Open Economies, Social Connectivity & Play - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm friends and welcome to the metacast cryptocorner brought to you by navik i'm your host nicola vreco or nico for short and today i'm joined by anton bernstein co-founder and ceo at pocket worlds pocket worlds is a metaverse company that brings people together to play it builds intricate rich worlds that are social by design and built to last for decades pocket worlds is the creator of highrise a leading mobile first metaverse which with over 13 million members and there's many reasons why i've been looking forward to this conversation with anton one high-rise is is very successful um but i haven't heard enough people talk about it also anton has some very down-to-earth thoughts and opinions about gaming and he's also not really crypto native but very well informed about web3 um and looks at it as a tool that can

help him build more rich and engaging worlds and um yeah very excited to dig in there so anton welcome to the metacast thank you yeah great to be here all right let's dive in so tell us a bit more about your journey because you didn't start your career off in games what were you doing before um and then what made you make the switch sure yeah um so one uh small correction from the intro by the way so we have uh i think north of 20 million users now on on high rise and north of four million on ever skies which is our second product um and uh in terms of the the journey so i actually started in vc i started working at insight venture partners and red point ventures where i was focused primarily on consumer internet businesses that included gaming so i worked on bam uh at red point worked on um this other company called on comma in at insight um insight had also invested

a jack and j into jagex a company called runescape or a game called runescape um but i was also focused pretty broadly on e-commerce and everything kind of consumer internet um things like uh even things like shopify but groupon actually was one of those uh products that uh i seek to invest into an insight and we ended up losing the deal and then i transitioned out of red point and started a company in australia that is now called luxuryescapes.com it's a travel business we basically sell vacation packages for people who are traveling from australia and new zealand to southeast asia primarily i mean it's a global brand at this point but australia new zealand is definitely the bigger market we do about 300 billion in sales or so today um uh i think folks in australia and new zealand pretty much everybody knows us we advertise on television and newspapers or something uh and then

we had a french satellite where i was based actually in paris um we were we were pretty remote um and global before uh kind of remote and global became a really big thing our dev team was in ukraine i was based in paris focused on the french business um it was called lukingo at the time and then we also had this australian satellite building luxury escapes and then we ended up selling the french business to a company called smartbox in uh in france they're a big um kind of they sell these retail gift boxes um in places like uh and uh when we sold the french business i basically decided that i wanted to start working in gaming and the reason why i decided i wanted to start working gaming is one i love games i grew up gaming that was kind of my childhood and then two is i love working in something very creative um and although

i mean building any business i think is a very creative endeavor i think especially working in gaming and trying to build the next kind of version of whatever um consumers might be interested in kind of requires a certain kind of creativity and discovery that um really appeals to me and so i ended up moving to san francisco after we sold the french business uh to start a new company i met with my co-founder jimmy uh we had a bunch of mutual friends and we started to build basically what was at the intersection of social networking and gaming so we weren't quite sure exactly what we wanted to build this was 2013 but if you remember in the mid to late 2000's virtual worlds were actually very very big um i'm actually a bit reminded of i went to nftnyc and saw the sandbox uh kind of um getup they had a gotham hall they had like this whole three-day event um and it really reminded me of second life because they have all these partnerships

like so many different brands and basically no users and second life was extremely similar gap was opening stores you know all these kind of like retailers were trying to get into the second life um well today second life is kind of a pretty niche product not a bad product but a niche product for sure um but in any case the mid to late 2000s virtual worlds were quite big and they kind of disappeared when in 2009 2010 mobile came on the scene um the iphone was released in 2009 2010-2011 everyone started to migrate over to that platform virtual worlds kind of that died out um flash there were a lot of flash face virtual worlds flash that out because the browsers were killing them and so 2013 when when we launched there wasn't much roblox at the time wasn't popular nobody really knew it um and especially on mobile there wasn't really multiplayer gaming and so we came in and decided well the next evolution

of social networking the next evolution of let's say facebook or even instagram which is just getting really should probably look more like a game we weren't sure exactly what that should look like we launched two products that were not successful one called pockets another one called harvest crossing both mmo titles on on mobile um and then the third was high rise where we really started to focus on ugc and people being able to build out the world itself and then also really focused on the social aspect so we built a news feed we built a messenger we built all these ways that people could connect with each other through a single social login and a single social layer um and tooling for users to actually build the world and construct the world and we launched that in 2016. it's grown uh ever since uh last year we did about 30 million in revenue uh we have north of two million monthly active users on high rise um our audience is pretty interesting it's uh largely female 70 female 75 female

