Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
Can you hear me? Looks like the music wasn't working, right?
Okay, so I see lone Turk.
Yeah, cool. Looks like it's working.
So thanks everyone for joining.
Welcome to the first Meta Monday space.
I'm Dim, and I will be your host for the next 45 minutes or so
while we deep dive into the mind of a builder in the web tree space.
So today I'm very happy to be joined by Julio X,
co-founder of LiquidX and the CEO of Pixelmon.
Jim, Julio, how are you doing?
Oh, looks like Julio has a little issue.
Let's wait for a minute while he reconnects.
Julio, I'm going to send you invite again.
Let's fix this, guys. Don't worry.
Okay, Julio, can you hear me now?
Julio, we don't have a sound. Maybe if I invite you as a co-host, let's try this way.
Julio, is it working now?
Hey, guys, can you hear me?
Yes, we can. Now we can. How are you doing, Julio?
Can you hear us well, Julio?
It should be fixed. Hey, Julio.
I invite you again, Julio. Sorry, everyone, for that. We're going to find a solution.
I hear you. Yes, I can hear you.
Okay, good. Sorry, everyone, for the issue.
Can you hear me pretty clearly?
I can, and I assume everyone can. Can you just confirm, guys?
Okay, yeah, we see a bunch of thoughts. Good morning, Julio. How are you doing?
I'm going to leave and come back in because I can't.
Yes, yes, now I can. Sorry about all that.
No worries. All good. How are you doing, Julio?
I'm good, I'm good. I'm sitting in an hotel in Singapore. I had a wonderful day with the team here.
I'm usually based in Kuala Lumpur, so we spent the whole day brainstorming things, which was a very interesting topic.
So, very good day so far. How are you?
I'm actually doing great. I was looking forward to this conversation,
as Pixelmon is one of my favorite ecosystems in the Web3 space.
So, yeah, very happy to have you here. We do have a lot to cover today.
The ecosystem, the Pixelmon project, has been buzzing lately.
But first, I would just love to talk about you for a minute.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and when you entered the Web3 space?
Yeah, I'd love to. So, I'm Italian, just from the very early days of the background.
But I've been living in Southeast Asia for 12 years now.
I moved down here because my original background is in Web2.
I was a co-founder in an e-commerce business in 2012 called Zalora, which ended up doing relatively well.
At least it didn't fail. We managed to IPO in 2019.
And in 2021 is when I officially, operationally moved to Web3 and co-founded LiquidX.
To be frank, that is also due to the timelines and rules there are post-NIPO,
where there's a two-year, let's say, cool-down period and whatnot.
Because instead, from an advisory and investing perspective and just spending time with teams in a non-public capacity,
I started this around 2018.
That's when I started getting passionate about gaming and getting passionate about Web3.
But yeah, how did I enter officially?
Let's launch LiquidX and LiquidX was simply a very vague idea that consumer IPs would be the real math adoption vehicle for the blockchain
other than speculative instruments and pure fintech.
So, that's how we launched LiquidX in 2021.
Great. So, fast forward to basically two years ago.
So, there is the Pixelmon Mint. It's a 10K collection. It's raising around 70 million from the Mint.
And then we have the reveal.
People will get pretty angry and disappointed as the artwork came out, you know, not as expected, let's put it this way.
And that's when you enter in the scene. So, you basically buy the project.
So, what was the reasoning behind that? Why not just start your own IP from scratch?
So, we had started, let's say, I think around January 2022, even before the Pixelmon Mint,
we had started looking with quite some interest at NFT communities because they had essentially a mechanism.
At the time, it wasn't so clear, how do you launch?
This day, I think one could nearly associate, but I won't get into that.
And effectively, what was happening, we thought, at least in the NFT space, is that there was a natural organic selection of product to community fits,
or probably product is the wrong word, concept, idea to community fit.
So, NFT communities were effectively communities where the founder had found a concept that had real, very, very, very organic traction for an IP.
And on the other hand, we were a nascent gaming studio that realized that, you know, we were very good at hiring people, or at least fast,
and we were fast at raising money, but we were not because of our prior experiences.
