EP.56 [EN] - Justin Kan & David Wurtz: the Fractal NFT Marketplace and its Meta-game / Fractal NFT 交易市场和它的“超级游戏”
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mabel Jiang, the host of 51%, a podcast series presented by Multicoin Capital. This show is the exploration of blockchain's rapid development across Asia with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities, and operators based in China. My goal is to bring Eastern perspective to West and Western perspective to East so you can better understand the crypto's unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

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Hello everyone, welcome back to 51%. This is your host, Mabel Jang. Today, we are super pumped to welcome two co-founders of Fractal, David Wurtz and Justin Kan. Hey, Justin and David, how are you? Hey, Mabel. What's up, Mabel?

Great to have you guys and congrats on the launch. It was super pleasure having you both on the pod today. I guess before we jump into the discussion about Fractal, our audience would love to hear about the background stories for both of you. Maybe we can start with Justin and then David.

Sure. Yeah. So I've been an internet entrepreneur for the last 18 years, since 2004, and started a bunch of different companies. The one that people have heard of is Twitch. Many of them, the other ones turned into fiery craters in the ground. And I've also been an investor.

for the last couple of years. First, I was at Y Combinator and a partner there. And then I've been investing in startups myself. And so...

Yeah, YC is how I met David actually. Dave, you want to go next? Yeah, Justin and I go way back from the very earliest days in Y Combinator. Back when it was like six people in a class and just a small little building in Cambridge. So yeah, Justin was in the first class of Y Combinator. I was in the second, got to know each other. So I've done a bunch of things.

I was an early advisor in Shopify, actually sort of right out of school, got a job at Google as a product manager for Google Checkout, exposed me to a whole bunch of really cool stuff in e-commerce that brought me into the Shopify world and actually ran one of the largest merchants on Shopify in the early days, helped with their growth and product strategy.

and went on in Google to found Google Drive. I had a really fantastic 15 year run at Google, just left to ape into crypto with Justin. So Justin, why don't you tell them what our December looked like? Sure. Yeah.

The story behind Fractal is, I was red pilled into crypto about a year and change ago. I should caveat that I was investing in crypto for a long time since 2013, but I never thought anything would actually work from a consumer application standpoint.

Well, maybe that's a little bit too strong a statement. I didn't see how something would work. When Ethereum came out, I was like, this is really interesting technically, and I bought some Ethereum, but I was like, I don't get what kind of app would actually run on Ethereum because you couldn't make something like Twitch

um you know run on run on it and i didn't really foresee defy right so i was just kind of like confused and then i invested in some crypto funds and then um some of my friends were starting different projects that were more consumer focused back in like maybe 2018. there was one friend of mine roniel who's founding this company audius it's like a audio you know like kind of like a um audio you guys are investors in audios i believe that it's like a uh protocol for for uh like sound spotify like a music protocol for

SoundCloud.

A year ago, I checked it out and I'm like, "Oh, this app works." And it actually works very seamlessly. And it's an entirely decentralized backend. And that was really interesting to me. And so then I was like, "Okay, you could make something here. This is interesting. The technology has advanced enough that you can make something that works." And so I started to explore and that's how I got reconnected with David and we were like,

both into creating something and so we just started exploring ideas and then um david was really into the solana ecosystem really into nfts and he was like let's do something in nfts and to me i was like well the next thing is obviously going to be gaming because there's already this multi-decade tradition of people valuing the assets inside of virtual worlds and games right people are

back when I started playing the very first MMO Ultima Online, like 20 years ago, people would sell the property in that game on eBay because it was scarce and because they spent time in the game and they valued their time, you know? So they, it was, it just is natural. Right. So to me, I was like putting that, like the hard part is getting people to believe that virtual items are valuable. Putting them on a blockchain is like an obvious step once they, once they believe that. And so I said,

i said we should do something in gaming uh nfts and that was kind of the start of fractal

uh and then in december so we we came up with the idea of november last year so that was 2021 and then um started hacking on it like end of november i think the first github commits were like november 30th and then spent all of december working on it and launched it got to 100 000 um uh you know our discord and pretty quickly you know and then we so we built up a community pretty quickly and then um

we launched them all this, uh, NFT collection. We launched the largest NFT collection on Solana of a hundred thousand special snowflakes that, uh,

that David designed and launched our marketplace at the end of the month. So first as a primary marketplace, and then in February, we launched a primary function, like a primary sales feature as well, like a launch pad where we help game companies launch their initial collections to their customers. And then we've been off the races. Now it's the end of March and three months in, it's feeling good.

