Blockchain games are one of the fastest-growing parts of the blockchain space. Who wouldn’t love an enjoyable activity that could earn you big bucks? Star Atlas is one of the latest “stars” in the burgeoning blockchain gaming space. In this episode, we hear about what makes it different and special, as our hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger talk to Michael Wagner, CEO, and co-founder of Star Atlas. Michael shares his thoughts on the development of the game, his grand vision, and where the project is headed currently. Will Star Atlas be the game that puts AAA games on the blockchain? Tune in and find out!
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Michael Wagner Of Star Atlas, Defining The Next Generation Of Gaming, Plus: AMC Explores Crypto And NFT, Tebow-backed Campus Legends, And More…
This episode features Michael Wagner, the CEO of Star Atlas. It is a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, political domination and more. It is a massive multiplayer metaverse set in the distant future. Michael is a serial entrepreneur with a formal background in capital markets analysis, economics and valuation methods.
He has founded multiple companies centered around the emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, one of which is Star Atlas. Collectively, he possesses ten plus years in capital markets analysis, holds his Chartered Financial Analyst designation, over seven years in blockchain, over 24 years in gaming and over five years in executive leadership. Michael, it’s great to have you on the show. Welcome.
Thanks, guys. That was a fantastic intro. I appreciate it. It’s good to be here.
You’re a fantastic guy. It makes it easy.
I prefer somebody with a little more experience. You’re killing here.
Every year, I’m working on it.
I’m assuming that your many years of experience in gaming is counting like playing Mario Kart and stuff when you’re a kid.
To be perfectly clear, that is all game playing experience.
It's all about aspirational wealth at the end of the day. Click To Tweet
Michael, we’ve done over 60 episodes of this show and this one’s been on the books for a long time and it’s been one I’ve personally been excited about. Eathan and I are part of a group of guys in LA that track what’s going on in NFTs, metaverse and gaming. Star Atlas has been a conversation topic. You’ve definitely caught a lot of people’s attention with what you’re doing and we’re excited to dive deeper.
We might as well start as far at the beginning as we can. How did you get into crypto? How did the idea for Star Atlas come about?
You guys talked a bit about my formal background already so we don’t need to elaborate on that too much. I would say one interesting anecdote to share is that many years of gaming experience and the group of friends that I grew up with in high school, we’re all big computer nerds, big gamers. This was in the ‘90s. Broadband internet wasn’t widely available. We formed a group called the LANarchist. These are Local Area Network parties and we would bring our computers over and play video games all weekend. We’d be drinking Mountain Dew, eating pizza and playing games. That’s how we spent almost every weekend growing up.
You’ve got some Twizzlers in there too, I assume.
All kinds of snacks. Fast forward ten years after high school, one of my buddies who was in that group went on to cofound my first company with me, Tokes. He introduced me to this concept of Bitcoin and mining script clients with GPUs. Given the experience building all of our own computers, it was a pretty natural fit and something that captivated my interest in terms of getting exposure to something that I saw is from a financial analysis perspective as a potential new asset class. Also, from the computer nerd in me wanting to build these computer systems, these rigs and milk crates and start mining cryptocurrency.
That all kicked off in 2013. I dumped a bunch of money into buying GPUs. I had rigs all over my house and was kicking circuit breakers left and right with the power draw then Mt. Gox collapsed. It was not profitable at all in terms of being a business endeavor but it did again captivate my interest in the potential of the technology. I immersed myself in everything crypto, Bitcoin for the next couple of years during the bear market. I made the decision to go full-time crypto in 2015 and launched that first company at the end of 2016.
Through that process, the development of Tokes or Multichain Ventures as it came to be known, I got introduced to two people who went on to cofound Star Atlas with me. That’s Danny Floyd, our Chief Product Officer with an immense background with twenty years plus in AAA game development, as well as Jacob Floyd our Chief Technology Officer. They serve similar roles with the previous company. To mention rounding it all out, Pablo Quiroga who I met through our interaction and intersection with the cannabis industry, joined as the Chief Revenue Officer pre-launch as well.
All of us have this passion for gaming. We saw what was emerging in this nascent space that was blockchain games. We saw the emergence of NFTs primarily as collectibles. In 2019 and 2020, DeFi was hot. It was proving itself as one of the best use cases of cryptocurrency, a blockchain that had been innovated to date. We made the determination that we could create a superior product by bringing the AAA quality mainstream gaming experience and implementing all of the financial incentives that blockchain can bring. That was through asset ownership through NFTs, crypto native tokens, ATLAS and POLIS, decentralized governance and integration of the DeFi protocols and primitives into the gameplay experience. Thus, Star Atlas was born.
What didn’t you want to include? We talked a lot about Web 3.0 and this converging technology. It sounds like you looked at all the different tools and what would make the coolest gameplay and you mushed all that stuff together. What about augmented reality? How does that fit into your vision there?
