All the Ways Crypto Can Make Gaming More Fun

Marguerite deCourcelle is co-founder and CEO of Blockade Games, which is releasing the role-playing game game Neon District the day this episode comes out. She discusses her background in art, how her love of video games led her to discover Bitcoin in the early days of the cryptocurrency, and how she helps create the next phase of web 3.0 content creation and distribution. Topics include:

• how Marguerite became involved in crypto and what led her to co-found Blockade Games
• her work on Pineapple Arcade and Plasma Bears
• the problems she sees with gaming and how blockchain technology can solve them
• how Blockade Games is utilizing blockchain tech
• Neon District, a blockchain-based RPG game with active gameplay and animation that uses NFTs and farming
• the difference between ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens and how each is utilized in Neon District
• how they have been marrying NFTs with DeFi through the NIFTEX exchange
• how an open economy challenges the dynamics of gameplay and how they account for this in their game design
• why a decentralized profile can be so powerful in gaming
• the types of users Blockade Games hopes to attract with Neon District
• why they are using the Matic Network
• how blockchain tech within a game changes the business model for Blockade as opposed to a traditional gaming company
• whether she thinks conventional gaming companies will be disrupted by blockchain technology
• the problems in content creation business models and distribution and how she thinks blockchain can solve them
• her personal token, COIN, how it is connected to CRED and how the two work together and people earn them
• what Coin Artist Liquidity Mining is and how it works

Thank you to our sponsors! 

1inch: http://1inch.exchange

Episode links: 

Marguerite: https://twitter.com/coin_artist

Coin Artist: https://coinartist.io

Yield farming NFTs: https://www.coindesk.com/nfts-yield-farming-defi-buzz-explained

Crypto puzzles: https://www.coindesk.com/theres-more-money-to-win-in-the-310-bitcoin-challenge-heres-some-hints

Blockade Games’s seed round: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-puzzle-artists-blockchain-gaming-startup-valued-at-13-million

CoinDesk podcast network with Marguerite: https://www.coindesk.com/what-artists-love-about-crypto

Delphi Digital podcast with Marguerite: https://www.delphidigital.io/podcasts/marguerite-decourcelle-building-towards-a-neon-future/

Delphi Digital report on Coin’s E-den syndicate: https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/social-tokens-the-rise-of-the-coins-e-den-syndicate/

OpenSea store for Alex Botez chess pieces: https://opensea.io/collection/get-pwnd

Blog post about the Alexandra Botez collaboration: https://coin-artist.medium.com/bringing-chess-to-ethereum-5969d9cfa07a

Transcript:

Laura Shin:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full time. Subscribe to Unchained on YouTube, where you can watch the videos of me and my guests. Go to YouTube.com/C/UnchainedPodcast, and subscribe today. 

Laura Shin:

Today’s guest is Marguerite deCourcelle, Co-Founder and CEO of Blockade Games. Welcome, Marguerite.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Hey, Laura. Thank you for having me. 

Laura Shin:

So, you’ve had a pretty long history in crypto, and there’s been a lot of things you’ve done that’s really fascinating. Tell us that story and you know, how you got into this whole space.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, this story starts a long time ago, in 2013, when I was actually really into gaming. So I had these amazing gaming GPUs, and at the time, the person I was with was in the military, and they were a network engineer. So, they discovered bitcoin around this time, and at this time, we could still use our GPUs for mining bitcoin. So, we made a few rigs. We participated in the race for the GPU battle that happened, but right on the other side of that was the ASIC’s race for the best ASICs and setting up those rigs.

So, we took our funds and backgrounds of building computers and gaming and participated in the early days of mining, which was when Scrypt coins really came about, like Litecoin, things like that, and started participating in the culture, I guess, of the what we’d call today now Crypto Twitter and that community. From there, though, my actual background was fine art. So I had been a curator and gallery director for over five years prior to mining the cryptocurrencies, and so I started to try to think about what is a distributed system? What are these decentralized networks? How do they work? What is a bitcoin, because it was a pretty abstract idea when you’re being challenged with what is money, and I started following Andreas Antonopoulos early on. I pulled people onto these different…like, similar to what we’re doing right now, but onto podcasted shows and just asked them a bunch of questions because, as a creative, I was really curious about what does it mean that these computers are essentially racing to solve these cryptographic puzzles?

And when they do, one of them unlocks a bitcoin reward, and that is money, and everybody on the network, all the computers agree, that that is money, and they check it, and then they track. So that was fascinating. So, I started actually making artwork first, portraits of people in the space that I thought were interesting and participating for different publications, like Bitcoin Magazine, and then, eventually, I found myself starting to encode information into these portraits.

First, it happened with Andreas Antonopoulos. I started using zeroes and ones, and then I realized, oh, those zeroes and ones could mean something. So, the next one I did was of Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson, which was my very first crypto puzzle, and it was themed a Dark Wallet because it was a project, at the time, of this idea of using a wallet to mix bitcoin for more anonymity, and when I was making it, I realized, oh, I should definitely hide something because of the theme. And when I posted this on Bitcointalk, I had no idea how viral it was going to go. It became one of the most viral threads on Bitcointalk in 2014, and I was kind of like, what did I do? So, first, we had set up a few phases of what I call a puzzle trail. So, one step leads to the next step, and you uncover pieces as you go, and it was all across the internet. We even hid information on different Wiki sites. I had to go and convince moderators of these Wikis to let me hide this information there. Anyway, there were different events along that first trail, like, such as a Minecraft server where, all of a sudden, these characters from Bitcointalk and Crypto Twitter were coming on board to this Minecraft server we’re hosting that was a part of this whole puzzle trail. It was just my first real experience and deep dive into the crypto community from this creative angle, and it blew me away because I was not really your technical, you know, cryptographer. I’m not going to be contributing to our ecosystem in that way, but the playfulness that we unlocked in that first puzzle blew me away.

