Early Days in Blockchain App Layer

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:05

   uncle will start my name is Sasha I work at near protocol how many people in a room nobody era maybe okay cool yes so today are we gonna frame this conversation into adoption and kind of how do we get from like very early early days of the Lockean space we barely have any audience yet int into the space where we're gonna get to like mass adoption so we're gonna talk about quite

2. 0:37

   a few themes about different projects five projects that are on panel today we're going to talk about fundraisers target audiences initial markets that projects focus on the fundraising experiences to the extent people have experienced that and things like that but then we're gonna also open it up for for public for any questions that you guys might have an addition so why don't we start with sharing your personal

3. 1:02

   experience why you got into crypt in the first place alright hello everyone you guys hear me okay good okay perfect so my name is Andrew I've been in the crypto world well personally for a long time since probably 2012 or 2013 when I bought my first Bitcoin but professionally since early 2017 when I started a small token investment fund before I cos were a household word but very soon after they became that and

4. 1:36

   that led to me eventually later that year we actually liquidated the fund and started a company me and a couple other people and some of the investors that were backing the fund we from the fund learned a lot about trading RC 20 tokens on the etherion blockchain and decided to actually launch a decentralized exchange on the etherion blockchain so in late 2017 we raised around a

5. 2:01

   venture funding on top of the existing money we had from the fund and put that into a fund raise for a company which is called ever bloom which is the one you'll see on my bio and we launched an aetherium exchange in the following year in 2018 called the ever bloom exchange and we did it on top of several different protocols ether Delta what you guys may be familiar with zero x and yuna swap and from then have been building out an audience like thousands of people have used our platform one of the unique things that

6. 2:33

   we provide is a professional user interface so what you'd see in something like coin based pro but on top of decentralized protocols and not just one of multiple protocols and that kind of leads me a little bit to why I'm here and why near is interesting to me because we don't want to just be an in theory 'm only player we're very seriously looking at branching out into other block chains that look promising like near and so for me I'm very

7. 2:59

   interested in in defy and the whole concept of you know digital assets whether it's fungible or non fungible and building software to help people trade so that's kind of my Baxter and how I got into crypto and what I'm working on today I'm the CEO of flux it's a highly scalable open market protocol gotten to crypto through every dot-com which was a curation ranking site back in 2017 from there started

8. 3:25

   flux market which was the first platform for derivatives on startups that was built on top of our using the augur 0x and maker from there found a lot of problems building on aetherium which eventually led us to build on top of NIR and now building this protocol thanks be here good evening everyone my name is chase I'm the CEO of Cod play that game um so essentially you may when you look me up

9. 3:55

   I guess you may see me as the CEO of Alto that IO which is another gaming platform that we're building a cup of aetherium I started off from a journey in crypto back in 2015 when I first bought my first Bitcoin no too late right but professionally I was involved in the crypto and gaming space and blocked in the gaming space back in late 2017 when I co-founded a company called out of that Iowa so what we were doing

10. 4:22

    back then was building a couple of platforms where game developers can you to create their own unconscionable tokens year 7 to 1 and year C 1 1 5 5 on the blockchain as well as a couple of other tools that would allow them to integrate those items into their games fast forward to today although it's pivoting onwards to outplay that game where we're still building platforms but this time around more of like an SDK

11. 4:54

    that would allow game developers to make their single-player games competitive so more of like a tournament system with a crypto payout in place and that's where neo is very interesting to us because of the fact that it provides us with more reach in terms of like which block chains we can work with and I think that near is very promising in terms of detect that they're providing and hopefully we could go ahead and make it happen as well but that's pretty much my

12. 5:22

    journey to crypto hi my name is Kanan so I got into crypto early 2017 I did my senior thesis on it and college after that I went there was a software engineer Bloomberg at Bloomberg I started the blockchain internal chatroom when we had like 800 plus employees every day I was like learning about blockchain talking to other people about it wasn't really doing my job both my parents are actually out here

13. 5:52

    entrepreneurs so I kind of got the bug from them and Stardust my company was actually the third idea I created a pitch deck for and pitched my dad on was the only one he liked so I left Bloomberg and started my company Stardust we're an easy-to-use API for game developers to create blockchain assets and implement those assets within their game I say that because you guys all know what blockchain is but the

14. 6:16

    typical game developers that we sell have no clue what it is and in my experience and journey game developers don't actually want to use blockchain they just want to use and you know an easy way to tap into an ecosystem of value the word blockchain is too much stigma attached to it they're in too much overhead and barrier to entry talk a lot more about that I connected with near about two and a half months ago we

15. 6:39

    actually started building on the loom DK you know TL DR it sucked and now we're on to better things talk more about that as well hi my name is Ed Tolosa I think out of almost everyone here I'm probably the one who loves the least about blotching I'm very much a newbie my expertise comes from a career of over 10 years in asset management particular trading fixstick currencies commodities some equities so what the Wall Street for a while stuff right now what I'm working on is a peer-to-peer

16. 7:17

    betting platform for sports betting and blockchain as some of you who probably know a lot more than me it's just a very natural evolution of a peer-to-peer vetti platform right so it's one of those things where I'm trying to learn more and get myself acquainted with a lot of the concepts a lot of the ideas but having come from that world of asset management I've seen how inefficient markets are how when you're trading a

