 Ironically, I think this is essentially the entire plot of Ready Player One, and we're beginning to see this emerge in real life. One of the most compelling things about blockchains is that their inherent neutralness cuts through the limitations of our everyday reality, enabling things that would be impossible without it to happen with a level of ease that's sometimes hard to fathom. That's certainly true of projects like Bitcoin, but there is another newer movement that's using these same dynamics to, depending on who you ask, help uplift people looking to better their situation around the world in ways that can't be provided by their local economies or, on the other hand, through a darker lens, it represents a fluffy form of modern slavery. I'm referring to Play to Earn, and on this episode, we're going to talk about it. Hey folks, I'm Adam V. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. On today's show, we're talking Axie Infinity, and the phenomenon of scholars, mostly based in the Philippines, who are playing a Pokemon-like game as a sort of career. To do that, as always, I'm joined by the other hosts of the show, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Hello, and Jonathan Mahion. Hey, hey. Stephanie is out this week. So folks, we have a lot of ground to cover here, we're just talking before the show, neither of you have been paying any attention to this thing, and I have, as usual, just dived in absolutely neck deep. So I read an article maybe about a month ago at this point that was talking about this Play to Earn movement. And Play to Earn really simply just means you play the game, you earn something that you can then turn into money. So it's like an approved form of gold farming, if you think about that. You know, you think back to the days of, you know, like World of Warcraft. Back when that was actually a thing that, you know, was like hot and new. And you'd have people from China, you'd have people from all around the world in places where the value of the gold in game was worth playing the game just for that. But the game itself didn't allow you to do that. They had all sorts of techniques to try to find you and stop you and make it so the goal that you were collecting was not something that would be valuable to you, but people didn't anyways. And it was kind of this arms race. So now fast forward to today, a game that launched several years ago and has been getting more popular over time, which has, as I mentioned, very kind of Pokemon-like, you have like a team of creatures and then those creatures fight other creatures. And that's basically how the game works. It's kind of brought back this moment. It really made me think of gold farming. But the kind of important difference is that they're OK with it. In a tokenized kind of game economy, it's actually normal to extract value from this type of an ecosystem. And so Axie has a somewhat complex ecosystem. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later in the show. But just generally, I wanted to kind of talk about how I got into it, kind of answer basic questions around this before we get into kind of the more nitty-gritty details. So when we're talking about this game, Axie Infinity has a really interesting characteristic about it, which is that in order to play, you actually need to own three NFTs. And each creature in this game is unique, represented by a single token that is one-of-one. And each creature has different characteristics. And creatures can be bred with each other to create new creatures, which means that if you have two NFTs, right, you have two of these Axie creatures, then you can actually create more Axie creatures. And since people need Axie creatures, they need to actually own a couple of them or at least have access to a couple of them, three in order to create a team. In order to get those, you have to buy them from someone. And this kind of creates a natural demand that is filled by other people who are playing the game, who are earning what's called Smooth Love Potion, or SLP. And this is sort of aphrodisiac that's required. Basically, in order to breed two Axies together, you need to have a certain number of SLP. And then also you need to have some other tokens, which again makes it more complex. Well, let's just focus on the SLP for now. So playing the game, you naturally earn SLP. And you can earn up to a certain amount per day, which is, depending on what you were doing earlier, it used to be more, but now it's probably closer to 100. Before we go deeper, does that make sense so far? Are you still with me? It sounds really interesting to be able to incorporate the possibilities of a secondary market and acknowledge that and embrace that as part of the game. The challenge I've always had with this concept is the balance between playing the game for the sheer fun of it and kind of the financialization of gaming in general, and how you strike that balance. On the one hand, I really see the opportunity for those who really have a passion for the game to be able to even make a living out of it. But at the same time, I do buy the argument that when you make that possible, or at least when you don't fight that possibility, it leads to people kind of financializing the game, hiring armies of gold farmers or clickers or like kind of minimum wage people, especially in cheap labor countries, who just click away and build up resources to turn this into an economy which ruins the game for everyone else. I'm really not sure how to feel about this. I kind of