Okay, okay, good morning, everyone.
Welcome to the second Mera Monday space. I'm Dim, and I will be your host for the next 45
minutes or so, while we did dive into the mind of a builder in the Whetri space.
Um, today I'm very happy to be joined by Charles. He's the co-founder of Nifty Island.
If you haven't heard about Nifty Island, you must definitely be living under a rock,
as it took by storm. Everyone's feed in the past few days, it's basically all I can see on my feed.
Charles, good morning. How are you doing? I'm well, thanks. You know, it's funny because
when you're sort of in the heart of these things, I can't tell whether my feed is just showing me
things I want to see. You know what I mean? So I have no objective reference point. Like people
tell me like, oh, it seems, you know, but then, you know, it's funny because you just, it's so
hard to know what, what is objectively going on, but it seems people know about it. So good stuff.
Game. Uh, you do, you do have people from all around web three basically posting about it.
So that's pretty, that's pretty cool. Um, let's get into it. Um,
can you tell us about the genesis of Nifty Island when the ID came up, et cetera?
Oh yeah. Yeah. So definitely the, you know, for me, um, the thing that's always really interested
me about crypto or the deep internet communities around it. So I was doing stuff in DeFi
long ago in ancient times. Uh, and, uh, and, and, and, and basically, um, you know, I was amazed
by how much people rallied together around fairly kind of uncharismatic, you know, governance tokens.
And when NFTs picked up, I thought pretty much immediately, I was like, Oh my God,
this is the rarefied version of what we saw in DeFi. Like this is sort of the real product in
crypto or deep online communities that people can opt into and grow together. That, that is the,
what I think the core offering is right now. And then, you know, my co-founder Zach and I thought,
all right, like this, if that is true, what, what should be built around those,
how can they be made more fun? Because it's not obvious to normal consumers,
how to get involved and what to do with those communities. Because really what NFT communities
are, are something that exists on X discord, blur, open C. And we thought there has to be more to
this. There has to be some other vector of the experience. And so we set out to build a new type
of user-generated content game world. We said the word island and we were like, Oh my God,
everyone needs their own island for sure. And then we kind of fleshed it out from there. So
yeah, that's kind of the genesis of it. That's more or less, you know, what it is and where it
came from. And when was it, was it 2021? You got it. Yeah. So it was right when,
yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this was NFTs were just starting to pick up.
I bought a crypto punk and I was like, Oh, this is, this feels good. And, and then I think Axie
was like starting to get interesting, but it was, it was not yet like fully ascendant. And then,
you know, there was no, I don't even know if board ape had minted, you know, it was like,
this is early days. It's actually crazy. Imagine before that the board eight men,
it's hard to even imagine, right? So yeah, anyway. Yeah, these were definitely crazy times. So we had
no idea what we were doing. One of the best memory for me was the top shot summer of 2020.
We are just trading Librons for $1, gifting each other moments that basically went crazy in price
a few months after it was definitely a different time than now. How many people are you now in
the team? So it's about 30. It's quite a heavy lift, about 30. And that's almost entirely devs
and artists. And then you kind of have me running around, you know, having ideas and, and sort of
talking to you all and stuff. And, and then we have a couple others too. I have a, you know,
biz ops lead in a, in a really wonderful content partner who makes videos with me and stuff. And
that's, that's really fun. So, but it really is devs and artists almost entirely.
Good. Can you tell us more about the play to airdrop concept? So it's basically taking place
right now during the beta, right? Yeah, you got it. So the play to airdrop concept is really fun.
And it's, and it's really like, the way, the way I look at it is we've been sort of in this
NFT PFP meta where we've been thinking out mints for a while. And I think it's a great way to start
a community. I'm all for it. I don't think it's the right way to launch a game of this nature.
Instead, I look at the game like a public good. And I look at projects like Uniswap and all of
the sort of DeFi summer projects and say, Oh, they used a token to bootstrap products that
fundamentally rely on different parties coming together to use them. That's what makes them
useful. You need people to LP on Uniswap. You need people to trade. And while Uniswap itself didn't do
an aggressive airdrop campaign, many others did in that time period. So the play to airdrop is
inspired by DeFi. And really the way to think about it is you can earn Island token by playing
and sharing a link to your Island. So really just participating in the game right now allows you to
become an OG in it. And my hope is that because the biggest holders of Island will be those who
play the game the most, we will have a dedicated community of like no other will be one of the I
hope the most passionate ERC 20 community out there. And we will have a lot to do together for
a long time. So if you're participating in play to airdrop, you're signing up to be a part of
something quite fun, and something we can grow together for a long time. Yeah, very interesting.
