Nigel Eccles - Co-Founder & CEO, Vault Laboratories Ep #63

Nigel Eccles is the co-founder and CEO of Vault Laboratories. VAULT is a new creator platform that uses the power of Web3 to unlock the next generation of fan experiences. Joe McCann guest hosts.

00:32 - Origin Story

04:48 - Vault

09:47 - Use case of Vault

14:38 - User experience in Web 3.0

18:01 - Why choose to build on Solana?

24:01 - BetDEX

25:51 - FanDuel vs BetDEX

27:41 - Regulation and user experience

31:04 - Youth as an inspiration?

32:48 - SAMO

34:42 - Exciting Projects on Solana

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Joe (00:09):

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Solana podcast. It's your guest host once again, Joe McCann. Today I'm super excited to introduce the one and only Nigel Eccles.

Nigel (00:21):

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Joe (00:22):

Nigel, I want to jump right into it. Can you talk a bit about your background and ultimately, how did you get into crypto or Web 3.0 or however you want to define it?

Nigel (00:33):

Yes. I've got about 20 years experience in consumer tech, mostly in sports. I'm originally from the UK. I'm originally from Northern Ireland. Around 2000 I was involved in a, I guess a dot com. It was a company called flutter.com as a product manager that I launched them as a betting exchange.

Nigel (00:51):

Since then I've been involved in a lot of different startups. The one that I launched in 2009 was a daily fantasy sports product called FanDuel. A lot of you if you're into sports, you almost certainly will be familiar with FanDuel because not only is it a very big fantasy sports operator, it's now a very big sports betting operator. Long history, I've always built consumer products. I've always been focused on B2C and trying to innovate and bring new consumer products together. Since then, I left FanDuel about four years ago and since then, I've actually launched three companies that are all in the consumer space.

Joe (01:32):

Wow. Three companies. When are you going to do something with your life?

Nigel (01:37):

Yeah. Well, they're all in their early stages. They're all in that promise space so it's exciting, but every day is still... There's still a lot of challenge. They're all still pretty early stage.

Joe (01:50):

Got you. We'll dive into each one of those in a minute. Can you maybe talk just a little bit about your journey of getting into crypto and then specifically, Solana?

Nigel (02:00):

I'm not super early. I've always, I've been aware of it for a long time, but 2017 was when I first got into it. Given that I've only ever really been interested in the consumer side, in 2017 I really dived in and was like, "Wow, this looks awesome." I remember reading about Ethereum. I never really had any interest in Bitcoin because I never really felt I had much money. And so I never really thought what's the point? I don't really have much money. Bitcoin to me seemed to be a great place if you had money and you wanted to store wealth. I didn't have any so it seemed mute to me. Whereas Ethereum seemed incredibly exciting so I get really interested in Ethereum. I also spent a lot of time looking at all these alternative coins in 2017. I remember going through CoinMarketCap coin by coin and going, "Okay. That looks totally pointless. That looks all promise, but no technology. That looks like that one above."

And really getting down to about 50 and I see chatting to some friends who are in the sector. Or that one looks totally scammy and just being fairly disillusioned. In the end I bought Ethereum and toyed with some of the stuff that was closer to being consumer ready like I think CryptoKitties. One of my former colleagues actually set up Rare Bits, which was an open sea competitor. Which was an NFT product back in 2017. He dabbled a bit, but really at the end of 2017 said, "This isn't even close to being ready for consumers. This is so hard to actually buy an NFT." It wasn't even clear what you would do with it regardless of any other form of transaction or paying for something, it was slow. It was expensive and I didn't see in the short term it was going to get there. 

