The 'hyper-financialisation' of play-to-earn with Ben Cousens from Zebedee

[Music] we are delighted to be joining by Ben from zebedy Ben what is zebedy all about uh zebedy is a fintech uh we're a payment services provider for the games industry and we use Bitcoin to do it but we put money in games effectively so money is now actually part of the game and not an abstracted thing represented through games currencies Etc right so but you you could say we've been paying money into games for years now everyone is very familiar with 99 P for a little hat and something and doing iaps and and then technically your money has been put into the game how how does this differ yeah that is that's funny that's what I talk about so yeah we've had coinut machines in the' 80s where you insert a coin and you get value in the play time uh games often represent money so Grand Theft Auto you always you win money and you objective is to be the richest guy in the city or whatever um but the value exchange is not bidirectional and it's not actually linked you don't you don't

really have money in the game and that's cuz money is an analog thing so we have all of these uh ways of working around it like topping up balances and then the games company is the custodian of the money these this is all friction and it's a bad user experience so we we can actually make it a seamless part of the flow of the game in a regulated and compliant way uh and it we believe it increases conversion it increases retention it increases engagement and generally improves the performance of a game for both the player and the developer so in a lot of cases people are already putting money into games but also and we talked about this before you can go and S sort of sell items or trade items within games already you can sell objects to other players or or build of characters or whatever it might be but this is all kind of done outside of the game this is done through people negotiating and then using I don't know gray s sites or just swapping money by PayPal or whatever is the idea that you're trying to make this an integrated part of the system and all of these kind of transactions could take place within the game yes that that is one usage of

our payment Tech so you you know you hit the nail on the head a lot of players already transact through gry market economies uh there's High incidences of fraud the developer has no recourse to help if there's any issues and they can't support it often as a result they they prohibit the behavior they say if you get caught doing it will'll block your accounts we can allow that to occur in game in a way that the developer sees and gets a cut of what is happening which is already an organic player Behavior uh and it's happening in a way that you're not triggering anti-money laundering restrictions or or fears uh players a kyc properly so all of this economic activity which is occurring already can now be brought into the game and made part of the monetization of that product it's a it's a new Revenue stream that is enabling something that already occurred that makes sense cuz I think a lot of people and myself included when they see like oh you're putting Bitcoins into games my mind immediately goes to okay so this is a a

web 3.0 thing this is about the blockchain somehow but it's it's not necessarily that is it uh no it it isn't it isn't and that we're yes we're using Bitcoin and that primes a lot of people to think that way but we're really using it because it's an inherently better Payments Technology it's it's natively digital it's open source and it's interoperable it also has really easy uh on and off ramps it's deeply liquid worldwide and it is at this point regulated and understood it's regulated in the US it's regulated in Europe it's regulated in Japan those are the three big gaming markets and so now you can actually pretty seamlessly flip between Bitcoin and your local currency whether that's pounds Euros or dollars so what we can then enable is tiny tiny transactions you're talking a thousandth of a scent can now be sent in game in real time based on events that occur in the game I like as simple as a player walking over a coin or collecting a coin or trading player to player or meeting in a market Bas all of this stuff can

now be enabled at the Nano transaction level uh with easy access back to real money so to speak right without going too techy like my understanding of Bitcoin is that one of the drawbacks has always been that the transaction time the processing time is significantly longer than a lot of other Payment Systems so when you're talking about little microtransactions and and you know you you click something and then bang it's in your wallet is it really immediately in your wallet or is just there's going to be a day or two before it pops up no it's really in like so common uh misconception is exactly that that bitcoin's slow but in uh in 2017 there was a software update to bitcoin called lightning uh we build on top of lightning and on top of Bitcoins it's Bitcoin lightning and then us uh and lightning enables instant transactions globally and it's it's very fast it's so fast you can actually stream money so I could walk into an area of a game and that could perhaps trigger me being paid per second that I'm walking around that area all of this is now possible when money is a digital programmable thing

and I'm imagining you guys offer like s sdks to build it into games and and following up to that I know that with certain app stores that we do dealing with mobile Google's always been pretty open or slightly more relaxed but certainly Apple are very restrictive about what they do and do not allow on their App Store especially when it comes to creating what they consider to be little mini marketplaces embedded within games now that's come to light a lot more recently with the Apple versus fortnite thing and there's a chance that W Garden may be coming down a bit but I imagine you still encounter a little bit of friction there as well yes so in well it a good question so in answer to the first part of uh your question we offer an API and a Unity SDK unreal SDK coming soon as well as additional developer Tools around it we also we've also built Integrations with places that Gamers often are so Discord twitch um you know all of these place we want the zebedy app to be with with you wherever you go

