James Key on AI automation and automated NFTs at Autonomy Network

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have james key founder of autonomy network james welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hey yeah it's good to be here thanks for having me looking forward you're welcome let's dive into all things blockchain

0:19automation decentralized exchanges how can we make web3 easier to use and just less hassle through automation i know your team's working on some pretty cool initiatives in this part of a blockchain and i'd love to dive into that so let's start with you know from yourself an overview of the solutions that you and your team at autonomy are working on and

0:42then we'll dive into the details okay sounds good all right go for it yeah so autonomy network is essentially a decentralized motivation protocol so we're infrastructure kind of like chain link but not for oracles or anything it's for automation so it's a ready and ready-made off-the-shelf solution for web3 developers to add features to decks to adapts

1:08for example like limit orders and stop losses on dexes recurring payments for dows nfts that like transfer themselves but much more engagement thing things like that amazing and yeah i think this is really needed obviously dex is it's super important because right now it seems like they're pretty limited in that you can only do spot orders or buying at the

1:28market price which is crazy to not have automation in decentralized exchanges to be able to set in order to buy at a lower price but otherwise i feel like payments in general you know having for example you know pre-authorized debits and credits in traditional finance where people are pulling funds from your account that's that's not possible in

1:50cryptocurrency and other automation functions maybe you can talk about there's so many different ways to automate in blockchain what are the main focuses that you're focused on right now it was we were definitely like very d5 focused initially like the limit orders and stop losses mainly just because you know trading for better or for worse is you know the

2:14largest kind of market in crypto and so it's you know the highest value highest frequency use case and you know especially after like defy summer happened and we just saw like dexes like exploding that's when i like really started to actually like work on this idea initially and so it's it's kind of from the like a very clear you know demand of

2:37Of d5 users for this thing even not just like trading but also like automatically liquidating yourself if you're borrowing before you get liquidated by someone else and so you avoid paying fee so you kind of essentially make borrowing cheaper in that way but now we're kind of sort of expanding on the used cases and like we'll always be you know like quite defy happy but

3:01we're expanding into other use cases like gaming and so i mentioned these like npc at these nfcs that transfer themselves and so we call them anfcs autonomous nfcs and so we're about to launch a game the public test net will be within a couple weeks and yeah the sign ups for oh nfc droppers as part of that is already live so yeah check it out very cool and you know

3:25you're speaking about focused on d5 since defy summer and in decentralized exchanges with this automation is that already live like for example could uniswap implement this right now or have other decentralized exchanges already implemented autonomy's technology yeah exactly we have our own ui autoswap.trade that's live on a few different a few different chains like

3:52Bsc avex etc but yeah we've had some partnership partner integrations like with ape swap soakery swap a few more that are a lot bigger that i can't quite reveal yet but i'm super super excited for those we're deploying onto non-evm chains as well so that's really exciting but yeah it's there's plenty of stuff like live that people can use like right

4:16today very cool and i guess this kind of technology although it's super important i feel like it's very back end and obviously developer heavy where you know people that are are just doing the trading they don't really think about you know this kind of automation they just go to the decks and they see oh they've implemented like this new kind of

4:37technology that helps i don't really need to know necessarily how it works as long as i can trust that it's safe and secure and you know secure with my funds is that right yeah 100 it was like very intentional that we kind of abstracted all this away and like the user shouldn't even need to know that they're using autonomy or an automation

4:58protocol or anything they just go to like say if you swap integrated us and to add limits and stops they would just go and like click limit and it would you know like the ux would be essentially the same as a centralized exchange and so they don't need to learn anything new they don't need to change their behaviors or anything like that they

5:16just they can just get access to a new feature which is awesome very cool and is meta dungeon is that the game that you guys are working on i was reading about maybe you can talk a little bit more about that yeah for sure so this is the kind of implementation of the these self-transferring nfts these amfts autonomous nfts that i was

