EP.54 [EN] - Felix Sim: Empowering Guilds with Salad Academy and GuildOS / 用 Salad Academy 与 GuildOS 为工会赋能 01:09:47

Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mabel Jiang, the host of 51%, a podcast series presented by Multicoin Capital. This show is the exploration of blockchain's rapid development across Asia, with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities, and operators based in China. My goal is to bring Eastern perspective to West and Western perspective to East, so you can better understand the crypto's unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

This podcast will feature a mix of English and Chinese discussions. The language you're hearing now will be the language I use for the rest of the podcast. Stay up to date with my latest episode by subscribing to this podcast. Thank you for listening.

Mabel Jang is a principal at Multicoin Capital. All opinions expressed by Mabel or other podcast guests are solely their opinion and do not represent the opinions of Multicoin Capital in any way. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as an inducement to make an investment or relied upon as investment advice. Multicoin Capital may at times hold positions in some of the tokens or companies discussed on this show. Hello everyone, welcome back to 51%. I'm your host, Mabel Jang.

Today, I'm excited to host the co-founder and project lead of Salad Ventures, Felix Sin, to be on our podcast. Hello, Felix. Hey, Mabel. How are you? Great, great. Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast. Finally, I can contribute to the content rather than just appreciate all the content that you've been sharing so far.

No problem. I guess before we jump into discussion, let's talk about your background. How did you get into crypto?

I got into crypto quite late actually compared to many of my friends and the people around me. I literally just got into crypto when I was introduced to Deribit which obviously allows you to trade, allows all of us to trade options on BTC or ETH and that was the first sort of one of the first major things that I did to get into crypto as they say.

And yeah, I mean, obviously one thing led to another. And from there, I then explored more about the ecosystem and about the other projects that's going on and came across this thing called Play to Earn, which at that time wasn't that popular actually. But I found that very intriguing and decided to dig more.

Got it. I didn't know you trade options. That's new to me. What were you doing before that, though? Meaning like your career? Oh, yeah. So I started my sort of professional career in a corporate bank doing FX sales trading.

in Singapore and then I moved on and joined a hedge fund also based in Singapore and I was doing everything over the years from back office to middle office to risk management to analyst work to all sorts of client relations and then when they moved me to the fund of funds team then I started doing a lot of

quant and qualitative analysis on the other funds. Yeah, so I've always had an interest in trading. I just never felt that it was supposed to be a career move for me. And then I moved to Dubai in 2008 and lived there for four years and worked in the DIFC, the Dubai International Financial Center. And I was doing a lot of regulatory work there. So

In simple terms, I helped financial institutions set up in the DIFC and help them work them through the process of getting regulated by the authority there. So did that for four years.

before I came back to Singapore in 2012. And of all things, decided to start an events company. So the only question that I know I will not have an answer for in this podcast is why did I start an events company? Don't know why I did that. Yeah, but we did it. And then it's specifically the events that I used to run in the team.

corporate events so we did a lot of team building family day festivals gala dinners it's all corporate events and all people employee engagement stuff

I met my wife along the way. She quit her job and joined that business and she's obviously been running it since. So since then, I think it's almost just over a decade now. The business is still doing pretty okay. And I was just looking at the numbers the other day and I realized that we've run over 2000 events and over the last decade, I think at least a million people have attended the events. So

That sort of got me very, very interested in human capital, in the way people work, in the way people are rewarded. And that, along with what I came across in the Play to Earn space last year, got me really, really motivated to start a project in this space.

That's super interesting. So I probably introduced you to Chris before, Chris Gonsalves from Community Gaming. Before he started Community Gaming, he was also running, it was not full-time, but he was also running kind of tournaments and events offline for gamers across New England and the United States. I definitely see a kind of a path leading towards Play to Earn at organizing events

guild and stuff coming from that event organizing space. So I thought that was a very interesting coincidence. Yeah, I think Chris is doing an amazing job at community gaming. And I think the parallel that you draw is very real. I think a lot of us, a lot of founders actually, not just in the crypto space, but a lot of founders tend to use past experiences to try and build something better, bigger,

And that's what I really enjoy about the crypto space. I like to say we get to use Web3 resources to build Web2 businesses. And I think all of us should actually be doing that.

Yeah, sometimes it's hard to really define what's Web 2 and Web 3. These days, these gags are used overly. It's actually hard for me to claim something as Web 2 because at the end, it's all business. But the way to organize the business, the form of it, sometimes it changes because the incentivization layer changes.

So now this leads to my question, what is Salad Ventures? And obviously your mission and vision. Yeah, I think the answer to that question

just subtly changes over time as we build. I still remember when you and I first met last year, Solid Ventures was nothing more than just a play-to-earn guild, right? And then we were doing so many things internally like the scripts that we wrote, that we used for our own guild, the training that we were running on Zoom, a six-day live Zoom training program, and

we're doing all of that internally, but at that time, Silent Adventures literally was just a guild. So,

obviously after we met and like so many times and discussed through what Salad was actually doing and what we could potentially achieve then I was inspired by you actually to make it into something a lot more institutionalized a lot bigger so that more people can be impacted by what we're building so I'd say Salad really is just it's a brand, it's a

It's a family of products that we will be building eventually. And what hasn't changed is me and my team, we really believe that, especially COVID, when it first hit all our shores two, three years ago, I think COVID has changed the way people work. And I believe that

there needs to be in this new way of work there needs to be new rules that's got to be new infrastructure new software new processes and new education so our mission really is to be able to contribute to these pillars and hopefully you know we're able to set a few good examples along the way and encourage more people to come into into this space and focus on building on this

Right. So you mentioned now salad is a suite of products. What are these pillars?

