Origins of the Axie ecosystem

Hello everyone. I'm Rolf. This is jee-ho will be talking about asking just in case you had you don't know what the fuck with that is to bait your own game. That's how it started out and we'll talk about how it start as a really small community. And then it's kind of growing to do to become like a digital Nation, might be interacting with governments. The Discord is maxed out, is only five discs in the world that are maxed out and you do is going to come to take us on that journey and tell us about all the coordination channel. Does it come with that? So ghoe, tell us how it all

started. I'm sure it's awesome to be here. And yeah, so I just I discovered and if he is in 2017 through crypto kitties and as someone who I grew up collecting butterflies fossils, playing games and for the first time, write, it felt like this was a an aspect on work space within crypto where I could actually use the skills that I've been building up over my life to my advantage, right? To to help build communities to help actually create a market before that, it felt like if I didn't, if I wasn't very technical or I wasn't interested in trading it seem like there wasn't really a space for me.

So yeah, I add a credit to the community. And that's actually where I met two of my fellow co-founders of acci Trung and Alexander. And yeah, so in March of 2018, I stumbled across axi. I just as a community member at 1st and on that day, that was the day that was revealed for the first time. So, for a month until that point, each actually was just metadata that you could look at into really, okay? Like this sounds cool. But like, are they ever going to show up? Like what is

this? Right? So it's very, very open-ended. And yeah, I think I think I got our approach has always been to iterate and build in public with the community add things slowly over time about that. I think like one interesting inside is so you a part of the community before there was really a game to play, right? So you interacting with people and also you came on as a community member and then you became part of the founding team, right? I thought, you know, I thought that the vision was amazing and NFC with actual utility that you could use your time and effort to create value with.

But yes, I have title to, but you cannot do anything with them. Rich is it? So I kind of wanted to help I started thinking about what I could personally do to add value to these assets. And so, I think that's the power of crypto is like once you have skin in the game, you start asking yourself how you you know, how you can actually help interpreting value than becoming part of the founding team. Tell us more about how did early Community right? How did that grow? I mean you do what you guys were going through the crypto bear

Market. What was the feeling like? We're the committee members. How did you guys going to grow the community? Yes, it was. So in March. I felt like the active Community was just, maybe 10 or 15 people talking into square at chatting about the future, what they would like to see from the game over the coming years. I think that was a really formative experience right where because there was no content. We really got to know each other and I think it was really important for the people building oxy. Ask I met this but also other community developers to learn about what people

actually want it. So I think that was I think I was really important to go special. I think it's something that in a few projects today cannot experience because there is so much excitement that and there's too much expectation of profit, right? Like it's all about, it's about money for a lot of the people in the states right now on which I think is okay, as things mature, but I think there's definitely something lost where you don't have When the majority of the community aren't these kind of lobbyists that are in, in, in it, for the long term and it for, in it to explore and try

something new. So today, you guys have like 1.7 million views, which I basically u d, i use literally right 1.7 million people playing, ask you every single day, being a bunch of hobbyist 15. The can't even see what the hell. This thing is to be coming, like a really big Community. What is the originate? You guys kind of take off? So, I think it was the bear Market fermentation. That was super important. They're what there's kind of this understanding of the long-term Vision,

right? Like nfnf used with true utility via the idea that Gamers should be able to turn their time and effort into real value. You should be able to sell your game assets and engine resources to anyone anywhere in the world and third, I guess, right? That game should be owned by the communities that play. Then writes, I think over those three years, people start to really understand the vision. And then right as the market matured, there were catalysts, right? Like the birth of player Aaron, right? Where, you know, when the hourly wage for playing oxy

surpassed in a minimum wage in many, Southeast Asian countries. I think that was, you know, when we first hit maybe product-market fit with everyday people everyday users. See out. And now it's gone. It's gone from an early Community where almost everyone was no, Bacterium in the Theseus, your hobby is too. Now. We're a situation where 50% of our users have never used to do before. 25% don't even have bank accounts. So how do these people that I've never heard of crypto before I have never used metamask. How do they find out

