CryptoKitties

And I think, you know, It's definitely not at its peak, but it's still very substantial amounts of volume on the chain simply because it's kind of like a game.

It's like CryptoKitties for ETH, right? It's like a way for people to get involved and understand that they can get exposure to real equities.

And it starts to open up the door for people to kind of have these opportunities.

wallets or portfolios that not only just hold a bunch of meme coins and maybe like one or two majors but now they have they're holding sk hynix and micron and um and krispy kreme like it's it's the you know the stuff is is kind of all over the place

Before I talk about this, I guess I'll talk about why is it that we felt was necessary to create a new protocol? So why reinvent the wheel? Why can't we just use what's out there today? So this is back in 2017 when we were starting to investigate how could we use blockchain given that it has so many complementary properties with IoT that it could be used to really advance the field.

Could we actually use some of the existing technologies that we see? So if you looked at some of the general purpose platforms such as Ethereum, you know, we all know that Ethereum has a lot of, you know, sort of throughput and scalability issues, right? You know, single like, you know, CryptoKitty app can clog up the entire network.

So that wasn't really viable that we think if you start hooking up billions of IoT devices to this platform, it's going to choke like there's no tomorrow, right? So that's really not going to work out.

Then we look at other technologies, something like IOTA, which is properly designed specifically for IoT devices.

Yep.

And early NFTs with CryptoKitties and other digital collectibles.

And then DeFi, which started in 2020.

And in each of these, the theme that I was synthesizing was ownership is enabling these markets to grow bigger faster.

But the key was like access.

You had access to own a piece of the product that you might use one day.

And then with CryptoKitties, it was collectibles, it was a game.

And similarly, you own the asset.

126.

The developers behind CryptoKitties create Dapper Labs to change the gaming industry and blockchain The developers behind CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, created a new blockchain specifically designed for blockchain-based games and digital collectibles.

127.

Blending Worlds.

Explore the revolution in gaming with blockchain.

From CryptoKitties to advanced game, see how blockchain changes play, offering real asset control and experiences.

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Crypto gaming will adjust and become a trillion-dollar industry.

The NFT paradigm shift toward metaverse and gaming in 2022.

These days, it seems the entire world is talking about non-fungible tokens.

The first non-fungible tokens, CryptoKitties, clogged the Ethereum blockchain in 2017 when they were launched Due to the overwhelming demand from people who wanted to collect, breed, sell, buy, and exchange those virtual cats.

Two hundred seventy-seven.

I mean, Animoca has been really active in the crypto blockchain space really since late 2017.

I guess we had our first big moment when we were involved to a certain degree with, uh, CryptoKitties and essentially helped usher in sort of, I guess, the NFT age, and I know we're gonna talk about that a little bit.

And of course, you know, um, our sort of, um, ownership of Sandbox, our involvement in Axie Infinity, OpenSea, you know, uh, Dapper Labs and so on, basically kind of made us a little bit of a household name in the early days of crypto.

But I think a lot of people might not remember that it was a long slog, right? It was from 2017 up until '21 when it really sort of started to take off.

Uh, yeah, there's some, uh, shout out to Alan Falcon.

He's one of the, uh, kind of OGs from Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties.

If you go follow his page, he's doing like daily doodles, toy drops.

He's kind of making the platform flex a little bit.

So now we're a couple of years later.

We're in the CryptoKitties era, and we're starting to see the initial... pangs of scaling and saying, hey, okay.

And I remember, so I took Harry, my third co-founder, and I knocked on Ed's door with Harry and I said, hey, Ed, remember that Arbitrum thing before you left to the White House that you were working on? I think it's time we pick that up properly.

And again, at this point, we were talking completely in an academic context.