David Wurtz - How Gamers Will Eventually Embrace Blockchain

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart.

Podcast with your boys Mount Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today we've got another killer guest on the show. Today we're talking with one of the original founders of Google Drive. He was early on at Shopify and he's done some amazing things in the tech world over the years that have absolutely changed the way we do business online today. And he is another person who has made the transition into blockchain, but not just blockchain by itself, blockchain gaming specifically. Now, if you listened a few months back when we had Justin Khan on and Justin talked about fractal. Well, this is David Wirtz, the CEO of fractal and ex co founder of Google Drive. So this is an amazing episode where we talk about David's backstory over at Google and Shopify, how he transitioned into blockchain gaming, how blockchain gaming becomes mainstream, what's happening, happening over at Fractal. Just a wide ranging conversation of everything. Blockchain gaming. So if you really want to dive deep into why blockchain gaming is so powerful and how blockchain gaming will eventually become mainstream even among all of the gamers that talk crap about it right now, this is the episode for you because David really does a great job of breaking it all down. Now, before we jump in with David, I want to remind you, make sure you join our Hard Fork whitelist. Go to Hardfork GG whitelist and enter your email, your Ethereum address. If you don't have an Ethereum address, that link will actually show you how to create an Ethereum address. We also ask for your Twitter and a Discord id. We ask for those four things if you go to Hardfork GG whitelist. But we will make it worth your while if you give us that information. Because we're going to use that information to send you free gaming NFTs. So go do that. Make sure you're at Hardfork GG whitelist.

Sign up there.

Don't forget to follow me and Joe. I am Matt Rwolfe on Twitter. Joe is Joe Fear on Twitter. And we are also Hardfork Gaming on Twitter. And one other little quick thing, we do these things called LFG Live now, where every other week we go live on YouTube. We have special guests, we do NFT giveaways, we give away tons of NFTs to the people that show up on the live streams. We play games live. We do all sorts of cool stuff live. And we give away a ton of free NFTs to that show up to the live streams. So make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel and you check in for our LFG lives. They go live every other week. Our next one is actually tomorrow, June 15th. So make sure you're there when we go live tomorrow. On June 15, we're giving away a ton of NFTs. Some of the NFTs are valued at over $150 right now, even in this bear market. So you're going to want to be on this one. We're giving away some cool prizes, and that's all I got to say about that. So let's go chat with David Wirtz.

All right. So David, we're here. Thanks for joining us today. And like we were saying, you guys have releasing things daily, it seems like from tournaments with all these games, launching new mints and now the Fractal wallet. Endless amounts of fun things going on in your life, I'm sure. So thanks for joining us.

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks, guys. Yes, it's definitely a busy time.

Yeah. And it's in Fractal. It's developed a lot over the last handful of months since the beginning of the year. We kind of synced up months and months back, but definitely would love to explore what Fractal has kind of done in the last seven months. Has it been like, what, last December, I think is when you guys were kicking stuff off.

December was when we started working on it. We launched around Christmas, so it's been six months. I can give you a quick recap of Fractal's first six months as a company if you'd like.

Let's go even further back with your story and before even Web3 showed up because just for our audience, we got a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of creators, marketers, folks that like to that probably share a lot of those things. And I know have used some of the tools you founded. So take us back to. I know meeting Justin was pretty far back there, Y Combinator, so wherever you want to take us.

All right. Well, yeah, so I met Justin back in the very earliest days of Y Combinator. He was the first class, I think it was probably 05, 2005. And I was the second class in winter 06. And so that was back when Y Combinator was super small. It was like six kit, you know, six projects a class. Justin and I got to know each other and stayed in touch over the years and he went on to co found Twitch and do other amazing things and I used, I went back to school and eventually ended up back ended up taking a job at Google where I co founded Google Drive, Google fonts and incubated a whole bunch of really awesome projects with really smart people over the years. And the fall of last year I got word that my old buddy Justin was doing things in crypto and we ended up on the phone and it was pretty immediately obvious we needed to do something here. Like I was very into the Solana community and just witnessing this amazing birth of a community in solana, specifically around NFTs and Justin with his breadth of experience. Well first of all he was investing in web3 games so we were talking very specifically about that. But it was sort of obvious that there was an opportunity for NFT assets for in game assets. And Justin had a really interesting vantage point of that. I was like, hey, we should do something with NFTs and community in Solana. And he was like yeah, and we should do something with games. And so the two of those visions collided and out of that came Fractal. And just a week or two later I recruited a CTO Mike who worked at a, a company I had invested in prior. And Justin brought in Robin, our other co founder who runs Goat Capital with, with Justin. So the crew was off to the races and we had a really busy December. Yeah, we, you know, we worked our butts off. I don't think we've ever worked harder in our lives. We, we pulled off launching the first version of the secondary marketplace in just about 30 days from starting and also in that time we dropped the largest NFT collection on Solana and that actually came together in nine days from inception to drop, which was absolutely bonkers.