So I started to build my Island over the weekend. I played two few games, I'm really
bad at it, like like every video games, maybe, maybe except Super Mario. And it's very cool,
because you can easily build a game in your Island. So for example, even myself, I don't
have any experience in dev in game design and things like that. And I was able to create this
little runner or race game, let's put it this way around my house. How is it important for you
that anyone can basically just jump in and create stuff? This is this is really fundamental to what
we're doing. So when you look at Roblox in Fortnite, there's a temptation to believe that's the last word
and how a user generated content game world can function. And I think actually the big studios
working in UGC are pretty conservative. And so you look at Fortnite creative, it's amazing,
like I'm this is no shade on it, but it is essentially Roblox in its basic primitives.
And that model is great, but it means that very few people make content. Overwhelmingly,
it's dev shops and does devoted teams that make content, everyone goes to those those experiences.
Now, with Nifty Island, we've changed the basic primitives, every user gets an island and you
can make an island very easily, you can try it for yourself, it's not hard to make an island.
And the game logic that occurs on the island are called playground games,
they can be deployed by anyone. So over time, what you'll see is a growing library of playground
games, and, and even cooler islands that you can make more and more easily. And so,
kind of like in the old days of like, think of, think of like Warcraft modding that led to Dota,
you know, people are making maps, people are making game modes, there's a sort of dynamic
interplay between people, you know, experimenting with game logic and the locations in which the
game logic occurs. This led to a lot of creativity, we're going to see the same thing here. I think
people in Nifty will invent game modes and come up with stuff over time, the game will be opened
up more and more so that you can build whatever you want on it. It's truly the goal to make this
like radically open in nature. We just have to get there, you know, we have to mature the tooling
and, and get there, but we will. Yeah, of course, it's a very gradual approach. And
it's great, you can just come up on day one with every features and everything possible. So yeah,
UGC user generated content is very important and it's at the core of Nifty Island. You mentioned
skins, games, game mode, any kind of assets. Do you plan on releasing some kind of a marketplace
and in-game marketplace for creators to easily monetize what they are creating?
Yeah, good news. Good news. We have it. It's live. It's not perfect. I haven't seen it. Okay,
so I haven't checked this, my bad. That's okay. That's okay. No, no, no, no, no, it's okay.
It's actually it's one of those features that I actually think is the very important but kind
of is downstream of getting invested in the game. You know what I mean? So it's like no one's
going to be interested in this marketplace until they're interested in the game. And so it's sort
of like a second order thing that happens. So not a problem. Don't worry about it. But what it does,
what it does, though, is basically, you can easily turn any game ready asset into an NFT.
And you can drop it to your communities for free, you can sell it will have open edition support
to which I think is going to be killer. And if you're a game artist, this is a chance to have
a direct relationship with the end user. You don't need to go through a big studio to sell your work.
Game artists, I think, will have a renaissance in the same way that digital artists did on OpenSea.
It is just, I think, patently clear that NFT is buying an NFT like a cool avatar is so fun. And
what you'll see with that marketplace over time, too, is eventually it'll have game modes and
things that are way more elaborate than just game objects. So yeah, but I'd highly recommend
checking it out. We also have things called bloom rewards, which you can spend our in game
currency to get your hands on your very first game ready NFTs. Highly recommend checking those out.
That's great. You just mentioned avatar. It's been crazy because we've seen these videos around
with people playing as, for example, we had orangey, we saw the video he was playing as his ape.
We also saw pudgy that are integrated very soon with both H2. How does it have how you
do you make that happen to have 10K collections fully rigged on almost day one of the launch?
Yeah, so there's, you know, this part of it that we can take credit for,
but there's a big part of it we can't. So first, in terms of what what we can take credit for,
we've gotten really good at assimilating lots of different game assets into NFT. That's
sort of our secret sauce is we have a really flexible content pipeline that's pulling avatars
in from chain from the metadata from different APIs, and it's taking files that are not the same.
People are making avatars in all different ways. I think they always will and making them all
usable in game. So that that was a lot of a lot of learning to make something that could do that.
