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In this episode of the Edge of NFT, we're joined by Ben Charbit, co-founder of AI Entertainment and a special council member of Opel. Discover the future of Web3 and high-quality gaming on the Bitcoin blockchain, as Ben takes us on a journey through the vision and projects of Opel. Gain insights into the growing prominence of NFTs on Bitcoin, the potential for immersive experiences, and the decentralized approach of the Opal Foundation. Join us to explore the intersection of ordinals, runes, and gaming within the Bitcoin ecosystem, and learn about the upcoming release of AI Beyond, a triple-A game on Bitcoin!
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Key Topics Covered:
- NFTs on Bitcoin: A game-changer for the blockchain space, pushing Bitcoin to the forefront of the NFT market. Bitcoin secures a leading role in the NFT space, potentially shifting focus from other ecosystems to the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Opal Foundation and Web 3 Development: Fostering decentralized projects on Bitcoin through shared governance and a commitment to decentralization. The Opal Foundation is dedicated to supporting Web 3 projects on Bitcoin through shared governance and decentralized network effects.
- The Promise of AI Beyond: A triple-A game integrating NFTs on Bitcoin with the Opal protocol, set to offer high-quality gaming experiences. AI Beyond introduces high-quality gaming experiences on the Bitcoin blockchain, incorporating NFTs through the Opal protocol.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- Opal aims to bring cocreation to a new level and unlock the full potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem. We're talking about state-of-the-art protocols that offer immersive experiences while being interconnected with the real-world value of Bitcoin." - Ben Charbit [15:42]
- "The beauty of the blockchain and NFT space is its accessibility and openness. It's crucial for mass adoption that this space remains inclusive and welcoming to everyone." - Kriger [22:10}
- We've chosen to focus 100% of our operations on Bitcoin due to its large ecosystem, brand value, and future potential with ETFs. Bitcoin's decentralization and safety make it the ideal platform for our vision of a virtual world connected through meaningful social and economic experiences." – Ben Charbit [35:27]
For the full transcript, see further below.
People and Resources Mentioned:
- Benjamin Charbitb LinkedIn
- Darewise Entertainment LinkedIn
- Darewise Website
- Opal Website
- Animoca Brands Website
- Ordinals Website
- Magic Eden Website
- Pixelynx Website
- Maincard.io Website
- AI Beyond Website
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About Our Guest:
- Bio: Ben Charbit is a game developer who originally worked on Assassin's Creed at Ubisoft. Along with his team, he was drawn to the idea of creating new worlds in the MMO genre, which they referred to as the metaverse or metaverses. Their goal was to build immersive, multi-functional worlds where players could not only play, but also receive an education, have a social life, and even earn revenue. This vision led them to delve into the world of NFTs and virtual economies, marking a new chapter in their careers.
- Website: Darewise
- Twitter: @Ben_Charbit, @Darewise
- LinkedIn: Benjamin Charbitb
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Full Episode Transcript:
Ben Charbit [00:00:01]:
Hi. This is Ben Charvin, co-founder of Of Entertainment and special council member of Opel, focused on advancing gaming and other technologies across the Bitcoin ecosystem. You're tuned into the Edge of NFT to show advancing the world's understanding of the coolest project and initiatives in the blockchain space. Keep listening.
Richard Carthon [00:00:23]:
Hey, WEBthD curious listeners. Stay tuned for today's episode to learn how Animoca Brands' acquisition of Darewise has impacted their journey.
Kriger [00:00:30]:
And find out what possibilities integrating the Bitcoin ecosystem and gaming brings to the table.
Richard Carthon [00:00:36]:
And how Opal, Special's counsel, is bringing co-creation to a whole new level to unlock the full potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Kriger [00:00:43]:
All this and more on this episode of Edge of NFT. Cue the intro.
Ad Read / Disclaimer [00:00:50]:
Welcome to the Edge of NFT, the podcast that brings you the top NFT% of web 3 today and what will stand the test of time. We explore the nuts and bolts of the business side and also the human element about web 3 is changing the way we interact with the things we love. This podcast is for the dreamers, disruptors, and doers who are pumped about this ecosystem and driving where it goes next.
Kriger [00:01:17]:
AI Entertainment is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands as a cutting edge tech company focused on building the future of the metaverse on the Bitcoin blockchain, And Opal aspires to be the state of the art Bitcoin ecosystem protocol crafted to provide immersive experiences across DeFi, gaming, technology, education, and more, all interconnected with the real world value of Bitcoin. Welcome to the show, Ben.