David, did I miss anything? Sorry, that was a lot. That was great. I mean, I'll just add a little bit. I guess maybe back three months ago, I sort of assumed that we would have to wait a year or so before we had amazingly fun, high fidelity AAA games

on the blockchain and I think we were wrong. There's a tidal wave of games coming on the blockchain right now and it's insane the amount of awesome teams that are crypto native that understand the importance of community and are really understanding the unique benefits of building their game on blockchain. And we're just so excited and thrilled by this. Fractal has a first row seed into this.

this movement and maybe it'll take 10 years for the gaming space to migrate over. But as Justin was saying, we just think it's such an inevitability because true ownership, composability, interoperability,

and all of the unique ways to align financial incentives between the studios and players with token economic design of these in-game currencies, they're just superpowers. Games can be more fun to play. They can leverage existing user bases.

So they'll grow faster and they'll be more aligned. And we think that applied to gaming and the intersection of gaming and crypto is going to be incredible. And we ain't seen nothing yet, but it's been insane the last few months. We've been just having the most amazing conversations with game studios and having a lot of fun building some awesome products, some of which haven't yet been announced. And yeah, we're just having a lot of fun.

That's awesome. So from a gaming asset focus NFT marketplace, so to speak, how do you think about your mission and vision? This is such a cliche question, but curious to hear what you have to say about that. Justin, you first. I think that, you know, I guess it's interesting. I'm curious how to compare notes with David here. We probably should have gotten our story straight before we went on the podcast. But, you know, my idea is that, you know,

Well, there's probably two. There's probably short term and then a very long term. In the short term, our mission is to empower the best blockchain games to get out there and to reach their audience and to support them in the best way possible. The way I think about how we're building this company is really like how I took the playbook from Twitch, which was at Twitch, we went to the streamers when we started and we said, how can we make this the best streaming platform for you?

And we asked them what they wanted. We just tried to deliver that relentlessly. And in the face of competition from huge giants that poured in hundreds of millions of dollars, Twitch was able to build an independent and pretty strong brand by being really there for streamers. And here at Fractal, the equivalent for us is the game developers. People were building blockchain games.

hundreds of them now. And our goal is to be the best friend of those game developers and figure out exactly how we can support them best in reaching their audience and helping them build their games. And so that's like, I would say that's the mission.

um long term you know what i think this leads to you know i guess my vision for it is i think that we can be the amazon of the metaverse you know i think that uh digital like games is how like the com the commerce layer for um digital items and and virtual items will be created uh because i think games are like kind of the obvious first step in things that you know

that have durable value in it with utility and so i think by building this like commerce layer for all these games like there's this opportunity as people spend more and more of their time in digital worlds and environments uh to really be that commerce infrastructure layer to um help them discover buy and sell things and so that's what i'm really excited about i think that i guess my controversial bet will be that is that like

I think that people will actually eventually spend more money on digital stuff and experiences than they do in the real world. We're kind of already at

you know consumptive capacity for like the real world stuff you can buy like you have all the food you know i mean this is obviously i'm in a privileged position to say this but like for most people in like western countries you have like as much food as you can eat as many clothes as you can wear you know as as many cars you can drive you have like enough you know and um and i think that like more and more of your disposable income and like you know will go to digital stuff and i don't

I think that infrastructure is like, doesn't even exist yet. And so that's where I'm excited to build and kind of the culture change or like the secular change that we're, we're following, you know? Oh yeah. What he said, but I will add to it. Yeah.

I mentioned I was privileged enough to be early at Shopify and I watched something really amazing happen where what Shopify did was they lowered the barrier to entry for merchants. Before Shopify, it was a lot more difficult to actually get set up with a web store and try to make a living selling shoes or whatever you had to sell.

Shopify unlocked a tidal wave of innovation in e-commerce as a result of lowering the bar to entry. By giving a long tail set of creators a really powerful suite of tools to create web stores, they allowed people to make a living doing what they loved. And I see a really beautiful analogy between Shopify and what we're aiming to do at Fractal, which is blockchain gives superpowers to games, but it's not necessarily easy to harness as just a

game development studio. And if Fractal can lower the bar, the barrier to entry for the game studios to interact with the blockchain and therefore tap into all the unique benefits that blockchain provide games, then we're going to see a tidal wave of innovation here. What it means to be a game is going to change.

