Unlocking the Secrets of Blockchain Puzzle Gaming: Infinity Keys

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Hot Mike, AKA Tim, and I am here with Andy from Infinity Keys. Everybody just welcome Andy. Let's go. Yep.

Oh, thank you everyone. No, no, no, no, no, stop. No, no, ever. That's enough. All right. Thank you.

Hey, so, uh, you know, we, we, we met a while back and, uh, we, we had great, great, had a great meeting. It was very cool. We were talking about the books on your bookshelf and, and, uh, just going every which way as you do when you have ADD like your boy. And, uh, and then now you're on the podcast. So thanks for being here and I just want to start off with the classic question. How'd you even get here?

Oh man. Um,

how'd you get into crypto? Here being crypto, cause we don't, we don't need to go, you know, life story unless you want, whatever you want.

Well, it's part of my life story. And so I'm good at telling it and it's a little brief, so don't worry, but, uh, it's a little, it's fun. So awesome to be here. Thank you so much. It was super fun to talk to you. We talked books and I think you mentioned The Three-Body Problem. Uh, and so I got it and I'm reading it right now. So just as a heads up.

Whoa. Recommendation accepted.

And it's fantastic. It's blowing my mind. It's just awesome. Anyways, how I got here. I was an academic before I got into crypto. So I did my PhD in media studies. I wanted to study video games. And so when I was getting my master's, I got a master's degree because I didn't want to get a job. And then once I was getting my master's degree, I actually did research and you could do research into video games and effects and behaviors. And so I just kept doing that because that was cool and fun. And I've been a gamer for a really long time. And so I got a PhD in it and then I became a professor in it. And I was a researcher and a professor and a teacher of video games and digital media for a number of years. And when you do that for a while, they give you tenure if you do a good enough job, which apparently I did. And then when you get tenure, you can study whatever you want. That's really what tenure is, is it's permission to say, okay, you've done enough now, you are a a thinker in the world. You can go do riskier things. So I said, well, what's risky? I'll look into virtual reality. And then not that interesting. It was okay. It was exciting, but not that exciting. I'll look into big data. Not quite for me. What's this Bitcoin and crypto thing? And that happened to be right at the beginning of 2017. And so all the podcasts were spinning up and all the communities, and of course the price run-up and CryptoKitties and all that happened then. And so I was just exploring what that was at the right time and had an opportunity after that to leave academia and join a startup that wanted to do crypto play. And so I joined the crypto industry and as a researcher and as a writer and in marketing and kind of didn't look back. And then 2020 hit and I worked for— I started doing freelancing for Status, who's like one of the earliest ICOs, super awesome spot. project. They're still building a crazy amount in the space. And then eventually I worked for Chainlink Labs and I did that for 2020. That's when I learned about PoolTogether. I actually learned about PoolTogether with Status because for Status, what I did is they had this mobile app, they still do, and you could do DeFi on it. It had a wallet and so you could do DeFi on it. And so I would write about how to do DeFi on the Status mobile app and PoolTogether was one of those projects. That just totally blew my mind and was like, this is why crypto, this is why composability. I loved it and I still love it very much. But then anyways, then I worked for Chainlink for a year and a half or so. I did marketing writing for them. I did my own podcast, video series, event hosting, all this sort of talky thing because I'm at least okay about talking about complicated things in ways that people like to listen to. I don't know if it helps them understand, but they at least like to listen to it sometimes. So yeah, that was kind of my journey. And then now, about a year ago, I founded Infinity Keys. While I was working for Chainlink, I had always had this idea of a particular kind of game I wanted in the world. And I've had this idea for a really long time, far before crypto. And when I saw games that were coming out in the space and I saw how people were using composability and metaverses and all those sorts of things, the pieces started to fit together. And so we could actually make Um, the vision of what Infinity Keys is. And so, so anyways, the long story short is I started it and I got a team together and we raised a little bit of money and have built an MVP for that and we continue to build it and it's super exciting. That's kind of my backstory. A few more things people might want to know about me. I'm like a full-on dad. I'm like socks and sandals, New Balance at the grill. I live, you know, I've got a minivan. I love it. I'm living that life. So in crypto, you never know who you're dealing with, you know, is it You know, Miami guy partying? Is it, you know, Eastern European guy who may have shady ties to, you know, Russian mafia? No, I'm just like a straight-up suburban dad in the Midwest. Just so you know, just so you know who I am.

That's exactly what— that's exactly what a shady someone tied to the mafia would say.

