September 8, 2023
Article by
King Solomon of Genfinity interviews Vavel Game Studios. Bringing the next generation of MMO games to life on Hedera.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Right, all right. I think we're gonna get kicked off here, guys. I always like to kind of start these off with a little bit of an introduction. So from Vavel Games' standpoint, if you can provide just a brief overview background of what you guys have built from the gaming standpoint and what led you into launching on the Hedera network with something like Imperium Galactic War and everything that Valve versus kind of led you guys up to this point in time, that'd be great. Up, he dropped down. Let me get him back up here real quick. I can still see him here. Miko, can you try and... You know what happens on Twitter sometimes is, it's been very buggy recently. So if this happens again, and I see you up here as a speaker now, if it does happen again, I would recommend just closing out the Twitter app entirely and coming back on. And I don't know if you caught that question to Vavelverse, but I always like to start these out with a little bit of an intro. If you could provide an intro into who you guys are from Vavel Games, what you've kind of built from the traditional gaming purview, and what led you into the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem, that'd be great.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Awesome. Thank you very much. And it's also great speaking again. As I remember, we were speaking like, it was in January or February, I believe. Yeah, it was one of the first. It was one of the first. It was a, it was one of those rapid-fire Zoom interviews that we were doing for a little while, and it was like, probably January timeframe, if I have to guess, that that might have been the case. And, we were originally planning to do a land sale, but we haven't decided not to do it this way and focus entirely on the integration with the Hedera network so that we actually have a working game within the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem. So, you know, in the end, we haven't launched it then. But yeah, just a few words about myself and our team. My name is Miko. I'm the CEO and co-owner of Vavel Games. I've been building games for over a decade now, and I've been working on MMO games for quite a long time. So to me, the concept of play-to-earn, in general, isn't something that came up five years ago. I used to play games like Eve Online, RuneScape, World of Warcraft, and in those games, when you trade items, there is generally provision in terms of service that the items that you have don't belong to you. And the only reason for that is that, if we were to allow the players to actually own the items, then we would be treated as a brokerage firm, kind of like when you buy stuff, get your bag. Yep. Run again.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Did his audio rug? Yeah, that... Yeah, Twitter is bugging a little bit. Vavel, if you want to close out Twitter and close out the app entirely and then come back up as a speaker, make sure you're joining us. Yeah, yeah. Are you on your phone or your laptop?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
I'm on my phone. Can you hear me?
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
I can hear you now. Yep, yep.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Have you heard what I said? Because I've been speaking for like a minute.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
No, we lost probably 60 seconds of it. So, I think you were talking about gamers actually owning and custoding their in-game assets is kind of where you left it off.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
I see. So, as I was saying, like, basically, in order for the gamers to own the in-game assets, it cannot be as a part of the game engine. Otherwise, the game developer needs to actually be a licensed brokerage, kind of like when you go to a bank. And with blockchain technology, having it in a public ledger, you know, the IRS can see if the user is cashing, you know, crypto dollars into dollars or any other currency. So, the tax responsibility is down to the user, not down to the actual game developer in this case. So, this is the real game changer in terms of what the technology provides the game developers. And that's what makes me very excited about blockchain as a whole. Now, in terms of Hedera and the reason why we chose Hedera, it's very simple. There's a lot of blockchains out there. But hey, Hedera has, in my opinion, the best technology concept. So, the gossip protocol is simply ingenious, in my opinion. It's super scalable, cheap, and it can be done at scale. So, that's the first reason. The second reason is, Hedera is an enterprise network. It is primarily driven by companies like Google, Boeing, LG, Lockheed Martin. Sorry, not Lockheed Martin, but LG. And there aren't that many scams and all this negativity that you would expect out of Solana or Polygon that just crops up left and right there. It's a lot more clean compared to all the other networks. And we got a reach out, we met with the Hedera Foundation, and we were the first grantee to receive money from the Hedera Foundation. As far as I know, the first wire that came out, I came to our bank account. And originally, I thought that it was all about JPEGs, you know, it was about having the assets like an avatar and having those JPEGs kind of traded, but it was all about cosmetics and those, you know, board ape yacht club things. However, as I quickly found out after months of development, the entire idea was, no, let's take the entire game and put it on the blockchain in a sense that take the assets that you have inside of your game, the valuable items, and simply tokenize them. And from there, it was a question of how do you actually build it? Do you do it in a way that you take your entire database onto the blockchain? And, you know, in the case of our game it would be a lot of data points and data sets that would need to be stored. I mean, we're talking about tens of millions of NFTs that would have to be created and managed on Hedera if we were to fully tokenize our game engine. So that would be quite inconvenient if you were to track about 10,000 NFTs per user, if that makes sense. So, taking it from there, we kind of created a new approach where, basically, because our game engine already has its own ledger, so it's almost as good as if you had Hedera, except our game engine controls it on its own and you can't really peek into what's under the hood. We basically have a system that enables us to take an item out of the game, destroy it, kind of like how teleportation works, and then basically put it on Hedera in the form of a Hedera-based NFT. And then the users can trade it, put it on any exchange, whether it is market.vavelverse.com or whether it's Zuse or SentX, Venly Market, Goldman, it doesn't really matter. It's down to the users to decide how they manage their assets. And then that player can basically either resell this NFT or send it back to the game by sending it directly into the Master Vavelverse wallet. And the URL or, you know, the address of the wallet will be listed on every single NFT that you have in your inventory from the Vavelverse Network. And after you log into the game and link your account, we have a token association and wallet connect verification flow. After you start playing, you'll be able to basically redeem your NFT in the game. I hope I haven't gone on a too long tangent.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
