The Token Takeover
Join us on "The Token Takeover", where we dive into the exciting world of web3 gaming and explore the latest trends and developments in this emerging industry. From NFT collectibles to decentralized gaming platforms, we'll break down complex concepts in a simple and fun way, making it easy for anyone to understand and get involved in this rapidly growing ecosystem. So, whether you're a seasoned crypto veteran or a gaming newbie, tune in and discover how blockchain technology is revolutionizing the world of gaming and beyond.
The Token Takeover
#12 Revitalizing Fragile Web3 Gaming Economies w/Neeraj Kashyap
In this episode of the Token Takeover podcast, we shared a conversation with Neeraj Kashyap Founder of Moonstream.to a Web3 gaming data, analytics, and action company.
Moonstream.to has worked with major Web3 gaming brands like Crypto Unicorns and Champions Ascension to curve tokenized inflation, with both data and tools.
Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/neeraj-kashyap-784035b8/
https://twitter.com/zomglings?lang=en
https://moonstream.to/
https://twitter.com/moonstreamto
Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GamingStartUp_
Hey, what's up everyone? This is No Autopilot coming to you with episode 12 of the Token Takeover Podcast. In this episode, I was joined by Niraj from Moon stream.to, and we talked about data analytics in the actionable tools that they provide to help Web three games fix their economies. So go ahead and sit back, relax, enjoy the podcast. One last little note. Unfortunately, when I was recording this, there's a bit of an issue with my mic, so there is some clipping on my audio specifically, but go ahead and power through it. Naraj was dropping knowledge throughout this entire podcast and it's definitely worth it. So thanks again. And with that said, let's go. Let's jump in the pod. Hey, what's up everyone? Uh, this is no autopilot. Coming to you with the Token Takeover Podcast, episode 11. We've been at it for a couple months. Uh, today we are chatting with a fellow Game seven member Raj from Moon stream.to, and him and his team are looking at use user data. Unlock the power within Web three game economy. So what's up Naraj? Thanks for joining, man. How you
Neeraj Kashyap:doing? Yeah, uh, I'm doing well. How are you?
NoAutopilot:And I can't complain. I'm caffeinated hydrated. Um, yeah. So, okay, so, so I've spent, you know, about an hour researching you and Moon to, but for the folks who haven't, maybe you can just give us like a quick walkthrough, your history, how you
Neeraj Kashyap:got into web. Okay. Yeah. How I. I started my life as a mathematician, like a, a research mathematician. Um, and so I was doing my PhD around the time that like the Bitcoin, um, white paper was released and it naturally made its way around the mathematical community. Uh, so that, that's when my sort of crypto first sort of entered my, you know, field of view. Um, and, you know, I was doing research in pure mathematics. I didn't like computers. I, I did all my work on like basically pen and paper. Right? Uh, that's the kind of mathematician I was. But like, it, it, it was interesting enough to me to the point where like, you know, I, um, I, you know, set up a, set up a minor, like, you know, tried to try to like, play around with it a little bit, but it never really held my interest too much. I didn't make much money off of it. Whatever money was like, you know, transferred amongst like other people, whatever, bigger communities and stuff I was part of. So, um, but you know, that, that's what sort of put crypto on my roadmap and, uh, I entered tech via healthcare, um, in like 2013, 2014. And so I was around, I was, I was like deep in, in like, you know, software and like in the tech, tech industry. Uh, when Ethereum came out and when Ethereum was released, they were billing themselves as the world computer. I don't know why they've stopped doing that, but that was super exciting to me. That's what like really got me on board. So, um, with Ethereum, you know, I started, uh, I sort of got active in the Ethereum community in like, 2016, like beginning of 2016, 16 is when I started to really get active. Um, first just running my own infrastructure and then, uh, sort of, I gradually moved my way up the stack at the time. Uh, well, around that time, I, I worked at Google. I used to work on the TensorFlow team at Google, and like one day I just woke up and I said, you know, why do I wanna, why do I want to like, waste more of my life increasing Google's advertising revenue? I'd much rather like, you know, be working on crypto. So I, I left my job at Google. I joined a startup called Doc ai. They were like, um, sort of using blockchain to, um, run clinical trials in a more transparent manner. Uh, so I, I ran the blockchain and the AI teams there. Um, and then in 2019 I left, I started, started this company and, uh, that's what I've been doing ever since. So that's, that's sort of my, my journey in, in crypto in like a sentence.
NoAutopilot:Throw the term OG around a lot, but you're like, actually, probably the first O spoken to. Well, I'm
Neeraj Kashyap:not, I'm not that much of an og, like, you know, I'm not, I'm not filthy, filthy rich or anything. So I, I think like, I know, I know like real og like those guys, those guys are a little bit,
NoAutopilot:I mean, that, that almost makes you more OG than most, um, okay, cool. Yeah, so let's. I don't wanna spend too, too much time on it.'cause I really want to dig into, to, to moon stream. But, um, man, I, you've, you've contributed a lot to blockchain. I, I guess I'm, I'm curious, what have been some of your proudest moments in your time at e or the different startups you've been a part of? Um, you know, how about the flip side would've been some of the most challenging times?
