Gala Gaming w Jason Brink and Neil Haran | The Edge of Gala

Gala Games is a community uplifting powerhouse defining new frontiers of Web3 entertainment. To understand what this new creation brings to the table, Josh Kriger gets the latest scoop from BitBender Jason Brink and Rep CEO Neil Haran. This sponsored episode is recorded live in downtown LA. It's the beginning of a new series called Edge of Gala, where we explore this unique and vast ecosystem crossing, gaming, music and film. In this conversation, Jason and Neil tell us how Gala Games is simplifying blockchain terminology to make it accessible to everyone, from tech enthusiasts to grandmothers. Learn how they're creating a diverse range of content, including games, music, and film projects, to cater to a broad audience and drive mass adoption. Plus, catch up with the team at Mocaverse in our new special segment, MocaMoment. All these and more in this exciting episode of Edge of NFT!

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Gala Games

This sponsored episode is done in Downtown LA. It's the beginning of a new series we're calling Edge of Gala, where we explore this unique and vast ecosystem crossing gaming, music, and film. I'm joined by Jason Brink and Neil Haran. We'll talk a little bit about these gentlemen and get into what they're doing together.

Jason, AKA BitBender, is the President of Blockchain and boringspeak. Neil Haran is the CEO and Founder of Rep. They're doing a lot of building in the metaverse with Plato Learn, Rawbots, planets, and other fun projects. If you don't know already, Gala Games is a community-uplifting powerhouse defining new frontiers of Web3 entertainment. It's great to have you here in person. Jason, I don't know if we've had an IRL moment in a while.

We haven't. It's been a long time since we've been able to connect face-to-face. It's great to be here in beautiful Los Angeles. I always have a problem with Los Angeles. I grew up in California. Wheels are coming off a little bit, but it is nice to be back here to be hanging out with everybody.

The food scene keeps getting better. It still is an epicenter of creativity and culture across all the different areas of your ecosystem that you've been busy building. What's been going on since we last got together?

There's a lot that's going on now in our space. Gala Games has been pushing the boundaries in everything we've done since day one. Some stuff that's coming up that's important to us is we're in the process of bringing new people onto our L1 GalaChain. This is one of the reasons that Neil and I are here together. We're pushing hard into music and film. We've got game launches that are stacked up throughout the end of 2023 and lots more coming to the platform. A few things are coming to the platform soon. Champions Arena is launching. We've got PokerGo launching in September 2023. We've got Q4 launches for a few different titles. Amazing stuff is coming out. I'm pleased to be part of it.

That's why we wanted to do this series. There are not a lot of companies that are building so much now like you guys. There's a lot to unpack.

It's more than I can personally keep track of. Every time I turn around, we're doing something else that I was unaware of. One of the reasons we wanted to do this with you is to sit down and drill into some of what's going on in the ecosystem.

Hopefully, it's a forcing function for you guys cataloging all this.

It would be nice.

Let's cover some of the games you mentioned. We'll go into more detail and why you guys have come together. Tell us a little bit more about Champions Arena and PokerGo.

Champions Arena is a fully mobile game that is launching. It is a Korean-style RPG battler. It is fun and has extremely high production values. It's a gorgeous game if you haven't had a chance to look at it yet. OneUniverse is our development partner on that in Korea. I have honestly not been this excited about a game in a while. It's worth checking out.

When you said the word fun, I heard the word addictive. You don't know what's going on in your company because you're busy playing Champions Arena.

I wish that that was the case. I've been able to put 1 or 2 hours into Champions Arena. That's all I've been able to put time into it. It is extremely fun. Do you ever play Final Fantasy VII?

I've played Final Fantasy. Not VII.

It has a battle system that is reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII, which is one of my favorite games of all time. It's cool. It's a lot of fun.

What's unique about PokerGo? There have been other poker games out there. It's a fun genre.

One of the things that are unique about PokerGo is that it has a sweepstakes-based system of earning built into it. You come in and play. By playing, you are earning spots in a leaderboard-based sweepstakes with actual Gala-based prizes. That's a cool thing. Do you like watching poker?

I've watched the Final Table. There's a lot on the line. It's entertaining.

PokerGo is the company responsible for all of the global broadcast poker you see, the World Series of Poker, and all of that. They do all of the broadcasting of all of that. For many years, within all of those broadcasts, there have been advertisements for the World Series of Poker application. There is not any longer. There are now advertisements for PokerGo Live from Gala Games. That's something cool. The PokerGo logo is going to be on the felt at the World Series of Poker. You can see some of this stuff on TV.

We talk about what it's going to take for mass adoption, and partnerships like this are happening. It is coming to fruition.

We are getting actual players.

We're talking millions of eyeballs here.

That's something we're excited about. It's a fun poker game. A lot of people are going to enjoy that.

