PoolTogether Community Podcast #15 - Rev from Atlantis World

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast. I am so pumped about this one. I being Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka the Operatic. Operator. And I'm here today with Atlantis World. We've got Rev here, we've got our very own Andy Kaufman in the building, in the Discord, and we're gonna talk all things metaverse today. I'm so pumped to have you both here. Welcome, Rev. Welcome, Andy.

GM, GM, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us.

So, Rev, I don't know, have you met Andy IRL?

Oh, not yet. Perhaps we can meet up at DevConnect in Amsterdam. Who knows?

Ooh. So when I met Andy, when I met Andy and I got to meet him, I had the pleasure of meeting Andy at ETH Denver. And he had 2 surprises for me. The first of which is his manicured facial hair. Which was a work of art. So, uh, that I think I'm not giving too much away there. It's, it's great. And the second thing is he, the first thing he did to me when he saw me was threaten me with a weapon. Andy, do you wanna talk about that real quick?

Uh, sure. I mean, it was just a, you know, a casual, friendly conversation of, I have something really cool to show you, but it's best done in like an alley with fewer people. And, you know, since we couldn't find an alley quickly enough, I pulled out the small little wrench I brought for the occasion in case I need to preemptively wrench attack to defend myself.

That was my very first experience with Andy, Rev. So, so I just look forward to you meeting Andy, Andy also giving you the business, basically. There's no need to respond. You don't have to respond. That's fine.

No, it's, it's just, you know, funny. Um, I met my co-founder 6 months in that we've been building, and I know Andy met some other folks from our team, which is fantastic. And I'm, I'm so glad, you know, we're such in a like weird space where you can, you can literally, you know, build cool stuff with others and never met them actually. But yeah, I love that, you know, that there's no borders, there's no filters of, of, you know, who you are, where are you coming from and all that.

Yeah, it's really, uh, especially in the Pull Together community and I'm sure in the Atlantis World community, because Andy is the new community lead there, the community manager. Like community is so important. It's so fun to build stuff with strangers who you suddenly build affinities for and warmth toward, and you get to team up, team up and do this stuff together. It's very fun. So Andy, congratulations on the new gig. Tell me how it's going. How'd this happen?

Uh, thank you. I mean, it started originally with, I was just interested in Atlantis World and the kind of idea clicked with me right away of having a gamified way where you can interact with different Web3 protocols. So, you know, easiest example, we have a PoolTogether building and NPC that you can interact with in order to deposit in V4 within Atlantis World. And then you can walk out of the PoolTogether building and you can go, you know, to Near, or you can go to 1inch, just integrating all the Web3 things in a gamified way. So I followed them kind of early on and was, I tried to be as active as I could. And once I learned about the community lead position coming up, it kind of just lined up really well with me figuring out what I wanted to do in Web3 specifically. And then joining also not just a community, but also a company that I can, you know, connect with and really, really make a difference versus joining some other, you know, big protocols or projects that I don't really care for. But it's been pretty good. We have a lot to learn and improve on, but I'm glad.

Yeah, I was so, I was so pumped to hear that you got that position. And so, Rev, you're obviously very brilliant and And you know, you, you know what you're doing when you hired Andy. So I'm, I'm so excited to see the partnership continue between PoolTogether and Atlantis World and Andy being on our team, but very much on, on the Atlantis World team as well. So listen, I'm, I'm new to this whole Atlantis World thing, but, but I love it. I love it. How can I try it? Oh wait, I must have NFTs. So, so can you, can you tell me, Rev, a little bit about Atlantis World, what you're trying to do, and then how we can get involved today? Like, how can we, how can I dip in?

Absolutely. Yeah, just a side note, I'm really grateful for Andy's and all of, you know, Pull Together community support, as we actually, for those of you who doesn't know us, we've been one of the Pull Together grant recipients. And we received a lot of also additional support from CallTogether, and it's been fantastic. In terms of Atlantis World, we started building Atlantis back in May. I met my co-founder at Kernel, which is Gitcoin kind of accelerator program. We actually started from 2 different projects. I was building like 2D pixel NFT token-gated battle game. Imagine like you have a CryptoPunk, so you could battle with CryptoPunks, and then you could have a CryptoPunk HQ to, you know, chat there, audio, video. And that was also an essence of social aspect of Atlantis. And then I met my co-founder CJ. He was building actually a 3D metaverse that was plugging into DeFi and had the sustainability aspect of that being a carbon offsetting, you know, within like virtual forest where you can plant trees that offset carbon. And that was really fascinating to me, but at the time I was like, Hey, we can do actually something bigger together, right? And Web3 has always been for me, you know, about co-creation, you know, collaboration versus like competing, as I think it's pretty like old schoolish nowadays, you know, to just compete for like being bigger or just, you know, more kind of, I don't know, like a lot of people, I think just, there's a lot of people who care about just money and it's never been for us. You know, we turned down all of the possible private money investment deals. We still fully bootstrapped. We are, you know, doing our best to be community-led, and that's also part of our ethos. And especially, I think when you're building product, it's really critical that you are actually proving, you know, the concept first, you're shipping this stuff, and only then you're kind of, you know, trying to get out there, right? But at the same time, you have a small knit community that really cares about you, be it, you know, 10 people, 100 people, or thousands of people and then you scale. So we started building, our vision was the same, but then we merged that and we made that 100x or perhaps 1,000x. So instead of focusing on DeFi, we actually focused on Web3. Instead of doing just, you know, social things for NFT communities, we were like, oh, why not to do that for a whole Web3 space? And then it turned out into, you know, Web3 social metaverse where we started gamifying Web3. you know, social interactions being audio, video, text chat experience. Then adding to that, even small mini games themselves in the future. And the last thing, and the most exciting thing for us was the onboarding to Web3. Because for us, even back in the days, being, you know, Web3 natives, it was still kind of clunky, you know, some parts of Web3. And we were just shocked that there wasn't that many of kind of great products tackling that. I mean, one of those products which I also enjoy is Rabbit Hole. And we're thinking, okay, what if you can do Rabbit Hole inside of metaverse, right? Where you can actually go, you know, around the buildings, cities, or islands of different blockchain nations and actually, and be experiences within a space that's super lightweight. So you don't need expensive hardware. So it's accessible, it's global. It's also tamper resistant because we decided to be browser-based and yeah, not be dependent on Apple, Google, or anyone's mercy.