Yeah, so in the last few months, we've been building a lot of products. But the three that have already been launched are the first is our Guild. So we rebranded the Guild. It's no longer called Sellead Ventures for obvious reason. So the Guild is now called Apollo Squad. So Apollo Squad is our Guild.

of scholars. So we've got scholars playing different games, including Axie Infinity and Pagaxie, which is what most other guilds also have scholars playing. And that continues to run, that continues to grow.

But our focus primarily are on the two other pillars, the two other products, one of which is GuildOS. So GuildOS is a web-based dashboard tool that allows anybody to start, manage and scale a guild in any blockchain game that we integrate with. So at the moment, GuildOS already integrates with Axie Infinity, of course, as well as PergAxie.

And this third product is Sallad Academy. So Sallad Academy is the Udemy for GameFi and how it works, what it does is it teaches anybody who wants to learn how to play a game, a blockchain game properly to do so by going through different modules and then taking a quiz

And at the end of the quiz, if they pass it, they then get to mint a free NFT certificate. Great. Understood. So let's start with your, I guess, initial experience running the guild. How did you think about...

positioning yourself to differentiate from the other guild service provider or not service provider, like other guilds generally in the space. Because at that time when you came out, I think there were already some competitors.

Yeah, at that time there were already quite a few guilds because obviously we're not the first. But I saw that there were a few things that, a few processes that I would have done differently if I ran a guild. And the way we differentiated ourselves was primarily through our process. For example,

As in the past and even today, many guilds were hiring, were trying to find scholars on social platforms like Twitter. And the way they would do it is they would post on Twitter and they would say, you know, just like and retweet this post and follow our account. And then by the end of the day, we'll pick, you know, like 10 people to give scholarship accounts to.

I think that that was a very, very strange way of bringing scholars into a guild, especially during those days, it was very expensive. The capital expenditure for each account was very high. And I found it strange because I don't think, I mean, like if Multicoin was hiring for an analyst, you wouldn't go to your Twitter and say, just like and retweet the guys. And then part of the day, I'll send someone to Kyle, right? Like that would never, ever happen in the real world.

So I thought it was really strange. Why was it happening in a guild world? Of course, you can say that it's more risky to hire the wrong analyst for a venture capital fund rather than hiring a wrong scholar. But everything is relative, right? The impact if you keep hiring wrong scholars or keep bringing on wrong scholars to your guild is going to be very, very big.

so that was one thing that we changed immediately when we first started and the way we did it was we literally posted on job boards online those online job boards and wrote proper jds and and told them exactly who we are and what we need them to do and and how much we're going to pay so the the theory behind that was that you know scholars are

in my opinion, sort of playing these play to earn games for guilds because to them it's an income source. In other words, it's sort of like a job. It's like an online job, really. So if it were an online job,

then shouldn't we hire and interview them properly as if we were hiring and interviewing somebody locally? So that was what's going through my head. That's why our source for scholars were not people on Twitter or actual gamers. We were targeting people who were looking for jobs online, and that worked out very well because those group of people were very, very serious in delivering what they promised us.

So that's just step one. And then there are so many different steps, right? Like, for example, how we interviewed them differently. Our application form requires the scholars to complete a personality test as well as an IQ test. And there is a certain hurdle that we need them to overcome in our test before we even

consider their application and then after they they if they get through the application stage we then put them through a six-day live zoom training program that was before we launched salad academy and so that was done very very manually but it was sort of like a webinar style on zoom um and and we tracked them very very cap we tried to performance very carefully as well so i think in a nutshell we were a lot more

pedantic about our processes. We were very, very careful with regard to who we gave a scholarship account to. And then after we onboarded a scholar, we were also very hardworking in managing training and tracking the scholars. And I still remember at that time,

Somebody told me that we were one of the most difficult guilds in the world to get a scholarship from and the easiest to lose a scholarship, which is quite true because if they don't meet the mark after a warning or two, then we just let them go because there's always somebody else out there who also deserves this opportunity but is willing to put in more work.

Yeah, I remember when we first chatted, one thing you mentioned actually left a deep impression because at that time, I've encountered many other guilds. Many were trying to impress people with the number of talents they have. But rather, you mentioned you win without, not because you have the largest number of people or labor, but rather it's the quality, the ROI. And I think the deep impression

insights about how to manage people, how to better utilize all the capital, the human capital, so to speak, was very interesting. So then it really inspired me to suggest the idea of becoming a management system.

Yeah, this is, it's also very cultural, right? Because as you know, my team, my core team and I, we're all Singaporean and we're all based here. Most of us have lived here for our entire lives. And the culture in Singapore, as you are obviously familiar with, is we're a very small country. And I have never seen a factory with 10,000 people working in it in my life.

