On the afternoon of Tuesday, February 21st, 2023, Formless held a Twitter Space hosted by Hayden, Community Manager of Formless. The guests were as follows:
Jeremy, Founder of Glory Games
Shaun, the Asia CM of Pudgy Penguins and the Customer Experience Manager of HQ.xyz
Vitalis, COO of Ladder & ChainStack
Poerain, the English Editor of Foresight News.

All four guests discussed their thoughts on the recent mini NFT and Gaming Rally.

Hayden:
Welcome to the 13th Twitter Space Live event of the Formless Web 3.0 Salon.My Name is Hayden, the Community Manager of Formless.

Today, we invited the
1. Jeremy, Founder of Glory Games
2. Shaun, the Asia CM of Pudgy Penguins and the Customer Experience Manager of HQ.xyz
3. Vitalis, COO of Ladder & ChainStack
4. Poerain, the english editor of foresight

to our live room to discuss “the 2023 Q1 NFT & Game rally”

For those new to this twitterspace, Formless is a Collection of decentralized identity protocols and open source tools that enables mass adoption of web 3.0 technology. Formless aims to build innovative, industry-agnostic social incentivization models around identity to bring Web3 with social value.

Formless The purpose of hosting Web3.0 Salon is to:

1. Broaden understanding of web 3.0 industry
2. Promote long-term development of web 3.0
3. Create a dedicated hub for discussions from industry leaders

Let’s have our guest introduce themselves and as well their roles respective projects. Let’s start with Shaun

Shaun: Hi Everyone, I’m the community and Customer Experience Manager over at headquarters. HQ is a bookkeeping software for web3teams. And I’m also the Asia Community Manager for Pudgy penguins. So for those of you who are unaware, Pudgy penguins is an NFT project on the Ethereum blockchain. Nice to meet everyone looking forward to this AMA.

Jeremy: Hi, thanks for having me. Everyone. I’m Jeremy founder for Lauren games. We are an AR location based social fi game. We bridge people into web 3 by playing sort of like a Pokemon Go + Final Fantasy game. You can you can play free to play or pay to play. In our in this way. We form a bridge for people to get to know a web 3 and defi through the game.

Vitalis: Thanks for having me guys. I’m Vitalis. I’m Director Operations Director at ladder. It is NFT AMM protocol. Chains stack is infrastructure blockchain infrastructure provider.
Like my background is previously ecommerce. I‘m full time crypto since 2017.
I joined telegraph is global development managers and made my way through global development department to CEO of coin telegraph within a year opened offices in Lebanon, New York, including Argentina and Brazil, in Korea, some European offices. So yeah. Happy to be present here. Thank you guys.

Hayden: I think we are experiencing some technical different difficulties with Poerain.
All right, no worries. Maybe we can proceed first, and then we can circle back to her. So the the first question of today is that right now in the market, we see that there’s a recent market relief, especially at the beginning of this year.
In fact, even now as well, right in the beginning of this year, January. The Bitcoin price floats above 21,000 US dollars. And as of right now, it floats above 24,000 US dollars, right? If this, the rest of the crypto market has also
seen a significant upward movement, which includes the NFT. Market and the gaming market. So what are your thoughts regarding this? Like, is this sustainable? And how can players kind of right on this? Let’s start with Vitalis first.

Vitalis: So yeah, first of all, like, I think that current optimism is market is just short term.
I tend to believe it is more bounce, like trend change, it doesn’t mean that we are going to see much deeper go much lower and much deeper doubts. I just mean that I’m not expecting reversal this year. And I think that we’re just moving to range and expecting some side moments with local
blobs called mini cycles, as we see for example right now.

And in terms of NFT Market, I think that NF T’s are decoupling can beat,
especially in Xero, kind of own narratives. And recently, we seen a really strong blogger narrative, and it attracted a lot of money or not detract it, I would say more subtracted and generated a lot of money. Via AirDrop, and we’ll see some new players come over there. And AirDrop money is also affecting positively price of collections as AirDrop money is used to trade and pump some floors. So all in all, I would say I’m pretty
bullish in short term, I mean, a couple of following months. But all in all for this year, I think we won’t see any dramatic change of market situation. And I’m not speaking about new heights.
And as for NFT market, like in a ledger is solving liquidity issues for NFT market. And we’re strongly focused on gameplay masters, so not on the on profile picture project. And I think that game-fi is, could be very strong driver of the industry, the next cycle. So a lot of projects got big investments, probably in 2020 2021. And it takes a
pretty long time to build a plus projects usually takes like, five years or so. So it means that in during late this year, or next year, we’ll see some betters and I think that market will start shifting from kind of profile picture world to some better utilities, in game items, etc.

