Solana and Web3 Gaming - Naavik Gaming Podcast

[Music] hello and welcome to the metacast cryptocorner brought to you by navic I'm your host Nico vori today we're going to be talking about the intersection of blockchain technology and game development specifically we're talking about the Solana blockchain as web3 developers we obviously have options out there for where we want to build and which change we want to integrate with and today we get a chance to talk to one of the biggest ones out there so what does Solana have going for it for starters it has scale over 11 million active accounts on Solana secondly cost the current cost per transaction on Solana is I think 0.00025 cents per transaction or something along those lines so very very low and then finally speed block times are I think now below 400 milliseconds um and uh I think improving all the time but that's all great but ultimately the

real question is why build on Solana when there are other options out there uh what is Solana doing for web3 gaming in particular how is it supporting the developer ecosystem and so to answer those questions we have Colleen nimkar uh who is the director of gains at the Solana foundation and he's going to be on the Pod today to answer our burning questions Colleen it is great to have you here welcome to the pod thanks for having me super excited about this conversation I always enjoy our chats so now now the rest of the world gets to listen in likewise likewise all right so cool we got that out of the way uh let's Dive Right into today's episode uh with some questions here so I want to actually start at the very very beginning um uh which is kind of the origin story for for Solana like what is the reason for Solana existing um and so you know that's really the question like why Solana versus ethereum or polygon or BSC or any of the other options out there uh so I actually want to ask about uh proof of stake versus proof of work I think many of our listeners are familiar with those terms um but I really want to understand what

was it about you know anatoly's Insight in 2017 with his white paper uh and then of course actually going live as recently as March 2020 I didn't realize I thought Solana had actually been around for a little longer but realized how recent um you know you going live with The Ledger actually is so I just want to get a little bit of a kind of a behind the scenes Inside Story on what was it uh about proof of stake that was like dollars insight and then led to the actual Ledger going live in 2020. totally so it's actually I think quite an instructive story and it's worth calling on actually that there's more here than proof of stake but but I can get into it I think um the the original problem that and totally was trying to solve was first and foremost one a scale so when he when he looked at ethereum right so his background is very much in building networking systems at places like where he like worked on stuff like you gave me and a lot of the uh Hardware that went into phones in the early days

so that was very much the DNA was like thinking about how do you build really efficient at scale uh networking systems and the sort of hardware and software related to those things and so when you know ethereum started getting popular he took a look and he was like this is pretty cool like an open compute system seems really powerful there seems like to be some fundamental issues here notably one which is that ebm is a strictly sequential um Computing Paradigm and so what that means is that there's some performance trade-offs that you you make because of that and so that is like when you when you saw that you're like okay can we build this in a way that leans into some of the strengths that have made compute generally what it is today and the two that are worth calling out are one parallelization and then two the fact that Hardware consistently gets better over time so on parallelization I think anyone who's been following the way that compute has developed over the last few

years in particular as compute for gpus and like Gaming use cases as well as increasingly sort of AI and machine learning related use cases so all that stuff is done like the progress there is entirely been made through better and better parallelization of processing and like that's how we can do these ridiculously large-scale models like what you know Chad GPD or open aisdom so I mean he had the observation of parallelization of like the way you scale and so how can we incorporate that into a blockchain and then there's a second which is Hardware has basically since the 60s like the chip industry really got going consistently followed Moore's Lawn and gotten more and more performant and scalable talking about a blockchain that leverages that as well right that gets faster for free um and so I think those are some of the insights that then led him to design Salon of the way to design and part of that to your point on or a question on proof and stickers and proof work is that proof of work is is just a very

inefficient system and so you know when we think about how do you secure this network we want to do in a way that's that's not so inefficient and so proof of stake was something that there's already some literature around and made sense as like a good economic way to protect the network that wasn't highly wasteful um and so those were some of the insights I think that led to him designing along the way it was design uh yeah and that kind of leads to the next question which is you know what is it about Solana then that makes it interesting for developers or at least in theory makes it interesting for developers uh all developers but of course specifically for game developers too what makes Salah is that what is the differentiating factor for Solana as it relates to developers using the tools and technologies that you guys are building yeah sure so we can talk about I guess from the lens of game developers in in particular and so the way I think about it is that Salon is important for call it two buckets

there's one which is expanding the design space for your game so if you're building a website so this varies from like the game developer's perspective like what are they able to do so if you're a game developer who's building up your game I think what we like I think what Salon is powerful for is we're doing like getting rid of the limitations that you might have right so in particular it's bright the things that are important here are you need a blockchain that's very scalable right if you I think everyone's aspiring for Success here your game back end right functionally which is what blockchain is in some ways needs to be able to handle the success case when you have millions 10 million players using the thing um and then that's it needs to be really really cheap to use and so that's where the low cost comes in and the final thing is like uh the way that Salon is designed or on-chain programs are things that other people can use basically let game developers leverage

