Coin Artist on Building *real* Crypto-Games | Layer Zero

we should be empowering the user to be a participant in the conversation so they can add value to the nfts they're holding their entities can become more valuable and not just in a way of like being like devs do something but literally there's pipelines there and bridges that exist that they can add value to the narrative and content creation process welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual

member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today on layer zero we're talking with marguerite de corcell which you might actually know as coin artist coin artist has been around in the crypto space for a very long time before there's even been as much room as there is today for the intersection of art games and crypto

uh uh coin artist is definitely an artist type hence the artist in the name uh and she's focused on crypto gaming but not in the way that you probably are hearing crypto gaming with what you think of it today with games like axio infinity where you have nfts and they do stuff uh marguerite is focused on uh a much more cyber cyberpunk version of crypto games as in like how do we uh how do we have interactions of the nfts in our wallets how does like if a two nfts of the same game end up in the same wallet and

interaction happens something a little bit closer to conway's game for life or just something about embedding data in the blockchain rather than just having like a normal game that has crypto assets embedded in it um so you'll hear us unpack what that means uh and it's this very untapped world of gaming that has not yet been built out that i hope does eventually become built because it sounds really really fun and marguerite coin artists is one of the people building out this world over at blockade games uh then we also talk about um the

physical center of the metaverse which is new york city and what's going on with new york and what it means to be social in the world of crypto in this day and age uh so all these conversations and more are coming your way right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible the brave browser is the user first browser for the web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking inside the brave browser you'll find the brave wallet the

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in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless what's up marguerite how's it going hi david how are you oh this is fantastic i think a lot of people will actually know you as your other name coin artist i think that's kind of where i want to start this uh start this uh this talk is where did coin artists come from so coin artist actually came in 2014 um when i was just discovering bitcoin and i discovered that there was this

place called crypto twitter which was yet to be you know called crypto twitter but it was all where these industry thought leaders were expressing um their opinions about bitcoin and it was the first thing i thought of because i was an artist as a fine artist and i was like okay i'm making a twitter handle what is it going to be and i was like well coin artist it's really generic and not a cool story at all but um but at the time actually also my i was known as yt instead of marguerite or coin artist um and yt came from if you've read snow crash it was like this

superhero like how could i make this um character persona and so i was i was that person anonymously basically until about like 2016. like people didn't even know as a woman um making crypto puzzles and playing around with creative technology uh the intersection of crypto art games uh it started really early on before you discovered bitcoin what i want to unpack the art side what uh what kind of artist were you were like a painter or or a digital art or what's up

yeah i was a uh i was a traditional painter and uh and drawing and for me i did so there was a lot of magazines at the time that needed art cover art um like even just like i remember doing a picture of andreas antonopoulos for bitcoin magazine um for one of their articles and it was in that process of making those uh portraits that i started playing around with different concepts so one of the projects with amir takai and cody wilson they were working on something called dark wallet at the time

and dark wallet was all about obfuscating bitcoin transactions like acting as a little bit of a mixer as a wallet um so i was like i wonder if i could hide something in this you know to like play into that obfuscation and uh that's when i realized that a bitcoin like private key with the the numbers and characters could be turned into all kinds of pattern making to equate to uh to that information you know how you can take binary in binary can then equate to ascii um

so so then like how could you make these different patterns into the art and like basically hide things in plain sight um embed it into the artwork so that's when i had that like little aha moment and i shared it on bitcointalk.org the um satoshi nakamoto's forum and people just loved it it just became like this big viral thing and as an artist i was like what did i do so like i i kept um so i teamed up with people along the way and and we continued to make these pieces um and it only became more gamified and

more complex over the years but uh but that's how it started so when people talk about the let's combine art and crypto if you if you tell them those words they're going to think like oh yeah you're talking about like nfts and web 3 in 2021 or 2022. but you uh were an artist that got inspiration from crypto back in 2014 before ethereum even existed like before we even had smart contracts and there's like one level of crypto art where there's crypto and then you can illustrate things about it but

