Ep. 566 Deep Dive Into L2s with Industry Expert Jacobc.Eth

SPEAKERS

Brendan Veihman, Bryce Paul

 

Bryce Paul  00:09

All right, everybody. I hope you’re having a fantastic morning, noon or night wherever you guys are in the world. You’re in the right place because we are joined with another awesome guest today on the crypto 101 podcast. We have today joining Brendon and I, by the way, Brendan, hello. How are you doing today?

 

Brendan Veihman  00:28

Great. Hey there, everyone.

 

Bryce Paul  00:30

Feeling good. I’m stoked to introduce our guests because this is a web three expert, a gaming expert, all things crypto all things blockchain. We’ve got Jacob C dot east, the founder of hyper play joining us today, Jacob, how are you doing today?

 

00:46

Doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, man, we’re

 

Bryce Paul  00:48

excited to dive in it because not every day we get to, you know, really speak to somebody who’s, you know, diving into the niche that you are with? hyperplanes. So we want to dive into that. But before we do we want to get your background and in really, how’d you come to be in the position that you are?

 

01:04

Yeah, I I guess like going way back, I was really attracted to early Bitcoin from from a political kind of activist worldview. It was an interest to me, but it wasn’t ever something I was like, seriously, or like from a career perspective involved in. And I, I worked in web two tech. And when I read the Etherium white paper, and started seeing that I got really kind of annoyingly obsessed, my coworkers will tell you. And so, you know, I, you know, I went and joined consensus and worked on some early grant funding, Dow’s got to join the Metamask team. And I worked as the drop operations there, and worked on a lot of the growth and monetization strategies. And I had really seen that the biggest area of growth that Metamask and de facto, the decentralized web we’re seeing was coming from gaming use cases. But the the wallet experience, and the the user interactions between a game and the players wallet, there were challenges that needed to be solved. And so I, you know, I am still advisor for meta mask. And I still work really closely with the meta mask team. But I, I started hyper play to, to solve both the wallet to game interaction problem for games and also the censorship problem. Because game developers were being forced to build very strange and bizarre user experiences in order to hack around appstore policies. And there needed to be a censorship resistant and developer loyal distribution platform that actually encouraged people to build in a way that makes sense for about three instead of instead of making them terrified that their business is going to be de platformed. So yeah, we, we launched hyper play in March. It’s, it’s available today in in Early Access, and we’re super, super excited for all the games and projects that are that are building on top of it.

 

Brendan Veihman  03:32

Let me just start this off by saying one of the first conversations I had with Bryce was, what do we think? Or what do I think about like when three and gaming because that is really my niche. And I’m super stoked to be able to just talk about this with you today, because this is really kind of hitting home. So you have this big

 

Bryce Paul  03:50

Brendan’s a big gamer if you can tell.

 

Brendan Veihman  03:53

Only you could see the PC that is sitting right behind the camera. Tell wonders as to where I stand in the scene. But, but no, no everything else aside, Jacob, you have this big extensive experience when it comes to Aetherium and layer twos and crypto as a whole. Why are you just now starting to get really excited about web three? Like what has you excited to really kind of dig deeper and invest a little bit of extra time and resources into web three now?

 

04:25

I’ve definitely been involved in my three for Yeah, wow. So all honestly, like, you know, I think that blockchains are about more than I think a lot of people see this as, you know, the next thing or something and that, that they’re going to get rich or something. And I for me, I think that this is a tech that was built to make people more free to help people to, you know, build infrastructure. Are human social interaction and human collaboration in a way that we want it to be structured. And I think that what’s so exciting about Aetherium is its composability. And its interoperability. And so, the composability allows us to structure our social interactions in the ways that we think make the most sense. And the interoperability is, you know, it allows the, you know, the early vision of the internet was a more interconnected world. And then we got a bunch of silos based on on surveillance. And today, by by by building the internet, around interoperable rails, and giving the internet a financial and transactional layer, it allows us to build ethical business models that ultimately distribute more ownership and power to the people who participate in these systems, rather than for web to corporate monopolies.

