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Simplified #68 | POKEMON ON CHAIN?! | GUNZ Mainnet
Recorded: April 28, 2025 Duration: 1:40:51Space Recording
Short Summary
In a groundbreaking move, Pokemon has partnered with Sui to bring its iconic IP into the blockchain realm, signaling a major shift in the gaming industry. This partnership, alongside the ongoing developments in NFT ownership and the financial success of blockchain gaming projects like Cambria, highlights the growing momentum and potential of Web3.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I gotta be everything I could be.
I gotta do this thing.
Honestly.
Why can't I do it all?
Honestly.
I bet I shock them when I drop.
I know they probably think I'm washed.
I'm kettle cooking with the chip.
It's on my shoulders till we win.
I'm getting older by the minute.
I really had it up to here.
They always looking like they're raining.
I've been planning every meal.
Got me sipping on this beer.
And I don't even fuck with beer.
No, I need some water and ideas.
I gotta start to make it clear.
I'm kind of peeping all the fallacy.
I'm powered by the people doubting me.
I had to eat it like a ton of calories.
And the analogy is that I'm blowing up and I've been carrying this weight.
So I found a way and now they weigh in on my heart.
But I will never let nobody second guess my heart
I'm really sick of all the pageantry
And they don't even have the faculties
They're trying to teach me what I have to be
But they don't comprehend the packaging
Open it up, fuck my old shit, all of it sucks
Piss on them records, I shit on them records
I thank everybody who saw the potential in me
But I still had to get it inevitably
If I could I would sit down and conversate with every hater
And try to debate them
I know it's subjective but it's my objective
To do it so well that it's not.
You can count on me, one, two, three.
When you got division of being you, what would I give one?
Fuck what they trying to see.
How can I make such insensitive shit and be so sensitive?
I'm hypocritical, too hypercritical.
It can get miserable.
I'm up on Twitter and I'm reading into it.
And the most pitiful part of the whole thing is I want to tweet that I'm up at the pinnacle.
I want to make them remember they didn't know.
I want to pound it in their head like Riddick Ball.
I got to tell you some shit that you didn't know.
Or I can let it go and just forget it.
But if I forget it, then I'll never get it.
But now it's all starting to feel unforgettable, you little bitch.
Yeah, leveled up.
Fuck all that being benevolent.
I am the best or never was.
Remember, there ain't no timelines when you timeless.
Ain't no guidelines when you guidelines.
Sipping my ties, finger top fives.
Knowing my time isn't timeless.
Please don't make me get a TikTok.ck got my feet up while they flip flop People trying to speak for hip hop got me really about to call the ops out
I think if I did I'd have an anxiety attack but maybe they'll feel how real my raps are
Maybe they'll believe me while I say I know I could get it if I want
But getting that's not getting that if you don't get it how you want
I know that's privilege but I've been embraced by our community Cause I'm not doing you I'm doing me but I just really hope you see that you and me
cuz if you act cool with your garden then you probably out here just ballin' like hot sauce
I'm in another fucking league I don't really care what the ebros think I don't really care what they need
I got them out here acting childish my mama hope for an engagement but I've been focused on engagement
this entertainment can't entertain that shit I hate doing karaoke but I love doing festivals I try to be the goat before I try a vegetable my
gg two times out of ten I might get a centerfold but I ain't looking for a gg
it's wrong with the rap like I get it off the tap I ain't out here looking for a Fiji yeah I've
been out of bounds with it ever since I stepped in had a smile at the intervention back in Maui
I could feel the tension head down, workin' eye intentions
That's how it goes with intentions
I'm pessimistic that I'm losin' somethin'
But I'm optimistic we can get wins
Icons tellin' me I'm reinventin' genres
Meanwhile, a hipster in pajamas
Sleepwalkin' through another blog post
Groundbreakin' every time I step out
You know no one took it, I just stepped out
Not a chef cookin', are you fat now?
We'll see who's hungry in the air
I gotta be Gotta be We're back without Big Bro.
This is Sammy Stefanina behind Matt's account because it turns out, despite having like 47 phones in my house, only one of them is logged into my own Twitter.
So the one that's logged into my own Twitter is also the one that's logged into Matt's Twitter.
So I get to cosplay as Matt for the next hour and a half.
Mac, how you doing, buddy?
We're doing all right, dude? We're doing all right, dude.
We're doing all right.
Been a fucking long weekend, but we got NFL draft.
Finally, something good happened for the Colts,
so it's a good way to start the week.
Is the good thing just not getting Shador Sanders?
Is there more to it than that?
The good thing is Tyler Warren of Penn State.
Shout out Pittsburgh product, by the way.
Let's go ahead and get into the introductions.
We've got a frigging, I know I say this a lot, we've got a frigging stacked, absolutely
stacked topic lineup.
We've got Pokemon, Artifact just disappears from the face of blockchain, which is something
that people have memed on as a
possibility forever. That'll be funny. Anyway, a wet three warrior, a puppy protector, and a
nerd extraordinaire. For four years, this man has guided newbies through the digital seas with
savvy and safety, a foster parent, an animal rescuer, and a marketing master with his consulting
agency. Welcome to the panel. It's been too long since Alex Popovich has been around.
agency. Welcome to the panel. It's been too long since Alex Popovich has been around.
Dude, it's good to be back. I was just thinking about you the other day, and I was thinking it's
been a minute. I'm very excited to be back, so thanks for having me.
Pleasure to have you, brother. Always nice to be thought of. Thanks, man.
With a career that's a fan of the solar system of WET3, he's now harnessing his expertise to bring this PC looter shooter to the masses with 150,000 wishlists and 20,000 closed alpha playtesters already hooked.
He's on a mission to make Earth from another sun the next big thing at blockchain gaming.
Please welcome the Sultan of the Stars.
We got Shiv on the panel.
How is it going, guys?
Sam, thank you so much for having me up.
It's an absolute pleasure. It's
1.36am at home and I'm only on a space right now because you asked right now.
And I was going to finish my night playing E-Fast and duck myself into bed, but excited to get into
this week because we've definitely had a lot of fun stuff going on in Web3 Gaming and excited to
get into it. What an animal, dude.
1.30 in the morning with Stand Up For Me.
Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. That's tremendously
kind of you. Don't
let us stop you from the eFast, though. I'm sure you
can boot it up on the second monitor. Up next,
unleash your inner floor and prepare
for a unique journey because this architect-turned-audiophile
is building a symphony of skyscrapers
and a concerto of code with
Eureka and reply corp
he's also a social media supercharger working on ways to build community previously unseen
welcome back to the panel from eureka it's jordan what's up everybody big big time in
web3 gaming we're saying the words pokemon look at that what a day don't forget how we've come
oh baby gotta catch them all and of course
by all i'm talking about our bags please for the love of god pokemon save us anyway um next
feel your cart and get ready to bring the buzz for the queen of kirby the smash bro slayer and
the archmage of operations at the wolves doubt it's flare what's up guys for the third week
straight i'm wondering if we might actually maybe talk about
cambria today i'll be hesitantly excited knock
there's always at least two topics that we send out to people that we do not get to and yeah
cambria has been the unfortunate uh receiver of that fate the last couple we're gonna get it today
though trust us for sure definitely maybe. Up next, he dances
between devil and deity, never
letting the hype overwhelm the real.
From crafting compelling content to catapulting
Web3 gaming, now an AI
specialist, by the way. Welcome back to the panel.
It's real. Jonah Blake.
Yeah, I also thought
about you last night.
I won't talk about why, though.
Dang.
That's going to let
brain-free in my head.
He just kept saying,
it's inevitable,
and I go, what?
And then it just happened.
I don't know what that was about.
You wake up in a cold sweat?
It's okay.
It's okay.
I just heard whispers of,
it's inevitable, inevitable.
Wait, did somebody else
dream about Sam last night?
It wasn't just me?
Boys, boys, there's plenty of me to go around.
We're at three so far.
Well, we know there's barely any women who had three.
So, you know, we have to do it the way that the Trojan, you know, warriors did.
I'll take what I can get.
Up next, we've got a guest who's traded the bull runs for balanced vibes.
He's gone from beast of blast to guru of growth, reminding us to chase our bliss and our bucks.
So sharpen your pencils and pay attention because we're about to get schooled by the sage of serenity,
the professor of profit.
It's ICO Beast.
That is an absolute banger intro, and I am super proud of that.
So thank you, Sam.
Glad to be here.
Great to have you back as
always brother love love the arc by the way still crushing it on Twitter as always you have a great
way of just sort of like ripping it off the cuff whatever's on your mind and it keeps working for
you up next he's the king of farcade who's building the tiktok of gaming on farcaster
telegram world app and more changing mobile games forever welcome to the panel the far caster phenomenon
it's charlie blackstock what's up oh man i decided to try to walk on the treadmill for this
and i am shockingly out of breath like two minutes into this this is good bad call it's altitude
charlie it's it's because it's denver you're at like 4 000 whole feet of elevation no no man's lungs could handle
has nothing yeah has nothing to do with that illegal pizza chipotle burrito i just crushed
two minutes ago are you allowed to blame the altitude if you live at altitude isn't that just
for us that fly in uh just just choose some caffeine gum and uh t and TikTok tells me you'll be fine.
Don't worry about it.
Last but not least,
behold the brilliant brain trust behind 11 Esports,
blistering breakout,
a phenomenal facilitator of fledgling talent
whose cunning craft catapulted his crew
to clinch four formidable Fortnite championships,
while his heart beats for the Indianapolis Colts
and Echoes RuneScapes,
pixelated quests,
his true brilliance shines in spotting the nurturing elite gamers, turning underdog squads into title-winning titans.
He's our chief simplifying officer. It's Knock.
I'm happy to announce that I've completed Dragon Wilds. Everything that I set out to do two weeks ago, done.
fucking hell of a good game
Fucking hell of a good game.
perfect, now you gotta start Expedition 33
Perfect. Now you gotta start Expedition 33.
dude, okay, so
the backlog is fucked, because Oblivion just came out
there's Expedition 33, there's so much
shit for me to do now, it's just
don't have the time for it, and nothing else is RuneScape
so, realistically, we're going back to old school
you guys have me
at my word, if you
ever find out that Oblivion is
reinstalled on my computer, I
will give it to whoever finds out because I'm not allowed.
I'm not allowed to touch that until I retire.
OK, until I retire.
And I'm trust me, I'm a long, I'm a long ways.
No ICO beast.