Star Atlas: We could create a superior product by bringing the AAA quality mainstream gaming experience and implementing all of the financial incentives that blockchain can bring to it.
There are two cool things about AR. First and foremost, when we debuted the company in January of 2021, it was a formal announcement announcing that we had closed some capital with the team behind FTFX. That led to some private token sales but also the development of our initial NFT marketplace. That’s at Play.StarAtlas.com. The first campaign we executed was called ReBirth: Genesis of a Metaverse. We call these Multimedia Meta-posters.
There was a fourteen-poster campaign that was executed over fourteen weeks, where every week we would unveil a new poster that describes some of the background, lore and history of Star Atlas and how we got to where we are in that universe. All of the concept art in the posters was created by our team internally. We enhanced that with augmented reality, working with Shape Immersive out of Vancouver and we also had audio soundscapes produced by some mainstream performers such as Blond:ish, Bassjackers and Deadmau5 on the final poster.
What we were able to create was this truly immersive experience that started to explain to people what Star Atlas would become and give them a sensation of what the metaverse could be through storytelling. That’s through augmented reality where the posters come to life and the sound brings you into the setting. That’s one component but the other part and maybe the more important part is that we are building out in Unreal Engine 5. It’s early access but we have a full production team building an Unreal Engine 5. That’s going to enable an enormous set of augmented reality and virtual reality experiences into the future.
While all of those are important for gameplay, I don’t want to diminish at all what we’re doing on the game development side. When you start thinking about what is going to be possible in the metaverse to the future and even the simple fact that Facebook is rebranding to Meta and how powerful of a statement that is. The centerpiece of their metaverse is around social experience, human interaction with one another.
Our centerpiece is gaming. That’s going to attract an enormous amount of people, not only to our product but also to cryptocurrency. The other components of the metaverse are things like transforming eCommerce. Why shop on Amazon.com if you can purchase your goods with cryptocurrency in the metaverse and have them delivered to your physical residence? Social media will definitely be disrupted and labor markets, productivity and true economies will be formed inside the metaverse.
For things like shopping experiences, AR is going to be a powerful selling tool. You can interact with your shoes. Let’s say you’re shopping in a Nike Store inside Star Atlas, you interact with your shoes in AR. When you hit the buy button, you get those shoes delivered to your house but you also get the commemorative NFT that you can equip on your avatar inside of the metaverse. That was an extended answer but AR and VR are definitely a big component of what we’re building in the future.
Why did you decide to build on Solana? I’m curious, in retrospect, if you have any other thoughts on that decision and how it shaped the future of Star Atlas.
There were many reasons. We analyzed pretty much every one of the upcoming generation 3 Layer-1 protocols. They’re things like Avalanche, Cosmos and Flow. Terra did not make the assessment but Solana was in there. Fundamentally, if I could say one thing, it’s the only Layer-1 protocol that has web scalable tech that we believe is going to be necessary to on-ramp potentially the global population into the metaverse. That’s a super big and bold statement. We see ourselves as first serving the crypto gaming community and into mainstream gaming and this concept of the metaverse where anybody can work, play, innovate, interact and shop. It can truly reach a global audience.
Solana has greater than 50,000 transactions per second. It’s a sub-second finality on stage changes, which equates to low latency. Anyone out there who’s a gamer and has ever experienced lag and gotten headshot because they were lagging out, it’s enormously frustrating. It’s low lag and low cost. It’s less than a penny per transaction and virtually every action or activity that a gamer, player or citizen of the metaverse participates in is going to need to be recorded on-chain. That’s our goal.
We need high transaction throughput and high scalability, which are accomplished through the unique consensus algorithm behind Solana and low costs. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to pay and they wouldn’t play. There were many other things. The simple fact that we were there in Solana talking to them in August of 2020, there were maybe twenty projects building on Solana.
We saw it as an opportunity for us to bring an innovative idea and concept to them that could lead to mass adoption of Solana and in turn, they would support us through things like marketing, press and helping get us that initial exposure that was so critical in growing our community. It was successful. They helped us out tremendously and they’ve also provided an enormous amount of support on things like tech and documentation. Also, helping our engineering team get up to speed with operating across the protocol. That was helpful.
One thing I always do mention and this is partially related to us closing our seed round, I first came across Solana when I heard Sam Bankman-Fried on a podcast talking about Project Serum. His endorsement of Solana and his choice of building our Project Serum, that decentralized exchange protocol that lives on Solana, to me, was motivating. This is a smart guy that’s been successful and if he’s selecting Solana then there’s probably something to that. There was also a little piece of that in there. We also did all of our own due diligence and analysis.
Who knows? Maybe some of our readers who are deciding where to build are listening to you as a smart guy and trying to figure out where their next move is. The trend continues.