I've gotten to know Neil a little bit. The history of how you guys got together and what you all are building, we should go into. When did you first meet Neil?

I'll give a brief introduction here. I met Neil because my boss, Eric Schiermeyer, who is the Founder of Gala and was one of the cofounders of Zynga, sent me an email that was a forward from Neil. Neil was saying, “We've got this thing. We'd like you to talk about it.” Eric forwards me a lot of these things. If you ever send Eric an email with some inbound request that you're looking at something, it's likely that I'm the one who will go through that and follow up on it. If you don't hear back, it's probably my fault. That's how I met Neil. We were able to get together and start talking about things. We found that we were well aligned. How about you? You tell him a little bit about Rep, Neil.

We were aligned with how well our visions complement each other. I can briefly talk about Rep, the social network.

We'll get into that. You started Rep, when?

Rep was started several months ago. It was done to help our game Rawbots have more engagement and create different kinds of users that could interact with the ecosystem. In Rawbots, you can build robots like Lego. You can explore space. Robot building is complicated. How do we add more variety of different players into that ecosystem? We decided to create a social network. Users can find robot parts in the real world. They can interact with each other by trading robot parts. Maybe they don't want to play the game, but they want to trade robot parts for other types of NFTs or in-game items.

That's going to be exciting as you merge those worlds together to touch on the synergy that you had with Jason and Gala a little bit more in-depth. How do you guys look at the creative process of building games? What's different about adding the blockchain piece?

If I go back to Web2, you think of a social network and Web2. Your name, user ID, or account would be some entry in a database. Whereas in blockchain, all of that stuff is around a different way of thinking, your account, wallet, or wallet address. Everything is around that. Everything is centered around you owning your data. It does not have anything to do with the database anymore. That's a fundamental shift between Web2 and Web3. We're trying to take the best of what was working with Web2 and bring it to a period in which we believe people are ready to own their own data, data privacy, and different ways of thinking about censorship.

What got you excited to work with Gala? They're a juggernaut. They're building a lot of great games. They’re one of the leaders on that side of the space. What was it about the chemistry you felt with your background in gaming?

It is my pivot on gaming. Originally, I was building traditional types of games that you would expect from Xbox and PlayStation. I was interviewed by Eric at Zynga. Eric is the one who offered me my first job in this gaming, where you had to think about user experience and making Zynga stupid simple. The importance of creating stupid simple interfaces that lead to powerful experiences was drilled into me every day of working at Zynga.

Several years later, I didn't have to go into that way of thinking with any of these guys. Eric is the one who was responsible for teaching me many of these ideologies to make things simple. That made me think a certain way for these several years. Everything I was focused on working on building has always been around user experience first. That's primarily what we do.

I was talking to an investor and friend of another company in this space. He was saying he lost his tokens. He doesn't know how to get to them. That might be an indication of why that company is struggling. We overcomplicate things a lot in Web3. Jason, we've talked about this before. One of the other keys to mass adoption is simplicity. That word means different things to different people and can be applied in many different ways. It is about boiling it down to simple.

The thing you always have to ask yourself in this space is when you say simple, do you mean simple for an engineer or my grandmother? A software engineer and my grandmother are going to have different levels of experience. The majority of people who use digital products tend towards my grandmother's end of the spectrum. She can barely use a computer. It's tragic to watch sometimes, but it's that degree of simplicity that we have to design for.

One of the things we see about some social media networks is they have made it quite easy to go there, click on the post button, and say whatever ridiculous thing you want to say. This is interesting because Rep presents a new way to look at social media and experience without making it difficult for people to engage with, which is critical.

An analogy is I was helping my mom with getting on my Netflix account. They give you four ways to do that. You have the QR code, link, and password option. We figured it out. That was an achievement for my mom and me interacting with technology. She's in Boston, and I'm here. That popped into my mind as you're talking because that's how simple it has to be when we're talking about gaming and music. You mentioned this new social network, which you all are building together. Gala Friends is the name of it. It sounds exciting. I would love to dive into what that looks like a little bit more, Neil.

For phase one, the basic social network is going to be what you would already expect from social networks like Twitter.

I don't know what to expect from Twitter.

Users will be able to create posts and interact with each other much in the way you already expect. The other component is the gamification and geocaching component. It's centered around the map and treasure hunts. Being able to find treasure chess can have music, secret messages, or pictures, but it can also have NFTs inside them. Imagine a social network revolving around this treasure hunt component. It can facilitate a vision where all of the various aspects of the Gala ecosystem can be brought together in a seamless way. That's the vision for Gala Friends.

With other social networks, you can get into a situation where people are DMing each other and interacting closely in real-time. There are opportunities to interact statically at different moments. I imagine there'll be a little bit of both in this network where you can get together with your friends and do things, but you can also interact at different times as someone who happens to go to bed earlier.

