Itheum hosted its most recent audio AMA on Wednesday 8 June at 12:00 PM UTC. Community members joined us on our Discord channel to listen to Mark & Praveen Paul, our founders, talk with Ethan Ng, CEO and Co-Founder of WondeHero, about the recent partnership and all things Web 3 gaming.
We want to thank everyone who joined — it’s always great to connect with our community members and fans!
Below is a full recap of the event. You can also listen to the recording on our official Spotify channel.
Mark
Great, good to see everybody, alright I think we can get started and then as people rock in, we can welcome the new participants as well, so everybody, thanks so much for joining us at this awesome AMA. Today is quite special for us because we have a guest joining us. Today’s ama is with WonderHero, and we have Ethan from the WonderHero team, who has so greatly taken the time to join us; we’ve been having a great time working with the WonderHero team, so firstly, welcome Ethan.
Ethan
Thank you, thank you for having me; it’s, you know, such a pleasure to be here, and we’ve got so much that we want to discuss and talk about as well. I can’t wait.
Mark
Great man, great to have you here. So my name is Mark Paul I’m actually talking from the Itheum handle, but yes this is Mark here. I’m the founder of Itheum, and with us today, we’ve got our co-founder Praveen as well. Praveen, do you want to do a quick intro?
Praveen
Yes, sure thing. Hi everyone, nice to be here and also great to have Ethan on board. You know, we’ve actually got a bit of common ground between us, I suppose, as projects, and it’s really nice to have you here as a guest speaker, and we’re looking forward to it. We’ve got a lot of questions, so it’s good to see a lot of community participation. There’s an A.M.A. text questions group there, so if you want to look at the questions on there, we’d be answering questions from that.
Mark
Yes, absolutely and guys and girls, remember there is a price as well so please correct me if I’m wrong; we’ve got four prizes for the top four questions, who will receive a $50 price if I’m not mistaken.
Praveen
Yes that’s right, so the top four will get a $50 price each so that’s what we’re hoping, so let’s ask questions, ask good questions and let’s get the ball rolling.
Mark
Cool, very cool, alright guys, so well, what we thought we’ll do is before we jump into the questions, we’ll first very quickly cover what this partnership between Itheum and WonderHero is about. So we’ll very quickly cover that and we’ll get a take from praveen as well as Ethan especially from Ethan as we want to get his take on this partnership and then we’re going to jump straight into the question so we won’t take too long with this intro but i think it’s pretty important we set the context so a couple of probably about a month back we started talking with wonderhero and we had we were discussing certain sort of requirements within the web 3 gaming space and the guild the web 3 gaming guild space and one thing that became pretty obvious is that gamers within this space they were generating a lot of data and especially as they move between games and they move between games they were leaving this huge footprint of data on chain as well as off chain and it became pretty evident that Itheum NFTs data avatar technology which effectively represents in this case a gamer could be used to track this gamer around right so Itheum has this concept of data adapters which can literally ,plug into off chain and on-chain data sources and track the gamer’s movements and the player’s movements and then attach it to their NFMe ID soul bound avatar and this is effectively how the idea of the game a passport came about so we have been talking to Ethan and the team for a while and we thought wow let’s just let’s integrate let’s coordinate an awesome partnership and provide the wonderhero ecosystem the game as well as the guilds that you know Wonderhero are associated with this gamer passport enabling for the first time in history a gamer to own their data their web 3 data as they move between games and guilds so this is going to be a super cool product we’ve already started building it and we got some pretty excited exciting news to share with you guys as well so with that i’ll get a quick insight from Praveen on this and then we’ll get a quick we’ll get an insight from Ethan from wonderhero’s perspective as well praveen over to you
Praveen
Thanks, Mark. I think you sort of covered the major aspects of it, Mark, so it’s an exciting partnership, our very first partnership as a project, so obviously that’s quite key for us, and we’re very thrilled that it is WonderHero. Wonderhero is a portfolio project of Morningstar Ventures. We’ve both got the same investors, so it always helps when we have, you know, the same investors helping us build synergies between all of the investors’ portfolios. I think that’s what opened the door for us to work together with Ethan and his team and then look at future partnerships as well with guilds which is something that we’d be announcing in the coming weeks as well, so I’ll hand it over to Ethan I think Ethan can give his view on this as well.
Ethan
Thanks guys right so you know like from one of heroes perspective I think we have majority of our players experiencing web 3 for the first time you know when they are playing this game on Wonderhero they need a game account which is standard from web 2 and now they also need a metamask wallet and then from there they get the experience buying NFTs that they own for the first time and they get to upgrade their NFT they get to have pretty good you know gaming experience with us and so from players perspective right this fascinating web 3 world is just it’s just scratching the surface right and then from one hero’s point of view we are in no rush to scale right we are dedicated here to build a great product and you know we want to create more depth for the game as well so from a player’s perspective now that you’ve got NFTs that you own and you’re playing a decentralized game at the same time with this this new concept of data that you own players can now choose to do so much more with their data and also guild will have this choice as well and now suddenly it opens up a new spectrum of things that we can do together right with Itheum on the possibilities in terms of the game’s data so now when you’re playing the game you’re playing to earn alright you’re saving up some tokens but at the same time when you actually up into i mean we’re going to talk more about this later on but now suddenly with your game data you’ll be able to get some additional tokens from the data that you own think about it right you’re playing the game you’re creating data out that you own and now with this data that you own you get to mine more tokens because it is of value to other parties today in web 2 you know the data that we supposedly have on facebook on twitter doesn’t belong to us nothing belongs to us right and now the fascinating new world is what today’s ama is going to be all about and how this partnership is still going to shape up in the near future right so that’s a pretty long introduction but i thought this is pretty exciting and also to share about this scope as well.