And you designed those, right? The fractal NFTs?

Well, we, yeah, well we found an artist out of Japan actually and it was, it was like, I mean it was such a small, it was such a tight time schedule that we didn't have, you know, we got incredibly lucky by getting someone that like, you know, had had the skill and could move fast. It was funny. Like they were, the artist was battling the clock. Not because like everyone, apparently everyone likes to take vacation around Christmas, I learned. So he was like I'm visiting family, like starting on, you know, I don't know, like the 17th or whatever. And I was like we gotta, we have to make it snow on Christmas. So I'm like sure. And, and these things take Time to render too. So he's like, all right, if I, if I do it now, you know, I might just be able to finish the rendering right before I leave for the airport. And like, all right, sounds good, let's do this.

There's a hundred thousand of them too, right? It's not like a little tiny project.

Yeah, well, he didn't, so he didn't need to.

He designed the animations and what we did was he took every frame and turned them into a unique nft. And the frames as the animation sort of grew in that mapped to power level, which actually is something that we're intending to make dynamic eventually.

Awesome.

So the original intent was to just reward our community as a thank you, as a token of our appreciation for joining the fractal community. But then we realized there was an opportunity in making a cross game asset that might be interesting to build on top of as game developers and conceived of a bunch of different, different attributes that might be useful for that construct. And one of those was Power level. With power Level, we envisioned you could tell the power level of a fractal NFT based on how large and complex it is. So it's sort of like an intuitive way to understand, you know, how, how awesome your, your fractal is. Right. But we conceived it as a metagame across multiple games. One of the concepts of crypto gaming that's really interesting and I don't think has been fully fleshed out yet is cross game assets and leveraging, you know, the player bases and performance metrics across different other games in your collection in your game. So we thought to ourselves, could we do that somehow with this token NFT project that we're going to drop? And so we set up the structure for it and we haven't executed on a lot of that vision yet, admittedly, and it makes me very sad because I'm so excited about the vision. It turns out that building a company is hard and you have a lot of stuff to do. So we have to prioritize things like the launch pad and making, you know, in scaling our infrastructure and hiring a team of engineers. Yeah, exactly. People. Yeah. So we've been busier than ever. But the Vera NFT collection is definitely one of those things we're going to be coming back to and executing on.

What was it about web3 that brought you in? Was there any sort of like moment or project or something where you're just like, oh, this is, this is it, this is the future?

I mean, I guess it's partially because of Solana itself, actually, like, so I was lucky enough to be an LP at Multicoin Capital, which ended up being early in Solana. And so I've been exposed to Solana from the very beginning, like all of the crazy teams coming out of the woodwork and building fast and stuff. So that was all, like. That wasn't hypothetical. That was. I was immersed in it from the start. Even before Solana launched, you know, I was reading the. The research that. And the memos that multicoin wrote on them. I was fascinated by that. The reason why I originally invested in multicoin was because I want. I was just fascinated by the concept of aligning people's interests. And, you know, if you think about it like the superpower of crypto is aligning people's interest, and those people don't need to trust each other, you know, and that's what, like, spawned Bitcoin. That was the heart of Bitcoin. And I think that concept applied to many other things, makes a lot of sense. So I was just. I was really into the concept of crypto since, you know, 2018, early 2018, when I started investing in it through Multicoin. But then I was very fortunate that multicoin sort of brought me up to speed with what was going on in the. In the builder space. You know, like, multicoin doesn't invest in just these hype projects. They invest in projects with, like, meeting developer communities and real tech. And so I got a filter on a very otherwise noisy industry, and that was my intent. So since 2018, I've become increasingly interested in what's going on. And I think that I say Solana, though, and I credit Solana specifically because it was. It was. It wasn't until I downloaded Phantom and, you know, bought a Degen ape did I actually understand what it. What Solana was from a community perspective. Prior to that, it was just a cool tech, but I really sort of fell in love with the community aspect of Web3 at that point. And at that point, I also had this light bulb moment go off in my head where I'm like, shit, we could build a consumer application on top of this. Now forgiving Solana's downtime and network congestion, for the most part, it's a performant chain. And I think.

These technologies are likely to get better and better, but still reserve the benefit of, you know, that trustless system where people who don't trust each other can coordinate up toward a common goal. Ever since that, I was on the lookout for applications of this cool tech and and then you know, that sort of primed my, my thinking for the conversation I had with Justin.

