Rumi Morales: Everyone and welcome to this all-star panel. The next $3 trillion are on gaming FinTech and stable coins. I'm Rumi Miralis. I am a proud partner and board member at outlier ventures, and it is my total joy to welcome these three amazing people on this panel today, I am here with. Chicago, who is the chief decentralization officer at coin FX.
Absolutely love that title, chief decentralization, officer Nick, and we can get more into what that means at . And Pablo Quiroga, who's the co-founder and chief revenue officer at star Atlas and scenario Arshad. Who's a partner at drive capital. So as we think about this, Category. I just want us to keep perspective.
One thing. This was something that I saw recently, which is that, in 2021, apple has added $618 billion to its market cap. And that is basically in context, adding an Ethereum, a Solana and avalanche Aluna, swap in an ACCE infinity to its market cap with some spiritual change. So as we think about, where the next real wave of.
Opportunities coming from and how to bring traditional, larger institutions into the metaverse and into what we're building, what our, what infrastructure needs look like. Put in place. What are the Trojan horses? The on-ramps the interesting ways to get people involved because we know there's opportunity here, but there's still a long way to go.
So with that, I'm going to let the, each panel has introduced themselves briefly. We'll dive into discussion and as always really welcome your questions. Love to get you all involved in what we're going to be chatting about right now. So Nick, why don't we start with you?
Nick Chicago: Yeah, thanks Rumi.
Thanks for having us. And thanks Outlander. So yeah, I'm the chief decentralization officer at coin effects.
We're focused on releasing a portfolio of uh, 199, Non-US stable coins really to. Help support projects like star Atlas as they go into having a stable coin settlement opportunity, either in a wallet or an off ramp without having to go through a centralized exchange or an AMM just creates a tighter game experience.
Keeps players connected and online to each other. It really payments in general have not. Found their way into the current world, which is of crypto, which is very much driven by exchanges. And so have every tool in your belt that you would ever need to trade crypto back and forth. But in terms of, turning crypto into groceries it's a little bit more challenging.
So we're really focused on being that bridge between Fiat web two and web three for for platforms and for operators.
Rumi Morales: Terrific. Thanks. And I'd add that Nick and his co-founder Matt Dixon will be at a fireside chat following this panel discussion for everyone to learn even more about coin FX scenario.
How about an introduction from you or if you don't mind.
Zunaira: Yeah, happy to. And yeah. Thank you, Rumi and outlier. So my background is actually it hasn't always been on the investing side. I came into this ecosystem back in 2017 and 2018 working with. With con at consensus with a lot of, the east core development movement.
Now I am a partner at drive capital where I focus on investing in the webs three and metaverse space. And it's been super exciting to me, like really like amazing founding team CEOs, CRS like Pablo and Eric, and to learn and continue to. Y to my horizon on how to think about investing and growing the space from the investment perspective.
Rumi Morales: And you this is this new for drive to be going into web three lines. Yeah.
Zunaira: So drive, we have a number of focus areas, but yeah, no, we haven't made our first web Sri investment yet. So this is going to be super exciting.
Rumi Morales: Terrific. Then let's turn to Pablo. A little bit more about you.
Pablo Quiroga: Yeah.
Hi everyone. My name is Pablo Quiroga serve as co-founder and chief revenue officer at star Atlas. We're the fastest growing next-generation gaming. Metaverse emerging from the confluence of cutting edge gaming technology blasting technology. Being built on salon protocol. We like to think of ourselves as a builders of a public utility that will drive the evolution of the internet.
As we're bringing forth our first experience to life based on our MMO RPG grand strategy game, utilizing unreal engine five and then hyper realistic. Happy to be here and hi to all the owners, boosters and mud factions at sir Alice watching us.
Rumi Morales: I was going to say, do you want to put in, what you shared with us in the pre-call yesterday, or we'll get that for later, the filters that you have.
Cause that was pretty funny.