All of our friends, the closest guys who have ears in the street and can predict where things are going have been super along with Solana for a long time. It’s all that we heard about. We’re like, “Give us the deets. What’s the story?” They essentially laid out what’s happening now. This was in 2020. It makes a ton of sense. It’s cool to see that it’s all coming to fruition.
When we are NFT.NYC and beyond, we’re seeing a little bit of a groundswell among people who are excited about Solana for various reasons. I talked to some folks who were excited about Solana NTF. We talked to Metaplex, who’s helping to facilitate NFT projects with Solana. It’s not just about, “This works.” There’s this community groundswell around Solana. That’s interesting.
A really funny story about that. In many ways, at Star Atlas, we’ve influenced some of the focus and direction of Solana. I don’t have any hard metrics behind any of this but I always like to give Anatoly and Raj a bit of a hard time because they were the first guys I was talking to about bringing Star Atlas to Solana. They were highly skeptical of blockchain gaming and of NFTs themselves. It took a while. It took a little bit of time to convince them but I know they’re fully supportive of it and they see the potential and they have for some time. That first call was a little bit of a rough one for me. I had to go back to the drawing board and say, “This is still a good idea. We still want to do this. Let me try it again,” and here we are.
One of the things that we saw in a couple of different places was that the Star Atlas universe has a dual token economy. What we see is it does reflect the tangibility and ownership and value of real-world assets. Can you tell our readers what does that means and how should that influence your thinking about Star Atlas?
There are four different asset classes across the Star Atlas universe. The first two are fungible. That is ATLAS, which is the in-game currency. There’s POLIS, which is the governance token. What is empowering and transformative about POLIS itself and the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization are not unique to us. These have been around for a long time, many years at least. Our objective and goals as a company are to build an enormous amount of value in this concept of the metaverse and ultimately have that turned over to the world at large over time.
Effectively creating a public utility that anybody can interact with and participate within and also innovate inside of and create their own opportunities for themselves. In doing so, it’s a synergistic symbiotic relationship. Every time somebody creates value for themselves by creating a unique experience inside Star Atlas, they are creating more value and more reason for other people to enter into the metaverse as well. That’s on the ATLAS POLIS.
Clearly, we also have NFTs, non-fungible assets that represent ownership. We also have fungible materials that exist throughout the game so these are things like minerals ore, food, farming and stuff like that. These all become input materials in the supply chain for people to ultimately create their own NFTs based on a blueprint. All of the ships that we’ve released will have blueprints associated with them. If you collect the requisite materials, you upgrade those and refine those into alloys, metals, plastics and polycarbonates. In doing that, you are able to mint your own NFT reflecting that ship or whatever the asset may be.
In-game assets and this creation of new forms of value and economies are fascinating. I’m curious if you can expound a little part upon the features of the in-game assets, how they create value. One thing I’m particularly interested in is utility versus not necessarily utility. We’ve seen sometimes the most valuable assets are the ones that are to flex or to show off. I don’t know how much of a role that is to Star Atlas. How is value created in these assets?
Maybe I’ll address the second question first. We are exclusively focused on utility-driven NFTs. Maybe not exclusively, we have the poster campaign that we ran. These are collectibles and items that people will be able to share with others inside their habitats in Star Atlas or in galleries or something that is in-game. We do have a wide range of asset pricing. We have ships that start at $20 and we have ships that we anticipate will sell for $5 million to $10 million.
The central space station penthouses of which there are only three that are being marketed at $10 million apiece. It comes with a unique 1 of 1 faction leader, crew card and a 1 of 1 faction leader ship, as well as full access to an arena, a stadium that exists on the central space station as well. It would be all with their own unique branding so there are people that are interested in this branding exposure.
I can think of some previous guests of the show who might want to go after that. What about Cosmos? That seems right up his alley.
If you can make an introduction, I’m happy to have a conversation. The idea is to be inclusive. We want to make sure that everybody can get access to the game because we’re reaching a wide audience, the global population potential user base. There are also individuals or groups of players that want the higher-end assets, the more prestigious, the more exclusive and the rarer are assets.
We’re trying to satisfy all of those demands and still be proportional and fair in the economic and reward structure of any of those. I truly believe that people are going to be seeing the potential of this, the growth potential of themselves and reinvesting back into themselves through earnings. It’s taking part of that income that they’re earning and buying another ship or buying a piece of land or upgrading items and components. Through that process, they’re going to be able to compound wealth. It’s all about aspirational wealth at the end of the day.
Do you have plans for nodes like Gala Games has their nodes that go across games? Is there an idea of interoperability between Star Atlas and outside NFT projects? We talked to the founder of Jadu who has these amazing jetpacks and hoverboards that can fly around the metaverse with different NFTs. What are your thoughts on those two topics riffing on what you shared?