OK, it's going to be a while.
I've got to give a huge shout out to our amazing sponsors.
We've got Ditch Those Clunky Chains and Join the Scale Revolution, a chain that logged over 600 million transactions at 46 million unique active wallets in 2024.
If you want frictionless on-chain gaming, then give a shout out to scale, the chain that's built different.
To scale gaming, AI, and high-performance dApps to the masses in the official chain of Simplified.
Thank you to them for all their support of Simplified and Web3 Gaming.
And ladies and gentlemen, get ready to roll with the fun in Lawland, official game of simplified this majestic mobile masterpiece merges monopoly goes mechanics with web3's
innovation built for web3 dgens and casual gamers alike roll to move across the vibrant themed game
board starting with an exclusive pudgy penguins board and earn ygg tokens points nfts and abstract
xp if you didn't know it is a ygg product. Gabby actually saying today that he's skipping Dubai
because he wants to put the finishing touches on Lolland, which I think is really cool. It's
launching soon on Abstract Chain. You can register right now at lol.land, lol.land,
and get extra rolls. We'll see you soon in the official game of Simplified. One quick note to
Scale. We've been working with them for nine months, but they are going to be moving on as
our official chain after this week.
So if anybody wants to slide in, feel free to let us know.
But we're jumping into the very first topic.
Nike is being sued for its artifact acquisition.
Late last week, CloneX owners took to X to express their frustrations and concerns that the NFTs were no longer displaying the images that they quote-unquote owned.
This obviously sparked a conversation about whether or not you actually own your NFTs. If Nike as the current owner of the artifact brand
should be responsible for maintaining the collection and paying those monthly dues that
we know about from IPFS that's necessary in order to keep this thing running. While the NFT asset
issue seems to be resolved for now, a lawsuit has come up explaining or claiming the following.
Nike sold unregistered securities.
Shout out, we've heard that one before.
Nike rug pulled the artifacts collection
mainly because they'll no longer be supporting it.
Two quick questions to the panel.
What actually happened with the NFTs here?
If anybody can simplify that for us.
And do you think the lawsuit will hold any weight?
Or is this an example of just bag holders
lashing out and under
other circumstances, nobody would really go there? Let's go over to Shiv,
Nock, and then ICO Beast in that order. Sure. So I think all in all, the case of these guys is just
a textbook case on how not to manage Web3 luxury communities. And in the the start there was a lot of that allure but I think the clonex
lawsuit really just shows how Nike and RTFKT were definitely firstly toasted by the lawsuit
that came their way which accused of rug pulling all the clonex holders and after basically
disappearing major NFT assets so I think it starts with community trust being massively broken. And of
course, the early time backers are all furious. And they did believe that Nike would institutionalize
and elevate the brand. And I think that was the first impression that all of us had. But
what we've realized very often in Web3 gaming and just NFT ownership is that big Web2 brand partnership doesn't often mean
good acts and goodwill being done in the space. So I think it's a good reminder for that. But I
think it also touches on almost a deeper issue of how Nike and maybe the overall team just failed
to integrate Web3 loyalty meaningfully. And in 2021, sure, flex-only strategies without ongoing value drops,
incentives, etc., were able to sustain communities when price was just going up.
But in a space similar to today's landscape or even previous bear cycles or mini bears,
you can't have it completely sustained beyond just the hype phase if you don't have ongoing
incentives or at least places for you
to get involved, which is a reason why I think Web3 games will be more successful than just
ownership communities in a long enough time span. So I think this does act as a harsh reminder that
even the biggest global brands, be it in 2021 or even in 2025, aren't able to just wing it in Web3. And any community,
if you're trying to have it rest on what Web3 brings shoulders, needs real living ecosystems,
not just the flex value of JPEGs. Great takes there. I always feel a little bit
blown away that these companies would rather get hit with lawsuits and sort of the drama versus
just finding a way to deliver, like maybe under deliver, but keep it going for a while?
Like how expensive, how hard is it for them to have like one or two people that just work
on this for a few years?
And maybe it turns into something in Web3 Rebounds or they find some magical foothold
that actually ends up being something great that the company can invest more into later down the road.
Nock, over to you, brother.
Yeah, a shocking number of people learned how NFTs work this weekend.
I'm kind of surprised.
We're in a technology that is almost a decade old at this point in time.
People still don't really understand what's going on.
I guess the oversimplification is that basically when you own an NFT, that ERC-720 or the ERC-1155 token that you own is effectively a token on a blockchain that points to an image that is typically hosted somewhere else, in this case IPFS.
That image being shown relies almost entirely
on those dues being paid.
And that evidently was not a case.
So while they didn't really take away the Clonex NFTs, you technically still own the
token.
You're in control of what that thing is on the blockchain.
It's just it's reflecting a different image now because people are no longer paying dues
to show that that clonex uh asset um
in something like a magic e-ener or open sea when you're looking at your item so crazy to me that
the number of people that were shocked about what happened or how that that could even happen because
i think people wrongly are operating under the assumption that an nft is on the blockchain
forever and that's really only true of bitcoin inscriptions um As to whether or not this lawsuit has any weight, I'll leave the
legalese to ICOBs here. But it's also surprising to me the number of people who don't understand
how these acquisitions typically tend to operate, you know, relative in size to what was paid or
what was rumored to be paid for Artifact and Clonex. Generally speaking, pretty small number dollar wise for a company like Nike, probably within
the range of, hey, we would prefer to scoop this up in case it's a thing versus allow
it to fall into the hands of a competitor like an Under Armour or an Adidas or somebody
of that nature.
So to me, I don't think that Nike ever, you know, making this acquisition was an indication
that, hey, Nike's all in in Web3 assets.
And I think we spoke about this a year ago when this happened.
It was a better indication that they're at least paying attention.
And ultimately, they've evidently decided that it's no longer worth, you know, them dumping resources into to sort of maintain this community.
The other thing that I don't think is actually that big of a deal, and maybe I see Obese is about to tell me why I'm an idiot,
but this lawsuit, from what I understand, takes place in the United States,
which is like historically the most litigious society on earth.
Anybody can sue anybody for pretty much anything.
And a lawsuit doesn't mean that Nike's in trouble here.
If anything, I would imagine that this probably just gets blood out.
Nike's a type of team that has infinitely more resources than pretty much anybody who would be going after them.
And this was an acquisition that ultimately did not work out in the way that people had hoped.
And I don't think that it'll hold much weight.
But yes, it's insane to me that people don't understand how technology works in this space.
We talk about this on a weekly basis.
This is something that you interact with almost daily. You should know that you're paying for a
token that points to an image that is hosted by somebody else somewhere. You don't actually own
the image. Well, that's why we have Simplified so Knock can teach us. Knock, real quick, I've
never had to pay IPFS fees for anything that I've done. Can you, do you have context on like,
is it like a Netflix subscription? Is it like $17.99 a month? Or is this like expensive?
That they're, that they're, you know, there's a reason why they are unwilling to just have like
some random account that pays it. Yeah, I just thought Charlie's hand fly up. So maybe we can
kick to him as well. But I'll say this. At a high level,
typically there is an ongoing storage fee. Depending on whether or not it's EVM or how you set it up, there's an ongoing or individual storage fee for each particular token. This is
why things like Sol Incinerator work. Basically, if you've got a bunch of jump NFTs, you can
effectively go and burn those assets and reclaim the Sol that is being used to host and take up
space on the blockchain. That's a very smooth-brained way of saying this, but it shouldn't
be something that is like a ridiculous fee on an ongoing basis now.
All right, we'll see if Chuck can add more color whenever we get there, but we got to go
to ICO Beast first. ICO, what do we think of this lawsuit? Is it bullshit and the rest of
the artifact saga from your point of view?
So I will preface this as usual, saying that none of this is legal advice. I am nobody here's
attorney, and I will probably never be anybody here's attorney. The lawsuit is pointless.
It's also probably not proper for me to like make comments on a lawsuit officially in this capacity.
But the reality is, okay, so it's not even super duper clear what the artifact holders are upset about.
It's not even really clear how they were damaged or harmed here.
Like, oh no, you lost access for some amount of time to a picture of your weird looking 3d jpeg thing like oh no they're
worth like what two grand or something now so like you're barely even covering an hour cost of like
a high-powered attorney for your damages and there's like that might get them out of their firm
to like get to the courthouse or something so like there's no chance that you're ever going to recoup
any of the value compared to the cost it's going to take to litigate this thing so it's dead in
the water from day one um unless they have some kind of like gigantic theory of um just this
massive like massive fraud massive consumer fraud like but no that makes any sense these are nfts
they didn't work out the pictures disappeared for a bit. I'm pretty sure they got them back up anyway. So it's like, oh, no, you lost the ability to see on OpenSea for like 16 minutes. Oh, no. So it's totally pointless. And I don't understand why people bring this stuff other than maybe they want to like try to get – they probably found some chop shop attorney group that wants to shake down nike for a few thousand dollars it's a berwick law
no way you're joking i know that they were i think it's berwick yeah uh well that makes a lot of
sense and i'll leave it at that uh for those of us that are unfamiliar jon Jonah, please inform us. Anytime someone on Twitter says like,
you sold me a red shirt and I ordered blue,
Berwick Law is like, I'm here to sue you for everything you're worth.
And nobody takes it that seriously.
And they make their money by just getting some level of a settlement
out of doing that?
Yeah, that's assuming they ever settle.
I don't think I've ever seen them or maybe
just by x payouts yeah and the funny thing is um in one of their cases they wanted to prove that
meme coins are worthless by launching their own shit coin called dog to the moon shit or something
shit to the moon too so they literally if they if you make a case saying that these are securities
then the legal firm berwick Law literally offered illegal securities themselves.
So it's like, I don't know, it's like one of these weird trap cards in Pokemon or in Yu-Gi-Oh!
where it also kills the card.
So I don't know how they're ever going to use that in their deck.
I was going to talk about some other stuff, so I'll wait for that part.
But yeah, I think it's Berwick.
