The Ronin Exploit & The Future of Axie Infinity - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm dear listener and welcome to the metacast crypto corner brought to you by navic i'm your host nicola freyko or nico for short and today i'm joined by chong c a ann lars dusay and anil das gupta um today we're going to be discussing ronin ronan's exploit so we're recording this on the first of april and this is going to come out next week and we're also going to be talking about the current state of blockchain games and as our backup topic um we'll be touching upon a new regulation if we have the time we'll see before that let's talk a bit about who we are so i'm hosting this main job is investing in blockchain games at bitcraft ventures and then we have ca hey guys yeah my name is uh chong on or ca i'm currently the vp head of americas for mythical games

all right and then lars yes i'm lars i am an independent consultant and i work with novik a bunch and i've got a game development background and so i make games then i analyze games and i've written a lot about blockchain games awesome i'm co-founder at first light games at uk web3 gaming studio we're currently working on a title called blast royale awesome all right great crew to discuss this it's been a hectic week in blockchain gaming um let's dive right in or before we dive right in can i just get something off my chest um so this is this is like my platform where i can just rant so my rant is about the term game phi i've been seeing this thrown around as a sort of catch-all for blockchain like games that are into like related to blockchain and it feels like it's coming from d5 and then they change the d with phi but just just to be clear d5 stands for decentralized finance so changing

the d into game makes this game finance or gamified finance which is i guess i mean some games you could call gamified finance right i think wolfgang would be an example um there are there are some other uh ones that i would i would call that but if i see a pitch deck um as an investor and it has game fi as description of what what's being built um not the best look for me i i prefer to use the terms um blockchain games or crypto games that's or web3 games that's that's safer um just just my take there i don't know if you guys want to add anything on that but uh yeah i i would like to sneak i think that's really good i i would very much agree with you in terms of the pitch side deck but i have to say it's a term i use myself so you can probably use your crucifix against me by the way but the reason i use it is i find when i speak to other people who are involved in web 3 specifically from the financial side that they seem to understand what i'm talking about a lot more when i use that term if i say to them i'm making like a blockchain game they look a little bit lost as soon as i say game fight they're like oh

let's have a conversation so look i understand i do agree with what you're saying because what does it really mean but i think it's one of those things how you know sometimes when you see a pitch deck and it's like we want to be the netflix of video games it's like you know that might sound contrite but you can understand it so i think you're right but i think it has its place in this world it's a necessary evil okay so feel free to use it know that if you send me a deck with that word in it's not immediately a bit bit down versus you i could say one thing about it yeah it's interesting because like i've seen games that pitch themselves as game fight and i think there's like this kind of spectrum on blockchain games like you have your like real og libertarian anarchist crypto games that are almost not interested in the monetary aspect they're interested in the protocol aspect then in the middle you have your kind of like you know your more traditional blockchain games and then way over to the right you have things that are literally just financial apps with pixel art basically you know and it's like

when i think of game phi i think of that far end of the spectrum you know where it's like okay this is just like like a d5 kingdoms is a good example where it's basically just a dex with like pixel art characters in it and it's like this is just a place you can go to like stake a bunch of tokens and like allegedly it has some like very thinly veiled like game mechanics um that is actually just it's just like a weird user interface basically 100 agreement nico if the game does have its built-in decks would that consider it to be game fire is that not enough because i think that's a relevant point there some games do have their own decks built in part of their architecture and then you could argue of it being somewhat of an exchange stroke market that it sort of financed maybe i don't know that's a question for you i agree i think i mean honestly like i think many blockchain games with open economies whether they have a built-in decentralized exchange or not will be in some way financialized but still i don't think that's you know game finance or something should be the core name right for me it's more of a like

an open blockchain game sometimes like that it's um look it's a quirk i like to round about these things um anyway um cool let's let's dive into like the the topics that we selected right so first of all ronin's exploits big news of the um of the week probably of the month uh this is major news and it is the biggest hack in blockchain history which if you know blockchain history is is quite something right there's amazing there's been some serious hacks uh it is it is an achievement it is an achievement yeah so what happens right um and i think it's because we're on a crypto corner we can maybe go a bit more into what bridges are how they work why they're risky and stuff like that um i'll i'll do my best like quickly laying the groundworks and if you guys want to correct me or or add on top of that then we can do that before we talk about the ramifications of this all and where we see this going um so essentially what happens um well first what is a bridge what is ronin so um about a year ago i think

the game actually infinity built by sky mavis was still being ran on on ethereum layer one which means that for every transaction that you did on the blockchain you had to pay very high gas fees um and so their solution to that which i think was a really great solution was they decided screw ethereum layer one well not fully screw it but you know i'm gonna build my own blockchain so they essentially built or they copied the code base of ethereum and they deployed it themselves they called it ronin and they said okay you know we now have our own blockchain and we have free um free transactions so no gas fees um and so uh this was actually the catalyst if you look at the amount of users that they have the amount of transactions that they have um that exploded from the moment they had that right before that every transaction you made costs you a few bucks um so it's normal that once that barrier goes away it's um it was suddenly solved now how does ronin interact with ethereum and that's key here it is through a through

a bridge and a bridge is essentially is a smart contract that exists both on ethereum and on the ronin bridge where um you if you want to get ether from ethereum onto ronin you deposit ether into a smart contract and it gets created on the other side in on ronin and you you can then with the same address take that ether and use it within the ronin ecosystem and it works like that in order to avoid um having more ether that exists on the main chain um and so that's very basically what happens there you can do the same with ether you can also do that with axi with um so actually the nfts but also with tokens crc20 tokens like slp xs and so that's initial uh contract where the ether was stored was basically exploited um and we can go maybe later after this stock why it was exploited um and the ethernet was was it was in there that represented the ether that was living on the ronin chain was basically

taken out by the hackers um and it was like 170 000 ether worth about 600 million and 25 million usdc um so 625 around uh that's million in assets or in value of assets lost so nico if you could just clarify for me it's like so i make sure i'm understanding correctly so basically the way a bridge works is like you've got these two contracts like the ethereum never really leaves ethereum but it stays in that contract and then you create basically vouchers on the other on the other blockchain that represent them and so it's basically like there's a theorem over there as long as the original value doesn't leave this holding account right like a voucher for an ethereum on ronin is just as good as if it was a unit of ethereum on real on on the ethereum blockchain and then all of the backstopping got like like just walked away exactly right and i was going to make this joke it's a bad joke but traditional finance guys might now be like wait do assets have to be

