 Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming out this morning. First of all, a special thank you to DEF CON and all the organizers for having me here. The hospitality so far has been great. I'd also like to make a public statement here that it's great to see some minority groups strongly represented here. I've noticed the increase in women and non-white guys at DEF CON, which is very positive, and I think diversity is an important thing for us to progress. So keep it up, and let's go together strong in this one. So CryptoKitties launched the Alpha just over a year ago, and it was really wild. We had tons of fun doing it. And for many people, it was actually the first time that they ever interacted with the blockchain in general. And for us, we felt that we were onto something new. A lot has happened since then. You know, we've had many lessons that we learned, and I'm here today to talk to you about some of them. Our community and our ecosystem has also grown significantly. We've had third-party apps like Kitty Hats come and expose this IDF extensibility of non-fungible tokens. We've had CryptoGoods who came along and did this whole physical representation of NFTs, which was pretty cool. We've had tons of fun arts. We've even had people who have gone out and gotten kitty tattoos, which was crazy. And our team has also grown since then, so I want to give a special shout-out to our team over there. We hail from 20 different countries, 18 plus different countries, 20 plus different languages, over six employees, so big shout-out to the team, all ranging from a variety of different backgrounds, different experiences and whatnot. So like I said, I'm here today to talk to you about user experience and blockchain. And instead of rattling off a bunch of bullet points, I'm gonna have a little bit of a philosophical discussion. I'm gonna break this down into three overarching lessons, and these lessons are gonna be very kind of human-to-human relatable, because I believe that if we can think and build our products for humans, then they're gonna be much stronger. So lesson one is titled Talk. And I'll begin this lesson by telling you a little bit about myself. So my name is Nick. I'm one of the founding members of CryptoKitties, and I'm the lead front-end engineer over at the Kitty Den. I was born and raised in the Caribbean on a small island called Trinidad, and I spent 19 warm years in the tropics. I had a very strong interest in arts and sciences, and at the age of 19, I left Trinidad, and I went to Montreal to study mechanical engineering. When I came back to Trinidad, I decided to go to the other side of my brain and start a fashion brand. So I was designing a parallel, producing it, selling it, and through a parallel design, I decided to learn how to do web development because I wanted to sell my clothes online. Eventually, I got a job as a web developer at an advertising agency, and a year and a half later, I quit that job, and I went traveling around the world. During that time, I built up a technical blog that had, I think, about half a million readers per month in its peak, and that was a time for me to really discover what did I want in this industry. I came back to Trinidad at some point, and then went to the Bay Area for a few months. And in November of 2019, I joined Axiom Zen as a front-end engineer. Initially, I had worked out of the Chilean office, and then I worked in Trinidad for six more months as well. And in January of 2017, I moved to Vancouver, and I sacrificed all the sun and warmth for a little bit of snow and cold. But it was a really good choice for me because seven months later, we were scheming cryptocurrencies, and in December of last year, we launched, we released the cats into the wild. So why am I telling you this? What relevance does my life story have to user experience? Well, the way that I think is that now that you know a little bit about me, we've established a little bit of a human connection. And the more that you get to know me, and the more that I get to know you, the easier it is going to be for us to build our relationship. So I'll tell you a little bit about cryptocurrencies. Yes, it was an app. Yes, it was a product that we developed. Yes, we just put cats on the blockchain. But for us, you know, we did a lot more. We gave these cats names. We gave them a story. And people felt really strong connections to the cats that they owned, because they had a story. And the interesting thing in this space is that we use a lot of technical words like interoperability and extensibility and whatnot. But outside of this room, outside of DevCon, nobody understands that. But by crafting narratives and crafting stories for the cats and for the ecosystem, we bring meaning and we bring life and we establish this really good human connection. So lesson one concludes, we give whatever you're building a personality. Give it a voice, let it tell stories. Because storytelling is important for establishing a human connection. And a human connection is really important for building a long-term relationship. So lesson two will be about listening. You know, we just went over talking. How do you talk to establish a connection? Well, you have to return in favor. You have to listen to the people that you talk to. So in December of 2017, CryptoKitties was released to the masses. I'm just gonna get a little water, excuse me, sorry. Can I get a sip? Thank