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This episode is live from Tokyo Tower, where he dives deep into Bitcoin Ordinals, NFT Japan, and Web3 Gaming. He is joined by industry leaders Bryan Brinkman, Danny Yang, and Trevor Owens. Together, they explore the impact of Ordinals on Bitcoin, the growing NFT scene in Japan, and the evolution of decentralized gaming. The conversation touches on Bitcoin’s role in Web3, how NFTs are reshaping digital ownership, and the innovation behind projects like Pizza Ninjas and Pizza Pets. This episode is packed with valuable insights for Web3 enthusiasts, developers, and investors looking to understand the next frontier of blockchain technology..
Key Topics Covered:
- Bitcoin Ordinals and Their Impact on Web3 – A discussion on how Ordinals are revolutionizing Bitcoin beyond just a store of value.
- NFT Japan: A Hub for Digital Innovation – Why Japan is becoming a major center for NFT and IP development in Web3.
- Web3 Gaming and Strategy-Based Blockchain Games – Insights into blockchain gaming mechanics and why Bitcoin’s slow block times offer unique advantages.
- Pizza Pets & Pizza Ninjas: A New Gaming Model – An exploration of how deflationary mechanics and PVP gameplay redefine NFT gaming.
- The Future of On-Chain Games – What the next wave of blockchain gaming looks like and how Bitcoin can sustain decentralized game development.
Episode Highlights:
- “Bitcoin Ordinals are reshaping how we see digital ownership on Bitcoin.” – Bryan Brinkman
- “NFT Japan is an incredible hub for digital artists and Web3 innovators.” – Josh Kriger
- “Web3 gaming thrives on innovation, and Bitcoin’s ecosystem is evolving rapidly.” – Trevor Owens
- “Pizza Pets created a truly deflationary gaming model, redefining the NFT experience.” – Danny Yang
- “Decentralized gaming means that even if developers disappear, the game lives on forever.” – Trevor Owens
People and Resources Mentioned:
About Our Guest:
Bryan Brinkman is a renowned digital artist and NFT creator known for his work on Ethereum and Bitcoin Ordinals. He has been a pioneer in the NFT space, pushing the boundaries of generative art and blockchain technology.Danny Yang is a blockchain entrepreneur and co-founder of OnChainMonkey. He has been instrumental in driving Bitcoin Ordinals adoption and bridging the gap between Bitcoin and the NFT ecosystem.Trevor Owens is the founder of Pizza Ninjas and managing partner at BTC Frontier Fund. A leader in Web3 gaming, he has been at the forefront of decentralized game development on Bitcoin, creating innovative projects like Pizza Pets.
Transcription:Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Kriger here, co-host of The Edge of Show, formerly Edge of NFT, live in Tokyo at the Tokyo Tower. And it's really an honor to be part of NFT Japan in Ordinals, Tokyo. Two great events happening, meeting some old friends and some new friends. And I'm here right now with Bryan Brinkman and Danny Yang, and excited to have you guys on the show. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, likewise. So it's been a minute since we've talked about Brinkman on-chain monkeys, and it was great to run into Bryan, who clearly, you drank the Bitcoin Kool-Aid, you're passing over to the Ordinal side. We'll get into all that, but first guys, why Japan? Why are we all in Japan together? What brought you here?Bryan Brinkman: Well, what brought me here was what Super Chief has created with his art, Golden Guy, NFT's Japan and Ordinal's Tokyo, all these events happening together. They were like, hey, do you want to come to Tokyo? I've never been. And so I was like, heck, yeah, that sounds fun.Josh Kriger: It's a, it's a, it's not a difficult flight, especially from LA. It was like direct.Bryan Brinkman: Oh yeah. From New York it was 14 hours. Um, but, uh, I, I got here and, uh, I think I'm adjusted at this point.Josh Kriger: I mean, you're an IP guy, so I think it would make sense that you like appreciate, um, you know, the, the TLC that Japan has been, has taken over the long period of time to develop really great IP.Bryan Brinkman: Oh, I would say so. I mean, just everywhere you look, everything is so well-branded and well-packaged. I'm in awe of just the vending machines that you walk by all the time and looking at all the different logos and artworks. There's no shortage of inspiration here.Josh Kriger: Absolutely. And Danny, what about yourself?Danny Yang: Well, Bitcoin brought me here. In fact, the first time I, or many years when I came, it was also, I came for Bitcoin because one of my Bitcoin companies was acquired by a company that had a presence in Japan. And now it's great that we're here all together because of Bitcoin, too. Yeah.Josh Kriger: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say no to Japan. This is my second time here. And I think my girlfriend and I were just looking for an excuse to get back because it's a really special culture, very artistically appreciative community and amazing food. So, it's been a lot of fun so far. We've got a great group out there, you know, having fun, learning and what not. So, I think we're at an interesting precipice in this market. Is the bull over? Probably not. You know, it's a fight for attention. I think we could all agree on that. What is your perspective on where ordinals and NFTs fit into that attention war at this point?Bryan Brinkman: That's a good question. I do think we are still in the bear in many ways compared to where we were in 2021. But in other ways, there is a resurgence happening right now. And I'm seeing art starting to sell more. I'm seeing PFP starting to tick up again. And we're starting to see people rally behind NFTs that are in these strong chains. And