Okay, interesting. Let's go to charlie from the farcade that will uh go to alex and tag jonah back in uh yeah i was just getting caught up on this because i mean i saw the news but
um i'm i'm guessing what happened was they were using the cloud flares like wrapper around ipfs because ipfs doesn't have a hosting
cost natively ipfs is like a peer-to-peer content system so like a lot of it's meant for hosting
static sites oh my god i'm out of breath walking this is bad i gotta reduce the incline i'm at i'm
at one percent incline let's take this baby down all right all right all right i'm just gonna step off to the side here
we got this i was doing great but this is like i started talking everything everything started
falling apart this is such a bad luck okay so i yeah ipfs is a peer-to-peer network which is free
and that's like a lot of the point of ipfs is to be this distributed file system. And it was like a very crypto thing back in like 2017, 2018. Like everybody is hosting a lot of
their stuff on there just for being this like AWS competitor for hosting. It looks like Cloudflare
had a wrapper around it for using it. And I'm guessing CloudX was using that wrapper and going
through Cloudflare. And Cloudflare has terms of service against if you're using their free tiers, you can't be making money. If you start like making
money with some of this stuff, you have to like basically be off like some of their free tiers
because it breaks their terms of service as far as I can tell. So I don't think this was
an issue with IPFS. We're not paying an IPFS bill. This feels like a more of a Cloudflare thing than
IPFS and just like a misunderstanding of a cloudflare thing than ipfs
and just like a misunderstanding of that and the one thing i wanted to touch on was nox point which
is the only nfts that stay on chain forever are bitcoin inscriptions which isn't true there's
actually a lot of nft collections on ethereum that are will be on chain forever because all
the data is actually on chain so it can be any nft collection can be 100 on chain it just depends
on the complexity of the art and the metadata so like there's a lot of like really cool svg
collections where all the data is 100 on chain so those nfts will be there for forever because all
the data that it took to render the art is on chain so that's just a little nuance and just
for the sake of simplified that i'll add some clarity there all right back to walk and let's get this god bless dude i hope you're still with us by the time i get you in the next
topic jesus christ yeah if anybody remembers to on chain monkey which was a really popular
collection they also ended up doing an ordinal this is what they were talking about like every
time they were like no no it's fully on chain like this is why that was important is because
this can never happen to on chain monkey,
but obviously it can happen to Artifact.
Let's go to Alex Popovich then, Jonah.
So this is like a perfect example of this thing
we've kind of been talking about for a while, right?
Which is that these gigantic web two incumbents
that sort of like swing into a new burgeoning sector and they bring all of their over engineering
and preconceived notions with them just are not really set up for the success
that they think they are.
And it's kind of sad because if you spent like a few minutes and just pretended
that you were an idiot, cause you are, and tried to figure this out from
someone who knew more than you, you could find out like a whole
bunch of really cool shit. Like you guys were saying, the only reason you're spending a bunch
of money with IPFS is if you're using a bunch of third party add-ons like for pinning or extra
storage and stuff like that, that can get expensive, of course, but you know, depends on what you need.
I don't know, man. It's just, it's, it's tough to look at because in theory, maintaining a community of people who are holding a non fungible token that can get them access to something or do this or do that or whatever is really not that hard.
for years. And weirdly, I've never run into some problem where I needed some time and everything
fell to pieces because I wasn't able to send a tweet for a day or I didn't know what to say or
do to run some sort of hype machine. It's just like open communication, set some standards,
be realistic. And I think they just over-engineered the hell out of it and then overlooked the stuff
that you really want to pay attention to, which is why i'm never excited when some gigantic like i said web 2 incumbent you know steps in and then
just decides to throw their name around and uh you know hope for the best yeah disappointing
especially because they had such a great relationship and they actually built some
really cool stuff in the process and then sort of at the end there just went out with a whimper
jonah over to you brother one second i'm ordering sort of at the end there just went out with a whimper. Jonah, over to you, brother.
One second. I'm ordering
Chipotle at the same place where they had the baby
mama fight. Jesus.
Okay, the Monday routine shall
not be interrupted. Well, we're out of hands
there, so the Chipotle order, I guess,
is going to move us on to the next topic.
All right, real quick. All I wanted
to say, because I already
ordered it, is the reason why they're going to let this go has nothing to do with the cost, because it's a rounding error on their balance sheet. Like there's so many other competitors in the shoe category right now that are growing and then you have creators like
Before he was into Hitler and being with his cousin Kanye West, you know was building a billion dollar shoe company
And now all these athletes want to be, you know a part of that and then you have now
New player rights around college. There's just so much more demand in the sports in the IRL category
And I think the concern is like yeah, you you can be a 20 billion, 50 billion,
90 billion dollar company. 300 billion I think is where
they're at. At least last I looked, it could be way down.
But when you're when you're building a business and you're
competing with so many different potential incumbents, you have
to say like, do we have enough time? It's not about money, time
do you have enough time to foster this brand in our balance sheet? And every time we have a quarterly report,, do we have enough time? It's not about money, time. Do we have enough time to foster this brand in our balance sheet?
And every time we have a quarterly report, how do we explain to investors that this brand is worth maintaining?
And instead of maintaining that brand, you know, why are we not going for more Steph Curry shoes?
Are we going for the next great player when we know those sales work so it's just boardroom politics where the cost of maintaining it from a public uh share
perspective is way more expensive than the potential return on that brand and what since
past copay people want to go outside more and that brand was built on you know being inside and it's
like okay well how do you build a shoe brand about being in your house so you don't that's why it
doesn't really make sense from an athletic brand business.
So there's just a lot of things that conflict
with what Nike is actually all about.
And digital collectibles still have a long time horizon.
So I think long-term,
Artifact could have been the biggest part of Nike,
but we're talking over the course of 20 years.
And the current CEO is not going to be there in 20 years,
and he needs to get a good payout.
Yeah, I'm glad that you put that little asterisk on it. And because this, you know, this is a very dramatic example. I don't want to say it's a one for one, but it kind of has shades of
like Netflix versus blockbuster kind of thing where somebody's going to do it and somebody's
probably going to have success with it. And it does feel like they were on the cutting edge.
It wouldn't have been that expensive to maintain that edge. But instead, they're just
folding and trying to do the same thing they've always done. And they might end up regretting it
down the road. To answer your question about the market cap, it was 157 billion in February,
right now sitting at about 85 billion. So they've been. Yeah. So that's why when I said their stock
was in trouble, it wasn't, you know, when I last looked at it, it was around 300. So they, they have a lot of
work to do and they don't want artifact to be a smudge on that, on that brand vision and,
you know, production of new product. Definitely becomes a lot harder to justify whenever you're
doing poorly in other areas. People only want diversification whenever the core business is
doing well. With that being said, let's move on to Slayer's favorite thing, Cambria.
Does it have a chance to break out is the question that we're bringing to the panel
before we get into the Pokemon madness.
Cambria is a self-defined risk-to-earn MMO built on chain.
Season 2 was featuring Gold Rush, the game mode which has players embarking on risky journeys
where they can kill monsters, farm chests, fight other players in an effort to acquire in-game rewards.
The longer the journey, the higher the risk.
Players can then sell items in the off-chain marketplace, share with guild members, or use the items themselves.
This game is getting praise from everyone playing it on crypto Twitter.
The prize pool for Season 2 reached roughly $1.5 million.
You'd love to see it.
With a portion of player spend going to the pool.
Does this type of RuneScape inspired game actually have a real chance to break out into the broader MMO scene?
Or is this just propped up by DGEN economics?
And is this timed seasonal event gameplay a good long-term strategy that they might be able to iterate more on in the future?
Shiv with the first hand up.
Surprised Noc isn't ready to dive in.
Shiv, over to you, brother.
Awesome, brother. Awesome. Yeah, I actually wanted to speak about this because I was speaking with a bunch of our community members that said this is probably their best, quote unquote,
web free MMO experience. And I think there's some very good things that they've cracked,
which have got them miles ahead of what a lot of the industry is at.
And I think if you just look at the pure innovations in play, where you're looking at players pay
into these price pools, bringing fair, fun, and actual solid risk reward dynamics, it's
something which has not been done very well in the past in this space.
And I think up until maybe even two years ago, it hadn't even been close to done well.
And we are now seeing it in a spot where within this game, you have syndicate systems which tax
other players, redistribute rewards. And I think the fact that you have passive economic opportunities
in the long run gives a lot of hope. So I've interacted with a lot of people that just spend time in
their community and feel really bullish. And I think if you have real gamers from Web3 that are
able to actually enjoy the game while having the sense of seasonal progression with their
season two success, with the level of economy-driven gameplay, but being done in a very
balanced way, because when you say economy-driven gameplay, but being done in a very balanced way. Because when you say
economy-driven gameplay, it's almost intuitive to feel like, okay, now how's the economy going
to break the gameplay? So I think that they've done extremely well. And eventually, I think this
can be one of those games that get emotional investment. I, at first, didn't even find the
IP super sexy. But then once I learned more about the game, once I tried it out, spoke to people, I understood that they've been able to create a loop where the
game can almost scale in a web 2 and web 3 sense without sacrificing that immersion. So I would
put it on one of the best bets going forward right now. But my last point will be I think a lot of
games can learn a lot of valuable
stuff from Cambria. And if replicated right, it can be a mini push forward for the entire industry.
Great take from Shiv on that one. Yeah, I'm curious if you guys think that these,
like, let's just imagine, let's say that Cambria, you know, a couple of years from now has 5 million
players. Is this prize pool, is this economic structure something that we think
will scale with that or is this something that needs heavy adjustments as we go forward flair
i know you're super excited to talk about this i want to send it over to you next yeah i think like
there's a lot of little details that cambria gets right all in the all at once which is something
that's rare like you have games that's like oh this feature is cool this feature is cool they
did a lot of things really well all together.
So the reason I was excited as on Web3 side first,
reason I was excited for Cambria
is because they start,
the first thing they put out was a pure DGN game, right?
Just wager eat and one be one,
quote unquote, fight somebody.
So it's a pure on-chain DGN game
and an MMO coming out from
a team that started out so native Web3, for me, was always like, this is going to be different.
How are they going to design their economy in a way that's different from a team coming from Web2
into Web3? And they delivered on that because some of the aspects of their economy are things that
unless you really know Web3 and the different personas, you wouldn't be able to do. So here's
an example no other MMORPG has. They had not one, but two different game loops for whales.
Passive whale, don't touch the game at all. Buy the NFT, stake it into the game, and you would
get some portion of certain player rewards from their activity. Then they had another group for
more guild managers, like active, you know, like YGG types, where you want to be a guild
leader, you buy stuff and sponsor free players because you have to pay to enter the game. And
then you can set with each individual member of the guild, a different split of like 70-30, 80-20,
50-50, whatever, and adjust it throughout the season based on their performance. They also set
these two types of whales to be diametrically opposed where the stronger one side got, the
less earnings the other side got.