you you jumped right into a a deeper connection behind like the ethos and values of crypto and being an artist with like the integration of like you know private keys in actual art can you talk about just like what you saw in the early days of being coin artist as the potential intersection behind crypto in art yeah absolutely so um i'd say initially the creative started looking at blockchain like a new uh a new medium um and how can we interact with it and

there were some fascinating things like you can just decentralize ledger but you could store all kinds of information on on it and so when it was cheaper people had images they had ascii images they had all kinds of information and how can you interact with the blockchain in a creative artistic way there was a lot of people you know it's i can't totally recall at the moment but there were a lot of fun experimental projects and rhea myers is someone who i worked with uh early on and they were a part of that exploratory group

um now as the head architect at dapper uh but so anyways there was just a lot of like like what can and i think we all loved the idea that the technology was so new so people had to like in the hiding and plain sight thing and just a satoshi nakamoto like his his lore so it was really inspiring for us to think about how could the blockchain be this new medium and like bitcoin itself was maybe as as a transfer of value was a little less

interesting as far as like the unit but it was more like things you could embed on the blockchain that was that was pretty cool um and and like using hashes uh as and pointing like we did things like make fake addresses um to make like trails digital trails that led to information that if you put it all together you got something so it was just kind of this neat process because of the fact that there's no third parties involved and it all just exists out there so understanding decentralized and distributed networks um it was really a fun playful time and

i think that's actually a big missing piece right now like for example a lot of the creatives and artists just skip that step they are now with these the interface and um and making like minting an image that they feel like is an nft but you're missing the whole like deeper meaning and how that ties into the networks that could be way more creative or like artistically driven um as an entire process i think i think you have some people making those steps but you know it's interesting you saw this back with different cryptos

that people didn't really care about that like how interesting the technology was they really just cared about the user experience so it's interesting to think about to these artists that are making extra effort to make um like for example josie bellini today just launched uh cyber brokers and it's all on chain using svgs and my cto at blockade games is a part of that like he helped with that launch but just this deeper conversation about these assets being on chain and what and what this art project is

i don't know i just feel like there's a huge gap in education now um and i wonder how we're going to recapture that or if we do recapture that i i actually don't know everything's so financially driven um and that's maybe the bubble that everyone feels but i don't know if it come this conversation comes back to the the interesting innovation of the technology behind everything you know like it's it seems like people are just more excited about making money in new ways yeah i think with what you kind of just described

where you you kind of laid out this easter egg like mmorpg like art hunt using by embedding data straight into bitcoin where you had like fake addresses that meant something and lead you down a trail that felt very gamified that felt like the intersection of like art and games but using data inside of a blockchain to be the board on which this game is played whereas whereas like now in the nft web 3 world it's really just like very external to the blockchains like yeah we just use ethereum to mint our nfts but everything else is external

um it definitely has to do with like the rising transaction fees and we can't really play with data on the blockchain in the way that we that we once did but uh is my intuition right that you were really interested in kind of making this like this shared ledger that we all have that can host data and turning it into like some sort of like artistic game rather than just like you know sending bitcoins around like how important was the gamification of it yeah absolutely i mean i think all the projects that we participated in since 2014 had some sort of magical moment where we're playing

around with blockchain technology to kind of demonstrate something that otherwise wasn't possible um something that we did in 2019 was called um i forget the actual title of it but it was a humans versus zombies headless game in which we sent nfts we airdropped nfts and half were human nfts and half were zombie nfts and then there was this um score scoreboard website all it said was how many humans there were and how many zombies there were

if you sent a zombie to a wallet that had a human in it then you didn't like transfer your zombie what happened was you minted a new zombie asset into the human's wallet um and it then turned their human into a zombie and so then on the scoreboard the zombies are you know gaining a zombie um and you could use an antidote and then the human begins frozen what the human uh nft gets frozen well the nfcs are non-transferable so yeah so they're in your wallet and then