And it led to, basically six years of that type of work for different projects, helping people educate their communities, as a tool for community building, and also, that type of crypto puzzle work attracts talent, dev talent, which makes sense if you think about some of these different processes to uncover talent. Like, I mean, you know, the CIA, we joke they put out cryptographic puzzles, and you know, people that can crack them are deemed as maybe suitable for…you know, it’s like as a way to recruit, essentially.

Anyway, I’ve found so many amazing developers. So, naturally, over these past six years, our projects became more ambitious. Just we were pretty much making full-fledged games. So it was in 2017, end of 2017, that artists I had been working with, artists that were better than myself and faster that I’d found along the way, and then developers that were brilliant, that we decided…as the cryptocurrency markets, you know, they started to rise, we had that bitcoin bull run.

One of my most famous pieces was solved. Had been unsolved for three years. Had five bitcoin in the prize. We were at this place in our history, our bitcoin history, where we decided it was time to do something more ambitious and more serious. So, we founded Blockade Games. That is the game company, and you know, we’ve released multiple different projects along the way, but that journey of how we got to where we are today has been pretty fun and organic.

My CTO of Blockade, his name is Ben Heidorn, he was getting his PhD in computer science and security, and I managed to talk him out of it. He only had one term left, and I was like, Ben, you know, you don’t really need to finish this PhD. What we’re doing is so much cooler, and ever since then, I mean…so, yeah, anyway, Laura, that’s been that journey here in a nutshell, and we can talk more about those different projects under Blockade Games if you’d like to.

Laura Shin:

Yeah. Well, so, just one thing I wanted to clarify about the puzzles, was it that once they solved the puzzle, then it would give them the private key that would enable them to take the bitcoins locked in it?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes, that’s the final step. So, along the way, you might get hints about how to uncover the private key when you get it, but it’s going to be information that’s, you know, encoded. It’s been shifted. There’s a cipher key required. I mean, there’s all these little pieces that you collect along that whole trail, that when you get to that final string of information, you’ll know, hopefully, how to uncover it.

Laura Shin:

And then for that one puzzle that was unsolved for three years with the five bitcoins in it, how much money was it worth in US dollars when you put that money in, and how much was it worth when the person finally solved it?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

I believe bitcoin was about 120 dollars a bitcoin when I loaded it, and then, let’s see, when it was solved, the sum was 50,000, and at the peak of that, it was worth 100,000. So, when it was worth 100,000 was when this whole wave of re-interest came around it, and it was a couple…actually, the group that solved it, they had worked on it pretty much for three months, and I knew that it was close to being solved. I watched it, like, on the Bitcointalk thread. People were really close, but then they just would talk themselves out of it. Like, oh, I’m never going to be able to solve this. So it sat really close to being solved for a while, but those developers who actually did that, they went on to…I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Pineapple Fund?

Laura Shin:

I am. That’s the person who, at the height of the bubble, just decided to give away roughly 86 million dollars in bitcoin because they had more money than they really knew what to do with.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Exactly. Yeah, an amazing individual, and they reached out to me when this puzzle was solved and asked if we would do more work like this if they contributed funds for us. So that’s when, about that time, February 2018, we made Pineapple Arcade, which was…we have since taken it down, but it was all these different arcade games that were crypto themed, such as a Pac-Man. But it’s actually the bitcoin chasing, you know…and then we had a MIRO coin that would disappear. So, just, we played around with remaking a lot of these old, classic games, but they had in them cryptocurrency prizes. So, if you played a certain way or you figured out some Easter eggs, just like the old ‘80s games, a lot of times, they had Easter eggs, you would unlock prizes.

Then, actually, the Pineapple Fund person himself created his own trail that was an in-real-life puzzle hint that started from the arcade and then led people running around Australia to win some bitcoin, which, a lot of people don’t know this story, but there were people that went to the extent of hiring…people in England hiring people through almost a Craig’s ad version to get people in Australia to go run around in national parks in the middle of the night and look for these landmarks, and yeah, it’s just our space is really wild.

Laura Shin:

I love it. I love it. So one other thing that you did along the way was Plasma Bears, and so why don’t we just kind of fill in a little bit more of the history, and then we’ll get to Blockade Games and Neon District?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes, so, Plasma Bears actually came after Pineapple Arcade. As we were exploring how would we build what we’re working on right now, which is Neon District, as we were really trying to wrap our heads around what we wanted that to be, that user experience, one of the number one things was a free-to-play blockchain game so that it could be open and inclusive. So Plasma Bears was basically…we tried to come up with a really fast application that we could build, web-based application, that took some of these bigger picture ideas to just test them out and see what kind of tech stack would be required to build the larger version, which was Neon District. So, Plasma Bears is essentially…it’s like a Build-A-Bear, if you imagine a Build-A-Bear, but it’s five separate NFTs, non-fungible tokens. The head is one. There’s two arms, two legs, and then the belly. We worked with artists in the crypto space, which, back then, places like SuperRare and KnownOrigin were still just kind of coming together. This was also in 2018, in the end of 2018 / early 2019, but I reached out to these different artists because a lot of them did really neat texture work like GIFs. We then basically skinned the bear parts with these GIFs made by these different artists. So, we made a huge library of those skins so you could have aesthetically different looking bears. There were whole sets, but there was this game of trying to complete the set if you wanted to, but then you would take these bears on a text adventure, and as you played the text adventure, you would receive, like, bear parts that had better stacks. So they had a breakout of, you know, their agility, strength, things like that associated with each bear part. So, you were basically leveling up your bear a piece at a time, so that when they would go on these text adventure missions that were rated by difficulty according to the different stacks…yeah, it was neat because the bears also had personalities. So, if you had mostly sad bear parts, your bear, all of a sudden, would be an animated sad bear on your webpage, and they’re fun to gift. So this was all free to play. So, we had people that were children all the way to, like, my parents and other people’s grandparents able to go to this web game. It was on, at the time, what was called Loom Network, which was an Ethereum layer, too, of network, which is no longer around anymore, but it allowed players…because it was so cheap and we could just take care of everything on the backend. We could, you know, run the nodes. It was somewhat centralized. Like, you wouldn’t think of this as a financial network. This was a playful exploration. So, anyway, yeah, it was so cool to have people playing and not cost anything and sending bears across social media. So, you could drop a claim link to a bear on Twitter, and someone could click it, and then to own it, all they would have to do is put in, basically, a username and password, and that bear would be in their inventory, and then we had a gateway where you could send those bears out to Ethereum.

