.jpg)
At Token 2049 Singapore, The Edge of Show dives into how crypto’s next cycle is being built in real time. Host Josh Kriger sits down with Yat Siu (Chairman, Animoca Brands), Alok K. Sinha (Co-Founder & Chief Ecosystem Officer, Puzzle Labs VEI), and Keith Kim (COO, Nextbase / MapleStory Universe) to unpack the future of real world assets (RWAs), altcoins, and Web3 gaming.
From tokenized real estate and on-chain mortgage bonds to altcoin treasuries, digital asset trusts and MapleStory’s Web3-powered metagame, this Token 2049 Singapore special shows how capital, culture and IP are converging. If you care about where crypto is actually going—beyond memes and market cycles—this Token 2049 Singapore conversation gives you concrete examples, playbooks and mental models straight from operators who are already shipping.
Key Topics Covered
Why Token 2049 Singapore feels like “Internet 1995” for tokenization
Yat Siu explains how growing regulatory clarity and institutional adoption have opened the floodgates for tokenization. From Bitcoin ETFs to digital asset treasury companies, Token 2049 Singapore marks the moment when tokens become a long-term structural part of global markets, not just a speculative side-show.
Crypto adoption, capitalism and why emerging markets move first
Using examples from Ukraine, India, South Korea, South America and hyperinflation cases like Zimbabwe, Yat breaks down why regions that need capitalism and property rights most are often the fastest to adopt crypto—framing Token 2049 Singapore as part of a much larger geopolitical and economic realignment.
Real world assets and tokenized real estate at global scale
Alok K. Sinha shares how Puzzle Labs is taking traditional U.S. mortgage flows and global commercial real estate and putting them fully on-chain. From NFT-represented loans to ERC-3643 RWA bond tokens and an 80-story mixed-use tower in Bahrain, this Token 2049 Singapore conversation shows RWAs moving from theory to production.
Structuring RWA bonds, yields and risk in DeFi-native language
The episode dives into how Puzzle Labs structures AAA vs BB tranches, uses pool NFTs to lock loans, and targets yields from high single digits to mid-teens while still respecting real-world credit risk. For DeFi listeners, Token 2049 Singapore becomes a masterclass in how TradFi securitization logic meets on-chain liquidity.
Hedging BTC with tokenized real estate and on-chain credit
One of the most compelling Token 2049 Singapore segments covers a hedge fund strategy where BTC is deposited, loans are issued at conservative LTVs, and proceeds are deployed into RWA tokens. By pairing volatile crypto collateral with tokenized credit and property, the structure aims to reduce liquidation risk while keeping upside.
Altcoins as a new “utility index” for global innovation
Yat reframes altcoins as the true engine of innovation—more like the S&P 500 of crypto than just speculative side bets. Instead of hunting for a single “altcoin to flip Bitcoin,” he argues that thousands of utility-driven altcoins will collectively surpass Bitcoin’s market cap while Bitcoin remains crypto’s savings account—an idea that lands powerfully in the Token 2049 Singapore context.
MapleStory Universe and Metaplay: Web2 gaming meets Web3 rails
Keith Kim unpacks how Nextbase and MapleStory Universe are using blockchain to supercharge “Metaplay”—the layer of trading, upgrading and meta-strategy around the core game loop. At Token 2049 Singapore, he explains how Web3 lets builders, not just studios, create new meta-experiences and earn from them.
Stablecoins, builder-first economies and mobile-native gaming
Keith explores when stablecoins make sense in games, how on-chain assets unlock new investor bases and builder incentives, and why the future is a hybrid of PC-grade depth with mobile meta-layers. In the Token 2049 Singapore ecosystem, MapleStory Universe becomes a blueprint for legacy IP evolving into fully on-chain, multi-platform economies.
Episode Highlights
“Tokenization is no longer a thought experiment. Institutions see other public companies holding tokens and realize this is a long-term structural shift.” – Yat Siu
“If you originate mortgages on-chain, data and documents are immutable. What used to take four or five months to become a bond can compress to under a month.” – Alok K. Sinha
“We represent each loan as an NFT, lock them into a pool NFT, and mint RWA bond tokens on top—mirroring any capital structure the market needs.” – Alok K. Sinha
“Everything you own in an IP—characters, items, progression—will be treated as an asset. Web3 just makes that obvious and tradable.” – Keith Kim
“Building a durable IP like MapleStory isn’t one secret trick. It’s making slightly better decisions than worse ones, over and over, for ten years.” – Keith Kim
People and Resources Mentioned
Yat Siu
– Chairman, Animoca Brands
Animoca Brands
– Web3 gaming and metaverse investment company
Alok K. Sinha
– Co-Founder & Chief Ecosystem Officer, Puzzle Labs VEI
Puzzle Labs
– RWA and on-chain securitization platform
Nuva Marketplace
– Joint RWA initiative mentioned alongside Animoca / Providence (context in episode)
Republic
– Investment platform exploring tokenized equity and RWAs
Solana
– High-performance blockchain referenced in cross-chain/RWA context
Dogecoin
– Meme coin referenced as a future potential treasury asset
MapleStory
– Original MMORPG IP from Nexon
MapleStory Universe
– Nexon’s Web3 expansion of MapleStory
Nexon
– Global gaming company behind MapleStory and MapleStory Universe
The Edge of Show
– Media ecosystem formerly known as Edge of NFT
(Some project names like Nuva marketplace and specific hedge funds are discussed conceptually in the episode and may not yet have standalone public sites.)
About our Guests
Yat Siu – Chairman, Animoca Brands
Yat Siu is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, one of the most active Web3 investors and operators in the world, with a portfolio of hundreds of projects across gaming, metaverse, infrastructure and decentralized finance. A long-time tech entrepreneur and early advocate for digital property rights, Yat helped drive mainstream awareness of NFTs and play-and-earn models while backing leading projects across chains. At Token 2049 Singapore, he shares how regulatory shifts, stablecoins and RWAs are converging to make tokenization a permanent layer of global capitalism.
