The Metacast by Naavik: Crypto Corner - Michael Sanders, Horizon Blockchain Games

[Music] dmd listener and welcome to the crypto corner episode on the metacast brought to you by navi i'm your host today nicola vareka or nico for short and i'm joined on this special episode by michael sanders from horizon blockchain games michael is the storyteller the chief storyteller at horizon welcome michael thanks nico thanks for having me it's great to be here how is it to be the chief storyteller in a time like this where it feels like over half of the gaming industry is absolutely hating on everything that is remotely touching blockchain technology and crypto yeah um you know it's that definitely poses a challenge fortunately for us um you know our community really understands what we're doing and we're focused very much on building a game first experience with our game and then

you you know we also have the infrastructure and wallet to help other developers and creators so whenever someone comes in and actually experiences what we're doing while they might have a little bit of skepticism at the outset once they like experience our game skyreaver and see like oh these folks are actually building a game first experience then it really starts to make sense with them and then they see that the you know the nft the blockchain component is more layered onto the experience providing them additional advantages such as like ownership and trade-ability and then things really start clicking you know like i've seen professional hearthstone and magic the gathering players play skyweaver without even really knowing at first that there is a blockchain component and through free play they end up winning these nfts and they're like oh holy [ __ ] crypto web 3 makes sense to me for the very first time um so you know there is a lot of noise and a lot of people are you know concerned for various reasons and i think a lot of the you know the concerns are valid and a lot of times it's people just haven't had a good experience with

a web 3 game yet and so we're here to change that and i know a lot of other games are coming out as well to do the same um cool and could you tell us a bit more about what horizon is building what you're doing there yeah so we founded horizon blockchain games in january 2018 and our vision is for building this new dimension where internet economies are fun accessible and for the benefit of all participants and our mission to achieve this is to drive web3 adoption by making blockchain easy fun and powerful for both users and developers so we have a couple different products to drive this adoption and the first is sky weaver which is a free-to-play trading card game where players can win own trade sell gift their nft cards and it's a very game-first experience sort of in the genre of hearthstone or magic the gathering and you know happy to dive into all the details about everything skyreaver related and then we also have sequence and

sequence consists of a couple different components so the first is that it's the smartest wallet for web3 it makes web3 easy fun and secure for everyone so you can think of it as like your your wallet your backpack your gateway and your passport to this next generation of the internet that has crypto nfts and everything else related to web3 and so that that's really allowing users access and then developers can also integrate the sequence wallet into their product or game to make it super easy to onboard people to their web3 application or game and then sequence is also a developer platform so it's a portfolio of products to make building these web 3 applications and games easy you know whether they're doing it on ethereum or a layer 2 or a side chain that's part of the evm ecosystem and just in case anyone doesn't know evm means the ethereum virtual machine so a network of chains

okay let's let's dive into sequence first and then we can go into sky weaver i have a lot of questions there um what makes sequence unique from the perspective of a user why would someone choose to use uh sequence over metamask or maybe over a coinbase wallet yeah so really it's about it's the harmonization of seamless ux so like an experience that's essentially as easy as any web 2 experience coupled with smart contract architecture which gives the user a ton of different capabilities and extensibility in the web3 ecosystem so you know to give you an example a user in two clicks through social or email login can create this secure non-custodial multi-chain web3 wallet they don't need to think about seed phrases or you know these complex structures that creates a lot of friction for the person who you

know might just be looking to play a game so we really solve the onboarding experience in that way and you know typically up until now you've kind of only had seamless wallet experiences that are more of like a custodial solution so the user doesn't actually have full custody and control of their funds whereas with sequence it's non-custodial the user's in total control of their assets um and there are a few other things so first like there's first class nft support so you know erc721s 1155s any game collectible it's going to display in your wallet with the art or the video and all the metadata and it's just gonna appear automatically and you can even view your nfts and collectibles in a gallery view so not only is it a place to store your assets it's a place where you can actually like engage with them and experience them so that's really important for for gamers um additionally like we've made a lot of the we've simplified a lot of the payment systems so you know transactions for example they render in a user-friendly format so

you can just see what you're doing and say like oh yeah that's that's what i want to do i want to send this nft over to my friend um we've also enabled so you can pay gas fees in any erc 20 token that you're holding so you know like if you're a brand new user you you might not have eth to interact on the ethereum network you might not have matic to interact on polygons so we let you pay those gas fees with any erc20 we also allow the developer of a game to actually subsidize those gas fees to make it extra friendly so that a user wouldn't need any token at all um you know there's other things like you can bundle transactions so you can send like you can send tokens uh such as erc20s like usdc and uh ether and matic in addition to collectibles like erc 1155s and skyweaver cards and other artwork in addition to erc721s and nfts um all in a single transaction so this saves users time they're not waiting for multiple confirmations it saves them money as well because they're only paying one gas fee