But instead, we realized that if we were going to try and find this community to concept fit, we would have to try 10, 20, 30 times and fail.
And that's when the M&A route kind of became very interesting.
And we started looking at IPs, and then pure chance.
I actually didn't know about Pixelmon during its Mint, but we heard of it, of course, through the media when it became after the reveal.
And a friend of a friend in the financial space introduced us.
And we, me and my co-founder, we visited that, we went into that phone call, to be frank, a little bit skeptical.
So we're like, OK, let's hear this out. It was introduced by a person we respect.
But the outcome of the call, the first call, was actually relatively positive.
And, you know, we kept speaking for around a month, with a couple of phone calls a week, trying to understand if this was feasible.
Now, to your question, why didn't we just build it from scratch?
Well, I think a few reasons. One was time.
So I think we kind of were starting to see, even if it was the bull market, by all means.
But we were starting to see that we were probably, the problems were starting to happen at the edges.
We started to see the cringes. And we wanted to move fast.
So we wanted to have to put this community together fast.
And we knew that if the market shifted, it would be very different.
Second, you know, if your thesis is consumer IPs will launch the blockchain and you do a little bit of, you know,
pure, boring investment banker consultant research on consumer IPs.
Well, Pokemon is number one by grossing. So by revenue, all time revenue.
It's 2x number two in one third of the time. It's 10x Star Trek. It's 2x Mickey Mouse.
3x the entire Marvel universe. So there's really something about monster collecting, one could say,
because the distance is just massive with everybody else.
Third, I think we saw a little bit of that magic that, frankly,
Palworld has proven in numbers, which is there's a huge population around the world of 18 to 35.
So people above 16 years old that used to play Pokemon, used to watch Pokemon and now really can't,
doesn't have a product out there to throw that monster collecting love to put all these together.
And it just made a lot of sense. And maybe a little bit of naivety because I just, oh, there's a bit of fudge.
Oh, that's not a problem. Again, if you knew all the problems you would have ahead of you, you'd never set up a company.
So I think ignorance about the depth of the issue back then was probably the last driving factor.
That's the funny part of it, right? So you acquired Pixelmon.
So what was the most important things for you to fix when you bought the project? Was it the art? Was it actually community trust?
Yeah, I think the key word was trust because, look, ultimately, art is important, but it's a means to an end.
So it is about creating something that people love. Community is your target and also community is what you're going to build with.
If there isn't that community, then there's no point buying that project because that was all we were looking for, the community to concept fit.
So trust and rebuilding trust was the first and foremost thing.
And we also realized that we had to do something fast. And I think Pixelmon was living proof of what happens when you try to do art fast.
We redid, frankly, the art in three months, the entire evolution ones, and we burnt out completely a team to do it.
But the first and foremost thing was this community needed a face to speak to, that face had to dox himself as soon as possible.
That wasn't day one, unfortunately, simply because the paperwork was not entirely processed and signed.
So at the beginning, I had an undocked role for around six weeks and then doxed myself.
But effectively, I said, look, I'm here, throw some anger at me, but try and mix in it some rational questions.
We're all in the same boat. I'm not. And this took a while to convince them to, but I'm not cyber with another suit on him.
And I'm going to show you that, by the way, answer your questions and and just keep on throwing me questions.
So I think literally in the first days, there were days when I would spend half my day just answering community questions.
So that's definitely something that struck me when I joined the Pixelmon community.
Basically, if you go to the Discord and I do wish that I could see that in more projects, but that's not the case.
There is a channel called Ask the CEO, and people are just throwing questions at you, some very odd, some a bit less hard.
Let's put it this way. And you take, I guess it must be hours, because when we look at your replies, it's like full paragraphs with a lot of explanations, etc.
How is it important for you to have this direct line of communication?
So I'll tell you, for in the first six months, it was probably the steepest or the better, the most important thing to the steepness of my learning curve.
Because I came from investing in web in blockchain as a technology and from investing and advising gaming teams on user acquisition.
And I had a background in Web2 operationally, but what I wasn't was I didn't understand the NFT space.
I didn't understand, well, the token launch space.
And even if I understood blockchain users in gaming, theoretically, I didn't understand all the tests that were being done out there.
