Malcolm CasSelle on WAX's digital asset marketplace and gaming

0:21are in the blockchain and gaming space if you could give a little bit of background for the viewers first of all what is wax doing in the space sure so wax stands for worldwide acid exchange and we are the first blockchain design just for digital goods we come from a long lineage of creating marketplaces for digital goods and so the wax blockchain is designed to be you can

0:43create items buy items sell items trade items and of course anyone can build their own marketplace using the wax protocol and watching very interesting I've played video games myself obviously for a while and there's a lot of custom items you can buy but it seems like these marketplaces where you can actually trade items and even between games is bringing up a whole new market

1:04for many people and I think a lot of people underestimate the size of the gaming space the volumes are actually seem to be really big could you talk a little bit about the size of the market and how quickly it's growing right now sure so the market for secondary items that's items for video games and people acquire when they're playing games like Counter Strike global Offensive or

1:24pubsey or for tonight people see Linux skins the cosmetic items that whole market for trading is about 50 billion the market kicks that for actually selling them for the first time when a user requires it was about a hundred billion so you're looking at really really big members our platform that we've developed prior to wax traded about two plus billion dollars in items

1:45so when we migrated those items to our test net we already had a really really strong audience we've done over half a billion dollars worth of trading on our test net well that's crazy and can you talk a little bit about how blockchain fits into all of this I know a little bit about NF T's non fungible tokens and if that's the core value proposition

2:06behind adding a blockchain into a marketplace sure so the blockchain is really important because it allows people to know the origin of an item it's like crypto in that like you could know for sure that it's authentic so security and effect of anticipation and blockchain supports both of those core objectives the third is that you know you own it because these days most of

2:32the digital items people get video games are controlled by the publisher in other words they can't withdraw them and do whatever they want with them the publisher decides to shut down or goes out of business or just changes their policy people who've invested millions of that or individually hundreds of hours or maybe thousands of hours in getting items or lots of money in

2:53acquiring and they're gone so the blockchain how helps them hold onto them and definitely do whatever they want with them and wax is a sex that the mechanism by which people normally you know generate those items or access them but then also swap them back and forth and then developers can go and build lots of amazing tools and applications and businesses on top of the wax

3:13blockchain so I can talk a little about the blockchain how in consensus and how it compares to other clock chains but fundamentally understand that it's for developers who want to actually build digital goods businesses and then also for the gamers and players who want to access the room that's interesting and you know there's a lot of block teens already out mainly the ones that people

3:32know are Bitcoin and aetherium is it necessary for wax to have its own blockchain to focus on just digital assets and gaming absolutely a figure iam is really a non-starter when it comes to the digital goods businesses the prices are variables so you don't know how much it's going to take to transfer an item from one person to another you take ten minutes to half an

3:52hour that's just is not viable for digital goods business because people want a free and they want an instant so our blockchain is designed especially for that so we took the eoseo approach we've created a delegated proof of state system so transactions are instantaneous and they're free we've made a lot of improvements in the basic governance to how a deposit chain is run I can talk

4:14about those but it helps the chain run much more effectively as you know chains like ETS are having a lot of problems now because of governance issues and we also see there's differences when you look at say what we're doing relative to Tron or others we talk about what we do from a developer standpoint to make it easy for them to onboard and utilize it and

4:34also what it is we do bringing lots of customers because we have you know seven million customers from our existing item trading business we can migrate over so we're growing every day more and more users on our blockchain as we're migrating them over and those become really attractive for people who you know want to build applications and they want to access users totally and in

4:55terms of all those users that's a huge amount already so congratulations to that but I see that there's usually technical barriers and it's not as bad with gaming people because they usually tech-savvy but have you guys focused on user experience and do you need any knowledge about blockchain to trade the items or to understand how the items are scarce resources on a blockchain that's

5:20I'd say our core competency is ease of use because we've been dealing with gamers for a long time we understand they want it and they want it right now they don't want to have to learn about blockchain learn about private keys to do what they wanted to do with their digital goods if that means trading them or swapping them or playing more games with the items they already have so we