that's Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin. And I think As we're starting to see these things rally, I mean, we'll see when this airs, what it's at. But again, today, Bitcoin has once again rallied above $100K. And the more that happens, the more people talk about Bitcoin, the more I think they're going to look at ordinals and runes and look into that ecosystem more and more. And so, like you said, it's an attention economy. And right now, there's a lot of positive attention moving in the coming months. What do you see, Danny?Danny Yang: Yeah, I agree with what Bryan said. And I think we're going to have a new president in the US soon. And crypto is really on an uptick because it was quite suppressed in the last four years, and even longer than that. Tell me about it. Yeah, I know. And now I think we're going to, and Bitcoin is doing well. And Bitcoin is getting a lot of attention for Bitcoin's strategic reserve by states, by different countries. And as Ryan said, you know, When Bitcoin does really well, the whole crypto ecosystem does well. And Bitcoin Oreos is a new thing that you can do on Bitcoin, which I think has a lot of growth.Josh Kriger: So Danny, I mean, you were an early adopter of sort of the Ordinals concept and sort of, you know, made a big decision with your fellow co-founders to really progress over to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Has it lived up to your own sort of expectations and hope?Danny Yang: Yeah, definitely. It's still very early. I think that's what people might not appreciate yet, how early Bitcoin ore nodes is. It's still a very small ecosystem, which is actually a good time for anyone to get involved and start to learn about it. Bitcoin is a long-term play. Bitcoin has been around for 16 years, and it's been gradually growing up. And each Bitcoin cycle, every four years, there's a big Upswing in both price action and also attention that not people give it and then you know, there's a downturn But then it comes back again And so, you know or nose is a new thing this cycle and you know It'll have its moment and then it might you know, you know have followed the same cycle right? There's this four-year cycleJosh Kriger: Right on. And I guess one thing that also brought you both here is a chance to hang out IRL. And you're working on a collaboration that I heard a little bit about. I'd love to learn more.Bryan Brinkman: Yeah, I mean, well, this goes way back. I mean, I've known Danny for quite a few years now. And very early on, he was bullish on ordinals. And I was probably a little more apprehensive because I was like, this is something new, and at the time it was like trading on spreadsheets, and I was like, this is way too complicated for my collectors to figure out right now, and thankfully the wallets have gotten better, the ecosystems have gotten better, the marketplaces have gotten better, and about 14 months ago we started really hammering on this idea of what is now called Flickr, which is a series of ordinals that are inscribed in a way that uses recursion to create animation on-chain.Josh Kriger: Can you talk about what recursion is for those that aren't familiar with that?Danny Yang: One thing that's different about Bitcoin versus Ethereum, and so NFTs as we know them is Ethereum NFT, ERC-721, and it's a smart contract chain that allows you to create basically actually quite complex NFTs with a smart contract. Bitcoin is not a smart contract chain, so it's very, the fact that it almost even exists is actually kind of amazing, because it's just very hard to do things like this on Bitcoin. So, recursion is this cool way of being able to do something that's composable, or where you can reference something else and reuse that code to do, or assets to create something new, right? And so that's recursion. Composability on Ethereum smart contracts or reuse of existing assets or code to do something new with it. So it's such an important part of the Ornos protocol.Bryan Brinkman: I would say just think of it as loading an NFT into another NFT. And you can do that infinitely. And what you did early on, which I found really interesting, was he took a lot of scripting language protocols that you could use to make generative art and inscribed all of that so that you could run generative art on chain in that way. And so that's what sparked our initial conversation of, oh, this is actually something that I can't do. on my Ethereum NFTs, I want to play around with that.Josh Kriger: That makes sense. And you chose the number in the collection for any particular reason?Bryan Brinkman: 30 being, in terms of animation, 30 frames a second is kind of the standard over the years. And so I made it a one second loop, which is 30 frames, which each frame has its own story, whether it's tied to a rare set, or a reference to past works of mine. They're all kind of neon light interpretations of the Bitcoin logo. And then they all load into this animation, which is actually an interactive piece of code that allows you to change the frame rate. add a strobe light to it, pause it, and start it, and all this other stuff. So yeah, it's really cool seeing what you can do. And then there's even further layers involved in terms of re-inscribing. And it goes deep. But I think what I like about the project is it kind of has the whole Felix the cat bag of tricks of what ordinals can do. And it'll allow me to then explain to people that might not be in the ordinals ecosystem what's possible and I think that's exciting.Josh Kriger: Why such a small collection versus if the goal is sort of to get more folks on board, why not 300 or 3,000 or some other derivation of 30? That's a good question.Bryan Brinkman: Personally, I just thought, keep it keep it simple and