I wish I could answer that question to the full depth because there's so much being planned. Jason is well aware of some of the cool stuff we're doing in terms of player interaction. Whatever you expect right now from multiplayer player interactions, we're pushing the limit on many of those things. You'll be able to see your friends online, play a Gala game with your friend, and explore treasure hunts or any of the things around geocaching. This higher level of engagement makes these mechanics you'll be able to experience with your buddies online.

Whatever you expect right now from multiplayer player interactions, Gala Games is definitely pushing the limit on many of those things. Click To Tweet

It's a bold decision to build a new social platform at this moment in time. I'm sure it's not one you took lightly, Jason. Why are you building this platform?

We are not the ones building it. Neil is the one building it, which is one of the things I love about it because what it demonstrates is that GalaChain is growing up and is now ready to bring on external developers to connect with people and have other people build on the infrastructure we have created, which is profoundly impactful in ways that people don't yet understand. Pay attention. This is important.

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It still begs the question of why this is one of the early infrastructure projects you wanted to support. It seems a fundamental thing, but it has to be done the right way. What are some of your thoughts on that?

For me, it is the things that are most important. It's funny because we were going to drop the announcement. The morning we were going to drop the announcement that we were partnering and working together, Threads launched that morning. We're like, “Pump the brakes here for a second. I don't feel like getting in the water with Zuckerberg when he's trying a new thing.”

Let's make sure you guys have your own moment.

Let that one slow down for a second, and did that slow down? It is still turgidly circling the bowl, but nobody uses Threads.

I jumped on the first week. We're trying to figure out how much of a presence we need on it. It's a question, but it reminds me a lot of Clubhouse.

The thing with it is it's cool, but Threads only works in connection with Instagram. It's the place you go to get long-form content about avocado toast. It's like the picture you see on Instagram. I want to see this person's long-form content. You go over to Threads. It's this weird, disparate, disconnected experience. It's strange. There has never been a better time to launch a new social media network because Facebook is weird. Few people in our industry, or even in our general age bracket, are heavy Facebook users. My wife uses it for Marketplace to buy kid’s toys.

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I've been locked out of my account for several months, and I don't miss it.

It's where my grandmother posts weird rants about things. Other than that, it's not a thing that most people use. You use it for Marketplace. Maybe that's it. Twitter, the bird app X, has its own unique issues. I’m a big fan. I love it. I use the hell out of it.

It's been good for the industry.

I have a great deal of loyalty to it, but it doesn't do everything. A great example of this is I would use the hell out of space if I could do it for my computer.

They changed that. You are in luck there. This happened a few weeks ago.

Good job, Elon.

Kudos on that one.

There isn't your one-place stop for all of these things. There's a tremendous marketplace for this. That's where Rep comes in because it fills these needs and connects all of these different pieces together in a positive way while giving you data sovereignty and allowing you to control your own data and not be a product.

That's one of the differentiating features between Web2 and Web3. Web1, back in the day, is this weird decentralized thing of a bunch of people running servers on their own. Web2 comes, and you have all of these Web2 companies that come doing the free to host your pictures and post social media content. Nobody pays for Twitter. People do, but that's not to post. Anyone can do these things for free. Nobody pays for Facebook.

Facebook certainly pays the bills. How does Facebook pay the bills? The way that Facebook pays the bills is because, in Web2, you're not using the product. You are the product. That product is using you. Web3 attempts to change this. The question is, how do we take information and concepts from Web2 that are viable, interesting concepts and bring those to Web3, where we take out the bad, keep the good, and continue building in a positive direction?

We're all looking for that. Gaming is such an obvious lubricant for that type of social economy. You mentioned the treasure hunts. It sounds like this is a way for people to organically stumble on new experiences, new games, and things they would do, which is how people like to embrace new content. This is a thought I didn't have until you shared that, but new ideas, brands, and concepts are not shoved in your face, but to naturally decide you like them.

If your friend has a pair of jeans and you see someone else wearing them, you're like, “Those are cool jeans” As opposed to that jeans company saying, “Buy my jeans tomorrow.” It sounds like, in a lot of ways, there's a social layer of eCommerce that's naturally going to be embedded into a product like this. Not because it's eCommerce forward but because that's what people do as humans. They try new and experience new things together.

Primarily, where Rep stems from is trying to make things and discoveries a lot more organic. It's not like I have to tell you about this particular game. You found this NFT in the park on your morning jog. You find this treasure chest, play this little game, and open it up, and there it is. You click it. You found a dinner for two coupon at the beach at a restaurant. You didn't know about this restaurant before, but now you go there. They look at your phone. They have you sit down and do that. It doesn't have to be games.