So I would never know how to manage a guild of 10,000 scholars, for example, 10,000 being an arbitrary number, but it's a very big number. But what we have seen and what we have grown up with in our life is we've seen small offices with 10 people doing the work of 200 people or 50 people doing the work of 10,000 people.

And the way that has worked in Singapore for the last 50, 60 years is the policymakers have constantly been investing in infrastructure and education because we just don't have the numbers here. And I think that has rubbed off on me a lot. And I thought, you know, what's the point of

I mean, if you really wanted to create social impact, I believe that you need to do it through education personally, and then you need to do it through by providing some kind of infrastructure. I think that is the way that you can scale social impact as opposed to just, you know, trying to recruit 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 scholars and then just handing them, let's say like a Pegasi account, right? Or something like that. That's,

It's what they say in the last podcast that I was on with DeFi Vader. Instead of giving a man a fish, it's the cliche, teach a man how to fish and pass him the tools and let him do it. I think that is more impactful to the space.

Absolutely. During the introduction of how this whole process works when you run the guild, you mentioned the course that you give people, the six-day course. Can you maybe elaborate on the process of the course of Sal Academy? How does that look like? And then how do you pick which games you give courses for?

So, if your listeners go to sellit.academy, they'll see the site. We've actually upgraded the infrastructure as well, so it's now running on the new platform, which is very good. And the way it works, I'll explain that first, is anybody can just go to sellit.academy to sign up for a free account.

They will then pick from our list of courses to take and courses are differentiated by different games and for some games there are more than one course because it might be a little bit more difficult to play or difficult to maximize earnings so then in that case we would create multiple courses for the same game

After they have picked the game or the course, they will then be presented with a list of modules. Let's say there are eight modules. It comes with slides, it comes with a training video recorded by my co-founder Wesley. The student would just literally go through each and every module.

At the end of the, let's say, eight modules, they will be presented with a quiz. They then have to complete that quiz. It all happens on Seller Academy. They complete that quiz. And if they pass, I believe we've adjusted the passing rate to slightly lower. I think it's 70%. Now it used to be 80% or 90%. So I just told him not to be too Singaporean and to be a bit more forgiving. So they lowered the pass rate. They get 70% of the questions right.

They then get certified by Sallet Academy And the way certification works is the platform first whitelists them Whitelists their email address that they use to register their account with This list of whitelisted emails are then sent to our partner which is obviously another multi-coin portfolio project Project Galaxy

We then, we work very, very closely with the guys at Galaxy. This list is then sent to their team. Their team then...

sends out an email there to invite the student to go to their site to mint a free NFT certificate. So thanks to the team at Project Galaxy, they've sort of completely taken away the need for us to even have to hire anybody in-house just to create this NFT minting technology.

So we integrate very well with them. And the student then gets to go to the Galaxy site and mint their free NFT. And these NFTs are all custom designed in-house by our team at Sellit.

And they're non-transferable, non-tradable, so it literally just sits on their Metamask account that they use to mint and they would then use that to show to either our managers at Apollo Squad, which is our guild, or to some other guilds as they apply for a scholarship there. So that's sort of how the entire process works.

we forgot to how we pick and choose games to sort of launch on the academy it's the first the first criteria is always it's got to have a it's got to have a working game

Because the Academy is a bit more like a launchpad for games that already work, that are already live. It is not a shield pad. So the game needs to be at least on the test net. We prefer it to be a main net, but otherwise test net would also work.

And we'll then go through the, we'll have multiple meetings with the team. So my content team and led by Wesley will then go on to have a few calls with their content team, with their game team, and basically go through the ins and outs of their game. How do you get started? What wallet do you need? How do you fund it? Where do you get testnet tokens if it's on testnet and so forth?

So it is very, very tutorial-based to make sure that we don't miss out on anything. And if anybody takes that course, they will know exactly how to get started in that game. And then part two will be how do you best play this game and how do you get a higher score, for example, and therefore make the most money. So we've had many, many games, and we constantly have games coming to us wanting to launch certificates on Salad Academy.

But the problem there is that, as you may also know, most of these games have spent more time on their white paper than the actual game itself. So if there's no game, there's nothing we can do to launch on the Academy. So that's the biggest criteria.

And then the next criteria that we look at before we decide to launch a game on Seller Academy is we do a lot of qualitative due diligence on the team. So we look at who's backing them. We ask around our own cap table, our own community of investors,

obviously we ask you as well and then you know if we get a good feeling that this is not a you know not a rug pull or not a potential rug pull or these guys are actually serious about what they're doing then we spend a lot of our time and resources to launch the certificates for them on on Satellite Academy. So

You mentioned this very old, simple concept, even cliche concept of giving people, teach them how to fish. So how do you think about Salad Academy and Guild OAS, the relationship between them and then the potential, I guess, growth loop look like?

It's super, super connected, these two products. In fact, the three pillars or three products that we have right now, Apollo Squad, GitOS, and Seller Academy are very, very much interconnected. In the XYZ to earn space or in the...

work 3.0, as I like to coin it, you still need to have sort of like a, you need to have a labor force. You need to have a group of people willing to do work for money, obviously. So that is, to us, that is Apollo Squad. Apollo Squad is our organized labor force. And then, you know, we need to then show them and teach them and train them what to do. And that would be what we do at Salad Academy.

