Hello, hello GM GM. Sorry. We're doing a little technical problem here. Hang on.
So, yeah, yeah, I am like white.
It's an incredible struggle. Two-point-there are a whole of people that see technology as a potential to improve lives.
Here at Web Summit we have so many doers, more people who just have a voice than people want to hear. We are old Rowan. That's what makes the Web Summit such a good place. One way that democracy dies is that people believe that their vote doesn't count. The status quo does not have to win.
We're living in an era where facts are under assault. Every human being deserves the dignity of the trade. People are courageous and they should never have to decide between their careers or their careers.
We are the champions that we have been waiting for. Activism comes in all different shapes and sizes. We want to have a better future. We want to have a future. Now it's time for hope. We've got five. For that hope. It's a long journey. Let's get to the beginning.
Hello, James, everybody. Sorry about the little technical problem there, but we are live here. My name is Casey Lau and as some of you may know, on the co-host of Web Summit and we're turning to Lisbon, Portugal this November
first to the fourth. We have a massive Web 3 presence across all our stages this year and we wanted to spotlight some of the speakers and startups that will be there in November. So for the next four weeks or so we'll be doing these Web 3 startup Twitter space round tables to get some of the conversations that will be at the topics of the day
come November. Today I'm very excited to kick it all off with Robbie Young, the CEO of Animoca Brands, who's joining us. And we also have assembled three startups who are exhibiting at Web Summit to ask Robbie's questions that hopefully will be relevant to all the startups attending. If you're in Web 3 or not, this should be a very informative
look of what is happening in the space. I will also leave some time at the end for audience questions. So the best thing for you to do if this is your first time in the kind of a newer Twitter space, there's a button at the bottom with a little like bubble. And right now it says to lead you back to the main tweet here. I would suggest you tweet your question and then toward the end I will
pick the best ones and bring you on stage so you can ask Robbie directly. Okay, so let's do this. So for some of you who are living under a rock, anemoka brands is the leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification, and is working to advance digital property rights and contributing to the establishment of an open
Metaverse. They have a broad portfolio of products from blockchain games to investing in the sandbox, Axi Infinity, Dapper Labs, and more. Robbie Young is a CEO and has been a leadership position for almost 10 years, Robbie. He's currently building out the North American business. Welcome, Robbie Young.
Hi Casey, it's great to be here and yeah it feels feels like all times I mean because here we are in Web 3 and and God you you and I have known each other since Web 1 to show to show our to show our age on
Web 1, it's very funny to tell people about Web 1 and how a lot of parallel from today what's happening in Web 3. So it's so excited to have you. So let's just jump right into it. I'm going to answer a few questions before I bring the startups on to the stage.
to ask you directly. I see you're traveling all over the world, and you're based in the United Kingdom. Anomocus-based Asia. What do you see now as the hottest regions for Web 3 right now?
Good question. I don't know that there's especially a hot region for Web 3 because the beauty of it is, you know, it's kind of like it does what it says on the tin. It's about decentralization. So one thing that I think I've noticed that I think is quite special about the Web 3.
community is that actually we don't see a huge sort of concentration of successful businesses in Web 3 in just one place. I mean if you look at all of the great companies in Web 3 who are leading the space and who've been in it for a while,
They could literally be from anywhere. They could be from Latin America or Asia or Central Europe or Western Europe. It doesn't matter. And I think that's the beauty is that Web 3 as a platform because it's essentially got the payment and the security and everything built into it. It allows people to operate.
from anywhere. And that's why it's thrived so much during the pandemic period because people were able to come together online when they couldn't come together in person and start new businesses and collaborate with each other and actually frankly build big companies in the absence of physical presence.