backed by something in order to be valuable um okay lars thank you for for laughing at that joke it's um it's this is bitcoin talk for you know you need a gold standard and and when 1971 we got off that and that's when everything went to [ __ ] um anyway so yes in theory on ronin or only on any layer 2 actually the amount of ether that lives there is exactly the same as was stored in the like the bridging contract the the initial bridging contract on the ethereum chain all right now um let's quickly talk about what happens so one of the things that is important when talking about different blockchains is the so-called blockchain trilemma and the blockchain trilemma basically means that if you're designing a blockchain choose two out of three and the three are one scalability two security and three decentralization um and so you can basically basically choose two and so ethereum and bitcoin they choose very high decentralization and security but

they have limited because of that limited um scalability so many limited amount of transactions per second that they can handle and so what sky mavis did ever because earlier we said oh there's no transaction fees on our chain is going to be it's going to be great and amazing they said okay we're going to have high skill high scalability but for that they chose lower decentralization and so this is the design mistake or a choice that they made but this is what actually bit them right now so they only had nine validators a validator is actually like a address or a node that confirms transactions that says okay this is a valid transaction um and five of those were were hacked the private keys were hacked and because five of those were hacked the hackers could then take the ethereum from the original contract um out of there um so yeah that's that's that's that's it that's what happened anything i missed i think that that sounds like everything

to it um was there um so there was usdc as well a much smaller amount um and that's some stable coin um it was 25 million of that and there was 600 million in ethereum at least at the exchange rates of the day um but all the vouchers are so nothing was taken off of the ronin blockchain right it was all the backstopping assets on the other side of the bridge right or was it the other no exactly that's and ironically like there wasn't even like nothing went wrong on the blockchain end like it's not that the blockchain got hacked right there's some there's just some transactions like the validators got hacked um yeah everything's the important thing there isn't it to notice i was gonna say just quickly i think one other thing that's worth adding is that those validators four of them were in the same location and then they gained access to one more which wasn't i believe which was the the axi dow one but i think already that kind of leads because you know initially you said was it a design choice or a design mistake i think it's harsh to call it mistake whether you believe in decentralized blockchains or

more of a centralized approach because that really wasn't the issue here as to why things went right or wrong right as we'll probably get into it was more of a a social hack you could sort of say social engineering problem you might say um in terms of how things went wrong and yeah i think a lot of people look at the story and and have like a lot of doubt over blockchain but that it's not the issue here you know it's actually just i.t security is the big problem here yeah i think that's i think that's like the critical piece here right so i think all the points you made are super valid um i think skype mavis made a decision at the time when they decided to have nine you know validator nodes um it goes back to the the trilemma that you're discussing right i mean they could have let's say had you know a thousand validators if they wanted to but they were going for you know speed and performance and so on and so forth so they set it up in this way but ultimately what it came down to is if you take a look at the the dow validator node the exception that they had made

because of product you know prior right when their performance was so high i was actually creating congestion and so on and so forth they made an exception at one time right to you know essentially you know provide or you know i don't know the exact mechanism they leverage but they kind of loosen some restrictions so that they can ease that congestion but they never went back to actually close that exception out right so could one kind of point to this and say hey you know i mean look like a lot of us that came from the gaming side of the business we know it's hard right making software is hard and so you know did they have the right checks and you know balances in place when they're doing something like that just you know have someone dedicated to go back and say hey we should probably double check to make sure these things that we flipped off are going to get turned back on and this particular hacker you know took took advantage of that vulnerability and because of what anil just said like they had you know four of the validators you

know nodes all in one place so once they were able to back the rent through that exception then it was just like here you go get access to everything else take majority control and then you know essentially hack their way in so yeah i mean the blockchain actually didn't make a mistake or anything to that if it did exactly what it was designed to do but ultimately it was a vulnerability that was in my opinion at least a human error and they weren't able to go back and you know resolve it quickly enough so you know here they are right so what are your guesses key takeaways from this i have a bunch i think you know one is that um it's interesting something like this happens and there's literally nothing you can really do about this because there's no help disk you can call there's no bank you can call and like hold those funds it doesn't work that way this is the blockchain this is neutral uh this is permissionless um and so that is like in this case i guess a bad thing um but then i mean we can go into that

later or this is more like a philosophical discussion about is it good that you know all of these things are you know non-reversible and immutable um anyway so so that's that's one takeaway and then the other one is that's it's clear for me at least sky mavis is a games company first and um i think they like you know ronin worked for a while right i mean and i'm not saying that they didn't make a mistake or whatever like this was to be expected but i think you know blockchain blockchaining is hard building a blockchain is hard building a bridge is also hard all of that stuff is complex and um i think this speaks to um you know more like blockchain as a service approaches or where or like layer twos or scaling solutions that are built by people who are actually like specifically like working on exactly that um and you know i think there's gonna be solutions where it's like i think for example in avalanche they plan on having subnets for each game and i think these kind of frameworks like um sky mavis was

really on the cutting edge here right you know setting up this whole thing by themselves and and i mean they had to right because they were so early um i don't expect this to happen too often because i think you know a lot of a lot of people gonna learn big lessons from this which is i guess you know a good thing i think my take is so i had when i worked for valve had a colleague by the name of tony cox and he posted in the aftermath of this just this great quote um so i'm quoting him here tony cox when asked what they learned from something that went wrong junior devs will tell you about a plan to avoid making that mistake again senior devs will recognize the inevitability of human failure and explain how they built that assumption into their future planning and that's what i think is the problem with kind of using the kind of cope of it's like well the blockchain wasn't hacked you know this was a social engineering failure it's like the next kcd comic where it's like you're never going to crack my password cluster it's like yeah but i'm going to drug you and beat you with a wrench until you tell me the password you know it's like building a safe with

like an iron plutonium lock and the safe is made of cardboard you know the weakest link will be attacked and if the most most blockchain hacks are social engineering hacks and your money is just as gone and your company is just as effed and um i think you know we need like people who are serious in the blockchain space need to learn to accept the inevitability of this kind of failure and so this is where your like bitcoin maxis and your ethereum maxies and your anti-sidechain people come in like the people on that mora narco libertarian side of blockchain and they're like you see this is why we were warning you guys about centralization i mean i'm kind of don't really have a staked out position of any blockchain thing because i'm just kind of a generalized blockchain skeptic but it's like axi made that trade off and what's so interesting is that you know i actually i have a lot of respect for kind of the bitcoin maxis even if i'm definitely not one of them myself is because there's a consistent position there and it's like we choose this horribly like energy inefficient thing

because it's proven to work and um we bite all of the bullets and the problem that sky mavis kind of ran into was that they wound up with the worst of both worlds right you know we have these like centralized evil banks that can just like if we want to take your money we're just going to take your money and there's nothing you can do and like everyone raises that specter but with that awful power also comes the ability for you know francine at customer service to be like yeah i'll reverse your fraudulent transaction i will occasionally do that that's not even an option here now it's like not only is there the potential for whatever this was was it an inside job was it a social engineering hack who knows but there's also no ability to reverse that transaction for you there's the big evil bank centralization of you completely trust them and when the value immutably escapes to the blockchain there's no throwing it back so there's like it it's kind of like you have to expend some effort to like it it's not even like the bad end of a trade-off it's just like well like we were talking about a

