“The Rule reads as follows: When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”
Today I’ve been at Coin-Op 2023, something like a friendly Fight (or Hug) Club for startups and game investors, and with a strong web3 angle.
I’ve made tons of notes too. The only problem is the conference enforces Chatham House rules so if I want to be invited back — and I do — I can’t give you any attributed quotes, the point being this freedom enables people to talk freely and impart information without fear of Crypto Twitter.
In other words, I could tell you who said it, but someone would kill me.
Actually — even under these conditions — most people self-censor. But there were a couple of real juicy zingers from well-known OGs that will have to remain unreported.
Still, I hope when people self-report their attendence, that’s not an issue! If nothing else, it was nice to meet up with folks, some of whom I’ve not seen for awhile.
More generally, it was also interesting to take the sector’s temperature given that the first Coin-Op conference was held at the height of the bull market in November 2021.
Many of the 100-odd attendees have since experienced tougher times; having to cut headcount and conserve cash and delay fundraising for better times, while some have shut down their businesses completely.
That stated the overall feeling — and I may be biased as it’s my gut feeling too — was most web3 founders are in this for the long haul and — in some mysterious way — they’re almost happy to have the opportunity to test their convictions through harsher conditions.
“It was too easy to raise money in 2022,” commented one CEO, who raised a seed round at what he himself confessed was an over-generous valuation.
However, there was also what I felt to be a raised level of debate about how best to add blockchain to games. This ranged from what could now be ranked in terms of sentiment as “web2.1” through to “web 3.1”.
By this I mean that those projects looking to go mass-market are planning to not expose their users to anything overtly blockchain or crypto at all. This approach is characterized as ‘let’s onboard grandma’.
Meanwhile others are increasingly not bothered about UX and friction and are looking to run as much of their game and its assets fully on-chain.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of games
Obviously, there’s a world inbetween these extremes but I think people are realising that creating value — whether cultural, emotional or financial — is most sustainable when it comes bottom-up from the community, not top-down from the developer.
This means putting more things onchain and more aggressively leveraging the still-novel potential of crypto and digital assets.
Related to this was interest in building systems that maximize the optionality of emergence, both in terms of what users can experience and what they can build on top of what the game developer is providing.
Of course, every public blockchain inherently contains the opportunity for user-generated content and that’s something the more on-chain projects are also leaning into.
So while plenty of market uncertainty remains, I felt that existing blockchain games are better understanding exactly what it is they’re doing. And in these times that feels like progress.
Have you installed crypto security layer Stelo for Metamask yet?