Dr. Jesse Reich (Aggroed) Of Splinterlands - A P2E Platform Where Magic Meets Mayhem, Plus: Arabian Camels NFT Movie, Henessy NFT, Wall Street Bull NFT, And More...

Combining trading cards with NFTs has become one of the best ways to have a good time while earning money and accumulating assets. This is exactly what Dr. Jesse Reich had in mind when he developed Splinterlands. Sitting down with Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger, he shares how the game serves as a P2E platform combining Magic and Mayhem. Dr. Reich A.K.A. Aggroed explains how he intends Splinterlands to be more than just a source of enjoyment—its a force of peace and goodness amidst today’s chaotic world. He also talks about the future of Splinterlands, the mainstream games he draws inspiration from, and game updates every player should look forward to. For this episode’s hot topics, the group talks about the first-ever major movie funded by an NFT, a Wall Street Bull NFT that sold out in under 32 minutes, and Henessy jumping into the NFT space.

—

Listen to the podcast here

‍

Dr. Jesse Reich (Aggroed) Of Splinterlands – A P2E Platform Where Magic Meets Mayhem, Plus: Arabian Camels NFT Movie, Henessy NFT, Wall Street Bull NFT, And More…

This episode features Dr. Jesse Reich, AKA Aggroed, Founder and CEO of Splinterlands, a digital collectible card game built on blockchain technology. It is similar in concept to games like Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone where you build up a collection of cards, which all have various stats and abilities, and use them to battle other players and skill-based matches. By using blockchain tech, players can buy, sell, and trade their digital assets freely as if they were physical cards, and all transactions are recorded publicly and immutably.

Jesse has been a gamer for life and created his own game in 2014 using Kickstarter. After working with his partner, Matt, they decided to combine forces and develop a digital version of another game Jesse had been designing, which became Splinterlands. Before founding Splinterlands, he worked as a professor, then as part of software sales and marketing for educational software companies.

—

Aggroed, it is a pleasure to have you here.

Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here. It’s exciting stuff. These are hot days for NFTs. I don’t know if you have been getting that feeling here, too. It will seem to take them.

It seems like January 2022 is going to be a warm month for the NFT season.

Let’s talk about the origin story. Where the heck did this idea for Splinterlands come from? We gave a little bit of background there but give us the full scoop.

When I was working with my partner, I made a game back in 2014. I physically printed it. Making the game and talking about the game was awesome. Physically printing it, shipping it, storing it, re-shipping it to individual users was an absolutely miserable process. I did that as a hobby. I took the weirdest route into this stuff as possible.

I’m a PhD Chemist. I was a foreign professor teaching courses at a military college in Massachusetts and then switched over to publishing. I have always been a gamer. What I did was catch the crypto bug. I want to have the most honest conversation on the show that I can. I’ve got pissed and angry, and I said, “This world totally sucks now. There’s way too much poverty and war. The surveillance state is totally overwhelming and disgusting.”

What I want is to provide the antidote for those poisons. Its peace, prosperity, and freedom. When I looked around, I said, “What do I need? What tool can help undo all this crap?” I landed on crypto. Crypto is the most powerful tool, second only to memes, to change the way that people’s behaviors are. In my brain, I quit. I said, “I’m done.”

I threw my PhD on the floor. I said, “I don’t even care about this stuff anymore. I’m going to dedicate my life to this.” What I wanted was a way to get people that aren’t into crypto to get into it and experience the benefits. Crypto teaches you peace. It helps facilitate so much trade that you are not likely to fight, kill or murder the people that you do business with. Crypto is facilitating all that.

That surveillance state gets pushed back because you have so much control of your own finances. They can measure every transaction that they want. You can still send things the same day to whatever person you want in the world whenever you want to. You just need your keys, some coins, and you are good to go. There’s a lot about this that I love.

When I was looking around back in 2018, I was talking to my partner and we were like, “It’s not going to be some high finance application that brings the masses here.” Maybe you will get that for trading and it will be billions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, trading will be big money but I don’t see that as the way that you get mainstream into crypto. It’s too niched.

Gaming is something where I can grab somebody by the collar and say, “Come play this game. I’m not even going to shove the blockchain stuff down your throat. You are just going to play it and have fun but by the end of it, you are going to go from this normie that never experienced this stuff to be like, ‘Here are my keys. Here are my passwords. Here’s my NFT. Here are my own digital programmable assets. Here are the tokens that I own.’ We are going to turn you into a degen through our game and be at the vanguard of doing that.”

You are like the guy that’s sneaking peas into a delicious calzone and they don’t even know that they are eating the peas because the calzone is so delicious.

It’s definitely a Trojan horse. It’s like, “You are going to come here for this game but you are going to stay for the life-altering crypto experience that you are getting.” If we want to go down that road, it’s more like putting LSD or some other crazy narcotic into that calzone. The people don’t even know how much this stuff can inherently change their behavior and mindset.

I had a bank put a nine-day hold on a check that I deposited. They were like, “How do you do business like this?” Even Bitcoin is an hour to process sometimes. I’m like, “The hell with this? Who can even handle this? I need my transactions fast. I need the ownership to be mine.” I want the freedom of speech that comes with these things.