5:39have a lot of innovations around that so one of them for example is our cloud wallet the cloud well it means that you can log on with a huge name and password you don't have to touch your private keys to be able to access all the components of the blockchain that are that are usable and really valuable those digital keys that adapt developer can manage on behalf of the user

6:01basically separate them from having to worry about it and it's very very useful for a developer who wants to make something easy for their user and it's great for a user who just wants to say hey look I just want to log in and of course they can use things like Facebook or Twitter or we chat etc to log into the system using you know single sign-on and then they can access the creation of

6:21new items or trading those items so we've essentially created a layer and we call them micro services that sit between the blockchain itself and the user experience and in that asset of a API is the developers can do things that make it easy for the consumers and that's really what's been missing the Tron I'm missing he owes another delegate acoustic

6:40systems and I'd say most layer two solutions as as we see them out there yeah it seems there's a really big focus on developers and building gaps and I think that's one of the ways that block chains have grown so quickly as they make it really easy for developers what's the current community looked like for developers in wax and how are you guys incentivizing them to versus using

7:02EOS or etherium to stay building on wax well I think a lot of them are coming to us because they see the ease-of-use they see the customers and they see they were committed to the community having control over things but not doing it so fast that it makes the experience horrible for everyone so we have games like prospectors one at the top one of the top es games that's

7:24incorporated with wax is doing really really well splinter lamb is another fantastic card game that's migrated over to wax and there's lots of tools in the EOC ecosystem who have jumped onto wax because they're really excited about what we're doing from a government standpoint we've also created this thing called the inspector general so that means that a community actually gets to

7:45govern itself and decide who's a qualified the block producer or an iron ecosystem we call them guilds so with that the community gets to drive those decisions they get to bubble up and they get to scoring right so that we don't see collusion we don't see you know blood producers who are not really contributing to the ecosystem still in the top 21 for example that just doesn't seem fair

8:05and the community themselves get to self-police around that and that's been very attractive to a lot of developers and fantastic producers well and there's games that are built on the blockchain like games that are built using yo so there's a lot of different people are starting to develop things like that but there's also just games like Call of Duty and where you can take items and

8:26put them on the blockchain how do you see the future of blockchain gaming is it full games on the blockchain or just utilizing parts of it so the blockchain is a very challenging component technically it's it's immature relative to the tools that most game developers are used to using when they develop the games so they're very reticent to jump on board quickly now the reality is

8:49indie developers are very excited even though the tools are there immature because they recognized it's a fast-burning market that can get a first mover advantage and some of them can actually be very successful we've seen a few examples of games that are doing single digit millions of dollars in revenue we've seen a few breakout to do more than 10 million dollars in revenues

9:07and for an indie game developer that's a lot of money so we're still waiting to see the real breakout hits something they can do save you know tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that's blockchain based so I still think we have another year or two before we're going to see something like that potentially there's been a lot of investment the past year

9:25and so as that market evolves we're here are providing tools and we see trading volume to continue to increase as I mentioned we've done over half a billion dollars on our test net so we're have been battle testing these you know ecosystem testing the ecosystem and the services we've built around it to make sure that as the market grows we're we're essentially growing with it

9:44and you know we're all we're all in conversations with folks making the best eCos the best games out there and then providing tools for that ecosystem that's great and what does the roadmap look like for wax moving into 2020 what are the top priority things that you're looking at building in to help grow this ecosystem well the number one thing is we want to migrate all of our NF T's

10:05that we were building on the Testament over to the main that's a really important step for us and people can see the magic of what's really been created right now we still have a lot of functions still running on the tests that our main net weight live in meteor and now we've been migrating things over so now all accounts now are migrated over where as they log in they get

10:24migrated if they're an old account and that will continue to roll out the cloud Welling was one of the features I just mentioned that just went live and that's a really fantastic feature there's many more things coming behind that but I would say those are the three most important ones right now yeah definitely need to have a get everything to the main net before you can move

10:42forward that's great and in terms of product wise what are you guys looking at building out next well we have a couple of really interesting applications we're doing with large brands who have digital collectibles or digital games we can't disclose them before their life you know because of NBA's but we're really excited I think q1 is going to be a big time for us