Alok K. Sinha – Co-Founder & Chief Ecosystem Officer, Puzzle Labs VEI
Alok K. Sinha is Co-Founder and Chief Ecosystem Officer at Puzzle Labs VEI, a platform bringing traditional credit, mortgage flows and real estate into fully on-chain structures. A serial CEO and published author with decades of experience in global finance, he has overseen lending businesses originating around a billion dollars annually in home loans. At Token 2049 Singapore, Alok explains how Puzzle Labs uses NFTs, pool structures and ERC-based RWA bond tokens to compress securitization timelines, unlock global investor access and make tokenized real estate—from U.S. mortgages to Bahraini waterfront skyscrapers—investable for crypto-native capital.
Keith Kim – Chief Operating Officer, Nextbase / MapleStory Universe
Keith Kim is the Chief Operating Officer at Nextbase, the Nexon-affiliated team building MapleStory Universe, which extends the iconic MapleStory IP into Web3. With a background in product strategy, tokenomics and policy design, Keith has helped translate a 20+ year MMORPG into a builder-first on-chain ecosystem where Metaplay—trading, upgrading, and meta-strategy—becomes as important as core gameplay. At Token 2049 Singapore, he outlines how MapleStory Universe is using blockchain, stablecoins and mobile-first design to turn long-lived IP into a programmable, multi-platform economy where both studios and community builders can participate in value creation.
Guests Contacts:
Yat Siu
LinkedIn Link: Not reliably available; best found by searching “Yat Siu Animoca Brands” on LinkedIn
Website Link: https://www.animocabrands.com/
Twitter Link: https://x.com/ysiu
Alok K. Sinha
LinkedIn Link: Not reliably available; best found by searching “Alok K Sinha Puzzle Labs” on LinkedIn
Website Link: https://www.puzzlelabs.io/
Twitter Link: Not publicly confirmed at the time of writing
Keith Kim
LinkedIn Link: Not reliably available; best found by searching “Jeongheon Keith Kim MapleStory Universe” on LinkedIn
Website Link: https://maplestory-universe.nexon.com/
Twitter Link: Mentioned in the episode as “next spacetime”; likely reachable by searching “nextspacetime” on X / Twitter
Transcript:
Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to The Edge of Show, live at Token 2049 in Singapore. I'm very excited to be here again with Yatsu, the chairman of Animoca Brands. Great to have you back on the show.
Yat Siu: Thanks for having me.
Josh Kriger: Always good to see you. And for context, at this point, you guys have over 600 Portco companies, including The Edge of Company. Very excited to be part of that family. And the conversation has evolved. Quite a lot, I'd say, in this cycle where we're opening up new doors with RWAs, with other types of tokenization. What is it, do you think, about this moment in time that has unlocked this possibility relative to the past? Is it that the regulatory climate is open? It's not the Wild West anymore? Or is there something else in the water that is sort of causing this sort of catalytic effect?
Yat Siu: I mean, the catalytic effect is, I think, two things. One, regulatory certainty, or at least the belief that regulatory certainty is coming because of the signals that are out there, led by the U.S. And, of course, the other one is that it's, of course, created institutional interest and adoption. It started with the Bitcoin ETF, and now it's gone all the way to digital asset treasury companies. Everyone's talking about tokens. They may not fully understand it, but they're like, oh, that's a Nasdaq public company that has some tokens. What does that mean? These are all ways in which basically institutions are getting involved. And so you put that all together, there's actually not just a belief, but an understanding that tokenization is real and here for the long term. And it reminds me a little bit like the early days of the internet, right? I mean, people talked about, you know, dot-com companies and so on. They're like, what's that? What's a dot-com? Why am I on the internet? I don't understand it. Mosaic browser, Netscape. These are all things that they didn't really understand, but they needed to learn about. And that's kind of the stage that we're in. And I would argue that the demand was always there, but it was sort of suppressed because of the regulatory uncertainty. Or actually, I would say more like the regulatory hostility, depending which country you're talking about. And that's now gone away, which means it's opened up those floodgates.
Josh Kriger: Very cool. So we talked about some of the big markets, obviously, leading the charge, but you've also talked about sort of the crypto index from the perspective of adopting markets in the relative adoption per population. Absolutely, yeah. Maybe you can speak to some of your insights there about countries like Ukraine, which might, you know, is a surprising sort of leader in that category.
Yat Siu: Yeah. I mean, I think outside of Ukraine, you've got like India and all these places. And it's an example where you have really sort of categories of places. I would divide them into two. One of them are really sort of classically defined as developing countries where people don't even have bank accounts, but they want to have some kind of stable currency or at least in their perception, stable currency. You saw that what happened in like, you know, Argentina, for instance, South America is one of those places as well. And stable coins has become one really big angle of adoption because, look, I may not understand the volatility of a token, but I do get a dollar, and it's a digital dollar, and I can basically then participate in the wider growth of the market. That's kind of one path of adoption that we're seeing. And the other one, of course, is when you look at places like Ukraine, or formerly Eastern Bloc countries, or Soviet Union satellite countries, these are countries that really came from a system which was communist and therefore had nothing. And then they got introduced to capitalism and property rights and they're like, hey, this is cool. So their understanding of that evolved not just from the physical sense, but into the digital world very naturally. You have the same effect in Asia. So for instance, crypto adoption, the number one country in terms of number one continent that has the most crypto users collectively is Asia. And again, if you think about the capitalist and sort of democratic and property rights revolution, for Asia, it's really been over the last few decades. If you look at, for instance, South Korea, South Korea had a GDP lower than North Korea 40 years ago. That's hard to imagine. And now it's the 12th largest GDP. And now guess what? What is the number one country in terms of crypto adoption? It's actually Korea or some version of that. In fact, another interesting stat is that in Q1 of this year, the Korean won was traded more frequently than the US dollar. So just to give you a construct of the countries that basically embrace capitalism, that actually appreciate it much more, are also the places that actually, or need capitalism, right? Are the places where crypto adoption happens faster. And in America as well, for a developed place, what are the centers of crypto? It's Miami, it's New York, right? And guess what they have in common? A love of capitalism, right? In contrast to, for instance, Silicon Valley, which has a lot of good technology, but it's not the center of crypto because it's also not sort of as capitalist, shall we say.