So it's. We were doing some research and saw that you have some Shopify experience from back in the day. And I heard you mention how you're bringing some of that mental model, the business model over there and the thinking of what Shopify did for a lot of brands. I think the reference you made is Nike to Allbirds and how Allbirds use Shopify and was able to scale with Shopify but not really move away necessarily. Shopify was a key thing technology that they leveraged to grow their brand over the massive conglomerate. So you kind of related that to Fractal and what you're building over here in web 3. I'm curious if you could talk about that in a little bit of the vision that you're doing.

I was lucky to be involved in Shopify back when There were only 15 people and it was just a bunch of geeks engineers building tools for merchants to sell things online. What happened is that they lowered the bar for participation in commerce and then you know, got a little bit lucky. Facebook's ads started working and like a blossoming of a new industry basically occurred on the backs of Shopify with, with NFTs and digital assets. I think we have another Shopify like industry shift where Shopify revolutionized E Commerce. I think NFTs and, and digital assets can revolutionize gaming. And I think there's definitely going to be a Shopify, a stripe, maybe multiples in that space now. I think it's early, but I think that's inevitable. Fractal. We see ourselves as a technology provider for web3 gaming studios just like Shopify made it so that merchants didn't need to get a merchant account to accept credit card and hire full time web designers. If they're just selling bowling balls, they don't need to have 17 engineers on their team. The same thing with blockchain games. There's just so many games that want to build on blockchain. Blockchain. But it doesn't make sense for them to have 17 blockchain engineers. Blockchain is particularly hard.

Oh yeah.

So fractal sees themselves as a partner in that effort and hopefully building the tools like Shopify did to lower the barrier for entry.

Yeah. I'm curious, why did fractal hone in on gaming specifically? Because I mean you could have been in a marketplace that just offers NFTs for any Solana products. Right. But you kind of honed in on gaming. So I'm curious, what was it about gaming that you attracted you into that?

This is definitely Justin's influence, I'm not going to lie. Right. I mean, it makes intuitive sense to me. Gamers have been buying digital assets for as long as computer games have existed. And so that's the hard part, that's the hard mental leap to make, which is this digital asset worth something? And gamers have made that earlier than any other industry and it's actually sort of already accepted and acceptable to pay for digital assets. The gaming market is also ridiculously large and it's larger than the art market, it's three times larger than the art market, and it's growing fast. The gaming digital assets asset market is just a really, it's a really early moment for what could potentially be a massive industry. And when you think about it from just basic principles of like true ownership of your assets makes sense. And there's a lot of questions, there's a lot of difficult questions we have to sort through, you know, about like exactly what, what the best uses of crypto are inside a game and what's a sustainable token economic model. And there's definitely a lot of game studios that are doing it for the wrong reasons. Like in any new industry you have good actors and you'll have bad actors. But if you believe that the fundamental technology represents an obvious upgrade to gaming assets, and we do, then it's pretty obvious why Fractal wants to focus now. Actually that takes some serious conviction, I'm not going to lie. Because most of the market right now is in these complete DGEN use cases, right. Most people are flipping NFTs and, and like that's the game, right? And that is a fun, it's a fun game, right? You guys probably have played it too, of course. But it's not, it's not what gaming is. You know, gaming starts with a really fun to play game and then giving people an open economy to want to interact with that game. But it has to start with the game. It doesn't start with the economy. I mean there have been examples like Axie Infinity, which have sort of started with economy. I don't know, maybe they didn't actually set out with that in mind, but it certainly became about the economy like pretty fast. Right. And how many people out there are actually playing Axie Infinity for fun? I'm pretty sure zero people.

They're literally in the news trending on Twitter right now about this exact topic. I think Bloomberg's blowing them up so about like how the transition to fun now is the big thing because the financial part basically dropped out. Yeah, so, but that's, that's a tangent.

If you don't have fun, then what you have is a Ponzi scheme, basically because you need to have people, you know sticking around in your economy coming back for reasons other than just to make money or else it just doesn't work. But it's really like. I don't pretend to have all the answers about what crypto gaming looks like though, because, like, I've read a lot of articles. There's a lot of like thinkers in this space. There's a lot of smart people like dissecting what crypto games mean and the right way to do do this stuff. I just feel like we're in such early innings that it's hard to know truly. I think like it's. Axie Infinity woke us up to the potential for this interesting thing to happen. And Stepn has done the same, but each one sort of is experimenting with a different thing. And after some time I think there's going to be some obvious ways to do this and I don't know if anyone knows that right now.

So I have a question here on the games you're launching because you're launching so many of them over at Fractal is. I mean, we literally shout you guys out all the time because you guys make it easy for us to play games on the fly. Literally the other week one of the games wasn't working for us. So I quickly jumped to Eve on Fractal Eve I.O. and started shooting people within two minutes yesterday. Panzer Dogs yesterday. Yeah, just on the fly. Like you make it easy, but what have you learned? Like talking about the economy and launching so many games. Are there certain? Because I know there's like smaller games, I think you've called them mini games. And then there's these like AAA big games that take a lot of development and all that. When it comes to economies and maybe just learning a lot. Do you see? Like, what are you learning? Maybe is it, is it more from the mini games? Are they figuring out the economies? Maybe in more of a micro sense that can be applied and evolved with future games to come. I feel like there's some kind of evolution there. I'm just curious of your thoughts, if you learned stuff.