It's a perfect cover. It's a great cover.

Now, are you a dad, an actual dad? Like, I'm a cat dad. Oh, okay. Okay. So you are a dad. Like, you're not just like fronting. It's not just like a look. You're not doing like normcore. No, you are.

No, no, I'm—

you are. You embody. Yes.

Yeah. I got 3 kids. We got 3 cats. We got like, you know, whoa, the whole, the whole thing. I, I go to take kids to taekwondo. We do it. We do all the stuff. Yeah. It's all real.

So why taekwondo? Why taekwondo and not, uh, BJJ or, you know, karate or, you know, I took Jeet Kune Do. See, this is where we're going. I'm just—I feel the freedom to ask this question.

You know, so Bruce Lee would tell you this: it doesn't matter where you start on martial arts mountain. Like when you go up the mountain, they all become the same thing. And so for us in particular, I've studied martial arts for a lot of years, and I mostly did soft style Chinese stuff. But we wanted to get the kids active, and it's not about teaching them proper kung fu. They just need some exercise and a place to go where that instills confidence. And so. For the first couple years of martial arts training, like, just throw some punches and kicks and learn how to listen to an instructor. Like, that's the important stuff you learn. So, so why taekwondo? Because it's near my house and it's, it's nice and it's really fun. And I do it with them. Like, I started at a white belt and it's super fun to do all this, like, you know, really beginner stuff. We have belt testing coming up next week. We're all testing for our yellow belts. So, you know, it's just fun, man.

Nice. Nice. Wing Chun, is that what you were doing when you're talking about soft style kung fu?

No. So I did mostly Tai Chi, but also Bagua. So there's like Bagua, Tai Chi, and then Xing Yi, which is a little harder, but that trio, Wing Chun comes out of those. So mostly I did Tai Chi and Bagua. Yeah.

Nice. Nice. Okay. So back to, we, our story crosses a little bit where I, Status was my first really getting it moment for crypto where I was like, oh, this is, this is really cool. 'Cause I could now explore a universe of dApps and I could look at like DAOs. I remember people like start your own DAO kind of thing, services and stuff. And Status was my, my way into that. And then in 2021, my friend Leighton, who I know from outside of crypto, just life in New York City, he came up to me and he was like, hey man, you should get back into crypto because of airdrops. Or I didn't know about airdrops.

Mm-hmm.

And I had some Uniswap airdrops and I had had kind of like a little ENS airdrop from Status and all of that. So it was really cool to like, and then from, from that moment, from the airdrop moment, I was, I was fully in. And then also, this is not really crossover, but you gave up tenure, bruh. You gave up tenure. That's not a very dad thing to do, to give up tenure.

No, I, I don't know. Maybe I'm a little bit of a rock and roll dad. There's times, there's times in your life where you see the path. And sometimes the path is not straightforward and it's a little bit rocky, but it was so obvious that this is a new innovation in society. What I studied, my discipline was new media innovations and how does that affect society and individual people and how do they interact with that? So this was core to what I studied. And here's this opportunity where there was just not enough people. It was 2019 and people were leaving. There was not enough people in crypto and I could join it and I'm insanely qualified and like, I know what it means. And so it was, the path was obvious, even though it didn't seem obvious. And I remember I talked to my provost and he was like, you know, we can't fire you when I was leaving. And I was like, yeah, but this is, this is the right way to go. And, you know, it was obviously the right decision. Like it's something I was made to do and meant for. So, but yeah, you know, sometimes take risks.

Yeah. One of my best friends is like struggling with that right now. He doesn't have tenure, but he's, he's about, I, you know, he just landed a big grant about to get That sort of thing. Um, but he's kind of feeling the itch to like, you know, I guess maybe in academia you're more on the sidelines sometimes. Like you're kind of like observing and like, and like pontificating and theorizing where, you know, getting, but maybe that's not true. I mean, you do a lot of research too, but, but it depends on where

you are. But, uh, that's right. Now being on both sides, there's a massive difference between

the

doing and the studying and both are really important and there is value in studying and especially in knowing how, like, knowing how to study something and having that as a discipline. Like, we need that as a social thing. It's like, how do we know things? Like, what is our basic— you know, science is one of the main ways. And so to have that process is incredibly important and to be able to explain that process and verify that process, teach that process so that we're not just a complete bunch of morons accepting whatever experts say all the time, but rather that we have a process that's super important. But it's not fun. Like, for me, it's kind of boring. Yeah, right. So, and I'm not that great at it. I was okay at it, but like, I'm good at new ideas and like trying crazy stuff. And so this was a much better path for me.

