Star Atlas | Metaverse Game on the Solana Blockchain

hello everybody today we are going to be talking about the solana blockchain the metaverse and how it all ties to games and here with us to speak to these issues is michael wagner co-founder and ceo of star atlas the company making a metaverse game using the solana blockchain welcome michael thanks so much joseph great to be here yeah it's awesome to have you on there's a lot of topics here that i'm super interested in but maybe we could start with the salon of blockchain i mean i think we can assume our audience has a basic understanding in terms of let's say bitcoin ethereum like basics of crypto but maybe you could speak to us first about solana and maybe the general concepts behind what is a third generation blockchain sure yeah so i mean i guess um if we can kind of back into that and say you know first generation blockchain was bitcoin right the genesis of the blockchain itself so bitcoin was the first uh in the next generation we saw

chains like eos where you have higher transaction throughput maybe different consensus mechanisms or consensus algorithms lower costs that allow for greater scalability um and then you know moving into where we where we live today which is you know the development and production of these third generation blockchains something like solana for example maybe to put some quantifiable figures behind it is capable of processing 50 000 transactions per second and this is you know scalable in a parallel fashion and we can kind of get into the specifics of that but um you know going back to say eos eos is capable of something like 5000 transactions per second bitcoin is capable of seven transactions seven to twelve transactions per second so you can just see the orders of magnitude um in scalability um and potential for greater user adoption as uh the underlying technology continues to improve right and maybe we could also just talk

about what is star atlas in terms of what kind of game is it and then from there it'd also be great to understand exactly how does solana and the blockchain tie into the game itself absolutely yeah i think that's a great starting point um you know and i don't want to be overly grandiose here but we we do genuinely believe what we're developing at star atlas is not only going to be the future of gaming in the gaming experience but also this entirely new human experience uh the way that people interact with the digital world it's different than anything we've seen today so star atlas itself from a video game concept is a is being developed out to aaa quality standards um so really seeking to develop a video game that would be attractive to a mainstream gaming audience something that you would even see in in esports tournaments for example highest quality levels of graphics uh we're building this out in unreal engine 5 and so you get this full cinematic quality in a video game rendered in real time um and so that was kind of our starting

point it's uh space themed so it's space exploration territory control political conquest and generally grand strategy so uh to compare that to some modern titles you can think of games like you know eve online uh maybe economics from entropia and star citizen more recently from the gameplay mechanics standpoint now what we're doing is enhancing that entire gaming experience by introducing uh blockchain mechanics to the to the actual gameplay and so that includes things like non-fungible tokens or nfts for all of the in-game assets now these these nfts are truly owned by the player and it really empowers the player then to purchase and invest into something that can then uh be sold later you know and if you're a gamer and you know how much time you spend in games how great would it be to be able to recapture some of that value that you create for yourself over time so nfts we have two crypto native assets uh one related to governance and one related to you know in-game transactional currency

and then uh we're also associating defy into the platform so that as players earn income through this play to earn model they're actually able to deploy that into yield generating vehicles so they can actually collect some residual income off of the assets they possess and so where it gets where it gets broader you know is first of all there's 2.7 billion gamers around the world so that's kind of our first target audience right is we have exposure potential exposure to that entire audience but when we start considering the potential of the metaverse where people can actually create uh their own value uh deploy their own strategies be uh you know create ingenuity and bring it into the game then and i identify methods of extracting value that aren't reliant on the mechanics that we've introduced that now has the potential to attract the entire global audience right and just uh legacy power structures and and kind of like systems of economics that are just imposed upon people because of

their geographic location okay and maybe just going back and kind of unpacking some of what you said because i think there was a lot there at least a lot for me sure so first in terms of the game similar to eve online territory control i get that from a platform perspective i mean you're using unreal so it sounds like it'd be easy for you to go for you to go cross-platform but is this cross-platform is this more of a web game or is it mobile is it you know uh what what kind like what platforms are you initially intending to to support we're still a ways off from the final decision on that specifically but we are building this out you know once again to triple a quality standards so you could you know envision playing this on a pc with you know high quality hardware um you know the potential to go across platform onto console is certainly exists because it's in ue5 and then you know being a game that is targeting this global audience we want