Life is a game in many aspects. If we start to think about organic interactions with people, we can bring that back into this social platform or network. We're not trying to be like X, Twitter, Threads, or Facebook. What we're trying to do is our own thing. We're trying to bring gamification, improve user engagement, and make this connection between us much more synergistic in that space.

Life is a game in many aspects. Click To Tweet

Jason was talking about the disconnectedness. You're having to shift different apps. You're on Discord, Telegram, and YouTube. Our vision for Rep is to have as many of these experiences in one platform. Everyone is engaging in this platform. While you're trying to share your opinion on something, you can also play a treasure hunt game, an actual mobile game, or all of these things together and still have it within that social network. You don't have to keep bouncing around.

I’m excited to check it out and follow your progress. I'm sure we'll have a lot of updates on what you guys are doing in that area. One of the key aspects of this broader adoption is the vocabulary that we use. We're talking a little bit about that, Jason. Before the interview, you all are thinking about lexicon for a broader audience a little differently these days.

This has been something I've hammered on for close to a decade now in this industry. I've always thought that a lexicon we've used in the blockchain space has been particularly terrible because if you take something like cryptocurrency, it's almost designed to sound scary. What is this? It's cryptocurrency. What do you do with cryptocurrency? Illegal, hidden stuff. That's the narrative, especially at the beginning. It's a bit different now, but if you go back several years ago, you ask people what Bitcoin is, and the response you would've gotten was, “Isn't that the thing that the people buy the drugs with?”

Fundamentally, it's still confusing.

It's a terrible term. It should never have been the term that was chosen. We did not make this any better with the advent of NFTs and nonfungible tokens. That's fun. It does not roll off the time. It has fun in the name, but that's about it. There's a gigantic amount of gradation between something that's nonfungible and a fungible token. They all get called nonfungible tokens because that's what people call them. We look at them as verifiable digital assets.

Your verifiable digital asset is something you're able to, on-chain, verify that you own. It has utility in a game, social media network, and wherever it has utility, but it's not an NFT that is stuffed off to one side in this weird NFT Degen culture. It's a verifiable digital asset that can be anything. It could be anything from real estate, treasure chest, or endgame item to digital asset or verifiable.

Is this naming live now and something you're adopting across all of Gala?

We're looking at changing the way we have this conversation, and this is part of it. The other thing is you'll notice in a lot of the games we've been releasing, look at Dragon Strike or look at Meow Match. We are dialing back mentions of blockchain in general. It's still there, and part of the tech layer, but the average user does not interface with it unless they need to.

Taking that angle is going to massively help with adoption because we have a lot of people that, when they first come into the space, are alarmed to start dealing with some of these concepts like cryptocurrency and NFTs. A digital asset is something they understand. This is a thing that happens on this distributed ledger, which is a blockchain. It's not necessary to describe it that way for the average user coming in from normal land.

There was a reason we evolved the name of NFT LA to Outer Edge LA. I am curious what you say to some of the OGs in the space when they react. Who moved my cheese analogy is applicable here. There are folks in the space who have an appreciation for certain words and concepts we've used over the last several years. I'm sure you guys get feedback on that side of the house. What's your response to that element of the community?

The way that it goes is this. You can always use whatever terminology you want, but the question that you have to ask is, what will the long-term impact be of continuing to exist without mass adoption? If you acknowledge that the name of something is blocking adoption, you have two options. You are clinging to the name and say this name is important, or you modify that name into something else.

You see this all the time globally with brands. My favorite example of this is the Chevy Nova. You might see a Chevy. They haven't made a Chevy Nova in years. Nova means exploding star. It's a cool-sounding thing in English, but if you put it in Spanish Nova, this doesn't go. You can try to sell that in Mexico if you want, but you're not going to do well with it because it's a terrible name for that specific context.

You can take a name like Cryptocurrency and NFT. If you are a cryptographically oriented person, a person in high technology, or an engineer and you're in the software space, these names are fine. If you're a grandmother who wants to play a cat game, that's not going to work. What we have to say is, “Are we going to create an ecosystem dedicated only to those who are in high technology and early adopters? If we're going to do that, let's stick with the names we've got. If we're going to build something inclusive and bring everybody on as users, we need to change some things up.”

That leads to a broader conversation around what culture, philosophies, and tenants you're bringing into these games you're building and the music and film projects you're working on. You did a project with The Walking Dead and another game, The Last Expedition. There is too much going on for me to keep track of. We'll figure it out, but as you're building all these projects, how are you thinking about gameplay and gamification differently to get more folks excited?

Differently than people in this space?

Different in a way that creates broader adoption.