I love this idea. And I noticed that you're trying to do something that's not 3D, that's like downscaled, it's 2D, it's retro, it's familiar to gamers, it's very nostalgic for sure. And I was wondering, does this work on mobile? Like, are you— because any device, right? And we realize that mobile is, is the most accessible, uh, developing, developed nations, developing nations, like mobile is king. Uh, are you able to do mobile stuff? Is there— is that in the works?

Uh, yeah, absolutely. So mobile is definitely one of our core goals right now. We're actually working on that. Also, the portal you know, about Web3, like at the moment, one of the main things to connect to the Web3 native applications, which means like connecting with your wallet, is through, you know, applications like MetaMask, right? Like browser that inside of this wallets. So that's also part of another like cycle that we need to teach other users. But our whole idea in terms of adoption is Getting people from zero to hero in, you know, in the fun environment where they can, you know, play, work, earn, and just, you know, socialize. And we— sorry, this is my dog's strange voices. And we start with crypto natives in mind. We do also understand that Gaming is currently a 3.4 billion user industry, which is, if you think about that, it's incredible. It's really insane how big that industry is. And to me, it's more so actually strange that a lot of people don't get it. And I truly believe that gaming, and especially blockchain gaming, will for sure enable the next, perhaps even billions of users that will let them ride through this gaming environment into Web3. Because even if you think about that, right, a lot of people who are in NFTs right now, they don't even that much understand, you know, how Ethereum or any other blockchain work. They're just in it for the culture, they're in it for the fun, and that's absolutely cool. Or perhaps in it for the profit. That's fine too. I mean, we're all ape and degen here and there. And this is just another use case. And with NFTs, with this notion of true ownership, especially within the games, for the first time ever, which is absolutely groundbreaking, we'll see more and more adoption. And for us, it's pretty critical that we start with, you know, the most simplest core building block and accessible block, which is for us is 2D, right? We're not sure, maybe like 5 years from now or at some point from now, Once we become endowed, you know, community decides that, hey, let's do something with 3D, we can also add that on that layer. But we really want to tackle the problem and be accessible for everyone. And mobile is obviously part of that.

So it's like this, it's like this Web3 browser that's a game. Like that's, that's a, it's like, it's like a metaverse browser for Web3. 2D browser. Am I right? Is that the ultimate purpose, the ultimate vision of Atlantis World?

The funny thing is, if you think about Atlantis World, for us, it's like, you know, we say like layer 1, layer 2, et cetera. So for us, Atlantis is like layer 0. As For example, we, we've been so fortunate and super grateful to have, you know, folks like, you know, Near, Stellar, Avalanche, Polygon, Harmony, and, you know, DeFi applications like Yearn, Balancer, Perpetual Protocol, also, you know, PoolTogether, even PoAP and a lot of other folks that have been joining us and supporting us. We are, you know, and we are so fortunate to have them in our ecosystem. And when you think about blockchains, right? If you are building a blockchain and usually like your ecosystem is the one that inside of our, that blockchain, right? Or building on top of that blockchain. In terms of Atlantis, we're onboarding all of the ecosystem players. We are neutral in a way. And even if, you know, some of our core team members have any kind of preferences towards, you know, DeFi or DAO or any other application or tooling, we don't impose that Beliefs on others. We don't impose it on our users. We actually give them the choice, and thus we're most interested in having diversity on that tree side. But that's just one of the you know aspects of Atlantis that we are most focused on right now, together with social. But then as the time goes, we are happy to explore you know different kind of beyond the onboarding process. Yeah, right beyond the class system. We're happy to explore co-creation and creative. creative, you know, creator side of Atlantis where you can also build your spaces. You can also build something creative. You can enable native business models inside of Atlantis. Imagine, I'm not sure if you open a virtual casino or virtual cinema or even virtual restaurant, people can come and, I don't know, drink virtual coffee or something. And yeah, you can also enable a lot of different use cases and Another cool thing is we do have a lot of token-gated, you know, token-gated buildings, but you can go beyond that and create token-gated rooms. So let's say we can have a PoolTogether HQ, which is open for everyone, but only OG PoolTogether members will be able to get into the lounge or, I don't know, coworking area or, you know, VIP room if they have X token or X amount of PoolTogether token or some other tokens. Yeah. Or even some particular PoPs or number of those PoPs. Yeah.