about taxes through friends and family that have had amazing experiences in our in our ecosystem. So while I think that, yes, it is important for us to make user experience much better over time. I think it's also really important for developers to understand what are the core benefits of their products, especially for everyday people. So, so for asking you, right, this combination of being able to play this fun and cute game. While also being able to potentially earn some cryptocurrency, also, learning cryptocurrency, right? This is a space that

people want to learn about right now, but they don't really have Clear ways to kind of get their hands dirty. So I think that's also, that's for that's part of it. So, I asked some people don't have money. I mean, a very large percentage of your community members are from developing countries. So, how is it that they get started in the first place? They have no bank account. They have no money, but you need a couple boxes to start, right? Yeah, so this this is actually a problem that our community

solved for us with the creation of the scholarship system are basically what we've done is the ability to play using a team of oxy's, and the ownership of activities has been separated. So, in order to actually play the game, all you need to do is download the game and scan, a QR code to log in. So, we now have people who are they? They might have a lot of Acts. He's right. Or even organizations, like, the old Guild that have, you know, thousands of teams of axies. I'm there. Then lend them out to people who want to get started. But don't have The Upfront Capital by

basically just giving out the QR code. So I thought that it might happen. I think it was during the pandemic. I was playing Animal Crossing. Tom Nook was making me work really hard to get these. I thought like, why am I doing this for no value? I also looked up like is it possible to sell my bells? And apparently, it was, but like Nintendo is cracking down super hard on it, right. This time. Like that might actually develop but it was, it was amazing when it when it finally came like, 5 months later with minimal

kind of encouragement or facilitation from the team itself. Yeah, I think that's awesome. I think another big question people have in dowse's specialty of dollars. Grow is, how do you manage kind of top-down coordination forces? Like, bought him a coordination, right? So you meant in a little bit about how the community solve some problems to hold scholarship system, which is extremely popular. Tell us a little bit about how you think about top-down coordination versus kind of Bottoms Up coordination, but within the active speaker system, Sure. It isn't. This is

I think a delicate topic, right? I I'm kind of a moderate when it comes to this. I think that you do need right, like a large army, not large, but like I guess very Focus teams of driving certain initiatives within a network or an ecosystem. But I do think that there are a lot of things that are not scalable unless they come from the community, right? So like I think education onboarding maybe like building analytics tools like I think these are things that need to be a support, right? Like helping other people like it, get on board

into the ecosystem desert things that the community has to do. Like I can't really come from Sky Mavis. But I think that in the beginning you do need a team of people that are well, incentivized to basically spend all of their time building out content for the universe. So I think that's the compromise that we made. I think in the long run, it will be impossible for one team to build enough content for hundreds of millions. Hopefully billions of people. So I do. I do think that long-term may be the last piece of the puzzle is making it. So anyone anywhere can

also builds amazing experiences on top of where I pee, but I think that's something that They need to be like a Northstar that we build towards. It can't be something that's done too early. We've seen in the early days. Right? We saw it and a few projects like cryptokitties. For example, they tried to like they are the kitty ever. It's the kitty versus now like this up to the community to add content of that really want no wear it. So I think I think it's a delicate balance. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think the idea that as you build communities, it's not just

about a product or say but also the content around that product comes in different forms and you can have this one of the initial cattle Catalyst, which may be the founding team of the following entity generating that content. But it will Timothy the community taking that over is the thing that we need scales. So, how's about some bottlenecks first, and then we'll talk about how you trying to sell them. Sure, that things are different buckets of scalability, right? First obviously, there was Like data, still hurts, right? And then end and 30 ft. So we, we address

that by basically creating our own evm sidechain. It's called Ronin. And that was actually, one of her big growth Catalyst that got us from 48,000 daily active users in April to 1.7 million. Today Project. Think about, I guess, when you think about scalability right now, but I think because we have now hit this new level. We're not having to think about other types of scalability, right? Like social scalability. Like our Discord is not maxed out at eight

hundred thousand play. What do we do? How do we, how do we continue to have a super tight-knit Community? When, you know, you can't really is very difficult to speak in Discord because there's it's like a flood of message messages, right? So, those, a lot of the tight-knit relationships that we were able to Foster in the early days, and I've been kind of like Bedrock of the community. It's a lot harder. I think at scale to to Foster that. So we have to think very purposely about how to how to, how to keep doing that. I think. Yeah. They're like Discord

