Fireside Chat with NEAR | Ep: 1 Devin Finzer from OpenSea

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

1. 0:03

   hey so we're starting new series we actually in general this year started whiteboard series they became really successful and so now actually branching out start a new series that will focus on gaming and we're going to spotlight a lot of different companies in space it's very new space and I think that people need to get a spotlight and recognition and really understanding of this we'll be focusing a lot less probably on research unlike whiteboard series and we'll be

2. 0:33

   focusing on more like understanding the narrative behind every company the learnings the challenges goals and things like that so and we're gonna jump into the first one we are here with Devin in New York he's co-founder of open sea and let's let's dive into the background sure also I'm Peter DePalo with near I'm in developer relations and who are you I'm Sasha I focus on business development here cool let's jump right in yep so Devin so what's

3. 1:05

   what's your background how did you get to start open sea and what do you do prior to this so prior to open sea I was a developer at Pinterest so worked kind of in consumer tech I also started a left Pinterest started a company in the personal finance space that was acquired by Credit Karma in San Francisco and then around in mid-2017 was when my co-founder Alex and I started getting interested in aetherium sort of like a lot of folks in tech at the time went

4. 1:37

   down the rabbit hole of understanding crypto economics blockchain reading a lot of white papers sort of the typical narrative and I think what what inspired open sea was really the idea that you could build consumer facing more mainstream oriented apps on block chains that weren't just around either buying illegal items with Bitcoin or a financial speculation right so crypto kitty's was the first company that

5. 2:07

   attempted that and they did a lot of really good work in user onboarding and it was really tough at the time right and I think that really got a lot of people in tech thinking about what are the other sorts of things that might be the first apps to take off and one for us you know the exciting thing about cryptic kitties was it was the first time that you really owned something in the digital world we've had digital assets that are valuable for a very long time game item sell for tens of thousands of

6. 2:40

   dollars already but the new ownership model introduced by crypto kitties really we thought would bring higher degrees of liquidity to these assets and higher higher ability for people to value them so that was the idea with open sea is a marketplace for all sorts of digital assets on blockchain starting with things like crypto kitties of games but ultimately and already we started

7. 3:09

   expanding to other assets outside of gaming so things like event tickets things like sort of the blockchain equivalent of domain names and you know maybe even one day physical assets as well so I want to hone in on one of those points is your so crypto kitty comes out it's got it gets a lot of buzz people in the community and outside of the community are hearing about it what in the world was missing like why was cryptic Kitty's not enough what you know what why did you need to start this company yeah that's a great question so

8. 3:43

   I think um crypto kitties was a very interesting phenomenon if we look back on it because at the end of the day technically you could have built the crypto Kitty's experience without blockchain right so a lot of it I mean you couldn't have marketed as that without you know with being honest about what it was but it was a vertically integrated experience where the marketplace was on crypto Kitty's Co the

9. 4:07

   assets were on crypto keys Co it was at the end of the day it was kind of treating him there have been trading and trading and breeding games for for a long time right like any oh that's yeah that's yeah but what was interesting I think or the kind of signal that we saw after crypto Kitty's launch was the lesser known projects that built things inside of the sort of emerging small cryptokeys ecosystem so those were

10. 4:31

    things like kitty hats which allows you to accessorize your crypto kitties kitty race which allows you to race your cryptic ADIZ and these were things that you know maybe it would be possible to kind of finagle to get to work in the in a centralized ecosystem but really this was like taking advantage of what it meant to own an asset on blockchain which was that other developers could come and permissionless lead yet another

11. 4:53

    experiences right so what we saw was we we knew it was kind of obvious at the time like that people saw crypto kitties in the gaming community and definitely they were gonna you know try other sorts of watching they didn't the crypto kitty success and you know the the big leap of faith was you know maybe there's an opportunity for marketplaces that exist outside of the game and maybe not every game builds a marketplace and I think

12. 5:23

    the proof of concept for that was there were a couple games the launch after crypto kitties one was called mythyrian which was kind of a card game another one was called crypto saga which was a role-playing game and neither of those games build marketplaces so there was actually demand from real users yeah albeit a small number of users right to trade these assets right another really