17. 7:48

    bond or you trade an option he's gonna take three days for the whole thing to settle right there's gonna be so many intermediaries there's so much inefficiency in the system and I'm talking about a big financial system the like it just makes sense that within a few years we're going to evolve to something where computers actually taking care of many of the tasks that humans are doing today and so for

18. 8:14

    something where I'm gonna be trading financial assets in this case currency it just makes so much sense to implement blockchain and also because the target audience we're going after is basically anyone but Americans anyone but the US for regulatory give you the regulatory concerns it just makes sense to have a centralized approach to having some sort of currency and all those type of things

19. 8:38

    so yeah that's pretty much why I got involved and I've been learning a lot from from the team in here for example so it's been it's been a good good ride so far and also what was the most contrary intuitive thing you learned so far well being in space both I'll say like focus on two things or or if you cannot come up with boast on one thing what was the most surprising and also the most challenging so far in space how may have

20. 9:08

    this okay so the biggest and the craziest hairy monster that I've had to encounter is regulation which is just building off of the last comment everything in everything in this space is kind of played out in a totally different way than you might have expected to write and so especially dealing with anything that's currency or securities or any of those fun words related so that's you know if we were to roll back the clock a year ago I was talking about this before everyone was

21. 9:39

    saying big institutions are gonna come into the space and then that is kind of played out a little bit differently than we thought we were saying that we'd see like the first licensed broker you know probably this year or like the first ETF approved or this year and all these things have just been constantly pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and so you're seeing a lot that to me has been one really surprising area of the

22. 10:02

    space in the sense that like you never quite know where it's gonna land and how things are gonna play out so I think the most counterintuitive thing that I learned was we're all in a bubble constantly it was really difficult when I first started building every dot because the experience I was going for was basically to onboard you know new mainstream users into crypto and I wanted to provide the super traditional

23. 10:27

    super easy app store and the one thing that I learned was unless it's really a zero to one vertical that you're working on especially in crypto it's going to be very hard to get mainstream users to actually adopt and so the tests that I always take is I asked my mom to onboard into whatever we're working on and if she has questions along the way then we've done something wrong and that's kind of our view of crypto in general is we're building on the protocol level but

24. 10:53

    we think it's really important to really help guide users and developers and so that's something that we try to do internally a lot is kind of step out of our own product and say you is the target user there can we reach this target user and what are the you know kind of stepping stones to get to that point all right I guess I'll add to what Pierre mentioned because that's fairly this very very similar learning

25. 11:16

    that I've had being in the gaming space for so long I've been working in games mobile games and browser games for the last ten years and given over into blockchain and gaming I thought that it was going to be easy for me to be able to bring over whatever it is that I've had in the traditional gaming space but it wasn't the case right when you're building a blockchain gaming company particularly a platform where you're trying to attract game developers to to

26. 11:47

    to work with you into pivoting their games traditional games onto the blockchain it's rather difficult in as much as it was difficult for ad networks to bring in game developers to put in ads onto their games before it became a thing and also harder even before for unity to convince game developers to use their game engine before it became the biggest game engine in the world right now

27. 12:17

    and so for me my biggest learning was that adoption doesn't come easy and it is a sum it's not a sum total of just what you're doing but rather a chain of different things that involves the ecosystem that just what you but what what you're building but rather the block and you're building on or the protocols that you're working with or the second layer that you're working with and so for me the biggest takeaway

28. 12:41

    at that one is that a lot of people in games doesn't really care so much about what you have behind it as long as it's fun and it's playable and I think right now blocking and gaming is still working on that and hopefully this year will you find a breakthrough for you not to see her but maybe next year very similar experience being in the gaming space and in college I was an indie game developer

29. 13:07

    and I wanted to use blockchain for my game and so therefore I thought when I started building my product everybody else did too and unfortunately I was wrong about that no one wants to use blockchain for the game that's just the truth and no one wants to play a blockchain based game that's also just the truth you don't need to know how to use a database in order to search Google you know as when you play a blockchain based

30. 13:31

    game you should just be able to play the game not need to know what the blockchain is in order to have a good time what I have done kind of with my product to counter that and something that I've been working on probably over the last eight months is designing a product and sales pitch that completely abstract that away really just selling again the value that the you know my product brings like Google sells the

31. 13:56

    value it brings rather than the underlying technology Google doesn't sell databases I'm not selling blockchain and so that's what I've learned over the past kind of 14 months and really you know I just approached other game developers now is you know having a great API for them to use no not any blockchain or scary words and make them run away so we were in coach but yes I think is that complexities the complexity of the blockchain what he's a most surprising thing just just like

32. 14:28

    everyone else said in my case I thought I I used something fairly complex I understand the micro structure the regulatory entities how it works for the financial system for alleys like the institutional side of you you're doing trading you're running fetch phones you know mutual funds all those things so I would think it would be fairly simple to come in and try to learn how everything

33. 14:51

    works in the blockchain the truth is is that Eddie's like everything right the more you just create a surface the more you find out like there's so many other concepts you just don't understand you don't know but to take it back to what many of you have said the solution is you need to abstract it because I a like even if you very well-versed on many of these things very few people will be and

34. 15:12

    so that's one of the reasons I really like me because I think part of your your philosophy your approach is just to make it very simple for people it kind of like have a blockchain running the background and not necessarily before the center yeah like it's a complexity and then we can talk about your target audience so how do you who is your target user how do you approach go to market was your initial market as well as how you're planning for scale if it's even like

