#19 User Acquisition in Web3 Gaming w/Andy from Stardust

Summary: Token Takeover Podcast - Conversation with Andy from Stardust

Major Themes:

• Web3 Infrastructure Development: The conversation centered on the development of Web3 infrastructure for gaming, particularly focusing on user onboarding and acquisition tools by Stardust. The discussion underscored the importance of seamless integration of blockchain technology into gaming to enhance user experience and engagement without compromising the traditional gaming feel.
• Custodial vs. Non-Custodial Wallets: A significant portion of the discussion was dedicated to explaining the differences between custodial and non-custodial wallets. Andy emphasized Stardust's approach to providing scalable, enterprise-level custodial wallet infrastructure that ensures security and compliance while being entirely white-labeled to maintain game developers' branding.
• User Acquisition and Data Analytics: Andy introduced Stardust's direction towards utilizing blockchain data for user acquisition and analytics. He highlighted the potential for blockchain to revolutionize user targeting and ad spending efficiency by aggregating and analyzing on-chain activities across various platforms and wallets.

Memorable Quotes:

• "If we're not helping game developers make more money at the end of the day, we shouldn't exist as a business." - Andy
• "The number one thing our industry needs right now is successful apps. We don't need more infrastructure; we need games to be able to go live and make money sustainably." - Andy
• "Blockchain should be an afterthought... Everything, decide exactly what the game player is going to see." - Andy

Actionable Takeaways:

• For Web3 Gaming Founders:
  • Be Cautious with Grants: Ensure that any grants or funding do not lock you into unfavorable conditions that could hinder your project's flexibility or vision.
  • Delay Blockchain Decisions: Focus on the game's development and user experience before committing to a specific blockchain, allowing for more informed decisions that align with the project's needs.
  • Consider Custodial Wallet Solutions: Evaluate the benefits of using custodial wallets, such as enhanced security, compliance, and a frictionless user experience, which could be crucial for mass adoption.
• For Developers:
  • Focus on the Game First: The quality of the game itself is paramount. Ensure that blockchain integration enhances rather than detracts from the user experience.
  • Leverage User Acquisition Tools Wisely: Utilize data analytics and user acquisition strategies that leverage blockchain's unique capabilities to target and retain users effectively.

This episode of the Token Takeover podcast provided a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities of integrating Web3 technologies into gaming, with Stardust's efforts exemplifying a focused approach to addressing these areas through user-friendly infrastructure, wallet solutions, and innovative user acquisition strategies.

https://twitter.com/AndyDotETH
https://www.stardust.gg/

Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GamingStartUp_

Transcript

NoAutopilot: 0:00

Hey, this is Noah Autopilot, founder of the Gaming Startup Collective and host of the Token Takeover podcast. In today's episode, we shared a conversation with Andy from Stardust, learning about some of the Web3 infra that their team is building, especially around user onboarding, as well as got a sneak peek at some of the user acquisition tools him and his team are building out. All right, enough of me talking. Let's jump in to the pod. Hey, hey, hey. Hey man, doing well. How are you? Good, having a good, uh, having a good morning. Is it, uh, is it overcast there like it's overcast here? You know it. Man, I used to have to drive that at least once a week between Portland and Seattle. That is a treacherous, treacherous drive. Yeah, I don't envy that. Weekly, why weekly? I covered national accounts. And so I had a small book, but it was spread across Montana, Seattle, Portland, and pretty much Seattle was the, uh, the largest market out of it. So I had to be in town at least a one day a week. That's tough. If you have like a pair of Bluetooth

Andy: 1:02

headphones, it would be pretty easy to do both of these simultaneously. In general, like you could just have your phone, I'm assuming you're on your phone, right? You can just have your phone, the Bluetooth headphones, and then we could just both sit in front of a microphone that's connected to discord. And then we would just basically use Twitter spaces with our Bluetooth headphones, essentially. And our audio is just gonna get picked up naturally into Discord.