Ben Charbit [00:01:40]:
Thank you for having me. Happy to be back.
Kriger [00:01:43]:
Yeah. It's great to have you here, and it's been great working with you at. And then we saw each other in Hong Kong and Lisbon. Clearly, we both have clones of ourselves throughout the whole world.
Ben Charbit [00:01:55]:
Well, you know, it's part of the game to travel around, connect with the community, preach the great word, and for us, of course, it's been about the second breath or the new breath of Bitcoin since 2023. And, it's a lot of travel, but I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't change it for anything. I've been very much enjoying it.
Kriger [00:02:20]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's a little easier to get around from Europe than from LA. I've been taking a fair share of 18, 20 hour flights, but I've gotten used to it. At any rate, like, I wanna mention to our audience, this is a particularly special media partnership, because Edge Josh has decided to participate in the Bluff token presale, something we don't always do, but we're really excited about what's going on here and really wanna dive into some of your recent, collaborations and and what you've been cooking up. Before we go there, Ben, just to recap for those that haven't seen our past episodes with you, could you kind of share a little bit more about Darewise's journey and the significance of its acquisition by Animoca Brands? Like, how is that influencing the future of the projects that you're working on?
Ben Charbit [00:03:12]:
It's actually great to be back because so much has happened since we last spoke. So, originally, you know, we all met back at NFT Ubisoft. Most of us actually used to work on Assassin's Creed. And, I think the original driver was that we really wanted to take part in this new chapter of the MMO genre, which, back NFT, a lot of us used to call the metaverse or metaverses. The idea was to build those new types of worlds where you would get to do more than playing. You would opt of course, you would play. But in this world, you might probably get an education, have a very rich, social, existence. You would earn some revenue.
Ben Charbit [00:04:03]:
So that was really the promise of the metaverse. And, you know, we're talking about this. Maybe I think it was in 2022 when we spoke. But, of course, the market was a little bit chaotic, and I think a lot of companies, you know, question this model. Not so much because we don't believe that this is a very reliable promise, but more because, of course, it will take a long time to get there. And when we were all thinking that we were building the metaverse, now we're AI we all understand. I think that we're building chapters or destinations within the metaverse, which is an open ecosystem that no one can ever own. You know? And NFT, of course, Edge Of is a big participant. So from that original vision, we had a very, wow moment, early NFT.
Ben Charbit [00:04:55]:
Kind of an epiphany NFT, we really encountered and decided to deep dive into the ordinals movement. So just, if I can take a little bit of a few minutes to remember what we're talking about here, January NFT. A great guy, great mind, Kelley Rodemar, actually back also from California, built and published the original theory and built the original protocol. With this, he was able to create this theory where every sat within Bitcoin would be numbered, and some sats would have a different rarity level than some others, giving different values to different sats. The first one of each block would be, you know, more, more valuable than any random set within a block. So that was the first thing. The second thing was the ordinals protocol that would make it possible to inscribe data on these sets. So that gave birth to to very to very simplify AI, NFTs on Bitcoin, which are basically digital artifacts inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Kriger [00:06:12]:
And and and the beauty of it is the immutable nature. Right? Because fundamentally, when NFT of the major critiques of NFTs when they came out is, ultimately, they're still tied to some kind of storage matter. And Kelley. You know, and if they turn out the lights, the NFTs disappear, where if it's on Bitcoin, that can't happen.
Ben Charbit [00:06:41]:
That's exactly this. The reason is because on Ethereum, you're basically holding the property you're the owner of a registry on a database that says you own that. But that is an IPFS link. So, basically, it points out to this IPFS where the data is actually stored, which is obviously going to be on a centralized server. It could be on AWS, on Microsoft Azure, whatever. With ordeals, it's very different. 100% of the data is stored on a chain. So if, you know, god forbid, there's a nuclear war and we shut down every service tomorrow, but we have 2 people that are able to run Bitcoin nodes and recreate the network, you know, which only takes a few nodes, then your data is there forever.
Ben Charbit [00:07:32]:
It's And they're
Kriger [00:07:32]:
gonna they're gonna generate a lot of Bitcoin if it's only 2 people running the nodes. That would be a good gig.
Ben Charbit [00:07:38]:
Well, you know, remember that 99% of all the Bitcoins, have been, have already been minted, mined now by buying now. So the limit of the remaining supply to mined is actually pretty limited. Pretty low.