Hayden: Yeah, I think something that I caught on that you said
was the you mentioned, the NFT market is kind of decoupling from the whole crypto space in general. And I think that’s something very true especially since the late of last year, where we start to see the NFT market kind of have a mini mini rally of sorts. And then in spite of the current or the den, crypto market. So Shaun, what are your thoughts on that? Right, especially as yourself being a community manager of Pudgy Penguin, what do you what do you think about this whole situation?

Shaun: Yeah, I actually do echo quite a number of the Vitalis sentiment that the general market sentiment is most likely going to be moving sideways for the next one year or so. And definitely, with this blur AirDrop, which I’m quite sure many of us actually did benefit from.

We do see the money flowing back into NF Ts, causing NFT’s to be general for price to rise. But what I do feel personally is that it feels a little inflated, in a sense that currently there’s a lot of wash trade going on, just to farm this Blur drop, because well, season one is just over, everyone has seen the potential of this blur airdrop, and everyone has started farming for the blue airdrop up to the season two, and therefore they’re just washed trading a lot. And without actual money flowing into the web ecosystem, and specifically into NF T’s in general. I feel that this trend is not sustainable. And we’re gonna have a lot of people bagholding and therefore
Why I personally feel is that we should be looking at projects that are actually providing real value to holders. And people benefiting from all this from holding the NFTs and not just like riding on the wave and end up holding over-expensive JPEGs.

Hayden:Yep. Hmm. I think you made an excellent point that it’s funny that you mentioned blur, right? Because I think even even within the Asia community or the Southeast Asia community blur is such a hype up project right now. Yeah. What about you? Jeremy, what’s your thoughts on that? Like, how do you see this NFTs market movement going on?

Jeremy: I totally agree. I think they’re not decoupled but I think much of NFT traders are also traders. And they try to find random market, as far as there’s a lag effect, right. So if the market sees some life, they try to front run by doing activities, of course, blur has hyped up a lot of activities, with, especially projects benefiting with zero comes from the platform. But getting in positions first, and then waiting for the pump is quite normal. And then after, you know, the market has run as well, then, you know, this usually, if you looked at the last one, there’s also another spate of activity until it dies down probably after two months high. So I think that’s quite the norm. But I think over time, this is going to mature as the varieties of NF Ts are going to increase, right.

Because we saw the hype in the last Bull Run is a lot of JPEG PFPs. As more projects developed, we will see a lot more gamefi related and art collectibles, I think that will give value.

So especially I guess, with the more varieties coming andwhat we call fair launch. I think that will give a lot more and not just the element of back holding and who’s going to be the last to hold the bags when the music ends.
But you know, like having having, really the way to have memberships into communities. You know, that is also phygital. Not just collectibles. But also, if I play a game and spent even up to 10,000 bucks on it. When I exited the game, I didn’t get anything back. But I think you know, with this NFT as part of the game, people can be able to exit the investments in a game or do not line or making an earning, but at least you know, at least for me, in this case, if I spent 10 grand, even getting like 30% back is bonus and so I think that will take another two to three runs. But I am seeing the trend on it now.

Hayden: Right, I think there’s there’s something very interesting to look into right? Building utilities for NF Ts, and one of one of the stronger use cases could potentially be gaming. And we write and we have Poerain back online with us. So Poerain this space is now yours. So before before we jump into the question, Could you do a quick introduction of yourself? And what what you do you see the NFT market place going?

Poerain: sorry for the delay. There was some network connection problem. I’m Poerain in the English editor of foresight news and I’m in charge of producing English articles. We are a media committed as web3 verticals of Bloomberg. And we are dedicated as a synthesis of information, platform data tools and plus ecological community. As long as you’re a blockchain related practitioner, foresight, foresight news is an ideal access to industry information for you. So if you are interested, you can follow us and dive in our product.

Oh, okay. Yeah, since the very beginning end of the year, we have witnessed multiple bullish signals, we are creating a more friendly macro environment like the fad is slowing down its pace to raise the interest rates. Hong Kong better embracing the crypto cryptocurrency industry. Also the blockchain ecosystem itself is going smoothly, both in terms of its innovative technology and better compliance management. So we are also constantly familiarized with new hotspots like the eye catching ETH upgrades. And it’s noticeable that various countries and regions are turning more of their attention towards blockchain. So overall, I believe we are backing into a promising future. And as the market is warming up, I think the NFT sector and the gaming sector are booming to like the blur boom recently. So I’m rather optimistic about that. Thank you.