Crypto is the most powerful tool, second only memea, that can change how people behave.  Click To Tweet

If you look at Twitter and YouTube, they are de-platforming and de-monetizing everybody. They own your stream. You think you own it but you don’t. You were renting it and they are paying you little crumbs of the income that they are getting based on the views and the data that they are selling for you and your audience. You are getting the crumbs, and people don’t even get it. It’s going to take another couple of years for this to fully sink in how much that Web 2.0 has totally been screwing and extracting value out of users.

Here at least, I’m trying to be one shining example of, “Here’s a game. Come play it. Come own it. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s competitive puzzle solving. It’s quite enjoyable. By the way, all along the way, you are not wasting your money. You are buying assets, collecting tokens, growing your knowledge base, and building a community. We are going to change your life. It’s not going to happen in a week but over time, as you enter into this game and this experience, we are going to turn you into a crypto degen and you are never going to look at it.”

Let’s cut open this calzone because I’m enjoying this analogy too much. I’m afraid of how addicted I will get to your game, especially after this episode. In spite of my fare, go ahead and unpack what’s in this calzone. Describe Splinterlands to us.

Our primary mission is to bring people into crypto. What we try to do is make this stuff as simple as possible. The game mechanics need to be rich and complex but what you have to do in the game needs to be simple. You come into our game and buy a pack of cards. In that pack of cards, you will have Summoners and Monsters. The Summoners are a team coach and your Monsters are the team. They will do battle. It’s like gladiator combat. It’s simulated.

This takes people getting used to it. It’s a trading card game but it’s an auto battler. The battles are only 2 to 3 minutes. If you are used to owning a Magic, Pokémon or something like that, you are like, “Where is my turn by turn? Why isn’t this a 30 to a 60-minute game?” It takes a second to get used to the fact that this is 2 to 3 minutes, super quick. It’s all about the strategy. You get in there, you are playing and battling it out. Right after, you watch it, see how it played out, and are right back into the next strategy.

What you are doing when you get a match, you find out who your opponent is and there are a couple of rules that change every single match. When you are starting off, it’s always the standard rules but when you get into Silver League or Gold League, now the rules start changing all the time. That means that there’s not one card that you have to own and it’s the all-powerful thing. It’s like, “I can’t even play it this round. Now it’s nerfed. It’s the most powerful card in the game.” It keeps changing depending on the ruleset.

There’s also a Mana Cap. It determines how much worth the cards you can spend. You are not actually spending them. They were not gone. It’s resource capping like, “Here, you can only play three cards. Here, you can play six big cards. Here, you can play either 3 big ones or 5 little ones.” It’s all part of the strategy of this, and then what team you can play.

That’s the way that we change this thing up all the time. As a player, you come in, see your matches, see what the rules are, what your Mana Cap is, what Splinters are available, and all you have to do is choose your Summoner and your Monsters. The battle plays out, it takes 2 to 3 minutes, and it will spit out a winner. If you are the winner, you earn cryptocurrency.

There are things like daily quests. If you complete enough battles that meet certain criteria, then you will get either NFTs or fungible tokens that are part of the game. If you are sitting there and you own assets, there’s an airdrop going on, so you get a governance token. If you stake the governance token, you can get more governance tokens. We are building out all the ways that that governance token can influence the environment.

Ultimately, we want this game to be one of the first, if not the first, truly decentralized games where it’s up to the players. We will be a development company to help build it. We will provide some vision but the ultimate fine-tuned detail is something that we want validator nodes for and we want an entire system of how this all runs. We want it to be ultimately a game that is owned and operated by the users, where our company assists in building the things that they want or we want but are only approved by the stakeholders that own the governance token.

There’s so much there. It’s clear that you are the primary reason that unemployment by choice has gone up in the United States.

How are you ever going to work your slave job? There are crafts and trades. God’s honest work is wonderful, so I don’t want to disparage it. The alternative is you get to hang out at home, own NFTs, watch them appreciate, earn and battle with them. The two aren’t even mutually exclusive. There are two demographics that I thought of. I traveled a bit through Southeast Asia and you would have all these shopping malls, people selling T-shirts, shorts, dresses, underwear, and whatever else they are going to sell. If traffic is slow, you don’t make any money that day.

Imagine that you are sitting there, you have your phone and can do some play-to-earn while you are waiting for customers. Maybe it’s too early or too late in the day and nobody is there, or it’s an outdoor market and it’s rainy. Rather than being like, “That day was wasted,” why not do some play-to-earn and you can battle and earn? We call it play-to-earn. Sometimes I’m like, “This is like work-to-earn. You can get both done at the same time.”

Another demographic that I keep thinking of is single moms. If you put your baby down, you can’t just go out and get a job. You can’t do part-time labor somewhere like, “My baby is sleeping. I will go to my next-door neighbor’s house and clean it.” That’s not an option but something like play-to-earn is. It’s this way that you can fit 1 to 2 hours of community video game labor and work into your overall ecosystem.

That’s at the lower end of the spectrum where you are socioeconomically disadvantaged and your objective is to earn money so that you can eke out a living as the fiat governments keep printing money ad nauseum and devaluing your dollar so that you can ever catch up on how much rice you need to eat. That’s the face that those guys are facing. What they will often do is rent cards in our ecosystem. There are so many different ways to earn in this game that you can rent cards and make a profit doing that.