NoAutopilot: 1:20

Yeah, I'm actually about to fire off a, uh, stage announcement too. So in the Discord at the very top, you should be able to jump in there as well.

Andy: 1:27

Okay, cool. I'm gonna get my headphones. We can do that.

NoAutopilot: 1:29

Your community is mostly in Discord, so let's do that. I love this, by the way. We, uh, this allows us to kind of serve both audiences. Exactly. Not everyone, many founders are, uh, are active on Twitter. In our community. What's up, Mr. House? Thanks for joining. Also, shout out to the Stardust official. Good to see you as well. This is a cool best practice. We might do this as a standard going forward. Yeah, man, I'm happy.

Andy: 1:48

I'm trying to, uh, Fun to, uh, all Web3 games. There's my, there's my pitchy sales vibe. All right, so let me hop into the Discord now. And I'm just gonna be listening on Twitter exclusively. Ooh, that's good, yeah. I'm just gonna have my microphone here sitting next to me.

NoAutopilot: 2:00

All right, look at this! Andy with the, uh, with the great idea. I love this. This is, this is fantastic. All right, well, cool. Let's get this thing kicked off. Shout out to the folks who are piling in here. I see UnfamiliarDude, Mr. House, Chief Yeti, What's up, man? Long time no talk. We need to catch up. Today we are joined by Andy. E from Stardust. Andy, how you feeling? Very good. Very good. Another day in paradise. What's your gaming? It could be anywhere in the world, but

Andy: 2:24

you've chosen to be here right now. Yep, definitely saying hello to unfamiliar to the audience, saying hello to Mr. Yeti in the audience.

NoAutopilot: 2:32

So we're doing a dual broadcast here. So if you're in the private discord community, like unfamiliar dude, you're listening to us on the stage. If you're on Twitter, obviously listening to us on Twitter. If you are on Twitter, feel free to share. Go ahead and share this space with your, uh, with your founder friends. If you have folks who are building web games, maybe they're struggling, either with the tool infrastructure side. I know everyone could use some help on user acquisition. So get this space shared with your network. Also shout out to, uh, OX Davey. Good to see you in the, uh, in the audience there. Andy, let's, uh, let's jump in. For the folks who don't know, can you give us a quick overview, who you are, what you do, and what is