Hayden: Blur seems to be the talk of the town, since everyone is mentioned that. Yeah. So I want to dive into something that Jeremy said earlier about: having integrating NFT collections into web 3 gaming. So I think one of such of the one of such late attempts is the Dookie Dash, right? For those of you who are not who are not familiar with Dookie Dash, it is the endless running game built for BYAC & MAYC Holders. Of course, Dookie Dash might not be the best in execution, they have their own flaws, and whatnot. But could this be a good direction for non gaming NFT to explore? Let’s start from Jeremy, for since you brought up this point.

Jeremy: For NFT projects, it’s all about tokenizing utility, as long as you have a community that believes in the roadmap and the vision, you can do anything.
Over the last Bull Run, what we saw was that people are projects hyping utility, but not being able to deliver. And like just finding anything to pump the news. So that the nfts value go up. Over time as, as things mature, definitely NFT could move into different things.

So I think the bull run two years, we look at a lot of gaming, gaming always be part of it, because that’s something that will draw in the most users over time. But that’s going to be for non gaming nfts, as long as their community they can do anything, right.
I foresee that this might be even applicable for communities looking to bootstrap, a community defined, right. As long as , people buy into that, and is actually the token response. I think that could be anything, gaming is the easiest, but because for that product, if you want to have a better quality kind of game, devs may not be game developers as well. So I think the SS, the communities for NFS matures, and they have been more sound expectation.
And then they really bite into projects, believing in the roadmap, I will say that going to be a lot more products, they’re going to build not just on games and collectibles, utility community, even for this year I think on the last year in a bear market, we see a lot of phygital events as well, that’s organized by NFT, communities, ventures, that types of gatherings that bring people together. So that kind of development is going to definitely grow over time.

And games are just a start. Right. So I think, I think having said that, there’s there’s two things that you need to consider, because some projects will build a game or something for the sake of of that, right. And it only serves their community, which is fine. But you know,
is that that might be a bit short term. So over time, the champions will stay and are those that has a greater ability to attract not just the community by continuing to grow as the project iterates into something else and then have a life on its own. Right. So I think for the blue chip projects for NF T’s they have all, you know, the subject to move into a brand, not just a game, you know, even just about licensing with the NF T’s. And I think there was an element of that in the board. It’s the ba ba YC community. So I think there’s something interesting that may play out over time.

Hayden: you mentioned a few interesting point which I’d like to highlight out. First of all, gamefi or web3 games could be a good way for NFT to explore a more defy approach. Is that something that you are working on?

Jeremy: that’s how we built the roadmap for the project. Not saying that, you know, could be for everyone. I mean, that’s because it’s an advantage for us as AR VR game engine, but it could allow is just a great way for people to even look at collecting digital assets, right? Because the first hurdle is why?
Why do JPEGs? Why are they worth that much? So if they can go beyond that, and again, brings them through that thinking, but then they can start to immerse himself in a world where other things are possible.

Hayden: I think that’s a great point. Vitalis, what about you. So to add on what Jeremy said, Are there any other ways are there any other methods where there is a NFT-Fi sort of narrative around that

Vitalis: I think that Jeremy noted the interesting thing about kind of licensing, because if we look at perspective of like, just pure branding, and detachment, it is hard to imagine, like my coders playing this game, so obviously, it won’t happen. And like, it should be another modal. So I think the current state of the market is NFT projects are experimenting and trying to find product market fit in these terms. And I see that there are no product market Market Fit yet. But again, some things just takes time. And I believe we could see very similar situations that was in the early internet was products like social medias, like Facebook, that pure, it was like, first product market fit product. I mean, probably before MySpace, but whatever, I just mean that it will take some time for experimenting among different projects. And it feels like current narratives will, will die very fast. And we’ll just see something grown up very unique, and nothing familiar to the current state, but it will take some time to experiment. Again, I think that games are very complex project. And it just takes a lot of time to build proper product in gaming industry. But I see very huge chance to see movement from web to companies like I think that as soon as someone from web to major companies will also have a good case of implementation of NF T’s into the games, like not building games just for games sake or not building games, just because you fundraise it enough money and because you can build it, because, like it’s hard to imagine how to monetize or how to pay back on it. But real product market fit in some in game utility items, inside games that are popular right now, then I would expect disruptions very short period of time.