Yeah, we definitely learned a lot. I mean, but we're sort of withholding judgment because I think we're just so early in the space. It's like the game hasn't even started yet, as far as we can tell. I think that there's definitely. It's common for games to launch mini games first just purely because it's easy to get things out faster and showing progress. I think that's actually a function of the ethos of crypto and just wanting to ship fast. I think the communities also just love that momentum and sometimes these communities are so antsy for anything that you have to keep them happy. And so many games are a good way to do that. But in terms of token economics, I don't know if there's any difference between minigames and bigger games. I mean, there's definitely more complicated token economic models. There's games that have multiple tokens and have lots of different game loops that you can use those tokens in. There's games that are a lot more simple like, like that are. That resemble. Maybe more just like D5 with a skin, you know, going on raids and by random chance and some, you know, based. Based on the attributes of your assets, you can either come back with some, some loot or, or nothing or lose or whatever. Right. But that's basically just D, which again, like, I think I, I want to withhold judgment because I think that there's actually some really interesting games in that space. Like for example, the, the Remnants. I'm not sure if you guys have ever heard of the Remnants.

No, that's a new one to us.

So it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty simple game, but it is just, it's just about going on, going on quests and, you know, conquering things and, and coming back with either more or less than what you had before. You know, that's very much like staking and you know, it doesn't necessarily need a cool visual skin, although it does make it a little bit more fun, I think. But that, you know, the remnants has that 80% of their NFTs are owned by active players.

Wow.

And what I love about that is I think that traditionally, or, sorry, more more commonly, these assets are owned by NFT traders and not players. That, that is a little bit worrisome when that number of the percentage of people that own your NFT collection, your game, NFT collection, or in the high 90s, if you're a game, you want players to own your asset. That's like how you're going to build your game economy. You look at the Remnants, which has a really simple core game mechanic and it's not, it's not really like, it's definitely not a AAA game and it's barely a game, but it's, it's engaging and people are doing it every day and like, having fun with it. It is interesting because it is very financial in nature, just based on the fact that you're going and conquesting and trying to gain more stuff. Maybe that's okay. I mean, it's not. It's not that it's bad that crypto is very financial in nature, like, or at least it is today. I think there'll probably be more, less financial versions of applications of crypto in the future, but right now it's very financial. So it's no surprise that crypto games sometimes have that spin. But it's interesting because that might actually make the game playable at least. But it's an honest version of itself. It's not trying to pretend to be fun to play what it's doing. It's fun to play, but it's because of the earning potential of it.

Yeah, there's a risk or something on the line for it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's cool.

So I don't know. I don't think that's all crypto games, but that's definitely a slice of them.

Do you know what it would take to get more of those traditional gamers into the crypto space? Because it seems like there is kind of that resistance that you're seeing from the traditional gamers, especially the, the more vocal ones that you see on YouTube and stuff, kind of talking shit about crypto gaming. So do you have any ideas of like, what's going to onboard more of those traditional gamers? Because you hear the analogies all the time about like the people back in 1998 saying, like, what is this Internet thing? It's a scam, it's whatever. And then look at where the Internet is now and you kind of see the same analogies with crypto and crypto gaming and stuff. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, you guys were with us with the EV tournament, right? So we were on the homepage of Twitch and we had a thousand concurrent viewers and 238,000 people that saw it over the course of a day. And I was in the stream for all of it. And the comments were not negative at all. I think I saw one negative, slightly negative comment about crypto in the entirety of the event, which happened over the course of an entire day. Instead, what I saw was a lot of people asking questions about the upcoming mint and fractal. And that was really promising for us. We felt like this was evidence that if the game is fun to play, gamers will come along. It's not about crypto, it's about the game.

Yeah.

Crypto is a way to empower the players of that game to give them options to allow them to cash out, to stake, to lend, to merge. Merging and stuff. That's interesting. And it allows for some really cool use cases inside the game. And these things are natively supported in blockchain so it makes it easier for game developers to do things like this. But connecting the game to a more open economy just makes it more interesting. And actually it could cause people to come in to engage with that economy because they might actually have a way to earn money if they're good at it. As long as not everyone expects that. Right. So EV IO's tournament that we called it the Fractal Cup. We're going to do a bunch more in the future. Of course that was the first one and it showed us the potential to go into the mainstream and we were really excited about that.