Okay. So now you're in crypto, but now there's, there's also an AI boom and a crypto bear market. So do you feel like you made the right choice or are you tempted to go to the AI side of things like so many of our friends have?

Well, it never occurred to me to turn Infinity Keys into an AI startup, but as soon as, you know, April happened and I, I realized I'd been using Midjourney and ChatGPT for like to build puzzles. Like we build games basically, and I'd been using them. It was just like, oh, this is how we can scale this. Because so Infinity Keys is gaming infrastructure for users to create missions. Right now I'm— we create those missions. It's my team, but we're building like creator tools. So you show up and you build the mission, but like teaching people how to make games is really hard. And like, Okay, bring your own art. Oh, well, now you gotta get an artist and now you gotta like, it's this whole thing. Well, AI, what it does is it lets people do these things, these creative tasks quickly and at quality and at speed so that we can make even more of these. So I'm very committed to Web3 because of permissionlessness and open systems. But AI happens to be a really useful tool for what I want to do. So it's not a full pivot, but we are for sure using it every day.

That's really cool. There's this, um, NFT platform that was called Lore, that is called Lore, probably still exists, but there's also, there's another thing called Lore, which is Prism, which is group buying NFTs. But I remember like you would, it's kind of like that. I don't know what the game is where like one person writes a line of a story and then fold, like, and then you pass it on and the next person writes the second line, but then folds the previous line back. So then you only see the line, you know what I'm saying? Like you only see the line of the most active part and you write, and then you see how the story unfolds. 'Cause you only have the context of the line. And so there's this NFT project that where you would do that. And the best ones would get like a Midjourney art applied to their, to their NFT. Like it would refresh the metadata and the ones, the stories that the curators liked or whatever. So, so I like, I love that. I love that. Is that, so Infinity Keys, is that where you're going right now? In my mind, it's like quests, right? It's like the gamification of, of Web3, um, and the activities you take and the things that you can do, but you're saying you want user-generated. That. Yeah, why don't— why don't I just— give me the whole spiel on— give me, give me the whole pitch on Infinity Keys and, uh, and where you're going.

If you've played any RPG, it'll give you a quest. If you can hear piano, there's my kids playing in the background, by the way. But you play any, any RPG and you open up your quest log and there's a quest, and you go and you find a quest giver and they say, here's your objective, here's what you got to do. And that's kind of how you get navigation through the game to engage in the play that is That is the world in the game. That's Infinity Keys, except instead of a quest giver and a single studio giving you a mission, it is whoever. Tim, you show up and you want to make a quest for PoolTogether people, you do it. Somebody else does. I see Darb in the audience decides, hey, I want to make a Chainlink one because I'm a Link Marine. Let's go. You can make it about Chainlink. You're excited about Tears of the Kingdom. That's what I'm playing right now is Zelda. and you just want to get excited and do a little trivia puzzle about Tears of the Kingdom, you can come and do that. That's the vision. That's the idea, is it doesn't even have to be Web3. It doesn't have to be crypto. It's people creating missions and quests, whether they're in the real world, you go to a location, whether it's solving a puzzle that's right on the Infinity Key site, whether it's finding something hidden in a book or playing something in another game, calling an API, or going and collecting an NFT item out of Decentraland. That's the big vision, is once you get people building their own, then not only can you make a quest that, you know, starts somebody at point A and they end up at point C, but you can also cross that quest over with somebody else's quest. And you can make somebody else's quest a requirement in step 2 of your quest. And now we've got these linkages because of composable assets and composable systems that let people build these webs of quests that who knows where they go. Right, right. Part of what people love about crypto is the rabbit hole. Like, oh, things can all go together and you can connect and I get an airdrop over here and this and that. Well, let's just give people that system in the form of a game and let people build their own crazy webs and rabbit holes. That's the big vision of Infinity Keys. Now, right now, if you go to infinitykeys.io— thank you for linking that in the chat— we've got a bunch of missions, a bunch of quests, a lot of which are with our partners to feature their products, to feature their ideas, because we are a startup and we're trying to be a sustainable company and business as well and figure out what do people want to do? What do, you know, people who want to pay to do this, what do they want people to do? sorts of things. So like a good example right now is the Aavegotchi portal that's on Infinity Keys. And most people in crypto have heard of Aavegotchi but haven't played. And so we set up this Aavegotchi portal with, uh, with the DAO where you go and you get an Aavegotchi to use. And it is like no money up front. If you collect any tokens, there's a tiny rake that we get because we actually couldn't turn off the fees. But you get to use an Aavegotchi and then you can go into the Gotchiverse and explore and find the passcode for a quest and You have to pet your gachi and you have to, you know, do some other things there. So like, that's the idea right now. So if you see Infinity Keys now, there's a lot of those partner games where, you know, you're learning about these various projects, kind of like the stuff Galaxy does and that sort of thing. But we, we try to have them be fun. We try to have them be riddles and puzzles because we're really building games. But all of this that you see now is in service to the greater mission of having this user-generated content of missions for wherever. And we are slowly but surely building out that infrastructure. One thing that just got launched recently is gasless. So we have gasless minting. You do a puzzle, you can, you mint the NFT. It's an achievement. It's on Optimism, but you don't have to care. Like you got it because it's just this gasless thing for you that lives on Infinity Keys in your wallet there. So there's some really fun things that we're building out now.

