🎙️Recap: Solana Mobile Ecosystem Talk
Host:
David, CMO of AGA // @Mister_10x
Guests:
Boo, Co-Founder & Algorithm of Canoe Finance
Chris McCann, Partner of Race Capital
Chris, Co-Founder & CEO of Mirror World
Ben Chow, Co-Founder of Jupiter Exchange
Jovan Tisma, Co-Founder of All.art & Solsea
Reele, Market Leader of 1Sol
A recap of a Twitter chat held by Arche Guild Alliance, sponsored by Canoe Finance, and featuring top-tier panelists to provide an in-depth insight into the “Solana Mobile Game Ecosystem”
Based on discussions that took place during this Twitter chat, we’ve created a first-of-its-kind curriculum in preparation for the #SolanaSummerCamp Hackathon!
Listen to the Twitter space recording here.
Recap of the Twitter Space
Arche Guild Alliance, David
Hey everybody, how’s it going? I’m the David the CMO of AGA…
Thanks for tuning in this is gonna be the AGA Show #2 this show is going to be all about Solana Mobile Game in the Ecosystem and a lot of different things that are going on in the space right now.
We’ve got some really knowledgeable and well-informed guests in this space all in different sectors and you know they’re going to be introducing themselves and giving us a little bit of a background into what they do and trying to point us in the right directions to navigate this crypto space and all of the crazy stuff going on right now so I’m going to hand it over to these guys…
Canoe Finance, Boo
Hi guys, here is Boo the Co-founder and Algorithm Leader of Canoe Finance and a math researcher at the University before not so many focused on a small algorithm in high-frequency trading things like GameFi assets…
Race Capital, Chris McCann
Hey everybody my name is Chris McCann. I’m one of the general partners at Race Capital Venture funds focused on all things early stage, particularly on the infrastructure side, and then we’re probably most well known we’re early seed investors for Solana FTX lightning labs data bricks a bunch of other companies both in the web 3 and web 2 spaces.
Jupiter Exchange, Ben Chow
Hey everyone, my name is Ben. I am the co-founder of Jupiter Exchange, we are Solana’s largest X aggregator and we power the liquidity of all Solana so we are in a number of…we have an SDK and API and we’re in a number of wallets games and define protocols all across Solana
1Sol, Reele
Hello everyone, my name is Reele. I’m the Marketing Leader of the 1Sol and 1Sol is a cross-chain DEC aggregator on the Solana and we’re happy to be here…
All.art & Solsea, Jovan Tisma
*Distorted Audio*
Jovan Tisma introduced himself to the space and what he’s been doing in All.art and Solsea.
Following the introduction of the guests, the host, David, began to ask a few questions of the panelists in order to learn about what guests had to say about the space.
Question Asked:
Race Capital has a close relationship with Jump. What’s your view on a pot back to jump and FTX? We’re trying to understand the capital logic of investing in a new public chain.
Race Capital, Chris McCann
To be fair, I don’t want to speak on behalf of Jump or any other investor. We only have the ability to control our own actions, not necessarily anybody else’s. I guess if you sort things contextually, to keep in mind, one of the things that have been most clearly over the last few cycles is that there is tremendous value in being a new or next generation of L1…
And I think people will always try to continuously chase these things, whether or not they’re successful or whether or not they’re differentiated, because there’s always a potential 100 X, 1000 X, or 10,000 X opportunity in becoming the next low-level computation platform, and it’s very hard to ignore some of these things. To be fair, access in both ways came out of the sort of Facebook Novi… They changed their name a few times, but kind of like the Facebook overall ecosystem, the language was really developed specifically for smart contracts, which is a very different departure versus some of the other development programming environments you used beforehand…
I guess my critical take on a lot of this stuff is that when you went from Ethereum to Solana and some of the other ones, there was a huge sort of 10X improvement in speed and cost, and kind of all that at some point…
But now we’re talking about very incremental stuff like if you can get sub-penny transactions, I think it’s nice but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle all that much. You can make your arguments against Solana and its reliability and a bunch of other stuff, but I think people will always be around the edges trying to improve developer experience, security, transaction, speed, and throughput and there will always be continuous like new L1. but in the long term. I believe that the race is always on for people who are always trying to find these new things, and I believe that this is why investors are always drawn to these things because they do have enormous value if you can truly build an ecosystem around them.