Mark
Thank you absolutely, man; I mean, this is a new right like we have gaming and gamers of these participants who are actively generating so much data, and you know it becomes really cool when we start to attach tools like Itheum to this ecosystem where the game data becomes an asset as well that he could monetize, so it’s really interesting. Still, I think yes, we should probably stop talking and then take some questions, so I’m going to read some of the questions, Ethan, for you first that I’m seeing in the live chat. Then we’ll after that, Praveen and I will shuffle a bit of the questions as well, so the first question is it’s a bit of a fun one. It’s from Dorybinder.
Question
Before a project is born, lots of brainstorming activities to get a befitting name for the project must have taken place any significant reason for choosing the name WonderHero and what reflection and significance does his name bring to your project so Ethan over to you.
Ethan
Okay, this is so unexpected; okay, cool, I mean, it’s good to get back to the roots of why we name it WonderHero, right? So I mean, we can all see the characters, the heroes inside our game. They are mostly females, and they represent certain values and certain characters you know that is present in the real world, right. Obviously, you know, Wonder woman was also a very, very inspiring movie for many ladies around the world. I thought, you know, connecting Wonder and Hero actually is universal, but at the same time it is very subjective to everybody’s relative feelings right. I thought using something so universal is actually very good too for everyone to interpret what they are and what are their favorite characters in the game right, so that’s actually how we came to decide about what they say or combining two these two words.
Mark
Yes wow, that’s actually a really awesome story so I think it’s a very cool way to start this A.M.A. I’m going to throw one more at you, Ethan. This one is from theorat. Let’s see if I can read this all out: Many NFTs games today set high costs to start the game and therefore start with a small player base. Does your game have an entrance fee or starting conditions, and if so, what are they? Do I need to hold an NFTs or a certain amount of tokens in order to enjoy the game?
Ethan
Okay right so the upfront cost to enter the game is basically to purchase the NFT to be able to play the game all right so on average it costs about 100 to 120 usdt worth of NFTs to play the game right and from there when you play the game you get to enjoy the pve experience playing against the bots and then we didn’t do much on marketing or advertising or anything like that because from the start we have always been looking from the data’s point of view to optimize the economics and obviously with the this bear market is buying us more time to make it even better and healthier and also from there we sorry hold on oh i’m so sorry just include something right and then from there we are actually pushing a lot of our players towards our pvp ranking we have from silver, gold, diamond and platinum, the rankings are updated on a weekly basis it’s relatively competitive and you can see the top players they get the rewards on the weekly basis and you can see the gifts they are on as well right and then we are also introducing a lot more features like infinite war and a lot more content into the game in the coming near future right so with this small upfront course you get to enjoy a lot more on development from the team basically and we’re going to introduce a lot more like I.D.O. for example we are we have been toying with the idea of guild versus cube for quite a while we’re looking for the perfect model to put it in where even public players can be part of it as well by being an audience and pledging some stuff which is really exciting right so you know that’s what i want to share for this question.
Mark
Cool thank you, Ethan, so we have another question we got offline, which is quite interesting. Well, basically, I think we touched on this initially, but this question is, could you please explain to us:
Question
What is the partnership plan, and what are the realistic next steps to this partnership?
Mark
Okay so i’ll touch on this and Praveen please free to also step jump in with some context as well so as we were saying initially in web 3 gaming we have gamers with pseudonymous identities or moving these platforms and guilds specifically when we look at guids we see well these are huge data silos and Itheum goal even before we looked at gaming was we have to break down data silos right in the real world there’s this massive amounts of data locked in silos thanks to all these tech giants holding our data we saw the same pattern in web 3 specifically amongst the gaming guilda so we started looking at that first but then we thought okay the instead of approaching guilds or even approaching games and saying you know use this tech to unlock data we looked at the the gamer the entity that’s actually moving around generating this data in this case the gamer right so we said okay let’s attach the technology to the gamer or the player that’s moving around because that’s when we have what we call an Itheum bottom-up adoption when we generate the data sets from the person creating the data and unlocking it then the you cannot denied the power behind this right because the data set is accumulating you can’t ignore it so we then what we wanted to do was partner with a game that was growing very very fast a game that even our team enjoys playing so our team internally plays wonderhero and then we had mutual contacts through our investors so and also wonderhero does a fabulous job of the way it enables data lineage on the blockchain in other words what the player is doing you can actually mirror a lot of that through the data on the blockchain so all of this just made it like a perfect partnership so what we’re doing with this partnership is we’re providing Itheum Data brokerage technology and NFMe ID avatar technology to let the gamer claim all of this data that they’re leaving on the blockchain when they play but on top of that these gamers also go and participate in different guilds right or different discord servers they might be in Wonderhero’s discord server they might be in another guild that they are actively involved with and what we realized was well they these gamers are also leaving a huge data footprint within discord so we built also on top of the on-chain adapter collecting the gaming data we built a discord adapter that’s collecting their discord engagement and activity uh and what we call the social community school so we’re taking all of these metrics we’re attaching it to a gamer’s identity in the form of an NFMe ID and eventually what we are saying is the gamer will then be able to join others like themselves in other words a bulk data set of gaming data and then trade this right and we’re gonna once this happens then this pool of valuable data in this case wonderhero gamers data becomes super valuable to guilds as they can then find the best performers the best earners the best social community members and including i guess one the Wonderhero Ethan maybe on that if you could kind of highlight if we if we were to pull this data set what value as the actual game creator would you see in such a data set.