Pablo Quiroga: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we're going to welcome the photo ly.
Nick Chicago: Yeah, such a flux.
Pablo Quiroga: So I'll tell you a little background on photo light each faction in our metaverse and start out with has a lot of lore, a lot of history, of course the game. Set in 26 20. So think of, I think 599 years from now in the foot ally are actually these light bearing alien.
So I'm literally made of light right now. I actually think that in real life too I think we all have our lights to shine out there. We call ourselves light warriors, but. Have different species. And we kind of something we were talking about with Nick on how cool it would be to interact Nick's technology with different factions and styles.
So I guess we'll explore that.
Rumi Morales: Absolutely. Let's dig in and just, this just makes me smile so much, what we're all doing is so cool. And, but it's funny when I first looked at this panel title it's around gaming, FinTech, stable coins, it seems very broad. But as I put it together, we're really talking like the plumbing of the metaverse and the real, the bones of what we're building public.
I love your phrase, public utility. And it would like to ask you more about that, but why don't we start with Nick if that's okay. In Nikki made interesting you post interesting question on our pre-call, which was, where do we think we are in this point in time? Like, where are. Right now as an industry, as web two and wet three are converging.
What, why does
Nick Chicago: Yeah. In real quick, Jump back to something you said earlier about the size of markets, right? I think that's one barometer and trillion sounds like a big number and it is a big number, but for example, in the, S ACA trails internet $3.2 trillion in volume move every single day.
The foreign exchange markets are fully decentralized market it's quadrillions of volume. And so what you're really talking about is the plumbing, and I'm super excited to have, Pablo here because people don't get super excited about plumbing in crypto, it's a dry topic, behind the.
Behind the metaverse our people and employees that need to get paid and people who are working all around the world. And there's a lot of challenges to getting those folks compensated quickly in the background. And then again, once you're in the metaverse. The reality is an analog world.
People are sitting in all different jurisdictions and have all different challenges in terms of accessing legal tender in their country and how you convert that into a tip to metaverse currency. I think we are right around 1998 internet and I'm sure there's all the young people on the call today.
That was my parents writing a check, a paper, check to a guy who had a bunch of modems in his basement, in our neighborhood. And I had to go to the library and read a bunch of books to get connected to the internet. And watch a Uber, Chuck, a baby, which was like a 3d baby in a diaper doing a 15 second mov clip.
And it took about an hour to download. And from those humble beginnings, we ended up with where we are now which is talking to Folks in the metaverse on zoom and 4k to 6,000 different people. And so it comes up on quick and we want to be a head and ready for that.
Eventually.
Rumi Morales: I think the thing with that dancing baby, as it took an hour to upload, and yet we all loved it so much. It was as if it was a scenario. Would you agree that this is like 1998 internet? Where are we in terms of getting people the right OnRamps the right entry points are good to enter web.
Zunaira: Yeah, I think looking at the early periods of web one and sort of the nascency and confusion, but also exciting development that surrounded that time. We're definitely right at the beginning. People like worry and talk to me all the time about how they feel like. They've they can't keep up so much has happened.
We've been in this space for so long, but oh, we didn't invest, we weren't believers early on. Did we miss the whole movement and and I just looked at them and I'm like, no way, this is what's so exciting is that we're continuously learning how to build out this technology.
And we're continuously learning what. Is like how it services and better improves the quality of life of individuals. We had our theses when we used to talk about NFTs back in the day and I think I even did, I did a deep dive. I wrote Kind of a research paper memo on how we go about investing in gaming and webs three.
All, a lot of my assumptions are wrong now, all of them, but a lot of what I was thinking and predicting and writing and defending It's not how we see the world today. But the thing that was important was that I was thinking about it and I was learning about it. And I think that's ultimately what kind of, let me keep up with the times a little bit.
