Paul Thomas, co-founder of Somnia Blockchain. Welcome. Hey there, great to be here. I am excited for this conversation. I have heard quite a bit about Somnia and especially around, most recently with the Kaido leaderboard, there's a lot of yapping going on. And so I wanted to get the lowdown from the co-founder himself about Somnia blockchain and exactly what it is, why people should be excited about it. But we'd love to learn about you first. Tell us how you got into crypto and then What made you decide to build a layer one? Yeah, I didn't want to build a layer one. Just want to put that out there before I begin. So career wise, I'm a computer scientist. I did three years at Goldman, which for my sins, I went into finance. I do like finance, but I did that for money, I'll be honest with you. So about 13 years ago, I joined a very early stage startup called Improbable. We had this vision to build this incredibly complicated video game is the way put it. I always wanted to work in the games industry ever since I was a kid. And I finally got my opportunity to do so. I kind of took that with two hands. Um, improbable grew from when we were four of us to at the end, I think I left when we were 1200 people, we raised some ridiculous amount, six, $700 million at a multi-billion dollar valuation. So it was like a big business by the end. So we primarily sold technology and services to the games industry. And then 2019, 2020, we moved into the metaverse industry. It wasn't called metaverse yet. We just called it digital events and digital entertainment for music and sport. Um, So my journey that I did pretty much all of the jobs ranging from engineer, support guy, sales guy, product manager, marketing guy, around the commercial teams, I did all of the jobs. Web3 wise, I got into Web3 properly in 1617 when Ethereum came about. So I never really got Bitcoin. I kind of saw it and I was like, interesting, this decentralized ledger kind of cool tech, but I just didn't understand it because... I didn't understand Veblen goods, like the fact this thing goes up in price, it becomes more valuable. I just didn't quite get what it was. I now understand it and I actually own a lot of Bitcoin now, but it took me a long time to really get Bitcoin. But when Ethereum came about, I got it straight away. This kind of like decentralized global compute platform, which anyone can access with a ledger associated with it. You can have ownership. I was like, this is really cool. I think this is going to change the world fundamentally. So I got really into Ethereum and I pitched very hard internally to start moving all of the games. that we were kind of working with throughout the games industry onto blockchain. that, I was like, this is going to be the future of digital assets. Everything's going to be on chain. This is going to be the future. Everyone thought I was crazy. I pitched it very, very hard. Eventually got like a mini research team and it didn't work out. Unfortunately, Ethereum was way too early back in 16, 17. We were looking at doing very large scale sets of transactions. It didn't work out basically as a, as a kind of product. So I was like, okay, nice idea. Let's put that on the shelf. So 2020. I get another go at this. So now we started to go into the metaverse industry and we're working with kind of like big brands like Major League Baseball, Universal Music, and they're all having their own kind of mini separated experiences. And I'm like, okay, we need a way for these to be interoperable because we want consumers to buy digital assets and one of them be able to move across all of them basically. And so I was like, we need to open trusted decentralized ledger blockchain is the solution there. So I started kind of got a research team. to start looking at what was in the market at that point in time. And I basically couldn't find, we couldn't find anything that's fast enough. The problem we had was we had this tech that could get tens of thousands of people into the same space at the same time. Everyone could see each other, everyone could talk to each other. And we wanted them all to transact and interact on chain simultaneously. That just didn't work. Blockchains would blow up at that point in time if you tried to do that. So that's when we started kind of first party research into a high performance blockchain. And that's what Somnip became. So yeah, that's my Web3 journey. Kind of, I went into Web3 because I had to. I was very passionate about it and cared about it a lot, but I kind of felt like I have to solve this problem for the problem we had. And now we've kind of realized it's actually a bigger problem we can help solve a lot of other things well. Well, I think those are some of the best, really best products come from like solving your own problems. And it sounds like that, you you had arrived, had something that you wanted, a product that you wanted to build, but the current infrastructure just wasn't available or ready. And so you decided you're going to just build it then, which is quite ambitious, you know, building a layer one. I've been part of, you know, multiple layer one projects and it's always a hard thing. I mean, Tell us about Somnia. First of all, tell us about the name, because it's a unique name and would love to hear the origin story. And then I want to get into your pin tweet, which I think is a good transition to Somnia blockchain and why you decided to build a layer one. So let's start with the name first and then I'll read the tweet and then we'll get into it. Yeah, cool. So the name is such a geeky story. So back at Improbable, where I used to work, we had a lot of different technologies that we named after kind of the Greek gods. So one of them was called Morpheus, one of them was called Phoebus, and these are all the gods of sleep, basically, and the children of the gods of sleep, which were the Somnium. So we just called it Somnia. So it's basically, but also kind of alludes to the concept of dreams. So people think about Somnia, they think about dreams. And the whole point is the technology is enabling these kind of dream spaces that people can be a part of. That's why kind of the positioning at the moment is the dream computer, because it's supposed to enable dream and dreamlike experiences basically. So that's where the name comes from, Spear Keykeeper. kind of love it. I love that. every project needs an origin story and the name makes a massive difference. And now that you have this name, you can think of so many brand extensions from it. You can name your products that are kind of related to it and features and offerings. mean, you could just do, you can even name your community things like from the phrase. So. The alchemy to call the somniacs. Yeah. There we go. No, that's perfect. I love it. Somniacs. OK, let me get into the tweet. You wrote this April 11, 2024. And then we'd love to hear from you on why you decided to build the layer one and how you went about it. And so the intro is, this blog sets out why we need another blockchain in this space. We didn't want to build this, but we had to solve blockchain's performance for metaverse and gaming. This is the foundation for open, interoperable, and composable