Auryn MacMillan on Blockchain and Esports

We talked to Auryn MacMillan, community manager at FirstBlood, to discuss the connection between esports and blockchain. We discussed how the blockchain technology integration behind Aether United is revolutionizing esports and the world in general.

Why did you become interested and involved in cryptocurrency?

It’s a bit of a random story, a weird rabbit hole, but similar to a lot of people. I stumbled across Bitcoin early on back in 2012. I saw a news report about the dark net and the deep web and I started poking around in there. I got the torrent browser out and had a bit of a look just to see. I noticed everything in there was denoted in bitcoin so that was where I fell in. The journey since then has been wild and twisting and turning, it’s been fun. I discovered Vitalik’s writings and his influence on the community pretty early on and when he started talking about Ethereum and programmable blockchain, that got me really excited and I’ve been heavily involved in Ethereum ever since; Mainly as a lurker but as of April last year, I started DAOhub, to form a community to support the DAO. That’s when I became really active in the Ethereum community.

Considering your first hand experience with the First Blood project, how do you think cryptocurrency can change the esports scene like in games such as League of Legends?

Yah, well there’s a couple of ways, the big thing I’d like to see is basically just radical transparency. One of the major issues in higher level and competitive play, I shouldn’t say just high level, competitive play across the board, particularly professional players across the board, is transparency in price pools and payouts. We’d like to create a system where essentially the shady behavior that’s been typical in esports isn’t really possible. And then on top of that, we’d like to create a system where esports players can be rewarded and monetized for their esports journey early on. As of right now, it’s a long, hard grind, which obviously gamers are into and like but it’s a long, hard grind to get to a point where you actually start getting paid to play. So with that system of wagering, the potential to monetize your esports journey begins much, much earlier and you can be rewarded for the journey instead of just for reaching the pinnacle.

How do you feel about the intrinsic characteristics of transparency with blockchain cryptocurrencies like bitcoin?

Obviously I’m all for it, I love the idea of radical transparency and opt-in transparency as well. A system like Bitcoin or Ethereum, they’re all pseudo-anonymous so every transaction and operation on the network is visible to everyone on the network but it doesn’t actually reveal who I am, but it does show on the network that a particular action was made. Those characteristics are what we’d like to build into our platforms in one way or another.

For esports, do you think this is a safer transaction than what is currently happening now?

I mean, the thing that will ultimately make our platform more attractive and like you said safer, is that as we tend toward decentralization of those aspects of the platform, we will eliminate the need to trust another party or to trust a middle-man. Everything will be routed through a smart contract that’s transparent and publicly orderable so there’s no need to trust essentially a third party to hold your money and then to pay it out when you actually owed it.

A very big part about cryptocurrency is how many people are available to use it, do you believe that crowd wisdom will make the world a better place both in esports and out?

Yah definitely, Justin and I, we’ve been talking for month since… August or September, bouncing ideas about esports, DAO, and how that would work back and forth and so the whole sort of crowd wisdom, futarchy governing a DAO is something I’m all for, it’s going to really change the world. Gnosis who just had a really successful crowd sale recently or token launch I should say recently are going to be creating a platform for launching futarchy based DAO, potentially what you guys will end up using, but the potential impact on the rest of the world outside of just esports with that technology is just unreal. The potential for harnessing that crowd wisdom through prediction markets and futarchy be very interesting to watch it play out.

And to all the viewers who don’t know Justin, he’s the CO and one of our co-founders for Aether United. Just a little bit of clarity in case you weren’t aware.

What problems in esports do you think cryptocurrency addresses besides the shady business, anything else?

There’s a variety I think, on top of what we already discussed, there are some other interesting use cases that probably haven’t even been thought of, haven’t really been addressed. But outside of our use case… There’s a project called Ownage their looking to tokenize in game assets, so that’s a very interesting use case where they’re looking to basically give you ownership of the items you use in game. So instead of there being items held in a custodial fashion by the game developer or the server or database. You actually own them, they might actually be portable through one game or another, for example I could take a card from Hearthstone and could use it as an item in League of as well… The card from Hearthstone becomes a ward in League of Legends. Or into a weapon in CS:GO or something like that. So that portability between games is something they’re working on, which I think is a really, really cool concept. And those use cases are going to become more and more frequent and as the ecosystem evolves and as more people start brainstorming ideas.

Do you think this is a problem or actually something new that would bring something interesting to the esports community?

Yah, I mean for instance that use case is actually addressing a problem where if you think about… So again, take the trading card example, if you’re thinking about a real life trading card game such as Magic: The Gathering or YuGiYoh or anything like that. Then you have a physical asset that you can actually trade with someone, that you can actually exchange cards. But thus far, there haven’t been any digital examples that properly replicate that because there’s no real scarcity to the digital assets that have been created. In the primary example I’m using, Hearthstone, the cards are not actually tradable, so you’re removing a core part of a trading card game. And I love the game, the game is awesome, but I would love it so much more if I was able to go “I don’t want this card but I want your card, let’s switch”. It’s such a cooler aspect to a trading card game. That way you have more player to player interaction instead of just diffusing something to the dust or something like that. Instead of just dusting cards and opening packs endlessly. Creating that secondary market place, secondary trading economy is a really cool concept.

So I think that would actually be addressing a real problem, with that point of view, there are several real world problems beyond just the business of people getting paid out for winnings or for having to give up custodial control of their funds. The one that I’m really excited about is being able to properly align the incentives of playing the game.

What I mean by that is, right now there is very little disincentive for essentially toxic behaviors in a game. Games try to address it by having a reputation system or having a system of time outs but they’re always pretty… relatively minor punishments for those offenses because ultimately it goes against the game company’s profit model, to lock people out of their systems. They want to keep people in their systems, maybe give them a slap on the wrist but that’s about it. You might get dropped to low priority or you might get a little time out but ultimately there’s not going to be that much of a disincentive.

Whereas in a system like ours, if you are pay-to-play, if you have to wager down then there’s a really strong financial disincentive for you to then go and feed the other team because as soon as you start feeding you lose money. You’re also able to win money if you play well, so you have that incentive as well. So there’s that really good alignment: There’s that strong incentive to act the right way and a strong disincentive to act the wrong way. So that’s one of the pain points or issues in esports and competitive gaming that this system is really going to help address. It’s just that alignment of incentives you can’t quite get right without some kind of a monetary incentive included.

How do you think that Aether United, which is our crowd-powered esports brand project, could have a significant impact on the esports scene?

Again I’ve been spit balling this idea back and forth for half a year now so I’m obviously all for it. But yah, I think giving fans ownership in their organization and giving them opportunities for fans to actually be a part of it which is something we haven’t really.. or something that I’m not aware of in the esports space, it’s something that’s more common in traditional sports but is becoming less and less common. Teams are moving from community-owned teams to more of a franchise-model, and so I see Aether United as reclaiming that community model, that community idea of having a team that I really feel a part of because I actually feel like I own a part of it. It’s not just me wearing the jersey, it’s me actually being a part of the team in some small way. Your decisions also can impact the company whether its good or bad and its up to you to decide. And that’s it, it goes beyond just having a financial contribution to it, I can actually have an impact over the decision making process. I can help decide who gets hired or what potential sponsorship deals to take or what to enter.. All that kind of stuff. As granular of an impact as I want to have I can potentially have on the team, which is something that I”m not aware of that exists anywhere, which is really a revolutionary concept. Well, I’m glad that you think it’s interesting because we’re putting so much time and effort into the project.

Looking at blockchain, what are you most excited for in the coming years or decades?