The node infrastructure or network architecture is something that we’ve envisioned from the beginning, though there’s no guarantee that we can execute on that. An enormous amount of R&D would still need to go into figuring out if that would even be possible on this networking layer. I’m a staunch supporter of Bitcoin. None of the innovations across any other cryptocurrency would exist clearly without Bitcoin first but I’m also not a Bitcoin maximalist. I understand that all of the innovation in the space has brought a lot of value and attention back to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, in its truest sense is censorship-resistant and that’s because of how fully decentralized it is, how nodes are operating all over the world and the simple fact that there is no real central entity behind that.
Star Atlas: All of the ships will have blueprints associated with them. If you collect the requisite materials and you upgrade those and refine those into alloys metals, plastics, polycarbonates, you are able to mint your own NFT, reflecting that ship or whatever the asset may be.
In order for us to create a metaverse that is censorship-resistant that anybody can participate in, we have to identify a path to true decentralization. That’s not just across the Solana network but that’s across all forms of Game Logic execution not existing on a centralized server anywhere. We aspire to that. I don’t know if it’s going to be possible. If it is, it’s going to be many years down the line before we get there. I would love to see that.
Taking a step back, we’ve talked a lot about philosophy on this conversation around the metaverse in reshaping the industry. Even though we’ve been immersed in hearing stories from folks like Enjin about how these games are reshaping economies, there’s also this flipside where people are quitting their jobs as nurses in developing countries to play games for a living. It’s totally reshaping some countries. When you take a step back and look at things from a macroeconomic perspective, how do you see this play-to-earn concept reshaping gaming but more broadly, capital markets?
We’re dedicating it to a ton of energy. Maybe quickly on your past question about interoperability. 100% interoperability will be the future of the metaverse. It’s difficult to accomplish in the short term though. There’s a lot of complexity in the creation of these assets and also the visual fidelity across platforms and environments. Something that exists in Sandbox would need to be fully recreated to exist inside Star Atlas and vice versa.
There’s not as much value for any one of the creators to facilitate that in the short term. Interoperability across chains for NFT marketplaces is extremely valuable and that’s probably the first implementation we’ll see. This multi metaverse model in the future where you’re flying in between the Facebook metaverse, Star Atlas, Sandbox, Decentraland and it’s all seamless. That will be the future many years out.
We know a guy that has the right jetpacks or hoverboards for your journey. We tried them out in New York. They’re pretty amazing.
This is an inside joke that I almost hesitated to say because it requires some explaining. Consider integrating with Margaritaverse. At NFT.NYC, Jimmy Buffett has a multi-story restaurant and conference center called Margaritaville which became our media center. We learned that Jimmy Buffett is a huge fan of NFTs. There may be a Margaritaverse in the future.
Or a Margaritaville ship in Star Atlas at some point that serves margaritas when not fighting battles. It’s pretty fun.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the social experience in the metaverse. We could build on a space station or planet somewhere, any restaurant, any bar, any experience. Maybe you guys cast from the metaverse.
I was thinking of that same thing. Thanks for the offer. We’re down. Let’s do it.
We’ll work on that together with you for sure.
That sounds amazing. I jumped around because I have so many questions but we were talking a little bit about the macro capital market perspective on play-to-earn gaming.
It will be completely disruptive to the global economy, which is in a fragile state as it is to be perfectly frank with you all. We saw this firsthand with Yield Guild Games via Axie Infinity in the Philippines. This was a result of the pandemic where a lot of people were unemployed or unemployable. They found an opportunity for themselves to not only work in the metaverse or work in a blockchain game but earn a superior standard of living 3 or 4 times what they’re making working a job in the local economy.
When I say that the metaverse is going to create the largest labor market the world has ever seen, it’s because we eliminate all that friction of geographic borders that exists. You will no longer be confined to working in the region that you live in. You will be able to work in the metaverse in any capacity for any person anywhere in the world. Beyond that, it’s going to be an extremely competitive labor marketplace.
Some people have expressed concerns about if this going to be a fiefdom or slave labor or child labor farms in China. It will be the complete opposite of that because if somebody enters into the metaverse and they look at the job board and they see that they could make 100 ATLAS an hour working for one person but 1,000 hours an hour working for another person, who do you think they’re going to apply with? They’re going to work for the person that is paying a superior wage, at least a fair wage, a competitive wage. There’s going to be a high degree of transparency behind all of this and it’s going to lead to a lot of efficiency and pricing of labor all over the world. It’s going to be incredibly disruptive, particularly in emerging markets and developing worlds.
It’s been an amazing sight so far. Michael, as we think about the next steps on your roadmap, things here that you’ll be launching, what exciting things can we share with our readers? What should they expect to see from Star Atlas?
