From Community Manager to C-Suite | Jiho, Axie Infinity

0:00With Axie, we're looking to be a relatable, fun, nostalgic entry point into the world of crypto. All right, nostalgia is the most powerful of human emotions. We have gamers, right? Our generation, we grew up playing games like uh Runescape, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Stardew Valley. These uh experiences evoke really powerful emotions. And when you can basically evoke that emotion and then attach crypto to it, right? You have a way to get people down the rabbit hole and I think a much uh I don't know. In a in a in a way that makes a lot more sense to

0:37you know, billions of gamers worldwide. Just got done filming with Jiho, the Chief Growth Officer and one of the co-founders of Axie Infinity. Blew my mind. Crazy stuff. Yeah, Axie's one of the largest play-to-earn games and he shares a glimpse of the future that kind of blows my mind. Yeah, we talked all about play-to-earn, understanding it, how it's the natural progression of a lot of the gaming industry, and what the world might look like in the next 10 years. Super excited

1:05for you guys to check this one out. You're going to love it. Enjoy it. What is up, you guys? Today, I am so excited to share with you one of my favorite companies, ButcherBox, my go-to resource for all my meat needs. If you've been following me by now, you know that I love meat. Steak and beef are my favorite food in the world and I really can't get enough of them. Well, ButcherBox has me covered. They've got the 100% grass-fed beef that I love, free-range organic chicken, wild-caught seafood for my wife, and a little bit of everything in between. There's great flexibility. You can mix and match

1:36boxes, choose when it comes to you. So, there's really something for the whole family. And it all comes at an unbeatable value. Generally less than $6 per meal. I've loved ButcherBox and I know that you will, too. Today, we're so excited to be sharing with you a special offer, free ground beef for life as long as you keep a subscription going with Butcher Box. You can find that offer special for our

1:59listeners at butcherbox.com/room. Again, that's free ground beef for life by going to butcherbox.com/room. You're going to love it. Today's episode is brought to you by Marketer Hire. With Marketer Hire, you can get expert marketers on demand. It's easy and fast. What's Marketer Hire? Simply put, Marketer Hire is a marketplace for marketing talent. They built a network of expert marketing professionals pre-vetted by top marketers from well-known and high-growth brands. And then they use their proprietary Marketer Match technology to match clients with the best marketer for every single project. And they match them fast,

2:44typically within 48 hours or less. There's zero risk. You don't sign or pay anything unless you choose to work with someone. Many of my startups in the portfolio are using Marketer Hire and absolutely love it. If you're a growing business, you will too. Check them out today at marketerhire.com. Again, that's marketerhire.com. And tell them Sahil sent you.

3:07Video games is uh the topic of the day. We've got uh I guess the like natural future of where people are saying video games are going. It's like the Web3 future. So you're going to guide me on this journey down in play-to-earn land cuz I grew up I was like a Pokémon guy. I love Pokémon. Uh World of Warcraft, Met, like all this stuff I played. I love video games. I

3:30haven't been as close to it recently. Invested in the space a little bit. I think it's awesome, but stoked to talk about video games today with with Jiho. Yeah, I mean I I I've never told you this, but I actually played professional Counter-Strike. No way. like 16. Really? Yeah. What How did that come about? Did you practice? And you were like sick at

3:50Counter-Strike? Yeah, pretty much. Dude. Yeah. This reminds me so much of you know Josh, but Josh has three So, Josh Fabian, founder of Metify, has three kids. I think three or four. And two of his sons are like top 50 in the world Pokémon players, and they're little dudes. And they go up against adults in this like strategy game, and they're just complete savages, like destroy them. And so, I'm imagining you as a 16-year-old kid or 15-year-old kid, like little baby Greg

4:16Totally. rolling around destroying people in Counter-Strike. Totally, yeah. We Me and my my clan actually competed in the qualifier for the World Cyber Games in maybe 2004. No way. Which was a long time ago. I love that. So, yeah. I need pictures. We're going to need to check receipts on this. There's one picture of me, which is

4:37insane, which maybe I can dig up. We're going to dig it up. We're going to throw it into the Discord after we're done with this, cuz we're going to need to see this picture. I need to see 15-year-old Greg. I'm going to get memed. I've got like the longest sideburn. Anyways, Yeah. So, what are we going to dig into today? I mean,

4:55we've got a lot to cover with Jiho. Have you Well, I've been just I've been thinking about play-to-earn a bunch, and also learn-to-earn. Mhm. Um, have you seen rabbithole.gg? What is learn-to-earn? So, play-to-earn, we're going to dive into it, Jiho. Like, we'll talk about all the definitions and get into it. Learn-to-earn, I've never

5:13heard of. So, what is that? Learn-to-earn, well, I'll explain it by the example like rabbithole. So, the way rabbithole work works is you earn tokens from decentralized applications by learning about them. So, for example, Uniswap is one of the biggest protocols that exists um, in decentralized finance, and they'll basically give, let's say, you know, 10 UNI tokens if you go on a rabbithole quest. And the rabbithole quest is all about learning about how Uniswap works and how to actually, you

5:53know, use some of their protocol. So, Uniswap is happy because they've just acquired this new customer uh who is vetted, right? They've actually learned how to use the protocol and they've actually they've got, you know, quote-unquote on-chain reputation. So, meaning you've learnt uh how to use Uniswap and it's almost minted to the blockchain. So, it's like this, you know, Greg Iceberg learnt

6:19this. Um and that's that's really the concept of learn-to-earn. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, it's a it's a natural sort of play adjacency to play-to-earn. It's really interesting to think about like normal world non-Web3 applications of that exact thing. Like how companies might be able to integrate learn-to-earn because if you think about like a bank, uh credit card company, new financial services infrastructure, they benefit so much from people understanding what