trilemma right they didn't even get two out of the three things you know they were presumably trying to get security and scalability um at the cost of decentralization but they only got scalability clearly from the results and i think it's kind of um but i don't really want to play a super blame game here you guys can reply to that part if you want to what i'm really interested in um just to make efficient use of this podcast is whoever's to blame who cares like what happens next right like i think the big questions are is um sorry this is changing the subject but it's like will they get the money back and if they don't are their investors going to bail them out and what happens if they get bailed out what happens if they don't get bailed out and then there's that whole interesting conversation of like you know ethereum is not really backstopped by anything i guess it's backstop by proof of work you know um but like all of those vouchers are still on their own in ethereum and like the values haven't plunged too much you know like can they just have their like you know get off the gold standard kind of moment

and just be free but i'm just wondering like will they get their money back and will they be bailed out and what happens in the yes no situations to either those questions great question that's that's what i wanted to get to anyway i have my thoughts i'd love to hear um cas first yeah um will they get their money back um i don't know if they're going to get a hundred percent of their money back but i think they're going to get some of it back uh and the reason i think this is like like what do you think fifty percent twenty five or nine hard to say right because it depends on what sky mabus is ultimately willing to sacrifice themselves right because like how that works for example what's that how would that work i'm just like if like for me either you get all the word gets placed right already so what's interesting right now is the hacker has these funds sitting in you know wallets that we can all see right i think the way that the hacker has moved the funds around either he's either flaunting he or she's

either flaunting it or they don't have the level of sophistication and actually trying to quote unquote launder the money um so i don't know maybe this is a demonstration of like hey you guys have vulnerabilities right it was just a demonstration of how they were kind of trying to prove to sky mavis that you guys need to tighten some things up right some very basic things that as a software as a service kind of company you guys need to time things i don't know that's one theory but ultimately to answer the question you know could they do something as simple as a bounty and say look you you kind of figured us out you caught us with their pants down you took a significant portion that's going to hurt our community you know like here you go here's x percentage of the thing that you took and then you know give the rest back could that potentially happen maybe but that's a very interesting stance as a company to take right especially as someone as big as that happened before it has happened before with other situations right and so and that's like a does that like involve like a promise not to press charges and basically like pretend that

you were a security researcher so i i can't speak to the exact nature of the the use case that i'm thinking about but yeah i don't they my understanding is uh they did not press charges um a lot of majority of the funds were returned but that individual because it was a massive hectic i think it was something in the tune of like you know close to 200 million like that individual got something like 10 million dollars right for the hack and they kind of considered him like a white hat that helped them right so you know they're spinning the narrative to some degree but the the the long-term ramification is i think to your point lars like how do you proceed forward and what are some of the you know like terms of service and you know the company protocols that you need to have in place if and when you run into a situation like this right so this is where i think sky mavis is at in trying to like determine how do they move forward in that in that sense but the second part of what you described around like the bailout portion um i'm not 100 clear on it but from my understanding the axiom infinity treasury i think has

a significant portion of still some of their funding in there so if they really needed to right without going back to the investors or like you know in the in irl with like finance going to like the banking sector going to the government saying please bail us out the axiom infinity treasury themselves could potentially you know uh you know renumerate the the individuals got that got their you know funds kind of stolen it could but it would completely deplete them at that point right so what are the ramifications of that but that is a that is an avenue that they can take right and then yes the third option would be yeah going to their investors and saying hey we can't deplete our you know treasury in this way can you guys give us some more funding so that we can you know do this while keeping our product safe yada yada yada so it's there's a lot of different options at play and so i think it's going to be really interesting what ends up happening and then you know the the third topic that we may or may not get to ultimately around how you change crypto into fiat

kyc process and so on and so forth that may also now factor into it moving forward but ultimately the way i see it is every company is on notice when it comes to hacks security what you think about it and out of the the trilemma the three things when it comes to security and decentralization i guarantee you a lot of companies are now looking at that extremely differently right what things do you almost need to centralize to protect the ecosystem of users and you know funds because now you're having real you know dollar values moving around that whole conversation is now this is like a watershed moment of change that's coming and i think it's kind of needed to some degree right so anyway that's my thing we'd love to hear your guys's thoughts go ahead lars yeah i think what's interesting is the bit about the trilemma is that any investor is never going to sacrifice scalability right because that's how you go to the moon and so now that they're on notice about security i think that is it i mean

if you believe the trilemma is ironclad i think that means that like every this is a major just push to even more centralization from here on out yes i mean i think so the way i look at it is um the what's the term that you use lars that i actually like like the like the maximus right like the the guys that are way over here they're like nope you have to be fully decentralized you know we have to be pseudonymous this that and the other i don't believe like that's the that's the future right some things will remain in that way and some applications will you know flourish you know in that sense but when it comes to things like games and you know things of this kind of nature that you know we're a lot accustomed to i think it's going to be some type of a hybrid and because it makes the most sense because ultimately you know whatever the technology is right what are we all trying to do we're trying to create like great experiences for our players for our users so if you kind of think of it from that perspective and you want them to have digital rights ownership the ability to

trade and sell and own the things that they're actually putting money into while giving them like you know some kind of fun experience hobby whatever you want to call it like well how do you solve for that right while keeping them safe while keeping you know trust and security all so i think it's going to end up becoming some type of a hybrid eventually certain pieces of it but you know we'll see anil what do you think yeah it's very interesting i think ca hit the tone on a lot of it that would agree with i think it's hard to estimate how much money a sky mavis will get back i've seen so far that it seems like the hacker maybe as ca said is either not the smartest or is flaunting he's already put quite a lot of the the money onto like a listings like ftx which is not the smartest way because that's exactly how the money could be reclaimed because they could decide to honor the agreement and you know we um there was a couple who stole a lot of bitcoin in 2016 i believe it was right all of those funds were recovered because because of the way that it was kind of handled you know going back to your kind of bounty things at the end of last year there

were two bounties paid out by polygon for similar reasons um so really to be totally honest if the hacker do their their stuff they could completely wash all of that money and and get away with it there's definitely ways to do it i don't think i'll say it here because they want to give people ideas fundamentally whatever my opinion is i think it's bad for the industry it's bad for crypto for this to happen like you know sky davis should be congratulated for basically in creating an entirely new industry that i myself am very much a part of because of it so you know myself and my co-founders our cto after hearing this news we just looked at each other terrified like is this our end game that you work your ass off you you create something amazing and then this happens to you and you know all respect to jiho for being on stage at the day of the attack and you know making the announcement and yeah he started injecting but he handled that like a pro right when he got on stage like i mean yeah like mid mid stream on doing something at a convention and they're asking him these questions so sorry i didn't mean to interrupt but like i got to give him some props there too it was amazing how he handled that i agree that's sea level