I don't say I totally did, but I kept my interest grew and I. Watching everything kind of blossom last year was super exciting and it wasn't in the ticketing space necessarily, or access to sports games, through, with NFTs, which is like totally what I thought would be like the entry point, it was through art and a lot of people had been talking about it and I went back to those discussions and I said, okay what was it about how they were thinking about this, that why did that make so much sense to them? And it helped me reframe and develop newer perspectives on where I see the next wave is going.
And obviously that's what the Dow is. It's with a whole host of different kind of what were just, once you use cases back in the.
Rumi Morales: I know it does really happen fast. And again, it turned to Pablo on two points the first one though, being a public utility, because as I'm looking at you right now, and I'm thinking if I'm my dad sitting at his kitchen and Virginia is staring at you wondering how in the world is this a public utility?
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you're framing, star Atlas in the world, how you're thinking about the future? It falling on some of the points in dismayed.
Pablo Quiroga: All right. Awesome. I was about to, yeah. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for that question and, thanks for the current frame right now of Webb street. If we could just meditated on the fact that, we can call all agree on that. The metaverse is the next evolution of the internet full stop.
What does that really mean? And that, to us, that star Atlas it, it means everything that we can possibly think that is online to be redefined in six different. Which we've characterized in our in our meetings as in our, in planning as identity immersiveness, our economy, multi-device community and a world that is time persistent.
So if we look at those six different points, imagine having an experience of buying goods through Amazon on one of star Atlas plus. It's really going to be, you're talking about a B2B market inside of a metaverse that could be interrelated to our own economy or not.
Because we can also create new dimensions in our rivers because we are a space. Members and time and physics is a pretty expensive and unrelated to the current requirements and anchors that we have here in this analog life. So it gets really exciting.
We can turn this. Inside out and start thinking about commerce and games and defy in social experiences on how we're going to consume media in the metaverse that gets very exciting for us. So at star Atlas, before I, I tackle this the question about public utility I think it's also To frame the type of tokens and the economy that we have.
And so Alice, so we're a dual token economy when it says utility token and the other is is governance token. So Atlas, which is the native utility token is something that players are going to be required to acquire digital assets, such as ships cruise line. That's a very simple example.
Before going further, Polis is a governance token that repre represents all of these incapacitating jurisdictional power in the metaverse. So you can really express an exert your dominance in different areas of a better word. But more importantly, it's also connected to our doubt and that's really where we're going to open up the early interaction to the public utility.
Meaning that pull is holders will be able to influence the way that we today as a quote unquote centralized operational development company or team are building the, of. Helping us shape the different decisions that we make as a company over time. There's going to be a lot more coolest holders and over time, maybe there's someone who's holding so much Polis and they're actually starting to build on top of our blockchain.
We believe that blockchain gaming is also utilize. Blockchain, not just selling NFTs and having a token. We have functionality and mechanics built on Solano protocol. It's very new. This is cutting edge. This hasn't been done before on top of that, we're also doing it in unreal engine five.
So think about this hyper-realistic environment and underneath the. You have the most complex system that they have that hasn't been performed in the past ever. So we're, that's our challenge, right? That's our summit. When we execute on this, it's really going to empower everyone because we're going to open this.
For the usage and the development of more developers and content creators globally. So if people want to build on top of stylists, there'll be able to do that. If a factions want to connect with Nick and have on-ramps and off-ramps for their own assets, there'll be able to do. So can
Rumi Morales: I actually then rope in Nick here and your title, chief decentralization officer. It's really interesting coming with that. What Pablo was saying too, is this move towards the path towards decentralization. Can you tell me what you are? What coin FX is doing in this regard and how you see helping that the plumbing of really creating that B2B market place in the metaverse that Papa was talking.
Nick Chicago: Yeah. My background is I've been in crypto for nine years and I've been in FinTech infrastructure for three years, actually working with financial institutions and doing all the un-fun stuff you have to do to turn a dollar bill into a dollar of out of Polis, for example. And I would say that the.
It's a, it's an area of the business. That's critically important for the metaverse in that. You have to teleport down back to earth and bring those new users on. And those new users have cash right, where they have to have a bank account. And I want to make it as easy as possible for those people to get into the metaverse.
What comes with that is a whole bunch of things that are not really sexy and fun but are really important for regulators. And I think can be either be a tailwind or headwind to explosive growth in the middle of. And so what that means is, ensuring that there's, good actors coming into the metaverse right.
People who are there just to play games and create this new world folks who are not there to commit fraud and take advantage of other users all these sorts of things that we have which are for the benefit of consumers, but, our. Overblown in that it's a lot of, for example, there's only a million users, right?
It's a very small market compared to a Facebook or something like that. And it took regulators are really long time to even care about Facebook, or even to understand what it is and the impact that it was having on society. So I think it's super important for the developers, the creators, the creatives that, that are going to be building these worlds to give them the tools that they need to not get blocked by.
And weighed down by this plumbing, right? This multi-jurisdictional, you look at the U S it's 50 states and five federal regulators you have to deal with. So that's 55 regulators. And to be honest, like the time's better well spent with, Hiring game developers and artists and creators, and do it building their brand and attracting new users, not becoming experts in payments and compliance and that sort of thing.
And what we've developed is something that I think is, the way it should be, which is, what if. What if the user's own PayPal, right? And that's really how we've approached this there's, card networks.
, there are banks and then you have FinTech providers that kind of sit as a layer on top. We have that opportunity to sit as a layer on top, follow all the rules, but design it in such a way that. Consumers still benefit consumers still have a role. I worked for Vanguard for a very long time.
As a consultant a lot of people don't realize this, but it's basically a Dao it's member owned. When they were coming out with the S and P 500 index fund. No one knew what it was. Wasn't a stock certificate. Didn't have a ticker regulators didn't know what to do with it.
They created a community where. Everybody was obsessed with low fees, right? They would get CDO, we'll get letters if they advertise because they pooled all their assets together in order to have the lowest cost S and P 500 index fund. And now with 3% of people's payroll going into a 401k, a lot of it goes into Vanguard.
9,000,000,000,012 trillion in assets, four times as much as their next competitor. I think it's largely because it's member owned and community driven. And so that's what we're trying to do with uh, effective is take some of those dowel principles and principles from Vanguard and credit unions and put that into a new payment rail that satisfies what regulators are looking for.
It makes it really easy for developers to integrate and just get people into the metaverse as quickly as possible. And in and out. Yeah,
Pablo Quiroga: what's great. Cool.
Rumi Morales: It's the decentralized PayPal and its applications across a number of industries, right? In this scenario, this is something that you were talking about on our call earlier.
It's you've had, vertical integration, but where are we in terms of, Going moving horizontally across use cases across web three, as an investor. What are you seeing, to bring like a star Alice and a coin effects together? Are you seeing more or what else do you need to see to make sure that the web three universe becomes much more horizontal and has applications across industries?
Zunaira: Yeah. I mean up until today. So much of what we've seen while there have been some kind of focuses on interoperability and the stuff that makes everything meshed together. We've been at a point where we've had these like vertical entry points into onboarding kind of users into the larger blockchain crypto web three ecosystem.
Now, though. And what I'm hearing from both Nick and Pablo is this kind of immense focus on developing true platforms and I guess starting with maybe one single product, but knowing that the vision is to actually build out something that enables everyone to plug into a metaverse that is like a horizontal approach to developing, developing out this ecosystem.
So when I'm looking at. Investments. It's going to be really hard to pick maybe the next game or the next single game developer. And keep doing that successfully. But if I find the folks who are helping solve through the pain points of developing games or allowing others to plug in and develop their own games then I'm looking at Something that is redefining the way gaming works with a focus on the metaverse and developing out the metaverse.
And I think that. We're starting to see that. So that's, what's super exciting. It's going from like those vertical entry points and shifting over to like horizontal approaches on how to develop out the web three ecosystem.