infrastructure that already very easily you don't have to constantly build your own smart contracts or so and so all of that in my mind is under the bucket of like game developer like the thing that's powerful that's Lana is that it removes the constraints that you otherwise have to work around on slower or less performance so that that's to me like from if I'm trying to build a game like what's wrong lets me do from a gamer's perspective I think the powerful thing is basically there's probably two things it's the speed to finality and then the cost again so um to be different right Gamers like you know I'm buying new monitors every year so I can get the refresh rate to get you know marginally lower so that you know I get like that better performance on the game um so you know Gamers care about their paying or at least hardcore games uh so hardcore cameras gear about the opinion even the average right like Casual Gamer on your mobile phone cares about the user experience that it's Crisp that's fast when I hit a button like I get a

response it's really important so those things are important and Amy Salon obviously delivers that in Spades you you mentioned the sort of speed to finality of being less than 40 milliseconds and you know something we constantly work on to get lower so one of the fastest out there and uh I think that matters for gamers in particular um and then the low cost thing right like if I'm doing you know if I'm engaging with a game's economy maybe I'm swapping token or purchasing ft or staking something whatever I I don't want to have to think about the incremental cost of that happening like I should just do it right and so that's why having fees basically be free of support and why our whole model is our like mentality is how can we get these to be lower and lower um right they're already extremely low right like point zero zero two five as you mentioned zero there but the goal is to like constantly work in to get that lower um and so the gamer never has this friction and experience so anyways

that's how I think about it it's like give game developers the ability to be really awesome games and on the other hand once those games are there make experience really frictionless for the gamers themselves got it got it um and I I think I I came up exactly when he said it and I couldn't actually dig up where the quote was I think it may have been a tweet or something like that which is why I couldn't find it but I think Anatoly is on the record of saying something along the lines of gaming is one of the big use cases that drives the flywheel of mass market adoption which is a sentiment that has you know guided my career in gaming since the very beginning once I got into it so I passionately believe that to be true um I'm curious to hear how much gaming um you know fed into the original use cases that Anatoly and you know you guys were thinking about internally versus something like D5 or other use cases that Salon is also obviously um used for if you had to kind of rank the verticals that Solana plays in or or

you know is influential in uh how would that look like internally what kind of conversations do you guys have around like Oh we must support gaming as a first class citizen versus D5 or versus something else yeah for sure so historically right I think when Angela was conceiving of Solana he had maybe a slightly Financial view but in his mind like watching was a very good tool for building open systems and one of the open systems would be very useful or like our financial things but I don't think he had a strong view on like which types of economies or what type of Commerce could be facilitative like blockchain he just thought that cumbers like in general a block should be very good for facilitating Commerce and so it's really easy then for you to make a leap from like okay what what type of Commerce is very native natively digital and games are like the ultimate form if you will and largest form of natively so from the early days gaming was something

that we were interested in um if you look at like sort of Solana's history D5 is probably the first thing that really like caught fire but gaming sort of all very closely after that it's to your question on like how do we rank at interlier it's just going to rain well one one interesting data point might be if you look at within the Solana Foundation sort of which is the organizational product the largest sub team if you will is focused on games so you know if that's any indication of how much games matter to us uh hopefully that'll tell you something so James is hugely important um because again it's the natively digital thing and so it's like a big bet and we're all Gamers too so there's some bias there in terms of like we personally care about it we personally play this thing now I I guess it's worth calling out really we think other things are important too but games are definitely in that like

first class citizen status in terms of things yeah I actually remember just anecdote here when we were making our choice around which chain to build on um this is back this is for Block stars back in I think spring maybe early summer of 2021 um I actually remember looking at we you know we collectively as a team looking at Solana and actually just missing Salon initially because it looked like you had this infographic out that was like here are all the different logos of the companies that are on there and it was mostly D5 right and there was no I don't think there was gaming at all on there and so we were like well it's not really for gaming and then I remember literally like maybe three months later same infographic uh lots more logos on it and suddenly there was gaming as like this big category with all the different games that were building on Solana and so that's ultimately why we ended up making the choice at that time it was like okay we can see how you know there is this support for for gaming um I'm curious how did that happen uh in that in that time period right like you

said D5 it was first D5 and then gaming came very quickly after afterwards was it web3 developers getting you know gaming companies startups coming to you and saying hey we'd like to build on Salon we think it's a good idea or was it the other way around where you guys were going out to devs and saying hey uh we'd like to support gaming as a use case we think it's Salon is a great fit come and build with us um how did that happen um internally organically inorganically at that time yeah it's a good question so my claim to fame if you will or my very my understanding I was actually the first person at the foundation focus on games um so I joined two years ago a little more maybe uh and I didn't enjoy necessarily to focus on games I sort of was to be a generalist Healthcare ecosystem but no one at the time was focused on games and and so I raised my hand I was like hey I think this feels like really important and and since then of course like we've expanded the game's team very significantly it's like for us but anyway random aside