And there's going to be many more games, much more uniquely suited to the individual players and perhaps a little bit more of like micro games, if you will, that are more uniquely suited. Just like Shopify allows for all birds to go after Nike in the shoes category. There's just a proliferation of these micro brands. I see similar things happening with games over the next ten years. That's awesome.

Both of you actually mentioned your previous experience. So for you, Justin, it was Twitch. For you, David, it was Shopify kind of impact and then shape how you think about a product. So I actually have a question for each of you related to that. So first of all, Justin, how did you make sure like all the requests came

from the game developers were being addressed as Twitch continued to scale? Because you can do things that don't scale at the beginning, but then how do you do it next step? - Yeah, so it's really interesting 'cause Twitch, I would say,

among marketplaces, you know, Twitch is kind of marketplace between streamers and, and viewers, you know, we, maybe it's not unique, but like we really, really invested in the streamer side and we were willing to do things that didn't scale for like a very long time. And including, I think, I mean, maybe it's, I don't know, you know, I'm not checking in today, but like, you know,

The way we started was we would just do anything and everything to support these guys. We had a team, it was called Network Development at the time, but eventually became called the Partner Team. These guys would go to every gaming conference and for people that had a following online, maybe they were popular gamers on Twitter or YouTube, we would set up their computer. We'd set up streaming on their computer.

help them. We'd take them out all the time. There's a huge amount of almost client services. We'd take them out. We would do anything to help them out. I remember we wanted to get Husky StarCraft on Twitch in the early days. He was a big YouTuber who did StarCraft streams and he was doing a music video for

He was doing a music video for like a parody music video about Starcraft. And he wanted like a red Ferrari, I think it was in the video. And like one of the guys on our team like went and figured out how to borrow a red Ferrari in LA to like let him to have to get him, you know, this Ferrari for his car photo shoot or whatever video shoot. And, you know, that's the type of thing that we would do to like get people on. And

I think that's actually really important because it was part of the ethos was really building in that customer service DNA into Twitch. And I think that persisted. I was at TwitchCon, it was before the pandemic, and I remember talking to my favorite streamer and he was like, "Twitch is a really good company. I feel very supported and I love Twitch."

like it was just like he was on property you know he was just like hey by the way like i really love this company you know and so i mean i think that's kind of that core dna that you set in the beginning in your company is kind of what is what reverberates throughout the life of it you know and so for us for me and i know for david it's very very important that with fractal we're creating a customer-centric company our customers are the game developers and our goal is to make them as happy as possible and so there's

so many different things that we're willing to do for game developers that are even outside the scope of fractal. You know, like when we partner with someone for their men, we don't just help them with, you know, the rare, you know, this rarity distributions and the blockchain contracts. We're helping them with like, do you need investor intros? We'll help you with that. We help, we help them meet other members of our community of game developers for collaborations. You know, we'll help them with, you know,

kind of anything and everything we can we can think of you know and so david i'm probably missing some great examples there you know feel free to fill in the blanks yeah i mean uh collection design you know like nfts are they're actually fairly hard to design a collection of balanced nfts because these games these games are going to need to be balanced

And the games are going to be dependent on these assets to be useful inside the game. So you don't want the NFT collection to be dominated by like certain traits. So we have a data scientist, Ludovic, who's like best at the world at that specific problem. And that's been incredible. Let's see other examples. I mean, I think a lot of time and attention just strategizing, you know, the mint dates are like huge,

They're a huge deal to these games, some of which are existing studios that have millions of dollars of investment.

And they really want to make a splash on the blockchain. And so we spend a lot of time strategizing, making sure that the mint date is extra special, telling the stories. Justin interviews everyone on Fractal Radio, and that's an awesome way for the Solana community and the crypto community at large to understand the background of the team behind the game, their stories, their motivations, their skill set, form their own opinions, do their own research. But Fractal is really trying to convey

you know, to convey the story. There's lots of other examples. I mean, one of the things we're about to announce is, and I guess we can leak it here, is the tournaments. So we're building functionality to allow the Solana community and the crypto community to participate in tournaments. And this is really important because whether or not we want to admit it or not, there's a...

huge fraction of people in crypto that'll buy a gaming NFT just to flip it because flipping NFTs is actually pretty fun. I'm not going to lie. I do it. Justin does it. Maybe Mabel, you partake. But ultimately, that's not really the sustainable business model we're going after here. We think the gaming industry is huge.