Who are they renting those cards from? It’s the Whales. The Whales buy up a whole bunch of cards. Sometimes it will play them. Sometimes that’s vanity. Sometimes that’s entertainment. Oftentimes, they are renting cards out. You have this capital exposure from the first world nations that it’s then getting lent to third world nations, where they can then earn a better living than they otherwise would have.

Splinterlands: Crypto teaches you peace. It helps facilitate so much trade that you’re less likely to fight, kill, or murder.

Germans are directly employing Venezuelans and Filipinos to go leverage their assets through this proof of victory game to earn as much money as possible. By doing that, it gets back to what you said, come work with us. You can go sweep the floors. There’s not an infinite amount of Splinterlands you can play in a day, so you might want to have some other things to do as well.

We are phenomenal for supplementing income all over the map geographically but also socioeconomically from the lower-end spectrum dudes that have to work to the higher-end spectrum dudes that buy a bunch of cards and rent them. We help people across that entire geographic and economic spectrum.

There’s so much to unpack. I have a billion questions and I’m loving this. One thing has been on my mind here. It’s this philosophical question. It has been in the news over and over again. I don’t know who’s pumping it or if it’s just an emergence here. The four-day workweek has been all over the place and it reminds me of this philosophical idea of we have made so much progress as a society but people are less happy and feel like they are working harder.

It feels like we could be at the precipice of this point in history where we can enjoy where we have gotten to. We can play games to earn as opposed to fighting battles with each other to steal each other’s treasure or something like that. Maybe that’s a little bit idealistic but you are onboard with this as that philosophical PhD style folk like me. What do you think there?

Let’s have nice things together. The twentieth-century government model of how things ought to work and the way that we print money, do war, and engage our neighbors is one atrocity following another. What I hope to spread are peace, prosperity and freedom. I hope to use crypto to do it. My game is the best on-ramp in the world to get people to come in.

You don’t have to buy into every piece of philosophy that I think. I’m a voluntaryist. I don’t want to force people into anything. I do like this Trojan horse idea of, “Come play my game. Come experience this. Come trade our tokens. Come rent and buy. Come form camaraderie with your neighbor and people all over the world.”

We are going to be less likely as a society to want to invade the Philippines if we are constantly, as people, engaging them in commerce. If our governments start trying to be like, “The poll numbers are down. Let’s go back to the dog and start another rover,” hopefully, that’s not the thing that can happen in the future if crypto is widely adopted or if this economic web is intertwined and interwoven between the common people of all countries around the world.

This is how we have nice things. There’s no law that we could write that would be like, “You need to be nice to each other. We should probably have laws that you can’t murder each other.” That doesn’t do the trick. What you need is leadership and economic incentive to bring us together as community members, friends, family, and neighbors, and have a social and a financial tie to having that be successful.

It’s not just Splinterlands that does this. It’s crypto that does this. We are one of the best ways to get people into crypto. Over the coming years, I hope that we get better at it by providing even additional games and additional ways to get in. Splinterlands is this complicated, heavy game. I would love to see some things like solitaire, chess, checkers, and dominoes have them be play-to-earn so that when a player walks in, the barrier of entry is even less.

They don’t have to figure out, “How do I play Splinterlands?” They just come in and they are like, “I’m playing dominoes or I’m playing backgammon,” or something. It’s built within this play-to-earn ecosystem. Maybe there’s some meta storyline. There’s a whole bunch of match-3 games like Candy Crush. You play Candy Crush, and then you power up your character to blast the spell at the evil wizard.

There can be this separate metagame. This is always from a designer because I’m still a game designer. Don’t get me wrong. I run this company, I do all this stuff, and I’m a chemist but honestly, all I want to do is make games and be snarky on the internet. That’s it. All of this is enabling that addiction. What I want is to be able to take that game and be like, “You are going to come in, do this battle, and it’s going to look familiar when you start. You are going to be playing foosball, solitaire or games that you have known your whole life. It’s going to be these easy internet things.” It takes this twist where you are like, “I own NFTs and I’ve got to do this RPG thing. I own cars, assets, and all this other stuff.”

I want to get folks engaged, even though you mentioned these simpler platforms. How do we get people into Splinterlands? We know that you have a card pack coming out. Chaos Legion launch is set for January 17, 2022. Can you give us some details about that and how people can get involved?

This is going to be our sixth card pack. We sold out a five, a land, and a skin. This is the first brand new offering I have had since June 2021. It’s Chaos Legion and it’s the next edition. It’s one of the bigger editions that we have done in terms of a sheer number of cards, the number of card packs that we are minting. It’s honestly to match the audience.

The number of people that have joined our game since June 2021 is 50X or maybe 70X, somewhere in there. It has been this enormous growth curve that’s happened here. We have Chaos Legion coming out. We had a presale for a month or two but that’s finally over. For anybody in the community that’s looking to start, this is the best time to get in because we haven’t had anything for people to buy since June 2021.

Do they just need one pack?

You start with a Summoner’s Spellbook, which is a $10 purchasing account. I know that’s a little bit weird because free-to-play games would never tell you, you have to spend $10 to even start. It’s like crypto. There are bots and other things, so you always have to have some kind of barrier to entry or else, they will take over everything that you are doing. There’s a small barrier to entry there. It’s $10 but then packs are $4. I know games that put out $1,000 treasure chests and things like that to get started. We don’t want to do that.

Look at the pain points in the world and try to find ways to solve them. Click To Tweet

A chunk of our audience is in the Philippines and Venezuela. If we start doing $100 packs, we immediately price out so many of the people that we are trying to provide the benefit to. What we do is we have land, which we keep super scarce. There are only 150,000 plots. I’ve got 500,000 VAU, so there’s not enough land for everybody.

We have things like that, which are super scarce that we do expect to keep going higher. We sold it for $10. The highs were $1,000 per plot. We have seen that thing 100X. That’s what scarcity can do. We don’t want that for the card packs. Every single year, we release another set of card packs and we want to keep it so that folks can engage at the price point. $4, in some parts of the world, is a lot of money but for a lot of the world, that’s still an affordable thing to get you started.

It seems quite manageable. I’m imagining back in the ‘80s, people would go to the arcade and get a bunch of quarters to feed them into one of these video games, pick your pinball or whatever but the quarters were left inside the machine. It’s exciting to be in this domain where people are willing to spend on this type of thing anyway but to have the opportunity to get something back makes sense.

That’s the dream. It’s asset ownership and it’s yours. Every now and then, people will rage quit and they will leave the game. They will be like, “I’m leaving your stupid game and I barely made any money.” I’m like, “Excuse me? You made money, didn’t you? It’s not all wasted. It’s not all gone. You are welcome. Have a good day.” They come back a year later and buy back in for more. It’s like, “I should have thought about that before.”

Speaking of land, we touched on a little bit about land expansion, where do we see this going in the future? What’s on the roadmap here for land expansion? What can folks expect?

We have been working on this for about a year. We saw that Kickstarter style of like, “If you want to come in with this, we will go build it but you’ve got to have to fund it, to begin with.” They bought 150,000 plots from us and we have been working on it for about a year. I probably have another quarter or two left before we can start rolling this thing out.

The whole idea of this is that we want to decentralize the game as much as possible. For this game, in particular, we wanted to have one more round of strategy. Splinterlands is on the strategic end. We want it as far into the heavy strategy as you can get. To do that, we have our round which is Blind, where I blind pick my Summoners and my Monsters, and so do you. They would then go on the board and you hit play.

What we want is one more round where I have picked my cards, you pick your cards, and then we add in items and spells that is a second way that impacts the game. When we were thinking through, “How do we want to add items and spells?” The options were like, “Do we build another pack and then we sell them there or our centralized business makes that money?” We are like, “Hell no. This is crypto.”

What we are going to do is we are going to sell you land one time, and then the owners of the land are going to improve it, harvest it, and then they will use the resources that they get to craft NFTs that are part of the game, which are those items and spells. It will be user-generated NFTs. If you look at the assets in our game, they are worth $500,000, so I’m not talking about handing over the keys to a little Miata or something and being like, “Here you go, community. Have fun with that.”

This is a major revenue stream from a successful business that we are now entirely handing over to the players to say, “We will make sure that the cards that you are making are well-designed and fair. We will be the ones to design them but you will be the ones to mint them.” That’s revolutionary in these games. Some of these big Web 2.0 companies have booted out players that tried to print their own cards.

Here, we are designing entire systems to enable them to do it. Every day, my partner and I wake up and say, “How do we put as much value into the hands of our player base as possible?” We go from that level of thinking. When we’ve got to items, spells, and land, we are like, “This is the coolest thing we could do. Let’s put this in the hands of the players and see where this goes.”

I met Aggroed in Puerto Rico at a fun event. Everyone was drinking and networking. I could tell this guy was thinking, “I have to get back to work. I have to start making this game better.” I’m thinking, “I’ve got to get back to the show. I have a lot of content to curate here in a conference to work on.” We enjoy being there but you were clearly so deep in this and you are living, breathing, and sleeping Splinterlands. It’s evident.

This is a dream. I read a book called The Purpose Driven Life. A lot of us, especially these days, want to have a purpose in our lives. The purpose that comes from all of this work is that we make other people’s lives better. It’s across that entire spectrum. I had a guy that sent me a picture of a bed and he said, “I’m no longer sleeping on the floor. Thank you to Splinterlands.” I had a dad who’s like, “My kid has a blood disease and it’s causing him all kinds of problems. I sit in the hospital and all I do is play Splinterlands. I’m thankful that this is an opportunity that I have.”

I have a whole set of Whales that have sent me notes being like, “This game has gone crazy. I’m a millionaire now. Thanks so much. I never believed this could have happened. PS, please write tax software.” That entire spectrum of people that are feeling this on an economic level, a day-to-day emotional or spiritual support level, or dudes that have made a freaking fortune doing it, I feel like this game is helping a lot of people.

My mission here is to try to help as many people out of this terrible fiat system that we have, where you work harder every year and the wealth that you have goes down. That’s terrible. Let’s get our money working for us. Let’s get our products working for us. That’s what NFTs and crypto can do. I don’t think it’s unique to Splinterlands. We just do it in a way that’s fun and can attract new users at a rate that decentralized finance can’t.

We talked a little bit about your DAO plans in Puerto Rico and you mentioned what you are doing with land, the new spells, and whatnot. Is there anything else on the governance side of things that you want to cover?

Splinterlands: Players come to Splinterlands for the game, but they will stay for the life-changing crypto experience.

