That's like that's you minting
Um, but you really just pulled it out of the pile
That's like what you felt and you look at the sword and you don't need to see the traits
You see that you pulled a valyrian steel sword out like you're like, oh my god
Like two million people pulled out swords, but I I know how you don't need to know
How many there are you know, how many there are you read the books?
There's like 48 and you got one and you know what you also
Are a player in the virtual game of thrones game of westeros
Which is kind of like a farm ville game and you pay 39 a month
So that you are in the lannister kingdom and instead of being like a normal
Lamo like free to play peasant you have like an upgraded premium member
Little castle mini castle and you know what you can put your sword
Right on the mantle that you collected over there
And in this world you could go walk around and you see john snow
You like teleport around you see john snow is leading the troops
Over like far across the land and you see denarius over there doing her thing
And you're teleporting around checking out westeros and you see like armies converge and you decide to go grab the sword
And you're like, I feel like I want to join the battle
And then you go and you join the battle and you go fight and you kick more ass because you have a better sword and like
There's also a tv show and there's books and like you're collecting nfts for tuning into the podcast
And like that's a whole world of fandom where every part of this is like
You're going on an emotional roller coaster and you have greater ability to participate and
You're form like you're meeting friends in these worlds and you have more to talk about
And you're having more experiences. And so like you're a bigger fan
That's all really cool. Uh, that's a cool world
That's like a world of like we think about entertainment today is like movies music games
But like what I just described is like
You know, it's a multimedia environment
That we're comfortable with we're comfortable with all those interfaces
Yeah, you're in you're adding an entire new layer multiple layers of engagement for
The audience I never even thought about the use case for a television show
Good I met I met somebody at nike who was describing we had a similar convo and they were like, um
You know, let's say nike had like a hundred marathons around the world that were like these super official nike marathons
And you run one and then at the end you get to claim your like
Your results and like that's you minting an nft and you get this nft. That's like got
A 3d like map of the course with the weather it has the results of all the other runners your time
It's like this interesting media file and then it's in your wallet. It's non-transferable
And you know you love these marathons. So you run in a bunch of them
And then what happens if nike delighted you and they said oh you friend you've run 25 marathons and your time
Is like a sub. I don't know what a good time is like sub two and a half hours
Something it's an amazing. It's like a it's a great time
Um, it's like an athlete time. Um
Maybe they send you a new nft like you've qualified and they auto their smart contract detects it
Automatically send you a nike runners club non-transferable nft
And the runners club is very special when you get it. You're like, oh my god
I have the runners club now when you go to the nike website
You now have early access to new running shoes that nobody else can get limited edition ones that you get like months earlier
Uh, you also will get invited to a once a year special marathon. That's in a cool part of the world
Uh that only runners club people go to and they have like a list entertainment and it's a huge thing
And you love it and you meet other people in the runners club and you're like, holy shit
We're all like great runners and we love nike stuff and great marathons. I'll see you with the next one
And then they do this for every sport
um a version of that and like wow that makes like
that's really great way to do marketing and like that's really aligned with like the behavior that you do like you love running and
That gets you to love the brand more and be a part of the brand's fandom in a way. That's like
Doesn't feel cheap or lame or or sellout-y. It's like that's pretty cool
I think it's very cool and I I
When you mentioned the game go back to the game of thrones example because when you mentioned that I thought about
all the people and probably the first like two it was the first like two three seasons where
It wasn't super viral yet. And you had a lot of og's that had either
HBO fans or just reported out who participated and you know
like you said the premieres of each episode of each season and I think that
Reward early viewers of a show early supporters of a show
By giving them that notoriety on chain whether it's in the form of like some metaverse or
Even in the form of a po-op that has special utilities associated to it or special privileges associated to it. Very cool
Fans like when I was at twitch, I did fandom marketing. That's why I keep on saying fandom like i'm obsessed with it
I think it's really interesting and I think that's one of the biggest use cases for nfts
And fans want three things
They want to go on an emotional roller coaster like noah
You don't want to actually die and fight to the death and put yourself in that situation
But you want to watch john snow do it and vicariously live through him
And go on that journey with him and go on an emotional roller coaster
And the better the emotional roller coaster the higher the highs and the lower the lows
the more the better that content was and then like
Two you want to self-identify as a fan
Um, you want to look in the mirror and recognize a fan?