Ethan
Well okay so that’s three questions in total right so there’s the first two questions and then this third question i’m gonna answer all of them so let me see right so from the team’s perspective right we have always been really focused on the game development only we have got so many requests on developing API right to be able to connect to other places but we have turned down so many opportunities because we want to focus on game development game economics and to give what our community and our players deserve right a fun great game that’s what it matters for us and then so when Itheum came along when Ethan came along basically we thought this was a pretty good opportunity for a lot of our users to be able to have power like because you see the thing is our slogan on WonderHero is your gaming passion is your greatest asset let’s think about that your gaming passion is your greatest asset so now again you know thinking about what three experience you get to play to earn right and on top of that you now have the possibility of using your gaming passion right with this data that you get to have that you own be able to mine more tokens for you i think that idea itself is pretty incredible and that gives a lot more depth with regards to the player the player relationship with the game in this case this WonderHero along with his data that the player owns it’s funny right because usually in this case the game should own the data but now he is the players that owns that data and this idea itself is just in my opinion it’s really mind-blowing right and this experience i think is so great that you know we decided to go into developing the api so i think everybody can expect that really soon right so we’re beginning with lower line first kind of api drawing up some data for our player for Itheum and then so to put things in this perspective as well right because we started on 26 of january we have launched with 10 guilds right so we’ve got PGG we’ve got yggc we’ve got merit circle and many more but today we have just under 60 views with a total number of total daily scholars of just under 6 000 right and then so now a lot of this guild with a lot of these players from the philippines, from brazil, from indonesia,from turkey,from france italy now besides playing to earn they are able to enjoy empowerment with the data that they own which is from their gaming passion in the first place right and their love for the game right so that actually started our journey together with Itheum to develop this api and we were actually very excited about it ; and so how this relationship is going to develop further as well is i mean i don’t think we can cover that depth of this partnership you know just in this AMA but we’re just scratching the surface here in this case you know using the data that the gamers own to be able to mine for more tokens but how’s this like how other games and other institutions will be able to draw use cases from the data decks which i believe mark will actually a little bit more it’s i mean now we are at 0.1 step 0.1 and how we can evolve right it’s really you know like nobody can imagine or expect how it can go especially for web3 but i think you know by taking this step from one hill’s point of view to empower all of our gamers to be equipped with the data that they own and so early in the web 3 stage i think you know this is going to blow up you know to a much bigger perspective in terms of the web3 wall right so this that’s basically my my answer
Praveen
Yeah, I’ll chip in a bit here, so yeah, I mean, what you’re saying is absolutely right. It’s revolutionary what we’re trying to do together right like give players the ability to own their data which is sort of never been done before , so it’s something that you know we need to start somewhere with then i’m going to probably pick a couple of questions which sort of answered were answered by both yours and mark’s discussions one was sort of from Otwe over the moon so he they were asking about the gamer passports although i haven’t been gaming for long i’m eager to progress and become very skilled do the gamer passports apply to both experienced and not so experienced players i mean this is a good question right like so if someone who’s new to gaming uh wants to get into this and get a gamer passport it’s really going to help them understand a lot about their game play right it’ll help them get better quicker because they have access to data and they have access to gameplay data and this is what is really going to help them you know evolve as they get into the gaming space and even though they may not have a data mindset by starting with data attached to them they are developing as a gamer much quicker than if they were to you know just go all out and play the game without any data now there was also another question asked by El nenny and and this was about the off chain and on chain data so the differences between these two uh and this is another good question like:
How are we capturing on-chain and off-chain data?
This is why partnerships with games like WonderHero are very important. Where can we also combine the power of data that we get on chain and data that we get off chain directly from the game?