our average age is about 20 and we are mobile first um ios and android are definitely our first party platforms or most important platforms and then we're actually launching web either at the end of this month or next month um where we're going to start kind of adding that platform a lot of that driven by our initiatives in web 3. um i'll also mention last year or a year and a half ago we acquired a business called ever skies um that's also been quite successful uh it's also a social platform built around uh ugc and dress up and clothing um we we just broke four million users forever skies uh we have just north of a million monthly active users on ever skies so that's also been a product that's been growing quite well um and in general kind of our mission is to uh uh you know basically kind of democratize this idea of meta versus bring build the next social platform

that goes beyond what we see with facebook and instagram and even to some degree discord and so the next evolution of highrise we're calling it the highrise world and in the high-rise world our intent is that anyone can build their own high-rise such that if you have a community or you have a brand or you have a certain id you might have a reddit you might have a discord we think you should also have a high rise and that high rise is your virtual social space uh you can create content in it your fandom can create content so they can create clothing and furniture but also they can create the experiences that other people will experience in your high-rise but it's branded to be your high-rise uh in the same way that your discord is branded to be your discord because when we think about growing the metaverse let's say and the examples that we saw with second life and a lot of the other virtual worlds that were happening i think what happened was is because they weren't partitioned in this way as

a platform with tooling for people to be able to um kind of come in and build their own communities they end up ended up kind of becoming their own subcultures their own niches second life is a pretty niche product and everything kind of every other virtual world that was created around that was its own niche product the analogy i like to use is discord imagine if there was only one discord and everyone had to join the same discord it just wouldn't make sense and so our approach to this is there shouldn't be just one metaverse we provide the platform we provide the tooling and then uh the high-rise world is really just a place where anyone can build their own community in the same way that they would with discord we provide a social layer and we provide the tooling for people to be able to build those social experiences inside each and every high-rise so that's kind of the approach that we're taking we haven't launched a third-party high-rise yet but we're going to be launching our first

third-party high-rise um next month uh and uh we'll be announcing some partners that we're doing that with um they're usually coming out of the nft community today because they already have digital assets they already have communities um they just need kind of a new social experience where those digital assets the nfts can be present and people can kind of uh have richer experiences than just kind of chat threads and discord um so yeah sorry that was a very long answer to your question it already touched upon many of the points that i'd like to to go bit deeper in so that was great um just to take a step back and talk about high-rise a little bit you told me that your audience is mostly female and on average 20 years old what do they do in high-rise how do they spend their time what brings them there yeah i mean i think if you asked any uh kind of retained player and highrise or user and highrise

why do you use highrise they will all tell you because of the friends i made on highrise and so the a lot of the core motivation ends up being very social um so there's a lot of kind of chatting socializing we have voice chat um so if you're familiar with the application clubhouse there are some similarities to clubhouse um you can build all sorts of games and experiences and so people are actually creating games um and the games that they're creating uh they're usually real time games so for example uh pageants um people would host a pageant they'd say dress up in the color red and then everybody else would dress up in the color red and then the winner would get um some currency um or like uh you know they'd play a game a lot of these games honestly so we don't invent any games all the games are invented by users and so actually a lot of these games i'm not even super

familiar with the mechanics because they're literally designed by the users and then explained by the users and they play them um so that's a big component dress up is a big component clothing and the way that people look is really important and then the secondary market and collectibility is a really big component so we built the app from the beginning since 2016 with a tradable currency and tradable items and so the secondary market ends up being a very primary mechanic of the high-rise world we do about 100 million dollars a year in secondary market transaction volume and so that's people uh buying selling trading clothing primarily but also sometimes furniture um and so kind of that collectibility aspect is a big one too um so yeah i'd say you know kind of socializing uh playing or creating games um and collecting content

what percentage of your user base actually earned something from label uh playable world that's right for high resolution yeah so we haven't enabled too much earning yet um that's kind of our goal with web3 we do have some earning products though like we do have users who do earn we have something we call the highrise brands program and that is internal brands so every month we run a design contest every month we run a contest where we we have some theme people design art uh they usually you know they could even sketch it on the back of a napkin or whatever and they submit that art the other users end up voting on that art so we have like a whole kind of system or platform to be able to vote on that content and then the content that wins our art team we have a 20 person art team our team will come in and actually refine and produce that content and sell it now when that happens the winner actually gets in-game currency and