Question Asked:
What’s your opinion on Solana Mobile? What do you think can attract more developers to the mobile gaming space on Solana?
Mirror World, Chris
Hey guys, this is Chris. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Mirrorworld.
Mirrorworld is essentially working on creating a mobile stack for developers, specifically to make native app development easier when it comes to crypto. We really think that right now, the developer experience itself as well as the end-user experience are always lagging behind when it comes to the mobile experience.
So, for example, when we look at any depth that is built in terms of native iOS or Android right now, the standard is that you have to leave your app to sign your signature with your fence more on meta mask and then hop back into the app and we see that there’s a 25% drop off just between that simple step and for any casual games or casual mobile apps that you are essentially requiring your users to stick within the app itself.
Every time they leave your app, that is essentially a conversion loss for your customer acquisition cost, so we really think that during this process, developers actually need a very easy way to combine. For example, social login within an app wallet that is compatible with Solana as well as like in the game marketplace framework where essentially you can’t directly purchase within your native mobile experience.
Right now, something like Step in actually has a huge team kind of backing up their spending wallet. They’re in the game marketplace and they’re constantly facing changes to the restrictions, for example, iOS and Android, so I think when we’re considering making the experience easier for developers, we also have to consider how to make it clear what is allowed within the Apple Store App restrictions on a monthly basis and weekly basis and really cater our SDK/developer tools and educational content based on backup to a web 2 product standpoint.
There’s a company called XSolana which essentially gives payment stores different portals as well as aggregated services in the gaming space, and one product that they have is called a web shop, which essentially allows game developers to directly launch a web app that is called with a browser within their phone so that they can bypass the 30% take rate from the app store, and I think all of these really have to come into place before the mobile experience can be improved for both developers and end users.
Question Asked:
What’s your opinion on Solana Mobile? What do you think can attract more developers to the mobile gaming space on Solana?
Canoe Finance, Boo
Solana Mobile storytelling is a brilliant ambition and it’s also a natural integration in crypto because the previous mobile trend apple its hardware place an important role to run its whole software ecosystem. If Solana Mobile strikes and plays such a low like Apple, it will bring a new trend answer, that’s also a big reason attract our team. The Solana is in a shadow of a large-scale tag. Once Solana overcomes this, it will build more widespread, and more mobile products consists of it. The Solana mobile will bring a new trend and new storytelling to the next crypto cycle. It will make Solana a great game to some degree, that we are all in the mobile category.
Question Asked:
As one of Solana’s biggest DEX aggregators, the Slope wallet system was just hacked. How does that affect you? Your platform’s trade data, etc.
Jupiter Exchange, Ben Chow
It’s a little orthogonal to what we’re doing. Thankfully, a few of us users in our community were affected. However, we’ve done as much as we can to help and we plan on launching an education series to help educate anyone on improving their security to help them deal with a situation like this.
The sort of slope reached was a more universal problem. I’m not sure if it’s something that’s specifically related to us, and fortunately, not a lot of our community was affected. But we are creating an educational program to help our users and anyone else improve their security and their best practices to help them mitigate things like this.
Fundamentally, it comes down to using your wallet. You are giving some level of trust and should be aware of that and aware of the risks. I would like to share that, from our standpoint, it’s important to understand how people go about developing. We take a web-centric view where we do minimal tracking. There is no analytics that we have. There are a lot of web 2 companies, which is sort of indicative of what this breach was right to track everything and every user behavior. When dealing with private keys and you have access to that data, it’s really important to be as secure as possible.