No, no, no. I think I preface some of this stuff too, and I remember our original interview. I should say, you know, the game, in and of itself, is totally functional, and it's worked. It's... you guys have had this game out to the mass populace for years at this point in time. Real quick, can you just mention how long Imperium Galactic War has actually been live from a gaming standpoint, as well as something that kind of... what was an interesting statistic to me is how many players can be playing at one point at any given time.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So we had the 10-year anniversary this year for the game itself. The game originally launched in 2013. The game was originally created by Mike Wallace, who was the lead producer or even line while he was at Kabam. And essentially, the game in its lifetime had a million players worldwide. But one of the coolest things about this game wasn't that just it was a new game or a new project in Kabam's portfolio. They were building a new MMO engine that is extremely scalable. It's written in C plus almost entirely, and we can have 10,000 players duking it out in a single instance. It's extremely optimized and scalable, and it's basically kind of like an authentic solution with a game built around it. But all in all, we are game developers at Vavel. We weren't really crypto developers. So we're not crypto-first, game-second. We are game-first and MMO game developers first. And to us, the ability to tap into crypto is the ability to basically allow the players to have trade inside of their game so that they will not get scammed while they play it. And that's all there is to it, to me.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me. Just the sheer scale of what you guys have kind of built under the hood here. And then, obviously, there's been some newer initiatives with HashPack and things like that. You had mentioned that, you know, the thought process was to maybe launch certain assets back in January, but then the transition into just launching everything within the Hedera network. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that process for you guys? Like, why, you know, we were back in January, I know you guys were, like, imminently, like, launching, and then where you're at now and what that kind of seven or eight months gap in between represented for you guys in a way that made sense to be able to launch properly and scale and why you made that decision?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Yeah, that was some grueling months. I'll tell you that. Without, you know, putting a finger on anybody. When we originally were building this game on Hedera, I thought it's all about just taking avatars and cosmetics that wouldn't really tap into the economy of the game itself. So having avatars that you can collect or have them sold or traded, kind of like you have your traditional pixel ghost, pixel club, or board ape, that was the original idea. Have something that would be completely neutral to the game, but it would add a lot of value, or it could possibly be farmed through gameplay, but not something that would actually impact the way you progress through the game. So that was the first assumption. The second assumption was that we kind of realized and we were told that the idea was to make kind of Eve online but with crypto. So this caused us to have to redesign a lot of the economy. We had to change completely how you progressed through the game. So for those who play MMOs, think of this as kind of like our game currently, the IGW Classic, has a single-player progression, whereas we had to change it so that it's trade-driven. Because in the current in-game, let's say you have an item that is part of a spaceship or a weapon, once you collect all the parts for that weapon, you basically have it fully unlocked. Whereas in the new version, we will not have it in such an easy way. Anyone will be able to get any part or blueprint, but in order to collect those blueprints, you will really need to collaborate with the rest of the community in order to do it. And you won't have it in a way where the majority of the top-level players will have everything unlocked. So first, we had to basically redesign the entire economy so that it would actually work and it would make sense for a player-driven trade economy. This also involved a lot of redoing the systems and actually making it so that we can take NFTs out of the game or blueprints out of the game and then put them back into the game. So this involved quite a bit of actually systems that we had to change. And then finally, it was actually down to the actual connection to the Hedera network itself and how do we create it? Because it's one thing about having a collection that is kind of fixed, and you have a list of 10,000 avatars, and those 10,000 avatars are always going to be the same. They can be unique, but they are kind of predefined. You already have everything set about them. And that's fairly straightforward, and that's how most blockchain games do it. In the case of our game, you can get one of 6,000 blueprint drops, and then those items get tokenized. However, it gets more complicated because you can have a gun, and after a patch, the values on that gun can change. So we also had to make it so that the NFTs and the metadata for those NFTs are fully dynamic. So if you have a spaceship that has six different weapons, and if for whatever reason we have a patch that actually changes the game and changes the statistics of the individual items, we want to be able to rebuild every single NFT in our network to match the current status, whether it was improved, decreased, buffed, debuffed. We need to be able to adapt to this. So there was quite a lot of work that had to be done in order to do that and also to make it in a way that we can actually create those NFT metadata for those NFTs. And from there, basically the point was, okay, how do we actually mint them? How do we connect to the Hedera network? We've never done it. We're not crypto developers. We're game developers, and we make MMOs. So we were talking to a few vendors, as well as partners from the Hedera network. I'll say that there are three total. Each one of them was promising that it would work, and basically every single one of them has not delivered anything. And it kind of gets to the point where we're like, "Okay, I guess we have to basically just build it ourselves." Fortunately, there were some great partners who came up. So, it was Goldman as well as Patches here with the HGraph.io. And those partners have delivered the missing modules that we needed. We're currently able to basically have the game self-managing the NFTs and just going live when we need to put it live. So, everything is ready. We're currently associating as many accounts as we can. We want to make it as big as possible and then just go live and have the first MMO up and running on Hedera.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