35. 15:43

    relevant at this point in time question so so we we this has been an interesting journey for us in terms of target target audience and for a lot of decentralized finance and just like crypto currencies in general so we when we started in 2017 what really got me excited early 2017 when we were working on the fund and then later when we kind of pivoted into a full-blown company and work out a

36. 16:08

    product what really got me excited was you know this notion that we could be doing capital formation across the globe and anyone could invest in something and anyone can participate in a particular economy that they were really excited about right and and it was very initially like a very retail if you want to call like kind of like Wall Street dish and Finance terms a very retail audience of people from everywhere in

37. 16:34

    the world investing in projects that they thought were interesting I think a lot of people kind of understood the risk that came along with that too but it was just very like individualistic empowering thing where we could transact globally invest in project globally and so that when we launched and we got into the whole decentralized exchange space was kind of who we were going after we

38. 16:59

    wanted to make a lot of what was out there at the time was in very transparent it was kind of the sketchy companies you didn't really know who was behind a lot of this stuff and I mean for the on the exchange space and we wanted to bring like a face to these exchanges to make something that was trip like trust of all that you that felt professional where you knew who was behind it you knew it was like a company that you could reach out to instead of

39. 17:24

    just being some shady project so that was our initial target audience of kind of helping that core early adopter market the narrative changed in 2018 a lot and in decentralized finance and cryptocurrency where a lot of people wanted to and thought that institutions would come into this bass and so we spent a lot of time and and that was interesting to us because we felt like it could bring some a level of sophistication it could bring more

40. 17:49

    money into the market which would create more you know volume and more liquidity and could benefit all these people that had invested early in these projects right so we started spending a lot of time in 2018 talking to institutions to see if there was some way to work with them and bring them into decentralized finance and into these peer-to-peer trading and stuff like that that I would

41. 18:15

    say was an interesting kind of journey and it lasts or earlier this year and and last year in that we kind of thought that would go a lot further than one it did and just kind of panicked give a funny anecdote a lot of times we meet with banks and stuff like that right and we'd have these conversations with their head of innovation or something like that and they'd tell us about how they're really curious about blockchain and how they're really curious about

42. 18:40

    crypto currencies but there would always be something that they'd say in the Middle where they'd say like but we also understand that this stuff the ethos of this whole ecosystem is to get rid of us right and so they were saying like you know we want to be involved in some sense but it also is it's an industry that's actively trying to remove us from being involved at the same time so it was a kind of a push-pull there where we weren't you know we were kind of trying

43. 19:06

    to bring them in and include them in the target audience of a decentralized exchange but there was kind of a like a cognitive dissonance that was happening there so lately we've been focusing again a lot more on just like the individuals the early adopters and the crypto native people which at an organ at like an individual level happens globally but organizationally institutionally doesn't happen that much at least in the US and so for anything

44. 19:31

    that's like company or organizational adoption of crypto we've been looking a lot more outside the US lately but yeah that we've kind of had a journey of our target audience over the last two two-and-a-half years yeah so we actually announced our protocol this morning so since 4:00 a.m. I was in communication with our office in Germany getting everything ready so our target user you could say today is a little bit farther off but because we're building on the protocol level

45. 20:02

    we're not going to be directly targeting the user so this kind of plays back into what I said before where you really have to guide the community and developers and so you know we're in this unique position where we spent you know a year building flux market which was this you know platform that was built on top of augur and other decentralized infrastructure and the main kind of learning that we got from that is you know it's very difficult to predict the

46. 20:26

    killer app you could say or the killer use case for our protocol but the important thing is to really help developers launch something scalable and launch something that can target these you know demographics of users and so that's kind of our our main focus right now is looking at different verticals you know sports betting is an example eSports whether niche derivatives social

47. 20:50

    media influence our forecasting and so we see our protocol in the end in the long term vision as Google for events that haven't happened yet and so the idea behind what we're building is to really aggregate a lot of different use cases and a lot of different markets to really use you know prediction markets to really derive a very accurate forecasting stream and so our target users are then you know people in

48. 21:13

    different verticals that I mentioned so being a gaming project there's usually just two target groups that you would be focusing on and that's usually the players or the gamers and sometimes or often times depending on what you're doing the game developers as well so without play our current target market right now would be game developers in particular but specifically game developers who are focusing on casual and hyper casual games because the whole premise of our

49. 21:50

    play is to bring skills based game into a certain level of thank goodness where it's a single-player game but if you are to integrate out play into that game it allows you to become a tournament with a group of people pulling in to join a specific tournament or two for you to duel or to compete with another player playing that same game so it could be any game a leaderboard game the fastest time as long as their skills

50. 22:23

    involved in playing the game that's where we come in and so in terms of trying to scale right now if you know if you're looking to the data there's about 2.4 billion gamers that are playing games right now and maybe about a hundred to 200 million of these gamers are playing hyper casual games or casual games and so if you look into casual games right now we are basically talking game developers who are very

51. 22:56

    interested in trading their games from a single player game of skill to a multiplayer game or a tournament and so hopefully we get to attract these audiences by making sure that there is an incentive for them to allow tournaments to come in to their games one of the biggest issues gaming is experiencing right now is user onboarding and it comes in two different school of thought particularly on blockchain crypto most of the gaming projects that are in blockchain