to ensure that we have some type of mobile accessibility as well and that might exist through streaming services or some other implementation that we that we uh uh implement but this will be you know three to five years down the line before we're really making any final conclusions on crosstalk and then you also mentioned nfts and then two types of tokens and so as far as the nft aspect is concerned does that mean what does that does that have to do with the ship that you buy do you own that specific ship or the art associated with that ship are they unique or how does that work with respect to how the nft integrates into the game yeah absolutely i mean you can actually think of virtually everything in the observable universe that is you know star atlas metaverse as being an own an asset that's able to be owned so everything from uh well the two core asset classes are ships and land so real estate virtual real estate we're seeing you know the prevalence of virtual real estate in various sandbox style games um on the rise uh

within our game it's things like ships which can be outfitted with crew members components modules weapons shields all of these different uh enhancements to your to your core ship asset those are all nfts and then on the land side it's it's not only owning the land but owning the structures so things like mining equipment and mining drills and then also connecting that out to space stations orbital space stations that supplement and support your land-based activity but all of these items uh are issued as um uh you know rare uh limited quantity assets finite assets uh that the players truly own and are able to trade on our nft marketplace or really on any nfc marketplace across the solana ecosystem right and so just to underscore that last point meaning if you were to acquire a ship in game or buy an nft of a ship or of land then through you know even outside of the game through an external

marketplace you could actually sell and make money from selling those assets that you've acquired in-game is that is that right 100 it actually creates an entirely new class of user because there will be people that you know purchase these assets uh from a pure speculation standpoint without ever having the intent of actually playing but because they want to maybe secure some prime real estate in the game and as we continue to grow and get more users that becomes a desirable parcel of land that now maybe we'll appreciate in value and you know where we where we really break the mold and differentiate ourselves from traditional gaming environments is that um our assets are not locked in the game now if you own a ship in star citizen it has value but it's very difficult to extract that value right or sell that to another player it's in fact prohibited in most gaming platforms we we tear that barrier down and we fully encourage um and uh well just fully encourage people to transact freely and and to capture the value that they've effectively invested into the game

either through capital or through time spent got it and it seems like just recently there's been a little bit of an nft trend right where a lot of games have been integrating nfts and for example some of these some of these sales of nfts for whether it's land in game or various types of characters have sold incredibly well even ahead of you know launching and so what do you think is the motivation or why do you think there's so much interest around nfts in games very recently it's you know it's almost uh like it's an obvious feature that should be available in hindsight you know and i think people are discovering this once again you know do you want to invest into an asset that is trapped into a game environment or this digital virtual environment that you have no way of extracting the value from or do you want to deploy your capital your time and money into something that actually can deliver a return to you over the time over time and further um you know

the potential for these assets to appreciate is very attractive to somebody who's looking to spend money and now if you can couple um you know playing a video game having a good time alongside true capital investment into a video game or digital assets which is clearly on the rise and you know we've seen things like cs go skins around forever right and and people buy and trade the cs go skins but um you know the the reality is people are looking to create this digital version of themselves their avatar and it's something that can and will be persistent when we introduce blockchain as one of the underlying you know mechanisms uh that that allow people to interact with this space because now your avatar can and your assets can move from one space to another right and it's very powerful right now the other thing that you had mentioned is basically two types of tokens one would be a governance token meaning are you planning on running star atlas as a dow and maybe for our

audience maybe you could explain the kind of concept of a dao and how that would fit into a star atlas at least in your implementation sure yeah um yeah so we i guess quickly we do intend to over time transition into a purely decentralized governance model initially because of the uh complexity of um you know planning and developing a product of this nature we operate as a centralized entity but over time we turn that power over to the community and to the global audience uh now a dao is a decentralized autonomous organization and um the structure simply introduces voting and governance rights to people who are stakeholders within that system and so if you have a dow token that dow token represents your interest in the protocol overall and in our case that will give people the ability to do two things uh well multiple things but but one path is through the game itself so within the star atlas game you're actually able to deploy

political strategy and do things like impose taxes on other players if you have the political influence in a region that someone's operating in outside of the game though is where it's where it's really most empowering and that people will be able to vote on things like asset release schedules um economic decisions within the game inflation schedules um uh and otherwise be able to determine things like flow of funds which the game is this perpetual machine that recirculates tokens by nature of playing the game well some of those tokens will go into the dow structure and then owners of the dow tokens have the ability to say well we want to vote on a portion of those proceeds to go back to star atlas the development company because without them the game will never get finished right and and but over time they can determine that you know star atlas we're just another vendor and maybe there's someone else out there that can build a better spaceship or a better version of the game or a better implementation into the game and the community as we turn this this