We want everything to be user-approved. We are building a validator set of nodes where we are trying to get this game as decentralized as possible and make the decisions of like, “What version of the software will we run have that be up to players?” One example would be, over the history of the cards, we have probably pumped out 700 cards or something and we have modified maybe 7 or 8 of them after we released them. We would look at the cards at different tiers or levels. They would have win rates that were over 70% and we are like, “This is breaking the game.” It’s fun to have.

What we like are cards that are overpowered in narrow sets. You get a certain rule and combination, and there’s nothing better than that card but then you get them the next rule and combination, and you are like, “I can’t even play that quarter. It’s worthless.” We want it so that in all these different rule sets, things are different. We have to design around that. We are doing our best on behalf of players to build a game with rich economics, community, and an economy that spreads for the benefit of everybody.

You mentioned handing some things over to the users and being excited about what you are working with here. Can you give us a little bit more about what’s next in store for Splinterlands? What other updates can we look out for?

The product roadmap that’s right down the pike here is that on January 17th, 2022, we are releasing Chaos Legion, which is our first set in six months. We are getting to the point where there are so many cards that the amount of money that somebody needs to pay to build a competitive deck starts getting higher when you have to compete with these players that have all the different editions. What we are doing is we are creating a modern and wild format. There are the two tracks that you can play in of either owning the most recent or older cards and making sure that they still have value while also not forcing every single player to own every single card to be competitive. That’s a big project for us.

The one after that, there are two parallel developments, one of getting all of our SPS governance live. We spoke a lot about it and we sold it, and a lot of people freaking flooded our game because of it. It crashed every server that we have. Our game runs on 30 different servers. A traditional free-to-play game might only run on one. It’s because of the complexity that blockchain adds, we are interoperable on Steam, Hive, Tron, Ethereum, WAX, and maybe one other as well. We have to operate across all of those.

When we had this growth that was 10,000 daily active players to over 500,000 daily active players in three months of time, it totally swarmed us. We had to figure out, “How do we scale our servers, not just 1 set but 30 sets for all these different kinds of bottlenecks?” It took us a whole bunch of months to do that. What we had to do is go back and say, “Remember all that stuff for the SPS governance we would build. Sorry, it has been delayed.”

Now we are focused on that with one arm and the second arm is trying to get this land creation put into place so that the players have the ability to mint their own NFTs in the game and experience what that can do for them. $500,000 is the rough estimate of what all of our assets that are out there are worth. I’m hopefully turning over a couple of hundred million dollars worth of asset production. It leaves us as the game developers and goes into the community. That’s going to make everything go gangbusters.

Why would you play other stuff? This is a question that I get. These are statements people make. This is a one-way valve for games. Once you experience this, you don’t go back. I’m not going to spend $500 on Hearthstone or something. That’s insanity. That’s pissing away money. Whereas in this game, I can own assets, rent them, and hope that they appreciate. If I have this digital asset that I own, I’m not going back.

Do you look at other projects for inspiration? If so, what’s out there inspiring you outside of the world of Splinterlands?

I’m generally attracted to the things that suck. I don’t mean the other projects that suck. I mean, find the pain points in the world and try to find ways to solve them. It’s little things like my bank holding my money for nine days. That’s freaking absurd. How does anybody live like that? Good ideas and plans start with where you have customer pain. You’ve got to build something that helps solve it.

Here, it’s stuff like, “The world wants to inflate your money and offer you the same amount of earnings per day, per hour and drown you.” I was feeling this as a PhD Chemist with a fifteen-year career trying to live a middle-class lifestyle and feel like every day I was getting further behind. I kept thinking, “If I’m feeling this as a mid-career PhD, everything in the world has to be broken.” I don’t understand how people can live poor, eat, get the things that they need or get anywhere close to what we consider the American dream. My inspiration comes from the common pain that I see from users everywhere, “We’ve got to make things better for them.”

In terms of games, I do look at other games. Axie Infinity has definitely been a freaking bonanza of dollar generation. Ultimately, my thought goes something like, “We have to invent a lot of things.” My brain is all around. I want our stuff to go mainstream because I want our users to come to experience this. If I want that, I have to focus on the text that can handle that in terms of scalability. I’m not super impressed by what I see. There’s still a lot of work left in terms of being able to make blockchain tech scalable.

Our game does 4 million or 5 million transactions per day on-chain. All of Ethereum does 1.2 million. On any given day, we are between 3, maybe 5, or even 6 times the amount of transactions that all of Ethereum has. We can scale another 20X without noticing but even still, that’s not like megastore games. Roblox is up there 120 million users per day or something absurd. There’s still a lot of work that we have to do to get the tech-ready.

I’m less staring at the other guys in the field and more trying to think down the road like, “What is it that we need to build so that we can run mainstream games?” I’m trying to think through that and listen to the pain points of my players, play the game myself, eat our own dog food and try to get a sense of what is it that’s missing from this. We are focused on how the hell are we going to scale this another 100X in a blockchain environment, especially as we go interoperable on other chains.

We want to switch gears a little bit and get your personal perspective on some questions. It’s a segment that we call Edge Quick Hitters. There are ten questions we ask every single guest that’s on the show as a way to get to know you a little better. We are looking for single-word or few-word answers but we can go a little deeper if you want. Are you ready to dive in?