52. 23:28

    encrypter right now are focusing on the existing players or gamers that are already knowledgeable in crypto and there's a couple of gaming projects that are focusing on bringing in users that are not so knowledgeable in crypto does it or have zero knowledge in crypto and bringing them into the game and then eventually introducing them into the blockchain when the time is right so

53. 23:53

    which means that as a game we need to create an environment where they don't really need to understand crypto there is education that is in place when they're playing the game about what it is or what it takes for them to be - - to bring the centralized items into my decentralized world and so right now it's it's a bit of it's a bit of a challenge onboarding is a bit of a challenge and this is something I think but even I think Stardust is also

54. 24:26

    thinking of as they move along with their projects including having more people in place whether it's of the crypto side of things or on the traditional gaming side of things thanks yeah another gaming project here um so we're definitely targeted at the game developers actually three out of the five kind of game Studios we have coming on board right now don't know what blockchain is and so a lot of people say to me well aren't blockchain cuoco games so say you know triple

55. 24:55

    quotes found those aren't they the lowest hanging fruit out there and and I say no because my API pretty much displaces their whole team which is the truth of the matter in the industry today people aren't building games on the blockchain they're building some sort of collectible pyramid schemes and so to actually target game developers and give them an API and an ecosystem to tap into of the blockchain is where we go

56. 25:20

    directly to those you know you think we know fortnight csgo League of Legends they all have the capabilities to build marketplaces to centralized trading logic game explorers all these things indie developers don't and so that's who we're primarily targeted toward is providing value for those developers and I think that's primitive any soccer fans here know there you go great so we're going for a long term sports fans global

57. 25:53

    globally the medium term goal is to capture everyone that's gonna watch the FIFA World Cup in 2022 we want to sign them up short term right now we only have a beta test we had 20 users what we're doing we're having them predict Champions League games it's going well so far we've got like over the span of five weeks over 1,700 forecasts from those 20 individual users so proximity but yeah

58. 26:23

    this is gonna be on soccer fans and cool maybe you can also share a little bit about like competitors to the extent you're going against like incumbents versus kind of creating that new market and and slowly cool how do you think about that all right I'm gonna make this an interactive one to try and wake us all up a little bit who here has money on or has used coinbase in the past they're like right next door practically what about finance about the same amount of people that's

59. 26:58

    interesting what about something else Wow okay I'm gonna pick on a few people Remy I know you I see some people I know what have you used other than coinbase or finance for exchange of crypto okay yeah that's a good one anyone that used bit mechs one okay Wow anyone that's used anything that is what you would kind of classify as maybe not decentralized but noncustodial like you

60. 27:29

    hold the keys to your own crypto only maybe four or so five okay interesting and as anyone ever been had an account that's been compromised one okay anyone have their SMS number ported before me I've had it do you know what I miss people know what I'm talking about like I have some a sporting okay good so okay so these are the question of competitors right these are all kind of competing platforms right exchanging

61. 28:00

    crypto in one way or another also before I forget anyone does anyone traded NF T's like crypto kitties or anything of that sort I'm not that many okay maybe like five on that one too yeah so there's a whole when we're talking about crypto currencies or NF T's or just trading these kinds of assets in general there's a whole slew of solutions right and they all come with their pros and cons the one of the core reasons why we

62. 28:31

    got into the space was because we still felt that there is a lot of lack of security and like the sameness thing you could probably do if you're gonna trade a lot of crypto is to at its most of the time maintain custody over your asset right to not keep it on a platform where you don't know how they're protecting it you don't know what their like account access controls are like you might be using SMS as a 2 factor but SMS is

63. 28:55

    getting compromised all the time now you know all these kinds of things at the end of the day to put your to what we saw a lot of people were like trading on something like Finance and withdrawing their coins back into a hardware or software wallet that they managed and maybe keeping the seed phrase or like keeping a copy of the key somewhere else so we were just saying why not why not just trade directly from your wallet and

64. 29:18

    and kind of manage it yourself and on that note how many people actually do have a hardware or software wallet that they keep stuff in ok and how many of you would say that you mostly try and keep the crypto off of the exchange it like the centralized custodial exchanges as much as possible Wow ok that was more than I expected so it was a decent amount of people in terms of people also trading on centralized exchanges or changes in general yeah so I mean we can

65. 29:49

    talk about competitors in the space all day long but I think that gives you some sense of like what's out there and and kind of like our motivations for why we got into the non-custodial decentralized side of it on that on the decentralized side I would say that there's a lot happening at different layers of the stack so I was at Def Con a couple weeks ago for aetherium you know there was a

66. 30:11

    lot of talk of layer 1 stuff like protocol smart contracts but now there's also a lot of talk of layer 2 stuff and and apps on top of that so there's you know what is a competitor if you're is a competitor someone at underneath of you at the protocol layer who might like you know switch something around on you or go up the stack and try and compete with you maybe right so there's a lot of other things to consider around like who and where people are competing with you

67. 30:37

    on the stack but I'll leave it there for now yeah so I'll also be interactive to wake everyone up looks like a lot of people are looking at their phones right now how many people have ever wanted to bet on an asset or an event or used augur okay only a couple people so that's kind of the basis of what we're doing and why we're doing it so we see huge value on being able to create you know basically a market on anything but to actually trade in that market today is very