small as a as kind of an entry into the space. I, you know, I've been a fan of the space for years of ordinals and I've been collecting, but personally I always get nervous about entering a new space and feeling like you know, someone might look at an artist and go, oh, they're coming into our ecosystem and they're trying to extract from it or do this other thing. So I wanted to come in in a way that said, here's a really thoughtful, interesting way of using it that shows that I care about what it does, and it's not about maximizing it. It's about making something really special. And that way, each one of those will live as a special piece, as a one-of-one art that will hold the value similar to my one-of-ones on Ethereum.Josh Kriger: Cool, and Danny, I mean, you guys are releasing this project together. How are you actually going to do the release, and how will folks have a chance to get one of these editions?Danny Yang: Well, I'll let Bryan answer that.Bryan Brinkman: Yeah, yeah. So there's 30 pieces. The way I wanted to go about it was give 10 to my community, and that'll be done via raffle in my Discord. There will be 10 to the on-chain monkeys community. So if you're an on-chain monkey holder, hang out in the Discord and other ways and figure out how you might qualify there. And then 10 will be raffled to the public, because I do think anytime I see a project that mints out entirely privately, I'm like, hey, that's not very fair. So I want to make sure that there's equal amounts of chance for people that might not even be in ordinals or be collectors of our stuff to have a chance at maybe getting into this. And so yeah, I think that'll be you know split evenly and it'll Probably go the raffles will start to go live in the next few days and run for a week And then we'll just gonna kind of sell these piecemeal very coolJosh Kriger: Yeah, excited to see how that goes and looking forward to seeing the art. I am an on-chain monkey holder, full disclosure.Bryan Brinkman: Same.Josh Kriger: Let's see, maybe I'll be one of your holders as well with this new piece. We'd love to step out a little bit and talk a little bit more broadly about your thoughts on this space from a creator economy perspective. Bryan, for those that don't know, also does a show and you specialize sort of in interviewing artists, which I think is really cool. What are some of the unexpected insights, maybe thoughts or ideas that you've sort of picked up from doing all these interviews that have sort of affected your perspective on the space.Bryan Brinkman: Yeah, so you're referring to a show I do with Adam Testa called Art First, where we bring on artists and talk for 30 minutes about their process of creation and then 30 minutes of sharing artists that inspire or that they've collected or inspire them. And it's a good way to kind of get insights. And in terms of what I've learned from different artists, learning about process is really interesting, especially speaking to AI artists, which is something that I'm not as you know, I dabble a little bit with mid-journey and stuff like that, but I'm not deep in the trenches of AI art. And really hearing how, you know, AI art can be created with this, like, to me, it's like the art of workflow, because they're basically jumping from one platform or program to LLM. And they're kind of mixing 10 different things, but the workflow itself is the canvas to get the output they want. And that's something that I learned from interviewing these AI artists more. And then talking to these different artists, like you said, the ecosystem's not the best it's been. So hearing about how they approach marketing and how they approach kind of building community is always really interesting. And so I think that's one of the benefits of this space is that as an artist, we're always learning from each other. I'm looking on the other side of this camera here and I see multiple artists that I've worked with, I've published, I've collaborated with. We're always trying to kind of figure out what works and what doesn't work and share that insight with each other.Josh Kriger: Is is marketing a project today building community today different than it was a year ago? Um.Bryan Brinkman: It's different than it was three years ago, when things were hot. Because back then, the collectors were interested in short term. They were there to make a flip. Now, they're looking for a community. I think a lot of collectors are looking to invest long term, but they're also just looking for fun people to hang around with and be a part of their journey. I think the artists that are still creating now that kind of didn't kind of wash away with the bear market are in it for the long haul and the communities that are building around it are going to be long-term communities of friends. And I think we're, if you look at who's flown out to Japan, who's flying out to Paris, who's going to these things, it's going to be these people that care about being around each other.Josh Kriger: Right on. And Danny, one more question for you. Stepping out from Ordinals into the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, you have Bitcoin L2s that are, a lot of them are coming up the ranks. Projects like Babylon that are really stretching the limits of what you can do with your Bitcoin. How do you see those developments influencing the Ordinals community and vice versa over the next year?Danny Yang: I think, overall, the Bitcoin ecosystem is getting richer in what you can do. So Bitcoin, historically, has just been store of value. And it's not very exciting. Store of value, as in not much activity happens.Josh Kriger: Yeah, digital gold, it's a cool analogy, but it kind of gets a little bit stale, right?Danny Yang: It's very