Treasure DAO - Building a Decentralized Nintendo - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] gm friends and welcome to the metacast cryptocorner brought to you by navic i'm your host nicola freiko or nico for short and today i'm joined by john and carell from the treasure slash magic team who are currently busy building the treasure verse treasure dao is described as building the building blocks of a universe of game worlds connected by composable nfts and the magic token and so as a little bit of context around this as many of you know i'm a big fan of loot and so a few weeks after loot was dropped i saw this this this thing this project called treasure that asked me to stake some loot nfts and some adventure gold and i was like yeah why not um i did look at it for a while and then you know a few months later

it seemed that i'm that i was holding tokens of a project that people are calling a decentralized nintendo consisting of the console play to earn games games from other developers and a launchpad for these games and then also a marketplace where you can trade assets as nfts and so magic is a currency that ties everything within this treasure verse together all games being built utilize utilize magic and the nfts can only be bought with magic and it also looked like treasure has a very dedicated community because i had people email me to talk about treasure and to get you guys on so here we go due to popular demand let's talk about what you guys are doing um john or carell can someone give me a like a very high level view of um you know what treasure is doing and i'm also interested to to get like the origin story like where does did this idea originate um you know what sparked the idea of building a decentralized nintendo um and what is a decentralized

nintendo love to learn more yeah so like you i was uh or i am a really big fan of loot i hadn't seen anything like it before in the space and was really inspiring for me and there are a lot of people making derivatives um when loot first came out and my thinking was we should try and do it with resources so instead of distributing adventure gear i'm from a decentralized finance background and a lot of the teammates are so we thought we'll just do the same formula where we create these mechanisms that don't have a context so economic building blocks devoid of a game to see if a larger game universe could be built then with magic magic as you mentioned we allowed people from multiple communities to farm it with the idea being if loot can create a video game in a bottom-up way building it then we can create um a network of metaverses or something like a video game console with using a

token um and in the same formula so the way it works is we're trying to build an economic layer to a network of metaverses rather than vr ar particular metaphors so we develop these economies that um mostly are just bridges between worlds so resources that they fight over they share emissions of and using this um joint economic structure the idea is that we can build a cradle that um a lot of games can be built on top of and over time what ends up happening is the magic token which is distributed across many worlds and used to support builders on a variety of platforms the dow can just continue diverting emissions towards the most successful products or new ones that it wants to bootstrap and it turns into this sort of nimble organization that uses the magic token which is a fantasy resource that's emitted into these metaverses as a way to sort of guide organizational

priorities and just lead to further growth of the dow how should i think about this is this like one big mmo or how do you describe this in terms that you know your traditional gamer would understand exactly right so for us the very important piece is the decentralized metaverse so we think the metaverse isn't necessarily or it isn't a product that a corporation makes and then you buy for a specific price and then they do the maintenance of it a metaverse in our mind is a community made story that has an underlying economic framework as opposed to a visual one so these are stories that people build through you know war um like uh plots um game loops things like that and over time um the community can shift and the the metaverse can can actually shift and so the boundaries between these places these worlds is

very thin uh you know they can bridge extremely easily because they're just stories that are being constructed um and uh we think that this decentralization is what separates us from other metaverses because we can create an underlying framework where all of the games and not just games but like land nfts characters all the ideas can just sit on this larger um not map but um framework and um yeah we think that's what makes us unique okay so treasure is a framework with a bunch of primitives an economic layer that can then be used as a foundation for games to be built on top of exactly right so magic is the central token we think of it as like the money or store of value across these worlds because um as more worlds get added to our larger network of metaverses becomes

increasingly scarce and the emission curve is also designed so it becomes um more hard to accumulate over time um but the there's also other resources called treasures and these are just um these can be native to a particular metaverse or they can kind of share emissions of specific kinds across worlds um and through those that's how these worlds establish relationships is through commerce that's fascinating and so you would call magic what other mmos would call gold right it is just this one currency that is used everywhere as this main way to transfer value exactly yeah but there's no it's not on a server there's no company housing it it's a decentralized asset governed by a dow okay and so if i can just sorry just quickly jump in i think one analogy and you know something to frame this well is like you know treasure and magic like where the magical sort of river weaving