But the thing I'll say that is so important is that NFT communities have not been, you know,
just chilling out during the bear market. Many of the best ones have made avatars. So tons of
projects have either used third party providers or made avatars themselves. And for the past two and
a half years, we've basically been in the trenches with them always learning like, what are they
making? Why are they making it? What file formats do they like? Can we make sure they all look
good in game? So it's a very, it's a combination of how great NFT communities are that they made
all this stuff. Some of it we made, but not all. And then it's also that we're quite good
at ingesting everything. So that's really the story there. Yeah, I love it. So by communities,
of course, we think about the blue chips, these massive projects and all, but you actually
gave the opportunity to the smallest communities of all, to actually be part of the game,
include a playable character. So I actually lived through it. I actually, I'm actually in the
process of integrating one. How important was it for you to integrate these very small communities
in the game? So now the way we viewed it kind of like, this is something you do partially for
tactical reasons, but really also because I just think this is how it should work is that
you shouldn't have to be the biggest project in the world to have a game that you can play
together. You should, every project should. And part of what I thought about in terms of just
making the space more interesting is imagine if you start a little project with your friends,
it's an NFT community. And what if you actually enjoyed more utility on day one than the best NFT
projects enjoyed in 2021? If suddenly the overall experience of owning an NFT is just
better across the board, that's what's going to grow the space. And so we thought, okay,
let's try and do this in a scalable way. It's mostly scalable right now. It involves a little
too much of me talking to people, but that's going to be automated away pretty soon. And
so what it will be is every community that wants to be a NFT just needs to say, hey,
here's an avatar. Here's a contract address. Boom, you're in game. You have a community page,
you can do custom prizes. So we're not far off. It just being completely scalable,
where we could have as many communities as want to be in there. We're basically there.
It's just just slightly manual. It just means I have to chat to you briefly.
How many so far? 200, right? 300.
So it keeps going up. I mean, we're definitely I think 150 plus. So yeah, we're adding more
and more. We took a couple day break. But we're adding more now. And yeah, so it's
I think 150 plus. It'll be at 200 pretty soon. Yeah.
Yeah, I love it. I'm just going to go briefly back to to mention that you say about Roblox,
obviously, I pinned a tweet that you posted months ago, I think was in May 2023.
Of the Roblox homepage, it's a screenshot. It's from 25. If I remember correctly, so almost 20
years. And I think they had like 150 users in the beta. How many users can you share at least
with us some numbers about the beta? And is it the trajectory that you want for Nifty Island?
Yeah, so I think we're really happy with the start. And I think like,
the way I've always thought about this is there's a lot of projects promising, you know,
mass adoption overnight. And you're not never going to hear that from me. I am I want to build
something that a small group of people absolutely love and want to tell all their friends about. To
me, that's just always how the best products have been built. It's things that just can't help but
grow. There doesn't need to be a crazy tactic. I don't need, you know, to immediately tell every
famous person to promote it. I mean, we will do that. But we don't it's not necessary, right?
It'll grow on its own. It's just a matter of speeding it up. So, so you know,
to answer your question, I mean, I think we've had something like 25,000 accounts created, there's,
I don't know, 7000 islands or something now, and then that people have made or put like some
moderate amount of effort into. And then I think the CCUs, I mean, we've been as high as 1000,
but then we were throttling it at 1000 CCUs. And then we've been, you know, as low as 300 CCUs,
we've been, and we've been throttling it, basically, we've had to. But today, we push an update that
will make it much more scalable. Like job one for us is making the game hyper scalable. And,
and we're, you know, it's not going to be that hard to get there. It's, it's doable. So yeah,
I mean, I think, I think honestly, it's good at DAUs, I think, like really truly active players,
I mean, I don't know, it's been like five or 6000. At last I checked, I think it's grown a little,
but that was a little old. But yeah, you know, I think it's off to a great start, given it's
promoted by me and the main account tweeting it, and a few other people who like the game
tweeting about it. And this is so yeah, I think it's off to a good start. Yeah, definitely.
These numbers are great. Especially how long has it been like four days, right? Five days,
it was last Thursday, if I recall correctly, it feels like a year. It honestly feels like a year,
but let me look, I don't know how long it's been. What I don't even know what date it is.
Is it January 22? Okay, I think it's been four days, maybe a little less than four.