Kriger [00:07:56]:
So you have AI a bit, yeah. So we have this moment and then sort of that creates an epiphany for you.
Ben Charbit [00:08:02]:
Yeah. So exactly. To go back to the to the to the schedule, January, Casey publishes this. February Kelley picks up. Big momentum around it. They've made it. Boom. Massive crash.
Ben Charbit [00:08:16]:
Done. Ordinals are dead. This is the time that we historians will call one day, ordinals are dead. Because people were just saying I'm publishing this on NFT Twitter, ordinals are dead. This is kind of the moment where we really decided to pay more attention to it. And Kelley everybody was saying that Oreo's were dead, for us, it really, you know, turned up on this light bulb of, like, hold on. This means we can actually have utility on Bitcoin. And that for us was a game changing moment because having utility on Bitcoin, even though, to be honest, at AI, the utility was limited, it was only to be a member of a community because you would be holding one of these assets.
Ben Charbit [00:09:04]:
But that for us meant we have the biggest ecosystem because in value, of course, Bitcoin was already 3 times bigger than Ethereum. We have the biggest brand. Probably the biggest, the brightest future because the ETFs are about to happen. We know. We don't know when, but we know it will be a reality at some point. From a regulation standpoint, the SEC is going witch hunting after every other ecosystem but Bitcoin because it's the most decentralized. It's truly decentralized. And, of course, it's the safest chain that has never ever been compromised.
Ben Charbit [00:09:41]:
So when you start lining up all of these factors, for us, it was AI, why are we even doing anything Edge, anything anywhere else? And we decided to steer 100% of our operations to Bitcoin. Even though, to be honest, back at the day, back at back at the day, it was, it was a little bit reckless because there was close to 0 infrastructure. But meeting with the community and understanding what was in development was very, very enthusiastic, you know, was giving us a very strong feeling that something major was about to happen. And I think now, you know, the rest is history.
Richard Carthon [00:10:22]:
It is. And and and, actually, I wanna jump in on that real quick because, like, I think there's a lot of synergistic things that were happening around this time. So, obviously, you're bringing in your experience working NFT Ubisoft working on one of my favorite games of all time, Assassin's Creed, and figuring out, of course, one of the biggest dilemmas in web 3 gaming is, of course, focusing on games that people just wanna play. Forget all everything else built behind it, but, like, how do we make that? And then the things that and it had real utility, but then you're also like, okay. There's this thing happening on Bitcoin. So here's the synergistic moment of blending those 2 together. So, like, let's just dive into the concept of, like, player owned economies and digital societies and, like, how did Darewise go about implementing these ideas while integrating it into the Bitcoin ecosystem?
Ben Charbit [00:11:05]:
You know, it's obviously something that will take years to really fully be expressed. I think we all have grand plans, grand visions. And to be honest, I think the the past few years have really significantly humbled us by by breaking down by not really challenging the overall vision, but rather forcing us to break it down into several milestones that we need to accomplish to event to NFT to to get there, you know, in a in a reasonable, time frame without just shooting unreasonably high expectation. And it's a little bit AI, you know, you see you look at the, you know, the Everest mountain and maybe you just don't start looking AI looking at the top, at the peak, and you think about the next step and how you get there and what is going to be your critical path. That's really how we did because AI beyond has this insane vision of really providing you with the opportunity to live a second existence in a in a, I would say, in a fantasy world, not, you know, not fantasy in the world in the in the heroic fantasy mean, but more something that you could fantasize about. So here it's in space, on a new on an alien planet, or you participate in this journey to create a new society over there. But, of course, before we touch that dream, we have to deliver a really compelling gaming experience. And I think this is when rather than really shooting for this massive range of, and massive spectrum of experience, we decided to refocus and be like, okay.
Ben Charbit [00:12:50]:
Let's build the first action game, which really takes the players on the world within this world, on Dolos, on this planet. And then we get to the second stage, which is about settling on the planet. And then we get to the 3rd stage, which will be about, like, developing, sophisticating your existence over there. So that's really how we envision this. And now the connection with Bitcoin AI kind of has really come very naturally because if we think about it, the fact that this second life will be a significant part of your life, which we believe. You know, I'm I'm I'm one of these guys who kinda grew up partly online, partly offline, playing back NFT. MMOs AI World of Warcraft, where I built some crazy friendships, and it was a big part of my life. I believe that this can really have a significant portion of your existence, where indeed this time you are going to generate revenue.