Rumi Morales: Apollo you've done immense work. I think just thinking through what that metaverse right.
Looks like. Across industries. I liked the way you talked yesterday and if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit more about decentralized autonomous companies, your Dax within star Atlas and framing out how that industry looks like in the middle.
Pablo Quiroga: Absolutely. I'd love to, and what's most beautiful about that is and start out with, we did not expect to see the rise and emergence of Dax so early, before our game is even live currently, there's over 30 decks that star Atlas, these decks have been able to raise between 500,000 and over $10 million in the past four months to create.
An onboarding system to acquire new players within their factions and their deaths. Some of these docs are creating decks of Dax funds of funds. You can think of, and these these deck operators are connecting with the capital injection. So the VCs or in just angel investors, and they're going to work directly to the deck operators.
The deck operators are purchasing the in-game assets and now. We hopefully the w we're at sir, Alice, we're going to open up utility to those shifts that people have been purchasing for the past two months. So it's quite the flow of capital at such an early stage, but. It's just amazing to see these decks are global.
So as an example there's a DAC in Brazil that is literally taking the flag of Brazil and wrapped it around the deck. And they have thousands and thousands of players already connected to the deck. The players, majority of them actually don't have the capital to purchase. Some of the more expensive.
That require more crew members, more resources, more energy to, to play the game. So what they're doing is they're, they are rent. They're going to rent these ships from third deck and earn somewhere between. 60 to 80% of Atlas that they gain from playing the game. And then, the operator keeps a 30 to 20%, right?
So there's all these structures already forming. What's exciting is that some decks are even created because of the nature of the centralization of our development and our product. There's a deck that created their own. Their own marketplace. And what would say that, we would be upset at that at store outlets because we have our own marketplace where we sell our shifts.
They literally took payers of our of our markets per ship. And they have their own marketplace. They're selling ships on their own marketplace using all of our Meda data, all over information. And so Nick, for example, like quite effects could go to. It to that marketplace and say, Hey, do you want an on-ramp off-ramp and not in, in benefit from what store Atlas is building and not even have to go to service, like the quote-unquote again, centralized development team.
Nick Chicago: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned Brazil because that's a great example for us. One of our network partners, investors members, that's how we're approaching this, is that every kind of investors, the member is Keon bank and they're out of of they're out of Brazil. They have the FinTech licenses to deal in both yak and crypto.
They have the integration with the pics now. Which is the Zelle of Brazil. And they handle the kind of compliance requirements in terms of identity verification and that sort of thing. That's exactly what we're trying to do, where, pop those two, you might not know where that is going to come from.
But by having a full kind of portfolio in every jurisdiction, we're able to be there waiting for when things kind of start, start to pop off. So that's super cool to hear
Pablo Quiroga: the salon is trying to have a. Nodes decentralized nodes, right? Today they have around 2000 net node validators.
If Bitcoin, 12,000 nodes were to go down, Bitcoin would disappear. The idea of being decentralized is so that if one node goes down that everything's still on record or now. So we see these Dax in the future that if we're not around anymore, the DAS are going to be able to continue building, and that is life.
So I love eat this is going to be around for hundreds of years. And it's with people like us in this room and people that are watching that hopefully are inspired by this continue to go out there.
Rumi Morales: Yeah. I have to say, I've been in this, in the crypto space for awhile and one of the reasons I stay is just all the time, like conversations like this, just keep my eyes so big.
As I think about the future, fascinated by the innovation here and just completely in awe by all of these. For those as mentioned one, learn more about Nick and coin FX. There's going to be a fireside chat along with his co-founder Matt Dickson coming up. Right now. So I'm so sorry. I'm going to have to say goodbye to everyone, but it's been a pleasure.
And thank you again, era Pablo, Nick. It's. It's been an honor as well as a pleasure. Thanks everyone. Thank you.