For us, the only tracking that we do is around performance and uptime, no user data, and no user behavior that you would normally see in a web 2 app. One thing, and not only to protect people’s privacies but to make sure we’re not leaking anything in an insecure way.
Question Asked:
As one of Solana’s biggest DEX aggregators, the Slope wallet system was just hacked. How does that affect you? Your platform’s trade data, etc.
1Sol, Reele
I totally agree with Ben. I think the education system is a good idea and the ones already implemented have had an influence on this data hack. This occurs on a regular basis throughout the year. We have a good protection system, and this is the most important thing to be the project for the users and to protect the user’s money. I think a good protection system and users’ trust in the project and education are really good ideas, and we will do that.
Question Asked:
What do you look for in these play-to-earn games, these Solana-based play-to-earn games, before you invest in them? What are the most important factors there?
Race Capital, Chris McCann
Perhaps one caveat: we don’t invest in a lot of things in the gaming sector specifically; instead, we look at lower-level infrastructure layers such as core storage, core data, sort of marketplaces of services, sort of underlying building blocks as opposed to the consumer experience itself.
I’d like to explain some frames of reference. It depends if the game is pre-launch or post-launch. Pre-launch, you’re probably most looking at the team concept, the idea. Is there an MVP can I play around with it? Have you done any user testing? Is this a sort of existing style of game that I already know that there’s an embedded user base of people who would be willing to play this? or are you attempting to introduce new concepts but failing? And if you’re doing net new concepts, is there any sort of user studies or user cases or reviews or something to show that people would actually demand this thing?
The most important thing is that the supply side of most of these tokens usually always makes sense. You want to use your tokens to incentivize usage or behavior, but the demand side from an investor perspective is always a question.
Why do you think people out there want to purchase this token at all in the first place? Because if there’s no demand-side pressure at all, then typically these tokens just kind of fall down, good as zero, and people move on to the next thing. So how do you actually construct this where it actually makes sense, and then on the seed stateside it’s all of those pluses I’m looking for not just what you think in theory or what consumers might say in questions, but can you actually prove this towards any meaningful numbers, metrics, traction, usage, engagement, or whatever, and it doesn’t have to be crazy big numbers.
For example, if you had 1000 people using your game but they were coming back every day and 60–70% of people were coming back every day and they were continuously using it more and more like that number, that engagement, those stats, those are going to be the things that are kind of most interesting to sort of tick the boxes and as you get bigger think like the kind of serious A+ or post token launch, you just need to more tangibly show that. So don’t just show it’s a small engaged group of users but you have to show it’s really an expense.
Question Asked:
I’ve been hearing some whispers behind the scenes that you might be doing something with gaming. What are you doing with gaming and how do gaming and DeFi come together?
Jupiter Exchange, Ben Chow
One of our core missions is really to bring decentralized liquidity to everyone, to the masses, wherever they are, and I think gaming is attracting a lot of users. StepN is a great example of people who are doing DeFi and trading without realizing they are because a lot of it happens within the game itself.
We’ve been working with a number of folks, Canoe Finance included, to offer up the ability for any gaming developer to easily access Solana liquidity through an SDK integration or an API.
We’re really excited about some of the amazing experiences that game developers can build with this. One of the best and early integrations that we had in gaming was with DeFi Land, where it took the whole farming metaphor, and when you’re trading crops or seeds, you’re actually doing Jupiter swaps in the background, but to users, they’re just sort of farming and trading crops.
It’s going to be really cool to see a lot of these things translated into different types of game models.
One of the challenges of StepN is that you have to manage your own liquidity and it’s harder to offer different trades like different token trades, so if someone who is in the StepN ecosystem wants to trade from GMT or GST to USDC or something, one of the reasons why we built out this infrastructure and we’re trying to offer it to other games and in any Dapp, we don’t have to deal with that kind of managing a DEX and managing our liquidity. You have access to all the liquidity in Solana, but you can still use it as a revenue source. So if you want to offer trading to your users within your app, you can charge whatever fee you want to have. That way, that can be a revenue source for your protocol without having to deal with all that liquidity.