in-game rewards if they win that contest multiple times then they're enrolled in what's called the brand's program and in the brands program they work very closely with our artists oftentimes actually doing the whole uh kind of the whole set the whole outfit or the whole set of clothing and then they end up earning a commission um and our users they'll make on average about five thousand dollars per collection um when they sell it that way uh and uh you know that's like maybe two three weeks of work um for five thousand bucks for for someone who's kind of an amateur artist where our artists really help them kind of polish it up um it's it's pretty decent uh but we want to expand that much much more um and then on eversky's uh our second product uh it's entirely ugc content so we have no art team whatever skies so all of the other skies content we have north of 200 000 items i think approaching 300 000 items now all of

them are created by our users and all of them uh earn an income from doing it and so can you quickly go through the difference between high-rise and ever skies so highrise is a virtual world platform properly so there's a virtual space virtual spaces are created generally by users infrequently by us and you walk around you hang out you play games there's things you interact with ever skies is actually a little bit more similar to reddit so it's a forum um it's a forum but clothing and avatars and dress-up are core to that forum uh and the way that the forum works is we have something called clubs so you can think of those as subreddits so each club is some sort of interest group and the clubs are moderated and hosted by ever skies users uh and you can come in you can join the club and there's lots of different themes lots of different interests but the kind of the thread that connects everything is this uh this idea of kind of dress up

and clothing and style and fashion um and actually if you look on on pinterest for a lot of fashion keywords ever skye's content ends up constantly bubbling up and popping up because the ever skies art style i think is so um i don't know so appealing so interesting and so user generated makes a lot of sense so you mentioned earlier there's around 100 million that's being transacted per year on the um the high-rise platform what percentage is around fashion is that like the majority the majority yeah i i mean it's hard to separate fashion and collectibles um but yeah i mean it's clothing it's all clothing pretty much yeah it's um i tend to because of personal bias underestimate the importance of fashion in virtual worlds i just want to look cool you know give me a cool suit of armor and especially like just like efficient and utility that's more important um but it's good to to be reminded that you know there's um other people on this planet

as well you know totally but i mean even for me i i you know i i'm a gamer i'm i'm less of a fashion oriented gamer let's say but you know i'll play fortnite and i'll see a skin that i really want i'll um i'll really want to buy it yeah i um i grinded for like two weeks to get a certain skin in in warzone um a very dark skin because that was harder to see when i was inside so i'm i'm that kind of gamer so it's still utilitarian yeah yeah pretty much um very sweaty that's me so earlier you talked about brands and how they failed you know until now to actually like build a build something like good within metaversus because in the end like there didn't seem to be users there and and players don't seem to want to spend time in in like corporate spaces which makes a lot of sense how do you think that will change with what you're

doing and perhaps you know looking forward to the benevos as well i mean i i think at least for what we're doing it is it is certainly up to the brand or the community developer to develop a rich and engaging place and what i mean by that is you know gap is still not going to have a really interesting discord like it's just not going to happen i mean gap can try um but it's very unlikely that people are going to be hanging out in the gap discord um and so i think that there's got to be some compatibility between the brand the identity of the brand with brand spell the community and the kind of content they release and the platform that they're on or the tooling that they're on um and so at least for me again that's the kind of way that i think about it because the analogy that i have for what we're doing is much closer to discord and it is allowing brands and communities to build up um these virtual spaces

um these kind of like next-gen social networks uh for their users to activate them in a different way so activate them in real time activate the music virtual goods um a very different business model right like think about discord or reddit no brands or communities are making money off discord or reddit um those business models are you know basically the discord's like we're offering you engagement so that should be enough um which i i think is fine but you know we're offering you engagement plus you can actually sell virtual goods to an audience if you can figure out how to do it well but we're certainly going to give you the tools to do it so i think at least our philosophy is we want to help brands or communities build build out their community platform you know build out their social platform and social network in the form of a high-rise um as opposed to saying uh well okay we have one world we have one social platform and then you can set up a shop you know

set up a gap shop and then people can come in and buy yeah content we're we're kind of i guess less focused on that and i'm not saying that that's a that's a poor strategy i mean sandbox is obviously very focused on that um and a lot of virtual world platforms i think are quite focused on that they're kind of doing these brand activations within the world the caveat is for those brand activations to work the world already needs to be a place where people live so it works in roadblocks because in roblox if you do want to uh introduce your content to a bunch of nine to 13 year olds then roblox is the place to do it that's where they hang out it makes absolute sense for an old navy or a gap to say we want to introduce ourselves to a bunch of 13 year olds in sandbox it's a little more confusing i actually think there's just a bunch of brands who say they want exposure to web3 they don't know how to get it sandbox is preeminent and so