And as Ethan was pointing out we are at this 0.1 version of the integration now, and it’s going to evolve over time so maybe mark, you can talk a little bit about the on-chain and off-chain aspect I think that would be quite interesting to get into over to you
Mark
Yep, sure so if you guys also look at the Itheum tech stack effectively, there are three groups of components. The first one is called the data cat stands for collection and analytics technology. This is how we bridge data from web2 into web3 by using custom-made data adapters. The second is the data Dex. This is where you tokenize your data assets primarily as data NFTs which think of it as a license to use your data
And finally, the data metaverse.T his is where you take all of your data assets and your data NFTs you link them to the NFMe avatar. This is when we imagine the future of the metaverse. Itheum’s goal ultimately is to create the metaverse version of you as an individual, right so, and in this case, you’re a gamer and you’re generating this whole lot of data on a daily basis and we’re going to let you own this and then trade it in the metaphors right. Now to go to your questions about the on-chain versus op-chain so these concepts apply to the first component which is called the data cat so we have built to date we have built an on-chain adapter that’s looking at all of WonderHero’s on chain activity or across both binance as well as polygon so we’re looking at the assets that are moving the earnings the rewards the claims all of that’s being monitored on a daily basis and it’s benchmarked at a daily basis at a certain time so we take that data set we attach it to the gamer the second thing we do is from a guild perspective so we’re announcing a super exciting partnership next week with one of WonderHero’s most famous guilds which we won’t disclose now but to stay tuned until next week and as part of this partnership we are installing our second adapter which is called the discord social adapter and this effectively is able to track the gamer’s social activity within discord with consent right so you obviously consent to do this and this adapter is not capturing all of your like written text it’s not looking at any of that it’s just looking at trends like how active are you how helpful are you in the Community how much are you streaming how much are you participating in other people’s streams and it takes this call and also attaches it to the passport
uh the next thing is as Ethan was saying is wonderhero is going to open up a private API this is where it gets really exciting right because now we have what the gamer is doing on chain we’re capturing that we have what the game is doing in different guilds as they’re communicating with their Community and the ecosystem and now this style the next part of this is the actual stuff that’s coming from the private API of wonder hero so when you put all these three things together you get this holistic view of yourself as a gamer you might see insights here that even you wouldn’t know about yourself and then you are able to kind of improve your game play but the most wonderful thing that comes out of this is you we are able to now create a pool of you know data assets that are linked to wonderhero gamers who are participating in you know in different gaming environments and through guilds etc and this bulk data set becomes super valuable and guess what when this data set is there and guilds come to access it they’re going to have to pay you to actually use it so this is another way that you’re going to earn by playing what you what you love to do that lien was saying it’s your passion to game you just game you just do your thing and you’re going to earn this additional revenue as people want to get access to your data centers through the bulk data set so it’s revolutionary this hasn’t been done before and this is going to really blow people’s minds so yeah stay tuned it’s got some we’ve got some really exciting announcements of that
Mark
So this question is one from kamilak now it just talks about the biggest problem of blockchain games developed so far is the game reward mechanism collapses after a while due to the inability to create a sustainable game system. For this reason, gamers who have made great efforts to bring them to the platform walk away from the game.
How will you create a sustainable play-to-earn mechanism in the game so that you don’t have the same problem
Mark
I think this is a good question
Ethan
Alright then luckily i’m ready because this i mean we have been working on this for such a long time i’ve been speaking with YGG Breeder Dao i’ve been speaking with like so many people like over the last you know couple of months about the development of the trends like how should we do this what is a better model right so there’s no one-size-fits-all kind of thing but i mean if we look at the price of wnd and hon it is that he is what he is right he has so we are looking to push how do i say this all right so in a web 2 game when you play the game you want to win and you will do anything to win right you will upgrade your hero your upgrade you find advantages right whatever advantage you can get you will do it to win right and then in some cases in web 2 you will spend your credit card to buy something that gives you the advantage if you are that competitive but in our case right what we found out is there are a huge number of players that are consistently farming a few stages that they love and that’s about it and they don’t upgrade any of the NFT’s so this is a new behavior we saw in web3 gaming which is on a huge contrast with web2 right so you know as i’ve been speaking with so many of our friends and investors in the past few months we would think that people come in to experience the web3 gaming and they’re also here for entertainment right because gaming has proven to be decades-long entertainment medium and so i think a much more sustainable direction would be for a game to be a key source of entertainment where he is also a medium for you to first hand get the experience what web 3 is all about and with the return on investment or the play to none aspect as a much secondary bonus right and then from there i think the ecosystem can be much healthier because now we are talking about rewarding the key contributors right who are the key contributors right who those people who have been grinding it out right getting the mastery of the game not only in NFT collection but also in the choice of their NFT teams when it comes to pvp now these are the key contributors that we want to reward further um and and when and also i mean they are taking entertainment to a whole new level right because they’re in that kind of serious competition right so i think we are going to move towards more towards entertainment kind of model where play to earn is going to be a little bit more secondary and we slowly focus on the game’s fun factor which we have proven that it is fun right and then so um with a lot more triple a games also coming into the space obviously triple a games really stays already stay for itself that the game should be fun and i mean we saw big time studios as well they launched the game but then they haven’t even released their token right but the game is fun and they have so many users and i think that’s a very good direction we’re looking at something they’re shaping up the future of game five and place one space right so i we think that by balancing this out a lot of pure players they are just here to farm and don’t care about the contributing to the game or anything about game play i think this is going to slowly phase out and then the contributors is going to contribute a lot more as well and from there i think then this this equilibrium this equilibrium can be striked and then from there you can see that the ecosystem for our token uh also for the future dow will be much healthier yeah.
Praveen
Wow, what a great answer Ethan I mean, very detailed, but yeah, I think the gist of what you’re trying to say was that it shouldn’t always be purely play to earn. There should be a fun element to it. Otherwise, you know that’s when the interest dies off half the time, right i think that’s something very important to consider, right so I’d just like to remind the audience maybe in the last 15 minutes or so, we’ll actually bring some of you on to stage so if you guys want to come on stage and are not shy to do so please prefix your question with live and that way we’ll bring you up on stage to ask a question directly, and that will be a good experience as well so once again in another 10 minutes so we’ll get into the live session so please prefix your names there
Praveen
So Mark over to you to answer a question.
Mark
So I came across a very good question, so this is by pw poshware I think it is so it says you’re new so welcome hello Itheum team. Would the passport open itself to manipulation by other ad networks, other guilds, or by other games example, if wonderhero uses their services would another game have access to see guild versus guild a starter?