Laura Shin:

Interesting. So, you know, I mean, this is really fun and fascinating. It just sounds, yeah, like a fun thing that anyone could do, but obviously, you’re using blockchain technology for a reason. So what problems exist in gaming that you think blockchain technology can solve?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, from my own gaming experience, I had multiple times through the process of what’s called grinding, which is where you’re playing these games and you’re trying to get to, let’s say, level 20, and once you do, maybe you realize the characters that you were developing along the way aren’t the ones you actually wanted. This is something you would see in World of Warcraft, something like World of Tanks, a lot of open-world games, and that’s frustrating, and you get burned out.

So players go through something called burnout, and I felt like blockchain opened up this opportunity from our experience with crypto puzzles and seeing people feeling incentivized for the treasure hunt, that digital treasure hunt experience, to unlock something valuable. I felt like we were in a place where the actual journey itself could be the process of creating the value, and therefore, when you leave, you’re leaving with that value with you. So, while people would tell me the crypto puzzles, they felt like, well, even though I didn’t win, at least I learned something.

You know, that’s, like, I guess a positive way to look at it, but in this case, you could learn something and also have almost memorabilia. It’s like having swag from the experience. There’s people that have played Neopets, and there’s a game called Neopets, and they talk about how, while, if I still had my Neopet today, that would have such sentimental value to me. So these are basically digital goods, and your game assets being digital goods, and as a space, as a content creator space, we are unlocking, currently, what is possible with digital goods, digital durable goods.

So there’s this time-money investment problem that blockchain games are exploring, and then there’s also, as we’re talking about, that Web2 content and Web3 ownership and trying to close the gap between the two. What we’re finding is we have unlocked, basically, a new type of development ecosystem for creatives, essentially.

So, while we have the financial markets and cryptocurrency for fungible assets, being able to have uniquely identifiable dynamic and now, like, even with interactive, as we’re exploring interactive non-fungible tokens and we’re starting to use programs as NFTs, the space is evolving so rapidly, I guess, that this developer playground and content creator playground that we’re co-developing together is fascinating. So I think, as any content creator could probably speak to the problem of creating something virtual and digital and it not feeling like you’re capturing the value of being able to sell it, historically, and now we’re at a place where artists are just basically flooding into our space because of this new opportunity.

Laura Shin:

Interesting. Yeah. I totally understand that, as a creative myself. So why don’t we then now talk about your company, Blockade Games? What are you doing?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, we’re using the idea of…well, I’ll speak more specifically to Neon District in a second, but when we think of digital goods, I think of how they still require some sort of bridge to interact with them. The game is that tool. So, we’re basically creating a platform in which users can take their assets that they own and have a way to interact with them and develop them, craft them, and bring them into…make them their own, essentially, and so, like, the game is that tool to bridge the gap in my mind between the content creation of Web2 and the ownership of Web3. The blockchain part of the game is actually just the fact that you own these assets. They live on the distributed networks. What we wanted to do with that was create Neon District, which is a cyberpunk role-playing game. Think of Final Fantasy VII, any Final Fantasy game, really, or Zelda. These games are immersive storytelling, very, very rich in storytelling about the hero’s journey, character development. So role-playing game from, if you think of Dungeons & Dragons or a lot of board games where you have a dungeon master that sits at that table with you. There’s an emphasis on story and being immersed. The other part with the games, though, is the art. So even, like, Final Fantasy as RPG really broke the ground as far as beautiful art and games together. So Neon District wanted to tie…since our crypto community seems to resonate really well with cyberpunk and that sci-fi genre, we wanted to make it really rich and beautiful in…if you’ve ever read Snow Crash or New Romancer or like, any of these classic sci-fi books, it has this gritty, edgy feel to it, and it’s very colorful. So, we spent a lot of time actually developing…we have over 10,000 art assets that you can use and craft cyberpunk characters.

You can swap out the different components, like I was talking about Plasma Bears before, where it’s five different NFTs that you compose into the bear. It’s similar with these cyberpunk characters, except they’re much more complex as far as their character class, meaning the types of characters they are and the role they play in your game play. So, we’ve unlocked not only that artistic composing part, which I’m very passionate about just with my own background, but also the ability for player versus player and taking these assets that you own, showing them off against another player.

So what we see on December 15 is, for the first time after three years of development on this game, you will be able to invite another player to play against your own characters, and you’re going to learning how the game mechanics and everything work. There’s a lot to the actual game mechanics of Neon District, such as there’s card games involved, there’s your characters’ attributes, but the most exciting part is it has active animation, it’s active game play, which is pretty big. There’s not very many PVP-active games in blockchain. I don’t actually know if there is one at the moment. They’re usually passive.

Laura Shin:

Okay. Yeah, this sounds really interesting. One thing I was wondering is you talked about kind of like certain complex things that you could do, and I heard an example that you gave on another show about the dungeons. Can you walk us through that and how, you know, that’s kind of like a uniquely crypto thing where…do you know what I’m referring to?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Which part of the dungeons?

Laura Shin:

About how you can create these contracts that people have to sign when they start and then…well, so I’ll just say it. You were saying that, basically, you could design your own dungeon, and you could have some kind of stipulation that, you know, if the other person loses, then they have to forfeit all their assets.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. So, in the future, I imagine that we could do something…

Laura Shin:

Oh, it’s not part of the game now?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Not currently, but it is something that’s on our minds about how we can…for example, right now, you’re going to have the PVP rollout, and then Q1, you’re going to have the campaigns, which is basically, it’s kind of like a dungeon in that way, but it’s player versus computer. So we’ve set up the story. We’ve set up everything you’re going to experience, and the drops, we are basically acting like the dungeon master.