Ben Charbit [00:13:49]:
You are going to create, like, a meaningful social life where you are going to get NFT and education. But then when we think about all this and then it starts to sound more like the metaverse, You know, to me, the connection with Bitcoin is very natural because Bitcoin is the digital goal. You know? And ordinals are kind of turning this digital gold storage area into a digital Janney for your digit for your second existence.
Kriger [00:14:19]:
I I love that concept mainly because we use Canva a lot in our company. So, I was skeptical about Canva. But then the more we got into it, the more I was like, ah, this is Oh,
Ben Charbit [00:14:31]:
I'm all about it. I only use this. I forced the whole team to drop PowerPoint and to start working on Canva for everything.
Kriger [00:14:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. We're Canva Janney, and they are not a sponsor. They should be Canva, if you're listening.
Richard Carthon [00:14:44]:
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Kriger [00:15:40]:
Now what you mentioned, Ben, sort of begs the question to me around the intersection of ORNL and RUINS, particularly around gaming in the gaming industry. Obviously, Animoca Brands, we're also a Portco company, and we're sort of an outlier. Most of the portfolio is gaming. AI is a gaming company. How do ordinals and runes relate to the gaming industry?
Ben Charbit [00:16:08]:
Oh, yeah. Of course, it's not the, it's not the most obvious connection at first because people think of Bitcoin as a very slow and expensive bit block chain, and rightfully so. This is the, you know, this is the compromise that you have to accept, when you want a high level of security and a high level of decentralization. Now Bitcoin is getting redefined as we speak. You know, from Bitcoin to Blockchain and Bitcoin token, we're now kind of talking about Bitcoin, the ecosystem. And the ecosystem has within its umbrella a lot of new services, a lot of new technologies, a lot of new protocols, and, of course, layer 2. And these layer 2s are providing a solution to the lack of scalability, the need for programmability, that we're both missing from the original Bitcoin main layer, value per, you know, pro sort of, like, offer that we had so far. So I think when we are right now, people are kind of trying to connect the dots here.
Ben Charbit [00:17:16]:
But if I can remind you, we're on June 24. Ordinals were really launched in February NFT. So it's slightly more than a year, which is ridiculous, you know, in terms of how long this whole thing has been running. And within a year, NFTs on Bitcoin became much bigger than NFTs on any other ecosystem, including Ethereum, including Solana. You know, thanks to this, Magic Eden went from being the 3rd marketplace to the 1st marketplace today before you know, in being more, you know, AI you see more trading and more volume on its platform than Blur than OpenSea. So now put yourself, you know, fast forward in 1 year or in 2 years NFT all of these l twos are now fully operational running, providing block time that is closer to a second when the Bitcoin block time is 10 minutes. And now you can see NFT you can start wondering, why will people be building anywhere else than on Bitcoin? What if they can basically have the same level of service on Bitcoin that they can have anywhere on Edge? But this time, there is over $1,000,000,000,000 of liquidity that people are sitting on. So, you know, I think I'm, I'm obviously Kelley bullish on Bitcoin, and I am being being supportive of that big statement right now in the space that people say that Ethereum was the was the was the test NFT, was it proof of concept, and that Bitcoin is now learning from all of of to take over.
Kriger [00:19:00]:
Yeah. So let's pontificate for a moment. I I I hear what you're saying. I mean, there's a mass amount of value there, and, you know, it's the godfather of the blockchain industry. So do you envision, like, ordinals as sort of sort of AI what wax did with skins and games, you know, which kick off the NFT movement where you're playing Assassin's Creed and you've minted your ordinal skin in the game one day, and and do runes become in game currencies? Like,
Ben Charbit [00:19:43]:
like, is that
Kriger [00:19:44]:
Is this where I am far off here? Is this, like, crazy?
Ben Charbit [00:19:47]:
You're not you're not in we're delivering this this year already. So AI beyond will be out in 2024. It will be the 1st triple A game to come out on Bitcoin, the 1st MMO game to come out on Bitcoin. And to be honest, I think it will be their 1st game of this level of quality to ever come out on any web 3 because AI is super excited about it. And, of course, or within AI beyond, your assets, your in game, items that can be, you know, your weapon, your apparel, some consumables. All of these will be ordinals. And the token that you'll be spending in the game or earning the game is called Bluff, and this is the token of the OPAL protocol. Now it's not a token that we're that we launched to be dedicated to AI Beyond.
Ben Charbit [00:20:39]:
It's just that Life Beyond is adopting this, the token of the Opal protocol, which is the protocol for what's here on Bitcoin. I'm sure we're gonna talk about it.
