NFL Goes Web3 With a Polkadot-Powered Game

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1:29Welcome to Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing. I'm Ash Bennington. We've got a great show for you today. John Linden, the CEO of Mythical Games and a gaming industry veteran who's worked at Activision on Call of Duty. We'll speak in just a moment. He is here. But first, let's take a look at these markets. Obviously, we've seen a bit of gyration. It's been a wild 24 hours. First, let's take a look at Bitcoin on my screen trading at 29 ,122. On a trailing 24-hour basis, it's down about two and a third percent. But as you can see that on the left side of that chart, looking at the sell-off yesterday afternoon, some pretty wild gyrations happening there.

2:07So too with Ethereum trading right now at$1 ,899. Call it pretty close to$1 ,900 for one ETH. Trailing 24-hour basis, well, you can see the same pattern there on that chart. On a trailing 24-hour basis, it's minus 3 % thereabouts, 2.78 on my screen. Trailing seven days, it's off just under 2%, 1.7 % or so on my screen. Lots to talk about. We've got a great show, lots of action to bring you. First, we're going to speak with our own Jeremy Varlow, who is joining us live from Austin, Texas, from the Consensus Conference. Hey, Jeremy, how are you, man? Very well, Ash. Day two of Consensus is upon us.

2:47Day one was a smashing success. We're all a little bit worse to wear. There was tons of after-hours activities last night, but excited to get day two on the road here. After-hours activity at a crypto conference, I don't believe it. Hey, listen, what's going on on the floor? What are you hearing? What's hot? Yeah, I mean, it's been a super interesting first day. I mean, the sentiment is incredibly high. You know, 2022 is not a great year for the space, but it really looks that people have put that behind them. Tons of building going on. You know, there are a bunch of exhibitors here, many of which that we know and are familiar with, but also quite a few that are new to the space.

3:28I spoke with a couple of projects yesterday that just launched in the last week. So there's a ton of building going on. People are super, super excited. obviously the conversations ranging from everything to regulation, but also building in the space. Lots of talk about NFTs, the metaverse. Web3 gaming is a significant, significant part of this conference this year. But yeah, it's been a great first day. I'm really looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions and also catching up with the different protocols that are here. Well, we've got John Linden with us to talk about Web3 and gaming in just a second.

4:02But let me ask you this. You mentioned building a lot. That's always an important theme at any crypto conference. What's new? What's different? You know, the thing that really caught me by surprise is how many Web3 wallets are at this conference. A bunch of new wallets that are launching, some new DeFi protocols as well, which we'll surely do a recap on. But, yeah, I mean, the space is growing exponentially. And, yeah, the wallet thing was very interesting to me. I actually downloaded a few wallets yesterday, sent some tests around. And, yeah, the user experience is improving rapidly. And I think that that's something that we're going to see a lot more of in 2023.

4:43What are you hearing about regulation? Obviously, this is one of the major topics here in the United States especially. What are you hearing on the ground? Well, it's interesting. I mean, obviously, regulation in the U.S. is top of everyone's mind, and everyone is very interested in any sort of development from that front. But on the other side of things, there's a lot of other jurisdictions that are popping up as well. The Bahamas has a very prominent presence here. The Cayman Islands does as well, obviously my home. Japan, Asia in general, as well as the Middle East. So, I mean, while, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty about the U.S.

5:18regulatory system, there are other jurisdictions that are really stepping up to the plate and promoting themselves as being, you know, very crypto native and wanting to be a significant part of the space. Hey, Jeremy, we sure appreciate you joining us. I know you're busy there from the floor. We appreciate you taking time out to update us here. Final thoughts, key takeaways. What would you like to leave our audience with? I mean, listen, it's a great conference to attend. If you can ever get down here, certainly do so. Today, day two, the general admission passes are able to hit the floor. So we're going to see, you know, probably upwards of 15 ,000, 20 ,000 people.

5:54I think it's the most prominent crypto conference that we have. So if you are crypto curious and you want to attend one of these shows, this is definitely one of the best ones to attend. And it's a beautiful seven degrees and sunny, not sweltering like it was last year. Absolutely. It actually rained the last couple of days. It's a little bit cooler today, but yeah, perfect day for Tom. Hey, Jeremy Varlow, thanks again, man. We'll have to have you back soon to do this. All right, guys. Have a fun show. Cheers. All right. That's our own Jeremy Varlow reporting live from Austin, Texas. And now we go live to John Linden.

6:29John, welcome to Real Vision. Thanks for having me. John, you guys have had a big week. Your new game, NFL Rivals, dropped yesterday. Give us the top line. Yeah, it's a project we've been working on. We announced it a little bit last year. And I think for us, we really wanted to partner with the NFL to create a real, true gamer-first experience, but really have that Web3 economy in it. And I think we've made great strides. The game came out yesterday. We're actually sitting number one in all sports games right now. We're sitting number one in the action game category. And I think we're number three overall in terms of all games on the Apple App Store right now.