see both sides of the argument and I haven't been able to figure out if financializing these games is a good thing or a bad thing or both. I think that eSports already turns them into professions, all commoditizing the assets to disseminate the ability to turn it into a profession to everyone else that isn't just really good on the Twitch response. I'm not quite sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, I see these people who really are passionate and good at playing these games, seeing this as an opportunity to turn it into a profession. And in many cases, we've seen examples of players who start off as amateurs that intern professional and kind of uplift themselves and their entire family out of poverty and these are beautiful stories of rags to riches through the beauty of the game and sportsmanship and all of that. But there's the dark side. There's the dark side of kind of gold-firing sweatshops in developing countries where you have rows and rows and rows of PCs and people just clicking away for no joy at all, doing effectively a factory job in this economy. Let me take us back to kind of the beginning of my journey. I learned about this from an article about a company called Yield Guild Games. It was actually an op-ed written by one of the primaries behind Yield Guild Games, which is a group out of the Philippines primarily, is my understanding, that started lending axes to people who wanted to play the game. Because as I mentioned, in order to play this game, Axie Infinity, you need to have three Axie creatures. Now Axie creatures, if you had bought them back during the crowd sale, would have cost, I think, dollars, is what the price wound up being for them. But today they trade for anywhere from $150 up to thousands of dollars. But $150 each is the pretty much lowest that I see out there and those are not axes that are gonna win you any games. So really in practice, the price is probably closer to $250 each. So you're looking at effectively a $750 upfront investment into Axie creatures in order to play the game. And then once you play the game, it seems like you can earn something in the range of about $250 every two weeks for the best LP. So that initial investment is the kind of thing that on the one hand makes it so that there is inherently demand for the thing that you are producing when you play the game, which is interesting from an economic standpoint, but it also presents a barrier. And so what Yield Guild Games did is they set up a program where they took the axes that they had and they partnered with local people in the Philippines who would basically go and recruit people who wanted to play the game, but who didn't have access to that much capital upfront or for just who it wasn't a good way to spend that much capital upfront. And then they would effectively loan those assets to these people and they would take 10% of what they earned and the person who managed the kind of local community and recruited people would take 20%. So in total, the people who were actually playing the game put no money in upfront and they were able to collect 70% of the revenue that they actually generated again in the form of this smooth love potion, which is a token that also again within this game is required as part of breeding one axi to another in order to create a new axi. So that's what Yield Guild Games did. And I saw that and I was like, man, that's really cool. I really liked that idea and think that that's pretty powerful because I think I've told this story before. A couple of years ago, I was working on a project where I was training an AI to identify within an audio file parts of speech that were not actual speech, right? Parts of speech that an editor would go through and would silence or would remove. And in order to do that, in order to train that type of model, you need a lot of data and that data can be very expensive to generate. So what I did is using Bitcoin, I connected with a number of people in Venezuela and I paid them a rate that cost about a quarter of what I would have paid, but for them was about 50 times what it was possible to earn locally. And so again, you couldn't do that if you were trying to do it with dollars because Venezuela is effectively cut off from the financial system. But through Bitcoin, you could and it was no problem. And what I found was that it was incredibly empowering for these people to do what was a very simple job, but which actually gave them enough resources to escape their situation. And the biggest problem that I had during the three months that I ran this test was that most of the people who we worked with pulled in enough money to be able to effectively escape from Venezuela. And then they weren't as interested in doing this work anymore because now they had options that were better for them. And so I really viewed that as a success, but it drilled home to me, the importance and the weirdness of having a global economy that everyone can access while at the same time allowing people who are in the United States to feel like, oh, this is really cheap and people in Venezuela to feel like, man, this is more money than it's possible for me to earn by an order of magnitude. So that's kind of the dynamic that's at play here. I'm gonna stop there before I go on. Any questions or comments on that? I think that whole global economy rule would work a lot easier and a lot more fairly if you actually allowed people to emigrate to any country they wanted to on the basis of merit and had open borders, which is a