power over the community is the one that will forge and form the future of star atlas and so it's all governance based it's really a voting structure and it allows people to determine the outcome of a collective uh endeavor which is what we you know are ultimately building at star atlas okay and you mentioned two tokens so one would be a dow token and what's the other token yeah so uh the dow token is called polis and um our in-game transactional currency is called atlas it was very important for us to separate the um the the tokens just because of the functionality underlying each one is really responsible for political strategy and governance the other one is is your in-game gold right you have to spend money in the game to upgrade items to refuel your ship repair your ship any operating cost in the game is takes place as uh or through atlas and and yeah so polis is just uh on the government side right and so if that is your sort of in-game hard currency does that also mean that unlike traditional games if i buy hard

currency in my game today i can't really trade that to somebody somebody's other account for example but in this case as a as a crypto token does that mean that i could kind of convert it to a different account or trade it to a different account absolutely yeah i mean it's freely tradable in fact the way that users connect to our platform and to our game is um it is similar to participating in d5 protocols or web 3.0 protocols where all you're doing is connecting a wallet so you know in most cases it's something like metamask uh phantom is really popular on solana phantom itself has nft support and it also has this wormhole bridge that allows people to move assets between ethereum and solana but you connect your wallet and that is effectively your user account and now we're able to pull a list of all of your assets because you're in full possession of them right and so um quite similar to these other d5 protocols you have cryptocurrency that lives in that wallet

that is tradable across any of the decentralized exchanges uh within the solana ecosystem which are all based on serum uh is the is the decentralized exchange protocol um but also any exchanges centralized exchanges like ftx or binance that could be trading atlas and police in the future so you can convert your atlas and polis into usd liquidate that back into a real bank account at some point should you want to and uh you know utilize this platform as a way to generate real income for yourself in terms of like maybe one implication of the the model that's that's being put forth is really around like the the economic modeling of you know how this how an external marketplace could impact the the in-game economy for example and is is this something that you guys are concerned about or is this something that's fairly well understood or what would be the danger of having this kind of a model if any from an economic modeling perspective it it introduces some degree of

uncertainty because we don't have complete control right so like entropia is a game that was similar um in terms of our model and way ahead of its time by the way and entropia came out i think 2006 um it's kind of space-themed mmo people could actually own land and assets in the game the difference was that they served as the kind of central bank of the economy if you will um so there was a there was a way to move real cash into entropia and there was a way to extract cash from entropia through a direct peg that they that they had created now in our case we don't want to be a central bank we want a free-floating economy to exist and so it does introduce some uncertainty for us uh with respect to all of these different stakeholders that have different motivations you know you have the gamers that want to play and they want to make sure that there's balance in the game but then you also have people that are strictly speculating on tokens because they think the value will appreciate um now with that being said i i'm kind of comfortable releasing this for information for the first time but we've

partnered with republic as well as um onboarded several economists into our team we have a team of about 12 people right now that are focused exclusively on things like you know corporate financial modeling tokenomics uh game economics and then game balance so it's very much the forefront of of our analysis and we're going through that process now and and um you know the objective is to deliver a robust functioning model at game delivery but we also know that there's you know this is an iterative process as well we can make as many assumptions as we want and hope everything works but at the end of the day we just have to deploy it and then iterate on it when uh you know based on things that are or are not working and so i wanted to now talk about you know probably a really interesting angle or or aspect of the game which is you know the metaverse and so one of the things that you had mentioned is that you plan on building a metaverse based on the solana blockchain as part of star atlas so a few questions so what does that mean to you in terms of the definition of the

metaverse and secondly how do you what what is the in what is the connection between crypto or solana tube the metaverse yeah i guess uh so let me circle back with why we selected salon in the first place and again it was it was really the underlying technology from a scalability standpoint uh so high transaction throughput extremely low transaction costs and also sub-second finality on state changes um you can think of finality as latency within the network and so with our objective being to deliver as many of the game functions entirely on chain as possible as opposed to us running a centralized server you know in the cloud that posts game data and things of that nature we want everything to run on chain and so in order to accomplish that you need a chain that is capable of scaling to millions to potentially hundreds of millions of users and so based on all of our assessment across probably six of the upcoming gen 3 protocols solana was it it had clear competitive advantages from the tech

standpoint from the team but also um it's once again kind of obvious in hindsight but we just saw the potential of what they were building and the people they were affiliated with so having groups like alameda research sam venkman freed um and and uh ftx behind and supporting solana that was a clear indicator that there was potential there and we're seeing now the massive explosion uh in development that is occurring on on the salon of blockchain it's probably you know the the most rapidly growing ecosystem out there so that's kind of why we selected solana how it integrates with the metaverse is that it becomes this underlying layer it is the database and it is where we intend to run all of the on-chain programs your smart contracts that determine game accounts so in an optimal scenario everything would live and and get processed on solana um now the metaverse as a concept there's really no clear consensus on what that actually is um