And for GitOS, after we send them off to get work done, whatever work eventually is, we need to be able to manage that labor force. We need to be able to track their performance. We need to be able to pay them. We need to be able to move people around, move assets around. So that's what GitOS does.

And the way we see this work is once we open up GuildOS to other guilds, which we intend to do so this year, the growth loop would be a lot more obvious at this stage.

If you think about the stakeholders that are in the SILED ecosystem, they are, of course, the game studios, the guilds, as well as the gamers, the players themselves, the scholars. And the way it works is right now we're putting a lot of time and resources behind building SILED Academy and getting more game partnerships

to launch Certificates 4 on the Academy. So we start with the games because they need help to explain the gameplay. They need help to sort of westernize many of the explanation that they have. Because many of these games are built in Asia or Southeast Asia mostly. So

They come to us and they need help. They've seen our past content, they've seen our past certificates. And that's sort of how we start the relationship. So we start with the game first. And then these games, of course, would have already got other guild partnerships.

and some other informal guilds, right? So, you know, a group of friends or just one guy with, you know, 20, 30 accounts and then he wants to start a guild but he doesn't call himself anything. But these games obviously already have the community that contains these people, the guild owners or the guild managers, right?

And then we work with the games to introduce GuildOS to these managers because we're going to integrate this game into GuildOS as well, which means it is easier for this manager to create a scholarship specifically for this game.

In other words, think about it. If there were two games and let's say they were both tower defense style games, right? So let's say gameplay is very similar. Tokenomics and all that are very, very similar as well.

But one game is integrated into GuildOS, which means if you wanted to create a guild around this game, you could literally just come onto GuildOS, pick the game, tell us how many accounts you want, and all that will be created for you. You fund those wallets, we'll pull the scholars in, the certified scholars in from ScytheLite Academy, and fill up your guild in, let's say, 30 minutes. Versus

another game that is not integrated into the salad ecosystem, what you would then have to do is you'd have to go onto Twitter and write a post which goes along the lines of like and reshare my post, guys. And by the end of the day, I'm going to give you 10 random scholarships, right? And then if you find those 10, you then have to reach out to them one at a time.

You have to do an interview, you have to train them, you have to make sure that they're not going to steal your NFTs or rock your account or something. You then have to go and create 10 different wallets and 10 different accounts. You have to fund all of them manually. If you're working with a wallet like Ronin, you cannot even import or create multiple accounts in the extension. You literally got to delete the extension and reinstall it.

So imagine doing that 10 times, right? And then sending out these accounts to these scholars and then on a daily basis, logging onto these accounts, tracking their performance, and then making sure that they are hitting the targets that you set. Then just to make things more realistic, the next day, one of them is not going to turn up for work.

And you wouldn't even know. So by the end of day two, you would have had an opportunity cost of one account not being played by a scholar because he just decided not to play that day.

So then you go through the whole process of firing the guy and then going back onto Twitter and then, you know, again, all over again. And then now you're saying, oh, this is great. I'm doing this work. And as a guild manager, I'm probably making about, let's say, $50 a day, right? That's $1,500 a month, let's say, earnings that this guild manager can get. And then he divides it by the number of hours that he actually spends per day managing this group of 10 people.

So now he's better off actually going to drive for Uber, Grab or working at McDonald's, right? Then become a guild manager. So all of that, it's super, super time consuming. And then at the end of the day, it doesn't make sense to run a guild anymore. I think in the past we talked about what the guild managers actually care about the most. What do they actually want?

I think everyone starts a venture for different reasons. But from what I see, most guild managers that I've observed at arm's length are in it for the money, which is not wrong because that's what capitalism is about, right? It's really about making money and okay, if they create value along the way, it's good.

Um, but they start guilds to make money and, um, they, I think one problem that I see a lot of these new guild managers are not, um, have not considered properly is, um,

they just look at the quantum, they just say, "Yeah, I've got a thousand scholars, so I'm making like, I don't know, $15,000 a month or something," then it's great. But if they literally divide it by the number of hours that they spend to manage a guild of a thousand scholars without a technology like GuildOS, then based on an hourly basis, it is no longer worth it.

I think that's a huge problem that we will be able to solve once we open GitOS to the other managers. And it doesn't matter whether they're a manager with five scholars or 50 or 500 scholars, it makes no difference to GitOS. We'll be able to help them manage it and therefore make more profits at the end of the day while creating a bigger impact.

Players, on the other hand, I think, want to clearly just want to make money. They need a job and it's really easy job to play a game regardless of what game it is, play a game and get paid. And most of these players don't depend on their scholarship as the only source of income.

So it's a supplementary source of income that lets them buy the next iPhone or shop at Zara or something or buy some gifts for their family. So I think with this, with what we're building here at Sellit, it helps to improve the entire ecosystem. It makes everything more efficient. And I actually believe that it makes everybody more money if they follow a proper process. It's more efficient.