I went back to focusing on Web 2.0 things over the following few years. In 2020 then, I started, I used to get interested in NFTs again. Interesting enough the first ones I looked at were Top Shot, which bubbled up very early in 2021 and then crashed again. And Nifty Gateway. Similarly, they had nice onboarding and that both of them you could buy-in with a credit card, but they both were a gateway for me to say, "Oh, I get this now. This is actually pretty smooth." Once I had an NFT, I was pretty beaten by it. It's like, okay. Because the first NFTs I ever bought was through a credit card. Then I went through the whole process of really understanding and trying to get my head around the infrastructure underneath it.

Joe (04:30):

Got you. That landed itself to probably some ideating on your end. One of these three companies you launched or projects, companies, whatever we call them these days is Vault. Can you talk a little bit about what Vault is and where the idea came from and frankly what's the plan with Vault?

Nigel (04:49):

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Vault is still very new, but we had been working with creators for about three or four years and what we'd been trying to do was to help them find a way to create a small space where they would bring in their very top funds and they would monetize them directly. If you ever read any material from this, [Ligen 00:05:11] is by far the leader here and we were talking to her three, four years ago and what we were trying to do is create this native mobile experience. Native was very important to us because if you look at consumption of media by consumers, 90 to 95% of it is mobile.

It's a native app. Whenever you do anything with consumers, they'll always say, "When's the app coming out?" You'd try and probe them and say, "Well, we got a really good mobile web." Then they'd go, "When's the app coming out?" Instead of fighting, we were like, "Look. It has to be a native mobile." We spent several years trying to build that native community, but it's really hard. What we found was it's hard to get people off existing platforms like YouTube, Instagram or Spotify. It's just hard to get them off.

Then secondly, it's very hard to monetize them particularly when Apple and Android are going to take a 30% cut. In about early 2021, when I started to dabble quite seriously with NFTs, I realized that actually this was a really interesting technology and we said, "This is a fascinating technology because I as a creator can actually monetize my work. I can actually sell something." Actually, if you think about it, it's much more in the analog world where I can create something of value and sell it. Previously to that in a digital world, it was very, very hard to do that because the person really struggled to buy something. When you could always right click copy something, it was very hard to do.

Now with the NFTs, that had provable providence. You had ownership and so we thought this is really interesting. We could definitely use this technology. When we dabbled with the NFTs, what we discovered was that lots of artists were really fascinated by it. Immediately they said, "This is great." But what we also found was a lot of them felt excluded. If you're a graphic artist, you're like, "Fantastic. Finally, a technology that people can discover art." If you speak to the graphic artists, NFT is just such a revelation to them. But a lot of the other artists, particularly music artists were like, "NFTs are fantastic, but it's not very authentic to what I do."

If you actually look in early 2021, [Grime 00:07:20], [Stevie Oke 00:07:20] and a lot of other music artists actually experimented with the NFTs, but they didn't really perform that well. Those NFTs are done between 60 and 90% in value from their meant price and a lot... More musicians actually just didn't do them. They just said, "Look. It just doesn't seem authentic. It doesn't seem to be the artist I am and it doesn't feel the right thing for me to be selling to my fans." We said to ourselves, "Well, why should this technology limit the art that could be shared? Why should it just be limited to graphic art?" Also, we thought it was interesting, everyone laughs at the right or they mock right click brigade. But they actually do have a point which is yes, you have ownership, but you have no exclusivity over this content.

There's anyone can see it and we thought there was something interesting if, what if we could A, remove the restrictions from the artist and B, create some exclusivity. Maybe only the people who own that NFT can actually see this piece of content. That was basically the background of the idea to Vault. What Vault is, is a platform where artists and some of the biggest artists that are coming on will be music artists would create a vault and they would then make keys to that vault and they would say, "Okay. I'm going to create a 1,000 keys and I'm going to the meant price of $50, a $100, a $1,000." Whatever price they set. That's fully set by the artist.

Then those NFT keys act as keys into a vault, and in that vault the artist can put any type of media that they want. That can be music. That can be video. That can be picture. That can be text. It could even be hyperlinks into other things like into merge or into live experiences. But the key thing there is that only the people with that NFT key can actually see what's in the vault.