Andy: 3:06

Stardust? So Stardust in general, well, I guess I'll start with myself. So I'm, I'm Andy, I'm the head of business development for Stardust. I joined in the summer of 2021. Stardust, I've been here for almost two and a half years. My background before then, I was, you know, managing actually Electructure for Goldman Sachs data centers out in New York for four years. And it sounds interesting, but it's really boring. I liken it to working on a nuclear sub. It's very, very cool and lots of stuff to learn about. Once you get over that hump, you basically, someone's going to run, run the sub. And at a certain point, you got to sweep sector three. And, you know, clean off sector two and turn the knob in sector four. And that's basically what it was. So I learned a lot. It's very cool to learn about like critical systems infrastructure, but I essentially worked five hours a week when it came down to it. So I spent all my time in crypto and gaming, and I got really big into software engineering on the side. I kind of knew about, you know, I bought Bitcoin back in like 2013, and then didn't really, you know, think anything was not essentially Bitcoin for a long time. I basically thought everything was Dogecoin and Bitcoin, like just a bunch of tokens. And then my buddy who ended up being Framework Ventures kind of enlightened me as to what Ethereum was and like the idea of kind of on chain logic and all the composability of that. And I was insufferable for about three months after that. And my wife didn't want to talk to me because I just was talking about Ethereum. And I had like, I was literally reading the Mashing Ethereum book out loud, like to her being like, is this not the craziest thing you've ever heard? And so that was in 2020. And so then I got, you know, into BigNet DeFi and then, um, NFT stuff happened. I actually wrote a like blog post about NFTs, convincing myself that it wasn't a fad. And like the week, that same week I went and bought a board 8, um, for 0. 3 ETH, uh, just cause I was like, I couldn't afford a coupon, but I was like, NFTs are going to be legit at some point in culture with tech. So I might as well just get some exposure to that. And then I was expecting like a five year turnaround. It was like a five fucking more round. But anyway, so like in summer of 2021, decided to go full blower. Started us, I joined as a solution engineer. Since then I've been, you know, I quickly transitioned to owning a lot of the clients. I had relationships in May of last year. I moved to head of BD and hired Rich Cabrera. We acquired a user acquisition team. So now I'm on my team now. Very, very exciting stuff. Very cool. I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out Rich. Shout out to, uh, Ready Player Rich. Yeah, he's, uh, yeah, he's in other spaces right now. Maybe I can pull him over here. But, so, to continue on to answer your question about what's Stardust then. Stardust has been, uh, interesting on infrastructure for a long, long time. Like, actually, almost six or seven years old. Almost seven years old now, which is pretty wild. So, we are custodial wallet providers. And blockchain infrastructure as well as position. And like, the headline is that Stardust helps game, Web3 game developers, uh, make their game successful. We help with the entire game lifecycle. On the developer and build side, we're, we're providing, you know, incredibly scalable enterprise level custodial wallet infrastructure. We're totally invisible wallets. So we don't own anything part of the login widget. There's no branding or pop ups or bump outs or logos at Stardust. We're completely white label sitting in the back. We're custodial. We have our money translator, like I'm in about states not required for us to operate, but we are building for that future of what does it mean to choose a custodian because you have to, but in the short term, what does it mean to make a choosing a well provider, a risk off decision. And then on the later side of the game life cycle, uh, acquisition. So we're finishing out building our DSP. It's live right now. Like we're working with a bunch of clients. You mentioned a couple of them in the post today, but basically you come to us and you say, Hey, Andy, I want to get You know, users on Android phones in India and Thailand to hit level three in my game. And you just choose to start us out of the MMP, you know, like AppsFly or whatever like that, the attribution team that you're using. And then we will go and do that campaign with you. I will continue to spend like a daily spend and go get you those users. And we're getting some really cool big partnerships on that side too. Some big names that are well known at Web3 to kind of like quadruple our, our, uh, you know, reach for attribution, which is exciting. But yeah, so I could talk a long time about all this stuff.

NoAutopilot: 6:35

Let's see. All right, man, you melted my mind a little bit. Let's see here. Let's break this down into bite sized chunks. Let's say I'm a early stage Web3 gaming founder. I love making games, right? That's all I really care about. Making great games, sharing with people. But I'm also interested in tech. And now I'm at this point where I'm going to be launching publicly, like an MVP or an alpha. How do the tools that start us both make my job or my project more successful in those early days? That's a great question,

Andy: 7:03

and that is kind of like, you know, just to say, that is the crux of like, Stardust as, as our, you know, we currently stand as a business, if we're not helping game developers make more money at the end of the day, we should exist as a business. There's no part of anything that we do that isn't focused back to that principle. That is the only thing that matters. And I'll say that I think the number one thing our industry needs right now is successful apps. We don't need more infra, uh, you know, we don't need really anything but games to be able to go live and make money sustainably. That is like the number one focus, for sure. As far as like what we do, if you're gonna do like an MVP, an Alpha, um, there's a couple of things you could do. I mean, it really depends on what you want to do on chain, what your vision is, and that's where, you know, again, we're totally weightless, extremely flexible on the wallet side, so we can do really whatever works, whatever vision you have. The super weight thing, if you're thinking like, Oh, I've already got this game. You know, our game's about to go live, and I'm gonna take it live next week or tomorrow. The very, very easy thing you could do, It's whatever, if you're creating user accounts, where it's really not hard to spin up any kind of, you know, login widget, OAuth, whatever. Um, it is one API call to tell Stardust to create a wallet for those users, but do anything on a chain. This is what DrDisrespect did, and he got a lot of, like, cred right away, because he onboarded, with us, 400, 000 wallets in a single day. Just by people having, you know, signed up to his, to his, you know, website, and made an account. To kind of, you know, vie for getting one of his, uh, early access, you know, tokens. But, uh, he didn't actually do the tokens to that day. He did it later on. It was just kind of an application process. But, like, if you're going to have a playtest, what I'd say to developers who are kind of thinking, oh, blockchain is this big heavy lift. Well, you could start with just player waltz. And that's, that is like, you know, one line of code, basically. But just an API call to create a wallet for each user. And you can even, if you have one with our waltz system, it's wallet per user. But that address for each user is actually the same wallet address across all EVMs. So even if you decide, like, you know, next month that you actually want to be on your own private subnet, on Avalanche or Arbitrum or whatever you want to be, it'll be the same exact situation. It depends on where the token contracts exist at that point, not where the wallets are created.