you. Apologies. So in December of 2017, CryptoKitties was launched to the masses. And by December 8th, three days later, we were literally on fire. I had been working for about six weeks straight with my team pulling like 16-hour days. You know, we were pretty exhausted by then. And I remember it was a Saturday. I was just trying to have a normal day. I was out buying little groceries, getting a little bottle of wine, you know, I wanted to relax. And then I got a few text messages from some of my coworkers saying that Genesis, which was cat number one of CryptoKitties, had just sold for $120,000. And I knew at that point that any sign of relaxation was officially out the window. And it showed, you know. I mean, in that first month, we had 1.6 million in web traffic. We had over 200,000 wallets created. And we had 52,000 new kitty owners. You know, I mean, things really skyrocketed. It was high time for us and for CryptoKitties. And, you know, we had to deal with that. I mean, at that point, it was immediately exposed that, you know, the network couldn't handle the traffic. Different geth nodes were just completely failing because of mem pools getting clogged. Our API, which was listening to events on said geth nodes, was just not picking up the events anymore. Our front end was just not showing the correct data as a result of that. And it was a nightmare, you know. Users were so new to this thing that they were just burning money on gas. They had no idea what they were doing. At that point, I think in the first two or three months or so, users had spent over $2 million in gas. Some people were spending up to 10 times more in gas without even realizing it, like 10 times more than they should have. And tons of it was wasted on failed transactions, you know. This is such a new environment for users. They just didn't know. And we were kind of freaking out, you know, we're dealing with people's money. We're dealing with completely new technology here. What do we do? So we had three options. Number one is just let them burn gas, you know, let it be. But that was a big no from our part because we were dealing with people's money and we have to protect people a lot better when things are new and especially when we're dealing with money. Option number two was to go for like a more preventative measure entirely. We tried to control the UI a little bit and prevent users from conducting transactions that we knew or that we assumed might be guaranteed to fail. But this also backfired because, you know, because of these multiple layers of information travel from the blockchain all the way up to your applications. Info just gets lost along the way and especially when get instances failover and then the API goes down, it's usually heavy traffic and the front end is just assuming the wrong information. So we ended up in a situation where we were literally blocking people from, you know, buying and breeding their cats and that was also a bad thing. So option three kind of sits somewhere in the middle or not really in the middle, but it's more like let's take the lessons of option one and two and apply it and let's give some user education and guidance here, you know, let's teach users like what is it that they're into in this new space. And during the alpha of CryptoKitties, we made a couple of wrong assumptions, you know, we thought that our users would just kind of get it. Yeah, we were testing whether they would like the pictures of the cats and whether they would get down with this old cat breeding thing and they did, but we did make a couple of assumptions that they would kind of get the whole blockchain thing and we were wrong. They were actually confused, you know, there was a lot of newness and a lot of unfamiliarity around that technology. But as soon as we gave people a little bit of guidance, they felt a lot more comfortable. They started to fall in love. The messages that we were getting through our various social channels at that point were hilarious, you know, people were just fascinated by this whole ownership of NFTs on the blockchain, you know, oh, I own this cat, this piece of digital art, you know. And that user guidance really paid off big time for us. We took that as a lesson to introduce more and more guidance throughout the app during its, throughout the web app during its lifecycle, development lifecycle. We started to talk about gas and we had these birthing fees for cats as well. We continuously educated people about that, you know, we got them educated through the onboarding and that type of thing. And people started to have this growing familiarity with the ecosystem. One of the most important things for us that was missing early on was what was happening after our interact? What was happening after our transact? In a normal, typical like client-server application, you know, you do something and you immediately have feedback, you know. If you are buying some kind of e-book online, you know, you immediately get this email with your PDF of your book. If you are buying something on Amazon, you know, you get this shipping receipts and you have this comfort that it's gonna be in the mail in a couple days or so. But with blockchain and with buying NFTs on the web, you go out there, you do this transaction, you send it off to the mysterious blockchain and then like, that's it, you know, the everyday users just like, oh, what the hell just happened, you know? So we started