for me that's proof of the pudding so i think that's a great f you know someone at a level um i think that you know and some of the other questions what can they practically do to kind of change it in the future well one thing that surprised me though why i brought up like the four being in the same location is you can do multi-sig right so for example having just nine nodes there's actually quite a few layer twos that do that even some that are worth quite a lot of money a lot more than ronin but they at least have multi-sig so they're not all in the same places i mean vitalik of fame is notorious for saying he doesn't actually believe in layer 2 for a lot of these reasons saying that bridges will always be like a vulnerability i think what lars said before as well about attacking the weak point i mean i was just nodding my head with everything he said he's completely right i mean it is true you know the the safe that's a car cardboard door but it's got an amazing padlock isn't going to do anything so i think what will they do i think that they will make more nodes i think they will go multi-sig they'll probably throw a few other things in there i think there's not too much more they can do other than that what will the investors do i think most of the investors because it really

opened everyone's eyes that even in a worst case scenario i think they will prop sky made this up because i think as well it won't look good for the industry as a whole if they were allowed to fail i think you know they more than prove their worth they were obviously i would imagine they will uh appoint like the most ninja cyber security person you've ever seen in your life like you know in a in a previous life they killed genghis khan or something like that that's just how secure they were you know they live in fort knox or something like that that's how secure this person is i think you'd have to do that as especially a company that's raised so much money um and then try and move on with it yeah i i think like the the thing that you're bringing up is really interesting because like yeah why would it just sit there right which is why i don't i you know i this hacker obviously had some level of skill in order to do a thing the fact that it's just sitting there and it hasn't been moved when they had ample opportunity and time to do it i think it signals something right so i think that's really fascinating that we can probably talk about at some other podcast but i think the psychology of it

is really really fascinating and then the other part too that i don't think we quite touched on yet is you know a lot of these uh you know blockchains these protocols these different you know d apps that are on here um you know they have you know various ways to interact right you know from without actually being a player in game and so i think the way that you know sky mabus wrote it out was the attack vector that this hacker took on was through what they call an rpc a remote procedure call easiest way to think about it it's just an endpoint it's basically an api right and so other games do this too like like dark forest for example which is another really popular you know web free game they allow users to directly connect to that thing right and have you know various functionalities so you can you know you know elicit some data so on and so forth but it's really interesting that games of this scale this magnitude and so on and so have those entry points right so i think these specific apis are probably going to be refactored and you know rethought and just really being considered now moving forward like is that a thing that we really need to do

and you know are those types of you know i guess transparent nature of touching back to the product and making you know getting post calls is that really a necessary thing i think that's also going to probably change into the future so yeah just something to like you know really think about because uh axi is not just a pure proof of stake uh you know uh you know from my understanding it's like a combination right because like they were proof of authority and then they i think they blend proof of stake which is which is kind of crazy which is very interesting in and of itself but this hacker was because of the way that they entered through the rpc through the dow through the validator nodes both of those things that ultimately matter right so yeah i think it's gonna lead to a lot of really interesting discussions and hopefully innovation you know within the space which is you know i think what i'm really looking for there's there's two things that i'm kind of thinking about is that um the first one is i think there's this kind of like nuclear scary option everyone needs to think about is that what if the hacker is sophisticated

enough to be like can i really steal this i know it says vulnerability let me just take it but not sophisticated enough to do what to do next and just panics and just abandons the funds forever you know that happens in real life when expensive stuff gets stolen like priceless paintings ancient artifacts from museums and they throw them in a dumpster and they run away because they don't want to get caught and they don't want to go to jail for the rest of their life they don't know how to launder all this money and you just never recover it ever you know and um i think that's kind of a scary thought to think about and i think it's but i think it's at least as likely as any of the other options is that the money will never be recovered and it will sit in that address taunting everyone forever um i'm not sure if it's more likely than any of the other options but it's something i'm thinking about and another part you know when we were talking about how like jiho handled this like a pro um i hate to cast aspersions but i strongly i mean maybe his performance on stage was good but sky mavis went six days either without noticing the breach or choosing not to

disclose it so either they didn't know about it which means frankly they're incompetent because they should have been watching like with stakes this high they should have had security monitoring and they should have known immediately when that much money was missing someone noticed it only because someone tried to withdraw the funds short sellers allegedly i haven't followed up on this short sellers allegedly noticed it and started making movements which one of them might be the hacker who knows um so either they're incompetent or they're dishonest which is it and if i'm an investor and potentially if they're gonna come to me and ask me you know potentially for a bailout or you know say it's like oh we're depleting the treasury or whatever like i would start thinking if i really want these founders to continue running the company you know if they've had all of these problems stack up against them and now have the largest hack of all time i would be thinking to myself do i trust this leadership team if they have just gone from being the poster child of the success of blockchain gaming to just being the face of mistake

after mistake after mistake after mistake is my investment safe you know that's what i would be thinking and i just i i can't imagine how i could have any confidence in someone who is either dishonest or incompetent frankly you know yeah no it's a really interesting uh viewpoint um i guess if so if i were to put myself into like gio's shoes and like imagine kind of like what happened you know during the time that those like five days or whatnot five six days when all the stuff was going down i mean having been not in this exact situation but having been in other similar fires as it relates to game development and things going sideways i can imagine the team just scrambling right trying to figure something out and i can imagine the guys maybe maybe they don't have it in terms of monitors you know because you would imagine there's like a knock uh you know having like triggers and trip points right maybe they don't have that level of sophistication yet so i i want to give them the benefit of doubt because when

you're doing something new and you're building a thing and it's challenging and they've been challenged to your point lars i don't know if i would call it a mistake but they've had some challenges with their tokenomics i think when you've got billions of dollars of valuation it's a mistake and you owe it to your investors to hire the people to give you that that that competency but i think i think i think the investors do are confident in this team right which is why they got the valuation that they did because they've had a bunch of success before they got to what i would consider uh you know some roadblocks right which i think a lot of successful products over time you're gonna run into roadblocks right and so that's what they're currently faced with and it just happens to be that as they're trying to let's say resolve their economy of the game and launch a new product in origin and this that and the other this thing happened right so it's a bunch of compounding effects and it's again i'm not trying to be defensive towards them i'm just trying to be like understanding of the situation and i can again imagine what it might be like for a small team there with a you know a massive billion dollar product