it's like basically a virus and um it's an entanglement yeah and it doesn't use a central application um and so anyways we just launched this out of hackathon i think it was like um am i maybe harvard harvard hackathon i can't totally remember but um just this idea that with smart contracts you can make this entire game just using smart contracts uh didn't you don't need to have an actual game like uh application and that was really interesting because there's so much more of that that could be done but do people

care about that like do they care about that game experience it seems like everything is monetarily driven um so how do we actually how do we actually inspire people to play in ways that just like with traditional games like how many people just sit down and play games because they're awesome and fun and interesting um their social how do we bridge that gap with where we are today um with this financial motivation which is really turning off a lot of gamers like actual gamers they think this whole space is

going to be a complete scam or is a scam and then you can see it already that the games that are trying to launch are already angling at that those pre-sale items to have the highest prices as possible to price people out and then build this toxic community and then you're going to be turning off all the gamers and then will you ever launch a game i don't know but that it feels very ico in that way it's just like icos but with extra better marketing because we brought in all these 3d professional you know artists now from the game

industry because these nfts are selling um so how how long is it going to take for us to actually or will we ever get over this probably bad reputation we're about to spin up just in the same way icos like icos never came back um they just rebranded they came up with all kinds of different you know acronyms to basically be the same thing as ico but they they really did that stigma stuck and i think that games and nfts are at the same risk right now i totally went

on complete tangent there but anyways no no it makes a ton of sense i think what i'm hearing is like there's this uh domain these this category of crypto games which are very very foreign to like the tradition that tradition traditional like the typical crypto games that we see today like the the wolf sheep game or like uh axe infinity which are very just like devout driven by the value of the assets but i think what you're alluding to is like there's this category of like on-chain

games that are crypto that are uh where the playing field is ethereum or l2s or just whatever is in the blockchain rather than just like you know nft assets and and something like that like how how big do you think the world of just like on chain how what do we even call this this category of game that if we're not calling it crypto games because that's been co-opted by this whole like nft number go up toxic value movement like what do we call the the versions of games that are like on

chain like the virus type games that you just explained is there uh have you thought about a name for this no i mean but that i was using nfts right and i think at the time we were all saying blockchain games you know and if we weren't using nfts no one thought nfts was going to stick as far as an acronym so it was really interesting that it did because everyone was thinking this is terrible we shouldn't use nfts we should say something else so we are all trying we're like blockchain games crypto games like trying to explore other terminology but nfts is what's the um and maybe the mystery because people didn't know what it was um

and i i don't know if you're gonna be able to differentiate uh it's assets that decentralized assets and the different models um because well if you think about gaming you have all kinds of different types of games like you know you have an rpg you have a uh you have a roguelike you have a there's just like different ways to label games i don't know if crypto is going to really be able to get more finite than than um than just and if i don't even know what do you think about when you hear games

like crypto games you the first thing you think of an nft game or do you think of crypto yeah we also like to uh the virus example is actually something that i have like uh pondered about or daydreamed about is like what happens when we can have like assets like like can you have like this virus asset that just like naturally people like accidentally run into like damn it i caught the zombie virus now my now my wallet is a zombie wallet like it doesn't meaningfully impact my wallet like i could still do all my things but

now it's got the zombie token in it like damn it now it's i got caught by the virus and like there's stuff like that i just have always wondered about like is there this world where just like there's this these assets in our wallets that have meaning inside of a particular context kind of like kind of like uh you know the game as in the game that everyone just lost because i brought up the game sorry like stuff like that on ethereum i feel like does how big of an arena is that because like there's a few examples that i can

think of but i'm also not the most creative person but like and and i take your point is like how how like how niche is that like if everyone everyone needs to be good at like using block explorers everyone needs to be able to write their own transactions uh like it's this isn't up to the wallets this is up to like ether scan and stuff like that and so it's a lot harder of an audience but it's actually what feels like the new thing as we're actually using this technology in ways that we could not have used um this technology in different ways like