between the parts and infusing the ecosystem with magic and so all of the things that john mentioned like we're kind of flowing in between worlds between metaverses between those stories and and the lore that's uh you know being created and you know you know feeling it with the kind of economic model to to parrot all right i think i'm sorry to grasp this more um and so all of that you're building does that exist so that that full economic layer is that fully on the blockchain or is there stuff that you are building that is also not on top of the blockchain no for now all of our games um and so bridge world is like our main game and you can kind of think of it as like a tabletop game it doesn't have a normal front end but it's fully on chain all the art will be on chain and reducing we're introducing new resources um types of assets that'll also be um on chain and

yeah this our little meta versus bridge world and then small verse which is the small brains collection these things all started because we initially were building in the loot universe and was hoping that loot would adopt us as their currency and also for ann and a gold um when that didn't happen we just started making our own and now we're finding other builders to come in and expand on this universe with us and so you have like then you you've broken off from the loot first there's there's no no ties there at this point anymore um we're trying to do something down the road i think with them but um they chose a gold as their official currency um so for right now we're doing separate things yeah okay and so is your objective right now um on the long run maximizing the value of of magic and is that like the common goal that everyone within the treasure verse shares yeah exactly magic is the thing that

powers our organization and all of these worlds and we've designed it so we have a marketplace that's transacted right now solely in magic and we take a pretty high royalty five percent to support the dow so what ends up happening is it's this flywheel where the growth of our products leads to our worlds leads to a lot more transactions and then the dow is recouping its native token which we use to not invest back in ourselves but new builders and new games stories what not and with that we're just spreading it out um to more places magic is the thing that connects all the builders so our thesis is that in the long term we'll see these dows scaling larger than blockchains you'll see them on multiple blockchains they'll even be in some like resembling web 2 enterprises and they'll grow to be brands and you see nfts like azuki teasing the idea of maybe becoming a

clothing manufacturer so for us we see this is a launch pad um nfts are a way to start developing native web 3 brands and products like games and magic is the thing that enables all of that in the organizational level okay so if i understand this correctly and feel free to tell me that i'm um i'm i'm wrong it seems like you their games these games incentivize the trading of assets in the marketplace on which there is a quite high five percent royalty that the treasure dow takes which then is used to incentivize or support other game developers um to also build games that also incentivize training and so that's then a loop that just keeps on growing right yeah and and not just games too right like um we're exploring building our own blockchain right now and seeing what that will look like so that would

be a good use case to invest in builders who want to build blockchain around magic and then later if um we continue to be successful you know our organization will grow to the point where it's making what people would call real world products and we want to put magic in the hands of those builders also so that everyone remains aligned to this common goal and why you just add to the so we have the um five percent royalties that are for the projects that we had initially seated and bootstrapped from the ground up so bridgeworld small brains small verse and all of those are are kind of following that five percent royalty model um all these you know ecosystem projects that have come out of the community um two and a half percent um go back to the dial um the rest of it you know whether it's two and a half which was the initial model um which has since kind of expanded uh to be you know freely controlled by the creators a lot of them starting off as as freeman's um you know go back to to their projects to really help and you know feel their

operations and uh you know as they grow their um project as well okay so there's a kind of revenue share between the original treasure dao and then the the builders of the games themselves you got it yeah okay um that's really fascinating and so before we go into the games because i'm curious what kind of experience exists right now and where you see this going um can you talk to me a few of the economic primitives you've built so as far as i understand right now there are um there's magic which is this fungible token that is the the lifeblood of your ecosystem you've you've provided a marketplace within the treasury ecosystem as well um that can be used to trade nfts you have different types of nfts um could you tell me a bit more about those and then also more more stuff that you've built that you provide to the games that you're you're supporting yeah sure um so we're really young we're only seven months old so we're just beginning to explore these things but