6:46they're building in the product suite. And so, I wonder whether there are ways to like leverage that idea by just like teaching people more and now suddenly you've acquired a customer effectively. And it's more interesting in the Web3 context because now you have like people that could be developers. Like they should do a developer camp where they teach you how to code on Solana or they teach you how to code on top of Ethereum and then you get one ETH for doing the course. Like they pay you to take the course because now they have new developers that are building on top of it and creating this whole ecosystem

7:19effect. Yeah, I think I I think that that's where it's all going where I actually did a thread on this where I believe that in the future you'll have your resume on chain. And you'll be able to apply at a job and then within 60 seconds get that job because, you know, those people know that you are great at Uniswap or you understand how to code in Rust, or Solidity, or whatever, and you have these these badges to prove it. Um I think that's the future. I got like a ton of backlash from that thread. Like thousands of people being like, "You're completely wrong." Like So, is the idea Sorry, I want to go

7:57deeper on that just for 1 second before you extend. So, the idea of it being on chain would mean that you would have your resume. It would also have like credibility scores on chain associated with every skill set then experience you say you have. So, people could have in a trustless way you would know when you went to it that that person had been stamped of approval and had executed a number of things really high quality

8:18with whatever that skill set is. What's stopping me Yes, that's exactly how it works. What's stopping me from going on LinkedIn and being like, "I'm the head of magic at McDonald's." N- nothing. So, what I do like about applying blockchain to this is it's vetted. You know, there's you I went through Rabbit Hole and I've learned this skill, and therefore I

8:43I've I've proven. Yeah. That really is interesting. It's interesting to think about derivative businesses you could build off of it, too, of like, "How do I um Like it would be very cool to say, "I'm going to Like you did Crypto College. You're teaching a bunch of people how to build in in Web3." Um if I'm an enterprising person, I might actually go buy a bunch of those NFTs, stake them, stake a bunch of people a scholarship, and say, "I want 10% of your first company." Like use it as my venture investment in them, and say, "If you're going to go build in this space, I'll buy you your ticket into this

9:15thing, but I'm the guy now. You have to give me a 10% stake, or when you raise your first round, I have to have priority access at a 20% discount to whatever you raise at in order to invest." And it's sort of like, I mean, it's what these incubators are doing in a lot of sense, but it's for a Web3 world. So, you actually are paying I mean, like you're you're giving them

9:32their ticket to the learning experience. And even cooler when you think about the actual protocols doing it. So like Solana paying to have students go and do a Solana boot camp because they know that it's going to create and foster a broader ecosystem. Kind of a cool idea to like think about what the businesses

9:49are that could be built around that. Yeah, I think uh I mean it makes sense, right? Like so with Crypto College like we were a course teaching about NFTs, DAOs, and social tokens and we had 150 people who are builders, right? They're building they've now like they're vetted, they've learned how to do this and a lot of them are building successful projects. It makes sense that either us as as Crypto College or or some external group um comes and basically yeah, stakes or lends out uh these these uh admission tickets and then you would imagine that it there's a smart contract that's baked into it that basically says yeah, I get

10:27X% of your revenue or I get Y Y. And that's the beauty about Web3 and and and crypto is that you can just bake that into the code of the smart contract. Yeah. So this learn to earn thing is really interesting. Um I want to I want to talk more about it with you cuz I think there are a bunch of cool I feel we could do a whole episode on learn to earn cuz I think there's like a bunch of really cool applications of it too to like dive in more, understand some of the business opportunities that come off this and also like can you

10:55create kind of learn to earn services that then um you know, you could plug into older world companies and figure out ways to foster new kind of uh ecosystems around your existing like old world Web2 company and products. I I really do think that's interesting. I do want to bring in Jiho and dive in on play to earn because the video game aspect and what they're building is super super interesting and I think we need to go

11:21deep on it. And he's he's the guy to bring in. He's the guy. So let's let's do it. We'll bring him in, we'll jam on it. Hey, this is Jiho. I'm uh the co-founder of Axie Infinity. Coming at you live. We are live. In Miami for NFT. Uh basketball, I guess. NFT basketball. Yeah, there's YouTube, podcast, Spotify, um and then a community. So, we built a

11:46whole thing around Discord alongside it. Oh, nice. I should join your Discord. going to be cool. We'll go in like after the episode drops, we'll invite Discord changed my life, bro. Yeah. Really? Yeah, like That's how I I That's how I, you know, like I I saw the Wired article that a CryptoKitty sold for $150,000.

12:02Like, what the [ __ ] is a CryptoKitty? Uh but this seems really like kind of interesting. This seems accessible. As I was always a gamer, I was always a collector. I wasn't I wasn't into crypto when it was about trading. I already knew how to trade options, so if I wanted extreme volatility, I already knew where to get that. Uh yeah. So, that So, then I I found I saw that a CryptoKitty in 2017, like December 1st or something like that. So,

12:24basically 4 years ago to the day. Uh right? Yeah, exactly 4 years ago. Happy birthday. Discover CryptoKitties, and I was like it was an interesting community, right? Like, people were doing interesting stuff around it. I built I I worked on a project called Kitty Hats that was building accessories on top of on top of it, right? So, uh I was trying to

12:46at Yale at the time? No, no, no. I graduated. I was a club recruiter for a couple of years. No way. Yeah, some of the some of the smartest people that I was was talking to that I'd been talking to all super interested in Ethereum. Uh in in smart contracts. Uh so, That's cool. So, that was on my radar, right? And then I saw CryptoKitties, uh but then right, it kind of was just a proof of concept, right? It was like it's like let's not try to turn this into something that it's not destined to be, uh but we knew that okay, like right, there was problems with the economy,