There is cool stuff coming out. Admittedly, we’re a little bit behind on our initial roadmap, our internal target launch dates to be fair. Fortunately, we have some nice stuff coming out. The first mini-game feature. In case I haven’t clarified yet, we essentially are building two concurrent products. We’re building one in-browser. This allows us to do a couple of things like build-out and test the blockchain logic, the game logic that is living on-chain and deliver that to the community for beta testing, alpha testing, if you will. It also allows us to deliver these game features on a more expedited delivery schedule versus building this full production game in Unreal Engine.
If anyone isn’t aware, typically AAA quality games will take 5 to 7 years, maybe longer to build. This is not anything disparaging on Star Citizen but they’ve been building for greater than a decade and they’re still in an alpha state or beta state. With all that said, we’re building out these two different versions of the game and we have the first feature for the mini-game coming out. We call that SCORE, Ship Commissions On Remote Expeditions.
I’ll share a little link with you guys. The next feature in the pipeline is called MORE. We’ll elaborate on that as we get closer to launch. With SCORE, the idea is that you can take your NFTs that you’ve purchased from us that we’ve been selling since early September 2021 through our Galactic Asset Offering. You can enlist those with the faction and the game that plays functionality will consist of managing a set of resources. You have to manage food, fuel, repair your ship and maintain your ammunition on the ship. As long as you’re maintaining those items then you will continue to earn ATLAS. It’s a time-based mechanism of earning ATLAS.
One quick tangent that I would like to point out and the depth of thought that’s gone into the economy. For us, it’s important that we create this fully formed self-sustaining economy in the long term, which is not purely based on inflation of tokens through an emission schedule and not purely extracted. We want people to be able to create value back but also part of it is that every activity is treated almost like a business and that there are true operating costs to function inside the metaverse.
Flying a ship, you’re going to have to repair it over time. You’re going to have to buy ammo and feed your crew. You’ll have to pay taxes on land that you own and you’ll have to replace mining drills as they wear out over time. Every activity in the game has a cost. What’s novel about our DAO structure is wherein a traditional game, if you were to spend on replacing equipment, it goes to an NPC and gets destroyed. That’s one of the only deflationary mechanisms that exist in traditional games.
In Star Atlas, all of that is captured by the DAO so it flows into the Star Atlas DAO and DAO stakeholders and governors get to decide what they want to do with that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be distributed out to them. It could be used to pay some third-party development team or us to create a specific feature that gets integrated into Star Atlas. They can be burned. They can be used to create a campaign that would attract more users, incentivize more users to join the metaverse.
While that last point might be counterintuitive, ultimately, what we’re trying to accomplish here is to build the largest GDP that we possibly can. The largest economic value, transacted value across the metaverse, which means that more value would ultimately flow into the DAO. If you’re a long-term governor in the DAO and you think long-term time horizon then you want to see exponential growth in the user base because it’s more economic value.
Here’s my pitch to whoever is running this DAO, maybe you know who they are but Edge of NFT broadcast within Star Atlas and if people want to contribute to us instead of paying their taxes, it goes back into the production of content supporting Star Atlas. They can ever nonprofit tax-deductible donation to Edge of NFT to support the NFT community and Star Atlas. It’s a win-win.
That is an amazing proposal that you will be able to submit with the launch of our governance platform. Getting back to your question of what are the exciting things coming up, SCORE is the first thing. The next big thing that we’re focused on and building also concurrently is the release of the DAO. It’s staking up POLIS. You can earn emissions of POLIS. You can participate in proposals and you vote across the ecosystem as well. Based on the results of those votes, as a development team, we would implement any changes imposed by the DAO.
If you guys want to go on to the platform, when that comes out, which should be before the end of 2021 and submit that proposal, if the community votes yes then we’ll do it. That’s where the proceeds will go because that’s what’s been written in code. It’s totally possible. A little bit more forward-looking, as I started building out this product in Unreal Engine, the first module is set to be released sometime in Q1 of 2022, possibly towards the end of Q1. We call it a showroom. It’s a glorified car dealership that is set in an absolutely beautiful setting but the purpose is to give people a sense of the scale of the assets that they’re buying. I’ve seen some of the demos already.
If you look at something like the Pearce X4 which is the smallest ship compared to one of the Titan class ships or even look at a commandership, which is already on a massive scale. It’s a couple of hundred meters long and looks at a Titan ship that is seven kilometers long. You get to see what that looks like in the game plan. It is absolutely mind-blowing where a turret on the Titan is as big as a commandership, which is already this massively powerful asset in the game. The idea is to allow people to walk around, interact with one another, configure ships, purchase items in the game and send those out on ship missions as well. It will be the first release of this cinematic quality gameplay that we aspire to.
What are the functionalities of these ships that can be programmed in? Can you have a casino ship? Can you have an arcade ship? I know that we’re supposed to move on to the next segment. I’m so curious, what’s the flexibility there?
Star Atlas: There’s going to be a high degree of transparency behind all of this, and it’s going to lead to a lot of efficiency and pricing of labor all over the world.