kind of like a pokedex in Pokemon that's the idea um but then in in response to the second part about App Stores um we're we're actually there's 12 or so games now powered by us in the App Store we've had no issues with uh Apple or Google to date um we do not Advocate that developers try and get around Ina purchases uh within Apple's things so you know we don't sit it's completely possible with the technology but we do not tell a developer hey um do all of your I with Bitcoin and you'll be fine because you won't be apple will take objection to that but rewarding players with Bitcoin uh and having Bitcoin in your game that is permitted uh and we've seen that pretty consistently we've had some very high level conversations with apple around this and we seem to be okay there um with regards to the kind of macro shifting landscape was to payments in Mobile ecosystems I do suspect that uh Apple's you know hold over that ecosystem is going to weaken over time we've seen the Netherlands has enforced

uh open payment standards within dating apps for whatever reason they chose to focus there so I can see that over time it's perfectly plausible that more and more Payment Systems will be permitted uh within app stores and we'd be ready to be there as soon as that happens and do you have any games out there in the world that are currently using the system or are you in the kind of beta testing with a bunch of companies uh no we've got quite a few games out now so yeah there's there's north of 20 developers now building on zeid um of which there's 12 who've got their games out in the App Store uh the latest is a game from fun games called Bitcoin miner which is as you might expect you mine Bitcoin in the game but it's real Bitcoin that you're earning um but we've also got implementations in some PC console stuff as well so probably what we were most well known for when we got started was we integrated our Tech into Counter Strike to show off what it can do um and that we we didn't intend that to be a fully-fledged product that's it's over a year old now uh but the servers is still full so we're still running it

that's a fairly high profile kind of launch pad for that sort of thing isn't it uh yeah I mean we we obviously did it deliberately but uh but you know I think Esports is a very logical place to put in something like this there's already it's already competitive play there's already orts tournaments around it so why not put that skin in the game really and and I don't think it can be considered gambling as much as skill skill based gaming because it really is definitively your skill you you have to actually be beating other players cuz they drop coins when they die uh and we can measure you know everything going on in game events to actually trigger those payments so it's it's very much a skill-based competition where now there is something on the line uh and I I personally feel it democratizes Esports you know if if you're good you can actually start to earn some money in your bedroom and we've seen that happening in uh Brazil we've got a sizable audience there uh and they've actually been earning enough money to pay for food and buy gifts and things uh for you know friends and family just through this Counter-Strike integration we've done

I know people have been talking obviously a lot about play to earn recently and there's a a real division of opinion on that one whether it's kind of a positive that allows people to you know generate actual benefits Financial benefits from the time they're putting in which a lot of people see as like maybe without it this is a wasted effort and now I'm actually getting something back from the time I invest so it's an Roi I guess but other people are think it's much more of a the moment you start treating games like that it becomes work and suddenly you're dealing with a labor market that can be easily exploited and all of this stuff so where where what are the feelings around that cuz obviously if you're introducing these kind of payment systems it it can facilitate that kind of that kind of use yeah I think um yeah it's I think play and earn or play to earn whatever bucket it gets you know put into is um it rubs people the wrong way because it very quickly looks like what I would call the hyper financialization of gaming uh and people don't you know gaming is meant to be entertainment and if you take it out

of entertainment is it really gaming anymore is it interactive entertainment or is it you know labor and work um you know we very much feel we're a payments company we're not advocating for these we we don't you know do toonomic designs around gameplay Etc where the idea is to earn you know really colossal amounts of money this is this is much more about very smooth payment flow improving ux for existing and new games um when you know when we look at play and earn gaming because obviously can do it you know the technology enables it um we very much feel as a company that you need to respect the individual uh and by respecting individual it means give them the money don't give them an abstracted form of money or a difficult form of money where you can't get it out you can't you know once you try to extract from that economy that actually what you get is is Pennies on the dollar and your time has been wasted or or your time was not valued appropriately I think you need to you know you need to give people real money you need to give them you need to give them pounds you need to

give them Euros you need to give them Yen uh and that's why we focus on actually getting people back to their bank account it's it's not all about Bitcoin it's about having this two-way value transfer and making it really part of the fabric of Gaming [Music]