Very cool. There's a Lens Collector, got a couple Pepe stuff going on, Spooky Gachi, AaveGachi Portal, even to get into your site. I had to solve a puzzle.

Yeah, we took that away because—

Okay. All right. I was going to say, I was going to say a little, that's a little too much friction, I would say, but I understand that's hardcore though.

We're learning a lot about users and, and some people really are into it and they love it. Right. Um, when you're talking about like mass, how do you make sure you're not turning people away? The first thing you have to do in game design is make it easy for people to play. don't make the game easy, but you have to make it easy to play. And so that's, you know, it's UX and crypto and we're early stage. And so we still struggle with that. Um, but we've got updates coming through like, oh, I just saw screens today of like the new updates for the UX and they're so good. So, you know, that's the process. You guys know this intimately, right? You know, building.

Oh yeah.

In crypto, it's just like that.

That's too many choices. Don't show us all the ways, all the places I could, all the vaults. Just give me one.

Yeah.

Yeah. I, So how do you raise money for this?

Well, we, uh, we— there's a big opportunity for an ecosystem of projects and people that want to feature their content. So if you build a quest and you want that featured, there's a lot of opportunity there. There's also some things like, um, sort of the way the technology works in the background— this isn't crypto, this is just, uh, how the game works— is if you want somebody to pass a requirement We call that a gate. And what can a gate be? Well, it can be a passcode. That's really easy. We just choose a word and you stick some boxes up there and that's a passcode. You can also have an NFT requirement where you have to hold a Poolie, for example. Now that's not that tough. You actually just have to, you know, put in the NFT, the contract address and the token ID, and there you go. If somebody, if wallet holds this, then pass forward. That's easy. But for things like an API, well, that's a little bit more of a custom setup, right? If I want to say you can only pass this quest when, uh, during a full moon, in your location. Well, now I've got to go to Chainlink, I've got to go to Chainlink Functions, and I kind of got to set up this API call, and I've got to do a geolocation check, and I've got to do some stuff. So for us, that's an opportunity of selling premium, essentially premium quests. So that's how we monetize, is like there's a business kind of on top of this where we've got this system where people can build quests, but if you want the cool stuff, then we'll charge for it. So that's how we raise money on it. And there's a bunch of places like that where we can do in-game revenue. you know, wearables and stuff like that for, um, when we have that. We have profiles, but they're very light right now on the UX, but that's an opportunity for us to do that. So right now we raised a small venture round, um, last year. It was very, very difficult because markets completely collapsed, but we did. And, um, we have a little bit of— we work with partners as well. So that Avogadro one, we went to the DAO and did a proposal and they paid us some money to, to do that. And we have that with a few other partners. We've got an Optimism grant for building out a lot on Optimism. That was a builder's grant. That's relatively recent. That was pretty cool. Excited about that. And then like a Lens content grant as well. So that one Lens quest that's on there is just the start. We have a full onboarding quest for Lens coming in the next couple of weeks. Actually, we'll have it live for ETHCC this summer. So people with Lens profiles can go do that and it'll be kind of Lens-focused stuff.

Yeah, I like this also as like creators, collectors. I mean, this is what you're talking about with, with opening it up to anyone, but taking people through a journey of your content or through your, the stuff you've created. You know, I could see like Thumbs Up Finance who writes articles that Feature pulled together sometimes in their newsletter, just, just doing Infinity Keys, like to gamify the content that you're already doing. Another thing that this reminds me of is, is I say CAPTCHA or CAPTCHA or whatever the CAPTCHA, like the, it's basically Sybil prevention because like you have to, you have to do all these things that like, no, no one's going to potentially bot just because of how complex it would be. Uh, at least right now.