um you know and there are a number of other things like we've made it really accessible it's browser-based you can also access it uh we're releasing a mobile app soon there's a chrome extension so it's quite universal in that sense and it's incredibly secure because we have multi-key architecture and this is one of the great benefits of smart contract architecture is that without needing to worry so much about like your seed phrases that single private key which if someone compromises it they get full access to your to your account right and they can drain your funds whereas with sequence it's actually a multi-signature design so by default you need two out of three keys to sign into your wallet um and you know you can rotate keys out um let's say you had like your cell phone was logged in to your sequence wallet and you lost it in an uber well you could actually remove that key remove your device from the wallet and then regenerate a new one with your remaining keys so what this does is it just it really gives the user

enhanced security and peace of mind and and then one other thing is that it actually so sequence actually brings all of the different evm chains together so like it's already supporting ethereum and polygon we're adding support for optimism binance smart chain arbitrom avalanche phantom and so the user can interact with all of these different networks all of the applications on these networks and all of the assets on these networks from the same simple sleek ui and they can even like bridge assets between different networks in wallet and so just really making the user experience nice and seamless to welcome people to web3 instead of making it so complex i really like that how does the um the safety work so i mean if you say the multi-key a three-key model is what you said right and how does it like where are these three keys so let's say that i you know

creates i use a social i use my google login to create a sequence wallet in my browser where do the different keys live yeah so by default there are three keys and there is one key that is associated with for example your google login there's another key that's associated with the device you're using and then there's a third key which is called the guard key which is encrypted and stored on a server and so this is this server you know horizon has access to but of course we don't have access to the key in and of itself because it's encrypted and furthermore we can't do anything with only one key because you actually need a quorum of keys in order to access your wallet so this really helps us it enables us to help users recover their account if necessary and as we go along we're actually planning to enable customization so niko if you wanted to you know let's say you're like i don't want that guard key there like because horizon you know it's on their server or whatever um you could actually customize it so like let's say you wanted to have seven keys and one's associated with your tablet or your friend's computer

and you know you have seven keys and you need five of them to sign into your sequence wallet um that's that component's not live yet but we will enable that customization for even enhanced security which you know will likely be reserved for those who are more advanced uh in the web3 space really fascinating one of the things i you know when i hang around in web 3 um on many of the decentralized apps that i use i click on connect wallet and it gives me meta mask and maybe sometimes while it connects um will that then work with sequence as well or how does that work yeah so um already you can connect with wallet connect um and then you can connect your sequence wallet that way and we're also in the process of working on a bunch of integrations with top dapps across ethereum and polygon you know a lot of a lot of games a lot of nft marketplaces even decentralized exchanges and d5 protocols um and so you'll start seeing that that sequence option and a lot more um daps

as time goes on how important because in beginning you talked about getting onboarding more people in onto the blockchain and into the world of web3 how important do you think is a user-friendly solution or well a solution for that i think it's extremely important um you know if you look at some of let's say like some of the top metaverse is in web 3. you know they'll see like you know let's just say snoop dogg or somebody tweets about some web 3 metaverse and then all these people flood to that application they're seeing such a significant drop-off at the wallet creation phase because it's just it's so much friction and it's it's foreign to people who are coming from web 2 you know and it's even frustrating for people in the web 3 space like i give tremendous kudos to the wallets that have existed thus far uh because they've helped like evolve this ecosystem right but i think it's really time that we welcome in hundreds

of millions and eventually like billions of people to web3 so we really need this seamless experience so that rather than seeing like you know an 80 to 90 percent drop off of high intent people we can actually onboard virtually every one of them through a very seamless login you don't want to know how many pieces of paper i have in a safe somewhere with 12 to 24 random english words written on them um so i told i totally get that what do you think is the most important next step in you know mainstream blockchain block stream blockchain adoption yeah so well first off i i believe that we've solved the onboarding experience problem which is a big crux for both you know not just the users but of course the developers and the game creators building these products you know because they need to be able to onboard these folks seamlessly and i think uh the other key piece is content that appeals to a more

general more mainstream audience you know like i think most of what we've seen is super interesting for a lot of you know crypto natives and people who've been in the space for a long time and people who get drawn in by nfts um but you know like such game-first experiences like sky weaver for example and other games that are just they're designed not to um you know the reason they exist isn't just because there's crypto in it it's actually in and of itself a fun experience that could be enjoyable even if there were no web3 component to it um but there actually happens to be like there's this addition these additional superpowers for end users so i really think it's creating content that's just enjoyable and fun and beneficial for you know a more mainstream audience and then in five years how many people do you see on board onto the blockchain space in five years