13:16right? So, we need we needed to figure out like how can we get people to actually just right, like want to hold these pets rather than just like breeding and selling, right? Uh we need we needed there to be more verbs, more utility, right? Uh I think of utility in terms of verbs, right? Like, okay, you could breed, you can collect. What else, right? Okay, battle, right? Um

13:39That's a cool way to think about it. I've never thought of that. Utility in terms of verbs. It makes a ton of sense though. Battle, yeah. Battle, collect, build. Yeah. Harvest, right? These are all uh verbs that we're trying to bring to Axie. That's so cool. Okay, so you so Discord, you ended up like you got into Discord channels cuz you saw that things were going on with it and stuff was happening. You would talk to a bunch of smart people that were getting into it and clearly then you started paying attention to it. And so like what actually brought you from there then to

14:07the Axie story? Yeah, so I joined Axie as a community member, right? So I I hopped in I think there were 10 people uh like that were regularly chatting in the Discord at that time. So it was and yeah, I met the founders uh Trung, Masamune. They were talking about their vision in the Discord at the time. It was like uh and I said, "Hey, like this is something that could work." It's right, it has that uh collectibility aspect and the scarcity, but there's also, right, this plan for long-term fun and uh utility. And I was like, I I saw that as the perfect formula for building

14:40an amazing community. Um or uh yeah, so Did the game exist at that point or was it just a vision? Yeah, so I arrived on the day I think that the Axies were unveiled. So there was a month where people were buying tokens, NFTs that you couldn't see. Actually, this is this is now like a common This is now a common strategy, right? But at that time it was People were like,

15:02the Adam bomb story. People were like, "Are these Is this a scam? Is Are Is this art ever going to be revealed?" And then as soon as the art was revealed, I think people felt safe to to kind of tell me about it. Yeah. Uh so then I I I arrived. You could see the Axies, right? Uh I bought three and then I was like, "Okay, like what do we do next, right? Like we need to we need to uh

15:21we need to we need to start building." did they cost when you first bought them? Do you remember? The Axies that I got were like .15 ETH each or something. Like these are origin Axies, right? So, I think you know, there was a chance that you could get a When you were buying these original Axies, right? There's only 4,088 of them hard cap. Uh origin Axies and around like basically each time a one of their body parts or a gene was rolled, there was a chance that it was a mystic part. Right? So, there uh six body parts. Um so, it's like around like a 30% chance that it would

15:56have a mystic part. Mystics are like limited, collectible. Yeah. Uh or kind of like the holy grail with an Axie, right? So, I think like mystics are I think around 30 ETH right now each, something like that. It's so cool because um like now we're all familiar with these terms. Like if you spend time in the NFT world, you like understand rarity,

16:15understand all the different properties. But in 2017 or what what it was 2017, it was like, "This is weird. I don't understand it." It's like the Chris Dixon thing of like if it looks like a toy, you know, but might be the thing of the future. were saying that like in the early days of NFTs, right? They were just they were pretty and I I I'd seen that I think Andreessen invested in CryptoKitties. It

16:37obviously became that world a lot later. So, I was like, "Okay, this is a space. This is going to be an entire market." Uh so, I was I was kind of looking for an opportunity to get involved as a builder in a project, right? So, uh yeah, I I found Axie and when you remember and just started trying to help out. So, I was helping with the community, doing some writing, just

16:55keeping the Discord chat liquidity high. You guys are kindred spirits now. you're the CEO of Axie Infinity, right? No, I'm not. No, I'm a co-founder, growth lead, I guess. CGO, I guess, in terms of that. So, you can go from a community member to a C-level executive by just literally partaking in the community and contributing. Like, you know, when you started, I would imagine joining that community, your first you know, you you never thought that you'd be or or correct me if I'm wrong, did you think that you were going to be the chief growth officer of this of this

17:30big thing? I don't know. I was taking it day by day. Like, I was just also having fun, right? Like, I was just hanging out, meeting new people. Uh and yeah. It's kind of the Web3. I always think about Greg's going to make fun of me for this, probably. Like, I am a uh I'm still a Luddite and I still am like developing my understanding of all these things and embracing it. And I think of all of these things in like prior to Web3 analogs. And I think of this as like a story of It's like the person that starts as like the you know, stockroom floor and now is

18:04the CEO. Like, Walmart, actually. I think the CEO of Walmart currently is a guy that like started as a store man like he started as a store clerk. right before this, we had Kat Cole who wasn't She had She was a Hooters waitress and then became the head. The head, you know? And I think I think the you know, the 2021 2022 equivalent of

18:23that is you start in the Discord. Mhm. We're hiring like incredible talent from the Discord right now, from the community, right? So cool. That's so cool. So, I want to get into um I want to get into the Axie story for sure cuz I think it's amazing. I've done a bunch of research and reading on you and um and the story. But, maybe we start like let's set the stage for people that are listening, people like me that probably don't understand it quite as much with just like a little bit of kind of definitions around it. So, can you guys talk you guys know this much better

18:57than me. Can you talk about like free to play and then how does that transition and what does play to play to earn mean? Yeah, sure. So, in the in the right in the in traditional gaming, right? Like the developers, the app stores, the publishers, they're all right, they're all working and they're they're they're working together. They're selling a product, right? They're still they're selling skins or game copies, selling loot boxes, right? But traditionally they're taking close to 100% of the revenue generated by the game. All right, there are some like black and gray markets, but it's it's not uh Yeah, they're they're kind of difficult uh to to

19:42to access and and use. So our our our model is a lot different, right? We're very focused on the community, the player-owned economy. Uh so we see it as we've kind of lowered taxes from close to 100% to around 4.25%, right? Which is the uh fee on the Axi marketplace, right? So rather than selling Axies directly, we uh monetize by just taking a percent or a cut of all peer-to-peer player-to-player