trying to scramble and figure all this stuff out um i think there's some level of let's wait and see until they disclose more information type of thing and yeah like dishonest i don't know about that i don't know if that would push it that far right i mean i'm not i'm not saying like i know they are i'm i mean and i want to say like i can empathize being in that position which is why i choose not to be in charge of billion dollar companies um because i can't take that kind of heat um but like what i mean is like i'm not saying they're definitely just honest i'm saying is it's like we only have two choices like either they didn't know or they knew and they chose not to disclose and neither one looks good not knowing makes them come off a little better but doesn't exactly give me a lot of coffee yeah but i mean when something like when when a big fire is happening is your immediate reaction is like oh crap i just found out something you know really really bad about what's happening let me go to my pr team and write up a trap saying hey guys this is exactly what's happening i think the natural reaction is all hands on deck swarm on the problem let's try to figure it out make sure it's a real problem so on and so

forth and then i think as they recognize [ __ ] like we got to actually communicate this out properly then they even actually put together like their blog post and that because it was pretty polished the way that they kind of rolled out all the information you could tell that it was a bunch of conversations happen they put something together they released it could the speed of that have been better like would we be having this conversation if they released that 24 hours later 48 hours later versus five days later i don't know right but i i think we can debate that point ultimately i think they are trying to be transparent everything's on the blockchain so it's not like it's not exposed right and so there's definitely some level of operational efficiency that they need to optimize against but i wouldn't go that far that's my personal opinion no i respect your opinion i think um man like i i didn't even consider them not being truthful about this imagine if like you can see on the blockchain that they were actually taking out all of their funds you know after they actually

discovered this um because you you can trace that [ __ ] so um that's yeah anyway never considered that um i don't think that's true either i i met i think um so i was at gdc last week i met uh jihos um and i could see it in his eyes he didn't know what was up you know you would have seen it if if he knew what was happening no i'm kidding but um no well i think you know it's the fact that this was happening for like a week it obviously it's like it's not very good right you should have checks and balances for this stuff um so definitely a mistake there but um i don't think that they they knew um yeah i don't think so yeah totally i they there's definitely areas of optimization fixes you know new new protocols within the organization that's going to need to happen for sure like to largest point if i was a if i was an investor of you know their studio and then you know like yeah i would probably start poking holes at all of the things

that i think a lot of us you know take for granted or we assume is going to happen right like all the different securities all the different you know processes and frameworks that you typically have in place when you know monies is being exchanged yeah i i think i think to some degree it's good and the positivity of all of this that i really like about web3 is like look at the community response which is really fascinating right i honestly thought that you know their their token prices were going to drop and i was going to buy that dip but it didn't drop as much as i thought it was going to it's actually surprising that it's kind of like you know kind of holding on where it's at right now i mean time will tell obviously how that's going to all shake out especially with all this amount of funds locked away in some hackers account but yeah it's just going to be fascinating to see how it all plays out in the next coming weeks months you know so on and so forth so well one question is how much can you currently how much can you currently trade right now i haven't i haven't followed up too deeply on that like how much does the dip in prices reflect like just lack of liquidity and how much

because like all the value kind of backstopping stuff is gone um is is trading unfrozen now can you just exchange freely i don't know that's a good question i mean i think this was what like maybe maybe it was like 14 15 you know of their of their market cap right but so there's still plenty i think that's around but yeah it's a good it's a good question like um did they did they unfreeze or did the exchanges you know unfreeze you know as well yeah that's probably something worth looking into as well so i mean because like my encounter is just like the russian ruble has collapsed a little bit less than some people expected but i would not want to be holding russian rubles right now but the russian ruble bounced back just recently right so even with all the sanctions and the stock market getting shut down uh now that they've reopened this that and the other it's normalized which is which is bad i encourage you to put your entire portfolio into russian rubles but i certainly am not going to do that myself hey i'm not saying that i would i'm just saying that it normalized it where it was before which is like fascinating because of the severe attack that occurred but anyways yeah it's a different different topic

a few thoughts there so one is i so i was um liquidity providing on ronin so i i was um lping the axs eve pair so i i had a bit of eat there that i think um is now unbacked right um and so i guess from my point of view um yeah it's it's hard to assess like what the hacker will do who they are right um like it wouldn't surprise me if we go the bounty route where you know they give the funds back they get maybe you know 10 20 million something like that and in the end i think everyone's happy in that case um so that wouldn't surprise me if that doesn't happen um i think that's a combination of the investors you know andreessen horowitz and the the the you know the axi or the yeah the axis treasury itself will you know fund the the i mean the axi as a game cannot go like continue without giving the funds back to the users on the road right it and so this company was was valued like

quite a lot of money so i and and so they're not gonna let that go to waste honestly like i don't know how much money um like the the game was making but i feel like in a few months they would have paid back or earned back the the money that they would have to refund their users now so as i'm you know potentially at the last year i'm actually not super concerned also i'm very well diversified right it's not that like my full bags are hanging on ronin um but um i'm i'm i think you know this this will be all right for the users um eventually at some point i think i think it's clear that for the hold holders of um axi tokens you know whether that's the axa nfts or axs or you know whatever they clearly believe that the funds are going to be recovered one way or another or um assuming the market's not frozen you know and and the prices reflect something like actual beliefs like um i think i think it's clear that they believe that this is gonna be okay i mean it's only been like like what like

i forget like a week two weeks like it hasn't been very long you know i mean i think if we get out like a month two months three months four months five months and the money still hasn't been recovered i mean i think we're in a very different situation um but one of the things you know you're talking about revenue is like when we when we did our navic report you know we modeled out the entire axia economy and even without this hack like the axia economy was not in good shape you know the pure actually was the game that proved that pure play to earn doesn't work and that their their monthly revenue was was steadily decreasing because it was intimately tied to growth in the user base and um so like i had a bunch of concerns about actually before this hack came and so um i don't know like if you're in the prospect as an investor it's like pour 650 million more into this or allow them to deplete their treasury there are plenty to use for other things it's like the opportunity cost of what that money could have been used for instead as opposed to resetting axi back to where it was before the hack which in my

assessment was not already like a great place like even if you believe in blockchain gaming there's like a million different ways to take that direction rather than just pour more bad money after good into the axi tire fire to be perfectly frank is that it's like 650 million could fund a whole bunch of crazy experiments in blockchain gaming rather than like this first idea we had that might work and now like we've identified all these problems with it why not invest in a bunch of other weird new crazy ideas that could go to the moon potentially you know even if if you completely believe in the blockchain space and don't have all my negative nancy opinions you know it just seems like a weird way to double down in in in my opinion is that it's like i mean i don't want to just like say this is the end of actually because like after i wrote my report um psych out alexander the ceo you know kind of responded it's like i think you're underestimating community which to me red is copium but i think he had a kernel of truth in there because like the amount of just like hold belief that the axi community has like