See other fans out there and spot them and be like that's a fan
And it's like oh they said the code. It's like it's not just merch. It's like you have the merch
This is from season one like this shirt
And like you had to go to the meetup to get it and like there were only 20 of us there
And like george rr martin showed up and like yeah
And then by the way, like that's an interesting theory
You said about aria stark like you got to read the books to know that and not just read the books
You got to listen to that cool podcast
Only people who are true fans listen to that podcast like I know those code words are correct
And oh my god, you have a silver status on your discord like
You have to apply for that and like you you're one of the ten, huh?
Wow true fan and like these are the things
self-identification and then the third
They want social connection. Uh, you like fans have a very specific
No matter what you look like or where you're from
Fans all share a very specific
Thing obsession about a thing in pop culture and if they connect they're likely to be friends
And so the question is like what's the quality and variety of your spaces where fans meet up?
And like the virtual ones the real ones like yeah, we met in line, you know for tickets for that concert
And that's why we're friends, you know
Line was forever. It rained and like you'll never forget that but you made a friend or
Like maybe the the social media account like everyone replies like with the code words and like the replies are really on brand and
We want to make friends. We want to go on an emotional roller coaster and we want to self-identify
And you can sort of see how nfts can do all that stuff
Certainly and I think that the true potential is yet to be realized by a lot of these big companies
You want to I want to take it back to the example you were giving about legendary items and skins and being able to loan an nfts
Buying and selling items and buying and selling accounts as you mentioned even skins on ebay or on the black market
A lot of gamers oftentimes say well
I don't want pay to play and I don't I don't like the idea of like yeah
If you want something like a legendary sword you have to earn it in game
You can't just go buy it and but people have been selling accounts with legendary items
and wow for over a decade and so and also like
Enjoy the buying they don't like buying and selling of gold either they say but that's what I love doing
But here's the thing though. They love doing that stuff
It's always like a couple of vocal gatekeepers that say, you know, like you're not a true gamer. Here's why like no true scotsman, you know and
Speak for yourself. Like that's what they think. Um
Pay to win. Let me tell you like how much revenue comes from people paying to win people want to you know
They don't all want to grind some people are totally like I used to download in pirate music
My parents bought it. They were like no big deal. Uh, itunes songs 99 cents, whatever
Um, it's just like we all come from different places and perspectives to these things and what we're trying to get out of it
Most people are not trying to most people are not signaling to other gamers how true of a gamer they are
They're looking to be delighted and distracted
No, it's a really good point you just made it's typically the the
The loud-spoken game keepers, but I guess what I was trying to get across was that
These practices already exist the buying and selling of gold the buying of selling of items or rather accounts with budgetary items on it. So
Activision in this case wins they love money if they had a proprietary nft marketplace and players can go and legitimately sell
Legendary items and they charge a 5 fee off of like a million dollar transaction
They can make a lot of money off of a market that already exists and there's value there to be captured
Um, and even the utility tokens like wow, there are people in venezuela. There are people in lebanon and iran in um in parts of
In parts of sub-saharan africa that spend all day playing wow and just farming gold and selling it to westerners on the open market
That's also the value that can be captured. So I hope that a lot of these game studios start to see the potential
I think some of them already have and
Um, we we see a shift towards more web 3 utilization or rather web 3 infrastructure utilization for video games
It it's hard. It's like we're so early too
Like I said, like we're in that like apps just came out sort of phase and
It reminds me of like metallica and napster
Like what you just said, like we've never had that like there's never been that kind of marketplace for games like we don't know
What the take rate would be and how much people would utilize it
We have an idea from like the revealed desires that I mentioned, right that you just called out people buying and selling
But we here's what we also don't know. Here's another new property
On the internet, you know, this is gonna sound silly
But like there's because the internet's open like we have all this harry potter fan fiction, right?
Went out there and created stuff and it that harry potter fan fiction
is far ranging in what it is to like pornographic to absolutely delightful and
Cool. That's like what happens when you have
Composed ability in your intellectual property. So like what else could happen if we had nfts?