Right. Super fascinating. I think you touched upon a lot of interesting things that I wanted to comment on. I think the first thing was that

Apollo Squad, it's really the power user of your own protocol. Well, I guess I call Salad Academy and GuildOS a protocol, but it's not the strict defining protocol as like the Web3 protocol, but more like a standard that you're creating, a framework that allow everyone else to use. But Apollo Squad is the first power user for that. And I think

that that approach actually allows you to improve GuildOS and Sal Academy before going out to the world and that everyone else use. So I thought that was very interesting. So I definitely see, um,

the kind of point that you know having the management tool having the education toolkits but then you know at the same time you also have your own kind of it's almost like an experimental organization for yourself to try out whether some approach works or not so i thought that was very interesting

The other thing you talk about, I guess the other thing that inspired me was that Sal Academy and GuildOS essentially kind of becomes this discoverability tool for the games. So like, in addition to the games itself being very fun and having like very good PR or whatever, like being on top of this, like can also give them a lot more exposure.

to the other guild managers and whatnot. So I thought that's also super interesting. However, I do have a question for here though, because think about all of these great games that you're integrating. I'm sure everyone else also know about it. I mean, there is a chance that sure, like someone decided to, you decided to integrate someone and then like nobody else knows about it, but this chance is relatively small.

So how about the guild managers who want to, I guess, be the discoverer of a new game that has the high potential in the future, but it's not existing yet on Salad or GuildOS? I'm sure you have thought about this. So is the question, how can they approach us? How can they find us?

Um, not find it, but more like, let's say I want to, I want, I want to use GuildOS as my, like, SaaS to manage my guild for a game that you do not integrate or you do not have the course for.

All right. Okay. It's, well, yeah, it would just take a bit of time to integrate, but it's not going to be that complicated anymore in the future. I mean, the most complicated game that we've integrated, so right now we've integrated with two games in the last few months of development, Axie and Pagaxie.

And for both of these games, I believe will be the most difficult games to integrate with because we don't know the teams there. We've got no special treatment from them. We're literally just using whatever tools that's available. We are setting up our own nodes to get the data from their chain.

or from their respective chains. So it's very manual still to set up at that time. But I think moving forward, especially if a game, for example, if a guild was already playing a game, they would most probably already know the team at the game. So all they need to do is make an introduction and...

We will similarly to the team at Project Galaxy, we'll also be building our own APIs for GuildOS. So we'll have an API slash SDK that will then allow games to integrate with GuildOS very easily. So the plan is to sort of flip it around and saying, look, instead of us writing every single line of code and trying to integrate every new game that we come across or that's been introduced to us,

We'll write the API, we'll come up with the SDK and send that to the games instead and let games integrate to GuildOS rather than for us to go out and actively write code to integrate every different game. So we'll be creating the standard with regard to how games, if they want to integrate into our software, what they need to do.

So that's what we're planning to do to be able to scale the integration process. I see. So you're doing pretty much like a do things, don't scale kind of model right now. Start with the more manual approach and then later on open up and become a standard. I see. That's interesting. You touched upon what the players want and what the guild manager wants. I guess...

The interesting thing is, for all of these, it's similar to how the guild managers have a lot of choices. They can choose whatever games they can. And then same for the players, they can also go in whatever guilds and hop around and say, "I like this one, so I'm going to stay." Or, "I don't like this guild, I'm just going to try out here and then leave."

How do you see, from your observation, because you also previously managed guilds before, from your perspective, how does the player really think or what does their psychology look like when they're choosing the guilds in addition to financial turnouts? Because I'm sure the financial turnout is also very, very important. But given that there are so many guilds, I'm sure a lot of guilds can offer them the same amount of money.

So what else are they thinking? Yeah, so the thought process behind a player before they go out and when they are going out to find a scholarship is they apply for every single guild that they can find. That is smart and that is something that they do.

Now the problem there then becomes attrition, right? Like how do, what do players want in order to continue staying in a guild? And I found that a lot of these scholars actually want a sense of community. They want a sense of fellowship, right?

with their peers, whether it is with other scholars in the same guild or with their guild managers. So they're always looking for this kind of affirmation that they are wanted, they feel that they are important. It's very emotional, because like you rightfully pointed out, there's so many

There's so many guilds out there. And, you know, it's obviously one day it's going to be, there is going to be some kind of equilibrium where if it's Axie Infinity, this is how much you get paid. If it's Pagaxie, this is how much you get paid. If it's Happyland, this is how much you get paid, for example. So I don't think pay or salary or price is the point. I think the main factor that,

scholars are looking for over and above getting paid on time is a sense of community. That is for sure something that all of them are looking for. Interesting. So I guess it's the same for every single organization that involves human. I think the sense of ownership and loyalty always plays a very important role.

Now let's talk about GuildOS a little bit more. What are the functions as of today that you're thinking to offer from GuildOS? And if you were to manage a guild today, I guess you are, what are some of the more sophisticated functions on your wishlist to build, to be included in a guild management tool?

