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Michael Wagner Of Star Atlas, Defining The Next Generation Of Gaming, Plus: AMC Explores Crypto And NFT, Tebow-backed Campus Legends, And More...
Blockchain games are one of the fastest-growing parts of the blockchain space. Who wouldn’t love an enjoyable activity that could earn you big bucks? Star Atlas is one of the latest “stars” in the burgeoning blockchain gaming space. In this episode, we hear about what makes it different and special, as our hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger talk to Michael Wagner, CEO, and co-founder of Star Atlas. Michael shares his thoughts on the development of the game, his grand vision, and where the project is headed currently. Will Star Atlas be the game that puts AAA games on the blockchain? Tune in and find out!
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Michael Wagner Of Star Atlas, Defining The Next Generation Of Gaming, Plus: AMC Explores Crypto And NFT, Tebow-backed Campus Legends, And More…
This episode features Michael Wagner, the CEO of Star Atlas. It is a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, political domination and more. It is a massive multiplayer metaverse set in the distant future. Michael is a serial entrepreneur with a formal background in capital markets analysis, economics and valuation methods.
He has founded multiple companies centered around the emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, one of which is Star Atlas. Collectively, he possesses ten plus years in capital markets analysis, holds his Chartered Financial Analyst designation, over seven years in blockchain, over 24 years in gaming and over five years in executive leadership. Michael, it’s great to have you on the show. Welcome.
Thanks, guys. That was a fantastic intro. I appreciate it. It’s good to be here.
You’re a fantastic guy. It makes it easy.
I prefer somebody with a little more experience. You’re killing here.
Every year, I’m working on it.
I’m assuming that your many years of experience in gaming is counting like playing Mario Kart and stuff when you’re a kid.
To be perfectly clear, that is all game playing experience.
It’s all about aspirational wealth at the end of the day. Click To Tweet
Michael, we’ve done over 60 episodes of this show and this one’s been on the books for a long time and it’s been one I’ve personally been excited about. Eathan and I are part of a group of guys in LA that track what’s going on in NFTs, metaverse and gaming. Star Atlas has been a conversation topic. You’ve definitely caught a lot of people’s attention with what you’re doing and we’re excited to dive deeper.
We might as well start as far at the beginning as we can. How did you get into crypto? How did the idea for Star Atlas come about?
You guys talked a bit about my formal background already so we don’t need to elaborate on that too much. I would say one interesting anecdote to share is that many years of gaming experience and the group of friends that I grew up with in high school, we’re all big computer nerds, big gamers. This was in the ‘90s. Broadband internet wasn’t widely available. We formed a group called the LANarchist. These are Local Area Network parties and we would bring our computers over and play video games all weekend. We’d be drinking Mountain Dew, eating pizza and playing games. That’s how we spent almost every weekend growing up.
You’ve got some Twizzlers in there too, I assume.
All kinds of snacks. Fast forward ten years after high school, one of my buddies who was in that group went on to cofound my first company with me, Tokes. He introduced me to this concept of Bitcoin and mining script clients with GPUs. Given the experience building all of our own computers, it was a pretty natural fit and something that captivated my interest in terms of getting exposure to something that I saw is from a financial analysis perspective as a potential new asset class. Also, from the computer nerd in me wanting to build these computer systems, these rigs and milk crates and start mining cryptocurrency.
That all kicked off in 2013. I dumped a bunch of money into buying GPUs. I had rigs all over my house and was kicking circuit breakers left and right with the power draw then Mt. Gox collapsed. It was not profitable at all in terms of being a business endeavor but it did again captivate my interest in the potential of the technology. I immersed myself in everything crypto, Bitcoin for the next couple of years during the bear market. I made the decision to go full-time crypto in 2015 and launched that first company at the end of 2016.
Through that process, the development of Tokes or Multichain Ventures as it came to be known, I got introduced to two people who went on to cofound Star Atlas with me. That’s Danny Floyd, our Chief Product Officer with an immense background with twenty years plus in AAA game development, as well as Jacob Floyd our Chief Technology Officer. They serve similar roles with the previous company. To mention rounding it all out, Pablo Quiroga who I met through our interaction and intersection with the cannabis industry, joined as the Chief Revenue Officer pre-launch as well.