It’ll be a much easier way for anyone to get up to speed faster and offer training with their games.
Question Asked:
What are you doing in the space where you think about the space having something to do with this app store? I know All.art is working on this. Can you tell us a few things?
All.art & Solsea, Jovan Tisma
We’ve been seeing as an open source of our unity wallet integration for game builders on Solana, like last year in August, more than 200 projects used the SDK and the database. From that, I think the Solana mobile with their app store will bring a lot more opportunities for games that they can have in purchase directly from mobile. That will also be interesting because, as somebody says here, like with an Android or Apple store, you really limited what you can offer and how you can deal, and I think with the web3 apps store what Solana is building now will create a massive adoption of mobile gaming into our ecosystem.
Question Asked:
It’s such a huge thing in this space between ETH and Solana, and people are saying ETH 2.0 is going to kill it, and others are saying ETH 2.0 isn’t going to do well, and then ETH will crash. What do you all think about that?
All.art & Solsea, Jovan Tisma
I don’t think it’s comparable to ETH because it’s a different technology and approach, and because it’s a big ecosystem, they need to make decisions really slowly, and I think, especially in our space of NFTs and digital assets, in-game assets, they will be really slow in adopting new things, and I think Solana has that leverage that decision and development could be much faster as that transactions and cheapest, so I think for the future if the builders and Solana are smart, I think it’s not a threat with all their updates.
Question Asked:
You’re on the other side of things. You know a lot of stuff that we in the public don’t know. Tell us about ETH vs. Solana. Where’s the money going?
Race Capital, Chris McCann
I feel like there’s a lot of misinformation. On the whole sort of theory emerged side, I’m sure there’s a lot of people here probably know more intricacies about but I don’t know, I feel like on the general press sometimes I see like “Oh the merge is happening, the Ethereum is going to be 10,000 times faster…” I don’t know if people understand like exactly mechanically what’s going on, basically the whole kind of merge coming up is swapping out a proof of work to proof of stake so going from basically the sort of minors and all the hardware out there to going from a stake based model which honestly is something that Solana had from day one. Solana did not have to do the merge; they did not have to move any of this stuff, and the main thing that affects is really the energy consumption, so everyone is probably aware that proof-of-work is a massively energy-consuming mechanism, whereas proof-of-stake is obviously a much more efficient mechanism. There are a lot of tradeoffs here and a lot of things that you need to take into consideration, which is why it took them so long to do it. But the merge is really just the switch for this; it doesn’t actually affect the transaction speed or the transaction cost; it doesn’t touch anything on the transaction or computation layer at all. It is purely just a consensus chain, purely just the swapping out of proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and that’s it.
At ETH 2.0, the much grander vision, there are a lot of other pieces that are coming later, but this upcoming merge is just that switch and that switch alone, and so after the switch, I don’t think you’re really going to see any material difference from a speed or throughput or cost side, and you’re mostly just going to see it from an energy saving side of the overall network, which is a hugely important thing to do, and it’s awesome that they’re doing it, but like that’s it…
My two cents on this is that this is one step on their roadmap to eventually get into the scalable kind of network that they talked about, but from all intents and purposes, Ethereum is taking a very long time to get here and one of the things that have always attracted us to the Solana team is that they’ve always kind of had this in mind from the beginning. They kind of built it from the ground up for this and yes, they’ve had their missteps too, I’m not saying they’re perfect, but they totally improvise as they built it from the ground, to be fast, to be cheap, to be hyper-replicated using soft of all the latest hardware using all the GPU threads.
So this is one of the things that attracted us to Solana so much in the beginning and still to this day.
Question Asked:
How do you think that ETH vs Solana really affects your business? If it does in any way?