That's fantastic. I should mention here, I know right now, and we're in the doldrums of the crypto market where it's the accumulation phase. Everything else, we've got 46 people down here. AvailableVerse dropping news. Obviously, you know, up to 10,000 players at once can be playing within a game that is eminently going to be launching aspects within Hedera, and the game has been live since 2013. If all you guys can share the space and just showcase the power of what Hedera can accomplish. But then this space, as far as you think about how many players are in this game at once or they can be in this game at once. I know you guys mentioned as well, and I'll get into that in a second. You guys broke, I think, you guys broke some records at one point in time, so I want to hear about that again. But we could all share this and just hashtag Ethereum, hashtag the Solana community, hashtag everybody else out there. That'd be fantastic. Let's get some more people in here. I want to ask you guys a question real quick about that, though. Because I know that back in January when we did our interview, you mentioned there was that one, there was a couple of really cool things that I remember from that interview. Number one, just the sheer scale of certain events that were going on within the game itself. One of which, as you mentioned, I think one of the OGs within the game, either that person passed away or one of their family members passed away or something, and then there was like this big community thing that came together and created, with all the spaceships. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? That was a really cool story.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So, it's quite funny. If you look in the trailer, I think there is a scene from this, but basically, sometimes, a tragedy strikes at one of the players. You know, they can pass away or somebody's, like, praying for a loved one in the hospital or had an accident or something like that. And then the community has this thing where they basically come together and they build a heart around their base. And, yeah, there were hundreds of players who were going around this player's base after they found out that he passed away. The funny part of the story is that he actually faked his death and then pissed off half the community. But we did actually have quite a few in-game funerals. It's always touching, especially if you remember and know those people personally. It's always kind of, you know, top moving if that happens. So it wasn't really a record. I mean, there were hundreds of players who left their fleets and ships out. The one record I think that we could claim on the testnet, we have tested our game engine, and we can manage up to 3,500 NFT transfers per second with our engine. So we're ready for prime time with trading and the ability to mint and manage the NFTs, basically.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yeah, go ahead.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Sorry, sorry, no, go on, go on.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
I wanted to ask because you did bring up an interesting subject. I think we hear about crypto gaming, and there's been kind of a hesitancy from some of these traditional gaming studios to dive full bore into crypto. That's not really the question that I kind of have though, is like building a game for gamers first, right? And I think that's very important for the way that gaming transitions naturally into crypto. Can you talk about that? You know, why it's important to have a game that's built for gamers first, but then leveraging the technology in ways that make sense to extend out different possibilities for custodianship or things like that? On top of just building a game that people want to play, right?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Of course. So, I think there's a few problems. Personally, there is a lot of stigma when it comes to crypto, and I think it's very warranted. A lot of people took advantage of a new technology and took advantage of people who wanted to make a quick buck, you know, buy low, sell high kind of mentality. So, that's the first problem. And if you have a sale of 1,000 NFTs and somebody tells you that, "Hey, buy this Crypto Zoo Pets for $1,000, and it's going to be worth more than it is right now," there is no possible way that they can guarantee that that is actually going to be the case, unless there is some kind of payout in mind or something like this. It's pure speculation, and it borders on having a Ponzi scheme within it. So people have to be skeptical regarding those kinds of projects, that's just my thing, and it's the same for a lot of game developers. It's based basically going for loot boxes and then not being able to guarantee to the users that if they pay $100, it's actually worth $100. A lot of people were abusing this to a huge extent, so that's where the first part of the stigma comes. Now, the second part is obviously these con men who actually came out and robbed people over their hard-earned money. So, that didn't help. And the other one is that the actual development and delivering the product that works, aside from the fact that MMOs in themselves are some of the hardest projects that you can actually develop. I welcome anyone to just Google "why is it hard to make an MMO?" There's a really nice Stack Overflow Stack Exchange post about it, but overall, it's hard to build it. And based on our experience and how advanced we are in the MMO technology side, we as a company at Valo, we basically have the MMO skill tree unlocked to almost full potential, and even so, we are very aware of how the technology works. It still took us two years to take our game that already has NFTs in it and it's already in a way that is fully tokenized to then actually create systems that would enable us to then basically have the trade and the ability to take the items out and into the game in a secure and seamless way. So, it's really tough, and the developers who could actually do it in many cases don't even want to do it because it's extremely hard to do. So, the majority of people who actually try to do something in the space are really promising something that they cannot deliver because it's extremely hard. And you know, to the point of making an MMO that actually works is even harder. So, I think those are the biggest challenges that crypto developers in general face. And the final part comes down to economics. You know, there is a buzzword "tokenomics," but it really is about the gameplay economy. When you have an RPG game or an MMORPG game, the economies of the game are extremely complicated, and they allow you to play the game for hours and hours. A game like RuneScape, World of Warcraft, TBR has so much content inside of it because it has been built up over the years that it can be played for years on end. You can play RuneScape eight hours a day for four years straight every day, and you will not run out of content, similarly in Imperium as well as in World of Warcraft. However, if you come out with a completely new game that's a completely new MMO, in most cases, you'll even not have that much content, and building it up simply takes time and years of development time. Our game had over 600 patches over the last you know, four years in that short period of time, and you know, just building it up from scratch is a Herculean effort. So those are the biggest challenges that crypto developers and game developers face when they want to actually make a game on crypto. And if you just create a simple card game or a, I don't know, Battle Royale game that has some crypto slapped on it, then people will basically play it for 10 hours, they'll collect everything, and then they'll get bored and they'll quit. And cloning League of Legends is really hard. So having a mobile game that is actually successful, that's something that Blizzard Entertainment had problems with. And you know, the majority of game developers aren’t Blizzard Entertainment, so it's even tougher than that, if that makes sense.