Hayden: I think what I love about your sharing is that there’s no one size fits all approach, right? Not all NFT projects are suited to go into gaming space. Like I think Prime example would be the Dookie dash project right there. It might not be the best game in the sense and it might not be best suited for the brand itself.

Vitalis: Yeah, because just just I’m just trying to kind of merge target audience and and of game and bike and I barley Majan. Guys for holding this NFT that costs like most of them are obviously new learners and game we just time killer that is usually played by kind of just younger generation and kids, etc, etc. So yeah, it’s just hard to imagine how how it should work together and how it should help. Just branding. Yeah, it’s it’s not very clear for me.

Hayden:I think that’s that’s a good point you have there, Poerain what about you? What do you think other? I mean, aside from the gaming side as well as the NFT-Fi side, do you see any other possible direction NFT could go into?

Poerain:Yeah, currently, it is a major trend to integrate enough T collections into gaming. And firstly, players, interaction data within a game can be recorded on chin. And it can be interlinked with other origin data outside the game or even among different games. And I think that’s an interesting point. Because maybe, on this basis, different games can have different and can have interactions and communications. For example, if you have some kind of equipment in one game, maybe a through some, some form of NFT, you can use it on a different game. And also, in this sense, players, identity info is more accurate and comprehensive, so that the project the projects can improve such additional values such as social and recommendation functions.

Also, diversified NFT’s can serve as a tool to categorize users to into different levels or sections according to their interests. But there’s one problem that’s currently what to a large extent attracts users to NF T’s in games maybe is that they can can economic benefits and expectations. I think that’s maybe the games have to improve their interesting mechanisms to to introduce more users into it.

Hayden: Thank you, then I think that’s that’s definitely on point. Right. Like, you mentioned about how the game mechanics could would be the attraction point for a lot of people come in to, to buy these NFT’s to begin with.

Shaun, Could you could you share more about like, how do you see this and that the usage of NFT grow over time? Because I understand that for pudgy penguins, there is actually there is actually some development on that front. I saw on your Twitter that here is the penguin that is dancing around. How do you see NFT grow in in other directions other than gaming and NFT-Fi?

Shaun: Yeah, first and foremost, really interesting discussion. So far, I do have a couple of thoughts. From the discussion earlier things, the first thing that came to mind was the fact that the current games in the NFT space are in the web three space, they’re just generally not as fun as how we expect it to be. We look at how games has progressed over the years, we start off with physical machines, the big clunky s machines that you play, or pinball with your Pac Man with and then went online. And the issue is that all these games cannot be saved. So we have online Pac Man, we have online pinball machines, but all these are still not saved.

And then people realize that, hey, I want my progress to be saved. I want to progress over time. So we see the next evolution of games being games like Runescape, like Maplestory, in which you get to save your progress and move forward. The next time you log in, but we’ve web3. I see as more of a lot of the ownership of the game assets. Such that I believe, I believe it was with at least will say that, like I’m able to exit if let’s say I choose not to play this game, it’s not so much of I want to profit from it. And this is where I feel a lot of work web3 games currently has done the reverse.

Like I shouldn’t be able to earn a living I’ll make a living off playing games because logically doesn’t make sense. There isn’t any real world value created to justify you making a living off playing games. Of course, no shit show that Esports players because those are entertainment in its own form. But me as an everyday player, I shouldn’t be able to earn a living off gaming in general. So I do believe that the next stage in which NFT games or web three games are going to develop is that the game should be front loaded. And the tokenomics of it like for you to benefit of it is going to be back loaded. So it’s like a little incentive like hey, if I want to sell my account, I no longer have to do it illegally in a way, but I’m I am able to get rewarded for my time because there is value created for another individual who sees value in the asset that you have found. So this is regards to the game fi sort of things. But as for how the NFT space is going to evolve. Personally, I do feel that as an industry, we are looking at the whole equation wrongly, we see NFS as the beginning of the whole project. But when we look at it the other way, we look at the brand as brand awareness first. And then we start trickling down, we can do other things like physical much games, or really just the branding itself.

And this is something that I do feel that the budget penguin team, it’s doing really well, like we are actually doing the inverse. Instead of focusing so much on the NSPS, we are actually expanding the brand itself, the brand awareness out there, getting out our brand, on Instagram, on Twitter, such that the content is not directly linked to the value of the NFL is. So it’s really getting on brand awareness, making people recognize your brand, your brand assets, eventually, the NFT holders do benefit from the brand awareness going up. And the value does roll back to the origin of holders. Because if you look at it, NFT’s are religious, like your IPO for traditional companies, you’re investing in that company. And using these funds, that company is creating more value to get other people into the ecosystem. So yeah, these are just some of the thoughts that I had through this whole discussion.