For the last few years, there hasn't been anyone making any actual games. There haven't been any games out there. There have been some DeFi protocols with stickers on, which is cool. It's like the Hot Wheels lunchbox with the stickers that you get on it. It's still not going to be as awesome as an actual game. What we've been doing is building and focusing on building amazing games that are amazing gaming experiences that are fun first, no matter what.

If you look at Last Expedition, it is a fantastic example of this. It's built by 5By5 Studios based in Austin, Texas, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gala Games. It's led by Phil Wattenbarger. He is the guy who was the Project Director on Halo Infinite and the Last Call of Duty multiplayer mods. There are a lot of the same engineers and designers who built Halo Infinite, and the Last Call of Duty are the ones that are building Last Expedition.

It's a AAA first-person, PVPPVE shooter. It is wickedly fun. Whether you give a shit about blockchain or not or care about NFTs or not, it doesn't matter. What matters is that it's a fun game. If you want to get involved in what I refer to as the entrepreneurial metagame, which is where some of the play-to-earn elements start to come in. This is where you can have your own world. You get to place the monsters on that. You could have a potential prize pool for winning your world. You could run your own tournaments. You can do all sorts of things if you want to. That's where blockchain can start to come in and support things, but it's completely optional. You can have fun with it.

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One key unstated component here to your strategy is it's not about targeting that same audience of OG crypto folks. Maybe call it 28 to 35 males. You're releasing a lot of different types of consumable content for different audiences of different age groups. That's the major part of these with all these different projects.

This is why we do things in film and music. Our focus isn't on, “How can we make this look blockchain?” It's on, “How can we take something and make it super blockchain without anyone knowing?” That's where we get the crazy adoption.

Can we touch on the film and music side for a moment? What's going on there? Does that have anything to do with your trip here to LA?

It does. I can't talk much about the music side of things, but I am actively involved, and we've got some interesting stuff popping off over the next few weeks that I'm down here in Los Angeles for, which should be entertaining and interesting. On the film side of things, there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. A few weeks ago, I got back from San Diego Comic-Con, where we had a couple of different panels. We had Ghosts of Ruin, which is an anime series that's being built on Gala Film. They had a panel in Hall H, which is the big hall. It is cool to go in there and see all of the development that has taken place and see some of the trailers. We're doing a bunch of stuff with David Bianchi.

David is a good friend of ours. He is one of the first folks I met in this space several years back.

David is amazing.

Shout out to David and what he's building with RZR. I got a chance to listen to the first live read of RZR.

There's so much going on. It's beautiful to watch it evolve and grow.

We're excited to grow with you. As we're wrapping up this conversation, is there anything else on your roadmap together, Neil, that you wanted to touch on?

We've touched on the greater vision of what the social network is meant to be. It is to help tie things together to make our interactions more meaningful and engaging.

I would like to invite everyone to come join our community to check out what we've got going on. You can join our Discord at GalaGames.chat, and also follow us at @GoGalaGames on all of the places that you might think to follow us and pay special attention because we're doing some cool stuff with Rep. It could give your own little hardcore home in your own social media space. Pay special attention there. There's a lot of cool stuff coming.

There's an Edge of NFT Broadcast Studio in Rep at some point.

I would love there to be an edge of NFT Broadcast Studio in Rep. That would be great.

Where do folks go to learn more about what you're up to with Rep and follow you?

Most of our discussions are happening at the Gala Discord. You can learn there. You can also check us out at Rep.run.

Jason, you've been generous with us in the past and our community with some giveaways. There were many games coming out. Which one are you going to focus on?

Let's make it extra spicy. Should we do that?

I like spicy.

I've got an ancient tier NFT, a verifiable digital asset from Last Expedition. They'll do a giveaway and they'll tell me who to send it to. However, you guys want to handle that on your social media, but I've got something for your community, and I will make sure that it is epically.

Check that out, readers. We'll share more details on our social soon. That's it for this Edge of Gala episode, but I'm looking forward to more to come. As our readers have read, there's a lot to unpack here, going on, and actual launches happening instead of talking. That's fun for a change.

It's nice. It is a busy next few months. Hang in there.

We've reached the outer limit of the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on the starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers. They'll make this journey much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, say something cool, and go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing @EdgeOfNFT. Start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us. Thanks guys for joining me.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Welcome back to our special new reoccurring segment, the Moca Moment. We're catching up with the team at Mocaverse on a monthly basis, given the breadth and depth of the special growing ecosystem. Mocaverse is the Animoca Brands membership NFT collection of 8,888 unique beings, the Mocas. They're building the world's largest Web3 identity pass in culture and entertainment, empowering personal growth, partner project growth, and growth of adoption of Web3 in general. For full disclosure, our parent company, Edge of Company, lies within the Mocaverse ecosystem. This regular segment is sponsored as part of our media partnership.