Yeah, that's that's amazing, but you know every time I turn on the news I see you guys are raising new multi million dollar rounds We're in a down market kind of right now in crypto, but it seemed like you guys are doing well What does the investment market look to you? I guess right now as we enter quarter four and into quarter one at 20
there in November. And I think what you find in common at these events within the Web 3 community is a tremendous amount of energy, positivity, and optimism. I think if you just read the headlines about the so-called crypto winter that we're experiencing at the moment, I think you'd be
surprised if you went to one of these events to actually realize that there is any such thing going on because the energy of the people in the space building is really infectious and when it comes to fundraising. Frankly, we've made a lot of investments in the space. We're one of the most active investors in Web
and many of the companies that we've invested in continue to raise capital, you know, ed increasing valuations during this period. I think one thing that's happened, though, is obviously the rate and the pace of investing has slowed down, so we as an investor also take our time more so than we might have done nine months ago or
a year and a half ago. But I think deals are still getting done. There's lots of capital available in the space. It's just that the bar has gotten a little bit higher. And investors are in a position where they can demand seeing more of a proof of concept, at least rather than just a great idea.
That's interesting. So with that investment kind of thesis, do you see any opportunity? So, you know, that was kind of a mad rush earlier this year. You're right. A lot of people raised off of just the imaginary deck. But now we're looking for a little bit more solid stuff. But do you see any specific
articles in Web 3 that you think don't have enough attention paid to it. And that you think a start-up should launch into. So I think there's a combination of things. I think that there are places where you can be still somewhat of a first mover and there are places that are just that have so much depth of opportunity that I
I think it doesn't matter whether you're first or not. So in the latter category, I would put games because that's where we spend most of our times and the game industry and the game community is vast. You're talking about $200 billion a year that gets spent on games and this transition to Web 3 has already
begun and we see about 10% of spending in games going into Web 3 enabled games, but it's only just started. So I think there, despite the fact that a lot of people are already in the space making games, I would encourage everybody who makes and is involved in the game business to come to Web 3 and
see what it's about. I think there are other areas which have had less attention focused on them. So for example, education. I think education is an industry which is ripe for Web3 adoption because one of the things that Web3 does so brilliantly is create incentive and reward mechanisms
for people building content for content creators and of course teachers and educators are some of the biggest content creators in the world and so figuring out a way to enable them to monetize and track the royalties of their content and be rewarded for all that content that they create in an education
I think will be transformational.
have you unmute and say hello to Robbie and ask your first question. Hello everyone, thanks for having me here. And the question is that in previous talks, Robbie, I heard you mentioned digital identities and important trends in lab 3. What is particularly missing on the way for
or portable profiles and reputation and what to focus on as a developer. This is a big topic because there are so many aspects to it. I think digital identity we can think of in two different kinds of buckets. I'd say there's kind of a technical bucket and there's a
consumer bucket. So the part you're asking about, I would classify as the technical bucket, meaning that we can think about how Web3 can enable us to transform our digital identity across various properties within Web3. So how do we
established that identity, does that take the form of a wallet, for example, or some kind of identification token that allows us to be identified and secure, and yet, and a way in which we're respecting the privacy of individual users. Because obviously, one of the things that we hope from Web 3 is that
We will add additional agency for users over their own privacy. So people will be much better able to control their own privacy and their own personal information. And I think that there are many companies working across the tech stack of providing these different types of
identity enablers and most of them tend to be driven by an application for a specific industry. So they focus on how do we tackle the problem of healthcare records or how do we tackle the problem of an identity for the purpose of financial transactions. So they tend to be a
find more driven by application just because the area itself is so vast. One way in which we're addressing this is we actually have a joint venture with a company called HexTrust and we are developing a wallet or have, I should say, developed a wallet together with them and the wallet which is called Griffin
focuses on being a regulated product with KYC built into the wallet because one of the things that's quite true across Web 3 is that as services to consumers and businesses become more and more mature, KYC is an inevitable part of entering the global financial system as these
products mature and doing KYC is cumbersome. Nobody likes to do it. And so our thesis was if we could build KYC into the wallet so that the wallet itself has been KYC'd and you do it once with the wallet, then new merchants and applications can choose to support that wallet and
on board that user without having to do KYC again. So that's one area in which we're tackling it. I think the second bucket to go back to your original question for identity is also thinking about how do we self-identify online, meaning are we anonymous, do we have an avatar, do we choose our favorite PF
P project as our identity. And I think that's also from a consumer standpoint, a big category of Web 3 native IP companies thinking about how they can help consumers to represent their identity from a personalization aspect online. And I think that's a big part of digital culture in Web 3.