Neeraj Kashyap:I think this is, this is the most challenging time that I've lived through personally. Like this. This market is just brutal. Um, feels really different. I survived through the last one. Um, and it didn't feel as bad as, as what, what we're experiencing right now, but, uh, positive things, you know. Um, I was, I was thinking about smart contract upgradability for like, uh, like pretty early on, like, you know, part of those discussions. That was pretty, uh, exciting and that's something that I, I really enjoyed. Um, but I don't think any of my contributions have been like, um, you know, like earth shattering or anything. I'm just like a regular person, uh, regular developer, sort of like in the space. Um, But, you know, getting Moon Stream to where it is, uh, has probably been also like, you know, the thing that I'm the proudest of, uh, because a lot of people, for a lot of people, you know, uh, when they're, when they're building applications or building protocols, uh, in Web three on top of Ethereum or like any other blockchain, um, They think of, you know, they, they think a lot about omics, but they don't think a lot about like, you know, once their protocol is live or once their community is live, how they're gonna keep things running. And, uh, that's sort of like, I noticed that gap. I noticed that people weren't thinking about that. And, uh, you know, moons like basically the value proposition of Moon Stream is we started with games because the problem is really pronounced in games. Uh, It's really hard to control, like the balance of, the balance of like tokens, the balance of assets inside an economy. But it's also really important because that's, you know, ultimately if your economy goes on balance, you know, if there's rampant inflation somewhere, or rampant deflation somewhere, or any of these things, like, you know, that's not an, that's not a community, that's not an economy that's gonna survive. And the greatest thing about Web three is that it allows any community, it allows like any group of people. To define like their own economy, uh, their own sort of like financial incentives, like for participation inside their community without reference to, uh, oh, I dunno why Siri thinks I'm talking to her, but without reference to like, you know, any external thing. Right. You don't have to, you don't have to respect like any institution outside of your community when you want to define like the incentives. That govern that community. Right? That's a, that's actually a big deal. I, I, people I think don't understand how big a deal this is yet, or at least not very many people understand how big a deal this is yet. But, uh, it like, you know, this is like actually financial freedom at the community level, right? Basically you can say that, you know, you get to participate in this community. Um, this is how participation in this community works and this is how the community sustains itself. This is how you get to participate in this community. As a living, not just like as a hobby, not just as like, you know, like, you know, but like, you know, as a living, this is how you get to like, give yourself to this community and, and sort of be part of this community. That that's actually a big deal. We've seen this with games. Uh, Web three games have been the pioneers of this. Uh, like, you know, even Axe Infinity, like Axe Infinity gave rise to y g. Uh, in my opinion, I'm, I have no affiliation with y g. Like, you know, I don't have any real connection with them, but this is like one of the greatest organization, like greatest. Sort of phenomena of organization, of people that I've ever seen, right? Like sort of spontaneously, tens of thousands, like, you know, maybe even over a hundred thousand people like coming together to collaborate over like this really abstract thing, which is like, you know, earning yield from the Axe economy. But, you know, a large number of people coordinating so really quite well. Like, you know, if you observe how, how Ygg does it, Collaborate really quite well. Uh, in order to earn yield from the Axe economy. It's, it's really impressive. Uh, it's the kind of thing that, you know, never really existed, uh, before this, except maybe for like, you know, the people who like ran like early internet infrastructure or something like this. Um, uh, or maybe early bitcoin infrastructure. But you know, over here the technical barrier to entry, entry was much lower because like the blockchain already existed, like the game economy already existed and then people just came together to sort of collaborate on top of it. That's, uh, that's really powerful and, uh, mainstream basically makes that. Possible. Basically, we, we build tools that keep those economies in balance automatically and autonomously in a decentralized manner, uh, without requiring like, you know, some overseer to control it. That's, that, that's what we're doing and that's something that I'm very
NoAutopilot:Got it. Okay. So, I mean, everything you said I, I think is spot on. Like the fact that people can rally around a digital community as a form of inter, but also as a form of living. The fact that people battle digital OTs online and make more money than like, yeah. Um, but like, so web three. Um, and then I, I, I do like the fact too that like any, you, you can really kind of come as you are to most web three communities. As long as you can contribute, there's a path for you. Make that living out of, out of supporting Exactly.
Neeraj Kashyap:Like actually all that matters is the value that you bring, right? Yeah. There, there's something really pure about the fact that, you know, you're only represented by an address, right? By a string of like letters and numbers. Uh, nothing else about you should really matter. I mean, ultimately right now it's not, it's not the case. Like, you know, most communities require you to dox yourself. Like, you know, most communities that have money require you to dox yourself and do all this stuff, but in principle, like, you know, You don't know, like some, some Ethereum account could be bringing value to your community and you wouldn't, you don't even need to know what's behind it, right? It could be a human, it could be an alien, it could be sentient ai, and this is the only place for that sentient AI to have some sort of equality.'cause like, you know, people like world Coin and so on are trying to like, you know, basically. Create this, this hierarchy between humans and like ai. But like all that matters inside a Web three community is that there's an Ethereum account and there might be some stuff associated like, you know, achievements or like reputation associated with that Ethereum account in terms of like, you know, what it can do inside that community. But ultimately the accounts, public actions on the blockchain are what determine like its level of access within the community. This. This is amazing. Uh, we haven't had this kind of foundation for like equality or meritocracy or like, you know, any of those things before in our, in our lives in, in our history, basically. Uh, so that's that's super exciting.