treasures themselves are the different kinds are kind of fungible still at this point because they're mostly just used for crafting and um there are some like our rarest ones called grin and honeycomb that people um put in a special category but we haven't really seen the differentiation at the level of like treasures utility that we think will happen later so for now they're mostly just um crafting tools um and then we've also a big thing in d5 is how do you keep liquidity for a token high and this has been a struggle for a lot of protocols we've seen things like olympus pro come along to try and um to try and you know create deeper liquidity so that um there's a phenomenon in d5 called rug pulling where someone will um pull all the liquidity after manipulating the prices and then people just get um really hurt by this phenomenon so we

want to build um we want to build g5 with a different skin so lp tokens which are used to represent one's proportional ownership of liquidity pool you actually get back in nft through uniswap v3 so we want to build um these items as in-game assets fantasy assets that the user has no idea that they're actually contributing to liquidity and participating in these d5 protocols so we started with balancer crystals are actually an lp token and yeah so it's really early days these are like the basic things we're exploring right now and then later we've created these hooks like bridgeworld will have a very established economy so other people can come along and um the way i think it's going to play out is that communities have to agree on what their metaverses are so when two metaverses collide there has to sort of be a handshake between communities about um value

what's fungible between these worlds and things like that so we're just flushing out our world as um yeah in depth as we can to create ways for other people to collaborate with us it is um it's impressive what you've been able to build over these past seven months um and and i mean if we have the time i'd love to go into the differences between you know treasure as an ecosystem and loot as an ecosystem um but before that i'd like to double click on something you said which i find very interesting so you said um you essentially gamified essential defy activities from users um so if i understand you correctly and i'm gonna just throw it out there and then you can you know tell me if i'm wrong or if it's correct um an lp pool a liquidity pool is a way um to for you know anyone to to purchase um a token and so in your case you know if you want people to be able to buy the magic token there has to be a um ethereum and magic

pool that's filled with both eth and magic so people can if they want to buy magic but ethan gets a magic back and then the other way around and so you give people nfts if they provide liquidity to that pool and then these nfts have liquid like a utility within the game so they can use it to play and then but that would also mean that at some points you could redeem your nft and get back to your your liquidity is that how it works right exactly so liquidity pool is if we want to have decentralized market makers someone has to come forward and put in the case of uniswap it's equal amounts in terms of value they have to put equal amounts of two assets forward to say i will make the trades here buys and sells i will make the buy and sell orders with my liquidity so it's really important to have deep liquidity especially for the native token so when you add liquidity to uniswap v3 you get back this nft and the reason they're nfts and uniswap is

that everyone has separate um parameters so you choose the point at which you're no longer going to make the market so if magic has had some horrible exploit and then it's going to zero you know you've already got this parameterized where you're no longer going to provide um liquidity if magic drops below a certain price so so so lp positions are actually nfts um technically and so what we did is we just put a skin on it where users are actually as you were saying yeah they're passing back and forth lp tokens they're actually passing back the protocol liquidity in the form of these game assets that have utility and the really neat thing in my mind about using normal d5 constructs and putting them in game five is that game fi has much more stickiness than um a d5 protocol because what we saw in defy summer is that someone else is just going to come along and fork your protocol and the token and there's nothing really anchoring

um a person to a protocol um but we see loyalty when things like brands entertainment gaming come along and game fi allows us to use our imagination to invent all kinds of interesting things that people want to own and collect and participate in so the search and defy summer was how do we create a reward big enough so these protocols can have stickiness and they weren't really able to do it but in game five we can because we create experiences that people want to continue participating in as part of that we will require them to contribute to the health of the protocol like by providing liquidity okay two reactions to what you said one is um you mentioned you wanted to give an example of when um the um the relation between ether and magic gets out of whack because in an of an event and you had the perfect chance to just say once this podcast comes out and everyone realizes how amazing magic is and the price triples um but i'll let

that slide for now um and then my second point was that i have been ranting quite a lot about people using the word game fi around blockchain games but in this case it actually makes a lot of sense so um i i appreciate this um and your use of that and it's it's very very apt in this situation and actually honestly like this makes a lot of sense and uh i really like that and i think um that's from what i understand now something we should see way more moving forward thanks yeah we're really excited about this right now it's still very academic because we haven't had a really had a chance to really build out um the full economy but you know we have a we have a ph uh you know uh economist with a phd on staff and we also consult with others like business professors and we we really think that like a year in when this is like really well built out it won't be as theoretical and it'll just it'll be just like the the best way for