But beyond that, there’s opportunity for players to collect backgrounds, art, different components, land, and pick plots on grounds, establish what would be considered a raid. So, if you’re familiar with World of Warcraft, again, any of these open-world RPGs, set up a raid in which you can create a boss character who could hold the center of your dungeon. You could drop monsters. You can customize and define the experience. You could set the rules, and then you could place bounties.

So, people could see what prizes they have a chance of winning if they go and explore this dungeon, but there could also be stakes placed, such as but if you lose, this is what you’re going to lose, and it would be something where, if you agree to that contract, that asset, whatever you’ve risked, would probably go into escrow. You would play the game, and if you lose, you would lose that asset in escrow. You don’t have to do it that way. You can do it so there’s much less at stake, but the idea that we can do that is pretty fun, and I’m someone that loves the idea of permadeath with these game characters. So, if you tell me that there’s an opportunity to go do something high risk with my game characters that I have maybe crafted and spent a lot of time on, when I lose one, it’s going to be devastating, but when I win, it’s going to be amazing, and I think this is…like, emotionally, you’re going to have to sign something away that says, you know, you’re not going to cause trouble if you lose, but I think the emotional feeling…even when I play…there’s a game called Darkest Dungeon, and it has characters that are almost similar where you send them on dungeon quests like this, and they’re emotional, so they go crazy, and you have to keep them sane and healthy. Otherwise, they start to perform badly in the dungeons, and sometimes they even hurt each other or there’s all these little things about their psychology. But anyway, they die, and when they die, it could’ve been a character that you’ve been taking care of for a long time and you have rehabilitated multiple times. It’s just devastating, and then imagine, because we haven’t done this yet, but I imagine it’s going to have a similar feeling. So, yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity for players to…like I said, the game works as this tool layer for us to give you something that becomes an interactive playfield.

Laura Shin:

And there are some other new behaviors in gaming that I think non-fungible tokens or crypto collectibles are enabling in Neon District. Like, I’ve also heard you talk about farming there. How are you using that?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. So, like, farming with…there’s two different ways that this could happen. One is in-game where you’re actively playing the game, you could be accruing different cryptocurrencies or different NFTs unlocking as a reward for your game play. There’s also the idea of actually…so, recently, I launched a personal creator token called COIN as a way to interact more with my developer community and my content creator community, and if you, for example, were to stake a game character, maybe it’s a high-level game character, and you’re staking it, it could have a chance at having a nice yield on COIN or some of these other…There’s another token called Cred, which is basically the underground, like, street cred currency of my community. So, like, there’s a lot of playfulness that we can have where you can play…because it’s not all locked into one application, we can take these assets and yes, we have an 1155 non-fungible token farm. We have 721 farms. We really just have knobs and levers to pull and play with, as far as giving gamers new opportunities to explore what they can do with their assets.

Laura Shin:

And so just explain the difference between an ERC-721 versus 1155.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So 721 is its own…like, is the contract, whereas the 1155 NFTs all exist within the contract. So they are not uniquely identifiable the same way as a 721 is. Consider 1155 a batch.

Laura Shin:

Oh, okay.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Which is better for developers in a lot of ways for just resource management.

Laura Shin:

Okay, and you’ve also been doing some fun things with NFT farming and sharding, which sort of marries NFT with DeFi. Can you explain how that works?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. So there’s an exchange called NIFTEX Exchange. What it’s being used for is taking things like high-value game assets and high-value art assets, basically anything that’s an NFT that’s considered high value, and the sharding is, basically, it gets sharded into ERC-20. So, the ERC-20 becomes a fractionalized representation of the NFT. What we did was we created a farm where you stake. You can stake COIN, Cred, or if we’re working with a partner, right now it’s RNG, which is Richard Kim from Galaxy Interactive’s community. It’s like a gaming-focused community. Anyway, they’re staking, too, right now, but we switch that out sometimes. Anyway, you take these tokens, and you can stake, and what you’re yielding then is this ERC-20 fractionalized representation of the NFT, and when it’s complete, then what happens is we turn out the Shotgun Clause. The Shotgun Clause means that anyone that now owns one of these shards can make a bid on the entire asset, and what will happen is that will price their shards. So, you know, if I own 10% and I’ve put a 1-ETH bid, then my assets are proportional to that. So if someone wants out…they can either buy my shards from me, off of me, or they can counter my bid, and we’ve seen some of that activity, but what we found is because of the nature of how involved it is, it’s what I would call inventory management with the high…when we were doing the high turnaround of the different farms and the different pieces, that we’re going to focus more in the future, longer farming times with higher value pieces so that it’s really something that people want, which is…I love the concepts, and they’re very cool, but we’re still really early.

So, right now, it’s definitely experimental, but yeah, it’s something to pay attention to because fractionalized ownership of NFTs, if you think about, you know, this in regards to the Mona Lisa or something else, art historically, then…we saw an Axie Infinity asset, one of the Axies. It started out at a 40 ETH valuation prior to being sharded, and then the bidding war for that Axie went on beyond 140 ETH. I don’t even know what it finally settled at, but pretty wild how it became a whale game, essentially.

Laura Shin:

Well, yeah, that’s what I was wondering about. When people can just buy their way into highly skilled players or owning valuable objects or into high levels of play, how does that affect the dynamics and the fun of playing the game, or how do you kind of like account for that in your game design?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Absolutely. So, actually, historically, having open economies in games, it’s something that big game companies stay away from because it’s so hard to do. So if you talk to, let’s say, a Fortnite, Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, it’s not necessarily because they’re not doing blockchain because they don’t believe in the technology. It’s because it’s a very difficult thing to do. So, yes, I think we saw, I think it was Doom 3 that…no, sorry, Diablo III had an open economy, and it destroyed…all the whales bought all the high-valued assets, and then the game was no fun for anybody. So it’s an auction house. It’s something that a lot of people point to when they say this does not work, but if you take something like Magic: The Gathering, for example, which is a lot of the backbone of the Neon District inspiration, is card game meets RPG. So, in Magic: The Gathering, for example, you can have a high-value card, but if you don’t know when to play that card at the right time, it doesn’t really matter that it’s valuable.