13. 5:46

    interesting one at the time was a game called crypto celebrities and are you guys familiar with Nozomi so crypto celebrities was a very interesting game because you could buy a crypt of celebrity collectible so for example you could buy the Donald Trump crypto celebrity and then the contract was written such that another account could immediately snatch that crypto collectible for a higher price so 20% upgrade right so the whole game it's it was actually the the term that's used to

14. 6:18

    describe these games in general is called a hot potato game all right um and the whole idea is you're trying to buy up this asset but hopefully someone else will buy it after you so that you make a profit right because someone has to buy it at a higher price the interesting thing about that was it's a market that's very constrained right you have divided a higher price you can't sell it on their site for a lower price but it's also ERC 7:21

15. 6:42

    compatible so it's a crypto keys like asset which means that you could build a marketplace which is what we did that allows you to sell these at a lower price so some of the weirdest stuff that happened really early on in the ecosystem was folks who had bought actually this is our record sale to date and this because ether at the time I think was around 1k was someone had bought the Donald Trump crypto celebrity on the Crypt of celebrity site for 100 eath and that's a hundred eath that they

16. 7:14

    sunk into this contract right no one else was buying it so they put it on sale on open sea for 85 ye though it's longer than 85 you trying to recoup some of so is the only way to sell a krypter celebrity to loss wow cool and it was you know it was an example of bringing an efficient market to sort of a semi-liquid asset but but in in other cases assets that had no liquid right so that was kind of a really exciting time

17. 7:45

    for us there were a lot of really big sales but you know it was as it is now a really small group of people actually like playing these right then the precedents there is really exciting like the the the fact that that's a first that you know the idea that somebody provided something they provide a platform to do something some some kind of game mechanic and there's no way like I'm guessing if a theorem was close to 1k was probably pretty close to going

18. 8:11

    you know the pretty close to the crash you know somebody's gonna see that and go oh shoot you know this is worth a lot of money right now this is real money and it dawns on them they want to get rid of it and there's no specific way to do that you provide you provide a way for precedents to happen something new to happen the second piece which is really really interesting to me is people throw around the word permissionless a lot but I cannot think

19. 8:34

    of a better example of permissionless than what happened with crypto kiddies which I think a lot of people are not actually familiar with which is the whole kiddie verse right the secondary market and then that example that you just happy I haven't heard of crypto celebrities but but the fact that it's you you actually do not have to ask anybody get anyone's permission it's just a standard powering this whole thing and it's a relatively simple standard if you look at the stuff

20. 8:57

    that allows this entire new set of mechanics to emerge another interesting example of that which didn't really you know come to fruition but there was it happened but it wasn't very successful um so there were a lot of people holding crypto slavery there's still people holding cryptids leverage and so you can imagine they're very incentivized to make these things valuable right so another guy came along and built a crypt

21. 9:23

    of celebrity breeding contra oh cool so basically you could take her to crypt of celebrities breed them together and make a new asset the implementation was you know it was I think people who are learning development school skills but the idea there is is pretty cool like the community that rallies around these crypto assets because they can permission lis develop on top of them and they're incentivized to do so that kind of like builds the ecosystem that's

22. 9:47

    really cool okay I was wondering also from your previous intrapreneurship experience what did what what did you learn like them that you're like now applying an open scene yeah yeah I think like Alex is my co-founder and I you know we come from a traditional startup background so like both of us have done small startups and so and we also did Y Combinator and I think those experiences have sort of driven us to take a very like you know adopt a lot of the learnings from like

23. 10:18

    the Lean Startup methodology and applied to crypto which works well for a consumer facing app like ours where you know it is a it's almost a three sided marketplace wherever you have buyers and sellers and we also have developers and so a lot of the growth hacking I'm just looking at what users are doing building and shipping features fast I think is really just the right way to approach building a company like that for other projects