i would say somewhere between 500 million and 1.5 billion that's that's my guess it's uh it's relatively conservative for uh people within the blockchain space but i i think it's um that's fair well i think i think in 10 years it's going to be like 4 billion-ish you know um i just think you know it's going to hit that point i'm not exactly sure when the acceleration is gonna i think it's going gonna come soon but yeah i'll throw it a little more conservative estimate i guess and honestly like i've i've used your wallets um i've played a bit of sky weaver that we can dive in next and um i'm very impressed with the the ease of use i've just just described how many times i have to like oh crap i have to set up another wallet because i'm using a different chain um you know and and having to write down these things um that said i mean curious to see how the recovery um like goes right if i ever like i don't know

lose access to my google account or whatever i'm curious to see how that goes but um i i really like the idea and i i believe that um this could be a game changer it's good um all right let's dive into sky weaver what is sky weaver how would you um how do you describe it to people yeah so it's a free-to-play trading card game and yeah as i mentioned it has a very game-first approach so we've actually been we've been building it for four years and rigorously play testing it for three or more with a lot of like you know professional magic players um a lot of casual trading card game players as well uh world champions of hearthstone and pokemon so we've we've very much focused on the game play and um yeah like we we talk more we talk about play to own we don't use the term play to earn because we're not trying to set the expectation you come to skyriver to make money you know skilled players can earn a lot of like awesome rewards that they can own and trade but the experience first and foremost is about the game and so

it's you know there's there's 500 unique cards in sky weaver um there it's a turn-based strategy game i know your your audience is like primarily gamer so they they know like what a trading card game is and you know it has a lot of uh incredible heroes like a very immersive experience in terms of where we're evolving the lore there's a lot of like dynamic strategies you can use with different prisms and different heroes uh something that's quite unique amongst trading card games is that you know uh units have attached spells so they're like these disposable attacks that you can initiate um during your turn and it creates for like a lot of sort of more game-changing moments and dynamism making the experience really exciting um it's it's player versus player of course and um yeah there's like an amazing deck builder built in game and then there's of course this player-owned uh market that makes it super seamless and easy for users to trade cards with one another in this like in this decentralized way so you know it's this

it's this trading card game with actual trading um kind of bringing the you know traditional tabletop games like magic the gathering online and actually bringing that trading component uh to the internet yeah a few weeks ago i had the game lead from god's unchained on um were it i mean putting trade like trading games are probably the the number one genre when you think about you know where it just makes sense to put it on on the blockchain where ownership is such so essential and so natural to to players um did you design sky weaver keeping in mind that it would be a blockchain game was it always blockchain like intended to be a blockchain game yeah yeah like we knew since day one of our company that we really wanted to enable folks to own and be able to trade their cards so we knew it was a blockchain game from the very beginning and you know right from the outset too we were we were building skyreaver at the same time we were building sequence because we knew we needed to build the

infrastructure and wallet to make the game accessible um you know so our friends could play it right and so anyone can play it interesting okay so would you would you say that you know sky weaver was what you like was the end goal and sequence was unnecessary parts together honestly man they're they're equally important um and i think as a as a company like they work so synergistically with one another for example with sequence we wouldn't have known what to build for sequence in terms of the wallet in terms of the infrastructure if we didn't have sky weaver to work on but at the same time like what good is a wallet what good is infrastructure if you don't have incredible content for people to enjoy right um and i believe as a company skyweaver will be the only game we make but we believe this can be a multi-decade franchise that could become the biggest trading card game of all time and that's our ambition so we want to service this game for a long term um yeah

that's really exciting i was a very big hearthstone nerd for about two years of my life right i played that way too much um so um i'm certainly looking forward to i don't play anymore i thought you know it and and also like the money i've put in there i guess like this is a very easy answer why you know blockchain just makes sense you know i've a few hundred bucks at least um i've put into that game and uh now i have a lot of beautiful cards in there that i don't look at can't access can't sell can't do anything with um yeah i guess that's uh that's what you're solving um curious knowing that you were building a blockchain game from the start did this influence some design decision decisions on the game side and or on the economy side for the game yeah yeah definitely i mean you know i'd say one of the one of the things we faced over the years was to

for example resist the temptation of making it making the experience to blockchain centric for the purpose of let's say doing some kind of nft drop or what-have-you or token sale to you know raise a bunch of money off the bat and potentially lock us into an economy or game design that doesn't actually serve the community and the longevity of the game um so we certainly like we've taken this very game first approach and we've been very deliberate with how we think about the economy so you know we wanted sky weaver to be accessible so free to play is an important component for us it's also a browser-based game so you know you can play it on most devices anything that's really internet connected um and so that accessibility is really important and then the way the entire economy works right is like we have 500 over 500 unique cards in the game you know each

with different artwork mechanics abilities and each of these cards exists as three different grade types so the first is that a card will exist as a base version and the base versions are non-tradable they're non-blockchain items but you can unlock all of them through free play which you know this eliminates any pay to win dynamics because everyone can unlock these cards and get the total access to the strategy of the game and then we have what are called silver cards so we have these weekly leaderboards and the top ranking players at the end of each week actually mint silver nft versions of the cards into existence and the silver version they're cosmetically enhanced so they don't provide you a gameplay advantage but they give you ownership cosmetic status in-game the ability to trade those um and then we have another game mode a highly competitive game mode called conquest where you pay to enter with either a dollar fifty or one silver card and it's a single elimination tournament style mode so if you lose your first match you're out and you lose your stake