11:03because we're gonna see a lot of these products going live that side say our main priority because we built a really robust developer portal you can check it out a developer that works that I hope all right developer hive is really beautiful it has live demos running people can see tutorials how things work so that's really what we're working with developers to leverage those tools to

11:25then build their applications I think we've put more time into making tools easy to use easy to understand than any other chain out there I'd be you'd be hard-pressed to find one that put as much effort into making it easy for developers to incorporate our tools and then of course also deliver a fantastic user experience I think what gets delivered all to a media is very easy to

11:44use and that will benefit the developers long-term and benefit the ecosystem totally and there's just so many millions of developers that know traditional languages that if they're able easily able to jump into blockchain with you know a one step process or something if you can acquire all of the developers that are currently understand Python and Ruby and all these other

12:07languages you could be the most developed blockchain out there I could I would say it's possible I think easy use is going to trump everything and of course changes that are reliable deliver you know high rely quality in terms of their speed and keeping the clock slow that they don't cost a blow out of controller or balloon because of you know either attacks on resources and

12:32other kinds of problems with block producers so I think if we continue to maintain the quality that we have now and make it easy music make the ease of use number one party as we have and I think yes it can attract a pretty wide ecosystem developers so fingers crossed we have a lot of work to do ahead of us sounds like you guys have a lot on your plate and I was also reading that not

12:52only are you guys tokenizing you know digital assets within games and digital collectables but there's also the ability to start tokenizing real world collectibles you know there's a lot of people that collect figurines or they collect sneakers and things and there's a market for that as well is that something that you guys are anticipating is going to grow and

13:10there's a lot of money to be made there or are you focusing mainly on the digital assets yeah tokenizing digital goods or tokenizing consumer product is I think big part of what wax is really optimized to do so we tokenized you know sneakers as you mentioned we did a big promotion with fnatic that was unbelievable people could not even if predicted how engaged

13:31people were we just did something with the celebrity Sports challenge and the loot box was really easy to use one-click and when they open up that loot box they could get of course digital items purely digital items but then they also had physical items in the samsung television or pair of sneakers it was essentially an NF t that enabled you to redeem it for that item but of

13:51course it could trade it could be sold and change hands many many times before it actually got redeemed so that tokenization of consumer product is a really powerful concept something that we excited with think we're going to see more of especially in eSports as you know promotions and giveaways and commerce are a big part of that world and we're providing tools for that so

14:11far working pretty well that's great and as the blockchain gaming space moves forward I can imagine some of the biggest players in the world are eventually going to jump on do you know what big game developers are currently looking into blockchain gaming you know any major developer like fortnight or pub G or Call of Duty would jump on wood could change the whole industry they're

14:33all looking at it I just think they're not going to make any moves because from their standpoint if it isn't broken they're not going to try to fix it if it's making money what they're doing now they're not going to try and you know change what they're doing what you're going to see I think is you're going to see an independent developer you know see Blanco sand sandbox and adapter labs

14:52and folks like that who are doing things if they can breakout and it really really works you're gonna see the big publishers copy it and try to do something similar I mean even for tonight as successful it is was essentially a slight change in pub G's basic game that Battle Royale game and pub G you know was a slight change of the game before that so all these games

15:11that we see are essentially the big ones that we see are most often derivations or slight modifications of something that predated it and that innovation is what keeps the game industry moving forward and are you guys looking for more strategic partners like them or are you looking for more developers or just more team members and how can they reach

15:30out to you I think developers are one party right now we want people to come and utilize the tools we can provide support we have a worker proposal system which actually funds projects that are coming over and they essentially put up their proposal this is what they want to do and then they get funding we have well over $900,000 in wax sitting there waiting for great

15:53projects and more comes out of inflation every day so we're looking for developers they can go to developer dive sorry developer dot works that IO that's the developer hide and they can reach out to us if they go to wax patio they'll see our telegram and lots of other ways there it's Regis awesome thank you so much Malcolm I'll leave those links in the description box below

16:13that's all the time we have for this interview but it's been a pleasure talking about wax and let's follow up in the near future I look forward to it thanks for having me Esther