that it has continued to surprise me um and i've learned not to underestimate that but i also don't believe it can last forever i think eventually i have to deliver the proof in the pudding and the challenge with actually origin specifically is that the float is based on hope and hope gets replaced with reality whenever you ship something and so when actually origin gets shipped there's no more talking about how actually origin is going to save everything because now it's here we can evaluate it same thing with the land gameplay like that's going to be the next thing that's going to save everything if actually origin doesn't turn out to be great like and so um as they ship things then there's nothing to to hold out for anymore and um so i think i mean the timing could not have been worse that they were planning to ship actually origin and this got you know swept out out from under them um i will it is interesting that they have chosen to just like plow forward and ship actually origin anyway because i mean you just have to you just have to assume you're going to get the money back and ship it you know so i applaud them for for just like making that choice and i'll be

interested in seeing how it goes but i mean i think this doesn't correct any of the economic fundamentals that were plaguing them before um and so like i i just felt like when we wrote a report you know i outlined like you guys need to pivot like you guys need to pivot away from a model that doesn't work and then instead they just double down on it and so um i think i think the hack like i think they're in trouble before the hack anyway is my point yep yeah i think that makes sense um but isn't isn't isn't actually i i'm not super familiar with their second product or i'm not sure if it's a expansion pack or an extension but actually origin is a brand new game correct yes it's a brand new game that ideas to make it a free to play game that's a lot more accessible um and so it innovates in that sense that you don't need to pay like 300 to get started the challenge with actually origin is that i mean maybe it's going to surprise me but basically it's entire premise is to funnel people into the play to earn game play that they've had before um at least based off of what they've written when when it launches and we see maybe maybe maybe they will have pivoted substantially away from

their own business model and it will stop everything and that would be cool um but um that's that's just i'm just going off of what they've written yeah i mean i i guess my view on all of this is like i i don't think it's gonna solve everything um you know much like the most successful products that we see in like gaming free to play you know whether it's mobile or you know traditional platforms um a product's gonna have a certain life cycle and over time when that life cycle starts diminishing it's going to get sunsetted and so on and so forth uh i i got to give them a lot of credit for trailblazing and trying to figure it out because almost every web3 product is some variant or plus one or plus three of what axia's invented so you know is this kind of unfortunate set of circumstances going to potentially you know increase the velocity of sun setting for the original axi infinity product maybe um but i feel like with most products you know you're gonna learn from your mistakes um the economy change one is really challenging uh particularly because of their you know inflationary kind of token

kind of setup but origin may or may not solve that but since it's a different product it's a different thing and now you might be able to actually move your assets from one game to another i don't know if that's all in their gameplay or not i haven't read their whitepaper or whatever but yeah you know i the way i see it is like some of this is you know business as usual within the gaming industry like we've seen this we've seen the story play out multiple times over um part of this is new and innovative and you're going to run into interesting problems there so yeah we'll i guess yeah to your point largely well time will tell if you know origin is going to help to you know course correct some of the you know the mistakes that they've made along the way in the learnings that they've had um but i kind of remain bullish on them right not only because the community factor i think is important because ultimately like water games if you don't have a bunch of users playing them right just becomes a ghost town so i think they're they have some defensibility in that regard their community is probably one of the strongest that i've seen in web 3. um and they still have even with this hack they still have a pretty massive war chest of things to do

without asking for more money from the investors so you know maybe the investors are going to do that like put them in a position where it's like you know they're in that they're in the pain box right it's like you have all the money in in your treasury in your you know like you have your war chest go play with that we're not gonna you know pour more into it see if you can actually come out of the paint box which is what they're gonna try to do and then who knows maybe more interesting things will happen from there so i i still remain bullish on them uh i think there's gonna be some again interesting i think innovations and or just ability to kind of tighten up areas that they're probably not as familiar with um and you know we'll see how it goes but yeah interesting yeah for sure yeah i am excited no did we didn't lose yeah we did anil got um he got hacked he got hacked his bridge got exploited by the ronin hacker and he dropped so um there we go rip a nil we're missing you but um we love you and neil please come back

so anyway well thank thanks a lot for your opinion there yeah i know i know i come out a little harsh i just i just want to make sure that we ask the hard questions totally you know because i feel like there's a lot of people who are thinking about these things and it's good to mention the treasure because that has been one of axi's traditional strengths is that they just have they're just so loaded that even if their first game is designed to like crash and burn like they they could spin up like 15 games from their treasury but now like that kind of raises the question of it's like well that's one of the prime sources of bailout money right it's like and so like they have to like kind of spend their their their one um extra life that they have um just to kind of get back to where they were which which kind of would make me very sad if i was them anyway nico i don't want me to cut you off you're very yeah and i was gonna i was gonna you know um give a comment on on your point of view here so um i actually made the prediction at the beginning of this year that if there was one game or team i would have to bet on to make to be the most successful blockchain game by the end of this year

it was axi and this guy made his team and now probably retrospect i don't know let's see my point was um one um as as you guys have touched upon the you know a community is huge right i've just had a look at the price of the axishard uh so the axs token and on the weekly you can't even see when the news dropped like it's it went down like 10 over a week um together with the rest of the market so pretty crazy support from the community i guess um so that's one point but second point and i think that's that's for me key is that i've i've listened to a bunch of the the conversations that the sky mavis team has had about you know the sustainability of their economy and i think they realize um as as many people start doing that um the true plain earn will never work um or is very unlikely to work at least in the short term right um i've made a post about this like for me true play and earn means that's 20 20

or more of your user base may makes 10 or more per day that for me i would consider a play to earn game um and i don't think we're gonna see that any time soon they realize that as well and when you say that axi is or axis economy is doing bad um are you looking at that from a lens of people are only playing it to play an urn or are you saying that like because because for me the way it looks is that the the they've shifted the narrative to you know you you can play our game and you know at least you get something for for your your um what you're doing just a one-liner to respond um i mean that at least as of last we analyzed them their revenue was down month row vermont okay but yeah that's fair i think as a as a [Music] if if you um if you analyze the success of the game by the revenue i guess it makes sense that's you know after the huge hype where everyone was trading to the max um i agree that i i guess that they're

doing not as well but i think that um you know that was bound to happen like the the the revenue levels were probably unsustainable and were driven by you know speculation and people coming in in like hoping to make more money and i don't think we'll see any other game um achieve the same revenue levels anytime it's more subtle than that actually because it's not just like oh destiny 2 got popular now it's less popular it's the issue that most games get popular they spike and then they settle on a baseline and um they make money continuously based on how many numbers of users they have the problem was i mean i need to you know i haven't updated from our last analysis but just based off our last analysis and you know a little bit of a follow-up we did a couple months later um so this is like current has like two three months ago um they make money not off of how many users they have but how many users are added and that's the problem the problem is that it's it's second derivative not like marching across the line itself because they make money off of growth not absolute number of users so