to introduce this thing about what happens after our transact, you know. We started to give them this activity feed where they say, listen, you have attempted to do something, you can go track it on Ethascan and you can see the progress of it and that gave a little bit of tangibility to the whole purchasing for users and they felt a lot more comfortable. We followed that up with giving them emails about when the transactions were successful and that gave them a second degree of comfort. So I'll conclude lesson two by saying users need guidance when they're in unknown territory. They need lots of guidance and education when they're uncomfortable. This is concepts that I like to refer to as the failure path. And in engineering and design, the failure path is a path that a user takes where they make continuously wrong steps. It could be things like entering an invalid email followed by entering a weak password following by clicking the wrong button. You know, if your users continuously take wrong steps, your UI and the user experience could become pretty daunting and terrifying very quickly. And if we can guide users through that failure path, if we could make each step of the way pleasant for them and educate them as to why they ended up in this situation as opposed to presenting them with random error messages that bear no meaning, then they would feel a lot more comfortable. They would start to gain familiarity with the surroundings. So lesson three is about connecting. I talk to you and then I listen to you. Our relationship is becoming established. How do we build a deeper connection? And how do we grow that connection and strengthen it? So in an ideal world, you know, we tell our story through our products. We gain the user's interest and we guide them through the early stages. You know, we get them through some simple onboarding flows and then off they go. You know, through onboarding and guidance, they're able to start interacting with the most important parts of your apps immediately. They are able to start engaging and having fun and getting integrated into whatever is you're building. But in blockchain, it's not straightforward at all. It is really a hazy maze before they can actually start engaging with anything. After we get visitors and after we get them to do whatever sign up flow exists at all, we have to introduce them to wallets because in blockchain, you can't do anything without a wallet. You know, you have to have a wallet to store your NFTs or to store whatever token it is your app is running. And in order to engage with any token at all, you need cryptocurrency. So this new user who was just immediately, was first of all just interested in cats, now they are learning about wallets and cryptocurrency. So we get them to sign up for our app a wallet and Coinbase to buy some crypto, you know. They finally get through to that. They manage to get some Ether. Maybe it takes them a couple of days because they have to validate their credit card and then they have to compile the Ether itself. And then after they buy it, they are like, okay, what's this thing? I have to wait. I have just given money and I have to wait to get something in return. And that's very unusual for people. And at this point, they are wrapping their head around this thing and they already kind of lost the plots. They are wondering, well, which one is the wallets and which one is the app? I don't really remember, you know. And then finally after that, maybe like three or four days later, they can interact, you know. They can get involved. They can play the game. And that's just, that is so unusual for users. It feels like we've literally gone backwards, at CryptoKitties for us. We've spent days onboarding people through conversations and messages and say, hey, well, this is what this thing does and this is what this thing does. And it's shocking that people stick it through. I mean, it's good news that people stick it through. It's a positive sign. It's a reassurance for us that it could catch on. But look at the steps there, you know. And at every one of these steps, there are huge drop-offs. And at some steps, you can't even control the drop-off, right? Because they're third-party applications. This is, it's totally out of your control at this point. It's starting to become like cognitive overload, you know. In lesson two, we spoke about guidance, but now there's too much guidance. There's too much education. You know, people came to this app because really they just wanted to buy some cute cats. And now they have a PhD in cryptocurrency on wallets and like blockchain, you know, and they didn't want that. Like the majority of users just don't want that. On the numbers show, the current state of the ecosystem reflects that. A year ago, we had 52,000 new kitty owners within the first month. But today, the user of the top 100 apps combined are less than 10,000. And the number of CryptoKitties players are a small portion of that. But you know, we're in this together. You know, we are a tight community here. And I believe that together we can address these problems. But the big question is obviously how? So has anybody here used a Game Boy? Very nice. So my experience with Game Boy in the 90s growing up was I got it. I put a game inside, I switched it on, and I started to play. And it was a very kind of a natural feeling. You know, I didn't have to go and read the Game Boy manual. I probably