digital experiences. And so you kind of set out your reasoning and also the rationale. And then you go into this blog post. Maybe you could summarize for us what you say in the blog post and then maybe take us to, you you wrote this about a year ago. And then, you know, a year later, like where are we? Yeah, so essentially we built the blockchain to solve the problem I was talking about. It's quite interesting when we started developing it, we wanted it to be a layer two. But the problem is when you think about applications which have what we call burst requirements, so hundreds of thousands, millions of people all interacting with chain on chain at the same time, but this happens in games, this happens in metaverses, this happens in real time experiences. you need a lot of throughput and a very high performance. So you're talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, basically, if you're looking at a global scale application. And so that's why we really started to think, how do you solve this problem? The other part that we felt very, very kind of important was that had to be on top of the EVM. The reason for this is I've taken projects to market before where I've tried to sell in new development paradigms to developers. And it was so hard and so expensive. I did this in the games industry and I was like, we're not doing that again. We're going to where the developers are. So it had to be on top of the EVM as well. That was like a requirement for us. And so the reason why we had to build a layer one is because to get to the level of throughput, we need to support these mass scale real time applications requires a really, really high throughput blockchain, which we couldn't work out how to make it a layer two. So that's the reason for layer one. There's also elements like finality, sufficient decentralization, those kind of elements were also important to us, but really it was the performance characteristics that are needed for these mass scale real-time applications. That's why we had to build a new layer one. Didn't want to do that though, would have much rather someone else, but I'll be honest with you. Well, tell us the, I guess, how do you get to, well, tell us a little about Somnia then. I mean, it's quite unique in that it, so it's capable of a million transactions per second. So I'm sure the audience is thinking how, like technically, how is it able to do that? And because with that many transactions per second or that much throughput, it's clear that that can definitely serve games as well as, know, kind of metaverse type applications or real time applications. And so maybe we can talk about the technical aspects and how, you know, how you get to a million transactions per second. Yeah, sure. So the chain is a complete rewrite. There are no modifications or forks of anything that exists in the whole web-free sphere today. And we had to do that to reach those performance characteristics. Many times in the chain's development, we had components that we were using off the shelf or forks of other things, but it just didn't work when we're trying to hit the scale we're trying to hit. So we have a new execution environment. So we take in EVM bytecode, and we compile that down in real time to machine code. that allows us to take advantage of CPU architectures. So goes super fast. We have a whole new database written from scratch called IceDB that is optimized for blockchain data structures. It can do really fast read and writes 15 to 100 nanoseconds for context. Normally databases are measured in microseconds and nanoseconds is really fast. And it also has what we call predictable performance. You can understand across all of the validator nodes in the network, whether this read or write of the blockchain. hit disk or hit the database, hit memory. And then you can cost that out exactly in terms of gas, which means you can put more gas into a block, which means higher throughput, essentially. The third bit is the consensus algorithm. So we have a new consensus model called multi-stream consensus, which is quite hard to explain in a core when you have a diagram ready. But essentially what we do is allow each validator on the network to run its own mini blockchain, which we call a data chain. And then there's a global consensus chain running across all of that that kind of brings the consensus. And that's running at 100 millisecond block times very, very quick. And that gives you those real time kind of characteristics and that global consensus gets reached very quickly. The other part, the part of the way that works is basically continually streaming the data from all the mini blockchains to all the other mini blockchains and no one is creating collisions. And because of that, you're creating a lot of data. You're literally creating like, if you weren't compressing it, tens of gigabits a second. And so we have then... a really novel networking algorithm that compresses that data down super small. So you can send that data between all the nodes in network really effectively. So it takes advantage of learning to be after the game industry, which basically takes the data and compresses it down. There's a load of different techniques it does there, but a couple of things. One, it takes advantage of what's known as the power distribution of transactions. So if you look at Ethereum transactions, it takes a power law where the top 2 % of accounts are called 95 % of the time. And the top 2 of smart contracts are called 99 % of time, think. So you can take that knowledge and compress down the data associated with them really, really efficiently. There's a load of other stuff. We also use BLS signature batching, which basically allows us to batch together signatures, send them over the wire as batches, which again gives better compression ratios. There's a load of things I could talk about. Networking. think that networking is probably the biggest special source out of everything. Because when you're getting to this massive high throughput, you're just having to send so much data between all the validators. You need to compress that down to run across the public internet to actually have a decentralized network. So yeah, TLDR, it's a complete rewrite of a blockchain. Nothing is off the shelf because we had to do that from a performance perspective basically to hit the levels we wanted to get to. And that makes sense. mean, it's doing a full rewrite like you have done. I think it enables so many more applications than, and increases the capability, of course. Tell us about the EVM aspect of it. You said it's EVM compatible, and so an application on Ethereum layer one can easily change their chain ID and then deploy on Somnia. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. So when we mean fully EVM compatible, we mean fully EVM compatible. So a lot of other teams say this, and then you have to make some modifications or you have to take advantage of different scaling structures like parallel scaling structures, or you have to change the way your front end processes the data because they have different kind of ways of streaming data from their blockchain out. Ours is completely the same. You literally can change the RPC endpoint, redeploy. This means you're already seeing this today, I think. QuickSwap actually, maybe got announced today, where QuickSwap is kind of moving over to Somnia and they can do that because it's so easy for them to port. And that was the, that's, think, very important for us because I think developer kind of ergonomics and making their life easier is one of the most important things for us and making sure that they can use all of the tools, all of the libraries and all the infrastructure that is all around the EVM already was very, very important. So yeah, it's complete. Literally, you can just change the RPC endpoint and it'll work. Obviously, if people know more, there are other services you need to rely on, but you can plug those in as well. Yeah. So gaming seems to be one of the first use cases that SOMNIA is focused on. Tell us how that's going. And I believe Game Developer Conference ended last week. I've been to, I think I've attended either two or three Game Developer Conference over like the last 10 years or so. And the last two that I, so the last one I attended a few years ago, there was a heavy Web3 presence and focus. And at the time, a lot of Web2 game developers were just very suspicious of crypto and blockchain, and a lot of them just did not like NFTs. And so I try to spend a lot of times just talking with Web2 game developers, are the issues that you have with NFTs? And so I'm curious to hear from you. Has that attitude changed? And why the focus on games right now? Yeah, so I think honest answer, the attitude is still there. I have a lot of friends who come from the games industry and are building indie studios. And they literally, when we go to the pub, they're like, why are you working in this crypto scam world? And I have to convince them basically. And so I think it's got better and it gets better every year as more mature applications and more teams come into the space. People are softening to it every year, but they're still, I think in general, the games industry is kind of like... this industry which doesn't like new stuff in the beginning, it kind of fights against it a bit. And then it starts to realize, oh wait, I can do all these cool new things. So the way I normally convince people, there's a few different ways. So one, I talk about the industry basically as step changes in terms of adoption. They tend to come from genres. So major genres come out, all of a sudden loads of new players come in. Platforms, so a new PC, a new console generation comes out, mobile comes out, loads of new players come in. Or business models. And the business model one is the one I really pitch to people. And I start to get them thinking about because you have these mechanisms that are fully in this decentralized ledger that people can buy and trade value between each other. You can create new systems, new structures in terms of business models that you probably couldn't do before. So I don't think anyone's quite cracked this yet, but I think UGC is a massive one where you have much open, interoperable UGC platforms. think also Pay and Earn, which Axie was kind of doing a little bit. think there is something there, which that definitely is like a new business model there, which I think would really kick off the space. kind of put that down to them. They kind of go, that's interesting. I haven't thought about that. I'm interested to actually try and start thinking about that. The other one has been a tooling gap. So I think a lot of them, like three, four years ago, it's just very hard to build a web three game. You had to do everything from scratch pretty much. You had to code all the smart contracts, work out a plug in your game engine to those smart contracts, everything you had to do yourself. And now that's got a lot mature, I think. from those tools like ThirdWeb, Sequence, Privy, they're helping people do that much easier. We all partnered with them and they're really, really helpful. But I think the next part for me is allowing them to put more logic and data on chain much easier. So today to do this, have to still write smart contracts and you have to still publish stuff to the blockchain. We're gonna create more APIs that plug into the game engine directly that allow people to put that data and that logic on chain much more seamlessly and much easier. So an example of this, we've already got a library out today, which you can take metadata from your game and put that on chain. So every time someone makes a headshot, that can get put on chain. Every time someone wins a match that can get put on chain. And once you kind of start putting that data on chain, other people can compose off that and start using that, which we'll probably talk about a bit later. So what I would say is that the industry is still skeptical web three, but every year it's softening. And I think as more new studios come about and adopt it, you'll see them soften more. At the moment, moment, this for me is going through what I call deconcentration. What happens is all the AAAs who are all the best talent do will go get AAAs then aren't doing so well. So we're going through this cycle of movement that we're usually doing. the ones that adopt the new technologies first, because they're the most innovative and try and do the most cutting edge stuff. And that's why I'm seeing at the moment. So yeah, it's getting better every single year. And I still think there's a healthy skepticism. but I think people are starting to realize that actually there is something here that could benefit the games industry. The other one I also pitch, which doesn't work as well, is Steam currently have control over your inventory and the way you go to market completely. So if you think about the Steam store and the inventory and things like that, they're in complete control of that and they can continually take revenue fees from you and you have no way to get out of that. Blockchain is a way you can basically do the same thing, but you pay a fraction of the cost because gas is nothing compared to the 30 % that Steam take. And so that's the other model I kind of put to people. The issue is obviously Steam have blocked off all of Web3 games because of that, because that's getting rid of their business model and that removes a very key distribution platform for PC developers in particular. So that pitch doesn't work quite as well unless you're on the mobile spheres and those other spheres. Yeah, and I think your explanation makes a lot of sense. I remember spending time with both AAA, AA, and independent developers. And I found that the attitude from independent developers was they were more open to Web3. And this was a few years ago. And I think things have probably changed. And I'm optimistic that things are changing. But I remember AAA studios were very, very just very skeptical. But it makes sense, right? Because they make so much money off a couple of titles. And changing the business model of these titles poses a huge risk. And so they're incumbents. They don't want to open it up to competition. But I think I am optimistic that things are changing. And I think your thinking makes a ton of sense where developers leave, and then they form their own studios. And they're more open