All right, I think I can follow up shortly on the latter aspect. So what do you think is more beneficial to develop sort of the product side of the digital representation or to work on standardization and develop something beyond 10 of T's towards like very high book that
shows and of change identity properties. So I can tell you which one is easier. The consumer products are always going to be easier because they will live and die on community adoption whereas I think the technical challenges are always, always harder and adopt
And we're talking standards in the industry is really hard. It's one of the reasons that we've tried to come together with some of our friends in the industry to form this open metaverse alliance for Web 3, OMA 3, because we felt like we just needed to have a forum where we could all be in the same room together.
virtually or otherwise. But talk through some of these issues of like how do we get this stuff to work together because you know we have no interest in controlling standards because that's not the point of Web 3 but it's to the benefit of everybody in the community if we at least establish some of these standards
So everybody knows, look, these are roughly the rules. And if you want our stuff to work together, then if you could follow these five or ten guidelines, then these are the best practices of how we can get our stuff to work together because if we don't, then we're missing a trick because that's really one of the big benefits of Web 3.
I'm going to pull up Sasha here. Sasha is doing some mining, green mining. Sasha, what kind of question would you have for Robbie? Yeah, thank you very much. First of all, thank you for putting this together. It's a pleasure to be online. Sorry for my voice. I'm a little bit sick today as October Fest flu is going around in
Germany. Yeah, thank you for the chance to stay questions directly to you, Robbie. I'm more coming from the like combination of real world and digital world or kind of meta level rather than deep down the tech as we're doing the combination of both worlds in real world and digital world. I
I would love to hear from your opinion on more and more activities like you mentioned gaming and also education and I could imagine there's a few more moving into the digital world, namely web free. Do you see any challenges for humanity, society? And if so, what challenges do you think could those be?
So I think the biggest challenge I see at the moment is kind of one that's most visible in Web2 products, which I think is just how do we deal with human behavior online because unfortunately human behavior is as diverse as humanity.
So there's good and bad. And I see a lot of struggles from governments in thinking how do we monitor online content and provide safe environments online for people and deal with people who don't act inappropriate ways and how do we decide what's appropriate and what isn't appropriate.
I'm and there are no easy answers to those issues, but I'd like to think that in a Web 3 context, we at least will have a lot more say in how this happens because Web 3 is all about building spaces that are community driven and community led.
as opposed to top down. And I think of it kind of in an analogy similar to what we have in the physical world where if I own a shop in the physical world and somebody comes into my shop and starts harassing my customers and acting inappropriately, it's my job as the shopkeeper to say something because
It's my shop and it's my space and I feel a responsibility to my other customers to deal with it. And that's something I think that comes from the idea of ownership. And in Web 2 online spaces, we as community members don't really own those spaces. You know, we just all
We're just all renters in this ecosystem. And so I think in a web three context, once we start to have more and more ownership of digital spaces and the digital property within them, we will feel like we have a stake at also investing ourselves in more self-policing of our online communities. So I think that's one aspect of
bit. I think the second part is because the revenue models of Web 3 are changing, how we monetize our behaviors online, not everything will be contingent on advertising. The problem with Web 2 is everything is focused on advertising. That's how we've built this attention economy.
So as a result, applications sole purpose is generally to see how long they can keep you online in order to show you as many ads as possible. This is what streaming services are all about. And so as a result, we end up with what could potentially be unhealthy behaviors and habits.
because we're being driven towards spending all this time online. Whereas I think Web 3 actually will end up being much more like our physical lives. You will spend some time online and you will spend time offline. But you will still be spending a lot of money online, engaging in commerce, buying things because
because you own them and investing in things. And so it would be less important how much time you spend versus how much money you're spending. And because it happens directly through commerce, then I think companies will be able to thrive based on smaller audiences and less attention. And I think that's actually quite a healthy transformation.