NoAutopilot: 8:47

Hey, are you a builder looking for a grant to build your ideal Web3 gaming startup? If so, you should take a look at the Arbitrum Grant Program. With grants up to 25, 000 and a specific focus on supporting early stage indie game devs, it could be the perfect fit. Link is in the description. Make sure to check it out. Now back to the podcast. One housekeeping thing I forgot to mention. This is a community call, so you don't have to listen to me talk the whole time. If you have a question, you can either hop up on stage and ask it, or you can drop it in the comments and I'll read it. So just let me know. Dang, you know what's super interesting about that is like a lot of these teams are, they're, they're moving into their seed round race. With the bear market, the expectation to be able to successfully raise is like the bar just has moved up. So a lot of these teams are at the point where they need to prove that they can drive on chain activity, that they can, you know, get some of those early day seven, day 15, day 30 type metrics now, or even, even for like grant programs. So like, even if they're not fundraising, you sign up with a grant for Arbitrum and now you have these milestones that you need to prove that you're, you're delivering impact to It seems like player wallets, creating those seems like a really, really easy way to, to spin up that process and get started.

Andy: 10:01

Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, that's the number, one of the number one things that games or chains kind of making a bet on. It is a bet, a gamble on like, you know, essentially content on their network and the volume, the future volume. Uh, you know, assumed expected volume from a game. Uh, but if you can show like that these walls are being made, obviously there's so much just to, you know, salt this a little bit. There's so much bullshit in the space too, of games, you know, and applications kind of faking their numbers a bit, um, you know, as far as, so at least it puts you in the conversation with that and shows that you're building. The other thing I would say is that it's such a light lift and you get to work with a trusted name like Stardust or, you know, doing, building out the entire infrastructure for shrapnel and. Dead drop and all sorts of stuff. Like it does show that you're plugged into a team and knows what they're doing. Um, right away, if you're a small founder. And the other thing I would say is just that, you know, we take a very consultative approach. We, you know, are happy to chat with you. And if it's not the right time for you and your team, like that's totally fine. We're going to be around, you know, for the next 10 years anyway. So we're happy to give our two cents on like how and why you're building the way you are in general, which can help you round out how you, how you're phrasing it back for those grants.

NoAutopilot: 11:00

Gotcha. Okay. That's fantastic. Quick shout out. So cosmic Exodus, and you pop in Tom everywhere. Love to see it. Unfamiliar Dude, Chief Yeti, Mr. House, TheSecondHill, JRP, we got Davey from HeyChef, great to have y'all. Okay, so I know you and I talked about this a little bit on our first time we synced. For the folks who are still on the fence, they haven't quite made the decision, should I go custodial wallet? Because there's a ton of benefits to do it. Should I go non custodial? Because of the ethos that is Web3. Can you give like the Stardust perspective on, on thinking through this challenge for these games? Yeah, absolutely. So can