you know i think you can you can look at it from the standpoint of some alternative virtual world within which an individual can live a persistent life it does require that the metaverse effectively lives on forever because you're creating a digital life digital representation of yourself within the metaverse but um where i extend that definition is is that a true metaverse needs to have a true fully functioning economy that is circular and supportive and so you know as we bootstrap adoption in star atlas we're using atlas and polis as incentive mechanisms to get users this is where the play to earn comes from but that's a very extractive dynamic people constantly pulling value out of the ecosystem as we release the subsidy but over time um it's important for us to be able to empower people and this takes place through the the decentralization and the dial function to empower people to create value for themselves

create uh experiences within the metaverse for themselves and uh you know it can come in the form of many many different innovations but things like in-game concerts say uh you know say a producer one of the producers from our rebirth uh digital art campaign dadmouse wants to go into the game and produce a set and invite people from all over the world to experience that in vr and set up a ticketing booth where you know you effectively have to fly your ship through the ticketing booth pay the fee with crypto and now you get access to the concert so things like that things like creating your own businesses on land unrelated to gameplay once again so you say another example would be a digital art curator somebody who goes out and buys nfts brings them into the game puts them on display in an art gallery and now sells those to other players that has nothing to do with political domination grand strategy space exploration any of those mechanics that we're introducing it has nothing to do with that

but it does add value back into the ecosystem because now people might come into star atlas just to experience this art gallery or to experience this concert so i'm thinking you know bigger experiences like this where people can contribute uh player created content and you develop out a a robust functioning economy that is not reliant on any centralized entity it's it's kind of a simulation of reality in the way that the real world works from the perspective of economics so if i were to try and summarize your definition of the metaverse within the context of star alice it would be this capability around bringing external or user generated content experiences some form of business inside of the game without the centralized authority essentially that's right yeah and and the only you know maybe further extension i would make on that is that there's kind of this concept of the metaverse is the graphical user interface that overlays the entire internet okay in 3d space so you can

think of like every website right now that exists online could also live inside the metaverse and all of your shopping experiences yeah they don't necessarily need to be related to star atlas but once you get into star atlas now you can go shop at the louis vuitton store in in game and maybe maybe you're buying digital items or maybe you're purchasing physical items that get delivered to you in your real house you know in your real geographic location but you're actually experiencing that shopping experience through this digital world so um the implications are huge when you start to introduce ar and vr to uh to a fully immersive world like the one that we're developing okay and then i also wanted to back up a little bit in terms of one of the comments you made as far as the economy needing to be circular and supportive i believe you said could you just help define what that specifically means just so i fully understand yeah um just think of it as uh kind of checks and balances or or just a balance sheet so if everybody's always pulling value out of the economy say through earning atlas

through gameplay and then taking that and selling it for real world money or converting it to an alternative currency that creates a situation in which the it's just not sustainable because we can't continuously issue new currency to incentivize new players and there's this negative um feedback loop where the value of the economy is constantly going down because it's being siphoned off so in opposition to that is you need people to bring value back into the economy and that's through being you know industrious entrepreneurs within the game and if they're contributing value yes they can extract a piece of it but now they're counter balancing the amount of value that's being pulled out so this is a very long term vision it's probably going to be 10 to 15 to 20 years for this to really fully realize itself but that that's the implication with the extractive economy got it and maybe the one last set of questions i could ask you is really around the integration of crypto more generally into games now if you

are an existing game developer and maybe there's a difference between if you already have an existing game versus a new game but would you say or what advice would you give to an existing game developer that might be looking at crypto today and thinking how can i integrate crypto into my game or do you recommend crypto for like new games and thinking about integrating crypto from the from the outset rather than trying to sort of bolt it on to an existing game i would tell them to steer clear and avoid it entirely i want to keep that competitive advantage for as long as possible um no i think you know i think it makes sense i think it's more difficult to integrate into existing games um because the game wasn't designed with that type of infrastructure in mind so it makes more sense for new game developers to try to integrate it it really does create more of a seamless flow of value between the game developer and the user and it allows us to introduce new economic models in the way that we sell video games because you know in our case you're not actually purchasing the game