68. 31:09

    difficult so if you look at you know existing solutions such as augur or you know connotes this when they finally go live maybe the really big problem is that once you get to the platform you either have an abstraction layer they have to go through which is ipfs in order to use let's say augur dhaka sino or you have to go through some type of you know more centralized option such as veil as an example that shutdown or Gesser and so if you end up getting past

69. 31:39

    all these steps and you end up getting to a market to actually trade the cost for trading today on etherium is extremely high and so in order to interact with a protocol like augur it's very expensive and so unless you're doing bets that are in the range of between ten and fifty thousand dollars per transaction the bet that you're going to be placing is not going to be worth it for the feed that you're placing as well with it and so that's kind of the basis that

70. 32:04

    what we're working towards right now is to provide a very scalable and very cheap way to trade and so you know for our trading as an example right now our projected cost is going to be 1,000 times cheaper than existing solutions also with resolution windows there are 72 times faster than existing solutions as well and so although augur and gun osis are similar to what we're building in terms of mechanics I'm a we're building is you could say on a different type of you know stack and are targeting

71. 32:34

    different types of users so a user that uses augur today you know they have actively around 25 to 50 users they interact with the protocol and these users are usually doing large ticket bets and the reason for this is because either you know someone has money in crypto which they don't want to off port through a kyc off-ramp or maybe they would like to bet on a market that isn't available on traditional solutions

72. 32:59

    today and so they keep their money in crypto and they keep it on auger we're targeting mainstream users and we're targeting people who want to spend you know 1 to 100 dollars and be able to bet on all these different assets alright um so I guess you've raised your hands good enough for the first two panelists so I'm not gonna ask you questions anymore but let me ask you a question should

73. 33:24

    biggest competitor I would say not necessarily competitor just yet but I do know a fact that there's a couple of projects out there both live and still in the works that are also trying to tackle gaming and tournaments in place if you go back in time 2017 there was this platform called first blood for example they raced ICO money I haven't kept in track in terms of like what they're

74. 33:56

    doing right now but it's basically like an eSports tournament platform as well but what we're doing is kind of like fairly within the ranks of how many of you have you have heard of skills with as it is that Z however you pronounce it skills right so it's essentially yeah I'm fairly similar except that the bailout system is monetary or like in a form of gift card or real-life prizes I don't know like a toaster or like a

75. 34:27

    computer I don't think it's too big though but um you know what I mean but what we're trying to do right now is to just basically focus on crypto just because it is something that is much more geographically lenient in terms of like where and who can participate so anywhere in the world as long as you're playing a game with skills that is integrated without play you can do in a tournament and get paid out in crypto if you want to do or just keep whatever the

76. 34:58

    in-game currency that is the equivalent of crypto if that's if crypto blocked is not your thing right so I think that right now the Reese why most of I would say competitors are not prominent it's because of the fact that the space that were working on right now is still not very mature when it comes to the gaming space and so I'm hoping to see more projects that are trying to tackle the same thing not because I wanted more competitors but because I wanted more innovation to

77. 35:31

    happen in space and whoever succeeds basically benefits not just themselves but also the players and the users that are competitive that wants to participate in in you know print events for example or or sanction their own tournaments if they wanted to so my kind of competition breaks down the three main categories I'll start with kind of the block chain competition we have Forte who ironically had the round led by King and partners my name then we

78. 36:05

    have dapper labs we have immutable recently raised rebranded from Fuel games gods Unchained those are probably the three biggest in the space right now and all of God's amount of money so you know one of the things that I think is the biggest irony in the space is it doesn't matter how much money you have if you don't understand your customer and the fact that I mean I'll hype

79. 36:29

    myself up here because I can the fact that you know we've spent the last 14 months talking with game developers and understanding that really they don't want to use blockchain directly but they don't really care if it's under the hood but rather they just don't want to be exposed to it that in itself is something that's gone way over the heads of those competitors and it's ironic because they're all taller than me but

80. 36:52

    kind of from that perspective it's it's strange that they're taking such a weird direction into the space and with a product that frankly just won't sell but triple wants to give you more money who cares then kind of there's the other half of the space which is you know steam or a competitor with steam we have a marketplace we have an explorer we kind of have more decentralized logic

81. 37:16

    like you can loan from one player to another with our API seem doesn't really have that you know our API is also agnostic so it can be delivered by any platform via Steam has to be delivered via their client but they're there another competitor and then they're even more like a discord as a possible competitor with us I think they'd be a great market place actually for virtual goods so I think you know understanding your competitors kind of

82. 37:41

    where you fit in with them is kind of the biggest thing that I've done kind of from market research perspective and answering the questions because I don't think we've gotten to fundraising but they'll come and they ask about all your competitors those you think that our competitors and those that you've never heard of before so for us it's anyone that's providing sports fans with skin in the game right so I'm and most people know the term but it's basically idea behind you sitting at the bar there's a

83. 38:13

    random game play being played on the TV and just by you betting with whoever's next to you even if it's $2 for the next beer or whatever it is that like whatever outcome is gonna take place in the next few minutes the random game on TV just became very interesting and so it's skating the game it's vey easy to think of it in the sense of sports betting and casinos and all this stuff

84. 38:37

    but it also happens in fantasy sports for example it also happens even any other type of competition where people are just trying to compete on really their forecasting skill and so there's there's a big gamut of our a massive range of competitors from the big massive sports books and things like that to very small startups that are trying to do something in the space where it's just really they're all try to do the same which is just become the second screen for sports fans so that's