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Totally. And I know that you mentioned obviously the on testnet what you can facilitate from the marketplace standpoint with NFTs. I kind of want to get into the announcement that came out from HashPack here in a second as well. But first, I've got kind of two questions for you. And I know Patches is down there, so I'll ask them one at a time because I like to wrap questions together. It's one of my faults. From a Hedera standpoint, the network tools and services that you guys are leveraging, or could be leveraging in the future, I'm imagining obviously you're using HTS or the Hedera Token Service. Are there aspects of consensus service that are being used down the line? Do you see maybe smart contracts being used, the file service being used, because I know that you guys kind of have the in-game Ledger. So what is being used kind of right now at launch, and do you think that there's an opportunity to utilize more services in the future in ways that make sense?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So right now, the two main services that we use are the Hedera Token Service. I personally do not believe in IPFS as a concept. I think it's in case of our game, it doesn't really make any sense. Anyway, because, well, assume that the game goes away and okay, then you lose the NFT. But even if the IPFS was still around and you had your NFT, then what's good from the NFT do you have if there is no game in the first place? I think it's just a cost increase running this kind of project at scale. I'm not even sure how hard it would be to cache 1 million JSON files on IPFS and update 10 million or 50 million NFTs because remember there might be a weekly patch and if we had 100 million NFTs out there, we would need to change 100 million, possibly 100 million, JSON files and then upload it to IPFS. It's a lot easier if you have it on traditional infrastructure, and it's a lot less costly to do it that way. So that's why we're not doing IPFS. In terms of the Hedera Token Service, we're currently using two functionalities. One is minting NFTs, and the other one is transferring NFTs. And then for understanding what is going on on the Hedera Network and getting the state of the network, we are working with Patches and HGraph.io to basically pull in the information about the collection and what kind of changes were done within the actual collection itself. So we basically see who traded and where, and then our game updates the metadata. So if you or anybody sends their NFT into the master wallet of the Vavelverse, then we will basically take this item and put it back into the account that you have. It's a seamless experience. It takes about, I think, five or six seconds, give or take, to basically take the blueprint in and out of your account. So, those are the main things we do now. There's one thing that we do differently from everybody, and we have optimized a system so that it's even more cost-effective than in other cases. When you have a blueprint, it's kind of like a consumable, and what we do is we pre-mint a large number of NFTs. Right now, we've been using the batch minting solution on the 13th. It's gonna change so that the batch minting, as well as regular minting, are all going to have two cents per pop. But we've actually had the system optimized so that it only costs us 10 cents to mint, sorry, seven cents to mint 10 NFTs. So with that, we're already doing it like 90% cheaper. But the idea is that when you take the NFT and you send it to our master wallet, we actually clean it, and it turns into a blank NFT that has no information on it. And it basically says, "Hey, this is a blank NFT for the Vavelverse. It might get changed into a future NFT." And when another user clicks mint inside of their game, this item might get randomly picked to be created into another NFT. So think of it as having a $100 bill and then wipe everything clean just so that you have a cotton piece of paper and then put whatever you want on it and give it to the user. It's kind of like a banknote that you can turn into an item.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
100%. And I mean, the one thing that you also brought up that I found very interesting is, you know, and this is, I think it's kind of a buzzword that we hear in crypto, but from a gaming standpoint, for some use cases, it totally makes sense when you talk about dynamic NFTs and the way that NFTs can shift and change and modify over time. The one question I have for you is that you have, you know, you guys have all these in-game assets, you know how they work internally on the ledger that you guys have already built for the past 10 years, right? As this stuff starts to go live in Web3, for these in-game assets that people can custody, one of the concerns that gamers always have is, are the developers going to push out a patch that nerfs, and by nerf, I mean reduces the utility of certain traits or certain things that exist in the game to make that gaming experience, from a developer standpoint, probably more fair for the wider gaming community? Have you guys thought about that as patches come out? As more things go live? As you guys start tokenizing and creating NFTs with in-game assets, when these patches go live, we also have to kind of, I guess, that's my question, is how are you kind of mitigating that type of, I don't know if it's a risk, but from a game developer standpoint, I'm interested in your answer.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So, I did have an hour-long speech about it like three years ago at one of the conferences. I did have quite a few follow-up questions from it. So, I'll just say that this is a very broad topic, and you can talk about it for two hours. But to sum it up, you can never appease everybody. You're always gonna make somebody angry. There's gonna be somebody who's gonna love you no matter what, and it's probably your dog. And then you're gonna have a cat who's gonna always hate you no matter what you do. And the same applies to gamers and your players, specifically, if you're a game developer. Now, if you have a game, let's, let's take a game like League of Legends that has 160 champions. Those champions get continuously changed. You can have a buff, you can have a nerf. And let's say, in the current meta, a character like Daren is buffed, and that character is stronger. And if the player who is very skilled at using that specific character is gonna have an advantage because he's perfect to play guard, and, he can use, or they can use, the character to the maximum extent and even more and in this situation, a player who doesn't play that character, doesn't know Garen well, will be at a very big disadvantage, and they will be angry at you because that character is overpowered. So you decide to Nerf it, and then the player who used to play