20:17uh transactions on our marketplace. So the original I just want to read it back to you guys make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So like earlier I think like Fortnite, everyone knows Fortnite. They you know Epic Games like has this massive ecosystem that they've built. The game is free to play and you go buy skins or you buy different attributes or whatever within the game. All of that

20:40money it sounds like is going to Epic. Like they are the 100%. That's the rent. The way you put it I thought was great. The rent, they're taking it. The players get to play. The utility the players get is that they have fun. There's no like you're not earning anything. And the difference here when you start thinking about play-to-earn is rather than that company taking 100% that whole pool now is basically for the players and for the ecosystem and the world in a in a way that you're creating. And the actual company actually takes a clip. Like it's a tiny percentage that gets taken out of

21:11the 5% or something. Yeah. It's also like an important thing to recognize, too, right? Is that people are also spending within Axie for reasons that they spend on right traditional digital items, right? Like they're spending for fun. They're spending for status, right? Like Axie is an incredibly fun game and it's an amazing community. This is actually what backs the economy. That's also why it's so hard to replicate, right? If it was just about mechanisms, then everyone would just copy the mechanism and then there there would be all these thriving uh NFT planner and games right now. But but there aren't There's only one, actually. Because I think it has to do

21:45with that uh idea of the social capital backing the economy. Could you talk more about that? So, what makes a great play-to-earn game? What are What are the ingredients? I think there there there are there's a lot. I mean, you need I think an amazing community. Something where the The way that I think about crypto in general is like, what are Are there products where the community is doing a majority of the work already? Uh where a middleman is extracting the value away from that community and can we cut out the middleman and basically reward the community for the work that they're already doing? So, I think that any

22:26product that has the community, like user-generated content, right? Like That's brilliant. Anything that has a high amount of work being done by users with large with large existing middlemen is ripe for disruption. So, that's how that's how I I I look at it. So, yeah. I think like the Roblox model would work better, right? If they opened up the economy even more. You know what? Roblox actually uh was very irrelevant for a long time until they allowed people to actually cash out their Ro- Robux. Um so, it's a more open model. That's why it's like That's why it's uh actually catapulted. But we just we're we're

23:01taking it to the natural conclusion, which is like you know, giving giving as much as possible uh to the community. So, we need to go deeper on this cuz that was brilliant. So, just as a framework, find a business or an industry where the community is creating the vast majority of the value. And if there is a rent collector sitting there that's somehow harvesting most of the value from that, it needs to be disrupted and it likely will be disrupted by something that looks more like Web 3 and that is more

23:32decentralized and community-oriented. I think it's so interesting to think about the incentives that you're relying on to advance these spaces, too, where like with the prior versions, you are relying on the fact that like Epic or whatever the developer is will continue to reinvest those profits to enhance and make the ecosystem better and continue to make the game better and make it more engaging and fun over time. With this, you're actually not relying on anybody because it is in every player's best interest to make the ecosystem better so that they can earn more money in it. And so, they all have that. They want to

24:07reinvest. Many of the players, right? You you can see each each of them as a digital pet store owner, right? Uh and I I actually Magic is actually a more of a decentralized model, too, right? Where All right, there's a secondary market. There is kind of like this economy. Uh each store owner, right, is kind of incentivized to host Magic uh nights, right? They have like Magic Friday, I

24:31think, like where they have tournaments. Right? So, it's more of a decentralized model, right? So, but I think like yeah, one of the things that NFTs do, in my opinion, is they give the characteristics of physical collectibles, like trading cards, to digital assets. Can we talk more about that? So, Magic I've always wondered like who was the like why they were throwing these Magic tournaments. Like, can you talk more about the mod First of all, I didn't know that you were like a Magic

24:55nerd. wouldn't say I was a Magic nerd, but I loved magic cards, Pokémon. I was a Warcraft guy. People were into that kind of stuff, like magic. Like these are a lot of them like were super early adopters because they see them they see the model is just like taking that physical world model

25:08and applying it to a borderless future. I just I when I look at him I see like Stanford baseball pitcher. Fun fact, the Stanford baseball team my freshman year, the entire team on all of our road trips would be sitting on our computers playing World of Warcraft together on the way to games. That's hilarious. Narrative violation. I

25:27love that. But yeah, going back to magic like do you do you know about their model? Cuz I'm I'm I've recently be been obsessed around taking sort of like older community models and bringing it online. So just curious of you. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm like I studied it a little bit in the early days of Axi. And I saw that basically physical events were really important to their propagation and the proliferation of magic, right? Where yeah, store owner the store owners and right like they they basically will the Wizards of the Coast they'll send merch

25:56basically and I guess appoint people. There's kind of like this bureaucracy or whatever and and they have this whole framework for basically yeah, hosting events and I think there are like thousands of them, right? Every Friday all across the country. It's funny cuz we we talk about the metaverse, right? We talk about this

26:14digital place. But so many of us forget that physical is where community is actually right so for for something like magic where there's a huge secondary market, right? Just like Axi. The community is really important because people need to be spending, right? For that flex, right? So in magic, right? Why do people buy a Why

26:33would anyone buy a Black Lotus, right? They might see it as a store value, but it's also right looks like you get to tell the other people in the magic community that you have a [ __ ] Black Lotus, right? The similar right similar similar dynamic in the Axi community, right? With all the the collectibility. Um and that it's that, right? Like uh status that right drives a lot of

26:54that economic activity, as well. Yeah, and it creates a it creates a world as you continue to scale it, both physical and digital, but you're sort of just what you're creating is not a game anymore. It's like an entire ecosystem, really a nation, um, of Axie players that's borderless. And so, doesn't matter if all the articles about the people in the Philippines that