from us at all wherein you know in a lot of cases you would just pay the sticker price to to get access to a video game or these uh free-to-play models where there's up charges on various items we can we can eliminate all of those and say you know now it's more of a invest to play and i hate to use that term invest right because um uh just because of regulatory concerns but the reality is they're they're effectively purchasing something that has some degree of persistent value which they can then turn around and sell later as i said so you almost you can almost think of it as an access fee that's recover recoverable or refundable or maybe we'll even go up in value over time so i just think that it's amazing we're going to be able to create these whole new models around how we attract users and reward people for engaging in gameplay okay and maybe for the audience in terms of what to expect for star atlas as far as like a potential launch date i think you had mentioned uh some of the development timeline but what what can we expect

is there like a specific date you have in mind or is it just more general timelines that you have in mind so far we have a major launch coming up um i would kind of point out we officially made our announcements of the world on january 14th of this year um so it hasn't been a lot of time we actually had four people on the team then uh we're up to about 70 people on the team right now wow we are scaling incredibly rapidly i'd say fifty percent of those um uh team members are under danny floyd's purview he's the chief product officer so it's a lot of our design creative uh aspect but nevertheless you know scaling up our our blockchain developments our web development our devops all you know every department is essentially growing so um with that said we launched a our initial campaign on april 24th and we called that rebirth genesis of the metaverse now this is a um it's a pure digital art campaign uh in which we created what we call meta posters it's these multimedia

digital art pieces that include audio soundscapes produced by artists musicians such as blondish the bass jackers we have dead mouse on there with major uh renza keel corcoran so we've got all of these great artists that we worked with and they produced the soundscape behind the art and then we've been filmed that uh with augmented reality through a relationship with shape immersive out of vancouver and so you know what you what what the result is is this really fully immersive 3d experience that starts to unveil the backstory and the lore of star atlas over time so every week we release a new poster and these posters are accompanied also with in-game rewards so you know owning a certain tier will get you say a spaceship and some land claims an orbital space station and then also things like unique skins uh custom emotes little pets that are you know one time only available during this campaign so um that will take us up through july 24th uh the next phase is for us to launch

what you know what we consider a mini game it's an in-browser version of the game and you'll be able to do things like ship configuration ship missions where you're flying around um uh space station configuration and then also land and mining operations so they're kind of crafting gameplay loops where you'll get to upgrade items based on you know time spent and also the income earned but also get to go out and explore the universe a little bit um concurrently we are scaling our unreal engine uh full production team and so we are undertaking efforts to build a pre-alpha release that will include a uh a shipyard module is what we're calling it but it's you know it's uh you're living in 3d space uh in in the full production version of the game and able to walk around a space station and look at your assets in a hangar and perform some minor functionality and that is likely to come out at the end of q2 or sometime q3 2022 but the but the

important part about the mini game in browser is that players will not only be able to purchase their assets they'll actually be able to deploy them and start generating income or yield so for us it was super important to execute in an iterative fashion as opposed to waiting five years to deliver a full final product we are getting pieces of gameplay out now so people can experience it and then we utilize that feedback to iterate on the game and improve the game so as opposed to waiting until the finish line delivering this big package we just we we kind of drop pieces at a time and keep people engaged right okay well michael those are all the questions i have do you have any final message to the audience or if there's any specific type of role you're looking for or anything like that uh do you do you have a final final thoughts for message you know one one final thing that i do want to share and it was um really amazing that we pulled it off because we we had short notice on it but um this all just got picked up in forbes we had an opportunity to work with neil

armstrong's uh ip estate uh so the estate manager and uh in collaboration with the united states space force as well as spacex on a on a rocket launch today um that actually took a satellite a gps satellite into orbit and it's named after neil armstrong so we were the ones that custom created a one of these meta posters for that event it's really historic you know and we're already seeking to combine and and kind of merge physical reality meat space with with digital virtual realities and virtual worlds and we're tying the story of that space ship launch into the real lore of the game so it's already in the canon so um you know with respect to people that we're hiring if you we're hiring everything so um specifically engineers game developers and and uh artists i would say you know reach out to us at careers.com but otherwise please take a look at our website we have a new website coming out in about a month we're super excited about but

um all of our social media links are on there very active discord community uh very active telegram community so we'd love to see you there um and final point is i host we host uh amphitheaters and discord or on twitter every week and it's an open q a for people in the community to reach out to the leadership team and talk to us and ask questions and um yeah we hope to see more people join us for those awesome so i'll include a bunch of links to all of the stuff that you mentioned in the show notes but definitely want to thank you for your time michael and for everybody else hope to catch you next time bye everybody thanks so much joseph [Music]