um so from a like strategic perspective it's a little bit of a mix so we were blessed to have a few games you know like believe basically a few game developers who wanted to build web three games in the very early days um look at Solana and realize like hey this is actually a really the the characteristics of the chain actually enable us to build our vision and so a few of the games that come to mind are probably star Alice and Rory that um decided to build on spawning in like the very early days and the uh we are actually a big fan of the team we've been working with them and so I think there's part of it which is call it luck you know organic growth um right place right time so we had a few of these games through in the early days um and then in combination with that like we were increasing the Staffing of our team to go focus on games um in terms of how we went about it I

think fundamentally I don't think we can convince people to build blockchain games I think that's like a journey that you have to go on yourself like as a game developer it's like you have to decide that this is something that you care about and want to do and once you reach a decision like Ben we're here to help like make you successful um so so that that's I guess the that's a fine distinction I draw which is that what we were trying to do is Empower game developers who wanted to build a webcam we weren't really going out there trying to convince people because I think what we've seen is that success in the space correlates extremely highly with your passion and grit and and we can't Infuse that in people so but what we can do is like be facilitators and help accelerate so what we were doing is basically going out there talking as many of the LinkedIn Builders as we can right like

you guys included so um that's kind of the we went about it and sort of in parallel to talking to game studios it was also like trying to understand as quickly as possible what are the pain points that game Builders are running into and then how can we build infrastructure to ease those pains right whether it's launching nfts or hey we need to set up a pool to swap tokens or you know we need a Unity SDK like that kind of stuff so there's a bunch of problems with strategy but hopefully that I think if I had to sequence it it's like we were fortunate in the early days to have some people believe in us and then we basically took that and ran with it uh and found out their leaders that's a perfect segue actually into into my next question um which is uh you don't just you know support web3 Builders through the technology piece and kind of having the conversations um you've actually taken a pretty active approach in terms of directly investing um in in certain companies uh I think

you uh last year this is some months ago now but you launched a hundred million dollar uh gaming fund that was specifically for South Korea um interested to hear I haven't read much about that since you made the announcement very curious to hear what's going on with that why why did you make that decision um obviously the Solana foundation and or other parts of Solana I think you guys do reorgs on a fairly regular basis um restructure some of the corporate entities but obviously you guys make direct minority Equity investments in um in game developers including uh you know block Stars full disclosure there um curious to hear what else you guys are doing uh kind of more directly along these lines where you're actually taking minority stakes and companies you're actually setting aside you know significant funds 100 million dollars is not to be not to be sniffed at and actually you know making these direct Investments for presumably strategic reasons so tell me a little bit more about what's going on there what is your what is your uh you know thesis around that what are the criteria that you look at in terms of how you make these Investments who you make these

investments into um what is what is the rationale behind um doing some of these more direct Hands-On investment activities yeah it's a good question in action so there's to your comment on the the reorgan the one thing that I can that it's worth probably starting the conversation with is just framing some of the organizations here so there is the Solana Foundation which is a non-profit entity based out of Geneva Switzerland its mission is sort of broadly to empower the ecosystem and like be a steward for it if you will um and that that's the team I'm a part of and most of the games team sits in the foundation um then there are separately Salona Ventures Salon Adventures is a venture firm that is trying to earn Mentor scale returns um primarily by investing in projects built up fauna and so for example the evidence of the ventures is the entity that does the bulk of the investing so for example like that 100 million dollar fund is sort of an adventurous effort

um I don't want to speak for them but the way I think about Ventures and I think sort of their thesis is that they want to make bets on things in crypto that have the potential and really looking for an at scale outcome and so if you think about things that are trying to do things on train at scale like they need a chain that can do that and so they have this view that like okay if we're trying to make that scale that's like realistically they have to be spontaneous or practically speaking and so that's where they focus it's like what are things that Salon that's sort of uniquely position to empower at scale and so they invest in games that they think fit that thesis but also other stuff um whether you buy or social um so since that Ventures um the foundation is something that's like investing in our mandate is not our goal it's something we can do and we

haven't writes on the case boxer then the way we think about it is like maybe a little bit different we think about who is pushing the boundaries of what's being done on Solana um right and so you know for example with lots of like a lot of the things that we were excited about I thought were really interesting is that it's trying to push for how people think about the way that they experience a game where it's like this is you know a band that I'm cultivating and so I I think this is sort of uh there's there's some questions on you know why should kids build on blockchain I think many games don't have a good answer this question I think you guys have a pretty exception Ally on so that's what was exciting to us and we thought that like this could Inspire other people to think about how they build games in a different way so Foundation generally speaking not an investor we do it in sort of some exception exceptional cases where we think people are like pushing the boundary in some way um most of actually what the foundation does when it comes to deploying capital is in the form of grants for public goods so public goods are things that

people are building so that are that are freely available resources for everyone so if you're building you know an unreal five SDK right that that might be I mean we have at least one of those on planet now I have a couple but if you're doing that it's like really high quality integration that game developer has been useful okay that's something that you know we'd support because it's like a public so Ventures sort of a VC investor doing VC investor type stuff with a focus on sort of things that are uniquely enabled by sauna Foundation mostly about public goods conversely with ecosystem occasionally you know making investments in people that we think are like pushing the battery in some way this this public good piece is actually it's kind of a big deal um I didn't know about this until we just just now you told me about it um how can people kind of keep up to date with that because I think that's one of the biggest pain points for for game devs right now is the friction the