Have you slept in the past week, Charles? Be honest. But so honestly, the honestly,
I've slept okay, you know, I've got I get in like a five or six hour stretch. And thankfully,
my co founder and I have very different sleep schedules. So I kind of can't help but get up,
it will be like 4am or something and I'll like bolt up from bed. And I'm like, Oh, shit, like,
okay, well, you know, when you wake up, and you like, kind of remember, like things that are going
on, you're like, Oh, right, we have this whole game and stuff, right? I better get going.
But, but so I'll wake up really early and get started usually. And then my co founder is basically
nocturnal. So he's up all through the night. So between the two of us, we do okay.
That's great. That's really good to hear. And what's basically the plan to bring
easy island to the masses? I mean, like outside of our echo chamber in web three?
Yeah, so I'll give the answer I got for now. And this will be high level to start and we can
dive into them. I've got a lot of ideas. But job one, and I just think this can't be understated,
right? The importance of this, which is the product has to be absolutely amazing. Like we
have to be so damn good. It has to be a completely unique offering that you can't get anywhere else.
And that's that's the that has always been and it always will be the pre condition for
onboarding a massive number of users, there's no shortcut, it has to be absolutely phenomenal.
And I think we're off to a good start there. There's a lot that I want to improve, though. So,
so there's that. And then with the product being absolutely great, when we get to that,
that point that I, I feel feel we're ready, it's not going to be too tricky, I think,
because the game is designed to be shared. And there's always going to be incentives to share.
And so a lot of it is bottom up virality, which again, the best products have grown that way,
time and time again, on the internet, that's how we're going to do it. And we could not ask for a
better user base that is more excited to become an OG and earn a token through participation,
right? We have the best users right now, that's our biggest strength. So they're going to do a lot
of the work with us. And also NFT communities, people like pudgy penguins, who we really love,
you know, that are spreading the word about NFTs, we always want to be a part of their
efforts. So we want to grow with the space. And then the last thing I'll say is, the game really
is designed for social media. It integrates with social media in a pretty interesting way.
And so will you see big twitch streamers doing it? Do we have some big twitch streamers on
the cap table? Yes, we do. And through through funds, it's not direct, but through through
some funds. So and you know, like I know some of the like, anyway, I won't get into it too
much, but we have some good people who can do it. Okay, yeah, we are almost going to, to
label that as an alpha, right? Community decide, but yeah, yeah, that's great. And in all of this,
obviously, monetization will be a big part of it. So what's actually the mainstream of revenue
that you're looking at? Are you looking at creative like, I mean, sorry, assets,
trading like marketplace, you know, or other other things.
Sorry, sorry, we were asking, what was it? What was the core of the question there?
Yeah, monetization, basically, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. So with monetization, few things, right? So
I'll tell you the ideas. And there's actually one where I want to be like, really open about
my plans there. And if you hear me say something, and you're like, Charlie, I think that's stupid,
or that's going to ruin the game. Like, please let me know I look at every single thing that gets
posted. So you can just say it. And I will respond to you hopefully within two milliseconds,
and then we'll get a gun. But the so here's here's the ideas I have. So one is marketplace,
that's going to take time to get really interesting. But marketplace inventory becomes
more and more compelling. We're working on enforcing royalties for it. We want creators to
benefit and us probably something like a 5050 split on a little bit of a higher than normal fee
schedule, something like 10% that we split 5050. That's decent that that will get going that'll
work. We obviously have a token, and the token will help the project, you know, do well.
We want to be really wary of, of, you know, using it as a treasury, but it does it does help
in some way we can raise, you know, like VC funding from that that's just like a short term
tactic. The another one I have is launching something I want to call nifty island premium,
which would be a monthly subscription fee that allows you to get like 10 god mode islands.
So if you're like a brand or a big creator, and you don't want to mess around in farm blooms to
upgrade your island, and you also need bespoke customer support, we could honestly with a
with a subscription model, I think we could probably be profitable, like, very fast. And
I think that would, that would be the way to go, you know, so so it's that think, oh, yeah,
here's the last thing I'm really excited about, is I'm very interested in skill based wagering
in game. And it's slated as our top priority thing to work on. Once we get out of this chaos here,
I think that can be taxed. And that revenue can also be shared with island owners. And,
yeah, so we have a bunch of ideas. And please let me know, because I really think
monetization is often where companies go wrong in gaming, they drive a wedge between them and the
players. I don't want to do that. So let me know if I say something stupid. I'm often wrong.