Richard Carthon [00:20:47]:
And I wanna spend a little bit of time on that. So AI like how you're, you're giving us the backstory of basically how we got here today, which is building these amazing, triple A level games on top of Bitcoin and then having the ecosystems put in place to support all the different elements that would make this game as awesome as it could be. So, obviously, creating the Opal Foundation was a very strategic move that you made. Of, I don't wanna say similar in the way that Magic Eden made this really big move to invest in the future of where Bitcoin was going, and it and it panned out in a big way. Obviously, what you're doing with Opal, you're seeing that vision as well. So, you know, tell us a little bit more about the Opal Foundation and then how it's using, your decentralized ecosystem protocol that has the BLIF token and and, like, talking us through, like, the different roles within the Opal Foundation.
Ben Charbit [00:21:44]:
Yeah. So Opal is obviously a pretty complex, you know, proposal, but, because it has several, several pillars that it's built on. The first one is that we believe that Bitcoin is ready for Web 3. And that, anything that we could do to facilitate the development of Web 3 on Bitcoin, was kind of our overall mission. So when we started to really pivot to the web to Bitcoin and we wanted to have an impact over there. We were really because we were genuinely loving this space, and everyone was trying to work together. There was absolutely 0 p v p. So different from what NFT we experienced on this theorem, you know, when everyone was trying to be super opportunistic.
Ben Charbit [00:22:33]:
The Bitcoin ordinal space was completely different, extremely welcoming, really, like, paying forward, you know, working together. I remember meeting Jan from X Verse and, you know, at the very beginning, Josh, we started to just hang out together and talk about everything, and then one thing led to another on how we Janney collaborated. And the story is really that the first play for us was, okay, we're, obviously, we're Adecco Brands. We have an extensive network of companies. A lot of companies will be willing to launch and they operate on Bitcoin at some point. What if we create a protocol that really makes it easier for all of these projects to launch? And rather than create a new like, several new tokens, what if we have one token that really, maximizes utility over time because all of these projects can start bringing their utility to a common, you know, a common operation, which takes the form of the OPAL protocol. So that was really the idea here. Like, rather than each AI to push our own token and push our own Ethan, what if we build together? You know? And because it's Bitcoin here, the ethos is, of course, about decentralization and shared network effect, you know, which is the essence of Bitcoin.
Ben Charbit [00:23:59]:
It doesn't belong to anyone, and it's the fact that we're all operating on it. You know, that either we're transferring value, storing value, and that miners are running this and securing the network through their operations. This is the kind of teamwork that makes it so valuable. This is a definition of the shared network effect. So what if we can create a protocol that Kelley emphasizes but also makes it so valuable for every builder? Whereas as a builder, member of this network, if I create value for the network, I get rewarded through several, I would say in multiple capacities, but, of course, in one which is through a token reward. And that is how we created the idea of the OPAL protocol, the BLIF token, and the proof of a valuable work NFT mechanism that will reward the positive contribution of each one of its members. Thanks to a shared governance, thanks to a shared treasury and ecosystem fund, and all of this being fully, fully decentralized. So the thing to really understand is that while there was, of course, one of their first brains be you know, behind it, we absolutely do not run it today.
Ben Charbit [00:25:22]:
It's fully NFT. And when the token will be out very soon now, you'll see a fully decentralized governance. We already announced the special counsel with Domo, the creator of BRC 20, Yatsuru from Animoca Brands, Leo Walt, the the CEO of the Bitcoin ETF, Valkyrie, David Bailey from Bitcoin Magazine, Ervila AI Horizon Labs. All of these are kind of their, you know, the gatekeepers or their guarantors that the decentralization is respected.
Kriger [00:25:56]:
Yeah. It's great stuff. And, obviously, it's for all the reasons you mentioned that we decided to, you know, be early supporters of the Bluff sort of token economy. It just makes NFT, you know, having built an ecosystem of our own through the combination of digital content and real world events. And, as members of a lot of ecosystems, things can get pretty fragmented at times. And and, having that sort of unified sort of, standard of of how do we onboard everyone, You know, we've seen what the success of Mokkaverse has been with their with their, comedian where they're able to do a token to sort of unite sort of the portfolio and all those projects. Having a unification standard around, the Bitcoin economy to me is a no brainer. There's a related question I have for you, though, which is around how do we get all that how do we tap into all those Bitcoiners, that, you know, are part of the native current of Bitcoin economy? And they're a little trepidated about all this new stuff.