Mark
Wow, good question, man so this is something we’ve been grappling with
So when we first spoke to Ethan and we shared this vision that the gamer should own their data the next obvious partnership we had to consider large guild so then we approached one of the largest guilds and we spoke to them and they loved the idea so firstly we thought maybe they wouldn’t like it because like i was saying earlier guilds you know they like to control their data but when we spoke to them they also were very open to this idea and then we you know this is the partnership we will be announcing soon but as we were like caught designing the guild experience. So, we knew what the gamer’s experience was when the gamer takes the data and attaches it to the passport and owns the NFMe ID evidence of this password and the data behind it but what is the guild experience so we said okay the guild needs to see aggregated insights right so if you’re playing through a guild or you’re participating in a discord server without a community the guild wants to see okay who are the best community members who are the best earners who’s demonstrating patterns of good gameplay because what the guild’s trying to do is effectively increase its players liquidity performance right in other words they want to get a new game and they want to see if they can get earnest onto that game as quick as possible so for them this sort of concept of an aggregated dataset becomes very useful like as an example right they could look at we’ve been talking to some girls that said that by looking at oh if they put a player onto a new game and they see how this gamer performs in the first two to three weeks in terms of earning this is a very good indication of how quick they are at learning new games and therefore this is the best person to put on to other games as well but when we’re talking to guilds some of the questions came up was could we get our data in other words if a gamer comes through a guild and then it claims their passport through this pipeline of this guild a in this example guild a said that I don’t want guild b to see the data that originated from this gamer’s interaction through our guild and for us that was a bit of a dilemma because what we are saying is you know the gamer is the one that’s moving around here the gamer should be the one picking whether they want guild a or guild b or both guild in a and b c a data so we are looking at this as an option if a guild as an example guild a comes up and says players who claim their passport through our guild and the games that are provided by our guild we don’t want any other guild to access this data we are thinking should maybe we would give them the option to get it but if they were to ever do that they have to first get the consent of the player and secondly they have to pay a premium to do this right so they need to pay their player more because this goes against the whole web 3 concept so we’re going to probably dis incentivize them to do this but it’s a question that’s come up i’m not going to say we have solved it yet but it’s a good question that you asked because it’s something that we’re actively dealing with right now so yeah that was the answer to that praveen do you want to take one or do we have an order.
Ethan
Hold on I want to I want to I want to add in some stuff about this as well. Let’s have a little bit of a paradigm shift here a little bit shall we like we’re not talking about web 2 we’re not even talking about web 2 problems here we’re talking about a web 3 issues. Let’s go back to the beginning of how bitcoin actually value added everybody first number one you need a fully decentralized way of transferring value from one person to another without revealing the person’s identity location so there’s no privacy issue right and that’s why it can happen and it stops the double spending issue so let’s look at this question again right so a guild doesn’t want to another guild the girl doesn’t want somebody else to enjoy or have leverage over the give information right but in this case i mean we are in the world of web3 right i mean if somebody has the kind of mindset probably they could go back to web too but what would what i think Itheum can probably stop this a little bit better is this data is encrypted right can be encrypted and also it doesn’t have any privacy issue and so we wouldn’t be able to attach identity with data and that meant that this data can be so much more useful right there’s number one the second part i want to touch on that you know for you know our 45 audience here is we know that traditional athletes they are providing a lot of their data to nike or i don’t know discovery channel or certain you know science lab you know in wherever it is MIT or whatever we have seen also documentaries of fighters being providing you know their body data so that science labs can get better products etc now these are the top estimates that we see you know in the world and this has been happening for a couple of decades i would believe suddenly now web 3 we are all ordinary people in every corner of the world and yet now the concept of us providing such data to top left to be able to produce even better products for western it’s just astounding right so i just want to put that into perspective because we don’t have to be top athletes we don’t even have to be top esports player to be able to enjoy this is no longer 1990s this is 2022 like this is a huge paradigm shift that i think you know everybody need to kind of shift their mentality a little bit.
Mark
Yeah I want to add on no I mean I’m really glad to hear you say that Ethan yes this is something that we’ve been taken aback as well when we speak to all these web 3 guilds. Their mentality is still you know they want to hold data which we are trying to explain to them web 3 is not this right so yeah it is quite interesting and like you said right this paradigm shift has to happen. I believe with something like a gamer passport when the gamers actually get to decide who uses their data, who shares their data, not the guild or some centralized entity. Hence, I think this is the paradigm shift we are hoping for in Itheum,we call this full bottom-up adoption, right. It’s what bitcoin did right. They disrupted Defi with full bottom-up adoption. There was no top first entity involved, so we’re hoping to do the same thing for data, so we are very glad to hear you say that. Guys, are we going to take anybody on stage or do we just take a few more questions.