Fantastic. Thank you for the input. Let me build up on that. You talked about bad behavior or not bad, but human behavior in general. If I look into, or if I look at companies in our real world, be it Nestler, Coca-Cola, or I could name a few
I don't want to finger point but there's probably companies out there that not always behave ideal. Do you think consensus mechanisms from the web free world could have a positive impact on let's say IRL in real life 3.0?
Yes, for sure because I think what's happening is that Web 3 and this goes back to You know me kind of teasing Casey at the beginning of this about how we've been in this industry for a very long time, but I noticed that a lot of people who are Around for Web 1 are really excited about what's happening
in Web 3 because it goes to the heart of what we feel like was the original mission of the Internet, which was to disseminate information as widely as possible for the benefit of as many people as possible. That's the purpose of it. It's not supposed to be to accumulate wealth and power, etc. in a small
that's not, you know. And I think the internet has been an incredible global equalizer for this purpose. And with Web 2, unfortunately, we've taken a little bit of a step back only because we've traded off so much value in exchange for convenience. I would be the
first person to admit the fact that I can find almost any music I would want to listen to on Spotify is really convenient. But there is a cost to that. And so I think we have to think about, you know, there's a cost to the creators of that content, there's a cost to all over the system that maybe is not
necessarily worth that ease of use necessarily. So I think when we look at what's being built in Web 3, it's quite exciting to me that we have a chance now to level the playing fields and the first point of level the
The leveling met playing field is through the financial inclusion that comes with the benefits of blockchain. Because now the payment method is built into the platform. It means that anybody can start an application and receive revenue from day one without having to open a credit card merchant account and all this other
infrastructure of business that is necessary, but unfortunately, slightly exclusionary because it's only accessible to people in very developed economies typically. Yeah, that's great. Totally agree. Casey, I know you stated two questions. Could I ask
One more I just will come back to you. I'm not gonna stop it there. I'm gonna make sure that sir go also has a chance to say something so sir go is from a company called Ludo and Ludo. Um sir gay you one of the questions you talked to me about was you're talking about the fragmentation in the metaverse maybe you want to ask that to Robbie.
Yeah, thank you for the invite KC and thank you for taking the time, Robbie, to answer all questions today. So putting my head off Metaverse user and of NFT Collector, I'm super fascinating of the traction the things are getting on different industries, art,
the world's virtual world gaming and so on. But one of the main challenges that I see in this space is the fragmentation of the space. There are many blockchain solutions competing each other and there are many apps and marketplaces. And for me, being a user of the web space and especially of the metaverse, it's very
difficult to stay always updated with the latest opportunity for myself that much my interest. What do you think is the solution? What do you think the solution and other challenges may be related to this Robbie? That's a good question. I think there's not
There's not an ECN search to it because it feels a little bit and I totally see where you're coming from. I think some of the fragmentation feels like when we think about the web before we had really really good search and a good search engine because then that search engine became our initial sort of
So content discovery is going to be very hard. And that's why I think right now we still rely on a lot of web 2 platforms that have relatively large audiences, places like Twitter, places like Discord. And so often we find our content.
communities and our content through word of mouth of other people who are engaged in the same interests and the same hobbies, but largely leveraging these web 2 platforms. So I do think that there's an opportunity in Web 3 for people to index and curate content and provide these navigators
tools to the metaverse. And we invested, for example, in a company who is just trying to index game projects and talk about the token ecosystem of game projects so that people, you know, so that it's essentially, imagine a marketplace like
like OpenC but just specifically focused on games because they want to have more information, they want it to be more feature rich for things that gamers like specifically because they feel like one size fits all marketplace is not appropriate. So I think more and more of these services will pop up and frankly these are tremendous opportunities
for builders in the space who have great ideas in thinking about how they can provide guidance to this. So I agree with you. It's highly necessary, but I do think that it points to an opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. And the next question that they have for you being the CEO of Alimoka,
applications versus infrastructure in Web 3 and token versus equity investment. I would like to understand your opinion. So the first thing I'll say is we like all of them. And we've invested in all of them.