Andy: 11:35

I follow up with the, when you say self custodial, are you referring to a specifically like a metamask type of environment? Are you talking about one of these, you know, quote unquote self custodial infrared providers that are not under the liability? They're, the walls can be exported, but it's similar to the, There's a different experience. So I think there's like kind of three options in my mind. There's like self custodial metamask, which is, you know, very self explanatory. There's like the middle is sometimes being called stodial option, which is oftentimes, I mean, that's like your passports, your sequences. I think sometimes third web is looped in there in general, where the players can usually take ownership of the wallet later on. Oftentimes there's a login widget. And then there's kind of our end, which is closer actually to like a, like a, like a fireblocks, um, when it comes to like white labeling full, full ownership of the liability, then it's just entirely the, the game and the app. So were you wanting to compare to us the number one, two, or both? I'm gonna have my cake and eat it too. Let's go. Let's do all three. We have to compare number one then. That's like straightforward, I think is. Um, yeah, the, the pop ups of self custodial stuff, um, with MetaMask. I mean, the user flow becomes the big thing, the friction. Now that we're doing user acquisition, you know, I can, I can point you to directly, you know, the friction that we see in these UA campaigns of what happens and where the people drop off with the attribution data we get about when and how heavy of a lift it is to get people to go get a wallet or even, even Web3 natives don't want to hook up their wallet because they have risk of getting stammed. Um, they don't have the right wallet for that app. It is an incredibly high mountain to climb. So the only argument in my mind to doing self custodial. Wallets are one, if you are running another user flow alongside of it, like a custodial flow, or two, you don't care about scaling yet, which is totally fine. Like, this is like, you know, we've been working with Pixels Online for almost two years now. They have been building, like, they built a lot of stuff self custodial first because they knew their community was Web3 native. And they want to build very transparently and constantly iterating with that community and not really worry about anything else. So if you're very much focused on scope of just web creatives, then yeah, go ahead and do that. In my mind, if you're creating user accounts, it hurts you very little to have an extra line of code to create a custodial while in the back and you can kind of be running essentially, you know, another inventory option for them that's non, uh, that is custodial. But I just, the number two, the semi custodial, this is much more nuanced. This is much more what keeps Andy up at night and not at all what game developers or especially the players think about at all. But the biggest thing I would say for this is two things, the branding, uh, the logo, all that stuff, like the, the real estate, the front end, we don't touch it all because we're fully custodial in the back. Whereas the semi custodial solutions often seem to want to own some very valuable real estate in that it's like things like Passport or, you know, Sequence has a login widget as well. So this is where you're going to see that powered by Sequence, that powered by whatever other provider. I'm just, I'm naming the biggest examples out there. So that to me, And, you know, is a very valuable real estate. You can see why, you know, someone like, you know, Immutable seems to have, like, a lot of their grants be focused on owning that portion of it. They're seeing, they're getting a lot of value from being, capturing that user data up front, which some game developers care a lot about. Havo is one of our clients. They are an enterprise Wallet to the Service client who is on Immutable X, but is using us to white label everything because they don't want to use Passport, as an example. So there's the, the kind of real estate that is being owned by some of these wallet providers. And then there's also just, like, the technical side of it as well. So I guess three things of these games, some of them have had issues with like actual play tests and you know live ops because this to me seems foolish of actual login being interrupted by your wall provider. The wall provider should sit and you know just focus on wallets and blockchain in my opinion rather than being such a critical engine on getting players into the game and even be able to play the game. The blockchain should be an afterthought essentially is that. Uh, the last thing and what might be the most is the liability. We squarely own the liability of the wallets. Like, that's where I liken us closer to Fireblocks sometimes. If something goes wrong, it's entirely our fault. That's why we're getting our money transfer licensing. That's the, like, regulatory compliance stuff. It is us who owns it, whereas the self custodial is semi custodial route. It's very ambiguous, and if you're at least a U. S. company, I don't think they're gonna, you know, regulate regulators, and I'm, you know, speaking out of turn here. Who knows? It's a very great, like, It's usually going to fall back to the game dev in general, as far as who's responsible for something going wrong. This is partially why, um, you know, fairly old news, but Apple likes our solution a lot because there's no backdoor for players to get, have a different user experience. The entire thing is brought to the user by the game developer. And this is the, I guess, the fourth thing about this is being able to export your inventory with the backdoor, with the, with the private keys. If you have access to the private keys as a user, you could have, as an example, And be able to withdraw an asset while the game thinks that you still own that asset. And you mess up the inventory state. The state management becomes a bit of a technical problem for games when there is a persistent backdoor for players to remove their assets anytime. Yeah, I guess another more straightforward, you know, problem example would be chargebacks on credit cards. If I, uh, I buy something with a credit card, and I withdraw it instantly because I can do that with it. If I own the private keys, then I can just dispute the charge and I get free NFT. Whereas with a game developer using a full custodial solution, all on screen actions come through the game dev. They prove everything. They can gray out the withdraw button. There's no other way around it. So if they want to hold it, lock it for five business days, they can do that. No problem.

