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Brent Annells (Smart Token Labs) & Mitch Penman-Allen (Perion) On Web2 Web3 Integration & Gaming, Plus Jacob & Co. NFT Watches, Yuga Labs Raises $450M, And More...
Tokens are the building blocks of Web3 Integration. Hosts Jeff Kelley and Eathan Janney welcome Brent Annells, the Chief Marketing Officer of Smart Token Labs, and Mitch Penman-Allen, a contributor at Perion. Brent talks about how tokenization changes everything. They’re building bridges to create pathways for mass adoption between Web2 and Web3. Next, Mitch discusses the future of gaming with NFTs and how they’re positioning eSports in the Web3 space, creating a competitive and rewarding experience for players to attract the best talent. Tune in!
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Brent Annells (Smart Token Labs) & Mitch Penman-Allen (Perion) On Web2 Web3 Integration & Gaming, Plus Jacob & Co. NFT Watches, Yuga Labs Raises $450M, And More…
**Our guests are Brent Annells, CMO of Smart Token Labs, and Mitch Penman-Allen, Cofounder at Perion. Smart Token Labs is creating a new standard for a tokenized future. They are building composable smart token bridges, bridges from tomorrow to today. Perion’s mission is to create and distribute opportunities by harnessing the untapped potential of the Web3 gaming community and positioning them as the economic champions of tomorrow. **
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Brent** and Mitch, it is great to have you. Welcome to the show.**
Thank you.
It is great to be here. Thanks.
There are so many cool things happening here. As we like to do for our readers who have not caught up with what you are doing, we would love to get some background from each of you on your projects and what led you to where you are at. Let’s start with you, Brent, and get a little background.
I always feel like the old guy in the room. I’m the Web1, Web2, and Web3 guy. I did my first tech first-generation startup in Silicon Valley in 2000, right around through the dot-com boom and bust. I ended up in Web2 with both Facebook and Uber looking after the brand at Facebook and partnerships at Uber. I had the experience of the mobile app-driven internet.
I’m in Web3 with Smart Token Labs. We are an open-source software development company. We have a vision that tokens are the building blocks of Web3. The tokenization of everything is going to change everything. It is the core infrastructure layer to Web3. We are building bridges and trying to create pathways to mass adoption between Web2 and Web3 for a better user experience.
My name is Mitch. I first got into crypto in 2017, like a lot of people. A friend of mine had met a guy called Willy Woo in Bali or Sri Lanka on a kitesurfing trip. We got connected. He had a small group of people talking and trading on deck. I became obsessed with the futures market. I started reading books all day long. It is mostly postgrad university literature around financial markets, hedge fund strategies, and things like that. By 2019, I was running my futures trading company.
One day in 2020, we were in Melbourne in the dog park. We had some pretty strict lockdown through COVID. We could not do anything but go to the dog park. I met one of the other Perion Cofounders, Amos. He was relatively interested in crypto and a developer. I thought, “This is great. We will be able to jump off and jump more into the stuff I was doing in the futures markets.” However, in mid-2021, Amos became number one in the world at Axie Infinity, which is the first touchpoint for a lot of people into NFT gaming. He told me all about the leasing model and how that works.
I was like, “This thing is going to be huge.” We dove in and founded Perion. We started with a pretty traditional model where we would lease Axies to gamers. A lot of people came in that route. If you look at Axie’s performance as an example, that token launched a double-digit-million valuation. It ended up doing 3,000X. We thought that was an interesting place for us in the ecosystem where we could A) Take an early position in games and B) Use our network of streamers because we are a competitive eSports organization.
We have around three million eyeballs in front of streamers. We could use that network of streamers to distribute content from these games that went back throughout the play-to-earn ecosystem. We became a launchpad, developed the initial eSports scene, and got the initial eyeballs that it needs to have to succeed. We developed our name further in the space. How it is positioning is being this competitive eSports content platform of Web3 gaming.
Creating experience for players in eSports attracts the best talent. Click To Tweet
Going into gaming is so much fun because the thing that attracted me about gaming is people don’t need to learn anything to understand gaming. It is going to be such a big on-ramp to crypto. Most people don’t understand how the Fed works or how DeFi works, but they understand games. They will do anything to play a game. We see gaming as this mass onboarding to crypto.
Let’s get to know a little bit more about each of your companies and how you formed a partnership. Mitch, since we heard from you a little bit, can you talk about the company a little bit more and the partnership?