NoAutopilot:Yeah. You, you know what's wild man? So I, I, I participate in a lot of discords and it's, it's interesting how comfortable I've become, like doxxing my identity and like, The original promise of web three was decentralized. Yeah. Autonomy being autonomous. Yeah. Yeah. I, that's an interesting concept. You know, I, I was having a conversation earlier today about, um, the, the morals and value of, let's say a web three on chain, defi end game versus. Let's say a web two gaming studio is now pivoting into Web three'cause of the prospects of more money per user or what have you. And like at first, I, I think a lot of people feel like the Defi games are less than. Um, but if anything, like, I think they were kind of the true pioneers. Like they kind of proved the model before everyone else. I. Kinda jumped on board. And so I, I, I don't know, I, I'm finding myself like not being as jaded to different type of gaming companies. Yeah. Like, who am I to say what they're building is.
Neeraj Kashyap:Not scams. Interesting. This is a really interesting point. You know, uh, uh, basically people's biases here depend on like, you know, where they've come from. Like, are they coming more from the gaming side or are they coming more from like the web three side? Uh, that pretty much dictates like, you know, what their biases are gonna be, at least in my experience Right. About which one is greater than and which one is left than, um, And Oh yeah, I'm coming more from the web. I'm a gamer. Like I've been, you know, games are a very, very important part of my life. In fact, I, I, after I finished my PhD, I went to Japan and that was based purely on like friendships that I formed playing Go. I, I played, I, I played go, I played backgammon. Like, you know, the, I, I'm like, oh. At some point when I was studying, I just stopped doing mathematics, and I just spent like six months playing a level of obsession that I had with it. And, um, I made some very good friends this way. And like, you know, I, after met, after I finished my PhD, I like sort of traveled. I, I went to Japan. I, uh, worked with one of my friends, uh, that I met playing go, he invited me to Japan. We were doing research on, um, On Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, like we actually built an algorithm. So you know, we had people stand on a Nintendo, we balance board and we could sort of diagnose them whether, whether they had one of these diseases or not, which was really, that's wild. Didn't exist at the time. Right. Um, just purely based on relationships that I formed in games. I had, uh, you know, the guy that taught me backgammon, he said like, okay, you're going to Japan. Like, you know, what's your plan? If you're ever like, you know, down and out, like you need some help, I know a guy in Hong Kong and he'll give you a job like, you know, Spending money on horse races and like, you know, these are all connections that I made playing games, right? So games are like a really, really important part of my life. Uh, almost everything I know about history I learned from playing the Total War games, right? Like it is just, uh, I love games, but I, I will say most people who are building games, even a lot of people who are building web three games don't really understand the role of decentralization in games. It's something that like, you know, we're just discovering together as like a community of builders now. Um, and the people who are the closest to understanding the value of decentralization in games, uh, is pro, is the people who are building like, fully on chain games and autonomous worlds and, and stuff like that. Uh, I also think like, like you. Or like people who participate in like the Dungeons and Dragons, uh, ecosystem, probably understand the value of decentralization in games. Um, you know, maybe some people who build board games, but, and like people who do like UAL style, like betting games and stuff, like, you know, they understand as well. But, uh, I think the closest that we're seeing is the, is the people who are building sort of those on chain games. It's, it's very interesting what's happening right now, uh, and very exciting
NoAutopilot:as well. Yeah, I think we're both, we're both very lucky to be in this industry at this point in time. Attributing even if it's small, like what the game. Yeah. Um, okay, so let, let's circle back to Teo a little bit. So, so a good portion of the audience are game builders in web three. Um, one brand that I saw that you guys had partnered with last year was crypto unicorns. I think what might be helpful is if you could kind of explain like what were things like for crypto unicorns before they partnered with, and then what things did they see value in and what things did you solve for that may be valuable for other folks who are on gonna listen to today's podcast?
Neeraj Kashyap:Yeah. I mean, crypto unicorns were our first. Paying gaming customer. And, uh, so like in 2021, you know, we launched, we launched Newstream as a product, as just an analytics product. And we had two types of users. We had traders, and we had like, you know, game game devs and game designers. Um, and we decided very early on that we didn't really wanna serve the traders. They were, that wasn't like a user base that like, Well, they weren't, that wasn't a loyal user base and it wasn't a user base that we cared very much about or that we associated very much with. Uh, and the game devs like, you know, we associated very well, very much with them. They were using, um, moon streams analytics to monitor what was going on in their game economies and like, you know, figure out well how their players were interacting with their smart contract, stuff like that. Uh, that's something that we liked a lot. And crypto unicorns were our first paying customer. Um, For, for, for analytics for their game. And, uh, that was around the time that they were launching and it was around the time that we were launching. So like definitely we've grown together, uh, with crypto unicorns. Uh, and a lot of our sort of general direction has been shaped by what we've seen in their economy because we started off as an analytics product and we realized that like, you know, analytics isn't enough because, uh, ultimately, You know, the analytics, like the analytics data that you get is only as good as what you're able to do with it. And so, you know, most companies they say, okay, we offer you analytics, and then like, you know, you have to sort of do everything downstream of that. We decided that like, you know, as a product for game developers and game designers, we don't want to sort of like let the buck stop there. We're willing to sort of go all the way and we're willing to. Accept, like the risk of running on chain operations because it was very hard for them to run on chain operations. Um, in a, in a sort of general way, we're we're willing to accept the risk of running on chain operations, uh, and like, and focusing on this vertical. We're, we're willing to like, you know, forego like all analytics, like sort of revenue or whatever in other verticals and like focus on gaming. And if we do that, then we're willing to accept the risk of like, live, live on chain operations. Um, The kinds of operations that are required is like, you know, let's say that you're a game designer and you, you have like some analytics dashboard that's telling you that like, Hey, inflation is out of control over here. Or Hey, this person is dumping on like, on like my e r c 20 token on my currency over here, or something like that. Um, that's great. You know, you, you get that information in a timely manner from your analytics like dashboard, but what do you do about it? Right? Right. And that's the point at which most people don't know what to do about it because most people don't have that familiarity with web three. So basically the problem that we decided to focus on is, you know, In a game economy, like, you know, what do game designers do? Game designers, ultimately the thing that they're the most familiar with doing is they want to increase player engagement. And the easiest way to increase player engagement is to give players stuff. Uh, but giving players stuff creates inflation. So basically game designers, like their natural mode is to like create. Create engagement while creating inflation. Right. Uh, and there's usually very little to counteract like disinflation there. You know, this is something that we saw in Axe Infinity actually. Right? The S L P S L P inflation was out of control. Uh, even before like the market crash, their economy was in trouble because like, they had no way to counteract like s l p inflation dynamics, right? Um, what does is we say, Hey, we have these mechanisms just out of the box. You can take these smart contracts and you can take these APIs, you can plug them into your economy, and they'll allow you to create deflationary pressure whenever you want on any token, right? Just, just by making a smart contract call or by making an a p I call. That's the, that's the basic value proposition that we're giving them is like basically deflationary pressure on demand, wherever you need it. That's the, that's the product, right. Um, that's been super useful for crypto unicorn in a variety of ways. Uh, the general thing is like, you know, the way that it works, the, the most common mechanism that games like to use in crypto unicorns is using this very consistently is, you know, starting with the analytics. You know, we, you, you can see all the on chain events, all the on chain actions that a player takes. You can associate point values to each of those on chain actions, right? And from those point values, you can create a leaderboard. And you can say, okay, this leaderboard is gonna run for like two weeks or a month or two months, whatever. Right? You, you, you have this leaderboard that runs for, for like some fixed amount of time. Uh, so this is all done by Moon Stream, right? You do the point, uh, point, point value associations to on chain actions, create a leaderboard, and then on Moon Stream you can go in and you can also say, uh, for each leaderboard position at the end, at the end of that leaderboard event, um, these are the rewards, the on chain rewards that a player is gonna get for achieving this position. Right? This is like a very general thing. What happens is that, uh, If you've done your, if you've distribute, done your reward distributions correctly, like if you've set the rewards correctly, the players are highly motivated to compete with each other, to sort of like, you know, get up high on the leaderboard. And since competing with each other requires these on chain actions. If you incentivize actions that burn the tokens or that create deflation wherever you want in your economy, then the net effect of the leaderboard event is to create that deflationary pressure. Although the people who get to the top of the leaderboard, they get like, you know, they might get some large reward in the token, like the, the net effect is a deflationary pressure. So this is something. That, uh, they started doing, basically when their game launched, um, they needed to actually create, um, breeding pressure on their, uh, uh, they needed to create breeding pressure on their unicorns because that was the only way to deflate their utility token. Um, and, you know, before they came to moon Stream, so basically they started off the, when the game launched, they had 10,000 unicorns. Uh, and they were estimating that like, you know, they would double the population of unicorns at the end of the first month of the game being live. Um, about like a few days in like, you know, barely, the, the population had barely, it hadn't even increased by like, you know, 1%, uh, players just weren't reading. So they created this leaderboard event. Uh, and this was important to them because this was the only way to burn their, their, their utility token. It's called corn milk. So this was the only way to burn it. And without this like, you know, the inflation on milk would go out, control. Yeah, first, first, like three or four days, very little activity. They were kind of like, you know, anxious, stressed out about this. So they created this leaderboard event, uh, where every time a player breeds bred a unicorn, they would get like a hundred points. If the unicorn had like some rare parts on it or whatever, they would get an additional, like, you know, I don't know, I think it was like 30 points or 50 points, something like that. So they, they have like these kinds of mappings, right? Um, and the players at the top would get like some really amazing rewards. Like they'd get a lot of like the governance token, which was worth a lot at the time. They, they would just get a lot of stuff right. Um, the. Player base just went crazy over this. And, uh, actually they hit their target. So once they activated this, uh, leaderboard event, they did actually double their unicorn population in the first month, and they doubled it again in the second month. So they got to 40,000 unicorns in the second month, and that, that was when the leaderboard event ended. And then after the event, so they were doing like a hundred percent month over month growth when they had the event active and without the event active, they sort of stabilized at 20% month over month growth. And so now they do these kinds of events like very regularly. I think right now they have something like seven or eight leaderboard events active, uh, on our platform. And uh, and this is something that like pretty much every other game, uh, every other game economy that's on Moon Stream is using this exact same mechanic, like for their own purpose inside their.