highly controversial opinion, but you can have a free market for capital and a closed market for labor. And then, as you discovered, it creates these incredible inequalities which are great opportunities, but they're opportunities that are unequally distributed and you create fantastic job opportunities for people and at the same time feel slimy while doing it. As I mentioned, kind of during the open, like on the one side, there's like, if someone can earn more than it's possible for them to earn locally, doing work that is less taxing and under better conditions, that feels like it should be a good thing. But you can very much look at this from the other perspective, which is this is rich countries and people in rich countries farming out low-paying work to people who have no better option. I think that there is a lot of tension there and I don't really think that I have an answer for what that is. I mean, isn't rich people farming out something that you choose to do because you have no better option literally the definition of a job? Okay, so I read this article about yield guild games and I was like, that's a really interesting kind of trend around all of this stuff and it's interesting to see people be so interested in this type of a game. And so I went looking for this on the internet and what I found was a subreddit called Axie Scholarships. So scholarship is the way that this was portrayed initially by yield guild games around the idea that again, primarily focused on trying to help people pull in a little bit of money off their assets, but that didn't really seem like the point. So I find this subreddit called Axie Scholarships and there's really two things that are happening there. One is you have dozens and dozens and dozens of people from places like the Philippines and Venezuela and other places that have this lower kind of cost or this lower local value scale who are looking for people to lend them or give them these creatures so that they can play this game and they can earn this revenue that would otherwise be lower for jobs that are less desirable to them. And these are people from students to homemakers, to people who just can't find a job, lots of people from Africa also. In general, it seems to have been kind of recognized as an opportunity. And on the other hand, you have these increasingly large groups of effectively professional gold farmers, kind of I think Andrea says, as you would describe it, who are looking for people who have never played the game but have done research into the game and have, you know, I've now started to see training courses pop up that people can take for free in order to prove that they understand the game even though they've never played it because they don't have any of these creatures yet with the hope of making it easier for them to find someone who will then lend them these assets. And the way that the assets are actually lent is very interesting. Axie uses a side chain on the Ethereum chain that's called Ronin, I believe. And basically when you create an account with Axie, you create a wallet and it kind of works like MetaMask. And so in order to work with somebody who wants to use your creatures, you set up an account and then you give them a QR code that allows them to log in from their mobile device or from whatever device they're going to use. Then they play the game and they earn SLP over the course of, you know, a two week period. And then at the end of the two week period, the SLP unlocks and you can claim it to the blockchain at which point it's split between the person who was playing the game and earned it and the person who provided the assets and the yield. So I really wanted to try this. I saw a lot of activity on it and I thought it would be very interesting, just this kind of like a sociological experiment to see what was up. So when I looked at it, the average rate that I saw in terms of the split in, you know, outside the world of yield guild games was more like a 50-50 split. And so I did something that was lower than that, you know, like I'm not in this for the funds, but I wanted to understand what's the experience, what are the dynamics of it? And I wound up working with three different people. The three initial people who I was working with, one was a student, fourth year computer science student in the Philippines. One was an unemployed man in the Philippines who was a little bit older than that. And one was a 21-year-old man in Texas, actually. And with these three people, I said, figure out which characters, you know, you want for your team. And then I purchased those characters for them, set up the accounts for them. And then basically just through a series of discords, because I maintained one for each one, so I could just kind of see what the experience was like with each of these people. You know, each day they would play the game, they would report what they earned. And then we just went through the first two weeks cycle, and so they all effectively got all their SLP out. I asked them a couple of questions, but oh, I should mention, the kid from Texas dropped out almost immediately and got a job for Uber Eats. And that, again, was, I think, another really interesting demonstration to me that this really is about not having any better options. If you have a better option, you're gonna take the better option. But if this is what your best option you proceed to be locally is, then it's a lot less exploitative than many other things that you might try to do. Especially if you, for example, have