 

Bryce Paul  06:00

Yeah, it’s like, it kind of harkens back to in your introduction, you talked a lot, or a little bit about what really got you inclined to the space was kind of like the political idea of like, you know, Bitcoin is this new free money, it that kind of drew you in, and it’s almost like what Bitcoin did the money, you know, Aetherium is doing to corporations, if you will, or it’s like, it’s that same level of disruption. And it’s it, but it’s like more than corporations. It’s like, it’s its identity, it’s everything. And it reminded me of your name, like I wanted to ask like, a lot of people probably like Jacob si dot eath? Like, does this kind of have a last name? Like, what is this, like, people might not understand what this is? So tell us what your identity Jacob C dot e is? And like, what does that mean to you? And how did it kind of come to be?

 

06:46

Yeah, I, I think that web three identity and web three reputation is super important. I, you know, I think that I think there’s some some larger meta conversations about how we think about identity and reputation in web three. And certainly there’s, there’s a number of people that want sort of what I would consider a pretty dystopian form of web three identity that’s based on like hashing people’s biometric data, or something like that, I think that people should be free to have one or many identities. And that there’s that we need reputation based governance, that the civil problem isn’t universally solvable, but we can understand the long standing reputation of an identity, what kinds of contributions it’s made, and to allow people to, to hold their identity and use it in a way that has reputation. So my DNS name is an example of that. But I, you know, I generally think that it will, we’ll see a lot more reputation based governance models for the protocols that people are building, and that that’s going to play a super important and positive role in terms of how people think about identity.

 

Bryce Paul  08:08

Yeah, and even like, with when I think like, you know, defy even identity is going to come to play a huge part, because there’s systems that are out there. Maple is one, true finance, there’s a couple of them that use like reputation based lending, and you could kind of have like an on chain, sort of credit score, that’s tied back to, you know, your ens or your, your address. And I just thought that was interesting. If anybody at home, you know, wants to check out those platforms, it’s, it’s really cool. Because, you know, like you said, it’s, it’s a really, you know, it’s a tech blockchain is a technology that really, like, inclusive, and, you know, for people at home who are listening, they’re like, Well, you know, why do we need an on chain credit score, like, I can go to a bank, and I got my credit score, but like, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably privileged. And like, you probably do have some level of like, you know, you could go anywhere and swipe your card, but that’s not the whole world and the whole world, sometimes, if they want to get a loan, or if they want to, you know, get a mortgage or whatever, like, they need to have identity documents, they need to have credit scores and reputations, or else they’re gonna get fleeced by a loan shark at 25% rate. And so this does this, this technology does blow open the doors to financial inclusion, for sure. But yeah, I definitely want to zoom in on hyper play, and the things that you’re building there, I would love for you to just to describe, you know, how like a listener at home might, you know, interact with the platform, you know, we’ve got lots of crossover between crypto lovers and gamers. And so how could somebody kind of bust into the platform and what should they expect?

 

09:37

Yeah, so hyper plays a web three native Game Launcher. So if people are familiar with steam, that’s, you know, a web two Game Launcher and distribution platform. Hyper play does the same kinds of thing things that steam does. It helps you discover web through games, download those games, and it is also an aggregator of multiple game stores. So we have our own store, the hybrid Play Store, it’s got about 50, plus or minus web three games that are a part of it, we also aggregate the entire epic game store. So all of your games, web two and three games that are in the epic game store, you can actually play instead of hyper play, you can play fortnight and you can play eldering Oh, wow, in any of those games, and we’re actually building on chain representations of your gaming reputation. There’s a lot of really exciting things that you can do by aggregating all of the gaming world into a single in to the decentralized web, and to have an interface for that. And then any game that you launched from within hyper play, hyper play has an overlay, similar to the Steam overlay. So people who have played games in Siem know that you press Shift Tab, and then you see a chat window, you can see, if you have a notification or achievements, steam is going to overlay those on top of the game that you’re playing your friends requests. So hyperplane does the same kind of overlay. But we actually are persisting your Metamask wallet into into the game. So you can actually approve transactions without ever leaving the context of the game, you can sign in using your wallet instead of a native game. And we support both native or browser based games. And we’ll also be supporting other stores in the future. So we really our goal is from an infrastructural perspective to allow the player to carry their their wallet, all of the assets inside of that wallet across every game that they play across every game store. And really to to also provide a really developer loyal platform to the builders so that they’re not living in fear of being censored, or D platformed. for building a web three game.