We'll focus on some exciting updates around Mocaverse with our guests, CryptoCreedo and Mark McGinley. CryptoCreedo is a Project Manager at Animoca Brands, which coordinates with cross-functional teams and oversees lifecycles for various Mocaverse projects. Mark McGinley is an Animoca Brand’s Game Director with a diverse background spanning over a decade of in-game design specializing in system design, crisis, AI, and engagement systems. He contributed to renowned Ubisoft titles like Far Cry Six and Rainbow Six Extraction.

We're excited to focus the conversation around the Mocana Odyssey by diving into the Cosmic Hunt and Moca XP. What is the Cosmic Hunt by Mocaverse? Mocana Odyssey is an immersive social experience that aims to challenge one's skills in achieving a high score in Moca XP and other rewards. Mocana was initially launched in March 2023 on Mocaverse’s play realm, featuring Arc8, a blockchain power gaming platform within the ecosystem. Mocana is taking new heights on August 24th with the launch of Cosmic Hunt. With all that background, how does Mocana manage to challenge an individual's skills in intellect? I'll pass this first one over to you, Mark.

It is in lots of different ways. We've been building up to this for a long time. It's a massive social experiment where we're inspired by big collaborative games. It's an experiment where you have a huge map, and you're digging for treasure. You have limited information. You're digging with your Mocas, and you have some choices. You do share the information with other members of the community. Do you work together or alone? You've got some tools in your arsenal that you can use to help you dig and some key strategic decisions to be made.

I have the opportunity to mint our Mocas, and we're fond of all of them. There were some early decisions we had to make around some of the personality traits that our Moca ended up deciding what type of Mocas they were and some other attributes. I'm curious if some of those early decisions are going to bite me or if they were good decisions. Any alpha for us, Mark?

We love all our Mocas. They're all of our babies. There are no bad decisions. All our Mocas are unique in their own special way. I personally love the Dreamers. That's my favorite tribe.

That is the majority of our Mocas. I have to double-check. I'll look after this segment, but that's awesome. How does this experience intertwine social engagement, skill building, and rewards? Can you get a little bit more specific here in terms of what we're talking about?

I'll let Creedo go into the kinds of things here.

There's going to be a huge map with different hidden information on different plots. Mocas have to work together or individually to reveal information, which will help them to get to the so-called treasures. During the design of the game or this experiment, we're looking to see how far we can stretch decision-making and have some dilemmas when it comes to choices.

From when you are choosing different tools to deciding on the excavated plots, these are all based on decision-making, which has been a common theme within the Mocana Odyssey. Even with the gaming activation, there are two leaderboards. One is the highest score you've ever achieved, and one is the accumulative score.

There are different reward pools. It's down to the player or the Mocas to decide which leaderboard they're going to go for. Do they want to spend more time grinding to get the accumulative score high so they can secure at least some rewards? Are they going in for the big prize by trying to hit the highest score they can ever achieve? Within the Cosmic Hunt, it's down to the Moca to share information to decide on what tools they want and how they're going to suspend their batteries.

The whole thing is a huge experiment that we want to do with our community. The focus is to provide an experience they've never experienced before. This is something that our team, at least me and Mark, think is interesting. We can't wait to see what everyone's reaction and actions are going to be within the experiment.

I feel like this is going to be a major distraction from productivity for me. This sounds like way too much fun, the ways you guys have created this ecosystem. I'm excited. Is there any sense of what the actual rewards could be that you can share at this point?

In terms of rewards, there are going to be NFTs or tokens, but I can't emphasize enough that the whole purpose of this experiment is not for the rewards. Everyone knows it's season one. It's almost like a pilot season. We want to see how far we can stretch instead of focusing on the prize. While you're enjoying the Cosmic Hunt, or even with the Mocana, everyone has their own interpretation of the size of the prize pool, but for us, the prize pool is one of the tools to leverage and encourage people to participate, which is what we're going for. The ultimate goal is to get people to participate and enjoy this experiment together as a community.

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Thanks for elaborating on it. There are a lot of cool things that Mocana has been building with all the different interactions and combos that people and users can interact and creatively use within the game. What was the inspiration behind Mocana? How has it evolved since it launched back in March 2023?

There's a lot of inspiration that we've got from Web2 games or projects. For the whole of Mocana, instead of inspiration, it's more about the ultimate vision and the goal. We know that, as Mocaverse, we're positioned as Animoca Brands' flagship NFT project. One of our goals, which we've repetitively said numerous times throughout, even before launch, is that we want to embody the network effect.

Animoca Brands has over 400 portfolio companies, and it's constantly growing, and I can't even keep up with it. Edge is part of the big family. We want to bring everyone together and create a layer where we can interact, operate, and collaborate in a systematic but also interesting way. We can constantly formulate new experiences for our holders and everyone within the family.