That's great that you're actually very, very open to feedback. And as you say, you reply very
quickly, I experienced that had a few questions, technical questions and all and like, you know,
snap of the finger, you reply directly, just just to think about a bit to the to the
island token. What's the tokenomics of it? What's the part that is located for the better?
Yeah, yeah. And so I'll say, okay, it's just it's funny, because I'm looking at those content,
get posted, I start missing stuff. Okay, I don't even know this, the guys posted something crazy.
Dial has something interesting. I need to watch this later. Anyway, so with the with the token,
I would the main reason I haven't published the light paper yet is I literally haven't had like
two seconds to do it. But but I do have I can verbally explain what the plan is. So,
so basically, island token is a scarce commodity that rations platform resources. That's our kind
of very like, you know, I've talked to the lawyers at depth, you know, description, high
level description, and the things that the things that it does, really, it's about deep
in game utility, if you want to make awesome islands, make sure people see them. And you
want to host tons of players on them, and you want to have an awesome time with with making
islands. Island token holding it is going to make that better for you. So basically deep creator in
game utility. That's one. Two, second thing I'm thinking about is there's going to be new NFTs
that come out through the game. Almost 100%. My dream for the marketplace is to be a true like
launchpad for others to make games on top of nifty. I think island token and this is an I
think I need to think about a little more. But the plan is to have holding island token
give you some priority access to some of those drops. So there's that. And then the final
thing is event, you know, as we roll out things, where the game has more financial throughput,
and you can pull ETH out of the game, as earnings, island token is going to enhance
your ability to do that, it'll let you get around platform fees, and pull more more money
out as a creator. So yeah, I really think we can do it in a way where the token has just deep utility.
It's not a mystery like, Oh, what does the token do? Like, you know, what are we governing? It's a
it's just going to be really straight up gaming gold. A good time. I love I'm psyched about the
token. I love tokens in general. I think they're just so much fun. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And
it's good that you're very open to that. But because we see a lot of, you know, stuff happening
in the space. And obviously, most of the time, we don't have any answers. And we're actually
walking in the dark with this kind of stuff. So very cool that you're. Yeah.
One last thing. Sorry, I just realized I should say this because we're talking about the token.
So on ironically, utility token, you buy it for the utility. I'm not you're never going to
see me talking about the price of tokens. You're not going to see me like, you'll see me very excited
about the game, and the fundamentals of what we're doing. And if people play the game, they may want
to own the token, but you're never going to see me talking about the price, you know, all that kind
of stuff. It's really, you know, if your enthusiasm got nifty, and you want to have the
best experience in it, that's what the tokens for. That's great. That's great to hear for sure.
Um, where do you see Nifty Island in the next five to 10 years?
On it. So this is where like, and I like that you said five to 10 years, because
this shit's difficult, and things take time, you know. So, so basically, in five to 10 years,
I really, and this, again, I don't want to say this with any hubris, or like, oh, damn,
like, we've had a good couple days, it's going to be easy. Now, don't believe that it's going to
be tricky as hell. But, but what I will say is there's no limiting factor on why it can't be,
you know, for Fortnite, or Roblox, or Minecraft level. That's not saying it's guaranteed,
or it'll be easy. It's saying there's no reason why not. Like, why couldn't we do that? And,
and so that's the way I look at it. It's Roblox, we're in Roblox 2005 right now. And,
but but we have one advantage Roblox didn't have, we have the best communities on the internet with us.
So maybe the timeline can be accelerated by that. And, and the internet's a much more
viral and crazy place than it was when Roblox started. So growth can happen faster. But
yeah, I mean, I from the day from day one, like, which is hilarious, and so,
so silly. I've always thought I'm like, let's build the biggest game in the world.
Like, why not, you know, I'm not saying I'm not, it's not a, that's not a promise.
It's just to say that that's 100% what I want to do with you guys as a team.
Perfect, I think that that's summing up very well. So we focused about UGC and obviously the
tools that you're actually giving builders and the opportunity game to sell their assets, etc.