On the front end, we are very much positioned as an eSports team of the Web3 gaming space. We have around 1,200 gamers playing for us. Something that we are more into is targeting competitive players. For example, the last season of Axie finished. We had three players in the top ten. We took out 2nd spot, 6th spot, and then equal 7th spot. A huge part of what we are doing is creating this team and this inspirational and aspirational environment where people want to be a part of Perion.
That led us to work with Smart Token Labs as they were creating experiential products for teams, guilds, and organizations. That was the inroad to it. We saw STL as a huge value add, creating merch and experience for our players. We are trying to attract the best talent. On the front end, we have this great team and this nice brand. On the backend, we need to do things to keep our player base engaged and keep them driving to perform.
It is so fascinating building an eSports team of that size. From being in NFTs, gaming is all over the place. It is a fascinating world. Bringing that together sounds like a fascinating process. Brent, how about you? Tell us a little bit about the company, how you feel about this partnership, and what excited you about it.
Smart Token Labs has been around for years. We have been building these two core products, which are both open-source products. One is AlphaWallet, which is an open-source mobile NFT wallet. It has been forked over 500 times and loved by Ethereum developers. That is a product in and of itself. There is TokenScript which is our framework for making tokens smart. Predominantly, that is NFTs. What it allows us to do is add rich utility and functions to NFTs. We create a smart token interface around an NFT or a token. It is the same thing. It allows NFT to connect to a smart contract, other tokens, and, quite importantly, Web2 sites and services.
That is part of what we are doing with the guys at Perion. We have a suite of smart contract-based products that are all fully open source and available to our partners. The NFT rewards token that Mitch and the team have used for their gamers is one of those templated rewards smart contracts that we have got in our library. We have this product called Token Negotiator, which token-enables Web2 sites or services. In this case, what we are doing is putting Token Negotiator into it into a merch site, which is called DeepSea Merch.
Mitch and the team are doing a drop of the season’s reward token to the top-performing gamers. Those gamers have that token in their wallet. When they visit the website, they are directed to DeepSea Merch. Depending on the token they hold, it will unlock different types of merch rewards based on their performance in the season. What it creates is a seamless and better user experience. It is a reward, surprise, and delightful experience for high-performing gamers. It takes them from the Web3 world of Discord and drops into visiting a mainstream Web3 site and unlocking rewards based on what they hold.
You are going to do a giveaway. We talked about merch. I could see why giving away merch is exciting. Maybe we will revisit that. We are still working out the details. Now that you mentioned how involved you are, it is a good day. We just have our bad memories of having to ship a multi-thousand-dollar piece of art to Turkey for quite a bit of cash.
You go from podcast to logistics company.
We are talking about rewards, loyalty, and NFTs. When we think more broadly, what impact have NFTs brought to the world of rewards and experiences for play-to-earn gamers? More broadly, how has it impacted loyalty? How has this interplay evolved in your eyes?
Web3 Integration: Tokenization will change everything because it’s a core infrastructure layer to Web3.
The biggest thing for us is we have a competitive player base. We need to drive them to bring their best. What we did with our NFT partnership with STL is we created this seasonal rewards token. We have 1,200 gamers. The seasonal rewards are only for the top 100 players. It is an aspirational environment where you want to make the top 100. What we are doing is driving their engagement through gameplay. They get to receive merch and cool things they want. Our players have been asking for merch for a while now. It is rewarding them for putting in the effort. That is a good value driver when it pertains to loyalty and things like that. If you put in the work, you will get represented.
In the broader context of loyalty, rewards, and marketing ecosystem, we are just getting started. It is very exciting about what is going to be possible to be enabled. The mechanisms for membership programs, rewards programs, and creating surprise and delight experiences for members of your community or your customer base have been around for a long time. I remember years ago, I worked in telecom marketing. The poster child of the rewards or loyalty space always used to be O2 in London. They had these incredible mechanisms and this thing called A Pie and A Pint.
You could go to the O2 branded stadium. All you had to do was show your phone at that point and show it had the Bluebar on it. You got a free pie and a free pint at the football match, which was pretty cool. I remember the best thing they ever did was they created this experience for customers who were leaving London and going to France. I don’t know if you have ever been stunned by international roaming fees. Most of us probably have. You get this horrible bill shock experience when you have done a little overseas trip. What O2 did is as you were going into the tunnel to go under the English Channel on the train, the last cell tower would see you as an O2 customer.