Yeah. It's hard to bot.

Yeah.

If you got to go into Gotchi and you got to do a thing and then you got to come back now. So, so, so it's hard, which should mean it is, especially as users come back to crypto here and hopefully soon is We're going to get this mass flood of attention and we need to be able to sort out if we're doing airdrops, for example, or you're doing some sort of token distribution. Is it one guy with, you know, 500 airdrop farming accounts? Because those exist and they're very real. And I can point you to all the platforms where you, where you can get those guys in your Discord and it's a hassle. But right now, like builders, we're flooded with those. If you do anything on Galaxy that's not super high, You know, symbol protection, even if you do have super high symbol protection, you're just going to get a flood of bots in your, in your Discord. And that sucks. I don't want to give those people tokens. They're just going to dump them. And that's not a community member. So that is part of the value is like, let's get real people. That means less people. It means fewer people because there's going to be less than 50,000 bots farming my content, but they're real people and those are extremely valuable interactions. So yeah, that's what kind of like where the value comes from is if we get real people doing actually engaging things. That's pretty cool. Crypto has this problem with bribery, right? If we give out tokens for everything.

Yeah.

And, and that's not enough, right? People dump tokens, people leave, and people come for the money and then bail, and they don't learn about things. But we're adjacent to this entire industry, multi-billion dollar industry, gaming, that, that incentivizes people to do things and not only gets people to do things, but people pay to do those things. People pay to spend thousands of hours hanging around in your metaverse instead of need to be bribed to hang around in your metaverse. And we can use some of the things from gaming. The, the sort of theory, the hypothesis of Infinity Keys is we can use gaming motivations to encourage people to do things alongside token emissions. Because if we just do token emissions, every project with a token knows like, well, now you get people coming in when airdrop, when this, when that. Well, no, play the game, interact, be part of the community. And there's a ton of room there to grow as an entire industry, in my opinion.

What, uh, what other ideas do you have for Infinity Keys? Cause I'm very intrigued of just the simplicity of like reading, looking at the, looking at the image and solving the puzzle. But then I'm like, this is very like text adventure-y. And, uh, I don't know. I feel like, you know, I would love to. Yeah, just where, where is this going? I know you said like, uh, we have creators who can create your own quests, like a self-serve model. That's really great. Uh, I like that. I love projects using this as well.

The actual infra that is Infinity Keys is 3 things. It's 3 main things. It's gates and gates are requirements. Do you want it to be a passcode? Do you want it to be an NFT? Do you want it to be something from an API such as weather that I said before, or geolocation, for example, you have to be at a particular location. So that's coming is whatever gate you want to be. You should be able to add in. And some, some of those will be harder than others. We got to figure kind of out how that fits into a UX and all that. But that's piece 1. Piece 2 is— excuse me— is ordering. How do you order the logic for these things and know that somebody's passed and here's where they go next? All that, that's just a core part of what we provide. And part 3 is what do you get at the end? Okay, great, you've accomplished this game. What's your reward? And what we have is the structure, it's called a rewardable, and you can stick anything in a rewardable. You can stick the ability to mint an NFT, you can stick access to, I don't know, a special kind of pool or reward or something like that. And that could be whatever, right? So like, I've been talking about this for a very long time because I love, um, PoolTogether so much, is I don't want to just give out tokens as a reward. That's fine, but like, it's boring. That's not part of it. What I want to do is give somebody a delegated position in a PoolTogether pool, dedicated pool, and then you win, then you get some percentage of the delegation, right? Let's say we've got 100,000 tickets to delegate, and the first place person gets 30,000, second place person gets 10,000, and then everybody else after gets, you know, 1,000 or even 100 or even 1 down to the last. Anything like that can be a rewardable. So there's a specific pool together example, but we could do a ton of different things, right? It can be as simple as an email. You get your email added to a list, or you get added to a whitelist, or you get permission to a specific channel in a Discord. But then we have this option for other treasures on-chain As well, or next steps to the clues, right? If you mint an NFT, actually it turns out that that's a dynamic NFT and on the next full moon it changes and, uh, and it sends you to the next piece of, of the adventure. We've done that once on one of our quests is, uh, the treasure was an NFT that was a pager. And then midway through the last part of the adventure is the, the NFT updated and the pager had a message on it that gave you the passcode to the next thing. And so you have to kind of go back and find that sort of thing. So as a creative person, it's just like, let's just build a thing where anybody can build a thing and stuff. And that's the idea. But where we are now is like, let's just get this to a format and a structure that is small enough that people can kind of grasp it and understand it so that as we hit this next cycle, people can really come in and say, okay, here's what people are using Web3 for. It's beyond crypto and token speculation. Um, but right here's something we can build using composable assets, and here's something I can do myself. And yeah, I can issue an NFT for free because somebody listened to my album or followed me on, you know, TikTok or whatever it happens to be. Um, let's keep things simple but give the option for people to make it complex. And what we've seen again and again is if you give people those tools in complex systems, then these really cool phenomena start to emerge. And that's what I'm excited for, is What will emerge when we give you guys the keys to the kingdom and it's not me? Oh man, I can't wait. I'm going to play your games. That's what I want to do. I want to play your games.