valuable. I mean, Bitcoin wealth is the biggest in the crypto space. But now you have more exciting things happening that many people can actually be active participants of and actually create. So I think Oronoz is leading the wave there. So Oronoz actually helped kickstart a lot of these other initiatives. And also, interesting, the timing came in similar times. Oronoz started Tuesdays at Babylon. I think it was around that time when theyJosh Kriger: So what about the future though? Is it going to be those initiatives that then reignite Ordinals or do you see a different future?Danny Yang: Well I think Ordinals, well the part of Ordinals I'm really excited about is art on Bitcoin and that is still very small today and has a lot of potential to grow. And for basically the art and Bitcoin, like the traditional art, the high-end art market, and the kind of Bitcoin holders or Bitcoiners or Bitcoin maxis, there's actually a lot of intersection there because it's kind of... people with a lot of money, some of them end up buying art because it's also a store of value and it's also what you can enjoy, basically use your wealth to enjoy life and also show off, right? So I think Ornos has that potential, also art on Ornos has that potential market fit there.Josh Kriger: Right on. Well, thank you both for sharing some time with me and sort of talking about your upcoming collaboration. Where can folks go to learn more about what you're working on, Bryan, and maybe have a chance to participate in this raffle?Bryan Brinkman: Yeah, so follow me on Twitter at Bryan Brinkman, B-R-Y-A-N, B-R-I-N-K-M-A-N, and join my Discord. It's open to all, and it's very chill. And so yeah, the the raffles will be happening the Discord and all the information on the drop will be happening on my Twitter And Danny, where do people go to follow you and OnChainMonkey?Danny Yang: Yeah, so OnChainMonkey has a discord you can find it off for the Twitter OnChainMonkey and you know, we're basically up. We're very focused on art on Bitcoin. So we support a lot of artists People are sharing art. They like, you know, Bryan's is actually one that's gonna be very hot, you know coming up when it comes out and And speaking of long term, he spent 14 months from start to finish before even kind of announcing it and releasing it. So it's going to be a great drop. Thank you.Josh Kriger: Amazing. And one more quick thought, Danny, is do you have any other drops or collections coming out with other artists?Danny Yang: Oh, we have our own. So we have Genesis and Dimension 300 on Bitcoin, but the OCM Katoshi is coming out on Bitcoin sometime in Q1. So that's one we've also been working on for quite a while, about two years now.Josh Kriger: Very cool. Well, thanks, guys. Great hanging out.Danny Yang: Pleasure.Josh Kriger: Hello, everyone. This is Josh Kriger, co-host of The Edge of Show, formerly Edge of NFT, live in Tokyo at the Tokyo Tower. And we are talking with Trevor Owens, the co-founder, founder, co-founder. Yeah. All right. Hi, everyone. Josh Kriger here live at Tokyo Tower. It's The Edge of Show. And we're here live at NF... I'm going to say Ordinal.Trevor Owens: Yeah, I'll just say both.Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Kriger here, co-host of Edge of Show. We're live at NFT Japan, Ordinal's Tokyo. I'm here at the Tokyo Tower with Trevor Owens, the co-founder of Pizza Ninjas and the managing partner at BTC Frontier Fund. He does a lot of stuff in this space. You also know him for the Ordinal Show on X, which how often do you guys do that?Trevor Owens: Twice a week.Josh Kriger: Twice a week. So he sort of wears every hat there is to wear around Web 3, including that really rocking Pizza Ninja hat. Full disclosure, I am a Pizza Ninja holder, so I can't help but be a little biased and bullish about this project. Well, it's great to hang out again in Tokyo. And, you know, this sort of event has been cooking for a while. We've been talking to Super Chief. I'm curious, what made you excited to come to Japan besides all the incredibly amazing food?Trevor Owens: Yeah, well, I mean, of course, I think, you know, a lot of credit goes to you, Josh, for kind of roping me in here. And we've been like around the world together this year in Lisbon and in Hong Kong and in Korea. Well, you roped me into Lisbon. Yeah. We're obviously an IP project with Pizza Ninjas, and when you look at the global IP landscape, Japan is number one in the world, even ahead of the US, because among the top ten global grossing IPs, five of them are in Japan. And the top two are also in Japan, which is Pokemon and Hello Kitty. And then Mickey Mouse is third, in terms of global revenue generated based on IP. So Japan is a heavyweight in the IP space. And I think if you're developing Web3 IP, then you need to be connected to the Japanese market. Including of course like the animation industry, you know, Japan is famous for animation industry for the games industry. And so, you know, there's this incredible talent incredible partnerships here. And I think it. If you are a Western IP and you're not. Working on breaking into the Japanese market. You're not getting the same level of exposure That you you could be because also IP is a very collaborative space and lots of IPs can do cross collaboration Maybe someday we'll have you know a Pokemon partnership with pizza ninjas or a Hello Kitty partnership would be super cool and so yeah, I think that it's just a It's a growing market. It's historically the most important market for IP. And I think that still, though, they're a little bit behind when it comes to blockchain technology and NFTs. And so being able to come out here and connect with the local market, we're early, essentially.Josh Kriger: Makes a lot of sense. So as you think about sort of the future of Pizza Ninja's IP, does gaming also come to mind? Obviously, Japan is a huge gaming market as well. A lot of the classic gaming IP comes out of Japan. I'm curious if that crossed your mind.Trevor Owens: Yeah, definitely. I think for the animation industry and for the gaming industry. And, you know, of course, like Nintendo is here, Sony is here. You know, they created so many big IPs. In fact, Sony also launched their own blockchain the other day. There was some fud around that because they were censoring transactions. But I also think, actually, in some ways, Japan is ahead of the U.S., specifically around regulations. So the U.S. is overregulated. Hopefully that'll change this year with the new SEC coming in. But a lot of the Western gaming companies have just stayed out of NFTs altogether, unless they're startups, because of the lack of clarity on regulation. But they don't have that problem in Japan.Josh Kriger: Yeah, they tried it and I think for a lot of these companies the roadmap was so murky. I don't think this industry has a problem figuring out creative solutions to define parameters. I think the problem is the ambiguity. And the sort of got you sort of mentality if you do something and then sort of like grandfathering you into, or not grandfathering you into new regulations, right? I think that's the risk factor.Trevor Owens: Yeah, 100%. And, you know, even if you're in the right, the SEC can still come after you like they've done with, you know, Coinbase and XRP. And, you know, you may not do anything against the law and you may win the case, but you may be, you know, you may die because of all the litigation and costs and just the general hassle in your daily life.Josh Kriger: Absolutely. So you seem pretty relaxed and I was impressed with how relaxed you were during the whole Pizza Pet saga. For those of you that are members of the Edge community, you saw the giveaway that we did. We had a lot of pizza pets among our community. Thank you for including us. But a staggering amount of virality created in a short period of time. I want to go into the inspiration for the project. some of the experiences that you learned or surprises along the way, but let's just start with the facts. How many communities were involved? How many pizza pets were minted? What was the sort of genesis of all this?Trevor Owens: Yeah, so it's around close to 400 communities and we did an open collab process where Any project that had a minimum amount of social presence and volume on different marketplaces could get a small allocation of like 20. And then for the partners that supported us over the past year, you guys included, we gave bonuses to give more to their community. So it was our way of giving back to all the partners that we've had over the past year who supported our events or sponsored our events. And we had, because it was completely, we created a checklist of how to calculate your thing completely open. Everybody got what was fair and it was all published. And so that worked really well to get a lot of people excited about and a lot of partners and we end up airdropping almost 60,000 pizza pets to all those different communities and within the first week of the game I think like half of them died so that was pretty crazy.Josh Kriger: I had some casualties in my own collection Fortunately, I think a lot of my core team kept their pets alive, sold them, a few died, but yeah, it was a brutal Game of Thrones first week. You think there's gonna be a couple deaths one day, and no, it's just everyone's dead.Trevor Owens: Yeah, yeah, and so we're actually down to almost 15,000 left. out of the original 60,000.Josh Kriger: Oh wow, that's higher than I thought.Trevor Owens: Yeah, yeah.Josh Kriger: Wow, so there's some commitment there. Yeah. Because you have to take care of these pets, you know, there's certain sort of enhancement opportunities for them. You know, if you want to sort of have a trippy pet, there's some LSD, there's some marijuana to slow down death rate, but of course that also slows down evolution.Trevor Owens: Yeah.Josh Kriger: So, yeah, that was a little bit of a surprise to me, all those unique components. You kept that under wraps pretty well.Trevor Owens: Yeah, thanks, thanks, yeah. I mean, we wanted to create a very simple game, we wanted to make it entertaining, and I think, you know, when we got the sort of parent-child features of Ordinals, it just made perfect sense there was gonna be a digital pet game at some point, because it worked so well. Of course, Axie Infinity was basically the number one game in all of Web 3, was just a digital pet game. And also inspired by CryptoKitties, because I think CryptoKitties is an OG project people love. And so we just tried to look at what those projects did well and didn't do well. create our own version of a digital pet game that's, you know, entertaining, you know, these different drugs, giving your pet drugs, you know, it's very... We're targeting, obviously, the majority of Web 3, I think, is between, like, 25 to 45. And so it's, you know, it's not a game for kids.Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's not PG.Trevor Owens: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people found it hilarious that they're giving their pet, like, steroids or marijuana or something like that. There's a lot of fun. And, you know, what we want to focus on was this deflationary mechanic. Right. So I think with Axie Infinity and with CryptoKitties, you know, they didn't hold their value over time. That's because we went from bull market, bear market, but also because of the inflation rate. And I think also with Axie specifically, you would see these Axie farms in Southeast Asia where people have a whole wall full of phones that are just playing the game or shaking or something like that. They did the same with Stepn. So you have to figure out how to... prevent botting as a means. And the main way we did that is by having a lot of random sort of PVP mechanics and really focusing on deflation because we do eventually want to add a breeding component, right? So the whole idea is like, You raise your pet and if you don't take care of it, it's going to die. That's the deflationary mechanic. But then after we want to have a breeding mechanic so that this game can kind of expand over time. But the fact is that the main goal everyone's going for is going from the baby pet or the egg to the immortal. So once you have an immortal, it's like that's the one you can breathe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You own that. It's not going to die. Well, they'll probably be a death match mechanic, though. You can fight them and they can kill each other. but it won't be like dying from you not paying attention, right? And so all the ones that are pre-immortal will either die or become immortal eventually. And so, you know, when you have a breeding mechanic, the goal is that they're going to breed them and then make more immortals and they can continue to breed them, etc. and play the game and they can sell the assets. You know, I joke it's a token that prints you tokens like the Holy Grail, right? But we wanted to have that deflationary mechanism so that way it's kind of like proof of work with Bitcoin, right? It's like you can't, the only way to make new Bitcoin is to spend electricity and the same thing with the immortal pizza pets. The only way to make more immortals is to play the game and you have to pay Bitcoin fees and there's some risk of dying. And so we wanted to like kind of align the incentives like Bitcoin and eventually there's going to be, you know, we're going to probably have something like a halving as well where the breeding rate after four years, or however many years we end up deciding to do it, gets cut in half, so it'll approach a finite supply of immortals. But we wanted to have, the dream of Web 3 is not only these incentive-based games. So these incentive-based games, you can't make in Web 2. Fundamentally, this technology, these incentives, change our behavior and how we react. to things. So like a normal Tamagotchi pet, you know, the game, it works for kids. I had one as a kid and my teacher took it when I was in school and then it died because the teacher took it and I cried or whatever. I was traumatized. But for adults, you know, when we play the old Tamagotchi thing, it's not the same. But now that these are actually worth something, and you can trade them, and there's opportunity to breed them, and then as people join the game, you can potentially have a revenue stream from these, assuming that people still want to collect them. It really changes the whole dynamic of the game. games with assets, games with incentives, games with monetary value, is something that can only be done in Web 3. And so that's really where we wanted to focus our attention because what our team is really good at is we know ordinals, you know, from top to bottom. And we've been able to make a lot of advanced stuff that no one else has done.Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was going to ask this question, like, I can just imagine how complicated this was to create the game, to create this additional IP. The mechanics were fairly sophisticated. There's a pretty close partnership with Magic Eden to pull this off. What were the biggest challenges that were even more challenging than you expected?Trevor Owens: Yeah, I would say definitely the integration of Magic Eden was a big hurdle.Josh Kriger: Like what you're doing, I don't think anyone's ever done before.Trevor Owens: They hooked us up big time. They put a lot of effort into it. They were excited to push the boundaries. Yeah, yeah. We couldn't have done it without them. And they put a lot of work in. They were great. But it was hard to build. It took maybe two months just to build. because we have 60,000 pets, like we started the game with 60,000 pets. Every Bitcoin block, we need to read the on-chain data and serve it to Magic Eden to update so that way people can't floor the dead pets. And there was a bit also rocky at the start because there was a lot of unknown on nodes, you know what I mean? So at the beginning, there were some pets that got through that people would, people would basically use DMT on their pets, which DMT is like an instant death or instant evolution, and we didn't anticipate, well, my goal was that people would do that, right? That was kind of how we designed it, but I never thought that they were actually gonna do it, and we had people DMT hundreds of pets, but then that they were gonna list them right away, and of course, when you're building this, you also don't realize, well, oh my God, people aren't even gonna look at the pets, they're just gonna be sweeping constantly, So there were some rough edges like that that we had and we got over those pretty easily. So what was the solution for that? So we ended up delaying the listings. We had to build this tech that would basically be able to update or read the on-chain data to check all the pets. you know, in three minutes, basically. Wow.Josh Kriger: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. We talked about it earlier. The Web3 community is creative. Like, if you give them boundaries, they will work within those boundaries as creatively as possible. I mean, the nature of this industry is disruptors, right? Yeah.Trevor Owens: There's always going to be somebody who's going