All of us have this passion for gaming. We saw what was emerging in this nascent space that was blockchain games. We saw the emergence of NFTs primarily as collectibles. In 2019 and 2020, DeFi was hot. It was proving itself as one of the best use cases of cryptocurrency, a blockchain that had been innovated to date. We made the determination that we could create a superior product by bringing the AAA quality mainstream gaming experience and implementing all of the financial incentives that blockchain can bring. That was through asset ownership through NFTs, crypto native tokens, ATLAS and POLIS, decentralized governance and integration of the DeFi protocols and primitives into the gameplay experience. Thus, Star Atlas was born.
What didn’t you want to include? We talked a lot about Web 3.0 and this converging technology. It sounds like you looked at all the different tools and what would make the coolest gameplay and you mushed all that stuff together. What about augmented reality? How does that fit into your vision there?
Star Atlas: We could create a superior product by bringing the AAA quality mainstream gaming experience and implementing all of the financial incentives that blockchain can bring to it.
There are two cool things about AR. First and foremost, when we debuted the company in January of 2021, it was a formal announcement announcing that we had closed some capital with the team behind FTFX. That led to some private token sales but also the development of our initial NFT marketplace. That’s at Play.StarAtlas.com. The first campaign we executed was called ReBirth: Genesis of a Metaverse. We call these Multimedia Meta-posters.
There was a fourteen-poster campaign that was executed over fourteen weeks, where every week we would unveil a new poster that describes some of the background, lore and history of Star Atlas and how we got to where we are in that universe. All of the concept art in the posters was created by our team internally. We enhanced that with augmented reality, working with Shape Immersive out of Vancouver and we also had audio soundscapes produced by some mainstream performers such as Blond:ish, Bassjackers and Deadmau5 on the final poster.
What we were able to create was this truly immersive experience that started to explain to people what Star Atlas would become and give them a sensation of what the metaverse could be through storytelling. That’s through augmented reality where the posters come to life and the sound brings you into the setting. That’s one component but the other part and maybe the more important part is that we are building out in Unreal Engine 5. It’s early access but we have a full production team building an Unreal Engine 5. That’s going to enable an enormous set of augmented reality and virtual reality experiences into the future.
While all of those are important for gameplay, I don’t want to diminish at all what we’re doing on the game development side. When you start thinking about what is going to be possible in the metaverse to the future and even the simple fact that Facebook is rebranding to Meta and how powerful of a statement that is. The centerpiece of their metaverse is around social experience, human interaction with one another.
Our centerpiece is gaming. That’s going to attract an enormous amount of people, not only to our product but also to cryptocurrency. The other components of the metaverse are things like transforming eCommerce. Why shop on Amazon.com if you can purchase your goods with cryptocurrency in the metaverse and have them delivered to your physical residence? Social media will definitely be disrupted and labor markets, productivity and true economies will be formed inside the metaverse.
For things like shopping experiences, AR is going to be a powerful selling tool. You can interact with your shoes. Let’s say you’re shopping in a Nike Store inside Star Atlas, you interact with your shoes in AR. When you hit the buy button, you get those shoes delivered to your house but you also get the commemorative NFT that you can equip on your avatar inside of the metaverse. That was an extended answer but AR and VR are definitely a big component of what we’re building in the future.
Why did you decide to build on Solana? I’m curious, in retrospect, if you have any other thoughts on that decision and how it shaped the future of Star Atlas.
There were many reasons. We analyzed pretty much every one of the upcoming generation 3 Layer-1 protocols. They’re things like Avalanche, Cosmos and Flow. Terra did not make the assessment but Solana was in there. Fundamentally, if I could say one thing, it’s the only Layer-1 protocol that has web scalable tech that we believe is going to be necessary to on-ramp potentially the global population into the metaverse. That’s a super big and bold statement. We see ourselves as first serving the crypto gaming community and into mainstream gaming and this concept of the metaverse where anybody can work, play, innovate, interact and shop. It can truly reach a global audience.