the skills to play a video game, but don't really have a lot of education really in anything else, and you would be doing something that's much more laborious and dangerous, but not actually pays anymore, and in fact pays significantly less. I think that's a really good point. And again, that flips me to the other side of this ambivalent feeling, which is, yeah, it's exploitative, but at the same time, for many people who find themselves attracted to these opportunities for income, it's far less exploitative than working in a sweatshop. It's far less exploitive than working in dangerous manual work that has the chance of injury. If the worst possibility of injury is repetitive strain injury on your mouse hands, that sure as hell beats working in a mine. Or what just the case for millions, you get a menial job in Dubai and they take your passport and now you can never leave and you're literally a slave. Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure they take passports of gamer farmers too, but just recently I was reading that they have like 9,000 people who have died in Dubai and they can't tell why these migrant workers died. So again, it's one of those things where you're like, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? And it's kind of a bit of a mixed bag, but it does give opportunities to a lot of people. Ironically, I think this is essentially the entire plot of Ready Player One. And we're beginning to see this emerge in real life. And at the same time, even if you don't like this happening, what we've seen in practice is that you can't stop secondary markets from emerging, even when the game companies that are building these systems don't want them. So the question is, would you rather have a secondary market that is part of the game and properly manage than a shadow market emerging that has nothing to do with the game? Back to my story for just a second. So the kid from Texas dropped out and I was like, okay, that totally makes sense. He kind of didn't tell me he was dropping out, he just kind of stopped reporting in after like a day. And I was like, hey, you've got something better to do, no hard feelings on our side. And so he was like, oh, yeah, I got a job with Uber Eats, I'm gonna go do that. And I was like, okay, that totally makes sense. And it simplified things for me because I'm doing this through one of my companies just again as an experiment. But like the taxable consequences of working with someone in Texas on this versus working with someone in the Philippines on this are pretty different. So one of the initial people who I was working with was like, hey, my brother would like to do this too. Can we bring him in? And I was like, well, I've got these creatures. So yes, you can bring him in and let's just see how it goes. And pretty much all of the people who I'm working with now, you know, these three of the two brothers and then the computer science students have all basically said that as soon as I want to grow this effort on my side, that they have people who are very anxious to get in and who they would like me to work with. So I have no intention of expanding this. Again, like this is experimental for me. I did the math on it and it would be possible under certain circumstances to actually use this to make a pretty decent return. But again, the way the economics of the game of working doesn't really support it. And frankly, I just don't have the time. It's the big part. But in the Philippines, this has gotten to be kind of increasingly important because one of the things that you can do with the tokens that you earn from playing this game, whether you're a player on the one side or whether you're someone who's providing these assets on the other side is you can actually breed axes. And by breeding these creatures, it has costs associated with it. But if you're lending your assets to people who are then earning most of what you need in order to do the breeding, then it kind of presents this really interesting self-reinforcing cycle where the more of these tokens that people earn who are working with you on your assets, the more creatures you can then create, which means you can then have more people working with you on this in the same way. And again, you kind of go back and forth between this, is this empowering? Is this disempowering? And kind of where is the balance between that? But again, whether it's because people are forced to take this because they have no better options or they're actually, they like it, kind of doesn't matter. It does seem like it's the best option that's available. And as we know, people will take the best option available. I mean, now it's increasingly sounding like some kind of virtual animal MLM pyramid Ponzi scheme. You're not wrong. There are definitely elements that are like that, which is just the expansion of the supply. So I'll talk about the final element. So I mentioned you need smooth love potions or SLP in order to do breeding. You also need AXS tokens, which are the AXI token. I've never owned an AXS token. Apparently they were sold during the crowdsale, but they're not awarded during gameplay. And so I have none of these. And as it stands today, in order to get the four tokens that you would need, not including the SLP, costs about 200 to $250. They're about 40 or $60 each. So that right there kind of puts a stop to it. And I think that that's the cap that prevents a lot of this stuff from happening, Andreas. But to your point, I mean, again, this idea that this is all about