🎮 The Rise of Blockchain Gaming: What Web3 Means for the Future of Play 👾- Yat Siu

So maybe let's talk a little bit about what we think of the open metaverse as a sort of primer, right? We think of the open metaverse as a space in which we have actual ownership, right? The whole concept of digital property rights. And there's a very big distinction not to confuse it with the metaverse as was defined by Facebook, right, which a lot of people still think it is. So they think of the metaverse as something that's, you know, 3D virtual reality with immersive experiences and you put something on your head and suddenly sort of you teleport into the metaverse. That's not the metaverse. That is an interface to the metaverse. But actually what you're experiencing is really an alternate reality that is real to you because the virtual world is effectively already real to you. In Asia, for instance, where I live most of the time — I would say depends where and I've been traveling a lot — people spend about nine hours on average a day online. Think about that. That's basically most of your waking hours. You're online when you're waking up. You know, I think the study is that within the first 15 minutes you grab your phone or you grab a digital device. Where do you go? Yes, you might look at something on the phone, but you've already traveled into a virtual reality. So your time and attention is already there. But the distinction is that the open metaverse is one where we own our time, where we own our data, or we have property rights around them. That space, which is known as the open metaverse, which is powered by blockchain, is what we collectively call as part of web3. Last year, that was over a 30 billion dollar economy. Now, just to put that in context: a 30 billion economy is roughly, is a bit bigger than the GDP of Iceland and Cyprus, and you know, 100 other countries. The reserves of this open metaverse, which is basically community-owned treasuries, was about 12 billion dollars. 12 billion dollars is roughly smaller than the fiscal reserves of New Zealand. So what's happening is that there's an actual country that is already in the virtual economical space that's developing, where people are making real income, you know, being employed, having actual capitalist opportunities at a developing firmness. You know, many of them from developing countries that were unbanked, but also in places in Europe and in Asia and so on, as they engage in these systems. All of this obviously is empowered by the banking infrastructure that is DeFi, right? And you know, last year DeFi was over 100 billion dollars of basically reserves, if you will, that was locked in the financial ecosystem. It's come down a little. I think it's maybe 60 or 70 billion today. But you know, just to give you another comparison: I think the Federal Bank of New Zealand has 102 billion dollars, for instance, right? So we're talking about national level economies that are basically building up from that. And that's the open metaverse. And that's only growing. One statistic that blows a lot of people's minds, because you know, to us NFTs are the representation of these digital property rights, as we have them in the physical world, is that it was 24 billion dollars of sales of NFTs that happened in 2022. And what's really fascinating is that, you know, there's only a small number of people, we're talking, you know, max millions of people that participated in the space. But of that 24 billion dollars, 90% of its value went to the creators and owners of these NFTs. Spotify in that same year only did 7 billion dollars in royalties, but it serves hundreds of millions of users. All these users own nothing, so they got nothing. And the creators — really think about them, publishers — pocketed, you know, the remaining and then paid peanuts out to the artists, typically speaking. So that is, you know, the state of this. So from our perspective, why would you exist in the web2 paradigm where you're making literally pennies on the dollar when you should be receiving your fair share of value, which is what's happening in web3? So that is the meaning of the open metaverse. And if you're not in it, then I think you're really sort of not seeing where the future is, because virtual work, I think, is the future anyway. We're already working at home on a computer. I mean, we're not actually physically — at least in developed countries — physically doing physical labor anymore. So even though we're not thinking of ourselves as maybe virtual employment, actually, does it really matter that you're physically in this office in the same way? You're remotely connecting with people, whether it's over Zoom, or whether it's over Slack, or whether it's over email. You're already a virtual being, and you can be anywhere in the world and you conduct your work. And that's really just the next step of engagement, where you then go from sort of this quasi, 'I'm sort of in the physical world but I'm also having this interface,' into basically full immersion into that space, where all value is generated from this. And this is why web3 and specifically crypto is so fascinating, because the medium of exchange in the open metaverse is going to be entirely crypto. And the other thing that's fascinating, of course, is when you think about something like AI, which become these autonomous agents in these games like these NPCs and so on, what are they going to be dealing with? They're going to be transacting in crypto. They're not going to open a bank account and sort of, you know, do KYC in the traditional sense. They have to be authorized, but they're just basically going to go ahead and trade stuff over crypto. This paradigm of what's happening in the gaming world, but like you mentioned about your children, last year something like 100 billion dollars was spent in web2 gaming items, right? And they were all trinkets, skins. They were cosmetic in nature. They were whimsical in nature. And really, if you think about that, that's a mirror of what we see in the physical world. When you think about us buying clothes and fashion, we're not buying them for utility. We're buying them because they make us look good, or they make us feel good. It's part of our identity. We buy these things to represent meaning about us. And that element of culture in the physical world is really already happening in the digital world, but in a manner where we don't own anything. And that's why the open metaverse, web3, and blockchain enables us to own these and create all the capital formation, the sort of possibilities that, you know, weren't possible before in web2 but are now possible in web3.