Well, what if supreme was like hey everybody new form of marketing
If you have one of those valyrian steel swords from game of thrones come to our website and why don't you mint an exclusive?
Supreme custom hoodie or whatever, right?
And like that's a new form of marketing and like supreme did not need to go to game of thrones to do that
That's like a new superpower. That's going to come to this world and we're going to see like
Take take, you know, if you look at dota like dota was a fork of
starcraft like the like the reason why we have that game is because so many other games didn't allow you to like fork them but like
uh commanding like starcraft like they were able to to edit and like make new versions of
and that's how we ended up like the intensity of the fandom around like
modifying games like in modding culture led to new esports and if you bring modding culture
To like ip and I think that's like what the composed ability of nfts allows like
That I think that's right there the x factor
Uh, because like brands will want to reach other
Will want to reach new audiences and like we have all you know
It's going to change what ad targeting is because like you go to facebook ads
You know, like I want to target women who are 18 to 24 instead
It's like no what like because that demographic is like a proxy for a behavior. You're like well women who are
24 18 to 24 they're likely to buy this product. Well, why don't maybe there's other proxies like oh
anybody that has like a token from
Like going to an exclusive meetup with like this kind of celebrity like maybe maybe they'd want, you know this token
Um, yeah, maybe they'd want this product and like you can airdrop them
deals and stuff like that so it's like you can do behavioral marketing and then like you can make like
Bring in the creativity of like that nike example or the game of thrones example
so like modding culture plus like that level of creativity equals I think like
The right like the sweet spot of like how we should have like companies engaging with us in marketing to us
and who knows what kind of like ip will get like
how you know, it's so fun in fortnite when like
Marvel characters show up like there's the revealed desire. We love it when like there's cross universe cross property stuff
Another example is like what if like
You know, oh like the only way to get that nft is you got to read the book like oh the sorting hat in harry potter like
everyone took online quizzes to see like what house are you and like
What if the book literally in that scene sorted you and like you got a ravenclaw nft?
And like it was soulbound and forever like you're and like they had a whole universe
Ready for you to go that you're gonna as a fan
Now because you read the book
All the other stuff they come out with reacts to like the fact that you have a ravenclaw token
The harry potter world comes out with a summer camp and it's only for ravenclaw people and you're like I want to go to that
A lot of the fan membership stuff that they want to do is like also possible and easier
I think the thing is like all this is possible today with like web 2
But like we're not doing it because it's really hard
It's hard to like sync up all these databases and apis and build these complicated things
But like these tokens in the blockchain, they make it really easy
The it's like everything's an infinite open api that's like with with like the right data
Wow, uh, I mean so much to dissect and so much to
A lot of the examples that you're presenting here. I never even thought about the whole notion of fandom
You said you're a huge fan or right? You said fandom, correct?
Yeah, I never thought I never even thought about the notion of fandom and how
You know fans make up so much of what?
A work of art or a television show or a game is but they don't have too much
They don't have too much influence or say your contribution
Well, god, you're welcome I just blew your mind
Yeah, no, you did. I have to go go and play this one back. Look jason
It's uh, I want to be cognizant of your time. We're almost at the top of the hour before you uh, before you head out
Is there anything else in the industry? We've we've discussed
Web3 gaming we've talked about soulbound tokens. We've talked about
Account abstraction, uh, we we started out the space talking about third web
Um, is there anything else in the industry right now that's really exciting you and you think it's important to highlight and discuss
There is so much uh out there, but I have a meeting right now that I need to go to
Uh, so my time is unfortunately up. I have to go
Talk about sales force, uh with adam lee
That's awesome, man. How we're gonna rank accounts. Uh, so
This was great. I love talking to you. I hope people enjoyed if anybody out there is a developer working on
Web3 and smart contracts play with third web. It is very cool. You'll love it
And even if you don't use smart contracts actually go check out third web and log into the dashboard
It is the best place to search for contracts. You can search for any contract
It's easier like than using etherscan for like minting stuff. So like check it out. It's free
Love y'all. All right. Thank you. I gotta go
Jason his shock. It's been a pleasure. Take care. Bye