Garen no longer gets like an 80% win rate, and they're like, 'No, this is... this is... you broke the game! It's not fair, it's not fun.' This happens constantly every time there's an update. It is one of the reasons I really hate doing patches that rebalance things. And generally speaking, when you do a patch like that, unless you realize there's something absolutely broken, and, you know, if you have 6,000 items and it doesn't matter how big your team is, if you have a few million players in your game or a few thousand players even, they will always be better at finding exploits than you are, even if you have access to spreadsheets. There is going to be some magical combination that, if you apply to this specific item under a very weird circumstance, it's going to be absolutely broken, and it's gonna, like, make you scratch your head, like, 'How is this even possible?' kind of scenario. Borderline, it's a bug, or worse yet, it's actually a bug that needs to be fixed. And where does it begin being a bug and where does it stop being a bug and become a feature? So there is no right answers. However, to answer your question finally, how will we manage it in IGLB Crypto? We will manage it exactly the same way that standard game developers are doing it. You know, we don't want to favor anyone in specific. The game is fairly balanced right now. However, you know, most of our players just suck it up, buttercup. You know, it just happens. You know, you need to adapt or die, kind of mentality. In this case, it's a gamer. There can be a chance that your ship will be reduced in damage output. But, you know, to that end, you should have a wider range of weapons that you own; otherwise, you will be susceptible to nerfs and debuffs.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
You know, on top of that too, mentioning that the game's been live since 2013. I did not kind of ask you about bridging the gap, right? How many, I guess from the traditional standpoint right now, how many gamers do you have that are actively participating in the game prior to the web 3 aspect, and what's been the experience in educating that community that's already there from the gaming standpoint about what's happening with Hedera, and how do you bridge that gap where they get interested in the ecosystem, they get interested in web3? Because I know most gamers are, well, some gamers are just purely gamers. What has that experience been like? So, how many gamers do you have right now playing the game outside of crypto, and what's your experience been like to try to bridge that gap and make them understand why you guys are integrating with crypto?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So, right now, we currently have like hundreds of daily active players. So, there's always somebody playing and fighting. We currently don't have tens of thousands of players logging in daily. We are also gearing towards a Steam launch, absolutely not related to crypto. And Mr. Newell does not want anything to do with AI or crypto on his platform. It's another thing a lot of our players have been waiting for, a crypto and the Steam release. Overall, the game is doing fine in a sense that we have an active community and they're applying it. In terms of bridging the gap from web to web3, I'm gonna say that there's a lot of challenges involved. First, I'll say how we're actually solving this, and then I can get to some of the problems and what I personally believe really needs to improve as soon as possible for crypto and for Hedera in general. So, to begin with, the web-to-player transition to a web three, when you log into IGW, you log in with a traditional login method. There is a login, you can log in with your email or you can log in with Facebook, Steam, whatever. It's just an authentication method using a standard OAuth2 login method. So, you log in just like you would log into any other application. We don't dangle a wallet in front of you. The game itself is quite easy to get into, and we've had players who are over 80 years old playing the game and learning it, and players as young as 10 years old, being my brother, who basically grasped it. So, it's quite easy to get into, nevertheless. It was acquired by a mythical publisher, Kabam, and it's quite easy to understand. It's not like EVE Online that is super daunting. So, it's quite easy to get into for regular users, regardless of age, sex, or the threshold as a gamer. So, if you're a new player versus a veteran player, it's not really gonna bother you.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
So, whenever I, you know, whenever I go to my grandma's house in like two and a half weeks, I'm gonna go there and I might mess around with some Imperium Galactic War here and try to just log in. It's what you say, something very interesting to me where it's the, a lot of the problem might exist within the onboarding process in and of itself. Which kind of leads me nicely to transition into like if you look at what HashPack has done from the email onboarding and what they're doing through Magic Link and things like that, where you don't even necessarily need to have all of this, 'Oh my God, I don't understand what I'm doing, why am I writing down 12 words, or why am I writing down 24 words, why am I doing X, Y, and Z?' It just becomes more of a seamless process. So, I know I interrupt a little bit, but I mean, that does, in my opinion, have to be kind of where we're getting to in the space. Is that onboarding users into web 3 needs to be as seamless as them not even knowing that they're using crypto or web 3. Yeah.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
One of the VCs I spoke with last year told me that, in his opinion, the final adoption of crypto will be that when a new user logs into the project and they start playing, they won't even know it's crypto or they won't even know it's web 3 while they're logging in because Regular Joe will not know how to use it.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
A hundred percent. And maybe you see, wow, I mean, I'm getting a little bit off-topic here, but you know, some of these traditional banks and financial institutions, they've had patents in the working for years about just rewards wallets, dealing in crypto tied right alongside your dollars or, you know, whatever your national currency might be, which is, it's pretty interesting to see that these financial institutions and banks are starting to think about this stuff years ago, 2018, 2019 timeframe, where you just get rewarded for normal actions. I think that is kind of a part of the path in onboarding I wanted to get into. Let's say recent milestones and achievements. I see a tweet here from you guys from September 1st, and this is 48 hours essentially after the associate The Collection aspect. And for those of you guys that might not know if you're listening for the first time, if you don't have a Hedera wallet or an HBAR wallet, and you go to HashPack, if you want to own or buy an NFT (not financial advice, but if you do want to do that), you do need to associate a token. It's kind of a trust and a spam prevention mechanism. But you guys had that associate collection aspect go out. I'm guessing very end of August. Seventeen thousand wallets connected. Is a big milestone and achievement I see from you guys. Can you touch base on that as well as any other milestones?