a builder to want to participate um in game five or whatever term you would prefer besides that one like um there are their inherent advantages to being part of a network of builders um they can help bootstrap your community because we can just divert users towards new products either by like allowing their art their items to be farmed in world you can even farm whitelist spots and then we can also just um you know the more unsavory parts of you know building a game which is sometimes your game fails and in nfts it's like very hard to know when to walk away from a project people have bought into it and there's this expectation sometimes that you continue working on it forever and the value of the network is that failed games can just be incorporated into the war in some way and we can transition them out in a way that's the least destructive to the community and the builders so we think that over time this model will just bring in lots of people who

want to build with others that's um makes a ton of sense could you uh tell me about the games because we're in this podcast focused on gaming and a lot of people listening will be are very critical of the current generation of blockchain games i'm curious you know i'm assuming as you said you've been building for seven months right so we don't expect you know gta 5 in on treasure um but i'd love to know like the current generation of games you've built a few i saw um can you give some examples about what the dynamics are how they tie into the economic layer that you've built with treasure um and also love to to get your vision on on where you see this going like in in a the best case scenario almost yeah for sure um i can let corel speak to bridge world i was just going to mention really fast like um you know we built a lot in seven months so we built um a marketplace on arbitram and we were mostly focused on infrastructure because when we moved to l2 um we had the belief

that eventually most all games and nft trading will be happening on l2 because it'll just be prohibitively expensive on l1 so when we went to arbitram there was no infrastructure we had there wasn't even an nft viewer for 1155s um so we built the marketplace and we've done on some days we were doing 10 of open seas volume with just two collections and um you know small brains did hundreds of million in volume i believe and the same for our legions collection um and yeah those are those were our big accomplishments in the first seven months but i let carell actually speak to the games yeah absolutely um so and i think it's it's important to to stress that you know while we've been building for for seven months you know i think the you know we we've been able to mobilize a community to build and parallel with us um so you know we we have the core games that you know again sort of seeded the initial thesis of you know the decentralized video game console and the initial cartridges if if you will um you know but

that said you know we've since spawned uh you know a number of other games and cartridges to build which you know have have all come from from the community um so i mean we've touched on it a little bit but you know i think going back to bridge world you know if treasure dell incubates games and and supercharges their growth with magic and resources and then bridge world is you know what mobilizes the economy and that gives the resources value builds the you know defined infrastructure for them and then ultimately it provides games the other cartridges in our ecosystem with a common economic framework through which they can integrate interact and then compete with one another but ultimately you know the the name of the game is that you know it's a strategic commerce trade and domination game which sits at the center of the treasure ecosystem it focuses on resource acquisition and you know is very much fueled by social coordination and then there are elements of geopolitics to it so guilds and other games in the ecosystem

acquire users users and resources they create and forge items and consumables and then deploy them strategically in contests over harvesters which are a upcoming game mechanic which we are baking in which are ultimately magic steak farms with concentrated yields so there's a huge focus on you know that sort of social coordination and group dynamics you know how communities operate and work against or with each other at the user guild and global level and so if i double click into each of those you know at the user level there are ways for um you know them to send out their nfts which we call them legions on quests they can craft and create new items consumables um you know they can summon and create uh you know other nfts as well other sort of legions within that class um at the guild level they can coordinate and compete for emissions and we're seeing a lot of cartridges actually come up that are coordinating together to

as a way for them to accumulate magic and ultimately send that into what we're calling the atlas mine uh to accumulate more so ultimately it does go back to that motto of like everyone is fighting for magic and it's this scarce and you know extremely valuable uh resource that everybody wants um you know if i click into the global level uh sort of dynamics you know the aggregate staking of magic in the mind really powers up bridge world you know magic is is what ultimately powers you know all things that treasure and you know if there isn't enough of it um being staked it you know freezes time in in the game and so this can lead to really interesting dynamics that we can kind of play out and um you know touches on a lot of what john had mentioned um and and so you know i think counterbalancing all of this stuff um you know it may seem like it is uh you know a lot to sort of digest but i think