85. 39:11

    really where we are coolin to the extent you can share maybe you can tell us a little bit more about your fundraising experiences this space kind of went through bubble-and-bust some people have like crazy war chests of money it doesn't mean that to Canaan's point doesn't mean that throwing money at the problem can solve problems but i was wondering so like what was your fundraising experience as well as like what do you focus on deploying capital

86. 39:33

    on or or maybe a staying away from fundraising and focus interaction instead yeah so some just some context so you can guys can understand where I'm coming from so I've been in the Serb space since 2008 with a different company called Localytics we built mobile app analytics I think it's actually mentioned on this on my slide and before that I was a software developer quit my job at Microsoft to start that company but the reason I

87. 39:59

    mentioned is because we we built that company we raised about sixty million dollars doing it I was a technical co-founder the company is still privately held today still going strong like 100 employees or so you know tens of millions of Revenue things like that so and there was a lot of ups and downs with that and I there's a lot of parallels to that space from that space that I would draw here in the blockchain

88. 40:21

    space but you know through that I lived through like the 2008 housing crash and what that did to the funding market we didn't really raise money for like a year or two after that happened been through the ups and downs of various dips in the in the public markets and like IPO booms and busts and things like that and so I mentioned because with any market with any industry there's always

89. 40:47

    going to be the ups and downs and crypto and blockchain is really no different just just kind of the timing is a little bit different but I also spent two years as a venture partner at a VC in Boston which is where I'm based and it was a firm called Sigma prime and we were doing series 8 deals one of five million dollar deals and usually like typical software startup stuff so if anyone wants to talk about fundraising and how

90. 41:12

    to do it and just like advice or wants help with the deck or wants to look at something I'm happy to you know help anybody in this room just hit me up after the thing but in blockchain and just a couple things I want to mention real quick you know obviously to 2017 and early 2018 before Bitcoin crashes like a totally different world I was able to draw on my previous investors and connections that I had already for our first round our first round was a million and a half we got our first term sheet in December

91. 41:43

    of 2017 we actually kind of dilly-dallied a little bit on closing around because of some other things that we were working on but eventually closed it in early 2018 and it was so it was ridiculously easy in comparison to what it is now now you know there's a lot of there were a lot of what you know Fairweather fans or whatever you want to call it back then every VC was getting in the blockchain now a lot of them that weren't really blockchain investors or

92. 42:13

    cryptocurrency or whatever before the bubble a lot of them are now gone like posts crash right and they're starting to come back a little bit because you know certain prices are on the rise again but you know a lot of the coins that were launched and these Kryptos that were launched back then a lot of them are dead a lot of people have been burned so they're not as actively involved another thing I say is we've seen a very big evolution in in just the mechanics of fund raises you know equity

93. 42:46

    versus token sales you know the kinds of agreements whether you're doing like a saft we've seen saft agreements who knows what's after agreement is okay a lot of people good you know that has come under a lot of fire from from government agencies like the SEC and and this whole debate of like what's the security what's not is the saft agreement is maybe the staff agreement is but maybe the token isn't and whatever whatever whatever right and some of these things are actually starting attested in court with like what's happening with kik and Ken who's

94. 43:20

    familiar with Ken okay cool a lot of people and and there was another company - the one that just did a reggae filing what was that block stack yeah and and there was one more block yeah someone's getting sued right now by the SEC right block one yeah telegrams getting halted right so all sorts of things in the mechanics of a fund raise have evolved quite a bit you know gone are the days of like these kind of like backroom

95. 43:53

    maybe not but I mean backroom deal like pre-sales at a 90% discount and then two months later the venture people flip it to the unsuspecting public like you got so anyway there's a lot of things you really have to think about and a lot of things have changed fundraising the space has gotten really difficult it does happen sometimes and there still are equity investors and token investors out there you got to know where to find

96. 44:19

    them and you got to have like a strong and compelling pitch now and you got to think about your your grand you know like a bigger play it's much harder to just kind of raise on like an idea at this point in time but again yeah we could probably talk about that all day so I'll stop there yeah I've also had a similar experience with my first project every DAP was a totally different landscape totally

97. 44:44

    different you know kind of view from investors view from users and the idea basically when you know I started every DAP and and kind of got my toes wet in crypto was you saw all these projects raising ICO money you know some projects I was familiar with you know is 70 80 100 million and then you know months later they closed the company and walked away with everyone's money and you saw this

98. 45:10

    routinely but what started to happen now and it started to kind of been a product of you know the the crypto market going down in terms of prices what you see is more traditional entrepreneurs coming to the space looking for real business models real addressable markets that really make sense and so you know gone are the days of the vision and will raise and we'll have a ten year time span and you know in our space

99. 45:39

    specifically of prediction markets you know some of the companies that exist today are very well funded which really creates the wrong incentive in my opinion for a lot of companies when you do raise so much money and you do have you know a five to ten year time horizon your focus is less on getting something to market that's usable that developers want to interact with their users want to interact with your main focus is

100. 46:03

     basically keeping the company a lot keeping you know the token investors that you've had invest before happy and so for us you know I can't say too much about our current fundraising round but right now we're in the process of raising we were actually out in SF a few weeks ago to basically have our first round of meetings for our seed round and so this was something that was kind of a