Josh Kriger: So what does this mean for countries that are suffering from hyperinflation, where everyone's trying to avoid using their currency? For example, challenges in Brazil right now. We all knew about the Zimbabwe hyperinflation we were dealing with. People are looking at currency and weighing it to figure out what it's worth.
Yat Siu: Yeah, I think there was an interesting example of an image where they were showing what the worth is of the toilet paper and money, and actually it was more money weight than actually toilet paper, stuff like that. It's pretty insane, right? Yeah. First of all, hyperinflation Cryptocurrency, tokens, and stablecoins in particular, are a natural hedge for them and they understand that. And so when you talk about adoption, earlier I mentioned about you need capitalism, and essentially that's the kind of thing, I have a need for that. And that's actually why South America adopted crypto so rapidly. Now, you know, money generally is a trust system, right? If I trust it, you know, if people suddenly didn't trust the US dollar, you're kind of screwed as well, right? And because the US has an element where you trust it and because of the government and the size and all that kind of stuff, you sort of give it that trust because everyone else is using it, right? But when others stop using it or when they don't hold it, because money is being printed all the time. That's the other thing. People used to believe that money was a store of value. Those who still believe that, they're not going to make it. They have to understand that money is basically being printed and will continue to be printed in an almost modern monetary theorist type of way. We've gone away from fiscal discipline. Just look what happened in the U.S. government right now. It's kind of shut down right at this moment in time as we're having this interview. Insane to think about because people can't agree on the debt ceiling because, again, there's just too much debt. So you need a hedge and that's why gold and Bitcoin are up.
Josh Kriger: So it's interesting because there's this bit of a doomsday narrative with what would happen when crypto becomes realized globally as a predominant optimal use case for transactions. I did a panel recently and I asked people I think that's a good question. cycle. If this continues to go the way that you described, and that does become a reality, is this a reality where capitalism as we know it changes or can sort of, you know, sustain or thrive in a crypto payment world?
Yat Siu: Well, first of all, I think capitalism will thrive even more and will become much more truer to the capitalist ethos than what it is right now. Because right now, capitalism is very much sort of restricted, depending on regulation and that kind of stuff. And you need some of that, because completely unrestricted has its own problems as well. But speaking quickly on the element of trust, when you talk about reserve currencies, when there was a crisis in an economy, people would adopt a different type of reserve currency to create that trust. Gold used to be that standard, and it's not entirely inconceivable that you might consider a mixture of gold and digital assets like Bitcoin as that kind of medium of trust. So in other words, if there was a mechanism where the Brazilian government was to say, We're going to go back to the gold standard. Again, I don't think they're able to do it, but let's just say if they were able to present themselves in that manner, it would bring confidence into the currency and some stability. That's basically where I think digital assets play an incredible role as they keep building themselves up. That's one thing. the trust element. Trust comes from a social construct. It's not just the currency dropping, it's the fact that people in the community themselves have a lack of trust of the system in place. If you are not trusting the government in question, then the currency will naturally drop. In the same way that if suddenly you stop trusting the U.S. government, then actually the dollar is going to be less used in circulation or stored as a store of any mechanism because you don't trust it. What is that? It's reputation. Our biggest actual index of that is our collective reputation, whether it's an individual, like your credit, or whether you're a country. It's all reputation-based.
Josh Kriger: It's all reputation. There's two critical parts of the economy that seem like they're next up and you've spoken to, and I want to cover now in the rest of this conversation. One is RWAs in real estate. 55% of the US economy is based on real estate. So it's a huge resource. And I think we've been in a world where, as a retail investor, you're having to make hard choices about investing in the markets, investing in crypto, and buying property. And it seems like now you may not have to make those choices as much anymore. With fractional real estate, it sort of seems like it would offset the increasing entertainability of real estate, which you not only want to live on, but you want to diversify your asset base with a really interesting asset class. So what is Animoca Brands doing in this area?
Yat Siu: I think you've recently announced... With Nuva, we announced it's a joint venture between us and Providence, basically launching the Nuva marketplace on RWAs. And obviously, starting with Helox, but obviously that's going to expand in different areas of product. Now someone around the world is able to buy a real world asset as a yield that you understand.
Josh Kriger: And they don't have to travel to that country, contract in a different language.
Yat Siu: They can have it in the form of a token. And you know, we didn't do this, but Republic and Solana had announced essentially the tokenization of some of our shares. And basically that's another way in which if you are an investor and you want to somehow have an ownership in Animoca Shares, you can now do it through a token eventually in the future through Republic. Because they've tokenized, essentially as an RWA, our equity. And you can see how that expands the investing framework of not just companies like ourselves, but others as well in the future. So, you know, it's just an exciting beginning where you can basically expand that. And why you would tokenize it is you expand the market of other people who would buy it. And this is kind of where stablecoins becomes interesting. Because now you have 150 to 200 million people around the world, in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, who all have the ability, potentially, to buy the US dollar denominator product, even if they don't have a bank account.
Josh Kriger: So just to play devil's advocate, do you have any concern that this retail liquidity is just going to be sort of the buyers of bigger sort of investors and whale selling? Or is it going to be a truly shared democratized economy?
Yat Siu: I think it's going to be a truly shared democratized economy because you now can participate together with everyone else on these new opportunities. And I think crypto demonstrates that very early on already. Think about how many people became very wealthy because they participated in Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana in the early days. It wasn't just the big VCs. In the traditional market, you could only do so at the IPO, but here you could be in ground zero. Yes, you take risks, you take chances, but the returns basically made more people wealthy. And crypto is a new wealth class.