27:16are earning a living wage playing Axie. It's amazing. It's like you watch these videos and it's very inspiring that there are people that are doing this. And then there's someone in America and like you go and host an event at Art Basel and people that have never met, never connected in person in any form or function are now all of a sudden

27:32connected in this cool, very real way. It doesn't matter the color of their skin. It's like very global. It's really, really cool. Um, that's one of the things that I love, just like the promise of it that I love so much is that borderless aspect to it. One of the things I want to also ask about is like, what are the challenges of the unique I don't know, drawbacks or challenges of this play-to-earn model. Like, with Axie, you had this massive hype cycle, um, you know, like Packy had his piece on it and there was all this press and everything and, you know, the prices of

28:04everything spiked. It's it's obviously like, with every hype cycle, it pulls back pricing. So, like, how do you think about that aspect of the play-to-earn model where you're going to have, natural, like any market, fluctuations in the prices and how it impacts players and gaming? Sure. I mean, this has happened to, right? Like, where we we built all through throughout went from, right, the cheapest, you know, kind of run-of-the-mill Axies went from, I think, $5 to 20 cents or something. But, that was really important for the

28:31community. That was character-building. That volatility actually uh, creates fermentation, a fermentation process. So, it's actually needed, right? Like, every crypto strong crypto community needs to go through a through a market to, uh, together. Unfortunately, maybe you're for better for worse, I think that that's how it works. I think that's also one of the hard parts of starting a project now, and a lot of projects come to me for advice on like how do you build a

28:56community? Uh it's like but they're they're operating in a totally different market, right? Like the same things that we did back then are not going to work now. Um It's like the Lindy effect. Have you read any Taleb? I know like he's like somewhat hated in the Bitcoin community for like being anti-Bitcoin, but hit the Lindy effect of the whole idea of like the longer you've survived, the longer you're likely to survive. And so being hardened by those periods of pain actually leads to more survivability of it. I think it's great. It's a great way of putting it actually. Like you need

29:22those moments. I'll also say there one of the drawbacks of like this whole narrative around play play to earn. I prefer we're we prefer to call it play and earn, right? Uh but one of the drawbacks of narrative is that, right, the community aspect, the you know, the the fun of the entire ecosystem it kind of takes like a backseat to, you know, um this thing that's a kind of a new innovation, right? It's There was There were so many fun games out there. There are a lot of amazing communities out there, right? This is kind of a fundamental new innovation, but sometimes uh it takes a little bit of the

29:55spotlight off of, right, the rest of the ecosystem and and and and also the stuff that basically allows the play to earn model to work, right? Then people start saying, "Oh, like play to earn, like how does this how is it sustainable?" Because they don't understand how fun the game is, how awesome the community

30:10is, right? Fast forward 10 years from now. What percentage of the game gaming market is play to earn versus traditional as you define it? Do Do you Well, I I think that these digital economies are become right, some of the largest economies of all time, right? So I like it's more like how many games will there be that are larger than large

30:34countries or something, right? Uh with economies that are larger than large countries. I I that there will be I think that there will be hundreds of millions if not billions of uh players playing you know participating in these uh digital worlds. Right, we're already seeing that our digital lives, our digital identities are becoming increasingly more important. Uh the pandemic right kind of expedited that. Uh but now it's like okay, we're using the digital world as kind of a a way to funnel or to sift through who we actually want to spend time with in in the physical world as well, right? So, I think that's also

31:10that unity, that fusion uh is is super bullish for uh everything that we're building. And And is the vision Could you walk us through a little bit of the vision of Axie in the sense of like um could you see a world where people not only come to Axie to just play, but they go maybe there's quests that have real world implications or like do you see it more as like um a potential like virtual world where it could be serious and fun or do you see it just fun? Like the you know, hey, we're just trying to build like the most fun experience and there's some on-chain

31:46revenue etc. Yeah, actually like so uh we we just had an internal discussion about this, right? It's like the world they want to see like oh, this is a fun game, right? But as uh right stewards of the ecosystem, we think a little bit more in terms of like what are the archetypes of players in this ecosystem, right? We still right now we have like uh battler competitive battlers, right? We have scholarship managers, people that are renting out

32:09their Axies. We have scholars, right? They're kind of just farming tokens uh to survive. Uh then we have the collectors, right? They're really into the aesthetics and the scarcity aspect of it. Um and then we have people who just they hold Axies and they stake it and they're also contributing to the ecosystem. There are people who right they trade the SLP token and this provides liquidity for it. Why? Because it has interesting like correlations to the rest of to the all other basically asset classes because it's kind of like a it's a it's a uncapped coin that's kind of tied to the value of human effort within our ecosystem. So,

32:45it's kind of like a weird correlation thing. So, basically there are all these different archetypes, right? And we need to also think about when we think about the future, what are the future archetypes of people that we want to have in our ecosystem? So, it's a little bit I think a more precise way of thinking about it because right fun is very subjective and some people believe that

33:05they're the arbiters of fun. But, it's to me it's like yeah, it's not specific enough. It's not something that you can build scientifically with. So, you hit on something there that I think is like one of the most mind-blowing like for it [ __ ] me up the first time I was reading about it to be totally honest, which was like this whole idea of the physical world real world economies that are being built

33:28outside and alongside adjacent to Axie. And like the scholar thing is a perfect example of this. Like I've seen it with I think it was what is it? YGG like Yield Guild Games? Is that what it stands for? And a few others that have kind of popped up that are basically have they've built real world physical businesses adjacent to Axie to kind of support the ecosystem that's being built not supported by Axie. It's just companies that have like enterprising entrepreneurs that have gone and realized they could stake people to go and play in the game the same way honestly as like what we've done with athletes in the past. Like Russian

