Decentralized Tech Livestream: Beyond Play-to-Earn: Building a Fair Gaming Economy

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Decentralized Tech Livestream: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . short version of how I got here.

Jon Radoff: So you opened up Earthscape. So let's dive right in though. Like talk about Earthscape, what's the problem? What are you working on? You know, people are probably learning about you for the first time here.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: Sure. So the shortest pitch is mobile game live streaming. I'm live streaming is the biggest game discovery platform out there, but all of the existing tools are focused on desktop and browser stuff. But majority of the gaming market is actually not gonna be serviced by that at all, because especially in like Asia, everybody's on their phones. Like actually over half of the gaming market is mobile first. And in some parts of the world, well over half is mobile only. Those people are completely locked out. So they're not able to participate in the creator economy. What's so ever assuming that they want to do something gaming related? Yeah, you get to it, right? But that's only gonna show you. That doesn't show what you're doing on your phone. So there's nothing really that's optimized for the developing world too. So we built a brand new tech package. It's out on both Android and iOS, all of the iOS versions still kind of just a proof of concept. We got a little bit more tweaking to do. But if you download it from the app store, you can play any game on your phone and assuming that you have a YouTube account, you just connect that and you can stream out to your YouTube account or working on integrating Twitch, but they want us to have more people first. And we're bringing our own audience too. So if you want to be a mobile game streamer, just get our app and it works.

Jon Radoff: So I recall a couple of mobile streaming platforms trying this in the past, some quite a long ways back. Like I remember this maybe 10 years ago. What's been hard about this market and how are you approaching it differently in terms of the solution to get to the kind of scale you're talking about?

Decentralized Tech Livestream: Well, as far as scale goes, it's really difficult to just reach people because there's a lot of fragmentation. And the way that we're scaling is through the telcos. So we've got partnerships with various telcos in different countries, starting with the Philippines and Indonesia. We also have some in partnership in South Africa. And we're gonna be closing one through a partner, a partner with a partner in Vietnam. So that'll be a good one to call them the VIP countries, Vietnam and Indonesian Philippines. So those are our three initial real target markets. And basically how that works is the telcos push our products, we at least the infrastructure behind it into every phone that uses that telco. So all the people that have those services on their phone, you could everybody uses it. And now they'll just be able to either consume streams or create streams depending on the package that they get. And that's going to be determined by the nature of the partnership that you get opted into. Some will get opted into one, some will get opted into the other. We're gonna scale it both at the same time so that we'd make sure we don't go too long-sighted on one or the other.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: But the end result's gonna be something like 250 million users

Decentralized Tech Livestream: over the course of the next couple months, get exposed to this tech package. So it should work out pretty well for the scaling. But where the only one that's really been optimized for the developing world, you can do mobile game streaming. But if you don't have a flagship device and you don't have a 5G or really active broadband connection, it's gonna suck. And also there's been a lot of problems with audio capture. We've solved all of those. And nobody else has been able to replicate it the way we did. Very thankful to our tech team to be able to pull this off. They did some miracles. But yeah, so that's kind of how we're scaling and why nobody else has been able to pull this off so far.

Jon Radoff: So there's a tech aspect of just getting it to work on a wider variety of devices,

Decentralized Tech Livestream: which allows you to act on devices

Jon Radoff: from several generations back, I'd assume, which is the kind of products that typically are used in a lot of the world. So that's one aspect, but you also have a, you're here, we're here at Blockchain Week, Korea Blockchain Week. So there's some tokenization aspect of this too. Can you talk to the business model and how you're thinking about that?

Decentralized Tech Livestream: So our primary business model is actually relatively web too. We don't follow the, at least I don't follow the ethos. I've been in this for a long time and I don't like all of these organizations that try to make money specifically on a token and relying on appreciation or price manipulation or liquidity coming in from traders to produce ROI. So we pay everybody in stables. Everybody that uses our app gets a wallet and as you generate revenue from playing games or live streaming or doing whatever you're doing, that just gets deposited. Well, right now it's credited to your account as points and then when you get enough, you hit a button and it redeems them for USDC that goes into your wallet. At that point, you do whatever the heck you want with it. We're going to be launching our own token. It's gonna power our progression system relatively soon but that keeps getting delayed for different reasons and people don't like that but it's better to delay it and have something that works really solidly than just rush it because people win moon, and again, as I already said, not a big fan of the win moon crowd. But yeah, so we are actually migrating everything over. We've signed a deal with a new layer one. I'd probably shouldn't announce everything right now because we can market any team who will shoot me. But we did sign a deal with a new layer one to migrate everything over there and they're gonna be helping us out. So that's basically gonna be the focus of my time and a lot of the tech teams time over October. Gonna be working very closely with this layer one and their senior development team to migrate all of our smart contracts which are already built. Everything's already completely created. We could theoretically deploy all the tokenization today. Like I could call up the devs and say, you just launch it. It's already even integrated into the app. You just can't see it because we've turned everything off on the backend so it doesn't show up. But as soon as we launch that, then everything for our progression will be decentralized. So your ability to be promoted on the streaming, like as a promoted streamer, your ability to get sponsorships from game studios, your ability to receive different types of rewards, your ability to become a content creator in a different way. So like you can go out and promote through social media of the games that you're asked to promote. All that stuff is tied to our token. And since I also think that in order to truly onboard the next billion users, which everybody talks about, you can't be importing them from a tech perspective, which is one of the big mistakes everybody makes. You have to onboard them from a Web2UX perspective. So basically, everything's integrated into the app such that you don't need to know anything. We have all the gas fees covered on the backend. You don't even know you have a token. It just looks like an additional asset in your wallet on your phone. And when you're staking to unlock things, your experience is that you're just buying a benefit. And then you can sell that back when you're done with it. What you're really doing is staking and unstaking, but who really cares? These are fancy terminologies that we've all come to use because we're all tech guys. We're all techies. We love how this stuff works. But the vast majority of people don't care. The analogy that I hear a lot is you don't need to know how an engine works to know that you need the car to get from point A to point B. Just need the car to get you somewhere and you need it to look good in the process because you don't want to be driving a feeder. But that's the whole ethos behind our tech integrations for tokenization. You don't need to know. You shouldn't know. And it'd be great if you didn't have to put gas in your car, but we will put gas in your wallet. So you don't have to worry about that part.

Jon Radoff: So we're both here at Korea Blockchain Week and you're touching on a few of your own views there. I want to talk a little bit more about what we're hearing at Korea Blockchain Week as well. You just pointed a really important one, which is how do you really onboard users into this technology? I think my answer is that user doesn't give a shit about the technology. They only care about the utility that they get out of whatever the application or the game is. So the more blockchain verbiage you have in there, the worse off you are. So it beamball, for example, we address that by, when we think of our decentralized physical infrastructure network, there's a supply side and a demand side. The supply side are the people who operate nodes and they actually do care about tokens because there are contributing capacity and earning tokens on the network by providing compute or providing checker nodes that make sure everything is going properly on the network. But on the demand side, the game studio side, yes, we have some really great Web 3 studios, like someone was just mentioning Pudgey Party in chat a little while back. They were asking, yep, there we go. So Pudgey Party is a good example of a game running on the Web 3 side. And they would know what a token is for sure. But that's not the majority of our traffic. Most of our developers are not even Web 3 developers as you'd expect. 99.9% or so of the gaming market today is what we call Web 2, which by the way, they don't call themselves Web 2. They just call themselves gamers. They don't even have this concept of Web 2 versus Web 3. And it's the same at the game studio level. So when game studios are building a game, they don't want to think about a token. So if they want to use our infrastructure, the last thing they want to hear is get a wallet set up and start converting your fiat currency into a token and buy it off the network. No, we give them an SDK. They download into their typical tools. There is no token. It's all automated on our network. They don't have to know. In fact, they may well not even know that there's blockchain tech involved at some point. So that, to bring it back to KBW, is a narrative that I'm hearing. So I've been at a few of the deep-in events here. And people talk a lot about the importance that, or the potential for deep-in to grow so much because the demand side of these networks by and large does not need to target a crypto-native consumer. It could be anybody who just needs these services. And it seems like that's your approach, too, based on the way you've described things. Love for you to just now run with that. If it's helpful to, I think, you maybe stated your position on it already. Or what else are you hearing at KBW? And how does it contrast with the last cycle of conferences, if I think about the last cycle, maybe it was just

Decentralized Tech Livestream: back April, May, when we had the Dubai events and stuff

Jon Radoff: like that, and then last year, maybe, this time last year?

Decentralized Tech Livestream: It's really interesting because it hasn't changed that much. A lot of the people that come to the conferences and are speaking on the panels, they seem to all have the same grasp that we need to be all moving in this direction towards something that doesn't require people to know what they're using. But it just works for them and solves their problem in a more effective way than the existing technology would solve it if they just kept doing things the way they

Decentralized Tech Livestream: were doing it.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: I don't know, well, I kind of do. But I don't entirely know why that hasn't filtered down into the builders. I was just at the main event yesterday and one of the things that a panel was talking about was this problem of onboarding has been solved. I'm like, sure about that. Yes, technically, we have, from a technical perspective, solved the problem. I all the tools are there now. You don't need to build the wheel again in order to figure out how we can onboard people into Web 3. But the problem has not been solved from a marketing and an onboarding perspective from the user side. It just isn't really there in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Even stuff that I keep seeing get funded is by and large just building a better casino and focusing specifically on the people that are already really into the tech and helping them use blockchain technology better. But that's not going to onboard the next billion users. And we hear that phrase all the time. And that was a phrase that I even heard at the same specific panel that I'm referencing. Like, how can we onboard the next billion users? Well, the problem has been solved. So we don't need to worry about that so much.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: Am I know?

Decentralized Tech Livestream: I mean, from it's, yeah, the tech is there to solve it now. But you have to actually incentivize the people that are going to be building the products to build them. And they're just not going to do it if you keep funding everybody that's focused on the casino. So if you want to onboard people into blockchain and that's also kind of a vanity goal. Do we really, I'm a blockchain OG. So I think that everybody should use it for a lot of ideological reasons. But ideology is rigid. We don't need to be pushing people on a technology just because we love it. If I could solve the problems that we're solving with Earthscape without using blockchain in a better way, that would be the better way to do it. But it can be solved better with blockchain. So that's why we're using blockchain for some of these functions. We want to make sure that people have actually access to an ownership over the time, energy, money, and attention that they generate and put into what they're building. And whether that's building an audience or building a track record of excellence or selling something or whatever it is, you should own that. But we shouldn't be pushing people onto this just because we like it. But I'm kind of getting off track here. Because yeah, people talk about onboarding and ex-going users. But the way to do that is by making it so that they don't have to know what they're going to be using because it should just work. When I'm booting up a game, I don't check the engine that is running. Like you were saying, John, I don't need to know that this is a Unity game. I just need to know that I like the game and that it looks good and that I enjoy playing it. And that should be the same for pretty much any technology that we use. So long as it solves your problems, long as you enjoy using it, as long as it's better

Decentralized Tech Livestream: than what you were using before, that's how it should work.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: You shouldn't have to know all of these fancy things about how to use it. You shouldn't have to know how it's all put together for it to be put together. If you have to know, nobody wants to really build anything. They just want stuff to work for you.