101. 46:28

     crazy experience I booked the flights I think about five days before I flew we ended up having I think 30-plus meetings while I was there for the week and when I booked the flights we had zero meetings on the calendar and so from a word-of-mouth tweet they were coming to SF we really filled up the calendar which was great the main sort of pushback that we had in terms of investors today is how we're going to

102. 46:52

     get developers to build them to the right verticals and really attract usage and this is something that we you know focus on a lot not only in our pitch but also our strategy is to really go after that with a high passion and intensity from there I think the important part is is follow-through you know after you raise a lot of companies raise money and then kind of dwindle out and so for us you know why we started working with

103. 47:17

     near is that we have really high conviction and shipping and shipping constantly and on time which is you know the same type of trademark of near is that whenever we talked with investors that invested in the year they say someone from the team is always up at all hours of the day building and that's something really important that we saw is that you know the standard has raised now we're projects really need to be committing to actually shipping code and

104. 47:41

     continuing to ship code whereas before in 2017 you know you could raise an ICO with just a white paper and a basic website and then you raise for a five to ten year time horizon these are very well put together thoughts and I completely agree with both what you said and I think that's one of the reasons why the very least for for for the first company that I co-founded which is Alto

105. 48:05

     we initially thought of doing an ICO this was early late 2017 very early 2018 and we were on the verge of doing to conceal when we decided against it and instead moved into venture funding instead equity because of the fact that number one we didn't want to be beholden to to token investors who doesn't have as much commitment to you as opposed to say for example an equity investor who

106. 48:38

     understands more of like what your business model is back in today's 2017 peter mentioned you have a white paper you have a basic website you can raise seven million dollars or ten million dollars or however how much you want to raise right it's basically selling the vision first before building whatever it is that you're planning on building and it kind of diminished that drive in a way for some founders to really build something

107. 49:09

     that's that that's beneficial to everybody because of the fact that they already sitting on that much money right and in a way that sort of like became that the winner down like this year in the last year like late 2018 and you know as we know it right now I say always I kind of say Ted right there are still other things that are happening like ieo initial exchange offering for example if that's the route you want to go for

108. 49:39

     but for us with Alto in the beginning we considered ico but then opted for adventure funding and instead and now without play we're doing the same thing with what Peter did flying over to San Francisco and then basically talking to investors that are not ICO investors right this is regular investors and so I wouldn't be able to say much on our current fundraising just because of the fact that it's still happening and it's still ongoing but I think that it's very

109. 50:12

     very important to note that there has to be a team that's already committed to building products and if not committed to building products at least already built a product in itself it's it's it's much more tougher I would say now as opposed to last year where the word blockchain and crypto is music to the ears of the investor because it's kind of like we're all right we want to be in the process you want to be part of this movement but this time around like a lot of a lot of investors you know got burned down in a

110. 50:43

     way and so it's you know they're more careful and so it's very very important that whatever it is that you're showing up for there has to be something that's already existing whether it's a demo whether it's an existing product with traction or it's it's it's already in place right now with a couple of user base that we have in tow so yeah basically I would say that you know um

111. 51:10

     as far as fundraising is concerned landscape has changed I think that the honeymoon period is over I think a long time ago it's a bit over and so right now we're going back to that space where great um we can go ahead and raise venture funding but if we want to raise money on tokens I think it's still doable it's just that it you need to create value first on the product side of things before selling out a token that is going to be used for whatever product you're building all great

112. 51:44

     thoughts many things you know go and forever talking about this to talk about a little bit of my fundraise that I've done probably over the past two months the biggest thing I would say that I thought going into the room was a better product would get me and then my competitor would get me an investment that is categorically not true you can have a better product you can be better looking but you won't get investment it's just the truth they'll they'll

113. 52:10

     always give it to in Ex Facebook exec with no idea and a shitty product over you that's just the bottom truth so really how do you then understanding that get an investment there are three things I would say number one identify a subset of the market your competitors cannot actually compete with you in for example indie gamers both you know Forte and dapper labs have 120 employees plus each thing maybe even over 240 days case they're burning you know ten you know

114. 52:42

     five to ten million dollars a year on salaries plus sponsorships they can't target in any developer it would only make them $100,000 a year it doesn't make them enough money if that's something your product can do it's an end that they can't even bother with so that's one way to do it the other way is targeting investors that actually know your space who will understand your product more than just oh this is normal

115. 53:06

     cash flow but actually maybe be able to compare and contrast your product against another a third is foam oh and it's really the only thing investors understand the only way I got investment was I walked in the room and I said hey we're raisin 500k I have six hundred gay committed tell me by the end of this week year if you're in and they said we're in I said okay that's great I may have had six hundred K committed it

116. 53:29

     wasn't like a lie but it was like a soft commit going through due diligence and so you really have to put up a strong face if you go in and say we have no investment please invest I mean no it will happen as much as you may wish wish it does so that's that's kind of three things I've learned I've learned like 50 million other things happy to let you in on those but those are probably some of

117. 53:53

     the biggest be I've taken away in the past couple weeks in our case right now we're just bootstrapping the company we have been speaking to investors but in our cases two people in the team and so time spent talking to investors it's time we don't spend on the product and like I said we have a beta a crappy beta you call it 420 people played they actually like it so the point is is that like every hour that we use on the product yields a lot

118. 54:25

     more value a lot more a lot more long-term value for the product for the company there now it's talking to investors who as you've heard from many of these guys they're all just part of the crowd and so as you as a star here and it's someone else invested in there so there's someone else like that they will all come in because the truth is is that all investors especially in the VC in the VC space it's like the old