sheer friction of integrating with blockchain and then you know wallets and then you know you can't use your chosen game engine you just mentioned Unity SDK and unreal5 SDK um those are big deals for for game devs right because game devs typically don't want to have to be building their own game engine from scratch like that's just not you know it's a solved problem right that is a bad idea yeah yeah many times many times over um and so that's that again is the kind of thing that I think can bring web3 developers to embracing blockchain Technologies and kind of expanding the design choices that you can make in games by integrating you know digital ownership and or tokenized economies um uh tell me more about this public good piece uh and the kind of efforts you're supporting right now especially as it relates to game devs you mentioned two that are extremely exciting to me you know the SDK and unreal5 um what else are you guys doing a receipt again it's not you doing it you're seeing these public good type things happening and supporting that what else is is coming down the pipe uh in terms of uh making life easier for

game devs um to integrate blockchain Technologies specifically Solana yeah sure so there's there's actually and we even include this link in the show notes perhaps is there's a notion page so we put together that's like a directory of resources specifically for game devs we call it the salon and games kit and so that's where we try to keep an updated list of resources mostly free resources the game devs we're building in from Sonic and leverage including links to like the unity SDK on real 5S given in terms of other things that we see coming down the pipe I think there's a few problem areas we're thinking a lot about now um you you mentioned a couple of them so one is wallet experience right how do we make that experience as seamless as possible on web on mobile in sort of applications that are downloaded and people who are building interesting tooling that facilitate that experience something we're very interested in um so actually for those who are

listening to this podcast if you have ideas in these problem areas definitely go to the salon Foundation website and website um because yeah this is a really important stuff so quality streets one big backup there's a second which is Fiat on and off ramping uh this is just something that there's a bunch of people out there who do it but I think we can get better at nailing the use case especially for games so continue to an area that I want to sort of see experimentation in um so so those are two buckets there are a few others I think that are interesting one is around people who are building social in Community Management tooling for games so relative one of the interesting and Powerful things about doing stuff on chain is that this is an open source of data that you can leverage and so you know it's an interesting way to use your acquisition you can look at on-chain users you can categorize the behavior and that can inform some

targeting strategy of like who are entrepreneurs that we we actually bring to our game you know based on maybe other game assets that they own you can see hey this person's played other Shooters might make sense for Mike so there's a field in the user acquisition there's also a piece around managing the existing community that you have right understanding hey what are the people that already own my you know say nfts what are they doing what do they care about how are they Paving and then what you know how can I sort of cater the experience to them so I think that's sort of an interesting area as well I think that's a little bit uh earlier in the sense that these tools become more important the more on-chain users you have if it's a small set of users then it's like not as high leverage to build this stuff but if you think about the future I think it's a big one um so so I guess those are a few I think there's another big problem area that we're thinking about which is distribution how especially a webview game can you

get to both the crypto audience and that Community as well as sort of the the world and gamers in general right because I think most game Builders aspire to words reaching Gamers as a community and and that's certainly what I like I'm excited about so how to do that given that there are some constraints with steam EGS being on the mobile app stores right so we've already taken some better instruction in the sense of like this Lana uh The Saga phone having its own dap store um But continuing to think about how do we support games getting distribution yeah I mean I think you just hit all like any web 3 Game Dev who's been working in the space like will tell you those are the big pain points um you know it's the friction piece with the wallet it's the lack of distribution channels and easy UA um it's the Fiat on and off ramp piece um and and I think an area that's interesting to call out as well which

you didn't mention is you know how do you integrate blockchain Technologies in your game without actually having it force people into a blockchain experience you know that free to play freemium model that's so familiar to to Gamers from you know Mobile in particular where you just you know download an app completely frictionless um you start playing and then if you like the game you can convert into payer with just the click of a button um without having to do like the wallet piece so when the you know like crypto piece and all that kind of stuff so I think there's like that's another big pain point I think that Us game devs are experiencing so if anybody's building that for Solana uh get in touch with Colleen um yeah so please do there might be some grants in it uh for you um cool well you mentioned something that I wanted to talk about next anyway and and that is the Saga phone um and this kind of ties in nicely with the idea of you know go where the gamers are you know Mobile gaming obviously is is huge huge huge and it's by far the biggest Revenue driver for all of mobile um in general and so I very ambitious from Solana to go uh

making your own phone um The Saga phone I believe is a it's a web three native experience um obviously I'm sure you guys are not blind to the fact that uh the road to mobile success especially on the hardware side is littered with giant companies who've tried and failed um Amazon Fire Phone and Facebook phone and you know there's a whole bunch uh along the way so very very curious to hear that this ambition is the well not curious I I get it I understand the desire to have a a native mobile experience I'm very curious to hear more about your thinking behind it uh the DAP store that you you mentioned briefly there um and what if anything it means for games in particular and by the way I think I've ordered three Saga phones and I haven't received them yet so if you're listening yeah kids are starting to get out actually I can up after the the podcast on that definitives have started getting in the hands of people I saw Twitter posts earlier today of someone saying like it's my first tweet for my

soccer club so I'm excited yeah it's happening um yeah so so I guess first you're right like you mentioned this a little bit but I'll uh go over it again like the motivation here was that most of the world experiences the internet through their phone yeah and a ton of what they're doing on their phone is playing games so it's not really an acceptable State of Affairs that the mobile experience of crypto is like the second class citizen so so that was the motivating factor and actually where we started was building software um for Android to make signing transactions better while the connections better uh and then I think I totally realized he's like well actually like I know a fair bit about the hardware phones like I think actually that we could we could probably build our own um right and it's not like we're designing a bunch of custom hardware for the most part a lot of this is just that you knew the right people like uh the the team at awesome who have the ability

to manufacture phones um and so we thought hey we can also like not only Google the software we can actually patch it into Hardware with a wallet and really showcase this right so to your point on the mobile World being littered with people who tried and failed we're extremely cognizant of that I think you know personally the probability that the Saga becomes this phone that you know hundreds of millions of people have is extremely low um but that's not really the point the point is that we want to showcase what is possible right and like what is possible when you have a device that has both transaction signing be really seamless so the US is really crisp and has distribution right so Fiats or the decentralized app store or the DAP store really doesn't charge 30 percent

supports crypto applications that have token than have to use like if we can show what's possible with a really powerful experience on mobile we hope to Galvanize the future Community to build for that more directly and do you right the important thing here is that there's The Saga there's the actual phone which is like a pretty high-end device it's pretty awesome but there's also this one on mobile stack which is a software toolkit that works on Android so you can build Android applications using it um and so I think if what we were able to accomplish is just to get a bunch of applications to use this one mobile stack on regular Android devices and have those be really high quality experiences especially games that would be incredible at least personally I don't totally agree with that but like that's me big success outcome um if we also sell a bunch of phones hell yeah um so that's the the thinking if you will Behind The Saga and like where we want

to push uh the mobile experience and what are you doing specifically for games if anything are there yeah foreign in terms of like the the software the hardware there's nothing game specific that said like we're talking to a bunch of games now or that the soccer teams aren't a bunch of games down where we're trying to select connections to people who are interested in being sort of you know in the dab store uh at launch so there's an element of here of like Are there games that are really interesting distribution um that already have mobile bills are using the SMS stack and there are a bunch of those who are um so so there's like a distribution angle here for games um and then we're basically mostly working with games teams who already have a mobile build on the roadmap and you know flagging to them that hey SMS exists like you can actually basically build a better

version or at least a more crypto friendly version of your Android build um and then just to clarify SMS you mean Solana mobile stack not correct yeah that that is yeah so yeah yeah I'm glad you clarified that I don't mean uh the message cool um and what's the what's the timeline uh in terms of getting that to Market into that I know you said you're already kind of working with some developers but what's the roadmap look like for really pushing this out there I know that uh shipping early 2023 we're in early 2023 now into the hands of developers and then from there on out what what comes next it's a good question actually I don't know I don't know that developer kits are getting in the hands of people starting like right now uh or it's already in the end of folks I think we'll want to get the feedback from that uh iterate and then at some point in 2023 then it'll go out I actually don't know like is it like mid 2023 23 Q4 but you know

sometime this year uh you know stay tuned got it okay yeah so that was a very unsatisfying answer but I actually just don't know uh which is a little sad no that's that's fair enough um so uh in addition to to the sagaphone um you guys obviously do a lot of other initiatives as well uh those of us who were in Lisbon which I think you sadly missed Colleen we missed you there um for Solana breakpoint the late late last year I think it was the second annual I'd go to the first one but was there for the the second one late last year um a whole slew of other things were announced you know many which are obviously not gaming related at all you've got weirder wonderful things like Geo nfts and you've got Solana spaces which is the Solana branded store and a whole bunch of other stuff that was just very ambitious right exciting to see exciting to hear and of course it was a packed out conference um which is which is great to see a lot of excitement there uh and one of the things you guys did in Lisbon was you had a whole gaming

track um in fact a whole gaming venue a venue dedicated just to gaming um and all the panels and all the demos there were you know specifically related to to gaming and it was really exciting for me to kind of get Hands-On with so many games in the same place try out a bunch of different um you know Integrations with with Solana blockchain nfts tokenized economies a lot of inspiration there but here's what I will say uh I think if we're intellectually honest um there is a long way to go for web3 Native games blockchain enabled games to get to the point where they're as frictionless and as smooth and as polished and as you know if you're going for AAA quality then you know AAA quality level uh games on web3 are few and far between I think we have a long way to go so I'm I'm very curious and I think that's fine by the way I don't I don't personally have a problem with I think it's great that there are so many developers experimenting with different things and like different business models different design paradigms for uh for what games can be when they integrate block Technologies that's

totally fine um but I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on you know what is Solana doing to kind of help level up I think you've mentioned a few of these things already but what are you guys doing to help level up that whole ecosystem you know the rising tide lifting all boats kind of notion where um one of the things I love about web3 is is how um collaborative we are you know in web 2 Mobile gaming like you would never share your internal metrics you would never um you know do shared Twitter spaces like you know you would hide everything behind walled Gardens you know until you're ready to show it to the world and then you know ship it so that uh nobody else can copy you right whereas in web 3 there's a lot more of that like uh willing copying you know we're happily sharing with other projects and other games what we're doing um and I see that from you know you guys as well it's Lana magic Eden you know a lot of the other ecosystem players um that are that are uh you know trying to help that Rising tide lift all boats and I'm just very curious to hear like that was a big thought that came home with me from Lisbon was how can we

collectively improve the quality bar and remove some of this friction you know some of it's on the developers themselves the game developers but some of it's not really in our control um you know some of it's it's at the ecosystem level is at the tech stack level um it's the wallet level and a lot of these things have to kind of work with each other right some marketplaces working with the tech working with the game devs working with you know the wallet providers working with the Fiat payment providers there's just a lot of moving parts and I wonder that was my big overarching question coming home from Lisbon I wonder how can we as a web 3 community and you specifically you know Solana blockchain help push that forward help move us in the right direction to get to that friction because games are meant to be fun right games are meant to be fun and you're not really there to like do a bunch of Hoops you just want to pick up your game start playing have a good time not worry about transaction times not worry about fees not worry about uh you

know wallets and things like that um you've alluded to some of the stuff you guys are doing I'm just really curious to hear uh you know with that that hat of intellectual honesty on uh there's a lot of work I think still to be done to really level up the web 3 gaming experiences no I percent agreed the way I think about it actually is that web 3 games are a concept that a lot of us are very excited about I think for good reasons which is that games are the best example of really rich digital economies and like digital experiences that people care about and so it feels like there's something there that web3 which is also very good at facilitating large digital economies and you know conveying a real sense of ownership digitally like conception is a very powerful fit however to your point in like little honesty I still categorize games and webbreed as pre-product Market fit like we still haven't seen a game that in my

mind like there's like three things that we want to see it's like one is the game is a large scale success like a bunch of people play it because they love the game uh true that it has a sustainable economy right like in open economy that's working that isn't just a bunch of people speculating and then three three is like has compelling like there's a compelling reason why parts of the game were on chain and so I'd argue there's no game crypto that has all three today uh and when I see all three like in my mind then we'll have proven the game then I told them like we're an experimentation so 100 agree um so anyway in terms of what we are doing I guess if I think about it there's maybe a few buckets the first big bucket is laying the groundwork for the technology and the supporting infrastructure so that game developers lives and Gamers Library so there's a but you know there's a few

layers to this piece um the first is the protocol itself constantly working to make a protocol faster cheaper real scalable that's a sort of core level right um so that is just constant on my worker uh effort and totally sort of this is what he thinks about personal making the blockchain possible then the second layer is okay if the blockchain is awesome you still need to have high quality supporting infrastructure whether that the wallet again a few marketplaces the on-ramps the RPC providers who providing indexing services so the game students can like understand hey you know how many which wallets actually own my game assets Etc um analytic service like there's a there's a bunch of other secondary services that you need um and so getting those built and today our role in that is in some ways seating perhaps some of the

early teams a lot of it's also a good coordination role like we're a steward ecosystem we're trying to coordinate Matthew and Ann Fanta and various other folks to like get to a place where the whole the cohesive experience is really compelling for games so the part here which is like us being a little bit of a shepherd one of the things that actually we constantly ask ourselves though is we we don't want to be chain makers and we also don't like we recognize that our perspective I think may not necessarily be the best so the balance that we try to find is yes we want to be Shepherds but also we want to get out of the way of the people who can move much faster and get to a great outcome if we're not involved and so we're constantly trying to make sure like do we actually need to be involved here or are people just better off innovating on their own um so I'm going to be helpful but we also try to like let people succeed and and not get into it so anyway in my mind like that's that

first bucket of like taxing and supporting infrastructure maybe that's really high quality I think there's a second way in which the foundation can support this which is helping get more users on chain so that the ocean or like the pie if you will get larger and larger per game right because getting a wallet set up is a big barrier like self-custody is a responsibility and there's a responsibility a lot of people don't understand and aren't comfortable with and that's totally understandable and so in some ways like what we want to do is create more high value use cases in my three so that people have a compelling reason to actually educate themselves and go through self-custody because I actually think that there's only so much that we can improve the user experience like at some point there's a fundamental thing that people will have to understand if they want to have self-custody that like if this is a responsibility that I'm taking and and there's no amount of product design that can ultimately change that like there's

some limit so I think the only real solution is that there need to be that like use cases in one three that are so compelling that people actually are willing to educate them by free and so what we want to do is cultivate as many of those as possible like games but tons of outside games because once you have someone who's comfortable with self-custody and has Assets in a wallet all of a sudden the incremental effort for them to try other web free applications becomes much lower so if we're able to onboard a ton of people through D5 or through some sort of decentralized social play those are all people I think that are much more likely to engage in a web 3 game right so we're trying to broaden that fight in general um now it's quite possible that games are actually the best way to do this but in general sort of that's like one way to think about it and then the last thing here which is not really in our control but maybe is is me like it's a call for help if you will the thing that I want to see

from the for game Builders I guess it's experimentation because until we find real product Market fit I think we just need to rapidly try a bunch of compelling ideas and see what works and what doesn't um I'm sort of skeptical about building quote-unquote games for update right now when you like don't really understand what's the type of game that makes sense um and so someone used the term triple I like high quality out of triple I like high quality indie game like I want to see a bunch of triple i stuff I guess um that that's experimenting with what's happening on chain um or at least like what the web drinking right and then once you figure out what works then we can invest hundreds of millions of dollars to make this like a really high production value anyways that again not in our control that's just like I guess what I would want to do is

encourage that experimentation as much as possible and reduce the barrier to do so yeah the the middle layer I want to come back to that um which is kind of the classic chicken and egg uh question right like if you were to boil that down you know uh is and it kind of goes a little bit against where we started with you know the anatelli quote and what I kind of happen to believe typically uh is you know you have these new technologies and a great way to accelerate Mass market adoption is to is to provide games and you know a fun reason to to do something but I think what I heard you say maybe not definitively but at least allude to a little bit is maybe this isn't actually one of those types of Technologies because it's actually more important because the the value is so Financial at the moment and maybe that won't be true forever but you know D5 being the primary use cases uh when the value is financial of adopting a technology you will jump through a lot of Hoops if you think you're going to make money or

you're going to make you know some aspect of your financial life easier faster better whatever um you are prepared to jump through hoops um but you're not really prepared to jump through hoops for a game um you kind of you know we talked about the the friction piece um so maybe maybe it's kind of maybe it is that chicken and egg piece here where you know you Salon I mean not your responsibility per se obviously it's in your self-interest to onboard as many people onto onto Solana as possible for whatever use cases uh makes sense but it is more of a case of you know it's great that we're going to have fun games eventually um on chain but the reason people will come on chain is actually not for the games it's for the financial aspect is that a fair yeah actually I'm glad you asked that question that's not exactly what I mean so I think I I was saying like they need to be use cases with real value for people to come on chain and when I say value I don't mean Financial

value actually Financial value is the one I'm least excited about it's more like like fulfillment value right so as an example like um NF pfp nfts are an interesting thing where champion of teams in many ways people look down upon especially for example game developers and I can sort of understand the perspective which is that you know it's just a JPEG it's like a JPEG and you like barely even own the jpeg of many instances use mostly like animating that actually like owning a receipt to the JPEG and it's like you know it's so much easier to do these than creating a game which is which is all true but actually the funny thing is I would say that nft pfps have product Market fit all right because I've met plenty of people and myself included that about an nfgpfp because we we just liked the art like we it resonated with me I identified with it something I just wanted to be you know like I was like hey this is cool and I'm awesome right and and so that like I didn't expect to make money on

the nft it was just like this is cool I sort of vibe with this project like I bought the thing I've created many people buy nfps for just speculative reasons that to me is not really productive but at this point plenty of people have bought enough to use like unironically because they it just connected with them right so so that to me that's an example of value where it's like this intangible thing where it's like I you know I I felt fulfilled like I was like sort of slightly happier that I owned this thing and as part of this community and I got to put it on Twitter or whatever it's it's it's you know it's very intangible and it maybe sounds a little bit hokey but to me like pfps are actually one of the few things in crypto that has product Market fit and yes it's kind of janky and maybe Niche and we'll see if they scale but that to me like there are people who have set up walls because I know this because I've helped them do so because they're like hey this is cool like I just want one um right so what my point was we need more things like that more experiences like that in crypto where they look at the experiences they're like hey that's

cool I really want to engage in that and then they will and and like the reward of engaging in that experience is worth them setting up the wallet and going through self-custody and games are probably the have the highest likelihood of being that engaging experience but my point was like any engaging experience has the potential to compel someone to come on train and then once they're on chain the likelihood that they'll do other stuff is much higher yeah yeah okay so I totally I totally buy that um absolutely and I think yeah the number of things that I've so I initially got into crypto for the financial aspect back in the the last bull run you know back in 2016 and then lived through the crypto winter until now and you know wrote another wave here but I had already engaged with crypto at that point and you know I kind of like the hurdle was much lower and I hadn't done anything for years right because the last crypto winter was was pretty long several years long I didn't do anything for years but then when the next poll picked up I was like oh I'm

I'm ready to engage with more use cases in crypto and I think I think that's to me at least what I don't know how long this this current crypto winter I actually have a question for you on this um to kind of wrap wrap the the pot up here for today but um I don't know how long this crypto one is going to last but what has happened is a lot of people got onboarded for the financial reasons and other value reasons to your point you know the nfts vibing with the community you like um all good reasons perfectly valid reasons why some somebody would would engage with crypto they've probably gone dormant for a while because of this crypto winter but then when the next you know I don't want to call it a bowl but when the next kind of wave of adoption let's put it that way um happens people are going to be much more like folks like me from the last crypto winter ready to re-engage with the ecosystem ready to re-engage with more dapps ready to you know play games their wallets they can dust them off their digital wallets to get the cobwebs off and off they go starting to engage

so I do think like while we may be in for a bit of a lull and this is my question to you next is what what do you see happening um in 2023 and and Beyond um we may be in a bit of a lull right now um and adoption might kind of be flat or even uh stall out completely but a lot of people got onboarded onto crypto there's a lot of awareness of crypto way more than 2016-17 you know when the last um bear Market hit so my question to you really is uh what do you see happening in 2023 um not just for for gaming but yes with a gaming lens please um you know I think there's still more bad news so to speak to come I don't think the the the uh the news is news cycle is fully played out yet um so my view is it shouldn't really impact web 3 gaming but it does because it impacts that broader adoption piece which we just talked about and so it's just that much harder to then onboard web 3 gamers for web3 because you've got

those hurdles and that friction so what are your predictions for 2023 and Beyond um especially as it relates to gaming but you know just more broadly so you guys have a uh you have a much better perch um from which to kind of observe the overall Market um and so curious to hear your your predictions yeah yeah there's one thing there's only like literally anything can happen and I've also learned that my ability to predict the future is extremely poor so I don't have any amazing predictions to give but but I can speak to how I see like that frame how like where we are right now and I think what needs to happen so about it I have a little bit higher conviction so what happened in 2021 and like early 2022 where I was like insane bull run it did get a it did get crypto in the Limelight and got a ton of attention on

it right a lot of uh normal people if you will um heard about it heard about nft maybe purchased one whatever or just bought some tokens on coinbase or whatever so that didn't happen um prices got way out of line with like the actual reality of what people were doing on chain and so in my mind actually so this is being a broader economy I think there's some craziness going on and so the interest rate change then precipitated like a basically reality setback in in the economy very bright generally and that sort of had it like then that took place crypto too but because of the nature of crypto where like the up Cycles are crazy in the downside because you can be crazy like if you have violent downswing so it's it's basically like back to reality for everyone especially in crypto and I think now the way I see it is that the crypto

world needs to prove that it's valuable to people right because when people heard about crypto in the in the last and uh two years and maybe tried it out in some ways you perform but and then you know in the last six months I mean the crypto industry has done an excellent job of just destroying the trust that the average person has in the industry right so the industry needs to rebuild trust prophecy so we have like a steep hill to climb and it's and I think the only way we do that is we like deliver experiences that people that actually bring some level of fulfillment meaning or value to their lives I think games have one of the best draws of doing this in terms of Builder experiences that people are like hey this is great uh and you know like it was a really like I had I'm happy that I used like played this game and had to like did these things on traded in the context of this game because the the thing I worry about to

me is like that crypto ends up like VR it's like this technology that has been hyped up for a long long time but remains subscale and sort of meeting and I think the battle that we have to fight now is to not end up like VR um right like actually deliver great experience of the value of people at Large Scale so I think that's about that we need to fight and I think that's the only way we really regain trust um and does that can take years for games in particular what I expect to happen is that this year so 2023 we'll see a bunch of real games launch Games built by people like yourself like real game Builders who've built successful games before and it'll be really interesting to see if any of these hit red games super hit driven brutally difficult to get a hit game so I have no idea if we'll see a success this year and you know or and I've even left an idea of which games those might be um but I think we'll get a bunch of good

shots on goal this year and I'm optimistic and we'll see at least a few right like to our earlier point or my opponent like games trying to prove that product Market fit you know dream scenario we get a couple games this year that have product Market fit like that demonstrate how you can build a web through game that has a sustainable economy has a bunch of players um and does some cool stuff on train so yeah not much of a prediction but more like how I see this year as being like the first test that people you if you will for web three games um and and the good case would be if we get some good games out of product Market fit and then they are like they help the Battle of regaining society's trust in crypto it's a tall order um but uh it can be done we have a lot of work to do for sure we have we have some work to do collectively well I think that's a great thought to to end on I think it's uh optimistic while realistic at the same time that's good we should all as an industry be

optimistic of course of what we're building uh but realistic at the same time about uh where we are right now in this moment in time so um Colleen thank you so much for coming on the Pod today uh great insights uh not just about Salon about the industry and the ecosystem and gaming uh more generally so feel free to come back to the show anytime loved having you you on an enjoyed our chat thank you thanks Nico yeah always enjoy our conversation this is this is a ton of fun and also a big thank you to all of our listeners uh we will be back uh in a couple weeks with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web3 so until next time friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is Nico navik.com and you can find me on Twitter at nicothefin DM's always open and we will have a bunch of show notes uh for some of the links that we talked about uh today so that uh folks who are curious about the Solana Foundation some of the tools that they're building uh could easily access those thank you very much

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