5:39mentioning about earlier it's kind of a demonstration of the use case rather than just kind of like putting it out into the world and just kind of expecting people to build their own games i think it was better to show what can be done but yeah so it's essentially a game with like two sets of nfcs like heroes which are the like player nfts that you

5:59know you need to own one of these in order to play and then there's the bosses in the game these a ft's like these autonomous nfts and so the bosses transfer themselves to the wallets of whoever owns you know various heroes like randomly currently currently we have it set to like every day it'll transfer itself and so when it's in your wallet you're able to fight the

6:20boss and there are a few different bosses that we're we're working with other crypto projects i can't name who yet but they'll be like branded bosses of these projects and you'll be able to use those nfts of those other projects in the game as like power-ups for helping you defeat these like each boss in particular and so we all the money from the mint that

6:44we're actually not making penny from this it's all going to adding to these like prize pools over time for each boss and so like even without our inputs of this of this money for the price pools when players are playing like there are various ways in which you can get an extra advantage by spending various nfts from you know external projects

7:07Sometimes you have to spend them sometimes you just have to hold them in your wallet and they don't get spent but in the cases where you do have to spend them if you lose against the boss the nft is taken by the boss kind of permanently and so the next player if they win they get all the nfts and tokens that the boss holds and so it's kind of this like a new take on play

7:26to earn gaming that's actually kind of sustainable self-funding it's not coming from token inflation because like it's it's kind of zero-sum if it was only coming from other players but in addition there are items that are minted from the boss itself so in that sense it's like the first ever like positive some kind of plate to earn game model that there's been

7:47very cool yeah i think as gamefight continues to grow just reworking and tweaking the economics of minting and the way that the just the nft's function inside of the game i think it's just going to continue to improve and you mentioned there about the minting i'm curious if to mint the heroes or to get the nfts do you just start playing the game or is there like

8:10an initial mint where people are contributing and how does that work yeah so we are essentially just have we'll do a kind of like a rolling drop of like initially we haven't decided exactly how many yet but around one to two thousand heroes and so like sometime later a couple of weeks ish we'll do like another a thousand up to a limit of course

8:35not just gonna inflate forever but yeah i mean the they're essentially just gonna be like it's just gonna be a random white list based on the sign up so we may do some like campaigns like you know you gotta follow and blah blah blah but there's no like we wanna do this on a pretty kind of fair random way so yeah that's good to know and with the

8:58autonomous nfts i'm curious do you guys have to make a new erc kind of protocol or does it just back on regular nfts and how do you add that functionality in yeah so it's interesting because kind of the like what is an nft i mean you can argue that it's exactly the code that's open zeppelin which you know basically everyone just like copies for from

9:27That's the nft or if you're looking at the actual erc the actual kind of definition of the standard it's essentially just an interface and so it just specifies okay you have to have these functions you know like transfer et cetera and who owns this id et cetera but it doesn't specify exactly how those are implemented and so this new type of nfc these anfts

9:53are they conform to this standard this interface but the implementation is such that it uses autonomy in the back end to do things under various conditions like you know every day randomly transfer itself to someone from this set of wallets et cetera and so like it is an nft it's a modified nft it's it's a bit of a blurry line of exactly what it is but i

10:18guess that's the nature of doing something new i suppose yeah definitely and i'm curious if you have a bigger picture for you know these types of nfts because i feel like it could have use cases in a lot of industries you know and gaming is a great first use case and a great way to bring adoption quickly but i feel like these nft functionalities could could help in a

10:42lot of industries do you foresee this becoming something bigger down the road yes i actually have like a very lengthy admittedly like seven part blog series on the on blog.autonomy.io i mean there's the kind of like really kind of crazy far into the future stuff where once it's possible to run ai on a blockchain obviously like the computational capacity of

11:10blockchains is like nowhere near enough today in order to do that but the interesting thing is that with a system like this because the automation is decentralized like you know if we wanted to we couldn't turn it off you know once we kind of completely removed ourselves from participating in the system i think the one of these super cool use cases is