So the, I love this, the layer zero, it's kind of like the, I feel like Vitalik was talking about this, like, you know, multi-chain, but not what cross-trip. Yeah. Like not Basically something that navigates all of the different layers and chains and all of this that covers it. And what I like about this is that it's like, it's a throwback, but you see this with VR technology. You see this with a lot of different things where it peaks and then it goes away and it peaks and it goes away. Same thing like skeuomorphic design. Right now, everything's flat because like the design tools don't allow for skeuomorphism. But there's a benefit to skeuomorphism. There's familiarity there. There's like a warmth to it, especially when you're going into new technology. And I love the idea of having a 2D world. It's a, you know, throwback, but makes it more warm, like makes the whole thing more approachable. I'm even thinking like Andy dropped a screenshot of this world and little Andy Coffin, not Eve, is just like hanging out there. And I can go up and talk to 'em, like, while I'm going to check on my pool prizes. And it's something about it that like really humanizes this experience that could totally dehumanize this experience, you know? Like Web3 is like cutthroat, like crypto is cutthroat, it can be at least. And so there's this warmth and like a slowing down kind of thing that is really attractive. This is me just speaking as like, someone who doesn't have those NFTs to be able to access the alpha, but I definitely want that. So like, how can we go test this out, Rev?

Sure. So I would love to just add one quick point to what you said. We are trying our best to mimic a lot of, you know, physical interactions as well to, as you mentioned, right, make it more so human, make you feel like Really like genuine interaction with another human being that also got trained at Boltigen or whoever it is. And for example, even the audio chat is spatial. And what it means that the closer you are to each other, the better you hear each other, right? And the more like you're far away from each other, so you lose kind of, you know, the voice gets lower and then you at some point start, you know, hearing That person. And there's a lot of different things like that. In terms of Ultra, right now it's token gated for the only reason that it's kind of in private stage. You know, we're adding a lot of fixes, even changing totally, you know, tileset of design because we don't want this actually, you know, like we built and designed a lot of clubhouses. All of them are unique. We don't have any copy-pasting inside of Atlantis. Literally everything single thing is designed and created natively using branded assets, using, you know, some story behind the brand, behind the community, behind the product. And we really do care about that because we think that in those details, a lot of things are shown, you know, who are building this, what are the community behind it, right? And so right now you can get the access if you hold Founding Atlantean Scroll. which you receive by either burning the key, founding Atlantean key, or you can obviously purchase it on OpenSea. In the future, actually, nearest time we'll open up the alpha for everyone. We do believe in free-to-play model. We don't want to limit our users in that regard, especially having the mission of onboarding as much, you know, players into Web3 as possible. Actually, it's like Our mark is like a billion, but we'll see. And I, when I say that, I don't mean just Atlantis, right? That's like we're doing that all together with our ecosystem. And yeah, stay tuned for our news. We'll definitely share that in the nearest days and happy to have you all around. And I think that we can actually host some sort of pool party. I'll be excited to see that happen.

No, that's great. Uh, Andy is pointing out that, uh, well, Andy, do you want to say, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I was just wanting to mention real quick that we currently have our contract paused, so you cannot burn keys to get a Scroll currently. So if you buy a key secondary, you will not be able to play in the alpha right now. So just a warning to anybody who was thinking about it.

Is there a benefit to get a scroll, like to burn a key? Like anything else happen when you burn a key or you just really just get a key to then get a scroll? That's the only thing that you want a key for.

Um, actually, so, okay. We intend to build this social, you know, like DAO system models of guilds inside of Atlantis. Right now we have 4 guilds, Air, Ignis, uh, and, uh, You know, like all, like 4 of them, like in, in, you know, it's water, earth, air, and fire. And each of the guild has their own HQ. And then we have in the central city of Atlantis, which is the central, you know, the central piece of all the metaverse, there is the Citadel of founding Atlanteans. So they have access to that Citadel as well as their HQs. of a given guild. The folks to hold Scroll, because if you hold the Scroll, then your guild is determined, right? But when you have the key, your guild hasn't been defined yet. So you burn the key to then randomly get assigned to a given guild, and those receive specific perks. For example, right, we are planning to airdrop first ever wearable Uh, like a, like a brooch of your guild. And then those folks who, you know, hold the scrolls and, you know, take active part in Atlantis will continuously receive some perks, uh, just as appreciation from our side of being our early supporters and being there with us since early days.

Okay. So, so then what? But that, that is that all those airdrops or those things, those bonuses and perks that comes with the key, correct?

Yeah, we're still exploring, but I think we'll probably do it for both. Okay. Or we'll let people, you know, give their timeframe if they want to burn their key, because some people I know, they just hodling the key. Uh, as we haven't denied the possibility of having some future use case for that key, that's called actually magical key. Um, so yeah, we'll see. But I mean, every kind of OG node found in Atlantin has at least one scroll.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. I just want to be an OG, right? So like, okay. So I could get a key. I can't do any, like, if I really wanted to like cover my bases, I would get a key even though I can't burn it right now. And I would get a scroll. But all I need right now to be in Atlantis World is, is the scroll. That's all I need right now.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

So what's the way— so we, Rev, you were talking about 5 years. What you're like, yeah, maybe we can go into 3D. Maybe there's other— like, can I hear what's like the 1-year big win for Atlantis World? Like in 2023, let's say April 1st, 2023. What's, what you, you, the Atlantis World crew has killed it. Everything you've, you've won every major battle, you've beat all the bosses. What, what's, what does that look like April 1st, 2023?