That’s tough because I think a lot of what will be really exciting is either not being worked on yet or is being kept quiet somewhere and is really going to explode onto the But there’s stuff I’m already aware of, we’ve talked about a few a little bit. Futarchy is the thing I’m really excited to see, I’m really excited to see decentralized and autonomous organizations popping up everywhere. Obviously, I was very involved in the DAO, the infamous DAO, and so I would love to see that experiment continue. I’m really looking forward to see some more robust versions of that pop up over the few years, few decades and see what happens from there. That experimentation and alternate systems of governance is what really excites me about Ethereum and blockchain as a whole.

What do you feel about the esports ecosystem and how it’ll grow, change, and how it interacts with blockchain in the coming years.

The esports ecosystem is really interesting, for me coming from a traditional sporting background. I Imagine it progressing somewhat on the same path but perhaps leap frogging some steps that aren’t really necessary. But the big thing I’ve noticed with esports as a whole, with the exception of some of the top teams, is that when you compare it with traditional sports, is the level of attention that essentially goes into high performance or excellence in performance.

There’s this concept in sports for the 24 hour athlete, which is essentially a really, really high level athlete often, or for the most part basically gear everything they’re doing 24 hours a day to performing better. That may sound really monotonous or really rigorous but he can break it down and say even things like going to a movie, if you’re structuring that right, if you’re using that time right, you can cast that as recovery time or relaxation time which is all stuff that when you shove it into your schedule, your performance schedule, your training regime, it’s all stuff that can be geared towards actually making you a better player.

And I haven’t seen that or at least I’m not aware of many teams taking that approach to esports. I see a lot of people focusing on the absolute grind, training 12 hours a day, it’s what I read about high level professional esports playing. They sit in their house, they go out and rent a house, they get 5 people living in there and they sit there and train ten hours a day. Which is an incredible grind and would just burn people out so quickly. Now if I think about that from a basketball perspective, to play basketball 10 hours a day, trying to play basketball 6 hours a day. Throwing the ball for 6 hours straight just trying to make 3-pointers, just doing that for an extended period of time, you would just burn out. You can do it maybe for a week, maybe two weeks something like that but after a period of time your body physically burns out, your mind just burns out.

So the big evolution that people see in esports is a transition towards, essentially smarter training. For players I should say smarter training, with more of a focus on sporting excellence as opposed to just the grind, there’s a lot more that impacts sporting excellence then just grinding game after game after game. On top of, obviously, the stuff we just touched on, scheduling recovery time; There’s diet, there’s mental exercises, there’s relaxation time, and there’s just other stuff like making sure your situation at home if alright. You’ve got a healthy social life, all that stuff is so important.

Those other things are probably what gets underrated y’know, you stick a bunch of guys in a house and tell them to play 10 hours a day, they become incomplete people and so they’re not going to perform at their peak because they’re missing part of what’s going to make them a charismatic complete person that wants to be there everyday, motivated that wants to improve. Not there just for the job but for the actual fans, for all these things that come with. That’ll be the big transition that we see across the board for the next few years and decades in esports. It’s just that transition to more of a sporting excellence routine.

And then on top of that, continuing to increase the professionalism across the board. You mentioned fan interactions, just something I think that esports is doing really, really well. They’ve leapfrogged a huge part of that growth journey that traditional sports would’ve had in turns of actually interacting with fans just because they’ve been able to make sure of the tools and practices that have been developed over the last century for traditional sports.

Is there anything else you want to add for us?

I mean, big things I’m just excited to see what you guys are doing, it’s really cool to see the project start to materialize into something. For months it was me and Justin spit balling ideas back and forth so it’s cool to see you guys actually taking action on it. I’m really glad you’ve found some other like minded guys that are cool to execute on it. You’re doing some cool stuff, I’m really excited to follow along and stay involved in whatever way I can in terms of participating as a community owner or whatever it is on the team. I don’t know how you’ll be structuring that, but I’ll definitely be participating.

A big thanks to Auryn for giving us a traditional sports insight into the future of esports as a whole. With his vast experience in blockchain and esports, he’s been a great help for our project and just a great guy to talk to in general. His thoughts on the 24 hour athlete is something that we take seriously and will implement when we ultimately create our crowdpowered Aether United teams as well.