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Pushing Web3 Forward: Scaling Bitcoin, Unlocking Creativity, Building Communities with Animoca Brands, CryptoCastle, Art by VESA, NewTribe Capital
Many people won’t associate the Middle East with the burgeoning Web3 industry, but it’s actually one of its busiest hotspots right now. From Saudi Arabia to the UAE, we’ll find developers, users, and even governments pitching in to create a favorable environment for innovation in the space. In this episode, we hear from some of the biggest names in the industry as they grace the halls of Edge of Dubai. Host Josh Krieger quizzes them on the latest developments on the horizon and the potential of this geographic region to make massive contributions to the industry. On the list are Yat Siu of Animoca Brands, the legendary CryptoCastle founder Yanislav Malahov, visual artist VESA and Juliet Su of NewTribe Capital. Sit back and enjoy these fascinating conversations!
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Listen to the podcast here
Edge Of Dubai With Yat Siu, Yanislav Malahov, VESA, And Juliet Su
In this episode, I’m here with none other than the Chairman of Animoca Brands, Yat Siu. It’s great to see you in person. It’s been a minute, but it’s more so passing by each other. We’ve been flying through Singapore and Korea. We’re not in Dubai. We’re in Ras. We’ve been in the Middle East region for a few weeks running into each other. You’ve traveled the world. Why is this region important to Animoca Brands and to the overall blockchain landscape?
First of all, the Middle East is generally super exciting. Demographically, it’s a very young population. A large part of the gaming community is coming from here in terms of emerging. When you look at a place like Saudi, something like 85% or 86% of the population is under the age of 36 and they love gaming. It’s one of the highest ARPU markets in the world.
That’s interesting.
When you even look at other markets, let’s say Turkey or Egypt, a young market as well in terms of population, very much interested in all things.
The same type of games as Asia. Have you delved into what types of games they like to play here?
Most of the games people play here are first-person shooters and RPGs. It is very similar to what you see in the West and some games from Asia, but mostly, it is Western studio games that they’re playing here. They have a deep interest in hunger to create new specific domestic titles that speak to the local market. That’s the opportunity that we and others see as well here in terms of a strong, thriving local market that has a hunger to develop it.
Take Saudi as an example. It has an eSports ministry and a sovereign gaming fund. I can’t think of many countries, if any, that have that kind of commitment. When you think about the level of investment that happens, for instance, here in the UAE, whether this is in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, in things of digital assets and Web3, broadly speaking, this is one of the most diverse investment places that you can find an interest in this space. There are many reasons to be here for all sorts of reasons.
Edge Of Dubai: Saudi Arabia has an eSports Ministry and a sovereign gaming fund. Not many countries have that kind of commitment to developing the industry.
Coinbase is considering this region. Can you touch upon why it’s important for non-gaming companies? Are you advocating they also have a presence here?
I think so. First of all, particularly when you see what’s happening in places like the US, people want to go somewhere where you have a little bit of clarity where you don’t know what’s going on.
It’s some kind of playbook.
They have to say, “This is okay.”
They’re like, “Even if it is 1,300 pages, give us a playbook. Tell us what to do.”
It is because of the way that things are being enforced without clarity that even the likes of giants like Coinbase are finding their way having to consider offshore places where they have at least some clarity so they can conduct these valuable services that they do. To me, this region and other places like Hong Kong that are similar in this regard are positive. It’s also good to have a little bit of global competition.
At the end of the day, people need to know where the talent is going to go. If the talent can’t stay in one place because it’s hostile, then they’ll go somewhere else because talent is super mobile. Regions like this demonstrate that it’s fluid. Look at how many people from around the world are in Dubai for instance. It’s super international.
We’ve seen that people move quickly. They’re willing to migrate. When that nomadic tendency takes over, you want to find a place where you can innovate, be creative, and not have boundaries. That makes a lot of sense. Speaking of innovation, I remember fondly our first show where I got to meet you where you shared your story of your fight with Apple in the early days. The fight doesn’t stop.
To paraphrase, you had multiple award-winning games at the top of the charts and then you got kicked off. Pushing the envelope is in your DNA and the DNA of the culture of Animoca Brands. You’re doing that again with Life Beyond. For those who don’t know, this is a Bitcoin-powered game coming up. Why Bitcoin? Why does the world need a game powered on Bitcoin?