it's normally okay it's completely normal for every game to like go to the moon everyone's playing elden ring and then like five ten years later from now people will still be playing elden ring and buying new copies of it and it's less but it's still like making money off that baseline like i still sell copies of defender's quest today even though like barely anyone's playing it you know like a couple copies a week um but it actually makes money uh yeah i appreciate it but like axi makes money off of the growth percentage itself based off of their snake eating its own tail business model and that's the problem there's crypto games that have sustainability you know um splendor lines is a good example um where and zed run is a good example like i mean zedron has like a very small number of players but it's like naively sustainable you know um and so like actually did like way more volume but the problem is is a trajectory in the model of it it's not like it got big and now it's crashed a little that's fine it's like you can't monetize growth itself because

growth itself can't last forever you want to be able to monetize off of of of any amount of users and preferably a high number of users and and that that's kind of the issue it's it's a little it's a little stuff no but that that that that's the heart of my credit i agree and i i don't think that they're gonna suddenly regrow their revenues in the way that they used to right in the same way that they used to i think the way i see this play out and i think they realize this is they need to build a open and immersive economy around axi and i think that's what they're going for with their land gameplay and let's save the whole the like land discussion yeah yeah i saw you already yeah yeah i'll give my some i'll give my stump speech later on some other podcasts um anyway so we can say that for another time i think in the end um if they build you know an ecosystem with different games in which you can use axes with different kind of resources i think there is where you know they will build a thriving economy where they can take a small um you know a fraction of every every transaction within that world um and and that's what i see their

end game is um and and that's what i've been hearing from them although obviously i can't um look in the inside their heads um and i'm actually interviewing uh philip law in a few weeks so he's a new game lead there so uh yeah that was that was a genuinely solid move they made you know and um philip law for those of you all who don't know in the podcast he's uh previously product or project manager i can never get which p it yeah on is go right and i mean i've talked to that guy and he's brilliant and those are the kind of moves they need to be making is um basically acknowledging that they need more outside expertise like not just in security but also in stuff like i mean one of one of the classic problems with um actually for instance is because so much of the initial interest was just financial like it was it was this like tree that sprung up that had shallow roots right you know whereas like if you look at the difference between something like pokemon and how it became just this

massive like worldwide brand you know like i mean just as simple of an example as and this is something i think they're they're starting to fix in origin is like axes are kind of like an undifferentiated mass you know it's that classic nft like just permutation thing it's like there's no aspect of like pikachu's my favorite you know um even though people are getting like tattoos and like little plushies it's like you don't have that deep degree of hook because at the end of the day an axi is like a little blob with a you know permutation phase here's an arm and yeah yeah and there's so many other variables like that that's just one out of like 50 variables and people like philip black get that on a deep level and so if people like philip law and other people with that like deep experience and like knowledge of what makes things connect beyond the surface kind of level understanding of community that i've mostly seen out of crypto games you know they could transform stuff i mean i have my whole hypothesis that in the end the blockchain will basically evaporate and um we'll get some ideas that came out of blockchain without getting caught up on

the implementation of blockchain um i think that's the future but without that'll be a whole podcast for its home someday but um i feel like if you you know axey needs to move away from this whole like rhetoric they sold themselves on in its early days and moved towards being more like a conventional game and using blockchain less of a we are all going to make it kind of thing and and um basically move towards uh just treating it as a less worse paypal and like in the open api for you know for for moving stuff around um but i think that they're already doing that i feel like i feel like the industry as a whole is moving towards that right so i can i can reverse fraudulent transactions occasionally on paypal no so i don't i don't mean it i don't so let me let me let me take a step back clarify what i mean right so the concept and some of the challenges i think that we're faced with like looking at someone

like axey as an early kind of uh you know like tip of the spear on like how web 3 was being formed particularly for games you know they helped coin the term play to earn which is now also being you know thrown around differently like i mean i mean i think way back when i wrote for navic and you know i think on one of these podcasts i was talking about play and own now i hear play to own uh you know you know various variations right but the point is like the dynamic of you know this change which i think is inevitable which is you know in in like five years time right users players they're going to actually value their pr time properly meaning if they can value their time and the games that are being developed has to be fun first versus monetary value first that that shift is already happening in my opinion at least from the ecosystem that i'm involved in and so if that becomes the norm where you have to be fun first but then because i value my time and because i own these things

there's value that i am then creating from that and i essentially become the harvester then i think the way that you approach your behavioral outcomes as a designer as a product manager so on and so forth and the way i engage with these d apps it's going to change so i i think the starting point of where it was created a lot of there's a different set of confluences that is challenging to solve for yes like this idea around not being able to reverse all that stuff is still in play but i think again over time i think that's going to change and you know from most of at least the the the newer let's call them web 3 you know 2.0 wave of games that are now coming downstream probably some will be released this year maybe next year i think they're really looking at that seriously and i think we're going to see that shift where it's like you you know if you had the equivalent of a free-to-play game versus let's say a blockchain-enabled game and they're equal in terms of their fun factor um i don't know i i think players would gravitate not saying all of them will

but i think there's a there's a good subset of players that will gravitate towards that which i think will you know be a different way of engaging if that makes sense yeah no i i get what you're saying and like i mean the thing i would always say is it's important to be educated by the way in which games have been financialized for the last 30 years um in the way there's been the problem is you can't have a system where like the value is provided artificially by digging holes and filling them in again like as a good example in destiny 2 like um if i am having trouble with the mission like i can go and hire a mercenary like a real world mercenary to come in and play with me and carry me through that mission and they're providing value to me i'm having more fun because i i want a big brother that i don't have to come in and carry you right yeah right right right exactly you know i mean that that is that isn't anything new right and you you've seen this and um the thing is is that like the system for facilitating that is maybe not like

first party first class on the system and my kind of position is that it's like it would be nice if we had like a less worse paypal kind of protocol for that but i don't think like the immutability like i want to avoid falling into these like worst of both world situations where you have the horrible onboarding of crypto and you have the not your keys not my problem of not your keys not my customer service problem of of of blockchain issues at the same time and i think like just just like getting a little unfixed from it's like okay we're going to change the world but it has to be with this 14 year old technology and nothing else um i i my prediction is that blockchain is going to evolve into all these protocols and technologies actually have nothing to do with the things we're working with now same thing happened in ai by the way that's how that took over the world here's a new numerical model it's not the same one we were talking about eight years ago but this one actually works um ai wins it's like okay cool interesting yeah i i i largely agree with that right i think there's i mean