that they're going and partnering with them i think sandbox is also paid a lot for that um because of kind of the speculative fervor around sandbox but at the end of the day when you put your stuff in a sandbox environment who are you exposing your stuff to and it's you know probably a few hardcore crypto people and so how would you see a web 2 brand be successful in bucket worlds or in high-rise or specifically where they wouldn't be um like could you give you an example i still struggle to get in like to find a reason why people would actually hang out there yeah so you know i'll give you a concrete example of what we're doing right now with a couple of ft communities um so you know they host amas on a regular basis right now their options for amas are twitter spaces and uh discord so what we're giving them is a platform to be able to host their ama

in virtual space so uh they have their own environment in their own room it's a place where people can hang out wearing their nfts so they already have the virtual goods right they've already purchased the virtual goods somebody sold them we have a mechanism where you can actually uh port those virtual goods over to the higher eyes world so you can just start kind of walking around and wearing them and they can host the ama inside of this virtual space while people actually hang out in that virtual space and interact with each other and interact with the host and interact with the environment um and so that's kind of this concrete way uh that people use this tech and use this platform to actually host a specific experience um that's the most basic right but then as we roll out more and better tools to be able to build experiences they can come in and build a game so like you know a doodles can come in and say we want to build a doodles game uh using the doodles content and doodles nfts avatars and be able to

charge for that game they can go in and they can actually use our map editor to build that game whatever that game is as an activation and then people can participate in that game maybe if they play the game they win a prize that prize is an ft uh and they can buy self trade that nft as they want um so it's like these kinds of activations they're obviously more effort to do than setting up a discord or a reddit but they're also potentially on the flip side if you can do it well potentially lucrative in the sense that you can actually sell content into the world and so what i would expect to be honest is that there's going to be some communities and brands that are really really good at this and actually turn this into a strong revenue driver most will not be really good at this and for most a high-rise won't be a great fit but given that there are thousands not millions of brands and communities out there um i think for us you know we're at three million

monthly active users today between high-rise and nervous guys i think to get to 300 million mau or get to 3 billion mau it's these people who can be like these communities or brands who can be really good at activating their audience using tooling like this that's really how you get in my opinion the 300 million mau it isn't building horizons which is going to end up being a niche virtual world just like second michael's um so um does that clear it up a little bit um i don't expect every brand like again i don't expect yeah probably to build a high-res maybe they will appear as a product inside one of the higher rises that activates the community that appeals the gap right that gap would want to advertise to but i don't expect gaps actually a high rise but i do expect like a community of furries you know to emerge and have a furry high-rise or a community of um i don't know maybe gta enthusiasts there's

like a gta high-rise man you know or this nft community that that has really strong great art they want to release that content into a virtual world and they want to create games around it like doodles is doing a great job of building up you know doodles to this virtual world um you know board apes is building out their virtual world and so there's a lot of products that um or a lot of communities that certainly don't have the resources to go and hire a bunch of game devs and you know build something immunity or you know the improbable or whatever you know board apes is doing um but they have a community that would love to engage that want to engage that want to be a part of kind of this kind of virtual space um and so we're trying to build a platform for them to be able to do that yeah it makes a lot of sense you mentioned um different high-rises for different you know brands or communities nfd projects etc are you doing land sales a la sandbox et cetera so yeah you know we we did a

first early land sale more as a test um it was on ethereum um so we didn't we launched an nft collection last november called the highrise creature club we launched it on an immutable x just for context i'm a seed investor in sky mavis you guys who make axi um very early investor and immutable um and uh and so that's why we we kind of started to explore um immutable and the reason why i'm investor in general is because it in these products is because a year year and a half ago we started exploring hey what do we want to use as we want to get into web3 i've been personally into web3 since 2013 that's when i first bought bitcoin 2018 we actually launched an nft project um this is like right when openc was opening up i was meeting up with those guys at the airbnb lobby because they didn't have an office yet um it was like very early days and so we were constantly exploring it was all very early and then a year year and a half ago we started to look at some of