threw it out. I didn't have to go and read the game manual either. I threw that out as well. The technology, which was a Game Boy, if we want to map the Game Boy itself to the blockchain and the game itself to say like CryptoKitties, for example, both of these were very self-guided pieces of technology. And the relationship felt very natural. And I actually went down the rabbit hole before this presentation of looking at Game Boy commercials from the 90s. And there are some really, really weird ones that I encourage everybody to check out. But one thing that was a prominent theme was the messaging. Game Boy didn't try to sell me on what their CPU specs were or what their LCD screen specs were. Their messaging across the majority of the ads was simple, was that you can have all the power of Nintendo right in the palm of your hands. And that was enough. That was all I needed as a user. I didn't care about the hardware. I just wanted to play. And with the games, it was the same as well. You know, with Zelda, the messaging in one of these super weird commercials was you travel through many worlds with endless characters and their eternally ventures. And it's lovely. It's simple. You put that game in and you start playing and you are guided through by the game itself. You're not banking on this insane, intense onboarding experiences. The blockchain is different, right? Blockchain is new. Blockchain is there's no familiarity in this space at all. But it is our job to build that familiarity and to take these underlying concepts and to abstract them entirely. Because a day-to-day user, they don't care about the things that we care about as developers. They don't care about securing their private keys. They don't care about gas. They don't care about different clients for different wallets. They want this feeling of familiarity. They want this feeling of comfort. And we need to start thinking like them and talking to them like humans. We need to speak their language through our products. And we're not doing that right now. It's tough to do that right now because there's just so much cognitive overhead. So lesson three is really about making friends easy. And what I mean by that is make growing the connection that a user has with your products easy. Make strengthening that relationship easier. What we've seen at CryptoKitties is that blockchain and non-fungible tokens and crypto assets and digital art are a great way for users to self-express, to create, and to collaborate, and to grow this technology together. And we need to provide that. If we want to appeal to the masses, if we want to grow the market together, we need to start giving these delightful experiences for users. We need to start making all of those abstractions for people. And we need to start getting them together and letting them engage with each other and experience joy through the apps that we build. And that needs to be our mission. Like UX is everybody's problem. It is not just for the designer. It is not just for the product manager or the UX expert. It is all of our problems. We need to start thinking like that. So at CryptoKitties, we have this bold statement. Let's bring the next billion users to the blockchain. And it's wildly ambitious. So my call here for you today is to let's do something a bit more realistic for now. Let's take those metrics and 10X them. Let's get our users from 10,000 to 100,000 by next year. Let's take these steps together. Let's build the tools. Let's build the ecosystem that we need. Let's think about our users. Think about the people outside of this conference. That's what's going to drive the technology forward. And DAPA Labs, which is the parent company of CryptoKitties, that is what we're doing. We are building the ecosystem for the next wave of users. So I encourage you to check out what is DAPA.XYZ for some more information about what we're doing and the tools that we're building and the ecosystem that we're creating to create these abstractions for people and to make onboarding to the blockchain much better. Thank you very much, everybody. I do have four minutes and 45 seconds for questions, if anybody has any. A little bit of shyness. OK. Toys? Like physical toys? So the design direction of CryptoKitties is something that we hold on to very strongly. We've explored some physical toys, some digital goods as well. But we need to get it right, because our artists and our creative team, they spent lots of time perfecting and maintaining this standard for the art of the cats. So we're experimenting. We're looking to see what's out there. But it needs to be done right here. Oh, that's like a totally different product altogether, though. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. What, sorry? Hi. You said you had a fall in daily active users from December to now. Yes. But you didn't really talk about what you might do to activate all the people who are non-active users. Can you speak about that for a minute? Yeah, definitely. So this early success of CryptoKitties has been largely about community engagement. We have this product in the hands of the community as quickly as possible. And we've been iterating based on their feedback. And I think that's important for any product that you're building. And for reactivation of users, it's been about keeping engaged with them as much as possible without being annoying, obviously. But it's tough, right? Like I said, I showed on one of my slides, there are so many hurdles that you have to get users to overcome. And really, it's about guiding them. You have to pin points where did they drop off, and why. And see what can you do at that point to re-engage them. From a human to human perspective, if you lost interest in something and I was trying to regain your interest and I told you about 10 other different things, you would lose interest even more, right? But if you can pinpoint where they lost interest and why, usually it's just because they had a bad experience. They got lost. And with a little bit of guidance through that one particular step, it could be super helpful. So narrowing down the information that you give to users to reactivate them is something that's super helpful. And also understanding why it happened in the first place. I feel very strongly about the human-to-human connection, as you can see. I think it's super important that, especially now that there's a ton of different pieces of software and apps out there in the world, they're in the millions by now. The ones that really engage with people and they make you feel like, there's human beings behind this. I think they have my back. That's where you're going to start to see your success. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. We can talk after. Yes. You want to use the mic so everybody can hear you. I'm sorry. Thanks very much. And real congrats on being the first proper interactive user experience in this space. What do you think about all the me-to's that have come along since? Do you find it a, is it kind of, are they honoring you? Or are you just happy to see what other people are doing with this? Or what are your thoughts? Sorry. All the me-to sort of crypto-kitty-like products that have come. Competition is very important and healthy. If there was only one of our kinds in any space, then it would just mean that that space is unsuccessful. So I would, I encourage everybody to go out there and push the boundaries and see what's possible and add more competition and do different things. Crypto-kitties was an experiment for us, right? We're still in day zero of blockchain development and of DAP development. And everybody should be going out there and being experimental as well. So I encourage people to, I encourage the copycats. I love to see it. And we've made friends with them as well, you know. So it's a good thing. Hi. You have the ambition of, or you stated the ambition of 100,000 DAP users in Q3. Scaling is still an issue. Are you looking at Plasma or other Layer 2 solutions for crypto-kitties? So for crypto-kitties specifically, the way that we feel right now is that because it was an experiment, because it's our Gen Zero projects at DAPLA Labs, we will leave it there as is. Future experiences or games or applications that we build, we will consider like other, you know, as you said, like Plasma or sidechains or whatever. Yeah, so that's for future, but for crypto-kitties, it will stay on the main network for its life. That looks like it. Or anybody else? Yeah. OK. Hello, everyone. Thank you for this interesting presentation. I'm a UX designer, and I'm really curious what would be your piece of advice for UXers? For UX in general? Yes, and for the process that we follow and how you would like us to collaborate with developers. Any advice I can bring back to my team? Yeah, so I'll give you some insights into the way that we work. I'll talk about two different things. One is how we work as a team internally. So we have this concept called three-in-the-box. And three-in-the-box is where, if you're trying to solve a specific problem, you get people from different disciplines in the same room together. And people from different disciplines. So if we're trying to solve any problem, let's get a designer, let's get an engineer, and let's get a product person in a room together to discuss. Because everybody's going to say something that's going to impact the other person's way of thinking. If I, as an engineer, am like, listen, this is not possible, but this is, it can trigger some thought process in a designer's mind. To be like, oh, that's cool. Maybe I will design for that instead. And the same goes vice versa. If the designer could encourage me to think a certain way, then it will help me to develop better. And I mean, I have a very, very high respect for UI and UX people. They are some of my favorite people to work with just because of the way that they think. And they inform a lot of decisions I make during my engineering process. But that's internally. There's only so many decisions that you can make internally. But as soon as you put it out there, users are just going to do something totally unexpected. So user testing as quickly as possible is extremely important, especially in this industry where things are so new. There is no written standard. There's no article, there's no famous 10 usability design article for blockchain. It doesn't exist. We have to write those articles. And the only way we're going to write those articles is by doing the research ourselves. And we need to just, whatever it is we're testing, if it's a feature or full-fledged product, get it into the hands of users as early as possible and observe them. Observe their actions, take notes, and ask them tons of questions. Yeah. That's it. Oh, sorry, one more. That's it. All right, time is up. But we'll meet outside. Cool. Thank you, everybody.