Sure. I love that. So, you know, we measure our success by success of our ecosystem. And what it means that if our ecosystem, you know, inside of Atlantis is doing good, then we're doing even better because we collectively, you know, celebrate our wins. And thus our main metric is that. And right now we have, I think around 40 ecosystem partners that we have, you know, most of them we haven't announced yet. We've just been busy building, you know. Sounds probably fun. And I would say, obviously there's some metrics, like for example, right now we are, I think, live on 7 chains. Like we have dApps live on 7 chains and we'd love to have, you know, by the end of 2023, probably at least 20, 25 chains live with their HQs, with their islands and their ecosystem inside of Atlantis, which is actually huge. Then have a consistent user base that are true to Atlantis, that are adding value to ecosystem, and ecosystem adds value back to that. Then we would love to already have a, you know, a lot of people on board to Web3 through this class, through meaningful interactions with Web3 ecosystem applications, blockchains, whatever it is. And I would say, if we would manage to get it done, I think that will be fantastic. So one of the things I'm really excited is once we've built all of this tooling, right? Once we have everything back in one place, or at least most of the projects, getting folks from universities and schools into that because, and that's why, you know, we're doing our best to make it fun, right? Games should be fun. If it's not fun, it's not sustainable. So, but that's just one aspect of that, right? We'd love to connect, you know, 50, 100 universities and even more schools to teach kids, to teach, you know, students, not just about Atlantis, but about Web3 in a fun gamified manner, in a manner where they also can connect with their friends, as we also adding, you know, the friends list, the social aspects. We're also right now exploring how we can integrate Even for example, we're in touch with Lens and exploring how we might even do that, you know, to enable kind of social and metaverse intersection. And the other thing is we would absolutely love to drive, we call it meta governance, where the DAO, you know, a lot of DAO interaction would happen in meta, in metaverse, not in meta, sorry, in metaverse. Yeah, I'm not that much a proponent of Meta. And yeah, I think onboarding, uh, ideally the next million users at the very least next year would be fantastic, but time will show.

Yeah, I love that. And the, the Meta governance, um, I'm just taking notes here, but the, the, the Meta governance, like Rabbit Hole is also doing similar things. And Rabbit Hole, you had mentioned them as like a, as a partner with Atlantis World or having their own, you know, building or their own, you know, island?

Yeah, we haven't partnered with Rabbit Hole. I mean, they build a great product. You know, what I love about Web3 and the true nature of Web3 is it's about collaboration. It's about co-creation. I don't like people, you know, who quote unquote compete, as to me, you know, the pie is big enough. Like there is room for literally everyone. And the thing about Web3, like, even if you think that pie is not big enough, you can literally bake another one. Like, you don't need to tear anyone's down. To me, we all tackling problem in different ways, but at the end of the day, we all wanted to achieve kind of the same thing, right? We're all here to help grow the industry, to make it more legit, to make it better, and at the same time, ideally make a living. and then share that and give back to the community. And whether you do that in a metaverse or you gamify and build inside of other metaverse, or even on our side, we are actually in touch with other metaverses. I'm literally reaching out to them and so does other folks or even games and some other projects. And for example, I was also pitching that to Decentraland, Sandbox, World Wide Web3, Et cetera. Because I think it's super cool when you have portals, when you have even metaverse HQs inside of your metaverse. And that in itself shows how genuine and truly caring you are and that you really care about interoperability of the space. And to me, that's how, you know, the metaverse should be because there won't be one takes all. And if there will be that case scenario, I think we are all doomed and we've done something wrong. I foresee the growth of the ecosystem, just like you have a lot of restaurants in your city, so will be the metaverses. And it's absolutely fine. We all have different preferences, choices, and yeah, and we can all, again, co-create and collaborate. We don't need to compete.

Well, that's certainly refreshing to hear. And And as you're saying this, the cynical side of me is like, well, yeah, Atlantis World didn't need to raise a penny. Like they didn't, you don't have any outside funding. And as you're talking, Rev, I'm thinking, well, how can we do that? How do we stop competing? How do we not stop having the scarcity mindset and start having more of a growth, help each other out, kumbaya type mindset when There's just such rampant profit taking and, and, you know, bag grabbing and, and hoarding and stuff and hodling. So anyway, so I love what you just said. I love that Atlantis World can just do, do this without any funding. You know, you, you raised, you, you made your own money. That's really great. I, I just, I see barriers before us. In that sort of world. So I'm wondering what those solutions are. I think one of them is, is being like what you're being like and reaching out to people and partnering up, even though it's messy. But do you have any other, any other suggestions of what you've seen work to get usually competitive protocols and such to work together?