these layer two solutions some of these you know alternative solutions that maybe we could actually start integrating because i have this fundamental belief when it comes to web3 that if you want to build a virtual economy this is just the right tool for the job um i i don't see you know web3 is necessarily i i i see there's something very interesting but most importantly i see this this technology um as as a kind of a composable money so you know this technology allows this kind of like permissionless interaction with this kind of uh database entry or database um and so that allows for this kind of composable money that that we see and i think composable money is a really powerful feature for a virtual economy um because we can just kind of put the money out there and then people can build all sorts of tooling around it and we see that happening in d5 with all these building blocks and now you know all the leverage that's gotten into the system and those people leveraging whatever but like

um fundamentally all that is proving out this point that there's this kind of like permissionless composable system around money um and i think if you have a virtual pure virtual economy it's just the right tool for the job um and so i've held that policy for a long time um but the tooling has just been pretty poor um and as the tooling has started to improve that's when we started looking i talked to this kind of disguise about ronin at the time they hadn't even launched ronin on axi yet so super early so i was like can we use running they're like no it's definitely not production ready yet so okay can i invest in a company instead um immutable same deal i was like can i use immutable they're like actually yes you can also we're closing this like you know relative so great um and so then we started using immutable in november we launched um the high-rise feature club on immutable x um and that was kind of our first test on on an ft collection it did really really well so our community was really into it we sold out in 30 seconds um we did like

i think uh two and a half or three million in primary transaction volume and then almost 10 million in secondary transaction volume um so it's definitely pretty successful the mechanic was is a pfp where it is a pfp a profile picture plus it's an outfit that you can wear in higher eyes and you could wear the individual traits in high-rise separately or you know the full outfit and we integrated it with the mobile app so you connect with your metamask on the website and then if you're connected then on the mobile app you can wear the outfit you can wear the individual tricks um and so we kind of did that at the highrise creature club that was really successful or our kind of audiences was although some of them were pretty reluctant about nfts they kind of have all come around more or less i i don't see a lot of negative sentiment about it these days um and then uh afterwards we launched uh high-rise land uh for people who own the creatures so it's kind of like a perk

and a way for us to test launching um an nfc collection on ethereum mainnet and kind of testing out land and so what land entitles you to do is build your high rise um so that's kind of how we think about it if you own a piece of land you can build a high rise if you're in an estate you can build a kind of a richer high rise each high-rise can still have infinite rooms so the kind of the the high-rise is indication that hey you have a community or you have a brand but then uh you or the people you allow can build infinite experiences inside and so when we launch these partnerships next month that will be in partnership with land so they have some land and they're going to be launching their high rises through that land and you can actually see the land on highrise dot game slash land just like a little map it's pretty cute it's like an island that looks like creature head because it is for the creature club do you move

um do you teleport from high rise to high rise or is this like there is is there this sense of distance as well yeah so the the right now the design system is uh it's definitely teleportation in the sense that um it's cui so you access the higher eyes through ui and then once you're in the high-rise you see a directory of rooms it's like an infinite directory of rooms and kind of the mental model is it's an infinitely tall high-rise so each one of these high-rises is infinitely dull high-rise and you can jump from room to room it's like you're talking about an elevator okay so you didn't go for the location-based high-rises necessarily um that increase in value supposedly as as they get like or as they're more to the center of the map a little bit so i mean that still exists in the sense that there is a map so there's a map and you can see where the towers are um so that still exists but you can't like walk right now at least you can't walk from one tower to another okay make sense yeah and then um so if

understand it correctly um you have three main pillars that you're using with three for and and feel free to to add more or to to correct me um one is what you're looking at and actually i haven't asked you this so this is a question will you be using web3 to open up the current existing economy within um your games high-rise there's secondary markets is the plan to turn that into like an open economy where people can freely transact items yeah so i mean we we kind of already have that with our currency called gold the only thing with our gold is that it's non-composable it's not exchange traded you can't you know there's a liquid markets for gold and so we're introducing a token called the rise token that rise token actually sits on top of everything so it is the kind of the the high-rise world currency our high-rise where branding is highrise 101 and so gold is actually the currency inside of our highrise which is called highrise 101 you can buy gold with the

rise token if you want to or you can buy content directly with the rise token any nfts that we release or that other high-rises release will be bought and sold on the high-rise marketplace and people can buy sell traded for the rise token or a stablecoin like usdc we're building by the way all of this on avalanche uh we we're building a subnet um on avalanche that we're calling the high res watching um and i can speak more to kind of why we decided on uh the subnet path um in a bit but uh that's kind of the way that the system works in terms of the way that we're actually releasing the rise token uh we're never doing any sales there's no private sale there's no public sale we're only distributing the rise token to our audience um to users of the high-rise world uh and uh we're also going to be distributing it for ecosystem development so when people want to build their high-rises or build their