I will do my best to not be so verbose. Let’s give it a shot.

Culture trumps over everything. Click To Tweet

Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

It was probably some candy.

Do you ever go to these days on the candy front?

No, I’m too fat. I guess it’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They are delicious, so I’ve got to stay away.

The holiday ones, we’ve got the pumpkins and the tarts.

The keto Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are not the same.

I thought you were going to sing the praises of those.

I have tried every one of the keto ones and they are not good.

Justin’s, is that what it’s called?

No. Those are good either.

I will say that for a debate another time. Question number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

I sold software. I know that’s not the last thing that I sold but if I have to think about what I sold the most, it’s software. That has been ingrained in my brain.

Question three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?

The most recent thing I can think of is my gas oven. There’s an electric oven and I’m turning it into gas. The fume hood above it is 30 years old, so it creaks and does all these terrible sounds whenever it’s operating. Finally, I’m like, “Let’s get a new oven for this thing.”

It’s almost all electric these days. There are few gases.

That’s terrible. Why live like that?

Splinterlands: Even if players lose in Splinterlands, they still get asset ownership and earn money. In the end, nothing is wasted.

Question number four, what is the most recent thing you sold?

The most recent thing I sold was a Splinterlands card. I don’t know if I’m responsible for every single sale but they sell all day long.

Question number five, what is your most prized possession?

It’s probably my truck but I hate owning things. It’s the Fight Club line, “What you own owns you.” That’s part of why I love all this digital stuff. There’s no drawer and no truck that has to move it. You just shove it into some cloud computer somewhere and you take it with you wherever you want. I hate owning things. It’s a hassle.

If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be? What do you have your eye on?

I don’t know how to answer this because I can’t get my brain out of running this company. I keep thinking of like, “What games could I purchase that I could then turn into blockchain games to then bring more people into this ecosystem and experience the peace, prosperity, and freedom that comes with it?” My brain is arguably broken, to a point where it’s broken. That’s what I think of day and night.

Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

Passion for others. It’s weird, you get me next to my neighbor and I will be like, “Get off my lawn.” That doesn’t mean that I don’t love them as a human and want better things for them. I love them as a human and want better things for them slightly over there. It’s passion and commitment to care for your fellowmen.

Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

It would be guilt. The amount of time that I have spent not liking myself has been high. If I could experience some of these gains without having gone through that much self-turmoil, that would probably be preferable. I’m here because of it. It’s not like I want to get away from that. Some of that self-doubt along the way or even self-frustration or self-hate, that would take us a long way.

Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was sitting here trying to figure out how to make another game. One of the things I want to do is bring on brands. You’ve got these mega-corporations that already have accumulated and aggregated millions of people. I can make my game and grind it out, player by player, to go bring them into Splinterlands where I could get this big brand, bring them into the ecosystem, and bring all their users with us. That’s what I was thinking about and what I was working on.

I’m in. Send me the investment paperwork.

Question number ten, what are you going to do next after the show?

I’m going to go work. I’ve got an all-team meeting for Splinterlands, so I’m going to go work on my pitch deck and explain a lot of the values that we talked about here. I’m trying to live them. Culture trumps everything. If I can get not just me working on this vision but hundreds of people that are working on it, then the amount that we can accomplish is orders of magnitude higher.

How big is your team? How many new folks have you hired?

We are shy of 100 and 60 of them are from the past. We put up this governance token and the market went nuts for it. It brought so many users into our ecosystem, and then we were like, “We need an entire support team. We need way more devs to support all the infrastructure that’s currently on fire. We need to go get marketing people.” That pump into our group started in June 2021. It has been going strong and now we are up to shy of 100 people.

NFTs will be the greatest store of wealth in the history of the world. There's no harder form of money than it. Click To Tweet

We have always found in our companies or startups, if you can get to the why behind things and imbue that throughout the company, then making decisions around the what and the how is so much easier for everybody.

You make three decisions, and then everything else aligns it to those three.

That’s Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks so much for participating. That was great. We’ve got some hot topics to cover as well. Eathan, what do you think?

The first one is Arabian Camels’ Antara movie NFT to drop on January 12. “Antara is the first major movie in history funded by an NFT, and Arabian Camels is the first NFT community to produce and part-own the rights of a $50 million Hollywood movie. The Antara Movie NFT is the first NFT that allows a buyer to digitally part-own rights of a Hollywood Movie, enabling holders to partake in the box office and streaming revenues.” This is awesome, groundbreaking stuff. We have been talking with folks that are in this scene of building blockchain into the film and television industry. It’s cool to see this monumental event happen.

I have run into 3 or 4 people that have said they did the first acts related to a film in NFTs. There’s some nuance there but let’s give them some credit where credit is due. It’s a super cool concept. People have wanted to do this for a long time. I remember when I first moved to LA several years ago with Territory Foods, my roommate was looking at crowdfunding for film and how to make it more of an egalitarian, universal opportunity for people to invest in the types of movies they like. NFTs have provided the lubricant that was required for this to be easy, graceful, clear and accountable. I’m excited about projects like this.

We can get more voices heard. I don’t even care what the storyline is. I feel like Hollywood has been producing the same film for many years. If I could go get some new things to watch or do, that would be exciting to me. I don’t think that it’s going to come from inside Hollywood. It’s going to come from creative minds, outside of it saying, “There are more stories to be told than this one narrative.”