I don’t want to reveal too much but we’ve spoken to a fully licensed digital casino operator and one of the concepts is how do they get integrated into the metaverse and create these experiences for players. You’re on track there. There are also things like concert halls and conference rooms. One of the cool things is if you own one of these larger ships and it has a concert hall in it, which is modular by the way, you can decide if you want that module in there or select from a list of modules that you want to retrofit your asset with.
Let’s say you want a concert hall and you go out and engage with some performer. Pick your favorite. You create them into a campaign or program with them of, “You’re going to be able to come on my ship and perform an act. We’re going to charge a ticketing fee at the door.” That ticketing fee might be you guys selling your own NFT that is proof of access or evidence of economic value. If they buy your NFT, that’s the ticket that gets them into the concert that you are producing with some performer. We don’t have a say in it.
Let’s replace some performers with Jimmy Buffett at this point. That would be fair.
Jimmy Buffett says he is an NFT fan. You can even have the Margaritaville or Margaritaverse canteen right next door where people stop and drink their digital beverage and hang out with their friends in VR and then go to the concert. These things are all possible theoretically going into the future. We’re not there yet. I want to be perfectly clear but this is part of what we’re building.
When I drink my digital beverage, will my screen start to get blurry and a little bit out of whack?
That’s exactly the idea. There was a funny bug that came out in Star Citizen. We’re fans of Star Citizen, to be clear. It had something to do with being able to heal other players. It was the stim kit, it was a needle. What people discovered was that you could overuse this thing on somebody else and it completely immobilized them. They would pass out on the floor and there’s nothing they could do and they were getting robbed. The idea was that you could heal your friends but people discovered that you could keep using it.
That’s like having one too many pot brownies.
People were getting stuck in these. They’d be spawning in and someone would be hitting them with the stim and they would knock them out. They couldn’t escape this loop. That’s been patched but it’s a similar concept. If you’re drinking a margarita in the metaverse, maybe over time your screen gets a little bit blurry.
That’s got to be a little more fun.
It’s all coming. We’ll admit it. We’re excited about Star Atlas and everything that’s forthcoming here. We want to ask you a few questions and get your personal perspective on a few things. It’s a segment that we call Edge Quick Hitters. It’s ten questions. We’re looking for short, single-word or few-word answers but we can always expand a little bit if we get the urge. Are you ready to dive in?
I’m terrible at these but I’ll give it my best.
We’ll find out soon. Question number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
That’s a tough one. I’ve told the story sometimes and I’ll try to keep this quick. I’ve always been entrepreneurial and one of my earliest experiences of being a business operator, if you will, was buying candy from Costco. This is with my mom. I’m taking it to the elementary school campus and selling it to students next to the snack bar. That candy got confiscated by the principal. They were not too happy with the fact that I was selling a product next to the snack bar. It was probably that because I was pretty young at that time.
There was a guest on the show that was buying them with their grandpa and selling them to their sister at triple the price.
We got to start keeping a spreadsheet about what kind of profit margins our guests had on their candy when they were kids because this is becoming a pattern. I’m also curious if that principal started to sell the candy to the other teachers after they confiscated it because that could have been part of the story.
I did not get it back so I don’t know what happened.
Question two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life? I’m presuming it’s the candy.
I think that would answer that, yeah.
Question three, what’s the most recent thing you purchased?
Experiences. Honestly, it’s going out and doing things. I haven’t purchased any material things in a while. I told you that I’m terrible at these. It would probably be a night out with friends if that counts.
What do you enjoy doing with your friends?
Bars tend to be the thing out here in Vegas. I’m looking forward to getting down to Miami. I had some good times out there. I won’t necessarily elaborate on those. It’s some good outdoor activities out there like boating and stuff that’s a lot of fun.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
That would be NFTs that were listed on Play.StarAltas.com. Four new ships came online. Check them out.
Question five, what is your most prized possession?
My integrity.
Question six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be?
Can we buy infinite perpetual life? I’m not sure.
You could try.
At some point, you’re going to be able to plug yourself in.
Our friend, Doug, sent us some sort of project around the fountain of youth that has been proven around blood transfusions. I’ll get you the paper on it. You can tell me what you think.
Is this like Silicon Valley’s Blood Boy?
No. Let’s give these guys a shoutout. bioRxiv, the preprint server for biology reversing age.
Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?
Star Atlas: It’s very important that we create this fully functional self-sustaining economy in the long term, which is not purely based on inflation of tokens through an emission schedule and not purely extracted.
I don’t know if my ex would agree. Empathy, having compassion for other people and caring for other people. What we’re building truly should be empowering. Star Atlas is a passion project for all of us. None of us are in this for the short term. Profit-seeking everybody wants to be successful financially as well but we truly believe in the product that we’re building and the transformative potential behind it. I would say that it’s empathy for other people.