Hayden: Yeah, definitely in agreement. One thing that I really liked about Project penguin as a project is that the branding is very strong. So I personally before I went into NFT, my impression of the penguins is that it’s a committee for web three project owners, and I think they have hold true to their branding throughout since inception, even. Yeah, that’s one thing that I really like about it.

Shaun: Yeah, I actually do not think this is planned either way. Like it was a good coincidence that, hey, we just happen to have a number of website builders in our space, who, like the penguin PFP started to use it as their PFP. And yeah, people started by because, hey, you could use it as a networking tool in a way.

Hayden: Yep, exactly. I think I think that’s the power of branding, right? You create the branding, then the community follows through, and then it becomes a flywheel effect of sorts.

Alright. I think that brings us to to the last part of the AMA and and I think there’s something that we all look forward to. Right. Could you let us know what’s, what are some exciting things we can expect from the projects that you guys represent for the next couple of months? Since we end with Shaun, let’s go with Poerain.

Poerain: Forsieght new is expanding its international layout. And we are a start. We started our media in Chinese continue to the English one. And now we are preparing for Korean websites. So keep tuned. Also in April, in Hong Kong, we are to host a blockchain industry session on we are now actively open to partnerships with international teams, for example, we are soon to integrate Galaxy into our wiki tools, besides our productive upgrade is on our way for users better experience. So just follow us and keep tuning. Thank you.

Vitalis: Oh, yeah. So I have exciting update for those who are listening. We are now at the final stage of the test net. And we’re just launching an event called monopoles poly allow and to trade mirrored assets of the test net, basically, major blue chip projects, and our partner projects most of the game fi, either test net, and it will, it’ll last only two weeks. And it is kind of the last event that is going to be happening on our test and before we go live. And that means that we will take a footprint on chain, for all the participants.

So those from his blog, AirDrop, it means that all the participants of monopole campaign will be also eligible for ledger token AirDrop in the future. And we’re building really hard for the last almost six months and believes it hmm. For NF T’s is really the great liquidity solution. So the things that we prepared is widely is for all the listeners of this ama to get to monopoly the campaign to Hayden, if you do not mind mascot to be in a link for Google form, so our listeners could get it could get access. And as for not so near future letter, we’re working on beige, NFTs on finalizing tokenomics. And yeah, almost all our forces are called on the main net, where we would like to go live in following plans as soon as possible. So yeah, we’ll be happy for you to test our product and share feedback. Thank you.

Jeremy: Thanks. Really excited to hear what everyone here is building and is releasing. For us. I think I speak for glory games, we have done the AR VR, you know, the pet catching aspect of the AR rather the location based app for the alpha. We have released it online, I’ll leave it on the links later, you can play but for now, it’s only for Android, we will be releasing a series of pets for collect and earn type in the next two weeks.

With a few partners, I think that’s something to look forward to. And then as well as we will be fundraising for the next round, which is the PvP and in game that’s formed for engagement entertainment for glory games.

Shaun: Sure. I actually consider myself really privileged to be from both headquarters and budget backgrounds, because it’s going to be an exciting year for both projects. So for headquarters, some alibis that we are going live in probably more than a month time. So if there’s any web 3 teams out there who from the crowd, who has issues with the bookkeeping, because especially like NFT’s it can really be a huge headache with paying your payroll to your, to your staff, that can be a headache when it comes to bookkeeping. So we’re currently in beta stage and we are going to our, to our Live stage in a couple in a month or so. So if there’s anyone out there who would like an exclusive demo of what headquarters is doing, feel free to slide into my DM happy to set up a call to actually share how we can help you with that.

And as for the pudgy Penguin side of things, is going to be an exciting year for us. So we do have toys on the roadmap very, is going to be out really, really soon. Sooner than you expect. We actually just released we went public with our news that we actually had a collaboration with retail monster, which is a pretty big brand in in the European and the western side of the US. So it’s going to be an exciting year. Be it for pudgy penguins or for headquarters.

Hayden: Amazing. Alright everyone. Thank you. That is all the time we have for today. Once again, Thank you , people who are attending our web three salon as well as a special shout out to our guests

Shaun the Asia Community Manager for pudgy Penguin banking and Customer Experience Manager for HQ.xyz
Vitalis is the CEO of ladder and Chainstack
Poerain the English editor of foresight news,
as well as Jeremy, the founder of glory games.

We will see you again next week. Thank you.