Bots, right? Like we're hoping to get our table and integration out this this month. I think that that's, you know, something that will help straight. So there's a way to approach it from Lake, a tools perspective, I guess, but we also were, I guess scaling out for Exemplar Community horizontally, right? Like we now have a Filipino Discord, a Spanish, this word, a Portuguese Discord. I just got your message this morning about now, they're setting up a Indonesian Discord, but I think we also long-term, right? Is like his will just scored be the home for communities for

web3. That's also something that we need to push for an answer on right as well. I'm not entirely sure yet. I think lots of see right through the merger of like forums and governance portals that in that might be that, that might be part of the solution, but it might be, might also just be like, in game chat in some cases as well. So if anyone's building at talk to him, right? He will help you. How much what's the volume that you guys did last year? All-time wear the number one and a few projects in terms of volume

of we've done two billion. I think over just over two billion dollars. I think last month I was about to come on. Okay, that's dope. So, I think one interesting aspect is initially ride as people develop develop products and we have communities kind of around them. It's a lot about Technical scalability and that's been like a narrative for a while. It's not moving to its social stability. Tell us a little bit about how some of the concerns about the community are changing over time. So, one example, is it used to be confined to Discord. Now,

you have millions of people playing your game every day, and that means there's people outside the Discord that matter like governments. Write more about what that looks like as you get larger. New. Boss is going to pick up here, just like, I need game, I guess so recently. I guess so, the government of the Philippines that starts like look into acci. And, you know, they haven't been necessarily very hostile. They're just wondering, like, how, like, how do we talk this thing? Like, should it be taxed excetera? It's cuz it was kind of a surreal

moment. So, I recently had to issue a statement to the Philippines thing that. Like we encourage our players to deal with the laws of their home countries, but I think there's also this element that we are thus digital nation, and we're now officially having to craft relationships and maybe alliances with these, I guess Legacy government's. I'm in some way. So I think Very, very Legacy. I think the other conceptual idea here is that you have new types of stakeholders that pop up. And I think you've you've told me about your

view that you think lots of different stakeholders are important, which I think is, maybe goes counter with some people. Believe number one, number two, that's probably a sequence to stakeholders, right, which is more when that's two questions, but that's for you to figure out which one to answer. Yeah. So there is kind of a, a movement, right? Of scientific community building, right? I'm caught trying to call it Community design, rather than Community Management, new management is very like pass it right? We're dealing with things of managing things are happening to us.

Where's the design is your very purposeful, purposefully kind of Designing. A way for people to understand the vision in a way to understand, how they can contribute in the way for them to be properly incentivized to contribute. So I think that's the way that I look at it. I think. Yeah, it was an accident. We have probably 15 different archetypes of different community members. And contributors each one has different motivations for participation different. Prerequisites, for your participation different ways, to best communicate with them best, engage them, motivate them

and incentivize them. So I think like it is really helpful. I think Peter actually help me with this where you basically map out every single stakeholder in your ecosystem. You can also like make estimates on like how much volume there. They're driving with in your ecosystem. How much of the great lake under the code? They're making his community developers, right? How much of the onboarding that they're doing? So I think. Yeah, it's really important. I think so basically break it down and try to make estimates around these.