Yeah, so the current version of GuildOS is called GuildOS Core, which literally means the main things that, the main modules that are required in order to save at least 100 to 200 hours a week off the hands of a manager or a team of managers to manage a guild. So right now we have definitely every single scholar management module

feature that you need so you could create scholars obviously edit them put in the details change the account scholars can log in as well to check their performance and check their payroll pay slips which is the second module which is payroll so in payroll

Our module allows us to be very, very flexible in how we pay. So for example, we'll say in the game of Axie Infinity, we would pay them, let's say, 50% of the earnings. In this case, SLP. We'll pay them 50% of SLP every week if they hit a certain baseline, for example. And these are sort of rules that we can already set in GitOS.

and we'll also say at the end of the month, if they earn, let's say, 10,000 SLPs, then we'll pay them an additional 2,000 SLP, for example. Payroll also allows us to

make salary payments on a periodic basis. So we can do that daily, we can do that weekly or monthly, anytime or at home as well. So the manager can log into GuildOS and they would say, so for scholars group one to five,

I want to pay them today. And the manager can log in and just literally click on the group of scholars that they want to pay and hit pay. Payments, we have also...

done. So you could pay them in the in-game utility token. So let's say again for simplicity sake, we use Axie. So in Axie, if you want to pay your scholars in SLP to their Ronin address, you can choose to do so. If you decide to pay half of them in SLP and the other half in XRP, for instance, we have also integrated with the FTX API.

and you just need to create a sub account in your guild's FTX account, put in the API key for that specific sub wallet, and we'll be able to send out payments from that account to your scholars as well. And then

The most important yet the most boring thing or action in running a play to earn guild is the claiming of the in-game tokens. So SLP and let's say Viz from Pagaxi allows you to claim every 14 days or so. I think most games are sort of using a very similar model.

And so, you know, with 10 scholars, and if you claim everything on the same day, it's fine. You claim it on the, let's say the 10th of every month or every 10 days, you literally log in to claim every account. But you still have to do it 10 times, right? So log in, claim, log out, log in again, claim, log out, do that 10 times, 50 times, 100 times, depending on how many scholars you have. And you've got to do that every, let's say, 14 days for Axie. What the feature that we have,

in Git OS is it's a background process. So what this background process does is every day it goes through all your scholars' wallets

And if there is any wallet that is claimable today, it would just simply make the claim. So it would withdraw the SLP from the Scholar's Game account into the Scholar's Game wallet, or it would withdraw the Viz from, again, the Pegasi account into an ETH wallet. So...

that is done every day in the back so you don't have to see it so literally every morning when you get up as the manager you would pull up your guild's treasury account treasury wallet and just see how much money you've earned overnight that's already claimed back to the wallet so those are the four or five features that has saved our HR team of three people at least 100 hours a week

already and then of course that's the tracking part of what we do. I tend to downplay the tracking of the performance of our scholars in GuildOS because

There's so many people who say there are just so many scholarship management tools out there, what's the difference between GuildOS and all the other scholarship management tools out there? And I'd like to ask just one very simple litmus test question, and that question is: do those tools require you as the user to provide private keys of your scholar accounts, of your Guild treasury accounts?

for the game, does that tool require you to provide private keys before they allow you to use it? And 100% of the answer is no. So the next question that I have is that if they don't have the private keys to your Scholar accounts, then how can they manage it?

In other words, many of the tools that's been promoted out there that says that they are a P2E guild management tool is not really a tool. Most of them are just glorified dashboards. They look really great, but they're literally just pulling from the game APIs and displaying data in a more beautiful way. That's really what it is. There is no management. You cannot...

via the tool, claim your SLPs or claim your VIFs. You cannot pay your scholars directly on that page, on that tool. They normally say, oh, they've got another script on GitHub that lets you do that, but you've got to download Node.js, you've got to do it on your computer because we don't want to take your private keys and blah, blah, blah. So to me, I think that is really a huge, huge difference. And that explains why, like you rightfully pointed out,

we still continue to run a guild because we are eating our own dog food. If the code doesn't work, if GuildOS gets hacked, I think we have the most to lose. We'll lose everything if that happens. So we take all that very, very seriously here at Salad.

That's super interesting. I like how you think very deeply about what's considered management versus not. I think this

At this stage, we are still at the phase where there are a lot more guilds coming out. Maybe there's some differentiation. We are already seeing some verticalization of guilds. Now we are already past the phase where everyone just go into Axe Infinity and say we have some differentiation, but it's all on Axe Infinity. Today, we are already seeing that. But still, the level of management that we are seeing is not the same.

not yet there. So I'm very looking forward to the next phase for sure. I have a very fundamental question here to ask you about all of these players. I'm sure a lot of people who are from the traditional space also are very confused. So this trend of, you know, pay first to play, it's something, you know, seems to be becoming more and more mainstream.

um, versus I think what people are used to are, um, free to play. It's completely different kind of, um, mentality or ideology. Do you think free to play is still going to be more dominant later on? Um, or do you think this is a paradigm shift that, um, like our industry is going through and then it's going to just stay here in this way? Um,

I'm curious your take here. I know this is very controversial. There's no right or wrong answer.

Thanks for that disclaimer because there is no right or wrong answer because we only know when we're dead, right? I mean, it's going to take, it's a long, long, long shift, I think. It's like, I don't know, it's like asking me if anybody would be reading books on the internet like 20 years ago, right? I think both models will coexist for a few very basic reasons. One is,

in the play-to-earn space today, there are no games that are both profitable and fun at the same time. They are either fun to play or they are profitable and therefore not so fun to play. The reason is because it takes time to build a good project. And games are...

like they're difficult to build, they're really difficult to build. It's not easy. There's a lot of planning that has to go behind it. So it's hard. So I think that both models will coexist for many, many more years. And they will attract different types of players to them.