Josh Kriger: I can see other bigger companies having to make their offering more available because they want a more successful IPO.
Yat Siu: Well, also, if you don't reach out this way, I think you're not going to make it because your competitor who tokenizes himself or creates RWAs will have more reach, more distribution, more scalability. I mean, think about what happened to companies who decided, I don't want to be on the internet. That was a thing 30 years ago. People were like, oh, we don't want to be online. We don't think it's serious. We want to stay a magazine, whatever it is, right? They went out of business, right? And I think the same is going to happen for companies who don't tokenize. If you don't tokenize, you're not going to make it.
Josh Kriger: So everything's going in a blender now and we're stirring it up. And one interesting sort of ingredient that some people are concerned is getting left out of the smoothie is altcoins. You know, in that regard, you know, there are some fun projects like You guys recently invested in a public company that's acquiring Ton.
Yat Siu: Alpha Ton.
Josh Kriger: Alpha Ton. Shout out to Brittany. But are we moving in a direction of altcoins also becoming treasuries and bundles? Absolutely. I mean, the obvious one to me is Dogecoin. Why isn't there a Dogecoin treasury yet?
Yat Siu: So before we go to Dogecoin, I mean, In order for you to be an institutionally credible product, you have to have either an ETF, a DAT, or somehow be present in a public listed company, because someone has to be accountable. Someone has to be responsible for the asset. And that's why digital asset treasury companies have become so interesting. I mean, it required, you know, basically, you know, a DAT for Ethereum, between SBED and Sharpling and those guys, for actually Ethereum to really become institutionally adopted in the way that, you know, it needed to. And I think this is true for every altcoin that's out there as well. And there's a next level thing that the DATs themselves are not just holding treasury, they have to show utility. And so Alphaton basically announced that they intend to acquire controlling stake in GAMI. And the GAMI token basically ripped by 70 or 80 percent, not sure what it is today. But more importantly, it basically demonstrated to a public institutional market, hey, there is gaming in crypto. I mean, yes, within our bubble, we know about it. But, you know, Wall Street doesn't know this, right? And then, oh, there's 60 million users. I didn't know that, right? Oh, there's a token economy inside the token ecosystem as well, that there's something. And it's part of the education and validation. And I would say that makes gaming perhaps the very first Web3 gaming adjacent digital asset treasury sort of entity that's out there. And that comes to the next point, which is that where is all the growth and innovation happening? It's happening in altcoins. Altcoins are bringing in people. Whether it's an NFT or whether it's a fungible token, it's utility. It's an experiment pool. It's an experiment pool. It's also where the growth is happening. People are building on Ethereum, building on Solana, building on Sandbox and the Mocha, whatever that token ecosystem is.
Josh Kriger: But for the last year, the value of these coins and the sort of value of what they're building, a utility sort of first idea has not actually shown in token prices.
Yat Siu: So collectively, it's become a $1.4 trillion market, which was smaller before, right? And the reason why it doesn't feel this way is because you have many, many more millions of tokens to choose from. Like you have many, many millions of businesses in the world, right? So that's why it feels this way. Whereas before, there were less tokens, so there was more concentration, right? Now, to the point, though, is that look at the stock market today. Gold is about $25 to $25 trillion. The stock market is $128 trillion. Apple is never going to be bigger than gold. But Apple, Facebook, Google, S&P 500, they're all driving utility usage and growth. They're basically bigger than gold. And that's what Altcoin's going to be. Now, which Altcoin, that's a different question. because it's not one altcoin. I think the mistake that a lot of people are making, and you know our belief around shared network and how we think a whole sort of ecosystem will grow. So we don't believe there's going to be one altcoin that's going to beat Bitcoin. That's very zero-sum classic thinking. We're thinking collectively, as we've seen before, that altcoins are going to expand the space, bring in people. Those companies are going to be collectively larger than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin will keep growing because Bitcoin is the savings account for crypto users.
Josh Kriger: Is it like 50 of the top altcoins, 100, 500? Like what's the index?
Yat Siu: I mean, I think it's going to be much more than that. The reason why is because unlike a, you know, the S&P 500 type of thing comes from the construction that these companies have a limited number of listed companies, so to speak. In crypto, you don't have a limited number per se, right? You have essentially, you know, you will have billions of tokens. And so rather it's going to be an index, it will be an index and people will be creating indexes of that type, right? But there's going to be much larger. It won't be like 500, it might be 5,000 or 50,000.
Josh Kriger: So an analogy that comes to mind for me is the spectrum of professional sports. You got basketball, you got baseball, you got soccer, you have all these teams and all these sports. They all have a piece of audience sort of awareness and it's sort of like What are going to be the teams, the sports, the stars of the lineup?
Yat Siu: That is one good analogy. But the other thing also to consider is that when you bring someone into the world of tokens, they are actually someone who starts to, whether they have or haven't before, actually understand money better. And so there is no such thing as a crypto user that doesn't have some level of financial literacy. That's not true for other industries. If you're in gaming, you don't care if your customer is financially literate. It doesn't matter. If you're in sports, I don't care if he's financially literate. But if you're in crypto, you have to be financially literate. So if we, as we here at least, or at least myself, believe we're going to have billions of people in crypto, that means you're going to have billions of people of financial literacy. That means you're going to have billions of liquidity, actually trillions of liquidity, larger than ever before, because people are going to redeploy capital from an investing lens mindset. And think about the leading projects today, like the luxury brands. When you buy a luxury brand, you don't think of it just as, hey, it makes me look good and feel good. I think of it as an investment. Rolex is an investment. Birkenback is an investment. Whether it's real or not, whatever. Diamonds are considered an investment, even though everyone's screaming at the top of their lungs, cartel, scam. People buy, thinking of it from the lens of investing. So everything you do in the future will be thought from that lens of investing. And that's because we already live in a capitalist world in which only a small percentage of people are capitalists, and we're just making more people capitalists because of it.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, thanks as always for all your insights. Appreciate your time today. Hope you have a great experience here. Really excited to see you again. Washington, D.C., October 29th and 30th on Capitol Hill. It's going to be a blast and we can continue the conversation with global leaders, enterprise leaders and whatnot. So thanks as always for your partnership.
Yat Siu: Thank you.
Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Josh Krueger here, co-host of the Edge Hub Show, live at Token 2049 in Singapore. Honored to be here with my special guest today, Alok Sinha, who is the co-founder and chief ecosystem officer of Puzzle Labs VEI. It's great to have you on the show.
Alok K Sinha: Thank you, Josh. Thank you very much. Delighted and equally honored to be here on your show. I know you've done like 450 of them.
Josh Kriger: Oh, you have a background in it too. What was the name of the show that you produced?
Alok K Sinha: So we used to do guts, glory, and story with some of the global speakers. But thank you. 450 is a big number.
Josh Kriger: It has a ring to it. Guts, glory, and story. I like it. So I've had the pleasure to get to know you and your co-founder CJ over the past few days. And I think what you guys are doing is pretty fascinating. Maybe you can kind of... Start with the genesis here of Pazza Labs and sort of your traditional track by experience.
Alok K Sinha: Sure, sure, absolutely. It's funny, I have been a serial CEO. I have written books which were published by Taylor & Francis in New York, London, India. And there was a point in time I was doing 400,000 miles a year. A week in US, a week in Europe, a week in Asia, a week in India. I said, I cannot do this any further. And so that is the time that Sujay and I, and I know Sujay for a long time, that is the time when we decided, why don't we do something which impacts, in general, the world at large? And this looks to be too bombastic, right? But you will hear some of what... And so we were sitting with one of the union ministers in India. He was the union minister for farming and agriculture. And, you know, India had given a big write-off on farmer loans, billions of dollars. And, you know, accidentally I was there. I don't know him as a friend. Accidentally. And he turned around and said, is there something we can do to make the farmers of this country more prosperous? It was not about waiving, you know, loans, but it was making farmers more prosperous. And so we decided that this is you know, a blockchain. So we basically, if you go into the you know, the details of how that happened. Basically, farmers get money from the government. They put in the crops, they sow the crops. By the time the yield comes out, it's six months down, 12 months. And if something goes wrong, that money is wasted. So we decided to create a marketplace which was based on, you know, a blockchain. And that was the genesis. What was that? When was that? This was in 2020.
Josh Kriger: OK, cool. And so fast forward, you know, you guys have a traditional lending business that's done like about a billion dollars a year in originated loans, commercial like or sorry, consumer mortgages. And and then you decide let's just put a real estate bond on chain, essentially, and I believe it's one of the first in history. Where did that idea come from, and what's been the progress so far with that initiative?
Alok K Sinha: So, you know, if you look at this platform, it's very generic. So, my title is Chief Ecosystem Officer, right? And ecosystem means you don't have any control. So this platform can host any ecosystem. So we have three, actually FinTech is the largest, but we do have farms, we do have automotive, and real estate, FinTech, that is the largest. If you look at the U.S. economy, nearly $14 trillion comes out of home mortgages and downstream securitization and bond market. It's the most expensive bond market, right? And Sujay's business is in home loan origination. He's a correspondent banker, does about a billion dollars. And we thought, why don't we put this entire thing on chain? The reason why it comes is, when a loan is originated, it moves at least five hands before it is broken down into bonds.
Josh Kriger: It takes a while.
Alok K Sinha: Yes, five hands, five turns. And every time it moves, the entire due diligence of the loan is repeated.
Josh Kriger: So billions of dollars. As fun as a root canal, pretty much.
Alok K Sinha: Correct. And repeatedly, right? So now what we said was, if you originate on chain, the data and the documents are immutable. Every time you move, you don't need to... Resubmit. Correct. So what takes... close to four to five months to convert a set of loans into bonds, which means you need to do due diligence, you need to do ratings, you need to issue the bond. We can squeeze it in less than a month's time.
Josh Kriger: That's major, major innovation there. And so far, approximately $300 million in business. And what's sort of the scope of what's been done in terms of types of transactions on chain, and what are the possibilities that you're aspiring towards moving forward?
Alok K Sinha: So let me come down to the real world asset tokenization, which is a very exciting piece that we are doing. So we represent a loan. as an NFT which is non-tradable. We represent a pool of loans, a pool of loans as a pool NFT where these loans are locked. And we then We then mint what we call as bond tokens, which is real-world asset bond tokens. We use ERC3643s. These are very safe tokens. They are permissioned tokens on a permissionless platform. And this is the flow. So basically we can create any structure, any capital structure, triple A, triple Bs, bonds, worse, and it's not only bonds alone, it could be bonds and equity in the same capital structure. It is so dynamic. And so what we have done so far, obviously we have done the tokenization of bonds, but we The piece that we are here at Token 2049 is for a Bahraini builder to tokenize his properties. Nearly $300 million worth of properties. What we have over here is just $10 million. It's a pilot property, but some very large properties that we have.
Josh Kriger: I haven't been to Bahrain yet. Is this a commercial and consumer or a mix? It's a mix. Are we talking waterfront properties or in the middle of the city? I'm just curious about the development project.
Alok K Sinha: I may not be allowed to talk about everything, but yes, these are waterfront properties. I love to be in the water.
Josh Kriger: Whenever I have the choice.
Alok K Sinha: One is an 80-story building which is mixed-use, office at the bottom, and then a very big hotel name brand at the top, 80 floors. And there is one which is tied up with the Hollywood living style.
Josh Kriger: So if you want to participate, do you have to be an accredited investor to participate in the project? And what's the minimum investment for this?