it's it's ultimately um you know kind of kind of bringing everything together um you know and sort of this model of complexity that you know i think wrapped into a game that fuels and powers everything yeah and if i could just add on there sorry like yeah that was that's great i completely agree with all that and then in terms of like the the larger vision the longer term one you know if i would i was speaking to a wayne or web 2 game developer who was interested in web 3 you know ethereum is is going to one day be a multi-trillion dollar technology and it actually started because of um world of warcraft when or this is the joke at least that um vitalik buterin who invented um ethereum had his wow weapon seized um because it's on a centralized server and he was so um frustrated with this he built a world computer where your assets could not be seized because it was housed on a decentralized network and so

you know over time like these nfts right now they've gone kind of parabolic so to speak and their prices are insane but the real value of an nft is just signaling things you're interested in it um letting a community tap certain people who've been very good stewards so we'll see these things not as like they'll become extremely popular not as like tradable items but just like demonstrating um yeah just parts of a community and i think game developers when they see that that's the future of nfts will be like oh wow this is a way we can deal with toxicity because we want to like give badges to users who act in pro-social ways and then you can't just burn your account and go make a new one because if you you lose all those badges which represent the contributions you've made um to the metaverse so that's like a good positive incentive to not be toxic and then you know just pure developers you have all this data on chain about what your users like what

they've also played in the past so from an advertising perspective you want all of your users to be using blockchain gaming so that's kind of where i see treasure going in the long term is to be on the forefront of these non-tradable nfts that help support the growth of the business and do you see so for the moment all the gaming happens on chain right so you provide a thin client that people access through the browser um to interact with the game how do you see um well do you see any like off-chain games like like more twitch based games um ever live within the treasure ecosystem um yeah we we want to explore lots of ways that magic can kind of be distributed to um new places new revenue streams and and right now so bridge world will always be a tabletop game to some extent where it doesn't involve that many moves

so to speak or transactions so it can be on arbitrary but when we build like traditional games um which we just entered into an agreement with strider dao andrew green has worked in the video game industry for many years and is helping us along with some advisors we're building out a our first game using the magic and treasures economy so for things like that that require a lot of transactions it's not feasible to do it on even layer two and we've seen on polygon for instance polygon has broken more than once because of a game the stardew valley clone the names escaping me right now actually shut down um polygon so these things need to move to um like higher throughput chains and we want to do it on cosmos where you can have um the same security but you can have functionally zero transaction costs um you know and you can even literally do

it where it's if there's zero gas because if there's a level of yield built in yield earning built into user activity then they can just be borrowing against um their yield for gas so they actually they don't pay anything i mean there are kinds of like crazy things that you can do when you move to uh move off layer one ethereum and we're just exploring those now yes yeah and and and the um you know i think that the universe of games that that are being built out um you know i think they they can really take any shape or form you know i think there's there's you know as as long as there are sort of deep integrations with um treasure and sort of the the model that we're building out magic and the use of the the resources which you know ultimately kind of you know can be brought into to to their worlds um you know we're very much open to anyone kind of coming to the table um if i double click on on schreider uh you know i think this is really interesting for us because you know we're teaming up

with them and a former lead designer from one of the world's leading mmorpgs i can't say the name um but really it's it's this goal of like building up a community first kind of bottom up aaa nft uh and web3 game studio and you know i think it's it's we're seeing more of this uh you know as as the space matures um you know they're they're veterans of the gaming industry um you know from from you know uh folks uh like the audience that that would be listening here uh and and they've created you know a ton of incredible successes um you know i think they're they're coming from places like ea rockstar games square enix you know they've had a hand in building games like dead space gta san andreas like red dead redemption so it's it's great to kind of have these uh you know more and more of these incredibly talented people come to the table um and for us they kind of form that partnership with them i mean it's it's it's a really uh humbling and bullish sign for for us at treasure um as you know we work together to build you know