Do you plan as a company to bring your own experiences? Basically, are you planning any
games on Nifty Island? Yeah, yeah, this will be really fun. So we, the nice thing about us is
we've been building for two and a half years. So like, we have quite a lot in the chamber
that we haven't put out yet. I mean, it's not an infinite supply, but we have more stuff. And
one of those things that was really one of my babies as a feature that I love is the quest
system. We have a tweet out about it. You know, if someone sees it, you can pin it, whatever. But
basically, you're going to see in game competitions that allow you to get POMS. And legendary POMS
are really like special to me. Like I've been looking at them for two years. I know some of
our OG team members, or sorry, like a stakeholders, community members have been too, you're going to
be able to earn those through crazy in game competitions. We've never sold a POM. You can't
buy one from the team. The only way to get them is to contribute to the future of Nifty
Island. And that turns you into like a vanguard of it. So I see it as sort of like, if you could
own the Master Sword or Mario's Cap, because you are an OG in something really special, you know,
that's that's what it's like. So you're going to see those coming out, they affect the airdrop
multiplier, or collector tier. They they give you a big roster of avatars that we made together
as a community based on a shared collection through POMDAU. And they'll have all kinds of like,
it's limited to start. But more and more, you'll see cool, just like things that mark you out as an
OG, like, I see them as like, if someone in 10 years sees that you own a POM, they're like,
oh, shit, like you were really there at the beginning, huh? And you're like, they're like,
yep, I was there for the wars. You know, it was crazy back then. But anyway, yeah. So quests
are coming in game competitions are coming. Those will be in some cases on team managed islands,
in some cases, done with partner projects or creators.
Love it. Well, I actually I asked the chat in the chat in the detail and discord chat about
questions. Also, if you have questions for Charles, please feel free to comment here.
I've picked a few ones. If you accept basically, are you open to question? Yeah.
Oh, man, dude, of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I don't mind at all.
There is one that sounds very simple. But I think the mechanics around can be very interesting.
So it's relics that is actually asking will island become NFT. So by that, I can imagine that
when you it's not only about the buildings or the things that you're creating, but the game
mechanics that can actually be proper to an island and result as part of the island,
any plans to to make the islands NFTs? Yeah, this is this is such an interesting one. Everybody,
it's sort of funny, because it comes up a lot and people do want it. And we certainly could do it.
And we've looked at it, I see it, you know, I see I see how it could become something,
I think, like down the line. Sure. First, like I could see it being really fun. Someone makes an
awesome island, and then you kind of want to take it over and use it as a creator yourself.
I see that I think I think it's great. The key thing is that what I will say is islands will not
be scarce. There will never be a time we need to pay, you know, and buy some land to start building.
That is fundamentally like wrong to us, like both like it, it's kind of it just silly,
make doesn't make sense. And but I could totally see people being able to sort of ascribe the
fruits of like property rights to the fruits of their labor, like I make a cool island,
mints it as an NFT, sell it to someone who doesn't want to build, but they do want to share it.
I could see that it's something we've talked about something we could do. If you guys really
want to see it, let me know. But what you aren't going to see for us from us is like,
oh, you know, land sale, the only way to make a cool island is to pay that will never happen.
It'll it'll always be that you can hop in and create if you want to.
Yeah, it looks like you're making this very rewarding. This is more like one that I've been
wondering, I've been seeing a lot of very, very creative stuff in my feed. I've explored a few
islands also this morning, we can see that looks like people have been playing for a full year,
but it's only been a few days. What's what's the craziest one that you so crazy experience?
Oh, man, dude, I'll tell you, I have been like every time I hop on the game, I'm surprised by what I see
every every time without fail. I mean, there was a cool dueling pirate ship one I was looking at
last night, I saw cynics made a crazy like skyscraper city spoons had a really cool island
that was sort of like a it's sort of like this vaporwave like kind of rolling hills thing. It's
sweet. There's others the sappy slide. I was amazed at how quickly people figured out what you can do
with sliding around speedruns and stuff like that. track those island dope. I mean, I'm going to miss
some and oh, I was looking Oh, you know, it was cool to here's what I'll say if I had to give like
actually concise answer. spotty Wi Fi, I just think was done amazing in game and and what
has amazed me most is sort of the way people have taken to branding stuff so quickly pudgy
gaming very similar case where you know, they have text on their island that's like follows on Twitter
like, you know, remember to favorite the island like, like this is what I love about the web three
user base is that we all and they're not really user base like stakeholder base is that you
guys we throw a product at you guys you guys figure it out like 50x faster than normal users
it's actually insane. Like every inch of surface area on this product is getting used right now.