The whole Mocana Odyssey concept came from is to bring all the portfolio companies, even partners, together and forming new and unique experiences that we provide for our community members. We took inspiration from different Web2 companies or games, hence the Cosmic Hunt and having different leaderboards for different Odyssey campaigns.

One of the points that may be worthwhile mentioning is that we started the Odyssey campaign with a one-off activation with Gamey, which we mentioned now, but we've expanded the Odyssey to other criteria with the staking requirements. You are earning XP through staking, which is a form of loyalty, and we want to reward those loyal holders, but also to social, where we have a social quest on Zeely, and also contribution when it comes to voting.

These are all intertwined into the XP system in the future. The goal is the Odyssey won't be with games. It's going to expand to all the different realms we've been talking about. Anyone who reads the book, it's about homecoming, journey, and adventure. We want our community members to explore different projects and other members within the Animoca Brands family, but eventually, the Moca XP is the homecoming part, which brings them all back together within one community.

It's exciting, and I'm honored to be part of it. I’m going to set the date on our calendar. Richard and I will have to have some break time to dive in. I want to talk more about XP, but before we wrap this segment, Mark, I have to ask you one more question. You've been in the gaming world for a long time and played this key role in Animoca Brand’s overall gaming ecosystem. What excites you the most about this particular adaptation of your superpowers? Are there any features you're excited about that we haven't covered yet?

My background is broad. I started out working for an indie studio and graduated from free-to-play. It was a new thing when I was young in the industry. Learning the whole transition of how you monetize content and how the business model changes was interesting and exciting to me. A few years ago, I was watching the play-to-earn space evolve. I was blown away by how similar it was to the free-to-play movement and seeing how some game companies were scared of it and some were embracing it. For me, Animoca was a great fit for that. It was about digital ownership, property rights, and players owning their assets. That's something that we're trying to push forward.

One thing we haven't talked about a lot in terms of our design decisions that influence things at Animoca is we think about NFTs as a store of culture rather than a coin like Ethereum or Bitcoin being a store of value. Culture is important to us. It is something that's not created from thin air. It's something instilled in our communities. All of our design decisions, like the XP system, are a good example. The drives are a great example of how we're trying to build culture. We believe that floor price is a reflection of culture, not necessarily the other way around.

We think about NFTs as historical culture rather astore of value. Culture is not created from thin air. It's something that'sinstilled in our communities. Click To Tweet

People designed for a floor price. We designed for culture, and the floor price follows. The XP system has come from that. We're okay if people want to hold our NFTs. That's fine. They're participating in their own way, but it's a lot more fun if they jump in and be an active part of the community. All the experiences we're looking to build now are ways that we can engage people and get them to experience new things they've not experienced in Web3. We get them to interact with other people in a social way and form this tight-knit community. Mocas are strong, but they're much stronger together. That's the culture we want to instill.

For those of you who are on top of things, we're going to share this information on social, but you can check out the Mocana Cosmic Hunt Launch Hunt Down at AMA on Twitter spaces on August 23rd, 2023. If you're reading this after, that's fine. Don't fret because that recording will be available on Twitter spaces for a couple of weeks. You can check it out after the fact, catch up on everything, and read everyone else's burning questions. Otherwise, Richard, I don't know about you, but I'd love to dive into Moca XP a little bit more.

What is Moca XP? It's the dynamic point system igniting from the heart of Moca NFT holder's engagement as you stake, dive into activation, and spark up social connections, and the power of Moca DAO, your Moca XP surges setting the stage fulfilling rewards and exclusive seizing and perks. Looking at this, how does the Moca XP system effectively capture and incentivize engagement from Moca NFT holders in a way that goes beyond traditional point systems? Creedo, I know you're talking about it a little bit earlier, but I like to hear both your and Mark's deeper dive into this side because this is a unique part of what you're doing.

The whole idea is gamification, which is a word that's been thrown around a lot. For us, it's about how we make things interesting, and everything that we push out has to be something that our team members would personally want to participate in, for example, Cosmic Hunt. I personally and the majority of our team members find it interesting.

Cosmic Hunt is launching at the end of season one because it is a recap of everything that we've learned through the XP system. It is almost as of the finale for season one. If you've earned your XP in the past few months, it's your time to earn it, use it wisely, and however you want to use it within the system. The XP is run time for a long time. We can constantly integrate new experiences and still use the same XP system. Members can compare different values and understand that the XP system is a way to earn additional benefits and a reward for their loyalty and engagement. Mark, is there anything else?

Mark, can you talk a little bit more about the mechanics behind it and how it relates to the Moca DAO?