HashPack - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Oh, and let me just correct, yeah, we just crossed 24,000. So, that's without having dropped it yet. And I'm sorry to step in, but without having done the completed the drop yet, the blueprint NFTs, the Vavelverse kind of drop, is already there. Gonna have the most holders on the entire network. Because before that, we had the most holders at twenty thousand four hundred, and yeah, we are less than a weekend from the first tweet, and we're, you know, yeah, it's already the most held platform.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
That's crazy, man. Because I know that you guys, I think what Marc was talking about, if you're not aware when Hash Pack did their claim through the early supporter aspects and things like that, you guys became the most widely held connection in Hedera pretty much within a week or two. And you're saying that Vavel has already passed that, so that's pretty cool.
HashPack - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Yeah, yeah, so it's, it's count, it's only going up. I mean, if you actually want to have some fun and click on HashScan, you can see all of the association associates come through. And also, since we released the snapshot tool inside of HashPack, you can actually go check by yourself, for yourself, and just put the token ID, and you'll be able to see how many accounts have associated.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
I think one other thing, you know, and maybe I'll ask Vavel this, you know, going to the website and looking at some of the, some of the partners or relationships you guys have, can you talk about, you know, maybe partnerships or relationships you guys have built in this space? I know that you guys recently did something with HashPack. What does that look like now, and what's that going to look like kind of in the future for you guys as things, you know, get more widely utilized from the gaming standpoint?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Gotcha. Yeah, I guess I'll still need to go over the second part of my previous question, but I'll do it right after answering your question now. So, in terms of the partnerships that we have, we are teamed up with HashPack, obviously, AgeGrav, GoMint. We also received investments from Vorte Gaming as well as Venly, and we're obviously the first grantee of the HBAR Foundation. So, those are some really important partners. We have also recently teamed up with SentX. We're gonna have a similar Twitter space on Thursday, similar time as well. In general, we want to be a cross-blockchain entity for which we've hit our game. If you're a crypto gamer, we want to make sure that you can play the game and have your assets traded, held in whatever shape or form you want yourself. So, we do not want to be exclusively with HashPack, exclusively with Venly, or exclusively with Blade. We want to be a cross-system, you know, kind of solution so that we aren't just held to one provider, so that the consumers can choose how they play the game and how they interact with the system. So, our goal for the next months will be around integrating with more partners and just growing the broader community. I know that there is a wallet connect feature coming into Hedera that would simplify the process of linking the apps to the wallet so that will also come with Blade support and most likely Venly support. And, yeah, we just want to be open to the network. Now, to quickly brush up on the previous question regarding getting the users into the actual game and what is needed for them to play. When you log in and play the game, as I said, you log in with Web 2. There is no wallet involved. And when you play, you're going to be getting in-game drops, you're going to be getting in-game assets, you're going to be creating spaceships. The idea is that once you get your first blueprint drop, you'll get the opportunity to basically turn it into an NFT. Click mint, then you will be taken to a wallet connect site. You'll have to link your account to the NFT, sorry, to your wallet account, to your Valiverse account, and once you have it done, you will be able to take the items in and out of the system, and that's it. You will need to have a wallet to play the game. It's just you won't be able to trade until you do. And that's it. You'll still be able to enjoy it with others; you'll still be able to play it; you just won't be able to buy the premium currency. And the one thing that is kind of missing right now is the ability, in my opinion, to buy smaller chunks of HBAR in a simple way because I believe the smallest amount you can get from the traditional wallets is around $35. So, I think this is something that hopefully will change to allow the users to just buy like one dollar worth of currency with their credit card.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yeah, and I kind of wanted to get into a little bit about the announcement that I saw HashPack push out today in the Palladium aspect and the, I don't want to call it an airdrop, but kind of an associate wallet thing. If maybe you, Marc or, if Vavel, if you guys can talk about what that current is going to represent in-game and what, you know, exists out there right now with this amount.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Can you please repeat the question?
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yep, sorry about that. So yeah, I know HashPack just put out a tweet maybe an hour or two ago about Palladium and associating your wallet and different aspects of the in-game currency that are also coming through Vavel. I mean, I'll read it. I have it pinned to the top. 'Amping up collaboration with Fable games, so associating the token ID for $5 worth of Palladium for all of the Hedera community, 15 for Early Access holders, and 35 for early supporter holders.' Can you touch base on what that relationship maybe with HashPack has represented thus far and what the in-game currency represents within Imperium as well?