Yeah, it's like you put something on the line and it gets people the wider audience, especially if it's free to play like EV IO or Panzer Dogs. I think it's a good way to at least onboard and get some interaction within a game and sometimes, or usually there's some kind of prize pool there to excite people enough.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, you'll see us doing a bunch more of that. We have some really fantastic game partners that I think some of them are announced already. Yeah. So the harvest we just put on our site and they're minting soon. The date's not announced yet but.

We'Ll.

Be a part of that actually. So it's really rad. We'll speak for that. We haven't put anything out though. Tight lipped about it.

All right.

Yeah.

But you guys will like that one for sure. But it's just so amazing that these high quality games are coming to Blockchain. You know, I think one of the gripes that people, traditional gamers have is that all the blockchain games are shit. Which like maybe is true on average.

Yeah.

But I don't think that's necessarily. That's definitely not true.

And I also think there's an element too of it's kind of the vocal minority. Right. The ones that are on YouTube are kind of shouting it out because of, you know, what they've built their brand on over the years as well. And you know, maybe some of them see it as a threat to what they've built.

Who knows?

But you know, I'm with you I feel like. I feel like crypto gaming becomes mainstream when crypto is just the plumbing. It's not the sales pitch for the game.

Right.

When people are selling it as a crypto game, that's the problem. But if it's just a really, really fun game and, oh, it happens to have like the plumbing behind it that's handling all the economics and stuff is built on crypto, but that's not what we lead with. I think that's kind of when we start to see that mainstream adoption and.

Exactly. I think what we see is that there's going to be. Here's what's going to happen. I'll just hypothesize for a second. I'm probably going to be completely wrong. And then of course, this is recorded. Everyone knows how long I was. Or maybe I'm right. And then this will go down in history. It's gonna be great. Yeah. Either way, I think there's gonna be a single breakout success game like League of Legends style success that basically causes a lot of mainstream gamers to reassess their fud. I think when they fall in love with this game and it might be the Harvest, right. It might be like literally the one that's about to launch, or it might be five years away, I don't know. But it's going to be there and it's going to be built on blockchain. And those players who maybe at one point were funding crypto and maybe even vocally are going to have an oh, shit moment themselves and they're going to say, oh, wow, this is awesome. I can take this asset out and it's mine. I can do something with it, I can sell it, I can lend it, I can buy assets to play this game. This just feels like what a game should have been. It's open and then I think they're going to say, oh, I appreciate the fact that this is crypto and they don't necessarily call themselves crypto fan, they call themselves fan of Steam, as it.

Kind of should be. Yeah. It's not the plumbing that we're the fans of necessarily. We could be fans of it, I guess, in theory.

Yeah. Well, no, I think crypto might be different than like aws, where, like, no one's passionate about the fact that Airbnb is built on aws. I don't know if it is, by the way, but like, you know what's interesting about crypto is that Solana and Avalanche and Polygon, they come with, with communities. And so it actually does have the Potential to pull people in to the communities. But even if it doesn't, the fact that the game is powered by it, the game is, is what people experience the crypto through. So yeah, so we launched, we announced Fractal Wallet we call Signed in with Fractal today. Officially announced. It was, it was live on the site for a month or so. It was actually what powered the fractal cup with EV IO. EV IO's tournament brought in 15,000 players. Now these are players that have never touched crypto before that now have a Solana based wallet. And we designed this solution, we designed the sign in with Fractal solution with that user in mind that doesn't necessarily know much about crypto but really wants a quick sign in experience and then just being able to engage with the game and that's a big part of our strategy going forward.

Well, that's connected to a variety of games. So I signed up, I think we all signed up pretty early on because of the EV IO tournament and Panzer Dogs. It's required there. And if I understand it correctly, you sign in with your Fractal wallet, it's very simple by the way. You use Google Social sign in and then you basically have a wallet and simple settings. There's no extensions. It's not me pitching necessarily, but it's just like literally the experience is simple to just get into it compared to a metamask or something else. So the onboarding is a lot cleaner. And then you can jump right into a game or a tournament in this case and capture your rewards and that can connect and maybe cash out or, or however to another wallet. It seems like it kind of integrates that way.

Yes, it's about, well, it's about getting people into the game, having fun as quickly as possible. And see, games have to make a choice, right? They have to make a false choice. Right now if you're a game developer, you have to choose whether you want to be Web2 or Web3. There's lots of benefits to going Web3, at least, you know, a bunch of people believe that. I believe that Fractal believes it. But if games choose that path, they suffer a lot of negative consequences, one of which is they need a staff of blockchain developers kind of a big deal. The second is that their users have to sign up for like some, some crazy crypto crap that they don't understand and that they have to put that in front of their user in the sign up flow. So Fractal is trying to solve both of those things right by Giving game developers a way for them to get users in the door, having fun as quickly as possible and then doing things like minting and selling assets inside games, which we think is going to be a predominant way in which digital assets trade in the future as these games become more playable and more fun to play. But they need the tools to do that. So Fractal Wallet and the signing with fractal from the front end is a nice player experience, but on the back end is a really great developer experience.