34:03tennis players have been backed by these like oligarchs to go and build a career and then they take a percentage of their earnings. That to me is like this seminal moment of what you're doing that all of a sudden there are economies being built outside of you where you're like, oh this looks like a country where you have all these random economy points. Did you guys Was that like a vision that you had or did you start seeing it and say, "Holy [ __ ] there's

34:26really something to this?" It was it's it's something right like I don't know. Like you if there's fog of war, right? Like so you just go and you try to get to to product market fit. In the early days we saw that where Axie was more more than a game because people were spending so much time on the Discord, right? Like that was kind of

34:43like their home. So we saw Axie in the early days as maybe a social network, but we couldn't pitch it as a social network when we hold had only 200 people in the community. But early on we saw that there was something very special happening with the community. You know, we've we all had, you know, a thesis that these digital economies would would

35:02start to rise. But yeah, you know, it was definitely, right like to see man, to see people start building on top of it, right? To see even physical physical businesses are starting to accept Axis and SLP as payment to lure, right, more foot traffic, right? Like if you if you know that there are a lot of like Axie players in your town, you can get them to come check out your business by accepting our in-game currencies,

35:27right? So this is a marketing strategy. It's a user acquisition strategy for businesses in the traditional world. So yeah, I think like right what is what is a nation? Like how do we define a nation, right? Nations typically have like, right, like a kind of an economy, maybe culture, national pastimes, sometimes languages. I think it's it's it's we're starting to see all

35:48of that develop within Axie. Physical borders are maybe like, you know, the last component of it. I think that we have a chance, you know, over the next 15 years to you know, potentially acquire some distressed real estate from a false sovereign nation and maybe set up a special economic zone or something that could be recognized by the UN. So yeah, we we already started we started issuing statements to the to the legacy governments of the world, right? Because they're like all like we we heard that the Central Bank of the Philippines was interested in an Axie and asking questions about it. And so we didn't

36:25know how to get into contact with them. so we put out like a an announcement saying that you know we encourage our players to pay taxes if they have to if they're if they're you know local I guess governments are requiring them to. Yeah I think I mean on one hand I hear you Sahil like you're not even saying anything but I hear you in terms of like it's wild that you can start a game bring people together

36:50that eventually leads to like a country. Um on the other hand it kind of makes sense right? Like you've built an economy you've built like-minded individuals you've built culture you've built community. Um we just had a conversation with Meltem and Meltem what you know what Meltem was saying is you know the future basically that there's going to be these like new churches and new cathedrals. Um and trying to build I mean like the church of Bitcoin I don't know if it's Bitcoin but basically like an actual you know treated as a religion for tax purposes and you can put your gains into this so that it's allocating on a tax efficient

37:32basis. You got to do it. It's kind of it's a crazy concept but not that crazy when you break it down to the atomic unit of it actually. I mean It sounds like my fraternity right? Like with like some I think it was like a non-profit organization or something right? Right. Yeah exactly and and it's you know how

37:48many people play Axie approximately? Uh we have 2.8 million daily active users right now. Millions of people right? Like Iceland is 400,000 people if you think about it. We have I think two players in Iceland. It was a long time where I was like [ __ ] I can't like Iceland Green yeah I think Iceland like we just didn't have any anyone there. I was like

38:10who wants to be the first? Yeah right. Yeah and I think like so I mean you're bigger than Iceland. You know you're you're you're you're five to six times bigger than Iceland. And it makes sense that like yeah, like you might want to acquire you know some people might want to move to this place.

38:29Makes it makes a lot of sense. to see people describe the scale of the Axi economy as in terms of GDP. Right. Right. So yeah, so Yeah, I mean that's like the tipping point, right? When we all start saying it that way. Well, old is you know gross domestic product, new is game domestic product. Yeah. I the um I I the first time I ever thought about this question like you asked like what is a country? Um you all know Harari has that book Sapiens which everyone should read if they haven't. And he goes into that. Like what is an organization? What is a company? What is a country? It's

39:03just shared belief at the end of the day. And it's just like you have a shared belief in something and there's community like all of what we're talking about here it's community. It's bringing it together. Like money, what is money? It's just trust. Like you have What is money? That was actually the opening line to my thesis. Seriously. But it's I mean it's crazy when you break these things down to the

39:21like boil them down to the root. I just that like I just think it's fast. I also think it's fascinating. If you're a builder and you're looking for a new startup idea what you have in Axi and probably there are a couple other things out there that have a similar fervor around them right now but not many is a group of 2.8 million people worldwide that are highly highly engaged with something that have a ton of needs. That like you can go and create something for exactly those needs. The people that were doing these scholar programs staking are doing that. But like there're going to be

39:54unique banking and financial services needs that come off of people that are playing on a regular basis. What can you go build that like services those people really really well? So we just we just actually just launched a DEX, a decentralized exchange. It's called Katana. I believe it's the second largest there's a 1.4 billion dollars locked in it. We only have two pairs Axis ETH and SLP ETH. We also have a USDC ETH as well. Um so we're getting stablecoin access to people in the emerging markets

40:21as well. Where did it previously happen? Was it like FTX or something where they previously did it? was in like Binance a lot, like DEXs on Ethereum and stuff. There was a lot of like friction around, right? Like basically you claim the token within your our ecosystem for playing the game, then you have to like transfer it out of

40:37the ecosystem to right to to sell it. Right. Um so yeah, like it's it's I think it was a huge catalyst for us. Uh yeah, I think they're A huge thing for you guys, this is just a random idea that I'm having right now, but like in terms of creating stability within the ecosystem as well, and I've