Solana has greater than 50,000 transactions per second. It’s a sub-second finality on stage changes, which equates to low latency. Anyone out there who’s a gamer and has ever experienced lag and gotten headshot because they were lagging out, it’s enormously frustrating. It’s low lag and low cost. It’s less than a penny per transaction and virtually every action or activity that a gamer, player or citizen of the metaverse participates in is going to need to be recorded on-chain. That’s our goal.
We need high transaction throughput and high scalability, which are accomplished through the unique consensus algorithm behind Solana and low costs. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to pay and they wouldn’t play. There were many other things. The simple fact that we were there in Solana talking to them in August of 2020, there were maybe twenty projects building on Solana.
We saw it as an opportunity for us to bring an innovative idea and concept to them that could lead to mass adoption of Solana and in turn, they would support us through things like marketing, press and helping get us that initial exposure that was so critical in growing our community. It was successful. They helped us out tremendously and they’ve also provided an enormous amount of support on things like tech and documentation. Also, helping our engineering team get up to speed with operating across the protocol. That was helpful.
One thing I always do mention and this is partially related to us closing our seed round, I first came across Solana when I heard Sam Bankman-Fried on a podcast talking about Project Serum. His endorsement of Solana and his choice of building our Project Serum, that decentralized exchange protocol that lives on Solana, to me, was motivating. This is a smart guy that’s been successful and if he’s selecting Solana then there’s probably something to that. There was also a little piece of that in there. We also did all of our own due diligence and analysis.
Who knows? Maybe some of our readers who are deciding where to build are listening to you as a smart guy and trying to figure out where their next move is. The trend continues.
All of our friends, the closest guys who have ears in the street and can predict where things are going have been super along with Solana for a long time. It’s all that we heard about. We’re like, “Give us the deets. What’s the story?” They essentially laid out what’s happening now. This was in 2020. It makes a ton of sense. It’s cool to see that it’s all coming to fruition.
When we are NFT.NYC and beyond, we’re seeing a little bit of a groundswell among people who are excited about Solana for various reasons. I talked to some folks who were excited about Solana NTF. We talked to Metaplex, who’s helping to facilitate NFT projects with Solana. It’s not just about, “This works.” There’s this community groundswell around Solana. That’s interesting.
A really funny story about that. In many ways, at Star Atlas, we’ve influenced some of the focus and direction of Solana. I don’t have any hard metrics behind any of this but I always like to give Anatoly and Raj a bit of a hard time because they were the first guys I was talking to about bringing Star Atlas to Solana. They were highly skeptical of blockchain gaming and of NFTs themselves. It took a while. It took a little bit of time to convince them but I know they’re fully supportive of it and they see the potential and they have for some time. That first call was a little bit of a rough one for me. I had to go back to the drawing board and say, “This is still a good idea. We still want to do this. Let me try it again,” and here we are.
One of the things that we saw in a couple of different places was that the Star Atlas universe has a dual token economy. What we see is it does reflect the tangibility and ownership and value of real-world assets. Can you tell our readers what does that means and how should that influence your thinking about Star Atlas?
There are four different asset classes across the Star Atlas universe. The first two are fungible. That is ATLAS, which is the in-game currency. There’s POLIS, which is the governance token. What is empowering and transformative about POLIS itself and the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization are not unique to us. These have been around for a long time, many years at least. Our objective and goals as a company are to build an enormous amount of value in this concept of the metaverse and ultimately have that turned over to the world at large over time.
Effectively creating a public utility that anybody can interact with and participate within and also innovate inside of and create their own opportunities for themselves. In doing so, it’s a synergistic symbiotic relationship. Every time somebody creates value for themselves by creating a unique experience inside Star Atlas, they are creating more value and more reason for other people to enter into the metaverse as well. That’s on the ATLAS POLIS.
Clearly, we also have NFTs, non-fungible assets that represent ownership. We also have fungible materials that exist throughout the game so these are things like minerals ore, food, farming and stuff like that. These all become input materials in the supply chain for people to ultimately create their own NFTs based on a blueprint. All of the ships that we’ve released will have blueprints associated with them. If you collect the requisite materials, you upgrade those and refine those into alloys, metals, plastics and polycarbonates. In doing that, you are able to mint your own NFT reflecting that ship or whatever the asset may be.