24. 10:43

    in the crypt of space I think it makes sense to adopt more of like a hybrid some start with some incorporations of startup learnings but some incorporating like these new sort of decentralized learnings so what are some of those I mean what was like what was the most unfamiliar you know like parallel like what was the newest or most challenging thing coming from previous like okay that like I'm

25. 11:07

    guessing SAS startup right oh yeah why why see model and like you know the the startup world is like really fleshed out what was like the most unfamiliar thing coming into the design this is the most interesting thing about the cryptid space especially building on the top layer is that you're dealing with a lot more uncertainty than you would be if you're building like an SAS startup so if the SAS start-up you're going after

26. 11:31

    there's a mature market and the that's one of the it's a blessing and a curse right like there's customers but there's also competition so you kind of there's a playbook right you learn what your customers want you build it for them you grow right and hopefully you grow with the crypto market I think there's a lot more moving pieces right there's the underlying blockchain protocols that are

27. 11:55

    changing all the time there's a much smaller user base especially in the in the sort of NFC top space and there's sort of big questions around how big those are gonna grow and what time horizon and then there's tons of companies that are tackling these problems from all different angles so you don't really know how fast things are gonna grow and I think in that type of environment you have to be careful

28. 12:19

    right you have to be lean um make sure you're not like pushing a market to where it isn't right like for example for us if there's not growth in NFT projects over the next year like open sea will not be a successful project right because we're not gonna create the NFT market like we're not gonna go and build all of these applications the whole idea is that there will be lots of focus building out of tees and they'll need a marketplace so I think that's I think that what what makes it a very

29. 12:52

    exciting space is that in SAS for example it's not always clear why a start-up really has an advantage other than the fact that they're targeting a very specific niche right right so I think in those types of environments like goo the big companies are often really well positioned which is why we see a lot of acquisitions we haven't seen like we haven't seen new as many new unicorns in the past couple

30. 13:16

    years as we did when startups were just starting to be interesting so I think that's why the crypto space in particular is ripe for small companies as opposed to larger companies coming in and dominating mm-hmm and what's nice is that we saw in the last like year or two a lot of veteran teams from gaming space could be electrically titles actually jumping into space is still very early a bunch of people sitting on the sidelines

31. 13:41

    but I see like at least like twelve or fourteen or so companies that actually have a lot of experience and kind of jumped into the space and really focus on MFT actually I wonder if a piece of that is you know people who are hungry for that the ability to build a unicorn because some might argue that right now because of what you said is like you have these big players sort of dominating the market it's easier to

32. 14:05

    build an acquirable company and that's like a really good strategy for an exit versus building like an actually innovative completely new thing like like it's almost like there's not a lot of space so everything is optimizations right like niche initiation is just things or like building on the new technology so that like Cisco can come in and I mean I know people who at Cisco and they're saying well all we do is acquire companies yeah you know mature

33. 14:29

    market here versus this market is completely trailblazing yeah interesting how did you also find your first customer yeah so a lot of our early growth was through discord so crypto Kitty's had a very active discord community encrypted celebrities had a very active discord community pretty much you know 80 to 90% of new games that come out have active discord communities and the flywheel so typically with a marketplace startup the flywheel is kind of more buyers more

34. 15:02

    people viewing your site the more sellers want to come on and then that leads to more buyers right right with us it's it's kind of similar but there's a third component to it which is that when we get our first developers building on open sea and and to build on open sea really just means launching any RC 7:21 and having it be tradable kind of with open sea as the main market right when that happens users get familiar with the platform they're like oh this is this is a place I can trade cryptic collectibles and gaming items

35. 15:31

    and then the next game that comes along the users are like when open see like when is this gonna hit open see so that I can trade it right so it's actually this interesting mechanic where users where people using the platform are pressuring developers to build or or maybe even just making them aware of open sea and because there's so much kind of interoperability and collaboration in the blockchain space

36. 15:55

    for example some of the games that launch on our platform have partnerships with other games in the space they tell them about up and seeing them and they they like make sure that they integrate with open seas so a lot of it in the early days was like hustling to make sure that every single year c720 one asset we were supporting and had a marketplace for now it's more like games are going to our developer Doc's making