Jupiter Exchange, Ben Chow
I think I would like to share that, you know, people always talk about cheap and fast, but when you hear cheap and fast, it’s sort of like everything feels the same, but I don’t think people realize the magnitude of how much faster Solana is and how much faster it can become because it’s a focus, it’s being built from the ground up, as Chris mentioned, to be cheap and fast.
It’s actually a dramatic difference. You know it will get cheaper and faster, in order of magnitude difference, it’s completely different altogether when you’re that much faster or that much cheaper. You’re all of a sudden empowering different kinds of experiences for people and different use cases.
I’m a big believer in the multichain world. Ethereum will be around for a long time, there’s a lot of great stuff being built there, it’s a great ecosystem, and in the same way, Solana will have a huge part of that future in terms of powering all of the things that we’re talking about today, like gaming and DeFi and all these amazing mobile experiences people are building.
Question Asked:
ETH vs. SOL. What does it do for you and how do you see it? How does it affect your business model? Give us the rundown.
Canoe Finance, Boo
From the different stories, I think we should focus on the infrastructure of a mobile app, and from StepN, there are three keywords for the whole architecture. The first keyword is about user-friendly architecture, which has been discussed many times.
The second is the algorithm, as StepN created his own counter-treating GPS algorithm… When we engage mobile users, there will be a huge volume, so there will be a new algorithm for the application layer, not for the public channel, only for the application layer. It also needs a new algorithm to power those users’ behavior.
The third keyword is the app chain. In other words, we could use some hardware innovation like the Solana mobile hardware… New hardware would be important in the new infrastructure of a mobile app. If the mobile app infrastructure could have more innovation and more focus, they would pass many examinations and infrastructure innovation in the next cycle.
Question Asked:
The AGA is a guild alliance that does a lot of things with gaming, connecting players with games and guilds and the likes… What do you guys see as the guild’s purpose moving forward once this market turns? Do you guys invest in guilds at all?
Race Capital, Chris McCann
No, we haven’t; we invest mostly in infrastructure and low-level system software, so we invest a little less in games, guilds, specific NFTs, and so on. Again, it’s more structurally for us, nothing like against them or anything.
On a positive note, I think these guilds were really good at assembling the initial potential users for a bunch of these games. Initially, it was kind of constructed around Axie Infinity, but it could be used for other games. If you’re a new game and you’re launching, to find the first 1 000, 10 000 loyal players or customers that are willing to use your stuff instead of trying to shoot in the dark, you had these aggregations of guilds who could be sort of a useful distribution channel for you…
On the more critical end, it seems that a lot of these guilds have basically turned into quasi-governments, almost like investment DAO’s. It was a little bit less about finding and playing the games as opposed to investing in buying land, acquiring assets, and all that sort of stuff. It was a little bit more self-serving and more financially motivated. Think of it as liquidity mining, less like playing the game, and the most important thing for the game itself. It’s fun and people want to play it and continuously use it despite the rewards or whatever.
I’ve heard a lot fewer people sort of talk about them as like the time periods got on, but as an initial idea for bootstrapping, distribution, and users, I do think it’s a pretty powerful concept other people could utilize.
Question Asked:
What do you see these guilds’ contribution to this whole plate of earned gaming space?
All.art & Solsea, Jovan Tisma
I think that guilds are also finding themselves in this new world because traditional gaming and guild gaming are totally different than here. As Chris said, it was more about playing games and discovering things; now it’s more about finances because it’s a game to earn money. Also, guilds want to earn money, so I think guilds will be a big part of the economy in the future gaming world.
The guild will transform into something decentralized like venture funds but more niche connected with games that they like and play. I think that’s the future of guilds in this space.
Question Asked:
As a contributing member of the AGA, how do you see the guild and its role in the ecosystem?
Canoe Finance, Boo
I read George Soros’s theory about an open society, which influenced my guild opinion greatly because, as we all know, the guild plays an important role in connecting developed and developing countries.