And I it's so cool. So it really is a testament to the user base. You give it to a web to audience
on day one. I don't think they would have figured this out quite yet.
Yeah, definitely. I've seen spotty's content around is built basically is massive thoughts.
And he's been very good at running. He's been a lot in meta versus I remember assisting to
to a concert in the central and basically this brings us obviously to competition.
Nothing tricky here. Just wanted to, you know, your view on how nifty island will be positioned
with the competition such as sandbox the central and or other side that will come sooner than
later. But yeah, so I think with this, like, it's not something I dwell on a lot. You can spend all
day thinking about competitors and kind of what they're up to and stuff. And in so many cases,
too, we don't necessarily know what they're going to do. So so it's like, you know, is it maybe
it's very similar, maybe it's not, I don't know. So what I'll say is, like, is there some reality
of competition that's sort of undeniable here? Like, yeah, I would say for sure. There's only
so many people. There's only so many so much room on the timeline. You know, these are just facts of
life. Is it something I'm dwelling on and kind of like thinking, oh, shit, you know, no, it's not
like the thing we will do completely regardless of competition is we're going to be laser focused
on you guys, what kind of game world you want, and we're going to work on it literally every
second until it's as good as humanly possible. And if you do those things, competition is just
not a factor. Like, we're we've we've we've operated from first principles from day one,
trying to build something unique, we're not staring at what other people are doing.
We're really trying to do our own thing. And we're trying to involve all of you. And what I'll
say is, like, if we ever fall short of that, let me know. But but really, like, there's a
reality of competition. But is it the right thing to focus on? Like, nah, I don't think so.
Great. Yeah, that's the perfect answer. Very complete. I do have a question in in the
comment of the space. It's from cooks, saying that is will there be like searching ways to
search or help creators with island discovery seems that if you're not on the main map page,
your island can't be found. And featuring island and stuff like that.
This is really good few things we're going to do. So first of all, the web app island directory is a
little bit like more has more real estate. So and people are using that a lot too, I think. So
so that's one. And we're going to have to keep refining the map, you know, and as you've seen,
people are hilariously good at gaming, getting to the top of these things. It's actually deeply
amusing to watch it. It's it's very funny. I kind of I kind of love how relentless people are. And
but yeah, we're going to be working on that one thing that we're going to be doing is the featured
island slots. We will be kind of like allowing letting partner projects nominate and like raffle
away sort of temporary real estate on the featured page. I think that'll be really fun. We want to
shout out our most active communities and let them know that, you know, if you rally your community
to be in it, we want to make sure you get they get a chance to climb the leaderboards. And so so
that will happen. But yeah, there's a lot of refinements we're making. I mean, the bloom
reward formula, we are looking at that, I'm staring at how many blooms all of you are earning.
And, and I'm seeing some of the more hilarious tactics and, and there will be updates that
make it a little trickier to to do certain things people are doing. It hasn't been too
bad. But people are, you know, obviously finding ways and doing stuff, and I get it. But anyway,
I kind of diverging now from your question, but we're going to be tweaking a lot of stuff with
that. That's good. And again, it's it's not even been a week. So yeah, it's pretty good so far.
Yeah, I just wanted to see if you have any anything that you'd love to talk about that
I haven't touched on it, or anything coming that you can announce, maybe not maybe not alpha,
just something cool. Well, here's one thing I this is sort of my orientation in general is,
so I'm going to cook some stuff. But you guys can cook stuff with us. So I'll pin one tweet,
like, can we get Gary V to acknowledge nifty island today? Can we do that? I think we can.
I think it's doable. I think that guy lives on Twitter, we can get him in here. So I say if
you see this tweet up here, just throw him a please, you know, show let him know, hey,
we got to we got to get this going. So you know, give that that tweet some love. And like,
who knows, maybe we get a V friends announcement going. So but do we have other stuff cooking?
Yeah, 100%. There's a ton. There's there's quite a lot in the pipe. I'm pretty much I've
been dropping a lot of Alphonse some stuff that's coming up. And actually, it's okay if I just
return to that competition point one more time. Sorry. Cool. So one thing I do want to say,
with the other side point specifically, is that, you know, we think a lot of the communities like
you guys biggest strength is the community that's around it. It's like such a powerful one. And
like, we are very much like excited for a pollers, mutiny pollers, people with codas, etc, to play.