37. 16:19

    sure that their things show up on up and see properly which is not too difficult of a process and then there's a little more just organic growth you have any stories about the early days like the hustle like you know like what yeah well I think in the early days we were always there was a lot of very brittle architecture on our side in terms of supporting ERC 7:21 so ERC 7:21 from a technical side all it is is a mapping of

38. 16:49

    addresses to list of unique identifiers and so that obviously just that contract itself does not magically produce crypto kiddies right there's a whole there's a obviously website for cryptic kiddies there's the cat itself the name of the cab the description consumers are like obsessed with the metadata but that's not the actual right thing yeah so in for crypto keys for example we had to go

39. 17:14

    and like it's not rocket science be like figure out their API and then cash all that data in stuff like that and then for like subsequent ones they would have their own API for crypto celebrities for example they didn't have an API so we like scraped the raw HTML nothing too like crazy it's all standard web stuff but you know you can imagine scaling that of texture is not like a really fun thing to do and so now in collaboration with

40. 17:39

    like the etherium community and primarily driven by them there is a standard for how that metadata should look right also there's a URL it's returned by the contract that produces some JSON with like the name description image etc and so we we've made our developer Doc's very friendly in terms of guiding people through how to be compliant and now there's projects that have large amounts of volume on open sea that we never have to work with to like

41. 18:09

    integrate in any capacity right so development experience would look really Koro oh yeah and it's still not right don't get me wrong it's still not easy to build in here she has anyone like working with solidity working with Syria more like all those things that you guys are solving but um the process for getting on open sea after you've understood ERC 7:21 is now entirely self-serve and relatively straightforward mmm that's really

42. 18:32

    awesome and when you when you talk to your friends outside of like web 3 in the centralized world what kind of responses do you get do they understand what you're working on or yeah I think um I think folks who like techno mean it's hard you know there's maybe two audiences right there's a completely non-technical audience and then there's like an audience who you know works at a startup in Silicon Valley or something like that for the former I think

43. 19:04

    conveying this I'm able to convey our project in a way that excites them by just saying that you know imagine if you know sometimes are not gamers so like maybe they play The Sims or something like that imagine if you could trade the items in The Sims somewhere else right or like imagine if you could use an item in a trading card game in like some other random game like having that ownership over the digital asset is relatively easy to convey by sort of giving examples of why that interoperable

44. 19:35

    is interesting and then for folks in the tech community I think it's I think it's an exciting idea that resonates with people and feels I guess a little bit far out for sure but yeah the idea of owning a digital asset you know we've we've now started hiring and we hire outside of the web 3 or the blockchain community folks who like know about blockchain but don't really know about it and I think what we've heard is like the coolness factor of this type of thing is pretty high I'm relative to you know building

45. 20:10

    another like sass startup that's just right you know another traditional web app which is all well and good but um I think this is an area and I think when you're looking for exciting areas of new technology you always want to look at what our developers doing in their side projects or like outside of work and this is definitely something that people would do even if they you know work paid

46. 20:33

    to do it right yeah I've been finding that recently the rate I run into people who think that this is a scam or are like really really turned off by the whole boom and bust cycle is decreasing so it's actually the rate itself like like I still run into them but it's much less frequently than you know even a year ago yeah yeah I think the centum of this change them yeah feels that way I've got no like

47. 20:58

    empirical evidence of that just the conversations you know and what's the next chapter for you guys like what's the next kind of main area of focus yeah so the big areas of focus are number one is like taking advantage of all of the user experience improvements that are happening in the ecosystem so tons of new wallets tons of like fiat onboarding solutions so we're not gonna build anything there or but we'll definitely integrate everything or integrate the ones that would work really well so I

48. 21:30

    think that will push the whole space forward right now acquiring ether using meta mask everyone knows that that processes is a really and then sort of in that same categories like experimenting with new block chains that you know have interesting enough T projects on them so obviously you guys like the cosmos project are now looking into like standards for NF T's I think not sure about year Cintron but they definitely do have some projects there so that's