Yeah, I'd love to start with by saying There's nothing wrong in taking investments at all. It, the thing is you need to understand your product well, your mission, your team, also your investors, you know, who you're taking on board, especially for the long term. And also you need to get your, you know, token economics and the whole thing right, which is, which is hard. And that's why a lot of startups fail. In our case, we've just been fortunate also. By the means of the nature of our product, right? Like if we've been building, let's say, a peer-to-peer swap or just automated market maker on, let's say, any other chain, it would be hard for us to, let's say, be so connected. So I'm also reminding myself of that, but still there's a lot of ways you can You can actually prove yourself before you take big steps, right? And raising is also a big step. I'm bullish on, especially the early days, right? If you're starting something, don't just try to raise right away. I don't think it's the best scenario unless you're a really experienced builder, entrepreneur, whatever it is, and you actually understand what you're doing. And especially if you're doing something novel, something innovative, I would take some time and, you know, explore some hackathons, explore some grant opportunities, explore some win-win, you know, like a barter kind of model, building experiences where you can first prove the concept of what you're building, get your first 50, 100 users or whatever it is. And also don't be afraid to reach out to people. Don't be afraid to ask for help. And I think that's a lot of that takes the, you know, you letting go your ego. When I reminded myself of just an example, you know, back in the days I was literally pinging CryptoPunks because our first ever demo was a CryptoPunk kind of token-gated city. It wasn't like that much token-gated, but I was pinging literally CryptoPunks and asking them, hey, Here's the screenshot of the demo. I just want to hear your feedback. No links, nothing. Just, just share what you think about this picture or this idea. A lot of people thought I'm, I'm crazy or I'm a scammer. Some people replied, and with some of them, I'm still friends because they're, you know, they're part of some DAOs I'm also part of. And it's just super cool. And when I scroll back to our, you know, first ever messages, which are from May, it's funny, you know, to see where we started and where we came to. And if it wasn't for that, right, if it wasn't for me or someone else from our team being humble and reaching out and asking people, you know, being just human, right, and being persistent, I think nobody, nothing would have happened. And that, that's kind of the main thing I would suggest, because if you truly care, if you are here for the long run, your day will come. But you should not be just, you know, motivated by the money itself because, I mean, there are some easier ways to make money rather than building products. And it's, and it truly is because it's not as easy or, you know, glamorous or just sexy as it looks. There's a lot of, you know, late nights and all of that that you're putting in. But if you're doing something that you're truly passionate, and especially if that's something that provides meaning to the society and gives you back, that's fantastic. And I think that's absolutely worth it. And on that journey, you know, people will feel that you genuinely care and they will be happy to support you and obviously get part of that success. And that's fine. You know, you should be sharing your upside with others and that will make you more successful and probably grow faster. Yeah.

So if I'm talking to my mom, she's going to ask me, hey, who'd you have on the podcast today? And my mom just, I think, signed up for electric, like online baking this year because she was sick of writing checks or something. I don't know. But, but I, I would love to explain to my normie friends, my non-crypto friends, Atlantis World, because I'm all about new possible ways to onboard my friends. And I think this is one of them. I think Atlantis World is very much a safe, warm space. It feels like visually, at least, that I could even see this on the, on the New York City subway, like people on their like Nintendo Switches, but they're on Atlantis World doing their banking and they're chatting with their friends and such. So how, how do you explain this to normies? How do you, and have you seen any success with onboarding people to crypto through Atlantis World?

Oh yeah, definitely. It's funny, you know, I usually, I started with some of my friends, you know, 2 of them are actually blockchain developers now, which is funny, even though they started like, oh no, this thing is scam, you know, don't try to get me in. You're probably in some, you know, bad environment or something. And now they're like, oh, this is fantastic. And I think it's critical to speak the language that people understand. Uh, you know, I study like linguistic— English is actually my 5th language. So I think it's critical to keep things simple, minimalistic, you know, to the most essential thing. So if I would describe Atlantis to the normies, I would say something what you said, just rephrasing that, you know, Atlantis World can teach you in a gaming environment how to, you know, what is Bitcoin and how to earn Bitcoin while you can speak with your friends, audio and video chat. It's like a Zoom banking, crypto, and game in one place, right? Something like that. Something that they understand, something that they use. And something that they might trust. Yeah. At the same time, I'm really convinced that it's important to understand part of behavioral psychology and just keep in mind that there should be some incentive for people to come and check out what you're building. And that again comes to whether it's something, you know, Super exciting, something like just unusual, which leads them to a huge sense of curiosity to check that out, or something that provides some tangible value to them. Or at least even if it's non-tangible value in terms of physical, you know, touchpoint or whatever, it gives them some joy or some, you know, emotional uplifting experience, which, for example, audio and video calling with your friends. could lead to.

Andy, do you have something to share with us?

No, you know me, I prefer to be more quiet. But, uh, yeah, I would say the most important thing of onboarding, whether with Atlantis World or even anywhere else, is like Rev was saying, you know, find the use cases that people can connect with. Like, for example, when I had friends who were kind of interested in crypto, and I know they like to play a lot of games. So I would show them things like Gods Unchained, which is like the crypto version of Hearthstone. Or if I know somebody who's really conservative with their money and they like to save, I'd show 'em PoolTogether. So it's a matter of finding what people can connect with in their existing lives with a product or protocol in Web3 that bridges that gap essentially. And then that really opens people's eyes of like, oh wait, this is a real thing. And I can do this thing I love with it.

I'm really glad you spoke there. Thank you for doing that. Great point. Um, I, I noticed that, well, one, Andy, Andy's probably, I think the newest hire at Atlantis World, but I noticed that CJ, who is at NFT LA, is posting about Atlantis World hiring like crazy. And PoolTogether being probably a really great Web3 recruiting service, how can we get the word out about what po— what are the positions available? What, who are you looking for? How can we help you in that area? How has it been trying to hire people and grow?