communities if they have certain milestones we're going to kind of give them some of the rise token um and then possibly some other mechanics around around staking and things like that but in general um kind of like fundamentally we are not doing any sales of the rise token because we want to make sure that when we distribute the rise token it's distributed to the people who are actually active participants of the network and not kind of financial speculators who end up kind of dumping the token two years later that we now see happening across the entire market um and so we kind of made that made that choice um because we don't really need cash we're profitable business quite well so instead we're going to use the rise token really as as kind of a reward mechanism and a mechanism to get people to engage and participate in kind of our web 3 ecosystem but yes it's on top of everything basically i'm a big fan of of the way you think about your token and what it represents

and who do you want who you want to have it no you who you want it to be held by um and then you know for what it's worth i think you should probably avoid any staking mechanism because i think staking immediately financializes things which turns it into something that has an roi which is something i don't think you you would want yeah i think it's true i mean the thing that we were considering and we may not do this because you know free our reasons for the reasons you mentioned but the thing that we were considering is a mechanism where uh well first of all you can stake your token in order to uh govern a tower or govern the platform okay as a whole yes and and this is kind of where it might get a little um like to your point uh the incentives might be a little misaligned but one of the i you know ideas we were tossing around is users can stake their token into a tower

the tower owner actually gets a percentage of the yield the stakers get yield and the stakers get the ability to vote into the tower and the tower owner gets a greater vote in the platform um because they have more users who they've attracted to their tower but you're right but that becomes much more of a financial game rather than a like interaction game so yeah or let's say skeptical of yeah but we've been thinking about it interesting um so that was in my head the first pillar right um having your own token and then the next pillar is the token gating so you essentially can um use tokens these could be i guess fungible tokens but mostly non-fungible tokens um to you know allow access to certain experiences certain high-rises etc so that's i guess then your your second part so uh yeah sometimes you want to basically you know spread your message um have as many people join as possible

and so uh when we do that actually the mechanism is you literally just go to the url of the environment and you're spectating you're immediately spectating you don't even have to enter the room yet and then we make it really easy if you want to enter the room because you have an mft you hit enter you connect your meta mask and they're like oh you have this avatar do you want to join us um super easy uh and then on the flip side if you want to do some sort of like a private community event maybe you won't have a reward attached to it maybe you have something else then it can be token gated um and then you kind of set your own permissions for which collections you want to to use as your gaining mechanism oh so yeah um i think it's a well we're doing that um for this uh first partner that we're dealing with yeah makes a little sense and finally it's also for you a revenue source then i guess you've launched your first uh 11 000 i believe nfts what's the strategy there how do

you see that moving forward yeah so i mean uh it was really our test that what it what does it mean to own an nft what does it mean to have an nft on our platform how do people use it um do they kind of rent it out in some way do they belong to it do they pessil trade it and uh and yes i mean as a primary sale it was very successful we're still collecting a lot of secondary sale revenue um we are kind of a top five project unimutable um by kind of transaction volume um so that's um that that all is very interesting uh i will say it was mostly a test for us because long term i mean all of our virtual gifts should be nfds there's no reason why they wouldn't be um i mean if it's just a an entry in a database indicating that someone has something in a way that's kind of more secure and more composable than the entry that's in our database on aws then it's kind of natural that that should be

the way that we track that information the way that we deploy content and so i long term i mean most virtual goods that we that we support should be nfps whether it's nfts that we produce and sell in the primary market that our creators produce and sell in the primary secondary market or even nfts that exist completely outside of our ecosystem that we allow to use inside of the high-rise world or enable to use in the high-rise world um i i think it's like a again like a core fundamental building block for us that just makes a lot of sense so that's kind of where we're going with it that being said um our kind of strategy right now with the avalanche subnet is i think there's a lot of games out there building that are trying to attract an audience from the liquidity of some blockchain

so they're convinced to work on polygon or solana or whatever because of the promise that polygon solana will have this big ecosystem and that people will come to their game or product and will adopt it and use it and buy their stuff so we we don't need to think about that as much because we already have an audience of 3 million mau and so what we want to do actually what we're really focused on is how do we make the best user experience for our existing users so that they can participate in this kind of composable technology um without uh the hurdle of figuring all of the ancillary things around it out like metamasks like coinbase whatever and so that's what we're laser focused on solving it's like how do we give people a wallet how do we solve the fiat on-ramp how do we um solve for gas so