Praveen
There are a lot of WonderHero questions, which is really great to see, right like I’m very excited to see so many WonderHero questions so I think there are two that you know probably Ethan can look at and then we’ll w bring someone on stage you know to wrap things up but there are too many questions it’s difficult to pick them, but there are two parts of the question. I will ask it in two parts one was like this is from mgg someone from mgg so did you face any major challenges this year in your development cycle this is for wonderhero and how what were there any that you thought were not worthy of talking about and how did you tackle them and then as a second part I guess you can also talk about what’s coming up for wonderhero you know down the track in the future as well so with these two questions we could then open up to the stage I suppose so okay Ethan over to you
Ethan
Okay right, well; to be honest, every single thing about developing this game is so hard and which is true, like it’s so hard, honestly, like the launch of the IDO, the tokenomics, the NFTs, the marketplace. I mean the liquidity right but in the queue management system our bridging solution oh man there’s just so many of it but i think i want to focus on one thing that i don’t think i’ve ever mentioned anywhere else before so yes all right so you know like when we launch on 26th of january i think at the part of time Axie infinity is still very hot I mean it is still very hot today right but back then it was like really the top of town and everybody’s going into it and their returns are pretty good and so what we wanted to do is to give our initial set of users a good income right because again why we started this project is because to have a chance to be able to change you know some people’s lives around the world you know just by playing a game that to me is more meaningful than being a CEO of exchange to me right which is where i was previously and then so when what we realized was the token prices had to go up you know in order to make up for it and so what we did was to use NFT as the income now let’s think about this because when you play the game you get NFT drops and so for the beginning few weeks we increased our NFT drops a lot because we knew there were a lot of players coming into the game and we don’t want we stopped we decided to stop selling the wonder boxes so let’s think about this right the game stopped selling when the boxes the NFT and now this existing players are getting all these NFT drops and they get to sell it on the marketplace so the players are now the suppliers of the NFTs to new players so that’s a good concept right and that’s great for the first few weeks that’s great because we heard from users you know making a thousand two hundred or even a thousand five hundred usdt worth so that’s great but by what that turned out to be another challenging factor is that you know we struggled with i mean we struggled with basically the NFT supply a little bit because if we decrease the NFT drops and then the income will get affected which is not through to our mission already right and that is when the entire game fine market got affected as well we realized that it’s not just us but every other big game are also facing the same issue right and then that’s one of the largest challenges that i probably want to highlight because our mission is to you know have a chance to change some people’s lives and you know we are i can’t say that we have 100 successfully fulfilled this mission but this struggle is really painful like from the CEO’s point of view because I didn’t fulfill the mission right so that’s why we are so focused on developing the game economics the game content making this a great game because that’s our mission and so you know I don’t think it has been shared anywhere else before in our announcements or even in any of our AMA but since you know this question seems really genuine and here’s my genuine answer yeah.
Mark
Cool, thank you, Ethan yeah that was very genuine like you said the first time you shared it so we appreciate that. So what’s the scene, guys shall we take some live questions?
Praveen
Yeah so we’ll hand it over to Bogdan now, who will just bring someone on stage. I think this is the first time we’re going to try this, so please, if you could just keep your questions short, that would be much appreciated so we could get more people on stage so keep your question short, you know, direct it at either Itheum or WonderHero and just ask a question we’ll answer your question and if you could just get back off the stage and someone else will come on following so over to you Bogdan to pick the first one.
Bodgan
Hello you are the first that you are invited to the stage:
Mark
Hey Ibad, yeah, you can ask a question now.
Ethan
Let’s go let’s go, man.
Ibad
So my question is do you consider WonderHero as just a play-to-earn game or play-to-have fun or game because after a while, projects start to lose their pipe and not earn its player that money and people start leaving the game and looking for new games that can earn much more than current one so what’s the solutions for team to prevent that?
Ethan
Okay i think the question is definitely for me Ibad good question right so I think in january you know we marketed ourselves as a player in game but as we observed when more and more games came out and you know a lot of us started to find out what are the good solutions we started to realize that there is a conflict here in terms of entertainment value as well as i mean it’s a triangle right so the contributors the entertainment value as well as the farmers like how can we strike equilibrium so to answer your question directly right i think with big time studios setting some examples for the market he is going to drive towards entertainment first and then so we feel that he is 15 for sure from play to earn to play and earn and then from there we feel that you will go to play or earn right repeat again it was from play to earn to now play and earn and then you will move towards play or earn because we know a lot more triple aaa games are coming up we know that there is a lot more free to play kind of games coming up and so a lot of them are adopting the freemium model which we see in the mobile games industry which is so successful right and so there will be a whole set of players that are just purely here to enjoy the web 3 entertainment games and there’ll be another set of players that is just here strictly to to earn all right and ignoring the entertainment value right so i think there will be new models that will be striking a very good balance for different set of users we can’t have one model to fit everybody because obviously today we can see it’s not working I hope I answer your question Ibad
Ibad
Yep that was a great answer thanks
Ethan
Thank you, Ibad thanks for being here.
Mark
Alright, well done.
Bodgan
Let’s go for the next so Ibad can you move back to the audience please, and I will invite you on the stage
Mark
Hi metauniverse welcome, please ask your question.
Praveen
We could just bring someone else on, so while metauniverse is sorting themselves out, we’ll get someone else on logged in.
Bodgan
Okay perfect champwizard, it’s your turn
Champwizard
Hello can you hear me right
Mark
Yeah let’s go
Champwizard
So my question is, what makes WonderHero outstanding and different from the others in the crypto space?
Ethan
oh man it’s so hard this question
Mark
Hey man have you played the game? Have you tried the game champ?
Champwizard
No uh, after this game, I’m going to play it
Praveen
Yeah you have to get into it because, yeah look I got both my kids onto it, and I can’t get them off it now!
It’s just full on, right it’s a fun game to play and yeah, i think that in itself speaks much but I’ll let Ethan explain more
Ethan
Alright, so number one it’s a mobile game right so you get to the concept of playing a game and earning some bonus tokens anywhere in the world whether you’re in the toilet whether you are on the bus whether you’re on the train right so their concept is pretty interesting right number one that’s that number two is the the storyline of the game is very interesting right so when you play the game you get to enjoy and understand the characters a little bit more their personality you understand there’s some kind of product organization behind all this that’s why you are on this mission right to save the world all right so you get to experience this on a mobile play to own game that’s number one that is number two and number three is is the graphics are i mean it is very engaging the graphics especially when you get to unlock when you get to unlock and trigger your hero’s ultimate and so that’s very very engaging every time you get to do it’s like you know you just feel so good about it and also the game is very balanced right so that means that you know like it’s not like the prettiest hero is the strongest no it’s not so it’s very balanced and that gives you a fair chance to be good in this game right and so the graphics is good and it’s well balanced and last of all is we have a lot more i mean the team is here like myself i’m here , i’ve been talking to the community actively except for the time that i have to focus on the economics but besides that the game the team has a lot more content that we are going to release for the game so it’s not whatever you see today is it are we gonna expand the wonderhero universe a little bit more as well so you can get to expect your existing NFTs to be able to have more value for you and so this is just your first step into the wonderhero universe and i mean since we’re also in this AMA you get to leverage further partnerships for wonderhero for you to be able to use your gaming passion as your greatest asset now i’m saying it it sounds like you know a very easy kind of thing cheesy slogan or whatever but you get to see as web 3 industry develop a lot further in the years to come you get to understand why we keep saying your gaming passion is your greatest asset right so we’re adding a lot more meaning to it I hope I answered your question.
Champwizard
Yeah that’s a great answer. Oh yeah, it makes sense. Thank you so much for answering it.
Praveen
Thank you also, champ; if you want to join our game streams, you know it; that would be a good way for you just to have a look at the gameplay; you know how it actually works, so we have game streams twice a week please tune in you know you can actually look at one of our guys playing WonderHero and we give a live commentary as it’s being played you know so it’ll be a good way for you to understand how interesting it is.
Champwizard
Yep i will do it.
Mark
Thank you definitely, and just to add to that the game streams we do are also how we are populating the game or passport with data, so it’s super interesting, probably the as a very unique sort of gaming stream, so you should check it out, man.
Mark
So Bodgan can we bring somebody else on?
Bodgan
Yes
Ethan
Can we get some ladies in here? I saw many ladies or ladies avatar I want to help.
Metauniverse
My question is, I have seen a lot of games; what like plan at WonderHero do you have for the wonder token, like what other plans are do you have for other people?Not everybody is like a gamer play games regularly; my kids play games, but you know like, I want to know if there are other important use cases for it?
Ethan
Yeah that’s a very very good question yeah right so we started adding a lot more okay so actually I’m gonna share a lot more insights about this first okay so on our whitepaper we have you know stated that the higher level you’re gonna be able to earn more tokens but then from our data we see that there isn’t much of this consumption of our tokens to play the game further despite this being the key utility now we have been facing the dilemma of adding more utilities in the game as well and we’re struggling with that as well so we want to add more utility in the game but with the key utility is not being utilized much we are always struggling with the idea right of adding more utilities however right i think i mean for wonderhero we’re gonna be working with a few more partners including Itheum right where you will be able to use your tokens for real-world utility for example you’ll be able to i mean depending on which country you’re from you’ll be able to use the tokens that you earn to pay for your utility bill like your telephone your data your mobile phones months to debut i think that’s amazing right so we’re still in discussion with one of our partners about this but i think that is something that is going to be a lot more useful i feel as a utility right besides the utilities that i mentioned that we want to add we are struggling to add into the game because again we need to prioritize here to see which is gonna make sense because ultimately all the contributors including the passionate players here would like to see a healthier wnd and play to earn considerations we are having here i hope to answer your question mata universe
Metauniverse
Yeah that’s answers my question. Thank you
Ethan
Yeah thank you just to add on right I don’t want to add 101 in-game utilities but still ending up with unhealthy game ecosystem i think that doesn’t make sense i mean i don’t want to end up with an announcement saying all right we’ve got to close down the project because we have done 101 utilities already because i don’t think just the youtube adding utilities is going to solve a long-term problem that a lot of these games are also facing we’ve seen a lot of new utilities added by other games as well but we don’t see the huge change as well right so i think a lot of top projects game projects are including Axis infinity themselves they are also coming up with a solution which is why i say equilibrium have to be striped and we’re talking about something a little bit more fundamental and more principled but do you know meta univers your concerns are legit i think a lot of our Community are asking the same questions as well but do pay attention a little bit closer with our Community in the coming near future because with all of our efforts and a lot of the things that we’re going to be announcing then you start to realize like hey the team is thinking about the bigger things they want to you know the team is thinking about really creating a healthy ecosystem right so so we are trying
Mark
Yeah thanks so much. Awesome thanks for thatm it was was great okay, so we’re running over, but i thought let’s take one more question. Bogdan if you can bring somebody on, and I think we’ll wrap it up after.
Bodgan
Samataka it’s your turn.
Mark
Hi there welcome samataka do you want to ask your question?
Samataka
My question is I have a problem when I’m trying out an NFT game because generally, the more person invests like, the hood of winning is higher compared to if their opponent is much more skilled but basically, no matter how much time I put into the game I won’t be winning as much if I don’t expect a lot so do you have something planned for this?