We've seen a lot of XP systems or soft staking systems where you stake your NFT and endpoints. You can spend your points on stuff. Those are interesting, but they're overdone. There are a lot of projects doing them and not doing creative things with them. We're trying to take it a step further in everything we award XP for. We have a bunch of actions you can do in the ecosystem. Everything that we award XP for is something that has value to the ecosystem. It's something that has value to other players. That's holding and staking your assets or interacting with social, being part of the community, participating in our contests, and participating in a DAO.

We are voting in a DAO. We're using XP to incentivize this because one of our missions at Animoca is to get people to understand the importance of governance in the Web3 space for the future and human rights. We think this is where things will go in terms of population governance. It's baby steps towards that. The first thing is to incentivize people to dip their toes in and make a vote.

If you have a Moca one vote, you come to the DAO. We have this interesting mechanism where the Moca DAO has been delegated a portion of a coin. We're doing votes that reflect the same votes that are going through the coin DAO. The idea is you can vote with your Moca. Depending on the outcome and the Moca DAO, we will vote on their behalf. This is one mechanism. We have different tribes. Each of the tribes has a different personality or theme. Governance is one part of that. We've got creativity, entrepreneurship, and values that we're incentivizing through XP.

It was a lot of fun to moderate one of those debates. One of the winners of the election ended up winning. It was cool to have the opportunity to be part of that process. It's an example of how you all are including all of us in the ecosystem as participants. There's one interesting aspect of all this that we haven't gotten into yet, which is also quite important, which is battery power. We talk about this a lot as a team. It's a marathon, not a sprint. You can only do so much in a day. We had a wildness component to the Outer Edge. It's important to, on all sides of it, encourage people not to binge and spread out their time and energy. How do you see that influencing participant choices and approaches as they navigate the realm of Mocana?

Maybe we need to talk a bit about how the mechanics work in the game because this is one of the more in-depth mechanics. It's an excavation game. You're exploring the map with your XP that you've earned through the staking and other engagements. You'll spend that in the store, the Moca Depot, and you get to pick your tools.

The different tools have different battery capacities. They can dig up different tiers of relics. The different relics have different likelihoods of certain prizes. You have choices to make. Do you go for a tool that has a bigger battery, which allows you more opportunities to dig? Do you go with a tool that has a lower battery, and you have the ability to dig up something more precious? The caveat is if you find it, you are guaranteed to find these rewards. There are the factors of the game that can influence your ability to find things, which is fun and the community. There's a trade-off between battery size versus dig potential.

Do you want to go surgical, or do you want to take the chainsaw out?

Chainsaw was one of the early designs for it all.

I realized that you can't dig with a chainsaw.

I'm sure someone could figure out a way to do that, but that's fun. I’m excited to dig into these tools. That was an intentional pun because we're talking a lot about digging in this episode.

It is one big whole experiment. We'll stay agile. We have different precautions, seeing different patterns of behavior to adjust the game or the Cosmic Hunts. We're excited to see how people react.

Not everything is revealed on day one. That's an interesting factor.

One thing that we talked about at the beginning and was shared at Outer Edge is that there is an IRL component to Mocaverse. The power of Web3 is connecting both digitally and in real life. Richard and I are hitting the road soon. We'll be in South Korea and Singapore. Rumor has it. We're going to be able to meet some of the Moca family in Singapore at TOKEN2049.

The power of Web3 is connecting both digitally and in real life. Click To Tweet

We have an official side event that's going to be hosted by Mocaverse, Animoca Brands, and the Sandbox. We'll also have some rolling events consisting of VIP networking Mocaverse after-party. And some exclusive events to meet and mingle with the best players in the Web3 and NFT industry. We're also going to be introducing something quite interesting that we'll be working on in the future at the events. If you can make it, I recommend heading over and taking part in the events.

That's a wrap for this segment. We appreciate you all spending a little bit of time with us during this busy pre-launch time. We know how intense these times can be. If you could share with folks where they can learn more about yourselves and keep in touch with what's going on in Mocaverse. If you don't have a Moca yet, this might be the right time to pick one up on the floor.

You can tune into Mocaverse.xyz. It is the website to see all things Moca.

It’s always a good time to pick up a Moca. If you do it fast enough, you can maybe join the Cosmic Hunts.

If you want to track what's going on with Mocaverse on Twitter, that's going to be @MocaverseNFT on Twitter. Thanks, everyone, for joining us, and we'll talk soon.

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Important Links

• Rep
• Gala Games
• Champions Arena
• PokerGo
• OneUniverse
• 5By5 Studios
• GalaGames.chat - Discord
• @GoGalaGames - Twitter
• Spotify - Edge Of NFT
• iTunes - Edge Of NFT
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• Mocaverse
• Animoca Brands
• Edge of Company
• CryptoCreedo - Twitter
• Mark McGinley - LinkedIn
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