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
So, the in-game currency that we have basically works kind of like gems in traditional free-to-play games where you can basically use it for whatever you're doing, whether it's building your ships, collecting parts, having research that is going to take 10 hours. If you spend a few Palladium, it's going to be sped up. Or you can purchase buffs that improve your statistics or other things inside the game. So it's basically the fuel for the in-game economy and allows you to expedite your in-game progress. So if you lose your ships and you need to repair them, you can either wait a few hours or you can spend like 20 cents and repair it instantly. That's basically what Palladium is. We're basically giving away a big amount. I mean, with the 20,000 wallets that we currently have, assuming that everybody is not an AS or ES holder, which obviously there are probably quite a few of them already, this would just mean that we're giving away like a hundred thousand dollars worth of Palladium to the community.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
I should have changed the Twitter space name to 'A hundred thousand dollars worth of in-game currency' now that I'm thinking about it. You guys might have seen us changing the name like 10 times during the spaces. No, I mean, that's really interesting. Can you maybe... I'll ask Marc here since we have you up here as well.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
It's probably more like a quarter-million dollars now because there's going to be quite a few AS and ES holders, which obviously means it's not just going to be 24,000 times five. I'm thinking it's probably going to be like 35,000 once we're done. So, let's, yeah.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
No, and, you know, I don't want to speculate too much on the early supporter, early adopter things from a price standpoint, but I did want to ask Marc. You know, understanding what you guys are doing through HashPack and I know that this is a Vavel game space as well you know, making these types of relationships and onboarding people, or onboarding projects, into the wallet aspect. You know, when you do something like this with Vavel, how do you make it make sense at the forefront of the relationship? And then, what types of things are you doing to cultivate that relationship moving down the line with these projects? And let's keep it in the purview of Vavel for the sake of this discussion, like making that relationship. And then, what do you expect moving forward within the relationship with Vavel? Are there different ways that you guys are going to be working together between HashPack and Vavel?
HashPack - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Yeah, well, I mean, let me preface by saying that I was actually checking earlier. We started the talks with Vavel with Miko back late October of last year, and this is finally coming out right. So, like, it's been a lot of back and forth. A lot of meetings and linking both teams together to make sure that when this hits the community, the experience is the one that we've all been craving in terms of the web3 gaming. And then, in terms of future-looking statements, I guess, it's really the way that we see anything in terms of the people that we collaborate with in the network and outside of the network is we're really looking for long-term relationships. Here at the end of the day, a lot of the issues that crypto has is that it's very short-minded. It feels like everyone's just kind of thinking in terms of like three months' time. And like, if we just look at the relationship we have with Vavel, we're nearing a year already. And just now, it's starting into a lot of the crumbs of the things that we've been working together are trying to come out. So, in terms of involving our own community, I mean, we were very clear when we first started HashPack and so on. Like, HashPack was born out of the community, and we believe that having the whole paradigm of engaging with the user base and also like communities of communities, because there's obviously bigger communities like the web3 and in general like crypto in general, and then there's like smaller communities like what is like with Hedera, right? We're always looking at how do we propagate the value to as many people as possible? How do we involve the most amount of people as possible? And how do we make it reach the most amount of people? I mean, it's been extremely, incredibly eye-opening as we've been doing more of these things with more projects in the network because when you start looking at the numbers, and we've shared this on our Twitter, right? But like when you start looking at the numbers and you compare them to traditional web2 businesses, I mean, just this drop in terms of total reach that we've had, it's probably been around 50,000. And you know, we just said 24,000 have associated. That's around 45-48 conversion rate. And the reason why we think it's working so well is because there's a complete alignment between the community and what we're doing as HashPack and the other projects like Vavel, in this case, is doing. Because what we're all trying to do here is really grow the pies together. Because at the end of the day, it's really going to be the best in all together. So that's really how we're kind of approaching all these things and yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's going to be a lot more that comes in the future. But right now, you know, we'll be dropping some more information throughout the week. And in the coming weeks, obviously, when NGW Crypto goes live, it's going to be, we're going to make sure to, that we, that we shout it off the roof. So everyone can see it and engage with the game and really take advantage of all these perks that we've, we've been, you know, crafting for a long time.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yeah, and I think it's interesting even from the Vavelverse standpoint when you think about these achievements that are being managed as well. I mean, I know essentially with the wallet association aspects and what's kind of going on with Palladium and the in-game currency stuff. That's all great that you're rewarding the community. But I know, you know, you work with like HashPack and things like that that there's almost like a front-running aspect to be like, let's actually monitor the statistics here and figure out how much engagement is occurring within those statistics in a way that we can push out and just keep the ball rolling downhill. Because if nobody else is doing it, and I know there's multiple wallets, but we have to benchmark somewhere. There has to be onboarding, there has to be wallet creation, there has to be things like that. And the wallets that are here should be participating in different aspects of the network in and of itself. So it's, you know, for me, it's cool to see those types of things coming. But not just from like a let's just get engagement for the sake of engagement standpoint, but let's actually measure real network effects from some of these initiatives that we're driving. And I know Marc that you certainly do that, which is amazing. And Vaviverse, I think it was a great relationship. Also, kind of the agnostic stuff and partnering with every wallet and everything else, I think is very, very smart. I kind of wanted to wrap it up a little bit here and just ask Vavelverse, is there anything that I might have missed that you guys wanted to touch on? And if, you know, feel free to go over that. But if not, any forward-looking statements that you have, let's say in the near term or maybe looking out a little bit further? What are you excited about for Vavelverse, for the gaming economy in Web3, for your game, for Imperium Galactic War, things like that? If I missed something, feel free to bring it up, and then forward-looking statements will be fantastic.