NoAutopilot: 16:16

It does feel like, you know, for Web 3 to be adopted by the quote unquote mainstream, you know, we, I, I feel like we do need to hide or, or not, not obstruct their experience. And so it does seem like what you guys have built there, uh, is really in line with, with helping onboard those audiences. Like, it's identical to, to what they would see from a traditional Web 2 gaming experience.

Andy: 16:36

Exactly. And, and everything, decide exactly what the game player is going to see. They can see their wallet address, they can see the transaction IDs. All that's just data that's being piped to the front and they have access to. Or you can talk about none of it. You know, really great way to talk, you know, soggle on and off blockchain, either actually executing on blockchain, or

NoAutopilot: 16:51

what do you, what do you decide to talk? Gotcha. Okay. Let's bring this back to our founder who, who maybe hasn't launched his game yet, or he's about to launch his game. Can you walk me through maybe like things that they should think through or consider when it comes through like the, uh, the wallet and like the managed platform you've built? And maybe three things, or things that they shouldn't do, or mistakes that you keep seeing teams make. Like maybe they go too fast, and they cut corners, and then they have to go back and like, redo it, or they miss on the opportunity to get a bunch of wallet data, or whatever. So like, can you, can you give me maybe like, uh, a couple, what teams must do, or should be doing? And two things that teams should probably stop doing. Biggest one I think is,

Andy: 17:28

is being cautious of grants. Are very important to me. As a, as someone, I've watched games. I would get so trapped into a grant that they have to legally make and finish a title without, and then they're not going to release it because it's so bad. Because the blockchain part is so fundamentally broken. They would rather just quietly make a title. Waste the money and end up with an extra, you know, a couple hundred K net positive from the time it took to develop that game to meet the legal requirements. I mean, you can get really trapped into a grant. That's an interesting thing for me, uh, as an aside, like, you know, competing with competitors that are giving grants, uh, you know, direct competitors. And meanwhile, we're having people pay us for the product. You know, that is a big net net swing where sometimes people ask me, what are you, what am I going to give them? Uh, you're going to give me money. So, yeah. Grants, I think, is the biggest thing in this. If we were to be entering a bull market here, the money starts blowing around again in, in funky ways. Just being very, very clear about what you want out of your vision, because if these are exclusive, or there's big, you know, strings attached, you're really kind of ceding a lot of, you know, reputation on, on that, on some other ecosystem you can't really control, uh, that much. So, that would be the biggest thing. Um, what I think people should do, Is delay the chain decision as much as possible, I guess, until you feel like you're ready to do something meaningful. You can, as an example, be partnering with someone like a Stardust who's chained agnostic and not have to instill, be talking about wallets, all this stuff without actually picking a chain and focus on the product. I mean, this is, I think you'll hear all similar people in my industry. Can someone say something similar? It's like the game is ours. Really? It doesn't matter where you build it. Um, it matters so much how good the game is. That is it. You know, you have to make sure that you're. You're focusing

NoAutopilot: 18:53

on that. Can I ask you, so this isn't a question related to Stardust, but it seems like you've been in a lot of different parts of the industry and you're super aware. So, so for like a lot of these teams, they use grant programs, almost the same as bootstrapping, right? So it's actually funding development. So without those early grants, they may not have the money to develop like their MVP. I hear you on being cautious with the chain selection and cut off as far as possible. But with capital as, as tight as it is in this market, I think that's a, a, I think that's a tough thing for, for teams to, to wrestle with.