creating more AXS, which then allows more people to come in. But if you think about it from the perspective of the AXI game and the company that's developing it, I mean, it all drives use, right? It all drives more and more people to come in and use this. And so long as there are more people coming in that want to use this than there are creatures that are being created or at least relative to the rate, then it seems like it's a pretty good decision on their part. I mean, there's a very, very vague great line between this and Herbalife, which is listed on the stock exchange, right? You know, the difference between a pyramid scheme and a successful business is whether they can get away with it or not. But kidding aside, I mean, I do think it's a very interesting concept and it's inevitable that more and more game economies are going to become financialized through a combination of NFTs, tokens, and in-game assets in this way. And what they're going to do is mobilize kind of the productive potential of people who have fewer better options and are willing to engage in this professionally. So I'm going to read us just a little bit of an op as it was posted to CoinDesk recently, which is entitled, Some Filipino merchants prefer payments in Axis SLP. This, I thought, really kind of drives the point home to me. So I'm quoting from this, a quick quiz on social media turns up a bunch of advertisements for all sorts of things you can buy in the Philippines with SLP. These include a pair of sneakers, a Sneaky X, a car service that adds garage, a polishing at Eco Wash, insurance renewals, at an insurance agency, a COVID-19 test, a dermatitis treatment at a doctor's office, an outfit for your toddler at Little Blossoms, a gift from Solid Toys, a laptop upgrade from Moran, a massage chair, a milk tea, a plate of dumplings, a session with online fitness coaches. And I'm going to continue, this is a different quote. The minting and acquisition of SLP has become an everyday task for lots of people. So it's useful to be able to spend it as an everyday currency, said Joseph Moore. He's referring to the obscure ERC-20 token originating from within the game, Axie Infinity, which has become the source of light layout for many Filipinos. The relevant part here is that if they cash it out to Filipino pesos, which is the local currency, then they tend to pay exchange rates that take about eight to 10% of the actual value relative to just the value. But what's happened is that all of the places that I just mentioned, those people who operate those stores aren't collecting it and immediately converting it into local currency. They are collecting it because they are actually Axie breeders. And so they collect it and then they actually use it to generate more money for themselves by creating further creatures, which then allow them to kind of expand it. So as a kind of both a new form of work, and then also as a sort of cultural phenomenon where they're simply not leaving the SLP ecosystem and are actually bringing much of the Philippines economy increasing proportion of it into that. We also saw the Philippines regulator come out and say the other day that remember everybody, this stuff is taxable and you have to report on this stuff. So again, of the, I believe, 500,000 daily active players that this game has, more than 250,000 of them are in the Philippines. And that number is growing very rapidly as more news about this comes out. Like I said, if you go to the subreddit for Axie scholarships, you will see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who are very interested in changing what they do professionally now to do this. I have some people working on video production and editing for me, who are based in the Philippines. And one of the things that I've really struggled with is persuading them to receive payments in Bitcoin instead of via the traditional banking system. And I'm currently horrified by the idea that they might be preferentially inclined to receiving payment in SLP instead of Bitcoin. That's my first thought on this, which is that this is really hurting my brain. The other part of this is I've always struggled throughout my life to explain what I do for a living to my family. And so I can just imagine the conversation of a Philippine young person who is now trying to explain to their elderly parents. No, no, listen, dad, this is real money. I'm getting my dermatitis treatments based on the virtual currency that I've mined from breeding virtual animals on the internet through a series of subcontractors who farm this money for me. And I'm like, okay, I had it hard explaining my profession to my dad, now that's a real challenge. So one of the interesting things about this phenomenon of businesses in the Philippines actually accepting SLP is that this is not universal, but in many cases they are not pegging into the current conversion rate. Instead what they're doing is they're setting prices based on how much utility the token would actually give them. So in order to breed one pair of creatures that have never been bred before because the more they breed, the more expensive it becomes to breed them costs 300 SLP, so 150 SLP per creature. And now we've reached the absurd point of our virtual animal breeding, farming, sweatshop, third world country currency having a stable coin. A stable coin that's not stable with any other currency, but that's stable with the cost of breeding more of the creatures that you're talking about. Yes, that's it, exactly. Well, once they create a