Question eight, the flip side, if you can eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
Ego is one of the most difficult things to rein in. I don’t see myself as egotistical but to the extent that we can eliminate that mental barrier that everybody has. Everybody possesses an ego. If we could find a path to eliminating that in human interaction, the world would be a better place.
Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was driving down from Northern Nevada. I’m in Vegas and had to visit some family up there who had some health issues. It’s a quick drive.
Question ten, last one, what are you going to do next after the podcast?
I’m probably going to hop immediately onto another phone call. It doesn’t look like it but I’m quite behind right now.
I appreciate you carving this time out and sharing those Quick Hitters with us. We have a couple of Hot Topics that we wanted to hit.
Let’s talk about this. The first one, AMC Explores Launching Its Own Cryptocurrency, NFTs for Major Movies. “The company started accepting cryptocurrency for AMC gift cards and is setting up to take online payments on its website and mobile app. CEO Adam Aron said Monday on a call with investors after reporting third-quarter results and the shares have risen more than 2,000% this year. It’s one of the hot meme stocks beloved by retail investors, even as the company has struggled to afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Executives also said on a Monday call that they’re talking with Hollywood Studios about creating commemorative non-fungible tokens, NFTs related to major films.”
We’ve been plugged in with Hollywood entertainment and there’s certainly a lot of folks that are moving fast on that. Good for AMC. It’s like when you root for the underdog thing. If everything comes back around for AMC and can embrace all this going on with the fun and support around it and integrating cryptocurrencies and NFTs. That would be beautiful, to be honest.
Entertainment properties, IP movies are some of the favorite things that people consume and their pastime and have their entire lives. They hold it near and dear to their heart. There is so much cool stuff that can happen there. Michael, what do you think?
Are you a moviegoer? Do you go to the theaters? Josh and I saw Bond and that was the first time I went to a movie theater in many years.
Historically, yes but certainly not since the pandemic hit. I watch Dune on HBO now. I’m perfectly comfortable in my own home, I can make my own bag of popcorn. I like my sound system and TV. I don’t know that I would be a moviegoer again. I applaud AMC for this innovation that they’re bringing to their brand, to their company. It’s somewhat emerging because of meme stock. This all started exploding with Wall Street bets on Reddit.
GameStop was the first. AMC was the second the due diligence continues onward but it’s great to see the innovation. People collected their first movie ticket when they went out on a date with someone. You keep your original movie tickets. The next stage is now you get a digital NFT representing that event that maybe you can even capture some additional metadata that you can’t capture with the physical goods so it’s cool.
I’ve got two predictions. One, AMC and GameStop collaborate on some NFT drop merch deals. It’s going to happen. Number two, AMC buys a movie theater ship within Star Atlas and starts showing movies in the metaverse as ticket events. If they’re thinking along these lines, they got to talk to Michael and his team. Michael, whoever’s doing be biz dev for you has to reach out to these guys.
You’ve got another call to make after that call after this one.
I like it.
Since you’ve done so much with capital market analysis, quick thoughts on these meme stocks and the role that’s played in our culture and economics. What’s been your opinion on it? Have you watched it closely? Have you kept your hands off?
I have not. I’ve been pretty buried in the head in the sand with Star Atlas for a few years. My own personal crypto holdings, which are far more promising than anything traditional equity markets are stocks and like. That’s gone completely neglected for way too long. My high-level superficial take on it is that I’ve read some of the research that has been published by the community about the short squeeze. That seems to be relatively legitimate.
The issues that are being brought up as a result of this the way that legacy financial services businesses and the industry itself operates appears to be quite corrupt and quite against retail. Retail, for the first time ever is getting an opportunity to say, “We’re the powerhouse in the room because there’s strength in numbers.” That’s about all I can share with you at the moment. I don’t have too much more than that. It touches on so many more issues outside of capital markets. It’s about society as a whole. We’re in this interesting place right now where it’s the uprising of the proletariat.
I love the increased engagement from all levels. Let’s hit the next hot topic. Tebow-backed company brings NFTs to the college football world. “Tim Tebow-backed company Campus Legend is launching their first-ever officially licensed athlete and school NFT marketplace this week with a special drop featuring players from the iconic 2008 University of Florida National Championship team.”
We’ve talked a bit about the potential of having NFT sports but then also college sports and even creating ways for kids that are even younger in sports to start minting some things on-chain that maybe can affect the rest of their career that’s come up here. What do you think, Michael? Are you a sports fan or more heads down into gaming?
I don’t watch sports much. I do like Formula 1. That’s about the only sports activities I do engage in but I have no familiarity with what Tim Tebow is doing. In one sense, it’s great to see innovation and new ideas being shared with the world. This is how people are going to get introduced to NFTs which will probably lead them down the rabbit hole of exploring blockchain, cryptocurrencies and all of the other opportunities that exist. The other side is a little bit skeptical maybe of some of the gimmicky feeling launches that are going on out there. I don’t know if this is that at all but it’s prudent to exercise caution with a lot of the collectible-based NFTs that are coming out.