One of the things that we’ve all said before is we look at L1, L2, and, generally, blockchains. It is like national economies or nation-states in and of itself. Bitcoin is a country, effectively. It has a very certain culture and a certain dynamic that takes place. That’s true for a lot of blockchains around the world.
Are these apples, oranges, and bananas here?
No. It is about how we enter the markets in cultural context that we can then maybe export afterward. Imagine if you’re making shoes for Switzerland. You don’t want to just make shoes for Switzerland. You want to sell it to America, Germany, and China, for instance, if you could. If you were only ever restricted to one ecosystem, then you wouldn’t be able to expand your market. One aspect of it is comparison.
One of the areas that wasn’t possible before Ordinals was a way to store digital culture. In the past, Bitcoin was very much the store value, perhaps the preeminent store of digital value. With Ordinals, you can store culture. You can store heritage. You can inscribe all sorts of interesting things about who you are and the prestige or whatever it is that you’re building.
That’s the zeitgeist of gaming. It is culture.
Everything we do in gaming, which billions of people do, is trying to store those forms of digital culture. You could argue that every moment in a game is an inscription of some sort, for instance. Some of them are valuable and some of them not. Most importantly, they mean something to you. Also, if you look at Bitcoin as a nation, there’s a whole bunch of people on Bitcoin who will never leave Bitcoin for any other platforms as well, so it makes sense to offer services there. When you think of market value, Bitcoin is also the one that has the biggest one of all.
No one argues about it being decentralized across the world. That gives you the freedom to be creative and to onboard from every country.
The way that I see it is that the kind of games that launch in Bitcoin will have a very different flavor because of the nation that is Bitcoin. In the same way that when you launch a game in America, it’s going to look different in terms of its feel, organization, and commercialization as a game that would launch in Japan or China, for instance, because of the community that’s there. That’s the same thing. Having a game like Life Beyond that focuses on the Bitcoin community and wants to be inside the Bitcoin culture will give it a specific narrative and a specific domestic edge. When you take a generic game and say it’s one-size-fits-all, it’s simply not going to make sense.
Edge Of Dubai: Games launched on Bitcoin will have a very different flavor about them.
You guys are not stopping there when it comes to innovation. You put a considerable amount of focus and energy into creating Mocaverse. We have a monthly segment with them called the Moca Moment. It’s a ton of fun getting updates from everyone on the team and sharing this very fast-moving locomotive train. At the same time, there are some really exciting developments that haven’t come to fruition yet with these Moca IDs. I’ve reserved mine. I’ve shared with everyone I know an opportunity to reserve. We did a contest. For people who are curious, what are Moca IDs all about and why with this particular movement?
First, what Moca ID is trying to do is create decentralized IDs as Soulbound tokens as a way to not just onboard Web2 users but also provide an identity layer that can be decentralized and can be truly yours for things that we’ve learned in our own experiences. For instance, take things like KYC. It’s a very simple example. We had to KYC with several games because of the value. What if you had an ID that was already pre-KYC? You don’t have to go and KYC a new wallet each and every time. You simply know that the customer is already KYC and then it’s okay.
One of the problems we had in the past was that people KYC, get the wallet, and then they sell the wallet. You don’t know if it’s a real user, for instance. Whereas with a Soulbound token, it does away with some of the issues of people doubling their identity as it were. Wallets themselves aren’t an effective source of identity. A Soulbound NFT that represents your ID is much more effective this way.
There are going to be a lot of perks. The way that Kyle described it to me is it’s like an airlines program on Web3 steroids. I described to him that way after I heard what he said.
It’s a way to create your digital reputation that can be created over your ID so that you can know stuff about it. The vision of a decentralized ID is not that we control it. It is that other people can compose freely on top of it. Imagine a decentralized team. What would that look like? It wouldn’t be that you have to use Steam to go in. You have to know who the users are and you can target them directly. It’s more of a pull marketing rather than a push. For instance, every person who played a first-person shooter, I’ll give you a 10% discount if you’re trying a first-person shooter. How do I know you played a first-person shooter? Your Animoca ID has that record. It has that history. It has all these details about it.