So that's just something that if you don't understand Web3, you wouldn't be able to do.
Something that's also from Web3 that I think worked really well for them is the fact that this season was only two weeks long.
You know, I have people on my guild that were like, it's 40 hours.
I haven't slept, showered or eaten because I've been so addicted to the game.
But people went hard and then they needed a break. I think short seasons in Web3 work
well because people's attention is so scattered. People want moments to rally around. And I
find for me when I'm looking at all the MMOs I could play, I go to things like Cambria
and I'm like, I'll put all my other games on pause because this is only here for two
weeks. Let's go grind this. This other game will always be there.
And I think in our space, at the level of earliness a lot of games,
because they're not fully polished, fully ready yet,
it doesn't always help to be persistently out.
A game like Cambria, like, if people are saying, like,
no, don't open servers for fun or tests,
because people will figure out how to break it,
and it won't be fun when the season opens again.
I'd be curious to see if that works with the Web 2 audience where it's more like of a viral moment
where it's here, everyone talks about it, creates a water cooler moment, and then it's gone. But in
terms of things they have going for them, that could also carry over to Web 2. Anyone who's a
hardcore, like, you know, who liked games like Albion, RuneScape, who were very risky,
I think there is an appeal for that, right? Competitive gamer, like you want who like games like albion uh runescape who were very risk risky i think there
is an appeal for that right competitive gamer like you want to go for the top like that could
be interesting and then they just built in virality in every element of their game it
wasn't just one thing but if you look at the amount of content they had people doing for free
from them it's when you turn in the major thing you were trying to grind for all season you got
like a slot machine like effect where there'setti, there's sounds, there's things spinning.
Like Inhuman literally cost himself less points in the airdrop so he could save up like 100 of these things to make a viral clip of like it breaking the game because he had so many.
You have people wanting to share their PKs.
You have just like little things about game satisfaction where when you crit hit somebody
the whole screen shakes and it makes
a sound so it just feels crunchy
so I think like there are just good
game design elements in there and it'd be
I'd be really curious to see
how this more short term
based seasonal based risky
type model appeals to some Web2
types because Web2 people like to gamble too
casinos are Web2 gambling and they're popular.
Great stuff from Slayer.
Appreciate all that added context.
I think that it's an interesting thing to see these, like you said, two-week event-based
open for a bit type things taking off.
I'm trying to remember the name of, there was a 3v3, v33 v3 v3 whatever battle royale basically where you would
go into a dungeon it was sort of medieval i'm forgetting the name of it but it was super viral
every weekend that it was open i know super vive now having player liquidity problems but in alpha
whenever they were only open for a weekend they had absolutely no player liquidity issues so it
does sort of beg the question that maybe there's something here by actually gating the time that people can engage with it.
Maybe the future of gaming isn't always on 24-7 or at least giving people incentivized events to play around.
And then they kind of go do their other thing and they circle back for the next major event.
Let's go over to ICOBeast and Alex Popovich.
Yeah, I was going to say, I think Slay did a great job laying out kind of the current value prop for it and things are doing really well.
I was a power user of Cambria's Degen Arena backdrink blast.
And I think that we've known for a while that they're building out this full MMO experience.
It's tough for me with the current sprint style seasons to be as engaged just because i don't have the time to to
grind this like a lot of people do um i wish i did because it looks like a lot of fun and i think
that some lessons learned that they figured out is that the the skill loops um like the full like
i guess life cycle for the skill trees and everything are not anywhere near where they
need to be yet for a full release um so like you can't you can't just release the game to have open servers
without having pretty substantial longevity
for your skills and the level up process and all that.
RuneScape takes a long time to max out your skills yet.
They don't quite have that same kind of time lock
for Cambria, but it works well
for these short sprint seasons
because you have
to kind of prioritize what you want to go after and figure out them and max that so i think um
what you kind of see in the gold rush or i guess they're not calling gold rush anymore
but this this short season is very similar like the twisted leagues um that runescape old school
runescape runs um every or used to run every few months uh but now i think those have kind of gone
by the wayside but But that competitive short burst season
where people can compete on fresh accounts
with new rule sets,
but like still a familiar game type,
absolutely has broad appeal
both in crypto and outside of crypto.
So I think that that's a winning formula.
But I do hope that they continue building out
the game loop for a potential future
much broader release
that allows people to enjoy the game for
what it is rather than competing for money and that sort of thing. I saw a knock spamming those
emojis. He's gonna have to wait just a second going to Alex Popovich then to Charlie behind
the farcade. Yeah I think there's there's some really cool stuff like from someone like me and
if you haven't heard me talk about this kind of stuff before like i'm not really that hardcore into the scene so i i kind of like look at it i guess from more
of a casual perspective and i think there's a couple things that are like undeniably super
strong about this right one you've got the difficulty of pulling people into a new game
obviously right there's so many things that come out it's really tough so what what can do it and for me it's always been like some piece of nostalgia and so the risk to earn thing is really really interesting because
i just vividly remember some of my most favorite gaming memories are just like risking it all for
no real good reason in the wilderness uh back in the day on runescape and the stakes were huge you
never knew what was going to hit you.
Like that was really exciting.
So something new there because, you know,
if you still play, you know, old school RuneScape,
then, you know, for sure you can still get some of it.
But, you know, with it going so hardcore towards like pay to play
with all of the, I mean, you can essentially just buy a 99 at this point.
So it's cool to get to leave that and do something else
that's potentially similar,
but also in the Web3 side, because, you know, who doesn't like owning stuff? I hear the concerns
about, you know, like in-game economies and all that kind of stuff. I think that there's a lot of
like good and bad examples to kind of base that on. I hear concerns about like, you know, player
burnout if like there's too much risk on the line. But I mean, to be honest,
I think that that's just kind of about finding your ideal audience, because obviously games like
Tarkov are super popular and they have their audience and some people hate it and some people
love it. And, you know, you're not you're you're not going to make a game that everybody just
absolutely loves. Right. So I'm not super worried about that either. I guess the only other thing
would be like what, you know, player struggle. Like if someone's just like miles better than, you know, stronger players
just dominate over weaker players way easier in a, in a risk to earn model like that, I think,
but too early to tell. And I don't, I think that's kind of getting nitpicky again. I don't know. I
think it's super cool. It's, it's unique. That's like the one big thing I look for. It's like,
okay, here's something new. There's a reason that this is different than other stuff. And I just, I just think that's cool. And then I think my final
point was on, uh, on Shiv's point about the IP kind of like growing on you. I think that's ideal,
right? Like I really hate it when too many things in web three try to ram down like uniqueness or
like something being super special before I even get a chance to figure out what the hell you're
trying to sell me. And I hate it when someone tries to tell me like, oh, this is the next biggest IP,
like anybody that brands their brand new startup as like the world's greatest IP or the best thing
to IP or whatever. I'm just like, okay, I don't even care to look at it anymore. Like, don't tell
me it's cool. Just like make something cool. Let me decide. It's way stronger that way. So
that's a, that's a super good sign in my opinion. Real quick, can I double down with you, Alex? I know you, especially on TikTok, primarily speak
to people that are, let's say, hyper casual crypto users. Do you find the concepts that
Cambria is bringing forward to be something that's easily understandable and maybe exciting
for those kinds of people similar to RuneScape? Or is it a little bit, I guess, overwhelming for them to sort of adopt
these concepts? I think if you went like too hard, then yeah, for sure. All of it's overwhelming.
But no, I think that's the cool part. I think that being able to say like, hey, did you ever
go into the wilderness on RuneScape? And you remember that feeling of like, well, I can't
carry too much because I don't want to lose it, whatever, like being able to tie it back to something that more people can relate to is
really the only thing that matters. So like if I'm talking to a huge group of people, that's
always the light bulb moment. And, and no, for that, for that reason, that's another one of the
things that makes me excited. I could, I can instantly look at this and be like, this is how
I would describe it to a room full of parents who are wondering like which of these games in this arena would be cool to like talk to their
kids about or like try to play together as a family. That's a that's a question that comes
up a lot like, you know, games that all of them could play together because for context,
a lot of parents watch us. And this is super easy to talk about. Like I could see it instantly
in 10 or 15 seconds,
like how to relate it to something.
So in that sense, strong as hell.
That's great, man.
Let's go over to Charlie and then I'll finally unleash the beast.
Knock, Charlie, over to you.
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things
I want to talk about.
One was like the seasonal aspect.
A game that we never really talk about on here
that I really love is a game that we never really talk about on here that i'm i really love
is a game called crypto the game i think they do a really good job of doing these seasonal
everyone buys in plays a bunch of games and it's really captivating for 10 days and everybody's
like obsessed with it for those 10 days that it's live and then it goes it goes dormant for about
six months and then does it again and it's an it actually got bought out by uniswap and was because it was doing so well but i think there's
a great room for games to pursue being more seasonal and just like capture as much attention
as you can in these short windows i think that that's gonna be more of the meta now since we are
so add we want to move on from like opportunity to opportunity game to game like i think games
shouldn't every game doesn't need to be pursuing being the next fortnight or the next world of
warcraft like you can be an extremely popular and extremely lucrative game if you aren't so
concerned about trying to be the world's biggest game and i think these short time window game
loops are really exciting for a lot of gamers it's a really good way to actually get new people
into the game because they're kind of like these one-time events to go try a new game and you feel like you get to start off like at
square one with everybody and so i i like games pursuing these more one-time seasonal things and
not trying to be this game that's live all the time and you have to really just hound dau and
metrics and make it make it work as instead try to get all of your users in at one time so i think
that's like my big thing that i like what they've done so far.
I know MMOs are very social, which is, I think, a very good part.
And hopefully that can keep a lot of users around.
But I do love games that find ways to not try to play in a space that they don't necessarily need to be playing in.
in and that space is being we don't need to be the world's next biggest mmo we can't be an
And that space is being we don't need to be the world's next biggest MMO.
incredibly successful company and incredibly successful game if we just do these seasonal
style mmo events that everybody already loves yeah i think there's nothing really wrong with
that and if they were able to get a 1.5 million dollar prize pool uh that that certainly speaks
to a lot of revenue coming through the door i I would love to see an indie company take a stab at this kind of seasonal thing where
they're like, we're only live for a week, a month or something, and just sort of see
how it goes long term.
It'd be really cool.
Knock.
All right.
It's your time to shine.
All that experience and RuneScape.