what what we see as as a future of um sort of the ecosystem uh you know we're going to see more kind of aaa gaming experiences and really move away from i think uh what has been the the meta for a long time which is you know kind of the financialization of it and and while really important you know what will keep people around uh you know what will be the delight and you know the social kind of dynamics of it is is what we see as uh as as a future that's really interesting um before we talk about the incentivization of game builders because i'm very very interested in that as well um i'd love to get your thoughts on shared resources within games so if i understand correctly you have magic you know being used within each game is magic emitted within games can people like play a game and then earn magic and are there other resources that are also shared between games yeah so that's the idea is that magic is spread across

many worlds and then the dao over time decides where to send it so it's dynamically emitted and then you know it's it's a store a value token where um you know gold is a store of value across lots of societies but we each have native monies and even other um things that kind of function like money um so local worlds will also have those and yeah it's possible that there are treasures that are emitted in in multiple metaverses that's we would definitely like to explore that more we're easing into this just because it just the integrations the more complicated they get um if you miscalibrate it's um it has pretty bad consequences so we're starting slowly where magic just exists in bridge world and then there's this uh game not game it's an nft project i found it called small brains and so the small brains will be able to earn magic in the next few months and that that's

like the first integration along with seed of life which is another um core product for treasure that um yeah we're slowly introducing magic to those worlds and then easing into deeper economic integrations yeah and if i can quickly add to that so we we have a sort of an ecosystem integration framework which you know does sort of outline steps and you know again happy to go into this in more detail but um you know really for other game developers uh cartridges that that are soon to be built um you know for them to seek uh you know magic emissions and and also treasure nfts uh to be uh woven into their game mechanics um so so that that's something that you know we're beginning to lean into a lot more um you know i think as really to grow the pie right and you know i think it's it's that that's ultimately the the name of the game for us um if i look back at bridge world and this is where i think you know the the role of our economist you know really plays uh you know that

in a really important role um is really to ensure there's balance uh in in the world uh and you know i think one thing that we um have discussed a lot and you know our building towards is kind of a treasure trade union of sorts where you know we have a framework for allowing games to opt in and opt out of shared drop rates and common inflation rates for tiers of different items and so this way games can integrate items from one another um you know for things like crafting recipes and so you know there are guarantees over the inflation rates of all these items and so that's it's a really interesting way for us to bring really everything into the mix and you know goes really into the the whole name behind bridge world you know ultimately being the world that bridges everything together that's really interesting and so that trade union would be in charge of balancing everything then i guess exactly and and finding ways for us to incorporate you know not

just you know the nfts that we've created at treasure but also in in other cartridges that that may come out as well one idea that i've had because i've been thinking about um what you you're building and other projects are working on as well um you know building this shared economic layer with shared resources within different games um and i don't know if you thought of this i'd love to have your opinion on on this um where you get games to bid on emissions of resources um usually using in your case magic maybe where they pay magic to be able to emit another resource your resources that's something that crosses your mind it's interesting yeah it's a cool idea okay to explore anyway um you have been using the word cartridge a few times and i i know you're building the nintendo and nintendo as a console could you

explain a bit more like what you mean by cartridge is is this like a thing is it an nft or is it just the the name you use for a game yeah that that is more of a way uh for us to kind of um uh i guess organize the collections and meta verses being put together i'd i'd i'd you know make that synonymous to to to a metaverse but within kind of our context as a console um you know games or metaverses or cartridges like bridge worlds like uh smalls of which you know they may contain multiple collections and you know different contracts that are associated to that okay okay i get that yeah um wow yeah this this was all i mean super interesting i i learned a lot i'd like to have your thoughts on um the difference between what you did with treasure and and what's happening with loot um so you know i'm following loot there's stuff happening um but it doesn't seem to happen at the same pace as as is being done with with um with