In-game assets and this creation of new forms of value and economies are fascinating. I’m curious if you can expound a little part upon the features of the in-game assets, how they create value. One thing I’m particularly interested in is utility versus not necessarily utility. We’ve seen sometimes the most valuable assets are the ones that are to flex or to show off. I don’t know how much of a role that is to Star Atlas. How is value created in these assets?
Maybe I’ll address the second question first. We are exclusively focused on utility-driven NFTs. Maybe not exclusively, we have the poster campaign that we ran. These are collectibles and items that people will be able to share with others inside their habitats in Star Atlas or in galleries or something that is in-game. We do have a wide range of asset pricing. We have ships that start at $20 and we have ships that we anticipate will sell for $5 million to $10 million.
The central space station penthouses of which there are only three that are being marketed at $10 million apiece. It comes with a unique 1 of 1 faction leader, crew card and a 1 of 1 faction leader ship, as well as full access to an arena, a stadium that exists on the central space station as well. It would be all with their own unique branding so there are people that are interested in this branding exposure.
I can think of some previous guests of the show who might want to go after that. What about Cosmos? That seems right up his alley.
If you can make an introduction, I’m happy to have a conversation. The idea is to be inclusive. We want to make sure that everybody can get access to the game because we’re reaching a wide audience, the global population potential user base. There are also individuals or groups of players that want the higher-end assets, the more prestigious, the more exclusive and the rarer are assets.
We’re trying to satisfy all of those demands and still be proportional and fair in the economic and reward structure of any of those. I truly believe that people are going to be seeing the potential of this, the growth potential of themselves and reinvesting back into themselves through earnings. It’s taking part of that income that they’re earning and buying another ship or buying a piece of land or upgrading items and components. Through that process, they’re going to be able to compound wealth. It’s all about aspirational wealth at the end of the day.
Do you have plans for nodes like Gala Games has their nodes that go across games? Is there an idea of interoperability between Star Atlas and outside NFT projects? We talked to the founder of Jadu who has these amazing jetpacks and hoverboards that can fly around the metaverse with different NFTs. What are your thoughts on those two topics riffing on what you shared?
The node infrastructure or network architecture is something that we’ve envisioned from the beginning, though there’s no guarantee that we can execute on that. An enormous amount of R&D would still need to go into figuring out if that would even be possible on this networking layer. I’m a staunch supporter of Bitcoin. None of the innovations across any other cryptocurrency would exist clearly without Bitcoin first but I’m also not a Bitcoin maximalist. I understand that all of the innovation in the space has brought a lot of value and attention back to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, in its truest sense is censorship-resistant and that’s because of how fully decentralized it is, how nodes are operating all over the world and the simple fact that there is no real central entity behind that.
Star Atlas: All of the ships will have blueprints associated with them. If you collect the requisite materials and you upgrade those and refine those into alloys metals, plastics, polycarbonates, you are able to mint your own NFT, reflecting that ship or whatever the asset may be.
In order for us to create a metaverse that is censorship-resistant that anybody can participate in, we have to identify a path to true decentralization. That’s not just across the Solana network but that’s across all forms of Game Logic execution not existing on a centralized server anywhere. We aspire to that. I don’t know if it’s going to be possible. If it is, it’s going to be many years down the line before we get there. I would love to see that.
We’ll work on that together with you for sure.
That’s like having one too many pot brownies.
That’s got to be a little more fun.
I’m terrible at these but I’ll give it my best.
I think that would answer that, yeah.
What do you enjoy doing with your friends?
What is the most recent thing you sold?
My integrity.
You could try.
Is this like Silicon Valley’s Blood Boy?
I like it.
The LANarchists.
First and foremost, if you haven’t been on our website, go to StarAtlas.com because it’s a cool, innovative, immersive website. The idea is we want to bring you into the metaverse at first interaction. Go there to check out our legacy white paper that we published in December of 2020 and also our game economics and tokenomics white paper published in August of 2021. In terms of community, we have a rapidly growing community on Discord so Discord.gg/staratlas. It’s greater than 90,000 people right now.
Important Links:
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Telegram – Star Atlas
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Twitter – Star Atlas
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Twitter – Michael Wagner
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter