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The Wolf Of All Streets
This Web3 Gaming Platform Set To Onboard 3 Billion Players – And It Pays To Win | Tom Kopera
00:24:32
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- [00:00]
Tom Kopera
See you at the Pengu Clash Arena.
- [00:02]
Scott
I feel like 2021 again. It's exciting. 5.5 million plus gameplays hosted 350k on chain tournaments 50k daily active users, 500 plus game developers, 40 games adding cinematic IPs, sports brands, celebrities, top NFT collections Deepin Network building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes, AI gaming launching AI agents for competitive play at tournament hosting and game launchpad Offering early investment opportunities in new games. Crypto gaming is back and better than ever. I spoke with Tom Kopera, the CEO and founder of Elympics, a platform with major brand partnerships that's reinventing the way that people win. To earn crypto. You can check out this platform, you can play a number of games with some of the largest brands in crypto and beyond, like Pudgy Penguins and you can actually earn crypto. The tokenomics are solid, the interest is there and this is poised to lead the revolution in Web3 gaming. You have to listen to this. Sponsored interview. That's dope. Tom. We're here to talk about obviously, which is a project that you've been building some absolutely incredible games, already built some amazing partners and to be totally transparent, I was going to review it, which is totally out of my nature. They sent me the site and I said what am I supposed to review? Can't I just talk to the guys who built this like I usually do and let them break it down for you? So invited you on so you could do it yourself.
- [01:51]
Tom Kopera
Makes sense 100%. I'm ready for it, you know, happy to do it.
- [01:55]
Scott
All right Tom, so listen, I've got the sites here. Can you give us the tldr? What is Olympics? Why does it matter? Why are you building this?
- [02:03]
Tom Kopera
Yeah, so you can think of Olympics as a multi chain entertainment layer that is actually bringing together developers, players and big brands and IPs under the umbrella of competitive gaming that we call Play to win. Why it matters is because it's a completely new way of entertainment that is sitting in the intersection of gaming and blockchain and it's actually supercharging and enhancing both. It's resolving problems on the monetization side, bringing a major use case for blockchain in web3 gaming as well. So you know, this is something that is actually bringing the first, for the first time, the truly multi chain games to the table, being populated across social messaging platforms and super apps.
- [02:44]
Scott
So we've had play to earn. This is different.
- [02:49]
Tom Kopera
This is much different. Always much different. How it's different. Yeah. So you know, with Play to Earn, the problem was I remember myself 2020, that's where we started the journey. And people were like pitching me Play to Earn. I was like, all right, it sounds cool, it's flashy, but it's not sustainable. And that's the main problem, like printing tokens and incentivizing people for attention and kind of being engaged the game this way. Inflating the token is not sustainable. In the case of Playtoin, this is a model that is real, that is actually bringing real revenues to real people, by real people. So all it works is like I and she's got now in the Pengu Clash competition. Penguin Clash is a game built page. Penguin is now infra. Right. So we can have like a little, I don't know, $10 entry fee. Like you pay that, I pay that. We have $20 prize pool. Whoever wins wins it. All right? So that's one of these examples. And then the whole monetization happens based on real money that's paid into the gameplays, right? And then it's distributed. The rewards are distributed to the developers like little cut out of the prize pool. The majority of the price will go to the winner. Right. They split on chain. Absolutely. Instantly, very transparently and verifiably on chain. And this is like new monetization model that is. That is real, that is sustainable, that is there to stay.
- [03:57]
Scott
I like that. You have to win, right? You don't just get paid the same to play. You don't just get paid to participate. You have to actually go in there and get good. So you're incentivizing people to spend more time improving their skills to make sure that they actually earn. That's what I'm assuming.
- [04:15]
Tom Kopera
That's it. That's absolutely truth. Obviously, in all sorts of different ways we are incentivizing people that have keeping playing. Let's say there are in game currencies different items. So you have opportunities also if you don't win. But it's always good to win because then you have most out of the competition. Right?
- [04:33]
Scott
What's the most popular game? Is it Pengu Clash? Clash of Orbs. I've got them all right here. Clash of Orbs, Penguin Clash, Cut to zero. Sweet Rush. You've got a lot and some pretty incredible partners here.