treasure why do you think that is is that because there's um in loot there's there's no one actually leading this um and you guys have a core team that's actually pushing pushing this forward um in my mind there are a couple reasons i just wanted to say i'm i'm a massive fan of loot and will support um the project however i can i think dom um who invented it has invented something that you know i mean the the idea itself is so incredibly powerful it when i first heard it and like really understood it it was as powerful as when i first really understood what ethereum is but it but you can also go up to someone who knows nothing about crypto or nfts and just explain basically what loot is and everyone i've done this to like family members they're like oh that's interesting you know people just get it immediately which is i mean that's a rare invention and so but the problem i think it was it was missing one thing which is the social coordination tool so we kind of think of treasure is it's

almost like a community maintained myth and there has to be a way for the community to agree on what actually exists in this world and how it changes and so magic is the token that can be used to basically signal what treasure believes it's part of its metaverse or like how the story is changing or and luke doesn't have that um there is no way for the community to agree on what actually is part of loot and um you know vitalik when he was talking about it said oh this is like a blockchain because anyone can just build on top of it but blockchains actually subsidize what is the um the truth or you know and then and then they punish people for um but anywho that it has a positive incentive in the form of the block reward and that's what metaverses need and that's what magic does it allows treasure to continue um supporting the development of the metaverse by distributing the native token to people who are actually building it and the other second problem was that

you know we are a community-made project corral who's now our um ceo i sort of speak so to speak there's you know in web 3 the job titles are a little looser um but he came in as a community member first he built treasure tools and my co-founder garp also started as a community member our product leads from bridge world nearly everyone um i just called approached us to work on the project and i attribute that to you know dom hoffman who founded loot also founded um vine i think it was or maybe it was twitch yeah it was fine yeah yeah so he's he's kind of a pseudo-celebrity and um that makes a bottom-up culture kind of problematic when the person at the very you know the person who founded the thing is already pretty famous so who wants to disagree with him i i kind of empathize with that situation he probably found himself in um when he he seemed to be backing away at times so the community could step forward but then it's like there's

you know they already trusted what he was gonna say is what should be done so that nothing gets done i don't know i kind of observed that happening and felt grateful for being an unknown builder myself that was trying to build this project because it allowed the community to really step to the forefront a lot sooner than is happening with loot um guerrell when you and i spoke a few days ago um you told me that you previously worked in a lot of you know fast-paced environments in the web 2 world um and now you're working you know in a decentralized way within web3 part of a dao you probably know don't know the faces and full names of half of people you work with on a daily basis um what are kind of the the takeaways you brought with you and um what are some of the key differences between working in in web 2 and web 3 when it comes to building games yeah definitely i mean we we at treasure we've been uh doing our best actually to

uh try and turn on video at the very least uh so we can see our our faces um but yeah i mean you know i think it's it's it's been an interesting journey for for me personally and i think for a lot of people coming from web 2. um i mean i think there's a lot of learning and unlearning of uh habits that that might have stuck around then and um you know i think you know coming from a world where you know there's a lot more process a lot more i'd say kind of structure and you know leaning into kind of more of that bottom-up community first uh sort of ethos that that we hold that treasure and where we all sort of started from and where i personally got into uh treasure um you know i think has has has has been pretty incredible um i mean it kind of brings to light and the ability for us to empower and people who are not you know quote unquote officially part of the core team if you will um to you know get up there and you know just start building and find ways to contribute and because you know we ultimately all have

a stake in it especially if you own magic or an nft and i think that's that's one big thing um you know you don't feel the same level of uh incentivization if you are you know a shareholder you know if you own the stock of uh of of tesla or something like that uh you know i think there's there's there's that sort of incentive model to contribute um contributing which which is lacking which we have uh in in web3 um and yeah i mean you know i think it's it's bringing a lot of you know the the operations the the scaling at least uh for for me and and my role into into this um you know i think a lot of nft and and uh you know web3 projects right now um especially in kind of the the the gaming space uh you know i think there's you know we have a big team of developers um but eventually you know you uh if if you kind of make it you celebrate a ton of success uh and you know ultimately you find a you know find yourself in a place where you know if to reach that next level and you find yourself with a ton more funding you

really have to grow sustainably and in a way that you know will help set you up for for the long term so um i mean we've i've been here uh formally full-time for i think since the end of march um and you know even since then i think we've brought in uh 10 15 people onto kind of the core team and so there's just that mode of of you know building and shipping which you know we and and i think projects should never lose but at the same time you have to inject some of that um rigor of uh you know having good processes having you know uh sort of accountability and being able to build cohesively as you know a unit uh to to try and get things done and that's happening kind of at the core level but then adding this other layer on top of it where we also want to work very closely and kind of shoulder to shoulder with the community and and that's a dynamic that you know i

think needs to be proven out and you know is is completely different uh from from web 2. when talking about community um as i said i'm impressed with with how many people have talked to me about treasure and and how many people have like randomly like shared what what's happened in the past 24 hours in the treasure verse um these are strong signals for me what do you think have you done have you done rights um with building this community well i think um being an unknown builder and being older than most crypto participants i mean i'm probably i'm in my late 30s i'm probably 15 years older than a lot of people trading our nfts so i've failed a lot in my life and yeah that brings with it a little more humility where you're willing to listen to people you have more self-awareness about your limitations so when i co-founded the project i knew where my blind spots were and

then people were coming in that were far more talented than me and i was happy to get out of their way and no one knew i was anyway so it wasn't like um they were fighting to keep me at the you know at the forefront and that really makes um all the difference and um we brought in i mean it was a stroke of luck that people like corel and my co-founder garp who is sort of a d5 wizard and we've brought in artists who you know the animator for small brains was doing um commercials for the world cup before this and he found he was just passionate about what we were doing and then that was all just luck that the community came in um but we're all just very passionate and fired up about this i mean i personally think that these nfts like we've kind of just entered into a second renaissance where we're building a a new version of the internet where everything will be anchored through web3 all of our identities um that we will have such attachment to the badges and the non-tradable nfts

that represent our accomplishments and our connections that eventually web 2 will just be completely reconstructed where um you know you have these brands that are absorbing all the kinds of industry rather than industries popping up and then inventing brands to sell their things it'll just be a total inversion of everything um that we've known before like how brands are formed how industries are built and yeah i have that passion most of the team does as well and i think that that kind of is can make an electric environment for other people to come into really fascinating and um it's useful and makes a lot of sense people want to if people want to learn more and perhaps you know join the community where they can can they find fun you guys yeah so so i'm personally on uh on twitter at xerox corel um i mean our uh treasure um account there as well is treasure underscore dell um you know we have a

thriving discord and i think we have 40 uh i think no 30 k members there um which is kind of growing over time that's discord.gigi treasurer dell one word um so you know you can find and uh all of us there the entire team um you know we have really engaged community members and mods who step in and help out and you know anyone who wants to come in and get situated we can definitely help you out um and i think the the other big part is you know we have um you know just contributors who have built uh incredible resources around education for all of you know the treasurer verse as a whole but also you know for each and every one of the individual games as as well so uh it's it's you know there's really good starting points i will call out um you know one community initiative called magis they're kind of a educational sort of institute that they're forming and you know they've you know created this website called startwithmagic.com which i think is a

really good primer for folks coming in if you after seven months after you started the project have people building education websites around the project that you've built um you've done something right so um i can only you know commend you guys for that where can people find you joan i'm on twitter also uh j patton p-a-t-t-e-n underscore um but yeah just to echo uh what you just said nico i mean uh battlefly which is one of the games building on top of treasure i think they closed like a 12 million deal last month and seeing that was just kind of one of those like out of body moments for me that you know these people building on top of us we're doing these enormous raises i still can't believe it fascinating all right well um i for one am very excited about what you guys are uh building and where the the whole treasure ecosystem ends up and and and yeah if if the vision that you have will come true because um there's never

certainty around that of course um but i mean you've done a lot of things right and you've achieved a lot in in the short time so i'm very excited to see where this goes um so yeah gorilla and john thank you so much for joining this was this was a great talk and on the edge of weird which people usually expect when they look at this and don't see any faces and they see avatars so um i guess that was expected um so yeah with that i think um just thanking you for being here and then listener you thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed this if you did feel free to give us stars wherever you listen if you can or a thumbs up um yeah if you want to talk about this more please join our discord and um yeah with that the metacast is out and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music]

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