 

Brendan Veihman  11:57

I love that you brought up steam as an example, because it is probably the closest thing that we have to this quasi web three marketplace. And I say quasi right, because you can trade items between players between games, if I have something from CSGO, and someone else has something from Team Fortress two, we can make a trade for that, you know, but we still can’t trade across marketplaces, you know, say someone has something in fortnight someone has something in valorant Liga, legends, another one of these games that’s made outside of Steam, then you can’t trade with them. It’s cool, because you can you can trade you can buy, you can sell the CSGO marketplace alone is a multibillion dollar marketplaces, which is just a wild thing to say. But do you think that we can get to a place where we can have these like cross platform trades and orders going through because that’s like, that’s what I see as the end game of web three. And gaming is that I can trade stuff from Riot to platform and items on riot. I can make those trades with people who have items in CSGO, on Steam, and kind of so on and so forth.

 

13:09

Yeah, I mean, I think increasingly, people are seeing game developers are building that natively into their games and are building secondary markets in their games. There’s also, you know, protocols and platforms that are being built, that allow people to make on chain derivatives of centralized assets, which there’s some problems with, but I will say that I do think that web three is going to enable a lot of use cases that were not previously part of web two, and that transcend secondary markets, and then do a lot of other things like gaming reputation, for example, and carrying your reputation with you across multiple stores, like, you know, a lot of like, I’ll just give an analogy from like 2017, when the epic game store launched, a lot of players were revolted by the idea of another game store, and that some of their games would be in a separate store. And the reason for that was, they had their entire reputation, all of their achievements, all of everything they’ve done in one platform, and to them that felt interoperable, because all the games are here, I have my reputation, I can carry it across all the games, and for it to start fragmenting was, you know, as a very felt fear, a very real thing to a lot of players with what we are doing today, aggregating all of the stores aggregating their achievements systems aggregating everything to do with the traditional, you know, the traditional web two world. This really allows us to create a freer ecosystem for for building on chain, reputation on chain games, everything that people want To the interoperability ultimately really empowers people to build other things. And there’s a lot of other use cases. I mean, people are seeing like extraction shooters where there’s like high stakes outcomes in the game where you can lose someone else’s back. And you can, you know, compete for really difficult to find items with significant outcome and stakes. So we’re, I think, or like, you know, like dark forest where you use zero knowledge proofs to have provably fair fog of war. Like, I think we’ll see new genres of games created around this tack that didn’t exist before. And that it will enable a new ecosystem of things that are genuinely fun and great for people.

 

Brendan Veihman  15:47

Certainly. Yeah, I think what the way that everything is kind of unraveling right now. It’s a really exciting time, because there’s so many different ways that this can be used. And so I’m excited to see kind of how it progresses. And so yeah, I mean, it’s a cool, yeah,

 

Bryce Paul  16:04

I think what I’ve heard some, some stats from like hedge fund managers and stuff aren’t talking about like, the next billion crypto users are going to come from crypto gaming, and all that kind of stuff. So I definitely want to like kind of get your your thoughts on just adoption curve or whatever of crypto gaming, but also along the same lines, like, do you like the stance that crypto gaming has right now? Or it’s like its marketing angle? Or do you think that like crypto should be obfuscated into the background and like, we should only focus on gaming and the the tech is just the tech?

 