NoAutopilot:Yeah, you, you kind of blew my mind. Um, okay, let, let's walk through this bit here. So they were emitting unicorns, um, but their, their goal of kind of doubling the amount of was, was kind of challenging. So by partnering with, they were able to create almost like an on chain version of z lee. For De Quest, where exactly?
Neeraj Kashyap:For on
NoAutopilot:chain events? Exactly For on chain events where they received, um, non-chain tokenized points. Yeah. That were then, uh, put into a leaderboard with the top participants reading or winning some kick ass reward.
Neeraj Kashyap:Yeah. Yeah. And those rewards are on chain. And the point is, like all this is, the Moon Stream automates this entire process. So basically like you just have to go in and specify the points. You just have to go in and specify the rewards and everything else is taken care of by our platform. So that's, uh, that's sort of like how Moon Stream works. Okay.
NoAutopilot:Okay. So like, so I, I am not a mathematician. Um, you're gonna be ashamed to hear that. Uh, you know, I may have gotten some deep.
Neeraj Kashyap:Don, don't worry. I didn't do. But
NoAutopilot:um, but, um, uh, so like, so, so I think the formula I've seen a lot is that games will have a Genesis collection. They'll, well, no, let's back it up. They'll have a Freeman that then whitelist people to a Genesis collection. Other people can like, earn their way onto that. They hopefully meant out. And they take those NFTs and to create some downward pressure, they enable a staking mechanism that, um, will provide mission of token over a period of time. Yeah. But that's like kind of as far as it goes, uh, from what I've seen. And it feels like that's a good start, but that's definitely not enough to create a moderately
Neeraj Kashyap:sustainable game. Exactly, because the tokens that are being emitted, so this is like, now let's just put the leaderboards and token distributions on, on the side. Okay. Let's talk about the scheme that you just mentioned of like, you know, you, you, you create these NFTs you basically want to tie up liquidity. So the, the name of the game when managing an economy is you need to manage, uh, you need to manage liquidity, right? You need to manage liquidity, and you need to manage like distribution, right? Distribution and liquidity. Um, The standard thing that people do is like, okay, let's tie up liquidity by creating a staking contract and let's like sort of emit this other stuff. Right? But what you're doing there is you're just really passing the buck along to now the token that's being emitted, right? Right. You're up liquidity on the nft, you're doing these token emissions, but if there's. If you're not managing those tokens that are being emitted in like in a reasonable manner, then you know you are just sort of delaying the effect of like any shock on your economy. Because once your user base realizes that the tokens that are being emitted have no value, then like it's game over. What you need to do is you need to create value for those tokens, right? So there needs to be a concept of production inside your economy and that production needs to be balanced in some way. And, um, How do you create utility for like, you know, the tokens that are being emitted? So the way that we do that is, this is now we do this like fully on chain, uh, is a crafting system. So like, you know, you can, instead of emitting like, you know, some random currency or whatever, that has no value, why don't you emit stuff that actually has value in your game? Right? So by. Staking your staking your NFTs into like, uh, into the staking contract. They harvest like, you know, resources inside your game, like wood or stone or whatever, right? And then you can use those resources on, we have an on chain crafting contract where you can create recipes like, you know, the game, the game can create recipes. So if a player comes in with like, you know, five wood and one stone, they can make an ax or something like this, right? Um, And then once they make an axe, they can actually equip that axe onto their characters using the, in the on chain inventory system. And then that gives their characters a bonus in game for like, you know, when they're actually like, you know, attacking something. Because if you have an axe like, you know, it, it serves as a weapon or it gives them a bonus, like, you know, Just whatever, like, or it gives them a bonus to harvesting more wood in the future, right? Like, there's all these kinds of things that you can do to create utility, uh, as you build a world. So the, the whole point about like a game is that like, you know, when you're building a game, You are really not thinking about like, okay, I'm building, like I'm building like this kind of an emissions scheme or this kind of like resource team. You're building a world that that's what players are engaging with. They're engaging with the world that you're building. Um, and these, if you sort of plug these on chain mechanisms into your world, if you sort of make them, if you sort of. Allow'em to make sense in the context of your world. You're actually creating like a very natural, um, like a very organic economy, uh, that's a lot easier to manage than, you know, just, just doing the first order of thing of like, you know, put the staking contract with some emissions, uh, uh, you know, online, like make it interesting.
NoAutopilot:Like I've, I've seen some of that too, where like the tokens you receive for taking can then be used. In like a crafting recipe. Um, do you feel like that, assuming they're doing that well, is that a, or do you think there's another
Neeraj Kashyap:layer? Oh, you always need to manage, uh, you always need to balance things, right? So the hardest thing is, is actually balancing, um, Just having the mechanisms for crafting are not enough. You also need some natural way to regulate the crafting. Like, uh, like, you know, a really good analogy is one of the greatest pieces of technology that I've ever seen in my life is Unis Wap. Unis. Wap is actually amazing, right? And Unis Wap doesn't just like, you know, just crafting by itself. Is unis wap without the invariant, right? Unis, wap without like the, like x times Y equals K, like, you know, the, the, the sort of conversion rate. The conversion rate logic, right? You also need to have the conversion rate, but you also need to have something. That's balancing like these different things in your economy, uh, and ideally balancing them autonomously. Now that's, that's a vision. That's like, that's the dream. That's, that's what we're building at Moon Stream. Uh, but even if, even without that, you at least need like a game designer or somebody like, you know, some group of people, some person or group of people sort of monitoring things and making sure that like the parameters are tuned so that like, you know, everything sort of stays in balance and like, you know, you don't. You know, you, you don't have like, you know, some particular resource completely getting devalued or like, uh, another resource becoming useless in the game. And like, you know, everybody that invested into being able to produce that resource at like in high quantities suddenly gets like, owned. They, they just get like, you know, destroyed by the market or something like that. These are all responsibilities of like the game.
NoAutopilot:So it's, so, it's like an ongoing. Ongoing process, which is to be expected because like, even though like web two gaming, it's the same thing. You know, you're, you're always having live ops, you're always kinda shoot shipping updates, ways to kinda keep things moving. Um, okay. And
Neeraj Kashyap:even with real economies, right? This is what the Federal Reserve does, right? Yeah, exactly. Like basically you just need someone to act as the Federal Reserve. And our goal, our vision is that the thing that's acting as the Federal Reserve is not a person, but is a smart contract, which is, which is sort of regulating, regulating the economy in a decentralized manner. That's, that's what we're building.
NoAutopilot:Um, okay. So since your, since your partnership with Crypto Unicorns, Um, I think that was last year.
Neeraj Kashyap:Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. 2021. Yeah.
NoAutopilot:2021. Oh dang. Okay. So, so have, have there been additions to the moon platform that have kind of spun out from learnings with crypto unit, like additions
Neeraj Kashyap:to your solution? Yeah. And then with other games as well. So at this point there are 10, 10 game econom, 10 economies that are like that, that are sort of. Using mainstream in which like mainstream has a strong presence. Um, like there's like crypto unicorns, champions, ascension, boom. Land is like the mo our most recent customer, the hunters on chain. Um, and yeah, with, with every single one of them, there's like more or lessons for us to incorporate. But in general, like what we try to do is we try to use them to focus our efforts rather than like, uh, Our efforts because, uh, ultimately we do want make these autonomous, um, regulators for economies like, you know, this on chain Federal Reserve kind of concept. Um, but a decentralized one. Uh, so for the name of the game for us right now is just focusing down on like, on like the really strong general, general like things, right? Like what I mentioned about leaderboards and on token distributions. That's something that pretty much every game. Uh, uses, right? That's something that everybody who comes to mainstream, they, they start out using analytics and then they naturally start using the leaderboards and the token distribution. Gotcha. So we're really focused on that, uh, on that, that experience for, for our
NoAutopilot:users. It's almost like, you know, to your point earlier, like the analytics are nice, like now you have a problem, but Yeah. Yeah. What's the solution? And the solution is looking at some of these other things that are proven and. Okay, so, so in, in my work I, I work with a lot of like early stage projects that maybe haven't launched their first on chain token or n f. Um, but, but it's coming soon, I guess. Does your platform, um, look at aggregating off chain and on chain data in way, or is that an area of interest for
Neeraj Kashyap:Actually, that's, People do come to mainstream. Uh, like the, the top of the funnel for us is analytics, actually. And, um, there's a lot of competition in that space, right? There's tune analytics, there's transpose io, there's like tenderly, there's like, you know, all of these different products that sort of help with analytics. Our edge actually has been that we, uh, that there's two things that we can easily support, like other networks, you know, uh, Like if a, if an app is launching on, um, on their own app chain or something, or even a lot of those products don't support test nets and we support test nets by default. So a lot of people come to us because we have That's cool. That's where you're doing your development for. Yeah. That's where the work happens happening before. Exactly. So, uh, that, that's one reason that people come to us over like the other analytics sort of options out there. And the second reason is that we make it easy to incorporate off chain data as well as on chain data because, uh, not every game is gonna be like a fully on chain game. Uh, most games are not that way. Uh, and that's okay like that. There, there's no reason to be like, you know, some sort of like a, like a pedant about it, right? So, um, We make it really easy to join on chain analytics with analytics that you're collecting from game clients and from your game servers and stuff like that. And so that's, uh, that's been a big deal as well.
NoAutopilot:Cool. And if, if you, um, I'm sure you guys are already on, but if take that next step, like done with the analytics, where here's your off chain, here are some out of the box way to optimize that would be,
Neeraj Kashyap:And we, yeah. Uh, yeah, opt optimizing. It is like, uh, so for us, optimization is economic optimization. That's really what we care about. Um, but, uh, different people, it's like, you know, in games that use Moon stream, uh, the data is being consumed by different people in different ways. So it's usually like game designers. Uh, they're consuming it for like the economic angle. And those are really like the users that that. Those are like the primary users. Uh, but then game developers use it for debugging and stuff like this. And, uh, and then customer support and live ops, they use the data as well to like, you know, to basically vet, like, you know, if you're on, if you're on, if you're doing like player support, that like someone's claimed something, you need to be able to quickly check that they actually did the things that they claim that they did instead, like become very important for those kinds of operations. As well. So yeah, it, it grows very naturally inside an organization, um, especially the analytics piece because just being able to understand what the players are doing is useful to pretty much everyone who's involved in like, developing a game or maintaining a game, so,
NoAutopilot:well, well, and I wouldn't shortchange yourself either. I, I saw on your website that another potential competitive, intelligent, as. I've gotten more and more into like marketing, consulting and that type of thing. A lot of folks are looking to see what are they doing. Side of the fence there, is there a weakness there that we could potentially,
Neeraj Kashyap:or even just something to learn, right? Like this is, it's natural to, to like want to know what your competitors are doing. And with crypto, you know, with web three games, like all of that data is public. Like, uh, web three games have no mode around their players. And that's something that like everyone should come to terms with and, and take advantage of.
NoAutopilot:Okay. Let's see. What, what other tough questions can I throw at you? Man, you're crushing everything so far. Um, okay, so can you, and I've noticed this from a couple kinda analytic type providers, but I've noticed that immutable, which I've kind of grown up in I M X ecosystem for the last probably three. So for me, I kind of feel it's like a, a destination for, I don't see a lot of analytic. Kinda supporting it in a lot of like avalanche polygon. I guess, can you explain why that is and something that could support games building
Neeraj Kashyap:on imu? So I can, I can actually explain to you why this is because we've had our experiences with immutable X. Uh, not very pleasant. I mean, nothing wrong with the, it's been very hard to integrate with. Immutable ZK sync, I think is gonna change the picture here. So the problem is that immutable X, first of all, it's, it's built on, uh, star ware. That's not a problem by itself. But the, but the, the issue, the reason it's difficult to provide analytics on immutable X is that. They don't expose the actual blockchain to users, right? So they expose like an a p I to to people who are using the blockchain. Um, it's, it's like a curated set of functionality that's actually, that would be possible on like, for example, the, you know, compared to Starnet itself, right? Or like the stark net test nets or whatever, right? Uh, That's like the full capability of that blockchain. What Immutable X does is they, they're running like that blockchain privately, and then they have a public a p i that gives you like curated access, like, uh, you know, limited curated access, the functionality of the blockchain itself. So most analytics, uh, You know, platforms, they, they need access to the nodes, right? They're like, they're basically using the public data that's available on nodes and there's, that's what scales, that's what generalizes very well. Right? Like if I build it for like one e v m chain, then it's very easy for me to generalize to any E v M chain. Sure. If I build it for stark net, then I'll, I'll be able to generalize very easily. Any start net L two, right? Like, like those are the kinds of, that's, that's what people build for analytics. Immutable X is like very. I think if you wanted to have access at the node, at the level of blockchain nodes, you'd probably need to have a good relationship with the immutable X team. And I think like the level of access that you have through the immutable X A P I makes it difficult to build an analytics solution. So I think that's the reason that it's been difficult so far in immutable X uh, immutable zk VM now is a completely different story, right? Because that's using like the Polygon zk, VM technology, which means that ultimately you'll just have access to like, Notes you'll have access to RRP C Endpoint and it'll be much easier for people to get analytics about games that are running on immutable CK p m. So that's, that's a very exciting development for me. What's happening within Immutable km?
NoAutopilot:Alright. Okay. Yeah, man, there's, I mean, every day Immutable is announcing some sort of new partner that they've signed, and it sounds like we're kind of in the dark on the analytic side. Sorry, friends. Um, okay, well, cool. Lemme see. What else do I got for you, man? Um, just general, uh, you know, with, with how deep you are in, in gaming market right now, are there specific chains that you find particularly exciting or even games where they're like, wow, I can't wait to see what, what kind of comes outta this?
Neeraj Kashyap:That's a, that's a good question.'cause I don't want to shill for anything like, you know, that I'm part of. I like, uh, but, uh, we have, we do try to be objective about these things. We've made an awesome list of web, web three games. So if you go to, uh, I can, I can send the link if you want. Uh, I'll put it in our chat if you, if you Awesome. Don't mind sharing it with the, with the listeners.
NoAutopilot:I'll put it in the show notes. Everyone.
Neeraj Kashyap:Yes. App list repository with a list of games that we're tracking. These are not games that like we're necessarily working with or anything like that. It's just games that like we're tracking, um, because we also play these games, right? So these, these are, these are games that we're sort of interested in, uh, that are represented on this list. Uh, and by the way, anybody can add to this list. So you could just like suggest an addition to the list pretty easily using the GitHub UI if you have an account. Um, those are all the games that we're interested in. Um, for blockchains. That's, that's also a good question. You know, from the business point of view, polygon has been really great. Like they've done a great job at attracting games. They've done a great job at sort of attracting the right partners. For example, immutable. Um, so. Um, that's an ecosystem that like, I really like, uh, just running a business. It's, uh, it's been like, it's very fruitful and productive for us to like, spend time in that ecosystem as opposed to like a lot of other ecosystems. And, you know, we're not like, we're not farming grant money or anything like that. We're literally just like, this is a rich ecosystem where people are building games, uh, and lot of interesting things. Um, I, I'm also sort of interested in, uh, In this, in the stark net ecosystem. Um, I ha there was recently a game launched called hin gg. It was like quite hyped up in like the on chain games community. I, I can, uh, it's, it's on the awesome list actually. Um, and it's, it's a game that uses like, uh, zero knowledge proofs in an interesting way. Uh, you know, with the, with the developer experience for that, that. That came from Starnet. So I mean, that, that's, uh, that, that's actually pretty interesting. Uh, but it's still early for that kind of technology. I, I don't know if that kind of technology makes a difference to like, you know, your standard gamer, like, you know, your just bog standard gamer probably doesn't care about zero knowledge proofs, and it probably doesn't improve their gameplay experience in any meaningful way. So that's, uh, that's something that remains to be seen, but, uh, it's exciting that it's at least possible on Starnet. So that's, that's exciting to me. Um, besides that, I don't know, um, app chains. I'm, I'm really interested to see what happens with like, App chains, uh, like, you know, avalanche has subnets, polygon has super nets. Like, you know, ev everybody seems to be like thinking about this. Um, for games it's really a problem. Like, uh, you know, if you're running a game on a, on a public network, on like a completely open network, let's say Ethereum, right? Uh, so you're running a game on Ethereum, nobody really is because it's so expensive. But imagine you were, uh, The prices, like the dollar of value that your players would have to play per day to play your game would depend on a lot of factors that had nothing to do with your game. Right? Let's say that. You know, some, some random like token, like, you know, like Pepe Pepe token, like whatever, right? They're launched like all of a sudden the like, you know, your players wouldn't be able to like get their transactions mind anymore. And it would, uh, you know, it would slow down like all gameplay to a crawl for something that's completely out of your control. So like games are, At least there's a large class of games where they're saying, Hey, we can't really afford this. Right? We can't afford for like, our players' game experience to be, you know, at the mercy of like, you know, all of like this other stuff that's out of our control. How do we fix it? And app chains are like sort of a path to that solu, uh, path to a solution there. Uh, it's gonna be interesting to see how that develops. Uh, there's a lot of problems as well, right? With app chains. Like they're, they're not decentralized. So if your game relies on like, You know, being a web three game for security, then like you're giving that there's some risks. Yeah, exactly. There's risks. Um, like, did, do you, do you see what, what happened with the Shiba Nu like L two, right? Like the, their, like their RRP C nodes were like stuck. I, I don't, I don't know. I haven't followed what's happening today, but, uh, yesterday, like, you know, things didn't look great for Siberian or whatever, so it was, uh, there's always risks when you're running, running like a separate chain. And the biggest risk is like one that, you know, Axe took, right? Uh, like$600 million. Like the, the, the Ronan Bridge hack, right? Like it's just, It's hard to run this infrastructure. Uh, and so it's gonna be interesting to see what actually happens with app chains. Um, yeah, I, I mean there, there's a, there's a little bit of other stuff, but, uh, it becomes very technical. I, I'm just curious to see what happens with app chains that, that, that's like sort of the biggest thing on
NoAutopilot:my mind. Right. You know, one thing that that's shining through all is that you are entrenched in like the goings on. Yeah. So let me hit you with this one'cause my audience loves to do. Um, if people want to get a con, get in contact with you, where should they go? How can they follow what you're doing? How can they learn about your product? I.
Neeraj Kashyap:Uh, the best place is, uh, by, by the way, we build everything open source, uh, except our infrastructure code is not open source for security reasons, but everything like, you know, all of our tooling websites, like everything is open source. Uh, so GitHub is a good place to go. Um, I'll, I'll send you that link in chat. You can have that. Uh, and then, and then our discord. So if you go to like our website, just go to Moon stream.to um, to the moon, it's easy to remember. So, uh, if you go to Moon stream.to, there'll be a link to join our Discord. Um, we're pretty active over there. It's not a super active discord because it's like a bunch of developers. Uh, but there's always someone there. If you have a question, there's always someone there to like respond to you. And we post updates about our activities over there weekly. So, uh, that's a good place to sort of like, Keep, keep, keep track of what we're doing.
NoAutopilot:Okay. And I did join that Discord, so, you know, welcome. Yeah. Get ready for my, uh, my novice question.
Neeraj Kashyap:Please, please. I, I actually, yeah, we're, we're always, uh, available to, like, we, we usually do like a lot of voice chats. Actually. We work, uh, on the voice lounge in that discord a lot with. Our team is like completely distributed. You know, we're globally distributed, so we use the Discord Lounge a lot to like work with each other. I'm gonna
NoAutopilot:crash one year meeting. Yeah.
Neeraj Kashyap:Uh, yeah, we're, we're totally okay with that.
NoAutopilot:Heck yeah. Okay. All right. So my last question for you, um, so for those that are building in web three right now, what's your single piece of advice for Build Better, faster? What, what's your been your, your experience? One piece of advice.
Neeraj Kashyap:It's a brutal market right now. If you're building in web three, it is not easy. Um, I guess it's not advice, but it's more like words of support. Like, hang in there. Um, you know, we, this, this market is cyclical. Um, and you know, the people who survive this bear market are like, They're likely to see really outsized rewards when the market turns. So just survival, just focus on survival. Do anything it takes to survive. That's what I would say. Um, that's, that's what we've been doing and that's what I recommend to anyone else. This is, uh, right now survival is the name of the game.
NoAutopilot:Raj put a, a massive smile on my face with that comment. Shout out to all the folks heads down building right now as the world crumbles.
Neeraj Kashyap:Yeah, right. It feels that way for sure.
NoAutopilot:Well, cool man, well this has been great. So, um, thank you again for hopping on all the links that Niraj has shared will be in the description. Uh, definitely check out his Discord engaging conversation there. Uh, again, another shout out to our friends at Game seven where I ended up. Raj, help me questions. And, uh, yeah. We'll, uh, we'll catch you in the next episode everyone. Thanks for listening.