Ethan
Okay I believe this question is for me too okay, let me get your question correctly so that I can answer it precisely it’s basically, you get to spend a lot of time in the game but in most of the battles you start to realize that you’re not winning your opponents because they have got better equipment and better items is that correct did I get your question correctly
Samataka
Yes
Ethan
Okay right so yeah it boils down to the nature of the game i have to say like for example right if we look at excuse me if we look at fifa for example every game is always on equal ground right it’s always there’s no i mean it’s pure skill based and then if we look at games like mobile legends dota those are pure skill based kind of games we look at first person shooter a lot of them are pure skill based as well but when it comes to RPG games is a little bit different i have to say because the more time you spend i agree with you the more time you spend on the game should give you the mastery of the game but when it comes to RPG game or besides that i think it can in cultivates time management skills in terms of which are the best places to be able to earn more and then you know to get more points or whichever it is so they can upgrade your Itheum system one number two is RPG games also include inventory management right like which are the inventory that is the best for your characters so that you can progress faster and so naturally i have to say in the RPG game it is about what how you can make the best out of your inventory your assets and and your game items so that you can win your opinion unfortunately this is the nature of RPG game and then you will still have to do something about your items to be able to upgrade them so that you can beat your opponent next time now this is the nature of the game yeah.
Mark
Yeah actually ethan i could probably add Itheum’s angle to this as well so in Itheum we have this concept of so you we have the game a passport right so as you’re playing this game we are collecting your data and letting you monetize it but you can if you were a really good gamer in this case maybe wonderhero and you had certain strategies that you would like that you have come up with which you feel is valuable you can actually take that directly into the itheum data dex mint those strategies as a data NFT and then trade that so it’s a way for you to take like your skills that you might have works all maybe you’re on the other end of this you want to improve your skills and you want to learn some strategies you can go to the itheum starter dex and buy somebody else’s skill set which they might have to advertise for sale so this is something that could also kind of work it might be quite interesting to see if this is something that would pick up like if you go to youtube you can see people talking about you know how their game play and exposing some of their skills and i’ve even seen i’m not an expert in this but i’ve seen you can actually pay people to teach you how to play games and and they share some insights and skills that only they possess so Itheum provides through the database the ability to trade this kind of data sets or data assets to teach people on how to improve so this is also some an interesting way to look at this.
Ethan
I didn’t know about that. Thanks so much Mark. I think this that is so exciting.
Mark
I saw this first with XC, right like you could actually go to certain websites and you can pay like a really good taxi payer or all and they would teach you things that they know that you don’t know and then that made us think wow okay they’re effectively selling their skill so how could we tokenize the skill as a data set and trade that in Itheum, so that’s another opportunity.
Ethan
This is going to be useful. This is going to be really useful.
Mark
Cool thank you samataka. So what do you think, guys should we wrap it up or I think it would be good to wrap up I must say.
Praveen
It’s been really good having you here Ethan. We’ve got a full house here like we didn’t expect more than 50, you know to turn up for this today, and yeah, it’s nice of all wonderhero questions, so we’ll have to get you back again here sometime, too and I hope that will be sometime soon.
Ethan
Yeah, I hope not too soon, man, because there’s so much to work on in WonderHero. I had so much fun, and really I think a lot of our, you know, a lot of our attendees today are really interested in the WonderHero portion but I think we need to I don’t know like I think I think we may have to I don’t know like share a diagram in future or something so that they get to understand like the privilege that they are going to be enjoying soon with this partnership between Itheum and Wonderhero I don’t think we have even scratched the surface on this particular subject in this A.M.A
Mark
Yes, yeah I totally agree we’re going to be doing that very soon, right so we actually we’re testing the gamer passport already, and I think it’s coming to a point very soon, Ethan, that we’re going actually to show this, and we’re going to introduce people to a whole new paradigm like the idea of owning your gaming data has never existed in history, so this is something I think it’s going to blow people’s mind as you said and couple that with the NFMe which is a fully interoperable 3D avatar representation of your data it’s going to be crazy so I think you’re right well we’ll definitely be we are in an education mode of the amount we want to educate more people about it but we are getting a lot of offline questions about the gamer passport, and how this would work so I think you’re right it’s time for us to maybe show people how this would work and yeah give some demos, and that would be definitely useful.
Ethan
Yeah so I believe we are having the next A.M.A. in WonderHero next week.
Mark
Yes
Ethan
Then know I’m sure a lot of our members in the WonderHero discord channel would love to find out a lot more about this game and passport because they have been asking about it for a while already, right so I think let’s let’s do that for the next round to talk so much more about the gamer passports and then um I hope like you can see the reaction from the Community I believe they’ll be so excited
Mark
Absolutely, I think that sounds like a plan, let’s aim to do that
Mark
So Ethan, well, thank you so much for coming, man it’s been fun. Every meeting we have with you and your team has been fun and that’s a good signal that this is a good partnership, so thank you so much for coming over man.
Praveen
Yeah yeah just before we wrap up, I’d like to thank uh our team members I think bogdan and Evan who coordinated this whole A.M.A. and organized everything, tested everything to make sure it went well. You guys did a fantastic job, so really good on you for that. Nathaniel from our team for coordinating along with Wonderheroes team too to make sure everything went well so I really appreciate all the team effort I think that’s what really sets these A.M.A. apart, right like making sure everything goes smoothly. Thanks guys and thanks once again Ethan I really appreciate your time and everyone who’s attended, yeah fantastic having you here.
Mark
Yeah thank you everyone for attending. Ethan do you want to say the final words, and then we’ll wrap up
Ethan
Yeah my final words here will be your gaming passion is your greatest asset.
Praveeen
Great way to end this!
Mark
So thank you, everybody. It’s been awesome to have you here, and we’ll look to see you at the next AMA. Thank you and Goodbye!