Joe (09:10):

That's so cool. You hear a lot in the NFT world about these token gated communities. You're quite literally giving out keys or the artists I should say are literally giving out keys to get access to things that only the folks that have those keys can access to. It's a really cool concept.

 

Have you seen novel or unique things that these artists are doing or is it pretty straightforward like, "Hey, here's me eating breakfast or this is my workout playlist or whatever." What are the interesting use cases you've seen that artists I've come up with in their vaults?

Nigel (09:48):

Yeah. It's a really good question. Something just before I come to there, the other thing that we've done is we've made it very simple for the fan to consume the media and we've made it very simple for the creator to create the media. On the fan side, typically when you have this NFT gated community, you have to go to the discard and then you have to authenticate via club ladder grip which takes about 23 different attempts. And just in frustration it seems to have worked, although you're not sure. Sometimes the channels show up and sometimes they don't.

It's a really clunky experience and I'm not really criticizing them. I know it's a technically challenging thing to do. What we have done is that we allow people to create account that then links to their NFT and authenticates very smoothly. That's number one. The linkage between account and the NFT is very smooth. If they then sell that NFT, we actually know the address to look in and we automatically look and say, "No. They've sold it. They don't have access anymore."

Secondly, from the artist's perspective, again, that's a challenge for them. It's like, where do they put their content? What we've done is we've allowed them to add content to this native app that is seamless. Basically, if you can add media to Instagram, you can use Vault. It is literally one click, grab the media, drop it in. On the question of what use cases, we've seen a huge range but I'll give you a couple of examples. One that we're seeing is the artist album drop. When albums are being dropped, now normally they're going straight to Spotify. Sometimes some artists are also doing vinyl because they have a fan base that wants to collect.

What some of the artists we're working with are saying, "Actually, that vinyl's $30. Why don't you have $60 premium vault drop, which will not only have the music in it, but will also have some other special things? It will have some of the inspiration behind the music. It will have the cover art. It will have Voice Memos from me. Some all of backstory to the album." That's been a really interesting one. Another one music artists are working with us on is the tour drop. I'm going on tour next month. I'm going to be traveling for the next three months. Both myself and my team will be taking lots of social media. What I'm going to do is every day drop pieces of content from that tour so my fans can actually travel the country with me and see behind the scenes material that they would never otherwise see.

That's a really exciting one and we've got a few artists we're talking to about doing that on upcoming tours. Then the third one and a different category which is athletes. Last year college athletes got name, image, likeness rights. Before they couldn't be paid. They couldn't monetize their name. That has changed. But the challenge for a lot of them is like, "Okay. But what do I sell?" We've seen some of them advertise the local car dealership.

But they feel it. Again, it feels a little inauthentic. They have this huge fan base and what we've been talking to them and say, "Well, what you really should be doing is creating a vault and showing people what goes into that Saturday game day. What goes into getting to match madness." We're working with a number of athletes now that are doing vaults like road to the NFL. This is how I got to the draft. The training that goes on behind the scene. The interesting thing at a college level is we have boosters on the other side who want to buy the keys.

We have a really brilliant market emerging, which is boosters said, "Look. We want to support these athletes and we have these athletes coming into the college. God, well, we'd love to tell the story of what we're doing." That's becoming a nice market.

Joe (13:15):

It's so cool because I think one of the cool things that happened with Instagram is that when it really started to take off with celebrities and athletes and musicians, it's that fans felt closer to them  because they could see, hey, they're in this tour stop. Or they're just literally eating their lunch or whatever the thing may be. It just felt more personable. What it sounds like, this feels like maybe the second derivative of that where not only are you going to start to be able to see, hey, the behind the scenes of such and such band on tour, but also the spectrum of the media that could be produced and consumed by the fans is huge.

Nigel (13:56):

Yes.