Not everybody wants to play games for money, right? Even if you gave them money, they may not even want to play the game. If only it were that easy to start a game studio and make it successful. It doesn't work that way. So I don't think the lure of making money is a strong one. I think games still have to focus on

not the play to earn aspect, but the actual game itself. I think games need to be addictive

you know, people tend to say that I've heard other guilds, you know, say that this game is, the art is really nice. And then, you know, the gameplay looks really fun and all that. And then they ape in, right? And then they create a medium post and they ape in with 100k, 200k and,

I'm thinking these guys are crazy. The game's not even live. You don't even know what it feels like to play and you're aping in. But there are still investors like that and I'm sure there are going to be players like that as well. But if you ask me,

what I think, what the advice that I give to studios, because as you can imagine, we're talking to games every other day now, multiple times a day sometimes. And the advice or the questions that I start with and the advice that I eventually give is, I think the game studio needs to decide on whether they want to make the game fun to play or profitable to play, because right now they can't have both. There's just not enough time.

And in order to make it fun to play, they have to focus on designing some form of addiction to that game. For example, for a period of time, I was addicted to Mini Royale, which

which is a first-person shooter, like Counter-Strike Clash of Duty kind of game online, right? By far away on the Solana chain. But I mean, you can't earn from the game. I mean, I've not played for a while now, but I literally was playing that game in between my fundraise calls, right? So in between calls with investors, I was just playing that game.

I'm just trying to keep myself awake, right? It's so boring to be saying the same thing over and over again to so many different people. But anyway, that's past now. Yeah, but I was addicted to that game. It's very, very low poly, which means the graphics not amazing, but it's like Counter-Strike. I love playing first person shooter games and it was fun and it was addictive. So I kept playing it without being paid, right?

So I think game studios need to design addictive games, not just fun games or games that look nice. It's got to be addictive so people keep going back. And then at the same time, I think games should also stop, especially blockchain games, blockchain games in particular. They should absolutely stop talking about tokenomics.

whenever they try and sort of design the game, I think they should talk more about the game economy as opposed to the token economy because I think that if they keep focusing on just the token economy or the tokenomics of their game project, it would either fail at launch or it would die a slow death because I think they've put their focus on the wrong thing.

Imagine if they design a nice game economy, a proper game economy that is circular, that sort of loops around, then the tokenomics should work itself out. But I think, again, that's another problem that I see with games, but I suppose that's a different chat for a different day.

But very interesting comments. I actually have some different opinions here, but I guess we're not exactly disagreeing with each other. I think first of all, in-game economy should be just tokenomics there. I guess what you're saying is about...

what you're saying was about more like how you use the governance and token and whatnot. But let's use Axie as an example. I think Axie, the SLP, for example, like the problem with that is like there's not enough burn and everyone knows that. Like if someone were to kind of

redesign x and whatever there are a ton of places where you can add burns of the g um it's not gst i was thinking about step and then make it fun and whatever like i was going to use step in as the flip example where like the the gst like you have to burn it all the time and then

then that's like when you fix the shoes and if you and you upgrade the shoes um and even like when you open the loot box whatever there's a ton of places but then

Because of the randomness within a game, which is the most fun part of every single game. People love opening the blind box or whatever. It's just like human nature. It makes the burn of the earning a lot more fun. So I feel like the in-game economy at the end still is about the tokenomics. Because if you were talking about the spending...

like whatever thing that's being spent in the game, it is the spending token versus I guess like, yes, if it's governance token, that's a different story. So I guess like that was a nuance that I was going to comment it on. The other thing, the other thing I was going to kind of respond to, to what you're saying about the, like, it can't, it can't be,

What were you saying? It can be fun, but then, or it can either be fun or either something that you play. Profitable, yeah. Yeah, I think it also depends because I think for people who pay first to play, like basically you have to buy an NFT first

to play, right? That's like what the, um, axiom infinity is. That's what step N is, whatever. Um, that's, that's something, um, you, you definitely, um, I guess care about a profitability that more at the beginning than the fun part.

But I think for any of that kind of game, it allows the game to start very fast and then iterate very fast. Because in the traditional studio model, you'll have to raise money from somewhere or just get the capital from somewhere. And you have a very long cycle of iterating. And then you probably spend seven years before going into...

the public. And then all of a sudden there are some bucks and then that, that just go GG. Like that's a very problematic approach. Um, I think, you know, which game I was talking about, maybe you don't, but, um, because in the Nintendo one, but, um, I think the key thing about like this whole thing is, is that, um, I think while, um,

You could get money initially from either the NFT sales or some sort of like initial liquidity bootstrapping approach. I think it is important to have the game to be launched at the same time. Without a game, gameplay, buying the NFT, it's just kind of nuts. I do agree with you on that.

But I think at the same time, like, you know, making a game fun to play, earning is part of the like addictiveness. Like today, every day these days, I go out to run because of

the amount of money I can earn for step in. But later on, I realized that all of those money I earned, I went back and burned from the upgrading, from like opening the loot box or from opening the box, like a lot of those stuff. Repairing your shoes, repairing your sneakers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of those. So I realized that I actually don't earn that much, but I, I think,

I get some sort of externality, which is health. There are a lot of people talking about like, oh, they lost weight and whatever because of that. So I think at the end, it's about if you can earn additional profitability, at least there's some sort of positive externality from the incentivized activity that you are doing, which you used to don't do.