You would ping that tower, and they would know that you are off to France. When you pulled out the other side of the tunnel, they would ping you with a text message and say, “Here is a free-roaming pack so that you don’t get bill shock while you are having a holiday in France.” NFTs create these seamless mechanisms for recreating all of that. On the one hand, you have all the utility-based stuff that can be done. We can drop NFTs to communities and these unique digital assets that they own. They can unlock whole sites and all sorts of experiences.
We are just getting started at the beginning of that. How does that create a better experience than O2 delivers? In a broader sense, you have got the liquidity part of it. We are talking to a couple of companies that have big membership points-based systems. You can tokenize those points and create a secondary market for the membership points someone holds in the Qantas’ Frequent Flyer program. If I’m not going to use those points, can I sell them or pass them onto someone else? That stuff is also massively exciting. We are at the very beginning of where it is all going to go.
It is exciting. It is creating free-market economies for everything. The financialization of the world is an interesting topic.
We are not theorizing this necessarily anymore. It is being put into practice. Years ago, things were a little different as far as putting things into practice. There has been a lot of vision, but being able to execute and see results, the uptake, and the real traction is here now. That is so exciting to see. It is just the beginning. We are just at the tip of the iceberg.
In real terms, the NFT holders are relatively small in terms of the volume, scale, and number of people that hold the NFTs. If you take PFP collections as an example and you hold a Bored Ape, a CryptoPunk, or a World of Women, it says a whole series of things about you. There is the financial component. If you have got $200,000 or $300,000 in your wallet, that says something about you. If you are heavily involved with the World of Women community, that says something about you. We are doing something with a global resort chain. There is a big conference happening in New York. It is not as cool as the one that is happening in LA.
It is a gaming resort. You can gamble, stay, and have a great time there. They are going to plug in Token Negotiator into their website. If you hold an Ape, you are a VIP while that conference is running. It is a bridge into Web3 for a Web2 hospitality and resort player. You don’t have to go and do a deal with Bored Ape to enable that. You can recognize the token and say by virtue of the value of that token, “That is a high-value player or person that I want in my facility. I’m going to make them a VIP for two weeks while they are in town.” Those sorts of things are almost limitless in terms of what might be possible.
The term Bored Ape is part of the whole brand of it and being the VIP and the player that you want to involve. Years ago, we were talking about, “Bored Apes are going to be very special in a few years.” “What are you talking about? Bored Apes? I don’t get it.” We have talked about it a little bit. Let’s cap it off and make sure there is nothing else worth jumping on. That is, NFTs are serving as bridges into Web2 site services and experience. Is there anything more you want to add on that to highlight what is going on?
I’m pretty happy with it. It is interesting. We have these digital tokens backed by physical goods. It is no longer just a picture. There is some redeemable aspect to it, which is interesting. I’m super excited about what we can do. What we are doing now with STL is a proof of concept for us. It is the first step of many.
Rewarding people for putting in the effort is a good value driver for loyalty. Click To Tweet
The final point I would make is that we are both Australia-based startups. We see Mitch and the guys as innovators in the play-to-earn space. They are creating this eSports team of the best players in the world. They have a high-value audience and cohort. We are excited about this. This is just a first toe in the water to do merch rewards and some of the things we have been talking about. Everybody wants a slice of those gamers that Mitch has in his portfolio. We are quite on the move for it.
It is a gateway to mass adoption. A lot of folks live in the Web2 world. As inclusive as the community is and as community-oriented as the Web3 world is, sometimes people get beat up a little bit for being primarily in Web2. We got to have some wide-open doors and build those bridges to bring people into the next phase of evolution in the world of NFTs and blockchain.
It is always the same old story, “The guys and girls from Web1 and Web2 didn’t get it.” It is always that same thing, but none of it is ever exclusively true. It is always somewhere in the middle.
When you look beyond your companies and the close partnerships here that we talked about, where do you get inspiration within the world of NFTs in this next phase of the development of the world of blockchain? What inspires you?
It is pretty inspiring to see what Yuga Labs has done, raising $450 million. It took us by surprise. It is interesting to see how they have made Bored Apes the thing to have by understanding what that community needed and what would get them leapfrogging things like CryptoPunks. The moves they made were impressive. Crypto was never this super popular in the mass market adoption phase. It was never this huge public-facing thing.