- [04:46]
Tom Kopera
Yeah, it's a lot of them. That's true. At the early stages of the infrastructure, we were testing more of an arcade type of the games, hyper casual games. And Sweet Rush was very popular at some point. I mean, still is but now obviously it's outperformed by Pango Clash and is the power of a very strong idea. You see what's happening on the market right now. Patrick's awareness is growing and also, you know, game is growing too. But we do have a lineup of multiple different IPs. Like doodles are coming already announced a couple of days ago. The game there is like Flappy Bird. There are some undisclosed Hollywood based IPs. Like one of our advisors is actually. Yeah, he used to be head of gaming at Disney, you know, so he's bringing a lot of IPs to the network. You know, all these announcements will be done across two weeks. But there's like a huge lineup of strong IPs.
- [05:34]
Scott
Yeah, I can see that. So what does it look like when you do a partnership with people like this? As you mentioned, everybody now knows Pudgy Penguins, right? They kind of were the outstanding winner of I think the entire last cycle. Toys in Walmart token goes up. NFTs are up. Everybody loves the Pudgy Penguins. Do you approach them and say hey, we want to build a game for you or do they come to you? Do you know them? I'm just wondering what the mechanics are of doing all of these partnerships, you know.
- [06:00]
Tom Kopera
So it's always like when someone has a brand, there are a couple of ways, like what to do with the brand. First of all, you care about proliferating the brand across multiple different channels being chains, you know, platforms. So there was an opportunity for paddies to tap into the telegram user base like a billion plus monthly active users. So that was the opportunity. And since we are very closely collaborating with Ton foundation and then we presented some ideas how we can convert a brand into the play to win world. And then it clicked. Right. So that's how we did it. Overall I would say, you know, speaking to these like Hollywood IPs, they all want, you know, the same thing. They want to cross pollinate the brand across multiple different environments. They want to monetize it too. And you know, the value proposition that we're bringing is like very straightforward. Not only we bring these opportunities to them and getting this distribution, but also we kind of bring these studio that are building games for them. So we're building the entire ecosystem where everything is built in our infrastructure.
- [06:58]
Scott
Talk about the infrastructure more. How is this built? How do you make it easy for them to basically be onboarded and launch something without spending months and months and months of development?
- [07:09]
Tom Kopera
Yeah. So here's the thing to understand at its roots, the games I'M talking about these are like real time multiplayer games, which is something that is very exciting, very engaging and at the same time very difficult to build. So if you imagine for a while you're like a small game, that studio, three people only if someone tasks you with building multiplayer game, you'd never do that. We just say, oh no, no, I'm not going to even tackle that. So what we do with our infrastructure is that we abstract away like all the complexity being like multiplayer networking, security, anti fraud systems, hosting, everything that is difficult there is done by our SDK that breaks it down in a value proposition that any developer on planet earth can easily build such a game. We're talking about like a couple of weeks in building and then the same goes for blockchain. So what blockchain brings to the table is like instant access to distribution of funds across these compet and then developers not having any idea on smart contracts can easily build it with our SDK. So basically end of the day we bridge like 2 million game developers across like from web 2 across to the web 3 world. So it's like a massive building power of people that can now build blockchainable games without prior experience and knowledge about it.
- [08:21]
Scott
So obviously there's a token associated. We saw, I think, a full cycle of people trying things with tokens that were either the first iterations or largely unsuccessful. Now you obviously find it to be the right time to do this and to launch a token and to have that token be at the core of the ecosystem. So tell me first about the token, how value accrues, why it's different and then why the timing now in your mind is good. Because there's always the market, I think, to consider as to when you're going to launch.