49. 22:01

    one categories kind of taking advantage of of the movement of the underlying infrastructure then the second category is we're working with bigger partners on building marketplaces for them so we're gonna be launching the marketplace for a Formula One racing game of one of our partners cheese wizards the game out of crypto kitties is now launching we're gonna be the primary market place for that and then we have some other

50. 22:27

    projects in the pipeline that like come from you know these traditional gaming backgrounds and I really like trying to shake up the space and then third is just you know the core functionality of open sea so right now it's an auction-based marketplace you can sell things for a fixed price you can put them on an eBay style auction but we'd love to do more so allowing people to barter NFT is so like swap a couple of

51. 22:51

    entities for another set of entities and then you know adding all the sorts of things that you might expect from a marketplace - like favoriting things maybe even messaging on all those things so how far away do you think we are from like converting an NST into money and paying for a hamburger with it you know I mean like by like like earning loot in the game and then like you're at

52. 23:15

    McDonald's in you're hungry and you're like so loot for cheeseburger so lease for cheese I think well I mean really the only thing that we need to happen is for I don't know if I see the other but like if if the cheeseburger company integrated died or either I think that would be kind of the limiting factor but I guess I mean yeah if there's a Fiat off-ramp that lets you get back into dollars you could certainly do that I think the bigger question is and that

53. 23:47

    we're actually close to is like how far away we are we from buying an N of T with USD right which is right now we sort of have a multi-step flow you can and there are actually companies that allow you did you do it to do that that integrate with open sea but for open sea itself we're still just working with like payment processors to make the onboarding into ether and then NFT

54. 24:08

    really just condensed into by an N of T with USD if they want to do that right yeah what so for me I don't see a huge difference between n FPS that you can at some point convert to something fungible and in your mind what what is the main difference between like you know an e or C 20 just token exchange and and like an NF T market you know like like there's a market place in my mind it's only the

55. 24:34

    metadata is that but there's got to be more to it than that well I think um I mean it's a difference between eBay and a stock exchange which are very different interfaces very different consumer bases very like you know a stock exchange is some or is either if it's a casual user that just buying the stock and one-click or they're doing sophisticated trading of fungible assets whereas a marketplace is somewhere it

56. 24:57

    can be often the discovery portal you know it's the the searching filtering sorting messaging all of those sort of peer-to-peer communications that you'd find in a marketplace are very different than what you'd find on radar relay or something would you imagine people doing speculation on NF T's though already are and then coming up with things that are like tracking different yeah and maybe maybe making like Candlestick charts for

57. 25:23

    like crypto kitties things yeah it's already sort of happening so there's a site called non fungible comm you know kind of early site but tracks so the probably the most mature NFT market over the last year although right now it's not as big as it used to be was the central land which is a land trading it's basically land in a virtual world and there has been there's a lot of excitement from

58. 25:49

    that community in part because there are a lot of holders of the decentraland token which is mana but there's also a lot of land holders and they've built a lot of tool I mean we have some tools as well on like monitoring the growth of that market over time and there's a guy who his name is Madi and he has a site called DCL blogger.com and it's just dedicated to how do you find good well

59. 26:13

    priced land and how do you value your land and how do you make a profit in it I don't know what his overall profit has been but I think he's made quite a lot of money just by flipping land so there's and what's cool is that you can apply that same like investment mentality towards all sorts of games right not just essentially and you can there are people who've made a lot of money in crypto kiddies there are people who make money and AXI there are people

60. 26:37

    who find new games and kind of try to get in early on them and then flip things so I think it's already starting to happen it's just kind of on a more microscopic scale yeah then in ERC 20 worlds right yeah the other like very interesting asset class that we're excited about is ENS names which are basically the equivalent of domain names for cerium and they're you know the domain name market if you invested in