Joe (13:57):

One thing I wanted to point on that you mentioned earlier that I think is important is the user experience. You mentioned just authenticating really easily and being able to add content as simple as Instagram. Given the experience you have in consumer related tech, can you talk a little bit about maybe your broader ethos on this?

Because I know that certainly with DeFi 1.0, it was hey, we're just a bunch of hackers and academic engineers and we're just creating primitives. But some of these apps are just painful to use and now we're starting to see a big emphasis on user experience because quite literally it will help onboard more people. Can you walk us through that being at the forefront for Vault and even potentially the other products that you're working on?

Nigel (14:40):

Absolutely core. The co-founder of Vault, my co-founder at Vault also co-founded FanDuel with me. He was our head of product design and user experience. He had leveraged from the design of the product through to customer service. He's a world class designer. There's no way, two ways around that.

What he brings to it is just a completely smooth flow. We want to get millions, hundreds of millions of people into crypto, but we want to make it a smooth experience. And we think that one day, yes, maybe everybody does self-custody, but that won't be their first experience. We have to give them value that isn't just coin goes up. It has to be something that is cool that like me, I go, "That's cool. I'd really actually like to learn and understand the underlying technology and what else it does."

If we look at what Vault works, we've actually enabled in our payments. People were like, "I didn't even know you could do this with Apple." We're like, "You can." They're not opposed to this. What happens is a creator creates a vault. They set a price. Let's just say they set it at a $100 a key. It can't go as low as 20. One of the beauties about Solana is its low transaction costs. Things shouldn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

If somebody's a fan of a band and they want to buy a vault, they should be able to buy something for $20. We could price it as low $20. The user can either buy with Solana. We give them the option with Solana. Or they can buy within in our payment. And that in our payment is two clicks.

Most people have their credit card already in their phone and suddenly they are owning an NFT that is built on Metaplex, built on Solana that they can then take off platform at a later date and self-custody. But they can have the full experience of owning that NFT and seeing the content without ever touching Solana or ever buying crypto. Without ever installing a wallet.

Joe (16:36):

Amazing. Yeah. Isn't it weird how people just want things that are fast and cheap? Such a novel concept.

Nigel (16:45):

Yeah. There's a very good book in usability. It goes back a few years called Don't Make Me Think-

Joe (16:50):

Yeah. Great book

 

Nigel (16:50):

... and it's perfect.

Nigel (16:52):

So many times people are like, you give them options or give them this, they're like, "No. Just make it real easy."

Joe (16:58):

Make it super easy.

Nigel (16:58):

If you can give them a straight line for them to get to where they want, the number of people you'd on-board will be several magnitudes higher than if you make them learn every step along the way.

Joe (17:09):

I totally agree. I think this may get to my next question around why Solana. It seems probably patently obvious at this point, but given that you have this experience in consumer tech, given that you built FanDuel or were co-founder with FanDuel, I don't want to diminish the massive team that brought this to market and maintains it.

While you were evaluating Web 3.0 related tech, and this is not meant to be a layup question. But you look at Solana versus some of the other ones and it's not that these other chains are bad, but when you're trying to design an experience that is seamless and as friction free as possible and using the principle of Don't Make Me Think, what was it that made you and your tech team say, "You know what? We're going with Solana because user experience is going to be so much better."

Nigel (18:04):

Yeah. It's a good question. It's funny the level of maxiness on Twitter. We have gone all in on an L1, but we've tried to be very clearheaded objective viewpoint because we're betting millions of dollars that this is the right decision. We're investing in an L1 because we think that this is going to be the best platform for us.

If it was a different one, we would totally have gone that different route because we can't be religious about it. We don't have the money to say, "Hey, we're going to invest in L1. That's not going to be the winner but for some reason we're going to do that." We started the process and even today we continue to look at other alternatives. I regularly look at Polygon. I regularly look at Arbitrum. I look at Avalanche. I look at NEAR because again, we're not religious. What led us to Solana though, was a number of factors.