I think it depends on like applications and infrastructure is not a you know, it's not an either or I mean both of them are important. It depends on it It depends really on a product market fit But I do think that we're going to see a wider range of
infrastructure than in previous generations because I don't think that the point of Web 3 is for us to you know four years from now all be on the same blockchain because one blockchain wins do you know what I mean that's not the point of Web 3 I think the point of Web 3 is that we can enable a highly fragmented
universe to be interoperable so that to the user experience it doesn't feel fragmented. So my dream scenario of Web 3 is that there are millions of tokens and hundreds of logchains out there, but from a user perspective you don't necessarily need to be aware of all of them. It's just that when you go to your favorite app
There's an in-app currency there that rewards that application user and incentivizes them. But whether you hold one token or a million tokens, it doesn't matter because they're all exchangeable to each other. And so from a user experience standpoint, everything is seamless.
I think we're headed in that direction and that's why we actively support a multi chain ecosystem because we think having this diversity of choice and this healthy competition amongst people developing technologies is really important for the growth and flourishing of the ecosystem.
And we look at investments, obviously we don't choose between application or infrastructure because we like both of them. And honestly, if you look at our portfolio of investments, we probably have about 40% in infrastructure and about 60% in applications. And in terms of equity and token, we don't
We're in Web 3, we prefer to always have some kind of path towards owning tokens in a project because that is the heart and soul of the project. That's where value will be built in being part of the network that binds all of our
us, having tokens across various blockchains. So in projects where we may take an equity position, we always have a view towards eventually a token position as well. Thank you. That's a great question, Serge. Don't worry. I'll be to come back to you again. Don't worry. Before I go back to Tatiana for our next question, if anybody
in the audience. I see some people requesting to speak. Just drop a question and the bottom right corner. There's a number six there now with a little bubble. Drop your Twitter question for Robbie. Robbie has a hard stop in 24 minutes. So we're going to get through this as fast as possible. Tatiana, this is your last question. Go for it.
Yeah, we touched slightly the problem of this Ron incentives in Web 2 towards advertising and this tension economy right and there is a conversation how Web 3 can create ethical data market with user as a center of it, but it's
It seems to be a long way to go, and there is a lot of educational and maybe level like mental model barrier towards it. So what's to take, how we can get more adoption in these types of products that facilitates this reversed attention model?
So I think the way I view it is, I think, an ownership economy is so fundamentally different. And I like to make the analogy of, you know, we make a lot of racing games. So I make a lot of games with cars and motorcycles. So I think about the car industry a lot.
And if I think about the car industry, if you are a car manufacturer like Volkswagen and you sell a car to a consumer, you don't actually care how much they drive the car. It's not important. It's the fact that they purchased a car from you because that's how you make your revenue. There may be service and other things
other things you can sort of upsell them on later, but primarily they're buying a car from you. And the problem is with our digital stuff because we have not had digital ownership before that model has been impossible. So if imagine if you applied the digital model of Web2, the
and economy model to car ownership, then they would be demanding that you drive your car for 23 hours a day and spend as much time behind the wheel as possible, which is crazy. And so if you look at a project, you know, we have a well-known project, user-generated content project called the Sandbox, and the way I view how people
people spend their time in the sandbox, I think the important thing is we think about new metrics of how we judge success in our industry. So one success level of course is engagement. So in traditional products we always look to daily active users or monthly active users or paying users
this kind of thing. But in something like the sandbox, the model is completely different because actually it's 100% paying users. Everybody who comes to the sandbox has bought an avatar or they have bought land or you know they are invested into the economy. And so I actually don't mind
as much how much time they're spending there because if they choose to spend a lot of money instead of time that's okay too because that's good for the community. They can buy assets and then you know give those assets to guilds and other players can use them and you know there are many different ways in which you can be a contributor
to the ecosystem, just like in the physical world, whereas in a Web 2 context, the only way you can really contribute to the ecosystem usually is by spending a lot of time. So I think I just try to encourage companies, especially outside the Web 3 sector,
to take a look at what we're doing here and to consider what the implications are of Web 3 on what they already do. Because I think the key to education is going to be onboarding companies and brands that consumers are familiar with and that will help them to engage more with what we do in a Web 3 context.