You've definitely had way more chats with game developing companies and studios than we have, but I feel like we're on the phone constantly, at least a couple a day. And the big thing is everyone has issues with onboarding users. That's, that's the thing. And you know, there's only so Many crypto or web3gamers here right now, so it's like we're going to have to dip into other pools and expand the audience and things like this. I could see helping speed up the adoption curve, you know, because we're early adopters. I'm kind of curious if you know, or have a feel for where we're at or any kind of indication of adoption, any trends that you're, you think are going to help kind of spur more people to crypto.

In terms of crypto adoption, we're super early still. You know, I don't think that's news to anyone listening to this. Like, we're, even though Solana and you know, some other communities and obviously Ethereum has taken off, have reached a large audience. I think that the number of people that are actually engaging with these technologies on a daily or weekly basis is almost nothing. And I think that that's likely to change over the next 10 years. And so I like to see ourselves like really the earliest of innings. I think Web3 gaming, even even earlier. I think like where crypto is strongest right now is these tokens. Right. And Ethereum is basically almost like a alternative to the ipo, Right. It's like a community owned IPO platform.

Yeah.

So Ethereum has strong product market fit for that use case, but for gaming there's no platform that has strong product market fit. And I think it's interesting to see how Solana and Polygon and Avalanche are sort of battling for that territory.

For sure, this question's kind of random and it's also sort of hypothetical, but with your background at places like, like Google and having experience with Shopify and stuff like that, do you see some of those companies like coming down into the Web3 path. Do you see them dabbling at all? Just out of curiosity, from your background there, do you think that they'll eventually move into Web3 as well?

That is a really good question. And I know that they're thinking about it. They have to be, unless their head's in the sand. But the question is whether they'll take the appropriate risks. I don't know if that's. I don't know if they will. You know, I think this is probably the classic innovator's dilemma where there it's more likely that a new company, which has a completely different DNA, is going to move faster and start small and inconsequential and then somehow become meaningful. I mean, Facebook started as like a dating app for Harvard students. Right. You just don't know where these things start from. I think the smart existing tech players will be making bets in the space more and more. I mean, we're seeing Twitter do that, and I don't know, maybe Elon will shake things up in that regard. I mean, they're already giving.

Facebook's kind of dabbling with the metaverse thing. Right. Although most people in the crypto space are like, no, Facebook, stay away.

But yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, I guess that's another roadblock that they have is a lot of the big Web two companies are probably going to be met with a lot of resistance from the Web three companies not wanting them to come in. So, I don't know, it's interesting how that'll play out.

Well, there is a stat that I got to give credit to Buffalo. He's here at the studio, the house we're in, and he saw a stat from the Defiant that just came out that VC investing this time last year, basically this is the timeframe from last May. It's up 97% right now, investing in the gaming space. So there's definitely a lot. And I know what a 16Z just got a fund of what, 4.5 billion, or put one together to build out a lot of what we're talking about here. Not just Solana, but just the wider, I guess, open economy. It's interesting, I guess, your take here. Obviously it's a crypto bear market, but it's also, it seems like there's all the signs that this is the most building time that we've had in crypto when it comes to gaming or apps and utilities that people can use for the foreseeable 10 years, he keeps saying, and that's the number they keep throwing around too.

Oh, really? Cool.

Yeah, you're spot on, I guess, Chris Dixon and all that. But what are your thoughts? It's interesting since you've kind of been on both sides of the world there too.

So I'll admit, guys, I'm not a gamer and that might be a bit of a surprise. I mean, I played a lot of Halo in high school and college and like, you know, I enjoyed the occasional game, but I have an addicted personality so I don't let myself get too much into these things or else. Whereas I don't have time for anything else. You know, I think one of the things that I've realized is that like gaming assets have a floor price that's supported by how fun the game is to play and every other nft. Like there's lots of reasons NFT technology makes sense. Tickets, social tokens. That one's like, you know, unexplored. But there's definitely some huge opportunities there. PFP projects, which I'm not even sure what the heck that is, but like that's some social phenomenon.

Fundraising. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, so there's all these use cases for NFTs, but like, the thing is like games, even in a bare market, let's just say that like, you know, the market goes down 90% from here. Right. Like you still want to like wake up and like enjoy life.

Yeah.