- [08:54]
Tom Kopera
We've been thinking on launching the token even earlier on. Right. We needed to accomplish a couple of things and actually timing naturally aligned into the fact that Ethereum is breaking out. And then we have this positive vibe on the market. Looking forward, I believe Q4 will be very, very strong. A lot of founders are preparing launches at timing as well. So I believe this timing is a very perfect fit, is the beginning of the wave that is coming. So it's good to be here. It feels good, right? And then at the same time, how are tokens different? Let's start with the understanding what happened in web3 gaming tokens. Most of them were just tokens to incentivize players and just hyperinflationary tokens. It could have been done, right? It's just we need to forget about it. We are completely different. We are infrastructure tokens. So think of us more like blockchain layer. Let's say first of all the token is facilitating all the operations on the network. So anything that happens, like any match, it's always like token is involved in multiple different, different ways. Like either the fact that developer needed to stake the token for the game to even provide operability, hosting, security, etc. So they can rent all of that by staking the token. Node operators that participate in the network need to stake as well. But also we are sitting on the real revenue like percentage of every single transaction on the network. We use it to the buybacks, we're distributing that to the community as well. There are token gating features and then token is also like a kind of internal currency of value exchange between node operators and game developers. So there are a lot of use cases in our white paper on NPX AI, you can read it all. But yeah, there's like a lot of different value accrual mechanics.
- [10:34]
Scott
So as you become more popular and there are more games, how does that value directly accrue to the token and benefit token holders? Because at the end of the day that's what people want, right? They want to know that like investing in a company in the stock market, you see what their profit is and you get a piece of that. I think a lot of people's criticism of tokens, as you kind of put it at the beginning, was that that didn't really happen. There's the token and there's the project and there's the people and they weren't necessarily all connected.
- [11:05]
Tom Kopera
I'll be like very short this time. So the more games, the more demand the perspective of developers need to buy the token, stake it to even deploy the game itself. The more game success is having, the more token is needed. But then on the other side, the more players, right? The more transactions. More transactions, there is more revenue. More revenue, there is more buybacks. So this is like you know, flywheel here.
- [11:27]
Scott
Yeah, that, that makes perfect sense. So I'm reading some of your numbers. 5.5 million plus gameplays hosted 350k on chain tournaments, 50k daily active users, 500 plus game developers, 40 games, 30 studios. So this is already extremely active and popular even without the token having launched.
- [11:50]
Tom Kopera
That's correct. That was our philosophy. We wanted to deliver on a business side first. And we consider this point in like a really like a starting point. Frankly speaking, we've been building this project for three years like a very concentrated Very focused, very heavy bet on the vision that was not very popular 2022among the playthrough and hype and metaverse hype. We already envisioned how the future is going to kind of converge between gaming and blockchain. Now it's happening and we are feeling like we're meeting this core gaming infrastructure for this new wave. And then we're going to expand from that to multiple different chains, different platforms. We're going to integrate like Coinbase Wallet pretty soon as the new kind of venue for games and that's going to grow exponentially because we're infra, we stuck up all the time. So in a sense we had a feature Apple, let's say pay as a fiat on ramp. It means that all the games are equipped all at once. All these four games that you mentioned, all at once are equipped with this feature. We have a chain. All four games can be immediately in the different chain. Right. So it's like a huge power and it's growing and stacking up.
- [12:52]
Scott
Yeah, I clicked through it. Obviously as you can see here, when you click on these games, it doesn't really seem like you need to be a crypto native to just go play the games. I mean when you click on Penguin Clash it obviously takes you to telegram. But I don't need to go through multiple, from what I saw, multiple complicated steps of wallets and seed phrases and stuff to simply go play the game. So what will that look like when the token is integrated into it? Do you think that this will be simple enough for any average person for grandma to play it without being totally down the crypto rabbit hole?
- [13:26]
Tom Kopera
Absolutely. Because as a matter of fact, we are not going to plan to use our token as any kind of token. That is payment means by players into the competitions. We lever existing tokens, especially ecosystem tokens. So let's say when you are entering Pango Clash you have a choice. You can just play casually, just train the game. You can now play with in game currency, we call it fish. So basically you can earn that currency by progressing within the game. There's no money involved, no tokens involved. It's just the in game currency, like a soft one. And then if you decide to go for like a tokenized rewards. So basically you want to go and play for tokens participating within these competitions with entry fees that are covered in tokens. You need to have tom token for example for telegram or for other chains, you know, other tokens. And then even if you are not crypto native, you can fiat owner from Apple Pay. Right. If you are, then you just connect your wallet. So there are like multiple different steps in this onboarding process and the first one is absolutely not, hey, create a wallet because otherwise we're going to throw you off.