That's right. That's right. Uh, and about PoolTogether, one of the things that with this new hyperstructure, Hypostroksha, uh, that's coming out in the end of July where you can have any token and any yield source and use PoolTogether with it. So you can deposit whatever you want. And, and all of the yield goes into one prize pool per chain or layer. So, uh, you have all these vaults and You know, you could deposit however you want and then prizes are distributed to those prize pools or to the vaults. But we're— I was talking with Brendan about this, who's the CTO of PoolTogether Inc., and then starting Generation Software, his own company that will support the protocol moving forward. And we've been talking to communities and it's like, what if you could deposit an NFT and be entered into the prize pool or be entered into a vault? So that's, that's actually pretty cool because this whole delegation thing is really interesting, but there's a lot of like dynamism. There's a lot of like, uh, when you delegate to people, they can, their status could change daily or, you know, by the minute. And so you want to make sure that, you know, with gas costs and stuff that the right people are delegated to. So it's, uh, it's an interesting nut to crack there, but yeah, I love that no loss prizes that you can, you know, if I like just the idea, if you're active, like if you're actually just doing and participating, then you're entered to win. Right. And then maybe, yeah, somebody who's who's, who's really putting in the work gets more of a reward. That's great. So this reminds me of a community I interviewed for the podcast. It's the ECO community, ECO. And they had this like idea to do their own like token that was like a reward token. It was basically like, they're trying not to like make it so much monetary value, but like more reward, reward points. They wanted to be the reward points of Web3, but they, their community loved doing these, these like geotag kind of quest things. And so I like interviewed them on the podcast and then a week later I get a DM and they're like, from their community manager, and they're like, Tim, one of our teams is requesting to talk to you about going to Central Park for them and, and finding this thing. So I basically did it. I went to Central Park. It was like 9 PM and I'm in, I'm in like this Shakespeare garden or something and I'm like digging into a fence post and I pull out this This, this gold medal. And, and I was live to Discord chatting with this person, with, with a couple of people, and they lost their minds. But you found it. Yeah, I found it. But it took me like, I barely found it. My phone was running out of battery. I had a battery pack with me. I had to get somebody to bring me one. I had my flashlight and I dug into this fence post and it was just like a last ditch, like, if it's not here, I'm going home. And I found it. And one guy was like, guard that with your life. And I'm like, wait, really? This is crypto. Maybe that, maybe you mean that. I don't know why you mean that. But anyway, I bring that up to think about like, like the even IRL elements of this that could be there, especially for like ETH Denver or some event where the Infinity Keys— have you done that yet?

Yes.

I'm not saying this is a novel idea, but I'm just Obviously.

So, uh, scavenger hunts are really interesting. Um, I've learned a ton about them over the past year because everybody wants to do one, everybody wants to have done one, but very few people have your actual story where they find the thing and will actually do it. So there's this really hard scale problem. So there's this great story about Meebits having this Easter egg scavenger hunt that came out right, you know, at the peak of '21 NFT season, and everybody latched onto it because It was hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of prizes because of the NFT value. But really, if you read between the lines of that story, 2 insanely nerdy people figured out this really hard code and it turned into a good story. But the actual process of playing the game was 2 people, and I'm not making games for 2 people. So there's this design challenge when it comes to scavenger hunts of who are you building for? And So one of our artists on Infinity Keys, the Gachidippity, he has made this puzzle for basically 80 people. And it's very small, and it's meant to be small. You buy his Gachidippity art, which is reasonably priced on the fake Gachi marketplace through the AaveGachi NFTs. And then you go through this custom adventure. And at the end, there's one physical prize. Maybe there's 2. But it is meant for a very niche audience. And so that— it's so perfect. It's really cute, and it's clever, and it's fun. It has been fun to do, um, and it's based in art. The problem with doing a startup is like you got to figure out how to scale, and I can't build scavenger hunts for everybody. So we've done some. One of the coolest ones that we've done that are, you know, close to this is at ETH Denver for Raid Brewed. Raid Brewed is the brewery offshoot of Raid Guild. You had to collect one of their beers and mint it as an NFT, and there's an NFT hidden under the spork, under the spork.