You can be and do, as a human, what you enjoy. You don’t have to register 100 times. You don’t have to keep saying, “I did this.”
We have over 450 investments in the portfolio. We have also our own games and studios. All of them would be able to utilize and benefit from the shared network effect that Moca ID will offer.
I’m excited. It’s a little bit of a foreshadowing. The Edge of Company certainly has some ideas for perks we can offer this ecosystem.
We look forward to that.
It’s not just limited to 8,888 Moca owners or a subset because a lot of us hold more than one, which I encourage you to check out. This is for the entire world to get some benefit.
The next level benefit is that we want to teach people about governance. We want to teach people about the power that they have with a Moca ID and Mocaverse NFTs, like how we do it with ApeCoin governance and many of our other future token projects.
A little bit less invasive than having to get your eyeball scanned, too.
How is that stored? Who controls it? What do we do with the data? Do we know?
What if that gets hacked? Eyeballs are becoming very important identity mechanisms for securing things that you don’t want to tap into.
The way that we think of the future of decentralized identity is that we may be a way to connect other identity layers but we don’t know what’s in it. In other words, you as an end user would then give permission to say, “I’m okay with you to take data from these 10 different sources, 3 different sources, or 5 different sources,” which we never have. Personally, decentralized identities on the blockchain are going to solve many of the privacy issues that places like Europe have, for instance. You can truly guarantee that the company that might be managing your ID doesn’t know that much about you.
It’s a very powerful concept. You get to go home soon to Hong Kong because ApeFest is coming up. There’s going to be a really exciting site event that the Mocaverse and Animoca Brands community is cooking up. Can you tell our audience about that in case they want to book a flight?
We’re going to have a little event in Mocaverse. It’s a boat trip. It’s been changing a little bit back and forth, but that’s what happened. Sandbox is also having a very cool event on the third as well.
That’s cool.
Generally speaking, I would tell everyone to come to FinTech week because there are going to be tens of thousands of people coming in who are Web3 enthusiasts and interests. It’s not just ApeFest. It’s Mocaverse. It’s Sandbox. There are all these little side events. Don’t come for us. Come from the fact that everyone else is building something there around that really exciting week. Come to Hong Kong.
Thanks for hanging out for a few. It’s good to see you as always.
Thank you so much.
Welcome to the show live in not Dubai but Ras at the Digital Oasis Summit. It’s been a pretty amazing few weeks. We had a lovely lunch. We happened to be sitting next to someone I thought we should all get to know better. This is Yani Malahov also known as The Godfather of Ethereum. It’s great to have you on the show.
Thank you.
We’re few years into the craze around non-fungible tokens, but there’s a long complex, and sophisticated history. One thing that jumps out to me is it’s all about the immutability of Bitcoin as a potential avenue for creating NFTs in a different way called Ordinals. You have been around the earlier genesis of this concept. Why don’t we start there? It’s a fascinating story. Tell us a little bit more about the previous years, what some of the early conversations were about Bitcoin, and what might be possible in terms of what we know as NFTs.
I discovered Bitcoin in 2011. In 2013, I was working on a colored coin wallet. You would say it is NFT art issuance wallets. Effectively, it was maybe the first wallet and platform that supported artists to timestamp their artwork and issue editions, which we called back then these NFTs according to, let’s say, the art world standard.
What made you decide to do that and go down that journey? At that time, I feel like even more so than now, people thought of Bitcoin as a store of value in a more traditional FinTech concept of a new version of democratizing capital. Why did this even come to mind?
I decided to become a blockchain, crypto, or, back then, Bitcoin professional. There was not much talk about blockchain either. Back then, it was Bitcoin and altcoins. I found somebody who wanted to do a project in the digital art world. He was an experienced entrepreneur from Canada. We met each other in the famous Room 77 Bitcoin bar in Berlin. It was the first brick and mortar store that ever started accepting Bitcoin already in 2010.
I pitched to him the idea of this project. He wanted to do something with Bitcoin and digital art also because of his wife who was an art world professional and a curator for physical and digital art as far as I remember. This is how these things got together. I was also working with Vitalik on some other things. We were hanging out in Calafou in the summer of 2013 and also in Milano. We were living the crypto-anarchist lifestyle.