Josh, thanks for bringing in the outside opinion here. You can write a press release that says something is the first thing but it doesn’t necessarily make it the first. It’s interesting to look at it in more detail. It’s not a live movie. They are even calling it the first movie, which assumes the fact that the movie is getting it made.

There are all sorts of historical stories of people going down the path and making a movie, and it never got finished. Somebody was creating a version of Dune, for example, that never got made or something like that. It remains to be seen how well it goes. It’s a celebratory event to see that something like this has raised enough attention to have some traction.

The next one here is An NFT collection of 10,000 Wall Street bulls sold out in 32 minutes. “Oil painter Cam Rackam watched in awe as his collection of 10,000 Wall Street bull NFTs swiftly sold out in October 2021. In the first five minutes of launching the NFT collection targeted at the retail traders behind the GameStop mania, a thousand of the colorfully creative bulls riding rocket ships had already sold. By about eight minutes, half of the collection was purchased.” We were chatting about this before we started. Part of what’s interesting here is it feels like there’s a pullback, especially with ETH. There’s a pullback in NFTs. OpenSea is still one of the hugest platforms for Ethereum transactions on the blockchain.

The thing is, every project has a probability of success if you will. We have talked about this a ton on the show. When things were slowing down in the fall a little bit in terms of NFT sales and people were like, “Is it going to continue that path? Is it going to recoup some of the ground that it lost in the fall?” The fact is if you built a good community and/or you have a good community, and you brought them to the table and into the fold, good things will probably happen if you are offering real value, real utility.

In this case, these guys are tapped into the Wall Street bets community. We know how powerful that community is. It’s built around fun and freedom, to use one of the topics of this conversation. There’s a lot of cool stuff happening around it. I’m not surprised that a project like that is going to succeed when it launches.

In fact, this wasn’t a hot topic but it’s worth mentioning, GameStop announced their first NFT marketplace, so they are going to bring an NFT marketplace to life. The whole thing is coming full circle here, where Gamestop is taking a role in the market. Aggroed, maybe there’s an opportunity to partner with GameStop now that they have crossed over the bridge.

GameStop will be awesome. I would love to love to work with them. Generally, I get a little bit nervous about the PFP projects because they don’t tend to have utility. The Bored Ape Yacht Club, what they did turning that not just into a social status but also a social passport was awesome. I commend them for having done that. Hopefully, the Wall Street bets crowd doesn’t just leave that as a pure collectible but they figure out some kind of utility because there are a lot of those projects that had a nice shoot up, a nice shoot down, and not a lot of stability. That goes back to having some utility beyond collection.

I remember early on in the NFT conversation, the idea of a Beanie Baby came up a lot. Our NFTs Beanie Babies, this trend is going to be exciting for people for a while, and then it’s going to fall off. For me, the answer to that question is, one NFT collection could be like Beanie Babies. As long as there’s utility, community, and interesting things you can attach to NFTs, they are a marker of ownership and it doesn’t make the whole concept of NFTs something that’s a fad.

I’ve got the exact opposite way. These things are going to be the greatest store of wealth in the history of the world. There’s no harder form of money than NFTs. The top of the hard money list is something like real estate or you’ve got to go into Boston and buy some expensive apartment, and there’s no more land there, so you’ve got to pay some exorbitant price.

Part of what makes that so powerful is that each piece is a unique building and there’s a limited geographic region. What makes NFTs even stronger is that you still have that property of them being unique. It’s an asset that you can own. When you buy in Boston real estate or New York real estate, there’s a limited geographic number of people that want to live or own a property there. Whereas you have a global audience when you get into NFTs. I don’t think every single project will be successful but NFTs will end up being harder money than even real estate because people are going to fight over them so much, and it’s a global audience fighting over them.

Splinterlands: What makes NFTs stronger is their property of being unique. It is an asset you can own that attracts a global audience.

Aggroed, you are giving us a wealth of quotes for your social posts. Let’s not worry about that, guys. I have heard a lot of great statements and definitive statements, too. I appreciate your conviction about NFTs. Let’s pour ourselves a Hennessy here. Hennessy Enters The NFT Space With $226,000 Release. “Hennessy is creeping its way into crypto. The LVMH-owned Cognac brand has released its first NFTs, priced at $226,450. Each will represent physical and digital ownership of the first and last bottles, 1 and 250, respectively, of Hennessy 8, a limited-edition expression from the Cognac house.” They are aiming high. That’s clear with these prices. Josh, is this your next purchase?

It’s possible. I like what they are doing. I feel like the exclusivity of these prices is not necessarily a great thing. I like what Splinterlands is doing with a little bit more accessibility to the masses. It’s an interesting debate and it’s one that we are going to have it NFT LA, the inclusive versus the exclusive approach to building community and pricing NFTs. It’s good food for thought.

There’s something interesting with physical underlying assets as a form of utility but I don’t see a ton else there built into this. There’s some scarcity. There’s the physical asset itself. It’s a brand that speaks to certain class-related things or whatever. Maybe it’s going to do well or there’s something else there. It doesn’t get me that excited that it makes headlines. Almost anything that does make headlines has the meta-purpose of drawing attention to the space. It tends to be a good thing. I don’t know about this one. I’m not so sure.