And games are a giant source of happiness for lots of people. And so we want to create an ecosystem of a community of people that are actually buying the NFT, not to speculate. Okay, speculation is sort of fun, but to actually play the game. And this is important because you know how crypto is, Mabel. In the next crypto winter, which can be long and cold and brutal,

you know what you're going to be left with is the ability to play a game. And then if the game is fun, everything's all right. You can play with your 17-year-old teenager on a Sunday in Panzer Dogs or whatever. And that's pure entertainment. And you're not going to regret that purchase. So I think that there's a huge opportunity for Fractal

to shift the motivation and the perspective for why people would buy these assets in the first place. And so anyway, that's a really long winded way of saying that tournaments is a huge part of how we could partner, bringing attention to the playability and how fun these games are and mixing it up with players who are buying the NFTs and not just traders.

I thought you brought on a very interesting point about how like these NFT sales bundle with all sorts of interactive experiences on Fractal that can actually kind of just become the lead generation for people to come into the game. I thought that was a very insightful point where I would assume like there was nobody else in the past have done that. And then on you, David,

David, you mentioned your experience on Shopify. There was one point in the past, like you mentioned to me, I thought it was very interesting. So I wanted to kind of learn a little bit more. So you said in the later days of Shopify, some large company actually started to get converted into Shopify.

Why did you think they developed that way? The reason I was asking this question is because today we are seeing a lot of these large games, the ones that are at the top, they are probably just running their own NFC stores and it's very possible that they want to be like that for a long time. So I'm just curious generally to see in the future if any of these will be converted. Hence, I was asking you this question about the Shopify large clients.

Yeah, honestly, I feel like the analogy is so spot on that I almost feel like I'm cheating on my final exam here because I feel like Shopify showed me how this might very likely play out. So here's the interesting thing. When Shopify was really young, there was a lot of FUD around this notion that as merchants scaled, they would outgrow Shopify. And you know what? That never happened. And in fact, the opposite happened.

the merchants that leaned into Shopify became the Casper or the Allbirds or the Kylie Cosmetics, which absolutely crushed in revenue and growth and made the large guys who were building their own e-commerce tech stack with a Magento custom installation and six web developers on staff. Frankly, I think it's just because

Shopify gave the small guys an insane advantage. Shopify's core business model was to build the tool and they did an excellent job of executing. They put together a killer team of engineering focused product development, very competent group of individuals that were just putting their heads down and building for customers for years.

And I think like they can amortize Shopify was able to amortize the cost of building the best possible product across thousands of merchants, whereas each one of those merchants had to make that same investment individually. Like so inevitably, if you compound that product development over ten years, which was in the case of Shopify, it became insanely good. Then add in the network effects of Shopify pay right with the point of sale and game over. Like you've got something that

the traditional, the folks that didn't join the bandwagon, didn't join the party actually got left behind. So what happened was the largest brands actually started converting into Shopify. Now, obviously that isn't necessarily the default, but I think there's been a lot of fantastic examples of this over the years. And I think as a result of Shopify just putting their heads down and building a really fantastic product.

With that being said, would you say your priority is the mid to long tail games at the beginning? Yeah, I think there's two factions of... I think we're going to see two types of successes in Web3 games. We're going to see traditional games moving over to Web3. And it's actually a fairly sensitive transition and not all of them are going to...

be able to cross over. But we've actually seen some examples, successful examples, even in our last three months at Fractal. Like for example, Cinder and a partnership we're about to announce just next week. These are existing games, millions of dollars into the game development, and they want to reinvent themselves on Web3. And so that's one faction. And the second faction are crypto native gaming teams. And actually, like,

I think that the majority of the opportunity might be in this second category. There's, you know, I'll use an example of a Fractal partner. Psyker. Psyker is a really awesome Tekken Mortal Kombat vibes player versus player fighter in like this post-apocalyptic world. It's really freaking fantastic.