Obviously the obvious headline was fast and cheap. But not just fast and cheap, but actually that being it was designed to be that. That was the criteria around how it was built. That was important to us because we knew that if in three, four years time that it got more congested, there was more demand, that the core team wouldn't be going, "Well, that's okay. We are fine with that because other things are successful."

We felt that there was a commitment for the core team. Though fast and cheap is core to this product, we're not going to the core to this platform. That was really important. The other factors we felt were that even at that point and this is early 2021, it had good momentum and that again was important. We didn't want to make a technically great choice, but all the momentum was going another direction and everything over the last 12 months has continued to convince us that was the right decision.

Nigel (19:56):

We also were impressed by this core team. Raj and Anatoly were straight on very first call. Somebody who's come from Web 2.0. Personally, I thought that was great that we can reach out to somebody and say, "Look. We're having issues with this." They've been incredibly supportive. I thought that was a huge factor as well.

Then the last thing I'd say that I've noticed about Solana is that I think there's a much stronger design ethos in Solana than I've seen in the other blockchains. I don't want to say it isn't bad, but these other ones. But some of the blockchains I've been on are, I think I cannot understand how they've made these design decisions.

 

I think some of it is a laziness about EVM. Which is like, well, it just works. It's EVM compatible so people will figure it out. I think Solana has gone down a slightly harder road, but it has forced people to say, "No. We're going to design this for humans."

I guess that handicap in a way has actually improved it. Something like Phantom, it is 10X better than MetaMask. Without a doubt I use MetaMask every day and I'm always still fascinated that for example, NFTs that I've sold six months ago are still in my wallet. I think there's a setting somewhere where I could change it to take those out. But the idea that they don't understand that would be something I would want natively is weird.

 

Those are, it's four or five major reasons. I think there's still a very, very large gap. We made the decision. We committed about 6 to 8 months ago. But since then it's only got stronger the thesis.

Joe (21:23):

Yeah. You bring up a number of points that I try to bestow upon a number of the founders of startups and projects that I'm advising is, look, you don't have to be religious about your technical solutions or choices. But I do think it's important to recognize that, hey, if your application or protocol is super successful, are you going to have to do what actually Infinity did and build your own scaling solution?

Are you willing to staff that or do you have the resources for that? Do you have the desire to do that? I think the second aspect is, and again, this isn't a NTL2 conversation. It's that in my view, when you add an L2 to your technical architecture, I have this running joke that the reason it's called an L2 is because now you have two problems. It's not just the L2 that you're building on, but you also have an upstream dependency on the L1.

I think a lot of the technical decision making early on is critically important to understand in the case that you do have this wildly successful app or protocol. Furthermore, to your point, Solana made some intentional design decisions that added some constraint around the protocol and furthermore, the applicability of the protocol.

I think, we're still early days-ish with what's possible on it and we're definitely have been pressure testing the network quite a bit. But I think longer term, this is currently going to be the chain that's going to enable those types of truly immersive rich internet experiences that users are accustomed to on mobile apps and Web 2.0 without having to have all these additional complexity. I take your point a 1,000% with MetaMask and I take nothing away from that team. But at the same time, Phantom has brought user-centric design to the wallet and that's super important for onboarding and more importantly for the apps that will ultimately be connected to those wallets. I hear you a 100% on that.

Because I know we're coming up on time pretty good, I wanted to switch gears quickly to talk about BetDEX. Because this is actually how we met. We were introduced by a mutual friend. He told me about your background and he told me that you were considering building on Solana and it was a fascinating idea. I said, "Would love to convert him to build this on Solana." Can you talk about what BetDEX is and what you're excited about BetDEX for? Then also again, maybe the design decision as to why you chose Solana.

Nigel (24:05):

Yeah. BetDEX is a sports betting protocol. The way to think about it is there's something like $2 trillion bet every year on sports globally. But that $2 trillion is basically split among tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of different sportsbooks. We take FanDuel's example. FanDuel is quite a big sportsbook, but all the money they take, they're the counterparty. They take that counterparty risk. All the money that DraftKings takes or say some of the other ones, BetRivers takes, they all take that counterparty risk.