to Web3 in that case. Yeah, I think just to riff off that a little bit, like I've sold technology to the AAA games industry, tried to get them to build with this MMO tech that I used to have. MMOs are very risky as kind of applications. I actually got it sold into a couple of major AAA studios. They canceled the games halfway through, unfortunately, and I was very sad. And I kind of tell people in Web3, I'm like, do not try to get them to adopt blockchain. It is very, very unlikely. Because as you've said, they're incumbents. They're not incentivized to take risks. They're incentivized to make Call of Duty 17 and keep going with the same thing over and over again because that's how they make money. So you need to go for the newer studios, the people who are willing to take that risk. Then they will create the breakouts and then the AAA will either acquire them or copy them. This happened in free to play. This happened in mobile. This happened in console very early on. It will happen again, I believe in Web3 as well. You know, just something anecdotal I want to share with you. I was in a Discord group and I ended up in this private chat with the CEO of this very, very large game, know, AAA studio. I have no idea how he ended up in this chat. I was very lucky, but I was privy to some of the conversations that they were having. And one conversation was, hey, we need to... you know, what's this crypto thing, NFT thing, we need to, you know, think about this and create like a skunk works inside of the company. And then, and then the response was, it's too risky right now. If you wanted to maybe dedicate like one or two developers to it, sure. And that's, think the overall attitude could probably be summarized in that in that conversation is, it's, there is some interest, but there's also some resistance because it does threaten current business models. But I'm encouraged by the CEO who was actually interested. And so I have not followed up to see where that studio is at this time in terms of their involvement in Web3 or crypto. But I'm encouraged by that conversation that he was interested. Tell us about the, what are the kinds of games that I guess that could be enabled by Somnia and the one million transactions per second. Yep, cool. just to start with, I was cool. A big chunk is going to be just web, like a web 2.5 games. These are essentially games with tokens or NFTs put into them. The first thing I would say is they have to be fun games. And then you add those mechanisms in. The reason why Somnia is a very good fit for them is a cost perspective. I didn't realize this, but speaking to web three developers, they have small games, some of them like 500 DAUs, not a very big game tool in terms of the games industry. but they're spending thousands of dollars a month for gas, because everyone does gas sponsorship. within the game, they're sponsoring gas for the players. So players don't even know they're on blockchain most of the time, which is the kind of model that you have to do. But they're spending thousands of dollars for a very small game. And on Somnia, that would be a fraction of the price. You're probably looking at hundreds of dollars. I don't know exactly, but it would be a fraction of the price. So that's a huge proposition for just everyone building a Web3 game. We can save a ton of costs. I think what you're seeing at the moment If a Web3 game gets even particularly big, has to build its own blockchain, its own L2, they tend to do. And that is not cheap at all. The operating costs of that are very expensive and then they're still playing some kind of fee to the sequencer that they're making. So this is not sustainable model in my view. If you look at the economics and we can give them a set of model, we believe, because we have a lot of throughput, you're not going to get those issues with a noisy neighbor taking up all of the throughput of the chain, then no one can use your game. That's just not viable basically. So I think Web 2.5 games is how I put them. There'll be a bunch of those. Those come in different formats. They're like your classic PC console, what I call shiny games. They look very high fidelity and graphically. Those also come on mobile in the more casual format as well. We have both of those sets, and I think those will both be pretty big and probably be pretty good. The other set we have are what I would call fully on-chain games. So these are games where they're really pushing the boundaries and putting a lot of their data and logic on-chain. In fact, they do all of their game logic and data on-chain. So we have two things here that are very valuable for fully on-chain games. One is obviously the throughput. So throughput is not just transactions, it's also about gas per second. So the compute that you can do with some of you, can do a lot of compute on-chain and that's very valuable to these games who want to put all of their logic on-chain because they're literally putting up like millions of gas per second in terms of the amount they need. And so they really need a super high throughput chain in order for them to actually scale. Again, the way a lot of people do this is they create their own L2 and even that they have to put a lot of stuff off chain. have to make compromises because they could not put it fully on chain. So we can stop those compromises and allow them to do that. I think these teams, well, I'm really interested in two things here. One, they tend to be the most innovative in terms of business model. They kind of really understand the mechanisms of web three and they're really pushing this kind of new frontier of business model. And I think they'll be probably one of the teams to crack it. The other thing is once you start putting all of that logic and data on chain, you get what I call composable video games. So another game developer can come in and take some of the smart contracts and some of the data from this game and reuse it in their game. That makes it much easier and faster for them to build their game. And then another developer can come in and build off that. And another one can come in. So you get this explosion of games that can be built much faster. Game development is all basically an exploration game. It's like, let's find the best video game as fast as we can. If you give them this platform where you can compose games together, I think you get more video games. And therefore, you find more fun video games. And therefore, you bring in more consumers. The reason I believe this so strongly is this is web 2 gaming. All of the major genres over the past 15 years, they've all been mods of existing games. MOBAs were a mod of Warcraft 3, survival shooters were a mod of armor. Basically, all of the major genres over the past 20 years have been mods of existing games. And I think you could get this same thing, but on this massive scale, which you start enabling more logic and data to be put on chain. And it has to be cost effective as well. So that's the other thing we do. So yeah, cost and compute basically solve problems all across the gaming sphere, in my view. And that's why we're so focused on gaming. We also understand the industry. I've sold technology to them for like the past 12, 13 years. We know a lot of people there. I know to avoid AAA, for instance, I know some other teams are trying to get the AAAs. I'm like, I wouldn't do that if I were you. I like the focus on fun. I think that's one of the kind of critical components, at least in my experience, of a lot of the Web3 games are not that fun. They instead focus on the of the Web3 native degen, make money aspect or angle, which is fine too. But we do, you know, we're missing the fun aspect. And I think really gets what is what gets people to use and become loyal to a game. And up until now, it's actually really hard to create a fun game. And so I think that's really good that you guys are trying to crack that code and really figure it out. And also games are really hard to build. I mean, they just take a long time to build good games. I remember when I was working for a specific layer one, and our focus at the time was on gaming, the strategy that we took was we take any random you know, AAA studio, they'll have maybe four, maybe at most five titles that are, you know, representing maybe 80 % of the revenue. But in that, you know, in that year, they might've tried to build another game or several games. let's say, let's say out of like, you know, let's say AAA studio has like 20 titles, maybe three to five are represent 80 % of the revenue. And so what do they do with the other titles? And so that has, that was kind of the focus is like, you know, some of these titles are just sitting on the shelf, you know, let's work together. Maybe we could turn this web two game into web three game, build it on our chain and see what happens. And then we can, you know, we can help. then, and then we figure out the terms in terms of, you know, revenue sharing, et cetera. That approach I felt at the time, like made sense because a lot of these titles just, there was no marketing behind them. They were kind of floundering. They just weren't doing well. And so could they have a home in web three? I don't know how that approach works now, but I'm curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, so there are two things that we're doing here. One, as you probably already know, the way you can unlock this is IP. So if you get a large IP, it kind of unlocks a large player base that you can bring in quite quickly. So I do think bringing major IPs to web 3 is a way to do this. Now, that is not cheap. You have to spend a lot of money to work with those IPs, but that is one mechanism that we're exploring and looking at very hard. The good thing at the moment, the games industry is a bit flat. those some of those IPs are much cheaper than they used to be. And that obviously helps a lot with an existing player base. I think the other one that we're exploring more, because I don't really I think it's very hard to sell into the AAA unless you're willing to put in a ton of cash and de-risk their game basically for them, is looking at the independents who have fun games at their core, but haven't quite got the community or player base really revving. And they you can see them on Steam, they have massive wishlists, they have a lot of interesting gameplay mechanics and really devout small community, but adding Web3 could potentially grow that out and expand the pie there significantly. And so I think that's another avenue that we're looking at significantly of these like gems that already are Web2s and bringing them to Web3. I think ultimately in general, in order for the games industry to work in Web3, we need to bring the Web2 developers to Web3. I think that's the only way we can scale. And we need to bring the Web2 consumers to Web3 games. The way you bring the Web2 consumers is you build fun games at their core and add at Web3 Mechanics, the way you bring Web2 devs is you give them opportunities they don't have necessarily elsewhere in terms of business models, in terms of game genres and gameplay, and you give them an easy way they can do that. I think that's the other crucial thing that a lot of people miss. It's quite hard. Until recently, it's been very hard to develop a Web3 game. You need to unlock that as well. So I think what you've done without saying so explicitly is kind of defined your target audiences. You've got kind of the web three, or sorry, the AAA titles that have IP that they need to maybe, that may not be producing for them at the moment. And so that might be an opportunity. And then the other audience that you described were, web two developers that are interested in building web three games and like getting them on board and making sure that they have tooling on Somnia that works for them, that's easy to build. And you can help them as a team with any kind of business development or customer development or kind of growth type things that they might need. And that seems very scalable. And I think makes a ton of sense. At the same time, there's a lot of competition. I think every chain is going after the gaming category because it has the potential to create so many transactions and actual users that actually use these applications on these chains. How are you messaging or positioning Somnia to the web2dev that is interested in building a web3 game? Yeah, so I don't think if you look at our kind of global position, we're not yet. This is more behind the scenes one to one. I think really it is giving them the full gamut of support. So Somnia at the end of the day is a blockchain. It's a really high performance blockchain, very, very cool technology, but it's really just one component part of building a video game and what makes games successful. And you want to try and offer them as many propositions as you can to bring them over. So we have a lot of different things here. So One is around go-to-market support. So in Probable, the place I used to work, we published three games ourselves. We understand the kind of mechanisms and ways you can take a game to market and how you do that. There's a small publishing team there that can support the games in terms of their go-to-market. They tend to specialize for a Web2 audience, but they're also building up kind of Web3 stuff. There are accelerators. So we partner with a company called Uprising, and we're looking at doing others who are running accelerators to take people from the Web2 kind of game development methodology. bring them into Web3 and get them to understand the mechanisms and mechanics you can do to take your game to Web3. We are doing things like grants and financial support. So we have a grants program, which essentially a lot of chains do, and then a very, very large investment fund from Probable, which is over $200 million, and that's investing in games directly. Game developers, in my mind, have two problems. One is cash and one is consumer eyeballs. And so giving them cash is big thing. But cash comes in different ways. We also have a services org. So that services org has primarily done web 2 development in the past, but now has been augmented web 3. So they kind of understand the bridge of how to develop web 3 components and bring them into web 2 games and game engines. So that's also a very important part. We have engineers and devs we can inject into teams to help them out. The final element I'd say, which has not been built yet, but we're building over time, and I can't actually tell you how we're doing this, but we are building this over time, is a consumer base. So essentially a group of eyeballs that we can use to kind of cross-pollinate all the games in the ecosystem. And this is why I kind of say online a lot, community is such a key thing for us in particular, because that community of gamers and players is going to be what we use as a huge value proposition to bring in game devs who want to build on top of Somnia, because we can point them across all the games of the ecosystem. So it's almost like we're building kind of mini web free publisher, even though we're a blockchain company, which feels weird to me because I was like, came here to build a blockchain and not building a web free publisher. But that's basically what we're building. And the proposition we're kind of taking game developers with, because I think that's what they need at the end of the day. I think you can't just sell tech. That's not enough. You need to give them the full package, and that's what's going to bring them over at the end of the day. I think because we are laser focused on games, we're going to have a lot more products as well that we invest in, like the tooling pipeline that I talked about, the integrations to the game engines, that a lot of other chains won't necessarily do, because they tend to have broader remits and are generally going general purpose, whilst we're going very specific. which again, I think will give us edge as we kind of invest more and more into that category and segment over time. So yeah, a lot of things there. I think that the laser focus positioning makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking of Immutable has the same thing. within Web3, they're probably the category leader focus on games. And they're quite laser focused on Web3. And it makes sense that you're building out almost like a publishing studio, right? Because the game developers, don't necessarily have a technology problem. They have a business problem. Whereas you built Somnia as a layer one. But to support their business problem, you've got to kind of help with go-to-market stuff and other things. And that becomes a value add to the game developer, because that's exactly what they're looking for. They're not thinking necessarily of, on which layer should I, layer one should I build. They're thinking, which layer one will probably give me the best support and actually give me users. And so you're meeting that need. And that as a layer one, that's a huge value add that you're giving to the game developer. I met with Gabby Dizon a few months ago. As you probably know, he's the co-founder of Yield Guild. And Yield Guild has, at the time, he said they have about 10 million gamers in their community, which is a tremendous amount of Web3 gamers. And I wonder how... Somnia might work with Yield Guild if you're not yet. Because having that many gamers in your community, cross-pollinate communities, for example, it could be a big value add for game developers. Because probably one of the questions they're asking is, if I build on Somnia, how will you help me get users or players? Well, the answer is, well, we have this partnership with Yield Guild, and they have 10 million gamers already, blah, blah. Anyway, I'm just curious about that. Yeah, so I think now we're getting into some of the secrets or stuff. yeah, the partnerships with kind of key dials around the kind of web for gaming space is a very important technique and tactic and creating partnerships with them because they drive a lot of players. I think, let me, I'll give you some hints. I'll give you a couple of bits that we're doing. So one of the other things we're doing is looking at collaborating with internet cafes across different regions like SEA and LATAM. and getting the games in our portfolio to be installed on them. That's like another kind of technique that we're using to kind of get in front of lot of eyeballs very quickly. There are other things as well, but kind of there's a lot of things here, but now I'm kind of getting into the guts of go-to-market, which is of supporting things. But for me, this is the key thing, right? Bringing in that proposition of the player's eyeballs and distribution is one of the hardest problems in game development, fixing distribution. And I think if you can do that, that is the win button for game developers. I think game developers... They love building video games. They're like artists. They just want to focus on building a fun video game. They don't want to deal with a lot of the business stuff. That's just annoying to a lot of people. And we want to help them with that, basically. And it's super hard stuff. Distribution is so hard. You mentioned a couple of geographies. What's your strategy in terms of which? Are you focused on any specific geography right now? yeah, go ahead. not, not not really anymore. I think what I sell developers is it really depends on the game you want to bring to market. So if you're looking at a lot of pay to win style mechanisms, where people can essentially inject in cash and become like a superhero in the game, you really need to go to the Asian market, particularly China. This is very prevalent. In fact, it's almost culturally So it's like a great thing that you have enough money to buy all this gear in the game become like the best character. In the West though, people hate that. People have like the opposite thing where it has to be egalitarian and skills-based. so what I tell developers, so we're basically looking at a broad market category here. We're building up players in the Southeast Asia region. I think at the moment is the biggest place we have traction. Latam region and Sub-Saharan African region. These are the biggest areas. I think primarily because they're looking to waste money essentially. Building up a Western consumer base, that is very important as well. And this is why we're trying to pick up fun games that appeal to those consumer bases, because I think they obviously have the biggest cash piles. They can deploy the most capital into these games. And so we're also looking at how we build up Western consumer base as well. So if you were to ask me where our community is today, I'd say it's mostly Southeast Asia, Latin, Sub-Saharan Africa. But I want to get more into the Americas and the European market, because I understand that that's where people have more capital to deploy. But that's a hard nut to crack. I think you need really fun games first there and you need to be very careful with your Web3 mechanisms. There's still a taint from previous cycles that people are like crypto is a scam. Don't get into that. My friends do this to me all the time and I can't explain to them. You are correct. There is a lot of scams in space, but there are some legitimate people trying to build businesses that are actually trying to help the world. Let me explain. But that's easy to do on a one-to-one basis, hard to do on a global basis. Yeah, you bring out some really interesting differences in gaming kind of attitudes across geographies. And you're exactly right with China, especially with pay to