How old was Vitalik at that time?
He must have been nineteen or something like that. He was barely a legal adult.
Did you have these conversations over coffee, drinks, or in one of your housing at that moment?
It was over laptops.
We didn’t have co-working spaces then, or were there?
Calafou was a community of people who left society to live in an abandoned factory which was half burned down as well. We were building technology for people who are completely out of society. This was one of the main ideas behind this community. For us, it was rather a temporary wiz-it. We were there for around 10 days or 2 weeks. I remember Vitalik sleeping on a super thin mattress on the floor. It was super basic living standards. We were living a very different lifestyle than we are now.
I’m curious. Were there ramen noodles being served in this communal kitchen or were you eating fresh food to spark all these creative ideas?
It was freshly cooked food by the community chefs. I remember one thing. We need to wash our dishes with these two buckets methodology. There was no running water. It was 2 buckets, which were 1 dirty bucket and 1 clean bucket, and then you dry the dishes. It’s the same way with how it usually gets done in Thailand on the street.
I also remember that Vitalik back then was waking up really early as well and spending all of his day on his laptop. Sometimes, we went for walks. This was the distraction we had. We climbed together. We climbed Montserrat, which is between Celafou and Barcelona. There’s also a picture of us standing on the peak. This was all before Ethereum.
How old were you back then, if you don’t mind me asking?
This was 2013, so I was 26.
You were the older mentor. You have seen a few things but are still inspired by some of the same principles as Vitalik around the democratization of the global economy, right?
Sure. Vitalik was famous for writing the Bitcoin Magazine. At this point, he wrote more than half of it. He originally got in contact with his Cofounder, Mihai Alisie, who brought Vitalik into the Bitcoin Magazine as a writer. I also became a Cofounder of the Ethereum project. Back to the NFT story, I still need to try to find the old private keys from several years ago. It would be fascinating to activate these NFTs. They are on the blockchain. We have the proofs, the timestamps, and the hashes of the artwork.
It’s missing the keys.
We never expected that there would be such a craze around NFTs and they would be sold for many millions or some of the NFTs would be selling for many millions. Nobody would’ve expected this in 2013. Otherwise, we would’ve framed everything and saved it. Maybe one of the lessons here for your audience is to never give up and hold onto really great original ideas because at some point, if the timing is right, it might be a good opportunity to get some value out of the work.
We have the movement around the Ordinals. There are a lot of folks in the community who think that there are some benefits of minting off of Bitcoin and also side chains of Bitcoin being created with BRC-21 and updates since then. Would you say that was also unexpected? What are your thoughts on where this renaissance of Bitcoin art goes from here?
The Bitcoin blockchain has been used for many things, not just transactions. In Prior years, several years ago, it was not very well accepted in the Bitcoin community.
The maxis didn’t like it very much.
I was also afraid that they were going to crucify us because we were timestamping artwork on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since there are so many blockchains and through the increase of the block size or the indirect increase of block size, there is more space and so much competition. It’s great for the Bitcoin blockchain to have more use cases. What do you think? Is it more accepted by the Bitcoin community to use it for digital art?
The answer is yes and no. The maxis are holding to their belief around the purity of Bitcoin as a store of value. That community is getting smaller. There are more folks who see Bitcoin as far more than a store of value. There are a lot of folks excited about the potential to do things with Bitcoin. We already know that it’s fully decentralized and accepted in that manner as opposed to all the new cryptocurrencies out there.
These hacker houses are also not a new thing.
They were in abandoned factories back then.
They sound vicious.
Every blockchain is timestamping.
You’re like a mentor or coach.
Thank you. It has been a pleasure.
It’s ambitious.
We were a media partner for them as well.
It’s always a pleasure.
NewTribe Capital. It’s great to have you on the show.
Thanks for inviting me.
That was when?
It was 2020, a few years ago.
This is through RAK DAO?
They are leaders of these different tribes.
It’s called what?
Important Links
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YouTube – Aeternity Blockchain
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@Noyyy – Twitter
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@ArtByVESA – Twitter