the you know you can play axia infinity without having assets right in theory but like with a zombie virus wallet game like that is brand new that is something that like and i think something that's similar in this category is uh the dark forest uh that zka roll-up game i don't know if you've played that um uh so maybe this is one of those things where it's kind of a concept now but maybe maybe we need zk roll up technology to make these transactions super cheap and and instant i don't know do you have any thoughts on that so there's like different types of games on different networks that are people are playing with and

interacting with but uh yeah i think that the cost of playing so for example like in with so i work with with uh so i'm with blockhead games and our one of our missions was to make a free to play game so how do you put everything on the back end so the players just having this experience interacting with decentralized assets um that could become valuable over time based on their game play and how do you build for that and it's true like even on polygons we and we launched on polygon it's becoming more expensive now is is it scalable and gonna be sustainable for us to continue that way and so it's gonna be in our roadmap to explore

what are alternatives and what is the cheapest way for us to keep that free to play experience but um yeah i guess like the different types of games so there's all kinds of things i think like remixing of content for memes for example let's say you make a meme and it's like it's some it's got composable layers and it's in your wallet i could see someone sending another like meme to you and it affecting and changing your me like we can remix media and content

based on our interactions across wallets and i just think of this as like being a fun thing to do and for nefarious purposes as like trying to you know if you want to bomb your friends with something like i just i want that to exist and i want to know how i can and i love the idea of sending a bomb to a friend almost like um like you're trying to sink a ship and they have assets in their wallet what does this mean what can you unpack that a little bit yeah so let's say you have nfts that are susceptible to some

sort of a bomb that i send and i could blow them up if i send it maybe it just cost me maybe there's some sort of mechanic there that makes me really consider about sending this bomb like maybe you have something in your wallet that if i do this it's actually going to blow back at me you know and awesome and i don't know and like maybe there's like there's just ways to think about that um and these different crossovers of nfts and projects that could exist um and yeah and like just playing around with your friends in ways like that where it's not a big deal but there's

almost an element of permadeath but it's also just kind of funny and then there's some sort of retribution that can exist and reward systems that could exist and badge systems that could exist um all on chain and i think like i think there's a lot of room to play there and everyone's so focused on trying to make like if you think about it everyone's like the next big triple a game and it's gonna have the coolest art and these assets are gonna sell for so much money but really the fun is like very much more accessible than that it's just how do you inspire people to want

to play um because even even if you think about it these blockchain games no one's actually like playing them for fun there's a grind component of can i earn and like manipulate and exploit the system and make some crypto and then go sell it but no one's actually playing crypto games for fun at the moment and what is the differentiator between a crypto game versus just a traditional game as a game company or as a creative why would you do one or the other if you're just trying to do something for fun why wouldn't you just do a traditional game so if you're going to use blockchain

mechanics or game mechanics that are new and exciting how are you going to leverage them to actually inspire people to want to interact in that way and will they want to interact with an app go outside of openc you know spend time on a third-party website um we haven't seen that yet and i don't i'm i don't know if interactive nfts are going to be the answer where you can play the games directly from the openc website um so you can play things like like a mind sweep there's things that exist right now using iframe support in directly in openc is like playing

minesweeper you could have might anyone could play with this particular nft that's owned by one person and then it's you could be signing the winner and having a leaderboard that of everyone's interacted with it and like with the leaderboard of this particular interactive nft's like output if that makes makes sense and you can do all kinds of like from that basis you can do dungeon crawlers i could host a raid i could put assets up for a bounty without people ever leaving open c for example um if you think about most casual crypto nft

collectors they probably do not leave the open c website very often right right because that's not where number go up is right that's that's kind of the trap of where we are right now right so uh with your i want to go back to the the bomb nft so i think that's really cool and just just for listeners who are fearful about their like board ape or their crypto punk getting exploded this wouldn't work like that all the assets that would interact with like this bomb thing would only be part of the same ecosystem so it

would be an opt-in thing it's not like your nfts are going to go explode but like the idea is that like you could have an inventory like you do in a game and you have assets in there and i don't know maybe this game is about um how many of your how many assets can you destroy by sending a bomb but like you could also in theory have like an anti-bomb shield and you could not host that in your wallet but you could make a zk proof that you have one and then if you get bombed you can uh like show your zk proof that you actually have a bomb shield and all of these things are like