Very cool. Sasha, go ahead. Now is your second question. Cool. Thank you so much. I want to follow up on the comments that you made, Robbie, about Web 3 and Grid Live 3. I think we agree, or I would say I agree with Web 3 and consensus mechanisms.
community build organizations are kind of a basis to create a whole new world here like also in real life and you were talking a lot about payment systems and capital and money being used and send and transfer and so forth. What is your opinion on a
Bitcoin is supposedly the magic internet money but also seen as potentially the future global reserve currency. Do you think that Bitcoin is going to be the web free currency that we use, let's say, over lightning network one day to transact even small portions on small transactions or do you see it's going to be some
like use DT or do you actually see that there's multiple currencies being used in multiple worlds or versus yeah with different use cases on each of them. So I think that's at least at the moment you know I don't have a crystal ball but my personal view is that I think that
we'll see a multiplicity of currencies. Although I think we'll think differently about what it means to be a currency because the beauty of tokens is they enable us to use, we can use those tokens as ways to exchange value.
also just as ways to verify identity or verify anything, basically, proof of anything. And so I think the role of Bitcoin from what I've observed over the last several years seems to be as the reserve currency of Web 3.
But the thing about Bitcoin that has made it easy for people to understand is also the thing that has held it back from growing more in my opinion, meaning that it just has one purpose. You buy it and you sell it. And that's it. You can hold
it obviously, but you buy it and you sell it. And so that's why I think the comparison to gold is often very appropriate. And Bitcoin provides a great reference within the ecosystem of so many Web3 created tokenized currencies. But I think for individual projects,
It makes a lot of sense for them to consider having their own tokens as a way to reward and incentivize their own communities. Because those tokens not only facilitate the exchange of value but facilitate signifiers of membership or ownership
or voting rights, you know, membership of a DAO, so many other things. And so I think that for projects themselves, they would be missing an opportunity to engage more broadly and deeply with their customers and their fans by limiting themselves to sort of a
a payment methodology alone. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's great. Hey, Sir Do, you have a question I think you should ask Robbie because this is also something I hear a lot of. It is, what is the biggest problem for metaverse creators currently? You have two pieces, this is question number five.
Yeah. So, so, so, so, should I go with the, with the question because it's related to this one, to the, to the creative part. So, so, so, so, should I go with the, with the question because it's related to this one, to the, to the creative part. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so,#
excited because I'm one of their users and I was very excited to see how it works and to check my nfp portfolio on their app. And unfortunately I had a similar experience like I previously had with other portfolio management instruments.
maybe half or 50% or 60% of my NFTs were there. And we all know what this is happening because many files of the NFTs are hosted on IPFS and other decentralized systems. We all like decentralized systems and that's why we're doing this. But in the same time, this has a downside.
which is related to user experience. Some of those media files cannot be downloaded in almost real time at a 2 megabytes per second speed. And as a user of this type of decentralized app, you again have a bad experience. So Robbie, what is your what is your opinion about specific layers
specific repositories, which are basically caching part of the data with a goal of providing a better user experience until the moment when different Web 3 infrastructure will be able to increase the speed to serve this type of data in real time. So I'm I think from
philosophical perspective, I'm not a maximalist of any type. I try to be quite pragmatic about the business approach and perhaps this comes from spending so many years working in Asia, you know, we're very pragmatic about just trying to solve problems and get them done and move forward and maybe this is
solution is only an 80% or 90% solution, but rather than spending too much time to get to 100%. And so I think I agree with you. This is an issue. But it is very important also to maintain decentralized storage of files and
and to honor the purpose of decentralization because when I think of it, you know, from our perspective as a company, when we sell a customer an NFT and tell them that this NFT is forever, we need to ensure that to the best of our ability, it will be forever. Because otherwise, we're not honoring our promise to our customers.
customer. And so it's incumbent on us to use whatever technologies are available to try to make that happen. And I think, again, you know, this points to the tremendous amount of opportunities that exist out there because, as you said, maybe caching content is a great intermediary solution.