And actually when you're having a, when you're like, when you're all red in your, your ticker and your public portfolio, it's probably like the time you want to just have fun and just sort of relax. And I think that's interesting because it might mean that, that games is a real industry. It exists through bear markets and it actually might provide a bit of a stability through what would normally be pretty dark and cold crypto winters. Now I don't know if we're entering into a dark and cold crypto winter, but it's certainly not boom times and. But you know, for what it's worth, we're not so worried about that at Fractal. We're just sort of, we have a lot to build. The market's huge. We think this is a long term play anyway. The market's going to go up and down and left and right. It's awesome to see that Andreessen is still investing aggressively. I heard this multicoin said this too, which is that they're writing just as many checks. I don't know if that's actually true or what people say because it makes people feel good. But fractal hasn't seen a slowdown in quality games coming to Blockchain yet. In fact, right around when Solana, because we're on Solana right now and obviously we're going to go multi chain at some point but we're on Solana now. But right when Solana went. Started going down precipitously. You would think that like it would have just been crickets actually we signed our three strongest games ever in that. In that period. And I think it's because. Well, I think it's because this trend is inevitable. I think it's going to happen regardless. And I also think that even as bad as the markets can get, if you're right that people want true ownership of their assets, then this isn't. This is just a matter of when, not if.

Yeah. And a lot of these folks that might have been the traders and the short timers not really understanding the deeper having the anticipation of development times of these games. Games take years in some cases to develop and you know, they might be in it for. I see that the, the PFP of that game or the access key dropped, you know, I'm out. Well, you know, it's, it's probably allowing others to come in at a lower floor price if they believe in the project and we'll have more, you know, better gamers, investors ideally for the people who stick it out and that are attracted during these times.

It's my hope.

It's my hope. We'll see. I think you guys are building the perfect thing and you have a launch pad too. You have the marketplace. But I'm really fascinated because we've had Psyker on, we've had meta Ops on and we're in chats with a lot of other games who have been essentially launched, it seems like by fractal. And I think with Psyker, we've had those guys on and they weren't even developers or game developers prior to. I know one guy was a marketer. We hit it off because we're all marketing nerds and content guys. But it's interesting of how it seems like you're almost incubating these games.

I don't know.

I'm curious of how that launchpad works on your side of things and maybe even how or why a company would pick fractal or why you would choose a game to launch with you guys over another.

I think we're the only company out there that's game specific. Right. I think there's something to be said for us just having a high quality bar and curating what is otherwise just a sea of projects that aren't that interesting. Right. Like the. There's a lot, there's a lot of need for people, especially folks that are just getting into crypto to have a trusted source of like quality projects that aren't going to rug and not are just, aren't just not going to rug, but actually have a chance at delivery.

Yeah.

And you know, I think when we evaluate a project we're holding a pretty high bar that's probably more similar to a venture capital due diligence than it is just like willy nilly, show us your ID and good luck on our launch pad. And that's why we don't mint things every day and we certainly could. There's definitely the demand there. But we just think there's value in being picky. And I'm not going to lie, it sucks to say no. Some of the teams seem to have their heart in the right place, but they don't have the material yet to support a launch. But we stay in touch with these games and we make sure we support them in other ways too, like giving them access to the SDKs we're building so that they can actually build their games, you know. So I think, yeah, I think that that's been working really well and I think games have been just incredibly. We're very lucky. Games have been really excited to partner with Fractal. We're only on Solana now and sometimes games that are on the fence about whether they're going Polygon or Solana are choosing Solana because Fractal, I think people just want a good partner that, a good long term partner that shares their long term aspirations.

What sort of filters do you put the games through? Like what criteria, what sort of standard do you hold them to?

Yeah, so we're ranking games. We have a spreadsheet. I won't share it. It might be too much information.

Yeah, probably.

But we have a spreadsheet that has like, I don't know, 10 or 12 columns and we're grading games on all those dimensions. But it's like things like size and engagement of Community. Obviously the gameplay itself is a huge deal. We play test. If you have a playable game, we're play testing it and giving feedback. We're looking at how crypto native the teams are and whether they understand how blockchain can be used. Used. You can sort of tell whether a team is just tacking on crypto or actually likes crypto for other reasons because I think the game will be Much more engaging. We. So we're looking at how crypto native they are and how sophisticated they are in that regard, how the quality and the, the caliber of the founders. You know, like you, you mentioned Psycher and like these guys had never built a game before. And when we met them at first we fell in love with them because they were entrepreneurs, they were smart as hell, they knew exactly what they wanted to build. They had a good white paper, we thought they did a good job with community and art and they had. So they had a good, well rounded mix and that's what is required in success in Web3. But it's funny because, you know, you might expect us to decline teams like that, but I think we're trying to take a more holistic approach. We're trying, we're trying to back good founders. Sometimes they come with a game already and sometimes they come with a really fantastic concept.

Yeah, almost.

You're basically betting on the jockey, not necessarily the horse.

Right. Love it. I'm sure your spreadsheet skills are pretty mad. You mentioned the spreadsheets. I'm like, is that a Google Drive spreadsheet or are you using.

