 Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by PolyMath. We're welcome back to exclusive CUBE coverage in the Bahamas for Polygon 18. This is the show about cryptocurrency, token economics, and the future of work and the economies and digital nations and the CUBEs here for two days of wall-to-wall coverage and we're excited to have the CryptoKitties team here. The phenomena took over the blockchain, really started to show the value of smart conscious in a really cool, playful, fun way. Really important story. Jody, Reeback, and Alex Shee, welcome to theCUBE. Hello, welcome. Thanks for having us. So I love the shirts, love to get one for myself someday, but you got any extras, I'm sure we'll take one. We do, we do. Okay, great. We'll give you one. Love to have one. Okay, so CryptoKitties, the folks that have been living under a rock for the past year, has been a real phenomenon where people were actually creating, you describe it. Okay, so CryptoKitties, the purpose is to bring the first billion people to the blockchain and CryptoKitties was the first endeavor in order to do that. So it's really a gaming and collectible game on the blockchain. It's kind of straightforward. You buy a kitty and with your kitty, you can sell it, breed it. There's a whole marketplace. Since the initial launch, we've had a bunch of special kitties get released. We recently launched in China, so there's a ton of kitties coming down the pipeline, so breed your kitties. So the fun game turned into quite an interesting experiment because people love fun around tech. When tech is kind of boring, sometimes you blockchain. What does that actually mean? What happens under the hood? So you guys kind of brought a fun piece of it. Was it by design, the growth? Was it more like, was it what you expected? Take us through some of the inside, the ropes of the company, was there a moment where you say, oh my God, can you believe what's happening? Like, this is really taking off or was it playing, take us through that? Sure, so I think inherently the blockchain technology, like blockchain is not something that's inherently easy to explain. So we wanted to do that in a fun, simple way so that people could learn about smart contracts and they could learn about all the benefits about being decentralized and sort of putting trust on the network. So that was our initial sort of goal. We have an amazing team behind us, so the creative team just said, we want to bring Kitties to the blockchain. So the group with Axeems and CryptoKitties has been working on blockchain technology since 2014. CryptoKitties was our first public project. And I think the team came together very quickly. I think we built this in four to six months. I think we were all surprised with the success of it and bringing down the Ethereum network, slowing it down. So I remember the team launched and I woke up one morning with hundreds of emails from media outlets just saying, we want to do a story on you. And it was really, really exciting and the team worked really hard, so we're really proud about it. It's one of those, it is kind of a pinch me moment because like, oh my God, this is like highly successful and that's really fun. And I think it's a great example of how you can use this fun technology in a way that people can relate to. But it also brought up some technical challenges because I think at the time and even now it takes probably the number one use case of Ethereum blockchain. I mean, I don't know, is there another use case that's actually as pervasive as crypto kiddies? You know what, I'm not sure, but I think one of the really interesting things for us was we learned a lot with the scalability and it's been interesting to see sort of other teams reach out to us and sort of sharing our learnings because I think in order to continue sort of building the ecosystem, we really need to share learnings and not hoard information. So, you know, we're definitely looking at scaling. I think, you know, one way we've addressed it is sort of building a lot off chains to speed up transactions. But I think that there's a lot to learn and it's going to take sort of the ecosystem working together and sharing ideas and knowledge to. What have you learned? What are some of the things you guys learned on this experience? Both on the kind of business side, integration side, developer side to some of the really hardcore, you know, tech infrastructure pieces. What are the learnings? I think the reality is, neither of us are technical people. So it's probably do a disservice to try and seek to that. Is there one, is there a couple things that jumped out at you? Was it performance? Was it, was it just? I think because there, you know, we're only starting to see applications built on the blockchain. You don't know what you don't know. And the team behind CryptoKitties and Axiom Zen, we built a number of products and we have a bunch of projects that we've worked and we have sort of our developer process. But when you're working with a new technology and you don't know what you're dealing with, it's hard to anticipate. And I think following best practices, leveraging, you know, other teams and working with the community, that's, I think what we learn most is you need to, you know, rely on the community and share learnings. Take a minute to talk about what you guys do there, each of you. What your role is at CryptoKitties, what you're focused on and what's going on in the company. Without giving me all those tricks and controls. Yeah, I know there's a lot we can't talk about. I mean, what's your role? I mean, what are you guys overseeing? What are you building? What's your role? Cross, we should explain a bit about Axiom Zen first and kind of the setup amongst CryptoKitties if you want to take a step at that. Sure, so Axiom Zen is a venture studio. We've been around for five years. So we have a part of the business that's focused on consumer blockchain technologies. We have quite a big enterprise SaaS business. So one of our companies is called Zenhub. If you've ever heard of them, Zenhub. And then we have sort of a joint venture part of the business where we work with companies to build and launch amazing and impactful tech companies. So CryptoKitties was born out of our consumer blockchain and specifically our Foundry. So my role with Axiom Zen is I'm chief of staff and I work with the executive team on strategy. I do, I work with the operations team. A lot of special projects and a lot of, you know with tech companies there's always things, special initiatives that are coming up and I really love to- And you got to be always learning, right? I mean, this is your, like you said, you're trying to new things. So it's kind of like a studio meets venture incubator meets R&D meets builder. Everything. Yeah, and I think sort of, I'll let Alex speak to his role, but one of the reasons our team is 80 people. CryptoKitties team is 30, but everyone who comes and joins the team is an entrepreneur at heart. So I think that's why we've been able to accomplish so much. Alex, your role. So I recently joined the company and I came on as CFO, so. So you've run all the numbers. Man, those gas prices on the C-20. I mean, you got to keep the trains running, making sure everything, the lights are on. 80 people total, including the 30 in the CryptoKitties. Yeah, inclusive of the thing. Okay, so what's the outlook? What's the objective of the firm? You guys should continue to experiment, do new more projects. Yeah, I think, so one of our, and we wrote and published the ERC 721 token. We didn't do it, but someone a deed or surely did within the team. So I think we want to continue to focus on that. You know, we have a number of projects in the pipeline that we're not able to talk about publicly, but definitely exciting things happening, continuing to build CryptoKitties. I mentioned we did a China launch, so we're continuing to expand and just build. So yeah, we've got a lot of exciting things. China must be really big. It must be huge. Yeah, Asia must be hot. Yeah, well, I think sort of. Mobile phone usage, just incredible. They're leaders in the collectible gaming space, so it naturally made sense for us to go there. Great, well hey, congratulations. What's going to be the outlook for CryptoKitties? You mentioned the marketplace. What are some of the cool things that are going on that you can point out that people might not know? Do you want to talk about our China launch and the special Kitties, or? I think you're doing a great job, keep an eye on it. Okay, so we recently launched in China, it's Chinese New Year, so we have a bunch of sort of special Kitties being released. We just had a company call earlier today where we saw a preview of some of the Kitties that are being bred. There's Dragon Kittie, there's Dog Kittie, so I guess look at the cool Kitties, building a story of your Kitties. I think it's just to bring great stuff, and again, like I said, at Sundance we saw the VRAR world starting to really go down this road of some new creative digital, and I think this is a great example. Where I see it going, which is, you know, taking this new decentralized infrastructure and creating new experiences, so congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I have the queue bringing new crypto experiences to our footage. Again, we're going to do a lot of blockchain, crypto currency shows. It's our first one of the year, we're going to cover Bitcoins in 2010, so we're proud of that. And look for the queue at all events, but here at the Bahamas, we'll be here for a whole other day tomorrow. Keep on watching, we've got a few more interviews to wrap up day one. We've got some big guests coming. We'll be right back after this short break.