Community Conversations: Behind the Scenes with Jason Sharp, Product Manager at InterPop

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventh installment of Community Conversations! As the community manager at Blokhaus, I am on a journey to interview builders, creatives, and community members from around the Tezos ecosystem. Our guest today is Jason Sharp, Product Manager at InterPop.

InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom for collectibles, comics, and gaming. It leverages the advantages of NFTs and the eco-friendly Tezos blockchain to create unique experiences for fans and brands everywhere. With InterPop, you can play, collect, trade, own, and more.

Play with BRIO is a skill-based eSports platform developed by InterPop on the Tezos blockchain. It currently features a unique Solitaire Square-Off for players to test their skills against others and it will be adding games like 21, Golf, Bingo, Mahjong, and more in the future.

Check out the interview below!

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Could you just give me a bit of background information about yourself and your professional history?

Yeah, my professional history goes back to when I was 13. I was actually a pro gamer — one of the very first pro gamers a long time ago. I played a game called Warcraft 3. My eSports and gaming career got kicked off there. I was, at one point, the number one Warcraft 3 player in the United States and North America. Then, I got into commentating for eSports. After college I went to work for a dev studio. It was the early days of the free to play revolution. I ended up getting a job in China and did a 10 year stint in free-to-play for a lot of very large MMOs.

Afterwards, I wanted to start making my own games; I started my own dev studio, built a couple of mobile games, and then got into the VR space and built a few VR games. I started a new company in the mobile space called “Same Table” with an app called “Qwikmatch” which was a socially competitive game — it’s pretty similar to what we’re building at InterPop. In the end, we got up to about 25 million users. It was really simple stuff — you could play checkers against somebody, you could play Connect 4, etc.

The thematic of my professional history has been around social gaming. I’m always very interested in how we can restructure and rethink gaming and the technology behind it. That’s what brought me here.

What made you interested in blockchain technology?

On the outside, it seems like it can be rather boring stuff — especially in the gaming space. But actually, there are many interesting applications when it comes to blockchain in gaming. As I mentioned before, I like to be at the forefront of organizational or societal restructurings. I like when technology changes how we communicate or work together — blockchain is kind of a slow revolution; the technology is getting there and improving. Then, it’s a matter of how we take that, make products, and reorganize ourselves around it.

One day, I got introduced to Brian David-Marshall who is a founder at InterPop and he explained to me what was happening and what they were doing. There’s a lot of crossover in our backgrounds and in the backgrounds of the team. I’m really excited about the Emergents card game. I was impressed with the team assembled, which comprised of top players and developers in the TCG space. I was, at one point, one of the top Hearthstone players in the US. I thought it was a great match.

Could you go further into the specifics of why you think that blockchain can create a lot of new, unique applications for gaming?

In the relatively short amount of time I’ve been involved with blockchain, I’ve kept my eyes open to some of the possibilities. When it comes to money in the gaming space — there’s the idea of needing trust. With blockchain you take the human element out of the equation — you don’t have to trust a central entity, necessarily, because there’s a smart contract where the funds are all stored on the blockchain and all the rules are very clear. Everything’s very transparent. There’s a dark history in gaming when it comes to money — sometimes the rules change or the rules aren’t always transparent. With blockchain, that’s all removed. That’s exciting.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are also pretty cool. Now, it doesn’t have to be an entire organization, but the idea that you are gaining ownership somehow — and the rules of ownership and what you get from those voting rights affect the organization in some way — that’s very exciting, especially for eSports.

Another thing that I think is very useful is interoperability — in particular, identity and profiles. So right now, every game, every company, has their own profiles and independent MMR systems. Now, imagine if that was able to be abstracted into something unique on the blockchain. For instance, I am a professional gamer — imagine if new games I joined already knew a little bit about me, assuming I gave them access to that through the blockchain. If they already have a decent idea of my history, maybe they can put me in groups or, especially, in ranked ladders based on my experience. Also, how about toxic gamers? This is a really big problem in the eSports community. Now, imagine if I was toxic in League and I got banned there — then that flag on my profile that could warn other games/communities as well. I actually think it’s a positive thing; however, other people might not like it. In addition, though, your actions in one place could help the other games better serve you. What if I was a positive gamer in one game and other games decided they were going to give you something special just for being a good gamer? That can be cool, too.

I’d love if there could be a unique gaming account present on the blockchain that could transfer from game to game. If I streamed on Twitch, then I could put that in my unique profile and I wouldn’t have to set that up every time.

Can you talk about what you’re building right now with “Play with BRIO” and such?

Yeah, absolutely. Play with BRIO is a platform for eSports skill games where you can play for free or for tez. Right now, the games are casual but the skill ceiling is high. You compete to get the highest score in the shortest amount of time. Our first game is Solitaire, but we’ve got a lot of other games in the works like Golf, Bingo, 21, Mahjong — a lot of classic games. Some of them you’ll play asynchronously against people and then compare scores — other ones you’ll play at the same time; however, that’ll be further down the road. The most exciting thing is the fact that this is all trustworthy. We don’t touch your money. You play your match, you can see it’s in escrow on the blockchain, and then when you finish, if you won, the wins just go to you. Also, it’s very liquid — you don’t have to deposit all your money and then one day take it out.

I think the main thing to focus on is our approach to blockchain development. We try to build under the assumption that our users don’t know anything about cryptocurrency and blockchain. We’re trying to make it stupidly easy to play. The goal is that my mom could sign up and play and not even realize that she interacted with the blockchain. I think that should be the goal for a lot of consumer-facing products; you just use the product and then you get all the advantages of the blockchain behind the scenes — like knowing that your funds are safe and secure. That’s the benefit of what we’re trying to do here.

Beyond that, what other plans are you considering?

Building more games! We’d like to go beyond the classics and bring more exciting game experiences. You know, as a game developer, that’s always fun. It’s like, hey, what other games would be fun to compete with?

Aside from that, we want to take what we’ve built and start abstracting all the tools and learnings into some kind of SDK or platform that other developers or game studios can use to bring their games quickly and easily to the Tezos blockchain.

Just talking about blockchain specifically — we’re also working on DAO stuff and unique profiles. However, that’s all pretty far down the road. Also, we’d like to incorporate NFT content that you might own elsewhere into the site. You can have your own unique experience on the site through avatars, skins, etc.

What do you think makes Tezos a good blockchain for these applications?

Tezos is the first blockchain I’ve worked with; however, creating, updating, and deploying smart contracts has been phenomenal and easy for us to do. We’re already on version 4 of our smart contract — although it’s all internal. The next positive is that the transaction costs are very low. Even at a small number of users — you’re playing games quickly and they’re games that take only a few minutes — imagine if that was on Ethereum.

I also appreciate the ecosystem’s focus itself. We’ve had great support for us to build products that just work — good products. It’s not about hype. It’s not about chasing the most recent trend. It’s about focusing on long term value. There is, of course, the on-chain governance, the self-amendment feature, and decentralization — but for a product developer like me, these other things are very important.

So, to wrap up, is there any message that you want to send out to the community?

Any of these products that are launching — come try them out and give us feedback! Feedback from crypto users and non-crypto users alike will help us build our product into an amazing experience for anyone that wants to play.