11:34that well i don't know if you caught slightly terrifying but essentially these things are kind of alive in the sense that they don't rely on anyone in order to do things and so if you have like an ai not just like a smart contract that just transfers itself to someone if you have an actual you know even minor intelligence you know the these bots or these contracts

11:55can autonomously figure out like how to make money through like arbitraging on decentralized exchanges or doing like all these various things they can self-replicate they can mutate intentionally every time they self-replicate and so you end up it's almost like a new form of life in the sense that if you kind of i'm not going to go through every definition it's in

12:16the blog post if you want to read it but you know there's like seven generally accepted conditions for life and i believe that these systems essentially tick all of those boxes so anyway i don't know if i actually answered your question for you but this is like a very it's very far into the future but i think it's super interesting stuff that's gonna

12:38maybe slightly terrifying but i guess we'll find out yeah yeah we will find out and you know i feel i keep getting flashbacks to elon musk talking about how you know ai can be dangerous and it can be used for good but it can also be used for evil and we'll see what happens when ai has a mind of its own and which path it will choose so let's start as the first use case with

13:00you know fun little games and with the game i'm curious a lot of these games you know they come out and there's a lot of hype and then and the traction goes up but then the retention goes down and it's like how do you keep people coming back and have it as a game that's popular you know year for years to come do you have any insight on how you're going to keep people retained

13:25And interested in the game yeah i'm just finished by the illinois screening i completely agree and the scary thing is that this technology is the thing that enables that kind of scary ai to not be able to be turned off but yeah to answer your question about the kind of long-term strategy i mean it

13:51the so there's kind of like two long-term strategies like the meta gender one the kind of autonomy one the autonomy one is that you know we want people to like this game and you know like improve it and build on it because like we're we're not like a game a gaming studio right we you know hardcore developers and i'm sure people can make better games

14:14and that's like for sure and so like we want people to it because you know they'll use autonomy on the back end et cetera but from the metal dungeon side like we you know we still want to have like a flagship kind of user facing like product just kind of strategically and so yeah we definitely do have a strategy it's essentially like we over time we'll

14:34just be adding more bosses and like the thing is with the incentivization that i mentioned that it's like a very sustainable like play to earn model it doesn't rely on inflating the token to infinity kind of the way that like axe infinity does and so you know nothing like this has been tried before so i suppose we still have to like prove that this is the case

14:53but that you know theoretically that's at least the plan to where the incentivization is sustainable in order for to keep engagement i mean like that's why we're adding like these i didn't really mention it but this is like the first ever team play crypto game you'll be able to like team up with people in order to defeat these

15:12these bosses but also just like keep adding new bosses where you know like boss number one drop something the boss number three you know you need it to in order to defeat it keep like partnering with like more nfc projects i mean there's plenty of nft projects and the more every week that we can there's definitely a possibility to just

15:32keep partnering with more kind of more brands nft brands in order to keep the pace up of adding new content and so yeah it's basically like very sustainable incentivization and just like a very clear path for like adding more content and complexity into the game and yeah very cool i'm looking forward to seeing how the autonomy technology you know moves

15:57through meta dungeon and then in into other forks and hopefully ai doesn't take over the world from your project but we'll see what happens so with that said in the near-term future here you mentioned the upcoming release of the game and the minting what is the best way for people to learn more and to get involved in meta dungeon yeah just follow us on twitter at

16:19autonomy network i'd say that's the best place also discord sometimes we drop alpha in the discord that's not on the twitter so but yeah i mean everything like eventually gets posted through their twitter will be like i mentioned releasing the public beta within a couple months and yeah would love to have people involvement playing it suggesting how to

16:42improve it and yeah sounds great james thanks so much for taking the time to discuss all of this i'm really fascinated with autonomy's technology looking forward to the release of the game all the best with the release and everything else moving forward and let's follow up in the near future perfect thanks session have a good you