Andy: 19:25

Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I think that, I think that I guess I would then just be making sure that it's in an agreement, um, or, or that it's a milestone base where if you guys don't hit that certain milestone, then, you know, you, you have a way to move somewhere else if you're not happy, or if you can't hit that milestone, what happens because of the, something with the chain, you're starting to get locked into something that you did where you're not going to have a path to success. Like make sure that we're, you know, understanding how you're going to build Like, actually. Don't take the money because the money is there, I guess is my point. Like, you need to make sure that there's a viable strategy. Um, and I'm not saying that, you know, most grants aren't that, but um, There are grants being given out right now for, you know, tech that is not finished. Underlying tech that is not finished. And, it's just, it's not happening. That is not necessarily a viable path to success, uh, is what I would say. Let's,

NoAutopilot: 20:08

uh, let's drop some names, Andy. No, I'm just playing, I'm just playing. Don't, please don't. I wanna, I wanna read off a comment. So this is from Unfamiliar Dude from Unfamiliar Territory. He says, I can attest to how easy the Stardust system is to use, being able to manage as many smart collections as you can imagine, all with an easy API call. Wow. Yeah. So

Andy: 20:25

we do have two products. One is focused specifically just on wallets and signing transactions. And that's on any, every EVM right now. So every single one, which is very cool. Like I'm, I'm up on people's test subnets that they've spun up this morning. I'm up on, you know, you, you, you name it really, as well as a Sweetie, Solana and Aptos. And then, and then, uh, unfamiliar dude is rocking our managed product, uh, which is our first infrastructure product that is kind of like not an all in one solution, but it does take care of a lot of the stuff all at once. So we own the contract creation, we abstract gas for you. So you can just all with a very simple API, just, you know, create new token contracts, transfer them around, update the metadata, all that good stuff. And that's on Polygon and Avalanche right now.

NoAutopilot: 21:00

All right, folks. So I want to be respectful of Andy's time. We booked this for 30 minutes. We got a couple minutes to go. Any questions, comments, concerns you want me to emcee and share, uh, feel free to drop them either in Discord or in Twitter. Also, shout out to Jordan! See Jordan poppin in. ARP, we got you in both, how about that? Yeah, but thanks for, uh, thanks for setting this up, Andius. It's been really interesting to learn about, uh, Stardust and you guys approach to solving some of these problems that, that folks are wrestling with. We didn't spend a ton of time on the UA piece, so I, I, uh, apologize for that. I guess while we're waiting for any last questions to come in, Anything else you want to maybe tease us with on the UA side? Yeah, to uh, to maybe get folks excited. Yes, badly.

Andy: 21:40

Um, this is kind of the future of Stardust in a lot of ways because right now on the wall it's an infrastructure actually starting to sign deals with platforms that are essentially going to be competitors to Stardust and you know some of these names already. So, focusing on just owning like their wallet's infra is the idea, and letting them kind of essentially have their own version of the managed product, but, but in a lot of ways, what we want to do is scale across all these ecosystems as far as blockchains, and all the platforms as service providers, and we want to sit further and further back, deeper and deeper into the earth we go, and then these are acquisitions where it becomes really powerful. Imagine, if you will, Ryan, He's playing seven games on seven different blockchains. He has, you know, 100 tokens across those seven custodial wallets. And he's connected his, you know, self custodial wallet to three of those games. And maybe there's two different self custodial wallets he's connected. And on one of those wallets, he's very active on DeFi, and the other one, you know, not really. He has MNFTs in there. That is a lot of data. And especially if we talk about the next degree of data, where it's not just what's in the wallet, but why? What, why did the things end up in his wallet? Did he buy that item? Did he trade it? Did he pick it up? Did he earn it? Did he grind for it? There's about 10 parameters that Facebook used that were able to calculate the value of a given player on the Facebook, you know, games API marketplace stuff. This is how Facebook became such a powerful entity. It's not the fact that everyone was using Facebook, it's that they were able to organize all the data so well and pass that value on to advertisers. And that's the future of Stardust. You're gonna be able to come to Stardust and buy into our data analytics as well as the inventory of users for your game, be able to go to more users, but as blockchain data becomes potentially more data on chain, who's poised for an asset than Stardust? Who can go grab and thread the needle across Ryan's seven different games on seven blockchains, seven wallets, and say, Yeah, Ryan monetizes really well on these three genres, and we can go get you 100, 000 similar Ryans because We know all these games across all this, this whole ecosystem. So that's the future that we're pied together with blockchain. All right. Do you have, do you have time for one more question or do you have a

NoAutopilot: 23:22

hard stop? I got time for one more. It's an internal meeting. So I've got time for one more question. All right. One more question. That's super interesting. So it's almost like the traditional web two ads platform where you choose like a user profile, you set up a budget, maybe a couple thousand bucks or whatever. And then your platform will go out, find and advertise, and ultimately bring in that user to my game. And then. It scales because you bring me more paying users than I pay you to find

Andy: 23:46

them. Exactly. I mean, yeah, we're essentially taking, do you know what IDFA is? This is identification for advertisers and, and what people, people might know it better as these days is that little pop up on iPhones that say ask app not to track. Yeah. Um, So this is a global identifier that Apple used, and I was going to get rid of it in a second, too, where, you know, essentially all the data was being passed it back to the advertisers to be able to, you know, do machine learning and figure out exactly what's the best chance of you monetizing, but as they could service you. As IDFA has been nuked, we saw the first upfall in mobile game advertising, which was, right, it's basically hyperbolic. And so this is a massive change to the momentum that was there. Everyone in mobile gaming, at least. I was looking for ways to spend their money to get you way back on track. And this seems to be like the perfect, you know, early release five years in the amount of money we need and all the, you know, bring up plumbing to all these games to start to get to that point. That is the future is like taking all this and change because it's essentially, you know, a ton of data, but someone has to be able to organize it. So, yeah, you'll be able to come to us as a new game. You don't have to use our wallets at all. And you'll be able to say, you can say right now, you'll give me these users of this type. And we're just going to slowly and then very quickly all at once rapidly increase your return on ad spend where, you know, It's suddenly getting better. The moment it gets better, uh, genre by genre, a Web2 traditional user acquisition. That's where Andy goes to GDC. And I'm just the big guy on campus because that's where a Web3 executive, or sorry, a Web2 game executive who has no interest in blockchain. This is the first top down pitch to, to, to executives versus the bottom up emotional appeal of owning your assets. They don't care about you and your assets. They don't care. They care about the bottom line. This is the way for them to increase their line. They incorporate the Stardust events ingestion API. And the access to all this data and suddenly if the return on ad spend is better, this is a, we'll be in like two years, 50 plus billion dollars per year industry. It's a massive mastery. And the moment, and it's all very transactional, the return on ad spend is better somewhere else, they dump it into that channel for inventory for new users. It's just very black and white.

NoAutopilot: 25:30

What a great place to end off on. Andy, this has been exceptional. Thank you for giving us some time and walking us through all this. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of fun. Good questions and happy to come back

Andy: 25:39

and

NoAutopilot: 25:40

also if anyone

Andy: 25:40

individually ever wants to chat, we're

NoAutopilot: 25:41

happy to chat. Right on. Alright everybody, I'm going to give you back your day. You all get out there and build. Have a great time and take it easy. Peace!