Alok K Sinha: So for an $80 million project, you don't want $100. So the minimum we've kept, although there is a little bit of discussion between, I don't want to call it an argument between our team, But for the smaller properties, which is let's say 10 million, we think $10,000. For the larger properties, let's say 80 million, maybe between $50,000 to $100,000.
Josh Kriger: So still, I mean, accessible in a way that was never possible for people that want to get involved in big commercial development. It feels to me like the biggest benefit here is to create a global investor pool of folks that maybe don't want to buy into a REIT or a mutual fund that's jurisdictions outside of wherever they are, where they can sort of stay in a digital currency format and more easily diversify what they do with their digital currency, their BTC, their ETH, their USDC, their Tether, to get a yield. Is that accurate in terms of the benefit, the use case here?
Alok K Sinha: Absolutely. I think today, most of the crypto tokens are not backed by real assets, right? It's on an exchange, you say $50, I accept $50, the price of the crypto is $50, right? And that's how exchanges work. But when you have something behind it, so let's say there is a property which is worth $10 million. Well, now you have pegged the property, affect the crypto to something real. So we've got a lot of these cases. So there is a hedge fund which is investing in CLOs. It's about $300 million. And they want to tokenize the entire SPV and give away the SPV as... Special Purpose Vehicle. Yes. Sorry to tell you that. It's a special purpose vehicle and the holders of that would be equity holders. So there is 300 million behind of real world assets and the holders know how much they are holding. So there is a huge amount of legal due diligence which is needed to be done when you are doing a real world asset tokenization. Sometimes you go to the extent of even getting rating agencies to rate whether this is a triple A class or it's a double B class. Added to that, you're yet getting on a triple A rated bond or a real world asset, you're yet getting about 8%, which is higher than what you would generally get. And on a double B, you can get 15 to 17, high teens.
Josh Kriger: So what strikes me about all this, and it's a fascinating use case for DeFi, is I think there's a natural tension with folks about where to park their money, whether it's in crypto, the big caps, small caps, or whether it's in real estate or a more traditional sort of mutual fund or ETF. Right? And it feels like what you're doing is bringing two giant economical forces of nature together where you can have your cake and you can eat it too. And obviously, I don't want this to come across as salesy, you know, but this is my editorial opinion that this could profoundly reshape global financial perspectives on how to live in a world of crypto and still have exposure to real estate. Is that the aspiration here? Do you see these two worlds coming together because of projects like yours?
Alok K Sinha: 150%, I mean, I'll go, and this is not salesy.
None: 150%.
Alok K Sinha: I'm just excited, and like, you know, yeah, go ahead. So think about how anyone invests. So if you have a pool of money, you would generally invest partly in AAA, partly in bonds, partly in equity, partly in real estate. That's the portfolio. What are we doing? We are giving you an option where all these portfolios are available to you in a tokenized form. So you've got bonds, AAA, available in tokenized form. You've got bonds, BBB, available in tokenized form. You've got real estate available in tokenized form. So now you don't need to buy real estate, but you can invest a real estate in Bahrain, in Middle East. By the way, we've got real estate even in Chicago and Texas.
Josh Kriger: Have you considered letting folks park their BTC get a loan on that, using the BTC as collateral, and then investing that loan in real estate, where you're getting that compounded benefit? Or is that what you're doing now, or something you're thinking about?
Alok K Sinha: So this is an exact use case that this hedge fund has come to us for. Exact use case. So basically, they have a set of investors who've got BDC. They want to stake the BDC, but this is a very smart thing they have done, which is different from what happened when FTX went down and that point in time.
Josh Kriger: Over collateralization, fixing funds, I mean, there are a lot of problems there.
Alok K Sinha: But even if you have... Under collateralization. Yeah, under collateralization. So even if you have, let's say, collateralization at 50%, your LTV is 50%, right? And your smart contract triggers if the LTV falls, it goes above 50% if the smart contract triggers. In a falling market, no one buys. So although you've got a Bitcoin to be sold or any other token to be sold, there's no buyers. And that is the reason why suddenly it comes down to zero. That's what happened.
Josh Kriger: You get a clawback on your loan.
Alok K Sinha: People have the money, have the money. A lot of defaults. So now what they have done is they have used both sides. So basically they are asking people to deposit their BDCs, 50% LTV on that. Let's say it's $100,000.
Josh Kriger: And 50 is more on the conservative side. You're essentially betting that Bitcoin won't go below 50% below its current value.
Alok K Sinha: But the smarter part is they use the same 50% into some kind of an asset. So this is a real world asset token. And if this collateral goes down, this is more liquid. So they sell it, which means at any point in time, no one is losing money.
Josh Kriger: Wow. And then you're sort of hedging. I mean, it's a hedge fund. You're hedging real estate against Bitcoin prices. Correct. And it's balancing the pendulum while making more alpha.
Alok K Sinha: And there's no risk. I mean, neither the deposit, of course, the deposit loses a little bit, but there is no risk.
Josh Kriger: I guess if just worst case scenario, the real estate market crashes and Bitcoin crashes, There's risk. There is risk, correct. But I mean with 50% it's not, you know, there's risk in everything except there's risk in putting your money under the bed.
Alok K Sinha: So the only piece is that if there is a margin call because the Bitcoin has gone down, you can adjust the margin call from the money that has been invested in real estate or any other.
Josh Kriger: So you don't have to, yeah.
Alok K Sinha: They don't have to pull the money out.
Josh Kriger: So obviously you're having some exciting conversations here at Token. For those listeners at home that want to learn more, where do you recommend they go first?
Alok K Sinha: So we are on www.puzzlelabs.io. We have a Telegram group. Join us on Puzzle Labs Telegram group. You can flash that on your screen. Thank you very much. But yes, we'll be excited to have those people on board.
Josh Kriger: All right. Great to meet you, Alok. Thanks, George. Excited to follow you guys on your journey from here. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Edge of Show. This is Josh Krieger, and we are live at Token 2049 in Singapore. It's bustling out there. You may be able to hear the DJ in the halls as well. And I'm really honored to be here with Keith Kim, who's the Chief Operating Officer at Nextbase. Thanks for being on the show.