stable coin, they're gonna need a monetary authority with a central bank and then they're gonna need to fractionally lend it out. So they're gonna have chartered institutions that the central bank issues these stable coins to. Breaking news, President Duterte has now released an executive directive that the central bank of the Philippines sell back part of its currency reserve in SLP stable coins. Okay, so there's so much good stuff in this article in this particular op-ed. It's gonna be linked in the show of this episode. So if you haven't read this, go ahead and read it, but I wanna read one more part from it. The big of the boys, which is one of the businesses that accepted say their customers tend to assess the price of SLP in terms of the effort, it would take them to earn it. If a baking experience, which is what this particular vendor sells, costs 150 SLP, they might say quote, oh, 150 SLP, that's just my daily quest. Living in the Philippines, I've seen this tendency to value SLP in relation to real world items too. It seems the player community cares less about how much SLP is worth in terms of Philippine pesos or US dollars. A friend of mine on his first day of playing acts, he excitedly told me he had earned three chicken joys in just a few hours. If you already know that chicken joys a popular item on the menu at the much loved fast food store in the Philippines called Jollibee, you'll also know that this is a highly relatable and culturally relevant unit of account understood instantly by Filipinos everywhere, end quote. I mean, it's the Chick-fil-A of the Philippines. Right, so like they're looking at this in terms of how much effort do I put in relative to the other types of work that I might do. So anyways, we don't have to belabor at this point. I just find the whole thing really fascinating because we've never seen a cryptocurrency seemingly break through in the way that perhaps SLP is in the Philippines right now. So I asked two of the people who were using my axes in order to do this a couple of questions. I said, why was this something you wanted to do and where did you hear about it? And so basically this person whom I'm gonna call Chris said that before they played the game, they watched their friends play the game a lot. They saw what their friends were earning and they kind of learned about it even though they couldn't play it since they didn't have access to it and that was kind of what brought them into it. Another person who I work with who's named Brye basically said the same thing. They said, I always wanted to play Axie but I didn't have the financials to start. I'm a college student and I heard about it for my friends months ago. They said that I can earn money while playing and since I'm a gamer for as long as I remember I wanted to earn money playing the game. So I then asked what do you hope to accomplish? What is your goal? And Chris said, day by day I need to accomplish the task and adventure in Axie because it gives me the most SLP that I can earn. My goal in Axie is to basically become very good at winning in player to player combat because that maximizes the amount of money that they can earn. Brye said, I hope to make our relationship as your scholar good and smooth with respect. I also want to accomplish doing partnerships with me because I have knowledge of the game. To be practical, my goal is to earn money for myself and also help my family because of this pandemic. I realized that maybe Axie is a thing that will help me in so far it is. I asked them then, what do you think of this whole thing? Is this important? And Chris said, it's a very interesting game where you can play and earn some money and convert it to real money. So yes, it's important. It helps investors and someone who needs financial to help each other and gain at the same time. Managers invest in the amount of money and wait for the day he or she will earn while the scholar needs to accomplish the task and gets paid for that more than they can earn without it. And my final question to them was, are there any other thoughts or observations that you have? And Chris said, right now, I think Axie wants to minimize the SLP game by players talking about kind of strategy within the game because shortly after this, actually, they decreased the amount of SLP that was possible to earn in absolute terms because again, the game has been growing very rapidly and there were lots of creatures coming out of the market. They did that to try and control it. If the supply of SLP is higher, then the price must be lower to balance vice versa. And Bry said, my thoughts are that the crypto world is going bigger because Axie Infinity is so famous and has lots of players based off my research. The total of Axie Infinity players is more than a million. Axie Infinity for me is a big opportunity, specifically for students who don't have the power to invest a large amount of money but who want to earn returns that they can't achieve otherwise. So that was just my little tiny sample poll. But again, broadly speaking, it seems like they were seeing as a very empowering thing, right? And a thing that, again, given the options they had available makes sense. So I kind of want to wind it down just because again, it takes a little bit of time and I have so much stuff going on. But on the other hand, they really want to do it. And I kind of feel like it's no skin off my back to just sit here and let them do it. So I'm not asking for judgments about whether I've done a good thing or a bad thing