win. It becomes kind of like a badge of honor that you have enough money that you can have the coolest skin and have all of these weapons that you paid for to get. And then the differences with the Western audiences, which is kind of more egalitarian, like you said. That those, think, attitudinal differences are very interesting because it does, it can play into like which geographies you ought to go into first. That's at least the kind of the approach that I took with one project that I was with. We were very focused on Latin America because the Latin America seemed to be kind of a balance between kind of pay to win and also kind of skill based. And at the time anyway, the penetration or the, well, how do I say this? The interest from blockchain projects, like they were not in the Latin American market. And so that seemed like a good place to go. But it also has its own kind of challenges. So I appreciate you sharing the. the attitudinal differences across geographies, because it absolutely matters. And most people don't know that. No, that's really cool. Well, let's go back to Somnia and kind of like your go-to market. So we've talked about your target audiences, the types of games that Somnia, that are enabled by Somnia's high throughput features. And you talked about a grant program and other ways that you're messaging to your target audiences and how they might become interested in building Insomnia. Tell us about the community. Insomnia has this kind of leaderboard. Has that been helpful at all? And if so, is it attracting, I guess, what kind of an audience is it attracting? Is it attracting gamers, just yappers? Is it attracting developers? the Kaito leaderboard is attracting Yappas at the end of the day. These are people who have very high mindshare and can kind of bring a message to a lot of people around the crypto audience. So they're very important as a kind of tactic and a tool in the toolbox. But it's a tactic and tool in the toolbox, basically, that helps spread your message wider and broader. We've just launched last week, a kind of program around that to incentivize that more. That's been very well adopted. and driven all the underlying metrics behind the scenes. In terms of gaming though, it hasn't been a superpower. I think what it's done is get the chain message out there of this high performance, EVM compatible, low latency, super low cost L1, which is very useful for more people to know about. Because at the end of the day, we are very focused on gaming, but it is a general purpose blockchain. You can deploy anything to it. I think one of the things that I'm very interested in is given these performance characteristics, what will developers build that hasn't been built before? And it could be that, so we have a thesis, a very strong thesis about games. And that's why we're focused there, but it could be someone comes in from left field with some other random vertical that I'm like, wow, that was actually the thing we should do. And we've got a couple of people building hyper liquid clones. That could be a thing. We've got people building kind of like social style apps, are like mini social networks. They're kind of putting a lot of stuff on chain, not as convinced by them, but they might work. So yeah, it could be something else that I haven't even thought of basically. so that's Really the broader message getting out there is still very valuable to us. But in terms of the gaming slice, I don't think it's had a particularly high impact there yet. It has built the bunch up more though, which is very useful. Yeah, you mentioned the real time aspect, which is I met with MegaEath a couple of weeks ago and that's kind of their messaging, right? Or positioning is like the first real time blockchain. And one conversation that we had is like, what kind of applications could a real time blockchain enable? And so we went through a number of potential use cases. Gaming was one of them, but we spent a lot of time talking about DeFi and how DeFi right now it's It doesn't necessarily have to be fast. It could actually be a little slower, but if it accomplishes what I'm looking for in terms of yield, I'm OK with it being slower. But what if it were faster? What if it were actually real time? What could that enable? And that was actually a very interesting conversation, because I don't think most people that are active in DeFi think about that. Right now, I think they just kind of accept the necessary evil that it's costly. You have to bridge to a bajillion different bridges to do your thing. It's just a huge pain to actually participate in DeFi to get potentially small yield with very high risk. So it's like not attractive at all. But what if it were safe and fast and actually gets you what you need in terms of like your yield goals. Like that would be very interesting. so it has a category, know, gaming makes the most sense, but the risk is it's a little slower and the category, and it just takes a long time to build a great game. You know, whereas DeFi on the other hand, you know, there's lots of, you know, crypto native people that are like, they already participate in DeFi and... A real time application or a real time blockchain could be very interesting in terms of what that could enable. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think there are two things I kind of think about here. One is, do, I think, hyperliquid already shows this right. So having blockchains with very fast block time and real time characteristics means you can build basically limit order books fully on chain, which normally you only get with centralized exchanges, you now get the same feel and quality in the decentralized platform, which obviously gives you all the benefits of decentralization, censorship positions, you own everything, all that kind of jazz. So I think there's a huge value proposition there. Now, if MegaEaf have that performance characteristics, we have that performance characteristics, Hyperliquid have, now there's five Hyperliquids, they're all gonna compete with each other and eventually it's gonna be like winner takes all, or maybe there's a few, but I don't think everyone will be able to win that battle at the end of the day, probably ends up, I hope. What I would really love is all the people move from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges, but they just have the same quality of experience. That would be awesome. The thing that I'm very interested in though is AI agents. I think this is super early by the way, I'll be very clear. I'm very skeptical about the whole AIX web3 space, but I do see one thing in particular of using agents to basically interact with blockchains. So in the future, I personally believe blockchains will become transparent infrastructure. No one will know what blockchain they're running on. No one will care. No one should care. It should be infrastructure like AWS servers or GCP servers. You don't know. if your website you're visiting is running on AWS or GCP. So if you imagine a future where AI agents are actually doing a lot of this yield farming and kind of interacting on chain for consumers, where are AI agents going to go? They're going to go to the fastest blockchain that has the