for example one of the reasons why we decided to work on the subnet is because the gas fee can be paid in our token in the rise token and what that means is you don't need to introduce a third-party token like matic or seoul or e into your ecosystem and so people don't need to figure out how to buy it all they need to do is be able to obtain rise and the way to kick start that is you air drop them rise so bam they have rise um and so these are kind of the considerations that we're most thoughtful about is how do we really solve that user experience problem or question um especially given that we're increasingly fully cross-platform like you need to be able to participate on mobile so how do you do that you gotta work with apple you gotta i mean there's a lot to figure out and so that's why we decided to start with the avalanche subnet because we have control and we can really improve the ux but over the long term we're really not a blockchain company you know we're uh we're

kind of a platform tooling company um if you will in in like the social and game space and so if there's a great community on polygon or a great community on solana or a great community on mainnet there's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't support them and say hey you can build a high-rise you can connect phantom or you can connect metamask and we can load in your nfts and your community can now hang out in this social space absolutely no reason why we can do that but the reason why we're launching with the avalanche subnet is because we think that for our users for our existing users we can solve a lot of the ux challenges that um and so that's what we're really focused on and you probably couldn't care less about the actual users of avalanche today which i can't see there being too many that are only on avalanche not on like polygons no no yeah yeah we don't really care about that i mean the one thing we might care about is is the kind of the liquidity for the token um but i think you know if you look at

trader joe or pangolin there's enough liquidity there that you know we can make sure for for sure that there's a liquid market for the rise token um pretty much i think on you know avalanche polygon solana ethereum all of them i think can satisfy that requirement yeah do you plan on um like acting as a sort of central bank around the rise token because you know let's say you airdrop your first rise tokens to whatever like your 10 000 most engaged users and you're unlucky and they were doing it you know all of as a big plan to start speculating on the price and then you know providing little liquidity and pricing it very high um how are you thinking about that yeah i mean to be honest i don't know what i can and can't say um from from a uh kind of a regulatory perspective um but i will say that uh first of all a very low likelihood that

our most engaged high-rise users who have been with us for many many years um are have all been doing this to collude on our token uh it would be amazing though and i would give them a huge props um uh so so i think the likelihood of that scenario is pretty low and and when we do release our token we're going to be releasing it with strong utility um like from the from the get-go so we won't just air drop you tokens and be like oh there's nothing to do with the token no uh the you know the and it's pretty straightforward for us right we already know what people are buying with with gold we already know how people are transacting and so as we release the rise token it's like okay pair it with content that we know people are into pair it with you know mechanisms and features that we know people will spend on and just make sure that that's denominated in rise hope um so it's pretty straightforward for us to i think um create utility for the token early on

um and for our audience to actually want to do it i you know as a good example um the high-rise creature club it's on immutable x right which i i think uh i love those guys i love immutable x and they're working through a lot of things but the ux is still somewhat of a struggle in the sense that not only do you need to figure out ethereum figure out metamask figure out ethereum figure out how to get ethereum into metamask then you also have to bridge it over to immutable and then transact on some um you know secondary market that is not open c um and despite all of that our users are doing it constantly like th there is high demand for uh the the creatures they're sitting at a point one eighth floor which i think is like one of the highest floors on the immutable um and it's because people want this stuff and and they're you know there's there's kind of a demand for it um and so i think if we can solve a lot of

the ux questions which is oh well i already have a wallet the fiat on ramp is really easy um and actually i already have the token because airdrop to me um i think that the band is going to be very very high uh at least that's what i see based on what i see with the higher expression club um so kind of i expect there to be quite a bit of transaction volume liquidity um you know we're also going to make sure that you know whatever decks we work with this has enough liquidity in it to support any kind of transaction volume um uh so so yeah i mean i i think i'm pretty confident that it's it's at least gonna have quite a bit of transaction volume with our community kind of transacting and figuring out what to do with it i think to your point if we start financializing it a little bit more like adding staking or something maybe that's where incentives start to become a little weird in this line and maybe we have the wrong actors start to participate so if we do do that we'll probably do that much later