61. 27:06

    domain names before the dot-com bubble you may have made out much better than many VCS right and um so there's a similar sort of hybrid utility investment to those sorts of assets and I think ENS is interesting because it's just been very in the past is you had to be pretty technical in order to get an e NS name now it's two clicks with meta masks and sigh I actually predict it over the next couple months we'll see that market become really big

62. 27:39

    that's what people already yeah well we just added support or so he ENS just became ERC 7:21 compatible so we had to support a couple days ago there's already like 500 names listed on open sea there's thousands being registered over just the first couple days of the project and so I think it's the beginning and then they're gonna write now they only have names that are above seven characters and they're about to

63. 28:03

    release ones that are under seven characters which I think will be a bit here to here go run and get your ENS Gary Ness in and what was the most challenging so far in this journey um most challenging I guess I sort of alluded to this but I think figuring out when to scale up versus when to wait like I think the biggest risk for our company is that were too early right and you know being too early could either

64. 28:37

    mean like a year or two early in which case I think our strategy is we'll be able to weather that right because we're a pretty lean team you know we have a lot of runway but you know being five years too early means probably the death of our company unless we're able to sort of chug along and we do make some revenue so I could imagine us you know puttering along and waiting for sort of

65. 29:04

    the tides to shift again but I think yeah it's been I think I'm really glad for example that we didn't like raise even more money last year and bring on a bigger team run because I don't think the market was ready for it I don't think consumers were ready for it I'm very glad that we waited this path didn't wait but we just sort of built with the existing team this last year and now it's hard to predict now what's gonna happen with these new NFT

66. 29:33

    projects but I'm still very conservative about how much adoption will see on aetherium and whether even aetherium will be the will be a robust enough platform for NF T's if it's not I don't think that's a huge deal because we're relatively blotching agnostic but if it's not and new blockchains aren't able to accomplish that either I think then you know it'll be a child but that's more of like an existential risk the risk of

67. 30:04

    like blockchains you know or like NF T's in general right you're saying like if the theorem can't do it and nobody else can do it and that teachers won't exist I mean yeah then it's like well of course you're not going to need a marketplace for entities if they don't exist in the world and also have question about like a whole market so do you think it's about usability and kinda like fixing the usability or is it about education or is it that market just

68. 30:27

    constrained and very small in fact I would actually say it's more that the experiences and content needs to improve so crypto kitties you know I don't think many people would have played crypto kitties if it did just spend another centralised game and so there needs to be a reason for people to want to own and use these games in some context and right now there is to some degree but it's not as strong as it could be and I

69. 30:57

    think those that will come from multiple angles one 1 is just traditional gaming teams smaller startups that are excited about blockchain building block stream based assets and high quality gaming experiences around them and right now that doesn't really exist and then the second is leveraging some of these pieces of interoperability to build consumer experiences that are superior to what you could do with a centralized game so I think a cool example of that is the crypto foxholes game right where you can you have this

70. 31:30

    little virtual world sort of like Minecraft you can build stuff but you can also bring your NF T's in it and so you can have museums of art and like a lot of weird stuff that you know it's still pretty rough around the edges but like you can imagine in six months there are features that he'll be able to build that just weren't possible um without some degree of interoperability between all these

71. 31:55

    assets so I think I think I'm not worried I guess that I mean user education is really important I think the friction thing is huge like that's just gonna you know reducing friction will help the entire every single game right and right but it's sort of like an incremental thing whereas I think the bigger thing is the quality of the experience gotta be attraction before you reduce friction yeah yeah yeah it seems like those new teams that joined the space a couple years ago from the

72. 32:27

    gaming industry right they are focusing on compelling game plays yeah interesting narratives they've done it many times over so it seems like yeah it's about balancing those delicate bones between gameplay and economics mmm and seems like yeah there'll be a lot of experimentation on space so one of the later questions I'm curious about and if you're comfortable sharing this go ahead

73. 32:49

    which is what is the biggest mistake you think you made along the way so far if there's anyone that pops out no that's a good question um I think we well it's not that big of a shake when we think about it we definitely made mistakes well there was um I think we could have worked more closely with so right now open sea is powered by a a set of smart contracts called wyvern which is it's similar to 0x is an exchange protocol it's a very generic exchange protocol