What do we think of Cambria and the current state of it before we go to Jonah?
Yeah, Ben is a motherfucker in the best way possible that dude deeply deeply deeply
understands uh what makes games like RuneScape and a lot of the MMOs that we grew up playing
so exciting and so compelling and I think the seasonal approach was a very intentional uh
decision from that team for for a couple of reasons ICOB sort of alluded to this a little
bit earlier when he mentioned the RuneScape Twisted Leagues.
I'll give a little bit of a deeper explanation of what that is.
Obviously, historically, you know, the meme in RuneScape is 92,
is halfway to 99, which is a really fucked up way of saying
the way you scale skills in RuneScape is exponential.
So the closer you get to 99 in numbers, really the further away you are,
which is this really annoying thing for a lot of
players and the average skill to 99 takes about 120 to 130 hours there are like 27 skills in old
school that are more if you're playing rs3 so it's a very daunting game there's a lot to get
through there's a lot of content you really don't even start playing RuneScape until you've logged about five to six hundred hours into RuneScape, which is not very appetizing for most people.
What I think Cambria has done really well is they've touched on a lot of the things that
RuneScape excelled at when they introduced leagues. So leagues are these seasonal events.
They run a lot longer than two weeks. They're 90 to 100 days and a bunch of things happen in the leagues namely augmented experiences so at certain
thresholds whether you've completed enough tasks or you've earned enough points by completing those
tasks you unlock relics relics give you a bonus xp or they give you a special ability that
otherwise wouldn't exist within the game and i think what that does for
players is it removes the barrier entry or it significantly um makes the barrier entry significantly
easier for people to sort of jump in and get excited about what's happening within a game so
in cambria you have all these different experiences that slayer did an excellent job of sort of
breaking out different ways to play the game, different ways to be participants within what's happening within the given
season.
Somebody like inhuman obviously is running through areas and wiping out
enemy,
enemy clans and,
and,
and guilds because that's inhuman.
He's,
you know,
an FPS player.
He wants to kill things.
that's the way that he wants to approach the game.
So that's the way that he built Reaper,
which was his guild within Cambria. There are many of other ways to play games like this and i think
they did an excellent job of giving different types of players different ways to be involved
and that's something that you see a lot happen in these leagues in these limited time events
where hey i might be a really highly skilled player and i want to participate almost entirely
in pvp so I can go ahead and do
that. Or I might be a player who prefers to do things like skilling, which is collecting resources
or being a participant to my guild and contributing in other ways, whether that be through resources
or equipment, etc. So Cambria and Ben, the founder of Cambria, really deeply understand
what drives players within leagues, what drives players within the RuneScape experience. And I think that they've done an excellent job of emulating a lot
of the things that we love about games like RuneScape, while also making it feel distinctly
Cambria. A lot of people talked about this. Originally, it was, you know, on-chain RuneScape,
or it was just a really poor RuneScape clone. And I think the more that people paid attention
and played the game, the more that I paid attention to the game and had conversations
about what was going on, it became clear that yes, this is heavily inspired by games like RuneScape,
but it has its own unique flavor and its own unique twist. And I think the two-week window
is actually a net positive and probably should be something that they consider doing moving forward for a couple of reasons.
The first is it gives a moment.
It creates an opportunity for community around this two-week sprint, right?
Everybody's in Discord channels.
People are pulling all-nighters.
They want to make sure that they're progressing well.
They're paying attention to what other guilds are doing, the stories that are happening within an individual season. And when you're playing a game that has that seasonal mode, it can be, and obviously evidently,
is very intoxicating for people who are deep within that realm.
That's part of the reason why you saw that prize pool
hit that $1.5 million pool,
because people felt compelled to spend within that game
because of everything that we just sort of outlined.
The other piece that is really interesting about seasonal approaches
is that it gives you reason and sort of an excuse to implement really interesting mechanics and get
very experimental with the mechanics that you bring into a given season because the stakes are
relatively low. If you dislike a particular mechanic, well, it'll be gone in two weeks and
New League will be coming in a couple of months. That's something that I think makes it more
appetizing for people to sort of get involved in. The other issue that you see with MMOs is that most MMOs are insanely
sticky. If you've been playing an MMO, you've probably been playing it for at least a decade.
It's probably the only one you play. You're really not all that interested in playing another MMO.
Something that goes on a seasonal basis that is relatively low stakes creates a window for even seasoned
MMO players to take away some time from the game that they normally play and jump into this
experience. Something that is familiar, yet different, that is timed for a two or three
week window. Everybody focuses on what's going on and then it wraps up. You go back to your other
game. So I actually don't think Cambria, if they maintain this seasonal approach,
is competing with other MMOs.
I think it's supplemental.
I think it's something that you can do
while playing your main game,
which is the biggest issue that you have in MMOs today.
Anybody who plays in MMO knows
it's the only thing you think about.
This experience gives you another way
to sort of jump into that MMO.
The last thing I'll say,
and I think this was the
biggest miss from Ben and the Cambria team, is they missed out on a massive content opportunity
that I hope that they take advantage of for the next season, which is releasing information about
new mechanics and incentivizing people to create content about the progress that their guild is
making, theorycraft about the way that they're going to approach that new season.
One of the things that happens around RuneScape Leagues
is about three weeks prior to the launch of the league,
they released this big wiki page that outlines,
here are all the relics, this is what the relics will do,
here's a list of sample tasks that you need to complete
in order to unlock points to get more relics,
and you have weeks worth of content leading into the season
of people theorycrafting their approach, their route, the things that they want to do, what they're going to rush to maybe get ahead of other players.
And then once the season goes live, you have those same people documenting the experience along the way.
So if you're part of that community, you know, hey, Inhuman and Reaper wiped out an entire other clan or a complete other guild or hey this group pulled
ahead on the leaderboards like this is important information that I think was done well from a few
people um Inhuman is basically like my source of content for Cambria over the last couple of weeks
so I think that he did a fairly good job with this but that is something that could be even
more compelling incentivize content creation incentivize storylines so that each season
becomes its own major event.
I know I've been rambling for a long time, but I'll sort of end it with this.
If Cambria is going to succeed or if any MMO is going to succeed moving forward,
you have to find a way to effectively compete with the incumbents.
And that is an insanely difficult thing to do where larger teams with infinitely more money have failed.
One of the ways that you can do that is by finding a way to be supplemental to the MMO experience.
I think these seasonal ventures can be supplemental.
It can give me a break from old school so I can jump into Cambria for two weeks and then go back to old school or wow or whatever it is that you play.
I think the game mode has legs.
I think approaching it in these seasonal uh events is probably the right path i just don't see any team sort of competing with a
incumbent mmo long term if you're always on and the option is play your main mmo or play this new one
knock uh all i heard there at the end was that you have too much time if you need something
to supplement RuneScape and your other addictions.
Jesus Christ.
Jonah, let's go over to you, bud.
What's your take on Cambria, and then we're gonna move on to Pokemon.
My take is I don't play it, so I don't fucking know.
But what I will say is, uh, shit, my fucking hazard lights were on.
Dude, Nock spoke for so long that i was able to talk
to the front desk of my apartment complex and solve like three billing issues during the entire
conversation i actually really appreciate it because i was thinking the whole time like
man i hope he keeps going so i could finish this up and he did it was incredible uh i do like i
like knock a lot though uh so he's cool uh most people i wouldn't put up with that um just saying
sam you know if you're ever,
I know you're new to this whole like mega Twitter spaces game yet.
You haven't done it that long, but just for the future.
Thanks, bro.
I appreciate that.
Hey, I just actually managed to renew my lease
while Jonah was explaining what he got done while Mac was talking.
We finally got a Web3 game that people want to play
while we were both talking.
But what I was going to say, well, Cambria is actually really cool, all jokes aside.
But I was going to say I agree with the, I forget who's behind the account, but your Farcade account.
I agree with what you're saying totally this idea of event-based gaming.
Or did not say that. I can't tell anymore.
Anyway, I love the idea of event-based only games because of the capital
that goes into them. So what do I mean by that? I mean this. Web3 Gaming would be mechanically
called dead if you're building a $100 million game. By definition, Web3 Gaming is dead
because there's just not enough users. The risk is very high. The investment is really difficult to make. But if you're making games that make, I don't know, five to 10 million a year
and have to give back anywhere from one to three million in prize pool over time,
that may not be venture investable by definition, but the margins are great that you could be a
millionaire making these games and do really well. And you know what? You're not going to have a lot
of competition coming at you because the really big studios that could kill you don't see you as
a big enough threat because the amount of money you're making is not big enough for them to
compete against. So you're sitting in this blue ocean of, you know, marginally good money that
you could be making while you discover what the big unlock is and you can be profitable doing it so i think web3 gaming is
dead for a big publisher but it's definitely alive for any developer that understands um
you know game fi in a sense of economic games of skill and the reason why that's such a huge
new area to invest in in my opinion and i don't mean invest from money but invest your time into
building is the only game that people are playing these days is fucking poker. And how many of those
poker style games do we need? Like, I only need one good poker game on chain. I don't need 12.
So if you have an idea for a poker-like game that competes in that same genre that's untapped,
that's a great market to put time into.
That's a great take.
Icy in the audience, I'm sure, would have some opinions
on bringing a poker game on chain and how many shots on goal we might need.
Maybe one or two, but I've been pitched seven different poker games,
and I'm going to be honest, I don't like poker
and I'm going to be honest, I don't like poker that much
that much to have seven different poker
to have seven different poker games.
games
and theoretically
there can be infinite
winners in games that big but
realistically it always ends up being like one
Jordan with the hand up, then we're going to move on
I just want to double or triple tap
on what Jonah just said
I have always believed
that Web3 is a fantastic
fit for smaller, cheaper indie
games.
Gaming as an industry is a shots on goal sort of thing.
And, you know,
I don't know what the actual percentages are
in terms of money earned in gaming
from the handful of dominant AAA
games versus everyone else.
But I sure as hell know that
the business models of the
everyone else are incredibly sustainable because they are what leads to the big studios and the
big games, right? It's a very, like the industry works very effectively bottom up and a huge
percentage of the problem of our industry so far has been the reliance on the success of a very
small number of very large shots on goal instead of
success of a large number of much smaller shots. And especially when the fundamental concepts of
our industry of like a sustainable crypto game economy that interacts with the gameplay and
player ownership and a token, all this stuff, it's really still very untested, very, very far from figured out.
There's probably years worth of work to do there.
It's way, way, way more effective to create games that you know that that economy is going
to function well for the amount of time you're designing it to function well for.
And you can kind of model it out.
You can predict and everyone can be happy versus, you know, what I think our industry was very much suffering
under for a while in its earlier days, the last few years where, you know, every game
had to promise that it was going to work forever.
Right.
And that's really, really hard to do.
It creates a lot of fun.
It creates overblown expectations and overblown fricking budgets and everything.
And anyway, so I think that, you know, a great way to slim down the scope of a game and the
complexity of its build and everything is to design it to be somewhat successful for
some amount of time and then go from there.
Great stuff on this topic, guys.
Let's get to Pokemon, though.
We're super excited that this is finally official, that they're coming to Web3.
Big shout out also to Icy and Gaming Daily, who published a really nice, succinct timeline that I was able to sort of leverage to build out this topic.
So back in March 2023, if you guys were here, you definitely remember Pokemon posted a job listing for a quote-unquote corporate development principle that was going to include some blockchain technology, whatever, whatever that meant.
But it did have Web3 in the job description and stuff like that.
So it made the rounds on Twitter.
Fast forward to July 2024.
Over a year later, a leaked patent spilled the beans that Pokemon was eyeing NFT digital trading cards with a mobile app and smart contract.
And then just recently, Pokemon Home's privacy policy dropped a bombshell,
tying Parasol Technologies linked to Mistin Labs, a blockchain crew.
Unsui, ever since, has been up over 70% since their blog post also hinted at Pokemon NFTs. Now, Pokemon Home's got these cool digital medals that you can trade or gift, earn them at Pokemon centers, events, or hitting app milestones, etc. It's not on the
blockchain dot dot dot yet. You know, we'll see whenever that maybe makes the switch. Some people
are surprised also by these items not being soul bound. They thought that they would be.
And by making them tradable, this basically means that you're opening up the
black market if you're not willing to let them trade them for crypto in app. So there's potentially
a sort of sketchy, unsavory way for people to acquire these. But at the same time, that's never
been an issue for Pokemon in the past. There's tons and tons of physical fakes and black markets,
et cetera, that currently has not affected the brand in any significant way
to the point of them doing that much about it.
So does this change your opinion, though, of Sui in particular,
now that they've landed the biggest of all fish,
maybe outside of Grand Theft Auto?
And what do you expect out of Pokemon in Web 3?
Jonah, with the hand up first, over to you.
Yeah, I think, one, it's a big yeah i think uh one it's a big win i actually
think it's a big win uh no matter how it's implemented it's just like you know we said
well nintendo or whatever this is the most profitable largest ip on the planet there is
there is no bigger ip this everyone's like
when when are mass adopting web 3 i mean you won the game that's it like it's done pokemon there's
nothing like if you go on the top 10 ip money making list i mean we're missing hello kitty
star wars which i think they already did some like we this is it this is the game you did it
well and that we won the game. So Sui won.
Congrats to them. That doesn't mean they win forever,
by the way, because if they can't show
promise or there's a problem with the chain,
then of course...
Pokemon doesn't give a shit if it's
on Avalanche or if it's on Sui or if it's
on Solana, as long as it runs fast.
I'm going to talk for a little bit, so just be
prepared, because I thought a lot about this
the last week. So one, this is really bad for EVM. Ethereum might actually be fucked. I'm being
dead ass. And this is someone who owns over $100,000 worth of Ethereum watching my bags go
to zero slowly. So the problem with Ethereum is two things.
Today they had a live conference like that you could watch talking about the future of
Ethereum from the Development Foundation.
And most of the really, really well backed people who are involved in Ethereum and want
to build an Ethereum have basically said, wow, this is a complete fucking shit show. It was basically the Ethereum developers, the core developers don't like helping apps
scale on their chain because it hurts the development of their chain itself.
Or like they're basically too lazy to continue building more tooling onto it.
So the reason why you're seeing Solana, Sui, Aptos, all these other chains grow is because
Ethereum Foundation is basically saying, yeah, go to them.
We don't want to fucking work with you.
Or, you know, go to one of our L2s.
And if they even, like, the problem for Ethereum right now is if they want to go back to being
an L1, that means they're going to tax these L2s significantly.
And someone like Abstract or someone like Base is going to be like,
we don't really want to be that Ethereum aligned now that we think about it. We don't like all
those taxes. So we're just going to make our own L1. Because now we basically can make L1s out of
the box, effectively, or do an L2 on Solana or something, which is a new thing coming.
So if they want to be a full L1, they're going to hurt all the users that they pushed over to L2.
And those users are going to stay with those L2s that will become L1s or 1.5s.
And if they want to go further into L2s, it'll lower the value of Ethereum price even more because people are just going to, you know, they're not going to settle on L1.
They're going to settle on L2.
That's just what it's going to be.
So they're kind of in the, what do you call it, Chinese finger trap where they can't, they really can't get out of.
And then you see like the whole narrative for Ethereum or EVM was that it is the safest chain.
It never goes down, you know, big banks settle on it.
And then here you have the biggest IP on the fucking planet.
Number one, there is, you know, the best.
It's the Bitcoin of IPs, effectively. And it didn't choose ETH. It chose SUI, which is not on ETH whatsoever.
That was its first choice. It could have picked any of these other L2s. It could have picked
Avalanche. It could have picked Abstract. It could have picked all these different chains,
and it didn't. So that's a huge issue for EVm like i'm actually i'm not going to do i didn't
go to dubai because i just don't want to be in that heat and also it's expensive to go there
uh more expensive than going to asia uh so like but i what i will go to next month is i'm gonna
go to solana accelerate because i'm not gonna keep my world living on fucking EVM. When I hear the developers of ETH don't give a shit,
and I see Pokemon going to L1s,
dude, I'm a businessman first, like, in a loyalist second.
I'm going to go where the money is.
So I'm going to go to Solana Accelerate.
I'm going to go to Sui Basecamp.
I'm going to go to Aptos, whatever it is,
because if Pokemon wants to go there,
then I have to go there as well.
And so I think it's just a huge loss.
Now, on the Pokemon side, it's not revolutionary, but it's a really great start.
And if I'm Pokemon, I am actually completely okay with the black market.
And Valve has the same issue, but it's not an issue if you think about it from a legal perspective.
Like, if I tell you that you can now legally trade and make money,
that means I now have to think about what like the global financial policy is in each
territory for trading and become Roblox, which is a multibillion dollar effort.
If I just say, here's where you can go grab these things.
And if you and like I don't say anything else, but you trade them on the black market and
I just look the other way, then if you get caught, then I can say, hey, I told you not to do that.
And if you don't get caught and I look the other way, all you're doing is proliferating my IP.
And the amount of trade that I was going to make on there was non-effective for my bottom line
anyway, and it's propagating the value of the IP for the other things we do sell.
So yeah, fuck it. Look the other way.
And then you have third-party fees you can take anyway,
like Courtyard or BZ or these other RWA trading platforms.
You can just suck up fees from them on an IP deal, right?
You can make your money anyway.
So it's a huge win for Pokemon.
I liked Sui even beforehand.
Look, Mark Zuckerberg may not be the best person in the world,
but I don't, you know, I
don't fade that guy. And Sui was born out of Facebook, like before the legal lawsuits and
stuff, like that was Facebook's blockchain. Mark Zuckerberg started it up and started a whole wing
under their business, which later became Sui. It was an offshoot. So, you know, when I look at SUI, I go, well,
they didn't leave Facebook because of animosity. They left because of court hearings. So I would
bet just an assumption without any information I have that Mark Zuckerberg still talks to him to
this day and probably has tokens privately in some way or something going on. And we talk about
things like Farcaster, right? Again, I think it's really cool.
But one day when the laws are good, Mark could be like, hey, Sui, remember how we built you guys
and all that stuff? Yeah, we're going to take these tokens and we're just going to tokenize
all of Instagram. Yeah, all of Instagram is going to be on chain now. All the billions of users we
have, yeah, we're going to do that. Also, Facebook too. But I'm going to own like 20% of your network
in the same way Sam Bankman did on Solana you cooled that and those guys are gonna be happier
than a pig and shit and they're gonna be fuck yeah we'll take four billion users from all of
your apps and put them on sui if it works so yeah i'm i'm very bullish on sui i have been prior to
pokemon um but it makes me really bearish ethereum for the reasons i listed it's it's it's actually
very disturbing that ethereum is in this position.
Wow.
I didn't expect Sui getting Pokemon to be an ETH death sentence,
but what you said makes sense.
I probably won't be going to Sui base camp quite yet,
but it is tempting.
Charlie, from the Far Cape,
what's your take on Pokemon going to Sui
and what this might mean for Web3 Gaming?
I was trying to follow along with what Jonah was saying, but when he doesn't compare things in stripper and escort terms, it's really hard to keep up with.
Okay, all right.
Very easy, very easy.
You're a new rapper who just got a million-dollar contract from Warner Music.
It's actually a loan.
You don't understand how money works, but you've got a fat stack of cash. And they paid you in dollar bills because that's what you asked
for. There used to be a strip club that you liked in Miami called Scarlet's. That's where every
rapper went when they first got their first paycheck. But now this new strip club built,
and they've imported Dubai models that are Russian. And as a black guy myself, I really
like snow bunnies.
That's like a big thing, right? So it turns out this new strip club has way more snow bunnies
than Scarlet's. And so instead of going to Scarlet's, which is usually the historical way
of celebrating your, your lending contract, uh, I'm going to this new snow bunny club.
Staggeringly good analogy, Charlie. I know that was, was i mean he had to have thought of that beforehand
this had to have been just ready i i you i you give me any scenario right now i can turn it into
a strip club analogy that was so good i mean it's gonna hard hard to top that i'll i'll respond to a couple things but um i i agree this is a giant win for
suey i don't know what they did to get this deal because there's not a single part of it that makes
sense to me like if you're if you're pokemon why in the world would you ever go onto a different
chain like you're you launch a chain by yourself would probably be a top 10 chain
day one and i just it there's not a lot of it that makes sense to like why they would do this
partnership tell you why can i tell you why yeah again in stripper terms okay um your buddy all
right so they're all japanese because pokemon is japanese your buddy, Yashiro, or Mr. Yakamoto, he started a strip club in Alabama called Daisies, okay?
But it turns out that Yakamoto didn't understand that the other strip club there called Betsy's,
which is very old styles from the 50s.