If you're one of those smaller sportsbooks and somebody Mattress Mark comes in with a million dollars, you can't take because you can't take the counterpart risk. The way that BetDEX imagines the world is says, "Well, what if all of those sportsbooks could basically share their liquidity in a central pool?"

Now, prior to crypto they probably wouldn't have wanted to do that because who would own that platform? What the governance would be. There will be lots of different challenges there on that actual protocol. Well, what BetDEX works as is, because it's going to be a decentralized protocol which will be owned through its token holders which may be many of those different applications, they then can pool their liquidity into a central exchange.

And so someone betting on FanDuel could be in effect counterpartied with somebody in the UK betting on a completely different website and they don't actually need to know that. Basically, BetDEX is the glue that's going to plug together all these different sportsbooks that gives us global liquidity pool.

Joe (25:40):

Super cool. Given your obvious experience with FanDuel, how would you juxtapose the two like FanDuel was for this type of a world or environment, and this is how BetDEX is different?

Nigel (25:54):

Yeah. They're actually very different. One day my aspiration is that FanDuel would use BetDEX. They don't have as immediate a need because they're a big sportsbook so they don't... Mattress Mark comes in and they'll say, "I'll take that liability." The way we want to see it is, we'll actually build the very first application which will also be called BetDEX. That's a licensed sportsbook in Malta that will take bets from over a 100 different countries. Unfortunately, not the US. Certainly initially.

But basically what will then happen is we will actually opensource that code and say to other operators, "Look. You can also build your own application. In fact, take our code. Put your own logo on it. Put your own brand on it and then you can interface with BetDEX as well." Then existing operators like DraftKings, like FanDuel can say, "Wait a second. There's this huge liquidity. Why are we managing all this risk ourselves? Why don't we pull some of our liquidity in here? Maybe I carry 90% of the risk of the money coming in and I just blow 10% onto this exchange." BetDEX is really a protocol and FanDuel really is an application that then would use that protocol like all of these other sportsbooks.

Joe (27:01):

Got it. Very cool. You mentioned something that hits home for me as an American that once again we are unfortunately geofenced, if you will, to a lot of the innovation that's happening in crypto and Web 3.0.

Nigel (27:14):

Yeah.

Joe (27:15):

Given your experience with FanDuel and certainly setting up BetDEX, can you talk a little bit about the policy risk? You mentioned a 100 different countries and how do you navigate that? Because the sports betting regulations in say the UK are very different than they would be in say New Jersey. Maybe even different they are in South Africa. How do you think about managing that? Again, not sacrificing the end user experience for folks that are using BetDEX.

Nigel (27:44):

Yeah. That's a very good point. Largely the regulatory issues set at the application layer, are very similar to... AWS typically does not have to deal with betting regulations. It's the application that builds on top of it. BetDEX is very simple. It's just their protocol it's up to those applications that build on top. For example, BetDEX the application is regulated in Malta. We are going through a very long process with the Malta's Gaming Authority and I was on the call with them yesterday going through my source of wealth and they want all my bank details. I've been fingerprinted. That's a process.

That's a process that happens at the application level. Basically the protocol just works with those applications and so it's agnostic to do that. It's the applications that deal with the regulation.

I will say that with FanDuel before we went through a lot of regulatory issues with FanDuel as a fantasy sports product. Then becoming a sports betting product. I'd say my personal view in the US regulatory process is, it always gets messy before it gets better. I see that with crypto as well. I'm actually probably one of the few crypto regulatory optimists in that I see what's happening today and some of it is ridiculous. A lot of it is through lack of understanding, but some of it, I think it is genuinely vested interests. Acting in their vested interests.