Kriger [00:27:14]:
Some of them are. They're AI you know, it's AI a little bit of who moved my cheese sort of syndrome there. But how do we give them access to content experiences outside the Bitcoin ecosystem that might actually make them more excited? It's like, you know, you have your platinum American Express card. It's not that you can't use it at different places, but wait. Now you can.
Ben Charbit [00:27:39]:
It's exactly that. You know, they're. I think we have to really understand and accept that Bitcoiners are not to they're not similar to crypto users from other ecosystems. Bitcoiners, they really love Bitcoin, and they believe that every other chain was kind of a scam, and every other token was a shitcoin. You know, that was the real strong Bitcoin culture for a long time. There was also another very strong assumption that was that, you know, Bitcoiners just wanna sit on their Bitcoin because they value it as gold, and this is just a storage value. And so they absolutely don't wanna spend it. Well, guess what? We're partially wrong here because we saw that, right, with the ordinals. Over AI 500,000,000 of dollars in fees were generated to the miners.
Ben Charbit [00:28:37]:
So a lot of people use NFT Bitcoins, in order to trade either ordinals or BRC 20, which was the first, kind of token standard for fungible tokens on Bitcoin. One thing that remains very important and still very true is that Bitcoiners don't really like to move their assets to another chain. You have to understand that this is also related to the current architecture of Bitcoin. If you're a Bitcoiner and what you like about Bitcoin is the securities, that it's very fully decentralized, right now, the only two ways that you have to transfer your assets into another ecosystem, let's say on Solana or on Ethereum, is either to go through a centralized exchange or to go through bridges that are not trustless. Because Bitcoin is lacking a certain level of programmability that makes Kelley impossible to trustlessly connect it to another ecosystem. So when you're in this position, then, of course, Bitcoiners don't really wanna go through these two options to eventually be able to enjoy the existing web three experiences that are already running on other, on other chains. But with OPAL, we're actually solving this problem. Like, we are going to do it day 1 with Pixel Links on Ethereum and their amazing, Black Mirror experience of with a AI tap, 250,000 educational games running on BNB is because these these companies are part of their, the Opel ecosystem or part of the Opel network and will support Bitcoin wallets and payments in Bluff token, which is the token of the Opal protocol Kelley on their platform.
Ben Charbit [00:30:37]:
So if you're a Bitcoin holder and you wanna enjoy these experiences, AI you don't have now to move your Bitcoin to Ethereum, get Ethereum, or even another token over there and then spend it. You just swap your Bitcoin for the Bluff token, which will be available as BRC NFT and as a RUNE token, and that you will just be able to start, you know, spending and enjoying the content that is accessible through this. So we're kinda creating these bridges between Bitcoin and other ecosystems. But rather than doing it from a technical standpoint, we're mostly leveraging our ability to connect companies because, again, we are the representative of Animoca Brands within the Bitcoin world. And so we're facilitating these close to 600 companies now within the Animoca brand portfolio and Animoca Ventures that have the NFT to bring Bitcoiners to their services and their product. And, of course, you know, who doesn't wanna have Bitcoiners today NFT, you know, it's there that it's basically the biggest liquidity.
Richard Carthon [00:31:52]:
It you're you're bringing up a a really awesome point, man, which is we've now gone to a lot of events for the first half of this year, and one of the largest sentiments that consistently comes up is the Bitcoin ecosystem and figuring out how to get more involved, whether that's in Bitcoin layer twos, whether that's in ordinals, runes, etcetera. People are paying attention. And it sounds like in a lot of ways, with what you're doing between, Opel and and AI, You're you're you're looking to be that bridge. And you just mentioned one of the partnerships with Pixel Links and how you're doing that and having the entire ecosystem work to make that a seamless experience. What if you are able to speak on some of the other partnerships and other things that you're facilitating between, you know, Opal, AI, etcetera, and then blending the 2 together? Are there other examples that you potentially can share with us?
Ben Charbit [00:32:42]:
Yeah. We're very lucky because we, we're we we we brought together 12 Genesys members. They are the members that for 12 months will be running the proof of a valuable work consensus mechanism. But we have already expanded the size of the network. And now I think we're at 17 companies now. We already announced a few others. We announced BitBoy recently. So we're doing a very good balance, a very good mix between companies that are already operating on other ecosystems, mostly Ethereum or Solana, and companies that are building Bitcoin native experiences.