And I would not be opposed to that myself because I think it's realistic that we need to make a transition to Web 3. We can't just jump into full decentralization overnight. And I'm a big believer in the fact that we should have interim solutions. For example, a lot of the games that I've been investing in recently and some of
them that we build in our own studios are what we would call Web 2.5 games. Ways in which we can onboard users in traditional Web 2 channels as well as Web 3 channels so that not everybody who participates in the same game has to have a wallet and has to own things that are tokenized because the
experience is not for everybody yet. We think there are great reasons that you should be fully Web 3, but we recognize that not all consumers are ready for that or want that or even know what that is at this point. So we have to figure out how best to accommodate everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Arby. Sir,
Did you just want to ask that? I think that's one of the questions you had was very good. It's like in hiring actually, right? That there's a lack of developers that are in Web 3. Is that hindering? Do you think Robbie the problem? Or yeah, sort of go ahead and ask him. Yeah, so again, from a developer perspective, we've seen that the
You know, for the web to they are a lot of instruments of tools build special special for developers to make it easier for them to develop apps from for web 3. Those things are being created right now part of them are decentralized again part of them are centralized but on this I would like to hear your opinion on what do you think
are the low-hanging fruits or what is needed by the creators? Now what are the biggest challenges of the creators? What they need currently to speed up the development process? What's your opinion on this, please? I don't think there's an easy answer to this, unfortunately. I mean, my self-interested answer is, oh, well, go build
of the sandbox that we have lots of easy tools. But I think the hard part, I mean recruitment is very hard. I think the only benefit that we have in Web 3 with recruitment is that actually we can recruit now from anywhere. And one of the things that we as a company, you know,
made kind of as a policy around a year ago is we realized that we no longer needed to think about forcing people to move physically to Hong Kong where our headquarters is because they don't need to all be based there necessarily. They will need to travel and spend time
because we can't work together without some level of human face-to-face contact at some point. But I think it's realistic for people to spend a lot of their time working remotely. And it allows us to be able to take advantage of the incredible pools of talent that exist. Can you hear us?
And it enables us to take advantage of all those pools of talent that exists in many places around the world. I think also what I've seen is there are a lot of people working on what I would call loose
mostly called middleware in Web 3 focused on mainly two buckets, one being financial applications and the other one being games related applications because I think those are the biggest use cases at the moment.
and trying to figure out, you know, to provide tools for developers so that they can much more easily enable Web3 mechanics and technologies within their applications. Thank you.
So any other questions? Thanks, Robbie. I got, I got rugged on my own thing. It's terrible. I think what we're going to do is I'm going to take some of the questions that were posted on the Twitter for you as you have just 10 minutes left. I got a question here from Twitter account
ZRO.Eath and they're building a socialization layer powered by AI for the metaverse. How do you see the role of socialization will play in immersive games and how does it differ or not from today's gaming communities? Good question. Yes.
So I think socialization will feel different. Well, here's here's something for people who are familiar with games. It's interesting to look back on the history of games because there are there's a very small handful of games that have persisted for a very long time. And I think the most notable or the example is a game called Ivan line, which you might all be familiar with. And Ivan
Online has been around for 20 years and has been hugely successful, you know, over a billion dollars of revenue. And they have some of the most rabid fans. I mean, that was one of the first online spaces where they had players in the game getting married, who met each other in the game and they have meetups and it's
It's a really, really, really engaged community. And the interesting thing is that it looks a lot like a blockchain game actually, because the level of commitment of the players in the game have basically resulted in the in-game assets and that
in-game economy having value because there is so much of a bond of trust between the players that they have what's essentially a Web 3 economy with no blockchain. But it's because it took all of that amount of time for those community connections to build up within their community.
where as we can accelerate that process in a blockchain game because we can use the blockchain to provide that layer of trust in between everybody. So we can get to that 20-year stage in a matter of months because it's built on blockchain. So that's quite exciting. And I think that when we look at socialization
And we are going to have a much different relationship with each other when we start to feel that sense of ownership and that sense of governance. So I think one of the topics we haven't really touched on today to think a lot about is Daos and the idea of actually having a say in what goes on.