I guess these data points, are these metrics around adoption that each user or stakeholder group is driving and then figure out ways to deepen your relationships with them. And so different types of stakeholders. So, within the community, you can kind of bucket certain people into groups. When you think of archetypes, are these only kind of community members? Are they also kind of investors may be Regulators, or like, I can remember then, right? So, from

left to right. There is a PVP, Battlers collectors Scholars scholarship owners. Mark Marketplace Traders like NFC Marketplace Traders, there's access holders, SE SLP Traders SLT holders. Sky, Mavis content, creators content creators can be like divided into Artist Artist Community developers streamers, like, stream Reserve. I guess, I could trust people. YouTube of people. There's Tik Tok ears as well, which is, we're finally starting to see the other content creators, and then there's

another institution dusters. So, I think in order for my target is to get four billion people on this Earth Play foxy. So it if we ever going to hit that, we actually need a large Broad and diverse Coalition of people. It can't be like only community members can't be like, I don't think we can discriminate, like, I think we need to be able to figure out how any single every single type of Person physically can I can find a way to contribute to this network? Especially if we're going to hit 4 billion. Plus people like using

some players that were passionate about like the game, right? But when you talkin about today, bring an Institutional people, it's unlikely, someone in this poor Discord is able to do that. So that's really something that Sky Mavis the company behind asking for energy is kind of catalyzing today. Right? Do you find that you work has shifted from kind of like helping a lot of members initially too kind of doing stuff. It's a bit outside the game or not. Really? Guys, I think.

As we've grown, my, my position personally has become a little bit more. I like, public-facing. I'm trying to figure out how to build intimacy at scale with the community. I guess. Rather than like, in the early days. It was just like talking to people one-on-one in the Discord. Sometimes, right? Having their likes. Very, I don't know. Yeah, very kind of small unscalable conversations. A lot of what I do is late like mass communication. You not doing a lot of writing economy, design launch wrangling

glycol. So it's like, figuring out how to delegate delegate internally in Sky Mavis, but also how to delegate to the community and how to figure out, how if you want to delegate them to something, to community. How can you be? So we got them to do it. Or why would they want to do it? How to use a dial to do then? And when do you not use about to do that? I think I'm really kind of in Spanish mode right now, when it comes to basically using Dallas to incentivize community members. I'm not sure. Like I want to see a bunch

of different models tried. I think maybe the solution is. I mean, different archetypes of contributor probably want to be rewarded in different ways. Right? Some people they just want like the glory and the fame. They don't there. If you try to give them money or tokens. They're going to kind of be insulted, right? It's others are at War mercenary, but they might, it might be because someone made their significant other won't let them contribute unless there's something concrete coming out of it, right? So I think you're third did many different ways to incentivize people and we shouldn't only

rely on like crypto or economic incentives. There's I think there's a lot to learn from open source community. So I've been trying to talk to Community Builders from the open-source world who have been doing this kind of stuff for twenty years without any access to tokens, right? That we can basically use their strategies and then, Like throw, you know, governments tokens until the government token and Senses Into the mix of kinds of, I think this happy Harmony or Union. So yeah, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it then. Very cool.

I mean, it's a bunch of Builders here. Right? So if you had to say what I like, one two, maybe three big problems that people could solve by building something. What would it be? Pat's, I mean, I'm I'm really excited. About, I guess. I think there's going to be an explosion of choices and like governance dashboards and basically how to merge like Community forms and governance Dutch words. I think that I've seen a lot of promising work done in that field. I think like they're going to be big Winners there. That might be like, where, you know, the next kind of range of web, three, social networks,

and coordination tools. Come out of an exciting. That's going to be really important. I think. Project perhaps similar to get coin. That might be like more specific to like specific Dallas or something. There as well. That might just be solved by get quite as well, like making more like white glove services for 4:34 second. I think that's where we're the next phase is coming. I think, I mean, I think there's so much unexplored design space and nephews as well right now, like please like, I don't know if you were just focusing on my

profile pictures because I got stuck. That's where we were spending a lot of money right now, but I think there's so much more design space unexplored. Like I might not even be able to like that. I don't think of these ideas. It's kind of like up to the Next Generation. Anything that you want to say before we wrap up. Yeah, I mean it's it's amazing to be here till it's still super cereal. I remember in 2018 2019 going to conferences and having to explain to every single person that I met what actually

was so yeah, I like thank you. Thanks for coming. This is this is an awesome experience. If you want to get involved in Oxy, I think the door is open and there's a lot of really awesome content online and I feel free to reach out to me as well. I'm G hose underscore. Taxi on Twitter. Thank you, everyone.