College football has some of the strongest stickiness there is between fans, their alma mater, the athletes that they saw play when they were in these prime years of their life but a collectible for collectible only goes so far. For the super fans, I’d like to see some utility on this project. I haven’t delved into it too far yet but moments are great. I wonder if there can be some utility in the mix as well.
For collectible stuff and being a longtime like baseball card collector, football card collector, I’m less concerned about additional utility on these things and more interested in the rarity, the quality of what they’re putting forward. Is it NBA Top Shot type-level quality or not? Is it going to be diluted over time by flooding the market? All these things would be of interest to me. Generally speaking, I like the idea of digital memorabilia. It’s what it comes down to. There’s so much passion for the University of Florida, for example and so many teams.
There is much stickiness around fans of college sports. It’s fun, another way to serve that passion that many people have and also reaching back into the nostalgic aspect of fandom, which in this iteration of NFTs so far, we haven’t done much of when we talked about that frequently. We haven’t tapped into that as much yet so I dig it. We’ll see if it’s a success but I definitely applaud them for giving it a crack but I like the overall concept. I think it’s cool.
Michael, what was the name of your group when you were a kid?
The LANarchists.
Are you familiar with the pizzaDAO? I need to connect you with the pizzaDAO, whose mission is free pizza for everyone because you mentioned pizza and Mountain Dew with the LANarchist. I want some collectible LANarchists NFTs. They’re going to be worth something. Each one comes with a free pizza and maybe you can do a partnership with Mountain Dew.
We’re full of ideas, Michael. We’re sleep-deprived. We had 35 interviews. I got up at 3:00 AM so you’re getting the best and worst of us.
You guys are definitely full of ideas. I’m not sure I’m ready to take on another project but probably let’s have a follow-up with that.
Star Atlas: The way that legacy financial services businesses and the industry itself operates appears to be quite corrupt and quite against retail, and retail for the first time ever is getting an opportunity to say, “We’re actually the powerhouse in the room because of strength in numbers.”
There’s so much cool stuff happening again. We’re excited about what’s next for Star Atlas. There are many people who are pumped about it and we can definitely see why. Where should folks go to follow you in the project?
First and foremost, if you haven’t been on our website, go to StarAtlas.com because it’s a cool, innovative, immersive website. The idea is we want to bring you into the metaverse at first interaction. Go there to check out our legacy white paper that we published in December of 2020 and also our game economics and tokenomics white paper published in August of 2021. In terms of community, we have a rapidly growing community on Discord so Discord.gg/staratlas. It’s greater than 90,000 people right now.
Guilds, communities and collectives have been forming. Come in there, ask your questions, get to know people and find some other gamers that you want to play with. You can find us on Telegram. Twitter is approaching more than 200,000 people so a lot of updates, content drops, sneak peeks that all come out on Twitter. Personally, it’s probably easiest to find me on Twitter as well. I hope to see you guys in the metaverse. I enjoyed the conversation. This is a lot of fun.
We’ll have a little giveaway as well to announce so keep an eye out on our socials. We’ll get the details together on that and share with you it’d be something fun. We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. Go to iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.
Remember, we always invite you to co-create and build with us at Edge of NFT. We are unlocking a whole new way to connect and collaborate with us through our own NFT drop, Living Tree NFTs. Through this project, we’ll be planting tens of thousands of real trees. This collection is not only beautiful generative art but will also be the foundation of everything we do with Edge of NFT and our community for years to come.
On top of that, Living Tree holders like you will co-create and participate in our podcast and access exclusive events and killer contests. It’ll be the front line for other NFT drops as well as a long, bright future of branching opportunities to come. Get on the whitelist by dropping us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet at us @EdgeOfNFT and we’ll share with you the steps required to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks for sharing this time with us.
Important Links:
- Multichain Ventures
- Play.StarAtlas.com
- ReBirth: Genesis of a Metaverse
- Shape Immersive
- Bassjackers
- Deadmau5
- Amazon.com
- Solana
- Avalanche
- Cosmos
- Flow
- Terra
- Project Serum
- Metaplex
- Gala Games
- Enjin
- Sandbox
- Decentraland
- Yield Guild Games
- Axie Infinity
- Star Citizen
- Play.StarAltas.com
- bioRxiv
- AMC Explores Launching Its Own Cryptocurrency, NFTs for Major Movies
- Tebow-backed company brings NFTs to the college football world
- pizzaDAO
- StarAtlas.com
- Discord.gg/staratlas
- Telegram – Star Atlas
- Twitter – Star Atlas
- Twitter – Michael Wagner
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com
- @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
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