So, if I look at communities, one I'm familiar with obviously because my colleague, Gat, is on the governance committee, is the Apecoin Dow. The Apecoin Dow meets and decides on a weekly basis. There have been all of these different proposals that have gone to the Dow.
And because the mechanism for voting and communication is secure and built into the process, it's very easy to do. It's not like running an election in a country, which is a much more difficult thing to secure. So they're able to function and provide governance across
a broad membership base relatively easily. And so I think that kind of participation will actually transform many of the online spaces that we engage with and the way in which we engage with each other. That's great. Yeah, we didn't really touch on DAO's, but yeah.
We only have so much time. Here's the last question coming in from Amir Mabhaut. He wants to ask you, Robbie, how do you see NFTs being used as tools to enable people to own their data truly? Okay, so this is a very general question, but also how to earn revenue from it. So, can people be entrepreneurs just by owning
FTs? Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think there was obviously, as you could see by people flexing on Twitter, there are lots of people who were traders of NFTs over the last couple of years who made a living trading those as virtual assets, just the way they would other kinds of assets.
I think when it comes to NFTs, I always think about them in two ways. One is you get into NFTs because NFTs are about culture. And so culture is about your passion and your enjoyment and something that you understand. And so like anything in life, the more you understand about it,
know, the better you will be at engaging with it. And so if I think of, you know, investing in NFT projects, the more you know about them, the more you understand what their value is to the community. And then you can kind of make your own judgment as to, as to whether you think that community is growing or shrinking, etc.
So I think engaging with it from a cultural standpoint is very important. And also thinking about where we are and thinking, sorry, secondarily about the utility. So utility is something that we always talk about in the NFT community and the more utility that we can enable for NFT
I think that inherently adds more value. And so one of the things that we try to do with all of our projects is to give them a basic utility and purpose at the start. You know, so it is a collectible, but the collectible can be used in a game. And so you can play. And that's why for us,
games provide utility inherently. But beyond that, what other utility can we provide? How many different games can you use it in? What purpose does it have? Or can you stake it for a reward? Or can you put it into a guilds and rent it out for other players to use when you
you're not using it. So the more of these utilities we can enable, then the more value can be created. So when we look at growing a business based on NFTs, think about how you can create and add utility to them. Because it's the network effects of enabling that additional utility
I think we'll benefit everybody Fantastic fantastic Robbie. Thank you so much for your time today really appreciate everybody give Robbie a round of applause in the Twitter space Thank you so much everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you sir. Go to Tatiana and Sasha. Thanks guys for being here
So if you want to see Robbie again, he'll be at Web Summit in November and we'll have him. Do you know what you're talking about? Do you know what your topics are? Yeah, we have a few different ones. I'm scheduled to be with Herman talking about building metaverses. I think Amy Wu also
who's on the 8 point down and I are having a chat. So pretty much covering the spectrum of stuff in Web 3. I'm excited, frankly, to have the audience of a scale that Web Summit brings to talk about Web 3. Because the bigger audiences we can get in front of to tell them how great Web 3 is, that's what makes me happy.
Happy Me to me to that's why I'm to hosting these I think it's a great and having someone like oh clear and concise on your answers is great Thanks, so again. Thanks for your time. Thanks startup. Thanks everybody next week same time We're gonna have the tezos co-founder Kathleen Brightman as our special guest with new startups on the roundtable so check it out you can sign up out
for the reminder at Luma/Web3Spaces or just follow the web summit on Twitter. Thanks everybody for your time, Marisol. Thank you so much and we'll see you next week on Twitter or November at Web Summit. - Great, thanks Casey. - Thank you guys. Thank you. - Thanks.
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