Through NFTs, you have basketball players owning NFTs and celebrities buying NFTs like Dave Chappelle, Eminem, and Snoop Dogg. The way they have been able to bridge into the traditional world is impressive. That is exactly where we see the space going. We are trying to be that for gaming. If you look at the NFT games, they are still pretty early-stage. We are seeing some pretty amazing AAA talent coming through and looking to bridge into this space. We are trying to be ready for when the games are mass market and consumer-ready, so we can be there waiting and ready to be that bridge.
I wanted to see any other companies or projects that stand out to you that inspire you.
There is so much of it. At a brand level, it is super impressive to see what Yuga Labs has done with those brand properties, the communities that exist around those three core brand properties, and the way they have been executed. Even the Mutant Ape drop off the back of Bored Ape could have gone horribly wrong. The vision around the other side is cool and super on-brand. It is full and open IP rights. The members of the community are the creators and the owners.
They can do whatever they want. They are doing these amazing things. Nevertheless, you have got this brand custodian sitting behind at Yuga Labs and painting a vision of where they are going to go doing the ApeCoin and pointing to the metaverse. It is believable. I get a little bit tingly when I talk about it because it is so hard to do. There is the same thread that pulls through everything in marketing and brand in history. You have passionate believers in the core brand property and what it stands for.
Having an Ape, whether you like it or not, says something about you. That is an amazing brand platform that has got a great business strategy that seems to be executing incredibly well. The other stuff is completely on the other side. It is around inclusivity, governance, enablement, and all these projects out there to try to change the world. I’m verging into DeFi.
What people are doing is to organize and mobilize communities of people around bigger cause-related stuff. World of Women seems to be that in a completely different way. It is celebrating female entrepreneurship and the power of being a woman and coming together to do things that change the world. I think about my kids. They are growing up in this world. It is all changing around us. I’m positive about it. I’m optimistic and hopeful that good stuff is going to come on both ends of the spectrum.
Web3 Integration: Gaming is so much fun because people don’t need to learn anything to understand gaming.
There is no doubt about it. There is no lack of enthusiasm.
I remember having a conversation with my father years ago. There was something going on with the government that he was upset about. He’s like, “Everything is going down the tubes.” I remember saying, “There are some things that are going up the tubes.” There is a lot moving in the positive direction. It is good to focus on it too. Speaking of positive direction, what is on the next bit of the roadmap for each of you? We will start with Mitch.
We are going through a process of scaling the team. We have been interviewing like crazy and looking for a CMO, a Web3 dev, a coin trader, and a couple of things to give us a bit of an edge in what we are up to. We are looking at building out models for game economies, working on the smart contracts for the DAO, and speaking to a lot of new games. There is this super exciting talent coming through. We are trying to help out in that launchpad capacity. That is a huge part of our roadmap. We are working on a couple of little interesting NFT products in the background. It is a little bit of a black box. We are not completely public on what we are up to there, but you have got some interesting stuff happening.
It was a Mars bar.
Was this in Australia?
Yes. I don’t think you have Mars bars in the US.
I bought an album.
Do you happen to remember what it was?
It was NERD. It was their album.
Did you sell it as a business that you had?
Mitch, beat that.
I was arbitraging necklaces in RuneScape.
It is a Mars bar.
It is a couch.
I sold a Nike jacket on eBay.
It is impulse control around Mars bars.
How about you, Mitch?
I will pack my bags to come to the US.
We will make something happen.
Important Links
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@TokenScript – Twitter
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@PerionDAO – Twitter
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@Mitch__Perion – Twitter
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Jacob & Co. Launches an NFT Collection of Digital and Physical Watches Inspired by the Metaverse – Article
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Enjin – Previous Episode
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Bored Ape Yacht Club Creator Raises $450 million to build an NFT Metaverse – Article
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Edge Of NFT – Discord
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Spotify – Edge of NFT
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About Brent Annells
The past decade I’ve been fortunate to work at some of the world’s most innovative media & technology businesses. I’ve used those opportunities to push the envelope on marketing, partnership and sales innovation that’s led to material growth in revenue, product adoption and market expansion. Recently completed Kernel fellowship into Web3 via KB4 🌱 and made full time shift into Web3 with Smart Token Labs.
About Mitch Penman-Allen
Mitch is a highly-skilled asset manager specialising in delta-neutral, linear product strategy. He has grown his small proprietary trading company to a highly efficient machine that turns over $100,000,000+ a month. He brings a keen understanding of market strategy and an ever-willingness to optimisation and opportunity.