Writer, Editor: VaporAviator (M), Jiahui (F)
Happy New Year Everyone 🏮 Welcome back to the new episode of {PotatoEng} ! In our last episode with Andy, we talked about his personal experience in Web3 and the founding story of Infinity Keys. We learned that web3 “casual game creator tool” is a better description of Infinity Keys’ essence than “a gamified quest platform”.
In this episode, we will dive into how IK integrates with Chainlink, its user profile, competitive landscape, and bear market strategy, and take a look at the future of Web3.
🌟 Project of this Episode: Infinity Keys 🌟
Infinity Keys is a no-code creator tools platform for brands and fans to build engaging metaverse treasure hunt experiences. More details in IK’s thesis
🥔 Potato Guest and Hosts 🥔
Dr. Andy Boyan | Co-founder, Infinity Keys
CoHost | F. Ex-theatermaker; Building Web3 infra
CoHost | M. Experience designer, Strategist in Web3 & immersive tech
# Explanation of some concepts:
# Oracle: The mechanism of writing information outside the blockchain into the blockchain completes the data exchange between the blockchain and the real world. It allows certain smart contracts to respond to uncertain external systems and is the only way for smart contracts to interact with the outside world.
# VRF (Verifiable Random Function): A cryptographic function that takes in a series of inputs, calculates them, and outputs a pseudo-random number and an authenticity certificate as proof that the function is calculated correctly, and anyone can verify it. The application of this function in games, gambling, etc. can avoid the occurrence of cheating behaviors such as human manipulation, and ensure the encryption of the calculation process and the verifiability of the results. Specifically, applying it in lottery games will make the game environment fairer.
# Pseudo-random number: A seemingly random sequence of numbers, but is actually generated by a fully deterministic and repeatable process (given the same inputs).
{ 6 } The application of Oracle in IK
Q: I saw IK is partnering with Chainlink, so how does oracle incorporate into your project?
Answer summary: IK uses Chainlink’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to determine winners and award prizes. At the same time, IK uses Chainlink’s Any API to obtain off-chain data (such as geographic location) to determine the timing of unlocking in the game. Chainlink also has other interesting use cases, such as contracts that automatically execute insurance payouts based on weather conditions, car rental systems that automatically unlock vehicles after payment verification, and more.
We’re a Chainlink user, the first use case is VRF (Verifiable Random Function). We’ve got a group of people who participated in the SmartCon Pack. We used Chainlink VRF to determine who the winners are and give out prizes.
Chainlink has a whole bunch of products, but **one of the coolest ones that’s underused is called Any API or External Adapters, which lets you go to a Web2 API and pull it on the chain, and execute something on-chain based on off-chain data **— that’s essentially what oracles are. For price feeds, you’ve got a bunch of (decentralized) data sources to be robust; for Any API, you don’t need a whole bunch of decentralization. For example, you can use Any API to pull your Steam/Duolingo/etc. data as part of requirements for on-chain achievements.
That’s what I’m really excited about Chainlink — let’s go off-chain and pull things on-chain and validate them and then reward people as part of their ongoing quests. For example, the timing to unlock a puzzle is important. Imagine in fantasy books, what if you need to say a magic word at the right time (like an eclipse), or only if you are at a specific geolocation and then things open — we can let people build mechanisms like that if we can leverage off-chain information. And Chainlink actually provides that in their developer tooling in a really strong way.
I worked for Chainlink for a long time, and we were always looking for cool fun use cases, and this is the most fun. There’re tons of other Chainlink stuff: Proof of Reserve (reliable and timely monitoring of reserve assets), DECO (privacy-preserving oracle), etc. Speaking of real use cases, there’re insurance protocols where insurance contracts can pay out based on what happened in the weather. And a couple of years ago, in a Hackathon, my friend built a rental system where the fulfillment of payment contracts would release access codes to rented cars. Also, you can pull in off-chain data and give people on-chain credits/achievements for being sports fans. The opportunities are limitless, the real question is whether they make business sense.
{ 7 } IK’s target audience, market size, and community
Q: How do you define key participants or creators on your platform, where did they come from, and where potentially they will come from?
Answer summary:Casual gamers. When it comes to games, people often think of hardcore gamers (stand-alone games, FPS (First-person shooter) games, etc.), but in fact, the market for casual games (including board games and even chess) is even bigger. Hardcore gamers are the loudest online and most willing to pay. Casual gamers are quieter. They generally play games not to beat anyone, but simply to have fun or to satisfy their fantastic imagination: for example, they want to see what it would be like to become a dragon. The users targeted by IK are gamers in a broader sense.
The casual games market is as large or larger than AAA games market. When people talk about gamers, they usually think about first-person shooter gamers (e.g. Fortnite) or Twitch stream gamers, and that is far from the majority. Gamers are people who play games, including puzzles, Wordle, board games, even chess, etc. Gamers who come up in crypto are very often likely associated with intensive gaming and that’s fine. But that’s not all games.