7:05So, you know, people talk about mass adoption. I think we've kind of talked to you. It has to come game first. And I think we're delivering that. So we're very, very excited on this first day. Very honored to get the support we're getting. And by the way, we're seeing some video right now on our screen. That's a clip of the actual action of the game. Those aren't NPCs. That's actual game action. That's actual game action. Yeah, so you're actually able to play the game. You know, your team, it's basically what we've set up as what we call an arcade team manager game. So essentially, you're coming in, you're building your team.

7:32Your team are assets that you can own. You can trade. You can sell. You're building that team. You're joining squads. The squads are also kind of NFTs behind the scenes. One thing you'll see, though, about our game, we don't actually use the word NFTs. We don't use the words Web3. We don't use the words blockchain. We just put out a game. And what's really great is I think we've been able to onboard, you know, hundreds of thousands of players already, which is great. into this game, and they're getting wallets behind the scenes if they don't already have one, right? So we've really tried to make a system to where players can come in very seamlessly, play the game, but they're still participating in this Web3 economy, and we expect people to kind of become educated more and more on what the benefits of that are.

8:10So this is so interesting. What you're saying, in essence, is you've abstracted away the interface with the wallet, with Web3, with NFTs' concept. It's just something that users are directly interacting with in a way that allows them to access technology directly through the gaming. Is that correct? That's right, yeah. And what we've also done is we really spent a lot of time. You know, we're from the gaming industry. We've been in the gaming industry for decades at this point. So we know kind of the rules and how to make that work. And frankly, we kind of walked in the front door with a lot of these app stores.

8:38You know, we had the first game last year on the Epic Games Store with Blanco's Block Party. This year, you know, we're now, you know, topping the charts on the Apple App Store as well as Google as well. So it's live on all these. So we've kind of gone in. We built a lot of tech very specifically for the gaming industry so that we can take transactions from the app stores and be able to still record them on chain very safely while abiding to all the compliance that we need to with these app stores. It's really interesting. Let me ask you this. For users who are more tech savvy, who are in the Web3 space, who are Web3 native, is there a capacity for those users to self-custody the assets at any point?

9:12Or is that something that you haven't gotten to yet? We're working through that right now. I will say that a lot of the traditional Web 2 app stores, they're very concerned, as are we, that a lot of gamers might not understand private keys and seed phrases. No one wants to set their private key down and suddenly lose it and you lost Zelda or you lost Super Mario, right? So it is a custodial account to start. We do have bridges in and out, though. So you can bridge assets in and out to MetaMask. You can sell them on OpenSea. You can do whatever you want. We do have the capacity to go completely non-custodial.

9:41That is definitely our goal in the future, but we're trying to ease into it as we bring on, you know, literally tens of millions of new gamers into the Zika system. See, this is what's so interesting to me, John, because this is a classic tradeoff, a classic balancing act that you guys must think about all the time, which is on the one end, you want a game that anybody can go into the app store and download, just like it could Candy Crush and be up and playing in 30 seconds or less. And on the same sort of the opposite side of that coin is you've got, you know, that if you don't have the ability to self-custody your assets, you're going to have people yelling at you and saying, not your keys, not your crypto.

10:12It's not really a Web3 application. And it's this balancing act, this almost dance that anyone who's sitting in your seat has to think about and has to deal with. That's right. Now, and I think, you know, last year, you know, there were a couple games for the first time in Web3. Blanko's block party was one of them that hit over a million players. So that was kind of a good milestone. but a million players in gaming is still pretty tiny, to be real honest. I came from the Call of Duty franchise. We had 50 million players on PC console. We had 500 million players on mobile, right? So we're basically trying to bridge those gaps, right?

10:44How do we have a comfortable experience to get people safely into the space and then educate them, give them more control? You know, we started with bridges. Bridges, you can bridge assets in and out, right? That's a great first step for gamers to understand. And then again, like I said, as we get comfortable, as the, you know, Jeremy just mentioned on the wallet side, as wallets get more secure and protect consumers in a very, very easy fashion, I think we will be going to full non-custodial. So we very much believe in the space. We believe in the power of what Web3 can do, but it has to be done very, you know, integrated into that game experience to be successful.

11:18So what's the culture like over there at Mythical? How are you hiring? Do you have folks who are like yourself, who are true veterans of the gaming industry? Do you have folks who are in the Web3 space, like how does that balance out? Because it really is, it's such an interesting kind of mix. In many ways, it's almost like what we see in DeFi, right? Do you have folks who have traditional banking backgrounds? Do you have folks who are Web3? I mean, it's really an interesting kind of mix up. We do. You know, we've been building since 2018. So we've been putting a nice foundation down. So we have great teams behind blockchain that have been able to kind of build out these amazing systems.