Keith Kim: Hi, Josh. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, so just to unpack Nextbase, they are sort of behind the MapleStory Universe project, also known as MSU. And since the inception in 2031, you've driven the strategy, the tokenomics, the policy design to bring this to life. So I guess with that said, Other than the fact that Token is one of the biggest events globally, and you kind of have to be here, what makes this event, this region, important to you guys?
Keith Kim: Of course, this is one of the biggest events that's usually happening, starting from Korea, where you have all the conferences, Korean Blockchain Week, Singapore Tokens, but actually Korea and Singapore, these two regions, are one of the biggest fan base of MapleStory.
Josh Kriger: Okay.
Keith Kim: And, you know, I actually graduated school in Singapore. I lived here over 10 years. Oh, cool. I have a lot of Singaporean friends who are like really asking me so much about this project because they have, they grew up playing this MapleStory, you know, since when they're in primary schools. So, I'm very, very happy to be here. A lot of huge MapleStory fan base and community bustling up. A lot of builders building on top of MapleStory universe from this region. So, definitely one of our top priority, you know,
Josh Kriger: So for those that aren't familiar with MapleStory, just give us a little bit of the 411.
Keith Kim: Right, MapleStory 101. It was launched back in 2003 when I was like nine years old. So back then everybody in elementary school, you know, after school what we do was like meet me at Hedesis. That's like one of the iconic towns that exists in MapleStory. MMORPG, where you create your character, you grow your characters, you acquire all the loot, equipments, enhance them, get stronger, defeat monsters, things like that.
Josh Kriger: So how many characters do you personally own? Over 60. And what's your OG favorite character?
Keith Kim: OG favorite character. Um, that's a tricky question.
Josh Kriger: I know, they're all, it's like, people ask me, like, favorite show, and it's like, I mean, it's like 450 shows, they're all family.
Keith Kim: So, right, um, I have spent most of my efforts playing a character called Blaster. So it's a special character that takes a lot of getting used to in terms of mechanics. He's a complex individual. Super complex. And I spent years mastering all the combos and everything.
Josh Kriger: Right on. So you sort of speak about this meta play thesis where fun, frictionless, let's go hand in hand. I've heard about this. Almost everyone that comes on the show in gaming talks about this.
Yat Siu: True.
Josh Kriger: But yet, here we are. Most games haven't accomplished that objective, even though it's right there in front of us. Why do you think that is?
Keith Kim: Actually, coming from Nexon, which has been doing this gaming business for over 30 years now, and MapleStory itself, as I shared with you earlier, is 23 years old. And we do have a lot of Metaplay elements that are already out there running in the web too. But we believe that could be done much better because of the financial layer, blockchain layer, the token layer, the ability to trade what you own. those things that were very, very important and valuable in Web 2 that cannot be traded now can be traded. So, you know, this whole layer makes it much better, much easier for these community to come up with this meta play layer. And let me just give you an instance of what's happening in the Web 2. In Nexon, we publish a game called FC Online that used to be called FIFA Online. And, you know, The core of the game is you play your team, right, and you do a match with someone else, team versus a team, and you control your character, scores are gold, and there's a winner and there's a loser. That's the core aspect of the game. The meta play that exists around this FIFA is people spend much more time on their mobile and web instead of that core game to trade their characters, to enhance their characters, team formations and you know all these meta play there that surrounds the core play and you know once when like we have rolled this out a few years ago and this became a huge part of the entire gaming community. It expanded the audiences as well. I don't have time to sit in front of a PC to play the actual match but you know maybe I can do that during the weekend but during the weekdays when I'm on the subway on the way you know I can just quickly use my mobile to do all the Metaplay layers. So we are bringing this Metaplay layer into a lot of different IPs that Nexon owns. And one of the biggest examples would be MapleStory. We are doing that in Web 2.0, and we are also expanding that in Web 3.0. And in Web 3.0, how does Web 3.0 Elements make it much easier is that we can incentivize the builders to create Metaplays with us. So in Web 2.0, it's mostly we have to build it ourselves. In Web 3.0, we can allow these builders to come and join and expand these IPs for us and along with us. And with these creativities that comes from the community, the quality is very, very nice. We're seeing great products coming up. The speed at which these contents are being expanded is super, super fast as well. So we believe blockchain is really helping us to achieve this meta play layer. to be done much faster in Web 2.
Josh Kriger: Right on. Let's talk about stablecoins for a moment. There is a thesis that stablecoins offer a significant value in gaming. And then there's other folks that say, no, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of gaming and you don't really need stablecoins. What's your take?
Keith Kim: I think it really depends on how those stablecoins are being used and designed in a particular game system. Stablecoin might really help a game to grow and might break some games. So I think it really depends on how exactly the use case is.
Josh Kriger: Are you looking at stablecoins?
Keith Kim: Of course, of course. Starting from the United States, we are seeing the blooming of each government in Asia. They're coming up with, you know, we have to make our own stable coins and boost digital economies. And that's really blooming everywhere. And it's quite evident. I have a very strong thesis that everything will be traded on-chain. It's bound to be that way. And with that trend on, people will start to recognize whatever that they have in the virtual world, in the IP, is also an asset. And I think it's only a good news to open up a market for these asset classes to be traded, viewed as a legitimate asset class, something that wasn't too big without these stable coins and on-chain economies. So I think if you were to open up these already existing huge market of gaming, and make them more legitimate, make them more tradable. That will open up the doors for external investors who didn't really play the game, which means they didn't really have the access to the game assets. Now they do have the access, so that will make the market much larger. And definitely, going forward, this is going to be the game changer for the game industry.
Josh Kriger: Does that sort of shift gears for like builder-first economies that are sort of a big part of your roadmap?