And more than anything, I needed to understand my community. I needed to understand those personas, not with just data. I needed to speak to them.
And so that couple of hours of answering questions, plus at the beginning, I think it was at least two holder phone calls a day.
And we would select them a little bit randomly. So I would just look at who was very active, plus a whale every day.
So, you know, you can't do many, but in 30 days you can do 60. And plus answering the questions, you understand your community.
It's as if you had been all in the same room for a long time and then spent time together.
So it was incredibly important. I think today that space has not I wouldn't say less important because my learning curve from it still exists.
It's just not as steep. It opens up my eyes to potential decision mistakes.
It is a place where I also frankly sometimes drop ideas in my replies to see what the reactions will be.
So it's a way to, let's say, implicitly test a theory and see community reaction before investing company resources in it.
It allows me to do less mistakes. But I think it plays another role that I would advise every home, every founder.
And this is maybe wearing my angel investing hat. And it is it. I think it keeps me humble because I think it's key for a leader, somebody who will aspire to be a leader at least or try to lead to be kept humble all the time.
He needs, of course, to lead with decisiveness. But at the same time, there needs to be a group that is able to challenge him so that he doesn't just start living in his own echo chamber.
And I think that is that space is in addition to many other things is the antidote to my echo chamber. It keeps me humble.
I like that reply. I like this keep me humble thing. It's very deep. You mentioned, obviously, that you're testing things.
I'm lucky enough to be part of the focus group's channels in the Discord. And this is very important because you are actually taking taking opinions from the community and adjusting and pivoting very, very, very quickly, which is something that is very rare in the ecosystem.
So in regards to the team, how how many are you in the big team right now to be able to produce all of this?
So there's around we do most things in house. So maybe to before I tell you the exact number, there's we are doing all of our games, including our hyper casual games in house at this point in time, 100 percent in house.
We might outsource some of the scaling of the art, environment, art and props and stuff later. For now, it's 100 percent in house.
The only thing we don't do in house is the production of our animation, where we are supervising following and we have our lower guys with them.
But that's produced out of house. It's also such a different skill if you think about it.
So that is being done right now with a team of 62 people, not all of them full time, some, let's say, around seven or eight, I think, a part time.
But there's 62 of us in total. Again, very transparent.
We have physical offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and in Singapore. In Singapore, it's a very small office. Real estate is expensive.
And we just got a co-working space set of rooms in Sofia, Bulgaria, because our art team, 3D art team has ended up growing very strongly in those countries where there's a lot of Ubisoft and other AAA gaming studios that you can hire from.
So there's a good talent base in a time zone that isn't too far from us.
Did you notice people coming from this major studio that you mentioned Ubisoft, et cetera, wanting to take the jump into Web3?
I think, so what I'm seeing is that there's a lot of people coming from that side of the world, the AAA studios.
I think the reason they join us are some of them, and particularly this is valid for the more senior ones,
are just looking for a professionally run Web3 environment to join.
And they're not going to join a company run by an undocked founder. They need a certain level of solidity.
I mean, they're not corporate, but they need something that they can, you know, these guys would have kids.
So they just have to think that way. And they're not looking for a quick buck. They're thought processes.
I'm going to be here for four to five years at least.
And those are people that have their believers in blockchain as a technology.
So you've got the Bitcoin guy, you've got the Ethereum guy. Very often they peg to the main reasons that we looked at this space in the first place.
And they just think there's something we can do here for gaming. Not always do they have a clear idea.
Is it play to earn? Is it play to mint? Is it free to play with ownership? They just believe in the tech.
The second category is a bit more common with the junior guys, which is, frankly, in the big studios these days,
other than a couple of guys in corporate and a couple of very senior guys, nobody sees production end to end.
So these guys are people that are looking to join a project and see it from end to end.
So I'm able to work on a project where the team is less than 100 people and we're going to deliver something great.
So it is that group of people that wants to sit somewhere in between big production and indie in a way that they feel ownership,
but they also know there's budget to create a good project.
And that's a lot of what has actually been attracting to us because they see there's budget for a good project,
but I'm not going to be just another piece of the machine. I'm actually in a team where people know my name.