74. 33:32

    that allows you can think of it as allowing any sort of state transition swaps on an on a blockchain right so you could do something like I'll trade you these three crypto kitties if you transfer ownership of the smart contract to me or like I'll you know even something that's not even really trading it's just I'll do this if you did this right and I think when we started working with the

75. 33:58

    who now works at cosmos on in like collaborating with him on that protocol it was that was huge for us and we probably could have done that earlier it in the very early days we kind of wrote our own really simple smart contracts and we've really tried to stay at this stage we think there's so much infrastructure that exists on smart contracts that we don't that's not where we want to operate right um so we're always looking to just build on top of

76. 34:28

    things and we I think we've done a good job of orienting ourselves towards that but there were a few like times when I think we could have done that we could have been more collaborative early on right it's like yeah everybody's building this new city and some people are like laying down the roads and some people are like installing lights and like the way I envisioned it is like you're like I want to set up the shop in the middle of the city you know please

77. 34:52

    just run your cords and I'll plug in the electricity please run water in here but I'm not a I don't wanna be a plumber right yeah I just want to set up shop that's cool cool all right it's a really good analogy up and do you see particular games getting a lot more traction than others so do see kind of like people dipping their hands into many different games and yeah my sense

78. 35:17

    is I haven't done a rigorous analysis of the data for it but my sense is it's a lot of the same customer or consumers trying all of the different games right so as opposed to and yeah right now if you look at our market rankings page it's there's no you know there's one at the top but there's no like there's a bit of a power law in that there's a couple games in the top five and then

79. 35:45

    the rest is like very low volume but of those top games you know they're they're all getting around the same volume but you know that could definitely change so the top ones are like my crafter heroes from Japan and axia infinity and crypto kitties and I guess arguably gods Unchained the cars aren't tradable yet there's a horse racing game called the dead run and these are all kind of around the same levels of volume

80. 36:15

    in the same number of users are there are some upcoming games that you're particularly excited about cheese wizards which is launching or which is doing their presale today just because I think I've always really liked crypto kitties approach to building decentralized games there they take it much more native or at least for this game sounds like it's a lot more native right it's you know they're not trying to build a fortnight competitor in terms of graphics but they are leveraging what's interesting about blockchain

81. 36:46

    which is you know asset ownership and ease of developing new things on top of cheese wizards which i think will be really cool to see they have a new wallet so it's in the advantage they won't ferry yes yeah for sure and I love the approach to their new wallet which is you know it's a smart contract wallet which comes with some challenges but ultimately I think is the way that you

82. 37:08

    know most account should work on the body yeah yeah and also looking forward to you mention that there are some innovations potentially on a business model side of things oh yeah so you know for right now our model is we have a percentage fee on every secondary sale that happens on open sea but we also allow the project developers to take a cut as well so they can take as much of a cut on top of the two and a half percent as they want so for example my crypto Heroes which uses

83. 37:39

    open sea as their a primary marketplace for buying and selling assets on aetherium they've made you know 500 or 600 eath just based on having an open sea marketplace right they didn't have I mean dad to implementing your sea 721 and do their metadata but they didn't have to set anything mmm they didn't have to exclusively partner with us but they're now incentivized to promote us you know to

84. 38:04

    some extent because they benefit from those sales as well so that's I think that's a cool example of having good symbiosis between the primary game and then the secondary marketplace which is now never something that has really existed in centralized third party marketplaces for games like op skins for example right the game has always been sort of uncertain about whether it wants that secondary marketplace to exist so they don't get to immediately benefit from it from a revenue perspective

85. 38:33

    sometimes you can make the argument and I think there is a valid arguments to be made that having secondary marketplaces increases the exposure of the game but it's much better to say not only do you get a secondary marketplace but you also get a cut of this and then you're directly incentivized to have sales happen on on these third-party marketplaces so I think those sort I mean you know we'll probably refine the