but if you win a match you win one silver nft when two matches you win two silver nfts win all three matches in a conquest and you win one rare limited supply gold nft and a silver nft and again with the golds no gameplay advantage but like status cosmetic um ownership tradability so this took us a lot of like a lot of consideration to figure out like how do we create an economy that's sustainable that benefits players that rewards players um and you know doesn't risk something like hyperinflation because if it's too easy to mint cards then you know they're no one's really going to care about owning them because there's just you know billions and billions and billions and then you know who cares right but um you know some people will sentimentality and status but like in terms of any tradeability and like selling it for something um so yes so being on the blockchain like we it's it's informed a ton of our our design thinking yeah makes a lot of sense so

i've been playing your game for bits i got a bunch of cards those are base cards and those are not nfts correct if they have the purple border yes um okay now i don't know if you've ranked highly on the weekly leaderboard um okay so yeah so so yeah then then they're base cards you're yeah you sound like me like i have not won any uh silvers or gold yeah because i admittedly am not the best tcg player and there are people way better than i am there you go yeah um that's really interesting um yeah why are you and so how do you think around the price because i've checked out your marketplace and i think the cheapest card for sale was a dollar 18 or something and the most expensive was one was 300 i believe um are you concerned with the price at all or is that because you know it is just like an additional element on top of the game and it doesn't influence the game for people because they can get the cards for free anyway um are you thinking around that yeah i mean the

you know the the price will attract different sorts of users into the game right like um and we've known well we've anticipated from the beginning that silver cards will trend around a dollar fifty that that's what we've imagined because conquest game mode costs a dollar fifty to enter and you can pay conquest with a silver card um you know this doesn't take into consideration all factors right because some people you know people have sentimental reasons as to why they love a card so much so then that can influence the value of it as well and cards um there's really interesting incentives for players each and every week in that you know of the 500 cards available in skyreaver only eight of them can be minted each week via conquest and there can be an arbitrary number of copies of those eight cards but it's so in week one you can mint cards one through eight and then in week two we shift to cards nine through 16 which means cards one through eight will never

be minted again and so their their supply is fixed so you know those sorts of things that scarcity will likely have an impact on the price that they're trading in the market and um yeah you know things have been going well so far and the other thing too is right like let's say a gold card becomes really expensive well you don't you don't need it to play the game right just like you said like you can unlock the base card um if you really want to accelerate unlocking cards in your game play then you could buy that silver card on the market and it's probably not going to be too expensive you know i understand people in different regions expense is a relative term but um you know it could be a dollar fifty in that range so um we think with the way we've designed it we're really we're we're catering to sort of the different demographics in that you can get the base cards to play the game if you want that ownership that rarity you can buy it or win it if you're super competitive um yeah so that's how we're thinking about things how are you thinking around expanding the game and keeping balance

things balanced yeah so we do uh we do patch updates every two weeks um and like minor fixes more often but um pretty much every day but um the the game balancing of cards we release a patch every two weeks and most most patches include some some balancing and you know especially over the last like three plus years of play testing just a ton of balancing right because you just learned so much um you know both through player feedback in the community in addition to the data that we're we're monitoring so the way it works is that um our sky weaver cards are eternal which means they're never rotated nor banned um so you'll always be able to play with your sky river cards now this means that it is essential to you know nerf or buff those cards because you know you don't want a card getting out of control like overpowered and then it being kind of a poor experience for people competing against you so um there is that uh so

we're constantly balancing and we're very transparent about that and it's for the long term health of the game so our players are you know very receptive to that and uh folks understand and um in terms of expansion like we have a we have a lot of cool plans um coming up so like we're we're looking at in-game guilds um we'll have observer mode and replay modes which really helps with like community engagement and streaming and things of that nature and tournaments um we've already had 11 community run tournaments and most of those have third party cash sponsors and those are all happening independently of us and so there's going to be a lot more tournaments coming especially because we've just entered into open beta as of february 8th so all the tournaments previously actually occurred in our code gated private beta so now that we're open like we're anticipating a lot more you know we're going to have new cards expansion sets we're going to be enabling the customization of private matches we'll be actually adding in different cosmetics so that users can personalize their player experiences um we have

these like they're called these lethal puzzle games coming out so there's a number of different things that we're adding in uh this year actually um to you know expand the sky weaver ecosystem and experience that's really cool you mentioned community a few times um and i think this is everyone realizes that community is key within a blockchain gaming world how did you approach community and what are some lessons that you've learned yeah so community has i mean i think most people in web 3 understand this that community is of the utmost importance and we've held that philosophy since day one and you know we started very modestly four years ago um we from the beginning we've set out to be very welcoming and inclusive um and so we've really nurtured that energy since the beginning and you can see in our discord which now has about 99 000 users which is actually bigger