But I also feel that like fantasy football was, crypto is just too popular. Means too many people have it. It's too beneficial to consumers and it brings two things to politicians what they love, which is money and votes. I am very bullish longer term, but there's going to be speed bumps on the way.

Joe (29:29):

Yeah. I totally agree. I think you and Sam at FTX are definitely regulatory optimists. I am cautiously optimistic. But I do believe that there's a growing momentum, certainly in the United States about bipartisan support for candidates who are pro crypto. I think this is a very real movement that's happening in DC. I know there's lobbying groups. There's super perks being set up. I agree with you. I think that there's going to be some bumps along the way. There will probably be some blunders and bureaucratic mistakes if history serves as well.

But at the end of the day, I think that to your point, it's so popular nowadays and the rebranding of crypto to Web 3.0 which now encompasses things like NFTs, which is bringing culture in the crypto. Which is bringing video games into crypto. Which is bringing fantasy sport and sports betting into crypto. It feels we're on a path towards this reaching some consumer safety slash normalcy. I guess the next question that I had was, if I'm a kid nowadays, I know you have some kids. I have a son, but he's much too young to even be using a computer.

One of the fascinating things that I think about kids these days is that the concept of a video game or the concept of art or the concept of a sport is just so different. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how even just conversations with your kids or your view on the youth is influencing some of the decision making in what you're doing with the projects that you're helping launch?

Nigel (31:09):

Yeah. It is very interesting. I've got three kids and they're all gamers and they're from 17 to 28. It's a broad range. It's interesting how they're discognitive, I would say. Obviously discard is prevalent in crypto. I'd say that they're all very familiar with NFTs. It's not such an alien concept to them that I think it is to people maybe my generation.

It's really you spend money on something that's virtual. They have that experience. When they're gamers, I think they're little skeptical of NFTs and games like a lot of gamers are because I think they see that historically a lot of the games companies have used innovations like this to, not to make the game experience better, but to actually make more money.

They look at them a lot of times and say, they like NFTs in their own right and they're interested and they've all bought and sold them. Because they look them and they say, "Okay. These are load boxes. This is another way to get money from me for something that I probably should have got in the first instance."

 

That's been really interesting. They are very natively digital. I think that's what's very clear that a large part of their life, a vast majority of their life is digital. And so the concept of a digital life is something that's totally new to that.

Joe (32:25):

Yeah. You and I were chatting at one point in Lisbon actually at the Solana conference and you had mentioned something along the lines of how fun it was for your kids to be sending SAMO to each other.

Nigel (32:38):

Yeah.

Joe (32:38):

And how it's this meme coin on Solana, but it was just this fun experience because they're not going to be sending each other hundreds of dollars in USDC, but hey, they can send each other hundreds of SAMO and it's this cool experience.

Nigel (32:53):

Yeah. I'm unashamedly a SAMO enthusiast. I think you are as well.

Joe (32:58):

Oh yeah.

Nigel (32:59):

SAMO and Dogecoins are fun and they're popular. As someone who's tried to build lots of consumer businesses many of which have not been successful, popularity is hard to get. While they don't... Dogecoins don't do a lot today, that popularity I think is incredibly powerful. I'd say that BetDEX, we deliberately have been working with the SAMO community and we've done some fun things with them because they have something that we really want as a company, which is popularity. We definitely want to do a lot more with them and I'm very bullish in SAMO. I'm actually quite bullish on Dogecoins in general which is, it's very rare that you get something that level of popularity. That they don't figure out something to do with the... I think it's a very strong community. I think it's got a long way to go.

Joe (33:44):

Yeah. I agree. One of the most fascinating things I think that's occurred over the past couple of years specifically with the GameStop saga is that internet culture is a force and it doesn't necessary really have to equate to some business case study or some scientific proof for something to work or be popular or have utility. That's one of the most fascinating things about crypto to me is that the internet culture around it and how it supports things that on the surface appear to be maybe trivial in nature, but there's a huge community behind it and there's something to be said for that. I think maybe the last question I'll ask because I know we're coming up on time is, given the crazy expansive growth we're seeing in Web 3.0 and particularly in the types of applications on Solana, what are a handful of the projects or applications that you're really excited about now?