technically possible with with cryptography and the cool thing about ethereum or blockchains in general is that you know these things are inherently turned base because they go one block at a time so every single block is one like unit of time in this like blockchain game because there is no middle time between blocks and so like the substrate on which we play on these this these block chains are so conducive to like this turn-based strategy game uh and and no one's really been able to

like fully tap into that power yet totally like i think like making factions and alignments and playing around decentralized identity and like exactly what you're talking about is is so fascinating because people be like what what just happened i also love the idea like you said your board ape would be safe but you could allow people to opt in into like wrapping their board ape or like you know making it so like they could submit assets with the fact that the higher value the asset and some sort of scoring generating system would allow them to have more weight

when they hit you know versus um and then also reward system and payback if they if they're successful and defend their their base i think when you think of your wallet it's really fun to think about it like you could build a tower defense and like defend your base and um and then also like how are you sending resources to help other people hire like teammates and how can like you create this ecosystem which i think is actually like a part of the future here it's just i don't know yet how it makes money and

that's the like so how can you sustainably make money because even just a crypto payout reward it's not really tied to any anything valuable right like but i would like to say this is a big difference why gaming and nfts took off on ethereum versus bitcoin is because of that capability to bootstrap so uh because bitcoins are limited you know developers have to walk into the space and have their own bitcoin and then they're holding on to the fact that bitcoin's going to keep going up but

they had to buy into it whereas in the ethereum space you can start your project you can come up with your own tokens nfts uh your own like your erc20 token and you have this whole economy you can just bootstrap and launch and with value generation and then um then ride on your reputation and and you're like if you can deliver so that is such an advantage so like it is potential that you could have these kinds of ecosystems in the ethereum or similar networks um it's kind of sad to see bitcoin not

actually take off in that same way but it's also maybe okay that bitcoin's one purpose is to be sound money and i think a lot of bitcoin enthusiasts have a hard time with that i think early on when vitalik was interested in colored coins and counterparty um i was really listening in that in that time period because it was creative use cases that i wanted to see happen on bitcoin but there were so many challenges because of the fact that a lot of decisions would affect the end goal of does this make bitcoin sound money and

if it doesn't answer that question then they generally said no um and so even with lightning network there's potential here to get creative on top of bitcoin but the rate of adoption on ethereum and other places where you can bootstrap faster and you have more users that don't need to be as technically inclined has a faster rate of adoption but the downside is that nobody is as technically inclined um

and also like there was like a natural schism right like all the all the sound money people got i guess for better or for worse got pushed out of bitcoin i guess some people saw that as a disappointment where um like we could we um do you feel like particular alignment with bitcoin like to say because this crypto world's very very tribal and when people get into the space the timing of when they get into space kind of impacts um how they perceive this base right so like people that got in in 2013 generally are bitcoiners more than they are ethereans and fewer people make that

the the pass over to ethereum later and later in time like do you wish that bitcoin was a good substrate uh for um like gaming type activities there's a few there are a few bitcoin gaming projects um gosh i can't remember it off the top my head but like uh i i just don't know if i think most of the bitcoin gaming efforts are like playing traditional games with like a bitcoin kickback almost like a right like a satoshi every

now and then yeah you know how like lolly rewards work where you have that one through plug-in and based on your like purchases you're get earning bitcoin as a reward um it seems like they're mostly like that where you can get this reward of bitcoin um based on gameplay which is pretty pretty interesting i think that's that's interesting still um but it's not as interesting in my opinion like creatively as what we can do with you know just the different combinations of smart contracts and interacting with people and um

the mayhem that could pursue across decentralized networks but it is uh you said the word permadeath yeah uh and i wanna i wanna go into that can you talk about the role of what permadeath is and talk about the role it plays in gaming well permanent can actually mean a few different things but um in this particular case i mean well are you familiar with like eve online i know the game i have not played it so in eve online i asked hilmer who is the