Yeah, this is great, like less anonymous, more freedom also and less siloing of the different department.
And we can actually we can definitely see how the pieces are moving very, very fast in your ecosystem.
So you mentioned games. Of course, this is a big part of the Pixelmon DNA.
Can you introduce both the Arena and the Hunting Ground games?
And what is the core difference between them and why did you choose to go with two big games already announced?
Yeah, so I mean, the first core difference between Arena and Hunting Ground is Arena is a desktop product and Hunting Ground is a mobile app product.
Arena is a combat, active combat, so meaning active click button, punch throws or ball of fire throws,
active combat game that has a PvP mode and what is known in the industry as a musso mode.
So musso is when you fight against hordes of enemies, kind of clearing room after room of them or space after space.
Think about One Piece Warriors or Dynasty Warriors. That's the PvE version of it.
The reason we decided to build the Arena was, well, we needed a game mode that was fast to build,
but could have a lot of art, communicate a lot in terms of art without having the length of time needed for large environments
or deep narrative. And musso came up as an interesting choice in that direction.
It's very social, you can multiply it, you can stream it, it's very visual.
It can communicate in IP very clearly because your character has a lot of moves, has very sophisticated ultimate moves, etc.
But you don't have to go down the rabbit hole of full open world building and narrative.
And we really wanted something that could go to market relatively soon, relatively, I'll say.
But let's say from this time we really started getting our team together and developing a year and a half.
Hunting Grounds instead was what we kind of wanted to build.
So it was the mobile market targeted and that's because we think that's still a huge blue ocean.
It's a market sizing point of view.
It's an RPG game that has both exploration, social spaces, so spaces where there's 20, 30 players in the same village.
I won't say hundreds because I don't think that's feasible or mobile, not with good art.
And effectively, PvP combat in a tournament mode.
But we knew that we needed some narrative for something like this, we would need at least multiple cities.
It's not something that's going to take a bit longer.
And yeah, and hence it comes live after the arena, but it is what we are kind of spending most of our time right now.
I love it. So for people who never saw any visuals or gameplay of both games, I posted two tweets.
One with gameplay from Arena that is a fast action game, Musotype, like you say, Dynasty Warriors, etc.
And the other one is Hunting Grounds.
And I have to admit that Hunting Grounds looks exactly like the dream that I had when I was nine years old and I discovered Pokémon.
The old Gamboi, like the massive one, the bulky one, black and white.
I was dreaming of this kind of open world Pokémon game and monster collecting type.
And I'm really, really excited about that one.
You mentioned that you are also producing 100% in-house the casual game.
So last year you released Kevin the adventurer.
So it was live for a few weeks.
It was a casual flappy bird type of game featuring Kevin, of course, your most recognizable man.
What was the goal of this game?
So the entire Hyper-Casual Games line is centered around two ideas.
The first one is the community should be kept engaged.
And we think that just the staking and NFT collections don't cut it.
We need other products that are engaging and gamify their experience.
And also, let's say, could, if very successful after being tested in the community, be ported to mobile app because we build them all as browser first.
That's just a matter of speed.
We can launch a game every three months, so two months build, one month live if we build browser first.
And the second line to it is, well, we are operating in a space, web-free gaming, where the formula, let's be honest, hasn't yet been found.
And by formula, I mean the perfect formula for wallet abstraction, the perfect formula for anti-cheat.
The perfect formula for when do you actually have to sign a transaction.
The perfect formula for the L2 and L2 building around it.
I could go on and on, the monetization, et cetera.
So do we really want to build games that take one, two years and then test things out of the blue on those games?
Or do we want to build games that you can build in two months and test things there?
So there's a big part of the hyper-casual games, which is us learning the backend, us learning the scale infra with web-free connections,
us learning anti-cheat and just figuring things out while building customer base.
While hope maybe, you never know, Pixelpals could just become a game that just is strong enough to port to mobile app and Android and have a million downloads
because you don't need to have AAA graphics for that if you have a great game loop.
So yeah, that is the thought process around it.
I think you will see every three to four months a hyper-casual game that furthers the Pixelpals IP come out of our studio.