here but I'm very curious. Again, like this feels like it's a trend that's going to extend beyond Axie because the inequalities that we're talking about that are driving this trend are not localized to the Philippines even and are likely not going to go away. As the world becomes more networked, as the internet penetrates deeper and speeds increase, it feels like there will be more of these sorts of islands that pop up, not literal islands, but sort of islands that were not previously exposed to the internet, but now by nature of that have access to financial opportunities that can't really be matched locally. So what do you guys think? I think what's really interesting about all of this is that many of the opportunities in crypto require capital investment to take advantage of. And the ones that are most interesting for the developing world are the ones that don't require capital where you can, to use a VC term, invest with sweat equity. You can work your way to earning some kind of crypto return. And all of these schemes in the short term provide some kind of excitement, whether it's clicking on ads, whether it's mechanical Turk type assignments, whether it's gamifying various processes, whether it's enabling AI training or any other kind of tasks like that. What it shows is that there is a vast demand for things where people can earn money for their labor online, remotely in places where they have no better opportunities. And that's fantastic. I mean, that's basically the opening of world markets for labor. And I think that's a great opportunity for many people. I feel that in most of these cases, what happens is these platforms have a short period of very, very rapid rise to popularity and then they get arbitraged effectively to death and they collapse because there is always someone willing to work for less money because of the dire conditions they're in and the desperation that exists in many places in the world. So it simply isn't sustainable. And then another platform rises in its place and another platform rises in its place. We saw something very similar with the early faucets that would give out small amounts of capital and many of the altcoins that had similar strategies with faucets, with airdrops, airdrops are enormously popular throughout the developing world for the same reason. Even if they involve clicking through hours and hours of various things in order to get to the faucet, people will do that. So I think this is a continuing trend. It's gonna keep happening. I don't think any of these platforms are sustainable in themselves, but the broader trends of people looking to find ways to earn access to international markets of capital and in the form of crypto, simply by working for that, that is going to keep increasing. I wanna go back to a point that you made earlier, Andreas, which is that this has elements of their pyramid, where you get creatures, you get people to use your creatures and you create more creatures and then more people can come in and can use your creatures and more. And so again, on the one hand, that is pyramid. On the other hand, the way that they've arranged the economics around this makes me think that we're talking about the size of this. And again, depending on what metrics you use, somewhere between 500,000 and a million and a half people actually play this game. The global population of people who would like to play this game in that context has gotta be several orders of magnitude above that number that they have today. So if it is MLME, then at what point does that actually become a problem? Because again, when I look at projects in the crypto space, I see one thing that is repeated that I believe is reliable, which is that when a new project comes along and it breaks open in a use case that has not previously been recognized as a use case, but that turns out to be popular. And I would really only say that this is Bitcoin with the money use case or the historic value use case these days. And I think Ethereum with the kind of everything else on a single platform use case, right? The cross-defy NFTs, et cetera. Ethereum has kind of won that for the time being. And it might lose certain parts of it, but just broadly, the reason why this is so powerful is because when you have one of these platforms that's the first platform, then when somebody new comes into the space and they say, where do I want to put my time, money and attention, then there's two things that happen. One, they either pick the project that is the obvious one, the Bitcoin or the Ethereum, or they are like, well, that's too expensive. I want to pick something that is like that. An Ethereum killer, for example, is what we call them. Ethereum or Bitcoin killer. And I'm gonna bet on that because even though it's not the dominant platform right now, I think that it has this feature and that feature and that feature that's gonna make it so that this is gonna be the one that wins. And so far at least, and again, we're very early in kind of the life cycle of cryptocurrency as a movement, but so far we've never actually seen one of these dominant platforms be replaced. I would also put Tether in this category, I guess. Although again, we may see perhaps the first one of these that falls out. Now, I look at Axie Infinity and I see kind of the same thing, which is that it's the obvious currently working and where the economics do seem to work and it's been around long enough to have kind of proven itself out version of this play to earn model. And so there are lots and