I mean, it can be valuable for lots of different reasons, for the art, for the edition that it was a part of historically, that it was owned by a pro player at one point and won in a certain tournament. So there’s different reasons why something can be valuable, and then when to play the…basically, imagine a sledgehammer, and you know a sledgehammer’s going to be very powerful and decimate your opponent, okay, but let’s say what you actually need is a screwdriver, a certain type of screwdriver, and you have to use it at a precise moment.

Now, that is a lot harder, and you have to be smart and thinking ahead and have the ability to use that asset at the right time. That’s the difference in how you design the game. It’s called the wide game design versus a vertical game design. So, the vertical game design is basically a power ladder to become the most powerful, whereas the power’s distributed in the Neon District across a wide…it’s a wide design.

Laura Shin:

Okay. Yeah. So I guess even if you could buy some of the fancy players or objects or whatever, if you don’t use it well, then you’re just going to have wasted your money because you’ll lose it right away?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yeah. Well, you won’t understand how to use it, and you won’t be able to recognize…it’s the strategy and the mechanics of the game. It’s like chess, right? It’s basically like chess on steroids, is how strategic the game is.

Laura Shin:

Okay. All right. So, in a moment, we’re going to talk a little bit more about how games can use blockchain technology and also turn to more on how all this can affect creators, but first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. 

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Laura Shin:

Back to my conversation with Marguerite deCourcelle. So, one other thing that I’ve heard you mention about how watching technology could be used in video games is for big decentralized profiles. What does that mean in gaming? Like, why would a decentralized profile be so powerful?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, this is something that actual game companies are really interested in. I know firsthand that, for example, Epic Games has slots that…they basically have slots for different user identities that they’re place-holding right now, and so this distributed network of decentralized identities, taking that off of the game companies as far as being in charge, or like, being responsible for user identity is a big deal.

It means that we can allow players to opt into things they want to be targeted for that’s outside of the game company, and the game companies could pay attention to that information that users are sharing, and so, for privacy reasons, this allows us to interact better with our users that want us to interact with them. So, if I am a tester and type of gamer, I’m playing these games. I’m sharing this information. I’m a social influencer. I can select that I’m a social influencer. I could put in and verify across my different social influencing accounts. Game companies can see this information. They can see what I like to do, what I’m playing with. With blockchain assets, if I’m sharing that information, you can see what types of assets they have. Game companies can target you as a user and give you other opportunities, almost as gifts won. It allows us to find our users better or different types of users better, and it allows us to…yeah, so those are the different reasons why decentralized identities are exciting and profiles are exciting.

Laura Shin:

So are you trying to angle Neon District or any game that you create through Blockade Games toward crypto people, or are you trying to draw in regular gamers who would then have to be introduced to some of these new blockchain-enabled concepts, like NFTs and farming, and if so, then how do you introduce those concepts to them?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, originally, the vision was to just drop a game to the mainstream market and let them uncover that it was a blockchain game, but what we’ve since actually decided to do, since we developed such a core crypto community, is we are going to use that audience, first and foremost, as we basically iterate on top.

So, instead of waiting for the entire game to be done with all the features, which would be needed for a public release for mainstream gamers, you would need to have all their normal things they would expect in a game. With the cryptocurrency gaming community, we can actually release earlier. So, we’re releasing early, and we’re going to be adding those features as we go, but off of what our users want. So, the goal is to still end with a game that the mainstream user doesn’t need to realize that it’s a blockchain game, but we’re going to go ahead and start with our cryptocurrency community that we’ve already cultivated.

Laura Shin:

But for just a regular gamer, do you feel like there will be a learning curve for them? Like, oh, now I can sell this valuable sword that I earned. Do you know what I mean? Or do you think it’ll just be pretty natural and easy for them to get those concepts?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

For right now, for this next year at least, there is going to definitely be a learning curve. There’s going to be this whole…you know, we need to have the magical moment that happens for users to be like, that might…if you can think back to the first time you sent a bitcoin, right, to somebody else, and maybe you actually paid for something with it a long time ago, and you’re like, what did I just do? We need that same experience for the gamers with this content. So, being able to have this sword and sell it, and now you have your first cryptocurrency, and maybe you actually didn’t spend any money to get it. Maybe it was literally just your skillset that allowed you to cultivate and craft this piece. Maybe it’s a sword, and you go and you sell it. So, in Neon District, we can cover your backend transactions, so we can get you to the Ethereum mainnet since we’re on a Layer 2 solution at the moment, without you actually having to have cryptocurrency.

But maybe you have to, you know, cover something for the transaction. It can also be your in-game currency that you have accumulated along the way. So, you make this transfer to Ethereum, and now that marketplace will prompt you to have your MetaMask wallet or whatever wallet you’d like, so that whole onboarding marketplace process, at least for this year one…year two, we’ll love to have our own marketplace enabled and people then just trade directly from the application itself, but regardless, my point is the magic moment of being able to trade that asset that maybe you never put any money into, other than your gaming skill and your time, and get your first cryptocurrency, and if that’s the way you get your first cryptocurrency, I think that’s going to be such a hook for people to understand these economies we’re creating.

Laura Shin:

Well, so, you mentioned that you’re on a Layer 2 network for Ethereum, and that was something I was going to ask you because, obviously, one of the biggest problems in crypto, sort of generally, but especially in Ethereum right now and in particular for, you know, these smart contract type transactions, is the scaling issue, you know, bumping up against the throughput on some of these chains. So, what blockchain are you using, and is it something where, if your game takes off, even as much as CryptoKitties probably could have done…you know, because it was limited by Ethereum, it didn’t really grow as much as people thought, but if it were to take off as much as CryptoKitties might have, then will your blockchain that you’re currently on be able to handle that?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, I was actually just talking to Ben, Blockade’s CTO, this morning, and exploring about, like, okay, so what if we hit a million users, a million daily users, like, what would it look like? And you’re still going to have scaling problems. This is not a magic solution, though it’s optimized so that 7000 transactions per second for the Matic network, which is what we’ve landed on, and it’s also…there’s still the opportunity, though, with…as I’m sure you’ve been following with Ethereum 2, with optimistic rollups and how successful those are. So if we hit a place where we start to bottleneck because of transaction scalability, we can explore doing it in something like a rollup, as well, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen in the immediate future. So, with the 7000 transactions per second that we’ll have on Matic, we have the ability to have a pretty robust, vibrant game with awesome users.