it just occurred to me that there's a good chance that you know a significant chunk of all of the 20 year old females in web 3 came there because of you guys so um i guess uh that's a good thing thank you thanks for that appreciation actually it's been really cool so we have matt we've had moderators in our discord for example who all came from our community all of them well almost all of them have uh have left our discord to go be moderators of other discord communities one of them is a moderator at crypto bats uh one of them is like working at some other web 3 company like look like this was kind of like their entry point and then they kind of went and discovered all that web3 had to offer a lot of them made like really good money on it and have kind of like altered their their careers because of it that's been super cool to see yeah amazing i love that there's um there's still quite a lot of pushback from traditional games people when you talk about you know the potential for this web3 stack this technology and what

it can do for games you know you said that nfts and then even fundable tokens are a natural fit for what you're doing do you think that's going to be the same for for most of the multiplayer games out there in the future i mean i i do think so i understand the pushback which is i i think if i had to like describe the emotional pushback it's like i go to games to escape i go to games to have joy and pleasure and fun and now i go to games and i'm greeted with finance i'm greeted with like having to think about finance having to think about speculation i mean think about prices going up having to having to choose like having to constantly make trade-offs and choices around like do i want this asset do i want that nasa like it's kind of this like intense commercialization of something that people find to be very entertaining um

i i don't know what the right analogy would be for movies but movies somehow managed to inject this um i would probably also be frustrated like yeah there's a way for me to make money off watching a movie but like that's not why i'm here i'm here to get be entertained for two hours and like turn my brain off and i think that there's i think that that like if i had to kind of articulate maybe where the pushback comes from i think a lot of that is a lot of it is that like stop injecting this like financialization this real life kind of financialization into games um that being said uh i think there will always be games that are just like for the fun and the beauty of it um and kind of like the joy of it but i think for multiplayer gaming in general multiplayer gaming is extremely oriented around status like they are status games um the end game is almost always a status game in multiplayer gaming even if it's skill based even if it's

like about being the best it's like why do you want to be the best often it's about status and so i think in that world where status really matters i think virtual goods and nfts are always kind of going to be present they're going to be a reflection of status whether you win this nft because you're like really really good at the game because you spend a lot of money or because you talk to the right people or you met the right people or whatever you've been playing for three years i think those will always be important they'll always have value and then i think if you can financialize those things um using this kind of composable money um and metaphor uh permissionless composable money thing then um they will be financialized because they have value because they represent something they represent status in in the world so yeah i mean i i think i think it's going to be very very big for almost any kind of or at least most kind of multiplayer gaming that has any kind of status games associated with it um but i also like i you know i get i get

the pushback it's like sometimes you just want this like beautiful thing that's not adulterated by the the financialization and speculative fervor of uh of goods i don't know of of scarce goods scarce assets yeah yeah i get that as well um you know having to think you know what's the best roi that i can get for this um and you know having me make having to make these calculations i guess like they're fun sometimes or in certain environments but not when you're you know playing in in like like a simulation game or whatever exactly yeah good all right well um it looks like time flies when i'm talking to you every time i do so um let's let's you know round this up anton i want to thank you a lot for for being here for sharing your story uh about pocket worlds highrise etc um it was great yeah thanks um and i appreciate the opportunity to talk about

is there by the way is there anything our listeners can do for you yeah so uh well one we're recruiting um i know a lot of folks in i guess in this fair market in recession are freezing recruiting and all that kind of stuff we've been growing really quickly um we need more people to help us achieve our vision um and so uh we have a lot of roles open on pocketworlds.com um you can see what's available there um so that part's really uh important and then the second piece is as we build out the high-res world model if anyone's interested in building out a high-rise um we will help you uh like i said we have token incentives we have all that kind of stuff so um we'd like you to come in and and really build a social platform or you know a social community uh on the high rise world platform so um hit me up if you're interested in doing that fantastic and where can people find you

uh they can find me on uh on twitter uh i'm anton burr and t-o-n-b-e-r um pocketworlds.com linkedin um yeah exactly uh you can find me on high rise my username is the jakeness um i actually made it because i was thinking of my friend jake when i was like testing and then i just ended up sticking with this username and now everybody knows me as the jakeness some some of these gamer tags man mine is the same like i took it as a part from someone else's gamer tag and now 20 years later i still run around with uh no four is mine yeah good all right well um this was fantastic anton thanks for joining listener thank you for listening if you enjoyed uh feel free to let us know if you want to join the conversation we have a discord where we talk about fantastic companies like pocket worlds and others and yeah we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers

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