11:48I'd say a core of our team is definitely from the gaming industry. I think we have actually eight former studio heads that have shipped a billion dollar of games apiece. So we really are pretty prolific in the gaming space. And that's really been one of our secret sauce. You know, we can come in, we can speak to game developers, we can speak to the app stores, and we understand kind of that gamer culture. But at the same time, we are blending, we're really blending three worlds together. We have gaming, we have blockchain, and we have fintech, as you mentioned. So we actually acquired a company last summer called Dmarket that are very much specialists in blockchain, I'm sorry, in marketplace transactions, but they had a lot of experience with blockchain as well.

12:21So blending those worlds is kind of the secret sauce. It's also one of the challenges we always have as well right hey everyone we're gonna take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners we'll be right back so this is so that you can do in-app transactions presumably native in a web3 format that's right i think you know we're making progress on that i think you know i think uh you know when we started the company in 2018 we originally wanted blank goes out on mobile and they basically kind of got a big no like hey we don't understand this we're not ready for it you know fast forward a few years later we have a top game now top game in the app stores on mobile.

12:55I think the next step for us is now let's start making it more seamless. Let's get those marketplaces in the game. How does that work? How do we work with these big distribution companies? And I think there's still challenges left to identify, but we're definitely tackling them head on. How big is your shop now, John? We're about 300 people. So we're pretty good size. We've been growing so fast. We did about a 5X GMV lift from 21 to 22. Last year, we did about$60 million through our marketplace. We're closing in on that per month now, which is great. I think this month we're going to be about$33 million in sales.

13:29This month gross sales going through our marketplace and blockchain. Next month we're on track for$45 million already. So we're growing at such a tremendous pace. And like I said, we're not letting up. We got this game. This game is going to be really exciting kind of leading up to the NFL season. So we're in what we call the offseason with our season zero. We're going to keep really adding to that product. We got a really fun couple announcements coming up as we lead into the season. but we also have another big racing title coming shortly afterwards. So we have a game called Nitro Nation World Tour.

13:56That game was, that previous version of that game on mobile was the number three racing title, had 80 million installs on that franchise. So that's what's coming next from us. We'll be launching that later this summer and soft launching very soon. So we're trying to move this into the tens, if not hundreds of millions of gamers. And kind of away we go. And was that your original title or did you partner with the original creator of that studio? Yeah, so we partnered with a studio called CM Games. It's an amazing studio out of Estonia. They've had a long, long history in racing titles. And that's really kind of what we think is important.

14:27I think games are hard enough to make on their own. We want to pick special, right? So find studios that know how to make these games. And that's how you get the AAA experience out of it. Hey, talk a little bit about the idea of how gamers think about NFTs. I think I was surprised at how negative the reaction was initially. It's just a general proposition throughout the space. And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Maybe it was just that it was viewed as a kind of extractive technology rather than as a technology that could liberate the players. Talk a little bit about how that exists in terms of the current state of play in the space more generally.

14:59Yeah, you know, I mean, I think gamers are very, you know, they're a very suspicious bunch, let's say. You know, they're very, can be, you know, if anything doesn't seem right to them, they have a tendency to kind of reject that concept. And frankly, I hate to say it, but some of the early Web3 experiments out there weren't really games. They were really kind of gamified economies, and that doesn't necessarily appeal to a true gamer. So I think for us, we're trying to bring out how do these new concepts really affect the gameplay. You have to have creative gameplay that comes. You have to have something new that comes out of it rather than just being able to buy and sell, right?

15:32That's not super exciting. But, you know, there's been trading economies, you know, with Steam and CSGO and things like that for decades now that gamers are very supportive of. So it's really up to us as an industry to deliver value to those gamers and do it directly, authentically in the game itself. All right. We've talked a lot about the gaming space here, but I want to shift gears to a true Web3 conversation. Talk about this decision that you guys made to switch from Ethereum over to Polkadot and why. Yeah, I think that's we've got a lot of feedback this week on that. You know, honestly, we've been looking at what it takes to keep growing this business.

16:06As I mentioned, we're actually processing probably, I think we're processing more gaming transactions than all of Ethereum at this point, which is really, really exciting. So games are huge. Say that statistic again. We're doing more digital sales transactions right now than Ethereum is doing on NFT sales right now. So we're doing more digital assets than they are. That's extraordinary. Yeah, so it's great. And we're just kind of getting started. I mean, to put it in perspective, when I ran Call of Duty, I think we did 1.4 million matches a minute, right? And so when we were one of the studios behind that title, think about that.