Laura Shin:

And why did you select Matic? You said also that it was very easy to connect to Ethereum. So how does that work?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. So, both Matic has their gateways. We have gateways to Ethereum. It’s very cheap. It’s something like 1/10,000th the cost of making a transaction on Matic than it is Ethereum. They match their addresses. So, your Ethereum and Matic address are the same, and it’s 100% EVM compatible. So, if you’re an Ethereum developer and you wanted to build on Ethereum and you feel like you’re somehow being bottlenecked because of Ethereum or it’s too expensive or the user experience isn’t really what you really wanted it to be, Matic was a solution for us to get all those things we wanted and still have all the benefits of Ethereum, essentially. So, it works right now as a Layer 2, which, in my mind, it’s probably the most successful Layer 2 currently.

Laura Shin:

And how does having these different blockchain technologies in the game affect the business model of Blockade Games as opposed to a traditional gaming company?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, we can take cuts from the secondary sales across as these assets’ trade over time. There is, you know, the question of, yes, we’re not a walled garden where we’re going to be reaping the benefits of the rewards and all the sales, but that’s also, like we were talking about the new content that…this new developer ecosystem where, when you build very robust communities that are rich, and so, in our case, it’s going to be rich in story, art.

And also just the experience, what happens is developers come and build supporting, basically, experiences for these assets, and they do this because there’s, one, a lot of these indie game developers are very highly experimental, and they’re not doing it, necessarily, for the money. They’re doing it just to see what happens and because it’s fun, and here’s a community they can interact with that’s established, and maybe they really resonate with the genre.

So that open developer ecosystem that this unlocks is something that hasn’t really been explored yet. You can look at examples like Minecraft and other games that have developer ecosystems, but in this way, like, if, let’s say, I’m a developer and I have collected a whole bunch of a certain type of asset, I can build an experience around that so now, all of a sudden, those assets are more valuable.

We saw that with CryptoKitties where they took a certain type of cat. Some developers took a certain type of cat. They filed a whole bunch of them, and they created a game, a racing cat game, just for those cats, and so then the Dapper Labs team was like, wow, what just happened? Why are these cats so expensive? And so, like, there’s just a lot of opportunity for people, when they own these assets, to explore new business models themselves.

The business models that are spinning up all over the place around content from just being an artist, so things that don’t even have the utility at all, just from brand recognition and content creator recognition, assets are selling. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to people like BEEPLE. He’s a pretty famous artist. His work is selling like crazy. He’s a traditional concept artist. Definitely worth checking him out. There’s the musician, the indie musician RAC, and he’s teamed up with other…so, since he’s doing the audio, he’s teamed up with other content creators, like the visual side, and they’re selling these NFTs that, once again, they don’t have utility. They’re just collectibles. So when you think of game assets as actually being something that’s a utility that are playful, like, I would like to argue that I think it’s going to be a stronger and more defensible ecosystem at large than what people anticipate.

Laura Shin:

And so this isn’t, like, super germane to the crypto audience, but I am so curious, do you think that traditional gaming companies will be disrupted by this technology, or do you think that they are just going to end up taking advantage of it and incorporating it into their existing games?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

I think that users are going to really enjoy the idea of asset ownership, and when they start to realize they can have business models themselves around games that they interact with…so if I am a Twitch streamer and people are dropping me game assets that now I own and my audience is also participating and I’m being gifted assets to give to my audience, my streaming audience, and as I interact with these assets, they become more valuable. So now people are buying them from me for a much higher price just because I played with them and they’re my fans. That whole business is going to be something hard to pull people away from, especially as we see this…I mean, streamers and content creators are really taking off all on its own. So, you add that additional Web3 ownership component to it, and it’s going to be…I think we’re just going to have so many fun, creative, indie developers coming over and collaborating with these content creators, that game companies will have to come up with some sort of strategy, and it might not be blockchain, but it might be something that feels or looks like blockchain, some sort of user experience that mimics it to keep people interested in staying over where they are, but yeah, when people are making money and becoming more successful for doing exactly what they already were doing already, yeah, that’s where I see the blockchain space really taking off.

Laura Shin:

Yeah, it’s something that I’m really excited about, and you’re actually already taking advantage of this a little bit. You know, you’re an artist, or more generally, a creative person, and that’s a group of entrepreneurs that traditionally have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to traditional content distribution models. So, what problems in content creation business models do you think blockchain technology could solve, and how are you already kind of trying to do that with your social token COIN?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. Right. So, actually, like you were talking about, when I first got into this space as an artist, man, I was shipping artwork around the world, paying for shipping it, competing to get into these galleries, which would then take 50% of the cut of my art. It was not enough for it to be a viable, like, livelihood where I could support myself. As we’re seeing artists come into our space and support themselves…and granted, it’s going to, I’m sure, get harder to be seen or recognized as it becomes more populated.

But the fact that we have the tools and people to capture the value of direct sales like this to consumers right across the internet and these assets and asset ownership, that to me was so powerful, and we’re just seeing these artists and the artists’ markets really take off. It was funny to me because I feel like this was something that was apparent a few years ago, but somehow, the wider cryptocurrency and Ethereum communities, they almost had, like, blinders onto it, but now it’s actually becoming mainstream popular and cool.

So there’s a coolness factor that’s happening, too, but so, anyway, the social token or the creator token with COIN, I’ve built a fan base since the beginning with doing the crypto puzzles, and you know, I tend to…people call me a people collector because I find talent, and I pull them in, and I keep them close, and so I have a lot of artists, a lot of developers that I think are awesome, and from there, they bring in others that we all think are awesome.