The four folks behind Psyker, and you guys can, listeners can listen to the Fractal Radio interview where Justin gets into their story. But like these guys have never built a game before. They're gamers. And actually they're awesome, super bright entrepreneurs. I think there's a bit of like finance background, marketing background on the team of four. They never built a game before. But when we met them for the first time, we just had a very...

great conversation about their vision for the game. They obviously knew how to do community, which is very important in crypto. And the level of execution on their trailer and their character development was just top notch. Now, like they've partnered with a gaming studio, right? But combined with their unique skillset and perspective on the opportunity, we think they're just going to absolutely crush it over the next few years.

And Psyker is just one example of dozens of teams like that, that we know, and it's accelerating. So it's really exciting to see, you know, how those two factions battle, like which is going to be more predominant. But I think we're going to see a mix of both.

That's awesome. Justin, I'm curious because you definitely interacted with a lot of these gaming studios in your past life. And then now you've been kind of just like also talking to a lot of these new Web3 native game developers. How do you feel about some of the major differences or I guess like the similarities among these two groups that David just mentioned? Well, I think they're different. They're coming from different places, but they're going to converge, right? I think the game...

like the web three like okay so some of the web three developers who are like more crypto native

It's actually very similar. It reminds me of mobile, actually, or like early free-to-play games. Like in the early days of free-to-play, like a lot of people were making free-to-play games like Zynga or something like that. They weren't like, they didn't start off really as like game guys. They started off with like, Pincus was like a startup guy, you know? And then he was like, this is an opportunity. And so I think a lot of the Web3 people who are making games, they're like, well, people want games. I want to like,

I'm an entrepreneur or like I'm a crypto entrepreneur and I want to like create something that people want and so I'm going to like make a game and I think the then and from the crypto side like they're sorry from the gaming side these people are like well they're mostly people want to create games right they're all people who want to create games but then they're interested in like

um figuring out like the new technology that's going to enable like more interesting business models and they see crypto as a way to you know tap into a different capital pool maybe to uh

sell like a different type of digital asset to the customers. And they see it as maybe like a different, more durable business model. Some of them are idealistic around it where they see it as like, this is better, where this allows you to give some participation in the upside to your base of players and fans. And so, you know, they're kind of coming at it from more from the game side, but I do think they're like going to converge, I guess, in the middle. Yeah.

Earlier, you touched upon Fractal NFT. So I want to come back to that because I thought that was extremely interesting. So the context was that on the platform launch day of Fractal, it had the historically largest NFT drop of all time. It's not just for Solana. So what was the thinking behind that move? And what does Fractal NFT represent?

Really all the credit goes to Dave. I mean, when we started off, we were like, hey, we should do a big airdrop because that would be cool. It'd be like, you know, it was just kind of like a token of our appreciation, you know, but it was, but I think that it's become something much larger and more durable. And, you know, Dave really championed that. So you should explain it, David. Yeah, I mean, we sort of realized that

pretty quickly that one of the superpowers of Web3 with respect to gaming was composability, right? So where one game could leverage the assets and player bases of other games

And at around that same time that we realized that that was a superpower, we were also trying to reward our community with a token of appreciation. So then we thought to ourselves, there's no way we're going to make this token of appreciation anything less than an example of a cross-game asset. And it just sort of was immediately the right answer.

The Fractal NFT is designed to be utilized by Web3 games. There's a bunch of games that are doing really fun things with them as we speak. We imagine that, like take a game that's building on the blockchain and they don't have a community, but they might have a really fun game.

How do you engage with... How do you get players? And if there's an existing community like the Fractal community and those folks are particularly interested in gaming, if you do nothing but just allow folks to...

utilize the fact that there are certain factions. The Fractal has four factions. There's Hexa, Penta, Quad, and Tri. And they're different colors and there's power levels to each. And so, for example, if you're Hexa, you're quite proud of that. There's only a thousand of you. It's a golden color, golden snowflake. If you can walk around in a virtual world or play a game and your player's glowing gold,

You feel special. You catch attention and people know exactly what that means. And as social creatures, humans like to flex and they like to show they were early and they like to show that they belong. And so games can use that and they can use that

For the Fractal NFT collection, they can also use any other NFT collection on a public blockchain. But we wanted to be an example of cross-game assets. We have something really interesting in store for the Fractal NFT, which, frankly, we would have built if we didn't have...

you know, if we had a team of 20 engineers already, we sort of think about the fractal NFT as a metagame. One of the things that we said when we first launched the collection was that the power level associated with each fractal. So every fractal has a power level from 20 to 100. And the higher the power level, the more complex and large the NFT looks. So you can like look at a fractal and see how powered it is, so to speak.

And what we said when we launched this is that the power level is subject to change slightly over time. And what we have in mind is a metagame that sort of extends beyond any particular game, but across a collection of games. And if a game is a partner in Fractals and in our ecosystem, what we can do is we can allow that game to level up or power up

people's fractals. And what that potentially could do is motivate a large community. There's about 33,000 wallets of fractal holders. It motivates those people to go play the games and try the stuff. Again, just like similar to what we were talking about with our tournaments, we want people to be encouraged to actually play the game and buy the NFT to play the game. So anyway,

if people have an incentive to go play and try, they might actually like the game and then they'll become part of the community of the game. And so the Fractal NFT is an experiment. It's a lot of fun. It started as a token of our appreciation and we quickly realized it could be so much more. That's definitely interesting. It becomes a ledger of your credential within this meta game. I call it amusement park, but yeah, like the same idea. So I thought that was super cool.

So you mentioned there are a lot of interactive experiences that you would like people to have on Fractal Marketplace so that they can go into the games. So to power all of these game developers, how do you think about the toolkits that Fractal should be providing in-house versus maybe there are some protocols that you could consider integrating? Because you also mentioned composability as a big part of blockchain. Yeah, I think like...

Fractal's website at fractal.is is only one surface by which assets will be discovered and purchased. But we think a lot of the transactions will happen actually in the game itself. Because if you're walking around a virtual world or you stumble upon a sword or a gem or whatever in your game,

You don't want to pop open a web browser and lose your flow state. You're in the middle of your game and your journey or campaign or whatever. So Fractal is thinking very deeply about what tools we can provide game developers to actually transact inside their own surfaces. And that's a really important part of what the future looks like. I think we'll have a lot more to reveal in the next upcoming months. I think that there's a lot of...

kind of open it. There's like, there's some interesting things that we want to do in terms of like opening up the fractal ecosystem to the ecosystem of games and, you know, kind of pushing it to from something that's like maybe more controlled by David and I, and to like something that, you know, is more,

implemented and covered by the community but like I don't know if we have anything to announce at this moment you know yeah well listeners should just keep watching

I have an interesting question for you guys. Curious to really just see how you think about that. It's also kind of inspired from a wide discussion from the community about minigames versus AAA. Minigames, really, the way I interpret it, it's more like...

I guess like games like Step N or maybe some other ones that do not really require a lot of in-house making for the studios or just takes a lot of time to develop. But rather they can ship very fast, iterate very fast. AAA on the other hand, obviously, they will have very good rendering and then beautiful pictures and whatnot, visual and whatnot. But it takes longer time to develop.

So it seems like in crypto in general, the feedback loop is actually much faster. So there was one type of argument saying that for a long time, maybe blockchain-backed games, the leading one will likely be the smaller ones, the smaller production rather than the AAA, because simply the AAA will take a long time to

to work on and then people probably won't be able to get any feedback. And by the time it was rendered, maybe it's not very done very well and then you'll have to go back and then it's kind of interesting. So curious to see how your perspective on this topic. Yeah, I'll go first. I think that mini games can be incredibly powerful because if you think about it, the NFTs are

They're about community. And if you give a community of people an icebreaker, a way to meet each other and interact, the actual icebreaker and the complexity of icebreakers could be really, really simple, but still very meaningful socially. Right. So even just like a very simple game of chance could be fun for a community to play and communities can battle each other, you know, monkeys versus bats.

thug birds or whatever. I think I'm very bullish about the mini game space for that reason. I think that they can be incredibly fun and engaging. And I also agree, Mabel, like, you know, maybe it's the analogy is how software changed between web software and like box software from like the 90s, you know?

Software was made for PC with these giant single launch events, right? And like three years of coding and then the big announcement and then you find out if the game sucks or not. And sometimes they just completely tank. Whereas then the internet came around and people were shipping things on a daily basis because distribution became free, basically.