16:37

Yeah. First of all, I’ll just say that blockchains are sorry, games are a bridge to the decentralized web. And if you looked at the 2021 2022, period, a lot of that growth came from places like the Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, those were countries where there are millions of people that are locked out of traditional financial systems that on boarded to play games, and then discovered through that decentralized finance, and we’re able to leapfrog the traditional financial system, and become owners and become empowered in the various different protocols in which those people participate. I think that there is a number of people, there’s a common cycle that exists in our ecosystem, when there are bull markets. So like, if we go back to like the 2020 1220 13, bull market of Bitcoin, people are building in a super trying to build all these interesting things on top of Bitcoin, then, you know, in the bear cycle of 2014, people became very depressed, they stopped building, and then they tried to appeal to the most conservative thing. And at the time, it was like, convince gas stations to take Bitcoin and stop building things. And then, and then you have like the 20s 2015, to 2017, bull market around Ethan, and things like that. And and then in the, you know, in the downturn after that people were like, No, this tech is never going to be broadly adopted, we need to obscure it away. And we need to adopt, like, enterprise blockchain things. And so many eath people in the 20 2018 2019 period, tried to pivot to enterprise blockchain. And they thought that this would be obscured away. And then, ultimately, very little was built in the world of enterprise blockchain. And the things that actually ended up taking off were things that built in a more web three native way that really double down on the value propositions of blockchains, that didn’t try to compromise what this was. And then, you know, and then we had this, this whole cycle of late 2020, defi, summer to, you know, the, the FTX debacle. And now you hear a lot of people just like happened in these other historical cycles, suddenly thinking that we should pivot blockchains or pivot our products to hide the web three aspects. And to not to not talk about those value propositions and people say web 2.5 or whatever. And then the the flatten it to basically just secondary markets for for assets. And I think that a lot more is possible here. The interoperability of identity, the interoperability of the assets, third party developers building games that connect to the contracts of another game, there’s so much more that can be can be constructed. I think that when people get really scared in, in the the lowest lows of market cycles, that It feels like retreating to a more web two world feels like an answer to a lot of people, I think that we should both make blockchains more accessible and make the user experience more accessible for people. But also, we shouldn’t hide the fact that we’re building web three tech, that we believe in decentralized protocols, that we believe in the extensibility and interoperability of these protocols, that those value propositions need to not be lost in the message. And we need to not let the depression of this market take people to build things that, you know, you don’t even really need a blockchain for. I mean, like secondary markets, like Diablo had a secondary market in 2011. And, like, it was fine. I mean, it is.

 

Brendan Veihman  20:54

You know, I think some of the most successful games and platforms are the ones that allow you to have a personality and a profile somewhere where people can go and say, Your see that, hey, on level 515, here are all my achievements, here are all my items, by attaching some sort of achievement or identity system, whether they have a monetary value or not, it’s creates a competitive environment. And people like to see oh, hey, this is the number one guy in the world or this is the most advanced player, or this is the person who has the most play time. This is the, the person that I want to aspire to be they have the coolest items, whatever it could be, you know, in other games, it’s like, Oh, hey, this person has a $5 million inventory of everything that I could ever dream of. It can vary so much. But that’s where we really see the most success when it comes to gaming. And I think that web three is the perfect way to complement that and bring it to the next level, because it can really expand on all the areas that we’ve been talking about, except make them better, it can be cross applicable, it can kind of booster this environment. And so my question is, you know, if we are to start seeing that, like on the mainstream gaming stage in web three, what would that do to the user base? What do you think that that would do to the user base? I’m going to try I fully understand that. So if we start seeing these web three practices, like applied to mainstream games from from big names, like, what do you think that that will do to the user base? You know, gaming across the world already has about a 40% market share, which means that almost 40% of the people in the world are playing games? Do you think that that number would like astronomically increase if the mainstream the big wig game creators start applying web three practices? Because that would essentially incentivize more people to kind of jump in, at least from my point of view?

 

22:50

Yeah, I think it has a lot of interesting implications. And it’s, it’s worth like considering what the the legacy models are to this. So like, the the traditional model of $60 game, you have to develop it as a game developer for two to four years is our common game development cycles. And you’re taking on massive amounts of risk as a game developer. And so at the end of that cycle, you release the game, it succeeds or it fails. And the business is either in ruins, or, or does well. And that business model was really dangerous. For a lot of game developers. It led to things like Konami, the largest game development shop in Japan abandoning making games, it led to, you know, a transition to other business models like mobile gaming, which surged in the last decade. And, and the problem with, you know, in the mobile gaming world was gotchas and paywalls. And you play this game for free for 40 hours, and then we drop a difficulty bomb on you. And then you need to spend $1,000 To finish the game. Or introducing just pay to win mechanics where people don’t even want to play the game anymore. Yeah, it’s not like game developers want to make these models, it’s that they have to find a sustainable business model to do their creative trade. So I, I think that the web three game model is so innovative and radical and empowering, because it allows the game developer to release a product that expands over time. iteratively. So you know if the game if the business model allows for a portion of the, you know, the trading of the assets in the game to be shared the fees to be shared with the game developer, the more activity you build in a games world, the more that that grows the revenue If the game developer, so suddenly, it’s not like the game developer releases this, and then maybe they release a couple of DLCs. And then they abandon the game. And then all the fans are left hoping well, I hope in five or 10 years, they make another game. Instead, it expands the game’s world over and over. And the more that game world expands, and the more that players adopt it and enjoy it, the more that the game developer grows that revenue, and it allows the game developer to build iteratively, and to see if something is working in a feedback loop with their customers, which is what we do in almost every other industry, like we don’t like, we don’t spend four years developing, I don’t know, like, like a rideshare app, and then find out if people find it found it interesting. We release, like businesses that are iterative, and then we learn from the customer in a feedback loop, and we build better products. And so this is the opportunity to do that in the games industry. And to do it in a way where you have the network effects of blockchains. And it’s not just even one game that’s succeeding, the more that any games succeed in this industry, we’re creating a category that onboards more people into web three, and the assets are interoperable. And those the growth of the web through gaming economy grows things for all of the game developers, and all the players too. And so it’s a it’s a flywheel that grows and helps developers and players alike in a in a virtuous cycle.