The reason why Betsy's works is not because it's a strip club,
but it turns out they have the best burgers and beer in town.
So Mr. Yakamoto was building daisies in the understanding that he was going to bring in all these imported hot Japanese girls to Alabama and he was going to serve like a new market.
But everyone who goes to Betsy's, they understand the culture of Alabama and that local territory.
And half the guys there go to it for a form of therapy.
They don't go there for the girls as a mr. Yakamoto is just way out of his depth in the region and he should have just
You know done what he normally did which is you know build another sushi bar and you know
This is unbelievable
I think we need to start a whole new Twitter spaces and just Jonah going on these rants
I'd coming next week week i'm excited to tell
you guys uh charlie back on on topic yeah again that again i just don't think that like
the reality is the dirty little secret with a lot of these chains is they're all the fucking same
like they all have a lot of very similar tech they all have like a lot of very similar
back ends especially when you go on like evm but there's just really not a lot of a difference and these things are so cheap and easy to spin up that like
if you're in ip like pokemon i still just feel like there's no reason for you not to be launching
on your own chain um that said the evm thing that i'll touch on i think people don't i i agree with
what jonah said which is i do think like the ethereum foundation a lot of
the developer stuff going on is just really annoying i think there's like some very juvenile
like entitlement happening with core developers and people pushing the ecosystem forward and it's
very like tiresome and it's been going on for a while and i think it makes all the ethereum and
evm people look really bad but the reality is is base is still just only one L2 on it. I think
the OP chain and OP narrative and OP stack where or this super chain narrative is still very much
in play. There's a couple of like some of the better consumer apps have ever been built just
on their own standalone L3s off of base. And base is talking about tokenizing US securities on its
chain, like that is such a
game changer for just tokenizing assets on a chain and so yeah maybe evm looks worse today
because it's definitely should have been what landed a ip like pokemon but it is not dead by
any means like there's so much momentum happening in that space and just with on l2s and l3s alone
regardless of ethereum and there's a lot of people who have very much stated,
especially with Optimism.
Optimism's gas token will always be Ethereum.
You can't use your own custom token for gas.
So Ethereum will be the native token
for all these OP Optimism chains,
which are building some of the best consumer apps
I'm seeing in this space.
And these are a lot of,
some of the world's best Web2 builders
are building on-chain apps and consumer apps that are all EVM based apps.
And so, yeah, it's definitely a window of the sales for Ethereum to not win an IP like like Pokemon.
But it's by no means dead.
Like there's so much momentum and so much stuff being built behind the scenes.
And there's and I just still think it's incredibly undervalued for where it should be based on the current market.
All the value and all the apps are currently running on that ecosystem.
It's a great point.
Love that you can give us a little bit more of the deep dive on the technicals.
Let's go to Slayer, then we'll tag in Nock.
Yeah, honestly, following Jonah, he made a lot of really good points.
So I'm not going to go too long in our paper.
I agree that like whether or not the actual implementation is impressive or like super,
you know, deep on the web3 side.
I think it's the fact that a company is bringing an IP like that into this space is a win.
You know, it's the same, like it's the same spirit of why I thought MapleStory's
white paper was such a masterclass because they went so into detail about just like, here's what we identified makes our game fun. Here's why it's hard to scale that since we've already been alive for 20 years. Here's why we think blockchain is the right move. And I think like, I'm not surprised that it's not a super deep thing. Because if you think about a company that's traditionally pretty conservative with their IP,
I wouldn't expect Nintendo and Pokemon to come out and be like, yeah, we're gonna go crazy and
do all this stuff, like start with something that's relatively quote, unquote, safer or smaller
scale. It does make sense, right? In terms of what it means for EVM or Sui, I think my biggest takeaway was like being quite surprised and impressed with the fact that in the last week alone, I just heard suddenly a lot more people talking about Sui in context of gaming, where for a while, you know, I know for gaming, especially with more like object oriented code and everything.
And it didn't take off at first.
But I think now you're seeing between that they have the handheld.
They have a couple of other people talking about games and ecosystem.
They're starting to get more buzz around them.
So I think it's interesting.
It's something to watch.
It's a great point.
Yeah, I couldn't personally name a single other SUI game at this point.
I know that there are a couple. Yeah, I've had conversations with them.
I think a lot of them are like coming soon sort of status, but that's about par for the course in most of Web3.
Now I'm going to you, then we're tagging in Jordan.
Yeah, I think that there's obviously a ton to unpack here.
The first thing that I'll sort of say is this is another example of what we talk about quite
frequently, but understanding timelines that you're operating on is incredibly
important in this space. A blockchain like Sui has
I think for the better portion of the last year sort of been
shit on for not doing anything and not paying attention and maybe
following behind some
of its competitors and then drops pokemon on everybody's head um so it's just another reminder
that when you're dealing with a war chest that has nine figures in it you get to operate on very
extended timelines and it's important that as participants in the space uh we understand that
silence does not mean work isn't happening, because obviously
it was.
In the case of Pokemon, I agree, I actually both agree and disagree at the same time with
something that Jonah said, which is kind of a mindfuck for me, but Jonah mentioned that
it doesn't matter how big of, how the implementation actually looks like here, what matters is
that they brought the IP, they won this deal. And I agree with that sentiment. I agree that the big win here is Pokemon in a very
real sense has decided we are going to take this IP and do something with it on blockchain. That's
something that we've been talking about. We've sort of idealized this moment where a big brand
like Pokemon comes to the space and that is meant to be like this validating moment for us and builders within this ecosystem.
And I still think that that is true.
I also think that the implementation and the way and how they choose to implement their IP into this blockchain version of things does matter.
version of things does matter and I think it matters a whole lot. I don't have enough fingers
And I think it matters a whole lot.
and toes to count how many failed Pokemon experiments I've you know touched on in the
course of my lifetime and you know even just in different games or different approaches or
collectibles or you know the way that Pokemon has generally experimented with their IP is
a willingness to sort of push the envelope a little bit, to get creative with that Pokemon IP,
but always to be protective of two things.
The first is that core gameplay, right?
The Pokemon game, the start in a small town,
work your way up, collect eight badges,
beat the Elite Four.
There hasn't been a whole lot of deviation from that,
except for things like Pokemon Online,
which allows you to just send Pokemon from the game
to like some sort of online storage box.
The second piece is the cards. And up until recently with Pokemon Online, which allows you to just send Pokemon from the game to some sort of online storage box. The second piece is the cards.
And up until recently with Pokemon Pocket, there wasn't really a whole lot of implementation and experimentation on that front either.
My bet is that neither of those two things, which are really the two core pillars of the Pokemon IP,
get introduced to blockchain tech in any sort of short-term timeline,
probably not even in the mid to long-term timeline.
I don't see them jumping into something like courtyard and officially
tokenizing their,
their cards because they're having enough of a headache and an issue
managing that supply chain and what's going on in the Pokemon TCG world with
physicals is already so far out of their control.
I just can't see them adding another element to try and figure out and navigate.
From a core gameplay, I mean, they have a cash cow that all they do every year is they
reskin a map, they add a couple of different things, and they make billions of dollars.
I don't see them implementing that either.
So how they bring Pokemon to blockchain, how they interact with people, how they get people
to be excited about the fact that this is something, a new way to collect or a new experience, I do think will matter pretty significantly when it
comes to how we look back at this in two or three years as to whether or not this was a success.
I think winning Pokemon is step one. And as crazy as this is to say, that is sort of like the easy
step, right? That is, hey, you brought the IP, you've signed the deal. We saw it with Polygon and Nike.
We saw it with Polygon and Starbucks.
What matters is the way that this is integrated within blockchain tech.
I also think it matters pretty significantly how they plan to use blockchain as to whether
or not this is going to move the entire ecosystem forward.
If this is a closed loop in which you are gaining, you know, soulbound or
relatively restricted NFTs, which I think you mentioned at the top of this topic that they're
not going to be soulbound, but if they're restricted, which it seems like they will be,
how do they integrate and how do they interact with the broader SUI ecosystem? How does that
interact cross-chain? Is this a user who's going to download something like a privy wrapper and be
entirely consumed within this ecosystem and never really have any exposure outside of SUI to blockchain,
I don't think that that's really effective at all.
I don't think that that changes anything for the broader scope of Web3 Gaming.
If it is a truly open economy and you're allowed to take those assets
and trade on marketplaces that you choose to trade on,
you can do the things that you want to do with those assets,
maybe there's some argument for this is a massive step for Web3 Gaming.
But today, I think I'd summarize my stance on this in this way.
I'm incredibly excited that Sui landed this deal.
I think this is a massive moment for crypto.
I'm also cautiously optimistic that this integration is meaningful for people who are participants within the crypto space.
integration is meaningful for people who are participants within the crypto space.
But I think I'm a little hesitant because Nintendo and Game Freak and the Pokemon company
historically have a very long list of projects that were experiments with the Pokemon IP that
were ultimately, you know, taken out back and all the other. And I'm hoping that doesn't happen here
with the blockchain tech and integration. Lots to be excited about.
Lots to be concerned about.
It really does feel like a let's just sit and see how this all plays out.
Great take from Nock.
Expected nothing less.
Let's go to Jordan, Alex, and then Jonah to finish this up.
Yeah, I also wanted to talk a little about what Jonah said because I agree with some of it.
But I think some of it was kind of missing it on this.
Which is, this has nothing to do with Ethereum, other than the fact that Ethereum doesn't do BD, and so misses deals like this.
Which we could critique Ethereum or not for, right?
But Pokemon doesn't have any provable expertise
on blockchain, right? I'm sure they've got someone there with experience that they're
paying a bunch of money to. I'm surprised it's not ICO or one of the people on this panel.
Honestly, you've missed the boat on that check. But they're paying someone for advice, right?
But all this really means is that Sui's BD team said the right things to Pokemon to convince them to pick them, right?
So however Sui's BD team managed to define the Web3 gaming industry in terms that were favorable to it, they got Pokemon.
I also very much agree with Nock about, you know, the amount of things that this company does.
And, you know, we'll see.
We've also seen time and time again,
like the implementation really does matter.
Because if Sui does,
if the picture that Sui's BD team
painted to the Pokemon company
of what the world looks like a year from now
with this project and the success for them,
if it doesn't pan out like that,
Pokemon will find a way to bail on Sui
and go somewhere else.
We've seen this kind of thing happen a number of times in this industry as well.
People shut shit down and start back up again.
I think this is hugely bullish for Web3 Gaming because this is the biggest gaming IP in the world
choosing actively to fuck around with Web3 Gaming.
And I think we should be paying really, really close attention
to the exact language that the Pokemon company uses to describe this stuff to their audience,
right? There's no better learning opportunity for us than any time any of these Web2 games
with existing gaming audiences talks about Web3 stuff. Look at exactly how they talk about it
and know
that this is what they think is the right way to communicate this to a Web2 audience, which we all
suck at and need to get better at. Final little note on Ethereum, because I agree with a lot of
what Charlie was saying about how integral Ethereum already is and how bullish all the
things that are building on it is. I don't think in any way anything means Ethereum is dead.
I think Ethereum's sole problem is that it could be the backbone of the future of economic
infrastructure globally and trade at $500 as far as it seems.
Right.
And that's like, that's what they have to solve.
But functionally, it's doing great.
it's doing great.
Alex Popovich, then Jonah.
So I would like to speculate optimistically
for a second about some of this stuff
because what if, and bear with me,
I hear it before I say it, I know, head in the clouds,
but one of the things that struck me as a possibility
is that at some point, right, like, and again, this is the optimist in me, I guess, trying desperately to claw its way to the top for a second.
Eventually, I like to think that companies or brands or IPs or whatever that like want to do something in Web3 may start to choose something based on what like architecturally makes the most sense for its inherent structure.
architecturally makes the most sense for its inherent structure. And something that strikes
me about the fact that this is SWE instead of something else is just the idea of move as a
language and as a framework. And I would definitely defer to someone like Charlie to get more
technical on stuff. But I just remember hearing my dad talk about Move as a language because he's in his blockchain development era right now.
And he made a comparison that basically was just like, so as, you know, as some languages, many languages have been retrofitted to be more effective for this kind of stuff.
Move is kind of cool because it had some pieces that were just like inherently better from the jump rather than having to retrofit something after the fact. And I wonder if because of the way that
like Pokemon works, depending on what all they want to do, if there was just like a technical
benefit to doing something move related. And then if you tap in like what could be more culturally
relevant to the Web three community to make that
boom but you know i would like to think that it's probably less likely that they cared more about
like what the web three space would think rather than their own existing audience because you know
one is gigantic and the other is relatively small um then it kind of makes sense to do something like
uh sui over movement or over Aptos.
But again, I'm certainly not an expert and I don't mean to like pontificate with my
speculations about move as a language.
I just thought that was potentially interesting.
And I like to daydream about a future wherein we don't exclusively treat every collaboration
and every partnership with something entering the Web3 space just as
a popularity contest based on who has the prettiest color scheme and the best mascot, but
maybe actually put like an iota of thought into how things are built and set up before we make
a decision. And of course, I recognize that that's easier said than done, given how much we just care
more about money. But I don't know. Then the only other thing, you know, if you're, if you're making a move like that and you are thinking about the web three side
and not just your side, then I think it also probably makes a little bit of sense to think
about the idea of like big fish in a small pond syndrome. And, you know, do you really want to
just be another big web two company that like did something on one chain where everybody is?
Or would you rather kind of like try to be, you know, the big dog in a different place where there's not so much stuff to compete with as far as like marketing to the rest of the web three side?
You know, I don't know.
Again, a lot of speculation here.
I don't know any of this for sure, obviously.
But that's just kind of where my head went.
Like as I sit here and try to think about like, why might you pick this ecosystem versus, you know,
something more established with more users or more whatever.
Over to Jonah and then do a Charlie from the far K with the handbag.
Yeah. Regarding the health of Ethereum,
I think people here are overestimating how healthy Ethereum actually is.
You just see the amount of developers that are on Ethereum.
Like it's not growing because if you want to look at the health of a chain, do an
estimation of how many new developers are coming to that ecosystem.
And, uh, it's not, it's not really going up.
Are you counting just the L one?
Cause that's not, that's disingenuous to only count the L one.
Cause the number of builders is growing, but it's growing a ton.
The L1 is the only thing I really I'm really talking about or care about, because
if the L1 doesn't work, then like, why do L2s exist on it?
Like, that's the whole argument that's being made right now in the ecosystem of Web3.
Because security and decentralization matters.
Like there're the reality
is a lot of these l2s can't just become l1s overnight like you'd still need to spin on
right now yeah so i don't know i just think like they they you need decentralization and security
for these chains to work and it's that's what they're using the l1 for. And so I think it's much harder.
Go ahead.
Because you're technical.
If the value of ETH continues to go down in price,
but also in usage at the L1 level,
are there still the same amount of validators
that are keeping it decentralized?
Or does that also go away
because the incentive to earn has lowered?
Yeah, theoretically, you're right.
If usage went down and price continues to go down,
validators would leave.
Validators are very opportunistic.
So you're right.
There could be a turning point where if everything just...
Because that's the problem that's happening right now.
But we're not even close to that point still.
I don't know. I'm not saying that you're wrong because close to that point still. I don't know.
I'm not saying that you're wrong because I'm also speculating.
But the same, like not you in particular, but a lot of ETH people who told me this similar story also said similar stories that Solana could never compete or that Solana is this or Solana is that.
And they were saying that at $8.
And they were saying that at $8, and they're not saying that at $150.
And they're not saying that at $150.
And they're not saying that given the size of their ecosystem now.
So I think Ethereum is not king-made by any means.
The only king-made coin is Bitcoin, and everything else seems to be replaceable.
Yeah, I would agree that Ethereum looks the most fragile i think it's ever looked but
i would also like challenge that with like i think there's literally like two l2s that are
building on it with just i know there's a lot of great the great chains this isn't me cheating on
any other chain but if you account it for like just base and like just world world coin which
is like sam altman's crypto project like just those two are very committed from the people i know to building on l2s and working with ethereum like just those two
alone are gonna be two of the biggest chains in the world and i think both would be like top 10
if not like top five coins and like the near term if base ever even launched like its own coin which
it's not going to um so i think like on that part well one this is recorded so if they ever do launch a token
on base i want that to be noted on this recording because i would never say never
so i want that to be noted on this recording that charlie blackstock said and i quote
base will never launch its own token uh because i i i'd say wait two to three years before you uh
say that statement again.
But like, all right, so you mentioned the two biggest, Sam Altman with WorldCoin and Brian Armstrong with Base and Coinbase, both of which are effectively running public companies now with WorldCoin, with OpenAI basically being a Microsoft wing, right? So it has to run by public security standards. And Coinbase being, I don't know what it is today, but last I looked, it's like between a $50 and $70 billion company. And when it's bull
market, it's like half a trillion, right? So very, very, very valuable company. Let me ask you this.
What happens if the shareholders of both of these public companies decide that they think it's in the
best interest of the company to make its own L1? Like if there was a mathematically financially
sound reason, since they already have the users to go and make an L1, why would they not do that
if the shareholders are demanding it? Yeah, I'm just like skeptical on the premise of like shareholders or like the board demanding
them to do an l1 if they're already doing extremely well i i would see that in like a
very bare case but there's also again i think there's a ton of technical overhead and again
if you're talking about like legal complexity like there's a ton of extra legal complexity
to now create your own security layer and decentralization layer which is what everybody uses ethereum for now so again i think
it's an interesting hypothetical i think we're you know five to ten years out from that like ever
really being a question and i think like things will become a lot more obvious between now and
then well all so i'm not saying you're wrong all i'm saying is there's only one certainty
i can rely on in blockchain and that's how many people use an l1 i can't rely on if an l2 will
always be an l2 they like you could say that that's not going to happen but mathematical
certainty is not is not a part of that equation versus eth L1 being L1 will always be L1 with 100% certainty.
So do you think, would you be shorting Solana now knowing they're going to be launching L2s,
which means they're just fracturing their user base and making everyone less,
less like more malleable as users because they could have a higher opportunity to leave?
Yeah, Jonah, you shorten it? I don't long or short anything in crypto
because there's so much criminal activity in crypto
that it can be manipulated.
I only spot trade in crypto.
I would never trust long or shorting here
because there's no rules.
So if I longed it or if I shorted it,
someone on the other end,
if I had a big enough position,
would find some way to fuck me.
So if you're asking me from the spot side, I think Solana maybe has a few hundred more dollars of upside in this cycle, tops.
So, you know, for me, my personal interest would be investing in new L1s like a SUI.
Or, quite frankly, and this is not with a token, just farming existing L2s as a user participant
because the amount of money I can make will probably outweigh the public interest I put
into those tokens. If you're asking me my honest financial, how I think about my own balance sheet.
It's a great balance. A little bit in the weeds, but I appreciate the thought exercise and the
conversation there. I think it is really interesting to bring it back to chain economics.
I do get what he's saying, though.
The point that Charlie's making is, would I apply my same logic to Solana as I just did to Ethereum?
And the answer is, if it had the same outcome as we have currently, then the answer is yes.
That's awesome stuff.
A little bit technical for Simplify, but maybe we can dive into some more of the details as we go forward in future episodes. Thanks to all my amazing panelists and thanks to our sponsors. A big shout out to Scale, the blockchain that's making WED3 accessible to everyone from your grandbot to your goldfish. The Scale Pacifica V3, they're proving that blockchain doesn't have to be a snooze fest. It can be faster than a runaway roller coaster. It's smoother than a Stefanina brother's brain.
So if you're ready to ditch those dial-up speeds and enter the fast lane in blockchain, check out Scale.
Thanks for being the official chain of Simplified.
Shout out to my brother, Matt Stefanina, who's also DJing in Dubai.
I think as we speak, it's like 2 in the morning over there.
Hope you guys are having fun.
And the fun doesn't have to stop here.
Dive into a delightful world of a law land the official
game of simplified launching soon this browser-based game combines the thrill of casual
board games with the rewards of web 3 earn ygg tokens and abstract xp as you roll across a variety
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Don't miss out on this exciting, exclusive, abstract game.
Shout out to YGG for being one of our sponsors and for kicking off Lawland,
their first flagship game, which is really exciting.
Thanks again, all of our amazing panelists,
Jonah, Alex Popovich, Slayer, TheFarCade,
a.k.a. Charlie, and of course,
we also had ICOBeast on earlier.
Love all you guys. Thanks so much.
We'll be back same time, same place on Monday
for another episode of Simplified,
as well as Wednesdays at 4 p.m. Eastern.
You can catch Gamified. We'll see you guys there.
Thanks so much. And of course, Nock, my lovely co-host.
How could i forget knock Thank you.