than like hearthstone and magic the gathering arena which of course are the two biggest web 2 trading card games and we just entered into open beta if you go there like the conversation is actually overall pretty wonderful um very little toxicity and we're very deliberate about curbing any toxicity and having conversations with folks so i think building a super inclusive space um where it's not um it you know we're also we're we're reactive so we let kind of the community run with some things and we have some principles about how to treat one another and we really want the community to support one another so that they're not always just like asking us questions and then we're always the ones who have to respond so it's been really about like empowering people within the community um we also have a creator's program so that this really like if someone's a streamer or a content creator of any sort right we're going to reward them and and foster them and nurture them so that they can grow our

their audience which you know in turn grows our audience but it's this really like symbiotic relationship um and yeah there's just like a lot of honesty and and we're very transparent with our community and um yeah just welcoming like and and it's it's welcoming in a community sense and then also welcoming in a technological sense with respect to how we've built everything you know we're not asking you to learn all about blockchain and wallets to start playing no it's like just come play the game like that's what it's about we want to provide a really fun experience for you do you have so you have nfts do you have a sky weaver token um we do not um you know we've of course like each and every card is a token and there are erc 1155s um and that's actually that we co-authored that token standard because we needed it to um enable a trading card game like sky weaver um and you know now that standard seeing a lot of adoption throughout the space so you know technically right now

there's 1020 different tokens because they're silver and gold but then in terms of like a you know a sky weaver token like an erc20 um we've we've done a lot of thinking about it over the years and we have some we have some cool plans uh and ideas coming up um so yeah we we do think there will be uh a token um at some point i just can't uh i just can't yet say exactly when it'll be okay exciting um you described different standards for nfts could you elaborate a little bit what makes the 1155 standard stand out for the from the 721 and what the key differences are yeah totally so 721 is awesome in the sense that every erc 721 is an nft it's a non-fungible token by like the true definition it's unique it's one of one this works really well for things like artwork uh if you only want a one of one artwork in terms of game items um

it's not always as applicable and as efficient because for example in sky weaver or really any trading card game you know like let's say we're talking about the mother ethera card in sky weaver we don't want each and every one to be unique because like my mother ethera is the same as your mother there like it has the same abilities and on the marketplace it it should have the same value or like very close to it so with erc 1155 you can have an arbitrary number of copies of a card all with the same properties all part of the same smart contract and then so there's there can be an arbitrary number of mother etheras and then we have fungi card over here and there can be a different number of those and each card can have its own arbitrary number of copies now this is this is super important for markets and liquidity and like efficiency of trading so in addition to co-authoring the 1155

standard we created something called the nifty swap protocol and for those who are familiar you can think of nifty swap like uni swap for erc 1155s so like uni swap for game items and collectibles on the blockchain and what this means is that it's an automated market maker which is a decentralized marketplace where there are no bid or sell orders instead prices are algorithmically calculated based on the liquidity supplied to the market so what this does is it makes it super easy for players like in sky weaver for example you can see on the market like oh um if i sell my fungi card it i if i sell it now it's gonna i'm gonna get a dollar sixty for it um you can also see the buy price and so it really just makes this trading experience nice and seamless and easy to understand um and then you know that underlying technology i'm talking about the nifty swap protocol uh you know there's there's a lot we could talk about there too um

if you're interested yeah no um i'm definitely interested it's probably slightly outside of the scope of um of what we're going to be discussing today but that's i think something i'd like to just to touch upon maybe in a future episode um it's interesting because right now it feels like you know everyone talks about the floor of nft collections and um you know with automated market maker like the floor is is just a number and it doesn't mean that you can at this point sell your nft for that price um and i think you know having these uni-swap like pools for you know nfts also makes a lot of sense it's really interesting yeah i mean it's also it's really important for games in general right like if they if they want liquidity on their markets so that their users can actually buy and sell like pretty much instantaneously so it actually makes the gaming experience a lot better and so that technology is that now fully open source that can other games use that as well yeah it's open source and

we're actually going to release a front end standalone version of it as well called nifty swap where it's a generalized marketplace for erc 1155 so just like instantly being able to buy and sell your game items and collectibles um and then so like so nifty swap as a front end will be like a generalized marketplace and then the sky weaver market it's a front end on top of the nifty swap protocol but it specifically focuses on sky weaver items sky river cars it doesn't pull it doesn't display anything else that are in the liquidity pools on the protocol so that means that you know someone else they can go build their own front end and they could do it to display like i don't like nico you create a game called nico's game and then like you could just display all of the the cards or the game items from your game in your front-end version of nifty swap and um in fact like there are even others who have already built um marketplaces for skyweaver that connect to the nifty swap protocol there so it really makes the

ecosystem truly decentralized because other folks can extend upon it so essentially you're competing against other people who could potentially build a better marketplace than you they could yeah um i'd say and if they do you know that like all the power to them and kudos to them for making it better than we could for now like most like the vast majority of liquidity flows through the sky river market because it's like in game that's where the most players are it's like nice and seamless et cetera um but yeah of course yeah um you know i can hear other game industry people in my head right now asking you okay how do you make money because that's still important when you're building a game and a business um could you tell us more about that yeah for sure man um so in skyweaver we earn we're in revenue in a few different ways um the first is that that conquest game mode i mentioned to you anytime someone's buying in with a dollar fifty we earn that revenue also any time that there's a trade on the skyriver market buy or sell we take a six percent fee

um furthermore if someone goes and sells one of their cards on a third-party marketplace let's say openc we earn a five percent royalty for that so we are earning you know kind of independently of where the items are traded um we're also uh planning to sell other cosmetics so not cards per se but you know like in the game there are heroes you've seen them nico like like we might have hero skins where you know you could buy those as cosmetics of varying price ranges or like you know island skins or kind of you know cosmetics like that a lot of web 2 traditional games would have as well so we can sell all those from a primary market and enable users to trade them too um and then so that that's on the skyweaver side how we earn revenue and then on the sequence side um of the wallet we monetize the end user through by providing them things like token swaps so if they're swapping tokens we take a super small fee for providing that convenience and making it super friendly and you know the the swap fee market um you know based on volume is

quite uh quite profitable in revenue uh generating so it's you know it's and there's a number of other monetization streams we can enable uh with sequence but those are like that's kind of the the gist of what we have at the moment um i've talked about um your game with my colleagues at navik and they mentioned um one that the game is insanely good it's gonna surprise and drive a lot of people into web three very polished and they were surprised at the slow out rule we've seen quite a lot of blockchain games kind of build in public um you've been slower with that could you elaborate a bit on that strategy yeah um we've just been we've been very deliberate and focused on making sure that when someone comes to experience the game they're not met with a ton of friction and a ton of uncertainty around what web 3 what blockchain is so we've been building the game and ensuring that it's like a really fun

experience and that's been like through all this rigorous play testing right um so that that in and of itself is like one journey just building a game on its own and at the same time like we're a startup you know we were only five people at the beginning we're now 45 but we're also building the infrastructure to make all of this possible so like creating that seamlessness like building a transaction relay or building a blockchain index or building this wallet make sure everything connects together and that it's secure because like the last thing we want to do is have some you know screw someone over right so doing all these things in tandem just like it takes time to make all of these things possible and in terms of like building in public i mean with sky weaver we you know we did open up the alpha as of december 2018 with a very small group at the time like 20 people outside of our company and then since that time we've just been welcoming more and more players into our code gated environment so you know we had like 100 over 100 000 users throughout the journey of the private

beta um experience so it wasn't like it wasn't totally in private you know you could get a private like a code access it wasn't that difficult um but it's just really been about like being super intentional with our design and making sure we deliver something that will break through you know and like you know your comment of like it being polished and being enjoyable and it being something that can break through and attract people to web3 and be this fun gaming experience that's what that's what our ambition was um so yeah hearing you say that it makes me believe that we we took the right approach with the way we're rolling it out i respect it um i also saw that your games are available on um the app store and on android um could you tell a bit about that experience like how easy was it to get it on there the fact that it's you know blockchain uh has blockchain assets in it yeah so um it's you know there there were there were some learnings throughout the process but now yeah now now we're in the stores

i'm pretty sure that on ios you can't interact with the market directly so like if you're playing on your your phone um so you would have to like play it like in browser um and then yeah in terms of like uh google play like you can use an in-app purchase to buy a conquest ticket for example and um i i've forgiven me for not knowing this because i don't have an android phone but i'm pretty sure you can interact with the market from your android and then of course you can if uh you know you're on on your browser so yeah like we're on both those stores and i think those experiences will get especially on ios i imagine it'll open up and like get better and better um and i think it'll just take a little bit of time uh for us like probably not that surprising to you most of our players are on uh well the highest percentages on android and then like desktop and then and then ios okay does uh so for the 1.5 dollar buy-in for the conquest mode

does android charge a fee on that yeah yeah there is a fee that uh google play collects okay interesting okay um all right um i also saw that you're building on polygon could you explain a bit what you were looking for on the blockchain side i guess obviously it would be have to be within the evm the ethereum virtual machine why did you choose polygon yeah so um it was uh it was a number of years ago where we realized like you know ethereum layer one wasn't going to be feasible for trading a dollar fifty card right like you're not going to pay a 20 plus dollar gas fee just to trade that um and so we've actually been very close with the polygon team since like super early days um to to mine all i know we were we were the first game on polygon one of the very first dapps uh i don't know which number but we we just spent a lot of time researching like different solutions and