look with with things that are coming and you know with with the usage and new use cases and you know case studies of things coming out it's gonna it's gonna evolve and iterate and adapt to a thing um yeah i i'm just pretty positive about it just because you know if this is like the biggest like you know with the axi hack if this is like the biggest thing that's occurred so far and i don't know there's throughput through it that at least i can see um yeah i i think it's going to be for the benefit ultimately for the players which i think is the most important thing right if i can if i could i appreciate your comments here if i could move things a little away from things i'm consistently grumpy about and something into a little bit slightly more neutral territory for the benefit of everyone no i love the i a more narrow technical point which i think i'm just as interested in is l2s vs l1s like a common security argument is that the more surface area you create it doesn't matter how many fancy

auditing stickers you stick on it and how many phds you get to look at it you increase the surface area you increase the complexity there's going to be a vulnerability you're just not going to notice it you know um and so like that's the vitilig argument that it's like to don't mess around with l2s like is this evidence of that you know or um you know because we've seen stuff with solana and polygon 2 you know like are l2 is the way forward or do we just need to move to l1s like l1s that are like like is the way forward is like they should have made their own l1 or we should just all wait for ethereum to merge to to do the big proof of stake merge or what what are your opinions sorry to take over from my side no it's it's an important discussion i feel like we've touched upon like five things in the last two minutes that i want to have like a whole single episode on um from my point of view the way i look at this um so one i want to just tell you that when it comes to not my keys not my customer service and and these types of of and the horrible wallets ui for the moment i

think um over the next years i think we're going to see some some great innovations on that side there's now smart contract wallets i did an interview with um michael sanders from horizon who's built um sequence it's called it's it's amazing like i've tried it um if you ever want to play sky weaver give it a try you'll see that well it's it's insane anyway um to come back on the layer did you say sky weaver i think anthony um mike hogan was working with that and he was like being like this is insane this i can't believe it was this easy there you go positive words from lars what's happening i know it's santa um no anyway we're talking about um layers so the way i see this is um we're gonna have a like a layered blockchain ecosystem where you know the more layers you go up the more like transactions and scale you need and so i think on the bottom like basically like no individual will ever do any layer one ethereum transaction anymore that will all happen on different layers um and so you're gonna have um i don't think we're gonna solve the blockchain trilemma but you know the the

base is gonna be super decentralized super safe and and there is going to be millions settles every every second and then as you move up layer wise i think you know transactions are going to be bundled um scale is going to increase decentralized decentralization is going to reduce slightly um and i think you know with that as as you move up you're gonna have you're gonna end up with something that's not really super decentralized and safe but the value of transacted there is gonna be negligible so it it's like there's always gonna be this um this trade up there anyway yeah that's that that's my thoughts any any final the final remarks because you have we have to wrap this things up i i feel like we could keep going and we didn't even touch up on our even our second topic um but we kind of did as well and um no i think this was was amazing and super valuable ca final final remarks i appreciate it don't we need to make bold predictions isn't that your favorite it is my thing do you want to make one have you played you want to make one okay bold prediction i honestly have no

grounds for knowing but i think they won't get the money back that's my bold prediction they will get the money back is that your bold prediction ca what about you uh yeah i mean i i i think they're gonna get some of their money back the all hedging all the time channel exactly just for example hey but like i'm just going by precedence right like do i think that they're going to get 100 back probably not but do i think they're going to get a majority of it back i think so cool okay we'll see who's right probably you yeah yeah yeah there's no skin in the game i i mean look as just another you know competitor colleague you know in the space like obviously i want you know them to do well and succeed right because they're doing bold things and i want their community to be you know uh yeah enumerated and you know safe as well um but yeah it's just it's just super interesting to see but i i think i think something good will happen the optimistic i think just for my my my final thought is it's like as much as i come across as negative sometimes um i

want to make clear that like the position i come from is that i fight for the users and that i just think um i'm not here to like hate on anybody or anybody's hard work but like i'm always going to empathize with the little guy at the bottom who put trust in people and so i think when you've got billion dollar evaluations you're playing with fire and you need to respect that and that is where everything i do and say comes from and so it's not out of a desire to tear anyone down or to poop on anyone's work or anything like that it's like i would love to live in a world where people succeed and get filthy rich and and don't hurt anyone in the process and and and that's just where i come from just just to make that clear is um i just want to make sure that whatever happens to sky mavis the people who put money at stake and the average average guy in gal et cetera you know doesn't get hurt in the process yeah 100 maybe this isn't as bold of a prediction but um one of the things that i am

pretty bullish on and i'll just say it here is you know how like in traditional free-to-play products when when we see a product have like an annual run rate of like 100 million dollars we're like yeah that game is crushing it right because like you're you're sitting probably in like the top yeah top 10 top 20 you know if you're doing that kind of revenue um i think this next wave of uh web 3 you know games that are coming uh i think there's going to be several that's going to hit that mark uh wow yeah i i think i mean because there's some really interesting you know projects that aren't just being built by some small team you know out of you know some basement somewhere like these are like legit what time frame what's that um i think i think within the next i would say 14 to 16 months we're gonna see some some actually like some really solid games like if you knew nothing about it and you just saw gameplay and you look at that you're like oh i wonder what you know console that's on or i wonder if i can download that on steam i think that will be the initial reaction and then you're going to find out oh crap this is a blockchain game right and i think

it'll you know change the perception at least somewhat uh you know potential you know others like maybe in the traditional space that look at the current crop of game right now and they're looking at it and saying uh that looks like a you know you know nintendo era superintendent nintendo genesis error games i think that perception is going to change in that time frame these are some things you could put your 625 million towards hey land gameplay man in origin what are you talking about um yeah um cool well um i've tried guild of guardians um the pre-alpha um that's been fun it's been good it looks great i think if you see that you you wouldn't think it was a blockchain game so um yeah i've been liking that one uh shout out to the immutable team um they're doing great things and i i really like uh i like them all right so with that um this was great episodes lars thank you for being the the critical thinker here and um you know looking out for the small guy and i think you know you're one of the biggest stars on this on the show um as our uca

oh gosh very very neutral and and always so um you know uh what you call it well i appreciate you guys putting up with me i i i learn a lot from y'all iron sharpens iron and i just i just i just don't want anyone to get hurt and that's what motivates me there we go i am i'm gonna do so we basically need to like get another podcast going where we talk about the current states i also have some ideas about you know i talked about um sustainable plato urban economies i have ideas how that might work um and who else to to uh pitch it to than lars who's gonna crush my hopes and dreams um so yeah we'll probably be stronger for you exactly exactly no that's totally true um cool well that was it uh cie lars thank you so much for joining me and listener thank you for listening in um maybe i should shout out so we're on youtube so if you're on youtube like and subscribe um i always love saying that i i've heard that so much now i can say it myself um and if you're on spotify you can like us there as well so that'd be great much appreciate it join our discord if you want to you know have

these discussions there and with that the metacast by navigating out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music] you