to figure out how to hack the system. You know, so yeah, so we basically had a, there's a listing delay, so that way, if like a pet dies, and then someone goes to list it right away, it's just delayed by I think 10 or 30 minutes, and then by the time that listing would actually appear, if it's already dead, the servers are, like the Magic Eden server's already updated, so it won't. it's still removed from the collection. So yeah, I mean, that was a challenge. Also, we had to also, because Magic Eden doesn't, you know, like, every platform works differently, right? And so Magic Eden has some constraints. Usually what people do on ordinals is they take like, there's a lot of caching of data, right? For high performance sites, they have millions of visits. the data they're actually looking at is probably them where they requested the API hours ago. But these pets are changing every single Bitcoin block, and so we needed to also generate a thumbnail for the collection page with the latest data to show on the marketplace so people would actually know what is going on. So that was also complicated. And yeah, that was probably the biggest hurdle, making the game You know, I think we had the game done in almost, like, May or June, but then we ended up launching in December because we had to make that service that took a lot of time.Josh Kriger: And how long did it take to make the game itself?Trevor Owens: We started on it in mid-March of last year, so... Oh, this is a long time coming. Yeah, yeah. And it's also, you know... Wow, I did not realize how much, you know... And we're a small team, too, so... Chipping away at it.Josh Kriger: But I guess the other thing that struck me as complicated was the pet pulverizer. Was that complicated?Trevor Owens: That was pretty easy, actually. Really?Josh Kriger: Yeah. So pet pulverizer are these six machines that will kill pets with certain attributes. If the owner, who's not actually on your core team, decides to push a button. It's truly in the community's hands. Yeah, yeah, it's PVP. And is it individual pets, or are they just all pets wiped out?Trevor Owens: So yeah, like it'll there's a couple pets that have an immune trait so that's like less than 1% and then the all the other ones have one of the six weaknesses and it will just if they if they Use lotion in time. So it's like people trigger the pet pulverizer. There's a delay so people have time to react How do they know that the pulverizer has been triggered it? An icon shows in the pet itself and then you just and people obviously talk about social media soJosh Kriger: Fascinating. So the Magic Eden team, I'm sure there's been a debrief or multiple debriefs with them since this. It seems like the mechanics that you guys created together probably have made their marketplace better in some ways to help future projects that want to do crazy stuff like this.Trevor Owens: Absolutely, I mean, now I think people are really seeing the potential of building games on Bitcoin ordinals. There's definitely some advantages, too, to doing on Bitcoin, because actually, the 10-minute block times make it easier for games that are strategy-based, right? Like, for this Pizzabets game, it's very easy to say, like, one day is 144 blocks, right? But on a chain like Solana, that every block is a few milliseconds. I don't even know how many blocks are in a day. Is it millions or tens of millions? It's probably a lot, right?Josh Kriger: But having the slow blocks actually makes it a little bit better for... For longer term games that are more like lifestyle games where you go in, you do something, and then you take a break. Where you're not playing this game for hours. For D-gens that actually do wanna work and do other things with their life, go check out a museum or something. Hang out with their significant other.Trevor Owens: Yeah, and I think also the process of inscribing, well, the process of creating this game was much simpler than if we did it on a smart contract platform. Because the actual pets themselves, the art updates, dynamically with the blockchain, whereas if it was on Ethereum, you'd probably need a separate website to construct the pets. It would probably be a centralized website. You couldn't really do an IPFS. But just because we have the complete freedom to do CSS, HTML, JavaScript, it made it a lot easier to develop. It would have taken a lot longer. But I think also that there's still definitely some rough edges. One of the biggest things that we kind of messed up at the beginning was actually feeding them. There was a lot of inconsistencies among different wallets, stuff that we didn't kind of expect. But we fixed those pretty quickly. And now, I also didn't realize, How many new people would come in and they're like, what's a mempool? Or how do I know if the next Bitcoin block is coming through? Or why is feeding my pet take two transactions? There's a lot of things that was like, oh yeah, of course. We made the game for Web3 natives, but even among that audience, there's a lot of people who still don't know even how Bitcoin works. So I think though, where we're going in the next six months, improving that UX, Bitcoin is going to be an ideal place for these type of on-chain games. Assuming that maybe the mempool doesn't get too crazy, and if fees go up 100x, then that'll be super interesting, but it'll also mean that it's gonna be harder for other games to launch on ordinals, which I think either way is good for us. If more games can come on ordinals, it's great for us because now... You're the OG game. But if fees are too expensive and no one can launch a game again, it's also good for us.Josh Kriger: So... Yeah, interesting dynamics there. So... So some of these have sold for quite a lot, these Immortals. What's the highest sale that you're aware of at this moment?Trevor Owens: I think around .07 BTC, so around $7,000.Josh Kriger: Yeah. I saw some for like $6,000 at one point. I was tempted. I was tempted. Not financial advice. None of this is financial advice. And what are the Immortals going for today?Trevor Owens: They've gone down a lot because there's now a lot more. There's more. Initially, the only immortals that were there were people that DMT'd their pets. It's impossible to predict what the final supply is going to be. There were quite a few sales for $1,000, but now they're around maybe $900 or something like that, and the pizza pets themselves are around $250. Initially, when launched, they were only like, it went from like $50 to like $10. But then when half the supply got wiped out, it went up. It went up like 50x.Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. I knew some people that were very upset they sold their Pizza Pet too early.Trevor Owens: Yeah, yeah.Josh Kriger: Because I think this is also interesting that it was free for the community. The people that gifted these community partners contributed gas, which I think was cool. But I think the most interesting thing for me was the sort of pricing dynamics of truly natural deflationary economy and what happened there. You're going to have to write a Harvard business case about this project. One last question I have for you. I mean, clearly so much work put in by you and your team on this project. I appreciate you breaking it down for our listeners. I'm sure having seen a lot, done a lot in this space, you try to go into things without too much expectation. But you can't help but have some expectations. How did this experience, how has it been relative to what you might have expected?Trevor Owens: Looking back on it and looking at how things played out, we got a lot of things right. A lot of the game mechanics we were trying to do worked exactly as we intended. And that also caused me to realize how many things we didn't know how they were going to work. The DMT thing worked better than we had hoped. Yeah, like I think we intentionally tried to limit the scope of this. You know, we didn't put breeding in until that's gonna come in season two, but we just want to focus on one variable, which was the deflation of getting your pet from baby to immortal. Because more variables you add, the harder it is to predict. Yeah, so I'm just yeah, I'm super proud You know, we did a lot of cool a lot of cool innovative new things like we the pets also talk There's also music we made I think the largest library of music on Bitcoin because we leveraged the Nintendo sound chip and one of our engineers Patrick who's a giga genius musician and musical engineer and engineer. He did the music by hand. If you were to put an mp3 on Bitcoin, it's too big. So it's very difficult to put mp3s on there. But when you have a sound chip, you can basically write the code instructions, which you can also compress. And then, you know, I think all of the music was like, it's maybe like five kilobytes for like a huge song made with that so that was super cool. And, yeah, like being one of the being the first forever game on Bitcoin there's been some kind of game things but they weren't. They ended at a point, or there's some games that are not on-chain games, but this is a game that is gonna go on forever, and there's no centralization to it. It's fully decentralized. If I were to bungee jump off Tokyo Tower right now, and then die from bungee jumping or something, whatever, a bus hits me, or it's our team, the game would keep going forever, which is super cool.Josh Kriger: bungee jumping for a little while, because I think your guidance for the next few phases will be critical. Plus, I'd miss you.Trevor Owens: Yeah, thank you, man. So yeah, I'm proud, and I think there were a lot of things that we didn't know how it was going to work out, and surprisingly, more than I was even thinking. But we got a lot of it right. So I'm happy about that, and looking forward to season two, where we're going to introduce the breeding and some other fun mechanics. And the community that's formed around Pizza Pets has been awesome. And a lot of these new community members are now joining the Pizza Ninja community, which is awesome. And so, yeah, I'm just having a lot of fun and proud of the work that our team has done. We've worked super hard for it.Josh Kriger: Cool. Well, thanks for breaking all that down for us. I have to say, I really admire what you pulled off and how you did it and how you dealt with the adversity and communication with the community along the way because this is truly new stuff. Every time there was a mistake or issue, you talked it through transparently. We know that's one of the big challenges with our space is non-transparent communication. So give you kudos for that. And it was a very enjoyable partnership. So thanks for including us in that. And it's great to see you in Tokyo at this event. It's going to be an exciting year to come. If people want to learn more about Pizza Ninjas, Pizza Pets, where should they go?Trevor Owens: Yeah, definitely follow us on X. You can follow me at Tio. Pizza underscore ninjas. Pizza underscore pets. Pizzapets.fun is the website. And also ninjas.pizza. So check out any of those. And yeah, I mean, hope you guys, if you're listening and you haven't heard of it, you check out the game and maybe give it a try.Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's not too late. And if you're more conservative on your risk level, just get an immortal and you're good to go. You can take care of it whenever you want, no pressure.
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