It's the same thing with mini games. I mean, you can... Almost every game that we talk to in Fractal is actually... Even if they have the North Star, crazy immersive AAA style in their head, every single one of them has broken that into a series of game modes. You know, the first game mode might be incredibly simple. It might be just equipping your character. You know, it might be something like...

just seeing your character in 3D and not even equipping. And the community loves that. They'll come along on the journey with you. The journey to create a AAA game, it could cost $100 million to create a AAA game. And actually, a lot of these things will compound into that level of success. But in the early days, it's about these simple game modes, getting out early, making sure the community is involved, building in public,

And yeah, I think it's an incredibly important part of the strategy for a lot of the games we're talking to. Yeah, I think there are going to be some huge wins that are seemingly very simple games, mini games as you called them. If you just look at traditional games, one of the biggest games of recent times is Among Us, which is a very simple game. They just captured an amazing...

set of social interactions and something that's like very streamable and you know kind of taps into like uh allowing streamers to create content and so it's like very viral and i think you'll see the same thing happen on blockchain games

I guess we are coming almost towards the end of the pod. I'm curious to see how you viewed the relationship between, well, I mean, you guys definitely touched upon on this already, but we'd love to expand on that question, which is how you view the relationship between the Fractal platform, the game developers, and the retail users, and specifically, what aspects of governance do you think

are proper for the community to vote on. Yeah, I'm not sure if I completely understand the question, but I'll give a shot. So, I mean, crypto is about community. And one of the ways in which a good crypto team operates in this new world is by building in public with their community by their side.

a lot of the games that we're talking to that do a fantastic job are actually in their discords talking to their users about features of their characters, game modes that they want to see, names, lore, which direction the story goes. And it's incredible. In some ways, the studio, the game studio is actually the entire community. So even if it's not formalized into a DAO with governance and votes and stuff,

it's still happening and it's really awesome to see. Now, obviously there's in-game currency, like it almost always the case a game has an in-game token so that they can design their own incentives and reward early participation and like do some really fun things. And obviously there are ways, you know, there are ways that you could potentially allow for voting proportional to how many tokens you have and whatnot and like a huge,

area of development right now is DAO management tools. I'm sure, Mabel, you guys are looking at that at Multicoin. But even in the absence of those formal tools, it's happening just by default. Yeah, let me try to explain what I meant here. It seems like, you know, different people definitely have different views on this.

A lot of traditional game developers will think the parameters in game, especially related to inflation and whatnot and those kind of things, should not be determined by the community simply because

oftentimes like the community members may not really know what they want or like they may not have the bird eye view on how the thing will develop it's almost like you know the game developers will become the fed of the the federal reserve of the of the games um on and then but on the other aspect like storylines that you just mentioned the the content like they could you know obviously give a lot of power to the community and then vote on those things so

I guess that is actually quite applicable to fractal as well as a metagame. Like what are some of the things that could go to community members versus some of the other things that the team could have a better hand holding on. So that was really why I was asking that question. Does that make sense?

I think we're still figuring that out. You know, like we don't know. It's like once you give someone the right to do, you know, vote on something, it's like really hard to roll that back, right? So I think in the extreme case where you're talking about like

a game that you know like game developers have worked a lot historically on balancing their economies so for a game developer if you're creating a new game you're like hey i'm gonna instead of being the fed myself i'm gonna like let a community decide that's like pretty harrowing for the game and i actually think we'll see a whole market of some games who are like more like traditional games where like they control the economy more tight-fistedly and then others you know

who are more like hey it's you're gonna yellow and the whole community is gonna vote and we're gonna see what happens and then we'll see what evolves from you know whether it caught you know game a community is like good at running a you know in-game economies or not i suspect actually some of them will be um but for you know we don't really know yet i think with when it comes to fractal like

we have a bunch of ideas on how we might create various mechanisms of community involvement in the governance but you know it's like we don't want we want to do do it when like we want to experiment and get some data first before we actually like you know promise everything we want to under promise and over deliver versus you know the reverse

Absolutely. Yeah. I think I kind of agree here. I think my head was definitely more on the progressive decentralization part and also obviously like, you know, experiment a little bit by a little bit, you know, every now and then instead of just like pushing for like a lot of changes at once. It was great chatting with both of you today. It was fun conversation. Thank you, David and Justin for coming. Thanks, Mabel.

Appreciate it. Thanks for having us.