lots of games that are right now kind of chasing this and they see the success that's there perhaps we're even building it beforehand and they are seeking to kind of tap into that same movement. But I'm not convinced that that's actually gonna happen. I think that perhaps Axie Infinity is the Bitcoin of its category because all the other projects will have to compete in order to be noticed. Whereas Axie is just the obvious one. If you're reading about play to earn, chances are pretty good. You're reading about Axie Infinity. Just like if you're reading about like a money that is basically cryptocurrency, you're reading about Bitcoin most of the time. So although it does have these characteristics that make it feel like it might not be sustainable over the long term, I think that maybe that's a number or maybe that's a problem that's so far out that it doesn't even really matter right now. I feel like this might be what it feels like to just get old because it's like what the kids are doing, like this obviously is the scam. Where's the intrinsic value? Like it's not sustainable. I don't get it. It makes no sense. And so I'm not saying it isn't fundamentally broken. I'm not saying it isn't gonna change the world. I'm not saying either of those things. I'm just saying I think this might be what getting old begins to feel like. As the youngest person in this discussion, I will take that with a grain of salt. And to be clear, you're the youngest person in this discussion, Jonathan. Just in case you're wondering. You know, Adam, I'm pretty sure the listeners know that the fact that you had to qualify that meant that you're very clearly older than me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's definitely the thing that comes with age is establishing that you're definitely a couple years older than someone else. Okay, anyway, folks, that's pretty much it for this one. Like I said, it's something that I think we're probably gonna see a lot more of. And one of the questions I'll be watching, like I said, is actually infinity the Bitcoin of its class or is this just a moment in time where this use case is being revealing and turns out play-to-earn gaming doesn't work like some of the other kind of significant network effects that we've seen. Because again, like actually infinity is not its own blockchain. Actually infinity is a blockchain that uses Ethereum and then has a side chain, but it doesn't have the network effects in the same way that I think that you see with these other products. So anyway, if you're interested in learning more, just look up play-to-earn, just like read about it, understand it. It's very, very interesting. I found the whole experiment to be really fascinating. And to a certain degree, rewarding, just in terms of getting to know people and getting to understand situations that I don't really have expertise in or exposure to on a regular basis. I think that's the one conclusion that we can reach with confidence, which is that while this platform may rise fast and then drop just as fast and fizzle out, the overall trend for play-to-earn, for any kind of sweat equity financial participation platforms that break down barriers to entry, that break down border controls that allow people to earn a living using online resources in less dehumanizing work conditions than manual labor, will continue to grow and will continue to flourish in wave after wave after wave. Unfortunately, a lot of them will be pyramid schemes and a lot of them will be scams, but ultimately, there is enormous demand for this. What if this becomes the future of the AI economy where everyone's like the future, everything's gonna get so automated that there's just gonna be 20, 30% of people perpetually unemployed? What if we just create virtual media labor? And this whole like pay-to-earn thing is just like a literal structural reinvention of moderately low, middle to lower, higher income, menial labor. And as we get rid of all the truck-driving jobs, we'll get more of these like pay-to-earn jobs to replace it in the meta economy. Yeah, I wanna have a conversation in the not too distant future when we get Stephanie back about kind of the snow crash world that we're kind of moving into, right? And snow crash, again, like if you haven't read that as a book and you're in the crypto space, do yourself a favor or read that. So much about what's being done in terms of metaverse stuff, in terms of much of the vision of many of the people who have built out a lot of this stuff has been influenced by, frankly, other Neil Stevenson books as well, but snow crash in particular. But it's not all positive. If you wanna know the direction of the next 10 years, just read Snow Crash 1984 and Brave New World and then bang your head against the wall for 10 years. Yeah, and Ready Player One and Ready Player Two are ultimately their dystopian novels. And they describe exactly this kind of play-to-earn ecosystem. And they describe it explicitly as a dystopian system. So that's coming up on a future episode. It'd be a lot of fun to have that conversation. All right, folks, that's all the time we have for this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Thank you very much for listening. Today's show featured Andrea Santanopoulos, Jonathan Mohan, myself, Anthony Lapine. Today's show featured music by Jared Rubins and Gertie Beats, and it was edited by Jonas. If you have any questions or comments, send us an email at Adam at speakingofbitcoin.show. And thanks again for listening. See you next time.