So, because it’s like a big family, essentially, and we called…so my token COIN is actually a part of what we call Coin’s E-Den, and it’s a syndicate within Neon District. So I have declared myself the boss of the syndicate, and I established the token economics so that I was the boss. I am the largest holder of the token, and I get to say what happens at the end of the day, and then there’s this whole hierarchy of the syndicate, and you can work your way up through, like, having more COIN to have different roles. And those roles, we will apply different functions as Neon District evolves, the game, but the idea is that we potentially will have multiple syndicates, and people could come in and stake a syndicate, and there’s something called Collab.Land which interacts with Discord. So it reads the tokens that are in my wallet, my COIN, or it could read any of the tokens I have, but in this case, in my Discord, it’s COIN, and people are automated into these different roles that are private. So, they’re not accessible to anyone that’s not basically a part of the syndicate. This is the community I go to when I’m doing something crazy, like I want to start a new farm and these are the mechanics I’m thinking of. I just, you know, very rawly drop those ideas to these folks, and we brainstorm. We all decide what makes sense, doesn’t make sense for our community at large, and from there, I’m actually able to take COIN, and for developers, like, there’s this project called BeyondNFT, which is a project focusing on developing interactive NFTs, which I’m really excited about.

So we will support that development with COIN. The idea is that, as we just target where our funding goes, we bring that value directly back into the community by interacting and playing with it. So, for example, we just made…on the side of Neon District development, I got really into chess. I’ve always loved chess, but The Queen’s Gambit happened, and it clicked to me that this is a perfect game for the Ethereum ecosystem to play with as far as being able to make chess pieces, defining…since now NFT support web files are 3D objects.

So we make these 3D objects. We set, basically, what was needed, the specifications of those chess pieces for an artist. Then we also set the specifications, what would be needed for a chess web game. We put bounties on that game development. We are actively developing chess pieces. Other people now are sending me messages of the chess pieces they’re developing, and this idea that we can have chess wars with different assets from boards that could also be NFTs, environments that could be NFTs, different types and variations of chess games. Anyway, going on a tangent here, but talking about, I guess, cultivating interesting activities where developers can shine, content creators can shine, artists can make now, basically, these 3D sculptures and you know, paint them, texturize them however they like, and it has immediate utility. So, I was talking about before how, you know, all this high-end value art is selling, but there’s no utility.

But when we make things that universally have utility, it adds this playfulness that allows us all to interact with each other, which, anybody in the space knows that we are obsessed with our community. Like, across Crypto Twitter, even just the developer space, content creator space, we’re very social. So bridging that social into some sort of fun game play is going to be really neat. Anyway, Laura, I don’t want to keep rambling.

Laura Shin:

Well, one thing that wasn’t clear to me, so when people buy these different 3D chess pieces and stuff, then where do they use them? Is it just a specific blockchain chess game that they can use them in, or can they take them…yeah, how does that work?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, basically, any developer that supports the files, the objects, and designs a version of the game, all of them are supported in these various games. So, yeah, there’s a lot of…we put bounties for that development. We have, I know, two groups that are actively developing games currently, and how they monetize it, that can go a few different ways. They can issue their own chess pieces as part of it, or they can also, like, maybe take a fee for when two people decide to go PVP.

Laura Shin:

Okay, and so, just to go back to COIN, what is it that people do with COIN, and how do they earn it, or how did you release it? I mean, you did talk a little bit earlier about how that’s then connected to yet another coin called Cred, but if you could just go over again what the difference is between the two and how people earn these?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So the reason I launched COIN was, actually, earlier this year when COVID hit, we had been fundraising for about six months, and it became apparent that it was going to become a different landscape for fundraising for a while, and we didn’t know how long. So, actually, Blockade, really, we got lean, and we started bootstrapping from that point forward to get to, actually, where we are right now with our launch date, but in the meantime, we decided, okay, we need to really lean on our developer friends, our community, our fans to help us get over the finish line.

So, launching COIN was a way to bridge, again…so I had I guess previously been straight out of the community. My projects had always been just collaborative with the community side by side. When we launched Blockade, it became this separation, and I felt it, and I actually didn’t like it for, you know, two and a half years, just almost like this wall of I can’t really interact with my people anymore in the same way because now there’s just this weird dynamic about, well, I’m not hired for Blockade, and there’s this different conversation. So, COIN allowed me, as my individual self, not being under Blockade, to reconnect with my user base, and what I did was I, myself, what I said was…so you have to roll with this story because it is just basically abstract, but I minted an NFT representation of, basically, my brand identity, and then fractionalized it, so sharded it into ERC-20s. So, from there, we distributed to everyone that was a long-time holder of…so a Trophy Holder, which is, people that have historically solved my puzzles across the years, they have something that’s called a Trophy, to a key, a founder’s key, a Neon District founder’s key. So, we had some distribution in that regard, and then I sold crypto puzzles. I made a series of crypto puzzles that you had to own the crypto puzzle in order to have access to the experience and to solve it, and then it had a pretty large bounty of COIN associated with it. From those sales, I actually took the Ethereum, and I seeded the Ethereum and COIN pair on Uniswap, and we started out low. It was actually 10 cents a COIN when we launched the market at that price, and then the market naturally just went up to 30 cents a COIN, and from there, it has fluctuated quite a bit, but I guess the exciting part about that is it’s now allowing the success of everything we’re doing, what the community does, what I do, if Blockade will accept COIN. It becomes this, like, ecosystem where everybody can share a little bit more directly in the success of things we’re involved in.

And when we decided to basically incubate different projects, and they want to stay a part of the ecosystem, that value comes back to us. So, with the cyberpunk genre intersection that I sit at with Neon District, in this past year with COIN, I’ve actually been connecting with a lot of cyberpunk type content creators, both audio, like in music styles that are associated, like Synthwave, different art styles like that and we’ve actually made now a more robust cyberpunk community of these types of content creators who have accepted COIN, who now want to work for COIN, and also just have found different people, I guess, that we resonate more closely together as content creators. All of this I see as a major win as we’re rolling out Neon District, because the idea of Neon District is to have a very rich developer and content creator community around it so that we can explore all these…and keep playing and being experimental about what is possible with NFTs.