 

Bryce Paul  26:30

Yeah, and like kind of with with all this adoption that’s coming in that we’re, you know, anticipating kind of my last question is like, is Aetherium ready? Is the technology there to scale? I know, we’ve got layer twos, we’ve got all sorts of new tech. But you know, in your opinion, are we are we ready for the primetime? Well, I

 

26:49

think that we’re going to see a lot of innovation and growth of block space, the growth of better blockchain tech, that’s going to continue happening. I’m actually the I wrote the founding proposal for a layer two blockchain which is mantle, which, specifically, even though it’s a layer two, on top of Aetherium, it uses an eigen da, which is a an external data availability layer, in order to significantly save on gas. And I’ll kind of just for people that may or may not be aware of this and how it works. Traditionally, in the layer two model, all of the data is posted to the theory ml one. But the theory ml one is actually not built for storing data. It’s not a data protocol. It was it was not meant for that. And there are some proposals around like, donk sharding, and stuff like that, that improve its data storage capacities, but ultimately, it is not a data protocol, Eigen da, in eigen layer eigen layer is a set of contracts that allow you to use Aetherium to secure an external protocol using an Aetherium validator and using eath staking and re staking. So with with mantle, a lot of what we built was the ability to have a more efficient data protocol, while also still having that external data protocol, derive a very significant amount of security from Aetherium. And to keep things tethered to the decentralization of Aetherium. So I think that mantle is going to be a better L to for gaming use cases. And we in hyper play are actually deploying some things that are not announced yet. But but which are going to be on chain and will have a really significant I’ll just say a reputation component for players, that that’s coming soon. And so we’re really excited about that. I think that the the tack of the chains, and the the efficiency to bring more and more on chain is increasing. I think we are we’re at a period where, you know, there’s a range of use cases are possible today, the more of this tech scales, the more the diversity of use cases become possible. It’s actually really similar to like the 1999 cycle in like the period before where people were pitching a lot of internet use cases that were not possible like your pets.com That was an inventor ran before they could walk in a sense. It was a business that was impossible to build in 1999. But you know, I am a subscriber to chewy I buy great treats for my dog. It’s literally pets.com

 

Bryce Paul  29:43

And they fulfill division.

 

29:46

Yeah, the tech has to mature there and yeah, so I think that we’re going to see the tech maturing and a range of ways and the the use cases that people want to see or are going to start happening iteratively over time.

 

Bryce Paul  30:02

Yeah, I definitely think, you know, the future. I mean, this is cliche, but like, the future really does belong to the visionaries like the people that can kind of see the eventuality of where that tech is going to be not where it is. It’s like, you know, like Netflix, I always think about, like Netflix and Reed Hastings, who was like, you know, going to bet on the whole new business model. And, you know, I think what we’re doing, you know, or what you’re doing here is very similar to that. It’s just a complete up ending of the model. And it’s beautiful. It’s cool to watch and hey, man, when you guys have those, those next big announcements that we alluded to, I’d like to bring you back and have you on another job. be incredible, but Jacob C dot E from hyperplane. Man, thank you so much for joining us. Where can we ask our viewers to go into stay tuned with all your updates?

 

30:50

Yeah, so hyperplane dot XYZ is where you can download hyper play today. Give it a try. We’ve also got Discord server, socials, you’ll find all those on the website or hyper play gaming on Twitter. But the number one thing I’d recommend is go go give it a try. Play some web three games. Have some fun, and give us give us some feedback. Love it.

 

Bryce Paul  31:14

All right, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you guys have a great rest of your day. And Jacob C dot e thank you for joining us.