So it is very interesting that you're mentioning Pixelpals because it's basically around the corner, it should be out very soon, right?
And can you tell us a bit more about it because it's my understanding that it's also tied to some allocations for the upcoming token, right?
Yeah, so Pixelpals is effectively...
So the way to explain it is imagine a farming game Tamagotchi style that meets a simplified version of online poker with Pokemon cards.
Okay, I've just said a lot about Bunderwood, but effectively Tamagotchi with card-based PTP.
And some, let's say, in-game currency betting mechanics between players where players can effectively raid each other's points through this PDP system.
Now, the crux around it is to test a bunch of things, but yes, it is what we call a farm-to-farm game because...
And when we came up with that one, maybe we're the first, I'm not sure.
But farm-to-farm, effectively Pixelpals will allow you to farm both some MOM token, but also other tokens.
So there's multiple benefits surrounding it in terms of potential airdrops as well as prizes for the participants.
It has a hell of a lot more depth than Kevin the Adventurer, so this is an original design, as I think you figured now by the styles we put together by our team.
We're trying to go live with both modes on day one, but it might be that we put the farming modes, so Tamagotchi, as day one.
And then within one week to ten days, the PVP goes also live, so the raiding between players.
That's great. I'm not sure I have the right to say it, but I did tested it as part of the group, the focus group.
And I really like the artwork, etc., and the fact that you can choose your MOM.
So it's a first step in creating bond with the characters, and it was very, very powerful.
I'm going to pin another tweet that was an announcement, a recent announcement, that you are actually in partnership with Play Ember.
Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, so Play Ember, I spoke to John on the team a couple of times, and it seemed to me immediately that these guys are experts in hyper, hyper-casual gaming.
They really know how to do it for Web 2. I'm not saying they don't know how to do it for Web 3, I'm just saying that's their background.
And one big part about an IP, and I've been a big believer of this since day one, is an IP is only an IP if other people want to use it to propagate their own products.
So it has been my objective for a while to rebuild, to find somebody else that wants to build with our characters.
And in John on the team, I found someone who wanted to do that, first of all, and second, we thought was the right type of partner that understood Web 3 and Web 2 hyper-casual games to do this with for that segment.
And that segment for me is particularly, you know, mainly Android-based hyper-casual app players, and we want a product with our IP there.
And that's what we're working with them. It might be a pure Web 2 game, it might be a Web 2.5. Really, the point here is not test Web 3 connection, the point here is further the Pixelmon IP and prove that people want to develop on it.
We are, and I have shared this, looking for similar partners to build in Roblox and in Fortnite Engine.
So I like what you're saying. So your point is like a good IP is only good if you're developing it yourself, but it's actually great and another level when you have outside companies appropriating it and want to build on it.
So what else do you think, in your opinion, makes a great IP? And why do you think Pixelmon is a powerful one?
So, I mean, so I think every IP has its own thing that makes it great. But if you look at it purely commercially, why is it an IP?
It's an IP because people are willing to use your character to pay 30% of the price of a t-shirt to you, to put your character on their t-shirt rather than ask mid-journey to make one.
And that must mean that they think they're going to get more than 50% price upside from it. So they can price up by more than 50% of that t-shirt because then they're going to pay 30% more, so 30% of the total price afterwards.
So an IP effectively means that others want your logo, your characters, your IP on their products because consumers are more likely to buy the same functional product if it has your IP.
And now then what does that mean if we take a step back for your in-house development? I think it means that you need to prove that you're successful beyond the single product function.
Meaning, okay, you could create a great game, a game with fantastic game loops. It could get you 4 million downloads on Steam in less than a week.
But can you then take that game and make it into a TV show? Or can you make another game that is a hyper-casual game with those same characters and get traction just because it's the same characters?
I don't know. But if you do, if you can be a winner across gaming genres and across channels, then you've kind of proven that probably the worth is in the actual story and emotional connection of the user to the characters and more than it is just having one great product.
Products need to be great functionally. But yeah, can you prove that you can make many, many, many under the same IP? Sorry, and then I rambled a bit.
But you said, why is Pixelmon a good one? Now, for me, in this kind of, it's all centered on world building. So for me, there are two questions really that are key.
And then there's a lot of cherries you can add on top, but the cake is made of two things. The cake is made of, first of all, first layer, the Pixelmon.
You have to have fantastic creatures, creatures that people want to understand, explore, own. By creature, I don't mean just the concept art. I mean everything, including the behavior, the way they run, the way they jump, the personality, the backstory.
All of that has to be thought through and be very original. I think our creatures are uniquely original because they went through the focus groups you just mentioned.
They didn't develop just from one set of great brains in our concept art and lore departments. They were sharpened and re-sharpened and re-sharpened by community into the things they love, they want to love.
So I think our creatures are just amazing. And to be honest, we all love Pokémon. It's number one IP for me in my heart, but I think that the process by which we've reached the design of our creatures is more original than the process that was followed by Nintendo 30 years ago and potentially deeper.
Then comes the second layer is world building in, per se, so the context. And for me, I mean, I will say it just in two words. It's Pokémon meets Game of Thrones. That's what the context in which we're putting our creatures is in.
And every time I say that to somebody or show them an illustration, they get goosebumps. And yeah, I'll leave it to that.
Giulio, do I have the right to talk about a certain video that you showed to the focus group? Not going to spoil anything. Just want to mention it.
On a very high level, yes.
Okay. So you mentioned goosebumps. I had goosebumps looking at, we can say, like an animated storyboard of some kind of an anime coming or something. I'm not going to tell more, but yeah, I had massive, massive goosebumps.
I think that was absolutely unique and great. And I can't wait to see more of that. Sorry if I said too much. Sorry.
No, no, no, no. Every time. I mean, that part of our process is the one that I think, who was it? Taco was telling me over dinner earlier. There's one chat that when it pings, I click on no matter what I'm doing.
And it's the chat where they send the new art pieces and updates for that pipeline. And I think all of us just get, yeah, just get very excited when we see all of that.
Yeah, there's also Taco saying to me, like, calm down, not too much. So no, I won't.
No, but yeah, so there is also something very unique about, and there is a lot of thought about that. It's like, you are actually giving the elders of the pixel mods, the IP, the commercial rights to it.
But there is only 68 type of monster. There is 12k Pixelmon, but 68 different types. How does it work? Because I own, for example, I own a cabin, but I'm not the only one. So how commercial rights works in that case?
Yeah, so the way, you know, taking a step into Legalese country, effectively, the Pixelmon company is a licensee, a perpetual licensee of the image of the monsters from the NFT holders.
And the NFT holders are effectively the owners of that IP. They can deploy it for personal use. They can deploy it even for commercial use without having to pay royalties up to 10,000. I think it's 10,000 USD of revenue.
And after that, they have to start sharing that royalties on that revenue with their other holders. So that's why when I talk about the Pixelmon monster IP system, we talk about a sharded IP system, or a fractional IP system, those words used as synonyms.
So effectively, what we are what we are talking about is how if there are 25 holders of a dragon, in very simplistic terms, royalties would be split amongst those 25, they would, we would use the blockchain for it.
So imagine royalties going in a pool in a wallet, where the smart contract very simplistically says, assign one over total possible total NFTs in existence for that species share of this payment with every holder that comes knocking.
So it's a fractional IP system, the legal, the legal, the pragmatic comparison that I have found and actually where some of our thought process came from was a company called Royal.io. I'm mentioning Royal, it's an A16Z backed company, but I mean, there's a lot nowadays doing it, which do the same thing to music.
So they buy, typically, off the secondary market or directly from the artist, a song, and then they split that song into what effectively are NFTs on chain. And then they, they assign royalties and I'm talking global royalties.
So it's the royalties from Spotify to, you know, radio in Bangladesh to, to those holders based on using effectively airdrop of currency.
So that's where the idea came from. And we just thought, well, if you can do it to music, you can do it to any IP. So, you know, one day we could do that with patents.
We could do that with as a way to, to rethink the patenting system in universities. And, but much earlier on, let's do something more fun. Let's focus on consumer IPs, products, characters.
That's great. One thing is that this protocol, this IP protocol will be powered by your token. So just before to talk about Mon, I'm going to pin another, another tweet, a recent announcement from last week.
You announced a big raise, $8 million from Pixelmon. But my understanding is that money wasn't the only reason you did these rights, right?
No, I mean, Pixelmon has a lot of runway from still the original mint. The money's good. I'm not going to, I'm not going to say money's bad, but the reason, I mean, we could have probably sold the same token at a significant multiple on the live market.
So why did we raise? We raised because I strongly believe in partners, one. So having the right partners to take you on a journey, having the right advisors. And I think those partners, there needs to be an incentivization that goes beyond the handshake.
I'm not a big believer, for example, of paying advisors. I only bring on board advisors that put their skin in the game first. And that's because just the incentive will be completely different.
And we wanted to really get the ecosystem behind an idea that we started thinking this could be bigger than just Pixelmon. Because Mon, yes, launches with Pixelmon.
But I really think, I mean, IPs on Chain is the reason that I started working in Webfree. And I think they need a lot of things. They need distribution. They need platforms to launch from.
And they need just general end-to-end support on coming to life, getting known and distributing their assets. So I think Mon is now effectively going through that process with Pixelmon.
But that's why I'm calling it a protocol. We are calling it a protocol. And for that kind of ambition, you need partners with expertise across a variety of things. Yeah.
Yeah, it's very wide, right? You have, obviously, Yatsu from Animoka. I also have Ray Chan from Engab to also have people from Immutable, Crunchyroll. So a lot of big names, even Rotten Tomoto, I see. A lot of big names. So definitely a lot of added value to have these people as part of the team and as partners, strategic partners and investors.
So Mon will power the games. Obviously, it will be the currency of the games. But how does a token power an IP protocol like that? So let's imagine I want to create a Kevin product, a Kevin statue or a t-shirt. And I will have, so if I go above the 10K limit, I will need to redistribute to all the Kevin holders. So this will go through the protocol, right?
Yeah, so this will be, so you have to think about the protocol, so the governance side of the protocols. Here, we're focusing on the governance and the royalty side. So the way this would work is imagine a system where there's two tiers of DAOs, of mini DAOs within a DAO, effectively. So the mini tiers are effectively the holders of a specific entity. So what you'd be doing is you'd be asking a Kevin holders.
Can I license your IP? If I make more than my initial investment, say 10K, after that, I start paying you a 10% royalty. Now, let's say on those high level terms, they vote. They vote by NFT count. So by Kevin count. If you pass that, then you're probably going to say, okay, can I get a Mon grant to kick start this? I want to do a Kevin energy trick.
So can I get a grant to kick start my energy drink? And at that point, what happens is on that proposal, the entire Mon holder community votes, and you might get your grant, you might not. Once you start generating royalties, the foundation works with you to effectively facilitate the reward to the Kevin holders, so that the vehicleing of the royalties to them.
So effectively, what you do is you work with the foundation, which stands as a, I mean, legally, I might get the terminology wrong. So I'm going to put this in brackets. But legally, as a licensing distributor partner, in a way, they take the royalties from you, they redistribute them through the chain to the Kevin holders in the form of Mon token. So those are the flows you would have in the example you gave me.
So it's basically subdao. So you have the big demand, the main one, and you have a subdao for each creatures. Correct. That's very interesting. Very, very interesting mechanics. So when do you expect to launch the token? And what will be the different location between all there's between people playing the casual games, etc.
So we we've kept our locations under wraps. So I'm afraid I won't be able to spill the entire beans. But what I'll say regarding our locations is this. Pixelmon was Pixelmon exists because of a community mint. Pixelmon kept existing because LiquidX decided that community is worth investing in.
Mon exists because from that entire launchpad, we could then build more ambitious IP propagation distribution platform and fractionalization platform.
And the distribution of the tokenomics takes that into account more than I have seen in other any other sizable project distribution takes the community into account first and foremost.
What we have also disclosed is that within that distribution, there will be both a so-called public sale event, which is the waitlist whitelist system that you can find through the Pixelmon Twitter and Mon Protocol Twitter X pages, as well as so a paid event, as well as an airdrop component.
So a free component to holders. These are things that I'm comfortable discussing in addition to the principle. In terms of timelines, well, we would like to be on this side of the halving is what we're working towards.
Internal readiness wise, I think we'll comfortably be there. We are ultimately a project that wants to launch with centralized partners from the get-go, so centralized platforms for exchanges essentially. So we do also depend a little bit on their timelines as to the final date.
Very interesting. And will the coin have utility directly at launch?
So yes, we are targeting a variety of ways, both using some of the mini games right away, as well as systems that hopefully will be interesting enough for people to participate in and ensure that I can't hear you anymore.
I'm not sure if it's only me. Can you guys hear you? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello, can you hear me?
I can't hear you. Okay, so I think Julia, Julia dropped. Yes, there might have been an issue there. So let's wait for Julia to come back. Okay, Julia is that Adam as a speaker.
Julia, can you hear me? Hey guys, can you hear me again? Yes, perfect. Sorry about that if it was on my end. Where did you lose me, Tim? At the beginning of your hand, sir, about utility, you said yes, basically.
I said yes. And I was going to say that we're both working on utilities on a variety of sides. We're working on utilities using already our mini games, our hyper casual games, as well as a dedicated, effectively mechanism that we hope and we think will be very engaging for users to engage right away on.
From the get go. Yeah, I don't want to say I have to tiptoe around this one for a variety of reasons, but yeah.
Okay, so that that's already enough, I guess it's already an answer. And I also promised that I will give away mon pre sale code. So if you want to win one, just comment with your favorite pixel mon and after the space I will pick, let's say, five winners and I will send you send your code.
We're almost on top of the hour, but we still have a few minutes. I still have a few questions for you, but more, more casual. And the first one is like, what's your favorite mon, obviously.
So I used to be a dead first fan of Tiki. Tiki is, is this totem mask. It looks a little bit like the life in Crash Bandicoot. I don't know if you remember that one.
Yes, but I must say, I, my second best and it keeps drawing on me more and more and more, particularly with its evolutions is our fire dragon.
Volcanus, then Varunoth and its second evolution called dragons, dragons are insane. Dragons are amazing. Where do you see pixel money in the next five to 10 years.
So, I have kids. Well, I have one and I have another one on the way.
In five to 10 years I want to sit in front of games and TV and particularly for my older girl, because she'll already be in that age range I wanted to be watching the anime with me.
And I want my upcoming boy to be playing the some of the softer, less violent games with me because you'll be a bit young.
But it really essentially what I mean is I want to be, I want something that I'm proud of, from a content perspective, I've been this crazy, you know, even if I've been workaholic for the last 12 years of my life, something that I've always done is watched my
animes and watched my action shows and played my RPGs. I want something that is, you know, I can feel proud of as a consumer of it. That's all I can say.
I like it. That's a great answer. Maybe the last one. What are you the most proud of since you since your royal pixel?
Two sides to that answer. I think what I'm most proud of is the community we've built. The feel in the Pixelmon discord is a collaborative feel that I enjoy going in there.
And I don't enjoy it because they glorified it, but because everybody's kind of like wants to contribute. You really feel it in the you're in the focus groups. I mean, it's such a nice thing for a group of people that are not paid.
They're not they're not financially incentivized to just keep collaborating like this for years. And when I mean community expanded to our teams or employees, because ultimately they are pillars of our community, too.
So just group of people. And then if I instead have to point to something tangibly, it's our monsters. As I said, they are the base of our IP.
And I think each and single one of them has so much character and depth behind it, even if we haven't disclosed it all that.
Yeah, it's just this is very true. I was surprised to hear that you redesigned them all in three months.
I think we need to have more side to side comparison of the original art and the new one and the V2. It was it's pretty amazing. Definitely an amazing job from the team.
Yeah, we are approaching the hour. Julio, I wanted to thank you. Thank you very much for being here today.
And yeah, I see you around. We'll keep an eye on what you're building and with the upcoming casual game also picks up.
So thanks again and speak to you soon. Thank you, Jim. I really appreciated it. And thank you for setting this up. Love it.
Goodbye, everyone. And see you next week. I'm not ready yet to tell who will be the next special guest, but I will announce it soon enough.
Have a great week, everyone. Cheers.