We know with these projects that they can be staged. That’s the pink elephant in the room that people don’t like to talk about in the space but I don’t mind sharing. For something like this, it could be a totally legit interested buyer but it’s not like Splinterlands. I was looking up, Aggroed, you are still the number one NFT game in the world. When we met, you were in number two actual dApp in the world behind PancakeSwap. Maybe there’s something there. You can integrate some pancakes into the game and switch places with those guys.

When you look at utility and mass adoption, you can look at niches like Hennessy and their community as well. Maybe they have some super collectors. This is their pride and joy. I hope they think about utility a little bit more going forward and use this as the first of many experiments in the space was just my thought.

It feels like dumb rich guy stuff. If you have dumb real dead money, this is a dumb rich guy thing to do. Honestly, businesses and brands should plan for that. You want to have some Whale hunting, Whale expedition that you are going on. I don’t think it’s a great look to have it as the only thing that you are doing in the space.

I had a Hennessy in terms of brand image that they are trying to promote if they even care about it but we will see.

We are drinking that Kool-Aid Hennessy, apparently.

That’s hot topics. That’s a wrap early on the show. I feel like we could spend a lot more time chatting about everything that is happening in Splinterlands. We are definitely super pumped about it. We are going to be following all these amazing releases that are coming up and everything on the roadmap. I’m super excited about it. For anybody that doesn’t know, where can our audience go to learn more about Splinterlands, yourself, and all the amazing projects you are working on?

The first thing to do is go to Splinterlands.com. Register for the game with your username and password, and get going. We are the easiest entry in the crypto that you are going to get. If you are a new user and you are trying to think through what to do, play a couple of matches and then after you do, start hanging out with the guys. We hang out in Discord and Telegram. If you go to Discord.Splinterlands.com or T.Me/SplinterlandsHq, those are the two ways that you can find us. We are on Twitter too and other social media. The community is one of the best parts of our game. They are generous, kind, thoughtful and great. Primarily come join us in Discord.

We have a giveaway we are going to be doing for all of our audience as well. We’ve got 50 Spellbook codes that we are going to give away. To our audience, keep an eye out on our socials. We will give you the deets on how to score one of the Spellbook codes. Thank you for the generous opportunity to give those away, Aggroed. I appreciate it.

That’s it, guys. We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFT. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to iTunes, rate us, say something awesome, and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.

Remember, we always invite you to co-create and build with us at Edge of NFT. We are unlocking a whole new way to connect and collaborate with us through our own NFT drops, Spirit Seeds, alluding to the Living Tree NFTs, which light the way to our event, NFT LA. It’s a one-of-a-kind, immersive, and unforgettable experience live in Los Angeles, March 28th to the 30th, 2022. Check it out at NFTLA.live and move quickly on early bird tickets as they are selling out fast. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

Important Links:

• Splinterlands
• Kickstarter
• Summoner’s Spellbook
• The Purpose Driven Life
• Axie Infinity
• Arabian Camels’ Antara movie NFT to drop on January 12 – Article
• An NFT collection of 10,000 Wall Street bulls sold out in 32 minutes – Article
• OpenSea
• GameStop
• Bored Ape Yacht Club
• Hennessy Enters The NFT Space With $226,000 Release – Article
• NFT LA
• PancakeSwap
• Discord.Splinterlands.com
• T.Me/splinterlandshq
• Twitter – Splinterlands
• iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
• Spirit Seeds

About Dr. Jesse Reich

In college Dr. Reich studied theater, chemistry, and education. He immediately moved on to graduate school at Texas A&M University. When he graduated he worked for BASF, the world’s largest chemical company. Due to family health concerns he left industry and spent a year teaching in an inner city high school followed by a year spent in a wealthier district school district. He then started professing at the college level at a military college in Massachusetts.

While teaching he adopted software in his class that pushed his students to new heights. After sharing his experience with the software he used in his course with the publishing company they offered him a job selling the software to other professors. It launched a 10 year publishing career. He sold software to prestigious schools like Harvard, Brown, and Yale and he also sold to giant schools like Ohio State and Northern Arizona University.

Two side projects ultimately merged to lead him to co-found Splinterlands.com. As a life long passionate gamer Dr. Reich had created a kickstarter game and raised $21,000 in the process. It was fun as a hobby, but he saw the challenges that arose with creating large quantities of physical products. He created a second game, but held off on publishing it until later.

In 2016 he started using the blockchain based blogging platform steemit.com to have an immutable place to free write on topics he wanted to investigate. After realizing that this blogging tool was an incredibly powerful tool towards protecting economic liberty and freedom of speech he got heavily involved. He founded a Discord group of like minded people called the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network with 20,000 people in it. And he became an elected official on the Steem Blockchain. He was approached by his partner Matt Rosen to work on a marketing platform together.

While at a meeting in Philly they launched their marketing platform, but also discovered they both had a love for gaming. Matt suggested they launch a trading card game, and Dr. Reich shared he had one essentially built. The resulting game was Splinterlands.com.

Since that meeting in April of 2018 the game has been played tens of millions of times, the cards are collectively worth millions of dollars, players have traded over a million dollars worth of cards with each other, and it’s become the most frequently played game in crypto!

Dr. Reich focuses his time on fund raising, sales, marketing, financials, game development, and community development.