40:54talked about it with several people. Like rich people don't sell the assets they have. They take loans out against it, never have to sell it, they live off of the loans against it. That will eventually happen in the Axie community, and then you won't have these massive price swings and volatility within the market because people will be leaving

41:11their SLP within the ecosystem. Sure. like have financial services infrastructure that gets built outside it that allows people to actually take a living wage as a claim against their What is it AXS and SLP? the next thing may- maybe maybe you agree. Like I think maybe the one of the next things that we should build on Ronin is something like right something like Aave or Compound right a money market basically. Um and that this will basically allow right like people to get liquidity right from their AXS holdings without having to

41:42suffer a taxable event. Could you could you explain what Aave or Compound is to to right and you know regular normies? Uh yeah, like so Aave and Compound are crypto money markets where you can basically deposit tokens and uh receive a stablecoin loan based on the value of those assets, right? So uh yeah, you might be able to right let's say you deposit $100 of a of a of a token of let's say ETH, you can then draw maybe, $20 of stablecoin, right? And this basically allows you to get liquidity uh from your crypto without having to sell it. And, yeah, you can also, right, like, on the other side, you can also

42:23borrow uh from these money markets if, maybe, you want leverage or you have some need for ETH. And the reason this is hugely valuable, I mean, in a normal in a non-Axie context is like if I have a ton of Bitcoin, but I bought it at $100 and now it's worth 60,000 and I want to go buy a house, I can't do that if I like I have to sell my Bitcoin, pay a huge tax on that gain, and then go buy a house with the cash. This allows you to leave your Bitcoin, you never have to pay the tax, and you can draw money against it, and

42:53then go and buy it. And so, in the Axie Infinity case, why it's interesting is people wouldn't have to sell and convert to fiat in order to pay for their food in the grocery store uh down the street. They could leave it in the game, which, by the way, has the nice benefit of creating price stability in the game, which drives more people in and continues to drive appreciation and growth of the ecosystem, but they can still draw against it to go buy their food and live live on a day-to-day

43:17basis. So, that's like pretty stable. potentially important project product. You know, we have to do a lot of education, right? Like, so, we see Axie as an accessible, cute, nostalgic um community-driven ra- uh kind of rabbit hole into the rest of crypto as well, right? So, you start with the game and the community, but then, right, you start to learn, okay, how to stake, right? How to uh pull liquidity. Um you start to all these other verbs, right, get unlocked, right? Stake, farm,

43:44deposit, borrow. Uh and uh yeah, 50% of our users have never used crypto before. Yeah, that's amazing. 25% of them don't even have a bank account. So, we have to do a lot of basic financial and crypto education. Um so, people are learning all incredible amounts. I see Axie as also like an education platform in some ways. Um there are a lot of educational like content companies coming to us, you know, saying hey they would want to have us reskin their course with Axie so that it really like it's people actually use

44:15it. Yeah, I mean this is like you're creating so much value for the web 3 and crypto ecosystem by educating people in this way. It's also what you're saying is the reason why I haven't invested in any financial literacy like platforms or businesses is because I fundamentally believe that financial literacy happens through actual like action putting skin in the game and like And no, seriously and like it's not me taking a course on like how to invest. It's by actually having skin in the game and learning it by feeling it out and like [ __ ] up, feeling the pain of something and getting rug pulled, whatever like ends

44:46up happening. Um but that like that the amount of value that's being created by taking something that looks like a toy, people get on ramped into crypto and now they're red pilled to some extent starting to see what the future looks like, all of these different things happening and suddenly we have, you know, it's 2.8 now, it's 10 in a few months, it's it's like it becomes very very powerful long term as

45:07you compound that. Super exciting. Do you um you mentioned Axie, you know, when you first started Axie you know, it was a social network. Mhm. Do you think in in in play to earn play to earn the way it works is there's like multiple worlds that you end up in? So for example like in social

45:31like there's multiple areas, right? There's Twitter for this, there's Instagram for that, there's TikTok for this. Do you think it's one big world in play and earn play and earn or do you think it, you know, you could imagine a world where maybe Axie create separate worlds? So I think that Well, we're just riffing, right? So this is this is all like very hypothetical and and and speculative, right? But I think that there will yeah, I believe in that there will be multiple worlds, but I believe that there will be certain assets uh starting with ERC-20s, like money kind of or or and tokens um, that will, right, like

46:08kind of be borderless because these things with like a, I don't know, liquidity and a dollar value or it's easier to port them between worlds, right? Uh, but then, right, obviously we get into like interoperability. I'm more bullish on vertical interop, so for that's in our case, right, one team of Axies, many different games built by many different

46:28developers in the Axie universe, right? Uh, and then eventually maybe like, right, like having standards to port them between, right, like plat- I I see it more as an attack vector. Like if I There's a if there was a game that was bigger than Axie that used NFTs, I would give those NFTs some utility. I would try to give them some utility in Axie, uh, to basically take their users. Um, so this is actually we did this with Decentraland in the early days where, uh, I we said that everyone who owns land in Decentraland can get free Axies and we just gave out a lot of Axies to

47:02Decentraland land holders and then we had the land, uh, sale and a lot of them ended up becoming members of the community and, you know, getting stakes in land, which uh, I think like changed a lot of lives as well, so. that. My last question for you is, uh, a sort of a look into the future. Like can a traditional gaming company effectively become play-to-earn and try to participate in this future or is this a new future that has to be built by people that are organic on the ground play-to-earn

47:41or play-and-earn? I think I think that these grassroots products that are built by users I think they have advantages. I also believe that there's room for traditional players to come into the space. I think it really is highly dependent on the team and then their kind of, you know, internal chemistry. I think that, right, like the this model can be applied to a lot of games, right? Especially where there's kind of there's rarity, there's scarcity, there's collectibility, there's a strong community, there's user-generated content. I think those are the right ingredients that would fit

48:17well for some kind of port. I think that I also I'm super bullish on All right. So, you're a traditional game developer, you have like a pretty good game. It's like a nice game in terms of mechanics, but maybe like there's something off with the IP or the art. I would love for them to come, right? Just

48:36reskin the game with Axie. Incubator. And then it becomes part of our ecosystem. And then they have the distribution, right? This is like community as a service, right? It's like your product has no adoption, but it's a good product. Okay, just like make an Axie product and then all of a sudden you're going to have millions of users. So, it's like Axie Infinity eating the world? Like maybe, right? Where

48:55the gaming world at least to start. It's like all about, right? The future is all about user community aggregation and distribution. Um right? So, if you have that, this is what DeFi protocols are learning uh that they can't do because there's no IP, there's no like there's no there's very little brand loyalty uh when it's just like, I don't know, clicking some buttons, right? It has to

49:15be attached to content. Yeah, and the way it's set up is you can have as many subcommunities as you want within the Axie world. It's already happening, right? Thousands of thousands of different guilds, right? These are these many of the guilds, right? They say all like they're metaverse guilds or whatever. They're all for the entire play-to-earn ecosystem, but all the only thing that they're actually playing where they have live users, the only, you know, economy that they're participating in on a daily

49:42basis is Axie. Yeah. We have a We have a common friend, this guy Josh Fabian runs this company Metafy. And it's like coaching, one-on-one coaching for gamers. You get coached by an expert. And he was telling me recently that Axie is like their number one requested thing that they want coaches to coach Axie because it's so valuable. People can actually go earn money doing it. So then they're going to they're willing to pay to invest in that. So it's another example of like like a good opportunity for a lot of our influencers, too. They're like they're like they're looking for, you know, cool ways to you

50:15know, monetize their time and effort within the ecosystem. So yeah, I'd love to chat with them. Yeah, you should get I'll connect you with them for sure. He's phenomenal. They're about to announce a big big fund raise. Big bright future. Well, thank you so much for joining us, man. This was This was epic. I mean, I personally just learned a lot, too. So selfishly, I feel much smarter on everything that everything that's happening in the space. And I am I'm bullish on the future for you guys,

50:37man. So so cool. Awesome. That means a lot. It's an Axie world and we're just living in it. Exactly. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Hell of an episode, man. That was a lot of fun, great conversation. I just like pretty cool just how open he is about their vision and talking about the whole story around it. And it's a really ambitious vision. So I loved it. What

50:58was your one big takeaway from it? I'll give you a couple takeaways. Number one, he started off as a community member and then became a co-founder. I knew you were going to love that. I What? My community guy. No, but honestly, like that that was really cool. And it just goes to show you that like you're not just joining a community, like you you potentially could be joining uh something that's going to change your

51:27life by joining one of these Discords. So super super cool cool to hear that. And the other thing is that game domestic product is the new gross domestic product. I liked that a lot, too. I loved talking to him about this whole infrastructure and startups and businesses that are being built adjacent to Axie. Like they have nothing to do with it. And there are all these entrepreneurial people who are attaching themselves to this fervent community and building really cool products, profitable products and businesses alongside it. And that to me is like a very cool framework for people in our community to think about is like, when

52:01you find a fervent community, it could be Axi Infinity players, it could be Harley Davidson riders, what can you go build for that fervent community that matters to them and that will attach to them that can be a great profitable business. There's so many opportunities out there and that was really cool to me to see. And also just the next 10 years, I'm really looking forward to seeing this vision that he explained actually play out and see is he right? Is it going to be a billion gamers worldwide doing this play to earn thing? It's a big vision. So, I'm excited about it. I had a blast. I just

52:32learned a lot. Let us know in the Discord what you think about play and earn. Yeah. And uh and let us know if you got any play play and earn game ideas. Yeah, we want to get in there. We're going to chat about it. We'll bring Jiho into the community after. He's stoked on it. Uh he wants to invest in the in the platform too, he said afterwards. So, we're looking forward to it. Let's jump in there and jam. Today's episode is

52:55brought to you by Marketer Hire. With Marketer Hire, you can get expert marketers on demand. It's easy and fast. What's Marketer Hire? Simply put, Marketer Hire is a marketplace for marketing talent. They built a network of expert marketing professionals pre-vetted by top marketers from well-known and high-growth brands. And then they use their proprietary Marketer Match technology to match clients with the

53:23best marketer for every single project. And they match them fast, typically within 48 hours or less. There's zero risk. You don't sign or pay anything unless you choose to work with someone. Many of my startups in the portfolio are using Marketer Hire and absolutely love it. If you're a growing business, you will, too. Check them out today at

53:45marketerhire.com. Again, that's marketerhire.com and tell them Sahil sent you. What is up, you guys? Today, I am so excited to share with you one of my favorite companies, ButcherBox, my go-to resource for all my meat needs. If you've been following me by now, you know that I love meat. Steak and beef are my favorite food in the world and I really can't get enough of them. Well, ButcherBox has me covered. They've got the 100% grass-fed beef that I love, free-range organic chicken, wild-caught seafood for my wife, and a little bit of everything in between. There's great flexibility. You can mix and match boxes, choose when it comes to you. So,

54:21there's really something for the whole family. And it all comes at an unbeatable value. Generally less than $6 per meal. I've loved ButcherBox and I know that you will, too. Today, we're so excited to be sharing with you a special offer, free ground beef for life as long as you keep a subscription going with ButcherBox. You can find that offer, special for our

54:42listeners, at butcherbox.com/room. Again, that's free ground beef for life by going to butcherbox.com/room. You're going to love it. Join our free community at trwih.com.