cheapest fees. And that's kind of an interesting proposition where I think I'll kind of chain and make this kind of chain kind of play in for them. And they can get to these places where they can was high frequency trade really super fast because they have these properties. So yeah, I do think there's also interesting spaces in AI as well, which you could leak into. In terms of the yield farming, I'm not sure. I think one thing I would say is there is still a problem today of if you look at Solana, for instance, very high performance chain, but it doesn't have enough performance in terms of not the real time characters, but the throughput. When there's a meme coin launch, you can't buy the meme coin or sell the meme coin. It's just a mess. When there's a massive NFT launch, you can't get the NFT. There's too many people trying to mint at the same time. And so you still need to go to even support the use cases of today, I would say. And that's really what we enabled with the throughput. And then the latency characteristics give you that much better feel where a consumer can play with these apps, click buttons, have fun, and not worry the fact that they're on a blockchain. And when they click a button, I have to wait 20 seconds now for the button to like spin and like do something. Or I think the biggest problem for us at the moment, and Meghry for having this as well, is the wallets are too slow now. So you click a button on Swamina to do a swap, the wallet takes... like so much time to come up and you press confirm and then you actually get the swap done instantly basically as soon as you press confirm. But what takes long now is the wallet infrastructure. And this is why I'm quite big on things like Sequence, ThirdWeb and Privy because they're making like this wallet infrastructure which is transparent to people, does gas sponsorship, you don't have to sign transactions continually. I think that's going to be very big for the space and where we need to get to in order to actually get more consumers utilizing this stuff in a much easier way. So yeah, that's my thoughts. Yeah, I've worked with Third Web. They're a great project. And they provide really great tooling for chains. You bring up some really interesting points around the wallet capability and how now that needs to be improved because these chains are so fast that wallets are kind of, they're slower. And so they need to be improved, which is a really good problem to have because now it's like the tide lifts all boats and in these faster chains are forcing these other infrastructure players to kind of improve their infrastructure. What I like about Somnia's approach is in Web3 we have a problem in that we have a closed set of users and the competition then becomes can we incentivize users from another chain to come to ours? And that also kind of creates mercenary type behavior. What I like what you're doing is that you're looking at web two developers that might be interested in three and want to build a game in web three, you bring them over. That actually grows the pie. And we don't have enough of that type of approach. I think we need to grow the pie. I think it's hard because then you have to educate and provide tooling that they may... will cost more as well as take more time. But once you provide that education and that tooling to Web2Devs, that creates a lot of loyalty. And it builds for them really a home now in Web3. And they can call so many a home as you provide that. And so I appreciate that you're doing that because that helps move the space forward. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I say this a lot. We can't keep selling the same tech to the same set of people and the same set of consumers. The pie has to grow in order for this to become the kind of vision that we will have in our minds of every consumer is interacting on chain in some form. In order to do that, you need to bring in more developers and you need to bring in the Web2 consumers as well. For that, Web2 consumers need experiences which are seamless. They just want to have fun and games. They just want to click buttons and play. They just, if they want to transact on DeFi, they don't want to go get random gas token and put it into their wallet. They just want to have fun and play. And this is why I think you have to think about models, which are very different to what we've traditionally thought about and kind of think, I think the big one that I kind of tell devs all the time is you should be paying for gas for your protocol, not the consumer. And people look at me like, what, what are you talking about? I'm just like, think about it. Who do you want to attract? Do you want to attract the Web3 native crowd? Fine. But if you want to attract a new crowd, they're not going to go. to some exchange, take it off, bridge to your chain. That's just so many steps, it's so complicated. You need to do gas sponsorship in order for you to be successful. And then people were like, but how are we gonna, how does that work? Because we need to make money somehow. like, you have to think of a revenue model for your application, for it to be successful. Just like you rent servers in the real world, you have to start paying for the chain infrastructure. I think that's a model that's already happened in gaming, and will start to happen in other applications as well. I do still believe you need public goods. Like I can't imagine Aave would do that, but Aave is like more like a public good. And so for public goods, I think it's more okay. But for a lot of like consumer facing applications, I just think that's not gonna fly. Well, Paul, before we end, is there anything else that you want to share about so many a blockchain that you haven't yet? There are a things we didn't go through reactivity. didn't go through, but I think, think as, as we're kind of ending, I think what I would say is we're currently in test net. We just started testing that about a month ago. so you can go to something.network, click the test net on the top, right. And start exploring it. We're really trying to encourage developers to play with it and kind of ask the question, what can you build now fully on chain that you couldn't build before because of blockchain limits. And so I'm really interested to see devs explore that. We've already seen some devs do some really cool things. Like the other day, this developer made this kind of massive multiplayer paint where each pixel, you could basically paint a different color and that was a transaction and people were making these massive interactive paint thing, which was really cool. So yeah, I'm just, very interested in seeing what devs build. And then from the consumer perspective, I would say come join the test net. We have kind of the classic quest incentive style programs and really we're trying to make it a fun place. There's going to be a lot of games, a lot of fun things to do. We do activities very regularly. what I would say to consumers is come in, start playing around and exploring the test net because it's a really fun place and we're going to make it more fun week to week. Awesome. Well, with that, Paul Thomas from Somnia Blockchain. Thank you so much. Cool, thanks a lot Peter.