- [14:30]
Scott
I want to know from a builder's perspective, you talked about starting this in 2022 basically. Right. And that was just, I guess after the hype wave kind of ended, as you mentioned. So what gave you the conviction to build throughout the entirety of the bear market and to believe that you could be successful with this model when so many people were failing or collapsing or really just giving up? Right. A lot. We saw a lot of great ideas actually die a few years ago because people didn't want to wait three years to be able to build and launch and see the fruits of their labor.
- [15:05]
Tom Kopera
Yeah, yeah. I think by nature, myself and other core contributors at our protocol, we're all these type of people that are very consistent and rejection is just a fuel. Right. Obviously the idea you're building towards needs to have some merits and it just needs to have some reasonable ground. And I think what helped is that the background of people are contributing to Olympics is a combination of Web3 and Web2 venture building. A lot of startups built out and exited. So I think the added value is we started to among the Hype 2022, we looked at everything from the perspective of a bet, saying that it's going to be more and more rational, so to say, if I may say so, more kind of revenue driven sector. So we started to ask, I guess probably different questions than many people at that stage. And so we got different answers. Right. And we're not discouraged by people living in like short time periods of little hypes for a week or a couple of weeks or a couple of months and just, you know, evaluating the reality through the lenses of a very short term. So, you know, the more you build it, the more you see the results. The more people are helping you, the more people understand you. So it got easier and easier and easier, I would say, I mean easier. It's a lot of work all the time, don't get me wrong. But that's how we build a conviction around something big. And that's how I learned personally that, you know, timing is everything and to time something properly, it doesn't mean like, oh, I spot the opportunity when everyone else is spotting it. It just need to be ahead, like, you know, maybe a few years.
- [16:45]
Scott
Yeah. So I'm looking at future plans. So you mentioned new blockchains expanding To Ton Base 4 Top 50 chains in 2025 Big IPs adding cinematic IPs Sports brands, celebrities, top NFT collections. Deepin Network building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes. AI gaming Launching AI agents for competitive play, tournament hosting and games. Launchpad offering early investment opportunities in new games. I think it's fair to say you have a lot of big plans in the next year beyond just launching.
- [17:16]
Tom Kopera
Scott, I can surprise you with the answer. It's all going to happen. It's all going to happen because we had these kind of plans every year, every quarter and we just to deliver all of that, you know, we were promising like Apple pay as the, as the Fiat on ramps. I'm laughing, you know, saying so, but we all delivered that. There's a team of almost like 40 people at the moment working on this protocol. So it's like a lot of manpower to pull it off. So I'm pretty convinced, convinced that it's all going to happen. The AI gaming is not just a vision, we are already executing towards it and it's actually cool. Cool example, you know, I will tell you why, because think of the reality in a way like so far there are AI agents with not so many use cases. And think of it this way, competitive gaming is a use case where agents can actually compete against each other. They have wallets so they can also generate revenue out of these competitions. You can train these agents with all the data that we have on the network. Because we track every single match, every single move of every single player. A lot of data can be deployed towards training. Also this competitive environment means that I can build the bots or agent, let's call it this way, and I can train him in a spectator mode, he can follow my moves, etc. Right. So and we're going to deploy it. I think it's going to, it's just a matter of few months and it's going to be out there.
- [18:34]
Scott
The AI side makes so much sense obviously with what's coming. Clearly you have great partners for this IP and going to a number of blockchains makes so much sense. Can you tell me more about the Deepin network? Building a decentralized game hosting network with nodes because that's really interesting to me. I think everybody who's in crypto at the core loves the idea of more decentralization and ability to participate in the network.
- [18:57]
Tom Kopera
I think a lot of use cases out there are pretty artificial, frankly speaking, like people are doing nodes for the sake of doing nodes. We're built different. All the concepts that you see in the road model or everywhere else, they're having some kind of substance behind it. I'll explain how the Deepin is going to work here because it's resolving a real problem in competitive gaming. So all it matters here are latency things you need to optimize for that. And if you want to fuel the network. The worldwide competition is like people in Nigeria, they want to compete if it's fueled by giants. But centralized data centers, we trained it with multiple of them. There's no close enough big data center to facilitate a good level of competitions, these kind of environments. So then deploying the network that is decentralized, anyone can join and we can kind of localize. We can optimize for latency with that. This is something that is actually increasing the comfort and just increasing the accessibility of the whole service of what's happening on the network. And that's real. Right. Plus I know that it can be optimizing the costs of the performance for game developers and create economic opportunity at the same time for another operator. So it's building something tangible, something that is resolving a real business problem and something that creates a profit opportunity almost for everyone. Either cost savings or pure profit.