found that one like the philosophy the ethos behind polygon is incredibly strong to contribute and expand upon the ethereum ecosystem there is of course the scalability so you know we can make those transactions we're talking about do it in a cheap way like in skyweaver for the time being like users don't even actually pay the gas fee because it's so it's so small and we subsidize that and with sequence we allow other game developers they could do the same so there's that scalability the security and their philosophy for becoming even increasingly decentralized and increasingly secure so overall the network just really fulfilled on everything we needed as a trading card game and just like you said being part of the evm ecosystem we knew the infrastructure we were building would be compatible with everything evm compatible so that you know that played a role um but yeah polygon's been working extremely well so far and i think it's just gonna it's gonna keep getting better that's awesome i've um recently been hearing a lot of

more more good things about about uh polygon so um yeah definitely some um some good things happening there um i have some some more general questions that i'd like to have your thoughts on um my first question is i've written down a few of the key benefits of building on blockchain games um so there's the real ownership of of blockchain assets that players have um then there's you know the community slash player ownership of the company through governance tokens there's the concept of interoperability the concept of composability um and also the fact that you have an instant open economy and liquidity and potential derivatives um my first question was going to be what excites you most of these i'm assuming that the answer to that is real ownership because that feels like what you've built sky weaver around um what excites you after that what what what of these you know what you think the

blockchain can bring on top of this the real ownership of assets yeah it's it's a great question man because when i think of all those things i'm like well like the synergy of all those things working together is really what excites me the most because like with that ownership you know you enable a deeper sense of evangelism and excitement from folks and likely better network effects because i think people understand it now but when we were first kind of sharing this idea in 2018 not everyone saw that like this could actually create more revenue for both like the user and the creator because you have more people who are willing to purchase in-game items because they're tradable and you know you talked about your experience with other games where you know those assets those items are locked away and you don't look at them anymore and you can't you can't extract any value from it um so you know now that you can like you know you're probably more inclined to buy those things and then that can boost revenue for the company the user benefits and

then it creates these positive network effects likely people are going to share it more with their friends like hey play this game where you can actually own these things um so that's really cool and then you know you mentioned the liquidity of course that's you know that's kind of essential if you actually do want to be able to trade those goods right like you do need these open markets uh in order to enable that um otherwise it's kind of like that floor price issue you talked about where yeah sure that's the floor price but like doesn't mean someone's going to buy it from me so if you have these liquid open decentralized markets where sort of anyone who has these cards and coins or what have you can actually provide liquidity to it and make the market more efficient and that's super powerful and then there's like there's all this extensibility right where people can do things independently of the game creator themselves so like in sky weaver you know like just as an example there's a group called medic guild that is playing sky weaver and they it's like

their their focus seems to be around having really kind of skilled players part of their guild a lot of like hearthstone magic the gathering pros who are now like you know in the the web 3 tcg place and space and super excited about by skyweaver and so part of their guild like they'll buy a bunch of conquest tickets and then they'll distribute them to their guild participants and then when their guild participants win like everyone shares in their rewards right like the guild comes to own them and then different people have different stakes or what have you however they plan to distribute those things and then they might also buy like a full card collection so that particular guild members can play construct it um and just so everyone knows there's two game modes in sky weaver there's discovery where you get you play with a random deck that's just given to you and then there's constructed where you build your own deck based on cards that you own so you know the meta guild will sometimes buy those decks for their players and then again like the rewards are shared amongst guild members and then there's other ideas that we've been playing around with like

um having in-game guilds where folks could potentially let's say like they burn multiple copies of the fungi card and then that means that their mascot for their guild is now the fungi and then anyone who wants to join they they have to let's say they have to burn one copy of that card and then they get to become part of that guild and then you can have like guild versus guild matches and like guild leaderboards and guild tournaments and things of that nature and then like it could even be that let's say whenever you burn these items uh to create a guild in the first place it actually creates a dao so a decentralized autonomous organization and what could happen is that you know you burn these items and by virtue of joining the guild you actually get minted in nft as confirmation that you're a member of this guild and it might be like number one because like let's say you're the first person nico like it would be like number one fungi guild and there's like artwork associated with it right and

then you know then i joined that guild and i get number two like fungi guilt and so then like what that that guild could do like they could have their own websites they could have their own discords where in order to participate or to get access to let's say different channels or different experiences you have to prove that you're part of the guild and you do this with the nft and it could grant you permissions you know you can of course give that or sell that to someone else and so this can create like they could go on and create their whole worlds around like that experience or you know also someone could create another game around skyriver cards if they wanted like sky beaver or something and like the you know the rules could be a bit different and then also like we've kind of touched on it but like the extensibility of that economy where you mentioned like yeah other folks can build front ends to the sky river market so it's like it becomes it could become this like gigantic ecosystem where there's all sorts of independent things happen some of them perhaps more strongly connected with the original sky weaver and then others perhaps more