Keith Kim: It will definitely help our roadmap to achieve there. Builders, whenever they create a new product, they create a new games or meta play layer, they want whatever that they're creating is more valuable. So this stable coin economy and growing on-chain economy is only going to create the total addressable market bigger for them as well. So definitely got to be a big impedance for us.
Josh Kriger: And there's this shift, I guess, towards mobile in the industry, right? I mean, I know that's how I play games. I have a couple at a time, just because I get really addicted. I'm sure I would get addicted to your game, so I'll have to think about that decision very carefully. At that same point, How has it been to shift towards having a hybrid? When did you guys get into mobile and where is the traction with mobile relative to traditional PC going?
Keith Kim: When we're talking about Nexon, our headquarter, Nexon has created its first mobile game over a decade ago. Definitely. But when we narrow down and zoom a little bit into MapleStory IP, the first MapleStory mobile game came almost 10 years ago. And actually, in web 2, it's thriving. It's growing very, very rapidly. And like you mentioned, a lot of people are playing mobile games instead of the PC games, because we all don't have that much of a luxury to sit in front of a PC, spend hours there.
Josh Kriger: And our phones are tied.
Keith Kim: We're all Androids at this point. 100%. But, you know, what I want to create is, you know, how I want to, like, reimagine this is instead of creating a separate virtual world on the mobile device, I want to create a seamless, transitionable, back and forth kind of mobile environment that's, you know, whenever you want to play your character, whatever you have in the game, on the PC you can do so. For example, during, on the weekend when you have less things to do, more time to play the game, then you can choose to be online on PC with the same character, same assets. And whenever you're on the go, you take that into the mobile. It's not a separate siloed version of two different versions.
Josh Kriger: So Netflix now lets you play games where you turn your phone into a controller. So I'm curious how that type of technology, what you think about that in terms of presence, roadmap, the future, because it feels to me like less and less people are going to own computers and they're just going to sort of use their more advanced smart TV as an access point to all content.
Keith Kim: Right, but I think we might be addressing quite a different audience here. When we talk about something very light and casual, it should be on the device that is more accessible with less control. You don't need a whole keyboard to play a three-piece puzzle game, right? You just need a touchscreen. It would be a wrong strategic approach to have that playable on PC. When we are talking about more hardcore games that you take a lot of time to master all the mechanics of it, they need to be on PC. Making it expendable and available on More casual devices and more casual manner is definitely one of the approaches. But how do we do that? People don't carry around keyboards with their mobile phones. We extract certain casual elements that's addictive, that exist in a very complex game.
Josh Kriger: Is it a mini game?
Keith Kim: No, it's not exactly a mini game. It's somewhere in between. For example, MapleStory is a complex game. It takes years to master and learn. But one of the core pillars of MapleStory is item enhancement. It has elements of chance. You have to accumulate the resources to do the enhancements by doing a lot of different quests and achievements inside the game. And with these, you can try the enhancements. And, you know, this is the way you get faster. We just extract that element out of the complex MapleStory, make it available on mobile. So, you know, when you have time, you will spend, you know, your time in front of PC to accumulate all the resources that you need. And when you're on the go, you can actually just, you know, play the enhancement part on the go. So, and we can make these little pillars, we extract these little fun pillars out of the complex game, make them available on mobile, you know, The Smithy idea is just one of them. And, you know, I think we will expand this way.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, I appreciate what you're saying. In the game, like, Last War, I'm sort of upgrading and upgrading and upgrading. And they've managed to figure out just the amount of acceptable time between upgrades that I can tolerate. Like, the last one is taking longer than I want. Like, just getting all this gold.
Keith Kim: You have the impetus to pay.
Josh Kriger: And like, I can't play the game while I'm accumulating gold because I'm spending it. And it's just like, man, I should just like, let the gold just accumulate, but you still have to go. It's very interesting how you guys have mastered this. And in terms of sort of lessons learned overall, Can you distill your experience down to some of the key insights that other game developers should take note of that maybe I'm sure you've shared with other folks? What is one or two deep insights that maybe are counterintuitive that you've shared with game developers? Because we all talk about the obvious stuff, like the game fun, freshness. What are some deeper insights?
Keith Kim: A lot of people ask me, how is MapleStory doing so well in Web 2 and Web 3 as an IP? What is the secret ingredient to it? And I have not built MapleStory for that long to really represent the IP and give you guys, this is a secret. But one thing I realized is that There's no secret. But what it takes is people make good decisions and bad decisions all the time. And let's say they're 50-50, making them 49 and 51, 48, 52, and repeating over again for years. That is the secret ingredient. Always choosing the better answer over the worst one and doing that over 5-10 years. Thinking about sustainability, these good decisions stack to each other and make a compounding effect.
Josh Kriger: Is it also about acknowledging the bad decisions transparently with your community? 100%.
Keith Kim: Seeing a longer time frame, so you can lose a little battle, but thinking that you won't lose the whole war, and you're actually doing an arms race, competing with different IPs. the metas and everything, and making sure that you're building your game with a vision in mind that's very, very long, 10 years, a clear statement that, you know, MapleStory IP is gonna be this, right? And fine-tuning your algorithm so you always have a higher probability of making a better decision. I think that's, like, the security ingredients. But, you know, I see a lot of games, you know, I think this, doing a lot of fast iterations, which is a good thing, but we always have to keep in mind that these iterations have to build up, stack up for your 10 years roadmap. Not like, hey, let's try this, doesn't work, eh, let's ditch it. No, that kind of attitude needs to change if you want to build a grand IP.
Josh Kriger: Keith, really appreciate your insights today. If folks want to learn more about MapleStory, where should they go?
Keith Kim: They should definitely check out our Twitter. They can look up MapleStory Universe, and they should also check out my Twitter. I usually don't post a lot, but I usually post the alphas and the leaks. So yeah, look me up, next spacetime on Twitter, and MapleStory Universe on Twitter.
Josh Kriger: Keith, thanks for hanging out today.
Keith Kim: Thank you so much, Josh.
.jpg)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.svg)