Ben Charbit [00:33:22]:
And I'm very happy that we maintained this balance. All of these companies so we can talk about Xperts, we can talk about Magic Eden, we can talk about AI Labs. You know, they're all providing a value, a dedicated value, to the network. So something that you cannot have if you're not part of Oracle. X Verse will be building additional UX on the Uverse app, dedicated for the BLIF token. They will provide a staking mechanism for the BLIF token. So straight from your X Verse wallet, you'll be able to stake your token and collect Richard. Magic NFT will create dedicated services for the collections that want to join OPAL and want to launch on Magic Eden.
Ben Charbit [00:34:10]:
And it goes on and on and on. And, of course, this is how their proof of valuable work is measured by the consensus. What the, the cons what the consortium does through this decentralized consensus is monitoring all of these companies, every member of the of the Opel network, and evaluating if these companies have a net positive contribution or a net negative. Are they contributing, or are they extracting value? And if they're contributing, they're earning a token reward. If they're extracting more than they're contributing, they get a NFT. Once where some of the token that they are staked that they staked in order to be a member is actually captured and pushed to the ecosystem fund that is used, again to either pay the token reward or fund new projects. We'll announce venture investment vehicles, actually in partnership with other great companies that are very famous out there. So we have so many that we're going to keep unveiling, in the next few weeks and then, also, over the next few months where Opal is really becoming a platform that is dedicated to the growth of Web 3 on Bitcoin.
Ben Charbit [00:35:27]:
And, of course, Web 3 is key to the adoption of Bitcoin. You know, we need more use cases, and this is really what we're trying to do to facilitate this. And maybe one last thing to mention is that this is completely permissionless. Again, remember, you know, OPOL is not the property of a company. OPOL is a fully decentralized protocol that is completely governed by its members. The blip being the governance token. But what, will and so one of the, kind of a logical conclusion of this is that it's permissionless. You know, there are NFT of rules that are exposed in the paper, which is that basically to be a member, you need to stake a certain quantity of token to be able to enter the Carthon.
Ben Charbit [00:36:13]:
And that's it. There is no form of gatekeeping that is being operated by a company or members to, onboard comp projects to join OPAL.
Kriger [00:36:27]:
Ben, that's some really exciting stuff, man. I really appreciate you breaking down what Opal's all about for folks that are interested in sort of getting involved. And, you know, clearly, there's a lot to unpack there and a lot of exciting stuff coming up. I wanted to take a moment though to, you know, get a little bit more meta with you. You're sort of super absorbed in what's going on with ordinals and runes. You know, what are some of your favorite communities and projects that
Ben Charbit [00:37:01]:
I'll You can't ask me this.
Kriger [00:37:04]:
What are some of the projects that you think people should take a peek at? Are you an epic, epic, epic, epic guy? What, what , what should we be looking for in AI?
Ben Charbit [00:37:15]:
I mean, listen. There are some that are really close to my heart. Of course, the first one that I can think of is a dog, you know, and the token launched. I would say it was launched by Leonidas, but he would probably be mad at me for saying it this way because it's truly such a unique project because it's truly a community project. The story of Doug and the and the and and, the Runestone at first, you know, is crazy. You know? It's it's how, you know
Kriger [00:37:50]:
I met the creator of the Runestone, by the way. I think you did as Kelley, Leo and Leo? Saw the first, like, sculpture version
Ben Charbit [00:38:00]:
of the road. The French the French artist?
Kriger [00:38:02]:
Yeah. Yeah. Super cool dude.
Ben Charbit [00:38:04]:
Yeah. He's amazing. So, you know, happy he's Parisian like me. So, of course, I'm very happy to see the French for the French community being so well represented. But AI, it's fantastic what happened. You know, it started with this AI. Leonidas had this amazing idea of, you know, let's collaborate. Let's launch a truly community owned, Rune token.
Ben Charbit [00:38:30]:
And before this, it started with this ordinal selection, the Rune, Where, the runestone where Leo really wanted to reward the early adopters and be like, you guys were here from the beginning. And so, you know, this should be a token for you that you were there. And, you know, it's a meme coin, so there's no utility at all, but this represents the culture. And so, of course, I'm a very big, big, big supporter. I'm also, you know, a big I'm also, I think, a big promoter of, of Runecoin, you know, Janney Arsek. Because, again, what they created and all of this mythology kind of happened. And so, I mean, I love how much design was put in behind this thing where, you know, we all got airdrops. These, these are, you know, arsenic, Oreos back then that you have to activate by transferring it to another wallet, which was their way to also show we understand how the technology works, you know, and, what is an active wallet and how we can monitor what's going on on chain.