Nigel (34:47):

I think a few things. I think Phantom is an incredible wallet and I think they have a long way to go. I'm very bullish on that. I really think that's going to be critical onboarding people onto the L1. In terms of NFT projects, I have a Monkey. I'm incredibly impressed by that community and I've joined a lot of NFT communities and that one is just... It's so hard to keep up.

Joe (35:12):

I agree.

Nigel (35:13):

Yeah. I think they've done an amazing job. I do think there will be a bit of a... By verification of ones that clearly could become like that and ones that don't. I think a lot of entities at the moment are sitting in this nether land of, are they going to maybe get there or not? I think when it becomes apparent, prices will reflect that. I think that's really interesting one. I'm very bullish on the Monkeys. I think it's a great community. In terms of games, it's still very early. I'm really interested in Game Fire. I think NFTs could be really interesting on games.

Filling games is hard though and I feel that a lot of these games are all have an amazing game priced in. Even though no one's seen a line of gold or... And so that does worry me. I feel there's going to be a lot of failures. The only one that I hold a bit of is Panzer Dogs. I've actually played their demo and it's a pretty cute game and the studio has evidence of building good games before. I'm quite excited about that one. I've liked what they've been dropping.

I am very nervous in general about the whole Game Fire. I think that 2022, it might be the year that we discover in crypto that building games is hard and building games with NFTs in them is just as hard as building games. Those are probably the major ones. I do think that games is going to be really important though. But it may be more games like the Cops Game or Wolf Game, which is on Ethereum. It may be more games like that, that are not... Or even Loot. Loot was a fascinating project last year. Obviously it lost a lot of steam. But new game format where the community is actually core in building the next stages like I just gave you the building blocks and we build it, I think there's a lot to go there given that Solana is priced at a level where a much younger audience that doesn't necessarily have a lot of money can innovate.

That's where I would be more excited as opposed to triple-A games porting over and suddenly their skins which weren't really worth anything anyhow, suddenly are tradable assets. I'm not as excited about that. I'm more excited about games that are weird that we don't really understand right now coming up organically.

Joe (37:22):

Yeah. I think that's a fair assessment. In almost any startup boom cycle, you see people just trying to innovate in myriad different directions, which is awesome. But ultimately the ones that have something truly innovative that people can gravitate towards are going to be the ones that really make it. Right now it's up for grabs.

I'm always on the space like you are in general. I think that the caution that you're hitting is worthwhile, but man, there's a lot of really cool stuff out there. I will tell you, a lot of the game developers that I've been meeting with that are launching games are seasoned game devs.

Nigel (38:02):

Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (38:03):

They just see this as a way to like, hey man, I always wanted to have an Indy game studio or do my own game and this is a means to facilitate that. I think the key though, to your point is how are we going to integrate these things in a way that feels it's accretive to the game?

What's fascinating about your kid's view of being skeptical of these things is very wise because what we don't want is just things to be bolted on. We want them to actually add value to the experience. TBD on that. We still got lots of time to see when this is going to pan out.

Nigel (38:36):

Yeah.

Joe (38:36):

Well Nigel, this was awesome. Where can people find you on the internet, Twitter, or Telegram or wherever you're comfortable with?

Nigel (38:43):

Twitter's the best place. I'm Nigel Eccles. I'm fully docs. You'll see me. I'm a nice little red monkey. Yeah. I'm @nigeleccles on Twitter.

Joe (38:51):

Amazing. Well, you heard it here first folks. Nigel Eccles, man, has so many projects and companies. We couldn't even get through them all. But thank you so much for joining us on the Solana podcast and we'll see you guys next time.

Nigel (39:04):

Thank you.