86. 38:55

    specifics of how that works but point being like you can now programmatically enforce those incentive systems and I think that's something that's that you know technically again it's possible the centralized world just for practical purposes it would have been too difficult well and it goes back to that like really early idea of precedence which is that you know I think most economists would say like you like the best way to run the world would be to create these incentive structures and

87. 39:25

    like that there's been a lot of regulation that's tried to do this in with like just taxes like tax incentives and and it's largely failed this is this is like the first time I'm hearing where it's like look this is just a automated incentive that's all it is it's the automated set of incentives that then like it's permissionless if I if I just come on and I want to put an NF T on your on your platform it works out I don't have to ask your permission and

88. 39:50

    then I find out that I'm making a lot of money off of these transactions and then it's in my vested interest because my incentive is now to promote your thing and your incentive is to promote my thing it's this mutual beneficial yeah so it's it's a it kind of almost solves tragedy of the Commons a little bit it's a piece of it which is pretty fascinating to me you know just like aligning incentives with some auto and stuff yeah but I think we're just

89. 40:14

    about out of time so first I wanted to say thanks very much for coming on and I have one more question which is do you have any advice for people who would want to start a blockchain company today oh yeah that's a great question um so I would say I think some learnings from other companies so there were a couple other companies in our YC batch we obviously have a lot of contact with other startups in the space the main or I guess the maybe there's two areas

90. 40:47

    where I think you can go wrong one is you can be a little bit too impatient so you can like start so for example for open C like we've never had a huge customer base right but at the same time we know that we're operating in a brand-new territory like no no daps have huge customer bases and so like while it's frustrating to sort of be operating in early space we're not so impatient that we go and try to like

91. 41:17

    build everything so like take this main stream before it's ready to be mainstream so I've seen companies that you know are so frustrated with the size of their market that they just kind of give up and sometimes just leave the blockchain space because they're like they they need the validation of the market um but are not you know because they're maybe not sold on the on the vision of their company and you know and in some cases I was very sold on the vision of their company it was like why are you not continuing this like just

92. 41:53

    you know stay in the space and you know it's gonna get really excited total I could be wrong but but I think that's I think I think for any blotching company especially in the sort of dap space you have to be sold on the exciting nature of interoperable smart contracts on the blockchain if you're not sold on that then you're just gonna get frustrated the other mistake that I think folks make is there so I guess this is kind of it's a different

93. 42:28

    reaction to the same problem which is this that the space is really early but another reaction a different reaction than giving up is to go and like you know try to do everything all at once and I think that's just you know infeasible in this type of environment right if you and and you're and not acknowledging the trade-offs between doing everything yourself and having interoperability and decentralisation so

94. 42:56

    for example there's a lot of companies in the end of T space that are basically just building centralize entities and that's fine like if you have a great idea for a centralized collectible service you know that could be interesting there's squid which is basically a centralized sticker market right and you know - it's a decent company it's a big company and but you you should acknowledge that you're gonna

95. 43:20

    be competing with the sort of design space that has been explored for now since the dawn of the Internet right and then the last mistake I would say I see people make is just not being like being sort of on the fence about how collaborative they want to be all right so and maybe this isn't a mistake but I think there there's companies that they're like uncertain whether they want to own the whole ecosystem or whether they want to play a specific role in the

96. 43:54

    ecosystem and so they end again it's sort of a similar outcome as they end up building a lot of stuff that you know really should be focused on by a specific company who's that like building a wall at building in a blockchain Explorer building like all these things and because they want to the whole thing and they haven't thought about like how to monetize and be successful in like a specific area of

97. 44:18

    the space right so so if I had to summarize its impatience yeah right trying to do too many things at once and then not committing to one thing that you want to do right is that what is a good summary yeah yeah really great advice yeah cool well thanks thanks very much I mean you know and the last thing I guess if people want to learn for the first time about open to you what stuff

98. 44:41

    yeah go to a place so open see data is the website and then we recently got the Twitter handle at open sea so ya can follow us there alright you can also join our discord great all right thanks very much cool