Yeah, sorry about that. Someone's calling me. Hiring is not easy, just to say the least. And especially when you care about, you know, people or I would say there's 3 main things that I'm personally looking for in people, and I highly appreciate that. So that's high level of intelligence, integrity, and energy. And let's say there's a lot of people that are just new to crypto, but they're eager to learn. They're really smart and hardworking and just authentic, which we which we really care about. And we love to work with them, you know, and Atlantis in itself is, you know, we have this mission to decentralize progressively. So at some point we'll be a DAO. And even though, you know, there's me, Andy, or CJ, or anyone else from the core team will become just and other guys, you know, in the community. But for those of you who would like to join us, we do have technical positions, product positions, growth positions, also even design positions. If any of you, you know, are rockstar 2D pixel game designer, yeah, feel free to reach out. You can also go to atlantis.world, press, you know, learn more, then you'll see our Notion Atlantis wiki page. And then you can find their open positions. Read if that resonates with you, read about our stories and other things. Like there's a lot of, uh, data there. And if it resonates with you, please reach out. We'd love to hear about you. And yeah, pull together. Would love to share about that. Would also appreciate that. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. We'll include that in the show notes that goes out of the email as well. Those, those open positions. So Rev, you, You also are with Unchained Fund or the Unchained Fund, which a couple of PoolTogether community calls ago, we just created a webpage and we created this whole campaign to delegate our PoolTogether funds to Unchained Fund to support the effort in Ukraine and support peace in Ukraine. So how did you get involved with this? I think you're one of the signers of the multisig. Yeah.

Oh yeah, it's, um, I'm actually from Ukraine. I grew up in a city called Kharkiv, which is the second largest city in Ukraine and the first capital. And then I, uh, you know, I spent some time traveling for a couple of years back, and just before the new year, I moved to Kyiv, which is the capital city of Ukraine, just because I felt really great with the whole vibe. And yeah, there was a lot of actually talks in Web3 from Ukraine. And when the war happened, I was in Dubai celebrating family, yeah, holiday. And I couldn't just stand still, you know, because like, how could you, right? And I pinged a lot of my friends, you know, Web3 natives, and I was just literally pinging in all like OG groups asking if anyone has started anything. If not, let's do it. I'm all for it. Let's do some fundraising, let's do some awareness campaign, whatever it is, but let's please include crypto in that. So, and that's how Unchained got started. Like, I'm kind of founding partner there. There was first a couple of folks there, other founding partners that more so, they're in crypto, but they just came into from traditional finance. And I knew that when it comes to, you know, funds or organizations, especially in the crisis time, or I should take— I should probably say wartime. Transparency, efficiency, and I would say global kind of awareness. It's really critical. And, you know, blockchain was checking all these boxes and I was like, yeah, hell yeah, let's do it. And I knew that we couldn't just have one wallet, you know, managing all the funds. That would be both, you know, stupid of us or foolish. Right. And so I think Folks that I thought A should be reputable, B should know what they're doing, and C ideally they should be also interested in that. So long story short, we got Near co-founder Ilya, who also grew up in the same city that I am. He's also Ukrainian. We also got zkSync co-founder, uh, small and big multi-sigs, and Peter Pan. Probably some of you know him, is pretty active in DAO space. We got, uh, you know, regional lead at Harmony also with us. You know, myself and CJ is one of the signers as well, and some other folks. And then we managed to connect 15 blockchain ecosystems together, uh, for this, you know, fundraising campaign. And so far we managed to raise $7.5 million in, uh, crypto within the 4 weeks. And it, it's been fantastic, you know, the, the level of impact we all had. And also thank you. To all of Pull Together community members for all of your support. It means a lot. In terms of on-chain, we knew that we should do something long-term, not just, you know, one-time fundraising. So, you know, we're still working. There's like around 30 core, you know, members, core contributors, and around, you know, 70 overall contributors with more than thousands of volunteers all around the globe helping out. And we do have different, you know, aspects that we allocate these funds to. So first off is volunteers that are passing, you know, special like filtering processes, uh, because there's a lot of scams and et cetera. We have a special even, you know, working group, you know, like, uh, filtering all this out. We also in touch with, in, in partnership with, uh, like, uh, some KYC verifying, uh, organizations in Ukraine. So it's been pretty productive. The second thing is other organizations, non-government, nonprofit organizations. And I'm really happy that this side of things, we actually kind of delegated to community. I personally asked the community, active members to take a lead on that so we can show to the bigger community that we actually transparent, that we actually care. So The community members, contributors from community led the vetting and filtering process for orgs that we've donated to and probably will donate as well. The next thing is social businesses that helping others on the ground. For example, we at the moment, among others, funding one of the restaurants in Kyiv that despite of this crisis are actually putting in the work fully voluntarily and they're preparing around 15,000 to 20,000 meals per day, which is absolutely incredible for people in need. And we are funding their, you know, supplies, food, and all that. And the other thing that I'm also super excited about is Unchained Help Card. And what it means is we partnered with Ukrainian bank to enable folks to issue online card via the mobile banking app. What I mean folks is people from specific demographics, be it, you know, women, women with kids, people, disabled people, et cetera. So we can provide with up to €50 or something each week for them. I mean, it's not that much, right? But when you think about on a scale of having 10, 20, 50,000 cards, that actually adds up to bigger numbers. So we are actually trying to fundraise more and kind of expand our network of partners and Just continue doing meaningful things. Another thing that sets us apart is we're not fully DAO. And the reason for that, in this case, it could be unproductive. You know, we cannot wait 3 or 7 days for decision-making. You know, people are dying, unfortunately. So there's a hybrid between DAO, community-led project, and some, you know, centralized group of people that are also highly trusted in this space. And all of these folks are coming together to serve the greater good. And if you're interested to, you know, in that, in Unchained Fund, feel free to become part of the community. Feel free to, you know, contribute, donate, volunteer, or even ask for requested funding or support. If you have anyone from your friends, peers, or even family members in Ukraine, we're more than happy to help.

That's really great. Yeah. Wow. And so you were saying that Unchained wants to be around for the long haul and you're working on ways to continue the work to other areas, correct? That's the idea?

Yeah, absolutely. So the thing is, I really wish this whole crisis to end as soon as possible, but part of me understands that theoretically, even if it will end in couple of weeks, which I doubt, unfortunately, but I will be super happy. You know, there's like my friends, some of my relatives are there. Even my father, he's like literally in Kharkiv right now. He refused to move out. It's like helping, you know, volunteering, helping women, kids, all that. I'm obviously proud of him. But yeah, you know, even when it all ends, we still would love to kind of continue contributing into developing stronger, better, more transparent, more, you know, technology-first country, which is friendly to Web3. And even now, you know, Ukraine recently accepted law that makes crypto fully legal. And there is a whole, you know, legal side to crypto. So you can run, you know, crypto businesses, exchanges, et cetera, which is, which is exciting. And even the government itself has been productive with raising over I think seventy or eighty million, or even more than that now. And crypto on you know different different chains.

Yes, but no airdrop though, right? I don't think they're doing an airdrop.

That's funny. Yeah, drug pulled from the country. Right?

That's how you do it. That's authentically entering the crypto space. I love it. I love it.

Yeah, that was funny. Yeah.

Okay, Rev. So I, now we can get a little bit lighthearted here and talk about your— Andy says he got a rug pulled by a nation state NFT in his wallet. Love it. I want that. I'm gonna make a bid on it. So I would love to hear, Rev, your predictions for 2022, just generally in the space. What do you think's gonna be hot? What do you, what do you think is cooling off? What are you excited about? You know, what are your shitposts on? All of it.

Oh yeah. First of all, I'm a really big fan of NFTs. And I think even with all the hype and, you know, some price fluctuations here and there, it's still so early. Like, you know, we just kind of discovered, or at least publicly, kind of PVPs, right? Or like social clubs through NFTs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, right? NFTs will get more mainstream, as actually they are right now, but we will start to see more new fresh use cases. For example, I'm keeping my eyes on, you know, NFT photography, which is really exciting, or even more so, I'm also a fan of, you know, music NFTs, and I think they're also going to be the next big thing. And they all and other use cases will Obviously, I'm building metaverse with Andy and other folks, so I'm bullish on that. But NFTs, again, for the first time ever, enable you to actually own your stuff inside of the game. You can be banned, quote unquote, right? But they cannot ban what's inside of your wallet. It's yours, right? If you compare that to the normal gaming, and I spent more than 10 years in all sorts of MMORPGs, I know that, right? This is a huge pain. of the industry. And once the, you know, more and more gamers will start to understand that, start to use that, we'll see more exciting things. I also feel the DAOs are currently hot. It's always cool to, you know, find the DAO that you really resonate with and start contributing there. I think we will see a better tooling for DAOs and more people adopting the DAO. DAOism or, and just DAOing. DAO, we usually say, you know, in our team, let's DAO it. Not like, let's not, instead let's do it like let's DAO it. And we're bullish on DAOs. So yeah, that's my take, you know, NFTs, music NFTs, photography NFTs, other use cases of NFTs. The second thing is DAOs, DAO tooling, just overall adoption of DAOs. And the third thing is obviously Crypto gaming and metaverse.

So when you were, when we were talking about earlier about Atlantis World, I was thinking, what would Zapper look like? Or, or these, these NFT browsers, or even just like wallet examined, like the wallet sleuthing. When you, when you see like with the Ronin thing yesterday, everybody was checking out the, the hacker's wallet and And then somebody dropped a Milady on there and everybody's like, oh, sick placement. But even in Atlantis World, it would be cool to like dig through somebody's pockets, I guess. Is that weird? But just specifically, I'm thinking NFTs. It'd be really cool to like look at their wallet with all their family photos.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. We actually do already have gamified NFT wallet. At least you can see your NFTs inside of Atlantis already, and they're like gamified. In the future, we plan to have a, you know, you can wear your backpack. People can literally like in, like in a world, you know, in World of Warcraft, for example, you can see what other folks are wearing, right? And we also, you know, we're bullish on this like game mechanics or game aspects that could be also adopted in Web3 native metaverse and that, make, you know, the whole thing even more funnier because, because why not? But also the other side of that, we, we are kind of juggling between, you know, transparency and openness of the industry, but also, you know, the privacy and, you know, overall like security side because we take, you know, privacy of our users seriously. Of course, to the extent that blockchain could allow us to, because I mean, If you're putting on, you know, your, if you're putting on your nickname, your ENS, obviously, you know, people can check what's in your wallet, but we're also exploring what we can do for those who perhaps might not want others to see, you know, their wallet address or something. So obviously there is a use cases like that, which we are also mindful of.

Yeah. When Atlantis World Tornado Cash, you know, I

love

it.

Love it. Yeah.

No, this is great. I mean, I, so I would love to just keep, so I'm really excited about the play-to-earn space, even though Ice Poker is currently tanking right now. But I know that one of the things that Decentral Games is trying to do with Ice Poker is put it into a mobile app because it's just way more accessible. Poker is for that. And I'm like, Oh, I would love to play poker in Atlantis World. And it actually would be like that mobile poker experience, right? At least I could see it. And I really love like the, the special touches of that spatial audio. When you were talking about that, I was flipping out in the chat because it was just like, oh my gosh, wait, I could turn and be like, wait, speak into my good ear, you know? And like, and like hear. But I love that. I love the, the just those special touches of like, you know, being able to dig somebody's pocket. That's so great. rucksack and play poker in the tavern with the Butterbeer, and then also be able to, like, you know, talk to people and hear them now that my AirPod Pros can handle that. So I love what you're doing. I got to go get me a scroll and a key.

Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I also wanted to share one kind of an exciting thing that we are focusing as well. And it's exciting for us because we also care about that. A true story. When Andy was joining us, and I respect that Andy is like anon/pseudonymous, and he was asking us if that's fine, you know, if we're okay with that. I was like, of course, yeah, you know, we're a pre-native startup. You know, I mean, obviously I'm doxxed and I'm fine with that. Like, it would be hard for us to achieve where we are without that. And also CJ is doxxed and some other folks. But We want people both in our team and inside of Atlantis to be comfortable with who they are, whether they wear a random PvP as their character, or they are, you know, just an anonymous, or they're just wearing, you know, their real face as their, you know, in-metaverse face or, you know, character or their body. It's absolutely fine. Like, we want people to be happy and to express themselves in their own unique way. And to me, that's just beautiful, right? And when we also have this other metaverse— sorry, like social networks that are banning you just because of you kind of even non-intentionally breaking their rules, which could be just, you know, The other day I was just really in the mood. I was messaging a lot of people just because I was in that mood, connecting with others, and I got banned. What is that? I've been using that network for a long time. Why are you muting me or banning? And people replied, we're having a good chat. So it's not that they reported that I'm a spammer. It's just the filters of the system. I think we can also segregate a lot of that to more so a hybrid version that it's not just dependent on a given tech, but also the people who fuel that ecosystem, meaning the, the, the, the, you know, the people, the, the, the members, or perhaps the DAO members, right? And I think it could be cool to have this intersection between Web3 tooling and meta governance in place that Respects who you are.

That's great. I love that. And then, and then also if you could put in some farmland for PoAP farmers where they could actually farm PoAP, I think that would be, I think that would be beautiful.

Yeah. And if you'd like to share some things on PoAP side and what we are planning to do with that, you know, PoAP station, et cetera, feel free to do so.

Sure thing. I think, uh, I think Tim was more messing around making fun of all the farmers that like to hang out in calls and see if they can get anything out of them, but we will have actual PoAP integrations as well within Atlantis World. And that could be anything from actually attending an event in the game to, you know, completing maybe a quest and using that as kind of an achievement system of you completing the quest. You earning the POAP that represents that. So when you look through your wallet, you can look back and go, oh yeah, I remember when I first started with Atlantis World, or when I did this adventure within the world to earn this. So it's kind of a nice little achievement system that follows within your actual POAP wallet as well, and in-game. So there's really a lot we can do with it. We also are partnered with POAP. Officially as well. And we have a POAP machine that we'll likely use to dispense different POAPs. And at the end of events, you'll be able to go and claim straight through the machine within Atlantis World.

Well, I would love for Oops to be running around Atlantis World, handing out POAPs and, and, and like, even like business cards, you know, like, oh, here's my, here's my POAP. You met me. Now you can go into Hot Mike's. Den of podcasting.

I love it.

And we can also token gate with those POAPs. So I'm, I'm writing down the oops, handing out POAPs idea.

Nice. Nice. Well, that's, that's our time, guys. Uh, anything else, Rev or Andy, that you wanted to talk about that, that, uh, we didn't cover today? 'Cause I want, this is your time. This is a, this is the community's time. I just wanna make sure that we were able to talk about everything that you wanted to talk about.

Yeah, I think it's been fantastic. I really enjoyed the conversation and all of you being here and listening to us. Thank you so much for everything. I just wanted to ask, for those of you who actually try to check Atlantis World out and just, you know, hang out in our community, please do be generous with your time or attention and, you know, share some feedback, especially, you know, the negative one, because we love it. We love to improve. And it could be harsh sometimes, but hey, it's part of the journey. So please do share your feedback, how we can make it better. Also, yeah, feel free to become part of Atlantis because soon, as we used to say, you know, it'll be a capital city of Web3 or perhaps even the internet. And we are more than happy to have you there. Thank you.

Well, thanks to Atlantis World. Thanks, Rev. Thanks, Andy, for joining us. Here on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. It's always a fun time. I learned a lot. I'm really pumped about this, this platform and the possibilities here and to go try out the spatial audio. I'm, I, I just am really jazzed about that. So, all right, until next time, everybody. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.