Ben Charbit [00:39:47]:
And then you're, as soon as you have activated this ordeal, you're starting to virtually mine this upcoming RUNE token. I mean, I think this is really it kind of connects back to what I truly love about Bitcoin and, to be honest, that I really didn't enjoy so much about some other ecosystem, which is that you can't really be a good builder on Bitcoin without understanding the tech. And why does it matter to understand the technology on Bitcoin is because Bitcoin was built with a vision in mind. There's a mission behind Bitcoin. If you haven't read the white paper, I obviously invite you to do it. It's 8 pages long. You know, it's not a technical document. It's more about the vision, you know, which is to build a censorship resistant system.
Ben Charbit [00:40:40]:
And the reason why the technology runs a specific way, which is not super super straightforward that differs in you know, when you first look at it, the management of UTXOs and all this, is because it's actually a translation of that vision. And most builders really understand that. When I think that on Ethereum, very often, you have a lot of builders that are more here for the business opportunity, and they don't really understand, like, what is a sequencer and, you know, how, you know, the staking protocol works and all these. And they don't really care about it. They just wanna be cool shit. Well, there is something more genuine, more authentic on Bitcoin. And that's why, you know, I love a lot of these other communities, whether it's OMBs or Nodeemonkeys or off course Quantum Cat and the Taproot Wizard guys, AI you know, Bitcoin frogs. I mean, I think my wallet is kind of public, so you can have a look at it a little bit.
Ben Charbit [00:41:39]:
I collect everything.
Kriger [00:41:42]:
Cool. Good rabbit holes for everyone to go down when they have a moment, and definitely some familiar familiar holdings, not nonfinancial advice, of course.
Ben Charbit [00:41:56]:
No. Absolutely not financial advice. This is a casino.
Kriger [00:42:01]:
Absolutely. Ben, where can listeners go and viewers, I should say, as well, go to learn more about you and the AI ecosystem as well as Opal?
Ben Charbit [00:42:16]:
So they can find me on Twitter. I'm at, NFT, of h a r b I t. And, happy to engage with all of the folks. And, of course, if you wanna know more about Opal, the protocol, it's Opalbt on Twitter. You can find more about life beyond Josh at AI beyond, which is our unreal engine AI, triple a, MMO coming to Bitcoin this year, built by a former Assassin's Creed dev team. So, something really that I'm really, really excited about. We're also the creator of that very amazing community, an organized community called Sparks. So you can find this of the Sparks Orientals, one word, on Twitter.
Ben Charbit [00:43:02]:
And I think you all have I mean, I think if you're paying a little bit attention right now to what's going on within the Bitcoin space, you will encounter Opal in one way or another. And remember, it's open to NFT. Anyone who wants to build WebSphere on Bitcoin, we're here to help. So whether you're natively from that space or you come from another space and you just want to, you know, find a gateway to enter this, this is why we're here. You know, we're not trying to be, you know, to run this, like, cool kids club that is shutting the door, at everybody else. This is the exact opposite. We believe in Bitcoin. We believe in its adoption.
Ben Charbit [00:43:46]:
We believe that Bitcoin, especially in this world, is a very, very important asset for the future of our world. And we believe that, of course, entertainment, gaming are, you know, proxies to facilitate the adoption. So if you have anything and you wanna just, you know, build with a nice group of people rather than building on your own, Come
Kriger [00:44:13]:
find us. Wonderful, Ben. I'll say one more thing, as we wrap, which is, I think one of the challenges of the blockchain space, the NFT space, historically has been this, exclusive inclusivity, paradigm where it's all about being part of the club. And if you're not in the club, you're not in the club. And and and and I think the problem with that is that's the opposite of what leads to mass adoption. So it's refreshing to hear about your outlook on it, and, you know, there's a lot of fun clubs. People can choose the club they wanna be in, but the doors are open, and so that's great to hear. So with that, we've reached the outer limit at the edge of NFT for today.
Kriger [00:45:06]:
Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on the starship, so invite your friends or create some cool strangers that'll make this journey all so much better. How? If you're listening, go to Spotify or Itunes right now. Rate us and say something awesome. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, join over 130,000 other subscribers by hitting the subscribe button, passing this episode on to a friend or 2. By the way, you can also now check us out on AI, and earn rewards for watching your favorite content like us. Be sure to tune in next time for more great web 3 content, and thanks again for sharing this time with us today.
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