So what we do is that we put out something as easy as solving a puzzle. There’s already communities out there (esp. board and tabletop gamers) who love to play and make their own games. And we see people who want to promote their games on our platform as well. So the audience is a little bit more generalized than focused on traditional or hardcore gamers. They will be the people who want casual gaming, something fun to kill the time and make them feel good.
There’s a lot of research on who are the people that game, what are their motivations, etc. And the loudest player type is hardcore gamers who speak online, have demands, and spend a good amount of money. The quieter ones are people who play for fantasy reasons, they’re not playing to beat anyone, they may just want to see what’s like to be a dragon. When I was playing Mario with my spouse, she liked collecting star bits (a common collectible in Super Mario Galaxy) and was having fun. That is a very legitimate gameplay, so when I think about IK, I want my wife to love playing it. I think the audience is underserved and there’s a massive opportunity, not just for business, but for creating engaging content around the Internet, Metaverse, or whatever.
Q: IK helps people manage their hobbies as well. For example, collecting is one of the habits that people think is niche but there’s a community out there.
Collecting is really an interesting game. There are NFT projects that are focused on really serious collectors, yet there are plenty of non-serious collectors, like Pokémon cards collectors. It’s not about the rarity or value of the cards, it’s about that they are cute and cool and it’s also a very legitimate collecting or gaming use case.
Q: Are there any similar projects/potential competitors of IK?
Answer summary:In general, if there is a platform that has the “you do something, and you get something” mechanism, it’s similar to IK. For example, Galxe just did a multiple choice quiz-like campaign for Optimism a while ago. In addition, you can also use POAP to create games, but the main purpose of POAP is to award badges and verify achievements. There is also a project called PREMINT, which focuses on designing promotion tasks for brands and communities. Also, Rabbit Hole has similar features, but they are educational and require user payment. We are more focused on games and creators, IK positioning is a Web3 game infrastructure for building non-specific games, and we can freely integrate with other protocols and tools.
There are a couple of achievement-based projects, which are similar to IK in the idea that you do something and then you get something. Galxe (prev Project Galaxy) is probably the biggest and most well-known. They did one for Optimism where you do a set of tasks (not games but multiple choice quizzes) and then you’re rewarded in NFTs or tokens.
And you can also make a game out of POAP, but it’s not their core mission, their core mission is to define experiences, have memories, and give people badges. I think it would be really valuable to have POAPs in IK as we’re building that composable community. But POAP itself isn’t focused on games. They’re focused on a system that awards badges and authenticates achievements.
There’s also a project called PREMINT that helps brands and communities do promotion tasks. You can make games out of it if you’re an aspiring marketer with ideas about how to do that.
Rabbit Hole is another one, you do a series of quests and then you get rewards. They’re useful but not fun, and usually you need to pay first.
So there are different use cases and we focus on games. The real value of IK is that there are games and you can make these kinds of games. And we’re adding a little more to distinguish ourselves. There are other create-your-own-game platforms like Sandbox, they’re mostly action-based or 3D metaverse-based games, but we’re very focused on casual games. You can make your own games using advanced tools and we can send you out to Voxels or Decentraland and you can play them there and get NFTs. We’re thinking about ourselves as an infrastructure where you can go and build non-specific games, and we’re not competing with any web3 games. It’s a slightly different model.
Q: How much does it cost to build a game on IK?
It depends. We are in Alpha now, so if you want to build your own game that will work, it costs nothing. If you want to do a cultivated campaign that requires us to invest time and assistance, we charge a fee depending on the intensity of the project.
Ideally in the future, I foresee a freemium model where you can come in and build a simple game (with NFT check, off-chain data accessibility, etc.), and if you need game design support or other support that takes development time, those are the places where we can provide additional services.
Q: IK has its own community and the partners also have theirs. Is there any overlap or conflict between these two communities?
I don’t think so. For example, we did a pack for Chainlink’s SmartCon, very often people will come and check IK out and think it’s cool. And then they will do more on our platform to check out other packs. So for us to be in the middle of that is fantastic.
Q: The reason for this question is that maybe some gamers from specific projects are driven by financial incentives instead of gaming experiences.
Answer summary:This is a question we need more comprehensive testing to answer. First of all, we have no financial incentives at the moment; second, if you come to IK to make money, you actually have to do a lot of “homework”. We’ve made each quest as different as possible, with barriers for players who are just speculating. At the same time, this is also a question that every crypto project must think about: how to fill the community with real users instead of speculators. IK’s solution is to reasonably motivate those community members who really contribute to the product iteration.
This is something we need to test out.
Right now we don’t really have financial incentives, only drawings for prizes. Maybe word hasn’t gotten out yet to attract farmers and Sybil attackers. And if you’re here for financial reasons, you actually need to do a lot of work. A bot can’t easily do the passcode check and all that stuff because every project has different setups. We, and a lot of projects building on IK, want to give the participants a little more work to protect against people who are coming to farm and trying to make it easy for airdrops.
But if we do an NFT sale or token drop in the future, how do we protect against people who are just there for token value? And that’s a hard conversation that anybody in crypto should be dealing with: how to make sure the community is authentic and not just speculating? My initial idea is to attach more utilities to the token (e.g. vote for good games, verify and validate, etc.). And I think if you build quality stuff that helps us be a better product, you should get financial incentives. If you come to the farm by building cool content, that’s also great.
{ . } Final thoughts
Q: Any special strategy during the bear market, and how are you planning to do the cold start for IK?
Answer summary:Don’t spend more than you have. IK takes a conservative approach, we don’t spend too much on sponsorships, events, and expensive merchandise. Whenever expenditure is required, we will carefully consider its rationality and conduct an audit. In addition, not only the crypto market, but the entire economic situation is going through cycles. So we are willing to save money and spend time polishing products that users really enjoy, and the dividends will eventually come.
We raised money and we spend little.
We raised an angel round in early 2022 and we planned to do another seed round at some point in 2023. We got grants from Lens, and we welcome partnership and grant opportunities. In terms of spending, we don’t have a giant treasury and we’re trying to be really conservative. We don’t spend much on sponsorships, campaigns, and swags. When there’s an expense (e.g. how much should people get paid, is there any compensation when the market returns, etc.), we need to make sure it’s justified and we do diligence accounting and stuff like that. It’s not like the last two years when it was about getting as much money as you could and paying as much money as you could. We’re not there anymore. The boring answer to the bear market strategy is don’t spend more than you have.
It’s tough because you have to spend on marketing. I got a speaker slot at DevCon and I wasn’t going to because it’s expensive. But it’s good publicity and advisors told me that one’s worth it. So we went to DevCon and we just did a little Bogotá promotional hunt which didn’t cost us anything.
Another thing is that not only crypto but also the macro environment runs on cycles. Everybody sees that it’s ok, let’s take time to do good investments now, and then those will pay off when people have good ideas for adoption. And I think we’ve got a really strong opportunity: we already have early traction and projects coming in, which shows that there’s a demand for this, people want to build puzzles for projects and people want to play casual games. So let’s just take the time, save our pennies, and fill out a product that people enjoy, and then the dividends will come.
Q: What can we expect from IK in the upcoming months?
There will be more hunts coming out. We have new product features like IK Questline that will let you leverage experiences for your profile. We also have special events like paid promotions, partnerships, holiday packs, and things like that. We just opened community-submitted puzzles (in Discord) and started providing templates, so you can expect more community-sourced stuff. We will go to events that make sense and build activations for events that are a little bit different than normal treasure hunts.
Yes, we’re building.
Q: What’s your or IK’s POV on the future of web3 and how does it relate to your or everyone’s daily life?
Answer summary:There are two scientists I admire, Darwin and Brahe. They may not be “scientists” in the true sense of the word, since what they do is mostly record, day in and day out, generating charts and data — but the theory of evolution and Kepler’s models of planetary motion are based on these data. Now that Web3 has accumulated a certain amount of data and has some cool tools, although the “big use case” may not appear, it is a good start. The seeds have been planted, and we’ve paved the way for broader adoption of crypto, by which time people may be comfortable with it without knowing the technical details behind it. I am very bullish on the technology itself as it advances the way humans organize society, whether or not it has a specific name (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, etc.).
One of my scientific heroes is Charles Darwin and another one is Tycho Brahe. Both of them are not really a scientist. Charles Darwin was a naturalist, what he did is just spent years taking notes and collecting data, and he didn’t come to a bunch of conclusions. Tycho Brahe is very similar, he was an observer and he had these crazy detailed charts that he kept for years. It wasn’t until Kepler came along and assisted him that some really interesting mathematical models were made. Similarly, the theory of evolution came out of Darwin’s big data collection. I think in web3, we’ve been experimenting with a lot of stuff and a ton of interesting tools. I don’t know if we’ve seen the big use case, but what we’ve seen so far is a really good start.
And there’s an incredible amount of monetary value in the field to incentivize people to keep building fundamental things like public-private key pairs that are now integrated among millions of people. The seeds are planted. Now it’s easy for people to have wallets, to understand that NFT is a digital asset that’s unique and verifiable, and basic things like that. They’re going to pave the way for the next level of crypto adoption, which people may not know it’s crypto. As people get used to these, it will allow next transition of value, where concepts like composable games and digital trophies will be commonplace.
We’ve got so much data and we’ve got all these really cool tools. Amazing things will just happen. I’m bullish on technology in general because I think it advances how we organize society, whether it has a specific name on the front of it (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, etc.).
Another final thought is that y’all should play my fun little simple games, and if it gets too hard, join the Discord, say hi, and ask for help. Games are meant to be talked about not meant to be played in seclusion.
P.S. The books Andy recommended in Part 1 are: < Ready Player One > (first book and the movie), < An Absolutely Remarkable Thing >, and < The DaVinci Code >.
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