- [20:15]
Scott
So we're sitting here recording. It's Wednesday, July 23rd but the TG I'm looking is actually tomorrow July 24th. So when this comes out because you know we require editing and things like that, this will have launched. So how can people participate to listen to this and want to get more involved?
- [20:31]
Tom Kopera
Yeah. So yeah, Digi is tomorrow. I'm excited. Obviously there's a lot of work.
- [20:36]
Scott
I can't believe you had time to talk to me today.
- [20:40]
Tom Kopera
Yeah, it is pretty crazy but I enjoy it. As I guess mentioned at the beginning, it's great to talk to passionate people. I consider myself as such and I can talk about it for hours. TGE tomorrow we listed in Kucoin Gate Maxi so I know these exchanges facilitated training. Obviously the centralized exchanges as well. It's very easy to get your hands on the token staking program as well. So all of these things how you can get involved. Our stakers will be invited further on to multiple different campaigns that we've been organized with games. So there's going to be even more opportunities as obviously strongly encouraged to read the tokenomics, understand the long term value of the token and the whole vision because it's going to fuel everything these agentic AI gaming. This is another use case all the for the token everything that is on the roadmap always going to Tie back to the token.
- [21:30]
Scott
I feel like 2021 again. It's exciting. There haven't been that many conversations over the past few years where people are actually still deeply committed to trying things and launching things and building things, where there's actually millions of people using it. So it's really nice, it's really nice to have the energy again beyond just Bitcoin ETFs besides just Bitcoin ETFs and what the United States government is doing, which is what we talk about.
- [21:56]
Tom Kopera
Yeah.
- [21:56]
Scott
So anything else that I might have missed that you want to tell people, obviously as this will have just launched and they're going to want to clearly test out these games and participate. So just the kind of last second here if I missed anything important for.
- [22:09]
Tom Kopera
Sure, I guess like kind of final thoughts. What I wanted to say is that what we're building, I believe is something that web3 gaming and crypto hasn't seen seen before is just something unlike anything that you've seen. It's unlocking a massive opportunity because there's like, you know, 3 billion players. We're building something that can onboard like all of them into the experience that is blockchain fueled. But then it's like very friendly 2 million game developers as an opportunity. If you compare it to like maybe 30k of Solidity developers, it's like a magnitude better in terms of like the amount of people that can build and contribute. So we are connecting these two worlds, Web two and Web three. We're connecting traditional gaming and the beauty of blockchain. And then we believe there is like a holy grail to be discovered at the intersection and feel like we're building it. So it's going to be like a huge wave coming up with all of these developments.
- [22:59]
Scott
Good luck, man. I'd love to have you on down the road and kind of get the update on all the things you've built. All the games that we played, I've been testing. The games are actually fun and very addictive. I need to stay away if I want to actually be productive in my life. But they're very confident that it's going to do well. I mean, it's pretty crazy everything that's happening in the Telegram ecosystem that you have pudgy penguins and it's on Telegram and they're launching their wallet. It seems that that flywheel is going to be really, really good for anybody in your kind of arena, 100% and.
- [23:30]
Tom Kopera
We are just expanding even beyond. So there's like plenty of opportunities across different platforms. And different chains. But yeah, Telegram is like a primary venue at the moment, doing very well. So I can also say like, invite you to test out these games. See you at the Penguin Clash Arena.
- [23:46]
Scott
I'll see you there, man. Get your username and crush you. The problem is I'm probably going to stink and I need to, if I want to win, I need to, you know, if I want to earn, I need to win.
- [23:55]
Tom Kopera
So you need to train. Yeah, you need to train like send.
- [23:58]
Scott
My kid in there or something with my name and you know, my kid will obviously be better than this, than me and get them, you know, trained up to make me some money. That's child labor, right? That's not allowed.
- [24:08]
Tom Kopera
Yeah, that's not allowed.
- [24:11]
Scott
Tom, man, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. This is great. Good luck.
- [24:15]
Tom Kopera
Thanks a lot.
- [24:17]
Scott
That's dope.