Laura Shin:

And you also have something called Coin Artist Liquidity Mining, which translates to CALM. What is that, and how does that work?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

So, in order to keep our…basically, so there’s enough liquidity for us to basically sell, if we need to, some COIN to pay for development for, you know, one of the projects we want to support. We are allowing people that want to support the community and efforts, basically, they become a liquidity provider by providing Ethereum and COIN to the Uniswap people, the pair, and then they receive what’s called a Liquidity Provider Token. That’s proof that they did this.

They bring this over to CoinArtist.io, where we have the liquidity mining initiative. So, you stake that token, and then what you’re earning back is a percentage over time of COIN and also a bonus token called Cred. So, Cred is this currency that basically is proof that you have contributed to the viability of the COIN ecosystem, and what we do with Cred is, across our different stores, such as the chess store, such as Neon District assets, basically, Cred holders can just place an offer in Cred and we generally will just accept it. We’ll also have limited opportunities with Cred. So, for example, there’s an asset called the Death Knight that is one of the most prized set possessions in Neon District, as they are the cyberpunk outfit for this character, and there’s a blade that’s coming out, the Death Knight blade. So, there’s a few people, myself included, that have worked really hard to complete that set. There’s not very many of them.

There’s only 25. There’s going to be 25 of these blades, and we’re talking about allowing there to be an auction using Cred as the way in which you can…so one will be, like, the loop box option to get, which is a random chance of getting this blade, but then also an opportunity for Cred holders to have the opportunity to make bids on the blade, and the only reason you would have Cred…it’s not listed anywhere. The only way you could get it is from being, you know, someone that has helped the ecosystem through the liquidity mining. And yeah, so there’s a lot of ways with both the game company through other exploratory projects we do that we can really, I guess, honor the Cred holders, and not only that, but Cred holders are actually bartering Cred with each other now with assets, which is pretty cool. So it has what I referenced before, it becoming the underground currency. It is, like, the next-level cool currency. Give you a Cred holder, it’s almost like, you know, you’re one of us.

Laura Shin:

I love it, I love it, the in-group. So I was so curious. I mean, you kind of talked about, yeah, just your role as a creator of the games, but then also your individual persona or just your individuals relationships, frankly, in the crypto community, and I wondered, so when you switched from doing the games to offering this token, what was the reaction to that?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

You mean alongside doing the games?

Laura Shin:

Well, not switched. Yeah, but you know, when you introduced this new social token, what was the reaction to that?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

A lot of people were excited…well, so I was exploring with the whole social influencer space in general because I personally don’t really want to be a social…that’s a lot of work to be a social influencer, and I don’t really want to be one, but what I see is that there’s such an opportunity for new businesses there, business models around having a creator token, social token, and being a social influencer. So, the reaction was excitement, really. I would say that I had a lot of positive reactions. I think, if anything, I get in trouble sometimes when I push things too far. Like, you know, if there’s a red button, I’m probably going to push it sometimes, and there was a case of people just getting really grumpy on Crypto Twitter about girls taking selfies and then tokenizing them or taking pictures of themselves. I just thought it was silly. So, anyway, I had fun and did my natural trolling with that where I would make it and still sell it, and there’s a fine line there. There’s a lot we discussed in that area, but social influence and what it should be seen as and how it should be marketed, you know, that’s a space that will be explored, but anyway…sorry, I wanted to talk about…so the social influencer piece, though, I’ve taken that idea next level where taking it off of me so much as being at the center and looking at people like Alex Botez, who actually is co-owner of the chess store Git-Pwned, which is basically where we’re minting these chess pieces from on Open C.

Laura Shin:

She’s a very accomplished chess player.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes, and she is incredibly talented both at chess and actually, also in engaging and entertaining. She has a dynamic with her sister. They’re both influencers. They’re both gamers, and then they also do these intense chess matches, and she’s a great educator. So what people don’t understand with a lot of these social influencers is that they are, like, educators, entertainers, just all these things all at once. Her being able to give these chess pieces to her audience as a gift, us figuring out how do we do that?

How do we bridge this gap with people that may not have a MetaMask wallet? So we’re exploring those ideas, but also, when she could actually play against other people with these 3D objects, when we have the games developed and we can do giveaways afterwards with these pieces that were played with, we’re going to be starting to really explore some of the ideas I’m very excited about, and I think is the future.

And I love that I was given this opportunity to work with her. I actually…it was funny because I was a fan of hers, and then I found out that Alex Atella, who’s the CTO of Open C, and her went to school together at Stanford. So we were able to close that gap really fast as far as, like, let’s do this crazy idea, and just I couldn’t be more happy that she’s been willing to explore it with us.

Laura Shin:

Great. All right. Well, this has been super fun. Where can people learn more about you, Blockade Games, Neon District, COIN, CALM, Cred, and anything else you’re working on?

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Yes. So things that are related to COIN are CoinArtist.io, is the site, and it has a sidebar, and it has information there. My Twitter, Coin_Artist, is probably where I’m most active. The Neon District account is neondistrictRPG. That’s the Twitter account. In the bio there, there’s the link to the Discord. The Discord is where we do all of our community interactions, and that’s where Coin’s E-Den lives, as well. So, if you ever become a COIN holder, you’ll have access then to the private syndicate, as long as you have five COIN. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it. The game is coming out…the first phase of the game is December 15th, and that will be targeted…the first pass will be for Trophy Holders and Key holders, and from there, we will keep releasing invitations to folks that want to come play.

Laura Shin:

Perfect. That is the day that this show comes out. So, yeah, I think people will be excited to play. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on Unchained.

Marguerite deCourcelle:

Thank you so much, Laura.

Laura Shin:

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Marguerite, Blockade Games, Neon District, and more, check out the show notes for this episode. Don’t forget, you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel. Go to YouTube.com/C/UnchainedPodcast and subscribe today. Unchained is produced by me Laura Shin with help from Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss, Bossi Baker, Shashank, and the team at CLK Transcription. Thanks for listening.