Do the poor in those countries buy coins to join web 3 or blockchain networks? No, but the guild, or play-to-earn, is the best way to engage those poor in developed countries. The Canoe Finance, CMO is from the Philippines and I also grew up in a small town, so I truly feel how the web3 opportunity changes our lives. If we want to bring the web3 application to more users, I think the mobile is the first condition, and then we can follow the capital from Gilbert and go from an open society to a closed society through some guilds to educate users, even if they should use an attainable smartphone that works if it’s under the guild education. I think the guild is a bridge to connect the global world, especially since we are in a global crisis now. We hope that guilds can play a possible role in developed countries and even in Africa.
I hope we can connect more durable countries together and connect the capitals of America or Europe.
Question Asked:
The 2022 Hackathon: There was some really impressive stuff coming out of there. Is there anything you saw that caught your eye or any new tech that you guys are really looking into counting on?
Race Capital, Chris McCann
The summer camp, I think the submission ended today or last night. I’m one of the judges for the hackathon so I probably can’t reveal all the secrets or anything per se but from the judge’s perspective we get sort of all the applications and we help the team to go through them and pick like a short list of who we think the most interesting one is and then from there we usually drill down…
Usually, in multiple categories, there’ll be like DeFi category and a gaming category, and an NFT, and I think there’s a mobile one this year and payments one so you can see there’s a first, second, and third prize for each of these different subcategories. We haven’t got all the submissions in but I’ve had a handful of people sending me things directly just to take a look at what they’ve been working on… One of the date indexing side, one on like the dashboard side if you are on the gaming side…
They’re like a few 1000-ish submissions or something like that and again I could be completely wrong on this. I don’t run the process, I’m just one of the judges so I sit here and help do the curation…
At this year’s hackathon, there are 2 categories I’d really look at… I’m hoping and expecting to see some really interesting things from the payment side. Solana Pay has had some time to digest and is now discussing sort of real-world or more interactive types of payments flowing into a sort of actual real-world use cases. And then the one kind of this topic is if you’re really utilizing things all around sort of SMS and mobile, how do you do mobile in a very differentiated way, not just a mobile reskin of an app or like a viewer or something, but like even in the traditional web 2, most of the big tech platforms, most of the views, as you said, are all moving to mobile. So like, what does this really mean for all the things we’ve built and all the things we’re building? So I expect to see some more interesting experiments, projects, and emergent needs in those two categories, payments and mobile.
Question Asked:
What is the Jupiter perspective? Is there any impressive tech coming out that’s really going to have a huge effect on the Solana mobile ecosystem?
Jupiter Exchange, Ben Chow
I’m gonna mirror Chris a little bit and not talk about anyone’s project in particular. There are a number of exciting ones there but I’ll share our experience with the hackathons which I think worked really well for Solana is one of the amazing teams and some of the top protocols that have come out of hackathons…
One trend that I’ve noticed for anyone building in the Solana hackathons is that many of the top teams actually submit an act or build their project across a number of hackathons. It takes more than one hackathon to get where you need to be…
Aside from the sort on the tech side, the most exciting thing about Solana, more than the project itself, is the SMS; it’s early, but I don’t think many people will think it’s not an apple or android killer or anything. The interesting thing about it is that for the first time you might have, the hardware seed vault could turn your phone into a ledger…
All the learning curve that crypto users today have to deal with in terms of protecting their seed phrases and trusting hot wallets kind of goes away… What you see with mobile apps being built on top of this stack is a mental model or usage model that people are very familiar with: being able to download apps from an app store, pay for things using your biometrics, whether it’s your face or your thumb, and not having to deal with passwords, not having to memorize your seed phrase, or protect your seed phrase… I think that will unlock a lot of amazing experiences…
Conclusion: At 3 PM UTC, August 17th, 2022, the AGA Show Series hosted a Twitter space with top-level speakers who will discuss different aspects of Solana’s ecosystem. It was a great opportunity for us to learn about Solana’s curious ecosystem and approached a variety of experts.