I did this. I did it. Yes.

Well, so you have it. Go to the Infinity Keys and do the Raid Guild thing. And you should be able to pass through if it's the same wallet. So if you collected this thing.

Yes. Oh my gosh. I was like, I'm going to get this. I'm probably going to Raid Brewed Keg. Okay.

Now people come and they play and they want to play all the games and they get stuck on this one because you can't get the beers. You have to go get them at conference. So next March, you know, whatever it is, then we'll pump it up again.

Okay. But there's like a puzzle. So I need to like go back and look. I took a picture of it. So maybe you that like, oh, there's a link. Oh my gosh, this is so great.

Fun, right?

I did, I did a thing that I was like, maybe this will, you know, this will be cool that I did this. And then now I'm actually finding the reward here live on the podcast, live.

This is the potential. This is what I'm shooting for is like, what else, what is there in my wallet that I don't know is a key to something? And cause that's what airdrop hunting feels like. That's what you said. That's why you came back. And it's like, oh, I did this thing because it was just interesting. And now turns out there's these cool connections to it. Let's build a world of that. There's so many platforms and places and projects that need attention and need users and need players. And you go and you experiment with some things. And then, yeah, you check it out. You do pool together for a week, and then you bail, right? And these sorts of things. But let's make that mystery happen all over the place and let people kind of come to their own conclusions and find those experiences. Another IRL one I'll give a little alpha, we'll probably— I think it's 90-ish percent chance of doing at Rare Evo in Denver coming up. This summer. We are working on one for ETHCC as well. If you will be in Paris, there may be an augmented reality portion of that as well. We're working on it. Something else. Oh, we did— man, what was this conference? There was some NFT Miami conference. I can't remember the name of it, but we buried one. We buried a treasure out in the beach, literally buried it, and people had to go find it. And they did. Yeah, we do stuff like that too. Like, it's just fun to do those experiences with people. But we try to either make them like a one-off, a really special thing, like burying the treasure or something that can scale. Like you buy those beers every year until they're out, right? Until Raid: Brut is done. And then you can claim some fun stuff.

That's really great. That's really great. Okay. Let's see here, Andy. What's the future of crypto? Where are we going? Where are we headed?

Well, we're going up obviously, because that's where we're going. I just did a tweet thread, not knowing this podcast was coming, but I did a tweet thread today. So I'm going to show my own tweet thread right now. This isn't all of crypto, but this is a prediction for the next year and a half or so, is something that I'm calling game chains. And game chains are basically like app chains where there's a particular segment, a particular vertical that is on one specific chain. Right now, you know, all the chains are basically just general purpose or they're one specific app, and those one specific app chains are not too widely used yet. But I think a chain that comes out that features a main game and that brings a bunch of smaller games along with it to have the main player base kind of have this network effect and gain players and rewards and secure the chain and do all these things, I think that will become really common and easy. Because people will have to do less on the infrastructure side, builders will have to do less on the infrastructure side. And you'll still be able to leverage a lot of the composability that you want. Like when I'm doing DeFi, like I have lending, and that is, I don't really want that touching my gaming that is separate. I do not need my liquid staking to be part of my, you know, access to my game items. I don't like that. I have kids, like I have a mortgage, I have to be responsible. And so those things to me are very separate. But my gaming, it's really nice when all of those things can talk to each other. That's where we find that magic. So I think game chains are going to be something in the future, in the near future that are going to be really powerful.