Of course it is.

Yeah, of course.

I'm not installing Excel in my MacBook.

Or using whatever the Mac is going to give you.

Yeah, right.

What is that? I don't even know. Sheets, I think, or page. Yeah. How about the Google one? Yeah.

Are there any.

I think it's called numbers. It's called numbers.

Numbers, you're right.

Are there any games in the pipeline that you're really excited about, either from a gameplay standpoint or just like an excitement buzz standpoint?

Yeah, I mean, the Harvest was one we just announced recently and I'm particularly excited about that one because the game is just next level. Man, you guys are shaking me down for some alpha here.

Come on.

Yeah, I really shouldn't, I really shouldn't spoil the fun of the announcements, but there's a couple others that I think would be particularly interesting.

No, we're good at spreading the word over here.

Our favorite statement's start with I shouldn't be saying this, but yeah, exactly.

No, you guys will have to wait. No, but there's some, there's some really high quality games that I think you guys in your audience would be particularly excited about because of the gameplay itself, you know, because I think like that when you can, when you can get on Twitch and have fun with streamers and stuff, that's an extra level of awesome. We try to attach that, those events to mints too, because, like, what we want is, we want. See, with EV, IO's mint, which happened after the Fractal Cup. It happened on a day where Solana went down 30%, worst possible situation. And they still almost sold out. You know, I, I think it was an incredible show show for that morning. And the other thing is that it's not just about how fast the Mint sells out, it's who's buying it always, you know, so with ev, I think a lot of the people that bought it were actually players, which is incredible.

Yeah, it was live for quite a bit before that, I think a good month or so. So, I mean, you were getting all sorts of traction.

Yeah, yeah, we. We left them on our. We left them on our. Our navigation and fractal for. For a. Of lot. Like, you know, probably five, five weeks prior to the Fractal Cup. And then the fractal cup was like the cherry on top.

Yep. I think that's why we kept going to it. Like, okay, that's easy to get to and it's really fun.

Perfect.

Okay.

Yeah, we want to encourage these games to be fun and playable and then we want to give. Show them as much love as we possibly can, you know, for sure.

Well, David, let's. Let's wrap this puppy up. This has been all sorts of crazy. We went everywhere. What's. I mean, Fractal is the, the main website. That's where you can get to everything we've been chatting about, about. You mentioned the Fractal Wallet. That's Sign in with Fractal. Is that the official name there? Cool.

Yeah. So Sign in with Fractal is like the way in which you'd say it to your friend. And Fractal Wallet is how the developers think about it. So it sort of has two names.

There you go. That works. Get in there. It's easy. And I know you're always giving away cool stuff, so keep an eye on the tournaments. Anything else that we should keep an eye on or point people to while you're here?

No, I think, you know, there's a lot of content that Fractal's producing on Fractal Radio where Justin, my co founder, goes through and interviews the founders. That's really, really awesome. So go, go smash the subscribe button on YouTube on fractal radio and you might, you might catch some content that you like. It's really interesting. Even teams that I think I know because I like, sort of interviewed them for, for a partnership. I learned so much when I just listen to them talk for half an hour about their plans. And it really helps you understand whether this is a team and a game that you're interested in. And I think that is so different than the typical experience in crypto where you don't know who they are and you have no idea why you'd back them or not. And all you're doing is trying to figure going to go to the moon and that just feels very surface deep. So it's so nice when you can actually understand the story. So anyway, fractal radio, go check it out.

It's solid. And I love the whole like proof by Justin or proof of Justin on the website.

Justin, I think. So you know the history. The history of proof of Justin, right, is we were hacked. We were. Our community was phished back in December. One of our employees was socially engineered and they stole a auth token from their discord. From their discord in a screen share. It was. It was terrible. Anyway, so we realized we needed to. We needed to make sure that anytime there was money transacting in a big way on fractal that we would like officially endorse it. So then we're like, huh, everyone likes Justin. So proof of Justin.

There you go.

And it's cool. It's a nice way to just sort of get reminded of what's coming out. Yeah, we, we've been having fun with that one.

Yeah, no, you guys are. I love all the, the content you guys are doing and, and it's been cool chatting with the team and everybody on there. You're definitely building a cool crew and the vision, that's what we've attached to it hard for because like, man, it's just so fun. So like it. We can't help ourselves to just keep shouting it out out and all the fun stuff you're doing there. So.

Yeah. Well, thanks for all your support. You know, we love you guys and yeah, it's great to have, you know, folks such as yourself and hard for gaming and the. And you know, we couldn't do it without you. So thanks for, thanks for your belief in us and hopefully we don't disappoint.

Just keep doing what you're doing. You're doing all right. All right, David, until next time, man. Thank you.

Cool, thanks guys.

Sam.