119. 54:49

     Knights a numbers game and that like most of their investments are going to go down to zero so they just need to make sure they don't pass up on the next big path right so yeah it is live from from our perspective it's a waste of time right now but when we need the money we'll do it I'm surprised what we'd start growing the team so cool and my last question was why did you decide to work was new

120. 55:14

     year or considering working was near is it something a product side of things so is it something on a just helping out the system side of things or something entirely different so for us just being in markets you know and trading in the trading markets of crypto it I think it's just good to be diversified between different block chains and different ecosystems you know being at Def Con

121. 55:36

     seeing where aetherium is going I like where it's going but it's definitely clear that it's kind of probably moving slower everything in the space moves slower than we all think it will so you know supporting other block chains supporting other ecosystems I think it's just like the prudent thing to do in this space right now it's every even even something like Bitcoin even something like aetherium is still a very nascent space just kind of like a drop

122. 55:59

     in the bucket from a financial markets perspective compared to other financial markets so it's diversification really and and you know you won't and then yet on top of that you want to look for projects with real people as was mentioned before actually doing work as opposed to some team that just got like a hundred million dollars in ICO and who knows where they are what they're even working on right so near feels and looks

123. 56:25

     and you know has the qualities of being real yeah well said you know for us when we started looking at layer ones there was a lot of due diligence we did around the technical side looking at funding looking at executables looking at the team and one of the obvious sort of choices given our location Germany was polkadot but one of the things that we get with NIR and what we've had from the very beginning is that you know our relationship with the team is very close and so we're able to you know be able to

124. 56:59

     have our sort of eyes and ears open to what's actually happening behind the scenes which is really rare with layer one protocols you know I'll just give an example My partner Jasper who's the CTO he needed a feature pushed out for our demo as we were planning on demoing our app to investors the next day I think it was 3 or 4 a.m.

125. 57:21

     San Francisco time before we flew within 30 minutes this update had been pushed and was live and our demo was back up and running and that type of sort of you know conviction that this team has around what they're building it's really unparalleled in the space and so what investors sometimes come to us and do Dede around near we always tell them that you know not betting on their team is gonna be one of their most sore losses that they missed out on going forward so it's sort of our

126. 57:51

     experience working within your team so far um I echo both sentiments in the sense that this is probably the first time at the very least for me working on a specific protocol where there is an utmost understanding and level of interest from what you're building from the get-go up until the very end I think that that's one of the things that near is doing which is actually great apart from

127. 58:22

     the stuff on the tech side of things which we are going to be using and thinking of using at the very least for plate but I think that one of the biggest things that you know one of the reasons biggest reasons why we wanted to work with near is the fact that they're willing to walk you through or walk with you in building a product and in identifying the space where things can get successful and really pushing out something into the wild that works and

128. 58:58

     that has to value not just to yourself but to the people that are going to use your product and so having that having said that it doesn't take away the fact that most of the products that are you know that are that are that are out there right now are just committed to say one blockchain or starting protocol for example I've made up it's good if you have a product that that is

129. 59:23

     blockchain agnostic and that you gotta make sure that at least if that's the case one of them has to be here not far so I actually released my product two months ago on the loom SDK we tried to onboard one of the games we've sold has any ten thousand daily actives and it was it kind of broke but it lightly really one of the issues here that we saw early on is and going back to my previous statements no one really cares what's under the hood they just care that it works so it's kind of on us

130. 1:00:01

     to pick up honestly our failure and find something that didn't fail we're currently sorry not on the Loom test net yet we're running or not loom near test net we're running a near local node but from our development standpoint it's running a lot better than we did on a loom - Jane we're also typescript natively developers so we prefer the typescript other than rather than the EVM but kind of from a from a larger perspective and some people have put you know tapped on

131. 1:00:32

     it here having a core being a bigger fish in a smaller pond rather than just a small fish and upon no one really cares about is a big deal I've actually had the pleasure of working in nears offices for the past few months here in SF and biggest thing with loom is coming like we needed a ETH send raw transaction function and they didn't have it and we've been asking for it for six months and they actually just pushed it out yesterday but don't worry I'm not going back but you know having that one-on-one interaction with the team the

132. 1:01:06

     ability of something breaks to be like hey can you fix this why are you doing it that way can you give us some insight here is actually very valuable also from the wallet perspective a lot of things they're doing with their wallet in contract specific access keys we are kind of doing internally already through a reword doing it through the EVM and so we leveraged kind of their technology in the core protocol to do that so we didn't really have to build it

133. 1:01:32

     redundantly what should just be in the core protocol I like everyone else I think face the forest won't spin the team we've learned so much from them I mention in the beginning that watching is not our native space or not something we really know we've learned a lot about that from that but like it's also just like just in general how you think about your product how you they were launching how

134. 1:01:56

     do you think about just the different technical complexities you may go through that may seem more mundane but it's it's been a great resource just working with the Neira team and at least from our perspective is not so much about what you have today but you know things are going to evolve a post size blows your product but also the new your team and so it just makes a lot of sense

135. 1:02:20

     to partner at this stage and probably one forward of course we're a little bit longer than expected sorry yeah so you know we are my understanding actually for whoever is available we're gonna go to the bar across the street if you guys are down