Well, this is similar. That's similar to app chains, right? As far as I understand it, I'm talking to Richard yesterday, who's a member, a community member at PoolTogether. And he was talking about like how generally these monster dApps, these monster apps could potentially have their own chains themselves, right? You know, part of like, I don't know, like an optimistic rollup or something, but that this is the game, the game part of that, like game chains. Like, I mean, Axie Infinity kind of has this with the Ronin, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Axie is a good example of this. Uh, I think Aavegotchi will be, um, something to watch for that. I think they're ambling that way, but, but I think it's different than appchains because like, let's say Aave does their own chain. I don't need Aave to connect with that much other stuff. Bridging, if there's secure bridging, right, we've got Chainlink, CCIP, it's going to be secure. It's going to work, then that can be its own thing and I don't need other things. But on a specific gaming chain, I think it'll make more sense to have a number of games in an ecosystem closer to like a Steam Marketplace. You go to one place for your Steam games, you go to Xbox Live for all your Xbox games, you're going to go to whatever chain it is, game chain, for the games that you play. And I think some places have kind of done that out of necessity, like Immutable. There's no other way to get on or off that chain because it's not permissionless, basically. But we're going to see more of that, especially with permissionless type chains. That's my prediction for the future of games and crypto, at least near future.

Okay. I have a final question for you, but I want, before I ask that question, do you have anything else that you wanted to talk about, address, announce before we wrap up?

Gasless on Infinity Keys is big. We are constantly working on the UX. We know everything with the UX. So if you're frustrated, just keep playing, hang out with us. This is your early baby. It's fun. Come Come have fun and think about what quests you would build and what you would make and be part of the journey with us. Right now we're still figuring out, like, if you claim keys with these quests that you do, what does that translate to in terms of future benefits? And we— it's still crypto. Like, we fully intend to do that. We don't know what that is yet, but collect keys, play the games. If you find a major bug, report it. If you find a way to level up in the Discord and be part of the community, the more advanced community, Do that. It's not hard. In fact, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what to do. Go play The Society on Infinity Keys and send me a message. I'll send you the passcode if you can't figure it out, but there's ways to figure that one out. That'll let you level up and there's other collection games and there's sorts of things that we're burying. Um, yeah, stick with us. That's, uh, that's kind of my alpha for, for the last thing. And, um, yeah, I appreciate everyone coming and hanging out.

Yeah. Okay. Here's my question. What happens if The Starbucks of the world, the, the, you know, civil protection is just so necessary. And Infinity Keys is found to be the best way to identify humanity. And the world turns to you and is like, please, please help us with civil protection. Would you sell out? Is that selling out?

It depends on what you mean.

I mean, like, like the way things work— I thought this was like a question in my head. When I thought, I was like, ooh, this is good.

The way Infinity Keys works is it will take a community of people deciding on what things are good and bad, good games and not such good games. And so yeah, I'll sell out if it means a community of people is going to get together and build games for each other. And some of those games are going to be Starbucks games and Taylor Swift games and like all those big, like, sure. Like, that's fine. Um, it doesn't need to be a, a niche set of things if a community of people come together to make decisions about how to build good games given the system. Our intent is to, is to release the core Infinity Keys game engine as open source software. People should be able to build with this thing, and if it maintains the same spec that we have, then great. What do you have? More composable games, and it works better together. So yeah, sure, I'll sell. I don't see what the sellout is. Yeah.

I'm just saying like, get me rid of, I don't want to identify fire hydrants and bicycles anymore for like, you know, 30 minutes while I'm trying to get in to do the thing that I want to do. I just want to play some games. And then that already proved that I'm the person that I am and that I can do the things and I'm not a bot. And yeah, so that's, I'm just so pumped at it. Even in this podcast, even in this, Andy, I get to claim my treasure for the Raid Brood. thing. And, and it's like this full circle story that happened at ETH Denver. It's beautiful. And now today. So even, even on this, I've won.

Let's give, let's give everybody any, a little Easter egg. So for the society puzzle, it's, it's a reference to a book by, called Circe by Madeline Miller. And the answer is witches. So I'll just give you the answer. You can look up, it's a fantastic book, a great reference. Uh, and there's some other witch-like narrative across Infinity Keys, but you can type in witches in the passcode and claim the society NFT. And that will let you level up to level 1 in the Infinity Keys Discord if you wish to use guild.

All right. So we got to do it. We got to join the Discord. We got to play some, you got to play some quests here on Infinity Keys. We even got a first quest. We got a first claim going. Thanks, Andy. And, uh, and this has been awesome. I just really, I love the fact that you're reading Three-Body Problem, that you You know, I won a prize that you're making games and you're going to let me make games too. We're all questing together and, uh, you know, we'll see each other at ECC. Some of these look cool

together. There we go.

It just works, baby. It just works, baby. Okay. All right. Well, uh, thanks so much for joining us and, uh, looking forward to questing together with PoolTogether and Infinity Keys in the near future.

Woo. Thank you. All

right. Thanks, Andy.

Thanks for having me on. Peace, dude. Bye.

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.