Hey, Rebecca, how are you doing? Hey, Marco, I'm good. How are you?
I'm doing great. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited. Awesome. Same here. It's been awesome since we've done one of those and very often it's that we get to talk to an actual game for the same structure so to be able to chance things around a bit today is pretty
exciting just to talk about the infrastructure and stats so yeah I'm really excited. Yeah yeah yeah thanks so much for having us on yeah this this will be this will be really good and I think you'll you get some really great questions from your community as well. Awesome yeah we'll we'll find out like a set it's
A little bit late in many people are the time zones, but luckily we're recording the space. So I would say we'll just give it one more minute for people to slowly enter the room. And other than that I would say, you know, then we could probably just get started with the AMA.
I think that's the best way to do it. Very cool. Awesome. Yeah, so we've already had a few community questions and I added them to basically a whole bunch of questions that I prepared myself that I think are really valuable to go over today for both people listening
online as well as those listening back to the recording. So yeah, I think, you know, just briefly covers what you're doing, what your background is, also just talk about the infrastructure in general, the industry in general. So yeah, I think there's actually a whole bunch to cover outside.
Yes, there's no shortage of topics. It was interesting. I was talking to someone who was not yet in Web 3, but they were looking to develop a game. They asked a question that just kind of made me do a double take, which was, so given that it's a very
I mean, this is the time when people are building. I mean, for people who are newer to the space, I mean, you just don't know.
last two years, if you're traveling all around the world, your telegram became like a spam machine. It was just, right? I mean, it's hard to group up with all the stimulus and it's amazing for growth if you can harness it, but it's very, very hard to build in that environment. So this is the opportunity to
to build. And I'm excited. I mean, it's a lot happening in this space. And Merit Circle, I mean, the community that you guys have built, all the members who are a part of your DAO, your ecosystem, or just, I mean, they're at the cutting edge of gaming. And you guys have really opened up this world. So yeah, this is just--
It's so amazing. It's been a crazy year out. We looked at the beginning of the marathon circle, we were just as color-ship-guilt. The majority of our audience were people just looking to play the games or in a quickbuck. That's about it, right? If we look at the Q&A today, sure
We're changing our strategies so we're going to be in the midst of between this scholarship audience versus people that are actually interested in the tech. The game is like a bigger portion of it that are actually looking for fun games to play. If you look at general turnout in AMAs,
in Tweed Shirt, the general audience size is smaller, but I would say the ones that are staying throughout this building season are actually very engaged and very excited and quite frankly they are the people, I mean you guys listening here, now two you are the people that essentially will also thrive during the boom or
by just helping us to basically provide feedback during the building season, things like that. So yeah, it's very exciting, awesome. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I think you know, throughout the next 30 minutes ish, I think I've got a whole bunch of questions
to go through with you and just get your whole take on the industry. But I think before getting into that, how about we just start by introducing yourself? Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is? Yeah, absolutely. Well, Mark, thanks again for having me on. So I'm for the actual layout. I'm
CoFounder and CEO here at Saga. So Saga is my second crypto startup. My first one was called SQ Chain. That was more in the DeFi space and it focused on providing short-term liquidity for small medium-sized businesses. My co-founder for SQ Chain was Zaki Manian, who's one of the original builders in Cosmos.
And I was co-founder and COO there for about four years. I built the platform up to about five billion in annual volume. And when we hit that milestone in early 2021, that's when I started to think to myself, okay, you know, I think I'm ready for a new challenge. So I started to look around to what else was happening.
in crypto. Before crypto, I was in AI. So I started my tech career in the AI space with the startup called Clobality, which provided AI based procurement for international services. I was an early employee
their head of business development, I stood up and ran their Asia operations as well. Within a year and a half we got back to my soft bank. So it was a very fast-paced growth that we enjoyed. But that was also around 2016 timeframe that I started to look around.