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. Our team really appreciates it. Just a very quick update, we're currently at 24,300. So just in the last hour that we've been having this podcast, we had another 300 associations. So it's going really strong we want to have a real MMO economy that would be driven on the actual network itself. You know, it took us two years to basically build it. There was absolutely no network activity coming from Vavel because we were in a building mode, and it was extremely complicated to build. Fortunately, we are past the development phase and just currently associating as many accounts as we can to get the launch as strong as we can. We believe that we have chosen the right network, the one that is, in our opinion, the most scalable and secure, both in terms of, let's call it, consumer trust as well as actual security of the network. I'm just super excited to be able to have a real, let's call it, player-driven MMO but done right. No kind of like loot box giveaways, no, you know, just, 'Hey, pay us $100 for an NFT and pray that it's gonna have a high value.' We want it to be player-driven, where the actual game economy is built by the players, and we're just going to be facilitators of it, and, you know, the people who are doing the maintenance and sweeping it with the brooms, janitors kind of thing, instead of, you know, being the, I don't know what. So yeah.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
That's great. Now I'm looking forward to seeing everything come to fruition for you guys and everything's starting to launch as well.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
A feature I would really want to have this out this year, though. We're currently in talks with the HBAR Foundation to see if we can get extra funding for this. But like, I had this idea basically for in-game crafting using, basically, on-chain crafting. So if you have a few NFTs that you send to a specific wallet, we would detect what kind of NFT that was. And then if you had, let's say, three blueprints that are of a rare rarity, you could turn them into a higher-tier rarity that would be epic, for example, and from epic to legendary, but have this entirely done on-chain rather than something that would be done using the traditional, let's call it, blockchain systems. Sorry, sorry, traditional gaming systems, but have its own on the actual network. So that's something that's, I would be pretty excited about to have included in the game because it was a feature that I really wanted to have in IGW for a while. And in this case, we would build using Hedera.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Let me see if there's any comments down here. Marc, while I look through comments real quick, can you just maybe re-mention the associate wallet aspect for those that do want to participate in something like this and what that represents, and maybe just go over that tweet that you guys pushed out through HashPack? And I'm going to look down here through comments as well.
HashPack - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Yeah. So, everyone who's here and that might be tuning in after, on September 8th, there will be a snapshot made. And there will be, that's going to be the cutoff date. So, if you go on our Twitter, you'll be able to find the token ID to associate. And then from there, today, just a few minutes ago, we actually released the announcement of the Palladium. And yeah, just take the second tweet in terms of how that Palladium will be dropped into. The receivers of the NFT, like Miko was mentioning, there's going to be like, once everyone joins the game, you'll be able to receive it on the patch. So, that's the basic gist of it. There's going to be more updates coming, and obviously, if there's any questions on Discord or DMS, and I'm sure that Vavel Games' Twitter DMS and Discord is always open. So, feel free to swing by our Discord or just Twitter DMs, and we'll, you know, if there's any questions, we'll be happy to assist on that.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome. I should mention from Genfinity's purview, tomorrow we're doing a spaces between Sicktoshi from Mad V Apes and Vechain, Quincy from XDC, XRPL representation with Spend the Bits. I think we have Unari coming on, and Tectum from Bitcoin, as well as Orbis86 from the Hedera ecosystem. And then I think on next Thursday, the 14th, we've got support for Hello Future Live coming down the pike. So, we've got Mint Condition, Max Walker Williams, Citadel, Acor, and Hello Future coming on. And then next Wednesday, we've got a pretty major space with two individuals from the Chamber of Digital Commerce, Jeremy Hogan, John Deaton, Rasheed from Alliance Block. So, stay tuned to some of our upcoming spaces. Again, if you guys are joining for the first time within this, we do the Hedera Corner spaces in collaboration with HashPack. Today, we interviewed Vavelverse. This is a game that is live. It's, you know, they've had it live and launched since 2013, bringing the aspects into the Hedera ecosystem, talking about Dynamic NFTs, talking about kind of the first MMORPG that is actually launching within Hedera live. And as Marc mentioned from HashPack, if you have not associated your wallet, if you want to look more into it, do your own research, and then associate your wallet or don't. But there are rewards being driven for participation within the community. I've got to give a gigantic shout-out and kudos to both of our guests today. Thank you to Vavelverse, and thank you to Marc from HashPack. So, thank you guys so much. Thank you.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
And if there's one more final thing I can say, we will be announcing the actual launch very soon on the 8th. We'll have the card of date for the giveaway for the launch. And then we plan on doing the mint. The mint might be a few days after we actually do the cut-off date. And from there, we'll basically just launch the game and distribute a new launcher link. It will be Vavelverse Launcher 3.0, and everyone will be able to log in and play IGLB Crypto.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today and really appreciate Marc setting this up and happy to do this interview. And looking forward to seeing everything come to fruition and Godspeed. I mean, I know how much you guys have been working since our first interview in January. It's really nice to revisit this stuff now at the beginning of September and to see the stuff, you know, start going live. So, I think it's really important for projects to do the due diligence behind the scenes to make sure that things get launched appropriately. Kudos to you guys for that. Really excited and congratulations on passing HashPack for essentially the most held NFT drop within Hedera that hasn't even launched yet. So, looking forward to seeing those final numbers.
Vavel Games - Miko - Co-Owner & CEO
Thank you.
Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
All right, guys, I will talk to you, we'll talk to you next time. And from Genfinity, for myself, we thank you guys, and we'll see you guys. Bye.
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