StepN is a great example, right? I mean, like when they, so there are a lot of, there are a lot of outlets that they can sort of, that players can actually deploy their earnings at GSD too. But when I, you know, one example, another example that I give is for example, like Diablo or D1, D2, D3, where you would be, you know, you would be in a dungeon and you would be hacking monsters, right? So exchanging your time

to kill monsters in the dungeon and then you know one monster then drops like a piece of iron and then another monster drops 10 pieces of gold for example you can take this iron the iron mineral and the 10 pieces of gold you go to goldsmith the goldsmith

not goldsmith, you go to the blacksmith, or you technically go to the goldsmith too, but okay, so you go to the blacksmith and then the blacksmith creates a shield for you, for example, right? And then you can take this shield and list it on a marketplace and then now sell it for, let's say, 100 pieces of gold.

So now this guy who actually spent his time to play the game and by chance he got that piece of iron and he got that 10 pieces of gold, he was able to forge a new item which then sold for 100 pieces of gold. I think in a traditional game, in a game of, if a game economy was basic,

the additional 90 pieces of gold would have come from the treasury, the game's treasury or the project's treasury. But in this case, it just came from another player's wallet, right? So there was no burn technically. I mean, the only gold that was burned was 10 pieces of gold, right? The initial 10 pieces of gold and a piece of iron ore. But this player then got 90 or got 100 pieces of gold back.

But this difference in 90 pieces of gold did not come from the treasury, it came from another player. So if a game economy was designed this way, then the utility token does not become inflationary, right? Because there's just no need for the treasury to keep sending out tokens.

then you don't have to worry about burn mechanisms, right? Because games need to worry about burn mechanisms because their tokens by nature are designed to be, or the game itself are designed to make their tokens inflationary because every time you do something, it will reward you. You do something, it will reward you. Great. But what if they could build on the storyline, build on the

the plot uh think of more items uh like the way that step n is doing it right like you it's not only buying loot boxes and then getting sneakers um different speed different different optimal speed not just different speed right um and then there's jewels that you know you can sort of add bling to your sneakers right so so these are things and then eventually imagine if you could sort of like you know there'll be a marketplace for jewels and then

these jewels will be sold, let's say the currency is GST as opposed to USDT for example, which is what's happening with Pegasi. So Pegasi

definitely will be super inflationary like Axie and then we're just going to be in as long as it makes sense to and then we will not unless something changes. But I think StepN is going absolutely the right way in how the team's thinking about the economy rather than tokenomics. I think sometimes

Everyone just says, whenever you talk about token, they say it's tokenomics, but it's not, right? It's really, you're designing the game. Your game studio designed the game. And think of more creative ways that people can play the game. And if you make the jewels,

a lot more attractive. For example, if you had jewels, then you'll be earning faster, not more, but faster, for example. And then these jewels cannot be bought except from the marketplace and it can only be sold. It will only be sold by another player. And then now it becomes very circular. It's a closed circular economy. There is a loop that happens when one player

create something, he puts it on a marketplace, it is sold for a higher value but none of these extra tokens are coming out of the game's treasury. If I design a game, that's exactly how I would do it.

Yeah, you probably don't know about the gems that you collect in the step-in thing. You actually could synthesize three similar gems together and then upgrade to the next level. The what? Yeah, and the percentage of the success is only 35% because I just synthesized yesterday and I was like praying that it doesn't get killed. Yeah, it was really funny. You should go try it.

Yeah, exactly. It's all about the randomness. People love randomness at the end of the day. So we are at almost towards the end of our pod. I just wanted to ask you one last question. You mentioned this word, XYZ to earn a few times. I think we also talked about it in our conversation.

So looking from a larger scale, how do you see Salad Ventures serves the larger Web3 space and platform of XYZ to earn? Yeah, so this future is, as I write up my timeline to myself, it looks more like a 10 to 15 year future. So it's a really, really big project that we're building over the next decade or so.

But I think fundamentally, I've said this a few times, you've said this to me a few times, I think the fundamentals don't change. Whether it's play to earn, X, Y, Z to earn, the fundamentals of good work 3.0,

ecosystem involves three things it involves a labor force in our case it is apollo squad for play to earn it involves the education aspect which in our case again it's solid academy you need to teach people how to do things you need to teach them how to do things properly

So the education pillar is important. And lastly, the infrastructure pillar of managing people, managing work, managing processes, paying them, auditing, stuff like that. The infrastructure pillar, in our case, we've built GuildOS, will apply, I believe, in any X, Y, or Z to earn vertical income.

Obviously, this will evolve over time. But in order for XYZ to earn, to happen, or to be more efficient, you need, number one, you need people. Number two, you need training. And number three, you need infrastructure and software. Awesome. I guess the simple principle always applies to everything. It was a blast chatting with you, Felix. Thank you for participating. Yeah, it was fun.

Thanks for having me. We should do it again next time. All right, cool. Awesome. Thank you. All right. Thanks. Bye. Bye-bye.