loosely affiliated but all of them like being part of this gigantic uh ecosystem where there are a ton of possibilities and i'll be honest with you like when i think kind of three five six seven years in the future and like i didn't like i don't i don't know what it's gonna look like i think it's gonna be incredible but it's not like concrete in my in my head yet when i hear you describe that line of thoughts where you know you have a guild and then you have to burn a bunch of uh cards and then that icon becomes your guild icon um i just want to you know grab all of the people who are hating on blockchain and tell them like how would you do like why why do you keep saying blockchain doesn't solve anything any of the problems we have today listen to this um that was really great uh really inspiring and um exciting as well and you know it summarizes um or illustrates my thoughts as well so um very good answer um you've told about or you've explicitly said that sky weaver is play to own instead of play to earn um

what are your thoughts on the sustainability of play to earn um moving forward yeah well i mean so there's there's play to earn as a name and then there's play to earn as an actual like practice or mechanism in a game and as far as my understanding of economics goes like if everyone can earn super easily in the game and like mint a bunch of assets and such like i don't know in my mind i think it's going to become like a inflated market um and i'm not claiming to be like a mastermind economist like they're i'm sure there's probably tons of like there are tons of ideas down the road that like people will come up with new stuff and we'll we'll we'll figure new things out about economics but um i think with with one of the issues i see with play to earn is that if you're setting the expectation that the game is about

earning and then someone comes to the game and they're not earning well that that's pretty disappointing and you know maybe you just leave because your original intent is not filled and then if everyone's earning well then you kind of run into the scenario that i've described where i think you're going to end up with this kind of hyper-inflationary market and then you're actually not actually earning anything of value um and furthermore like if if your game's purely based on play to earn and then a new product comes out where there's a higher yield i mean i think the natural tendency is to just go shift over and go after that higher yield so what we've focused on is being play to own in that if you win an item if you purchase an item from the market from another player that you truly own that item and it's yours to do whatever you want with um but first and foremost it's about the game experience in and of itself so like even if you don't win anything like the the purposes of just enjoying the game the strategy in and of itself and

we believe that if you can build a really strong game first experience kind of independently of how much someone might earn from the experience then you can foster a long-term community that's in it for intrinsic reasons uh perhaps more so than just like some financial gain it's a really good answer and to just you know agree with what you said about sustainability of play to earn and people playing a game to earn money um one of the basic rules of economics is there is no such thing as a free lunch and so you know having one ecosystem where everyone makes money it just doesn't work uh maybe it does for a bit but uh at least not sustainably um and now we're at the the final question that i'd like to ask all my guests um and um it's not always exactly the same one but i'm i'm a big fan of both predictions so with this michael could you share with us a bold prediction about blockchain games

yeah um i have a couple different tangents here that are going on in my head and what like this one might not be that bold because i'm sure other people are saying it too but i believe that in 10 years like most games will be web 3 games they'll be connected to the blockchain i don't think every game needs to be you know like if there are if there isn't the ownership of items like you know it might not need to be so there's no need to force a game on to blockchain just for the sake of doing so um but i do think most games will be and that players users will come to expect being able to own the items that they pay for especially and likely a lot of the items they win too um i think with respect to you know and then i can imagine all sorts of scenarios with respect to like those guilds and how those dows start to evolve around the ecosystem and then this starts tying in with like web 3 and the metaverse more broadly in which i think a lot of people are going to have

a lot of their identity or kind of an alternative identity to their physical world identity where they're in you know web 3 and the metaverse and they derive as much meaning from that experience as they do from the physical world um you know that tangent in and of itself makes me question if we're already in a blockchain based virtual reality but then this would be kind of another layer to that and new dimension um and something that i think is super beautiful about web3 um and these games is the ability to have this global economic system where everyone can participate just by having this internet connection and i think it offers a lot more um you know it enables a lot more equal opportunity um and and access uh with these permissionless systems and i think that's super exciting there is this idea i have and like i don't know when it's gonna happen but of this like unified

consciousness where in which everyone's participating in these decentralized experiences and economies accessing it from anywhere in the world feeling as though they're physically uh close with one another through virtual means we could have this like awakening where everyone at the same time like just taps into love and recognizes this like unity and oneness um so maybe that's like my bold prediction that all of these things could end up leading to this like uh beautiful yeah just beautiful awakening and awareness uh somewhere down the road that's really good i really like that um cool well um that's it for our time michael i thank you so much for joining me on the pod um listener i hope you enjoyed uh i hope you're as excited about horizon sky weaver and sequence as i am um i'm going to play more of that game i want to get some of these nfts maybe even get some gold nfts um yeah that's what i'm gonna go for it's my new new uh after i've finished binging eldon

ring um i'm gonna i'm gonna put myself to that i think that's a good game anyway um michael thanks so much for coming on listener thank you for listening um yeah this was the miraculous and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music] you