16:39If you're trying to record just the existence of a match on chain, that's a lot of volume. So gaming is huge. We have to do it appropriately. But what we're also looking at is we're looking at the future. And I think what we found is we started a foundation or helped found this foundation called Mythos Foundation with the Mythos token. It's kind of an industry doubt. We have a lot of Web2 companies joining. We really see the opportunity of where games can start being interoperable over time. We think that there's new governance models that need to come out. But most importantly, we need very strong security models and great performance.

17:12And frankly, we've been searching. We've talked to a lot of great companies out there. There's a lot of great companies out there. But we really found that the Polkadot team, the Polkadot ecosystem was pretty fascinating. That team has been very heads down, focused on governance, focused on security, focused on scale and interoperability. And we love that. You know, we don't need a lot of marketing flash from our blockchain partners. We need true, amazing tech. And I think Polkadot's the right choice for gaming, to be super honest. So we're definitely going deep with them. You know, we're going to be launching what we're calling the Mythos Super Chain, which initially is the mythical chain.

17:43But there's other groups. If you look at the Mythos Foundation, there's 25 other companies that have already joined. And I think you'll see some of them also have their own chain tech that has their own governance models and their own security models. But we all roll up into that shared security model. We roll up into an interoperable economy over time. We think that's a super powerful place of where we want to build next. And that's sort of the sort of underlying architecture of Polkadot by design to have those multi-chain with the pull-up functionality. Talk a little bit about the transaction speed throughput, some of those other parameters that you must have been thinking about before making this switch.

18:15Yeah, we're obviously always looking at that. You know, we went our first chain. This is actually going to be our third kind of iteration of chains over five years. And we've tried to stay very nimble. One thing we do believe in very much is that EVM address space. So we are maintaining the EVM address space on top of the Polkadot substrate ecosystem. So there's been other groups that have done that in the past. We're not the first to do that with the Polkadot community. But we do think that that's really important. I think that, to me, is kind of the glue that binds this industry right now is that EVM address space.

18:45So we are keeping that layer. But we do love the substrate system behind the scenes. I think, honestly, it's a lot of opportunities. We can upgrade independently. We get the shared security model from the Polkadot relay chain. So we are truly decentralized. But, you know, we do look at performance. We've had good experience so far on the Polkadot chain. Yeah, it's really fascinating. You know, I'm not a gamer myself. I was many years ago. And so I still, you know, maintain a hand. And I go to YouTube and I watch the games, right? That's how I stay from becoming totally a dinosaur. But the question that I have for you is this.

19:15One of the interesting things to me about the gaming space, one of the things that people in the gaming space do so incredibly well is user interface, user experience. It's something that's always been light years ahead of everything else. The ability to simplify, the ability to get directly to the functionality that users care about, that gamers care about. And I'm curious, and I've long thought that this is going to be one of the potential, potential ways that we're going to get more mainstream applications from Web3 technology. People who understand how to do user experience and how to do user interface.

19:45Talk a little bit about that because the challenges are really considerable right now in the traditional Web3 world. How are you handling some of that? You've abstracted some of it away. Go ahead, please. Yeah, we've really tried to abstract it as much of it away as we can, right? Until people are ready. And I think that's a key. And you're right. We've gotten a little flack from people saying, oh, well, this is not true Web3 yet. You know, not my keys, not, you know, that type of thing. And I agree with that. You know, like I said, we definitely believe in those concepts. But we do want to make sure, you know, when, you know, an average consumer comes into the game and someone that's not crypto native, they can figure it out and they're protected.

20:21Right. So we've definitely taken it very easy. You know, as you come into NFL Rivals, you are not going to see a single wallet pop up right away. Right. But there is a wallet behind the scenes. Everybody gets a wallet immediately. And we're riding in through that custodial account assets into that wallet. Now, if you link a wallet or you want to bridge stuff in and out, it'll start syncing that instead. It'll kind of ditch the temporary wallet, move to your more permanent home. And we think that's really important, right? And we do think that gamers will become big in the economies. We think that, you know, we think that more and more transaction volume will end up coming from the gaming space.

20:53I think what you'll also see, it's going to be less volatile, right? One thing that's really interesting is, you know, the average Ethereum transaction right now for a digital asset is still sitting over$500 US per item. That's pretty much still out of most consumers' reach, right? And ours right now, we're averaging, we're doing about two and a half times the volume of NFT transactions in Ethereum. But we're sitting at like$17,$18. Now that's up from 12 or 13 from six months ago. So it's definitely growing in value. But our focus is not on a speculative nature, right? Our focus is on true utility, true user interface behind these items.

21:30And to do that, yeah, you definitely have to onboard. You have to think through user UI and UX from the day one of a project. Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing.