Welcome to our AMA on skill to
Um, just wait for a few more people to join and then we'll kick it off.
Hello, hello, hello, hello. That's it. Indeed. Did you see on Twitter, Tom?
So, name or hiding name? It's very brave, isn't it? No, sorry, I'm logged in through Zilliqa portal.
Oh, I like it. Good maneuver, good maneuver. Yeah, yeah, still not brave enough to actually
venture into Twitter myself very often. Well, I mean, I am on Twitter every day,
don't get me wrong, or X, sorry, I'm on X every day as a lurker just reading about crypto, but
yeah, don't actually ever post anything. I will one day do that.
Yeah, you should be, you should be shilling your podcast that you and your man do on LinkedIn.
Yeah, Fanzone, but with a three instead of an E, so we talk about all things sports and entertainment
but yeah, it's mainly over on LinkedIn. We get listeners, but it is on YouTube and podcasts.
You do get some good guests from there, I must admit. It is entertaining from time to time.
Thanks, mate. Indeed. You just need to convert some of those people onto Zilliqa's chain, Tom.
Yeah, that's the plan. Well, we've actually got, we've got a Zilliqa special coming up soon,
haven't we? We're planning for, yeah, well, that's a sneak preview, haven't seen the invite.
Look forward to it. Talk to the seats.
Right, okay. So we are joined today by some of you may know Matt Dyer, CEO of Zilliqa Technology,
and also our head of business development, Tom Fleeton. And as you can see in the title,
today we're talking about the future of game fight on Zilliqa. So, Tom, do you want to kick
it off and maybe first cover to people what exactly game fight is?
Yeah, I think maybe before you go into that, Tom, I don't know, people who might not know you,
do you want to just, I guess, give a bit of your background and everything else and kind of where
you come from? Yes, good idea. Okay, yeah, so hi, everybody. So my name is Tom Fleeton.
I lead BD for Zilliqa, mainly focused around the sports and gaming areas.
My background, so I've worked in the sports and entertainment industry for a long time.
I used to head up sports and entertainment in the UK for IBM. So I worked with lots of
high profile sports organizations like Liverpool Football Club, St. Andrews Golf, England Rugby,
and others, and then kind of caught somewhere along the line, caught the crypto web three
bargain to join Zilliqa a couple of years ago now, almost two years to the day. And yeah, I've been
I've been working on various initiatives at Zilliqa from work with our esports partners,
as well as our horse racing partner, Racing League, and also contributing on the growth of
web three war and everything we're doing around gaming. So yeah, so that's background on me. Do
you want me to sort of kind of set the scene and talk about why Zilliqa are focused on these areas,
first of all? Yeah, I think just from a perspective, just so everyone understands
our approach, I think a lot of people who know Zilliqa, obviously, there's a lot of focus
around web three war and what we've done there. Obviously, we've got winner's circle coming out,
and we've got a horse token coming with that as well. But I think it's maybe just worth positioning
the macro on Zilliqa's take on where the market is at the moment. So we've got good examples of
the likes of Socius and Chili's in terms of what they're doing. We've got a good example around
Axie Infinity in terms of how they had first move advantage in the last bull market, which
we get to these prices with bitcoins clearly rallying pretty hard at the moment. And I think
it's worth just giving a lens or a perspective on why Zilliqa is taking a slightly different
approach to driving gaming on the chain, just so everyone's kind of got a full appreciation.
It's not just one game that we're kind of looking at. It's more of a holistic play around how we
feel we've got a differentiator. So I don't know if you want to kind of have a stab at that.
Yeah, okay. So yeah, when I joined, it was clear that we'd looked at the gaming and the sports
sectors from the previous bull run. And we'd basically seen that they'd both achieved good
traction, but had flawed models. So if you look at Axie, the growth of that game was insane.
It went from something like 1 billion market cap to 10 billion market cap in less than six months
in the last bull run. You also had fan tokens, mainly through chilis and socios performing
similarly, I think the total kind of fan market cap economy exceeded something like $5 billion
during the last bull run. But obviously, those models weren't proven to be sustainable. And I
think there's various reasons for that. And we feel that we can take a different approach and
create more sustainable models this time alone. So firstly, if you look at the gaming side,
the fundamental problem when it comes to play to earn is that all the players are rewarded
just for playing. So what that means is that if you stop bringing in new players,
you're eventually going to run out of rewards. We just believe that fundamentally, some players
need to be net contributors to the game if you're actually ever going to create a sustainable
economy. The other problems that that model led to is that it incentivizes the use of bots.
If all players get paid for turning up and it doesn't matter actually how good you are,
then why not create thousands of bots to turn up and play the game. And then finally,
if all you care about is the rewards that come back, then actually the quality of the game
doesn't matter at all. So as long as it's kind of passable, it works, then that's kind of good
enough. And we're now clearly seeing a new crop of Web3 games that put gameplay first and they're
much higher quality. That's clearly the case. But I think the jury is still out on the correct
tokenomic model for this game. There is such a thing. There's probably going to be more than
one model, but I think the jury is still out in terms of what works in terms of creating a
sustainable game economy. And our solution to that is skill to earn, which I'm sure we'll go
through in more detail later. Now, on the sports side, again, Chile Socios achieved big things
in terms of the fan tokens and the partnerships that they closed in the last ball run.
But the real problem from a sustainability point of view and from a fan's point of view
is two things. Firstly, there's not a huge amount of utility associated with the tokens.
You can often sort of vote in polls, you can play, you use them for kind of games within
the Socios app, but it's not a particularly compelling experience to be a token holder
of a fan token. And then also there's generally no way to earn the token. So you're not really
rewarded for being a fan. You're just asked to part with money and invest in these tokens.
And then if you don't have significant utility associated with a token like that, then ultimately
the only real reason to buy and hold it becomes speculation. And that's not really what
fan tokens should be about. Yeah, I think that's why possibly they've changed their model slightly,
isn't it, in terms of opening up an EVM or layer one ecosystem to enable that capability. And I
think from our perspective, we're obviously strong from a layer one perspective in terms of what
we've got in place. And I think having laser focus in and around the skill to earn mechanism
that we feel drive sustainability is a narrative that's going to attract a lot of people towards
Zilliqa. And I think, I don't know, Tom, just in terms of strategy as well, obviously people are
probably thinking, right, we've got these esports teams, we've got racing league. What is the kind
of strategy around that? Is that Zilliqa looking to do everything themselves or are they looking
to kind of bootstrap the ecosystem around that? Maybe just talk to that might be quite helpful
for people as well. Yeah, right. So from my perspective, the partnerships that we're,
there's two sides to that. So firstly, the partnerships that we're working on at Zilliqa,
they're complementary, right? So the esports partnerships, they clearly, they clearly add
value in terms of getting new awareness and new players for whether to be war. But then they're
also the esports organizations are also like standalone organizations in themselves, obviously,
they have their own fan bases and their own challenges as a business. And actually, they're
the perfect types of clients for us to work with on the fan token side. And that's something that
we're exploring with all of our esports partners at the moment. So that's the first part.
And then the other thing, when it comes to our partnerships, is we really wanted to
show what good looks like in terms of these two challenges that I've set up from around how we
can create a sustainable model for web gaming, and how we can create fan tokens with genuine
utility and the ability for fans to earn them. And ultimately, once we've rolled out all of these
projects, what we hope is that the wider ecosystem and outside of Zilliqa, the wider crypto ecosystem
can benefit from that, because we're going to build a lot of tools, a lot of infrastructure
that actually can attract other builders in the future to come and experiment and launch their
projects in these areas on the Zilliqa chain. Yeah, I think that's fair. And just in terms of
obviously your background around traditional sport, Tom, why do you think this skill to earn,
I guess, construct would work for that space? Yeah, so I think if you look at the challenge
that sports organisations face today, there's lots, but primarily they all centre around the way that
young people consume content, and the way that they're consuming content differently to
previous generations. So firstly, they expect a lot of interactivity, right? So this is a great
example of what we're doing right now. I'm sure we'll have a bunch of people that expect to be
able to come on stage and ask questions and actually get involved in the discussion. And
that's like a relatively modern phenomena when it comes to content, something that sports,
as an industry, has not really got its head around. And the same can obviously be said to be true
of platforms like Switch, YouTube, and also just the popularity of gaming in general is obviously
a very interactive entertainment for certainly more so the traditional sport.
Younger people are also more likely to follow many sports and not just necessarily
like super dedicated to a single sport. And we're also seeing a lot of evidence that younger people
value their digital world just as much as their physical world, if not more than their physical
world. That's clearly been demonstrated in lots of different ways. And the combination of those
things for sports organizations, it just makes generating loyalty from their fan base a lot more
difficult. And so we really see that skill to earn will give fans firstly more of an interactive
experience. There's actually something for them to do beyond just passively consuming the content.
It will give them an incentive to actually dive deeper and learn more about the sporting question.
If you're going to be incentivized for being a skillful fan, what we mean by that is somebody
that knows a lot about the sport, about the players, about what's going on, then that's
obviously going to lead to a deeper engagement in the sport. And then thirdly, it also gives a way
for sports organizations to actually reward loyalty more effectively. And I think a good example of
this that we've seen coming out of the crypto world is karate combat. So for those who are familiar
with that concept, basically the karate token can be purchased or also also won or it's been
air dropped a lot through various means and then fans can use that token to make their predictions
on who's going to win the upcoming karate combat fights. If they get them right, then they win
more tokens. So I myself received a karate combat airdrop because of an NFT project that helped.
I've never had any interest in karate combat whatsoever, but all of a sudden I find myself
watching highlights clips, checking the results on the internet. So I'm sort of slowly but surely
becoming a lot more interested in that sport purely because they've adopted a kind of web 3
loyalty model around it. And I think it's a good example of how sports organizations can use this
technology to drive greater engagement from their fan bases.
Yeah, and I guess just leaning in on the skill to earn, play to earn kind of model, how do we,
how do you position the benefits I guess of skill to earn against play to earn? I know you've talked
to a little bit, but maybe taking web 3 war as a good example or the horse token with racing league,
how would you articulate that to the to the audience?
Yeah, so I think the sort of basic one is that you can create a sustainable economy which we've
already talked about. Like you can't cross over that if we don't want to create a Ponzi scheme
that relies on new users to be joining all the time for the value to maintain within the project.
But I think it goes a bit beyond that. So firstly, if you look at if you look at actually
the esports industry and our partners that we're working with there, there's kind of no such thing
as a semi pro esports player. If you compare esports to traditional sports, it's very much
an all or nothing sort of situation. And there's also no real defined path to becoming a pro.
You're either good enough or you're not. You're either earning a load of money or you're not
really. And skill to earn actually can provide a place for aspiring pros to start earning money
in gaming before they turn play. And that I think can become something that's really quite huge.
And it can become part of gaming. I'm not saying it's going to take over all gaming,
but I think there's plenty of plenty of games out there that would fancy themselves as
particularly good at one game or another. And if they've got an opportunity to
rewards along the way, that's that's going to be really appealing.
Yeah, and I think we've got a great example. I noticed Valentin just joined the spaces as well.
I think some exciting stuff coming from a skill to earn a mechanic being unlocked in Web3 War,
which I think is going to be a good marker down in terms of the skill to earn mechanics. So we're
really excited to kind of see that come to life as well. I think just other areas just to kind of
focus in on around from a value accrual perspective, obviously, with these independent economies
coming on top of the blockchain in itself. I guess we've talked about awareness from bootstrapping
and showcasing what good looks like. I think it's an important caveat. We're trying to drive
that growth. And then with things like skill to earn and playing against other people, staking
your tokens as a function to get access, it obviously drives TVL and on-chain tokens into
the ecosystem. And any marker of a blockchain around the activity, that's clearly a marker that
people look at. So we're excited about that. I think as we get more people interacting with
applications, whether you call that a DAP or an application in the classic sense, clearly that
drives up the wallets and usage, which is really important. Transactions specifically around smart
contracts is where gases burn. Again, that's what fuels the trajectory of a layer one. And as we've
got more projects building on Zilliqa that have been used by a large number of people, clearly
that's going to drive interactions on the layer one as well, which in turn drives a deflationary
mechanic. So I think from a perspective of looking in at what's happening on Zilliqa, the success of
what we've seen with Web3War, I think some of the teams are building some cool stuff from a DeFi
perspective, where we're going to start to see a lot more liquidity being put into the ecosystem.
I know we've had challenges bridge-wise in recent months, but looking to put some more
resiliency around that in terms of options from a bridging perspective, we're going to make the
Zilliqa ecosystem a lot easier to interact with moving forward. So that for me is also an important
component to think about outside of just the specific games themselves, which is really exciting.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it can, like as this economy grows and as the different experiences
for sports fans and gamers develop, there's no reason why this can't really become a real kind
of thriving sports and entertainment chain and ecosystem. That's what we're pushing towards.
Yeah, so I think just in terms of, I think obviously we've covered off quite a lot there,
I think some exciting stuff, as I say, Web3War activates the Web3 component as people kind of
are talking about. So I'm really excited to see that come alive. I think from a winner's circle,
Tom, I don't know for anything, for people listening in, I don't know if you want to give
a little bit of a story around what that's all about as well. Yeah, sure. So Racing League or a
horse racing organization that we've partnered with, they've actually launched the first team
based horse racing competition in the UK and it's all, their organization's all about giving
fans of horse racing new ways to engage in the sport beyond just sort of placing a bet. And so
once we understood that, we realized they're a partner that's, it was right up our street in
terms of what we're looking to build out with skill to earn from a sports perspective. And what
that's going to mean in practice is a number of things. So firstly, there's a loyalty side to
rewards side to what we're building with the winner's circle. And the winner's circle by the
way is the name of the basically like exclusive club for Racing League that we're going to be
launching soon. There's going to be the reward side where people that participate in the winner's
circle can vote on various decisions that are related to Racing League. They're also going to
get discounts on things like actually owning a share in the racehorse, tickets for horse racing
events, merchandise, all that good stuff. But then there's also going to be a gamified side to the
experience, which is where skill to earn comes in. And that's going to be all about basically
making correct predictions, both in real life horse racing horse races, and then ultimately also
in a kind of virtual environment. And we're really excited about rolling out those features over time
and making that experience increasingly rich as we kind of get through the roadmap.
And ultimately what it's going to give horse racing fans is not just new experiences, but also the
opportunity to earn rewards for the skill and knowledge that they build up over time for being
a fan of horse racing. Exciting. Pretty bullish on that one as well, to be honest. I'm not meant
to say that, but that is an exciting opportunity. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I think I guess in a
nutshell, we're kind of building what we think is something really exciting. I think it's going to
encourage a lot more developers to come and build on Zilliqa. And I think what Valentin and the crew
of building out from a web3war perspective is really exciting. I don't know if Valentin's here
as well. I don't know if Valentin, do you want to kind of give the listeners an update quickly on
where we're at in terms of web3war and what's coming? I don't know, Isaac, before we open the
floor to a Q&A, a bit of an impromptu, eat it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Yeah, I think
it's an exciting opportunity. Yeah, I've sent an invite to Valentin. So if you're there, Valentin,
feel free to jump on, give the people what they want.
I need some elevator music now. Yeah, in the meantime, if anyone else has got questions,
then feel free to raise your hand. Hello, hello. Hello. Hey, how are you doing, sir?
Oh, great. Only great news. Thank you. Thank you, Isaac. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Matt,
for having me. Hello, everybody. Great news. When you guys see me busy, we're not joining
one time on stuff because we are working here. We have great news. We finished all the tests.
It's all there. No bugs, nothing on the middleware, nothing on the hub, nothing on the game.
It's already unprepared. I'm just playing with the boys of final, what we call the final
grandmaster or gold master test. The entire Zilliqa team is invited. Sorry, guys. We cannot
open to everybody outside the company because there are some exposure to some very nasty stuff
that we cannot do it. But tomorrow, before some of you wake up, version 3.0 of the game will be live.
Hub 3.3 will be live. Skill2ware will be there with the ranked matches. Season 1 in the past will
be there available for everybody. Oh, and we have so many other surprises, a big collection of NFTs.
We are so excited, guys. We are there. No more promises about it to come. It will be, no, no, no.
You guys can play and earn now. We can win and earn. So, I want to see all the other games,
so-called games, which are more like Netflix videos, where they are at. Because we, from
Link Thunder, as part of Zilliqa group, we did it. We're there tomorrow. We're going to be live.
Congratulations, mate. Thank you. Long time. So, thanks for coming in. So, I don't know,
Isaac, do you want to open up questions to the floor or what do you think?
Absolutely. If anyone would like to ask a question, either in the comments or if you want to be
invited up to speak, then feel free to make the request. Skill2earn starts tomorrow, 28th of
February, 2024. I just wish I had some skill. It's the only problem. Skill2earn. A lot of hard
work has gone into this one. I'll tell you what, I've just discovered that I've got a soundboard
here. We could actually make it into like a game show. Anyone have any questions, either from Matt,
Tom or Valentin while he's here? Or are you all just absorbing all the juicy goodness of the spaces?
Yeah, no worries. So, I hope everybody's enjoyed this format. It'd be great to get some feedback
on whether this type of engagement with the community works. We're definitely up for doing
more of this kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let us know.
Great. Well, thanks for joining, guys. I think we're good on questions from what I can see.
Oh, we've got one from Zilliman saying, what's the time that the game releases?
And will the network be hyping from Asia?
Yeah. So, tomorrow, in UTC, it should be between 10 and 11. It's only a matter of how much the
upload of the update takes. All the multiplayer servers are up and running by default. They are
serviced multiplayer. So, it's not something we can lower down. It's a company called Photon,
the same one as in the game called Escape Ontarco. So, when the update is done and you guys update
and I beg you to uninstall everything and install fresh, just so we avoid any kind of headaches,
you guys can jump in, swap up your zeros to FPS and start playing. Start winning and then start
learning. Amazing. So, if you're... I don't know what you're based, Zilliman, but for Singapore
time, that'll be about 7, 8 p.m. in the evening. Sorry. If you have any time, check it out.
One more question before we go is from Georgia Todd. When Moon?
I think the Moon started, isn't it? We're almost there.
The rocket's firing up. Yeah. I think, due to the side, it's an exciting time. I think we're just
really bootstrapping hard and say Web3 War is the first one. We've got a lot more coming down the
pipe. As I say, DeFi is being expanded as well. It's an exciting time to be part of the Zilliqa
ecosystem and I'm super excited to see more and more projects coming and building on top of what
we're putting forth. I think with Zilliqa 2.0 as well, we're going to start to make some announcements
around what we're building there in the next few weeks, all in all, as we kind of move into this
next phase of the market cycle. I think Zilliqa is going to be well-placed to be part of the story.
Isaac said, thanks very much for giving up your time. I know everyone's really busy,
probably watching the market, seeing what's going on, but the support is appreciated
and we look forward to accelerating the pace of change on Zilliqa. Thank you.
A perfect ending. Thanks everyone. Appreciate you tuning in and we'll catch you again.