And, and it's like, and I would just enjoy it for its own sake. You know what I mean? Like,
like, they like other side will do its thing. I wouldn't stress it. And I mean, you know, obviously,
I have, you know, interest in you guys playing, but I'll just say like, you know, we're excited
to play with you guys. The ape avatar should go live today. They got a little delayed. But I
figured I should say that just on here, like, you know, we've got no, we got we don't really have
any like beef with anybody. And I really like and I really view it as such a strong community. So
we'd be excited to get more more of you guys in there.
Yeah, definitely. It's good to hear. For many people. Unfortunately, the web space is a zero
sum game. And I don't think it is. I've been the tweet that you've addressed to Gary V.
I'm going to ask fee fee in the audience fee fee if you see this penguin in the audience,
this guy is very involved in the Gary V community. So fee fee if you can pass the message to Gary V.
I know you've been deep into Nifty Island to I've been actually one of your tweet too, because
you are the first to go who got the igloo for penguins on Nifty Island on your island. And
that's that's very cool. I saw that. I saw that. Wait, where? Where? I remember the account. Wait,
who was it? Yeah, it's been on top of space. So it's fee fee. Yeah, it's fee fee. And oh, yes. Yes.
I have to give him kudos. He's French like me. So French excellence, French. Love to see it.
Love to see it. French homies at night. Yeah. Do you have any plan to participate to
IRL events? Okay, okay. Okay, let's do it. This is it. This is where I used I'm sorry to use the
spaces. Well, selfishly, I guess, but I would be down to go to NFT Paris. But if and I know
maybe this is vain or like stupid, you know, that's fair. I'd be down if people if they
don't want to hear us talk a little bit. I'm definitely be down to fly out. If they want
to have us. They can let us know. I'll just say that like I'm down like I think it'd be super
fun. You know, we're not Yeah, so I just yeah, so anyway, I don't know, you know, let him know.
Let him know. Let Gary Vee know. Let NFT Paris know we're down. This is this is this is over
operating. Yeah, I'll go to GDC to eat Denver would be fun. I haven't really thought about
it very much. But yeah, yeah, I'm kind of down for anything. Honestly, so good to hear. Well,
let us know if NFT Paris actually answered these calls would be I will be there if he also will
be there with the country or community, there will be the friendships, etc. So we'll be very,
very happy to have you there. So yeah, hopefully, hopefully, they also do this.
Awesome. Yeah, no, I've got a bunch of people I want to see that are based there.
Maybe it would be really fun. We've been cooking in Europe.
You got you guys always are, let's be honest.
Yeah, many people don't realize because, you know, it's very centered in America,
less and less in my opinion, we see a lot of also focused on Asia. But when when Americans
are sleeping, we are here, we are on Twitter, we are cooking, we are building 100%. Yeah,
it never stops. It's 24 seven. So so that that's very cool. We're gonna admittedly,
we're kind of loud, you know, we can't help ourselves. You know what I mean? It's so so
no, it's it's cool. It will be like, basically, like, we're tweeting about NFTs, and there'll be
some like, European eth core dev, who's like, Yep, you're welcome for this thing working,
you know. But anyway, yeah, no, no, it's a good good crew.
That's cool. That's very cool. Well, Charles, it's been 45 minutes. I know you're very,
very busy, man. So if there's anything else you want to touch on, or,
or any closing remarks that you want to do, go ahead.
I'll say, again, let me know if there are things you don't like, things you want improved. Let us
know. We're like wide open discord is a great place to do that. We have a great mod team. So
Twitter is great. I will do my best. I will miss some stuff. Yeah, it's just life. So
go for that. And then the other thing I'll say to I'll just keep saying this, because I think
it's so important is like, just like Ethereum or Solana itself, right? It's they're made cool,
because the community does stuff on top of them. That's the spirit of what we're trying to do with
nifty. So like, you know, just look at it like that, really, like this is the chance to be an
OG in something really fun. And we're going to be building it for a long time. And, and yeah,
deeply appreciate you all playing. Thank you for for doing that. It's a it's been awesome to see.
Thanks, Charles. Thanks for coming today. Well, I will actually see you next week, everyone,
for the third episode of Meta Monday. I can't tell yet who's the guest. But it's going to be an
interesting one. So don't miss out. I will I will post it later this week. So have a good
rest of the day, everyone. And thanks again for tuning in. Cheers.